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Crapsack Only by Comparison: Difference between revisions
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{{examples}}
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* ''[[The Adventures Of Oliver And Columbina]]'' features two worlds: The rosen dream lands, and reality-where-you-get-bored. The latter is simple and unproblematic for the readers, but totally incomprehensible for the characters.
== [[Film]] ==
* The characters in ''[[Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home]]'' find themselves as [[Fish Out of Temporal Water]] in [[The Eighties]], and Doctor McCoy in particular is horrified by modern day medical practices, angrily comparing them to "the Dark Ages" and "the Spanish Inquisition". Since it's a rather lighthearted film, the whole thing's treated as comedy rather than serious criticism.
* In [[Masters of the Universe (film)|the 1987 ''Masters Of The Universe'' movie]], Teela and Man-at-Arms have their first taste of Earth food. Teela curiously asks what the white sticks in the middle are for, and she's instantly rendered nauseous when she's told that they're rib bones and she's eating a dead animal.
** Man-At-Arms, meanwhile, doesn't seem to mind.
* ''[[Pan's Labyrinth]]'' plays this straight for a few minutes, as the problem with our world is claimed to be that it has bright sunlight and cold. Then brutally averted for the rest of the movie, as it turns out that the world the heroine now lives in is a straight [[Crapsack World]] saturated in nightmares.
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* Vonda N. McIntyre's ''[[Thieves' World]]'' short story "Looking for Satan". A group of people come to Sanctuary and find it appalling. This is not so unusual (Sanctuary is a [[Wretched Hive]] after all) but the reason is that the place they come from is idyllic: everyone lives together without jealousy or greed and with a [[Free-Love Future]] orientation.
* [[H. G. Wells]]' ''[[wikipedia:Men Like Gods|Men Like Gods]]'' (1923). As the result of an interdimensional accident a group of English citizens find themselves in another world. The people there are pretty much perfect by human standards, and Wells uses their comments on the visitors' attitudes and values to criticize English society of the time.
* Inverted
* Inverted in ''[[Discworld/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]'', with a traveler who considers Ankh-Morpork to be ''not'' crapsack because his own homeland is so much worse. Rude and obnoxious guards are celebrated for not torturing random innocents to death, and so on.
* This trope, or possibly its inversion, shows up in ''[[The Dispossessed]]'' by [[Ursula K. Le Guin]]. The protagonist, Shavik, goes from an anarcho-syndicalist utopia on the planet/moon Anarres to its planet/moon Urras (it's a double-planet system, and the two bodies aren't too different in size), which is dominated by the capitalist parliamentary republic A-Io and the totalitarian socialist Thu ([[Does This Remind You of Anything?|if this reminds you of anything]], [[Cold War|it]] [[Space Cold War|should]]), both of which have rigid class structures. After encountering the way the lower classes live and then being forced to take refuge in the embassy from a post-apocalyptic Earth, he says that the planet seems like hell to him; the ambassador comments that, compared to the way things are on Earth, it looks like heaven.
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* Most citizens of ''[[Xanth]]'' (magical realm) who travel to "drear Mundania" (non-magical rest of the world) feel that way about it.
* ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'' would constitute a [[Trope Codifier]] in that Swift was using the fantastic societies Gulliver encounters to lampoon British society at the time.
* Heaven in ''[[The Salvation War]]'' isn't very appealing to modern humanity. The hills and forests are pretty and air is incredibly clean, but most humans live in slums or on farms outside the Eternal City, working as slaves for the angels, and there are no useful strategic natural resources. For those who were given Salvation a thousand years ago, though, a surplus of crops, a roof over the head and no fear of raiders is indeed paradise.▼
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode [[Doctor Who/Recap/S31/E07 Amy's Choice|
== [[Print Media]] ==
* ''[[MAD]]'' magazine Zigzags this in the 2018 with a story where Archie Andrews (portrayed as he was in the 50s) starts to think his life is the boring (even Betty and Veronica fighting over him is starting to get old) so Dilton decides to give him access to his [[Time Machine]], hoping a trip to the future (as in, 2018) will make him appreciate what he has. After a day of living in this time, Archie does start to have doubts, but eventually weighs every option; yeah, gun violence, gang activity, political corruption, and lack of morals does make the future a little dark, but not so much when compared to the Cold War, polio, and having to worry about being drafted. He does find two things about the future that convince him it's better - Veronica and Betty no longer fight over him (neither insists he choose), and the things he used to do that were once considered "juvenile" are pretty tame when compared to what modern teens get away with. In short, he decides that the future isn't exactly ''perfect'', but it's better than what he once had.
== [[Music]] ==
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== [[Visual Novels]] ==
* Several of the main cast members in ''[[Sharin no Kuni]]'' live under extremely harsh legal restrictions which they have mostly come by undeservedly, and the main character was put through a [[Training from Hell|nightmarish training program]] in order to become qualified to oversee and rehabilitate such individuals. However, the legal system of the setting, which is explicitly intended to ''prevent'' crimes and socially destructive behavior, rather than conferring fair and proportionate punishments on the guilty, is stated to result in much lower crime rates than our own, and such restrictions are implied to be very rare compared to imprisonment in Japan, which already has low crimes rates by real world standards, such that a town which is considered to have an unusual concentration of social unrest has a grand total of three residents living under restrictions.
==
* In one ''[[Bob the Angry Flower]]'' comic, Bob dies and goes to heaven; he realizes that everything up there is so awesome that people still living on earth are in agony, relatively speaking. He then jumps down to earth, saying "I've gotta kill everyone!" (doubles as a cruel parody of [[Damaged Soul]]).
== [[Web Original]] ==
* In ''[[Fine Structure]]'', characters from universes with high numbers of spacelike and timelike dimensions, where intelligence arises spontaneously everywhere, land in our universe of 3+1 dimensions, where the laws of physics are limited and intelligence is barely tenable at all. It's compared to a kind of hell.
▲* Heaven in ''[[The Salvation War]]'' isn't very appealing to modern humanity. The hills and forests are pretty and air is incredibly clean, but most humans live in slums or on farms outside the Eternal City, working as slaves for the angels, and there are no useful strategic natural resources. For those who were given Salvation a thousand years ago, though, a surplus of crops, a roof over the head and no fear of raiders is indeed paradise.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* The [[Tex Avery]] cartoon "The Cat That Hated People" is about, well, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin| a cat who hates people]]. The cartoon starts with an alley cat complaining about his miserable life, how humans throw boots at him, hit him with brooms, and even shoot at him. He complains about how he doesn't get along with children (who tie paper bags onto his feet) babies (who flail him about a playpen), and housewives (who hit him over the head with broomsticks when he scratches their furniture). As he complains on the sidewalk, his point is proven by people who step all over him, the last one kicking him for good measure. He finally decides to leave people forever by hitching a ride aboard a rocket and flying to the moon. However once there, he finds the moon is [[Cloudcuckooland| a crazy place]], full of weird creatures who assault him in bizarre ways. (For instance, a lipstick applies itself to his mouth, then a giggling pair of lips gives him a wet smacker; then a living diaper, safety pin, and bottle of baby powder chase him, then diaper him and shove a bottle in his mouth; he has a tantrum, and his head is diapered too). Realizing this place is worse than Earth, he [[Cartoon Physics| golf drives himself]] back, and is ''happy'' to be back. Even though he's no better off than he was before, with people still stepping on him, he has a newfound appreciation for his home.
{{reflist}}
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