Crapsack World/Western Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • South Park is the archetypal comedic Crapsack World: it's full of racism, violence, jerkasses, idiots, murder, and such.
  • The whole point of Stressed Eric.
  • Definitely the point of Drawn Together.
  • Ditto Duckman. Even the animation depicting the show is deliberately ugly, even if it's the studio's style.
  • The world of Invader Zim, where humans are generally stupid, ignorant and repulsive and the world they live in is polluted and unclean. The episode "Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom" featured creatures from another almost hell-like dimension crossing over under the impression that the other side is a perfect world that they can ruin, but they are so repulsed by their first impressions that they immediately retreat back into their own world. The Irkens, the other main civilisation featured, are a cheerfully xenocidal species that decide rank by the individual's height and whose main form of entertainment is the extermination of entire planets while eating nachos and curly fries. The main characters---being somewhat more intelligent than most of the others---nevertheless only seem able to cope by being delusional (Zim), apathetic (Gaz) or ridiculously persistent (Dib).
    • The episode "Door to Door" plays with this idea well, as Zim shows a cretinous family what will happen if they don't buy his candy--the Crapsack World will become even worse!
      • And the future he shows them is, in actuality, the fate Zim has in mind for Earth when he succeeds.
    • Of course, as mentioned in the comic books section, this is Jhonen Vasquez.
    • It's been theorized by fans, that since EVEN Dib Who had swore to stand against Zim and protect the world stopped caring, things would get better. The world would change from an Dystopia with no happiness, to a growing society with hope for the future.
  • The Venture Brothers features this pretty heavily. All of the primary characters are neatly defined by their failures, and the same goes for most secondaries. There will be no Affectionate Parody; cameos are more along the lines of a drug-crazed Johnny Quest, a world-dominating Walt Disney Expy, or the Fantastic Four where Mr. Fantastic isn't the useless one. The ONLY good character besides the Venture Brothers themselves in the whole show is a Necromancer who doesn't care a whit about messing with the powers of beyond and black magicks.
    • However, Dr. Girlfriend and The Monarch have proven themselves to be a genuinely loving couple, and as shown throughout the third season, plenty of the other characters have shown to have some unselfish positives about themselves, too.
  • Moralton in Moral Orel. Originally this was played for laughs, but by Season Three it got downright depressing with just how horrible everything was.
  • Monkey Dust seems to fit this perfectly.
  • Springfield from The Simpsons is a perfect example. Matt Groening has said that it's a horrible place to live and the only person who would have any hope of ever escaping is Lisa.
    • Perhaps Reverend Lovejoy was telling the truth when he told Marge that Homer's "gone to a better place".
    • An in-universe edition of Time magazine featured a panoramic shot of Springfield on the cover, along with the headline, "America's Worst City".
    • Highlighting this, and the way a real person would struggle to cope with it, was the purpose of Frank Grimes in "Homer's Enemy".
    • In another episode, Mayor Quimby notes that Springfield is known by the nickname "America's Sorrow."
    • The Boys Of Bummer had a billboard reading "Meanest City In America". The slogan was proven in a most excruciating way that takes things to South Park extremes.
    • Amongst the many books created as merchandise for the show is a booklet written as an in-universe tourist's guide to Springfield. There's more then a few hints of just what a horrific place to live in it is, but the climax has got to be the page on neccessary medical treatments. Basically, due to a combination of horrifically low levels of water sanitation, as well as an insane variety of indigenous diseases and abominably high levels of air pollution and ambient radiation, anyone who wants to even visit Springfield is highly recommended to undertake one of two precautions if they hope to survive the city's environment. The first is a months-long regime of about seventeen booster shots a day to build up resistance to the toxins. The seconds is wearing a full biohazardous environment suit, complete with radiation shielding and its own internal air-supply every single moment of your visit there. It even notes that, for non-natives, breathing the air in Springfield can take years off of the poor fool's lung functional lifespan.
  • Springfield has nothing on Quahog, Rhode Island. Everyone in town is a moron, a pervert, a Jerkass, mentally ill, or some combination of the above. Brian might be an exception, but he is a huge Small Name, Big Ego (at least in later seasons) and can be a jerkass. No, Meg is not an exception, since she has a violent streak, Yandere tendencies, and huge self-esteem problems (of course, this was all brought on by the fact that she's the Butt Monkey, not to mention significantly abused by her parents). Also, the mayor is a corrupt Cloudcuckoolander who's gotten away with killing people in public, and a rapist is allowed to walk the streets and live like a normal person (presumably because he has an amusing Catch Phrase. Giggity giggity goo!). That's right, take away the humorous tone of the show, and Family Guy becomes creepier than Gummo.
    • What about Joe? The only time he turned into a Jerkass was when he got new legs.
    • What's even worse is that the show implies that Quahog isn't the only town in the series to be messed up. In the episode A Fish out of Water, Lois decides to help make her daughter Meg feel better about not going on Spring Break by going to a town filled with Spring Break Fever, and the next morning has some kids stating that some teen who got into a party ended up falling out of the house and getting into a coma, and they actually think it is so cool, that they actually want to emulate him by doing the same.
    • That's really more mocking the "woo woo" idiots who always turn up at Spring Break events than indicting the towns said events take place in.
    • The original point was actually Lampshaded by Meg in the latest season, her claiming that if anyone else saw her life with the Griffins, Peter would be in jail for a lifetime, Chris would be jobless, Lois would be without her husband, etc. Then we get her awesome Reason You Suck Speech subverted by her wanting to be the family's butt monkey since it "keeps them together".
  • Jefferton in Tom Goes to the Mayor. Word of God says not only is it an amalgamation of every real-life crapsack town the creators had been to, it is actually the titular character's own personal Hell.
  • The world of Futurama has many attractions to it, but at base it's stereotypical American trailer park expanded to world size: nearly everyone is annoyed, annoying, credulous, stupid, bigoted, and rude; vital human organs are removed from unwilling donators on the city streets, at-least moderately-intelligent animals, including humans, dolphins, and whales are killed for food or fuel; it is implied that there will be no qualms about synthesizing a needed oil in the cells of gene-spliced third-world orphans who would then presumably be violently harvested. The Earth's most looked-up-to figure is a megalomaniacal, genocidal (of both aliens and his own troops), jerk who's lousy in bed. And Richard Nixon, or at least his head, rules the whole lot, his tyranny (as before) limited only by his incompetence and self-hatred. Even Santa Claus is a totally postal invincible psycho who has turned Xmas into a night of terror and despair, where the populace huddle in military-grade bunkers and hope to survive his brutal rampage. Now do you want your flying car?
  • In the third season of ReBoot, the formerly-bustling city of Mainframe has been turned into a pretty nasty Crapsack World. It gets better, but by the Cliff Hanger ending of the fourth season, it looks like it might be on its way back to Crapsackdom.
  • Hill Valley in The Oblongs, where the wealthy residents of the Hills never receive any comeuppance for their treatment of the Valley people.
  • The world of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack is a grim, dystopian place plagued by violence, diseases, and jerks.
    • To be fair, that's a fairly realistic depiction of 17th century piracy and ADVENTURE!
  • Megas XLR has the alternate dimension, as shown in "Rearview Mirror, Mirror".
  • The world in the 1960s USA/Czechoslovakian series Nudnik seemed to exist solely to torment the titular character.
  • The world of Samurai Jack. Basically Aku rules everything, and the only weapon that can stop him for sure is Jack's sword. If you're not a slave, chances are you're being terrorized by some two bit thug. It's been getting better since Jack showed up though.
  • The Gotham City of Batman: The Animated Series is almost as bad as its comic counterpart. In most other action shows of its time, there were space monsters and futuristic skyscrapers. Gotham was the only kids' show setting you had to walk the streets of while worrying about getting mugged and shot.
    • Batman Beyond is similar, only now the cars can fly.
      • Earth in general in the DCAU can likely count.
      • Arguably, the Batman Beyond version of Gotham is worse than its Animated Series predecessor. The announcement guy for one of the commercials said so himself: "Gotham has become a city without a hero. Its people, no hope. Its youth, no future." Which raises the question of why people still live there at all at this point.
  • The appropriately named Miseryville in Jimmy Two-Shoes. For starters, it's heavily implied to be Hell. The town is ruled by Lucius Heineous VII, who runs a company dedicated to making people miserable.
  • Russia and New York are essentially portrayed as this in An American Tail. It's amped up a notch in Fievel Goes West to justify the Mousekwitz family leaving New York to go west.
  • Dougal County in Squidbillies certainly qualifies.
  • Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic: Imagine an afterlife where very few people actually ascend to heaven, but most suffer in the nine circles of hell for the sins they committed in life. In hell, where mankind's sins have caused Lucifer to grow in power, not worshipping the Christian faith not only sends you to limbo for all eternity despite the good deeds you have done in life, even unbaptized babies must reside in the first circle through a fault not entirely their own (this was where Dante's stillborn malformed child was held). Then there's Dante's mother, who upon committing suicide, was sent to The Wood Of Suicide by Minos where she is turned into a fleshly tree growing in eternal pain. And of course there are the rest of the nine hells, like Gluttony, a wet fleshy realm where Cerberus (who looks nothing like a three headed dog mind you) swallows the gluttonous and condemns to a fate of everlasting hunger. This all isn't surprising since the animated short is based on the video game which itself is based on Dante's Divine Comedy. Lucifer sums it up to Beatrice perfectly:

Beatrice: "It is not our fault. None of it. Man is good."
Lucifer: "No... you don't understand. The Earth is another form of Hell. And men are its demons."

  • In the other Dante's Inferno, Hell is a huge urban landscape in total disarray. The punishments of the damned are more or less the same as the original, but the images (and the actual damned themselves) are updated so viewers will recognize them. Marilyn Monroe is among the suicides turned into trees, Limbo is a slum where Virgil and company are essentially bums, and identity thieves take on the appearance of whoever passes by. In this case, it's played for laughs.
  • In the Gorillaz universe, Murdoc Niccals was permitted, nay, required as part of his community service sentence, to look after a coma patient. A coma patient whose condition was Murdoc's fault in the first place, mind you! Not to mention three single men - one a well-known criminal and all-round sleazebag, one a ditzy prescription-drug addict, and one a possession victim who may not at that time have had UK citizenship - who were, at the time, living in a building haunted by demons and zombies, apparently ran into no legal obstacles whatever when they decided to raise a ten-year-old non-English-speaking girl they found in a FedEx crate. Okay, so Noodle actually worked out fine (at least until El Manana), but ...
  • Kids Next Door. From congress passing laws to hurt kids even though they break the constitution, to constant battles, to the fact a huge-ass ship manned by Candy Pirates can plow through your city at any moment, its surprising that no one in the universe is suicidal.
    • Though adults and kids outside of the conspiracy seem to be completely unaware that anything abnormal goes on at all, though that changes from time to time.
  • An episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron had an evil clone of Jimmy managing to create another earth, where every single person there, parents and teachers included, was a Complete Monster, the sun was never bright, and doing anything good would result in getting chewed out.
  • After the Nanite Event, the world got a lot nastier. Everyone is infected with Nanomachines that can go rogue and cause horrible mutations at any given moment. Imagine you're sitting on the bus, and out of nowhere, the guy sitting next to you screams in pain and turns into a rampaging monster that'd give H. R. Giger nightmares. Bad day to be you. Quite possibly an even worse day to be the guy who was sitting next to you. This happens around the world every day, and only one person in the entire world might be able to turn the monster back into a normal person. And if he can't turn you back, you're either killed outright, or else "contained" indefinitely, by Providence, the morally-gray (at best) international consortium that more or less runs the post-Event world.
  • Argai the Prophecy: By 2075, Earth has become this.
  • The animated series of Jumanji, more so than the film, depicts the game-world as a brutal place to live, in which Alan can barely survive. Unlike many of the other examples on this page, Jumanji is not a dystopian and human Crapsack World, but a monster-filled, Nightmare Fuel jungle. It's Darkest Africa on steroids.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog is full of jerkasses, idiots, psychopaths, and Deliberate Nightmare Fuel.
  • For random civilians, Megakat City seems to apply. The city, or large parts of it, seems to be destroyed on a regular basis, the police are too incompetent to prevent supervillain attacks before they happen, and the local eponymous vigilantes can only stop the attacks from consuming the whole city, but usually several skyscrapers, at the least, are destroyed in the process.
  • For that matter, the City of Townsville also applies in terms of constant random giant monster attacks. More explicit crapsack worlds were portrayed in a Bad Future where Him took over, and the Townsville portrayed in The Movie before the Powerpuff Girls were created.
    • There's also The Town of Citiesville from one episode whereas Reality Ensues, criminals run amok unstopped and everyone else there is a complete Jerkass to everyone, and especially the Girls and the Professors, being considered freaks and the Girls' heroism aren't welcome there.
  • There's a reason why in Superjail business is always booming. The world is violent, cold and crime-filled everywhere. Do not show any signs of kindness or the predatory masses will see it as weakness. You will be robbed and beaten savagely within seconds of giving a kind word. And that's just life outside the jail.
  • The world of Popeye, according to Fridge Logic in Cracked.com's 6 Classic Kids Shows Secretly Set in Nightmarish Universes. Evidently, there, World War II lasted for thirty-nine years, with both sides having spinach-fueled super-strength.
  • The town in Beavis and Butthead. The adults are either mean-spirited and ill-tempered or peaceful yet clueless, the kids are stupid and/or violent, and the whole town looks like the extension of a junkyard.
  • The universe of Cow and Chicken is a huge trailer park and everyone acts like white trash.
  • Cybertron, home of Transformers Generation 1, is either a burnt-out urban wasteland sucked dry of energy after eons of warfar (see Generation 1), a natural Death World for any species that aren't Mechanical Lifeforms and may be a hazard even for them (see the Comics, where Cybertron's natural ecology includes huge lightning storms and seas, of acid), or both.
    • Earth often isn't much better after the Transformers show up. Two armies of sentient Humongous Mecha that have been fighting for probably longer than the human race has existed have chosen our planet for their latest battleground. Oh, and for extra Paranoia Fuel, those giant robots can disguise themselves as anything even vaguely mechanical, including buildings.
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