Disproportionate Retribution/Literature

In Diana Wynne Jones' The Merlin Conspiracy, due to some inadvertent time hopping as he flees an assassin sent by two big bads who want him dead for no discernible reason, Nick winds up in the assassin's home before the hit was taken up. A little over a decade, in fact. The two big bads pay a visit as the children they were, and Nick laughs as one steps on an egg, which sets off the two's berserk button and triggers the need for revenge years later.
- During the same interlude, Nick hangs up on the assassin's ex-wife in the middle of a phone call, which sets in motion her ultimate plot to take over Britain and destroy its other magic-users before they could oppose her. Without which the rest of the book probably wouldn't have happened anyway.
In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean serves 19 years as a galley slave for stealing a loaf of bread (plus several escape attempts). Later he steals a 40-sous coin and receives a life sentence.
- This was however an accurate reflection of the French justice system at the time.
  - One should keep in mind his actual crime, he broke glass (back when it was probably worth hundreds or thousands of times the value of the bread), was armed, and robbed an occupied residence. Which is an easy felony (actually multiple felonies) that will put you away for a long time under the American legal system. With escape attempts using violence and fleeing a felony, and resisting recapture, it is entirely likely he would never get out under, say the American common law legal system. Not of hard labor of course, but still...
    - Of course, his number of escape attempts had a lot to do with the horrific prison conditions, which complicates the issue of Valjean's sentence then versus now.
    - To be more specific, Valjean was sentenced to 5 years for the initial theft/property damage. He attempted to escape 4 times, with each escape attempt adding time onto his sentence.
Slagar the Cruel from the Redwall novel Mattimeo arguably qualifies, since his entire reason for being is revenge against Matthias for his grievous, insanity-inflicting injuries...that were actually well-deserved, what with him being Exclusively Evil and all, and furthermore had nothing to do with Matthias whatsoever. Simple logic doesn't stop him from kidnapping Matthias' son (the eponymous Mattimeo) and several other children, however, as well as siding with the delusional polecat-slash-pagan deity Malkariss.
- The Redwaller kids point out immediately afterwards that Asmodeus's poison corrupted his mind and made him go batshit crazy into thinking that the Redwallers were responsible, even though he decided to steal everything valuable in the abbey after they'd saved him from death.
A Song of Ice and Fire has a number of examples. Gregor Clegane typically crushes anything that so much as annoys him. He most notably held his little brother's face to a burning brazier for playing with one of his old toys, scarring him for life. Petyr Baelish's kingdom-conquering is mostly due to a grudge he nurses from being rejected by his childhood sweetheart for a wealthier and more dashing man. Tywin Lannister is well known for his harsh retribution. A popular song, "The Rains of Castamere" was written about how he completely wiped out two noble houses for being disloyal. The Freys have possibly the most shocking example: After Robb Stark reneges on his wedding promise to House Frey, Lord Walder massacres Robb, his mother, most of his noble bannermen, and most of his army at the wedding feast of his uncle, thereafter called The Red Wedding. Joffrey Baratheon/Lannister is also know for this trope, typically cutting everybody's heads off for any act of defiance or making them duel to the death. He once even almost executed a person for getting a little bit too drunk and dishonouring himself in a tourney.
The Sword of Truth series sees a man being tortured by a Mord-Sith after he assassinates a mage in the opposing army (after stabbing a little girl; the girl survives, the mage doesn't). Surprisingly, the torturers are the heroes. After the man has spilled all his information, the mage's lover orders him to be tortured to death as slowly as possible, in retaliation for being so cocky when he was captured.
- In the first book, the staff taking care of the tomb of Darken Rahl's father were executed if a single petal fell off the flowers there or a single torch went out in Rahl's presence. And he considered himself merciful for allowing them a quick death in such cases.
- In one book, Kahlan looks through old records of trials, one of which includes an entry about a wizard who had been executed for being an incurable alcoholic. Her initial response is to think it's an example of this trope, but when she thinks about it, she realizes that, given the raw destructive power of wizards, it just wouldn't be safe to let the guy live.
The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequel feature a powerful magic guild called the Bondsmagi. One of them, Falconer, seem to be particularly guilty of this trope, as he tortures the main hero and threatens him with death of his friends just for speaking to him with no respect.
- The Bondsmagi love disproportionate revenge. The reason everybody respects them is because killing one will get the entire guild after you to kill you, your family, your pets, etc. They're also known for burning an entire city to ash because a dozen of them died during a war against the Therin Empire.
Michael Crichton's Timeline has Robert Doniger, the business-man who sends the heroes back in time to the Middle Ages to fix something gone wrong. Long story short, lots of things go wrong. When our heroes do get back, they get their revenge on Doniger, unethical as he is, by sending him back in time with the same machine to the Middle Ages where he gets a nasty case of the Black Plague.
- The Film of the Book was a bit less dysfunctional, with Doniger's fate being A: a quicker death, B: a sort-of accident caused when he D: tried to leave the protagonists to their fates in the past just to save his own reputation. It seems less like Disproportionate Retribution and more like Poetic Justice.
  - Doninger wanting to leave them in the past to save his company's rep happened in the book as well. He says he's kidding, but the other character, who knows him very well, doesn't believe him. Also, there's the part about him wanting to sell time travel tech to rewrite history, so Doninger comes across as deserving what he gets.
One villain in the Fingerprints series got her Start of Darkness when she vowed revenge on the person who murdered her mother. Upon learning that the murderer had already died for unrelated reasons, she decided that wasn't satisfactory - someone had to suffer, and it didn't particularly matter who. She began targeting the hero (who was related to the murderer but didn't even know about the murder, let alone take part in it). Unusually, the villain is eventually persuaded by the hero that what she's doing is pointless... but only because she finds another target more directly connected to her mother's murder, whom she proceeds to go after with great enthusiasm.
The Judgment, the short story written by Franz Kafka, has a man's father reveal that he is aware that the son has been lying to an old friend living in Russia (who may or may not exist) about his engagement. The father then orders the son to drown himself. The son does so.
Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter books forces students to write lines in their own blood with a quill that cuts into the skin on the backs of their hands. All of this for speaking out of turn and/or questioning the Ministry.
- Even worse, it's stated that at least one student's hand is bleeding quite badly, and that Harry himself has another permanent scar.
- The ending of Chamber of Secrets in the film version is formidable. Harry makes Lucius Malfoy lose his slave. Which is a disproportionately minor retribution when you remember that he caused a young girl to be mind-raped, and tried to organize the murder of every Muggle-born child in Hogwarts. Lucius then falls head-first into this trope by trying to murder Harry with the ever-dreaded AK-666. Of course, it just happened to come into the actor's head during filming; the actual script said something along the lines of "LUCIUS yells a curse to fire at HARRY, who dodges." Nowhere in the script did it have Lucius explicitly yell "Avada Kedavra!"
- There's also the treatment Harry received from the Dursleys for most of the eleven years prior to his acceptance into Hogwarts, and occasionally afterward as well. He was confined to the cupboard under the stairs pretty much just for existing, yelled at for asking questions or innocently mentioning strange dreams, and punished (up to and including being denied meals) for exhibiting signs of the hated magic, which he neither understood nor was able to control. For example, in the first book he gets locked in the cupboard for much of the summer just for talking to a snake after the "vanishing glass" incident.
- Voldemort once applied for the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts though his primary goal was to hide the Ravenclaw diadem Horcrux in the Room of Requirement. Dumbledore rejected his application because he knew Voldemort had ulterior motives for being there and he wanted him gone. That and he figured a snake-like Humanoid Abomination that reeked of Dark magic probably wouldn't be a good influence on students. Even though he had accomplished his real goal, Voldemort still felt pissed off by the rejection. And that's why no Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher has ever managed to hold on to the position for more than a year after Voldemort's visit. Turns out the position really is jinxed.
  - Word of God later stated that while Voldemort's death lifted the curse, Slytherin's shady reputation nonetheless stands.
In the Conan the Barbarian story "Wolves beyond the Border", the Pict shaman Zogar Sag is briefly jailed for mugging a merchant and stealing his liquors. He react by summoning a Swamp Devil (actually his brother) and sending him to kill the merchant and the guards who arrested him. It should be noted, however, that Conan stated that imprisoning a Pict is the worst offence you can make to him.
Tom Clancy's Without Remorse has the hero, after his girlfriend is brutally killed, decide to start killing any drug dealer he runs across, on his way to finding the real killers.
- Lest we forget, Clark at one point managed to kidnap one of the dealers who killed his girlfriend (and bragged about it to Clark). He shoved him in a boat and drove back to his island home, leased from the Navy and stocked with all kinds of surplus gear. Like a pressurization chamber!! For the next ten hours, he uses it to put his captive at around 100 feet simulated depth, and to raise it when the man didn't answer his questions properly. By the time Clark had finished, every joint in the man's body was crippled, the insides of his eyes had burst, most of his muscles were for all intents and purposes one giant bruise, and he had the next best thing to a stroke. When finished, he drove the man back to the mainland and left him on the beach for the police to find: Blind, incoherent, and crippled, spending the next month in agony before finally dying.
  - Given that the person dying was one of the people who had raped Clark's girlfriend to death, and that she took even longer to die than this schmuck did, it can be argued that the retribution was actually proportionate to the original offense. Avenging death by slow torture by inflicting death by slow torture is an Eye for An Eye.
- Roughly two thirds of Sum of All Fears is about Elizabeth Elliot trying to ruin Ryan's career and marriage for taking offense to her bad manners in the previous book. The movie version is vastly improved by the fact that she isn't in it.
In Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs is placed into a torture program for 24 simulated hours by some Punch Clock Villain technicians hired by the Big Bad. After he escapes, he remembers a passage from his favorite author about making every struggle personal. He returns to the technicians' office and kills everyone who works there, then goes to a strip club that is tangentially related to the affair and massacres everyone working there as well. He melts the heads of everyone he kills, preventing them from being resurrected in a new body, as most people are after death. His rampage is considered outrageous by everyone who learns about it.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street: Perchance to Dream, main character Jacob Johnson uses his powers to stop everyone in Springwood from dreaming in order to protect them from Freddy. This has the adverse side-effect of making everyone edgy, paranoid, and violent; at one point a character browses through a newspaper and finds a section mentioning a kid who stabbed his teacher in the eye with a pencil after getting a bad mark and a man who shot his wife because she was "vacuuming in a really irritating way".
In Holes, every member of the Yelnats family and their descendants are cursed with bad luck because one of their ancestors, Elya Yelnats, forgot to fulfill a promise to Madame Zeroni. The promise? All he had to do was carry her up a mountain, and sing a certain song while she drank from the spring on the top.
- Admittedly, the spring apparently had some sort of healing/growth properties that would have given the old and possibly dying Zeroni a longer life. Still a bit harsh, though.
- She did give him fair warning when the made his deal. If she didn't follow through, what good was the threat? It's also a very mild curse—just bad luck, and usually non fatal. Stanley Yelnats the first was robbed by Kate Barlow and left in the desert to die but he still survived.
- And it did help her descendent in the long run.
  - After he carried her descendant up a mountain and sung the song to him while he drank from the water at the top, thus fulfilling the promise and causing good luck.
A race introduced by Timothy Zahn in the Hand of Thrawn duology have this as part of their legal code. The penalty for murder is death, life for life - either one who is guilty, or ten of his clan who are innocent. They use this to justify flattening a Bothan space station and further inflaming the political mess engulfing the New Republic.
- The bothans themselves. A species had a single member slight the bothan race, and in retaliation, they burned the homeworld, slaughtered every member of the species, erased records of them, and Made them never have existed.
In Slaughterhouse-Five a character speaks of feeding a dog steak and watch springs for biting him and proposes enacting horrible revenge on the main character for accidentally doing something involved with his friend's death! Now, this all happens offstage and the character's never seen again, so...
In Ray Bradbury's short story The Flying Machine, a Chinese emperor beheads the bewildered inventor of the titular machine, has the machine burned along with the inventor's remains, and has the ashes buried secretly, all because someone might be inspired to use such a machine to destroy the Great Wall of China.
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao responds to the death of his father at the hands of one of Tao Qian's officers by committing a genocide against Tao's subjects.
According to Aristotle, Greek Tragedy actually requires that the Tragic Hero suffer disproportionate retribution for his actions. Aristotle judged that it had to be this way because if the hero was innocent than he wouldn't get Character Development and if he deserved his fate than it wouldn't be tragic.
A lot of characters in Maggie Furey's Shadowleague trilogy teeter on the brink of this, but as of the first book (The Heart of Myrial), only one character has gone over - intending torture, rape and murder for a noble who seems perfectly unaware that her grunts (who have already died for their crimes) were committing said crimes, and killing whatever innocent bystanders stand in his way.
In Storming Heaven by Dale Brown, a plot point in the backstory is how meddling bureaucrats put an end to a border patrol program because a pregnant drug mule carrying contraband in her body panicked after a prolonged chase by helicopters and was induced into premature labor- the drugs in her body killing both herself and her baby, resulting in horrible publicity for the program. Again, they were chasing drug mules with helicopters.
- Grzylov from Air Battle Force loses a baseful of bombers when Patrick has them destroyed to stop them attacking Turkmenistan. His response in Plan of Attack? Nuclear sneak attacks that wipe out most of the American strategic arsenal.
- In Executive Intent, Somali pirates attack a Chinese ship. At first, the Chinese helicopter sent tries to warn them off. When the pirates start killing hostages, the helicopter crew respond by attacking the pirates. Fair enough. Then the helicopter is shot down by a pirate. The Chinese response is a massive aerial and amphibious attack and takeover of Mogadishu. Later, some Yemeni terrorists crash an explosive-laden boat into a Chinese warship, sinking it. The Chinese proceed to punish Yemen too.
In the Farsala Trilogy, a young smith named Kavi loses the use of his hand when a deghan tries to grab a sword from him. Years later, he betrays Farsala to the Hrum and causes the death of the entire deghan class.
Lady Holdless Thella of Renegades of Pern lives and breathes this trope. In one case, she and her raiders ambush a trading caravan, destroying several carts and killing or wounding most of the traders and their beasts. She does this because earlier, when she was chasing down a family running from her, she encountered the traders, and the man she questioned was evasive and unhelpful.
In one G. K. Chesterton Father Brown story, the Asshole Victim was inclined to do this. In retaliation for an insult years before, he threw a Moslem into a pig-sty, breaking his arm and his leg, and then left him there overnight. That wasn't why he was murdered, though: He proposed to his ward, and was rejected. His planned revenge for this was to have her marry an old friend of his, and then have the old friend hanged for murder.
Done a great deal in ~Aesop's Fables~. One particularly harsh example is in the story of the monkey and the camel. The monkey danced for all the desert animals and amused them with how nimble and cute he was. The camel saw this and figured that he could do just as well. He showed off, trying to dance as well, but of course was much clumsier and oafish. The animals were so annoyed at his terrible dancing that they drove him out of the desert, and then ate him, "serving refreshments of camel humps and ribs". Ow.
In Digital Devil Story, the entire plot is set in motion because the Alpha Bitch Kyoko was rejected by our protagonist Nakajima. She dupes Jerk Jock Kondo into beating the crap out of Nakajima. Thoroughly displeased, Nakajima summons the great demon Loki and has the demon consume Kyoko's and Kondo's souls.
In Andy Hoare's White Scars novel Hunt for Voldorius, Malya is chosen for Voldorius's equerry. They get her to obey by threatening to kill a hundred people every time she is disobedient.
In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The Phoenix on the Sword", Thoth-Amon, having gotten back his Ring of Power and wanting more than anything to make his former master Ascalante pay for all the humiliation he's heaped upon him, sends a demon of Set after him and throws in, just for giggles, everyone with him at the time. Including, as it happens, Conan whom Ascalante was trying to assassinate at the time.
- In "Beyond the Black River", Conan vows to kill ten Picts for Balthus's death, and seven for the dog that died with him. To be sure, the Picts had slaughtered a lot more than seventeen in their attack.
In Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, the Cat who Walks By Himself gets some pretty harsh treatment simply for saying his Catch Phrase "I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me." Some of the harsh treatment may be justified, because over a large part of the story, the Cat is clearly trying to get something without giving anything back in return—nevertheless, when the Dog and the Man lay down the law and tell what they expect of the Cat in the future (keep the mice away, be kind to babies) and the Cat agrees to their terms, they still vow that they and their descendants will torment the Cat for always and always just because he spoke out of turn.
- Earlier on in the story, the Dog immediately tells the Cat that they can never be friends again just because the Cat didn't want to come along on his exploration trip. Really, it's not all that hard to see why the Cat would prefer not to retain too close a relationship with such jerks.
In Laurence Yep's Dragon Series, a teenager is forced into a marriage with a river spirit. Upon escaping (after a thousand years, mind you), and seeing her former village had become a wealthy and industrialized city, Civet is overcome by loss and decides that dragons are responsible. She destroys the Inland Sea where the Inland dragons live, by taking away all the water, and then uses the water to destroy River Glen, her former village.
Nearly the entire class on the 30th floor in Wayside School fell victim to this trope courtesy of Mrs. Gorf, who would turn her entire class into apples for minor offenses such as sneezing, saying "God bless you" after said sneeze, crying, and arriving late for class.
Achilles from the Ender's Shadow series takes this to an extreme by killing people for doing good things to help him because he can't bear for anyone to have seen him helpless.
In The Lotus Eaters, Legate Pigna gets wadded up paper thrown in his face and yelled at by Carrera, who was angry about how bureaucratized the Legion was getting in the year after his Heroic BSOD. The response? Plot with the enemy to overthrow the government.
- Arguably, Carrera's nuking the city to get at the family of the terrorist organization's leader also qualifies, considering earlier in Carnifex it was shown that his people could get at the family members with more selective means of killing.
In the first Alex Rider book, Herod Sayle planned to kill millions of innocent schoolchildren as revenge for the Prime Minister bullying him at school. Then we have Damian Cray in the fourth book, who arranged the death of a journalist who objected to the violence in his video games, and later told Alex he planned to kill him before he found out he was a spy, on the basis that Alex had done too well at what was supposed to be an extremely difficult game. And then in Scorpia Rising we have Razim, who, as a child, stabbed his nanny in the leg when she told him off for teasing his sister. Yeah, Anthony Horowitz is fond of this trope.
In Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, the narrator, Montressor, is insulted by Fortunato prior to the beginning of the story. While it isn't said what the insult is, apparently it wasn't so severe that Fortunato thought their friendship was dissolved. In any case, it's difficult to imagine that he could have done anything that would make walling him up in a wine cellar and leaving him to die of dehydration anything but disproportionate.
The punishments in Candide are wildly disproportionate, and are Played for Laughs. To name a few, one character is given several thousand lashes for taking a walk, another character is hanged for expressing his beliefs (and for fun), the latter's companion is lashed for simply being his companion, etc. The book is filled to the brim with this sort of thing.
In Children Of The River, Sundara's Love Interest back in Cambodia, Chamroeun, is revealed to have been beheaded with a hoe for (horror of horrors) stealing a potato because he was hungry.
In Freedom, Loki/Gragg ruins the credit rating of someone fool enough to cut his queue.
In Rosemary Well's picture book version of The Little Lame Prince, the kingdom is under the influence of an evil usurper, and the crown prince is taken in by a convict who was "condemned to death for stealing apples".
The captain of the Albatross in the Knight and Rogue Series has Michael flogged for accidentally spilling paint on him. Bonus points for Michael not having been the one to spill the paint in the first place.
In an example of disproportionately low retribution, the head inquisitor in the Safehold novels gives orders that result in a massacre and is sentenced to one week's kitchen duty.
In Death: A number of murderers and criminals throughout the series have done this. Promises In Death reveals that Max Ricker sliced up three men and left them floating down a river. Why? Because they stole from a store owned by his son, Alex Ricker, and caused him embarrassment. Creepy!
The Dean Koontz short story "Kittens". Sure, it's horrible when you're a first-grade girl and you find out that your father has been drowning your cat's litters of kittens and claiming that "God took them", but drowning your twin baby brothers in the bathtub to get back at him is going a little far. (Especially disproportionate because drowning kittens was a common practice back in the day.)
Stephenie Meyer, angel that she is, would like you to know that Lauren, whose biggest offense was saying something sarcastic to Bella and disliking her, was involved in a huge modeling scam that cost her thousands, and some of her hair. And she had only, what, six lines of dialogue in four books?
In the period mystery Eater of Souls, an ancient Egyptian serial killer murders people who'd subjected him to extremely minor offenses, like buying the company of a tavern prostitute before he could cross a room to purchase her services himself.
Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Okay, some of the punishments the Vigilantes subject the villains to can be considered this. A notable instance is the book Vendetta in which the Vigilantes skin John Chai alive! Well, the story says caning, but caning and skinning someone alive are not the same thing. His crime was drunkenly committing a hit-and-run on Myra Rutledge's daughter Barbara Rutledge, killing her and her unborn child, and then getting away with it because he's the son of the ambassador of China and used Diplomatic Impunity without a qualm. The reason the punishment in Vendetta can be considered this trope is because the crime occurred in Weekend Warriors, which is a few books back, and by then the reader will probably have forgotten the full impact of the crime.
The protagonist of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno believes that being sent to Hell for eternity is Disproportionate Retribution for finite sin (not exactly a new idea - see Religion and Mythology section). He later comes to the conclusion that punishment in Hell is a) not eternal, and b) actually a form of highly extreme psychotherapy.
In the Knight and Rogue Series a half-mad captain has Michael flogged for accidentally spilling paint on him.
Not as violent or as graphic as some examples, but Anne does this in the Anne of Green Gables series in one of the most infamous scenes in all of literature. Most of the girls of Avonlea school are quite used to being teased by Gilbert Blythe, and most ignore it or become mildly offended. When Gilbert dares to make fun of Anne's red hair, Anne smashes her slate over his head and breaks it in half. And refuses to speak to him for years afterward. Quite the hefty punishment for one ill-timed comment.
In The Highland Twins at the Chalet School, when Fiona McDonald makes a snarky comment at Betty Wynne-Davies, Betty responds by planning to steal the Chart of Erisay, a document containing military information about the remote Scottish island where the McDonalds live. She then makes a deal with a Nazi spy to hand it over to him, after he hears her talking about it and corners her. When news gets back to the school and police are called in, Betty winds up being expelled.
- More generally, one way to guarantee getting punished in the Chalet School, usually by fines and a heavy ticking off, is...talking slang. Yeah.
In Ozma of Oz (the third Land of Oz book) Princess Langwidere is a woman who can remove her head and replace it with another; she has thirty heads that she can exchange this way. Why does she get angry at Dorothy and have her thrown in the dungeon? Because she wants Dorothy’s head, and the selfish brat refuses to give it to her!