Karmic Death: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:klansman-on-fire 1525.jpg|link=Reno 911!|frame|"[[Death by Irony|You know...he's accident-prone. This is not the first time this has happened]]."]]
{{quote|''"If I am dangling over a precipice and the hero [[Take My Hand|reaches his hand down to me]], I will not attempt to pull him down with me. I will allow him to rescue me, thank him properly, then return to the safety of my fortress and order his execution."''
|'''[[Evil Overlord List Cellblock A]]''' #74.}}
▲{{quote|''"If I am dangling over a precipice and the hero [[Take My Hand|reaches his hand down to me]], I will not attempt to pull him down with me. I will allow him to rescue me, thank him properly, then return to the safety of my fortress and order his execution."''|'''[[Evil Overlord List Cellblock A]]''' #74.}}
No matter how evil the villain is... the good guys can't just ''[[Thou Shalt Not Kill|kill]]'' them. They're supposed to be pure and noble (or innocent). Having blood on their hands means they'd have to change genres and become [[Anti-Hero|Anti Heroes]].
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More common in Western markets, as a result of [[Media Watchdogs|heavy censorship]] and the general reluctance among writers to feature their character (usually in a show with a younger [[Demographics|Demographic]]) doing such acts as killing, especially if they're [[Kid Hero|underage]]. Occasionally known by the older demographic as "getting one's comeuppance."
Compare [[Hoist by His Own Petard]]. See also [[Cruel Mercy]]. [[The Dog Shot First]] usually involves this. [[The Killer Becomes the Killed]] is a [[Crime and Punishment Series]] variant.
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{{examples}}
▲== Anime & Manga ==
* The villain in ''[[The Castle of Cagliostro|The Castleof Cagliostro]]'' is crushed (possibly ''decapitated'') by the moving hands of a giant clock. The camera cuts to a long [[Gory Discretion Shot]] but you hear a nasty crunching sound.
* ''[[Drifting Classroom]]'': Sekiya.
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== <s>Karmic</s> Comic Books ==
* Comic/film example: ''[[Spider-Man (Comic Book)|Spider-Man]]''. Spidey, infuriated over his girlfriend's death/near-death (depending on which version you're reading/watching), has the Green Goblin on the ropes when the villain reveals that he is Spider-Man's friend's father. As the Green Goblin apologizes, he sets up his glider behind our hero. Spidey jumps out of the way at the last second and the blade on the glider's tip impales the Goblin, [[Hoist by His Own Petard|killing him]]. [[Back from the Dead|For now.]]
* The Governor from ''[[The Walking Dead]]'' suffers one of these at the conclusion of the [[Wham! Episode|"Made to Suffer"]] arc. After the remainder of his troops have finally broken into the good guys' sanctuary, scattering them to the wind and killing over half of them, one of his soldiers, at his urging, shoots a fleeing survivor... the main characters' [[Anyone Can Die|wife and infant daughter.]] Upon discovering the Governor made her kill a baby, she empties her shotgun into the back of his head. The entire squad of soldiers get Karmic Deaths as well, as they're implied to be overwhelmed by zombies a moment later.
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** The Witch King stabbed Frodo with a Morgul blade and the same is done to him by Merry allowing him to be killed by Eowyn.
* ''[[Harry Potter]]''
** In ''[[Harry Potter and
** Vincent Crabbe uses a powerful fire-spreading curse on the heroes that he himself can't control. He's the only one who gets killed by it.
* The villains in the ''[[NUMA Series]]'' (the National Underwater and Marine Agency) of books written by [[Clive Cussler]] tend to die this way. The person who wanted immortality and nearly flooded the oceans with a very hard to kill Gorgonweed ended up killing herself by taking the potion meant to make her immortal because someone she had killed had messed with it making sure that anyone that drank all three of the shots needed for immortality would die from it. One person who wanted to destroy the world's fish trade with mutant fish was eaten by his own creations. A third person wanted to control the world's water and ended up dying by drowning, but the place where she was ended up blowing up so that may have killed her instead.
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** Earlier in the season, there's the former Division scientist who was turning people into [[Manchurian Agent]]s, and ends up killed by one.
== Newspaper Comics ==
* The Brow from ''[[Dick Tracy (comic strip)|Dick Tracy]]'' was an agent working for [[Those Wacky Nazis]], and like most of them, hated America; he met his end when, after a fight with Tracy, was thrown out a window and impaled on a flagpole that was flying the American flag.
== Tabletop Games ==
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** In the ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' add-on ''Dead Money'' the insane former elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, Elijah, kills dozens of people, brutally tortures Christine, enslaves a mentally handicapped Super Mutant, and forces you to fight your way through dozens of Ghost People to penetrate the Sierra Madre Casino under the threat of death, all so he can access the treasures inside the Casino's vault. In the final confrontation with him, an option for dealing with him is to just let him have the treasure while you waltz away. He'll walk into the vault and trigger a trap, locking himself inside forever.
* In ''[[Fallout 3]]'' after you've visited most of the rusty abandoned vaults and Vault-Tek headquarters and discovered the true purpose of the vaults and why they [[Gone Horribly Wrong|went horribly wrong]], you have the chance to find a voice recording on an alien spaceship of the Vault-Tek CEO who masterminded the vault system and their true purpose; the recording shows {{spoiler|the aliens kidnapped him and [[Body Horror|performed experiments]] on him, despite his snivelling attempts to be diplomatic.}}
* Quite a few in ''[[BioShock (series)|BioShock]]'':
*
** The sequel makes it even more satisfying by revealing that the Big Daddy was {{spoiler|Delta (that is to say, ''you'')}}, protecting {{spoiler|Eleanor}}.
** Though his death isn't Karmic, what you can do to Sander Cohan after is. After killing him, you can take his picture like how he made you do so to his underlings. The trophy you get from doing so is even titled ''Irony''.
** Frank Fontaine (the [[Final Boss]]) dies in a particularly karmic (and Catharsis) way. The [[Boss Battle]] begins after he gives himself a mega-strong overdose of ADAM (proving everything he told you during the game about the evils of objectivism and benefits of free will was the deception of a [[Straw Hypocrite]]) turning himself into a huge, hulking beast. When the final blow is struck, the Little Sisters (who, due to his own machinations, have been trained to extract ADAM) tackle and swarm him, draining the stuff from him and reducing him to a burnt-out corpse. Not only Karmic, it is a well-deserved [[Undignified Death]], as is he is not only done in by his own ill-conceived creations, he’s done in by a group of little girls.
*** If you get the Good Ending, this becomes more Karmic yet, given his final words:
{{quote|'''Fontaine:''' I had you built! I sent you topside! I called you back, showed you what you was, what you was capable of! Even that life you thought you had, that was something I dreamed up and had tattooed inside your head. Now, if you don't call that family, I don't know what is. And now…}}
::* He’s [[Killed Mid-Sentence]], and Jack adopts the Little Sisters, raising them as his own daughters, who prove to be far more of a family than anything Fontaine’s lies claimed.
* ''[[Valkyria Chronicles]]'' delivers satisfying ends to the morally corrupt characters of the story. Even Squad 7 is subject to it. The closer a character is to the moral high ground, the better their epilogue is.
* The final boss of ''[[Disaster: Day of Crisis]]'', Evans, meets his end... At the hands of his own colonel, who actually survived being shot by Evans. Awesome.
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* In the beginning of [[Skyrim]], there's an Imperial captain who sends you to your death, even though it was said that you were not on the execution list. If you escape with Ralof, she's the first NPC you kill. It's karmic because it's now ''you'' sending ''her'' to her death.
* [[Complete Monster|Curtis Blackburn]] of ''[[Killer7]]'', an unrepentant rapist, kidnapper, and organ harvester gets mutilated by his own organ harvesting machine after resident [[Badass]] Dan refuses to let him have a peaceful, stylish death.
== Visual Novels ==
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== Webcomics ==
* In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090202094520/http://ah.indolents.com/comic/128 anti-HEROES]'', the lich Finx, [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this moments before his demise.
* The [http://goblinscomic.com/d/20080110.html Fat Guard] at the claws and beak of [[Fluffy the Terrible|Fluffles]] in ''[[Goblins]]''. His plan was to, through [[Being Tortured Makes You Evil|months of agonizing torture]], turn it into a killing machine that would fight for Brassmoon. Well, he got the first part right...
* ''[[The Wotch]]'': Natasha Dahlet of DOLLY is turned into a dolly.
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* In ''[[Justice League]]'', during a battle with his brother Orm in the aquatic underground, [[Aquaman]] has Orm hanging off a frozen cliff, begging his brother to have mercy. After he said "You're weak! You're not fit to...(slips)" (Had the sentenced have been finished, he would have likely said "rule"). Aquaman stares, walks up to Orm while he hanging on the cliff, extends his hand and... picks up his trident, leaving Orm to fall to this death.
{{quote|'''Aquaman''': I believe this is mine.}}
{{quote|'''Darkseid''': Loser.}}
* ''[[Metalocalypse]]'' features a slimy PR lady-slash-cult leader get squished by the very comet she tried to kill everyone with.
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{{quote|'''Phantom Stranger''': Ultimately it was karma that delivered the final blow to Joe Chill. ...Funny how Chill just happened to be under that crumbling ceiling when it came down.
'''Spectre''': I wouldn't know anything about that... }}
* ''[[Batman Beyond]]''; while they [[Never Found the Body]], it is generally assumed that Ra's al Ghul was finally [[Killed Off for Real]] (''and'' the Lazarus Pit truly destroyed) in the episode "Out of the Past", where he perished trying to save the mind-transference device that he had used to cheat death one final time, by stealing the body of his own daughter Talia. Seeing how Ra's - as Bruce Wayne claimed - "cowered in fear" of death his whole career and used every means at his disposal to prevent it, this seemed fitting.
* Megabyte in ''[[
* Slightly subverted in ''[[Tangled]]'' (2010). During the climax, Mother Gothel starts aging to death when the hero cuts Rapunzel's hair; however, it's Pascal, the chameleon, who actually sets up her fall out of the tower's window. As Gothel is backpedaling and covering her face, Pascal pulls the same hair that had been cut to create a trip wire near the window. Gothel then trips over it while wearing the very lace-up boots she had used to kick Pascal across the room moments earlier. She can't maintain her balance because of the heels and she falls to her death below.
** Pascal's set up might not count as Goethel aged to dust before the impact.
* Aku's death in the final episode of ''[[Samurai Jack]]''. After five seasons, a sixteen-year hiatus, and five decades (in-universe) of making Jack's life Hell, gloating and mocking him in every confrontation, Aku is brought down by his own machinations. In the penultimate episode, Aku takes control of his daughter Ashi's body using the portion of his essence she was born from, a process that gives Ashi full access to all of her father's powers, ''including'' the ability to open portals in time. Thus, when Jack helps her retake control through [[The Power of Love]] and she retains Aku's powers, she is able to let Jack ''finally'' return to the past, mere seconds after Aku's spell hurled him into the future. Now that Jack has 50 years more experience under his belt, Aku stands no chance, and is reduced to attempting to crawl away like the coward he is, a pathetic and fitting end to such a cruel villain.
== Real Life ==
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* [http://www.snopes.com/horrors/animals/snowball.asp Check out this news story]. A man tried to turn his pet goat Snowball into a guard-dog, and resorted to [[Kick the Dog|beating the goat with a stick]] to make it more aggressive. [[The Dog Bites Back|Guess who the goat's first victim was]]?
* In a similar manner to Steele from Balto, while he didn't die, Chris Matthews frequently mocked those he felt were stupid and implied that they would bomb at Jeporady. On May 14, Chris Matthews ended up invited onto Jeporady, where he not only lost, he absolutely bombed the questions at Jeopardy. Bonus points for the specific Jeopardy game being Celebrity Jeopardy, which is well known for asking simple questions, making his bombing of the questions also an ''[[Epic Fail]]''.
* If a show could be considered "dead" when cancelled, ''[[Politically Incorrect]]'' was a show that died a Karmic Death, as it did so when its host made a politically incorrect statement on the air, claiming the 911 terrorists were braver than American soldiers using cruise missiles.
{{reflist}}
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