Nice Job Breaking It, Hero/New Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • John Siegenthaler, a very respected journalist who signed onto That Other Wiki with the greatest of intentions, but singlehandedly ended up ruining it FOREVER. In May of 2005, some anonymous loser added some false information to his page that said that he was a suspect in John F. Kennedy's assassination. This error went unnoticed for five months. Then, someone informed Siegenthaler of the error. He created an account on Wikipedia to correct it, but the administrators didn't realize his intentions and kept reverting his corrections; they eventually blocked him. Also, by editing the article, he was in violation of the Wiki's Conflict of Interest guidelines, which specifically prohibit people from editing articles about themselves or people close to themselves. Eventually, a shitstorm went down that led to the creation of several controversial Wiki policies, including Biographies of Living Persons, the Oversight feature (and its very first use was on the Siegenthaler article!), and registration being required to start new articles. Most haters of Wikipedia say this was when the wiki Jumped the Shark. And all John Siegenthaler wanted to do was correct an error. Nice job breaking it, hero!
    • Ironically, Wikipedia Watch, a site that Wikipedia is at war with due to its webmaster posting personally identifying information about its editors, ended up being the hero in this controversy by giving Siegenthaler personally identifying information about the guy who added the false information in. So, this controversy is also an example of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!
    • Such things were bound to happen from the very premise of the game. It's like spilling heaps of oiled sawdust all around the shop: one can always blame a smoker who walked by at night and didn't read the sign in big letters on the other side of the building, but dismissing any thoughts about fire safety made the result simply a matter of time.
  • In Happy Tree Friends, Splendid appears to be incapable of not doing this.
  • During one campaign in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, the "ape-liberation" terrorist group Prime 8 attempted to detonate a high-yield nuclear weapon in downtown Paris. The Global Guardians stopped the simian supervillains... but during the course of the battle the heroes managed to knock down the Eiffel Tower (which, in turn, destroyed several square blocks of the city during its collapse). Oops!
  • Cracked.com article 6 Movie Heroes Who Actually Made Things Worse, about heroes who heroically tried to stop villains and ended up making things worse than if they did absolutely nothing (Inglourious Basterds, The Ring, Kick Ass, Con Air, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Avatar).
  • Eddie accidentally shooting Ephram's two remaining son's while in a daze which in turn causes his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog features this trope writ large. Dr. Horrible is an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who is unable to follow through on any of his grandiose plans for world domination and is repeatedly humiliated by his Arch Enemy, Jerk Jock Captain Hammer. But when Hammer goes to far as to steal his would-be girlfriend, he makes it personal and gives Horrible a reason to get serious. When Hammer tries to kill Dr. Horrible with his own damaged Death Ray, it explodes, injuring the hero and revealing his True Colors as a Miles Gloriosus, and killing Penny, breaking Horrible's Morality Chain and making him a true supervillain.
    • It's also shown in the prequel comics that the anti-intellectual insults Justice Joe flings at the Mad Scientist villain he's fighting are why Dr. Horrible decided to switch from admiring the heroes to becoming a villain in the first place.
  • Linkara's "Lord Vyce" story arc ended with this. Long story short, the Earth is being threatened by the feared intergalactic conqueror Lord Vyce, who claims he conquers worlds to "protect" them from being invaded by a much greater threat. Linkara and his nakama defeat Vyce, strip him of his weapons and leave him stranded on a desolate planet. At the episode's end, we see that the evil entity Vyce spoke of is very real--and now that Vyce is out of the picture, it's free to roam in our reality.
    • It's worse than that: Linkara has the entity's sacred tome in his possession, and he casually and routinely rattles off passages from it during his reviews. He didn't just leave our world vulnerable to attack from an Elder God--he might have unleashed it!
  • Suburban Knights: The Cloaks, the obstacles, and Jaffers are actively trying to stop the reviewers from finding the Gauntlet. Turns out they had a good reason to do so. Malachite was tracking Team 2's map, meaning that he wouldn't have found the gauntlet in the first place if the reviewers hadn't gone looking for it.
  • In Pay Me, Bug!, the protagonist has some security forces pinned in a stairwell; that is, until he mentions that he only has one pistol in a voice loud enough for them to hear him.
  • In the Whateley Universe, uber-mage Fey has stopped the Necromancer three times and defeated the supervillainess Hekate. Only just recently have we learned that every one of these battles has caused Fey to draw enough life energy from ley lines that she has caused ecological disasters each time. Oops.
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