Sadist Show: Difference between revisions

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* ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'' plays this for drama.

* ''[[Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu]]''. Guu uses her logic-defying powers just to fuck Hare's life up. His mother is not much nicer to him. Seriously, asking him if he saved his game, and then turning it off for no apparent reason? He never knew his father most of his life, and it turns out that it was the school doctor, who looks at pornography and hates him with a passion.

* ''[[Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt|Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt]]'': It's like ''[[Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi]]'' [[X Meets Y|meets]] ''[[South Park]]'' [[X Meets Y|meets]] ''[[The Powerpuff Girls]]'', Japanese Anime Style.

* Pick a harem series. Any. You'll be lucky if it ''isn't'' this trope.

* ''[[School Days]]''. Maybe the ONLY harem series that takes itself seriously.

** Snigger.

* ''[[Ultimate Girls]]''. UFO Man has revived three girls by sacrificing much of his own life force, so now they're in charge of protecting Tokyo. Oh, but growing 50 feet tall is only the half of this show. While most fellow fanservice shows just feature embarrassment as a natural emotion of being seen naked, this show actively goes out of its way to utterly humiliate the protagonists. It's not enough that embarrassment becomes the girls' power source as their magical spandex wears out (''very'' quickly). Oh no. When they revert back to their normal size, they don't even get their clothes back, even though said embarrassment has already served its purpose.

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* ''[[Blood C]]'' chances are if you're not a ally of the [[Big Bad]] or Saya prepare to die ''[[Cruel and Unusual Death|horribly]]''.

* All characters in the movie version of [[X 1999]] die either in the first 5 minutes after they're introduced or at least before the end of the movie.

* [[Love Hina]]. Everything bad that happens to the main protaganist is meant to be funny. Not many people find it to be funny at all.

* [[Girls Bravo]] takes that [[Up to Eleven|to the point where its own protagonist becomes allergic to females]].

* [[Excel Saga (anime)|Excel Saga]]. [[Failure Is the Only Option|Everything Il Palazzo assigns to his henchgirls ends up in failure]], Hyatt is [[Ill Girl|so ill that she continually dies and comes back to life]], [[Failure Is the Only Option|all of Menchi's attempts to escape Excel's ownership end in failure]], [[Butt Monkey|Mr. Pedro]] lost ties with his family to Gomez, Nabeshin is prone to lose loved ones only moments after he reunites with them, and Excel's neighbors are led by one hell of an iron-fisted bitch.

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* ''[[Life in Hell]]''. [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]].

* ''[[Garfield]]''. Lots of the humor revolves around Garfield, Jon, and Odie (usually the latter two) being injured. In [http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/1998/ga980111.gif one strip], Garfield [[Running Gag|kicks Odie off the table,]] ''[[Crosses the Line Twice|then drops a freaking vase on him.]]''

** [http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/20e9a6a05f3b012ee3c100163e41dd5b This strip] is another particularly sadistic one.

* [[Hagar the Horrible]], particularly when the titular character deals with his wife Helga.

* [[Baby Blues]], mainly for the parents.

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* The early novels of Evelyn Waugh are sadist shows. In the first few pages of Decline and Fall, for instance, Paul Pennyfeather gets debagged, expelled from Oxford, fined five and sixpence for two cigarette burns in his room, cheated out of his inheritance by his guardian, and sent to work in the worst school in England. No wonder he's upset. ('God damn and blast them all to hell,' said Paul meekly to himself as he drove to the station, and then he felt rather ashamed, because he rarely swore.')

* When [[Philip K. Dick]] was going through his darkest days of depression and insanity, he wrote some ''very'' painful stories, most of which consist of him bashing down his protagonists so that even suicide seems like a happy option.

* ''The Gap Cycle''. Hooooo, boy, ''and HOW''. It's even represented by an ''actual'' sadist show in which a large-breasted woman ''cuts off her breasts'' with a rusty knife, then guts herself. [[Fridge Horror|On a nightly basis, thanks to future technology - but she still feels everything.]]

* ''Justine'' by the [[Marquis de Sade]] is nothing but a [[Sadist Show]] punctuated by philosophical monologues. The world is not just indifferent, but actively malevolent. Justine is consistently punished for her decent behavior while her persecutors experience nothing but boons for their cruelty and selfishness.

== Live Action Television ==

* The [[Ur Example]] for this in television might be the game show [[Queen for a Day]], on which five female contestants described in excruciating detail their horrible [[Real Life]] problems (such as deaths in the family, cancer, job loss, poverty, homelessness, even ''mental illness'') in order to win prizes, the host viciously belittling and ridiculing them as the audience laughed at their predicaments. When the winner was announced, the other contestants were ushered off the stage and given ''nothing'', not even bus fare home. This passed for family entertainment for ''twenty years'' on American TV.

* The re-imagined ''[[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined]]'' plays this for drama. It got excruciatingly (and brilliantly) dark at points.

* Teen soaps are prone to this half of the time, apparently to show you that some [[Teens Are Monsters]]. [[Nickelodeon]] usually leads this trope, as well as [[Dan Schneider]] shows that employ [[Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male]]/

** The [[Dan Schneider]] shows ''[[iCarly]]'' and ''[[Drake and Josh]]'' are poster-children for [[Comedic Sociopathy]], each having a massive [[Karma Houdini]] in the form of Megan, and Sam with their targets [[Drake and Josh]], and Freddie.

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** The same goes for ''[[The IT Crowd]]'', often in a big way.

* The [[Britcom]] ''[[Bottom]]'' (as well as its spiritual predecessor ''The Young Ones'') exists entirely so the audience can watch two only-slightly-sympathetic [[Loser Protagonist|Loser Protagonists]] sharing an apartment, arguing, dreaming up [[Zany Scheme|Zany Schemes]] that inevitably fail, beating the hell out of each other, and suffering fatal injuries at least once every three episodes. Edmondson, Mayall, and Planer also joined forces for ''[[Filthy Rich and Catflap|Filthy, Rich, and Catflap]]''. This sort of show is really Edmondson and Mayall's specialty.

* ''[[Peep Show]]'' is another [[Britcom]] to fit this trope, a cringingly awkward black comedy following, once again, two only-slightly-sympathetic [[Loser Protagonist|Loser Protagonists]] as they ruin their own chances in life and love.

** Every single episode can be summed up as Mark Corrigan narrowly avoids a fleeting moment of happiness.

* ''[[Married... with Children]]''. What redeeming moments the characters had were very few and far between, and such moments were almost always the exclusive purview of Al and to a lesser extent Bud.

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* ''[[Mad TV]]''

* It's arguable that the humor in Australian mockumentary ''[[We Can Be Heroes]]'' derives from the patheticness of the characters.

* ''[[Everybody Loves Raymond]]'', to some extent. There are no more than token efforts to solve the [[Dysfunction Junction]] situation. Ray is a wuss when it comes to standing up to his wife and mother, although he does get better at this in the later seasons; Frank is an insensitive [[Jerkass]]; Deborah is a mean, overly angry housewife; Robert is a self-loathing whiner who expresses [[Wangst]] despite the fact that he's in his forties; and Marie is simply the personification of the devil who uses guilt to get what she wants in addition to being meddlesome.

* ''[[Dinner Impossible]]'' could be fairly accurately summarized as "Food Network tries to kill Robert Irvine." ''[[Restaurant Impossible]]'' allows him to spread the suffering around a bit more.

** From the same network, a lot of the "Food Network Specials" basically consist of the audience waiting for the cake to fall over.

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* ''[[It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia]]'' is this trope in ''spades''. The main cast of five has virtually no redeeming qualities and their attempts to improve anything ''always'' makes it worse. Sweet Dee was originally conceived as the voice of reason, but very quickly lost that aspect of her character and is now just as horrible as the rest of them.

* ''[[Lexx]]'' is another [[World Half Empty]] example. The characters are less than sympathetic, and while you'd kinda root for them at first, by the third series you'd wish [[Kill It with Fire|they died in the pilot]], for the ''entire Universe's'' sake. The third series tries to redeem them, but some even consider {{spoiler|[[Crosses the Line Twice|blowing up Heaven and Hell planets]]}} to deserve them the fate above. Fourth series goes to {{spoiler|Earth}}, which doesn't have that much luck or sympathy either, and is destroyed chunk by chunk {{spoiler|until it is blown up and between the survivors manage to wind up [[Our Presidents Are Different|President Buffoon]], the [[Mad Scientist]] partly responsible for Earth's destruction (and his [[Fan Girl|Fangirls]]), and of course, [[Satan|the devil himself]]}}.

* [[The BBC]] show ''[[Mongrels]]''

* ''[[Malcolm in the Middle]]''. The show is wall-to-wall power struggles and emotional warfare. The rule on that show is that whatever makes the characters (especially Malcolm) the most miserable is what will happen. Just two examples: the episode that ends with Francis dragged naked behind a Zamboni on a skating rink (after trying to stop getting deeper in debt to his evil employer), and the episode that ends with Malcolm being insulted, a lot, by a girl, having a crying jag, and drying his tears with poison oak.

** There was an in-universe example of this as well... In one episode, Francis babysits his brothers and sets up a "contest" to see which brother loves him most by doing random tasks for him. This quickly devolves into a brawl, and Francis briefly cuts in, saying something to the effect of "Whoa, whoa. This was supposed to be about love, and you've turned it into something ugly! ...Carry on." He then sits down with a drink and watches his brothers fighting, saying "This, too, pleases me."

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== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''Whacked!'' No matter what the specifics are for any given round, it will ''always'' involve slaughtering your opponents with baseball bats, meat cleavers, exploding rubber duckies, oversized shishkabobs, cacti, missiles, and plenty more! [[Death Is Cheap|Again, and again, and again!]]

* [[~~Conkers~~ Bad Fur Day]]. [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]. Maybe minus the "fur" part, since none of it has anything to do with his fur so much as his acid-trippy trials and tribulations, which are ultimately topped off with his life being ruined. Did the prologue say that this was all how he became the king? {{spoiler|It was all a lie. He never became anything grand; he just went through hell for nothing... or, less than nothing, if you will.}}

* [[Conker's Bad Fur Day]]. [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]. Maybe minus the "fur" part, since none of it has anything to do with his fur so much as his acid-trippy trials and tribulations, which are ultimately topped off with his life being ruined. Did the prologue say that this was all how he became the king? {{spoiler|It was all a lie. He never became anything grand; he just went through hell for nothing... or, less than nothing, if you will.}}

* [[Dragon Age 2]], Hawke is caught smack dab in the middle of having an apostate (or being an apostate) on the run from Templars and insane blood mages and have absolutely no way to make anything better. Only the way they approached one bad thing after another. Either by being pragmatic/sarcastic/angry.

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* ''[[Something Positive]]'' is a form of Sadist Webcomic that is more about characters surviving their lives while the world continues to spit at them. (Of course, how sympathetic you think they are depends on how you view the [[The Eeyore|passive-aggressiveness]] and sadism they react with.)

* ''[[~~8-Bit Theater (Webcomic)|~~8-Bit Theater]]'' has an entire cast of idiots, sadists, and idiotic sadists. The main characters are Fighter, a nimrod who manages to be [[Too Dumb to Live]] and [[No One Should Survive That|too stupid to die]] at the same time ([[Obfuscating Stupidity|or maybe not]]); Black Mage, a psychotic murderer who kills any- and everyone that gets in his way (and a few others just for the hell of it); Red Mage, a [[Munchkin]] powergamer blissfully unaware of his own idiocy with no regard for anyone elses' well-being; and Thief, a duplicitous, greedy elf supremacist with no conscience. All their opponents are of matching idiocy, and the king of the local kingdom wears the literal interpretation of [[Dead Baby Comedy]] for shoes. In fact, the most sympathetic main character other than White Mage, the voice of reason, is Black Mage, as he's at least tried to change. Well, before it was revealed that in order to obtain his doomsday attack, he sacrificed orphans to a dark god. Said doomsday attack is also powered by love; i.e. it siphons love out of the universe, and the divorce rate goes up by a few percent every time he uses it.

* ''[[8-Bit Theater]]'' has an entire cast of idiots, sadists, and idiotic sadists. The main characters are Fighter, a nimrod who manages to be [[Too Dumb to Live]] and [[No One Should Survive That|too stupid to die]] at the same time ([[Obfuscating Stupidity|or maybe not]]); Black Mage, a psychotic murderer who kills any- and everyone that gets in his way (and a few others just for the hell of it); Red Mage, a [[Munchkin]] powergamer blissfully unaware of his own idiocy with no regard for anyone elses' well-being; and Thief, a duplicitous, greedy elf supremacist with no conscience. All their opponents are of matching idiocy, and the king of the local kingdom wears the literal interpretation of [[Dead Baby Comedy]] for shoes. In fact, the most sympathetic main character other than White Mage, the voice of reason, is Black Mage, as he's at least tried to change. Well, before it was revealed that in order to obtain his doomsday attack, he sacrificed orphans to a dark god. Said doomsday attack is also powered by love; i.e. it siphons love out of the universe, and the divorce rate goes up by a few percent every time he uses it.

** Even White Mage is becoming more of a [[Jerkass]], with her refusing to heal Black Mage when he has a spear through his head (though to be fair, it's [[Complete Monster|Black Mage]]). Also, to add insult to injury, Thief almost never gets his comeuppance, whereas Black Belt (an actually slightly sympathetic character) is the only character yet to have been [[Killed Off for Real]] (even the [[Big Bad|Big Bads]] turn up in Hell occasionally).

** Technically, Thief does get his comeuppance when he loses everything he has ever stolen when his bag of holding is frozen, then is shattered into a million pieces in order to kill one of the fiends. He is catatonic for several strips afterwards.

** It's true, he rarely gets his comeuppance, so it's just that more hilarious when Berserker strangles him with his own intestines. He has savagely attacked Thief at least 3 times by now.

* The webcomic ''[[Ansem Retort]]'', which tells the tale of a sadistic [[~~Fox~~]] reality show.

* The webcomic ''[[Ansem Retort]]'', which tells the tale of a sadistic [[FOX]] reality show.

* [http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/ Garfield minus Garfield] forces this trope into being, but that's somewhat the point.

* ''[[Nana's Everyday Life]]'' is basically about how long you can keep a character alive without putting her out of her misery...

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** Though this trope does exemplify many of the [[The Golden Age of Animation|golden age animated shorts]] with [[Tom and Jerry]] and [[Looney Tunes]] leading the pack.

* ''[[Aqua Teen Hunger Force]]''

* ''[[Invader Zim]]'': A megalomaniac alien, a deranged hedonistic robot, a paranormal-obsessed lunatic and his self-centered, sociopath sister in a ignorant, cybergothic [[Crapsack World]].

** This one's worth elaborating on a bit, because there's something special about just ''how'' all these characters come together to create the amazingly unfortunate (for the characters) milieu of this show. Vasquez has managed, through no small amount of effort in both writing the show and fighting to get his ideas aired by the censor-happy Nickelodeon network, to create a world wherein ''everyone'' fails at ''everything'' they try '''all the time'''. The only ones who come out okay are the ones (read: Gaz and...pretty much just Gaz) who do. Not. Give a shit. About anything. Dib tries to foil Zim's latest plan to destroy Earth? Dib probably succeeds, Zim's plan fails, ending up with Zim learning nothing, Gir having destroyed half the lab (again), Dib taking the blame for whatever damage Zim wrought on the world, and Gaz rubbing salt in his wounds by calling him a kook. [[Pyrrhic Victory|Pyrrhic victories]] all around, nobody grows, and the world is worse off. In ''every goddamn episode''. Vasquez is a misanthropic ''savant.''

* ''[[Family Guy]]'' - From about season 4 and onwards.

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* ''[[Frisky Dingo]]''

* Pick one of the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' derived series from WB in the 90s and tell yourself it isn't sadistic, you won't be able to.

* When ''[[Drawn Together]]'' isn't about taking the piss out of [[Reality TV]] (the original premise which it pretty much dropped in the second season) or [[Animation Tropes|cartoons]], it's about heaping abuse on the dysfunctional housemates. Fortunately, they all retain strong [[Jerkass]] tendencies, so there's little room for sympathy save for Captain Hero, who was originally the biggest of the Jerkasses but developed into the most sympathetic character.

** ...and then developed into a [[Heroic Sociopath]].

* ''[[Stressed Eric]]'' (and how!)

* ''[[The Ren and Stimpy Show]]''

* ''[[The Venture Brothers]]''. More on show page.

* ''[[Cat Dog]]'', everyone hated them just because they're different, [[Yank the Dog's Chain|they never succeeded]], and they lived in a [[Crapsack World]].

* ''[[Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy]]''. It's a rare occasion that the neighborhood kids did something positive toward the Eds. {{spoiler|It changed by the end of the movie--the neighborhood kids actually start liking the Eds at that point.}}

** In most of the episodes, a character gets hurt practically every five seconds. The show practically revolves around pain.

* ''[[South Park]]'' - the moral of the show appears to be "Life sucks, then you die. Then life continues to suck, and you die ''again''."

** And [[Cosmic Plaything|if you're unlucky]] you [[They Killed Kenny|will continue to die in very horrible ways]] only for [[Laser-Guided Amnesia|no one to remember]].

* From it's second season and onward, ''[[Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends]]'' often wound up being this.

* ''[[Jimmy Two-Shoes|Jimmy Two Shoes]]'': It takes place in a town that's obviously [[Hell]], with the titular character the only one in the cast that isn't either a [[Comedic Sociopathy|complete sociopath]] or an [[The Hedonist|idiotic hedonist]].