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* In [[Diana Wynne Jones]]' ''[[The Magids|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 {{spoiler|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 {{spoiler|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 (Literaturenovel)|Les Misérables]]'', Jean Valjean serves 19 years as a galley slave for stealing a loaf of bread (plus several escape attempts). Later {{spoiler|he steals a 40-sous coin and receives a life sentence}}.
** This was however an [[Truth in Television|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...
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* 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 ([[Mind Screw|who may or may not exist]]) about his engagement. The father then orders the son to drown himself. The son ''does so''.
* [[Tyrant Takes the Helm|Dolores Umbridge]] in the ''[[Harry Potter (Literaturenovel)|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 [[Death Ray|the ever-dreaded AK-666]]. [[Throw It In|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!"]]
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** 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]]'', [[Ax Crazy|Takeshi]] [[Crapsack World|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 Onon 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.
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* 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 {{spoiler|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 (Creator)|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''.
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* 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 ''[[Dragonriders of Pern|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 [[GKG. 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: {{spoiler|He [[Wife Husbandry|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". [[Nightmare Fuel|Ow.]]
* In ''[[Digital Devil Story (Literature)|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 (Literature)|The Phoenix Onon 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 (Literature)|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 (Literature)|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|Laurence Yep's]] ''[[Dragon Series (Literature)|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 [[Sadist Teacher|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.
* [[Complete Monster|Achilles]] from the [[Ender's Game|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 ''[[CarrerasCarrera's Legions (Literature)|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 {{spoiler|his [[Heroic BSOD]]}}. The response? {{spoiler|Plot with the enemy to overthrow the government.}}
** Arguably, Carrera's {{spoiler|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 (Literature)|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 {{spoiler|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 [[A Taste of the Lash|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 {{spoiler|[[Off Withwith His Head|beheaded with a hoe]] for (horror of horrors) stealing a potato because he was hungry}}.
* In ''[[Daemon|Freedom]]'', [[Heroic Sociopath|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".
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