History Main / HowTheMightyHaveFallen

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': General Ironwood starts out as a powerful, respected, larger-than-life leader, but as the series progresses and tragedy mounts, he's reduced to a paranoid, bitter shell of his former self. [[spoiler:By the end of Volume 8, his allies have all turned on him, [[BigBad Salem]] and [[TheHeavy Cinder]] barely acknowledge his existence and deem him NotWorthKilling, and he's left to die unmourned and alone under the debris of the kingdom he sacrificed everything and everyone to save.]]

* ''Manga/DeathNote'''s ending leaves [[spoiler:Light broken both physically and mentally, with all his sycophants either dead or not having a clue who he is. The anime scene with him running sobbing from the warehouse only for Ryuk to unceremoniously write his name on the Death Note a few minutes later is the ''nice'' version of his death, and within a few years, the world's gone back to normal. In the original manga, he's killed while writhing in agony and begging that he doesn't want to die.]]

* ''Series/{{Pennyworth}}'': At the end of the pilot, [[ANaziByAnyOtherName Raven Society]] leader Lord Harwood is captured by the government and spends the next two episodes being tortured, at the end of which he's left heavily maimed (missing a foot and his ''nose''), brainwashed into forgetting his identity, and tossed out into the street to live as a homeless beggar. Though this gets subverted shortly after, as his [[TheDragon lieutenant]] Bet Sykes finds him and nurses him back to both physical and mental health, setting him on the path to reclaiming his position as the BigBad.
** It ends up happening to him again in Season 2, when [[spoiler: [[TheStarscream Colonel Salt]]]] [[{{Gaslighting}} gaslights him]], turning him into a paranoid maniac whose own troops eventually put him under indefinite house arrest [[spoiler: until he commits SuicideByCop in order to spite Salt]].

* ''Fanfic/NotThatKindaFired'': Bakugo entered U.A. as TheBully and a hot-shot would-be hero with the belief that he would become the Number One Hero. Three years later, he just barely graduates from U.A. and has been stuck as a sidekick that keeps getting passed between agencies because his horrible attitude is not enough to strip his license. Meanwhile, not only have several of his classmates achieved high rankings as heroes, but his main bullying victim has become the current #1 Hero's senior analyst and one of the few people Endeavour trusts. [[spoiler:And when he learns about the latter, he blows his top inside Endeavor's agency and gets his last chance to clean up his act before his hero license is pulled revoked.]]

* In [[Literature/JacquesMcKweon Jacques McKweon]] by Creator/BenCroshaw, star-pilots lost their purpose after quantunnelling made the job obsolete. Those who were once heroes who explored space and saved worlds were now homeless bums who either gave cheap transport for tourists or have "gone to the black" and were now space pirates.

* In ''Literature/WillSaveTheGalaxyForFood'', star-pilots lost their purpose after quantunnelling made the job obsolete. Those who were once heroes who explored space and saved worlds were now homeless bums who either gave cheap transport for tourists or have "gone to the black" and were now space pirates.

[[quoteright:350:[[WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/loserlord_ozai.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:From [[GodEmperor Phoenix King]] to [[BarefootCaptives Loser Lord]].]]