Karma Houdini in Web Original.
- Ace Attorney according to an AI:
- Exaggerated in #1. Trucy mentions that Klavier and his friends stole computers from Valant so often that people stopped reporting the crimes.
- In #5, Matt Engarde gets acquitted despite admitting that he killed Juan(over using expensive cooking oil, no less) in court.
- AoHaru Manga Library: In stories where both Keiichi and the heroine get dumped by their first girlfriend/boyfriend, the ones who get humiliated are the ones who humiliated Keiichi. The heroine's dumper usually goes unmentioned and may have gotten away scot-free.
- Takadox in the BIONICLE web serials. Originally an evil warlord who betrayed his fellows but was locked up with them anyway for 80,000 years, then mutated into a sea-insect unable to breathe air. He spent the following several hundred years being a savage creep and hypnotizing his partner Carapar into a dim-witted slave. He was later freed and given breathing gear on the condition that he has to take part in a suicide mission. He betrayed his new team too, activating a trap they wanted to avoid and leaving them stranded on an island. He shows up again on another island just when the local volcano erupts, hypnotizing a group of heroes and leaving them to their doom by stealing their boat too (they were rescued later). Takadox disappears from the story afterwards, never receiving any punishment, what more, his mutation was undone through means outside his doing, turning this loose cannon back into his powerful original self. His only comeuppance is that now not even his former partners would trust him.
- The season four Bravest Warriors episode "The Crowd I'm Seeing" has the Upta Gals get no punishment for committing acts of vandalism and harassing men under the dubious excuse that they're fighting against misogyny. Beth does make a half-hearted effort in addressing that their actions are wrong, but rather quickly gives up and joins them in their mischief.
- The animated web series Caillou the Grown Up portrays the title character of Caillou as a 22-year-old man still acting like a little kid who abuses his father and uses threats to make his father let him have his way. Caillou never faces any punishment for his actions even though many of them would realistically have resulted in him getting arrested.
- Climate Town: Many examples of oil corporations getting caught breaking the law or doing immoral things end up with the corporations blaming consultants or contractors and getting away scott free.
- In The Confession the Confessor doesn't pay for his crimes and the only person who knows about it can't tell anyone.
- The Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series has a few:
- In the first installment, Sketchbook's influence drives the puppets insane, though it's unclear how intentional this was. They are never punished. Subverted later in the HELP videos where the Money Man rips their face off.
- In the second, Tony the Talking Clock yells at the puppets until their ears bleed and rots them alive for questioning whether time is real. He is never punished. Double subverted in the third where it looks like he was brainwashed into being part of the cult, but that turns out to be All Just a Dream.
- In the HELP videos, the Money Man holds the puppets and Sketchbook hostage and tortures them horrifically. He gets off totally scot-free.
- In the third installment, Shrignold and the Love Cultists attempt to brainwash Yellow Guy into joining an insane cult and force him to marry "his Special One" against his will. It's also left ambiguous whether Shrignold raped Yellow Guy. They are never punished, though given how awful the initiation process is it could be argued that what they went through before their appearance was bad enough. The end credits also show their idol Malcolm in flames, implying the cult eventually fell somehow.
- In the fifth installment, the Healthy Food Gang feed Duck Guy's organs to Yellow Guy.
- Apparently subverted on all counts as of the final episode of the TV reboot, in which every teacher from the original series is shown dead on the floor; however, the canonicity of the series to the original show is unclear, with several of the teachers having been given Adaptational Nice Guy treatment before they were killed off. In particular, the Lamp from the sixth installment of the web series did a 180 in character.
- The Dream SMP features Jschlatt (the character, not the content creator that plays him of the same name), who was an all-round jerkass whose transgressions include and are not limited to tyranny and suppression of freedom of speech, arranging the Public Execution of a teenager, treating everyone around him like crap, animal cruelty, and Domestic Abuse. However, despite his final canon death during the Final Battle of Season 1, he didn't truly face punishment as his death was of a stroke/heart attack rather than the intended execution via firearms.note
- Super Kami Guru tries to pull off one of these in Dragon Ball Z Abridged, making a Deathbed Confession that he instigated the albino Namekian genocide to cover the fact that he had drank all the water before dying peacefully from old age. Then it turns out he isn't dying. The Namekians soon change that.
- The most egregious example by far is Dad
, who was able to avoid having to face the consequences for his inexplicable acts of random violence...by rocking out really hard. Also, his head caught on fire again. Seriously, what's up with that? - In the Elfslayer Chronicles, a game of Dungeons & Dragons played online, a PC gets fed up with the DM's plotline of preventing a war and kills the figure necessary to prevent said war. He then kills this person's lover, whom he framed for the deed, implicates another party member in the killing, and gets away scot-free. Nobody really cared because the elves were all humongous victims, the plotline was blatant DM wish fulfillment, it was a yaoi campaign, he had completely airtight in-character reasons for doing so (Word to the Wise: If you have clever humans in the party, NEVER try to play up that Humans Are Bastards), the PC in question had metagamed horribly to implicate him in the crime despite having no reasons for doing so in character, and because at no point in the campaign could he, within the rules, be connected in any way to the crime. As one comment said: "It's like Death Note, but with elves."
- Equestria Chronicles has the notable example of Daedalus. And he knows it. Run.
- Apocalypse Cartoons' Father Tucker is about a Pedophile Priest who seldom gets any comeuppance for molesting children.
- In the last episode of his Friday the 13th: The Game series, Chris runs around antagonizing and attempting to kill one player. When she fights back and nearly kills him, he makes an alliance with Jason, leading him to where the rest of the players are hiding. During his attack on the cabin they're holed up in, Jason inexplicably freezes, so the other players (including Chris) get in a car and drive away to victory.
- In Friendship is Witchcraft Twilight Sparkle gets away with throwing Cadence in a pit to die and marrying her brother Francis. Nor does she get any sort of retribution for the other evil actions she's done. To make matters worse, she's convinced that this makes her the hero of the story.
- In the various GoAnimate "Grounded" videos, the non-troublemakers/punishers tend to get away with the more heinous actions than the kids that got into trouble in the first place. The most egregious of this is Fred in Samster 5677's videos who will abuse the living hell out of the Scooby Gang and any attempts to punish him results in him being able to reverse it.
- Gaming All-Stars: Goro, Booger Meister, King Boo, Mephiles, and (If one views them as villains rather than anti-heroes forced to work for Polygon Man) Master Hand and Crazy Hand avoid true defeat in The Ultimate Crossover and Remastered. Meanwhile, Papu-Papu manages to escape justice in 2.
- In Idiotsitter, this is Invoked and Averted in "Fight Day", Gene waits till the end of Fight Day (7 PM), hiding to avoid being hit while telling the others to go after each other (she even tries to time the exact 'ding' of the clock, but fails several times). Its averted because Billie punches her in the face anyway.
- Discussed in The Nostalgia Chick's review of Jem: one of the things she actually finds funny about the show is that the Misfits are always doing wildly illegal things without anyone seeming to care.
- George Wickham of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is actually even worse than his book counterpart (who, mind you, was already a vile person), and he gets even less comeuppance in this version. True, he'll never make any money off of the sex tape of him and Lydia (which he tried to release and sell online without her consent), but considering how emotionally abusive he was to Lydia (and Gigi, before the start of the series), and that releasing that tape would've ruined her life, that hardly seems like enough punishment. There's nothing to stop him from doing it again to another girl. But thanks to legal loopholes, the Bennets can't sue him. The fact that Lydia at least doesn't wind up married to him for life in this version, and at least with Lizzie's videos, there is a large audience online who knows what a scumbag he is, is only small consolation. After he appears in one of Gigi's side videos, and Darcy is able to track him down and prevent the release of the website, he's never seen again, and presumably is able to live happily ever after. No wonder fans like to speculate that the reason we never see him again is because Darcy killed him.
- In Marble Hornets, the Operator himself is the only villain who isn't stopped by the conclusion. This is justified, as the Operator is immortal and basically impossible to truly destroy, not to mention he may not even be able to feel suffering like humans do anyways as he's more akin to a force of nature. Thus the only hope is that letting him finally take the person he'd been hunting for so long (Alex) was enough to satisfy him. The ending seems to suggest that the answer is that it was, but deliberately ends on a note of ambiguity by having Tim cough while in the woods like the Operator's presence often caused people to do.
- Migraine ends with Ken Muntz getting away with murdering over half a dozen innocents, and declaring he's going to kill more in the future.
- In the New Deal Coalition Retained timeline, Ted Bundy manages to frame Kenneth Bianchi for his own murders, allowing him to not only get away scot-free but also goes on a successful political career, eventually becoming Governor of Washington. Subverted when his cabinet uncover his crimes and assassinate him.
- Only A Lonely Heart ends with Y'golonac's plans foiled, but Y'golonac faces no comeuppance for all the rapes and murders he orchestrated, and it's made evident he's going to return in a later story.
- This is Michael-lan's current intended goal in The Salvation War, but as a whole the demons (particularly Memnon) have in effect been let off the hook for their murder, rape, and torture of "undead" Second Life humans... by the modern humans, anyway. The undead, on the other hand...
- Ultimately, Michael's plan succeeds beautifully, but he immediately discovers that he was Out-Gambitted by Ehlmas, and is now doomed to be a meaningless puppet ruler for all eternity.
- Any FP game where you have to do an objective while avoiding a supernatural force that wants you dead. Said forces can kill you gruesomely & not have any regrets whatsoever. One such example is Slender.
- Shipwrecked Comedy: The Case of the Gilded Lily ends with Lily immediately forgiving her husband, who had been blackmailing her, and it's implied that he didn't face any legal consequences.
- Discussed in So This Is Basically... Gravity Falls when JelloApocalypse briefly breaks character and begins ranting about how Mabel never learns anything and constantly gets away with or rewarded for bad behavior:Marvel as the writers take the best character and gradually make her the worst character by having her learn no lessons for forty episodes, then watch as Marbles makes Dipstick give up everything so she can have summer free time and boys over and over again. And she's just totally selfish all the time, like, like they bring it up In-Universe and it just never gets resolved, like LITERALLY THE DEVIL CALLS HER OUT ON IT AND— (The rest abruptly gets edited out)
- Sunset Paradise includes Whisk, who managed to escape arrest unlike the rest of Benedict’s Organisation and Benedict himself who died, although it was on level with her crimes, as she only really stole, not even committing a single confirmed murder.
- The KGB Torture Technician Konstantinov in Special Forces.
- In CrazyCommentaries's LP of Super Mario 64, the penguins are this. They made the duo search for about 10 minutes to find the penguin that was right at the start of the level, launched the duo off a cliff for trying to throw them off, yelled at them for taking a shortcut, and pushing them off the edge of a racetrack at one particular turn where it is already really hard to get past it in the first place.
- Survival of the Fittest. The Big Bad Danya, who, so far, has managed to avoid any serious repercussions for his crimes (although he was injured twice, and as of v3 seems rather proud of the scars) is definitely one of these. Arguably certain villains also avoid getting their just desserts, experiencing relatively peaceful deaths as opposed to the violent slaughter they visited on their victims. Version three ended up subverting this; JR Rizzolo won the game, but when he got home he found his family had abandoned him. During the events of the fourth season, after he'd managed to become a celebrity, he is murdered in his home by Maxie Dasai.
- As of the ninth announcement of v4, Danya is no longer a subversion, thanks to Dorian Pello.
- Tails of Fame ends with Douglas Kevro getting both Rast and Seamus killed, and getting full immunity for orchestrating hundreds of deaths in the story. It's made clear he's going to continue his criminal activity by the end with no one to oppose him.
- You'd expect nobody to be handed sheer luck in a Sadist Show like Happy Tree Friends, but there's a good number of examples:
- Fliqpy is one of the characters with a high intentional kill count, but his survival rate is among the highest. Meanwhile, Good Flippy is the most likely to suffer the consequences. Really, Fliqpy has only ever died to the hands of Lumpy or a widespread disaster.
- Splendid, like Flippy, almost never dies. He has fewer than Flippy and nearly always gets off scot-free after putting the Tree Friends in jeopardy. The only exception was the episode "Gems the Break", though that episode had Splendid at his worst.
- Mr. Pickels is a serial killer who has yet to suffer any remote comeuppance, excluding the episode "All In Vien", in which Vampire Lumpy takes a bite out of him. As a result, Mr. Pickels has the highest survival rate out of every character.
- Pop, a terrible father whose irresponsibility often gives Cub a terrible death, survives in most of the episodes he's appeared in.
- In Villain Support, the Acme Corporation will never suffer serious consequences for backing virtually every super-villain in existence. They're simply too powerful, with them owning their own set of Dragon Balls, a massive supply of mosquito-dragons, and many villains willing to do their dirty work in exchange for favors later, up to and including the Anti-Spirals. Fortunately, very few of the involved villains are actually able to capitalize on the Acme Corporation's support, with most just not listening to John and Levi when they try to give advice.
- In the Whateley Universe, one of the most evil villains we have met so far is Dr. Emil Hammond, a normal who has experimented on and tortured mutants for decades. He was captured, but in a huge 'OJ Trial', his super-expensive legal team (hired by the mutant-hating Goodkind family) not only gets him off but makes it look as if some evil mutant supervillain has been framing the poor man. He gets hired by the Goodkinds as a researcher, and when 14-year-old Trevor Goodkind manifests as a mutant, Hammond tortures the kid for days. In another story, we see that Hammond has a lab devoted to agonizing experiments on teenaged mutants. Punishment so far? None at all. He has a bigger lab. The overall plot has advanced about one semester out of what seem to be a planned 4 years; it may be a bit early to claim Houdini-hood for villains who simply haven't gotten their comeuppance just yet.
- Ultimately by the final chapter of Worm, Contessa.
