Do with Him as You Will

"Stop begging. You Are Already Dead."

"He's all yours."

— Iron Man (dropping a terrorist before his victims), Iron Man

The Hero has the villain at his mercy. He can kill him right here — but he won't. It's not because the hero would be stooping to the villain's level, or because letting the villain live would be more of a punishment. No, rather than killing the villain himself, the hero will instead leave the villain to the tender mercies of his victims, usually with some variation on the trope name. This is usually because the hero believes that it is the victims who have more right to vengeance than he does. He may arm the victims first.

Slaves, oppressed citizens, abused prisoners, terrorized villagers, tortured laboratory subjects, and the families of the victims are the most commonly used. Because of the inherent setup of empowering powerless people against their oppressors, the Hero doing this may often have Bully Hunter tendencies.

Sometimes, an Anti-Hero will do this as a form of Cold-Blooded Torture, usually as a means to deliver a Cruel and Unusual Death without doing the dirty job on his own.

Can result in the villain being Torn Apart by the Mob.

Compare Murder by Inaction. Differs from The Dog Bites Back in that that is a form of Karmic Death, while with this one, the hero deliberately sets it up. A subtrope of Throw 'Em to the Wolves.

As this is frequently a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In the manga of Akame ga Kill!, Leona throws Prime Minster Honest to this fate.
• Don't Meddle with My Daughter! presents a villainous example, as part of Athena's backstory. After she was defeated 20 years ago, by her nemesis Heavy Metal, he took her to an unmarked island where he had gathered all of her enemies, then allowed them to "take turns" with her before they finally gang raped her all at once. The story concludes with Athena settling the score.
• In Drifters, Toyohisa brutally defeats Lord Aram, who had been sent to winnow the elf populace. It takes a bit of coaxing, especially with a language barrier still in place, but the elves get the message that if they don't start changing they will be hunted to extinction by their rebellion alone quite nicely.
• In Fist of the North Star, while Kenshiro was fond of making his enemies die a time-delayed death, he has left a bad guy at the mercy of his victims more than once. As pictured above, one of Jagi's scumbag lieutenants had been burying his victims up to their necks and having his men force people to saw their heads off. When Kenshiro gets done dispatching the mooks, he decides that the most suitable way to punish this bastard is by burying him up to his neck the way he'd done to his victims and leaving him to the mercy of the villagers he'd been abusing.
• Inverted in High School D×D, where it's the victim leaving the villain to his superior. Issei defeats Raynare, only for her to revert to her Yuuma persona and beg for her life. Issei, too conflicted to deal with her himself, leaves her to Rias, a death sentence in itself. Resolving things this way leaves Issei with long-lasting intimacy and self-esteem issues.
• Highschool of the Dead: As soon as he discovers that Shidou is a sociopathic Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who flunked Rei because her father was investigating Shidou's own Corrupt Politician father, Soichirou Takagi gives Rei free reign to take revenge and kill him. When Rei ultimately decides he's Not Worth Killing, Soichirou instead banishes Shidou and his followers from his estate.
• In The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Karatsu's usual approach to dealing with villains is to temporarily raise their victims' corpses and let them be horribly slaughtered.
• In the Pokémon: The Series, Ash and his friends regularly leave Team Rocket at the mercy of the episode's starring character or Pokémon when they don't deliver the beating themselves. A rather direct and blunt case occurred in "So You're Having a Bad Day" when Meowth is forced into a Enemy Mine with the protagonists against some angry Pangoro. When they find out the reason they're after them is because he and Team Rocket stole all their food, Meowth begs them to keep quiet. It is Serena of all people that bluntly tells him fat chance and angrily informs them who's at fault, watching as he, Jessie and James take their inevitable blasting off. In the heroes' defense, they lampshade how often Meowth backstabs them in Enemy Mines enough to make it a preemptive strike at worst. That and they also reason that he could likely just as easily avoid the beating by apologizing and giving back the food.

Comic Books

• The Authority: The titular group does this to one unnamed Indonesian general when he claims they wouldn't kill him, as this would bring the rest of the world's governments on them. They reply that they won't do anything to him, but drop him off in the middle of a slum that had particularly suffered from his actions.
• The DCU:
  • Batman:
    • In Batman: The Cult, the Dark Knight is captured by a cult and brainwashed into helping them kill their way through Gotham. He manages to break free and later returns to bring down the leader, Deacon Blackfire. Knowing that giving Blackfire a well-deserved death would only serve to make him a martyr, Batman focuses on causing as much pain with every blow as possible. Eventually Blackfire breaks and begs for mercy, in front of the throngs of cultists. The fatal element of this is that part of Blackfire's creed that he hammered into the heads of his kidnapped followers was that their substantial suffering was insignificant in the greater scheme of things. To show himself to be weak and submissive enraged the people that had suffered greatly for him, and the disillusioned cultists tore him apart so ferociously that nothing identifiable remained.
    • In another comic, an abusive psychiatrist convinces his patients to do his dirty work through manipulation and hiding his identity. When Batman figures out who it is and unmasks him in front of his patients, it's noted that "if I allowed them to beat him for 15 seconds, I am sure he would have died. I allow them to beat him for ten."
    • In an early Batman and the Outsiders story, Geo-Force left Baron Bedlam to the mercy of the Markovian people after overthrowing his regime.
  • In DC: The New Frontier, Wonder Woman, after defeating some enemy soldiers, gives their weapons to the women they'd been using as sex slaves. One guess as to what they do with them.
  • In Year One of Injustice: Gods Among Us, shortly after Superman kills the Joker, Wonder Woman flies to an African refugee camp, where she interrupts the rape of a woman by a soldier who was supposed to keep the peace. Wonder Woman disarms the soldiers in the camp, and tells the women that they have nothing to fear from them. One of the women then states that as soon as she flies away, the men will keep doing what they always do, to which Wonder Woman tells the women to pick up the guns and do what they have to do. As she flies away, gunshots sound out in the camp below.
  • Jonah Hex: Jonah hands an Indian-butchering sheriff over to the tribe he's been preying on, but then subverts it in another issue, where he hands a murderess over to the carnival who hired him, but when he sees them start to enact "carnival justice", which involves beating her to death all night long, he puts a bullet in her head.
  • In their second miniseries, the Secret Six do something similar with the inmates of a North Korean prison. They also do it later in their ongoing when they hand a child-killer over to the father of one of his victims (although he did hire them to do it), Catman even giving him instructions on how to most effectively torture him to death.
  • In an issue of Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, Guy Gardner disarms some sadistic alien slave drivers and leaves them to the picks and shovels of their charges. However, this is taken as a bad sign that the trace of Red Light inside him may be growing.
  • In Supergirl crossover Red Daughter of Krypton, Lobo becomes fed up with a crime lord who is dumb enough to attack him even Lobo had spared him and was already walking away. Annoyed, Lobo takes his gun away, hands it over to one of his sex slaves, and leaves. The crime lord tries desperately to placate his former plaything, but her and her partners' grim glares show that they will not be appeased.
    Lobo: Your men would still be breathin' if you'd only been polite when I walked in. Still, I showed you mercy. I just hope you showed your dancers more courtesy...
    hands gun over to dancer
    Crimelord: N-now, Suchin, let's not be hasty...! If I ever hurt any of you girls, it was only because—
    shooting noises
• In the "Friendly Fire" arc of DMZ, the US military disposes of whistleblower Stevens (whose unit participated in a civilian massacre, which he then exposed the covering-up of) by handing him over to a civilian mob. The mob, knowing that he was party to the murder of their friends and families, beat him to death. Subverted in that the mob immediately regret what they did and allow a medic to get to him (although it's already too late).
• In Incorruptible, Max Damage drops a gang of murderous white supremacists off in the middle of an ethnic neighborhood they terrorized.
• Magicka: The heroine at one point encounters Hitler (the most evil men Earth produced were assembled in one point in time and space) but is prevented from killing him. Later on, she teleports him, in full uniform, into the middle of a crowd of prisoners in Auschwitz, circa 1942. The view then pans out to the silent crowd holding boards with nails in them...
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Punisher:
    • One story sees Frank take on a high-rise building full of criminals, led by a guy running (among others) a Snuff Film ring with immigrant women (the guy literally splits the women apart with his penis). Frank cripples him and leaves him to the women.
    • A mutual version in an arc where Frank goes to Belfast. He shoots the legs out from two sadistic gang leaders from opposing sides, and leaves them a gun before walking away. While they both go for the gun, it's subverted in that Frank knows they'll bleed out before they can kill each other, and the gun's empty anyway.
  • In Kickers, Inc., hero Jack Magniconte's approached by a mob boss whose son committed suicide after joining the satanic coven that the Kickers are investigating - a cult that secretly doses members with hallucinogenic drugs. The Don wants to know who’s responsible but Jack refuses to help him. Later, when the cult's leader escapes prosecution, a disillusioned Jack tells the Don's men exactly who they're looking for.
  • Nextwave: The squad does this by accident. Upon de-transforming a police officer who had been changed into a giant mecha, they leave him in the care of a crowd that claims to be his friends. In his weakened state, they don't notice his panicked eyes and whispered protests, and don't know that the cop is extremely corrupt and they just handed him over to the people he's been terrorizing and extorting for the last twenty years.
  • Supreme Power: Nighthawk's first issue sees him do this with a racist graffiti artist (who painted over a nice graffiti art showing the birth of Jesus Christ, but with black characters with the words "CONGRATULATIONS, IT'S A N*GGER) after punching him in the face. He leaves as he sees the inhabitants of said neighborhood have noticed what the graffiti artist did and are coming after him.
  • X-Man (Counter-X): Nate Grey learns that the monster from 'down-spiral' (a lower, grimmer world in the Multiverse), whom he'd been defending a group of mutant Corrupt Corporate Executives from, was targeting them because they stole his race's children in order to harvest and sell their organs, and it's too late to save any of the victims. Nate responds by executing most of the mutants himself, but singles out the woman who suggested the plan to kill the children, delivering her alive to the world she stole them from.
• A non-lethal variant in an issue of Preacher has Jesse drive the local KKK leader (in full uniform) into the black part of town and dump him out in front of a bar.
• Inverted in Spawn, where Spawn uses his powers to turn a Ku Klux Klan leader black and then leaves him to be found by his fellow Klan members, who lynch him.

Fan Works

• Done accidentally by Dungeon Keeper Ami when she frees another Keeper's harem and leaves them for the heroes to find, and also imprisons a warlock formerly employed by that Keeper, leaving him for the heroes to find. In the same area. When the warlock's crimes included sacrificing (to the dark gods) the children whom those women unwillingly conceived. And while his cell was locked and the women couldn't get in, it had gaps between the bars, and there were plenty of rocks to hand. When Ami discovers the aftermath, she's initially upset about the women undermining her decision, but hears them out and agrees that they were justified.
• In the Elfen Lied fic Family Sticks Together, Alex attacks Yu Kakuzawa after he kidnaps Nyu with the intent to rape her, but when he discovers that he's not the Director Kakuzawa who turned his father into a Super-Soldier and runs the Diclonius Research Institute, he, although frustrated, leaves it up to the resurfaced Lucy, remarking that nothing he could do to him would possibly be worse than Lucy's wrath. When he's trying to leave, the two have this brief discussion:
  Lucy: What makes you think that I'll let you leave?
  Alex: You have two people in this room. One of them stripped you naked for God knows what purposes. If you want to waste your time on me, then go right ahead. However, I do believe this guy deserves death.
  Lucy: [looks at Kakuzawa] We are in agreement.
• The Forbidden Drink: At the end of Return of the Titans, despite the fact that Odalia personally wronged them by driving their friendship apart, as well as inflicting 15 years of mental and physical abuse on the former, Amity and Willow opt not to kill her, though not without severely wounding and torturing her beforehand, instead deciding to let Skara, whose parents died from the Draining Spell and whom Odalia allowed to die by doing nothing about it, and Cat, whom Odalia crippled for life and ripped out her eye while she was a puppet, finish her off.
• The Night Unfurls:
  • After freeing Soren from Barnum Bailey, Sanakan leaves the thug leader at the mercy of angry townsfolk. Said townsfolk have been harassed by Barnum and his thugs before, since they were unable to pay protection money. The narrative cuts away after he is shown being beaten up.
  • During the Rebel Scum Arc, many of the rebel aristocrats find themselves to be Torn Apart by the Mob. It is said that this has been quietly approved and encouraged by Sir Kyril and his company, because those aristocrats decide not to heed the crown's call of suppressing the rebellion, an indication of picking the Black Dogs' side.
  • Kyril intends to leave Mandeville to his daughter Chloe, whom he tortured and had her mother murdered in the past.
• In Opening Dangerous Gates, when Harribel was about to finish Xiphias Gladius off, she sensed that if she stayed any longer, Lucy would not survive her presence, so she tells the rest of Team Natsu she will leave the rest to them and returns to Hueco Mundo.
  Harribel: I would have ended you quickly; however I don't think they will.
• In the Pony POV Series 7 Dreams/Nightmares Gaiden series, Patch, having become an Action Girl due to her journey to reconstruct the Rainbow of Light after the G2 world suffered an apocalypse, gets brainwashed by Film Critique, the Pegasus Despot using the Shard of Laughter to become an Evil Overlord, and turned into a member of his brainwashed harem. After spending an undisclosed number of days as his Sex Slave with the rest of the harem, she's freed by Brightglow. She then steals the Shard back, purifying it (due to fitting the profile of a proper Bearer of the Element of Laughter), breaking his spell. She proceeds to shoot him in the leg, arm his now unbrainwashed harem with swords, and leave him to his Karmic Death at their hooves. She also stole all the ammo of his willing guards. She apparently did this to several other people who were abusing the Shards and even admits she has a habit of doing so.

Films — Animation

• At the end of Corpse Bride, Lord Barkis is revealed to have tricked Emily into eloping with him, before killing and robbing her. The residents of the Land of the Dead want to punish him, but Elder Gutknecht tells them they are in the land of the living, and have to abide by their rules. That is, until Barkis drinks the poisonous wine meant for Victor, so the rules of the Dead now apply to him as well. Thereupon Gutknecht replies: "He's all yours." The residents of the Land of the Dead then drag Lord Barkis away to an unseen and presumably very unpleasant fate.
  "New arrival."
• The Lion King has an accidental example. Simba spares Scar when backing him to the edge of Pride Rock, even though he doesn't think Scar deserves it, and exiles him from the Pride Lands, but Scar attacks him anyway. In the ensuing fight, Simba tosses Scar off of Pride Rock, where he's met with the starving hyenas. Since Scar had, mere moments before, tried to pin the blame on them for Mufasa's death, one can imagine the outcome.
• Rango: When the incapacitated Big Bad tries to bargain with Rango, the chameleon replies by kicking him toward Rattlesnake Jake (who the mayor just betrayed), saying "Why don't you take it up with him." The mayor is promptly subjected to a (possibly) metaphorical Dragged Off to Hell fate.
  Rattlesnake Jake: What was that you said? Pretty soon, no one will believe you even existed.

Films — Live-Action

• At the end of 6 Underground, this is how the Ghosts deal with Rochav Alimov, dumping him into one of the refugee camps he regularly had bombed as a show of force. He is promptly chased down and beaten to death by an angry mob.
• Andersonville: Happens villain to villain when Confederate General Henry Wirz allows his Union POWs to conduct a Court Martial for the soldiers who thrived by stealing from fellow POWs.
• In Cross of Iron, Sergeant Steiner's reaction to Zoll raping one of the female Russian soldiers then beating her is to lock him in a room with the girl's comrades.
• At the start of Django Unchained, after killing one of the slave traders he acquired Django from, Dr. Schultz hands the survivor's gun to the rest of the slaves and tells them that they now have two options: stay in chains or kill the remaining slaver and make a run for the North. They choose the latter.
• The Evil That Men Do: Despite being contracted to kill Dr Molloch, Charles Bronson's character leaves him to be killed by the local peasants who are strongly implied to have been his former victims.
• In the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy's (2023), Vanessa reveals that the children possessing the animatronics (the victims of "The Yellow Rabbit") don't remember who killed them or how they ended up where they are, thus they do Afton's bidding without hesitation. Once Abby reminds them that Afton is the one who lured them away, killed them, and trapped them in the animatronics, they look at him and they. Are. PISSED. So much so that they let Mike, Abby, and the barely-conscious Vanessa escape the pizzeria while they trap Afton in the Springlock Bonnie suit, causing him to die slowly and painfully in a pizzeria with his body trapped forever in an animatronic.
• Zig-zagged in the Chow Yun-fat film Full Contact. Having been betrayed and left for dead by his friend Sam at the behest of Sam's cousin, big time gangster Judge, Ko (Chow) agrees to forgo his vengeance in exchange for Sam's help taking down Judge. Later, he leaves Sam to fend for himself against an entire bar full of mooks. He then jumps in and helps just when Sam is becoming overwhelmed. He tells Sam he was never really going to renege on the deal; he just thought it would be funny to mess with him.
• In Hannibal, Cordell Doemling pushes Mason Verger into the pen of pigs upon Hannibal's suggestion. "You can always say it was me."
• In The Hunting Party, the protagonists ultimately succeed in capturing a Serbian war criminal. They drive to a town he persecuted, leave him in the town square, and drive away. We don't see his fate, but it was probably unpleasant.
• In Inception, Saito turns False Friend Nash over to Cobol Engineering. It is implied that he will come down with a bad case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
• In Iron Man, after Tony's first "live-fire exercise" with his newly-completed armor, he leaves Abu Bakaar, the leader of the gang of Ten Rings terrorists, to the mercy of the villagers they'd been raiding. The film cuts away before we see what happens to him, but given the Ten Rings had been in the process of putting all the military-age men in the village to death and hauling the women and children off to use as human shields and God only knows what else, his death was undoubtedly unpleasant.
  Iron Man: He's all yours.
• Played with in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The audience is meant to see the father T. rex injuring Ludlow and leaving him at the mercy of the baby T. rex as Laser-Guided Karma for arming the expedition to recreate Jurassic Park on the continent and capturing the dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs are just animals who don't know better; from their perspective, the big guy is just teaching its young to hunt.
• At the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Alice uses her powers to awaken all of Freddy's devoured souls, who rip him apart from within.
• The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood: After rescuing Marian from the dungeon, Robin turns the villainess Lady Sallyforth over to his Merry Men, telling them to use her as they see fit.
• In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, ape hero Caesar refuses to save Jacobs and leaves him hanging on the side of a bridge to the scarred, Devil in Plain Sight bonobo Koba, who is bitter after having been the subject of human experiments for years. Koba is visibly delighted when he throws him to his death.
• Seven Samurai has an unusual variant of this trope. The samurai capture a bandit and immediately have to protect him from the (justifiably) murderous villagers. However, when they are approached by the oldest woman of the town, who lost every member of her family to bandits and has since been almost unwilling to continue living, they quietly step aside and allow her her vengeance.
• In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Anthony, after rescuing Johanna from Fogg's Asylum, leaves the cruel asylum keeper to the mercy of his "children".
• In Three Kings, Major Gates finds Troy being tortured. Anyone in the torture squad who tries to fight back is quickly and easily killed. The lead torturer, however, has his hands raised and makes no moves. Gates shoots him in the leg anyway, then passes the pistol to Troy, who levels the pistol with the torturer's face. He then deliberately moves the pistol off to the side and vents his frustration by emptying the entire clip into the wall.
• At the end of The Warriors, the Gramercy Riffs descend upon Luther and his Rogues gang after finding out Luther was the killer of Cyrus, and not the Warriors. Luther lets out a loud scream as it happens, implying he's about to be Killed Offscreen.
• In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Mystique stuns Magneto and takes his helmet off, leaving him for Xavier. It's less brutal than most instances of the trope, since Mystique knows that Xavier won't hurt Magneto if he can avoid it.

Literature

• In the Agent Pendergast novel Brimstone, Reverend Buck leaves Hayward at the "mercy" of his followers after condemning her in front of them. He's well aware that they are itching to stone her to death.
• In the Age of Fire series, this is Wistala's final act of vengeance against Hammar, the warlord who killed her Parental Substitute, Rainfall, and stole his land. After manipulating a war between Hammar and the Wheel of Fire dwarves, she makes her move during the final battle of the conflict, grabbing Hammar from the battlefield and dropping him amongst a group of dwarf warriors. While we don't actually see him die, it's strongly implied.
• The Baroque Cycle: In Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, Daniel Waterhouse does this to Big Bad (and actual historical figure) George Jeffreys.
  Daniel Waterhouse: You speak of putting Jeffreys to death with the strength of your right arm. Yet I tell you that if we must rely on your arm, strong as it is, we would fail. But if, as I believe, England is with us, why, then we need do no more than find him and say in a clear voice, "This fellow here is my lord Jeffreys," and his death will follow as if by natural law, like a ball rolling down a ramp.
  [some time later]
  Daniel Waterhouse: I apologize for the disruption. You have heard of Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge, the one who decorated trees in Dorset with bodies of ordinary Englishmen, who sold English schoolgirls into chattel slavery? [...] The man I speak of, whose name you have all heard, the man who is responsible for the Bloody Assizes and many other crimes besides — judicial murders, for which he has never dreamed he would be made to pay, until this moment — George Jeffreys, Baron of Wem, is he. [points]
• In The Continental Op story "This King Business", the murderer of the previous head of the army, the current head of the army, is thrown to the soldiers. The Op's a pretty cold-blooded guy but he's horrified by this, as it's all but stated he's Torn Apart by the Mob.
• In Death Masks, Harry and two Knights of the Cross confront a Denarian who repents when it's obvious he has no chance for survival, abandoning his Coin to the Knights. The Knights immediately take the coin and stop their hostile actions, as the Denarian has repented, even though they can see that it's a false repentance, and they leave. Harry berates them for leaving as the Denarian mocks them for their Honor Before Reason. Harry fumes for a moment before reminding the Denarian that he's not a Knight of the Cross, before beating the bastard within an inch of his life with a baseball bat until he gets the information he needs. As he leaves the room, the Knights acknowledge that that was the plan the whole time.
• The Demonata: In Wolf Island by Darren Shan, Grubbs, having promised Antoine that he won't kill him, proceeds to leave him to the tender mercies of a group of the werewolves he has been abusing in the name of science. Though Antoine is quite literally thrown to wolves, this does not fit the Throw 'Em to the Wolves trope, as Grubbs has no qualms about getting blood on his hands and is merely delegating the murder to circumvent his promise.
  Grubbs Grady: I said I wouldn't kill you... but I said nothing about them.
• Discworld:
  • Raising Steam: Double subverted in that the Low King has Ardent completely defenseless, but instead announces that he'll be judged for his crimes (crimes that caused other grags to declare their disgust for him, like murdering a dwarf bride on her wedding day for marrying a human)... by a jury composed of the victims' families.
  • Averted in other books where mob justice is frowned upon by Granny Weatherwax.
    Granny: The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
• Ged does this in the Earthsea book The Farthest Shore on a slaver ship where there are only half-a-dozen slavers. All he needs is to remove the slaves' chains.
• At the end of the Fox on the Rhine/Fox at the Front alternate history duology, a captured Himmler is left in the hands of newly liberated concentration camp prisoners, under the guise of a botched handover between American troops and (anti-Nazi) German authorities. Allied high command orders an investigation... but not a rigorous one. This is perhaps a nod to the fate of many real life concentration camp guards (see below).
• The Girl and the Ghost: After defeating the pawang, the heroes let the creatures he enslaved decide what to do with him. He's carried off, and it's not shown what exactly they do.
• John Carter of Mars: In Edgar Rice Burroughs' Gods of Mars, John Carter exposes the god pretender Issus as nothing more than a deranged crone who manipulated her people for eras. He refuses to soil his hands with her blood and hands her over to a angry mob of her former followers, who proceed to literally tear her apart.
• In Kitty Norville, Kitty used to be part of a werewolf pack in Denver until she was exiled by their abusive leader, Carl. Later, she gets drawn back into a local conflict and discovers that Carl has only gotten worse while she was away, ruling the pack with an iron fist. When she finally has Carl cornered, with a silver-loaded gun pointed at him and the rest of the pack closing in, Carl begs her to spare him. Kitty lowers the gun and says, "I'm sorry, Carl. That's not for me to decide." Then the whole pack descends on him and rips him to shreds.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress:
  • The Lunar rebellion is set off early after some Peace Dragoons rape and murder a woman named Marie Lyons. After they're captured:
    Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury. They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex. Makes me sick to think about what happened next but don't suppose they lived through as long an ordeal as Marie Lyons endured.
  • And mentioned at the same time, with spies they had discovered earlier:
    Adam Selene announced that these persons had been employed [...] as undercover spies — and gave names and addresses. Adam did not suggest that anything be done. [... M]ost of them lasted no more than hours.
• In the Night Huntress series, Bones, using his vampire mesmerism, uncovers a spy in the government agency Cat works for. Bradley, the spy, helped arrange an attempt on Cat's life. After the interrogation, he asks Cat's boss, Don, if he wants to lock Bradley up. Don just says, "You know we're not letting him live, not with what he knows. Just don't make a mess," and Bones drinks the man to death.
• In The Oregon Files book Dark Watch, Eddie Seng introduces one Anton Savich to a hangar full of recently-rescued Chinese immigrants. He then introduces the immigrants to Savich, and then goes onto reveal how Savich was the mastermind behind said immigrants being enslaved and used as cheap labor in his gold mining operation on the Kamchatka Peninsula which forced them to work under absolutely deplorable conditions under both him and the local "Snake head" triads he had hired to keep the labor in line. Suffice to say, Savich does not last much longer once Seng locks him in with his former victims, and given everything he put them through there are few if any who feel pity for him.
• In The Painted Bird, there are some Nazi-aligned Polish partisans who have been raping women and basically torturing and killing everyone in the village they enter. They are defeated by Communist partisans who hand them over to the townspeople, who brutally torture them to death.
• Protector of the Small: Kel assists in stopping bandits in Squire. Many are captured and brought back to Corus to be tried, after which the majority are executed. She finds the deaths themselves to be sobering and is sickened to see that to a lot of the populace executions are a cause for celebration, but is relieved to see that the people she worked with are also serious about it. Buri, a K'mir, tells her she's never sure if this or the K'miri method are better - the K'mir just present the families of the wronged with the criminal in this trope.
• Done accidentally by Repairman Jack, when he was hired by an abused woman's brother to teach her brute of a husband a lesson. Jack confines the wife in a closet and gives the man a moderate beating, then leaves him tied up alive, satisfied with another job done ... only to receive an accusatory call from the brother, who'd assumed it was Jack and not his sister who'd tortured her abuser to death before reporting "a prowler" who'd killed the man.
• Attempted in Sandman Slim; it doesn't quite take, as Mason survives the pounding by the Hellions and ends up gaining (at least political) power again.
• In Shamran, the hero, Filip, confronts the officer in charge of "marking" the people of Tronn, a mandatory practice where any citizen (except for members of the government and the military) of a certain age has either their sight, hearing, or speech surgically removed. After disarming the officer, Filip throws him at the feet of the patrons in one of the capitol's larger inns, all of them people the officer so zealously has marked throughout his life. In the next scene, the guards of the capitol's castle gets a nasty surprise in the form of the officer, now blind, deaf, and mute, fumbling and crawling around in the dirt in front of them.
• In Silver Canyon by Louis L'Amour, the heroes lay out the evidence against The Man Behind the Man in a way that convinces everyone of his guilt but lacks any hard evidence. The local sheriff then makes a point of walking away, as do the heroes, leaving the Big Bad alone with the loyal ranch hands of a man he murdered. Those ranch hands then start making preparations to lynch the Big Bad, causing him to confess to the sheriff out of desperation to at least buy himself a few more weeks of life until the trial.
• Skylark Series: A mob on an oppressed planet requests this in Skylark Duquesne when their work overseer (who treats them like slaves) is deposed, but Seaton persuades them to put the man to hard labour alongside them instead. He does make it clear to the former overseer, though, that stepping out of line will mean a handover.
  Mob members: Stomp 'im! Give 'im the boot! Stomp 'is head clean off! Stomp 'im right down into the rock!
• In the backstory of A Song of Ice and Fire, when King Brandon "Ice Eyes" Stark liberated a castle being held by slavers, he allowed the freed slaves to do what they wanted to the slavers. The slaves chose to hang the slavers' entrails on the heart trees as an offering to the Old Gods.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the sadistic, pain-obsessed droid EV-9D9 has her limbs blasted off and is left to the mercies of the mutilated droids in her Torture Cellar. For extra points, her pain receptor and "pain vision" third eye are removed beforehand, robbing her of the sensation of her own destruction (which she had been anticipating).
• In Poul Anderson's "Time Lag", Elva, rescued, is told they will do whatever she orders to the commander of the invasion fleet. She tells them to just shoot him and get it over with. Given that she had posed as Happiness in Slavery to cajole concessions from him — he had even declared he would marry her after the invasion succeeded — he is shocked.

Live-Action TV

• In season 9 of 24, Kate Morgan gets information out of a villain by threatening to leave him at the mercy of a gang that wants him dead.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the first season finale, Mike Peterson/Deathlok is finally released from Garrett's control, and naturally takes the opportunity to take revenge on the man who turned him into a monster. When this happens, Garrett begs Coulson, who's standing nearby, to call Deathlok off; however, Coulson merely says that "Mr. Peterson is free to do as he wishes."
• Angel:
  • In season 2's "Reunion," Holland Manners, having had Drusilla re-sire a resurrected Darla, gives them full backing for whatever massacre they intend to carry out and organizes a wine tasting at his house for Wolfram & Hart employees to celebrate his success, only for Drusilla and Darla to crash the party, intending to kill Holland and the W&H employees there as revenge for being used as pawns. Angel shows up, apparently planning to Save the Villain... but instead, Angel also wants them dead and locks them all in the wine cellar with Darla and Drusilla before leaving them to die.
  • In season 3's "Double or Nothing," Jenoff, a paranormal crime boss/casino owner, comes to collect Gunn's soul in accordance with a Deal with the Devil Gunn made years ago. In the climax, Angel chops off the head of said crime boss. It quickly becomes apparent that this will only temporarily incapacitate him, so Angel asks who else in the casino owes the man, and leaves as the mob descends on the Jenoff.
• Used twice in the same scene in the Babylon 5 episode "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place." Lord Antono Refa, a racist Centauri noble, arranges to ambush the Narn Resistance leader G'Kar and some of his people in the tunnels below the Narn capital. Refa tells his soldiers that G'Kar must be taken alive, but the rest they can kill as they please. Unfortunately for Refa, his guards have been subverted by his rival Londo Mollari, who has arranged all this so Refa will be killed by the Narn and found with evidence that he was a traitor to Centauri. The soldiers lower their guns and walk away, leaving Refa helpless and alone. In a deliberate echo of Refa's own words, G'kar instructs his followers to make sure that the planted evidence is found and that Refa's head remains intact for identification, but the rest is theirs, to do with as they will. Suffice to say that Refa does not die quickly or easily.
• Bosch: After Deputy Chief Irving's son is killed by the corrupt cops he was investigating, Irving recruits Bosch to do an off the books investigation to find the shooter. They start by interrogating George's partner Eddie Arceneaux, and Bosch scares him into talking by threatening to hand him over to the drug gang that he and the rest of his crew attacked a few days before George's murder.
• Day Break:
  • At the end of the series, detective Brett Hopper discovers that the person who killed his father years earlier is actually uncle Nick, his father's old partner. Hopper's informant Damien, a career gangster, captures him after he tried to double cross Damien and, to give Hopper the satisfaction of killing him, presents him with a gun. Hopper taunts the killer's protests that he had no choice by saying that there's always a choice and walks away. Damien executes the killer seconds later.
  • Hopper threatens to do the same to Torrez earlier on as part of his Good Cop/Bad Cop routine with Damien, except this time Damien simply shoots Torrez when Hopper wasn't done interrogating him. Hopper is furious, but Damien warns him off.
• In the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor, after maneuvering House into letting the TARDIS back into its own control room and delivering it a Reason You Suck Speech, has one more instruction for his old girl:
  The Doctor: Finish him off.
• In the Game of Thrones episode "The Battle of the Bastards", Jon Snow has finally defeated the evil sadist Ramsay Bolton, who just murdered Jon's little brother Rickon, raped Jon's sister Sansa, and killed more innocent people than anybody can count. Jon understandably beats Ramsay to a pulp, but decides the final say goes to his sister Sansa, Ramsay's unhappy and abused wife, who has suffered at Ramsay's hands even more than Jon has. Boy, does Sansa deliver that revenge. It's actually a twofer; after being left to kill Ramsay, Sansa in turn lets his starving dogs have the honors.
• G.B.H.: In this British political comedy/thriller, the young thugs who have been stirring racial tensions by beating up black people while dressed as policemen are betrayed by their controller, who hands them over to a gang of black rioters. They are only beaten up and humiliated rather than killed, but he doesn't seem to care; he laughs hysterically as he watches them dragged from their van.
• In Kamen Rider Fourze, normally Gentaro Kisaragi, the titular Rider, is an All-Loving Hero who constantly will try to befriend anyone, even a former enemy. Hiroki Makise, the Pyxis Zodiarts, is the exception to the rule after he not only tried to drive Gentaro's friend Yuki Jojima over the Despair Event Horizon, but then proceeded to trap every girl who ever rejected him on a bus that he rigged to drive over an unfinished bridge. Once the threat has been dealt with, Gentaro leaves his opponent to his would-be victims.
• Law & Order: Referenced in the episode "Helpless"; Dr. Olivet accused a gynecologist of raping her after putting her under anesthesia. After he initially beat the rap, D.A. Stone was able to turn the tables after over fifty women contacted him, revealing that the doctor had done the same to them.
  Ben Stone: In a perfect world, I'd like to see your client locked in a room for a week with these women, but I'll settle for seeing him spend the rest of his life in jail.
• In an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a murder forces Detective Eames to face her past, because of a case she failed when she messed up the evidence. This resulted in an up-and-coming D.A, who Eames had a short relationship with, career being ruined before it began. Goren, however, discovers in the end that Eames never did anything wrong and that it was the D.A who screwed up the case, because he has personal issues against women to say the least and he was out to ruin her career, but it backfired on him. When the truth is revealed, Goren has a chance to cuff the D.A, since he was also the murderer who tried again to ruin Eames by framing her, but he instead gives the cuffs to Eames so she can make the arrest and bring closure to an Old Shame that was haunting her for years.
• Malcolm in the Middle has a variation. In an episode where Dewey was transfered out of the special-ed class, his former classmates, needing his leadership, ended up tying up their teacher, the principal, a security guard, and a janitor. When one of the students realizes that a lanyard Francis had was made by him, and Francis mentions that he bought it at a store far from there, Dewey realizes that the Principal and the teacher were using arts and crafts time as a sweatshop. Dewey states that no one will say anything about this, so long as the special-ed class gets an actual curriculum. As Francis unties the janitor and the guard, they agree not to say anything on the condition that they get five minutes alone with the principal and the teacher before they are untied.
• Many villains in Mission: Impossible met their ends due to the IMF orchestrating matters so that the bad guy's own people kill him.
• Stargate Atlantis:
  • Teyla uses the threat of this in order to get information on where the Athosians have been taken. She tells the man she will announce that he is a Wraith worshiper and leave him to the townsfolk. He gets very cooperative after that.
  • The team's first encounter with Lucius, a man who applies pheromones to himself to compel everyone to like him, ends like this. Once the pheromones wear off and they destroy the source of them, they simply return him to his hometown. A town whose population spent years under his thrall treating him like a god, including six women who married him under the influence. His next appearance establishes that he had an extremely unpleasant homecoming.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Equinox Part 2", Janeway threatens to leave one of the Equinox's crew at the mercy of the creatures they've been murdering in order to power their ship unless he tells her what the Equinox's Captain Ransom is up to. Ransom's conscience eventually catches up with him, but his Number Two is unwilling to stop committing genocide in order to get home, and mutinies. Ransom beams "everyone worth saving" to Voyager and resigns himself to his death at the hands of the creatures. Janeway leaves the remaining mutineers to the same fate.
• On Supernatural, when Dean and Sam rescue Linda Tran from a secret prison, they hand her a demon blade and allow her to take care of the hell intern who had been guarding her.
• In Titus, after the titular character and some of his friends have cornered Amy's rapist in a high school bathroom, the principal enters, saying he's going to call the police. However, the principal follows with "call me when I'm done," giving Titus and company permission to wail on the rapist.
• The Wire: Marlo tries to do this to Omar as revenge, by having Omar framed for the murder of an innocent delivery woman and sent to jail, where almost everyone in custody has been robbed by Omar at one point or another. Omar manages to survive long enough for Bunk to clear his name.
• In The X-Files episode "Sleepless", the Preacher lets the ghosts/apparitions of the Vietnamese civilians whom he and his unit killed during the War and who follow him around kill his former squad-mates and superiors.

Pro Wrestling

• There are multiple cases of wrestlers, standing in the ring with someone The Undertaker is coming to beat down, shoving that person directly into Taker's arms and leaving the ring post-haste.
• At the end of 2001, Lexie Fyfe, who had taken down Tiny Tim and The Diva in a tag team match, suddenly attacked her partner, Macaela Mercedes, and left her to a recovering Tim and Diva, claiming she was just looking for a way to get back at Mercedes, who gave Fyfe a black eye during their earlier feud.
• Seth Delay left his tag team partner Salvatore Rinauro to Matt Sydal in response to Rinauro's harassment of Daizee Haze in NWA Wildside. Rinauro turned to Alter Boy Luke and Sydal's arch enemy Delirious for help but they would not give him any either.
• On the May 16th, 2011 episode of WWE Raw, Michael Cole is signing a contract for his match at Over the Limit with Jerry Lawler. In the middle of Cole's Breaking Speech, Jerry replies with a Shut Up, Hannibal!... then praises Cole's Dragon-in-Chief Jack Swagger. Cole replies that being Cole's "sidekick" is the best thing that's ever happened to Swagger and no-one remembers what Swagger was ever the champion. Cue Swagger getting absolutely furious with Cole. However, instead of beating down Cole himself, he simply looks over Cole's shoulder to Jerry and says "He's all yours" and walks out of the ring, leaving Cole completely alone going into his match at Over the Limit with a justifably furious Lawler who beats the stuffing out of Cole and subjects him to a priceless Humiliation Conga. Though this may have been invoked by Lawler via Batman Gambit.
• Every member of Valkyrie's first incarnation felt they had been wronged by the SHINE wrestling promotion except the debuting Ivelisse Vélez, who saw nothing remarkable about the conflict(having been part of larger, more ambitious takeover efforts) and Valkyrie as another way to advance her career. When the power stable's leader Rain all but admitted the title belt she held was the only thing keeping her from retiring, Velez kept pursuing a title match anyway, even as the rest of Valkyrie advised against it. Velez hesitated when awarded a shot due it being from circumstance rather than merit, but met Made In Sin's argument that it was a ploy to weaken Valkyrie with the rebuttal that the champion being in Valkyrie was all that mattered. Velez went on to use an order from Rain to lay down for her to try and get an easy pin on Rain, then proceeded to overwhelm and essentially retire the leader of her own faction. As the rest of Valkyrie watched in horror Rain admitted Velez was right about the title belt, but added Ivelisse was no longer part of Valkyrie. Allysin Kay, Taylor Made and April Hunter immediately beat Velez's ass after that.

Roleplay

• In The Gamer's Alliance, a villainous variant happens to Awar in the aftermath of the siege of Vanna. Ronove, who has betrayed his former companions in the Grand Alliance and has become the new Dreadlord of the Northern Horde, uses his authority to free Awar from demon captivity... only to end up handing him over to a pissed off Refan whose adoptive little sister Awar had killed some time earlier. Refan executes Awar then and there.

Video Games

• In Alpha Protocol, this is a possible fate for Sergei Surkov once you learn that he's been manipulating both you and Konstantin Brayko. Provided that you spare him, Brayko will show up once you confront Surkov, eager to stab the living hell out of him. You can either stop him or let him have his fun; you don't get to see the results of the latter, but later news reports indicate the results looked "like a bear and a tiger fought over the remains".
• One of the signature executions in Assassin's Creed: Unity: you can kill the bourgeoisie yourself, but why take the blame when there's a violent mob demanding their rape and murder? Weaken a target by decimating their security forces, and then throw them into the crowd. This is how the Assassins deal with Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay in one of the trailers after helping the crowds storm the Bastille.
• In Harebrained Schemes' Battletech, the end of the campaign reveals Kamea dealt with her Evil Uncle Espinosa by handing him over to the Taurian Concordat over his role in the Perdition Massacre, noting he is all but certain to be tried as a war criminal and executed.
• A villainous version crops up in Bioshock 2. After you and Stanley Poole have finished rescuing or harvesting all the Little Sisters in Dionysus Park, Sofia Lamb decides she's had enough with Stanley trying to play both sides of the fence, and calls you up with The Reveal: it was Stanley who had you arrested and turned into a Big Daddy in the first place. For good measure, she also hacks the door to the booth that Stanley's been hiding in, and leaves him to your tender mercies.
• At the end of Borderlands 2, you're given the choice between killing Handsome Jack yourself or letting Lilith, the lover of one of the people he killed and who he had been putting through hell following the incident, do it for you. The latter is actually considered an "optional objective" and thus gives you an XP bonus.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins: If the Warden or any of their companions (except Alistair) defeats Loghain in a duel at the Landsmeet and he yields, the Warden may choose to allow Alistair to give Loghain the killing blow as revenge for abandoning the Grey Wardens at the Battle of Ostagar. However, this act will prevent Alistair from marrying Queen Anora, Loghain's daughter, if he was encouraged to inherit the throne of Ferelden and the Warden will be forced to choose between Alistair and Anora on which of them will suceed King Cailan as the ruling monarch.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition allows the player to judge captured enemies. In more than one case, there's an option to hand them over to those they have most personally wronged.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • You can occasionally encounter Thalmor Justiciars escorting Stormcloaks captives. You can give the captive weapons to defend themselves, and overdo your job by giving them dozens of Magic Staff as a part of Screw You, Elves! moment.
  • In one old Nord ruin you can find a Necromancer who's enthralled the spirits of several women to serve as his harem. You can kill him the normal way, or you can steal to Soul Gem he's using to control the ghosts, giving them back their free will. No points for guessing what happens next.
• In God Hand, Gene finishes off Shannon this way.
• Jade Empire: A Closed Fist (evil), but awesome, option; after freeing a mother and daughter from slavers, you can hand the daughter a knife and tell her that if she would like her freedom, she is welcome to "earn" it by using that knife to kill the slaver.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • It's possible to be doling this one out on Atris. After it's clear her Knight Templar tendencies and collection of Sith holocrons have corrupted her, you can cheerfully lock her in her archive room with those holocrons and walk away.
    Exile: Those are Sith Holocrons, Atris. They don't tolerate failure...
  • If choosing the light side path, Queen Talia of Onderon gives the player the choice on what to do with General Valku. They can choose to have him executed, imprisoned, or put it back to the Queen to decide. If the player chooses the latter the Queen will have him sentenced to death for treason and executed on the spot.
• Web game Legacy of a Thousand Suns involves a sadistic bitch who surpasses the Villain Protagonist in evil: she spent trillions of credits to build a giant robot shaped like herself, then only used it to stomp on independent frontier colonies because it turned her on. Your main character tears her out of the cockpit and leaves her to literally be stomped to death by the small sci-fi western town she was tormenting at the time.
• Mass Effect 2: One of the possible endings of Jacob's loyalty mission is to just leave after having destroyed all the mechs that were protecting Ronald Taylor from the wrath of his feral former crewmates.
  Jacob: You were a better man dead. Far as I'm concerned, you still are.
• In Max Payne 3, as Max is holding Arthur Fischer, a corrupt surgeon who works for an organ thieving ring, at gunpoint, the standoff is suddenly interrupted by a visibly disturbed Serrano, the leader of a slum-gang who had served as an antagonist for much of the plot, before he ended up being imprisoned along with the ring's other unfortunate victims. After a moment's consideration, Max lowers his gun, and allows his former enemy to kill the doctor with a scalpel.
• Myst V: End of Ages: In the climax, villain Escher is captured by the freed Bahro, a slave race he had tortured and experimented on previously. Yeesha's instructions to them are to "treat him as one of the Least", making something of a Broken Aesop out of the whole episode.
• There are few of these in Red Dead Redemption. Mainly (if not exclusively) when John is in Mexico helping out the revolution. In particular, there's the fate of Vincente de Santa: John can either finish him off personally or just walk off and let the rebels shoot him up.
• At the end of Sleeping Dogs (2012), Wei is given evidence that Pendrew is the one that caused the death of Uncle Po, and that he had dealings with him in order to climb ranks. So, with that evidence, Wei is able to put him in prision, but not before revealing that all the Sun On Yee in said prison already know of his actions and they'll be very happy to see him...
• In Tales of Maj'Eyal: Nektosh the One-Horned went mad (well, madder) with power after discovering some incredible new magical ability in the form of a Sher'Tul disintegration wand... then realized it was running on a limited supply of energy, and he'd already burned through most of it. Having written a lot of checks his ammo supply can't cash, he's been carefully rationing his remaining shots to keep his followers from questioning him, while frantically trying to think of a plan that'll keep him "from being trampled by an angry mob" (in his words). You could kill him... or you could go for the Make Him Squirm achievement, the icon for which depicts a panicking Nektosh backing away with his hands held outward, by repeatedly dodging his shots until he can't cast them any longer, then just walking away. Given the context, this is pretty much the meanest thing you could possibly do to him.
  Made Nektosh use up the last of his power, then left the area and ignored him until beating the game. The other Whitehooves will catch on any second now...
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves ends with the beaten Big Bad at Drake's mercy. After said Big Bad gives a "Not So Different" Remark speech, Drake decides not to kill him... and instead opts to simply leave him there fully aware of what the circling Guardians will do to him.
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings:
  • Near the end of the second chapter, Vernon Roche swears vengeance on King Henselt for executing his entire squad. Shortly after that, Geralt fights and defeats the king just as Roche shows up. Geralt can try to talk Roche into sparing the king's life, or he can just walk out of the room and leave the two of them alone.
  • There's a Side Quest in Flotsam, where two explorers go into the ruins of a burned down insane asylum, one of them gets trapped inside and Geralt has to go in after him. After talking to both the lost explorer, and the ghost haunting the ruins, Geralt concludes that the explores were cursed years ago, when they were soldiers and killed an enemy soldier after he told them about some loot that hidden somewhere in town, and they were, indirectly, responsible for the fire that destroyed the asylum. To lift the curse, Gerald can do one of two things: kill them and take their heads to the ghost, or lead them to the ghost.

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick: Belkar Bitterleaf does this in one story arc. After slaughtering his way through a group of Mooks, he stabs a sword through the foot of the man who had betrayed him and his allies. Rather than finish him, Belkar leaves the man in the capable hands of the traitor's best friend, who has also been sold out.
  Belkar: See what we learned today, Mr. Scruffy? Solve a man's problems with violence, help him for a day. Teach a man to solve his problems with violence, help him for a lifetime!

Web Original

• In Kaiju War Chronicles, Match 113 ends with Glidor, the Mad Scientist who set up a Let's You and Him Fight between Frankenstein and King Kong, accidentally revealing to Frankenstein that he set the whole thing up. This enrages Frankenstein, but Glidor then reminds Frankenstein that the monster would never kill a human and thus won't kill him. Seeing this, Frankenstien frees Kong from his bonds and tells him that Glidor was the one who took him from his home island. Kong, now knowing who to blame for his kidnapping, sends Glidor on a one way flight into a mountain.

Web Videos

• At the end of Dirty Laundry, Frank Castle a.k.a. The Punisher leaves the violent pimp battered and soaked in the booze from his own bottle, then leaves a lighter on the ground for the hooker that the pimp had just abused. She chooses to light him up.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020): At the end of "Good Warner Hunting," Walter Grubb (aka. Chicken Boo) beats a hasty retreat. The Warners respond by releasing all the Animaniacs co-stars he'd hunted and letting them have their revenge.
• American Dad!: At the end of "Frannie 911," Francine decides to embrace her reputation as an enabler and lets Roger be himself (i.e., a jerkass). But he then finds out the hard way that it goes for everyone else.
  Roger: Wait, where are you going? You said you were an enabler!
  Francine: Oh, I am. And I'll be your enabler as soon as Stan finishes being who he is: the guy who beats the crap out of you when you deserve it.
• Ben 10: Ultimate Alien has Charmcaster leaving Darkstar weakened to be beat up by the heroes after discovering he had formed an Unholy Matrimony with her just to take advantage of her power and had no real feelings for her.
• In The Legend of Vox Machina, Goran Vedmire is a brutal enforcer who helped the Briarwoods maintain their iron grip on the town of Whitestone, and ends up at the mercy of Percy DeRolo. Percy has sworn a bloody vendetta against the Briarwoods for their crimes against his family and hometown, but since Vedmire wasn't working for them at the time his family was killed, Percy instead leaves it to the townspeople that he oppressed to decide his fate.
• Sombra's defeat on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic can be seen as this, with the twist that the heroes never had the means to significantly harm the villain before that point.
• At the end of Over the Garden Wall, Wirt decides to focus on leaving the woods and leave the Woodsman to deal with the lingering threat of the Beast. Wirt discovers the Woodsman's lantern is actually the Beast's Soul Jar. Instead of blowing it out himself, he hands it to the Woodsman, whom the Beast had used all these years, telling him it's his problem. The Woodsman ultimately blows it out and extinguishes the Beast's soul.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Moral Decay", Buttercup, wanting to buy a new punching bag, has amassed a tidy fortune from the tooth fairy for teeth she has accumulated from punching the teeth out of all the criminals, and even monsters, after she tried to knock out Bubbles' teeth intentionally after doing so by accident. When she attacks the show's main villains unprovoked, Blossom and Bubbles get wind of it and the two help the villains set up an ambush on Buttercup to teach her a lesson. The beating Buttercup got from the villains damaged her own teeth so much, she had to spend all the money she earned through her scheme on her dental bills after the Professor finds and confiscates the stash.
  Buttercup: Uh, guys? A little help here?
  Blossom: Sorry, Buttercup. You know what they say. "An eye for an eye..."
  Bubbles: "An' a toof for a toof!"
• Rick and Morty:
  • In "Look Who's Purging Now", Rick Sanchez lends Arthricia a suit of Powered Armor to enable her to take revenge on the ruling elites of her planet for forcing the poor to kill each other in their yearly festival. At first, Rick is content to let Arthricia massacre them herself, having had his fill of violence for the day, but when he sees how much fun she's having, he changes his mind and joins in.
  • A villainous example: In "Unmortricken", Evil Morty out-gambits and defeats Rick Prime, destroys all his backup bodies, and steals his schematics for the Omega Weapon. He could then just finish him off himself, but decides to revive the near-dead Rick C-137 (the main one), who's been on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Rick Prime for decades, to do it for him, leaving the room and telling him "Knock yourself out," which according to Word of God was also a test to see if Rick would prioritize his revenge or stopping Evil Morty from taking the Omega Weapon. Rick chooses Revenge and beats Rick Prime to death with his bare hands.
• Superman: The Animated Series: Superman throws a beaten and defeated Darkseid at the feet of his slaves on Apokolips, telling them they are now free and can do whatever they want to him, but it doesn't work out the way he intended. He is shocked when the slaves approach Darkseid with great reverence and genuine concern for his well-being, and gently carry him away to receive medical treatment. Darkseid is not a benevolent ruler by any means, and his slaves are very much not the happy sort. They're just so broken at this point that they literally have no concept of not being ruled by him, and the thought of freedom never even crosses their minds. As he's being carried away, Darkseid takes the opportunity to gloat at Superman.
  Darkseid: I am many things, Kal-El. But here, I am God.
• In the The Transformers G1 episode "Prime Target", a crazy human hunter obsessed with Hunting the Most Dangerous Game sets his sights on Optimus Prime. He gets the Autobot to come to him by kidnapping and torturing several Autobots, which pisses Prime off. By the end, when the hunter has been defeated, Optimus ties him to the front of the Russian plane he stole at the beginning of the episode and leaves him at a Soviet base, allowing the Russians to have their justice.
• A rare villainous example in the Transformers: Prime episode "The Human Factor". The MECH terrorist Silas has become a Cybertronian by placing his brain/nervous system into the body of the deceased Decepticon Breakdown. Cylas decides to join the Decepticons, and tries to win "a place at the table" by gifting Megatron a weapon. Both Megatron and Knockout (Breakdown's close friend) are angered and horrified at what has happened to Breakdown. So much so that, when Cylas' plan fails, Megatron allows Knockout to get his revenge on Cylas.

Real Life

• At the end of World War II, after the Allied forces began driving back the Nazis and Imperial Japan, they frequently allowed those whom they had wronged to enact some retribution without fear of punishment, as long as the person in question was someone that the Allies felt had it coming.
  • Most of the death camps used in The Holocaust had been abandoned by the time Allied forces got there, but Dachau was still in operation when the American army liberated it. After taking the camp and figuring out what it was for, the Americans armed the surviving prisoners and set them loose on the Nazis who ran the place, while the Americans just sat back and watched.
  • There is at least one account of a Japanese POW camp in which this happened. After the camp was taken by Allied soldiers, the Japanese commander surrendered to them and demanded to be treated "as befits a Prisoner of War". The soldiers took one look around the camp and turned the Japanese commander over to the prisoners, who buried him alive.
  • This sort of thing happened all over Europe in the immediate aftermath of the liberation. Unofficial policy was that the Allied forces would give liberated forced labourers, camp inmates, PoWs, and civilians a grace period in which they could do what they wanted to German soldiers, or in a lot of cases just any German. After that, the rule of law was put back into place.
• Allegedly, Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer was deliberately sent to clean showers with a schizophrenic inmate who hated Dahmer while the guards left for long enough for the other inmate to kill him. Similar incidents are often suspected in murders of high profile prisoners.

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