Unishment

"So, you like donuts, eh? Well, have all the donuts in the world! Hahahaha! [...] I don't understand it, James Coco went mad in fifteen minutes!"

"As for his sentence, remember what he said in the courtroom? His only thought, his only desire, was to be 'reunited with his crew'. I can't help thinking, after everything that's happened, after everything he's done, we gave him exactly what he wanted."

— Capt. James T. Kirk (Kelvin Timeline), Star Trek: Khan, Pt. 5

The punishment equivalent of Attack Backfire: A character is legitimately guilty of some offense, tried and convicted, and sentenced to punishment, except that (whether intentionally or otherwise) the punishment in question is something that the character actually desires — they consider it some kind of reward instead (or maybe they don't, really, but they take the punishment in stride just to piss off their punisher).

This can be the result of a successful Briar Patching; alternately it may be the result of Deliberate Values Dissonance, Power Dynamics Kink, or being Too Kinky to Torture. Sometimes this is done deliberately as Restrained Revenge on the part of the punishers themselves, as a poetic way to combine reward and punishment for those who technically messed up but are Saved by the Awesome, or as a form of Loophole Abuse when they're required to punish someone they don't feel actually deserves it. Someone employing a Failure Gambit is invoking this trope as the consequences of their own failure is what they are often after; it can also overlap with Springtime for Hitler if a character intentionally tries for the Unishment and fails. It may also lead to someone being Gracefully Demoted. Not to be confused with Cool and Unusual Punishment (which is still a legitimate punishment, and it's the audience who desires to see it executed).

See also Cursed with Awesome and some cases of Infernal Paradise. A supertrope to Get into Jail Free and Desires Prison Life, in which getting into prison in pursuit of another agenda is the desired goal, and Getting Suspended Is Awesome, when a kid sees getting suspended from school as a reward because they get to stay home. Compare also Arson, Murder, and Lifesaving, when his "crimes" were actually helpful. Compare Chew-Out Fake-Out, where instead of being reprimanded the guilty party is excused or even praised. Contrast Curse That Cures (where a Curse is actually welcomed by a character because it cures them of a sickness or injury), Cruel Mercy (when the character spares another's life only for it to suffer a Fate Worse than Death), Not Supposed to Be a Punishment (alleged reward feels more like a punishment), and The Not-So-Harmless Punishment (when a character's punishment is introduced as seemingly trivial but is revealed to actually be far worse than initially thought).

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Examples:

Advertising

• This ad for Dunkin Donuts shows a Dunkin Donuts location in the home penalty box at TD Garden serving coffee to Boston Bruins winger David Pastrnak during his penalty for tripping an opposing player.
• An infamous Pepsi advert was banned for being a rather blatant Take That! to Pepsi's direct rival, Coca-Cola: a child, unable to reach the Pepsi button on a vending machine, instead purchases two cans of Coke, and use the Coke cans as an improvised footstool to get himself a can of Pepsi. However, from a financial point of view, Coke is the winner: the child purchased two cans of Coke, as opposed to one can of Pepsi.

Anime & Manga

• In After War Gundam X, after some rather risky stunts, the Kid Hero protagonist is given the "punishment" of... guarding the girl he has a huge crush on. By this rate, it's obvious that everyone can see he'd do anything for her.
• One storyline of Ayakashi Triangle features the Crimson Gourd, which sucks people inside and dissolves them. Reo is disappointed she doesn't get trapped inside, because if she managed to escape before her suit fails, she'd just have her clothes melt off and shake around an enclosed space with her friends.
• Cahe Detective Club: During a summer vacation Emina enters her club to a Mystery Night contest on a beach. But her members don't find much interest in detective work nor do they have the skills. They eventually lose and gets a penalty of surviving on a harsh island for a while. However they are either used to island environments or just very optimistic. So they treat it like an ordinary vacation while Emina is the only one who has a hard time.
• In Dragon Ball Z, it was revealed that Demon King Dabura was sent to Heaven instead of Hell, since he'd probably enjoy Hell. In filler, this is shown to have backfired when it turns out that he likes Heaven just as much, but he actually turns good.
• A one shot h-manga titled Garudere, revolves around a couple who met at a wrestling event, and for her birthday he got her tickets to see the rematch fight she wanted to see, and he also got her a surprise gift, a maid outfit so he can live out his maid fantasy. She angrily refuses the second gift and throws it at him, knocking down an expensive anime figurine, and he tells her that he'll forgive her if she wears the outfit. She reluctantly wears it, and when he takes a picture she places him in a submissive choke hold, which he finds arousing, and they end up having sex. At the end, she ends up taking a job at a maid cafe to pay him for the expensive figurine.
• In Hozuki's Coolheadedness, Dakini is the head of the Welcoming Committee, and inflicts Corporal Punishment on her subordinates when they misbehave. The thing is, everyone knows this, so the only people working there are masochists who actually enjoy it and want to be punished. They even thank her when she does so. All in all, things work well because the spanking motivates them to work harder, so Hozuki leaves the situation as it is.
• Hybrid × Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia:
  • In the final story arc, the portal between Earth and Batlantis is about to close permanently. Empress Aine is miserable because she wants to be with her Earthborn lover Kizuna and she doesn't really like ruling, but feels a responsibility to the people of Batlantis. Wanting Aine and Kizuna to be happy, Grace quickly pulls a coup d'état, then once she is the Empress, sentences Aine to permanent exile from Batlantis. Everyone present understands what Grace is doing and Aine happily goes through the portal.
  • Sometime before the portal closed, the Captain of the Batlantis Guard, Zelshione, had an affair with Kizuna. When she realized she was pregnant, she went AWOL and retired to the countryside, where she gave birth to a son. Eventually, the other soldiers find and arrest her. Empress Grace tells her that having an affair with Empress Aine's lover and going AWOL is treason and must be punished, but she doesn't want to hurt her friend Zelshione or her son. So Grace officially dismisses Zelshione from her position, confiscates her weapons, and sentences her to house arrest in the palace until she can raise her son into a splendid person. Since Zelshione was tired of fighting and just wanted to raise her son in peace, this suits her just fine.
• In Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, Kanna's parents banished her for pulling pranks, which led to her meeting Kobayashi. Given the fact that the only reason she was pulling pranks was so they'd actually pay attention to her, it's probably the nicest thing they ever did.
• Overlord (2012): As punishment for a mind-controlled defection and requiring expensive resources to resurrect, Ainz orders Shalltear Bloodfallen to act as a living chair for him during a meeting. Thing is, Shalltear is incredibly depraved and is soon panting and squirming under him. The trope gets played with, as Ainz was completely aware that would happen, despite his station requiring him to hand out discipline, he feels like the above spoiler was his fault. So he picks something Shalltear won't mind, but that he finds deeply uncomfortable, in essence punishing himself.
• In Pokémon Generations, Cyrus, the leader of Team Galactic, wakes up in the Distortion World after being stopped by Giratina from messing with Dialga and Palkia. The Distortion World is a dimension void of emotion and a place of nothingness with no one present, but Giratina. Cyrus decides he is content to remain in the Distortion World as he believes it is the perfect world he sought for and informs Team Galactic to not look for him.
• In Tenchi Muyo!, Ryoko is tortured with electric shock...and apparently finds it arousing.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs
  • Leon sees being scolded by Queen Mylene as this and feels envious of others receiving it.
  • When Angie kowtows in public in order to get help to save Leon, her father later points out that she has disgraced the family's honor. He punishes her by marrying her off... to Leon, the guy she's in love with in the first place.
  • Jilk being the biggest trouble maker of Marie's boyfriends, gets punished the most often. But Leon notices that Jilk's oddly happy after being hit by Marie, which hints at this being Mischief for Punishment.
• The Villainous Daughter's Butler, I'll Crush the Destruction Flags: When Cyril calls out his pupil Sophia for pretending to be angry in order to get time alone with him, threatening to punish her for being bad, she just turns seriously red and is stunned, making Cyril wonder if his strictness is at fault for giving her those kinds of interests.
• The Way to Protect the Female Lead's Older Brother: After being framed for letting Roxana's Sex Slave out of his cell, and almost killing Roxana's mother, Dion Agriche is sent by their father into the borders of their lands to collect the beasts who escaped in the ensuing commotion. Roxana complains this is hardly a punishment for Dion and Lant probably just wants to keep him out of her sight.

Comedy

• Bill Cosby's "Chocolate Cake for Breakfast" routine, from his stand-up special Bill Cosby: Himself, ends this way. Bill's wife wakes him out of bed at six o'clock in the morning, in order to serve his children breakfast. When his daughter comes down for breakfast, she asks for chocolate cake, which Bill deduces must be healthy, because it has eggs, milk, and wheat in it. When his wife finds out, she flips out and sends Bill back to his room, which is where he wanted to be in the first place. This is followed by a Call-Back to an earlier comment about fathers, in that "we are dumb, but we are not so dumb", in that Bill was intentionally doing something wrong so he'd never be asked to do it again.
• Whitney Cummings jokes about how women are actually rewarding their man by giving them the silent treatment, not punishing them.
• One comic relates the founding of Australia as a penal colony by imitating a griping English criminal who can't believe he's being shipped off to some godforsaken island halfway around the world for stealing a loaf of bread. Then the prison ship passes Bondi Beach, a beautiful stretch of beach that is today one of the most popular and well-known places in Australia to visit. "Lemme get this straight...I steal a loaf of bread, and I get to spend the rest of my life on that beach?" And 200 convicts go, "Hell, yeah!"
  • Bill Hicks did a similar joke. "So I get to stay here, with the shitty food and shitty weather, or go to a tropical paradise? ...I'm Jack the Ripper."
  • Canadian comedian Ryan Belleville as well, doing a bit of Self-Deprecation when he claims Canadians are stupid. Why? Because they descended from the British. And why are the British stupid? Because they came to Canada and decided "Hey, let's live here in this lifeless frozen wasteland while sending our criminals to Australia!"
• That Mitchell and Webb Sound - Room 102 What happens when people get wise to Room 101 (oh no, don't exploit my crippling fear of beer and intimacy!)
• British comedian Mark Steel sometimes jokes about the fact that he was expelled from school for truancy, pointing out that the punishment basically amounted to being forced to do more of the thing that earned him the punishment in the first place.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics:
  • In a one-shot, Archie's dad sends the teen to his room for some infraction. Fred then realizes that Archie has video games and other toys in his room. The comic ends with Fred playing with Archie's stuff, telling his son to go back to the living room.
  • Another comic had Jughead getting several detentions. It turns out he found being in a quiet classroom a perfect chance to do his homework.
• Astro City: In "Welcome to HumanoGlobal", Marella and her colleagues are chewed out by their boss for being too quick to interpret harmless activities as clues to supervillain plots. They are reassigned for two weeks handling non-emergency duties — which enables them to attend an Honor Guard charity event and meet the heroes firsthand.
• Darkseid once appeared in the book Young Justice, where he attempted to turn the ghost-girl Secret into a protege. When this failed, he angrily used his Omega Effects to restore her to life, leaving her a perfectly normal teenaged girl with no powers or abilities. This happened to be exactly what she wanted the most in her (un)life, and she wisely decided not to tell him that.
• Fables:
  • Flycatcher, better known to the reader as the Frog Prince, is honor-bound to return to the Homelands and attempt to rescue his wife and child, a Suicide Mission that would almost certainly be pointless as they are probably dead already. To stop this from happening, Sheriff Bigby writes him up for minor infractions — usually violating the masquerade by eating flies in human form — and sentences him to community service in the form of janitorial work. Flycatcher finds this work rewarding and occasionally returns to do it for free even after the need for this informal arrangement is obviated.
  • In one arc, Boy Blue steals the Witching Cloak and the Vorpal Blade to invade the Homelands by himself. When he returns safely, with important intelligence for Fabletown, his "punishment" for the theft is to be sent to the farm, where Rose Red just has him help her out with her daily work.
• By the end of Holy Avenger, the half-dryad Lisandra is judged for her crime of destroying an entire village and turning its population into plant monsters, which made resurrecting them impossible. The judges take into consideration the fact that she was under a very powerful curse at the time, and "condemn" her to use her powers to erect a magical forest in memory of the village, which she will then have to tend to and protect for the rest of her life, accompanied only by her loving husband and their eventual offspring. Terrible fate for a half-dryad druid!
• Judge Dredd:
  • A museum guard gets laid off (after training his robotic replacement), and the boredom results in him flipping his lid and opening fire on the street with a rifle. (This is noted as very common in Mega-City, due to the 3% employment rate.) Dredd stops him, and sentences him to ten years...in a labor camp. The man is absolutely ecstatic about the chance to work again, and hopes he'll get to do really hard labor, like smashing rocks. Dredd reflects that sometimes, the law can be kind.
  • A man's surgical implant picks up radio and forces him to listen to a particularly obnoxious DJ 24/7. He quickly decides the only way to silence the DJ is to kill him, but gets arrested during the attempt. He's sentenced to isolated imprisonment... where the radio signal can't reach him, finally granting him peace.
• The Punisher:
  • Frank Castle has said that he doesn't mind being sent to prison when caught by the authorities. After all, there are lots of criminals in prison. And he's repeatedly surrendered to the police so as to get close to an otherwise untouchable criminal. And once to rescue Daredevil.
  • During one notorious Audience-Alienating Era in the late 1990s, Frank died and became a disincarnate spirit sent by angels to fight supernatural menaces. At the beginning of Garth Ennis's character-rerailing The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank arc, Frank was suddenly human again with no explanation beyond that he "didn't like it" and "told the angels where to stick it". A later issue revealed that from the angels' point of view, Frank pissed them off so badly that as punishment they resurrected him as a normal human being and dumped him back into the blood and filth of a corrupt world...which of course was just what Frank wanted.
• Superman;
  • In The Trial of Superman, when the Tribunals finally wise up about how unfair they have been to Superman in attempting to judge him for his ancestors' roles in the destruction of Krypton, they compromise by sentencing him to a life of "Atonement." Namely, since Superman has dedicated his life to the Never-Ending Battle for Truth and Justice, they order him to continue it, knowing full well that Superman wants nothing more than to do so.
• In The Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Shockwave's Start of Darkness involves the corrupt Senate subjecting him, a senator noted for his empathetic and passionate personality, to a brain surgery that all but destroyed his emotions as a punishment for speaking against them. In the present day, Shockwave notes with bemusement what a stupid idea for a punishment that was; removing his emotions meant that he was incapable of feeling bad about it, thus defeating the entire purpose. It also caused him to lose any sense of morality or restraint he had before, causing him to help murder the whole Senate in cold blood for his own benefit.
  • Double Subverted in The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye. At his trial, Megatron abuses some loopholes to get himself assigned to the Lost Light as co-captain so he can be "properly" tried by the Knights of Cybertron once they are located, seemingly escaping any true punishment for his many crimes. Most of the Autobots on the ship consider this a travesty of justice, but Megatron finds dealing with the eccentric crew and ludicrous situations they find themselves involved in to be the harshest punishment of all. Then double subverted when Megs goes through major Character Development, begins to redeem himself, and eventually admits that he's actually the happiest he's ever been.
  Megatron: Not a day goes by—not an hour—when I don't have to stand back from this endless parade of nonsense and remind myself, by means of several blows to the head, that I am here of my own volition, and not as a result of some—some elaborate trap set by Optimus Prime.
• In the Marvel Super Heroes 1992 Winter Special, Glitch had surrendered to Iron Man after being tricked by Spymaster and was handed over to Nick Fury. As his Parole Officer, Nick would put him to work by making S.H.I.E.L.D.'s security systems hacker proof. Even Glitch lampshades on how this is what he wanted from the beginning. A challenging task worthy of his hacking skills.

Comic Strips

• In a Bloom County arc, Oliver hacks into the electric company's system and reduces his dad's bill to only a dollar. His dad scolds him, and tells him if he does it again, he'll have no glazed beets at dinner for a month. (Then adds that if he does it to the phone bill, it will be two months.) Of course, he knows that glazed beets make Oliver throw up, as his son quickly notes.
• Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes tried to pull this on his babysitter Rosalyn, tackling Rosalyn while wearing his Stupendous Man outfit (pretending that she's yet another female supervillain), letting her chase him around the perimeter of the house, then sneaking back inside and changing from his mask and cape into pajamas. When Rosalyn finally confronts him, he appears to have been in bed the whole time, denying any knowledge of what "Stupendous Man" did. But even when Rosalyn tells him she knows he is Stupendous Man, Calvin tauntingly points out that she can't punish him anyway, since her punishment is always sending him to bed and he already is in bed. Rosalyn then makes him go downstairs and write a confession of his misdeeds for his parents to read when they return.
• Dilbert introduced Wally as an employee doing his best to get fired in order to take advantage of lucrative severance packages. Scott Adams based the character on someone he knew in Real Life that did the same thing.
• Used as a punchline in For Better or for Worse, after April steals one of Elizabeth's bras and uses it as a slingshot to shoot Koosh balls at the dog (which Elly admittedly found amusing), she is sent to her room...and instead of thinking about what she did, takes a nap.
• Garfield: It's so hot that Garfield decides to kick Jon while the latter is watering the flowers. Jon retaliates by hitting him with water, which Garfield liked. Realizing what just happened, Jon kicks Garfield hoping to receive the same retaliation. Garfield instead pulls down Jon's shorts and wraps him with his hose.
• In one series of Peanuts summer camp strips, Charlie Brown was called to the head counselor's office; he dreaded why, and hoped they wouldn't make him work in the kitchen and "clean out the grease trap". Instead, the staff said that his name was mentioned in the girl's camp when some commotion broke out; figuring Charlie Brown was a troublemaker, they sent him home early. To be honest, he was glad to leave early, seeing as he never liked camp, and flattered that his name had been mentioned in the girl's camp. "And best of all," he said on the bus home, "I never had to clean out the grease trap!" (In truth, he had never done anything wrong; the true troublemaker was Peppermint Patty, who saw the Little Red Haired Girl who he had a crush on, and felt jealous when she saw how pretty she was, presumably starting the altercation.)
• In The Wizard of Id, Spook is given ten days in solitary for trying to escape in this strip. However, it seems the prison has a bit of an overcrowding problem...

Fairy Tales

• Albanian fairy tale The Girl Who Became a Boy concludes with the title character getting cursed with a biological sex change, enabling her/him to finally satisfy the princess s/he'd married earlier in the story. And they lived happily ever after.

Fan Works

• Boiling Isles and Beyond: After Amity comes out, her parents disown her and throw her out. Amity is overjoyed by this as she is finally free from their grasp and she gets to live with Luz.
• The end of When Duty Calls sees Scarlet Glade being punished for helping her half-siblings. The punishment is suspension and a transfer but since she did a good deed, in practice, it's more like a vacation and a promotion.
• In Fever Dreams after Light "confesses" to being The Mole for Kira when cornered the taskforce decide it would be best if Light remains under house arrest under L's supervision which of course is exactly what Light wanted.
• Towards the end of Past Sins the punishment faced by Nyx is being released to the care of Twilight Sparkle, who is charged with seeing that she has a proper foalhood and never again becomes Nightmare Moon, to their absolute delight. Interestingly, there is some opposition to this from those who recognise it as not being any punishment at all.
• In RealityCheck's Nyxverse, Prince Blueblood's father, Duke Blueblood, is hatching a plan to take over Equestria. Blueblood goes along with it until he realizes to just what lengths his father is willing to go, and assists with exposing him instead. Celestia punishes the Prince for his complicity by assigning him a diplomatic mission to repair the damage done as part of the plot. This is also a reward for his Heel–Face Turn by involving a lot of traveling by ship, which Blueblood loves.
• In a possible homage to the Albanian fairytale below, the protagonist of the manga A Thousand and One Knights in Wonderland is changed from a woman into a man through a dragon's curse. Which is perfect for him because he has fallen in madly in love with a princess.
• Duel Nature: Rainbow Dash thinks that Twilight's sentence for her fight with Princess Luna might be this when she learns that Twilight got to read an advance copy of Daring Do and the Spear of the Windigos as part of it.
  "You beat up a Princess and they punish you by letting you read the book I've been dying to get my hooves on for nearly a year? If I punched Princess Celestia, like, right now, could I get in on this too?"
• Happens twice in quick succession in Address Unknown (Remedy): Derpy is put on probation by the Cloudsdale Mail Delivery Service and demoted to ground delivery in Ponyville. While she initially sees it as humiliating for a pesgasus as it's supposed to be, she quickly realises that she's better suited to walking than flying anyway, especially in a storm. Then she gets fired after a few hours in Ponyville, over an accident caused by Twilight, but it frees her up for a permanent position with the Ponyville Postal Service, offered by Post Haste because she was able to finish her rounds well ahead of schedule in spite of the accident.
• Noir Et Blanc has an instance of this when Harry gets annoyed with the other Gryffindors hounding him when "he'd made it perfectly clear that he didn't feel like associating or being bothered. Now they'd decided to ignore him, as 'punishment'. That didn't bother Harry in the least. He preferred it so."
• In The Hurricane, Ra's al Ghul essentially gives this to Laurel Lance when he gives her a complete release from the League after she helps Batman save them from being "Jokerized"; Laurel is free to do whatever she wants with the training she has received from the League, but the one thing she can't do is call on the League and their resources at some future date (which is why this is a punishment, as that means cutting herself off from Shado, who has been her closest friend for the last three years).
• In A Growing Affection, as punishment for not informing Tsunade of Naruto's plan to act out again to get demoted, Hinata is instructed to help Naruto clean the Hokage Monument.
  Hinata: So my punishment is to spend the morning with you? I think the Hokage might be getting soft.
• In The Lunaverse, Twilight Sparkle eventually turns herself in to the law for her crimes. Her punishment? House arrest and community service, in Ponyville, as their new librarian. Thus she gets to atone properly to the ponies she had hurt (she rejected the initial sentence of house arrest at her family's estate, as it would just be a long vacation), and she can spend almost all her time reading and studying magic, which she loves.
• Invoked in The Little Stark, as while eight-year-old Ariel didn't explicitly ask Ursula to make her human, her interest in humanity probably made her better suited to adjust to life on the surface than any of her sisters would have been.
• The Wrong Reflection: Due to a Noodle Incident where Eleya "cussed out three ambassadors, a rear admiral, and the Proconsul of the Romulan Republic", Eleya gets a massive black mark on her service record and is told by Admiral Riker that she'll probably never make admiral now. Then the author's note for the chapter goes and quotes Kirk's advice to Picard in Star Trek: Generations, just to drive it home.
  Eleya: Respectfully, sir, can you see me stuck behind a desk directing fleets or running a research office?
  Riker: Mm, no, I can't.
  Eleya: Then I think I'll survive. Sir.
• Varrick's "punishment" for his actions in Book 2 are elaborated on in Seeking Sato, where it turns out in addition to being pardoned, he has his own company again, with all its profits going towards Kuvira's campaign, which he works for. And it's not like he can't conceal his money under "business expenses".
• Invoked in The Land of What Might-Have-Been regarding the half-scarred, half-beautiful face of the Mentor of the Deviant Nations (the counterpart to Glinda); where the Radiant Empress (Elphaba's insane counterpart) intended that this twisted face would be a punishment due to her own warped belief in the importance of beauty and her perception of Glinda's "betrayal", the Mentor instead sees her face as a badge of honour, reflecting the lost innocence of the war.
• In I Am NOT Going Through Puberty Again!, Itachi's punishment for committing the Uchiha massacre is being stripped of his ANBU Captain rank and being demoted to Chunin. Justified, since the Hokage decided to make the attempted Uchiha coup public, and thus Itachi's actions were seen under a completely new light. The demotion came because, since he killed his almost entire family, he had to face SOME form of punishment (mostly because it would allow everyone to pretend his actions weren't under orders from the village's leadership, which would be bad for PR). It barely lasts either way —- Itachi is named Hokage in the fic's epilogue.
• Due to the Ranma signing the marriage licenses to Ukyō and Shampoo in Ranma: Happenstance Gone Right, he's kicked out of the Tendō home. Even though he now lives out of a tent in a vacant lot, Ranma no longer has to deal with his father or the Tendōs so he's actually much happier; besides, he's used to roughing it after spending most of his life on the road.
• And the Giant Awoke: Getting sent to the Wall, joining an order of men who are forbidden to marry? No doubt, a horrible punishment for Loras Tyrell!
• The Lost Kingdom features reference to Trick/the Blood King having basically invoked this when he explains how Morgana's mother Vivienne was a fae oracle in his court before she fell in love with Gorlois. Under the rules of the fae, marriage to humans is forbidden, but rather than execute Vivienne for her decision to marry Gorlois, Trick's wife suggested that instead he claim that he was "punishing" Vivienne by stripping her of her powers. This allowed him to claim that Vivienne was being punished for choosing humans over the fae by stripping her of her powers, but it allowed her to be with the man she loved (although he expresses regret that this led to Vivienne dying of plague because she no longer had a fae's resistance to disease).
• Purple Days: In one of his lives, Joffrey sentences Eddard Stark to a "banishment" to the North, never to return to the capital again.
• Lady Black, Lord Potter:
  For their reluctance to tell Molly one shred of what happened at their meeting with the goblins after the reading of Sirius' will the twins were sent to their room. This made Harry smirk, because if anything Molly had just encouraged them to do...whatever Fred and George wanted to do, as they valued secrecy.
• The Rigel Black Chronicles: Professor Snape has to put more than the usual amount of thought into punishing "Rigel" for any misbehavior; his usual detentions won't work on someone so devoted to the art of brewing.
  Rigel: Who is my detention with on Friday?
  Snape: Me. We might as well make use of the time, and I have a vague suspicion that you wouldn't respond to normal disciplinary actions even if I were to set you to clean cauldrons all night.
  Rigel: I like cleaning cauldrons.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic "Best Hell Ever", Twilight finds herself in Hell and is condemned to sort and reshelve Hell's library, which has an infinite number of books and shelves. She is also allowed to read any book she chooses. It is later revealed that this was actually a mistake by the demon who put her there, and he later sends her back because she wasn't supposed to be there in the first place, where she breaks down to Spike and Starlight because she was having a blast.
  "What makes this Hell, again?"
• In the Good Omens fanfic Its Own Place, Aziraphale unwittingly ends up in Hell instead of Heaven After the End but since he's still an unfallen angel, Beelzebub and Hastur decide to banish him to Purgatory instead, a place they consider to be even worse than Hell. Said place turns out to be exactly like the Earth Aziraphale and Crowley both desperately miss and Aziraphale, upon learning this, switches gears from trying to get out of his punishment to trying to get Crowley to be given the same "punishment" too.
• In Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past, after Draco provokes Neville into attacking him by making a vague reference to his parents' mental state, Professor Dumbledore questions them both after Snape attempts to give Neville detention for the apparent assault. Finding that Draco isn't willing to admit his own part, Dumbledore transfers Neville's detention from Professor Snape to Professor Sprout. Since Neville loves Herbology, the prospect of garden work isn't especially daunting.
• In the Chapter 4 Omake of Sage of the Leaf, Kurenai and Asuma argue that Tenzou's "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards Sasuke and Sakura inadvertently gave the visiting villages a bad impression of Konoha and demand that Hiruzen punish him for it. Hiruzen agrees and "punishes" an all-too willing Tenzou by making him fill in for a waiter at the "Icha Icha Mansion" (an obvious Shout-Out to the Playboy Mansion).
• If Wishes Were Ponies: After yet more CMC shenanigans, Harry is grounded to the library. Sure he might miss his 3 new friends, but he gets unrestricted access to all the books and all the knowledge they offer him. He even thanks Twilight, who comments on this in one of her letters to Princess Celestia.
• Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail:
  • Those who usually end up on the Infinity Train wish to get back home immediately. For Chloe, who knows that going back home means dealing with her ignorant father, Childhood Friend and the black hole that's Ash Ketchum, she would rather stay on the train as long as possible to see what the train has in store and to reinvent herself.
  • For hurting Chloe, Lexi is punished by his father to leave the Library of Flying Books Car to protect Chloe on her journey across the train, meaning that he's going to get his wish to see the rest of the Train at long last.
• The Infinite Loops: The Admin Hephaestus was accidentally involved in the Crash, a second Reality-Breaking Paradox that affected the entire multiverse. He was supposed to be punished by surrounding him with parole officers who would make sure that he never did anything like that again. Hermes, who knew how much Hephaestus had suffered from his Jerkass family, arranged for the parole officers to be a trio of hot Valkyries who find quality armorers to be sexy. They mostly protect Hephaestus from his ex-wife.
• Leave for Mendeleiev: After Aurore sasses him through Frozer, Hawkmoth declares that, to punish her, he's never going to turn her into Stormy Weather again. Effectively meaning she's never going be at risk of becoming an akuma again.
• Harry's New Home: As in canon, detention with Snape is supposed to be a punishment, and is considered so by every student who fears or resents him. But Harry likes his new foster father and enjoys spending time with him, and the chores are actually good for him: extra homework (he needs to catch up and enjoys learning, since the Dursleys intentionally hampered his education), writing lines (good quill training) assisting with potion work (hands-on studying, and responsibilities he feels proud about), and so on. Snape finds it difficult to punish the boy when he's enjoying every moment of it. And then Harry starts inviting his friends to take part in "study sessions", everyone realizes how nice it is (except for Ron), and Snape's hard-earned reputation as the terrible bat of Slytherin is irrevocably sunk.
• Queens of Mewni: When Etheria tried to kill Sky in rage, their mother Diana decided Sky did have a little bit of blame in the situation by egging Etheria on, and punished Sky by confining her to her room and forbidding her to leave Mewni Castle. This suited Sky just fine, as it gave her peace and quiet to work on her weaving spells. (Contrast this to Etheria, who was sent to St. Olga's, which, even considering Etheria tried to commit sororicide, some thought was too harsh a punishment.

Films — Animation

• The plot of Beavis And Butthead Do The Universe is kicked off when the duo blow up up a science fair and are tossed into court. The judge, having just watched Touched by an Angel the previous night, decides to be lenient and send them to space camp as a way to have them learn to channel their destructive impulses towards something poisitive. This is treated as a spectacularly awful idea with the people in the courtroom familiar with the two reacting in shock and horror (including a facepalm from Daria).
• At the end of Lilo & Stitch, Stitch's sentence for the havoc he caused is exile to Earth, a punishment chosen very deliberately by the alien councilwoman in order to avoid separating him from his newfound family while still satisfying the law.
• In Shrek, Shrek discovers that his land has been occupied by fairy tale characters who were exiled by Lord Farquaad, and the reclusive ogre wants them all gone ASAP. Of course, the fairy tale characters would much prefer to be at their homes rather than Shrek's.
  Shrek: Attention, all...fairy tale things. Do not get comfortable! Your welcome is officially worn out! In fact, I'm gonna see this guy Farquaad right now, and get you all off my land and back where you came from!
  (Beat; everyone bursts into cheers and applause)
• In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Mr. Mackey announces a ban on Terrance and Phillip clothing in South Park Elementary and that students caught wearing any apparel will be sent home. Everyone, except for Wendy and Gregory, cheers and runs outside posthaste.

Films — Live-Action

• Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion: Zig-zagged — after accidentally shooting up the camp, Bud and Lou are given a pass to town, on the request of one of the higher-ups so she can meet with them. However, Sergeant Axmann, who's a traitor in the camp, gives them the wrong address as a way to get them killed by his Al-minya allies (fortunately, they avoid it).
• Midway through The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the main character has a complaint lodged against him for committing an act of Police Brutality against an elderly woman. Until the complaint gets sorted out, he is put on modified assignment and placed in charge of the precinct's evidence room. Since he's a Functional Addict and the evidence room is where seized drugs are stored, this is the equivalent of punishing a small child by locking him inside a candy store.
• Casino Royale (2006): Bond invokes this when his testicles are being whipped by Le Chiffre. He acts as though Le Chiffre is doing him a favor by scratching his balls; however, it is clear to all involved that this is just his way of trying to cope with the torture.
• The best way to sum up Violet's reaction to her Humiliation Conga in the 2005 film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like her book counterpart, she's turned into a giant blueberry and had to be squeezed out, resulting in her turning permanently blue. Unlike her book counterpart, she sees this as a small price to pay for her newly super-flexible body (which is especially beneficial as she's a competitive athlete in this adaptation).
• In Coming to America, King Jaffe Joffer is outraged with how Prince Akeem and his servant Semmi have been living in a squalid New York City apartment, and working for a local fast food restaurant. He tells Semmi "You have disgraced yourself, and you must be punished. You will confine yourself to our royal suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, [to Oha] see that he puts on some decent attire, [to female servants] and I want you to bathe him thoroughly"^note A Call-Back to Akeem's servants making sure "the royal penis is clean", making Semmi happily say "Oh, thank you, your majesty!", before shamefully lowering his head again.
• In Ever After, King Francis threatens to punish Prince Henry for balking at his Arranged Marriage: "I'll simply deny you the crown and...live forever!" Rebel Prince Henry immediately fires back, "Good. Agreed. I don't want it!" and walks off.
  King Francis: [to Queen Eleanor, in frustration] HE'S YOUR SON!
• Hocus Pocus: If one takes her words at face value, Winifred Sanderson and her sisters spent their three hundred years between death and resurrection in Hell, and "found it quite lovely."
• In Iron Eagle, the main character manages to "steal" an F-16 fighter plane to rescue his father from a Middle East dictator. The boy's punishment was government appointment to the US Air Force Academy; at the beginning of the movie, his application to the Academy had been rejected because of his high school grades. The government officials were convinced by the boy's friend that, having stolen government property, he needed the discipline the Academy instills.
• Referenced in Kill Bill 2, when the Bride has been tied up by Budd and refuses to respond when he talks to her. A misogynistic friend of Bud's laughs:
  Ernie: White women call this the "silent treatment". And we let 'em think we don't like it!
• In the Disproportionate Retribution training film Law Abiding Citizen, Clyde Shelton confesses to a murder because he wants to be imprisoned.
• The Life of David Gale: The titular character is an activist against capital punishment who is convicted of rape and murder, sentenced to death, and subsequently executed. Evidence emerges that he was actually innocent, creating an anti-capital punishment backlash. The film eventually reveals that he was a willing participant and both he and his alleged victim sacrificed themselves in order to discredit the death penalty.
• Duke from M*A*S*H: "If I nail Hot Lips and slug Hawkeye, do I get to go home too?" Subverted, since Burns was punished and went home in a straitjacket. (Maybe Double Subversion, because he was then Kicked Upstairs.)
• In My Cousin Vinny, the title character hates his hotel accommodations, which include being unable to sleep due to the screeching owl in the tree, and the train outside his window. After being locked up for contempt of court, even with the rowdy prisoners making noise all night, hard-nosed New Yorker Vinny sleeps like a baby.
• Done in National Security, where a cop is accused of assaulting a black man (he was really swatting a bumblebee, which wasn't visible on a tourist's camcorder) and put in prison. As soon as he arrives in prison to serve his 6-month sentence, he sees every large black prisoner give him the "throat-cut" gesture. A guard holds him and warns him against trying anything, threatening the guy with solitary confinement. Seeing all the angry black prisoners, the guy elbows the guard in the face. Three months later, he is released from solitary. He immediately punches another guard, and goes right back inside.
• The main character of North By Northwest causes an uproar in the midst of an auction by placing outlandish bids and getting confrontational with anyone who outbids him. Eventually, security is called to escort him out of the building — which is exactly what he wanted, since there were two men in the room who were planning to kill him.
• In Old Khottabych, the titular genie teleports a boy to India for daring to act unpleasant towards the genie's master and supposes the boy will be made a slave. As a Fish out of Temporal Water, he is absolutely unaware that a) civilization has marched on really far, b) the Soviet Union and India have established a really cordial friendship. As a result, the boy is welcomed with open arms, has a wonderful holiday and makes many friends.
• The Parent Trap (1961)/The Parent Trap (1998): Susan and Sharon/Hallie and Annie are punished for their prank war with banishment to a cabin and mess hall table segregated from all other campers, but as they're forced to interact, they eventually drop their hostility enough to discover that they are identical twins and not merely lookalikes, and their isolation affords them the chance to bond and prepare to switch places at the end of camp.
• In Sexy Beast, retired safecracker Gal is confronted in Spain by an old comrade-in-arms with an unwanted offer to do One Last Job in London. Things get messy, forcing Gal to go to London to do the job against his wishes. In the end, the chief London gangster finds out what happened in Spain and banishes Gal from London as punishment. Gal can now return to Spain and be left alone, which is what he wanted all along.
• One of the more famous examples is from Song of the South, in which Bre'r Rabbit manages to escape Bre'r Fox's clutches by pleading with him not to throw him in the briar patch. Of course, the briar patch is Bre'r Rabbit's home, and a place that it would be impossible for Bre'r Fox to get to him from. Johnny, who hears this story from Uncle Remus, later uses a similar ploy against the Favers brothers, begging them not to tell their mother about Ginny giving him her puppy. They do, and get a good thrashing for it.
• Star Trek:
  • Done deliberately in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Admiral Kirk had stolen and ultimately destroyed the Enterprise for an unauthorized mission, and, upon returning in a stolen Klingon Bird of Prey, ended up using it to save Earth from total destruction. The Federation Council notes that he has to be punished for his actions, so they winkingly "demote" him to Captain and give him command of a new ship, the Enterprise-A, knowing full well that's the best way to reward him (what happened to his crew that had helped him falls under Disobeyed Orders, Not Punished: the announcement of the verdict starts by noting that every charge but one has been dropped, which happens to be the one charge directed solely at Kirk).
  • Becomes a minor subvert in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when this demotion in response to Kirk working outside the bounds of authority becomes key character evidence in a trial to convict him of assassination of the Klingon chancellor. Not that it really mattered since Kirk and McCoy were treated to a Kangaroo Court heavily biased against them anyway.
• Tlayucan: Miss Prisca, a wealthy but lonely Old Maid, has drunken sex with Matias, the local blind beggar. Afterwards she is compelled to go to the priest and confess. He says that her sin is grave and she must take a heavy punishment, and then says that she has to marry Matias. The priest seems to think that this is a big punishment seeing as how Matias is not only blind but also a dirty beggar, so he is taken by surprise by her smile of joy. Miss Prisca would like nothing better than to have a husband and not be lonely anymore, and she and Matias are soon married.
• Given a passing mention in X-Men: First Class. A prison guard where Alex Summers was staying at the beginning of the film remarks that he's "the only prisoner I've ever seen who actually prefers solitary." Sure enough, when we first see him, Alex is in solitary. A subversion, since Alex doesn't really enjoy solitary, he's trying to stay away from people so he doesn't actually hurt them with the energy blasts that are his mutant power, and which he has great difficulty in controlling.
• In Zebra in the Kitchen (1965), a boy who works at the zoo is so distraught by the animals' substandard living conditions, that one day he takes the zookeeper's keys and lets all the animals loose. They wander all over town before they can be recovered. But this act of protest did call the town's attention to the deplorable zoo conditions. So the boy's punishment was that he had to do volunteer work at the zoo every day for the rest of the summer, which was clearly what he wanted.

Jokes

• During the Cold War, an underground joke from behind the Iron Curtain ran as follows:
  Person А: Why do we send saboteurs to Siberia, which is part of our socialist paradise, instead of exiling them to the capitalist hell of the West?
  Person Б: Because we could not afford the increase in sabotage.
• There's this old joke about a man asking for a leave from his boss to accompany his wife to the opera:
  Boss: I'm sorry, John, but this is a busy month. We can't spare anyone.
  John: Thanks, boss, I knew I could count on you!
• Another joke told of an avid First-Person Shooter (Doom in this version of the joke) gamer who discovers he won't be let into Heaven, but St. Peter grants him a consolation prize of three wishes. His wishes? IDDQD, IDKFA, you can drop me down now. The joke may, however, be interpreted as a subversion — the man was let into Heaven, figuratively speaking; it just hadn't the expected form.

Literature

• In The Baby-Sitters Club, when Mary Anne tries to sneak over to the boys' side and Logan starts a food fight at summer camp, they are punished...by being barred from their least favourite activities.
• In The Belgariad, Polgara punishes Salmissra, Queen of the Snake Worshipping Nyissans, by turning her into a giant Snake. Upon re-visiting her a couple of years later, it turns out to have worked wonders for her running of the state. Being turned cold-blooded soothed her temper and desires, turned her from a Hot-Blooded The Vamp in a Decadent Court to a depassionate Queen who rules with an iron fist and who has a pragmatic view on politics. It also immediately cleansed her mind from the multitude of drugs she was on and her new body were completely detoxed, leaving her sober for the first time in her adult life.
• In Both Can Be True, Ash gets lunch detention for wearing socks with swear words on them. The detention room is so peaceful and quiet compared to the cafeteria that they wish they could get detention every day.
• Captain Underpants: In the third book, George and Harold pull a prank that causes the school lunch ladies to quit. As punishment, Mr. Krupp forbids them from having cafeteria food and forces them to eat in his office; however, the boys end up thrilled they don't have to eat the Foul Cafeteria Food and take pleasure in grossing Krupp out by describing their homemade lunches.
• The Conquerors Trilogy: The Zhirrzh Thrr-gilag was punished by the Overclan Prime by being stripped of both his family and clan names. It seemed a punishment until the Overclan Prime explained that Gilag was to start his own clan whose purpose would be to deal with other species, in effect raising the new family to a status almost equal to the Overclan themselves. There's a reason Gilag's main political enemy was absolutely furious....
• In the O. Henry story "The Cop and the Anthem" a hobo named Soapy attempts to invoke this, hoping for a relatively warm and safe winter in prison. Despite all his efforts this fails, until he's inspired by organ music to try to change his life. Naturally he's immediately arrested for vagrancy.
• The Enchanted Files: Throughout Diary of a Mad Brownie / Cursed, Angus has violated the "Great Oath of the Brownies" many, many times in just a few months (including revealing himself to other humans, insufficient mischief and bringing humans into the Enchanted Realm)... yet he also played an important role in the return of the Princess of Sunshine. Consequently, he is permanently branded a "rascal", and is sentenced to five years of service to Alex, after which he'll be free to attach himself to any family he wants.
• In the Forgotten Realms short story "Reunification (Body & Soul)" by Jeff Grubb (which follows on from his Forgotten Realms comic book) Vartan, a former member of the Realms Master crew who is now an agent of the Elven god Labelas Enoreth, steals from his god in order to save his former captain's life (something Labelas secretly allowed him to do, but couldn't be involved in). His punishment for this transgression is to be banished from the god's presence, i.e. reunited with his friends.
• One case of The Hardy Boys had a delinquent admit to breaking into a mansion (but only as a dare), making him a prime suspect in a series of robberies in the area. The Hardys prove his innocence and catch the true culprits, but Chief Collig says that he still has to answer to his break-in charges...by spending hours of community service working on police cars. The kid is an aspiring mechanic, so it didn't feel like a punishment to him at all.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Hermione tags along when Ron and Harry go to duel Malfoy, and they all nearly get caught by Fitch or eaten by Fluffy. Outraged that they nearly got her killed (or worse, expelled), she refuses to speak to them for awhile, but since they find her an such annoying know-it-all, Harry and Ron consider this a good thing.
  • Subverted in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Professor Lockhart requested that Harry serve his detention for flying a Ford Anglia to Hogwarts helping Lockhart answer his fan mail because he thought Harry would enjoy it. Harry practically begs Professor McGonagall to serve his detention with Ron cleaning trophies under Flich's supervision instead, but she refuses and Harry is bored senseless for about four hours by Lockhart's "advice" on being a celebrity.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Snape's punishment to Neville, Luna and Ginny for trying to steal Griffindor's sword from Snape's office is... to go to the Forbidden Forest and help Hagrid, their friend. That's all happening when the school is under the Death Eaters' control, corporal punishment is usually used along with the Cruciatus Curse! Possibly deliberate, considering Snape's true loyalties...
• In The Inheritance Cycle, the dwarf Orik interferes with the Twins as they try to read the intentions of Eragon and Murtagh on discovering the Varden. When brought before the Varden's leader Ajihad, Ajihad reprimands Orik for interfering and removes him from service to the Varden, thus returning him to the service of Orik's king Hrothgar, but also appointing him as Eragon's guide to their headquarters (located in a dwarven city), now making him exempt from the Varden's rules and above almost every normal member of the Varden when working with Eragon, who lampshades it
  Eragon: He just placed you in a powerful position, didn't he?
  Orik: (grins) That he did, and in such a way that the Twins can't complain about it.
• Gordon Korman:
  • In Don't Care High, Sheldon and Paul get kicked out of Geography class (the class before lunch) for laughing hysterically at another student's mistake. Sheldon is happy about this because they now have a two-hour lunch break.
  • In A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, the protagonists deliberately discredit a faulty generator, leading to its destruction. The principle wants to keep them away from the replacement, so he puts them on a school trip to Greece, which is exactly where they'd been trying to get from the start. Bonus points because another student assumes they're upset and actually tries to comfort them about it.
• I Quit Being An Adventurer: The guildmaster rips Aix's guild card because he was a minute too late to his self-aggrandizing monthly speech, in order to blackmail him into accepting an even worse rank than his previous (already bad) rank. Aix ends up being grateful for it, because the guildmaster's incredibly exploitative attitude were running him ragged for a fraction of the money he should have legally earned, and now he's free to finally have the life he wants. Plus, the guild quickly learns they made a mistake because Aix was critical to the guild's work — and now Aix won't return no matter what they promise him.
• Aragorn's judgment of Beregond in The Lord of the Rings. To help save Faramir from his father's madness, Beregond abandoned his post as a member of the Tower Guard during the siege of Minas Tirith, and shed the blood of his comrades on the Rath Dínen when they attempted to force their way past him to carry out Denethor's will, all of which would have earned him a sentence of death in the past. Aragorn instead had the death sentence remitted in recognition of Beregond's valor during the subsequent Battle of the Morannon, and that his actions were out of his love for his Lord. He therefore decrees that Beregond would be removed from the Tower Guard and the City itself...in order to take up his post as Captain of the White Guard when Faramir departed to take up his posting as Prince of Ithilien.
• In Love From Your Friend Hannah, the title character is punished for cursing at a bully on the school bus by being forbidden to ride the bus—which she hated doing in the first place.
• Mermaid's Song: When a Ghrismog is attacked by an eel, Elan is able to calm the eel and get it to release its victim. The other Ghrismogs accuse Elan of causing the attack in the first place and have her sent to a Dispenser, a judge who deals with minor crimes. The Dispenser knows Elan did nothing wrong, but because she sang to the eel, which Merra are forbidden from doing, he sentences her to swim alone for a day in the open ocean beyond the protection of the reefs, knowing the punishment won't bother her.
  Dispenser: You are afraid of the open sea?
  Elan: No, Sabat.
  Dispenser: Say yes.
  Elan: Yes.
• No Picnic On Mount Kenya is the true story of three Italian soldiers in WW2, who break out of a POW cap in order to try to scale Mt. Kenya. After a disasterous climb (that ended in failure), they break back in to the POW camp because it was preferable to returning to the front.
• In The Red Vixen Adventures, Alinadar, a former Child Soldier Space Pirate, is convicted of twenty-eight counts of piracy and sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor. Since it's to be served under the direct supervision of the planetary governor, who is the love of her life, she doesn't mind at all.
• The protagonist of "The Staff in the Stone" by Garth Nix is a wizard who goes AWOL from Magical Society and settles in a friendly rural community rather than be stuck as a Court Mage. He's eventually tracked down by a sympathetic wizard who invokes the trope by magically binding him to be unable to leave the community.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch novel Losing the Peace, Dr Crusher, on secondment to a refugee organisation, stripped the runabout her team was using for parts to help the refugee camp, then contacted the Enterprise for more help. Picard not only decided that this came under the aegis of his current orders, but brought two Obstructive Bureaucrats along against their will, so they could see the situation. When "communication problems" prevent him getting orders to leave, another starship arrives to relieve him of duty, but the captain makes it clear that, having done that, she has no problem with them all continuing. Acting-Captain Worf, however, thinks that at the very least Picard should be confined to quarters. And since his wife had no authority to strip the runabout, she should probably be confined to quarters as well...
• In the short story "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Kurt Vonnegut, a cheap, easily available immortality serum has made the world extremely crowded. At the end, the protagonists end up going to prison — which grants them far more room and privacy than they ever had on the outside.
• This is the theme of the novella Two Coloured Eraser. A youngster has been sent to headmaster because of his pranks. He notices a two-coloured eraser on his desk. The headmaster explains one end of the eraser is meant to erase pencil inscription and the other ball-point pen inscriptions. The kid gets interested. The kid is punished by writing hundred times "I shall not make pranks at school" on paper. The headmaster then comes to check him after a hour. The kid describes he wrote fifty-five times with pencil until he broke its tip and then wrote fifty-five times with ball-point pen, and he erased the extras. Everyone is happy...
• In the short story "Zeepsday" by Gordon R. Dickson, a human is placed on trial in a galactic court for insulting an alien. He is found guilty and sentenced to be "confined" by his fiancée for a year, with all expenses paid by the insulted alien. The judge recommends they spend the year at a very expensive vacation spot.

Live-Action TV

• The Batman (1966) episode "The Greatest Mother of Them All" subverted the usual formula of "villains go to jail at the end of the two-parter" by having them get captured toward the end of the first part. One by one Ma Parker and the four other members of her family/gang are easily nabbed, some without even putting up a fight; unfortunately, Batman and Robin aren't suspicious about this. When the gang members are brought before the prison warden in their blues and stripes, they look very helpless and ashamed...until the two "guards" flanking the warden suddenly grin and take their "boss" hostage. All along, Ma Parker had been infiltrating the prison with criminals posing as cops, until the warden had been the only legitimate lawman left; once he was out of the way too, Ma declared herself the new warden and let all the inmates have total run of the place. But when Batman and Robin finally caught on to what was happening (after a "prison trustee" hides a bomb in the Batmobile) and come to investigate, the Parkers temporarily move into jail cells and force the former warden (who is made to look as if he's still in charge) to show them "safely in their cells" to convince the Dynamic Duo that nothing is wrong. So the prison just becomes the Parker gang's new hideout, with them coming and going as they please to commit more robberies, never worrying about getting punished because they're already being "punished". Their ruse is finally discovered during a robbery attempt, when Batman (who can't see their faces because he's coming at them from behind and they're wearing trenchcoats over their prison uniforms) rips the shirt of one of the Parker boys as the gang is escaping and later confirms that the cloth came from the penitentiary.
• The Big Bang Theory: Amy pretends to be sick far longer than she's actually ill because Sheldon takes it upon himself to treat her illness, including Vicks chest rubs and bathing her. When he finds out she's been lying, he regretfully informs he has to spank her. She tries her best to hide her excitement.
  Sheldon: Excuse me! You're not supposed to be enjoying this!
  Amy: Then maybe you should spank me harder.
  Sheldon: Maybe I will!
• In the Blackadder Goes Forth episode "Private Plane", Blackadder and Baldrick are captured by the Germans and the Red Baron shows up to tell them they will suffer "a fate worse than a Fate Worse than Death"...being sent to Germany to teach young girls Home Economics. Naturally, Blackadder is thrilled with the thought of being sent away from the trenches and the war. Unfortunately, Lord Flasheart arrives to "rescue" him....
• In an episode of Bones, Booth only gets a rapper to cooperate with an investigation by promising to put him in jail for a month and charge him with murder. The rapper is ecstatic, while Bones is completely dumbfounded, unable to comprehend the term "street cred".
• Subverted in The Brady Bunch episode "Confessions, Confessions", where Peter has to assign punishments to his siblings for breaking a vase. Peter actually broke it, but all his siblings confessed to it so Peter wouldn't be grounded from a much-anticipated camping trip. His parents put two and two together, so they made Peter assign punishments as a Batman Gambit to get him to confess himself. So Peter let them pick their own punishments: Jan has to help Mom bake cookies, Marcia would have to take Bobby to the amusement park, and Greg had to take Cindy to a mantinee. The parents, however, pulled rank and replaced the unishments with more appropriate punishments, such as yardwork.
• Deliberately invoked in Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Internal Affairs discovers that Hitchcock and Scully lost a bag of cash from a crime scene thirty years earlier. It turns out that they'd had an informant who'd helped them crack the case, but was denied witness protection. They let her escape with the money so she could go on the run. Captain Holt sympathizes with their actions, but is required to punish them, so he restricts them to desk duty for a year. Naturally, Hitchcock and Scully are entirely pleased about not having to leave their chairs.
  • A very similar plot plays out in a later episode. The same two officers managed to lose the contact information for a suspect in a burglary that ended up getting official attention. It's revealed that the witness was actually an undocumented immigrant, and had begged them not to take his information, for fear of being deported. The mayor's office pressures Amy to discipline them, so she gives them both a week's paid suspension, which those two see as extra vacation time.
• In an episode of The Burns and Allen Show, an associate of theirs gets deported. Gracie doesn't know what "deported" means, and when it's explained to her, she unfortunately comes to the conclusion that "deportation" is a fancy word for "free vacation". She immediately attempts to get herself and George deported.
• In one episode of Chopped, the remaining chefs have to make a dessert using grits. The show normally forces chefs to make dishes out of ingredients they're not too familiar with, but this time, one of the chefs blurts out, "I love grits!" when he finds a box of the stuff in his basket. Not only did he win that round by a landslide, somehow, the other required ingredients happened to line up exactly with his grandmother's grits recipe, allowing him to cook it exactly the way she would've.
• In Cutthroat Kitchen, sabotages are meant to put chefs at a disadvantage. However, some of the sabotages work in the victim's favor because they have gotten an ingredient they were missing. Other times, chefs have nullified the punishment by gaming the auction.
• Drake & Josh: "Dune Buggy" ends with Drake being grounded by the boys' parents after he confesses to crashing the dune buggy they restored. However, because of the injuries he sustained in the crash, Drake's grounding consists of just laying in bed all day without going to school and having Josh bring him whatever it is he needs.
• Doctor Who, "The Mutants": in the 30th century, an Earth Empire Marshal intends to rule the tribal planet of Solos, because he is not only extremely bigoted against the population there, but also has thoughts of ruling grandeur. When the Doctor and Jo are sent there on a mission by the Time Lords, they find it is to help save the population. The thing is, the population is going through a mutation which they think is a disease. It's not, proven by a lengthy Solonian calendar, and a crystal stone which focuses and converts radiation emitted in a cavern. When the Marshal, back in power after being taken off for investigation by Earth Control, starts to implement his plan, he throws Jo, along with other rebels including a Solonian, into a refueling bay, which uses the same kind of radioactivity, to kill them. What the Marshall doesn't realize is that the Doctor has given Jo the stone, and the stone and radiation is exactly what the Solonian needs to undergo his beneficial mutation...
• Extraordinary Attorney Woo: After Young-woo resigns abruptly and asks for her job back, Myung-seok says that she can return to the firm but that she won't be able to take any time off as a consequence of leaving her colleagues in the lurch. She replies that she never had any personal days to begin with.^note Young-woo and the rest of the rookies are at Hanbada on one-year contracts. In Korea, contract workers aren't granted any benefits beyond basic insurance provided through their tax contributions.
• In Fallout (2024), after some misunderstandings result in Lucy attacking the dwellers of Vault 4, she is punished with death...by banishment to the surface, and they're only giving her two weeks' worth of food to take with her. They emphasize the dangers of above, but as she just came from there and was openly intending to go back as soon as Maximus recovered, she's a little bemused their punishment amounts to a resupply.
• An episode of The George Lopez Show involved Max hitting on an attractive house guest. George tells him to go to his room, then decides against it, considering that it wouldn't be a punishment at this point.
• On Good Eats, the Dungeonmaster has used Alton's credit card to purchase a fancy needling machine. When Alton finds out, he sends the Dungeonmaster to skim the moat. The Dungeonmaster gleefully goes off to do it, with his "lucky straw."
• The Heavy Water War. The Norwegian director of the heavy water plant knows Germany is losing the war and he'll end up ostracized or imprisoned as The Quisling. A friendly German officer points out that all Norwegian officers are being detained. So he has himself arrested wearing his reserve officer's uniform, ensuring he gets to sit out the war in a low-security prison and return after the war as a patriotic hero.
• The Impractical Jokers have mentioned on numerous occasions that Joe is the hardest of the lot to punish because he has little shame. He looks like he's enjoying at least half of his punishments. (This is especially true when, while dressed as Captain Fatbelly, he gets to tell everyone who's not from Staten Island to "SUCK IT!")
• Played with in The Kicks. "Breakaway" sees Devin getting the standard punishments for the events of "Go Big or Go Home": Two weeks without her phone or laptop, and, because she mouthed off about the previous two, television privileges. She's initially as devastated as you might expect, but by the end of the episode, she decides that she didn't mind being unplugged for a little while. She even declines her parents' offer to return all of the above early...much to their dismay, because the fact that she must use their computer in the dining room for homework with the TV off so it doesn't distract her is a punishment for them.
• In the third season of Lexx at one point Kai is malfunctioning due to falling from the top of one of the cities of Fire. He's later captured by the authorities of another city who put him through what will apparently become an extremely long and bureaucratic trial. He then learns that the maximum penalty of the city is to be thrown off the top...which is exactly what Kai needs to repair himself. After unsuccessfully asking them nicely to receive that punishment, they oblige when he uses his grappling hook to put the judge's neck in a choke hold.
• Married... with Children:
  • Bud is studying to join Oxford but then he meets Marcy's niece Amber and considers her a reason to stay. When Al decides to punish Bud for failing the test, Bud convinces Al to send him to his room (where Amber is waiting for him) as punishment.
  • In another episode Al makes a deal with the devil and when the devil comes to cash in, he tells Al he will be in hell forever and he can never see his family again. Al is euphoric.
  • At the end of the family's trip to England, Al gets locked up in the Tower of London for stealing a hotel towel. Upon hearing that he actually gets bread and water to eat, he says that makes it the best vacation he's ever had.
• M*A*S*H: After Hawkeye slugs Frank in the eye, he is placed under house arrest in the Swamp while awaiting a court martial. He enjoys having a break from his duties, and the whole camp admires him for standing up to Burns and supports him; the cook even goes out of his way to get him a grilled buffalo steak for dinner and Father Mulcahy even arranges it so that the weekly movie is shown in Hawkeye's tent instead of the Mess Tent so Hawkeye can see it as well. The trope is then neatly subverted when Hawkeye is cleared and Frank is in hot water for supposedly assaulting a woman — he's actually innocent, but no one is interested in making Frank's house arrest pleasant.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: In a classic case of this, the Spanish Inquisition torture a penitent with such horrible methods and devices as The Cushions, The Comfy Chair, and the Cup Of Coffee At Elevenses.
  Biggles: It doesn't seem to be hurting her, lord.
  Ximenez: Have you got all the stuffing up one end?
  Biggles: Yes, lord.
  Ximinez: Hm! She is made of harder stuff!
• Fletcher spends an episode of Porridge just wanting some peace and quiet alone in his cell but being constantly bothered by visitors, including other prisoners, warders and a fact-finding team from the Home Office. When the prison chaplain comes to see him he finally snaps and attacks him. He is brought before the prison Governor...who punishes him with three days' solitary confinement.
• Prison Break is basically built on this trope. A main plot point for the first few seasons is that Micheal Scofield attempts bank robbery so that he may go to prison in order to help his brother escape.
• In an episode of Roseanne, DJ needs to be punished due to playing a prank on Darlene. The initial suggestion of grounding him is dismissed as this because "he never goes anywhere" anyway. So instead he gets a Cool and Unusual Punishment in having to go to school in a suit and tie.
  Roseanne: I'd have made him wear a dress.
  Darlene: starts grinning
  Roseanne: Too late!
  Darlene: frowns
• Played for laughs on Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell, when Heinrich McNg explains why Senator Jackie Lambie was banned from attending party meetings that she hadn't been coming to anyway.
  Shaun: In retrospect, do you think it was wise not only to demote Ms. Lambie but suspend her from attending any Palmer United meetings?
  Heinrich: We had no choice, Shaun. She hadn't attended the last three party meetings.
  Shaun: Yes, but do you think preventing her from coming to the meetings she wasn't coming to was the most effective form of punishment?
  Heinrich: If she wasn't going to come to the meetings we weren't going to let her stand by and not come to them.
  Dolly: She wasn't coming to them, just 'cause, she wasn't coming to them. Not 'cause you told her not to.
  Heinrich: No she wasn't!
  Dolly: Yes she was! Not! Coming to them! Idiot!
  Heinrich: No, she wasn't not coming to them because she wasn't coming to them, she wasn't coming to them because we said she couldn't.
  Dolly: You can't stop her coming if she's not coming! What are you stopping?
  Heinrich: ...Well we did! And you're an idiot!
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott isn't interested in taking shore leave, because he has a bunch of technical journals to catch up on. Kirk specifically "orders" Scotty to go along in order to keep the lower-ranked men from starting trouble with visiting Klingons. Instead, it is Scott himself who starts a brawl with those self-same Klingons. This sparks the following exchange:
  Kirk: Scotty, you're restricted to quarters until further notice.
  Scotty: Yes, sir. [smiling] Thank you, sir! That'll give me a chance to catch up on me technical journals!
  • Note that the punishment is doled out after Scotty informs Kirk that he started the fight to defend the Enterprise's honor while he had previously remained silent while the Klingons were insulting Kirk. Also, Scotty is almost immediately seen back out working again; it's not stated but likely that Kirk realizes how pointless it all is.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Natural Law", Tom Paris is forced to take a spaceship driving test for violating local rules and is banished from this sector of space for leaving before the test is over to help Voyager; considering that he was planning to leave this sector, it's hardly a punishment for Paris.
• In the pilot of Still Standing, Lauren misbehaves, and Bill responds by telling her to go to her room. When Judy reminds Bill she has a TV and a stereo in her room, he then gets wise and tells her to go to his room.
• In the Season 1 finale of Superstore, Cheyenne ends up giving birth inside the store. When Cloud 9 won't let their employees have paid maternity leave, manager Glenn gives Cheyenne 6 weeks paid suspension as a "punishment" for violating company rules by having her "insides" all over the store, distracting employees, and having her child in the store with her. Unfortunately, he gets fired for this.
• In That '70s Show, when Eric is preparing to go to Africa for missionary work, Kitty and Red find out what the gang has been doing in the basement for the past 8 years. Despite their rage, Red is unable to punish Eric because he can't think of anything worse than sending him off to Africa, which Eric was doing of his own volition.
• Trace: In "The Lost Little Ones", former beggar Dinara is delighted to have ended up in a penal colony — because there, she has clean clothes, cocoa for breakfast, and has learned to read and write.
• Almost every season of Trailer Park Boys ends with at least one of the boys (usually Julian and/or Ricky) going to jail. Not that they mind it though, so long as there's access to dope and booze. Ricky in particular seems to treat jail like more of a vacation than a punishment.
• This trope is called "Alexment" by Justin Russo on Wizards of Waverly Place. This is the way his sister, Alex Russo, generally gets away with things.
• Young Sheldon: In "A Romantic Getaway and a Germanic Meat-Based Diet", after he catches Tonya smoking, Pastor Jeff "punishes" her by cancelling their trip to the Noah's Ark petting zoo.

Puppet Shows

• In the episode White As Snow from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Scarlet saves Colonel White's life by pulling rank on Lieutenant Green, using his Spectrum ID to bypass navy security, stowed away on a submarine and then impersonated Colonel White. White sentences Scarlet to death, but notes that as Scarlet is indestructible there's not much point in carrying the sentence out.
• The Baby in Dinosaurs. Every time Earl gets mad and throws him into the wall, Baby just yells "AGAIN!"

Radio

• Bleak Expectations: When stuck in Hell, Ripely is made to stand in a pool of water juuuust in front of a legion of scantily clad men, who are forever out of reach. She's initially horrified, until she realises she can still see them, and therefore enjoys the view.
• Old Harry's Game: A group of country and western musicians wind up in Hell, but as the demons learn even being horribly tortured won't do anything. In fact, they just keep singing. At least until they get stuck on a word that rhymes with "infernal" and Nero removes their vocal chords.

Sports

• Delay of game infractions in American Football are charged on the offense when they allow the play clock to run out without snapping the ball as a way to prevent a team in the lead to just sit on the ball for huge chunks of time and make the game boring. The penalty is five yards. There are some occasions, though, when a team will intentionally get flagged for delay of game because they want to back up five yards to give their punter more space to punt the ball deep in the "coffin corner" (as close to the opponent's goal line as possible without crossing it - a punted ball that touches the end zone is called as a touchback and the opponent will get the ball at their own 20-yard-line). Usually this is when the offense stalls on their opponent's side of the field but not close enough to try a field goal and the line to gain is too far. It's becoming less common, though, as the opposing teams are beginning to decline the distance penalty. (There was also a brief trend of using the infraction to run out the clock, but the rules were quickly changed after that.)
• In basketball, there are multiple unishments related to fouls and freethrows.
  • While a foul call in "bonus" situation can provide free throws for the offended team, it also terminates their possession of the ball returning the fouling team the ball. Therefore it is a common strategy for a team trailing by a few points in the score to spend the final minute or two seeking to foul as quickly as possible to get more opportunities to score. When a team has committed so few fouls that the "bonus" is not yet in effect, they commit additional fouls ("They have two fouls to give") just to set up this strategy.
  • When an opposing team has a player with a notoriously poor free throw shooting record, the opponents will deliberately foul that player at any time they are in "bonus" because - on average they will give up less points with two iffy foul shots than one regular shot. Frequent use against Shaquille O'Neal earned the strategy the name "Hack a Shaq", as well as making Shaq the player with most free throws in playoffs. However the most extreme use was in 1997 when Bubba Wells fouled Dennis Rodman six times in three minutes, setting an NBA record for fastest ejection on six fouls. To avoid combining these strategies, coaches may bench their worst shooters in closing minutes of a game.
  • "Foul up three" is used when a team leading by three would rather allow two free throws rather than risk giving up a three-point shot. Statisticians doubt the effectiveness of this strategy.
• Minor infractions in Ice Hockey are punished by having the individual offender sit in the penalty box while the opposing team's power play units (five skaters at a time) play against the offending team's penalty kill units (four skaters at a time). How effective that is as a punishment depends greatly on the relative abilities of the power play and penalty kill units. During the 1980's, the Edmonton Oilers had such a potent goal-scoring roster that they would frequently have one player start fights on purpose so that both sides would play 4-on-4 hockey, which opened up the ice for the remaining four skaters and gave them an easier time in scoring goals — it got to the point that the NHL changed the rules so that fighting majors would still have the two sides play 5-on-5 with each participant still in the box.
• The 1993-94 New York Rangers had, amongst their roster, hotshot winger Alexei Kovalev. One game in February saw him stay out on the ice longer than he was supposed to — a hallmark It's All About Me superstar move — so strict disciplinarian coach Mike Keenan forbade him from returning to the bench for the next shift...then the next shift...then the next shift...all the way to the end of the period.^note Individual ice time wasn't kept back then, so depending on sources the exact amount of time Kovalev stayed on the ice was somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes — save for goalies, shifts rarely last longer than one minute lest the player collapse in fatigue and cramps. Apparently, Kovalev concluded exactly the opposite of what Keenan intended and thought that he was being rewarded for good play, and at any rate, he did score a goal in that super-long shift.
• This is often invoked in sports events, like football. It occurs multiple times that a player is one yellow card away for getting a suspension for the next match, but that following match is actually meaningless. For example in the case of a round robin stage where the team already qualified for the next round, but they still have one match to play in the group. The player deliberately commits a foul that results in a yellow card. The player is then suspended for the next, meaningless, match. After he sits out his suspension he can begin again with a clean slate. However, the governing bodies regularly see through these acts and suspend the player and/or coaches for additional matches due to unsportsmanlike conduct.

Tabletop Games

• Monopoly has jail, where you need to either roll doubles, pay $50, or use a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card to get out. In the late game when the majority of properties are owned, sitting in jail is beneficial since you can still make money and manage properties: it basically means you can only gain money, since your opponents are the only ones orbiting the board and potentially landing on your properties. Since players actually want to stay in jail in the late game, you have no choice but to leave on your third turn in prison, and there's also a common house rule (and one that appears as an option in a lot of video game adaptations) that prohibits you from earning while behind bars.
• Warhammer 40,000: Have you ever heard the story of Tuska the Daemon-Killa? He was an Ork Warboss who fought and "killed" a warp daemon and enjoyed the experience so much that he led a WAAAGH! into the Eye of Terror to fight more of them. Bringing battle to several Daemon worlds, he and his army of boyz finally met their match at the foot of Khorne's own Brass Citadel and were wiped out, though not before inflicting several losses on the overwhelming hordes of daemons; Tuska personally went down impaling a Blood Prince on his Power Klaw using his last ounce of strength. These Orks still fight that same hopeless battle every day against the unholy horde, but since every Ork is a Blood Knight down to the last, they consider it the ultimate Ork Warrior Heaven. "Told ya I knew where da best fightin' woz."

Theater

• In Cinderella (Rodgers and Hammerstein), when the stepmother tells her to go sit in the corner, she sings a song about how she doesn't mind being told that as nobody bothers her in the corner and she can escape the drudgery of her life through fantasy.
• In Hamlet, the title character has a perfect opportunity to kill Claudius, when he finds him praying for forgiveness for his sins, but he does not take it as he fears that Claudius dying shortly after being absolved would send him to Heaven. As a result, Hamlet decides to wait for a time when Claudius is in the middle of some sinful behavior.

Video Games

• In The Alliance Alive, when Kuwalsa finds Vivian, his fellow Daemon, attempting to expose his nefarious deeds, he removes her immortality. This is an awful punishment by Kuwalsa's standards, because he's a crazed bigot who can't imagine anything worse than being a pitiful fragile human, but Vivian is pretty okay with it. She's already lived for centuries (and in the most luxurious social position imaginable, mind you) so she's still gotten more than all humans and even some Daemons do. Dying at some distant, vague point in the future doesn't mitigate that. And in the meantime, she still has freedom and cool Daemonic superpowers with which she can help her friends!
• The Criminal Case: Pacific Bay case Uncivil Rights focuses on the murder of Annette Arbor, the Mayor of the most game's most technological district Innovation Valley, who has been advocating for robot's rights. The killer is revealed to be unemployed mechanic Larry Newark, wanting revenge for losing his job. At sentencing, Judge Dante sentences Larry to not only 25 years in prison, but being put on the prison's worst job, garbage disposal. However, Larry is so thrilled to have a job and regular meals, he actually asks to go to prison for longer... which Dante agrees to, changing the sentence to 40 years.
• In Darksiders II it is invoked and then quickly defied in the post-credits final cutscene: Satan criticizes Lilith for her failure in securing an army of Nephilim for the incoming Apocalypse. She acknowledges this and simply states "I await your punishment", while subtly smiling. However, Satan counters that "this time Lilith you will get no pleasure". The camera quickly zooms out from her, flinching with a scared face, then it fades to black and we hear her screaming .
• Disgaea:
  • In the ending of the first game, Flonne is guilty of helping an army of demons invade heaven, admittedly to bring down a Knight Templar. As punishment, she's turned into a flower. However, if you unlock the Golden Ending (by completely avoiding any ally kills), then she's instead given a slap on the wrist by Lamington and sentenced to be restored as a "fallen angel" ^note i.e., the frills on her outfit go from blue to red, minimal demonic features on her head and face and a tail. With no change in personality or morality, meaning she can now survive in the Netherworld and stay with her friends Laharl and Etna. And as of Disgaea 4 the punishment has proven even more mild: she was able to become an angel again after the events of Disgaea Infinite, and is now an archangel.
  • Disgaea 4 also has the characters cross this with Cruel Mercy on the evil Nemo, an Omnicidal Maniac who tried to pull a Redemption Equals Death when he realized how corrupt he'd become. This would have meant the destruction of his soul, and thus the escape of any real punishment for his crimes, so the heroes instead rescue him and kill him normally so he will have to labor in the afterlife as a Prinny. This means he will suffer, but will also have a shot at eventual reincarnation, as there are no sins that can't be paid off eventually. Nemo accepts this as probably the best fate he can possibly hope for.
  • Prinnies that accept their fates, like Nemo, Kurtis or Laharl's mother seem to have this mentality about their punishment. They realize that no matter what kind of evil they have committed, eventually they all can look forward to the Red Moon having to do basically menial tasks, and happily work towards that end. Though since prinnies are treated as slave labour and cheap explosives in the Netherworld, they may take a LOT of time before they begin to think like this.
  • Disgaea 3 takes place in a demonic boarding school where being an "Honor Student" involves cheating, skipping class, bullying other students and so forth. Delinquents on the other hand do their homework, pick up litter, and follow a self-imposed curfew. The worst delinquents in the school, Raspberyl and her friends, are such a nuisance to the faculty that they deal with them the only way they can: making them the first students in the history of the school to graduate. Naturally they are thrilled, as this cements their reputation as legendary delinquents.
  • Sicily in Disgaea Dimension 2 is punished for hurting angels when they try to force her to go back to Celestia, which she deliberately ran away from because she was unhappy there. Her punishment? She's banished from Celestia.
  • Usalia in Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance is cursed by Majorita to need to do the thing she hates the most in order to stave off turning into a mindless beast: eat curry. At the time the curse was laid down, this was punishment, as Usalia couldn't handle spicy food. By the time of the story though, she's learned to love curry, and is quite happy to eat it. To make matters even better, her parents developed a recipe for a particularly good variety, she is now teamed with Killa, a Supreme Chef whose curry is especially delicious, and she starts learning to cook for herself and shows considerable promise. And for the cherry on top, she eventually manages to devolve the curse into her Super Mode, enabling the bestial transformation without the ill effects, and the first victim of this power is the very asshole who cursed her in the first place.
• Disney Infinity: At the end of 3.0's Toy Box Takeover expansion, Merlin punishes Syndrome and his flunkies for almost taking over the Toy Box by "blowing them to Bermuda". It isn't until after Merlin does so that he realizes that sending the bad guys to Bermuda, a tropical paradise, may not have been the wisest idea in retrospect. Sure enough, after this we cut to Syndrome and the rest of the baddies enjoying themselves on the beach in Bermuda.
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, an Avvar chief's son tries to kill the Herald of Andraste for personal glory and unsurprisingly gets his ass handed to him. The chief, who was bound by custom to respond to this, throws a goat at the Inquisition's fortress and explains he really wanted his son to fight the Tevinter Imperium. One of the possible judgements the player can lay upon him is to "exile" the chief and his clan to Tevinter with as many weapons as they can carry. The chief has no problems with this verdict. Neither do your companions; this is one of the few choices in the game that will earn their unanimous approval.
  Movran the Under: My idiot son got me something after all! [walks off laughing]
• Kicks in twice in Dragon Quest VII for Ruff. First, a villain tries to curse the town he was being raised in by turning all the animals into people and all the people into animals. But Ruff was a white wolf, and it turns out he likes humans and wants to be one. Later, that same villain (after being mostly depowered) tries to get revenge on Ruff for defeating him by turning him back into a wolf, but instead he accidentally gives Ruff the ability to speak perfectly (whereas he could only say about three words before). Ruff, who has grown fond of the party at this point, is overjoyed at being able to properly express himself and communicate with his friends.
• Fate/Grand Order's event based on Journey to the West involves the Gorgon Sisters, acting as the Demon Kings, forcing Medusa to take Sanzang's punishment for all of them. Sanzang considers 10,000 push-ups, but decides that Medusa is too strong for that to bother her, and instead sentences her to write a 10,000 page reflective essay on the temple library's scriptures. Your character conspicuously decides not to tell Sanzang that Medusa is a bookworm who would love such a big research project, as well as getting away from her sisters' bullying for a while.
• In Final Fantasy X-2, one of the possible culprits of the Mi'ihen Highroad Mystery is Chocobo-lover Calli. Her sentence? Rin decided to bring Chocobos back to the Highroad (which was why she caused all the trouble in the first place), and he puts her in charge of caring for them. Lampshaded by another character saying that it didn't look like a punishment at all.
• League of Legends has a few, both from the original lore and the modern lore:
  • Soraka's original, Journal of Justice-era lore involved trying to punish the mercenary alchemist Warwick through a Karmic Transformation, which turned him into a bloodthirsty werewolf. While this seemingly did strip him of his scientific knowledge, he instead had way too much fun using his new form to rip people apart to care. He was already a sadistic monster; she basically gave him the ability to indulge his appetites directly. Their lore after that (but prior to future retcons to both characters that permanently removed their association) makes this a bit more of an actual curse, as Warwick will eventually fully become a mindless beast unless he devours Soraka's heart.
    • Warwick's current lore, where he's an alchemical hybrid in the shape of a werewolf, zig-zags this a bit. He seems to be resigned to his "curse," the result of the alchemist Singed trying to bring out his "beast within" literally, but appreciates the knowledge of his "true nature" as a killer and the ability to hunt other killers.
  • Prior to the Institute of War retcon, Cassiopeia was a Noxian spy who specialized in seduction for information, but when she broke an oath of secrecy to a Freljordian diplomat she wound up turning into a naga. Because of her position as a noble's daughter she faced no shame or shunning from Noxian society, and upon finding out that her new form came with extremely toxic poison and a petrifying glare, the Noxian army gave her a new position as an assassin and eventually a Champion, which was easily one of the greatest honors a Noxian can obtain aside from high military rank. ^note  One could argue this punishment could only end this way, as despite being rather evil, Noxxus is a Meritocracy where "what you are" is a complete aside to "what you have done and can do", so Cassiopeia would never be punished like the curse intended her to be .
    • In the current lore her transformation was caused by an Ancient Shuriman security system, the result of a desperate gambit to claim the power of Ascension for the Black Rose cabal. Like Warwick, she has mixed feelings about the transformation—at first, she absolutely despised it, and there are still signs that she doesn't entirely approve of her new form. But the chance to use that power to serve the Black Rose and simply *take* what she wants directly instead of having to scheme for it is proving quite appealing...
  • For an example from the modern lore, the revenant-warlord Mordekaiser deliberately planned to be defeated. When his spirit was severed from his iron armor by a rebellion whose decendants would later found Noxus, the souls of his empire remained in the realm of the dead, unfading—letting him forge a new empire of the dead there, an afterworld where souls would remain under his dominion eternally. He seems to also be ready to come *back* to the realm of the living, and it's implied he's about to do so in the heart of Noxus itself...
  • Another, more heroic modern lore example: Taric, whose appreciation for the world's beauty ended up leading to his men getting slaughtered by Void monsters while off admiring a temple, was exiled to climb Mount Targon. While most people used this as a chance to start a new life in exile, Taric took the chance to atone for his mistake seriously. His successful climb led to him becoming the Aspect of the Protector, giving him the ability to guard the entire world and its beauty alike.
  • During the story Confessions of a Broken Blade, Riven, a Noxian ex-soldier and expatriate haunted by her past, now living in Ionia, is accused of killing an elder and must stand trial as a result. As it turns out, both her and Yasuo, who had also been accused of killing said elder in the past, played roles in the elder's death—Riven's runeblade accidentally fragmented as a freak result of exposure to wind magic, while Yasuo could have prevented the blade-shrapnel from being lethal had he been there to guard said elder instead of leaving to fight Noxians. In the end, seeing the death was accidental and Riven's honest desire to atone, the judge sentences her to hard labor—working the fields of her adopted Ionian parent-figures (which she'd been doing prior to her trial), and repairing damage to both the courthouse and homes damaged by the Noxian invasion. Riven, appreciating the chance to redeem herself and earn the mercy she's been offered, accepts.
  • Senna, trapped in the lantern of the spectral torturer Thresh, ended up managing to be the only soul to successfully pull this off against him, as well as the only soul to ever escape his grasp outright. Her unique abilities allowed her spirit to not only survive within the lantern, but also to find out new information from the other souls trapped inside. When her husband Lucian finally managed to free her from the lantern, she also escaped with a relic cannon that could channel both light and shadow. Technically zigzagged in that she was still tormented by Lucian's repeated attempts to rescue her, risking his life and freedom repeatedly to either save her or bring her to rest.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past features an imp who, upon being disturbed, punishes Link by halving his magic's power. Well, he actually halves how much power it takes to use magic, so you can effectively use twice as much.
  • The Game Boy sequel The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening features the same imp, who now punishes you by... increasing the number of bombs, arrows, and magic powder you can carry. The imp justifies his "punishment" by telling you "now look at all that junk you have to carry!". However, at the end, the character lampshades the trope by saying "Take care, see you again," in a totally cordial tone. This makes sense, as the entire game is a dream of all the things Link has faced before.
• If Sablin's faction defeats Chita during the Russian Civil War in The New Order Last Days Of Europe, "Tzar" Mikhail II is captured and brought in for questioning. Sablin learns that "Mikhail II" is actually an Australian descendent of the Romanovs who was kidnapped by Chita's forces and made into a figurehead. Sablin's punishment for him is... permanent exile from Russia back to Australia, exactly what the man was begging for in the first place.
• You come across a few black chests in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, each with a being trapped inside, begging to be let out. After you find the key and let it out, it curses you... with a new paper-folding ability that helps you progress further through the level. It's heavily implied this is intentional because they're the four heroes who sealed up the Shadow Queen, and were destined to curse whoever opened them to be free, but a thousand years has let them think flexibly on what counts towards towards being a "curse". The last one is even disappointed to hear that Mario's gone through this schtick several times already, and thanks him for letting it do the whole song and dance.
• Running afoul of the cultists of Lamashtu in Pathfinder: Kingmaker prompts a group of punishers to go after you and curse you with "deformity"...which, given that Lamashtu's standards of "beauty" are grotesquerie and animalistic mutation, the "curse" amounts to making your Player Character more attractive.
• In Path of Exile, the standard Oriathi punishment for everything is exile to Wraeclast, an untamed wilderness continent which due to the experimentation of the Vaal is filled with hostile magical beasts and The Undead. Because Oriath is a despotic theocracy, more than a few exiles are not at all unhappy about this; the Ranger, for instance, makes it quite clear from the first Act on that she feels quite at home.
• Ignus from Planescape: Torment. He was an insane pyromaniac mage who burnt down half of the Hive. His punishment? Being turned into a living conduit for the Elemental Plane of Fire, giving him even better ability to burn stuff. In fact, the only part of the punishment that worked was that it made him so happy that he was content to remain floating in one place in reverie, not causing problems for anyone...Until The Nameless One comes along.
• Eddie in Silent Hill 2 may be an example, if you believe the idea that the town calls out to the guilty and punishes them. Two of the other characters are clearly suffering punishment for the things they've done. Eddie is punished by being faced with the visages of all the people who have tormented him throughout his life. Instead of breaking down, he sees this as an opportunity to dish out Disproportionate Retribution against his tormentors, and takes full advantage of it until he finally crosses James Sunderland. Subverted given that Eddie ends up being put down for his bloodlust.
• In Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, the Columbine killers naturally wind up in Hell after they commit their shooting rampage and kill themselves. However, being fans of Doom gave the two the skills they needed to take on everything Hell could throw at them, and they proceed to have A Hell of a Time extending their killing spree to The Legions of Hell, in between meeting famous historical figures like John Lennon and Friedrich Nietzsche. By the end, even Satan, the Final Boss, is impressed, and proceeds to make them his minions.
• In Super Mario RPG you can sleep as many nights as you like in the ridiculously expensive hotel of Marrymore, but if you don't have the money to pay off your stay you're forced to work off your debt at the hotel. Of course, if you do a good job the tenants will tip you with some rare and otherwise Too Awesome to Use items, making it well worth doing over and over just to stock up.
• In Overcooked! 2, the Onion King is punished with temporary exile for accidentally awakening the Unbread. His "exile" takes him to a beautiful tropical island and a picturesque campsite in the woods, which he is inclined to treat as a well-deserved vacation. Kevin, however, still bugs him to think about how he's going to convince the concil to let him back while the Onion King just wants to focus on goofing off.

Visual Novels

• In 10 Days with My Devil, it's forbidden for angels and demons to fall in love with humans, or to interfere with their fates as determined by the Fate Database. Haruhito is already on thin ice for a past infraction, for which he's been sentenced to personally collect 10,000 human souls. When during his route he not only fails to complete his sentence but falls in love with the protagonist and manages to circumvent her fated death, the punishment is expected to be much more drastic, and it is: he's stripped of his powers and banished from both the angel and demon realms to live as a mortal. Which leaves him free to be with the protagonist. Haruhito is, unsurprisingly, completely okay with this.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc's Big Bad Monokuma loves giving punishments to the losers in his killing game. So, rather uniquely, The Ultimate Punishment would be a legitimate and horrifying punishment for anyone else, but Monokuma/Junko Enoshima is a sadomasochist who loves spreading despair and even gets off on suffering despair herself, so when the remaining students unravel her plans, she's all too happy to kill herself in a Rasputinian fashion.
• Super Danganronpa Another 2: Even though Kanade Otokonoji is executed for her and her sister Hibiki's murder of Setsuka, Kanade doesn't mind it very much because Hibiki is going down with her and she'll get to see her despair in her last moments.
• In Marco & the Galaxy Dragon, Dosgoro once locked Arco up in a gumball machine to ensure that Marco stole something for him. Being the Big Eater that she is, Arco didn't mind in the slightest.
  Arco: This is the country of happiness!

Webcomics

• Basic Instructions: In "How To Discipline Your Employees", the boss decides to make disciplinary action fun (for him) by handing out "demerit badges" misbehaving employees have to wear. The employees take to wearing them on cub scout-style bandoliers, proudly flaunting their misdeeds. Also, since completing the entire twenty-five badge set awards you a firing, but apparently only if you do that, it gives them a convenient way of keeping track of how far they can push things. Specifically, up to badge twenty-four.
• Fen Quest: At the end of thread 3, Fen faces judgement for killing lord Rasyan in single combat. However his friend had "bought" the judge's leniency, so she sentences him to joining the army, which was what he planned to do in the first place. Rasyan's subjects are not happy with this, and set a huge bounty (for the average farm worker it's forty years of income) on his head.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, when Princess Voluptua essentially has to punish Galatea for a serious crime she's committed — recklessly activating an incredibly dangerous alien device For Science! — Volly contrives a way to go easy on her while still teaching her a lesson. She locks Golly in a literal palace full of advanced technology all geared toward entertainment and recreation. Golly is very pleased, until she realizes she now has three choices, any of which give Volly the win: 1) yield to the decadence of the place and become harmlessly complacent, 2) resist it, implying she acknowledges that some technologies can be a bad thing, or 3) find some reasonable balance between the two. Galatea then spoils Volly's Xanatos Gambit by declaring her intention to reverse-engineer everything in the palace into devastating weapons just to spite Voluptua.
• Material Girl: The main character is cursed, gets kidnapped by his sister's wardrobe, turns out to be a good thing in the end.
• In The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, Satan tells Wonderella that he made a circle of hell specifically for Monty Python fans where they are forced to quote Monty Python jokes at each other for eternity, as a sort of Ironic Hell. The fans love it and think they're in heaven, it's everyone else that gets punished.
  "Irony's all relative, anyway."
• Oglaf
  • One man is sent to Hell for liking butts and is sentenced to being crushed by giant sweaty asses. Naturally, he is delighted.
    Demon: Can you, like, pretend not to be enjoying this? My supervisor's doing an inspection this afternoon.
  • Another demon grants a young nerd's wish to have sex with devil girls, then reveals that when he dies he will become a devil girl, just as they did. He immediately invites them to paint figurines with him, and one comments they'd never realized it was a punishment.
    Devil Girl: I thought I was "giving back to the community".
• At the beginning of the second story arc of The Order of the Stick, Haley maneuvers her teammates into pulling one of these on her — she plants five ordinary rocks into the loot pile and then tries to keep them all to herself when dividing spoils, knowing that the others would assume this meant the rocks were extraordinarily valuable because she would never willingly pass up a chance to earn wealth. Naturally, her "punishment" is to be denied all of the rocks, which get split evenly among the other five team members. She gets a double portion of gold as consolation.
  Roy: Just remember Haley, you brought this on yourself.
  Haley: Yes. Yes I did.
• In Ozy and Millie, one of Lewellyn's ancestors was reportedly cursed with seasonal baldness. Lewellyn, like his ancestors, is a DRAGON. No member of his family ever had any hair to lose. At least until he adopted Ozy.
• In this strip◊ of Polandball, Germany is sent to a work camp in Siberia for his misdeeds during the Second World War, to his great delight. It's that kind of comic.
• In Spacetrawler, Yuri is captured by aliens and tortured for pretending to be a representative at their government function. However, they've never encountered human physiology before, so they have to ask Yuri how to torture her. She exploits this by begging them not to feed her sweets, make her watch rom-coms, or massage her feet with almond oil. The last one gets nastily subverted by Shuar, who realizes she's being had and decides to cut off Yuri's legs before the "massage".

Web Animation

• In the Eddsworld episode "25ft Under the Seat" Edd, Tom and Matt are to be executed for taking their keys from an underwater museum. Their type of execution? Death by Oxygen.

Web Original

• A couple of examples from the Not Always series:
  • From Not Always Learning, a fight breaks out over the bullying of a disabled student, and the vice principal has to punish all involved for fighting. The bully is suspended for bullying a disabled student and fighting. The student who fought the bully on behalf of the victim, and won, is assigned to write an essay about winning a fight.
  • From Not Always Related, a family had trained a cat not to jump on counters or meow incessantly for the fancy canned cat food or else he gets sprayed with cool water. One very hot day the house's air conditioner broke, so it was miserable inside and the cat began to act up — the family didn't realize the cat was doing it on purpose for the "punishment" until he started purring.
  • And on Not Always Right itself, a small child is warned that if she goes into the restaurant kitchen they will make her wash dishes. She's fine with that.
  • This little boy LOVES cleaning mirrors!
• In this tumblr post a witch curses a princess so no man will love her. The twist ? She's a lesbian so she doesn't care if boys lack romantic interest in her.
• Occurs in Worm, when the girls bullying Taylor are given only a two-week suspension for an extensive campaign of abuse. Turns out to be subverted for some of them, as Sophia was also suspended indefinitely from the track team and also got in hot water with the superheroes because she was herself a superhero on probation, while Madison got in trouble with her parents. Also, Taylor specifically told the principal not to expel the bullies because the expulsion would result in them getting into a better school and that would be an unishment.oo
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers:
  • In "Mario the Olympian", Mario joined the Olympics in hopes of free food, but gets tired of performing. After Mario shoots Dumbledore to escape the Olympics, the rest of the competetors are sicced on him. When Mario is finally caught, Dumbledore sentences him to jail. Mario ends up being happy about this because jailtime means he'll get free food.
  • In "War Of The Fat Italians 2020", after beating SMG3, he is banished to the Internet Graveyard, a place which is considered a hellhole. SMG3 actually fares well in there and even takes over as its ruler after spending enough time there. A later episode would reveal that he was supposed to be born in that dimension in the first place, but a disturbance knocked his landing pod off course and he ended up in the Mushroom Kingdom instead.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Gumball and Darwin throw a bowling ball into the Robinsons' backyard, so Mr. Robinson has them do chores as punishment. Gumball and Darwin do them with gusto, such as raking the leaves, cutting the grass with a nail clipper, and painting his fence repeatedly, which creeps him out.
  • When Nicole assumes Gumball and Darwin have been stealing stuff from around the house, she tells them that they can't come to the museum with the rest of the family, but as it turns out they didn't want to anyway.
• Played straight, discussed, then invoked in one episode of American Dragon: Jake Long. Near the end of the school year, Jerk Jock Brad pranks the school principal by sending him a cake which, when cut, bursts apart in his face, for which he gets suspended. The main characters discuss that this is a pathetic punishment, because it's no secret Brad didn't like school anyway. Jake, inspired by this and feeling overworked from his responsibilities as the American Dragon, pulls the same prank on the Dragon Council, who punish him by removing his ability to become a dragon for one week.
• Francine and Binky attempt to invoke this in the Arthur episode "Desk Wars" by trying to get Arthur to argue with them so Mr. Ratburn will split them up and someone will be moved to Brain's empty desk, which is right in front of the fan on a very hot day and which Brain's fitted with a solar-powered supplies dispenser. Subverted when Arthur protests that he likes his desk and doesn't want to argue with them, making Mr. Ratburn send Arthur to Brain's desk. Arthur's not happy about this, especially after Binky moves to his own desk and sweats on in.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • "Lock-Up" has a particularly ironic example, perhaps even a subverted inversion: Former Arkham Asylum guard Lyle Bolton becomes the psychotic vigilante Lock-Up because he believes that the criminals confined there are not being punished harshly enough. After he starts terrorizing non-criminals too (because they are too "sympathetic" to the criminals), he is straitjacketed and put in a cell in Arkham among all the inmates for whom he has such contempt. But Lock-Up is happy about this punishment, because now he can keep an eye on all the lunatics 24 hours a day — blind to the fact that he is now one of them, and that if any of them escape, he will be helpless to do anything about it.
  • In "Fire from Olympus", Maxie Zeus perceives his incarceration in Arkham as "coming home" to Olympus, interpreting his glimpses of Poison Ivy, the Joker, and Two-Face as Demeter, Hermes, and Janus.
• Averted in one episode of Beavis And Butthead when Principal McVicker suspends the boys for a week. After explaining to the duo that means they don't come to school for a week, they think it's cool and start rocking out. Realizing this, McVicker instead sentences them to a week without laughing or else they'll be expelled and sent to a school of delinquents where "they'll get their asses kicked on a daily basis."
• In the Ben 10: Omniverse episode "Universe vs. Tennyson", Ben is put on trial by the Celestialsapiens for having recreated the universe using Alien X in an earlier episode. He spends the entire episode trying to prove his innocence, then later tries to justify his actions as saving the day, believing that the punishment would be the universe being undone. At the end of the episode, he (technically) loses the case, and it turns out that the punishment for unauthorized recreation of the universe is roughly equivalent to five USD. Ben isn't amused that no one told him this.
• Bob's Burgers: Subverted on "Bed and breakfast", when the family decides to rent out rooms and Louise, wanting her own room back, deliberately gets in trouble in an effort to get sent to her room. But Linda clarifies that by "Go to your room" she meant the room the family is sharing.
• When most of the main team in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command are captured by Zurg, his scientists put them in Tailor-Made Prisons that were supposed to both torture them and counter their specific powers: XR has his extendable limbs stretched out to their limit, Booster is stuck in a cell that keeps bouncing him around so he can't break out, and Mira can't phase through the walls because loud sirens keep breaking her focus. Except XR finds the stretching pleasant (like a form of chiropractic therapy), Booster finds the bouncing fun, and Myra just finds the sirens slightly annoying, all of which frustrates Zurg and leads to him calling his torture division incompetent. The planned torture for Mira consisted of making her watch XR and Booster being tortured while she's unable to do anything to help them. Since they don't feel tortured, that plan failed. This is subverted later on in the episode though, as XR's stretching eventually turns incredibly painful while Mira and Booster find their helplessness far less fun when Star Command is about to be destroyed.
• On Dexter's Laboratory, Dad decides to punish Dexter and Dee Dee by sending them to each other's rooms. While it's sheer torture for Dexter, it's the best day ever for Dee Dee, because she gets free rein of the secret lab in Dex's room...or so Dexter thinks. While he's driven insane by paranoia and tears her room apart, she spends most of the time napping. Dexter ends up having to switch living quarters with the dog as punishment. The dog, you guessed it, completely trashes the lab when Dexter doesn't even suspect it.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy Turner has to brave the "horrifying trials" of the "sadistic" Yugopotamians. Of course, Yugopotamians are Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: The Species, so these trials include walking through a flowery meadow, hugging a teddy bear, and eating chocolate. All of these would be unbearably painful or even fatal to Yugopotamians, but are enjoyable for a human.
• Chris from Family Guy was once caught with his hand down his pants at school. The principal punished him by ordering him to keep his hand down his pants all week. Boy, what a week that was!
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends:
  • Subverted. To get out of a horrifying dinner called "It" (which basically consists of vomit), Bloo keeps making trouble, expecting to be sent to his room without dinner. Unfortunately, Mr. Herriman is fighting a carrot addiction, and he sends anyone who sees the carrots to their rooms without dinner; Bloo's pranks, including smashing a wrecking ball into the house, actually help Herriman. In the end only Bloo remains and has to eat the dinner. He's even punished for those acts by Frankie by being forced to eat "It".
  • Also subverted in the first episode. After getting caught in her scheme to get rid of Bloo for inadvertently ruining her chance of getting adopted by a wealthy family, Duchess hopes that Mr. Herriman will send her away as punishment. However, he realizes that's what she wants, and says she has to stay instead.
• In the Hey Arnold! episode "Harold the Butcher", Harold is caught stealing from the butcher, Mr. Green, and is forced to work there for a whole week to learn his lesson. After a while, he loves it and dreams of being a butcher when he gets older. Once his sentence is up, he tries stealing another piece of meat, just so he can get sentenced to work at the butchery again, but Mr. Green doesn't fall for it as he found Harold more trouble than he was worth (Harold had pretty quickly cost more than the ham he stole or the work he would give in accidentally destroyed merchandise). However, when he needed help with his annual meat sale he's forced to accept Harold's help, and afterward is so impressed he takes him on as an apprentice.
• In the House of Mouse cartoon Topsy Turvy Town, Mickey and Minnie Mouse are "punished" by the court for breaking the town rules by having to go on a tropical vacation.
• In Infinity Train, the train itself can end up functioning like this. It's an Epiphanic Prison, with a helpful number on your hand signifying how well you're doing on reaching that epiphany and having it stick. So if a passenger refuses to acknowledge the lessons they need to learn, or are outright malicious to the denizens or even other passengers, their punishment is their number staying stagnant or going up, which extends their stay on the train. Which is a bad thing if you ever want to go back home, but not so much if you hated your old life. There are several characters both seen and discussed throughout the series that deem the Death World of the train to be far more preferable than returning to the problems that await them back on Earth. Combine that with the fact that some of the pocket dimensions in the car can make for incredibly comfortable living spaces where you don't have to constantly run for your life, and you have people who have happily spent years on the train over figuring out a way back.
• In the Johnny Test episode "Johnny of the Jungle", when Hugh refuses to let Johnny go on a field trip to the zoo at night, Johnny graffitis one of the walls of the house so Hugh would get angry and send him to his room for the rest of the night, allowing Johnny to sneak out and go to the zoo without Hugh checking on him. Johnny then had to get home before the sun would come up and Hugh would see that Johnny has replaced himself in bed with an inflatable decoy.
• In the "Let's Play Teachers" episode of Kaeloo, Stumpy tries to get Kaeloo, who is playing the teacher, to send him Standing in the Hall, after Mr. Cat notes that only a teacher can be stupid enough to think that being expelled from class is a punishment. Kaeloo decides to give Stumpy lines to write instead.
• King of the Hill:
  • The episode "The Son That Got Away" has Bobby (and Connie) disrupting their music class, and Hank decides to punish Bobby by making him clean the rain gutters. He later finds out Bill and Dale took the job from Bobby out of personal satisfaction.
    Bill: You say punishment, I call it funishment.
  • In the same episode, Hank berates Kahn for making Connie mow the lawn, thinking of that as a privilege.
  • Also in the episode "The Buck Stops Here", Hank makes Bobby get a job during the summer instead of stay in his room playing video games the entire break. He gets a job working for Strickland and almost gets into a lot of trouble. So after Hank rescues both of them he tells Bobby his punishment for all of this is that he is grounded for the rest of the summer (aka staying in his room). Bobby clearly catches what his father means and thanks him.
  • In the episode "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Alamo", Bobby is punished with summer school because he wrote in his Texas History textbook. Hank is upset, but then he finds out that what Bobby wrote was a speech Hank had given earlier about the Alamo, presenting the bare facts rather than the "pop history" version that depicts the Texans as drunken cowards. Smiling, Hank says that since Bobby has to take summer classes anyway, he might as well skip school the next day and they both take a trip to Six Flags.
  • Averted in the episode "High Anxiety", where Hank allowed Bobby to punish him for accidentally using drugs. Bobby decides to punish Hank by not allowing him to mow the lawn for a week. To almost anyone but Hank this would be an Unishment, but it's a genuine punishment to Hank, who even complains to Bobby that the punishment is too harsh.
    Hank Hill: Come on, son, have a heart.
    Bobby: You wanna go for two?
• Looney Tunes: In the Judge Granny webtoon "Caged Witness", both Tweety and Sylvester are held responsible for crimes committed in the case. Tweety is simply locked up in his cage for an unspecified period of time ("Fwankly, I can't tell da diffewence!"), but Sylvester is nowhere near as lucky with his sentence.
• The Loud House: This is what kicks off the plot for the episode "Rita Her Rights". Rita Loud is sentenced to do community service, namely picking up trash in the park, after getting too many traffic tickets. But she finds her stay at the park much more relaxing than being at home, and thus keeps committing small crimes to get more community service.
• Miraculous Ladybug: In the episode "Robostus", Marinette asks her teacher for permission to visit the principal's office. She refuses, but Marinette keeps insisting until the teacher snaps and...sends her to the principal's office as punishment.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Boast Busters", Snips and Snails' are forced to help clean up the mess caused by an Ursa, a massive bear monster they lured into town to see if Trixie can actually back up her claims of having defeated one in the past. Twilight decides to give them an additional "punishment" in the form of growing mustaches on them with one of her magic spells.
  • Starlight Glimmer's punishment for her actions in the season 5 finale "The Cutie Re-mark" is to be made Twilight Sparkle's personal student. However, the Mane Six acknowledge that she is too dangerous and unstable to be left unattended, and that her magic power (which Twilight acknowledges may be on par with or stronger than her own) can be a great benefit to Equestria. It helps that she saw what her actions may lead to, and didn't like it.
• In the Phineas and Ferb special "Summer Belongs to You", Buford tries to invoke this trope, citing that he will eat a bug if he loses the bet. Phineas quickly points out that Buford would eat a bug if they merely asked, and he refuses to accept their counter-suggestion unless it also includes eating a bug.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Bart After Dark", Bart is punished for vandalism by being forced to work in the house he vandalized...which turns out to be a burlesque house. He thoroughly enjoys his time there and develops a rapport with the owner.
  • In "Treehouse of Horror IV", Homer sells his soul for a donut and is sent to Hell upon finishing it, where he is subjected to the Ironic Hell of being force fed "all the donuts in the world". Homer's gluttony proves to be too much even for the forces of Hell to handle, as he keeps asking for more donuts even after finishing the lot, leaving the demon who was "torturing" him very frustrated.
    Homer: Nom, nom, nom, nom, MORE!, nom, nom, nom, nom...
    Demon: I don't understand it. James Coco went mad in 15 minutes!
  • In "Marge Be Not Proud", when Bart is caught shoplifting a video game from a supermarket, Homer suggests that Bart be punished by being grounded; no leaving the house, not even for school.
  • At one point in "Team Homer", Principal Skinner reminisces about the food he was served as a Vietnamese prisoner of war, describing it as a "thin stew"... then immediately contradicting himself that it was made up of "fish, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice", which couldn't be considered a thin stew by any except the strictest definitions. He also adds that he nearly went mad from the effort of spending years trying to find a Vietnamese restaurant in America that served it, as none of the ones he's tried ever got the spices right.
  • Double Subverted in "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson". Bart expects to be told to go to his room, but Homer realizes that's not a punishment and sends him to the garage instead. But then Bart uses this opportunity to steal a riding mower.
  • Also used in "Dead Putting Society". Bart and Todd Flanders end up competing against each other in mini-golf and Homer, always looking for an opportunity to mess with Flanders, makes a side bet: The "father of the boy who doesn't win"^note Ned insisted on this wording since he didn't want to hurt either boy's feelings with "loser" would have to mow the other's lawn in his wife's best Sunday dress. In the end Bart and Todd both forfeit because the game isn't fun anymore; Ned thinks it's over, but Homer points out that neither boy won, so they both have to go through with the bet. However, Ned actually ends up having fun since it reminds him of his college days, while Homer made an ass of himself for nothing.
    Homer: D'oh! Oh my god, he's enjoying it!
  • In "The Old Man and the Lisa", Lenny is temporarily put in charge of the nuclear plant. Homer makes a bad mistake and Lenny sends him home to think about what he did. He soon forgets what it was and spends the rest of the day watching TV.
  • In "Homer's Odyssey", Bart is being disruptive during a field trip and Mrs. Krabappel punishes him by making him sing "John Henry Was a Steel-Drivin' Man" in front of everyone on the bus. This is intended to humiliate him, but he sings with great enthusiasm and obviously enjoys it, to the point that Mrs. Krabappel has to yell at him three times before he reluctantly stops the song.
  • Used in "Homer the Great", where Homer takes the Stonecutters' Oath, which says that if he violates the organization's trust "may my stomach become bloated and my head be plucked of all but three hairs". Moe interrupts, saying that he thinks Homer should have to take a different oath, but Number 1 insists that "Everyone takes the same oath."
    Moe: 'Cause he's already kind of heavy, you know, and...
  • In "Sideshow Bob Roberts," Sideshow Bob is elected mayor of Springfield and starts using his power to harass the Simpsons by, among other things, getting Bart bumped down to the kindergarten class at school. Bart takes to it with gusto.
    Kindergarten Teacher: (teaching shapes) Now, boys and girls, who knows what this is?
    Bart: Triangle.
    Kindergarten Teacher: Very good, Bart! You have first choice of toys for free-play.
    Bart: Cool! I call the Flintstone phone!
  • In "Bart the Mother," Marge tells Homer to punish Lisa for lying about Bart's whereabouts, as she said he wasn't with Nelson. Homer promptly tells her to march herself to the Kwik-E-Mart and buy him some chips and a beer, and gives her a little extra so that she can get something for herself.
• South Park:
  • "Here Comes the Neighborhood" had an influx of rich (black) people moving into the town causing most of the native poor (white) people to resent their presence to the point that they passed laws forbidding rich people from mingling with poor people. Much of the episode was actually a subversion, since the rich people were outraged that they were excluded from South Park's blue-collar lifestyle. But on at least one occasion it was played straight: poor people at the back of a bus object to Bill Cosby and his kids sitting down next to them, and the passengers make them sit in the front in much more comfortable chairs. They obey, and then a passenger tries to taunt Cosby by sarcastically remarking how pleasant it must be sitting up there - only for Cosby to sincerely tell him that, yes, in fact, it is.
  • In several episodes, Saddam Hussein is shown to be way too comfortable and happy in Hell, and is even in a sexual relationship with Satan himself. Both Satan and God realize that he's not getting punished as is intended, and the two eventually cooperate to give him a fitting punishment: he's sent to Heaven instead, which is full of Mormons who constantly rope Saddam into social activities he considers boring, making this an Inverted Trope, too.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Ghoul Fools", Patrick gets sent to an Ironic Hell where he has a talking donut on his head that he can't eat because when he tries to grab it, it makes the top of his head grow so the donut is out of his reach. Patrick complains that it's a plain donut and makes it turn into different flavors, then asks for it to turn into a stack of pancakes, and then a Krabby Patty before deciding he wants a plain donut again, leading to the donut's Big "NO!" while Patrick is having fun deciding what flavor the donut should be. Later on, when everyone is sent to their Ironic Hell, some of them actually enjoy it (Sandy in particular gets to catch a ghost she found in her milkshake).
• A case of this happens in The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries in the episode "A Good Nephew Is Hard to Find". After Granny's nephew Paul Freleng is found out as being behind the Kaiju sightings, he is sentenced to 200 hours of community service working as a costumed carnival mascot. He ends up enjoying it so much that he signs up for even more hours of community service.
• Total Drama: In "Heroes vs. Villains", Chris is at the end of only a year-long prison sentence for contaminating Camp Wawanakwa in the previous season. He's spent sentence hosting a fake season of Total Drama, with cockroaches as the contestants and a carved cashew to replace Chef Hatchet. When he is released, Chef is there to welcome him and inform him that the producers renewed Total Drama for another season, which he gets to host once more as if nothing happened.
• In an episode of T.U.F.F. Puppy, Snaptrap plans to sink the T.U.F.F. cruise ship by ramming a mobile iceberg (with an all-you-can-eat salad bar) into it. Larry, however, wants to go to Acapulco, so at one point in the episode, he tries pedaling there instead of the cruise ship. When Snaptrap finds out, he bans Larry from the salad bar. Larry doesn't care, because he doesn't even like salad. This example is also in contrast to the series' running gag of Snaptrap dropping Larry in the shark tank (usually for little to no reason).
• The Warner Bros. cartoon "Hobo Bobo" entails a small elephant who is tired of carrying logs in the jungle and yearns to join his uncle in the United States, playing elephant baseball for the circus. He sneaks onto a ship by painting himself pink (he is completely ignored by people who think they must be getting delirium tremens), but he is arrested for causing a panic after his pink paint washes off. The judge sentences Bobo to — working for the circus! As the elephant team's batboy.
  Bobo: Batboy-schmatboy, I'm still carrying logs!
• WordGirl: In "House Arrest", Chuck the Evil Sandwich-Making Guy is placed under house arrest at the Botsfords' residence while his jail cell is being repainted. He enjoys the way Mrs. Botsford is treating him as a guest enough that when he's free to go, he deliberately commits crimes in an attempt to get arrested and go back to the house.

Real Life

• Schools can be subjected to this quite a bit. Quite often, "punishing" a child who has a different learning style or doesn't care about school will be giving them exactly what they want.
  • Misbehaving can lead to suspension, which means time away from school. Schools eventually realized that the kind of student who would get suspended for breaking the rules that severely is the kind of student who wouldn't see being forced out of school as a bad thing. This is why a number of schools have in-school suspensions, which is basically detention that lasts all day. However, this can still be Unishment for some because it means they're out of class all day and while they may be given work, they may not exactly be forced to do it. In fact, most ISS teachers don't care what the students do as long as they're quiet and don't use electronics. Students sometimes even go for this intentionally if they are antisocial, don't want to be at the mercy of school bells, or can't concentrate in a crowd, and so will be given a day of peace to focus on their schoolwork.
  • One American school required violators of dress code to wear prison jumpsuits. Many students violated the dress code just so they could wear these prison jumpsuits.
    "I don't think that jumpsuits are going to work, because my friends actually, instead of it being a punishment, they'll see it as an opportunity to be like, rebels," said Meredith, who also isn't sure whether his hair, dyed bright fire-engine red, will pass muster, "I don't think there's going to be enough jumpsuits for everyone in the school."
  • One criticism of zero tolerance school bullying policies is that it unfairly stands against the victim, whilst not really punishing the aggressor, whether the victim fights back or not. The Bully has free rein to terrorize their victim with increasing violence and has nothing to lose by merely being suspended for a short amount of time, as they don't care about their work and will simply return to torment the victim all over again in time, while the victim is ostracised and openly disregarded. All this does is create an incentive for the victim to suffer in silence, which in the long term results in severe physical and mental trauma that only continues to escalate.
  • When some schools began to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that they could enforce social distancing without any problems, a student shared pictures of crowded school corridors showing that there were no attempts at social distancing whatsoever. They suspended her, and it not only reduced her risk of catching the virus, but gave her enough free time to tell her story to any media outlet that wanted it, making the school look worse by trying to cover it up and thus spreading it even further.
  • At some speeches about Autism, a few speakers mentioned being told to go stand in the hall because they were being a disruption. They actually used this as an opportunity to relax. Somewhat subverted in that being told to stand in the hall (or sit in another room) isn't always intended as a punishment — it's sometimes to help them cool down.
  • One student couldn't stop laughing at "n-th root", which in German sounds similar to "Ente" (the German word for duck). As a result, he was sent to stand in front — which gave him the perfect opportunity to perform the duckling dance in front of the entire class, behind the teacher's back. It took the teacher several minutes to notice.
  • How Philadelphia sports update analyst Natalie Egenolf got her start in the media industry. As a student at the now defunct Cardinal Dougherty High School, her teachers decided that if she won't stop talking in class, her chattiness was best used for their in-house morning news program, CDTV. That led her to enroll at Temple University in Communications, and to this day, see an expansive role in Philly's sports media.
• Some people cannot succeed outside of the US prison system, so they keep doing illegal things. This is a major theme in The Shawshank Redemption.
• Drug lord Pablo Escobar arranged to serve his prison sentence in a prison he was allowed to design himself and staff with his own guards. Since he was able to run his criminal enterprise from in there and it actually served to protect him from assassins, he probably didn't mind too much. Eventually, the authorities declared he had to go to a regular facility after he brought some people into his prison to be killed, and Escobar became a fugitive by just walking out the back door.
• Australia began as a penal colony to remove cons from England's crowded prisons. However, as shown in Great Expectations, if you survived your sentence (which was far from guaranteed) then it was quite possible to become very wealthy indeed from the abundant mineral resources and cheap grazing land. And public outcry eventually mitigated the worst excesses of neglect and brutality in Transportation, to the point where inmates traveling to Australia on a prison transport were less likely to die at sea than paying passengers; the shipping lines were paid per living prisoner, on arrival.
• The founding principle of Mahatma Gandhi's program of non-violent resistance, Satyagraha, is that the best way to defeat an unjust law is to break it, and then insist on being punished for it, as the forces behind the unjust law and the public that supports them will then have their noses rubbed in just how unjust it is.
• In March 2014, Utah resident Andrew Wilcox lost a bet to his brother and had to dance on a busy street intersection for 30 minutes to whatever music his brother chose. He quickly started a dance party which became an internet sensation and got a date out of it. Read about it here.
• Some political criminals of the German Democratic Republic were punished by forcing them to move to West Germany. As a matter of fact, most political prisoners in the GDR were "bought" by West Germany to be released into the West. The GDR was desperate enough for hard currency to ignore the political ramifications of this and West Germany knew enough about East German prisons to want to spare political prisoners that fate. Depending on the decade, this trope was subverted — if Russia felt like it, then the order of the day was to send political criminals to the Gulags in Siberia.
• Radical labor leader Eugene V. Debs spent much of his incarceration in the prison library reading socialist literature — guaranteeing that once he was released, he would be even more radical.
• Many small-time criminals in Depression-era America actually looked forward to jail, since it offered them some measure of employment, as well as guaranteed meals and a relatively comfortable place to sleep. It was referred to as "three hots and a cot."
• In Spanish Louisiana, the Tignon law was established to humiliate freed slaves by forcing all black women to wear headscarves. It instead became a fashion statement that persists to this day, and was even adopted by Empress Joséphine of France after they traded the territory back to France (who sold it to America).
• Buying an item in bulk to destroy it as a protest strategy is a form of this for the company who sells the product. Most companies aren't going to care what you do with their products once you've purchased them. If anything, buying and destroying a product gives the company free publicity, especially after the Turn of the Millennium, if the protestor intended to show the action on social media. Meanwhile, the protestor destroying said product comes off as immature for "hurting" a company by giving the company their money.
  • Ethan Van Sciver bought a whole crate of die-cast Rose Tico action figures to destroy them in order to complain about The Last Jedi. Disney couldn't care less whether Van Sciver intended to give them away as Christmas presents, paint them green and stick them up his nose, or (as actually happened) attempt to cut them in half with scissors, only to fail because they were clearly marked as die-cast. All that Disney cared about was the bit where Van Sciver bought a whole crate of Star Wars action figures.
  • There was a boycott of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 in which the boycotters went around buying as many copies of other Sonic games as they could find. Sega wasn't complaining.
  • Something similar occurred to The Beatles after John Lennon's infamous "bigger than Jesus" comments; outraged Christian fundamentalists organized mass burnings of Beatles records and merchandise. As Lennon and the other Beatles would later note, it wasn't quite the punishment to them it may have seemed.
  • Book burnings are the first documented cases of this. While many early ones involved forcibly taking the books off the shelves and possibly torching the whole bookstore or library for carrying them, most modern book burners have to buy the books first. For example, every so often Mein Kampf will sneak its way onto the best sellers list, mostly because of people buying copies to burn or deface. While Hitler can't collect the royalties, it's hardly a punishment to the publishers and/or stores.
  • Black Sabbath owes a surprising chunk of their initial success to this; angry Moral Guardians buying their records to destroy as protest just sent a message to the music brand that, hey, these guys sell records, so make more, and give them more press. This mixing with the Streisand Effect helped make them musical legends, and brought the Heavy Metal genre out of the underground.
  • In 2017, Keurig withdrew sponsorship of pundit Sean Hannity for defending then-Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of making unwanted sexual advances towards teenagers. Hannity's supporters responded by destroying their Keurig coffee makers. The "destroy Keurig" campaign was ridiculed since Keurig had already taken the protestors' money, and the people destroying their machines only screwed themselves over.
• Scathing reviews and criticisms of a work can often boost its sales. For example, The Emoji Movie was near universally panned and many internet personalities savaged the idea of the film and trailers before it even came out. This may have saved the film, which was deemed too boring and slow to keep its target demographic occupied (and thus discouraging parents from taking them to see it). However, plenty of adults went to see the movie to see what all the fuss was about, resulting in the film being a success.
• For continual drug taking and what was perceived as a lack of effort, keyboardist Richard Wright was fired from Pink Floyd for the tour of The Wall but kept on solely as a paid session musician. However, due the amount of special effects necessary for the tour, it ended up being a financial loss for all the band... except for Richard Wright, who still received his wage for doing nothing.
• At the start of Christian missions into Nordic countries, the missionaries very quickly learned that a Fire and Brimstone Hell didn't sound like a punishment to people who spent their entire lives in one of the coldest places on the planet. So if anything, by what these missionaries were saying, they should ignore the Bible even more. The missionaries instead stuck with the version of Hel from Norse mythology as a place of insufferable cold and loneliness until they had spread Christianity enough to muscle out Norse mythology as a practiced religion.
• According to The Death of WCW, this is how WCW punished most of its top stars, to the point that it was referenced onscreen — whenever a wrestler was punished, they would be suspended with pay, which was basically paid leave or even a paid vacation. This is particularly egregious in the case of Scott Steiner, who, if the rumors are true, was a pitbull full of rage that terrorized the locker room. However management refused to punish him seriously, because they were every bit as scared of him as Steiner's fellow wrestlers were, to the point that it's been alleged the reason why Steiner got such a massive push in WCW's twilight years is because he all but bullied management into giving it to him.
• German soldiers who were taken as POWs by the Western Allies were typically shipped to the United States, as having an entire ocean between it and Europe meant that any German POWs that escaped their camps would have no way of returning to Germany anyways. Due to this, security at American POW camps was quite lax and the German POWs were relatively free to do as they please. Especially later in the war, German POWs would end up being better treated and fed than their comrades still on the frontlines. As the end of the war in Europe loomed, there was a mass exodus of German troops fleeing from the Eastern Front towards the West, knowing that if they surrendered to the Western Allies, they would be treated far better than what they could expect from the Soviets. After the end of the war, many German POWs enjoyed their time in the United States so much that many of them stayed as immigrants.
• In some online video games, players that cheat or are poor sports may be put in a server that has other people like them. Normally, this would be a punishment in the form of "getting a taste of their own medicine" as well as keeping them away from other people who just want to play the game normally. For some people under this punishment, they may actually like being forced to play with others like them since people of a similar mindset will generally enjoy each other's company, thus playing with others who cheat and cause chaos can be more fun than playing with people who don't.
• Some video games have anti piracy or anti cheat measures that prevent a player from progressing or simply make it as unfun as possible to play, such as disabling quests or making certain features not work. Some measures go the extra mile with things like making all of the player's weapons turn into chickens that do Scratch Damage or have enemies that won't stop spawning to overwhelm the player. For this type of anti piracy/anti cheat, some people take it as a challenge to see how far they can go and might even enjoy the challenge more than actually playing the game normally.
• A popular legend (that may even be true) has it that when Daniel Defoe was put in the pillory for writing a satirical pamphlet that spoofed the Tory position on religious dissent, public acclaim led to him getting flowers thrown at him rather than the usual Produce Pelting.

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