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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished / Anime & Manga

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in Anime & Manga.

  • Attack on Titan:
    • A rare villainous example: While searching for Eren, the Female Titan kills the Survey Corps members who try to fight her. Mysteriously, however, she spares Armin... who realizes that she is The Mole and later figures out that she is, in fact, fellow graduate of the 104th Trainee Corps, Annie Leonhart.
    • Goes on even further in the Manga, when Eren and many others discover that two more members of the 104th Trainees are powerful Titans determined to kidnap him. He lampshades the trope while fighting them as a Titan, by saying that their biggest mistake was teaching him how to fight.
  • A few in Battle Royale, but most notably Yuichiro. He was the only person who ever had any faith in Mitsuko and tried to reach her at all (which actually did succeed), and what happened in the manga version? She raped him after he was shot, in a crazed attempt to "make it better," before stabbing him to death with her kama. Not only that, he was shot with his own gun, which he had traded to a friend as a sign of good faith. Note that the above happens only in the manga, and while Mitsuko does kill him in the movie, the novel and the manga, the events differ slightly in all three.
  • This is pretty much the punishment for being a good person in the Berserk universe.
  • In Bleach, Captain Urahara Kisuke is deeply worried about the mission his lieutenant has been sent on, and considers the circumstances suspicious. Concerned for her safety as well as the safety of the rest of the team, he sneaks after her and arrives Just in Time to keep a traitor from murdering what remains of the team. He then spends a sleepless week rushing to find a way to cure what has been done to the team — they were turned into Humanoid Abominations — and finally manages to stabilize the transformation so they'll keep their human minds and bodies, after which he collapses from exhaustion. Not long after he wakes up, he's arrested on false charges, put through a Kangaroo Court, sentenced to being stripped of his powers and exiled from his dimension, and is branded a traitor, murderer, and Mad Scientist who was Playing with Syringes. The actual traitor goes on to be considered essentially a saint for the next century.
    • Also applies to Kisuke's friend Tsukabishi Tessai, who was with him at the time; Tessai uses two forbidden spells to first instantly teleport Kisuke and the team to Kisuke's lab (they wouldn't have survived being physically moved) and then to freeze the team in time for a week (in order to give Kisuke time to figure out how to save them). For doing this, Tessai goes through the same Kangaroo Court and is sentenced to life in prison — and considering Shinigami are The Ageless, that 'life sentence' could have turned out to be effectively forever.
  • Chainsaw Man: Asa Mitaka, the protagonist of Part 2, cannot seem catch a break when trying to be nice. Accepting the Chicken Devil's offer of friendship? She gets framed for their murder. Stopping to rescue a cat during a Devil attack? Her mother dies trying to save her. Opening up to her new friend Yuko, accepting her kindness, and saving her life? Now she has a violent sociopath out to massacre her classmates for her perceived benefit. Trying to save Yuko after nearly killing her? This weird lady with rings in her eyes turns Yuko into an even bigger monster. It just doesn't stop, and it's a miracle Asa still believes that Good Feels Good after all the crap she's been put through.
  • In Claymore, Teresa saves her dear Clare as well as an entire village from being raped, pillaged, and burned by a bunch of bandits, and got marked for death as a reward since the Lawful Stupid Organization forbids Claymores from killing humans, no matter the situation. Worse in that the village being attacked was her fault, since she'd intended to leave Clare there so she could live in peace and killed the yoma who had been there first. However, the presence of yoma in the village was what was keeping the bandits at bay, so killing the yoma meant giving a gateway for the bandits to begin their operation.
    • Even more sad was when Teresa saves another town from a yoma without being paid the hefty fee that the Organization asks for as payment (since she was on the run), but said it felt nice to do something good without being paid. Moments later, an execution party came to take her head.
  • Code Geass: No wonder Lelouch is such a lying bastard, since the universe seems to feel that every single attempt on his part to not act like an evil little sociopath must be dealt with as harshly as possible. Nearly everything that goes wrong can, in some way or another, be blamed on the fact that he wants to protect his little sister and doesn't want his best friend to get hurt.
    • The most egregious example: Lelouch decides not to go through with his plan to make it look like Euphemia plotted to assassinate him, which would've given Japan justification for a full-scale revolution. Instead, he decides to accept the third option that would allow everyone to get what they want without any bloodshed, even though it means he'll lose his chance at revenge. Oops, we can't have that! Instead, his Mind Control Magical Eye goes out of control at the worst possible time and he accidentally forces the most innocent and idealistic character in the show to massacre the people she was trying to help, sparking the revolution anyway, though it eventually fails and everyone is effectively back at square one.
    • Lelouch's desire to protect his sister can also be viewed as a character flaw. He often endangers his men by putting his sister, one person, before the good of everyone else in Japan.
    • If he killed or enslaved Suzaku when he had the chance, he'd be that much more powerful.
    • Had he not also spared Villetta in the second episode, he could have avoided many, many problems.
  • Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Mikan Tsumiki, a Shrinking Violet whose life has been nothing but a constant stream of abuse, makes her first real friends and starts to build some self-esteem. What happens when she tries to repay this kindness by helping find Ryota when he goes missing? She ends up running into Mukuro, gets kidnapped, and is brainwashed into becoming a member of Ultimate Despair.
  • Death Note: Shinigami use their Death Notes to kill humans before their time, thereby adding that human's lifespan to their own. Therefore, if a shinigami uses a Death Note to deliberately extend a human's lifespan (by killing their would-be murderer, for example), that shinigami will die.
  • Digimon Tamers: Leomon attempts to stop Beelzemon from harming the Tamers anymore. Beelzemon promptly turns around and stabs him, kills him, and "eats him". This leads to Jeri's Despair Event Horizon and the D-Reaper's invasion.
    • This happens to Beelzemon himself when he attempts to atone for the above scene by saving Jeri from the D-Reaper; he has his help thrown back in his face and gets rather violently shot multiple times.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • In Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon, Gohan and Videl as The Great Saiyaman and Saiyawoman end up saving Hoi from committing suicide by jumping off a building. Turns out Hoi was a terrible man who wanted to revive a demon and was the survivor of an equally evil race of extraterrestrial wizards, and intended to feed Earth to it.
    • In Dragon Ball Super: Broly, Beets first attempts to stop Paragus from stealing a ship, but later assists him willingly when he learns Paragus is trying to rescue his son. Unfortunately when they do find Broly, their ship is damaged beyond repair. Paragus reacts to this news by shooting Beets to save on resources.
  • In ERASED, protagonist Satoru Fujinuma experiences a phenomenon he calls "revival," where he's forced to intervene in disasters about to happen around him by getting trapped in a time loop until he averts said disaster. He complains that getting involved always has negative consequences for him but still does anyway. The first time we see him do this in the series, he's hit by a car trying to save a little boy from the same fate. The third time, he unwittingly foils a kidnapping, and his mother is murdered as a result while he's set up to take the fall.
  • Fairy Tail:
    • This is the backstory of Loke/Leo. His former master Karen was very abusive and treated her Celestial Spirits as slaves. It reached the point where Leo summoned himself and refused to allow her to use her magic until she surrendered her keys and released her spirits. She refused and went out on a mission without being able to use her magic. This resulted in her getting killed, and Leo is blamed for her death while being banished from the spirit world. The kicker? The person who killed Karen was a Celestial Spirit mage herself, and proceeded to use Karen's spirits sans Leo as tools herself.
    • Mavis Vermillion had to cast a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to save her friend Yuri Dreyar from an And I Must Scream fate. She gets cursed by the god of life and death with both immortality and death magic that kills everything around her as long as she values life, and can only be controlled if she throws her empathy away and is willing to kill without care.
  • Fruits Basket:
    • Machi was afraid her baby brother was cold and went to put a blanket on him. Her parents accused her of trying to kill him and forced her out of home.
    • Kyoko is beaten to the point of hospitalization, loses her chance to get into high school, and gets disowned by her parents after trying to straighten out her life and leave the gang she was in.
    • When he was much younger, Kureno was actually freed from the zodiac curse. He agreed to pretend he was still a part of the Zodiac and stay by Akito's side at all times though, because he didn't want to abandon the poor kid. It's implied in present times that it would have been better for Akito's overall mental health if Kureno had instead broken away then and there, instead of feeding Akito's clingy dependency issues. When Kureno tries to make it better and gives Akito a very heartfelt talk about how it is better to live moving forward, Akito fully breaks down and stabs the poor guy in the back. Literally.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, Winry's parents, two medics that worked to save the lives of several injured Ishvalans in the genocide, were killed by Scar, after bandaging him up and treating his wounds. When Winry finds out, she immediately loses it.
    • Also, when Armstrong finds two Ishvalan women and try to allow them a way to escape, they don't get far before they are incinerated by Kimblee right in front of him, although Kimblee claims he's doing this because he respects Armstrong's convictions and doesn't want to see him court-martialed. This sends him into a massive Heroic BSoD.
    • Turns out the entire reason Father was defeated was eventually this. He not only took a liking to his own 'father' Hohenheim, giving him knowledge about the world, education and numbers, but also specifically spared him when Father eventually sacrificed the nation of Xerxes to attain a body and achieve immortality. Hell, Father split half of the loot/souls with Hohenheim and let him go as he pleased for the very purpose of thanking him! Unfortunately, Hohenheim (rightfully) treated this generosity as a massive betrayal, and spent the next 400 years personally knowing each one of the souls he has, along with siring the heroes AND becoming a major obstacle to Father's Assimilation Plot...
  • In Fun Territory Defense By The Optimistic Lord, the backstory of the 30-year-old salaryman who reincarnates into the main character Van Nei Fertio is that his only "reward" for working hard and being competent on the job is to simply have more and more responsibility shoved on him until he got home late one night and apparently died in his sleep.
  • Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden has several good deeds end up badly.
    • When a young Temdan was about to be killed by a monster, a young Tegu used his celestial power to save him. Temdan thanks him, but his previously unknown disease begins to take its toll on him. Since Tegu is revealed to be a celestial warrior, a sign of ruin for the kingdom, he gets immediately imprisoned.
    • Tomite pays the ultimate price. During the summoning ceremony for Genbu, Tomite sees an injured person and rushes over to help them get to safety from the falling hail. The person is Shigi, who uses Tomite's good nature to have him let his guard down, and promptly kills Tomite.
  • Valiant efforts and good intentions don't usually turn out so well for people in Gantz. The series starts off with two of the main characters (one of them against his will) helping a drunk homeless man who had stumbled onto the subway tracks. They manage to get him onto the platform, and are subsequently hit by a train.
  • Hello! Sandybell: Sandybell encounters a frenzied horse running around and calms it down. The horse warms up to her, and allows it to ride it around. When Kitty (the true owner of the horse) sees this, she Bitch Slaps Sandybell for riding her horse (even though her own negligence caused it to run away).
  • Henkyou no Roukishi Bard Loen: The "Witch" gave a girl she treated like a granddaughter a medicine that saved her from a pandemic in their village, even though she was asked by her mother to never reveal it to others. The girl then told everyone, who refused to hear when "Witch" told them that this was the only dose of the medicine left. The villagers, including the girl, convinced themselves she was a witch responsible for the disease and set her house on fire, with her inside.
  • If I See You In My Dreams: Masuo is always trying to look out for his workmate Hamaoka, especially since she's often targeted by men who try to sexually harass her. Unfortunately, this invariable alienates Nagisa, whom he's in love with. The fact that Hamaoka is very much in love with Masuo doesn't help matters either.
  • The main plot of Inuyasha got started when Kikyo decided to be nice and take care of a paralyzed bandit. The universe's reward for her kindness: She gets to slowly bleed to death, thinking that her first love, who is also the first person to ever treat her like a human woman, had decieved her from the start and killed her in cold blood. And that was only the beginning...
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure started when George Joestar I, out of the goodness of his heart, adopted an orphan boy named Dio Brando. Dio repays George's kindness by fatally poisoning him in an attempt to claim the Joestar fortune. Over time Dio would become the Arch-Enemy of the entire Joestar family, being killed by Jonathan Joestar's great-grandson Jotaro Kujo, but even that would eventually lead to Pucci, Dio's Dragon Ascendant, killing Jotaro in revenge, along with his daughter Jolyne and almost all of her friends.
  • Ishigami got hit with this hard in the backstory of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War when he discovered that the Ogino was cheating on Ootomo. Since Ootomo had been relatively nice to him in the past, he tries to convince Ogino to stop in private. Ogino not only refuses to do so, but outright tries to buy Ishigami silence by offering to let him sleep with Ootomo, which causes Ishigami to attack him in a blind rage. This just ends up making things worse when it draws a crowd and Ogino paints the situation as Ishigami being a violent stalker (not helped by Ishigami's refusal to admit the truth so as to preserve Ootomo's innocence) and he ends up being suspended until the end of the school year, falls into depression, and is shunned by all his classmates.
  • The unfortunate fate of many characters in Kaiba. Characters are constantly sent over a Despair Event Horizon or end up in depressing situations. Frequently, side characters are tragically killed just trying to find a better life.
  • This happens frequently to the title character of Kaiji, almost to the point of being the theme of the show.
    • His situation starts with him cosigning on a loan for a friend. Months later, this turns out to be a loan from the Yakuza, who show up on Kaiji's doorstep to collect on the loan when said friend disappears. (Funnily enough, he trashes a nice car out of frustration just before this. It turns out to be a yakuza car... and he suffers no punishment at all.)
    • He gets an offer to go onto a ship and gamble for one night for a chance to clear this debt. After getting scammed multiple times in multiple ways, he decides to team up with his friend (who apparently didn't disappear after all...) and another man down on his luck to give him a better chance of winning the gamble. Early on, he meets the conditions to leave the ship with his debt cleared, but he refuses to leave until he's helped his two team members do the same. By the end of the allowed time for the gamble, he gets the other two to meet the conditions while losing his own advantage and being taken as a slave—however, with the extra those two got, they can "buy" him back immediately after and all three will be allowed to leave. They keep the money and leave him to be taken away to work off his debt as a slave.
    • He convinces someone else to "buy" him back and then takes back the extra cash his friends were trying to keep. He then uses this cash to "buy" back another scam victim out of sympathy. It turns out that this arrangement has a few strings attached, sending him into even greater debt than before.
    • He's later abducted by the yakuza again and presented with a race for enough money to cover his new debt three times over. He only gets this money if he finishes first or second. The race is a footrace across a thin iron bar. With a potentially fatal and definitely very painful elevation. There are three times as many contestants as iron bars. Pushing other contestants down is not only allowed, but encouraged, and there's one guy in front of him. The one guy in front of him is slow as hell, but he refuses to push. The guy behind him catches up and isn't so nice... Luckily, he manages to grab the bar and pull himself back up, being disqualified but not injured.
    • For another chance to get prize money (and for the winners of the previous "race" to collect theirs), it turns out that they have to walk, though not race, across another iron bar, this time with a dropping distance of several dozen stories and an extremely powerful electric current running through it. When the ten people who have decided to cross are all around the halfway point, he decides to get them to all forfeit the money so they can have the current cut and safely crawl back to safer ground. The power isn't cut... and everyone except Kaiji falls and dies. And then when he makes it, he finds out they were all disqualified because of him asking anyway, and he doesn't receive the prize money he just nearly died over.
  • Weaponized by Ousen in Kingdom: While trying to siege an impregnable city, he creates a swarm of starving, weakened refugees and drives them towards it. Being a kind-hearted man, the lord of the city allows them in and shares his city's food stores with them. This bites him back in multiple ways: his food stores are depleted faster, the refugees cause unrest, and Ousen sneaked in saboteurs among the crowd. When his city is about to fall, the well-meaning Lord of Gyou is Driven to Suicide.
  • In episode 13 of Little Witch Academia (2017), instead of allowing themselves to be eaten by Vajarois as a sacrifice for the Samhain Magic Festival like volunteers before them, Akko, Lotte and Sucy instead try to exorcise the spirit. After succeeding in doing so, freeing Vajarois of her tortured existence while entertaining the audience more than everybody else in the show, they end up getting disqualified from the contest for not following the rules.
  • In Macross Frontier, super popular Idol Singer Sheryl Nome, befriends a young girl Ranka Lee, who also wants to become a singer, and encourages her to do so, including offering a co-place at her show. Not long after that, Ranka becomes the new celebrity, and Sheryl finds herself forgotten and deserted by both her fans and her agent. Her CDs land in bargain bin, and her posters are thrown into rubbish to make place for Ranka's. Then it gets subverted as Ranka saves Sheryl from her illness and helps her defeat said agent. Oh, and Sheryl regains her popularity too...
    • And it seems that in the movie it gets harsher. While Sheryl's fall wasn't in the first movie, she is also set up to be ruined financially, having paid for rescue operation of Galaxy. And then Sheryl's "reward" for paying for rescue operation is being sentenced to death.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, the noble Hero Antagonist Arrow Mellow of the Blue Team turns on his own allies and shoots them down when he sees them targeting someone who appears to be a civilian fleeing from the fight. Unfortunately, that "civilian" is actually the pilot of the ZZ Gundam, and when Judau gets into his mobile suit, Arrow is killed in battle.
  • Monster is all about this trope. Dr. Tenma saves the life of a young boy, who turns out to be the titular monster, and spends the rest of the series paying for it. He also has a habit of risking capture to tend to others' wounds, even when he knows they're bad guys, and he eventually gets caught by the police because he stopped to help a little kid who scraped his knee. Poor Tenma.
  • In Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, when Ken Miyamae hears that Maeno's being transferred, he decides to be a little nicer to him before the time comes. In reality Maeno was being transferred to Ken's office, and a change of editorship causes three of Maeno's mangakas to be transferred to Ken due to "the two of them being so friendly recently". Even worse is the fact that each of the mangakas have been affected by Maeno in a different way: the first one is a newbie who's still too charmed by Maeno's good looks to realize what he's like, the second one is so traumatized by Maeno's shoddy editing in one year that she's distrusting of all editors and the third one is a senior mangaka who's hellbent on getting revenge on Maeno.
  • My Divorced Crybaby Neighbour: Sawatari defends his neighbour Ochiai from a drunk old man who's molesting her, but it turns out he was an important client of their company, resulting in Sawatari getting suspended with his pay cut. On the flip side, Ochiai, feeling guilty for the situation, offers to cook for him during his suspension, starting off their friendship.
  • My Girlfriend Gives Me Goosebumps!: Rinko warns Haruka to stay away from Kisaki. Not only this fails to deter Haruka, but Kisaki forces her to hang out again, this time to talk about Haruka, with the naration noting that her days of suffering begins once more.
  • Zig-Zagged in My Hero Academia. Izuku finds out his "friend" Bakugo is in the clutches of a Muck Monster and impulsively runs to his rescue despite being Quirkless. When All Might obliterates the monster and the other Pro Heroes tend to him, the Pros chew out Izuku for his actions while praising Bakugo for his "bravery". Despite this, this action is what reinspires All Might and allows him to choose Izuku to carry on the power of One For All.
  • In the manga version of My-HiME, Yuuichi intervenes to save Shiho from some thugs who were planning on sexually assaulting her, but he gets injured in the process, essentially forcing him to give up kendo. As a result of his action, the entire kendo team is disqualified, and they take out their anger on him, forcing him to leave his school and come to Fuuka Academy.
  • My Monster Secret: One of the few genuinely thoughtful things Akane does in the series is offer to take over driving duties during a camping trip so that Akari can have a few beers during a rest stop. Unfortunately, the van doesn't survive the trip (Akane's knowledge of cars turns out to be a century out of date, and she attempts to compensate using her demon powers), and she finds herself on the hook for replacing the van even though it wasn't solely her fault.
  • The manga version of My-Otome has an incident in which Arika accidentally upsets Nagi, archduke of Artai, who orders her killed for it, until Nina offers to take her punishment. Nagi then whips Nina's backside with a riding crop and starts whipping her harder when seeing the bandages she put on when she pricked her fingers while desperately trying to finish her sewing project. Mashiro (or rather, the boy pretending to be Mashiro) then punches Nagi, and everyone gives him a What the Hell, Hero? speech for almost causing an international incident.
  • Naruto:
    • The reason Nagato finally snapped and became Pain. Well, that and a bit of more general Cosmic Plaything status and a dead best friend (whose corpse he preserved and rigged up as a zombie avatar of himself).
    • Kakashi's father chose to give saving his captured friends priority over completing a mission, and as a result, was ostracized in the village- even by those he had saved- and ended up taking his own life. Kakashi took the inherent lesson to heart, suppressing his emotions and placing the mission above all else, and it took Obito telling him that he considered his father a hero, and going off to save Rin for Kakashi to change his mind and aid in Rin's rescue.
    • Kakashi abandoned the mission to save Obito after being called out on his actions. Unfortunately Obito ended up becoming the Big Bad Tobi and ended up being responsible for all the problems that happened in the ninja world.
  • Two prominent examples in Ojamajo Doremi. When Hazuki performs healing magic on a bunny near death in season 1, she gets a cold (though it would have been far worse had the Queen not taken most of its power) and her magic confiscated for at least two weeks. At the end of that season, Onpu selflessly performs mind control magic to save the group from being found out as witches by friends and family. Because that was the exact moment Majo Ruka's charm decided to run out, she is put into a coma and the Queen would have left her that way if it wasn't for the girls convincing her than the Dark Magical Girl had changed for the better.
  • In Okane ga Nai, Ayase kindly help a hurt and soaked Kanou, giving him shelter and words of comfort. Four years later, he gets owned (literally) by the very same Kanou, who begins the renewal of their relationship by raping him and subsequently taking control of every aspect of his life. This is not played quite positively, but it's not played entirely negatively, either. Presumably because it (and Ayase's incredible level of pathetic) are supposed to be titillating, since it is hentai.
  • One Piece:
    • This seems to be one of the reasons why the Straw Hats are wanted. Every good thing they do (beating up other pirates or sadistic assassins) simply makes them look like a bigger threat in the eyes of the World Government and Marines. Though the corrupt marine Nezumi does cause Luffy to get his first bounty, it should be noted that Luffy's deeds were considered to be "undermining the worth of Marine forces" back in the East Blue Saga.
    • Though it's arguable as to whether this qualifies as punishment, considering bounties are usually considered a symbol of pride in the One Piece world, and the Straw Hats (with a couple exceptions) think it's downright awesome when theirs go up. This is because bounties aren't just cut and dry how dangerous or evil you are, they're how big a threat the government views you as. Given many of the Straw Hats' adventures expose the Government's dirtier side, particularly involving the employment of the Seven Warlords, those "good deeds" make the Straw Hats big trouble.
    • When Luffy met Zoro, the latter had been starving for nine days and was awaiting execution. The reason Zoro was arrested in the first place? While passing through the Marine Base town, he saved a little girl from being attacked by a vicious dog, whose owner (the son of the Marine leader of the town) promptly threatened to have the girl and her mom executed unless Zoro allowed himself to be arrested.
    • Sanji gives food to Gin, a starving pirate, who later comes back with the rest of the Krieg pirates, as Krieg wants to steal the Baratie. Possibly subverted when Gin is unable to bring himself to finish off Sanji. Sanji even gives food to Krieg himself, who promptly attacks him once he's eaten his fill.
    • In a flashback, the fishman Fisher Tiger took in a little ex-slave girl named Koala, and brought her back home. Koala's hometown sold Tiger's location out to the Marines (unbeknownst to Koala herself), and Tiger was consequently mortally wounded in the fight that ensued.
    • In the Dressrosa arc, the Living Toy Thunder Soldier is branded as a criminal because he stepped in a human's house in the process of saving his kidnapped surrogate daughter Rebecca.
  • Pretty Cure:
    • Before the events of HuGtto! Pretty Cure began, Hana, back in her old school, stood up for a girl named Eri, who was being bullied by the members of the cheerleading squad just because she had a higher billing than anyone else in a upcoming tournament. When Hana came in to defend her, the bullies decided to redirect their anger at Hana by basically avoiding her like the plague. They managed to rope Eri into it too, under the threat that she'll be targeted again if she even so much as comforts Hana. It's all but implied that this was the reason why Hana changed schools in the first place, as well as the cause for her Stepford Smiler tendencies throughout the first half of the season. And to make things worse, the future Hugtan and the Criasu Coporation came from turned out to be an Alternate Timeline where Hana never transferred, ultimately playing in a role in her untimely death (revealed by Word of God to be suicide) as she had never met Saaya or Homare or tried to better herself, resulting in George deciding to stop time in order to prevent Hana from suffering like her future counterpart. While his and Hugtan’s intervention does change Hana’s future for the better, it doesn’t change that the entire series started due to Eri’s bullies targeting Hana and turning Eri and the rest of the school against her just because she stood up against them.
    • Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure: Lala manages to get retrieve the Star Pen from the Notraiders, only for herself to be accused of stealing it thanks to a misunderstanding. This causes her and the others to briefly become fugitives.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • Ash ends up losing to a scatterbrained trainer named Cameron in the Unova League Vertress Conference after helping him register for the tournament. Making matters worse, Cameron actually missed the registration period, but Ash was able to convince Nurse Joy to make a slight exception for him.
    • Ash ends up losing the Kalos League in a similar manner; the winner, Alain, didn't even want to enter the tournament initially, but Ash talked him into it. Alain even rubs salt in the wound by betraying him and allowing Team Flare to kidnap him during their attack on the Lumiose Gym.
  • This is practically how the universe works in the bleak world of Puella Magi Madoka Magica. There's a sadistic Equivalent Exchange of happiness and sadness, so each hopeful Wish is counterbalanced by an equal curse. In particular, Sayaka Miki makes a wish to heal the broken arm of the boy she loves (when he was consumed by despair over being unable to play the violin again), only to be stood up by another girl and eventually fall into despair and become one of the Eldritch Abomination monsters all Magical Girls fight.
    • Most of the wishes do this, but the first and most memetic instance is mundane: Madoka agrees to be Mami's friend, and fight with her so that she won't be lonely. Mami's so happy about this that she doesn't pay attention in her next fight and gets decapitated.
  • In Rave Master, because a woman named Aciela used magic to create a parallel world where humanity didn't go extinct, her each and every descendent is doomed to a life of misery and loneliness.
  • God, Tsuna from Reborn! (2004) is a very good kid. But it seems that whenever he ends up doing good or something morally right, he ends up paying for it. Sometimes literally. He saved a rare raccoon-panda thing from being rolled over by a roller coaster, but then the zoo fined him for breaking a few things in the process. He also caught a few infamous crooks, but the police arrested him too for looking like he was one of them, (he was in his boxers).
    • On a more serious note, he almost paid a greater price when Mukuro feigned a give-up and asked Tsuna to kill him. But Tsuna, invoking the Thou Shalt Not Kill trope, declined. Mukuro proceeded to grab him from behind, whispered why he fails at life into his ear- accompanied by a nasty headbutt- and then throws him in the direction of a nasty, pointed object.
    • This also turns out to be an Enforced Trope in the setting because the universe wants him to be a mafia boss, and even with the number of superpowers floating around the setting, it is logistically difficult to do this and be a morally upstanding young man. At least the main thing it actually requires him to do is to get into high-stakes superpowered battles with other mafiosi.
  • In Red River (1995), Yuri and her friends help a group of peasants in Egypt organize into a proper rebellion, with the intended end goal of getting Ramses released from prison so that he can set off on his goal of taking power and making life better for the lower class. Most unfortunately, she forgets to actually tell this part to the rebels. Thus, the leader is more than a little annoyed when he sees her sneaking off in the middle of the incited riot, thinking that she never actually cared about their cause and was abandoning them when things were tough. He swears vengeance on her and joins the next battle specifically for a chance to kill her.
  • Chirin of Ringing Bell has finally avenged his mother by killing the Wolf that has terrorized the sheep. Unfortunately, the other sheep are far too shocked by what he has become to accept him back into the flock, and he goes off alone to potentially freeze to death.
  • Tsukasa from Romantic Killer has issues with dealing with girls, which is revealed to stem from helping Yukana, a woman he happened to run into one day, pick up her bag after she fell and dropped it. While this was a kind gesture, it made Yukana become dangerously obsessed with Tsukasa, turning her into a relentless Stalker with a Crush to the point that Tsukasa had to get a restraining order against her and was forced to move to a school much father away.
  • Touhou Suzunaan ~ Forbidden Scrollery has a chapter where the Human Village is dealing with an infestation of rats brought on by heavy rains, and Reisen Udongein Inaba creates a set of cat-shaped statues that repel the pests using ultrasonic sounds. Her "reward" for a job well done is a "gentle scolding" (read: punishment) because she didn't get her master Eirin's permission beforehand.
  • UQ Holder! reveals that Evangeline McDowell's history as The Dreaded started when she saved a town from some wizards. That earned her quite a few enemies who tried to kill her. With every one she killed in self-defense, more and more swore vengeance until everyone was afraid of and hated her.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS: Revolver, when he was eight, reported the Lost Incident. Although that led to the six kidnapped children being saved, it also led to Revolver's father being imprisoned for three years. When Dr. Kogami finally returned home, he was left comatose after being infected with a computer virus. Revolver probably blames himself for this.
  • In YuYu Hakusho, Yusuke is a teen delinquent, always in trouble, being told he'll never amount to anything (and starting to believe it). One day, he sees a little boy chasing a ball into the street, and rushes out to stop him without a second thought. He gets killed as a result. The worst part is if Yusuke had not pushed the kid out of the way, the kid would have been perfectly fine. Because Yusuke 'saved' him, he got some scrapes. Though eventually dying turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to Yusuke, since he gets better.
    • After everything he does in the series—a good half of it actively in pursuit of saving the day, and a majority of it within reasonable moral guidelines—he then gets killed again by the vastly more powerful villain. That isn't this trope; he totally earned getting killed by Sensui after Tempting Fatenote . What is this trope is that his bosses then work out that he's got the genetic potential to turn into an atavistic super-demon, and send a strike team to obliterate his corpse. Again, he gets better.
  • In Zetman, the entire chain of events which is the main premise of the story is triggered by Jin trying to rescue a suicidal man.

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