No Good Deed Goes Unpunished / Literature

Examples of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in Literature

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• In 11/22/63, the time-traveling protagonist goes through a great deal of trouble to stop the Kennedy assassination, in the belief that doing so will make the world a better place. Instead, it causes major damage to the fabric of time, and leads to an even bleaker future.
• In Across the Universe (Beth Revis), the book ends with Amy and Elder dismantling the machine that pumps tranquilizers into the water supply, giving the people of Godspeed back their emotions. The sequel describes in disturbing detail how this leads to mass suicides, panic attacks, riots, and overall dissent.
• In Alternate Routes, the protagonist has been on the run for years from people who want him dead because He Knows Too Much, having accidentally overheard something he shouldn't have. The reason he overheard it was because he saw some colleagues in trouble and went to see if he could help.
• Animorphs: The Andalites named their Alien Non-Interference Clause the law of Seerow's Kindness after this trope. Seerow was an explorer who found a primitive yet intelligent race of symbionts, and gifted them knowledge and technology. These Yeerks then began a conquest of the Galaxy, enslaving or killing millions.
• Anita Blake quotes the saying in her first book, Guilty Pleasures: "He had to be stopped. If I hadn't interfered tonight, he would have been stopped. No good deed goes unpunished."
• Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World: At the start of the story, when Nick realizes that a member of his party is embezzling funds, he gives said member the chance to come clean. Which he does... while also accusing Nick of doing the same. Worse is that Argus, the party's leader and Nick's mentor and father-figure, let the less honorable team-member stay while kicking Nick out.
• Bazil Broketail:
  • One of Lagdalen's first acts in the series was helping out Relkin by providing him and Bazil with false documents so they would be able to join the New Legion. This is later discovered and results in her being expelled from the novitiate, ending her career in the clergy she worked for. Subverted when Lessis — impressed with her willingness to break rules in order to do what is right — approaches her right after and gives her an offer to serve as her personal assistant in the Office of Unusual Insight. Lagdalen naturally takes the opportunity.
  • Evander gets this twice.
    • He saves the Port Tarquil's mayor when Gadjung casts a curse in order to kill him. He is cursed himself by Gadjung in return.
    • He rescues princess Serena from would-be kidnappers. Although she does show gratitude, she later panics and gets him imprisoned when she discovers his inhuman, cursed skin. To her credit, she regrets her actions afterwards.
• Subverted in Blood Meridian. David Brown gets shot with an arrow and wanders the camp pleading for medical attention. Neither the Doc, nor the Judge, nor his own brother dare help him. Finally, the Kid does the surgery, and gets a stern talking to by Tobin, who angrily hisses that Brown would have killed the Kid had the surgery gone wrong, and that playing the hero will be the end of him.
• Boot Camp (2007): Garrett, Sarah, and Pauly, three teens who have escaped from an abusive boot camp, steal a boat to cross the Saint Lawrence River into Canada, first pulling out all the stoppers in the other boats at the dock. Harry and Rebecca stupidly chase after them in one of the boats, which almost immediately starts to sink. By the time the kids have reached the other side, Harry and Rebecca's boat is foundering in the middle of the river. Rather than leave them to drown, Garrett drops Sarah and Pauly off, then takes his boat back into the river to pull Harry and Rebecca aboard. They reward him for saving them by taking him right back to Lake Harmony. Mr. Z references this trope by name while punishing Garrett.
• The plot of By Fire and Sword is started when the protagonist rescues the Big Bad inadvertently. Note that the villain is Historical Domain Character, making this a Been There, Shaped History at its most blatant.
• This is a recurring theme in the short stories of Ramsey Campbell.
  • In "Cold Print", one of his works set in the Cthulhu Mythos, Sam Strutt sets Y'gonolac's bookshop ablaze to prevent him from setting up a cult in the Severn Valley. Unfortunately, Y'gonolac catches him before he can escape, and messily devours Strutt.
  • In "The Brood", Blackband puts his life on the line to destroy the vampire moth's young to stop their killing spree, and ends up their latest victim as a result.
• In Carrie, Sue and Tommy's attempt to do something nice for Carrie and give her a magic prom night ends with Tommy dead and Sue traumatized — and to add insult to injury, THEY get blamed for the whole mess.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Accelerator suffers brain damage via a bullet to the head the first time he uses his powers to save rather than hurt someone. And he continues to get hit with this again and again as the story goes on, although he eventually begins to see some benefit from it as he adjusts his worldview.
  • Not to mention Touma himself, who almost always winds up in the hospital after helping someone. His first attempt at helping someone? Lost his memories.
• The Chronicles of Prydain:
  • In The Black Cauldron, Taran gives up his magical brooch to "buy" the titular cauldron, only to find out it can't be destroyed without letting someone willing die. Eilonwy tries to comfort him by pointing out that while he doesn't have the brooch anymore, no one can take away the fact that he did something truly honorable. And then he is pretty much forced to give up that very thing, when the only person around to help move the cauldron only will do so on the condition that Taran lie and say the other person found and retrieved the thing.
  • Taran is hit with this later on when his refusal to fight dirty or kill downed enemies results in the death of one of his beloved mentors (and numerous other village people as well). Of course it's eventually averted, since it's precisely the fact that Taran becomes willing to put Honor Before Reason and do good despite the cost that makes him worthy to draw Dyrnwyn in the last book.
• Codex Alera: Gaius Sextus works a furycrafting that sends fear into the heart of his enemies, and sends an entire legion of enemy troops running, except for one man, who stands, and is promptly cut down. Meanwhile, Isana sheds a few tears when she realizes that that man was sentenced to death for being braver and stronger than the rest of his unit.
• The sports-themed gamebook Defending Champions (from publishers of the "Which Way" series) gives you a choice about whether or not to punish one of your team for violating curfew. If you decide to let him off the hook, this leads to a Non-Standard Game Over. This act of clemency leads other players to think you're not cracking down on curfew violators and sets off a chain reaction that leads to you losing complete control of team discipline.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, Karyl and Rob manage to turn a battle their dumb superiors put them into from an unquestionable disaster to a draw that actually favours their side, and get arrested for treason for their trouble.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry's unwillingness to let evil triumph because he refused to save someone started a war that caused an uncertain (but extremely high) number of deaths and made him even more of a social pariah among the wizarding community than he was before.
  • Probably the clearest example is when one of Harry's enemies gifts him his own tombstone. It reads "Harry Dresden: He died doing the right thing."
  • In Proven Guilty, Murphy abandons an investigation to help Harry save a teenage girl who is the daughter of a genuine Knight in Shining Armor, by going through the heart of Winter itself, with no guarantee that she'll come out alive, the odds stacked against her. She doesn't even hesitate to help. Her reward? A demotion, and a warning that she'll get fired if it happens again. As of Changes, she is fired. For exactly the same reason.
• What is it that persuades the church that the Dungeon Item Shop is bringing in so much income from the community that they ought to pay a 10% church tax and give some of it back? Well, the shop donated toys and teddy bears to the orphans in the church's care.
• Earth's Children: In The Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla saves Brac, Broud's son, from a hyena attack by killing the animal with a sling. She then gets cursed with death for a month for breaking the Clan's rules about women using weapons, with Broud actually pushing for a permanent curse. That said, because she did save Brac, Brun decides to only have her banished temporarily rather than permanently to give her a chance.
• Evolution: A Neanderthal known as the Old Man looks after Jahna and her brother when they are cut off from a hunting party in a snowstorm. Does his hospitality result in gratitude and reconciliation with the skinnies? No, his generosity is rewarded by the children's father only with a brutal death.
• The Fifth Season: Central to the setting are Orogenes, who have the ability to, among other things, calm the constant seismic activity that plagues the world. When an orogene uses their abilities to save their family and neighbors from an earthquake, the survivors' first order of business is often to track them down and kill them out of fear and prejudice.
• Frankenstein: The Creature gets shot in the shoulder for saving a little girl from drowning and is attacked by a family he had been secretly helping with chores.
• Ghost In the Noonday Sun: After Oliver tells First Mate Ringrose that he marked the spot where he thinks the treasure is buried by leaving his jackknife pointed in that direction, Ringrose's jaw drops "like a trapdoor." He then reveals that he saw the jackknife lying there, thought Oliver had lost it, and picked it up to return to him later.
• Gladiator: Instead of being thanked for saving a fellow employee from suffocating in a bank vault, Danner is immediately suspected of planning to rob the bank with his Super-Strength at a later date, and is promptly fired and interrogated.
• Guardians of the Flame: Kathol and Durine are jailed for beating up some young noblemen who were about to rape a woman, as the ringleader is the son of the local lord. He had no fear of ever getting punished, naturally. Thankfully, along with Pirojil the trio have connections as well, being on a mission from the dowager empress, and pull strings with the garrison commander to escape.
• The Hangman: The title character's second victim is a man who loudly calls him a murderer for killing his first victim, a foreigner who had done nothing wrong. No one else stands up to The Hangman for the rest of the story, and he ends up killing them all with no opposition whatsoever.
• Harry Potter:
  • Dumbledore takes an orphaned boy to Hogwarts and gives him an education in magic. That boy grows up to be Lord Voldemort.
  • Lord Voldemort's birth came as an indirect result of a Ministry of Magic official arresting Voldemort's would-be birth mother's father, who starts attacking her upon learning that she harbors a crush on a Muggle man, and her brother, for their violent tendencies (they tried to fight off the officers trying to arrest her brother for his abusing magic on the very same Muggle man she has a crush on), giving her time to drug the Muggle man she has a crush on with a Love Potion long enough that said Muggle man would take her away and eventually involuntarily become the father of her child.
  • Dumbledore does his best to protect Harry and makes sure he survives, despite knowing that his wanting him safe instead of prepared for things will lead to horrible results. The worst being Sirius' death, which almost broke Harry. Consequently, Dumbledore has to call himself out while explaining everything to Harry.
  • Harry gets his own in Goblet of Fire, when he and Cedric are near the Triwizard Tournament cup. Harry suggests they both take the cup at the same time, making both of them winners. The cup was a Portkey and transported both to a graveyard. Cedric gets killed, Harry tortured and almost killed himself, and Voldemort gets resurrected. Had Harry selfishly chosen to take the cup himself, Cedric would have survived... and could have run off to inform Dumbledore about the Portkey, possibly preventing Voldemort's resurrection.
• In High School D×D, Asia Argento often uses her powers to heal anyone. At one point during her time at the Roman Catholic Church, she met Diodora Astaroth, a devil who deliberately injured himself, and healed him immediately. Since the Church opposed devils at the time, Asia was banished as a heretic.
• In Honor Among Enemies, Warner Caslet is the captain of a light cruiser in the navy of the People's Republic of Haven. Haven has recently suffered a coup d'etat and is now ruled by a vicious, bloodthirsty regime which not only kills the officers who fail in their assignments, but shoots their families for good measure. When he is dispatched to the Silesian Confederacy as a scout for a commerce raiding operation that will prey on the merchant shipping of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, which Haven is at war with, he discovers a batch of home-grown pirates who are sadistic on a whole new level, capturing merchant ships even when they know they will not be able to take any captured cargo with them and torturing/raping the crew en masse. Caslet manages to convince his Peoples Commissioner that these pirates deserve to be caught, even if it is not in their orders to do so, and eventually tracks down their ship. However, the pirates are in the midst of capturing another freighter, and this one is a Manticoran ship, which Caslet has standing orders to capture himself. Caslet knows that there is a good chance that his ship will be destroyed if he decides to engage the pirates, and his own superiors might very well execute him on general principles if he risks his command to save a ship belonging to an enemy nation, but his personal integrity will not allow him to stand by and he again convinces his Commissioner to allow an intervention...then the Manticoran "freighter" he was trying to save revealed that it was a disguised warship and ended up capturing his ship. He avoids his government's wrath over this due to a legal loophole (All the officers claimed that the Manticoran freighter was flying under Andermani colors at the time in their reports, and his orders stated he was to assist Andermani ships), only then to end up earning the personal displeasure of a dubiously sane member of the Committee of Public Safety for showing basic decency to prisoners of war.
• In The House of Night, Stevie Rae saves Rephaim's life. In the end, this small act is the catalyst for Stevie Rae's boyfriend Dallas to go over to the dark-side when he finds out she's been hiding him this whole time. Stevie Rae is also Mistaken for Cheating.
• The Hunger Games: Darius. He steps in to try and prevent Thread from whipping Gale to death. He gets knocked out and is later made into an Avox by the Capitol.
• I Am Mordred: After Mordred frees the hawk, it kills Nyneve (and thus Gull, who's her familiar), since it's really Merlin transformed.
• I'm Quitting Heroing: Leo saves humanity from the demon army. However, rather than welcoming him as a hero, the people regard him as a threat because of his strength, and the king eventually exiles him.
• In The Irregular at Magic High School, a soldier named Dick, fed up with his motherland's discrimination against people like him, turns traitor and captures a family of innocent-but-politically-valuable civilians (including a thirteen-year-old girl) so he can sell them to his new masters. During the standoff, a friend of Dick's begs him to think about what he's doing and let the civilians go. Dick hesitates for a few seconds, tempted by his conscience...and because of that moment of distraction, the terrified child was able to hit him with a fatal spell. What Dick was going to decide if he hadn't been killed, we'll never know.
• John Putnam Thatcher: Downplayed in Sweet and Low. When one character offers to get the murderer a lawyer, his Sit Com Archnemesis pounces on how the guy didn't extend him the same courtesy when he was Wrongfully Accused.
  Rarely had a charitable impulse been more untimely. And, though Thatcher, it wasn't as if Curtis Yeoman had so many.
• Justine, by the Marquis de Sade, is an incredibly over-the-top rendering of this trope, with the title character's virtue and good deeds rewarded with the worst kind of abuse and suffering throughout her life. And considering that the author's name is where we get the word "sadism," we have a clear picture of just how bad things get for her.
• In Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, Thorfinn decides that it would be a good idea to take in a number of Normans on the run from England. They later kill the only heir of a neighboring lord, leading to an understandable Roaring Rampage of Revenge and preparing the way for Thorfinn's own death.
• Michael (and Michael alone) is a frequent victim of this in the Knight and Rogue Series. Trying to save a 'kidnapped' woman gets Michael arrested, taking the fall for another man gets him flogged, letting Fisk escape Ceciel's guards gets him experimented on, refusing to arrest an innocent woman gets him marked unredeemed, stopping a man from beating a young boy gets him arrested-again, helping to put out a fire gets him chased by a mob, helping arrest a murderer gets him kicked out of town, and trying to save a man who's falling gets him accused of murder. As Fisk says, heroism is vastly overrated.
• The Legend of Drizzt: Drizzt's good deeds in the early part of his life caused him no small amount of grief. During his first surface raid he spared the life of a little elf girl and faked her death. Unfortunately, Lolth knew about this and didn't like that he wasn't an Ax-Crazy child murderer. She demanded a sacrifice from his house, and his father Zaknafein sacrificed himself in Drizz't's place. When the little elf girl he spared grew up, she mistakenly blamed Drizz't for the massacre that claimed her family that night due to her trauma. She spent her entire life hunting him and nearly killed him only to die in the attempt. Then there was the time he stumbled upon a gang of barghest whelps that had murdered a farming family and avenged them by killing the whelps. This earned him misplaced blame for the murders (as a Drow, he was a prime suspect) and the ire of a persistent bounty hunter. This trend more or less ended after he met his True Companions, who made sure Drizz't would get better PR.
• In Peter Blauner's Man Of The Hour, the main character saves a class full of students from a bomb on a school bus but becomes implicated in the subsequent investigation, turning his life upside down and forcing him to clear his name by finding the real bomber.
• In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Richard helps out a homeless person and becomes an Unperson for his trouble, although it works out for him in the end.
• In Otto of the Silver Hand, One-eyed Hans captures a guard in Castle Trutz-Drachen and demands to know where Otto is being held. Once he gets the information he wants, he considers killing the guard, but leaves him Bound and Gagged instead. Eventually the guard escapes from his bonds and raises the alarm. Hans says, "See now what comes of being merciful."
• Post Mortem (2022): Officer Miller is a genuinely nice person who tries to help Ralph as much as he can. His kindness is rewarded by Ralph killing him after he discovers who he was. To add insult to injury he was still sympathizing with Ralph for what he went through.
• In Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief, giving money to a beggar triggers a stampede of them.
• In Michael Connelly's The Reversal, Jason Jessup's defense attorney complained to the judge about the prosecution only releasing part of the data they intend to use against Jessup. Prosecutor Margareth McPherson (nicknamed Maggie McFierce) replied they were still within the deadline and suggested the defender believed no good deed should go unpunished.
• Scrapped Princess: Queen Elmyr was the mother of the eponymous princess, who, according to Grendel's Prophecy, must be slain before the eve of her 16th birthday, as she was destined to bring about the world's destruction. But Elmyr knew her daughter was innocent, so she secretly arranged to have her spared and taken in by the Cassull family. When her husband became aware of this, 15 years later, he had her imprisoned in the castle tower, where she was tortured and beaten for it. And, in a cruel twist of fate, Elmyr eventually succumbed to the extent of her injuries and perished - in the cell next to her daughter, whom she had never been allowed to see, without ever knowing her name, or hearing her call her "mother".
• The Sherlock Holmes story "The Gloria Scott" has Holmes' friend's father escape from a convict ship, but turn back to save a man's life... only for him to blackmail his rescuer and ultimately drive him to suicide.
• In The Ship Who... Sang, Helva and her brawn Jennan are sent to rescue colonists on Chloe, a planet in imminent danger of being fried by its unstable sun. These colonists having chosen Chloe for a life of pious reflection, they aren't easily convinced to be taken away from their home, which wastes a lot of time. There are enough of them in the final batch that they physically can't all fit into Helva's interior, and Jennan and three colonists have to suit up and ride in her airlock, where they're less protected from the wave of heat that strikes as Helva tries to flee. Still they probably would have made it with burns and heatstroke, but Jennan tried to calm his panicking companions and was struck by a flailing limb which disconnected something in his suit, and quickly died.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Happens constantly to Jon Snow. Actually happens to just about everyone in his family for that matter. And most people in Westeros (particularly those who like Snow's family are well-intended, or just not much morally questionable; it's often joked among the fandom that while Anyone Can Die, the author prefers to target those the audience might sympathize with).
  • And of course Jaime Lannister , who, despite being a member of the Kingsguard and sworn to protect the king, killed the Mad King Aerys to prevent him from murdering every person in King's Landing. Unfortunately, no one understood why he did it (or cared), and he was forever branded with the title "Kingslayer".
  • Ned Stark tries to prevent Queen Cersei and her three children's deaths by warning her to run away, as he has learned her dark secret, and he knows the king will have them all executed. Her answer is to capture him, have him painted as a traitor and force him to accept being separated from his entire family, while keeping his eldest daughter as a prisoner.
• In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin finds a young girl who is unable to speak English and he realizes that she is probably lost. Quentin proceeds to buy her some food and spend the next few hours trying to find her family. His thanks for this is an arrest from the police, who were summoned by the young girl's older brother who thought that Quentin was kidnapping the girl. Quentin is fined seven dollars for this 'crime'.
• Space Wolf: Grey Hunter, naturally, this being the Crapsack World of Warhammer 40,000. During a Chaos-instigated rebellion on a world in the Wolves' territory, Ragnar's squad rescues a planetary defense forces unit that stayed loyal to the Empire. Their reward? A deep mind-probe by an Inquisition psyker (to be doubly sure of their loyalty) that kills one and ages the others a few years.
• Spoonbenders: When Irene discovered that the financial investment firm she worked at was embezzling their clients, she took it up with her bosses who proceeded to lie to her face about it while also trying to gaslight her into thinking she's imagining it. She responds by slapping him in the face before she starts calling all of their robbed clients. By the end of it, Irene is fired, lawsuits are filed against her on "assault charges" and she's forced to represent herself, worried that word would get around about Ad Hominem attacks in association with her infamous family name. At the end, she ran out of money and was forced to move back in with her father.
• In the backstory of Star Wars: Kenobi, this is how Annileen's husband Dannar died; he stopped to help a stranded traveler one day but Tusken Raiders killed them both.
• "Here lies Sam Flood/ Whose nature bid him/ To do much good/ Much good it did him" reads the writing on the wall in The Stranger House. Generally considered a saint, everyone is queuing up to take the credit for driving him to suicide. It turns out that he was murdered. For trying to get justice and care for a little girl who was raped and then sent to Australia to hush up the crime.
• In the Alicization arc of Sword Art Online, Kirito and Eugeo are forced to break the taboo to help their valets Ronye and Tiese, when they're about to be raped by Raios and Humbert, who shield themselves behind the fact that as nobles they have the right to "punish" any perceived slight as they see fit. They're forced to turn themselves in to the Knights of Integrity and labeled as criminals. On the flip side, their actions sped up their plans to find Alice, and they were taken to the Cathedral much earlier than they expected.
• The 1986 Disney storybook "Thumper's Little Sisters" has Thumper saving his sisters from a vicious dog. His mother and father yell at him though in spite of his sisters standing up for him. Why? Thumper ended up leading the dog back to their burrow!
• Titan's Forest: Early in Crossroads of Canopy, Unar uses her magic to help a slave plant additional seeds in order to cover for another slave, who was too weak to do the work and would have been thrown to her death for it. The next day, the wear on her magic reserves causes her to be passed over when the gardeners are being judged for their power, costing her her chance to venture out of the Garden and forcing her to remain a servant while her friends progress in station.
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, where the whole story revolves around a good deed that is punished, namely the protagonist's father, a defense attorney, making the unpopular decision to defend a black man who has been falsely accused. Even more so the reason that the black man is in trouble in the first place was because he did a number of good deeds for a troubled young white woman because he felt pity for her.
• The main events of Ben Mikaelsen's Touching Spirit Bear get kicked off when Villain Protagonist Cole Matthews raids a store and brags that he did that. When one boy reveals that Cole had done this, the boy gets ravaged brutally.
• Wicked:
  • Elphaba starts out trying to do good. She ends up getting killed off for real by the end of the book because of it. (The musical version has much more family friendly ending for her though she's still blamed for everything)
  • Glinda suffers from this trope, since her attempt to help Dorothy by giving her the ruby slippers only contributes to Elphaba's eventual nervous breakdown when she hexes the ruby slippers so they won't come off Dorothy's feet, which keeps Dorothy from giving them to Elphaba...which could very well have kept Elphaba from lighting her broom, and... well...
  • All of Glinda's attempts to help Elphaba be a better and happier person not only fail, but take a toll on her social circle and emotional well-being, and are possibly what help drive Elphaba on a more radical course. It's implied that the adult Glinda is something of a drunk specifically because of this.

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