General
Come to think of it, this is what many people think of the world in real life.
Anomalocaris
I know it says no real life examples. Uh, what about the end-Permian extinction? It's so bad, 90% of all life died out. Pretty much all animals were suffering. Heck, they even call it the Great Dying! It seems like the only thriving forms of life were fungi and bacteria. If you can think of any animals or plants that were thriving through the extinction, tell me. I'm not counting the K-T extinction, because at least mammals were thriving - Purgatorius is an example. Fossils were found before and after the extinction.
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That would be Death World and not Crapsack World.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
There was no sentient life so it can't really be considered a Crapsack World.
I'm a Troper!!!
I'm sure North Korea is pretty crappy.
This shall be my true, Start of Darkness
I think that the trope refers to an entire world being crappy. North Korea is more of a Crapsack Country. A pretty small one, too.
Edited by 79.103.102.9 It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Worth noting also that Crapsack World is No Real Life Examples, Please!.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Here's an idea: How about remake the trope pages so that World Half Full and World Half Empty are subtropes of the trope Crapsack World?
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World Half Empty would then just be an aversion of World Half Full.
I'm a Troper!!!
I want to proffer that subgenres exist for Crapsack World, viz. "Crapsack Altruistic Type" with Orwell's "Animal Farm" as evidence, i.e. "All animals are equal, except that some animals are more equal than others." And the "Crapsack Egoistic Type" with Lewis' "There Will Be Blood" and Daniel Plainview as an example. There are plenty of Egoistic Types, I believe. The Altruisitc Types could use more research. Your thoughts?
Edited by 69.172.221.4 perspective without distortion
Could school be considered a real life example of a Crapsack World? Aside from being pretty crapsack itself, it definitely makes the world itself out to be one.
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Once you leave, you're surprised to discover that actually the world is pretty cool with occasional moments of crappiness.
This trope is about how the audience and author, not the people in the work, view a place. School doesn't have an author or audience, so it doesn't qualify.
I'm a Troper!!!
Crapsack Worlds don't exist in real life...sure school can be a hellhole, but still....
I've got a question: what's the difference between a Crapsack World and a Dystopia? Both of them seem practically synonymous, if you ask me!
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I think the difference is that a Dystopia is a Crapsack World for the purposes of social commentary.
I'm a Troper!!!
shouldn't some specific parts of the world be added. no racism intended, but Somalia may qualify.(Also north korea because of lack of freedom and rights)
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Crapsack World is a trope about how the audience and author view a place. Real Life has neither, so it cannot qualify.
I'm a Troper!!!
I think that we should go back to having "Crapsack World" and "World Half Empty" as separate tropes. They are very different concepts. A Crapsack World is a horrible place to live in, but isn't necessarily immutable or unsurvivable. A World Half Empty is a world in which there's no hope and anything that anyone does to attempt to improve things will result in failure, things getting worse, death, etc. I thought they were much better as different pages.
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Agreed, though we will then need to do a clean-up on the scale of The Messiah to Messianic Archetype. Still, I do want World Half Empty, with its more-or-less original connotation, back.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage — Paul McCartney
They were merged because it was completely impossible to keep the two seperate. No point in having two seperate pages if 99.9% of the examples were the same, all of the other pages used the two interchangably and nobody could really agree on what the differeance even was.
The split suggested by 75.110.108.57 is not a definition that existed before. It was 'one is comic and one is serious'.
They were merged because it was completely impossible to keep the two seperate. No point in having two seperate pages if 99.9% of the examples were the same, all of the other pages used the two interchangably and nobody could really agree on what the differeance even was.
The split suggested by 75.110.108.57 is not a definition that existed before. It was 'one is comic and one is serious'.
That's not how I remember it. I remember it being defined pretty clearly as the original poster said.
The definitions weren't the problem, they kept getting confused or used as synonyms both in the inbound links and examples. It got so bad that keeping them separate was deemed unfeasible because it would have required constant monitoring of the inbound links as well as examples.
Still, the Trope Repair Shop would probably be a better place to re-hash this out.
Doctor who should not be here, it doesn't fit the trope at all.
People who are good in doctor are generally rewarded and those who do bad things get killed off usually. And the show has too much of an optimistic tone for this.
Wereboar
"Deus Ex" does not belong to this trope. As the description points out "Please also note that a Crapsack World will suck for everyone and everything. NO one benefits or enjoys their existence in such a place, and if so, it is only brief.". There are plenty of people benefiting from the situation. Many, if not the most people actually live a decent life (especially those in employ of (shadow) government and corporations), not to mention members of the various cabals. It is almost our present world only with more exacerbated problems.
More a case of "World Half Full". Just note that the worst (morally-wise) possible outcome is to assist people who use artificial plague to their own ends but they also make sure it won't get out of hand.
I edited out the part that said that its not a subjective trope and that a crapsack world is a crapsack world for everybody.
A decent chunk of the examples listed here have a population that's relatively well off (sometimes even the majority; its only a crapsack world from the viewpoint of our protagonists), and rich, well-entrenched minorities serving to make bad problems even worse with their sociopathic tendencies are common.
Edited by Bloodseeker
I think the description of the Marvel Universe as a Crapsack World is severely biased. For one thing, no specific examples are named, are we supposed to just take the poster's word for it? Also he gets some of his facts wrong, the being who committed suicide was NOT God, in fact that story was officially proven false later when it was recreated (as Nemesis the universe-creating system, in the Avengers/Ultraforce crossover); at best it was a TOOL of God's. Also the Syse-Neg story has never been referred to again and may be a case of Canon Discontinuity. While Marvel Earth may still deserve and entry here (what with the Mutant Prejudice that is the foundation of the X-Men series) this section needs an overhaul.
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To be honest, the Wall of Text isn't the only problem. There are no citations. And it really does read as a pointless take that to the writers. I get a lot of people hate Marvel's writers (I'm no fan myself) but if you want to keep something, at least provide reasons for it. There may have been citations before, but if they were removed for being biased, then either keep them or remove the whole thing. Also, another major problem: the crapsack world tendencies of Marvel were made decades ago, and as recent events have shown, Marvel's track record of doing the research is...problematic at best. How much of the crapsack tendencies are still in continuity?
Okay, maybe the specific column on Marvel is difficult to cite. To be honest, I think the whole thing needs to be taken down and started from scratch. Lets start small, namely Earth (which I will wholly agree is not worth saving and we should just let Galactus eat the planet) pointing out the various ways the government and the public target and demonize the heroes (X-Men has Days of Future Past/Operation: Zero Tolerance, Genosha when it was anti-mutant, etc., and J. Jonah Jameson's persecution of Spider-Man sometimes extending to other superheroes depending on the writer, and more recent examples such as Civil War and Dark Reign.
After that, we can start spreading out to the various other civilizations in the galaxy, with the Shi'ar, the Kree, and Skrulls, nearly all of whom are expansionist imperialists who conquer you without a second thought. Following this, if we can start providing specific examples of where they appear, we can include the whole Eldritch Abominations and jerkass cosmic forces. And can someone please tell us where that "God committed suicide to form reality" thing came from? I've never heard of that before I came to this site.
Still kind of wall of texty, but it reads a little better than the old entry, and at least it cites various sources. If you want to put it in, go ahead. — ~~~~
Seriously, I don't want an Edit War over this, but the new entry is actually worse than the one I deleted before. I've removed the most contentious paragraphs, which smacked of Take That!, soapboxing and justifying edits, but it's still far too long and extremely biased. Crapsack World is not a subjective trope - if you're potholing to pages like Face Palm, Wall Banger and Did Not Do The Research, you're doing it wrong.
Oh, and as regards the earlier post which took my name in vain - the part about my having no edit history prior to deleting this entry is simply incorrect. I created the Stan Lee page and completely rewrote the Daredevil page (which in its original form consisted of about three short paragraphs and some unnecessary snark) as well as providing numerous examples on other trope pages. Ironically, this included an entry for the Wildstorm Universe on the Crapsack World page which was subsequently deleted without explanation - despite the WSU being far more crapsack than the Marvel Universe. Also, and unfortunately, I'm not employed by Marvel comics.
I admit I screwed up by not referring to the Discussion page in the first instance, but my gut reaction on reading the entry was that it was completely unsalvagable for all the reasons I already stated. My biggest problem with it was it smacked heavily of Complaining About Shows You Dont Like - for example, criticism of the writers' treatment of mental illness, whether justified or not, is irrelevant to the trope under discussion. That's what Just Bugs Me is for.
Edited by BizarroHulk
"tavas"/"natsu"/"antvasima", please stop ban evading in a pathetic attempt to edit this wiki.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Antvasima, you are forbidden from ever participating in the wiki again, by any handle. That is the final judgement of the mods. Making new handles every time we disable one is not helping your case. Go away.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Actually I'm far more of a Genma fan. Regardless of what you think of me, there is a forum thread
. for you to put your side of things rather than in discussion pages or making new handles. If you explain things there, maybe it will help.
Not debating with you anymore. And Eddie is the one who decided all this. I'm just his "puppet mouthpiece" in this respect. Dude, go get some help for your mental issues.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
@Two Gun Angel- Good job condensing the Marvel example. Sounds good.
Hodor
Uhm... What did I miss?
"That's ridiculous. What would a walrus do with a magic bag?" Pokeamida
likes the cheeses.
This page is being split due to length. It has reached a size where it is in danger of causing server performance issues. See this thread for details.
To alleviate this, I split off the current content along the lines of the current folder structure. New examples should be placed in the appropriate media sub-pages.
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!
I removed Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, since it meets virtually none of the criteria for a Crapsack World. For one thing, the series is pegged firmly at the idealistic end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. True, humanity as a whole seems to be on the decline, but everybody left seems to be neighborly and friendly and no one seems to be struggling to make a living.
Shouldn't this be a YMMV trope?