"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears it is true."
A Crapsack World is a horrible setting where the jaded notion of "anything that can go wrong will go horribly wrong" almost always applies, and it corrupts its inhabitants into perpetuating that nastiness against each other. More succinctly, trying to survive in one of these places is gonna suck.
Although there are countless ways Crapsack Worlds can be depicted (often with Scenery Gorn), it is usually dark, on the Romantic end on the Romanticism Versus Enlightenment scale, and on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism, so it will have either Grey and Gray Morality or Black and Gray Morality, if not outright Evil Versus Evil in the worst of cases (beware of Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy if you decide to go this route though). Settings like these are not kind at all to idealists, who usually get traumatized and/or die horribly when their attempts to change the world through idealism meet tragic ends.
Heroes in this setting are usually Anti Heroes, and often have at least a bit of the Deadpan Snarker about them. Being good will suck, and if there are genuinely good heroes in this setting, expect them to be Knights In Sour Armor and/or Hurting Heroes—more idealistic heroes such as the Knight in Shining Armor tend to not last long in this kind of setting. Any victories they manage to win over the forces of this world are likely to be Pyrrhic in nature.
Villains tend to run the gamut from sympathetic Anti Villains (on any level of the Sliding Scale of Anti-Villains) right down to the most horrific monsters to grace any kind of media. Truly awful villains are especially common in these kinds of settings, both to represent the misery of the setting in general and to give the Anti-Hero someone to whom he can look good in comparison. In truly extreme cases, even the most popular or powerful of these monsters suffer just as badly as everyone else. And Anyone Can Die.
From here, these worlds can be depicted by authors in various ways, whether it would be dramatic or comedic, immutable or mutable.
— James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion, misattributed to Robert Oppenheimer
- A dramatic Crapsack World has plenty of angst to go around, and often makes Woobies out of its sympathetic cast, particularly the protagonist, as they suffer horribly in their attempts to do the right thing or pursue their dreams. Expect characters who do the right thing to suffer for it. Expect characters who do the wrong thing to prosper... and then suffer. Examples: New World of Darkness, Old World of Darkness, Sin City, and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- A comedic Crapsack World is Played for Laughs and is made up of idiots, Jerkasses, Butt Monkeys, Chew Toys and the occasional Only Sane Man, with plenty of Comedic Sociopathy to go around. These include the Black Comedy, the Sadist Show and the World Gone Mad. The "upside" is that it's usually parodic and funny in its extremes. Though people die left and right, it likely has Negative Continuity to facilitate the inhabitants' suffering. Examples: Invader Zim, SpongeBob SquarePants, Happy Tree Friends, The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Matt N Dusty, Drawn Together, and South Park. Paranoia is not an example of this in the slightest.
- An immutable Crapsack World has agony Inherent in the System, both physically and metaphysically, and cannot be saved or made a better place. Trying to break The Corruption will instead always result in breaking every bone in your body and it winning, and any positive changes that you try to make will ultimately be torn down and revealed to be All for Nothing—or, even worse, they will only succeed in making things even worse for you and the people that you were trying to help, and/or even accomplish whatever the villains wanted in the first place. Examples: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Warhammer 40,000, FATAL, and the Lovecraftian Fiction genre in general.
- A mutable Crapsack World simply starts out as crappy, but a determined protagonist and his True Companions, be they the Knight In Shining (or in many of these cases, Sour) Armor or a simple old PI, can actually cause some, but mostly few, positive changes in the setting. See also A World Half Full. Examples: Elysium, Fallout, Mad Max, and Waterworld.
No Real Life Examples, Please! This is a metaphysical trope that's clearly defined by the writer, not an opinion by people complaining about the world as a whole (localized places that are very horrible in Real Life should perhaps go to Wretched Hive and other non-metaphysical tropes instead).
Examples:
- Anime and Manga
- Asian Animation
- Comic Books
- Fan Fic
- Film
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Mythology & Religion
- Newspaper Comics
- Tabletop Games
- Theater
- Toys
- Video Games
- Visual Novels
Everything is NOT awesome...
