A Crapsack World is a horrible setting where the jaded notion of "anything that can go wrong will go horribly, horribly wrong" almost always applies, and it corrupts its inhabitants into perpetuating that nastiness against each other. More succinctly, life in one of these places sucks. Although there are countless ways Crapsack Worlds can be depicted (often with Scenery Gorn), it is usually dark, and on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus 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 viewers/readers saying Too Bleak, Stopped Caring or the Eight Deadly Words 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 Stepford Smilers—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 sorted into a few overlapping subcategories: 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: Neon Genesis Evangelion, The World of Darkness, Sin City, A Song of Ice and Fire, Supernatural, Threads, Lovecraft Country (2020), most Bad Futures, and non-parodic Zombie Apocalypse settings in general. A comedic Crapsack World is Played for Laughs and is made up of idiots, jerks, Butt Monkeys, and the occasional Only Sane Man, with plenty of Comedic Sociopathy to go around. The "upside" is that it's usually funny in its extremes, and Bathos is inherent when bleakness and absurdity collide. Though people die left and right, it likely has Negative Continuity to facilitate the inhabitants' suffering, or makes this part of the humor. Black comedies, Sadist shows, and Dramedies are often set here. May be a Crapsaccharine World, a World of Dumbass, a World of Jerkass, or a World Gone Mad. Examples: Borderlands, Helldivers, Saints Row, Fallout, The Good Place, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Invader Zim, The Boondocks, Rocko's Modern Life, A Series of Unfortunate Events, SuperMarioLogan, but obviously not Paranoia. 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 it winning, often breaking every bone in your body in the process, 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: Warhammer 40,000, Dark Souls, LISA, Xeelee Sequence, A Walk Through Hell, Final Destination, the Project Moonverse, Shadow Star, the Cthulhu Mythos, most non-overthrowable Dystopian fiction, and non-Lovecraft Lite Cosmic Horror Stories in general. A mutable Crapsack World simply starts out as crappy and tends to slide there without intervention, but a determined protagonist and their 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, if usually small and hard-won, positive changes in the setting. See also A World Half Full. Examples: Elysium, Mad Max, Waterworld, Fist of the North Star, V for Vendetta, The Hunger Games, WALL•E, Half-Life, BlazBlue, Attack on Titan, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Persona 5, The Owl House, the Hellaverse, the Nasuverse, Metal Gear, and Invincible (2021). It's common to see combinations of and sliding scales between these categories as well- for instance, Idiocracy mixes comedic and mutable for a cringe-inducing but not hopeless satire, and the works of Franz Kafka derive much of their humor from the immutably terrible setting. The shared world of the SCP Foundation, meanwhile, ranges between all four depending on the author and part of the Loose Canon they're writing in. This kind of world often occurs After the End. Wretched Hive and City Noir are city-sized versions of the Crapsack World. A Dystopia is a speculative Crapsack World ruled by repressive forces modeled after real-life politics. A Teenage Wasteland is a Crapsack World run by kids. If the Crapsack World's continued misery is caused by supernatural forces, see Dark Fantasy, Hell on Earth or Cosmic Horror Story. A Death World and Mordor are Crapsack Worlds taken to the logical extreme. If a Sugar Bowl (usually the antithesis of this trope) turns out to be one of these under the surface, then you have yourself a Crapsaccharine World. If the people who live in the Crapsack World don't realise or pretend it isn't a horrible place to be in, it is a False Utopia. A Villain World or Death World is likely to be this, and Bad Future is a Sub-Trope. Someone who just thinks the world they inhabit is this is The Cynic or a Straw Nihilist. For worlds that are almost literal sacks of crap, see The Dung Ages. See You Would Not Want to Live in Dex for other crapsack environments, and on a less negative note, the World of Badass, which is also likely to have elements of the Crapsack World, to give justification on why kicking ass is very important to survival. Compare World of Jerkass, a world which is only unpleasant because all of the characters are horrible people. This trope is also known as World Half Empty, for the expression of pessimism being a state of seeing a glass with half the amount of water in it as being "half empty". Also, a half-empty glass means it can only be emptied, and can't be refilled. It represents hopelessness and inevitable doom, fitting this trope perfectly. By definition, contrast A World Half Full. No Real Life Examples, Please! This is not a subjective trope; 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 other non-metaphysical tropes instead). Also, do not use this page to complain about worlds you don't like. If you have to say "Some people think" or "Arguably," it doesn't belong here.