He ()his father and goes out to play
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"The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying."
— , on .
Say you're watching that new thriller that everyone's been talking about. You've heard nothing but praise for its uncompromising brutality, , and ability to mess with the audience, but so far nothing you've seen gives even a remote indication of why—
Whoa. That's why.
You've just been hit with the Gut Punch: the single moment when a work makes it abundantly clear that the gloves have come off. This is where you realize that playtime is over:
has been switched off, the hero won't be getting up from that
anytime soon, , and
has become a very real possibility. Maybe things go , maybe the story was always that dark and . Either way, this is a clear indication that the creator has decided to get dangerous.
This is not simply about shocking events, though a Gut Punch is a good way to lead up to a . This is about a single moment that instantly and clearly establishes that the tone of the work as a whole is fundamentally darker than what the audience has been led to expect. If there's a particularly dark moment in a show that then reverts to being somewhat lighter, it's not this. This also isn't a subjective trope. This is about the one moment where the entire tone of the story shifts .
Sub Trope of , , , and . Super Trope to , , , , and especially . The , , and the
are three characters extremely likely to cause one of these. Sometimes related to .
This trope may contain unmarked spoilers. You have been warned.
&&&&open/close all folders&
&&&&Anime & Manga&
Legato's introduction in
pulls this off in a single frame. It's a bright and sunny day, the kids are playing with Vash. Then out of nowhere, Legato. He killed and ate the friendly shopkeeper Vash was just speaking to, and feels it would be a downright shame if the little girl Vash just bought an ice cream for would have to be next. The entire scene is completely horrific, but what cements it as this is the opening shot of the usually lighthearted and goofy Vash looking legitimately terrified for the first time in the series that clearly indicates exactly how bad things are about to get.
Legato: If I'd felt like it, all the people within a 50 meter range, in 0.2 seconds, would all be dead... In the next ten minutes, you'll learn the true meaning of hell.
It's also implied (and stated in the manga) that the hot dog he gave the little girl was made from the remains of the aforementioned shopkeeper. Yikes.
was already a pretty dark series, but it still manages to show this somewhere around the end of volume 9 with the death of
except for Kurono. The fact that
afterwards does nothing to mitigate the new knowledge that
has ceased to exist.
has loads of them, but the two most prominent happen to the same characters, but in different ways, in episode 34 Jeri's partner, Leomon, is killed then absorbed by Beelzemon, and there's no Village of the Beginnings in this series., Later on, after Beelzemon's ,
Jeri has been trapped by the enemy, and just when things seem to be hopeless, Beelzemon uses all his strength in to a single attack, Fist of the Beast King, which is Leomon's signature attack, and is then able to let Jeri free... if only she hadn't been too shocked by remembering her partner through his killer, and not being able to actually leave her imprisonment, and uttering the line You're... not... Leomon, distracting Beelzemon long enough for him to be brutally stabbed in the back. You know, for kids!
Kamina's brutal death in
was not only a legendary , but the event that changed the series from a fun, colorful, lighthearted adventure romp to an epic war story on a massive scale. The fan reaction to this event is polarizing to this day, and the show aired more than half a decade ago.
The Mazinger series:
: The last third of the anime series got increasingly darker due to the new enemies: Professor Morimori was murdered,
was definitely destroyed — which was a big deal and caused Sayaka to suffer an . Kouji and Shiro's mother returned only to be revealed as an imposter, while poor Shiro was forced to shoot her in spite of his uncertainty as to whether or not she was his real mother. And then you have the final episode wherein the heroes triumph over Dr. Hell and return to his
... only to find out one of the
was secretly working for a . Then two unknown
appear, easily destroying the Institute, Diana-A and Boss B when Kouji goes out to fight them, they easily and mercilessly trash the apparently invincible Mazinger-Z.
This episode was better developed in the Mazinger-Z vs Great General of Darkness feature. Several Mykene
lay waste to New York, Moscow, London and Paris in a single day before heading towards Tokyo. Kouji sorties out to fight and gets completely trounced as they burn Tokyo to ashes. Meanwhile back in the Institute, another War Beast strikes, bringing the place down. Shiro gets badly wounded when a ceiling falls on him, and lapses into a coma. The next morning, another squad of War Beasts attacks, and Kouji deploys Mazinger-Z despite his injuries and weakened state — not to mention that his robot is unrepaired and power-depleted. He's outnumbered and is being easily defeated until
manages to destroy one of the Beasts out of sheer luck. And the cast breathes relieved for a second ... until the Beasts easily get rid of Boss and return to trash around a helpless, powerless Kouji.
manga the punches started when the Mykene blew up a coast city after Great Marshall of Darkness replaced the former deceased . In a few episodes the Japanese army threw an attack against the heroes and their ,
went through a , the Fortress of the Science got destroyed — forcing the heroes to run away and lie low — the Mykene burnt Tokyo to ashes, conquered Japan and crafted a , obliterating whole cities. Then you have the . The heroes were busy building a new
when the Mykene army launch an attack. Misato gets sliced in half in front of Tetsuya as he is unable to do anything, Mazinger-Z and Great Mazinger are trashed, Prof. Kabuto dies to save Tetsuya, and in reaction Tetsuya, realizing it was his fault commits a
in the anime version was not quite so brutal, but in exchange you had a scene where Prof. Kabuto dies in arms of his son Kouji.
: In the Ota chapters both sides lose the war. The Vegan invaders are destroyed, but Duke, Maria and Sayaka die and
comes. Only Kouji and Hikaru are left alive. It was lucky Grendizer was the last series in the original saga, because you have to wonder how the creators could have gone on.
: This series is the original
manga -that was far darker than the anime and other
. So, what you have when you blend an
with a ? In the first arc, Kouji and Sayaka go to meet Kouji's grandfather. Hey, that is Kouji's father! Scratch that, it is Kouji's father's head! Dr. Kabuto has turned mad(der) and has beheaded his own son? And now he is trying to off his grandson? He has just raped and murdered Sayaka impaling her with a dozen of metal rods? And Kouji has killed him in turn, losing one arm? And now Mazinger has absorbed Kouji? Wait, that is not a "normal" , that is an ... that has just destroyed the world. Then again, it had been completely overrun by Dr. Hell's armies, so there was little left to save. Let's reiterate this is the first arc.
The fight with the 13th angel. It's generally agreed by fans that this is the point in the series when things started to take a turn for the worse.
The fight with
Arael. Hey, it looks like the cast is starting to resolve its issues and the show might be heading towards general mental stability! You know what would be really fun? How about breaking out the
and completely shattering the tentative peace between the main characters in the process?
Asuka, after finally recovering from the aforementioned ,
almost instantly and starts
Except that they survive.
is so horrific that the mere sight of it is enough to bring
Shinji all the way from temporary
across the
and , setting the tone for
quite nicely.
of Nina Tucker followed some relatively lighthearted introductory chapters and served as a wake-up-call for both the audience and the main characters.
The death of Maes Hughes kicked off the main plot in earnest, killed off one of the series's most beloved comic relief characters, and served as the
for the most sadistic villain of the series.
of the crew, gets killed by a witch. This is shocking to the audience not just because it happens so early in the series, or because it completely subverts our expectations about
genre, or because her appearance in the opening suggests she'll live at least long enough for Madoka to fight alongside her, but because for the first 80 seconds of the battle, Mami seemed to be doing , even unloading the
from the previous episode on it, and then, within the space of 10 seconds, the witch revealed its
and bit her head off.
: The death of
cements the story as a , as it's the moment when Light's mindset begins to visibly shift from "I will become the god " to " of this new world".
The original
started out as a light-hearted, comedy series about Goku and his misadventures with his friends. Then Krillin was murdered at the end of the 22nd World Martial Arts Tournament, changing the tone of the series forever. And at the start of , Goku is killed making a heroic sacrifice to stop his brother from killing his son. Then, most of the original cast is killed in the battle against the Saiyans. The Dragon Balls are also lost because Piccolo (and Kami with him) died, meaning no one can be revived until much later when another set of Dragon Balls is found elsewhere in the galaxy.
Given that
and a big chunk of the story, , , which showed Guts as a dark, brooding and ruthless warrior on the brink of madness due to his obsessive revenge against Griffith,
once we got to that point... Until we found out just how much everything went horribly wrong once
went down, which involved
a former good guy making an
and becoming a godlike demon lord,
the sole female protagonist
by said former good guy, and the main man who
in the process. Wow.
: The Thousand-Year Blood-War Arc emphatically changes the darkness and tone of the story when the Vandenreich invades Soul Society. The initial salvo destroys half the 200-strong First Division, including the Lieutenant, in 3 minutes, leading into an invasion that ignores many of the shounen battle rituals: Captain-class Quincies mow down the
instead of confronting the captains, ambush captains and lieutenants instead of following introduction rituals, and instantly steal the Bankai of four captains. In just over 7 minutes, the 6,000 strong Gotei 13 suffers just under 2,500 casualties, including some of the story's major players: Kira, Byakuya, Renji, Rukia and Kenpachi are utterly trashed, Kyouraku is maimed for life, and Yamamoto is completely obliterated. From there, the story becomes darker, more sadistic and more traumatic for characters. This mood also sets up the arc's mini-flashback storyline which is not the fandom-expected funny, ditzy
tale of Isshin and Masaki's first meeting, instead being a tragic tale of how Aizen's Hollowfication experiments accidentally ruin Ryuuken Ishida's life.
: Saving princess Emeraude from the bad guy seems like a difficult, if not standard, quest for the newly chosen heroes... but having to kill the bad guy for
AND THEN also having to kill the princess for being
and thus unable to fulfill her duties, is
Diva's rape and murder of Riku in an episode benignly titled "Boy Meets Girl". The rape/murder of a child is bad enough, but most works that include such a thing will have it happen to a random , not a member of the main cast whom viewers have come to know and care about from the very beginning. Made even worse by the fact that
Riku had been saved from the brink of death only a few episodes earlier. This event traumatized both the audience and the heroes, causing
Saya and David to each have a , and forcing Kai to grow up. The show was by no means fluffy, light-hearted fare beforehand, but it took a distinctly darker tone from this point onward.
had the deaths of
Portgas D. "Fire Fist" Ace and
Edward "Whitebeard" Newgate in the climax of the Paramount War. Up until then, One Piece got saddled with the term .note& It has the added bonus of a literal gut punch, in the case of the former.
has the loss of Akane's child, and the resulting death of her boyfriend Kazuya, showcasing what is at stake for the Himes.
of , the turning point in Arika and Nina's characterization is the death of their mutual friend Erstin at Nina's hands, not long after she had been revealed as .
features them periodically to remember the reader that it may be a comedic series but the protagonist is still a wanted criminal that the police leaves alone only because he always goes after much worse criminals and tries to limit the body count.
was dark from the start, being a show about a
controlled by , which has made feeling any extreme emotion, mental illness or thinking differently from the masses illegal. The antagonists that the Ministry of Welfare and Public Safety Bureau took down already included all kinds of criminals from a suicidal rapist to a
who likes turning her victims' corpses into art. The show doesn't seem like it could get any darker, and then after Shinya defeats
and saves Yuki, one of Akane's best friends, Shinya falls unconscious due to being shot. Sadly,
appears at that moment and kidnaps Yuki and lures
with her. Makishima gives Akane the chance to save Yuki, if Akane can shoot him with a shotgun. Akane tries to use the Dominator on him, a weapon which can only kill someone if the Sibyl System judges them as as mentally unstable or not pure of intention. It doesn't fire, as Makishima genuinely believes in his actions being normal and justified. Makishima gives Akane one more chance to shoot him, and Akane can't do it. Makishima then slits Yuki's throat, and after the next episode being a
episode, Makishima then proves to be more dangerous than all the other antagonists who only hurt or ended a few lives...Makishima aims to break down all society, and actually succeeds for at least a few weeks. Even after being caught, he escapes and continues upping the ante.
The season 1 finale of . When
Sailor Jupiter is killed, it's the start of the punch. Then when
Sailor Mercury follows her, you just know the rest of the characters aren't safe.
Two in . The revelation that
Annie was the female Titan who brutally killed all those members of the Survey Corps and Levi's own personal squad right after Eren started to trust them; and if this wasn't enough, right after that
and Bertolt are revealed to be the Armored Titan and the Colossal Titan respectively. , these moments introduced the paranoia and
elements that would ultimately come to separate the second half of the series from the first.
The second season of
has the death of Misaka 9982. The first season tended to lack blood, let alone death, so the arrival of the hero
as a rescue before .note& It doubles as a bit of an in-universe
for the hero as well, resulting in a
that leads to her resolving to get herself killed in the climax of the arc.
&&&&Comic Books&
: Minutemen explored the titular Minutemen in their Golden Years, showing their successes, their infighting, and some darker themes, like The Silhouette's investigations into child murder and pedophilia. Then in issue 4,
she and her partner are murdered in their beds after she's kicked off the team. After this, the real mental toll and questionable morality set in, as characters die or leave, and the Minutemen fade away.
? is already somewhat darker than the standard Superman story, but doesn't broadcast its true intentions until two formerly
torture and kill
Pete Ross, Superman's childhood friend.
starts off bright and bubbly with young Loki doing spy missions for Asgardia with cheer and zany schemes for a chance at full redemption, while the backstage machinations hint on a dark undercurrent earlier, but the gut punch comes at the end of the
tie-in issue 9:
Narration: ...A story of Loki's chance to play hero — and of his last hope of redemption. And now, that story ends. Forever.
It goes downhill from there. Lost or looses their friends, their brother, their sins are revealed (the cute nerdy God of Mischief seeking redemption — a body thief and child murderer) and .
The first issue of
was one for the entire Italian comic book industry. At the time (1962) the stories were always relatively light-hearted, good always won... And then came out a story with a
who got away with robbing the
blind, murdering his father and cousin and driving his mother to madness. And to drive home the point, at the end
shoots some strawmen in which he believes Diabolik is hiding himself, then leaves... And one of the strawmen starts bleeding.
&&&&Fan Works&
In the second book's finale, Jack and Sophie are able to save Robin from Teresa's , but her soul'd being under the influence for so long that she begs Jack to
her, he does.. A bit earlier in the same chapter, Jack and Sophie discover that Jack's sister, Teresa, who appeared to be just a victim, was pulling the strings all along, the she goes psycho on them and slices her brother's eye off, and almost kill them and their students, only for Jack to deem her beyond saving and ends up killing her in self-defense.
The last book starts , only to shock even more with Samantha's sacrifice, killing off one of the most beloved and sweet characters in the story, and it ended up being useless, as instead of preventing the onther's deaths, most of them actually die before the final battle, and then, ALL of them, save for Luke, die at some point during the final confrontation..
Chapter 4: Hitomi, having gotten her first taste of using
to make her victims kill other people and , uses her powers to cause a massacre at a diner, resulting in the deaths of 20 innocent people, and showcasing that the
mutual (if varying) lack of regard for human life.
Chapter 18 and 19: While previous SUE attacks had interfered with the canon villains' plans, Bachiko and Meiko's plan provides Ishigami and Nagi the opportunities they need to put the the former results in his and Yukariko's deaths, while the latter results in Shiho and Mai being forced to fight like in canon, with Yukino barely managing to defuse the situation by arriving before Mikoto and knocking out Shiho.
Chapter 21: the Obsidian Lord, possessed by the Usurper, kills off the entire First District and destroys Miyu, the latter action sealing off the possibility of pushing the
and undoing any of the deaths.
In , the first indication of just how dark the story will be is when Mar, having arrived in the
world, encounters a
who reveals that Luffy has been executed 20 years ago.
In , Norio and Chosuke are trying to find the whereabouts of one Misa Torizakinote& only to find
her body resting against a tree, gutted and obscenities written on her arms. Chosuke states it best.
Chosuke: Norio, don't look now
but I think Misa just killed herself.
Earlier in that same episode, shit really goes down when
a brainwashed Ryusei kills Shun, landing the first kill in the story.
&&&&Films — Animation&
For the first 40-50 minutes of , the story is about a boy and his giant robot friend and they mostly goof around while trying to evade an incompetent G-man. Then the boy and the giant stumble upon a deer recently shot by a gun lying on the ground. , and things only get worse from there once the G-man starts becoming a real threat. Then nuclear weapons and Cold War paranoia get involved.
starts off as a fairly lighthearted Disney film about a young African lion cub and his life in the Serengeti.
All that changes when King Mufasa is killed by his evil brother Scar, who makes poor Simba believe that he did it, tries to have him killed, and then takes over Pride Rock and turns it into a tyrannical nightmare that Simba has to end.
has the scene where a wolf kills a lamb's mother, establishing that this is not just a cutesy little cartoon about sheep.
. As noted in 's review, Edwina's death (complete with her bones on a dinner table right after), drives home the point that Mrs. Tweedy (and the film) aren't fooling around.
&&&&Films — Live-Action&
The first 45 minutes of
could easily be mistaken for a romantic drama in which everything is slightly... off. Then we get Asami's , which is so scary that it turns the next half hour of violence-free romance into pure terror.
The original
gets two back to back in the same sequence. First we get something that looks like this, specifically the deaths of
Tom and Judy. In any other horror movie made at the time, that sequence alone would have been enough to qualify as this trope. It doesn't, but only because the real punch comes immediately afterward when we see an extremely graphic (for its day) image of the zombies chowing down on the recently charred corpses that changed the film from "goofy b-movie" to "terror incarnate." 's reaction provides the page quote. It's worth emphasizing the "" bit:
: This was in a typical neighborhood theater, and the kids started filing in 15 minutes early to get good seats up front.
This is a major part of the reason for the fame of 's iconic : not only did it immediately shift the film from a thriller about a couple on the run from the law into a prototype for the , but it also communicated that no one was safe by
. This trick would later be repeated in the introduction of .
has Yu-sun, the little girl, drowning in the river, setting off the cycle of brutal revenge on both sides.
seems to really like this trope:
gives you one when Sue returns from the Hmong gangs
brutally raped and beaten, which reveals the depravity of the gangs that had previously limited themselves to standing around looking menacing.
is a story of a waitress who wants to improve her life: she learns how to box and manages to achieve international fame up to fighting for world title which leaves her a quadriplegic for the last third of the movie.
Ned's death and Munny's return to his hard-drinking, murderous ways.
shifts fairly abruptly from being a low key character study to being a
crime story when
Standard is killed. To clearly state the shift for anybody who wasn't clued in by that, the villains then proceed to
splatter 's brains all over the wall a few minutes later.
Julian's death in
kicks off the main plot while establishing the film's
twice: once when the
pursuing the heroes starts butchering anybody they might conceivably run to for help, and again when
kick off the grand finale by firing a harpoon right through one of the heroes.
understood right from the opening scene that the film version of
than the animated series, what with the imprisonment of the Sorceress and He-Man hacking and slashing his way through a dozen or so of Skeletor's Centurions (who might have been faceless , but ). But any illusions that Skeletor might have been up to his usual cartoony tricks are shattered when he out-and-out murders
Saurod . This Skeletor was much more villainous than his cartoon counterpart, who'd never directed any real acts of violence toward his minions.
has a grim opening where dozens of condemned victims are led to a gallo whoever, the Gut Punch comes where one victim is a child who has to stand on a barrel so his neck can reach the noose, the sign that this one
&&&&Literature&
has this by way of
, who gets killed off halfway into the book to establish that, yes, .
: Cedric's death at the end of
the first shown murder in the entire series, and started it rocketing towards
territory.
: From the start the series is clearly darker and more cynical than the usual fantasy novel. But Ned's execution takes it to a whole new level. You do NOT expect a main character to die like this. And again when the Starks are betrayed by the Freys (the
quickly became infamous as one of the biggest
in the history of television).
is provided by the arrival of
Well-portrayed in the film adaptation as well - the hobbits (and the audience) suddenly realize the sort of nightmare they're up against.
As befits the title, the ending of
is one for . Prior to Changes, the series was relatively light - while the good guys have never had it easy, they still usually came out without too many severe casualties. Then, at the end of Changes,
Harry has to murder Susan to both save his daughter and completely wipe out the Red Court.
The subsequent books have picked up the tone shift and run with it -
Ghost Story shows in painful detail exactly how much of a toll Harry's death has taken on both his friends and the world, while Cold Days involves Harry having to deal with his seemingly inevitable transformation into a sociopathic monster due to the Winter Knight mantle, is filled with
, and ends on an even more depressing note than Changes.
The death of Cloud, the protagonist's
brother shows that Peace: Cats of the Valley is every bit as hardcore as the
We get to know Julie and Maddie very well, as
Julie narrates the first half of the book, and much of it is about her friendship with Maddie. Then we learn
that Maddie is still alive. In the climatic scene,
Maddie saves Julie from torture by shooting her. It's absolutely heart-wrenching.
: In the opening chapter, unemployed people are lined up for a job fair. We get to know Augie Odenkirk, who befriends a woman named Janice, a woman with so little support that she has to bring her baby with her. Augie decides that he's going to take Janice to breakfast, then
a serial killer plows into the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, killing several people, including the three about whom Stephen King has made care.
series as a whole is too dark and violent to get much darker, but taking the third book as a single work, most of the "evil" going on is either safely offscreen or nonviolent. Nevil Storherte, the most prominent of the
trio, spends most of the story coming across as a seditious and weaselly but charismatic manipulator. He never quite seems like the type to condone violence except in necessary situations, and since he's the , it seems likely that the story's conflict will remain mostly political... until, near the end of the book, he fires an explosive
into a crowd of civilians in an attempt to kill a target who might be there. Shortly thereafter, he privately laments the deaths... and blames them on his intended target for maybe being there.
The Silo series by Hugh Howey starts with a brilliant gut punch when a would-be protagonist follows his wife into the seemingly deadly post-catastrophe outside world that everyone in his silo sees only through a single screen. He believes, as his wife did after some thorough research, that the image on the screen is a computer generated lie to keep everyone inside. In fact, the idea of going outside is a capital crime in the silo, and everyone guilty is got rid of by sending them there to clean dust off the cameras feeding that screen, and to die a horrible death quickly afterwards. There is indeed bright and green pastoral world outside, and for a few happy minutes the would-be protagonist is cleaning the lenses, waving at people inside and making plans to find his wife. Until he starts dying violently, tears off his helmet and finds out that the green pastures are CGI fake on his helmet's screen, tricking every condemned criminal into cleaning those lenses, and the real world is as deadly as seen on TV. Gut punches don't stop there: initially the books show just what their protagonists know about their world, and in the end their entire existence turns out to be a carefully constructed lie, hiding some truly horrible reality.
&&&&Live Action TV&
has a notorious one at the end of the very first episode. The hero has been framed for child abuse by the evil government and is about to be sent to a penal colony, but his heroic
and the lawyer's girlfriend have discovered proof of the government's corruption and are about to blow everything sky-high.
Then in the last-but-one scene of the episode the lawyer and his girlfriend are casually blown away by government agents. The prison ship takes off. The end.
has at least three escalating ones over its lifetime. Season One: Flutie's death. Season Two: Angel loses his soul. Season Five: Joyce dies. If anything, season two has two moments of these back to back:
the aforementioned moment where Angel's soul is lost and
the moment not long after where the soulless Angel proceeds to kill Jenny Calender.
, Being Buffy's spin-off, one can only expect, and there's just as much gut-punching, Season 1 Doyle sacrifices himself., Season 4 Cordelia never woke up from her coma., and finally, but most prominently Fred's slow and painful death, being hollowed by having her internal organs liquified in order for an
to take over her body.
mixes in two during its first season: the first is early on when
Janet York is murdered by
the man posing as her father and again at the finale where
the season ends with Jack in tears cradling his dead wife's body.
In , there's
Lady Sybil's death. Series 3 is just as melodramatic as the previous two, but the graphic, gasping death scene of one of main family members, who had just become a mother and is arguably the nicest person on the show was unprecedented and shocking. William's death was noble, Lavinia was perhaps destined to die ? but Sybil's death was frantic, quick and horrifying. Never before had the show been so shocking to watch.
has always been bleak, the gut punch moments have not stopped since mid season 2 when
11 year old Sophia, who was lost in the woods, was revealed to be both dead and now a zombie. Rick is forced to gun her down while her mother screams nearby. Season 3 continues the trend with
Rick's pregnant wife Lori dying from a medieval c-section birth while her 12 year old son screams and cries, he then has to shoot her dead body in the head so she won't turn into a zombie. Rick has a full blown mental break upon finding out, goes to find her body and discovers a zombie has eaten it. Rick
mercilessly kills a hotheaded prison inmate in a "three strikes and you're out" situation and The Governor deliberately
shoots Merle in the gut so he will turn into a zombie, shortly before his younger brother Daryl catches up to them and is forced to put down his only surviving family member.
has quite a few:
This is the entire A-plot of The Coming Of Shadows from the Emperor's heart attack onwards is a series of escalating gut punches.
The deaths of
every single GROPO we just spent an episode meeting in GROPOS.
The revelation of
the sleeper agent in Divided Loyalties.
The slow revelation of the truth in Passing Through Gethsemane, with one more in the tag.
Two words from The Day of the Dead:
Zoe's dead.
In Believers from Season One, we seem to have the stock sci-fi ending where the 'backwards' aliens are grateful to have their son back despite the surgery going against all their beliefs, they quietly take their son home, typical happy-after-all ending, and then
the parents are cooperating long enough to take their son and ritually kill him as they still believe the surgery destroyed his soul. And the viewer isn't told they're wrong. One of the earlier hints that this isn't your grandfather's social-science sci-fi.
But probably the single greatest one in the entire series:
Lennier's betrayal of Sheridan in Objects at Rest.
The Bombing of Narn in The Long Twilight Struggle. The Narn-Centauri War had been mostly a background event at this point, important but not crucial to the overall . Then suddenly the war is over, the Centauri control Narn and have turned the aggressiveness , and once again, .
- the episode "Charmed and Dangerous". You know things are going south when Leo is shot by a darklighter's arrow and Paige has her powers stolen too, effectively leaving Phoebe as the only sister with her powers (and she is the weakest active power-wise) with the Source of All Evil out for the kill.
of who exactly killed Laura Palmer on
( Her father, possessed by an
obsessed with her entire being) is one of the most infamous of these in TV history, to the point where AMC ran no commercials whatever for the final twenty minutes of the original broadcast. What makes it even worse is that the reveal is followed by what was, back then, probably the most brutal depiction of murder seen in an American mainstream TV show.
has a lot of these, considering its
nature, but the biggest one in the show has to be
Alex's death. She's on her knees with Martin Keamy's gun to her head, crying and BEGGING her father, Ben, for help. Ben is a master of the
and has basically been playing every other chara he obviously has a plan, right? Nope.
The Israeli skit show The Chamber Quintet started discussing politics a lot more openly after
in 1995; given that the writers and actors were staunch leftists and the public sphere had just taken a sharp turn to the right, making
prime minister for the first time, they obviously featured much darker skits much more often, the darkest of which was probably , from 1997, after Netanyahu?s election (the second half of the Gut Punch), in which
gave a chilling performance as the assassin, , with a
and a monologue about how the viewers know deep down that ultimately he?ll be pardoned in twenty years in exchange for expunging the charges against a staunchly leftist party (implying they?ll be persecuted politically), and that he?ll be hailed as a hero in Jerusalem, which will become far more nationalistic and right-winged. To make matters worse, as of 2014, the (attempted) political persecution of the left and the change in political climate in Jerusalem .
In , a human is turned into a monster and, unlike other men-turned-monsters in the franchise, is not returned to normal but instead written off as a lost cause by the antagonists and killed. Worse, he's revealed to not be t as at the same time the audience is shown that the first monster that Gaim killed was in fact a close friend of his that had gone missing. Usually in Kamen Rider, defeating the
s and Gaim had been presented as a shonen
show not unlike
This episode shows that nothing will ever be "right" again and that the competition that the main characters were taking seriously is nothing compared to the real conflict.
The first episode of
opens with protagonist Teresa boasting about how wealthy and powerful she is... and then she gets shot dead.
&&&&Professional Wrestling&
The 2011 "Thug Assassins" angle in the Urban Wrestling Federation, in which new champion Rasche Brown was knocked over and then shot by two unknown assailants. To make matters worse, Brown seemingly never appeared at any other he was essentially, unceremoniously, killed off.
&&&&Theatre&
is basically a ... right up until the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt. .
&&&&Video Games&
The game opens in the fairly idyllic area of Ascalon - grass and flowers are everywhere, and enemies are easy and will generally not attack you unless provoked. Then
happens, and you get out of the prologue.
Nightfall opens with the Sunspears rooting out a conspiracy and launching a massive invasion of Kourna to counter it. Everything goes well until Varesh unleashes a horde of demons, devastating the Sunspear army while one of them eats their leader's . After that mission the players are fugitives trying to avoid capture by a hostile army.
has dozens of paths the Personal Stories can follow, but all share the same Gut Punch: Claw Island. A massive undead attack completely overwhelms the island and the player's mentor .
has one of the most famous video game examples, which occurs halfway through when
features the reveal of the 's plan to end all life, his successful acquisition of the
he needs to do it, and the death of the only character with a means to stop him, all in short sequence at the end of Disc 1 of 3 (which had been largely light and partly humorous up this point except for some angst in the backstories of party members).
starts out as a typical cliche packed Shōnen adventure. Then, about a third of the way through the game,
occurs (The main character is a replica, having been created for the express purpose of playing his original's role in fulfilling a prophecy in which he's manipulated into destroying an entire city) and we are subject to one of the most vicious examples of
ever seen in a game.
The remarkably easy-to-do and remarkably gory-for-the-time Pit Stage Fatality, for those who used to believe this game was a clone of Street Fighter.
Scorpion's original Fatality, where he reveals there's nothing but a bare skull under his mask, served as a
for this strange ninja's story.
starts out in a moderately
world, but doesn't initially explain how it turns into the
that it's advertised as. Then less than halfway through the third major zone, Ainle,
Ellis, the kid cadet who's always looked up to you, . And the name of the mission in which this happens? "Wake Up Call." Things don't really improve from there.
waits until the player has been lulled into a suitable sense of security before it shows its true colors — it seems upbeat enough for a medieval war game for two thirds of the plot. Then there's Battlefield 40, where you begin your invasion of
for the sake of protecting , and have to slaughter an entire town of civilians . And it gets worse very quickly from here.
starts off as a simple 1980's email simulator, then the player's 'go to' website crashes, and they lose all contact with Emilia. They then receive an email from the websites administrator that reveals
Emilia was sending them an email desperately begging for their help before the crash and things get very dark very quickly.
gives you the events of the Wrathgate. The Forsaken unleash the New Plague. You now see it cause the senseless and meaningless deaths of some of the Horde's and Alliance's greatest heroes and shatter any chance of peace between the two factions. And if you're playing as Horde, you helped create the New Plague, in one of the more light-hearted questlines that go all the way back to the first levels.
In Mists of Pandaria, at the end of the Jade Forest questline, the battle between the Alliance and Horde, with their respective Jinyu and Hozen allies, results in the Sha being empowered, devastating the landscape and both sets of combatants.
In , you have a few missions trying to find out what Saren is up to, and a ton of sidequests mowing down violent criminals and terrorist cells with impunity. Then you have Virmire. First, you encounter the
for the first time, and the tone of what had been a sci-fi jaunt suddenly gets a lot more serious. Then, no matter what you do, no matter how well you play, either Ashley or Kaidan will die. It's up to you to decide who performs the . You may have to put down Wrex as well, depending on your influence with him. The mission to Virmire sets the harsh precedent for the rest of the series: from that point onward, you know that the
is a lot more dangerous and time-spanning than you thought,
and tread a lot more cautiously.
The Gut Punch for the series as a whole is the ending of Arrival, the last DLC mission for , which requires Shepard to destroy a Batarian system killing countless innocents in order to stop the Reapers. It's essentially saying that from this point on, no matter what you do, you'll still be sacrificing someone.
starts with a Gut Punch. A front-row seat for the Reaper invasion of Earth. There's also the fall of Thessia, which is a complete and utter defeat for the good guys, which, in an earlier version, would have included a Virmire-like dilemma.
appears to be a collection of fairly cheerful
tales of heroism. Then you finish all seven and unlock an additional chapter, which seems to be a standard
tale... until Oersted is tricked into murdering the king. Everything in his life falls apart from there. Ladies and gentlemen, .
is unmasked. It's Kalas. The main character. He's led you - not just you the player, you the player stand-in Guardian Spirit along the entire time. And then he cuts off your viewpoint and the screen fades to black. Oh, by the way? The really nice leader everyone loves? She's pure evil, and the one he's working for. And that's when you realize you've judged the entire plot the wrong way from the minute you hit Start.
The gut punch in
is the point where the President of the United States confesses that he's just a figurehead for an , that the entire facility the game is taking place on is a cover for a massive new battleship with vast nuclear strength and weapons to control information, that you're just a pawn of said ancient conspiracy, and that he wants you to kill him (which someone else beats you to). The whole scene sets the
and to an extent the series.
initially comes across as a shooter with a somewhat darker-than-usual undertone, when it becomes apparent the situation is not one suited for your tiny rescue and reconnaissance squad. About halfway into the game, Capt. Martin Walker uses white-phosphorus mortar rounds to pass an enemy camp, only for the game to reveal the resulting gruesome murders included forty-seven of the civilians he's there to rescue. The game and Walker's mental stability only go downhill from there.
scene in Andrew Ryan's office, in which the
of the game finally rears its ugly head. It is revealed in short order that
not only has Atlas had you on puppet strings for the full duration of the game, but he's really Frank Fontaine, the one responsible for much of what's happened to turn Rapture into the
that it is. And by the way? .
platformer
up until the beginning of level 4, which begins the parade , regular , jump scares and more general-purpose terror that makes up the meat of the game.
pulls this off very effectively in Mission 3, where you return to Kharak after a short test jump to discover that the planet's surface and orbital installations have been destroyed, effectively rendering the Kushan species near-extinct. The narrators in particular help the scene by just barely maintaining a calm and collected tone.
sets itself up with an especially bleak
setting from the get go, which makes the subdued, sudden and un-dramatic NPC deaths (typically at your hands following their turning ) gradually easier to deal with, except for 's descent into madness and despair. The fact that the majority of players would not
until later adds to it.
starts out fairly dark with the deaths of the Lord of House Forrester and his eldest son, leaving 13-15 year old Ethan to take the reins of the gutted remains of his household and try to survive the obvious squeeze House Bolton and its bannermen will be putting on those had been loyal to House Stark. And then
stabs him through the neck, killing him at the end of the first episode. Things do not get better, to put it lightly.
Seems to happen at least once per game in
which isn't too surprising considering ...
has the player character being framed as the cursed human of legend who's existence would cause natural disasters that will lay waste to the world. Most of the game's second half is spent on the run from former allies and other dangerous Pok&mon.
The day was seemingly saved in
when Dusknoir has captured Grovyle, the criminal stealing ...
only for Dusknoir to reveal that he's a mole from a grim future ruled by an insane Dialga by sending the protagonists there to be executed. The rest of the game is all about stopping said future even though it will cause everyone from that future, including the player character, to cease to exist.
By the last leg of , the villains are revealed to be a suicide cult who are using an
to destroy the world.
During the efforts to stop them, one of the companions ends up being killed by their leader Kyruem.
being captured and
by an unseen force, followed by Entei almost killing the protagonists which spells out this game isn't going to give a pass on Legendary Pok&mon, or the heroes.
Later on, the game makes good on that promise with a second gut punch that ends up with Nuzleaf betraying the heroes and petrifies them, along with nearly the entire Expedition Society. He and Yveltal then go on to turn nearly everyone else in the world, including the inhabits of Serine Village, into stone.
The first boss battle of
against Toriel hammers home the importance of two of the game's selling points. Up to that point, it's a safe bet that the player killed at least a few monsters without giving too much thought about it like in any RPG, but by being forced to fight the lovable
of the player character, and possibly kill her by mistake, and they begin to see the importance of sparing enemies. Reset to the last save to spare her, and Flowey will be there to
, making it clear that the game, including some of its inhabitants, knows about
and that it won't fix all of your problems here.
&&&&Webcomics&
seems at first to be just more of the kind of surreal goofiness that had defined previous
comics...until we find a meteor on a collision course for the main character's house.
Even after the meteor business solidified the fact that the story was taking itself more seriously than its predecessors, it's still fairly light material. Then
Jack Noir flips the fuck out and goes on a homicidal rampage, instantly promoting himself to .
also very suddenly demonstrates the darker turn the comic takes in Act 5 Act 2. (Spoilers in link)
Despite the fact that , the main character dies onscreen with basically no warning right after a particularly lighthearted and charming sequence, and the girl who led him there responds with a smiling emoticon.
Due to Xykon's
tendencies, it's very easy to assume that he's not that much of a threat. However, during the invasion of Azure City, he swiftly reminds the audience exactly how dangerous he is by
Much later in the comic, Tarquin is firmly established as a villain, but doesn't show quite how ruthless he is until he kills his own son, Nale.
In , the adventuring group has had a fairly easy time questing and defeating monsters...and then a special
appears and
ends up killing Pauline...
has Kin, who has been slowly recovering from the . And then there's Minmax, who has
and seems to have reached the point of "seeing" her like her people do. And then
an alternate-universe version of Kin deliberately
leaving them still in love, but Kin no longer understands why. When she abruptly attempts to send Minmax and Forgath on their way—probably never to see them again—Minmax panics and grabs her leash in an attempt to slow things down and talk it out.
on both of them speak volumes.
&&&&Western Animation&
has an unusually late example at the end of season 2. Up until that point, the show had proven its willingness to tackle difficult subjects, but always ultimately ended in a relatively lighthearted way. In the season two finale, despite a great deal of foreshadowing Zuko refuses to take a
and instead sides with , the Fire Nation
in taking over Ba Sing Se, held up as the Earth Kingdom's last defence, and just when a
arrives in the form of Aang reaching the Avatar State,
attacks him mid-transformation, outright killing him, his life only spared by the
Katara had received from the northern water tribe. Where Season 1 ends with the heroes victorious, season 2 ends with them battered and broken and having lost much that they had gained.
supplies one as well, halfway through the first season. Immediately after
the conclusion of the Pro-Bending tournament, the soundtrack fades out as members of the audiences slowly pull masks up over their faces. Then one of them reaches into their popcorn, slowly pulls out a weapon... and
. This set the
tone of the show quite nicely, which culminated in
a completely unambiguous murder-suicide during the season finale.
into the Web during their
situation, stranding him there before starting his conquest of Mainframe. We're led to believe that Guardian Enzo can protect the city, but then he , , and gets
begins like any other, with Peter and Joe going fishing and wondering where Quagmire is. When they go to his house they see Quagmire hanging from a noose and nearly dead from asphyxiation while watching clown porn. , and everything goes to Hell from there.
&&&& Real Life&
The name of the trope is not just word play. Strong negative emotions cause a not-completely-understood reaction between the enteric nervous system (the so-called "second brain") and the anterior cingulate cortex (which regulates physical and emotional pain). It's the same reason your stomach turns in knots when you're scared and why you get butterflies in your stomach when you're nervous.
Alternative Title(s):
Audience Sucker Punch
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GutPunch