Be Careful What You Wish For

"So this is it; this is what I wished for; just isn't how I envisioned it..." —Eminem, from "Careful What You Wish For."

"I DIDN'T MEAN IT!"

...you just might get it.

If a character expresses a wish that things were different and actually gets what they wished for, it is very possible that the results will not live up to their fantasies.

The circumstances can vary on how the wish is made, then consequently granted. The character making the wish may or may not have known that it was actually going to be granted, and the thing which grants it may be anything, depending on the genre—a wish-granting Genie who wants to show the character the error of their ways or just plain wants them to suffer; a sudden appearance by Louis Cypher ready to offer a Deal with the Devil; a tour through an Alternate Timeline; or even just an ironic twist of fate. The "deal breaker" that makes the wish not worth it also comes in a lot of possible flavors: maybe the character finds out that to get what they wanted they must give up something even more important to them; maybe the element of their life they wanted gone is really essential to who they are; maybe their wish has consequences they haven't thought of—or maybe they find out that It's the Journey That Counts and that Wanting Is Better Than Having.

This is an elementary form of Deconstruction - The character wants X, and then they find out X has unpleasant unanticipated consequences. Thus, X is deconstructed—the plot shows that X isn't as great as you think it is, and in fact may not be what you actually want at all. Nine times of ten this is an outright Aesop, though strictly speaking it doesn't have to be. A crucial element of playing that angle well is making the "deal breaker" a meaningful, inherent flaw to the original wish rather than something tacked on or that could have easily turned out differently if the character had more common sense. Otherwise, a Broken Aesop is almost guaranteed.

Often a cause of Blessed with Suck, though not the only one; wont to count as an Opinion-Changing Dream; contains the same type of irony as Ironic Hell. In some cases the experience may lead the wisher to discover an Awful Truth.

Sub-Trope of Be Careful What You Say.

Super-Trope of It's a Wonderful Plot, I Wish It Was Real, I Wished You Were Dead and Rhetorical Request Blunder.

Compare Gone Horribly Right, when science or logic is involved rather than wishes.

Contrast the Literal Genie, which ignores the intent of the wish in favor of the exact words; this trope is about the complications that arise when you get exactly what you wanted, rather than exactly what you said. A Jackass Genie is likely to cause this to happen, if he doesn't just twist your words entirely.

Examples of Be Careful What You Wish For include:

• Anime and Manga
• Comics
• Films
• Literature
• Live-Action Televistion
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Western Animation
• IRL

Fairy Tales

• King Midas. A notoriously greedy man, he once made a wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. When his wish was granted, he was ecstatic... at least until the first time he tried to eat something. In another version of the story, he turns his daughter into gold. Thus this is Older Than Feudalism.
• In The Twelve Wild Ducks, a queen says, "If I only had a daughter as white as snow and as red as blood, I shouldn't care what became of all my sons." A troll witch hears and takes her sons.
• In The Seven Ravens, the father wishes his sons were ravens for their being so forgetful. (To add to the irony, he was mistaken about why they hadn't done as he said.)
• In The Myrtle, a woman wishes for a child, even a sprig of myrtle.
• In Hans the Hedgehog, the father wishes for a son, even a hedgehog.
• Similar stories went around in seventeenth century England. In some cases a Catholic or Anglican parent would rather their unborn child to have no head than be a Roundhead, in others, a Puritan would wish for their child have no head than have a priest make the Sign of the Cross on it. Either way, they ended up with a headless baby.
• There is a fairy tale about a poor couple that rescues an elf and is granted three wishes in return. The wife, being hungry, wishes she had a nice, tasty sausage. Her husband scolds her for wasting a wish on such a mundane thing and blurts out in anger: "I wish that stupid sausage would stick to your nose!" which is, of course, exactly what happens next. In the end, they have to use the third wish to get the sausage off the poor woman's face and have thus wasted all three of them.
  • …At least, they still have got the sausage.
• There's a story from somewhere in Africa about a tribe that doesn't exist any more, because when seeking a reward from some supernatural being, the men said that the best thing that could happen to them was for their wife to give them a son, and for their cattle to give them female calves. — So be it, all your children shall be sons and all your calves shall be heifers. — They rejoiced, until...
• Prince Ivan, the Witch Baby, and the Little Sister of the Sun. Your son does not talk. Wish for any child at all, because things can't be worse, and you get a witch child born with her iron teeth who eats you up.

Fan Works

• Dragonball Z Abridged has Gohan pointing out this trope in his nerdish way after he and Krillin realize the recently-revived Picollo was brought back to Namek... just not with them.
  • On that note, Krillin wished for the perfect Christmas tree. Shenron delivered. Thanks for the special, you two!

Reject Mall Santa: Turles, sir! Our ship has mysteriously changed course for a new planet: Earth! Turles: Does it contain the sufficient amount of joy? Reject Mall Santa: According to our sensors... yes! Turles: Well, then... merry Christmas!

• Kill la Kill AU: In Comic 41, we have Ryuuko, in light of Satsuki's illness, and she wishes to be the "sick one" instead of her then ill sister. Unfortunately, this comes true and the comic ends with her in the hospital as her illness gets worse. In the second part of that arc, Satsuki wishes to be the sick one, too, so Ryuuko won't be alone.
• The Outside seems to imply this, as Ryuuko wanted little more than to go outside. She does get to but, unfortunately, this costs her the life she had before, as her getting injured is the reason she's removed from Satsuki's care altogether.

Music

• The titular character of Marilyn Manson's concept album Antichrist Superstar rises to become the Physical God he always dreamed of being, but crosses the Despair Event Horizon in the process and destroys the earth in a nihilistic rage. The last words of the album are actually "when all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed" - repeated over and over amidst a wall of static.
• The titular King in Metallica's "King Nothing" did get the title he worked for, but alienated his would-be subjects in the process, leaving him alone to attend to a crumbling kingdom.
• The Talking Heads song, "Burning Down The House" opens up with "Watch out, you might get what you're after"
• Kinda done in "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Albuquerque":

"I see this guy Marty tryin' to carry a big ol' sofa up the stairs all by himself. So I, I say to him, I say 'Hey, you want me to help you with that?' And Marty, he just rolls his eyes and goes 'Noooo, I want you to cut off my arms and legs with a chainsaw!' So I did."

• Eurydice in Hadestown wants to "lie down forever," so she's taken to the underworld.
• The narrator of Rush's song "Xanadu" wishes he could visit the stately pleasure dome of Coleridge's poem and gain immortality by drinking honeydew and the milk of paradise. He succeeds, but finds himself eternally trapped within the dome.
• Mentioned in the Art of Dying song "Completely;" the lead-in line to the chorus in (both versions) is "watch what you wish for, you know you just might get it..." In the original, there is a line in the chorus about how "everything you want/ain't always what you need..."
• The song "Black Fox" by Heather Dale. Whilst out on a unsuccessful fox-hunt, the master huntsman proclaims "If only the Devil himself come by, we'd run him such a race!". A little black fox then appears, and the huntsmen chase it until it crosses a river... and promptly turns into the devil, whereupon the huntsmen have a collective Oh Crap moment and flee, pursued by the (now-laughing) little black fox.

Religion and Myth

• In The Bible, even God could be harsh in granting wishes when the wishers were being too whiny. In response to the Israelites complaining about all manna and no meat, he gave them meat for a month "until it come out at your nostrils, and it be loathsome unto you" (KJV).
  • Jephthah in the book of Judges gets a lesson in Be Careful What You Pray For, when he prays to God, "If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering." (Judges 11:30,31) God gives him the victory, but when Jephthah comes home, the first thing that greets him at the doors was his only daughter! The jury is undecided over how Jephthah actually goes through with the sacrifice, whether he does make her a burnt offering or, as some believe, keeps her a virgin for the rest of her life, which in that culture at the time was considered a sacrifice.
  • Of course, though, the Bible being what it is, these could just God and/or the author of those specific books/passages teaching humanity the important lesson to "choose your words carefully".
• One particular instance is Draupadi, the Pandavas's wife, in the Mahabharata yearning for a husband in her previous life. She wanted her husband to be as strong as Vayu, as talented as Indra, as moral as Dharma and as beautiful as the Ashwini twins. She forgot to specify that she wanted one husband. As a result, in her next incarnation, she married five men and was the wife of five husbands simultaneously.

Theatre

• In Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the hapless (and gormless) Tom Rakewell's troubles start with him wishing he had money, upon which a mysterious manservant appears to inform him that an estranged uncle has left him a fortune. Once Tom realises that urban decadence and high living are no substitute for the love he left behind in the countryside, he wishes he were happy, and his servant convinces him to marry a genderbending circus artist. Once the marriage falls apart, he dreams of a machine that turns stone into bread and, upon waking, wishes it were true; the servant wheels in a prototype. The machine is a complete fraud, and Tom is bankrupted. You'd think the fact that the servant gives his name as "Nick Shadow" would have rung a bell at some point...
• Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods: Everyone wishes for something at one point - in fact, the beginning prologue song comprised of mostly the lyrics "I wish, more than anything, more than life" - but it typically backfires. Cinderella wishes to go to the Festival but doesn't count on a prince chasing her around the woods. The Baker and his wife wish to have a child but don't intend to also run around the woods trying to get stuff for the Witch.
  • This theme carries through the whole thing. Just when you think everything is resolved, someone whispers "I wish...", which kicks off the whole second half of the play.
• In Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry asks three traitorous nobles what he should do with a drunk who called him a nasty name. The nobles, unaware that Henry knows of their treachery, tell him emphatically that he should show no mercy for this (minor) infraction and punish the drunk harshly. In doing so, they leave themselves no room to ask for mercy when Henry reveals his knowledge of their betrayal. He has them executed.
• Shows up in I Married an Angel.

Tabletop Games

• Notorious warning given by almost all GM's in fantasy roleplaying when a player acquires a magical artifact or spell that grants them wishes. Often leads to almost comic wordings of wishes to avoid the GM taking it too literally and punishing the player. Apparently the fact that wish is 9th level (requiring the character to be at 17th level with genius-level Intelligence to be able to cast it at all) and ages the caster five years (In pre-3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons) isn't bad enough.
  • This reminds me, when you get a wish spell, NEVER sing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song.
  • Theoretically, you could cast a 2nd wish spell to de-age your caster 10 years, thus negating the aging effects of both your 1st wish spell and the wish you used to de-age yourself. Or, just use the wish phrasing found in the "Be careful what you wish for" section here.
• Magic the Gathering has a cycle of Wish cards, the flavour text of each of which is a variant on the following: "He wished for X, but not for the Y to [Verb that means use effectively] it."
• Warhammer 40,000: a piece of background fluff mentions the Dark Angels besieging the fortress of a rogue planetary Governor who'd turned to Chaos. The governor asks his daemon of Tzeentch for a way to break the siege, the daemon hands him something and disappears. The governor just has time to wonder what it is before he is surrounded by the hulking blue force fields heralding teleporting Space Marine Terminators- the daemon gave him a teleport homing beacon allowing the Dark Angels to kill the governor, effectively ending the siege.

Web Original

• Rob from Dimension Heroes wishing for a less boring summer. Boy, did he get that wish granted...
• The Creepypasta titled "The Three Wishes", found on Encyclopedia Dramatica. (It may be one of the least NSFW pages on the article, but it's still ED, so exercise caution).
  • 95% of creepypasta is this.
• Invoked in an intentionally nonsensical manner in the Something Awful parody "horror film" Doom House. "My name is Reginald P. Linux, and ever since my wife died, I've been very depressed. This is why I've been searching for the house of my dreams. But as a philosopher once said, be careful what you dream for, because you just... might... get it." Since he wasn't "dreaming for" a house haunted by an odd-looking figurine and built over a terrorist burial camp, this makes no sense, and it's only put there as a parody of bad writing.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is this trope played deadly straight. Billy/Dr. Horrible wants to be a supervillain and join the Evil League of Evil. He also wants to get a girlfriend. Well, he gets one of his wishes when the Evil League demands that he commit a heinous crime ("a murder would be nice of course") as a membership test. This turns out to be Foreshadowing, as the final confrontation with his Arch Enemy, Captain Hammer, ends with the latter's humiliating defeat and the entire world bowing to him in fear due to the murder of... his girlfriend, Penny. Cue his entry into the Evil League, having both gained and lost everything he wanted.
• From one of The Cinema Snob's reviews, Beware Children At Play...

Snob: You know, the kids are evil, just fucking kill them! (Massacre of children begins as the Snob watches in horror) Snob:...I wasn't serious about killing them!

• In one Retsupurae showing a kid who wanted all of his "fighting moves" to be used for MUGEN, Slowbeef comments that it couldn't get any worse... just before he shows off his Super Attack.
  • This tends to happen whenever Slowbeef says "how could this get any worse" and variants...with one notable exception.

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