Arisa takes this trope and tweaks it. Rather than the wishes themselves that are messed up, it's the desire to have one's wishes granted. Most of the people are overlooking the obvious with rationalizations of "it could never happen to me" until it actually does, making selfish and arbitrary wishes without considering the side-effects. that is, rather than being about wish corruption, it's about the corruption by wishes (having your desires constantly fulfilled). Understandably, the entire class as a result is just a few shades short of psychopathy.
Hohenheim of Fullmetal Alchemist spends his entire long life (over 400 years) wishing his life would end. When the end finally comes, however, he wishes he would not die yet.
Father heartily lauds how Truth gives humans despair when they get conceited, to keep them in line. Then, following a long, action-packed sequence of events, he winds up in front of Truth himself, who reminds Father of his exact words, and points out how conceited Father was to think he could absorb a god. He gets plenty of despair.
Human transmutation is wrought with this. By the laws of alchemy, it is forbidden, since the value of human life is immeasurable, so attempting it will cause those involved to lose that which was most precious to them. When Izumi attempted it to revive her stillborn child, she lost her reproductive organs. When Ed and Al tried it to revive their mother, Ed lost his leg and his brother.
In Bleach, Aizen tries to help Ichigo get stronger because he wants a Worthy Opponent. Well, he got what he asked for... right through his stupid face.
Ichigo tells Keigo after he loses his powers that he always wanted a normal life...then sees the folly of that when Ginjo and Xcution start messing up his life.
The series Asatte no Houkou begins with a single (well, double) instance of this, with a dash of Swapped Roles. The rest of the series consists of the characters dealing with the results.
Making wishes under the old sakura tree in Da Capo can have major consequences. For some it's even worse though when those wishes get reverted.
The 'Suruga Monkey' arc of Bakemonogatari initially appears to be a minor twist on the traditional story of the Monkey's Paw (the twist being that the paw has grafted itself to its owner's arm) but turns out to be rather more of a twist than usual. The owner's first wish was to run faster than her classmates to stop them from laughing at her; everyone in the class faster than her was mysteriously beaten up the day before the athletics carnival. The real twist is that the paw isn't a Monkey's Paw, it belongs to a malevolent spirit called a Rainy Devil that grants your true subconscious wish- even though Kanbaru wished to run faster than her classmates she really wanted revenge on them, so the Rainy Devil possessed her and beat them up. Things get worse when the sempai she had a long-term crush on gets a boyfriend. The final twist is that after granting her third wish, the Rainy Devil will take her soul.
The RayearthOVA starts this way - the heroines fear their graduation, as they will be separated. So they wish something prevents this... then all the mayhem starts.
The scientists in Utawarerumono wanted to live forever. Unfortunately Iceman was basically a god and they just REALLY pissed him off, so he gave them all bodies that would be immortal by turning them all into red jelly.
In D.Gray-man, the unlucky Miranda Lotto loses her one hundredth job. She says: "Day after day, things always go wrong for me. I wish tomorrow would never come." What's the problem? Her Innocence-superpowered clock hears it, and it grants her wish. The whole town where she lives gets stuck in October 9 for more than a month.
Quite a few Franken Fran stories end this way. One, for example, has a modern Elizabeth Bathory asking for eternal youth and eternal life. Fran gave her what she wants by turning all of her cells into the one type of cell that isn't programmed to die: Cancer Cells.
Actually Fran just gave her what she wanted. The Women went way overboard with the treatment and Fran was trying to warn her when it was too late. Still an example but not Fran's fault.
xxxHolic features a chapter and episode involving a monkey's paw, which, as in the original W. W. Jacobs short story, grants wishes for its holder - five wishes in this case, one for each finger of the mummified paw, which break one at a time as wishes are granted. Also as in the original story, the young woman who gets hold of the paw finds her wishes backfiring on her, particularly when she thoughtlessly wishes that there would be a railway accident so that her lateness would be excused, causing a bystander to be suddenly pushed in front of the train. The paw and her own careless wishes end up killing her.
Definitely the instance that most people think of in the Dragon Ball franchise is when Perfect Cell, wanting to get a good fight before he destroys the Earth, hears from Gohan who, not wanting to fight, will let loose and kill him if Cell pushes him too hard. Cell, beingCell, goes ahead with that anyways, pulling some heavy Kick the Dog moments by nearly killing the rest of the cast and killing Android 16, and which pushes Gohan to go Super Saiyan 2 and beat Cell half to death and drive him to Villainous Breakdown. Gohan even invokes the whole trope by pointing to Cell that him letting loose is what Cell wanted in the first place.
General Wolf of Monster comes to regret asking Johan how he's feeling. Johan can't put it into words, so he demonstrates it by killing everyone close to the general. This lets the General feel Johan's own isolation.
This trope happens to be the one that catalyzes the real story for Tenma, and thus the entire series. Tenma, after being demoted by the corrupt hospital director for saving a patient and dumped by the director's daughter, states that his superiors "would be better off dead" to that same supposedly comatose patient. Should've thought that one out better; turns out his patient, Johan, is a sociopathic mass murderer who would gladly oblige such a request.
Mostly subverted in Ah! My Goddess. Goddesses grant wishes to humans, and they don't try and cheat them out of anything. It does, however, apply when a demon is granting a wish, since A; they might cheat you on it, and B; they will ask for something in return proportionate to the wish, though according to Hild at least, that means a demon won't ever grant a wish to destroy the world, since no mortal could possibly have anything to offer of equal value to that wish.
One other danger in wishes with demons is that even if they don't cheat you on the wish, you still can't back out of it if it being granted is something they want.
Zelgadis of Slayers wishes to be strong. And then he gets his wish. And it sucks. He's strong, yes, but he's now an human-golem hybrid with stone skin and metal hair.
Actually, it's a funny case with Zel. He mentions that he could've lived with the effects if he wasn't being used as a guinea pig for his grandfather Rezo.
Fushigi Yuugi Especially in the manga, Miaka wishes to be rid of her problems with school and her mother, and that there was a god she could pray to. Well, in a way, she gets her wish: she is in an alternate dimension where there is no school, and she gets to be the priestess to a god in this dimension. But, it's not all roses. She's in a Cast Full of Pretty Boys, but she has Virgin Power. She is constantly getting the Distress Ball, too. Oh, and then there's that whole thing about the Beast God consuming his priestess' body and soul as she makes her wishes.
Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures: After Keroppi has a bad day, he wishes that he would be more of a dependable person, just like Kitty White is. He and Kitty switch bodies. Thanks, magical Fish.
In Nightmare Inspector, Hiruko often lets the dreamer's wishes be fulfilled. Whether they were actually beneficial to the dreamer is an entirely different question ...
Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Professor Cobra wanted to be reunited with his dead son. Yubel promised to do so. He thought that meant she would bring him back to life. She/He had other ideas, consisting of erasing the memory that his son died in the first place and dropping Cobra to his death. But, hey, if you believe in the afterlife... Yubel was like that about a lot of things.
This is a very important theme in Tenshi ni Narumonwhere the strength of one of the main characters' wish almost erases him and other two individuals from existence.
Analyzed in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Kyubey grants wishes in exchange for the wishee becoming a Magical Girl and fighting monsters for him. The problems that arise from the granting of the wish aren't exactly because of the wish itself, or from Kyubey - while he's not exactly trustworthy, he has no incentive to screw with peoples' wishes. The problem is the person making the wish is almost never honest about what they really wanted. Veteran Magical Girls repeatedly warn potential ones against the perils of a selfless wish, and that's part of what makes it so tragic: there are no selfless wishes. Every selfless wish has a selfish motive behind it, and seeing the chance for that selfish desire slipping away with the rising happiness of someone else sends a Magical Girl deeper into despair... which is, of course, what Kyubey wants.
In the end Madoka manages to make an actual selfless wish that remakes the world and destroy Kyubey's schemes. The catch is that it comes at the price of removing herself out of existence. Madoka doesn't care about that side-effect; unfortunately, Homura (whose every action in the plot was for Madoka's wellness) does - the plot of the third film, Rebellion is about her trying to reverse Madoka's wish, no matter the price.
In Himitsu no Akko-chan, (the original version from 1969), the titular heroine, Akko-chan, upon meeting a deaf-mute kid, asks her magic mirror to turn her into a deaf-mute version of herself, reasoning that, after her brush with disability, she'll be able to restore herself with a second wish. However, since the mirror works only by clearly enunciated utterances, and since it was enough literal to strip Akko-chan of the ability to speak at all, the unfortunate wishee finds herself deaf, voiceless and cut off of her power source. She gets better later, though, as the Reset Button simply presses itself after imparting a much needed Aesop.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 begins with the narrator saying she hates Tokyo and wishes it would just break, the whole city. Cue the titular earthquake.
