• The Future Forest: As fun and colorful as the installation looks, the various sculptures were constructed to be a warning regarding our increasing supply of disposable junk plastics slowly eroding our environment.
• How Hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights portrays the world. Everything seems bright and cheery and people of every race seem happy and content but everywhere are grotesque situations and bizarre creatures representing sin and immorality.

• In the Korean Animated series called Running Man, the plot goes about a bloody war that happened years ago because the seven tribes want a powerful energy source called the Soul Tree. The leaders of the tribes decided to hold a competition so people can get a share a piece of the Soul Tree if they win. There's already a The Hunger Games vibes in this, but it goes deeper:
  • First, the Running Man found out about the game being rigged by the show's host, Charming Gold. He was bullied by his peers because he looked ugly as a monster before. That scenario caused him to discover his powers in sucking the life of his fellow kind. Not only he will look young, but he will stay immortal for a thousand years. Not only that, his plan is actually to 'restart the world' and make his own kind considering he killed his own kind. Then they found out that the other competitors they battled, the D.V 7, are actually the kidnapped champions from different tribes who were forcefully experimented and brainwashed to fight against the Running Man.
    • What's worse? This happened to Gai and Liu's older sister, Jean.
  • But the biggest reveal is that the world is actually being judged by the God of Earth named Ulcus. Miyo and Dr. Mala were able to uncover the true story of Ulcus, but they were horrified when they did. Ulcus wasn't meant to save mankind, he was meant to save the world by destroying it without the concern on whoever lives in that world and 'recreate' it again. Ulcus said that this happened years before the Running Man series started. If Ulcus did the same thing once again, the characters will die a horrible death because of Charming Gold's greed. He really messed it up big time, even though he has a reason for his attitude.

• A strip by Argentinian cartoonist Quino depicted a tourist first arriving to a foreign country, who is first delighted when he sees that everyone from the cab driver, hotel employees and people on the street are always singing a merry tune... until policemen, The Men in Black and government agents surround him suddenly, and menacingly observe that he is not singing.

• The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing: Even though the world always seems a little... off, the protagonist doesn't actually figure out anything too strange until about halfway through.
• A Brighter Dark: The kingdom of Hoshido is revealed to be this. Like in the game, Hoshido is a beautiful land with excess food and water that seems like a perpetual golden age. However, it becomes quickly clear that Hoshido was made for Hoshidans, and anyone else, be them tribals, shapechangers, non-humans, and ''especially'' Nohrians face heavy discrimination and violence.
• In Everqueen, Alaris is a city pretending to be a Crystal Spires and Togas attempt to restore the glory of the Golden Age, but in reality, it merely replicates some ancient architecture with no attempts at originality, and is built in an extremely colourless, cold fashion. And of course, there is Urban Segregation. Plus the leadership serving Chaos toward the end.
• Ambience: A Fleet Symphony: Charlotte is a glitzy, glamorous casino city, as long as one doesn't look too closely at what Premier Kerrigan Badeau is up to.
• The Games We Play (The Gamer/RWBY) depicts Mistral as this. Between the fact that open misery draws the Grimm and The Mafiaesque grip the ruling Families have on the kingdom, Granny's city is crime infested in such a way that people can cover their eyes and pretend its (sic) clean.
• Indiana Jones And The Daring Daughter (link) depicts Pankot Palace as this. Whereas the film depicts it as a big, old palace with a big, dark secret, this fanfic goes further by going for this trope. The walls are covered in many colorful murals and mosaics cover some of the floors, delicately carved benches line the place, there is a greenery abundant with flower bushes and trees ripe with fresh fruits, a river runs nearby with a series of bridges and waterfalls, and servants inside are available for visitors at their beck and call. But at the same time, the greenery is tended by servants who have dull, tired eyes, which makes one of the main characters wonder what has been going on with the workers, and also how such a palace had become so rich and opulent after having been abandoned for so long. And that's not getting into the missing children...
• The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World.
  • C'hou. Since the four pretty much viewed C'hou as a Crapsack World in With Strings Attached, they are initially pleased by the changes wrought by the Pyar gods when they return. The new city Tevri'ed is beautiful and full of interesting things, money is easy to make, and the guards are friendly and helpful. In particular they like the new inhabitants, the G'heddi'onians, who are pleasant and civilized. Less than a day later, they've been jumped five times by both outworlders and inhabitants, and within a few more days they thoroughly hate the “Geddies,” who viciously turn on the four when they don't act heroic in the proper way. For example, George saves a library full of people by ripping up an evil magic book—and the Head Librarian fines him heavily for destroying a unique item. And things just get worse from there. While everyone blames the Black Tower for making things bad, the lousy behavior of nearly all the people wasn't created by them.
  • In-story, the Flying Island of Tipaan, a luxury resort run on the backs of the Svenjaya, an oppressed servant race. The four at least manage to alleviate their lot.
• The Last Great Time War: The outermost Time Lord colony seemingly becomes a peaceful utopia. In reality, it's an illusion created by the Horde of Travesties to lure in victims so they can devour their timelines.
• Mastermind: Rise of Anarchy: Fumikage reflects that after the revelations of Strategist For Hire, the world of Pro Heroism feels like an oil slick that somebody dumped glitter into. Pretty and shiny on the surface, but with a lot of grime lurking beneath the sheen, and that nobody with any power seems inclined towards trying to clean up the mess.
• In Winx Club, Magix is an upbeat, light-hearted Sugar Bowl. In Paradoxus, Magix only appears to be one while in peacetimes, but after Bloom and Stella's deaths, it unravels as an outright Crapsack World. Because, well, when a war of dimensional scale breaks, it's pretty difficult to keep the Sugar Bowl appearance. Thus, making it a subversion. It doesn't help that the very corrupt Council of Rocalucce and the nobility of several kingdoms are rewarded with power for helping Eudora invade Magix and, consequently, have grown complacent enough to drop the façade. In peacetimes, they made an effort to pretend that, respectively, they worked for the three schools' best interests and were helping the recently crowned queens rule their planets better.
• Any Sailor Moon fanfic that frames the Silver Millenium as a dystopian future.
• In Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Sonic's home planet is a nice and rather peaceful place to live. The rest of the galaxy? NOPE.
  • Episode 69 has Marmolim. A planet inhabited by cute beady-eyed aliens with a penchant for magic. Sounds great — except for the fact that they've nearly been wiped out by Shroud, and are torn in a religious civil war between Christians and Maledict-worshipers.
  • New Jerusalem, the Angel capitol city, is subtly implied to be this with the Big Brother Is Watching You and Happiness Is Mandatory overtones.
• Slayers Trilogy: The alternate future with the Dragons. Peace and order everywhere, death was rare, massive technological advancements, and criminals were extinct! The problem? To make sure that this peace and order is never disturbed, all humans were purged of any and all evil thoughts, stripping them of their free will.
• This Bites!: The World Government is to be seen by the average citizen as upholding the law, taking dramatic steps to ensure it remains so. After the events of Alabasta, a goal of Protagonist Jeremiah Cross becomes to make the world a better place by ripping away the veneer of peace, exposing the World Government's actions to the average citizen. He exposes massacres, slavery, the fact that some Marines will kill their own men for the chance of getting a pirate killed and more.

Multi-Media

• Fluffy Pony works (which involve a species of genetically engineered "magical pony" pets) offer an interesting inversion; Fluffy ponies are designed to see the world as a Sugar Bowl, regardless of how cruel and harsh the world may be (Depending on the Writer), making their world this trope through their eyes, while the human characters see the world for what it really is (though it is not impossible for a Fluffy that has had enough experience with the world to realize how dangerous the world is). Combine this with them being programmed to be naturally innocent, trusting, weak, and naive, and throw them in a world full of natural predators, many other things in nature that can kill them, and a surprisingly dis-appropriate number of humans who want to mistreat if not outright torture them for little to no reason (again, how prevalent this is depends on the writer, and there are usually just as many people who genuinely want to help and care for them), and those who aren't lucky enough to be taken into a loving household will often either have to learn they live in a Crapsaccharine World or end up either dead or just saying "Wan di" on loop until something kills them.

Fanfiction

• Beyond the Wall: The forest village is a lovely, friendly place where everypony has everything they need, and everypony is happy and cares for one another...but no one can come in, and no one can go out. Because Gaea doesn't love anything or anypony outside the wall, intruders are killed on sight, and any villager that tries to leave is killed and buried within the village grounds so Gaea will still love them.
• The Conversion Bureau. The ponies are willing parties to the genocide of humanity...and it's considered a good thing.
  • In the spin-off story The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum, TCB!Equestria paints itself up as a paradise, but any veneer of niceness is easily broken if you dig deep enough. For one thing, it's shown that the Empire is very dreadfully unprepared to support the massive influx of newfoals coming in, and if you even so much as question Queen Celestia's "wisdom", you could get sent to a prison camp where you'll be worked to death or tortured, as TCB!Spike learned the hard way. There are also mentions of re-education centers; PHL members Aegis and Verdant Tract allude to having had brushes with those in the past, something which neither of them want to go through again. And according to TCB!Granny Smith, the whole land is "poisoned and dying".
• In Jericho (MLP), most of Equestria appears to actually be sweet, but there are... darker parts. It starts to get dark in chapter 3, where the main character, Jericho, a pony from a faraway land, stumbles across a dark Government Conspiracy around the western borderlands of Equestria. It gets lampshaded.
• Chains actually pulls this off in a far more subtle fashion. In this story, Equestria basically follows mostly to being the Sugar Bowl it always has been in the MLP canon, it even has Princess Celestia as still mostly a benevolent ruler and the resident Big Good. However, if you're a human living in Equestria (yes, they fully exist in this story) consider yourself enslaved.
  "What the hell is going on with this country? It all looked so sugary and nice up until an hour or so ago."
• Lines and Webs Equestria appears to be a Sugar Bowl because it has been socially designed as such by Celestia, who is using the Elements of Harmony to slowly strip all ponies of free will.
• Rainbow Factory, both the song, the original fic, and its many spin-offs portrays the titular factory as a cover-up for a death camp, where children who have failed their flight test are ground up for material to make rainbows, so they can eliminate weaker children and preserve Cloudstale's own idea of strength.
  (from the song): in the Rainbow Factory, where fears and horrors come true, in the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through.
• Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles): While the fact that one of Equestria's greatest heroes turns out to be Serial Killer is bad enough, some of the many spinoff works present Pinkie's murders as part of a larger conspiracy, going up to the highest levels of Equestrian Government.
• Fallout: Equestria: In true Fallout fashion, the backstory reveals that past-Equestria slowly became one due to the brutal war with the Zebra Nation, splitting the government between six ponies who had no experience in politics, invention of mega spells equivalent to nuclear bombs thanks to Fluttershy's well meaning efforts, and the increasingly morally questionable actions Equestria had to resort to, up to and including spying on its citizens to make sure everyone is "happy" and getting into the heads of anyone who may be a threat in a desperate attempt to keep things together. It goes without saying, things just kept going From Bad to Worse.
• MLP: Despite seeming to be very similar to the Sugar Bowl world of the original show, the story's world features such things as child prostitution, oppressive, soul-destroying cults, and a flourishing culture of bigotry.
• Chrysalis Visits The Hague is all about Queen Chrysalis' indictment for war crimes at the (Real Life) International Criminal Court in The Hague. A B-plot meanwhile covers the Equestrian kingdom's efforts to stomp out the Changelings once and for all in her absence. The story soon starts dropping hints that a good portion of Equestrian society has been erected on a hotbed of horrific crimes against sapiency, with allusions being made to — among other things — The Yugoslav Wars. Needless to say, it gets a bit dark and cynical at points.
• The Assassination of Twilight Sparkle universe has Unicornia, a pretty sweet place to live, what with the advanced technology, healthcare, food, fashion and bright smiling children. Just as long as you can stand the culturally ingrained racism, the politicians dragging their children into their power plays, and the casually institutionalized slavery. Path of the Dragon even reveals that there's inequality even among the unicorns themselves, with the nobility being the only ones holding majority, if not all, of the power aside from the Royal Family. To put this into perspective, if an average Unicornian can get by without getting screwed over by the nobility, it's considered a lucky break.

Abridged Series

• In Friendship is Witchcraft, ponies pride themselves on ignorance, slavery, racism, and general abuse to non-pony races is not only tolerated, but openly encouraged, dark forces plague the world on a regular basis, an unknown but no doubt sizable proportion of the population are unknowingly robots who apparently (if anti-robot propaganda can be believed) go on murderous rampages if they learn their true natures, there was a massive World War One-esque conflict not long ago, the government has spies everywhere Twilight is allowed to cause mayhem and commit evil dead on a regular basis, without any negative effects to herself, Fluttershy openly runs an Apocalypse Cult, and the ponies in general are either too ignorant to notice horrors of their world or just don't care... Lampshaded by a paragraph from one of Episode 8's ending spinning newspapers:
  Citizens hope to set a trap that will lure the panther into the smoking crater left by last week's moon crash, where it will be eaten by the spiders. The Ponyville Rescue Squad assures citizens that they have a Plan B, which involves herding the panther close enough to come within reach of the downtown Tentacle Monster.
• My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series has Equestria ruled by the Ax-Crazy Affably Evil Mad God Celestia, whose "teachings" turned her student into a cynical alcoholic mess, most of the ponies are either shallow and self serving or mentally unstable, there is a secret war being fought between Eldritch Abominations that ponies are too ignorant to notice, Fantastic Racism is rampant throughout the three species of ponies, the entire cast live depressing lives, and the various events of the series rarely end with any real resolution.
• Scootertrix the Abridged: Though Lighter and Softer than the examples above, it is still ruled by a very irresponsible Princess Celestia, who usually leaves her subjects to fend for themselves and recruits three school-aged fillies to serve as her generals in a war between Equestria and two different evil empires closing in from both sides. Oh, and the series also deconstructs the idea of characters being aware of the fourth wall, by showing how mentally and emotionally draining it would be, knowing that their lives are nothing more then a show, that can be cancelled at anytime and having to live with the burden that if the general public found out, it could have devastating consequences to the world, and if they uses their fourth wall abilities too much, it could create plot holes that will come back to bite them in unsee-able circumstances.
• Ultra Fast Pony: Equestria is ruled by a self-absorbed immortal, who openly treats her subjects however she fills at the moment without a care in the world, the world is populated almost entirely by selfish jerk asses, murder has been illegal for all of ten years, criminal organization commit acts of violence with very little in their way, and Ponyville is in such deplorable state, its rat infestation is the only thing keeping their crocodile problem confined and the water is contaminated with arsenic.
  Rainbow Dash: There's one thing I'll never understand, Scootaloo. Why can't everyone in Ponyville just accept me for who I am?
  Scootaloo: <Maybe because we live in a corrupt society where the lower class are mistreated while unelected dictators take all they want without thought towards building a more stable future for us all to live in.>
  [and later]
  Chrysalis: My changelings need to consume pure love!
  Twilight: And you came looking for it in Equestria?
  Chrysalis: Yes.
  Twilight: That's stupid. You're stupid!

Webcomics

• Star Mares uses the more saccharine elements of the setting as a smoke screen for the more unsavory elements of the Star Wars universe, such as Fantastic Racism. The fact that all the characters are brightly colored in contrast to the largely monochrome backgrounds helps drive the point home.

• Devo's "Beautiful World". It starts off talking about how great the world is. Then it becomes apparent that this is someone else's opinion and that the narrator of the song doesn't agree with it. The idea is that the person who says the world is beautiful has been conditioned to believe it is and doesn't know about the bad things. The video makes this apparent.
• Definitely exemplified in the song "Handlebars" by the Flobots (by extension, this song makes an example out of Real Life). The first half is well enough off, describing the good that we people can do. It's "good to be alive" in a world where we can do anything. However, the song takes a sharp turn in the middle:
  I can hand out a million vaccinations
  Or let them all die in exasperation
  Have them all healed of their lacerations
  Have them all killed by assassination
• The PV and lyrics of the Vocaloid song "Hello, Planet".
• Lily Allen's song "LDN" about London and how everything looks exciting and wonderful at first, but when you take a second look... Indeed, most of Lily Allen's songs come across this way due to the musical style they use and the sound of her voice. "Smile" and "The Fear" come to mind.
• "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton starts out about a nice and sweet song about unrequited love, but soon takes a sinister turn into escapism, cyborgs, and kidnapping.
• Perfect Lawns by Curse in the Woods lives and breathes this trope:
  Prettyville, perfect lawns
  Sprinklers programmed to go off at dawn
  Luxury car in every drive
  Ain't it grand to have a trophy wife.
  ...
  So take all your vitamins, sterilize everything,
  Lock all your windows like they tell you on CNN.
  Don't forget to set your security alarm
  'cause the rest of the world is out to do you harm...
• In the video for Travis' cheery tune "Flowers in the Window", the band drives into a small town in the middle of nowhere that is inhabited solely by beautiful pregnant women. After about four minutes of the band wondering how this could be, Fran Healy wanders to the outskirts and comes upon a solitary shackled man in a pen, screaming and presumably begging Fran to free him. Fran and the boys, fearing a similar fate, high-tail it out of there.
• The Mastodon music video for "Deathbound" depicts an eclipse making the inhabitants of the puppet world of Magicland Ax-Crazy. Played for Laughs.
• There Is No Depression in New Zealand, by 1980s New Zealand rock group Blam Blam Blam. The song is told from the viewpoint of the Government of the day, which maintained a façade of civil order while public unrest was threatening to boil over.
• The Dean Martin song "Do You Believe This Town?" is about a town that, on the outside, seems like Mayberry, but is actually brimming over with greed, corruption, and bigotry.
• Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" comes across as this, after record label executives wanted a more romantic context to the song.
• Red Velvet's "Russian Roulette" music video is wonderfully unsettling, seeming to take place in a world that resembles the real world except much brighter and much more bizarre at the same time. The premise sounds pretty straightforward, with Seulgi confirming it's about the girls attempting to murder one another because they all like the same boy. There are scenes in a school and a shared residence. Yet, in addition to the unnaturally lurid hair colors (a clear throwback to retro video games), the world in the MV apparently doesn't work the way it does in real life: When doing various activities, including eating breakfast, the members are Emotionless Girls; cars move in the direction of the sidewalk; their efforts to murder one another leave no noticeable injuries, and in at least one instance (Irene and Seulgi pushing Wendy's bed into the sidewalk to kill her), the girl subjected to the murder attempt doesn't visibly care or struggle. Enhances the creepiness factor, being coherent and familiar enough for the overall sheer weirdness to leave an impression. (And, again, probably inspired by classic video game mechanics as well as cartoons like Tom and Jerry and Itchy and Scratchy, which also defy real-world rules.)
• Suggested in Peter Schilling's "(Let's Play) U.S.A." with this line:
  "Did you hear the master plan? One nation under Disneyland."

• Danganronpa:
  • Hope's Peak Academy in was officially a government-funded private school whose goal was to raise hope for Japan's future, where students lived in harmony and were guaranteed success in life. However, the school's small pool of Ultimate students wasn't enough to keep the academy afloat, so they opened their doors to the public and began actively defrauding reserve course students out of their parents' money with massive tuitions. Said students were also often bullied by the Ultimates and one was manipulated into undergoing a surgical augmentation procedure by the school intended to make him a transhuman genius, which eradicated his old personality. The Gaiden Game Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls reveals that the school's staff may have even been actively abusive toward their own students, including the elementary branch. And this is all before The Tragedy even begins.
  • The world in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is actually quite nice, and completely peaceful. So much so that people are bored out of their wits and willing to watch teenagers murder each other in the killing game as reality tv. A show which is on its 53rd season. With the mastermind claiming that all of the students willingly signed up to be brainwashed into thinking they're someone else and put on TV. All of this assuming we can trust what Tsumugi says.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! seems like the idyllic setting of your typical harem comedy. Then you peel back the bright colors and learn some of the deeper layers, which include charming topics like depression, domestic abuse, self-harm, alienation, and suicide. And then there's the gradual, apparent breakdown of reality and numerous horrifying encounters. All of which are revealed to be the result of Monika manipulating the game's code, because she (and any president of the Literature club) knows they're all in a video game. One where she doesn't have her own route, and she's a yandere for the player.
• GENBA no Kizuna has Rougetsu City, which seems to be a beautiful and economically prosperous part of Tsukihami, but is plagued by organized crime families, like the Dokuganryuu family, which runs many illegal businesses with impunity due to bribing government officials, politicians and police officers, thus leading to the city becoming so dangerous that police officers are 67% more likely to be injured or killed on duty than in the rest of Rougetsu.
• Beyond Coast in Policenauts.
• The Nagasaki of the years prior to the Meiji Restoration is portrayed as this in Shall We Date?: Ninja Shadow. The city itself is bursting with riches, businesses and entertainment, but the Big Bad Suetsugu and his influence have corrupted the merchant guilds and there's a lot of crime, illegal trade and slavery under the facade. It's so bad that the Vigilante Man group the Player Character joins (as a Sweet Polly Oliver) was specifically formed to deal with such horrible things.

• The Amazing Digital Circus: The titular circus is a bright and colorful world filled with wacky characters…who are really human souls trapped in a digital world, unable to escape, barely holding on to their sanity.
• Bravest Warriors has Venus Five, a cutesy world, inhabited by adorable, sexually liberated aliens ... or so it seems, until the crew find out that every now and again the world bursts into fire, only for things to immediately go back to normal with no explanation. They eventually find out that the world they see is just a holographic projection set up by the planet's rulers to fool both outsiders and even most of the planet's population and in reality, Venus Five is a hellish fire world inhabited by grotesque aliens.
• The setting of ENA seems to be one of these: it's a goofy, surreal place full of quirky characters, but ENA's sad side is explicitly a Death Seeker, and many of the locales have rather sinister undertones (such as the maze in "Extinction Party", which seems to have a vested interest in having ENA there and twists the warnings of its inhabitants so she doesn't get suspicious). ENA: Dream BBQ also implies that some sort of Great Offscreen War took place, the local deities are the only things keeping the world from decaying into nothing, and one of the ENAs did something so horrible that the entire species was collectively Barred from the Afterlife and earned the ire of basically everyone, including said local deities.
• Everyone remembers Happy Tree Friends, right? Those cute, innocent creatures from Mondo Media where nothing could go wrong? Well, if you watch one whole episode, eventually you'd be wrong. The show largely focuses on the sweet forest animals getting killed in every single way possible. Stay out of this one, kids.
• If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate: The entire point of the video, contrasting the idyllic Disneyesque setting with all the gross and brutal details of the Middle Ages that Disney cartoons tend to leave out.
• Pretty Blood: Malino Land used to be a Sugar Bowl ala Teletubbyland, but Pretty Blood turned it into the worst dystopia imaginable.