->''Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player\\
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,\\
And then is heard no more; it is a tale\\
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,\\
Signifying nothing.''
-->-- '''{{Shakespeare}}''', ''{{Macbeth}}'', Act V, Scene 5

Once upon a time, a man decided to climb a mountain. He took a nasty fall, badly bruising himself, and landed in the woods next to a very shaggy dog. Despite his injuries, he limped back to his house, where he left the dog, then to the nearest hospital, where he got some x-rays. When he got home, the dog looked hungry, so he made a steak just for the dog, and turned on the television. He was just about to call the pound when he heard that a wealthy couple, on vacation in the vicinity, had ''lost'' a very shaggy dog, and were offering a [[UndisclosedFunds very large sum]] for his return. He bought a plane ticket, but fell short on funds. Being a thrifty man, never wanting to live in debt, he sold a chair from his house to pay for the ticket. When he got on the plane, he found that he couldn't take the dog without preparations; the airline, however, was willing to transfer his ticket for a nominal fee. He was forced to pay this fee, and the veterinarian's bills, with a credit card, which irked him even though he knew the reward would offset it. Then he flew to the city in question, but since he was only twenty-four, had to walk ten miles through the woods, going in the general direction of the manor. When he arrived, he found he had missed the front gate entirely. He walked directly up to the door with the dog and rang the bell... when he and the dog were shot dead by a guard. Noticing that the dog's corpse looked similar to the dog that the couple had lost, the guard showed it to them. The couple then said, "That's not our dog. Our dog wasn't THAT shaggy."

Did you feel like that story had no point? It didn't. Sometimes an author will go one step beyond a ShaggyDogStory, and ShootTheShaggyDog. Don't just KillEmAll; make all their accomplishments a moot point [[SenselessSacrifice and their deaths completely senseless]]. Don't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death; [[GroundhogDayLoop trap him in a grim cycle of]] [[RubyQuest reincarnation]], and make him [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption a failure in every incarnation]]. Don't ''even'' KillEmAll; they don't even get to bring the {{Villain}}s down with them. The only thing that's changed in the last 400 pages is that a few ineffectual people have died... Some of whom were the protagonists.

Occasionally part of AnAesop, to show ''[[CrapsackWorld just how crappy]]'' the world becomes when you violate the lesson; frequently used to try and show a '[[DarkerAndEdgier gritty]]', [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism cynical]] world. Sometimes, it's an attempt at tragedy that makes the mistake of nullifying itself by [[DarknessInducedAudienceApathy making it impossible to ''care'']]. Depending on the particulars, it can overlap with DiabolusExMachina, and is a frequent cause of AngstAversion.

'''NOTE: An ending in which TheHeroDies heroes die or are implied to die does ''not'' a ShootTheShaggyDog make. This trope should refer to stories where the protagonists are ineffectual, accomplish nothing, fail to bring villains to justice, AND they die.'''

The ultimate DownerEnding. See also CrapsackWorld and WorldHalfEmpty. Spoilers ahead, of course. If the writer's a cynical bastard it might be a BlackComedy.

----
[[foldercontrol]]
!!Examples:

[[folder:{{Anime}} and {{Manga}}]]
* The Chapter Black saga from ''YuYuHakusho'' could be considered an example of this. The characters pull out all the stops, sacrificing a great deal in the process, in order to try and stop Sensui from opening a tunnel to Demon World, only to eventually learn that [[spoiler: A) Sensui's true motive for opening the tunnel was just so he could go to the demon world and find an opponent who could kill him, B) he would have been dead within a month anyway, from a fatal disease, and C) the spirit world's elite soldiers could seal the demon tunnel with relatively little effort.]]
**This was made even worse by the fact that [[spoiler: the manga's ending reveals that demons aren't really all that violent, and many of the ones that had attacked humans over the years were brainwashed by King Enma so that he could look effective.]]
* Asano, the UnluckyEverydude from ''TheTwelveKingdoms'' has several of these moments in his plot arc. Despite being an OrdinaryHighSchoolStudent trapped in another world, he is ultimately ineffectual in doing any good for himself or for his friends, and he eventually becomes a patsy of the BigBad. Just when it looks as though he's about to redeem himself by performing a vital, heroic mission for the good guys, he gets intercepted by the villains, who kill him in spite of his being armed with a gun, while they only have primitive weapons. To further rub salt into the wound, Asano, before he dies, learns that his mission was completely unnecessary, since reinforcements were ''already'' coming to help the good guys.
** Considering Asano wasn't part of the original book (and neither was his female counterpart) and the only reason for him to be there is to externalize Yoko's inner TomatoInTheMirror conflicts in the medial transition, this is hardly surprising.
* ''NeonGenesisEvangelion''. Both of the endings count, really. The series one may be [[GainaxEnding up for interpretation]] -- God help you if you try -- but ''End of Evangelion'' does this in a rather {{Anvilicious}} manner: After spending 24 episodes trying to prevent the Third Impact, half of the cast has various [[DroppedABridgeOnHim bridges dropped on them]]. Then the Third Impact ''does'' occur, [[spoiler:instigated by the organisation that was believed to be trying to prevent it]], but the Instrumentality turns out to be out of their control and melts every human on earth into a 'oneness' consisting of orange liquid. [[spoiler:The instigator is then subsequently destroyed by a rampaging Unit 01, leaving Shinji and Asuka as the only un-melted people on earth, trapped in a world ruined beyond all comprehension.]] ''End of Evangelion'' not only shoots the shaggy dog, it riddles it with 50cal bullets, fires an rocket-propelled grenade at it, and runs it over. Then nukes it from orbit, just to make sure.
** The ''series'' ending, prior to ''End'', is probably a regular {{Shaggy Dog Story}} more so.
* ''{{Narutaru}}'''s anime adaptation. Most of the cast goes insane and dies in a generally unsatisfying fashion, except for the [[BreakTheCutie main character]] and the vaguely established villains, who vanish off the face of the earth around episode 10. Most of the plot points are LeftHanging, and noone seems to care much. The description that 'nothing much has happened except that a few ineffectual people has died' fits the story like a glove, although this is because the anime only covers the first half of the manga, cutting off right before things start to get ''really'' bad. The manga, incidentally, may also count as this.
* ''SchoolDays''. After spending ten episodes acting like a complete jerk and taking advantage of [[IdiotPlot the complete idiocy]] that seems to affect the entirety of the school, Makoto is [[spoiler:stabbed to death by his pregnant ex-girlfriend Sekai, and then his corpse is decapitated by his girlfriend Kotonoha, who proceeds to murder (and cut up) Sekai and runs away, taking Makoto's head with her.]] Life at the school goes on, unaffected by the lunacy that just transpired.
* The whole Fallen One arc in ''[=~D.Gray-Man~=]'' is one of these. Allen encounters another Exorcist, Suman Dark, who has betrayed his [[EmpathicWeapon Innocence]] by betraying the Black Order to a villain, and has been turned into a [[OneWingedAngel giant angelic torso-looking thing]]. Allen struggles to save Suman while he attacks mindlessly, killing a lot of innocent people. Allen finally manages to hold Suman back by over-activating his own Innocence, and he manages to pull Suman out of the monster... [[spoiler:only for him to find that Suman has lost his soul anyway. Turns out Allen hadn't succeeded; Suman's Innocence basically timed out. Then, just to make things worse, Suman explodes in a fountain of blood, thanks to the sudden appearance of the villain from whom he begged for mercy in the first place.]]
* ''{{Gilgamesh}}'' ends with the deaths of [[spoiler:the entire main cast against the villains, followed rapidly by all life on Earth getting wiped clean by a being who intended to reform the Earth afterwards, but is killed before it can recreate it.]]
* ''ChronoCrusade'', also a definitive example of a DownerEnding, ends with [[spoiler:the main cast either dead or broken. None of the heroes' goals were met, and the villain succeeded in all his plans, with his "death" only being a temporary setback. If anything, the world would have been better off if the heroes had NOT been around.]]
** Luckily, the manga version [[BittersweetEnding doesn't end]] [[AdaptationDecay that way]].
* The first season arcs of ''HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi'' are all like this; the audience are treated to several versions of the local {{nakama}} going AxCrazy and murdering each other in various gruesome fashions, only for the GroundhogDayLoop to kick in and the whole tragedy repeated in a slightly different manner. The last arc seemingly subverts this, [[spoiler:as Keiichi remembers one of the other realities and talks Rena down from her attempted mass murder/suicide...]] Only for [[spoiler:Rika to get murdered anyway later, and the whole town wiped out by the volcanic eruption. Again.]]
** Also from ''Higurashi'', "Plan 34". A plan to [[spoiler:kill thousands of innocent people in order to prevent a disease from causing a ZombieApocalypse scenario]] is initially presented in the anime as evil, but better than the alternative. Then, the manga arc ''Onisarashi-hen'' shows that after the plan was carried out, [[spoiler:infections started breaking out all over Japan anyways, due to people who had once lived in Hinamizawa but had moved away or were out of town at the time of the massacre]]. And ''then'', because ''Higurashi'' '''really''' loves kicking you when you're down, it shows that [[spoiler:the infection isn't as contagious as first thought and dies out on its own, demonstrating that the Plan 34 massacre was entirely unnecessary, and that the perpetrators were horribly misguided at best, or willing to intentionally kill thousands of innocents for political gain at worst]]. Isn't ''Higurashi'' wonderful?
** UminekoNoNakuKoroNi does it in similiar manner. One example is a pair of climatic fights in the 4th arc, where the protagonists were about to win.
** [[spoiler: And all the Rikas get to become Umineko's FallenHero BigBad as well, starting the cycle of death all over again for another group of people! Because [[YouBastard she knows you want more.]]]]
* ''Jigoku Shoujo'' [[spoiler: Negoro Tetsurou]]'s story is a mild version of this, played mostly for laughs.
* OsamuTezuka's ''Apollo's Song'' manga fulfills the "Don't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death, trap him in a grim cycle of reincarnation and make him [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption a failure in every incarnation]]" point of this trope to a T.
* The ending of ''DeathNote'' may or may not fit this trope, depending on which side of a [[BrokenBase divided fandom]] you're on. Light supporters think it does, whereas anti-Light fans are more apt to classify it as the closest thing a CrapsackWorld like the one depicted in the series will ever come to a happy ending.
**Granted, some consider it a KarmicDeath.
* ''{{Bokurano}}'' has one of these. Sure, [[spoiler:TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt is prevented]], but only effect of the events within the show are [[spoiler:killing off 15 other Earths, all but one of the main characters and several thousand people, in addition to demolishing a large portion of Tokyo.]]
*''{{Saikano}}'' debatably. The world is being destroyed because of war so the ApocalypseMaiden kills off EVERYBODY as an act of---mercy? But wait, aren't the wars being caused by seismic instability that's turning vast chunks of the earth uninhabitable and will eventually destroy it anyway? So Chise's actions really change nothing in the long run and are relevant only to her love interest? There's such a thing as making a premise TOO hopeless.
* ''TokyoBabylon'', particularly when the continuation provided by ''{{X1999}}'' is added in. [[spoiler:After spending the series waiting to see if Subaru can inspire any actual feelings of love in him, and just when Subaru has realized his feelings for Seishiro, Seishiro decides that... no, he doesn't care about Subaru. So he tortures him, tries to kill him, and does kill his sister, leaving Subaru permanently broken with the heart's desire that one day Seishiro will kill him too. Except that when he tries to let that happen, he ends up killing Seishiro instead. And then he becomes the Sakurazukamori in Seishiro's place.]]
* The anime adaptation of ''Requiem'' (marketed as ''Anal Sanctuary'' in the United States) has Yukina being presented with Cecilia, an angelic violin capable of opposing Cannone, the demonic violin that has driven Akio to...ahem...enslaving the female student body of St. Cecilia academy. [[spoiler:Immediately after we see Cecilia, cut to a scene of Yukina and the priestess who presented the violin in captivity, about to be raped by Akio's possessed students, and Akio in possession of Cecilia. Everyone gets ruined, mission failed, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 pints of [[NauseaFuel shit]].]]
* The ending of ''{{Texhnolyze}}'' results in [[spoiler: [[KillEmAll the death of everyone on the surface, just about everyone in Lux, and every main and supporting character who ever appeared]]. The survivors get turned into what essentially amount to sentient, cybernetic trees]]. Naturally, the protagonists are completely ineffectual in stopping any of this; if anything, they make things worse.
* ''{{Kurokami}}'' ends with most of the cast dead and when everybody expect hally life for main protagonists appears that curse is not lifted, and requires sacrifice to save humanity which will nullify all reasons why they were fighting. And even after that sacrifice one genius concludes that it does not matter much since many other curses still exist o that one was not a big deal.
* ''{{Lost Universe}}'' partialy ends in that way. Protagonists die while fighting with big bad. But too bad, there are few baddies left and now there are no people who have abilities to defeat them if they will show up.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:ComicBooks]]
* ''Pride of Baghdad''[[spoiler: ends with all four protagonists being gunned down by American soldiers without even achieving the freedom that they'd been dreaming of. The end also implies you should feel bad for caring about the animals when there are people dying, too.]]
* ''{{Shade the Changing Man}}'' ends with him rewriting history so that none of the events of the comic ever happened, leaving one character (who had gone back in time with him) missing, his son trapped permanently in a female body and he himself unable to reconnect with his lost love. There is a slightly upbeat moment in the last panel, but if you think about it, it's unlikely to have worked out the way he wanted it to...
* The Karate Kid and Triplicate Girl plot thread from ''Countdown to Final Crisis''. The two members of the LegionOfSuperHeroes are dumped in the 21st century for reasons unknown to them, and Karate Kid turns out to be infected with a virus that could wipe out all life on Earth. After spending months trying to find a cure and eventually teaming up with the rest of the cast, they end up in an alternate universe, and Karate Kid dies, the virus spreads and turns humans into [[BiologicalMashUp animalistic humanoids]], and Triplicate Girl is torn to pieces by a pack of said animalistic humanoids. All to set up an universe similar to that of Jack Kirby's Kamandi character.
** And you wanna know what's the real shit-kicker? That universe was going to be destroyed anyway in FinalCrisis. Its remnants were fused together with those from other worlds and Comicbook Limbo so the original Kamandi-verse was recreated anyway (i.e. OMAC, Kamandi and the Post-Final Crisis original New Gods). Yes, Karate Kid and Triplicate Girl literally died for absolutely '''nothing'''. Oh Countdown, is there nothing you ''didn't'' destroy?
* ''MrHeroTheNewmaticMan'', an obscure comic published with NeilGaiman's name prominently over the title (but with little actual involvement from him) ended up being this sort of a story when the entire year and a half run of the series ended up being nothing more than a successful XanatosGambit by the BigBad to retrieve and destroy the titular renegade steampunk soldier. A planned second volume may have changed things, but the imprint's failure made this the end of the story.
* In the MarvelUniverse, Crusader was a Skrull sent down well before the invasion and set to gathering intel. But the target he'd been set to spy on, ComicBook/TheAvengers, had just disbanded, and he had no other instructions. So he started watching movies of them, got cozy with a cashier register, discovered and trained one of the MU's very few gay superheroes, and ended up taking up said hero's power ring when he died. Very quickly he started BecomingTheMask and ended up on Earth's side during the invasion, with a not inconsiderable amount of angst. It ended with him defeating a childhood foe, and then killing the Skrull that had been impersonating a major hero, "saving his home" .... and then the Skrull Kill Crew [[http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/6803484.html shot him.]] ''Nice.'' Though there's an opening for an AuthorsSavingThrow. He might not actually be dead.
* ''100 Bullets'' ends [[spoiler:with nearly all of the characters dead as the ThirtyXanatosPileup comes crashing down on everyone. Only a few characters get out alive, and none of them get away with anything worth the trials they went through during the course of the series. On the other hand, the cartel that has secretly controlled America has been destroyed, which is a pretty significant change.]]
* Any [[ExecutiveMeddling editorially mandated]] CosmicRetcon where decades of continuity get eaten by a NegativeSpaceWedgie. The publisher doesn't just restart the title and ignore the old version. Instead, they write an ''ending'' where the old, no-longer-cool version of the characters must ''watch'' the NegativeSpaceWedgie annihilate their timeline and destroy everything they have ever fought, worked, loved, or dreamed for, and there's absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it (except work to ensure that a ReplacementGoldfish universe will get created after they're erased). All this makes for a vicious DownerEnding for characters who were originally created to be [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism very upbeat,]] and forces the new version to [[BrokenBase shoulder the blame]] in fans' minds for how the original ended. The various LegionOfSuperHeroes reboots are a good example, especially the 'End of An Era' story during ''ZeroHour''. And ''CrisisOnInfiniteEarths'' gives us some other good examples.
* In {{Watchmen}}, Rorschach realizes something is going on when the Comedian is murdered. He notices how Dr. Manhattan goes away to Mars and Ozymandias survives an assassination attempt, and while trying to get more information, he's put in prison himself. Fellow superheroes Nite-Owl and the Silk Specter break him out of prison. Nite-Owl and Rorschach find out that the conspiracy is caused by [[spoiler: Ozymandias, who staged the attempt on his own life]], who plans to [[spoiler: destroy half of New York City to get the USA and Russia to stop fighting each other]]. They find his hideaway in Antarctica only to learn that he [[spoiler: simply launched the attack when he first saw them coming]]. They all agree (except [[spoiler: Rorschach]]) to never tell the public about what went on, making their journey truly pointless. [[spoiler: Rorschach is subsequently killed by Dr Manhattan due to his refusal to help keep the secret]].
* 'Planet Hulk', granted it was pretty damn obvious that Hulk was going to be brought back to Earth by a storyline at some point, but to [[spoiler: have a damaged warp-engine (placed by rebels as stated in World War Hulk though supposed ally Miek allowed them to do so) explode]] and effectively destroy everything he had spent a good portion of the novel building towards,[[spoiler: a wife, future child, kingdom, peace and acceptance as a respected and admired being]] in the last few pages seems to fit this trope to a T.
* Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Somebody wants Blue Beetle Ted Kord dead. He asks everybody he knows for help, and they all turn him down, often in the most insulting manner they can manage. In the end, he tracks them down discovers their secrets, discovers a plan to kill all his friends, and then promptly dies. After having accomplished nothing. Basically, the story is that Blue Beetle lived, he sucked, and he died. The end.
* Many of the stories in WillEisner's ''Contract with God'' trilogy are of this type.
* From ''CalvinAndHobbes'', Calvin finds an injured baby raccoon and tries to help it. [[spoiler:He fails, and the raccoon dies]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:{{Film}}]]
* {{The Departed}}. [[spoiler:[[KillEmAll Everybody dies]], except Dignam]]. Read http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/synopsis for the full uglyness.
* JohnWoo's masterpiece, ''TheKiller'', is sort of an example; the protagonists bring down a mob boss, but the main character dies before he can reach his goal, to raise enough money for the eye transplant of the singer that he blinded in the movie's first shootout. Not only that, but in a rare [[AntiHero antiheroic]] example of KarmicDeath, his Plan B of having her use his eyes falls flat when that's where the mob boss shoots him. And the other protagonist, a [[CowboyCop maverick cop]], is arrested by his fellow officers when he finally guns down the mob boss to avenge his friend and keep the villain from [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney getting away with it all]] because he had done so right in front of them in cold blood after the boss had surrendered to them, so he can't use the money to have the singer's eyes fixed either. When Woo piles on the tragedy, he piles it ''on''.
* Despite his valiant efforts, the hero of ''NightOfTheLivingDead'' utterly fails to protect any of his fellow survivors from the ZombieApocalypse, and in the morning, as the sole survivor, is unceremoniously shot by a ragtag band of zombie hunters that doesn't bother to look very closely at their targets.
** Let's ''hope'' that's the reason they shot the heroic [[spoiler: black protagonist]]...
* An extreme example is seen in the 2007 horror film ''TheMist''. In the movie, a thick, billowing fog has swept over the countryside, bringing with it hordes of ravenous otherworldy creatures, and several dozen people are trapped inside a supermarket with the monsters outside and no way to contact the outside world. Near the end of the film, a group of people led by the protagonist [[spoiler:make a break for it in the hero's jeep]]. After [[spoiler:a brief stop at the hero's house to confirm that yes, his wife is dead, the five of them (including the hero's little boy) decide to ride on until either the mist ends or their fuel runs out. Naturally, the fuel runs out first...and our group is surrounded by mist, likely to be snatched up and killed horribly as soon as they leave the car. They make an unspoken decision to commit suicide, but there's five of them, and only four bullets. We cut to outside the car, and there are four shots. Then we see the hero in a car full of corpses, screaming in grief and repeatedly trying to shoot himself with the empty gun.]] But it doesn't end there... [[spoiler:he exits the car, screaming for the monsters to come and get him...and not half a minute later, tanks and jeeps roll through the fog. Monsters are being blasted with flamethrowers, and trucks of survivors are being driven through. And the mist is being cleared...]]
** Also note [[spoiler:the truck is coming from the back, so they were driving from salvation all along.]]
** There is one other interesting detail: [[spoiler:The survivors include the mother who left in the beginning, having successfully found her children. ]]
** You know what's ''really'' frustrating? The original short story by {{Stephen King}} ended with the first spoiler, [[spoiler:[[BolivianArmyEnding leaving it likely they would die, since the mist had spread all the way across New England, but allowing room for optimism]].]] (Although King has said that he liked the alternate ending of the film.)
* The Japanese [[{{Toku}} Tokusatsu]] feature film ''{{Casshern}}'' did this in spades. The story hinges on a CrapsackWorld AfterTheEnd where everyone is dying of pollution, fallout and biochemical warfare agents unleashed in the last world war. A scientist creates a 'Neo-Cell' project where new organs can be grown at will and the human body regenerated and rendered immortal. This is the setup for a FreakLabAccident that creates a race of Badass superhumans that must be battled by the hero, the scientist's dead war hero son resurrected by his father's techniques and suited up with an awesome cybernetic combat suit. Naturally this all goes horribly wrong - and turns out it was never right in the first place.
** If the fact that Casshern basically fails to do anything heroic whatsoever during the entire movie, backfiring spectacularly every time he tries to save innocent people and spending most of the film killing rather sympathetic {{Anti Villain}}s who themselves engage in [[KickTheDog pointless violence for no reason]] wasn't enough to make this pointless and {{Glurge}}y, the ending really cements it. I guess it was meant to be a {{Deconstruction}} of the usually upbeat Tokusatsu genre, but...what?
* ''{{Cloverfield}}''. [[spoiler: Everyone dies. Except possibly Lily. The monster doesn't die onscreen, but WordOfGod says that it was killed.]]
* ''Rocket Attack USA'', a 1960s propaganda piece featured on ''MysteryScienceTheater3000''. The heroes manage to infiltrate a Soviet missile base, but the missile launches anyway (with ''hilariously'' awful special effects) and wipes out New York. [[spoiler: "We cannot let this be... THE END."]]
* See the entry under DiabolusExMachina for Sean Penn's film ''The Pledge.''
* In ''{{Cube}}'', characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all end up dying or being killed by another character, except for the autistic savant. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.
** The sequel is even worse. After many perils, the heroine manages to escape the maze but [[spoiler: once her superior has received what she was sent to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. She obviously knows what's coming, yet does not try to resist or escape.]]
** Not to mention ''Cube Zero'', a prequel to ''Cube'' shown from the point of view of the maze operators, in which it is revealed that the savant [[spoiler:was in all likelihood killed by the operators moments after the first film's ambiguous ending]].
* Nevil Shute's ''OnTheBeach''.
** Although that was mostly because the [[SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped anvil needed to be dropped]].
** And then there's ''The Day After'', and (urg) ''{{Threads}}''...
* ''Film/{{Alien}} 3'' starts out by killing off the characters that Ripley saved (including a little girl), stranding her on a prison colony, and showing that for all the pyrotechnics of the second film, the alien menace is still at large. Needless to say, [[DisContinuity most fans consider the series to have ended with the previous film]].
* In ''{{Chinatown}}'', the protagonist spends most of the movie investigating the murder of the head of the water department, uncovering a rather complicated conspiracy in the process. He eventually discovers the villain, who's revealed to be so evil that he even [[spoiler: raped his daughter and fathered a child by her]] but [[spoiler: In the end he gets away with everything, taking custody of his incestuous grand-daughter at the same time, and the police shoot the protagonist's love interest dead as she attempts to flee with the girl.]] As the famous quote goes: ''"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."''
* "The only thing that's changed[...] is that a few ineffectual people have died." Yep, that just about sums up Robert Redford's ''Jeremiah Johnson''...
* ''Sha Po Lang'' (''Killzone'' in the US) is a Hong Kong police movie that pretty much ends with [[spoiler: all of the cops dying. Including the BadAss and TheCaptain]]. Fortunately, the BigBad doesn't get away unscathed either. [[spoiler: He kills the BadAss cop by throwing him out the window of his skyscraper....and right on top of the car the BigBad's wife and baby were waiting in. ''Ouch.'']]
* Both the original German and English ReMake versions of ''Funny Games'' follows a HopeSpot with a real WallBanger of a DiabolusExMachina to ensure that the movie has a DownerEnding. The entire movie is a TakeThat at [[YouBastard its own audience]], so it's somewhat to be expected that it would ShootTheShaggyDog as well.
* ''Epic Movie'' ends with the four lead characters being inexplicably flattened by a runaway water wheel, making the whole movie pointless. Even more so than it already was.
* ''{{Brazil}}'' ends with the revelation that [[spoiler:the film's "happy ending" was just a hallucination, and the main character was actually tortured to insanity]]
* ''TwelveMonkeys'' closes with [[spoiler:the death of the the hero, as well as 90% of the human race.]] What's particularly striking is that Gilliam somehow found a way to make these funny. However, the film isn't totally a downer, since [[spoiler:one of the scientists in the future appears at the very end sitting next to the mass murderer on the airplane, announcing that she works in "insurance." Taken another way, however, it could also imply that she sent the main character back in time as "Insurance" for their rule over man in the future, and that she was not acting in the best interest of mankind by sending him back.]]
* ''{{Ran}}''. Influenced by ''King Lear'', AkiraKurosawa managed to make his film incredibly depressing. Nearly everyone dies or is pointlessly killed. The father, Hidetora, lord over a great clan, plans to divide his kingdom to his three sons, expecting them to be loyal even though most of his power came through bloodshed, war, and treachery. He ends up banishing the third and youngest brother, who warns him of the stupidity of such a plan. He stays with his first son, at the First Castle. Through a large chain of events, Hidetora [[spoiler:loses everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. He is left insane, and his only hope is his youngest son.]] When the father manages to reunite with his youngest son, he [[spoiler:dies due to an arrow from an enemy soldier]], and the father [[spoiler:dies of a heart attack.]] The ending is bleak, as [[spoiler:the blind brother of Lady Sué, wife of one of the other brothers, is left alone, as his sister was killed. He ends up dropping the gift his sister gave him, and is left to die in the ruins of his father's castle, forgotten.]]
** The Sengoku period (in which the film is set) is infamous for constant, often senseless violence, and general chaos. Even the title, ''Ran'', can be translated as "chaos".
* Alexandro Jodorowsky [[SignatureStyle loves to do this]]. ''Fando & Lis'' ends with [[spoiler: Fando killing Lis, whom he was taking to the mythical City of Tar in order to cure her paralysis]]. ''El Topo'' has [[spoiler: the people the title character spent the entire third act helping mercilessly gunned down, rendering all his efforts worthless]]. And ''The Holy Mountain'' [[spoiler: ends just before the climax, with a major character proclaiming the movie over and the shot panning back to reveal the film crew shooting the scene]].
* ''Sorry, Wrong Number'' and the radio play it was based on. In the end, and after a few IdiotPlot scenes (between the protagonist's mistakes and the depiction of the police), she fails to prevent her own murder. And this was based on an episode of a radio show where the rule was almost always to make sure the bad guy ''lost''. (Oddly enough, it was also their most popular production...)
* ''{{Das Boot}}''. [[spoiler: After everything they've survived for 99% of the movie, they're [[RocksFallEveryoneDies killed in an Allied air-raid]] once they get home.]]
* ''Requiem For a Dream''.
* ''BurnAfterReading''. [[spoiler: The three least despicable characters are dead or comatose, and... not much else has actually changed.]] The film even has a recurring MrExposition team lampshading how pointless the events of the film are.
* ''Terminator 3'' set a new standard in ShootTheShaggyDog. Not only was the CrowningMomentOfAwesome of the preceding movie totally erased; [[spoiler: but after all that crap they went through, Skynet winds up obliterating humanity anyway while John Connor hides out in a hole]]
** The first film's message was that time travel can't change the past and that Skynet even trying to do so only caused both itself and the leader of the resistance to be. The second movie's entire Aesop was the change to the idea that we can change the future. Then it decides that maybe it was right the first time. An exercise in indecision, rendering a whole [[strike:movie]]''series'' pointless beyond the pretty explosions?
* One word: ''Bulworth''. [[spoiler:Five words: Rapping politician, meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a ''comedy''. And he ordered the hit on himself!]]
** Actually, [[spoiler:The titular hero manages to call off the original assassination by contacting the hit (wo)man. The actual assassination was ordered by the corrupt businessman Bulworth was once an associate of, just before he becomes America's next great urban leader.]] Even more of a downer.
* The remake of ''DawnOfTheDead''. At the end of the movie, it appears that the few remaining protagonists' struggles have paid off, and they're finally able to sail into the sunset to find an island they can start a new life on. Guess what? [[spoiler: Island zombies, is what. How do you like them coconuts?]] Although [[spoiler: the characters aren't actually ''shown'' dying..]]
** This ending was tacked on after test-audiences griped about the original, far more ambiguous, version.
* The last half hour or so of ''The Descent'' is an extended version of this trope, as it's implied that if you can't stay together as a cooperating pack [they can't] the only way to be BadAss enough to get out of the cave is to go crazy and become as vicious as the crawlers. [[spoiler: Also, in the UK ending, everyone dies. At least Sarah regains her humanity at the last minute... by choosing to stay with the hallucination of her dead daughter and apparently accept death.]] Hooray!
* Pretty much the entire point of ''NoCountryForOldMen''. The protagonist is being stalked by a ruthless killer set on his trail to retrieve the money he found. For the climax, [[spoiler: not only is he killed by a secondary character]], but for ''true'' Shaggy Dogness, said climax [[spoiler: takes place completely off screen! The audience surrogate (the town sheriff) comes across the scene moments too late to do anything. By the end, the killer has even murdered the protagonist's wife (following up on a threat he made), and the sheriff is so disillusioned by the whole thing that he decides to resign.]] Depending on who you ask, the ending makes the movie either completely pointless and a waste of time, or a brilliant deconstruction of film structure and story resolution.
* ''The Great Silence''. The film sets up a pretty standard story of an antihero out for vengeance and protecting some townsfolk from cruel bounty hunters. And then [[spoiler: the bounty hunters kill the comedic sheriff, kill the townsfolk, kill the hero's girl, and kill the hero. It is a total and unqualified victory for the villains.]]
* The same twist ending was used in {{The Cave}} and {{Ghost Ship}}, [[spoiler:where the parasitic/ghostly evil that they spent the whole film trying to defeat has just infected a new host.]]
**''Ghost Ship's'' flashbacks could be construed as this as well. So many people killed and the thieves didn't manage to get away.
**Note that in ''Ghost Ship'', the original screenplay is available. Trope is averted in it. http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/ghost_ship.html
* Along with a {{Crapsack World}} and a [[DiabolusExMachina Diabolus Ex Machina]], the film ''[[ASimplePlan A Simple Plan]]'' literally [[spoiler: shoots the helpless underdog, when Bill Pullman's character finally shoots his unwitting, lower functioning brother, played by Billy Bob Thornton]], in what can only be described as a DethroningMomentOfSuck, made even worse by the fact that the entire plot is rendered meaningless in the film's final frames. And yet, the ending to the movie is cheery and lighthearted compared to the novel.
* In ''{{Dresden}}'' the main character (a British pilot) manages to [[spoiler: live through the bombing of Dresden with [[OnlyAFleshWound serious injuries]] and escapes back to England. After the war, he flies back to see his true love (and, OMG, their child)... when his plane crashes. He dies. They don't even give him a death scene - he dies in the voice-over at the end.]]
* ''The Wages of Fear'' is particularly cruel. The protagonist takes on an extremely dangerous job (trucking badly needed nitroglycerin up a mountain). He turns out to be the only man in the group to make it all the way alive. Word of his survival gets back to his village, where everyone including his girlfriend dance with joy... and [[spoiler: as he drives back joyfully in his now-unloaded truck, he gets too excited, loses control, veers off the side of the mountain, and is killed]].
* The ''FinalDestination'' series of films is about a group of people who see a premonition of their own death, and manage to escape it with this knowledge. However, Death does not give up on trying to claim them and looks for other ways to kill the protagonists. The protagonists then spend the rest of the movie trying to escape dying again and again, only to in the end fail and die, making all their efforts till that point fruitless.
* ''Munich''. [[spoiler: "In the end, did we really accomplish anything?"]]
* How was this missed, etc. ''EasyRider'' ends suddenly when Billy and Wyatt [[spoiler: are blown off their bikes by two rednecks in a pickup, for fun.]] Not to mention that George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) [[spoiler: meets a similarly pointless end in a redneck attack about halfway through the film.]]
* ''The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.'' It was all very well done, with great effects and brilliant acting, but the story itself seems to lack a point. It builds up for the first three-quarters by telling us an interesting story of a man's life then provides no kind of Aesop, whatsoever.
** As Chad Vader said about Benjamin's life: "It was a bit weird, but kinda the same as everyone else's."
* In ''[REC]'' nobody survives the mysterious virus. [[spoiler: And if they don't pull a retcon with ''[REC]2'', Angela is getting dragged into darkness at the end to be either infected or feasted on, or even BOTH.]]
* ''Cold Mountain''. Civil war soldier ditches the army, travels through adverse weather conditions, and goes through absolute hell just so that he can get home to his girlfriend. Finally gets home to his girlfriend, [[spoiler: and then a soldier comes along and shoots him.]]
** At least in the movie, they managed to conceive a child before he got offed. So that wasn't a complete Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
* ''The Jammed'' is about a woman who tries to help three illegal prostitutes in Melbourne. Then end up (mostly) worse than when she found them. [[spoiler: One commits suicide, one runs off and one ends up in immigration detention]]. This is an attempt at TruthInTelevision.
*This trope is deliberately invoked by the film ''Gallipoli'' in order to deliver an anti-war {{Aesop}}. In it, two young Australian men go to great lengths to join the army during World War 1, go through some training that doesn't seem to be taking the war seriously (for example, their drill sergeant gives them a lecture on contraception), and, in the final three minutes of the film, the characters actually go to war and are promptly killed. Roll credits.
* ''Legends Of the Fall''. Several ineffectual people end up dying, including most of the Ludlow family, and the tragic heroine. The protagonist himself, in exile and old age, gets eaten by a bear at the end.
* Averted before release in ''First Blood'' (the first ''Rambo'' film). The ending, as originally taken from the novel (yes, [[AdaptationDisplacement there was a novel]]), scripted and filmed, had John Rambo dying in the closing scenes. The ending was reshot (paving the way for the sequels) because test audiences hated it.
* The ''{{Shaft}}'' revival with Sam Jackson. Shaft spends the entire movie shooting, and getting shot at by, people in order to secure the evidence to put a murderer in prison... [[spoiler:and then the victim's mother just shoots the murderer anyway (on live TV to boot), rendering the protagonist's efforts completely worthless.]] Roll credits.
* ''Open Water'' is two hours of people stranded at sea waiting for a rescue [[spoiler:that will never come.]]
* The DenzelWashington film ''Fallen'', where he plays a police detective, has him spend the whole film trying to figure out a way to stop the [[OurDemonsAreDifferent demon]] Azazel, who can possess people just by having his host touch them, and move on to a new body within a few hundred feet if his host is killed. At one point in the movie, he murders the main character's brother using poison. Eventually, the protagonist lures him out to an isolated cabin, and smokes cigarettes laced with the poison his brother was killed with, before shooting Azazel (who was currently possessing his friend and partner). Azazel than possesses the protagonist and stumbles around in the snow for a bit, before dying. [[spoiler: The camera than pans out as Azazel narrates how pathetic and pointless the protagonist was, before its revealed that he manages to survive by possessing a kitten]]. Whats worse [[spoiler: is how pointless the whole thing was; Azazel was only antagonising the character for his own twisted amusement, and nothing is ultimately accomplished, except the protagonist's name being besmirched, and his nephew being left without any family]].
* The original ''Last House On The Left'' has the two parents exacting revenge on their daughter Mari (and her friend Phyllis)'s rapists and killers[[spoiler: but they end up murdering two of them in front of the two idiotic cops who bumble their way through the movie and are most probably going to be arrested.]]
* In the horror movie ''Catacombs'', we have an example of this trope mixed with a WallBanger. The protagonist visits her bitchy sister in Paris, and she is brought by her to a sort of rave party in the labyrinth-like catacombs under the city, along with a group of French goths. Then the two of them get lost, and the sister is apparently killed by an axe-wielding serial killer wearing a goat mask. The protagonist is then stalked by said monster in the catacombs for a whole hour... until it turns out that [[spoiler: it was all an overlong joke of dubious taste planned by her sister and friends. Unfortunately, this is revealed after the protagonist has killed one of them in the darkness. The sister then proceeds to yell at and insult the barely-sane anymore protagonist, who then proceeds to slaughter the rest of them, including her sister, and leaves.]]
* ''{{Angel Heart}}'' - originator of "The Angel Heart Award" which goes to any show that (like Se7en and Titus) which leaves you saying, "How depressingly pointless and squick was that!?" followed by "Who do I talk to about getting back the last two hours of life I just spent watching this horrid movie!?"
* ''{{Titus}}'' - with Anthony Hopkins ... pretty much everyone dies in an artsy fartsy orgy of revenge.
* ''{{Se7en}}'' [[spoiler: The main characters achieve exactly nothing, and indeed are an essential part of the serial killer's master plan.]]
* ''Dancer in the Dark'' - the most depressing movie I have ever seen, anywhere; ultimately pointless. [[spoiler: And ends with the execution of the innocent, blind main character.]]
** Not really. The main character does [[spoiler: accomplish her goal of preventing her son from going blind by getting him the operation he needs, which is all she wanted anyway]]. Plus she wasn't exactly innocent, [[spoiler: she did in fact kill her neighbor.]] Still an ''exceptionally'' depressing movie, though.
* ''DragMeToHell'': [[spoiler: the old gypsy dies (but of natural causes), the demon escapes, and our heroine, who doesn't deserve it in the least, gets, well, dragged to Hell.]]
** And don't forget [[spoiler: the medium who waited 40 years for a chance of redeeming her failure to save a young boy by meeting the Lamia again and killing it. Her assistant screws up the plan due to having a lousy aim, she fails to break the protagonist's curse and she ends up dead for her efforts.]]
* ''Employee Of The Month'' - a [[BlackComedy black comedy]] about a man who breaks up with his fiancee after getting fired from his dream job at a major bank chain, and cheats on her with his coworker, Wendy. After a night of hard drinking, chatting with his estranged friend Jack (a coroner), and multiple attempts to mend his relationship, the protagonist (David Walsh) walks back into his workplace with a pistol, insults his former coworkers, puts a gun to his former boss's head (but doesn't kill him), and promptly walks out of his office [[spoiler: directly into a bank heist. Dave manages to foil the robbery, at the apparent cost of his own life.]] This turns into a [[spoiler: quintuple]] twist; [[spoiler: the robbery was part of a two-year plan to erase David's identity and leave him and his friends filthy rich. Dave, Jack, and Wendy meet up in a motel room, prepared to divide their earnings and part ways. Dave kills Jack. Wendy kills Dave and runs off with Dave's ex-fiancee (Sarah) with whom she's involved in a lesbian relationship.]] All of this sex and mayhem is finally rendered moot after the credits, [[spoiler: when Sarah and Wendy's car is hit by a bus, killing them both.]]
* ''Happy Times'' uses this trope. After the main character spends the entire movie unsuccessfully trying to start a relationship, [[spoiler: he is left in a comma after being hit by a garbage truck]]. The hope that he might have at least helped someone else is destroyed [[spoiler: since she runs away because she feels like a burden. Neither character knows what has happened to the other character and neither will obtain their dream]].
**It's really a BittersweetEnding more than anything. Despite the main character going into a coma never knowing of where the blind girl has gone, there is a bit of reward in the fact that she experienced some of the happiest times of her life, according to her, and has inspired her to go out into the real world and find her place in it. Ambiguous, and sad, yes, but not completely without hope or purpose.
*''[[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064695/ More Dead Than Alive]]'' fits very nicely into this trope. The entire movie focuses on a guy known as "Killer Cain" trying to settle down with an honest living after spending 18 years in jail for a string of murders he commited prior to the movie. Being an ex-criminal, it's hard for him to find work. The only job he can keep is one at a shooting show. However there, he has to put up with an insolent young co-worker of his. To make things worse, he's made plenty of enemies in the past. By the end of the movie, [[spoiler: he not only gets the ranch he wants, but he gets to marry the woman he loves in a classic Western movie fashion. But then one of his old enemies (apparently the guy's father was one of Cain's victims) shows up, guns him down]].
* The ''{{Halloween}}'' series. Laurie is believed to fit this trope, but Jamie definitely does. [[spoiler: She gets mocked for being related to Michael, becomes mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, has all her friends, her sister, and her dog killed, gets kidnapped by a cult and is forced to have sex with Michael, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment.]]
*''Arlington Road'' is practically ''the'' god-king of this trope. The movie stars Jeff Bridges as a university professor who is an expert on domestic terrorism, and whose wife died in a failed FBI mission some years earlier. He has a young son, a girlfriend, played by Hope Davis, and keeps in touch with his wife's former FBI partner, played by Robert Gossett. One day he begins to suspect his next-door neighbors, played by Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack, to be terrorists, based on a number of incidents that have occurred around them, including his son being hospitalized after an accident involving a firecracker. Nobody will believe him though, finding his ideas crazy and paranoid, pointing the finger at his being unable to recover from the trauma he experienced when his wife died in the manner she did. Things only get worse for Bridges when [[spoiler: his girlfriend ends up being murdered by Cusack right after she starts to believe in Bridges' suspicions. Her death is subsequently covered up as a car accident.]] Not one to be let down, Bridges continues to go after the terrorist couple, when his son is taken hostage by them. He goes after them, following a van he is led to believe to contain his son to a parking garage, with Gossett tagging along. He arrives at the garage, but finds out that he was following the wrong van. After that, he opens the trunk of his car, only for [[spoiler: a bomb that had been carefully planted inside to go off, destroying the building he had been baited to, killing Bridges, Gossett, and hundreds of other people.]] How can things get any worse than that? Well, [[spoiler: Bridges is posthumously framed for blowing up the building, and now is forever demonized as a terrorist/suicide bomber, Robbins and Cusack get away scot-free having accomplished what they set out to do, and Bridges' son lives now fatherless and motherless with relatives, never knowing of his father's innocence.]] Many people, including renowned movie critic Roger Ebert, have been highly critical of the way this movie ends, due to the ridiculous contrivances and complications involved that led up to this point, not to mention the fact that, in order for this plan to be successfully carried out in real life, you'd need to practically be BornLucky or have PsychicPowers, your target acting in every exact way you want them to, moving in on the right locations at exactly the right time. In short, the dog was shot by a blatant XanatosRoulette.
* In ''The Incredible Melting Man'' the titular character is an astronaut who has been irradiated on his way back from Saturn and who is slowly melting to death. There is no cure whatsoever. Only killing and consuming people stops his pain, even briefly. In the end, during a confrontation at a power plant, his best friend is endangered and the astronaut regains a bit of humanity and saves his life - only for said friend to be shot to death by a pair of random security guards. The astronaut kills the guards, collapses and expires. A janitor cleans him up what's left of him the next day and throws him in the garbage. Oh, also? ''More'' astronauts are headed to Saturn.
* What else would you expect from ''TheGreyZone'', a holocaust movie whose main characters are Sonderkomandos (the Jews in Nazi death camps whose chores included leading other Jews into the gas chambers and then burning their bodies afterward), a Jewish doctor who works for Josef Mengele ... and Mengele himself?
* This trope is displayed in the movie ''[[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448011/ Knowing]]'' starring Nicholas Cage, [[spoiler: most notably in the complete and utter futility of John's (Cage) obsession with the numerical code, and later, his attempts to save his son and Abby. Further, Diane, Abby's mother, dies while attempting to rescue the children from the Strangers who are actually able to save them, and who were planning on doing so without the interference of either parent.]]
* The fan-made Warhammer40000 feature film ''{{Damnatus}}'' - our heroes find themselves hopelessly outclassed, but still fight on. [[spoiler: they defeat the 'enemy' leader, but he was actually a rogue inquisitor, and in doing so, they screw up his plan to bind a daemon, with the result that it is instead, [[NiceJobBreakingItHero summoned without any restrictions]]. They are all killed attempting to escape, and then the planet is [[EarthShatteringKaboom killed from orbit by Inquisitor Lessus.]]]]
* ''TheOmen''. [[spoiler: Everybody dies, except Damien the Antichrist.]]
* ''Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance''. The other films of Korean director Park Chan-Wook's "Vengeance Trilogy" aren't so bad ([[CrapsackWorld which is not]] [[HumansAreBastards to say they're "good"]]), but for this one, he sets his dog-shooting gun to full automatic and doesn't let up on the trigger once.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:{{Literature}}]]
* ''[[NineteenEightyFour 1984]]'' ends with the main character being brought down by the government, like thousands before and after. Not only was he scheduled for execution, he was ''happy'' about it. "He loved Big Brother." Of course, the plot in this case was just an excuse to describe Orwell's dystopia.
** The (yes) 1984 film version is quite true to the book in most respects but fudges the ending by just having Winston Smith mutter "I love you", making it ambiguous as to whether it's Big Brother he loves or Julia.
* The ending of ''[[TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy Mostly Harmless]]'' is pretty much the ultimate Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, as Arthur never finds his soul mate, who was cruelly taken from him in a freak accident, and at the end every Earth in every universe is destroyed, with virtually every character being killed in the process. Douglas Adams has admitted that the ending was "rather bleak," and was [[CreatorBreakdown a result of his depression]]. He would have probably fixed it... if he hadn't gone and ''[[AuthorExistenceFailure died]]''.
** The Quintessential Phase, the section of the radio plays that follow ''Mostly Harmless'', have [[spoiler: everyone's Babel fishes [[DeusExMachina rescuing them at the last second]] by teleporting them to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where Fenchurch has been working]].
** The same book has the in-universe example of Bartledan literature. Which, as Arthur Dent discovers when he reads some, always ends at the 100,000th word.
***And the main character [[spoiler: died of dehydration three chapters before the end, because of never calling a plumber after a minor sink malfunction early in the book. (I honestly don't know why I spoilered this)]], thus not only shooting the dog, but also mentioning that it's not that shaggy ''in several thousand words''. Though a book within a book, it is certainly a magnificent reference of this trope.
* The Marquis de Sade's ''Justine'' tells the story of a young, virtuous girl who is subjected to a ridiculously unending series of tortures, rapes, degradations, and humiliations, with each of her tormentors more depraved than the last. In the end, she is finally reunited with her sister, and freed from her life of misery, only to be killed by a lightning bolt.
*''The Eagle Has Landed'' features a squad of German paratroopers sent to kidnap Winston Churchill. Putting aside the fact that they're only having to do suicidal missions for not playing along with the whole Holocaust thing, their cover is only blown because one of the Germans does a HeroicSacrifice to save two children, all but one of the Germans end up getting gunned down [[spoiler: though the sequel reveals that the leader is NotQuiteDead]] and it's ultimately revealed that the Churchill they were after was just an impersonator.
* FranzKafka is the god-king of this trope.
** ''TheTrial'' is the story of a man shuffling endlessly through a bureaucracy to try to stave off his execution for a crime that is never explained to him.
** ''TheCastle'' tells a similar story of a man trapped in an endless bureaucratic maze. The book ends halfway through a sentence: Like JorgeLuisBorges said, if Kafka did not finish many of his novels, it's because [[TethercatPrinciple they do not end]].
** ''The Metamorphosis''. Gregor turns into a giant bug. And dies, alone and unloved.
*** However, since Kafka's books are ''unfinished'', because he didn't complete them before he died, his true intent is unknown.
***Yet the end of Samsa is the same that Kafka face after suffering from tuberculosis. SoYeah.
* In Kurt Vonnegut's ''The Sirens of Titan'', it is revealed at the end that [[spoiler: all of human history was manipulated in an attempt to send a missing spaceship part to a]] Tralfamadorian robot named Salo who is carrying a message, and that his message [[spoiler: is only a single dot that means "Greetings."]]
** As anyone who has read Slaughter House 5 can attest, this is par for the course for the Tralfalmadorians: they perceive time in multiple directions and well to summarize, every Tralfalmadorian ever knows how the universe ends: They cause it with a failed weapons test. Why don't they stop it from happening? They've already destroyed the universe, and they're just waiting for it to actually happen. You'd be a little more pissed if it didn't blow your mind.
** As anyone who has actually read BOTH Slaughter house 5 AND The Sirens of Titan can attest, the Tralfalmadorians in the two different books are two DIFFERENT species of alien. When described what they look like they are different and they have different history and ideals. The only thing the same is their names.
* Richard Adams' ''The Plague Dogs'' features a scene where the runaway lab dog Snitter searches for "the tod," a fox character that had helped him and his fellow fugitive Rowf survive in the wild, before Rowf eventually got mad at him and chased him off. Snitter is about to give up the search, when the tod appears out of nowhere, [[spoiler: followed closely by a pack of hounds and a fox hunter, who proceed to rip the tod to pieces.]] The movie had a slight variation, if you look in the animation section ...
* AmbroseBierce's ''An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'', a dramatic story in which the hero's noose snaps, and he escapes his execution [[spoiler: only to instead snap out of his fantasy and die without a fight]]. Whether you walk away thinking this is infuriatingly cheap or a brilliant deconstruction depends on how well your High School English teacher explains the point of the thing.
* StevenErikson's ''{{Malazan Book of the Fallen}}'' series has at least two examples:
** ''Deadhouse Gates'': After a continent-wide rebellion breaks out, a horribly outnumbered army manages to travel the entire breadth of said continent toward the only remaining refuge for the Malazans, all the while defending huge numbers of civilians. After fighting and winning over 2 dozen large scale attacks alone through all manner of obstacles they get within touching distance and the bulk of the army fights to the death in order to get those they escorted to safety. [[spoiler:The commander of the refuge then listens to his treacherous adviser and marches out his 10,000 troops where they are forced to surrender and are all crucified. If it hadn't been for some others acting on their own to secure the city the last refuge and all its inhabitants would have been lost as well. For the bulk of the characters involved it was still this trope though. Understandably the Malazans are pretty pissed when they retaliate, though as the first example shows the shaggydogness was not over for them.]]
** The first half or so of ''The Bonehunters'': After chasing Leoman of the Flails halfway across the continent to Y'Ghatan, the Malazan army [[spoiler:gets their ass handed to them as Leoman walks away with a goddess at the last moment before turning Y'Ghatan into a death trap by [[KillItWithFire turning it into an inferno]]]].
* ''IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream'' starts with the insane, and slowly decaying, AM having wiped out humanity except for the main characters, who receive a FateWorseThanDeath. When it ends, [[spoiler:four characters are dead, but the narrator has received a ''worse'' FateWorseThanDeath.]]
** However, [[spoiler:in the self-sacrificing act of killing the others to release them from their endless torture, the narrator has regained a measure of humanity.]] It's a happy ending, by HarlanEllison standards.
* Brilliantly subverted in Joseph Heller's ''[[{{Catch22}} Catch-22]]'', which ends with [[spoiler:the entire supporting cast dead, the protagonist faced with an enormous moral dilemma, and the entire world seemingly falling apart]], only for the main character to realize that [[spoiler:he can just leave]]. He does so, and the reader is left unsure whether he should laugh or cry.
* The ''{{Warhammer 40000}}'' novel ''Eldar Prophecy'' features a civil war on an Eldar craftworld that is slowly drifting towards a warp rift and certain destruction. As all the sympathetic characters are killed off one by one, the DesignatedHero finally kills the villain, presumably saving the craftworld. Then, in the last two pages, we learn that all of this was a XanatosGambit by the ''real'' villains, who can now feed the souls of all the war's dead to a CosmicHorror and send the survivors straight into warp rift. Even for 40k, this is a DownerEnding.
* ''BraveNewWorld'' by Aldous Huxley ends with [[spoiler: the "initial" main character being banished and the "real" main character hanging himself]].
** On the other hand, the [[spoiler: place the first guy was banished to]] sounds awesome.
* In the eleventh book of the ''[[WheelOfTime Wheel of Time]]'' series, [[spoiler:the Shaido Aiel who was developing a flirtatious relationship with Faile, and who were in the process of ''rescuing'' her, are also unceremoniously bludgeoned to death by Perin...who is not even responding to this relationship, but killed them simply because they were apparently threatening Faile by being around her. So far, he still doesn't know about what was going on. One sees clearly that the author finally intended to wrap up the series soon.]]
* ''OfMiceAndMen'' in a particularly famous example. And ''TheGrapesOfWrath''. AND ''In Dubious Battle''. Heck, can we save time and say anything by Steinbeck probably has one of these?
** TheGrapesOfWrath is an interesting example in that the protagonists acknowledge that they've fallen under this trope, and almost seem ''comforted'' by it. As Ma and Pa look back on how their family has slowly torn apart, they can't think of anything they could've done differently. Their fate was inevitable, and they seem to find comfort in that. It's like "Well, our actions were completely futile and what's left of our family are all probably going to die soon, but hey, at least it's not our fault".
** ''The Pearl'' too. All that happens after finding the pearl is that they get their boat broken, their house burned, and their baby shot.
* ''Bios'' by Robert Charles Wilson ends with [[spoiler:every last person on the planet dead, and all of their work revealed to be irrelevant]].
* The RedDwarf book series does this to a certain extent. Throughout all adaptations there has been one consistent goal for the RedDwarf crew: get back to Earth. No matter how terrible things got out there, Lister and company had the knowledge, that somehow, some way, there would be a way back home... however, in the book continuity, it's revealed that the entire Earth has been turned into a garbage planet, abandoned to be covered in garbage till the end of time.
* For a Junior Fiction example, Goosebumps ''loved'' this trope. Every single book had a twist ending, and more often than not, Stine shot the shaggy dog, albeit offscreen. Killed a monster and are escaping into the swamp? Uh-oh, looks like his extended family is still out there! Won The Most Dangerous Game (of tag) by convincing the monsters who forced you to play that you're in an advanced team? Uh-oh, now the advanced team wants to play! You've managed to convince an evil witch who turned you into a chicken to turn you back into a human? Uh-oh, now she's turned you into a pig! Seriously, there was no way out for these kids. Depressing as hell to a seven-year-old.
** And for a double example, there's ''Legend of the Lost Legend''. The kids go through a series of hellish trials to win a priceless artifact their father has been searching for, only to discover it's the ''wrong'' priceless artifact in the last ten pages. Shaggy Dog. They then are directed to the ''right'' priceless artifact...which has a curse on it that dooms its holders to wander lost for eternity. Shaggy ''Dead'' Dog.
* Thomas Hardy's work, ''especially'' ''Jude the Obscure'' and ''[=~Tess of the D'Urbervilles~=]'', the moral of both of which is that life is a horrible never-ending series of tragedies inflicted on a cruel God that will culminate in your death alone and unloved.
** And for Tessy, you die alone and unloved while the love of your life ''walks off to marry your sister.'' And that's supposed to be the ''happy'' part.
* Mal Considine in James Ellroy's ''The Big Nowhere'' spends the whole book struggling to make a name for himself to get custody of his adopted son from his mother, both of whom he rescued from the Holocaust, when it turns out the mother was a collaborator and was lying to him the whole time. He finally manipulates a union conflict into the perfect way to make his money, only to get caught up in a related murder case and unceremoniously shot by the killer. His partner Buzz Meeks later tries to send the kid a sizable nest egg, but the person he makes the deal with is less than trustworthy and we never find out if he followed instructions or just kept it for himself. And then Meeks is killed in the prologue of the next book, but at least it's with a blaze of glory BolivianArmyEnding and his death continues to affect the plot.
* The MagicTheGathering Shadowmoor anthology includes a tale of five Kithkin brothers. Each of the first four wanders out in turn and meets a grisly death. The fifth and most competent and powerful goes about avenging his brothers, and is not yet finished this task when he is squished to death by a passing giant. What do you expect from a culture of paranoia? The moral is "All outsiders want to kill you". Of course, in Shadowmoor that's almost true.
** "Almost true" is an understatement.
* K. A. Bedford's ''Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait'' ends with the main villain declaring victory while the defeated protagonist thinks to himself that it doesn't matter anyway because {{Eldritch Abomination}}s will soon RetGone the entire Universe, and he for one can't wait for it all to finally end.
* In ''Things Fall Apart'', after reading pretty much the whole book about the life of a deconstruction of the ProudWarriorRaceGuy named Okonkwo and the complicated culture that he lives in, the Europeans come over and start destroying the culture, and Okonkwo is driven to hang himself. To make it more of a ShootTheShaggyDog, a European who saw his body thinks about Okonkwo and how he might make a whole chapter in his book, or if not a chapter a decent paragraph. He then decides to name his book "pacifying the primitive tribes of the lower Niger".
*Stephen King's ''{{The Dark Half}}''. [[spoiler: The entire book revolves around Thad Beaumont trying to save himself and his family from his dark twin George Stark. He succeeds, but in ''Needful Things'' we learn that Thad, unable to cope with everything that's happened to him, has become an alcoholic and his wife has taken the children and left him. And then, as if that wasn't enough, in ''Bag Of Bones'' the protagonist tells us that Thad has committed suicide.]]
* The final {{Animorphs}} book. [[spoiler: {{Action Chick}} Rachel goes on a suicide mission onto the Blade Ship, which will soon be blown up by the heroes in a hijacked Pool Ship. Rachel creates enough of a diversion on the Blade Ship for the heroes to fire on it, but a pacifist android drains power from the Pool Ship's weapon systems. Rachel is unceremoniously killed by a Blade Ship crew member, shortly after killing Jake's brother, whom Jake spent the entire series trying to save from the alien controlling his mind. Because the heroes could not destroy the Blade Ship, it flies to some other planet and [[ImpliedHolocaust kills millions of civilians]], just for fun. Later, the same crew member who killed Rachel kidnaps Aximilli and assimiliates him into an entity called "The One". Three of the four remaining heroes try to rescue Ax, but they end up suicidally ramming the Blade Ship.]] Entire book series ends.
** K.A. Applegate has a nasty tendency to do this with her books. Discontinuity exists for a reason.
* The WindOnFire series subverts this. After three plucky kids save the city in the first book, the second opens with it being completely destroyed and all the citizens enslaved. However, in the third book Kestrel realises that two things survived from their epic quest of the first book: the voice of the "wind singer" and her brother's pollution by a spirit called "the Morah", both of which are needed to renew the spirit of the world.
* ''The Nightingale and the Rose'' by Oscar Wilde. Young man is mopey because some girl doesn't like him, wants to give her a red rose, and can't find one. A nightingale feels sorry for him and travels around the world looking for a rose, and can't find one either. The nightingale sacrifices her life, brutally and painfully, to create a red rose from her own blood. The young man finds it and gives it to the girl, but she dumps him anyway, and he throws it in the gutter and decides love is stupid. End of story.
* An actual ShaggyDogStory that shoots the shaggy dog: a short story of unknown provenance, entitled "A Good Man." The title character spends his life doing good deeds, and at the end he's in a plane crash and gets eaten by cannibals. The cannibals all throw up, [[RegretEatingMe just as he told them they would]]. The moral of the story? [[ShaggyDogStory You can't keep a good man down]].
* In Gregory Maguire's ''{{Wicked}}'', Elphaba's story is like this. Of course, those who have done their pop-culture homework know [[KillItWithWater what's going to happen]] before the story starts, but, after witnessing her journey, it gets downright depressing.
** In a case of AdaptationDecay/ [[AdaptationDistillation Distillation]] the play uses a XanatosGambit to change outcome. Making the book a bit of a DownerEnding after seeing the play first.
* This is the fate of about half the characters of ''Lonesome Dove.''
* Half of JodiPicoult's novels. Just one example:
**''MySistersKeeper'' - Fight your battle for medical emancipation, [[spoiler: win it - and it's the same result, only you get to DIE.]]
** To elaborate, Big Sister has agressive leukemia, so her parents conceive Little Sister so Big Sister can have healthy blood, marrow, etc. When Big Sister's cancer returns and she needs a ''kidney'', Little Sister has had it and sues her parents for control of her own body [[spoiler: after getting encouragement from Big Sister, who's also getting tired of this]]. Little Sister [[spoiler: wins the long and heart-rending court case, only to get hit by a car and put in a coma. After being declared braindead Big Sister gets her kidney, which finally helps her beat the cancer.]] So they Shoot the Shaggy Dog and ''[[spoiler: harvest its organs!]]''
** And in the movie, [[spoiler: Kate dies, so basically Anna just sued her parents so her sister could die of renal failure]].
*** Doesn't really apply to the movie, though, because Kate was the one who talked Anna into the lawsuit. She was ready to die, and they both knew it would be the result.
* The Ergoth Trilogy, of the Dragonlance world: The hero goes from a farmer to a hero, fights everyone and everything (sometimes twice) for his love. Then, everyone and everything join him as allies for the final book, all for his love, and when he finally reaches her - surprise! He realizes he doesn't love her. So he goes back to being a farmer.
* ''Tales from WatershipDown'' has a pair of related stories, "The Story of the Great Marsh" and "The Story of the Terrible Hay-Making". In the former, El-ahrairah leads a friendly warren of rabbits away from certain annihilation through the titular marsh. In the latter, [[spoiler:the warren rabbits make a nuisance of themselves to the humans living near their new home, against El-ahrairah's advice to lay low and stop causing trouble, and literally get mown down by the humans after going too far]].
* Appears in ''Faces of Deception'', a probably-obscure ForgottenRealms novel by Troy Denning. The protagonist Atreus is a deformed and spectacularly ugly man who is sent on a false quest by the priesthood of the goddess of beauty, to whom he has gone looking for divine interference to fix his appearance so that he could live a normal life, and who like his money but want to be rid of his face. Eventually he finds the legendary valley he's looking for, and at the same time finds love for the first time in his life, because the locals are able to see past even the most horrific of appearances. He can't stay at the valley forever, however, so he's tempted to fulfill the quest supposedly given to him by the goddess and steal an important source of the valley's special power. He knows he will never be able to have a remotely normal life without being cured of his ugliness, and he's shown as being too weak not to try (partly understandably and partly just because it's his character). This is built into a very interesting dilemma, and how it could be solved isn't evident to the reader before the ending. [[spoiler: Nor to the writer, it seems; the novel ends with no resolution, with Atreus disappearing down a river leading to a place unknown and possible death on a boat he did not intend to board. He may or may not survive the river, but it actually makes no difference for the story. Whether the main character lives or dies. [[SoYeah So, yes.]]]]
* Mary Stewart's ''The Wicked Day.'' Arthur spends the entire book trying to create and maintain a peaceful, unified kingdom. Mordred spends it trying to escape the prophesy that says he will be Arthur's doom. In the end, through a series of unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings, they both fail catastrophically and end up killing each other.
* [[PerryRhodan Perry Rhodan]] has a ''lot'' of these. Since it's written by a team of authors, it's not uncommon for a character introduced at the end of one issue to immediatly die at the beginning of the next - sort of like a [[AbortedArc Murdered Arc]]. Note that NominalImportance doesn't protect you in the slightest. There are at least three particularly glaring examples:
** Near the beginning of the series, a ([[InformedAbility supposedly]]) brilliant scientist gets introduced via a very elaborate SobStory, and it's obvious that the author had a lot in stock for him, given how fleshed out he was. Next episode? Killed by falling tree on Venus. (ScienceMarchesOn, not DidNotDoTheResearch. It's ''old'' Sci-Fi.)
** A little later on, in an early "epic" arc (Masters of the Island, if ThisTroper recalls correctly), a common-if-Angsty soldier is introduced to us, with name, background, musical ability and everything. He dies ''offscreen'' ("To Atlan's grief, MauveShirt von Forgothisname was among the casualties.").
** It also happens to technology. In one issue, there's a lot of fuss about how a species is obviously centuries ahead of humanity because they have got an energy-draining "Raptor Ray". Later on, the species is unceremoniously genocided (or at least vanishes entirely), and the technology is ''literally never even mentioned again''.
** Even entire ''species'' aren't exempt from this. The BodySnatchers, for example, are made up to be a gigantic threat even to TheEmpire... and are subsequently defeated by humanity, with 1960s technology, and ''never mentioned again''.
** Worst offender, though? ''John freaking Ellert'', a time traveller with the ability of leaving his body and not being confined by time and space (as much). He is shot ''twice''. First time, he loses his temporal focus point on ''his second mission'', and appears doomed to float through time and space forever, unable to find back. However, at least two other authors liked the character enough to bring him back several hundred in-universe years later, with (again) a lot of SobStory and even more InformedAbility and InformedBadassery. He is then mind-killed by an AI. Painfully.
* Many of Cormac McCarthy's works would fall into this category. "The Crossing" is a near literal example,and "Blood Meridian" flirts with it.
** "Child of God" is an almost textbook example; the novel is about a societal outcast who slowly descends into madness in his loneliness and eventually becomes what could best be described as a human troll. The book ends with him dying in custody after being arrested for murder and necrophilia.
* At the end of ''{{Ring}}'', Asakawa realises that [[spoiler:he was spared because he copied the tape and showed it to Ryuji, and he goes to get Shizu to do the same for herself and Yoko.]] Then, in the sequel, ''Spiral'', we learn that [[while he got them to copy the tape again, their time had run out and they both died anyway.]] Then we find out that Mai's own attempt at halting the spread of the virus [[spoiler:was utterly pointless, as Ando contracted it by reading Asakawa's notes on the video]].
* The short story called ''The Eyes'' is about a pair of private investigators, Hill and Flint, who are hired by a teenaged girl, Heather. She needs them to protect her after she witnessed a murder perpetrated by a member of the most notorious gang in Camille, New Jersey, The Nocens. [[BetterThanItSounds After a few chase scenes, some shootouts, and even a torture scene]], [[spoiler: Hill and Flint manage to kill just about everyone in the gang's headquarters, including the leader. While walking back to their office with Heather, they are suddenly shot at by a large number of gang members. Heather is shot in the leg, Hill has his head blown apart by a shotgun, and Flint is rammed into a wall by a truck. As the driver gets out, Heather futilely trys to crawl away from him. The driver points his gun at her face, says "You didn't think you killed all of us, did you?", and shoots her in the head. Ouch indeed.]]
* An example from the [[TheBrothersGrimm Grimm Brothers]]' Household Tales, entitled "[[http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/2catmousepartnership.html Cat and Mouse in Partnership]]", can be summarised as follows: A cat and a mouse get married (which, ordinarily, would be the weirdest part of a story, but it gets weirder). They buy a pot of fat to see them through the winter, and decided to stash it in the local church, reasoning that nobody would steal it from there. Over the course of the year, the cat fabricates a few christenings as a pretext to go to the church and eat the fat. When winter rolls around, the cat and mouse go to the church to retrieve the fat; the mouse, discovering it empty, suddenly realises what the cat has been doing. Then the cat [[KilledMidSentence eats the mouse mid-sentence]]. It even goes so far as to end by declaring "Verily, that is the way of the world."
[[/folder]]

[[folder:LiveActionTV]]
* The ending of ''Mortal Kombat Conquest'' was very much one of these. The show ends with [[spoiler: Shao Kahn getting fed up with the situation and sending his minions to [[KillEmAll kill everyone]]]].
* ''TheCorner'', by ''TheWire'' creator DavidSimon, is one big grimfest.
* Although each season of ''TheWire'' ends with successful convictions of drug dealers, it becomes progressively more and more clear with each season that the best the police can do is sweep up the low-level boys. Everyone sufficiently high up is untouchable, and American social and political systems make effecting actual change impossible. In the final episode, [[spoiler: Detective McNulty has to resign from the force, Lieutenant Daniels and Rhonda Pearlman "fall on their swords", Mayor Carcetti and Commander Rawls are both promoted when they don't deserve it, and the crooked newspaper reporter who ran with a story about a falsified serial killer is lauded. Most of the supporting characters also come to realize that they can't change the system, and will be shuffled into the background while a new generation of thugs and cops dominate Baltimore]].
* The first episode of ''[[BlakesSeven Blake's 7]]'', has the one lawyer on the planet who actually cares about the truth investigate Blake's frame job and get painfully close to unravelling the whole thing when government guards simply gun him and his girlfriend down. It was a deliberate attempt to frame the entire series by demonstrating the spirit crushing government's resolve and it worked brilliantly.
**The ''last'' episode of ''Blake's 7'' was an even ''bigger'' ShootTheShaggyDog moment, [[spoiler:what with its KillEmAll ending.]]
* ''DoctorWho''s third season finale manages to do this with ''the entire future of the human race'' (Long story short: [[spoiler: It's doomed... and then ''[[ItGotWorse things got worse]]'']]); This occurring two episodes after it was described as "Indomitable", thus rendering said episode spectacularly moot. To really rub salt in the wound, the events that caused this are explicitly ''not'' covered by the ResetButton that later follows.
**One could argue, that it has a point and a big one at that. The point being that everything has to end, even the existence of the human race. (and it lasted damn long, since it's the year one hundred trillion and the end of the universe.)
**River Song did mention a trip to the end of the universe with the Doctor. So maybe they work things out.
**In the original series episode "Caves of Androzani", while the Doctor manages to save Peri, the rest of Androzani Major and Minor go completely to hell because of a chain of events that was started by the Doctor simply ''being'' there and ended with every main character dying pointlessly. The entirety of these places were so riddled with corruption that it just took one thing to make everything collapse. Particular examples of this hopelessness include Stotz killing the rest of his crew and Sharaz Jek, moments after getting the revenge that the war this episode centered around was started because of, is shot in the back.
***This could pretty much sum up much of the Fifth Doctor's career. He had a tendency to ''not'' save the day.
* An episode of ''StarTrekVoyager'', "Course: Oblivion", has the crew discovering that they -- along with Voyager itself -- are in fact clones of the ''real'' crew and ship, having been brought into existence in an earlier episode, and now they're falling apart. They spend the episode dying one by one and unsuccessfully trying ''not'' to die, until the whole thing finally falls apart, kilometers from the real Voyager, which is totally unaware of what has happened. Arguably the most depressing part comes when, desperate not to have their existence be in vain, they create a log of their exploits and launch it into space, where it gets destroyed seconds later.
* Nikki and Paolo from ''{{Lost}}'' were originally meant to be much more important characters, but [[TheScrappy the fanbase utterly despised them so much]] [[ThePoochie that they were simply killed off]].
** 90% of {{Lost}} is like this, notably [[spoiler: ALL the Tailies from Season 2]] who influence nothing and die when they've started to.
** Rousseau & her daughter are finally reunited at the end of Season 3 [[spoiler:only to be killed by snipers a few episodes into Season 4]]
** In addition, the Season 5 finale appears to have revealed that [[spoiler:John Locke's]] ENTIRE character arc and development was nothing more than to be a throwaway pawn in the ultimate [[XanatosGambit scheme]] of a newly revealed BigBad.
* The whole of ''{{Supernatural}}'', Season Three, could apply to this. Sam tries so hard to save Dean from eternal torment and gets increasingly unhinged, Dean more or less gets over his suicidal nature and tries hard himself because he's terrified, they both bring the crazy, clingy panic in spades and in the end, [[spoiler: none of it means anything because Dean's dead and gone to hell anyway. (Though he got better)]]
* In the new ''BattlestarGalactica'' series, the mid season finale has the humans and the Cylons rebels in a MexicanStandoff with each side threatening to execute prisoners. It takes some work and some tough choices, but in the end, both sides agree to back down, set aside their differences, and to face the future...together. And together, they finally, ''finally'' find Earth, which cues the heartwarming music and the celebration montage. The ships enter the atmosphere of their new home after years of searching and finally... they find out that [[spoiler:Earth is a radioactive wasteland with the thirteenth tribe nowhere in sight.]] Cue a {{Pan}}view of all the main and secondary characters standing and wandering around in shock, no doubt wondering [[WhatNowEnding "What the frak do we do now?"]]
** The impact of this [[spoiler: was much negated in the finale when the writers pulled Earth 2.0 - our Earth - out of nowhere, meaning they had a sort of happy ending after all. Only sort of, as since we are described as their descendents it means the history and culture of the Kobolians and Cylons was completely lost, including the lessons they had suffered horrendously for, and that humanity is still being judged as likely to repeat the same mistakes they spent several apocalypses and years of hopeless suffering overcoming by 'angels' who jerk us around and manipulate us to this day.]]
* ''KamenRiderRyuki'': The whole ORE Journal subplot seems pointless. At the very end, Reiko-[[{{Honorifics}} tachi]] finally [[spoiler:unravel the mystery of the Kamen Riders and the Mirror World, only to have all their hard work undone by the ResetButton.]]
* The ''[[BabylonFive Babylon 5]]'' episode ''Confessions and Lamentations'' is a borderline example of this: [[spoiler:An alien race is on the brink of extinction and several main protagonists try to prevent that. When the doctor finally combines AppliedPhlebotinum and TechnoBabble to a working cure he finds out the whole race already kicked the bucket.]]
** At least he managed to save [[spoiler: the other species that was vulnerable to the disease]].
** ''Intersections in Real Time'' has Sheridan captured by his government, tortured and messed around with by a professional so he would confess that his seditious acts were due to being alien influences. In one scene they brought in a Drazi prisoner who they beat into confessing his involvement, but Sheridan convinces him not to give in. He's dragged off screaming, but eventually, Sheridan gives his torturer a rousing speech about how every time he refuses to back down, he wins. He's dragged off for what appears to be execution, but it turns out that they were just giving him to another torturer who repeats the same tactics that his predecessor did. And the kicker? We see the Drazi prisoner alive and well, as well as in on it.
*''Series/{{Heroes}}'': DL's death. We found out he was dead in the ''first episode'' of S2, for god's sake, but they spent about half of Four Months Ago following him around to show us how. Was it from the bullet wound received in the S1 finale? Nope. Did he die a heroic death rescuing a little girl? No chance. He was killed by some psycho-moron who thought it'd be a great idea to shoot someone in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses for the crime of cockblocking him - that is to say, asking him to pretty please let go of his wife, they're going home now. WTF? Oh, and did I mention the murderer hasn't been mentioned since?
* The Dana breast cancer plot in season 3 of ''TheLWord''. (Arguably the show's [[JumpTheShark shark-jump]].)
* ''AreYouAfraidOfTheDark'': Many of the {{Downer Ending}}s, examples include "Super Specs" (the AlternateUniverse wins, and the protagonists are imprisoned in a crystal sphere), "Pinball Wizard" (doomed to repeat the game forever, i.e. "trapped in a grim cycle of reincarnation"), "Thirteenth Floor" (Karin goes through all that trouble to escape, only to find out [[TomatoInTheMirror she is one of the aliens]] and they were trying to rescue her), "The Dangerous Soup" (the demon is NotQuiteDead, and our heroes are once again LockedInAFreezer with it), and "The Chameleons" (Sharon sprays the real Janice, who is then permanently chameleonized, and executed shortly after).
** Arguably the point, since the FramingDevice for each episode is a campfire scary story. They're not supposed to have happy endings.
* In its original run, the short-lived 1999 comedy series ''Action'' ended with the scamming Hollywood-agent protagonist (Jay Mohr) suffering a sudden heart attack, after a day of unsuccessfully shooting his last-chance movie. He dies in an ambulance, after which his new gold Rolex is stolen by medical workers. (He's out of time, you see.) Had [[ScrewedByTheNetwork the next episode aired]], he would've [[ResetButton woken up]] and returned to work, but the show was taken off the air, resulting in a shockingly dark ending to a rather dark comedy series.
* There was once a planet named Earth. Beginning in 1992, it was attacked nonstop by numerous empires, organizations, and alien invaders- another one stepping in to invade the moment the previous one was defeated. The aliens only ceased their attacks for the occasional invasion by TheLegionsOfHell, and they both took a break for the occasional time-traveling mafia terrorist or mad scientist dinosaur. No matter who it was trying to conquer Earth, no matter how much was destroyed, defenders always stepped up to defend it, succeeding onscreen until 2008, and then offscreen until at ''least'' 2025, when Earth could defend itself successfully even against entrenched invaders, and had become an intergalactic crossroads. And the defenders, the defended, and their children all lived happily- wait, nevermind, everyone not in a specific city was killed by homidical robots. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the show is ''PowerRangers'', which shoots the shaggy dog in PowerRangersRPM, leaving every previous season ultimately futile.
**By the end of the [[PowerRangersTimeForce 30th century]], what is still left of Earth has caught up and barely surpassed the technological levels seen in ''[[PowerRangersSPD SPD]] about '''Nine hundred years prior''' ''
* ''[[BuffyTheVampireSlayer Buffy's]]'' sixth season runs on this trope, most particularly in the storylines ending with [[spoiler:Xander leaving Anya at the altar and Tara's death]].
* As of the Season 5 finale of GreysAnatomy, the entire life of [[spoiler: George O'Malley]].
** Doesn't really apply unless every single patient he's ever saved dies at the same time.
** His love life counts though
* Many fans of ''{{Eastenders}}'' felt that the Ronnie/Danielle storyline was an example: Danielle is Ronnie's long-lost daughter, Ronnie doesn't know, complications go on for months until Ronnie finds out, and just as they're about to finally embrace as mother and daughter [[spoiler:...Danielle is hit by a car and dies.]]
* The story of Jack Holden on HomeandAway. After a long series of breakups remarriages and other crises with his soul mate Martha, he abruptly gets shot dead, right when she's only just recovering from her battle with breast cancer and the loss of her baby. Not only that, but he gets shot by a fellow cop who he has been following, believing to be corrupt. Angelo accidentally shoots him, thinking he's the crooked developer come to kill him. The kicker is that a few months later Angelo has been cleared of murder charges and is now a series regular.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:TabletopGames]]
* Most of the games in the first run of White Wolf's ''{{World of Darkness}}'' setting were gigantic exercises in Shooting the Shaggy Dog. The good guys in each setting were gradually (or abruptly in Hunter: the Reckoning) revealed to have a long and unpleasant past of doing rather nasty things in the name of the cause, and the series of epic centuries-long secret wars they were fighting generally tended to be either unwinnable stalemates or tragically doomed noble causes. And most of their problems turned out to be caused by the arrogant hubris or ignorance of their own predecessors anyway. And to top it all off, the entire original setting had a series of apocalyptic end of the world scenarios as its grand finale.
** [[DisContinuity No.]]
** To be fair, very few people actually used the metaplot from WOD games, writing off most of the fluff as being the long rambling fictions of writers trying to do a 'storytelling' game. And even of those few who did use the whole metaplot, no DM would actually run a campaign that ended with 'And the world is destroyed by your unstoppable god-like ancestors' without agreeing it with the players first.
*** No GOOD DM. Nothing like the joy of a five-year campaign ending with having to listen to NPCs talk for two hours, after which they destroyed the world...
* In ''CallOfCthulhu'', mythos monsters (and more mundane horrible experiences) make you lose "sanity points" and you gradually go insane. You get back Sanity Points by defeating monsters, which often require magic to kill. However, spells also cost Sanity, and most spells cost large amounts. If you don't go insane, it's all right, because most monsters can kill you anyways. However, it is justified by the fact that it is based on [[HPLovecraft Lovecraft's]] [[CosmicHorror equally bleak books of the Cthulhu Mythos]].
** If you want a bleak [=RPG=] where AFateWorseThanDeath awaits and [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption failure (and death) is often the only option]] for characters in the long run, try ''Delta Green'' (which is basically ''Call of Cthulhu'' meets secret society Special Ops). Or take ''[=KULT=]'', a Swedish roleplaying game with its gloves off, the setting of which can be summed up as "SplatterPunk, CosmicHorror, MindScrew and lots of {{Squick}}".
[[/folder]]

[[folder:{{Theater}}]]
* In Stephen Berkoff's ''The Trial'', Joseph K spends the entire play trying to fight a trial he doesn't understand in a world that is set firmly against him. He collapses and dies in a cathedral in the final scene, no closer to understanding or accomplishing anything than at the beginning.
** And the bad thing is, that's actually ''better'' than what winds up happening to him in Kafka's book.
* Does the protagonist of Elmer Rice's play ''The Adding Machine'' avoid being executed for murdering his boss? No. Does he [[spoiler:have a chance of doing better in his next life]]? No, [[spoiler:each time he is reincarnated, he gets worse]]. Does he at least [[spoiler:get the companion promised to him, a nice-looking woman called Hope]]? No. That's the situation when the final curtain falls.
** A similar fate befalls Mr. Zero in the [[AllMusicalsAreAdaptations musical version of the play.]]
*In ''Urinetown,'' Protagonist Bobby Strong inspires the poor to lead a revolution against the evil Caldwell B. Cladwell, who has gotten private toilets outlawed, charges exorbinant fees for the use of his public toilets, and has his corrupt police force take anyone who subverts his goals to the titular Urinetown [[spoiler:(which is in fact simply being thrown from the tallest rooftop in town)]]. In the end, Bobby himself is taken to Urinetown before he can see the revolution through to fruition, and once the poor wins out, and everyone can pee for free, the town's water supply quickly dries up and everyone dies horribly [[spoiler: while the inspiring victory music of the finale continues to play.]]
*The plot of the musical "Chess" revolves around the romance between the Russian chess champion Anatoly and the American second, Florence. The London and Broadway versions differ in the details, but the ending remains roughly the same in both. Anatoly defects to the United States. In an effort to get him back into the fold, the Russian powers that be offer to release Florence's father, a Hungarian revolutionary who vanished during the 1956 Budapest uprising, if he loses the match and comes back to Russia. In the end Anatoly decides that he cannot hurt Florence by keeping her from her father, so he defects back to Russia. [[spoiler:It doesn't matter anyway, since the man the Russians release is actually a captured American spy, as part of a deal with the CIA. Florence's father is probably dead. Anatoly has given up Florence and the match for nothing much at all.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:VideoGames]]
* ''{{Terranigma}}''. The main plot turns out to be one big XanatosGambit on part of a dark god that made the hero revive a previously dead world, complete with human life... So that the dark god and its associates could conquer it. Once he finds out he's been the XanatosSucker the main character is reverted to a baby for trying to stop it, nearly killed by his own love interest and ExpositionFairy and just barely avoids death due to the sacrifice of his love interest. ''Then'' comes the part revealing that the new world and his own world exist in a cycle of death and rebirth where the rebirth of one world means the destruction of the old one: Foiling the plot and saving the new world from the dark god means he, and everyone he knows and loves from his own world, must die along with said god (and yes, [[ButThouMust thou must]]). This isn't the part that makes it an example of this trope, though. That would be the part where the hero turns out to be the ChosenOne by the PowersThatBe who run the worlds: ''[[CosmicPlaything He is reborn to do the exact same thing]] [[GroundhogDayLoop over and over again every time the cycle is repeated]]''. And the cycle would only ever be broken if he ''failed''. The game tops this off with the mother of all MoodWhiplash endings, where the protagonist is 'rewarded' with a final day in his pre-heroic existence together with all his friends and family, all blissfully ignorant of the fact that they will die at the end of it.
* Possibly the biggest instance of a variation on this trope in a console RPG, however, can be found in the obscure Squaresoft game ''Live-A-Live''. ''Live-A-Live'' has these as the ending for at least half its stories. Cube's chapter has most of the crew dead from their interpersonal conflicts, and stopping the computer that exacerbated these problems into fatal situations feels bittersweet at best. Sunset is still guilt-ridden over his past after saving the town from the Crazy Bunch, and still hunted as a outlaw. Akira's home and closest friend are burned down and dead, respectively. . The villain's "good" ending just looks like a lot regret despite his triumph, and let's not get into the possible Armageddon Ending of the final chapter. Then again, you're playing a game that spells the title ''Live-A-Live'' as "Live-A-'''eviL'''". You should know what you're getting into.
* In ''SilentHill 2'', while escorting Maria in the hospital, if she gets killed, most easily during the Pyramid Head chase, it's a NonStandardGameOver. However, all your hard work is apparently pointless, since she is scripted to die at the end of the chase sequence.
** Subverted, since [[spoiler: there's a lot more going on with Maria, who survives dying quite a few times.]] Nonetheless, SilentHill absolutely LOVES this trope. Consider:
*** In Silent Hill 1, two endings [[spoiler: revolve around the protagonist not being able to save his daughter at all from the great demon, and possibly only delaying the EldritchAbomination from doing...whatever it was going to do.]]
*** In Silent Hill 2, all endings [[spoiler: reveal the protagonist, originally sympathetic, murdered his wife and is being punished for it. In one ending, he commits suicide. In another, he takes the malevolent spirit who looks like his wife with him, with hints she will 'die' for the fourth time just as his wife did, and in one ending, he attempts a resurrection of his wife with spells from a world which would make Lovecraft wince.]]
*** In Silent Hill 3, there is a NonStandardGameOver where the protagonist [[spoiler: is consumed by an evil spirit in a horrific scene]] and an ending where she [[spoiler: is possessed by a diabolic entity and kills the OnlySaneMan.]]
*** In Silent Hill 4, one ending kills both protagonists horribly, one ending kills one protagonist and the other is lucky to survive, and a third leads to [[spoiler: an evil genus loci taking over the protagonist's apartment, with who knows what horror to come.]]
*** And finally, in Silent Hill: Homecoming, [[spoiler: one ending sees the hero turned into a walking symbol of evil, one ending sees him drowned by his own father, one reveals it was all due to electroshock therapy at BedlamHouse]]. Oh, sure, the series has a couple of happy endings, somewhere...
*** And then, the joke endings traditionally show the protagonists make it through all that only to be [[spoiler: abducted by UFOs]], rendering the whole nightmare they went through moot.
* If you don't get the antidote for the zombie virus, every character's ending in ''ResidentEvil: Outbreak'' ends with them dying. The best you can hope for is a glorious death, taking out loads of zombies as you go -- and that sort of thing only occurs if you're playing the final level with a combination of characters that can't be set up anywhere but online. And since Capcom took their servers down as far as this game is concerned...
** Taking out a bunch of zombies becomes pretty pointless too, when you remember that they would have just been destroyed when Raccoon City is nuked anyway.
*** Well, the justification of doing that is you don't want to be there when the nuke goes off. So you gotta kill the zombies in your way to do so. That's how I look at it anyway.
* The entire first third of ''{{Summoner}}'' consisted of you going through great lengths to gather and destroy four magical rings on the advice of your [[{{Mentors}} Mentor]] (a renegade ex-[[TheWatcher Watcher]]) and the royal house of your homeland in order to become powerful enough to smash through [[BigBad Murod]]'s Orenian army, free Orenia, and kill Murod. Unfortunately, it turns out that the king's brother and the queen were conspiring with Murod and broke the siege to let in the Orenian army, destroying the four rings actually releases the [[SealedEvilInACan incredibly powerful demons imprisoned within them]], one of your party members was a partially unknowing patsy for this scheme, and your mentor has actually been [[NotHimself Possessed]] by the most powerful of the four demons from within one of the rings since the start of the game, meaning that your ENTIRE game up to this point has been nothing more than the fulfillment of the villains' XanatosGambit. This is made more exasperating yet by a SideQuest earlier in the game which would have implicated the traitorous brother in an earlier crime if the NPC characters involved didn't [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption screw up their part of the operation]].
* The ending to the original ''{{Doom}}'' had the SpaceMarine escaping from Hell and returning to Earth... only to find that the demons he had been fighting have already invaded. [[SequelHook Cue the sequel.]]
** The ending of the first episode wasn't a bad example as well. After killing the two bosses, the Barons of Hell, the only exit is through a teleporter and after taking it, you get killed by a bunch of monsters, and, no, God Mode ''will not'' help you. And the debriefing text afterward is so meta: "Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base, you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you? Where's your fat reward and ticket home? What the hell is this? It's not supposed to end this way!"
* In DeadSpace, do you really think anyone will get out of that mess?
** Well, WordOfGod said that Isaac survived... however, since the aformentioned WordOfGod has left EA, it's possible that's changed.
* The plot of ''{{Diablo}}'' revolves around a protagonist who seeks to stop the titular demon from destroying the town of Tristram, setting himself free from the cathedral, and leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. In the end, he kills the demon (actually, his human host) and plunges [[SealedEvilInACan the stone containing his soul into himself]], with hopes that he will be able to contain the demon's power. All in all, a reasonable ending. Now, cut to the second game. It is revealed that [[XanatosSucker he couldn't resist it]]. He became Diablo, destroyed Tristram, set himself free, and is now leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. Well, crap. [[spoiler:It was [[RetCon actually revealed]] that by the time you face Diablo in the first ''Diablo'' game, you're already under his control. The entire point of [[XanatosGambit Diablo's plotting in the first game]] was for him to find a stronger host body. He reckoned, correctly, that any being strong enough to fight his/her way down to him, and then "slay" him was exactly what he needed.]] The manual to ''Diablo II: Lord of Destruction'' even points out how every time people thought it was over, the brothers just kept reemerging.
** The expansion of the sequel isn't much better. You manage to [[DeaderThanDead smash Mephisto and Diablo's soulstones]]! Except that Baal is still left unchecked, and [[spoiler:he's figured out the location of the source of the soulstones, the Worldstone. Oh, and he manages to convince one of the [=NPCs=] to give him a PlotCoupon, meaning free access to the Worldstone for him]]. By the time you catch up to and kill Baal, Tyrael comes down and notifies you that [[spoiler:Baal's corruption of the Worldstone means that the only way to prevent the entire Realm from becoming an outpost of Hell is to destroy the Worldstone. Not even Tyrael himself knows what will happen afterwards]]. All you can do is enter the portal he opens for you and wait for ''Diablo III''.
*** Which was announced in 2008. And yes, a Diablo-like demon is seen in the trailer. And one effect of destroying the Worldstone has been made clear: The previous location of the Arreat Summit on the world map is now labelled as the Arreat ''Crater''. Ouch.
* The video game version of ''I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream'' was built with this in mind. There is only one way to win in any satisfying, [[MultipleEndings "good ending"]] kind of way. Either you get all the characters to face their personal demons and die with dignity, after which four of them sacrifice their lives to give the fifth one a chance to defeat AM once and for all but must continue to forever roam AM's deceased mind to make sure it stays that way, or the lone survivor is turned into an [[WhoWantsToLiveForever immortal]], [[NightmareFuelUnleaded hideous,]] [[AndIMustScream miserable monster]]. And apparently HarlanEllison, the original story's author, had initially objected to the good ending. And the part where the characters can die with dignity at all. In this sense, it's entirely true to the original story.
*''Kya: Dark Lineage'' ended on what seemed to be a happy note with the heroine defeating the BigBad and restoring peace to the alternate world... until the artifact that was supposed to take the heroine and her brother home dumps them in a desolate world where it's implied they're eaten by a monster. OK...
* ''Chakan: The Forever Man'' ended like this: Chakan, a soldier [[CursedWithAwesome cursed with immortality]] until he destroyed all supernatural evil because he bested Death in a duel, never gets his final rest in any of the two final endings you can get. After he has 'rid the elemental and terrestrial planes of evil', Chakan impales himself with his own swords, only to be brought back to life by Death and mocked that, since there are countless planets in the universe that still have evil in them and he can never visit them all, his task will remain unfinished forever. You then duel Death. Be defeated, and Chakan will lament that his final rest can wait as he is still bound by his deal with Death. Defeat Death, and the game ends by showing you an hourglass that never empties: Death can't release you if you kill him. Either way, the plot Shoots the Shaggy Dog by ''not'' allowing Chakan to die at the end.
* In an old Bullfrog game called ''Flood'', you guide your character Quiffy through 42 levels of platform trouble and reach an ending animation where Quiffy climbs up a manhole to freedom and is immediately squashed by a truck. He deserved better.
* This is the first half of the 4th ''FireEmblem'' game, ''Genealogy of the Holy War''. Everything starts going south for the main character, Sigurd [[spoiler: after he enters Augustria. He promised the King he would leave after a year and a half; the king sent troops to attack Sigurd before then. Sigurd's friend Eltoshan, a knight under the king, gets executed for questioning his actions. Sigurd's wife Diadora gets kidnapped. Sigurd's father is framed for the murder of Grandbell's prince and Sigurd's wanted by his own country for crimes he didn't commit. He is offered refuge in the country of Silesia but he leaves after Grandbell sends troops in. While making a slow march towards the capitol, he watches his father die and finds out his sister and best friend (his brother-in-law) were killed while bringing reinforcements. When he reaches Velthomer, he is tricked into leading his small, exhausted army before Alvis's troops by being told the King knows he's innocent and that he can now rest. Alvis shows off his new wife, a brainwashed Diadora, and orders his troops to slaughter 'em all. Alvis himself kills Sigurd.]] But don't worry, seventeen years later all their kids finish the job.
*In ''F.E.A.R.'', despite your character being a badass SuperSoldier with insane superpowers, you end up failing every single mission objective you're given; everyone you're assigned to protect dies, and the PsychoForHire you were sent to kill ''willingly allows you to execute him'', and comes back later ''[[MyDeathIsJustTheBeginning even more powerful]]'' as a ghost. Also, after blowing up part of a city to stop the BigBad, the game ends with her still alive and attacking the 3 survivors.
**The expansion pack, ''Extraction Point'', is even worse. You go through the entire game to rescue your teammates, only to have them killed off moments before you reach them. Finally, at the very end, just as you attempt to escape the whole insane situation, your ride blows up for no apparent reason and the game ends with you bleeding out on the asphalt watching the entire city burn down as a precursor to the end of the world.
*** ''Project Origin'' is almost as bad, if not worse. Most of your ineffectual teammates are dead, Alma is still alive, plus she is now pregnant by you, with a potential FetusTerrible. Said by some to be the Antichrist. Has Monolith finished off the shaggy dog for good?
* Along with the ReplacementScrappy and MindScrew issues, this trope is perhaps another reason why ''MetalGearSolid 2'' received such venomous reactions. Everything (and I mean ''[[ThirtyXanatosPileup everything]]'') that occurs only served to further the plans of the villains, the main character nothing but a pawn who isn't even sure if what he's experiencing is real anymore; and neither is the player for that matter.
* The basic plot of ''Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant'' goes like this: "There's a MacGuffin hidden on this planet. The Dark Savant is looking for it. Find it before he does, and don't let him have it." During the game's ending, after you've killed the Dark Savant and finally found the MacGuffin, the ''real'' Dark Savant shows up, [[HostageForMacGuffin hostage in hand]], and demands that you hand it over in exchange for [[MadScientistsBeautifulDaughter the girl you met earlier]]. The game actually lets you [[MultipleEndings choose whether or not to hand it over]], but if you decide to keep the MacGuffin, he just kills your party and takes it from your corpse. If you agree to the exchange, he gives you the girl, you give him the MacGuffin, and he goes off into space, with your characters in pursuit. Either way, you completely failed in your mission. [[SequelHook Cue the sequel.]]
* In ''IWannaBeTheGuy'', if you don't move out of the way out of a [[EverythingTryingToKillYou slowly falling apple]] at the end of the ending sequence, you will actually ''die'', which defeats the whole purpose of trying to be The Guy in the first place. Also, you have to fight [[ThatOneBoss The Guy]] all over again!
** During the fight with The Guy to become The Guy, it is revealed that, [[spoiler: The Guy is your character's father. He killed his own father to become The Guy, and you are going to kill him to become The Guy, and in the future your son is going to kill you and become The Guy.]] Geez...talk about pointless.
* One possible ending in ''ShadowOfDestiny'' has the main character [[spoiler: escape death and, in the process, [[AnAesop realise how precious life is]]. It's all very heartwarming... and then he lies down to look at the sky and is promptly run over by a car. End of game.]]
** Even more so given that your character spent the entire game cheating death thanks to a time travelling device and the help of a Homunculus. After he finally comes to the bottom of it and deals with his assailant once and for all, [[ItSeemedLikeAGoodIdeaAtTheTime he believes himself safe and hands back the time travelling device and parts ways with the Homunculus just before he is run over and no longer able to save himself...]]
* ''Peasant's Quest'' (a video game spin-off from Homestar Runner and parody of old {{Sierra}} games) -- The goal is to gather up everything needed to be allowed to go fight the dragon, Trogdor, and then get past the traps guarding the gate to his lair. If you fail, of course, you die. If you succeed... [[spoiler: Trogdor tells you how impressed he is that you got this far, and then burnininates you because, of course, silly peasant, you can't defeat a DRAGON! Fortunately, you get a statue in your honor, so it's not ''completely'' pointless...]]
** Another Homestar example: the whole point of [=SBCG4AP=]'s third episode, "Baddest Of The Bands", is to get cash to fix your broken [=FunMachine=]. Once you finally paid it off, [[spoiler: not only is the console ''still'' not working, it turns out that all you had to do to "fix" it is to remove a "crusty wad of jalapeno cheese spray" stuck on the game cartridge!]] To quote Strong Bad himself, "What the crippity-crap!?"
* What about ''MortalKombat Armageddon's'' Konquest mode? Our protagonist, Taven, and his brother Daegon is forced into hibernation for millennia by their parents in order for them to participate in a quest to stop the EndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt. The quest ends up destroying his entire family, with Daegon being resurrected early and killing their parents AND enslaving his guardian dragon for his clan, Taven's own dragon being killed to prevent his progress on the quest, and finally the brothers facing each other in Mortal Kombat (Taven wins, though he doesn't like it). And when he finally ''does'' complete the quest, not only does it ''not'' depower ''or'' destroy the entire cast, as the quest was supposed to upon completion, but it actually ''supercharges'' them, essentially causing Armageddon to happen faster instead of stopping it dead in its tracks.
** The same thing effectively happens in the Konquest mode of ''MortalKombat: Deception''. In both cases, the protagonist falls prey to an enormous XanatosGambit/[XanatosRoulette Roulette]], thus creating the situation of the main game itself.
* ''{{Persona 2}}: Innocent Sin''. The heroes fail to prevent the Big Bad from having his way and all of the Earth is destroyed aside from the city they live in which now hovers above the destroyed Earth. Maya, the CoolBigSis, also dies because she gets stabbed by some crazy woman and all is lost. In return, the heroes get to rewind time so the event that started it all 10 years ago never happened. Of course this means all they did during the game was for no reason at all and it's pretty much just a big Game Over, please load your latest save (which was 10 years ago).
* ''{{Resistance}} 2''. [[spoiler: Your first act in the game is to watch the [[BigBad Big Bad]] make a shiny escape, and then lose your home base. Your second act is to lose your second base, but just narrowly manage to save the inhibitor serum, which keeps you from turning into something like the Big Bad. But that doesn't matter, because suddenly you're going from place to place without ever bothering to keep yourself safely injected. What follows is a series of battles that you ultimately fail to win each and every time. But that's okay. At the end, you've set us up the bomb, and killed the big bad of the game. You ride the nuclear wave out of the flagship, and land, albeit roughly. Too bad it doesn't mean a thing. Some big, scary floating rock now dots the atmosphere, Earth is still screwed, and to top it off, your hero has just turned. Then he is very shortly thereafter executed.]]
* The original ''AlienVsPredator'' game had a particularly scary campaign for the squishy human Marine. Having fought your way through the infested colony and escaped to the unsurprisingly infested space station above the planet, having beaten the inevitable alien queen, [[spoiler: you just get abandoned. You've probably seen too much. In any event, it didn't really matter as you started the campaign having just been facehugged anyway, so you're basically screwed regardless of what you do. Yay.]]
** In an old ''Aliens 3'' arcade shooter, the players take role of two prisoners fighting for survival as the Xenomorphs invade the prison. Finally, at the end, they run into the Weyland Yutani team sent in to retrieve Ripley. However, rescue is not high on their priorities and the Weyland Yutani thugs opt to just shoot the players instead.
* At the end of ''GrandTheftAuto 3'', our hero is implied to have flipped out and ''literally shot'' the shaggy dog, i.e. Maria, who he went through all that trouble to rescue.
* The diamond subplot in ''GrandTheftAuto 4''. Practically every criminal organization (and there are a lot) in the city gets involved in one way or another trying to steal a bag of diamonds the size of your fist. At the end of a long shootout, one of Bulagarin's men throws the bag into a passing truck full of mulch. Newspapers later report that the diamonds are found by a homeless man.
* {{Infocom}} used this trope at least twice.
** In ''Infidel'', the PlayerCharacter solves an ancient pyramid's brutal riddles, defuses its {{Death Trap}}s, and opens the treasure sarcophagus in the Burial Chamber... [[spoiler:only for the room to collapse, burying him alive.]] This is arguably [[JustifiedTrope justified]], as the PlayerCharacter is a greedy, lying fool, but is that really a consolation after solving ''so many Expert-level puzzles?''
** ''Trinity'' tops this. It's a 1986 TimeTravel game that begins with your narrow escape from a [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt nuclear holocaust]], which surely ''implies'' that your goal is to [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong prevent World War III.]] And you do eventually make it to the site of the first atom bomb test... [[spoiler:but you can't change history, and history now includes nuclear extinction. You're in a StableTimeLoop, and all you can do is escape from the holocaust again ... though it's implied you'll end up back there over and over again.]] While you do [[spoiler:prevent disaster from happening in 1945]], the final line emphasizes that, [[spoiler: ultimately, you are surrounded by children who will never grow up.]]
* In Adam Cadre's ''Varicella,'' PlayerCharacter [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Primo Varicella's]] goal is to become Regent to the royal prince. Most players will need many, many [[NintendoHard playthroughs against a frustratingly tight]] [[TimedMission time limit]] to devise a XanatosGambit and eliminate Varicella's [[AssholeVictim homicidal rivals.]] Your reward for pulling this feat off is [[spoiler: victory! Except the prince grows up to be more AxCrazy than all of the rivals put together, and sentences Varicella to torture and death.]] There are other endings, all grim, save for an EasterEgg. Given the [[SickSadWorld dreary setting]], in which everybody's some combination of "evil," "crazy," and "victim," the shaggy dog's death might have been inevitable.
** Even the happy EasterEgg ending is a combination of [[spoiler:it's AllJustADream with a TomatoSurprise. Typing 'wake up' at any point reveals that the whole game was a college student's dream, an AlternateUniverse inspired by falling asleep while reading a history textbook.]]
* ''Jinxter''. [[spoiler: You die pointlessly, after spending an entire game trying to avoid this.]] ''Computer Gaming World'' labeled this one of the top fifteen worst game endings of all time.
* Tenchu 4. [[spoiler: Gohda castle burns, Kiku and Sekiya are dead and [[BigBad Onikage]] has (possibly) infected Ayame]]
* The ending of the Hierarchy Campaign in ''Universe at War''. Orlok is betrayed and killed, his rebellion accomplishing absolutely nothing except getting the Masari prince captured -- even the major characters he apparently killed during his campaign turn up alive and well when it switches over to the Masari.
* In part two of Chapter 9 in ''[[PhantasyStar Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus]]'', The GUARDIANS are looking for a young Beast boy infected with the SEED-virus to give him the vaccine before [[ShootTheDog the AMF CASTs kill him]]. However [[spoiler: once found he ends up turning into a SEED form, forcing him to be [[ShootTheDog killed anyway.]]]]
* In FinalFantasyCrystalChronicles: Echoes of Time, [[spoiler: Larkeicus spent 2,000 years planning a way to restore the crystals to the world, building a tower miles high to reach the place the cataclysm would occur. It then occurs anyway, only BECAUSE of the methods he used in the process, and since he's there at the time it ends up killing him. To top that off, the only reason it happened so exhaustingly high in the sky was because he built the tower that high.]]
*In the "Sisters" mode of ''{{Castlevania}}: Portrait of Ruin''. Since it's a prequel to the storyline of the main game, the ending doesn't surprise anyone who's unlocked it, but it's still a kick in the teeth. [[spoiler: You don't even get to fight Brauner or Dracula. As soon as you walk into Brauner's room, he takes CutscenePowerToTheMax and vampirizes the protagonists in front of their dying father. You have no chance to avoid this in any fashion.]] Fortunately things get better in the main story.
* Activision's ''Apocalypse''. At the end, Trey has defeated the Four Horsemen, and confronts the BigBad Reverend himself. But before Trey can take him down, the Rev blasts him with lightning and transforms Trey into one of the demons. TheBadGuyWins.
* ''ChronoCross'' retroactively does this to ''ChronoTrigger''. Remember the super mega happy ending you got with Chrono and Marle hooking up and pretty much everyone except Magus going home to their happy new worlds? [[spoiler:PSYCHE! They all die! Oh, and your actions caused millions of people to never be born and get flung into non-existance and curse your existence. TimeTravel is in fact a horrible thing that causes worse things to happen. The world in the future collapses thanks to the technology created by Lucca. And Schala merged with Lavos to become an even more powerful, unkillable being that Chrono and his friends cannot defeat. And Dalton, a minor mini-Boss that defeated himself, remembers Chrono and his friends, conviently winds up in their time period, and turns a tiny little town into a world-conquering army so he can murder everyone in Guardia and burn it to the ground. Oh, but Magus lives. He just may or may not be a different character in ''ChronoCross''. Depending on the RetCon that day. And he can't save his sister at all, so she rejects him.]] [[NiceJobBreakingItHero Aren't you glad you went back in time to save the future?]]
** Both ports of ''Trigger'' released since ''Cross'' also added extra cutscenes to further emphasize this fact: [[spoiler: The Fall of Guardia did not exist in the SNES version, so the game never ended with "Unexplainable army kills everyone in Guardia including our heroes." The Dream Devourer fight in the DS version was also new and pretty much exists for you to fight, win, and then be told you ''can't'' win and get sent back to the past...thus Chrono and his friends cannot stop the horrible events in the future from happening let alone their own horrible demises.]]
* Probably less shaggy then most, but the ''Dream Chronicles'' series of puzzle games have this sort of ending. You spend the whole game looking for your kidnapped husband and child, and at the end [[spoiler: you're whisked away to an enchanted prison. After escaping from that, you get amnesia and forget you even have a husband and child.]] It's not the worst and these problems are quickly fixed in the next game, but it's annoying.
*The game ''Cyber-Lip'' is a Contra-style action side-scroller developed by Neo Geo. The story appears to be fairly run-of-the-mill throughout: the President orders two BadDudes to find and destroy the titular Cyber-Lip, a military supercomputer that's gone mad and destroyed a good portion of the Earth with its deadly army of cyborgs. Throughout the game you receive briefings from the President after each level on where to progress next. Once you reach the final level and destroy the Cyber-Lip once and for all, you receive a message from the President congratulating you on a job well done. Seems obligatory enough, being an arcade shoot-'em-up and all... until the player is suddenly hit with an OuterLimitsTwist of an ending when it is revealed that [[spoiler: the "President" was an evil alien leader bent on world domination the entire time. The aliens apparently were the ones that caused the Earth's military technology, including Cyber-Lip, to go haywire, probably via programmed viruses or some similar means, and you, being the naïve pawns that you were, went right along and finished the aliens' job for them: destroy every last remaining bit of Earth's defenses, allowing the aliens ample room to take over your planet once and for all. "The Earth is ours," declares the faux-President, and with an evil grin and a pair of frightening, red glowing eyes to boot.]] The End! No sequel was ever made, nor announced, and it is highly unlikely that one will ever be made, so as far as anyone knows, this marks the end of the heroes' feckless, fruitless battle. Now, just imagine the reactions of the people who spent quarter after quarter to get to the end of this game and defeat the final boss, only for their efforts to be greeted with THAT.
* ''WURM: Journey to the Center of the Earth''. First you are looking for your lost crewmates, then you find a distress beacon placed by a subterranean civilization, and dig deeper down to search for and help them them, only to find out they went extinct long ago.
* Sonic 2006 does this. After all the events of the game, after all the cheesy drama and etc., the princess simply [[spoiler: does what was doable at the BEGINNING OF THE GAME: Going back in time to literally snuff out [[BigBad Solaris's]] flame, wiping him out of existence and negating the entire plot.]]
* ''BatenKaitos Origins'' has the story of Seph and his {{Nakama}}. First they try to save the village of Rasalas from [[BigBad Wiseman]], only to arrive too late to do anything. Then they try to negotiate with Wiseman, who uses the opportunity to [[spoiler:[[MoralEventHorizon wipe out their hometown while they're away]]]] and simultaneously prove to them that they were completely powerless against him. This is something that Seph takes to heart after he discovers the results of the aforementioned act, and he decides to [[spoiler:make a DealWithTheDevil for the power needed to defeat Wiseman]]. Once they return, they find that [[spoiler:Wiseman has taken over the minds of everyone in the world's largest city]]. As they are fighting through the aforementioned group to get to Wiseman, the [[MagicalNativeAmerican Children of the Earth]] see the "senseless slaughter" they are inflicting, and decide to fix the problem by [[spoiler:killing them]]. Which they succeed in doing, thus allowing Wiseman to escape completely unharmed. And the best part? [[spoiler:The Children of the Earth had viewed Wiseman as a threat and were about to do the same to him before Seph and his Nakama stepped in. Meaning that if they had simply done nothing, there would have been no need to lift the world up into the sky, Wiseman would have been killed, and they wouldn't have had to pay the price of their DealWithTheDevil - because there would have been no deal. Every single one of the problems faced in both this game and the original BatenKaitos could have been completely avoided]]. Sucks to be those guys, huh?
* In ''{{Dreamfall}}'', none of the game's three progatonists manages to achieve their objectives. Although main character Zoë Castillo manages to prevent a societal and technological collapse in Stark, she fails at her mission to stop [=WATICorp=] from releasing the Dreamer and proves unable to rescue her ex-boyfriend--worse still, she is placed in a permanent coma. Over in Arcadia, April Ryan is unable to prevent the Azadi Empire from completing their EvilTowerOfOminousness, or even figure out what it's for, and is left for dead. The third protagonist, Azadi apostle Kian Alvane, is arrested for treason by the empire just after he decides to try to convince its leaders of the error of their ways. While some or most of these may end up being reversed if or when the game receives a sequel, calling the game's ending a downer would be a gross understatement.
* ''ObsCure II'': Mei spends the first half of the game trying to track down her twin sister Jun and save her. When she finally tracks her down, [[spoiler: the game lets you control Jun's escape attempts, only to have her brutally killed literally ''seconds'' after yanking that control away.]] [[ItGotWorse Things go downhill from there]]. [[spoiler: One by one, the heroes suffer increasingly {{Cruel And Unusual Death}}s until only two of the original students remain, all their attempts to stop the infection from spreading fail, and the ending leaves the two survivors facing down a cloud of black spores implied to be surrounding an even more horrific monster than the FinalBoss.]]
* In many video games, a NonStandardGameOver, as well as HaveANiceDeath and TheManyDeathsOfYou can be considered a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, [[ItsAWonderfulFailure especially if they put considerable effort into it]]. Then again, so can an ordinary, generic game over, if you think about the consequences before retrying.
* At least the "Path of Darkness" ending to ''AloneInTheDark''. If you shoot Sarah, Lucifer's XanatosGambit fully succeeds, and the possessed Carnby opens the gates of hell, heralding TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt. Earlier, it is said "Lucifer's failure is also his reincarnation".
* In ''SuperRobotWarsOriginalGenerations'' (read: NOT Gaiden yet), we have a mechanical dog who eventually develops and feels like an actual dog. After spending through hardships that affirms that it has emotions and is like a [[strike:human]] dog, it is captured and was about to turned back into a mindless machine again. Thankfully, the dog gained an iron will and it was able to escape that predicatement and was on the verge of being rescued... only to be shot down dead. ''What's the point of having an iron will and all those hardships if in the end, it just dies like that?'' It seriously makes her whole development, and the build up that leads to its iron will escape completely pointless. Thankfully, OG Gaiden deals with the continuation and is now trying to resuscitate the dead shaggy dog. That dog's name? Lamia Loveless.
* The ending of {{Yume Nikki}} likely qualifies....
* Played straight in ''BatmanArkhamAsylum''. At two points in the game you're required to save [[spoiler:Dr. Young, getting a NonStandardGameOver if you fail. After you save her the second time she dies ''literally about a minute later anyway'' falling for a trap left by the Joker.]]
* Poor, ''poor'' [[StreetFighter Charlie]]... his death was a ForegoneConclusion (in ''Street Fighter II'', Guile's motivation was that Bison killed Charlie. Charlie's debut game was a {{Prequel}} with no Guile in sight), and really, YouShouldKnowThisAlready. But if you don't, Charlie can never win. In ''Street Fighter Alpha'', he thinks he's defeated M. Bison, but Bison comes from behind and kills him. In ''Street Fighter Alpha 2'', a {{Remaquel}} of the original Alpha, he gets knocked off a waterfall in Venezuela, but only after getting shot by a Shadaloo helicopter. In the non-canon ''Marvel Super Heroes VS Street Fighter'', he's been given a FaceHeelTurn and works for Shadaloo. Somehow, in ''Street Fighter Alpha 3'', he's alive and well. This time, he actually manages to beat M. Bison... but Capcom fixed that by adding Guile to the home ports of the game and declaring his ending canon canon. In his ending, Charlie infiltrates M. Bison's base with Guile and Chun-Li, and while Guile and Chun-Li escape, the base self-destructs, killing Charlie and Bison both. What's worse is that Bison came back, while Charlie has been KilledOffForReal (or not, since Capcom loves {{Retcon}}ning this series).
* In the ''TwistedMetal'' series, competitors fight in a massive demolition derby with missiles, blowing up opposing cars, monuments, and cities with abandon. The prize? A wish granted by competition organizer Calypso, who wavers between LiteralGenie and JackassGenie . It rarely ends well, though occasionally someone ''will'' wise up and turn down the wish.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:WebComics]]
* In ''BobAndGeorge'', the epilogue for the story explains the characters' futures, but keeps reminding us that the entire cast was going to die in between the classic MegaMan and X time periods. It then subverts it by saying that was if a minor comment hadn't convinced Dr. Wily to not try to activate Zero who will kill everyone, and [[HappyEnding they all just fake their own deaths and move to Acapulco to prevent a time paradox]].
* ''TheLastDaysOfFoxhound'' is a prequel comic about the boss characters from ''MetalGearSolid''. Five of whom you kill in the game. By design this pretty much means it'll turn into a ShootTheShaggyDog, but the penultimate page [[http://www.gigaville.com/comic.php?id=499 really drives it home]].
* '' {{Concerned}}: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman'' is a great example of this; after all his adventures, [[spoiler: the title character accidentally deactivates the 'Buddha' cheat code and dies, broken and bleeding, at the base of the Citadel.]] Too be fair, the comic's title should have been a hint.
* Although YourMilageMayVary on whether this was a sad ending at all, considering [[UnsympatheticComedyProtagonist the protagonist]].
* ''Filthy Lies''. The artist got sick of doing the comic and dropped a giant septic tank on the protagonists. Then he realised he missed doing the comic, so [[IGotBetter they got better]]. Even this, however, was better than the second time around of the artist getting sick of doing the comic, and just stopping.
* The GOFOTRON Arc of ''SluggyFreelance'' would be a good example of this (although not for the main characters). It would take too long to explain the entire plot so basically its an entire 2 and a half month plot arc where Torg, Riff and Bun-Bun are transported to another universe, which is set up as an epic futuristic soap opera, with many characters introduced. In the end, the entire universe is destroyed (the main characters escape, though none of the natives do). And then it turns out the universe was just created part of an experiment by an alien race to find a new form of energy. Then it turns out that the company is a waffle iron company, and the entire purpose was to find a new way to power ''waffle irons!''. Oh, and the company decided to pull the funding.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:WebOriginal]]
* ''Gemcraft: Episode Zero'' ends with the player grabbing the Gem of Eternity and instantly start turning into the Forsaken, the narration explicitly states that no matter what you do the corruption will eventually take of completely. Worse, it's a prequel and canonically the next person that comes along (that is, the player of the original ''Gemcraft'') kills the Forsaken... and gets possessed.
* In the ''HomestarRunner'' toon "Homestarloween Party", Strong Sad concludes the story being told by the characters this way. It doesn't go over too well.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:WesternAnimation]]
* ''WhenTheWindBlows'' charts the slow death from nuclear fallout of an elderly couple after a nuclear bomb goes off in England.
** Originally a [[ComicBooks graphic novel]] (and also a {{Radio}} play). And of course their deaths are the {{Anvilicious}} point of the story, meant to show up the absurdity of the British Government's civil defence plans.
* Intentionally done in the pilot episode of ''AeonFlux'' (actually drawn out into six two-minute shorts), in which the main character's guns-blazing assassination mission fails when she steps on a nail and falls to her death, her body and even her apartment being destroyed by her superiors, her assassination target dead by other means, and her entire shooting spree of a mission being futile.
** The second season, dealing with the question "How do we do a sequel when the protagonist is dead?", turns this trope up to 11 by having her die (pointlessly) in ''every episode''.
* In the movie version of ''The Plague Dogs'', the movie ends with the two dogs [[spoiler: swimming out to sea and drowning after their fox friend had just sacrificed himself to give them time to escape; this wasn't how it was in the book--see above.]] The real kicker is that many people prefer the movie ending, that's how bad the DeusExMachina was in the novel.
*[[SpongebobSquarepants "Once upon a time, there was an ugly barnacle. He was so ugly that everyone died. The end!"]]
* FamilyGuy's marijuana episode, however, it [[strike:might have]] was done to make us hear about Seth's ways.
* ''{{Futurama}}'s'' Jurassic Bark, especially from the dog POV. Fortunately, the dog gets unshot in [[TheMovie Bender's Big Score]].
** Although he then gets ''literally'' shot [[spoiler: by Bender's death ray]] to get "fast-fossilized".
* In one ''LooneyTunes'' segment ("8 Ball Bunny"), Bugs Bunny comes across a penguin. After swearing he would help the penguin get home (after regretting making him cry), he finds out that penguins come from the South Pole. He tries to help the penguin to the Antarctic, going through hell and high water to do so, only to find out when he finally gets there that this was a domesticated performing penguin who lived in Hoboken, and he just dragged him several thousand miles for nothing. The usually calm, [[BoringInvincibleHero impossible to beat]] Bugs suffers a mental breakdown.
**That would probably fall more along the lines of a regular, slightly less malevolent ShaggyDogStory though.
* The "Transmutate" episode of ''BeastWars: {{Transformers}}''. A [[UglyCute gentle, horribly misshapen]], [[IllGirl mentally feeble]], [[AnimalMotifs bird-like]] Transformer is pursued by [[LawfulGood Silverbolt]] and [[ChaoticEvil Rampage]] because Silverbolt is the epitome of the KnightInShiningArmor archetype and wanted to protect ''[[ViewerGenderConfusion her]]'', while Rampage sees a kindred spirit because she was a twisted freak. [[spoiler: In the end she tries to get between them with her shield when she sees them fighting, and gets destroyed.]]
* The ''SouthPark'' episode "Stanley's Cup", a ''Mighty Ducks'' parody which ends with a pee-wee ice hockey team being beaten bloody by a professional team, and their teammate dying of cancer. "Woodland Critter Christmas" also qualifies, to a lesser degree: the episode consists of a story written by Cartman in class for the sole purpose of saying Kyle died at the end.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:RealLife]]
* WWII Naval pilot Joseph P. Kennedy, eldest brother of John F. Kennedy, volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, a dangerous series of 1944 missions to destroy the German V3 supercannon. He and his co-pilot were to arm the explosives in their bomber, which could not be done remotely, and bail out. The bomber would then be piloted by remote-control, crashing into the V3's bunker complex and exploding. But shortly after the explosives were armed, they prematurely exploded, vaporizing plane and crew. The [[ShootTheShaggyDog shaggy dog was thoroughly shot, however,]] when mere weeks later, Allied troops captured the alleged V3 complex and discovered that no such supercannon had ever existed.
* [[NietzscheWannabe What's the point? We're all going to die, anyway.]]
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