Unfortunately, a lot of the story's characters find that their actions
amount to nothing.
- The reason Chloe Cerise ran away from home was because she not only wanted to stay away from Vermillion City for a while, but also so that everybody who ever hurt her or bullied her would get their stuff together and apologize to her, or otherwise get punished for it. The result? Parker goes completely off the deep end in doing just that, creating an evil Chloe clone that not only traumatizes everyone, but sends her family into a lawsuit-infested downward spiral, with her reputation utterly in ruins by the end of it all. To add insult to injury, Goh, the one person she wanted an apology from the most, has been so thoroughly broken he can't even fathom the idea to try fix everything, believing himself to be an utter failure.
- Goh Fujihachi spends most of Act 1 frantically searching for a way to get Chloe back, growing more and more worried sick as he fails to make any progress. By the end of the act, he gets to call Chloe... who makes it clear she wants nothing to do with him and would rather stay where she is.
- His search for the Infinity Train also ends like this. Not only does he fail to get even a hint as to how to proceed, but by Act 2, when his trauma has made it fit for him to become a passenger, he's too depressed to want to do anything.
- His quest to become a better person is also rendered naught when he's reduced to a suicidal mess in the process, no thanks to Parker and Zeno's machinations.
- In a roundabout way, Parker’s Mind Rape of him is this, as Zeno showed him all the possible futures, and only one had Goh not realizing his mistakes.
- His Goal in Life was to find and search for Mew. Arc 3 has him confronting Mew for real and he starts thinking that he doesn't deserve it after his selfishness caused him to lose everything, culminating on a very long trip onto the therapy train.
- Near the end of the Fog Car saga, The Apex come to realize their quest for strength was all for naught, and all they got out of it is an extended Train trip and probably being forgotten by everyone they ever loved along with the fact that Simon and Sean are both dead, their bodies dropped off where the Train initially found them and their souls reincarnated into denizens for a very long time.
- Everything Grace Monroe did to make the Apex was for a proof of strength and so that she can be worshipped, looked up to and not be alone. Arc 3 has her learn very horrible truths that she's nothing more than a serial killer when she finds out that numerous denizens on the Train were once humans and that she must tell everyone the truth else they become subjected to the Cage of Flauros, especially Hazel, the girl that she began to bond with. After everything is said and done, the Apex wants nothing to do with her and separate and she walks back to Le Chat Chalet Car knowing that it will take a long time for anyone to ever forgive her.
- Everything Sara Diktaylis did to ruin Chloe's reputation and break her ends up leaving her with nothing in the end: she has no friends, she has no future, she has no one who will forgive her and no mother to care for her. She is now stuck blaming herself, unable to move on and is sent to the foster system to a family who, while better than she expected, she feels is making everything worse because she thinks she doesn't deserve loving parents.
- During Sara's Engineered Public Confession in Chapter 17, it's revealed that Sara had lied to them about Chloe, making her look like a spiteful bully and she was taking advantage of their desire for recognition. As a result, it was very easy for Sara to manipulate them into becoming bullies themselves, which pretty much destroyed their lives once Trip filmed them bragging about all their bullying. At the end of it all, all of Class 5-E were forced to realize that they were nothing but pawns to the real spiteful bully, and they had thrown away everything for a lie while realizing that Chloe really just wanted their friendship and they spat it back at her face, with their parents ashamed, their social and educational lives in shambles, a school's reputation tarnished, numerous teachers without jobs, all of their fellow students having to be shuffled to other schools and a city who must shoulder this burden for many years to come.
- Le Chat Chalet Car: Mallow feels that her efforts to get others to care about Gladion's disappearance were effectively worthless, as her concern was mistaken for a poorly-masked crush. However, Lana points out that her roundabout way of doing so did nobody any favors.
- The Fog Car Part 1: Parker confirms that his 'nightmare therapy' was well and truly pointless when he recounts how he watched multiple futures where he'd never summoned the Unown, and in all except one extreme case, Goh cooled down before he did anything unforgivable and started making progress with Ash since there was no UnChloe to distract anyone.
- The Fog Car Part 2: Amelia wastes no time telling Grace that this little cult she made was absolutely worthless; the numbers don't do anything except say how far away you are from progress and Amelia does not care a single bit about them.
