All for Nothing in Literature.
- Both of the novels in the Bloodline series end like this!
- In the first book, Tepes' grand plans to restore House Dracul completely crash and burn, leading to his and Mina's deaths. And the good guys' rescue mission to save Lily was also all in vain — Lily is Driven to Suicide and John undergoes a particularly nasty Face–Heel Turn.
- Less so in its sequel, Reckoning, but the bulk of the novel involves Quincey attempting to redeem himself by abstaining from human blood. By the end, he is forced to resume drinking it again, since otherwise he would be too weak to protect himself and Mary from their enemies.
- The Cat Who... Series: In book #9 (The Cat Who Went Underground), Qwill spends three weeks at his cabin, spending part of that time trying to have an addition built onto it that he can use as a study. He goes through two carpenters (both of whom disappear and turn up dead) before the addition, except for its foundation, is destroyed in a storm. After that, he gives up on having it built and soon after moves back to Pickax.
- Stephen Donaldson does this all but nonstop in his Thomas Covenant books, thanks to the absolute cunning of Lord Foul the Despiser, to the point that one character outright advises the protagonist: "It boots nothing to avoid his snares, for they are always set about with other snares". It's a very, very standard part of his fiction.
- Kevin Landwaster, a lofty and wise ancient lord, who, after brutally battling Lord Foul for years, fell into despair, eventually resorting to The Ritual of Desecration, that snuffed out almost all life there for centuries. The hope was that the land could regrow while Lord Foul would surely die. He didn't. Kevin using the ritual was Lord Foul's idea in the first place.
- The Unhomed Giants, subject to a lengthy rescue campaign by the Lords — who were wiped out in a genocide brought about by the very omen they thought would save them, all unwilling to run or raise even a single hand in self-defense. They were told that their troubles — dwindling numbers, declining birthrates, slow death — would all be over when their race gave birth to triplets. They did. All three of them were soon possessed by staggeringly evil spirits.
- Whatshername — we never hear her name - who tried to warn the Lords about a nasty Ur-Vile ambush, and who was bewitched to be unable to speak at all, so that her very attempts to warn the Lords would delay them long enough for the ambush to be sprung in the first place.
- The story of Sunder and Hollian, who accompany the heroes throughout the journey, and both die and are resurrected in extremely unlikely circumstances and their son Anele, who is entrusted with the Staff of Law and who outright loses it.
- Convenant's daughter Elena, who locates all the MacGuffins needed to get to the Earthblood, which grants one wish to the drinker, granted unconditionally so long as it's within natural power , and then completely screws it up when she does drink it, sending the spirit of the aforementioned already despair-broken High Lord Kevin after Lord Foul. He is swiftly overpowered and enslaved and turned on her, and just as swiftly kills her. The summoning also breaks the natural Law of Death, allowing Lord Foul to raise the dead from this point forward.
- Drool Rockworm, who tried to win freedom for the Cavewights from Lord Foul, and who was just being led along by Lord Foul to recover the Illearth Stone.
- Devolution: After Kate and Mostar (and eventually the rest of the community) have invested a great deal of effort into starting a garden so that they can use its produce to survive the winter, and just when it's starting to bloom, it's unceremoniously trampled into muck by the alpha Sasquatch.
- In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, at one point Rodrick has a Wild Teen Party and forces Greg to help clean it up so he doesn't get in trouble, down to nearly getting caught with the bathroom door replacement (Someone at the party had written on it and they couldn't get the words off, so they swapped it with a downstairs closet door). It's brushed off for a while... then later in the book, the parents find that one of the guests had fiddled with a camera in the closet and taken a very incriminating picture of the whole thing. Rodrick and Greg get punished.
- In The Divergent Trilogy, Tori's Roaring Rampage of Revenge to avenge her brother George's death in Insurgent and death in Allegiant amount to this, after The Reveal that her brother George is alive and outside the fence.
- The Emperor's Gift: Hyperion believes that one of the reasons reason the Space Wolves are outraged the Inquisition intends to purge Armageddon's population, since it renders the sacrifices of all the Wolves who died fighting Angron's army to ensure the people would be spared worthless.Hyperion: When seen in such a light, the Wolves' actions - already noble enough - takes on another layer of righteousness. They've lost warriors, too. How many of them died in glory, only to learn now it had all been in vain defending a doomed population?
- In Alice Scanlan Reach's "Father Crumlish and the Cherub Vase" Vince, an employee at a local junk store, steals the titular vase after it's won as a door prize at the Ladies' Aid Society's yearly supper because its original owner has agreed to pay $300 for its return and Vince needs the money for his widowed mother's latest operation. Unfortunately, Vince accidentally kills the man who won the door prize and his mother dies an hour before he confesses everything to Father Crumlish.
- The Fear Street book "The Rich Girl" has Sydney and Emma finding a bag of money. They decide to hide it but then friend Jason starts acting up, and the girls end up killing him. When it looks like Jason is coming back from the grave, Sydney starts to snap and finally has a total breakdown to land in the mental hospital. At which point, it turns out that Jason is alive and he and Emma did all this to get rid of Sydney so they could get the money for themselves. But when they try to spend some, they find out that while some bills are real, the vast majority of it is fake play money. The book ends with Emma rocked to realize she destroyed her best friend for a "fortune" that doesn't exist.
- Essentially the entire plot of The First Law turns out to have been this, in the sense that nothing truly changed and the protagonists were only tools. Certainly all of Logen's and Jezal's quest in the second book qualifies, as does, to an extent, Glokta's defense of... again the entire plot.
- Harry Potter:
- In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry and Dumbledore fight through all of Voldemort's protections on his locket Horcrux, only for Harry to later discover that it was a fake.
- The Distant Epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows shows that Harry Earned His Happy Ending — the world is at peace, he no longer has soul pains, and he has a warm relationship with his son Albus; when Albus worries about his Sorting, Harry assures him that he won't be placed in Slytherin if he doesn't want to be. Then Harry Potter and the Cursed Child came out, and we find out a new evil is rising, Harry's scar hurts again, his relationship with Albus is and has apparently always been strained, and Albus was put in Slytherin and is miserable there.
- In The Hunger Games this is what Katniss feels like after Prim, the sister she went through all of the hell of the Hunger Games for, dies in the final portion of Mockingjay.
- Jaine Austen Mysteries: This is a two-way case for Dickie Potter's plan to divorce Patti Devane and get a healthy divorce settlement and Conrad Devane's murder plot to kill her and get her money, both from Killing Bridezilla. For Conrad, it's because unbeknownst to him, Dickie and Patti had already married in Vegas before the events of the book, so her money would go to Dickie, not revert back to her Mother Daphna, and by extension, him. For Dickie, it fails... because Patti had frittered most of her money away in bad businesses. When Veronica, Dickie's girlfriend finds this out, she drops Dickie like a hot stone.
- John Putnam Thatcher: The villain from Murder Without Icing commits two murders to delay his creditors seizing assets that he needs for an upcoming business deal that he believes will keep him from going bankrupt. The business deal is a scam, so committing the murders wouldn't have done a thing to persevere his company and reputation, even if he hadn't been exposed as a killer.
- In the prologue of the first The Machineries of Empire book, Kel Cheris' unit takes tremendous losses and she herself is forced to commit heresy to secure the enemy infrastructure intact — only for her superiors to pull her and her people out and bomb the entire area into oblivion.
- The Mad Scientists' Club The bad guys in The Big Chunk of Ice spend the whole novel trying to retrieve a stolen diamond that had been lost in the (now melting glacier) and fallen into a plaster cast the mad scientist club were making. At the end, it turns out that it was not the diamond, but rather a glass doorknob that a drunk tourist had yanked out of the motel and discarded in the glacier. As one of the villains puts it:
Three generations of research, six months of planning, and a free-wheeling trip across the bloody ocean to boot. And all that kid had was a bloomin' doorknob?
- Meg Langslow Mysteries: By the beginning of the book, two characters in We'll Always Have Parrots have spent decades in hiding without needing to.
- The killer got into debt with a Loan Shark while financing the publication of some comics he wrote and faked his death, gave up art, and worked a series of unsatisfying jobs while waiting for his girlfriend to sell his work to a movie or TV studio. When he finally finds out that his brother paid off all his estate's debts right after he faked his death, and his ex-girlfriend never told him about that, and that his ex made a trashy In Name Only TV adaptation of his beloved comics without giving him any credit, he snaps and kills her.
- Michael’s Nervous Wreck agent is a former 70s radical who changed his name and took a job he never really liked after breaking into a government office and burning draft cards. It turns out that he broke into the wrong office and burned dog licenses instead, and if he had been burning draft cards, since no one got hurt, the statute of limitations would have expired many, many years ago.
- Moon Base Alpha: The mystery in the third book is an attempt to poison reviled Corrupt Corporate Executive and space tourist Lars Sjoberg. Lars poisons himself with the help of his daughter Lily to force the moon base to send him home early because of how miserable he is (the allocation of space on cargo shuttles is keeping him from getting regular permission to leave). Unknown to Lars, everyone on the base is about to be evacuated because of equipment failures and all his efforts achieve nothing but leaving him humiliated, in legal trouble, and facing an ugly divorce when his wife disapproves of his cowardly efforts to make Lily take all of the blame.
- The novelization of Murder by Decree has Holmes disputing the justification of the government's actions to resolving what they thought was the threat to the monarchy. Annie Crook's Catholic child by the Duke of Clarence & Avondale would never been a serious claimant: the Royal Marriage Act 1701 would have rendered the marriage invalid and the Act of Settlement 1772 mandated a Protestant as a successor to the throne. Thus, the threat that led to these horrible crimes only existed in their paranoia.
- Both the book and the film version of The Neverending Story play with this: Atreyu has risked his life and lost people important to him on a quest to find out the cause of the Empress's illness and what had to be done to cure her, only to have her reveal that she'd known both of these things all along. Atreyu is understandably furious about this, until the Empress explains that his quest was important and did have a purpose, even if it wasn't the one stated up front.
- The Wilbur Smith novel Power of the Sword has Afrikaner outlaw Lothar De La Ray steal millions of pounds worth of diamonds from a tycoon with the help of his son Manfred and his longtime friend Swart Hendrick. Following the robbery and subsequent chase, he ends up arrested and imprisoned after sacrificing himself to help Manfred and Hendrick escape the police, he loses an arm to gangrene, and steadily loses his mind and becomes stricken with arthritis within prison. He does succeed in allowing Manfred and Hendrick to get away, but both of them end up losing their shares of the stolen diamonds later on (and it's noted that Hendrick would've had a hard time selling them and making use of the proceeds anyway, being a black man in 1930's South Africa). To further rub it in, Manfred and Hendrick later become well-off and successful without making use of the diamonds. That said, things do end up subverted when Manfred is forced to go on the run following a failed attempt to assassinate Jan Christian Smuts, with him and Hendrick taking Lothar's share of the diamonds, which he had hidden away during the robbery for Manfred to recover at a later date.
- The Robert Ludlum novel The Road to Gandolfo has General Hawkins embarking on a wild plot to kidnap Pope Francis I and hold him for the ransom of one dollar for every Catholic in the world. This involves using Francis' lookalike opera singer cousin to pose as him long enough for the abduction to take place. After various crazy twists, the kidnapping is pulled off and Hawkins sends the ransom demand. To his shock, the Vatican replies that the Pope is perfectly safe and see no reason to pay. Hawkins realizes the cardinals like the imposter far more than the real Francis. Not only that but Francis himself enjoys taking an extended vacation from the pressures of the job while using a radio to "coach" his cousin how to play the part so Hawkins' entire scheme doesn't net him a dime.
- The Running Man: Richards joins the Running Man contest, being pursued by groups of 'Hunters' and receiving money for every hour he stays alive, in order to provide for his wife and his sick daughter. He makes it further than any previous contestant in the history of the show, eluding the Hunters for almost two weeks and managing to escape on a plane after he publicly threatens to blow up the airfield (which is a bluff). Killian then offers him a job, but reveals that Richards' family had been killed in a home invasion only two days after the start of the contest. With nothing left to live for, he hijacks the plane and flies it right into the Games Tower.
- Run with the Wind: During Day 1 of Hakone Ekiden, Prince is the starting runner for Kansei University and unsurprisingly comes last in his section, but the admirable efforts of Musa and the twins help the team climb up the rankings. Unfortunately, the last runner for the day is the very sick Shindo; he has to push himself to move at all, let alone complete his section, and the team drops back down to 20th place for that first half. The team has nothing but admiration and concern for Shindo, who insisted on competing since withdrawing would mean Kansei dropping out of Hakone together.
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: More Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark has "The Bed by the Window," about two old men staying in beds adjacent to each other in a nursing home. George gets to look out the window and describe to his roommate everything he can see outside, which makes Richard happy just listening to it. But then Richard gets so envious of George's spot by the window he plans to kill George by hiding his heart attack medicine so that he can take the bed by the window. His plan works, and when George dies, Richard looks out the window...only to see the brick wall of another building just across the alley. Richard has ultimately gotten his friend killed for nothing, and he has to live with the murder for the rest of his remaining years. It's worse if you read the original ending of the tale, where George is revealed to be blind and describes all the things outside the nursing home to cheer Richard up.
- Sing the Four Quarters: Then-Crown Prince Theron of Shkoder's attempt to start his reign with a the diplomatic success of securing an alliance with the neighboring realm of Cemandia? The one that wrecked his relationship with his youngest sister because she would not cooperate? It was a decade before anyone sat him down to spell out that the kingdom in question's hostility to the Elemental Embodyments called kigh is so great that even those with wholly untrained talents for communicating with them (of which Princess Annice had loads) are regarded as 'Demon Kin' to be exorcized or executed whenever found. IOW, if Annice cooperated rather than petition their dying father for admission to the Bardic Acadamy the best-case scenario would have been her engagement summarily broken along with any associated treaties; while Theron finding himself short a sibling he honestly cared for, facing a Holy War, or both within weeks of his accession were significant possibilities.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- Upon Cersei Lannister's coup to install Joffrey Baratheon to the throne, Ned Stark is given the choice to either confess to false charges and take the black, or defy the Lannisters and face execution. Ned is pointed out that if he chooses the latter, his daughter Sansa will be at the mercy of the Lannisters, so he understandably chooses the former. Then Joffrey goes off-script and executes Ned anyway, meaning he is both dead and has his reputation tarnished, while Sansa is taken hostage for a year because her brother Robb declares rebellion upon their father's death.
- Daenerys Targaryen saves Eroeh and Mirri Maz Duur from being gang raped by the Dothraki khalasar who sack their village. While Mirri's case is more of The Farmer and the Viper, Eroeh's story falls squarely in this trope. She is merely a sad, terrified girl who can only count Daenerys to protect her. As a result, when Daenerys loses the loyalty of the khalasar after Drogo's death and is recovering from her childbirth, the khalasar waste no time to gang rape and brutally kill Eroeh.
- The liberation of Astapor and Yunkai. Soon after Daenerys leaves, Astapor undergoes a Full-Circle Revolution that sees the former slaves subjecting their masters into slavery, while Yunkai reverts to the way it was before Daenerys' visit. When she hears about their fates, Daenerys laments that she has created "ten thousand Eroehs".
- Many people have conquered Harrenhal, but their attempt to rule over it always failed, creating rumors that the castle has a Curse associated with it (though it's more that Harrenhal is Awesome, but Impractical). When Petyr Baelish inherits it as a reward for his cooperation with the winning side of the War of the Five Kings, he chooses to level it to the ground.
- The Dance of the Dragons from the viewpoints of everyone involved. Rhaenyra insists over her birthright as heir to the Iron Throne because her king father said so. She does reign over King's Landing for half a year, but loses her three eldest sons, her husband, many of her supporters, and her own sanity, as she's driven paranoid over the many attempts against her life and ends up lashing it out against anyone she suspects to be traitors, causing her reputation to tank and forcing her to abandon the city anyway, before she is captured and executed in front of one of her two surviving sons. Her half-brother, Aegon, insists that he is the rightful heir because he is a man. He ends up losing his wife, brothers, sons, and grandfather in the process, and becomes even more of a drunkard and womanizer than before. Aegon officially wins the war and would go down in history as the true king... which is rendered irrelevant because he is assassinated shortly after the war ends, and his daughter dies childless, meaning all the efforts to crown him over his sister are in vain because the throne passes over to Rhaenyra's sons, and their progeny will be the one to continue the Targaryen line.
- The now-non-canon Star Wars Legends expanded universe reveals that Emperor Palpatine came back to life after the events of the Original Trilogy. though he's destroyed again by the end of the Dark Empire stories. This is a notable source of Fanon Discontinuity for many, despite the fact that Lucas actually liked it more than most of the EU book series. As of April 2014, it is considered non-canon, and the emperor's actor, Ian McDiarmid stated that Palpatine is now Killed Off for Real... aaaaand then Palpatine came back anyways as the Big Bad in The Rise of Skywalker.
- A disappointing example occurs in the Sword of Truth series, in which the dramatic climax of the (relatively good) first book turns out to have been all for naught. Umpteen books later, in the final book of the series, we discover that Darken Rahl would have died no matter what box he opened. So much for The Power of Love.
- The original novel of The Terminal List focuses on James Reece, a Navy SEAL who learns he's gotten a terminal brain tumor likely to kill him in a bit over a year. Reece is soon on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those who have been working against him and the book ends with him having finished his first "list" and ready to work on more before his time ends. The very last page is a voicemail from Reece's doctor on the phone he long threw away, telling him that the latest tests show the tumor isn't as bad as they thought, can be treated with surgery and a 70% of a full recovery, meaning his entire "going out in a blaze of glory" crusade was unnecessary.
- Titan's Forest: Everything Ular does in the first book is for the purpose of learning magic, returning to Canopy, and fulfilling the fate she believes lies in store for her as the bodyguard of the reborn Audblayin, and is willing to justify rather extreme actions on the basis of the great destiny they will work towards. When it's revealed that Audblayin was reborn as a girl, and will thus take a male bodyguard, it becomes clear that everything she did — every betrayal, every abandonment, every death she caused and the aid she gave to Kirrik's destructive plans — served no purpose at all. She does not take this well.
- Treasure Island: When the Captain's party gives up their stockade, part of their supplies and the map to Silver, he knows something's going on, but he never mentions his suspicions to the other pirates. When they arrive to the point where the treasure had been buried, they find that someone (Ben Gunn) had done it before - and the Captain's party ambushes the pirates, rendering all their efforts to nothing.
- Universal Monsters: In book 5, Captain Bob uses his library card to try and break into Ben Browning's RV. It breaks... and then it turns out the door was unlocked the whole time.
- A subplot in the first book of Watchers of the Throne has Chancellor Tieron working to get the High Lords of Terra to repeal the Edict of Restraint, which forbids the Custodes - the Imperium's biggest, baddest group of Super Soldiers - from venturing out of the Imperial Palace and aiding in the Imperium's many wars. Ultimately, the Custodes Captain-General votes against. Then, Guilliman returns and repeals the Edict anyway, and it turns out that the Custodes have been secretly ignoring it already. This being said, Tieron managing to assemble the High Lords in the first place does aid them, so it's not entirely for naught.
- Witch King: It's revealed that the main characters' year-long captivity was orchestrated by their mutual friend Bashat to prevent them from interfering with his scheme to become the first Emperor. However, the protagonist Out-Gambitted him five years earlier, having noticed his ambitions and ensured he couldn't get the political support he'd need. His lieutenant is crushed to realize that Bashat threw away his best friends and his good name for a power grab that never had a chance of success.
