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• The Cosmic Horror Story that is Neon Genesis Evangelion. Half of humanity died in the Second Impact, war killed off even more, the oceans are barren, and the remaining ecosystems are on the brink of complete ecological collapse. The humans who managed to survive that are now trapped in a war with theAngels. The only means of defense is to send what few children were born at the right time out in gigantic Angel-derived Evangelions. But it's actually worse than that. The children who are supposed to pilot the Evangelions are traumatized, broken, neurotic and mentally unstable to begin with, and the rest of the cast is growing to be increasingly generally bitter, psychologically incompetent, and pessimistic. Also, the entirety of existence basically revolves around the Hedgehog's Dilemma, which is the philosophical notion that if you go near other people, you become Hell to them and they become Hell to you, but when you go far from them, you cannot survive. As time passes, the dysfunction and insanity only gets much more worse in scenes that are more and more horrifying and madness-inducing, while everyone is forced to watch them in all their gory details, the most memorable of them being played with unfitting music, finally culminating in what the masterminds who masqueraded themselves to be humanity's protectors had in mind in the first place: ending the world in a manner that suits them through a controlled mass Mind Rape and suicide of all humanity caused by the fusion of two dead-yet-almighty Eldritch Abominations. The only positive thing is that humans can be reborn, but the world would have been left as a totally alien and deserted Hell by then.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds has Satellite, where Yusei has lived a hard life. This changes later on in the series. The post-apocalyptic world Z-one, Antimony, Paradox and Aporia come from is also this.
• High School Of The Dead is an animated version of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead on a worldwide scale. Being a badass is a survival requirement, the zombie (called Them) hordes never seem to completely go away, and the best you can hope for is to hold them off long enough to survive another day.
• Newport City in Dominion Tank Police is a pretty horrid place to live. The main heroes are violently crazy for tanks and blowing up lots of stuff, the few good people are all targeted by criminals, the whole city has been blanketed with a poison gas cloud for years, ANY attempt to fix this is sabotaged or destroyed, corporations are so corrupt that it would scare William Gibson, and life is generally pretty cheap.
• The City In Blame! is immeasurably vast and completely unmonitored, with countless civilisations existing within it; most of which are run by cruel and corrupt cyborg overlords. A common goal for anyone in the 'verse who hasn't already modified (or had modified) their bodies to the point of looking only vaguely human, is obtaining access to the Net Sphere - which would serve the dual purpose of stopping the chaotic expansion of The City (which, by the end of the manga, had consumed a majority of the Solar System) and providing an on-line paradise for anyone and everyone. That's right; in this world, absolute escapism is the only hope humanity has left.
• The Great Kanto Desert in Desert Punk is also one of these. It is a place where caring for your fellow man and helping others out of the goodness of one's heart is openly mocked (especially by the main protagonist) and the lifestyle most mercenaries follow is to only look out for number one (none as much as the main protagonist). The narrator doesn't make things any better, stating every few episodes how the humans are all idiots who will never learn from the past, and are doomed to repeat it, which they more or less do. Add to that the nearly tyrannical Oasis Government who controls all of the West Kanto region and an army of old-world robots which were the cause of the original apocalypse and you have an extremely depressing and all-around crapsack atmosphere (especially due to the selfish, vile, and disgusting attitude of the main protagonist).
• Go Nagai's Devilman, at least the manga version. Half the time, Akira's efforts amount to nothing, if he even gets the chance to fight the Monster of the Week. Humanity's reaching the end of its rope, demons can possess people with little to no effort, and humanity believes signs of said possessions can be seen in people that don't follow the lock-step. Hence, by the final volume in the series, Witch Hunts are carried out... except half the time the actual possessed people take part to hide their true nature. And the end result? Our hero loses faith in humans and kills a lot of people.
  • The end result of things getting worse is the world of Violence Jack, where society has completely broken down After the End and the remnants of humanity are divided between the strong and the weak. The evil warlords and biker gangs that rule this world are by far the worst villains that Go Nagai has created since Amon from Devilman, and mainly like to torture, rape and murder people in horrific ways.
    • But wait, there's more! It turns out all iterations of the Devilman 'verse are interrelated because The entity known as God has put the whole setting in a perpetual time loop to torture Satan with the death of the one he loves over and over and over again.
• For the most part life in the GUNNM / Battle Angel Alita universe sucks hard. The few somewhat decent places happen to use things like Mind Control in order to maintain said decency. We don't know very much about Jupiter and Venus other than the facts that the people of Venus Eats Babies (genetically engineered to be non-sapient) and on both planets the people have Biological Immortality, which as a result they do not allow the birth of any more children. The places that don't have this limit are in a civil war (Mars), or just happen to be hellholes that don't legally exist which results in assorted miscreants doing whatever the hell they want in said places including and definitely not limited to wiping them out, which occurred on Earth and some asteroid colonies (like the nursery colony the Guntroll team was from).
• Mirai Nikki. For perspective, the former most sympathetic character, the Woobie lead, was last seen massacring orphans in a desperate attempt to bring his dead parents back to life. His father killed his mother, and then his father was killed by the mob. The second most sympathetic character is a full-blown terrorist Mad Bomber.
  • The Toku style Hero of Justice is a vigilante psychopath.
  • The female lead is an Ax Crazy Yandere who, upon being told by the protagonist that he loved her, drugged him and tied him to a chair so he'd never leave. He got out, but he's still with her. Yay!
• Between the warmongering kingdoms and their corrupt nobility, the heresy-crushing Holy See, and the evil Godhand and their ravenous demonic Apostles, life in the world of Berserk really, really, really, really, really, really sucks hardcore. The world seems to exist only to make people as miserable as possible and to give the demons somewhere to play; humanity exists so that the demons have something to play with. The biggest idealist in the entire setting (who is anything but altruistic and is quite willing to use ruthless methods to accomplish his dream) snapped under the pressure and is now the Big Bad.You can't expect much else in a world where God "it"self was created as a result of humans subconsciously wishing for a cause to their misery, and has been busy being that cause ever since; it even calls itself "the Idea of Evil".
  • The demons get screwed, too. The price that people pay to become demons, in addition to sacrificing the people closest to them, is a guaranteed trip to Hell after they die. Hell is a nightmarish vortex of damned souls that drags your spirit into it, where you suffer indescribable pain and torment until all traces of your being has been utterly consumed in a sea of eternal suffering. And thanks to Griffith/Femto taking advantage of the Skull Knight's dimension warping attack, that Hell has literally broken loose. That Hell where all demons go when they die? Everyone goes there. No exceptions. The only reason why demons have it worse than humans is that to stave off death a bit longer, they have to make gut-wrenching sacrifices that will haunt them for the rest of their lives and beyond. If you're a good person? You get sent there sooner with the next bandit raid, rampaging monster or invading army. Life in Midland sucks hard.
• Claymore is in much the same boat as Berserk above, as far as ravenous, human-eating monsters are concerned (there are lots of them and they are pretty much unstoppable for normal humans), but normal people tend to be, on average, significantly nicer than they are in Berserk. Just by a bit. But then the heroines find out that everyone on their island, demons, Awakened Beings, and Claymores alike, are being manipulated so that they can become perfect weapons to fight the truly horrific monsters on the mainland.
  • However, there are the Seven Ghosts of Pieta which are trying to change the continent, either by killing an Eldritch Abomination greater than the others (Priscilla for Clare), or is leading a full scale rebellion against the Organization (Miria). So far ...both seem to be succeeding.
  • Miria's rebellion is a complete success, the means of making Awakened Beings and Yoma is destroyed, and the only thing left is the last Abyssal One like Cassandra as well as Priscilla.
• Another Dark Fantasy manga contender is Ubel Blatt. The main human empire is the sole bulwark against Wistech, which uses horrifying, corrupt magitek to create Body Horror Eldritch Abominations and Weapons Of Mass Destruction as tools of war, but the humans are bolstered by the might of the Seven Heroes who won the last great war by striking at the heart of Wistech; and now it seems the Four Lances of Betrayal, former companions of the Seven Heroes who betrayed their comrades, are Back from the Dead and stirring up touble in the hinterlands. seems like a recipe for a cliché White And Black Morality setting, no? Wrong. It turns out the Seven Heroes are frauds; they panicked and chose to stay behind after reaching the border, and when their four former True Companions came back after successfully completing their mission, the "heroes" ambushed and slaughtered them and demonized them into the Four Lances of Betrayal to cover their own asses. After their return, the "heroes" were acclaimed throughout the empire and got positions of power and prestige as nobility, which they proceeded to abuse and reign oppressively over the populace; at least two devolved into monsters, one went batshit crazy from guilt and paranoia, and the rest are at the very least flagrant hypocrites. The Four Lances stirring up trouble are also fakes using the name as free publicity. And that's not mentionning the Fantastic Racism towards those with elven/fairy blood, the numerous other corrupt assholes which liberally pepper the setting, or the fact that The Hero, an Anti-Hero on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Seven Heroes, as he's one of the true Four Lances, mysteriously recovered from the massacre, is still one of the more morally upright main characters bar some others in his current group. And of course, after several good-guy victories and a slowly building Hope Spot for the setting in general, come volume 9 and 10, things go downhill again.
• Played extremely straight in the anime Texhnolyze. The entire population of Lux are either: a) evil, selfish bastards, b) poor broken woobies, or c) some combination of the two. Not to mention that they all live in a cave underground and the entire city survives because of Rafia, which grows from people.
  • And don't think you can escape by going to the surface. It's not pretty.
• Ergo Proxy. 85% of the world's population has been wiped out. The environment outside the dystopia-style domes is completely destroyed and most people who set foot there are killed from infection. People on Earth are unable to reproduce. What's more, the Ridiculously Human Robots are all going insane, and the... things... directly ruling the Earth will all die when the permanent cloud cover dissipates and they get exposed to UV radiation.
• Wolf's Rain takes place 200 years After the End of civilization as we know it. Most of humanity is crammed into crumbling domed concrete cities ruled by warring Nobles, and the environment outside is slowly decaying. Maybe the most telling line in the entire series is spoken by the wolf Hige, who looks at the sky and says, "C'mon, birds, let's see some flying up there." But we don't see any birds at all after that — maybe they're all extinct. Until the final episode, when the world is regenerated.
  • Not quite. That world was the previous one before ours, and while the world did regenerate, it was corrupted by Darcia's bloody eye falling in the purifying waters of rebirth, making the next world (ours) also a far cry from Paradise. There is still some hope left, though, as in the last shot a reincarnated Kiba appears to start his quest for Paradise anew.
• Modern Tokyo is portrayed as a World Half Empty in Tokyo Babylon, with frequent suicides, dreary lives, and gloomy commentary on consumerism. All designed to Break the Cutie, naturally.
  • And its sequel, X/1999, is hardly nicer. The only two options seem to be "Kill All Humans!" or"Let Them Kill The Planet", and nobody's yet figured out how to Take a Third Option.
• Post-apocalyptic Tokyo 3 in AKIRA.
• The Future that Trunks came from in Dragon Ball Z, a ravaged post-apocalyptic wreck where two powerful Androids go around killing anyone who opposes them, and have already killed the most powerful heroes of Earth. What makes it worse is that the Dragon Balls are gone because Kami, who shares a soul with Piccolo, one of the aforementioned heroes, is dead.
  • In the main timeline Earth is implied to be one of the few places other than the afterlife exempt from this. The galaxy at large is a Crapsack World, because its most politically powerful resident, Frieza, is an Axe Crazy Evil Overlord who correctly believes that he is the strongest being in the universe. So you have someone more evil than anyone in human history who is his own Death Star and who's been running around the galaxy for decades doing whatever he likes because there's nothing anyone can possibly do to stop him or even scratch him. Until Goku goes Super Saiyan.
• Most of the stories in Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series. The historical chapters feature a decidedly unromantic depiction of feudal Japan full of war, famine, disease, filth, corruption, death & copious amounts of mutilation with sharp objects. But at least the characters in those stories had the breathtaking beauty of nature to raise their spirits. Those who have the misfortune of being born in this world's bleak, Zeerusted future get no such luck. In addition to having all the above mentioned problems, the world is ecologically screwed, full of bigots who mistreat clones and robots, and occasionally ruled by an oppressive theocracy. After people start piling into rocket ships to escape this awful mess, the Earth eventually faces an immigration crisis when the space colonists & their children start coming back in droves because most of the other planets in the universe are even worse than the world that they left! When humanity finally goes extinct in the (chronologically) final chapter, it comes as something of a relief.
• The war-torn desert planet that Now and Then, Here and There takes place on, mostly because it's a (slightly) exaggerated version of modern Africa.
  • The planet is actually Earth, 10 billion years in the future. The sun is expanding into a red giant and will eventually destroy the world.
• The post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the world of Fist of the North Star.
  • If you're an Average Joe or Jane, you're a (literally) dirt-poor peasant scraping by on your meager provisions. You'll be constantly on the lookout for roving brigands and vicious biker gangs who, if you're lucky, will savagely beat you and steal all of your possessions, effectively sentencing you to death in the desert wasteland. If unlucky, you'll likely wind up murdered, either for your stuff or just for their sick amusement; and possibly raped if you're female. Also, you must worry about power-mad martial artists enslaving you and your loved ones and slaughtering you on a whim as they set out to establish themselves or their empire. And just to make things worse, this isn't one of those nuclear After the End series that forgot about fallout; if you don't starve and aren't murdered, you might end up with radiation sickness.
  • If you happen to practice one of the superpowered martial arts disciplines of the series, odds are you'll fare little better. If you're a low-level villain/lackey, you'll undoubtedly fall to the head-detonating protagonist, Kenshiro, or possibly to another "good guy" after you kick one dog too many. If a low-level hero, you must constantly battle thugs, and there's no telling when one of the previously mentioned power-mad martial artists (who will be light years beyond your ability) will carve a swath of destruction through your homeland, either killing, enslaving, or imprisoning you. If a high-level villain, odds are even greater that you'll be killed by Kenshiro, though there is a rare chance of being killed by another high-profile martial artist (such as Rei or Toki). Finally, Kenshiro himself has arguably the worst fate of any character in the series: he loses his father, all three of his brothers (granted, he kills one of them, the evil Jagi); his best friend Shin, who was corrupted by Jagi; his two other martial artist allies Rei and Shuu and most of his other friends throughout the series. And worse, the "off into the sunset" ending with him and his lover, Yuria, is rendered bittersweet when it's revealed that Yuria is dying of radiation poisoning and has a limited time left to live.
  • There is one brighter possibility in all of this: the environment has begun to recover slightly by the end of the series. And you have to figure most of the bandits are dead by that point.
    • Though from what was seen in the New Fist of the North Star OVAs, set years later, the world hasn't really decided to clean itself up just yet.
  • In fairness, although it starts out completely bleak, it doesn't stay that way, thanks to Kenshiro (and a few tough allies). In fact, the whole point of the story (Tetsuo Hara said something to this effect) was that even one selfless, brave, honorable hero could save the world. Pretty harsh place to live, no question, but solidly on the "idealism" side of the scale.
  • In the manga, the Colonel reveals that the world before the nuclear war is this. He served his country of Japan faithfully for years. However, he was summoned to a meeting where he discovers that his corrupt superior the general is having an orgy along with corrupt politicians and corrupt corporate executive officers, who effectively rule the world and he has to serve them. Oh, and the nuclear war, it was apparently an accident triggered by the politicians and the corporate heads. Too bad those corrupt leaders blew themselves up along with lots of other people.
• The world of Casshern Sins is a decaying mess; all the robots are rusting, and presumably something equivalent is happening to any humans. Only the protagonist is unaffected by the ruin, but he's the one that caused it in the first place; and he's amnesiac, so he can't work out why 99% of the population wants to kill and eat him.
• Hell Girl is ostensibly set in the real world. But with each grudge Enma Ai satisfies, it's more obvious that hers is a world of miserable bastards. On the one hand, we have her targets, almost always selfish people who deceive, abuse, and hurt those around them. On the other hand, we have her contractors — who, while usually sympathetic, nonetheless resort to damning their enemies and themselves to hell to solve their problems (The most generous thing you can call it is assassination). And then there are the cases where the contractors are just as bad, and even where the targets are completely innocent. Ai will take pretty much anyone's contract, and she never lacks for work. The ultimate proof of this World Half Empty is the final storyline of Futakomori, in which hundreds of people in one town go vengeance-crazy, damning even their friends and family. It's a great show, but watching too many episodes in a row is hard on the soul.
  • Futakomori (the 2nd season) is sick and sad enough...but wait until you see Mitsuganae (the 3rd season); it will shatter you soul into a million little pieces.
  • Then there was the episode where a nurse (who was a good, hardworking person in every way) is sent to hell by a person she doesn't know because said person was a sick bastard who wanted to send her to hell because... well, just because he could.
• Pick a Hideshi Hino manga. Any Hideshi Hino manga. Good luck sleeping afterwards.
• Any work of Mohiro Kitoh qualifies, most especially Bokurano (the manga at least), which takes place in a Multiverse Half Empty with, without giving anything away, about as hopeless a scenario as anyone can imagine. As well as his effectiveness in savaging modern day life, his work focuses on the individual effort of people to stay noble in the face of such circumstances.
  • Narutaru.
• The Universal Century of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. The One Year War which causes the deaths of half the population of the Solar System is between the Earth Federation, a corrupt, incompetent, and racist government unable to properly defend the solar system vs the Principality of Zeon, who started the war by gassing a colony full of millions of people and dropping it on the Earth. Even after the One Year War was over, war constantly sprung up due to the weakness (and/or the malice) of the Earth Federation, and totally evil bastards as faction leaders are incredibly common. You can seriously argue that the solar system would have been better off if both sides had wiped each other out.
  • Better for whom???
  • Well, there is one Gundam AU based on the premise of the Federation and Zeon wiping each other out...while certainly less dark, it's hard to say people are better off.
    • To be fair, after Neo-Zeon had been eradicated once and for all, the Earthsphere and its colonies enjoyed a long period of peace with minor conflicts until Crossbone Gundam and Victory Gundam, and even in Victory Gundam after everything-it's a hopeful ending. People are TIRED of War.
    • ... but yet the same tragedy repeats in G Saviour. People never learn...
  • This even applies in G Gundam, where they established the Gundam Fight specifically to avoid war. While the wealthy and powerful escaped to space colonies, the people left behind on Earth have to endure their cities and landscape being torn up every four years, and Gundam Fighters are specifically absolved from causing property damage because most governments have just stopped caring about Earth. Several nations hire thugs or assassins as Fighters, or use coercion and blackmail to get them. And when someone tried to improve the system a tad, it winds up creating the Big Bad.
  • Gundam SEED starts off similar to UC calender series, where most of the conflict stems from political and ideological reasons, but soon goes off the deep end and degenerates into hell on earth, literally. The earth is going through an energy crisis due to nuclear power jammers that have been integrated by ZAFT, almost the entire world is controlled by one side or the other through draconian military regimes, much of Earth is in ruins due to the war, and both sides are equally willing to use WM Ds on their enemies and ALLIES equally. In addition, the main source of scientific progress has come from a series of genetic experiments that spawned a worldwide terrorist ideology and the war itself and recently reached the utter abandonment of the value of life in order to pursue a goal that would give birth to Kira Yamato and Rau LeCreuset. And the leaders of both sides are monsters to boot.
  • The setting of Gundam 00 is a crapsack world as well, with the people living in poverty suffering endless warfare while the rich people relying on the giant solar panel system not giving a fuck about them. In the first season, political games among the three greedy, corrupt global superpowers still exist, and the second season is basically all the corrupt politicians banded together to continue torturing people who suffer in extreme hardship under their tyrannical grips. In both cases, we have the Byronic Hero Celestial Being who are among the very few people truly willing to change the world for the better even though their methods are questionable at best.
  Setsuna F. Seiei: Exia R2, Setsuna F. Seiei, clearing the way for the future!!
  • Gundam AGE is a blend between this and Crapsaccharine World (in part because of Art Style Dissonance). On the one side, The Federation employs a powerful State Sec that operates by falsifying history and laid the groundwork for a decades-long war when they turned every victim of a failed colonization project into UnPeople rather than bring them home. On the other, the UE/Vagan have a sympathetic cause that they ruin by wiping out civilian colonies, which sets several otherwise-decent people on lifelong quests for retribution. Also, Anyone Can Die, and if they don't they'll probably be traumatized by fighting in battles that definitely do not involve Bloodless Carnage.
• In pre-timeskip Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann humans have been driven from the surface into underground villages. If anyone dares to climb to the world above, they're mercilessly hunted down and killed by the Spiral King Lordgenome's Beastmen. Of course, all it takes is a band of insanely badass fighters led by an exceedingly charismatic and determined idiot, and then his young friend/stepbrother of sorts to turn everything around. Then the aliens show up.
  • Neither the Pre-timeskip world nor the Post-timeskip world looked too good. First people were forced to live underground, so there would never be 1 million humans on the planet. After timeskip, they are forced out of their underground homes, where they were safer, only to reach 1 million and get attacked by aliens, though those are easily repelled... until they toss the Moon at Earth, just to make sure humanity is exterminated. It gets better, though, when Simon and Co. turns the Moon into the Cathedral Terra, a giant battleship later named Chouginga Dai-Gurren.
    • Plus, post-timeskip, the ruling government was entirely staffed by idiots who had their position based not on merit, but merely because they were friends with the protagonist.
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Goodbye Mr. Despair) takes place in a world where a suicidal, paranoid Large Ham megalomaniac is actually one of the most sane and collected members of the cast. This is all Played for Laughs, of course.
• The Code Geass world isn't too great either. There's the Holy Britannian Empire, which looks like it's rich and beautiful at first, but is actually a racist, totalitarian, Social Darwinist Empire which is less like the U.K. and more like Nazi Germany and where people who are enslaved are treated as "Numbers". Slaves can sign up to be citizens through military service, but the discrimination is still widespread there. It is ruled with an iron fist by The Emperor and his constantly-warring children through a Medieval feudal system. If he gets bored, feels slighted in any way or actually plans something, The Emperor of Britannia will order your country to be either enslaved or razed to the ground. Then there's the Chinese Federation, an overpopulated union of states where starvation is more common than food whose puppet ruler is still a child propped up by corrupt eunuchs. Finally, there's the Euro Universe (E.U. for short), a loosely-maintained and hardly-defended union similar to the Chinese Federation but with better living accommodations. Even though their role in the story and world relations are minor, they actually make it out to be a pretty nice place with equal rights and everything... until Britannia conquers most of it. All this while the Diabolus ex Machina constantly torments the Anti-Hero protagonist and everyone else.
  • The crapsack nature of the Euro Universe is expanded on with the OVA Code Geass Akito The Exiled, in which it is revealed that the Japanese are just as prejudiced against there and that the ruling class are just as dangerous as in Britannia.
• Barefoot Gen. An autobiographical work set in the author's youth. He grew up in Japan during World War II. The climax takes place on August 6, 1945. No fantasy or fiction is needed to create a world of horrors, we ourselves have done a fine job of it.
• Japan in Speed Grapher is a crapsack world. Everyone person in power is corrupt, and a Mega Corp has bribed even the police force. All but a handful of characters are monsters.
• Elfen Lied is set in a world with corruption and decadence at every corner, where being a mutant means a lifetime of being broken, and some of the worst monsters you'll find including child rapists, Serial Killers (One of whom is the protagonist) and sadists who join PMC's just to get the chance to kill legally. Even little children are rotten and willing to Kick the Dog and kill it!
• When describing the world in Black Lagoon, Revy says it best:
  When I was a brat, crawling around in that shithole city, it seemed God and Love were always sold out when I went looking. Before I knew better, I clung to God and prayed to Him every single night — yeah, I believed in God right up until that night the cops beat the hell out of me for no reason at all. All they saw when they looked at me was another little ghetto rat. With no power and no God, what's left for a poor little Chinese bitch to rely on? It's money, of course, and guns. Fuckin' A. With these two things, the world's a great place.
• Blue Drop. If you're a Magical Girl, you're a Child Soldier bomb disposal unit. If you're a schoolgirl, you're little more than a sex slave. If you're a guy, you're used as a lab-rat for transgender experiments if you're lucky. If you're not so lucky as to be part of an experiment, you're an animal, a third-class citizen treated like freed Africans in Antebellum America — not a slave, but only just. If you're one of the Arume, alien lesbians who made Earth like this, then you're living with the knowledge that your species is extinct and living on borrowed time, the only option for survival being a cultural change none of them have the courage to make. Both sides are ravaged by and living in the ruins of a war that was literally entirely pointless because of that lack of courage.
• Amberground in Letter Bee is a corrupt world of perpetual night, where a man-made sun shines over the capital city of Akatsuki. Life is rough almost everywhere, and even the people assigned to deliver some happiness throughout the world through letters—the titular Bees—could be killed by or lose their Life Force (Heart) to mechanical monsters along the way.
• The world of Sai Kano, while never directly shown, is undoubtedly this. We know that there's a large-scale war going on from the beginning, but halfway through we find out that the protagonist's hometown is peaceful because Chie's specifically protecting it, and everywhere else has gone to hell. By the end of the series, all the different countries have either been destroyed, or are committed to plans of mutually assured destruction, and Chie's lost most of her humanity and turned into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds out of a desire to give everyone a nice, painless death. There's a very good chance this was the best thing left to do at that point.
• The Alternate Universe medieval Japan of Kagerou-Nostalgia. The nation has been engulfed in a civil war for decades, with eighty percent of the country under the control of the psychotic Kiyotaka Kuroda, who organises random massacres of the population by Sociopathic Soldiers just for kicks. The remaining twenty percent of the country go out of their way to avoid opposing Kuroda, even aiding the "People Hunts" in some cases so that he'll leave them alone; generally speaking their governments seem to be either crooked or cowardly. People who do go to war with Kuroda have a tendency to go insane, coming home and spreading even more misery around. And that's without mentioning Gessho Kuki, The Man Behind the Man to Kuroda, and the armies of demons and monsters he summons to bolster the General's ranks. The world's only hope at this point are six kids, who don't like one another, have yet to defeat a single major enemy, and whose major accomplishment as of the most recent volumes have been getting their leader killed and her kingdom decimated, and suffering a betrayal by one of their own. They've yet to really help anyone, and the entire setting is pretty much overwhelmed with a sense of cynicism and despair.
  Kazuma Shudo: "In the end we were powerless, again. We fought like mad, but all that's ever left is the devastation."
• Whatever's going on in Angel's Egg, it's world isn't an inviting place to live.
• Basically it's a whole Crapsack Universe in Galaxy Express 999, with only a few bright spots here and there. But the majority of planets Tetsuro and Maetel visit are either:
  • run by corrupt governments,
  • on the brink of destruction,
  • inhabited by oblivious, arrogant people,
  • stricken by severe poverty or
  • all of the above.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Are you a Muggle? Enjoy getting Driven to Suicide, dismembered and eaten by a Witch. Are you a Witch? Enjoy a life as a horrifying Eldritch Abomination trapped in its own Hell-dimension, then capture by a Magical Girl, then having your Soul Jar eaten by an Incubator for energy. Are you a Magical Girl? Enjoy isolation from all your friends and spending the rest of your life at a shitty job fighting insanity-inducing abominations where the smallest misstep can spell swift death. And it doesn't even stop there — by accepting the contract with Kyubey to become a magical girl, you basically become a Lich, and if you don't die horribly at some point, you WILL mutate into a Witch. And the universe itself? Is undergoing entropy, such that it will eventually die if not fed by the Incubators a steady diet of emotional energy harvested from the despair of said Magical Girls when they inevitably fall and become Witches (though we still don't know whether that is even true or if Kyubey is just fucking with people's heads for its own amusement). Fun for everyone!
  • Kyubey never lies, though he's often used half-truths. So it's implied that the universe-saving thing is at least partially true. Though it's not like humans will be around to enjoy it when his plan is through.
  • Through Madoka's wish and ascension to goddesshood in the final episode, though, things have gotten a little better. However, with the disappearance of witches, all magical girls now have a new problem to deal with in the form of demons born from the curses of humanity, because Incubators still need the energy to stave off the heat death of the universe. Indeed, the meguca battle never ends...
• Psycho Pass takes us 100 years into The Future, by which time people's minds can be quantified and people's "criminality coefficients" are tracked by the Sybil System. If you so much as have a brief thought about harming someone, you will be either drafted as a special police officer or summarily executed without trial by a gun that turns you into Pink Mist. Oh, and juvenile statutes have since been revoked, so there are no exemptions for children. (Sound familiar? This series was written by the same guy as Madoka above.) This has all led to a brutal societal emphasis on sanity at all costs, to the point where antidepressant abuse has skyrocketed and a certain girls' boarding school advertises its old-fashioned sheltering from the world...and most art has been restricted.
• Planet Gunsmoke in Trigun is a barely-habitable desert planet that humanity is forced to retreat to after it has already killed Earth, but even mankind's fight for survival isn't enough to unify the people. About half the population is made up of resource-hording tycoons and trigger-happy bounty hunters with no disregard for the well-being of bystanders.
• Planet Amoi of Ai No Kusabi is a Dystopia ruled by a Master Computer which favors the Elites which are all Artificial Humans controlling the human populace with an iron fist and humans unlucky enough to be born in the slums are not even considered human. The remaining populace are exclusively house slaves that are castrated or a Sex Slave with no rights whatsoever.
• Loveless takes place in a rather shitty world. To put things into perspective- almost all of our main characters are or were abused children and are severely emotionally fucked up; even people on the 'good guy' side do very bad things (Ritsu-sensei, anyone?); the few decent people who try to help are useless; kids as young as twelve get dragged into presumably-very-dangerous spell battles; Seven Moons Academy gets attacked and the ones dealing with the resulting mess are the students; and, at least for now, The Bad Guy Wins.
• Angel Sanctuary is not at all what it's name implies.
  • Earth? Doomed. Hell? Dangerous for most. But hey, it could be worse. You could go to Heaven...
• Gantz, for innumerable reasons. People are forced against their will to fight against aliens to the death in a game, for no apparent reason at all. People die by the bucketload, even all of the main characters. It gets worse when it's clear that not all the aliens are even aggressive, and that many of the humans are terrible people. It is eventually revealed that all of the fighting and dying was just a training exercise for the apocalyptic arrival of an alien race of giants who decimate the planet.
• When you think about it, the entire Saint Seiya world is this. There are always misanthropic gods out there making war on Athena and her Saints, which always causes millions of fatalities. If you're a normal human, you are completely hopeless at the hands of those deities; however, if you want to achieve the power to defeat these gods and protect yours and your loved ones' lives, that is, become a Saint, you'll still be out of luck. You'll have to pass through a rigorous Training from Hell to enter a order of warriors who live under a (officially, at least) stern Spartan regimen - and if you happen to be a girl, shame on you! You'll never be able to show a face to anyone again. Also, as a Saint, you'll need to be prepared to die young and horribly in a bloody war that probably is going to happen again anyway after a few centuries... but, of course, after going out of the way to ensure (temporary) peace on Earth, you sure will be rewarded for all your efforts in afterlife, isn't it? WRONG! Because the King of the Underworld hates you and will make you pay for opposing him by casting you on freezing hell of Cocytos for eternity. Lovely, isn't it? And if you think that by staying out of gods' way and behaving yourself until death comes to claim your immortal soul you're going to able to actually rest in peace in the Underworld, you couldn't be more wrong, as King Hades is eager to throw even the most innocent Purity Sue Ill Girl in Tartarus for a single completely minor sin committed in life. Yeah.
• The works of Junji Ito tend to be cosmic horror stories. Everyone is doomed, they just don't know it yet. The setting of Uzumaki in particular is a pretty horrible place. That's what happens when a town is built over the ruins of a Genius Loci Eldritch Abomination city that is obsessed with spirals and hates humans. The only way to avoid a horrible death or fate worse than death is to devote the rest of your life to spirals without ever leaving the area. Which is also arguably a fate worse than death.
• Acid Town is set in a Crapsack World- There is no mention of school, all of the main characters are orphans, gangs and mob bosses rule the streets, children and teenagers resort to drug selling and prostitution to feed themselves, and war planes and biohazard zones are frequently mentioned.
• The world during Apocalypse No Toride. If not already apparent by the Plague Zombie reaching the secluded prison, when the main characters bust out and drive to Tokyo, the city is completely overrun and in shambles.
• The Legend of the Legendary Heroes—if you're a Cursed Eye bearer, you'll be victim to severe Fantastic Racism and likely die young. If you're a commoner, you're at the mercy of poverty and of the nobles, who'll be more than happy to kill you for petty reasons. War is also rampant, meaning that there's a good chance you'll be dragged into one regardless of who you are, with age meaning nothing. Furthermore, what with war breaking out across the entire continent and Fantastic Nukes in the hands of many, your country is likely going to be conquered sooner or later—in which case you better pray that the one doing the conquering accepts surrenders. Oh, and the world is destroyed every thousand years, with the next deadline being about ten years away. There's a reason why most of the cast are desperate to change the world.
• Shingeki No Kyojin gives us a world where humanity was driven to near extinction by being *devoured by giants*, forcing those who are left to hide in a walled citadel. Food is scarse because there's very little space for plantations, the resident army is pretty much Titan food and the whole Power of Trust deal is harshly deconstructed. If you're a human who lives in this world, chances are that you're either going to be eaten by a Titan, see your relatives and friends get eaten by a Titan or die out of hunger. Have a nice day.
• The world of Naruto was this during the Warring Clans Era, their version of the Sengoku Period. Clan feuds were so prevelant that shinobi wouldn't say their last names to outsiders, for fear of being attacked by an enemy. The average life expectancy was barely 30 years old for both civilians and shinobi due to the high death toll among the clan's Child Soldiers. Became a World Half Full after Hashirama founded Konoha alongside Madara, since a lasting peace actually began and the average life expectancy started to rise.
  • Frighteningly, it's mentioned that the world was even worse before the Sage of Six Paths introduced the chakra arts and sparked the Warring Clans Era. That makes sense when you consider that this was the time when the Juubi was rampaging across the world.