Everybody Dies Ending / Anime & Manga

Examples of "Everybody Dies" Ending in anime and manga. Beware, all spoilers will be unmarked.

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• By the end of the anime adaptation of Akame ga Kill!, everyone is dead except Akame, Najenda, Wave, and Run. Subverted in the original manga where Mine survived her death (she was put in a coma instead and wakes up in the final chapter), Tatsumi who technically died but came back as a dragon and Kurome, who lives to be together with Wave. Run doesn't make it in the original either, however, so it balances out.
• By the end of AKIRA (The Movie, not the manga it's based on) the only survivors are Kaneda, Kei, Kai, and the Colonel. Everyone else is either killed by Tetsuo or killed when Akira sucks everyone else into a vortex; Tetsuo's fate is left ambiguous.
• Akudama Drive: None of the named characters, except Brother and Sister, survive the ending of the show. This includes all the Executioners and the entire Akudama system.
• No one dies in the main story of Bakuman。, but in one in-universe manga, Classroom of Truth, everyone, including the main character, dies. The main characters consider it overly depressing and pointless.
• Attack on Titan ends with roughly 20 named characters still alive^note Armin, Mikasa, Levi, Historia, Jean, Connie, Reiner, Annie, Pieck, Gabi, Falco, Onyankopon, Kiyomi, Niccolo, Kaya, Karina (Reiner's mother), Artur & Lisa (Sasha's parents), Rico, Hitch, Muller and Surma. This may seem like a lot, but Attack on Titan has had well over 100 named characters throughout the series. A couple of characters, such as Yelena, are implied to be alive, but aren't explicitly seen in the final chapter, and some very minor unnamed characters, such as Connie's mother, survived as well. However, 80% of the world's population, including most of those within the walls, were killed in the Rumbling, including Eren himself (who was responsible for the aforementioned devastation).
• Basilisk is the fight between the Iga and Kouga clans. 10 members of each clan are pitted against each other, and they die one by one until all that is left are the Star-Crossed Lovers, who are both Driven to Suicide.
• Battle Royale: This is the very premise of the manga. Even people outside of the competition itself get to die a lot as well.
• Berserk closes the Golden Age arc by killing off every major character but four: Guts (who lost a hand and eye to demons), Casca (who lost her mind), Griffith (who went evil and was responsible for all of the above), and Rickert (who was not with the Band when everything went to hell). The entire world of the series seems to be heading that way, as well.
• In Bokurano, each character who pilots the Humongous Mecha dies after using it, and by the end of the manga, there are no survivors. The TV series is mildly kinder, allowing one character to survive.
  • Additionally, in the manga Jun has to travel to another universe to battle, but cannot find the other mech's pilot and kills people one by one until he finds them, triggering one hell of a Heroic BSoD. In the end, A Million Is a Statistic.
• The Chrono Crusade anime fell victim to this. In fact, the only major character that wasn't either permanently killed off or otherwise rendered ineffective was the Big Bad, who at the end of the last episode is manipulating Mehmet Ali Ağca to assassinate Pope John Paul II (who survived the attempt in real life). Downer Ending, indeed.
  • Averted in the manga, where the Distant Finale shows that the only good characters to have died within a decade of the previous chapter are the two leads, whose deaths were a Foregone Conclusion from the beginning. ^note  Of course, since that finale occurs some seventy years after the main storyline, every character who wasn't a "demon" or thrown into a time-slip has died of old age.
• CLAMP:
  • The X1999 movie starts killing off its cast from its first scene — in some cases not even bothering to pause to introduce the characters first — and doesn't stop until everyone but Kamui is dead. The TV series is a little gentler, but as far as the manga is concerned, all bets are off.
  • RG Veda (which was also their debut long-running manga). Some people were actually surprised that two major characters survived.
  • ×××HOLiC: By the end of the manga, all the main characters except Watanuki have long died, courtesy of Clamp's last minute timeskip, pardon the pun.
  • Blood-C starts by killing off two main characters in episode 6 and later, the majority of Saya's classmates except for the class representative die in episode 8 and 9. Then it's subverted in episode 11 when the dead main characters all turn out to be alive, but then Fumito kills them off permanently and massacres the entire village, which leaves him, Saya and Yuka as the only survivors.
• As if the whole show isn't trippy enough, Cat Soup ends with all characters vanishing from existence one by one with no real explanation.
• Every single salmon in the Crimsons – The Scarlet Navigators of the Ocean manga about a school of migrating salmon dies. Even the ones who aren't eaten by predators and successfully make it back to their birthplace to spawn. Because, according to The Other Wiki, "Salmon not killed by other means show greatly accelerated deterioration (phenoptosis, or "programmed aging") at the end of their lives. Their bodies rapidly deteriorate right after they spawn as a result of the release of massive amounts of corticosteroids."
• The Curse of Kazuo Umezu: The girls suffer from this at the end of "The Haunted Mansion".
• "Conclusion: God's War", Shotaro Ishinmori's posthumous finale to Cyborg009 (written by his son from the drafts and notes on the arc), pulls this BIG time on the cast. Although there's a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, the cyborgs are bumped off one by one, until 009 and 003 are left to die together as the world is destroyed and then reset.
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners already has its opening sequence foreshadow David's demise, but the series ends with all the main characters besides Lucy (whose survival was likewise foreshadowed in the ending credits) and Falco as disfigured corpses.
• The premise of Death Note dictates this conclusion from the beginning. By the final episode of the Anime, nearly every major character of the show is dead, including Light himself. To further hammer home the point, one of the final rules of the notebook is that once someone dies, they may never be brought back to life.
• Devilman manages to kill off the entire main cast including Akira in the span of five volumes. Violence Jack technically brings many of them back...only for them to go through hell all over again.
• Dragon Ball Z: Bardock - The Father of Goku: By virtue of being a prequel. Every main character in the special (Bardock and his squad) along with the entire Saiyan race dies, killed by Frieza. Only a few Saiyans survived by virtue of not being on the planet, such as Vegeta, Nappa, Raditz and Goku himself.
• Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor Exodus seems to be gunning for this, considering two main characters are already dead and the death flags are even worse than season 1.
• Fate/Zero progressively kills off almost every character due to the war-like nature of the tournament. With the exception of Waver, the only survivors are those who factor into Fate/Stay Night: Shirou, Rin, Sakura, Illya, Zouken, Gilgamesh, Saber (sort of), Aoi (possibly), and Kirei (technically dead).
• In Fist of the North Star, all of the important characters are dead by the series' end except for Kenshiro, Bat, Lin, Mamiya, Airi, and Ryu, with Ken and Mamiya being the only major fighters of those six.
• In From the New World, the protagonists Saki and Satoru are the only named characters left alive in the end. Every other named character, human and Bakenezumi, gets brutally killed off by the end of the war. You know it's going to get bad when three out of the five main characters get killed prior to the final battle. And that's before getting into how Kamisu 66 and its entire population got erased off the face of the Earth...
• Most of the cast of Fushigi Yuugi died through the course of the series. This was, however, undone in the OVAs.
• Future Diary, in the concluding arc of the series, almost all of the characters in the whole series are progressively killed off, including the series' deuteragonist, Yuno. However, the ending subverts this, with the existence of an alternative parallel universe where the cast survives.
• Gall Force series manage to do that nearly all time. Each time lots of cast is introduced just for one purpose: to gradually kill everyone and finally wipe all life from the entire galaxy.
• Characters in Gantz die once to get involved in the story (and can possibly die again). Being a Mauve Shirt or even a main character is no protection from death. Then came the Osaka arc, and after that came the Italy arc.
• It is never actually made clear if this is how GaoGaiGar Final ends, but considering that the Brave Robots all get defeated in the quite brutal ways (Volfogg is impaled by 5 clones of one Soul Master, ChoRyuJin is cut in half vertically, after which both Enryu and Hyoryu use Supernova, destroying them both and their enemy). After the Big Bad is defeated, GGG is only able to send two people back to our own solar system, while the rest will be stuck in an alternate universe that is on the verge of collapsing. And you thought GaoGaiGar was a happy-go-lucky Super Robot Anime?
• In Ga-Rei -Zero-, the entire named cast dies in the last 2 minutes of the FIRST episode. It's an effective cliffhanger, but...Then they kill half of the cast not presented in the first episode. The body count keeps rising in the manga including some survivors of Ga-Rei -Zero-.
• Genesis Climber MOSPEADA^note  Another one of the three shows scavenged to make Robotech pulls this in its first episode. The one character who survives becomes the protagonist by default.
• Getter Robo as whole, particularly Getter Robo Go and Shin Getter Robo qualify as by the end of each, half or most of the main cast die/ascend to a higher plane of existence. In Shin Getter, Saotome, Michiru, Genki and Benkei disappear by the end due to Getter Dragon melting down. In Getter Go, Kei is a vegetable, Gai, Go, Ryoma and Tahire are assimilated by Shin Getter. Rando is killed before the final conflict and Shin Getter absorbs anyone it touches, including a good chunk of the Dinosaur Empire in Siberia. If take the series as a whole, including the Getter Arc anime, the majority of the cast are dead/mia/incapacitated etc. The original 4 Getter pilots: Ryoma, Hayato, Musashi, Benkei. The Saotome instituate: Michiru, Saotome, Genki, Getter Go: Go, Gai, Tahire, Kei, Getter Arc Anime: Kamui's Mother.
• The anime Gilgamesh killed all of the characters but one in an event that also wiped out everyone else on Earth, but gave birth to one new life, which was immediately strangled by the sole survivor.
• Played for Laughs in episode 297 of Gintama when the main characters, in trying and failing to save a Not Quite Dead Kagura from being burnt (It Makes Sense in Context), end up going with her into the incinerator at the tail end of a ridiculously long Conveyor Belt o' Doom. They end up surviving in the long run, though, thanks to Plot Armor and the First Law of Resurrection.
  • Played straight in Episode 61 where Gintoki and Katsura massacred the Alien Pirates of Harusame.
    • Even better in the movie where Gintoki switch weapons in order to mow down the pirates.
  • The ending is seemingly this, where Tama wakes up in a distant future where everyone is already gone and forgotten. Fortunately this is just a meta joke brought up by Hasegawa because the characters can't think of an actual ending.
• Though possibly expected, in the space of about three chapters, Gunslinger Girl rapidly descended into this, with almost half of the named SWA cyborgs (Beatrice being among them) and likely their handlers, in the case of the others, being killed in a bloody battle against a well-armed terrorist group in possession of a missile. Almost everyone dies, except for a few select handlers and SWA staffers. Even then, only Jean is seen in the Distant Finale, with everyone else's fate uncertain. And Petrushka, Rico, and Claes get to avoid dying in battle and live out the rest of their short lifespans in peace (or succumb to cancer in Petrushka's case).
• Hellsing, gets pretty close to it. Out of the entire original cast, only Seras, Integra, and a now immortal Heinkel are still alive after the 30-year timeskip. As for everyone's favourite psychopathic vampire, well...Alucard is alive, but he was dead for a good 30 years. As well as the named characters, a sizable percentage of the civilian population of London bit it during the final battle, courtesy of Millennium, Iscariot, and Alucard himself, and pretty much every mook Iscariot and Millennium had is also dead.
• All but three of the main characters are killed off in Innocents Shounen Juujigun, and of those three, one is explicitly killed off post-story, and another is implied to be dead.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has two choice examples.
  • Zig-zagged in Part 4 with Bites The Dust managing to kill Josuke, Jotaro, Rohan, Okuyasu, and Koichi in one time loop, but none of their deaths take due to Kira having to cancel the ability before they died on the next loop.
  • A genuine example in Part 6. After Pucci obtains Made In Heaven, all of the surviving cast up to that point save for Emporio is killed. Their souls are reincarnated in the new universe Emporio unwittingly creates by killing Pucci, but they're still different people who've lived much different lives compared to the original universe.
• In Key the Metal Idol, lots of characters, including main and supporting characters, die during Key's quest to become human.
• In the Japanese version of the final episode of the 80's series of Kimba the White Lion almost all of the main cast, including the main character, died after 52 episodes of them appearing regularly. This even extends to characters who didn't die in the original manga.
• King's Game ends with everyone being "punished" at some point during the games except for Nobuaki...who chooses to continue playing to avoid death himself. Its sequel, Shuukyoku (as well as the anime), kills off everyone again including Nobuaki. This is made all the crueler given that in order to stop the game, everybody needs to die or else it'll just continue on to another class—which it does anyway.
• By the end of the prequel film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, only one named character who does not appear in the game this movie serves as a lead-in to is still alive — Libertus. Roughly half the movie takes place during a surprise attack, and everyone else ends up as casualties on one side or the other. Most of the people who are Saved by Canon due to appearing in the game end up dying there (see the Video Game section below).
• By the end of the Kite (1998) movie, every important character is dead except for the main heroine, who is so screwed up inside it seems implied she will keep waiting for her dead boyfriend until she dies from starvation or dehydration.
• Mangaka Mohiro Kitoh may be said to be a challenger to Tomino's Kill 'Em All Throne:
  • Shadow Star: Don't mess with the little girl who can use the whole world as a weapon. Oh, and while at the end, it resembles The End of Evangelion in that there are two people alive, it doesn't feel that way.
  • Bokurano makes a valiant attempt to out-Tomino Tomino himself. Early on, the children discover that even if they win their battles, they're guaranteed to die. Only later is it revealed that for every battle they win, an Alternate Universe is destroyed. Which they are, on occasion, forced to watch by their Robot Buddy. The estimated death toll by the end of the series is over 328 trillion human lives...not counting the possibility of life on other planets in the destroyed universes.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes: A war story with a huge cast means some will bite the bullet at some point or another. As of Volume 15, many of the main cast of The Heroic Legend of Arslan have gotten the Tanaka treatment as well.
• Magical Witch Punie-chan features "Kill Them All" as the invocation activating the lead Magical Girl's powers...Mayhem ensues, as you may imagine.
• At the end of MD Geist, the main character, who is a military-developed human killing machine, reactivates a canceled countdown time that unleashes a self-replicating robot army designed to exterminate all human life on the planet, just so he can have a stronger opponent to fight. In the sequel, he foils a plan to nuke all of the robots in one stroke, and then leads them to humanity's last remaining stronghold so that they can completely destroy it.
• The second season of Monster Rancher ends with the five main Monsters fusing together to become the Phoenix and sacrificing themselves to destroy Moo, killing Mocchi, Suezo, Golem, Tiger, Hare, Moo, and the Phoenix.
• Naruto invoked this trope TWICE with its final arc, when the entire cast except Team 7 and the resurrected warriors are the only ones effectively alive after the Moon Eye Plan activates, then, when the Moon Eye Plan is defeated, Sasuke pulls an epic Ass Pull in declaring that he wants to defeat Naruto, when only him and Naruto could bring everyone back to life...but only through co-operation, meaning, if him or Naruto kills the other, there are only three people truly alive in the entire world, with no way to bring them back.
  • Although, they wouldn't really be dead but turned into White Zetsu instead.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion also had a "kill 'em all" ending, due to the writer Hideaki Anno going through depression at the time (much like "Kill 'Em All Tomino"). However, Evangelion manages to avert this, sort of. The last two TV episodes and the movie all detail The End of the World as We Know It, and while every life-form is merged into a giant amorphous superconsciousness, human individuals can potentially choose to get out of it. The main cast, however, is practically obliterated — only Asuka and Shinji are seen alive at the end, and most of the other mains were killed before Instrumentality even began. However, the facts that Asuka herself was explicitly killed before Instrumentality began, at least implies that there can be a potential Everyone Lives.
• In a series where very few people from mooks on up are ever Killed Off for Real, One Piece has this happen in the backstories of two Straw Hats and one of their close allies:
  • Nico Robin was the sole survivor of the population of her home island of Ohara. It was targeted for destruction by a Buster Call to kill the scholars who could read and had been studying illegal glyphs, but the rest of the population was murdered as well while attempting to evacuate because of the mere possibility that some scholars escaped and were hiding among the general populace. Robin herself only survived because Kuzan, one of the Vice Admirals involved in the Buster Call, chose to spare her and let her escape.
  • After being attacked and defeated by an enemy pirate crew, all of Brook's friends died a slow death by poisoning as they recorded their last song as a group, dying off as the song was played. It's exaggerated because even Brook himself didn't survive his own Kill 'em All backstory. He just had a Devil Fruit power that let him come back one time after dying.
  • Trafalgar Law's birthplace, Flevance, suffered a fate not unlike Ohara's. The population fell ill due to lead poisoning from the mining and use of a toxic metal called Amber Lead. The Government and royals knew of its toxicity, but neglected to warn the citizens because of the booming economy created by its excavation, and allowed the spread of propaganda that falsely declared the poisoning throughout Flevance was contagious. What resulted was a quarantine, the outbreak of war in a desperate search for treatment, and in the end, a national genocide that left all the citizens dead except for Law (who himself only survived by hiding in a stack of corpses that were being carted out of the kingdom).
• Outlanders has Japan vaporized in a skirmish, then North America is obliterated from orbit, then the Moon is crashed into the Earth killing everyone else. Finally, except for the two main characters and their ship's crew, everyone dies in a suicidal attack on the imperial capitol, which blows up taking the entire planet with it. It's a good thing that the surviving characters are fertile (quintuplets, no less).
• Osomatsu-kun: At the very end of Episode 10 of the 1988 anime, Chibita accidentally kills everyone by opening a window and the wind turning off the candles that represents everyone's lives, thus making everyone go to the afterlife.
• Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom does this over the course of the series, and then finishes its spree very callously in the final episode. At the episode's end, after the series seemingly following the "Cerulean Blue Sky" route of the Phantom of Inferno visual novel, Reiji/Zwei, at the episode's end, is shot dead by either Elen/Ein or a completely random passerby on a cart, and depending on the interpretation of the final scenes, Elen/Ein herself possibly committed suicide by oxytropis. In conclusion, every major character, except MacGuire, possibly Ein, Shiga and Mio is dead by the end of the series.
  • The fate of Elen and Reiji is actually ment to be ambiguous, as we are never shown if they are actually dead. This is not the first time that both characters have been "killed" before.
• Played with in Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
  • In the original series, Homura Akemi is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, and in every single iteration thus far, she's been the only magical girl to finish alive and not a witch. Madoka's wish undoes every witch-out in both the present and the past, saving everyone at the cost of her own existence.
  • Inverted in Puella Magi Oriko Magica where the girls all survived... Except for Madoka, which made Homura reset time regardless of the happy outcome for everyone else.
  • In Puella Magi Kazumi Magica, the Pleiades Saints and all the villains of the stories end up dead apart from Kazumi herself and the two Pleiades she initially met, Umika and Kaoru.
  • In Puella Magi Madoka Magica Wraith Arc all the girls but Homura die. She is given the chance to escape the failed world and return to Godoka's side, but Homura instead uses the last of her time magic to reset the current universe and prevent their deaths because she felt Madoka would be disappointed in her if she didn't.
  • Puella Magi Suzune Magica ends with every magical girl besides Hinata dead.
  • Averted hard in the first arc of Magia Record, with the entire cast surviving and defeating Walpurgis- by the end of the second arc, only four girls out of over fifty are dead. The anime adaptation downplays it- the main five girls survive, but many of the characters die, and it’s implied that, though Walpurgis was defeated again, Homura's friends died, so Homura resets the timeline again.
• RahXephon ends up with about half of the main cast dead by the end of the penultimate episode. However it's like that at first until Ayato "retunes" the world to get a happy ending.
• The SDF-1 and its entire crew are wiped out at the end of the first third of Robotech. However, this is a complete departure from the original cut, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, where everyone is fine at the end, making this the rare hackjob that ups the death count.
  • Though, throughout the series, a lot of people die on both sides. A Zentraedi battlecruiser is destroyed in the first episode, but the first on screen deaths are ground crew taken out by enemy ordnance exploding. We also see various Earth space ships being destroyed and the implied deaths of the crews on the Daedalus and Prometheus. Other combat deaths occur due to the war plot. As far as civilian deaths, the Ontario province is demolished in a freak accident during an attack against the SDF-1 hovering over it, and Dolza's fleet blasts about three-quarters of the Earth's population while the fleet is in orbit.
• The entire main cast of The Rose of Versailles dies by the last episode, leaving only a few of the supporting characters to narrate the historical fates of the more prominent figures people most easily recall of the French Revolution.
  • The manga is particularly egregious about it. At the start, the protagonists were supposed to be Marie Antoinette, Oscar, and Fersen (later Demoted to Extra). At the end it looks as if at least Fersen (who in Real Life survived until 1810) will survive the series, we already got the Sequel Hook to Eikou no Napoleon-Eroica...Cue the second-to-last page detailing Fersen's eventual death by lynching and the last one being a page-wide drawing of his dead body.
  • As its sequel, Eikou no Napoleon-Eroica follows suit. In this series we have four protagonists: Alain and Bernard are inherited from Rose of Versailles, and then we have the title character Napoléon Bonaparte and his first wife Joséphine de Beauharnais. Alain and Bernard die halfway in after a failed attempt to kill Napoleon before he can be crowned emperor, Joséphine dies her historical death in 1814, and the manga ends with Napoleon's death at Saint Helena.
• In Sailor Moon anime, every secondary heroine sacrifices her own life to allow the title character to press on toward the Final Battle. Twice. There is a subversion in the final season. While all the main cast except Usagi die, the Starlights actually live to see Sailor Moon save the day.
  • The series began with everyone from the Silver Millenium dead, necessitating that Queen Serenity use the Silver Crystal to reincarnate them centuries later on Earth.
  • The manga likes this trope even more. The guardian Senshi get killed in the first and third arcs, Sailor Pluto dies in the second arc, and everybody dies in Stars. Nobody on the good side dies in the fourth arc.
  • As villains go: In the manga and Crystal, literally the only villains to survive (out of 48 in the manga and 37 in Crystal, plus three small-time monsters of the week in the former and four in the latter, and not counting Tuxedo Mask and Chibiusa being brainwashed) are the Amazoness Quartet, who were brainwashed to begin with. (Although the Four Kings of Heaven were also brainwashed, and return in spirit form) The Witches 5 even die twice.
• The entire point of Saiyuki's prequel, Saiyuki Gaiden, which deals with the original incarnations of three of the ikkou, and Goku's childhood in Tenkai. Contains flavours of Foregone Conclusion as well, because of this. It ends with three out of the four main characters horribly dead and the fourth subjected to Laser-Guided Amnesia and sealed in a cage for 500 years.
• Staying true to the original Seven Samurai, by the end of Samurai 7, Gorobei, Kyuzo, Kikuchyo, and Heihachi have all died in battle, leaving only three of the original seven. Naturally, this is also true of its Western remake The Magnificent Seven.
• 7 Seeds reveals that The End of the World as We Know It happened after an Apocalypse How, so obvious all of humanity was killed off except the five teams of eight people each that were chosen to be cryogenically frozen to survive the catastrophe. Subverted, since the Ryugu Shelter arc proves that shelters were built all over the place in hopes of having a lot of people survive. Played straight as, up to now, they have not met any living person except themselves.
  • This is the plan for how Team Summer A is chosen. Get every candidate into life-threatening situations and the last seven remaining (one for each class) are the chosen team.
  • This was the plan behind the missiles and nuclear warhead in the Fuji Ship. If they thought there was no hope left, the missiles and warhead were launched all over Japan, killing everyone there and the crew of the ship gets blasted when the ship self-destructs at the same time.
• Shaman King: Zig-Zagged. Immediately after awakening as the new Shaman King, Hao proceeds to kill every single character. However, when they all show up inside the Great Spirit alongside his mother, they convince him not to kill every human and Hao revives almost all of the characters.
• A slight subversion of this trope comes from the not-very-well-known anime Shin Hakkenden in which, by the end of the series, only two of the named characters are alive. One is the narrator (who doesn't really even take part in the story until 3/4 of the way through the series) and the Misled Villain Girl, who's pregnant. The reason this sort of counts as "subverted" is the two main characters die.
• In the hentai Spy Of Darkness, the protagonist Anne sacrifices herself to kill the rampaging "sex-beast" known as Dragon after it brutally rapes and murders all of her companions. In the end, it's stated that the records of Anne and her comrade's deaths will be sealed away under top level clearance, which means that very few people will even know what happened to them.
• In Tetragrammaton Labyrinth, this is what happens to any character that shows up more than twice in the story. It's less of a Downer Ending rather than a bittersweet ending, though. It's kind of ambiguous what kind of ending it is, but it seemed like it was an Earn Your Happy Ending type.
• In the Downer Ending of Texhnolyze, everybody either dies gruesomely or becomes a permanently stationary automaton. Given the nature of the show, this is probably expected.
• Osamu Tezuka used this trope often, even in his early career. In his late '40s work Lost World, out of the dozen or so main characters, only three survive to the end & several nameless extras are killed when the rocketship crashes on top of them. Astro Boy storylines frequently ended with everybody who wasn't a main character or a Recurrer dead (and sometimes even them!). Most of the Phoenix stories end with everybody except the eponymous bird dead, including the entire populations of a couple of planets, which is understandable since the main theme of the series is that the quest for immortality is futile & we should be happy with the lives we have.
• Yoshiyuki Tomino has produced a number of anime, including several Gundam shows, where he kills off a large number of characters, often due to bouts of depression in his own life. He's not known as "Kill 'Em All Tomino" for naught. Incidentally many instances of his tendencies coincide with instances of executives trying to screw with him, see Zeta Gundam, Victory Gundam, Aura Battler Dunbine, Space Runaway Ideon. His reputation is so notorious that his "Kill 'Em All" moniker used to be the namesake of this trope, prior to it being renamed from Kill 'Em All to "Everybody Dies" Ending.
  • Space Runaway Ideon is the all-time heavyweight champion of this. The entire cast (including children) die bloody and gruesome deaths, culminating in the complete destruction of humanity and the Buff Clan, along with a large chunk of the galaxy. Between this series and its predecessor Zambot 3, creator Yoshiyuki Tomino actually earned the nickname "Kill 'Em All Tomino".
    • So much so that Tomino even gets killed in Be Invoked.
    • Amusingly, Tomino himself has admitted that he sometimes wonders how he came up with the ending to Space Runaway Ideon.
    • Enough so that Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry, whose directing team worked with Tomino, ended up being a subversion. It began as an Everybody's Dead, Dave and ended that way, but just about everybody expected Sara and her cohorts to drop off.
    • Saikano feels incredibly influenced by Ideon, particularly considering the two have essentially the same ending; the main difference is, Saikano has no Earth-Shattering Kaboom, and Shuji stays alive as the last man on Earth as Chise accompanies him as an Energy Being.
    • Hideaki Anno himself stated Ideon was a big inspiration for Neon Genesis Evangelion, so you can see where that was coming from. It even has it's own Be Invoked (in the form of The End of Evangelion), with similar results.
  • Many of the Gundam series directed by Tomino also have high death counts, Zeta Gundam and Victory Gundam in particular. The ironic thing about the Gundam series is that Tomino's stated reason for his Kill 'Em All tendencies was to discourage sequels.
    • In particular, Zeta Gundam's penultimate episode is titled "Casualties of War." What happens in it? About half the cast dies. Believe it or not, it still gets worse.
    • After the Hideaki Anno example above, Tomino inspired yet another popular "Kill 'em All" creator: Gen "Urobutcher" Urobuchi. Urobuchi's tendences to write dark works partially comes from his viewing of Zeta Gundam in his younger days, which he claims that it shocked him so much it changed his perspective on life as a whole.
    • Victory Gundam rarely goes a single solitary episode without someone dying, and by the end of the series only about a quarter of the named characters end up surviving.
    • Though Tomino is not involved with Gundam 00, the latter half of the first season (especially episode 24) sees a massive die-off of both main and named characters. The second season and the movie avert this however, so the series overall actually stands out as probably the lightest 21st century Gundam anime in terms of characters killed.
    • Likewise, the final two episodes of Gundam SEED, while leaving nearly all the main heroes safe, killed off the majority of the supporting cast, and the only survivor among the antagonists was via a last-minute defection to the good guys. Unfortunately, the most blatantly obvious death (and the most moving one at that) got eliminated via Retcon in the sequel, with no explanation ever given (the Special edition was slightly more ambiguous). Seriously, the guy (originally and still apparently) gets disintegrated by antimatter, and then comes back to life.
    • The original idea for the SEED ending involved the main cast being killed off one way or another, with the only survivor being Athrun (who would be maimed). The idea was dropped due to protests from the voice actors, who became attached to their characters early on.
    • It's worth noting that Gundam Seed currently holds the record for most character deaths, out of all the Gundam series.
    • Likewise, episodes 47 and 48 of Gundam AGE killed most of the supporting cast. Moreover, with the exception of Lord Ezelcant and Falk, EVERY NAMED CHARACTER from Vagan in the Third Generation gets offed by the end of these two episodes.
    • But the end literally ALL the support pilots died. The only surviving pilots for either side were the 3 Gundam pilots and Ezelcant's clone (because Kio goes out his way to save him.) Despite this they still act like it was a happy peaceful ending despite all the Vagans Kio and Asemu actually wanted to save dying.
    • MS IGLOO 2. Everybody dies, except for one lucky Federation soldier and a Feddie higher-up. It's no small wonder some people have compared this to V Gundam in terms of bleakness.
    • Amusingly subverted with ∀ Gundam, in which (despite it being a Tomino directed series) most of the cast survives, even those you wish got blasted to hell (looking at you Guin), or at least don't need to be (looking at you now, Gym). Course, this series was made long after Tomino apparently found a new lease in life, so...
    • Downplayed in the second half of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans Season 2, when the majority of the protagonists' side dies and the antagonists win. The kill count isn't that huge but all the Gundam pilots on Tekkadan's side are dead in the end which also includes The Hero, making it the first Gundam TV series to have the lead Gundam pilot killed. The director originally wanted kill off everyone in Tekkadan because he thought that they deserved to be punished. One of the producers suggested to have Kudelia killed as well but the writing staff were against it and wanted the characters to live. The survivors, at least, still ended up having stable lives after changing their identities, and it is implied that Ride starts another revolution that could end up succeeding this time.
  • Also Aura Battler Dunbine sees one character survive, a sylph by the name of Cham Fao, who Tomino seemed to have a soft spot for. Everyone else went down in flames and explosions, taking most of Earth and Byston Well with them.
    • That they tried to push, as it was mentioned that she was never seen again.
  • To illustrate how associated Tomino is with this Trope, the picture for the main page used to be him smiling. You know this means bad news when he does.
• Toward the Terra introduces many characters over the decades of time and light-years of distance it spans. In the end, the only named survivors are a small handful of minor characters, one major character who's been there the whole time, and one major character who was introduced in the second half. Compare that to the dozens-strong kill count of named characters, including both main characters, and it's a wonder the ending is as upbeat as it is.
• By the end of the first volume of Urotsukidouji (otherwise known as Legend of the Overfiend) the only survivors are Jyaku, Megumi, Nagumo, and Akemi; everyone else is killed by demons, Niki, or Nagumo in his transformed state.
• Uzumaki: In the end, everybody dies. Not only the main characters, but everybody who's in Kur�zu-cho. This is a big part of why it's effective as a Cosmic Horror Story.
• The Venus Versus Virus anime ends with every major character dead. The only characters who survive are minor comic-relief characters. The anime Overtook the Manga.
• In Wolf's Rain every character dies, one at a time. While the world dies. And then the world is born again. And everyone is apparently reincarnated a really long time later...possibly in the modern day.

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