Pokémon

• Cubone's mother was killed by Team Rocket. Cubone (originally named 'Orphan', or more accurately, 'Orphon') is portrayed as pining for its mother and wearing her skull as a helmet and carries her femur as a club.
  "It pines for the mother it will never see again. Seeing a likeness of its mother in the full moon, it cries. The stains on the skull it wears are from its tears. It wears its mother's skull, never revealing its true face."
• Mewtwo is well known as the victim of "years of horrific gene splicing".
• Gengar steals the life out of people
  • Gengar's pre-evolved form Haunter's “tongue is made of gas. If licked, its victim starts shaking constantly until death eventually comes.”.
• Lampent, who swoops in afterwards to steal their soul
• Duskull who if "it finds bad children who won't listen to their parents, it will spirit them away—or so it's said" and "loves the crying of children"
• Drifloon who "tugs on the hands of children to steal them away. It is whispered that any child who mistakes Drifloon for a balloon and holds on to it could wind up missing." It also carries souls away to the underworld, sometimes by accident.
• Shedinja "It is believed that this Pokémon will steal the spirit of anyone peering into its hollow body from its back"
• Alakazam "Its brain cells multiply continually until it dies. As a result, it remembers everything." In short, they all die of brain hemorrhages if their heads don't explode. Another way to interpret this, though, is that it continues to produce neurons throughout its lifespan, like a tree continues to grow throughout its lifespan. The cells keep multiplying, but they aren't necessarily the cause of death.
• Pinsir, who “grips prey with its pincers until the prey is torn in half. What it can’t tear, it tosses far.”
• Hypno feeds off of nightmares. He has been known to kidnap children and then feed of the nightmares of the children and their parents. There was an episode on this, and a subplot in HeartGold and SoulSilver.
• Banette is an abandoned doll that sprung to life. They are not happy they were abandoned.
• The reason Farfetch'd is rare is because people are hunting them to the brink of extinction. Apparently they are really good roasted with leeks.
• Ninetails, while usually gentle, is said to be highly intelligent and vindictive. According to legend, it will place a thousand year curse on anyone who pulls one of its tails as a joke. Another states it can cast a sinister light from its eyes and take control of its foe's mind.
• Yamask. They are the spirits of people, who carry mask was once their human face. Hilariously lampshaded here.

Human Characters

• Pokémon: James from Team Rocket is an escapee from a Gilded Cage. Becoming a criminal was his only way out.
• Jessie came from a lower class background where they often time had no money for food... so she and her mom ate snow and pretended like it was delicious...
• Your conversation with Lt. Surge in Pokemon Red And Blue/Yellow reveals there was a war not long ago and that humans used Pokémon in this war. Yes, Pokémon is a post-war recovery story.
• N Harmonia. N goddamn Harmonia.

• Shadow Games were underground events.
  • The first ever Shadow Game had high stakes and involved the players putting some money on their hand, then stabbing the money with a knife, keeping the money that ended up on the knife but risking stabbing themselves in the hand in the process.
• Losing was very nasty in the manga.
  • Yami often either killed the loser or drove them insane.
  • There was no "Shadow Realm" in the manga. It was the world of the dead. All those characters died.
• Kaiba was much nastier, outright trying to kill Yugi and his friends more than once.
  • His men were hired thugs and were armed with guns.
  • He even tormented his brother Mokuba by locking him in a room full of terrifying holographic monsters after he lost to Yugi.
  • Mokuba, who is quite nice in the better-known anime, once tried to poison Yugi and Joey in the manga.

• Monster Rancher is a rather dark animé masquerading as a light and happy children's show. This is mainly due to the censored English release, which contains none of the blood and throat-ripping in the original but retains numerous on-screen and implied deaths as well as plenty of actual (though massively toned down) violence. It's is actually, still, a pretty dark post-apocalyptic animé and has one of the biggest downer endings of any children's show (if you ignore the tacked-on Series 3).

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: In the original comic they are raised with one purpose: to murder Shredder, which they do in issue one.
• The Mask: In the original comic, the Mask was a psychotic killing machine similar to The Joker, but with horrific supernatural powers.
• Casper the Friendly Ghost: Though it is sidestepped by the creators of the original comic and later cartoon, Casper is actually about a dead, lonely and suicidal child.
  • Sidestepped in the movie, where Casper died when he wouldn't come in from sled riding and caught pneumonia and died. He remembered this happending when Cat was in his old room and he saw his sled.

• The Wizard of Oz: The directors tried to make the book, which is actually rather dark and disturbing, seem friendly, bubbly, and non-threatening without actually removing many of the dark elements.
  • The Tin Man lost all his body parts one by one. They were replaced by metal so he could survive long enough to see his love again. By the time he was whole, she had already fallen in love with a man made out of the Tin Man's lost body parts.
  • To the shock of many, Wicked with its twisted fantasy dystopia is actually a more faithful adaptation of the original book than the 1939 movie.

• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer it is revealed that the vampires and Sunnydale may or may not all be in Buffy's head.
• In her character profile on NBC's website for Community, it is stated that Britta was molested on her eleventh birthday by a man in a dinosaur costume, and her dad didn't believe her when she told him. This incident has been only vaguely alluded to on the show.

• Portal. On the surface, it's a puzzle game with the player as a tester of a Cool Gun. Beneath the layers though shows an incredibly dark place caused by Mad Scientists, the player had her entire life robbed from them, many were murdered For Science! - there's no way of knowing how many people have died in the facility before you, the entire situation with Cave Johnson, and that the A.I. that guides the player through each test area unfolds throughout the first game as rather homicidal with a fatally cavalier approach to human life.
  • This is made more explicit in Portal 2, as you make your way through the ancient test chambers. It's balanced by a more wacky view of the Aperture Science backstory, but parts of it are even darker than the original. Like the fate of poor Caroline, for an example.
• Invoked in the multiplayer mode of Assassins Creed III, which is marketed as a This Is Reality version of the Animus Database that allows people to relive the past. As the player levels up, they unlock cheesy, happy-go-lucky meta-commercials promoting it; completing difficult challenges, however, unlocks hacked versions, which contain "Erudito" pointing out true motives, hired actors, careful marketing and blatant lies to hide the truths about it.
• Gensoukyou, the setting of Touhou, is a fairly pleasant place now, but originally it was swarming with far more monstrous, humanitarian youkai, and the first humans to live there were all youkai exterminators who came to control the youkai population. That ZUN remains predictably unhelpful as to whether (and by how much) youkai eating humans still occurs makes the situation more unpleasant.

• Grace in El Goonish Shive is a Keet squirrel-girl who was bred as a Super Soldier and grew up under horrifying conditions. Hugs?

• Word Of God for Adventure Time is that Ooo is After the End, a combination of the "Mushroom War" and the return of magic killing all humans (except for Finn) and transforming the planet into the weird, wondrous and dangerous place it is now. The show itself heavily implies this through numerous background details and references, until the fifth season premiere "Finn the Human"/"Jake The Dog" finally explicitly states it, and it is just as horrifying as you can imagine.
  • The Ice King is a humorous Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, with one of the most tragic, terrifying cases of Loss of Identity as his origin story. "I Remember You" plays this for all its worth, contrasting his dark backstory with the incompetent clown he has become for full Tear Jerker effect.
  • Marceline is a "radical dame who likes to play games" and one of the most well-adjusted characters, and a good contender for having the worst life out of anyone in the show. This includes a monster (literally) of a father, a Missing Mom, living through the aftermath of aforementioned Mushroom War as a child, losing a Parental Substitute, being abused by a Bastard Boyfriend, and spending 1000 years with almost no friends until Finn came along.
• The Flintstones. The first thing Fred does in the morning is hit the 'snooze' button on his alarm clock. Since the alarm clock is actually a small talking bird, this means bashing it unconscious. And that's just scratching the surface — various animals and dinosaurs were used in various mundane situations such as terraforming, waste disposal, and housekeeping. And since they're Talking Animals, they often either snark at whoever's using them or make Aside Comments about their situation to the audience. If you treated animals like in the show nowadays, you'd be arrested.
  • Homer Simpson believed this trope and tried to use a pelican to mix cement. He then tells the bird "Come on, say something funny like 'It's a living'." The pelican then falls over dead.
• The Animated Series of Alf is based on Gordon Shumway's life on Melmac. Which exploded. Which means most everybody we see on that show died - including Alf's family. All those wacky surreal adventures ended with a light in the sky. Word of God has three of the supporting characters from that show survive, and the premise allows for others. But at least a good portion of them met their fate before the Tanners even found Alf.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has shown that the ponies have been on the brink of extinction on numerous occasions. Equestria only exists in the first place because a horde of Eldritch Abominations that feed on hatred devastated the ponies' original home (and almost froze their new home after they followed the ponies). Then Discord arrived to cause an "eternal state of unrest and unhappiness", which only stopped when the princesses arrived to lay the smack down. Then one of said princesses went mad with jealousy and almost froze Equestria again by trying to enact The Night That Never Ends.
  • It's also implied that Discord came to power by a prince falling in love with a princess with a Love Potion. They ended up so in love that they could not defend their kingdom from him.

• Steam Powered Giraffe, a generally lighthearted act featuring three performing automatons and a steampunk theme, has a shocking amount of this in their history. Even just a cursory glance over their official timeline and backstory reveals BodyHorror, fates worse than death, the funny robots experiencing the horrors of war first-hand, and the fact that Rabbit's core was once stolen and misused, resulting in an explosion that killed several people... including the descendant of his creator, Peter Walter II, whom Rabbit seemed to regard as a father figure. It is directly stated that this deeply bothers Rabbit, understandably. (It's later stated in his own bio that he spends his free time feeding the ducks in the Walter family cemetery.)