Troperville
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Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville— mighty Casey has struck out.
— "Casey at the Bat", Ernest Thayer
1. A finale to a movie, a TV series, a video game, or some other form of media that ends things on a low note, or in some other way that isn't quite happy. These tend to be rare, as there is overwhelming pressure to tie loose ends up in a " happy" way. Sometimes done as a way to assure that the show, once canceled, cannot be revived later (similar to the Grand Finale), but sometimes leaves the show on a cliffhanger.
2. A similarly low-key or unhappy ending to an episode of a normally "happy" series. Also rare, due to the same reasons as above. Sometimes used in an attempt to get Emmy nominations, or to at least surprise the viewer.
Sometimes, a Downer Ending can still conclude the character arcs in a very satisfying way, despite being dark. Sometimes, it can be overused to the point it's practically a Mandatory Twist Ending. If it comes out of nowhere or is the result of an Ass Pull then it may be the result of the writers summoning Diabolus Ex Machina. If enough people consider it fundamentally unjust, it may acquire the Discontinuity and Snicket Warning labels.
Kill Em All and The Bad Guy Wins are particularly cruel variations of this. A Prequel may require one, or both; the Happy Ending was Doomed By Canon.
If the ending mixes elements of happiness and Downer Ending, then it's a Bittersweet Ending. And if the whole adventure leading up to it turned out to be meaningless, then it's Shoot The Shaggy Dog. The Cliff Hanger is often a Downer Ending, but one implicitly not final; tune in next time to see how they retrieve this one.
See also Gainax Ending, Last Breath Bullet, World Half Empty, and Yank The Dogs Chain. Occasionally, part of a Tragedy. Sometimes a Foregone Conclusion, either because of a historical setting or if the work is a Prequel. The hero may or may not die. Realisation of an Inferred Holocaust may turn even the most Tastes Like Diabetes "happy ending" into one. Downer Endings easily lead to Tear Jerker or Nightmare Fuel.
Since this is a trope about the endings of stories, every entry is by definition a spoiler
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- One of the classic manga downer endings was Go Nagai's Devilman, which ended with the main character losing everything and everyone he loved (including his Plucky Girl girlfriend, savagely dismembered by a psychotic mob of humans), losing the final battle between his army of devilmen and Satan's army of demons and ending up ripped in half by Satan, who was really his best friend Ryou (who was in love with him), and quite dead. And humanity probably got all but wiped out, although it doesn't go into great detail about that. The sequel series, Violence Jack was, if anything, even nastier.
- Devilman Lady has a similar ending, and in fact Ends with a lead-in into Shin Violence Jack.
- As for Violence Jack. It turns out the main hero is Devilman Reborn, the main bad guy is created to TORTURE SATAN, created by Satan himself, and it ends with Satan and Devilman getting ready for round 2. And isn't in English. Anywhere.
- OK, just so we're clear on the chronology: Devilman-Violence Jack-Devilman Lady-Shin Violence Jack. Go Nagai really likes re-threading familiar ground (which in his case isn't necessarily a bad thing).
- Both exemplified and ultimately subverted by Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. Most of the individual arcs end with one of the main characters either brutally murdering or being murdered by one (or more) of their best friends, but the cycle of murders ultimately leads to a Good End for the main characters.
- Given that it's about war orphans starving to death in 1945 Japan, Grave Of The Fireflies has not just a downer ending, but a downer beginning and a downer middle. There's ironically a ray of sunshine in the ending in that the two ghosts are reunited in the afterlife, but overall, the whole thing is the downer of downers.
- Fortunately, however, fireflies also symbolize reincarnation.
- Unfortunately, the movie ends with the ghosts of the two characters sitting on the park bench and overlooking a modern city, suggesting that they refuse to move on to the next life and still haunt the place where they died even decades later.
- Strangely enough the story was based on a semi-autobiographic about the author and his sister. Considering that he wrote a book about it, he must still be alive, or maybe he's like Ghostwriter.
- He wrote the story due to feelings of guilt he had that he survived while his sister died. he remarks that there were many times he found food and ate it without bringing any back for her and wishes that he had died.
- Monster Rancher, an anime on Fox Kids TV, ended its second season with most of the cast sacrificing itself in a fight against the Big Bad. The main hero was sent back to Earth in shock. There was a third season where they were resurrected, but it was not shown on network TV.
- .hack//AI Buster, the novel and canonically first installment of the .hack// series, ends with Lycoris deleting herself and reincarnating as poisonous scenery.
- Nirvana-Flowers, to be exact. Yes, they are poisonous, but also beautiful. Also, they have a deeper meaning: Nirvana flowers are said to guide the living into the realm of death.
- The first episodes of Chrono Crusade suggested a more-or-less lighthearted comedy/action series, if with a few shocking parts. It ended with most of the cast either dead or mentally scarred for life and the Great Depression just around the corner. Azmaria's fate might have been enough to push it towards bittersweet, but Remington is metaphorically kicked between the legs when he sees that the villain survived, and is on his way to try and assassinate the Pope. End series.
- Fortunately, this is not the case in the manga version; while still hardly completely happy, it certainly wasn't as unbearably bleak as the anime. Most notably, the villain had the good graces to stay dead, and all of the main cast members survived (although Rosette still died much younger than she deserved, leaving Chrono to live on without her. So like I said: not completely happy.)
- The first season of Magic Knight Rayearth ends with the protagonists discovering they were being manipulated for almost the entire series, essentially assisting the suicide of the very person they were meant to rescue and being sent home, traumatized.
- Apparently that was the original ending. The continuation was made entirely because of fans raging against CLAMP.
- While the TV ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion is most definately a psychologically happy ending (in that Shinji finally obtains peace of mind), what happened physically in the real world is up to debate. End of Evangelion, however, plays this trope very straight.
- L/R Licensed by Royalty ended with at least one, if not both, of the main characters pointlessly dying within the literal last minute of the show. Much screaming and ranting from this editor ensued.
- There are no happy endings in Ghost In The Shell. The conspiracies are stopped and life goes on, but the whole thing will get covered up and most of the vilains go free. Not much left to do than count the losses and cleaning up the mess.
- Texhnolyze, while maintaining an extremely dark and depressing atmosphere throughout the show, still manages to pull off one of the saddest Downer Endings imaginable (could also be classified as Kill Em All).
- The Suzuka manga takes a sharp turn from what had previously been a Love Hina-esque Romantic Comedy after an unplanned pregnancy results in the couple contemplating an abortion before deciding against it, backing out of college and a promising career in track and field for the both of them so that the male protagonist may become a salaryman while the female stays home and cares for the baby. To top it off, the male protagonist's rival and the character who had perpetually played second banana to him in track go on to represent Japan in the Olympics. There's probably a moral in here somewhere.
- Futari Wa Pretty Cure had a Downer Ending in theory, but by the time it aired, it was already well known to even the most oblivious viewer that the Oddly Named Sequel starting next week would have to start by waking Mepple, Mipple, and Porun back up.
- Gilgamesh, itself an extremely dark and depressing show with overtones of hopelessness, has one of the most spiteful Shoot The Shaggy Dog Downer Endings ever. Kiyoko, having already lost everyone and everything she cared about, having been forced into debt, despair, and work as a call-girl by the very Countess supposedly trying to "save the world" whilst ruining the lives around her, and who in lonely desperation turned to a member of the opposing Gilgamesh who then impregnated her, dies after mutating into a birthing cocoon for the hybrid lifeform. In the climactic final battles against the twisted Enkidu, his cohorts, and the Gilgamesh forces, it's revealed that they're essentially unstoppable and un-killable. This leads to the Kill Em All deaths of pretty much everyone in the cast not already dead at this point. In the end, it's revealed that the TeaR organism responsible for the first near-apocalypse and which has instigated the horrible events of the story is actually a living manifestation of the Countess's own petty, dark, hateful, jealous, twisted heart, and that she's directly responsible for everything without realising it, despite ostensibly and ironically trying to fix it. Upon this revelation, she accepts the death of Humanity and allows TeaR to wipe out all life on Earth. To add insult to injury, in the odd, meta-void left behind, TeaR is then killed by the Gilgamesh spawn from the husk of what was left of Kiyoko, meaning that TeaR won't go on to recreate the planet in its image and it's all gone for good.
- Death Note: The last episode in the anime could be considered a downer, as everything goes to hell (at least for the main character) pretty damn quick. The investigation team finally confirms that Light is Kira, he's shot several times by Matsuda (Light's Number 1 fan), and after limping away dies at the hands of Ryuk who fulfills his promise of one day writing Light's name in his Death Note. Then again, the entire series was dark and Light is a Villain Protagonist, so one could argue that he got what he deserved.
- While this may be true for the manga, in the bonus parts of the anime DVD it's suggested that Light became a Shinigami.
- It's very much a mileage question, really.
- The live action version changed the events, but kept the general gist the same: Light is tricked into thinking L is dead and the task force in America. In reality, L had written his own death to occur 21 days in the future, negating the death Rem wrote, and the task force is around the corner watching everything on CCTV. Light's identity as Kira is proven, Matsuda shoots him (albeit in a more restrained manner than in the anime/manga) and Ryuk finishes him off. Light dies in his father's arms, and the rest of his family are told Kira killed him.
- Furthermore, we see that the surviving members of the task force's lives suck for having gone through the experience. They solved the case, but they are depressed.
- Technically, it's only Matsuda, and that's because he believes that Near killed Mikami, but doesn't have any proof of it. Ide, on the other hand, accepts the result, knowing that if Near lost, they'd all be dead.
- The biggest downer in the story is the implication that Misa committed suicide after learning that Light died (in the credits of the final episode of the anime, she is seen on the top of a building dressed in what appear to be funeral clothes).
- At that point, her life had been quartered, so most likely she would've died soon anyway (she was about 20-ish).
- Don't forget that since Rem saved her, Rem's remaining lifespan was transfered to her.
- Quartered isn't exactly right. It is implied her lifespan was already up once. Then that shinnigami died in saving her, which boosted her lifespan. She then quartered that lifespan sufficiently that Rem panicked. Rem died saving Misa, extending her lifespan again.
- Uh, I'd say that the biggest downer of all is Light's family being in ruins. Who cares about Misa? She got what she deserved, which was her death by her own hands on Valentines day, which is quite fitting. While Light's mother is a wreck, still mourning over the loss of her husband, the death of her only son and the wheelchair bound daughter, who is so traumatized by everything that has happened that she can't even WALK.
- Well, in chapter 97 word of god states that she attended her coming of age ceromony, so she did get a bit better.
- Misa cold-blooded murdered one member of L's task force, as well as several other people. If she survives, *that's* a downer ending.
- Berserk ends with the hero and all his friends being transported to Hell, where the Big Bads reveal the true nature of demons and persuade the hero's best friend, who the hero and his other friends recently rescued and who is completely fucked up from a year of being put to the torture, to sacrifice his friends in exchange for becoming one of their number. The best friend accepts their Deal With The Devil and from there, it all goes to hell as everyone is picked off one by one by a whole mess of things out of pure nightmare until only the hero and his love interest are left. Then the hero's arm gets caught in a demon's jaws and he's forced to chisel it off with a broken sword in order to save his love interest, only to get held down and lose his right eye as he's forced to watch as the love interest is raped by his former best friend, who has become a demonic god. The manga continues the story after this, but the anime ends there. Never watch the last episode of Berserk if you're feeling depressed.
- Weiss Kreuz Gluhen ends with Sena and his long-lost mother both dead, Omi having sacrificed what was left of his innocence in order to fully establish himself as the head of the morally dubious Takatori family, Ken in prison, Yoji amnesiac and lacking most of his personality, and Aya apparently bleeding to death on a city sidewalk from a gut wound while the many pedestrians walking past take no notice.
- Saikano has one of the most depressing finales ever: despite Chise's efforts, the world ends and the only survivor is apparently Shuuji. Chise herself becomes a tiny ball of light and the viewer is left with the impression that hope is utterly lost for good.
- Given that it involved Time Travel one would suspect the manga Golden Days by Takao Shigeru to have one of these. It does, and by the time Mitsuya returns to his time every single person (excluding his grandfather) he met in the past is dead - which is all the more sad, since there was a possibilty they would still be alive. (He only went about 70 years back in time.)
- Air undoubtedly qualifies, the final episodes follow Misuzu's excruciating battle to remain cheerful through bouts of extreme pain, ending with her death in the arms of Haruko. For those who paid close attention to the mythology of the Anime and the Game, there is still hope: The curse of Kannabi No Mikoto, Misuzu's first previous life, can be broken if one earns true love and happiness, which she does through Yukito and Haruko. So although she may have died breaking the curse, her next life will be free of it, and free to pursue happiness - if she has a next life, that is. It's All There In The Manual, hence strictly speaking it's a Bittersweet Ending with an uplifting and hopeful note - if it were not for the fact that the anime's ending is still rather ambiguous, even with the manual in hand. And of course, for poor grieving Haruko it all doesn't make one shred of a difference.
- By the end of Space Runaway Ideon, over half of the cast has been killed with many of the surviving protagonists expressing a rather bleak pessimism about their fates. Eventually, the series ends when the anime's title robot is destroyed along with the surviving cast members.
- Of course, that's nothing compared to the fact that everyone in the entire universe died. Or did they? The ending was very surreal and sort of left up to the interpretation of the viewer whether anyone had truly "died" in the end.
- Yoshida Akimi's hard-boiled shoujo manga Banana Fish is famous for being a Tear Jerker. When the manga came close to its end the author was flooded with fan mail that begged her not to kill off Ash, the main character. Unfortunately she did, but provided readers with several one-shot prequels and a bitter-sweet sequel only months after the series ended. (All of these can be found in Banana Fish - Another Story..
- The first season finale of Code Geass: the protagonist, Lelouch, has just been forced to kill his beloved half-sister because his own Evil Eye went haywire and drove her Ax Crazy, going on a rampage killing all the Japanese people she can see just when the series was about to make a brighter turn (the Japanese were about to have equal rights with their conquerors, and Lelouch was about to ally himself with the cause). As he leads his forces into battle with The Empire, he finds out that an agent of the Emperor has kidnapped his younger sister, the person for whom he's doing all this. In the process of going to rescue her, he loses his army and C.C., his closest ally, his trusted bodyguard Kallen has her faith in him badly shaken, and to cap it all off he ends up in an almost surely fatal Mexican standoff with his former best friend Suzaku, who now despises and wants to kill Lelouch because said half-sister was his girlfriend. It all ends with the two friends leveling their guns at one another.
- The second season makes it even more of a downer by showing what happened immediately afterward: Suzaku beats Lelouch senseless, Kallen runs away rather than doing anything to help, and Lelouch is dragged before the Emperor, who laughs in his face before giving him Fake Memories via Mind Rape, all in order to lure C.C. out. He spends an entire year living under these altered memories until C.C. returns and undoes the damage.
- The only good thing about R2's ending is that Lelouch accomplishes his goal and the world does become peaceful. Still a downer because in order for this to happen, Lelouch must be killed by Suzaku, who must forever don the mask of Zero.
- The ending is really only a downer for Lelouch and Suzaku, one being dead and all and the other having to live out the rest of his his life as Zero. For everyone else, it's either Bittersweet (Kallen, Nunnally and C.C. come to mind) or actually outright happy. It's a hell of a downer for Lelouch and Suzaku, though, especially after you realize that when the people who were in on/figured out Zero Requiem at the end die, Lelouch will just be a despot and a tyrant instead of the man who Xanatos Gambit'd everybody into world peace.
- Lelouch could have easily averted the final battle with simply diplomacy and working out a peace plan between all sides. Most of Tokyo is destroyed, out of the survivors of Tokyo nearly all of them are below the poverty line, Japan's Sakuradite, the only thing that could save them is mostly gone, thousands if not millions die uselessly, Europe is led by a bunch of moronic pansies, and Nunnaly is just as insane as the rest of her family.
- Lelouch enacted Zero Requiem because he felt he had to pay penance for his sins and those of his family. Was it a selfish act given the state of the rest of the world? Perhaps. But keep in mind that the new governing body does contain Schneizel, who's been geassed into helping Nunnally govern wisely and peacefully. As long as that guy's nuclear ambitions are controlled, he seems like a good enough ruler (Lelouch even admits/foreshadows this earlier).
- Diabolo ends with the main character, Ren, killing his evil best friend and cousin, then committing suicide-by-cop. There are only two characters left standing by the last page, and they're side characters: a prostitute and a guy with six months to live.
- Magical Princess Minky Momo: Classic magical girl anime from the 1980s, Minky Momo, ends with Momo, the main character, and princess of the Land of Dreams, being run over by a truck. She dies rather anticlimactically. However, she is reborn later as a human, but by then, the show's over. Later parodied in the very first episode of Excel Saga.
- Witchblade features the Witchblade breaking down and slowly destroying Masane's body (which it doesn't do in the Original version), and when she finally dies, her daughter's only indication that she died is a tiny shell made from Masane's remains.
- Franken Fran stars apprentice Mad Scientist Fran (who looks like a cross between Sally Ragdoll and Terra) who can perform miracle surgeries, but seems to be unheeding of the consequences. Of course, this being a "Little Shop Of Horrors"-style manga, a downer ending is all but guaranteed. For instance, Fran's emergency surgery on a girl who just rejected a homely boy saves her life, teaches her humility and the power of love, restores her body, brings the two of them closer, and suddenly transforms her into a giant praying mantis who eats her boyfriend the first moment they're alone. To the girl's credit, she did seem to like him for who he is and not how he'd taste. It's also an Outer Limits Twist, as well.]].
- Tsukihime has these in about half of its routes, especially in the True Ends.
- Arcueid, continually losing her power, in the end leaves her lover behind and goes back to eternal sleep in her castle, forever dreaming of her times spent with him.
- Akiha's route ends with the protagonist killing himself to restore her sanity, though it is hinted in the fandisc sequel that he might still be alive. Her normal ending simply has her spending the rest of her life as a mindless bloodsucker.
- Hisui's ends with her sister Kohaku, the mastermind behind most of the game's events, killing herself in guilt and to let Hisui live in peace. Akiha also dies. This is a really bittersweet ending since you still get the girl and it gives an incredible feeling of life goes on.
- The Epilogue, taking place after any (or all) of the routes, has the protagonist once again meeting the woman who taught him to value life. He thanks her for all she had done; during their talk, it is revealed that the protagonist will only have a few years left to live, less if he continues to use his Mystic Eyes.
- The plot of Fate/stay night revolves around There Can Be Only One, so most of the cast are killed off one way or another. Only the Unlimited Blade Works route is exempt.
- Heaven's Feel "short" Ending has Shiro defeating Black Saber with his Deadly Upgrade, but his mind is destroyed from going Beyond The Impossible. The Normal Ending has Shiro accomplish his task of destroying the corrupted Grail, but again, he dies from overload, and Sakura spends the rest of her life waiting for him to return (he doesn't).
- There is an even earlier ending where Sakura is in danger of becoming psychotic ( from magical energy deprivation), forcing Shiro to choose between his ideals (saving the lives of others) and the one he loves (who potentially could go insane and kill many people and, although unknown to Shirou or even her, already has killed many people whilst unconsciously walking around the town looking for magical energy). If the player chooses the ideals, Sakura's death emotionally unsettled Rin; it is implied that the War ends with Shiro, having become another Emiya Kiritsugu, killing all the remaining Masters (including Ilya and Rin) and destroying the Grail, ending up a broken person, with no emotions, and having killed everyone he cares for. Really, most of the longer and more complex Bad Ends can be considered Downer Endings, considering that the story takes place in a Multiverse.
- The real downer ending is normal HF. The True End is actually almost as good as the UBW Good End, simply swapping Rider for Saber and making everyone even more badass.
- Narutaru, the anime, had No Ending. In the manga, however... Every character got their own little downer ending, for one thing, but it all culminated when everyone in the entire world dies except for Shiina and Mamiko, both of whom are pregnant. The briefest glimmer of hope is given in the final pages, which show Shiina's daughter and Mamiko's son, in an Adam And Eve Plot.
- This is really just a downer series. Example - one supporting character gets anally raped, cut up, decapitated, and has his head stuck on his Creepy Doll.
- Zeta Gundam. The Titans have been defeated, but with the exception of Kamille, Fa, and the crew of the Argama, everyone else is dead or missing. Axis Zeon emerges as the strongest power after the war, and while Kamille succeeds in killing Scirocco, he got his brain fried as a result. Then again, if you know that Kamille Gets Better in ZZ Gundam, then the ending isn't as bad.
- At the end of Angel Cop, All the main and secondary characters are dead, Japan's government doesn't change at all despite our heroes' efforts, and it's headed toward a complete economic collapse. Angel was badly wounded and Raiden had to activate a bomb within his body that would kill Lucifer. Most likely, both of them were killed in the resulting explosion.
- It wasn't a complete downer, Angel was only knocked down by the resulting explosion that came after shooting Raiden in the head, Asura survived the fight with Lucifer and left with Angel away into parts unknown in the end, Taki escaped his custody at the end and killed Maisaka+Nogawa with a bomb.
- Often referred to as one of Yoshiyuki "Kill Em All" Tomino's happier endings, the ending of Heavy Metal L-Gaim isn't an upper to any significant degree, even if everyone kind of screws themselves over in reality. Sure, all the heroes live, but the villain succeeds in his plan to kill the main characters family off by causing irreparable brain damage to the hero's little sister, and in a bit of a stupid move on his part, he goes to live alone with her on some planet away from everyone else in the team. Meanwhile, neither Love Interest gets the nod, the best friend and the fairy sidekick may think they are dying of radiation poisoning and leave the group to wander alone somewhere, and even the dude who does the Heel Face Turn doesn't get to be with the one he loves.
- Junji Ito's Uzumaki. Everybody succumbs to the curse of the spiral. Everybody. And it'll keep happening, again and again...
- Despite the fact that the mood in the School Days anime starts very happy and then gradually goes downhill, the ending is still a big shock when the pregnant Sekai kills the male protagonist Makoto with a knife, then gets slaughtered brutally by her rival Kotonoha, who slices her open with a hacksaw to see if she's really pregnant. Kotonoha then carries Makoto's head around on her sailing trip. Brrrr! "Nice boat", indeed.
- Likely the only positive thing about this ending is that Makoto, here a dimwitted and lecherous scumbag who uses the girls around him for his own pleasure, gets what he deserves.
- Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto ~Natsu no Sora~ ends with protagonist Sora returning to her hometown and succumbing to her heart condition. This is especially egregious since she seemed to be mostly fine for the largest part of the series.
- Lost Universe, despite being a mostly light hearted 'action/adventure' type anime, kind of slaps the viewer in the face by ending with Canal destroyed, Kain apparently dead, and Millie waiting at home for both of them to return. There may be a little hope as Millie hears a ship landing outside, but it's strongly implied that this is just a dream. Oh, and to make it even worse, it's revealed that despite the implied Kain/Millie potential romance, the two are actually related, as Millie's grandfather, who is also the Big Bad, was the brother of Kain's grandmother (making the granddad Kain's great-uncle). This may be even more of a shock to fans of the Slayers series, since Lost Universe was created by the same people and is, in fact, supposed to be the "Next Universe Up" from the Slayers world.
- Your Mileage May Vary on this one. Some people didn't see it so much as a downer ending as more of an ambiguous/bittersweet ending. Also, Kain and Millie live in a futuristic world with advanced medical knowledge where there may be no more need for an incest taboo, like the universe in Tenchi Muyo. Even if they don't, they are second cousins, which is generally considered distant enough to breed without complication. Incest is relative, after all.
- The end of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Part 1, where Jonathan dies to save his wife and unborn child, taking his adoptive brother turned villain, Dio, down to the bottom of the sea with him.
- X/1999. Almost the entire named cast is pretty much dead or assumed so, either in mutual takedowns or as suicidal charges against the Big Bad, and Tokyo is largely destroyed AND flooded. The sole survivor is the protagonist, but even he loses his two best friends, one of whom arbitrarily does a Face Heel Turn the literal instant the protagonist chooses to join the heroes to protect the two of them. The villains don't get to celebrate this new ally for long, because the Face Heel Turn-ed friend eventually chooses to screw the rules and decides to Kill Em All.
- Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. At the end, Al's friend Bernie attempted to fight and destroy the Federation's latest Humongous Mecha, the Gundam NT-1, or risk having the peaceful Space Colony nuked. Except that he was himself using a damaged grunt unit. And the pilot of NT-1 was Chris, Al's neighbor who's attracted to Bernie (the feeling is mutual). The two dueled until Bernie was killed and Chris gravely injured. In front of Al. "After Al found out the nuke carrier had been stopped and rushed to tell Bernie." And then Chris asked Al about his "cousin" Bernie...
- In Doubt, when you finally think everything is over, Hajime is hung by another Wolf, and Yuu picks up Mitsuki's cellphone, which ends up in Mitsuki getting into her Wolf mentality again and killing Yuu. Obviously, Rei gets away with all of this.
- A very old example is ''Triton Of the Sea''
 , When the title character spends the entire series avenging his family, who were annihilated 5000 years ago by the bloodthirsty Poseidon family, only to find out from after defeating the Big Bad that it was the Triton family who were the bloodthirsty ones and he proved it by committing genocide, thus causing a Heroic BSOD. THE END. It should be noted that this is the first series written and directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, and was considered a kid's show at the time. So Yeah....
- Pom Poko ends with one of the three Transformation Masters dying, another one going insane and forming a Buddist Dance Cult, before proceeding to turn his 'male parts' into a treasure ship, and sailing away (with some of the tanuki who couldn't transform) to reach Nirvana, not realising that they're sailing to their deaths. Meanwhile, Gonta and another group of tanuki have one final attack against the humans which results in them all getting killed. In an act of desperation, the rest of the tanuki stage one final performance - of how their home used to be, before appealing to the humans. Although they are slightly successful it is too late, thus forcing the tanuki to do what the kitsunes did: blend into society, abandoning those who couldn't transform. The film tries to end on a happy note by having all the tanuki meet up, rejoicing, but it doesn't really work, and there isn't enough happy to make it a Bittersweet Ending.
- The ending of Chirin no Suzu (or The Ringing Bell, as it's known in English) is the story of a lamb who is out to avenge the death of his mother, who was killed by a wolf. After realizing he can't kill the wolf in the state he's currently in, he offers to become the wolf's apprentice. After many years of training Chirin is now an adult, very rugged and disfigured with many battle scars, and the wolf decides to bring him to the farm where he grew up to kill a sheep and bring it back to him. Once he kills the guard dogs, he makes his way into the barn, chooses a sheep and charges - but he realizes that he can't bring himself to do it, because she has a lamb with her. He leaves, but the wolf confronts him. Chirin stabs the wolf with his misshapen horns, and the wolf congratulates him on succeeding with his goal before dying. Chirin decides to go back to live on the farm, but the other sheep are afraid of him. He realizes that without the wolf he no longer serves a purpose, as the sheep won't accept him and the wolf he has grown to love as a father figure is dead, so he goes back to the mountains where the wolf lived, during a blizzard. He is never heard from again and is presumed to have died; but he, or at least his ghost, was rumored to have visited the valley, as the sheep heard the ringing of a little bell that was never removed from his neck.
- Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade ends with the protagonist being forced to shoot his love interest in order for her to remain a bargaining chip in the Wolf Brigade's schemes against the police. The last line after the event? "And then the Wolf ate up Little Red Riding Hood".
- 5 Centimeters a Second had the two lead characters meeting by chance in school and quickly falling in love with each other. However, since their parents' jobs require them to move a lot, they quickly lose contact with each other (the anime is set in the 1990s, where cell phones and e-mail are not as widespread as today). Both characters basically never see each other again, which causes a great deal of emotional pain to both of them. The film ends with a Tear Jerker montage of how they both move on with their lives. What makes it even worse is when the film teases the audience by having the two leads pass each other on a railroad crossing, but neither recognizes the other until it is too late, and a passing train separates them.
- Your Mileage May Vary. Until they passed each other, the main character had been hung up on her and was in the process of ruining his life through pining. After the trains pass, it's implied that he gets over her. Closure. Some see it as more a Downer Ending subverted into a Bittersweet Ending.
- Another Gundam example in the novel, Hathaway's Flash, where Mafty Navilles Erin aka Hathaway Noa is captured in the end and was sentenced to death by Bright Noa, who had no idea it was his own son he was executing. Ouch.
- That, and moments before he's executed, the ghost of Quess Paraya appears to him, tells him she never loved him, and tells him that his struggle, started by her death that made Mafty go against the Federation, was all fruitless and his reason for starting it a lie. Double ouch.
- Tokyo Babylon. So, the hero's Love Interest turns out to be a sociopath, kills The Hero's sister, cripples his grandmother and then walks away like nothing happened. Nice.
- Bang.
- It's worth mentioning that despite being a downer, this ending is awesome.
- Mobile Suit Gundam kicked off the Real Robot genre with its hopeful and optimistic ending. Right after it came Fang of the Sun Dougram. In it The Earth Federation wins, the La Resistance surrenders, the heroes are surrounded and, instead of at least giving us a Bolivian Army Ending, give up and destroy the titular mech. What's worse is that the viewer is told in the very first seconds of the first episodes that he's up for a Downer Ending, but since the show is quite long, it's easy to forget that.
- Kurokami also end in that way. after lost of sacrifices final baddies are destroyed and everyone could live happy life. It appears that nothing really changed curse is still intact and to beat it final sacrifice is required which nearly makes everything completely pointless. Also to Daichi finally concludes that even if that curse if lifted, probably countless other curses exist.
- Kite manages to pull this off with the came-out-of-nowhere murder of Oburi while Sawa patiently awaits him at his apartment for their Happily Ever After.
- The Kuroshitsuji anime has quite the downer ending where we see Sebastian rowing a boat with Ciel laying inside of it in a bed of white roses, just like in the second ending animation. However, we see Ciel isn't dead yet and around him in the water are the Cinematic Records of his memories up to that point. When they reach their destination Ciel finally sits on a bench (the same one as in the final shot of the opening theme) and looks at Sebastian, ready for what's to come. Sebastian tells him he'll make his death as quick and painless as he can, but Ciel retorts saying he wants him to make it as painful as possible. Sebastian agrees and we see him gently caress Ciel's face, removing his eye patch in the process. The last few shots we get are of Ciel's 'normal' eye wide and what looks like almost sorrowful and frightened as he stares at the demon. Then Sebastian leans down and our final shot is of his lips curling into a smile before it cuts off to the credits.
- Not to mention what happened an episode or two before that where Maylene, Bard, and Finny have to kill Pluto (Plute, Pleute, Puru?). We also don't know what happened to the three afterwards, although we're left with the knowledge of "when I left they were still breathing".
- Quite a few of the manga arcs have had downer endings, too. The Jack the Ripper arc with Madam Red dying. The Circus arc where we see all the first tier members die, except Snake. And let's not forget all the children Ciel had burned alive when he set Baron Kelvin's estate on fire, although his reasoning was that the children would never be themselves and remain in such a traumatized state that killing them was probably the best option. These are the first ones that come to mind.
Comics
- The "Going Sane" Batman arc, in which the Joker has been sane for six months while Batman has been recovering in a small town two hundred miles from Gotham. As soon as Batman reappears, Joseph Kerr runs out on the love of his life, sinks into the water, and emerges with a maniacal grin...
- The Punisher arc The Slavers. All Frank's really achieved is a few more corpses and a little more of his own humanity chipped away. The horror still continues, no one is redeemed. And the worst part? It's based on real-world crimes.
Film
- Chinatown is among the most famous: It turns out Mrs. Mulwray was raped by Noah Cross and gave birth to his daughter. After Noah Cross killed Hollis, she tries to escape to Mexico. But when Noah Cross shows up to stop her, she shoots him and is then shot by the police. Noah Cross then takes her daughter/sister, which was why she was trying to escape. All while the water conspiracy will never be revealed. The kicker? JJ can't do squat about it. As the quote goes: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
- Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. David, the little robot boy, was programmed to love his human mother just as a real child would, and when she abandons him in the woods (to save his life, but he doesn't understand this) he spends the rest of the film trying to find the Blue Fairy, thinking she can turn him into a real boy that his mother will be able to love. In the end, he finds an underwater replica of the Blue Fairy, and stays there wishing to be human for so long that he gets frozen inside the developing glacier. Two thousand years later, he's discovered by aliens, who use his mother's DNA to create an imperfect clone who will die once it falls asleep. David spends one idyllic day with her and then, as she dies, decides to die as well. It's hard not to cry.
- They're not aliens; they're the extremely advanced machines, the "descendants" of human-created robots like David.
- Memento is actually very depressing. It's suggested in the film that Leonard killed his own wife accidentally, and that Leonard's already killed the man he's been looking for, and is basically going around killing innocent men. Not only that, but he lies to himself (by manipulating the evidence before he can forget to do so) so that he'll have some meaning in his life when he finds out he's already found the "rapist."
- Not to mention that at least once he's been manipulated into someone's dirty work (unrelated to his ongoing investigation).
- It's could also be argued that his wife used his short-term memory loss to commit suicide by insulin overdose. The film alludes to an even more distressing future in that Teddy was helping Leonard find John G's who were generally bad men, at least; having killed Teddy (because he was also a John G), no such buffer remains, and Leonard's killings will be indiscriminate.
- Without Teddy, however, it is doubtful whether Leonard would be able to find any other target. Not to mention the Memory Gambit he pulled by tattooing Teddy's plate number on his arm. It actually is a little intriguing to find out what would happen next.
- If anything, Teddy was Leonard's only real friend. At the end of the film, though liberated from Teddy, Leonard has only sold himself into the service of Natalie, who has totally no compunction about using him.
- The dark comedy film Withnail And I, ended on a sad note, with Marwood (I) and Withnail likely to never see each other again and only the wolves knowing what a good actor Withnail can really be. But even that's not as bad as what originally happened where Withnail pours the wine down the gun, drinks it and pulls the trigger, blowing his brains out.
- The original ending of Ridley Scott's The Future Is Noir movie Blade Runner (1982) (restored in the later Director's Cut and the "Ultimate Director's Cut" aka 25th Anniversary Release) was apparently considered too dark by studio execs and test audiences, so for the version shown in theatres they slapped on a happy ending with the characters driving through the green fields of the countryside in bright sunlight. Considering the entire movie is set in a dark dismal Los Angeles in a dystopian cyberpunk world of 2019 where it always rains, that's a truly bizarre moment, more similar to a dream or a drug trip. What were they thinking?
- Given Philip K Dick's drug use, it's not as out of place as it could be.
- Brazil (1985) by Terry Gilliam. You know it's a Downer Ending when the fact that the protagonist goes insane in the torture chair (and will probably be executed soon thereafter) can be considered the most merciful thing to happen to him!
- He doesn't so much go insane as switch off from reality; in fact one may even take some hope from the fact that in his mind he's completely free, although it's a pathetic hope in an unsympathetic world.
- Twelve Monkeys: The Army of the Twelve Monkeys is a red herring; James Cole has basically wasted his time during the entire movie, and the plague that will devastate the earth is released anyway.
- This might almost shade into Bittersweet Ending, since there's an implication that someone else from the future has been sent back to do what James could not, preventing the release of the virus.
- Well, the scientists' goal never was to prevent the virus, they explicitly said past cannot be changed. They were just there to get a sample for the virus, to cure the future.
- You're forgetting the bit at the end where James realizes that the Army doesn't release the virus, and heads to the airport to flee the country with Kathryn because the FBI are hunting him. He reaches the airport, and Kathryn recognizes the man who actually does release the virus. James goes charging after him as he runs for his plane, pulls a pistol out his jacket and is promptly gunned down by the FBI agents watching the airport for him.
- He's not just gunned down right in front of Kathryn, but also right in front of his past self as a child.
- Remeber the final shot of the film, with the guy who releases the virus on the plane chatting to the woman in the seat next to him? Look closer. It's the woman from the group of scientists that send Cole back. Cole's actions leave enough evidence that they identify where the virus came from, and they send her back to get the sample of the virus from before it mutated.
- The French film La Haine ends with one of the three main characters, Vinz, being killed accidentally by a police officer. The cop and Vinz's friend Hubert point their guns at each other, and a shot is heard right as the film cuts to black.
- The Chinese film The Warlords ends with Pang Qingyun (surprisingly well-acted by Jet Li) killing his sworn brother Zhao Erhu for personal gain, only to be killed by the third brother Wuyang in an My Name Is Inigo Montoya moment... after Wuyang killed Erhu's wife to protect the brotherhood, mistakenly believing that Qingyun had wanted her. And the downer part? The three corrupt generals who basically antagonized the brothers throughout the film and manipulated the entire course of events get off scot free, after Wuyang's execution.
- In retrospect, it may be compared to the Peach Garden Oath brothers of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms: the death of the second brother ends up dragging down the other two to their own demises, and it's the older brother's fault.
- Chinese films are good at Downer Endings in general. John Woo's The Killer ends with the hero dead and with his eyes ruined so they can't be used to have his love interest's eyes fixed, his love interest all but blind forever, and the hero's Cowboy Cop ally being arrested by his fellow cops after gunning down the villain in cold blood to avenge his friend and keep him from getting away with it all, preventing him from using the Killer's money to have her eyes fixed either.
- No Country For Old Men. The hero dies. Offscreen. His wife dies. The villain escapes with nothing more than a broken arm. Tommy Lee Jones visits his elderly friends.
- On top of that, Jones has a dream which could be interpreted as being about his father preparing for his arrival in heaven. His final line:"And then I woke up" can also be interpreted to mean he now has "woken up" to the delusion that there is an afterlife. Bummer, huh?
- OR, as suggested on the film's Wild Mass Guessing page, it suggests the whole movie was just a nightmare the sheriff had. The villain's seemingly unstoppable rampage does have a certain dreamlike quality to it (it doesn't really matter how vicious and mean you are, you can't go around murdering people willy-nilly and have society seemingly ignore it like it does in the film).
- The Mist. The hero leads an escape voyage. As expected, not everything goes according to plan. Mere minutes after killing the religious zealot, Ollie is killed by a giant enemy crab. The main character and 4 others (two elderly people, a young lady, and his child son) escape in a car. Driving miles and miles through the mist, they find no survivors. The main character happens upon his house, where he sees his dead wife strung against the wall with the acid-web. They continue driving until they run out of gas. The main character has Ollie's gun, and while his son is asleep, silently agrees with the other 3 that death would release them. He holds the gun to his son's head, and shoots just as he's waking up. Then he kills the other 3. Turns out there were only 4 bullets. None left for him. He falls out of the car on purpose, in his distress, screaming for the monsters in the mist to come claim him. He hears some noise behind him... When army folk in gas masks and flamethrowers come. He stares dumbfounded at them. He just killed his own son, and for no reason at all.
- Of course, this differs from the original short story, in which no convenient soldiers arrive to clear the mist and kill the monsters... the mist and the monsters are still very much present. However, the characters are still alive by the end of the story, and while the situation is still grim, a very, very small inkling of hope is suggested by the last few lines. Still a downer ending, in a sense, but not as much as the theatrical adaptation.
- The Butterfly Effect. In the director's cut, Ashton Kutcher's character realizes that everyone - and we mean everyone - would be better off without him. He goes back to the womb and asphyxiates himself with his umbilical cord, resulting in happy endings for all but our nonexistent protagonist.
- It actually gets slightly more downer if you pick up on the infrequently mentioned fact that the protagonist is said to be a 'miracle baby' on account of his mother's numerous miscarriages/stillbirths before he was born... which implies that the whole "go back and kill yourself in the womb because your very existence brings misery to your friends and family" thing has already been played out X number of times by his would-be siblings. Cursed family or what!?
- And then more so when you pick up on the even less mentioned fact that his Dad had to keep going back so that the protagonist would NOT die in the womb. Talk about futile.
- The theatrical ending's no picnic either. The hero discovers that everyone's problems stemmed from the fact that he "clicked" with his future girlfriend when they were little, so he averts this by being mean to her on the first day they meet. They never become friends, she has no reason to stick around when her parents divorce and leaves with her mom, her brother doesn't get molested by his father, no one gets blown up, no one becomes a hooker... fast forward to the "present", where both the hero and the girl are both beautiful, successful people but wouldn't know each other if they passed in the street (which they Anviliciously do).
- The original ending to the 1986 film Little Shop Of Horrors, which is exactly the same as the stage play. Audrey II eats human Audrey, and then eats Seymour after he tries to attack it. Miniature Audrey plants are sold all over the city (if not the country), and the plants take over New York just before the end credits roll. The film ending was changed (using reshoots and edits) due to the disastrous reception it got at test screenings, though the final musical number "Don't Feed the Plants" did make it to the soundtrack album.
- The Candy Snatchers is about the kidnapping of a Catholic schoolgirl, and it focuses quite heavily on her plight as well as the complications that arise. It doesn't end well. The girl is still bound, gagged, and blindfolded and locked in a box buried in the ground, while the only person who knows she's there, a mentally retarded child, runs off, having forgotten her. She screams through her gag all throughout the ending.
- Cloverfield, anyone? Every character dies except one, and her death is implied; the monster responsible might have possibly lived, and New York (and the people living there) has been almost completely destroyed. Oh, yeah, and some people got motion sickness.
- It's not as bad as at first glance. Word Of God states that the monster died from the saturation bombing of the city.
- In Mirrors, the movie ends with the main character, Ben, seemingly becoming trapped in the realm of mirrors or somewhat similar. He just saved his wife and kids from the fate his sister met at the hands of an evil demon who lives in mirrors, and now they may never see him again. (Unless there's a sequel, the ending has way too many loose strings left untied)
- Manos The Hands Of Fate ends with the main character becoming a slave to the villain, the wife and five-year-old girl becoming the villain's concubines and the movie being seen by a few poor, tortured souls.
- The Great Silence ending was so bleak that an alternate, upbeat ending had to be created. In the original ending the sheriff is dropped through the ice of a frozen-over lake, the hero is killed by Loco, and the hero's girlfriend is killed 5 seconds later while trying to avenge him. And all those villagers the hero was trying so hard to save? The bounty hunters gun them all down before riding off.
- By the end of Lord Of War, due his career in weapons smuggling, Yuri's uncle and brother are killed, his parents have disowned him, his wife has divorced him and taken his only son with her, and the Interpol agent chasing him through the whole film has him dead to rights thanks to bullets in said dead brother's corpse. However, he manages to escape a trial because he acts as a proxy for the United States Government. The film then ends with Yuri continuing his trade, supplying weapons to various armed conflicts in the world.
- Alien 3. The second film ended with Ellen Ripley, her new "surrogate" daughter, her Marine love interest, and a battered android finally getting a happy ending... until everyone but Ripley is arbitrarily killed off in an escape pod crash at the opening of the next movie. Making matters worse, she's stuck in a penal colony at the "ass-end of space", the prisoners have no weapons, every prisoner (save for one) is killed by the final scene, and Ripley ends up taking a swan dive into a leadworks to stop her employer from harnessing the Xenomorph species. The film ends with the hulk of her escape pod sitting in silence, until her final transmission from the original movie plays in the background.
- Michael Biehn, who played love interest Hicks in Aliens, was so angered by the perfunctory death of his character that, to allow the third movie to use a photograph of him to depict Hicks, he demanded a sum of money equal to the paycheck he got for the entire second movie. He received it.
- Worse when we learn that she was simply cloned later, making the whole effort futile.
- Terminator 3 ends with The End Of The World As We Know It. While it was always set to happen, some people didn't accept it.
- Not to mention the killing of the franchise.
- If you don't count The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Salvation.
- Beneath the Planet Of The Apes ends with Taylor, his girl, and the guy who came to rescue him dying - and while falling, Taylor triggers an Earth Shattering Kaboom. The Insignificant Little Blue Planet speech that follows makes it even worse.
- Subverted in Waynes World. It initially ends with the girlfriend not getting a record deal and going with the sleazy villain while Wayne's house explodes and Garth dies. Of course, that ending sucked, so they went with the Scooby Doo ending for a brief period before settling on the "Super Happy" ending. The sequel ends similarly, but with a "Thelma and Louise" ending instead of a Scooby Doo ending.
- Ginger Snaps. You know it's bad when the best you can say about it is "hey, at least not EVERYBODY dies".
- Boytown. Which, suprisingly enough, is not a black comedy.
- Hero. Sword betrays Snow and convinces Nameless not to go through with the assassination. Snow confronts him and at the last second he drops his sword and lets her kill him. Snow is devastated so she embraces him from behind and then drives her sword through both of their bodies. Nameless is executed. The final scene is of a wall peppered with arrows apart from a perfect, empty human silhouette.
- Moulin Rouge (the 1952 version): it plays out like the typical last-minute catch, with Toulouse-Lautrec racing to find and apologize to his love... and he doesn't make it. He goes into an absinthe-induced stupor and dies, while people misunderstand his art and motivations. Before he dies, the dancers from the first scene in the Moulin Rouge come back to dance for him one last time before fading out as he dies. The only thing that stops it from becoming a total Downer Ending is the hint that he will go to Heaven.
- The 2001 Moulin Rouge also ends sadly, but it's a Foregone Conclusion anyway. It's also implied that the act of writing their story has enabled Christian to deal with his grief and that he will now move on with his life as a successful writer.
- Another downer Bio Pic is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, largely because the film is less concerned with his successes as an actor and friend than his failings as a sometimes abusive husband and father and his prickly relationships with directors, the result of a permanent Man Child nature induced by an indulgent mother. By the end, he's depicted as a man who's almost completely alone in life because he's alienated everybody else; although he does fulfil his dream of starring in Being There, it turns out to be his second-to-last film. The death isn't depicted on screen, but a text crawl reveals the following: he gets nominated for an Oscar for Being There but doesn't win, he left his kids token sums in his will (the fourth wife he was preparing to divorce got most of the rest), and he apparently was pining for his first wife until he died.
- The Incredible Shrinking Man, which has a false ending part-way through, suggesting that he will just have to learn to live with being child-sized. Then it all goes wrong, he keeps shrinking, his wife thinks the cat ate him and he gets trapped in the basement. But it's okay, right? Because he's struggling to survive and climb the stairs so he can get his wife's attention when she comes in. No. His wife leaves with his best friend, never knowing he wasn't eaten, and he realises he's going to shrink away to nothing. All his struggling has achieved nothing and it ends with him getting philosophical and accepting the coming end, staring at the stars.
- Tale of the Mummy: Most downer endings will settle for ruining a few characters' lives, maybe killing the main cast; this film, however, takes it to a new level. By the end, most of the cast is indeed dead. The hero is the last one to go, having just been forced to shoot his girlfriend, before learning too late that it didn't really solve anything. The villain's human servant is locked up as a woman mad, what's left of the cast is none the wiser, and all the character death kind of shrinks into insignificance when you realize that the mummy's got himself a new body, and now he's all set to wreak destruction and misery on the world as soon as the credits finish rolling...
- In Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, a school bus accident has destroyed the lives of many families in a small Canadian town. A lawyer (played by Ian Holm) intends to get them a cash settlement for the loss of many of the town's children. The time spent by the lawyer building this case takes up much of the movie, and when it finally comes time for a deposition to find the true facts about the accident, it's unraveled by a young teenager (played by Sarah Polley) who lies about what happened that day. She does this to get back at her father (who is in an incestuous relationship with her), thereby robbing the families of any sense of closure. The lawyer's attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter (see in the beginning of the film) are rebuked, and he is left depressed. The film ends with the lawyer witnessing a bus driver (who was behind the wheel of the school bus that crashed) motioning passengers onto a coach bus.
- Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, although really, that's a Foregone Conclusion. They both die.
- Das Boot. All the German submariners survive their dangerous mission (by a hair), only to get bombed by the Allies as they return to the shore. Most of the crew runs to shelter, some of them apparently wounded. The war correspondent runs back to the dock to find three of the most characterized of his fellow submariners dead, and the mortally wounded captain keeling over just after he watched the submarine we've been following the whole movie sink in its dock.
- The Empire Strikes Back. Luke Skywalker has just replaced his hand because of a duel with a certain Dark Lord of the Sith who immediately afterwards claimed is actually his daddy, his friend and yet-to-be-revealed sister Leia had witnessed her love Han Solo become encased in carbonite by said Dark Lord, and good ol' Lando and Chewie fly off to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt and Boba Fett. Luke, Leia and the droids just stare out into the galaxy while the depressingly beautiful theme "Han Solo and the Princess" woefully leads to the film's end and the eventual Return of the Jedi, literally.
- Star Wars seems to love this. Let's see what other downers we have:
- Phantom Menace: Qui-Gon has just been killed, and the Sith have been revealed to exist in the galaxy again after a thousand years in hiding.
- Revenge of the Sith: The Jedi are almost extinct, Anakin is Darth Vader, Palpatine is Emperor and being a Large Ham about it. To add insult to injury, the last line of the saga is given to Threepio, a droid.
- Return of the Jedi: is lucky. The Emperor is dead, although at the cost of Darth Vader's life.
- Dante in Clerks specifically references the Empire ending as a Downer Ending, adding that he likes it because "That's what life is: a series of down endings." This line had more meaning in the original cut of the film, which ended with a random guy robbing the store and shooting him.
- The Ice Harvest. The movie isn't so bad, but the alternate ending, including the canonical one from the books, pretty much defines downer. In the book, the main character kills his corrupt boss, kills the woman he's been fantasizing about because she has a razor to his throat, kills his partner who was going to kill him too, manages to get rid of the hitman, and survives to morning with the money and is in the middle of making his getaway, only to die via camper crushing his chest after stopping to help the owner because he was writing on the back of it with a marker.
- The Green Mile, where affable Magical Negro Coffey is still executed even though he is 100% not guilty of his crime, but not before he accidentally gives Edgecombe possible everlasting life, cursing him to have to watch all his friends and loved ones die around him while he continues to survive.
- Barton Fink has a very grim ending, with the titular protagonist having the script he struggled with for ages rejected, his boss hating his guts and telling him he'll conform or else, his home burned down by the only person he could really identify with, who turned out to be a Nazi serial killer who also murdered the woman he loved, one of his heroes and possibly his family. And all he has is said serial killer's package (not a euphemism), which he hasn't opened. And then he has an awkward conversation with a woman in a bikini. The end.
- Dancer in the Dark. An immigrant woman, going blind from a progressive genetic disease, works under exploitative conditions at her factory job, is saving up money doing some kind of terrible laborious piecemeal work at home to pay for an operation for her son so he won't go blind from the same disease she has, has a landlord who finds out about her son's operation money and steals it to pay for his wife's shopping debts, ends up killing the landlord by accident, goes to prison and gets hanged while singing tragically.
- Bittersweet Ending is probably a better classification. Yes she is executed tragically for something she doesn't deserve, but only because she deliberately refused to hire further legal assistance instead opting to get her son the operation needed to ensure that he will keep his vision for the rest of his life. And he does.
- Amistad ends with Cinque and his fellow captives going free back to Africa. In the final shot of Cinque on the ship looking hopefully (or wistfully) ahead, we read some text on a screen saying that, after getting back to Africa, Cinque finds that his whole tribe and everyone he knows has been captured by slavers. It's even more depressing since apparently it's based on a true story.
- The book doesn't mention that sad part, it merely ends with a sea captain bombing a Spanish slave-trade fortress and seeing clouds in the shape of a lion in the sky.
- Night Of The Living Dead had the main character get shot and killed in a zombie-cleanup mistake less than a minute from the ending. Both a downer and very disappointing.
- Not disappointing at all considering the racial and class themes of the movie.
- Don't forget that we see at the end the humans basically playing games with the zombies, making us look worse than them. They just wanted to eat us, we made them into blood-sport toys.
- The original adds salt into the wound by allowing for a very possible alternate interpetation that it was racially motivated.
- The sequel Dawn Of The Dead was originally going to have a downer ending too. The two surviving characters were each going to kill themselves. Instead, just as one of them is about to, he gets a sudden burst of adrenaline (or something) and runs out and takes off in a helicopter. Still a little downer since it has very little fuel left. The remake got full downer, though. The survivors go in a boat to an island...where there's more zombies. Although the deaths aren't shown, not much they can do by this point.
- Ironically, this is a direct inversion of the original's last-minute change. In the sequel's "pre-test-audience edition", the movie ended when the boat left the dock, allowing for at least a glimmer of hope.
- Se7en had the killer John Doe ultimately succeed by having Detective Mills succumb to the sin of Wrath and kill him. How did he do this? He killed Mills' pregnant wife and sent her head to him in a box. The film ends with a catatonic Mills arrested and taken to an uncertain future, and his partner Somerset admitting that the world is a crappy place to live in, but still worth fighting for.
- Atonement is incredibly bleak, even for a story about star-crossed lovers. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Cecilia and Robbie both died in WWII. The final scenes of them together were entirely imagined by Cecilia's sister, who had years earlier given false evidence against Robbie that led directly to their separation and indirectly to their involvement in the war and subsequent deaths.
- Ashes and Diamonds ends with the main character dead and his country doomed to 44 years of Communist (mis)rule, the latter of course being a Foregone Conclusion and not considered a Downer Ending by the Communist authorities who approved the film despite its strong anti-Communist subtext.
- Requiem For A Dream. The main character gets his left arm amputated, His best friend is stuck in a southern prison apparently without a trial and suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, his girlfriend is condemned to a life of prostitution and his mother is locked up in a loony bin after an ill conceived weight-loss treatment and electroshock therapy. Remember kids: Drugs are bad!
- The ending for the original 1954 Godzilla falls under this trope. Not only does One of the main characters sacrifice himself to stop Godzilla but It's also heavily implied that Godzilla isn't the only member of his species. In other words, Japan's efforts to stop Godzilla are in vain.
- The Ring's ending is bad enough (the ex-husband dies, and the curse is never going to stop), but if you want real bleakness, try the Japanese sequel. In the book and movie Rasen, not only do the surviving characters of Ring die, but the curse turns out to be a hell of a lot worse than we thought. Everyone in the world is going to die — and some will give birth to copies of Sadako first. She will be all that's left of humanity. (The third book, Loop, confirms that this has happened, but also turns the whole series on its head in a way that renders the Downer Ending almost moot.)
- Gone With The Wind is known for Scarlett O'Hara's optimistic closing line: "After all, tomorrow is another day!" What those who haven't seen the movie don't realize is how hollow that note of hope is. Scarlett ends the movie pathetic, a selfish woman alone with her misery. She's just driven away the only person who still loved her; her daughter, her parents, and the whole world she was raised in are dead.
- Of course, a lot of people think she gets exactly what she deserves, reserving all their sympathy for Rhett as he verbally lashes out at her for the last time and walks away heartbroken.
- Water Horse. There can only be one water at a time, and when an egg is laid, the old one dies. At the end, a kid finds an egg, the cycle continues, but that means the one the main character spent the movie raising is now dead.
- It might be okay if not for the fact that the old man telling the story is the kid who raised the old water horse, and he says that he never got to see it again after letting it go free. It's implied that it came back looking for him more than once, too.
- The Wicker Man. The entire time you are watching this film you just feel bad for the protagonist.. Attacked by bees, everyone lies to him, he witnessed a little girl burn to death, his wife and an entire island of people are trying to kill him. And then they do. and he dies.
- Which would all be very sad if Nicolas Cage wasn't running around in a bear suit punching women in the face.
- It's got nothing on the original version. His own faith ends up guaranteeing he will be the sacrifice— and in the end, it probably won't do the islanders any good anyway. And the little girl was in on it.
- The French film The Wages of Fear is about four men driving two trucks over mountain roads, carrying nitroglicerin, which is needed to extinguish a fire. During the journey, three of them is killed. The only survivor arrives, collects the money, and starts driving home happily. He takes one corner too fast, and falls to his death.
- In the underrated American remake Sorcerer, Roy Scheider's character is a small-time crook in deep trouble with The Mafia. A friend gives him a plane ticket to Los Piedras; soon he takes the explosives-moving job described above in a desparate attempt to make enough money to pay off his enemies and go home. And as above, he emerges as the sole survivor, returns to civilization and gets his reward. The last scene shows him taking one last drink at the local dive he frequents; the camera then cuts to outside, where a local is pointing out the place to the the friend who sold him the tickets...and two hitmen. Don't spend it all in one place, Roy.
- One simple phrase that will devastate any James Bond fan: "We have all the time in the world."
- The Fearless Vampire Killers (and the musical it inspired), so lighthearted throughout, ends with Sharon Tate, following a long vampirization process, revealing long sharp teeth and biting Polanski's character. Ominous narration tells us vampires were finally able to spread around the world. Which due to a previous scene, might count as Inferred Holocaust.
- Dodge Ball originally had a dark ending in which the team lost the game, with the film ending abruptly after the line, "Average Joe's has come here for nothing. Absolutely nothing!" But, due to higher forces, this ending was scrapped and the happy one shown in the film was included.
- This is arguably just a joke ending, as evidenced by all the story threads that are only wrapped up through the theatrical ending.
- In Dresden the main character (a British pilot) manages to laboriously live through the bombing of Dresden with serious injuries and escapes back to England. After the war, he flies back to see his true love (and, OMG, their child)... when his plane crashes. So, he is killed... in the post-script... by a voice-over.
- Soylent Green, because Soylent Green is people.
- The indy cult hit, Open Water: The husband dies of a combination of exhaustion and blood loss after a shark takes a chunk out of his leg. The wife, in despair, chucks her flotation gear and dips under the surface for good. Just to twist the knife, there's a brief Hope Spot where it looks like the Coast Guard might at least reach her in time.
- Not if you watched the DVD: the chapter in which their absence is realized and the distress call goes out is called "Too Little, Too Late."
- Saw III. Now, before you hit me with a "Well, duh," hear me out. Throughout the film the audience is subjected to the plight of a man who has lost his son and a woman whose marriage is falling apart. The man is sent through three traps in which he has to forgive the people who he feels are responsible for his son's death and the woman, a doctor, has to perform very delicate brain surgery on John (Jigsaw) and keep him alive, lest her head explode (they've put a collar on her that's rigged up to John's heart moniter. If his heart stops, the collar goes PLOOIE). At the end, we find out that the man and woman are husband and wife. Jigsaw's apprentice, Amanda (who has a hero-worship love for John) shoots the doctor just as her husband walks in. He shoots Amanda in the neck, and as she bleeds to death John tells her that he was testing her and she failed. The husband then cuts John's neck open with a power saw thus, effectively, killing his wife. As John dies, he drops a tape recorder. The man listens to the tape, which explains that Jigsaw is the only person who knows the whereabouts of the man's young daughter. The last shot of the movie is the girl, scared and alone in a dark room, clutching a stuffed bunny. I think it's the darkest of the Saw films' endings.
- And then the guy gets shot in Saw IV before he can even begin to try and find his daughter.
- Although it's eventually undone by the beginning of Saw V, where they reveal investigators going through John's warehouse and trying to piece together what happened find the little girl alive and well, as it's implied to take place not long after Saw III. Although as the little girl is carted off into an ambulance, she tragically pleads to know where her parents are.
- The French film 8 Women: A man is found murdered and the suspects (the titular eight women), trapped in the house by a snowstorm, go round and round in circles revealing secrets and trying to figure out who killed him. In the end, we find out the man and his younger daughter staged the murder to give comeuppance to all the other women, who used him and treated him horribly. Fair enough, not so bad. However, after the girl reveals that the murder was a hoax, that she was the only person who cared about her father and that she's going to take him far away from all of them, she opens the study door just in time to see her father blow his own head off.
- The film Bad Lieutenant ends with Harvey Keitel's character forgiving the rapists and finally redeeming himself. His reward? "Hey, cop!" *bang*.
- What about Scarface? Most of the main characters but his wife falls into the spiral of destruction Tony created!
- The 1984 BBC telefilm Threads is a nonstop barrage of futility, as the effects of a nuclear strike in Britain are shown in graphic detail. The main characters are a woman named Ruth and man named Jimmy, who has found out Ruth is pregnant two months before the attack. In the background of early scenes with Ruth and Jimmy's family, we see tensions between the U.S. and Russia boil over. In the middle of May, a nuclear strike initiated by Russians hits near the character's home of Sheffield. Jimmy is never seen again, presumably vaporized in the strike. Government teams coordinating relief efforts in the basement of a command shelter are suffocated to death after falling debris blocks all the air vents into their bunker. Jimmy's family, a sweet father and mother, are afflicted with radiation sickness and slowly waste away. Ruth's family, last seen pleading with Ruth to come back as she goes out to search for Jimmy, die in the home of their basement, and are then robbed by looters who steal the jewelery off their bodies. The only survivor of Jimmy's family is his sister, who is placed in an internment camp. Ruth gives birth to a baby girl, and dies ten years after the strike, having suffered from premature aging. Ruth's daughter, Jane (who knows very little English) is caught stealing food and runs away with another boy, who proceeds to rape her. In the end, Jane (visibly pregnant) wanders through a ruined city, and finds a makeshift hospital, where she gives birth to a stillborn child, who she holds in her arms in the final shot. God damn.
- Black Book, by Paul Verhoeven, is one of the most brutal espionage/resistance dramas ever. The only part of the ending which isn't a downer is a last-ditch effort by the main female and an elderly resistance member who find the doctor that betrayed them trying to escape with his ill-gotten gains. He's hiding in a coffin in the back of a hearse. The pair knock out his driver and seal him inside by driving nails into it. He pleads with them to let him go, and he starts pushing out all the valuables he swiped while collaborating with the Nazis, but they push it back in. The woman even adds her father's necklace to the collection, admonishing the doctor to redeem himself by handing it to him in the afterlife. The pair lament that this is the first and only act of justice perpetrated during their lives in the war, as the doctor doomed all others to failure. His accomplice in the resistance does not get his karmic comeuppance either. In a movie involving the SS against a resistance group during World War II, it's mindblowing that the biggest Complete Monster is a greedy American doctor. The nazi who defected to become the woman's lover dies at the hands of a bureaucratic pencil-pusher who wishes to uphold all of Germany's kangaroo court convictions in order to ease the transfer of power to the Allies. Realistically depressing and empty deaths are a hallmark of this film. The 'black book' is a list of the anti-resistance conspirators, who are all dead by the end, and handing it to Army Intelligence is largely an empty gesture as well, done only to give the two survivors a sense of finality and closure.
- Alatriste (the movie). In the last hour or so, the guy loses everything he cared about: The woman he loved and never married now is syphilitic; his friend Quevedo was sent to jail and his squire to galleys. Meanwhile, as a parallell, the Spanish Empire crumbles, and even the villain-ish mastermind Count-Duke Olivares is senile. The main character fights to the bitter end for a country that never loved him in a doomed battle.
- The books are quite different; maybe because the book dealing with that part has not been written yet.
- The Last Samurai certainly qualifies. The good guys lose the final battle, virtually all the major characters (and the more memorable red shirts) are wiped out and although the main character does eventually help the emperor see the light, it is too late to save the Samurai and their way of life.
- The whole point of the Rebellion was to make sure the Emperor stands up for himself, and not bow down to the west or anyone else. Keeping the Samurai class would be a waste of money since the Samurai where no longer needed as Japan had just created a modern army.
- Miracle Mile: Just as it looks like Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, and Brian Thompson will escape Los Angeles before it gets hit by a nuclear bomb, the bomb hits. This causes the helicopter they were flying in to crash into the La Brea Tar Pits. As they are slowly roasted/drowned in the hot tar, they actually make a feeble attempt to console themselves with the fact that "maybe someday" they'll be discovered as fossils. Yes, you read that right.
- The Vanishing: After obsessively searching for his wife, Saskia, for three years, Rex Hofman finally meets her kidnapper, Raymond Lemorne. As Rex has no evidence to expose him, Raymond tells him that the only way he will learn of Saskia's fate will be if he experiences it himself by drinking a cup of coffee with a sleeping pill in it. Rex at first refuses, but then Raymond reminds him of how he will be tormented with uncertainty of having never known what happened to Saskia and missing the opportunity to learn for all eternity. After much hesitation and confliction, Rex finally drinks the coffee. When he awakens, he discovers he has been buried alive.
- The Korean film Shiri works itself up to this. A detective finds out that the North Korean sniper he's been tracking was his fiance all along, but doesn't face her. He foils the North Korean plot to blow up a stadium, but then has to stop his girlfriend from assassinating the South Korean president, and is forced to shoot her dead. He finds out later that she actually loved him after all and sent him a message with the details of the bomb plot and how to arrest her. Oh yeah, and she was also pregnant.
- They Shoot Horses, Don't They? puts its Depression-era characters through a grueling marathon dance contest, during which one of the entrants suffers a heart attack and dies, another suffers a mental collapse, and pretty much everyone endures staggering physical, mental, and emotional torture. The kicker? The folks running the contest will be deducting the entrants' food, medical, and other expenses from the cash prize they're all killing themselves for, leaving the "winners" with little if anything for their trouble. When one of the characters hears of this it pretty much confirms all of her bleakest and most cynical thoughts about the world she's trapped in, and she begs another character to put her out of her misery by shooting her in the head. He complies, and is arrested and (presumably) given the death penalty (but not before uttering the title phrase when asked why he did it). Meanwhile, the agonizing contest continues, with the remaining dancers unaware of the futility of their effort. Yowza, yowza, yowza!
- To add a real-life downer twist, actor Gig Young - who won the only Oscar of his career for his performance in this film - went on to kill his wife and himself a decade later.
- In Horace McCoy's original novel, the marathon comes to a premature end when a fight breaks out and a stray bullet hits and kills an elderly woman in the audience, and the remaining dancers are given $50 each. We still get the "assisted suicide" at the end, though.
- Depending on how much sympathy you have for a group of amoral jewel thieves, the ending of Reservoir Dogs could be seen as a downer. All the principal characters are shot to death by police except for Mr. Pink, who is presumably arrested. The real downer is that Mr. Orange, the one heroic character, ultimately dies because he trusted a criminal too much.
- It should be pointed out that the misplaced trust went both ways, and said criminal dies as well as a result, which makes this a double downer.
- Revolutionary Road caps off a rather depressing plot with a downer ending. April dies trying to use a home abortion kit. Frank moves out of the house with the kids and continues the job that he hates. Living around the Wheelers has caused all their former neighbors to question their own lives, which leads them to be depressed about their idyllic suburban hopelessness.
- I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) ends with its protagonist clandestinely meeting one last time with the girl he'd hoped to marry during a period of (all too temporary) freedom and respectability; having escaped from the chain gang a second time, he's now a bitter, frightened, impoverished wreck of a man, and when the girl asks how he lives as he's running away into the shadows, he famously whispers, "I steal!"
- Kes. The main character's brother kills the title bird, and then his mom yells at him and tells it was just a bird. The end.
- Devdas, the Bollywood analogue to Romeo and Juliet. The male lead goes through ordeal after ordeal to find his love, then dies in a drunken stupor right outside her gate. The gate shuts in her face, right before she would have seen him.
- Troma pick-up Combat Shock (original title: American Nightmare): In the last 3 minutes, our main character, a Viet Nam vet suffering from PTSD, shoots his wife, cooks his deformed baby alive in his aparment's antiquated oven, and drinks some very sour milk (90% chunks) before finally blowing his own brains out onscreen. The previous 97 minutes are far from a picnic, as well.
- "Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.
- Being John Malkovich: John Cusack goes through the portal a bit too late, and is forced to live in a little girl's brain, watching his wife and lover living happily, unable to do anything.
- It is also sad to consider that in exactly the same fashion as John Cusack's character John Malkovich is controlled by other people and cannot do anything but watch (not even close his eyes). Malkovich himself did nothing to earn such a fate, so these people who control him practically pulled off a Karma Houdini. It is even more cruel if you consider the possibility that years later the people controlling Malkovich make him enter the magical portal to get into yet another person and so forth, which would possibly doom Malkovich for ages as they continue doing this.
- While 28 Days Later ends with a somewhat upbeat tune (the Finnish jet pilot requests evacuation for the survivors), the sequel 28 Weeks Later ends with a shot of the Infected exiting a subway in Paris, implying that the survivors got mainland Europe infected instead of just Great Britain.
- American History X ends with the protagonist's brother being shot, just after he was starting to change his life.
- Likewise, Little Odessa ends with the protagonist's brother being shot due to his brother's criminal activities and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, their mother dies of cancer.
- The Italian film Bicycle Thieves tells the story of a man who has his bicycle stolen when he needs the bicycle for his job. He and his son look through Rome and when they finally find the thief, they can't prove anything. At the film's end, the man decides to steal a bike, but people catch him in the act. Even though the owner doesn't press charges, we are left the protagonist who lost his dignity in the eyes of his son, about to lose his job, and have his family starve to death because he is unemployed.
- The film I Want To Live! is based on the true story of Barbara Graham. It ends with her in the gas chamber. Can't always get what you want, Babs!
- Gone Baby Gone doesn't end well for anyone, except the possibly least sympathetic character in the movie. Remy Bressant and Nick Poole are dead and Lionel Mc Cready and Jack Doyle are in jail. Despite being revealed as being behind the plot to abduct Amanda, all four spent the movie as sympathetic characters and their motivations were at least understandable. Bea Mc Cready is completely estranged from Helene and probably will never be able to see her niece. Angie Gennaro has left Patrick Kenzie because of the decision he makes at the end of the movie. And Patrick has to live with the death of Corwin Earle on his conscience and the realization that he made the wrong choice in returning Amanda to her mother. The only person who gets a happy ending is Helene Mc Cready who is reunited with her daughter who she thought was dead but instead of changing her ways as she promised and Patrick had hoped, she goes right back to being completely self centered and a terrible, irresponsible mother.
- The obscure Polish film Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las (Just Beyond This Forest) tells the story of a young Jewish girl in WWII being hastily escorted out of the Warsaw ghetto to the countryside for safety, by an old Aryan washerwoman who is only doing it for the money. But just as the washerwoman warms up to her, things go rapidly downhill when they are stopped by German patrol. The washerwoman is willing to risk her life for the girl, but the girl has grown tired of the struggle and willingly turns herself in.
- Donnie Darko ends with Donnie jumping through time to ensure his own death so his crush will not be run over by a keanu-looking guy in an evil bunny suit.
- Don't forget to add the fact Donnie is terminating the existence of that whole tangent universe, saving the lives of anyone who would have died in it, including his mother and sister and the whole damn dance team on the doomed plane.
- Synecdoche, New York shows the main character spiraling slowly downward, losing his health and the people he loves, and ends with him sitting among the empty ruins of his life's work, given a final stage direction: "Die."
- American Beauty was originally going to end with Jane and Ricky being arrested for the murder of Lester when they were innocent of the crime, thanks to an incriminating video tape they made.
- In The Loop ends badly for pretty much everyone who isn't Scottish.
- United 93, due to... well, you know.
- Though it may be a Tear Jerker, I think the Korean War film, Tae-Guk-Gi(Tae-Guk-Gi: The Brotherhood of War in some places), definately counts. The older brother has pulled a Face Heel Turn and gone to the North side because he thought the South killed his brother who he tried to work his ass off to get sent home. Said brother is actually alive and sees the older brother in a battle. The older brother, now crazy, attacks him. He eventually comes to his senses after a talk with the younger brother. The younger brother pulls out a pen he had received a the beginning of the movie as a gift. The two make promises on the pen that they'll both come back home. The North Korean soldiers then attack, making the older brother send his sibling running away, promising they'll meet again. He picks up a machine gun and kills several soldiers before being killed himself. Fade out to the present, where the younger brother, now an old man, sees the remains of the older brother, and breaks down, crying as he more or less begs is sibling to come back and fulfill the promises he made. One of the few movies to make this troper shed a tear.
- When The Wind Blows, the main characters survive a nuclear bombing, but are obviously dying of radiation poisoning. They remain in denial with complete faith that help will arrive and save them. Even in the end they have a semi-optimistic tone, but have clearly given up as they crawl into their paper bags and into their shelter to die.
Literature
- Virtually anything written by John Steinbeck. Not because he liked downer endings of course. He just loved inherently depressing subjects in the first place that couldn't end in anything but tragedy.
- Also fond of them is author Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian ends with every character in the posse dying, except for the villain, Judge Holden. In No Country For Old Men the protagonist is killed by the Mexicans, and his wife is killed by Anton. The Road's Bittersweet Ending seems comparatively festive.
- The Redwall novel Martin the Warrior has one of the biggest Downer Endings ever seen in a book for children. (Technically it's a Bittersweet Ending because the Big Bad of the book has been defeated, but that's not enough to rescue it from Downer Ending territory. Not by a long way.) The titular hero, blaming himself for the death of his girlfriend in battle, goes into exile and tries to forget she existed.
- Present in most of the Fantastic Comedy novels of Tom Holt. Little People and In Your Dreams stand out as having especially (even gratuitously) depressing endings.
- The same is true of his novels set in antiquity (Olympiad, A Song for Nero, Alexander at the World's End). This might be somewhat justified by the narratives exploring various ancient philosophies, but not entirely. For example, A Song For Nero, which starts out as a relatively amusing story about two itinerant conmen having adventures all over the Roman Empire. And then in true Tom Holt fashion, everything falls apart about 3/4 of the way through the book. It's ridiculously depressing.
- Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger of 8-bit Theater fame. It was so bad that in lieu of an author's afterword, the author had an apology.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: All of the main characters died (except Zaphod, who was never mentioned again after the end of the third book) in an explosion that resulted in Earth being destroyed in all possible realities. Rather jarring in a series that was mostly lighthearted comedy, if not above a little black humor. Reportedly, Douglas Adams was considering writing a sixth book to end on a lighter note, but - rather depressingly - died before he managed to complete it, or even change it from its Dirk Gently origins.
- After covering space, time, and probability, the afterlife is the obvious final frontier. He's not dead, he's just doing research.
- That would come as a shock to him. He was an outspoken atheist.
- Yeah, he's just a fine, sterile powder now.
- Fit the Twenty-Sixth of the Quintessential Series of the radio broadcast presents a different ending from Mostly Harmless; in it, most of the main characters reappear at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, including Fenchurch and Marvin. Fitting that Adams, who loved to change the story for each format, would create two wildly different endings.
- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four (written in 1948). "He loved Big Brother." Indeed.
- George Orwell seemed to like this trope, as he did this with Animal Farm as well.
- One of his early essays was titled How the Poor Die. The man was not a happy chappy.
- Read Hemingway? There's even a joke about his writing: "Why did the chicken cross the road? - To die. In the rain. Alone."
- And that's no exaggeration. One of Hemingway's most critically acclaimed shorts, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, is a prime example. You can always tell who will die horribly in a Hemingway story - it's the one who is happiest.
- Give It Up by Franz Kafka is about a man searching for the afterlife and being told that his quest is futile.
- Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis features a main character who becomes a bug (literally "vermin") whose only escape from his life's horror is self destruction. With his usefulness as a breadwinner gone, his family ignores him and he dies a slow, painful death. Afterwards, his sister is marked for her money-making potential as a bride, indicating that the cycle will just continue.
- Ironically, if he had become a beetle as indicated by the text, he could've flown away as soon as his body became small enough.
- Not so. The story's narrator specifically describes how he is still more or less the same size as before, but with six legs and has trouble moving in confined spaces because of his hard carapace.
- Some people think that Gregor was insane and hallucinating being a bug, noting that no character actually directly states that he really transformed...
- The epilogue Re-metamorphosis (not printed in all editions) has Gregor turning back into a human at the very end of the book. Although it's still kind of a downer.
- Ever heard of 'magic realism'? Seriously, read fewer fantasy books if you're interpreting Kafka literally.
- Another Kafka novel, Der Prozess (The Trial) is so horribly depressing, it spawned the term "kafkaesque" to describe any situation that is utterly absurd and mindcrushing to anyone still sane (while everyone around you seems to accept it as natural, but doesn't tell you what is going on). The protagonist is being told he is accused of a crime but no-one he meets is willing to tell him what he is actually accused of, and when or where the trial will be, and he is stuck in a hopeless mire of bureaucracy and red tape that grows ever more grotesque.
- The Chinese zeitgeist novel Wolf Totem ends with the protagonist killing the wolf he raised from infancy with a shovel. After he maims it by clipping the points of it's fangs off, ensuring that it can never survive in the wild. And after he lets it suffer for three days from a mortal throat wound caused by an iron chain, just because he can't bring himself to kill it. And it gets better! Due to the wholesale slaughter of Mongolian wolves, the grassland is overgrazed, succumbs to desertification twenty years later, and Beijing suffers its first ever sandstorm.
- One character from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (also known under various other titles) kills everyone, including himself, rather than die slowly of a terminal disease. Check The Perfect Crime for specific details.
- Rama Revealed ends with Nicole des Jardins dying painfully of a heart problem. She decides to refuse help and die rather then burdening her family. Eagle tells her the secret of life: God is an uncaring, manipulative creator who uses life to justify his universe. Death is, "...darkness...forever." Nicole sees her daughter, an octospider, her husband and a genocidal dictator die then fades out.
- The Chocolate War ends with the hero beaten senseless in a fixed fight, the villain being given MORE influence, the only adult who isn't evil useless, the school hating the hero, and the hero ends the book with an internal monologue on the pointlessness of ever trying to defy a cruel system, and urging his sidekick to just bow down to the school's bully based dictatorship. Looking at the back jacket, in the sequel, things get worse.
- At the end of the sequel a more villainous leader takes over the school gang, but there is hope things will change because the hero of the previous book is coming back to school and it is heavily implied he will continue to stand up to said gang.
- China Mieville's Perdido Street Station: it is revealed that Isaac's girlfriend Lin is still alive, and he's reunited with her just long enough for her mind to be partially destroyed by the last slake moth, leaving her a slobbering near-vegetable. All of the other people whose minds were drained by the slake moths are lost causes. It is revealed that Yagharek's mysterious crime that caused him to be exiled from garuda society and have his wings torn out is rape, and even though the female garuda that was raped very pointedly tells Isaac to not judge Yagharek, Isaac refuses to help him. The book ends with Yagharek pulling out his feathers and smashing his beak, so as to appear "human". He encounters Jack Half-a-Prayer, who extends out his hand, inviting him to join his gang.
- It's important to note that Yagharek's victim also asks Isaac not to help Yagharek to escape his punishment.
- Isaac's descent from jolly Mad Scientist into snivelling despair at the end makes this one of the most Downer Endings he's ever seen. About the only 'good' to come out of the whole endeavour is that the city is saved, but given that New Crobuzon is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, it's hard to be pleased.
- The short science fiction story The Cold Equations is famous for its Downer Ending: there really isn't a way to save the girl, and she goes out the airlock willingly so the spaceship doesn't crash.
- Speaking of short science fiction stories: Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang includes "Hell Is The Absence Of God,". A skeptic and cripple who despises God on account of all the horrible misfortunes in his life is struck by a genuine Beam Of Enlightenment, which makes him love God unconditionally and supposedly guarantees his entrance to Heaven... and then moments later he dies and is arbitrarily sent to Hell, where the titular absence of God inflicts constant Mind Rape on his now deity-loving psyche... forever.
- Stories Of Your Life And Others also contains the short "Division By Zero," which you can read for free here. Though this could more be considered a downer book, and is especially disturbing if you've studied a maths-based subject to any extent.
- Romeo and Juliet and all their adaptions by extension. C'mon, they kill themselves at the end when if Romeo had waited just one more single minute he would have seen Juliet was not dead and they could have gone off into the sunset together.
- One of the movie adaptations makes it even worse. Juliet wakes up while Romeo is still alive, but he has already drunk the poison. So he dies knowing that his death was completely pointless. As if the original ending wasn't enough of a downer.
- For that matter any of Shakespeare's Tragedies: Hamlet and Othello and King Lear. Macbeth, despite being named as a tragedy, is really more of a Bittersweet Ending because, when you think about it, it's pretty darn happy that the Evil Overlord is overthrown and a new, fairer king is installed.
- For the record, in Hamlet the hero manages to kill his father's murderer, but his indecision has brought about the deaths of pretty much everybody else in the play.
- Othello murders his wife because he is lead to believe that she is unfaithful, only to find out that she was not, leaving him no real option other than suicide.
- King Lear has arguably the most downer ending of all. Both Lear and the Earl of Gloucester misjudge their children, driving away the faithful children and putting themselves in the hands of the faithless ones. Both find out how wrong they were. Both are reunited with their loving child only to die afterwards. Lear, in particular, is content to spend the rest of his life in prison so long as he is with Cordelia, only to have her murdered. (There is good reason why Shakespeare's version was almost never performed for roughly 150 years.)
- Oedipus Rex and its sequels. Ah, where to begin. . . Basic overview: When Oedipus is born it is prophecized that he will kill his father and marry his mother. So, Oedipus is abandoned in the wilderness to die, but of course this doesn't work and he is eventually adopted by the rulers of some other state who he believes to be his birth parents. Because of this—
- In possibly the earliest documentation of road rage, Oedipus unknowingly kills his biological father.
- Solves the riddle of the Sphynx and unknowingly marries his biological mother and has children with her.
- Which causes a plague to descend on his kingdom because nature/the gods/whatever are so not cool with this.
- His wife/mother commits suicide when she realizes what has happened.
- Once Oedipus realizes what has happened shortly afterward he finds the dead body of his wife/mother and uses the broaches in her clothing to gouge his eyes out.
- And then the sequels become the embodiment of It Got Worse. Ouch.
- In fact just about any Greek Tragedy fits this trope, Medea in particular in that no one learns anything from the whole business.
- Childhood's End, by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. The Overlords cannot join with the Overmind, and are instead remembered as the "devils" who "exterminated" countless other intelligent species by uplifting them until they (the species) can evolve and join the Overmind.
- Flowers For Algernon in spades. The whole book itself was pretty Deus Angst Machina, but by the end when have to watch as Charlie goes back to becomeing mentally handicapped, writhing in pain and dread all the way, you seriously wonder why the book doesn't burst into flames.
- The Warhammer novel Eldar Prophecy features a civil war on an Eldar craftword. Every sympathetic character is killed off over the course of the novel, until finally the Designated Hero kills the villain... and then, in the last two pages, the Man Behind The Man steps forward and reveals that everything has gone according to plan, and they can feed the souls of all the Eldar who died to Slaanesh so that the entire craftword will be pulled into the Warp.
- This was writen by C.S Goto and never happened
- Similarly, Fire Warrior ends with Kais, with the help of Space Marine Ardias and a few Crisis Suits defeats the forces of Chaos. However he ends up mentally broken and horrendously traumatized from his experiences.
- Speaking of Warhammer 40K: Graham Mc Neill's Storm of Iron. The Iron Warriors won, all the Imperial Fist Space Marines and Jouran Imperial Guard are dead or enslaved, and all the gene-seed is winging its way to Abaddon the Despoiler for his 13th Black Crusade. Guardsman Hawke is the only real survivor. See his Dead Sky Black Sun for more.
- Pick a John Le Carre novel. Even when the characters win, it's still a downer.
- Most of Donna Leon's books. While the commissario solves the crime, it turns out he can't prosecute the perpetrators because of their political backing or similar issues.
- Virtually anything written by Oscar Wilde, or especially Hans Christian Andersen. "The Little Match Girl", anyone? Or the original "Little Mermaid"?
- The last book of the Sienkiewicz Trilogy, Pan Wolodjyowski, ends with the main character dead, along with several of his companions, and part of Poland ceded to the enemy. It is especially tragic for his wife, as the book deals with their relationship, which is very loving. This is in stark contrast to two earlier books in the trilogy, With Fire and Sword and The Deluge, both which see the lead couples get reunited and also end with victorious battles.
- Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix: His Godfather is killed, which is made worse when Harry finds out that he didn't even need rescuing in the first place and to make matters worse, it turns out that the weight of the Wizarding world is on his shoulders alone. And just to twist the metaphorical knife, Harry realizes in the end that he could've used Sirius' magic mirror to talk directly to him all along.
- Phoenix is arguably a Bittersweet Ending though, since the wizarding world believes Harry in the end. Prince is a more straight example.
- Even worse is Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince, which ends with Dumbledore dead; Snape apparently evil and definitely a killer; Bill Weasley permanently scarred right before his wedding; and Harry, Ron, and Hermione dropping out of school to finish what Dumbledore started, knowing how slim their chances are. Harry even breaks off his new relationship with Ginny.
- Things eventually end on a happy note in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows but not before Mad-Eye Moody dies, Fred Weasley dies, Snape dies, Tonks and Lupin die, even freaking Hedwig and Dobby die. "Always darkest before the (literal) dawn" indeed.
- Don't forget that Rowling even goes so far as to bring back Colin Creevy just to tell us that he was killed in the battle. The entire last book is a bloodbath of epic proportions.
- The Stephen King novel The Green Mile: The protagonist is forced to execute John Coffey, the black man who did not do the crime he is being executed for, but not before he's Blessed With Suck by him, and thus is forced to watch in perfect health while his friends die of old age, and is not injured in a catastrophic bus crash that takes the life of everyone else on the bus, including his wife. The book ends with his final friend, a woman in the nursing home where he lives, dying before he can tell her about his wife, and him spending his final days alone and wishing for death, but still in perfect health. As hard as it is to believe, the film was an upper ending in comparison.
- The King novel It also has a pretty depressing ending. The main characters, who were very close as children but then forgot all about each other, return to Derry and reunite only to defeat the monster at the cost of three out of seven friends dying. Those who survive begin to forget each other again, which is pretty angsty in my humble opinion after how much emphasis has been put on how tragic it was that they forgot each other, and their childhood, to begin with. The last sentence, paraphrasing: "Those are the thoughts of Bill Denbrough on this morning when he still remembers his childhood, and the friends he shared it with."
- Only one character was killed during the confrontation with It, and another died of suicide hundreds of pages earlier. Bill, Mike, Bev, Richie, and Haystack all survive. Right?
- Right, and it's strongly suggested that Ben and Bev have hooked up.
- In the end of King's Duma Key, even though Edgar manages to defeat the evil Perse, many of his friends and family, including his daughter, have been killed. Depressed, Edgar then uses his powers to summon a massive hurricane to Duma Key which presumably destroys the island and himself.
- Philip K Dick's short story Second Variety ends with the main character bleeding out as the first of many homicidal robots exits the Earth's atmosphere towards humanity's final holdout on the moon, using a rocket and coordinates which he unwittingly provided to it. His only solace comes from noticing that the robot carried an EMP grenade - once they wipe out humankind, they just might avenge our race by killing each other.
- Conn Iggulden's Emperor series has quite the downer ending. Then again, the novels are about Julius Caesar and his friendship with Brutus, so it was hard not to see it coming.
- The second novel in the tetralogy also has a downer ending, with Caesar's wife being murdered and Caesar himself being sent to Spain, having to leave his daughter behind.
- Private Peacefull by Micheal Morpurgo. They all die during the Battle of the Somme.
- For some, the Animorphs series was a downer ending. Sure, they ended the Yeerk invasion, but Rachel dies. Tom dies at Jake's command, having never been freed from his Yeerk. and Jake is depressed. Tobias leaves to live his life as a hawk. Marco's life is bittersweet shallow. Cassie gets her dream job, but never ends up with Jake. Ax becomes a war hero, but ends up getting assimilated into the Borg. And presumably, everyone but Cassie dies in the Bolivian Army Ending.
- The (book) version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Esmeralda actually IS hanged, and Quasimodo goes down to die with her freaking corpse.
- Honor Harrington, despite often being viewed as a Boring Invincible Hero, loses quite a bit when it counts.
- Field of Dishonor ends on the field of dishonor with Honor killing Pavel Young and (temporarily) ruining her career in politics and in the Manticoran Navy.
- At All Costs features the largest battle in Human history, with the knowledge that even their 'win' doesn't mean a thing. No one lost their shipyards and the reasons for the war hasn't changed. 2 million dead and the War just got going with the only chance for meaningful peace up in flames.
- Storm from the Shadows: The war with the Solarian League is starting in truth and even though Manticore has better technology the Mesan Alignment is about to take out their shipyards. Worse the SL may not view it as a real war, making Manticore look bad to all potential allies if they do the deep strikes needed to win a real war, and No one knows Mesa has infiltrated everyone. Oh and a fleet of 100 S Ds is about to hit the lightly defended capital of the Quadrant.
- In Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, the protagonist Joe Bonham is introduced as an american soldier who has left behind his family and loving girlfriend in order to enlist in the army during World War I. In the opening scenes he awakens in a hospital bed after being hit by an artillery round. He gradually realizes that he has lost all of his mobility and his senses except for touch — he has lost his arms, legs, eyes, nose, ears, tongue, both jaws and all of his face — but that his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body. He tries to suffocate so the doctors give him a tracheotomy, taking away his ability to kill himself. He attempts to talk to the doctors using morse code in order to communicate his desire to die, and being denied that, to be shown around the country as an example of the horrors of war so that young men won't do as he did. Then they strap his head down so he can't "talk." Oh yeah, then he resumes going insane, something which was temporarily halted when he learned he could communicate in some way. It is more or less explicitly said that this is how he will live out the rest of his life. Downer Ending Indeed.
- Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde definitely qualifies. As we find out at the end the Hyde personality wins, and Jekyll spends his last hour before permanently turning into Hyde writing down the case from his perspective and hoping he finishes it before he transforms, as Hyde would likely destroy it. Then, rather than live life as a murderous monster, he commits suicide. This ending tends to come as a shock to people who haven't read the novella, since the Jekyll and Hyde duality has ingrained itself into pop culture and is more often than not played for laughs.
- Ray Bradbury's short story "Mars is Heaven!" starts out as a sort of Ontological Mystery in the beginning. A crew from Earth land on Mars, which looks like Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. However, when their long lost dead relatives start appearing, it becomes more of a Lotus Eater Machine story. It ends with a sort of Downer Ending, where the town and the crew's long dead loved-ones were hallucinations made by aliens. The aliens kill everyone in their sleep, bury them for some strange reason, and destroy their ship.
- Nearly all of Bradbury's short stories from The Silver Locusts, aka The Martian Chronicles have downer endings. The first three expeditions to Mars are destroyed by the Martians. The first is offhandedly slaughtered by a dour Martian who believes that his wife is psychically cheating on him with the outsiders. The members of the second end up being considered madmen and consigned to a looney bin, since Martians are psychics and capable of physically manifesting their halluctinations; and are eventually pronunced incurable and executed by the doctor — who, when the "hallucinations" persist, considers himself contaminated with their insanity and kills himself. The third expedition is the aforementioned "Mars is Heaven!". The entire collection consists almost exclusively of downer endings where Martians are wiped out by human viruses, psychically torturted to death, or commit suicide; as well as humans committing murder and suicide, with the majority eventually returning to Earth to be wiped out in a nuclear war. A few stories can be said to be upbeat, particularly the last; but only by comparison to the rest.
- A great deal of Bradbury's short stories have Downer Endings. In the collection "The Stories of Ray Bradbury", for some reason each selected story is one tale of morbidity after another.
- Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty ends with one of the main character's loves dead and one of them near death. He is kicked out of the house where he has lived in for the last four years. His best friend feels betrayed by him, and his other friend has betrayed him. In addition, he probably has AIDS.
- M.T. Anderson's Dystopian future novel Feed ends with the protagonist watching over his completely
paralyzed brain dead girlfriend. That's bad enough, but it's also implied that shortly after the end of the book American society will collapse and then be wiped out by an angry alliance of all the other countries in the world.
- Intrinsic, no doubt, to the Horus Heresy series, as they are filling in the tragic Warhammer 40000 Back Story. Some just foreshadow evil, but the sad endings include:
- Graham Mc Neill's False Gods: Horus assassinates two people, revealing his choice.
- Ben Counter's Galaxy In Flames: A full-blown The Bad Guy Wins, with the only consolation being that the good guys are not all Dying Alone.
- Graham Mc Neill's Fulgrim: In a battle full of treachery, Fulgrim kills Ferrus Manus; consumed by guilt, Fulgrim is tricked into letting a daemon possess him. It traps him, aware of all that happens and unable to act, for all time. Horus is horrified and declares that he will figure out a way to rescue Fulgrim and deal with the daemon — after his revolt.
- Dan Abnett's Legion: The Alpha Legion decides to commit treachery, and so abandons the soldiers with them to a horrible death. And John Grammaticus is Driven To Suicide.
- In James Swallow's Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels novel Deus Encarmine, Rafen is forced to pledge himself to Arkio as the reincarnated Sanguinius. Which is the point at which he realizes that they will meet at some point and one will die. And Arkio is not merely a fellow Blood Angel but his brother. Though this being a two-part series, this has shades of a Cliff Hanger.
- "All quiet on the western front."
- In Gav Thorpe's Warhammer 40000 novel Angels of Darkness, Boreas comes to the conclusion that the man he tortured and interrogated (and condemned to a Fate Worse Than Death) was right: the Dark Angels have committed themselves to the wrong path. He convinces the Dark Angels with him to remain in a hermetically sealed fortress, so they will not release a fatal virus on the planet, even though they will die themselves, but he knows the message he sends to the other Dark Angels will not convince them. Rather than face what they could do when desperate for air and food, commit suicide together.
- The Dresden Files aren't the happiest books in the world, but book 11 ends on a really depressing note. Sure, they found the traitor on the Council, but the whole thing was a Xanatos Gambit set up to get the Black Council's guy on the Senior Council. Morgan, who was a Jerk Ass but a completely loyal one, is dead. Anastasia Luccio, the woman Harry has been dating, turns out to have been mentally coerced by the spy into the relationship in order to keep an eye on Harry. And Harry's half-brother, Thomas, has given into his vampire side after being tortured by the skin-walker and fed humans by it, and has returned to the White Court.
- Lady: My Life As A Bitch ends with Lady trying to be accepted by her family, which seems to lightly work, until her older sister Julie convinces them otherwise. Lady is then rejected by them, with her family coming to the conclusion that she's a mad dog, and call the police to have her taken away and euthanised. Before the police come though, Lady escapes with encouragement from Mitch and Fella, herself having taken on a light view of Humans Are Bastards, and runs off with them. She's stuck as a dog forever, and earlier in the book when she just lived life as a dog, Lady lost herself, forgetting all human life and it's memories, which is probably going to happen again. Oh, and Terry's still around, turning people into dogs if they (accidentally or not) get him angry, with no cure.
- The Boyin The Striped Pyjamas definitely counts as the two main characters end up being gassed in a concentration camp while being completely unaware of what is going to happen to them. What makes it even worse is the fact that the non-Jewish boy was only in the camp to help his friend find his father who is "missing" and it is very clear to the reader that his father is in fact dead.
- Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress, last book of Beggars trilogy, ends in one of these. the Supersleepless are all dead(though samples of their sperm and eggs survive), most of the Sleepless die when Sanctuary is destroyed unreconciled with the Sleepers(though its better than if they had survived unreconciled), last bookd panacea(the Cell Cleaner which makes a person immune to almost all diseases, cancers, arthritis, skin blemishes, ect. as well as allowing said person to subsist on skin contact with dirt and sunlight) is unavailable to future generations, and an engineered virus(which is able to work around the Cell Cleaner) has infected a significant npart of the population with a disease that causes a fear of novelty(worst than it sounds).
- Among the Horatio Hornblower series, Ship of the Line has a downer ending: The Sutherland is heavily damaged, forcing Horatio to surrender, Bush has lost his leg, and both of them are prisoners of war.
- Lord Hornblower wasn't much better. Hornblower's mission was a success and he was raised to the peerage because of it, but Bush, the closest person Horatio had to a friend, dies in the process. Then when Napoleon escapes and Horatio tries to escape, he fails, and in the process loses his mistress. Only news of the Battle of Waterloo saved him from dying again.
- The Lorax by Dr Seuss, that tiny shimmer of hope does not make it a Bittersweet Ending.
- Pretty much all of MichaelMoorcock's Eternal Champion books consist of grim stories of war and betrayal, followed by downer endings; most notably the Elric of Melnibone books. The Eternal Champion himself is doomed to find only strife and pain in all of his manifestations; too never be at peace, but eternally seperated from anything and everything he loves. Mercifully, only one incarnation, Erekose, is even remotely aware of this destiny; but he has enough Wangst about it to make up for the rest.
- Edgar. Allan. Freakin'. Poe.
- The Pit and the Pendulum isn't an example, as the protagonist is rescued at the end. For ultra-depressing, Tear Jerker downer endings (and middles, and beginnings), though, there's nothing like his poetry.
- Chuck Klosterman's debut novel, Downtown Owl. 2 out of 3 of the main characters focused on are killed in a deadly blizzard...and they're both rather young. The one that survives is well around in his late 70s early 80s. And it also includes a fake newspaper article explaining how nearly half of Owl's population was killed (about 800 live in Owl).
- The Canadian novel 'Tent Of Blue' by Rachel Preston, though it borderlines with No Ending...
- Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby goes downhill rapidly in the climax as a series of unfortunate circumstances occur: Daisy Buchanan accidentally drives over Myrtle in Gatsby's car, Tom convincing Myrtle's husband that Gatsby was the driver, causing him to murder the depressed Gatsby, and then shoot himself. Daisy and Tom return to their extravagant lifestyle, leaving Nick all alone to wonder what in the world happened. Hardly anyone attends Gatsby's funeral and Nick reflects on how much rich people suck and how Gatsby was stuck in the past the entire time.
- The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral—sure, they got the body back, but you're just treated to another funeral of people ripping their hair out in misery.
- Less down than most of these, more on the par of the Star Wars movies, where things look bad but surviving heroes are determined, but take a look at the last scenes of Dark Force Rising, second book of the Thrawn trilogy. After a hard battle and three Big Damn Heroes moments, the New Republic is barely, just barely able to survive an Imperial trap. The New Republic and the Empire had been in a race of sorts to get to the long-lost Katana fleet of heavy Dreadnaughts, and in the aftermath of the battle the heroes find that while they'd been fighting among Katana fleet Dreadnaughts, there were only fifteen there. Out of two hundred. You Are Too Late, indeed. The heroes try to console themselves, saying that the Empire is strapped for crews and won't be able to scrape together four hundred thousand people to crew the Dreadnaughts anytime soon. And then they take a look at the bodies of the Imperials they just killed. They are all clones. Meaning that the Empire has found a new stock of Spaarti cylinders, and it won't take years to find and train crews. Maybe only months. Maybe not even that long. This Is Going To Hurt.
- Outbound Flight is this or bittersweet, depending on who you ask. No one clearly, unambiguously good is around at the end of the novel - the two essentially good main characters either left back in the first half or died in a Heroic Sacrifice that preserves the last fifty survivors of Outbound Flight, which originally had fifty thousand people on it. The woman who sacrificed herself got another character to promise her that she'd send back a message to her brother, who hated her. And from Survivors Quest we know that those survivors and their descendants curse that woman's name for abandoning them, that no one ever learns what she did, and that the man she extracted a promise from set up a criminal organization and didn't so much as think about her request for fifty years. Damn, Lorana, you got the short end of the stick.
Live Action TV
- A Very Special Episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air ended with Will, in hospital after a mugging, sobbing to himself after talking Carlton out of shooting the perpetrators in revenge.
- Another episode ended with a crying Will being comforted by Uncle Phil after Will's worthless father once again let his son down.
- And let's not forget the one where Hilary's boyfriend, bungee jumping on television, is killed when it turns out the bungee chord was too long. Not only is Hilary watching it happen, but he was proposing to her at the same time.
- The whole thing was somewhat diminished when you consider they played both that event and the aftermath totally for laughs: the episode didn't end with her boyfriend dying in his bungee jumping accident; it lead directly into Hilary, still wearing her wedding gown now dyed black, coming back from his funeral, and the entire family making jokes at his expense. Hilary's depression following was shown to be easily remedied with retail therapy, and every time she tried to talk seriously about her loss, she failed to remember her fiancé's name.
- I saw the episode at a very young age, and it scarred me. I didn't realize any of that was supposed to be funny. In fact, even now at age 26, none of that sounds remotely funny. But that's a different trope...
- In House, Dr. House usually makes a last minute diagnosis that saves the patient's life. Not so in "Wilson's Heart," where the patient was Amber, Wilson's girlfriend and former member of House's intern team. House figured out what was wrong with her, but there was nothing that could save her. Wilson woke her up for one final goodbye, and then she died. And if that wasn't enough, 13 finally gets the nerve to get a test done on herself, and it turns out she does have Huntington's disease, which gives her around twelve or so years to live, by her own estimation.
- It might have only involved House being miserable but the ending of Season One was just as heartbreaking. Stacy (his ex) has just told him that she loves him but she can't be with him, Cuddy has offered her a job in the hospital so he has to be around her even more and while Stacy and her husband hug and celebrate his partial recovery, House summons up his courage to try and walk with his bad leg but fails and collapses in agony. Who knew that an ending shot of House chewing on a pill could be so depressing?
- Then there's the Season Five finale, where it turns out that House has been losing his mind more than he thought, actually admits that he needs serious help and Wilson ends up admitting the sad, terrified man into a mental institution. Wow.
- Also in Zoey 101, in the episode Chase's Grandma, Zoey and friends plan a surprise birthday party for Chase. At the same time, Zoey discovers that Chase's grandmother has the same borthday of Chase, also that she is sick. Finally in the day of the party, just after Zoey prepares for it, she is told that Chase is gone, which upsets her. Michael reveals that Chase's Grandmother died from, according to him, something "more than a flu". Inmediately Zoey looks for Chase, catching him in the PCA's fountain, mourning his late grandmother.
- The final scene reveals Zoey comforting a depressed Chase.
- The season finale of Bones, in which, even though Booth wasn't dead, it was revealed that Zach, one of the main characters, was Gormogon's (a cannibal serial killer) apprentice, having been duped by a much stronger personality and forced to kill. In the end, he realizes how wrong he was, tells them how to find Gormogon, pleads guilty, and is sent away to a mental correctional facility. And this from Bones, where the usual endings are light and fluffy.
- In the series premier Zach reveals to the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold therapist/profiler that he didn't really kill anyone, but telling the truth would land him in actual jail, where he'd be toast.
- The series finale of Seinfeld ends with all four main characters being branded anti-social misanthropic Jerkasses and sentenced to prison.
- Of course, they deserved it. The real tragedy? They had apparently run out of things to talk about, and started to repeat the first conversation from the first episode.
- To be fair, that sentence was Kramer's fault. He had to hop. He had to HOP ON THE PLANE!
- The Scrubs episode "My Life in Four Cameras" sets the show in an ever-happy sitcom-environment for the second half: A man has been wrongly diagnosed and may live another 20 years, two main characters' relationship gets magically fixed and an employee on the brink of being fired may stay working at the hospital. This is dissolved with a hard cut near the end of the episode. The patient is dead, the relationship rather messed up, and the former employee - fired. JD explains that "around here, things don't end as neat and tidy as in sitcoms".
- In "My Lunch", after a girl dies from an apparent OD, they discover that her organs could go to multiple patients who need new ones. However, its discovered that the donor actually died of rabies, which means that now each of the recipients have rabies too. At the end, all of the patients, including one who was a good friend of Dr. Cox's and who didn't need the organ immediately, died. This sends Cox over the edge and into a horrible depression. This is in stark contrast from earlier, happier plots, including JD trying to force Cox to have lunch with him and Elliot and Carla trying to help The Todd cope with his homosexuality only to discover that he's using the homosexuality to be close to the two girls - and is apparently bisexual, now ogling and making a pass at everyone.
- Setting the stage was "My Old Lady", which opens with JD, Turk, and Elliot each getting a patient to deal with, with the narration saying that the statistic is one of three people who go into a hospital will die there. Turns out the statistic was wrong this time: all three patients die.
- For being a humorous show, Scrubs is unusually full of episodes with a Downer Ending. They are usually especially vicious, since everything seems to be going well until the final crashdown. See episode "My Screw Up", in which everyone's happily preparing for a sympathetic character's birthday party only for it to be revealed his funeral at the end.
- It was actually assumed to be Jack's birthday party and it was Ben's funeral.
- The season 1 finale "My Last Day," made when it was unknown whether the show would get picked up for another season, is just such an episode. The episode seems like it's wrapping up to a relatively upbeat conclusion, but in the last 30 seconds, Jordan comes up to the assembled cast and reveals all their secrets which she had previously kept to herself, such as she and J.D. *** ***, Turk knowing that Dr. Cox has feelings for Carla, and Dr. Kelso lying about Cox's promotion, leading to a near-total destruction of the trust between them all that kept them together for the entire season.
- Not to forget "My Butterfly", which is split into two halves, each showing a different chain of events hinging on JD and Turk watching a butterfly. In the first half, everything goes wrong, Turk and Carla fight, Elliot lets her 8 year old patient down, JD misses a diagnosis, cultimating the death of a patient. In the second half, exactly the opposite happens and everything goes right, they make the right diagnosis early through a stroke of luck and the patient can get surgery quickly..... but he still dies.
- A similar thing happened in "My Occurence", where half the episode, where it turns out that everything was a mixup and Ben doesn't really have Lukemia, was actually JD's imagination.
- In the various Law And Order series, the prosecutors occasionally lose cases and sometimes win by the letter of the law while still being unable to correct a greater injustice and letting the offender get away with it. There have also been instances where living victims of crimes have committed suicide, regardless of the offender getting punished, or the victims or family members taking revenge on the criminal, thus becoming criminals themselves. In one specific case, the prosecutors successfully put a leader in the Russian mafia in prison for life, only to later find that the entire family of their star witness has been kidnapped and murdered by the mafioso's "business associates".
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit uses this trope often. It seems to be in full force in the current (10th) season. If everything seems to be (relatively) alright but there's still five or so minutes left, expect someone to die. Maybe several someones.
- For this reason, the series' tend to be a case of Truth In Television as well, since real life works out this way far too often.
- One particular instance that stands out involved a man wrongfully imprisoned for statutory rape when he slept with a girl who later turned out to be under 18. Turned out the girl in question was actually an adult and pretended to be a minor as part of a blackmail scheme. The real downer comes when she is arrested... for manslaughter. The innocent man had been beaten to death in prison.
- One particular episode of the original series that stands out is Mayhem, which follows 3 different cases. The primary one deals with a man randomly killing people making out in the backseats of cars. A suspect is eventually arrested based on eyewitness testimony and his refusal to provide a believable alibi for his whereabouts at the times of the killings. Turns out the suspect was gay and with his lover at the times of all the murders, but was afraid of his mother finding out. Briscoe and Logan go to get him released from jail only to find out that he'd been killed over a bologna sandwich. And to twist the knife? Mom had figured out his sexuality YEARS ago and was just waiting for him to come out himself.
- The Twilight Zone had a number of episodes with rather sad endings. "Time Enough at Last" is probably the most famous, and is (ironically) a perfect example of an Outer Limits Twist.
- "On Thursday We Leave For Home" is particularly brutal. I cried for two hours after seeing it.
- Space Above And Beyond had a Cliff Hanger downer ending where three of the major characters died and the remaining two are left feeling empty and unsure. The episode was still very satisfying.
- Xena: Warrior Princess had a downer ending where the main character sacrifices herself. There was huge disagreement in the fan community as to whether or not this was appropriate for her character.
- Don't worry, though! In the Dynamite comics, Gabrielle hit the Reset Button.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer season 2 ended with Buffy alienating her friends and her family, stabbing her lover through the chest with a sword and sending him to a Hell dimension, and then leaving town for places unknown.To Sarah Mclachlan. Season 5 ended with the second death of Buffy.
- Another Mutant Enemy production, Angel, ended the the series with one main character dead, another leaving to pursue a Life Of Normalcy, and all of the other main characters about to start a fight that will almost certainly result in most, if not all, of said characters suffering a painful and gruesome death. This ending also qualifies as a Bolivian Army Ending.
- It has now been revealed in the official comic continuation that all of the remaining characters are alive, although some have gone through some...changes.
- Wait, dying and having one's soul tied to the Evil Corporation that you tried to destroy and now being forced to do their bidding counts as alive?
- Blake's 7 ended its third and fourth (final) seasons with Cliff Hanger Downer Endings. Series 3 ended with the Liberator destroyed, the crew abandoned on a desolate planet and Blake revealed to be an illusion. Series 4 ended the series on a downer with Scorpio wrecked in a crash; Avon killing Blake (the real one this time); Vila, Tarrant, Dayna and Soolin all killed; and Avon, the last man standing, surrounded by heavily armed Federation troopers. Gunshots played over the start of the credits. (This was intended by writer Chris Boucher to be a Cliff Hanger; those actors who wanted to come back for a fifth series would turn out to be Not Quite Dead. However, the BBC decided not to commission another series.)
- Red Dwarf ended its sixth season on a Downer Ending: the regular characters were killed one by one in a space battle with their future selves. The final image was of their craft, Starbug, exploding. However, because it was a Time Travel episode that ended in a severe Temporal Paradox, the next season was able to begin by assuming the timeline had been repaired by the explosion and it had all been undone.
- Some fans of the series would suggest the REAL downer of that particular ending was that it marked the departure of Rob Grant from the writing team, leading to a marked decline in quality in the series, as it slowly limped its way to a lingering death.
- Forever Knight ended its third and final season by killing off almost its entire cast in the last two episodes. Not only did the vampiric hero not achieve his wish of becoming human, but he ended up killing his girlfriend, and he finally begged for his master to stake him.
- Black Adder ended every season with the death of at least one, and usually several, major characters, before "reviving" them in a new era for the next series. The final season, Blackadder Goes Forth, ends with most of the major characters being sent out into battle and presumably to their deaths, with the last shot fading slowly into a field of poppies.
- Not quite every season. The final special episode in modern times ends with Blackadder fixing all the time-continuum screwups, and maneuvering himself into becoming king.
- And technically Blackadder the Third only ended badly for George. Blackadder succesfully switches positions with George and presumably poses as the Prince Regent (later George IV) for the rest of his life. (Then again, Your Mileage May Vary, if you know your history.)
- Mortal Kombat Conquest was a TV series loosely based on the ultra-violent video games by the same name. It ended with the Big Bad (Shao Kahn) killing ''everyone''.
- The first season of The OC had a downer ending with Ryan and Seth leaving town and Marissa turning to drink.
- The Sit Com Dinosaurs ended with an environmental responsibility message both depressing and Anvilicious. The final episode begins with the failure of a beetle swarm to show up and check the spread of a form of creeper vine because their breeding ground was destroyed to make a wax-fruit factory. The efforts of the Wesayso Corporation to fix things result in killing off most of the plant life on Earth and starting an ice age. The show ends with a sad instrumental piece playing over a shot of the Sinclairs' house being slowly buried in a snowdrift.
- The short-lived superhero series M.A.N.T.I.S. ended by having the hero and his love killed battling a dinosaur. By then, there was no budget for a full-scale dinosaur, so they were effectively killed by falling trees. The final scenes have the sidekick narrating about how he buried the hero and dismantled his lair. This is one case where just canceling the series without a final episode would have been better.
- Yes, folks, Sam Rami's attempt at a more realistic superhero was killed by an invisible dinosaur from another dimension.
- Twin Peaks has an ending which seems to take fiendish delight in screwing over every likable member of the cast. For some viewers, this Anvilicious quality is brilliant, because the nihilistic 'moral' is very much in tune with the inaccessibility of the series itself.
- The original version of The Office ended on quite a low note in its second series. Tim is rejected once again by the receptionist Dawn, who is leaving for America with her skinflint boyfriend, while David Brent has been made redundant and practically breaks down trying to make them take him back. The series as a whole ends on a much more positive note after the two Christmas special episodes.
- Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future ended with the death of a main character (and the abrupt end to an ongoing Ship Tease), along with the destruction of the heroes' base of operations. On Christmas Day, to boot.
- The ending of the fifth series of Murphy's Law involves the police officer who Murphy had earlier saved killing herself and Murphy himself coming frighteningly close to pulling the trigger on himself.
- Babylon 5 ends its first season with an assassination, and a major character on the station being shot in the back. The second season ends with the failure of the station to create peace, and the start of a major war. The third season ends with the main character literally leaping into a gargantuan abyss to escape the nuclear doom he's called down on himself (he's standing in the enemy's capital city). The fourth season was originally going to end with the main character surviving a mock execution to find out that his interrogation ordeal is beginning all over again... but due to potentially impending cancellation, that was moved up a few episodes, and that season ended on a more "up" note.
- The character *died* at the end of the third season. He got better, only to die *again* at the end of fifth season, albeit in 20 years time. But his death was not the only loss, and source of grief in the final episode. Navigational hazard my ass...
- Indeed, that could be the single most tragic event in the entire series. Main characters die and suffer defeat; sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't. But they always do so in pursuit of their goals and in pursuit of victory. Lennier went through every episode of all five seasons serving as Delenn's aide; always dutiful, always respectful, never putting a wrong foot forward, always a source of support and guidance for the rest of the crew. For five years he has loved Delenn from afar and not once has he stepped out of line. In the last season, he even joins the Rangers, despite having little previous military training, because he thinks that if he can become a brave hero in Delenn's eyes then she would have eyes for him rather than Sheridan. Despite the futility of this, he perseveres, hoping but never interfering, and in the very last episode, when confronted with the one temptation he's tried the last five years to resist, he gives in. For just an instant, he sees the chance to step into Sheridan's place at Delenn's side by leaving him to die. He even comes to his senses moments later and goes back to help him, but by that time Sheridan had already freed himself. Lennier rounds the corner to see the betrayal in Sheridan's face and the hurt confusion in Delenn's and he flees. Delenn, as always, is willing to forgive him, but he can't forgive himself. A lifetime of service, humility, and self-deprivation has been lost because of a single moment of weakness.
- Not to mention that at the end, poor Delenn is going to end up a lonely recluse after Sheridan goes, Londo and G'Kar will die at each other's hands as the Centauri civilization falls apart and the Earth is temporarily going to crash back to the Dark Ages. But overall it's a rather upbeat ending, since humans and Minbari are going to evolve into Vorlon-like beings, Sheridan becomes a sort of Arthurian dying-leader-vanishes-to-return-one-day figure, and dear ol' Vir manages to save the Centauri by becoming the Emperor, getting rid of the Drakh with the Alliance's help, and finally rebuilds a new, kinder Centauri Empire.
- Veronica Mars ended with the titular character's reputation sullied by an online sex video, while her father faces prosecution for evidence tampering and probable defeat in the election for the county sheriff's office against an inept and crooked successor.
- Hex. Since they'd already killed off the original main character, the last few episodes consisted of the main characters repeatedly screwing up, betraying each other, and narrowly failing to save the day. The finale involved one of the few surviving original cast members being used as a human sacrifice to bring about the end of the world while the heroes flee in terror and the big bad enjoys an orgy. Not that Hex was ever subtle, of course.
- Quantum Leap: Sam makes a noble sacrifice, but this causes a temporal reaction that results in him never getting home.
- Season three of M*A*S*H has the well-known, heartbreaking ending of 'I have a message. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.'
- The episode was made more poignant because the actors' looks of shock were entirely genuine; they weren't told that the character was being killed off.
- To make matters worse, the actor didn't know his character was going to be killed. He was standing just off camera.
- While a great story, this is actually an urban legend.
- The first-season episode "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" ends with a childhood friend of Hawkeye's dying on the operating table.
- "Yessir, That's Our Baby" involves the 4077th staff struggling to secure a Stateside adoption for an abandoned infant, after discovering that that its being of mixed race (it was sired by an American G.I. with a Korean peasant woman) will condemn it to life as an impoverished, enslaved outcast in Korean society. Their inability to get around Army bureaucracy finally forces them to leave the child in the care of a nearby monastery, where she'll be shielded from the locals and might have a chance to leave Korea...in 15 or 20 years.
- Tour Of Duty ended with a surrounded Lt. Goldman and Sgt. Anderson calling down an artillery strike on their own position.
- Farscape loved Downer Endings. Season finales were always huge downers, and in fact, before the miniseries, the entire show ended with the baddies defeated, Aeryn telling John she's pregnant with his child, and then the televised equivalent of a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere swoops down and kills them both. Also notable was the episode "...Different Destinations", which brutally subverted Set Right What Once Went Wrong by having a whole monastery of nurse-nuns being slaughtered as a result of the main characters' actions. Ouch.
- Goodnight Sweetheart ends with the protagonist being trapped in the past.
- Are You Afraid Of The Dark had a few downer endings, for example "The Tale Of The Pinball Wizard", where Ross has apparently won the game, only to find that he's trapped in a pinball machine replica of the mall, doomed to play the game forever.
- Also "Tale Of The Chameleons," which ends with the hero drowning in a well trapped in the form of a chameleon, and the villain about to do the same to the hero's family and friend.
- This Is Wonderland ends with Alice having to talk her sister into going to jail, James being left in critical condition with a stroke, which was strongly implied to kill him, and fan favourite Anil Sharma getting killed by gangsters. On the plus side, Elliot found true love. But there wasn't enough happiness to qualify as a Bittersweet Ending.
- The Wire loved these. The ending of the fourth season is particularly brutal, as only one of the four main kids introduced this season had a particularly happy ending in Namond, who was adopted by Colvin; conversely, Michael and Dukie end up working in the drug trade and Randy is stuck in a group home, despite Carver's efforts to keep him out, where he's beaten up in the final montage. Elsewhere, Bubbles accidentally kills his young protege and attempts suicide, Carcetti is made to look like an idiot by the governor of Maryland, and Bodie is killed after being seen getting into a car with Officer McNulty, who seemed to have genuine respect for him and yet was inadvertently the reason for his demise.
- And it gets worse for some characters in the fifth season. Butchie is tortured to death. Omar Little finally finds happiness in Puerto Rico but is lured back by Butchie's death and is then killed by maybe the least sympathetic character ever. Dukie is socially promoted out of middle school, but is so viciously bullied in high school that he drops out and starts shooting heroin. Michael is thought to be a snitch, so he is forced to leave Bug with a distant relative and take up Omar's old trade. Randy has become hard to the world in the group home. Johnny Fifty (from Season 2) is seen homeless. Gus the saintly newspaper editor is busted down to the copy desk while lying reporter Scott Templeton wins a Pulitzer prize. Carcetti actually wins the governorship after completely selling out, and promotes the backstabbing Rawls to state police commissioner. Daniels is promoted to Commissioner, but is blackmailed on the first day and forced to retire. Valchek is himself promoted to commissioner to replace him. The Greeks escape. The prosecution of Marlo collapses, and he walks free. McNulty has alienated the two women who loved him and lost his job. And worst of all, Herc actually has a good job, working for the scumbag lawyer. There are some high points, but *damn*.
- The new series of Doctor Who has ended every season finale with one of these. For the first three, however, it's tossed in something lighthearted in the very last scene to break up the Tear Jerker mood. The first season ended with the Ninth Doctor dying. The newly minted Tenth Doctor gives a (possibly vaguely unnerving) grin, but if you were a fan of Nine, there was no way you were smiling along with him. (Jack's face when he realizes he's being left behind is pretty damn heartbreaking, too). That ending looks practically cheerful next to the second season's finale, in which Rose is torn from the Doctor and trapped (seemingly forever) in an alternate universe against her will. Lots of sobbing, on the characters' and viewers' part, ensued. The episode's final scene is the arrival of Donna, which some found to be a badly timed mood breaker, while others welcomed the distraction. The third season ended with the Doctor mourning the loss of the Master, the only other member of his race and a Magnificent Bastard and then having the only friends he has left walk out on him. In the last scene, the Titanic crashes into the TARDIS. The fourth season ends with the Doctor, all alone, again. Jack, Martha, and Mickey walk off into the sunset together after a quick goodbye, Ten palms off his clone on Rose in the alternate universe because he can give her what the Doctor never can, and he quickly mindwipes Donna to prevent her from dying a horrible brain-frying death. It gets increasingly tragic, and the episode makes no effort to lighten the mood. It ends with a rain-soaked Doctor in his shirtsleeves, staring brokenly at nothing in his empty TARDIS. (sniff)
- The third season ending also involved the remnants of the human race, in the year one trillion, having made a desperate attempt to escape the end of the universe by flying to Utopia, trapped at the end of the universe and 'screaming at the dark'. Very little was actually made of that.
- Doctor Who has actually had a surprisingly small amount of these downer endings. Of particular note is the 3rd Doctor adventure Inferno, where an entire alternate world, filled with people the Doctor knows in the original world and has spent the last 4 or 5 episodes trying desperately to save, winds up being infested with proto-human Zombies. Further, the Doctor's last-second escape leaves him with the sight of those few redeemable people left in the world about to be killed by lava. Oh, didn't I mention that the entire world was also coated in insane levels of lava along with those zombies? About the only good thing to come from this adventure is that the Doctor is at least able to prevent it from happening to our own world. But he's still left essentially scarred from the experience in the other world.
- The Caves of Androzani is one of the biggest downers in the history of the show, Inferno notwithstanding. Almost every single person who appears in the serial dies for small, petty reasons, and the Doctor is forced to crawl across a burning landscape in order to save a companion he's only known for five minutes. He regenerates, but only just. This is made even worse if one realises that the Fifth Doctor has managed to lose every other companion up until then due to his own ineffectualness.
- Doctor Who and the Silurians ends on a poignant note. The 'Silurians' of the title are a reptilian species that dominated the Earth at the time of the dinosaurs, and are portrayed with a degree of sympathy. The Brigadier blows up the Silurian base, killing them all, and the Doctor, seeing the explosion, realises what's happened.
- In the fourth of five episodes of the third season of Torchwood, Captain Jack Harkness' lover dies in Jack's arms after Jack calls the bad guys' bluff and the bad guys call it right back with supervirus to the face. This is the second most horrible thing to happen in this episode, the first being the part where the government of the UK talks itself around to giving the "lowest-achieving" 10% of the nation's children up to alien extortionists for more-or-less-eternal torture — with the implication that every other government on Earth is currently having the same conversation. It gets darker from there.
- By the end of the miniseries, the heroes have given up so thoroughly that a couple of the villains have had to step up and save the world, the kind-of-sympathetic bureaucrat character who's been getting thrown under the bus by his superiors all season long has murdered his family and committed suicide because all the alternatives are worse, the crappy amoral government officials have been replaced by ambitious amoral government officials, Jack has delivered the coup de grace to the alien threat by ordering his young grandson's painful and graphic death while his daughter screams his name and tries to claw her way through steel and reinforced glass bare-handed to get to him, and Gwen has lost every friend she has and is hanging on to her pregnancy only because it would hurt her husband to abort and spare herself the pain of bearing a child in this fucked-up world. Jack's decision to run from Earth as far and as fast as he can and not come back for a few millennia is pretty understandable.
- The episode of The King Of Queens "Inner Tube". After a cold-ridden Doug works up the guts to go to where Carrie's having her meeting and apologize to her, when he does, she throws water onto his face and venomously says "You make me sick!" (which is in sharp contrast to his Honeymooners fantasy where she gladly accepts his apology). On top of that, at the episode's end, they show him in a parody of the football movie Brian's Song with a voiceover that says "But when they think of him, it's not how he died that they remember - but how he lied. How he did lie!".
- While not as bad, the episode "Fight Schlub" didn't exactly end on a high note either. Even in Doug's fantasy, the IPS workers don't win the bar fight with the Priority Plus workers; as a matter of fact, some of the IPS guys don't even try to fight back (although to be fair, it was Doug's imagination). So in the end, the IPS guys don't get their restaurant back, Doug doesn't get his dignity back and he's left with a fear of bubble wrap (but it doesn't last long). To be fair again, it was sort of a dim episode, with Carrie's subplot serving to lighten the mood a bit.
- And then there's the two-parter "Pregnant Pause". Carrie unexpectedly gets pregnant, so she and Doug frantically try to make plans for the baby, including Doug getting a second job as a limo driver, which quickly exhausts him. In the end, she miscarries. If there were a sadder way to end a season, that would be it.
- The short-lived ABC Dramedy Cupid relied on surprise Downer Endings during its short run as well.
- In the Outer Limits revival, nearly every episode ends in soul-crushing gloom and despair. Humans Are Bastards, it's a Crapsack World, we get it, we get it...
- One particularly crushing episode involved a group of four or five humans being put in special underground bunkers while the rest of humanity prepares to meet an alien race. The humans can only talk to each other, but live in their bunkers alone. Every six hours, an alarm goes off, and they have to push a button to prevent nuclear missiles from devastating the world in case humanity was wiped out by the aliens. The routine continues endlessly until one by one the humans in the other bunkers mysteriously get cut off, leaving the last guy alone with his thoughts. He slowly goes crazy, and finally resolves to let the missiles fly, convinced humanity has been wiped out by the aliens, until he's contacted by the general in charge of the program, who tells the protagonist that everything is fine, the aliens have been defeated, and they'll get him out of there soon. The protagonist accepts this, still marginally crazy, and deactivates the alarm time and time again, while the camera switches shots to show the general being mind controlled by an alien while the Capital building and all of Washington DC burns in the background.
- The fourth season finale of Corner Gas had Brent selling Corner Gas, Davis being transferred to Woolverton and, saddest of all, Lacey moving back to Toronto. Fortunately, it was All Just A Dream.
- Supernatural is a pretty miserable show anyway but there are still tons and tons of episodes that have downer endings. "Time On My Side" has Bela turning into a sobbing, terrified little girl as the hellhounds come to take her away, "Jus in Bello" - nearly everyone dies because their plan ended up not working on account of Lilith, "All Hell Breaks Loose - Part One" - After a Please Wake Up speech, Sam dies (he gets better) and Dean ends up sobbing on his brother's shoulder, "What Is And What Should Never Be" - Dean's in too much pain to believe Sam when he tells him what they do is worth it, "Heart" - Sam has to kill a sweet girl of the week because she's a dangerous werewolf, "Crossroad Blues" - Dean really, really wanted to make that deal to bring his Dad back, "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" - Dean's crying about their Dad's death and there's nothing Sam can say that would make it alright, "Everybody Loves A Clown" - Dean takes his frustration out on his beloved car with a crowbar and looks like he's going to break down any second. And, as a proper depressing finale, the second season premiere - "In My Time Of Dying" has John die while his sons look on helplessly.
- The season three finale, "No Rest for the Wicked"; after spending the entire season trying to void Dean's contract with Lilith, they finally get a chance to kill her, but she escapes. Dean dies and goes to Hell. No, really]]. Talk about a seriously downer ending.
- Supernatural loves to end its seasons on a downer. In season 1 Sam was frantically trying to drive his dad and brother to the hospital and discussing their next move when they were smashed by a semi, season 2 ends with Sam back from the dead, but only because Dean sold his soul and now only has one year to live and the final shot of season 3 shows Dean strung up by meathooks in hell while the sound of his screaming for Sam echoes over the closing credits.
- And also recently the ending of season 4. Turns out that Dean was right about Ruby being evil, and after convincing Sam that Dean saw him as nothing but a monster, she leads him to kill Lilith whos turns out to be the last seal holding Satan in hell. The brothers work together to kill Ruby, but than the credits start to roll just as the end of the world is beginning.
- CSI episodes do this unusually often, considering the show's genre. They usually get the bad guy, but there's a fair number of episodes where things just go bad. In particular, "Alter Boys" comes to mind- where they arrest one brother as a suspect in a double murder, find out his brother is the actual killer and he was just burying the bodies as he's easily manipulated, convince him to tell them about what happened with his brother to avoid jail (as he's convinced he simply couldn't make it in jail), then find themselves completely unable to provide concrete evidence against the brother; the bloodstain they find has flour caked into it enough to prevent DNA sampling, he's scratched the interior of his gun barrel so the markings won't match, and got his brother to handle the murder weapon. In the end, the actual killer walks free, the DA is pushing for death penalty on the one that's still in jail, and the brother in jail commits suicide by ripping open his wrists with his own incisors. Cue to anvil-dropping symbolism with Grissom looking at his hands covered in the suicide's blood.
- Season Eight finale. Warrick is cleared of charges and on the path of redemption, and everyone is happy... then Warrick is shot dead by the Under Sheriff, the man who set him up in the first place.
- The ending of Dead Set, in which all of the main characters, as well as the entire British civilisation, are either dead or undead.
- The short-lived live action Jigoku Shoujo series had a really depressing Gecko Ending. Like Tsugumi in the anime, Hajime is offered a straw doll by Ai, then forgives his target and chooses not to use the doll. But then the target pulls the string! Even though Hajime refused the contract, he still gets Ai's mark on his chest, letting him know he'll go to hell when he dies — for a contract he never accepted!
- NCIS likes to end seasons on a downer note:
- The season two finale, "Twilight," ends with Caitlin Todd getting her brains splattered over the landscape (and some on a co-workers face) by a high-powered sniper rifle, in mid sentence. "For a moment there, I thought I was going to—"
- The season three finale, by comparison, is a bit milder, but it still ends with Gibbs quitting, after most of the episode showed them struggling to function in his absence.
- The season four finale is more of a Wham Ending than a Downer Ending, but the season five finale, "Judgment Day," involves the death of NCIS Director Jenny Shepard and ends with Gibbs's team of Nakama being summarily disbanded and scattered to new assignments.
- Stargate SG-1 is generally good fun, but it has its moments. A good example is season 3's "Forever And a Day" in which Daniel loses his wife for the last time. Owie.
- The season 1 episode "The Trials of Tantalus" was close to the ultimate downer ending. Trapped for 50 years alone, with nothing but knowledge about the universe, only to be rescued hours before the building containing the knowledge is destroyed forever and all knowledge lost
- The episode "Ethon" was uber-dark by SG-1 standards. Not only does Earth lose one of it's Cool Ships, along with the deaths of dozens (including the popular Colonel Pendergast), but to top it all off, all the destruction proved for naught. The "peaceful compromise" Jackson hoped could be reached never comes to be.
- Meerkat Manor (the original, not "Next Generation") had the ultimate tragic ending, when their superstar Flower had her life tragically cut short in an incident documented right on the air. She will be missed, always.
- Sleeper Cell ended with The Hero's Arch Enemy pulling a Karma Houdini and escaping their Final Battle, with the former near death and left to fend for himself in a veritable extremist hornet's nest.
- Battlestar Galactica commands full mastery of this trope.
- Mid-season finale for Season Four is one of the most downer endings coming after the most uplifting: the fleet, allied with the rebel Cylons, finally find Earth and there is much celebration. That is until they land on Earth and find everything is a nuclear wasteland. All the characters stare out at the ruins a city and the episode ends.
- AND in the final season Ron Moore, in Nazi-writer Deathcamp Execution style, breaks and then kills just about every Cutie and Woobie on the ship Duala, Gaeta, and Boomer in season 4 alone so as to severely strain your mileage when rewatching the series. Honestly, who can see those characters in the miniseries and not weep for how it will end?
- Finally, the series ended at apparently hopeful note, but let us consider: the people gave up their culture and technology, as well as their chance to warn the future generations of their errors in favour of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Think of what all that entails: dying of trivial diseases and injuries, struggling to stay alive in a manner unknown to most of the population, and generally leading at least as shitty existence as they did back on Galactica, apart from the bit about being hunted by Cylons, though natural predators and at least some of the native humans probably take care of that aspect in their lives. Oh, and cute little Hera is destined to die at young age after popping out enough babies to sire modern humanity, which means she probably started in her early teens. Yay?
- Eastenders - The Secret Mitchell storyline. In 2008, we discovered that Ronnie Mitchell had given up her baby daughter for adoption as a 14 year old. She'd spent a lifetime regretting it, and always wore a locket carrying a picture of the child. She'd given away an identical locket carrying her own photo as a keepsake to her daughter. We then learnt from Ronnie's cruel and manipulative father, Archie, that Ronnie's daughter had died as a young child. A few weeks later, a young woman called Danielle moved onto Albert Square. Danielle became friends with Stacey Slater, and Ronnie, not being Stacey's biggest fan, quickly took a dislike to Danielle too. It was then that the viewers learned that Danielle had a locket identical to Ronnie's. She was the daughter that Ronnie had given up. Later, the two began to bond, though Danielle was still scared of Ronnie's reaction if she found out the truth. Every time Danielle felt close to Ronnie, her mother would become emotionally distant. Ironically, this was because Ronnie was constantly tormented by her grief over her supposedly-dead daughter. When Danielle fell pregnant, Ronnie convinced her to have an abortion, telling her that she regretted having her own baby all those years ago. Unfortunately, Archie realised who Danielle was before she could tell Ronnie. Unwilling to let his lie be exposed, he convinced his granddaughter that Ronnie knew who Danielle was, and didn't want to know her. The plan backfired when Danielle confronted Ronnie. Archie convinced his daughter that Danielle was crazy and lying, causing Ronnie to throw Danielle out on the street, telling her "who would want a daughter like you?". A few minutes later, Ronnie found the locket that she'd given away with her baby and realised that Danielle was telling the truth. Running after her, Ronnie calls out to her long-lost daughter. Danielle turns and sees Ronnie, who pleads "Baby!" Danielle laughs with joy - for both of them, this is the moment they've been dreaming about their whole lives. She runs across the road for an emotional reunion with her mother. And gets hit by a car. Moments later she's died in her mother's arms. Nine months that storyline went on for before that ending.
- ALF gets caught by the military in the final episode. This was NBC's fault as much as anyone else's.
- There was a post-series made for TV movie where he makes some friends in the government by going on a wacky road-trip and gets officially recognized as a citizen of the united states with human rights, though.
- The current season of Medium ends on one hell of a downer. Alison is forced to choose between her ability to dream the future, or her own life, due to a tumor growing in her. Meanwhile, she's busy trying to solve a case that's been going on for YEARS with a Mexican drug lord. She is having dreams about the results of her possible operation, and how they'll take away her powers... blah, blah, blah. She saves the day, has her surgery, and the episode ends after we and her husband and boss find out she had a stroke during the operation. (This is also the series finale, for the station it was running on). However, after the episode fades out on Alison lying comatose, we get a bit of joy at the words "To be continued" showing up on screen, even if it will be on another channel.
- Of all shows to do this, the Season Finale of Top Gear was quite a surprise, given the show's usual nature.
- Andromeda seasons tended to end like this. Especially the first one.
Music
- Pink Floyd's last album (or Roger Waters' first solo album), The Final Cut, ends with the song "Two Suns in the Sunset". One sun is the sun. The other 'sun' is a mushroom cloud. However, the soulful sax fade-out turns it from a wrist-slitting downer into a lingering melancholy.
- [[Queensryche Queensryche's]] Operation: Mindcrime ends with Sister Mary killing herself(?), and Nikki on trial for murder and insane.
Video Games
- Velvet Assassin has an incredibly horrific, Tear Jerker ending. Basically the final level takes place in a village being burned to the ground and the villagers rounded up (and taken to the church) or killed by the Nazis because the village was hiding British spy, Violette Summers, the player. In the end, the Nazis take all the villagers to the church, lock them inside, and set the church on fire. Violette is too late in getting there, hears the villagers burn alive and collapses (although survives and wonders the countryside in the credits). The leader of the Nazis turns about to be the guy Violette was supposed to kill.
- The heroine of this game was inspired by real life WWII spy, Violette Sbazo, who after a couple successful missions was later captured by the Nazis, and was tortured, starved, raped, and later executed.
- Xeno Saga Episode 3. All the connections between worlds have been severed, KOS-MOS drifts alone and broken, four other major characters are killed or disappear (not counting all the villains, many of whom are Anti Villains), and humanity still hasn't found Lost Jerusalem. Definitely setting up for a fourth offering, but said offering hasn't happened yet.
- Half Life 2, Episode 2 ended with Eli Vance getting brainsucked by tentacled Advisors while his daughter and a helpless Gordon Freeman watch, horrified. Fade To Black with her weeping over his body.
- Some could say that Half-Life: Blue Shift is the only game in the franchise with a happy ending, as Barney and three other scientists manage to escape Black Mesa before the place detonates.
- The games have endings that are somewhere between Downer Ending and Bittersweet Ending — in each installment the Big Bad is destroyed or at least thwarted, but right after that (or as a consequence of that) things just get worse. Well, they have to do something to keep the series going...
- The original series? For Half-Life and its expansion, Opposing Force, Gordon is placed into statis as some sort of mercenary by the G-Man, and Adrian is apparently frozen for eternity, respectively.
- Halo 3 ends with Master Chief and Cortana floating helplessly in deep space, and Sgt. Avery Johnson and most other favorite characters KIA.
- The entire Halo Trilogy does this. Halo 1 ends with almost everyone dead, and John and Cortana alone. Well, there is Dustin Echos (Yeah, bad pun). Halo 2: Earth gets raped... hard. Halo 3: Wake me... when you need me.
- May be a Bittersweet Ending for now, as the Covenant is disbanded, and the Flood have been neutralized, at least temporarily. But there may be more than one Gravemind, the Brutes etc. are still out there, and who knows if some other unknown prophet survived(there are several "minor prophets").
- Higly unlikely the "minor Prophets" will be a threat, if anything they are all dead. The entire race of Prophets lived on their city-ship "High Charity". That was taken over and destroyed by the flood in Halo 2, and its shown too that any ship leaveing High Charity was immedietly destroyed by the fleet currently parked in "Quarenteen". That means if any prophet tried to leave they were shot down. Now maybe there were some Prophets IN the fleet. The flaw with this is that in Halo 3 the fleet was destroyed and high charity slammed itself down on a planet. Sucks to the the Prophets.
- Kingdom Hearts ends the first game with Riku and Mickey trapped behind the door to darkness, Kairi separated from Sora, and Sora's party at the footsteps of "Castle Oblivion", which would become the setting for Kingdom Hearts: Chain Of Memories where everything will just get worse.
- 358/2 Days also has one of these, thanks to being Doomed By Canon. Word Of God says that Birth By Sleep won't end well, either. Really KH 2 is the only game in the series with a genuine happy ending, and then only after a lot of hard work and sacrifice on the part of several key characters.
- Maybe not the Downer Ending implied, but in 358/2 Days, Square decides to crush any hope that someone had of Nobodies having hearts. If you die as Roxas in Story mode, it shows the same continue screen as the original Kingdom Hearts, just with Roxas floating in darkness instead of Sora. However, the difference is that when you die as Sora, it shows his heart floating above his body. When you die as Roxas, no heart floats above him, showing that even he has no heart.
- XIII, the cel-shaded first person shooter based on the first half of the comic series of the same, ends with a Cliff Hanger after The Reveal of the conspirator, with the protagonist in an impending doom situation. Due to poor sales, the developers declined to adapt the rest of the story in game format.
- Call Of Duty 4 ends the Prologue Act with the player in the shoes of President Al-Fulani, watching his nation collapse all around him as he's dragged off to be executed. Act I ends with the player-controlled side character's helicopter getting caught in the blast radius of a nuke bomb detonation; the player survives the crash long enough to stand up several times, painfully crawl to the downed helo exit ramp, and THEN die. And in the final mission, Every single member of the player's squad (as the main character) except the CO is executed while wounded and unable to retaliate. Its even worse because all of these guys had just saved the world and reinforcements are literally seconds away from saving the day.
- At least the game's ending wasn't a total Shoot The Shaggy Dog, unlike the Shock & Awe mission.
- COD 4: Modern Warfare 2 manages to make it worse. In the midst of a war initially generated by Makarov and his men, after countless trials and a bitter struggle to reach Shepherd, the true main antagonist after he betrays Makarov, he finally reveals his motivation- as the commander of all US forces, with the Russians having already invaded the US, and with his status as a war hero secured as, to almost everyone, the man who brought Makarov down, he reveals that he attempted to galvanize the USA into fighting with force- and succeeded. The only thing killing him does is disallow him from seeing the end results of his already complete scheme. That, and Soap and Price are fugitives, and with the USA in a fervor despite its military lacking a commander, it and Russia are going full pelt towards a cataclysmic war the likes of which the world has never seen. Not to mention the two player characters that die while the player can do nothing about it.
- Games in the Grand Theft Auto series have mostly had victorious endings, ranging from "Okay, there's no corrupt cop trying to ruin our lives any more, we're fine" to "I rule all of Vice City now! Mwa ha ha ha haaa!". Grand Theft Auto IV, however, has a darker and more sincere narrative, and ends with Niko's cousin/best friend being accidentally shot dead at his own wedding; Niko gets his revenge, but it doesn't make him feel better. There is an alternate ending, though... in which Niko's girlfriend gets killed instead at the same wedding. Yay!
- Of course, the alternate ending is a bit happier as at least Niko still has Roman, whereas in the other one, Roman is dead and Kate has left Niko. Still, neither ending is very happy.
- There's still the possibility of Niko and Kate getting back together, though. You get a call from her on Niko's cellphone after the end credits.
- In GTA: Advance: You learn that your partner in crime Vinnie who was planning to get out of Liberty City with you never had such intentions. He apparently croaks early on, but was planning to eliminate you so you don't get caught up to him. You managed to kill him and escape from Liberty, but not without seeing 8-ball get arrested, the first contact aside from 8-ball killed, and Cisco, a Cartel dealer who you were friends with, crossed the heart of the Yakuza lady after apparently sleeping with her. A real bittersweet ending indeed.
- And in Chinatown Wars, Huang Lee finds out that his uncle killed his father in cold blood on the orders of the triad boss Hsin, for the promise of being promoted once Hsin steps down. The game ends with Huang killing his uncle, having already killed several of his fellow triads who were framed as being snitches and being betrayed by another friendly contact.
- The Castlevania series' bad endings:
- In one of the endings to Castlevania II, the narration says that killing Dracula a second time wasn't enough to save Simon, and that Simon died from the curse.
- In the SNES version of Dracula X, Richter heads into Dracula's castle to rescue his girlfriend Annet and her sister Maria. Rescuing them requires going into two separate hidden areas. If you fail to rescue them, at the end of the game Richter will be shown walking away from the castle alone. This is made more poignant by the fact that if you failed to rescue Annet, she was transformed into a monster and you had to kill her...
- In Harmony of Dissonance, if you defeat Maxim in Castle B, but without the JB and MK Bracelets equipped, Maxim and Lydie both die. This is in contrast to the best ending, where Maxim and Lydie both live to tell the story...well, except Juste's opposed to telling the story to Lydie.
- The normal ending is somewhere between this and Bitter Sweet Ending; Maxim dies but Lydie lives.
- The Dawn of Sorrow bad end is possibly one of the worst: Despite overcoming his Superpowered Evil Side the first time in Aria, Soma could succumb to his dark side by failing to hold onto a Love Token Mina gives him, making it a very, very cruel and ironic ending considering the circumstances.
- In Aria, the Bad Ending essentially has Julius coming in to fight Sora, who is now the dark lord. Either Soma dies or the dark lord wins, and neither outcome is pleasant.
- In Symphony of the Night, the worst ending is triggered by simply killing the brainwashed Richter, leaving Maria heartbroken and Alucard filled with self-doubt about what he had to do. Unused voice clips on the disc suggest that an even worse ending was cut, one in which Maria turned into a monster and Alucard had to kill them both, without ever figuring out who was behind it.
- Fallout has the player character get the Vault its needed water chip, and save the world from The Master, but he'll still get exiled at the end, as the Vault's denizens are now terrified of him. The clip of him dejectedly walking back into the wastes afterwards while the Ink Spot's "Maybe" plays in the background is a pretty powerful scene. In an alternative ending (depending on the player character traits chosen at the beginning, or the character's alignment, or the player's ability to press the "initiate combat" button before the Overseer walks away), the player responds to this rejection by killing his boss in a violent fashion. It's almost alright, though; the intelligent Death Claws that moved into the Vault sometime between the first and second games built a little memorial for him.
- The Death Claws don't make it, though... unless you manage a lightning quick playthrough in game time.
- Fallout 3 has a similar ending where, in the "good" ending the Vault Dweller sacrifices his own life to bring clean water to the wasteland of DC. The other endings are much much worse. An upcoming downloadable content release called 'Broken Steel' will apparently change this.
- Terranigma ends with the lead character ceasing to exist because he destroyed the evil entity that was the source of his life. He is 'rewarded' for this by The Powers That Be by being allowed one last day in his pre-heroic life along with his old friends - all of whom will cease to exist along with him - before dying. The credits are superimposed over the last dream of the protagonist as he fades away.
- It's implied that, as the world cycles back and forth, Ark's spirit is the one with the "duty" to perform this role. Every time.
- There is also the implication that he actually did survive, as if one waits until after the credits, the scene switches to Storkholm. Surface Elle answers a knock at the door, which causes the song "A Place To Return To," theme music for Ark's village, and commonly used as his own theme, to play. The implication being that maybe, just maybe, it was actually Ark at the door. His whole village is still gone, mind you, as is his original Love Interest, but since he seems to have grown fond of Surface Elle throughout the game, it might actually classify more as a Bittersweet Ending.
- Any of the Suikoden games, unless you have recruited the 108 Stars of Destiny.
- Clock Tower: The First Fear. Sure, Jennifer survived, but her three friends are all dead, and she's very nearly lost her sanity.
- The sequel is bad too. Jennifer is adopted by Helen and goes under therapy, only for Scissorman to attack her again. In three of the endings, she fails to defeat Scissorman and dies, in one she kills him but dies in the process, and in one she kills him and survives. Even in the good ending, Scissorman has still killed some of the people she knew. Helen's endings are no better, as there are four endings in which she dies and Scissorman lives, and only one where he is defeated and she survives.
- You want a REAL videogame Downer Ending? You beat Digimon World 3, and what do you get? Only a FMV of the end boss exploding, its wreckage falling down to Earth like pretty shooting stars, and then the credits roll... with a catchy end song over an ugly background. And that's it. For a game based around Level Grinding (but quite fun) the end is... something of Gainax proportions.
- Perhaps should be mentioned that only applies to the American version.
- Conker's Bad Fur Day ends with Conker as king of the land... but he's gone through hell, he's Surrounded By Idiots, and his girlfriend got killed in front of him. The last shot of the game, same as the first, shows him seated on the throne, looking deeply irritated, as somber music plays on the soundtrack.
- What makes it worse was that earlier, Conker had an opportunity to wish Berri back to life, but forgot to, completely squandering his one and only chance at a happy ending.
- Which still isn't as bad as the ending that was originally planned, where Conker commits suicide.
- Splatterhouse ends with the protagonist, Rick Taylor, giving his back to the burned-down remains of the titular house, after having to kill his Distressed Damsel girlfriend possessed by an ugly grand-guignolesque demon and probably scarred for life. The Mask of Terror, which helps him on his quest only to try to kill him at the end releasing from a tomb the Final Boss and which he broke to pieces, just puts itself back together with a nasty cackle. On the sequel, though, we learn that the girl is still alive, held captive by the Big Bad's forces, and that the one in the first title was just a fake.
- Splatterhouse 3 has three downer endings, where Rick loses one or both of his wife and son, and one good ending where he saves both and destroys the Mask forever, depending on whether or not the player beat the stage-specific time limits.
- Silent Hill 2 has three downer endings (one of which is a secret ending). Specifically, in one ending the main character, James, commits suicide, in another he leaves the town accompanied by a sinister simulacrum of his dead wife who might be dying of the same disease she suffered, and in the secret ending he is seen rowing his dead wife's corpse to an island on the middle of a lake, with the declared intent of invoking the dark powers of the town in order to bring her back to life.
- If you do things just right, he does get out okay, by abandoning the problem.
- The first Silent Hill had two downer endings, one with Harry and Cybil trapped in hell together, the other being the famous Dying Dream ending. Both Bad Endings have somber credits music (different from the good endings) to go with them, but the worst ending has a vocal ending theme, "Esperandote".
- Three of the endings in Silent Hill 4 are downers: Henry moves back into his still-haunted apartment, Eileen dies, or Walter completes his 21 sacraments and both of the protagonists die.
- And the movie ending: Alessa merges with Sharon, then she and Rose leave Silent Hill, but are still stuck in the other dimension where no one can see them, which can imply that the Dark Alessa has expanded the "nightmare" beyond just Silent Hill. How's that for a Downer Ending, having a vengeful, bordering-on-demonic spirit expanding her reality-warping, nightmarish anger and hatred over the whole world? There's a reason why people call this game "the scariest game ever" simply because the implications seen throughout the series are very depressing.
- All of the endings in Deus Ex: Invisible War are downers to some degree. Either all of humanity link up with the AI Helios and give him a Borg-like Hive Mind, a perfect democracy at the cost of the individual self(Bittersweet Ending), the Illuminati take over the world, the Templars wipe out all biomodification and create a Taliban-like world government, or humanity fights itself to extinction, leaving only the Omar cyborg race.
- The connection between humans and Denton/Helios is one-way. He simply reads everyone's minds in order to determine everyone's needs and wants, in order to weigh them all and allocate resources and set laws accordingly. People retain their freedom and individuality, Denton explicitly states that it will NOT be a hivemind; just a perfect democracy. Not a downer ending at all.
- Except that a long established truth about democracy is that a perfect democracy is the same thing as slavery.
- The Illuminati ending doesn't have any particular down notes, unless you really don't like free trade.
- The ending of the Dungeon Siege II: Broken World short story, "Bound Together".
- Some of the endings of Tactics Ogre The Knight of Lodis are quite the downer endings. In one of them the hero's lover sacrifices herself to kill the Big Bad, the hero's best friend dies thanks in no small part to the hero, said best friend's father, a duke, sends his army after the hero, forcing him to go into hiding. The game's secret ending (which is also the canonical one) is hardly any better as all of the above happens and the hero is rewarded by the Pope for killing the Big Bad with a new name, Lans Tartare, which reveals to fans of the series that this game was a prequel, and that the hero is an antagonist in Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
- However, you can get a non-canonical good ending, if you manage to take just the right actions, and the Hero and his girlfriend walk off into the sunset. However, a mentor he rejected does die in her place.
- The second and fourth endings of Drakengard fall into this category. One was severely messed up, the other provided an example of Nightmare Fuel to forget the medicine for your dying father that brought you on your adventure in the first place. You're teleported back to the castle just in time to see your dad die.
- The game 1213 ends with the eponymous lead character finally escaping... only to discover that what he's escaping to is an Earth seemingly completely devoid of life after the atmosphere turned completely toxic for reasons that are unclear to everyone, and he and his clone siblings - now all irredeemably insane or dead - were created specifically to seek out and contact any survivors that might exist. The game ends simply on a scene of the devastation, before there's any sign of survivors... although, in a small concession to hope, it ends before the possibility is completely eliminated, either.
- Worse, it is implied that the actions of the player in the first part of the series (in escaping from the quarantined part of the facility he accidentally unleashed zombies on the whole place, not to mention the fact that the villain took out several members of the place's leadership over the course of the game) have ensured it doesn't possibly have the resources to engineer another human capable of surviving out there, and might not even be able to sustain themselves. Worst of all, is that the last human on earth is unstable in such a way that he will not be able to remember anything for more than a week (including his identity, what's going on, and where the game took place) and is doomed to wander forever in a desolate wasteland he won't even be able to remember. And that's ignoring the hallucinations.
- Breath Of Fire 2's "bad ending"; the one you get if you can't activate the machinery underneath your city. Which you can't get if you let the old man in the Eye Machine die. The old man just happens to be protagonist Ryu's father. In it, Ryu takes his mother's place as the living seal to the Dragon World. He has to take her place because she literally gave her life to open the gate to let your party go after the BBEG. BoF2 rivals Terranigma as the biggest continuous downer game in Nintendo history.
- 7 Days a Skeptic, from the Chzo Mythos series of games: the Player Character turns out to be an impostor who killed a man and took his identity to fulfill the dream of being in space. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, he gets arrested for 6 murders, 5 of which (those of his crewmates) he didn't commit.
- In the sequel/prequel, 6 Days a Sacrifice, not only is it revealed that the protagonist of 7 Days ended up as, essentially, Destiny's slave, the player character of that game kills the woman he's in love with (who had been possessed by John DeFoe during the sex scene... which, y'know, implies that you had *** *** JOHN DEFOE), then becomes fused with John DeFoe's ghost to become Chzo's new Prince. On the plus, he was already dead... and if not, he looked totally badass.
- The fact that Chzo actually won in the end is a shocker in itself.
- Possibly, because his motives remain vague, and the last chronogical event of the series is Malcolm freeing the Trilby clone from Chzo's clutches. Chzo is NOT happy to have Trilby taken away from him.
- Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation ends with Lara apparently falling to her death. However, she comes BackFromTheDead in Angel of Darkness.
- In Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Lara has to destroy the Scion, which her and her father had dedicated their entire lives to finding. She also has to come to terms with her first murder of a human being. Neither of these story elements were in the original game and seem like they were added forcibly, so it's hard for veteran Tomb Raider gamers to give a shit about them. This may not count as a Downer Ending for some.
- Tomb Raider: Underworld. Hey Lara, guess what? That lifelong quest of yours? And your father's? Every minute of your life you spent on it was totally wasted, your mom's been a zombie the whole time. Seriously, Legend ended on a goddamn triumphal march complete with soaring orchestral accompaniment, compared to this.
- Final Fantasy X: The main character fades out of existence because he was a dream of the fayth; essentially part of a giant aeon being summoned by Yu Yevon. When Yu Yevon got snuffed, the summoning ended, the fayth were freed, and all residents of the Dream Zanarkand faded away.
- Of course, depending on how things play out in Final Fantasy X-2, Yuna might be able to convince the fayth to summon him up again.
- According to the first game the Fayth gave Tidus his own personal "heaven".
- The major kicker is that his girlfriend who was supposed to die doesn't—at a point when she's come around to his earlier opinion that self-sacrifice for the greater good is a bad thing. Conversely, he now shares her earlier opinion that it's the right thing to do and she has to live with that. It just seems cold, at that point.
- Nobody decided "self-sacrifice for the greater good is a bad thing". What they decided was that a pointless sacrifice that would ensure that Sin returned was a bad thing.
- On one hand, the Lucavi demons, of Final Fantasy Tactics are destroyed, and mankind saved. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who fought them died doing it, and no one ever knew how close they were to a demonic end of the world because they were too busy fighting a civil war. The heroes MIGHT have been remembered had the one decent person who survived the entire ordeal and wrote an eyewitness account of such not been burned at the stake for charges of heresy because the revealing of what the heroes have done would reveal the falsehood the Church has been spreading for generations. And, if you're in the camp that sympathizes with Delita, he loses everyone dear to him, because the hero who slayed the demons had been his best friend, the princess he married and became King and Queen with decided that Delita had manipulated everyone and herself as well, and stabbed Delita, who, in turn, lethally stabbed her back. The man who had manipulated everyone else and became King lost his sister, his best friend, and his wife in rapid succession, and was forever alone, unloved, and misunderstood at the top of the kingdom even if he survived.
- On the bright note, though, decades after the events of the game, it is revealed that the narrator of the story, having already established himself as a credible historian of his time, is, in fact, the descendant of the eyewitness who was burned at the stake, and that he was successful in revealing the truth to the world.
- Also, Ramza and his party having died is just a fan interpretation. If anything, the ending (particularly the PSP version's) implies they did survive, if obliquely. Ollan isn't sure whether what he sees is really Ramza and Alma, but then, if they were ghosts, why would they be riding Chocobos? And the PSP version's credits show the two of them stopping off for water by a stream, very much implying they're still alive.
- If you choose to kill Ryoji Mochizuki in Persona 3, the characters' memories are erased so that they won't have to fear the Fall, and can live their lives as ordinary high school students happily until everyone dies.
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin is even worse. The heroes fail to prevent the world aside from Sumaru to blow up, and Maya who they all idolized dies. Instead of dealing with the state of this world Philemon gives them a chance to create a separate universe where things didn't go wrong. Meaning all you did was for nothing. Fun. At least Eternal Punishment is better.
- The finale of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII sees the protagonist, Zack, gunned down by the whole Shinra army, just outside of Midgar where he was going to see his girlfriend after being apart for five years, when his friends in the Turks searched vainly for him in order to save his life. If you've ever played (or even heard of) the original, you know it's a foregone conclusion (this game being a prequel and all), but it's still heartbreaking.
- Especially when you consider that what Cloud and Zack suffered together sets the stage for Cloud's emotional dysfunction in the original game and provides Sephiroth with the ammo he needs to Mind Rape Cloud.
- Fatal Frame: just about every canonical ending to the series.
- StarCraft: Brood War is a classic example by any standards. The game ends with the Zerg triumphant, the Protoss and Terrans scattered (in the final cutscene the Terran commander shoots himself, having penned a farewell note to his wife back on Earth) and most of the characters who could loosely be classified as "good guys" either dead or having abandoned the fight.
- Then there is Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. Not only does he lose his grandpa halfway through the game, after striking down the Big Bad, he finds out that he was just summoned there just to help by his friend in the ring, and was nothing more than a "dream" character, and that he is instantly whisked away back to his "dimension" while pleading to his friend to remain in Phantomile.
- Yume Nikki ends with the main character committing suicide.
- For one whopper of a Downer Ending, look no further than Planetarian. This "kinetic novel" (more akin to a piece of illustrated writing than a game) ends with robot girl Yumemi getting gunned down by a big mecha, after the protagonist hauled her out of the planetarium she still felt obliged to work for and where she had been waiting for her co-workers to return for thirty years. The worst part is that she had a fair chance of surviving where she was - if the protagonist wouldn't have blown her power supply by letting her run all that heavy equipment for that one last show. Leave it to Key Visual Arts to make as depressing an ending as possible.
- Planescape Torment, for pretty much every possible ending. Best case scenario, you revive all your friends, send them to Sigil and then and go to the lower planes to suffer for all eternity for crimes committed by past incarnations. Alternatively, you can kill your mortality, leaving all your friends (save, possibly, one) still thoroughly dead, and you very likely facing oblivion. So oblivion or hell, no matter how nice you've been the entire game.
- However, if it makes you feel better, the 'hell' ending has the protagonist becoming immensely powerful. He was already extremely strong before, but now he has the memories and power of countless incarnations as well. I can't help but hope he does pretty well in the eternal war he's sentenced to for his crimes.
- Most endings in the Visual Novel Kana Little Sister can be seen as Downer Endings, since in all but one of them the protagonist's beloved sister dies, often in some of the most tragically depicted death scenes in gaming ever. The fact that the makers tried to give most endings a bittersweet lining doesn't lessen the sad fact that the protagonist fails to save the most important person in his life, even after offering one of his kidneys for transplantation, as happens in some scenarios. The one ending in which she doesn't die results in her leaving him after a while. The guy just can't win.
- Dreamfall: The Longest Journey: One of the heroines gets stabbed and disappears without trace, possibly dead. The male hero finally sees the light and turns to the good side, only to be captured by the bad guys. The evil mind-control plan you sabotaged and thwarted? Only delayed, the final cutscene shows the public going crazy about the product without knowing what it really does. The main character's ex-boyfriend who she still had feelings to? Most likely dead, replaced by a clone without anyone knowing the difference. The guy who the main character fell in love with during the game? Disappeared, presumably dead. The main character herself? In coma and about to die after being duped by the bad guys. With her father crying by her side as her life fades away. Not to even mention the heartwrenching scene where your plush toy/pet android, if you put his batteries back into him after using them elsewhere, talks with one of the big bads right after you've fallen into coma about if you're going to wake up ever again.. It also counts that about a billion seemingly really important things are left completely unanswered by the time the game ends.
- Mother 3 ends with the main protagonist Lucas confronting the Masked Man in a final showdown in order to pull the last needle to awaken a Dragon that will undo the damage done by the big bad. The catch? The Masked Man is Claus, his brother that died early in the game (at the age of nine, incidentally) and was revived as a cyborg by big bad Porky to pull the needles in order to destroy the world, and brainwashed him into commanding his army. Claus slowly regains his senses after his father takes a spell aimed for Lucas, and takes off his helmet to reveal his face. Cue sad music as Claus commits suicide, firing one of his instant kill lightning spells at Lucas (which is reflected by an item that he was wearing to ensure that the other party members don't get in the way, as they will just die from this if they are resurrected, since they lack the item) and dies in Lucas' arms, saying that he was glad that he could be with his family before he died. Lucas then pulls the final needle, which ends the earth; the difference in this case being that everyone is implied to survive and that the world will regenerate as it was before Porky's interference. For a game in a series that largely focuses on children fighting absurdist enemies like hippies...
- If you didn't stick around for the after-the-credits show, it merely looks like Lucas went insane from witnessing his brother kill himself not 30 seconds ago and pulled the last needle with an empty or dark heart, thusly pushing the dragon's awakening all the way back into being a bad thing. Which actually makes a little more sense than the proper "Everyone died, but not really" version of the ending.
- In the fantasy video games Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege II, the heroes' final victory over the Big Bad results in a cataclysm and The End Of The World As We Know It. Twice.
- Kane And Lynch: Dead Men. In the "damned if you do" ending, Kane winds up alone on a small motorboat at sea with a dying Lynch and his dead daughter, despite the game giving you the illusion of there being a way to keep Kane's daughter alive all the way to the ending by making you protect your daughter through the last area. Even if protected flawlessly, she -will- get gunned down at the docks, and Lynch will take one in the chest while you get your boat started, and be dying. The one member of your crew you -did- save curses your name, rushes ahead, and grabs a second boat, ditching you. In the "damned if you don't" ending, Kane abandons Lynch in South America, with his crew being burned out of a church, certain to die, with his daughter vowing to hate him forever for abandoning the crew to save her life. For a game that seemed to be about Kane's redemption, that's two epic Downer Endings that some people viewed as Wall Bangers.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: After the protagonist, Naked Snake, comes back from his mission in Russia, he finds out that the woman he slept with and was beginning to have feelings for was a Chinese spy who was just trying to get at the Philosopher's Legacy that he had retrieved. Much more horribly, however, was learning that The Boss, his mentor and mother figure who he was forced to kill to complete the mission, was just a Fake Defector ordered to get close to the main antagonist, Colonel Volgin, to steal his money, then having to take the fall for America when he detonated a nuclear warhead inside Russia. The game ends with Snake saluting the anonymous grave of The Boss, one of thousands in Arlington National Cemetery, trying and failing to fight back tears.
- The Next-Gen Alone In The Dark has a "pick your poison" pair of downer endings. Giving the player an option to choose which one is kind of like twisting the knife.
- Some people thought the Really Bad Ending was So Bad Its Good, though. "I'm the light bringer, I'M THE FUCKING UNIVERSE!.
- Worse, the game's negative reception may have killed the franchise. No plans for a sequel so far.
- Activision's Apocalypse for PS 1 doesn't even give you a "lesser of two evils" ending. Bruce, after defeating the four horsemen, comes face to face with the Big Bad himself. He says "see you in hell" but before he can fire, the Rev blasts Bruce with a bolt of lightning, turning him into a "demon" himself, complete with glowing Hellish Pupils. Who knows what he will unleash upon the universe. All your hard work is rendered pointless, ie they shot the shaggy dog.
- Ikaruga has you go through an intense boss fight ending with a phase that must be timed out (you can't shoot at all) only to see the titular ship explode performing its last attack on the final boss, killing both the pilot and copilot.
- The pseudo-prequel Radiant Silvergun has the mothership Penta being taken over by the Stone-Like, and everyone is killed except the quirky robot Creator who resurrects the 2 main characters through cloning. Not as bad as Ikaruga but still a downer.
- The 11th Hour also has a "pick your poison" set of endings: if you pick Marie, she turns into Stauf and eats you alive, if you choose Robin, she has actually been turned evil and will murder you, so the only way to survive is to choose Samantha, a Bittersweet Ending, as Robin is destroyed in the burning mansion along with the Big Bad (she had irrevocably turned evil, anyway).
- Given that Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals is a prequel, and the final confrontation was shown at the start of the previous game, anyone who played the first game will know that Maxim and Selan die in the Fortress of Doom after the battle with the Sinistrals. While this was pretty much inevitable, the writers decided to make the blow even harder by showing that the comrades they fought alongside throughout the game are totally confident that Maxim and Selan found a way out somehow, and are definitely going to return.
- The Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series has several:
- In the fourth case of Justice For All, if you fail to present the correct evidence to the correct person in the final parts of the case, you get a bad ending in which your client and murderer Matt Engarde goes free, the innocent Adrian Andrews is found guilty, Maya is never seen again, and Phoenix runs away from the courtroom. Unfortunately, the mood of this ending is ruined by a typo: "The miracle never happen."
- The fourth case of Trials and Tribulations ends with your client, who you just got off the hook, deciding to kill himself rather than let his girlfriend, who is the real murderer, get convicted. Fortunately, it's mitigated by the knowledge that the guilty party was finally nailed a year later, as played out in the game's first case.
- The verdict of the fourth case of Apollo Justice is left entirely up to you. If you choose "Not Guilty," you get the normal, happy (and canonical) ending to the game, but if for whatever reason you choose "Guilty," the verdict is postponed until tomorrow, but in the meantime your client, who is in the hospital from being poisoned, dies, and the verdict is "postponed for eternity."
- Warcraft III - the demonic Burning Legion are defeated; however most of the human kingdoms have been destroyed, their population transformed into undead monsters. And the World tree, which helped maintain Night Elves' immortality, was destroyed in the process, although it started to regrow soon afterwards.
- Also in the expansion pack, where Arthas fuses with Ner'zhul, creating one of the most powerful villains in the franchise. Things haven't gotten a whole lot better in the universe since then either.
- If how many Sealed Evils In A Can have become unsealed, or close to it since then is any indication, things have gotten a whole lot worse.
- Unless you're playing in World Of Warcraft as one of the Death Knights who upon completing an early quest chain will free himself or herself from the Lich King's service and goes on to rejoin the Alliance or Horde.
- Not to forget the novel trilogy War of the Ancients: the demons are repelled, but the Well of Eternity implodes tearing the continent in half, the dragons are weakened by treachery, and Illidan secretly smuggled some of the water from the Well and makes a new one. Worst of all, the real villains (Cosmic Horror known as the Old Gods) even manage to gain something from these events, transforming the drowning Highborne into their servants, the Naga.
- In Tales of Symphonia: Knight of Ratatosk/Dawn of the New World, two of the three endings are Downer Endings:
- Bad Ending (essentially a Non Standard Game Over): Emil commits suicide because he terribly wounded Marta.
- Normal Ending: Emil is sealed away with the world tree, Yggdrasill, for 1000 years.
- Gregory Horror Show for the PS 2: After dealing with the terrifying guests who were out to kill you, finding out their even more disturbing habits, wandering through a dungeon like maze under the hotel, obtaining all of the souls within the hotel, dealing with Gregory's witch-like mother, who uses the souls to keep herself "beautiful", and fighting to remain sane throughout the whole affair, we come to the ending explaining that the hotel was a dream, a mental formation breeded by the weakness within all humans hearts. Now, they could have ended it with the burning down of the hotel due to the sacrifice of NekoZombie, but oooh no! The narrator reveals that the harsh reality of life may force him/her to COME BACK TO THE HOTEL!! To make it worse, a CG clip at the end reveals that the hotel rebuilds itself, Gregory comes back from the dead, and that YOU'VE RETURNED TO THE HOTEL!
- Splinter Cell: Double Agent had Enrica being killed by one of Fishers own men. he kills the agent and is now on the run from his own agency. Kinda sucks. She was hot too. A huge downer indeed.
- There are, in fact, multiple endings to Double Agent. Either Sam loses it and sides with the JBA, becoming a terrorist, Sam retains his sanity but gets caught for terrorism and put into a trial he cannot possibly win, or Sam retains his sanity and utterly destroys the JBA, but also loses all contact with the NSA, forcing him to go underground until such time that he can prove his innocence...which may never happen. None are particularly happy, but some are at least slightly more hopeful than others.
- Turns out Sam doesn't care about his innocence: upcoming game Splinter Cell: Conviction has him going completely off the reservation to find out who killed his daughter and why. And then kill them. And anyone in between. There's really no coming back from that much evil...is there?
- Brave Story: New Traveler kinda has a downer ending too. Sure, you save the girl from a evil, strangely hot-looking, half naked, super emo, top-half-sticking-out-of-a-giant-toad's-mouth goddess]], but in the end, the whole of the land you just visited was all an illusion, your new friends will soon disappear into nothingness, and you yourself will eventually forget the entire journey.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl: After 20 hours of wandering the Zone, killing mutants, shutting down machines that destroy people's minds and barely surviving, you finally approach the Wish Granter and make a wish, and then either die in a horrible way, or go blind, depending on your actions throughout the game. There is a better ending too, but many players get too frustrated by the Wish Granter endings to even try and play the game any more.
- All the Wishgranter endings are downers, as is the bad ending from the true final area. The true ending though, is pretty much a Happily ever after.
- Knights Of The Old Republic II has the main character abandon everyone that cares about him to sail off alone into uncharted space, to wage a futile battle against an ancient, omnipotent evil empire. As did the hero of the first game. And the redeemed Mandalorians? Doomed. Mira dies in a Heroic Sacrifice, Visas' planet is still dead, Czerka's still dicking around, and thanks to cut content, the HK droids still run rampant, causing war and strife across the galaxy. Oh yeah, and they kill the one person who was actively trying to stabilize the Republic. That's the good ending.
- And yes it's still better than some of the endings that were cut from the game. Especially the one where Darth Traya kills... pretty much everybody, actually.
- Doshin the Giant, surprisingly. The islanders construct the Tower of Babel, which blocks out the sun and causes the island to break apart. Doshin holds the tower up long enough to let the humans run, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere for them to go, and the entire island sins into the sea while Sodoru contemplates the fact that he is dying. In the end, Doshin falls face-down dead into the water and becomes a new island.
- Exmortis gives you a choice of two intensely depressing endings: having found out that you're actually the Hand of Repose, a prophesied living gateway for the Exmortis to return to Earth through, you can either decide to Screw Destiny and run for it, or give in and become the Hand. If you decide to run, you make it as far as the forest before being jumped by an Exmortis demon, whereupon you wake up exactly where you began the game, with no memory. And if you choose to give in, well, you're stuck watching your new masters obliterate the human race for the rest of your life. Either way, you're screwed.
- Exmortis 2 is even worse. At the behest of a shadowy benefactor, you travel across a world ruled by the Exmortis, picking through abandoned houses for clues and getting scared shitless by ghosts, demons, and the bodies they left in their wake: at the end of it all, you get to put the Hand of Repose out of his/her misery and send every last Exmortis tumbling back into the Spirit Realm, freeing the humans survivors from their reign of terror. And then you meet the shadow benefactor, who reveals that he's actually Lord Vlaew, the master of the Exmortis; apparently he wanted to avoid being betrayed by his own minions, and now that you've succeeded in removing the only creatures capable of killing him, he'll be able to rule the world as he sees fit. As if it couldn't get any worse, Vlaew congratulates you for your help and gives you a reward: a quick death. In fact, the only thing that stops this from being an outright Shoot The Shaggy Dog ending is the distinct possibility that there may be a sequel.
- And according to the creator's blog, when this sequel is eventually made...he plans to have the same protagonist from the second game be brought back from the brink with some sort of acquired power, out for revenge. He'll find a way to make it a downer no doubt but at least there's the possibility of [[Badass great badass potential.
- From the new Prince Of Persia: Elika dying, and the Prince screwing the world over to bring her back. It gets points for being a Sequel Hook, though, though the game's 'proper' ending in the Epilogue DLC doesn't end things on a much bettere note. Namely, Elika hates the Prince for bringing her back and setting Ahriman free, soon nowhere will be safe from his touch and the Corruption, and after successfully navigating the Temple to the lands beyond that are (currently) untouched by Ahriman, Elika tells the Prince he can do what he likes and then abandons him to go find her missing people.
- The indie adventure game the white chamber (lack of caps intended) has several endings. Four of them result in Sarah dying, but both of them are all too easily avoidable. The other three... Holy shit. You learn that Sarah, the person you've been playing as, murdered the entire crew just for the sake of getting the artefact's power, and she's been forced into a loop in order to redeem her sins. And that's part of both endings. The bad ending results in Sarah failing to redeem herself and being forced into the loop again, the worse ending ends with her being tormented by zombies, and the good ending? Not that much better. She redeems herself, the station explodes, but she's isolated on an island on the neareast planet. And the artefact is still around. Sure, you get Fanservice, but the music doesn't help either. Then again, there's the rather hilarious bonus ending, so does that even things out?
- In the finale of Dead Space, it's revealed that Isaac's girlfriend had been dead (committed suicide to apparently avoid death via necromorph) since before the game began; and he was hallucinating her presence all the time. After finally managing to kill the hive mind and narrowly escape, Isaac replays Nicole's message and turns it off prior to his suicide. He's then attacked by undead Nicole (though again he may have been hallucinating). So the hero's dead or mad on the edge of space, the marker that was keeping the necromorphs at bay is apparently destroyed, and the Ishimura remains drifting in space, full of necromorphs (the kicker is that the Ishimura would've been destroyed, had it not been for Isaac fixing the damn thing).
- Isaac could very well have survived, too, even if it wasn't a hallucination. I mean, come on, he's survived far, Far, Far worse. Sure, he took his helmet off, but Necromorph-Nicole had apparently not even changed enough to grow blade-arms or the like - in fact she was the only Necromorph who's original form you could really still identify, she was so little changed.
- The real downer (and something most people forget) is the fact that the marker isn't the original marker. The marker in the game is one created by the Earth government from one discovered on Earth. So, even if Isaac had somehow been able to completely destroy the hive mind, all the necromorphs, and the marker itself, there would still be the original and maybe even more copies.
- Wasn't the Ishimura destroyed when the chunt of Aegis 3 it'd been mining slammed back into the planet? In any case, the necromorphs on board are no threat, since the Hive Mind has been destroyed, and the Marker was returned to the planet.
- Condemned: Criminal Origins ends with Ethan Thomas managing to defeat the apparent source of the city's madness (a demon-ish entity with lots of metal implanted in it's skin); but as he and Malcolm are driving away, Ethan realizes that Malcolm's nephew, Leland aka SKX, is still alive and locked up in the back of Malcolm's car. Ethan can either choose to take his revenge on SKX for ruining his life or have mercy; but SKX does take a bullet on his head; while more of the metallic freaks are seen. Ethan is seen later at a diner, his life still ruined, the one person he trusts admitting to wearing a wire, and apparently transforming into one of the freaks.
- The sequel, Bloodshot, ends on a higher note, but still a pretty ominous one. Ethan, a burned out alcoholic, manages to defeat the Oro, the cult that apparently included the metal-jawed demonish guys from the first game. He and two friends escape, apparently all is happy. Except it's revealed that the President of the United States is a member of the Oro. And SKX? He survived his gunshot, killed his Uncle, and is accepted into Oro-dom, including all that cool metal dentistry.
- Geneforge 4. The three major endings are: letting the Shapers win and in doing so make the whole rebellion completely pointless, help the rebellion release the Unbound so that the war spreads to the other half of the continent, or force a stalemate that results in the PC being executed or enslaved.
- It is possible if you have the right amount of hidden stats for you to be merely imprisoned and have alot of people come to agree with your ideas. And in some of the shaper endings it's possible for them to have a reform of their code that allows more of an amnesty for Serviles.
- The majority of endings in the Geneforge series are downer endings to some degree. There are very few good ones, and they're typically hard to get.
- The ending of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, when Martin turns into a frikkin' dragon. It seems like The Cavalry until he turns to stone. Then he delivers his own eulogy.
- The ending of Robotech:BattleCry: The game is narrated by your character. At the end of the next-to-last mission, the Zentradi ship husk that acts as the backdrop for the fight suddenly engages a space-fold, taking the enemy fleet and you... to Saturn. The last mission is in space, where you finally kill the Big Bad. And then you find out that all of your narration is just your character's final minutes, recording how he got there as he runs out of oxygen. So Yeah.
- One fan theory is that the light Jack sees and mentions at the end is a ship defolding, and that they came to rescue Jack. The opposing theory is that the light is Jack dying.
- F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is a downer as it gets. The game ends with your entire squad except Morales and possibly Stokes killed, and Alma is still free and running about. Also, Alma rapes you.
- A Shoot The Shaggy Dog too; the only significant thing happening other than Alma raping Beckett is that a few ineffectual people die. And the fate of the Pointman, etc. is still hanging, since the Expansion Packs featuring him were discounted as Canon Discontinuity.
- Alma's rape was supposed to be a downer? Oops.
- Killzone 2 ends with you showing up in the Helghast Emperor's palace in order to arrest him. However, he points out that the ISA have lost millions of soldiers and entire fleets during the war, while the Helghast have lost "nothing" and only his leadership is keeping them in check. In anger, resident ethnic scrappy Rico kills him, only for you to find out he wasn't lying as a substantial Helghast fleet, that had been kept in reserve, begins its vicious counter-attack.
- The Unreal series has a fondness for these. Two involve drifting in space in an escape pod... alone.
- This is subverted in Ring of Fates (much to the joy of the player, albeit in a slightly confused fashion), where the protagoists, after having endured numerous wounds at the hands of Glades, look to be set up for a miserable life...But accidentally achieve Glade's goal of becoming a god, and use it rewrite reality so that they and their friends can live Happily Ever After.
- Obscure NES title WURM: Journey To The Center Of The Earth involves the crew of a mining vessel trying to discover the fate of their cohorts. Early along, they stumble on a distress beacon and risk life and limb to rescue a subterranean kingdom...only to find out, after going too far underground, that the beacon is ancient, and the people you wanted to save went extinct centuries ago. And nothing you can do changes anything.
- Another World (aka Out Of This World) ends with otherworldly researcher Lester Chaykin unconscious, after being injured while escaping from enemy troops. This could also wind up under No Ending or maybe a cliffhanger, since nothing is ever finalized, but Lester's alien buddy, err Buddy, shows up to carry him off into the sky to destinations unknown, leading to the sequel.
- It gets more depressing in the Mega CD sequel, Heart of the Alien. Lester never gets back home and is in fact killed by one of the evil aliens, forcing Buddy to cremate Lester's body at the end.
- In the Visual Novel Ever 17, some of the GOOD endings are Downer Endings!]] The worst being Tsugumi's Good Ending: Tsugumi and the protagonist, Takeshi, are able to get out of Lemu before in implodes upon itself, thanks to a tiny submarine that will propel itself to the surface, where rescuers are waiting. Partway through the journey, it breaks and begins to sink again...breaking underneath fifty feet of water. Takeshi manages to lock Tsugumi into one section of the sub, and disconnects the part that he's in so that the lighter weight will carry her to the surface. Takeshi sinks to the bottom of the ocean and drowns, while Tsugumi floats to safety, pounding on the glass window, screaming and crying to Takeshi that she doesn't want him to die. Sora's ending is just as bad.
- For such a relaxing game, Dream Chronicles sure has some sad endings The first one ends with the heroine being whisked to a magical prison, and the second ends with her getting amnesia and forgetting her husband and child.
- In both the Playstation and DS re-releases of Chrono Trigger an additional cutscene was added post-credits in which, despite saving the entire world the heroes' home kingdom is burned to the ground and the citizens are killed. The whereabouts of the heroes is left ambiguous. The sequel, Chrono Cross, implies they were also killed as they are only seen as ghosts. To top it off some of the characters you can play as are implied to have had a role in the incident.
- In Operation Flashpoint, the main character, David Armstrong, gets sent to a desolate island in the middle of nowhere, has his all friends massacred by the Soviets (twice), and generally has a pretty awful experience. The game's epilogue, however, states that the entire incident between the US and USSR was passed off by Moscow and Washington as a "misunderstanding", the Everon War being given a small footnote in an obscure military history book. Seems all his friends died for nothing in the end, and were completely forgotten.
- In Army Men: Sarge's War, the game ends with pretty much every green soldier except Sarge and a few other minor grunts dead. It doesn't help that most fans consider this to be the last game in the series and all others as In Name Only. "War is hell, and hell is for heroes".
- After winning the Revenge of the King game in Kirby Super Star Ultra, instead of showing Kirby's victory, the ending cinematic shows a defeated, depressed King Dedede walking a lonely road. At least his Waddle Dee friends come one by one to walk beside him. Yes, the game actually makes you feel guilty for winning, although alternatively, seeing a Downer Ending for your opponent might be satisfying.
- The end of Kirby's Dreamland sees Dedede flung from his castle and falling to the ground. You're then shown the code for the "hard mode game". Completing that shows Dedede thrown to land on his head. He then runs around the screen crying in pain before collapsing. It's a wonder he ever "plays" with Kirby ever again.
- Punch Out for the Wii somewhat has one and it's terribly depressing. If Little Mac loses 3 matches in the mode "Mac's Last Stand", he will keep his word in retiring from boxing for good. The game then shows Doc Louis in a room that shows various photos of Little Mac's victories over the boxers he faced. Doc Louis then rings the bell on the bike that was Little Mac's. If that wasn't enough, Doc Louis looks up at a photo of him and Mac during their training, saying to himself that he is proud of Mac. And just to make sure that the point is driven home, players cannot play the career section in their profile since it is literally "retired."
- Not as much of a downer ending as you might think: Mac has fought his way to the top of the world, literally, and holds the ultimate prize: world boxing champion. He then defends his title against everyone by beating them again. After that...well, what do you have left? Doc even says, "You're right, let's go out with a bang". He challenges every single fighter he's already beaten twice to attack him over and over again until he literally cannot fight back anymore. What other boxer in the history of boxing has ever done something like that? No wonder Doc's proud of him: Mac's the greatest boxer in the world!
- The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening. The entire island was a hallucination, and Link is lost at sea. And that's the good ending.
- Not quite true, in the "good" ending at least one other person makes it off the island.
- Makoto's route in Kanon. The only bright spot to Yuichi feeling terribly heartbroken is that his new friend and he will get better. Eventually. It's bad enough that it almost seems nicer to Makoto if she's just allowed to vanish and presumably die of exposure like in the other routes.
- Diablo. First game starts with the noble king being corrupted and his kingdom destroyed. Then you have to kill the undead king, plus demons are killing people, the prince has been kidnapped. After 16 annoying levels of demon slaying you finally make it to the boss and beat him... you find out that the kidnapped prince you were tasked to find and rescue was Diablo all this time, and you just killed him. To top it off, you became Diablo and took his place, bringing the world back to the way it was when it started and making your whole quest pointless.
- Except that now instead of posessing the body of some frail young prince, the Lord of Terror is now inhabiting an extremely powerful warrior's body.
- Doom: Shareware version: You fought through the demon-infested labs and defeated the two Hell Barons.. only to have the last teleport lead to a Hopeless Boss Fight. Full version: You just fought through Hell itself and finally manage to return to Earth.. only to find it overrun by demons. And they killed the bunny.
- Saints Row: The first game ends with your character supposedly dying in a boat explosion, shortly after reaching his goal of helping his gang take over the entire city. To make matters worse, in the second game you learn that one of your best friends organized the whole thing.
Webcomics
- All but one of the main cast die at the end of The Last Days Of Foxhound. Of course, given that the characters in question are the villains in the original game, it was pretty much inevitable.
- Concerned, with the subtitle "The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman", is another example. The main character ends up falling off the top of the citadel, and still survives. However, he realizes the only reason he hasn't died thanks to his own to stupidity is the fact that he has an in-game cheat activated, and turns it off without thinking about the consequences. It turns out that rebel medics were only a few minutes away, and they proclaim him "Totally Dead".
- Some took it as an implication that the rebel medics knew of Frohman and just really didn't want to deal with him, Your Mileage May Vary.
- The webcomic minus is a subversion: it suddenly ends with the title character resurrecting every person and animal that ever died, which cause everyone that was resurrected and already alive to be crushed by the lack of space. However it's noted that they're nothing especially sad about it as that just means everyone become ghost and they all just go on with their lives and the Earth is made into a theme park by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that the ghosts visit.. After a bit of Fridge Logic you also realize that, for all we know the title character could have changed things back or done pretty much anything after the strip ended at some point.
- Sluggy Freelance has this at the end of its last couple storylines. First, Zoe dies, and now Riff realizes that he's in a hell-world that his own dimensional counterpart has made, rules, and enforces, and decides rather than fight, heopts to join the rest of the citizens in drugged idiocy
- In The Order of the Stick's prequel book "Start of Darkness", Redcloak's brother Right-Eye's family is killed by adventurers, spurring Right-eye to betray Xykon, leading Redcloak to kill Right-Eye in a loyalty test by Xykon, Dorakon is killed and has his soul trapped by Xykon, and Xykon convinces Redcloak that he either has to accept he killed his brother for nothing or work for Xykon until his plan is finished. There hasn't been any real comeuppence yet, either.
Web Original
- Considering the fact that the premise of Survival Of The Fittest is 'Kill until only one survives' these kind of endings are pretty much inevitable. Of especial Tear Jerker material is the ending of V1, whereupon the winner visits the families of a number of their deceased classmates. There's also the fact, y'know, that the winner is the only survivor out of the group of 123 kids on the island.
- In Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog, although the main character manages to defeat and humiliate Captain Hammer and become a true villain, the girl of his dreams dies after being impaled by shrapnel from the explosion caused by his faulty death ray and believing that Captain Hammer will save them all, leaving Dr. Horrible a successful but lonely man.
- This becomes an even bigger downer if you take the view that Penny is the only remotely heroic character in the entire piece. While everyone else is caught up in the whole superhero/supervillain standoff, she does the real good—not by trying to save the world or conquer it, but simply working to make her little corner of it just a bit better than it was — yet her quiet struggle goes largely unnoticed and unappreciated. Then, to top it all off, she gets killed in the crossfire of said superhero/supervillain standoff, and even then she's denied her dignity as an individual, referred to in the press as "Captain Hammer's Girlfriend." Only Billy seems to mourn Penny for herself, and even he arguably grieves not for her but for the illusory "girl of his dreams" he imagined her to be. Damn. You. Joss.
- The very last shot (literally the very last two seconds) is completely depressing. Penny's dead, Captain Hammer's got his just desserts, and Dr. Horrible has come into his role as a villain and sociopath. Sad, but at least the only person who would really be upset over Penny's death (even for selfish reasons) doesn't really get hurt by it, right? That's something at least, right? WRONG.
- Downer ending for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog? It was more of a Bittersweet Ending. Yes, Penny died and that was a shame, but let's look at the bright side of things:
- Captain Hammer's groupies on the street corner are now fans of Dr. Horrible.
- The pain that Captain Hammer felt when trying to kill Dr. Horrible left quite an emotional scar and he needed to see a therapist because of it.
- Our Villain Protagonist, Dr. Horrible, has been accepted into the Evil League Of Evil.
- Season 1 of lonelygirl15 ends with the death of the main character. The Grand Finale is also very bleak.
- Honorable mention: All About My Dog: Marimo on You Tube. The whole thing is pretty sad, but if the last 5 minutes don't make you cry you have no soul.
- In Bionicle Teridax takes over Mata nui's mind and rules the universe.
- Season 2 of The Guild ends with Codex feeling horrible about breaking Zaboo's heart, seeing the guy she liked making out with her married friend Clara, and then finding Zaboo making out with Stupid Tall Hot Girl. Meanwhile, the guild leader Vork has a breakdown, and Bladezz deleted Tink's character, which in this series is just as angsty.
Western Animation
- In The Simpsons, the first two episodes where Mother Simpson comes back have melancholy endings. In the first, Homer sits for hours on his car after Mona is forced to go away again. In the second, she's alive but he doesn't know it. Even when he tells himself she's alive (after finding a 'message' that says 'I'm OK'), none of them show any signs of believing in it and the real message is a sweet down-to-earth one that they don't find. The third of these episodes has Mona Killed Off For Real, but it nonetheless ends on a more upbeat note.
- WITCH is more or less composed of nothing but downer endings, except for the season finales. The villain always tends to be one step ahead of the heroes and with each step closer to achieving their plans, all the heroes tend to get is motivation to do better next time. The heroes are on the losing side of the war for just about every episode.
- Avatar The Last Airbender ends its second season with The Hero being struck down during his Transformation Sequence, leaving him horribly wounded and believed dead; the heroes barely escape as the Earth Kingdom falls to the Fire Nation, which now rules the world almost uncontested; Prince Zuko has regained his place in the royal family as he tried to all along but at the cost of betraying his beloved uncle, and is left wondering if it was worth it.
- Several other Avatar episodes end in Downer Ending, the most important of these is "The Day of Black Sun Part 2: The Eclipse", where most of the invasion force is captured, and Aang must retreat with only a few allies. The only thing that came out of it was Zuko's Heel Face Turn, but to them it seemed like a full Shaggy Dog Story.
- Before that there was "The Puppet Master", which ended with Hama succeeds in forcing Katara to use the technique she swore she'd never use.
- And most recently, the play of their adventures in "The Ember Island Players" ended in Aang's death and the Firelord's victory. Justified because it was shown in the Fire Nation, where that was the ending everyone pretty much wanted - and the only one the government approved, most likely.
- And mention has to be made of "Appa's Lost Days"; Appa endures all kinds of hardship, survives and makes it all the way to Ba Sing Se where Aang is, and just as the audience is gearing up for the happy ending...he's captured again and dragged down into the earth, leaving only a single footprint to show he was ever there.
- "Zuko Alone." Zuko offers to help out a small farm family by rebuilding their barn and protecting them from corrupt, dishonorable soldiers. He teaches the little boy to wield a sword and never give up without a fight. Meanwhile, Zuko remembers how back at home the only person who cared for him was Ursa. It seems almost as if Zuko will find some acceptance in his new life as a refugee. But when his fight with the soldiers reveals who he is, he gets run out of town by everyone for being the Fire Nation prince. Poor Zuko.
- "Lake Laogai". Appa returning does not make up for character death.
- Batman The Animated Series had a couple of these. Such as at the end of the episode Mudslide, Matt "Clayface" Hagen's structural integrity is slowly slipping away and his girlfriend and scientist Stella has almost completed a procedure that will allow him to stay in his human state whenever he wishes... until Batman appears and turns off the machine in a rather cold, unheroic moment. Admittedly Hagen had to hurt several people and steal the technology and Batman originally offered to help Hagen himself, as well as claiming "the lab boys will take it from here", from which we can assume they would continue and finish the procedure. The two fight it out of the laboratory and Clayface is doused in rain, further loosening his integrity until the pair are hanging from a cliff. Batman loses his grip of Hagen and he falls into the water before dissolving completely (although later episodes reveal he was, of course, Not Quite Dead). The episode ends on a wide shot of the cliff, Batman climbing up and helping Stella who is now in tears. The tragedy of it all is somewhat dampened by the fact that this is a Shout Out episode: Dr. STEELLLAAAAAA!!! hid her Frankenstein's lab in the Bates Motel, while Clay Face himself resembles an Oscar statue.
- In the sequel to that episode, the new Robin meets and becomes smitten with a cute girl who turns out to be an "extention" of the newly re-formed Clay Face that accidentally developed a mind of her own. At the end of the episode she's forced to re-merge with her "father", and later when the police are trying to figure out just what to charge Clay Face with, Robin bitterly says "Murder."
- The Movie Batman: Mask of the Phantasm ends on quite a low note as well. After it is revealed that Andrea Beaumont is actually the Phantasm and she attempts to murder the Joker (as he was originally the hitman who killed her father), the theme park they are in is blown up and both Andrea and the Joker vanish in a cloud of smoke. Batman is left tending his wounds in the Bat-cave until he finds Andrea's locket, which she had left for him in the cave. The second-last shot of the movie is of Andrea standing on a cruise liner, alone.
- Come to think of it, pretty much EVERY episode of Batman The Animated Series ends on a sad note in the earlier seasons, and quite a few in later ones. Some prime examples include "Tyger Tyger", "Baby Doll" (and its sequel episode, "Love Is A Croc"), and the series' final episode, "Judgement Day".
- The episode "His Silicon Soul", which was a follow-up to a previous episode "Heart of Steel". A sentient computer called H.A.R.D.A.C. created robots to act as replicants to better help his creator's lab (by money i.e. robbery, ect.) and when Batman shows up, a replicant of Batman is made in secret, but was hidden before it could be activated. Months later it is activated by chance and unlike it's predecessors was sentient in that it thought it was Bruce/Batman but couldn't deal when he found out he was a robot. During the fight, the real Batman looks like he died (for a while) and the robot is so utterly horrified by this(remember it is based on '''Batman'''), it then goes and kills itself.
- Batman Beyond in general could be considered depressing when looking at Bruce Wayne's character. Rebirth was the first blow, where it appears that he ultimately loses in his personal battle against crime. Alfred's dead. Most of his sidekicks had left him on bad terms. Not even his Rogues Gallery is around. He just lives alone with a dog and a bunch of old memories.
- Pretty much any Batman The Animated Series episode involving Mr. Freeze is going to be tragic, but his apparent ending in Batman Beyond involves him finally gaining a human body and a girlfriend, both of which betray him in the end. He takes out a high-tech exosuit, is foiled by Batman, joins forces with Batman when Big Bad Derek Powers/Blight goes berserk, and sacrifices himself to save the new Batman. His last words are uttered in a completely heart wrenching, fatalistic manner, to boot:
Batman (Terry): You've got to get out of here Freeze! The whole place is coming down!
Freeze: Believe me...you're the only one who cares.
- Other ignominious ends: Bane is permanently hooked up to the Venom drug just to keep his body functioning; Original Batman and Batgirl had an affair that ended badly; The Movie with the aforementioned new Robin, the Joker, and the Kill Sat; the karate teacher's apprentice from BTAS is killed by snake-worshipping cultists.
- The Batman Beyond episode "Heroes" also ended on a low note. The Terrific Trio are betrayed by the law enforcement forces, discover that there is no cure for their powers (and their conditions are actually getting worse), and that their co-worker (who more than likely may be Doctor Doom's analogue) knew all along what would happen and that he set the whole thing up to get the Ben Grimm analogue out of the way in order to have the Sue Storm analogue all to himself. All 3 of the trio members are implied to die horrible deaths and only the co-worker is confirmed to be left alive, with great remorse on his part. This is shown in the exchange between Terry and the co-worker:
Terry: Satisfied?
Co-worker: No, you don't understand, I was their friend....
Terry: Right....
- This was averted in the Batman Beyond episode "Eggbaby." A series that was originally dark to begin with, they specifically wrote a more lighthearted episode around the common theme of the parenthood high school project so that they could submit it for an Emmy. They knew this was the only way they had a chance since animation is for kids.
- The Teen Titans animated series ended with an episode that saw long-lost ex-Titan Terra, who had previously become a stone statue at the end of her story arc, alive and living a life of mundanity. The stage seems set for a joyful reunion, but after repeated claims that she doesn't know him, "The Schoolgirl" admits that "Things were never the way you remember," and rejects Beast Boy's pleas to get her to return to the team.
- It makes sense, though. As the Sladebot pointed out, Terra's done "horrible things" and to force her to remember them (if she really forgot) would not only be Mind Rape but quite possibly imprisonment or death should law enforcement get involved.
- Superman The Animated Series had one or two as well. At the end of the two-part "Apokolips... Now!" story, the people of Metropolis drive off Darkseid and his forces after being rallied by Dan Turpin even after Darkseid has captured Superman. Darkseid cannot rule over them as they do not fear him, so he withdraws... But not before he fires his Omega Beams. They skid past Superman and hit Turpin, who is disintegrated immediately. Superman goes into a rage as Darkseid escapes and the final scene is of Turpin's funeral with Superman paying his respects: "In the end, the world didn't need a Superman... just a brave one". This event is the primary reason to why Bob added Darkseid to the Nightmare Fuel article.
- Which isn't even getting into the episode "Legacy," which concludes with the entire world and even some of his closest friends fearing Superman. Not to mention that, when he actually managed to physically defeat Darkseid, barely, the slaves of Apokolips came to their master to tend his injuries, rather than embracing freedom. And this was the series finale.
- Luckily, Superman manages to eventually mend his public image and Darkseid finally gets it in the Justice League series.
- Transformers Beast Wars ended in a bittersweet finale. Though the Maximals had defeated and captured Megatron, they suffered heavy casualties as well. The first Dinobot sacrificed himself earlier on to prevent Megatron from destroying the proto-humans. Depth Charge killed himself and Rampage in a final attempt to stop Megatron from raising the Nemesis(he didn't succeed, though he did get closure with his long-time nemesis Rampage). Tigatron and Airazor came back as one being, Tigerhawk, only to be gunned down by Megatron aboard the Nemesis in a last-ditch effort to stall Megatron. The Transmetal II Dinobot finally turned good only to die just a few seconds later after refusing to save himself from the exploding warship. Heroes aside, fans have also expressed sadness with the deaths of the Predacons as well, including Rampage, Inferno, and Tarantulas. If we're counting Transmutate, both Dinobots as separate characters, and Tigatron, Airazor, and Tigerhawk as separate as well, then Beast Wars ended with a death toll of 14 characters out of 22. That's more than half the entire cast.
- In the classic Transformers episode, "the Golden Lagoon" Beachcomber discovers a quiet, peaceful, Bambi-esque clearing filled with wildlife. A closer look reveals a lake of liquid "electrum," a gold and silver compound with the oddly useful effect of making Transformers apparantly invulnerable. He attempts to keep it to himself but the Decepticons find it anyway and proceed to let all hell break loose. Eventually the Autobots win out but it doesn't happen without the place being gutted by the ensuing chaos. At the end, all Beachcomber can do is look dejected at the ruined landscape and utter "Yeah... we won".
- Hey Arnold! had a few:
- "Arnold Betrays Iggy": ends with Arnold mad at Iggy for forcing him to wear bunny pajamas.
- "Helga and the Nanny": ends with Helga's homelife back to its regular dysfunctional state.
- "The Pigeon Man": That whole episode's a Downer, but at the end, Pigeon Man loses his home thanks to the bullies who don't understand him, after he's lived as a hermit for years to avoid people like them. But the clincher is that all of his pigeons each grab a string attached to Pigeon Man and fly him away into the sunset. Make what you want of the metaphor. There is a small bit of hope since Arnold's kindness convinces the Pigeon Man that not all people are jerks who will treat him like an outcast, but it's still a pretty depressing episode from start to finish.
- Futurama: many of its Emmy-nominated episodes, plus:
- "Time Keeps on Slipping": Fry forced to blow up the star pattern he had meticulously created for Leela, which would apparently have been enough of a romantic gesture for Leela to finally return his affections if she had seen it. She coincidentally didn't see it because she was trying to cheer up Fry.
- Also in that episode, Bender's dream is to become a Harlem Globetrotter. He fails to achieve this goal even though the rest of the crew are declared honorary Globetrotters just because they were in the right place at the right time. During the end credits, we hear Bender sadly whistling the Harlem Globetrotters' theme song.
- "Jurassic Bark": Fry decides at the last minute not to resurrect his fossilized dog, reasoning that it had lived a full and happy life and Tampering In God's Domain was not wise. A final montage reveals that, in fact, the dog had spent the rest of its life pining for its lost master.
- In "Bender's Big Score" Fry goes back in time, meaning that his dog did manage to be with him. And what's more, on 2012 (The year when he was supposed to die) Bender tracks down Fry, who is living in his old Pizzeria. He fires a laser at the builing and it collapses and Fry's dog looks at it just in time for the fire and dust to instantly Fossilize him. This was a bit of a Ret Con, due to most fans finding the original ending soul crushingly depressing.
- Rocket Power - "Power Play": In the final seconds of a roller hockey game where the winner gets to play NHL stars, Twister's game tying shot at the end is disallowed.
- The Fairly Odd Parents - "Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker": Not quite a You Cant Fight Fate as it would've happened without him going back in time, but Timmy goes back in time to try to stop his teacher from becoming madly obsessed with fairy godparents; he successfully stops it from happening the way it did originally (it was apparently Cosmo's fault), but then accidentally ends up making it happen anyway.
- As Told By Ginger: "Hello Stranger": a subversion of the Visit By Divorced Dad trope.
- And in "No Hope for Courtney", Ms. Gordon dies and Carl starts to cry at the news of this. Originally, Ms. Gordon was going to come out of retirement, but the voice actor died during production so it was rewritten that her character died as well.
- In the end of the opera-themed Looney Tunes cartoon "What's Opera, Doc," Elmer Fudd has "killed the wabbit," and the dead Bugs Bunny gets up so he can do a bit of Lampshade Hanging: "What did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?" It's true: most famous operas have Downer Endings.
- The Powerpuff Girls, episode "Twisted Sister" has a horrible Downer Ending; the girls create a new sister named Bunny. Despite her infantile mind and hulking, Quasimodo-like physique, she learns to be a hero, saves the day, and then just randomly... explodes. Even the narrator is in tears as the episode ends. What a Mind Screw for any kid watching it.
- And of course, that's the episode that finaly won the show a damn Emmy.
- The end of the Fantasia segment, "Rite of Spring", could be seen as a downer ending, since all the dinosaurs die. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for the Executive Meddling, Walt Disney would have kept the happier ending where a band of early humans start a bonfire and then dance in celebration of their discovery.
- The last episode of Home Movies ends with Brendan accidentally dropping his beloved video camera out of the window of a car and watching it get run over and smashed by another car, after he had given up on his dream of being a film maker because he believed that his movies shouldn't be watched, despite producing impressive material for an 8-year old with a cheap camcorder.
- Those of us who didn't think it was protected by the Rule Of Funny thought the ending to Camp Lazlo fell under this: it looks like something's gone right for Lumpus, when it turns out he's just some looney who has the real Scoutmaster, an aged version of Heffer from Rockos Modern Life, locked up in a closet and is dragged off to a looney bin. A person actually complained to the creator that it was a low note for a finale, so he told her that Jane bailed Lumpus out and they lived Happily Ever After in Acorn Flats... but still...
- Thanks to it being unexpectedly cancelled, the Silver Surfer series ends with the Silver Surfer apparently dead and the universe destroyed.
- South Park has a few:
- The episode where Stan is forced to coach a Pee Wee Hockey team. One of the kids on the team has Leukemia and promised that he would live if they won a game. Eventually, they are asked to play a game at Pepsi Stadium against another Pee-Wee hockey team, but when the opposing team doesn't show up, the Colorado Avalanche volunteers them to play against the Detroit Red Wings. In probably the most cruel subversion of sports movies, if not anything, ever, the Detroit Red Wings crush the poor kindergarten team by 31 to 1, all while brutally hurting many children who are less than 6 years old. When the Wings win, they have their own cliche "victory scene" while Stan's poor team is left writhing on the floor. The last shot in the episode? the child with Leukemia utters "...no hope..." and friggin dies. Truly a Downer Ending on all accounts. Made even worse by the Mood Whiplash of South Park's closing credits song.
- For some, the worst one is the one where Kyle spends the whole episode trying to help get a whale to Mexico so it can go to the moon. The boys thought they were following the whale's wishes when, in fact, it was just a cruel prank by employees at the park. He succeeds, and is so happy because he did what he'd been led to believe the whale wanted. The silent end credits play over a shot of a dead whale on the moon. Some people found it hilarious, so Your Mileage May Vary.
- How about the one where Britney Spears dies? It sounds funny, sure, but MAN. That was a dark episode.
- The British animated film The Plague Dogs is depressing throughout, with the story being based around two dogs who escape from an animal testing lab and try to survive in the Lake District. However, even by the standards of the rest of the film, the ending can still be considered a downer. The film ends with the two dogs being hunted by the Army, who believe that they are carrying the bubonic plague. The dogs are cornered at the beach, and try to swim to an island that doesn't really exist. It is implied that they drown.
- Superjail, of all the shows, had a downer ending in episode Mr. Grumpy-Pants where a little girl with cancer ends up in Superjail.
- Moral Orel had quite a few episodes end on a low note, but managed to actually subvert this trope for the Grand Finale. Clay completely ruins his marriage and his affair with the coach, and his life is left in shambles, and even with Orel's upbeat happiness, he hates Clay. While Clay is a Jerk Ass, it's implied that Orel's life is pretty messed up too as his idealism is shattered. However, the subversion is that fast forward many years, and Orel grows up to raise a functional family.
- In the Family Guy episode "The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire" Loretta has an affair with Quagmire. The episode ends with the couple getting into an argument and deciding to divorce.
- Even sadder is the fact that Cleveland Jr. has been negatively affected by the split.
- The final two parter of the short lived series Clone High is probably the most upsetting use of a downer ending as the entire main cast with the exception of Principal Scudworth are frozen in a meat locker just as Abe Lincoln realizes his feelings for Joan of Arc only to discover she has just slept with J.F.K. the show ends with a To Be Continued... The cancellation of this show is scientific proof that MTV blows.
- The ending of Foofle's Train Ride (1959) could be seen as a downer.
- The series Delta State ends on a definitive low note. After the heroes manage to recover their lost memories, vanquish the Big Bad once and for all and avert the apocalypse, Luna, who has the power of precognition, sees an alternate ending to a vision of the future she had repeatedly over the course of the series: in the original ending, the world is destroyed; in her new vision, she foresees that her and her friends will eventually be possessed by rifters, the bad guys
- Tons of Sponge Bob episodes thanks to Negative Continuity. In one episode, Spongebob, Patrick, and Squidward are lost in the forest forever. In another, Spongebob and Patrick are vaporized. another has Plankton's only customer going to the hospital. One has Mr. Krabs eaten.
- Negative Continuity also gave Dexters Laboratory carte blanche to end at least a couple of episodes this way. The most well-known example is "The Big Cheese", where Dexter is left unable to say anything but "Omlette du fromage". Amazingly, this proves his ticket to unsurpassed fame and fortune. But at the climax of the episode, Dexter finds he cannot get into his lab anymore as he cannot say the access password. To top it all, the computer then activates the ultimate security procedure, and the entire lab obliterates itself. Dexter is left weeping over the loss of his most treasured possession, while Dee Dee hauntingly taunts him with a chorus of "That's all you can say! That's all you can say!"
- An even darker ending had Dexter and rival Mandark getting so caught up competing over who would be the one to save the Earth from an impending meteor collision that they end up destroying all but the heads of eachother's mecha, leaving the Earth to be completely obliberated by the meteor. The episode ends with the two, still arguing, in what is now deep space.
- Ace Lightning had a fair few downer ending episodes. One where Sparx was killed by a couple of crazy puppets ''shooting her with her own sword'' (which came completely out of the blue in what had previously been a fairly light hearted episode), another in which the protagonist's ex-girlfriend all but ended up hating him through no fault of his own (actually there are a few of those), and then of course there's the final episode where at least one major bad guy gets away, Lady Illusion is shot dead and the other bad guy is shown to be well and truly alive in the Sixth Dimension -and holding the Master Programmer hostage. We never found out what happened due to the cancellation.
- The second half of the first Season of Winx Club gets many of these too. Let's see: Mirta, the first(and only) friendly witch gets turned into a pumpkin when she was trying to help Bloom, speaking of which, she later finds that her boyfriend is a prince and is in an arrianged marriage with another girl. After finding this, depressed, she returns to earth, where the Trix steal her powers, becoming much more powerful. With her new powers, the Trix then proceed to take over Cloudtower, summon an infernal army to conquer the world. However, things got better for every good character.
- The Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles episode "Genesis Undone": With the clones suffering from a genetic defect that will cause them to become stone permanently, they and the Manhattan Clan reluctantly seek the aid of Dr. Sevarius. However, Sevarius uses the Manhattan Clan's DNA not to save the clones, but to give life to his own new, improved clone, whom he refers to as his son. Some fighting later and Goliath turns Sevarius's 'son' to stone, leaving the doctor desperately pining for the one thing he had ever cared about. Meanwhile, the clones have already been permanently petrified, and there is apparently no way to reverse the process
- This Troper's memories are hazy and fragmented, but some time in The Seventies he watched a hour-length cartoon about a male bird (
some kind of duck? a curlew) who is the last of his species. After surviving lots of dangers, he finds a female of his species. They survive some more perils and, in the last five seconds four minutes of the movie, out of left field, the female is shot by a hunter farmer. The movie ends with the lone male flying rightwards leftwards while the camera pans out and the narrator says, "Now there is only one (species name). Soon... there will be none." The animation was realistic-looking (rotoscoped? human-looking humans, like in Superfriends), the animals didn't talk or anything. Anyone remembers this?
Theater
- Cabaret. The Nazis are in power, Cliff flees Berlin and what looks to be his only chance at a family, Sally has a mental breakdown, and the Beta Couple falls apart for the very practical reason that one of them is Jewish. Oh, and in some productions, it's implied that the Emcee ends up as a victim of the Holocaust. Musicals are such light-hearted fun, ja?
- The movie version is slightly less of a downer, with Maximilian admitting to be a Jew, so the Beta Couple can be married; but being Jews in Nazi Germany...
- A Chorus Line. Paul is injured, with a fifty-fifty chance of being able to ever dance again - that's all the audience knows. Only half of the remaining actors are cast. Even when we see them all in the final number, they've become interchangeable, 19 men and women who all look just the same, dance just the same, smile the same tired, bright smile. They're all providing backup for that One Singular Sensation that we never see. Curtain.
- Wicked. Yeah Elphaba and Fiyero are alive, but they have to leave their homes, he's stuck as a scarecrow, Glinda is now all alone with every single person she's ever been close to dead or in jail, Nessa is dead, Boq is a tin man and the Wizard had his world shattered by Glinda's revelations. Yay?
- Even worse, she has to act happy most of the time, in both the book and musical.
- ''Ha, you think thats bad, in the novel version, Fiyero is killed off half way, Elphaba goes partly mad with grief and deppresion, calls Glinda a traitor and abandons her, all her animal companions are killed off, she fails to rescue her half-niece from the Wizard, kills her Nanny, and then accidentally get killed by Dorothy and the wizard gets to fly away happy. The worst part is Elpheba is forever remembered afterwards as the "wicked witch", eternally being remembered as the personification of evil.
- Bousille et les justes. You know what happens? The main character, the only good character in the story, is forced to testify for a guy, knowing that it's wrong. AND, he's incredibly morally opposed to lying. In the end, he feels so guilty about his actions that he hangs himself in his garage. Ouch.
- West Side Story, but seeing as it's based off Romeo And Juliet, it's not hard to see that coming. (At least Maria survives the show, unlike Juliet.)
- Spring Awakening: Wendla dies from an abortion her mother forces her to have after indirectly getting her knocked up by sheltering her from sexual education at the beginning of the play. Moritz kills himself rather than face the shame of confronting his parents after flunking out of high school. Authority sucks in general.
- Let's not forget the fact that Melchior found out that Wendla was dead when he went to meet her in the cemetery and saw her name on a tombstone.
- Oliver!, considering the only one who has a happy ending is Oliver himself. And that's after watching Nancy killed by Bill Sykes, who in The Movie and the book accidentally hangs himself trying to escape with Oliver. In the musical, he's just shot. Still, must've been pretty traumatic to be a part of...
- Hair. "Let The Sunshine In." We could use it now that Claude has died in Vietnam.
- Little Shop Of Horrors. Audrey II eats Audrey, Seymour and the audience, while Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon explain "Subsequent to the events you have just witnessed/Similar events in cities across America/Events which bore a striking resemblance/To the ones you have just seen- began occurring/Subsequent to the events you have just witnessed/Unsuspecting jerks from Maine to California/Made the acquaintance of a new breed of flytrap/And got sweet-talked into feeding it blood..."
- Fame: The Musical ends with the entire cast serenading the audience in mourning of the main character's offscreen death by cocaine overdose
- Urinetown ends with the uplifting victory of the rebel poor who quickly die of dehydration.
- Miss Saigon. Unable to convince the father of her child and his new wife to take her son back to America with them, the titular character shoots herself in order to force their hand. (As a half-Vietnamese child, he would have been an outcast in Asia.) The father is left with the dead woman in his arms, lets out a gut-wrenching cry of anguish... Curtain.
- Fiddler On The Roof: Perchik and Hodel are in a prison encampment in Siberia. Chava has been disowned by Tevye after she ran off with Fyedka, a russian soldier. Those don't even hold up to the true Downer Ending, when the entire population of Anatevka is forced out of their town by Mother Russia. Cue a sad ending where we see the entire town packing their bags and leaving home depressed. The last thing we see is Tevye cuing the fiddler to stop playing.
- Although Tevye & Co. are planning to come to America, which will get them out of Europe just in time to avoid WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust.
- A Streetcar Named Desire. Sure, everyone knows Blanche's famous last line "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers. In the play, these are her final words as she is led to an insane asylum. After being raped by her sister's husband. And her sister blames her. And the sister and husband stay together. The kindness of stranger indeed...
- Not even Blanche can be called a sympathetic character in this one. While Stanley's actions can't be justified, Blanche did drive her family's estate into foreclosure, stayed in a bordello after that, then comes to New Orleans and immediately accuses Stella of abandoning the family and calls Stanley racial epithets before she even meets him. Tennessee Williams seemed to have a thing for plays with Downer Endings and few sympathetic characters. See below...
- The Glass Menagerie. Tom is essentially forced to make a very selfish decision and abandon his mother Amanda and sister Laura rather than spend his entire life working a job he hates and taking care of a crippled and emotionally disturbed sister and an overbearing mother whose ways are too stuck in the past to help anyone.
- Come on. The part where Jim the gentleman caller leaves Laura after saying that he's engaged (after that KISS with Laura) is itself a downer in some ways.
- One of the four movie versions deviates this to a Bittersweet Ending, as while Tom still leaves, Laura is shown to have overcome her reclusiveness to begin a new life.
- Sweeney Todd, though not exactly a happy plot to begin with, has its funny and entertaining moments in its morbidity. However, the ending pretty much takes the cake in what's also a bit of a Kill Em All as Sweeney Todd, after murdering the Beadle and a crazy old woman before finally taking vengeance upon Judge Turpin, threatens and nearly kills his disguised daughter Johanna, then tries to find Toby (to eliminate him as well), realizes that the crazy woman he just killed was actually his wife, then kills Mrs. Lovett (by tossing her into her oven and burning her alive, no less) for not telling him that his wife was alive. The movie ends with Sweeney, blindly grieving over his wife, getting his throat slit by Toby, who had just undergone a seriously horrific Break The Cutie ordeal which consisted of him learning exactly what Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett had been up to down in that bake room and then being stalked by the two in the sewers in the attempt to kill him. And then it takes the whole thing one step further by having Toby (who usually had genuinely white hair at this point) then immediately going back to working the giant meat grinder humming an Ironic Nursery Tune, showing that he has been driven completely insane by said ordeal.
- Stephen Sondheim has gone on record confirming that Anthony and Johanna are the only two to receive a "happy" ending. As happy as it could be, anyway.
- Merrily We Roll Along, being Back To Front, has a Downer Ending in the beginning, where it's played for dark humor. Coincidentally (?), it's also a Stephen Sondheim musical.
- The musical Assassins ends with the various Presidential assassins and would-be assassins winning the battle for Lee Harvey Oswald's soul, resulting (in the strange universe of the play) in the death of John F. Kennedy. Guess who wrote the music and lyrics.
- The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny ends with the protagonist executed and Mahagonny in the midst of collapse. The protagonist's body is carried across the stage alongside various political banners calling for such futile things as the restoration of the golden age, while the ensemble sings, "Can't do anything to help a dead man."
- Death Of A Salesman. Hate to break it to you, but the salesman dies.
- More to the point: he kills himself thinking the best thing he can do for his family is get them his life insurance. His suicide invalidates the policy.
- Bat Boy: The Musical: Bat Boy/Edgar has a psychological breakdown and flies into a murderous/suicidal rage after it is revealed to him that Meredith is his mother and Shelley is his twin sister, Mrs. Taylor burns her last surviving child alive because she mistook him for the Bat Boy, and Dr. Parker kills Edgar, Meredith, and himself, leaving Shelley and the few surviving townspeople to tell the story to the man who was coming to take Edgar away to a mental institute.
Real Life
- The K-T event at the end of the Cretaceous period. After years of dwindling away, the last of the largest and most awesome land animals ever were wiped out, along with 70% percent of all life. Pretty much the ultimate (and literal) Rocks Fall Everyone Dies. If you have any doubts, watch the finale of Walking With Dinosaurs, and bring a box of tissues. Said scene features the narrator wistfully noting that they'll never be back again, and showing a few shots of birds flying, in an attempt to cheer the audience up.
- Even worse was the P-Tr extinction, better known as the "Great Dying," which wiped out 83% of all life on the planet. It took millions of years afterwards for the recovery to even begin.
- Perhaps a Bittersweet Ending? If they hadn't died off, there's a pretty big possibility that evolution would've gone a completely different route, and humanity would never have existed.
- The American Civil War. Rutherford B Hayes' election ended the Reconstruction. Sure slavery ended and the South now respected the Federal government but the South remained a white man's country for the next hundred years. Was It Really Worth It?
- Entropy.
- World War I. With nearly an entire generation of young men slaughtered over four years in a 'war to end all wars', the Versailles treaty that ended the war was mostly about weakening Germany and enriching the victors rather than making a lasting peace. The result was another, even more destructive war just twenty years later.
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