"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
Once upon a time, a man decided to climb a mountain. He took a nasty fall, badly bruising himself, and landed in the woods next to a very shaggy dog. Despite his injuries, he limped back to his house, where he left the dog, then to the nearest hospital, where he got some x-rays. When he got home, the dog looked hungry, so he made a steak just for the dog, and turned on the television. He was just about to call the pound when he heard that a wealthy couple, on vacation in the vicinity, had lost a very shaggy dog, and were offering a very large sum for his return. He bought a plane ticket, but fell short on funds. Being a thrifty man, never wanting to live in debt, he sold a chair from his house to pay for the ticket. When he got on the plane, he found that he couldn't take the dog without preparations; the airline, however, was willing to transfer his ticket for a nominal fee. He was forced to pay this fee, and the veterinarian's bills, with a credit card, which irked him even though he knew the reward would offset it. Then he flew to the city in question, but since he was only twenty-four, had to walk ten miles through the woods, going in the general direction of the manor. When he arrived, he found he had missed the front gate entirely. He walked directly up to the door with the dog and rang the bell... when he and the dog were shot dead by a guard.
Did you feel like that story was pointless? It was. Sometimes an author will go one step beyond a Shaggy Dog Story, and Shoot The Shaggy Dog. They won't just Kill 'Em All; they'll make the characters' accomplishments a moot point and their deaths completely senseless. They won't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death; they'll trap him in a grim cycle of reincarnation, and make him a failure in every incarnation. Sometimes they won't evenKill 'Em All; the protagonists won't even get to bring the Villains down with them. All in all, the only thing that's changed in the last 400 pages is that a few ineffectual people have died...some of whom were the protagonists.
Occasionally part of An Aesop, to show just how crappy the world becomes when you violate the lesson; frequently used to try and show a 'gritty', cynical world. Sometimes, it's an attempt at tragedy that makes the mistake of nullifying itself by making it impossible tocare. Depending on the particulars, it can overlap with Diabolus ex Machina, and is a frequent cause of Angst Aversion. In short, this is a story where at its conclusion you have to ask "What the hell was the point?"
NOTE: An ending in which the heroes die or are implied to die does not, on its own, a Shoot the Shaggy Dog make. This trope should refer to stories where the protagonists are ineffectual, accomplish nothing, fail to bring villains to justice, and they die.
The ultimate Downer Ending. See also Crapsack World. Compare Reset Button Ending, which may lead to or be the cause of one of these. If the writer's a cynical bastard it might be a Black Comedy. Tends to result in a form of Darkness Induced Audience Apathy if the writer isn't really good at it. Not to be confused with Shoot the Dog, which is a regrettable act that may or may not involve an actual dog.
Has nothing to do with Shooting Shaggy'sDog (or for that matter, his other dog). See also Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies for a roleplaying equivalent.
Spoilers ahead, of course.
The Chapter Black saga from Yu Yu Hakusho could be considered an example of this. The characters pull out all the stops, sacrificing a great deal in the process, in order to try and stop Sensui from opening a tunnel to Demon World, only to eventually learn that A) Sensui's true motive for opening the tunnel was just so he could go to the demon world and find an opponent who could kill him, B) he would have been dead within a month anyway, from a fatal disease, and C) the spirit world's elite soldiers could seal the demon tunnel with relatively little effort.
CLANNAD After Story, before the Reset Button is hit, shamelessly goes for a shaggy dog shoot, taking the story from sad to abjectly miserable and pointless. Despite this, there are some who think this ending is superior to the True End.
Asano, the Unlucky Everydude from The Twelve Kingdoms has several of these moments in his plot arc. Despite being an Ordinary High School Student trapped in another world, he is ultimately ineffectual in doing any good for himself or for his friends, and he eventually becomes a patsy of the Big Bad. Just when it looks as though he's about to redeem himself by performing a vital, heroic mission for the good guys, he gets intercepted by the villains, who kill him in spite of his being armed with a gun, while they only have primitive weapons. To further rub salt into the wound, Asano, before he dies, learns that his mission was completely unnecessary, since reinforcements were already coming to help the good guys.
Considering Asano wasn't part of the original book (and neither was his female counterpart) and the only reason for him to be there is to externalize Yoko's inner Tomato in the Mirror conflicts in the medial transition, this is hardly surprising.
Neon Genesis Evangelion (particularly its supplemental film adaptation The End Of Evangelion) is a borderline case: after Instrumentality/Third Impact, the Earth is left in ruins and everyone besides Shinji and Asuka is reduced to "primordial soup" with the choice to recreate themselves if desired (meaning that the whole plot caused more harm than good for everyone who would rather not live as part of a puddle of Tang).
Considering at this point Asuka is actually already dead the Asuka we see at the end is simply a recreation from Shinji's mind of who he thinks Asuka is. The only actual survivor is Shinji himself making this an even more crapsack world ending with every dog shot but Shinji.
Narutaru's anime adaptation. Most of the cast goes insane and dies in a generally unsatisfying fashion, except for the main character and the vaguely established villains, who vanish off the face of the earth around episode 10. Most of the plot points are Left Hanging, and noone seems to care much. The description that 'nothing much has happened except that a few ineffectual people has died' fits the story like a glove, although this is because the anime only covers the first half of the manga, cutting off right before things start to get really bad. The manga, incidentally, may also count as this.
School Days. After spending ten episodes acting like a complete jerk and taking advantage of the complete idiocy that seems to affect the entirety of the school, Makoto is stabbed to death by his pregnant ex-girlfriend Sekai, and then his corpse is decapitated by his girlfriend Kotonoha, who proceeds to murder (and cut up) Sekai and runs away, taking Makoto's head with her. Life at the school goes on, unaffected by the lunacy that just transpired.
During the last few episodes of Code GeassNunnally's apparent demise was one of the key reasons Lelouch started the Zero Requiem, feeling he has nothing left to live for. Guess who shows up to oppose him not long after he's in too deep to turn back?
Even though the end result is world peace, it comes at the expense of the destruction caused during the Zero Requiem, which, again, could have been averted had it not been for the above case. Not to mention that the resulting peace will not last more likely than not, and at the same time, Lelouch will still be dead, when he would be more useful alive as a leader.
The whole Fallen One arc in D.Gray-Man is one of these. Allen encounters another Exorcist, Suman Dark, who has betrayed his Innocence by betraying the Black Order to a villain, and has been turned into a giant angelic torso-looking thing. Allen struggles to save Suman while he attacks mindlessly, killing a lot of innocent people. Allen finally manages to hold Suman back by over-activating his own Innocence, and he manages to pull Suman out of the monster... only for him to find that Suman has lost his soul anyway. Turns out Allen hadn't succeeded; Suman's Innocence basically timed out. Then, just to make things worse, Suman explodes in a fountain of blood, thanks to the sudden appearance of the villain from whom he begged for mercy in the first place.
Who then destroys Allen's left arm, punches a hole in his heart and leaves him for dead, because the arc just wasn't cruel enough as it was. Really, the only good things to come out of the arc is that Tincampy manages to escape with Suman's Innocence, and the destruction of Allen's arm eventually leads to him receiving a Shonen Upgrade.
Gilgamesh ends with the deaths of the entire main cast against the villains, followed rapidly by all life on Earth getting wiped clean by a being who intended to reform the Earth afterwards, but is killed before it can recreate it.
Chrono Crusade (anime only), also a definitive example of a Downer Ending, ends with the main cast either dead or broken. None of the heroes' goals were met, and the villain succeeded in all his plans, with his "death" only being a temporary setback. If anything, the world would have been better off if the heroes had NOT been around.
The first season arcs of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni are all like this; the audience are treated to several versions of the local nakama going Ax Crazy and murdering each other in various gruesome fashions, only for the Groundhog Day Loop to kick in and the whole tragedy repeated in a slightly different manner. The last arc seemingly subverts this,as Keiichi remembers one of the other realities and talks Rena down from her attempted mass murder/suicide... Only for Rika to get murdered anyway later, and the whole town wiped out by the volcanic eruption. Again.
Also from Higurashi, "Plan 34". A plan to kill thousands of innocent people in order to prevent a disease from causing a Zombie Apocalypse scenario is initially presented in the anime as evil, but better than the alternative. Then, the manga arc Onisarashi-hen shows that after the plan was carried out, infections started breaking out all over Japan anyways, due to people who had once lived in Hinamizawa but had moved away or were out of town at the time of the massacre. And then, because Higurashireally loves kicking you when you're down, it shows that the infection isn't as contagious as first thought and dies out on its own, demonstrating that the Plan 34 massacre was entirely unnecessary, and that the perpetrators were horribly misguided at best, or willing to intentionally kill thousands of innocents for political gain at worst. Isn't Higurashi wonderful?
It's even worse. The trigger for Hinamizawa Syndrome isn't distance from Rika, which the villains originally suspected; it's actually just extreme stress. In that case, their whole plan to wipe out the village through Plan 34 actually CAUSED the outbreaks in Onisarashi-hen.
Umineko no Naku Koro ni does it in a similar manner. One example is a pair of climatic fights in the 4th arc, where the protagonists were about to win.
And all the Rikas get to become Umineko's Fallen HeroBig Bad as well, starting the cycle of death all over again for another group of people! Because she knows you want more.
Jigoku Shoujo Negoro Tetsurou's story is a mild version of this, played mostly for laughs.
Tokyo Babylon, particularly when the continuation provided by X1999 is added in. After spending the series waiting to see if Subaru can inspire any actual feelings of love in him, and just when Subaru has realized his feelings for Seishiro, Seishiro decides that... no, he doesn't care about Subaru. So he tortures him, tries to kill him, and does kill his sister, leaving Subaru permanently broken with the heart's desire that one day Seishiro will kill him too. Except that when he tries to let that happen, he ends up killing Seishiro instead. And then he becomes the Sakurazukamori in Seishiro's place.
The anime adaptation of Requiem (marketed as Anal Sanctuary in the United States) has Yukina being presented with Cecilia, an angelic violin capable of opposing Cannone, the demonic violin that has driven Akio to...ahem...enslaving the female student body of St. Cecilia academy. Immediately after we see Cecilia, cut to a scene of Yukina and the priestess who presented the violin in captivity, about to be raped by Akio's possessed students, and Akio in possession of Cecilia. Everyone gets ruined, mission failed, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 pints of shit.
Kurokami ends with most of the cast dead and when everybody expects a happy life for the main protagonists, it's revealed that the curse is not lifted, and requires a sacrifice to save humanity which will nullify all the reasons why they were fighting. And even after that sacrifice, one genius concludes that it does not matter much since many other curses still exist so getting rid of one was not a big deal.
Lost Universe pretty much ends this way depending on how you interpret the Cut Short ending was supposed to turn out. Protagonists die while fighting with the Big Bad. But too bad, there are a few baddies left and now there are no people who have the abilities to defeat them if they show up.
YMMV since the ending was pretty ambiguous, but Wolf's Rain finishes with pretty much the entire cast dying within the last couple of episodes, and they never reach the Paradise they're looking for. In fact, the only thing they manage to do is stop somebody else from getting to it; it's pretty disheartening when the entire 30 episode show was about getting there. It's kept from being a Downer Ending by implying that they've been reincarnated, or have been put back in the human world, or… well, something, but seeing as they were there anyway, it definitely counts.
Oh! Great wrote a self-contained arc in his H-Series Silky Whip Extreme called Junk Story, that is a pretty damn grim version of this trope. To Wit: The plot is that, 100 years before the story began, A super-powerful military robot called Gatt fell in love with a woman named Mariko. By being denied Mariko, Gatt took revenge on all of humanity, destroying most of civilization and forcing humans to live in fear. The first 3 issues are Mariko, revived as an immortal cyborg, teaming up with a gun-runner to try and destroy Gatt. Only, it's revealed in the last two issues that all of this was pointless; The world government has deliberately allowed Gatt to keep rampaging for a century, as even though they have cyborgs vastly more powerful than him, leaving humanity in fear of an external monster foe makes them easier to control. The end of the series involves Mariko being captured by Caligula, a powerful Ax Crazy cyborg employed by the government, the Gunrunner-Turned-Love-Interest getting killed off, and Mariko being forced to become Caligula's personal sex slave. Not only does the ending completely invalidate every plot development brought up until that point, but it brings up even MORE questions that will never be answered.
While the overall series is not so grim, but the 18th episode of Scrapped Princess ends with Furet getting killed in order to prevent Pacifica and the others from getting captured, only to have them get captured five minutes later anyway.
Katanagatari combines a horrendous character mortality rate with an epilogue that states the Thanatos Gambit that caused everything seems to have had no effect whatsoever.
In Bakuman。, "Classroom of Truth," a work submitted for the main characters to judge, ends this way. The characters are put into a survival tournament to escape their classroom, and all of them die. Even the main character gets chased down and eaten by a doppelganger. Mashiro and Takagi note that it is the opposite of the typical Jump manga that value hard work and friendship, but having the main character die in spite of his efforts doesn't work.
Death Note in every adaptation sees the deaths of all major characters and many supporting ones, and leaves no implication that the world is a better place for any losses or sacrifices. If Ryuk's statement about Cessation Of Existence is an Author Tract, this can't be anything but a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story; negative gain for everyone would be the only possible outcome.
To be fair there was one character who achieved all his goals and changed the world in the way he wanted - Near. Your Mileage May Vary on whether it made the world better though.
The Impel Down/Marineford arc of One Piece. Luffy breaks into the most secure prison in the world, makes grudging allegiances with SEVERAL old enemies in the process, undergoes incredible punishment and nearly dies from poisoning...all to save his brother Ace from being executed. It's said that he's sacrificing his lifespan again and again with near-constant uses of Gear Second, plus the treatment Ivankov gives him for the poisons. He then breaks OUT, makes it to the execution, reaches the platform against ALL odds with help from newfound friends, and ACTUALLY SUCCEEDS IN FREEING HIS BROTHER. After all that...it's some choice petty insults from Admiral Akainu that goad Ace into a fight when he and Luffy are about to escape, leading to Ace getting killed by taking a magma fist intended for Luffy. It's the first real time in One Piece where the protagonist DOESN'T accomplish his goal.
Fate/zero ends like this, which shouldn't surprise anyone who is familiar with Fate/stay night, given that Zero is the prequel and sets up the scenario for Stay Night, but the details are heart wrenching. At the end, Kiritsugu is forced to destroy the Grail which he had banked all his hopes on because it had become corrupted. His wife is dead, he will never see his daughter again, and he has only a few years to live. Sakura is still with the Matou. Saber still blames herself for the destruction of her kingdom. Worst of all, the villains all survive. The one ray of hope that keeps this from being the worst Downer Ending of all time is that Shirou has taken up Kiritsugu's ideal and will eventually make things better.
Comic Books
Pride of Baghdadends with all four protagonists being gunned down by American soldiers without even achieving the freedom that they'd been dreaming of.
Shade the Changing Man ends with him rewriting history so that none of the events of the comic ever happened, leaving one character (who had gone back in time with him) missing, his son trapped permanently in a female body and he himself unable to reconnect with his lost love. There is a slightly upbeat moment in the last panel, but if you think about it, it's unlikely to have worked out the way he wanted it to...
The Karate Kid and Triplicate Girl plot thread from Countdown to Final Crisis. Two members of the Legion of Super-Heroes are dumped in the 21st century for reasons unknown to them, and Karate Kid turns out to be infected with a virus that could wipe out all life on Earth. After spending months trying to find a cure and eventually teaming up with the rest of the cast, they end up in an alternate universe, and Karate Kid dies, the virus spreads and turns humans into animalistic humanoids, and Triplicate Girl is torn to pieces by a pack of said animalistic humanoids. All to set up a universe similar to that of Jack Kirby's Kamandi character.
And you wanna know what's the real shit-kicker? That universe was going to be destroyed anyway in Final Crisis. Its remnants were fused together with those from other worlds and Comicbook Limbo so the original Kamandi-verse was recreated anyway (i.e. OMAC, Kamandi and the Post-Final Crisis original New Gods). Yes, Karate Kid and Triplicate Girl literally died for absolutely nothing. Oh Countdown, is there nothing you didn't destroy?
Mr Hero: The Newmatic Man, an obscure comic published with Neil Gaiman's name prominently over the title (but with little actual involvement from him) ended up being this sort of a story when the entire year and a half run of the series ended up being nothing more than a successful Evil Plan by the Big Bad to retrieve and destroy the titular renegade steampunk soldier. A planned second volume may have changed things, but the imprint's failure made this the end of the story.
In the Marvel Universe, Crusader was a Skrull sent down well before the invasion and set to gathering intel. But the target he'd been set to spy on, The Avengers, had just disbanded, and he had no other instructions. So he started watching movies of them, got cozy with a cashier register, discovered and trained one of the MU's very few gay superheroes, and ended up taking up said hero's power ring when he died. Very quickly he started Becoming the Mask and ended up on Earth's side during the invasion, with a not inconsiderable amount of angst. It ended with him defeating a childhood foe, and then killing the Skrull that had been impersonating a major hero, "saving his home" .... and then the Skrull Kill Crew shot him.Nice. Though there's an opening for an Author's Saving Throw. He might not actually be dead.
Any editorially mandatedCosmic Retcon where decades of continuity get eaten by a Negative Space Wedgie. The publisher doesn't just restart the title and ignore the old version. Instead, they write an ending where the old, no-longer-cool version of the characters must watch the Negative Space Wedgie annihilate their timeline and destroy everything they have ever fought, worked, loved, or dreamed for, and there's absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it (except work to ensure that a Replacement Goldfish universe will get created after they're erased). All this makes for a vicious Downer Ending for characters who were originally created to be very upbeat, and forces the new version to shoulder the blame in fans' minds for how the original ended. The various Legion of Super-Heroes reboots are a good example, especially the 'End of An Era' story during Zero Hour. And Crisis on Infinite Earths gives us some other good examples.
In Watchmen, Rorschach realizes something is going on when the Comedian is murdered. He notices how Dr. Manhattan goes away to Mars and Ozymandias survives an assassination attempt, and while trying to get more information, he's put in prison himself. Fellow superheroes Nite-Owl and the Silk Specter break him out of prison. Nite-Owl and Rorschach find out that the conspiracy is caused by Ozymandias, who staged the attempt on his own life, and plans to destroy half of New York City to get the USA and Russia to stop fighting each other. They find his hideaway in Antarctica only to learn that he simply launched the attack when he first saw them coming. They all agree (except Rorschach) to never tell the public about what went on, making their journey truly pointless. Rorschach is subsequently killed by Dr. Manhattan due to his refusal to help keep the secret. And at the very end, it's suggested that Ozymandias's scheme may be about to be exposed, thus destroying his work to prevent the Cold War turning hot and rendering everything in the story meaningless.
Planet Hulk, granted it was pretty damn obvious that Hulk was going to be brought back to Earth by a storyline at some point, but to have a damaged warp-engine (placed by rebels as stated in World War Hulk though supposed ally Miek allowed them to do so) explode and effectively destroy everything he had spent a good portion of the novel building towards, a wife, future child, kingdom, peace and acceptance as a respected and admired being in the last few pages seems to fit this trope to a T.
The storyline alone is an example, but the overall comic ultimately subverts it, as Hulk's child Skaar survives the destruction and eventually comes to earth and affects the story. Then it turns out that Skaar has a twin brother, who also survived, and ends up causing another story.
Many of the stories in Will Eisner's Contract with God trilogy are of this type.
The graphic novel House is about as pure an example of this as you're going to find, particularly in regard to the "shaggy dog" part. Three people explore an abandoned house. All three of them get lost and die. The end. We never find out anything about them other than that two are in love, or anything about the house other than that it's Bigger on the Inside, and the deaths of the protagonists are ultimately arbitrary, independent of their own mistakes or failures.
Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Somebody wants Blue Beetle Ted Kord dead. He asks everybody he knows for help, and they all turn him down, often in the most insulting manner they can manage. In the end, he tracks the culprits down, discovers their secrets, discovers a plan to kill all his friends, and then promptly dies. After having accomplished nothing. Basically, the story is that Blue Beetle lived, he sucked, and he died. The end.
This happens sometimes in Chick Tracts. In "Fatal Decision," in which the doctor sells all his stocks and bonds to afford a vaccine for a patient, loses his son in an auto accident on the way there, and arrives to give it to the patient. The patient destroys the vaccine because a disgruntled orderly manipulated him into distrusting the doctor, resulting in him dying a few days later.
Film
The Coen Brothers LOVE this trope. There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of their films end with most of the characters dead and their accomplishments (if any) negated. Specific examples:
John Woo's masterpiece, The Killer, is sort of an example; the protagonists bring down a mob boss, but the main character dies before he can reach his goal, to raise enough money for the eye transplant of the singer that he blinded in the movie's first shootout. Not only that, but in a rare antiheroic example of Karmic Death, his Plan B of having her use his eyes falls flat when that's where the mob boss shoots him. And the other protagonist, a maverick cop, is arrested by his fellow officers when he finally guns down the mob boss to avenge his friend and keep the villain from getting away with it all because he had done so right in front of them in cold blood after the boss had surrendered to them, so he can't use the money to have the singer's eyes fixed either. When Woo piles on the tragedy, he piles it on.
Despite his valiant efforts, the hero of Night of the Living Dead utterly fails to protect any of his fellow survivors from the Zombie Apocalypse, and in the morning, as the sole survivor, is unceremoniously shot by a ragtag band of zombie hunters that doesn't bother to look very closely at their targets.
An extreme example is seen in the 2007 horror film The Mist. In the movie, a thick, billowing fog has swept over the countryside, bringing with it hordes of ravenous otherworldy creatures, and several dozen people are trapped inside a supermarket with the monsters outside and no way to contact the outside world. Near the end of the film, a group of people led by the protagonist make a break for it in the hero's jeep. After a brief stop at the hero's house to confirm that yes, his wife is dead, the five of them (including the hero's little boy) decide to ride on until either the mist ends or their fuel runs out. Naturally, the fuel runs out first...and our group is surrounded by mist, likely to be snatched up and killed horribly as soon as they leave the car. They make an unspoken decision to commit suicide, but there's five of them, and only four bullets. We cut to outside the car, and there are four shots. Then we see the hero in a car full of corpses, screaming in grief and repeatedly trying to shoot himself with the empty gun. But it doesn't end there... he exits the car, screaming for the monsters to come and get him...and not half a minute later, tanks and jeeps roll through the fog. Monsters are being blasted with flamethrowers, and trucks of survivors are being driven through. And the mist is being cleared...
Also note the truck is coming from the back, so they were driving from salvation all along.
There is one other interesting detail: The survivors include the mother who left in the beginning, having successfully found her children.
You know what's really frustrating? The original short story by Stephen King ended with the first spoiler, Bolivian Army Ending leaving it likely they would die, since the mist had spread all the way across New England, but allowing room for optimism. (Although King has said that he liked the alternate ending of the film.)
In The Strangers,the titular villains manage to overpower and kill the lead characters.
Subverted. Yes, the villains stabbed Kristen and James seemingly to death. However, Kristen turns out to still be alive! At first glance, you might think that makes no sense. However, Dollface showed feelings of guilt. It can be inferred that she was the one who was supposed to stab Kristen to death, but since she didn't have the stomach for it right then, she actually didn't try that hard to kill her!
The Japanese Tokusatsu feature film Casshern did this in spades. The story hinges on a Crapsack WorldAfter the End where everyone is dying of pollution, fallout and biochemical warfare agents unleashed in the last world war. A scientist creates a 'Neo-Cell' project where new organs can be grown at will and the human body regenerated and rendered immortal. This is the setup for a Freak Lab Accident that creates a race of Badass superhumans that must be battled by the hero, the scientist's dead war hero son resurrected by his father's techniques and suited up with an awesome cybernetic combat suit. Naturally this all goes horribly wrong - and turns out it was never right in the first place.
If the fact that Casshern basically fails to do anything heroic whatsoever during the entire movie, backfiring spectacularly every time he tries to save innocent people and spending most of the film killing rather sympathetic Anti Villains who themselves engage in pointless violence for no reason wasn't enough to make this pointless and Glurgey, the ending really cements it. I guess it was meant to be a Deconstruction of the usually upbeat Tokusatsu genre, but...what?
Rocket Attack USA, a 1960s propaganda piece featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The heroes manage to infiltrate a Soviet missile base, but the missile launches anyway (with hilariously awful special effects) and wipes out New York. "We cannot let this be... THE END."
In the original Cube, characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all end up dying or being killed by another character, except for the Idiot Savant character. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.
The sequel Hypercube is even worse. After many perils, the main heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
Cube Zero, a prequel to Cube shown from the point of view of the maze operators, reveals that the savant was in all likelihood killed by the operators moments after the first film's ambiguous ending. It's also very heavily implied that the heroic maze operator from Cube Zero actually is the autistic savant of Cube (although they are played by different actors). The movie itself is actually closer to Bittersweet Ending. Rains manages to escape, but will continue to be pursued until recaptured. Wynn is lobotomized and thrown back in the Cube. Everybody else dies except for the villains.
Alien 3 starts out by killing off the characters that Ripley saved (including a little girl), stranding her on a prison colony, and showing that for all the pyrotechnics of the second film, the alien menace is still at large. Needless to say, a lot of fans consider the series to have ended with the previous film.
This also extends to the comic adaptation, Newt's Tale, which tells Aliens' events from the perspective of the titular girl of the same nickname. Not only does it spoil her eventual fate in the third film, but it makes the extended backstory (where she narrowly escapes after her mother and brother are massacred by the xenomorphs during the colonists' last stand) more pointless than her appearance in the sequel. The comic book adaptation of the third film goes one step further and makes a point of showing her death by drowning.
In Chinatown, the protagonist spends most of the movie investigating the murder of the head of the water department, uncovering a rather complicated conspiracy in the process. He eventually discovers the villain, who's revealed to be so evil that he even raped his daughter and fathered a child by her but In the end he gets away with everything, taking custody of his incestuous grand-daughter at the same time, and the police shoot the protagonist's love interest dead as she attempts to flee with the girl. As the famous quote goes: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
Supposedly, the original script had a happy ending with the the Big Bad being shot, and Jake getting the girl, but Roman Polanski insisted on this sort of ending.
The Ghostwriter, another of Polanski's films, ends with the title ghostwriter getting run over by CIA agents after not quite exposing that the CIA controlled post-9/11 British policy via the Prime Minister's wife. Then again we're only told his "accident" was "really nasty" and the PM did manage to get his memoirs published before he was killed and if anyone else notices that each chapter's opening sentence sound a bit weird before they're recalled and burned....
"The only thing that's changed[...] is that a few ineffectual people have died." Yep, that just about sums up Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson...
Sha Po Lang (Killzone in the US) is a Hong Kong police movie that pretty much ends with all of the cops dying. Including the Bad Ass and The Captain. Fortunately, the Big Bad doesn't get away unscathed either. He kills the Bad Ass cop by throwing him out the window of his skyscraper....and right on top of the car the Big Bad's wife and baby were waiting in. Ouch.
Epic Movie ends with the four lead characters being inexplicably flattened by a runaway water wheel, making the whole movie pointless. Even more so than it already was.
Brazil ends with the revelation that the film's "happy ending" was just a hallucination, and the main character was actually tortured to insanity
Ran. Influenced by King Lear, Akira Kurosawa managed to make his film incredibly depressing. Nearly everyone dies or is pointlessly killed. The father, Hidetora, lord over a great clan, plans to divide his kingdom to his three sons, expecting them to be loyal even though most of his power came through bloodshed, war, and treachery. He ends up banishing the third and youngest brother, who warns him of the stupidity of such a plan. He stays with his first son, at the First Castle. Through a large chain of events, Hidetora loses everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. He is left insane, and his only hope is his youngest son. When the father manages to reunite with his youngest son, he dies due to an arrow from an enemy soldier, and the father dies of a heart attack. The ending scene is bleak, as the blind brother of Lady Sue, wife of one of the other brothers, is left alone, as his sister was killed. He ends up dropping the gift his sister gave him, and is left to die in the ruins of his father's castle, forgotten.
The Sengoku period (in which the film is set) is infamous for constant, often senseless violence, and general chaos. Even the title, Ran, can be translated as "chaos".
Kurosawa seems to be fond of Shooting the Shaggy Dog. Ran is a good example, but his best is probably The Bad Sleep Well, his (very loose) adaptation of Hamlet. Toshiro Mifune spends the entire movie building up his plan to get his ultimate revenge on the corporate grifters who drove his father to suicide, but he ends up falling in love with the daughter of his primary target, leading the evil executive to drug his own daughter and arrange for him to be killed. You don't even see him die - the daughter and her brother return to his hideout, only to be told by his badly beaten best friend that he, too was drugged and then sent on the road, where he was killed by a train. The movie concludes with the executive's kids effectively disowning him, but other than this he gets away scot-free with literally every terrible thing the movie spent time elaborating upon.
Alejandro Jodorowskyloves to do this. Fando&Lis ends with Fando killing Lis, whom he was taking to the mythical City of Tar in order to cure her paralysis. El Topo has the people the title character spent the entire third act helping mercilessly gunned down, rendering all his efforts worthless. And The Holy Mountain ends just before the climax, with a major character proclaiming the movie over and the shot panning back to reveal the film crew shooting the scene.
Sorry, Wrong Number and the radio play it was based on. In the end, and after a few Idiot Plot scenes (between the protagonist's mistakes and the depiction of the police), she fails to prevent her own murder. And this was based on an episode of a radio show where the rule was almost always to make sure the bad guy lost. (Oddly enough, it was also their most popular production...)
The film did try to suggest she deserved what she got. Her husband, who had planned her murder, doesn't get away with it either.
Terminator 3 set a new standard in Shoot the Shaggy Dog. Not only was the Crowning Moment of Awesome of the preceding movie totally erased; but after all that crap they went through, Skynet winds up obliterating humanity anyway while John Connor hides out in a hole
The first film's message was that time travel can't change the past and that Skynet even trying to do so only caused both itself and the leader of the resistance to be. The second movie's entire Aesop was the change to the idea that we can change the future. Then it decides that maybe it was right the first time. An exercise in indecision, rendering a whole movieseries pointless beyond the pretty explosions?
The original script for Terminator Salvation not only nearly did this to John Connor, but to the entire point of the character and all three preceding movies in the first place. Basically, Connor was supposed to have been killed, and then have his skin and face grafted onto the cyborg Marcus, who assumes the identity of John Connor and leads the Resistance. This ending was leaked, and the fandom was not happy, forcing a rewrite. If they'd gone ahead with it, it would have meant that Skynet went on a wild goose chase across the entire franchise, since the John Connor we know wouldn't have been the "real" John Connor. It wouldn't have mattered if Skynet had terminated him or Sarah, since he was nearly that easily replaceable.
Though there are those who wish they stuck with that ending anyway.
One word: Bulworth. Five words: Rapping politician, meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a comedy. And he ordered the hit on himself!
The remake of Dawn of the Dead. At the end of the movie, it appears that the few remaining protagonists' struggles have paid off, and they're finally able to sail into the sunset to find an island they can start a new life on. Guess what? Island zombies, is what. How do you like them coconuts? Although the characters aren't actually shown dying..
This ending was tacked on after test-audiences griped about the original, far more ambiguous, version.
The last half hour or so of The Descent is an extended version of this trope, as it's implied that if you can't stay together as a cooperating pack [they can't] the only way to be Bad Ass enough to get out of the cave is to go crazy and become as vicious as the crawlers. Also, in the UK ending, everyone dies. At least Sarah regains her humanity at the last minute... by choosing to stay with the hallucination of her dead daughter and apparently accept death. Hooray!
The Great Silence. The film sets up a pretty standard story of an antihero out for vengeance and protecting some townsfolk from cruel bounty hunters. And then the bounty hunters kill the comedic sheriff, kill the townsfolk, kill the hero's girl, and kill the hero. It is a total and unqualified victory for the villains.
The same twist ending was used in The Cave and Ghost Ship, where the parasitic/ghostly evil that they spent the whole film trying to defeat has just infected a new host.
Ghost Ship's flashbacks could be construed as this as well. So many people killed and the thieves didn't manage to get away.
Note that in Ghost Ship, the original screenplay is available. This trope is averted in it.
Along with a Crapsack World and a Diabolus ex Machina, the film A Simple Plan literally shoots the helpless underdog, when Bill Paxton's character finally shoots his unwitting, lower functioning brother, played by Billy Bob Thornton, made even worse by the fact that the entire plot is rendered meaningless in the film's final frames, where it turns out the money that all of the movie revolved around is marked, and has to be burned. And yet, the ending to the movie is cheery and lighthearted compared to the novel.
In Dresden the main character (a British pilot) manages to 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. He dies. They don't even give him a death scene - he dies in the voice-over at the end.
The Wages of Fear is particularly cruel. The protagonist takes on an extremely dangerous job (trucking badly needed nitroglycerin up a mountain). He turns out to be the only man in the group to make it all the way alive. Word of his survival gets back to his village, where everyone including his girlfriend dance with joy... and as he drives back joyfully in his now-unloaded truck, he gets too excited, loses control, veers off the side of the mountain, and is killed.
He did accomplish his original objective, though.
The Final Destination series of films is about a group of people who see a premonition of their own death, and manage to escape it with this knowledge. However, Death does not give up on trying to claim them and looks for other ways to kill the protagonists. The protagonists then spend the rest of the movie trying to escape dying again and again, only to in the end fail and die, making all their efforts till that point fruitless. And anyone that escapes a movie experiences Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome.
Munich. "In the end, did we really accomplish anything?"
Easy Rider ends suddenly when Billy and Wyatt are blown off their bikes by two rednecks in a pickup, for fun. Not to mention that George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) meets a similarly pointless end in a redneck attack about halfway through the film. How was this missed, etc.
During a scenery / music / driving montage, no less! And... Boom Up And Out over the burning heap of motorcycle on the banks of the Mississippi to the tune of Bob Dylan singin' about flowin' rivers and star-spangled deltas.
But even that's not the truly dead shaggy dog. The final line of dialogue in the film is when Wyatt says to Billy, "We blew it." What "it" is exactly is never said, but the film's tagline was, "A man went looking for America. And couldn't find it anywhere."
The "We blew it" line is a reference to the disillusionment that would come to the aging hippies of the 70's. The we Peter Fonda is referring to are the Baby Boomers as a collective whole. The promises of the peace and love generation that took root during Woodstock ended at the Altamont free concert. The entire film was a commentary about how the sixties weren't living up to these promises, and a number of the themes addressed in Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" are also present in "Easy Rider".
In [REC] nobody survives the mysterious virus. And if they don't pull a retcon with [REC]2, Angela is getting dragged into darkness at the end to be either infected or feasted on, or even BOTH.
Cold Mountain. Civil war soldier ditches the army, travels through adverse weather conditions, and goes through absolute hell just so that he can get home to his girlfriend. Finally gets home to his girlfriend, and then a soldier comes along and shoots him.
At least in the movie, they managed to conceive a child before he got offed. So that wasn't a complete Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
Of course, there is a lot more to the story than that. It's more of a Bittersweet Ending, really.
The Jammed is about a woman who tries to help three illegal prostitutes in Melbourne. Then end up (mostly) worse than when she found them. One commits suicide, one runs off and one ends up in immigration detention. This is an attempt at Truth in Television.
The film Carnosaur is about a small town that is attacked by bio engineered dinosaurs. Our heroes, manage to survive by using a forklift to disembowel a T-Rex. Then THIS Happens. Making everything pointless.
This trope is deliberately invoked by the film Gallipoli in order to deliver an anti-war Aesop. In it, two young Australian men go to great lengths to join the army during World War 1, go through some training that doesn't seem to be taking the war seriously (for example, their drill sergeant gives them a lecture on contraception), and, in the final three minutes of the film, the characters actually go to war and are promptly killed. Roll credits.
In the original script, the main character was meant to be shot and killed within a minute of him stepping onto Gallipoli beach. The worst part is that the film is closer to what actually happened than most war films.
Legends Of the Fall. Several ineffectual people end up dying, including most of the Ludlow family, and the tragic heroine. The protagonist himself, in exile and old age, gets eaten by a bear at the end.
Averted before release in First Blood (the first Rambo film). The ending, as originally taken from the novel (yes, there was a novel), scripted and filmed, had John Rambo dying in the closing scenes by indirect suicide. He pulls a gun out of Trautman's jacket, places it in Trautman's hand, and moves the hand to point the gun at him, and presses Trautman's finger against the trigger. Test audiences hated it, so the ending was reshot with Trautman convincing Rambo to turn himself in (paving the way for the sequels).
Open Water is two hours of people stranded at sea waiting for a rescue that will never come.
The Denzel Washington film Fallen, where he plays a police detective, has him spend the whole film trying to figure out a way to stop the demon Azazel, who can possess people just by having his host touch them, and move on to a new body within a few hundred feet if his host is killed. At one point in the movie, he murders the main character's brother using poison. Eventually, the protagonist lures him out to an isolated cabin, and smokes cigarettes laced with the poison his brother was killed with, before shooting Azazel (who was currently possessing his friend and partner). Azazel than possesses the protagonist and stumbles around in the snow for a bit, before dying. The camera than pans out as Azazel narrates how pathetic and pointless the protagonist was, before its revealed that he manages to survive by possessing a kitten underneath the cabin. Whats worse is how pointless the whole thing was; Azazel was only antagonising the character for his own twisted amusement, and nothing is ultimately accomplished, except the protagonist's name being besmirched, and his nephew being left without any family.
Even worse is that this is all lampshaded in the movie First at the very beginning of the movie when Azazel as the narrator tells you that he is going to tell you the story when he was almost killed, and then at the end he says "I told you this was the story when I almost died, didn't I?" Bastards.
In the horror movie Catacombs, we have an example of this trope. The protagonist visits her bitchy sister in Paris, and she is brought by her to a sort of rave party in the labyrinth-like catacombs under the city, along with a group of French goths. Then the two of them get lost, and the sister is apparently killed by an axe-wielding serial killer wearing a goat mask. The protagonist is then stalked by said monster in the catacombs for a whole hour... until it turns out that it was all an overlong joke of dubious taste planned by her sister and friends. Unfortunately, this is revealed after the protagonist has killed one of them in the darkness. The sister then proceeds to yell at and insult the barely-sane anymore protagonist, who then proceeds to slaughter the rest of them, including her sister, and leaves. Some people just can't take a joke.
Angel Heart - It turns out that Mickey Rourke has been hired by the devil to condemn himself to hell.
Titus - with Anthony Hopkins, based on the play by William Shakespeare ... Let's just say that it inspired the Scott Tenorman episode of South Park and leave it at that.
Se7en Detectives Mills and Summerset achieve exactly nothing, and indeed are an essential part of the serial killer's master plan. John Doe kills Mills's wife, prompting Mills to kill him, leading to Mills being arrested.
Dancer in the Dark - subverted. It might appear as the most depressing movie ever, anywhere, and ultimately pointless. And ends with the execution of the innocent, blind main character. As is typical of Lars von Trier, it's really about a gigantic Heroic Sacrifice on part of a female heroine. She does accomplish her goal of preventing her son from going blind by getting him the operation he needs, which is all she wanted anyway. Plus she wasn't exactly innocent, she did in fact kill her neighbor.
In another Lars von Trier movie called Dogville, the protagonist is running away from The Mafia, which is alsoher home, and seeks shelter in a tiny American village during the Great Depression. She ends up discovering that poor people can be just as evil. They do some pretty terrible things to her, for their own benefit, throughout the entire movie. After nearly two and a half hours of this, The Mafia shows up and Grace participates with them in killing everyone in the village. YMMV on how to take that, but it's made clear that Humans Are Bastards, and she has earned nothing for the pain she went through. It's also argued that they all deserved it, including her, making this a trope subversion.
Another one of Lars' movies — Melancholia, Part one: a woman is completely undone by depression and is abandoned by everyone, save for her sister (who really hates her sometimes) and nephew. Part two: she kind of starts to get better and then a giant planet destroys the Earth which was "evil anyway", so no biggie. Naturally, it's considered to be one of his most uplifting films.
Drag Me to Hell: the old gypsy dies (but of natural causes), the demon escapes, and our heroine, who doesn't deserve it in the least, gets, well, dragged to Hell.
And don't forget the medium who waited 40 years for a chance of redeeming her failure to save a young boy by meeting the Lamia again and killing it. Her assistant screws up the plan due to having a lousy aim, she fails to break the protagonist's curse and she ends up dead for her efforts.
One of those is debatable: Sam Raimi has stated that the heroine committed a sin and avoided the consequences, thus deserving what she got. He does concede that she may have been "a littleover-punished."
She obviously had it coming. But her co-worker who stole the fruits of her labor to betray both her and the bank, well, he can be redeemed with a little waterworks display.
Employee Of The Month - a black comedy about a man who breaks up with his fiancee after getting fired from his dream job at a major bank chain, and cheats on her with his coworker, Wendy. After a night of hard drinking, chatting with his estranged friend Jack (a coroner), and multiple attempts to mend his relationship, the protagonist (David Walsh) walks back into his workplace with a pistol, insults his former coworkers, puts a gun to his former boss's head (but doesn't kill him), and promptly walks out of his office directly into a bank heist. Dave manages to foil the robbery, at the apparent cost of his own life. This turns into a quintuple twist; the robbery was part of a two-year plan to erase David's identity and leave him and his friends filthy rich. Dave, Jack, and Wendy meet up in a motel room, prepared to divide their earnings and part ways. Dave kills Jack. Wendy kills Dave and runs off with Dave's ex-fiancee (Sarah) with whom she's involved in a lesbian relationship. All of this sex and mayhem is finally rendered moot after the credits, when Sarah and Wendy's car is hit by a bus, killing them both.
Happy Times uses this trope. After the main character spends the entire movie unsuccessfully trying to start a relationship, he is left in a coma after being hit by a garbage truck. The hope that he might have at least helped someone else is destroyed since she runs away because she feels like a burden. Neither character knows what has happened to the other character and neither will obtain their dream.
It's really a Bittersweet Ending more than anything. Despite the main character going into a coma never knowing of where the blind girl has gone, there is a bit of reward in the fact that she experienced some of the happiest times of her life, according to her, and has inspired her to go out into the real world and find her place in it. Ambiguous, and sad, yes, but not completely without hope or purpose.
More Dead Than Alive fits very nicely into this trope. The entire movie focuses on a guy known as "Killer Cain" trying to settle down with an honest living after spending 18 years in jail for a string of murders he committed prior to the movie. Being an ex-criminal, it's hard for him to find work. The only job he can keep is one at a shooting show. However there, he has to put up with an insolent young co-worker of his. To make things worse, he's made plenty of enemies in the past. By the end of the movie, he not only gets the ranch he wants, but he gets to marry the woman he loves in a classic Western movie fashion. But then one of his old enemies (apparently the guy's father was one of Cain's victims) shows up and guns him down.
The Halloween series. Laurie is believed to fit this trope, but Jamie definitely does. She gets mocked for being related to Michael, becomes mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, has all her friends, her sister, and her dog killed, gets kidnapped by a cult and is forced to have sex with Michael, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment.
Arlington Road is practically the god-king of this trope. The movie stars Jeff Bridges as a university professor who is an expert on domestic terrorism, and whose wife died in a failed FBI mission some years earlier. He has a young son, a girlfriend, played by Hope Davis, and keeps in touch with his wife's former FBI partner, played by Robert Gossett. One day he begins to suspect his next-door neighbors, played by Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack, to be terrorists, based on a number of incidents that have occurred around them, including his son being hospitalized after an accident involving a firecracker. Nobody will believe him though, finding his ideas crazy and paranoid, pointing the finger at his being unable to recover from the trauma he experienced when his wife died in the manner she did. Things only get worse for Bridges when his girlfriend ends up being murdered by Cusack right after she starts to believe in Bridges' suspicions. Her death is subsequently covered up as a car accident. Not one to be let down, Bridges continues to go after the terrorist couple, when his son is taken hostage by them. He goes after them, following a van he is led to believe to contain his son to a parking garage, with Gossett tagging along. He arrives at the garage, but finds out that he was following the wrong van. After that, he opens the trunk of his car, only for a bomb that had been carefully planted inside to go off, destroying the building he had been baited to, killing Bridges, Gossett, and hundreds of other people. How can things get any worse than that? Well, Bridges is posthumously framed for blowing up the building, and now is forever demonized as a terrorist/suicide bomber, Robbins and Cusack get away scot-free having accomplished what they set out to do, and Bridges' son lives now fatherless and motherless with relatives, never knowing of his father's innocence. And it's implied that the alleged terrorist Bridges talked about early in the film, who he was never convinced was guilty, had a similar stunt pulled on him by the couple. Many people, including renowned movie critic Roger Ebert, have been highly critical of the way this movie ends, due to the ridiculous contrivances and complications involved that led up to this point, not to mention the fact that, in order for this plan to be successfully carried out in real life, you'd need to practically be Born Lucky or have Psychic Powers, your target acting in every exact way you want them to, moving in on the right locations at exactly the right time. In short, the shaggy dog was shot by a blatant Batman Gambit.
In The Incredible Melting Man the titular character is an astronaut who has been irradiated on his way back from Saturn and who is slowly melting to death. There is no cure whatsoever. Only killing and consuming people stops his pain, even briefly. In the end, during a confrontation at a power plant, his best friend is endangered and the astronaut regains a bit of humanity and saves his life - only for said friend to be shot to death by a pair of random security guards. The astronaut kills the guards, collapses and expires. A janitor cleans him up what's left of him the next day and throws him in the garbage. Oh, also? More astronauts are headed to Saturn.
What else would you expect from The Grey Zone, a Holocaust movie whose main characters are Sonderkomandos (the Jews in Nazi death camps whose chores included leading other Jews into the gas chambers and then burning their bodies afterward), a Jewish doctor who works for Josef Mengele ... and Mengele himself?
This trope is displayed in the movie Knowing starring Nicholas Cage, most notably in the complete and utter futility of John's (Cage) obsession with the numerical code, and later, his attempts to save his son and Abby. Further, Diane, Abby's mother, dies while attempting to rescue the children from the Strangers who are actually able to save them, and who were planning on doing so without the interference of either parent. Oh, and the Earth literally gets burned to a crisp.
The Warlords. The three main characters (and a woman that two of them fought over) die in vain as it is revealed they were only being used as pawns by corrupt politicians to do their dirty work.
The 1970 film The Love War with Leslie Nielsen and Angie Dickinson pretty much defined this.
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (AKA Doppelgänger). Turns out it's a mirror Earth. Literally; the exact same things happen, the exact same people are there, all of the writing is just backwards. The hero is thought to have aborted his mission to the mysterious planet on the other side of the sun; instead, he's arrived on it, but since the mirror Earth sent an identical astronaut to our Earth, both Earths believe their own astronaut has chickened out and returned home. The hero spends most of the film trying to prove he's not crazy, finds the evidence in orbit (his spacecraft with right-sided lettering- all other evidence was destroyed when his landing craft explodes), loses radio contact before he can tell anyone else of his evidence, crashes and dies immediately thereafter, and the only person who semi-believed him throws themselves out a window at the very end. The hero is dead, never vindicated, still no one knows what the planet on the other side of the sun is, and due to the inextricable mirroring of events, this happens on BOTH Earths.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After searching for the Holy Grail almost the entire movie, Arthur, Lancelot and Bedevier are all arrested by the police, and the camera is shattered by one of the policemen. In fact, to make it "worse", this ending occurs just as Arthur and a miraculously-appearing army are about to assault the Castle Aaaagh where the Frenchmen are guarding the Holy Grail itself, presumably. The ending is, of course, a cop-out. This is a Monty Python trademark, and is practically expected in each and every one their works.
Monty Python's Life of Brian - Loosely based on the life of Jesus Christ, you know from the start that the story can't possibly end well. Of course, there's somewhat of a Pet the Dog moment at the very end to brighten it up".
And Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life: We are all shaggy dogs, because life has no meaning. Now, piss off!. That pretty much also sums up everything the group's done during its long existence, and is the last film they ever made as a group.
Yes and no. David was trying to become a real boy so he could get his mother to love him. He does not achieve the goal of becoming a real boy. However, it turns out that he did not need to achieve this goal anyway. He does get one day of happiness with his mother and she tells him before she dies that she loves him and always has. He dies shortly afterwards (Why? Well, maybe he ran out of battery juice or maybe by that point he had gotten everything he wanted and so he 'shut down' as a result of this). So the ending does not quite qualify as Shoot the Shaggy Dog, because David got what he truly wanted in the end. Also, he went to "...that place where dreams are born" (i.e. the afterlife). That should be impossible for a robot that is not human to achieve. But the fact that he did indicates that he did become human in a sense. So he ended up achieving more than he set out to do, which is another reason the ending does not quite qualify as Shoot the Shaggy Dog. It does, however, qualify for Fridge Horror when you consider what David has done to his mother to achieve this.
Two things to point out here...1. Yes, the movie ends like this, but the book has Rosemary naming her kid Andrew instead of the cult leader's name (essentially giving the cult the finger) and she decides to raise her kid to be a good person (essentially giving the cult the finger again). 2. There is a sequel that has Andrew grown up and being a good person...in the end, he uses his awakened powers to rewrite history and make the events of both movies or books just a dream Rosemary was having. Yes, the sequel is considered cruddy and the resolution can be considered a copout, but at least everything got completely turned around in the end.
The Ruins. One of the Americans survives, makes it to the jeep and presumably gets back to society... while being infected of the same malevolent vine that has killed all her friends (you can see the spores growing on her clothes), and now is poised to do the same to the world at large. Meanwhile, the friends of the Greek associate of the Americans happen upon the eponymous location, presumably doomed to the same fate. The book didn't have this problem, as everyone died and the vine was contained.
An alternate ending makes the Shoot the Shaggy Dog even more explicit, showing Amy's eye filling with blood and the vine appearing under her skin, and then the flowers of it growing on her grave.
Depends on the ending. The European version of the film has an ending where Amy escapes but it cuts away before the shot of the vine appearing, implying she is not infected. So she gets away after all.
Both House of the Dead movies end this way. The first, after battling across an island and a castle and some tunnels, they finally fight the Big Bad, the girl gets impaled with a sword and they get picked up by a helicopter immediately afterward. The second movie, a much crueler plot, where a team of special ops goes into a college campus which is infected with the undead. After losing all but three members, they get the McGuffin, only for it to be lost in the process of escaping. So they have to go back and get it again. After its secured, only one member makes it back. He's then stopped by a now crazy member who was forced to cut off his own hand and the McGuffin is lost again when he blows up their escape vehicle with a grenade after the female lead shoots and kills him. Now that this is over, they head toward Los Angeles, which is now smoking with destruction.
Cabin Fever does this with one of the most hilariously cruel endings ever.
A little known movie called Dead Men Walking featured every single person in the film dying except the main protagonist. As she gets outside, she starts running toward the gate to escape. Freedom and safety are in her sights. And then she's gunned down by an FBI sniper from the roof of the prison. Who then gives a resounding, triumphant fistpump. The end.
In The Collector, Miranda has a chance to escape from Freddie, but she's too weakened by pneumonia to do so. Of course, she dies. And Freddie buries Miranda in his yard. At the end of the movie, he is seen stalking his next victim at a nursing school.
The film Jedda focuses on the titular character, an orphaned Aboriginal woman raised by white farmers, being kidnapped by a tribal Aborigine, and the efforts of her love interest to track her down and bring her home. At the end of the film, Marbuck pulls her over a cliff, killing them both.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These four people spend the whole movie running and are picked off, one by one. We think one might escape (albeit without the woman he loves) but no, he gets caught, and at the end his doppelganger catches out the last known human. Nothing is accomplished. Everybody dies.
In The Shining, several scenes are spent following Dick Hallorann who, following a psychic premonition of the peril at the hotel, travels all the way from Florida, making his way through the storm of the century until, after against all odds finally reaching the remote, snowed-in hotel...where he gets about ten feet past the front door before taking an axe to the back and being instantly killed. This differs from the book, where Hallorann manages to rescue a seriously-wounded Wendy and Danny and escape the hotel.
While the character arc may have been completely pointless, Hallorann does ride in on a tractor that is eventually used by Wendy and Danny to escape the hotel.
Saw The main plot in every film ends with the protagonist dying, whether or not they actually learned anything. They never actually accomplish whatever their goal was and always fail, hard. Saw VI has the worst case of this in that the main character clearly learned the lesson, had developed as a character, and was going to go out into the world and make a difference with his new found appreciation for life. Then he melts into a puddle of goo.
Let's not forget the final epilogue. It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.
A rare upbeat version of this comes in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Ostensibly, Dr. Parnassus and Tony go through Hell and (in Dr. Parnassus' case) back (literally) to protect Lily from Mr. Nick, but in the end, Tony's a con artist who gets killed, and Mr. Nick wins the bet and gets Lily's soul. Even Mr. Nick is surprised at the outcome. But not really, because then we learn that Mr. Nick claims not to know where Lily is, and we later learn she ends up Happily Married to Anton and living a happy life in the real world. To make it all even more upbeat, the final shot is Dr. Parnassus smiling at Mr. Nick, proving all of this is just their little game, and there are no real, lasting consequences for any innocent characters, really.
Black Swan: Nina goes progressively more insane over the course of the movie, and seems on the verge of some kind of breakthrough at the end, only to die from a self-inflicted wound after her first performance. Of course, given the aforementioned insanity, it's impossible to know how much of the movie is real and how much is only in Nina's head, thus making the story potentially even more pointless.
The Departed: Big Bad Costello gets killed by his own mole over being an FBI informant, who is hailed as a hero. Eventually, all four of The Moles and Reverse Moles, including the protagonist, the captain, and a cop minor character end up dead.
Bat*21: An Air Force Para Rescue team attempt to extract Lt. Colonel Hambleton after he is shot down over Vietnam, but their helicopter is shot down, and the entire crew is killed soon after, either by being shot or being made to walk through a minefield.
Mad City (starring John Travolta) had an ending like this. The protagonist spends the whole film trying a desperate (but admittedly stupid) move to get his job back. In the end, it not only doesn't work, but he commits suicide to boot.
Wild Things ends with a dizzying number of gambits being revealed, but what it all boils down to is that Suzie Toller (who was "killed" off midway through the film) is the only one left standing at the end. What this means is that half the film is spent following characters (like Duquette and Lombardo) who both end up being double-crossed and killed, which makes their plots (especially Duquette's quest to break the case) completely pointless.
The Parallax View ends with not only the protagonist, Frady, failing to publicly unmask the true nature of the Parallax Corporation and also failing to stop another assassination of a senator ordered out by them, but is also killed at the scene trying, and on top of that is falsely accused of being the assassin solely responsible by the official investigation committee for the senator's death. The protagonist in all his efforts essentially accomplished nothing but getting himself and those associated with him killed, with his memory tarnished by the committee, and the Parallax Corporation able to continue its murderous operations unscathed.
In Blind Faith, Charlie tells what really happened, that the murder he's accused of really was in self-defense. It shows the judge receiving and considering his testimony on the events and his father finally deciding to help him. However, it was all pointless since Charlie hung himself with his shirt in his cell anyway as one of the guards freaked him out with a story about the electric chair, which he would be headed to, burning the flesh off of one inmate. This was pretty much the end.
Bereavement: Allison's uncle and boyfriend are both killed trying to save her, neither getting any closer to doing so in the process. Allison manages to escape the serial killers's clutches, with his hostage/protege/kidnap victim, and make it back to her uncle's house. The killer beats her there and kills her aunt, then sets the house on fire. Allison defends her cousin from the killer, then is killed by the little boy, who then goes and kills the serial killer. The house burns down with Allison and her little cousin inside, and the boy setting up a new murder room for his own use.
Urban drama ''Prison Song paints a grim, hopeless picture of inner city life for black males. The protagonist loses his father to police brutality prior to the film's opening, then gets an extended Humiliation Conga - his step-dad gets arrested by police harassing him over his photography business not being licensed, he and his childhood friend are fooling around with a laser pointer, his mother being declared insane (and then heavily sedated) after she tried to break him out of prison. He gets a brief Hope Spot when he gets admitted to a good college, but he can't pay the tuition, forcing him to drop it. He then gets accused of murder because (in self-defense) he pushed a man attacking him into subway tracks, thus electrocuting him. The main character gets twenty-five years to life as a result, and ends up having to deal with corrupt guards and abuses, only to attempt a prison break - which fails miserably, and he gets blown away by the guards after the getaway car leaves without him.
A Russian War MovieThe Crossing (not to mix with the USA film) depicts a Soviet atti-tank platoon, which is retreating towatrs the titular crossing, where the Soviet troops are regrouping. They travel obne whole day towards the crossing, then on the dawn of the next day they are attacked by a German armored troop, and are wiped out, without managing to inflict any (serious) damage to the enemy. A tragic and pointless end.
Subverted in the Based on a True Story film The Brest Fortress. The whole garrison is killed (with exception of a few captured soldiers) and the enemy continues to advance into USSR. However, during the time of siege (first week of the war) they manage to kill more enemy soldiers then the rest of their whole army group did in this time, and this sets an important example to the demoralised Red Army, prompting it to stand ground and thus contributing to the ultimate victory.
Go Ask Alice is a story of this type. The main character goes through the gamut of the drug/sex underworld and then dies immediately after getting her life back in order - from a drug overdose.
1984 ends with the main character being brought down by the government, like thousands before and after. Not only was he scheduled for execution, he was happy about it. "He loved Big Brother." Of course, the plot in this case was just an excuse to describe Orwell's dystopia.
The (yes) 1984 film version is quite true to the book in most respects but fudges the ending by just having Winston Smith mutter "I love you", making it ambiguous as to whether it's Big Brother he loves or Julia.
In the section of House of Leaves entitled "Tom's Story," Tom Navidson recites a short story about a homeless man who was given shoes by a rich passerby that eventually wore away, leaving him barefoot once again. Only since he had worn the shoes for so long, his feet were now soft and uncalloused; they were cut by the ground, and the man died of infection.
The ending of Mostly Harmless is pretty much the ultimate Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, as Arthur never finds his soul mate, who was cruelly taken from him in a freak accident, and at the end every Earth in every universe is destroyed, with virtually every character being killed in the process. Douglas Adams has admitted that the ending was "rather bleak," and was a result of his depression. He would have probably fixed it... if he hadn't gone and died.
The Quintessential Phase, the section of the radio plays that follow Mostly Harmless, have everyone's Babel fishes rescuing them at the last second by teleporting them to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where Fenchurch has been working.
The same book has the in-universe example of Bartledan literature. Which, as Arthur Dent discovers when he reads some, always ends at the 100,000th word.
And the main character died of dehydration three chapters before the end, because of never calling a plumber after a minor sink malfunction early in the book. (I honestly don't know why I spoilered this), thus not only shooting the dog, but also mentioning that it's not that shaggy in several thousand words. Though a book within a book, it is certainly a magnificent reference of this trope.
The Marquis de Sade's Justine tells the story of a young, virtuous girl who is subjected to a ridiculously unending series of tortures, rapes, degradations, and humiliations, with each of her tormentors more depraved than the last. In the end, she is finally reunited with her sister, and freed from her life of misery, only to be killed by a lightning bolt.
The Eagle Has Landed features a squad of German paratroopers sent to kidnap Winston Churchill. Putting aside the fact that they're only having to do suicidal missions for not playing along with the whole Holocaust thing, their cover is only blown because one of the Germans does a Heroic Sacrifice to save two children, all but one of the Germans end up getting gunned down though the sequel reveals that the leader is Not Quite Dead and it's ultimately revealed that the Churchill they were after was just an impersonator.
The Trial is the story of a man shuffling endlessly through a bureaucracy to try to stave off his execution for a crime that is never explained to him.
The Castle tells a similar story of a man trapped in an endless bureaucratic maze. The book ends halfway through a sentence: Like Jorge Luis Borges said, if Kafka did not finish many of his novels, it's because they do not end.
The Metamorphosis. Gregor turns into a giant bug. And dies, alone and unloved.
However, since Kafka's books are unfinished, because he didn't complete them before he died, his true intent is unknown.
Yet the end of Samsa is the same that Kafka face after suffering from tuberculosis.
Kafka's Metamorphosis, however, is neither a book nor is it unfinished. It's just a short story, and, even though he may not have been entirely happy with its ending, it's complete.
In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens Of Titan, it is revealed at the end that all of human history was manipulated in an attempt to send a missing spaceship part to a Tralfamadorian robot named Salo who is carrying a message, and that his message is only a single dot that means "Greetings."
As anyone who has read Slaughterhouse Five can attest, this is par for the course for the Tralfalmadorians: they perceive time in multiple directions and well to summarize, every Tralfalmadorian ever knows how the universe ends: They cause it with a failed weapons test. Why don't they stop it from happening? They've already destroyed the universe, and they're just waiting for it to actually happen. You'd be a little more pissed if it didn't blow your mind.
As anyone who has actually read BOTH Slaughterhouse Five AND The Sirens of Titan can attest, the Tralfalmadorians in the two different books are two DIFFERENT species of alien. When described what they look like they are different and they have different history and ideals. The only thing the same is their names.
That's the only aspect of the ending that fits this trope, however. The end of the main character's arc is a great wrap-up to his bizarre life and character development, and a real Tear Jerker to boot.
Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs features a scene where the runaway lab dog Snitter searches for "the tod," a fox character that had helped him and his fellow fugitive Rowf survive in the wild, before Rowf eventually got mad at him and chased him off. Snitter is about to give up the search, when the tod appears out of nowhere, followed closely by a pack of hounds and a fox hunter, who proceed to rip the tod to pieces. The movie had a slight variation, if you look in the animation section ...
Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a dramatic story in which the hero's noose snaps, and he escapes his execution only to instead snap out of his fantasy and die without a fight. Whether you walk away thinking this is infuriatingly cheap or a brilliant deconstruction depends on how well your high school English teacher explains the point of the thing.
Deadhouse Gates: After a continent-wide rebellion breaks out, a horribly outnumbered army manages to travel the entire breadth of said continent toward the only remaining refuge for the Malazans, all the while defending huge numbers of civilians. After fighting and winning over 2 dozen large scale attacks alone through all manner of obstacles they get within touching distance and the bulk of the army fights to the death in order to get those they escorted to safety. The commander of the refuge then listens to his treacherous adviser and marches out his 10,000 troops where they are forced to surrender and are all crucified. If it hadn't been for some others acting on their own to secure the city the last refuge and all its inhabitants would have been lost as well. For the bulk of the characters involved it was still this trope though. Understandably the Malazans are pretty pissed when they retaliate, though as the first example shows the shaggydogness was not over for them.
The first half or so of The Bonehunters: After chasing Leoman of the Flails halfway across the continent to Y'Ghatan, the Malazan army gets their ass handed to them as Leoman walks away with a goddess at the last moment before turning Y'Ghatan into a death trap by turning it into an inferno.
However, in the self-sacrificing act of killing the others to release them from their endless torture, the narrator has regained a measure of humanity. It's a happy ending, by Harlan Ellison standards.
Brilliantly subverted in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which ends with the entire supporting cast dead, the protagonist faced with an enormous moral dilemma, and the entire world seemingly falling apart, only for the main character to realize that he can just leave. He does so, and the reader is left unsure whether he should laugh or cry.
The Warhammer 40,000 novel Eldar Prophecy features a civil war on an Eldar craftworld that is slowly drifting towards a warp rift and certain destruction. As all the sympathetic characters are killed off one by one, the Designated Hero finally kills the villain, presumably saving the craftworld. Then, in the last two pages, we learn that all of this was an Xanatos Gambit by the real villains, whose Evil Plan involved feeding the souls of all the war's dead to a Cosmic Horror and send the survivors straight into warp rift. No matter which way the war fell, people would die, the Cosmic Horror would be feed, and the villains would win. Even for 40k, this is a Downer Ending.
This also happens in the last book of the first Dawn of War series from Warhammer 40,000. During the second book, a Blood Ravens Librarian performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save a new recruit. In the third book, he is found to be alive on a deserted Eldar world, suffering from Laser-Guided Amnesia. He wanders around trying to figure out just what the hell is going on, being led around by Chaos Marines who are subtly trying to sway him to join them, while an Eldar pushes him to think for himself about what they're really doing. Just when his actual chapter arrives, and he begins to realize just what is happening, the Eldar who had talked to him kills him for no visible reason, and is in turn killed by the Chaos Marines before he could explain himself, if he was even going to bother...
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley climaxes in a scathing critique of the very system the world runs on by the three main lead characters, only to end with one of them choosing banishment, the second being forced back into the system, and the third hanging himself in frustration.
In the eleventh book of the Wheel of Time series, the Shaido-affiliated Aiel who was developing a flirtatious relationship with Faile, and who were in the process of rescuing her, are also unceremoniously bludgeoned to death by Perin...who is not even responding to this relationship, but killed them simply because they were apparently threatening Faile by being around her. So far, he still doesn't know about what was going on. One sees clearly that the author finally intended to wrap up the series soon.
Of Mice And Men in a particularly famous example. And The Grapes of Wrath. AND In Dubious Battle. Heck, can we save time and say anything by Steinbeck probably has one of these?
The Grapes of Wrath is an interesting example in that the protagonists acknowledge that they've fallen under this trope, and almost seem comforted by it. As Ma and Pa look back on how their family has slowly torn apart, they can't think of anything they could've done differently. Their fate was inevitable, and they seem to find comfort in that. It's like "Well, our actions were completely futile and what's left of our family are all probably going to die soon, but hey, at least it's not our fault".
The Pearl too. All that happens after finding the pearl is that they get their boat broken, their house burned, and their baby, ie the proverbial shaggy dog, shot.
Bios by Robert Charles Wilson ends with every last person on the planet dead, and all of their work revealed to be irrelevant.
The Red Dwarf book series does this to a certain extent. Throughout all adaptations there has been one consistent goal for the Red Dwarf crew: get back to Earth. No matter how terrible things got out there, Lister and company had the knowledge, that somehow, some way, there would be a way back home... however, in the book continuity, it's revealed that the entire Earth has been turned into a garbage planet, abandoned to be covered in garbage till the end of time.
For a Junior Fiction example, Goosebumpsloved this trope. Every single book had a twist ending, and more often than not, Stine shot the shaggy dog, albeit offscreen. Killed a monster and are escaping into the swamp? Uh-oh, looks like his extended family is still out there! Won The Most Dangerous Game (of tag) by convincing the monsters who forced you to play that you're in an advanced team? Uh-oh, now the advanced team wants to play! You've managed to convince an evil witch who turned you into a chicken to turn you back into a human? Uh-oh, now she's turned you into a pig! Seriously, there was no way out for these kids. Depressing as hell to a seven-year-old.
And for a double example, there's Legend of the Lost Legend. The kids go through a series of hellish trials to win a priceless artifact their father has been searching for, only to discover it's the wrong priceless artifact in the last ten pages. Shaggy Dog. They then are directed to the right priceless artifact...which has a curse on it that dooms its holders to wander lost for eternity. Shaggy Dead Dog.
Thomas Hardy's work, especiallyJude The Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, in which the moral of both of is that life is a horrible never-ending series of tragedies inflicted upon you by a cruel God which culminate in you dying alone and unloved.
And for Tessy, you die alone and unloved while the love of your life walks off to marry your sister. And that's supposed to be the happy part.
Literary critic John Sutherland commented that Hardy had evidently gone for the little-used Clementine Ending: So I kissed her little sister, awful sorry, Clementine.
Mal Considine in James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere spends the whole book struggling to make a name for himself to get custody of his adopted son from his mother, both of whom he rescued from the Holocaust, when it turns out the mother was a collaborator and was lying to him the whole time. He finally manipulates a union conflict into the perfect way to make his money, only to get caught up in a related murder case and unceremoniously shot by the killer. His partner Buzz Meeks later tries to send the kid a sizable nest egg, but the person he makes the deal with is less than trustworthy and we never find out if he followed instructions or just kept it for himself. And then Meeks is killed in the prologue of the next book, but at least it's with a blaze of glory Bolivian Army Ending and his death continues to affect the plot.
What, doesn't Upshaw's story count for anything? Comes within inches of apprehending the Wolverine killer when Dudley shows up and threatens to out him to the rest of his squad. Cue suicide, posthumously framed for murder and the Wolverine killing Mal later in the book. And of course Dudley gets away with everything.
The Magic: The Gathering Shadowmoor anthology includes a tale of five Kithkin brothers. Each of the first four wanders out in turn and meets a grisly death. The fifth and most competent and powerful goes about avenging his brothers, and is not yet finished this task when he is squished to death by a passing giant. What do you expect from a culture of paranoia? The moral is "All outsiders want to kill you". Of course, in Shadowmoor that's almost true.
"Almost true" is an understatement.
K. A. Bedford's Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait ends with the main villain declaring victory while the defeated protagonist thinks to himself that it doesn't matter anyway because Eldritch Abominations will soon Ret Gone the entire Universe, and he for one can't wait for it all to finally end.
In Things Fall Apart, after reading pretty much the whole book about the life of a deconstruction of the Proud Warrior Race Guy named Okonkwo and the complicated culture that he lives in, the Europeans come over and start destroying the culture, and Okonkwo is driven to hang himself. To make it more of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog, a European who saw his body thinks about Okonkwo and how he might make a whole chapter in his book, or if not a chapter a decent paragraph. He then decides to name his book "pacifying the primitive tribes of the lower Niger".
Stephen King's The Dark Half. The entire book revolves around Thad Beaumont trying to save himself and his family from his dark twin George Stark. He succeeds, but in Needful Things we learn that Thad, unable to cope with everything that's happened to him, has become an alcoholic and his wife has taken the children and left him. And then, as if that wasn't enough, in Bag Of Bones the protagonist tells us that Thad has committed suicide.
Also by King, The Dark Tower series. The hero spends a whole book and a half 'drawing' the three heroes who will assist him on his quest to reach the Dark Tower. Every force in the universe seems to be working against them: A sorcerer named Walter, the almighty Crimson King, Susannah's hell-child Mordred... In the last book they ALL die in an incredibly melodramatic manner; the three peripheral heroes, and all the villains, leaving Roland to face the Tower alone... After which he is taken RIGHT BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE QUEST. Jeez, Stephen...
There is a bit of hope at the end though, as Roland's past has been changed subtly. He now has an item he wished he had through the whole series, indicating the loop may not be infinite.
Susanna didn't die, and meets up with the other two in an alternate Earth.
The Wind On Fire series subverts this. After three plucky kids save the city in the first book, the second opens with it being completely destroyed and all the citizens enslaved. However, in the third book Kestrel realises that two things survived from their epic quest of the first book: the voice of the "wind singer" and her brother's pollution by a spirit called "the Morah", both of which are needed to renew the spirit of the world.
The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde. Young man is mopey because some girl doesn't like him, wants to give her a red rose, and can't find one. A nightingale feels sorry for him and travels around the world looking for a rose, and can't find one either. The nightingale sacrifices her life, brutally and painfully, to create a red rose from her own blood. The young man finds it and gives it to the girl, but she dumps him anyway, and he throws it in the gutter and decides love is stupid. End of story.
An actual Shaggy Dog Story that shoots the shaggy dog: a short story of unknown provenance, entitled "A Good Man." The title character spends his life doing good deeds, and at the end he's in a plane crash and gets eaten by cannibals. The cannibals all throw up, just as he told them they would. The moral of the story? You can't keep a good man down.
In Gregory Maguire's Wicked, Elphaba's story is like this. Of course, those who have done their pop-culture homework know what's going to happen before the story starts, but, after witnessing her journey, it gets downright depressing. The play changes outcome. Making the book a bit of a Downer Ending after seeing the play first.
This is the fate of about half the characters of Lonesome Dove.
My Sister's Keeper - Fight your battle for medical emancipation, win it - and it's the same result, only you get to DIE.
To elaborate, Big Sister has aggressive leukemia, so her parents conceive Little Sister so Big Sister can have healthy blood, marrow, etc. When Big Sister's cancer returns and she needs a kidney, Little Sister has had it and sues her parents for control of her own body after getting encouragement from Big Sister, who's also getting tired of this. Little Sister wins the long and heart-rending court case, only to get hit by a car and put in a coma. After being declared braindead Big Sister gets her kidney, which finally helps her beat the cancer. So they Shoot the Shaggy Dog and harvest its organs!
And in the movie, Kate dies, so basically Anna just sued her parents so her sister could die of renal failure.
Doesn't really apply to the movie, though, because Kate was the one who talked Anna into the lawsuit. She was ready to die, and they both knew it would be the result.
Handle With Care - Mother of another Ill Girl attempts a Batman Gambit to pay for said Ill Girl's medical bills: Sue her ob/gyn, who is also incidentally her best friend, for not informing her that she was going to give birth to a severely disabled child (in other words, getting up in court and saying in front of the Ill Girl that if she'd known she was going to be born that way she'd have aborted her). She wins. But then the Ill Girl dies in a freak accident and they put the cheque in her coffin.
The Ergoth Trilogy, of the Dragonlance world: The hero goes from a farmer to a hero, fights everyone and everything (sometimes twice) for his love. Then, everyone and everything join him as allies for the final book, all for his love, and when he finally reaches her - surprise! He realizes he doesn't love her. So he goes back to being a farmer.
Tales from Watership Down has a pair of related stories, "The Story of the Great Marsh" and "The Story of the Terrible Hay-Making". In the former, El-ahrairah leads a friendly warren of rabbits away from certain annihilation through the titular marsh. In the latter, the warren rabbits make a nuisance of themselves to the humans living near their new home, against El-ahrairah's advice to lay low and stop causing trouble, and literally get mown down by the humans after going too far.
Appears in Faces of Deception, a probably-obscure Forgotten Realms novel by Troy Denning. The protagonist Atreus is a deformed and spectacularly ugly man who is sent on a false quest by the priesthood of the goddess of beauty, to whom he has gone looking for divine interference to fix his appearance so that he could live a normal life, and who like his money but want to be rid of his face. Eventually he finds the legendary valley he's looking for, and at the same time finds love for the first time in his life, because the locals are able to see past even the most horrific of appearances. He can't stay at the valley forever, however, so he's tempted to fulfill the quest supposedly given to him by the goddess and steal an important source of the valley's special power. He knows he will never be able to have a remotely normal life without being cured of his ugliness, and he's shown as being too weak not to try (partly understandably and partly just because it's his character). This is built into a very interesting dilemma, and how it could be solved isn't evident to the reader before the ending. Nor to the writer, it seems; the novel ends with no resolution, with Atreus disappearing down a river leading to a place unknown and possible death on a boat he did not intend to board. He may or may not survive the river, but it actually makes no difference for the story whether the main character lives or dies.
There's also the subplot related to one of the protagonist's sidekicks, who dies shortly before the end. "You know that secret I've been keeping from you for your entire life?" "Yes?" "I'm still keeping it. [dies]"
Mary Stewart's The Wicked Day. Arthur spends the entire book trying to create and maintain a peaceful, unified kingdom. Mordred spends it trying to escape the prophesy that says he will be Arthur's doom. In the end, through a series of unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings, they both fail catastrophically and end up killing each other.
Perry Rhodan has a lot of these. Since it's written by a team of authors, it's not uncommon for a character introduced at the end of one issue to immediately die at the beginning of the next - sort of like a Murdered Arc. Note that Nominal Importance doesn't protect you in the slightest. There are at least three particularly glaring examples:
Near the beginning of the series, a (supposedly) brilliant scientist gets introduced via a very elaborate Sob Story, and it's obvious that the author had a lot in stock for him, given how fleshed out he was. Next episode? Killed by falling tree on Venus. (Science Marches On, not Did Not Do the Research. It's old Sci-Fi.)
A little later on, in an early "epic" arc, a common-if-Angsty soldier is introduced to us, with name, background, musical ability and everything. He dies offscreen ("To Atlan's grief, Mauve Shirt von Forgothisname was among the casualties.").
It also happens to technology. In one issue, there's a lot of fuss about how a species is obviously centuries ahead of humanity because they have got an energy-draining "Raptor Ray". Later on, the species is unceremoniously genocided (or at least vanishes entirely), and the technology is literally never even mentioned again.
Even entire species aren't exempt from this. The Body Snatchers, for example, are made up to be a gigantic threat even to The Empire... and are subsequently defeated by humanity, with 1960s technology, and never mentioned again.
Worst offender, though? John freaking Ellert, a time traveller with the ability of leaving his body and not being confined by time and space (as much). He is shot twice. First time, he loses his temporal focus point on his second mission, and appears doomed to float through time and space forever, unable to find back. However, at least two other authors liked the character enough to bring him back several hundred in-universe years later, with (again) a lot of Sob Story and even more Informed Ability and Informed Badassery. He is then mind-killed by an AI. Painfully.
Many of Cormac McCarthy's works would fall into this category. The Crossing is a near literal example, and Blood Meridian flirts with it.
"Child of God" is an almost textbook example; the novel is about a societal outcast who slowly descends into madness in his loneliness and eventually becomes what could best be described as a human troll. The book ends with him dying in custody after being arrested for murder and necrophilia.
At the end of Ring, Asakawa realises that he was spared because he copied the tape and showed it to Ryuji, and he goes to get Shizu to do the same for herself and Yoko. Then, in the sequel, Spiral, we learn that while he got them to copy the tape again, their time had run out and they both died anyway. Then we find out that Mai's own attempt at halting the spread of the virus was utterly pointless, as Ando contracted it by reading Asakawa's notes on the video.
The short story called The Eyes is about a pair of private investigators, Hill and Flint, who are hired by a teenaged girl, Heather. She needs them to protect her after she witnessed a murder perpetrated by a member of the most notorious gang in Camille, New Jersey, The Nocens. After a few chase scenes, some shootouts, and even a torture scene, Hill and Flint manage to kill just about everyone in the gang's headquarters, including the leader. While walking back to their office with Heather, they are suddenly shot at by a large number of gang members. Heather is shot in the leg, Hill has his head blown apart by a shotgun, and Flint is rammed into a wall by a truck. As the driver gets out, Heather futilely tries to crawl away from him. The driver points his gun at her face, says "You didn't think you killed all of us, did you?", and shoots her in the head. Ouch indeed.
An example from the Grimm Brothers' Household Tales, entitled "Cat and Mouse in Partnership", can be summarised as follows: A cat and a mouse get married (which, ordinarily, would be the weirdest part of a story, but it gets weirder). They buy a pot of fat to see them through the winter, and decided to stash it in the local church, reasoning that nobody would steal it from there. Over the course of the year, the cat fabricates a few christenings as a pretext to go to the church and eat the fat. When winter rolls around, the cat and mouse go to the church to retrieve the fat; the mouse, discovering it empty, suddenly realises what the cat has been doing. Then the cat eats the mouse mid-sentence. It even goes so far as to end by declaring "Verily, that is the way of the world."
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, The Emperor publically appointed twelve Grand Admirals who would wield more clout than mere Admirals in the Imperial Navy. One of them, Grand Admiral Teshik, was known for actually having compassion, which wasn't really common among the Grand Admirals - Grant respected his enemy, Tigellinus was charismatic, and the thirteenth, secret one was morally ambiguous, but only Teshik actually refrained from committing war crimes, or doing anything more reprehensible than fighting for the Empire. His flagship was actually named Eleemosynary, which apparently means "benevolence"; very odd, considering how Star Destroyers are usually named. When he failed a task the Emperor set to him he was sent on an impossible mission as punishment; he came back so badly wounded that seventy-five percent of his body had to be replaced by cybernetics. The Empire is heavily prejudiced against cyborgs who aren't Darth Vader; it's a verse where most scars get healed by bacta, and those who end up with heavy cybernetics are seen as weak and repulsive. The abuse Teshik suffered made him close off and become hard-hearted, but during the Battle of Endor, when he was pinned by a falling column and a construction worker helped him escape, he changed again, and after the Emperor died he tried to rally the fleet and fought on in the battle, refusing to retreat. Eventually his flagship was disabled and he was captured by the Rebel Alliance / New Republic, who put him on trial for "inhuman atrocities committed against the citizens of the galaxy," convicted him, and sentenced him to death. He could only laugh mechanically at the irony of this. Here's what Word Of God had to say.
"Teshik's execution was nothing necessarily just, just politics as usual. Someone prominent had to take the fall for the atrocities committed by the Empire, but with Vader and Palp both already dead, only the GA in charge of the Core and that held off the Rebels for hours after the Death Star's destruction made a suitable showstopper. Tragically, Teshik was perhaps the least 'evil' of the GAs. Life's tough."
What makes it go over the edge from Shaggy Dog to Shoot The Shaggy Dog is that another Grand Admiral, Grant, known for antialien bias, retreated and later surrendered instead of being captured. He got to live in luxury under New Republic supervision.
One of Stanislaw Lem's novels, Fiasco, plays this dead straight. With a title like that it'd have been disappointing if the shaggy dog had not been shot instead of it being Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
There is a recent spanish novel called Dime Quien Soy about a spanish woman named Amelia Garayoa who abandons her family for a french comunist in the Spanish Civil War, which takes this trope Up to Eleven almost every good character die except the protagonist and a few others, and, of course, all of them are totally ineffectual, because the bad guys are very powerful (this novel takes place in the XX century, when totalitarianism were in full force). Oh, and this book is also Karma Houdini Heaven when some of the most horrible villains ever created (and a immense number of jerkasses) make atrocious things without repercussion. This book, by the other hand, is a very well written shaggy dog shooting story, but is also too depressing to read. Julia Navarro, the author, even tells that this is a novel about losers, not heroes or heroines.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, the entire course of the story follows the creation and growth of a town, and the plight of one family in particular- the Buendias- over the course of (as you might have guessed) about 100 years. While the storyline plays out through dozens of characters, the tragedies and successes pile on one another, with quite a bit more of the former. However, it all comes to an end when the previously booming town is ravaged by four years of constant rain, a character marries her nephew (unbeknownst to her) and, although they are apparently the first truly happy couple in the book (and the only surviving members of the family), their child is born deformed (with a pig's tail), the mother dies and the baby is devoured by ants. Oh yeah, and then a divine wind wipes the town off the face of the Earth, erasing every effort by the characters and any record of them.
The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar: It takes the last year in the life of its main character. In that timespan, said main character travels from place to place, revisits old friends, tries to carry out many different plans but ultimately dies with what little he has been able to accomplish (such as his marriage) pretty much nullified or worse. Sure, he has immortalised himself with prior achievements, but the novel itself is very much an example of this.
A Song of Ice and Fire has a few of these, notably Brienne's character arc. A minor character from the second book primarily distinguished by being in love with another minor character, in the fourth book she got her own plot arc. She accepted a commission from Jaime Lannister to find and protect Sansa Stark, which she never did do; instead, she spent approximately five hundred pages wandering around the area, eventually getting diverted onto a side quest, which she also never finished. And then she got picked up by the zombie of Sansa Stark's mother, who decided that she was a traitor for taking a commission from Jaime Lannister, and had her killed.
She's not actually shown dying. Zombie Catelyn wanted her to hang because she refused to kill Jaime. Brienne's last chapter ends as she screams something: this might mean that she accepts Catelyn's quest in exchange for her life.
And Book 5 reveals that she's alive. Doesn't explain how she escaped, though.
Seems to imply that she didn't, though, as she acts strangely, claims she's found Sansa held in captivity by the Hound, and insists that Jaime must follow her alone. The latest news is that he's basically dropped off the face of the planet for weeks.
Quentyn Martell's arc is a straight example, though. Entire chapters are spend on his journey to meet Daenerys and marry her. He meets Daenerys once without leaving any real impression on her and then gets roasted by a dragon. Neither his journey nor his death accomplished anything.
It's actually much worse than that. His death did accomplish something: he accidentally lets loose two of Daenerys' dragons into the city she sacrificed so much to protect and reform, causing mass death and pushing it closer to war, both with the enemies outside the gates and with the many factions within it. Many, many innocents die, and because Dany herself is missing, no one can calm the dragons. Then the Yukai start executing hostages...
Rickon's pet direwolf is named Shaggydog. Foreshadowing?
Played brutally straight in The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien. The human warrior Hùrin is captured by the Big BadMorgoth during the devastating Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Morgoth wants to know the location of Gondolin, and when Hùrin dares to defy the Dark Lord, Morgoth places a curse on Hùrin's family, and proceeds to make their lives a Trauma Conga Line. He succeeds; by the end of the tale, both Tùrin and Niènor are dead. What makes things so much worse is that when Morgoth releases Hùrin, the first thing Hùrin does is travel to the approximate location of Gondolin and call out to its king, Turgon ... which is reported back by Morgoth's spies. Which makes the suffering of Tùrin, Niènor, and Morwen (and countless others) entirely pointless.
Oh, and he finds his wife...but she dies in his arms a couple hours later.
The whole point of Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Conqueror Worm: the mimes, who represent mankind, spend the entire play chasing after a phantom they can never catch and in the end, die and are eaten by the titular Conqueror Worm.
In Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. Horza survives 700something pages of action and horrors, but in spite of all his efforts, he dies without even having influenced the outcome of the war.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not only is Esmeralda hanged, but it happens right after her reunion with her long lost, long-suffering mother (who dies trying to defend her from the very guards she had called after she realized that Esmeralda was a gypsy fugitive but before she had realized that she was her own long lost daughter). Man, Victor Hugo really knows how to twist the knife in those stories he writes, doesn't he?
In The Woods by Tana French, at a glance your standard crime thriller in which a troubled detective tries to solve the murder of a young girl. Over the course of the book we come across 3 unrepentant psychopaths, one of which is only mentioned during a monologue, all of which manage to do ruin the lives of people around them and get away scot free.
Taking home bronze in the Complete Monster awards is Cathal Mills, who as a teenager held his girlfriend down so that one of his friends could rape her, at Cathal's urging. Then he manipulated her into forgiving him and they continued to date until he got bored and discarded her. 20 years later he still openly gloats about how his friend went to prison while he ended up a successful businessman. In his own words, he is "delighted" because he knew then he was smart enough to get away with it. And judging by what he says to the protagonist regarding his female partner, Cassie, rape is still something he considers his duty to mankind. We don't hear from him again after that.
Then there's the unnamed student from Cassie's college years, who deserves special mention for achieving complete monster status without having actually appeared in the book. Master of the Wounded Gazelle Gambit , he convinces all of Cassie's friend that she threatened to accuse him of rape if he broke off their relationship (a relationship that never actually occured). Having destroyed her credibility, he leans over and whispers to her something along the lines of: "If I raped you now, who do you think would believe you?" All because she politely turned down his offer of sex. We are told that he is currently living happily ever after.
And finally, there's Rosalind, the victim's sister and the one responsible for her death. Manipulating both her own family and the protagonist, by the end of the book she has succeeded in convincing her idiot boyfriend that her father and younger sister were abusing her, persuaded him to kill the sister then let him take the fall for the murder. Her actions also result in her father being branded a paedophile and her other sister attempting suicide. Did we mention that by this point she has driven her mother borderline insane? Or that she'd been slowly poisoning her sister for years before the murder, all out of spite that the parents were spending money on sending her to ballet school and Rosalind felt 'underappreciated'? The revelation is especially jarring considering that the character had seemed utterly grief stricken and fragile beforehand. Well, at least she gets her just deserts in the form of an engineered confession... oh wait, nope! The evidence is inadmissible in court, rendering every effort by the protagonist throughout the last 600 fucking pages a colossal waste of time. Then Rosalind sells her sob story to the papers, effectively making money by pretending she was abused. Probably the most triumphant example of The Bad Guy Wins ever recorded.
There is one last thing though. Throughout the book the troubled detective is struggling to find out what happened to him in the woods when he was a kid. All that he remembers is that he came out bloodied and battered, and the two friends who went with him were never seen again. Guess What?! WE NEVER FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED. EVER.
Les Misérables features the June Rebellion, which much of the main cast takes part in. After much buildup it's quickly crushed by the French government, with the only rebel survivors being Marius (unconscious) and Valjean.
The Mysterious Card: A woman gives the protagonist a card containing a French sentence. Anybody to whom he shows the card suddenly becomes hostile (the hotel concierge tells him to leave within 24 hours; his wife leaves him). Finally he meets the woman who gave him the card: She suddenly dies and when he examines the card again, it is blank.
In her book The First Four Years Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicles the early years of her marriage, and it's one long case of Shoot the Shaggy Dog: their crops fail every year, she and Almanzo both almost die of diptheria (which gives Almanzo a stroke and leaves him dependent on a cane for the rest of his life), their son dies within a week of his birth and then their house burns down. One could understand why that book wasn't published until after she'd died.
A very depressing case of this in The Chocolate War. The plot focuses on the main character deciding to "defy the universe" and not participate in the school's Chocolate sell, which also happens to be sponsored by The Vigil's, an underground mafia-like group. Long story short, the Universe wins.
The Ice Harvest ends with the main character surviving the worst night of his life, only to be killed when an RV accidentally crushes him backing up.
The film changes this, with the RV only knocking him over, but an alternate ending where he's killed does exist.
The Interlopers by Saki heavily implies one of these (read: is a prime example). The heads of two feuding families are pinned by a falling tree. Pinned there, they talk it over and realize they have no idea why the families are feuding. Just as one thinks that the family feud will be ended by the only two men in the family who can, wolves howl nearby.
The Ruins by Scott Smith mostly plays this straight. Four american college students along with a couple of similar foreigners wander through the jungles of Mexico and end up trapped on a hill with some ruins of a mine and carnivorous vines that hunger for their flesh. Played straight in that none of the characters accomplish anything but dying. Only slightly averted in that there's never really any positive spin or serious hope for escape to begin with. The characters just get set up in this bad situation, things actually get worse, and they all die one by one. It's like the equivalent of having a story that opens up with a skydiver whose chutes fail and then the story ends by him going kersplat on the ground.
There is, however, the fact that the carnivorous vines are contained and don't escape into the world.
The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle is basically made of this trope (and White Guilt). The Mexican main characters get robbed, run over by a car, raped, beat up, lose their unborn baby and nearly die of starvation, only to be washed away by a friggin landslide in the end after the white protagonist tries to kill them in a homicidal racist rage.
Michael Moorcock seems to like this trope, throughout The Elric Saga but most memorably in the Runestaff, when D'Averc, after fighting his way to the throne room to be reunited with his love Flana, is shot to death before he reaches her
The Jonathan Kellerman novel The Butcher's Theater is about a serial killer in Jerusalem. One of the subplots involves Elias Daoud, an Arab-Israeli police officer trying to earn the respect of his Jewish colleagues. At the end of the novel, he has helped solve the case, and one of the other detectives, the one who had been most prejudiced against him, calls him up to ask him to assist on another investigation. In a later Kellerman novel, it is revealed that Hamas judged Daoud to be a collaborator, killed him and his wife, and took their kids and raised them to hate Israel.
Chris Adrian's The Childrens Hospital is a 600+ page long post-apocalyptic magical realism novel about prophecies, medicine, emotional growth, and love. That's why it makes perfect sense that after hundreds of pages of build-up and plot twists and character development, the last 50 or so pages are just the book's Loads and Loads of Characters going insane and dying from a disease that kills every living adult by turning them into ash from the inside out. The book ends with the main character having her baby taken away, screaming and losing her mind as she turns into ash and watches the hospital's children inherit their new Earth. One assumes the author thought ending the book with any kind of resolution to its numerous plot threads would have been too plebeian.
Keystothe Kingdom seems like a light-hearted series, doesn't it? For 6 books, no one has died, except for the bad guys, who are clearly defined, and they are done in off-screen, so as not to stain the protagonist's hands. There has been little permanent damage to the human world, and anything in the other world can be easily repaired with magic. But a contrived sequence of events reveals in Book 7 that Sunday was actually a pretty nice guy, and all the protagonist managed to do was accidently get his own mother killed returning everything to the status quo. He resists any of the "villains" attempts to improve the world not because they're obviously evil, but out of sheer fear that any change would be bad. This has been fed into by the alleged "Big Good," who just wanted her own demise. The only hope is that he'll make things better several years down the road now that he's stuck with her position, which he didn't even want.
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin is a perfect example. The titular Children are cursed by the Dark Lord Morgoth as punishment for their father's resistance. Our hero Turin spends his life fighting against the forces of Morgoth, but everywhere he goes is destroyed, everybody he befriends dies, and eventually he discovers his wife is actually his sister and they kill themselves. He does succeed in killing the dragon Glaurung, but Morgoth has plenty more where that came from. It only gets worse in The Silmarillion, where Hurin, after being released from years of watching his children suffer, tries to avenge them and his wife, but only ends up helping Morgoth. He gets told this, and afterwards kills himself.
Live Action TV
The ending of Mortal Kombat: Conquest was very much one of these. The show ends with Shao Kahn getting fed up with the situation and sending his minions to kill everyone.
Law & Order: all of them, but especially SVU - loves this trope. The more anvilicious they can make it, the better. Usually happens to their Victim of the Week, but bonus points if it wreaks further havoc on the detectives or resident DA.
Although each season of The Wire ends with successful convictions of drug dealers, it becomes progressively more and more clear with each season that the best the police can do is sweep up the low-level boys. Everyone sufficiently high up is untouchable, and American social and political systems make effecting actual change impossible. In the final episode, Detective McNulty has to resign from the force, Lieutenant Daniels and Rhonda Pearlman "fall on their swords", Mayor Carcetti and Commander Rawls are both promoted when they don't deserve it, and the crooked newspaper reporter who ran with a story about a falsified serial killer is lauded. Most of the supporting characters also come to realize that they can't change the system, and will be shuffled into the background while a new generation of thugs and cops dominate Baltimore.
In spite of his Roaring Rampage of Revenge, Omar never gets the chance to kill Marlo, nor does he make any significant impact on stopping the flow of Stanfield goods onto the Baltimore streets. He gets shot in the head by a kid when he stops at a convenience store to buy a pack of smokes). This was arguably deliberate on creator David Simon's part, as he wanted to show that being the most feared vigilante in the city doesn't mean much, and the character ultimately realizes how futile his struggle is in the scene prior to his death.
The first episode of Blake's 7, has the one lawyer on the planet who actually cares about the truth investigate Blake's frame job and get painfully close to unravelling the whole thing when government guards simply gun him and his girlfriend down. It was a deliberate attempt to frame the entire series by demonstrating the spirit crushing government's resolve and it worked brilliantly.
Hell, the whole of Season 4 (the last season) was spent shooting shaggy dogs. They barely accomplish anything except survival — and fail that in the final episode. All the episodes are dedicated to tearing them apart — everyone around them dies, they lose important people, Avon's grip on sanity gradually weakens...
Doctor Who's third season finale manages to do this with the entire future of the human race (Long story short: It's doomed... and then things got worse); This occurring two episodes after it was described as "Indomitable", thus rendering said episode spectacularly moot. To really rub salt in the wound, the events that caused this are explicitly not covered by the Reset Button that later follows.
In the original series episode "Caves of Androzani", while the Doctor manages to save Peri, the rest of Androzani Major and Minor go completely to hell because of a chain of events that was started by the Doctor simply being there and ended with every main character dying pointlessly. The entirety of these places were so riddled with corruption that it just took one thing to make everything collapse. Particular examples of this hopelessness include Stotz killing the rest of his crew and Sharaz Jek, moments after getting the revenge that the war this episode centered around was started because of, is shot in the back.
This could pretty much sum up much of the Fifth Doctor's career. He had a tendency to not save the day.
This goes back even to Logopolis, his predecessor's final story (and the first in which he appears) where a significant proportion of the entire universe is destroyed by entropy. Although insignificant on the scale of such an unbelievably cataclysmic event, the region destroyed includes the Traken Union, thereby almost immediately rendering all the events, people and struggles in The Keeper of Traken (the previous connected story) dramatically null, void and pointless. (The fact that this is only obvious when you stop and consider it suggests that this was a side-effect rather than dramatic intent on the part of the writers).
An episode of Star Trek: Voyager, "Course: Oblivion", has the crew discovering that they — along with Voyager itself — are in fact clones of the real crew and ship, having been brought into existence in an earlier episode, and now they're falling apart. They spend the episode dying one by one and unsuccessfully trying not to die, until the whole thing finally falls apart, kilometers from the real Voyager, which is totally unaware of what has happened. Arguably the most depressing part comes when, desperate not to have their existence be in vain, they create a log of their exploits and launch it into space, where it gets destroyed seconds later.
Especially depressing because the probe is destroyed during its launch. If they'd just left it sitting somewhere it would have been fine once the ship dissolved around it. Basically the Idiot Ballshot the shaggy dog.
This coulld apply to the whole third season of Supernatural. Sam tries so hard to save Dean from eternal torment and gets increasingly unhinged, Dean more or less gets over his suicidal nature and tries hard himself because he's terrified, they both bring the crazy, clingy panic in spades and in the end, none of it means anything because Dean's dead and gone to hell anyway. (Though he got better)
Also in "Mystery Spot" when Sam watches Dean die over and over, and once he thinks Dean's safe, Dean's shot dead and the Trickster refuses to fix it. (Again, he got better)
In the new Battlestar Galactica series, the mid season finale has the humans and the Cylons rebels in a Mexican Standoff with each side threatening to execute prisoners. It takes some work and some tough choices, but in the end, both sides agree to back down, set aside their differences, and to face the future...together. And together, they finally, finally find Earth, which cues the heartwarming music and the celebration montage. The ships enter the atmosphere of their new home after years of searching and finally... they find out that Earth is a radioactive wasteland with the thirteenth tribe nowhere in sight. Cue a Panview of all the main and secondary characters standing and wandering around in shock, no doubt wondering "What the frak do we do now?"
The impact of this was much negated in the finale when the writers pulled Earth 2.0 - our Earth - out of nowhere, meaning they had a sort of happy ending after all. Only sort of, as since we are described as their descendents it means the history and culture of the Kobolians and Cylons was completely lost, including the lessons they had suffered horrendously for, and that humanity is still being judged as likely to repeat the same mistakes they spent several apocalypses and years of hopeless suffering overcoming by 'angels' who jerk us around and manipulate us to this day.
Confessions and Lamentations is a borderline example of this: An alien race is on the brink of extinction and several main protagonists try to prevent that. When the doctor finally combines Applied Phlebotinum and Techno Babble to a working cure he finds out the whole race already kicked the bucket with the exception of deep-ranging spaceships and remote colonies, which isn't much to go on. At least he managed to save the other species that was vulnerable to the disease, and stop it from mutating further. Also at least, this loaded an enormous Chekhov's Gun (which wasn't fired until the following season, in 'Matters of Honor'). The death of the Markabs' homeworld made their system's jumpgate dispensable, and thus available to be destroyed in the maneuver that enabled the first victory against the Shadows.
Intersections in Real Time has Sheridan captured by his government, tortured and messed around with by a professional so he would confess that his seditious acts were due to being alien influences. In one scene they brought in a Drazi prisoner who they beat into confessing his involvement, but Sheridan convinces him not to give in. He's dragged off screaming, but eventually, Sheridan gives his torturer a rousing speech about how every time he refuses to back down, he wins. He's dragged off for what appears to be execution, but it turns out that they were just giving him to another torturer who repeats the same tactics that his predecessor did. And the kicker? We see the Drazi prisoner alive and well, as well as in on it.
Then there's Believers, where a young alien is brought to Dr. Franklin to be treated. It's explained to the parents that his condition can be treated with simple surgery. However, the alien's religion strictly forbids surgery, as they believe it will cause the soul to escape the body. Franklin spends the entire episode trying to research alternate treatments and/or convince the parents to allow him to perform the surgery. In the end, he says to hell with their beliefs and performs the surgery anyway. The parents are at first shocked, calling their son a soulless demon, but appear to acquiesce and take him away. At the last instant, Franklin realizes that they plan to destroy what they think is an empty husk, and rushes to their quarters, only to discover he's too late. Ironically, Science Marches On and only a few years after the episode was made techniques were developed that would make the cultural conflict moot today.
Heroes: DL's death. We found out he was dead in the first episode of S2, for god's sake, but they spent about half of Four Months Ago following him around to show us how. Was it from the bullet wound received in the S1 finale? Nope. Did he die a heroic death rescuing a little girl? No chance. He was killed by some psycho-moron who thought it'd be a great idea to shoot someone in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses for the crime of cockblocking him - that is to say, asking him to pretty please let go of his wife, they're going home now. WTF? Oh, and did I mention the murderer hasn't been mentioned since?
The Dana breast cancer plot in season 3 of The L Word. (Arguably the show's shark-jump.)
Also all of season 6. In the end it turns out most of the established relationships are shams and Shane and Jenny's relationship is done in with Jenny's murder.
Are You Afraid of the Dark?: Many of the Downer Endings, examples include "Super Specs" (the Alternate Universe wins, and the protagonists are imprisoned in a crystal sphere), "Pinball Wizard" (doomed to repeat the game forever, i.e. "trapped in a grim cycle of reincarnation"), "Thirteenth Floor" (Karin goes through all that trouble to escape, only to find out she is one of the aliens and they were trying to rescue her), "The Dangerous Soup" (the demon is Not Quite Dead, and our heroes are once again Locked in a Freezer with it), and "The Chameleons" (Sharon sprays the real Janice, who is then permanently chameleonized, and executed shortly after).
Arguably the point, since the Framing Device for each episode is a campfire scary story. They're not supposed to have happy endings.
In its original run, the short-lived 1999 comedy series Action ended with the scamming Hollywood-agent protagonist (Jay Mohr) suffering a sudden heart attack, after a day of unsuccessfully shooting his last-chance movie. He dies in an ambulance, after which his new gold Rolex is stolen by medical workers. (He's out of time, you see.) Had the next episode aired, he would've woken up and returned to work, but the show was taken off the air, resulting in a shockingly dark ending to a rather dark comedy series.
There was once a planet named Earth. Beginning in 1992, it was attacked nonstop by numerous empires, organizations, and alien invaders- another one stepping in to invade the moment the previous one was defeated. The aliens only ceased their attacks for the occasional invasion by The Legions of Hell, and they both took a break for the occasional time-traveling mafia terrorist or mad scientist dinosaur. No matter who it was trying to conquer Earth, no matter how much was destroyed, defenders always stepped up to defend it, succeeding onscreen until 2008, and then offscreen until at least 2025, when Earth could defend itself successfully even against entrenched invaders, and had become an intergalactic crossroads. And the defenders, the defended, and their children all lived happily- wait, nevermind, everyone not in a specific city was killed by homicidal robots. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the show is Power Rangers, which shoots the shaggy dog in Power Rangers RPM, leaving every previous season ultimately futile.
By the end of the 30th century, what is still left of Earth has caught up and barely surpassed the technological levels seen in SPD about Nine hundred years prior
Not to mention in those 900 years the ecosystem still hasn't healed itself and the Earth, for the most part, is still a barren wasteland.
Buffy's sixth season runs on this trope, most particularly in the storylines ending with Xander leaving Anya at the altar and Tara's death.
Even more particularly, the Nerds drug Buffy, she has a hallucination that she is in an insane asylum being treated for her delusions that she lives in Sunnydale, she is the Chosen One, she has The Power of Friendship and she fights supernatural monsters. Throughout the episode, we assume that the Sunnydale scenes are real within the context of the Story and the Asylum scenes are hallucinations. Near the end, Buffy is about to kill her "imaginary" friends, but the potion wears off Just in Time. The finale is back in the Asylum. Mad!Buffy has had a relapse. Doctor and Parents sadly leaves her cell. The sad implication is that Buffy really is mad and we have spent 6 years of our life watching insane delusions.
Not true. Joss Whedon invoked Word Of God on this one via the DVD commentary. He stated that the whole episode was open to interperetation, but also made a clear point of saying that HE PERSONALLY BELIEVED THAT THE ASYLUM SCENES WERE HALLUCINATIONS.
Many fans of Eastenders felt that the Ronnie/Danielle storyline was an example: Danielle is Ronnie's long-lost daughter, Ronnie doesn't know, complications go on for months until Ronnie finds out, and just as they're about to finally embrace as mother and daughter ...Danielle is hit by a car and dies.
Arguably the same could apply to most soap opera deaths. Another example from Eastenders involves Sharon and Dennis, who spend years fighting for their happy ending. Then, on New Year's Eve, after Sharon finds out she's pregnant with their first child (after believing it was medically impossible for her to get pregnant) Dennis is stabbed to death in the street.
The story of Jack Holden on Home and Away. After a long series of breakups remarriages and other crises with his soul mate Martha, he abruptly gets shot dead, right when she's only just recovering from her battle with breast cancer and the loss of her baby. Not only that, but he gets shot by a fellow cop who he has been following, believing to be corrupt. Angelo accidentally shoots him, thinking he's the crooked developer come to kill him. The kicker is that a few months later Angelo has been cleared of murder charges and is now a series regular.
The penultimate episode of Dollhouse season two. The gang shows up at Rossum HQ, blows up the supposed doomsday device...only for the end of the world to be going strong ten years later.
During the first season of 24, Teri Bauer is kidnapped by a man she believes is a close family friend while looking for her daughter. She gets rescued several hours later by her husband, and then learns at a hospital that she's carrying Jack's child. When she gets put into a safehouse with her daughter, she's forced to run after an assassin kills all of the security protecting her - an act which culminates in her and her daughter being run off the road, and her believing her daughter died. Teri goes wandering around for hours (while suffering from amnesia) until she finds an ex-boyfriend she was with when she was separated from Jack, and they are eventually rescued. Near the end of the day, she even gets to reunite with her daughter (who isn't dead). Yet, in spite of all this, Teri is unceremoniously killed after snooping around CTU and discovering what Nina Myers had done over the course of the day, making her entire character arc pointless.
At the very least, Teri was a Character As Plot Device. She was killed off to demonstrate that the writers were not afraid to kill off any character, no matter how attached other characters or how much time the audience had invested in their adventures. They followed through on that, killing off, among others, George Mason in season 2, Ryan Chappelle in season 3, Tony Almeida (but he got better) in season 5, Curtis Manning in season 6, Bill Buchanan in season 7 and Renee Walker in season 8. Being close to Jack Bauer or in charge of CTU greatly increased a character's likelihood of death in 24, but not as much as being a terrorist.
In season 4, after 12 hours of character development with President John Keeler and his son onboard Air Force One, it's hit with a missile and shot down over the Nevada Desert. The son dies, John is last seen in critical condition, and neither of them are ever mentioned again.
By the end of the eighth season, most of the supporting (and even main) characters are screwed out of anything resembling a victory. While Jack gets a Bittersweet Ending by exposing the conspiracy (albeit, at the cost of having to flee the country and leave his friends and family behind), President Taylor is so ashamed of her part in the day's events that she decides to resign when it becomes clear that everything she did (including trying to forge a fraudulent peace) was unbefitting of a leader. President Omar Hassan is still dead. Suvarov (if what Charles Logan did is anything to go by) will likely be pardoned by his successor, even though he was the one who orchestrated most of the events of the final season.
To top it off, Renee Walker, arguably Jack's last chance for love and happiness, is dead, and a post Season 8 scene reveals that Chole is arrested for helping Jack escape. Admittedly, she went willingly rather than betray Jack, but she is arrested all the same.
Quantum Leap - Sam spends the entire series improving the lives of everyone he leaps into, even giving up a chance to go home to save his best friend's marriage, but Word Of God (literally, it's just white text on a black screen) says he never got to go back to his own time.
According to Al the Bartender, this is because Sam himself subconsciously doesn't want to go home. Of course, things may have been different, if only someone told Sam that he was married.
In The X-Files, the plotline about Mulder's sister Samantha. After years searching for his sister, being told numerous times that she was alive and he would eventually be reunited with her if he just keep looking, he finds out she was dead all along.
Given that Mulder's reaction to this is to be relieved that Samantha is at peace, this might not apply. The ending to the series, however, does: Mulder and Scully are fugitives, with Mulder carrying a death sentence, knowing that aliens will conquer the planet in 2012 and there is nothing they can do to stop it.
You could say this about Derek Reese in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. After a near season of not being allowed to do anything and being sidelined by Sarah all the time, he ends up pointlessly dead for his time traveling troubles.
Wesley's arc in Season 3 of Angel. He finds a prophecy that he believes states that Angel will kill his son. So he kidnaps Angel's son, but he gets attacked and his throat cut and nearly bleeds to death. Meanwhile, Angel's son is taken to a Hell dimension, Wesley barely survives, loses all his friends, and Angel tries to kill him in revenge. To top it all off, we find that the prophecy was false and Wesley's sacrifice was for nothing.
In The Vampire Diaries Anna's century long attempt to free her mother ended with her mother being killed a couple weeks after she was finally released. Then she went into town to save her boyfriend from a vampire attack, but the town council already knew about the attack, and she ended up being killed by the same defenses that meant he hadn't been in danger in the first place. Then her boyfriend drank the vial of blood she gave him in an attempt to turn into a vampire, but it didn't work.
Quite a few episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, but most especially the Adena Watson case (which is the basis for almost the entire first season) and, indeed, Tim Bayliss's entire character arc.
In Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, the first part of the Speculative Documentary follows a prehistoric dragon who lost his mother to a T-Rex before he could learn how to fly or breathe fire, but he eventually defeated all odds that he not only survived but ended up with his own territory and mate. But then the K-T Event happens and the entire species of the prehistoric dragon went extinct.
The Shadow Line: Joseph Bede reluctantly steps into the shoes of the drug baron he worked for (who's just been killed) in order to do one last big deal so he can get out of the drugs game and devote his life (and the money) to caring for his dearly beloved Alzheimer's-ridden wife. He sets up the deal, but his carefully-laid plan goes wrong. By risking his life in a game of Xanatos Speed Chess he manages to put it right. Finally the deal is concluded, and Bede prepares to end the game once and for all by getting ready for an attempt on his life which he knows is coming. Just then his wife attempts suicide, is compulsorily taken into care and tells him to forget her and move on. Unable to face this, Bede gives up and just lets his killer get on with it.
The episode "Giant of the Skies" from Walking With Dinosaurs about an Ornithocheirus traveling halfway across the globe enduring varios hardships in order to reach the mating grounds only to have it driven away and eventually dying from starvation and exuastion, and it never got to mate a single time.
In the second season of Lexx, the crew jumps into the Light Zone and inadvertantly gives a crippled being named Mantrid the ability to self-replicate and produce millions of copies of his robotic arms (which end up assimilating entire races and planets). The crew has adventures on different planets throughout most of the season (which are then immediately eaten by Mantrid's robot arms, rendering all the development of the supporting characters pointless). By the end of the second season, the crew is forced to destroy Mantrid, but its too late - the Light Zone is destroyed (caused by all of Mantrid's drones collapsing the universe into itself by all congregating at a single spot) and the Lexx is spit back out into the Dark Zone. By the end, the only thing that's changed is that an entire universe of people and planets have been destroyed, as well as several main characters (including Lyekka and the original Zev).
The third season also does this. The crew wakes up after being in cryostasis, only to discover that the ship is low on food and must eat to survive. They come across two planets, Fire and Water, and decide to forego destroying the planets so Lexx can eat. 13 episodes later, after risking their lives many times over (with one main character, Stan, dying and then being resurrected), Stan goes to the Lexx's bridge and destroys both planets anyway, rendering the entire season's plot pointless.
Music
Savatage's Dead Winter Dead is a Rock Opera about the Bosnian War. One of the characters is an old man who plays cello in a bombed out square, protesting the war with complete disregard for his safety. Unfortunately, he can only tempt fate so long before he's finally killed. His protest accomplishes virtually nothing, two other characters are saddened by his death and flee Sarajevo, but otherwise nobody notices or cares and the war rages on.
More or less the plot of S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things. All of Sorrow's friends are killed in World War I, his fianceé dies in a dirigible accident in front of his eyes, and is forced into a trip by Baron Saturday to the moon where Sorrow learns that his life has, and will continue to be, meanigless. By the end, Sorrow is emotionally shattered and isloates himself from society for the remainder of his life.
Newspaper Comics
Happens regularly on Pearls Before Swine in Rat's stories about "Angry Bob". In a typical example, Angry Bob decides to go to a bar to socialize, and quickly strike up a romantic rapport with a beautiful woman. They begin kissing in her car, only for Bob to get caught by the woman's UFC husband and die horrifically.
Bo Burnham gives a tale of a frog that falls subject to this while looking for a beautiful lady frog. Bo even says at the end that the moral of the story is "irrelevant, 'cause we're humans."
Tabletop Games
Most of the games in the first run of White Wolf's Old World of Darkness setting were gigantic exercises in Shooting the Shaggy Dog. The good guys in each setting were gradually (or abruptly in Hunter: the Reckoning) revealed to have a long and unpleasant past of doing rather nasty things in the name of the cause, and the series of epic centuries-long secret wars they were fighting generally tended to be either unwinnable stalemates or tragically doomed noble causes. And most of their problems turned out to be caused by the arrogant hubris or ignorance of their own predecessors anyway. And to top it all off, the entire original setting had a series of apocalyptic end of the world scenarios as its grand finale.
Paranoia. It's essentially a game that states, in the manual, that every game should be a (funny) shoot the shaggy dog story.
In Call Of Cthulhu, mythos monsters (and more mundane horrible experiences) make you lose "sanity points" and you gradually go insane. You get back Sanity Points by defeating monsters, which often require either magic or better weapons than the players have to kill. However, spells also cost Sanity, and most spells cost large amounts. If you don't go insane, it's all right, because most monsters can kill you anyways. However, it is justified by the fact that it is based on Lovecraft'sequally bleak books of the Cthulhu Mythos.
KULT, a Swedish roleplaying game with its gloves off, the setting of which can be summed up as "Splatter Punk, Cosmic Horror, Mind Screw and lots of Squick". In KULT you can sort of "win", and become an Eldritch Abomination that you were before the Demiurge trapped you and the rest of humanity. Of course at that point there isn't exactly much left of you as you were as a human.
Honestly, how do you think it's going to end in Warhammer40000.
Dont Rest Your Head is made of this Trope: literally every game mechanic represents a different gradual (or rapid) slide of your resources dwindling away, as your life becomes more and more a nightmare. With a little luck and a kind GM, you may manage to save whatever is most important to you as you are destroyed in the process. If not... then this trope.
Theater
In Stephen Berkoff's The Trial, Joseph K spends the entire play trying to fight a trial he doesn't understand in a world that is set firmly against him. He collapses and dies in a cathedral in the final scene, no closer to understanding or accomplishing anything than at the beginning.
And the bad thing is, that's actually better than what winds up happening to him in Kafka's book.
Does the protagonist of Elmer Rice's play The Adding Machine avoid being executed for murdering his boss? No. Does he have a chance of doing better in his next life? No, each time he is reincarnated, he gets worse. Does he at least get the companion promised to him, a nice-looking woman called Hope? No. That's the situation when the final curtain falls.
In Urinetown, Protagonist Bobby Strong inspires the poor to lead a revolution against the evil Caldwell B. Cladwell, who has gotten private toilets outlawed, charges exorbitant fees for the use of his public toilets, and has his corrupt police force take anyone who subverts his goals to the titular Urinetown (which is in fact simply being thrown from the tallest rooftop in town). In the end, Bobby himself is taken to Urinetown before he can see the revolution through to fruition, and once the poor wins out, and everyone can pee for free, the town's water supply quickly dries up and everyone dies horribly while the inspiring victory music of the finale continues to play.
The plot of the musical "Chess" revolves around the romance between the Russian chess champion Anatoly and the American second, Florence. The London and Broadway versions differ in the details, but the ending remains roughly the same in both. Anatoly defects to the United States. In an effort to get him back into the fold, the Russian powers that be offer to release Florence's father, a Hungarian revolutionary who vanished during the 1956 Budapest uprising, if he loses the match and comes back to Russia. In the end Anatoly decides that he cannot hurt Florence by keeping her from her father, so he defects back to Russia. It doesn't matter anyway, since the man the Russians release is actually a captured American spy, as part of a deal with the CIA. Florence's father is probably dead. Anatoly has given up Florence and the match for nothing much at all.
As well as the example in the Literature section, the song "Turning" in Les Misérables is one long Lampshade Hanging of this trope, although the first line is somewhat stupid when you consider that most of the dead students had participated in the 'successful' July Revolution 2 years before.
They were schoolboys, never held a gun Fighting for a new world that would rise up like the sun Where's that new world, now the fighting's done? Nothing changes, nothing ever will Every year, another brat; another mouth to fill Same old story, what's the use of tears? What's the use of praying when there's nobody who hears?
Video Games
Both Left 4 Dead games can be considered this, depending on how you choose to interpret them. The first game was originally four unrelated campaigns, each meant to be a different "movie" that the characters were in, each of which ends in at least one of the characters surviving (assuming you beat the finale). However, later-released DLC filled in the time "between" two of the campaigns — suggesting that the whole thing is pointless, because each time they're rescued, they only end up in the next campaign, no better off than they were before.
The Sacrifice has its share of Shoot The Shaggy Dog moments and aversions. The comics take place immediately after the crew is rescued by the military where they're kept in qurantine in a military camp slowly dissolving into anarchy, by guards who don't even know what Boomers and Smokers are. Also, it's revealed that Zoey had shot her father for no reason - he may not have zombified, but they took their cue from horror movies once he got bit. It ends with Bill sacrificing himself so that the other three can get to an island.
The sequel makes this explicit — the five campaigns are in definite chronological order, rather than being distinct "movies" like the first game — and even taken as a whole might still end up shooting the shaggy dog. In the ending to the last campaign, the characters are evacuated by the military, but various things about the city in the last campaign suggest that the military may be killing off "carriers" (people who do not themselves become zombies when infected, but can spread the infection to uninfected people who will become zombies from it), which may include the player characters. An alternate interpretation has them being kept in isolated quarantine and being subjected to medical experiments in an attempt to find a cure, instead of just being killed off, because that's so much better.
Final Fantasy XIII-2: Arguably. Timey-wimey stuff cancels out the seemingly happy ending from Final Fantasy XIII. The plot of this game centers around Serah searching for her sister Lightning who has vanished for no apparent reason. Various time paradoxes destroy progress made by the protagonists. In the end, Serah and Mog die after beating the bad guy, Lightning is crystalised, and the bad guy gets better.
Terranigma. The main plot turns out to be one big Evil Plan on part of a dark god that made the hero revive a previously dead world, complete with human life... So that the dark god and its associates could conquer it. Once he finds out he's been the Unwitting Pawn the main character is reverted to a baby for trying to stop it, nearly killed by his own love interest and Exposition Fairy and just barely avoids death due to the sacrifice of his love interest. Then comes the part revealing that the new world and his own world exist in a cycle of death and rebirth where the rebirth of one world means the destruction of the old one: Foiling the plot and saving the new world from the dark god means he, and everyone he knows and loves from his own world, must die along with said god (and yes, thou must). This isn't the part that makes it an example of this trope, though. That would be the part where the hero turns out to be the Chosen One by the Powers That Be who run the worlds: He is reborn to do the exact same thingover and over again every time the cycle is repeated. And the cycle would only ever be broken if he failed. The game tops this off with the mother of all Mood Whiplash endings, where the protagonist is 'rewarded' with a final day in his pre-heroic existence together with all his friends and family, all blissfully ignorant of the fact that they will die at the end of it.
Possibly the biggest instance of a variation on this trope in a console RPG, however, can be found in the obscure Squaresoft game Live A Live (this is going to get a bit long). In the hidden Medieval chapter, the handsome knight Oersted gathers a crew of three other heroes to save the princess from the newly resurrected demon lord. They defeat the demon, only for one of the heroes to realize that that wasn't the actual demon, before dying of his illness. Then the dungeon collapses, and another member of the crew is caught by it. The two remaining heroes return home, and Oersted sees the demon in the night, and kills it... only to realize that it was an illusion. He killed the king instead. The entire kingdom declares him to be the true demon, and they capture and torture his remaining companion, almost to death. Said companion does die, after setting Oersted free and telling him to keep believing, because there is still one person who still believes in him; the princess. Oersted returns to the demon's lair, finds a secret passage in the strangely uncollapsed chambers, and finds... the companion that got caught in the collapse. Turns out he faked his death, and then proceeded to cause Oersted's life to go straight to hell, because he was jealous. Oersted duels him to the death, and then the princess, the last person who believed in him, shows up. She asks why he never came to rescue her (the traitorous friend having found her first), declares her love for the traitor and hatred for Oersted, and kills herself. Absolutely nothing good was accomplished, and now Oersted is completely alone and hopeless. Poor guy. Is there any wonder he then made himself into a demon lord using nothing but the raw power of his hatred?
In Silent Hill 2, while escorting Maria in the hospital, if she gets killed, most easily during the Pyramid Head chase, it's a Non Standard Game Over. However, all your hard work is apparently pointless, since she is scripted to die at the end of the chase sequence.
Subverted, since there's a lot more going on with Maria, who survives dying quite a few times. Nonetheless, Silent Hill absolutely LOVES this trope. Consider:
In Silent Hill 1, two endings revolve around the protagonist not being able to save his daughter at all from the great demon, and possibly only delaying the Eldritch Abomination from doing...whatever it was going to do.
In Silent Hill 2, all endings reveal the protagonist, originally sympathetic, murdered his wife and is being punished for it. In one ending, he commits suicide. In another, he takes the malevolent spirit who looks like his wife with him, with hints she will 'die' for the fourth time just as his wife did, and in one ending, he attempts a resurrection of his wife with spells from a world which would make Lovecraft wince.
In Silent Hill 3, there is a Non Standard Game Over where the protagonist is consumed by an evil spirit in a horrific scene and an ending where she is possessed by a diabolic entity and kills the Only Sane Man.
In Silent Hill 4, one ending kills both protagonists horribly, one ending kills one protagonist and the other is lucky to survive, and a third leads to an evil genus loci taking over the protagonist's apartment, with who knows what horror to come.
In Silent Hill Origins, one ending leaves the protagonist trapped in asylum-like surroundings and given sinister injections by mysterious hooded individuals, as well as strongly hinting that the protagonist is in fact the serial murderer known as the Butcher.
And finally, in Silent Hill: Homecoming, one ending sees the hero turned into a walking symbol of evil, one ending sees him drowned by his own father, one reveals it was all due to electroshock therapy at Bedlam House. Oh, sure, the series has a couple of happy endings, somewhere...
And then, the joke endings traditionally show the protagonists make it through all that only to be abducted by UFOs, rendering the whole nightmare they went through moot.
If you don't get the antidote for the zombie virus, every character's ending in Resident Evil Outbreak ends with them dying. The best you can hope for is a glorious death, taking out loads of zombies as you go — and that sort of thing only occurs if you're playing the final level with a combination of characters that can't be set up anywhere but online. And since Capcom took their servers down as far as this game is concerned...
Taking out a bunch of zombies becomes pretty pointless too, when you remember that they would have just been destroyed when Raccoon City is nuked anyway.
The entire first third of Summoner consisted of you going through great lengths to gather and destroy four magical rings on the advice of your Mentor (a renegade ex-Watcher) and the royal house of your homeland in order to become powerful enough to smash through Murod's Orenian army, free Orenia, and kill Murod. Unfortunately, it turns out that the king's brother and the queen were conspiring with Murod and broke the siege to let in the Orenian army, destroying the four rings actually releases the incredibly powerful demons imprisoned within them, one of your party members was a partially unknowing patsy for this scheme, and your mentor has actually been Possessed by the most powerful of the four demons from within one of the rings since the start of the game, meaning that your ENTIRE game up to this point has been nothing more than the fulfillment of the villains' Evil Plan. This is made more exasperating yet by a Side Quest earlier in the game which would have implicated the traitorous brother in an earlier crime if the NPC characters involved didn't screw up their part of the operation.
The ending to the original Doom had the Space Marine escaping from Hell and returning to Earth... only to find that the demons he had been fighting have already invaded. Cue the sequel.
The ending of the first episode wasn't a bad example as well. After killing the two bosses, the Barons of Hell, the only exit is through a teleporter and after taking it, you get killed by a bunch of monsters, and, no, god mode will not help you. And the debriefing text afterward is so meta:
"Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base, you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you? Where's your fat reward and ticket home? What the hell is this? It's not supposed to end this way!"
The plot of Diablo revolves around a protagonist who seeks to stop the titular demon from destroying the town of Tristram, setting himself free from the cathedral, and leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. In the end, he kills the demon (actually, his human host) and plunges the stone containing his soul into himself, with hopes that he will be able to contain the demon's power. All in all, a reasonable ending. Now, cut to the second game. It is revealed that he couldn't resist it. He became Diablo, destroyed Tristram, set himself free, and is now leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. Well, crap. It was actually revealed that by the time you face Diablo in the first Diablo game, you're already under his control. The entire point of Diablo's plotting in the first game was for him to find a stronger host body. He reckoned, correctly, that any being strong enough to fight his/her way down to him, and then "slay" him was exactly what he needed. The manual to Diablo II: Lord of Destruction even points out how every time people thought it was over, the brothers just kept reemerging.
The expansion of the sequel isn't much better. You manage to smash Mephisto and Diablo's soulstones! Except that Baal is still left unchecked, and he's figured out the location of the source of the soulstones, the Worldstone. Oh, and he manages to convince one of the NPCs to give him a Plot Coupon, meaning free access to the Worldstone for him. By the time you catch up to and kill Baal, Tyrael comes down and notifies you that Baal's corruption of the Worldstone means that the only way to prevent the entire Realm from becoming an outpost of Hell is to destroy the Worldstone. Not even Tyrael himself knows what will happen afterwards. All you can do is enter the portal he opens for you and wait for Diablo III (announced in 2008) One effect of destroying the Worldstone has been made clear: The previous location of the Arreat Summit on the world map is now labelled as the Arreat Crater. Ouch.
The video game version of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was built with this in mind. There is only one way to win in any satisfying, "good ending" kind of way. Either you get all the characters to face their personal demons and die with dignity, after which four of them sacrifice their lives to give the fifth one a chance to defeat AM once and for all but must continue to forever roam AM's deceased mind to make sure it stays that way, or the lone survivor is turned into an immortal, hideous,miserable monster. And apparently Harlan Ellison, the original story's author, had initially objected to the good ending. And the part where the characters can die with dignity at all. In this sense, it's entirely true to the original story.
Kya: Dark Lineage ended on what seemed to be a happy note with the heroine defeating the Big Bad and restoring peace to the alternate world... until the artifact that was supposed to take the heroine and her brother home dumps them in a desolate world where it's implied they're eaten by a monster. OK...
Chakan: The Forever Man ended like this: Chakan, a soldier cursed with immortality until he destroyed all supernatural evil because he bested Death in a duel, never gets his final rest in any of the two final endings you can get. After he has 'rid the elemental and terrestrial planes of evil', Chakan impales himself with his own swords, only to be brought back to life by Death and mocked that, since there are countless planets in the universe that still have evil in them and he can never visit them all, his task will remain unfinished forever. You then duel Death. Be defeated, and Chakan will lament that his final rest can wait as he is still bound by his deal with Death. Defeat Death, and the game ends by showing you an hourglass that never empties: Death can't release you if you kill him. Either way, the plot Shoots the Shaggy Dog by not allowing Chakan to die at the end.
In an old Bullfrog game called Flood, you guide your character Quiffy through 42 levels of platform trouble and reach an ending animation where Quiffy climbs up a manhole to freedom and is immediately squashed by a truck. He deserved better.
This is the first half of the 4th Fire Emblem game, Genealogy of the Holy War. Everything starts going south for the main character, Sigurd after he enters Augustria. He promised the King he would leave after a year and a half; the king sent troops to attack Sigurd before then. Sigurd's friend Eltoshan, a knight under the king, gets executed for questioning his actions. Sigurd's wife Diadora gets kidnapped. Sigurd's father is framed for the murder of Grandbell's prince and Sigurd's wanted by his own country for crimes he didn't commit. He is offered refuge in the country of Silesia but he leaves after Grandbell sends troops in. While making a slow march towards the capitol, he watches his father die and finds out his sister and best friend (his brother-in-law) were killed while bringing reinforcements. When he reaches Velthomer, he is tricked into leading his small, exhausted army before Alvis's troops by being told the King knows he's innocent and that he can now rest. Alvis shows off his new wife, a brainwashed Diadora, and orders his troops to slaughter 'em all. Alvis himself kills Sigurd. But don't worry, seventeen years later all their kids finish the job.
Along with the Replacement Scrappy and Mind Screw issues, this trope is perhaps another reason why Metal Gear Solid 2 received such venomous reactions. Everything that occurs only served to further the plans of the villains, the main character nothing but a pawn who isn't even sure if what he's experiencing is real anymore; and neither is the player for that matter.
The most blatant example is probably taking Emma to the Shell A core to upload the virus to make GW bug out. You easily spend at least an hour on the entire ordeal, including killing Vamp for the second time, trudging your way through tedious underwater segments, sneaking Emma past several patrolling guards, and then doing a 5-minute long Sniping Mission to ensure Emma makes it to the end. If she dies through any of this, Game Over. If she makes it over to Shell A, Vamp jumps out of the water and grabs her. He can also kill her for a Game Over, but if you kill him... he ends up having stabbed her anyway, and there is nothing Raiden or Snake can do to save her. And on top of that? THE VIRUS DOESN'T EVEN FULLY UPLOAD.
The basic plot of Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant goes like this: "There's a MacGuffin hidden on this planet. The Dark Savant is looking for it. Find it before he does, and don't let him have it." During the game's ending, after you've killed the Dark Savant and finally found the MacGuffin, the real Dark Savant shows up, hostage in hand, and demands that you hand it over in exchange for the girl you met earlier. The game actually lets you choose whether or not to hand it over, but if you decide to keep the MacGuffin, he just kills your party and takes it from your corpse. If you agree to the exchange, he gives you the girl, you give him the MacGuffin, and he goes off into space, with your characters in pursuit. Either way, you completely failed in your mission. Cue the sequel.
In I Wanna Be the Guy, if you don't move out of the way out of a slowly falling apple at the end of the ending sequence, you will actually die, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to be The Guy in the first place. Also, you have to fight The Guy all over again!
During the fight with The Guy to become The Guy, it is revealed that, The Guy is your character's father. He killed his own father to become The Guy, and you are going to kill him to become The Guy, and in the future your son is going to kill you and become The Guy. Geez...talk about pointless.
One possible ending in Shadow Of Destiny has the main character escape death and, in the process, realise how precious life is. It's all very heartwarming... and then he lies down to look at the sky and is promptly run over by a car. End of game.
Peasant's Quest (a video game spin-off from Homestar Runner and parody of old Sierra games) — The goal is to gather up everything needed to be allowed to go fight the dragon, Trogdor, and then get past the traps guarding the gate to his lair. If you fail, of course, you die. If you succeed... Trogdor tells you how impressed he is that you got this far, and then burnininates you because, of course, silly peasant, you can't defeat a DRAGON! Fortunately, you get a statue in your honor, so it's not completely pointless...
Another Homestar example: the whole point of episode three of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, "Baddest Of The Bands", is to get cash to fix Strong Bad's broken FunMachine. Once repairs are finally paid for, not only is the console still not working, it turns out that all you had to do to "fix" it was to remove a "crusty wad of jalapeno cheese spray" stuck to the game cartridge! To quote Strong Bad himself, "What the crippity-crap!?"
In the Konquest mode of Mortal Kombat Armageddon, Taven and his brother Daegon are forced into hibernation for millennia by their parents in order for them to participate in a quest to stop The End of the World as We Know It. The quest ends up destroying his entire family, with Daegon being resurrected early and killing their parents and enslaving his guardian dragon for his clan, Taven's own dragon being killed to prevent his progress on the quest, and finally the brothers facing each other in Mortal Kombat (Taven wins, though he doesn't like it). And when he finally does complete the quest, not only does it not depower or destroy the entire cast, as the quest was supposed to upon completion, but it actually supercharges them, essentially causing Armageddon to happen faster instead of stopping it dead in its tracks.
The same thing effectively happens in the Konquest mode of Mortal Kombat: Deception. In both cases, the protagonist falls prey to an Evil Plan thus creating the situation of the main game itself.
And then, it comes Mortal Kombat 9. Before being killed by Shao Kahn, Raiden sends a message to his self from MK1 in order to prevent the Armageddon, thus making the game to clear every event and effort of each of the past games, barring Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero and Mortal Kombat Special Forces for being prequels.
Persona 2: Innocent Sin. The heroes fail to prevent the Big Bad from having his way and all of the Earth is destroyed aside from the city they live in which now hovers above the destroyed Earth. Maya, the Cool Big Sis, also dies because she gets stabbed by some crazy woman and all is lost. In return, the heroes get to rewind time so the event that started it all 10 years ago never happened. Of course this means all they did during the game was for no reason at all and it's pretty much just a big Game Over, please load your latest save (which was 10 years ago).
Persona 3's Bad Ending can be considered as an example of this trope. The protagonist and the rest of SEES not only accidentally release the Sealed Evil in a Can ( Nyx ) But then are given the chance to kill him while he's still in human form. If the protagonist decides to do so, The Memories of the Entire SEES team are wiped and they lose their ability to summon persona [[Xanatos Gambit(Which removes the only chance they have of defeating Nyx). Not only that, but they also Lose all their memories and friendships garnered during the previous year. The game then Fast Forwards to the end of the school year, which has the protagonist, Junpei and Yukari singing karaoke, drinking, and partying their hearts out, Unaware that the end of the world is nearly upon them...]]
Resistance 2. Your first act in the game is to watch the Big Bad make a shiny escape, and then lose your home base. Your second act is to lose your second base, but just narrowly manage to save the inhibitor serum, which keeps you from turning into something like the Big Bad. But that doesn't matter, because suddenly you're going from place to place without ever bothering to keep yourself safely injected. What follows is a series of battles that you ultimately fail to win each and every time. But that's okay. At the end, you've set us up the bomb, and killed the big bad of the game. You ride the nuclear wave out of the flagship, and land, albeit roughly. Too bad it doesn't mean a thing. Some big, scary floating rock now dots the atmosphere, Earth is still screwed, and to top it off, your hero has just turned. Then he is very shortly thereafter executed.
The original Alien vs. Predator game had a particularly scary campaign for the squishy human Marine. Having fought your way through the infested colony and escaped to the unsurprisingly infested space station above the planet, having beaten the inevitable alien queen, you just get abandoned. You've probably seen too much. In any event, it didn't really matter as you started the campaign having just been facehugged anyway, so you're basically screwed regardless of what you do. Yay.
In an old Aliens 3 arcade shooter, the players take role of two prisoners fighting for survival as the Xenomorphs invade the prison. Finally, at the end, they run into the Weyland Yutani team sent in to retrieve Ripley. However, rescue is not high on their priorities and the Weyland Yutani thugs opt to just shoot the players instead.
At the end of Grand Theft Auto III, our hero is implied to have flipped out and literally shot the shaggy dog, i.e. Maria, who he went through all that trouble to rescue. This is one of the few times this is played for laughs.
The diamond subplot in Grand Theft Auto IV. Practically every criminal organization (and there are a lot) in the city gets involved in one way or another trying to steal a bag of diamonds the size of your fist. At the end of a long shootout, one of Bulagarin's men throws the bag into a passing truck full of mulch. Newspapers later report that the diamonds are found by a homeless man.
The homeless man is later shown in the ending of The Ballad Of Gay Tony expansion pack, right after Luis lands in the park. He is later seen partying, though he strangely is still seen in his ragged dirty clothes.
In Infidel, the Player Character solves an ancient pyramid's brutal riddles, defuses its Death Traps, and opens the treasure sarcophagus in the Burial Chamber... only for the room to collapse, burying him alive. This is arguably justified, as the Player Character is a greedy, lying fool, but is that really a consolation after solving so many Expert-level puzzles?
Trinity tops this. It's a 1986 Time Travel game that begins with your narrow escape from a nuclear holocaust, which surely implies that your goal is to prevent World War III. And you do eventually make it to the site of the first atom bomb test... but you can't change history, and history now includes nuclear extinction. You're in a Stable Time Loop, and all you can do is escape from the holocaust again ... though it's implied you'll end up back there over and over again. While you do prevent disaster from happening in 1945, the final line emphasizes that, ultimately, you are surrounded by children who will never grow up.
In Adam Cadre's Varicella,Player CharacterPrimo Varicella's goal is to become Regent to the royal prince. Most players will need many, many playthroughs against a frustratingly tighttime limit to eliminate Varicella's homicidal rivals. Your reward for pulling this feat off is victory! Except the prince grows up to be more Ax Crazy than all of the rivals put together, and sentences Varicella to torture and death. There are other endings, all grim, save for an Easter Egg. Given the dreary setting, in which everybody's some combination of "evil," "crazy," and "victim," the shaggy dog's death might have been inevitable.
Even the happy Easter Egg ending is a combination of it's All Just a Dream with a Tomato Surprise. Typing 'wake up' at any point reveals that the whole game was a college student's dream, an Alternate Universe inspired by falling asleep while reading a history textbook.
Jinxter. You die pointlessly, after spending an entire game trying to avoid this.Computer Gaming World labeled this one of the top fifteen worst game endings of all time.
Tenchu 4. Gohda castle burns, Kiku and Sekiya are dead and Onikage has (possibly) infected Ayame
The ending of the Hierarchy Campaign in Universe At War. Orlok is betrayed and killed, his rebellion accomplishing absolutely nothing except getting the Masari prince captured — even the major characters he apparently killed during his campaign turn up alive and well when it switches over to the Masari.
In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, Larkeicus spent 2,000 years planning a way to restore the crystals to the world, building a tower miles high to reach the place the cataclysm would occur. It then occurs anyway, only BECAUSE of the methods he used in the process, and since he's there at the time it ends up killing him. To top that off, the only reason it happened so exhaustingly high in the sky was because he built the tower that high.
In the "Sisters" mode of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Since it's a prequel to the storyline of the main game, the ending doesn't surprise anyone who's unlocked it, but it's still a kick in the teeth. You don't even get to fight Brauner or Dracula. As soon as you walk into Brauner's room, he takes Cutscene Power to the Max and vampirizes the protagonists in front of their dying father. You have no chance to avoid this in any fashion. Fortunately things get better in the main story.
Activision's Apocalypse. At the end, Trey has defeated the Four Horsemen, and confronts the Big Bad Reverend himself. But before Trey can take him down, the Rev blasts him with lightning and transforms Trey into one of the demons.
Chrono Cross retroactively does this to Chrono Trigger, by revealing that the kingdom of Guardia was destroyed, with most of the cast living in 1000 AD implied to be destroyed, between the events of the two games, the residents of the timeline canceled by the Trigger heroes were sent to the Darkness Beyond Time, and the first game's Big Bad took on a new, even more dangerous form. Whether these things render the entire plot of Trigger pointless or merely explore a darker side of it is up to interpretation.
Both ports of Trigger released since Cross also added extra cutscenes to further emphasize this fact: The Fall of Guardia did not exist in the SNES version, so the game never ended with "Unexplainable army kills everyone in Guardia including our heroes." The Dream Devourer fight in the DS version was also new and pretty much exists for you to fight, win, and then be told you can't win and get sent back to the past...thus Chrono and his friends cannot stop the horrible events in the future from happening let alone their own horrible demises.
Certainly not the case. The day of Lavos is contained and the "apocalypse" gets delayed from the Day of Lavos in 1999 AD to the Time Crash in 2400 AD. Civilization gets an extra 401 years directly because of Triggers character's actions.
Probably less shaggy then most, but the Dream Chronicles series of puzzle games have this sort of ending. You spend the whole game looking for your kidnapped husband and child, and at the end you're whisked away to an enchanted prison. After escaping from that, you get amnesia and forget you even have a husband and child. It's not the worst and these problems are quickly fixed in the next game, but it's annoying.
The game Cyber-Lip is a Contra-style action side-scroller developed by Neo Geo. The story appears to be fairly run-of-the-mill throughout: the President orders two Bad Dudes to find and destroy the titular Cyber-Lip, a military supercomputer that's gone mad and destroyed a good portion of the Earth with its deadly army of cyborgs. Throughout the game you receive briefings from the President after each level on where to progress next. Once you reach the final level and destroy the Cyber-Lip once and for all, you receive a message from the President congratulating you on a job well done. Seems obligatory enough, being an arcade shoot-'em-up and all... until the player is suddenly hit with a Cruel Twist Ending when it is revealed that the "President" was an evil alien leader bent on world domination the entire time. The aliens apparently were the ones that caused the Earth's military technology, including Cyber-Lip, to go haywire, probably via programmed viruses or some similar means, and you, being the naive pawns that you were, went right along and finished the aliens' job for them: destroy every last remaining bit of Earth's defenses, allowing the aliens ample room to take over your planet once and for all. "The Earth is ours," declares the faux-President, and with an evil grin and a pair of frightening, red glowing eyes to boot. The End! No sequel was ever made, nor announced, and it is highly unlikely that one will ever be made, so as far as anyone knows, this marks the end of the heroes' feckless, fruitless battle. Now, just imagine the reactions of the people who spent quarter after quarter to get to the end of this game and defeat the final boss, only for their efforts to be greeted with THAT.
Baten Kaitos Origins has the story of Seph and his Nakama. First they try to save the village of Rasalas from Wiseman, only to arrive too late to do anything. Then they try to negotiate with Wiseman, who uses the opportunity to wipe out their hometown while they're away and simultaneously prove to them that they were completely powerless against him. This is something that Seph takes to heart after he discovers the results of the aforementioned act, and he decides to make a Deal with the Devil for the power needed to defeat Wiseman. Once they return, they find that Wiseman has taken over the minds of everyone in the world's largest city. As they are fighting through the aforementioned group to get to Wiseman, the Children of the Earth see the "senseless slaughter" they are inflicting, and decide to fix the problem by killing them. Which they succeed in doing, thus allowing Wiseman to escape completely unharmed. And the best part? The Children of the Earth had viewed Wiseman as a threat and were about to do the same to him before Seph and his Nakama stepped in. Meaning that if they had simply done nothing, there would have been no need to lift the world up into the sky, Wiseman would have been killed, and they wouldn't have had to pay the price of their Deal with the Devil - because there would have been no deal. Every single one of the problems faced in both this game and the original Baten Kaitos could have been completely avoided. Sucks to be those guys, huh?
In Dreamfall, none of the game's three protagonists manages to achieve their objectives. Although main character Zoë Castillo manages to prevent a societal and technological collapse in Stark, she fails at her mission to stop WATICorp from releasing the Dreamer and proves unable to rescue her ex-boyfriend—worse still, she is placed in a permanent coma. Over in Arcadia, April Ryan is unable to prevent the Azadi Empire from completing their Evil Tower of Ominousness, or even figure out what it's for, and is left for dead. The third protagonist, Azadi apostle Kian Alvane, is arrested for treason by the empire just after he decides to try to convince its leaders of the error of their ways. While some or most of these may end up being reversed if or when the game receives a sequel, calling the game's ending a downer would be a gross understatement.
Obs Cure II: Mei spends the first half of the game trying to track down her twin sister Jun and save her. When she finally tracks her down, the game lets you control Jun's escape attempts, only to have her brutally killed literally seconds after yanking that control away.Things go downhill from there. One by one, the heroes suffer increasingly Cruel And Unusual Deaths until only two of the original students remain, all their attempts to stop the infection from spreading fail, and the ending leaves the two survivors facing down a cloud of black spores implied to be surrounding an even more horrific monster than the Final Boss.
In Super Robot Wars Original Generations (read: NOT Gaiden yet), we have a mechanical dog who eventually develops and feels like an actual dog. After spending through hardships that affirms that it has emotions and is like a real person, er, dog, it is captured and was about to turned back into a mindless machine again. Thankfully, the dog gained an iron will and it was able to escape that predicatement and was on the verge of being rescued... only to be shot down dead. What's the point of having an iron will and all those hardships if in the end, it just dies like that? It seriously makes her whole development, and the buildup that leads to its iron will escape completely pointless. Thankfully, OG Gaiden deals with the continuation and is now trying to resuscitate the dead shaggy dog. That dog's name? Lamia Loveless.
Played straight in Batman: Arkham Asylum. At two points in the game you're required to save Dr. Young, getting a Non Standard Game Over if you fail. After you save her the second time she dies literally about a minute later anyway falling for a trap left by the Joker.
Poor, poorCharlie... his death was a Foregone Conclusion (in Street Fighter II, Guile's motivation was that Bison killed Charlie. Charlie's debut game was a Prequel with no Guile in sight). Charlie can never win. In Street Fighter Alpha, he thinks he's defeated M. Bison, but Bison comes from behind and kills him. In Street Fighter Alpha 2, a Remaquel of the original Alpha, he gets knocked off a waterfall in Venezuela, but only after getting shot by a Shadaloo helicopter. In the non-canon Marvel Super Heroes VS Street Fighter, he's been given a Face Heel Turn and works for Shadaloo. Somehow, in Street Fighter Alpha 3, he's alive and well. This time, he actually manages to beat M. Bison... but Capcom fixed that by adding Guile to the home ports of the game and declaring his ending canon canon. In his ending, Charlie infiltrates M. Bison's base with Guile and Chun-Li, and while Guile and Chun-Li escape, the base self-destructs, killing Charlie and Bison both. What's worse is that Bison came back, while Charlie has been Killed Off for Real (or not, since Capcom loves Retconning this series).
At this point it seems likely, but definitely don't bet the dojo on it. Don't forget that Gouken, who was killed before the first game, and whose death was a huge turning point and defining moment for no fewer than three major characters, was brought back. And Rose. And shouldn't Gen have gently shuffled off long before now?
In the Twisted Metal series, competitors fight in a massive demolition derby with missiles, blowing up opposing cars, monuments, and cities with abandon. The prize? A wish granted by competition organizer Calypso, who wavers between Literal Genie and Jackass Genie . It rarely ends well, though occasionally someone will wise up and turn down the wish.
The Futurama video game ends like this, as the playable characters' reviving device is destroyed, and they, who have traveled back in time to prevent the beginning of the game, are crushed shortly afterward by the final boss. And then, just when it looks like their actions had prevented the professor from selling the company, Mom offers him the sombrero he was wearing at the start of the game. Return to the first scene.
Dead Rising ends this way as well. The protoganist, Frank West, enters a shopping mall that later becomes overrun with zombies. Frank can go around the mall, gathering information on the outbreak and/or save the remaining survivors. Of course, it ultimately doesn't matter, considering Carlito has infected a bunch of orphans, given them all a serum that delays the growth of the larva that turns them into zombies, and had them sent to various orphanages throughout North America, resulting in the infection's nation-wide spread. The rest of the world is left alone, but it can only be assumed that some infected people will cross into other countries. But then again, there is the sequel.
Some of the first game's other endings didn't use this trope (many people who die from plot live). Said sequel make all of Chuck's efforts for nothing if you fail to get the conditions for Ending S. Endings F-B all end with Chuck and Katey dying with no chance of escape despite everything you've done. Ending A leads into Dead Rising Case West, so you survive there, at least.
Driver 3: Tanner shoots Jericho, but spares his life. Then Jericho gets back up and shoots Tanner, who is last seen flatlining, the doctors attempting CPR. The game wasn't received so well, then there was the In Name OnlyParallel Lines, which was the final nail in the coffin. RIP Driver.
Or maybe not. Driver 5 is in the works which will carry on this plot line: Tanner is in a coma and a great part of the game, if not all of it will take place in his head while he tries to wake up.
Pirated copies of Earthbound give us a meta-example. You play through the game, which ends up being almost exactly the same (more enemies, though) and, once you get to the final boss, The game freezes. And then deletes all of your save files.
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. Admittedly it's the Bad End, but still- the hero devotes his entire life to taking revenge on the Valkyrie for killing his father, making a Deal with the Devil and crossing the Moral Event Horizon to do so. Ignore for a second the fact that the Valkyrie only escorts the souls of those already dead to Valhalla, the Norse warrior's heaven. He finally achieves his goal, but then Freya shows up and reveals that the Valkyrie will reincarnate eventually, rendering Wylfried's victory pointless and his revenge impossible. He then gets sent to hell per the terms of his contract, having accomplished nothing but bringing the kingdom he was trying to protect to ruin. To add insult to injury, the epilogue reveals that the Valkyrie took a dive in the fight as an act of repentance, as she felt that Wylfried's Face Heel Turn was her fault.
Halo: Combat Evolved has several moments like this. At the end of the first chapter, John dramatically rescues a marine who trips and nearly misses the last lifeboat; unfortunately, all the marines on board die in the crash anyway. At the end of what is arguably the third mission with the objective of finding/rescuing Captain Keyes, it turns out that he was already part of the proto-Gravemind. The goal of the second chapter, and side-objectives several times throughout the rest of the game, is to rescue groups of marines so that they can be evacuated to a safer part of the ring, which is destroyed at the end of the game leaving no survivors (later retconned to a single dropship of survivors).
Kingdom Hearts 358 Days Over 2. Roxas's best friend, who has spent the entire game trying to figure out her purpose and later defy the purpose Organization XIII have engineered for her ends up getting brainwashed/reprogrammed, doing their dirty work for them, including trying to kill Roxas. He is forced to kill her, and when he gets ready for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, he gets beat down by The Rival from the first game, gets his memory wiped so that he doesn't even remember his friend, and the stage is set for Kingdom Hearts II... where he is absorbed by Sora in the prologue. At least you knew (most) of it was coming, if you played the games in the order they were released.
Divinity 2. In the end, it turns out you have been manipulated by the villain's girlfriend the entire game. You end up resurrecting her, making the villain invincible, and then find yourself imprisoned in some sort of crystal, alive and conscious to watch the world you tried to save burn. That's not even to mention what this does to the already trashed reputation of the dragon knights from their last accidental betrayal of mankind. It's probably a good thing you are the last one.
Bioshock had an ARG for the sequel called 'Something in the Sea' who's main character became well-liked enough to be placed in the game. Many a fan cheered when they saw Mark Meltzer's first audio diary in the game recording his heroic efforts to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Not so much cheering at hearing his last...since you take it off his corpse...after YOU kill him personally...with his daughter a few feet away from his body. Because he had been turned into a Big Daddy by Sofia Lamb.
However, if you have a soul and rescue Cindy and you eventually get the good ending, then his sacrifice is not in vain. If you are a Complete Monster and harvest the girl...well...then it invokes this trope.
Undermining this somewhat is a bug - if you return to the area where Meltzer is patrolling after killing him, another Big Daddy has taken his place. Killing this Big Daddy will yield ''another'' copy of Meltzer's final audio diary.
Plus that means that the Creator isn't real, and you're NOT the Creator, which was the main gimmick of the series!!!
The American campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Everything that Sergeant Paul Jackson does, from taking part in the invasion of Qu'rac, trying to capture Al-Asad (and failing), protecting a tank as it moves through a hostile area and rescuing a downed Cobra pilot from group of terrorists is all rendered moot as you evacuate Qu'rac. A nuclear missile goes off in the city, killing your commanding officer, your fellow teammates, the pilot you just saved, and, eventually, you. This is done to drive home the point that war is (if you consider the actions that you just took in the campaign) pointless. General Shepard comments on this in the sequel: "50,000 of my men died in the blink of an eye, and the world just fuckin' watched."
Somewhat disputable. It's fairly heavily implied that Al-Asad had the resources to dominate the Middle East with Russian Ultranationalist aid and (given the implications of that) heavily devastate all opponents. If nothing else, Jackson and his allies managed to dismantle Al-Asad's army to the point where nuking his own capital became the only way for him to salvage even a flipping of the bird from the defeat. Still an utterly tragic Pyrrhic Victory, but still vastly preferable to the alternative.
In the sequel, this trope returns in spades. Private Allen goes deep undercover with a terrorist cell killing hundreds of civilians in a Moscow airport - and then gets shot by the cell leader Makarov. When Russian authorities discover his body, they declare war on the U.S. Later, Ghost and Roach are dispatched to gather proof that Private Allen was innocent and that there was no reason for the Russia and the U.S. to be at war. Roach then delivers the evidence to General Shepard - who then shoots him and Ghost dead, douse them with gasoline, and set them on fire amid Captain Price frantically radioing in that Shepard is not to be trusted. If only this had actually worked...
Suikoden Tierkreis doesn't require the death of this particular Dog, but it certainly tries to bait the player into it. All but two Dialogue Trees in the game end with you taking the same path you would anyway, one repeats endlessly until you make the right choices . . . and one lets you determine whether or not to Combined Energy Attack the Big Bad, risking the lives of those who participate in the attack, with a "yes" answer being the default option, and a "no" answer being a declaration that there must be some other way to defeat him, with no indication you're doing anything more than denying what's necessary. Choose "no," and you'll later discover that he made the same choice against a similar foe, and every single one of the participants except him died. He was warped and twisted into becoming the villain he is now, and if you choose "yes," you'll follow in his footsteps, over the bodies of a hundred and seven of your allies (all of whom have previously been given names and personalities, and many of whom have had side quests centering on them!)
Knights of the Old Republic starts on the planet Taris, which has several side quests such as helping innocent people escape from bounty hunters (or killing them) and finding a cure for the rakghoul disease. As soon as you leave Taris, Malakfires on the planet from orbit and kills everyone. Even the Hope Spot you ear playing light side is turned into a twisted joke The MMO reveals that the Outcasts found their Promised land, and survived for a few generations, only to be picked off by rakghouls, disease, starvation, and finished off by toxic waste. Then again, this isBioWare post-Dragon Age, so No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
Oh, and the Shaggy Dog is used for target practice well after that. The second planet you visit, with its nice peaceful farms is nuked by Malak. In the Crapsack World of the sequel, Exile goes back to find everyone lays the blame for it squarely on the Jedi...even Exile, who wasn't even there, and ultimately turns the dog into a bloody pulp in the upcoming MMO by having Revan and Exile leave everyone and everything they loved behind to wait and wonder while they die alone and horribly to try and stop the True Sith - who come back and turn Coruscant into a bloodbath anyway.
Well, it is possible that Revan and Exile delayed the True Sith from invading for about a few hundred years. So there efforts may have amounted to something.
There are also hints that Jedi Master Satele Shan, who is descended from Bastila Shan and plays an instrumental part in the war with the True Sith, is also Revan's descendant, after Bastila hooked up with him.
Killzone 2. All the ISA's sacrifices have apparently been for naught, as they are about to be annihilated by the Helghast's reserve fleet. Well, there is the threequel.
The old Amiga game onEscapee has a doozy. The main character has been sucked onto an alien world, survived untold dangers, and has met up with some fellow humans. All he has to do is deal with an alien blocking the hangar controls, and they can fly on out of there. After dispatching the alien, he returns to the ship...and it's gone. The crew mistook a brief lapse in his life signs as him dying, and blasted off without him. Not only is he stranded, but the hangar was rigged with explosives to cover the escape. He has enough time to let out some Manly Tears before everything explodes...
At least one of the endings in Gunstar Super Heroes has the entire Gunstar team dying pointlessly.
This happens twice in Dragon Quest V. While your character is a child traveling with your father Pankraz, you get the assignment to rescue the incredibly bratty Prince Harry. After going through the tunnel complex where he's held, you find and release him... but some minions of the Big Bad get the drop on you! Luckily, Pankraz beats them both handily. The Big Bad then takes you hostage and says that he'll kill you if Pankraz interferes - and revives his minions. Pankraz then gets beaten to death by the minions, and you and Prince Harry are forced into slavery. Ten years pass before the next phase of the game. Later on, you get married and have children - but the day after your wife gives birth, she is kidnapped! It turns out that the former castle chancellor is in league with the monsters. You eventually find him right before he dies from monster-delivered injuries. Later on, you find your wife - when the Big Bad turns both you and your wife into living statues. You are then stolen by tomb robbers and sold to a rich man - where you watch him having fun raising his child for the next eight years. However, you are eventually found and restored by your children!
Robotron 2084 is an Endless Game that can't technically be won, then the sequel, Blaster retroactively shoots the shaggy dog, since it is revealed that the last human family has in fact been killed.
The fifth ending of Drakengard, which is only unlocked after 100% Completion (keep that in mind). After spending the entire game trying — and failing — to protect the seals that will prevent The End of the World as We Know It (all of whom are destroyed off-screen no matter what you do), Caim and Angelus manage to face down Manah. Before anyone can do anything, Manah is crushed and killed by her own brother, causing the destruction of the fortress you were all in that kills Caim's sister, Furiae (again off-screen). Manah's death and the destruction of the seals and Barrier Maiden angers The Watchers, who decide to enter the world and destroy it. After losing the rest of the party against The Watchers in a series of Senseless Sacrifices, Caim and Angelus engage the leader of the Watchers and both of them are transported into another dimension for a climactic final showdown... The 'other dimension' turns out to be modern-day Tokyo. After a grueling Bonus Boss fight, the Watcher leader finally gives up the ghost. At which point Caim and Angelus are instantly and anticlimactically shot down and killed by a JSDF jet fighter in the closing cutscene. DRAKENGARD!
It Gets Worse. These events cause the magical plague that nearly destroys humanity in NieR. That game ends with the title character destroying humanity's only hope of recovering from the disease.
And in the sequel to the first ending of Drakengard, Drakengard 2, also does this in its Ending A. The entire game is spent destroying the districts that essentially form the seals that bind Angelus, Caim's dragon from the first game. After destroying the dragon and launching the world into an apocalypse extremely similar to that of the first game (following Furiae's death), they realize that they have to make another goddess seal... so they place Eris as the goddess seal and the districts are remade. That basically means that the seals you've worked so hard throughout the game and killed a ton of people for the sake of destroying? They all have to be rebuilt to make Eris' burden more tolerable.
The ending to Red Dead Redemption. Despite all the hardships John Marston had to go through to kill his partners in his old gang for the US government in order to get his family back, he's still gunned down by the government official that got him into the whole mess in the first place. Worst of all, John's son, Jack, dedicates the rest of his life to be a wandering gunslinger like his father in order to avenge his death, something John explicitly never wanted his son to be.
The [adult swim] flash game Corporate Climber goes somewhere between this, Karmic Death, and Eternal Recurrence. Promoted from "peon" steadily on upwards, you're often given dubiously ethical tasks (for instance, as a CFO you're ordered to "Cook the books" by throwing them into a fire.) As a board member your only assignment is to "Live it up," but once you're promoted to president you "Pay the piper," thrown out the window by all the people you've wronged. If you want, you can go to hell from here, but you can also return to Earth as a peon and start all over.
Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors: Ending 5, "Knife". After finding door 9, Junpei and the others backtrack to find Clover. While searching, Junpei finds Lotus stabbed to death and is himself stabbed moments later. Though Junpei sees his killer, the player doesn't, leaving the player with no real understanding of the plot and no idea as to who the killer is.
Not just that ending. Ending 6, "Submarine", You walk into the main hall, and see Ace, Santa, and Clover on the staircase, covered in blood. Along with Seven and Lotus, you flee through a series of rooms, which had been unlocked, util you reach the Sun Room. Akane lay dead, and you find the dead bodies Seven and Clover. With all of the others presumably dead, you run over and examine a strange submarine bobbing on the water. Then... you are stabbed and die, with all of your questions unanswered, and much more mysteries apparent.
If the "Safe" ending hasn't been cleared beforehand, then the "True" ending (which is otherwise the Golden Ending) ends with several of the group, including the main character, forced to hopelessly try and work out a passcode for which they lack the necessary clue.
One Chance: Possibly the most depressing game ever. The best ending you can hope for is only your wife, coworkers, and most of the world dying. And you can't play again until you empty your cookies folder.
Mondo Medicals. You wander through the corridors (of the eponymous facility?), solving your way past mind-boggling obstacles and generally being confused and creeped out, and at the end - instead of any answers at all - you get a sudden bullet in the head.
In Radiant Silvergun, our heroes are powerless to stop the Stone-Like from wiping out human kind. The Creator robot creates clones of Buster and Reanna, but dies before he can warn them of the future. Thus, humanity is doomed to repeat the cycle, and will never learn the error of their ways.
The Playstation FPS Codename: Tenka: The main character is an honest citizen who has worked many years to get off a ravaged Earth, only to find that the colony he has chosen is run by a Mega Corp that use its inhabitants to manufacturate mindless war cyborgs. He narrowly escapes being turned into one and wages war with the guidance of a rogue AI in order to escape the colony. After destroying countless assets of the Mega Corp, his "reward" is being killed by the AI, who no longer needs him.
The ending of Uşas (for the MSX) involves the two protagonists placing the four jewels they painstakingly fought to obtain on the forehead of the statue of the titular goddess only for it to obliterate our protagonists with a nuclear explosion. In the Japanese version, it was explained as an artifact of an ancient civilisation and that it's switch was the jewels. There is no such explaination in the PAL version.
FEAR 2: Project Origin ends with three of Michael Beckett's teammates dead, one missing and presumed dead, one mortally wounded, and Beckett himself trapped with the Big BadAlma in the very machine meant to destroy her-which has been turned off by Corrupt Corporate Executive Genevieve Aristide in an attempt to curry favor from her superiors by capturing Alma. To add insult to injury, Alma then rapes Beckett and conceives a child who is implied to be just as powerful as its mother, possibly setting the stage for The End of the World as We Know It.
Canabalt: No matter how far or fast you run, the only thing waiting for you is failure and death. There's no escape, and nothing to run to.
In stark contrast to the rest of the Suikoden series' normal endings, the normal ending for Suikoden 2 ends with Riou losing everything he ever cared for (his hometown, his sister and his best friend, the latter by his own hand), all his victories rendered hollow, and forced into a position he never asked for nor wanted as a figurehead ruler. The game ends with the not so subtle implication that Riou becomes a broken, bitter man whose status will likely be taken advantage of by ambitious advisers and generals...after all, what point was there to stop Luca and the Beast Rune, if in the end you become far worse off than you were before?
The ending of DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu. Next EXY went back in time in order to destroy the DonPachi Corps and prevent the events of DoDonPachi dai ou jou from happening. But in doing so, she ends up causing the events of DOJ—Colonel Longhena is appointed the commander of DonPachi, and the Blissful Death Wars happen anyway. Simply put, the entire plot of DFK was absolutely pointless.
"How long would this endless series of conflicts continue..."
Dead Island pulls this twice in the final few minutes. First, the voice (a Marine Colonel) guiding you to find a cure for the disease gasses you, leaves you for dead, steals the cure, and calls in an order to bomb the island - making all the work you did getting survivors to shelters and gathering medical supplies for them completely irrelevant. Second, when the Colonel gets bitten by his zombified wife, he uses the only vial of the cure (which you spent a good chunk of the game buying time for the scientists to develop) on himself - which doesn't work and turns him into the final boss.
The "Relinquish" Bad End in Vacant Sky, which requires completing the final dungeon without your other party members and minus a few skill upgrades you'd normally get right before entering, a task far harder than obtaining either of the "good" endings. Auria kills the villain in a cutscene, but not before he uses his power to make her perceive that she dies immediately afterward, despite being immortal. Nothing is done to stop Halo Locks from being restored and killing countless people; not only is this the only ending where that happens but it would in fact fail to happen had you lost the game anywhere except the final boss, as the villain's plan hinged on getting Auria to the bottom of the final dungeon. But wait, there's more! This is also the only one of the three main endings in which Vastale does not die and nothing at all is done to even slow down the Virad menace, and it's likely that Vel never wakes from her coma. That's what you get for intentionally violating the story's Aesop.
An In-Universe example happens in The World Ends with You - Neku wins his first Game, Shiki is picked to come back to life, and everything is happy.... but, really, you didn't expect the game to be that easy to win, did you? Not only can Neku not come back to life for a The Conductor explains that because Shiki became the most important thing in the world to Neku, she's been taken as his Entry Fee. Everything Neku worked for during the first Week is negated. It gets even worse when, at the end of the second Week, The Conductor uses an equally trumped-up excuse to not only take away Neku's victory, but make it as if the second Week never even happened. When Neku learns, at the end, that these were all created because Kitaniji literally could not bring him back, and everything he thought he was playing for is a lie, he is, understandably, upset. Neku even lampshades this at one point during the third Week, where he's given up on the Game entirely - he tells Beat that even if he won, Kitaniji would just come up with a stupid excuse to disqualify him. When, after the last events of the game, The Reveal (and a doozy it was), and his apparent loss and (second) death at the hands of Joshua, he believes everything to have been in vain, he wakes up in the exact manner he does at the beginning of each Game, in the Scramble, leading to believe he has to play again. His literal "What the HELL!?" is big enough to have almost become a meme in itself. Of course, the game itself isn't an example, and in fact, is the complete opposite - if it weren't for Neku, his growth as a character, and all of his and his partners' actions, Shibuya would either be destroyed, under the complete control of Kitaniji, or ruled by Minamimoto, and he does get to come back to life at the end and reunite with all of his friends... except one.
The Last Days Of FOXHOUND is a prequel comic about the boss characters from Metal Gear Solid. Five of whom you kill in the game, and the last one having manipulated them into rebelling in the first place so they could get killed. By design this pretty much means it'll turn into a Shoot the Shaggy Dog, but the penultimate page really drives it home.
Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman is a great example of this; after all his adventures, the title character accidentally deactivates the 'Buddha' cheat code and dies, broken and bleeding, at the base of the Citadel. Too be fair, the comic's title should have been a hint.
Filthy Lies. The artist got sick of doing the comic and dropped a giant septic tank on the protagonists. Then he realised he missed doing the comic, so they got better. Even this, however, was better than the second time around of the artist getting sick of doing the comic, and just stopping.
The GOFOTRON Arc of Sluggy Freelance would be a good example of this (although not for the main characters). It would take too long to explain the entire plot so basically its an entire 2 and a half month plot arc where Torg, Riff and Bun-Bun are transported to another universe, which is set up as an epic futuristic soap opera, with many characters introduced. In the end, the entire universe is destroyed (the main characters escape, though none of the natives do). And then it turns out the universe was just created part of an experiment by an alien race to find a new form of energy. Then it turns out that the company is a waffle iron company, and the entire purpose was to find a new way to power waffle irons!. Oh, and the company decided to pull the funding.
Falcon Twin (link): All of the time and effort that the protagonist spends trying to get back to her own Crapsack World is completely wasted because her (not)girlfriend decides that leaving her to bleed to death in a burning building is an OK thing to do, even though medical attention isn't unreasonably far away. However, considering that the tone of the entire series and the veryEMO protagonist both come from well beyond the Despair Event Horizon, could you really expect any other kind of ending?
Homestuck: The White Queen abdicated her throne, escaped to Earth, met up with the remaining exiles, and was almost ready to leave for a new universe with the survivors and her recently-awakened husband as part of a lengthy plan. And then Jack appeared completely unexpectedly, killed them all (except PM) before they could do anything, then did exactly what they seemed to be trying to avert. The worst part of it all is that even after Jack appeared, they still could have accomplished something if AR had finished his job in time, but he couldn't bring himself to destroy the station containing WV, sealing their fates (and then WV got impaled anyways). On the other hand, PM survived, put on the White Queen's ring, and followed him to the trolls' session with just one thing clearly on her mind, so a potential subversion?
Web Original
The final episode of There Will Be Brawl has one with Link. After revealing that he survived being stabbed by Zelda, he rallies her back to the side of good, only for them both to be killed nigh instantly.
Gemcraft: Episode Zero ends with the player grabbing the Gem of Eternity and instantly start turning into the Forsaken, the narration explicitly states that no matter what you do the corruption will eventually take of completely. Worse, it's a prequel and canonically the next person that comes along (that is, the player of the original Gemcraft) kills the Forsaken... and gets possessed.
In the Homestar Runner toon "Homestarloween Party", Strong Sad concludes the story being told by the characters this way. It doesn't go over too well.
Red vs. Blue: Wash comes into the Valhala valley looking for the Epsilon Unit. Before he even says a word, he just shoots Donut and Lopez, neither of whom had anything to do with the Epsilon Unit getting stolen. And now, Donut's Killed Off for Real.
Though it still gets worse when you consider everything from the viewpoint of Simmons, Lopez, and Donut: without even a hope of defending themselves against the Meta, who'd found the base they were relocated to, they tried to find a way to escape. They couldn't, and when Washington showed up right before the Meta would have killed them, Simmons was sure that they'd be safe.
Sintel. A young girl befriends a baby dragon only to see it snatched away from her by a larger dragon. She quests to find and rescue her friend, searching for what seems like forever before finding the dragon's lair and confronting its owner, only to find after mortally wounding the dragon that it bears the same scars her dragon suffered as a baby. She had traveled all that way and not only failed to rescue her friend, but she killed him herself.
The Grickle short,"The Smartest Dog In The World" story consists of a dog trying to save his dying owner. The dog looks up a map to the nearest hospital, find diagrams on how to ride a motorbike, places his unconscious owner on the back, leave the garage... then promptly crash through a wall three houses down, which causes the motorbike to burst into flames, killing them both AND anyone who may have been inside the house at the time. At least the cat survives.
Demonophobia is effectively one giant waste in the efforts of its poor main character, Sakuri Kunikai, who's stuck in Hell for an impossibly long time and to add to that, for every second that passes in our world, an insane amount of time passes in Hell, there's no way out, and she is too mentally tortured from dying nonstop to look for any loophole out, if there even is one. The reason this is so is that she genuinely tries to escape through the events of the game only to realize her prison has no exit.
Played for Black Comedy in The Nostalgia Critic's James and the Giant Peach review. He's let out of jail on the condition that he'll do a positive episode on a film everyone likes, he has to praise it constantly otherwise he'll be hated again, and when he finally does give his honest opinion (he doesn't like the movie but can see why people do), he gets massacred by all the guns pointing at him.
Western Animation
When the Wind Blows charts the slow death from nuclear fallout of an elderly couple after a nuclear bomb goes off in England.
Originally a graphic novel (and also a Radio play). And of course their deaths are the Anvilicious point of the story, meant to show up the absurdity of the British Government's civil defence plans.
Intentionally done in the pilot episode of Æon Flux (actually drawn out into six two-minute shorts), in which the main character's guns-blazing assassination mission fails when she steps on a nail and falls to her death, her body and even her apartment being destroyed by her superiors, her assassination target dead by other means, and her entire shooting spree of a mission being futile.
The second season, dealing with the question "How do we do a sequel when the protagonist is dead?", turns this trope up to 11 by having her die (pointlessly) in every episode.
The series kept the protagonist alive (mostly), but ends with the transhumanist Big Bad being right and the protagonist unwittingly destroying humanity.
Word Of God is that the series was intentionally made with no continuity at all.
In the movie version of The Plague Dogs, the movie ends with the two dogs swimming out to sea and drowning after their fox friend had just sacrificed himself to give them time to escape; this wasn't how it was in the book—see above. The real kicker is that many people prefer the movie ending, that's how bad the Deus ex Machina was in the novel.
Family Guy's marijuana episode, however, it might have was done to make us hear about Seth's ways.
Also the OJ Simpson episode. After building up that they shouldn't just assume that OJ was really guilty, at the very end he stabs a couple people to death and runs off, ending with Peter saying "Oh, I guess he did do it then."
Futurama's Jurassic Bark, especially from the dog POV. Fortunately, the dog gets unshot in Bender's Big Score.
Although he then gets literally shot by Bender's death ray to get "fast-fossilized".
In one Looney Tunes segment ("8 Ball Bunny"), Bugs Bunny comes across a penguin. After swearing he would help the penguin get home (after regretting making him cry), he finds out that penguins come from the South Pole ("South Pole?! Ooh, I'm dyin'!"). He tries to help the penguin to the Antarctic, going through hell and high water to do so, only to find out when he finally gets there that this was a domesticated performing penguin who lived in Hoboken ("Hoboken?! Ooh, I'm dyin' again!"), and he just dragged him several thousand miles for nothing. It would be just a regular Shaggy Dog Story, except that the usually calm, impossible to beat Bugs suffers a mental breakdown because of it.
This trope is cruelly used in the Private Snafu short "The Chow Hound", in which a bull gives his life to be turned into meat to be delivered to Snafu to feed him in order to fight the enemy. Unfortunately, Snafu has eaten so much already by the time the package arrives that he throws out the bull meat, such to the chagrin of the Bull's ghost.
The "Transmutate" episode of Beast Wars: Transformers. A gentle, horribly misshapen, mentally feeble, bird-like Transformer is pursued by Silverbolt and Rampage because Silverbolt is the epitome of the Knight in Shining Armor archetype and wanted to protect her, while Rampage sees a kindred spirit because she was a twisted freak. In the end she tries to get between them with her shield when she sees them fighting, and gets destroyed.
The South Park episode "Stanley's Cup", a Mighty Ducks parody which ends with a pee-wee ice hockey team being beaten bloody by a professional team, and their teammate dying of cancer. "Woodland Critter Christmas" also qualifies, to a lesser degree: the episode consists of a story written by Cartman in class for the sole purpose of saying Kyle died at the end.
And then those woodland critters turn out to be the most evil monsters ever created by anyone's imagination.
"Zim Eats Waffles:" Dib uses a hidden camera to watch Zim's house all day to collect evidence. He watches him eat waffles and have pointless conversations for most of the episode. Finally, something worth recording happens, and then the army of cyborg zombies break in and destroy all of Dib's recording equipment. Dib goes to bed.
Bolognius Maximus: Zim and Dib have injected each other with bologna DNA. They're quickly turning into delicious bologna. They'll have to put aside their differences and work together to- too late. They're both giant pieces of bologna. Roll credits.
Though thanks to Negative Continuity, they're both fine the next week, even though they both refer to the events of the episode in later episodes. Apparently, they somehow got better.
Real Life
WWII Naval pilot Joseph P. Kennedy, eldest brother of John F. Kennedy, volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, a dangerous series of 1944 missions to destroy the German V3 supercannon. He and his co-pilot were to arm the explosives in their bomber, which could not be done remotely, and bail out. The bomber would then be piloted by remote-control, crashing into the V3's bunker complex and exploding. But shortly after the explosives were armed, they prematurely exploded, vaporizing plane and crew. The shaggy dog was thoroughly shot, however, when mere weeks later, Allied troops captured the alleged V3 complex and it was destroyed with a more conventional method by 617 Squadron on July 6, 1944.
The July 20th Plot was one of the many desperate attempts by sane Germans disgusted by Hitler and the Third Reich during World War II. The plan was within inches of killing Der Fuhrer and failed only due to the combination of a cavalcade of improbably unfortunate twists of fate. Planned and carried out in large part by the charismatic one-eyed and one-handed Major Claus Philipp Maria Justinian Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Brigadier-General Hans Oster, General Friedrich Olbricht, and young Oberleutnant Werner Karl von Haeften, all of whom (along with many, many, many others who were crucial to the plot) paid for their attempt to shine a ray of hope through the darkness of the Reich with their lives - and many of them paid with the lives of their families and friends.
Valkyrie is the extremely authentic and well-researched film that tells much of the story.
Except a good number of those associated with the plot were doing it to escape "facing a Jewish tribunal" at the end of the war. Not exactly for good reasons, but "trying to kill Adolf Hitler" covers a multitude of less-than-noble motives.
The Vietnam War veterans were looked down upon at the time of their return.
To make it worse, in 1975 after the Americans left Vietnam, the Communist Northern side quickly steamrolled over the Southern side that the US sided with. Making the entire conflict and casualties on the American side ultimately meaningless.
There's the Second(Third if you count its war with France) Vietnam War of 1979 between Vietnam, Cambodia and China 4 yeas later, especially meaningless for China and the CIA. China went to help the revolution in Cambodia because of a American "suggestion", which evolved into a war between Khmer Rouge and Vietnam, flattered the industry and trust it had built in North Vietnam before during the last war, only for Khemer Rouge to fall. Oh, and small-scale fighting continued until 1990.
The book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls describes how the '70s generation of Hollywood filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, et al.) reinvented Hollywood in counterculture terms, only to end up either dying, being underfunded and ignored or becoming the new establishment by the 1980s. (The final chapter is even entitled "We Blew It," a reference to the final line of dialogue from Easy Rider, the film which begins the story.) Possibly averted with some '90s filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino, The Coen Brothers, Kevin Smith, Paul Thomas Anderson, et al.) who took the '70s films as their inspiration and retained their indie cred throughout the 20-aughts. Or maybe not. Then again, it's a whole new decade.
Another filmmaking example, the documentary Lost in La Mancha was intended to be a behind-the-scenes of the Terry Gilliam movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It didn't go as planned. In fact, at certain points in the documentary, it almost seems as if God Himself doesn't want this movie made. On the other hand, recent rumors suggest this may someday soon be averted.
Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in the Soyuz 1 space mission, during the Space Race. Komarov knew the mission was unsafe, but knowing that his friend Yuri Gagarin was his backup, went ahead with the mission anyway so that his friend wouldn't have to take the risk instead. Everything went wrong. The capsule's solar cells didn't deploy properly. Communications broke down. The manoeuvring thrusters that were designed to re-orient the ship lacked pressure. He couldn't see the sun to navigate the ship. After all that, after a heroic effect rigging up a system with the gyroscopes so that at last he could re-enter the atmosphere, the parachutes failed, and he died. Within a year, his friend would die in a plane crash anyway.
Is there any outcome starting with "A twelve year old girl killed herself" that wouldn't be an example?
This troper also noticed in the story she died by poisoning herself with a pesticide, with would very likely leave her kidney's polluted and unfit for transplantation, at least to his limited medical knowledge.
The entire Universe will eventually give way to entropy and be cold and dead forever more. The aversion is Pascal's Wager.
Your Mileage May Vary when it comes to Pascal's Wager. Dyson's eternal intelligence hypothesis would probably be an aversion. Also one has to consider the possibility of The Multiverse.
