Shoot The Shaggy Dog - Television Tropes & Idioms

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.

—Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5

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 had no point? It didn't. Sometimes an author will go one step beyond a Shaggy Dog Story, and Shoot The Shaggy Dog. Don't just Kill Em All; make all their accomplishments a moot point and their deaths completely senseless. Don't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death; trap him in a grim cycle of reincarnation, and make him a failure in every incarnation. Don't even Kill Em All; they don't even get to bring the Villains down with them. 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 to care. Depending on the particulars, it can overlap with Diabolus Ex Machina, and is a frequent cause of Angst Aversion.

NOTE: An ending in which heroes die or are implied to die does not 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 and World Half Empty. Spoilers ahead, of course. If the writer's a cynical bastard it might be a Black Comedy.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

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.
- This was made even worse by the fact that the manga's ending reveals that demons aren't really all that violent, and many of the ones that had attacked humans over the years were brainwashed by King Enma so that he could look effective.
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. Both of the endings count, really. The series one may be up for interpretation — God help you if you try — but End of Evangelion does this in a rather Anvilicious manner: After spending 24 episodes trying to prevent the Third Impact, half of the cast has various bridges dropped on them. Then the Third Impact does occur, instigated by the organisation that was believed to be trying to prevent it, but the Instrumentality turns out to be out of their control and melts every human on earth into a 'oneness' consisting of orange liquid. The instigator is then subsequently destroyed by a rampaging Unit 01, leaving Shinji and Asuka as the only un-melted people on earth, trapped in a world ruined beyond all comprehension. End of Evangelion not only shoots the shaggy dog, it riddles it with 50cal bullets, fires an rocket-propelled grenade at it, and runs it over. Then nukes it from orbit, just to make sure.
- Worth mentioning that its stated those with the will to do so will be revived, but it still doesn't actually say just how difficult doing so would be, so its likley most of the (already reduced) population is gone for good.
  - If the bitch with some of the worst problems in the series can do it after a few months I expect its not that difficult. Wanting to do it on the other hand is an entirely different matter...
  - Yeah but since everyone else is dead her obsessions and problems don't really have an object anymore. You can't be a recognition-obsessed attention whore when you live with one other guy in a freaking desert island! So I think they'll get better. However, it would have been nice if the Gainaxers had at least shown us some vegetation or some food source or a glimpse of the future or something! It's like ending Berserk [[Youshouldknowthisalready on the rape of Casca]], dammit!
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, just when he's starting to show he may not be that bad, 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.
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.
Gilgamesh ends with the deaths of the entire main cast against the villains, followed rapidly by all life on Earth getting wiped clean.
Chrono Crusade, 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.
- Luckily, the manga version doesn't end that way.
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 Higurashi really 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?
Jigoku Shoujo Negoro Tetsurou's story is a mild version of this, played mostly for laughs.
Osamu Tezuka's Apollo's Song manga fulfills the "Don't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death, trap him in a grim cycle of reincarnation and make him a failure in every incarnation" point of this trope to a T.
The ending of Death Note may or may not fit this trope, depending on which side of a divided fandom you're on. Light supporters think it does, whereas anti-Light fans are more apt to classify it as the closest thing a Crapsack World like the one depicted in the series will ever come to a happy ending.
Bokurano has one of these. Sure, The End Of The World As We Know It is prevented, but only effect of the events within the show are killing off 15 other Earths, all but one of the main characters and several thousand people, in addition to demolishing a large portion of Tokyo. It doesn't help that the threat that the Earth faced was engineered by a mysterious evil Earth from a parallel universe, and would have done nothing to the Earth if the children hadn't entered into the contract.

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Comic Books

Pride of Baghdad ends with all four protagonists being gunned down by American soldiers without even achieving the freedom that they'd been dreaming of. The end also implies you should feel bad for caring about the animals when there are people dying, too.
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. The 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 an 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. It's 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?
Y The Last Man: After four years of loyal searching, Yorick finally reunites with Beth, only to discover that Beth had been planning to dump him before she and Yorick got disconnected. Yorick then realizes his feelings for 355 and confesses just in time to see her get sniped by Alter, whose motivation for stalking Yorick the entire series had been her desire to be killed by a man. Oh, by the way, she also murdered his mom a few months ago—he didn't even know she was dead! The Distant Finale 60 years later ends with Yorick escaping imprisonment and vanishing into the day after telling one of his clones essentially 'Life sucks, but you'll learn to deal with it.' And we never did definitively find out what killed all the other men.
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 Xanatos Gambit 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 Authors Saving Throw. He might not actually be dead.
- Uh...Comic Book Death; nobody in comic books is actually dead.
  - Cept for Batman's parents, Gwen Stacy, and Uncle Ben.
100 Bullets ends with nearly all of the characters dead as the Thirty Xanatos Pileup comes crashing down on everyone. Only a few characters get out alive, and none of them get away with anything worth the trials they went through during the course of the series. On the other hand, the cartel that has secretly controlled America has been destroyed, which is a pretty significant change.
Any editorially mandated Cosmic 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. Examples: Crisis On Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Spider Man: One More Day, the various Legion Of Super Heroes reboots...
In Watchmen, Rorschach realizes something is going on when the Comedian is murdered. He notices how Dr. Manhattan goes away to Mars and Ozymandis 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 Ozymandis, who staged the attempt on his own life, who 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.

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Film

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.
- Let's hope that's the reason they shot the heroic black protagonist...
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 and set themselves up for the darkest, cruelest movie ending this troper has ever seen. 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.
  - This troper considered the main characters to be so stupid, it was too bad the main character didn't get killed.
- 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, 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.)
The Japanese Tokusatsu feature film Casshern did this in spades. The story hinges on a Crapsack World After 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?
Cloverfield. Everyone dies. Except possibly Lily. The monster doesn't die onscreen, but Word Of God says that it was killed.
- Unless there is Word Of God on this too, it seems possible to me that Rob and Beth didn't die.
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."
See the entry under Diabolus Ex Machina for Sean Penn's film The Pledge. It's fortunate that no one in this editor's family owned a gun, because he came out of the theater wanting to go home and blow his head off out of sheer repulsion toward the futility of human existence.
In 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 autistic savant. 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 is even worse. After many perils, the heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. She obviously knows what's coming, yet does not try to resist or escape.
- Not to mention Cube Zero, a prequel to Cube shown from the point of view of the maze operators, in which it is revealed that the savant was in all likelihood killed by the operators moments after the first film's ambiguous ending.
- Wrong. The main character ended up lobotomised after being caught helping people in the Cube escape, and was then dumped inside, with it heavily implied he becomes the idiot savant from the first movie.
Nevil Shute's On The Beach.
- Although that was mostly because the anvil needed to be dropped.
- And then there's The Day After, and (urg) Threads...
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, most fans consider the series to have ended with the previous film.
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."
"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.
Both the original German and English Re Make versions of Funny Games follows a Hope Spot with a real Wall Banger of a Diabolus Ex Machina to ensure that the movie has a Downer Ending. The entire movie is a Take That at its own audience, so it's somewhat to be expected that it would Shoot The Shaggy Dog as well.
According to a recap this troper read — you couldn't pay her to actually watch it — 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.
- Seen it, can confirm it. Thought that was just a dig at Diaboli Ex Machina than Shooting the Shaggy Dog.
Brazil ends with the revelation that the film's "happy ending" was just a hallucination, and the main character was actually tortured to insanity
Twelve Monkeys closes with the death of the the hero, as well as 90% of the human race. What's particularly striking is that Gilliam somehow found a way to make these funny. However, the film isn't totally a downer, since one of the scientists in the future appears at the very end sitting next to the mass murderer on the airplane, announcing that she works in "insurance." This implies that future humanity will become immunized and return to the surface after all, so the hero does not die in vain.
Ran. Dear God, Ran. Influenced by King Lear, 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 is bleak, as the blind brother of Lady Sué, 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".
Alexandro Jodorowsky loves 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, this troper was almost squirming in his seat), 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...)
Das Boot. After everything they've survived for 99% of the movie, they're killed in an Allied air-raid once they get home.
Requiem For a Dream. Dear lord. The last 15 minutes depressed this troper for a week afterwards. Yeah, it was kind of the point, but still.
Burn After Reading. The three least despicable characters are dead or comatose, and... not much else has actually changed.
Terminator 3 set a new standard in Shoot The Shaggy Dog. Not only was the C Mo A 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 films 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 movies 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 movie pointless beyond the pretty explosions?
One word: Bulworth. Five words: Rapping politician, meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a comedy. And he ordered the hit on himself!
- Actually, The titular hero manages to call off the original assassination by contacting the hit (wo)man. The actual assassination was ordered by the corrupt businessman Bulworth was once an associate of, just before he becomes America's next great urban leader. Even more of a downer.
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!
Pretty much the entire point of No Country For Old Men. The protagonist is being stalked by a ruthless killer set on his trail to retrieve the money he found. For the climax, not only does the killer easily slaughter the protagonist, but for true Shaggy Dogness, said climax takes place completely off screen! The audience surrogate (the town sheriff) comes across the scene moments too late to do anything. By the end, the killer has even murdered the protagonist's wife (following up on a threat he made), and the sheriff is so disillusioned by the whole thing that he decides to resign. Depending on who you ask, the ending makes the movie either completely pointless and a waste of time, or a brilliant deconstruction of film structure and story resolution.
- Actually you are a bit off on your first point: Llewellyn is NOT killed by Chighurh, but by the Mexican cartel mobsters, offscreen. And the ending is the same as the book. I don't undertstand why people complain so much about the film's ending because of it.
  - The complaints probably come from people who hadn't read the book.
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. Trope is averted in it. http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/ghost_ship.html
The Children of Dune movie shot the shaggy dog of the Dune movie, as well as its own. Everything Paul Atreides worked for in in ruins, and by the end everyone is dead, crazy, or doomed.
Of course, it's a matter of opinion, but this troper thought the last few seconds of X-Men: The Last Stand shot the shaggy dog execution style. After a huge battle in the middle of San Francisco Bay, with presumably dozens of humans and mutants dead, in an effort to prevent the distribution of the mutant cure... it doesn't bloody WORK!!! Magneto coaxes a tiny bit of movement out of a metal chess piece, which means that his powers are not completely gone, and he may even be on the mend. It makes the entire core of the movie pointless.
Along with a Crapsack World and a Diabolus Ex Machina, the film A Simple Plan literally shoots the helpless underdog, when Bill Pullman's character finally shoots his unwitting, lower functioning brother, played by Billy Bob Thornton, in what can only be described as a Dethroning Moment Of Suck, made even worse by the fact that the entire plot is rendered meaningless in the film's final frames.
- And yet, the ending to the movie is cheery and lighthearted compared to the novel. This troper, who loves the movie, was deeply depressed reading The Other Wiki's synopsis.
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.
Munich. "In the end, did we really accomplish anything?"
How was this missed, etc. 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.
This troper feels that way about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was all very well done, with great effects and brilliant acting, but the story itself seems to lack a point. It builds up for the first three-quarters by telling us an interesting story of a man's life then provides no kind of Aesop, whatsoever.
- As Chad Vader said about Benjamin's life: "It was a bit weird, but kinda the same as everyone else's."
Evelyn Tremble's storyline in 1967's Casino Royale: He's suddenly killed by Vesper Lynd, who was in things for herself all along. This may be somewhat forgivable: Originally Tremble was the central character but Peter Sellers was fired before all his scenes were finished, neccessitating a massive rewrite.
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.
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 Telvision.
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.
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. The ending was reshot (paving the way for the sequels) because test audiences hated it.
The Shaft revival with Sam Jackson. Shaft spends the entire movie shooting, and getting shot at by, people in order to secure the evidence to put a murderer in prison... and then the victim's mother just shoots the murderer anyway (on live TV to boot), rendering the protagonist's efforts completely worthless. Roll credits.
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 brothewas 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. 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.
The original Last House On The Left has the two parents exacting revenge on their daughter Mari (and her friend Phyllis)'s rapists and killers but they end up murdering two of them in front of the two idiotic cops who bumble their way through the movie and are most probably going to be arrested.
- However this actually fits since one of the main themes of the movie is the pointlessness of revenge.
In the horror movie Catacombs, we have an example of this trope mixed with a Wall Banger. 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. She then proceeds to slaughter the rest of them, including her sister, and leaves.
Se7en The main characters achieve exactly nothing, and indeed are an essential part of the serial killer's master plan.
Dancer in the Dark - the most depressing movie I have ever seen, anywhere; ultimately pointless. And ends with the execution of the innocent, blind main character.
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.
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 comma 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.
Pans Labyrinth - if you don't believe the Faun is real, then the whole movie is one big Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
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 commited 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, 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.

Close Film

Literature

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.
- This troper thought at the time that he retained his individuality and spirit, but came to understand why Big Brother was necessary in the Crapsack World he inhabited.
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.
  - That is the worst thing I have ever heard.
- 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.
Franz Kafka is the god-king of this trope.
- 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.
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."
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.
Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series has at least two examples:
- 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.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream starts with the insane, and slowly decaying, AM having wiped out humanity except for the main characters, who receive a Fate Worse Than Death. When it ends, four characters are dead, but the narrator has received a worse Fate Worse Than Death.
- 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 Catch22, 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 Warhammer40k 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 a Xanatos Gambit by the real villains, who can now feed the souls of all the war's dead to a Cosmic Horror and send the survivors straight into warp rift. Even for 40k, this is a Downer Ending.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ends with the "initial" main character being banished and the "secondary" female main character being killed (purposely) by the "real" main character who was in love with her and who took drugs and hung himself the next day. Wow.
- On the other hand, the place the first guy was banished to sounds awesome.
In the eleventh book of the Wheel of Time series, the Shaido 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".
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, Goosebumps loved 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, especially Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the moral of both of which is that life is a horrible never-ending series of tragedies inflicted on a cruel God that will culminate in your death 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.
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.
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.
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".
Technically, it's a Bolivian Army Ending, but Thirsty by M.T. Anderson is nonetheless more depressing than any above example I have personally read or seen, even The Mist. The main character, a Vampire Refugee promised a cure by an angel if he kills a rather nasty Sealed Evil In A Can, has been unknowingly working for the Legions of Hell the whole time. Said Legions of Hell have decided he's no longer of use to them, but aren't bothering to kill him because there's nothing he can do at this point. You see, the lower-level bad guys now want him dead for killing the being they worshipped, the lower-level heroes know he's becoming more and more bloodthirsty and are determined to kill him, and the forces of Heaven automatically send all vampires to hell. (Yes, God Is Evil—or at least jaw-droppingly prejudiced, considering that the hero has spent the whole story trying to become human again—which incidentally is impossible.) The reason it's not truly Shoot the Shaggy Dog? When the story ends, his family has trapped him in his room, and is ready to kill him, but he's trying to restrain himself from killing them. In theory, having given in, he could escape— although it has been specifically mentioned that he has almost no chance of survival and no allies, and besides, he'll have to keep slaughtering people for their blood. Then again, this is all rather fitting for such a Crapsack World.
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.
The final Animorphs book. Action Chick Rachel goes on a suicide mission onto the Blade Ship, which will soon be blown up by the heroes in a hijacked Pool Ship. Rachel creates enough of a diversion on the Blade Ship for the heroes to fire on it, but a pacifist android drains power from the Pool Ship's weapon systems. Rachel is unceremoniously killed by a Blade Ship crew member, shortly after killing Jake's brother, whom Jake spent the entire series trying to save from the alien controlling his mind. Because the heroes could not destroy the Blade Ship, it flies to some other planet and kills millions of civilians, just for fun. Later, the same crew member who killed Rachel kidnaps Aximilli and assimiliates him into an entity called "The One". Three of the four remaining heroes try to rescue Ax, but they end up suicidally ramming the Blade Ship. Entire book series ends.
- K.A. Applegate has a nasty tendency to do this with her books. Discontinuity exists for a reason.
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.
This is the fate of about half the characters of Lonesome Dove.
Half of Judi Picoult's novels. Just one example:
- 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 agressive 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!
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.

Close Literature

Live Action TV

The Corner, by The Wire creator David Simon, is one big grimfest.
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 Mc Nulty 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.
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.
- The last episode of Blake's 7 was an even bigger Shoot The Shaggy Dog moment, what with its Kill Em All ending.
Doctor Whos 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.
- One could argue, that it has a point and a big one at that. The point being that everything has to end, even the existence of the human race. (and it lasted damn long, since it's the year one hundred trillion and the end of the universe.)
- River Song did mention a trip to the end of the universe with the Doctor. So maybe they work things out.
- 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.
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.
Nikki and Paolo from Lost were originally meant to be much more important characters, but the fanbase utterly despised them so much that they were simply killed off.
- 90% of Lost is like this, notably ALL the Tailies from Season 2 who influence nothing and die when they've started to.
- In addition, the Season 5 finale appears to have revealed that John Locke's ENTIRE character arc and development was nothing more than to be a throwaway pawn in the ultimate scheme of a newly revealed Big Bad.
The whole of Supernatural, Season Three, could apply to this. 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)
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 totally nullified in the finale when the writers pulled Earth 2.0 - our Earth - out of nowhere.
Kamen Rider Ryuki: The whole ORE Journal subplot seems pointless. At the very end, Reiko-tachi finally unravel the mystery of the Kamen Riders and the Mirror World, only to have all their hard work undone by the Reset Button.
The Babylon 5 episode 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.
- At least he managed to save the other species that was vulnerable to the disease.
- 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.
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.)
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).
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.
The premise of Power Rangers RPM is that Venjix's army has wiped out most of humanity, except for the survivors living in Corinth/Boston. Which means every earth-based ranger team (with the possible exception of SPD and Time Force, depending on when this season takes place) has a good chance of being dead. Nothing the heroes did in the past 16 seasons even matters anymore.
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.
As of the Season 5 finale of Greys Anatomy, the entire life of George O'Malley.
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.

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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 Aeon 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.
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.
"Once upon a time, there was an ugly barnacle. He was so ugly that everyone died. The end!"
Family Guy's marijuana episode, however, it ~~might have~~ was done to make us hear about Seth's ways.
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. 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, and he just dragged him several thousand miles for nothing. The usually calm, impossible to beat Bugs suffers a mental breakdown.
How Did We Miss This One: The "Transmutate" episode of Beast Wars: Transformers. A gentle, horribly misshapen, mentally feeble, bird-like Transformer is persued by Silverbolt and Rampage because Silverbolt is the epitome of the Knight In Shining Armor archetype and wanted to protect it 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.

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Tabletop Games

Most of the games in the first run of White Wolf's 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.
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 magic 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's equally bleak books of the Cthulhu Mythos.
- If you want a bleak RPG where A Fate Worse Than Death awaits and failure (and death) is often the only option for characters in the long run, try Delta Green (which is basically Call of Cthulhu meets secret society Special Ops). Or take 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".

Theatre

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.
- A similar fate befalls Mr. Zero in the musical version of the play.
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 exorbinant 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.

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Video Games

As far as this troper is concerenced, Far Cry 2 was one of these, after all, the only good thing is the civiliands fleeing the town, and having never met them (and not giving a damn about the reporter), this troper felt he had totally wasted his weekend.
- Considering the fact that your only goal in the begining was to kill the Jackal, the fact that you end up saving a large portion of the countries civilians makes for a pretty heroic ending.
Illusion of Gaia has one of these as the ultimate reward for a sidequest — it turns out that, despite all the neat gifts you got previously, the real goal of the sidequest was to rebuild the body of the first boss of Soul Blazer so he can have his revenge on humanity. You have to destroy him, and he's received a massive power upgrade. Not to mention that you had to do some morally questionable things to get this far in the sidequest.
The spiritual sequel Terranigma one ups this: The main plot turns out to be one big Xanatos Gambit on part of a Dark God that made the hero facilitate the rebirth of a previously dead world, complete with human life... So that the Dark God and its associates could conquer it. The main 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. And 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 means he, and everyone he knows and loves from his own world, must die along with the villain (and yes, thou must). And then there's 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 thing over and over again every time the cycle is repeated. Throw some Mood Whiplash into this during the Downer Ending that follows and we have the recipe for a game that made this contributor cry over the sheer futility of it all.
- It actually sort of makes you wonder if the Wachowski brothers played Terranigma while coming up with the idea for The Matrix.
- This troper prefers a different interpretation. The Power Of Love allowed the "dark hero" (which you are, in fact, playing the whole game) to rebel and finally destroy Dark Gaia and thus break the cycle. Granted, he and his Doomed Hometown are still slated to vanish, but this takes on more of a Heroic Sacrifice tone.
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 editor, for one, found one of the bad endings so tragic that he fell into a state of angst lasting the rest of the night and had to be calmed down by friends and family. And we are talking about a SNES game here, my friends.
- Live-A-Live has these as the ending for at least half its stories. Cube's chapter has most of the crew dead from their interpersonal conflicts, and stopping the computer that exacerbated these problems into fatal situations feels bittersweet at best. Sunset is still guilt-ridden over his past after saving the town from the Crazy Bunch, and still hunted as a outlaw. Akira's home and closest friend are burned down and dead, respectively. And Orsted's chapter is so depressing and frustrating that this editor could only cry for poor Orsted, deeply moved when the Heroic Mime broke his silence only to declare his hatred for the world and everything in it. The villain's "good" ending just looks like a lot regret despite his triumph, and let's not get into the possible Armageddon Ending of the final chapter. Then again, you're playing a game that spells the title Live-A-Live as "Live-A-eviL". You should know what you're getting into.
  - This troper, after trying all of the worst endings, was getting VERY upset, but after defeating the villain in the proper way almost cried of relief watching the splendid (for a SNES game) Good Ending. Some Anvils REALLY Need To Be Dropped.
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.
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.
  - Well, the justification of doing that is you don't want to be there when the nuke goes off. So you gotta kill the zombies in your way to do so. That's how I look at it 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' Xanatos Gambit. 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!"
Knights Of The Old Republic II features the protagonist thrwarting a galaxy-spanning Sith plot which exists solely to mess with her head - if the Exile didn't exist, the Big Bad wouldn't be doing anything important. Over the course of this scheme, she causes the deaths of the few remaining Jedi masters and the destruction of two planets (to be fair, one was uninhabited)... and is then rewarded for it all by being told "It doesn't really matter what you did, and the real threat to the galaxy is something else which you probably don't stand a chance against. Have a nice day."
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.
  - Which was announced in 2008. And yes, a Diablo-like demon is seen in the trailer. And 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...
Call Of Duty 4, where a player character and the city the missions have been taking place in are destroyed in a nuclear explosion, immediately after the heroic rescue of a woman from her downed helicopter, as if just to punctuate just how much of a Shoot The Shaggy Dog moment the developers wanted, as well as a Flashback where the player participates in an assassination mission, only to find that the supposedly dead target is the Not Quite Dead Big Bad.
- In the first case, they not only shot the shaggy dog, they totally vaporized it with a nuke.
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 three endings you can get; the "bad" ending has him lamenting that his final rest can wait; the "normal" ending has him cleansing the world of evil and impaling 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; and the "good" ending...just has you staring at an hourglass for several minutes.
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.
- Apparently, however, while you do get to see Sigurd and Diadora as ghosts in a later conversation, any indication that they are living together in the afterworld is so small that this troper (yes, one whose SN comes from this very game) has seen a comment saying "justice is dead."
In F.E.A.R., despite your character being a badass Super Soldier with insane superpowers, you end up failing every single mission objective you're given; everyone you're assigned to protect dies, and the Psycho For Hire you were sent to kill willingly allows you to execute him, and comes back later even more powerful as a ghost. Also, after blowing up part of a city to stop the Big Bad, the game ends with her still alive and attacking the 3 survivors.
- The expansion pack, Extraction Point, is even worse. You go through the entire game to rescue your teammates, only to have them killed off moments before you reach them. Finally, at the very end, just as you attempt to escape the whole insane situation, your ride blows up for no apparent reason and the game ends with you bleeding out on the asphalt watching the entire city burn down as a precursor to the end of the world.
  - Project Origin is almost as bad, if not worse. Most of your ineffectual teammates are dead, Alma is still alive, plus she is now pregnant by you, with a potential Fetus Terrible. Said by some to be the Antichrist. Has Monolith finished off the shaggy dog for good?
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 (and I mean 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 basic plot of Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant goes like this: "There's a Mac Guffin 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 Mac Guffin, 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 Mac Guffin, 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 Mac Guffin, 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 guaring 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 SBCG4AP's third episode, "Baddest Of The Bands", is to get cash to fix your broken FunMachine. Once you finally paid it off, not only is the console still not working, it turns out that all you had to do to "fix" it is to remove a "crusty wad of jalapeno cheese spray" stuck on the game cartridge! To quote Strong Bad himself, "What the crippity-crap!?"
What about Mortal Kombat Armageddon's Konquest mode? Our protagonist, Taven, and his brother Daegon is 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 enormous Xanatos Gambit/[Xanatos Roulette Roulette]], thus creating the situation of the main game itself.
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).
- So, they lose, but they get to hit the Reset Button and Ret Con everything into a better world? I guess it still sucks to be them, but at least they brought the world back (until the sequel, anyway).
  - Well, technically the blown up world still exist, they just get to create an Alternate Reality of the world were things COULD have gone better, of course if things were better there, there wouldn't be a sequel.
This Troper is going to try so very hard to keep calm while talking about Resistance 2. He's also going to try and keep it short and sweet, to preserve said calmness. 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.
- This troper vaguely recalls an old Aliens 3 arcade shooter he had played where 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.
Oddly played in the latest Prince Of Persia game for the PS3/360. The "odd" part about it: it's the Prince who pulls the trigger to shoot the shaggy dog. After spending the entire game healing the lands with Elika and fighting off Ahriman and his soldiers, Elika makes a Heroic Sacrifice to seal away Ahriman for good. The Prince cuts down the trees of life that make up the seal just to revive her, willingly letting the darkness spread across the land again, unleashing Ahriman upon the world, and undoing all the work he and Elika had done. Good going.
At the end of Grand Theft Auto 3, 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.
- He wasn't trying to rescue her; he was just in it for revenge on Catalina. The only reason he didn't shoot Maria sooner was because he always ended up working for her significant other (first Salvatore, then Asuka).
  - Thus, all his travails still kind of seem pointless, in a different way.
Infocom used this trope at least twice. 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 Character Primo Varicella's goal is to become Regent to the royal prince. Most players will need many, many playthroughs against a frustratingly tight time limit to devise a Xanatos Gambit and 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 part two of Chapter 9 in Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, The GUARDIANS are looking for a young Beast boy infected with the SEED-virus to give him the vaccine before the AMF CASTs kill him. However once found he ends up turning into a SEED form, forcing him to be killed anyway.
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.
Castlevania Order of Ecclesia. Dracula's dead until the next episode rolls around. Shanoa simply dissapears and Ecclesia (and other government-sanctioned vampire killing agencies) fade into history, never touched again. The only thing the story does is tell you why the government doesn't actively fight.
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. The Bad Guy Wins.
Chrono Cross retroactively does this to Chrono Trigger. Remember the super mega happy ending you got with Chrono and Marle hooking up and pretty much everyone except Magus going home to their happy new worlds? PSYCHE! They all die! Oh, and your actions caused millions of people to never be born and get flung into non-existance and curse your existence. Time Travel is in fact a horrible thing that causes worse things to happen. The world in the future collapses thanks to the technology created by Lucca. And Schala merged with Lavos to become an even more powerful, unkillable being that Chrono and his friends cannot defeat. And Dalton, a minor mini-Boss that defeated himself, remembers Chrono and his friends, conviently winds up in their time period, and turns a tiny little town into a world-conquering army so he can murder everyone in Guardia and burn it to the ground. Oh, but Magus lives. He just may or may not be a different character in Chrono Cross. Depending on the Ret Con that day. And he can't save his sister at all, so she rejects him. Aren't you glad you went back in time to save the future?
- 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.
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.

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Web Comics

In Bob And George, the epilogue for the story explains the characters' futures, but keeps reminding us that the entire cast was going to die in between the classic Mega Man and X time periods. It then subverts it by saying that was if a minor comment hadn't convinced Dr. Wily to not try to activate Zero who will kill everyone, and they all just fake their own deaths and move to Acapulco to prevent a time paradox.
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. 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. This troper thinks he may have died or gone comatose.
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 destoryed (the characters escape). 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.

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Web Original

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.

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 discovered that no such supercannon had ever existed.
- Not to mention that the project was permanantly shelved after the disastrous flight.
  - Sources? Mine (Paul Brickhill's "The Dam Busters") indicates that the V3 was demolished by six-ton Earthquake bombs courtesy of 617 Squadron ("Dambusters" Sqn). Ian V. Hogg's "German Artillery of WW 2" supports V3's existence.
What's the point? We're all going to die, anyway.

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