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alt title(s): Everybodys Dead Dave 
This is beyond the loss of a Redshirt, or even a Redshirt Army. Sometimes, to show that a situation is really, really dire, the main character and his friends have to look around and see that everybody except themselves is dead.
The guy who appeared that one scene to offer advice, dead. Captain Ethnic, dead. The Ace, The Cape, the Badass Normal? Dead, all of them. Wait, what about the Implacable Man? In the end, even he was mortal.
Sure, life might be going on elsewhere. Greece was still populated when Odysseus lost his crew, and the entire world was intact when Seras lost her squad. But for the person who survived, everyone is gone — they are alone. For now, at least.
Maybe, though, there really are no people left and you are officially After The End — the last group of survivors.
The idea is this: we have a tragic ending, but still allow the main characters to move on to the next adventure. Try harder next time.
This could be the conclusion to a story. It could be the setup, too. A common subversion is that the whole event is part of some nefarious scheme to get a hero's cooperation, and no one is actually dead. And sometimes this is the prologue to a Ghost Ship story.
See also: And Then There Were None, Last Of His Kind, Last Starfighter. Compare and contrast: Total Party Kill, Kill Em All and Everybody Lives.
Examples
Anime
- Hellsing begins with Celes/Ceras/Seras Victoria's entire police unit being slaughtered by vampires. Technically, she gets killed by a vampire too, but...
- Berserk: At the end of the anime, almost the entire Band of the Hawk gets brutally slaughtered by demons in a manner that exemplifies numerous Primal Fears, and the only survivor other than Guts and the newly Face Heel Turned Griffith isn't in much condition to fight anymore given what happens to her at Griffith's hands. Enjoy knowing the endearing, Badass Normal minor characters while you can.
- Soukou No Strain
- Genesis Climber Mospeada
- And Macross, too.
- And Robotech - Shadow Chronicles, partially, as What the Invid didn't destroy, the Shadows did.
- Played as a joke/Shout Out to Red Dwarf in Clannad. When Sunohara wakes up after falling asleep in class, Okazaki plays a prank and tells him that the world has ended; He is actually a hologram and Sunohara is the only person left on Earth. Naturaly, Sunohara freaks out and asks whether this is true. Okazaki then admits he's lying; he's actually a cyborg. This serves to freak Sunohara out even more.
- Vexille does this soon after The Squad infiltrates hostile territory, with only the titular Action Girl apparently surviving the slaughter. It is later revealed that her lover The Captain also survives but he doesn't reappear until the end of the movie.
- Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure is infamous for frequently killing off protagonists near the end of each arc. It's especially prevalent at the end of the sixth arc where *everyone* on the entire planet, *including* all but one of the protagonists who wasn't even the main focus of the story and the Big Bad, have been killed off. Thankfully most of them get better.
- In Saikano, the main character is the only one left on the desolated Earth at the end.
- An early fan sub of the series put a disclaimer on the second to last episode that said "If you want this series to have a happy ending, stop watching here." Never has a better synopsis of a final episode been written.
- This is what happens in the Wham Episode number 6 of The Daughter Of Twenty Faces to the Twenty-Faces' original team, with only Chiko herself surviving the massacre and the subsequent fireworks.
- Extreme example — Neon Genesis Evangelion where only two young teenagers are left in the world, with everyone else turned into Tang, along with it's spiritual predecessor Space Runaway Ideon the whole cast and its namesake ship are killed off, but are able to be reborn Technically, the latter case is a Kill Em All, but this trope is briefly invoked when the hero realizes that he is the last of their group shortly before dying himself.
- In fact, many of the anime made by director Yoshiyuki Tomino between 1980 and 1997 have this sort of ending, Ideon being Tomino's 1980 work. Similarly, Zeta Gundam may spare some of the cast but kills off the entire cast of villains (save the next show's big bad), well over half of the supporting cast, and then also mindwipes the main character. Victory Gundam does this similarly. Long story short: if they're a part of the 'Shrike Team,' expect a death soon.
- Happens to Sousuke in Full Metal Panic in episode 17. The events of that episode also parallel a part of his Back Story.
- Code Geass seems to start like this: Before the first episode is even finished, it seems that everyone who could have been a supporting character in the story is dead, and only in the subsequent episodes do you find out that C.C. and Suzaku both survived getting shot.
- This is the situation near the end of SailorMoon, but (fast) everybody gets better at the end
- Still, seeing Chibi-Chibi fade out of Usagi's arms was quite a tear-jerker.
- In Alien of Darkness, there is only one survivor.
- In the most recent arc of Katekyo Hitman Reborn Tsuna and Co. are transported 10 years into the future where they are told many major supporting characters have been killed by a rival mafia group. Including all the arcobalenos (including Reborn) and Yamamoto's father. Tsuna's parents, Vongola 9th boss, Shamal and Naito Longchamp are still MIA.
- In Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, Tatarigoroshi-hen and Yakusamashi-hen end like this. In both instances, the point-of-view character (Keiichi in the former and Satoko in the latter) is the sole survivor, and for similar reasons; they both fall off the same bridge into a river that carries them out of Hinamizawa. Although they survive it, they eventually die shortly thereafter.
- Also occurs at the start of the second series, subverting the happy ending of the first series with Rena being talked down by Keiichi. Turns out everyone was killed in a "gas leak" (yeah right) except for Rena, who happened to be out of town at the time. Unlike the previous example however, Rena really does survive the incident, and presumably leads the rest of her life out.
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, Scar initially believes himself to be the only survivor of the Ishval genocide.
- In later chapters of the manga it is revealed that Hohenheim was originally a slave in Xerxes, and when Father tricked the king into using the entire population of the country to create a philosophers stone only the two of them survived.
Comic Books
- The first Transformers comic book starts its Un Cancelled run (pictured above) with the bad guys victorious and the good guys reduced to one pacifistic medic and a bunch of scrap.
- In Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, the main character wakes in a hospital after being shot in a firefight — he's a cop — only to find the hospital apparently empty. Then he finds the zombies. The city is in much the same state. He does find survivors though, including his wife and son.
- Spoofed in a Peanuts strip where Peppermint Patty, after napping in class, wakes up to find the room empty except for Marcy, who tells her the world came to an end and they are the only survivors. Patty looks out the window and asks "So why is the playground full of kids?" Marcy replies "Sorry, sir. When I saw you got an A on that quiz, I thought the world had come to an end." (Schulz said he intended the strip to make fun of preachers predicting the end of the world, and was surprised when no one wrote him to complain about it.)
- Used in the print comic Garfield, in a Halloween storyline starting on October 23, 1989 where Garfield
 wakes up to find that Jon and Odie are gone. And his home has been abandoned for some time. Which can only mean...
- Near the end of Maus, Art asks his father Vladek what happened to Art's paternal family after the war. Vladek then explains briefly what happened to each of them as far as he knows — all except one brother who now lives in Israel - died in the Holocaust.
- In Punisher: Born, Frank Castle's last Vietnam deployment ends with him as the sole survivor of Firebase Valley Forge, surrounded by the corpses of all his comrades and the hundreds of Vietcong who overran the base. The Vietcong directly around him have all been beaten to death with the butt of his gun. None of the soldiers who show up to "rescue" him are particularly surprised at what he eventually becomes.
- In The DCU mini-series Kingdom Come, viewpoint character Norman McKay has prophetic visions telling him that this will happen to Superman. In the end it happens exactly like that. Except instead of redshirts, it's an entire battlefield filled with most of the superhuman characters in the DC universe which gets hit with a nuke. There are survivors, thanks to Captain Marvel's Heroic Sacrifice, but most of them are dead, with Superman kneeling in the ashes, more or less unharmed but exceptionally angry. Kingdom Come is worth reading just for this — it's about the only time we've ever seen Supes in a true, unhindered, out-and-out homicidal rage.
- The ending of the original Devilman manga. Everybody, and I mean everybody but Satan bites it.
- The premise of the original batch of Marvel Zombies stories. The intermittently intelligent zombies don't know what to do since they ate everyone. Then, in the sequel, they have the same problem AGAIN, after eating nearly everyone in the entire KNOWN UNIVERSE. Hank Pym: "I can't believe we ate the whole thing.".
- In the related 'Army of Darkness Versus Marvel Zombies', Ash fights through the zombie invasion from first bite to apocolyptic showdown. He's allowed access to Doctor Doom's dimension spanning machine and waits too long to make a choice of what dimensions. He ends up right back in a similar world of everyone's dead, except the super-powered zombies are now also werewolves.
- In Miracleman the eponymous character discovers that his nemesis has killed virtually every single person in London. During the fight to stop the carnage from spreading they kill everyone else in the city. The issue ends with Miracleman crying over the body of his enemy's innocent alternate personality and sitting on a pile of corpses.
Film
- Similar to the above, the hero of 28 Days Later wakes up in a hospital bed to find that he's apparently the only person remaining in the whole of London. He isn't, but almost everyone else has been transformed by The Virus into enraged superhuman bloodthirsty almost-zombies (so not quite dead, but near-enough).
- The Battle of Yavin in the first Star Wars film ended with all the on-screen rebel pilots except Han, Luke, Wedge and a Y-wing pilot dead, with all of the dead pilots having only been introduced so they could fight in the battle. However, the Expanded Universe continues to write more and more just-off-screen characters into the battle.
- Only two students out of the forty-two who make up the cast of Battle Royale survive the Program. And that's precisely one student more than was meant to survive and "win the game".
- In the original book the "winner" was not one of the two survivors.
- Sunshine : the movie's old website gushed about having each of the principle characters die.
- In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Robin arrives from the crusades only to find his entire home destroyed and his family dead, his blinded servant the only survivor.
- Mercilessly parodied in Robin Hood: Men in Tights:
Robin Hood: Blinkin, listen to me. They've taken the castle!
Blinkin: I thought it felt a bit drafty. Cor, this never would have happened if your father was alive.
Robin Hood: He's dead?
Blinkin: Yes.
Robin Hood: And my mother?
Blinkin: She died of pneumonia while... oh, you were away...
Robin Hood: My brothers?
Blinkin: There were all killed by the plague.
Robin Hood: My dog, Pogo?
Blinkin: Run over by a carriage.
Robin Hood: My goldfish, Goldie?
Blinkin: Eaten by the cat.
Robin Hood: (on the verge of tears) My cat?
Blinkin: Choked on the goldfish. Oh, it's good to be home, ain't it, Master Robin?
- In an alternate ending of Army of Darkness Ash starts taking his magic potion, of which he is only supposed to take four drops, pauses to hear a noise, and then accidentally double counts a drop. When he wakes up, he's the last man on Earth looking over an apocalyptic wasteland screaming "No! I slept too long!". Guess Hollywood went with the
happier more kickass ending.
- From Dusk Till Dawn ends with only the main character and one girl surviving
- Russian film The Ninth Company ends with all characters but two main ones dead.
- Then there was a film about boy scouts fighting weapon dealers.
- Cassandra's Crossing.
- Alien and Aliens. Then they Kill Em All in Alien 3, but Ripley is cloned Back From The Dead for part 4.
- Different Dave, but in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Everybody's dead but Dave.
- The Quiet Earth: the quote says it all.
Zac Hobson, July 5th. One: there has been a malfunction in Project Flashlight with devastating results. Two: it seems I am the only person left on Earth.
- The Mexican Standoff in Reservoir Dogs ends up with everyone in the room dead or near dead except for heavily wounded Mr White, mortally wounded Mr Orange, and Mr. Pink who promptly makes off with the diamonds (and gets arrested). Immediately after, Mr. White shoots Mr. Orange through the head and is shot dead by the police. NOW everybody's dead, Mr. Pink.
Literature
- The Bible, Genesis, chapters 6 - 9: God kills all but Noah's family in a world-wide deluge:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. (Gen. 6:5-8)
- The Bible, Genesis, chapter 19: God destroys Sodom and Gommorah; only Lot and his daughters are spared.
- In The Odyssey, Odysseus's ship sank and only he survived to spend seven years with Calypso. Therefore, this is Older Than Dirt.
- At the start of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Earth is destroyed and Arthur Dent is thrown out into the universe. Quite literally.
- Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi opens with one of these, the two main characters literally the only ones left after a battle. They even wake up to find themselves as such, too.
- Markus Zusak's The Book Thief ends with the entire street where Liesel lives with her foster family being bombed to rubble by the American planes. Everybody dies, except for Liesel, who happened to be lurking in the basement, reading a book, Alex Steiner, who was working for the German Army as a tailor, and Max, who was in a concentration camp at the time. The only things keeping this from being a Diabolus Ex Machina are that 1. The narrator is Death himself ("I do not wear a cloak with a hood unless it is chilly"), and 2. Since the prologue, the narrator has been informing the audience of how everyone is going to die. ("A fact about Rudy Steiner: he did not deserve to die the way that he did.") and 3. The bombings were plenty foreshadowed themselves. Saves this book from being thrown at the wall of many a reader's corner.
- In Catch-22- by the end of the book, nearly all of the Loads And Loads Of Characters are dead. But because they only died one at a time and each chapter only focused on a few characters, this realization doesn't really hit the reader until the last chapter, where there's hardly any left.
- In Catch-22's sequel Closing Time, Yossarian and the chaplain are the sole survivors of a nuclear war that killed everybody on Earth. They then decide to commit passive suicide by leaving the bunker.
- Happens three times in Terry Pratchett's Nation. A tidal wave kills everyone in Mau's village, leaving him sole survivor. A ship destroyed by the same wave leaves Daphne the one survivor (two, if you like parrots). Meanwhile, a plague has decimated England wiped out (among others) the 137 other people standing between Daphne's father and the crown.
- Harry Potter comes pretty close, though there ARE survivors other than the main characters.
- The Day Of The Triffids is a classic post-apocalyptic novel by John Wyndham in which the narrator wakes up on a hospital bed, and realizes that a freak space phenomenon (later implied to have been a malfunctioning orbital weapon) has caused everyone to go blind. The only few people unaffected are those like him who were asleep, sedated, or otherwise unable to look at the sky. The resulting collapse of civilization causes most of mankind to die like flies, and that's when the killer mutant plants show up.
- To be fair, the mutant killer plants were always there, just kept locked up and their dangerous stingers regularly docked.
- The book The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father and son as they travel south during what is suspected to be a nuclear winter. The father and son are all they have left.
- Z For Zachariah - the only survivor initially is the young girl in te mysteriously unaffected valley, writing her diary.
- Dragonlance has this. When Caramon goes forward in time, he find the entire world dead. Done well enough to the point of Nightmare Fuel.
- The Pilo Family Circus ends with almost everyone in the circus being slaughtered by Kurt Pilo during his Villainous Breakdown; the only confirmed survivors are Steve, Shalice the Fortune Teller, Mugabo the Magician, Gonko the Clown, and Jamie.
- In "The Yarn of the 'Nancy Bell'" (the first of the Bab Ballads by W.S. Gilbert), the sole survivor of the Nancy Bell's crew describes what happened to the others.
- Nevil Shute's On The Beach describes the reactions of the remaining survivors of an all-out nuclear war that has already destroyed most of the population of Earth. The characters are mostly Australians who are waiting for the fallout to reach them, but they know that they're already doomed.
Live Action TV
- Red Dwarf: Three million years after a nuclear reactor leak killed the crew of an interstellar mining ship, the only survivors of the pilot episode's disaster are the main characters. Well, one survivor. The other three protagonists are the ship's AI computer, an evolved, humanoid descendant of the main character's pet cat (and, therefore, not actually born at the time of the disaster) and a holographic simulation of the main character's roommate. Why a hologram? Because he's dead, Dave.
- Being a comedy, the page quote (where Holly breaks the news) quickly spirals into an Overly Long Gag - and the book adaptation's take ends with Holly ranting every possible grammatical combination of the words, "everyone", "is", "dead" and "Dave".
- Doctor Who did this several times:
- "The Horror of Fang Rock": Everybody on the island except the Doctor and his companion, dead.
- "Warriors of the Deep": Every named character but one is killed (and that one is a fairly minor one). Famous because the Doctor figures out how to destroy the alien invaders quite early in the story, but can't bring himself to kill them until it's too late for all the people he might have saved.
- Pyramids of Mars. Once again, everyone dies but the Doctor and Sarah Jane.
- "The Caves of Androzani": Everybody on the (sparsely populated) planet of Androzani Minor except the Doctor's companion, dead (at least every named character — we are not told explicitly that all of the soldiers were involved in the failed attack in the caves died, but we are not told that anybody survived, either). And yes, that includes the Doctor. He gets better. Bonus points for also killing off all but one of the characters who appear in scenes on Androzani Major, although the off-screen population survives intact.
- "The Parting of the Ways": Everybody not evacuated from the Game Station except companion Rose Tyler, dead. (Including the Doctor again. And his other companion, Jack Harkness, although he gets brought back by Applied Phlebotinum (permanently, it turns out.) Plus a considerable percentage of Earth's population.)
- The episode Turn Left is one long conversation between Donna and Rose. Donna turns right instead of left, and the whole world changes. Every other character that's ever had billing in all three series and is not already dead, dies in this episode through one Heroic Sacrifice after another. That’s the Doctor (who does not get better), Martha, Sarah Jane, Maria, Clyde, Luke, Gwen and Ianto. Jack is still alive, but a prisoner of the Sontarans and is in no position to help.
- Completely subverted in the episode The Doctor Dances wherein it looks like the entire human population of Earth is going to be wiped out. In the end, the ninth Doctor is ecstatic that for only the second time ever (and the first time in the new series) NOBODY dies.
- In the recent episode 'Waters of Mars', it is flat-out stated by the Doctor himself near the beginning of the episode that every single character except himself dies. When he tries to saves them, the leader, Adelaide, commits suicide anyway, knowing that she was meant to die, although two of her subordinates do remain alive.
- Supernatural has a few of these, most notably in the episode "Croatoan" where an entire town's population except the brothers and one doctor (not counting one kid who turns out to be working for the Big Bad) are wiped out.
- Another memoral episode is "Jus In Bello" where the brothers could easily have stopped any more deaths just by allowing Ruby to sacrifice one virgin girl, who was prepared to be the sacrifice. Even for Supernatural, this episode has a Downer Ending...
- Season 5 has the episode "The End". 5 years into the future, Dean witnesses a zombie apocalypse where Bobby is dead, Lucifer possesses Sam's body, and possibly every other hunter he's ever known dead as well. All that's left is him, Castiel (who is self-destructing fast), and Chuck. At the end of the ep, future-Dean leads a suicide run at Lucifer wherein he sacrifices Castiel and everybody else he brought along with him except past-Dean. Lucifer kills him without effort and so, in the future, the only main character left is Chuck. This episode was put-a-gun-in-your-mouth-and-pull-the-trigger depressing.
- Babylon 5 gets one in Gropos. Note, however, that this may be more of a Redshirt Army.
- Babylon 5 gets two, actually. In the episode Confessions and Lamentations, members of one of the minor species on the station ( the Markab start coming down with an unknown illness, which eventually begins to kill them off. Rather than looking at it scientifically, they get whipped into a religious fervor and decide that it's the judgment of God killing the immoral, and all they need to do to be saved is to come together to pray and perform sacred rituals. As they lock themselves away, Delenn and Lennier (two regular cast members, immune to the plague because of the species difference) go in with them to offer help. At the end of the episode, the doctor on the station figures out a cure and races down with it to save everyone . . . and they're all dead. The two regular cast members are the only ones left alive, to the point where Delenn is holding the corpse of the obligatory cute child that had been dancing around earlier in the episode. In fact, news reports at the end of the episode state that the plague was severe enough that it effectively killed off the entire species, and they never appeared on the show again. It was shocking and utterly depressing, but amazingly well done.
- The end of the Farscape episode "Different Destinations". What's worse, it's the heroes' fault due to changing history, and just to twist the knife, the "everybody" in question was a monastery-full of NUNS. Nurse-nuns. With children.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine novel Fallen Heroes. Odo and Quark accidentally shoot themselves three days into the future with an alien artefact to find the station in ruins and everyone dead. There are then a series of flashbacks showing just what happened - aliens attacked the station looking for the artefact, which wasn't there as it had been sent into the future...they end up putting everything right by figuring out how to time travel back into the past again.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode The Siege of AR-558 ends with the main characters in addition to 10 or so soldiers alive - out of a 150-strong unit.
- In earlier episode "Valiant", the titular ship, sister ship of "Defiant", is destroyed and the only survivors are Nog, Jake, and one girl - the rest of Red Squad dies.
- In Star Trek Voyager episode Dragon's Teeth, The Vaadwaur, once 6 billion strong and a major power, are reduced to less then 600 - but are no less dangerous...
- Both the new and old Battlestar Galactica series begins with a devastating Cylon attack on the Colonies, leaving only the Galactica and a number of civilian ships. There Is Another.
- In the ending of the Japanese toku Prety Guardian Sailor Moon, Princess Sailor Moon, in a fit of angsty rage, literally ended all life on Earth, turning the whole into a desert. This was, naturally, complete with shots of her friends and family disappearing in a white light. Just for the emotional kick. Things got better.
- 24: Jack's backstory involves a mission by a Special Forces team to take out Victor Drazen, a genocidal Milosevic lieutenant. An emotionally scarred Jack is presumed to be the only one who makes it out alive...until team member Stephen Saunders surfaces as the Big Bad in Season 3.
- They failed to kill Victor Drazen and his sons as well
- Appears in Power Rangers RPM's basic premise. Save for Corinth, the Domed Hometown City Of Adventure, the entire planet is a dead empty wasteland, all inhabitants dead (a few refugees get to Corinth, of course, but obviously most don't). Included among the dead, implicitly, are most, if not all of the protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters of the past 16 seasons, and any descendants the above groups may have produced in the interim (if it is descendants who were primarily killed, then everyone we knew is still deceased, just of old age rather than killer robots- the timeframe is unclear). Heroic immortal characters from past seasons are implicitly dead, as they would be helping fight the enemy if they weren't. Except the aliens and people from the year 3000, everyone from Power Rangers you could care to name is now dead in an unmarked grave. If the grave was marked, the marker has since been destroyed.
- The AU movie for Kamen Rider Faiz, Paradise Lost. The number of humans alive doesn't even get close to the five-digit mark. At the start.
- In the miniseries The Stand, the CDC office where Stu was imprisoned while The Plague was decimating the general population was adorned with the uplifting grafitti "All Dead Here"
Music
- "Come Away Melinda" (various versions). Probably the closest thing to a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming you can get in a song about the last two survivors of nuclear armageddon.
Mythology
- The indian epic of EPIC LENGTH Mahabarata has its final showdown in a massive battle involving almost 4 million warriors. At the end of the eights day, the battle ends with only the five Pandava brothers and three of their warriors surviving, as well as the three last members of the opposing Kaurava army.
Radio
Tabletop Games
- Used to bleak effect in a couple of scenarios from a Champions supplement dealing with alternate dimensions. In particular, in one the player characters arrive in their home city's counterpart in a world where Germany won WW 2, developed nuclear weapons before anybody else did, and conquered the US. They run into and fight power armored patrols, get in touch with the local resistance, get sent to another city to speak with the real leaders there...then the Nazis, alarmed that there are still superpowered individuals despite all their heretofore effective-seeming efforts to exterminate them, drop a nuke on the city they just left. And then threaten to repeat that performance as necessary until the resistance surrenders for keeps...
Theater
Video Games
- Twice in Halo: Before the game even starts, the human military capitol of of Reach is bombed into molten glass with only the hero's ship escaping. By the end of the game then the Halo, all humans and all enemies have been utterly obliterated with the exception of the hero, his trusty Exposition Fairy and a handful of stragglers including 343 Guilty Spark, Sergeant-Major Johnson and the soon-to-be Arbiter.
- The same thing also happens in the earlier Marathon series: after a seemingly happy ending in the first game, the sequel reveals that during intervening years, the entire colony was kidnapped into slavery by aliens or nuked to the bedrock, and the good-girl AI dismantled for scrap—however, said AI is revealed to have survived this in a largely irrelevant Twist Ending to the second game. The final game ends with only a few dozen humans from the colony still alive.
- The even earlier Pathways Into Darkness STARTS with you Late To The Party, everyone other than you having gotten killed already.
- By the end of the trilogy, humanity's population is reduced to a few hundred million, and the only surviving main characters are Lord Hood, Half-Jaw, the Arbiter, Chief, and Cortana, although the latter two are marooned in space thousands of light years from civilization, and a few of the "expendable" supporting characters are present in the 21-gun salute cutscene.
- Both System Shock and System Shock 2 kill almost every single NPC aboard the station/ship besides the nameless player. There's a group of survivors in the first game, but they are wiped out before the player can reach them. In the sequel, the ending cutscene shows SHODAN taking control of Rebecca Siddons and menacing Tommy Suarez (presumably killing him).
- It's particularly annoying in the second game: you actually see quite a number of survivors, only they die before you can meet them, sometimes while you watch haplessly through the window. Tommy and Rebecca example is even worse. You run to escape pods bay only to find they're just leaving in the last pod.
- Dead Space follows the tradition with a massive ship drifting in space and its crew turned into monsters. The few survivors you see either kill themselves, or murder each other in truly disturbing ways.
- This is the fate of the "God of Destruction" Alex in one of the Multiple Endings of Nippon Ichi's Makai Kingdom. He wants to destroy everything; he succeeds. And is left alone in an empty universe, too powerful to kill himself.
- A very similar thing happens in the Demon Path of Soul Nomad And The World Eaters. Except you're the one who destroys everything, and when the fabric of the world is undone you go along with it.
- Call Of Duty 4 does this twice; first, when the nuclear warhead in Al-Asad's capital detonates, killing Lieutenant Vasquez, most of his squad, the Cobra pilot they were rescuing seconds earlier, and, a few minutes later, Sergeant Paul Jackson, the player character. Later on, "Soap" MacTavish is disabled by a gas tanker explosion, and forced to watch helplessly as Griggs is shot in the throat, Gaz is executed in the forehead by the Big Bad, and the rest of his surviving SAS/Marine unit is gunned down in cold blood by the Ultranationalists, right before Price slides him his Colt M1911 and lets Soap rip the badguys a new one. Talk about your Downer Ending.
- Soap has been confirmed as (one of) the protagonist(s) of the sequel. Price's status is still unknown.
- Price and Gaz have died in every game they've been in. They'll be back.
- In Modern Warfare 2, Price lives. This trope applies to this game as well, as everyone in Task Force 141 except for Soap and Price are dead by the end.
- This is your character's Back Story if you select the "Sole Survivor" background in Mass Effect.
- And from what Bioware has indicated, this is a possible ending for Mass Effect 2.
- Sets the stage for the first Doom, when the hero is the only surviving member of a squad of marines sent to two survivorless moons (overrun by demons go figure) and then Hell.
- And then again in Doom II where the hero is the last man on earth (sans a lone escaping spaceship).
- At the conclusion of Doom 3, the nameless protagonist is the only survivor. Every single NPC he has met over the course of the game has met their end through one way or another.
- In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, the only non-Max character of any import to live through to the end of the game is Jim Bravura, who happened to take a few bullets to the torso first. Though, if the player completes the game on the hardest difficulty setting, Mona survives too.
- In Dead To Rights, Jack is the sole survivor at the end.
- The White Chamber, regardless of the three main endings, drives the point home that Sarah murdered the entire crew, and she is the only one still alive, everything that seemed to be alive that she had encountered was a complete illusion.
- On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode Two, near the end of the game, The Big Bad comes in and kills everybody at the robotics convention off... even the beloved characters from the first game... even the characters you had JUST finished side-questing for. As Gabe and Tycho would probably say, "Shit just got real."
- In EP 4 of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, everyone except Battler is killed within the first day.
- Knights Of The Old Republic II opens with the player character awakening in a mining facility with everybody else dead except for an old woman who had been in a hibernation trance and a man who was forgotten in the detention area.
- You were supposed to be responsible for the deaths of nearly everyone in your party, but it was cut due to time restraints. If you go evil, you almost kill everyone in the galaxy.
- In Left 4 Dead, the four survivors are some of the only people not turned into zombies. The only other people that appear in-game are a man locked up in a church (who quickly turns into a zombie himself), and the people that come to rescue the survivors at the end of each campaign.
- And even their rescuers often come to bad ends in the first game. The survivors are truly fortunate to be immune to both infection and helicopter crashes.
- Used in Super Paper Mario when a rather cute samurai-Japan gets sucked into The Void. You survive, but upon going back to the world you find this blank white space, with the occasional piece of broken building or debris.
- Red Faction: Only Parker and Eos survive.
- Red Faction II: Only survivors are Alias, Shrike, and Tangier (if you get a good enough karma rating).
- Most of the first Resident Evil has Jill or Chris wandering a zombie-infested mansion with only one person to aid them depending on which one, finding out that everyone they went in to look for in the first place is dead or dying except Rebecca.
- In Final Fantasy VI, after The End Of The World As We Know It (which is roughly the midway point of the game; yeah, it's that kind of story), Celes wakes a year later to find herself and Cid on a tiny godforsaken spit of land. There are no other humans, all the animals are dead or slowly dying, and there is nothing visible to suggest that any other land survived the apocalypse. Truly the end of the world. Cid explains that all of the other survivors committed suicide in despair before too long. If Cid dies, Celes, seemingly the last human alive, jumps from the cliff like all the others. However, she survives, and a dove with a familiar bandanna tied to it gives her enough hope to try and find other survivors and other continents. Turns out that not everyone was dead after all. It's still close to that level of despair, though. If the player manages to save Cid, this doesn't happen, and instead he convinces Celes that she ought to take the raft he's made and check if there are any survivors on the mainland.
- Turns into almost an aversion, since, after Celes goes back out into the world, she not only finds the sender of said bandanna, but every single one of the party members you could gain during the first half. (You'd almost think they were immune to end-of-world-death or something. That said, if there ever were twelve people who were going to survive After The End, it does make sense that it'd be the twelve you've been using to fight the Ax Crazy nigh-omnipotent clown who made The End happen.)
- On the other hand, those twelve people were pretty much at ground zero when The End occurred, and were in an airship hundreds if not thousands of feet in the sky to boot, so they had to survive the blast and the fall. Even as superhuman as P Cs are apparently required to be, they still had to survive worse conditions than anybody else.
- In Mortal Kombat 3, Stryker is the lone survivor of the destruction of an unspecified major city.
- In Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, you start out as the only surviving passenger of a zeppelin after it's untimely crash. And depending on how you play and which options you pick during the endgame, you will end up the only living being in the entirety of Arcanum AND the Void.
Web Original
- In each season of Survival Of The Fittest, only one character is left standing when everything is finished.
- In the flash series Bunny Kill, main character Snowball is always the only one left alive at the end of each installment. No exceptions.
- One of Yahtzee's short stories involves a crew of a spaceship infected with a deadly virus and quarantined to stay on the spaceship until their inevitable deaths. Only 2 crew members are left, but then it's revealed that the 2 crew members have died from the virus already, thousands, if not millions of times. The ship's suicidal AI has been cloning them over and over again for thousands of years, hoping that one of them would be smart enough to figure out the endless loop and self-destruct the ship before they succumb to the virus and have to be cloned again, with no knowledge of past events.
Web Comics
- In the first arc of Order Of The Stick, when Celia is turned back to normal (having been turned to stone by the villains), Nale (the leader of said villains, now captured by the heroes) informs her that she's been stone for a thousand years, and everyone she's known and loved are long dead! She blasts him when she finds out he's lying, but he still thinks it was "worth it".
- Something similar happens to the unfortunate Rina in "The Dragon Doctors". The young lady is turned to stone for two thousand years and is devastated to learn everyone she's ever known is dead. Kili the shaman also went through a similar experience; as a kid, everyone but Kili in Kili's town was killed by a tsunami, leaving Kili to wander the beach looking for survivors and screaming at the sky when none were found.
- Pretty much every supporting character in the Sluggy Freelance story arcs "KITTEN" and "KITTEN II" is killed off or rendered catatonic. There's also the "GOFOTRON Champion of the Cosmos" arc, which ends with the entire Punyverse being blown up.
Western Animation
- Parodied on The Simpsons when Homer and Bart watch a movie entitled The Thing that Ate Everybody, which contains the following exchange;
"You mean, it ate Patrick?"
"It ate everybody."
"What about Erika?"
"It ate everybody!"
"Stupid!"
- In Transformers: Beast Machines, it seems like everyone's dead, but as the series progresses the planet's fate is revealed to be far more surreal: the entire populace of the planet has had their sparks (robot souls, essentialy) forcibly extracted and placed in containers.
- In the pilot episode of Futurama, Fry awakens in the future and realizes that his family, his co-workers and his girlfriend are all long since gone. After a moment of reflection... he lets out a jubilant "Yahoo!"
- And in the last movie, after yet another mass-death on Zapp Brannigan's ship, which only he and Kiff survive.
"How many men did we lose?"
"...All of them."
"Well, at least they won't have to mourn each other!"
- In Gargoyles, by the end of the episode "Future Tense" there are only two main characters left living. Though it was all a dream.
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "Same As It Never Was" a Bad Future tale set thirty years in the future, features the final battle between the turtles (and their surviving allies) and the Shredder, who has conquered the world. In the end, the only surviving cast members are resistance leader April O' Neil and present-day Donatello, who soon after is whisked away to another era.
Other
- Similar to the Men in Tights parody, one story (framed as a country song setting in The Big Book of Urban Legends) starts with a sheriff telling his friend who just returned from a trip that his dog had died... because of eating too much horse flesh... due to the barn burning... because of the house fire... because of the candles at his mother-in-law's funeral... who died due to seeing his wife run off with another man...
Farmer: So I'm going to have to raise three children without their mother?!
Sheriff: Heck no, your kids all died in the fire!
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