Star Crossed Lovers / Anime & Manga

• CLAMP:
  • Seishirou Sakurazuka and Subaru Sumeragi from Tokyo Babylon are trapped in a cycle of love and hatred since Seishirou is the current assassin known as the Sakurazukamori, an enemy that the Sumeragi family has been fighting for generations. Seishirou should've killed Subaru when he witnessed him murder someone, but decided to make an odd sort-of bet between them, erasing their first meeting from Subaru's mind. After meeting and living together years after, Seishirou betrays Subaru, leaving his life completely shattered. Nine years later, they find themselves on opposite sides of the war for the world in X1999, but it's obvious their concentration is more on each other than the planet's fate. The two's names are even taken from stars: Seishirou after "Orion", the constellation that appears to be pursuing "Pleiades", which gives Subaru his.
  • And as revealed by X1999, Subaru's sister Hokuto and Kakyou Kuzuki. The breaking point for Subaru and Seishirou was the latter's murder of Hokuto when she tried to save Subaru at the cost of her life; Kakyou was Hokuto's soulmate and as shown in the X OAV, he tried to save her to no avail. Years later, Kakyou's biggest wish is to die so he and Hokuto can be Together in Death.
• A recurring theme of Makoto Shinkai's works:
  • Voices of a Distant Star features an almost literal example of this. The two main characters are light-years apart due to her fighting in space, and due to mankind having Faster-Than-Light Travel without a corresponding Subspace Ansible, her messages to him take years to reach; in the final act now-20 something him is receiving messages from still-15 her and as he remarks In-Universe, a message travel time of years might as well be forever. In the second novel, Words of Love/Across the Stars, Noboru outright goes Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder in the gap of time between messages, rationalising that they never formalised their relationship. That said, the very last scene contains blink and you miss it allusions, made explicit in the manga adaptation, to his joining the Space Navy gearing up for a rescue mission, meaning there might be a chance they could get together after all.
  • The Place Promised in Our Early Days: Hiroki and Sayuri struggle with their feelings for each other because the latter disappeared from the former's life and, by the time he finds her again years later, she is in a coma. Even after she is awoken, she loses her memories of her romantic feelings for him. He vows to start over from the beginning and try to make it work; whether it does, we don't get to find out.
  • Takaki and Akari in 5 Centimeters per Second are an interesting example; their parents' moving for work means they keep getting separated and their relationship unravels over the years as communication slows and ceases, but they still have marginally more of a chance at a happy ending than most examples. As far as poor Kanae is concerned, this too applies; after struggling with Cannot Spit It Out for much of the second act, her Anguished Declaration of Love is interrupted by the much-foreshadowed rocket launch and she decides to let it be instead, but the manga ending suggests that she eventually meets Takaki again and tries her luck once more. Whether it works out is never shown.
  • In The Garden of Words, not only is there a sizeable age gap between Takao and Yukari, but also the potential ethical issues of a teacher-student romance; at the end, Yukari moves away to take up a new teaching position, but the possibility still exists that they might reunite in the future.
  • Your Name carries on the tradition; not only are Taki and Mitsuha separated by spatial distance, but by time and death too; in Taki's original timeline, the passing comet Tiamat - an almost literal falling star - 3 years ago split off a meteor that killed Mitsuha. That said, by the end of the film, they finally reunite, with the strong implication that they get together at last.
  • Weathering With You has Hodaka Morishima and Hina Amano. To elaborate, Hodaka is a runaway from an upper middle-class family that physically abuses him and Hina is an atmokinetic pauper. What's more is that they're both living in Tokyo, which is doomed to sink from constant rainfall. The story also follows suit from two different angles: The first is the police trying to send Hodaka back to his island home while social services are trying to take Hina and her brother Nagi in due to their orphan status. The second is Hina's fate as the sunshine girl to be sacrificed in exchange for stable weather. In the end, this is subverted; Hodaka rescues Hina heedless of the cost, and despite being caught and sent back to finish his high schooling afterwards, they eventually reunite.
• Two of Mitsuru Adachi's manga series feature romances forbidden by feuding parents. In Rough, the parents run rival confectionery businesses. In Katsu!, the fathers are former boxing rivals. In both cases, the girl's father is more rabid than the boy's father.
• Hiromi Oka and Coach Jin Munakata from Aim for the Ace!, mainly due to the fact he was dying of leukemia by the time they met and fall in love.
• Attack on Titan: Eren, with Mikasa. The final chapter reveals that he does return her feelings and would love nothing more than to start a relationship with her. Unfortunately, circumstances outside of their control separate the two, and Mikasa is ultimately left with no choice but to kill him to save humanity.
• Basilisk, which is essentially a Japanese Tokugawa-era send up of "Romeo and Juliet", has its star crossed lovers: Gennosuke from the Kouga and Oboro from the Iga. They even make reference to the old belief that star-crossed lovers will be reborn as twin siblings.
  • Also, the beginning of the show shows another pair of star crossed lovers: Koga Danjou and Iga Ogen, Gennosuke's grandpa and Oboro's grandma respectively.
  • Probably, also Kagero and Gennosuke. She would've been an excellent prospect for him except for her being Blessed with Suck and him truly liking his arranged fiancee Oboro, thus she's stuck as the Unlucky Childhood Friend and that takes a HUGE toll on her emotional well-being.
• In Berserk, it's almost as if fate has made it its personal mission to ensure that Guts and Casca never find happiness. That moment of love the two of them shared near the waterfall in the Golden Age Arc was the closest they came to it before the Eclipse went down and everything literally went completely to Hell. Ever since Casca lost her sanity from a brutal rape at the hands of her former superior turned archdemon -- Griffith -- she can no longer understand human emotion and has no recollection of her relationship with Guts. Even with her sanity recently restored, she cannot even look at Guts or speak his name without the horrible Eclipse memories coming back, and only time will tell if she and Guts can still be together.
• In Beyond the Boundary, we have Akihito and Mirai. Akihito is a half-human, half-youmu hybrid. Mirai is from a spirit hunter clan whose blood is deadly to youmu. Even worse, it's revealed that Mirai was given a mission to assassinate Akihito because the youmu inside him, known as Beyond the Boundary, is a powerful reality warper who could potentially destroy the world.
• In volume one of Bizenghast, two spirits needing to be released are those of a young pair of lovers. They had wanted to marry, but the man's mother refused to let him marry a girl of slightly-lower status. So one night, during a ball, the man stabbed his lover in the back as they danced before killing himself. As Dina frees their souls, the young woman's ghost whispers to her lover "I forgive you..."
• In Black Lagoon, a fairly strong case can be made for the Yakuza Princess Yukio Washimine and the badass Yakuza Ginji Matsuzaki. On one hand Ginji's loyalties lie solely with Yukio and his reasons are all but stated to be romantic, whereas Rock speculates that Yukio's decision to take over the Washimine clan came from her desire to be with Ginji. On the other, they were subjected to an absolutely brutal breaking process that involved: an all-out war against Hotel Moscow, the bloody betrayal of a group of the Washimine yakuzas where Yukio was physically/sexually humiliated by the ringleader and Ginji took an horrible yet well-deserved revenge on him, Ginji's death in a duel with Revy and, right after the last one, Yukio commiting suicide rather than facing Balalaika in dishonor and being without Ginji.
• Mari and Hagino from Blue Drop are divided by the fact that one is a high school student and the other the commander of an alien battleship, whose people plan to invade earth.
• Arguably averted in Blue Submarine No. 6. Hayate and Muteo part ways at the end because she has to look after a emotionally-devastated Verg and he has to help in the rebuilding effort of what remains of humanity. However, it's implied by the final episode ending credits, that they will eventually get back together again once things finally settle down.
• In Boarding School Juliet, Dahlia Academy has two factions at constant war with each other. In spite of this, their first year leaders, Romio Inuzuka of the Black Dogs and Juliet Percia of the White Cats fall in love. Their relationship officially begins at the end of the very first chapter, and they spend the rest of the series hiding their Secret Relationship from their peers. If they get discovered, it's social suicide; not just their schoolmates, but their respective countries, would turn on them. It's later revealed that this wasn't the first time it happened. Romio's mother and Percia's father were also previously in a Secret Relationship during their time in Dahlia, and instantly became pariahs after their secret is outed.
• Case Closed has several cases:
  • Shinichi Kudo and Ran Mouri. While their feelings have been kinda wavering for quite the while, as time passes they have grown stronger - but Shinichi is trapped in the body of a little boy (the titular Conan) and cannot openly tell Ran who he is, lest she and his friends will be targeted by the same evil organization that shrunk him. In the meantime poor Ran waits for Shinichi's return...
  • Hideomi Nagato and Miyuki Hyuuga. First, he and his friend Mitsuaki caused the fire that killed Miyuki's parents. Second, Hideomi had a Heel Realization, then returned and saved little Miyuki but was badly burned. Third, while he helped Miyuki out as much as he could, Hideomi thoroughly hated himself due to guilt. Fourth, and the most important reason: when Miyuki fell for him despite knowing what he had done and asked him to marry her... Hideomi crossed the Despair Event Horizon and committed suicide. It went From Bad to Worse later.
  • Shuichi Akai and Akemi Miyano were this as well in the past. He started dating her only to strengthen his position as The Mole for the Black Organization, but seeing that she was an Anti-Villain and that she liked him despite suspecting that he was using her made him change his mind. When he was found out he tried to get her to come with him, but she refused because her little sister was an Org. member and she didn't want to abandon her. And few afterwards, after a last and failed attempt to free herself and her sister, she was murdered.
  • Additionally, Natalie Kuruma and Wataru Date. Things were going relatively well, they were about to get engaged... but right before that, Date was run over by a car in front of his best friend and died. Natalie found out by chance, identified his corpse, and hung herself in grief. And then her Parental Substitute mistakenly believed that she had gone the Spurned into Suicide way...
• Chrono of Chrono Crusade has the worst luck when it comes to relationships. First, he meets Mary Magdalene, who informs him after he's known her for months that she has had prophetic dreams since she was a child that he would be the one to take her life. He does, although not in the way either one expects. He's so guilt-ridden over her death that he sleeps for 50 years in her tomb, waiting for his energy to deplete to join her in death. But Rosette Christopher comes and wakes him up from his years of slumber, and things start to be going good for him...until her brother Joshua is kidnapped by Aion and he's forced to make a contract with her, slowly draining away at her life. In the anime they die together, Rosette as a result of the contract and Chrono from his wounds in the final battle, but in the manga they spend six years apart, and Chrono arrives back to her side just in time for her to die in his arms. It's implied that he lives on for decades afterwards.
• In City Hunter, some of the featured girls in a given story arc are either the results of their parents' doomed romance or at least related to someone in such.
  • The parents of Etsuko, one of the girls who audition for a movie, met once many years prior to the start of the series. They wanted to marry each other, but ended up separating because everyone around them opposed it, never to see each other again. ^note Etsuko's mother told her about her father while she was alive. Her father, meanwhile, goes on to have a family of his own, though he regards Etsuko's mother as The One That Got Away and is unaware that Etsuko's mother was already pregnant by the time of their separation. Etsuko joined the audition precisely because she hoped to see her father, who would direct the very movie for which she auditions.
  • The story of the parents of Kimiko, a seventeen-year-old girl with Unwanted Harem, is this trope in a nutshell.^note  To elaborate: Kimiko's parents loved each other and wanted to get married, but Kimiko's paternal grandmother, who saw too many women after her son and too many men after her, all with only getting their wealthy estates in mind, could only see Kimiko's mother as just yet another Gold Digger, and so sent her son aboard with an employee of hers, in the hope of getting her son to forget about Kimiko's mother through work. It backfired horribly. The plot is quite similar to Romeo and Juliet, except that Romeo and Juliet both ended up dying of natural causes (the would-be husband, heartbroken over being separated from his One True Love, suffered from Despair Event Horizon-induced Death by Despair while the would-be wife ended up with Death by Childbirth) and that they had a child — Kimiko — in this scenario, though the would-be husband never found out about him having a daughter right up to his dying moment and his mother didn't find out about Kimiko until he was long gone. This is why Kimiko has been raised by her maternal grandfather.
  • Kasumi's grandmother turns out to have been in such a situation.^note  Long ago, she was in love with a man who was not of the family, but she and the man separated due to her family rules. While she went on to have a family of her own, up to and including Kasumi herself (though she still misses him), the man stayed a bachelor for life. Ryo discovers the backstory via a combination of his detective work and the confiding of the man's side of the story, told to Ryo by the man's adoptive son.
• Code Geass has two couples like this: Ougi and Viletta, then Lelouch Lamperouge and Shirley. The first ones subvert the trope and get their happy ending, even if YMMV on that... the second couple plays it straight, with Shirley dying in Lelouch's arms. The movie series have a more complicated case, starting with Lelouch's own death still happening with her now being there to see it.
  • Euphemia and Suzaku Kururugi are another pair. Although they were on the same sides, Suzaku was still considered inferior. And Euphemia still died. At the same time, Lelouch is implied to have some affection for Euphemia while being on the opposite side to the point of saying she was "the first woman I loved" when he was forced to Mercy Kill her and Euphie brings up how she once wanted to marry him when they were kids.
  • There's also Lelouch and Kallen, in a more traditional example. They did share goals, and she even served as his bodyguard, but eventually he became an Evil Overlord, and she was driven by those very same ideals to fight him. That being said, Lelouch was intentionally invoking this trope — as it is revealed in her Character poem that he knew that Kallen would abandon those ideals if he told her that he loved her. Knowing that Zero Requiem would end in his death, he pushed her away, not wanting to drag her down with him.
• Remy Matsuda and Merril Benten Tamagawa from Cyber City Oedo 808, since she's a sort-of vampire/human hybrid and he's a human Anti-Hero who must take her down. It ends with them sharing a Last Kiss before Benten puts Remy in a capsule and shoots it into outer space.
• Daimos: The series begins with Planet Baam launching a war against Planet Earth after blaming them Earthlings for the death of their monarch, King Leon. Participating in the war are Leon's children, Prince Richter and Princess Erika, but while Erika is tending to the wounds of some of the Baam soldiers, her ship crashes and she loses her memory. She wakes up on Earth, having lost her memories, and is touched by the kindness of the humans that try to help her. She instantly falls in love with the human who rescued her, Kazuya, who feels the same way. Erika's love for Kazuya is undercut when Richter sends a transmission to Earth challenging the pilot of Daimos - the voice of her brother jogs her memories and she remembers that she's the Princess of the Baam and she's complicit in their war crimes against Earth. Scared that Kazuya would hate her if he knew the truth, Erika tries to run away from the base and fakes her death so he would stop worrying about her, but she's caught in the act and Kazuya notices her wings. Even then, Kazuya refuses to stop loving her and vows that they will reunite. Once Erika hears this, she becomes filled with relief. The rest of the anime is about the two trying to quell the fighting between their homeworlds and trying to establish everlasting peace, just like what King Leon would have wanted.
• D.Gray-Man:
  • Any person who tried to make a deal with the Earl to bring back their loved one, which would only end badly for both parties.
  • Krory, an Exorcist and Eliade, an Akuma. It was his nature to destroy Akuma and it was her nature to kill Exorcists. He ends up killing her before he joins the Black Order.
  • Taken further with Kanda and Alma, who were lovers in a previous life, only to be brought back to life by the Black Order as part of the failed super Exorcist program. Then Alma was driven mad into a massive killing spree and Kanda was forced to kill him. Only for Alma to not be dead and fought Kanda to the death again when he was revived. But this time, thanks to Allen, Kanda is able to send Alma to the afterlife in more or less peace, and later come back.
• Both the protagonists and the rival in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School are unfortunate enough to be in this type of relationship:
  • Makoto and Kyoko: Her Forbidden Action is "surviving past the fourth round with Makoto Naegi alive", meaning that if she doesn't kill him herself, the poison in her bracelet will kill her. She chooses to give up her life for his, but is fortunately revealed to have survived in Side:Hope. The opening even lampshades this by showing her falling away from him as they reach desperately for each other's hands.
  • Hajime/Izuru and Chiaki: Hajime's own insecurities caused him to view himself as unworthy of her, leading to him volunteering for the Kamukura Project. His new self, Izuru, loses all memories of Chiaki and falls in cahoots with Junko, who ultimately murders Chiaki. It's only after he watches her bleed to death that Izuru is stirred to weep, and he then carries her hairpin around for the rest of the series.
  • Kyosuke and Chisa: At first, they seemed like a happy Official Couple, but are quickly torn apart by her death in the first episode of Side: Future. Side: Despair later reveals that Chisa was tortured and brainwashed by Junko, becoming evil and acting as her mole, meaning she was working for the very side her boyfriend had vowed to destroy all along. It's even worse when one considers that Kyosuke's other friend, Juzo, also was in love with him, kept it a secret both out of fear and to not ruin Kyosuke and Chisa's bond, and died in a mix of Heroic Sacrifice and Redemption Equals Death while mistakenly believing that Kyosuke hated him, when in reality Kyosuke desperately wanted Juzo's forgiveness.
• Dear Brother:
  • In the anime, Mariko tells Tomoko and Nanako about the legend of two lovers who died in Seiran School. They were separated by their different social class and killed themselves to not be torn apart, under the biggest elm tree in the garden. It's the same tree that Rei waited for hours underneath, under Fukiko's orders, causing her to catch a huge fever.
  • Nanako and Rei might qualify as well. Especially in the anime where Rei dies in an accident right when she was going to meet up with Nanako, in what's all but stated to have been this close to become their first date.
• A Dog of Flanders (1975): Alois Cogez and Nello Daas, because her abusive father despises Nello for being a "pauper". She is repeatedly punished for hanging out with him and his abuse worsens whenever he catches them together, but she doesn't give up on him, even after they're formally banned from seeing each other.
• Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai: Baran and Soara's story is very close to a classic Romeo and Juliet plot, except here Romeo goes horribly wrong and they have a kid with Infant Immortality.
• Lucy and Kouta in Elfen Lied. Not only do both of them have massive issues (Kouta is an amnesiac, Lucy is a Diclonius and has been rejected by almost everyone in her life until he and Yuka took her in), but there's how Lucy killed Kouta's dad and sister in the middle of a killing spree coming from her cracking under the pressure.
• ''Emma: A Victorian Romance: William is a nobleman and Emma is only a housemaid. Their love has been tested so many times due to their different class social standing. They eventually married and have four children.
• Evyione Ocean Fantasy: Yashin and Evyione. Not only is Yashin a merman and Evyione a human, but Evyione is also a princess and very few of Evyione's life choices are actually made by her. If Evyione chooses Yashin, there will be severe political and personal consequences for her.
• Fairy Tail:
  • Erza Scarlett and Jellal Fernandez. Both have confessed (or been interupted while confessing) to have loved one another, spend more time thinking about one another than any other potential couple in the series (except maybe the two background characters whose whole schtick is not being able to confess their love), have displayed a telepathic ability to tell when one is in trouble or rooting for them, and every time they're about to get a chance to be together something will happen to take Jellal away, like corruption, or death, or arrest, in that order. And even disregarding that, Jellal is utterly convinced that Erza deserves someone much better than himself (a vigilante on the run from the law) as a lover, even going so far as to lie (badly) about already having a fiance, which Erza sees through but accepts reluctantly since she has no intention of forcing him into a relationship he's not ready for. The epilogue reveals that Jellal was pardoned by the newly crowned Queen Hisui, meaning that he and Erza can finally be together. While Erza claims that "it's complicated", it's suggested that she and Jellal will get together one day.
  • A more straight example would be Zeref Dragneel and Mavis Vermilion, the Big Bad and Big Good, respectively. Ankhseram's Curse denied them any chance at happiness together — as a curse of contradictions, Zeref's love for Mavis allowed her curse to be broken and be killed by their first and only kiss. It was her death that caused Zeref's true Start of Darkness. It becomes Fridge Horror when one realizes that Mavis didn't die. Her body was killed but her spirit became an Astral Projection that can only be seen by members of Fairy Tail, and it's implied she spent much of this existence by Zeref's side. Zeref himself admitted to being able to feel her presence, but as he wasn't a member of the guild, he was unable to interact with her. It makes what Ankhseram did all the more crueler: they were both among the living still, but couldn't be a part of each other's lives. Eventually, they finally die together through the use of the One Magic.
• The Familiar of Zero has Louise's best friend, Princess Henrietta of Tristam, and her boyfriend and first cousin Prince Wales of Albion. At first politics prevent them from being together officially, so they have covert meetings. Then Wales is murdered by Louise's treacherous ex-boyfriend Jeean-Jacques, and later a heartbroken Henrietta ends up giving an Anguished Declaration of Love... to the copy of poor Wales's body, animated with a little of his soul.
• If you're a Member of the Zodiac in Fruits Basket, you and your beloved will be Star-Crossed Lovers. The only question is whether you get scarred by Akito (physically, mentally, or both), or just never confess your love and languish in your misery. When Akito is defeated and has a Heel–Face Turn thanks to Tohru, the curse is slowly broken and the major part of the separated/unconfessed couples get together..
• Fullmetal Alchemist (2003):
  • Edward Elric and Winry Rockbell somewhat fit into this category. They are hinted to either have mutual feelings, or one of them has Unrequited Love for the other. But whatever the case, Ed's fate and decisions have kept them apart time after time. And in the movie Conqueror of Shamballa, this trope especially fits— Edward has to go back for the sake of his world's safety, leaving Winry solo. She even says with a melancholy gaze, "That's Ed. I know it. I guess this is goodbye for good..."
  • The same could be said for Ed and Rose. Rose is in love with Edward, however Ed's feelings are more ambiguous (though, he does blush when Rose confesses to him and he never technically rejected it). The two end up split up when Edward goes back across the Gate in Conqueror of Shamballa, stopping any potential romance before it began.
• Fushigi Yuugi and its prequels have plenty of these, especially among the Mikos and some of their potential Senshi:
  • In the backstory and in Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden, Uruki and Takiko "Genbu no Miko" Okuda are more or less get together, but everyone knows what happened to her in the end. If the reader doesn't know, well, here it is: Takiko was being devoured from the inside by Genbu as a side-effect of having been a Miko; everyone else thought she had fallen victim to a Soap Opera Disease (and to be fair, she was already an ill girl) but her father knew the truth, so he Mercy Killed her and commited suicide afterwards. Takiko lived enough to make her wishes and die in Uruki's arms; he never married and became The Good King. (Still, their next reincarnations got their happy ending).
  • In the backstory and the upcoming Fushigi Yuugi: Byakko Senki, Tatara and Suzuno, the Byakko no Miko embody this. They fell in love, and Suzuno summoned Byakko and asked him to keep her and Tatara together forever. Byakko said he couldn't do that, and had to send her back to her own world in Tokyo. She eventually married someone from our world and raised a family more or less happily, while he asked a Time Master fellow Seishi to stop time for him so he could guard the Shinzaho better — but they never forgot each other. Decades later, the old and widowed Suzuno died in her grandson Toki's home of old age, Tatara died in a battle in the book, and in the meantime Miaka's brother Keisuke read to the dying Suzuno about her lover's destiny. In the anime, their souls are reunited across space and time to spend the afterlife together.
  • It doesn't even have to happen between Mikos and Seishis. Uruki's cousin Firuka and Urumiya Hagas from Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden were this as well, with him loving Firuka because she was kind to him in his moment of need but being unable to show it properly, and Firuka believing her love for him was onesided even after he died in his Self-Sacrifice Scheme to free his brother Tegu, who ultimately tells her how much Hagas loved her. (In a slightly happier note, Tegu becomes Firuka's Second Love, and one of their descendants became Uruki's successor.)
• In Future Diary, Yukiteru eventually develops feelings for Yuno, despite her being an Ax-Crazy Yandere, but unfortunately they are both Diary Holders in the competition to replace Deus Ex Machina, requiring one of them to kill the other (along with the rest of the Diary Holders) to prevent The End of the World as We Know It.
• Chigusa Tsukikage and Ichiren Osaki in Glass Mask. The world also seems to be hell-bent on keeping Maya and Masumi away.
• The main pairing of Gosick, Kazuya Kujou and Victorique de Blois, lived under a prophecy stating that they would be separated by a war, but their hearts stay entwined. Ultimately, the trope is defied since Kazuya and Victorique survive the war, find each other again and get married.
• Newtype romances, in any Gundam series that includes Newtypes, generally do not end well. This goes double if Yoshiyuki Tomino, Mister Kill 'Em All himself, is actively involved in the series. Note that newtype analogs, like the Coordinators from SEED, don't really count (they tend to survive, and have stable relationships).
  • Unless you see Stellar and Shinn's bond as romantic. Then, they get the raw-est part of the deal. Not helped by how Stellar's last words are "Shinn... I love you". If they don't count, is there a sort-of trope that is an equal of "Star Crossed Lovers", but with friends and family?
  • Also, while Kira and Lacus do get their happy ending, Kira and his first girlfriend Fllay count as this. She started out as a Yandere who pretended to love him to get revenge since he didn't save her father from a really messy death, then truly fell for him when he showed her genuine kindness... but she could only sort-of tell him her true feelings after she was murdered by the Big Bad, as her soul managed to have a last talk with the grief-stricken Kira before he fought and killed said Big Bad.
  • Saji Crossroad and Louise Halevy fit this trope after the Wham Episode of Mobile Suit Gundam 00, where she became her family's Sole Survivor and lost her hand as well. The second season has them fighting on opposite sides, as he's forced to join Celestial Being as their Tagalong Kid to save his life and she's become a Dark Action Girl for the A-Laws. It takes them LOTS of effort to get back together.
    • Lyle Dylandy and Anew Returner. It starts well but ends up terribly, since she turns out to be an Innovator Manchurian Agent and betrays Celestial Being when her "trigger" (her Innovator twin Revive Revival) appears and "resets" her. When Lyle offers her a Last-Second Chance she almost takes it, only to be mind controlled by Ribbons Almark into fighting him anyway and she eventually has to be killed by Setsuna to keep her from killing Lyle.
  • The Mobile Suit Gundam Wing novel Frozen Teardrop give us Treize's parents, Ein Yuy and Angelina Khushrenada. They tried to run away to escape the Parental Marriage Veto coming from her family, but her Smug Snake father Cinquante kidnapped Angelina back into the clan and got Ein killed. She was so broken that she went insane with grief. Also, Trowa Phobos and Kathy Winner may end up as this too.
  • And now we have Flit Asuno and Yurin L'Ciel from Mobile Suit Gundam AGE. Yurin dies in the Wham Episode, and while Flit marries his childhood friend Emily and they're still together after the Time Skip, Yurin's death was also his Start of Darkness and Emily simply can't fill the void she left.
    • From the Third Generation Kio Asuno and Lu Anon. It's bad enough that Kio's from Earth and Lu's from Vagan, but Lu also suffers from an incurable disease due to Mars Ray exposure. While Kio eventually got her medicine (which only relieves the symptoms and doesn't actually cure the illness), she dies in Episode 38, leaving Kio heartbroken as he escapes Vagan with his father.
• Haikara-san ga Tooru has three of these:
  • First is the main characters, Nice Guy Shinobu and The Lad-ette Benio, after Shinobu goes MIA and later has Trauma-Induced Amnesia.. They get better, but not before MUCH heartbreak.
  • In the backstory, Shinobu's grandmother and Benio's grandfather, who were in a Perfectly Arranged Marriage but were torn apart by political/social standings (One family was pro-Shogunate, another supported the Meiji Restoration.) The reason why the leads were betrothed was a sort-of promise made to them: if their kids or grandkids have a chance to marry, they'd be engaged to do so as a sort-of solace.
  • And there's more! Shinobu's own parents were an example, too. His father was a member of the Iijyuin clan, but his mother/Colonel Iijyuin's mistress was a German woman. They couldn't marry due to social standing and her heritage, so after Shinobu's birth she was forced to leave her child in the care of his paternal family and leave Japan.
• Jeudi's parents Friederich and Helene in Honoo no Alpen Rose. Specially because they did get married and had Alicia/Jeudi, but then they had to run away from Austria to Switzerland, Helene and Jeudi went missing, and it went From Bad to Worse.
  • As things get worse and worse, it seems the Universe itself is conspiring to give Lundi and Jeudi trouble. Specially when Lundi disappears when the train he and Jeudi have boarded to reach Austria is caught in a bomb attack, and Jeudi has to go to Austria alone.
• In Hungry Marie, Anna's father (a Catholic priest) and Taiga's grandmother (a Taoist priest) do not approve of the two having contacts with the "enemy". It's mostly played for laughs though.
• In The Ideal Sponger Life, each nation's royal family jealously guards their Royalty Super Power, such as the Capuan Space-Time magic. About a hundred fifty years before the start of the story, a Capuan prince fell in love with a princess from a neighboring kingdom. Both families opposed their marriage and he used Space-Time magic to elope to another world, disappearing from history. Their descendent Zenjiro is summoned to marry into the Capuan royal family devastated by war. Negotiations with the other kingdom over the status of a child who may inherit powers from both bloodlines, or the possibility of Zenjiro taking concubines, are very tense.
• Inuyasha: Inuyasha and Kikyo thanks to Naraku's making them think they betrayed each other, fatally injuring Kikyou AND making her seal him. Later she's forcibly revived by a witch, and things aren't much easier as he's starting to fall for her reincarnation Kagome and she's filled with rage and pain. In the end, she dies again but much more peacefully, in Inuyasha's arms.
• Jewelpet Sunshine: Ruby and Mikage love each other but can't be together because Jewelpet/human love is taboo. They manage to get together at the end, but only because Mikage compromises by becoming a Jewelpet himself.
• Tomoe from Kamisama Kiss has this as his default view on human/youkai relationships. Naturally, he ends up in one such relationship with Nanami.
• Akiko Hashou and Takao "Taka" Itou from the old jousei manga Kasei Yakyoku. Sara Uchida's own love on Taka doesn't have much more hope, either, and it's even worse when she does get something close to a love declaration as well a passionate sex from him... and then The Great Kanto Earthquake destroys Tokyo.
• Aslan and Paiva in Kaze to Ki no Uta in the Backstory of the manga. Their son Serge's relationship with Gilbert dosen't fare well either, but considering that it took place in 1880's Europe, it was bound to happen.
• Kishin Douji Zenki has two cases like this:
  • The Warrior Monk Souma Miki and the Action Girl Anju trained together and were heading towards Childhood Friend Romance, but she was caught by the Big Bad Karuma and then Brainwashed and Crazy into becoming her follower, then into killing her former companions. Only Souma survived and he believed Anju to be a traitor for years, not knowing that her memories were erased; when he calls her out on it, she begins to recover them...
  • Later, there's Inugami and Sayaka. Inugami is the Prince of the Demon World, a half-demon young man who opposes Zenki in the second part of the series; on the other hand Sayaka is one of the heroine Chiaki's muggle best friends. Inugami is at first cold and uncaring, but slowly begins to defrost as Sayaka starts getting to him...
• Knight Hunters.
  • Kikuno and Shuichi Takatori were very in love, but she was forced to marry his evil older brother Reiji. Then it got worse... Specially for their off-marriage child, Mamoru Takatori... aka Omi Tsukiyono.
  • And later, Omi himself, when he falls for his cousin Ouka Sakaki... Reiji's illegitimate daughter and the only person he loves. And she's shot to death in his arms.
  • Also, Youji Kudou and Asuka Murase. So much that he ends up killing her when she's the amnesiac Dark Action Girl Neu.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2016): Link and Midna's relationship ends up doomed because the nature of people is to fight, and therefore the Twilight and Light realms cannot coexist. Midna cannot remain in Hyrule, and she will not allow Link to follow her and leave Hyrule without its chosen Hero. She gives him one Last Kiss before shoving him away and destroying the Mirror of Twilight behind her, permanently separating the two as well as their realms. While there are places where the two worlds reflect each other and communication is possible, the destruction of the Mirror means there is no way for Link and Midna to be together physically.
• The Leijiverse has the beautiful Space Pirate Girl Emeraldas and the genius engineer and Captain Harlock's bro-for-life Tochiro Oyama. The two of them are very much in love, but across The 'Verse's many continuities, circumstances always conspire to keep them apart until (usually) Tochiro dies heroically and/or tragically, leaving Emeraldas to roam the universe alone in her unmanned battleship. In only one continuity, the two of them spend enough time together to have a daughter, but even then the three of them are forced to go their separate ways.
• Lupin III: The Secret of Twilight Gemini: Part of the film's backstory reveals Dalune was formerly a member of the French foreign legion, while Lorre was both a dancer at the Geltic royal palace and a member of the royal family. They fell in love soon after they met and consumated their relationship not long afterward. Unfortunately, it was during a time when there was firece conflict between the Gelts and the Igo Tribes. The last time they saw each other was the day the Geltic Tribe was forced to flee their ancestral home. Neither one knew Lorre was with child, which Dalune didn't become aware of until many years later, after Lorre had long since given birth and passed away.
• Solomon and Sheba from Magi: Labyrinth of Magic. After knowing each other for five years and Sheba gaining a long unreciprocated crush on him, Solomon finally fell for her, they became a couple, and he got her pregnant. Their happiness was short lived since Solomon fused his soul with Ill Ilah's Rukh in order to Screw Destiny and had to leave Sheba behind. She only had his Empty Shell of a body left. Sheba was left alone and heartbroken, but decided to endure her grief in order to accomplish her beloved's dream, only to be betrayed and killed by her former friends and die without getting the chance to meet her son Aladdin.
• Magic Knight Rayearth: Princess Esmeraude and Zagato are in love, but since Esmeraude is the local Barrier Maiden and she's required to dedicate herself only to Zephiro, as soon as her thoughts turn to him, Zephiro begins to crumble. Esmeraude intends to summon the Magic Knights to kill her so a new Pillar can be chosen, but the desperate Zagato kidnaps her. Their situation is so bad, it's said that they can only be Together in Death. And that's what happens: as the Magic Knights kill Zagato believing him to be the Big Bad, Esmeraude cracks and her Superpowered Evil Side awakens. What's left of her conscience projects her image to the Knights and explains everything, begging them to kill her. As the girls slay her, they see Zagato and Esmeraude's souls together, and hear Esmeraude first thanking them for releasing her, then telling Zagato that she's finally all his'.
• Sankt Kaiser Olivie Sägebrecht and Hegemon Claus Ingvalt from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid. Long before they were crowned rulers of their respective countries, the two had grown up together to become very close. Alas, the Ancient Belka War happened, and they found themselves leading opposing sides, and in the end, Hegemon Ingvalt failed to stop Sankt Kaiser Olivie from performing the Heroic Sacrifice that she would eventually be famed for. He would carry this regret all the way to his grave and beyond, with Einhard Stratos, his descendant and sort-of Reincarnation, still carrying the sadness of his failure as she meets the clone of Olivie, the Magical Girl Vivio Takamachi...
• Meiko Akizuki and Shinichi "Nat-chan" Namura from Marmalade Boy, due to the Hot for Teacher angle as well as the social class difference (Namura is middle-class, Meiko is The Ojou). Subverted later: they do get their happy ending.
• Maya and Reina from Maya's Funeral Procession. Not only are they half-sisters, but Maya later commits suicide.
• Mazinger saga:
  • Mazinger Z: Shiro Kabuto and Lorelei. He was the little brother of Kouji Kabuto, The Hero and pilot of Mazinger-Z. She was the daughter of a foreign Mad Scientist, or better said — a Robot Girl built by that Madscientist, who wanted to prove he was better than Dr. Kabuto, builder of Mazinger-Z and Shiro's grandfather. What happened? He built a Humongous Mecha, Rhine X1, and a Robot Girl, Lorelei, that was meant to fuse with it to make it work. When the scientist got a fatal wound, he confessed the truth to her and pleaded her to defeat Mazinger; determined to fulfill her father's last will, Lorelei merged with Rhine and challenged Mazinger to a death match, so a very unhappy Kouji was forced to fight and kill her. Poor Shiro was devastated after that.
  • UFO Robo Grendizer: Duke Fleed and Hikaru Makiba. Hikaru's father refused to accept their relationship, since Danbei was a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad was perfectly willing to killing any male came near from his daughter), but that was not the real obstacle (or an obstacle for that matter). The real obstacle was that Duke wanted to return his Doomed Hometown of a planet to rebuild it if he managed surviving the war, whereas Hikaru did not want to leave Earth. Not matter what their feelings are, a separation is inevitable.
    • Also, Duke and his fiancèe Rubina. Duke is Crown Prince of planet Fleed, a world was invaded and scorched by the troops of King Vega, and he now is fighting the Vegans to prevent them from conquering Earth. Rubina is King Vega's daughter, and the closest to a loved one that Vega had. They got engaged before the Fleed's invasion, but King Vega -who never agreed the engagement in first place-, refuses seeing his daughter getting married with Duke. Of course,it ended up in tears.
  • Shin Mazinger Zero has Kouji Kabuto and Sayaka Yumi themselves. A Robot Girl named Minerva-X has witnessed almost 3000 timelines in which the world is destroyed. The trigger for this is ALWAYS the same one: Sayaka is horribly murdered (and in one continuity, raped before dying), Kouji crosses the Despair Event Horizon, becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, and in no time Earth is destroyed by the out of control Mazinger. Poor Minerva has reset the timeline to try averting these tragedies and help the star-crossed lovers stay together and alive, but it never works... until the present one, which may be the 'line in which both Sayaka and Kouji will survive and keep the world safe.
• In the Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch manga, Rina and Hanon both fall in love with humans, knowing full well that they will eventually have to leave them to rule over their kingdoms. (Hamasaki actually has a mermaid ancestor, but this seems inconsequential.) They tell Lucia this too, but her guy Kaitou turns out to be the prince of an ancient powerful race that can breathe underwater, so she's safe.
  • Hippo and Yuuri. Hippo is a penguin who can turn into a little bishonen and is a guardian, fighting alongside the mermaid princesses. Yuuri is part of Gakupo's henchwomen, so they do end up falling love and fighting each other. At the end of the first season, Yuuri gets turned back into her original non-human form and she and Hippo are separated. An episode in the second season revolved around the two getting to meet for one night only in their human forms and she will disappear again when the sun rises. Half the episode is about how they are afraid to meet each other because it will be just for one night. It's a heartbreaking episode.
• In Millennium Actress, the romance between Chiyoko and her on-the-run love interest never comes to fruition, though she is chasing him for most of her life.
• Shinji Ikari can be seen as having relationships like this with either the second Rei Ayanami or Kaworu Nagisa in both Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Rebuild-Tetralogy. In one way or another — God it sucks to be Shinji
  • Rei: She's perhaps the only person (other than Kaworu) to give him unambigous, unconditional affection in his hell of a life, and he's the only person to value her for herself, not her function as Mecha pilot, Apocalypse Maiden or Replacement Goldfish. Too bad she's a Half-Human Hybrid Artificial Human created to destroy the world, not to mention partially cloned from his dead mother and thus Shinji's half-sister, with neither of them knowing that last bit. In the classic series, she pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to save his life, in the Rebuild movies, she gets eaten by an Eldritch Abomination while he's in 10-Minute Retirement, and he ends up inadvertently causing The End of the World as We Know It in a futile attempt to save her. Finding out what happened proves too much for his fragile and delicate mind.
  • Kaworu: In the classic series Shinji met Kaworu in one of the lowest points of his whole life (and that's saying a lot), was drawn immediately to him, Kaworu offered him kindness and told him that he loved him (whether romantically or not, he still said it)... and then it turned out he was an Angel in human form, which completely shattered Shinji's mind. But Kaworu still cared, offered few to none physical resistance when Shinji confronted him, and ultimately allowed Shinji to kill him while saying that thanks to Shinji, his life was meaningful. And in the Rebuild series he also approaches Shinji kindly after the heartbreaking deals with poor Rei, but also ends up sacrificing his life again.
  • In the Girlfriend of Steel Visual Novel, Shinji and Mana. Out of nowhere comes this attractive, kind and energetic girl who openly shows interest in Shinji and the two of them hit off very well... until Mana is revealed to be an ex-test pilot for a JSSDF Humongous Mecha who got severely injured in the course of her job but wasn't allowed to quit. Instead, she got forced into seducing Shinji and using him to spy on NERV in order to find out the Evas' possible weaknesses - and ended up falling in love with him for real. When she tries to defect for Shinji's sake, she almost gets killed first by a JSSDF plainclothes commando unit then an N2 mine, with NERV deciding that whatever she knows is not worth the price of pissing off the entire Japanese military. In the end, Mana is forced to assume a false identity and disappear from Shinji's life, with neither having any illusions of ever seeing each other again.
  • Gendo and his wife Yui, who died before the start of the series. Everything Gendo has ever done, it's destined to get her back by his side.
  • Misato and Kaji end up being this too, after the latter is shot and killed by an unknown assailant.
• One Piece:
  • Gold D. Roger is revealed to have had a lover, a Plucky Girl named Portgas D. Rouge. Around the time Roger was executed, Rogue was pregnant with their son; keenly aware that said baby's life would be in danger, she held the baby inside for twenty months to protect them, and perished as soon as she gave birth, entrusting baby Ace to Roger's Worthy Opponent Garp.
  • It looks like Vinsmoke Sanji and Charlotte Pudding are heading towards this, as they fell in pretty much Love at First Sight and in other circumstances they would've been an absolutely perfect match... yet not only their marriage was arranged by two horrible people (Sanji's Archnemesis Dad Vinsmoke Judge and Pudding's Evil Matriarch Charlotte "Big Mom" Linlin), but it would force Sanji to leave both his beloved True Companions and his lifelong dream to reach the All Blue, essentially making him abandon everything he's ever stood for. And then it turns out that Pudding is a Mommy's Little Villainess anyway, and played up the Nice Girl act to sucker Sanji AND his family into her mother's plans. And then Sanji still giving her a kind comment on the Third Eye that Pudding hates so much has made her go through a sobbing Villainous Breakdown and not killing him.
• In One Stormy Night, Mei and Gabu seem doomed to part ways because their Interspecies Romance is frowned upon by both their kin. Averted; they find one another again and stay together in the end.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • In "Lights, Camera, Quacktion!", a movie called "Pokemon in Love" is filmed with this plot. A Wigglytuff and a Psyduck fall in love despite a war between Normal and Water Pokemon going on. Psyduck eventually sacrifices himself by shielding Wigglytuff from an arrow, which ends the war.
  • The male and female Nidoran from the Orange Islands episode "Wherefore Art Thou, Pokémon?", an obvious Shout-Out to Romeo and Juliet. As a bonus, they are named Tony and Maria after the protagonists of West Side Story, a modern take on the original play.
  • In "Fear Factor Phony", after a run-in with some ghost-type Pokemon, Wobbuffet runs away, leaving behind the rest of Team Rocket. The ghosts are actually trying to live in peace and quiet, but the Psychic-type Pokemon in the nearby abandoned town are making too much noise. Team Rocket decides to help them in their plight. Around the same time, Wobbuffet runs into the aforementioned Psychic-types, and falls in Love at First Sight with the Kirlia dancer (and she reciprocates!). When his teammates show up to kidnap the Psychic-types, Wobbuffet (usually a Yes-Man to the rest of Team Rocket) actively goes against them to protect her. Unfortunately, the romance was short-lived, since Status Quo Is God dictates that Wobbuffet stays with Team Rocket, and he winds up getting sent flying without even saying goodbye.
• In Power Of Hope Pre Cure Full Bloom, this ends up being the situation between Nozomi and Coco. Despite there being feelings between the two, they never admitted their feelings towards each other prior to Nozomi becoming a teacher. Because of her being a teacher and Coco being the king of the Palmer Kingdom, Coco broke off contact with Nozomi, leaving her confused about why he abandoned her. After nearly dying due to overuse of her Time Flower-restored powers, the two end up admitting their feelings and get married.
• Princess Tutu.
  • Played straight with Tutu and the Prince in the fairytale inside the story, since the former is cursed to turn into a speck of light and vanish when she confesses her love.
  • Subverted by Ahiru and Fakir; Ahiru is forced to give up the pendant she uses to transform into a girl to save Mytho, but Fakir still promises to stay by her side, even though she's now just a duck.
  • Almost played straight with Rue and Mytho, due to her being Princess Kraehe and him being cursed into a Raven... but Rue's Anguished Declaration of Love and Heroic Sacrifice unlock Mythos's feelings, revert him to a human, let him rescue her from her Archnemesis Dad, and earns them their happy ending.
• Ranma ½:
  • Hikoboshi and Orihime, the two lovers in Japanese Mythology who could only see each other once a year, are referenced when Ranma and Akane go to the Weaver festival in one chapter of the manga. The star-crossed lovers are mentioned again later on by a somewhat-delusional-from-being-fried-by-fireworks Ranma.
    Ranma: [to the Akane in his dream] I feel as if we are... we are like Hikoboshi and Orihime when they finally met each other.
    Akane: [the real one] Huh?
  • In the anime, two one-shot characters, Princess Ori and Kengyu, are a play on Hikoboshi and Orihime, as well.
• Romeo × Juliet, given the source material. Leontes Montague and his men lead a bloody coup and murder all the members of ruling House Capulet. Only Lord Capulet's young daughter, Juliet, is able to escape. Fourteen years later, Juliet fights against House Montague's oppression as the masked vigilante "The Red Whirlwind". While attending the Rose Ball hosted by the Montagues with a friend, Juliet meets Romeo, Prince Montague's son, and both of them fall deeply in Love at First Sight. Their tragic end is quite different from the original, though. It's revealed the daughters of the Capulet family are the seeds of Escalus, the tree which holds Neo Verona in the air and thus must sacrificially merge with it to keep it alive. At the end after the battle against Montague, Romeo frees Juliet from Escalus, but is fatally stabbed in the process. When he dies, Juliet decides to merge with Escalus, whilst holding Romeo in her arms so she can save Neo Verona and die together with Romeo.
• The Rose of Versailles:
  • Oscar and André. They're childhood friends who grew up together and later fall in love with each other, but since Oscar is a noble and André is her servant, they aren't allowed to get married. They do get together, but the day after their first night together, André dies while protecting Oscar in battle. The next day, Oscar gets killed in action too, during the Storming of the Bastille, and she spends her final moments wishing to reunite with André in the afterlife.
  • Marie-Antoinette and Count Fersen. They fall passionately in love at first sight, but Marie Antoinette is in a loveless political marriage with Louis XVI and Fersen can only love her from a distance to not bring even more damage to her already negative public reputation. At the end, Marie Antoinette is executed during The French Revolution, which causes unbearable heartbreak and grief for Fersen who is killed by an angry mob years later.
• Saint Seiya:
  • In the Hades saga, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is used here as well: Orpheus' expy Lyre Orphee is one of the Silver Saints and his girlfriend Eurydice is half-turned into stone in the middle of Hell, lamenting that Orphee is always sad and won't leave her side after death.
  • Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold has two pairs of doomed lovers: the reformed Cancer Deathmask and the Innocent Flower Girl Elena (she's murdered by his rival and, as an ill girl, was doomed already) and Leo Aiolia and Lyfia (they get lots of Ship Tease, but in the end he must die again alongside his fellow Golden Saints while she stays in Asgard to be Odin's new priestess/representative).
• In Sailor Moon, there are instances of this:
  • In a one-shot from the Sailor Moon manga, there is a variant of the legend of the Weaver and the Cowherd, where the couple shirked their duties because of their love, and thus were barred from seeing one another. The Weaver was the villain of the story, because the Cowherd saw her without make-up on during one of the days, and feared that he no longer loved her now that he saw she was really very plain (and getting fat from overeating due to boredom). At the end of the story, he shows up and assures her he still loves her.
  • In the Silver Millenium days, Serenity is the Princess of the Moon and Endymion is the Prince of Earth, so they're not allowed to even meet and thus they have to do it behind their people's backs. Then the war comes in, Endymion is killed, and Serenity either kills herself due to grief (manga and Crystal) or dies alongside him as she's hit by the same blast that takes his life (first anime). Then they're reincarnated into Usagi/Sailormoon and Mamoru/Tuxedo Kamen, who do manage to get AND stay together.
  • Codename: Sailor V gets Minako in one such situation: she believed to have finally found her true love in her latest infatuation, Ace... who was then quickly revealed to be Danburite, the series' Big Bad and Kunzite's Dragon and the reincarnation of Adonis, one of her soldiers from the Silver Millennium who had been in love with her, but went unnoticed by her, and quickly dies by her hand soon afterwards. As he dies, Ace claims that Minako/Sailor Venus is fated to never find true love, implying it would be by her own choice and she'd always choose duty over love-and as announced, every relationship with a ghost of a chance ends by her own choice, with the only exception of the hinted one with Rei that doesn't get in the way of her duty.
• In The Secret Agreement, as if being gay lovers from very different class strata ca. 1920s-30s wasn't star-crossed enough, it turns out that if Yuuichi doesn't steal Iori's life energy he will die instead. There is really no way for them to win.
• Seraph of the End:
  • Guren Ichinose and his girlfriend Mahiru Hiragi, since Mahiru was a beautiful and talented human girl until she was turned into the demon Mahiru-no-Yo. Even after this, Guren has never romantically loved anyone else, and Mahiru's actions through the plot (including more than one instance where she possesses Guren's body ) are to get back with him. No matter what.
  • The show's producer, Kentaro Hattori, compared Mikaela and Yuuichirou to Romeo and Juliet, saying that, "Just like Romeo and Juliet, Yuu and Mika have been torn apart."
• The Seven Deadly Sins:
  • Ban and Elaine. Ban became an immortal thanks to a Heroic Sacrifice made by Elaine, thus the barrier between life and death separates them. Ban however decided to make it his personal mission to find a way for them to be reunited. Near the end of the series, Ban sacrifices his immortality to resurrect Elaine and they can be together at last.
  • Meliodas and Elizabeth. 3,000 years ago, they were the prince and the princess of two enemy races. The Demon King (Meliodas' father) and the Supreme Deity (Elizabeth's mother) cursed them for betraying their races by falling in love. Meliodas can never age nor permanently die, while Elizabeth repeatedly reincarnates as a human. In every of Elizabeth's reincarnations, she meets Meliodas and he's Forced to Watch Elizabeth die over and over again; the curse kills Elizabeth three days after she remembers her past lives and even if she doesn't remember, she dies from old age. The cycle has repeated more than 100 times by the start of the series. They finally break out of the cycle when Meliodas destroys the curses.
• Resine and Simone from Shiroi Heya no Futari, the first Yuri manga. Simone is stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend. Resine refuses to fall for anyone in the rest of her life.
• In Sonic X, this is the case in the final season with Tails and Cosmo the Seedrian. Upon first meeting, the pair developed a strong bond and eventually mutual romantic feelings for one another. Unfortunately, in the penultimate episode, in order to stop Dark Oak, Cosmo was forced to perform a Heroic Sacrifice by immobilizing him while the Sonic Driver was fired at him. Making this even worse is the fact that it was Tails who pulled the trigger, the pair of them confessing their feelings for each other in Cosmo's final moments, with the only remnant of her that Sonic could recover was a small seed. However, it is hinted that she may come back as the final scene of the series is of a pot in Tails' workshop, with the seed he planted having sprouted.
• Sorcerer Stabber Orphen:
  • Majik and Fienna are this, because she can't leave her village or she will die, as a part of being the revived priestess of a Dragon God, whereas he aims to be a great sorcerer and that includes Walking the Earth.
  • Childman Powderfield and Azalie Caith-Sith, as well. Azalie loved Childman ever since she was a teen and he was a young adult, but he rejected her Love Confession because she was the most talented student from their Wizarding School and he didn't want to be a distraction. Her bitterness fueled her ambitions and she ended up as an Eldritch Abomination after an experiment Gone Horribly Wrong, plus she believed he wanted to eliminate her after her transformation - when in reality he loved her back, felt horribly guilty and wanted to save her. And then, it went From Badto Worse...
• In Tenchi Universe Ryo-Ohki is in love with Ken-Ohki, a cabbit who belongs to bounty hunter and Ryoko's worst rival, Nagi. It's their love for each other that's keeping Ryoko and Nagi from killing each other.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
  • Simon and Nia in the ending. Nia dissolves into nothingness right after she and Simon get married, and she should've died after the destruction of the Anti-Spiral but held on for days solely out of determination. Simon spends the rest of his days Walking the Earth on his own. Lampshaded in-series by the Big Bad.
  • Yoko and Kamina. Right after acknowledging their feelings and sharing their First Kiss, Kamina gets killed off in battle.
• In Ten Yori Mo, Hoshi Yori Mo, Mio Mizumori and Shou Narumiya were this. In at least two lifetimes.
• In Tokyo Ghoul, relationships between Ghouls and Humans are rare but do occur. A provision of the Anti-Ghoul laws addresses this concern, with the human facing serious time in prison and their Ghoul lover facing either imprisonment in Kokuria or execution on the spot.
  • Yoshimura and his Lost Lenore, Ukina. Their romance ended in tragedy, but changed him from a ruthless loner into the kind Friendly Neighborhood Vampire of the current story. It also resulted in the Big Bad of the series, their Half-Human Hybrid child Eto/Sen, being hunted by various organizations.
  • Nishiki and his human girlfriend, Kimi. She explicitly points out that if he's exposed as a Ghoul, he'll be killed and she'll be sent to prison. When Anteiku is raided, he makes the decision to leave her in hopes of protecting her from suspicion.
• Sakura and Syaoran in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. At first, even though they are physically together, Sakura is never allowed to remember she is in love with him. Then it gets much, much more complicated, with all the complications putting more distance between them, metaphorically. At the end of the series, due to Timey-Wimey Ball shenanigans, Sakura and Syaoran become the parents of the same boy Syaoran was cloned from. Once reality finally fixes itself, the clone/parent versions of Sakura and Syaoran are absorbed into their counterparts. However, the remaining Syaoran's very existence has become a time paradox because he's now the son of his own clone and his girlfriend's clone. As a consequence, Syaoran can't stay in a dimension for an extended period of time and he sets on an endless journey, but he hopes to find a way to bring his parents back and Sakura promises to wait for him to visit her dimension sometime in the future.
• In Uzumaki, a girl from Kirie's class is in love with a neighbor boy, while their families absolutely hate each other. The two sneak out together a few times (and of course, get caught and separated again), until they see two snakes making love. This inspires them to...well, this being Uzumaki, the two lovers spiral their bodies tightly around each other to form a human rope, telling their families that they will now be together forever, before throwing themselves into the sea to drown.
• Subverted in the Vampire Princess Miyu OAVs. Kei Yuzuki is a very handsome human who is horribly bored with his life but does his best to hide it, so at first he only wants eternal youth and beauty and consults the Uncanny Valley Girl from his school, Ranka. Turns out she's a Shinma and she promises to give him what he wants yet planning to make him her prey... but later, the guy ends up falling in love with her despite knowing who she is, and much to her own shock Ranka finds herself returning these feelings. They reach an agreement and Ranka transforms Kei into a Shinma, so Miyu (who had her eyes set on him too, thus she was horribly humiliated when she found out) had to send them both to the Dark. The last time we see them, they happily and peacefully walk together towards the Darkness.
• Ai and Yota from Video Girl Ai, since he's a human and she's a Robot Girl who shouldn't have human feelings and was tasked with simply helping Youta, but fell in love with him which is a death sentence for Video Girls. They earn their happy ending, though.
• Voltes V: Lozaria with Gohl, who was literally thrown into jail and tortured when it was found out he wasn't Horned like the rest of the nobles. Emperor Zambajil took pleasure in seeing Gohl scream for her as she was taken away from him, and she later died in childbirth.
• In Whisper of the Heart, Shizuku is told the story of the grandfather clock by the antique dealer; the Dwarf King and the Elf Princess are deeply in love, but can't be together due to coming from two different worlds. The Elf Princess is turned into a sheep for most of the day, only returning to her true form when the clock strikes twelve, the only time of the day she can see the king. In turn, he waits dutifully for her each day just for the chance to see her for that fleeting moment.
• Makie and Taki Renzaburou by the end of the Wicked City movie. While them hooking up and becoming a Battle Couple is one of the biggest plot points of the movie as a whole, in the end the pregnant Makie must return to the Demon World and Renzaburou musty stay on Earth.
• In Wild Rock, Yuni and Selim decide there's no way to overcome the fact that they're from Feuding Families and are both future chieftans, so they part and each have families of their own. It isn't until their sons fall in love and decide to unite the two tribes that they meet again, agreeing it was long overdue.
• Windaria: Roland and Veronica, the heirs of the countries at the brink of war. It looked to be subverted as the Queen of Lunaria hoped a marriage between them would neutralize the possiblity of war but they ended up fighting.
• In Winter Cicada, Akizuki and Kusaka are lovers on opposite sides of the Boshin civil war. It ends pretty much how you'd suspect.
• Wolf's Rain has not one but four sets of lovers, all of whom could be considered "star-crossed" in various ways.
  • Much of Lord Darcia's motivation for becoming the series' villain involves his lover Hamona falling into a coma and subsequently dying, which he blames on the wolves.
  • Hubb Leboski spends most of the series trying to get back together with his ex-wife Cher Degré, which indirectly leads to his getting involved with the wolves.
  • Kiba's main love interest is Cheza, the girl made of Lunar Flowers. Unfortunately, her status as a Living MacGuffin keeps her trapped by many Nobles, forcing Kiba to fight his way back to her.
  • The wolf Hige, who's always dreamed of finding a hot babe, eventually gets together with the wolf-dog Blue. Of course, with everything else that's going on nobody gets much time for romance, and they all die in the OVA episodes. At the very end Hige is apparently reincarnated as a human, along with the other wolves, but we don't see Blue.
• The relationship between Willem and Chtholly in WorldEnd: What Do You Do at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? was tinged with tragedy right from the start. A man who had lost everything falls in love with a girl who believes that her own death is just around the corner. Despite everything he does to prevent it, Chtholly dies saving his life in one of the most gut wrenching moments in light novel history. This sad inevitability is perfectly reflected in the anime’s rendition of Scarborough Fair, an English folk tune about the futility of love, which plays during their first meeting and during Chtholly’s death.
• Your Lie in April: Despite their obvious chemistry, Kousei hesitates to make a move on Kaori because he believes that she's in love with Watari. She also has an illness that gets worse over the course of the story. By the end of the story, the illness claims her life, and it's only in a posthumous letter that she admits she never had any feelings for Watari and had always loved Kousei, far too late for him to act on it.
• The Chinese daughter of a crime lord, Li-En, and her Mamodo partner, Wonrei, from Zatch Bell!. No matter what the outcome of the battle between the Mamodo is, Wonrei will have to eventually return to the Mamodo world.