Warning: As a Spoilered Rotten Ending Trope, EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default. You Have Been Warned.
Sudden Downer Endings in Anime and Manga.
- The 1975 anime adaptation of A Dog of Flanders, true to the original material, has the main character and his dog freeze to death in the last episode. The series is quite positive and upbeat (and looks like Heidi) otherwise, so to many children, this came as quite a shock.
- Since a lot of people in Japan were familiar with the eponymous tale and how it ended, fans of the show sent tearful mails to the staff days before the final episode aired, pleading not to have Nello and Patrasche die at the end. The staff went ahead anyway, devastating everyone who watched it. Yes, even those who wrote the letters.
- In Dragon Ball, the conclusion of the 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai arc. After Goku loses to Tenshinhan in the finals but befriends him all the same, Krillin is killed off-panel when he goes to fetch Goku's Four-Star Ball and Nyoi-bo. Made worse in the anime where it happens as they have a victory dinner, but Goku doesn't feel like eating at all until he gets a horrible feeling and sprints back to the tournament grounds.
- One airing of the anime's dub in New Zealand actually ended the series' run in that country with that episode, meaning there was no answer as to what killed Krillin or why!
- The End of Evangelion, not when viewed as a stand-alone work, but as an end to the TV series as a whole, is this after some heavy-handed Cerebus Syndrome that had been dissipated by a strange yet undeniably optimistic ending returns with a bitter twist in this film adaptation — resurrected by the alienation and dissatisfaction of the bulk of the series' original fan-base.
- Excel♡Saga parodies this, like everything else, in one late-run episode, which is very dark and humorless compared to the other episodes and ends with Excel being shot and left to die. It's actually around episode 23 of 25. The actual final episode (#26) was unaired due to crossing the line way too many times.
- Fairy Tail. The S-class/Tenrou Island arc ends with most of the main characters being blasted by Acnologia and presumably dead. As future seasons show, they thankfully weren’t, but it is still one of the darkest moments in the story.
- The end of the Fist of the North Star prequel film Legend of Kenshiro is so pointlessly sadistic it could have been written by Thouzer himself. Ken has recovered his spirit, embraced his destiny as the messiah, and saved the city... then Siska turns out to have a third detonator and blows it up anyway, leaving Kenshiro screaming despondently among the ruins and corpses of his friends. The only thing that saves this movie from being a complete downer is the fact that after the credits roll comes a montage of the very first episode of the series, where Kenshiro meets Bat and Lin and battles Zeed, setting off on his path to become the Savior of Century's End, set to the very awesome "Road of Lords".
- In Guardian Fairy Michel, after 25 episodes of happy, lighthearted hijinks, Michel dies at the end to rejuvenate the Tree of Life, Kim leaves the island, and the villains still have their floating castle.
- Happens in-universe in episode 8 of season 1's Haganai. Sena is playing a Visual Novel where her character is having fun with friends at a swimming pool, and Yozora nonchalantly mentions that the game would be godly if a shark suddenly appeared out of nowhere and killed them. Sena berates her for suggesting such an awful thing, but then that's exactly what happens. Sena at first thinks it's a joke and that her main character would easily vanquish it, only for the shark to kill him, and she suffers from a bad ending. Rika mentions that this game was particularly notorious in online forums for this ending if you failed to trigger a certain flag earlier in the game. Everyone in the clubroom, Yozora included, was completely shocked by it, but after she recollects herself, Yozora calls it a godly game, while Sena angrily snaps the disc in half.
- The final episode of the first season of Higurashi: When They Cry ends on a happy-looking ending where everything is back to normal after Rena tries to bomb the school. When Rika gets called into Ooishi's car it's revealed that the "Groundhog Day" Loop has started again. This is emphasised in the first episode of the second season when a present-day, now-adult Rena discusses what really happened after she hugged Keiichi on the rooftop. As it turns out she was arrested and sent away. Hinamizawa then suffered an accident, leaving Rena the Sole Survivor of the village.
- Hoshino, Close Your Eyes is a niche series with an infamous ending that many believe was the author lashing out at the publisher out of spite after being denied an anime adaptation. The main character Kobayakawa is a socially awkward loner who gradually learns to come out of his shell and make friends. In the end, he suddenly becomes His Own Worst Enemy and rejects his crush after her Love Confession on the grounds that he doesn't feel that he's good enough for her. His friends encourage him to stop being an idiot but he reinforces his decision by cutting contact with everyone. In the end, after he's burned bridges with all the friends he made over the past year they all go on to lead happy, successful lives while he goes back to being the asocial Loser Protagonist he was at the start.
- The extra chapter steers this into a Happy Ending, through Big Damn Reunion.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood, despite his adopted brother Dio slaughtering his loved ones and effectively ruining his life, the optimistic, compassionate hero, Jonathan Joestar, comes out on top and disintegrates his body with a fire-charged Hamon Overdrive. The artifact used to empower Dio is destroyed, peace returns, and Jonathan marries his childhood friend, Erina. All seems well, until Dio returns as a disembodied head and murders him on his honeymoon in an attempt to replace the body he lost. The viewer is initially comforted somewhat by Erina's escape and Dio's apparent failure and death. However, two parts later, Dio returns with Jonathan's body, indicating that he won after all. Though not for long thanks to the protagonists of Part 3.
- The 1981 anime Kyōfu Densetsu: Kaiki! Frankenstein features a particularly off-the-wall instance of this trope. In this version of the story, Frankenstein's Monster befriends a little girl, whose father and the other villagers try to kill him. Frankie fights them off, but the little girl gets hurt in the crossfire, so he realizes that as long as he's around she'll be in danger. Saying his final goodbyes, Frankie throws himself off a cliff. The girl's father, seeing this, has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and shoots himself, and the movie ends with the little girl now a friendless orphan.
- The first half of the first series of Magical Princess Minky Momo had this in episodes 45 and 46. In episode 45, Momo's main mode of transportation — the Gorumepopo — loses energy and disappears, Momo loses her pendant and pets on a train, Momo encounters bad guys who want her pets, and when she tries to get her pendant in order to transform to save the man who helped her, her pendant shatters. In the next episode, Momo tries to go to school and can't pay attention, so she goes to the park where she tries to retrieve a baseball and gets run over by a truck. She then dies, but is reincarnated as the real child of her foster parents. The rest of the series is All Just a Dream in the mind of the human Momo about a new Minky Momo that came to Earth.
- Mahoromatic: It's a Foregone Conclusion that Mahoro would die. It's the whole premise. The ending is still ridiculously dark. And confusing.
- Master of Martial Hearts: The first 4 out of 5 episodes will make you think that this OVA is just a silly, goofy, mushy comedy with some brutal fights between the main character Aya and her opponents in a tournament. Then the 5th episode comes in. To wit: Aya ends up killing her opponent in a Berserker Rage. Then, she finds out that every one of her friends was a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who had manipulated her right from the beginning. They mentally broke all the losers of the tournament, making them into "perfect women" to be sold into sexual slavery. Aya's "friends" did this because her parents did the same thing to their parents, and they want to kill her to get back at her mother. Then Aya's mother shows up and kills them off, revealing to her that this is a Cycle of Revenge going back to their grandparents. So an "Everybody Dies" Ending ensues, with Aya limping away from the blown-up building. Then her so-called best friend's mother gets a visit from someone that she is very scared to see. There had been very few hints that something like this was going to happen.
- Ojamajo Doremi. Everyone has to give up their powers, because one of the girls messed up and broke a witch law by casting a spell to make everyone forget learning that they were witches, causing her to go to sleep for an entire century as punishment. The whole giving-up-the-powers thing was the only way the others were finally able to wake her up. But that's just the first season.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: In the very last minute of the series, Stocking turns out to be evil, slices Panty into 666 pieces, and walks into the sunset with the revived Big Bad. It's mostly Played for Laughs, but it just comes so out of nowhere that the audience is left shocked and confused.
- The 2009 adaptation of Phantom of Inferno followed the Elen route from the game all the way up to the more-or-less happy ending Elen and Reiji got, ending on the same image of Elen standing in the middle of the flower field, smiling...then an Inferno sniper shoots Reiji dead and Elen kills herself out of grief. Which is NOT something that happened in the game.
- There were plans for Pokémon: The Series to have a sad ending if it had ended early. The final episode would have been a Distant Finale showing Ash as an old man who is no longer a Pokémon Trainer looking back on his childhood and missing the friends he made.
- Despite being a comedy, Prison School infamously ended with a pretty devastating one. Kiyoshi spends the entire series trying to get with Chiyo, the kind-hearted younger sister of the Absurdly Powerful Student Council President, and risks getting beaten or expelled at every turn for her. The final arc of the manga revolves around his Love Confession to her, but Hana tries to sabotage it in order to keep Kiyoshi for herself. She ends up succeeding at the last second after revealing that Kiyoshi was still wearing her panties, and as a result Chiyo is shown to end up becoming a bitter man-hater like her sister and it's heavily implied that boys at the school will continue to suffer with her as President.
