Too Bleak Stopped Caring / Anime & Manga

• Afro Samurai's main character is a borderline sociopathic Villain Protagonist with few redeeming qualities who cares about nothing but killing the person who killed his father, resulting in him killing large amounts of people just to find his father's killer. The person who killed his father, Justice, while having well-meaning but rather not necessarily morally right motives, is very morally gray. The only reason the audience only sympathizes with Afro, in spite of his goals being identical to those he fights, is because we saw his backstory, and didn't see theirs. Resurrection makes a point of cleaning this up, with Afro directly confronting the destruction he leaves in his wake and trying to break the endless Cycle of Revenge he's trapped in. The manga, on the other hand, makes it even worse, with Afro becoming a straight-up psychopath and the story ending in the most unsatisfying way possible.
• Ajin. It's hard to root for the characters, most especially the main protagonist who ended up becoming a Sociopathic Hero, and both sides have very flimsy reasons to get back at each other.
• Akame ga Kill! is one of the darkest shonen manga series ever released. The main characters, while likable, are assassins, which is a very shady occupation for a protagonist. Some of the antagonists can be likable and because Anyone Can Die, prepare for several tearjerkers. Then in the manga's second arc, the apathy is taken up to eleven with the appearance of villains who are pure evil. Killing off major characters also loses its shock value as the series goes on.
• Akudama Drive: The anime has received a mixed reception. It goes farther than Akame ga Kill! when it comes to the body count. Most viewers are here for the cool artstyle and shipping between Swindler and Courier (and the villainous counterpart Doctor and Cutthroat). It's hard to care about the whole premise: a cyberpunk world with Grey-and-Gray Morality (or Black-and-Gray Morality) where both Executioners and Akudama criminals are equally horrible. The Executioners are already corrupted since the crime rate has skyrocketed, while Akudama criminals (except Swindler) are ambiguously good at best and outright irredeemable at worst.
• In Aldnoah.Zero, Inaho and Slaine are highly flawed characters, and their many faults or self-inflicted mistakes can make it hard for the audience to sympathize with them. The fact that Slaine becomes the Big Bad by the beginning of season 2 doesn't help.
• The third installment of Animal X can come across as this. Not only is Minato and Yuiji's long-sought for daughter kidnapped, there's a Hate Plague spreading that only affects dinosauroids causing a ton of chaos and fear, plus it becomes very clear why most dinosauroid females are protected so fiercely by their husbands when Minato is outnumbered and unable to save Yuiji from being gang raped in front of him. To make matters worse, after the aforementioned event the two are forced to return their daughter to human custody even after she was saved, and then Minato finds himself unable to cope with the emotions he feels and lashes out at Yuiji, kicking him out of his bed and Slut-Shaming him right before the series went on Hiatus.
• The Animatrix: Given how many times the Second Renaissance segment is mentioned on the film's Nightmare Fuel page and how grotesque and cartoonishly disturbing the imagery and violence in it is, you'll understand if more than a few viewers are turned off or disturbed by it. Part of the problem is that it's very unclear who we're supposed to be rooting for as the Humans Are Bastards trope is being taken to extremes, so it's impossible to sympathize with the humans, and the Machines become literal monsters by the end and ultimately enslave mankind.
• The Area 88 manga falls victim to this. Much of the story takes place in Asran, a North African kingdom experiencing an unending civil war in which neither side gains a long-term advantage. Amoral arms dealers are happy to take advantage of the conflict. Many of Area 88's pilots are lost souls who have abandoned any hope of living a normal life (or, living to see next week). Shin never seems to make any headway in his attempt to earn enough money to break his mercenary contract, leaving him frustrated and melancholy. Shin's time at Area 88 leaves him so traumatized and maladjusted that when he receives not one but two opportunities to resume a normal life, he returns to a life of combat both times. By the time the manga reaches its bittersweet ending, the audience likely has ending fatigue.
• Basilisk: Both ninja clans have more than their fair share of Jerkasses. Oboro is incredibly naive and indecisive and boy does she pay for it. Any character is going to be killed in a few episodes. And the whole contest is being held by corrupt nobles.
• The second season of Birdy the Mighty: Decode was criticized for some for going out of its way to be Darker and Edgier and Bloodier and Gorier than the first season, including one of the main characters of the season being a revenge-driven serial killer who also engages in self-loathing, the realization that the title character is a genetically-engineered Super-Soldier forced into being a Space Police officer, and issues of Fantastic Racism which ties into the other two.
• Black Lagoon, especially in the earlier stages. While many find it unapologetically entertaining, it's very easy not to care about what happens to anyone since they're all jerks, evil, psychotic, and/or Straw Nihilists, and love to talk about their reasons for being so at length to anybody who cares to listen, and to those who don't have any other option but to listen.
• Blood-C is this since the characters kept holding the Idiot Ball despite the danger around them which is why viewers care less when they are brutally killed, most especially the Red Shirts. It doesn't helped that Saya is a Failure Hero and whatever she does, many people die which irritated a lot of viewers. And at the end, it turns out most of Saya's friends are assholes who are hired to act those roles. You won't feel sorry for them when they're gruesomely killed and the Big Bad turns out to be Saya's friendly neighbor, Fumito, who got away with another of her supposed "friends", leaving tons of corpses on the trail and the town in ruins. The only characters who are sympathetic or redeemed were Itsuki, Tadayoshi and dog (who is Watanuki's corporeal form). And yet, Itsuki and Tadayoshi died, and Watanuki is powerless to do anything to help Saya since he cannot leave the shop.
  • The movie tries to lighten things up. However, the climax may throw all of that out the window: Saya fulfills her revenge except that she found out that Fumito is in love with her and all of her actions are for her survival, regardless that he killed thousands of people in the past and abused her emotionally and psychologically. Also, she can't go back to Mana again after she found out that she killed her dad at the beginning of the movie. Because of this, Saya is established as a Tragic Hero.
• In regards to Candy♡Candy, more than one watcher/reader ended up getting tired of all the relentless, neverending, borderline ridiculous melodrama surrounding Candy's life and ended up dropping the series.
• Cannon God Exaxxion. The alien invaders are A Nazi by Any Other Name. The boss of the defending humans doesn't give a crap about collateral damage and will kill and destroy at will. While Kenichi Sonoda had dipped his toe in this trope before, this was when he took a freefall into it, and never really surfaced, as evidenced with the reaction to Gunsmith Cats Burst, which actually ended up being a Creator Killer for him.
• A problem reading Cells at Work! [BLACK] is that, due to the Edutainment nature of the series, it deals with a lot of depressing issues such as disease, stress and pain being experienced by an unhealthy body. And these elements are portrayed by anthropomorphised cells, meaning the characters themselves are dying by the thousands. To make matters worse, the metaphor used by the manga is that an unhealthy body is akin to a "black company", i.e., a sweatshop, meaning that even the surviving characters are being subjected to stress, overwork, bullying, suicide, addiction and depression. Quite a lot to digest, considering it's a spinoff of an optimistic and cheery series.
• This was one of two of the major reasons why Cheat Slayer was cancelled after one chapter: Aside from all the "isekai cliche characters" being blatant copies of characters from other isekai works, they were portrayed without any sympathetic qualities and thus giving the readers no stakes. The protagonist isn't immune to all this, either. Small wonder people have criticized it as a Shallow Parody.
• As soon as the second episode, Side:Future of Danganronpa 3 got this reaction. A large problem with the anime was the frequent killing of characters who had barely been introduced, making it rather difficult to care what was going on given that most of Future revolved around the new cast.
  • Episode 5 takes it up a notch: All five deaths that occurred up to that point were of fan-favorites and likable characters. Those who survive are mostly from the controversial Radical Faction, and Munakata's Sanity Slippage slowly turns him into The Scrappy.
• DEAD Tube really goes over-the-top with the atrocities the cast commits against each other. Not even the main characters are all that better than their competition. A lot of readers give up on caring and those who continue to read after not caring mostly read it to see just how hilariously fucked up things get.
• Desert Punk, albeit a comic series falls into this. Almost every single character is a massive Jerkass, and the few exceptions never prosper in this world. By the middle of the series, it's quite clear that none of the three major characters have a Hidden Heart of Gold. Summing things up is the comment by the Lemony Narrator in the last episode in respect to the After the End setting, which is to the effect that "invokedWith people like this, it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct."
• In A Devil and Her Love Song, there's so much drama and emotional conflict on latter volumes that it becomes really hard to root for the characters, especially if those who make others suffer go unpunished. Specifically, Maria's old best friend Anna gets Put on a Bus after more or less acting awful to Maria after she came to school to see her, and Maria's father, John, never explains why he raped her mother and she never chews him out for it, though he is a priest and clearly trying to atone for his actions.
• The Devilman franchise. Devils are either rapacious monsters or innocent victims of persecution and humanity is at its absolute worst on every imaginable level. With lovely scenes of death, destruction and so much more. And in the end, Akira is killed, Devils are extinct, Satan has destroyed all life on Earth and God destroys the entire planet to start things over from scratch so he can punish Satan yet again. Many fans have come to the conclusion that the "crybaby" subtitle in DEVILMAN crybaby is referring to the viewer. Being that it's the Trope Codifier of grimdark, this shouldn't come across as too surprising.
  • Violence Jack., the sequel to Devilman, manages to be even darker than the original series, with a Crapsack World 10 times more brutal and depressing, full of rapists, sadists, murderers and scumbags of the highest order, and the protagonist, Jack himself, starts off as an apathetic and sadistic Sociopathic Hero, not caring about anyone but himself (thankfully this changes due to some character development), with some very innocent, well-meaning and kind-hearted characters always constantly suffering at the hands of the sadistic villains who Jack fights. As a result, it's pretty hard to go through this series for some. Not helped by the series' notoriously graphic scenes of child-murder, rape, cannibalism, and zoophilia.
• In Domina no Do!, the amount of crap Takeshi suffers from chapter to chapter due to the women around him will frustrate readers whenever they're not being astonished at all the other crazy stuff that happens in this manga.
• The OVA Doomed Megalopolis, an adaptation of Teito Monogatari, gives several of its "heroes" the Adaptational Jerkass or Adaptational Dumbass treatment, with the absolute worst being turning Yoichiro into a rapist when his relationship with his sister Yukari was at least consensual in other versions, but Yoichiro here is a Karma Houdini instead of dying like before. This often leads viewers to wish that Kato would succeed in destroying Tokyo.
• Elfen Lied. The lack of subtlety in the narrative, the Black-and-Gray Morality, and the exaggerated emphasis on how 90% of Humans Are Bastards to the point of being Card Carrying Villains is often enough to make the viewers exhausted and angry instead of sympathetic to the Diclonius' plights (who themselves are Ax-Crazy by nature to some extent anyway). Granted, this is toned down in the anime and later on in the manga, but whether it makes up for the earlier levels of disturbance depends on the reader/viewer..
• Ergo Proxy Near the beginning of the series, there were a few moral dilemmas stemming from black and black morality. Stop the Proxy that's loose in Romdo and the fascist government regains total control over the city. Don't stop the Proxy and it'll continue a murder spree.
• The Familiar of Zero: Louise's constant abuse of Saito ended up making this series very hard to enjoy for most people, with most of the other characters being annoying and unlikable. And the characters that are likable take a level in jerkass as the story progresses.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa (the movie sequel to the first anime) is particularly extreme in its darkness. By the end Ed and Al are together again, but are trapped forever in another universe as World War II is about to break out. By comparison, the manga and Brotherhood anime series end with Ed and Winry happy together with children.
• Future Diary: It pits a Deadly Game where most of the participants are ruthless, insane or care only for those they know. The Hero's female deuteragonist is perhaps the least sane of the lot. While the protagonist starts off as an All-Loving Hero, the entire story is a Sanity Slippage that sees him become a willing killer, and then lose all composure when he finds out he cannot resurrect those he killed even after winning the game. The ending sees him recreate the world with everyone alive again, but it can be a chore to get there.
• Gantz, aside from the blood and gore everywhere and the overly gritty tone, it's really hard to sympathize with the main characters as many of them are jerkasses at best and downright malicious at worst. Even with the series getting Earn Your Happy Ending, it still feels like a chore to read through for some.
• Genocyber: The extremely graphic and disturbing violence, lack of any genuinely likable characters and incredibly nihilistic tone ended up turning a large number of people away from this series. Most audiences who watch it do so out of Bile Fascination.
• The fantasy manga Gesellschaft Blume has a gruesome premise: The Hero can only defeat the forces of the Big Bad by killing their own party members and obtaining their levels. When both new and old members join his party, don't expect them to survive. While it did last for five volumes, the majority of readers on both sides of the Pacific shied away quickly and the remaining readers mocked it for its extreme edginess.
• Gilgamesh has immortal monsters made from antimatter that want to create some sort of new reality. And on the other side, a Manipulative Bitch whose main reason for getting rid of the reflective sky (which gives the heroes their incredible powers by the way, meaning they probably shouldn't be serving her) is being dumped by the guy who engineered the future. And the children are such Wide Eyed Idealists that they get used by both sides. It's actually a relief when everybody dies. And it somehow makes even that terrible because TeaR is killed by a Gilgamesh spawn from Kiyoko after it destroys everything, therefore everything is gone forever and can never be brought back potentially better. Then again, the mangaka who wrote the source material has made other work that gets hit with this, so it's not entirely surprising.
• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters: A major criticism with the trilogy's story is that it starts on such a bleak note and only gets worse and worse for the characters with each ending. By the last movie, you've just been watching an angsty Failure Hero who gets thousands killed, was being manipulated by two alien races that both turn out to be Evil All Along, and ending with an Evil Versus Evil battle between two Generic Doomsday Villain monsters that are otherwise completely unbeatable, with none of the camp, relatable characters, or enjoyable kaiju fight scenes present in most other films to balance out the bleakness here, making it very hard to care about any of it.
• Goodnight Punpun has a protagonist that suffers through a Trauma Conga Line of events that change his life, turning him into a miserable kid with a lot of Wangst inside. Punpun doesn't ever change throughout the story, and since it's mostly focused on him, it can be very hard to care about him or his problems.
• Gundam:
  • A common criticism levied at the main Universal Century or "UC" setting of Gundam is that nothing ever seems to get better for anyone regardless of what happens, especially later on. The Earth Federation is a corrupt and inept oligarchy verging on a fascist dictatorship that oppresses those living in space and only seems to prop up its existence by pissing off groups who are worse than them (such as the Principality of Zeon or Cosmo Babylonia and the Crossbone Vanguard) and sheer dumb luck. Even in endings where the Earth Federation does eventually collapse, it's only because they were either replaced by something worse (like in G-Saviour, Reconguista in G and Mad Wang), collapsed into chaos and infighting (such as in the end of Crossbone Gundam) or experienced an apocalyptic event (∀ Gundam). The peak of which being...
    • Mobile Suit Victory Gundam is considered one of the darkest Gundam series. Countless good characters die nearly every episode. The main bad guys are some of the most irredeemable and hypocritical scum imaginable, and regularly get away with it. And the heroes trying and failing to accomplish.... much of anything for most of the story, especially stopping, and saving their loved ones from, said bad guys makes this one of the most depressing Gundam series in the franchise.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE ran into this problem fairly quickly. Not only is its "Advanced Generation" setting very reminiscent of the Universal Century, but it has one of the highest body-counts in the franchise with named characters being killed off left, right and centre, in very predictable, cliched, gratuitous and very preventable ways to boot. By the time the final episode rolled around, almost all the fan-favourite characters had been killed off, as had all the goodwill the series had built up.
• The anime version of Hanebad! has been hit rather hard with this. In addition to the anime toning down most of the comedy to add in more drama to the story, several of the characters have gone through Adaptational Jerkass in the making.
• Season one of Hell Girl in particular can get a little ridiculous. Every episode, you're introduced to a new villain with no real objective other than to prove his/her guilt in as many obvious ways as possible. Even when they get what's coming to them, it's not before they've completely ruined someone, or many people's lives, sometimes irrevocably. And you know the next episode is just gonna feature someone even crueller. The first season tries to rectify this by introducing the Intrepid Reporter Hajime, who starts trying to prevent people from using the Hell Correspondence and getting Enma Ai to send their tormentors to Hell in exchange for their own souls. Problem is, Hajime never succeeds until his own daughter Tsugumi gets mind raped by Enma Ai, (she and her dad are descendants of a person from Enma Ai's Dark and Troubled Past), and then Ai tries to use it on him, and if anyone should know not to use the Correspondence, she should, so what she does makes her a monster only slightly more sympathetic than the villains in the series.
• Highschool of the Dead: apart from the obvious bloodshed, gore, and people turning into zombies, it's very hard to sympathize with anyone who is willing to cross moral boundaries simply just to survive the zombie apocalypse, aside from the main characters. The villain's infamous orgybus also doesn't help.
• Hot Gimmick is one of the few shoujo manga that fits this trope. Every character is a Jerkass or an idiot, and nobody receives any major character development (in fact the opposite seems to happen). The Esoteric Happy Ending doesn't help, not even when the novel ended up fixing it via having the girl finally get a chance to walk out on the Fetishized Abuser.
• Ichi the Killer treads perilously close to this trope. A psychological drama set in the brutal (albeit colorful) world of a nigh-lawless Tokyo red-light district could be forgiven for a cast whose morality comes in various shades of gray, but Jeez Louise… Nearly every character in Ichi either skipped gleefully past the moral event horizon long ago or is presently teetering on its edge. Almost everyone of plot significance is either 1) a murderous, manipulative bastard, 2) completely deranged, 3) a depraved sadist and/or masochist, 4) some other kind of sex pervert (you want necrophiliacs? Ichi's got 'em!), 5) a cold blooded mass murderer, 6) willing to do absolutely anything for money, 7) some combination of the foregoing. The two main protagonists? Completely deranged sadomasochistic mass murderers. Yeah. It’s so over the top that one character, a Yakuza *hit man* with a functional family life and a few glimmers of empathy, starts to seem like a nice guy just by comparison. So why would anyone who occasionally goes outdoors for something other than a load of canned meat and tarp read this? It’s the plot (tense, coiled and well-paced), and Ichi’s surprisingly incisive exploration of identity and desire.
• The Island of Giant Insects: Most of the cast is comprised of unlikeable assholes, incompetent buffoons, incompetent buffoonish assholes, and attempted rapists. There's also a good deal of Fan Disservice with young, attractive ladies getting eaten alive while naked.
• Jormungand: Most of the characters are all bloodthirsty bodyguards for a deranged woman with a god complex who claims to want to save the world by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and that's not even getting into the logical fallacies her plan actually has.
• While Kichikujima seems to be going for a mix of What You Are in the Dark and Humans Are Bastards as its theme, it takes very little time for most of our main group to reveal themselves as a bunch of cowards who will stoop to absolutely any low for a chance to save themselves. On top of that, almost every revelation about their characters makes them look even worse than they did before. The main character is at the very least ashamed whenever he does something wrong and one girl who was already on the island seems good and normal enough (to the point that the cult mistake her for the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary because she's the only person they've ever met who wasn't horribly selfish), but beyond them all the characters do is panic and scheme to stab each other in the back. It's to the point that the insane, mutant cannibal cultists manage to be some of the most sympathetic characters, because they at least seem to care about each other in some warped sense of the word.
• Koizora: With the main character Mika experiencing heartbreak, rape, unwanted pregnancy, then a miscarriage and more, it seems like it desperately wants to be a tear-jerker, when all it does after a while is make you wonder what sad thing won't happen to this girl.
• The original Lady!! manga feels like this for many viewers. Lynn gives in to the bullying and returns to Japan, George marries Madeleine (and later dies, leaving Lynn in her care), Lynn isn't a Plucky Girl and less willing to take initiative and there's an endless Cliché Storm of Love Triangles and stock school drama. In the end, Lynn becomes accepted into the Russells not out of her own merit, but because Arthur threatened not to help them out of poverty if they didn't. You'll find many fans who reject it completely, and prefer Toei Animation's changes where The Power of Love keeps the Russells together.
• The Laughing Salesman: The moment Moguro approaches a potential client they're doomed. He makes them an offer and fulfills it on the condition that they don't break a rule in their contract, which they inevitably end up doing. Even if they reject his offer he still punishes them.
• Magical Girl Site isn't so popular because it is a horribly grim-dark Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction manga that tells about a suicidal protagonist who is also a victim of her brother's abuse. Thankfully she gets a chance to join the Magical Girl Site contract, where all the girls can become magical girls. Except... the contract turns out to be a Hope Spot where she has to sacrifice a certain amount of her lifespan every time she uses her magical attack and fight nothing but between the girls who have also joined Magical Girl Site in a form of Deadly Game. Also, the fact that this manga runs in a Shonen magazine doesn't help at all. Seeing all these premises, the audience might expect our poor protagonist to die in a few moments during the deadly game (or even after she wins and has become the true magical girl).
• Part of the reason why Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force failed was due to the Huckebein's Invincible Villain status. Almost every chapter they appear in sees them effortlessly take down a character, regardless of how powerful they had been previously portrayed. It got to the point where, after Curren wounded Hayate, fans had finally had enough and stopped reading entirely. They did try to address the problem in the final chapters by having the Huckebein start to lose, but it was too little, too late, and Force was Quietly Cancelled before a resolution could be reached, and there hasn't been anything made in the main series continuity since, with subsequent installments going in an Alternate Continuity, due in part to the abysmal reception of Force.
• Masamune-kun's Revenge: The series isn't dark, per se, but the entire premise of the love story between two polarizing and heavily flawed characters like Masamune and Aki can come off as a hard sell of a romance story. Masamune goes out of his way to manipulate and lie to those he calls his friends and Aki frequently shames and humiliate anyone who declares their love for her. One anime reviewer even declared it the worst anime of 2017 for this reason.
• MD Geist: Our hero really isn't any better than the Big Bad and eventually releases the Death Force simply because he knows how meaningless his life would be without something nasty to fight. Let that sink in for a moment: he obliterates humanity just to be an asshole.
• Michiko & Hatchin is set in a Crapsack Country filled with Jerkasses and other rotten types pushing the helpless and each other around, and the few people who aren't, most notably the Deuteragonist Hana, can't do much but deal with it and trudge through in the meantime. Even Michiko, who starts out genuinely caring about Hana as they search for her father Hiroshi, grows increasingly abrasive the closer they get to finding him, which does little to help matters.
• Now and Then, Here and There: After the Non-Indicative First Episode, the series pulls no punches in being grim-dark, complete with one of the most abominable villains in history and a main character who is near-powerless to change much. In the end, the protagonist has no great influence and is able only to inspire the actually-powerful Lala-Ru to bring about a more-or-less happy ending. The mostly-positive outcome feels insignificant after the series' overall dark journey.
• In Overlord (2012): The main characters are hopelessly overpowered when compared to the rest of the cast, and also, for the most part, extremely evil. Even the Token Good Teammate, Sebas, after spending several episodes nursing a girl back to health, is willing to kill her at a moment's notice if Ainz asks him to, though fortunately Ainz stops Sebas at the last second, revealing it was a test of his loyalty. It's very clear how most plot arcs are going to turn out; the only question is the level of collateral damage caused in the process. And one infamous arc in the third season is dominated by a lot of what could charitably be described as Torture Porn. Depending on your level of tolerance, and your patience, it can become very difficult to care about how any of this ends.
• Popee the Performer: Popee and Papi are Jerkasses alright and can do whatever to torture poor Kedamono when he does nothing wrong, and many of the characters suffer a Cruel and Unusual Death, to the point the show is unwatchable.
• Pupa, particularly the series, which is usually viewed as a disjointed, directionless mess on account of being only twelve episodes long, with each episode clocking in at around two minutes - certainly not enough time for the story that's trying to be told. The extreme gore, rampant cruelty, creepy incestuous overtones, largely unlikable cast and sub-par animation make for a show that's hard to sit through,^note And once again: this thing is less than half an hour long! let alone become invested in.
• Re:CREATORS, from one of the same writers of Aldnoah.Zero, suffers from an overly cynical and depressing tone being passed off as more "realistic" regarding the fictional characters being brought to the real world. The "good" characters are depicted as ineffective and/or clueless and most of them die without accomplishing anything. The Audience Surrogate has no real personality outside of being angsty and depressed. The Obviously Evil character and the morally ambiguous one, meanwhile, adapt with no effort to the real world and get what they wanted. And the Big Bad? Well, she was over-powered from the start and the only way to deal with her was to cave in to her demands, meaning that the whole series was a "Shaggy Dog" Story where nothing of real note had been accomplished.
• Redo of Healer: The main character is a Serial Rapist and a very creative torturer with a harem of slaves and his female enemies (that he either bought or brainwashed)... but he's still a saint compared to his enemies. It's very easy to stop caring about what happens to anyone unless you're into rape/sex and Black Comedy scenes.
• Sakura Gari, Christ on a cracker. Out of the main characters only one (Masataka) is unambiguously good, and he gets horribly raped and broken through the story. And while Masataka manages to walk out and away to start rebuilding his life, the other protagonist (Souma) is all but stated to have died.
• The School Days anime, since it adapts the darkest aspects of the visual novel. By the end of the series, there are absolutely no sympathetic characters left, as everyone turns out to be some combination of malicious, selfish, and/or psychotic.
• School-Live!:
  • School-Live! is a Slice of Life Zombie Apocalypse series written by a person who works with nitro+, a Visual Novel company which is infamous for creating H-novels with mostly dark and edgy stories. It doesn't help that the girls are already mentally broken from the zombie apocalypse, one of the girls being very oblivious to the situation, and another girl slowly turning into a zombie despite taking a Magic Antidote. On top of all that, Chapter 51 reveals that the Zombie Virus might be an airborne virus that could infect anybody at any time, so if this is true it could result in any of the characters randomly getting infected and dying at any point no matter how much progress they've made up to that point.
  • The anime manages to avert this by having more lighthearted and comedic moments than the manga already had, ending on a bittersweet but optimistic note, and also stopping shortly before it can reach the parts of the manga that get really dark.
• Shaman King becomes this by the middle of the story, at least in the manga. The heroes and villains become increasingly unsympathetic and nihilistic. By this point the heroes acknowledge they cannot defeat Hao and allow him to become the titular Shaman King in spite of all the horrible things he has done because he is just that powerful. You also have Hao's speech about how humanity will never change and is ultimately destined to be wiped out. The epilogue shows that no matter what the heroes do they cannot make a difference. This is especially evident that this shift comes after a long hiatus and the author had a mental shift to reflect these new views. Flowers is not much better, since nothing seems to go right for the heroes, they begrudgingly serve a god who's finger is constantly on the trigger to destroy the world, and they get smacked around considerably before they can gain any ground.
• Shiki enters this territory when the humans become aware of the existence of the Shiki who are responsible for the declining population of the village and the deaths of several of their loved ones. Due to the nature of the series being Grey-and-Gray Morality, both sides crossed many lines to fight for their survival. If you have a favorite character on either side, chances are that they would either be dead or broken. It doesn't help as the ending shows the humans won against the Shiki but lost their loved ones and their homes are burned down and the Big Bad got away scot-free though she felt some amount of remorse for her actions.
• A Silent Voice is filled to the brim with the message that Bullying Is Wrong and while that message is certainly truthful, the manga did not let up on the drama after it turned from a one-shot into a series, including the point of some characters attempting to commit suicide. And even after those events, the manga is still very heavy on the emotional aspects of grief and being emotionally broken, to the point that one cannot care for very long anymore.
• Texhnolyze. While there are characters who are noticeably better or worse than others, no one is truly good, with even the most sympathetic characters being Anti Heroes. A lot of viewers saw the show's Downer Ending coming a mile away, and were just waiting for everyone to give up and die.
• The well-known hentai series Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend rivals Devilman in every way possible when it comes to this trope. The amount of rape scenes (including, famously, tentacle rape), extreme gorn (which borders on guro at times), and each installment ending on a downer tends to put people off.
• Under the Dog: The OVA is viewed as this. Hana ultimately fails in her mission to save Nanase, and Anthea does a Mercy Kill on Hana. This results in the deaths of Hana's family. Anthea later confronts and kills the Pandora, which turns out to be Nanase's transformed father. Then it turns out that Nanase isn't the candidate they were looking for, so Anthea kills him as well, rendering the entire OVA pointless.
• Valvrave the Liberator: Some viewers are finding it increasingly hard to care about the series (even with all the Camp) because the majority of characters are either Jerk Asses, Too Dumb to Live or is Too Good for This Sinful Earth. The episode where the majority of the Module 77 students are massacred turns the series into a "Shaggy Dog" Story, and the 200 year timeskip shows certain characters' survival as a Foregone Conclusion.
• Very Private Lesson: Almost everyone is a jerk (or far worse) and any attempt at drama or plot development seems to go nowhere with the cast behaving like idiots, creeps, and/or bullies far too often for the viewer to ever really care if anything happens to them or not.
• Wanna Be the Strongest in the World!: Sakura is a novice in the wrestling world so she repeatedly gets her ass handed to her, and many of her fans turn on her, shouting how much she sucks and that she let them down. This turned off many viewers early on, who thought the show would be nothing but Sakura being humiliated and hated on over and over. By the end of episode 4, things turn around and the series gets much more even-handed- she's still challenged in the ring but has more expertise under her belt, so she doesn't seem so outclassed. Of course, before that point, a lot of viewers had dropped the series.
• The Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest manga is set in such a ridiculously Darker and Edgier Crapsack World, uses heavy themes (like rape, bullying, etc.) in such grossly exploitative manners and has characters so into Black-and-White Morality... that many readers have simply given up on it.
• X1999
  • The 1996 movie is regarded as this by modern viewers since it was released while the manga was ongoing. While the Dragons of Heaven are still benevolent, the Dragons of Earth become sociopaths including Kusanagi who is the Token Good Teammate and a Friend to All Living Things. There's also the fact that both sides ended up losing their members and the barriers got destroyed leaving Tokyo Tower as the last building standing.
  • The manga is leaning towards this as of the hiatus. Yuzuriha is missing, Arashi is controlled by Hinoto's Dark Side who is responsible for sending random attack to the Dragons of Heaven and Subaru, inheriting Seishirou's role as the Sakurazukamori assassin which got him to join the Dragons of Earth with the belief to make Kamui realize his true wish. And the real kicker? It's revealed Kamui's true wish was not to return Fuuma back to normal and the Cliffhanger chapter ends with Kamui, lying down on the ground as Fuuma is about to stab him. And now a decade has already passed, readers seemed to care less about what's going to happen.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V has this with its anime. Part of the story is for Yuya to learn what exactly is the best way to make people happy. But as the series progresses, it becomes really hard and at points outright uncomfortable to watch what's supposed to be a kid who wants to enjoy card games and make people happy be kicked in the teeth for his efforts. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome can be explained by Yuya's earlier ignorance and naivete, but after a while, it just feels like puppy-kicking especially when considering that he is a part of Zarc the last thing you want to do is to Break the Cutie yet the villains with Yuri being the most obvious force him into this role that by the time Zarc arrives the multiverse suffers due to most of their actions and it takes a Deus ex Machina to bring things back to a normal pace.
• Your and My Secret is supposed to be a comedic "Freaky Friday" Flip story in which Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy duo Nanako and Akira swap bodies. Nanako proceeds to establish herself as a selfish, messy, violent, domineering bully who loves the freedom her new male body gives her, refusing to give it back to Akira and living it up, while at the same time threatening him with verbal and physical abuse if he dares think of doing something she doesn't approve of with the body she doesn't even want back. Akira's own family tell him, to his face, that they prefer the more "conventionally masculine" Akira that Nanako provides, and Nanako's grandfather, the Mad Scientist who caused this mess, likewise refuses to repair the machine that could switch them back because he prefers the quieter, more demure Nanako that Akira makes. The closest thing Akira-as-Nanako has to a friend is his "best friend", Senbongi, who constantly sexually harasses him, including kissing him by force and groping his breasts and genitals. Akira ends up falling in love with Senbongi, simply because he's the only person who seems to "care" about Akira. When Nanako's grandfather fixes the machine at last, Nanako destroys it so she can keep Akira's body and her stolen life. About that point is where most readers dropped the manga and wanted nothing to do with it — which is all the more understandable when you learn that the manga ends with the two of them deciding to stay in each other's bodies.
• Your Lie in April is founded on the main character Kousei's misery. When it's not being Played for Drama, it's being Played for Laughs. Even when things seem to be going well for Kousei, like him overcoming the trauma of his abuse to play piano again, the story punches him square in the balls with Kaori's death. And everybody besides Kousei is a huge jerkass.
• The tone of Yuureitou can get pretty harsh sometimes, and many of the characters have less than pleasant secrets they're willing to hide and aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. It's definitely par for the course for mystery, but with no true good figure in the tale, it becomes somewhat difficult to root for the protagonists.

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