Removed this:

• The Dark Knight. Oh, lord... Rachel, Harvey, and a few others are dead, and Batman is on the run. And sure, some bad people have been killed(mostly by Harvey or The Joker), but what did that achieve? Just moved some other underworld figures up the ladder.

A) The entire point of the film is that Batman becomes "whatever Gotham needs (him) to be" in order to maintain Harvey Dent's legacy, and ensure that his death wasn't in vain. That by itself disqualifies this for Shoot The Shaggy Dog.

B) Batman (and Two-Face) dealt a serious blow to the criminal underworld by catching their current ringleader (Maroni), the man who was leading them on (the Joker) and their main accountant (Lau). It's unknown how this has effected the Gotham mob, so saying "some criminals moved up the ladder" is wrong.

C) Batman foiled the Joker's plan, and saved two boats full of innocent people, in effect that proving that Gotham could be saved (because the people believed in doing the right thing).

This page needs an enema. There are probably more examples of stories where the main characters die than those that actually fit the trope.

Some examples that clearly need to be reconsidered:

Yu Yu Hakusho: This is somewhat debatable. Is a hollow victory grounds for invoking this trope? It's not like we have an End of the World as We Know It moment or anything like that. The fact that we learn tragic information about the demons' background doesn't really negate the fact that "the good guys" live to fight another day, and their charge is not lost, either.

Death Note: Who/what qualifies as the shaggy dog? Even if you consider Light as the sole protagonist, he's succeeded in much of his mission to rid the world of crime. He ultimately met his fate at the hands of Ryuk as expected. L's successors succeeded where he failed. Every human who wrote a name in the book dies (also expected). Even if one considers this a Downer Ending, it cannot reasonably be cited as an instance of "Shoot the Shaggy Dog."

Code Geass: This entry makes perhaps the least sense, since in fact Lelouch ultimately accomplishes his goals along the way. The fact that he faces his sister as a rival and dies a martyr at the end doesn't change the fact. If somehow it turned out that this happy ending were thwarted after the end or something like that, THEN I could see this fitting the trope.

The way that the Terminator films went from "The future can be changed" in the second film to "The future is inevitable" in the third is resolved to a great degree by the alternate-present series The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It is shown there that pro-Skynet and anti-Skynet forces have been planted throughout history, each trying to either prevent or promote the Robot Apocalypse. Every time someone prevents Skynet from being built, someone else creates the perfect environment for it to be created in some other way. The only question remaining is why are the only two constants in this equation John Connor and some Austrian bodybuilder.

Isn't this trope subjective, by this Wiki's current definition? It is, after all, based on audience reaction.

I think it's best to remove the second paragraph about the Yu Yu Hakusho anime/manga.

This was made even worse by the fact that the manga's ending reveals that demons aren't really all that violent, and many of the ones that had attacked humans over the years were brainwashed by King Enma so that he could look effective. The anime took the more reasonable "demons ARE violent but are capable of working toward peace with humans, and vice-versa."

Yusuke ends up rescuing a whole race that had been framed for crimes they didn't commit and oppressed for thousands of years. Thanks to him, innocent people can now finally live in peace without being kidnapped, brainwashed and murdered just because of what they are, it's an awesome accomplishment. How is that a Shoot The Shaggy Dog example? Just because the people in question are not human?