Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 3,37 (click to see context) from:
# TheTwilightZone1959.TropesQToZ: Especially heartbreaking in "The Time Element" because Peter Jenson not only is unable to prevent the death of a young couple (oh, and prevent the mass death and disaster at Pearl Harbor), he also gets himself killed and part of his life erased from existence as well. This episode not only shot the shaggy dog, it skinned and made it into a floor rug. Nonlethal version in "The Big Tall Wish". "It's a Good Life". No, it isn't!
# VisualNovel.{{Island}}: TheEndingChangesEverything: After Sestuna finally gains enough Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, it's revealed near the very end of the story that he's never been time traveling after all, just taking The Slow Path in a universe in which events find a way to closely repeat themselves given enough time. This twist was cited as ruining the entire story for fans of the anime in particular for its seemingly unintentional ShootTheShaggyDog nature, especially since there's no time left in the story to deal with the consequences by that point.
# Memes.{{Rugrats}}: People making chocolate pudding at 4 in the morning because they've lost control of their lives. Some even think of it as a mid-life crisis.Explanation From "Angelica Breaks A Leg", Angelica takes the hospitality of the Pickles to the breaking point for Stu. Oh, as for the pudding? She wasn't hungry anymore. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" CERTAIN DELICIOUSNESS! SUPER CHOCOLATE PUDDING GIGA SPOON BREAKAHHHH!!!
# YMMV.ASongOfIceAndFire: Quentyn Martell. While some readers find him interesting and his story arc as a great deconstruction of a hero's journey, others find him boring and overly idealistic, and thus find his story arc as ShootTheShaggyDog and a complete waste of time.
# Film.KamenRiderZeroOneOthersVulcanValkyrie: Lyon Arkland (the Big Bad of the previous film) dies without being able to mass-produce the Solds he wanted to enter the global arms-race with. He DID however accomplish his goal of turning the members of Metsubojinrai into the engineered threat he wanted said Solds to fight, claiming the lives of most of the season's heroes by proxy of the insane Mechanical Abomination he turned the Humagears into doing it for him. For bonus points, the entire incident sours the relations between man and machine the heroes have been fighting to establish all season, with the government itself planning to crack down once again on A.I..
# Film.Cube2Hypercube: After many perils, the main heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
# VideoGame.LaPucelle: The Overlord Ending, in which Prier fights through the demonic hordes of the Dark World only to kill one too many demons and turn into a Demonic Overlord herself. This causes all of her friends and allies to leave her, alone and trapped in the Dark World with nothing but a sexy new makeover to show for it. Worse, this ending is canon: Overlord Prier makes cameos in every other Nippon Ichi game, and the Updated Re-release has an entire bonus story based upon what happens next.
# Literature.TheLuminaries: The end of Sook Yongsheng's quest for revenge against Francis Carver. He's shot dead by George Shepard without ever confronting Carver in person.
# Characters.ChainsawManDevilsAndFiends: Owing to Aki being a deconstruction of the Stock Shōnen Rival, his entire arc in the story ends on a downer note. He's so driven by his goal of killing the Gun Devil that he ultimately loses the majority of people he cares for and sacrifices both his body and lifespan to see his goal through. He does all of this only to learn that the Gun Devil had already been defeated and he later gets used as a pawn by the woman he seemingly loves and possessed by the Gun Devil, becoming the very monster he had been hunting.
# Fridge.TheAvengersEarthsMightiestHeroes: The Skrulls came to Earth because their homeworld was destroyed by Galactus. Considering that Galactus showed up not too long afterward, that pretty much mean the entire purpose of the Skrull invasion would have been one massive ShootTheShaggyDog incident for them, especially if they succeeded in getting rid of Iron Man and the Fantastic Four before his arrival.
# Literature.SpoonRiverAnthology: Minerva Jones' story. She's bullied because of her appearance, raped by Butch Weldy, and finally dies as a result of a botched abortion.
# AnyoneCanDie.VideoGames: Regardless of how long they survive or how important they are to the narrative, no less than seventy percent of the NPCs are capable of perishing depending on how (or if) you complete their sidequests. Frustratingly, many of them die after you spent hours doing their sidequests, and some characters like Blaidd and Sir Gideon Ofnir are killed by your very own hand. And then there's the Frenzied Flame ending, where you can choose to set the whole world on fire.
# CobraKai.TropesIToR: Deconstructed with Kreese's flashbacks in Season 3. Kreese joined the army and shipped out to Vietnam with good intentions, wanting to serve his country and be a hero. He and his squad were captured by the Vietnamese and put in a nightmarish prisoner camp where they were forced to fight each other to the death when Kreese refused to set off a bomb and blow up their mission target because his friend Ponytail was too close and would have been killed. To make matters worse, Ponytail was killed minutes later anyway. Then Kreese discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a car crash while he was away. All of these experiences led Kreese to adopting the worldview that mercy and altruism are a weakness, and all that matters is who is strong and weak, turning him into the violent sociopath he is in the present.
# VideoGame.Portal1: GLaDOS originally tries to kill Chell in the final test chamber. The revised ending also shows that Chell is going to be dragged into another "test", so her escape attempt was still a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
# Recap.SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E3TheBullyJustOneBite: By way of a Hope Spot. Downplayed in that SpongeBob managed to survive his assailant, but that doesn't stop Mrs. Puff from thinking that he beat up Flats, who she thinks is innocent because Adults Are Useless in this story, resulting in her claiming that she's going to kick SpongeBob's butt. All the pain and suffering SpongeBob tried to avoid is still going to happen, if not even worse because adults are more seasoned than students.
# Fanfic.{{Pokedex}}: The ending of ''The Saga of the Great Pod" is like this, unsurprisingly given the nihilistic author.
# VideoGame.TheOverseerSeries: The bonus dungeon in the North Road is this — a Harder Than Hard gauntlet that pits you against waves of high-level creatures, including Deathclaws (and variants), Cazadores, and more, that you ostensibly follow because you're trying to find a missing adventurer who may have high-level loot on him. Once you reach the end, you find... nothing except a note (with the adventurer's body) functionally laughing at the player for wasting all their time carving through enemies for no reward at all.
# Characters.MassEffectCommanderShepard: In 3, Renegade Shepard seems to go through allies even faster than the Reapers, personally killing Mordin, Wrex (if he survived the first game), Legion, and Ashley/Kaidan. If you count preventable suicides, you can add Tali and Samara to that list, as well (and you can render Samara's suicide entirely pointless by killing the last of her daughters immediately after). Deaths by omission/neglect include Miranda, Jack, and Kelly Chambers. And so on.
# Manga.DeathNote: Light is killed by Ryuk, having been exposed as Kira, after so many people have been pointlessly killed. The world is rotten again, and nothing's been accomplished.
# Film.ThirteenDays: Discussed — Bobby at one point explains the rather detailed process of how important government officials and their families would be evacuated from Washington should missile launch be detected in Cuba, then ends with this: Bobby: Of course, that's for morale. Missiles only take five minutes to get here.
# Characters.TwistedMetal: He finds out in the end that he's an undercover FBI agent, and saved dozens of lives in a bombing incident. He is, in fact, a hero... and he's standing in front of one of the world's most wanted criminals, who shoots him dead.
# Film.WonderWomen: The film ends with Harber being surrounded by a bunch of vengeful action floozies, one of whom is his Love Interest, who aims his own hand-cannon at him. Presumably he will be killed imminently, but judging by his lustful smile, he apparently thinks it's orgy time. Tsu: (voiceover) Goodbye, Mr. Harber. Like all great minds, we cannot avoid our destiny. (Screen fades to black.) Kevin: Yes, this truly was a tale of great minds.
# BrokenBase.TalesSeries: More recently, there has been a been a bit of a divide between fans who like the darker stories and bittersweet or even downer endings that more recent games have had, and fans who feel that the series is getting too dark to be enjoyable and that the unhappy endings make the stories feel pointless, and would prefer the series go back to having lighter stories and unambiguously happy endings.
# Characters.HarryPotterSiriusBlack: No pun intended. After breaking out of prison, Sirius is instead placed under virtual house arrest in his horrible childhood home with most of his colleagues on field duty, and Harry in Hogwarts with only a bitter old House-Elf for regular company. He dies in battle before his name is cleared out of a mix of lack of field experience and Suicidal Overconfidence and does not play a major role in helping Harry achieve his destiny. His mistakes with Kreacher are cited by Hermione as a cautionary tale instead.
# VideoGame.RaySeries: RayStorm's Extra Mode ending seems like it's a Bittersweet Ending, with the enemy forces (and billions of inhabitants, many of which were from Earth) being destroyed by having their capital colony dropped into a gas giant. While your badly damaged ship moves away into the distance. If you're playing on the 13-Ship Mode, the ending goes From Bad to Worse when you see this text after the credits: Earth and Secilia have vanished. Likewise, those that developed the "RAY" technology and all evidence of its existence have been wiped away. No record of R-GRAY craft was found, and no R-GRAY craft has ever returned. RayForce and RayCrisis are considered downer endings also, due to the former having the heroine's fighter being damaged beyond repair at the end after destroying the Earth and the latter being Doomed by Canon since it is a prequel to RayForce and all of your efforts to disable Con-Human being pointless until the events of RayForce.
# Film.RosemarysBaby: Rosemary becomes suspicious of her husband and the neighbors he's befriended and tries to protect her unborn baby from them. Everyone who is inclined to help her dies or is horribly injured. She discovers her suspicions are all too horribly true - in fact, worse, because she thinks they're "only" going to sacrifice her baby - and tries to escape, but fails. She births the antichrist, and it falls directly into the hands of Satanists.
# TearJerker.MegaManX: Vile's death at the end of Maverick Hunter X in Vile Mode. ShootTheShaggyDog doesn't even begin to cover it.
# Funny.SomeJerkWithACamera: "ABC Goes to DisneyLAND!"
# YMMV.JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind: Risotto Nero fell into a life of crime due to tragic circumstances, yet he and his team never got any respect from the Boss, and just keeps losing his teammates one by one. He then dies an ultimately futile and unfortunate death just as he was about to kill the Boss. Despite all that, he keeps his emotions under a stone cold façade to the very end.
# Recap.SCPFoundationSCPs2500To2999: Assuming that SCP-2718 is merely a cognitohazard that causes you to believe it or makes it the afterlife of those exposed, then O5-7 unwittingly doomed who know how many to eternal agony for nothing by writing the only remaining vector for it, only realizing the possibility after they've already put it down in an impossible to revise/edit/delete document.
# NotAllowedToGrowUp.ComicBooks: There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by the time he changed his name to Nightwing. Jack Kirby had officially aged Jimmy Olsen to 21 in the 1970s. And Supergirl had gone from a little teenybopper to a full-grown young woman by the '80s. After the Crisis, though, Jimmy got turned back into a kid, while Dick got to stay an adult, and poor Kara got erased from existence.
# SarcasmBlind.VideoGames: Undead Nightmare once again features the omni-bigot Conspiracy Theorist and memetic Large Ham Herbert Moon, who blames a broad yet bizarrely specific cabal of groups for the undead plague. John Marston, Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, piles sarcasm onto Moon for his irrational hate, which Herbert mistakes for support for his righteous cause to single-handedly stop the undead plague and bring down the conspiracy. Herbert Moon is promptly eaten by zombies seconds after he steps out of his store.
# Fanfic.PaperAndSand: Any attempt to end the Cycle and kill Scion is ultimately this. Anytime someone does succeed in killing Scion, Eden transforms the individual into an Endbringer and then turns back the clock.
# Series.TheIncreasinglyPoorDecisionsOfToddMargaret: Alice dies suddenly, making the whole romantic subplot moot.
# Film.PromisingYoungWoman: Subverted. Al murders Cassie and Ryan lies to the police to make them think it was a suicide, but the last scene exposes them and sees Al arrested for Cassie’s murder.
# VisualNovel.{{Island}}: TheEndingChangesEverything: After Sestuna finally gains enough Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, it's revealed near the very end of the story that he's never been time traveling after all, just taking The Slow Path in a universe in which events find a way to closely repeat themselves given enough time. This twist was cited as ruining the entire story for fans of the anime in particular for its seemingly unintentional ShootTheShaggyDog nature, especially since there's no time left in the story to deal with the consequences by that point.
# Memes.{{Rugrats}}: People making chocolate pudding at 4 in the morning because they've lost control of their lives. Some even think of it as a mid-life crisis.Explanation From "Angelica Breaks A Leg", Angelica takes the hospitality of the Pickles to the breaking point for Stu. Oh, as for the pudding? She wasn't hungry anymore. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" CERTAIN DELICIOUSNESS! SUPER CHOCOLATE PUDDING GIGA SPOON BREAKAHHHH!!!
# YMMV.ASongOfIceAndFire: Quentyn Martell. While some readers find him interesting and his story arc as a great deconstruction of a hero's journey, others find him boring and overly idealistic, and thus find his story arc as ShootTheShaggyDog and a complete waste of time.
# Film.KamenRiderZeroOneOthersVulcanValkyrie: Lyon Arkland (the Big Bad of the previous film) dies without being able to mass-produce the Solds he wanted to enter the global arms-race with. He DID however accomplish his goal of turning the members of Metsubojinrai into the engineered threat he wanted said Solds to fight, claiming the lives of most of the season's heroes by proxy of the insane Mechanical Abomination he turned the Humagears into doing it for him. For bonus points, the entire incident sours the relations between man and machine the heroes have been fighting to establish all season, with the government itself planning to crack down once again on A.I..
# Film.Cube2Hypercube: After many perils, the main heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
# VideoGame.LaPucelle: The Overlord Ending, in which Prier fights through the demonic hordes of the Dark World only to kill one too many demons and turn into a Demonic Overlord herself. This causes all of her friends and allies to leave her, alone and trapped in the Dark World with nothing but a sexy new makeover to show for it. Worse, this ending is canon: Overlord Prier makes cameos in every other Nippon Ichi game, and the Updated Re-release has an entire bonus story based upon what happens next.
# Literature.TheLuminaries: The end of Sook Yongsheng's quest for revenge against Francis Carver. He's shot dead by George Shepard without ever confronting Carver in person.
# Characters.ChainsawManDevilsAndFiends: Owing to Aki being a deconstruction of the Stock Shōnen Rival, his entire arc in the story ends on a downer note. He's so driven by his goal of killing the Gun Devil that he ultimately loses the majority of people he cares for and sacrifices both his body and lifespan to see his goal through. He does all of this only to learn that the Gun Devil had already been defeated and he later gets used as a pawn by the woman he seemingly loves and possessed by the Gun Devil, becoming the very monster he had been hunting.
# Fridge.TheAvengersEarthsMightiestHeroes: The Skrulls came to Earth because their homeworld was destroyed by Galactus. Considering that Galactus showed up not too long afterward, that pretty much mean the entire purpose of the Skrull invasion would have been one massive ShootTheShaggyDog incident for them, especially if they succeeded in getting rid of Iron Man and the Fantastic Four before his arrival.
# Literature.SpoonRiverAnthology: Minerva Jones' story. She's bullied because of her appearance, raped by Butch Weldy, and finally dies as a result of a botched abortion.
# AnyoneCanDie.VideoGames: Regardless of how long they survive or how important they are to the narrative, no less than seventy percent of the NPCs are capable of perishing depending on how (or if) you complete their sidequests. Frustratingly, many of them die after you spent hours doing their sidequests, and some characters like Blaidd and Sir Gideon Ofnir are killed by your very own hand. And then there's the Frenzied Flame ending, where you can choose to set the whole world on fire.
# CobraKai.TropesIToR: Deconstructed with Kreese's flashbacks in Season 3. Kreese joined the army and shipped out to Vietnam with good intentions, wanting to serve his country and be a hero. He and his squad were captured by the Vietnamese and put in a nightmarish prisoner camp where they were forced to fight each other to the death when Kreese refused to set off a bomb and blow up their mission target because his friend Ponytail was too close and would have been killed. To make matters worse, Ponytail was killed minutes later anyway. Then Kreese discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a car crash while he was away. All of these experiences led Kreese to adopting the worldview that mercy and altruism are a weakness, and all that matters is who is strong and weak, turning him into the violent sociopath he is in the present.
# VideoGame.Portal1: GLaDOS originally tries to kill Chell in the final test chamber. The revised ending also shows that Chell is going to be dragged into another "test", so her escape attempt was still a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
# Recap.SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E3TheBullyJustOneBite: By way of a Hope Spot. Downplayed in that SpongeBob managed to survive his assailant, but that doesn't stop Mrs. Puff from thinking that he beat up Flats, who she thinks is innocent because Adults Are Useless in this story, resulting in her claiming that she's going to kick SpongeBob's butt. All the pain and suffering SpongeBob tried to avoid is still going to happen, if not even worse because adults are more seasoned than students.
# Fanfic.{{Pokedex}}: The ending of ''The Saga of the Great Pod" is like this, unsurprisingly given the nihilistic author.
# VideoGame.TheOverseerSeries: The bonus dungeon in the North Road is this — a Harder Than Hard gauntlet that pits you against waves of high-level creatures, including Deathclaws (and variants), Cazadores, and more, that you ostensibly follow because you're trying to find a missing adventurer who may have high-level loot on him. Once you reach the end, you find... nothing except a note (with the adventurer's body) functionally laughing at the player for wasting all their time carving through enemies for no reward at all.
# Characters.MassEffectCommanderShepard: In 3, Renegade Shepard seems to go through allies even faster than the Reapers, personally killing Mordin, Wrex (if he survived the first game), Legion, and Ashley/Kaidan. If you count preventable suicides, you can add Tali and Samara to that list, as well (and you can render Samara's suicide entirely pointless by killing the last of her daughters immediately after). Deaths by omission/neglect include Miranda, Jack, and Kelly Chambers. And so on.
# Manga.DeathNote: Light is killed by Ryuk, having been exposed as Kira, after so many people have been pointlessly killed. The world is rotten again, and nothing's been accomplished.
# Film.ThirteenDays: Discussed — Bobby at one point explains the rather detailed process of how important government officials and their families would be evacuated from Washington should missile launch be detected in Cuba, then ends with this: Bobby: Of course, that's for morale. Missiles only take five minutes to get here.
# Characters.TwistedMetal: He finds out in the end that he's an undercover FBI agent, and saved dozens of lives in a bombing incident. He is, in fact, a hero... and he's standing in front of one of the world's most wanted criminals, who shoots him dead.
# Film.WonderWomen: The film ends with Harber being surrounded by a bunch of vengeful action floozies, one of whom is his Love Interest, who aims his own hand-cannon at him. Presumably he will be killed imminently, but judging by his lustful smile, he apparently thinks it's orgy time. Tsu: (voiceover) Goodbye, Mr. Harber. Like all great minds, we cannot avoid our destiny. (Screen fades to black.) Kevin: Yes, this truly was a tale of great minds.
# BrokenBase.TalesSeries: More recently, there has been a been a bit of a divide between fans who like the darker stories and bittersweet or even downer endings that more recent games have had, and fans who feel that the series is getting too dark to be enjoyable and that the unhappy endings make the stories feel pointless, and would prefer the series go back to having lighter stories and unambiguously happy endings.
# Characters.HarryPotterSiriusBlack: No pun intended. After breaking out of prison, Sirius is instead placed under virtual house arrest in his horrible childhood home with most of his colleagues on field duty, and Harry in Hogwarts with only a bitter old House-Elf for regular company. He dies in battle before his name is cleared out of a mix of lack of field experience and Suicidal Overconfidence and does not play a major role in helping Harry achieve his destiny. His mistakes with Kreacher are cited by Hermione as a cautionary tale instead.
# VideoGame.RaySeries: RayStorm's Extra Mode ending seems like it's a Bittersweet Ending, with the enemy forces (and billions of inhabitants, many of which were from Earth) being destroyed by having their capital colony dropped into a gas giant. While your badly damaged ship moves away into the distance. If you're playing on the 13-Ship Mode, the ending goes From Bad to Worse when you see this text after the credits: Earth and Secilia have vanished. Likewise, those that developed the "RAY" technology and all evidence of its existence have been wiped away. No record of R-GRAY craft was found, and no R-GRAY craft has ever returned. RayForce and RayCrisis are considered downer endings also, due to the former having the heroine's fighter being damaged beyond repair at the end after destroying the Earth and the latter being Doomed by Canon since it is a prequel to RayForce and all of your efforts to disable Con-Human being pointless until the events of RayForce.
# Film.RosemarysBaby: Rosemary becomes suspicious of her husband and the neighbors he's befriended and tries to protect her unborn baby from them. Everyone who is inclined to help her dies or is horribly injured. She discovers her suspicions are all too horribly true - in fact, worse, because she thinks they're "only" going to sacrifice her baby - and tries to escape, but fails. She births the antichrist, and it falls directly into the hands of Satanists.
# TearJerker.MegaManX: Vile's death at the end of Maverick Hunter X in Vile Mode. ShootTheShaggyDog doesn't even begin to cover it.
# Funny.SomeJerkWithACamera: "ABC Goes to DisneyLAND!"
# YMMV.JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind: Risotto Nero fell into a life of crime due to tragic circumstances, yet he and his team never got any respect from the Boss, and just keeps losing his teammates one by one. He then dies an ultimately futile and unfortunate death just as he was about to kill the Boss. Despite all that, he keeps his emotions under a stone cold façade to the very end.
# Recap.SCPFoundationSCPs2500To2999: Assuming that SCP-2718 is merely a cognitohazard that causes you to believe it or makes it the afterlife of those exposed, then O5-7 unwittingly doomed who know how many to eternal agony for nothing by writing the only remaining vector for it, only realizing the possibility after they've already put it down in an impossible to revise/edit/delete document.
# NotAllowedToGrowUp.ComicBooks: There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by the time he changed his name to Nightwing. Jack Kirby had officially aged Jimmy Olsen to 21 in the 1970s. And Supergirl had gone from a little teenybopper to a full-grown young woman by the '80s. After the Crisis, though, Jimmy got turned back into a kid, while Dick got to stay an adult, and poor Kara got erased from existence.
# SarcasmBlind.VideoGames: Undead Nightmare once again features the omni-bigot Conspiracy Theorist and memetic Large Ham Herbert Moon, who blames a broad yet bizarrely specific cabal of groups for the undead plague. John Marston, Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, piles sarcasm onto Moon for his irrational hate, which Herbert mistakes for support for his righteous cause to single-handedly stop the undead plague and bring down the conspiracy. Herbert Moon is promptly eaten by zombies seconds after he steps out of his store.
# Fanfic.PaperAndSand: Any attempt to end the Cycle and kill Scion is ultimately this. Anytime someone does succeed in killing Scion, Eden transforms the individual into an Endbringer and then turns back the clock.
# Series.TheIncreasinglyPoorDecisionsOfToddMargaret: Alice dies suddenly, making the whole romantic subplot moot.
# Film.PromisingYoungWoman: Subverted. Al murders Cassie and Ryan lies to the police to make them think it was a suicide, but the last scene exposes them and sees Al arrested for Cassie’s murder.
to:
# TheTwilightZone1959.TropesQToZ: VideoGame.DetroitBecomeHuman: Kara's storyline can end as this, as Alice can die just after they crossed the border to Canada. Kara can choose to either shut down herself or move on without Alice (which she does very reluctantly). Especially heartbreaking if the revolution otherwise succeeds, as in "The Time Element" that case Kara could just as well have been able to hide in the city until things get resolved.
# Anime.UnderTheDog: ShaggyDogStory: The OVA is ultimately this. Hana is killed by Anthea at the former's request before her Pandoraization rate becomes too high to continue protecting Nanase, resulting in Hana's family being killed. Her last words to Anthea are to continue protecting Nanase. However, when Anthea catches up with him it turns out he's not the kind of candidate they are looking for, so Anthea kills him as well, [[ShootTheShaggyDog making all of the tragic events of the OVA completely and utterly pointless]].
# Webcomic.CwensQuest: Cwen has spent most of her life plotting revenge against her father. While her previous accomplishments haven't been rendered entirely meaningless, the fact remains that her father's Jerkass behavior finally caught up to him shortly before she was ready to wreak her own vengeance.
# WMG.AdventureTime1: For extra sadness, [[ShootTheShaggyDog Marceline will try to tell him that since becoming the vampire queen, she doesn't need protection from what he's trying to save her from.]]
# Awesome.IshStateExperiments: The fact that some players managed to build a working flying machine to get off of the island. Despite most of the group falling off of the plane and into the void, as revealed by Word of Saint Paul, one player managed to survive and reach the edge of the map. [[ShootTheShaggyDog Unfortunately, he was doomed to die by the next event, which required him to sacrifice something to the center of the map, after he had dismantled the flying machine.]]
# CrapsackWorld.ComicBooks: The world of Ruins, an alternate universe Anti-Marvels. Wolverine is dying of adamantium poisoning, Bruce Banner is a mass of tumors, the X-Men have all been imprisoned and experimented on by President Xavier, and Nick Fury is a crazy survivalist who was taught cannibalism by Captain America. After Phil Sheldon has investigated all this, trying to find out what's wrong with the world, [[ShootTheShaggyDog he dies of radiation poisoning]], because PeterJenson not only is unable Parker got a type of infectious cancer from his spider bite instead of superpowers. Would you be surprised to prevent learn it was written by Warren Ellis?
# Trivia.TheWalkingDead2010: According to Talking Dead, Otis was the one who found and corralled the undead Sophia into Hershel's barn, but Shane killed Otis before Otis knew of a missing girl in the group, meaning that the whole search and Daryl's near deathof a young couple (oh, was all [[ShootTheShaggyDog for naught]].
# Film.TheSkeletonKey: The heroes accomplish absolutely nothing, andprevent in the mass death end, they suffer the same fate as all the other victims.
# Literature.LikeWaterForChocolate: After waiting for Mama Elena anddisaster at Pearl Harbor), he also gets Rosaura to die and Esperanza to grow up and get married before they can be together, Pedro goes Out with a Bang and Tita is Driven to Suicide.
# Recap.TheWalkingDeadS10E12WalkWithUs: Earl kills himself by driving his head into a spike so that he won’t reanimate and endanger the kids in the cabin with him. Unfortunately, he failed to destroy his brain, and he reanimates later when the kids are all asleep. Thankfully, the very competent Judith is there to put him down, but nonetheless, poor Earl failed at what he was trying to do.
# TearJerker.PrideOfBaghdad: ''Index entry or ZCE''
# YMMV.DraggedAcrossConcrete: BrokenBase: Kelly Summer's storyline, specifically her abrupt, [[ShootTheShaggyDog tragic fate]]. It's either an effective and somber way of humanizing Vogelmann's victims and reinforcing the movie's incredibly bleak look at the consequences of crime, or it's a tacked-on and gratuitously cruel attempt at establishing the villains' cruelty that clogs up the runtime considering she is never addressed or referenced again following her death.
# Series.Touch2012: Subverted. Lucy, Martin, and Jake all succeed in rescuing Amelia from Aster Corps after spending half of Season 2 looking for her, but shortly afterwards, Lucy is killed, not Amelia.
# Characters.SurvivorGameChangers: Came back because of his Could Have Been A Contender situation in his first season. A big deal was made of his getting to show off his strategic chops. He was reunited with his close friend at the merge, as well as fellow alumna Debbie, only to be voted out third for being a threat.
# YMMV.MegaManMegamix: In Shadow Man's opinion, Blues' actions during The Greatest Enemy In History were far over the line. After Shadow Man, whose main trait until this point was loyalty to Dr. Wily's orders (he is a Ninja, after all), went against his orders to use the confusion of Roll telling both Mega-Men to stop fighting to rescue Copy Mega-Man and give him a fairly heartwarming talk about how he could become his own person with his own life, realizing that the whole thing was a ShootTheShaggyDog because Blues had set him up to commit suicide via Heroic Sacrifice was unforgivable.
# Characters.BoardwalkEmpireNuckysOrganization: He barely survives his gunshot wound in "Two Impostors", only to commit suicide 5 episodes after (10 months, chronologically).
# ThatOneLevel.ActionAdventure: Chapter 11: Keep Moving. One of your allies whom you just met takes a bullet before the level starts, and you are forced to spend the majority of it carrying him along, limiting your combat options to your pistol and preventing you from taking cover, all while being flanked from every vantage point you can see and with dwindling pistol ammo reserves on higher difficulties. Even more insulting, once you make it through this section, the game has the escortee [[ShootTheShaggyDog killed off]] anyways by the Big Bad in a cutscene. Great.
# Literature.JudeTheObscure: Poor Jude. As a child, he thinks it would be better had he never been born, andpart by the end of the book, he may as well not have been. He never realises his life erased from existence as well. This dreams of going to the university at Christminster or entering the clergy, his children all pre-decease him, the girl he loves returns to her unhappy marriage with his former role model, and his wife is already eyeing her next conquest before his dead body has gone cold. Jude the obscure, indeed.
# Film.HalloweenResurrection: Myers finally kills Laurie along with several Red Shirt characters, and he's still Not Quite Dead at the end.
# YMMV.{{Texhnolyze}}: AngstAversion: The main reason why a lot of people don't end up watching this show. It contains brutal violence, no entirely sympathetic characters, pretty much no humor or lighter moments whatsoever, one of the most bleak and cynical views of humanity to ever be portrayed in an anime series, and unabashedly heads towards one of the biggest ShootTheShaggyDog endings without ever promising otherwise. It's no wonder that when people read up on it consisting of all of these things, they don't want to put themselves through it.
# Series.TheRanch2016: An in-universe example. Heather tells the story of a calf she owned called Dairy Potter. The calf became very sick and nearly died, but Heather managed to nurse it back to health. Shortly afterward, the calf was killed by a mountain lion.
# Literature.SlaughterhouseFive: Considering that Billy can see how everything ends, it's easy for him to take this view.
# Funny.FriskyDingo: Almost the entire episodenot only in which the Xtacles attempt to pass Nearl off as Xander Crews, with the highlight being either "Elephant showers with their noses!", "[[ShootTheShaggyDog It's complicated enough without all the evil twin bullshit having,]]" or the entire Flowers For Algernon/Harrison Bergeron/Tom Bergeron/Agamemnon exchange."I'm gonna kill Babar!"
# SelfDemonstrating.DoctorDoom: After she finally brought her father back and got reunited with her former lover, Doom killed Cassandra Lang, Kristoff Vernard's former best friend.
# Film.FiveBrandedWomen: Jovanka and Daniza accomplish nothing, Daniza being killed by the partisans and Jovanka implied to eventually die when the soldiers reach the trench.
# VideoGame.XolgaAndMrToko: The first series has a lot of these. First we have episode four, when despite the duo's efforts to prove him innocent, Ferris is found guilty of murder and imprisoned. Next we have episode six, that has Mr.Toko's friend Austin getting shot right after they both escape from theshaggy dog, Organisation. Finally, the entire series seems to be one for Xolga after the pendant tells him that their human bodies have been 'eaten' by it skinned and made it into a floor rug. Nonlethal version they're stuck in "The Big Tall Wish". "It's their current forms forever.
# WebVideo.SuperEyepatchWolf: This was his experience with Fear & Hunger. Across countless hours and countless deaths, John slowly comes to understand the dungeon and its obtuse, punishing mechanics more and more, and gradually uncovers secrets that help him to push forward further and further, until he ultimately finds himself standing before aGood Life". No, it isn't!
glowing abyss in another plane of reality, from which emerges an unfathomable eldritch god. Roaring in defiance, he steels his beaten and broken body for one final battle... and the beast swats him aside with a single tentacle, killing him instantly and sending him right back to the title screen.
# VisualNovel.{{Island}}: TheEndingChangesEverything: After Sestuna finally gains enough Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory ZeroTimeDilemma: KickTheDog: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, establish himself as a jerk, Delta [[ShootTheShaggyDog murders Gab]], the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealed near that the very protagonists must abandon this timeline minutes before the entire shelter is destroyed if they want to survive, and they (as well as the player) would otherwise be responsible for Gab's death. Though given Zero's vast resources it wouldn't have been impossible for him to build a way for Gab to escape, but that would require more compassion than Zero is capable of.
# Characters.ArkhamHorrorTheCardGameCampaignCharacters: His quest to reach Kadath and find the Gods reveals that the mountain is long-abandoned, while Virgil himself gets unceremoniously killed by Nyarlathothep.
# Recap.DoctorWhoS29E13LastOfTheTimeLords: The final fate of the entire human race at the end of thestory universe is despair and death. There was no Utopia. They turned inwards and turned themselves into mentally regressed heads in spheres; basically dead.
# TearJerker.TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye: Shock's mournful monologue to Ore's corpse was really touching, even if they were both just a bunch of throwaway guys. [[ShootTheShaggyDog And then the Sparkeater kills him]]. Shock: As the saying goes, "You flare, you flicker, you fade." Yeah—and the world's a darker place without you, buddy.
# TheBadGuyWins.LiveActionTV: "The Tale of the Pinball Wizard". Ross seemingly wins the game, only to find that he'snever been time traveling after all, [[ShootTheShaggyDog trapped and doomed to replay it forever]].
# Funny.TheAmazingWorldOfGumballSeason5: Darwin just puts the suitcase containing the money back inside the bank. The police think it's dangerous [[ShootTheShaggyDog and blow it up]]. Defeated, Gumball declares "Well, we tried."
# Anime.DragonBallZTheHistoryOfTrunks: HeroicSacrifice: Deconstructed. Gohan knocks out Trunks to prevent him from takingThe Slow Path in a universe in which events find a way to closely repeat themselves given enough time. This twist was cited as ruining on the entire story for fans of the anime in particular for its seemingly unintentional ShootTheShaggyDog nature, especially since there's no time left in the story to deal Androids with the consequences by that point.
# Memes.{{Rugrats}}: People making chocolate pudding at 4 in the morninghimself and risk dying. But because they've lost control of their lives. Some he goes alone it makes it even think of it as a mid-life crisis.Explanation From "Angelica Breaks A Leg", Angelica takes the hospitality of the Pickles to the breaking point for Stu. Oh, as easier for the pudding? She Androids to kill Gohan, and he wasn't hungry anymore. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" CERTAIN DELICIOUSNESS! SUPER CHOCOLATE PUDDING GIGA SPOON BREAKAHHHH!!!
# YMMV.ASongOfIceAndFire: Quentyn Martell. While some readers find him interestingexactly putting up much a fight prior to confronting the Androids alone. And because Gohan dies, it only make the job of defeating the Androids an even more impossible task. And with no one to train Trunks anymore, it take years before Trunks feels strong enough through his own self training methods to take on the Androids again… [[ShootTheShaggyDog and his story arc as a great deconstruction of a hero's journey, others find him boring he still loses and overly idealistic, and thus find his story arc as ShootTheShaggyDog and a complete waste of time.
very badly]].
# Film.KamenRiderZeroOneOthersVulcanValkyrie: Lyon Arkland (the Big Bad of FinalDestination: PrimalFear: This film series is built around the previous film) dies without fear of being able to mass-produce hunted down by the Solds Grim Reaper until he wanted catches up to enter the global arms-race with. He DID however accomplish his goal of turning the members of Metsubojinrai into the engineered threat he wanted said Solds to fight, claiming the lives of most of the season's heroes by proxy of the insane Mechanical Abomination he turned the Humagears into doing it for him. For bonus points, the entire incident sours the relations between man and machine the heroes those who have been fighting to establish all season, with escaped it and kills them in elaborate, agonizing ways. The inevitability of death is really emphasized because in this series, Death always wins and the government itself planning protagonists' efforts to crack down once again on A.I..
cheat it [[ShootTheShaggyDog are entirely pointless in the end]].
# Film.Cube2Hypercube: After many perils, the main heroine manages EscapeRoomTournamentOfChampions: ShaggyDogStory: Zoey and Ben have managed to escape Minos' escape rooms again, but at the maze but once her superior has received what she very end, they end up in yet another escape room. One, in which, they may not escape from this time.
# Characters.BigBrother14: She wassent permanently evicted in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
# VideoGame.LaPucelle: The Overlord Ending, in which Prier fights throughthe demonic hordes least amount of time of anybody to ever play the US run of the Dark World game. Not only to kill one too many demons and turn into a Demonic Overlord herself. This causes all of her friends and allies to leave her, alone and trapped did she do really bad in the Dark World with nothing first challenge, but a sexy new makeover Dan saw fit to show for it. evict her because she caused his team to come in last. Worse, this ending is canon: Overlord Prier makes cameos it was implied that houseguests evicted before the coaches chose to formally enter the game would have a chance to be polled by America to re-enter or compete to re-enter, which was scrubbed due to the twist being accepted, leaving the person who was most eager to be in every other Nippon Ichi game, the house stuck at home until Finale Night and a huge demand for her to return to the Updated Re-release has an entire bonus game someday.
# Characters.Fallout76: ShaggyDogStory: All of their efforts to rebuild West Virginia fail miserably due to the destruction of Charleston followed by the Scorched Plague. It would be a ShootTheShaggyDog storybased upon what happens next.
if not for the fact their vaccine against the Scorched Plague allows the Resident to stop them.
# Literature.TheLuminaries: TheGreatGatsby: Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy ends with her flatly rejecting him, thus rendering all of his work for nothing. And then he dies.
# Film.IShotJesseJames: Bob Ford never gets a chance to move on with his life, as his notorious reputation follows him wherever he goes. When he finally gets close to achieving what he wants, he loses the love of his life and dies in a gunfight.
# Manga.BlackJack: Black Jack often cures patient with difficult to impossible cases, only for them to be killed in some other fashion.
# SacrificialLion.VideoGames: Eternal Darkness is loaded with characters who could at least be considered this — within the [[ShootTheShaggyDog main cast]], no less! Theend of Sook Yongsheng's quest best cases can be made for revenge against Francis Carver. He's shot dead Anthony and Paul, who get arguably the most unpleasant ends out of the Chosen — and while most of the others' contribute to an overarching cause in a way that's acknowledged in following chapters, the plot significance of theirs is debatable.
# PapaWolf.RealLife: Leopoldo Narvaiz stabbed his ex girlfriend, 17 year old Shannon Mann, and her three siblings, 19 year old Jennifer, 15 year old Martha, and 11 year old Ernest, to death for refusing to rekindle a relationship. The siblings' father deliberately got himself arrested for an act of petty theft in order to kill him in jail, but [[ShootTheShaggyDog Narvaiz was moved to death row]] byGeorge Shepard without ever confronting Carver in person.
the time he was booked. Narvaiz was executed by the state of Texas a decade after the murders.
# Characters.ChainsawManDevilsAndFiends: Owing ArknightsNationsNToZ: She angrily tells W she'll never give Reunion any information, shortly before she goes off in disguise to Aki being a deconstruction of the Stock Shōnen Rival, his entire arc die fighting Rhodes Island, who was trying to rescue her in the story ends on a downer note. He's so driven by his goal of killing first place. In the Gun Devil that he ultimately loses the majority of people he cares for and sacrifices both his body and lifespan to see his goal through. He does all of this only to learn end, neither Reunion nor Rhodes Island got anything they wanted. It's such a "Shaggy Dog" Story that the Gun Devil had sheer pointlessness of all the deaths caused by the Misha rescue attempt leaves Amiya extremely emotionally disturbed afterward.
# Fanfic.TalesOfTermina: Link entered the lost woods to find Navi, by the time leaves he not only fails in finding her but ended up in a hellish time loop that took half a year to escape, greatly deteriorating his alreadybeen damaged psyche.
# Film.FunnyGames: Not only do all the sympathetic characters die, but this is neither the first nor last time that this exact scenario has played out for the killers. What's more, the rewind trick suggests that the chances of any future targets to survive are next to zero.
# Characters.{{Watchmen}}: All of his personality changes and different outlook on life is rendered meaningless as he's one of the millions killed by Ozymandias' plan.
# Film.DeadSnow: The whole movie is full of defeatedand he later gets used as efforts leading to Total Party Kill.
# YMMV.{{Milgram}}: Shidou is also apawn by notable example. While many seem to resent the woman he seemingly loves and possessed by the Gun Devil, becoming the very monster he had been hunting.
# Fridge.TheAvengersEarthsMightiestHeroes: The Skrulls came to Earthidea of forgiving him at all because their homeworld was destroyed by Galactus. Considering that Galactus showed up not too long afterward, that pretty much mean 1. his crimes were premeditated unlike many others and 2. he may have caused the entire purpose deaths of over 200 people (while most of the Skrull invasion other prisoners had a much more limited scope), he also has a large fanbase that either [[ShootTheShaggyDog find his motive tragic]], sympathize with him because of his willingness to atone via the death punishment, or...think he's hot.
# Characters.SuperCometAfterTheImpact: All of his efforts to find his family lead to him dying alone at the edge of the impact crater. It’s unclear whether his family is even still alive.
# VideoGame.FateUnlimitedCodes: DownerEnding: There are several of these, as well.Saber Alter's, for one: in the end, she personally killed Shirou and also somehow killed a physical manifestation of her un-corrupted side to allow Dark Sakura to take over the world/kill everything/whatever her objective wouldhave been one massive be after Shirou is dead. Kotomine's ending is just as bad. Sakura has one, as well. Bazett's is a ShootTheShaggyDog incident story. Dark Sakura's ending, which has her fully succumb to Angra Mainyu.
# TearJerker.{{Inscryption}}: Your last game with Magnificus isn't much better either. At the start, he seems to blame you for what is happening to Inscryption, calling you out while issuing an epic last challenge of wits against his opponent. He puts out other bombastic speeches, accusing you of not caring about his world being erased, while the game crumbles and breaks down around you... and then, by the end of the fight, it's shown that this is (possibly) an act: Similar to Leshy, Magnificus wanted to give the player one last game before being erased, and spends his last moments struggling to desperately shake your hand, but [[ShootTheShaggyDog he is deleted in front of you before he's near enough to do that]].
# WesternAnimation.{{Bilby}}: Fortunately subverted. It looks like the bilby's journey was All for Nothing when the albatross chick is snatched by an eagle - but the bilby gets dangerous and rescues the chick from the predator.
# Characters.{{Lkyt}}: ''Index entry or ZCE''
# TearJerker.DescendantsOfDarkness: Kazusa's death. That whole arc spent to protect her and she [[ShootTheShaggyDog dies anyway]]. Poor thing.
# PlayerPunch.RolePlayingGames: The bombardment of Taris, [[ShootTheShaggyDog making nearly everything you did there completely pointless]]. Mission's reaction supplies the page quote.
# Film.TheTraceyFragments: A scene near the end seems to strongly imply that Sonny drowned in a nearby lake while Tracey was hooking up with Billy, rendering her whole journey to find him completely pointless.
# Characters.BlackMirrorMenAgainstFire: Stripe does uncover the truth about the roaches, but has his memory erased and goes back to murdering them,especially if they succeeded meaning that he ends up exactly as he was at the beginning of the episode.
# YMMV.WhyCharlieBrownWhy: If you want to think of a reason why Janice doesn’t return after this, it's possible she [[ShootTheShaggyDog didn't actually overcome her cancer]]. The ending is somewhat ambiguous about this: it may be that the reason Janice's hair has grown back isn't because her cancer is ingetting rid remission, but that her and her family decided to end treatment and let the disease take its course rather than prolonging her pain.
# Funny.AchievementHunterGTAV2013To2015: Gavin's repeated stealing ofIron Man Michael's dump truck, which eventually results in Gavin crashing his helicopter, leaving the truck floating in the air. Once it finally returns to earth, Gavin and an incredibly frustrated Michael, attempt to drive the immense truck through a series of narrow, winding streets to their destination, only for Gavin to run over Michael [[ShootTheShaggyDog and the Fantastic Four before truck to inexplicably blow up]].
# VideoGame.BatmanArkhamCity: ShootingSuperman: Some of the Penguin's goons mention offhand that Cobblepot dangled one of hisarrival.
hostages over a pit of rats, but for some reason the guy managed to last days without being harmed. It makes sense knowing that one of his prisoners was Otis Flannegan, a.k.a. "Ratcatcher". Eventually, Penguin lost patience and [[ShootTheShaggyDog dropped him into Tiny's tank instead]].
# Characters.ElenaOfAvalorCivilians: SkewedPriorities: He and Mateo are too preoccupied with catching up with each other on magic techniques to the point of singing a song, ignoring that he was running out of time to create a potion that would free him from his disintegrating book. They manage to free him in time... although [[ShootTheShaggyDog he ends up dead afterwards anyways]], so maybe he and Mateo had a point this time.
# Characters.PokemonDesolation: Him killing off Kuiki/Keegan. While it's unclear how he felt towards them and it's possible to read their actions as somewhat sympathetically, he still basically stole Keegan's life away from him, threw him away when he didn't need him anymore, let him be other people's problem for years, and then killed him off the second it was beneficial for him to do so.
# Film.TheBeastmaster: {{Jerkass}}: King Zed towards Dar, until he realized he's the son he lost. But then Maax [[ShootTheShaggyDog kills him]], spoiling any potential reunion.
# Literature.SpoonRiverAnthology: Minerva Jones' story. She's bullied because RedsARevolutionaryTimeline: Inspired by his cautious optimism towards Red America, George Orwell's stories are less soul-crushingly depressing. The Last Man in Europe, this timeline's version of her appearance, raped by Butch Weldy, and finally dies as a result Nineteen Eighty-Four, becomes less of a botched abortion.
ShootTheShaggyDog story as Winston Smith escapes to America and witnesses a debate in Times Square.
#AnyoneCanDie.Literature.HungoverAndHandcuffed: Mina spends the entirety of "Matamoros" trying to prevent a murder that's more or less inevitable by the time the story starts.
# LateToTheTragedy.VideoGames:Regardless of how long they survive or how important they are to Dead Space 3 has you arriving very late indeed, 200 years after the narrative, no less than seventy percent first expedition team to reach Tau Volantis. That team was even later, discovering the remains of an alien civilization wiped out millions of years ago. Dead Space 3's DLC, Awakened focuses on Isaac and Carver trying to get back to Earth to warn of the NPCs are capable impending party by the Brethren Moons. They arrive, [[ShootTheShaggyDog find absolutely ''no'' radio traffic from Earth, and the Brethren Moons showing themselves]].
# Farscape.TropesDToG: EverybodysDeadDave: The ending to "Different Destinations". What's worse, it's the heroes' fault due to changing history, and just to [[ShootTheShaggyDog twist the knife]], the "everybody" in question was a monastery full ofperishing depending on how (or if) you complete NURSES. With kids.
# YMMV.ChronoCross: FATE: "Now eliminating Prometheus." Prometheus is better known as Robo, your Robot Buddy party member from Chrono Trigger. Now, up until that one scene in Chronopolis, Robo had not appeared in Chrono Cross at all. He was not mentioned at all. None of your party members [[ShootTheShaggyDog have]] any way of knowing who he is. He appears out of nowhere, delivers two or three lines of dialogue, and is killed, while Chrono Cross's cast is probably wondering who this robotic voice is and why they should care. His death basically serves solely to piss off any Chrono Trigger fans who picked up the sequel, which is part of why some of those who liked the former [[ShootTheShaggyDog have]] issues with the latter.
# TearJerker.MobileSuitGundam00: Lichtendahl attempts a Heroic Sacrifice to save Christina. .. but it doesn't work, since not only is she fatally injured as well, but the Ptolemy bridge explodes right after that, [[ShootTheShaggyDog completely erasing any chance of survival]]. Honestly, that episode becomes a sobfest just four minutes in, what with Haro going "Feldt, I'm sorry; Feldt, I'm sorry", and a grieving Feldt tearfully saying that it needn't apologize because what happened to Lockon wasn't its fault.
# ShaggyDogStory.ComicBooks: 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank: The kids manage to break into the bank and steal thousands of dollars, only to be caught by the cops after a car chase sends theirsidequests. Frustratingly, many getaway van into the river. And one of them die after you spent hours doing their sidequests, and some the cops accidentally shot Berger, which is implied to lead to his death. And then it turns out the bad guys robbed an entirely different bank, without Paige's dad. Honestly, it might as well be ShootTheShaggyDog, though most of the characters like Blaidd and Sir Gideon Ofnir are killed by your very own hand. And then there's the Frenzied Flame ending, where you can choose to set the whole world on fire.
# CobraKai.TropesIToR: Deconstructed with Kreese's flashbacks in Season 3. Kreese joined the army and shipped out to Vietnam with good intentions, wanting to serve his country and be a hero. He and his squad were captured by the Vietnamese and put in a nightmarish prisoner camp where they were forced to fight each other to the death when Kreese refused to set off a bomb and blow up their mission target because his friend Ponytail was too close and would have been killed. To make matters worse, Ponytail was killed minutes later anyway. Then Kreese discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a car crash while he was away. All of these experiences led Kreese to adopting the worldview that mercy and altruism are a weakness, and all that matters is who is strong and weak, turning him into the violent sociopath he is in the present.
# VideoGame.Portal1: GLaDOS originally tries to kill Chell in the final test chamber. The revised ending also shows that Chell is going to be dragged into another "test", so her escape attempt was still a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
survive.
# Recap.SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E3TheBullyJustOneBite: By way of a Hope Spot. Downplayed KamenRiderDriveEp38WhyIsTheDevilStillSeekingEvolution: Poor 041, who was saved by Heart in that SpongeBob managed to survive his assailant, but that doesn't stop Mrs. Puff the previous episode, is killed by a combination attack from thinking that he beat up Flats, who she thinks is innocent because Adults Are Useless in this story, resulting in her claiming that she's going to kick SpongeBob's butt. All the pain Chaser and suffering SpongeBob tried to avoid is still going to happen, if not even worse because adults are Mach.
# Awesome.{{Watchmen}}: It's moreseasoned than students.
# Fanfic.{{Pokedex}}: The ending of ''The Saga of the Great Pod" is like this, unsurprisingly given thethat. As Rorschach brings him round to his nihilistic author.
# VideoGame.TheOverseerSeries:way of thinking, only then does he start to help people. It's incredible, really. The bonus dungeon in psychologist's wife was literally threatening to leave him on the North Road is this — a Harder Than Hard gauntlet spot when he stopped to help that pits girl, his life is more or less ruined, and yet he still just has to stop and help. Picking up genuine heroism from a psychopathic Anti-Hero might seem odd, but what do you against waves of high-level creatures, including Deathclaws (and variants), Cazadores, and more, that you ostensibly follow because you're trying to find know? And then Ozymandias' plan gets everyone involved blown up anyway. [[ShootTheShaggyDog Ouch.]]
# DownerEnding.AnimeAndManga: The circus arc in particular was amissing adventurer who may have high-level loot on him. Once you reach the end, you find... nothing major downer ending, as nearly everyone involved except a note (with Baron Kelvin and the adventurer's body) functionally laughing at the player doctor were sympathetic characters, and turned out to have done Kelvin's bidding and died for wasting all their time carving through enemies for no reward at all.
''nothing''.
# Characters.MassEffectCommanderShepard: In 3, Renegade Shepard seems to go through allies even faster than ModernWarfareUnitedStatesMilitary: AllForNothing: All the Reapers, personally killing Mordin, Wrex (if he survived effort lead to save her ends up so, considering every single one of them end up dying, [[ShootTheShaggyDog including Pelayo.]]
# VideoGame.LollipopChainsaw: The three survivors you rescue during thefirst game), Legion, game's prologue end up dying and Ashley/Kaidan. If you count preventable suicides, you can add Tali and Samara to that list, as well (and you can render Samara's suicide entirely pointless by killing the last of her daughters immediately after). Deaths by omission/neglect include Miranda, Jack, and Kelly Chambers. And so on.
# Manga.DeathNote: Light is killed by Ryuk, having been exposed as Kira,turning into zombies anyway after so many people have been pointlessly killed. The world is rotten again, and nothing's been accomplished.
# Film.ThirteenDays: Discussed — Bobby at one point explainsthe rather detailed process of how important government officials and their families would be evacuated from Washington should missile launch be detected in Cuba, then ends with this: Bobby: Of course, that's for morale. Missiles only take five minutes to get here.
helicopter they are on crashes.
# Characters.TwistedMetal: He finds out in the end that he's an undercover FBI agent, and saved dozens of lives in a bombing incident. He is, in fact, a hero... and he's standing in front of one of the world's most wanted criminals, who shoots him dead.
# Film.WonderWomen: The film ends with HarberRuPaulsDragRaceSeason6: After being surrounded by continuously told to bring more glamour and to not use camp as a bunch crutch, come the hip-hop episode Milk struts the runway in a mermaid dress to appeal to the judges' aesthetic...and gets sent home anyway.
# YMMV.RedHoodArsenal: BaseBreakingCharacter: The inclusion ofvengeful action floozies, one of whom is his Love Interest, who aims his own hand-cannon at him. Presumably he will be killed imminently, but judging by his lustful smile, he apparently thinks it's orgy time. Tsu: (voiceover) Goodbye, Mr. Harber. Like all great minds, we cannot avoid our destiny. (Screen fades to black.) Kevin: Yes, this truly was a tale of great minds.
# BrokenBase.TalesSeries: More recently, thereJoker's Daughter has been a been a bit of a divide between fans who like the darker stories and bittersweet divided on whether or even downer endings that more recent games have had, and fans who feel that the series is getting too dark to be enjoyable and that the unhappy endings make the stories feel pointless, and would prefer the series go back to having lighter stories and unambiguously happy endings.
# Characters.HarryPotterSiriusBlack: No pun intended. After breakingnot Lobdell can made anything good come out of prison, Sirius is instead placed under virtual house arrest in his horrible childhood home with most of his colleagues on field duty, her character. It doesn't help that both Jason and Harry in Hogwarts with only a bitter old House-Elf for regular company. He dies in battle before his name is cleared out of a mix of lack of field experience and Suicidal Overconfidence and does not play a major role in helping Harry achieve his destiny. His mistakes with Kreacher Roy are cited by Hermione as a cautionary tale instead.
# VideoGame.RaySeries: RayStorm's Extra Mode ending seems like it's a Bittersweet Ending, with the enemy forces (and billions of inhabitants, many of which were from Earth) being destroyed by havingalso Base Breakers in their capital colony dropped into a gas giant. While your badly damaged ship moves away into the distance. If you're playing on the 13-Ship Mode, the ending goes From Bad to Worse when you see this text after the credits: Earth and Secilia have vanished. Likewise, those own right, given that developed the "RAY" technology and all evidence of its existence have been wiped away. No record of R-GRAY craft was found, and no R-GRAY craft has ever returned. RayForce and RayCrisis are considered downer endings also, due to the former having the heroine's fighter being damaged beyond repair at the end after destroying the Earth and the latter being Doomed by Canon since it is a prequel to RayForce and all of your efforts to disable Con-Human being pointless until the events of RayForce.
# Film.RosemarysBaby: Rosemary becomes suspicious of her husband and the neighbors he's befriended and tries to protect her unborn baby from them. Everyone who is inclined to help her dies or is horribly injured. She discovers her suspicions are all too horribly true - in fact, worse, because she thinksthey're "only" going to sacrifice nothing like their [=pre-New52=] counterparts. Some fans thought that Lobdell did a decent job with the character, giving her baby - a redemption arc. Until it was revealed to be a trick, and tries to escape, but fails. She births the antichrist, and it falls directly into the hands a case of Satanists.
ShootTheShaggyDog.
# TearJerker.MegaManX: Vile's death at the end of Maverick Hunter X in Vile Mode. ShootTheShaggyDog doesn't LongRoadToFriendship: It gets worse when Twilight tells Sunset to "please leave her alone, " and again, Sunset has to do it. Sunset even begin notes that by trying to cover it.
# Funny.SomeJerkWithACamera: "ABC Goes to DisneyLAND!"
# YMMV.JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind: Risotto Nero fell into a life of crime due to tragic circumstances, yet he and his team never got any respect from the Boss, andavoid breaking Twilight's heart, she'd done just keeps losing his teammates one by one. He then dies an ultimately futile and unfortunate death just as he was about to kill the Boss. Despite all that, he keeps his emotions under a stone cold façade to the very end.
# Recap.SCPFoundationSCPs2500To2999: Assumingthat. All that SCP-2718 is merely a cognitohazard that causes you to believe it or makes it the afterlife of those exposed, then O5-7 unwittingly doomed who know how many to eternal agony for nothing by writing the only remaining vector for it, only realizing the possibility after they've already put it down in an impossible to revise/edit/delete document.
# NotAllowedToGrowUp.ComicBooks: There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by thetime he changed his name finally coming to Nightwing. Jack Kirby had officially aged Jimmy Olsen to 21 in the 1970s. And Supergirl had gone from a little teenybopper to a full-grown young woman by the '80s. After the Crisis, though, Jimmy got turned back into a kid, while Dick got to stay an adult, grips with her feelings, and poor Kara got erased from existence.
# SarcasmBlind.VideoGames: Undead Nightmare once again features the omni-bigot Conspiracy Theorist and memetic Large Ham Herbert Moon, who blames a broad yet bizarrely specific cabal of groups for the undead plague. John Marston, Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, piles sarcasm onto Moon for his irrational hate, which Herbert mistakes for support for his righteous cause to single-handedly stop the undead plague and bring down the conspiracy. Herbert Moon is promptly eaten by zombies seconds after he steps out of his store.
# Fanfic.PaperAndSand: Any attempt to end the Cycle and kill Scion is ultimately this. Anytime someone does succeed in killing Scion, Eden transforms the individual into an Endbringer and then turns back the clock.
# Series.TheIncreasinglyPoorDecisionsOfToddMargaret: Alice dies suddenly, making the whole romantic subplot moot.
# Film.PromisingYoungWoman: Subverted. Al murders Cassie and Ryan lies to the police to make them thinkSunset [[ShootTheShaggyDog threw it was a suicide, but the last scene exposes them and sees Al arrested for Cassie’s murder.away]].
# ComicBook.LesInnommables: Happens with regularity.
# Anime.UnderTheDog: ShaggyDogStory: The OVA is ultimately this. Hana is killed by Anthea at the former's request before her Pandoraization rate becomes too high to continue protecting Nanase, resulting in Hana's family being killed. Her last words to Anthea are to continue protecting Nanase. However, when Anthea catches up with him it turns out he's not the kind of candidate they are looking for, so Anthea kills him as well, [[ShootTheShaggyDog making all of the tragic events of the OVA completely and utterly pointless]].
# Webcomic.CwensQuest: Cwen has spent most of her life plotting revenge against her father. While her previous accomplishments haven't been rendered entirely meaningless, the fact remains that her father's Jerkass behavior finally caught up to him shortly before she was ready to wreak her own vengeance.
# WMG.AdventureTime1: For extra sadness, [[ShootTheShaggyDog Marceline will try to tell him that since becoming the vampire queen, she doesn't need protection from what he's trying to save her from.]]
# Awesome.IshStateExperiments: The fact that some players managed to build a working flying machine to get off of the island. Despite most of the group falling off of the plane and into the void, as revealed by Word of Saint Paul, one player managed to survive and reach the edge of the map. [[ShootTheShaggyDog Unfortunately, he was doomed to die by the next event, which required him to sacrifice something to the center of the map, after he had dismantled the flying machine.]]
# CrapsackWorld.ComicBooks: The world of Ruins, an alternate universe Anti-Marvels. Wolverine is dying of adamantium poisoning, Bruce Banner is a mass of tumors, the X-Men have all been imprisoned and experimented on by President Xavier, and Nick Fury is a crazy survivalist who was taught cannibalism by Captain America. After Phil Sheldon has investigated all this, trying to find out what's wrong with the world, [[ShootTheShaggyDog he dies of radiation poisoning]], because Peter
# Trivia.TheWalkingDead2010: According to Talking Dead, Otis was the one who found and corralled the undead Sophia into Hershel's barn, but Shane killed Otis before Otis knew of a missing girl in the group, meaning that the whole search and Daryl's near death
# Film.TheSkeletonKey: The heroes accomplish absolutely nothing, and
# Literature.LikeWaterForChocolate: After waiting for Mama Elena and
# Recap.TheWalkingDeadS10E12WalkWithUs: Earl kills himself by driving his head into a spike so that he won’t reanimate and endanger the kids in the cabin with him. Unfortunately, he failed to destroy his brain, and he reanimates later when the kids are all asleep. Thankfully, the very competent Judith is there to put him down, but nonetheless, poor Earl failed at what he was trying to do.
# TearJerker.PrideOfBaghdad: ''Index entry or ZCE''
# YMMV.DraggedAcrossConcrete: BrokenBase: Kelly Summer's storyline, specifically her abrupt, [[ShootTheShaggyDog tragic fate]]. It's either an effective and somber way of humanizing Vogelmann's victims and reinforcing the movie's incredibly bleak look at the consequences of crime, or it's a tacked-on and gratuitously cruel attempt at establishing the villains' cruelty that clogs up the runtime considering she is never addressed or referenced again following her death.
# Series.Touch2012: Subverted. Lucy, Martin, and Jake all succeed in rescuing Amelia from Aster Corps after spending half of Season 2 looking for her, but shortly afterwards, Lucy is killed, not Amelia.
# Characters.SurvivorGameChangers: Came back because of his Could Have Been A Contender situation in his first season. A big deal was made of his getting to show off his strategic chops. He was reunited with his close friend at the merge, as well as fellow alumna Debbie, only to be voted out third for being a threat.
# YMMV.MegaManMegamix: In Shadow Man's opinion, Blues' actions during The Greatest Enemy In History were far over the line. After Shadow Man, whose main trait until this point was loyalty to Dr. Wily's orders (he is a Ninja, after all), went against his orders to use the confusion of Roll telling both Mega-Men to stop fighting to rescue Copy Mega-Man and give him a fairly heartwarming talk about how he could become his own person with his own life, realizing that the whole thing was a ShootTheShaggyDog because Blues had set him up to commit suicide via Heroic Sacrifice was unforgivable.
# Characters.BoardwalkEmpireNuckysOrganization: He barely survives his gunshot wound in "Two Impostors", only to commit suicide 5 episodes after (10 months, chronologically).
# ThatOneLevel.ActionAdventure: Chapter 11: Keep Moving. One of your allies whom you just met takes a bullet before the level starts, and you are forced to spend the majority of it carrying him along, limiting your combat options to your pistol and preventing you from taking cover, all while being flanked from every vantage point you can see and with dwindling pistol ammo reserves on higher difficulties. Even more insulting, once you make it through this section, the game has the escortee [[ShootTheShaggyDog killed off]] anyways by the Big Bad in a cutscene. Great.
# Literature.JudeTheObscure: Poor Jude. As a child, he thinks it would be better had he never been born, and
# Film.HalloweenResurrection: Myers finally kills Laurie along with several Red Shirt characters, and he's still Not Quite Dead at the end.
# YMMV.{{Texhnolyze}}: AngstAversion: The main reason why a lot of people don't end up watching this show. It contains brutal violence, no entirely sympathetic characters, pretty much no humor or lighter moments whatsoever, one of the most bleak and cynical views of humanity to ever be portrayed in an anime series, and unabashedly heads towards one of the biggest ShootTheShaggyDog endings without ever promising otherwise. It's no wonder that when people read up on it consisting of all of these things, they don't want to put themselves through it.
# Series.TheRanch2016: An in-universe example. Heather tells the story of a calf she owned called Dairy Potter. The calf became very sick and nearly died, but Heather managed to nurse it back to health. Shortly afterward, the calf was killed by a mountain lion.
# Literature.SlaughterhouseFive: Considering that Billy can see how everything ends, it's easy for him to take this view.
# Funny.FriskyDingo: Almost the entire episode
# SelfDemonstrating.DoctorDoom: After she finally brought her father back and got reunited with her former lover, Doom killed Cassandra Lang, Kristoff Vernard's former best friend.
# Film.FiveBrandedWomen: Jovanka and Daniza accomplish nothing, Daniza being killed by the partisans and Jovanka implied to eventually die when the soldiers reach the trench.
# VideoGame.XolgaAndMrToko: The first series has a lot of these. First we have episode four, when despite the duo's efforts to prove him innocent, Ferris is found guilty of murder and imprisoned. Next we have episode six, that has Mr.Toko's friend Austin getting shot right after they both escape from the
# WebVideo.SuperEyepatchWolf: This was his experience with Fear & Hunger. Across countless hours and countless deaths, John slowly comes to understand the dungeon and its obtuse, punishing mechanics more and more, and gradually uncovers secrets that help him to push forward further and further, until he ultimately finds himself standing before a
# VisualNovel.
# Characters.ArkhamHorrorTheCardGameCampaignCharacters: His quest to reach Kadath and find the Gods reveals that the mountain is long-abandoned, while Virgil himself gets unceremoniously killed by Nyarlathothep.
# Recap.DoctorWhoS29E13LastOfTheTimeLords: The final fate of the entire human race at the end of the
# TearJerker.TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye: Shock's mournful monologue to Ore's corpse was really touching, even if they were both just a bunch of throwaway guys. [[ShootTheShaggyDog And then the Sparkeater kills him]]. Shock: As the saying goes, "You flare, you flicker, you fade." Yeah—and the world's a darker place without you, buddy.
# TheBadGuyWins.LiveActionTV: "The Tale of the Pinball Wizard". Ross seemingly wins the game, only to find that he's
# Funny.TheAmazingWorldOfGumballSeason5: Darwin just puts the suitcase containing the money back inside the bank. The police think it's dangerous [[ShootTheShaggyDog and blow it up]]. Defeated, Gumball declares "Well, we tried."
# Anime.DragonBallZTheHistoryOfTrunks: HeroicSacrifice: Deconstructed. Gohan knocks out Trunks to prevent him from taking
# Memes.{{Rugrats}}: People making chocolate pudding at 4 in the morning
# YMMV.ASongOfIceAndFire: Quentyn Martell. While some readers find him interesting
# Film.
# Film.
# Characters.BigBrother14: She was
# VideoGame.LaPucelle: The Overlord Ending, in which Prier fights through
# Characters.Fallout76: ShaggyDogStory: All of their efforts to rebuild West Virginia fail miserably due to the destruction of Charleston followed by the Scorched Plague. It would be a ShootTheShaggyDog story
# Literature.
# Film.IShotJesseJames: Bob Ford never gets a chance to move on with his life, as his notorious reputation follows him wherever he goes. When he finally gets close to achieving what he wants, he loses the love of his life and dies in a gunfight.
# Manga.BlackJack: Black Jack often cures patient with difficult to impossible cases, only for them to be killed in some other fashion.
# SacrificialLion.VideoGames: Eternal Darkness is loaded with characters who could at least be considered this — within the [[ShootTheShaggyDog main cast]], no less! The
# PapaWolf.RealLife: Leopoldo Narvaiz stabbed his ex girlfriend, 17 year old Shannon Mann, and her three siblings, 19 year old Jennifer, 15 year old Martha, and 11 year old Ernest, to death for refusing to rekindle a relationship. The siblings' father deliberately got himself arrested for an act of petty theft in order to kill him in jail, but [[ShootTheShaggyDog Narvaiz was moved to death row]] by
# Characters.
# Fanfic.TalesOfTermina: Link entered the lost woods to find Navi, by the time leaves he not only fails in finding her but ended up in a hellish time loop that took half a year to escape, greatly deteriorating his already
# Film.FunnyGames: Not only do all the sympathetic characters die, but this is neither the first nor last time that this exact scenario has played out for the killers. What's more, the rewind trick suggests that the chances of any future targets to survive are next to zero.
# Characters.{{Watchmen}}: All of his personality changes and different outlook on life is rendered meaningless as he's one of the millions killed by Ozymandias' plan.
# Film.DeadSnow: The whole movie is full of defeated
# YMMV.{{Milgram}}: Shidou is also a
# Fridge.TheAvengersEarthsMightiestHeroes: The Skrulls came to Earth
# Characters.SuperCometAfterTheImpact: All of his efforts to find his family lead to him dying alone at the edge of the impact crater. It’s unclear whether his family is even still alive.
# VideoGame.FateUnlimitedCodes: DownerEnding: There are several of these, as well.Saber Alter's, for one: in the end, she personally killed Shirou and also somehow killed a physical manifestation of her un-corrupted side to allow Dark Sakura to take over the world/kill everything/whatever her objective would
# TearJerker.{{Inscryption}}: Your last game with Magnificus isn't much better either. At the start, he seems to blame you for what is happening to Inscryption, calling you out while issuing an epic last challenge of wits against his opponent. He puts out other bombastic speeches, accusing you of not caring about his world being erased, while the game crumbles and breaks down around you... and then, by the end of the fight, it's shown that this is (possibly) an act: Similar to Leshy, Magnificus wanted to give the player one last game before being erased, and spends his last moments struggling to desperately shake your hand, but [[ShootTheShaggyDog he is deleted in front of you before he's near enough to do that]].
# WesternAnimation.{{Bilby}}: Fortunately subverted. It looks like the bilby's journey was All for Nothing when the albatross chick is snatched by an eagle - but the bilby gets dangerous and rescues the chick from the predator.
# Characters.{{Lkyt}}: ''Index entry or ZCE''
# TearJerker.DescendantsOfDarkness: Kazusa's death. That whole arc spent to protect her and she [[ShootTheShaggyDog dies anyway]]. Poor thing.
# PlayerPunch.RolePlayingGames: The bombardment of Taris, [[ShootTheShaggyDog making nearly everything you did there completely pointless]]. Mission's reaction supplies the page quote.
# Film.TheTraceyFragments: A scene near the end seems to strongly imply that Sonny drowned in a nearby lake while Tracey was hooking up with Billy, rendering her whole journey to find him completely pointless.
# Characters.BlackMirrorMenAgainstFire: Stripe does uncover the truth about the roaches, but has his memory erased and goes back to murdering them,
# YMMV.WhyCharlieBrownWhy: If you want to think of a reason why Janice doesn’t return after this, it's possible she [[ShootTheShaggyDog didn't actually overcome her cancer]]. The ending is somewhat ambiguous about this: it may be that the reason Janice's hair has grown back isn't because her cancer is in
# Funny.AchievementHunterGTAV2013To2015: Gavin's repeated stealing of
# VideoGame.BatmanArkhamCity: ShootingSuperman: Some of the Penguin's goons mention offhand that Cobblepot dangled one of his
# Characters.ElenaOfAvalorCivilians: SkewedPriorities: He and Mateo are too preoccupied with catching up with each other on magic techniques to the point of singing a song, ignoring that he was running out of time to create a potion that would free him from his disintegrating book. They manage to free him in time... although [[ShootTheShaggyDog he ends up dead afterwards anyways]], so maybe he and Mateo had a point this time.
# Characters.PokemonDesolation: Him killing off Kuiki/Keegan. While it's unclear how he felt towards them and it's possible to read their actions as somewhat sympathetically, he still basically stole Keegan's life away from him, threw him away when he didn't need him anymore, let him be other people's problem for years, and then killed him off the second it was beneficial for him to do so.
# Film.TheBeastmaster: {{Jerkass}}: King Zed towards Dar, until he realized he's the son he lost. But then Maax [[ShootTheShaggyDog kills him]], spoiling any potential reunion.
# Literature.
#
# LateToTheTragedy.VideoGames:
# Farscape.TropesDToG: EverybodysDeadDave: The ending to "Different Destinations". What's worse, it's the heroes' fault due to changing history, and just to [[ShootTheShaggyDog twist the knife]], the "everybody" in question was a monastery full of
# YMMV.ChronoCross: FATE: "Now eliminating Prometheus." Prometheus is better known as Robo, your Robot Buddy party member from Chrono Trigger. Now, up until that one scene in Chronopolis, Robo had not appeared in Chrono Cross at all. He was not mentioned at all. None of your party members [[ShootTheShaggyDog have]] any way of knowing who he is. He appears out of nowhere, delivers two or three lines of dialogue, and is killed, while Chrono Cross's cast is probably wondering who this robotic voice is and why they should care. His death basically serves solely to piss off any Chrono Trigger fans who picked up the sequel, which is part of why some of those who liked the former [[ShootTheShaggyDog have]] issues with the latter.
# TearJerker.MobileSuitGundam00: Lichtendahl attempts a Heroic Sacrifice to save Christina. .. but it doesn't work, since not only is she fatally injured as well, but the Ptolemy bridge explodes right after that, [[ShootTheShaggyDog completely erasing any chance of survival]]. Honestly, that episode becomes a sobfest just four minutes in, what with Haro going "Feldt, I'm sorry; Feldt, I'm sorry", and a grieving Feldt tearfully saying that it needn't apologize because what happened to Lockon wasn't its fault.
# ShaggyDogStory.ComicBooks: 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank: The kids manage to break into the bank and steal thousands of dollars, only to be caught by the cops after a car chase sends their
# CobraKai.TropesIToR: Deconstructed with Kreese's flashbacks in Season 3. Kreese joined the army and shipped out to Vietnam with good intentions, wanting to serve his country and be a hero. He and his squad were captured by the Vietnamese and put in a nightmarish prisoner camp where they were forced to fight each other to the death when Kreese refused to set off a bomb and blow up their mission target because his friend Ponytail was too close and would have been killed. To make matters worse, Ponytail was killed minutes later anyway. Then Kreese discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a car crash while he was away. All of these experiences led Kreese to adopting the worldview that mercy and altruism are a weakness, and all that matters is who is strong and weak, turning him into the violent sociopath he is in the present.
# VideoGame.Portal1: GLaDOS originally tries to kill Chell in the final test chamber. The revised ending also shows that Chell is going to be dragged into another "test", so her escape attempt was still a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
# Recap.
# Awesome.{{Watchmen}}: It's more
# Fanfic.{{Pokedex}}: The ending of ''The Saga of the Great Pod" is like this, unsurprisingly given the
# VideoGame.TheOverseerSeries:
# DownerEnding.AnimeAndManga: The circus arc in particular was a
# Characters.
# VideoGame.LollipopChainsaw: The three survivors you rescue during the
# Manga.DeathNote: Light is killed by Ryuk, having been exposed as Kira,
# Film.ThirteenDays: Discussed — Bobby at one point explains
# Characters.
# Film.WonderWomen: The film ends with Harber
# YMMV.RedHoodArsenal: BaseBreakingCharacter: The inclusion of
# BrokenBase.TalesSeries: More recently, there
# Characters.HarryPotterSiriusBlack: No pun intended. After breaking
# VideoGame.RaySeries: RayStorm's Extra Mode ending seems like it's a Bittersweet Ending, with the enemy forces (and billions of inhabitants, many of which were from Earth) being destroyed by having
# Film.RosemarysBaby: Rosemary becomes suspicious of her husband and the neighbors he's befriended and tries to protect her unborn baby from them. Everyone who is inclined to help her dies or is horribly injured. She discovers her suspicions are all too horribly true - in fact, worse, because she thinks
# TearJerker.
# Funny.SomeJerkWithACamera: "ABC Goes to DisneyLAND!"
# YMMV.JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind: Risotto Nero fell into a life of crime due to tragic circumstances, yet he and his team never got any respect from the Boss, and
# Recap.SCPFoundationSCPs2500To2999: Assuming
# NotAllowedToGrowUp.ComicBooks: There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by the
# SarcasmBlind.VideoGames: Undead Nightmare once again features the omni-bigot Conspiracy Theorist and memetic Large Ham Herbert Moon, who blames a broad yet bizarrely specific cabal of groups for the undead plague. John Marston, Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, piles sarcasm onto Moon for his irrational hate, which Herbert mistakes for support for his righteous cause to single-handedly stop the undead plague and bring down the conspiracy. Herbert Moon is promptly eaten by zombies seconds after he steps out of his store.
# Fanfic.PaperAndSand: Any attempt to end the Cycle and kill Scion is ultimately this. Anytime someone does succeed in killing Scion, Eden transforms the individual into an Endbringer and then turns back the clock.
# Series.TheIncreasinglyPoorDecisionsOfToddMargaret: Alice dies suddenly, making the whole romantic subplot moot.
# Film.PromisingYoungWoman: Subverted. Al murders Cassie and Ryan lies to the police to make them think
# ComicBook.LesInnommables: Happens with regularity.
Changed line(s) 39,102 (click to see context) from:
# Characters.GameOfThronesJaimeLannister: His Season 5 story arc. After spending most of the season traveling to Dorne and infiltrating the city to rescue Myrcella, he fails to save her and she dies in his arms.
# VideoGame.PoliticsAndWar: 00 server time, with any amount not used up lost in the following day. Some players works around this by buying all available units before 0:00, and then buying all available units after that, in an attempt to gain a military advantage through the "double buy." In turn, some players hold off making any offensive operations until their oppositions starts "double buying," then bomb them as much as possible to negate any advantage of doing this. It helps with the above war mechanics, too.
# Characters.SonicTheHedgehogIDWIndependentAntagonists: He dies in disgrace immediately after all his plans go bust. As a final insult, Eggman finally gives Starline the praise he longed for upon learning how Surge and Kit came to be.
# TearJerker.AvengersEndgame: The Gamora we knew in the first two Guardians of the Galaxy and Infinity War is gone. The one we got here and will probably see again in the MCU is the pre-Guardians version. Even if she was already rebellious and does in fact make a Heel–Face Turn, it's hard to shake off the sensation she won't be exactly the same.Worse, the Gamora we knew is still dead. So she escaped her abusive adoptive father, found her new family and defrosted for them, only to die at the hands of said abusive adoptive father thinking that she has doomed the universe. No reset and no happy ending for her. Even if it's a comedic scene, Star-Lord is overjoyed to see Gamora again during the final battle, only for her to obviously not know who he is and reject him, since she comes from a time before they met each other. Gamora is also absent from the final shot for the Guardians. She apparently ran away after the final battle and Quill is shown searching for her.
# Manga.AnneFreaks: If you were rooting for Anna and Yuri since the beginning of the series, wait until near the end of the manga when Anna asks Yuri to join her in her world by killing Shono, and he willingly chooses to do so, slitting the throat of what is the most sympathetic character in the series. Oh, and Shono leaves behind her a husband and a little kid ? Yeah, shining example of this trope, especially since even the characters acknowledge it. invoked
# Film.DraggedAcrossConcrete: Midway through the film, the audience is treated to an extended vignette centered on Kelly Summer, a new mother and bank teller agonizing over the necessity to return to work after three months' maternity leave. We get an extended sequence of Kelly retreating to her apartment from the bus stop, begging and bargaining with her husband at the locked door to touch her baby one more time before leaving. Then she returns to work, and is warmly welcomed by her manager and coworkers. Then the bank robbery commences, and after a tense standoff between the robbers and staff Kelly has her skull blown to bits by a round of automatic fire. The movie promptly cuts back to Ridgeman and Lurasetti, and Kelly is never mentioned again.
# Fanfic.DragonsOfIceAndFire: Arya Stark in Winterfell. Jon launches a whole campaign to save his sister, amassing free folk and northmen to march on Winterfell to rescue her... only for "Arya" to burn to death in a tower while Jon's army is ambushed outside the castle walls. In the immediate aftermath, Jon's sister is thought dead and he even receives the blame from some for her murder. Nobody even finds out that she was a fake, Jon mourns Arya's death and it makes the entire northern coalition's purpose moot. Another mention to Margaery Tyrell trapped in the Red Keep by Cersei. It's a hostage situation that lasts 77 days because nobody wants to risk Margaery's live. And yet this whole standoff is resolved when Cersei strangles her in a fit of rage, resurrects her as wight, and sends her in to the trial as a distraction.
# Headscratchers.DeathNoteRulesOfTheDeathNote: Exactly. Intentionally saving someone's life through use of the Death Note is what causes a Shinigami to die. If he intended to save Bob then he would die, otherwise he'd be fine.Not only does the anime mention it as well, it's a major plot point; it's how Gelus dies, and how Light gets rid of Rem. But the point of this question is that the Shinigami didn't extend Bob's lifespan, despite intending to. But it did. The Death Note isn't connected to one's life span; it kills you regardless of how much time you have left. So the Shinigami increases Bob's lifespan, and dies. Unfortunately, Bob doesn't get to enjoy that extra time, because the Death Note kills him first. Bob's the shaggy dog, and he just got shot.
# MoodWhiplash.AnimeAndManga: If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see... Now and Then, Here and There. Surprise!And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, perfect anime for Syfy, MD Geist.
# Literature.AfterlifeLabirynth: Joseph died 591 times by 2014-07-28
# Characters.MagiaRecordWingsOfMagius: Attempts a Doppel suicide bombing in Season 3 of the anime, together with Nemu, to bring down the amalgamation made of Alina, Old Dorothy and Embryo Eve. Both of them failed to kill it in the end.
# Recap.HTFIveGotYouUnderMySkin: Sniffles didn't have to create a vessel to go inside Giggles' infected body as she would've been cured by just laying down after a while. Too bad they all died before even noticing it.
# DrivenToSuicide.VideoGames: In The Classroom Trilogy this happen multiple times.On the fourth day of the first game, a student "can't take it any more" and throws themselves out of the window. On the Last day of the first game, A student arrive and unexpectedly pulls a gun on the teacher and shoots him and an other student, before shooting themselves. Once you complete the game, Alex snaps after escaping the shooting and walks out onto the street. Though the first car misses them for what looks to be a Happily Failed Suicide, the second car doesn't , he still survive though. At the end of the second game Mr. Henderson throw himself out of the window like the student from the first game, Samuel note that it must be a déjà vu for Alex.
# Recap.MrRobotS01E06: Shayla was killed shortly after the kidnapping. Nothing Elliot did during the episode could have saved her.
# TearJerker.{{Animaniacs}}: The "Ballad of Magellan" - not only for its morbid tone and ending, but there is something indescribably melancholy-sounding about the chorus, as if you can hear in their voices the Warners were aware their show was doomed (this was in one of the later episodes).
# Characters.TheTexasChainsawMassacre2023: If none of the Victims escape the Family, then not only did they not find Maria, they end up just meeting her fate at the hands of the Family.
# Fanfic.X2009Epic: Subaru's sacrifice negates all the supernatural components of the apocalypse and severs the connection of magic to the world, effectively making everything Kamui and Fuuma did pointless.
# VisualNovel.ZeroTimeDilemma: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to establish himself as a jerk, Delta murders Gab, the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealed that the protagonists must abandon this timeline minutes before the entire shelter is destroyed if they want to survive, and they (as well as the player) would otherwise be responsible for Gab's death. Though given Zero's vast resources it wouldn't have been impossible for him to build a way for Gab to escape, but that would require more compassion than Zero is capable of.
# Pantheon.{{Gameplay}}: Wanting to put Peacock to a better use besides vigilante justice, he talked with Caitlyn and Vi with plans of setting up a meeting with Vi to talk with Peacock about the fact that they both are Blood Knight and ruthless cops who still want to do justice. Upon seeing how they are not so different, Peacock and Vi instantly got on board the idea of working together, and celebrated by launching a attack on some suspected crimes that were going on within the house of Villainy...possibly causing MORE damage than she could've done with Jinx (probably because while Peacock thinks Jinx takes things too far, Vi and Peacock have more common grounds and thus, less reasons to think the other takes things too far). Caitlyn offered him her sympathies and lets him drink with her.
# Film.TheIronBodyguard: By the end of the film, Wang-wu, the best and only surviving fighter of the resistance, ends up being cornered by General Chong's riflemen battalion. Despite both General Chong and Yen-feng being dead at that point, it's unlikely the riflemen are just going to let Wang-wu leave after killing their boss just like that, so...
# YMMV.KingsGame: despite getting run straight through by a chainsaw, Natsuko somehow survives long enough to kill Nobuaki alongside her, rendering pretty much everything he's done moot. Being impaled through the spinal cord by a chainsaw should've rendered her paralyzed and dead.
# Characters.StrangerThingsSupportingCast: The government spent such an effort trying to convince the world that she miscarried her daughter that Terry went insane. She knows the truth deep down, but the government made sure to destroy everything else in her mind, rendering her unable to fend for herself. Season 2 reveals that her present state is a result of her attempt to bust into Hawkins Lab and find Jane. She succeeded in that much, before Brenner caught her and essentially had her brain deep fried.
# TheDogBitesBack.{{Literature}}: In Morgawr, Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil, who'd already gone through a serious case of Break the Cutie, goes through shattering psychological and mental torture at the hands of The Morgawr's Dragon, Mwellret leader Cree Bega. By the end, Ahren has almost no self-respect left, and is alone on a ship when Cree Bega comes on board, murders his one companion, tells him about the Mwellrets' torture of his crush, demands the books of magic from him and then attacks. Ahren just barely manages to man up and skewer the slippery bastard, who's had it coming for almost three books now. Easily Ahren's Moment of Awesome, and one of the most affirming moments in an otherwise ShootTheShaggyDog story.
# Characters.BladedanceOfElementalers: She gave up everything and was willing to lose both Claire and her own life in order to revive the Demon King. She succeeded momentarily, but then it is all abruptly undone essentially because Claire refuses to cooperate. Then she throws everything she has at Kamito in a last-ditch effort to re-awaken him, and he kicks her ass without the Demon King's power. Jerkass she may be, but everything she had fought for was unraveled in front of her because Claire and Kamito basically said "no". And the worst part? It was never going to work in the first place. She wants to kill the Elemental Lords to eliminate The Corruption, but the Demon King is also corrupted. If Kamito had awakened, he would have destroyed the world in exactly the same method that she was trying to prevent.
# ToTheTuneOf.RealLife: The well-known "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" was originally a comedy song called "Der Deitcher's Dog" [sic] about how the eponymous German's dog has been made into sausages — itself stolen from a Swabian folk song, Zu Lauterbach hab i mei Strumpf verlorn.
# YMMV.TheShadowLine: The show has a generally gloomy atmosphere and even the most sympathetic characters are heavily flawed, which can make it hard for viewers to get invested. The fact that the main character dies without accomplishing anything while the bad guys get away scot-free seals the deal.
# YMMV.{{Lost}}: Danielle Rousseau is probably the most tragic character of all. She was forced to kill her friends including the love of her life, had her infant daughter taken away, spent 16 years as The Aloner going nuts, and when she was finally reunited with her daughter, she got killed off.
# Wakfu.TropesSToU: Nox's entire life.
# Recap.YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeriesS4E9RexAndWeevilDoAtlantica: By the time Yami arrives back from his duel with Rafael, he questions why Professor Hawkins is already safe after being kidnapped. You know, the reason he went to duel Raphael in the first place. Yami: So this whole traumatic experience could've been completely avoided if I hadn't arbitrarily left in the middle of the night? Professor Hawkins: Turns out, yes!
# WMG.TalesFromTheDarkMultiverse: In the first volume, Billy Shepherd(The kid whose diary Pilgrim got) didn't managed to press the button in time as Castenado slew the boy, and managed to captured the Pilgrim, and forced him to watch as the rest of the survivors are killed or captured...oh and too to drive in his failure to god, Castenado slashes out his remaining eye...and oh boy does it come to bite him hard, as the Pilgrim adapts to his condition and manages to turn the tides on the blind pirate with a bullet to the stomach and head, and thus turns the raiders into his proxy of zealots, with the exact same rule except it's either accept god or take a bullet.
# Film.HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers: After getting mocked for being related to Michael, becoming mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, all her friends, her sister, and her dogs killed, Jamie is kidnapped by the cult of Thorn and is forced to have sex with Michael and bear his child, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment in the theatrical cut or stabbed by Michael, put in a coma, and literally shot in the head by the Man in Black in the Producer's Cut. Jamie could be the contender for the most depressing character in all of the horror genre.
# RoleAssociation.FilmM: A Narc and one of Charlie's Angels' daughter Ariel Dubois is sick, so they have another kid, Olive, to be her sister's spare parts. Olive doesn't like this, so she hires Jack Donaghy as her attorney. In the end, everyone gets what she wants.
# VideoGame.BubbleBobble: In a bad ending for the NES/VC version of Bubble Bobble, after getting the suddenly-required crystal ball in one-player mode and defeating the final boss, both girlfriends are rescued... only to poof away when they reach the ground. Compare this to the arcade, where the player character's girlfriend is rescued, and the other remains in captivity.
# Webcomic.{{Hiimdaisy}}: Parodied in "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again" when Vamp kills Emma. Snake: Kid! Emma's being stabbed! She's gonna die! Raiden: Why am I even trying anymore?
# Film.MenBehindTheSun: On several levels. Ishii's bioweapons research is made moot since the war ends with Japan defeated before he can deploy his pathogens in force. The marutas are all killed off, the last one trying and failing to kill Ishii himself. The epilogue notes Ishii never faces prosecution for his crimes and gets to supervise the usage of bioweapons in the Korean War.
# UsefulNotes.FrenchNewWave: ShaggyDogStory: Their movies tend to have very thin plot and the story keeps subverting any narrative resolution. Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us is a conspiracy movie without a conspiracy, the atmosphere generally stemming from the Cold War Post-Historical Trauma.
# Film.TheLastCircus: No one accomplishes anything in the end. The film ends with both clowns arrested, and Natalia and the Ghost Rider's final stunts end in their own demises.
# Film.ArlingtonRoad: Not only were Michael's attempts at saving everyone unsuccessful, but he took the blame for everything posthumously, and left his son an orphan.
# Anime.TransformersCybertron: The retcon that the energon sun collapsed to make the black hole turns the entire Energon series into one of these, annihilating the planets they fought for the whole series offscreen. Again, however, the actual show largely ignores such things (mainly, Cybertron and Jungle Planet still exist.) The screen-given (and therefore more official) explanation is that the destruction of Unicron upset the balance between good and evil, and the black hole is the result. Its first victim is an uninhabited world, aptly named Moriturus - "I am about to die" in Latin.
# Film.ToLiveAndDieInLA: The film ends with Masters dead, but just seconds after he successfully managed to burn all evidence of his crimes, making Chance's psychotic crusade to bring him to justice completely worthless even if we didn't take into account the fact Masters killed Chance.
# WesternAnimation.DCAnimatedMovieUniverse: The entire story ends with Flash going back in time to prevent Darkseid's second invasion and the decimation of Earth. However, this will inevitably cause the entire timeline to change just like what happened after the Flashpoint Paradox. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the fresh start this DC Universe will receive once the timeline resets.
# Characters.PhantomThiefJeanne: Neither version has Zen able to be saved, despite Maron's best efforts. It's even more cruel in the manga, where Zen himself has no say in the situation, and his mother gets a sudden call about his death after all of the work she'd done to bring him home.
# VideoGame.HIDE: DownerEnding: This game is a very bizarre example of all three. At face value, it's just a typical ShootTheShaggyDog ending, where even if you find all five locations you'll get caught, which the end screen rubs in further by saying your struggle was utterly futile. However, it says "You will be brought to justice and they will never be.", which can be interpreted as you'll be rightfully punished for your awful crimes (subscribing to the convict theory) while your victims will always be just that - victims who never got any justice.
# Literature.TheSagaOfYngvarTheTraveller: Svein and his men encounter a group of people leading around a creature with a wooden tower on its back. They steal it away from them and attempt to lead it themselves, but the creature just sticks it head down and refuse to budge so they hide in the reeds while figuring out a plan. They then steal it from its owners for a second time, and this time they are more successfull. "But as they didn't know the nature of the creature or what it needed to eat, they stabbed it with spears till it fell dead. Then they went down to the ships and rowed off."
# WebVideo.TwitchPlaysPokemonCrystal: The mob actually managed to successfully use an item in combat, an antidote on a poisoned Oxxy. Oxxy gets KO'd in the very same turn.
# Characters.DantesInferno: Ended up killed in her revolt, with no resolution to her plight besides being killed by the very people who wronged her before.
# TearJerker.BigBrother: In BBCan, Emmett telling Talla that she was going to be evicted. She was reduced to tears. When she walked out of the house, she stopped and spread her arms over the door, still fighting back tears.Funnily enough, it was just like what happened in BB12 to Britney, although Britney took it better. Before Talla, BBUK had Kathreya. Similar to Talla, she was one of the most carefree and friendliest houseguests ever, and at one point a choice to win. However, a surprise double eviction a few days before the finale started with the eviction of Mohamed (somewhat of a ShootTheShaggyDog story given his status as an Elimination Houdini) and then the next evicted houseguest was Kathreya. You could hear her and the rest of the houseguests crying because she had to leave.
# VideoGame.AssassinsCreedValhalla: DoingInTheWizard: Oddly for a franchise with explicitly supernatural elements, the game does this with the Beowulf saga. Eivor investigates a mass murder, then discovers that Grendel is merely a deformed and simple-minded man who Does Not Know His Own Strength, not unlike Lennie from Of Mice and Men. His mother was likewise a normal, elderly woman (albeit with some druidic magic) who just wanted to keep her son safe. Eivor is forced to kill them both, and the whole thing is a tragic ShootTheShaggyDog story. Eivor tells the Quest Giver what happened, and she decides to make the story more heroic and exciting when she writes it down.
# Characters.TheQuarry: He can get cured from his lycanthropy by Ryan and Laura only to end up being mauled to death by Caleb a few minutes later. This can only happen if the player has him swim to the shore instead of staying in the island.
# VideoGame.FarCry1: In Evolution, after going through one of the game's most annoying difficult fights in order to protect a badly injured Doyle from attacking rebels, you go off to look for an escape vehicle, and when you get back Doyle has apparently crawled off, leaving a trail of blood for you to follow. After following his trail for 2 entire levels, you come across his corpse, and realize that an indeterminate amount of the trail was just the Big Bad leaving a trail of clues by dragging his corpse along, all just to dick with you.
# Characters.CallOfDutyZombiesVictisAndOtherPlayableCharacters: They're screwed over hard after all their work due to siding with Maxis. Eventually Subverted; they're able to provide a key part of Primis Richtofen's plan to save the universe, though, and are put in stasis for safe keeping. Double Subverted in Tag der Toten, where for their troubles in getting the Agarthan Device, they’re RetGoned out of existence.
# Literature.BeastsAndBeautyDangerousTales: In "Beauty and the Beast", Mei breaks the Beasts' curse and restores him to normal....only to mistake him for one of her fathers' men and stab him to death, realizing her fatal error too late.
# Fanfic.TwilightSparklesAwesomeAdventure: Happens when the author drops a spaceship on the Tyrant. There's also the fact that Celesia isn't even Twillight's mother, which was built up as one of the main reasons they were fighting.
# Recap.StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm: The macrovirus plot started because Voyager went to help a Garan mining colony. The Doctor comes up with an antidote—and the Tak Tak destroy the colony before he can save them.
# TearJerker.DarkSoulsIII: there is no happy fairy tale ending, just the end of the Age of Fire and all that entails.
# DownerEnding.{{Film}}: The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
# WebAnimation.SonicForHire: From "Wreck-it Ralph" on, Sonic and Co. were trying to find the Creator so they could ask why he was messing with the universe. After pointless clues through Ralph, Dracula, Sir Arthur, and Link, they end up getting a right clue from Lowbrow Studios, which leads them to the real Creator. Once they find the Creator who is Dominique Wilkins, he orders Sonic to "kill his idol", which Sonic does before they can ask why he was messing with the universe. Looks like that question will never be answered.
# Film.{{Shenandoah}}: ThrowTheDogABone: Charlie's mission to rescue his youngest son from captivity fails and indirectly gets three other family members killed, while the boy ends up escaping and getting home on his own. However, the whole affair isn't quite a ShootTheShaggyDog tale, as his quest does end up rescuing his son-in-law Sam from being taken to a Hellhole Prison where he might have died like so many other prisoners in the war.
# TabletopGame.ForceOfWill: What the Alice Cluster was, especially for Alice and Pricia. Alice spent so much time coming to Attoractia to save it, only for it to fall and for her to struggle with control of her own body. Pricia, after losing her comrades in the Seven Kings, and her friends in the Sacred Beasts, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Valentina and wins...only for Valentina to take her body over in the process.
# Characters.TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWildLinkAndZelda: She cries to Link and heavily laments how all her efforts (assumed to be preventing the fall of Hyrule and stopping the Calamity Ganon from doing so) were for nothing.
# Funny.ZeroPunctuation2: Yahtzee comments how when a new player (to DayZ) came by, that unless the guy actually talked to him and asked what was wrong, he would have shot and looted him.Also, when said player gave Yahtzee a blood transfusion with (Yahtzee swears this is true) his ample supply of blood packs and nothing else, he comments on how he could have learned about The Power of Friendship and "sticking together in the face of adversity". Until a zombie came by, broke his leg, and either chased the other guy off or killed him. "Boy, did I feel like a waste of blood."
# VideoGame.FireEmblemGaiden: Implied in Sonya's ending in the remake. In the original, it was just stating that she's Jedah's daughter and having her sisters sacrificed for Duma by him explaining her hatred to him. In the remake, she attempts to find a cure for Witches, only to disappear after a lot of traveling, and it's implied she became a Witch herself taking residence in Nuibaba's Fear Mountain. Her ending is pretty much the only ending that changes from neutral to worse (though it is unknown whether her becoming a witch is bad or not, since after Duma's death it isn't known if witches lose their souls).
# Film.HanselAndGretel2013: Kevin manages to escape, even after being shot by an arrow. Unfortunately, he runs into the road and is hit by the sheriff's car. Turns that annoying arrow into straight up impalement, too.
# Literature.TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar: The whole story, when you consider it - Griboyedov spends all this running around, trying and failing to do all kinds of things, and then he is killed by a mob.
# VideoGame.PoliticsAndWar: 00 server time, with any amount not used up lost in the following day. Some players works around this by buying all available units before 0:00, and then buying all available units after that, in an attempt to gain a military advantage through the "double buy." In turn, some players hold off making any offensive operations until their oppositions starts "double buying," then bomb them as much as possible to negate any advantage of doing this. It helps with the above war mechanics, too.
# Characters.SonicTheHedgehogIDWIndependentAntagonists: He dies in disgrace immediately after all his plans go bust. As a final insult, Eggman finally gives Starline the praise he longed for upon learning how Surge and Kit came to be.
# TearJerker.AvengersEndgame: The Gamora we knew in the first two Guardians of the Galaxy and Infinity War is gone. The one we got here and will probably see again in the MCU is the pre-Guardians version. Even if she was already rebellious and does in fact make a Heel–Face Turn, it's hard to shake off the sensation she won't be exactly the same.Worse, the Gamora we knew is still dead. So she escaped her abusive adoptive father, found her new family and defrosted for them, only to die at the hands of said abusive adoptive father thinking that she has doomed the universe. No reset and no happy ending for her. Even if it's a comedic scene, Star-Lord is overjoyed to see Gamora again during the final battle, only for her to obviously not know who he is and reject him, since she comes from a time before they met each other. Gamora is also absent from the final shot for the Guardians. She apparently ran away after the final battle and Quill is shown searching for her.
# Manga.AnneFreaks: If you were rooting for Anna and Yuri since the beginning of the series, wait until near the end of the manga when Anna asks Yuri to join her in her world by killing Shono, and he willingly chooses to do so, slitting the throat of what is the most sympathetic character in the series. Oh, and Shono leaves behind her a husband and a little kid ? Yeah, shining example of this trope, especially since even the characters acknowledge it. invoked
# Film.DraggedAcrossConcrete: Midway through the film, the audience is treated to an extended vignette centered on Kelly Summer, a new mother and bank teller agonizing over the necessity to return to work after three months' maternity leave. We get an extended sequence of Kelly retreating to her apartment from the bus stop, begging and bargaining with her husband at the locked door to touch her baby one more time before leaving. Then she returns to work, and is warmly welcomed by her manager and coworkers. Then the bank robbery commences, and after a tense standoff between the robbers and staff Kelly has her skull blown to bits by a round of automatic fire. The movie promptly cuts back to Ridgeman and Lurasetti, and Kelly is never mentioned again.
# Fanfic.DragonsOfIceAndFire: Arya Stark in Winterfell. Jon launches a whole campaign to save his sister, amassing free folk and northmen to march on Winterfell to rescue her... only for "Arya" to burn to death in a tower while Jon's army is ambushed outside the castle walls. In the immediate aftermath, Jon's sister is thought dead and he even receives the blame from some for her murder. Nobody even finds out that she was a fake, Jon mourns Arya's death and it makes the entire northern coalition's purpose moot. Another mention to Margaery Tyrell trapped in the Red Keep by Cersei. It's a hostage situation that lasts 77 days because nobody wants to risk Margaery's live. And yet this whole standoff is resolved when Cersei strangles her in a fit of rage, resurrects her as wight, and sends her in to the trial as a distraction.
# Headscratchers.DeathNoteRulesOfTheDeathNote: Exactly. Intentionally saving someone's life through use of the Death Note is what causes a Shinigami to die. If he intended to save Bob then he would die, otherwise he'd be fine.Not only does the anime mention it as well, it's a major plot point; it's how Gelus dies, and how Light gets rid of Rem. But the point of this question is that the Shinigami didn't extend Bob's lifespan, despite intending to. But it did. The Death Note isn't connected to one's life span; it kills you regardless of how much time you have left. So the Shinigami increases Bob's lifespan, and dies. Unfortunately, Bob doesn't get to enjoy that extra time, because the Death Note kills him first. Bob's the shaggy dog, and he just got shot.
# MoodWhiplash.AnimeAndManga: If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see... Now and Then, Here and There. Surprise!And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, perfect anime for Syfy, MD Geist.
# Literature.AfterlifeLabirynth: Joseph died 591 times by 2014-07-28
# Characters.MagiaRecordWingsOfMagius: Attempts a Doppel suicide bombing in Season 3 of the anime, together with Nemu, to bring down the amalgamation made of Alina, Old Dorothy and Embryo Eve. Both of them failed to kill it in the end.
# Recap.HTFIveGotYouUnderMySkin: Sniffles didn't have to create a vessel to go inside Giggles' infected body as she would've been cured by just laying down after a while. Too bad they all died before even noticing it.
# DrivenToSuicide.VideoGames: In The Classroom Trilogy this happen multiple times.On the fourth day of the first game, a student "can't take it any more" and throws themselves out of the window. On the Last day of the first game, A student arrive and unexpectedly pulls a gun on the teacher and shoots him and an other student, before shooting themselves. Once you complete the game, Alex snaps after escaping the shooting and walks out onto the street. Though the first car misses them for what looks to be a Happily Failed Suicide, the second car doesn't , he still survive though. At the end of the second game Mr. Henderson throw himself out of the window like the student from the first game, Samuel note that it must be a déjà vu for Alex.
# Recap.MrRobotS01E06: Shayla was killed shortly after the kidnapping. Nothing Elliot did during the episode could have saved her.
# TearJerker.{{Animaniacs}}: The "Ballad of Magellan" - not only for its morbid tone and ending, but there is something indescribably melancholy-sounding about the chorus, as if you can hear in their voices the Warners were aware their show was doomed (this was in one of the later episodes).
# Characters.TheTexasChainsawMassacre2023: If none of the Victims escape the Family, then not only did they not find Maria, they end up just meeting her fate at the hands of the Family.
# Fanfic.X2009Epic: Subaru's sacrifice negates all the supernatural components of the apocalypse and severs the connection of magic to the world, effectively making everything Kamui and Fuuma did pointless.
# VisualNovel.ZeroTimeDilemma: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to establish himself as a jerk, Delta murders Gab, the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealed that the protagonists must abandon this timeline minutes before the entire shelter is destroyed if they want to survive, and they (as well as the player) would otherwise be responsible for Gab's death. Though given Zero's vast resources it wouldn't have been impossible for him to build a way for Gab to escape, but that would require more compassion than Zero is capable of.
# Pantheon.{{Gameplay}}: Wanting to put Peacock to a better use besides vigilante justice, he talked with Caitlyn and Vi with plans of setting up a meeting with Vi to talk with Peacock about the fact that they both are Blood Knight and ruthless cops who still want to do justice. Upon seeing how they are not so different, Peacock and Vi instantly got on board the idea of working together, and celebrated by launching a attack on some suspected crimes that were going on within the house of Villainy...possibly causing MORE damage than she could've done with Jinx (probably because while Peacock thinks Jinx takes things too far, Vi and Peacock have more common grounds and thus, less reasons to think the other takes things too far). Caitlyn offered him her sympathies and lets him drink with her.
# Film.TheIronBodyguard: By the end of the film, Wang-wu, the best and only surviving fighter of the resistance, ends up being cornered by General Chong's riflemen battalion. Despite both General Chong and Yen-feng being dead at that point, it's unlikely the riflemen are just going to let Wang-wu leave after killing their boss just like that, so...
# YMMV.KingsGame: despite getting run straight through by a chainsaw, Natsuko somehow survives long enough to kill Nobuaki alongside her, rendering pretty much everything he's done moot. Being impaled through the spinal cord by a chainsaw should've rendered her paralyzed and dead.
# Characters.StrangerThingsSupportingCast: The government spent such an effort trying to convince the world that she miscarried her daughter that Terry went insane. She knows the truth deep down, but the government made sure to destroy everything else in her mind, rendering her unable to fend for herself. Season 2 reveals that her present state is a result of her attempt to bust into Hawkins Lab and find Jane. She succeeded in that much, before Brenner caught her and essentially had her brain deep fried.
# TheDogBitesBack.{{Literature}}: In Morgawr, Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil, who'd already gone through a serious case of Break the Cutie, goes through shattering psychological and mental torture at the hands of The Morgawr's Dragon, Mwellret leader Cree Bega. By the end, Ahren has almost no self-respect left, and is alone on a ship when Cree Bega comes on board, murders his one companion, tells him about the Mwellrets' torture of his crush, demands the books of magic from him and then attacks. Ahren just barely manages to man up and skewer the slippery bastard, who's had it coming for almost three books now. Easily Ahren's Moment of Awesome, and one of the most affirming moments in an otherwise ShootTheShaggyDog story.
# Characters.BladedanceOfElementalers: She gave up everything and was willing to lose both Claire and her own life in order to revive the Demon King. She succeeded momentarily, but then it is all abruptly undone essentially because Claire refuses to cooperate. Then she throws everything she has at Kamito in a last-ditch effort to re-awaken him, and he kicks her ass without the Demon King's power. Jerkass she may be, but everything she had fought for was unraveled in front of her because Claire and Kamito basically said "no". And the worst part? It was never going to work in the first place. She wants to kill the Elemental Lords to eliminate The Corruption, but the Demon King is also corrupted. If Kamito had awakened, he would have destroyed the world in exactly the same method that she was trying to prevent.
# ToTheTuneOf.RealLife: The well-known "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" was originally a comedy song called "Der Deitcher's Dog" [sic] about how the eponymous German's dog has been made into sausages — itself stolen from a Swabian folk song, Zu Lauterbach hab i mei Strumpf verlorn.
# YMMV.TheShadowLine: The show has a generally gloomy atmosphere and even the most sympathetic characters are heavily flawed, which can make it hard for viewers to get invested. The fact that the main character dies without accomplishing anything while the bad guys get away scot-free seals the deal.
# YMMV.{{Lost}}: Danielle Rousseau is probably the most tragic character of all. She was forced to kill her friends including the love of her life, had her infant daughter taken away, spent 16 years as The Aloner going nuts, and when she was finally reunited with her daughter, she got killed off.
# Wakfu.TropesSToU: Nox's entire life.
# Recap.YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeriesS4E9RexAndWeevilDoAtlantica: By the time Yami arrives back from his duel with Rafael, he questions why Professor Hawkins is already safe after being kidnapped. You know, the reason he went to duel Raphael in the first place. Yami: So this whole traumatic experience could've been completely avoided if I hadn't arbitrarily left in the middle of the night? Professor Hawkins: Turns out, yes!
# WMG.TalesFromTheDarkMultiverse: In the first volume, Billy Shepherd(The kid whose diary Pilgrim got) didn't managed to press the button in time as Castenado slew the boy, and managed to captured the Pilgrim, and forced him to watch as the rest of the survivors are killed or captured...oh and too to drive in his failure to god, Castenado slashes out his remaining eye...and oh boy does it come to bite him hard, as the Pilgrim adapts to his condition and manages to turn the tides on the blind pirate with a bullet to the stomach and head, and thus turns the raiders into his proxy of zealots, with the exact same rule except it's either accept god or take a bullet.
# Film.HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers: After getting mocked for being related to Michael, becoming mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, all her friends, her sister, and her dogs killed, Jamie is kidnapped by the cult of Thorn and is forced to have sex with Michael and bear his child, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment in the theatrical cut or stabbed by Michael, put in a coma, and literally shot in the head by the Man in Black in the Producer's Cut. Jamie could be the contender for the most depressing character in all of the horror genre.
# RoleAssociation.FilmM: A Narc and one of Charlie's Angels' daughter Ariel Dubois is sick, so they have another kid, Olive, to be her sister's spare parts. Olive doesn't like this, so she hires Jack Donaghy as her attorney. In the end, everyone gets what she wants.
# VideoGame.BubbleBobble: In a bad ending for the NES/VC version of Bubble Bobble, after getting the suddenly-required crystal ball in one-player mode and defeating the final boss, both girlfriends are rescued... only to poof away when they reach the ground. Compare this to the arcade, where the player character's girlfriend is rescued, and the other remains in captivity.
# Webcomic.{{Hiimdaisy}}: Parodied in "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again" when Vamp kills Emma. Snake: Kid! Emma's being stabbed! She's gonna die! Raiden: Why am I even trying anymore?
# Film.MenBehindTheSun: On several levels. Ishii's bioweapons research is made moot since the war ends with Japan defeated before he can deploy his pathogens in force. The marutas are all killed off, the last one trying and failing to kill Ishii himself. The epilogue notes Ishii never faces prosecution for his crimes and gets to supervise the usage of bioweapons in the Korean War.
# UsefulNotes.FrenchNewWave: ShaggyDogStory: Their movies tend to have very thin plot and the story keeps subverting any narrative resolution. Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us is a conspiracy movie without a conspiracy, the atmosphere generally stemming from the Cold War Post-Historical Trauma.
# Film.TheLastCircus: No one accomplishes anything in the end. The film ends with both clowns arrested, and Natalia and the Ghost Rider's final stunts end in their own demises.
# Film.ArlingtonRoad: Not only were Michael's attempts at saving everyone unsuccessful, but he took the blame for everything posthumously, and left his son an orphan.
# Anime.TransformersCybertron: The retcon that the energon sun collapsed to make the black hole turns the entire Energon series into one of these, annihilating the planets they fought for the whole series offscreen. Again, however, the actual show largely ignores such things (mainly, Cybertron and Jungle Planet still exist.) The screen-given (and therefore more official) explanation is that the destruction of Unicron upset the balance between good and evil, and the black hole is the result. Its first victim is an uninhabited world, aptly named Moriturus - "I am about to die" in Latin.
# Film.ToLiveAndDieInLA: The film ends with Masters dead, but just seconds after he successfully managed to burn all evidence of his crimes, making Chance's psychotic crusade to bring him to justice completely worthless even if we didn't take into account the fact Masters killed Chance.
# WesternAnimation.DCAnimatedMovieUniverse: The entire story ends with Flash going back in time to prevent Darkseid's second invasion and the decimation of Earth. However, this will inevitably cause the entire timeline to change just like what happened after the Flashpoint Paradox. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the fresh start this DC Universe will receive once the timeline resets.
# Characters.PhantomThiefJeanne: Neither version has Zen able to be saved, despite Maron's best efforts. It's even more cruel in the manga, where Zen himself has no say in the situation, and his mother gets a sudden call about his death after all of the work she'd done to bring him home.
# VideoGame.HIDE: DownerEnding: This game is a very bizarre example of all three. At face value, it's just a typical ShootTheShaggyDog ending, where even if you find all five locations you'll get caught, which the end screen rubs in further by saying your struggle was utterly futile. However, it says "You will be brought to justice and they will never be.", which can be interpreted as you'll be rightfully punished for your awful crimes (subscribing to the convict theory) while your victims will always be just that - victims who never got any justice.
# Literature.TheSagaOfYngvarTheTraveller: Svein and his men encounter a group of people leading around a creature with a wooden tower on its back. They steal it away from them and attempt to lead it themselves, but the creature just sticks it head down and refuse to budge so they hide in the reeds while figuring out a plan. They then steal it from its owners for a second time, and this time they are more successfull. "But as they didn't know the nature of the creature or what it needed to eat, they stabbed it with spears till it fell dead. Then they went down to the ships and rowed off."
# WebVideo.TwitchPlaysPokemonCrystal: The mob actually managed to successfully use an item in combat, an antidote on a poisoned Oxxy. Oxxy gets KO'd in the very same turn.
# Characters.DantesInferno: Ended up killed in her revolt, with no resolution to her plight besides being killed by the very people who wronged her before.
# TearJerker.BigBrother: In BBCan, Emmett telling Talla that she was going to be evicted. She was reduced to tears. When she walked out of the house, she stopped and spread her arms over the door, still fighting back tears.Funnily enough, it was just like what happened in BB12 to Britney, although Britney took it better. Before Talla, BBUK had Kathreya. Similar to Talla, she was one of the most carefree and friendliest houseguests ever, and at one point a choice to win. However, a surprise double eviction a few days before the finale started with the eviction of Mohamed (somewhat of a ShootTheShaggyDog story given his status as an Elimination Houdini) and then the next evicted houseguest was Kathreya. You could hear her and the rest of the houseguests crying because she had to leave.
# VideoGame.AssassinsCreedValhalla: DoingInTheWizard: Oddly for a franchise with explicitly supernatural elements, the game does this with the Beowulf saga. Eivor investigates a mass murder, then discovers that Grendel is merely a deformed and simple-minded man who Does Not Know His Own Strength, not unlike Lennie from Of Mice and Men. His mother was likewise a normal, elderly woman (albeit with some druidic magic) who just wanted to keep her son safe. Eivor is forced to kill them both, and the whole thing is a tragic ShootTheShaggyDog story. Eivor tells the Quest Giver what happened, and she decides to make the story more heroic and exciting when she writes it down.
# Characters.TheQuarry: He can get cured from his lycanthropy by Ryan and Laura only to end up being mauled to death by Caleb a few minutes later. This can only happen if the player has him swim to the shore instead of staying in the island.
# VideoGame.FarCry1: In Evolution, after going through one of the game's most annoying difficult fights in order to protect a badly injured Doyle from attacking rebels, you go off to look for an escape vehicle, and when you get back Doyle has apparently crawled off, leaving a trail of blood for you to follow. After following his trail for 2 entire levels, you come across his corpse, and realize that an indeterminate amount of the trail was just the Big Bad leaving a trail of clues by dragging his corpse along, all just to dick with you.
# Characters.CallOfDutyZombiesVictisAndOtherPlayableCharacters: They're screwed over hard after all their work due to siding with Maxis. Eventually Subverted; they're able to provide a key part of Primis Richtofen's plan to save the universe, though, and are put in stasis for safe keeping. Double Subverted in Tag der Toten, where for their troubles in getting the Agarthan Device, they’re RetGoned out of existence.
# Literature.BeastsAndBeautyDangerousTales: In "Beauty and the Beast", Mei breaks the Beasts' curse and restores him to normal....only to mistake him for one of her fathers' men and stab him to death, realizing her fatal error too late.
# Fanfic.TwilightSparklesAwesomeAdventure: Happens when the author drops a spaceship on the Tyrant. There's also the fact that Celesia isn't even Twillight's mother, which was built up as one of the main reasons they were fighting.
# Recap.StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm: The macrovirus plot started because Voyager went to help a Garan mining colony. The Doctor comes up with an antidote—and the Tak Tak destroy the colony before he can save them.
# TearJerker.DarkSoulsIII: there is no happy fairy tale ending, just the end of the Age of Fire and all that entails.
# DownerEnding.{{Film}}: The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
# WebAnimation.SonicForHire: From "Wreck-it Ralph" on, Sonic and Co. were trying to find the Creator so they could ask why he was messing with the universe. After pointless clues through Ralph, Dracula, Sir Arthur, and Link, they end up getting a right clue from Lowbrow Studios, which leads them to the real Creator. Once they find the Creator who is Dominique Wilkins, he orders Sonic to "kill his idol", which Sonic does before they can ask why he was messing with the universe. Looks like that question will never be answered.
# Film.{{Shenandoah}}: ThrowTheDogABone: Charlie's mission to rescue his youngest son from captivity fails and indirectly gets three other family members killed, while the boy ends up escaping and getting home on his own. However, the whole affair isn't quite a ShootTheShaggyDog tale, as his quest does end up rescuing his son-in-law Sam from being taken to a Hellhole Prison where he might have died like so many other prisoners in the war.
# TabletopGame.ForceOfWill: What the Alice Cluster was, especially for Alice and Pricia. Alice spent so much time coming to Attoractia to save it, only for it to fall and for her to struggle with control of her own body. Pricia, after losing her comrades in the Seven Kings, and her friends in the Sacred Beasts, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Valentina and wins...only for Valentina to take her body over in the process.
# Characters.TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWildLinkAndZelda: She cries to Link and heavily laments how all her efforts (assumed to be preventing the fall of Hyrule and stopping the Calamity Ganon from doing so) were for nothing.
# Funny.ZeroPunctuation2: Yahtzee comments how when a new player (to DayZ) came by, that unless the guy actually talked to him and asked what was wrong, he would have shot and looted him.Also, when said player gave Yahtzee a blood transfusion with (Yahtzee swears this is true) his ample supply of blood packs and nothing else, he comments on how he could have learned about The Power of Friendship and "sticking together in the face of adversity". Until a zombie came by, broke his leg, and either chased the other guy off or killed him. "Boy, did I feel like a waste of blood."
# VideoGame.FireEmblemGaiden: Implied in Sonya's ending in the remake. In the original, it was just stating that she's Jedah's daughter and having her sisters sacrificed for Duma by him explaining her hatred to him. In the remake, she attempts to find a cure for Witches, only to disappear after a lot of traveling, and it's implied she became a Witch herself taking residence in Nuibaba's Fear Mountain. Her ending is pretty much the only ending that changes from neutral to worse (though it is unknown whether her becoming a witch is bad or not, since after Duma's death it isn't known if witches lose their souls).
# Film.HanselAndGretel2013: Kevin manages to escape, even after being shot by an arrow. Unfortunately, he runs into the road and is hit by the sheriff's car. Turns that annoying arrow into straight up impalement, too.
# Literature.TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar: The whole story, when you consider it - Griboyedov spends all this running around, trying and failing to do all kinds of things, and then he is killed by a mob.
to:
# Characters.GameOfThronesJaimeLannister: OnceUponATimeLandsWithoutMagic: His Season 5 story arc. After spending most search for his father. Turns out Regina killed him shortly after he ran away. His whole mission turns out to be as well, as his mission to destroy magic was really just him being manipulated the whole time to deliver Henry to Peter Pan, and he then gets killed for his troubles.
# Film.{{Centurion}}: DwindlingParty: Only Dias, Bothos, and Thax make it to Hadrian's Wall. Dias implicitly calls Thax out on his treachery, and Thax is killed in their ensuing struggle. Bothos is shot with an arrow by the Romans, who mistake him for a Pict, killing him. So Dias is the only one who makes it inside. [[ShootTheShaggyDog Not that it matters anyways because the Romans try to kill him after all that]] to keep the fate of theseason traveling to Dorne and infiltrating the city to rescue Myrcella, he fails to save her and she dies in his arms.
# VideoGame.PoliticsAndWar: 00 server time, with any amount not used up lostNinth Legion a secret. For a full rundown:Tarak: Shot in the following day. Some players works around this back by buying all available units before 0:00, Vortix and then buying all available units after that, in an attempt to gain a military advantage Aeron. Leonidas: Speared through the "double buy." In turn, some players hold off making any offensive operations until their oppositions starts "double buying," then bomb them as much as possible head by Etain. Macros: Leg cut by Thax, who leaves him to negate any advantage of doing this. It helps with the above war mechanics, too.
wolves. Brick: Speared by Etain. He proceeds to spear himself even further to kill the Pict behind him.
# Characters.SonicTheHedgehogIDWIndependentAntagonists: He dies in disgrace immediately after all his plans go bust. As a final insult, Eggman finally gives Starline DetroitBecomeHumanPlayerCharacters: AllForNothing: If Kara abandons Alice at Jericho or leaves her at the praise he longed for upon learning how Surge and Kit came recycling plant to be.
# TearJerker.AvengersEndgame: The Gamora we knewdie, she will later come across an old pamphlet advertising Alice's android model, rubbing it in your face that [[ShootTheShaggyDog Kara would never have deviated in the first two Guardians of the Galaxy and Infinity War is gone. The one we got here and will probably see again in the MCU is the pre-Guardians version. Even place if she was already rebellious and does in fact make a Heel–Face Turn, it's hard to shake off the sensation she won't be exactly the same.Worse, the Gamora we knew is still dead. So she escaped her abusive adoptive father, found her new family and defrosted for them, only to die at the hands of said abusive adoptive father thinking that she has doomed the universe. No reset and no happy ending for her. Even if it's a comedic scene, Star-Lord is overjoyed to see Gamora again during the final battle, only not for her to obviously not know who he is and reject him, since she comes from a time before they met each other. Gamora is also absent from the final shot love for the Guardians. She apparently ran away after the final battle and Quill is shown searching for her.
Alice.]]
#Manga.AnneFreaks: If you were rooting for Anna and Yuri since the beginning Awesome.{{Sports}}: First Test of the series, wait until near the end of the manga when Anna asks Yuri to join her in her world by killing Shono, and he willingly chooses to do so, slitting the throat of what is the most sympathetic character in the 2013 Ashes series. Oh, Ashton Agar is 19 years old, on debut, the last man in, has just watched his team implode, and Shono leaves behind her has only a husband struggling, out of form batsman for support. What does he do? Plays like a seasoned pro and a little kid ? Yeah, shining example of this trope, especially since even drags his team back into the characters acknowledge it. invoked
game by scoring 98 of the best, breaking half a dozen world records in the process.note [[ShootTheShaggyDog Australia still lost the Test]], though by only 14 runs instead of the possible three-figure margin by which they would have lost without Agar's first innings.
# AdaptationExpansion.AnimeAndManga: The Japanese Nanniichuan story, in the manga, ends up a complete bust when Ranma and Ryoga break into a waterline. In the anime, they uncover a strange urn that leads to the next two episodes being an extended Fetch Quest that ultimately ends in... an entirely different ShootTheShaggyDog ending.
# Film.DraggedAcrossConcrete: Midway through TheDeadDontDie: None of the film, characters or plot lines really develop into much, and almost everyone dies.
# VideoGame.OneChance: The whole game. Even if you make a cure everyone except you and your daughter are dead, making it unlikely you two will last much longer.
# Funny.CampCamp: The episode ends with Cameron ordering theaudience is treated assassination of his body double, then defecting to an extended vignette centered on Kelly Summer, Russia in a new mother and bank teller agonizing over the necessity to return to work after three months' maternity leave. We get an extended sequence of Kelly retreating to her apartment submarine that emerges from the bus stop, begging and bargaining with her husband at the locked door to touch her baby one more time before leaving. Then she returns to work, and is warmly welcomed by her manager and coworkers. Then the bank robbery commences, and after a tense standoff between the robbers and staff Kelly has her skull blown to bits by a round lake. Cameron: None of automatic fire. The movie promptly cuts back to Ridgeman and Lurasetti, and Kelly is never mentioned again.
# Fanfic.DragonsOfIceAndFire: Arya Stark in Winterfell. Jon launches a whole campaign to save his sister, amassing free folk and northmen to march on Winterfell to rescue her... only for "Arya" to burn to death in a tower while Jon's army is ambushed outside the castle walls. In the immediate aftermath, Jon's sister is thought dead and he even receives the blame from some for her murder. Nobody even finds out that she was a fake, Jon mourns Arya's death and it makes the entire northern coalition's purpose moot. Another mention to Margaery Tyrell trapped in the Red Keep by Cersei. It's a hostage situation that lasts 77 days because nobody wants to risk Margaery's live. And yet this whole standoff is resolved when Cersei strangles her in a fit of rage, resurrects her as wight, and sends her in to the trial as a distraction.
# Headscratchers.DeathNoteRulesOfTheDeathNote: Exactly. Intentionally saving someone's life through use of the Death Note is what causes a Shinigami to die. If he intended to save Bob then he would die, otherwise he'd be fine.Not only does the anime mention it as well, it's a major plot point; it's how Gelus dies, and how Light gets rid of Rem. But the point of this question is that the Shinigami didn't extend Bob's lifespan, despite intending to. But it did. The Death Note isn't connected to one's life span; it killsyou regardless saw me here... Do svidaniya, campers! Max: (Beat) [[ShootTheShaggyDog Fucking waste of how much time you have left. So the Shinigami increases Bob's lifespan, and dies. Unfortunately, Bob doesn't get to enjoy that extra time, because the Death Note kills him first. Bob's the shaggy dog, and he just got shot.
# MoodWhiplash.AnimeAndManga: If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see... Now and Then, Here and There. Surprise!And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, perfect anime for Syfy, MD Geist.
a Saturday.]]
# Literature.AfterlifeLabirynth: Joseph died 591 times by 2014-07-28
TheTomorrowSeries: The final book, The Other Side Of Dawn ends with the enemy nation being allowed to keep a large portion of the land they have invaded, so while the survivors can move back to Wirrawee, they are now right on the border, and the whole group had effectively been fighting (and dying) for very little.
# Recap.LegendsOfTomorrowS1E3BloodTies: Snart stealing the emerald so that his father won't go to jail ends in vain Because Destiny Says So that he will go to jail.
# Characters.MagiaRecordWingsOfMagius: Attempts a Doppel suicide bombing in Season 3 of the anime, together with Nemu, to bring down the amalgamation made of Alina, Old Dorothy GodOfWarSeriesNormalHumans: He glided and Embryo Eve. Both of them failed to kill it in the end.
# Recap.HTFIveGotYouUnderMySkin: Sniffles didn't have to create a vessel to go inside Giggles' infected body as she would've been cured by just laying down after a while. Too bad they all died before even noticing it.
# DrivenToSuicide.VideoGames: In The Classroom Trilogy this happen multiple times.On the fourth day of the first game, a student "can't take it any more" and throws themselves out of the window. On the Last day of the first game, A student arrive and unexpectedly pulls a gun on the teacher and shoots him and an other student, before shooting themselves. Once you complete the game, Alex snaps after escaping the shooting and walks out onto the street. Though the first car misses themclimbed for what looks seems to be a Happily Failed Suicide, thousands (if not millions) of miles to the second car doesn't , he still survive though. At the end of the second game Mr. Henderson throw himself out of the window like the student surface from the first game, Samuel note that it must be a déjà vu for Alex.
# Recap.MrRobotS01E06: Shayla was killed shortly after the kidnapping. Nothing Elliot did during the episode could have saved her.
# TearJerker.{{Animaniacs}}: The "Ballad of Magellan" - not only for its morbid tone and ending, but there is something indescribably melancholy-sounding about the chorus, as if you can hear in their voices the Warners were aware their show was doomed (this was in oneabysm of the later episodes).
Universe in order to change his fate. Only to fall from the bridge when he thought he could stop Kratos and fall back into the abyss.
# VideoGame.ShinMegamiTenseiI: HeelRealization: Neither the Law nor Chaos Hero realize that their ideologies might be flawed until right before you kill them— at which point the Law Hero realizes he's simply God's Unwitting Pawn instead of The Chosen One, and the Chaos Hero realizes that his quest for power was mostly pointless since you [[ShootTheShaggyDog overpowered him regardless]].
# Characters.TheTexasChainsawMassacre2023: If none MassEffect2CouncilSpaceNPCs: His project turns into this. Almost everyone associated with the project gets killed. Legion reveals the majority of the Victims escape geth have no interest in another war, and Legion himself is perfectly happy to communicate voluntarily with humans. So in the Family, then not only did they not find Maria, they end up just meeting her fate at the hands of the Family.
# Fanfic.X2009Epic: Subaru's sacrifice negates all the supernatural components of the apocalypse and severs the connection of magic to the world, effectively makingend, everything Kamui and Fuuma did pointless.
# VisualNovel.ZeroTimeDilemma: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to establish himself as a jerk, Delta murders Gab, the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealedthat the protagonists must abandon this timeline minutes before the entire shelter is destroyed if they want to survive, and they (as well as the player) would otherwise be responsible for Gab's death. Though given Zero's vast resources it wouldn't have been impossible for him to build a way for Gab to escape, but that would require more compassion than Zero is capable of.
# Pantheon.{{Gameplay}}: Wanting toGavin put Peacock to a better use besides vigilante justice, he talked with Caitlyn and Vi with plans of setting up a meeting with Vi to talk with Peacock about the fact that they both are Blood Knight and ruthless cops who still want to do justice. Upon seeing how they are not so different, Peacock and Vi instantly got on board the idea of working together, and celebrated by launching a attack on some suspected crimes that were going on within the house of Villainy...possibly causing MORE damage than she could've done with Jinx (probably because while Peacock thinks Jinx takes things too far, Vi and Peacock have more common grounds and thus, less reasons to think the other takes things too far). Caitlyn offered him her sympathies and lets him drink with her.
# Film.TheIronBodyguard: By the end of the film, Wang-wu, the best and only surviving fighter of the resistance, ends up being cornered by General Chong's riflemen battalion. Despite both General Chong and Yen-feng being dead at that point, it's unlikely the riflemen are just going to let Wang-wu leave after killing their boss just like that, so...
# YMMV.KingsGame: despite getting run straightDavid through by a chainsaw, Natsuko somehow survives long enough to kill Nobuaki alongside her, rendering pretty much everything he's done moot. Being impaled through was pointless. This is especially evident if you play the spinal cord by a chainsaw should've rendered her paralyzed and dead.
# Characters.StrangerThingsSupportingCast: The government spent such an effort trying to convincemission after recruiting Legion. If Shepard never did the world that she miscarried her daughter that Terry went insane. She knows the truth deep down, but the government made sure to destroy everything else in her mind, rendering her unable to fend for herself. Season 2 Project Overlord DLC, Archer reveals that her present state is a result of her attempt to bust into Hawkins Lab and find Jane. She succeeded in that much, before Brenner caught her and essentially the area had her brain deep fried.
# TheDogBitesBack.{{Literature}}: In Morgawr, Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil, who'd already gone through a serious case of Break the Cutie, goes through shattering psychological and mental torture at the hands of The Morgawr's Dragon, Mwellret leader Cree Bega. By the end, Ahren has almost no self-respect left, and is alone on a ship when Cree Bega comes on board, murders his one companion, tells him about the Mwellrets' torture of his crush, demands the books of magic from him and then attacks. Ahren just barely managesto man up and skewer the slippery bastard, who's had it coming for almost three books now. Easily Ahren's Moment of Awesome, and one of the most affirming moments in an otherwise ShootTheShaggyDog story.
# Characters.BladedanceOfElementalers: She gave up everything and was willingbe nuked to lose both Claire and her own life in order to revive the Demon King. She succeeded momentarily, but then it is all abruptly undone essentially because Claire refuses to cooperate. Then she throws everything she has at Kamito in a last-ditch effort to re-awaken him, and he kicks her ass without the Demon King's power. Jerkass she may be, but everything she had fought for was unraveled in front of her because Claire and Kamito basically said "no". And the worst part? It was never going to work in the first place. She wants to kill the Elemental Lords to eliminate The Corruption, but the Demon King is also corrupted. If Kamito had awakened, he would have destroyed the world in exactly the same method that she was trying to prevent.
# ToTheTuneOf.RealLife: The well-known "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" was originally a comedy song called "Der Deitcher's Dog" [sic] about how the eponymous German's dog has been made into sausages — itself stolen from a Swabian folk song, Zu Lauterbach hab i mei Strumpf verlorn.
# YMMV.TheShadowLine: The show has a generally gloomy atmosphere and even the most sympathetic characters are heavily flawed, which can make it hard for viewers to get invested. The fact that the main character dies without accomplishing anything while the bad guys get away scot-free seals the deal.
# YMMV.{{Lost}}: Danielle Rousseau is probably the most tragic character of all. She was forced to kill her friends including the love of her life, had her infant daughter taken away, spent 16 years as The Aloner going nuts, and when she was finally reunited with her daughter, she got killed off.
# Wakfu.TropesSToU: Nox's entire life.
stop David.
# Recap.YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeriesS4E9RexAndWeevilDoAtlantica: By the time Yami arrives back from his duel with Rafael, he questions why Professor Hawkins is already safe after being kidnapped. You know, the reason he went to duel Raphael in the first place. Yami: So this whole traumatic experience could've been completely avoided if I hadn't arbitrarily left in the middle of the night? Professor Hawkins: Turns out, yes!
# WMG.TalesFromTheDarkMultiverse: In the first volume, Billy Shepherd(The kid whose diary Pilgrim got)BojackHorsemanS6E08AQuickOneWhileHesAway: Gina didn't managed to press want the button in time as Castenado slew the boy, and managed to captured the Pilgrim, and forced him to watch as the rest circumstances of the survivors are killed or captured...oh and too to drive in his failure to god, Castenado slashes out his remaining eye...and oh boy does it come to bite him hard, as the Pilgrim adapts to his condition and manages to turn the tides on the blind pirate with a bullet [=BoJack=] strangling her revealed to the stomach and head, and thus turns press because she feared that controversy would end up overshadowing her career. In the raiders into his proxy of zealots, with the exact same rule except it's either accept god or take a bullet.
# Film.HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers: After getting mocked for being related to Michael, becoming mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, all her friends, her sister, and her dogs killed, Jamie is kidnapped by the cult of Thorn and is forced to have sex with Michael and bear his child, andpresent, she's finally impaled by farm equipment in the theatrical cut or stabbed by Michael, put in a coma, actually suffered PTSD from that event, and literally shot in the head by the Man in Black in the Producer's Cut. Jamie could be the contender for the most depressing character in all of the horror genre.
# RoleAssociation.FilmM: A Narcher lashing out at co-stars and one of Charlie's Angels' daughter Ariel Dubois is sick, so they have another kid, Olive, to be directors alike has now earned her sister's spare parts. Olive doesn't like this, so she hires Jack Donaghy a reputation as her attorney. In the end, everyone gets being difficult to work with because nobody knows what she wants.
happened.
# Recap.BabylonBerlinS4E12: The Reichswehr document ends up with the NKVD, leaving Katelbach and his editor stuck in jail.
# VideoGame.BubbleBobble: In a bad AloneInTheDark: At least the "Path of Darkness" ending to the 2008 game. If you shoot Sarah, Lucifer's Evil Plan fully succeeds, and the possessed Carnby opens the gates of hell, heralding The End of the World as We Know It. Earlier, it is said "Lucifer's failure is also his reincarnation".
# Manga.ShadowStar: The anime adaptation. Most of the cast goes insane and dies in a generally unsatisfying fashion, except for theNES/VC version of Bubble Bobble, after getting the suddenly-required crystal ball in one-player mode and defeating the final boss, both girlfriends are rescued... only to poof away when they reach the ground. Compare this to the arcade, where the player character's girlfriend is rescued, main character and the other remains in captivity.
# Webcomic.{{Hiimdaisy}}: Parodied in "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again" when Vamp kills Emma. Snake: Kid! Emma's being stabbed! She's gonna die! Raiden: Why am I even trying anymore?
# Film.MenBehindTheSun: On several levels. Ishii's bioweapons research is made moot sincevaguely established villains, who vanish off the war ends with Japan defeated before he can deploy his pathogens in force. The marutas are all killed off, face of the last one trying and failing to kill Ishii himself. The epilogue notes Ishii never faces prosecution for his crimes and gets to supervise earth around episode 10. Most of the usage of bioweapons in the Korean War.
# UsefulNotes.FrenchNewWave: ShaggyDogStory: Their movies tend to have very thinplot points are Left Hanging, and noone seems to care much. The description that 'nothing much has happened except that a few ineffectual people has died' fits the story keeps subverting any narrative resolution. Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us like a glove, although this is a conspiracy movie without a conspiracy, because the atmosphere generally stemming from the Cold War Post-Historical Trauma.
# Film.TheLastCircus: No one accomplishes anything in the end. The film ends with both clowns arrested, and Natalia and the Ghost Rider's final stunts end in their own demises.
# Film.ArlingtonRoad: Notanime only were Michael's attempts at saving everyone unsuccessful, but he took covers the blame for everything posthumously, and left his son an orphan.
# Anime.TransformersCybertron: The retcon that the energon sun collapsed to make the black hole turns the entire Energon series into one of these, annihilating the planets they fought for the whole series offscreen. Again, however, the actual show largely ignores such things (mainly, Cybertron and Jungle Planet still exist.) The screen-given (and therefore more official) explanation is that the destruction of Unicron upset the balance between good and evil, and the black hole is the result. Itsfirst victim is an uninhabited world, aptly named Moriturus - "I am about to die" in Latin.
# Film.ToLiveAndDieInLA: The film ends with Masters dead, but just seconds after he successfully managed to burn all evidencehalf of his crimes, making Chance's psychotic crusade to bring him to justice completely worthless even if we didn't take into account the fact Masters killed Chance.
# WesternAnimation.DCAnimatedMovieUniverse: The entire story ends with Flash going back in time to prevent Darkseid's second invasion and the decimation of Earth. However, this will inevitably cause the entire timeline to change just like what happened after the Flashpoint Paradox. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the fresh start this DC Universe will receive once the timeline resets.
# Characters.PhantomThiefJeanne: Neither version has Zen able to be saved, despite Maron's best efforts. It's even more cruel inthe manga, where Zen himself has no say in cutting off right before things start to get really bad. The manga, incidentally, may also count as this.
# ComicStrip.FunkyWinkerbean: Lisa's death. The author made it clear almost a year before thesituation, and his mother gets a sudden call about his death after all of the work she'd done to bring him home.
# VideoGame.HIDE: DownerEnding: This game is a very bizarre example of all three. At face value, it's just a typical ShootTheShaggyDog ending, where even if you find all five locations you'll get caught, which the end screen rubs in further by saying your struggle was utterly futile. However, it says "You will be brought to justice and they will never be.", which can be interpreted as you'll be rightfully punished for your awful crimes (subscribing to the convict theory) while your victims will always be justplot line resolved that - victims who never got any justice.
# Literature.TheSagaOfYngvarTheTraveller: Svein and his men encounter a group of people leading around a creature with a wooden tower on its back. They stealit away from them and attempt to lead it themselves, but the creature just sticks it head down and refuse to budge so they hide in the reeds while figuring out a plan. They then steal it from its owners for a second time, and this time they are more successfull. "But as they didn't know the nature of the creature or what it needed to eat, they stabbed it with spears till it fell dead. Then they went down to the ships and rowed off."
# WebVideo.TwitchPlaysPokemonCrystal: The mob actually managed to successfully use an item in combat, an antidote on a poisoned Oxxy. Oxxy gets KO'd in the very same turn.
# Characters.DantesInferno: Ended up killed in her revolt, with no resolution to her plight besides being killed by the very people who wronged her before.
# TearJerker.BigBrother: In BBCan, Emmett telling Talla that shewas going to be evicted. She was reduced to tears. When she walked out of the house, she stopped and spread end with her arms over the door, still fighting back tears.Funnily enough, it was just like what happened in BB12 to Britney, although Britney took it better. Before Talla, BBUK had Kathreya. Similar to Talla, she was one death, so enduring a year of the most carefree and friendliest houseguests ever, and at one point a choice to win. However, a surprise double eviction Lisa not knowing, getting a few days before the finale started with the eviction of Mohamed (somewhat of a ShootTheShaggyDog story given his status as an Elimination Houdini) false hopes, and then the next evicted houseguest wasting away in hospice, was Kathreya. You could hear her and the rest of the houseguests crying because she had to leave.
# VideoGame.AssassinsCreedValhalla: DoingInTheWizard: Oddly for a franchise with explicitly supernatural elements, the game does this with the Beowulf saga. Eivor investigates a mass murder, then discovers that Grendel is merely a deformed and simple-minded man who Does Not Know His Own Strength, not unlike Lennieexcruciating. Bull's encephalopathy from Of Mice and Men. His mother was likewise a normal, elderly woman (albeit with some druidic magic) who just wanted to keep her son safe. Eivor is forced to kill them both, and the whole thing is a tragic ShootTheShaggyDog story. Eivor tells the Quest Giver what happened, and she decides to make the story more heroic and exciting when she writes it down.
# Characters.TheQuarry: He can get cured from his lycanthropy by Ryan and Laura only to end uphistory of football injuries has recently been fodder for awkward "jokes" about him being mauled to death by Caleb a few minutes later. This can only happen forgetful or quirky, which would possibly be chuckle-worthy if the player has him swim to the shore instead of staying in the island.
# VideoGame.FarCry1: In Evolution, after going through one of the game's most annoying difficult fights in order to protect a badly injured Doyle from attacking rebels, you go off to looknot for an escape vehicle, and when you get back Doyle has apparently crawled off, leaving a trail of blood for you to follow. After following his trail for 2 entire levels, you come across his corpse, and realize that an indeterminate amount of the trail was just the Big Bad leaving a trail of clues by dragging his corpse along, all just to dick with you.
# Characters.CallOfDutyZombiesVictisAndOtherPlayableCharacters: They're screwed over hard after all their work due to siding with Maxis. Eventually Subverted; they're able to provide a key part of Primis Richtofen's plan to save the universe, though, and are put in stasis for safe keeping. Double Subverted in Tag der Toten, where for their troubles in getting the Agarthan Device, they’re RetGoned out of existence.
# Literature.BeastsAndBeautyDangerousTales: In "Beauty and the Beast", Mei breaks the Beasts' curse and restores him to normal....only to mistake him for one of her fathers' men and stab him to death, realizing her fatal error too late.
# Fanfic.TwilightSparklesAwesomeAdventure: Happens when the author drops a spaceship on the Tyrant. There's alsothe fact that Celesia isn't even Twillight's mother, which was built up as one of they're the main reasons they were fighting.
# Recap.StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm: The macrovirus plot started because Voyager went to help a Garan mining colony. The Doctor comes up with an antidote—and the Tak Tak destroy the colony before he can save them.
# TearJerker.DarkSoulsIII: there is no happy fairy tale ending,direct result of severe brain trauma. And just the end of the Age of Fire and all like Lisa's fate it's been confirmed, months in advance, that entails.
# DownerEnding.{{Film}}: The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
# WebAnimation.SonicForHire: From "Wreck-it Ralph" on, Sonic and Co. were trying to find the Creator so they could ask why he was messing with the universe. After pointless clues through Ralph, Dracula, Sir Arthur, and Link, they end up getting a right clue from Lowbrow Studios, which leads them to the real Creator. Once they find the Creator who is Dominique Wilkins, he orders Sonic to "kill his idol", which Sonic does before they can ask why he was messing with the universe. Looks like that questionBull's story will never be answered.
# Film.{{Shenandoah}}: ThrowTheDogABone: Charlie's mission to rescue his youngest son from captivity fails and indirectly gets three other family members killed, while the boy ends up escaping and getting home on his own. However, the whole affair isn't quite a ShootTheShaggyDog tale, as his quest doesend up rescuing his son-in-law Sam from being taken to a Hellhole Prison where he might have died like so many other prisoners in the war.
# TabletopGame.ForceOfWill: What the Alice Cluster was, especially for Alice and Pricia. Alice spent so muchtragically, this time coming to Attoractia to save it, only for it to fall and for her to struggle with control of her own body. Pricia, after losing her comrades in the Seven Kings, and her friends in the Sacred Beasts, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Valentina and wins...only for Valentina to take her body over in the process.
# Characters.TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWildLinkAndZelda: She cries to Link and heavily laments how all her efforts (assumed to be preventing the fall of Hyrule and stopping the Calamity Ganon from doing so) were for nothing.
by suicide. Here We Go Again!!
# Funny.ZeroPunctuation2: Yahtzee comments how when a new ProtonJonLivestreams: In Duck Game, one of the minigames requires each player (to DayZ) came by, that unless to climb up to the guy actually talked to him top of a screen and asked what was wrong, he would have shot and looted him.Also, when said player gave Yahtzee grab a blood transfusion with (Yahtzee swears this is true) his ample supply of blood packs and nothing else, he comments on how he could have learned about The Power of Friendship and "sticking together in the face of adversity". Until a zombie came by, broke his leg, and either chased weapon to kill the other guy off or killed him. "Boy, did I feel like a waste of blood."
# VideoGame.FireEmblemGaiden: Implied in Sonya's ending inplayers. Jon is able to get to the remake. In the original, it was just stating that she's Jedah's daughter top first and having her sisters sacrificed for Duma by him explaining her hatred grabs a gun, [[ShootTheShaggyDog but kills himself right afterwards]] thanks to him. In the remake, she attempts to find a cure for Witches, only to disappear after a lot of traveling, and it's implied she became a Witch herself taking residence in Nuibaba's Fear Mountain. Her ending his finger slipping. He is pretty much the only ending that changes from neutral to worse (though it is unknown whether her becoming a witch is bad or not, since after Duma's death it isn't known if witches lose their souls).
# Film.HanselAndGretel2013: Kevin manages to escape, even after being shot by an arrow. Unfortunately, he runs into the road and is hit by the sheriff's car. Turns that annoying arrow into straight up impalement, too.
# Literature.TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar: The whole story, when you consider it - Griboyedov spends all this running around, trying and failing to do all kinds of things, and then he is killed by a mob.not amused.
# Film.{{Centurion}}: DwindlingParty: Only Dias, Bothos, and Thax make it to Hadrian's Wall. Dias implicitly calls Thax out on his treachery, and Thax is killed in their ensuing struggle. Bothos is shot with an arrow by the Romans, who mistake him for a Pict, killing him. So Dias is the only one who makes it inside. [[ShootTheShaggyDog Not that it matters anyways because the Romans try to kill him after all that]] to keep the fate of the
# VideoGame.PoliticsAndWar: 00 server time, with any amount not used up lost
# Characters.
# TearJerker.AvengersEndgame: The Gamora we knew
#
# AdaptationExpansion.AnimeAndManga: The Japanese Nanniichuan story, in the manga, ends up a complete bust when Ranma and Ryoga break into a waterline. In the anime, they uncover a strange urn that leads to the next two episodes being an extended Fetch Quest that ultimately ends in... an entirely different ShootTheShaggyDog ending.
# Film.
# VideoGame.OneChance: The whole game. Even if you make a cure everyone except you and your daughter are dead, making it unlikely you two will last much longer.
# Funny.CampCamp: The episode ends with Cameron ordering the
# Fanfic.DragonsOfIceAndFire: Arya Stark in Winterfell. Jon launches a whole campaign to save his sister, amassing free folk and northmen to march on Winterfell to rescue her... only for "Arya" to burn to death in a tower while Jon's army is ambushed outside the castle walls. In the immediate aftermath, Jon's sister is thought dead and he even receives the blame from some for her murder. Nobody even finds out that she was a fake, Jon mourns Arya's death and it makes the entire northern coalition's purpose moot. Another mention to Margaery Tyrell trapped in the Red Keep by Cersei. It's a hostage situation that lasts 77 days because nobody wants to risk Margaery's live. And yet this whole standoff is resolved when Cersei strangles her in a fit of rage, resurrects her as wight, and sends her in to the trial as a distraction.
# Headscratchers.DeathNoteRulesOfTheDeathNote: Exactly. Intentionally saving someone's life through use of the Death Note is what causes a Shinigami to die. If he intended to save Bob then he would die, otherwise he'd be fine.Not only does the anime mention it as well, it's a major plot point; it's how Gelus dies, and how Light gets rid of Rem. But the point of this question is that the Shinigami didn't extend Bob's lifespan, despite intending to. But it did. The Death Note isn't connected to one's life span; it kills
# MoodWhiplash.AnimeAndManga: If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see... Now and Then, Here and There. Surprise!And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, perfect anime for Syfy, MD Geist.
# Literature.
# Recap.LegendsOfTomorrowS1E3BloodTies: Snart stealing the emerald so that his father won't go to jail ends in vain Because Destiny Says So that he will go to jail.
# Characters.
# Recap.HTFIveGotYouUnderMySkin: Sniffles didn't have to create a vessel to go inside Giggles' infected body as she would've been cured by just laying down after a while. Too bad they all died before even noticing it.
# DrivenToSuicide.VideoGames: In The Classroom Trilogy this happen multiple times.On the fourth day of the first game, a student "can't take it any more" and throws themselves out of the window. On the Last day of the first game, A student arrive and unexpectedly pulls a gun on the teacher and shoots him and an other student, before shooting themselves. Once you complete the game, Alex snaps after escaping the shooting and walks out onto the street. Though the first car misses them
# Recap.MrRobotS01E06: Shayla was killed shortly after the kidnapping. Nothing Elliot did during the episode could have saved her.
# TearJerker.{{Animaniacs}}: The "Ballad of Magellan" - not only for its morbid tone and ending, but there is something indescribably melancholy-sounding about the chorus, as if you can hear in their voices the Warners were aware their show was doomed (this was in one
# VideoGame.ShinMegamiTenseiI: HeelRealization: Neither the Law nor Chaos Hero realize that their ideologies might be flawed until right before you kill them— at which point the Law Hero realizes he's simply God's Unwitting Pawn instead of The Chosen One, and the Chaos Hero realizes that his quest for power was mostly pointless since you [[ShootTheShaggyDog overpowered him regardless]].
# Characters.
# Fanfic.X2009Epic: Subaru's sacrifice negates all the supernatural components of the apocalypse and severs the connection of magic to the world, effectively making
# VisualNovel.ZeroTimeDilemma: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to establish himself as a jerk, Delta murders Gab, the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealed
# Pantheon.{{Gameplay}}: Wanting to
# Film.TheIronBodyguard: By the end of the film, Wang-wu, the best and only surviving fighter of the resistance, ends up being cornered by General Chong's riflemen battalion. Despite both General Chong and Yen-feng being dead at that point, it's unlikely the riflemen are just going to let Wang-wu leave after killing their boss just like that, so...
# YMMV.KingsGame: despite getting run straight
# Characters.StrangerThingsSupportingCast: The government spent such an effort trying to convince
# TheDogBitesBack.{{Literature}}: In Morgawr, Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil, who'd already gone through a serious case of Break the Cutie, goes through shattering psychological and mental torture at the hands of The Morgawr's Dragon, Mwellret leader Cree Bega. By the end, Ahren has almost no self-respect left, and is alone on a ship when Cree Bega comes on board, murders his one companion, tells him about the Mwellrets' torture of his crush, demands the books of magic from him and then attacks. Ahren just barely manages
# Characters.BladedanceOfElementalers: She gave up everything and was willing
# ToTheTuneOf.RealLife: The well-known "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" was originally a comedy song called "Der Deitcher's Dog" [sic] about how the eponymous German's dog has been made into sausages — itself stolen from a Swabian folk song, Zu Lauterbach hab i mei Strumpf verlorn.
# YMMV.TheShadowLine: The show has a generally gloomy atmosphere and even the most sympathetic characters are heavily flawed, which can make it hard for viewers to get invested. The fact that the main character dies without accomplishing anything while the bad guys get away scot-free seals the deal.
# YMMV.{{Lost}}: Danielle Rousseau is probably the most tragic character of all. She was forced to kill her friends including the love of her life, had her infant daughter taken away, spent 16 years as The Aloner going nuts, and when she was finally reunited with her daughter, she got killed off.
# Wakfu.TropesSToU: Nox's entire life.
# Recap.
# WMG.TalesFromTheDarkMultiverse: In the first volume, Billy Shepherd(The kid whose diary Pilgrim got)
# Film.HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers: After getting mocked for being related to Michael, becoming mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, all her friends, her sister, and her dogs killed, Jamie is kidnapped by the cult of Thorn and is forced to have sex with Michael and bear his child, and
# RoleAssociation.FilmM: A Narc
# Recap.BabylonBerlinS4E12: The Reichswehr document ends up with the NKVD, leaving Katelbach and his editor stuck in jail.
# VideoGame.
# Manga.ShadowStar: The anime adaptation. Most of the cast goes insane and dies in a generally unsatisfying fashion, except for the
# Webcomic.{{Hiimdaisy}}: Parodied in "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again" when Vamp kills Emma. Snake: Kid! Emma's being stabbed! She's gonna die! Raiden: Why am I even trying anymore?
# Film.MenBehindTheSun: On several levels. Ishii's bioweapons research is made moot since
# UsefulNotes.FrenchNewWave: ShaggyDogStory: Their movies tend to have very thin
# Film.TheLastCircus: No one accomplishes anything in the end. The film ends with both clowns arrested, and Natalia and the Ghost Rider's final stunts end in their own demises.
# Film.ArlingtonRoad: Not
# Anime.TransformersCybertron: The retcon that the energon sun collapsed to make the black hole turns the entire Energon series into one of these, annihilating the planets they fought for the whole series offscreen. Again, however, the actual show largely ignores such things (mainly, Cybertron and Jungle Planet still exist.) The screen-given (and therefore more official) explanation is that the destruction of Unicron upset the balance between good and evil, and the black hole is the result. Its
# Film.ToLiveAndDieInLA: The film ends with Masters dead, but just seconds after he successfully managed to burn all evidence
# WesternAnimation.DCAnimatedMovieUniverse: The entire story ends with Flash going back in time to prevent Darkseid's second invasion and the decimation of Earth. However, this will inevitably cause the entire timeline to change just like what happened after the Flashpoint Paradox. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the fresh start this DC Universe will receive once the timeline resets.
# Characters.PhantomThiefJeanne: Neither version has Zen able to be saved, despite Maron's best efforts. It's even more cruel in
# ComicStrip.FunkyWinkerbean: Lisa's death. The author made it clear almost a year before the
# VideoGame.HIDE: DownerEnding: This game is a very bizarre example of all three. At face value, it's just a typical ShootTheShaggyDog ending, where even if you find all five locations you'll get caught, which the end screen rubs in further by saying your struggle was utterly futile. However, it says "You will be brought to justice and they will never be.", which can be interpreted as you'll be rightfully punished for your awful crimes (subscribing to the convict theory) while your victims will always be just
# Literature.TheSagaOfYngvarTheTraveller: Svein and his men encounter a group of people leading around a creature with a wooden tower on its back. They steal
# WebVideo.TwitchPlaysPokemonCrystal: The mob actually managed to successfully use an item in combat, an antidote on a poisoned Oxxy. Oxxy gets KO'd in the very same turn.
# Characters.DantesInferno: Ended up killed in her revolt, with no resolution to her plight besides being killed by the very people who wronged her before.
# TearJerker.BigBrother: In BBCan, Emmett telling Talla that she
# VideoGame.AssassinsCreedValhalla: DoingInTheWizard: Oddly for a franchise with explicitly supernatural elements, the game does this with the Beowulf saga. Eivor investigates a mass murder, then discovers that Grendel is merely a deformed and simple-minded man who Does Not Know His Own Strength, not unlike Lennie
# Characters.TheQuarry: He can get cured from his lycanthropy by Ryan and Laura only to end up
# VideoGame.FarCry1: In Evolution, after going through one of the game's most annoying difficult fights in order to protect a badly injured Doyle from attacking rebels, you go off to look
# Characters.CallOfDutyZombiesVictisAndOtherPlayableCharacters: They're screwed over hard after all their work due to siding with Maxis. Eventually Subverted; they're able to provide a key part of Primis Richtofen's plan to save the universe, though, and are put in stasis for safe keeping. Double Subverted in Tag der Toten, where for their troubles in getting the Agarthan Device, they’re RetGoned out of existence.
# Literature.BeastsAndBeautyDangerousTales: In "Beauty and the Beast", Mei breaks the Beasts' curse and restores him to normal....only to mistake him for one of her fathers' men and stab him to death, realizing her fatal error too late.
# Fanfic.TwilightSparklesAwesomeAdventure: Happens when the author drops a spaceship on the Tyrant. There's also
# Recap.StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm: The macrovirus plot started because Voyager went to help a Garan mining colony. The Doctor comes up with an antidote—and the Tak Tak destroy the colony before he can save them.
# TearJerker.DarkSoulsIII: there is no happy fairy tale ending,
# DownerEnding.{{Film}}: The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
# WebAnimation.SonicForHire: From "Wreck-it Ralph" on, Sonic and Co. were trying to find the Creator so they could ask why he was messing with the universe. After pointless clues through Ralph, Dracula, Sir Arthur, and Link, they end up getting a right clue from Lowbrow Studios, which leads them to the real Creator. Once they find the Creator who is Dominique Wilkins, he orders Sonic to "kill his idol", which Sonic does before they can ask why he was messing with the universe. Looks like that question
# Film.{{Shenandoah}}: ThrowTheDogABone: Charlie's mission to rescue his youngest son from captivity fails and indirectly gets three other family members killed, while the boy ends up escaping and getting home on his own. However, the whole affair isn't quite a ShootTheShaggyDog tale, as his quest does
# TabletopGame.ForceOfWill: What the Alice Cluster was, especially for Alice and Pricia. Alice spent so much
# Characters.TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWildLinkAndZelda: She cries to Link and heavily laments how all her efforts (assumed to be preventing the fall of Hyrule and stopping the Calamity Ganon from doing so) were for nothing.
# Funny.
# VideoGame.FireEmblemGaiden: Implied in Sonya's ending in
# Film.HanselAndGretel2013: Kevin manages to escape, even after being shot by an arrow. Unfortunately, he runs into the road and is hit by the sheriff's car. Turns that annoying arrow into straight up impalement, too.
# Literature.TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar: The whole story, when you consider it - Griboyedov spends all this running around, trying and failing to do all kinds of things, and then he is killed by a mob.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Added DiffLines:
!!Wick Check input (100 examples)
# TheTwilightZone1959.TropesQToZ: Especially heartbreaking in "The Time Element" because Peter Jenson not only is unable to prevent the death of a young couple (oh, and prevent the mass death and disaster at Pearl Harbor), he also gets himself killed and part of his life erased from existence as well. This episode not only shot the shaggy dog, it skinned and made it into a floor rug. Nonlethal version in "The Big Tall Wish". "It's a Good Life". No, it isn't!
# VisualNovel.{{Island}}: TheEndingChangesEverything: After Sestuna finally gains enough Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, it's revealed near the very end of the story that he's never been time traveling after all, just taking The Slow Path in a universe in which events find a way to closely repeat themselves given enough time. This twist was cited as ruining the entire story for fans of the anime in particular for its seemingly unintentional ShootTheShaggyDog nature, especially since there's no time left in the story to deal with the consequences by that point.
# Memes.{{Rugrats}}: People making chocolate pudding at 4 in the morning because they've lost control of their lives. Some even think of it as a mid-life crisis.Explanation From "Angelica Breaks A Leg", Angelica takes the hospitality of the Pickles to the breaking point for Stu. Oh, as for the pudding? She wasn't hungry anymore. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" CERTAIN DELICIOUSNESS! SUPER CHOCOLATE PUDDING GIGA SPOON BREAKAHHHH!!!
# YMMV.ASongOfIceAndFire: Quentyn Martell. While some readers find him interesting and his story arc as a great deconstruction of a hero's journey, others find him boring and overly idealistic, and thus find his story arc as ShootTheShaggyDog and a complete waste of time.
# Film.KamenRiderZeroOneOthersVulcanValkyrie: Lyon Arkland (the Big Bad of the previous film) dies without being able to mass-produce the Solds he wanted to enter the global arms-race with. He DID however accomplish his goal of turning the members of Metsubojinrai into the engineered threat he wanted said Solds to fight, claiming the lives of most of the season's heroes by proxy of the insane Mechanical Abomination he turned the Humagears into doing it for him. For bonus points, the entire incident sours the relations between man and machine the heroes have been fighting to establish all season, with the government itself planning to crack down once again on A.I..
# Film.Cube2Hypercube: After many perils, the main heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
# VideoGame.LaPucelle: The Overlord Ending, in which Prier fights through the demonic hordes of the Dark World only to kill one too many demons and turn into a Demonic Overlord herself. This causes all of her friends and allies to leave her, alone and trapped in the Dark World with nothing but a sexy new makeover to show for it. Worse, this ending is canon: Overlord Prier makes cameos in every other Nippon Ichi game, and the Updated Re-release has an entire bonus story based upon what happens next.
# Literature.TheLuminaries: The end of Sook Yongsheng's quest for revenge against Francis Carver. He's shot dead by George Shepard without ever confronting Carver in person.
# Characters.ChainsawManDevilsAndFiends: Owing to Aki being a deconstruction of the Stock Shōnen Rival, his entire arc in the story ends on a downer note. He's so driven by his goal of killing the Gun Devil that he ultimately loses the majority of people he cares for and sacrifices both his body and lifespan to see his goal through. He does all of this only to learn that the Gun Devil had already been defeated and he later gets used as a pawn by the woman he seemingly loves and possessed by the Gun Devil, becoming the very monster he had been hunting.
# Fridge.TheAvengersEarthsMightiestHeroes: The Skrulls came to Earth because their homeworld was destroyed by Galactus. Considering that Galactus showed up not too long afterward, that pretty much mean the entire purpose of the Skrull invasion would have been one massive ShootTheShaggyDog incident for them, especially if they succeeded in getting rid of Iron Man and the Fantastic Four before his arrival.
# Literature.SpoonRiverAnthology: Minerva Jones' story. She's bullied because of her appearance, raped by Butch Weldy, and finally dies as a result of a botched abortion.
# AnyoneCanDie.VideoGames: Regardless of how long they survive or how important they are to the narrative, no less than seventy percent of the NPCs are capable of perishing depending on how (or if) you complete their sidequests. Frustratingly, many of them die after you spent hours doing their sidequests, and some characters like Blaidd and Sir Gideon Ofnir are killed by your very own hand. And then there's the Frenzied Flame ending, where you can choose to set the whole world on fire.
# CobraKai.TropesIToR: Deconstructed with Kreese's flashbacks in Season 3. Kreese joined the army and shipped out to Vietnam with good intentions, wanting to serve his country and be a hero. He and his squad were captured by the Vietnamese and put in a nightmarish prisoner camp where they were forced to fight each other to the death when Kreese refused to set off a bomb and blow up their mission target because his friend Ponytail was too close and would have been killed. To make matters worse, Ponytail was killed minutes later anyway. Then Kreese discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a car crash while he was away. All of these experiences led Kreese to adopting the worldview that mercy and altruism are a weakness, and all that matters is who is strong and weak, turning him into the violent sociopath he is in the present.
# VideoGame.Portal1: GLaDOS originally tries to kill Chell in the final test chamber. The revised ending also shows that Chell is going to be dragged into another "test", so her escape attempt was still a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
# Recap.SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E3TheBullyJustOneBite: By way of a Hope Spot. Downplayed in that SpongeBob managed to survive his assailant, but that doesn't stop Mrs. Puff from thinking that he beat up Flats, who she thinks is innocent because Adults Are Useless in this story, resulting in her claiming that she's going to kick SpongeBob's butt. All the pain and suffering SpongeBob tried to avoid is still going to happen, if not even worse because adults are more seasoned than students.
# Fanfic.{{Pokedex}}: The ending of ''The Saga of the Great Pod" is like this, unsurprisingly given the nihilistic author.
# VideoGame.TheOverseerSeries: The bonus dungeon in the North Road is this — a Harder Than Hard gauntlet that pits you against waves of high-level creatures, including Deathclaws (and variants), Cazadores, and more, that you ostensibly follow because you're trying to find a missing adventurer who may have high-level loot on him. Once you reach the end, you find... nothing except a note (with the adventurer's body) functionally laughing at the player for wasting all their time carving through enemies for no reward at all.
# Characters.MassEffectCommanderShepard: In 3, Renegade Shepard seems to go through allies even faster than the Reapers, personally killing Mordin, Wrex (if he survived the first game), Legion, and Ashley/Kaidan. If you count preventable suicides, you can add Tali and Samara to that list, as well (and you can render Samara's suicide entirely pointless by killing the last of her daughters immediately after). Deaths by omission/neglect include Miranda, Jack, and Kelly Chambers. And so on.
# Manga.DeathNote: Light is killed by Ryuk, having been exposed as Kira, after so many people have been pointlessly killed. The world is rotten again, and nothing's been accomplished.
# Film.ThirteenDays: Discussed — Bobby at one point explains the rather detailed process of how important government officials and their families would be evacuated from Washington should missile launch be detected in Cuba, then ends with this: Bobby: Of course, that's for morale. Missiles only take five minutes to get here.
# Characters.TwistedMetal: He finds out in the end that he's an undercover FBI agent, and saved dozens of lives in a bombing incident. He is, in fact, a hero... and he's standing in front of one of the world's most wanted criminals, who shoots him dead.
# Film.WonderWomen: The film ends with Harber being surrounded by a bunch of vengeful action floozies, one of whom is his Love Interest, who aims his own hand-cannon at him. Presumably he will be killed imminently, but judging by his lustful smile, he apparently thinks it's orgy time. Tsu: (voiceover) Goodbye, Mr. Harber. Like all great minds, we cannot avoid our destiny. (Screen fades to black.) Kevin: Yes, this truly was a tale of great minds.
# BrokenBase.TalesSeries: More recently, there has been a been a bit of a divide between fans who like the darker stories and bittersweet or even downer endings that more recent games have had, and fans who feel that the series is getting too dark to be enjoyable and that the unhappy endings make the stories feel pointless, and would prefer the series go back to having lighter stories and unambiguously happy endings.
# Characters.HarryPotterSiriusBlack: No pun intended. After breaking out of prison, Sirius is instead placed under virtual house arrest in his horrible childhood home with most of his colleagues on field duty, and Harry in Hogwarts with only a bitter old House-Elf for regular company. He dies in battle before his name is cleared out of a mix of lack of field experience and Suicidal Overconfidence and does not play a major role in helping Harry achieve his destiny. His mistakes with Kreacher are cited by Hermione as a cautionary tale instead.
# VideoGame.RaySeries: RayStorm's Extra Mode ending seems like it's a Bittersweet Ending, with the enemy forces (and billions of inhabitants, many of which were from Earth) being destroyed by having their capital colony dropped into a gas giant. While your badly damaged ship moves away into the distance. If you're playing on the 13-Ship Mode, the ending goes From Bad to Worse when you see this text after the credits: Earth and Secilia have vanished. Likewise, those that developed the "RAY" technology and all evidence of its existence have been wiped away. No record of R-GRAY craft was found, and no R-GRAY craft has ever returned. RayForce and RayCrisis are considered downer endings also, due to the former having the heroine's fighter being damaged beyond repair at the end after destroying the Earth and the latter being Doomed by Canon since it is a prequel to RayForce and all of your efforts to disable Con-Human being pointless until the events of RayForce.
# Film.RosemarysBaby: Rosemary becomes suspicious of her husband and the neighbors he's befriended and tries to protect her unborn baby from them. Everyone who is inclined to help her dies or is horribly injured. She discovers her suspicions are all too horribly true - in fact, worse, because she thinks they're "only" going to sacrifice her baby - and tries to escape, but fails. She births the antichrist, and it falls directly into the hands of Satanists.
# TearJerker.MegaManX: Vile's death at the end of Maverick Hunter X in Vile Mode. ShootTheShaggyDog doesn't even begin to cover it.
# Funny.SomeJerkWithACamera: "ABC Goes to DisneyLAND!"
# YMMV.JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind: Risotto Nero fell into a life of crime due to tragic circumstances, yet he and his team never got any respect from the Boss, and just keeps losing his teammates one by one. He then dies an ultimately futile and unfortunate death just as he was about to kill the Boss. Despite all that, he keeps his emotions under a stone cold façade to the very end.
# Recap.SCPFoundationSCPs2500To2999: Assuming that SCP-2718 is merely a cognitohazard that causes you to believe it or makes it the afterlife of those exposed, then O5-7 unwittingly doomed who know how many to eternal agony for nothing by writing the only remaining vector for it, only realizing the possibility after they've already put it down in an impossible to revise/edit/delete document.
# NotAllowedToGrowUp.ComicBooks: There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by the time he changed his name to Nightwing. Jack Kirby had officially aged Jimmy Olsen to 21 in the 1970s. And Supergirl had gone from a little teenybopper to a full-grown young woman by the '80s. After the Crisis, though, Jimmy got turned back into a kid, while Dick got to stay an adult, and poor Kara got erased from existence.
# SarcasmBlind.VideoGames: Undead Nightmare once again features the omni-bigot Conspiracy Theorist and memetic Large Ham Herbert Moon, who blames a broad yet bizarrely specific cabal of groups for the undead plague. John Marston, Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, piles sarcasm onto Moon for his irrational hate, which Herbert mistakes for support for his righteous cause to single-handedly stop the undead plague and bring down the conspiracy. Herbert Moon is promptly eaten by zombies seconds after he steps out of his store.
# Fanfic.PaperAndSand: Any attempt to end the Cycle and kill Scion is ultimately this. Anytime someone does succeed in killing Scion, Eden transforms the individual into an Endbringer and then turns back the clock.
# Series.TheIncreasinglyPoorDecisionsOfToddMargaret: Alice dies suddenly, making the whole romantic subplot moot.
# Film.PromisingYoungWoman: Subverted. Al murders Cassie and Ryan lies to the police to make them think it was a suicide, but the last scene exposes them and sees Al arrested for Cassie’s murder.
# Film.ResidentEvilTheFinalChapter: Part of Isaac's plan to hit the survivors of Raccoon City involves luring zombies to it by dragging live humans behind his armored vehicles. The last one is a woman that he releases, letting her run to the gates, giving Alice and Claire a shot at saving her, so they open the gates and pick off all the zombies behind her as best as they can. Isaacs waits till the gates are open and they've played their hand, whereupon he has the woman shot dead.
# Characters.GameOfThronesJaimeLannister: His Season 5 story arc. After spending most of the season traveling to Dorne and infiltrating the city to rescue Myrcella, he fails to save her and she dies in his arms.
# VideoGame.PoliticsAndWar: 00 server time, with any amount not used up lost in the following day. Some players works around this by buying all available units before 0:00, and then buying all available units after that, in an attempt to gain a military advantage through the "double buy." In turn, some players hold off making any offensive operations until their oppositions starts "double buying," then bomb them as much as possible to negate any advantage of doing this. It helps with the above war mechanics, too.
# Characters.SonicTheHedgehogIDWIndependentAntagonists: He dies in disgrace immediately after all his plans go bust. As a final insult, Eggman finally gives Starline the praise he longed for upon learning how Surge and Kit came to be.
# TearJerker.AvengersEndgame: The Gamora we knew in the first two Guardians of the Galaxy and Infinity War is gone. The one we got here and will probably see again in the MCU is the pre-Guardians version. Even if she was already rebellious and does in fact make a Heel–Face Turn, it's hard to shake off the sensation she won't be exactly the same.Worse, the Gamora we knew is still dead. So she escaped her abusive adoptive father, found her new family and defrosted for them, only to die at the hands of said abusive adoptive father thinking that she has doomed the universe. No reset and no happy ending for her. Even if it's a comedic scene, Star-Lord is overjoyed to see Gamora again during the final battle, only for her to obviously not know who he is and reject him, since she comes from a time before they met each other. Gamora is also absent from the final shot for the Guardians. She apparently ran away after the final battle and Quill is shown searching for her.
# Manga.AnneFreaks: If you were rooting for Anna and Yuri since the beginning of the series, wait until near the end of the manga when Anna asks Yuri to join her in her world by killing Shono, and he willingly chooses to do so, slitting the throat of what is the most sympathetic character in the series. Oh, and Shono leaves behind her a husband and a little kid ? Yeah, shining example of this trope, especially since even the characters acknowledge it. invoked
# Film.DraggedAcrossConcrete: Midway through the film, the audience is treated to an extended vignette centered on Kelly Summer, a new mother and bank teller agonizing over the necessity to return to work after three months' maternity leave. We get an extended sequence of Kelly retreating to her apartment from the bus stop, begging and bargaining with her husband at the locked door to touch her baby one more time before leaving. Then she returns to work, and is warmly welcomed by her manager and coworkers. Then the bank robbery commences, and after a tense standoff between the robbers and staff Kelly has her skull blown to bits by a round of automatic fire. The movie promptly cuts back to Ridgeman and Lurasetti, and Kelly is never mentioned again.
# Fanfic.DragonsOfIceAndFire: Arya Stark in Winterfell. Jon launches a whole campaign to save his sister, amassing free folk and northmen to march on Winterfell to rescue her... only for "Arya" to burn to death in a tower while Jon's army is ambushed outside the castle walls. In the immediate aftermath, Jon's sister is thought dead and he even receives the blame from some for her murder. Nobody even finds out that she was a fake, Jon mourns Arya's death and it makes the entire northern coalition's purpose moot. Another mention to Margaery Tyrell trapped in the Red Keep by Cersei. It's a hostage situation that lasts 77 days because nobody wants to risk Margaery's live. And yet this whole standoff is resolved when Cersei strangles her in a fit of rage, resurrects her as wight, and sends her in to the trial as a distraction.
# Headscratchers.DeathNoteRulesOfTheDeathNote: Exactly. Intentionally saving someone's life through use of the Death Note is what causes a Shinigami to die. If he intended to save Bob then he would die, otherwise he'd be fine.Not only does the anime mention it as well, it's a major plot point; it's how Gelus dies, and how Light gets rid of Rem. But the point of this question is that the Shinigami didn't extend Bob's lifespan, despite intending to. But it did. The Death Note isn't connected to one's life span; it kills you regardless of how much time you have left. So the Shinigami increases Bob's lifespan, and dies. Unfortunately, Bob doesn't get to enjoy that extra time, because the Death Note kills him first. Bob's the shaggy dog, and he just got shot.
# MoodWhiplash.AnimeAndManga: If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see... Now and Then, Here and There. Surprise!And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, perfect anime for Syfy, MD Geist.
# Literature.AfterlifeLabirynth: Joseph died 591 times by 2014-07-28
# Characters.MagiaRecordWingsOfMagius: Attempts a Doppel suicide bombing in Season 3 of the anime, together with Nemu, to bring down the amalgamation made of Alina, Old Dorothy and Embryo Eve. Both of them failed to kill it in the end.
# Recap.HTFIveGotYouUnderMySkin: Sniffles didn't have to create a vessel to go inside Giggles' infected body as she would've been cured by just laying down after a while. Too bad they all died before even noticing it.
# DrivenToSuicide.VideoGames: In The Classroom Trilogy this happen multiple times.On the fourth day of the first game, a student "can't take it any more" and throws themselves out of the window. On the Last day of the first game, A student arrive and unexpectedly pulls a gun on the teacher and shoots him and an other student, before shooting themselves. Once you complete the game, Alex snaps after escaping the shooting and walks out onto the street. Though the first car misses them for what looks to be a Happily Failed Suicide, the second car doesn't , he still survive though. At the end of the second game Mr. Henderson throw himself out of the window like the student from the first game, Samuel note that it must be a déjà vu for Alex.
# Recap.MrRobotS01E06: Shayla was killed shortly after the kidnapping. Nothing Elliot did during the episode could have saved her.
# TearJerker.{{Animaniacs}}: The "Ballad of Magellan" - not only for its morbid tone and ending, but there is something indescribably melancholy-sounding about the chorus, as if you can hear in their voices the Warners were aware their show was doomed (this was in one of the later episodes).
# Characters.TheTexasChainsawMassacre2023: If none of the Victims escape the Family, then not only did they not find Maria, they end up just meeting her fate at the hands of the Family.
# Fanfic.X2009Epic: Subaru's sacrifice negates all the supernatural components of the apocalypse and severs the connection of magic to the world, effectively making everything Kamui and Fuuma did pointless.
# VisualNovel.ZeroTimeDilemma: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to establish himself as a jerk, Delta murders Gab, the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealed that the protagonists must abandon this timeline minutes before the entire shelter is destroyed if they want to survive, and they (as well as the player) would otherwise be responsible for Gab's death. Though given Zero's vast resources it wouldn't have been impossible for him to build a way for Gab to escape, but that would require more compassion than Zero is capable of.
# Pantheon.{{Gameplay}}: Wanting to put Peacock to a better use besides vigilante justice, he talked with Caitlyn and Vi with plans of setting up a meeting with Vi to talk with Peacock about the fact that they both are Blood Knight and ruthless cops who still want to do justice. Upon seeing how they are not so different, Peacock and Vi instantly got on board the idea of working together, and celebrated by launching a attack on some suspected crimes that were going on within the house of Villainy...possibly causing MORE damage than she could've done with Jinx (probably because while Peacock thinks Jinx takes things too far, Vi and Peacock have more common grounds and thus, less reasons to think the other takes things too far). Caitlyn offered him her sympathies and lets him drink with her.
# Film.TheIronBodyguard: By the end of the film, Wang-wu, the best and only surviving fighter of the resistance, ends up being cornered by General Chong's riflemen battalion. Despite both General Chong and Yen-feng being dead at that point, it's unlikely the riflemen are just going to let Wang-wu leave after killing their boss just like that, so...
# YMMV.KingsGame: despite getting run straight through by a chainsaw, Natsuko somehow survives long enough to kill Nobuaki alongside her, rendering pretty much everything he's done moot. Being impaled through the spinal cord by a chainsaw should've rendered her paralyzed and dead.
# Characters.StrangerThingsSupportingCast: The government spent such an effort trying to convince the world that she miscarried her daughter that Terry went insane. She knows the truth deep down, but the government made sure to destroy everything else in her mind, rendering her unable to fend for herself. Season 2 reveals that her present state is a result of her attempt to bust into Hawkins Lab and find Jane. She succeeded in that much, before Brenner caught her and essentially had her brain deep fried.
# TheDogBitesBack.{{Literature}}: In Morgawr, Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil, who'd already gone through a serious case of Break the Cutie, goes through shattering psychological and mental torture at the hands of The Morgawr's Dragon, Mwellret leader Cree Bega. By the end, Ahren has almost no self-respect left, and is alone on a ship when Cree Bega comes on board, murders his one companion, tells him about the Mwellrets' torture of his crush, demands the books of magic from him and then attacks. Ahren just barely manages to man up and skewer the slippery bastard, who's had it coming for almost three books now. Easily Ahren's Moment of Awesome, and one of the most affirming moments in an otherwise ShootTheShaggyDog story.
# Characters.BladedanceOfElementalers: She gave up everything and was willing to lose both Claire and her own life in order to revive the Demon King. She succeeded momentarily, but then it is all abruptly undone essentially because Claire refuses to cooperate. Then she throws everything she has at Kamito in a last-ditch effort to re-awaken him, and he kicks her ass without the Demon King's power. Jerkass she may be, but everything she had fought for was unraveled in front of her because Claire and Kamito basically said "no". And the worst part? It was never going to work in the first place. She wants to kill the Elemental Lords to eliminate The Corruption, but the Demon King is also corrupted. If Kamito had awakened, he would have destroyed the world in exactly the same method that she was trying to prevent.
# ToTheTuneOf.RealLife: The well-known "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" was originally a comedy song called "Der Deitcher's Dog" [sic] about how the eponymous German's dog has been made into sausages — itself stolen from a Swabian folk song, Zu Lauterbach hab i mei Strumpf verlorn.
# YMMV.TheShadowLine: The show has a generally gloomy atmosphere and even the most sympathetic characters are heavily flawed, which can make it hard for viewers to get invested. The fact that the main character dies without accomplishing anything while the bad guys get away scot-free seals the deal.
# YMMV.{{Lost}}: Danielle Rousseau is probably the most tragic character of all. She was forced to kill her friends including the love of her life, had her infant daughter taken away, spent 16 years as The Aloner going nuts, and when she was finally reunited with her daughter, she got killed off.
# Wakfu.TropesSToU: Nox's entire life.
# Recap.YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeriesS4E9RexAndWeevilDoAtlantica: By the time Yami arrives back from his duel with Rafael, he questions why Professor Hawkins is already safe after being kidnapped. You know, the reason he went to duel Raphael in the first place. Yami: So this whole traumatic experience could've been completely avoided if I hadn't arbitrarily left in the middle of the night? Professor Hawkins: Turns out, yes!
# WMG.TalesFromTheDarkMultiverse: In the first volume, Billy Shepherd(The kid whose diary Pilgrim got) didn't managed to press the button in time as Castenado slew the boy, and managed to captured the Pilgrim, and forced him to watch as the rest of the survivors are killed or captured...oh and too to drive in his failure to god, Castenado slashes out his remaining eye...and oh boy does it come to bite him hard, as the Pilgrim adapts to his condition and manages to turn the tides on the blind pirate with a bullet to the stomach and head, and thus turns the raiders into his proxy of zealots, with the exact same rule except it's either accept god or take a bullet.
# Film.HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers: After getting mocked for being related to Michael, becoming mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, all her friends, her sister, and her dogs killed, Jamie is kidnapped by the cult of Thorn and is forced to have sex with Michael and bear his child, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment in the theatrical cut or stabbed by Michael, put in a coma, and literally shot in the head by the Man in Black in the Producer's Cut. Jamie could be the contender for the most depressing character in all of the horror genre.
# RoleAssociation.FilmM: A Narc and one of Charlie's Angels' daughter Ariel Dubois is sick, so they have another kid, Olive, to be her sister's spare parts. Olive doesn't like this, so she hires Jack Donaghy as her attorney. In the end, everyone gets what she wants.
# VideoGame.BubbleBobble: In a bad ending for the NES/VC version of Bubble Bobble, after getting the suddenly-required crystal ball in one-player mode and defeating the final boss, both girlfriends are rescued... only to poof away when they reach the ground. Compare this to the arcade, where the player character's girlfriend is rescued, and the other remains in captivity.
# Webcomic.{{Hiimdaisy}}: Parodied in "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again" when Vamp kills Emma. Snake: Kid! Emma's being stabbed! She's gonna die! Raiden: Why am I even trying anymore?
# Film.MenBehindTheSun: On several levels. Ishii's bioweapons research is made moot since the war ends with Japan defeated before he can deploy his pathogens in force. The marutas are all killed off, the last one trying and failing to kill Ishii himself. The epilogue notes Ishii never faces prosecution for his crimes and gets to supervise the usage of bioweapons in the Korean War.
# UsefulNotes.FrenchNewWave: ShaggyDogStory: Their movies tend to have very thin plot and the story keeps subverting any narrative resolution. Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us is a conspiracy movie without a conspiracy, the atmosphere generally stemming from the Cold War Post-Historical Trauma.
# Film.TheLastCircus: No one accomplishes anything in the end. The film ends with both clowns arrested, and Natalia and the Ghost Rider's final stunts end in their own demises.
# Film.ArlingtonRoad: Not only were Michael's attempts at saving everyone unsuccessful, but he took the blame for everything posthumously, and left his son an orphan.
# Anime.TransformersCybertron: The retcon that the energon sun collapsed to make the black hole turns the entire Energon series into one of these, annihilating the planets they fought for the whole series offscreen. Again, however, the actual show largely ignores such things (mainly, Cybertron and Jungle Planet still exist.) The screen-given (and therefore more official) explanation is that the destruction of Unicron upset the balance between good and evil, and the black hole is the result. Its first victim is an uninhabited world, aptly named Moriturus - "I am about to die" in Latin.
# Film.ToLiveAndDieInLA: The film ends with Masters dead, but just seconds after he successfully managed to burn all evidence of his crimes, making Chance's psychotic crusade to bring him to justice completely worthless even if we didn't take into account the fact Masters killed Chance.
# WesternAnimation.DCAnimatedMovieUniverse: The entire story ends with Flash going back in time to prevent Darkseid's second invasion and the decimation of Earth. However, this will inevitably cause the entire timeline to change just like what happened after the Flashpoint Paradox. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the fresh start this DC Universe will receive once the timeline resets.
# Characters.PhantomThiefJeanne: Neither version has Zen able to be saved, despite Maron's best efforts. It's even more cruel in the manga, where Zen himself has no say in the situation, and his mother gets a sudden call about his death after all of the work she'd done to bring him home.
# VideoGame.HIDE: DownerEnding: This game is a very bizarre example of all three. At face value, it's just a typical ShootTheShaggyDog ending, where even if you find all five locations you'll get caught, which the end screen rubs in further by saying your struggle was utterly futile. However, it says "You will be brought to justice and they will never be.", which can be interpreted as you'll be rightfully punished for your awful crimes (subscribing to the convict theory) while your victims will always be just that - victims who never got any justice.
# Literature.TheSagaOfYngvarTheTraveller: Svein and his men encounter a group of people leading around a creature with a wooden tower on its back. They steal it away from them and attempt to lead it themselves, but the creature just sticks it head down and refuse to budge so they hide in the reeds while figuring out a plan. They then steal it from its owners for a second time, and this time they are more successfull. "But as they didn't know the nature of the creature or what it needed to eat, they stabbed it with spears till it fell dead. Then they went down to the ships and rowed off."
# WebVideo.TwitchPlaysPokemonCrystal: The mob actually managed to successfully use an item in combat, an antidote on a poisoned Oxxy. Oxxy gets KO'd in the very same turn.
# Characters.DantesInferno: Ended up killed in her revolt, with no resolution to her plight besides being killed by the very people who wronged her before.
# TearJerker.BigBrother: In BBCan, Emmett telling Talla that she was going to be evicted. She was reduced to tears. When she walked out of the house, she stopped and spread her arms over the door, still fighting back tears.Funnily enough, it was just like what happened in BB12 to Britney, although Britney took it better. Before Talla, BBUK had Kathreya. Similar to Talla, she was one of the most carefree and friendliest houseguests ever, and at one point a choice to win. However, a surprise double eviction a few days before the finale started with the eviction of Mohamed (somewhat of a ShootTheShaggyDog story given his status as an Elimination Houdini) and then the next evicted houseguest was Kathreya. You could hear her and the rest of the houseguests crying because she had to leave.
# VideoGame.AssassinsCreedValhalla: DoingInTheWizard: Oddly for a franchise with explicitly supernatural elements, the game does this with the Beowulf saga. Eivor investigates a mass murder, then discovers that Grendel is merely a deformed and simple-minded man who Does Not Know His Own Strength, not unlike Lennie from Of Mice and Men. His mother was likewise a normal, elderly woman (albeit with some druidic magic) who just wanted to keep her son safe. Eivor is forced to kill them both, and the whole thing is a tragic ShootTheShaggyDog story. Eivor tells the Quest Giver what happened, and she decides to make the story more heroic and exciting when she writes it down.
# Characters.TheQuarry: He can get cured from his lycanthropy by Ryan and Laura only to end up being mauled to death by Caleb a few minutes later. This can only happen if the player has him swim to the shore instead of staying in the island.
# VideoGame.FarCry1: In Evolution, after going through one of the game's most annoying difficult fights in order to protect a badly injured Doyle from attacking rebels, you go off to look for an escape vehicle, and when you get back Doyle has apparently crawled off, leaving a trail of blood for you to follow. After following his trail for 2 entire levels, you come across his corpse, and realize that an indeterminate amount of the trail was just the Big Bad leaving a trail of clues by dragging his corpse along, all just to dick with you.
# Characters.CallOfDutyZombiesVictisAndOtherPlayableCharacters: They're screwed over hard after all their work due to siding with Maxis. Eventually Subverted; they're able to provide a key part of Primis Richtofen's plan to save the universe, though, and are put in stasis for safe keeping. Double Subverted in Tag der Toten, where for their troubles in getting the Agarthan Device, they’re RetGoned out of existence.
# Literature.BeastsAndBeautyDangerousTales: In "Beauty and the Beast", Mei breaks the Beasts' curse and restores him to normal....only to mistake him for one of her fathers' men and stab him to death, realizing her fatal error too late.
# Fanfic.TwilightSparklesAwesomeAdventure: Happens when the author drops a spaceship on the Tyrant. There's also the fact that Celesia isn't even Twillight's mother, which was built up as one of the main reasons they were fighting.
# Recap.StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm: The macrovirus plot started because Voyager went to help a Garan mining colony. The Doctor comes up with an antidote—and the Tak Tak destroy the colony before he can save them.
# TearJerker.DarkSoulsIII: there is no happy fairy tale ending, just the end of the Age of Fire and all that entails.
# DownerEnding.{{Film}}: The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
# WebAnimation.SonicForHire: From "Wreck-it Ralph" on, Sonic and Co. were trying to find the Creator so they could ask why he was messing with the universe. After pointless clues through Ralph, Dracula, Sir Arthur, and Link, they end up getting a right clue from Lowbrow Studios, which leads them to the real Creator. Once they find the Creator who is Dominique Wilkins, he orders Sonic to "kill his idol", which Sonic does before they can ask why he was messing with the universe. Looks like that question will never be answered.
# Film.{{Shenandoah}}: ThrowTheDogABone: Charlie's mission to rescue his youngest son from captivity fails and indirectly gets three other family members killed, while the boy ends up escaping and getting home on his own. However, the whole affair isn't quite a ShootTheShaggyDog tale, as his quest does end up rescuing his son-in-law Sam from being taken to a Hellhole Prison where he might have died like so many other prisoners in the war.
# TabletopGame.ForceOfWill: What the Alice Cluster was, especially for Alice and Pricia. Alice spent so much time coming to Attoractia to save it, only for it to fall and for her to struggle with control of her own body. Pricia, after losing her comrades in the Seven Kings, and her friends in the Sacred Beasts, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Valentina and wins...only for Valentina to take her body over in the process.
# Characters.TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWildLinkAndZelda: She cries to Link and heavily laments how all her efforts (assumed to be preventing the fall of Hyrule and stopping the Calamity Ganon from doing so) were for nothing.
# Funny.ZeroPunctuation2: Yahtzee comments how when a new player (to DayZ) came by, that unless the guy actually talked to him and asked what was wrong, he would have shot and looted him.Also, when said player gave Yahtzee a blood transfusion with (Yahtzee swears this is true) his ample supply of blood packs and nothing else, he comments on how he could have learned about The Power of Friendship and "sticking together in the face of adversity". Until a zombie came by, broke his leg, and either chased the other guy off or killed him. "Boy, did I feel like a waste of blood."
# VideoGame.FireEmblemGaiden: Implied in Sonya's ending in the remake. In the original, it was just stating that she's Jedah's daughter and having her sisters sacrificed for Duma by him explaining her hatred to him. In the remake, she attempts to find a cure for Witches, only to disappear after a lot of traveling, and it's implied she became a Witch herself taking residence in Nuibaba's Fear Mountain. Her ending is pretty much the only ending that changes from neutral to worse (though it is unknown whether her becoming a witch is bad or not, since after Duma's death it isn't known if witches lose their souls).
# Film.HanselAndGretel2013: Kevin manages to escape, even after being shot by an arrow. Unfortunately, he runs into the road and is hit by the sheriff's car. Turns that annoying arrow into straight up impalement, too.
# Literature.TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar: The whole story, when you consider it - Griboyedov spends all this running around, trying and failing to do all kinds of things, and then he is killed by a mob.
# TheTwilightZone1959.TropesQToZ: Especially heartbreaking in "The Time Element" because Peter Jenson not only is unable to prevent the death of a young couple (oh, and prevent the mass death and disaster at Pearl Harbor), he also gets himself killed and part of his life erased from existence as well. This episode not only shot the shaggy dog, it skinned and made it into a floor rug. Nonlethal version in "The Big Tall Wish". "It's a Good Life". No, it isn't!
# VisualNovel.{{Island}}: TheEndingChangesEverything: After Sestuna finally gains enough Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, it's revealed near the very end of the story that he's never been time traveling after all, just taking The Slow Path in a universe in which events find a way to closely repeat themselves given enough time. This twist was cited as ruining the entire story for fans of the anime in particular for its seemingly unintentional ShootTheShaggyDog nature, especially since there's no time left in the story to deal with the consequences by that point.
# Memes.{{Rugrats}}: People making chocolate pudding at 4 in the morning because they've lost control of their lives. Some even think of it as a mid-life crisis.Explanation From "Angelica Breaks A Leg", Angelica takes the hospitality of the Pickles to the breaking point for Stu. Oh, as for the pudding? She wasn't hungry anymore. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" CERTAIN DELICIOUSNESS! SUPER CHOCOLATE PUDDING GIGA SPOON BREAKAHHHH!!!
# YMMV.ASongOfIceAndFire: Quentyn Martell. While some readers find him interesting and his story arc as a great deconstruction of a hero's journey, others find him boring and overly idealistic, and thus find his story arc as ShootTheShaggyDog and a complete waste of time.
# Film.KamenRiderZeroOneOthersVulcanValkyrie: Lyon Arkland (the Big Bad of the previous film) dies without being able to mass-produce the Solds he wanted to enter the global arms-race with. He DID however accomplish his goal of turning the members of Metsubojinrai into the engineered threat he wanted said Solds to fight, claiming the lives of most of the season's heroes by proxy of the insane Mechanical Abomination he turned the Humagears into doing it for him. For bonus points, the entire incident sours the relations between man and machine the heroes have been fighting to establish all season, with the government itself planning to crack down once again on A.I..
# Film.Cube2Hypercube: After many perils, the main heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
# VideoGame.LaPucelle: The Overlord Ending, in which Prier fights through the demonic hordes of the Dark World only to kill one too many demons and turn into a Demonic Overlord herself. This causes all of her friends and allies to leave her, alone and trapped in the Dark World with nothing but a sexy new makeover to show for it. Worse, this ending is canon: Overlord Prier makes cameos in every other Nippon Ichi game, and the Updated Re-release has an entire bonus story based upon what happens next.
# Literature.TheLuminaries: The end of Sook Yongsheng's quest for revenge against Francis Carver. He's shot dead by George Shepard without ever confronting Carver in person.
# Characters.ChainsawManDevilsAndFiends: Owing to Aki being a deconstruction of the Stock Shōnen Rival, his entire arc in the story ends on a downer note. He's so driven by his goal of killing the Gun Devil that he ultimately loses the majority of people he cares for and sacrifices both his body and lifespan to see his goal through. He does all of this only to learn that the Gun Devil had already been defeated and he later gets used as a pawn by the woman he seemingly loves and possessed by the Gun Devil, becoming the very monster he had been hunting.
# Fridge.TheAvengersEarthsMightiestHeroes: The Skrulls came to Earth because their homeworld was destroyed by Galactus. Considering that Galactus showed up not too long afterward, that pretty much mean the entire purpose of the Skrull invasion would have been one massive ShootTheShaggyDog incident for them, especially if they succeeded in getting rid of Iron Man and the Fantastic Four before his arrival.
# Literature.SpoonRiverAnthology: Minerva Jones' story. She's bullied because of her appearance, raped by Butch Weldy, and finally dies as a result of a botched abortion.
# AnyoneCanDie.VideoGames: Regardless of how long they survive or how important they are to the narrative, no less than seventy percent of the NPCs are capable of perishing depending on how (or if) you complete their sidequests. Frustratingly, many of them die after you spent hours doing their sidequests, and some characters like Blaidd and Sir Gideon Ofnir are killed by your very own hand. And then there's the Frenzied Flame ending, where you can choose to set the whole world on fire.
# CobraKai.TropesIToR: Deconstructed with Kreese's flashbacks in Season 3. Kreese joined the army and shipped out to Vietnam with good intentions, wanting to serve his country and be a hero. He and his squad were captured by the Vietnamese and put in a nightmarish prisoner camp where they were forced to fight each other to the death when Kreese refused to set off a bomb and blow up their mission target because his friend Ponytail was too close and would have been killed. To make matters worse, Ponytail was killed minutes later anyway. Then Kreese discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a car crash while he was away. All of these experiences led Kreese to adopting the worldview that mercy and altruism are a weakness, and all that matters is who is strong and weak, turning him into the violent sociopath he is in the present.
# VideoGame.Portal1: GLaDOS originally tries to kill Chell in the final test chamber. The revised ending also shows that Chell is going to be dragged into another "test", so her escape attempt was still a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
# Recap.SpongeBobSquarePantsS3E3TheBullyJustOneBite: By way of a Hope Spot. Downplayed in that SpongeBob managed to survive his assailant, but that doesn't stop Mrs. Puff from thinking that he beat up Flats, who she thinks is innocent because Adults Are Useless in this story, resulting in her claiming that she's going to kick SpongeBob's butt. All the pain and suffering SpongeBob tried to avoid is still going to happen, if not even worse because adults are more seasoned than students.
# Fanfic.{{Pokedex}}: The ending of ''The Saga of the Great Pod" is like this, unsurprisingly given the nihilistic author.
# VideoGame.TheOverseerSeries: The bonus dungeon in the North Road is this — a Harder Than Hard gauntlet that pits you against waves of high-level creatures, including Deathclaws (and variants), Cazadores, and more, that you ostensibly follow because you're trying to find a missing adventurer who may have high-level loot on him. Once you reach the end, you find... nothing except a note (with the adventurer's body) functionally laughing at the player for wasting all their time carving through enemies for no reward at all.
# Characters.MassEffectCommanderShepard: In 3, Renegade Shepard seems to go through allies even faster than the Reapers, personally killing Mordin, Wrex (if he survived the first game), Legion, and Ashley/Kaidan. If you count preventable suicides, you can add Tali and Samara to that list, as well (and you can render Samara's suicide entirely pointless by killing the last of her daughters immediately after). Deaths by omission/neglect include Miranda, Jack, and Kelly Chambers. And so on.
# Manga.DeathNote: Light is killed by Ryuk, having been exposed as Kira, after so many people have been pointlessly killed. The world is rotten again, and nothing's been accomplished.
# Film.ThirteenDays: Discussed — Bobby at one point explains the rather detailed process of how important government officials and their families would be evacuated from Washington should missile launch be detected in Cuba, then ends with this: Bobby: Of course, that's for morale. Missiles only take five minutes to get here.
# Characters.TwistedMetal: He finds out in the end that he's an undercover FBI agent, and saved dozens of lives in a bombing incident. He is, in fact, a hero... and he's standing in front of one of the world's most wanted criminals, who shoots him dead.
# Film.WonderWomen: The film ends with Harber being surrounded by a bunch of vengeful action floozies, one of whom is his Love Interest, who aims his own hand-cannon at him. Presumably he will be killed imminently, but judging by his lustful smile, he apparently thinks it's orgy time. Tsu: (voiceover) Goodbye, Mr. Harber. Like all great minds, we cannot avoid our destiny. (Screen fades to black.) Kevin: Yes, this truly was a tale of great minds.
# BrokenBase.TalesSeries: More recently, there has been a been a bit of a divide between fans who like the darker stories and bittersweet or even downer endings that more recent games have had, and fans who feel that the series is getting too dark to be enjoyable and that the unhappy endings make the stories feel pointless, and would prefer the series go back to having lighter stories and unambiguously happy endings.
# Characters.HarryPotterSiriusBlack: No pun intended. After breaking out of prison, Sirius is instead placed under virtual house arrest in his horrible childhood home with most of his colleagues on field duty, and Harry in Hogwarts with only a bitter old House-Elf for regular company. He dies in battle before his name is cleared out of a mix of lack of field experience and Suicidal Overconfidence and does not play a major role in helping Harry achieve his destiny. His mistakes with Kreacher are cited by Hermione as a cautionary tale instead.
# VideoGame.RaySeries: RayStorm's Extra Mode ending seems like it's a Bittersweet Ending, with the enemy forces (and billions of inhabitants, many of which were from Earth) being destroyed by having their capital colony dropped into a gas giant. While your badly damaged ship moves away into the distance. If you're playing on the 13-Ship Mode, the ending goes From Bad to Worse when you see this text after the credits: Earth and Secilia have vanished. Likewise, those that developed the "RAY" technology and all evidence of its existence have been wiped away. No record of R-GRAY craft was found, and no R-GRAY craft has ever returned. RayForce and RayCrisis are considered downer endings also, due to the former having the heroine's fighter being damaged beyond repair at the end after destroying the Earth and the latter being Doomed by Canon since it is a prequel to RayForce and all of your efforts to disable Con-Human being pointless until the events of RayForce.
# Film.RosemarysBaby: Rosemary becomes suspicious of her husband and the neighbors he's befriended and tries to protect her unborn baby from them. Everyone who is inclined to help her dies or is horribly injured. She discovers her suspicions are all too horribly true - in fact, worse, because she thinks they're "only" going to sacrifice her baby - and tries to escape, but fails. She births the antichrist, and it falls directly into the hands of Satanists.
# TearJerker.MegaManX: Vile's death at the end of Maverick Hunter X in Vile Mode. ShootTheShaggyDog doesn't even begin to cover it.
# Funny.SomeJerkWithACamera: "ABC Goes to DisneyLAND!"
# YMMV.JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind: Risotto Nero fell into a life of crime due to tragic circumstances, yet he and his team never got any respect from the Boss, and just keeps losing his teammates one by one. He then dies an ultimately futile and unfortunate death just as he was about to kill the Boss. Despite all that, he keeps his emotions under a stone cold façade to the very end.
# Recap.SCPFoundationSCPs2500To2999: Assuming that SCP-2718 is merely a cognitohazard that causes you to believe it or makes it the afterlife of those exposed, then O5-7 unwittingly doomed who know how many to eternal agony for nothing by writing the only remaining vector for it, only realizing the possibility after they've already put it down in an impossible to revise/edit/delete document.
# NotAllowedToGrowUp.ComicBooks: There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by the time he changed his name to Nightwing. Jack Kirby had officially aged Jimmy Olsen to 21 in the 1970s. And Supergirl had gone from a little teenybopper to a full-grown young woman by the '80s. After the Crisis, though, Jimmy got turned back into a kid, while Dick got to stay an adult, and poor Kara got erased from existence.
# SarcasmBlind.VideoGames: Undead Nightmare once again features the omni-bigot Conspiracy Theorist and memetic Large Ham Herbert Moon, who blames a broad yet bizarrely specific cabal of groups for the undead plague. John Marston, Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire, piles sarcasm onto Moon for his irrational hate, which Herbert mistakes for support for his righteous cause to single-handedly stop the undead plague and bring down the conspiracy. Herbert Moon is promptly eaten by zombies seconds after he steps out of his store.
# Fanfic.PaperAndSand: Any attempt to end the Cycle and kill Scion is ultimately this. Anytime someone does succeed in killing Scion, Eden transforms the individual into an Endbringer and then turns back the clock.
# Series.TheIncreasinglyPoorDecisionsOfToddMargaret: Alice dies suddenly, making the whole romantic subplot moot.
# Film.PromisingYoungWoman: Subverted. Al murders Cassie and Ryan lies to the police to make them think it was a suicide, but the last scene exposes them and sees Al arrested for Cassie’s murder.
# Film.ResidentEvilTheFinalChapter: Part of Isaac's plan to hit the survivors of Raccoon City involves luring zombies to it by dragging live humans behind his armored vehicles. The last one is a woman that he releases, letting her run to the gates, giving Alice and Claire a shot at saving her, so they open the gates and pick off all the zombies behind her as best as they can. Isaacs waits till the gates are open and they've played their hand, whereupon he has the woman shot dead.
# Characters.GameOfThronesJaimeLannister: His Season 5 story arc. After spending most of the season traveling to Dorne and infiltrating the city to rescue Myrcella, he fails to save her and she dies in his arms.
# VideoGame.PoliticsAndWar: 00 server time, with any amount not used up lost in the following day. Some players works around this by buying all available units before 0:00, and then buying all available units after that, in an attempt to gain a military advantage through the "double buy." In turn, some players hold off making any offensive operations until their oppositions starts "double buying," then bomb them as much as possible to negate any advantage of doing this. It helps with the above war mechanics, too.
# Characters.SonicTheHedgehogIDWIndependentAntagonists: He dies in disgrace immediately after all his plans go bust. As a final insult, Eggman finally gives Starline the praise he longed for upon learning how Surge and Kit came to be.
# TearJerker.AvengersEndgame: The Gamora we knew in the first two Guardians of the Galaxy and Infinity War is gone. The one we got here and will probably see again in the MCU is the pre-Guardians version. Even if she was already rebellious and does in fact make a Heel–Face Turn, it's hard to shake off the sensation she won't be exactly the same.Worse, the Gamora we knew is still dead. So she escaped her abusive adoptive father, found her new family and defrosted for them, only to die at the hands of said abusive adoptive father thinking that she has doomed the universe. No reset and no happy ending for her. Even if it's a comedic scene, Star-Lord is overjoyed to see Gamora again during the final battle, only for her to obviously not know who he is and reject him, since she comes from a time before they met each other. Gamora is also absent from the final shot for the Guardians. She apparently ran away after the final battle and Quill is shown searching for her.
# Manga.AnneFreaks: If you were rooting for Anna and Yuri since the beginning of the series, wait until near the end of the manga when Anna asks Yuri to join her in her world by killing Shono, and he willingly chooses to do so, slitting the throat of what is the most sympathetic character in the series. Oh, and Shono leaves behind her a husband and a little kid ? Yeah, shining example of this trope, especially since even the characters acknowledge it. invoked
# Film.DraggedAcrossConcrete: Midway through the film, the audience is treated to an extended vignette centered on Kelly Summer, a new mother and bank teller agonizing over the necessity to return to work after three months' maternity leave. We get an extended sequence of Kelly retreating to her apartment from the bus stop, begging and bargaining with her husband at the locked door to touch her baby one more time before leaving. Then she returns to work, and is warmly welcomed by her manager and coworkers. Then the bank robbery commences, and after a tense standoff between the robbers and staff Kelly has her skull blown to bits by a round of automatic fire. The movie promptly cuts back to Ridgeman and Lurasetti, and Kelly is never mentioned again.
# Fanfic.DragonsOfIceAndFire: Arya Stark in Winterfell. Jon launches a whole campaign to save his sister, amassing free folk and northmen to march on Winterfell to rescue her... only for "Arya" to burn to death in a tower while Jon's army is ambushed outside the castle walls. In the immediate aftermath, Jon's sister is thought dead and he even receives the blame from some for her murder. Nobody even finds out that she was a fake, Jon mourns Arya's death and it makes the entire northern coalition's purpose moot. Another mention to Margaery Tyrell trapped in the Red Keep by Cersei. It's a hostage situation that lasts 77 days because nobody wants to risk Margaery's live. And yet this whole standoff is resolved when Cersei strangles her in a fit of rage, resurrects her as wight, and sends her in to the trial as a distraction.
# Headscratchers.DeathNoteRulesOfTheDeathNote: Exactly. Intentionally saving someone's life through use of the Death Note is what causes a Shinigami to die. If he intended to save Bob then he would die, otherwise he'd be fine.Not only does the anime mention it as well, it's a major plot point; it's how Gelus dies, and how Light gets rid of Rem. But the point of this question is that the Shinigami didn't extend Bob's lifespan, despite intending to. But it did. The Death Note isn't connected to one's life span; it kills you regardless of how much time you have left. So the Shinigami increases Bob's lifespan, and dies. Unfortunately, Bob doesn't get to enjoy that extra time, because the Death Note kills him first. Bob's the shaggy dog, and he just got shot.
# MoodWhiplash.AnimeAndManga: If you're watching Gurren Lagann on the Sci-Fi channel, you get an additional whiplash if you stick around after the show's end to see... Now and Then, Here and There. Surprise!And after that's over we still have half of Gurren Lagann left, and it'll be followed by the ultra-violent, super-depressing, perfect anime for Syfy, MD Geist.
# Literature.AfterlifeLabirynth: Joseph died 591 times by 2014-07-28
# Characters.MagiaRecordWingsOfMagius: Attempts a Doppel suicide bombing in Season 3 of the anime, together with Nemu, to bring down the amalgamation made of Alina, Old Dorothy and Embryo Eve. Both of them failed to kill it in the end.
# Recap.HTFIveGotYouUnderMySkin: Sniffles didn't have to create a vessel to go inside Giggles' infected body as she would've been cured by just laying down after a while. Too bad they all died before even noticing it.
# DrivenToSuicide.VideoGames: In The Classroom Trilogy this happen multiple times.On the fourth day of the first game, a student "can't take it any more" and throws themselves out of the window. On the Last day of the first game, A student arrive and unexpectedly pulls a gun on the teacher and shoots him and an other student, before shooting themselves. Once you complete the game, Alex snaps after escaping the shooting and walks out onto the street. Though the first car misses them for what looks to be a Happily Failed Suicide, the second car doesn't , he still survive though. At the end of the second game Mr. Henderson throw himself out of the window like the student from the first game, Samuel note that it must be a déjà vu for Alex.
# Recap.MrRobotS01E06: Shayla was killed shortly after the kidnapping. Nothing Elliot did during the episode could have saved her.
# TearJerker.{{Animaniacs}}: The "Ballad of Magellan" - not only for its morbid tone and ending, but there is something indescribably melancholy-sounding about the chorus, as if you can hear in their voices the Warners were aware their show was doomed (this was in one of the later episodes).
# Characters.TheTexasChainsawMassacre2023: If none of the Victims escape the Family, then not only did they not find Maria, they end up just meeting her fate at the hands of the Family.
# Fanfic.X2009Epic: Subaru's sacrifice negates all the supernatural components of the apocalypse and severs the connection of magic to the world, effectively making everything Kamui and Fuuma did pointless.
# VisualNovel.ZeroTimeDilemma: Subverted. For seemingly no other reason than to establish himself as a jerk, Delta murders Gab, the participants' dog companion, and presents his bloody corpse to them as good news. This does turn out to be a kindness however, because it's revealed that the protagonists must abandon this timeline minutes before the entire shelter is destroyed if they want to survive, and they (as well as the player) would otherwise be responsible for Gab's death. Though given Zero's vast resources it wouldn't have been impossible for him to build a way for Gab to escape, but that would require more compassion than Zero is capable of.
# Pantheon.{{Gameplay}}: Wanting to put Peacock to a better use besides vigilante justice, he talked with Caitlyn and Vi with plans of setting up a meeting with Vi to talk with Peacock about the fact that they both are Blood Knight and ruthless cops who still want to do justice. Upon seeing how they are not so different, Peacock and Vi instantly got on board the idea of working together, and celebrated by launching a attack on some suspected crimes that were going on within the house of Villainy...possibly causing MORE damage than she could've done with Jinx (probably because while Peacock thinks Jinx takes things too far, Vi and Peacock have more common grounds and thus, less reasons to think the other takes things too far). Caitlyn offered him her sympathies and lets him drink with her.
# Film.TheIronBodyguard: By the end of the film, Wang-wu, the best and only surviving fighter of the resistance, ends up being cornered by General Chong's riflemen battalion. Despite both General Chong and Yen-feng being dead at that point, it's unlikely the riflemen are just going to let Wang-wu leave after killing their boss just like that, so...
# YMMV.KingsGame: despite getting run straight through by a chainsaw, Natsuko somehow survives long enough to kill Nobuaki alongside her, rendering pretty much everything he's done moot. Being impaled through the spinal cord by a chainsaw should've rendered her paralyzed and dead.
# Characters.StrangerThingsSupportingCast: The government spent such an effort trying to convince the world that she miscarried her daughter that Terry went insane. She knows the truth deep down, but the government made sure to destroy everything else in her mind, rendering her unable to fend for herself. Season 2 reveals that her present state is a result of her attempt to bust into Hawkins Lab and find Jane. She succeeded in that much, before Brenner caught her and essentially had her brain deep fried.
# TheDogBitesBack.{{Literature}}: In Morgawr, Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil, who'd already gone through a serious case of Break the Cutie, goes through shattering psychological and mental torture at the hands of The Morgawr's Dragon, Mwellret leader Cree Bega. By the end, Ahren has almost no self-respect left, and is alone on a ship when Cree Bega comes on board, murders his one companion, tells him about the Mwellrets' torture of his crush, demands the books of magic from him and then attacks. Ahren just barely manages to man up and skewer the slippery bastard, who's had it coming for almost three books now. Easily Ahren's Moment of Awesome, and one of the most affirming moments in an otherwise ShootTheShaggyDog story.
# Characters.BladedanceOfElementalers: She gave up everything and was willing to lose both Claire and her own life in order to revive the Demon King. She succeeded momentarily, but then it is all abruptly undone essentially because Claire refuses to cooperate. Then she throws everything she has at Kamito in a last-ditch effort to re-awaken him, and he kicks her ass without the Demon King's power. Jerkass she may be, but everything she had fought for was unraveled in front of her because Claire and Kamito basically said "no". And the worst part? It was never going to work in the first place. She wants to kill the Elemental Lords to eliminate The Corruption, but the Demon King is also corrupted. If Kamito had awakened, he would have destroyed the world in exactly the same method that she was trying to prevent.
# ToTheTuneOf.RealLife: The well-known "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" was originally a comedy song called "Der Deitcher's Dog" [sic] about how the eponymous German's dog has been made into sausages — itself stolen from a Swabian folk song, Zu Lauterbach hab i mei Strumpf verlorn.
# YMMV.TheShadowLine: The show has a generally gloomy atmosphere and even the most sympathetic characters are heavily flawed, which can make it hard for viewers to get invested. The fact that the main character dies without accomplishing anything while the bad guys get away scot-free seals the deal.
# YMMV.{{Lost}}: Danielle Rousseau is probably the most tragic character of all. She was forced to kill her friends including the love of her life, had her infant daughter taken away, spent 16 years as The Aloner going nuts, and when she was finally reunited with her daughter, she got killed off.
# Wakfu.TropesSToU: Nox's entire life.
# Recap.YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeriesS4E9RexAndWeevilDoAtlantica: By the time Yami arrives back from his duel with Rafael, he questions why Professor Hawkins is already safe after being kidnapped. You know, the reason he went to duel Raphael in the first place. Yami: So this whole traumatic experience could've been completely avoided if I hadn't arbitrarily left in the middle of the night? Professor Hawkins: Turns out, yes!
# WMG.TalesFromTheDarkMultiverse: In the first volume, Billy Shepherd(The kid whose diary Pilgrim got) didn't managed to press the button in time as Castenado slew the boy, and managed to captured the Pilgrim, and forced him to watch as the rest of the survivors are killed or captured...oh and too to drive in his failure to god, Castenado slashes out his remaining eye...and oh boy does it come to bite him hard, as the Pilgrim adapts to his condition and manages to turn the tides on the blind pirate with a bullet to the stomach and head, and thus turns the raiders into his proxy of zealots, with the exact same rule except it's either accept god or take a bullet.
# Film.HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers: After getting mocked for being related to Michael, becoming mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, all her friends, her sister, and her dogs killed, Jamie is kidnapped by the cult of Thorn and is forced to have sex with Michael and bear his child, and she's finally impaled by farm equipment in the theatrical cut or stabbed by Michael, put in a coma, and literally shot in the head by the Man in Black in the Producer's Cut. Jamie could be the contender for the most depressing character in all of the horror genre.
# RoleAssociation.FilmM: A Narc and one of Charlie's Angels' daughter Ariel Dubois is sick, so they have another kid, Olive, to be her sister's spare parts. Olive doesn't like this, so she hires Jack Donaghy as her attorney. In the end, everyone gets what she wants.
# VideoGame.BubbleBobble: In a bad ending for the NES/VC version of Bubble Bobble, after getting the suddenly-required crystal ball in one-player mode and defeating the final boss, both girlfriends are rescued... only to poof away when they reach the ground. Compare this to the arcade, where the player character's girlfriend is rescued, and the other remains in captivity.
# Webcomic.{{Hiimdaisy}}: Parodied in "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again" when Vamp kills Emma. Snake: Kid! Emma's being stabbed! She's gonna die! Raiden: Why am I even trying anymore?
# Film.MenBehindTheSun: On several levels. Ishii's bioweapons research is made moot since the war ends with Japan defeated before he can deploy his pathogens in force. The marutas are all killed off, the last one trying and failing to kill Ishii himself. The epilogue notes Ishii never faces prosecution for his crimes and gets to supervise the usage of bioweapons in the Korean War.
# UsefulNotes.FrenchNewWave: ShaggyDogStory: Their movies tend to have very thin plot and the story keeps subverting any narrative resolution. Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us is a conspiracy movie without a conspiracy, the atmosphere generally stemming from the Cold War Post-Historical Trauma.
# Film.TheLastCircus: No one accomplishes anything in the end. The film ends with both clowns arrested, and Natalia and the Ghost Rider's final stunts end in their own demises.
# Film.ArlingtonRoad: Not only were Michael's attempts at saving everyone unsuccessful, but he took the blame for everything posthumously, and left his son an orphan.
# Anime.TransformersCybertron: The retcon that the energon sun collapsed to make the black hole turns the entire Energon series into one of these, annihilating the planets they fought for the whole series offscreen. Again, however, the actual show largely ignores such things (mainly, Cybertron and Jungle Planet still exist.) The screen-given (and therefore more official) explanation is that the destruction of Unicron upset the balance between good and evil, and the black hole is the result. Its first victim is an uninhabited world, aptly named Moriturus - "I am about to die" in Latin.
# Film.ToLiveAndDieInLA: The film ends with Masters dead, but just seconds after he successfully managed to burn all evidence of his crimes, making Chance's psychotic crusade to bring him to justice completely worthless even if we didn't take into account the fact Masters killed Chance.
# WesternAnimation.DCAnimatedMovieUniverse: The entire story ends with Flash going back in time to prevent Darkseid's second invasion and the decimation of Earth. However, this will inevitably cause the entire timeline to change just like what happened after the Flashpoint Paradox. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the fresh start this DC Universe will receive once the timeline resets.
# Characters.PhantomThiefJeanne: Neither version has Zen able to be saved, despite Maron's best efforts. It's even more cruel in the manga, where Zen himself has no say in the situation, and his mother gets a sudden call about his death after all of the work she'd done to bring him home.
# VideoGame.HIDE: DownerEnding: This game is a very bizarre example of all three. At face value, it's just a typical ShootTheShaggyDog ending, where even if you find all five locations you'll get caught, which the end screen rubs in further by saying your struggle was utterly futile. However, it says "You will be brought to justice and they will never be.", which can be interpreted as you'll be rightfully punished for your awful crimes (subscribing to the convict theory) while your victims will always be just that - victims who never got any justice.
# Literature.TheSagaOfYngvarTheTraveller: Svein and his men encounter a group of people leading around a creature with a wooden tower on its back. They steal it away from them and attempt to lead it themselves, but the creature just sticks it head down and refuse to budge so they hide in the reeds while figuring out a plan. They then steal it from its owners for a second time, and this time they are more successfull. "But as they didn't know the nature of the creature or what it needed to eat, they stabbed it with spears till it fell dead. Then they went down to the ships and rowed off."
# WebVideo.TwitchPlaysPokemonCrystal: The mob actually managed to successfully use an item in combat, an antidote on a poisoned Oxxy. Oxxy gets KO'd in the very same turn.
# Characters.DantesInferno: Ended up killed in her revolt, with no resolution to her plight besides being killed by the very people who wronged her before.
# TearJerker.BigBrother: In BBCan, Emmett telling Talla that she was going to be evicted. She was reduced to tears. When she walked out of the house, she stopped and spread her arms over the door, still fighting back tears.Funnily enough, it was just like what happened in BB12 to Britney, although Britney took it better. Before Talla, BBUK had Kathreya. Similar to Talla, she was one of the most carefree and friendliest houseguests ever, and at one point a choice to win. However, a surprise double eviction a few days before the finale started with the eviction of Mohamed (somewhat of a ShootTheShaggyDog story given his status as an Elimination Houdini) and then the next evicted houseguest was Kathreya. You could hear her and the rest of the houseguests crying because she had to leave.
# VideoGame.AssassinsCreedValhalla: DoingInTheWizard: Oddly for a franchise with explicitly supernatural elements, the game does this with the Beowulf saga. Eivor investigates a mass murder, then discovers that Grendel is merely a deformed and simple-minded man who Does Not Know His Own Strength, not unlike Lennie from Of Mice and Men. His mother was likewise a normal, elderly woman (albeit with some druidic magic) who just wanted to keep her son safe. Eivor is forced to kill them both, and the whole thing is a tragic ShootTheShaggyDog story. Eivor tells the Quest Giver what happened, and she decides to make the story more heroic and exciting when she writes it down.
# Characters.TheQuarry: He can get cured from his lycanthropy by Ryan and Laura only to end up being mauled to death by Caleb a few minutes later. This can only happen if the player has him swim to the shore instead of staying in the island.
# VideoGame.FarCry1: In Evolution, after going through one of the game's most annoying difficult fights in order to protect a badly injured Doyle from attacking rebels, you go off to look for an escape vehicle, and when you get back Doyle has apparently crawled off, leaving a trail of blood for you to follow. After following his trail for 2 entire levels, you come across his corpse, and realize that an indeterminate amount of the trail was just the Big Bad leaving a trail of clues by dragging his corpse along, all just to dick with you.
# Characters.CallOfDutyZombiesVictisAndOtherPlayableCharacters: They're screwed over hard after all their work due to siding with Maxis. Eventually Subverted; they're able to provide a key part of Primis Richtofen's plan to save the universe, though, and are put in stasis for safe keeping. Double Subverted in Tag der Toten, where for their troubles in getting the Agarthan Device, they’re RetGoned out of existence.
# Literature.BeastsAndBeautyDangerousTales: In "Beauty and the Beast", Mei breaks the Beasts' curse and restores him to normal....only to mistake him for one of her fathers' men and stab him to death, realizing her fatal error too late.
# Fanfic.TwilightSparklesAwesomeAdventure: Happens when the author drops a spaceship on the Tyrant. There's also the fact that Celesia isn't even Twillight's mother, which was built up as one of the main reasons they were fighting.
# Recap.StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm: The macrovirus plot started because Voyager went to help a Garan mining colony. The Doctor comes up with an antidote—and the Tak Tak destroy the colony before he can save them.
# TearJerker.DarkSoulsIII: there is no happy fairy tale ending, just the end of the Age of Fire and all that entails.
# DownerEnding.{{Film}}: The 1981 thriller Blow Out, about a sound man who accidentally records a presidential candidate's assassination, ends with the hero arriving too late to stop the bad guy from killing his love interest, the assassin has also just destroyed every existing copy of the recording and by killing the assassin the hero has ironically tied up every remaining loose end for the conspirators and as such the cover is ultimately a success.
# WebAnimation.SonicForHire: From "Wreck-it Ralph" on, Sonic and Co. were trying to find the Creator so they could ask why he was messing with the universe. After pointless clues through Ralph, Dracula, Sir Arthur, and Link, they end up getting a right clue from Lowbrow Studios, which leads them to the real Creator. Once they find the Creator who is Dominique Wilkins, he orders Sonic to "kill his idol", which Sonic does before they can ask why he was messing with the universe. Looks like that question will never be answered.
# Film.{{Shenandoah}}: ThrowTheDogABone: Charlie's mission to rescue his youngest son from captivity fails and indirectly gets three other family members killed, while the boy ends up escaping and getting home on his own. However, the whole affair isn't quite a ShootTheShaggyDog tale, as his quest does end up rescuing his son-in-law Sam from being taken to a Hellhole Prison where he might have died like so many other prisoners in the war.
# TabletopGame.ForceOfWill: What the Alice Cluster was, especially for Alice and Pricia. Alice spent so much time coming to Attoractia to save it, only for it to fall and for her to struggle with control of her own body. Pricia, after losing her comrades in the Seven Kings, and her friends in the Sacred Beasts, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Valentina and wins...only for Valentina to take her body over in the process.
# Characters.TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWildLinkAndZelda: She cries to Link and heavily laments how all her efforts (assumed to be preventing the fall of Hyrule and stopping the Calamity Ganon from doing so) were for nothing.
# Funny.ZeroPunctuation2: Yahtzee comments how when a new player (to DayZ) came by, that unless the guy actually talked to him and asked what was wrong, he would have shot and looted him.Also, when said player gave Yahtzee a blood transfusion with (Yahtzee swears this is true) his ample supply of blood packs and nothing else, he comments on how he could have learned about The Power of Friendship and "sticking together in the face of adversity". Until a zombie came by, broke his leg, and either chased the other guy off or killed him. "Boy, did I feel like a waste of blood."
# VideoGame.FireEmblemGaiden: Implied in Sonya's ending in the remake. In the original, it was just stating that she's Jedah's daughter and having her sisters sacrificed for Duma by him explaining her hatred to him. In the remake, she attempts to find a cure for Witches, only to disappear after a lot of traveling, and it's implied she became a Witch herself taking residence in Nuibaba's Fear Mountain. Her ending is pretty much the only ending that changes from neutral to worse (though it is unknown whether her becoming a witch is bad or not, since after Duma's death it isn't known if witches lose their souls).
# Film.HanselAndGretel2013: Kevin manages to escape, even after being shot by an arrow. Unfortunately, he runs into the road and is hit by the sheriff's car. Turns that annoying arrow into straight up impalement, too.
# Literature.TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar: The whole story, when you consider it - Griboyedov spends all this running around, trying and failing to do all kinds of things, and then he is killed by a mob.
