Cosmic Horror Story / Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan is set in a world where humanity is living in fear of a race of giant monsters called "Titans" who are driven solely by their desire to eat human beings. They don't do it to survive, but purely for pleasure. The only way to permanently kill them is to slice the back of their necks, as they can regenerate even from decapitation, and engaging one has an extremely high likeliness of dying. It ends up subverted in the end, though, as pretty much all of the Titans' evil can be traced back to very human antagonists, humanity outside the Walls is far from extinct, and at least some factions have become technologically advanced enough to be able to threaten the Titan-using faction. It ends up double-subverted, however, since the reason behind the power of the Titans is that a mysterious organism attached itself to Ymir, turning her into the first Titan. Whatever this organism is was never explained, although there are several hypothesises; it could be the source of all organic matter, a very unique biological parasite or even an outright god. Its power connects an entire race to a different plane of reality, enables transformations which defy every biological law, and it's strongly implied to be unkillable - the manga's epilogue shows an explorer in the future approaching a tree identical to the one it was found by Ymir in, where Eren, its last host, was buried. This itself implies that the explorer will bond with the organism and, in some way, restart the cycle, and humanity - through their own actions or by the being's very nature - is unable to do anything about this.
• Berserk is a story in which humans are powerless compared to the things that lurk in the darkest parts of the Astral Plane and invade whenever it suits their fancy. The world that humans live in is filled with nigh-unbeatable monsters ranging in appearance from hideous to unspeakable, which consider humans far beneath them and eat people without a second thought. As if that weren't bad enough, the world right down to the fabric of reality seems designed to maximize human suffering. Events are being manipulated by god-like beings who promote evil as an end in and of itself, sending plagues and monsters as if to speed up the Apocalypse. The lost chapter contains the Idea of Evil, a practically omnipotent god created by humanity's collective unconscious to be the source of all suffering. Although these entities were originally born from human beings and human needs, they inhabit a dimension of spacetime so alien to our waking experience and have become so much more powerful than the humanity which gave birth to them, that they might as well be aliens for all intents and purposes. Finally, the work is quite pessimistic about the possibility about the ultimate source of the evil being defeated completely, since it and the God Hand exist completely outside the reach of human agency. Can one man like Guts make a difference? Until the story's finished, no one can say.
• Bokurano, a deconstruction of different focus than Evangelion, yet similar to it: Something is making you fight in its super robot against other super robots, to decide the fate of the world and infinite numbers of other ones. Why? You will never have the slightest idea. The manga features one attempt at an explanation, but it really doesn't help make anything better: the Multiverse has a virtually infinite number of parallel universes constantly springing from slight divergences, but this apparently puts a strain on existence, and so the giant robot battles happen to be a "defense mechanism" to get rid of most universes with not enough divergence with each other. It's a whole new level of cosmic insignificance.
• Initially hinted at in Chainsaw Man with the Darkness Devil and the Cosmos Devil, beings born from fears so universal they are essentially Eldritch Abominations that humans can't hope to deal with or properly understand. Finally cemented with The Reveal of the Chainsaw Devil's ability to Ret-Gone devils and their concepts from all of history, with humanity none the wiser that their very memories and existences have had a piece just permanently cut out including in some cases the readers themselves.
• Death Note establishes early on that the only reason humanity even exists is to act as a food source for death gods. The penultimate chapter goes the extra mile by stating in no uncertain terms that there isn't even an afterlife to look forward to.
• Death Parade's take on the afterlife falls right into this. If you die, you're faced with the binary options of continuing to reincarnate or being discarded and deleted from the system. The celestial bureaucracy decides which fate you get by subjecting you to an arbitrary, sadistic Secret Test of Character. The kicker? The whole system exists because the people running it are so detached from humanity that it's the only way they can think of to assess the human soul, and they neither know nor particularly care when they get it wrong, to the point where the higher-ups have had to bring in an assistant to mitigate the Quindecim staff's frequent fuckups and teach them about how humans work.
• Devilman: Thanks to humans being bastards killing the only people protecting them from demons, it leads to them being left alone against the enemy. At the very end, it's implied that humans have been all killed, leaving only demons and devilmen and then everybody except Satan dies. Oh, and God is a gigantic Eldritch Abomination that kills anybody who gets too close it. AMON makes it even worse — God has put the entire world on a time loop so all humans and demons live and die for nothing over and over, just to make Satan suffer the loss of his beloved repeatedly for all eternity; it's also implied that this covers the whole franchise, with each of its iterations being another cycle of the loop.
• Digimon Tamers started as a Coming of Age Mons series but experienced a Genre Shift when the true nature of the D-Reaper was revealed. At the end of the series, after destroying more than 40% of the Digital World, endless Mind Rapes, and a total invasion and subjugation of the Real World, the D-Reaper cannot be defeated, at least not conventionally. However, it was reverted to its original form, a dinky little program from the early Internet with less power than a cheap calculator. The fact that the main writer is a contributor to the Cthulhu Mythos will not shock anyone who's watched the series, nor will the fact that he also wrote Serial Experiments Lain.
• Dragon Ball Super builds upon the original series by revealing that all intelligent life in the universe could be snuffed out of existence by a petulant god that not even Son Goku can beat. Said god then reveals that there's a multitude of other universes, each with their own destructive gods and above all of them is a god who can wipe out entire universes with the flick of a wrist, usually because he finds them unappealing after a while.
• Getter Robo, especially when the nature of the Getter comes into question. Exactly what it is, is left up in the air, and its intentions may or may not be malevolent.
• The canonical manga Interquel that was never published would put both GunBuster and DieBuster in that territory, with revelation that, long story short, the Universe is one big Eldritch Abomination, the Space Monsters are its immune system and humanity can do nothing but desperately fight for survival, sacrificing their weapons and champions in the process.
• Housing Complex C's story heavily takes its cues from the works of H. P. Lovecraft, specifically The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
  • Kimi herself appears to be a representation of Yog-Sothoth itself, if the imagery shown during the time she arrived on earth is anything to go by and her apparent powers over time-space. Also, the bubbles shown around her are likely supposed to be the Silver Globes described in the lore regarding Yog-Sothoth.
• Junji Ito's works as a whole are heavily influenced by Lovecraft, but two examples particularly stand out:
  • Remina: A newly discovered celestial body turns out to be a gigantic Planet Eater abomination, likely even a Star Eater, hurtling towards Earth and devouring every other celestial body in its path; once it reaches Earth, it stops only long enough to "play" with its meal a bit, swallows the planet whole, and then continues on its rampage, leaving only a handful of human survivors within a specially-built survival shelter drifting aimlessly in space.
  • Uzumaki: A town is built on top of an impossible spiral structure, which proceeds to cause increasingly horrible things to happen before absorbing the entire town. It has done so countless times before and will do so countless times again.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: A post-apocalyptic Crapsack World where a catastrophe caused by an ancient conspiracy meddling with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know led to the annihilation of half of humanity's population, with the remainder under the relentless attacks of "Angels": alien (or not) assailants whose motives and psychology we do not have an idea of. Their biology becomes increasingly bizarre over the course of the series—even early specimens are stated to exhibit wave-particle duality, and one late Angel is a four-dimensional being with a three-dimensional "shadow". Later specimens appear to be evolving toward interfacing with humanity, which mainly just causes Mind Rape of various types. Various factions within the series vie for the opportunity to take down the Angels in the way they deem most appropriate, with the winner being the creation of equally nightmarish humongous mecha, but such a last resort requires the chosen pilots to be mentally ill and psychologically tortured in order for them to function. The war only results in increasingly horrifying circumstances and adversaries, while a key benefactor of the protagonists is actually a Lovecraft-style Ancient Conspiracy who were always planning to use the Angels to resurrect an even worse alien God and cause The End of the World as We Know It In Their Own Image. In the end, the apocalypse is so incomprehensible it even also makes us real life humans go mad from the revelation. And please note that this summary actually leaves out several even more screwed-up revelations about the setting and characters.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Oh, boy... Long story short? Aliens with Blue-and-Orange Morality^note basically a race of sociopaths among which emotions are treated as a form of mental illness harvest magical energy created from girls' suffering and eventual mutation into eldritch horrors in an attempt to stave off the impending death of the universe via the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and even the invincible bad guys don't know why the universe can be infinitely sustained with Industrialized Evil of all things.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Sailor Stars, the last arc of the anime, reveals that Sailor Senshi exist across the galaxy and have all been engaged in an epic battle against evil. Sailor Galaxia, one of the strongest warriors, has been exterminating entire planets so that she can collect Star Seeds, which are souls. Galaxia is said to have wiped out 80% of the galaxy. The manga is even worse: Galaxia, bad as she was, was also an unwitting pawn to the anthropomorphic personification of Chaos, which at the climax absorbs the source of the universe's life. Sure, Usagi destroys Chaos, restores life to the galaxy and resurrects all her dead friends, but we're told that Chaos has survived, and that one day it'll be back.
  • Chaos is also the true evil in the anime as well. In the manga, it is also the true power behind every other major villain in the series. The Sailor Senshi exist to fight it, and will likely be fighting it for eternity.

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