Lovecraft Lite / Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan starts off like this. The last remnants of humanity are being gruesomely hunted to extinction by huge, mindless, incomprehensible Humanoid Abominations, for seemingly no reason. Our heroes are vastly out-gunned by the Titans, and they don't even have the consolation of dying a meaningful death, as the Titans don't even need to eat humans to survive — they just think we taste good. The show gradually becomes less Lovecraftian as we learn more about the origin and motivation of the Titans, and as the heroes discover methods of fighting back.
• Berserk stands somewhere between this and a full Cosmic Horror Story. Very, very bad things happen, people die horribly, get raped, tortured, Go Mad from the Revelation... but the protagonist and his True Companions refuse to just give up and the author has implied it's going to go the bittersweet or Earn Your Happy Ending route in the end.
• The climax of Digimon Tamers involves the D-Reaper; an extremely powerful, seemingly invincible monstrosity trying to destroy the universe. Albeit with a great deal of difficulty, the heroes manage to defeat it anyways.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball Z delves into this a bit during the Buu Saga, featuring a destructive, evil creature Made of Magic that is thousands of times more powerful than the universe's God-equivalents and has successfully murdered or absorbed all of them except one. Buu also successfully wipes out humanity and destroys the Earth along with several other planets. Thankfully, most of this is reversed thanks to the Dragon Balls.
  • The mere existence of Beerus and Whis, beings so powerful that they can kill creatures as strong as Super Saiyan God Goku with a word, given how Beerus executed Zamasu. There are also other Gods of Destruction and their attendants who are equal or stronger, and Zen'o being the ruler of all of them who can destroy the entire multiverse. Thankfully, most of these ultra powerful entities are benign or at least neutral. However, that still doesn't stop the random God of Destruction from destroying your planet because they hate the food or because they were looking for something.
  • The Future Trunks Saga in Dragon Ball Super shows what happened when just one of the gods goes out of control. Zamasu, an Apprentice Supreme Kai from another universe, decides that all mortals are failure of the gods and must be wiped out. To that end, he steals the body of Goku, an extremely powerful mortal, murders him and his entire family while he's trapped in his original body, teams up with another version of himself from another timeline, kills off the other gods in the other 12 universes, and begins to slowly kill off the populations on different planets before arriving on Future Trunks' Earth, which was already decimated by the androids for almost twenty years. One of the Zamasus is also an immortal, so he can't be killed, while the one who took Goku's body grows stronger every time he fights and gets hurt. Their actions also effected at least two different timelines. The saga ends with Merged Zamasu becoming one with the multiverse and killing everyone in it before Future Zen'o kills him by destroying the entire multiverse of that particular timeline, making this the darkest chapter in the entire series.
  • The Universal Survival Saga ups the Lovecraft aspects by having Zen'o decide to eliminate the losing universe during the tournament. Meaning, trillions upon trillions of people will be wiped from existence because they lost a tournament. Although, it's subverted at the end, where they all get wished back and it was all a Secret Test of Character set up by Zen'O. But if mortals had failed that test (which very nearly happened), Zen'o was going to erase everything.
• Ghastly Prince Enma: Burning Up at the very end went into this — Heaven and Hell agree to destroy the Earth to harvest energy produced by human souls, which their supplies has run low, and because Youkai Patrol members are demons and cannot die, therefore they doesn't understand what dying means for humans, they don't see a reason to stop it. They later change their minds and solve the problem.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, since it's both a light, satirical Slice of Life and a story of The Only One fighting Eldritch Abominations produced by a MegaCorp
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. So there's this Tome of Eldritch Lore which, every once in a while, unleashes an Eldritch Abomination that crunches planets like walnuts. This thing has never been stopped. It's bound to an Delicate and Sickly girl and slowly killing her, while her guardians descend further and further into villainy due to their inability to save her. The only method the largest mage army in the universe can come up with to save Earth is freezing the girl in magic ice until the end of time. Feeling hopeless yet? Fear not, for the White Devil and her loyal cohorts have already been dispatched to the scene! Just lean back and watch them befriend some eldritch ass! It still isn't quite enough: the befriending manages to destroy the abomination for now, but the book will still kill the girl and respawn elsewhere. The threat is only permanently dealt with when the Book's intelligence decides to commit a Heroic Sacrifice, out of love for the girl it was bound to. There is also the implication that civilizations inevitably annihilate themselves after reaching a certain level of advancement (which is why there are so many Lost Logia around). It is perhaps telling that the ur-Precursor civilization in in this series shares a name with the author of the Necronomicon (Al-Hazred).
• Naruto takes place in a world where there are nine Eldritch Abominations called the Tailed Beasts whose power is compared to forces of nature. And as the series goes on, it turns out that while harnessing their strength is highly dangerous, it's still entirely possible and has been in the past. That's why the Tailed Beasts don't like humans, they spent decades being used as nothing more than tools of war, much like the ninjas, only they are even more dehumanized than their hosts as humans almost never even bother to learn their names. In this series, the greatest monsters are humans.
• The Nasuverse's background setting has elements of this: if you piece together the background materials it turns out that the Earth itself is trying desperately to kill off humanity, and has enlisted the help other cosmic entities (such as the spirit and personification of the Moon) to do so. Humanity is constantly at the mercy of its own collective consciousness and that of the planet's, Alaya and Gaia respectively. The only way for Humanity to be free of them is to 'kill' the planet and to evolve to a higher level of existence, but this will only cause the other planets in the Sol System to turn on Humanity. And assuming Humanity can overcome them, the entire universe would probably turn on Humanity for getting above itself... so basically, the only way Humanity can truly be free is to destroy the universe itself. Still, another thing about the background setting is that Alaya is completely on humanity's side here (though it is a Well-Intentioned Extremist) and due to its nature, humanity also has a fair shot of doing exactly that. Humanity is holding its own, as evidenced by the fact that we're still here, and it is implied that the Earth is eventually going to lose... at which point humanity will be advanced enough to survive without it. Thus, it can said that while it is a Cosmic Horror Story, it may not be humans facing eternal doom and irrelevance. Of course, if Angel Notes is to be trusted, the Earth's parting shot is getting the rest of the planets to try to kill humanity in its stead.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The setting is a Lovecraftian Mind Screw Cosmic Horror Story, but ends with the protagonist and his Benevolent Abomination half-sister finding resolution and becoming The Anti-Nihilist. It also shows that "inscrutable and unspeakable horrors from beyond space" have nothing on Humans Are the Real Monsters... doubly so because it turns out Humans Are Cthulhu (or at least have the potential to become it, which leads back to the previous trope — the true Big Bad group wants it to happen for the sake of becoming "gods" and everyone else is expendable. In comparison, Rei/Lilith and Kaworu/Adam seem downright cuddly by the end).
• Noein keeps a hopeful tone, but it also has a number of Eldritch Abominations running around, and the bad guy is threatening on a cosmic scale (since he wants to destroy the universe and start it from scratch), albeit without the level of unconcern that a true Cosmic Horror villain would have.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica is like this:
  • The entropy problem is not yet fully resolved, The Incubators get away with everything, despair and misery are still necessary components of the universe and human civilization, Kyouko couldn't save Sayaka, but at the very least the titular character remade the world so that magical girls no longer mutate into witches, though at the cost of her very existence and new entities called "wraiths" exist instead. And there is still plenty of conflict going on...
  • As for the Rebellion movie, the Incubators' plans finally blew on their faces, and their experiments with Homura's soul gem culminated in her being able to usurp Madoka's place by transforming herself into what she calls "a devil". It's implied that Homura is using the Incubators as substitutes for human suffering as to regulate entropy herself. She also wipes everyone else's memories to get them to live relatively normal lives without worrying about Magical Girls rebelling against her, specially Sayaka, who, prior to her mind wiping, seemed pretty upset about what Homura did. That said, Madoka still seems to retain at least a fraction of her power, and she's able to resist Homura's brainwashing to some degree. Homura ultimately laments that, should Madoka regain her memories, she'll have to antagonize her best friend.
• The Big Bad of Shamanic Princess, the Throne of Yord, operates on a level beyond human understanding and is completely impossible for the protagonists to overcome. It throws the heroine into a gauntlet of Mind Screws just because it thinks she's interesting — and what measure is the suffering of a mortal to a sentient fount of eternal magical energy, anyway? Fortunately for the heroine, the story has significant gnostic influences which level the playing field between human and Eldritch Abomination, making outcomes besides madness or death possible.
• In Soul Eater:
  • One of the major villains is a Humanoid Abomination whose existence brings the world into chaos, but so are two of the protagonists who want to protect it. Said abomination also has emotions, most prominently extreme paranoia.
  • Insanity is also a major theme of the series, with most major characters (heroes included) losing their shit in a nightmarish way at least once, and the Big Bad's very existence spreading madness throughout the world.
  • The series gets slightly more Lovecraft cred in the end much the same way Persona 3 did. Big Bad Asura turns out to be far too powerful for anyone to truely defeat (he's the personification of madness and fear, after all; two things that can't truly be eliminated so long as there are living things that can experience them,) so a bunch of the main characters have to sacrifice themselves to seal him on the moon. Sure, most of them survive anyway, but Crona now has to (or may, depending on one's interpretation) stay on the moon for eternity to hold Asura back.
• The second season of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is like this, with the Anti-Spiral. It is a hive mind of another spiral race that gained Instrumentality to stop its evolution, and is trying to control or slaughter all other spirals in the universe, to prevent them from accidentally breaking it with too much spiral power. They come from beyond the stars, form a pocket universe they created themselves, and when more than a million humans walk the earth, they come forth to destroy them. Their weapons are immensely powerful and unlike anything else our heroes have ever seen, their numbers seem to be endless, and their victory is all but certain. Of course, since this is TTGL all it needs is some hot blood and a few drills to deal with the problem.
• Wicked City features a setting in which monstrous, extra-dimensional beings exist in a world parallel to our own, except they can be fought with the proper training and equipment, are interested in negotiating with humanity, and only a handful of them are evil.

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