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Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Once upon a time, a man decided to climb a mountain. He took a nasty fall, badly bruising himself, and landed in the woods next to a very shaggy dog. Despite his injuries, he limped back to his house, where he left the dog, then to the nearest hospital, where he got some x-rays. When he got home, the dog looked hungry, so he made a steak just for the dog, and turned on the television. He was just about to call the pound when he heard that a wealthy couple, on vacation in the vicinity, had lost a very shaggy dog, and were offering a very large sum for his return. He bought a plane ticket, but fell short on funds. Being a thrifty man, never wanting to live in debt, he sold a chair from his house to pay for the ticket. When he got on the plane, he found that he couldn't take the dog without preparations; the airline, however, was willing to transfer his ticket for a nominal fee. He was forced to pay this fee, and the veterinarian's bills, with a credit card, which irked him even though he knew the reward would offset it. Then he flew to the city in question, but since he was only twenty-four, had to walk ten miles through the woods, going in the general direction of the manor. When he arrived, he found he had missed the front gate entirely. He walked directly up to the door with the dog and rang the bell... when he and the dog were shot dead by a guard.
And, of course, the dog they'd lost? Wasn't that shaggy.
Did you feel like that story had no point? It didn't. Sometimes an author will go one step beyond a Shaggy Dog Story, and Shoot The Shaggy Dog. Don't just Kill Em All; make all their accomplishments a moot point and their deaths completely senseless. Don't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death; trap him in a grim cycle of reincarnation, and make him a failure in every incarnation. Don't even Kill Em All; they don't even get to bring the Villains down with them. The only thing that's changed in the last 400 pages is that a few ineffectual people have died.
Occasionally part of An Aesop, to show just how crappy the world becomes when you violate the lesson; frequently used to try and show a 'gritty', cynical world. Sometimes, it's an attempt at tragedy that makes the mistake of nullifying itself by making it impossible to care. Depending on the particulars, it can overlap with Diabolus Ex Machina.
The ultimate Downer Ending. Spoilers ahead, of course.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- The Corner, by The Wire creator David Simon, is one big grimfest.
- Although each season of The Wire ends with successful convictions of drug dealers, it becomes progressively more and more clear with each season that the best the police can do is sweep up the low-level boys. Everyone sufficiently high up is untouchable, and American social and political systems make effecting actual change impossible.
- The first episode of Blake's 7, has the one lawyer on the planet who actually cares about the truth investigate Blake's frame job and get painfully close to unravelling the whole thing when government guards simply gun him and his girlfriend down. It was a deliberate attempt to frame the entire series by demonstrating the spirit crushing government's resolve and it worked brilliantly.
- Doctor Whos third season finale manages to do this with the entire future of the human race (Long story short: It's doomed... and then things got worse); This occurring two episodes after it was described as "Indomitable", thus rendering said episode spectacularly moot. To really rub salt in the wound, the events that caused this are explicitly not covered by the Reset Button that later follows.
- One could argue, that it has a point and a big one at that. The point being that everything has to end, even the existence of the human race. (and it lasted damn long, since it's the year one hundred trillion and the end of the universe.)
- River Song did mention a trip to the end of the universe with the Doctor. So maybe they work things out.
- In the original series episode "Caves of Androzani", while the Doctor manages to save Peri, the rest of Androzani Major and Minor go completely to hell because of a chain of events that was started by the Doctor simply being there and ended with every main character dying pointlessly. The entirety of these places were so riddled with corruption that it just took one thing to make everything collapse. Particular examples of this hopelessness include Stotz killing the rest of his crew and Sharaz Jek, moments after getting the revenge that the war this episode centered around was started because of, is shot in the back.
- This could pretty much sum up much of the Fifth Doctor's career. He had a tendency to not save the day.
- I wonder what would have happened if they'd let him use the sonic screwdriver?
- He tried. They shot the shaggy screwdriver.
- An episode of Star Trek Voyager, "Course: Oblivion", has the crew discovering that they - along with Voyager itself - are in fact clones of the real crew and ship, brought into existence in an earlier episode, and now they're falling apart. They spend the episode dying one by one and unsuccessfully trying not to die, until the whole thing finally falls apart, kilometers from the real Voyager, which is totally unaware of what has happened. Arguably the most depressing part comes when, desperate not to have their existence be in vain, they create a log of their exploits and launch it into space - and it is destroyed seconds later.
- Nikki and Paolo from Lost.
- The whole of Supernatural, Season Three, could apply to this. Sam tries so hard to save Dean from eternal torment and gets increasingly unhinged, Dean more or less gets over his suicidal nature and tries hard himself because he's terrified, they both bring the crazy, clingy panic in spades and in the end, none of it means anything because Dean's dead and gone to hell anyway. (Though he got better)
- In the new Battlestar Galactica series, the mid season finale has the humans and the Cylons rebels in a Mexican Standoff with each side threatening to execute prisoners. It takes some work and some tough choices, but in the end, both sides agree to back down, set aside their differences, and to face the future...together. And together, they finally, finally find Earth, which cues the heartwarming music and the celebration montage. The ships enter the atmosphere of their new home after years of searching and finally... they find out that Earth is a radioactive wasteland with the thirteenth tribe nowhere in sight. Cue a Panview of all the main and secondary characters standing and wandering around in shock, no doubt wondering "What the frak do we do now?"
- Kamen Rider Ryuki: The whole ORE Journal subplot seems pointless. At the very end, Reiko-tachi finally unravel the mystery of the Kamen Riders and the Mirror World, only to have all their hard work undone by the Reset Button.
- The Babylon 5 episode Confessions and Lamentations is a borderline example of this: An alien race is on the brink of extinction and several main protagonists try to prevent that. When the doctor finally combines Applied Phlebotinum and Techno Babble to a working cure he finds out the whole race already kicked the bucket.
- At least he managed to save the other species that was vulnerable to the disease.
- Heroes: DL's death. We found out he was dead in the first episode of S2, for god's sake, but they spent about half of Four Months Ago following him around to show us how. Was it from the bullet wound received in the S1 finale? Nope. Did he die a heroic death rescuing a little girl? No chance. He was killed by some psycho-moron who thought it'd be a great idea to shoot someone in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses for the crime of cockblocking him - that is to say, asking him to pretty please let go of his wife, they're going home now. WTF? Oh, and did I mention the murderer hasn't been mentioned since?
- Or that DL just could have phased through the bullet?
Anime
- The Chapter Black saga from Yu Yu Hakusho could be considered an example of this. The characters pull out all the stops, sacrificing a great deal in the process, in order to try and stop Sensui from opening a tunnel to Demon World, only to eventually learn that A) Sensui's true motive for opening the tunnel was just so he could go to demon world and find an opponent who could kill him, B) he would have been dead within a month anyway, from a fatal disease, and C) the spirit world's elite soldiers could seal the demon tunnel with relatively little effort.
- Asano, the Unlucky Everydude from The Twelve Kingdoms has several of these moments in his plot arc. Despite being an Ordinary High School Student trapped in another world, he is ultimately ineffectual in doing any good for himself or for his friends, and he eventually becomes a patsy of the Big Bad. Just when it looks as though he's about to redeem himself by performing a vital, heroic mission for the good guys, he gets intercepted by the villains, who kill him in spite of his being armed with a gun, while they only have primitive weapons. To further rub salt into the wound, Asano, before he dies, learns that his mission was completely unnecessary, since reinforcements were already coming to help the good guys.
- Considering Asano wasn't part of the original book (and neither was his female counterpart) and the only reason for him to be there is to externalize Yoko's inner Tomato In The Mirror conflicts in the medial transition, this is hardly surprising.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both of the endings count, really. The series one may be up for interpretation — God help you if you try — but End of Evangelion does this in a rather Anvilicious manner: After spending 24 episodes trying to prevent the Third Impact, half of the cast has various bridges dropped on them. Then the Third Impact does occur, instigated by the organisation that was believed to be trying to prevent it, but the Instrumentality turns out to be out of their control and melts every human on earth into a 'oneness' consisting of orange liquid. The instigator is then subsequently destroyed by a rampaging Unit 01, leaving Shinji and Asuka as the only un-melted people on earth, trapped in a world ruined beyond all comprehension. End of Evangelion not only shoots the shaggy dog, it riddles it with 50cal bullets, fires an rocket-propelled grenade at it, and runs it over. Then nukes it from orbit, just to make sure.
- Yeah, yeah, it wasn't that shaggy anyway.
- Well, it could be interpreted that the Instrumentality melts everyone to make them unto beings of pure consciousness (or whatever), who are then forced to face their faults and overcome them (the interrogations of episode 25-26), and ultimately inserted in a reality where they are justly welcomed as better people than they used to be. (The "congratulations" scene at the very end.)
- Narutaru. Most of the cast goes insane and dies in a generally unsatisfying fashion, except for the main character and the vaguely established villains, who vanish off the face of the earth around episode 10. Most of the plot 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 like a glove. This is because the anime only covers the first half of the manga, cutting off right before things start to get really bad, culminating in The End Of The World As We Know It.
- School Days. After spending ten episodes acting like a complete jerk and taking advantage of the complete idiocy that seems to affect the entirety of the school, just when he's starting to show he may not be that bad, Makoto is stabbed to death by his pregnant ex-girlfriend Sekai, and then his corpse is decapitated by his girlfriend Kotonoha, who proceeds to murder (and cut up) Sekai and runs away, taking Makoto's head with her. Life at the school goes on, generally unaffected by the lunacy that just transpired.
- The whole Fallen One arc in D.Gray-Man is one of these. Allen encounters another Exorcist, Suman Dark, who has betrayed his Innocence by betraying the Black Order to a villain, and has been turned into a giant angelic torso-looking thing. Allen struggles to save Suman while he attacks mindlessly, killing a lot of innocent people. Allen finally manages to hold Suman back by over-activating his own Innocence, and he manages to pull Suman out of the monster... only for him to find that Suman has lost his soul anyway. Turns out Allen hadn't succeeded; Suman's Innocence basically timed out. Then, just to make things worse, Suman explodes in a fountain of blood, thanks to the sudden appearance of the villain from whom he begged for mercy in the first place.
- Gilgamesh ends with the deaths of the entire main cast against the villains, followed rapidly by all life on Earth getting wiped clean.
- Chrono Crusade, also a definitive example of a Downer Ending, ends with the main cast either dead or broken. None of the heroes' goals were met, and the villain succeeded in all his plans, with his "death" only being a temporary setback. If anything, the world would have been better off if the heroes had NOT been around.
- The first season arcs of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni are all like this; the audience are treated to several versions of the local nakama going Ax Crazy and murdering each other in various gruesome fashions, only for the Groundhog Day effect to kick in and the whole tragedy repeated in a slightly different manner. The last arc seemingly subverts this, as Keiichi remembers one of the other realities and talks Rena down from her attempted mass murder/suicide... Only for Rika to get murdered anyway later, and the whole town wiped out by the volcanic eruption. Again.
- Fist of the North Star starts with Kenshiro searching for his lover Yuria, who was snatched away from him by his rival Shin, whom had left kenshiro for dead after defeating him in a duel. After wandering across a ruined earth and defeating Shin's followers, he finally manages to find Shin's palace located in the town of Southern Cross. However, Ken learns from him that Yuria commited suicide before he could manage to get there. It would suck if the series had ended right then and there after Shin's death. Luckily, it doesn't.
- Jigoku Shoujo Negoro Tetsurou's story is a mild version of this, played mostly for laughs.
Manga
- Don't just have the protagonist die an agonizing death, trap him in a grim cycle of reincarnation and make him a failure in every incarnation. Apollo's Song. Just... Apollo's Song.
- The ending of Death Note may or may not fit this trope, depending on which side of a divided fandom you're on. Light supporters think it does, whereas anti-Light fans are more apt to classify it as the closest thing a Crapsack World like the one depicted in the series will ever come to a happy ending.
ComicBooks
- Pride of Baghdad ends with all four protagonists being gunned down by American soldiers without even achieving the freedom that they'd been dreaming of. It's probably worth pointing out that said protagonists are lions, not humans — not that this changes the message at all.
- It's worth noting the story was based off a real-life story where the lions were shot after being accidentally freed. Pointless? Up to the reader's interpretation.
- The protagonists are granted freedom from the Baghdad Zoo by American bombs and some lament the loss of their old lives while others leap at the chance for freedom. Eventually, they learn the American invasion has made things uncertain, chaotic and dangerous, and are eventually killed by the occupiers, not out of malice, but negligence or stupidity. Pointless, indeed.
- Shade the Changing Man ends with him rewriting history so that none of the events of the comic ever happened, leaving one character (who had gone back in time with him) missing, his son trapped permanently in a female body and he himself unable to reconnect with his lost love. There is a slightly upbeat moment in the last panel, but if you think about it, it's unlikely to have worked out the way he wanted it to...
- The Karate Kid and Triplicate Girl plot thread from Countdown to Final Crisis. The two members of the Legion Of Super Heroes are dumped in the 21st century for reasons unknown to them, and Karate Kid turns out to be infected with a virus that could wipe out all life on Earth. After spending months trying to find a cure and eventually teaming up with the rest of the cast, they end up in an alternate universe, and Karate Kid dies, the virus spreads and turns humans into animalistic humanoids, and Triplicate Girl is torn to pieces by a pack of said animalistic humanoids. All to set up an universe similar to that of Jack Kirby's Kamandi character.
- Y The Last Man opens with the title character, Yorick, on the phone with his girlfriend. Just as she's about to bring something up, he interrupts her with a marriage proposal. Before she can answer, every man in the world except him dies. Yorick sets out on a quest to find her. He spends the next four-ish years as the only man on the Earth, and is pretty much celibate the entire time well, except one teeny little encounter, because he's looking for his girlfriend. When he finally finds her, he discovers that the thing she was going to say is that she wanted to break up with him - though of course, this is no longer the case.
- It. Got. So. Much. Worse. After that revelation, Yorick decides he really loves the previously nigh unstoppable Action Girl. Just as they start contemplating their future together, she gets shot in the head extremely easily by the antagonist. Antagonist then brings up the fact that she also murdered Yorick's mom several months earlier. Yorick didn't even know she was dead. Yorick then realizes all of the antagonist's actions have been in the pursuit of pissing Yorick off to the point that he wants to kill her, because she's suicidal and wants to be killed by a man. I Am Not Making This Up. Then the epilogue jumps 60 years in future where, while humanity has been saved through cloning, Yorick is an old man locked up against his will, after possibly attempting suicide. As if the author wasn't sure if the audience was depressed enough yet, we then get a series of Flash Backs involving the deaths of the last two main characters, one of which was a cute pet monkey. And the last kernal of wisdom Yorick imparts to his youngest clone before he dissapears amounts to little more than 'Life sucks, but you'll learn to deal with it.' This troper has never felt more infuriated, insulted, or dissapointed by any other ending in any medium.
- And while, overall, it's not the worst thing that happened, we never definitively find out what killed all the other men.
- Mr Hero The Newmatic Man, an obscure comic published with Neil Gaiman's name prominently over the title (but with little actual involvement from him) ended up being this sort of a story when the entire year and a half run of the series ended up being nothing more than a successful Xanatos Gambit by the Big Bad to retrieve and destroy the titular renegade steampunk soldier. A planned second volume may have changed things, but the imprint's failure made this the end of the story.
Film
- John Woo's masterpiece, The Killer, is sort of an example; the protagonists bring down a mob boss, but the main character dies before he can reach his goal, to raise enough money for the eye transplant of the singer that he blinded in the movie's first shootout. Not only that, but in a rare antiheroic example of Karmic Death, his Plan B of having her use his eyes falls flat when that's where the mob boss shoots him. And the other protagonist, a maverick cop, is arrested by his fellow officers when he finally guns down the mob boss to avenge his friend and keep the villain from getting away with it all because he had done so right in front of them in cold blood after the boss had surrendered to them, so he can't use the money to have the singer's eyes fixed either. When Woo piles on the tragedy, he piles it on.
- In a surprisingly dark twist the second Austin Powers movie manages to negate the whole love story of the first film before the opening credits: turns out Liz Hurley's character was just a killer robot all along. Played for laughs.
- She gets a marvellously prefunctory Hand Wave - "Basil, Vanessa was a fembot!" "Yes, we knew all along, sadly." - and is never mentioned again.
- Of course, if you liked her character, it might all come off as a bit callous despite its Crosses The Line Twice intentions.
- The film Death Proof (originally shown as part of the double biller Grindhouse). The first half of the film builds up four young women into main characters and then abruptly kills them all, moving the focus of the film to the villain in an entirely different, unrelated location. Sure we expected some murder, but so much character development and time focused on them it came as a real shock to see all our heroines die so suddenly.
- Despite his valiant efforts, the hero of Night Of The Living Dead utterly fails to protect any of his fellow survivors from the Zombie Apocalypse, and in the morning, as the sole survivor, is unceremoniously shot by a ragtag band of zombie hunters that doesn't bother to look very closely at their targets.
- An extreme example is seen in the 2007 horror film The Mist. In the movie, a thick, billowing fog has swept over the countryside, bringing with it hordes of ravenous otherworldy creatures, and several dozen people are trapped inside a supermarket with the monsters outside and no way to contact the outside world. Near the end of the film, a group of people led by the protagonist make a break for it in the hero's jeep and set themselves up for the darkest, cruelest movie ending this troper has ever seen. After a brief stop at the hero's house to confirm that yes, his wife is dead, the five of them (including the hero's little boy) decide to ride on until either the mist ends or their fuel runs out. Naturally, the fuel runs out first...and our group is surrounded by mist, likely to be snatched up and killed horribly as soon as they leave the car. They make an unspoken decision to commit suicide, but there's five of them, and only four bullets. We cut to outside the car, and there are four shots. Then we see the hero in a car full of corpses, screaming in grief and repeatedly trying to shoot himself with the empty gun. But it doesn't end there... he exits the car, screaming for the monsters to come and get him...and not half a minute later, tanks and jeeps roll through the fog. Monsters are being blasted with flamethrowers, and trucks of survivors are being driven through. And the mist is being cleared...
- Also note the truck is coming from the back, so they were driving from salvation all along.
- The Japanese Tokusatsu feature film Casshern did this in spades. The story hinges on a Crapsack World After The End where everyone is dying of pollution, fallout and biochemical warfare agents unleashed in the last world war. A scientist creates a 'Neo-Cell' project where new organs can be grown at will and the human body regenerated and rendered immortal. This is the setup for a Freak Lab Accident that creates a race of Badass superhumans that must be battled by the hero, the scientist's dead war hero son resurrected by his father's techniques and suited up with an awesome cybernetic combat suit. Naturally this all goes horribly wrong - and turns out it was never right in the first place.
- If the fact that Casshern basically fails to do anything heroic whatsoever during the entire movie, backfiring spectacularly every time he tries to save innocent people and spending most of the film killing rather sympathetic Anti Villains who themselves engage in pointless violence for no reason wasn't enough to make this pointless and Glurgey, the ending really cements it. I guess it was meant to be a Deconstruction of the usually upbeat Tokusatsu genre, but...what?
- Cloverfield. Everyone dies. Except possibly Lily. The monster doesn't die onscreen, but Word Of God says that it was killed.
- Rocket Attack USA, a 1960s propaganda piece featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The heroes manage to infiltrate a Soviet missile base, but the missile launches anyway (with hilariously awful special effects) and wipes out New York. "We cannot let this be... THE END."
- See the entry under Diabolus Ex Machina for Sean Penn's film The Pledge. It's fortunate that no one in this editor's family owned a gun, because he came out of the theater wanting to go home and blow his head off out of sheer repulsion toward the futility of human existence.
- In Cube, characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all end up dying or being killed by another character, except for the autistic savant. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.
- The sequel is even worse. After many perils, the heroine manages to escape the maze but once her superior has received what she was sent to find, he has her unceremoniously executed for no apparent reason. She obviously knows what's coming, yet does not try to resist or escape.
- Nevil Shute's On The Beach.
- Donnie Darko. Turns out the whole movie was merely setting up the character for his (arguably) senseless death.
- On the contrary, Donnie discovered two parallel timelines through his visions: One in which he dies in his bed, or one where he survives by random chance (by not being at the wrong spot at the wrong time), but his survival sets in motion a chain of events that results in the deaths of his mother and sister (who take the airplane that crashes), of his girlfriend and of the guy Donnie shoots dead in the alternative future. So he goes back in time and makes a choice.
- The DVD commentary claims that Donnie's purpose was to give the plane engine a reason for existing, so the universe didn't collapse.
- Alien 3 starts out by killing off the characters that Ripley saved (including a little girl), stranding her on a prison colony, and showing that for all the pyrotechnics of the second film, the alien menace is still at large. Needless to say, most fans consider the series to have ended with the previous film.
- In Chinatown, the protaganist spends most of the movie investigating the murder of the head of the water department, uncovering a rather complicated conspiracy in the process. He eventually discovers the villain, who's revealed to be so evil that he even raped his daughter and fathered a child by her but In the end he gets away with everything, taking custody of his incestuous grand-daughter at the same time, and the police shoot the protagonist's love interest dead as she attempts to flee with the girl. As the famous quote goes: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
- "The only thing that's changed[...] is that a few ineffectual people have died." Yep, that just about sums up Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson...
- Sha Po Lang (Killzone in the US) is a Hong Kong police movie that pretty much ends with all of the cops dying. Including the Bad Ass and The Captain. Fortunately, the Big Bad doesn't get away unscathed either. He kills the Bad Ass cop by throwing him out the window of his skyscraper....and right on top of the car the Big Bad's wife and baby were waiting in. Ouch.
- Funny Games follows a Hope Spot with a real Wall Banger of a Diabolus Ex Machina to ensure that the movie has a Downer Ending. The entire movie is a Take That at its own audience, so it's somewhat to be expected that it would Shoot The Shaggy Dog as well.
- According to a recap this troper read — you couldn't pay her to actually watch it — Epic Movie ends with the four lead characters being inexplicably flattened by a runaway water wheel, making the whole movie pointless. Even more so than it already was.
- Pretty much any film written by Terry Gilliam.
- Brazil, for example, ends with the revelation that the film's "happy ending" was just a hallucination, and the main character was actually tortured to death
- One could make an argument that in the world of Brazil, dying in a torture-induced hallucination of happiness IS a happy ending. But that should only drive home further how depressing a film it is.
- Twelve Monkeys closes with the death of the two protagonists, as well as 90% of the human race. What's particularly striking is that Gilliam somehow found a way to make these funny.
- There is possibly a small note of hope in Twelve Monkeys: it's subtly implied that the woman sitting next to the zealot on the airplane is there to collect the disease-sample the main character was originally sent back for; at least the remnants of humanity can be immunized and stop living underground..
- Ran. Dear God, Ran
 . Influenced by King Lear, Kurosawa managed to make his film incredibly depressing. Nearly everyone dies or is pointlessly killed. The father, Hidetora, lord over a great clan, plans to divide his kingdom to his three sons, expecting them to be loyal even though most his power came through bloodshed, war, and treachery. He ends up banishing the third and youngest brother, who warns him of the stupidity of such a plan. He stays with his first son, at the First Castle. Through a large chain of events, Hidetora loses everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. He is left insane, and his only hope is his youngest son. When the father manages to reunite with his youngest son, hedies due to an arrow from an enemy soldier, and the father dies of a heart attack. The ending is bleak, as the blind brother of Lady Sué, wife of one of the other brothers, is left alone, seeing as though is sister was killed. He ends up dropping the gift his sister gave him, and is left to die in the ruins of his father's castle, forgotten.
- In fairness, all of the above was pretty much the point. The Sengoku period (in which the film is set) is infamous for constant, often senseless violence, and general chaos. Even the title, Ran, can be translated as "chaos".
- Alexandro Jodorowsky loves to do this. Fando & Lis ends with Fando killing Lis, whom he was taking to the mythical City of Tar in order to cure her paralysis. El Topo has the people the title character spent the entire third act helping mercilessly gunned down, rendering all his efforts worthless. And The Holy Mountain ends just before the climax, with a major character proclaiming the movie over and the shot panning back to reveal the film crew shooting the scene.
- Sorry, Wrong Number and the radio play it was based on. In the end, and after a few Idiot Plot scenes (between the protagonist's mistakes and the depiction of the police, this troper was almost squirming in his seat), she fails to prevent her own murder. And this was based on an episode of a radio show where the rule was almost always to make sure the bad guy lost. (Oddly enough, it was also their most popular production...)
- Das Boot. After everything they've survived for 99% of the movie, they're killed in an Allied air-raid once they get home.
- Requiem For a Dream. Dear lord. The last 15 minutes depressed this troper for a week afterwards. Yeah, it was kind of the point, but STILL.
- Burn After Reading. The three least despicable characters are dead or comatose, and... not much else has actually changed.
- Except for Linda finally getting her surgery.
- To be fair, Chad was pretty much responsible for the whole stupid blackmail plan, so he kind of had it coming to some extent. Now, Ted, on the other hand...
- Pretty much anything by David Lynch
- To this troper at least, Terminator 3 set a new standard in Shoot The Shaggy Dog. Not only was the C Mo A of the preceeding movie totally erased; but after all that crap they went through, Skynet winds up obliterating humanity anyway while John Connor hides out in a hole
- One word: Bulworth. Five words: Rapping politician, meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a comedy.
- The remake of Dawn Of The Dead. At the end of the movie, it appears that the few remaining protagonists' struggles have paid off, and they're finally able to sail into the sunset to find an island they can start a new life on. Guess what? Island zombies, is what. How do you like them coconuts? Although the characters aren't actually shown dying..
- This ending was tacked on after test-audiences griped about the original, far more ambiguous, version.
- The last half hour or so of The Descent is an extended version of this trope, as it's implied that if you can't stay together as a cooperating pack [they can't] the only way to be Bad Ass enough to get out of the cave is to go crazy and become as vicious as the crawlers. Also, in the UK ending, everyone dies. At least Sarah regains her humanity at the last minute... by choosing to stay with the hallucination of her dead daughter and apparently accept death. Hooray!
- Pretty much the entire point of No Country For Old Men. The protagonist is being stalked by a ruthless killer set on his trail to retrieve the money he found. For the climax, not only does the killer easily slaughter the protagonist, but for true Shaggy Dogness, said climax takes place completely off screen! The audience surrogate (the town sherriff) comes across the scene moments too late to do anything. By the end, the killer has even murdered the protagonist's wife (following up on a threat he made), and the sherriff is so disillusioned by the whole thing that he decides to resign. Depending on who you ask, the ending makes the movie either completely pointless and a waste of time, or a brilliant deconstruction of film structure and story resolution. (This troper is strongly in the latter camp.)
Literature
- 1984 ends with the main character being brought down by the government, like thousands before and after. Not only was he scheduled for execution, he was happy about it. "He loved Big Brother." Of course, the plot in this case was just an excuse to describe Orwell's dystopia.
- The (yes) 1984 film version is quite true to the book in most respects but fudges the ending by just having Winston Smith mutter "I love you", making it ambiguous as to whether it's Big Brother he loves or Julia.
- The book version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (not any of the movie versions, which tend to have somewhat upbeat endings tacked onto them) has just about every member of the cast meeting pointlessly horrible fates. Esmeralda (who just had a poignant reunion with her long lost mother) is dragged away and hanged for a crime she didn't commit. Her mother is murdered while trying to defend her. Frollo is killed by Quasimodo, who then entombs himself with Esmeralda. Phoebus (the man whom Esmeralda was convicted of killing) casually witnesses her execution and does nothing to help her. (His "horrible fate" is that he's forced to give up his playboy ways and get married.) Most of the thieves and beggars are slaughtered wholesale by the king's guards and nobody really comes out of the story having gained or learned anything useful. No wonder Hollywood adaptations tend to extensively rewrite the ending.
- Other novels by Victor Hugo have their main characters meet tragic fates after all their efforts have turned up to be completely pointless. The Man who Laughs and The Toilers of the Sea, for instance.
- Surely this Troper can't be the only one to remark on straw deaths in Les Miserables. And for somewhat minor characters, at that.
- And Jean Valjean dies happily.
- The ending of Mostly Harmless is pretty much the ultimate Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, as Arthur never finds his soul mate, who was cruelly taken from him in a freak accident, and at the end every Earth in every universe is destroyed, with virtually every character being killed in the process. Douglas Adams has admitted that the ending was "rather bleak," and was a result of his depression. He would have probably fixed it... if he hadn't gone and died.
- The Quintessential Phase, the section of the radio plays that follow Mostly Harmless, have everyone's Babel fishes rescuing them at the last second by teleporting them to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where Fenchurch has been working.
- This troper's library copy was missing the last page of the book, where it's revealed that it was the Vogons who destroyed Earth, again. In other words, the book just ended with the Earth suddenly being destroyed without explanation, taking a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending and multiplying it by about ten.
- Every Earth in every universe? They missed at least one.
- The same book has the in-universe example of Bartledan literature. Which, as Arthur Dent discovers when he reads some, always ends at the 100,000th word.
- And the main character died of dehydration three chapters before the end, because of never calling a plumber after a minor sink malfunction early in the book. (I honestly don't know why I spoilered this), thus not only shooting the dog, but also mentioning that it not that shaggy in several thousand words. Though a book within a book, it is certainly a magnificent reference of this trope.
- The Marquis de Sade's Justine tells the story of a young, virtuous girl who is subjected to a ridiculously unending series of tortures, rapes, degradations, and humiliations, with each of her tormentors more depraved than the last. In the end, she is finally reunited with her sister, and freed from her life of misery, only to be killed by a lightning bolt.
- The Eagle Has Landed features a squad of German paratroopers sent to kidnap Winston Churchill. Putting aside the fact that they're only having to do suicidal missions for not playing along with the whole Holocaust thing, their cover is only blown because one of the Germans does a Heroic Sacrifice to save two children, all but one of the Germans end up getting gunned down though the sequel reveals that the leader is Not Quite Dead and it's ultimately revealed that the Churchill they were after was just an impersonator.
- Franz Kafka is the god-king of this trope. The Trial is the story of a man shuffling endlessly through a bureaucracy to try to stave off his execution for a crime that is never explained to him.
- The Castle tells a similar story of a man trapped in an endless bureaucratic maze. The book ends halfway through a sentence: Like Jorge Luis Borges said, if Kafka did not finish many of his novels, it's because they do not end.
- The Metamorphosis. Gregor turns into a giant bug. And dies, alone and unloved.
- In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, it is revealed at the end that all of human history was manipulated in an attempt to send a missing spaceship part to a Tralfamadorian robot named Salo who is carrying a message, and that his message is only a single dot that means "Greetings."
- Richard Adams' "The Plague Dogs" features a scene where the runaway lab dog Snitter searches for "the tod," a fox character that had helped him and his fellow fugitive Rowf survive in the wild, before Rowf eventually got mad at him and chased him off. Snitter is about to give up the search, when the tod appears out of nowhere, followed closely by a pack of hounds and a fox hunter, who proceed to rip the tod to pieces. The movie had a slight variation, if you look in the animation section ...
- The first half or so of the Bonehunters book in Malazan Book Of The Fallen is like this. After chasing Leoman of the Flails halfway across the continent to Y'Ghattan, the Malazan army gets their ass handed to them as Leoman walks away with a goddess at the last moment before turning Y'Ghattan into a death trap by turning it into an inferno.
- You mentioned Bonehunters, but not the Chain of Dogs?
- Describing the Chain of Dogs on this page would cause the ascension of the god of shooting the shaggy dog. Best to play it safe.
- I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream starts with the insane, and slowly decaying, AM having wiped out humanity except for the main characters, who receive a Fate Worse Than Death. When it ends, four characters are dead, but the narrator has received a worse Fate Worse Than Death.
- However, in the self-sacrificing act of killing the others to release them from their endless torture, the narrator has regained a measure of humanity. It's a happy ending, by Harlan Ellison standards.
- Brilliantly subverted in Joseph Heller's Catch22, which ends with the entire supporting cast dead, the protagonist faced with an enormous moral dilemma, and the entire world seemingly falling apart, only for the main character to realize that he can just leave. He does so, and the reader is left unsure whether he should laugh or cry.
- The Warhammer 40k novel Eldar Prophecy features a civil war on an Eldar craftworld that is slowly drifting towards a warp rift and certain destruction. As all the sympathetic characters are killed off one by one, the Designated Hero finally kills the villain, presumably saving the craftworld. Then, in the last two pages, we learn that all of this was a Xanatos Gambit by the real villains, who can now feed the souls of all the war's dead to a Cosmic Horror and send the survivors straight into warp rift. Even for 40k, this is a Downer Ending.
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ends with the "initial" main character being banished and the "secondary" female main character being killed (purposely) by the "real" main character who was in love with her and who took drugs and hung himself the next day. Wow.
- On the other hand, the place the first guy was banished to sounds awesome.
- In the eleventh book of the Wheel of Time series, Aram is unceremoniously killed after an unmotivated rebellion against Perrin that disregards the various prophecies and foreshadowings connected with it. Oh, and the Shaido Aiel who was developing a flirtatious relationship with Faile, and who were in the process of rescuing her, are also unceremoneously bludgeoned to death by Perin...who is not even responding to this relationship, but killed them simply because they were apparently threatening Faile by being around her. So far, he still doesn't know about what was going on. One sees clearly that the author finally intended to wrap up the series soon.
- Of Mice And Men in a particularly famous example. And The Grapes Of Wrath. AND In Dubious Battle. Heck, can we save time and say anything by Steinbeck probably has one of these?
- Surprisingly not. Cannery Row is surprisingly upbeat for Steinbeck.
- Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson. Most completely pointless story ever. How did this thing get nominated for a Hugo and win an Aurora?
- Bios by the same author. Ends with every last person on the planet dead, and all of their work revealed to be irrelevant.
- The Red Dwarf book series does this to a certain extent. Throughout all adaptations there has been one consistent goal for the Red Dwarf crew: get back to earth. No matter how terrible things got out there, Lister and company had the knowledge, that somehow, some way, there would be a way back home... however, in the book continuity, it's revealed that the entire Earth has been turned into a garbage planet, abandoned to be covered in garbage till the end of time.
- For a Junior Fiction example, Goosebumps loved this trope. Every single book had a twist ending, and more often than not, Stine shot the shaggy dog, albeit offscreen. Killed a monster and are escaping into the swamp? Uh-oh, looks like his extended family is still out there! Won The Most Dangerous Game (of tag) by convincing the monsters who forced you to play that you're in an advanced team? Uh-oh, now the advanced team wants to play! You've managed to convince an evil witch who turned you into a chicken to turn you back into a human? Uh-oh, now she's turned you into a pig! Seriously, there was no way out for these kids. Depressing as hell to a seven-year-old.
- And for a double example, there's Legend of the Lost Legend. The kids go through a series of hellish trials to win a priceless artifact their father has been searching for, only to discover it's the wrong priceless artifact in the last ten pages. Shaggy Dog. They then are directed to the right priceless artifact...which has a curse on it that dooms its holders to wander lost for eternity. Shaggy Dead Dog.
- Thomas Hardy's work, especially Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the moral of both of which is that life is a horrible never-ending series of tragedies inflicted on a cruel God that will culminate in your death alone and unloved.
- Mal Considine in James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere spends the whole book struggling to make a name for himself to get custody of his adopted son from her mother, both of whom he rescued from the Holocaust, when it turns out the mother was a collaborator and was lying to him the whole time. He finally manipulates a union conflict into the perfect way to make his money, only to get caught up in a related murder case and unceremoniously shot by the killer. His partner Buzz Meeks later tries to send the kid a sizable nest egg, but the person he makes the deal with is less than trustworthy and we never find out if he followed instructions or just kept it for himself. And then Meeks is killed in the prologue of the next book, but at least it's with a blaze of glory Bolivian Army Ending and his death continues to affect the plot.
- The Magic The Gathering Shadowmoor anthology includes a tale of five Kithkin brothers. Each of the first four wanders out in turn and meets a grisly death. The fifth and most competent and powerful goes about avenging his brothers, and is not yet finished this task when he is squished to death by a passing giant. What do you expect from a culture of paranoia? The moral is "All outsiders want to kill you". Of course, in Shadowmoor that's almost true.
Tabletop RPGs
- Most of the games in the first run of White Wolf's World Of Darkness setting were gigantic exercises in Shooting The Shaggy Dog. The good guys in each setting were gradually (or abruptly in Hunter: the Reckoning) revealed to have a long and unpleasant past of doing rather nasty things in the name of the cause, and the series of epic centuries-long secret wars they were fighting generally tended to be either unwinnable stalemates or tragically doomed noble causes. And most of their problems turned out to be caused by the arrogant hubris or ignorance of their own predecessors anyway. And to top it all off, the entire original setting had a series of apocalyptic end of the world scenarios as its grand finale.
- In Call Of Cthulhu, mythos monsters (and more mundane horrible experiences) make you lose "sanity points" and you gradually go insane. You get back Sanity Points by defeating monsters, which often require magic to kill. However, spells also cost Sanity, and most spells cost large amounts. If you don't go insane, it's all right, because most monsters can kill you anyways. However, it is justified by the fact that it is based on Lovecraft's equally bleak books of the Cthulhu Mythos.
- To be fair, the game also offers characters the chance to bring sanity back to normal via psychotherapy; or as close to normal as you can get, as gaining more extensive Cthulhu Mythos knowledge lowers your maximum sanity (meaning that cultists worshipping the Outer Gods are, by the definition of normal society and common sense, insane). In fact, psychotherapy is supposed to be the standard way of regaining some control over your psyche, not seeking out more mythos monsters to slay. Call of Cthulhu is supposed to be about normal people facing subtle terror and Cosmic Horror, it's not a 1920s version of Dungeons And Dragons (a game which is clearly geared towards superpowered teflon adventurers raiding dungeons and hack-and-slaying opponents for experience points and treasure).
- [[Warhammer40000 Warhammer 40,000]] treats everything in the galaxy this way, but especially the Imperium. They call it "GRIMDARK", in all caps, for a reason, folks.
Theatre
- In Stephen Berkoff's The Trial, Joseph K spends the entire play trying to fight a trial he doesn't understand in a world that is set firmly against him. He collapses and dies in a cathedral in the final scene, no closer to understanding or accomplishing anything than at the beginning.
- And the bad thing is, that's actually better than what winds up happening to him in Kafka's book.
- Does the protagonist of Elmer Rice's play The Adding Machine avoid being executed for murdering his boss? No. Does he have a chance of doing better in his next life? No, each time he is reincarnated, he gets worse. Does he at least get the companion promised to him, a nice-looking woman called Hope? No. That's the situation when the final curtain falls.
- In Urinetown, Protagonist Bobby Strong inspires the poor to lead a revolution against the evil Caldwell B. Cladwell, who has gotten private toilets outlawed, charges exorbinant fees for the use of his public toilets, and has his corrupt police force take anyone who subverts his goals to the titular Urinetown (which is in fact simply being thrown from the tallest rooftop in town). In the end, Bobby himself is taken to Urinetown before he can see the revolution through to fruition, and once the poor wins out, and everyone can pee for free, the town's water supply quickly dries up and everyone dies horribly while the inspiring victory music of the finale continues to play.
Western Animation
- When The Wind Blows charts the slow death from nuclear fallout of an elderly couple after a nuclear bomb goes off in England.
- Originally a graphic novel (and also a Radio play). And of course their deaths are the Anvilicious point of the story, meant to show up the absurdity of the British Government's civil defence plans.
- Intentionally done in the pilot episode of Aeon Flux (actually drawn out into six two-minute shorts), in which the main character's guns-blazing assassination mission fails when she steps on a nail and falls to her death, her body and even her apartment being destroyed by her superiors, her assassination target dead by other means, and her entire shooting spree of a mission being futile.
- The second season, dealing with the question "How do we do a sequel when the protagonist is dead?", turns this trope up to 11 by having her die (pointlessly) in every episode.
- In the movie version of "The Plague Dogs," the movie ends with the two dogs swimming out to sea and drowning after their fox friend had just sacrificed himself to give them time to escape; this wasn't how it was in the book—see above. The real kicker is that many people prefer the movie ending, that's how bad the Deus Ex Machina was in the novel.
- The entire invasion of the Fire Nation plot in Avatar The Last Airbender: The only thing it accomplished was nearly all the hero's allies captured with the heroes themselves on the run from the Fire Nation once again, without even the benefit of everyone thinking Aang is dead. There was Zuko completing his Heel Face Turn (or probably just his Calling The Old Man Out), which may or may not have happened anyway.
- Subverted once we find out in the Grand Finale that Bumi took the opportunity to break out and take back Omashu by himself.
- The second half of the second season was even worse. Aang, along with his friends, spends the entire second half (when not trying to find Appa) trying to warn the Earth King about the Fire Nation and tell him when would be the perfect time to mount an invasion only to fail miserably and get a lightning bolt in the back for his troubles.
Video Games
- The video game Geist has several of these moments. First, the character you've been trying to rescue for most of the game is eaten alive by a giant snail demon. Fortunately, you manage to rescue him from inside its shell, and the creature flees. Then, once you've secured his escape, his helicopter is shot down by a ghost soldier in your original body. Shortly thereafter, you finally find your old body... only to be captured and stuck back into the brainwashing VR simulator you escaped from near the beginning of the game.
- Illusion of Gaia has one of these as the ultimate reward for a sidequest — it turns out that, despite all the neat gifts you got previously, the real goal of the sidequest was to rebuild the body of the first boss of Soul Blazer so he can have his revenge on humanity. You have to destroy him, and he's received a massive power upgrade. Not to mention that you had to do some morally questionable things to get this far in the sidequest.
- The spiritual sequel Terranigma one ups this: The main plot turns out to be one big Xanatos Gambit on part of a Dark God that made the hero facilitate the rebirth of a previously dead world, complete with human life... So that the Dark God and its associates could conquer it. The main is reverted to a baby for trying to stop it, nearly killed by his own love interest and Ninja Butterfly and just barely avoids death due to the sacrifice of his love interest. And then comes the part revealing that the new world and his own world exist in a cycle of death and rebirth where the rebirth of one world means the destruction of the old one: Foiling the plot and saving the new world means he, and everyone he knows and loves from his own world, must die along with the villain (and yes, thou must). And then there's the part where the hero turns out to be the Chosen One by the Powers That Be who run the worlds: He is reborn to do the exact same thing over and over again every time the cycle is repeated. Throw some Mood Whiplash into this during the Downer Ending that follows and we have the recipe for a game that made this contributor cry over the sheer futility of it all.
- It actually sort of makes you wonder if the Wachowski brothers played Terranigma while coming up with the idea for The Matrix.
- This troper prefers a different interpretation. The Power Of Love allowed the "dark hero" (which you are, in fact, playing the whole game) to rebel and finally destroy Dark Gaia and thus break the cycle. Granted, he and his Doomed Hometown are still slated to vanish, but this takes on more of a Heroic Sacrifice tone.
- Possibly the biggest instance of a variation on this trope in a console RPG, however, can be found in the obscure Squaresoft game Live-A-Live. This editor, for one, found one of the bad endings so tragic that he fell into a state of angst lasting the rest of the night and had to be calmed down by friends and family. And we are talking about a SNES game here, my friends.
- Live-A-Live has these as the ending for at least half its stories. Cube's chapter has most of the crew dead from their interpersonal conflicts, and stopping the computer that exacerbated these problems into fatal situations feels bittersweet at best. Sunset is still guilt-ridden over his past after saving the town from the Crazy Bunch, and still hunted as a outlaw. Akira's home and closest friend are burned down and dead, respectively. And Orsted's chapter is so depressing and frustrating that this editor could only cry for poor Orsted, deeply moved when the Heroic Mime broke his silence only to declare his hatred for the world and everything in it. The villain's "good" ending just looks like a lot regret despite his triumph, and let's not get into the possible Armageddon Ending of the final chapter. Then again, you're playing a game that spells the title Live-A-Live as "Live-A-eviL". You should know what you're getting into.
- In Silent Hill 2, while escorting Maria in the hospital, if she gets killed, most easily during the Pyramid Head chase, it's a Non Standard Game Over. However, all your hard work is apparently pointless, since she is scripted to die at the end of the chase sequence.
- If you don't get the antidote for the zombie virus, every character's ending in Resident Evil: Outbreak ends with them dying. The best you can hope for is a glorious death, taking out loads of zombies as you go — and that sort of thing only occurs if you're playing the final level with a combination of characters that can't be set up anywhere but online. And since Capcom took their servers down as far as this game is concerned...
- The entire first third of Summoner consisted of you going through great lengths to gather and destroy four magical rings on the advice of your Mentor (a renegade ex-Watcher) and the royal house of your homeland in order to become powerful enough to smash through Murod's Orenian army, free Orenia, and kill Murod. Unfortunately, it turns out that the king's brother and the queen were conspiring with Murod and broke the siege to let in the Orenian army, destroying the four rings actually releases the incredibly powerful demons imprisoned within them, one of your party members was a partially unknowing patsy for this scheme, and your mentor has actually been Possessed by the most powerful of the four demons from within one of the rings since the start of the game, meaning that your ENTIRE game up to this point has been nothing more than the fulfillment of the villains' Xanatos Gambit. This is made more exasperating yet by a Side Quest earlier in the game which would have implicated the traitorous brother in an earlier crime if the NPC characters involved didn't screw up their part of the operation.
- The ending to the original Doom had the Space Marine escaping from Hell and returning to Earth... only to find that the demons he had been fighting have already invaded. Cue the sequel.
- The ending of the first episode wasn't a bad example as well. After killing the two bosses, the Barons of Hell, the only exit is through a teleporter and after taking it, you get killed by a bunch of monsters, and, no, God Mode will not help you. And the debriefing text afterward is so meta: "Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base, you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you? Where's your fat reward and ticket home? What the hell is this? It's not supposed to end this way!"
- Knights Of The Old Republic II features the protagonist thrwarting a galaxy-spanning Sith plot which exists solely to mess with her head - if the Exile didn't exist, the Big Bad wouldn't be doing anything important. Over the course of this scheme, she causes the deaths of the few remaining Jedi masters and the destruction of two planets (to be fair, one was uninhabited)... and is then rewarded for it all by being told "It doesn't really matter what you did, and the real threat to the galaxy is something else which you probably don't stand a chance against. Have a nice day."
- In all fairness, the Exile does accomplish some very important things, including: 1) Stopping the Omnicidal Maniac from destroying all life (something only she could do) and 2) Finding and training the new generation of Jedi Masters that rebuild the order.
- The destruction of Taris from the first game can be considered a minor version, since all the NP Cs that you helped over the first three hours of gameplay are ruthlessly slaughtered by the Big Bad.
- The plot of Diablo revolves around a protagonist who seeks to stop the titular demon from destroying the town of Tristram, setting himself free from the cathedral, and leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. In the end, he kills the demon (actually, his human host) and plunges the stone containing his soul into himself, with hopes that he will be able to contain the demon's power. All in all, a reasonable ending. Now, cut to the second game. It is revealed that he couldn't resist it. He became Diablo, destroyed Tristram, set himself free, and is now leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. Well, crap. It was actually revealed that by the time you face Diablo in the first Diablo game, you're already under his control. The entire point of Diablo's plotting in the first game was for him to find a stronger host body. He reckoned, correctly, that any being strong enough to fight his/her way down to him, and then "slay" him was exactly what he needed. The manual to Diablo II: Lord of Destruction even points out how every time people thought it was over, the brothers just kept reemerging.
- The expansion of the sequel isn't much better. You manage to smash Mephisto and Diablo's soulstones! Except that Baal is still left unchecked, and he's figured out the location of the source of the soulstones, the Worldstone. Oh, and he manages to convince one of the NPCs to give him a Plot Coupon, meaning free access to the Worldstone for him. By the time you catch up to and kill Baal, Tyrael comes down and notifies you that Baal's corruption of the Worldstone means that the only way to prevent the entire Realm from becoming an outpost of Hell is to destroy the Worldstone. Not even Tyrael himself knows what will happen afterwards. All you can do is enter the portal he opens for you and wait for the sequel.
- Which was recently announced. And yes, a Diablo-like demon is seen in the trailer. And one effect of destroying the Worldstone has been made clear: The previous location of the Arreat Summit on the world map is now labelled as the Arreat Crater. Ouch.
- Although this troper thought that the effect of smashing the Worldstone was clearly seen in game: Reset Button and having to do the whole thing all over again vs stronger monsters in the Nightmare and Hell modes at least the first two times.
- The video game version of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was built with this in mind. There is only one way to win in any satisfying, "good ending" kind of way. Either you get all the characters to face their personal demons and die with dignity, after which four of them sacrifice their lives to give the fifth one a chance to defeat AM once and for all but must continue to forever roam AM's deceased mind to make sure it stays that way, or the lone survivor is turned into an immortal, hideous, miserable monster. And apparently Harlan Ellison, the original story's author, had initially objected to the good ending. And the part where the characters can die with dignity at all. In this sense, it's entirely true to the original story.
- Final Fantasy VII certainly fits this trope. The whole point of the game from mid Disc 2 on was to stop Meteor from hitting the planet, given that Cloud himself gave Sephiroth the Black Materia that the player spends half of the game trying to keep from Sephiroth, and to get revenge on Sephiroth for killing Aeris. Needless to say, Holy, the planet's last hope turns out to be sentient and will wipe out anything it deems harmful to the planet. Including humanity, if need be. It ends up MAKING WAY FOR METEOR! However, it's implied that Aeris somehow gains control of the Lifestream, and that stops meteor. However, the game cuts to 500 years later, when the only signs of life come from Red XII and his cubs, as they look over a cliff at the ruins of Midgar, which are now overgrown with plant life. That is, until Advent Children cleared things up. It only raised more questions.
- There's supposed to be an audio clip of children laughing that you can hear after the "500 years later" appears, implying that at least some of humanity was spared.
- Kya: Dark Lineage ended on what seemed to be a happy note with the heroine defeating the Big Bad and restoring peace to the alternate world... until the artifact that was supposed to take the heroine and her brother home dumps them in a desolate world where it's implied they're eaten by a monster. OK...
- Call Of Duty 4, where a player character and the city the missions have been taking place in are destroyed in a nuclear explosion, immediately after the heroic rescue of a woman from her downed helicopter, as if just to punctuate just how much of a Shoot The Shaggy Dog moment the developers wanted, as well as a Flashback where the player participates in an assassination mission, only to find that the supposedly dead target is the Not Quite Dead Big Bad.
- In the first case, they not only shot the shaggy dog, they totally vaporized it with a nuke.
- Chakan: The Forever Man ended like this: Chakan, a soldier cursed with immortality until he destroyed all supernatural evil because he bested Death in a duel, never gets his final rest in any of the three endings you can get; the "bad" ending has him lamenting that his final rest can wait; the "normal" ending has him cleansing the world of evil and impaling himself with his own swords, only to be brought back to life by Death and mocked that, since there are countless planets in the universe that still have evil in them and he can never visit them all, his task will remain unfinished forever; and the "good" ending...just has you staring at an hourglass for several minutes.
- In old Bullfrog game Flood, you guide your character Quiffy through 42 levels of platform trouble and reach an ending animation where Quiffy climbs up a manhole to freedom and is immediately squashed by a truck. He deserved better.
- This is the first half of the 4th Fire Emblem game, Genealogy of the Holy War. Everything starts going south for the main character, Sigurd after he enters Augustria. He promised the King he would leave after a year and a half; the king sent troops to attack Sigurd before then. Sigurd's friend Eltoshan, a knight under the king, gets executed for questioning his actions. Sigurd's wife Diadora gets kidnapped. Sigurd's father is framed for the murder of Grandbell's prince and Sigurd's wanted by his own country for crimes he didn't commit. He is offered refuge in the country of Silesia but he leaves after Grandbell sends troops in. While making a slow march towards the capitol, he watches his father die and finds out his sister and best friend (his brother-in-law) were killed while bringing reinforcements. When he reaches Velthomer, he is tricked into leading his small, exhausted army before Alvis's troops by being told the King knows he's innocent and that he can now rest. Alvis shows off his new wife, a brainwashed Diadora, and orders his troops to slaughter 'em all. Alvis himself kills Sigurd. But don't worry, seventeen years later all their kids finish the job.
- Apparently, however, while you do get to see Sigurd and Diadora as ghosts in a later conversation, any indication that they are living together in the afterworld is so small that this troper (yes, one whose SN comes from this very game) has seen a comment saying "justice is dead."
- In F.E.A.R., despite your character being a badass Super Soldier with insane superpowers, you end up failing every single mission objective you're given; everyone you're assigned to protect dies, and the Psycho For Hire you were sent to kill willingly allows you to execute him, and comes back later even more powerful as a ghost. Also, after blowing up part of a city to stop the Big Bad, the game ends with her still alive and attacking the 3 survivors.
- The expansion pack, Extraction Point, is even worse. You go through the entire game to rescue your teammates, only to have them killed off moments before you reach them. Finally, at the very end, just as you attempt to escape the whole insane situation, your ride blows up for no apparent reason and the game ends with you bleeding out on the asphalt watching the entire city burn down as a precursor to the end of the world.
- Along with the Replacement Scrappy and Mind Screw issues, this trope is perhaps another reason why Metal Gear Solid 2 received such venomous reactions. Everything (and I mean everything) that occurs only served to further the plans of the villains, the main character nothing but a pawn who isn't even sure if what he's experiencing is real anymore; and neither is the player for that matter.
- The basic plot of Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant goes like this: "There's a Mac Guffin hidden on this planet. The Dark Savant is looking for it. Find it before he does, and don't let him have it." During the game's ending, after you've killed the Dark Savant and finally found the Mac Guffin, the real Dark Savant shows up, hostage in hand, and demands that you hand it over in exchange for the girl you met earlier. The game actually lets you choose whether or not to hand it over, but if you decide to keep the Mac Guffin, he just kills your party and takes it from your corpse. If you agree to the exchange, he gives you the girl, you give him the Mac Guffin, and he goes off into space, with your characters in pursuit. Either way, you completely failed in your mission. Cue the sequel.
- In I Wanna Be The Guy, if you don't move out of the way out of a slowly falling apple at the end of the ending sequence, you will actually die, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to be The Guy in the first place. Also, you have to fight The Guy all over again!
- Possibly, but not necesarilly, during the fight with The Guy to become The Guy, it is revealed that, The Guy is your character's father. He killed his own father to become The Guy, and you are going to kill him to become The Guy, and in the future your son is going to kill you and become The Guy. Geez...talk about pointless.
- One possible ending in Shadow Of Destiny has the main character escape death and, in the process, realise how precious life is. It's all very heartwarming... and then he lies down to look at the sky and is promptly run over by a car. End of game.
- Peasant's Quest (a video game spin-off from Homestar Runner and parody of old Sierra games) — The goal is to gather up everything needed to be allowed to go fight the dragon, Trogdor, and then get past the traps guaring the gate to his lair. If you fail, of course, you die. If you succeed... Trogdor tells you how impressed he is that you got this far, and then burnininates you because, of course, silly peasant, you can't defeat a DRAGON!
- The plotline to Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia certainly has all the earmarks of this; Shanoa starts out with her memories and emotions stolen after her "brother" Albus interrupts the ritual to complete the Dominus glyph to destroy Dracula and steals it. Not only are you forced to kill Albus to get the glyph back, but you find out in sequence that A.) your memories and emotions were used to create the glyph, instead of being stolen by Albus as you were told, B.) your order's entire purpose is a fraud, seeking to resurrect Dracula instead of destroying him, and Dominus was created by his own power, and C.) using Dominus would've killed you. So, you kill off the Order, but Dracula is revived anyway, and while you are able to defeat him, you're forced to use Dominus to do so. Fortunately, Albus' soul was trapped in the glyph and sacrificed himself to allow Shanoa to live and give her back her memories and emotions, but the ending reveals no one even noticed her victory, and the entire ordeal will be forgotten. Way to put a damper on the plot, Konami.
- What about Mortal Kombat Armageddon's Konquest mode? Our protagonist, Taven, and his brother Daegon is forced into hibernation for millennia by their parents in order for them to participate in a quest to stop the End Of The World As We Know It. The quest ends up destroying his entire family, with Daegon being resurrected early and killing their parents AND enslaving his guardian dragon for his clan, Taven's own dragon being killed to prevent his progress on the quest, and finally the brothers facing each other in Mortal Kombat (Taven wins, though he doesn't like it). And when he finally does complete the quest, not only does it not depower or destroy the entire cast, as the quest was supposed to upon completion, but it actually supercharges them, essentially causing Armageddon to happen faster instead of stopping it dead in its tracks.
- Persona 2 or rather the first half that is Innocent Sin. The heroes fail to prevent the Big Bad from having his way and all of the Eart is destroyed aside from the city they live in which now hovers above the destroyed Earth. Maya, the Cool Big Sis, also dies because she gets stabbed by some crazy woman and all is lost. In return the heroes gets to rewind time so the event that started it all 10 years ago never happened. Of course this means all they did during the game was for no reason at all and it's pretty much just a big Game Over, please load your latest save (which was 10 years ago).
Interactive Fiction
- Infocom used this trope at least twice. In Infidel, the Player Character solves an ancient pyramid's brutal riddles, defuses its Death Traps, and opens the treasure sarcophagus in the Burial Chamber... only for the room to collapse, burying him alive. This is arguably justified, as the Player Character is a greedy, lying fool, but is that really a consolation after solving so many Expert-level puzzles?
- Trinity tops this. It's a 1986 Time Travel game that begins with your narrow escape from a nuclear holocaust, which surely implies that your goal is to prevent World War III. And you do eventually make it to the site of the first atom bomb test... but you can't change history, and history now includes nuclear extinction. You're in a Stable Time Loop, and all you can do is escape from the holocaust again ... though it's implied you'll end up back there over and over again. While you do prevent disaster from happening in 1945, the final line emphasizes that, ultimately, you are surrounded by children who will never grow up.
- In Adam Cadre's Varicella, Player Character Primo Varicella's goal is to become Regent to the royal prince. Most players will need many, many playthroughs against a frustratingly tight time limit to devise a Xanatos Gambit and eliminate Varicella's homicidal rivals. Your reward for pulling this feat off is victory! Except the prince grows up to be more Ax Crazy than all of the rivals put together, and sentences Varicella to torture and death. There are other endings, all grim, save for an Easter Egg. Given the dreary setting, in which everybody's some combination of "evil," "crazy," and "victim," the shaggy dog's death might have been inevitable.
- Jinxter. You die pointlessly, after spending an entire game trying to avoid this. Computer Gaming World labeled this one of the top fifteen worst game endings of all time.
Web Comics
Web Animation
- In the Homestar Runner toon "Homestarloween Party", Strong Sad concludes the story being told by the characters this way. It doesn't go over too well.
Web Original
- One could argue that Survival Of The Fittest tends to end this way, especially for those who try to escape and usually for the winner, who is the Sole Survivor of the abducted students, has lost their best friends, and only has a life that's been pretty much turned upside down to go back to. And that's if Danya doesn't decide to throw them back onto the island for the next game.
Notable Real Life Examples
- WWII Naval pilot Joseph P. Kennedy, eldest brother of John F. Kennedy, volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, a dangerous series of 1944 missions to destroy the German V3 supercannon. He and his co-pilot were to arm the explosives in their bomber, which could not be done remotely, and bail out. The bomber would then be piloted by remote-control, crashing into the V3's bunker complex and exploding. But shortly after the explosives were armed, they prematurely exploded, vaporizing plane and crew. The shaggy dog was thoroughly shot, however, when mere weeks later, Allied troops captured the alleged V3 complex and discovered that no such supercannon had ever existed.
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