Shoot the Shaggy Dog/Anime and Manga


 * The end of the Golden Age Arc from Berserk.
 * 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
 *  Clannad After Story, before the Reset Button is hit, shamelessly goes for a shaggy dog shoot, taking the story from sad to abjectly miserable and pointless. Despite this, there are some who think this ending is superior to the True End.
 * 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 (particularly its supplemental film adaptation The End Of Evangelion) is a borderline case:
 * Narutaru's anime adaptation. 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, although this is because the anime only covers the first half of the manga, cutting off right before things start to get really bad. The manga, incidentally, may also count as this.
 * 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, Makoto is Life at the school goes on, unaffected by the lunacy that just transpired.
 * During the last few episodes of Code Geass
 * 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...
 * Gilgamesh ends with the deaths of
 * Chrono Crusade (anime only), also a definitive example of a Downer Ending, ends with
 * The first season arcs of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni are all like this; the audience are treated to several versions of the local True Companions going Ax Crazy and murdering each other in various gruesome fashions, only for the Groundhog Day Loop 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.
 * Also from Higurashi, "Plan 34". A plan to kill thousands of innocent people in order to prevent a disease from causing a Zombie Apocalypse scenario is initially presented in the anime as evil, but better than the alternative. Then, the manga arc Onisarashi-hen shows that after the plan was carried out, . And then, because Higurashi really loves kicking you when you're down, it shows that . Isn't Higurashi wonderful?
 * It's even worse.
 * Umineko no Naku Koro ni does it in a similar manner. One example is a pair of climatic fights in the 4th arc, where the protagonists were about to win.
 * And all the Rikas get to become Umineko's Fallen Hero Big Bad as well, starting the cycle of death all over again for another group of people! Because she knows you want more.
 * Hell Girl Negoro Tetsurou's story is a mild version of this, played mostly for laughs.
 * Osamu Tezuka's Apollos Song manga fulfills the "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" point of this trope to a T.
 * Tokyo Babylon, particularly when the continuation provided by X 1999 is added in. After spending the series waiting to see if Subaru can inspire any actual feelings of love in him, and just when Subaru has realized his feelings for Seishiro, Seishiro decides that... no, he doesn't care about Subaru. So he tortures him, tries to kill him, and does kill his sister, leaving Subaru permanently broken with the heart's desire that one day Seishiro will kill him too. Except that when he tries to let that happen, he ends up killing Seishiro instead. And then he becomes the Sakurazukamori in Seishiro's place.
 * The anime adaptation of Requiem (marketed as Anal Sanctuary in the United States) has Yukina being presented with Cecilia, an angelic violin capable of opposing Cannone, the demonic violin that has driven Akio to...ahem...enslaving the female student body of St. Cecilia academy. Immediately after we see Cecilia, cut to a scene of Yukina and the priestess who presented the violin in captivity, about to be raped by Akio's possessed students, and Akio in possession of Cecilia. Everyone gets ruined, mission failed, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 pints of shit.
 * The Fox of Chironuppu.
 * Chirin no Suzu.
 * The ending of Texhnolyze results in the death of everyone on the surface, just about everyone in Lux, and every main and supporting character who ever appeared. The survivors get turned into what essentially amount to sentient, cybernetic trees. Naturally, the protagonists are completely ineffectual in stopping any of this; if anything, they make things worse.
 * Kurokami ends with most of the cast dead and when everybody expects a happy life for the main protagonists, it's revealed that the curse is not lifted, and requires a sacrifice to save humanity which will nullify all the reasons why they were fighting. And even after that sacrifice, one genius concludes that it does not matter much since many other curses still exist so getting rid of one was not a big deal.
 * Lost Universe pretty much ends this way depending on how you interpret the Cut Short ending was supposed to turn out. Protagonists die while fighting with the Big Bad. But too bad, there are a few baddies left and now there are no people who have the abilities to defeat them if they show up.
 * YMMV since the ending was pretty ambiguous, but Wolf's Rain  by implying that they've been reincarnated, or have been put back in the human world, or… well, something, but seeing as they were there anyway, it definitely counts.
 * Oh! Great wrote a self-contained arc in his H-Series Silky Whip Extreme called Junk Story, that is a pretty damn grim version of this trope. To Wit: The plot is that, 100 years before the story began, A super-powerful military robot called Gatt fell in love with a woman named Mariko. By being denied Mariko, Gatt took revenge on all of humanity, destroying most of civilization and forcing humans to live in fear. The first 3 issues are Mariko, revived as an immortal cyborg, teaming up with a gun-runner to try and destroy Gatt. Only, it's revealed in the last two issues that all of this was pointless; . Not only does the ending completely invalidate every plot development brought up until that point, but it brings up even MORE questions that will never be answered.
 * While the overall series is not so grim, but the 18th episode of Scrapped Princess ends with  getting killed in order to prevent Pacifica and the others from getting captured, only to have them get captured five minutes later anyway.
 * Katanagatari combines a horrendous character mortality rate with an epilogue that states the Thanatos Gambit that caused everything seems to have had no effect whatsoever.
 * In Bakuman｡, "Classroom of Truth," a work submitted for the main characters to judge, ends this way. The characters are put into a survival tournament to escape their classroom, and all of them die. Even the main character gets chased down and eaten by a doppelganger. Mashiro and Takagi note that it is the opposite of the typical Jump manga that value hard work and friendship, but having the main character die in spite of his efforts doesn't work.
 * Death Note in every adaptation sees the deaths of all major characters and many supporting ones, and leaves no implication that the world is a better place for any losses or sacrifices. If Ryuk's statement about Cessation of Existence is an Author Tract, this can't be anything but a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story; negative gain for everyone would be the only possible outcome.
 * To be fair there was one character who achieved all his goals and changed the world in the way he wanted - Near.
 * The Impel Down/Marineford arc of One Piece.
 * But he does
 * Fate/Zero ends like this, which shouldn't surprise anyone who is familiar with Fate/stay night, given that Zero is the prequel and sets up the scenario for Stay Night, but the details are heart wrenching.
 * But he does
 * Fate/Zero ends like this, which shouldn't surprise anyone who is familiar with Fate/stay night, given that Zero is the prequel and sets up the scenario for Stay Night, but the details are heart wrenching.