From Bad to Worse/Anime and Manga


 * Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to revolve entirely around this trope.
 * 15 years ago a massive explosion in Antarctica caused severe changes in global climate that killed half of the worlds population. Now freakishly huge and terrible creatures are repeatedly appearing out of nowhere to attack the almost entirely deserted Tokyo-3. And the only thing that can stop them are scary giant cyborg robots that can only be piloted by a bunch of emotionally scarred 14 year olds. There's no one else who can do it, and if they fail to stop the attackers, it will be the End of the World as We Know It. And that's just the first episode. Things go downhill from there very fast.
 * Every single one of the main characters is either highly emotionally unstable or seriously fucked up in other ways. Fighting the Angels also takes a very high toll on their mental health and as the show progresses, it more and more shines through
 * The last few episodes are this as well for Shinji (everyone else is pretty much already going through this), a brief Hope Spot when Kaworu appears and shows Shinji some love, but then  having to do this leave Shinji completely broken mentaly, add to that,  having left Tokyo-3,  dead, ,  falling into despair and it looks like Shinji's in for a rough ride, then all of a sudden: End of Evangelion happens.
 * The Sailor Moon anime not so much, but the manga goes overboard with this. In the last "season" of the manga, every single person Usagi loves outside of her immediate family dies one by one, most are made a reanimated corpse slave of the Big Bad Sailor Galaxia. She has killed countless millions of people and intends to do so on Earth, and she's only doing it for the power. Granted, it is Sailor Moon, so it ends well, but the last few chapters are like a unending shower of angst.
 * Bleach probably sets the new record for most iterations of "got worse" in a single 20 page issue, with the release of chapter 364. Then . While the last page hints at a Big Damn Heroes moment by a certain third party, it's going to be have to be pretty damn big to make a difference at this point.
 * Let us put it this way: Tite Kubo is in love with the Big Damn Heroes trope. However, in order for Big Damn Heroes to be required, things must first look very bleak indeed. Thus, events in Bleach tend to get constantly worse until someone shows up to save the day, at which point things briefly get better before quickly going to Hell again in order to set it up for someone new to come save the day.
 * In chapter 406, Aizen  All we know now is that Isshin is alive, and that Aizen has a mullet.
 * The most glaring example, from Digimon Tamers (which was inspired by NGE), is after episode 33. So, the little kid converted the bunny Deva into her partner. Yeah! There's no need to kill (there is no Disney Death in this series) the last (or so we think) enemy that we hadn't met so far! The title of episode 34? " Dies!". Oh,it got worse, much worse, and then some. The main characters are 10 years old (bumped up to 13 in the dub).
 * Chapter 104 of Fullmetal Alchemist. We already have . Then in 104 we have . Pretty much, it got worse. A hell of a lot worse.
 * Just about the summary of most of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Typically follows this pattern:
 * And then in Minagoroshi-hen, It Got Worse.
 * And after that, in Matsuribayashi-hen,.
 * Going by the speed at which the loop shortens, and bearing in mind that it's known to cover several years at one point, the number should be more like several thousand. Oh, and although Rika is the only one to explicitly remember earlier loops (with some help from a friend), the others aren't unaffected - Satoko's trap-building skills are the result of long experience. In short, by the time it's all over, none of those close to Rika are exactly normal people.
 * Narutaru is the poster anime for this trope, as it starts out on a light and deceptively cheerful note and ends up getting systematically darker and more disturbing with each episode until the anime ends on a pitch black note (and the manga it was based on—only the first half was actually animated—is far worse).
 * Bokurano is pretty much the same way. Mohiro Kitoh seems to enjoy doing this to kids.
 * In Silent Moebius, after Roy gets killed by Ganossa, Katsumi gets hold of a sword called Medium. Six months later, things go from bad to worse.
 * Saikano is an example of this trope to the point of causing chronic depression. One release actually had a warning at the end of almost-happy episode 10, saying that absolutely nothing happy was going to happen after that point.
 * The manga has a similar note after the date in volume 2. That's when you remember you're only halfway through volume two of seven.
 * It is pretty difficult to get worse than the beginning of Texhnolyze but the show manages to do so in spades.
 * School Days is a deconstruction of the Love Triangle, in its original visual novel (Choose Your Own Adventure-style) video game format about a quarter of the endings fall under this. For the infamous anime, they made one that was worse than any in the game:
 * The final two episodes of Berserk are the moment when the series starts spiraling into horror, concluding the Band of the Hawks arc on a very horrific and depressing note. It all starts when Griffith activates his Crimson Behelit and transports everyone to hell. After the Godhand explain the nature of demons, Griffith accepts their Deal with the Devil despite Guts's best attempts to reach him..
 * In the manga, after a brief reprieve as the series moves back to its present day ("Band of the Hawks" is a flashback), it just keeps getting worse from there. And in the most recent chapter? . Berserk might as well be called "From Bad to Worse: The Series."
 * Guts and Casca's entire romantic relationship is this. It just never seems to get any better for these two.
 * The Majin Buu saga in Dragonball Z. Buu goes on a rampage after killing Vegeta. Then he gets redeemed, only to be overwhelmed and absorbed by the evil inside him. This new creature kills off a large chunk of the long-standing cast, and every challenger, though at first looking quite promising, is eventually defeated and absorbed as well. And just when Goku and the temporarily restored Vegeta think they've got him on the ropes, Kid Majin Buu finally does what nobody else had every been able to do - he destroys Earth, and everyone on it, including the four friends Goku and Vegeta just saved. Three of whom are their sons. Even before destroying Earth, Buu had already used the aptly-named Human Genocide Attack, meaning there weren't many people left to kill anyway.
 * Basically, if Goku is begging for the monster to stop (and mind you, Goku isn't the type to beg. At all!), you know everyone is well and truely fucked.
 * The last Story Arc of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has plenty of this. The previously immobile enemies wipe out the Redshirt Army in seconds. Mauve Shirts die left and right. A Space Ocean swallows the Cool Ship, rendering Spiral Power useless. The Dai-Gurren Brigade is caught in an inescapable Lotus Eater Machine. It's revealed . If this were another Humongous Mecha anime, this would trigger bucketfuls of Heroic BSOD. In Gurren Lagann however, this only succeeds in triggering awesome.
 * Pretty much the ending of Zeta Gundam in which . The actual getting worse happens in Gundam ZZ, where.
 * The Novelization dials it up a notch:.
 * Yet GundamZZ somehow manages to be a comedy that takes Refuge in Audacity. Subverted in the movies, which may or may not invalidate ZZ's existence.
 * The prequel to Zeta, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, is one long It Got Worse as, while the heroes have their minor victories, the ostensible villains succeed in their goals... which turns out to be a Batman Gambit causing the creation of the real villains, the Titans of Zeta. 0083 is basically an "it was getting worse even before it got worse" prequel series.
 * To sum up the whole thing, the Universal Century is a steady It Got Worse Gundam universe, beginning with the Laplace Incident in UC 0001 that set the course for the numerous tragedies to come, followed by the One-Year War, the formation of the Titans and Gryps Conflict, followed by the Axis drop. Some time later, the much weakened humanity has to confront the evil Crossbone Vanguards and, the worst of the worst, Zanscare Empire, ultimately leading to the Earth Federation's collapse and an interstellar Dark Age. The Universal Century is not a happy place.
 * The original Gundam SEED was a slow moving It Got Worse until the emotional battle between . At that point the series fell off the It Got Worse cliff and the whole Humans Are the Real Monsters thing reached the breaking point. With superweapons galore and gorn at unbelievable levels, human life was reduce to little more than numbers on paper and the only reason that there was even any life left on Earth at the end was because of the existence of the.
 * Gundam 00 is an It Got Worse universe as well, up until the destruction of an orbital elevator, which ironically was full of apathetic wealthy humans. From here on things start to take a turn for the better.
 * Code Geass: If things look like they're going to get slightly better for Lelouch, the universe will fix this by an inconveniently timed bullet/confession/precision-guided meteor strike on whatever Lulu loves, etc.
 * The biggest example is the infamous Wham! Episode where everything explodes due to the smallest mistake. Shit hit the fan in a way that no one could predict. "It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated."
 * About 2/3rds of the way through Mai-HiME, the heroine of the series even remarks "I've finally hit rock bottom" after one of her friends tries to backstab her, which causes her to lose her temper so that her veritable little sister abandons her, her younger brother remarks that he doesn't want her help anymore since he doesn't want to be a burden on her, and the HiME war seems to be getting out of control. But, that statement being as it is a beacon for It Got Worse:
 * Can basically be used to sum up most of Full Metal Panic!! The Second Raid. A shadowy organization is working against Mithril, providing their enemies with technology to match theirs. Sousuke is not only pulled off of his assignment to guard Kaname and leave the job in the hands of someone he doesn't trust to protect her adequately, he is further commanded to never have any contact with her again. Instead, he is ordered to devote his energy to working with a Humongous Mecha that he hates because its technology is unreliable. Eventually he slips into a Heroic BSOD and simply walks away from a mission, wandering through Hong Kong, acquiring a bottle of scotch, and letting himself get picked up by a prostitute. And then It Gets Worse:.

In the light novels, it gets a "hell" of a lot worse --. Not fun.
 * Both the anime and the manga of Chrono Crusade use this. Often. Most of the examples are far too complicated to list here, but here's a few cliff note examples, avoiding spoilers as much as possible: After the heroes are attacked on a train, they seem to defeat their enemy—only to put themselves into an even more dangerous situation. They win the fight, but inadvertently give information to the Big Bad in the process. Another scene has the heroes finally reaching one of their goals, when they're attacked by the Big Bad. Chrono attempts to protect Rosette, but gets badly wounded in the process. In the manga, his fear of Rosette getting hurt causes him to fly into an Unstoppable Rage  In the anime, Chrono recovers to fight Joshua-- And that's not even talking about how either the anime or the manga ends...
 * The first dozen or so episodes of Now and Then Here and There. It Got Worse: The Series
 * In Excel Saga, Excel's life worsens as the series progresses. Excel goes from living alone and trying to pay the rent on a crapppy apartment, to sharing the apartment with two other people, to trying to escape a prison and an island, to losing her memory (though her life was actually pretty nice then, but Excel would not see it that way), to regaining her memory and living under a bridge.
 * In the anime, the story of Pedro, the cursed migrant worker, is a comedic version of this. Oddly enough, it's also the only continuity the show has until almost the very end.
 * Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex in both seasons, particularly towards the respective ends.
 * Barefoot Gen, set in Hiroshima during World War II, begins with wartime shortages and deprivation. Then Little Boy drops. Afterwards, the title character must deal with famine, crime, and occupation.
 * Grave of the Fireflies The starting point for getting oh so much worse is the firebombing of Kobe.
 * During the One Piece Sabaody Archipelago arc, the Marine Admiral and his subordinates are picking the Straw Hats apart one by one. And then  Think rock bottom has been reached? Oh ho, think again. The whole Whitebeard War arc is pretty much one big It Got Worse, and we have still yet to reach the Godzilla Threshold.
 * End result: Blackbeard's crew  "Whitebeard War" Saga? Try "The World Is Now Shot To Hell" Saga.
 * Elfen Lied is pretty much an ongoing downward slide of It Gets Worse.
 * Welcome to The NHK tends to feel like It Gets Worse, and Worse, and Worse, and Worse, and ...
 * Gantz pretty much lives this trope. The first issue sees the protagonists die. Things get no better for them as they are forced into a bizarre war-game by a sentient 1337-5p33king black sphere. Even in an early mission, the enemies rapidly scale from 20-foot tall statues to a hundred-foot Buddha trying to kill the team. And that's not even the worst they face in that incident. Which compared to the  missions was pretty much a walk in the park. Also, the complications created by Gantz' ability to   which is exploited by at least one team member with predictably screwed-up consequences.
 * You think Claymore is pretty grim and bleak? Try chapter 95. Holy shit.
 * Good News . Wait... that isn't good news... that isn't good news at all...
 * It says something about a series when is a bad thing.
 * And now - MORE BAD NEWS! ... and we haven't seen them since.
 * And, to make a very, very, very bad story short: the Organization is in turmoil, the Claymores are revolting, and to combat them, the Organization has . Where Berserk is "From Bad to Worse: The Series", Claymore is "We Got Bad News: The Series."
 * Gyo by Junji Ito is a beautiful example. What starts with one dead fish ends up wiping out humanity. Every time you think the horror has reached its limit, it increases exponentially.
 * Uzumaki by the same author also does a good job, especially the final few chapters.
 * Junji Ito in general. Hell'O Dollies is a good example: it's already bad enough that children are turning into creepy wooden dolls, but somehow he takes it even beyond.
 * Revolutionary Girl Utena starts out a fun, weird saga of a crossdressing girl in an odd school caught up in odder after-school activities. We're introduced to the main cast and their personal problems. There's humor involving funny animals, body-switching curry, and the cas hangs out and watches the weird happen with confused, bemused indifference. Then Touga, a member of the group of not-quite-friends, breaks down everything the main character was fighting for by pretending to be her prince. Then the Black Rose Saga starts, and the sex, obsessions, emotional craziness, and horror elements begin. The bubbly sidekick tries to kill the main character. Then the Akio arc starts, and it all gets five billion times WORSE. Heaven help any kid that tries to watch for the sword duels and nutty sense of humor.
 * Twentieth Century Boys ends its first two arcs with things getting incredibly worse. The first arc  while the second   Both instances are also Hope Spots.
 * While it's normally more optimistic, the point of the recent flashbacks in Mahou Sensei Negima seem to be to show exactly how everything went to hell for Negi's parents immediately after the war ended. (And judging by Negi's past, things didn't really get better for the Springfield family for a while.)
 * The manga MPD Psycho by Eiji Otsuka uses this as a primary plot device, with its body-hopping serial killers and web of conspiracies. The live-action TV adaptation actually tones this down a bit; which is rather unexpected, since it was adapted by Takashi Miike.
 * In Naruto this occurs during.
 * Naruto returns, far more powerful than ever, having removed the flaw from his Rasen-Shuriken and gained other levels in badass to boot. But it's not enough. He destroys some of Pain's lesser bodies, but in the end Pain beats him down, stabs one of his potential Love Interests through the stomach right in front of him. This ain't over yet; it gets worse.
 * Out of unimaginable anger and despair,
 * Believe it or not,
 * Sasuke remembers returning to the Uchiha compound to find everyone dead in the streets. It gets worse when he goes home to find both of his parents dead. It gets even worse when he finds out that his brother had killed them. And it manages to get even worse when said brother makes Sasuke watch the death of his beloved family over and over again for days on end.
 * It gets even worse when he finds out that his brother.
 * The first half of Tsubasa Chronicle starts off like your average action/adventure story where a group of characters fated to meet go on a journey together to find the pieces of Sakura's lost memories that have taken the shape of unique feathers. Their journey sends them to all sorts of interesting and diverse dimensions. Sounds like a light-hearted series, especially considering it includes Syaoran and Sakura from another very well known CLAMP work, right? Wrong. After the Rekord Country arc It Got Worse, just watch the Tsubasa Tokyo Revelations OVAs—that's where the series took a very dark turn. The manga continues with the darkness through several arcs, including Fay's past which is anything but pleasant. Along with things getting darker, toward the end it turns into a massive Mind Screw.
 * xxxHolic, Tsubasa's sister series, also takes a dark turn. We're introduced to some interesting, yet funny characters such as the very quirky and Tsundere-esque Watanuki Kimihiro who can see the supernatural -- this only causes him problems, though. We follow Watanuki through his daily life as he helps around Yuuko's shop and tries to win the heart of Himawari, while arguing with his (thought to be—in his mind, anyway) rival, Doumeki, for her affection. As Tsubasa took a darker turn, Holic slowly followed suit. As the story progresses
 * Monster - Except for  Maybe.
 * D.Gray-man's protagonist, Allen Walker's entire life is this trope. He's abandoned by his parents at birth because of his apparently deformed arm. As a very young child he works at a circus where he's beaten by the clowns. He's finally adopted by Mana at the age of seven, only to lose him three years later. Then Allen makes a contract with the Millennium Earl to bring his foster father back, only to have Mana curse him before Allen unwillingly kills his now-Akuma father with his own Anti-Akuma weapon arm. The trauma turns his hair white. Then he goes through hellish training with General Cross for four years, which leads to him becoming an exorcist. After that it's just one horrible situation after another, including:  and  . Think he deserves a break? Too bad: It Got Worse. The night before   he is told that  . It hasn't gotten any better since then.
 * In the Natsume Ono manga Not Simple, the protagonist Ian is almost It Got Worse personified. The events of his life are as follows: His sister (who is the only person in his family he's close to) is put in jail when he is a child. During this time, his emotionally distant father abandons him to his physically abusive alcoholic mother, who later decides to start selling his body to fund her booze habit. After his sister is released, she moves to the United States and he completely loses contact with her, leading him to walk back and forth across the U.S. several times to try and find her (which he never does.) During this time, he learns that  The light at the end of the tunnel for all this has been a woman he met and fell in love with three years ago, who he is supposed to reunite with upon returning to the States. When he gets there, however, he finds out that she has died in the interim, which leads him to finally commit suicide in a New York subway bathroom.
 * Every installment of the Weiss Kreuz series between the Bittersweet Ending of the original anime and the beginning of the Weiss Side B manga is a long, inexorable progression of It Got Worse and It Got Worse Some More, as the Dirty Business the protagonists are forced to deal in takes its toll on each one's sanity.
 * Each episode of Shiki is pretty much an exponential slide of "It Just Got Worse".
 * When Negima's Ala Alba pull off a dangerous rescue/theft right from the clutches of Fate, they lose some promoted-to-main characters but at least they succeeded, right?
 * Oh wait, Ouch!
 * Is the series starting to have a DBZ syndrome?
 * The Twin Signal manga is a sustained examination of this trope, occasionally bordering on Diabolus Ex Machina.
 * As a Deconstruction of the Magical Girl genre, Puella Magi Madoka Magica has this in spades. You say that and that  wasn't bad enough? It gets worse. . And it doesn't even stop there --  In short, this anime is known as the Neon Genesis Evangelion of the Magical Girl genre for a reason. You can pretty much name any episode from episode 3 onwards and expect this trope.
 * And then.
 * More like
 * MD Geist has a wonderful example at the end. The planet Jerra has been mauled by years of brutal civil war, killing off a majority of the population.
 * In the second half of Tiger and Bunny, Kotetsu discovers that . Before he can figure out how to even approach the subject, however, his partner Barnaby starts having a breakdown over, leading to an argument between them when Barnaby overhears . Barnaby disappears And Kotetsu shows up at work one morning to find that.
 * But things did get much better towards the end.
 * Diabolo is made of this as a result of the Deal with the Devil plot. Oh, so you're doomed to lose your soul when you turn eighteen but you get super awesome powers from it, well that's not so—wait, you start to lose your mind as your powers get stronger, okay that's pretty bad, but still—you got your powers because the little girl you played with all the time was sacrificed in a demonic ritual that you were blamed for, that's kinda screwed up-- Well fuck.