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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 Endofthe 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 that preventing the end of the world has never been an option. It has always been just about the when and how, not about if it happens or not.
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 Kaworu reveals himself as the final angel, invades NERV and almost causes the third impact before deciding to Screw Destiny and make Shinji kill him, having to do this leave Shinji completely broken mentaly, add to that Asuka in a coma, Toji and Kensuke having left Tokyo-3, Kaji dead, Rei being the third one so far, Misato 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. Two of the best captains get downed in 3 pages, without any buildup or warning. Then two of the best Espada are revealed to still be alive in another 4 pages. Then Aizen, Tosen, and Gin are freed from the Blazing Fortress that Yamamoto had trapped them in at the start of the fight by the weirdass thing that Wonderweiss came in with, free to do as they please, and right in front of Kira and several of his injured buddies. 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 drops Isshin, Urahara and Yoruichi in one shot, and then goes to the Soul Society to try and destroy Karakura Town. 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? "The Kindhearted Hero, Leomon 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 the chaos of the rebellion in Central, the return of Furher Bradley, the deaths of Fu and Buccaneer, the army of Cyclops soldiers, Mustang being forced to commit human transmutation and becoming blind as a result,. Then in 104 we have Father completing his nationwide transmutation, turns almost the entire population of Amestris into a Philosopher's Stone (including several major characters) and absorbs the power of God. Pretty much,it got worse. A hell ofa lot worse.And then it got better.
Just about the summary of most of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, thanks to a Groundhog Day Loop plot that's been repeating itself for about forty thousand days (over a hundred years), and only one of the protagonists can remember the previous cycles. Typically follows this pattern: two people die on the night of a festival, one person gets suspicious of his or her friends, the suspicious person kills someone, Rika turns up ritualistically murdered, and thousands of people die overnight.
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.
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: Girl A snaps, kills the hero, Girl B snaps, kills Girl A, slashes her open to see if she's really pregnant from the hero, then flees with the hero's rotten, decapitated head to die on a boat alone at sea.
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. Because the Eclipse is the ceremony for the birth of a new Godhand, which only happens once every 216 years, every demon in the Berserk universe (with the exception of Zodd, who in the manga is busy fighting the Skull Knight) comes out of the woodwork to eat the Hawks alive. Many characters that we had come to like die horribly until only Guts and Casca are left, Guts because he makes a very badass showing against demon after demon after getting his bearings, and Casca because Pippin and Judeau, the two best warriors of the Hawks other than Guts and Griffith, sacrifice themselves to keep her alive and because the monsters have even worse in mind for her than being eaten. As Guts tries to save her, a demon snaps its jaws around his arm as he tries to reach her. Then Griffith gets reborn as Femto, the fifth member of the Godhand, and gets his hands on the now-naked Casca, who he proceeds to start having his way with. Guts does everything he can to make a dent in the demon's hide, and when the sword breaks, Guts uses what's left of the sword to chisel off his own arm in a serious Badass moment to free himself so he can save Casca and kill Femto, a Hope Spot that is very cruelly quashed when Guts finally gets free and rushes Femto, only to be basically dogpiled by a whole mess of monsters, pinned down, his right eye clawed out, and forced to watch as Femto rapes Casca to insanity right in front of him. And that's the point where the anime ends.
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? Femto uses the Skull Knight's dimension-warping attack to fuse the mortal and supernatural worlds together, resulting in Hell on Earth. Berserk might as well be called "From Bad to Worse: The Series."
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-namedHuman 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 the entire universe is threatened by the protagonists' very existence. If this were anotherHumongous Mecha anime, this would trigger bucketfuls of Heroic BSOD. In Gurren Lagann however, this only succeeds in triggering awesome.
The Novelization dials it up a notch: Kamille got mind-fried and then watched as Rosamie sacrificed herself to save him from Gates Cappa, who has a free shot at the mentally crippled Kamille. At that point he thought she was his mother and, well, when Fa came to pick him up, she didn't know he opened his helmet and is presumably dead.
Yet GundamZZ somehow manages to be a comedy that takes Refuge in Audacity. Subverted in the movies, where Kamille does not end up mind-screwed and tearfully reunites with his girlfriend Fa in a Bittersweet Ending 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.
The original Gundam SEED was a slow moving It Got Worse until the emotional battle between Athrun and Kira, where Nicol and Tolle were killed, Dearka was captured by the Archangel, and Athrun and Kira both went MIA. At that point the series fell off the It Got Worse cliff and the whole Humans Are Bastards 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 Three Ships Alliance and Kira himself.
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.
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: The next episodes see her little brother, and the guy she finally realized she had a thing for, dying in front of her, both killed by the now possessed Dark Magical Girl, what-used-to-be her adopted little sister; her other good friend going off to die in a Heroic Sacrifice to take out her best friend who has gone mad; and her entire life and everyone she actually cared for pretty much being in entire ruin by the final episode. But at least they got better.
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: he finds out that his worst enemy, Gauron, is still alive and claims to have had Kaname murdered in Sousuke's absence.
In the light novels, it gets a "hell" of a lot worse — cue Mithril destroyed by Amalgam, Kaname kidnapped by Tessa's psychotic brother (who just happened to invent a new type of mechanical soldier to dominate the world with), Sousuke wandering the earth looking for Kaname (where the author just decides to insert a Canon Sue as a love interest *wince*), Tessa's brother mind raping Kaname in an attempt to sway her over to his side. 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 Rageand unseal his powers, which drains Rosette's lifespan drastically as he uses them. He manages to stop himself, only to be stabbed by Aion, who then takes off with one of the members of their Nakama. In the anime, Chrono recovers to fight Joshua--removing his horns, but also "stopping" his time in the process. Aion then kidnaps Rosette and abandons Joshua and the other apostles for dead. And that's not even talking about how either the anime or the manga ends...
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.
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.
During the One Piece Sabaody Archipelago arc, the Marine Admiral and his subordinates are picking the Straw Hats apart one by one. And then Bartholomew Kuma shows up to utterly annihilate them. 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 killed Whitebeard after he was already wounded, Blackbeard has the Gura Gura/Tremor Tremor Fruit along with his own, rendering him the most powerful pirate alive (P.S, this is also the man who released dozens of criminals from prison who were so vile that they were erased from history, meaning the new strongest pirate in the world is batshit insane). And to add further pain, guess what happened to Luffy, the childish, happy-go-lucky protagonist? He watched his brother die in front of him after he went through hell (6 levels of it to be exact) to rescue him from death and becomes mentally fubar. "Whitebeard War" Saga? Try "The World Is Now Shot To Hell" Saga.
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 Osaka and Italy missions was pretty much a walk in the park. Also, the complications created by Gantz' ability to bring the dead back to life and alter memories 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. Bad news: a new type of Awakened Beings appear that have no weak points. Good news: they die on their own if you fight them long enough. Bad news: they reproduce exponentially by infecting people with their parasites. More bad news: Riful is still alive. Kinda good news: she is attacked by the Organization's hunter-killers. Good news: said hunter-killers are killed by Alice. Back to bad news: that's because Alice Awakened. Very bad news: Alice Awakened because Beth, Number #2, was killed by one of those parasites that turn people into mindless monsters. And the very, very bad news: the cause of all this is still at large... and it is immensely more powerful than any of its spawns. Holy shit.
Good News Priscilla is back to her normal mindset and using consciously her apparently endless powers to kill Alice and Beth, who had almost killed pretty much all the already established as insanely powerful characters or whoever overpowered those characters, all in a "*scoff* whatever" mildly interested attitude. Wait... that isn't good news... that isn't good news at all... Priscilla has killed Riful with a single, effortless touch and has approached Clare's group, resulting in Clare activating her trump card of Awakening...only to discover that she is physically incapable of Awakening.
It says something about a series when a character not being able to irreversibly transform into a horrible man-eating monster is a bad thing.
And now - MORE BAD NEWS! Now that Clare finds out that she can't fully awaken - and can't use her speed to its full potential in order to defeat Priscilla - she is quickly defeated, but Deneve and Helen escape with her while they have the chance. Meanwhile, the Destroyer (which is Luciella and Rafaela's combined awakened form) is infecting and sucking the life out everything in its vicinity, and in the turmoil, Clare gets assimilated, which allows Priscilla to catch up with the group. However, Clare is able to take control of the Destroyer's youki for a brief moment and catches Priscilla, allowing both Deneve and Helen to escape as both Clare and Priscilla are absorbed into the Destroyer.... 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 resurrected three very powerful former #1 warriors, one of them being the series' first serious Complete Monster... and all of whom awaken within the hour due to the resurrection process. That's right, three new Lords of the Abyss, one of whom was irredeemably evil to start with. 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 has Kenji and Fukubei seemingly die stopping Friend'sHumongous Mecha, Friend take credit for its destruction and become the beloved savior of Japan while the second ends with an even more sadistic man taking over Friend's identity, killing a ridiculous amount of the world's population and becoming the president of the world. 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 Pain's invasion of Konoha. Having already killed Jiraiya and coerced Sasuke into joining him, he then runs amuck, tearing souls out of people, launching massive amounts of ordinance at homes and orphanages, summoning monstrosities, and disturbing the peace. He confronts Tsunade and proceeds to rip the soul out of Shizune, gaining the hidden location of Naruto. The village is in ruins, shinobi are dead, and the secret they tried to protect is lost to the Big Bad. And then Pain nukes Konoha.
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, Naruto's never-before-seen 6-tailedfox form appears. Pain gets a massive beating (even moremassive in the anime!), but he manages to trap him in a planetary object. Oh, wait, things get horrible from here; Naruto bursts out, in the 8-tailed state; however, Pain claims he can trap him in an even bigger ball of dirt. It goes from scary to tragic when Naruto willingly starts to tear off the 9-tailed Demon Fox's seal, which would kill Naruto and unleash a far greater threat than Pain.
It gets even worse when he finds out that his brother was ordered by the village's elders to kill the Uchiha clan, then prompting Sasuke not to want revenge against his brother but the entirety of Konoha.
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 knownCLAMP 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 Watanuki unconsciously tries to kill himself by falling out of a second story school window, which happens during a pivotal moment in the Acid Tokyo arc in Tsubasa. We also learn that Himawari doesn't get close to people because she was cursed with horrible luck — so bad that she's unintentionally KILLED people merely by being in the vicinity. Things continue to go downhill from there.
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: losing his arm, and Innocence, and getting a hole torn out of his heart thanks to Tyki and seeing the only place that he could ever call home, the Order, almost be destroyed by a Level Four Akuma attack. Think he deserves a break? Too bad: It Got Worse. The night before his mentor dies he is told that he is the host of the batshit evil Fourteenth Noah who wants to take over his body and personality in order to become the Millennium Earl... and he'll have to kill someone who he loves dearly. 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 his sister is also his mother, which was the reason the woman he thought was his mother hated him so much. Finally learning that his sister/mother moved to England, he goes there only to find out that she has been sent to prison again... only to die from AIDS. Which she caught from her boyfriend, who just so happened to be the same man that Ian's body was repeatedly sold to as a child. Oh, and since the man was infected at the time, that means Ian has the virus as well. 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 WorseSome 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? What do you mean there's more forc- FOUR MORE AVERRUNCUSES? Oh SHIT.
Oh wait, when Negi recovered and with two of those Averruncuses defeated, things should be moving up about no- wait WHAT?! COSMO ENTELCHIA HAS SET THEIR PLAN IN MOTION?! THE MAGICAL WORLD IS APPEARING IN MAHORA?! Ouch!
FINALLY, the battles with Negi and Fate, Setsuna and Tsukuyomi, and Mana and Poyo are over with Ala Alba victorious. Both group are starting to work together and WHAT! THE COSMO ENTELCHIA MEMBERS ARE ASSEMBLED AND THE LIFEMAKER HAS REVIVED!? 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. None of the robots in Otoi-sensei's faction ever gain back any lost ground. Ever.
As a Deconstruction of the Magical Girlgenre, Puella Magi Madoka Magica has this in spades. You say that your best friend just got eaten alive by an Eldritch Abomination and that entering into a contract with Kyubey means you have to fight them in order to obtain their Grief Seeds wasn't bad enough? It gets worse. It turns out the Soul Gems that magical girls use to tap into their powers are just that — soul gems — and that upon entering into the contract, you basically become a lich. And it doesn't even stop there — You know those Grief Seeds the magical girls are collecting? They're what happens when a magical girl's Soul Gem, which darkens every time she uses magic or otherwise gives in to The Corruption, goes completely black. This means that every Witch (those Eldritch Abominations that magical girls fight in the series) was once a magical girl herself (with the exception of those Witches that were once the familiars of other Witches), and that every magical girl will eventually become a Witch. And this is exactly how Kyubey wants it — his job is to create magical girls and act as an "incubator" that aids their maturation into full Witches. 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. With the possible exception of episode 10, which is more like Things Got Worse. Repeatedly.
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. Then Geist unleashes the Death Force because he ran out of things to fight...
In the second half of Tiger and Bunny, Kotetsu discovers that his NEXT powers are fading and he'll have to quit being a superhero. Before he can figure out how to even approach the subject, however, his partner Barnaby starts having a breakdown over the inconsistencies in his memory regarding his parents' still-unsolved murder, leading to an argument between them when Barnaby overhears Kotetsu's plans to quit. Barnaby disappears after his father figure Albert Maverick (who also happens to be his parents' murderer) tampers with his memory again. And Kotetsu shows up at work one morning to find that his ID has been revoked, nobody knows who he is, and he's being accused murdering Barnaby's old housekeeper.