Crapsack World/Anime and Manga

"Setsuna F. Seiei: Exia R2, Setsuna F. Seiei, clearing the way for the future!!"
 * The Cosmic Horror Story that is Neon Genesis Evangelion. After half of us have died and the Earth was left a wasted place, what was left of Humanity is left in a post-apocalyptic death race against the Angels. The only means of defense is to send what few children were born at the right time out in gigantic Angel-derived Evangelions. But it's actually worse than that. The children who are supposed to pilot the Evangelions are traumatized, broken, neurotic and mentally unstable to begin with, and the rest of the cast is growing to be increasingly generally bitter, psychologically incompetent, and pessimistic. Also, the entirety of existence basically revolves around the Hedgehog's Dilemma, which is the philosophical notion that if you go near other people, you become Hell to them and they become Hell to you, but when you go far from them, you cannot survive. As time passes, the dysfunction and insanity only gets much more worse in scenes that are more and more madness-inducing and utterly horrifying, while everyone is forced to watch them in all their gory details, the most memorable of them being played with unfitting music, finally culminating in what the masterminds who masqueraded themselves to be humanity's protectors had in mind in the first place:.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's has Satellite, where Yusei has lived a hard life. This changes later on in the series.
 * Highschool of the Dead is an animated version of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead on a worldwide scale. Being a badass is a survival requirement, the zombie (called Them) hordes never seem to completely go away, and the best you can hope for is to hold them off long enough to survive another day.
 * Newport City in Dominion Tank Police is a pretty horrid place to live. The main heroes are violently crazy for tanks and blowing up lots of stuff, the few good people are all targeted by criminals, the whole city has been blanketed with a poison gas cloud for years, ANY attempt to fix this is sabotaged or destroyed, corporations are so corrupt that it would scare William Gibson, and life is generally pretty cheap.
 * The City In Blame! is immeasurably vast and completely unmonitored, with countless civilisations existing within it; most of which are run by cruel and corrupt cyborg overlords. A common goal for anyone in the 'Verse who hasn't already modified (or had modified) their bodies to the point of looking only vaguely human, is obtaining access to the Net Sphere - which would serve the duel purpose of stopping the chaotic expansion of The City (which, by the end of the Manga, had consumed ) and providing an on-line paradise for anyone and everyone. That's right; in this world, absolute escapism is the only hope humanity has left.
 * Go Nagai's Devilman, at least the manga version. Half the time, Akira's efforts amount to nothing, if he even gets the chance to fight the Monster of the Week. Humanity's reaching the end of its rope, demons can possess people with little to no effort, and humanity believes signs of said possessions can be seen in people that don't follow the lock-step. Hence, by the final volume in the series, Witch Hunts are carried out... except half the time the actual possessed people take part to hide their true nature. And the end result? Our hero loses faith in humans and kills a lot of people. And then It Gets Worse.
 * The end result of things getting worse is the world of Violence Jack, where society has completely broken down After the End and the remnants of humanity are divided between the strong and the weak. The evil warlords and biker gangs that rule this world are by far the worst Complete Monsters that Go Nagai has created since Amon from Devilman, and mainly like to torture, rape and murder people in horrific ways.
 * But wait, there's more! It turns out all iterations of the Devilman 'verse are interrelated because.
 * For the most part life in the Gunnm / Battle Angel Alita universe sucks hard. The few somewhat decent places happen to use things like Mind Control in order to maintain said decency. We don't know very much about Jupiter and Venus other than the facts that the people of Venus Eats Babies (genetically engineered to be non-sapient) and on both planets the people have biological immortality, which as a result of this they do not allow the birth of any more children. The places that don't have this limit are in a civil war (Mars), or just happen to be hellholes that don't legally exist which results in assorted miscreants doing whatever the hell they want in said places including and definitely not limited to wiping them out, which occurred on Earth and some asteroid colonies (like the nursery colony the Guntroll team was from).
 * Mirai Nikki. For perspective, the former most sympathetic character, the Woobie lead, was last seen The second most sympathetic character is a full-blown terrorist Mad Bomber.
 * The Toku style Hero of Justice is a vigilante psychopath.
 * The female lead is an Ax Crazy Yandere who, upon being told by the protagonist that he loved her, drugged him and tied him to a chair so he'd never leave. He got out, but he's still with her. Yay!
 * Between the warmongering kingdoms and their corrupt nobility, the heresy-crushing Holy See, and the evil Godhand and their ravenous demonic Apostles, life in the world of Berserk really, really, really, really, really, really sucks hardcore. The world seems to exist only to make people as miserable as possible and to give the demons somewhere to play; humanity exists so that the demons have something to play with. The biggest idealist in the entire setting (who is anything but altruistic and is quite willing to use ruthless methods to accomplish his dream) snapped under the pressure and is now the Big Bad.
 * The demons get screwed, too. The price that people pay to become demons, in addition to sacrificing the people closest to them, is a guaranteed trip to Hell after they die. Hell is a nightmarish vortex of damned souls that drags your spirit into it, where you suffer indescribable pain and torment until all traces of your being has been utterly consumed in a sea of eternal suffering. And thanks to.
 * You can't expect much else in a world where . This setting is perhaps the closest we have to Warhammer 40000: The Manga.
 * Claymore is in much the same boat as Berserk above, as far as ravenous, human-eating monsters are concerned (there are lots of them and they are pretty much unstoppable for normal humans), but normal people tend to be, on average, significantly nicer than they are in Berserk. Just by a bit. But then the heroines find out that.
 * However, there are the Seven Ghosts of Pieta which are trying to change the continent, either by killing an Eldritch Abomination greater than the others (Priscilla for Clare), or is leading a full scale rebellion against the Organization (Miria). So far...both seem to be succeeding.
 * Played extremely straight in the anime Texhnolyze. The entire population of Lux are either: a) evil, selfish bastards, b) poor broken woobies, or c) some combination of the two. Not to mention that they all live in a cave underground and the entire city survives because of Rafia,.
 * Ergo Proxy. 85% of the world's population has been wiped out. The outside environment is completely destroyed and most people who set foot outside are killed from infection. People on Earth . Essentially all humans on Earth live in dystopic domes. What's more, the Ridiculously-Human Robots are all going insane, and the... things... directly ruling the Earth will all die.
 * Wolf's Rain takes place 200 years After the End of civilization as we know it. Most of humanity is crammed into crumbling domed concrete cities ruled by warring Nobles, and the environment outside is slowly decaying. Maybe the most telling line in the entire series is spoken by the wolf Hige, who looks at the sky and says, "C'mon, birds, let's see some flying up there." But we don't see any birds at all after that -- maybe they're all extinct..
 * Not quite.
 * Modern Tokyo is portrayed as a World Half Empty in Tokyo Babylon, with frequent suicides, dreary lives, and gloomy commentary on consumerism. All designed to Break the Cutie, naturally.
 * And its sequel, X 1999, is hardly nicer.
 * Post-apocalyptic Tokyo in Akira.
 * The Future that Trunks came from in Dragon Ball Z, a ravaged post-apocalyptic wreck where two powerful Androids go around killing anyone who opposes them, and have already killed the most powerful heroes of Earth. What makes it worse is that the Dragon Balls are gone because Kami, who shares a soul with Piccolo, one of the aforementioned heroes, is dead.
 * In the main timeline Earth is implied to be one of the few places other than the afterlife exempt from this. The galaxy at large is a Crapsack World, because its most politically powerful resident is a Complete Monster who correctly believes that he is the strongest being in the universe. So you have someone more evil than anyone in human history who is his own Death Star and who's been running around the galaxy for decades doing whatever he likes because there's nothing anyone can possibly do to stop him or even scratch him.
 * Most of the stories in Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series. The historical chapters feature a decidedly unromantic depiction of feudal Japan full of war, famine, disease, filth, corruption, death & copious amounts of mutilation with sharp objects. But at least the characters in those stories had the breathtaking beauty of nature to raise their spirits. Those who have the misfortune of being born in this world's bleak, Zeerusted future get no such luck. In addition to having all the above mentioned problems, the world is ecologically screwed, full of bigots who mistreat clones and robots, and occasionally ruled by an oppressive theocracy. After people start piling into rocket ships to escape this awful mess, the Earth eventually faces an immigration crisis when the space colonists & their children start coming back in droves because most of the other planets in the universe are even worse than the world that they left! When humanity finally goes extinct in the (chronologically) final chapter, it comes as something of a relief.
 * The war-torn desert planet that Now and Then Here and There takes place on, mostly because it's a (slightly) exaggerated version of modern Africa.
 * The planet is actually
 * The post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the world of Fist of the North Star. If you're an Average Joe/Jane, you're a (literally) dirt-poor peasant scraping by on your meager provisions. You'll be constantly on the lookout for roving brigands who, if you're lucky, will steal all of your possessions, effectively sentencing you to death in the desert wasteland, and savagely beat you. If unlucky, you'll be murdered, and possibly raped as well if you're female. Also, you must worry about power-mad martial artists enslaving you and your loved ones and slaughtering you on a whim as they set to establish themselves or their empire. And just to make things worse, this isn't one of those nuclear After the End series that forgot about fallout; if you don't starve and aren't murdered, you might end up with radiation sickness. If you happen to practice the series' brand of martial arts, odds are you'll fare little better. If you're a low-level villain/lackey, you'll undoubtedly fall under the head-detonating protagonist, Kenshiro, or possibly to another "good guy" after you kick one dog too many. If a low-level hero, you must constantly battle thugs, and there's no telling when one of the previously mentioned power-mad martial artists (who will be light years beyond your ability) will carve a swath of destruction through your homeland, either killing, enslaving, or imprisoning you. If a high level villain, odds are even greater that you'll be killed by Kenshiro, though there is a rare chance of being killed by another high-profile martial artist (such as Rei or Toki). Finally, Kenshiro, the protagonist, has arguably the worst fate of any character in the series. He loses his father; - granted he kills one of them, ;, who was corrupted by ; and virtually all of his other friends. The "off into the sunset" ending with him and his lover, Yuria, is rendered bittersweet when it's revealed
 * There is one brighter possibility in all of this: the environment has begun to recover slightly by the end of the series. And you have to figure most of the bandits are dead by that point.
 * Though from what was seen in the New Fist of the North Star OVAs, set years later, the world hasn't really decided to clean itself up just yet.
 * In fairness, although it starts out completely bleak, it doesn't stay that way, thanks to Kenshiro (and a few tough allies). In fact, the whole point of the story (Tetsuo Hara said something to this effect) was that even one selfless, brave, honorable hero could save the world. Pretty harsh place to live, no question, but solidly on the "idealism" side of the scale.
 * The world of Casshern Sins is a decaying mess; all the robots are rusting, and presumably something equivalent is happening to any humans. Only the protagonist is unaffected by the ruin, but he's the one that caused it in the first place; and he's amnesiac, so he can't work out why 99% of the population wants to kill and eat him.
 * Hell Girl is ostensibly set in the real world. But with each grudge Enma Ai satisfies, it's more obvious that hers is a world of miserable bastards. On the one hand, we have her targets, almost always selfish people who deceive, abuse, and hurt those around them. On the other hand, we have her contractors -- who, while usually sympathetic, nonetheless resort to damning their enemies and themselves to hell to solve their problems. (The most generous thing you can call it is assassination.) And then there are the cases where the contractors are just as bad, and even where the targets are completely innocent. Ai will take pretty much anyone's contract, and she never lacks for work. The ultimate proof of this World Half Empty is the final storyline of Futakomori, in which . It's a great show, but watching too many episodes in a row is hard on the soul.
 * Futakomori (the 2nd season) is sick and sad enough...but wait until you see Mitsuganae (the 3rd season); it will shatter you soul into a little pieces.
 * Then there was the episode where.
 * Pick a Hideshi Hino manga. Any Hideshi Hino manga.
 * Any work of Mohiro Kitoh qualifies, most especially Bokurano (the manga at least), which takes place in a Multiverse Half Empty with, without giving anything away, about as hopeless a scenario as anyone can imagine. As well as his effectiveness in savaging modern day life, his work focuses on the individual effort of people to stay noble in the face of such circumstances.
 * Narutaru.
 * The Universal Century of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. The One Year War which causes the deaths of half the population of the Solar System is between the Earth Federation, a corrupt, incompetent, and racist government unable to properly defend the solar system vs the Principality of Zeon, who started the war by gassing a colony full of millions of people and dropping it on the Earth. Even after the One Year War was over, war constantly sprung up due to the weakness (and/or the malice) of the Earth Federation, and Complete Monsters are incredibly common. You can seriously argue that the solar system would have been better off if both sides had wiped each other out.
 * Better for whom???
 * To be fair, after Neo-Zeon had been eradicated once and for all, the Earthsphere and its colonies enjoyed a long period of peace with minor conflicts until Crossbone Gundam and Victory Gundam, and even in Victory Gundam after everything-it's a hopeful ending. People are TIRED of War.
 * ... but yet the same tragedy repeats in G Saviour. People never learn...
 * Well, there is one Gundam AU based on the premise of the Federation and Zeon wiping each other out...while certainly less dark, it's hard to say people are better off.
 * This even applies in G Gundam, where they established the Gundam Fight specifically to avoid war. While the wealthy and powerful escaped to space colonies, the people left behind on Earth have to endure their cities and landscape being torn up every four years, and Gundam Fighters are specifically absolved from causing property damage because most governments have just stopped caring about Earth. Several nations hire thugs or assassins as Fighters, or use coercion and blackmail to get them. And.
 * Gundam SEED starts off similar to UC calender series, where most of the conflict stems from political and ideological reasons, but soon goes off the deep end and degenerates into hell on earth, literally. The earth is going through an energy crisis due to nuclear power jammers that have been integrated by ZAFT, almost the entire world is controlled by one side or the other through draconian military regimes, much of Earth is in ruins due to the war, and both sides are equally willing to use WM Ds on their enemies and ALLIES equally. In addition, the main source of scientific progress has come from a series of genetic experiments that spawned a worldwide terrorist ideology and the war itself and recently reached the utter abandonment of the value of life in order to pursue a goal that would give birth to.
 * The setting of Gundam 00 is a crapsack world as well, with the people living in poverty suffering endless warfare while the rich people relying on the giant solar panel system not giving a fuck about them. In the first season, political games among the three greedy, corrupt global superpowers still exist, and the second season is basically all the corrupt politicians banded together to continue torturing people who suffer in extreme hardship under their tyrannical grips. In both cases, we have the Byronic Hero Celestial Being who are among the very few people truly willing to change the world for the better even though their methods are questionable at best.

"When I was a brat, crawling around in that shithole city, it seemed God and Love were always sold out when I went looking. Before I knew better, I clung to God and prayed to Him every single night — yeah, I believed in God right up until that night the cops beat the hell out of me for no reason at all. All they saw when they looked at me was another little ghetto rat. With no power and no God, what's left for a poor little Chinese bitch to rely on? It's money, of course, and guns. Fuckin' A. With these two things, the world's a great place."
 * Gundam AGE is a blend between this and Crap Saccharine World (in part because of Art Style Dissonance). On the one side, The Federation employs a powerful State Sec that operates by falsifying history and . On the other, the UE/ have a sympathetic cause that they ruin by wiping out civilian colonies, which sets several otherwise-decent people on lifelong quests for retribution. Also, Anyone Can Die, and if they don't they'll probably be traumatized by fighting in battles that definitely do not involve Bloodless Carnage.
 * In pre-timeskip Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann humans have been driven from the surface into underground villages. If anyone dares to climb to the world above, they're mercilessly hunted down and killed by the Spiral King Lordgenome's Beastmen. Of course, all it takes is a band of insanely badass fighters led by an exceedingly charismatic and determined idiot, and then his young friend/stepbrother of sorts to turn everything around. Then the aliens show up...
 * Neither the Pre-timeskip world nor the Post-timeskip world looked too good. First people were forced to live underground, so there would never be 1 million humans on the planet. After timeskip, they are forced out of their underground homes, where they were safer, only to reach 1 million and get attacked by aliens, though those are easily repelled... until they toss the Moon at Earth, just to make sure humanity is exterminated. It gets better, though, when Simon and Co. turns the Moon into the Cathedral Terra, a giant battleship later named Chouginga Dai-Gurren.
 * The Hentai anthology Cool Devices. It says a lot about the series when one of the most "optimistic" endings is . The really bad endings will likely make you want to force-feed the DVDs to whatever sick fuck came up with the idea.
 * Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei (Goodbye Mr. Despair) takes place in a world where a suicidal, paranoid Large Ham megalomaniac is actually one of the most sane and collected members of the cast. This is all Played for Laughs, of course.
 * The Code Geass world isn't too great either. There's the Holy Britannian Empire, which looks like it's rich and beautiful at first, but is actually a racist, totalitarian, Social Darwinist Empire which is less like the U.K. and more like Nazi Germany and where people who are enslaved are treated as "Numbers". Slaves can sign up to be citizens through military service, but the discrimination is still widespread there. It is ruled with an iron fist by The Emperor and his constantly-warring children through a Medieval feudal system. If he gets bored, feels slighted in any way or actually plans something, The Emperor of Britannia will order your country to be either enslaved or razed to the ground. Then there's the Chinese Federation, an overpopulated union of states where starvation is more common than food whose puppet ruler is still a child propped up by corrupt eunuchs. Finally, there's the Euro Universe (E.U. for short), a loosely-maintained and hardly-defended union similar to the Chinese Federation but with better living accommodations. Even though their role in the story and world relations are minor, they actually make it out to be a pretty nice place with equal rights and everything... until Britannia conquers most of it. All this while the Diabolus Ex Machina constantly torments the Anti-Hero protagonist and everyone else.
 * Barefoot Gen. An autobiographical work set in the author's youth. He grew up in Japan during World War Two. The climax takes place on August 6, 1945. No fantasy or fiction is needed to create a world of horrors, we ourselves have done a fine job of it.
 * Japan in Speed Grapher is a crapsack world. Everyone person in power is corrupt, and a Mega Corp has bribed even the police force. All but a handful of characters are Complete Monsters.
 * Elfen Lied is set in a world with corruption and decadence at every corner, where being a mutant means a lifetime of being broken, and some of the worst Complete Monsters you'll find including child rapists, Serial Killers (One of whom is the protagonist) and sadists who join PMC's just to get the chance to kill legally. Even little children are rotten and willing to Kick the Dog and kill it!
 * When describing the world in Black Lagoon, Revy says it best:

"Kazuma Shudo: "In the end we were powerless, again. We fought like mad, but all that's ever left is the devastation.""
 * Blue Drop. If you're a Magical Girl, you're a Child Soldier bomb disposal unit. If you're a schoolgirl, you're little more than a sex slave. If you're a guy, you're used as a lab-rat for transgender experiments if you're lucky. If you're not so lucky as to be part of an experiment, you're an animal, a third-class citizen treated like freed Africans in Antebellum America -- not a slave, but only just. If you're one of the Arume, alien lesbians who made Earth like this, then you're living with the knowledge that your species is extinct and living on borrowed time, the only option for survival being a cultural change none of them have the courage to make. Both sides are ravaged by and living in the ruins of a war that was literally entirely pointless because of that lack of courage.
 * Amberground in Letter Bee is a corrupt world of perpetual night, where a man-made sun shines over the capital city of Akatsuki. Life is rough almost everywhere, and even the people assigned to deliver some happiness throughout the world through letters--the titular Bees--could be killed by or lose their Life Force (Heart) to mechanical monsters along the way.
 * The world of Saikano, while never directly shown, is undoubtedly this. We know that there's a large-scale war going on from the beginning, but halfway through we find out that the protagonist's hometown is peaceful By the end of the series, . There's a very good chance this was the best thing left to do at that point.
 * The Alternate Universe medieval Japan of Kagerou Nostalgia. The nation has been engulfed in a civil war for decades, with eighty percent of the country under the control of the psychotic Kiyotaka Kuroda, who organises random massacres of the population by Sociopathic Soldiers just for kicks. The remaining twenty percent of the country go out of their way to avoid opposing Kuroda, even aiding the "People Hunts" in some cases so that he'll leave them alone; generally speaking their governments seem to be either crooked or cowardly. People who do go to war with Kuroda have a tendency to go insane, coming home and spreading even more misery around. And that's without mentioning Gessho Kuki, The Man Behind the Man to Kuroda, and the armies of demons and monsters he summons to bolster the General's ranks. The world's only hope at this point are six kids, who don't like one another, have yet to defeat a single major enemy, and whose major accomplishment as of the most recent volumes have been getting their leader killed and her kingdom decimated, and suffering a betrayal by one of their own. They've yet to really help anyone, and the entire setting is pretty much overwhelmed with a sense of cynicism and despair.


 * Whatever's going on in Angel's Egg, it's world isn't an inviting place to live.
 * The world in Urotsukidouji is apparently such a wretched place
 * Basically it's a whole Crapsack Universe in Galaxy Express 999, with only a few bright spots here and there. But the majority of planets Tetsuro and Maetel visit are either
 * run by corrupt governments,
 * on the brink of destruction,
 * inhabited by oblivious, arrogant people,
 * stricken by severe poverty or
 * all of the above.
 * Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Are you a Muggles? Enjoy getting Driven to Suicide by a witch. Are you a witch? Enjoy being warped into a horrifying Eldritch Abomination and getting killed by a magical girl. Are you a magical girl? Enjoy being cut off from all your friends and spending the rest of your life at a shitty job where the smallest misstep can spell swift death. And it doesn't even stop there -- . And the universe itself? . Fun for everyone!
 * Through, though, things have gotten a little better. However, . Indeed, the meguca battle never ends...
 * Planet Gunsmoke in Trigun is a barely-habitable desert planet that humanity is forced to retreat to after it has already killed Earth, but even mankind's fight for survival isn't enough to unify the people. About half the population is made up of resource-hording tycoons and trigger-happy bounty hunters with no disregard for the well-being of bystanders.
 * The Nasuverse is pretty crappy. Between the vampires, which- apart from only one or two exceptions- are most definitely not friendly, and other supernatural creatures, ordinary humans are constantly being killed and having their life sucked out of them. The only people who oppose the vampires are an order of Church Militant Knights Templar who kill anything nonhuman regardless of threat and aren't too concerned about killing innocent bystanders, and a cabal of power hungry mages, most of whom are only interested in their own research, and the only reason they fight the vampires at all is to preserve the secrecy of magic. In fact, some mages kill people in the course of their experiments, and for the most part, as long as they kill any witnesses to prevent discovery, they won't suffer any penalties. But even the mages have it bad; the Mage's Association has an established aristocracy, and those who aren't part of it are basically second class citizens. And anyone who makes a ground-breaking discovery will receive a sealing designation, which is a polite way of saying that they'll be locked up for the rest of their lives and experimented on. Oh, and if all that wasn't bad enough, the entire human race is ultimately doomed, and there's nothing anyone can do stop it.
 * Loveless takes place in a rather shitty world. To put things into perspective- almost all of our main characters are or were abused children and are severely emotionally fucked up; even people on the 'good guy' side do very bad things (Ritsu-sensei, anyone?); the few decent people who try to help are useless; kids as young as twelve get dragged into presumably-very-dangerous spell battles Seven Moons Academy gets attacked and the ones dealing with the resulting mess are the students; and, at least for now, The Bad Guy Wins.
 * Loveless takes place in a rather shitty world. To put things into perspective- almost all of our main characters are or were abused children and are severely emotionally fucked up; even people on the 'good guy' side do very bad things (Ritsu-sensei, anyone?); the few decent people who try to help are useless; kids as young as twelve get dragged into presumably-very-dangerous spell battles Seven Moons Academy gets attacked and the ones dealing with the resulting mess are the students; and, at least for now, The Bad Guy Wins.