Darker And Edgier / Web Animation

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• Season 9 of DEATH BATTLE! has a notably darker tone compared to previous seasons in regards to how it portrays its fights. Several fights are portrayed with an overall tragic angle, with a large amount of them ending on a bittersweet note ("Tanjiro VS Jonathan Joestar", "Omni-Man VS Homelander") or even an outright Downer Ending ("Black Adam VS Apocalypse"). The season also features a lesser number of straightforward heroic characters, with the majority of the fighters being either Anti-Heroes, Anti-Villains, or outright villains.
• The third season of Gotham Girls is much darker and realistic than the last two. In fact, many DC Animated Universe fans consider this to be the ONLY canon season.
• Homestar Runner parodies this with its 2010 April Fools' Day gag, HSR Xeriouxly Forxe.
  Singer: There's new demographics when nobody asked for it!
• JibJab, originally, light in tone, went from gently mocking Bush and Kerry in 2004 to mocking McCain and Obama straight up in 2008, along with the broken promises made by presidents in election day that never come to light when they are actually in office. The "Year in Reviews" went from hoping it'll get better to, most recently, the 2008 Year in Review summing up everything that's bad, and adding "wars and famine" to the end.
• The Lobo (Webseries) is considered by DC fans to be R-rated humor compared to Gotham Girls due to excessive profanity and violence.
• Mario Brothers is this to the Super Mario Bros. franchise. King Koopa is a completely serious and terrifying villain here, and deaths are treated with the seriousness death entails.
• Power Star manages to be even darker than the aforementioned Mario Brothers, dealing with Mario getting his mind taken over by boos (Here depicted as threatening spirits who intend on eradicating the whole universe, Luigi going out of his way to kill him for the greater good and failing, and not to mention, an excessive amount of blood in every battle that happens.
• In Ratboy Genius, earlier episodes were mostly short slice-of-life adventures, but Ratboy Genius Dreams Minecraft has an actual antagonist in the form of Little King John and a more adventurous plot, which hilariously, grew the fanbase. The sequel miniseries The Flood continues in the same vein.
  • Starship Genius kicks off with Big Fish Boss and his army devouring an entire planet, Galactus-style.
• Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles^note (Seasons 1 — 5) is a Random Events Comedy, that just gets more insane as it progresses. From Reconstruction^note (Season 6) onwards however, plots are a lot more focused, backstory is elaborated on, justification is provided for The Blood Gulch Chronicles' Random Events Plot (Without even a single Retcon), action scenes are more frequent and intense, and just about every character gets rounded out (Some are surprisingly complex). Revelation and The Project Freelancer Saga^note (Seasons 8 - 10) in particular have some genuinely great character drama.
  • Season 11 looked like it was a return to the comedy of the original format, but halfway through gets as dark as the series has ever been.
  • The Chorus Civil War takes the same format. At first it started the same way as the earlier season, and things get darker as the season progresses.
• Do you want to know the exact moment when RWBY hit this trope? When the main Rooster Teeth webpage has a blog post from one of the writers saying that things will get darker and you'd better think twice about letting your kids watch this.
  • This was just after the episode that had Yang being arrested on live television after being tricked via illusion into breaking Mercury's leg. Oh, and she didn't even hurt him anyway - it was all an act, which he laughs about later.
  • "Heroes and Monsters" ends with Adam torturing Blake by stabbing her in the stomach, and then slicing off poor Yang's arm when she tries to intervene. Damn.
  • "The End of the Beginning", the third season finale, has Pyrrha being murdered onscreen and ends with Weiss being forcibly taken back in by her abusive father, Blake abandoning the rest of the team, and Yang so emotionally broken she can't even get out bed, leaving Ruby to go AWOL on a crazy mission to keep fighting the bad guys. For comparison, the previous finales both neatly restored the status quo in about a minute after a big, fun action scene.
  • The theme song When It Falls is pretty dark. It opens with a soft piano interlude, and then the first verse enters
  Maybe red's like roses
  Maybe it's the pool of blood
  The innocents will lay in
  When in the end you've failed to save them
  Their dying eyes
  Are wide and white like snow
  And now they know
  The cost of trusting you's obliteration
• Although already dark, Episode 10 of the webseries Salad Fingers could very well be darker than the previous episodes. The episode in question is entitled "Birthday," and it starts with our protagonist Salad Fingers about to throw a party for Hubert Cumberdale, his finger puppet. He then goes to what he refers to as Milford Cubicle's corpse (which was still hanging from the rack where SF left it in the episode "Nettles") and asks it to take a hot bath and prepare for Hubert's party. SF then gets a knock at the door, and he sees a long pole that's extending to the sky. Worried about Milford, Salad Fingers leaves his horse Horace in charge of the house until he got back. He walks out into the forests and goes through some trash and finds a puppet that he calls Dr. Papanak. Dr. Papanak then examines him and unexpectedly bites him. Salad Fingers then throws him over to a horse that resembled Horace, and the puppet began to cut into the side of the horse. Salad Fingers witnesses this, and assures the horse that he knew it hurt, but he should try to hold still and let the puppet consume its blood. Salad Fingers then takes a nap and when he wakes up, he seemed older stating that he was asleep for probably 'Six Mondays.' He then goes back to his home to discover that more horses were at his house and that the flesh on Milford Cubicle's skeleton had been cleaned off. Salad Fingers is enraged and casts the horses out of his house. He then goes outside and sees the pole again and asks it if it was the ringleader behind Cubicle's fleshless corpse. However, it turns out that five Salad Fingers-like beings had eaten the flesh off of the corpse and were seated at a table. Salad Fingers then goes to the table and sits down. The pole soon extended from the sky and a present was revealed to be at the top of it. Salad Fingers opens it and it turns out to be a hat made out of Cubicle's face. SF puts it on, and stated that he'll wear this hat until his death.
• Thomas & Friends Machinima Sodor: Dark Times is far darker then the show it was based on, as the tone is far darker and more depressing, there’s little if any humor, an Ax-Crazy murderous steam engine named Alfred (an alternate version of 98462 from The Railway Series) as the Big Bad, and almost all of the steam engines we’ve come to know and love being Killed Off for Real.
• Super Smash, the gritty reimagining of Super Mario Bros makes itself to be a rather awesome flash.
• The There she is!! series of videos at Sambakza.net feature Doki and Nabi, a rabbit who falls in love with a cat. The first two videos are cute and funny, showing Doki chasing Nabi despite his arguing that they are different species, then him getting her a birthday cake. The third and fourth videos show how society is REALLY against this pairing, with the two of them getting injured, property destroyed, pet dying, etc. Not so fun anymore, huh?

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