Basic Trope: An ending where nothing good happens.
- Straight: The show Tropetopia ends with Emperor Evulz winning, and the main characters Alice, Bob, Charles, and Diane suffering a slow and painful death at Evulz's hands.
- Exaggerated:
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog
- The Tropetopia game has Multiple Endings, but all of them are unhappy.
- Downplayed:
- Despite everything that's lost, there are some hints that the minor characters, Elaine and Frank will save Alice, Bob, Charles, and Diane.
- Bittersweet Ending
- Justified:
- It's a tragedy.
- It's a Doomed by Canon Prequel.
- The Hero Dies.
- Morton's Fork (for Multiple Endings where none of the endings are good (or even atleast end in a Bittersweet note)
- Inverted:
- Subverted: It seems like that Emperor Evulz has won and Alice, Bob, Charles, and Diane are going to die... but then it reveals it was all in Diane's imagination. Emperor Evulz was defeated off-screen.
- Double Subverted:
- Then it is again revealed that everything that happened is in Alice's imagination, and she is having a Dying Dream while being slowly killed by Emperor Evulz.
- Cruel Twist Ending
- Parodied:
- Every character in the show, including Emperor Evulz and his mooks, suddenly dies without explanation and depressing music is played over the credits.
- Bob gets down syndrome at the end of the episode.
- Zig-Zagged: Multiple Endings
- Averted:
- The show ends with a relatively happy ending.
- The show ends with a cliffhanger.
- Enforced:
- The executives demand that Tropetopia must be made into Oscar Bait, so it was afflicted with this.
- A combined Writer Revolt and Creator Breakdown means that the show is driven to have an unhappy ending.
- The downer ending is written as a way to assure that the show, once canceled, cannot be revived later.
- Lampshaded: "If only we have defeated Evulz... now we're dying a slow and painful death..."
- Invoked: Evulz rigs Alice, Bob, Charles, and Diane's weapons to be useless, and upgrades his armor to be invisible so he would win.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Charles decides to use the last of his strength to kill Evulz and heal him, Alice, Bob, and Diane.
- Discussed: "Imagine if Evulz kills us or something."
- Conversed: "Why are they dying? I thought this would have a happy ending!"
- Implied:
- Deconstructed: The audience begins to not care what's happening due to the ending being too dark.
- Reconstructed:
- The downer ending better delivers the message of the Aesop, and/or it makes Tropetopia far more emotionally moving, than a happy ending would have done.
- A Time Skip and/or Distant Finale movie Tropetopia Lives On! is released a decade later, and it ends with Jack defeating Emperor Evulz once and for all, avenging his late big brother, Bob, who died in the hands of Evils ears earlier.
- Played for Laughs: Tropetopia ends with Alice, Bob, Charles, and Diane slowly dying a painful death... and then Evulz begins to mock them by a rap song and he and his mooks begin to dance on their bodies when they're completely dead, complete with a Skrillex song.
- Played for Horror: Emperor Evuls points at the screen and says "I will take over your world next." with the scene being a Surprisingly Creepy Moment
Back to Downer Ending, where nothing good happens at the end.
