You Are Too Late / Anime & Manga

Examples of You Are Too Late in Anime & Manga

The hero may still interfere with the villain's plan, but at a high price

• Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend ends with Doraemon and gang returning to earth from Planet Green, to stop Shirah's green nuke which will turn earth into a plant-covered wasteland, with all living beings converted to non-sentient plants, only to realize they are way too late for that, with Tokyo - and the rest of the world - now covered in endless vegetation, trees and shrubs growing to the tip of the Tokyo Tower. But just then, Gian sees an airplane frozen in mid-air thanks to the Stop Watch being prematurely activated, and they still have a chance to undo the nuke's effects before deactivating the watch.
• Bokurano with Jun Ushiro's final battle. After overwhelming the opponent in hand-to-hand combat, Ushiro prepared himself to crush the opponent's cockpit. However, he was tricked into opening it, allowing the pilots to escape. Unlike Komoda's battle, there was no way to identify them among the 10 billion lives on Earth. Naturally, there is only one sure way to win this battle: You have to kill every single person on the planet. To understand just how messed up this all is, imagine this situation: Your mother's dead. Your sister's dead. Your best friend's dead. Even your girlfriend is dead. And you too, are about to die soon. You have experienced grief, and fully understand the pain of losing your loved ones. However, just before that, you have to inflict this pain on every innocent life on Earth. They have to experience the horror of losing their loved ones right in front of their eyes, as they too are withering away. Understably, Ushiro experienced a mental breakdown as he carried out this final mission. Luckily, he was able to finish what he started, and passed away shortly after.

The hero has to think of a new plan

• In A Certain Magical Index, the heroes race to stop Othinus from completing her spear Gungnir which will allow her to master her powers, only to arrive just as she's completed it. Afterwards, Touma is put through a living hell where he's curb-stomped by her repeatedly, but he manages to stop her by convincing her to pull a Heel–Face Turn.
• The characters of Negima! Magister Negi Magi responded to Chao's preperations by using the time-traveling watch she'd given them to Set Right What Once Went Wrong despite the item being powered only within the few days of the School Festival thanks to the World Tree's magic. After that it was purely a matter of thinking on their feet and hoping for a good outcome.
  • Bonus points for being too late because of said time machine, which was rigged to send them into after she had won.
• The Alabasta arc in One Piece has the initial objective of the Straw Hats and Princess Vivi to stop Crocodile before he instigates the civil war between the royal army and the rebels which he manufactured to take over the kingdom. When that ends up failing, they revert to the goal of reaching the rebel leader (whom Vivi knows) to convince him to stop. However Crocodile was prepared for that too and prevents it with the war going on as planned. After which the two goals now are to stop Crocodile and find the rebel leader to stop the war from progressing further.

The villain's plan is his own undoing

• Claymore: Riful arrives to kill Easley after a battle against Luciella who left him on the verge of death. However Easley reveals his partner and claims that "it's too late. Nobody can kill Priscilla now." The couple is finally defeated no sooner than seven years later each on their own because Easley had sent Priscilla away.

The villain's plan was out-gambitted by the heroes

• The rule of thumb when fighting Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass: when he contacts you first, you have probably already been screwed up three times over by him without noticing it. Depending on the circumstances or how you interpret his character, however, he may either belong here or in the fifth kind.
• The ending of Death Note, where it turns out that Near had already replaced Mikami's Death Note with fake before the final confrontation happened.
• This was parodied on 4chan when a certain martial artist explained to Veidt "I killed you and your plans thirty five minutes ago."

No twist; it's genuinely too late

• Doubly Subverted during the eclipse in Berserk. Skull Knight pops in and saves Guts and Casca right before Griffith can pull the Coup de Grâce on them. However, by this time, both had suffered a Fate Worse than Death, and afterward the God Hand declared that they were going to bring forth an age of darkness.
• The death of L and Watari in Death Note. The evidence to prove that Light is Kira has finally been found and then Rem kills them. The good guys win in the end, anyway, though.
• In Devilman, this has happened to Akira Fudo several times. The biggest downer is the death of his Love Interest Miki Makimura murdered by a lynch mob, to the point he killed all of those involved. The series ends with one of the biggest Downer Endings in manga history.
• Fairy Tail: Despite Erza and Minerva killing Kyouka, it wasn't in time to stop Face as she forcefully finished the countdown sequence. Fortunately Grandeeney and three fellow Dragons were able to destroy all but a few of Face's 3000 pillars, saving Fiore from becoming a magicless land.
• Dio in the first arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Although he seemingly dies along with Jonathan, he comes back for an epic sequel in Part 3. And he isn't just alive - he successfully replaced his destroyed body with Jonathan's, meaning that he accomplished exactly what he was trying to do.
• Maria no Danzai: When Mari's son Kiritaka leaves the house in the middle of the night, she worriedly tracks his phone down and follows him. By the time she reaches him, he's a mangled mess in the middle of the road, having broken his legs after Okaya and his gang used a fake sex video of Mari to blackmail him into jumping off a nearby overlook. Mere moments after Mari and Kiri's eyes meet, Kiri is run over by a truck and his entrails are smeared across the road, leaving a horrified Mari to cradle his remains and tearfully beg for her son to come back as Okaya watches from above.
• The heroes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory are dogged by this trope, between being unable to stop the nuke from being fired successfully to failing to prevent a Colony Drop.
  • Even worse, Jamitov Hymem and Bask Ohm use the entire incident as justification for the formation of the Titans. Everyone losses.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny, the heroes uncover a plot to Colony Drop the remains of Junius 7 onto Earth. Though they fight heroically to prevent it, they got there way too late, and it causes massive damage to a large portion of the world and reignites the war from the last series.
• Played straight in End of Evangelion, where Shinji arrives too late to save Asuka from being eaten alive, and as a result, gets to see the remains of her Evangelion Unit-02 being thrown on the ground. He is subsequently crucified by the MP EVAs.
  • Subverted in the Manga version, where Shinji does arrive in time to save Asuka from being eaten alive. He still gets crucified, though, and this time both Shinji and EVA-01 get giant holes in their hands.
    • And played with in Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22, where Kaworu arrives too late to prevent Shinji from initiating Third Impact and thus the end of the world, but arrives just in time to stop Shinji from letting it progress too far. Apparently, though, an alien piloting a giant alien in robot armor is able to throw a spear from above planetary orbit...
• While pretty much all the protagonists and side characters in the entire Planetes series are trying to prevent the Space Defence Force's attempt to crash an experimental space ship into the largest city on the moon, all their efforts end up failing when the SDF averts the crash themselves when their demands are met. And since unlike their methods, their demands were fairly reasonable (dividing space's resources among countries based on their population instead of how much contribution they paid the NATO-Expy, the end result isn't all that bad.