Dying is the worst thing many people can imagine, but plenty of authors dream up fates beyond the limits of reality or comprehension to subject characters to, making some anime characters suffer fates worse than death. They usually involve unimaginable pain or mental torment that is impossible to escape from, at least under a character’s own power.
This isn’t a trope solely reserved to villains, but it is often used to show how particularly evil they are, that they would subject others to such a fate or deserve one themselves. A hero will very rarely put an enemy through anything worse than a clean, fair death, and it says a lot about the ones who do.
10 Gold Experience Requiem Will Never Let Diavolo Die
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo
Fates worse than death are all over JoJo, such as Kars’ one-way trip to space and the Angelo Rock. But to Diavolo’s horror, the villain of Part 5 gets the crown jewel of eternal suffering. Giorno’s Stand, Gold Experience, undergoes a last-minute evolution into Gold Experience Requiem, and wastes no time testing out its new abilities: reverting anything to “zero” and denying the causality effect.
Diavolo is transported out of reality and into an infinite loop of scenarios in which he dies horrifically in myriad ways, from being stabbed to hit by a car to experiencing his own autopsy. As Giorno says flat out, “his end is without end.” For Diavolo, who spent his life violently paranoid about being found and killed, there’s no worse way to spend the rest of his time than waiting for his next inevitable death.
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9 Junpei Yoshino Becomes Mahito’s Plaything
Jujutsu Kaisen
Bumping into a cursed spirit is never good for an unfortunate, powerless human. But some curses are definitely more sadistic than others, and chief among them is Mahito. However, when he’d like to, he is good at pretending to be a human’s friend, bonding with them and gaining their trust by empathizing with their negative feelings.
Manipulated so, Junpei Yoshino never sees it coming when Mahito first murders his mother and then subjects him to his Idle Transfiguration technique. He transforms Junpei into a reptilian creature unable to speak or move outside of Mahito’s control, only able to cry as he’s forced to fight Yuuji. It’s this, rather than Mahito simply killing Junpei, that earns the curse Yuuji’s undying hatred.
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8 Dr. Kanou Used Rize As A Permanent Experiment
Tokyo Ghoul
Rize Kamishiro is responsible for one of the best first-episode plot twists in anime when she attacks Kaneki. Afterward, she’s presumed dead, but years later Kaneki discovers her alive. Dr. Kanou engineered not just Kaneki’s transformation into a ghoul but the accident that apparently killed Rize, all to perform his twisted experiments.
A ghoul’s kakuhou is the regenerating organ that makes them a ghoul, and Kanou used Rize’s to perfect his hybridization experiment on Kaneki. He kept Rize prisoner in his laboratory, mutilated and restrained, so he could repeat the process indefinitely. Even after she’s freed from him, Rize is locked up again and starved so she will never again reach her former power.
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7 Puella Magi All End Up Worse Than Dead
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Kyubey and the other Incubators do what they do to prevent the heat death of the universe, making them technically some of the anime villains that actually have a good point. And that’s where any possible sympathy for the horrible cats ends. Targeting specifically teenage girls in emotional pain to manipulate plants them squarely in the “evil” category.
On the surface, becoming a magical girl grants them wishes and makes them heroes. But what Kyubey conveniently leaves out before the girls contract with him is that the transformation steals their souls, dooming them to fight witches until they inevitably fall into despair and become one. Until they’re killed by a new magical girl, they will exist forever as mindless monsters, in a domain made up of the worst parts of their human lives.
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6 Sinners In Quindecim Are Headed For Absolute Nothingness
Death Parade
One of the best fantasy games in anime has worse-than-deadly consequences. The competitors are already dead, and must play a game together so Decim can observe them and determine who is rewarded by reentry into the cycle of reincarnation, and who is punished by banishment to nothingness. The latter permanently destroys their soul, ensuring they will never be reborn.
The unlucky person will never get to experience life again, to right the wrongs they regret or experience the joys they never had. Decim needing an assistant to make sure he doesn’t pick wrong due to his misunderstanding of human behavior is bad enough. Worse are Arbiters like Ginti who will fail souls out of pure contempt for humans.
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5 Mai Suffers Emotional Torture In The Shadow Realm
Yu-Gi-Oh!
In the original Japanese script of Yu-Gi-Oh!, many high-stakes duels end in the death or mutilation of the loser. To avoid violent content, the English dub leaned very heavily on the Shadow Realm, the hellish dimension to which losers’ souls are sent. Their body remains comatose in the real world, helpless without the soul it belongs to, and while it can die, the soul cannot. These changes made to the Shadow Realm basically made it even worse than any fate a losing duelist could suffer. It subjects human and spirit prisoners to an eternity of tortures derived from their worst fears and insecurities.
After Mai’s duel with Marik, he sends her mind to the Shadow Realm, where she is emotionally tortured. Seeing the light slowly leave her eyes as the Shadow Realm takes its toll on her is brutal to see, and while she is eventually rescued, the emotional scars of her time there are part of what causes her dark arc in the following season.
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4 Hidan Can’t Be Killed, So Shikamaru Does Worse
Naruto Shippuden
Many of Naruto’s strongest jutsu are capable of dispatching enemy shinobi in countless gruesome ways. In taking revenge for the death of his sensei, Shikamaru chooses a method that is simultaneously more mundane and infinitely more brutal. While this is surely Shikamaru’s best moment, and one of the most cathartic sequences in the entire series, Hidan’s fate is so horrible that it almost make viewers sympathize with the ruthless villain.
Shikamaru tricks Hidan into a trap and buries him alive. His compatriots in Akatsuki don’t bother to look for him, and he’s left under the ground starving, dehydrating, and otherwise wasting away. And when the Akatsuki members are killed and resurrected, Kakuzu specifically notes that Hidan isn’t with them: he’s still there under the ground and suffering, where he’ll presumably remain until long after Boruto’s time.
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3 Father Goes Back Through The Gate
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Like many other action and fantasy-heavy anime, Fullmetal Alchemist doesn’t pull its punches with this trope, from the souls trapped inside Envy’s body to poor Nina and Alexander. However, Father’s fate at the hands of Truth — being forced back through the Gate and imprisoned there eternally — has several layers of horror for him.
The Gate is inescapable, denying him both freedom and any chance to learn, grow, or change as Edward did (though he spent centuries believing he didn’t even need to try). Instead, he’s farther back than where he started in the flask, the absolute last place he wanted to return to. The anime adds an extra line of him pleading for mercy, saying he only wanted freedom and knowledge, which just hammers in how far he’s fallen from what semblance of innocence he once had.
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2 Junji Ito’s Unluckiest Protagonists Are Turned Into Twisted Monsters
The Enigma of Amigara Fault
Bittersweet endings, let alone unambiguously happy ones, are few and far between in the works of horror mangaka Junji Ito. From being torn apart mind and body by a controlling mother in “Layers of Fear” to being trapped in millennia of nightmares in “Long Dream,” there are many horrific fates that don’t necessarily kill. And yet, possibly the worst mistake an Ito protagonist could make is venturing into the hole that was made for them.
“The Enigma of Amigara Fault” compels person after person to enter holes in the mountain shaped perfectly to fit them, trapping them inside and viciously transforming them. Originally published alongside the equally grotesque “Gyo,” it has not yet received an anime adaptation. However, that’s perhaps for the best: animation can’t quite capture the depth and intense wrongness in Ito’s artwork, as the holes’ victims emerge tortured and monstrous, if they make it out of the mountain at all.
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1 Dallas Genoard Got Way Worse Than Cement Shoes
Baccano!
His sister might love him, but Dallas isn’t exactly a nice guy. He’s less of a successful criminal and more of a very prolific jerk: gambling wildly and ganging up on random unlucky people in the street to beat up and rob. Still, even he didn’t deserve what the Gandor family did to him in retaliation for offending them.
The “cement shoes” method of drowning and body disposal is a staple of mob media. Dallas and company are trapped in barrels that are filled with cement and tossed into the Hudson River. Thanks to the immortality formula they took, this will never kill them, and they will drown forever without relief. Though they can technically still die of old age, they’re young, and decades is still an unbearably long time to drown, making this one of the worst fates that anime characters ever suffered.
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