Anything with elves and non-elves. “Oh you’re gonna do the thing where the elf outlives the non-elf and is sad at the non-elf’s mortality.” The Lord of the Rings kind of established this with elves like Elrond outliving non-elves by thousands of years. Elrond was there when Sauron forged the rings. He’s kind of always been there. He knows Aragorn is just a man who will die in what would be a mere sliver of his own life, but he respects the man. So when his daughter wants to marry Aragorn, and give up her immortality (IIRC other elven media hasn’t really done this), it’s a huge loss for him, but he gets it.

The loss part is the very plot of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and they smack you with it in the first episode. Frieren had a crush on this blue-haired boy, Himmel (German for “heaven”, no less), and he just up and died after their adventure, and she never really breaks down in tears, but over the next two seasons, she just begins to mourn this guy. The flood is coming, but it may be centuries away. Peak best girl might start to look 13 or maybe even 14 before she starts to really miss Himmel the Hero.

Then there’s Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms. You know what’s coming at the end. When it does, when she breaks her promise… it still hits like a tonne of bricks.

Oh, and that .hack//SIGN remake… what was it called? Oh yeah, Sword Art Online. Anybody hear of that one? Yeah, figuring out what part of .hack//SIGN they were ripping off was fun. Mostly the first two seasons. And when they paraded out the undefeated duelist, I said “yeah I remember this OVA.” Except it wasn’t three best friends sharing a character and playing in shifts. It was MUCH worse than that. I joke, I kid, but SAO is actually one of my favourite series. I’ve read the books as well as watched the anime, and Mother’s Rosary (book 7, and the part I’m referring to) is by far my favourite part, but it did come from a .hack//SIGN OVA… though, it’s more fair to say both came from MMO tropes. It’s like when Deep Impact and Armageddon were both accused of copying each other, until the producers came out and said they both attended a scientific seminar on what would happen if an asteroid threatened to extinguish all life on Earth. (I wonder if Makoto Shinkai attended as well, considering that’s what his magnum opus is about.)

But no, it doesn’t kill the anime for me if I see what it’s doing.