Saddest anime deaths?

[Holeypaladin]

Clannad: After Story has some of the saddest death scenes of all time.

[Snotgirl]

The part where Han Solo died.

i cri evrytim

[Miss Devil]

Any thing from the anime Another. I hated seeing certain characters die in such a gruesome manner.

Spoiler: one of those deaths.. WARNING NSFW 

[Melanite]

This is the most recent one I saw that shattered my heart.

Spoiler: Tokyo Ghoul Spoiler 

Hide, when Ken carried him and the music was playing, that really got to me. I've heard the death is not confirmed but still, what a way to end it!

[Dancraft41]

This was mine:

Spoiler: Assassination Classroom 

I hated and loved the episode of Assassination Classroom where Korosensei was killed after calling roll. I was crying like a baby, to say the least

[Evening Rain]

I think the original mention of Ilya's death is very true. That really hit home for me.

Basically, Gilgamesh is responsible for my top 2 saddest anime deaths, Ilya and F/Z Rider. :'/

[Cfavano]

isn't Ilya not an actual person in the anime so she can't really die?

[Imperial1917]

To me the Angel Beats one wasn't as sad, because they were technically already dead.
That and I have no soul.

Try asking what death is in a philosophical sense rather than a biological one. Biologically, death is usually defined as a cessation of brain activity. Philosophically, socially, death is the cessation of the ability to interact with someone; the point at which no further back-and-forth interaction can be obtained within the natural spectrum. While the characters of Angel Beats were within the school they could experience a type of interaction indistinguishable from real interaction. At the end of the series they passed from that world and into another where, as far as they knew, they would never meet again. It is a sense of loss, the same one that would cause an orphan to describe the death of its parents as never being able to talk to them again. In that sense, they were alive and, at the end of the series, died.

isn't Ilya not an actual person in the anime so she can't really die?

This is why we can't have AI. Or clones. Or children, for that matter.

There's a philosophical issue here where treating someone as a non-human/non-sentient being rolls into a deep, dark place pretty fast. Ilya may have been a homunculus, but aside from being born in a vat, there is little to distinguish her from an actual human. Or to be more precise, she easily fell within the considerably wide spectrum of what we would consider human. Because of this, we can consider her death sad.

Besides, the argument is neither quite here nor there. If a puppy died, we wouldn't mourn it as a human, but we would mourn it all the same. It is a matter of empathy and loss, not merely whether the thing was human.

[XanesFox]

Well.... saddest death I have seen in Anime is a tie between Nina Tucker, and Ushio from Clannad.

As for an actual animation based off a spin off of Undertale was Flowerfell's Frisk in the song Secret Garden. It pretty much tells how the girl tries to make friends in the underground when all they do is kill her over and over again but each time she dies a flowers added to her body. Eventually she goes blind and Sans starts to help her and grow close. By the end of their journey shes covered in so many flowers that she cant move. So Frisk asks Sans to take their soul to set them all free. Sans tries to convince her to live and stay with him. But her body gives out and she dies in his arms.

Heres the video link to it
https://youtu.be/SFXAbpj34ZI

[LastExile]

Spoiler:  

MAES HUGHES!! That one tore my heart out.