This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Tycho: "A catch-all term describing story elements which were meant to either amuse, entertain, or be only slightly scary to its adult audience, but which — in execution — are so trauma-inducing that they may cause people to void themselves in terror." It really confused me. Isn't that the description of unintentional nightmare fuel? And from the examples it seems like unleaded means it's intentional. I usually don't have problems with understanding english, I think this really should be replaced by a different sentence.
Antheia: This page never really got its own description. For the most part, it was copied from the ordinary Nightmare Fuel page (which came first), with only minimal changes. I completely agree with you that it needs to be changed; I'd do it myself, but really shouldn't even be reading TV Tropes now, I should be translating three different texts from English and doing a terminology assignment ...
Oh, and by the way: new entries to discussions (and most other new entries too) go at the bottom of the page. There are some exceptions, but those pages will say so at the top of the page.
MikoGalatea: Do you guys think this page ought to be split? It's gotten so big as to be a bit unwieldy, though I've gone and fixed it since the last time most of it vanished.
Seanette: I'd support divvying it up by medium as with Nightmare Fuel.
Malicious Illusion: I made a change in one of the Larry Niven examples. The rich girl wasn't taken apart; Gil mentioned that's something an organlegger COULD do if they had the urge. But he'd also mentioned that organleggers don't do that, as they don't see most people as, well, people. Nor as "toys", but just as product. They're "professional", if that makes sense.
Shay Guy: Congratulations, fearful tropers. As of September 11, 2008, this is the longest page on the whole wiki
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theorc: Removed a Doctor Who example again. It's at the bottom of the page; no need to repeat it.
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. It's all Silent Hill, so I'll give the developers the benefit of the doubt.
- Even though the Silent Hill series are supposed to be scary, some moments are disturbing in unusual ways. For example, you get used to killing weird monsters while walking through rust-and-blood covered town in Silent Hill 3, but then comes Vincent's startled question: "Monsters? They look like monsters to you?..."
- The really bad endings of the games tend to lean towards this. For example, in the first game, Harry's journey into the town was nothing but a dying dream. The last scene shows him leaning out the window, blood streaming from his forehead, and his hand on the car horn... In the third game, Heather has reverted to her previous incarnation as Alessa, and is last seen holding a knife, with which she murdered Douglas. In the fourth game, Walter succeeds in completing the 21 Sacraments. His child self lies down to sleep on the couch, saying that he and the room will be together forever. Cut to adult Walter, staring at Henry's radio, as it broadcasts a report that several bodies were found in Silent Hill, one of them being Henry's body, but his face was mutilated beyond identification.
- I've never even played Silent Hill, all my knowledge of it is second hand, and that line still just made me shudder.
- The part in the hospital of Silent Hill 4: The Room, where one of the rooms contains a giant, scarred version of Eileen Galvin's head, taking up the room from the ceiling to the floor, complete with creepy breathing and wobbling eyes that follow Henry around the room.
- This troper has not been able to play Silent Hill 2 past the room where you get the flashlight. To reveal the fact that having the flashlight on lets monsters see, and, obviously, attack you, the monster that hides behind the manniquin doesn't trigger the radio! That's cheating! It's not the jump scare itself that's Nightmare Fuel, but the fact that your radio is reliable when the game wants it to be! What if it happens again?!
- Actually, with those monsters (And pretty much, those monsters only), the radio just doesn't react until they start moving. In all other ways, it's perfectly dependable. You can pick up that controller again now.
- The most scary part in the entire series (so far, hopefully); Silent Hill, the elementary school. You go into the girls room expecting tons of monsters and there is nothing but blood and US public school bathroom goo. You look around for items and after a little bit, you hear a highly distorted voice of a child sobbing.
- Although the nightmarish effects of Silent Hill 2 are overwhelmingly intentional, a possibly accidental example occurs when you solve the music box puzzle at the end of the game. The whole game has conditioned you to the horrible sounds of Silent Hill, and although the music box theme may be meant to give a moment's respite, the very contrast with the aforementioned sounds makes it eerily jarring.
- And of course, shortly after that, the hotel changes into it's Nightmare Fuel-eriffic burnt and water-damaged(as opposed to blood and rust in the other games) alternate version, with the scariest music in the game.
- Can we just include the entirety of the Silent Hill series? This particular editor has a hard time sleeping after playing any of the games.
- This troper would like to single out the intro to Silent Hill 4, which scared her so badly that she had to turn off the game (before she actually played any of it) and sit in a brightly-lit room with her dog for a few hours. Too bad the rest of the game didn't quite measure up to that level.
- This troper had that reaction to the trailer.
- To make the above poster even more right, before this article's lead was rewritten, it read "Some games are meant to be scary".
- This troper has played Silent Hill 2 something like six times, and there's still one moment that always scares the hell out of him. It's in the last area, the hotel. You know that you're supposed to get up the third floor, where our dead wife Mary supposedly waits. Try to take the staircase, and you'll go up to the second floor to find it locked up. Okay, gotta find another way up. But then as you go back down the stairs, at the instant you pass between one screen and the next, you hear Mary's soft, pleading voice go "Jaaames..." GAH! I jump out of my skin EVERY time, even though I KNOW it's coming.
- I'm also surprised no one's mentioned the infamous "Bloody Mirror Room" in Silent Hill 3. There's a certain bathroom where Heather can go in, with nothing of any import in it...but if you stand in front of the mirror for a minute, the reflection of the room starts becoming covered with blood...which after it's covered the whole reflected room, then leaks out and starts covering the real room...and then starts covering your reflection. And the worst part? If you stay in there to watch too long, you'll die instantly if your reflection is completely covered. Cute, Konami.
- No! Not cute! Gah, why did you have to remind this troper of that?! Now this troper won't sleep for days!
- No, you don't die instantly. Once your reflection stops moving, your health starts draining(and Heather starts getting covered in blood for real), but the door is now unlocked(it first locks to make you think you're permanently trapped)
- This editor finds the Game Over screens of Silent Hill 3 and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha VS the Soulless Army to be extremely disturbing. In SH 3, should the female protagonist, Heather, die in the alternate/nightmare version of the area she's currently exploring, the (mostly) harmless monster Valtiel will appear and drag Heather away by the legs, due to the "certain something" Heather has incubating within her. Then of course the rusty-background-plus-distorted music-game over screen appears.
- The Non-Standard Game Over if you shoot Claudia in the birthing chamber(resulting in the God being born) was the worst.
- Should Raidou's HP hit zero in Devil Summoner, he wakes up in the Training Hall (which serves as a tutorial at the start of the game), seemingly unharmed, only to be berated and chastised by the mysterious all-knowing disembodied voice that gave him his mission. The shit hits the fan when blue spirit-y copies of Raidou himself swirl around him while the omnipresent voice berates him, and then Raidou simply collapses, as if he's had his soul ripped from his body.
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Surely this is deliberate horror?
- The "bathtub scare" in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was the scariest part of the game for this editor. If you walk Alexandra Roivas into the upstairs bathroom of the mansion and have her approach the bathtub, you're treated to a dramatically zooming-in shot of Alex hallucinating her own naked and mutilated corpse in a bathtub full of blood, accompanied by her letting out an ear-piercing shriek of terror. This is certified by this troper, who managed to jump on his couch when seeing this for the first time, which is a lot considering he's always ice cold no matter how scary is the stuff he's playing.
- This happened to this troper at 12:00 in the morning, and this troper has surround sound...meep
- This editor's thoughts when he saw that scene was more "Holy shit, the people who made this knew what they were doing." than "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!". The worst part for him was the entirety of Maximilian's chapter. Any attempt to summarize it would be in vain. And when you think that it's finally over and go back to controlling Alex, you find the worst part of it all: the voiceacting over the autopsies.
- Hell, the whole game was Nightmare Fuel - the screaming in the background when your sanity is low and the accompanying music stayed in this editor's memory for a long time, often keeping him up until 4 in the morning. Also, the 2nd floor painting changing into a scene straight from Hell gave him a nightmare where he woke up in a room full of evil paintings that did bad things when you took your eyes away from them.
- This troper remembers the creepy statues that followed your every move. Oh yeah, small tip: DON'T SHOOT THEM!!
Simon Greedwell: Taking out:
- The same troper who made the paragraph above, though, finds all the other levels very Nightmare Retardant, especially the Big Top level, filled to the brink with Monster Clowns; when he first heard the squeaks they make while dying he couldn't stop laughing.
- This troper, while initially terrified from the very beginning (the player character's actions notwithstanding), she found the exremely cheap shots, bosses that don't die even when you empty their health gauge, and unblockable hits effective Nightmare Retardant.
- The same troper who made the paragraph above, though, finds all the other levels very Nightmare Retardant, especially the Big Top level, filled to the brink with Monster Clowns; when he first heard the squeaks they make while dying he couldn't stop laughing.
Because said editor completely missed the point. Carn Evil is famous for its deliberate use of black humour along with the blood and gore.
This troper saw that most of the pages under the Nightmare Fuel Unleaded category were missing headers, so I took it upon myself to add some. You're welcome.
This Troper (Dialga X) proposes a name change to this trope Name Change For Nightmare Fuel Unleaded YKTTW Discussion
