Line #5 NightmareFuel/BeastWars


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8	[[caption-width-right:350: ''[[AdmiringTheAbomination "Magnificent..."]]'' ]]
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10	->''"Mmmmm... Is that fear you are feeling, Maximal? Mmmm, yesss... My spark -- it '''feeds''' on terror. Let it grow... Let it '''consume''' your circuitry. Feel it, yesss, '''feel''' it! '''FEEL THE FEAR!'''"''
11	-->-- '''Rampage'''
12
13	''WesternAnimation/BeastWars'' is a very violent show, exploiting the MechaMooks loophole as far as it can. Characters are bashed up, blown apart, shot, stabbed... This is not a show for children under ten, having been written with an eye towards not boring those who grew up on the original Transformers and were at that point in their teens and twenties.
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15	'''Spoilers are unmarked'''
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17	* Tarantulas, is essentially, TheMadHatter without the whimsy, and very much a sadist, which is hinted at with the exchange below. Toss in good ol' arachnophobia and you have yourself one of the most horrifying Transformers characters ever created.
18	-->'''Cheetor:''' This is a dumb plan, web-face. I don't have any real blood, just mech fluid.\
19	'''Tarantulas:''' Oh, my filters will adjust. It is the act I enjoy more than the nourishment.
20	** Apart from the threat to Cheator, Blackarachnia's attempted download of Tarantulas's data trax later on results in, among other quite frightening visuals, her being trapped in a web while he closes in on her as a giant spider, apparently with intent to eat her alive.
21	* Tarantulas being attacked and seemingly killed by Inferno in "Other Voices" was brutal even for Beast Wars; A lot of the destruction thus far had been played for laughs, but when Tarantulas is set on fire he simply screams and staggers around uncontrollably before collapsing, without the slightest bit of comedy. He got better, but for the rest of the episode he was, to all intents and purposes, dead, and his later reanimation implies he actually was killed rather than being taken offline.
22	* In "Other Voices", the fact that the Vok used ''[[WesternAnimation/TheTransformersTheMovie Unicron]]'' as AFormYouAreComfortableWith while speaking with Optimus has terrifying implications towards their powers.
23	** And this is only reinforced when Tarantulas was faced by the Vok avatars they extracted from Tigerhawk. Tarantulas arguably knew more about the Vok than anybody else, including Megatron, and had cheated death twice with his backup plans, but what does he do when he sees them? ''Screams hysterically'' while making what looks like a superstitious warding gesture, and then fires blindly at them to the point of accidentally killing himself in panic. [[NothingIsScarier Just what did he know that scared him so much?]]
24	* The Vok Planet Buster was all kinds of terrifying, being the aliens' official response to a handful of robots contaminating their "experiment", and it proceeds to [[DisproportionateRetribution blow up all the energon on the planet]]. If it wasn't for Optimus [[HeroicSacrifice sacrificing himself]], it's likely the whole planet [[ApocalypseHow could have been destroyed]] with everything on it. And even after the blasted thing's destroyed, it's ''still'' trying to kill everything due to the Quantum Surge that comes in it's wake. The expanding blast wave engulfs the whole planet, cutting through shields and starship hull like tissue paper, radiation bombarding the planet like deadly rain. Rattrap, Cheetor, and even ''Megatron'' cry out in agony as their superstructures mutate from the radiation, and on first viewing you can't tell if they're dying in front of your eyes or what (and Scorponok and Terrorsaur in fact ''do'' die). And then there's that [[HellIsThatNoise hellish noise]] that pervades the Axalon and Darksyde as the radiation cuts through. After the Planet Buster weapon and the Quantum Surge are done, half the planet is good as burnt.
25	** Not to mention, Optimus's sacrifice wasn't deliberately planned. He knew it was a dangerous mission, but he intended to bail out and fly back afterwards. [[OhCrap Then the hatch turns out to be sealed]]. Optimus spends the last minutes before the crash stuck in a coffin-size chamber hurtling towards the weapon, while Megatron taunts him by hologram about how the Maximals are doomed without him and the war is lost.
26	** It's only just a couple of frames, but after the planet buster's destruction, [[https://i.imgur.com/WPYG9ZP.jpg Optimus Primal's head flies at the screen]], [[https://i.imgur.com/AZkTUbR.jpg with a look of terror on his face and most likely]] ''[[https://i.imgur.com/WPYG9ZP.jpg still conscious]]'', as his eyes are still lit up.
27	* Despite the tragedy of the character, Rampage, definitely qualifies for this trope:
28	** His backstory establishes him as a failed experiment created by the Maximals (y'know, the ''good guys''). The original mission of the Axalon was to dump him someplace far and barren.
29	** On Earth, Rampage is reactivated in "Bad Spark" and proceeds to tear Tarantulas limb from limb (offscreen). Blackarachnia and Silverbolt come across Tarantulas's arm hanging from a tree and laugh about him being "disarmed". They later discover the rest of him, and are subsequently attacked by Rampage.
30	*** The scene where they find what is left of Tarantulas is disturbing in of itself. They had previously thought that the energon storm had damaged him but then realize something else had done it. Silverbolt explains that Rampage was responsible, to the surprise of Blackarachnia who said the Maximals thought he was dead. Silverbolt admits they were wrong, and Rampage may be immortal.
31	** It takes the combined efforts of Silverbolt, Cheetor, Blackarachnia ''and'' Optimus Primal to shoot him off a cliff, making Rampage TheJuggernaut in a SlasherMovie.
32	** To top it all off, he was invincible and insane, and murdered and ate an entire colony of Transformers.
33	** While never stated in the show the aforementioned colony that Rampage killed and ate was [[ToServeMan not a transformer colony.]]
34	** Remember Tarantulas's early characterization? Rampage more or less took that over as the creepy cannibal, all the while playing it up into the stratosphere. While Tarantulas usually had an end goal of some kind, Rampage is entirely unhinged to the point that torture for the sake of pain is an end onto itself. And none of it is ever played for laughs.
35	* Despite all the above, what Megatron does to his spark in this debut episode is arguably even more terrifying:
36	** Megatron finds Rampage damaged...''and proceeds to cut his spark in half'' offscreen. Back at the Predacon base, once Rampage is healed, Megatron holds up Rampage’s spark in a box-like contraption, the spark held between several spikes of Energon, which he then squeezes, causing Rampage to yell in pain. Then Megatron proceeds to force Rampage to join the Predacon ranks, all while doing a creepy EvilLaugh.
37	** Later in the series, Megs uses that part of Rampage's spark to create an evil Transmetal 2 clone of Dinobot, who has no compunctions about torturing the spark to compel Rampage to ''continue'' to obey him, while he seems unhurt by it, and does so almost every time with a dementedly sadistic grin on his face.
38	*** It's more disturbing than that. Both of them show the same crackling pattern when the spark is harmed. Dinobot 2 is feeling exactly the same pain, and ''doesn't care at all.''
39	*** Rampage could very easily have just been an AxCrazy musclehead, but instead he's played like an even more sadistic [[Literature/TheSilenceOfTheLambs Hannibal Lecter]]. During the episode ''Changing of the Guard'', Rattrap uses a bathysphere-like device to try and reclaim the sunken Axalon's Sentinel module and comes face to face with Rampage, who seizes his vessel with one claw and just starts squeezing it hard enough to crack the glass while taunting Rattrap.
40	--->'''Rampage:''' (disturbingly softly) Come out, come out, [[DeadlyEuphemism time to play.]] sinister chuckle
41	** While he did lose a little bit of his unholy scariness after his debut, Rampage still remained a powerful and very threatening enemy to the Maximals, surviving everything from being blown to pieces by both his own weapon backfiring on him after Dinobot shoved Waspinator into his cannon and by Ravage's transwarp cruiser's primary weapons, taking a massive missile to the face, being impaled by a stalagmite, and other injuries thanks to his immortal spark and super-accelerated healing ability. It says a lot about him when his demotion from TheJuggernaut stopped only a couple rungs down at ImplacableMan.
42	* Transmutate, the malformed, mentally stunted, childlike being from the episode of the same name (pictured above) was deeply unnerving. The fact that it was then blown up by the two Transformers who were trying to protect it didn't help...
43	** A part of the disturbing nature of this character is how brazenly it captures a mentally-stunted character. It's overall a surreal episode, given its place in the series: an action-packed, tragic game-changer episode just preceded it, and the next three episodes would go on to truly solidify the series' place in the Transformers canon with some epic revelations, and sandwiched in the middle, we have this odd, docile episode about a mentally stunted robot that is just "not quite right".
44	** Proving once again that this is a subjective trope, many fans actually saw it as TheWoobie.
45	* Cheetor's dream in ''Feral Scream'' is pretty disturbing, particularly what Cheetor transforms into in said dream.
46	** Cheetor's roar echoing across the landscape in the dead of night.
47	*** Feral Cheetor's first appearance sees him stalk and dispatch a whole group of predacons, including Dinobot 2 and Megatron, all the while moving too fast to be seen clearly. The scenes in between the attacks are very tense and paranoid, particularly when Megatron panics and shoots Waspinator by accident.
48	*** More to the point, Megatron himself is ''panicking'' by then. This is a guy who laughed off the imminent destruction of the planet he was stranded on, and used it to take out Optimus. Every time something goes wrong for him, he is at worst briefly angered, and at best uses it to his advantage. Feral Cheetor, though? He's reduced to blasting at random shadows. ''And it doesn't help.''
49	* There was a scene where Megatron goes to the Ark to steal his ancestor's (That would be G1!Megatron's) spark. Instead of cutting it out like he did with Rampage, he does something even more horrifying. He uses a tentacle-like appendage to rip his ancestor's spark out.
50	* Then there is what Megatron does to Dinobot after his sacrifice. He took their greatest hero, and made a clone of him more powerful and dreadful than ever. Megatron made him into a horrible insult against his memory on purpose and every scene featuring him felt like something out of a horror movie. Now, try to imagine how it must have felt for the Maximals, especially [[VitriolicBestBuds Rattrap]]...
51	** Worse, there were talks of an unproduced episode idea titled "Dark Glass", where Rattrap would try to probe Dinobot II and see if there was any trace of the original's personality beneath the fierce clone.
52	** While his very existence is nightmare fuel in its own right, his nature and appearance don't help matters. His beast mode resembles a skeleton, his robot mode looks scarred and patched together and he gives off the vibe of being a reanimated corpse like a zombie or vampire rather than a "natural" being like the other characters. While Waspinator was intimidated by the original, he was never outright fearful, but when he meets the clone, he is ''terrified.''
53	* Given that sparks = souls, it is instructive to contemplate just how much Predacon technology revolves around horribly abusing them. And that at least some of the characters don't just end up dead, but with their sparks utterly extinguished. Forever. This doesn't necessarily mean "oblivion", just that their sparks are blasted out of the physical universe forever and forced either into the Allspark or the Pit (Transformers Heaven and Hell, respectively). To say nothing of all the MindControl.
54	* Megatron's last resort was to ''wipe the entire Cybertronian race from existance'' by killing Optimus Prime (and thus the Matrix) before the Great War could end. This would pretty much wipe everyone on the show but [[MadScientist Taran]][[TheStarscream tulas]] (and that's only in the 3H continuity because he's got DivineParentage in the form of ''Unicron'') ''from existence''. It's thusly no small wonder that Megatron is ''reluctant'' to go through with it.
55	** Tarantulas and the Tripredacus Council aren't given clear origins in the show; but WordOfGod indicates they had been considering a Cybertronian origin for them had the show continued, ala Liege Maximo and Jhiaxus.
56	** There's also the fact that destroying Optimus Prime would have also destroyed The Matrix of Leadership, leaving absolutely no means of [[WesternAnimation/TransformersTheMovie defeating Unicron when he arrives in 2005]], which would have meant the end of Cybertron and Primus.
57	* Inferno spent most of his post-debut screentime being Megatron's LaughablyEvil [[TheDragon Dragon]]. Then came ''The Agenda (Part 2)'' where we see just how psychotically devoted to "The Royalty" he is when he detonates a stockpile of raw Energon Crystals in an attempt at killing Optimus and Cheetor [[TakingYouWithMe with a suicide attack.]] If Beast Wars hadn't been renewed for another season he actually ''would'' have died trying.
58	-->'''Inferno:''' For... The... ROYALTYYYYYY! [[LaughingMad Pained, insane cackling]]

Context NightmareFuel / BeastWars