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Nightmare Fuel: Blaz Blue
Yes, those are eyes on the backs of the spiders.
"Wait...did this nightmare fuel used to be...HUMAN...?!"
—Ragna, during his encounter with Arakune in Calamity Trigger Reloaded
Ragna wasn't kidding. While BlazBlue isn't the Trope Namer, that doesn't stop it from having a disproportionate number of scary moments.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
From Calamity Trigger, Ragna and Nu fusing together and forming the Black Beast. Her childish giggling does not help at all.
Depending on how you interpret Ragna's Badass Creed, his Astral finish kills his opponent utterly.
We finally get to see exactly how Ragna lost his arm, and it is not pretty. Seeing a young Ragna, his arm cut off, surrounded by a ring of fire as a Yukianesa-possessed Jin looms over him, all while Terumi's silhouette watches with twisted amusement is beyond freaky. Picture here◊.
In Carl's Bad Ending, he confronts Hazama, who beats him and props Carl up where he is helpless, then begins slowly tearing Nirvana apart. Carl desperately pleads for him to stop, but he continues and breaks her into pieces. Hazama then grabs Carl by the collar, sickly grinning and delivering a brutal Breaking Speech to him, before finally throwing him against a wall and killing him. The whole scene is both awesome and terrifying. Picture here◊.
Ragna's Bad Ending is a definite example. Ragna's Azure backfires from overuse and turns him into a new Black Beast. He can do nothing as he ravages across what's left of the world and destroys it. The chilling screams of the people he devours do not help.
A bit more detail... Arakune Was Once a Man, but after trying to tap into the power of the Boundary and experimenting on his own body, he began to degenerate. Now he's nothing more than a black mound of goo, smelling of trash, filled with bones and disgusting insects, and eating anyone he comes across. His speech is fragmented, and he swings between insane laughter, paranoid rambling, nihilistic threats and tortured screams. As of Continuum Shift, he seems to be regaining his sanity in short bursts, mostly warning Litchi to stay away from the Boundary. And even at his craziest, he's aware that the is SOMETHING wrong with him, but he can't quite place it.
Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it did. If you were too distracted by Arakune's Creepy Awesome factor, or his Woobie points above and possibilities that he's learned his lessons once Litchi probably cures him, Chrono Phantasma finally turns him into the terrifying monster he's supposed to be with his new Astral animation. Remember how nothing happened when he hit the opponent? Now something does happen, and that something is very, very grotesque even for BlazBlue standards: the opponent gets sucked into (read: devoured by) Arakune and is trapped in a giant spider web. Then all of a sudden a bunch of HUGE eyeballs pop in from the background as a swarm of spiders, with the exact same eyes on their backs, begin to close in on the opponent, covering the screen in the process. Once the screen is completely covered by spiders, you hear a very loud and unnerving "CRUNCH!" as the Astral Finish display pops up. Once the screen clears, nothing is left. Yes, you know what just happened. That poor soul just got eaten alive by spiders. And now their blood is raining down on the screen.Holy. Fucking. Shit. Prime phobia trigger for Noel.
In Continuum Shift's True Ending, Ragna and Terumi fight, with Terumi shutting down Ragna's Azure to make the fight into a Curbstomp Battle. After Mu-12 is completed and sent to destory Amaterasu, Ragna insists on fighting to the end, and invites Terumi to play. At this point, Terumi goes apeshit and beats Ragna to within an inch of his life, screaming at him to just die, with Ragna struggling to stand and from the sound of things choking on his own blood. Terumi has done plentyofhorriblethings by this point, but even when doing some of his worst actions he retained an air of Black Comedy and evil glee. Here, he drops the jokes and just goes all out. He isn't enjoying this like his other evil actions, he just wants Ragna to die, painfully, and seeing his sadism in full force is really disturbing.
Terumi: "Ouroboros!! Picked a great time to grow a pair, huh? YOU'RE gonna play with ME? I don't think you understand how this shit works!"
Makoto's bad ending. Rather than describe it here, you can just watch it here on YouTube. There aren't enough words to properly describe how fucked up this ending is. No hyperbole.
Relius: So friendship is the core of your soul, eh? No, there must be more. Let's go deeper...deeper...
There's a particularly chilling portion of this ending where all we hear is Makoto sobbing, pleading with Relius to stop, and a few times mentions what he's doing is hurting her, while he ignores this and says he will go on. What makes that even worse is that their character portraits aren't shown at this time, amplifying the effect of us hearing a rape in progress.
Even the Help Me Professor Kokonoe segment is chilling due to Makoto still begging for mercy even after she's entered Kokonoe's lab.
Want more? Use his Astral Heat (Puppeteer's Altar). The opponent is trapped in one of Relius' labs and restrained in some way. If you'll notice, the walls are smeared with the blood of past subjects, who are hanging above on swinging crosses, the shadows of which can be seen. Relius then nonchalantly alludes to what he's going to do to him/her and the doors slam. All you can hear over the announcer is the death cry of the victim. For even more horror, some of the "experiments" are particularly gruesome. While Hazama is dying of boredom ("Not like I don't deserve a hundred times worse...") and Tsubaki's appears humane (despite her facing the wrong way due to blindness, and more about Relius being savvy enough that Tsubaki's utter loyalty assures that she's not going to rebel), those swords for Platinum's are going into her barrel, Bang's knees are pressed under stone blocks with more on the way, Arakune is being boiled alive, and before you even think to laugh at the hamster ball, read above to know exactly where that's going. Yeah, he's that kinda person.
Some say that nightmares can begin with a sense of safeness. In that very case, the combination of Litchi and Arakune's Bad Ends count. We were lured into a sense of happiness and heartwarming that we saw Arakune still has enough heart and care about Litchi's welfare, trying his best to remove her from his curse, and she is able to live on her life normally without any memory of him... in which we later learn that the corruption within Litchi is similar to Alzheimer's disease. Without a cure, it will continue to rot her until she dies, and all Arakune took was memories of him, and without his memory, Litchi becomes unmotivated to find the cure and blissfully unaware of it, awaiting the day she withers and die with her memories being jumbled here and there, or at worst, become the next Arakune and then start eating everyone nearby until someone kills her. Can she just join NOL so she can have a shot in surviving and have a Heel Realization to make amends instead? Please??
Carl's entire story. Even if he does become a adult, even if everything is okay for Carl, the kid's gone through enough crap to rival Ragna. He dropped out of the Academy after his father integrated his sister into Deus Machina: Nirvanaand left her half-done for the boy to finish, and was effectively abandoned to grow up on his own terms making a living as a vigilante. On top of that trauma, it is implied that Nirvana amplifies the bloodlust of its wielder and stymies other emotions to that end, leaving him cold and emotionless on missions and a broken wreck that distrusts the adults around him otherwise. While Bang and Litchi did comfort him to a degree, he nearly broke all over again when he realized that Relius' improved detonator doll was built using his mother's soul. The kid's about as stable as Shinji, and who can blame him?
Mind Eater is a form of geas that, while it allows the subject to somewhat freely express themselves, any command that is issued by the controller will be executed whether the subject wishes to cooperate or not. After overtaking Kazuma and slaying Tomonori (the latter is somewhat justified, as Tomonori was trying to kill Kazuma to prevent the merge) alongside his role in the Black Beast's creation, Terumi deserved no less... not that he took his rehabilitation very well, mind you.
Nine knew a more advanced form that further overwrites the subject's will, reducing them to a warped puppet of the controller. Poor Tsubaki...
