Nightmare Fuel / Code Geass

Bad day, Orange?

• Episode One
  • In the penultimate minutes of the very first episode... the very first episode... Lelouch activates the Geass and says to some Britannian troops: "I, Lelouch vi Britannia command you; *Beat* now all of you... die!" The the squad gets Mind-Control Eyes and the leader begins to giggle dementedly. He replies with "Happily, your highness!". Then the troops point their guns at their own throats, and oblige in a Gory Discretion Shot. This on its own is bad enough, but it is made into Nightmare Fuel by how none of the soldiers fight against the order (unlike Euphemia), and kill themselves whilst smiling.
    • There may be an explanation for that. Both groups that were ordered to kill themselves by Lelouch are part of the "elite" forces assigned directly under Clovis (the son of the emperor) or the Emperor himself. Most of these royal forces have a "Be ready to die willingly and gladly for the royal family" policy, and Lelouch IS the son of the emperor.
  • Act two is Nightmare Fuel of a more realistic variant: terrorists stealing an alleged chemical weapon and moving it into a densely populated urban area, necessitating a massive military manhunt to find them; especially for people who experienced the 2013 Boston bombings and the huge manhunt afterward to find the perpetrators to the point of Harsher in Hindsight.
    • It also doesn't help that the climax of this episode is this line from Clovis:
      Destroy the Shinjuku ghetto... LEAVE NO ONE ALIVE!
• Everyone's favorite Psychopathic Manchild, Mao, ends up shooting C.C., and then takes out a chainsaw with the intention of making her "compact" so he could bring her on a plane with him; remember that C.C. cannot die. Meep.
  • Mao in general is scary, both as an individual threat and for what happened to him. He has no control over his mind-reading abilities and it's left him insane, driving his serial killer-esque actions during his little trilogy of episodes. This is underscored when he's shown stumbling through a quiet library which, to him, may as well be in the middle of Times Square at the busiest hour of the year.
• Thanks to C.C.'s immortality, in the end of the first season her Knightmare was crushed by water pressure, with her inside. And then, in between seasons, she resurfaced. Rather... disturbing mental image.
• C.C.'s distraction of Suzaku was pretty freaky: using the C's world, C.C. merges her consciousness with that of Suzaku's, causing him to see an image of his late father; this causes him to go absolutely insane and fire haphazardly, screaming in pain and anguish.
  • To make matters worse, Lelouch makes physical contact with C.C., causing her to Mind Rape herself: the way she screams for Lelouch to stop is unnerving at best; heartbreaking at worst; it's also worth noting that this is one of the times we're shown C.C.'s many deaths, as noted below.
• At some point, we're treated to a montage of C.C's various deaths. All of these deaths are violent. Burned at the stake? Check. Put inside an iron maiden? Check. Shot at least twice in the head, once in a battlefield and another in front of Lelouch? Check please.
• When everyone's favorite idealistic Rebellious Princess, Euphemia, is accidentally ordered by the power of Lelouch's geass to kill all the Japanese people- an act so contrary to her nature that she actually tries to resist it at first, a feat unseen even when Lelouch previously ordered people to kill themselves. But once she submits, all of a sudden her cheerful, polite sunshine demeanor is telling everyone in Japan to commit suicide- and when that doesn't work, she orders her soldiers to massacre an entire stadium's worth of them and more. With her incredibly cute blood-soaked dress, utter polite speech, red-tinted Geass eyes, and the fact that she still wants to run the special province of Japan with Lelouch (wait, are there Japanese people in the special province of Japan?), it is a truly terrifying picture to behold.
• In the penultimate episode of R1, Lelouch fights Cornelia atop the palace: this would be awesome, but Cornelia's face during this is a psychotic leer fueled by her full-blown sister complex after what happened to Euphie and battle rage; yikes.
  • The same goes when Jeremiah shows up as an Ax-Crazy cyborg in the following episode: his facial expressions are absolutely demented, and he shouts just about every line at the top of his lungs; this was probably meant to be funny, but it ends up being bat-shit terrifying.
• A scene early in the second season, in which Suzaku holds down a panicked, screaming Lelouch while the Emperor erases the memories that best define who Lelouch is, is emotionally intense enough to qualify here: it doesn't help that aspects of the scene are reminiscent of rape... especially the way he tries to close his eye, only to have Suzaku force it open to meet the Emperor's line of vision; it's very hard to watch.
• The scene near the middle of R2 when the Black Knights are in the laboratory where the engineered Geass-children are. Three of the children, after Geassing a Black Knight to shoot another, look up at Rolo and shout, "Big brother Rolo, is that you?" all smiling and whatnot. Then Rolo smiles back saying "Hey I missed all of you guys, how have you been?" He then promptly shoots them.
• In Episode 10, Kallen uses her newly acquired Guren and her Radiant Wave Surger on Jeremiah in his Sutherland: we get to see Jeremiah being microwaved ALIVE; even worse, Jeremiah has a total Freak Out upon seeing that Zero is nearby filled with rage and vengeance, refusing to eject even though he was being microwaved, right before our very eyes... Thankfully, his Sutherland auto-ejects, but still...
  • And he was originally going to die from those injuries, but luckily Popularity Power kicked in...
  • On the other hand, none of the other pilots that faced Kallen's RWS ever ejected, meaning that they died while they were trapped inside their own Knightmares!
• But the king of Nightmare Fuel in Code Geass is probably Charles', Marianne's, and V.V's Assimilation project, the Ragnarok Connection, which looks like it was ripped straight out of Neon Genesis Evangelion, includes columns of what appear to be human souls, and ends with Charles and Marianne evaporating into glowy dust as they scream at Lelouch!
  • The line during the Ragnarok Connection shows up in a Freeze-Frame Bonus:
    Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate.
• And V.V., for his part, may very well be Code Geass's Nightmare Fuel representative: he looks like a standard-issue Creepy Child. This would be creepy enough, but it turns out he's really Charles' twin brother! And he's physically dangerous, with weapons and the like. And he's the head of the Geass Cult, a rather shady, creepy society in and of itself; as well as being one of the architects behind the Ragnarok Connection (see above). And then there's his rather Squick-y death scene....
• Schneizel's Dissonant Serenity. He declares that he will become a god, for the sake of world peace. And how would he achieve this? He would nuke cities, at the cost of countless lives. He would be ruling through fear, to ensure that no one ever dares to disturb the peace, lest they be nuked. Cornelia of course, thinks he's insane, and he is! He then guns her down with no remorse. As he does this, he remains calm and serene. It's horrifying.
  • The fact that both Schneizel and Lelouch are perfectly willing to sacrifice 1-2 BILLION innocent people to achieve world peace is pretty frightening. Being batshit crazy must run in the family.
• Rolo. A Tyke Bomb who can stop one's perception of time and assassinate you in an instant. Deaths are nothing to him, he even points it out in a rather bored tone below, although it's a little paraphrased.
  Rolo: I kill so much, I don't count them all. Nobody counts how many times they brush their teeth, or eat a meal. It's just like that.
• Charles mind-raped Nunnally to make her believe her mother Marianne had been murdered in front of her, mixing this with having the seven-year-old girl crippled to make the whole deal more believable; as a result, poor Nunnally was not only confined to a wheelchair, but also went blind out of trauma.
• Lelouch's mother, Marianne, possessed Anya Alstreim, an Action Girl, through Grand Theft Me in order to survive her assassination, and Charles constantly erased and re-wrote her memories to cover all of this up. The poor girl was left as an emotionless wreck, as she had gaping holes in her memory, and never really knew which memories were truly hers and which were not.
• Shirley's nightmare has everyone wearing masks and laughing creepily.
• Every time Lelouch lets out a signature Evil Laugh: it gives us a peek into his clearly fractured mind and the laugh in of itself seems almost like he's grasping at whatever amusement he can get from the horrible act he had just accomplished to find some incentive to continue onward.
• Schneizel's fate: to serve Zero with complete and utter loyalty, with no memories of what he's doing; since Lelouch is dead, Schneizel is trapped in that essential coma for the rest of his life, not that he didn't deserve it.

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