open/close all folders
Unsleeping City
- The mutated Santas are explicitly horrifying, mainly due to not repeat the same fate as the corn cuties from Fantasy High.
- Null's appearances are a big source of this, whether it's the shudder-inducing mystery behind it, the very realistic ways in which it harms the lives of the people of New York City, or its incredible power, it is truly worthy of its title of Big Bad of the season.
Fantasy High Sophomore Year
- Fantasy High Live brings us "Baron from the Baronies", a skeletal, goblin sized doll person that torments Riz across the season, acting as a manifestation of all of his fears and insecurities. The first scene with Baron, wherein he appears to Riz in a mirror before breaking out and dragging Riz away is genuinely creepy, so much so that even the players get disturbed.
- Kalina. Unlike most of the villains in this show, she has pretty much no comedic aspects to her character, even her occasional snarking being more threatening than funny, and trades in their usual bombastic and crass attitude for an outwardly polite, deadly efficient behaviour. The scenes she fully appears in are always tense, as the Bad Kids have no idea where the limits of her abilities lie, but know that she's fully capable of backing up her threats, as in her first talk with one of the PCs, they've already witnessed her imprison Gorthalax and almost get Riz killed by possessing Fig, and follows up this scene by almost drowning Fabian, destroying the Hangman, and getting Ragh's mother killed.
Starstruck Odyssey
- While A Starstruck Odyssey is significantly Denser and Wackier than previous main seasons, its two main antagonists both qualify.
- Admiral Gust Weatherall is a Military Brat who carelessly used extreme pesticides on the vineyard where he made his wine. This resulted in the horrifying deaths of dozens of Amercadian cadets. He then covered up the incident by wiping Norman Takamori’s memory and destroying his career, then framing UFTP for the incident, which set off a war that claimed millions of lives. While the circumstances are over-the-top, the idea of a high-ranking officer being responsible for the deaths of many recruits before framing a foreign power for it is chillingly plausible compared to the rest of the season’s antics.
- King Prilbus of the House of Frengus, silly name aside, is terrifying. The idea of cerebro slugs is bad enough in this setting, but it turns out that it’s been him and his house that have instituted the cultural norm among the slugs that they have to fully take over the bodies of their hosts instead of living in symbiosis with them. But then we learn that his goal is to turn the entire moon of Rubian V into a titanic Cerebro Slug, then fly that moon-sized parasite into the black hole at the center of the universe, which he believes will allow him to take full control over all reality. If the plan works, then he would take control of the setting’s deity and become emperor of the known universe. If it doesn’t (which it wouldn’t, given the “god” in the black hole is fictional and was invented by an in-universe science fiction author), then he would kill 20+ billion innocent people along with nearly his entire species (including his son) all while he himself stays out of harm’s way and avoids any consequences. His villainy ups the ante significantly from all preceding Dimension 20 villains.
Misfits and Magic
- Evan's past is marred with constant trauma and supernatural occurrences, like a pig's head in a butcher shop coming to life and telling him that God and the Devil killed each other, or his father opening up his own chest and asking Evan to dance.
A Court of Fey and Flowers
- Grandfather of the Lords of the Wing. Described multiple times as the embodiment of all the worst parts of birds and their inventor, he is a looming shadow over Lady Featherfowl and Lord Airavis’ conduct at the bloom. The birds in the Nest herald a missive from him by squawking uncontrollably, and the cousins’ first instinct is to hide rather than face their Grandfather. They frequently refer to his habit of consuming his own young which he gave to birds, and given that neither Chirp nor Squak’s parents seem to be in the picture…
- The fate of the Court of Craft. Somehow drained of their magic and banished to the material plane, all but BINX have faded until they are little more than inanimate objects, places or concepts unable to speak, think, or even remember who they once were.
- Prince Apollo appearing in the woods outside the Seelie Court to murder Captain K.P.Hob. In his first appearance Apollo seems nothing more than a dimwitted Boisterous Bruiser who values fighting above all. This scene cements the Prince’s bloodthirstiness, as he calls for the Captain to face him in battle while loosing arrows that burrow into Hob’s back to kill him the longer they are left in.
- These arrows also fade from Apollo’s signature gold to plain wood after being fired, denying Hob and the Pack of Pixies any proof of the Prince’s involvement in the attack.
- The Chorus of the Court of Wonder. A trio of masked fey robed so there is almost no distinction between them, who speak not in unison but in harmony. They wish to force Rue join their ranks to silence their coming out and criticisms of the courts, and are not merely confident but certain in their ability to do so.
Neverafter
- The fate of princess Rosamund du Prix, Sleeping Beauty. The briars have grown around her and into her, to the point where she has to pull them out of her mouth where they had taken root in her stomach in order to even speak. Also, rather than being "just" a plant, the briars in this version are sapient and act as a Guardian Entity to Rosamund. They are also Yandere levels of obsessive, having murdered every prince that came to save her and explicitly shows her their bodies to show how "safe" she is. When she does wake up, the briars immediately attempt to prick her with the spindle to put her to sleep again.
- Keep in mind, this is the first scene in the entire show.
- The briars also warn her that she should stay with them because the Time of Shadows has come and she will be safe within the brambles. Rosamund, with her mental link to the plants, can feel that they are terrified. Meaning that whatever lies beyond her sleeping kingdom, it is much worse than eternal sleep and being a seedbed for briars.
- Rosamund spends months climbing through the vines that have apparently covered the entirety of the kingdom of Reverie. By the time she gets out of the brambles, her body is ripped and torn from the thorns.
- Oh, yeah, and of "A Warm Heart and a Tombstone", Rosamund is still infested with briars from when she was first woken up.
- The Gander, the giant demonic goose haunting Timothy Goose. The creature is giant-sized and malevolent, and makes it explicit that not only is it responsible for the death of Timothy's son Jack, it will kill Timothy as well once he's used his three wishes.
- Ylfa's family attempting to murder her with a silver dagger. Already a heinous betrayal, but Fridge Horror sets in after Brennan notes that the dagger (which strikes her in the arm), was aimed for her heart or throat. Silver burns werewolves. While it may have been a quick death, it would've been agonising for Ylfa who's only eleven years old.note
- Pinocchio's first encounter with the Stepmother: a door of one of the carriages in the caravan suddenly stands out to him, and he tells Pib to not go in with him, with a few weak excuses. When he enters, he ends up in a strange, unexplained space, where he sees a silhouette of his "Mom", who somehow knows that he's just met Rosamund, and cryptically tells him to keep an eye on her. It's the first signs of many that something is seriously wrong with the Stepmother.
- Stepmother is given more detail in episode 2, as the party finds an abandoned village. The Stepmother is Cinderella's stepmother, and, like in the fairytale, she used to be a perfectly normal woman. Then one day she came back different and frightening, called on her daughters, and ate them. According to the mice who still live in her house, she used to have a name before that but now she is just Stepmother.
- How Pinocchio ended up turning back into a puppet: a woman (who he recognizes as a fairy) approaches a group of playing children and asks each one for their father's name. As each child answers, a scream is heard from the town, implying that something terrible is happening to these fathers. When Pinocchio attempts to protect his father by giving the wrong name, either his inability to lie or the fairy kills him instantly, causing him to wake up as a marionette.
- The Fairy Godmother is not doing great. At some point after Cinderella's story ended, the Fairy Godmother returned to her village and started cursing and transforming people and things at random. Then Cinderella returned and stabbed her with a glass spear. When the party finds her, the fairy godmother is surrounded by half-transformed objects, Body Horror abound, and is madly obsessing over making Cinderella follow her proper happy ending.
- Even before whatever happened to her, the mice of the village imply that she was still terrifying. The mice are deeply traumatized by their experience of being forcibly transformed into men and horses, and the transformation apparently included Mind Rape making them perfect servants.
- We meet The Stepmother in episode 7. Dear God. If she was human at one point, she isn't anymore. She is so horrible and terrifying that seeing her is enough to make The Wicked Fairy tear out her own eyes just to stop looking at her. Her skin is bulging with the worlds and stories she's devoured in her wake, and the mere act of viewing her true form in the sword of truth, combined with Pinocchio finally defying her, shatters reality itself.
- There's also her updated portrait, which is now the page image for this page. It barely registers as humanoid, especially considering her original portrait appeared to just be a normal woman's silhouette. Considering how Brennan describes her, she seems to be something truly uncomprehensible.
- Of the party, only Pinnocchio and Ylfa look directly at her. After Ylfa fails a charisma saving throw, she receives three red tokensnote and sees a vision of The Stepmother eating her grandmother’s head.
- Even the shattering of reality isn't much better. As Brennan says "Reality shatters," his voice is twisted and duplicated, and the editing makes it appear as though even the characters are being split, flashing between their different portraits rapidly. Oh, and even as reality breaks around them, The Stepmother keeps coming after them.
- Timothy peeking through a keyhole into the Cannonade. He ends up staring deep into a massive, floating blob of ink, which is possibly connected to the creators of the Neverafter. After failing a wisdom-saving throw, the ink ends up taking up his whole field of vision, and he focuses entirely on it. Suddenly, he starts realizing the odd nature of his life and his reality, and begins dissociating from reality. Then he realizes there's something ''real'' looking at him, and he's very much not real, so they have unimaginable power over him. When he finally pulls back, he's been partially turned into an illustration on paper.
- Ylfa's full backstory, as seen in episode 9. Initially, it goes about as standard, barring some changes in wording. However, once the wolf says "The better to eat you with", it seemingly grows to an enormous size, somehow towering like a giant monument despite the room not changing in size at all. He calmly tells Ylfa that he ate her grandmother, and she asserts that, soon, the Woodsman will come and kill him. Then days go by, and nothing happens. The wolf doesn't eat her, and the woodsman never comes. Eventually, Ylfa starts starving, and the wolf tells her to kill him and eat his body. She initially refuses, but after a while, her hunger takes over, and her personality fades so much that she ends up doing exactly that. We even get sound effects of her eating him.
- The Stepmother's true origin. After her daughters had their eyes pecked out by birds, and Cinderella was either unable or unwilling to help, she set out in search of a witch who could either heal the girls, or at least explain why their lives were so full of suffering. She ended up finding Baba Yaga, who revealed to her that she was a character in a story; specifically, that she was a side character in someone else's story, who didn't even have a real name. Saying the Stepmother didn't take it well would be an understatement, as she almost immediately sacrifices her name by stabbing herself in order to reach and possibly confront the writers of her story. Then she starts plucking illustrations from the various versions of her story, or rather, characters from those versions, and eating them. Eventually, she grows big enough and powerful enough to consume characters outside her original story, including the Wicked Queen.
- When the heroes enter into the ripped up Cinderella book and discover this, they end up in a partially erased world, where a large amount of the world simply doesn't exist. Not that it's blank paper, or a black void; they can't even look at certain parts of the world. The Stepmother has the worst of it, as even her face has been at least partially erased, and when she speaks her name, a rip in reality appears where it should be.
- Upon breaking into the Baron of Bricks' lair, we finally find out why Ylfa keeps seeing visions of the Big Bad Wolf boiling alive. It's because he is actually boiling alive, chained down in a ginormous stew pot.
- What's worse, the Baron is doing this in order to kill the Big Bad Wolf... permanently. The longer he stays in the pot, the more of his iterations die. Since the Wolf is also the avatar of Death in this universe, if all of his iterations vanish, nothing would be able to die.
- The Baron's motivations. After losing his two brothers to the Wolf, he becomes the Baron of a small town, and forces its inhabitants into a mandatory war draft. His town creates weaponry to be used in battle, and he profits from the constant turmoil of the kingdoms around him. And if he was trying to remove death itself from a world locked in a war...
- The true horror is lampshaded by Brennan and the rest of the cast. Post-battle, they confirm with each other that if the Baron had succeeded, the world would've been locked in a constant, never-ending war. No one would die from any means (including disembowelment, torture, old age, etc.) and the only way peace would ever be achieved would be through total subjugation. Yikes.
- Toy Island. When the party arrives, it is completely abandoned, and everything is either in a state of decay or stasis. And then Pinocchio finds Candlewick.
- Everything about Candlewick, from the way he acts to how he's grown up on the island, is chilling. He's never left the island in his entire life, and genuinely believes he's still a little boy. His clothes are far too small to fit him, lacerating him with every movement. He can barely eat, and often forces himself to eat unsavory meals with whatever is left on the island. He's so obsessed with the idea of never growing up, even the implication that he's not a little boy is enough to send him into a rage.
- The fate of the boys on the island. When the Sword Of Truth is asked to identify the meat in the hot dogs, it declares "... technically, donkey!" It doesn't take long for the party to piece together what the "technically" part means.
- When Snow White kills Rosamund, Thumbelina tries to save her—but the briars get there first. They snap out of Rosamund, puncture Thumbelina's eyes and suck out her life, and then reanimate Rosamund by manually moving every part of her body, including her organs. Even Baba Yaga is grossed out.
The Ravening War
- Witnessing a knight get injured by a falling yam causes Bishop Raphaniel to have a sudden gory vision:Matt: A flash, tear, flesh, viscera, red blood, tear, black, shadow
- Karna’s constant Horror Hunger as part of her pact with The Hungry One, complete with vacant stare and uncontrollable drooling when on holy ground. When she kills Sir Drunon, she also murders the Disposable Sex Worker he was with, carving out a section of the knight, the prostitute, and her own rotting flesh to burn as an offering to her god. And it is still not satiated.
- The way Bishop Raphaniel ends their assassination targets. He calls upon the powers that have haunted him all his life to cast Shatter inside the carriage, only to realize too late who he is casting it on. The occupants are not killed, they are splattered all over the interior and Colin Provolone.
- The true purpose of the Fellowship of Destiny’s Architects. They see themselves as the final line of defense between Calorum and The Hungry One. A peaceful Calorum is a Calorum that is too appetizing for The Hungry One to resist consuming. According to the FDA, it is only by creating rot and decay in Calorum though war that the land may spared this fate though many will suffer and die.
- And the worst part? The visions that Bishop Raphaniel experiences may hint that this plan is ultimately futile.
- It's even worse than that. Archbishop Camille Cauliflour was using the FDA to summon the Avatar of Deus Pa'Zuul, an entity of infinite hunger and pointless destruction.
Dungeons and Drag Queens
Mentopolis
- The end of episode 2. The Prefrontal PIs are in De'Lux Industries and have access to Elias's raw ocular feed, which reveals that the Big Guy has been thrown out of a skyscraper window. The PIs may move at the speed of thought, but now they are literally under a deadline to solve the mysteries.
- In episode 3, the PIs learn about what Elias was doing at Gobstopper Industries: The Psychometer, a device that allows for the mapping of the brain, as well as planting thoughts into it. As Brennan narrates the development of the project, the screen vibrates and gets bleached out by light as he describes a parallel brainwave to Elias's wavelength and the shape of a white key, suggesting quite heavily that the Psychometer has been used on Elias himself, and was the reason for the explosion at Cerebell Pacific and the death of Norrel Ojiccle— the Psychometer potentially overloaded the console when the white key was inserted.
- And then, at the end of the episode, as The Fix is confronting DA M. Bition in his office, Bition calls in someone, and the vibrating screen returns as some menacing figure appears complete with the same motif of the white key, before lunging toward The Fix.
- The next episode is no better, with the looming, indistinct, bright white figure growling that they’re going to make the Fix “join the winning side”, as Mark Bition just stands there, slack-jawed, with pure white pupils and a glowing keyhole in his chest.
- Even worse? When the Fix shoots this figure with his gun, the bullet does nothing. The Fix has to throw himself out the window just to escape the unwinnable situation.
- The fact that apparently a Bully walked up to Elias Hodge as child and cut his face bad enough to leave a scar with some ice skates. Then as far as we know the only result was that people laughed at Elias Hodge and the bully suffered no consequences for his actions, again as far as we know. That is a fair bit of nightmare fuel for just how crapsack the world might be that Elias Hodge lives in.
- In episode five, there’s a rather sweet scene between the Fix, Conrad, and Ronnie Reptile, where Fix has just told Ronnie that some snakes have a sensory organ on their head that tells them if they’re in light or shadow. Ronnie promptly grows one himself…and all of a sudden begins trembling in fear.Ronnie Reptile: There’s, there’s a shadow downstairs.
Burrow’s End
- The first episode ends with an absolutely terrifying one, made worse by the ambiguity caused by the stoats' own inability to fully comprehend it. A strange "dust storm" rolls in, heavily implied to be some kind of radiation or nerve gas. It causes immediate symptoms of brain damage and respiratory issues in animals who are in it for too long, killing the very young and the very old of the warren in minutes. The main cast flee to higher ground and survive, while the other survivors of the warren attempt to seal themselves away deeper in the warren itself, an apparently fatal mistake.
- Rick Perry, the show's prop and miniature designer, urged Aabria to send a content warning to all the players before the shooting of Episode Two. And boy howdy, is it ever warranted. The main focus of the episode is a battle being fought against a sickened, diseased bear being used as a combination home and battle carrier by a colony of parasitic chipmunks. The bear is placed on the table initially as an oversized miniature, then OPENS UP to reveal it insides as the battle map. Complete with organs, bone, and muscle as terrain, and an actually beating heart! Then later, as the fight progresses, the bear's skull is taken off to reveal its brain as well. Between that and the parasitic chipmunks living inside, whose primary weapons appear to be a combination of its own tongue and intestines, it's no wonder that one of the behind-the-scenes crew reported nightmares for a week after seeing it in the shop.
- The wolf in the seventh episode is nothing but body horror. Every attack on it mangles the poor thing like it's made of tissue paper and deli meat, tearing entire parts of it off that then grow back stronger and wrong until it's unrecognizable as a wolf.
- In the eighth episode, we're treated to the Apocalyptic Log of a doctor at a nuclear reactor which underwent critical sabotage caused by the First Stoats. The last tape ends with the sound of them apparently tearing the guy's throat out and him gurgling his last breaths. Hell, Brennan - the guy who delivered all of the horror that was The Stepmother in Neverafter - reacts by leaving the table because "that's TOO FUCKING SCARY!"
- In the last episode, the revelation of Phoebe is puppeteering Dr Wenabocker's body is terrifying enough. Seeing the "miniature" for the battle, as Phoebe starts using her Blue powers to distort Wenabocker's body, with the human flesh hanging off the mutated stoat forearms like a robe's sleeves, is enough for another content warning at the top of the episode.
- That's all bad enough, especially combined with Phoebe's intent to trigger another reactor meltdown to expand the Blue Forest, but her Blue powers make her The Necromancer, letting her bring the dead soldiers back to life, as well as mind control other revenants... like Ava and Tula, who are made to attack their own family.
