Moment Subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
As is to be expected by a game made by former Shin Megami Tensei developers, Monark is no slouch when it comes to its unnerving atmosphere, its characters, and the dangers lurking within Shin Mikado Academy...
- The opening of the game. The protagonist is forced to fight for his life and defend himself from the Daemon Legions at the behest of an enigmatic figure, only to lose and die by way of being stabbed. The last shot of the protagonist is him lying in a pool of his own blood. He's somehow still alive when we see him next, but damned if it isn't creepy.
- This cutscene gets even worse when you learn the Vice-President is actually an Artificial Human and is but one of many clones Yoru has made since the Barrier went up. The Vice-President is also revealed to be the only one among his clones to have successfully developed an Ego, which raises the question: How many of these clones did Yoru kill off trying to create a success like him?
- Shin Mikado Academy's circumstances are terrifying, to say the least. Imagine you are one of the teachers or students at the academy. You're going about your day in school when all of a sudden a Mist starts to settle within the school and a barrier is suddenly erected around the campus. Anyone caught within the Mist starts going crazy, either turned into a rambling mess or just plain unhinged. Worse, you have absolutely no way of contacting anyone from the outside and are effectively cut off from the rest of the world.
- Speaking of the Mist, early on you'll come across a girl named Reina who's talking to a storage closet like it's her best friend. As you explore the second floor of the main building, you'll find memos of her and her friend Miyu conversing back and forth until Reina started going off the deep-end from prolonged exposure to the Mist, obsessed with never letting go of Miyu's hand. When you bring this up to Reina, she suddenly breaks down and apologizes while looking for her friend. The last written memo has Miyu mention how she fears Reina will kill her. A previous memo mentions her throat is so painfully dry, a sign of dehydration, as Reina won't let her leave because of her madness. Oh, and the storage locker? There's a disgusting smell coming from it, and you can't see what's inside of it, either and it's cleared after the Mist is dispelled without any further mention.
- When you reach the rooftop, you'll find that the students here are obsessed with graduating. In order to progress through the area, you have to get a student barring the door to step aside, who is upset and questions why the teacher is so intent on holding graduation. You quickly learn why he barred the door as said "graduation" is the teacher and students taking a swan dive off the roof.
- Although hard to notice at first, a closer look at the enemy Legions will show a disturbing sight. Like your Fiends, the Legions all have faces...except whereas yours otherwise look narmish, the faces on the Legions are withered and wrinked with red eyes and lipless teeth. Worse still, the face doesn't look to have been grafted, as you'll notice cracks surrounding the exposed face, implying what you're seeing is what your Fiends look like underneath their "skin".
- Kurama Hitotsubashi and the Student Council after he took over. He presents himself as a Reasonable Authority Figure, understandably barring any and all access to the second floor of the main building since it's covered in the Mist and is doing his best to maintain order in the school by pacifying the panicking students. As you quickly learn, however, members of the Student Council are also blocking the main entrance, preventing anyone from going outside as if to keep them trapped on the first floor. And then, of course, there's the Student Council itself; they act like mindless zombies, praising Hitotsubashi's very name, happily following any order he gives them, and every single one of them has red eyes. You later learn they've all been put under the effects of his Authority as the Pactbearer of Pride, which gives him total control of their bodies. By his own admission, they aren't really aware of what's happening, and even if they were, they can't process it. Think about that for a second.
- The first-year building of Shin Mikado is not in a good state, especially compared to the rest of the school when you enter it. For starters, you first room you come across has overturned furniture and bloodstains. The students themselves are also being abused and tortured, both psychologically and mentally, by the Pactbearer of Wrath. According to Kokoro, he's been killing every first-year he finds and will not allow anyone to leave the building. It got so bad Kokoro had to lock the front entrance so as to prevent any other first-year student in Shin Mikado to wander in and become the Pactbearer's unlucky victim.
- It gets even worse when you witness how Subaru goes about killing his victims: as he's currently in a coma and assumed dead by everyone else, he uses his Authority to possess students, causing friends to kill friends and only releasing them after they literally have the blood on their hands. The extreme psychological trauma gets so bad that one of Subaru's bullies ends up murdering another, thinking it will earn him salvation and forgiveness from Subaru—upon which he just blankly asks him, "And?" before plunging him back into the torture.
- And why is Subaru assumed dead in the first place? The leader of the gang of bullies says he tried to escape through the window or committed suicide, to avoid being locked up in the 3rd floor. The truth of the matter was that Subaru was cornered and pushed out the window. As the cast discuss, none of this justifies his wanton murder, terrorizing, and torturing everyone else but he certainly had a good reason to!
- Also on the 3rd floor of the first-year building is an Unsettled teacher who is hell-bent on disciplining students for the slightest infractions. A student running in the hallways? He breaks her legs to make sure she never runs again. A student has "extraneous material" in class? He rips the student open to conduct a full-body cavity search'' just to be absolutely sure they don't have anything else extraneous on them.
- For anyone who's ever suffered a terrible break-up, stalkers, or romantic relationships that have gone disturbingly wrong, the entirety of the Club Building arc with Shinya and the Tono Twins is this. You've got everything from a crazed ex-girlfriend going around trying to murder you but not before going through all of your friends, one by one. You've got a girl crazy with grief at her dismal love life, where the Protagonist has to act like the perfect boyfriend as she goes on ranting and raving about how she wants someone who'd go through hell for her, like the Fairy Tale Prince that jumped out a window, blinded himself from the fall, then wandered around the forest for years. And then there's the Unsettled girl desperately barricading herself in the door, with her stalker knocking and trying to pass himself off as a concerned boyfriend. The last gets even worse when you find evidence that his tracking her movements and violating her consent and privacy was well before any of the weirdness began happening in the school.
- Nozomi's backstory about her childhood best friend Hikari, especially terrifying for a parent or anyone who was also a cowardly child. She was consistently bullied by others for her meekness and late one winter's day, her tormentors decided to hide her backpack in a supposedly haunted park. Hikari, the brave one of the duo, volunteered to find it while Nozomi could only wait on a bench in terror. Hours later, Nozomi finally gathered the courage to call the police, and after a frantic search, they find Hikari's corpse. The "ghost" haunting the park was actually a serial killer. Nozomi blames herself, Hikari's grieving parents blame her, and the event has clearly traumatized her for life.
- The Authority of Woe can be considered one of the most powerful Authorities in the game alongside the Authority of Greed. Whereas Greed allows the user to manipulate time and space to their liking, the Authority of Woe alters reality itself. The Monark Tristia uses it to erect the Barrier surrounding Shin Mikado, but that's just one use for it. It's other ability is the power to rewrite or erase memories. Tristia's been using it to ensure Yugo is kept Locked Out of the Loop and to keep Shinya obedient whenever he starts to sympathize with the Pactbearers or questions whether what they're doing is right. This is plenty scary and terrifying on its own, but Yoru's use is even worse. For starters, she went and tried to create her own Monark, i.e. the highest class of Daemon, and although he proved to be a failure, she dumped him in Shin Mikado to serve her needs and force Sora's hand. To ensure her "child" could integrate and act without notice, she altered the memories of everyone in Shin Mikado.
- In correlation to this, in the Pactbearer of Greed arc, "Recurring Twilight", one of the puzzles has you figuring out the identity of a student whose name is crossed out on the Memorial Monument dedicated for the students who died in the academy. The student in question is named Takanori Suzuki, a member of the Journalist club since middle school who covered the occult and died in an accident not long ago while he was waiting for his younger sister. You can find his desk in the second-year building with a rosemary flower and a farewell letter...written by Chiyo, who clearly misses him and says his favorite flower was rosemary. And according to her, her big brother also loves rosemary. Asking around the second-year students has you learn that pretty much everyone has forgotten Takanori, and every physical record of him (save for what's on digital archives) is censored out. In case it hasn't dawned on you, the Vice-President? Chiyo's brother, who you've been playing as since the start of the game? He's not Chiyo's brother. Takanori is, and Yoru made sure everyone forgot he ever existed.
- A bit of Fridge Horror here. In Act 2, it's revealed that "Sora Jingu" is actually the Monark of Woe called Tristia, and Yugo is her Pactbearer. The reason Yugo is clueless as to what's going on in the academy is because Sora keeps erasing his memories with her Essokinesis, which is responsible for the Barrier. Yugo's not the only person who's had his memories erased, however; in "Unhinged Darkness", Sora remarks how Shinya's constant defence of the Vice-President and insistence that he's not a danger to the world is unfortunate and she'll have to start over again, implying she's erased Shinya's memories anytime he starts to sympathize or attempt to understand the viewpoint of the Pactbearers the Jingu family is tasked with eliminating. Based on the wording, it's happened more than once...
- Speaking of Tristia here, the reason she's impersonating Sora Jingu, who is revealed to have died years ago, is because Yugo wanted to see his wife again. Tristia not only granted that wish to some extent by pretending to be her, but she came to genuinely fall in love with Yugo. So much that the idea that she will have to stop being "Sora" when faced with the prospect of Yugo dead or dying causes her to mentally snap as shown in the TSC Pactbearer Act 2 chapters.
- In "Birth of a New World", Tristia absorbs Yugo into her to save his life, and then proceeds to absorb Shinya when she feels how much Yugo loves their adopted son before deciding to absorb the world Yugo loved so dearly, which also includes the student body. In her confrontation with Kokoro and the Vice-President, she also makes it clear that any semblance of personality or individuality the people she's absorbed had is gone, and refuses to do so.
- In "Woeful Execution", Yugo's death breaks Tristia far worse than in Kokoro's chapter. Wanting to continue being "Sora Jingu" at any cost, even without Yugo, she decides to kill each and every person who is not content with their life or pursuing their own desires, and therefore their Ego. The first person she kills after she deals with Yoru is Shinya, who expresses his dismay and sadness for having just lost Yugo mere moments ago, and she does it with little fanfare or so much as a change of expression. By the time Ryotaro and the Vice-President confront Tristia, she's killed over a hundred people in the school; nearly the entire student body.
