Nightmare Fuel / Persepolis

• Life in Iran Post-Revolution. A couple of more specific examples:
  • The chapter/scene where Taji, Marjane's mother, has rape threats uttered against her. In the comic book, it might be more of a Fridge Horror situation, as the confrontation itself takes place off-screen, but even then, seeing Taji understandably shaken as she recounts the event, followed by a panel explaining that she didn't leave her bed or talk to anyone for a few days after the threats, is disturbing on its own. The movie redoes the scene so that the audience actually sees the man yelling at Taji, followed by her trying to fight back tears as Marjane asks if Taji is okay.
  • When it's revealed that the government is brainwashing all teenage boys into willingly dying for the country, by promising them riches and women in the afterlife if they do so.
• When Marjane was a child, she and her friends hold nails in their fists and try to beat another kid with them because of his father's role in the government. Thankfully, this is stopped by their mother before they could even reach him.
• Early on in the series, Marjane and her family meet a young Communist girl named Niloufar who is sweet and kind. A passport forger was housing her because he had employed her brother before. Later, it's revealed that she was arrested by the government when they saw her hiding in the apartment and set to be executed. Because it's illegal to kill virgins, her family was given a pittance as a mock dowry, and she was forcibly married to (and raped by) a soldier before they killed her. Marjane's parents are terrified that the same thing could happen to their daughter if she isn't careful. What especially drives it home is that Marjane suggests to her mother that maybe the government made it up to scare people and they just shot Niloufar; her father interjects and says, "No, your mother is right." He knows because Niloufar's family reported they received a dowry of 15 tumans.
• "The bracelet was still attached to...I don't know what..." The movie actually makes this worse by showing you just what the bracelet was attached to.
• The silhouetted figures of Satrapi's friends running away from the police - and the one who tries to jump across to the other building but falls to his death. And the police simply staring down at him, and then coolly walking away from the scene. Brr...
• The purged illustrator who drew a mullah kicking a soccer ball and labeled him "assassin". No one knows what happened to him, but everyone has their own Epileptic Trees about his fate.
• The fact that, barring some artistic liberties, all of this actually happened.
• The Iran-Iraq war was very much this (everything from the SCUDS to the Chemical Weapons), but what takes the cake is the passing mention by Marjane's husband that he was nearly close to being killed by Iraqi chemical weapons (among other things). Said chemical weapons are described in nightmarish detail as being "higher than the mountains", which gives us a clear perspective about just how bad the war really was for any soldier fighting.
  • Doesn't help that there's a lot of veterans in Iran still suffering from injuries related to chemical weapons, and it isn't pretty.
• In the second book, Marjane attempts to get the morality police to arrest a man who was "looking at her", when he obviously wasn't so she herself could avoid arrest. Her grandmother chastises her for doing such an awful thing, and she feels remorse throughout the story. What really twists the knife is seeing the man carried off, swearing on everything from the Prophet Muhammed to the Quran to the Dome of the Rock that he did nothing whatsoever.

---