Fridge Horror in your own works

Fridge Horror doesn't pop up a lot on this wiki, but it's there. Have you ever experienced it within the context of your own work? Once when I was including some of the Required Secondary Biological Aspects to allow a race of nigh-immortals to be night-immortal, I wrote that their nerve cells could regenerate, to allow them to take nerve damage that would otherwise be cumulative and eventually paralyze them. Some time later, I realized that this meant they could get nerve cancer, which just sounds... ugh.

Tell me your tales of innocuous horror.

Mine's nowhere near as bad as yours but I wrote a character called Wayne (a Stoners Are Funny type character) who always saw a giant wasp when he took acid. It was Played for Laughs. It was only later that I realised that hallucinating a giant wasp would be bloody terrifying.

Let me see...

I think this might work, although it's more like Nothing Is Scarier.

In the third book of The Chaos, Nick, Adam, John, Abeiuwa, Riku and their newest recruit, Jackson, arrive in Orlando. John mentions how the place looked so familiar, all while acting slightly unhinged. Finally, they arrive at a nearly demolished bulding.

At that point, John goes into a blind panic, screaming for his brother and his father. It's later revealed that John, Nick's uncle and Thomas' younger twin, was inside the building nine years ago when it caught on fire, resulting in John's and Thomas' father's death.

The Fridge Horror comes in when you realize that Mary, Nick's mother, was involved too, and he has to wonder if her trauma was part of the reason she did not tell Nick what really resulted in Thomas' leaving his family.

Phew! That was a lot to type.

edited 8th Dec '11 1:31:53 PM by Masterofchaos

I have a character known as "Red" who is an amnesiac, limited time-traveller who is hunted by her younger self (in a mutable single timeline). The Fridge Horror is this: the only logical explanation for that behavior is that (A) her past self Cannot Self Terminate, and that (B) her merely being alive at some future point in the timeline will cause some event so horrible that her past self would commit delayed suicide to prevent it.

After realizing this, I wrote in her future self as a Nigh-Invulnerable Axe-Crazy Complete Monster.

In one of my works, the main villain is supposed to be defeated in a Deader than Dead fashion by the hero. Said fashion involves, essentially, removing them from the universe and placing them in an area outside all existence. Although not infallible (the hero performed it incorrectly the first time she did it, allowing the imprisoned to escape), if done correctly, it is pretty much inescapable. It is supposed to be a horrific punishment, reserved only for the most complete of Complete Monsters, so it shouldn't have any fridge horror attached to it, right?

But it did occur, when I realized that the villain I'd imprisoned was an extremely talented manipulator of space-time, powerful enough to use her powers on a planetary scale. Put completely outside the universe like that, they have a blank canvass to work with—what would stop them from creating an entirely new universe? And essentially becoming a god?

I don't generally go in for Joker Immunity, so the chances of this happening are slim. But if I ever wanted to do it, it's a route I could finagle.

In my setting, due to various interdimensional-warfare-induced distortions in certain parts of reality, many distances are quite literally determined subjectively: A wandering mind creates a wandering path, and so forth. Hence, the easiest way to get from point A to point B is to "create" a shorter path through absolute focus, achieved through extreme concentration and unbelievable single-mindedness.

Now, take a wild guess as to the defining characteristic of the primary antagonist, other than psychopathy.

Or, more to the point, what the protagonists lack.

None I can think of. Well, my setting does involve coexistence of magic and science, not to mention all the numerous religious factions so there got to be some pop up, even if unintentional.

May not really count, but...

My last story takes place in a futuristic dystopia where even though humans are the majority, they suffer severe discrimination, which seriously hurts the main character (who the reader's attention is focused on). The Fridge Horror kicks in when you realize that, for all the pain you see the main character going through as a result of this discrimination, the same pain, to a lesser or greater extent, is happening to every human on the planet Earth.

Also, in my current story, something is mentioned in passing that becomes more horrible the more you think about it - when the Reality Warper protagonist has a breakdown, he proclaims himself God and sends everyone who exists, as well as everyone who ever has existed, to hell. When he recovers from said breakdown, he retcons this away, but it still happened, it's just that no-one can remember it. And it's explicitly stated that the hell he creates is so miserable that spending any period of time there is equivalent to spending an eternity there...

edited 8th Dec '11 4:38:08 PM by PDown

I've never thought much about this unless it's intentional.

If Gravity ever became really, truly serious, he could destroy pretty much all of society. If he ever joins the link with Time, he could probably destroy the world. And he's an Unfettered Well-Intentioned Extremist. We're just lucky he's not all that imaginative.

My constant Deconstruction for Hunting the Unicorn has resulted in lots of Fridge Horror. Not just the obvious Fridge Horror of Blaine being so Oblivious to Love that he has no fucking clue about his stalker—but Fridge Sadness just hit me recently that Blaine is a Relationship Sue because he's terrified that Kurt's going to leave him.

Which makes him enough of a woobie, but the real Fridge Sadness kicks in here: Considering the history I gave him with relationships, he has every reason to think that.

MUST. RECONSTRUCT. NOW.

In Shakura's sunset: My main character's tribe has these familiar which are created from the life force on anyone in the tribe over the span of many years slowly sapping away bits of their souls, in order to create their familiars.

In my Harry Potter next gen fic "The Four Witches Go to Hogwarts" and its sequels, there ended up being Fridge Horror in the way that James (Harry's son, not his dad) treats Scorpius that I realized while writing the story and thus it affected the way I developed their relationship with each other. For background, James and Scorpius are both in Gryffindor in this story and Scorpius is basically like Sirius with traits such as Apologizes a Lot and his Berserk Button is basically anything that might even sort of sound like it's possibly saying he has a tiny similarity with Draco—he's almost an unintentional Deconstruction of Strong Family Resemblance of sorts, or at least what happens when someone looks like an infamously criminal relative of theirs. I basically intended him to be the anti-Draco (since I absolutely despise Draco and Lucius and did NOT want Scorpius to act like them at all) and he highly admires and worships Harry (and does a lot of fanboy gushing over James early on in the story).

Basically, about halfway through the story, James invites Scorpius to stay over for the Christmas holidays with him (Draco disowned him for reasons that, surprisingly, aren't Draco's fault, if you want to know, PM me because explaining it would be a HUGE spoiler for things I have planned for the story). During this time, James gets the stupid idea that it would be fun to go mess around in Harry's office on Christmas Eve night and he drags Scorpius along with him. Scorpius sees Harry's pensieve (which Harry had put memories of Draco into because he wanted to make sure he didn't think about Draco too much while Scorpius was visiting) and asks James what it is. James, who actually doesn't know, lies and tells Scorpius it will make him "turn into the person he wants to be like" and basically pushes Scorpius into it. Even with the fact that Scorpius ends up getting traumatized by seeing kid!Draco in the pensieve since he thinks that's himself at first, the Fridge Horror is that James basically was using his "friend" as a guinea pig to test an unknown substance and just assumed that since it came out of Harry's head, that it was safe. That and other similar incidents (such as James telling Scorpius to drink Polyjuice without telling him what it was or why) made me realize that James was being disturbingly manipulative and led me to have Scorpius break off the friendship after too many times of James trying to trick him into being a decoy for various pranks/rule-breaking behavior. Then there was double Fridge Horror when James's behavior seemed like a fantasy version of The Aggressive Drug Dealer with the way he'd tell Scorpius things like "you're not a real Gryffindor if you don't do what I say" in the context of telling him to drink body-altering substances and I realized later what a bad friend James was being and so I had Scorpius realize it too in the story.

So I guess this is a case where I realized the Fridge Horror in the characters' relationship early on enough for me to break them out of the unhealthily unequal relationship (even more Fridge Horror is that I was going to initially make them a romantic pairing, which then would make it be a disturbing Seme and Uke dynamic that I dislike).

edited 9th Dec '11 4:37:11 PM by Rainbow

In a heavily creepypasta-inspired Pokemon fanfic I'm working on, the protagonist, who is an amnesiac fusion of Red and The Missingno regularly experiences in-universe Fridge Horror after learning various things that he did in his past, including summoning an Eldritch Abomination and murdering the protagonist of Gold and Silver, and the death of his Pikachu.

From New Dawn:

• Matthew's extremely high pain tolerance, combined with his Tyke Bomb training and Fake Memories. One reader commented that the trope combination basically gave her the chills. To be precise, her interpretation was that Matthew went through so much hellish training killing and violence is second nature to him, and then his training was conveniently erased from his memory by dad, but the instincts never went away...

• Nebiros. Consider his warped appearance, consider his insanity, and then think on how he was a perfectly normal kid before he hit the Despair Event Horizon. Body Horror barely covers what I implicitly made happen. A kid deformed and turned into a disgusting Monster Clown, the sheer bloody pain driving him insane. This all happened when Nebiros was sixteen, and happened because a bunch of sadistic bullies just didn't like how nerdy Nebiros was before that.

• Kyrio's powers. How many of Matthew's memories are his own, and were not manufactured or altered by his Magnificent Bastard father? Kyrio has a record with fucking with people's minds, and while he cares for Matthew, he is not above sadistic training.

• Angie Sephion and her clone sisters. These very funny and quirky characters engaged in war against their home country, and had no will of their own. Consider that Sandalphon was fond of commanding them to do very degrading tasks. Consider Sandalphon's record with women. Sandalphon looks 12. Ew barely covers it.

• Ocreus attacking Libya after the war with Gaddafi was done. He explicitly states he wants to destroy the best weapons humanity has to offer. He states he did everything necessary to force the United States to try to nuke him. The nuke was blasted out by Ocreus, and he laughed at it. We later find out Ocreus was mass produced...

• Consider that The Seer loves to pervert wishes into things that would leave people in a state of Body Horror, And I Must Scream or worse. He visits Samantha in her prison cell after she smothered Jackson White. She wished to be free...