Now with a sandbox!
It appears that many Nightmare Fuel pages have problems, including:
1. Listing non-scary things that made the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable at worst.
2. Having spoiler tags on them (which is against the page's guidelines).
3. Listing Fridge Horror and fan theories.
And much more!
On a few occasions, people from outside the site's community have pointed out our overly lax usage of Nightmare Fuel to make fun of us, meaning that it can legitimately harm our reputation to let this go unchecked.
The TRS thread
meant for redefining Nightmare Fuel started to become a place for cleaning up Nightmare Fuel pages in general, so we may as well move these discussions to Long Term Projects where they belong.
Here are the guidelines to determine whether something is Nightmare Fuel or not.
- This is a page whose name is intended to be taken more literally than most. It's not enough for material to be scary; to truly qualify, it has to be frightening enough to legitimately unnerve/disturb the viewer, with actually being nightmare-inducing as the ultimate endpoint.
- Good signs that something IS Nightmare Fuel include if:
- It left you feeling shaken even after the credits had rolled, you turned the last page, or are otherwise done with the work.
- You have a hard time falling asleep if you think about it at night, or have a literal nightmare about it.
- You dread that episode, scene, level, chapter, or song during re-watches, and consider skipping it.
- With that said, don't add something just because it happens to be your personal phobia. For example, spiders can be scary and many people have arachnophobia, but just because a spider happens to be in the work, it does not make a Nightmare Fuel entry. It needs to reasonably be scary to someone without the phobia.
- Don't confuse tension with fear. If the hero is in trouble, but you know he'll make it out okay at the end, it's probably not Nightmare Fuel unless the threat is especially disturbing.
- Good signs that something IS Nightmare Fuel include if:
- Explain WHY the entry scared you. Try to convey your sense of fear to your readers. Avoid putting up Zero-Context Examples.
- Remember that Weblinks Are Not Examples, and neither are quotes on their own. You should explain the horror in your own words, rather than rely on others to do so.
- Don't add things that might have scared someone. If it didn't scare you, and you don't personally know anyone else who was scared, you shouldn't be adding it to Nightmare Fuel.
- Nightmare Fuel should stick to you even after you're done with the work.
- If something is initially presented as scary but turns out to be harmless, it's most likely not Nightmare Fuel since The Reveal makes the scariness vanish.
- Jump Scares are a good source of Nightmare Fuel, but not all of them automatically qualify: being startled is not the same as being scared.
- Hypotheticals are not Nightmare Fuel:
- Remember that Trailers Always Lie: a scene that is presented as scary in the trailer could very well turn out to be inoffensive in the finished work. Only add examples from unreleased works if they were especially terrifying in the previews.
- Fan theories do not belong on the Nightmare Fuel page under any circumstance. No matter how much evidence they have to support them, don't add them until they've been officially confirmed. In the meanwhile, take them to Wild Mass Guessing.
- Fridge Horror goes on the Fridge page, not Nightmare Fuel. Don't add it unless it's Ascended Fridge Horror.
- Keep in mind the work's intended audience when considering whether or not something is Nightmare Fuel.
- If something is normal or expected in the genre, it does not automatically qualify. Violence in a Fighting Series or gore in a horror movie must be especially disturbing or gruesome by the work's standards to be Nightmare Fuel.
- Remember that Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films. If a work is rated PG-13 or higher but would only be scary to young children, it's not Nightmare Fuel.
- The standards on what qualifies as Nightmare Fuel are especially stringent on works aimed at children and pre-teens: kids have hyperactive imaginations, so even something benign can give them nightmares.
- Spoiler tags do not belong on Nightmare Fuel pages. Much of what scares us comes from inherently spoilery stuff such as death and the unknown, so finding spoilers on these pages should be expected.
- Nightmare Fuel is an Audience Reaction, so it needs to be scary for the audience. Describing how the characters react to something scary isn't needed. Just because something scares them, that doesn't mean it scares us as well.
- Nightmare Fuel is a No Real Life Examples, Please! page. Meta-examples involving the actors, production, or behind-the-scenes incidents are not allowed.
Guidelines when proposing cleanup of a page:
- Some rules are pretty objective. If you see a Zero-Context Example, Fridge Horror, Real Life example, speculation, In-Universe reaction that isn't scary to the viewers, examples that explicitly describe themselves as not being very scary (including "mildly creepy", "somewhat unnerving", and other synonymous phrases), or examples that are just scene summaries without going into detail about why it's so scary, you can (and should) remove them immediately without coming here to ask.
- You should also strip all spoiler tags from the page. Itty Bitty Wiki Tools has a tool for that, but it can cause problems, so if you use it be sure to preview the page and thoroughly look it over.
- Once you've fixed the objective issues with the page, bring it here so we can look at the more subjective problems, such as examples that may not be scary enough to qualify. If a consensus is reached that a certain entry does not qualify, it can be removed.
Edited by Zuxtron on Aug 1st 2020 at 9:40:30 AM
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
I'll get the ball rolling with a pretty bad page, or more accurately, group of sub-pages: NightmareFuel.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic.
The pages are literally a list of every single mildly unpleasant thing that ever happened in the show. Some of these are so inoffensive that I can't comprehend anyone actually being frightened by them. Most likely, they were added in an attempt to pad out these pages in order to make the show appear Darker and Edgier than it actually is. Here are a few choice entries:
I could go on for pages, and apparently so do other tropers as these pages are separated into sub-pages by season. I bet that if I trimmed away all of the blatant overreactions, everything would easily fit in a single page.
Of course, there are other problems with these pages, such as spoiler tags and Fridge Horror entries. Should I go ahead and take a chainsaw to these pages?
Blapper of Water
Please put the rules from this post in the OP. They're a little long, so maybe put them in a folder. But I think they need to be in this thread, too.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Good idea. I will take some time and scour the media I have on my list. I am fairly certain a few have NMF pages that need to be gone over.
Who watches the watchmen?
I did decide to work on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 Nightmare Fuel page, honestly most of it's pretty good, minus the spoilers being on and it was all about Ego for the most part.
Unfortantly someone made a post about that brief mention of Thanos and it spread throughout the page, considering it was just a brief mention of him in the movie I deleted it, practically because it's a small statement that appears once or twice throughout the movie and the post was a long ass conservation referencing Infinity War, I don't think that's a big case of Nightmare Fuel at all. (Like put that on the Infinity War movie once the movie's out in 2018)
edited 6th Sep '17 7:21:09 AM by ReynTime250
I've begun removing the spoilers for Nightmare Fuel.Undertale. I noticed that there is a tab for non-canon examples, should those be added in a separate page? Since the heartwarming, funny, and tear jerker pages already have non-canon examples. The NF page for Undertale does have lots of theories and some Natter, the page may need to get checked out.
Since the game is a Walking Spoiler. There are a lot of spoiler tags within the page. I'll try to remove some of them each day..
edited 5th Sep '17 11:55:54 PM by SithPanda16
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
The rules have been added to the OP. I can't believe I forgot to do that!
Itty Bitty Wiki Tools has a tool for removing all spoiler tags from a page. But I'd be careful using it, it's pretty buggy and tends to remove the wrong set of closing brackets, so if you want to use it you should double-check the page afterwards to fix these issues. It also turns some characters into � symbols, so maybe copy-paste that symbol into control-F to fix these too.
There is no Planet B
Great thread, the nightmare fuel sub-paged are a real mess.
I'd support taking a chain-saw on the nightmare fuel examples on the pony show. :-)
I'd like to nominate this whole page: NightmareFuel.The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. It is a video blog setting update of Pride and Prejudice. None of it meets the criteria in the OP, most of it is Fridge Horror in the vein of "Lydia is so cute, it is so horrible to know that something bad is going to happen to her, which you know if you read the book" or "Caroline is a manipulative bitch, that's why episode XY when Lizzy believes her is so horrible."
Sure, having a younger sister manipulated and sexually abused is Adult Fear scary, but none of it is presented on-screen in the way that would meet the rules.
Can I send it to cutlist?
edited 6th Sep '17 7:26:56 AM by XFllo
Glitch letters are a problem that arises any time you copy and paste certain characters. The problem is, it's easy to miss the characters until they start glitching, because they're things like an ellipses (instead of three separate dots it's one unit), curved quote marks, and other things like that. I'm pretty sure they're the result of people editing from mobile, but not 100%.
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
They also appear when you use the spoiler-tag removing tool, no matter what device you're using. That tool probably needs some fixing.
Blapper of Water
On Shin Megami Tensei I, I just encountered an example that admits it's an Urban Legend of Zelda (there's a lot of natter and forum back-and-forth). I'm gonna cut that example citing the "no hypotheticals" rule but I'm mentioning it here in case there's an issue with Urban Legend of Zelda.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
No, I mean when people edit the page in mobile, and then you later come in and copy/paste the entire page (because that's what the tool does, it gives you a page without spoilers to copy in), the weird letters that you didn't notice get glitched.
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
I'm done removing the non-scary stuff and spoiler tags from NightmareFuel.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. I ended up cutting away so much stuff that I'm pretty sure I could fit everything in one page. What does everyone else think about merging the subpages?
EDIT: Just cleaned up NightmareFuel.We Bare Bears. Although that show is so tame and non-scary that I'm not sure anyone has ever actually been scared by it, I tried to be merciful and leave in stuff that might frighten the faintest of hearts.
edited 6th Sep '17 12:44:46 PM by Zuxtron
Blapper of Water
If it's My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, then I'd be sure to check out that work's YMMV clean-up thread. The sandbox for the YMMV page is here, so if you mean to put any off of the Nightmare Fuel tab, that'd be where to put it.
Though now that I've typed all that I think you mean to put it all on to one Nightmare Fuel/ tab. I think the entries for the different seasons could go on one page, yeah.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
Yes, I meant putting everything on NightmareFuel.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, not putting it all on YMMV.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic (there's still enough content left to justify a subpage).
EDIT: I'm making a Sandbox page showing what a merged Nightmare Fuel would look like for that show.
SECOND EDIT: Sandbox.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Nightmare Fuel is done. I think it looks pretty good myself.
edited 6th Sep '17 1:05:19 PM by Zuxtron
Should we make exceptions for spoiler tags if it's a film that was recently released?
I don't really see the benefit, especially since we've been trying to get rid of spoiler tags from Nightmare Fuel pages already.
There is no Planet B
Sandbox.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Nightmare Fuel
Good job! ![[awesome]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minis/award_star_gold_3.png "[awesome]"){kind=small}
Though personally, I would delete more of them. I haven't read the whole sandbox page, but some of the examples seem hardly scary, even for a kids' show.
Lots of the examples have wrong Example Indentation, too. I don't think conversation mode should be allowed on subpages.
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
The idea is that if you're reading the Nightmare Fuel page, you've either already seen the movie or don't mind getting spoiled. Spoiler tags are unnecessary in both cases.
Nothing on the page actually scared me, so I had to put myself in the mindset of an easily scared little kid while picking which examples to keep, otherwise I would have deleted almost every Nightmare Fuel page on the site 
. If there's something you think doesn't belong, you could bring it here for discussion. As for bad indentation, you can clean them up where you see them, as with any other page.
edited 8th Sep '17 5:08:58 AM by Zuxtron
There is no Planet B
Of course I can. This Is A Wiki. It is just that I am already involved in other clean-up projects, like commenting out ZCE, and at times I feel like troping is no longer fun, but HARD work. :-)
Is it allowed to straight up delete those natering additions, especially now when there is a clean-up effort going on? Fixing it is tedious work.
Any feedback on the NightmareFuel.The Lizzie Bennet Diaries sub-page? I propose to cutlist it.
edited 8th Sep '17 5:41:42 AM by XFllo
Should we do something similar to the Tear Jerker, Heartwarming, Awesome, and Funny Pages where we remove spoilers?
edited 9th Sep '17 4:24:41 PM by SithPanda16
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
Tear Jerker mentions a high risk of spoilers, but nothing about not using tags at all. The rest don't say anything about spoilers.
I do agree that at least Tear Jerker should be spoilers-off, and probably Awesome and Heartwarming too. Funny could keep spoiler tags since jokes aren't as tied into the plot as the other pages.
Blapper of Water
I think the other subpages are saliently different from NF, so they should maybe get an ATT thread or their own effort. People kept comparing them in the TRS thread but others kept shooting the comparisons down (for valid reasons).
edited 10th Sep '17 8:41:41 AM by WaterBlap
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
I asked about this in ATT. We could make these into their own threads if needed, although I think it might also fall under the Violations of the spoiler policy thread.
Anyway, I'll start looking over NightmareFuel.Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure next. I'm thinking about cutting the following from the NightmareFuel.Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Phantom Blood page:
- How does the story start? With a woman being sacrificed alive! Her blood is used to turn a guy wearing the Aztec Mask into a vampire, who proceeds to kill one of his followers and absorb his blood.
- The imagery of the crashed carriage where Jonathan's mother died was quite gory.
- Jack the Ripper decapitating the horses and then emerging from one of the stumps of the now decapitated horse.
- The fact that Dio considers a serial killer like Jack a kindred spirit is nothing short of disturbing.
- During the fight with Tarkus in Part 1, he decides to grab two hapless townsfolk, and crushes them to paste with his bare hands, before drinking the body juices that came out. We even get to see one of the victims have the skin on his face tear off near the end of it.
- Page, Jones, Plant, and Bonham are all vampires, but look more like demonic monsters than normal vampires. Thankfully, Straizo defeats them instantly before they could do anything.
- In fact, Dio's army of zombies are more like Legions of Hell. Considering what Dio is like, it's probably no coincidence.
There's also this entry, which is full of Natter and probably needs cleanup:
- Dio sends Jonathan's dog to the incinerator just to break him. Why? Because he's a dick. This is even before he became a vampire that tried to Take Over the World For the Evulz.
- The Abridged version makes it worse.
Dio: So, Jonathan, how do you like the dinner I made for you? Sorry if its a little...burnt.Jonathan: *Looks slowly from his paw-shaped bit of meat to Dio.*Dio: *hurried whisper* Don'tfuckwithme.
- Why didn't anyone hear Danny trapped in the incinerator? Dio wired his mouth shut and stuck him in a box. When the groundskeeper finally opens the incinerator up and Danny jumps out, the wire is melting off his muzzle and his body is charred black. Dio did this. Dio was TWELVE when he did this.
- And after he becomes a vampire, he gets so much worse. He does continue his dog-kicking streak throughout the rest of the storyline, but the most horrible thing that he does would have to be the scene in which he turns that woman into a zombie and calmly watches her eat her own baby. The woman Dio has brought before him is begging him to take her, but spare the baby. He gives her his word that he will not even touch it. Shortly afterward, the zombie mom does as is said above. He kept his word, but it once more proves what a monster he was.
- How can you forget that the first thing he did after becoming a vampire WAS TO CLEAVE A MAN'S HEAD IN TWO. Not only that but afterwards that creepy breathing sound he does... ugh.
Dio: Urrrrrrrrrrrrry.
- Even the dub version of that was creepy... but instead of the classic 'Wry' he instead whispers Jonathan's nickname instead.
- Dio's taste in pets, which involves putting cats' heads on birds, so he'll Kick the Dog if one manages to be too vulgar. Later, he put a man's head on a dog's body to amuse himself.
- The Abridged version makes it worse.
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
The Ask the Tropers thread I made came to the conclusion that spoiler tags are not needed on Awesome, Funny, Heartwarming, and Tear Jerker.
Now with a sandbox!
It appears that many Nightmare Fuel pages have problems, including:
1. Listing non-scary things that made the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable at worst.
2. Having spoiler tags on them (which is against the page's guidelines).
3. Listing Fridge Horror and fan theories.
And much more!
On a few occasions, people from outside the site's community have pointed out our overly lax usage of Nightmare Fuel to make fun of us, meaning that it can legitimately harm our reputation to let this go unchecked.
The TRS thread
meant for redefining Nightmare Fuel started to become a place for cleaning up Nightmare Fuel pages in general, so we may as well move these discussions to Long Term Projects where they belong.
Here are the guidelines to determine whether something is Nightmare Fuel or not.
Guidelines when proposing cleanup of a page:
Edited by Zuxtron on Aug 1st 2020 at 9:40:30 AM