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Nightmare Fuel / Everything is Fine

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"Winston... Come here, lazy boy..."
I know why you're here. Lots of things are scary about this webcomic. Everything is NOT fine.

Unmarked spoilers ahead!


  • The cat-helmets are cute at first, but the more you have to look at them, the more unsettling they become. It doesn't help that they constantly obscure the characters' facial expressions, so you never know what they're really feeling. There are several moments in the comic that just has everyone stare in silence, underlined by the unblinking unchanging helmets.
  • The very heavy implication that it's simply not allowed for the residents to be anything but happy. Sam chastises Maggie for trying to talk about a serious, maybe even sad topic and they flat-out ignore that their dog Winston is dead and that his corpse is slowly rotting away in his basket.
  • The whole situation with Winston. Sam and Maggie's stubborn insistence that he's still alive, even as his corpse is rotting and attracting flies is incredibly creepy. Then it only gets worse when Sam decides to give his body to a homeless man outside their house, still acting like Winston is alive and he's just taking him for a walk. We're then treated to a nice scenes of the homeless guy happily munching away at Winston while Sam and Maggie sit at the dinner table with no visible reaction. Doubles as a Tear Jerker, as Maggie is implied to be heartbroken over having lost Winston completely now and still feebly calls out to him in the next episode.
  • The red lights that occasionally flare up in the characters' masks' eyes. There is no explanation what they're for or what they are, but since they always appear when a conversation starts to turn sour, it's heavily implied they act as some sort of behavior control.
    • A prevailing theory is that they get shown live footage of their children, who are being held hostage.
  • Stepping out of line even once will get a resident's status set to "red". This means their neighbors, friends and even families have to actively shun them and act like they never existed at all. They're also thrown out of their house and left to fend for themselves on the streets. What this eventually leads to is the red resident starving to death, due to no one being allowed to give them food or even help them get some.
    • It gets even worse: No Going Back implies that if parents mess up and get the red-status, their children are Forced into committing suicide. And the mask the parents wear make them watch live video-footage of it happening with no way to stop it or to even call out for their doomed children.
  • Maggie's Sanity Slippage after Charlie is set to red. She starts seeing Charlie and hearing his desperate pleas in reflective surfaces, along with flashes of a happier past and even though she tries to just forget about all of it, it only worsens her mental state. It gets so bad, Maggie actually tries to commit suicide and is only stopped by a Happy Flashback to a conversation with her child. This concludes in a ghostly vision of Charlie without his face encouraging her to go to his basement, but warning her that once she does, there's no going back.
  • Maggie killing Officer Tom with a hammer. When she first hits him his mask is dented inward and you see a sickly green substance along with blood ooze out of it. After Tom makes a rather pathetic attempt at pleading for his life, Maggie just keeps hammering away at him until his head is nothing but a bloody mess of green goo, blood and brains.
  • The 1984-esque paranoia of the setting really sinks in after Friends for Dinner, when Bob and Linda offer Sam, Maggie, and Charlie an alliance to essentially sell out their neighbors and defend each other from accusations of non-conformity from the same neighbors. Neighbors watching each other, security cameras everywhere in public, and police going out of their way to harass you if they think you're even considering stepping out of line invokes all the worst parts of the Red Scare and Orwellian literature, with the added surreal framing of the comic's cutesy art.
  • Omae wa Mou Shinderu and No Going Back reveal exactly why the setting is a Childless Dystopia: everyone’s children are basically being held hostage by the government to keep civilians in line, and if a civilian happens to do something wrong (which is rather easy to do if they aren’t willing to manipulate, gaslight and sell out those outside of their residence)? Their kids are forced to commit suicide while they themselves are Forced to Watch the whole ordeal, including having to listen to their kids’ final words. The whole experience is so traumatizing to Bob and Linda that they’re quickly reduced into Empty Shells.
    • Their eyes were red during this scene, inferring that every time someone's eye went red, that was the government showing them something - their children in a prison cell, maybe - to remind them of the consequences for falling out of line.
    • Why are the kids so calm and happy-sounding when they jump to their deaths, not even needing to be pushed?... How much worse is whatever will happen to them if they don't?
  • Another disturbing detail is the simple fact that despite Bob having conclusive evidence to prove that Sam and Maggie killed Officer Tom, it’s completely disregarded solely because his body was found in their basement and that Bob even dared to report that a murder had occurred in the first place. It doesn’t help that Sam and Maggie seal their fates by effectively turning their tactics on themselves, relentlessly gaslighting and questioning their every word until Linda snaps and tries to stab Maggie. Words mean everything in this society - and it absolutely shows. And Omae wa Mou Shinderu ends with an absolutely chilling Wham Line:
    Officer Greg: Bob and Linda Miller, of Residence 395, Neighbourhood 147-D. The State finds you guilty of murder. Effective immediately, you are designated...Red-Status.
  • All of the above doesn't hold a candle to what happens in Chapter 27: The entire city is being systemically purged. All of the obedient sheep who followed the rules to the letter to keep their children safe? Killed for the crime of living on the next block to be scheduled for incineration. And of course, it's implied that their children are no longer of any use to the government.
    • It's also very chilling to consider that Sam and Maggie's blocks were next on the schedule and just how close they were to being flamed. If Bob and Linda hadn't forced their hand, enabling them to unknowingly nab their spot to Lakeview in the process of framing them, they'd have been cooked alive.
  • All Good Things has a wide scenery shot as Sam and Maggie are driven to Lakeview. At the end of the shot we see a squirrel that seems to carry a chopped off body-part.
  • Once Sam and Maggie arrive in Lakeview, the first thing they're told by the police officer who brought them is that people in Lakeview "don't really do cars". In other words: There is no way to escape from Lakeview via car.
  • The teaser for season 2. It begins with what looks like the first meeting between Sam and Maggie since school on New Years Eve. At first, it seems like a sweet moment of them sharing a kiss but then it becomes literal nightmare fuel when their daughter appears, wearing the mask and burning alive. Sam drops the title while appearing as a burning skeleton under his mask!
  • The Season 3 Premiere shows the world's fall into madness. An insane military organization usurps the government and kidnaps as many children as they can, then forces everyone to wear stupid-looking cybernetic headgear that marks them as slaves for the government. Those that refuse are either shot to death or get to watch their children die. Sam and Maggie get a call from Sarah, and she's being slowly brainwashed by her 'friends' in the new government to believe in the new world order. Even then she realizes that everything is going to shit first.

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