Nightmare Fuel / Goblin Slayer

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Fighter knows what's coming. It's not pretty.

Goblin Slayer already sets the tone by introducing its titular character in the wake of violence and blood. However, the events leading up to this introduction has sent both manga and light novel fans reeling from the sheer Gorn and Nausea Fuel involved, and never forgets to remind just how an inhuman race of sadists and rapists with a vehement hatred for humanity can inflict terror on the helpless.

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In General:

• Every other goblin attack results in cute, pretty women being stripped, naked and completely helpless because they are being raped and tortured, sometimes killed. The victims are relatively nice looking but there's absolutely nothing titillating or arousing about this. When it happens right at the beginning of the first volume, it's a dead-ringer that it's just going downhill from there. And expect this to be the norm; you'll see it a lot.
• The goblins themselves are just pure nightmare fuel. If you think that they are going to be like your typical Standard Fantasy Setting goblin, you are dead wrong. These things might not be strong alone, but they often come in massive numbers, have literally no motivation to do anything other than Rape, Pillage, and Burn, can evolve and change tactics very quickly to make sure something that works against them once won't later on, and personality-wise, they are just so venal, that you'll actually just wish for them to go extinct already. Even worse, goblin quests are only worth a few dimes of pay so no veteran adventurer will take them, and people often assume they are weak because lone goblins can be taken care of even by children. The result? Unsuspecting rookies who underestimate goblins accept those quests only to get annihilated. Mind you, even steel-rank adventurer brigades are outright overwhelmed, raped and killed by these monstrosities.
  • Visually, the goblins are just gratingly ugly, possibly worse than standard goblins just to emphasize how evil they are. It's especially jarring when you compare them to just about any other character or creature in the manga. They have very detailed and uncanny features as opposed to the standard seinen manga artstyle anything else has — it's almost like they aren't supposed to be here in the first place. Biologically, they also aren't anywhere near pleasant, since they are often described to have this absolutely awful and repulsive odor and like to use their spit and feces to make poison for their daggers. All of these which are signs that these things aren't anything good to begin with.
  • The reproduction process of a goblin. They are exclusively male, so they'll take whatever women they can come across and rape them, which will result in goblin children no matter whatever the mother's race is. She will give birth to a new goblin in a span of three days and more will come after a week. If you're in that pitiful state, you only have an estimated 2 weeks of lifespan left. It can come across as incredibly disturbing even if you're into that type of stuff.
  • Still thinking about sparing goblin children because they look innocent enough? Please don't. Chapter 13/Episode 12 shows what happens when one spares goblin children: One female adventurer made the mistake of sparing a goblin kid and got bashed to death by said kid for her trouble. The next few pages then detail how said goblin survived in situations where others of his kind would die, to the point that he tricked and (seemingly) killed a rather high-level adventurer and took his axe. This goblin grows to become the Goblin Lord, the mastermind behind the attack on the farm in previous chapters. There's a reason Goblin Slayer never spares any goblins he meets, especially the Goblin Lord when he's begging in front of Priestess, because without his knowledge, the defenders would have been outmaneuvered and slaughtered.
• GOBLIN SLAYER himself. After all, he is to the goblins what goblins are to humans. He has executed hundreds of goblins in his adventurer career and does so with emotionless, cold, lethal prejudice. And he has no plans of stopping anytime soon. His hyper-fixation on goblins, his almost emotionless nature, and loner tendencies have people say he's a complicated individual at best which is a drastic Understatement.
  • Imagine being a normal boy growing up in a village with a loving sister only to witness your home pillaged and destroyed by goblins who then kill nearly everyone in it. Then you see your own sister beaten, raped, and finally killed by these impish savages right in front of you while you are hiding for your life. After the chaos ends, you're left with no home, no family, nothing...but a burning desire to eradicate all goblins off the face of the planet.

Volume 1

• Goblins get creative when they decide to be vindictive little bastards. In the first chapter alone, we have:
  • The newbie Warrior being ripped to pieces when his sword is caught on the cave ceiling due to it being too long to effectively use in such tight quarters. One goblin triumphantly hoists a severed arm up in its hands (and in the anime we get to see it being cut off, complete with the Warrior's scream of agony). When the Priestess finally sees what was left of him, she immediately throws up.
  • Fighter being beaten and then gang-raped while she screams to no avail, her wails echoing throughout the cavern as Priestess can only watch helplessly, finally escaping while whispering "I'm so sorry" over and over.
  • The female mage being stabbed and molested while dying of poison made from the goblins' urine, feces, and poison herbs. Her ordeal is so horrible that she has to ask Goblin Slayer to just kill her. He obliges.
  • Thanks to Goblin Slayer's intervention, the girls held prisoner within the nest are finally freed. The central focus is on Fighter however, freshly stripped nude and sporting glazed-over eyes. A discarded plaything, limp as a ragdoll, all the while looking... moist. She's clearly suffered a Heroic BSoD that she's not coming back from.
  • The entire scene about the goblin children in general. Never mind connecting the dots behind their existence, Goblin Slayer just slowly approaches them, eyes blazing behind his visor with cold-blooded intent. Priestess, sensing his bloodlust, can only muster a feeble defense for the babies. He just casually refutes her, raising his club without hesitation... and it cuts to him muttering his goblin count, armor and club soaked in blood.
  • Think of it this way: Mere seconds were the factor separating Priestess from suffering like her female companions. Even months afterwards under Goblin Slayer's guidance, she has never forgotten.
  • What's worse is what Priestess says in the aftermath, "this is a common occurrence". What happened to the Greenhorn Party is not a one-off incident created by three fool-hardy beginners coming together. It happens a lot.
• Then there was what happened to the all-female team of Adventurers who got caught in the Elven Fortress.
  • The Light Novel goes into details stating that the leader of the group died last, after watching the goblins burn the Wizard at the stake, shoot the Ranger to death with her own bow, and then stuff the entrails into the mouth of the Monk that tried to bite her own tongue in a suicide attempt. They then spent three days and nights violating the Knight while torturing her and then mangling her body to the extent she could hardly have been seen as human, before tossing her into the river so the villagers knew what happened.
  • The manga shows the goblins in the process of violating the Knight, who is dead at this point, and the others suffering the above-mentioned fates. The next and last time they are shown, they are just listless corpses that quickly disappear behind roaring flames, wiping away the evidence as if nothing happened in the first place.
    • Alternatively in the manga version, Noble Knight doesn't look any worse than any other girl that was captured and raped by goblins but are still alive, and she had no injuries that looked particularly fatal, so a manga reader might assume that she is still alive. The only actual confirmation of her death is the experienced Goblin Slayer assuming that too much time has passed for there to be a survivor. If one truly thought she is still alive at this point, it does give the bleak implication that Goblin Slayer may have accidentally burned alive a broken and traumatized woman, and never realized it since, as stated above, the roaring flames wiped away all the evidence.
• Chapter 6 of the manga adds yet another to the list of goblin cruelty: In an old fortress a horde appropriated as a nest, there is one room designated to be the goblin's waste heap. Within the refuse, excrement, and other unmentionables is a captured elf strapped to a wall, completely exposed. Precisely half her whole body, down the very symmetrical line, is scarred and welted, with the other half left alone purely just for kicks.
• Chapter 12 establishes that goblins have the capacity to use Human Shields. Captured, battered, hardly-breathing women (and children in the Light Novel), bleeding from various cuts and bruises, tied to wooden boards in uncomfortable and humiliating positions with their limbs contorting at odd angles. Some of the victims appear distressingly young. And the horde attacking Cow Girl's farm possess enough girls to form an entire row.
  • The Goblin Lord notes that these women are merely the expendable ones, the ones that no longer have use. Besides whatever in the hell that could possibly mean, there are still many more back at its nest for their continued purpose as breeding machines.
• The Goblin Lord leading the Farm Siege carries an unusually beautiful battleaxe. His backstory in Chapter 13 explains how he got it. A warrior stormed his nest, hacking goblins left and right. The Lord disappeared into the back, only to face the warrior while holding a naked woman hostage with a flamberge. Before the adventurer could act, the goblin tossed her into his arms, and proceeded to skewer both of them with the sword, sporting a most malicious, gleeful, ear-to-ear grin as he did so. The battleaxe was a trophy to that terrible moment.
  • This takes on a sadder tone as it is implied the warrior attacked the nest because he was trying to save her in the first place. Both of them seemingly died in that goblin pit in complete despair. Year One however reveals the Barbarian clearly survived, albeit with a scar, which gives just a little bit of hope for the woman as well.
  • When the Goblin Lord catches sight of Priestess, he's delighted, because he wanted to hear some screams. He then expresses an intention to eat her organs and rape her to death. When she casts her Protection spell, he changes his mind and decides to torture her in various ways while using her in the way goblins tend to. When he tries his I Surrender, Suckers, we learn he's done this many times before to other female warriors.

Volume 2

• We meet the Sword Maiden. She's described as a very beautiful and powerful woman, a former Gold-ranked Adventurer revered for taking down an Evil God and saving the world. However, there are scars lining her body, and she hides her eyes behind a black cloth because they were burned blind. What fearsome creature did this to her? Goblins. Everything they normally did to any other woman, they did to her when she was a fresh rookie and left her terrified of them, in spite of being one of the strongest people in the world.
• Chapter 22 has the Labyrinth quest run afoul the moment Goblin Slayer failed to take the Goblin Champion by surprise. He's consequently hit with so much force his body flies across the room, crashes into a coffin, and shatters the solid stone just as easily as his bones. Because of this, Priestess loses focus on her Protection miracle, causing all hell to break loose - Lizard Priest, Dwarf Shaman, and High Elf Archer are easily overwhelmed under a sea of goblins, who proceed to tear off High Elf Archer's clothes as she struggles in vain. Worst of all, Priestess is left alone with the Champion in a disturbingly familiar Call-Back to the first chapter, right down to the poor girl pissing herself again... except there's no one to save her this time. The monster proceeds to rip her shoulder out with its teeth.
  • This moment is adapted in episode 7 of the anime, and Priestess's scream of pain is chilling, and echoes through the scene for a good few minutes.
  • The manga version is still incredibly nightmarish as well, carrying over into Chapter 22. Priestess practically goes limp from shock, her eyes are dull, and she has blood, snot, and tears trailing down her face, heavily averting Beauty Is Never Tarnished. She's so out of it that when the Champion takes a further bite out of her shoulder, all she can do is quietly grunt in agony.
    • All of this is made even more horrifying when you remember that Priestess is only 15 when this happens. She's still just a child.
• As incredible as it is to see Goblin Slayer force himself up and literally rise out of the grave in Chapter 23, the manga saw fit to give us a clear view of his hand as he pulls out a stamina potion. Fingers should not bend that way.
  • The Goblin Slayer himself ascends into something all too terrifying. For being broken, battered, smashed and nearly gored, he still rips out a Goblin Champion's eye with his bare, shattered hand, and in the midst of tearing its throat apart with an improvised garrote of hair that was even cutting his own hands. It's at this point that he rises from being an obsessed Anti-Hero to almost seeming like an Ax-Crazy, Goblin-goring Animated Armor that treads the line of being Ambiguously Human (though it's really just being a raw Determinator). Thankfully, this is enough to cause the Goblins to flee and leave his party be, which lets him cool down - and pass out from his near-mortal injures.

Volume 5

• The party find the stakeout point where Noble Fencer's party had set up camp, which was weeks after they were no longer heard from again. While their likelihood of survival is obvious to everyone, it doesn't stop the actual discovery of a half-elf's rotted, torn corpse from being as nauseating as it is tragic.
• Goblin Slayer studies a corpse, and is shocked to find it's the same goblin he shot down with the loosened arrowhead back at the town square. The wound that should have been difficult to heal naturally has been restored back to full function; something up there with the rest of the goblin horde is capable of healing magic.

Year one Volume 1

• The first chapter of the Gaiden Manga shows just how Goblin Slayer's village was destroyed while he was forced to hide. Not only were the men killed first, but the women were stripped and raped while screaming for help, including the younger ones, while he was forced to hide and listen as it happened to his sister. Then, when he comes out after the majority had left, he finds that corpses everywhere (including those of Cow Girl's parents), some missing pieces of their body while hanged with their eyes wide in terror, before nearly being killed until he was saved by a passing Rhea.
• Near the end of Chapter 7 of the GS Gaiden: Year 1 manga, a party whom Goblin Slayer had temporarily worked with went to explore a mine to hunt blobs (as the monk mentioned that doing so would earn them a good portion of money). What gives this a spot in the Nightmare Fuel category isn't the blobs or goblins, for once. Instead, it's a gigantic worm creature known as a "Rock Eater" that not only looks terrifying enough just for one page, but has also devoured one of the party members in a gruesome manner - only her face (with her left eye... well, punctured) and leg can be seen peeking from its maw.
  • In the same chapter, Goblin Slayer pins down a goblin and guts it like a fish as it screams bloody murder. Right in front of said party. When one of the horrified members asked what he was doing, he just flatly stated that he's performing "research" while yanking out the goblin's intestines.
    • In volume 8, he skins a goblin with a tattoo to study it, and the rest of the party barely react.
• The Rock Eater is back! (Year 1 chapter 12) This time making its flashy entrance by devouring a scout's upper half, and then reappearing for real to scare the god-knows-how-many adventurers enlisted to hunt it down shitless. Thankfully, we know that Heavy Swordsman, Spearman, Witch, and Female Knight survive the events.
• Year 1 Chapter 13 averts the typical "blobs melting clothes" hentai-humour in a very terrifying way by HAVING A BLOB MELT AN ADVENTURER'S FACE ALIVE WHILE HE SCREAMS IN ANGUISH FOR HELP. Even worse, when a paladin casts a Miracle Light spell, it's revealed that there are a lot of blobs residing on the ceiling above them.
  • In the same chapter, we see Goblin Slayer defeating the goblins he lured in at ease. For the moment it looks awesome....until one of them shoots him in the back of the head with a slingshot, leaving a stinger ending for those who haven't read the original manga or novel itself and making them wonder what's gonna happen to the village next...
• Year 1 Chapter 14 is rather close to being GS's darkest hour. While it was thankfully revealed that he wasn't knocked out cold because of his helmet, he went after the goblin (who had ran out of the fenced village) due to his "Must Kill Goblin" mindset. The result? He didn't realize it was luring him for a surprise attack from several other goblins who hadn't entered. He was then constantly beaten up by the few goblins until he was presumably out cold. While it isn't exactly a nightmare fuel, the very thought that Goblin Slayer was taken down that easily can be an extremely unpleasant thought...
• Year 1 Chapter 27 reveals the existence of a threat that fans of Warhammer would be familiar with, the Skaven. This means that the existence of the people of Goblin Slayer is just one ambitious ratman away from being extinguished, with the saving grace being that if they're anything like the original, then they would be too busy backstabbing each other.

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Ew! I don’t like ‘em! I don’t like goblins! Aughh!