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The Program
Program V1
- Kami Steele's death has her get blasted in the stomach with a shotgun at close range, and then gives a nice description of her guts spilling out.
Program V2
- Louisa Bloom has a graphic Nightmare Sequence in her first in-game post, where she gets called out on her anti-American beliefs. Her punishment? Being forced to kill her classmates, friends, and family at gunpoint, until finally getting executed by her own mother. Even if it's just a dream, yeesh.
SOTF-TV
TV2
- Vahka Basayev's path of destruction throughout the season, starting with his brutal assault on his friend Marcus Redder for being on a different team than him, throws mad bastard Taylor DeVasher off a tower after a chase, holds Gene Steward hostage for Zoe Walker's weapon, fights his partner Vincent Holway to death, threatens his own teammates afterwards with a grenade and his own mentor, getting into scraps with Anastasia Arcadia and Alice Young and finally meeting Marcus again, skewering his fomer friend in a brawl. This all culminates in his last thread at the Ice Palace, after a talk with his friend Yagmur Tekindor seemingly getting through to him, only to come across a group featuring his Love Interest Regina Aston, two of his classmates Zoe Walker and Michael Robinson... and Bella Bianchi, a girl from the other school who Vahka had promised to kill. This results in Vahka throwing a grenade into the room, killing two people and injuring the rest including himself, but not for long as Yagmur shoots, beats and kicks him to death in retribution, all the while Vahka smiles as he dies.
- Anastasia Arcadia's slowly losing her grip on reality after the deaths of Sebastian Bellamy and Shawn Thornton. She was introduced in pre- and early game as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl type, though with some Hidden Depths. However, she snaps, and devolves into a Talkative Loon who actively encourages everyone killing each other, drinks other people's blood, and spends time arguing to herself.
Lore
- Typically, scenes of torture that occur in seasons of SOTF-TV are considered Nightmare Fuel In-Universe. Here are a few examples:
- TV1 introduced Susan Crawford as a mentor, who is an ill-spoken protester of SOTF. The reason why she's so anti-SOTF is because her younger sister was tortured to death on the show, which subsequently became a meme. That's bad enough, but the lore for Season 28 goes into detail about what happened to poor Erin. She was tricked into being handcuffed to a drink cooler, then tortured with a knife for four hours, including losing some of her toes and then getting vivisected alive. Eventually, she started outright begging for death. Her killer didn't care. By the way, this was early into the season. It... really puts a lot of Susan's behavior into perspective.
- In Season 51, one of the more notably horrific moments of the game occurred during the first evening. Noted bigot and bully Frank Copeley came across a gay interracial couple consisting of Marcus Chaudhury and Cedric Hoffman. After brutally clubbing Marcus, he captured, tied up, and tortured Cedric for hours. This included several homophobic and brutal methods, such as cutting Cedric's clothes and hair and smearing Marcus' blood on them. Although Cedric broke free and killed Frank in one of the most cathartic moments of the season, it was still a harsh moment of the season. Even worse, it was noted this event occurred during a slow period on the game so the producers had no choice but to show it in full. In fact, after Cedric won the game and came out as transgender, the scene fell under more scrutiny for its uncensored depiction of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and torture.
Second Chances
SC1
- The death of Nicole Husher. We're not told what happened, just that the results are not pretty.
SC2
- The death of William Lohman was a graphic death spread out in many segments. Imagine fighting with one of your classmates over a gun, then falling off a cliff. Imagine being unable to move because you broke your bones, with said classmate's dead body just a few feet away. Imagine watching seagulls eat your classmate, including the eye, then having to fend off being eaten alive by them. Finally, imagine drowning when the tide comes in, because your injuries are so severe you can't even try to get out. It's not something you'd wish on anyone.
- The entire Cold-Blooded Torture scene fits. The thread literally opens (as in the first post) with Blaine Eno ripping off Michael Crowe's fingernails, and then only gets worse from there on out. It's slightly made better by some Black Comedy moments and the fact that Michael kills Blaine at the end, but it's still a graphic torture scene.
- Kasumi White slowly dying of infection is creepy, largely because of how it's presented. Her hallucinations as she succumbs to her illness is full of Mind Screw, Psychological Horror, and Painting the Medium. The entire sequence alternates between pictures, poetry, script format, apparent flashbacks, heavily formatted text, and normal text as Kasumi analyses her relationship to God, her boyfriend, those around her, and herself as she's dying. The idea of slowly dying of an injury is disturbing enough, but the bizarre imagery, sudden formatting, and existential horror is what pushes it into nightmare territory.
- Damion Castillo's slow decline after being abandoned by his friends at the Shipping Yard, spending a day alone there trying to drag himself out hindered by his injury. Culminating in him desperately trying to end his life as the area turns into a danger zone and failing.
- The deaths of Felicia LaChapelle and Sophie McDowell via poisoned soup. The effects of such a death are presented with chilling realism, and it's extra cruel considering that the two of them were some of the nicer remaining students and had wholly good intentions.
Virtua
- Tania Chell's weapon was a bottle of mysterious cloudy liquid simply labelled "Miracle Elixir." It's later revealed what exactly it is in her death thread. It's corrosive acid. There's a description of it landing on her corpse and dissolving her skin. At least she was already dead by that point.
- While not as overt as The Program or SOTF-TV, Virtua has some nightmarish elements in its lore. According to an in-universe document, side effects of playing the game include "moral, gender, sexuality dissonance, trauma, depression, stress, addiction, nausea, mental afflication, nightmares and tiredness." The Epilogue makes this aspect a little more clear: after the simulation is shut down, Rebecca Clark essentially has a mental breakdown when she realizes that everything she went through was part of someone else's entertainment, and that she's not even a teenage girl but a man. Her immediate reaction is to start harming herself. The death tag at the end, as well as the following post, heavily implies Rebecca is gone. The Epilogue ends with her player happily reminiscing about how life-like the game was, and how he'd bring a friend next time. There's the typical Downer Ending you'd expect from SOTF, and then there's... that.
EVO
- Billy-Jay Clarke looking right at the sun with his "ocular luminescence" (eyes that shine in the dark). It causes his power to overload and his eyes to melt out of his skull.
- Some of the abilities can be fairly horrifying in a Body Horror sort of way if you think about them too hard. For example, Johnny Marsh has his skin become transparent, but everything else is still visible, making him look similar to an anatomical model. Now imagine that you wake up on a Deserted Island knowing that there are a bunch of potentially Ax-Crazy people about and looking like that under a scuba suit that you're now wearing. Or how about Taryn Gregory's power, whose blood crystallizes upon exposure to oxygen and can be used as knives. Aside from the idea of crystallizing blood, the concept of what happens during certain times of the month has been brought up and discussed by handlers. Or the ability where you can turn parts of your body to stone, but you can't change it back. There's a lot of Fridge Horror in Evolution overall.
Supers
- Emily Zhou, having been without her suppressant medication, finally loses out to her Gift, graphically, viscerally, and painfully changing into her bat form, screaming all the while. Not only is the process itself horrific, but her complete loss of rational thought immediately results in her reacting to the person who had been trying to help her as a threat. Oh, and the others in the vicinity get to hear all of this going down. In the dark.
- Yvette Monday's Gift is existentially horrifying. Any kind of injury that breaks the skin causes her to lose matter until the wound heals. Her injuries can't be treated. The loss of matter can't be slowed and only reversed extremely slowly. All the way she steadily shrinks due to leaking from the wound. She can't feel pain, so she might not even realise she's hurt until after the fact, exemplified when she severed multiple fingers as a child. It's little wonder she's petrified of being hurt and averse to touch.
Cyber
- Kirsten Slagel, convinced that the game is nothing more than a prank and that there are no consequences within it, decides to opt out… with a spear gun.
- Gillian Kruger and Boston Sullivan get into a tiff over a misunderstanding, leading to Gillian hitting Boston over the head with a mirror she found. This results in the two of them being fused together in a flash of light. This leaves Jill completely helpless as Boston starts carving off parts of both her and himself in a bid to fix the problem.She dies after him. It might be the single most graphic moment in the version.
- Patrick Nguyen gives his allies a motivational speech atop a tank, jumping off afterward and landing on a car door. What follows is a prop glitch that sends Patrick plummeting through the map , frantically pleading for help before his radio goes dead. It is not entirely clear what happens to him after, but Kenton Zinn certainly thinks he’s still screaming.
