http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/WanderingWitchTheJourneyOfElaina
This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
The series doesn't pull its punches in highlighting how dark Elaina's world is:
- "The Girl as Pretty as a Flower":note Episode 3A The flesh-eating flowers, which puts anyone without magic into a hallucination before eating them.
- Even before it's revealed what has happened to the girl, there's just something wrong about her from her mannerisms to her facial expressions.
- The ending, good god. Early in the episode, Elaina visits the village near the flower field and meets a young soldier whose sister recently went missing, the titular "girl" whom Elaina met in the field at the beginning. The following evening, Elaina visits the field one last time before departing, only to find the soldier "reuniting" with his sister... who has now transformed into a large plant. Having clearly lost his mind and body to the flowers, the soldier declares that they should share the flower field with "everyone in the country" as he embraces his sibling, whose vines slowly start to consume him. Elaina flies off clearly disturbed, while we cut to a shot of infected human-plant zombies quietly lumbering towards the unknowing town. Then the segment ends, and is never brought up again for the rest of the episode.
- "Bottled Happiness":note Episode 3B Nino's story as a depressed and abused slave ends on in-universe Fridge Horror.
- "The Princess Without Subjects":note Episode 4 The viewers get to see just how powerful witches can be with Mirarosé descending into madness as she leaves her kingdom in ruins.
- Wonder how terrible Mirarosé's father is? If murdering his daughter's lover isn't bad enough, he also had her child, his grandchild, die. No wonder Mirarosé snapped.
- In retribution for the loss of her lover and her child, Mirarosé forcibly transforms her father into a hideous monster that'll kill and devour anything in its path. All the while her father's consciousness remains present but forever be unable to control the body's actions. Call it justified or disproportionate, the fact that Mirarosé caused the ruination of her whole kingdom in retribution for the execution of her lover and child is terrifying.
- Javalier is nothing to sneeze at either, being a fire-breathing dark dragon-like abomination whose many insectoid legs make it look like a demonic centipede Kaiju. But if Javalier wasn't creepy enough, once Mirarosé establishes her dominance over the beast and its relationship to her, the brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown she delivers to Javalier once he's been rendered helpless becomes the truly unnerving thing.
- While Elaina doesn't show it, she's terrified of the true Mirarosé and immediately flies away, knowing that if she stays there, she'll probably meet the same fate as the king and the subjects. In the anime, the episode ends with Mirarosé having breakfast with her imaginary lover and her imaginary child, completely oblivious to the fact that she's talking to herself.
- "Retroactive Grief":note Episode 9 is probably the darkest and most violent episode in the anime so far due to the nature of its antagonist and its bloody and depressing resolution. It even comes with a disclaimer right off the bat that the story's content may be inappropriate for some viewers due to the grisly subject matter of the episode.
- Selena, Estelle's childhood friend, is revealed to be an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer, even in the past due to the amount of abuse she got from her parents. By the time Elaina and Estelle meet with her the time the murder of her parents was set to take place, we see Estelle wounded from her fight with Selena, and the only way Selena could be put down is with a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and decapitation from Estelle, at the cost of her memories of Selena. By the end of the episode, Elaina is so deeply affected by the events that she takes off without the money and breaks down in tears from the whole ordeal, while having to live with the knowledge that nobody but her will ever remember what happened. The usual ending music plays without the beautiful imagery this time around.
- Selena manages to figure out that not only the two witches that tried to intervene in her plans are actually from the future but that one of them is Estelle. Had the older Estelle not murdered Selena, the latter would most have likely come after the younger versions of her and Elaina.
- The ordeal raises a question - what would past Estelle have done to her future self after seeing her murder past Selena?
- The No-Holds-Barred Beatdown is depicted by the anime in an absolutely brutal fashion. Estelle slams Selena into a wall with a flying barrel, and then starts to flay her alive by means of Magic Missile Storm. Even as her body gets increasingly mutilated to horrific effect, Selena continues to laugh maniacally and giddily describes how much pain she's in. All of this culminates with Estelle wringing Selena's neck with what amounts to a magical noose and, after sacrificing her memories of Selena to fuel her magic, chokes her so hard that it straight-up tears her head from her shoulders, complete with a Sickening "Crunch!". The audience is then treated to a final shot of Selena's headless body crumpling to the floor beside her bloodied head, still sporting wide-open eyes and her signature Slasher Smile.
- Worse still, when the witches return to the present, a bloodied Estelle is last seen in a dark room - totally immobile, barely able to speak, and blissfully unaware of what she had just done as Elaina hightails it out of there. Considering that she had already been rendered anemic from the time travel, the fact that she had multiple stab wounds from Selena, and the fact that her final outburst had caused her to start bleeding from her eyes and mouth, it's not too far-fetched to infer that Estelle died shortly after returning to the present. If she really did die, then in the end it was truly All for Nothing, and Elaina had to both watch a new companion violently murder a child using her powers, and see said companion die before her eyes.
- The music that is used when Estelle executes Selena, it's terrifying. You can hear it for yourself here.
- The music is called "A Cruel Sign Drifting in the Dark". Befitting for its meaning that there are things that are beyond saving and turn into horrible destructions.
- "Until The Snow Melts": This chapter is pretty infamous in the fandom for its dark and depressing storyline.
- "The Cursed Slave" in Volume 6 not only reminds the reader that slavery is very much a thing in the setting, but manages to be pretty horrifying through the backstory of the titular cursed slave, Hestia. Her mother, the "Witch of Curses", served a country that eventually fell in a bloody war, and all of the country's children were captured to be sold as slaves. Hestia's mother, disguised as a hideous witch, cursed Hestia as she was about to be sold so that anyone who laid a finger Hestia would eventually come to die under grisly, suspicious circumstances—a fate which befell all of her eventual owners except the last, a mercenary named Giulio. Giulio came to know Hestia and care for her as a person, and they settled in the Wandering Wood, a cursed forest, to escape from society and also from the witch who had cursed Hestia—again, her mother, who they had heard was searching for the slave she had cursed so long ago. Eventually, the Witch of Curses came to learn that Hestia was in the Wandering Wood, and came to find her, only to be slain by Hestia—by her own daughter. By the time Elaina arrives on the scene, it's too late—Giulio is burying the Witch of Curses and as he happily tells Elaina how he's waiting for Hestia's mother to come give approval now that the curse has been lifted, it's all Elaina can do to tell the reader—and avoid telling him—that his prospective mother-in-law will never give approval, as she is dead by their hands.
