Working on cutting down TheDreaded.Real Life to remove examples that declared humans or human-operated weaponry to be this trope.
No examples of specific humans, groups of humans, or weapons used by humans in this section, please!
open/close all folders
Health
- In general, being diagnosed with a terminal illness or any illness that has no treatment is this. Tying into that, being told that your illness hasn't any other cases or that others with said illness have died before having intervention.
- Diseases can be pretty terrifying in this way too, such as cancer or AIDS.
- In the 1980s, AIDS was a mysterious disease no one knew about, except that it was fatal. Over time as more effective treatments and preventatives came out, it lost much of its dreaded title, though since there's no cure, it's still pretty dreaded.
- Cancer comes along in so many different forms, each one more or less deadly than the others. While some cancers like squamous-cell carcinoma
aren't very deadly, others like pancreatic cancer and lung cancer have much higher death rates and are considered much more threatening and scary.- AIDS and cancer are so dreaded that thinking you had it but being tested negative are known as AIDS scares or cancer scares.
- Then there's the granddaddy of them all, the Black Death, which took out 1/3rd of Europe. Let's just say that we're lucky that life today is a lot cleaner.
- The 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed anywhere between 5 to 10% of the planet, or about 100+ million people. World War I, recently concluded and infamous for being the bloodbath that destroyed Europe, killed less than 20 million. Unlike most other pandemics, this one primarily killed healthy young adultsnote , causing mass chaos and a breakdown of society since almost all those of working and reproductive age were either sick or dead. Even the most hardcore virologists — who tend to be a pretty crazy group of people to begin with — admit that they feel a nasty dose of fear every time a new mutation shows up in that particular influenza strain. Remember swine flu? A variant of H1N1, the same strain as the Spanish flu.
- Lyme Disease is shaping up to be one of these as carrying the disease it are discovered in an ever-growing area. The acute form of the disease is bad enough, but the chronic formnote can cause debilitating pain, blindness, and susceptibility to bacterial infections.
- Ebola is shaping up to be this, given that it's symptoms can lay dormant in the body for up to 21 days and, more often than not, people tend to die from the excessive bleeding, even if treated. Made more dreaded when there was an outbreak in 2014.
- Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease)is this to any farmer and consumer alike, as, there's no successful treatment for it and it's caused by a prion, which, unfortunately, as The Virus page notes, aren't killed by heat, which makes it a dangerous foodborne illness.
- On a (slightly) lighter note, there's injuries. Sure, a papercut is bad as those hurt like hell (because they cut through more sensitive nerves) but the most dreaded injuries are the ones that involve the head and spine, as those can lead to more permanent effects.
- One of the less talked about ones: Rabies. There's a reason it's recommended you get a rabies shot after every encounter with a hostile animal. Initial infection shows no symptoms for weeks, and by the time you begin to show, You Are Already Dead.
- And in 2020 came COVID-19, a highly contagious, sometimes fatal respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
- On an institutional level, it pushed the entire planet past the Godzilla Threshold, bringing the world to a standstill, closing businesses, schools, theme parks (including those owned by Disney), casinos (including in Las Vegas), causing major league sports to cancel their seasons, resulting in the unprecedented postponement of the Olympics, and leading authorities to ban gatherings and order people to stay in their own homes. The Catholic Church, which literally teaches that one can go to Hell for missing Sunday Mass, has canceled public church services. In fact, although the measures taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 may bring about a second Great Depression, this is seen as preferable to allowing the disease run unchecked.
- On a personal level, even as the Coronavirus Pandemic (hopefully) seems to be slowing down, being diagnosed with Covid is still a huge dreaded moment. Why? Because, thanks to the incubation period and alarmingly high transmission rate, you pretty much immediately have to go into quarantine, which means cancelling any and all plans you have (including work), and sheltering in place, while anyone who was even remotely near you, be it family, friends, or coworkers, within the past few days also has to get tested, which can lead to even more quarantines if and when more positive cases turn up, essentially snowballing on itself in a brutal cycle. Entire workplaces can end up shut down, and whole families can have their future plans ruined or massively revised by a single positive case that yields more cases.
- Fungal infections of any stripe are feared by medical professionals, and for good reason. Not only do they mostly show up in hospitals, where patients are usually already dealing with some other malady, they're extremely difficult to defeat, with debriding infected tissue, as much antifungal medication as they can get away with, and a lot of prayer being the only real viable treatment. For patients already critically ill or injured, the reaction of the medical staff invariably includes sitting down with the family and informing them that there's a high chance their loved one is going to die. The COVID-19 pandemic has made matters worse with overcrowded hospitals, overworked medical staff, and thousands upon thousands of patients on ventilators that if not cleaned regularly are an excellent infection vector for fungus.
Animals
- Honey badgers. They're famous for being avoided by every predator in Africa, and have been known to chase away elephants and eat (young) jackals and crocodiles. It's true, honey badger don't give a shit.
- Wolverines too. They've been known to chase away bears and cougars from their kills.
- Golden eagles have been spotted chasing grizzly bears and scaring badgers not dissimilar to honey badgers away from a meal.
- Orcas. Their mere presence in an aquatic biome has been recorded to scare away sharks (which already qualify as this to humans). After an orca attack, entire great white populations are known to vacate the premises, usually a feeding ground which sharks travel thousands of kilometers to get to.
- Locusts. These hungry little bastards never strike when expected and make every situation go From Bad to Worse, as they often come after droughts. Look at any point in the history of an agrarian society (which is most of them) and a swarm will be there. Populations have been forced to migrate because of locusts, and some modern surveillance of insects was created to specifically deal with them.
- Skunks are notorious for spraying potential predators, which leaves a very strong odor that's hard to get rid of and easy to smell even from a distance. Because of this, people avoid them at all costs.
- Any type of carnivorous predator (i.e lions, cheetahs, grizzly bears) is feared by humans and animals alike.
- Bears in particular have been considered this worldwide since antiquity. Many names used, regardless of language (bear, bruin, grizzly) refer to its color — it is simply "the brown one". This is because it was so feared as to be He Who Must Not Be Named, with the original name for the animal being forgotten to time due to superstitions that merely saying its would summon one. Being that bears will, on occasion, hunt humans if other prey is scarce, this is justified. They can also appear to be The Unfettered, since bees (themselves The Dreaded) don't deter them when elephants will avoid hives.
- Africanized honeybees, AKA killer bees. So called due to their higher aggression; they attack perceived threats much sooner than other bee types, and at closer range. Most bees will let you near a hive for about 30 seconds as long as you don't touch it and keep moving. Killer bees will attack merely within line of sight after only about 10 seconds and can chase for a quarter of a mile. They also aren't easily lost by jumping into water like regular bees — they wait for you to come up for breath or climb down your snorkel. They're actually no more poisonous than any other type of bee, but will send far more soldiers to defend the hive than most other species. All that said, there are far fewer deaths from "killer" bees than the regular kind, which are more often due to allergy.
- Gustave the crocodile. A giant man-eater from Burundi, Gustave embodies the Super-Persistent Predator trope and thus strikes fear in the hearts of both animals and humans in the area. His human death toll is said to be three hundred or more, he's Immune to Bullets, has all but laughed at the many pitiful attempts on his life and he's so vicious that even hippopotamuses (some of the most powerful, aggressive and dangerous animals in Africa) are terrified of himnote .
- Hippopotamuses themselves are also this. They are extremely aggressive and territorial, can run faster than humans even on land, and their jaws can chop a crocodile in half. Crocodiles and lions will almost never approach an idividual, and the hippos live in herds. It says a lot that Steve Irwin, who is best known for handling crocodiles and venomous snakes, claimed the most scary thing he has ever done is crossing a river full of hippos.
- Small as they are, centipedes are this in quite a few entomology labs. In addition to their highly toxic bite, they're quick and vicious little devils.
- The Humboldt Squid is one of the most feared creatures in the sea if you're fishing around in the waters near the Humboldt Current. These things are pretty big squid that are known to kill and eat fishermen, subjecting the victim to a Zerg Rush, tearing them apart with their beaks. They're also known cannibals, which fishermen take advantage of when they're specifically going after them. Researchers and recreational divers report the same; the squids have been known for attacking and wrecking cameras on sight and assaulting divers so often one man dedicated to their study had to start diving with body armor. Because of their fearsome reputation, and the fact that their skin often flashes red when in the midst of a struggle, they are known especially in the regions near the Sea of Cortez as El Diablo Rojo (the red devil).
- If you live in the Midwest, you get Japanese beetles. Besides being an invasive species, if your garden, lawn, or crops get infested, there isn't a lot you can do, as whatever you use could damage your plants or poison the whole town, traps can end up attracting more of them, and introducing predators might get your yard wrecked. Not helping is that prevention methods are also hit or miss and mostly deal with the grubs. As someone said, you can't control the Japanese beetle. They're also the reason why a law was made in 1912 outlawing imports of plants rooted in soil.
- Bedbugs. Not a lot to explain, except that they travel, are really discrete, and not too many exterminators know how to deal with them.
- The Asian Giant Hornet is this, owing to it being the largest hornet species on record, highly aggressive nature, and being a known predator to bees. Their reputation has led them to being dubbed ‘Murder Hornets’. When they were sighted in Washington, many fish and wildlife experts have scrambled to prevent their spread just to prevent these bugs from proliferating.
- Elephants. The largest land animal in the world, their sheer size means almost nothing will even think of attacking them. An entire pride of lions will scatter when one elephant comes their way. The above mentioned hippos and rhinos, the largest land animals after the elephant, are less than half their size. Elephants are strong enough to easily flip over either animal. In fact African elephants have been known to kill rhinos. In this video an elephant crosses a river while passing through a herd of hippos. The highly aggressive and territorial hippos all spread out and let the elephant cross with no resistance.
- As a contender from the spider kingdom, few arachnids are scarier than the Australian Funnel-webs, though one of the scariest has to be the Sydney Funnel-web; these are spiders that come from the Australian Outback, so it is no surprise that they're some of the biggest spiders in the world and fittingly equipped with a set of quite possibly the largest fangs on any spider. This species has not changed since the day spiders first appeared on the Earth, having been around since the time of the dinosaurs. While funnel-web venom is known to be potentially deadly without treatment, the Sydney Funnel-web is particularly known to be scary due to the fact that it is known to remember intruders in its territory, and has chased and bitten trespassers that have returned to its home.
Weather
- Hurricanes are the closest thing that real life has to kaiju: massive storms born from the sea that can devastate cities through wind and flooding. (Pacific Rim even made the comparison explicit.) In many of the world's tropical zones, building codes are written with the expectation that the building will likely get hit by a hurricane one day, and the possibility of such a storm arriving is considered good reason to evacuate everyone to higher ground. It doesn't stop some people from holding "hurricane parties" and riding out the storm in their homes, sometimes with predictable results; an urban legend claims that, during Hurricane Camille in 1969, twenty-three people died holding such a party, a tale that never actually happened but is often repeated to convince people to listen to the authorities when they tell you to pack your bags and get out.
- And among meteorologists who track hurricanes, few things set off more alarm bells than seeing a low-pressure system form off of Cape Verde. When a "Cape Verde hurricane" forms out here, it gets a very long running start, picking up steam across thousands of miles of warm ocean water before reaching land. The storms that result are massive and form the classical image of a hurricane, and while many of them go out to sea, those that hit land often make the record books.
- Lightning quickly turns into this for anybody involved in an aquatic activity. It is common practice for swimming pools and waterparks to close immediately the moment somebody so much as sees a lightning flash or hears thunder. Water carries the electrical charge from a lightning strike, so a strike in a body of water can zap everybody swimming within, like an Electrified Bathtub on a much larger scale.
Natural Features
- Mountains are a special case. It's not unusual for a massif to have at least one iconically difficult, defining feature to its name (e.g. the Eiger's infamous Mordwand), yet several other relatively direct summit routes, with the most hazardous routes a feather in the cap of accomplished climbers. Some mountains, however, are simply viewed as an achievement just to survive, let alone climb:
- Annapurna may have been the first 8000+ meter peak to be summited, but that hasn't stopped it from regularly entering conversation as the deadliest of any of them— for every three who summit, one climber dies. Its 3-kilometer south face, a front runner for the most difficult climb on Earth, is just the most visibly extreme example of its tendency to collect avalanches like so much pocket change. It's dangerous to just be around, as avalanches and storms at its foot can easily wipe out dozens of trekkers or prospective climbers at a time. Oh, and there are multiple smaller summits, all just as avalanche- and rockfall-prone.
- What K2 loses out to Mt. Everest in height, it makes up for in climbing difficulty by orders of magnitude. Rising steeply above one a region so inaccessible and remote that the mountain itself has no local name, it's an almost entirely exposed climb and the bottlenecking profile near the summit means you're basically staring down the barrel of a gun. Warm weather will start dropping seracs and avalanches on you, whereas the storms the area is known for can trap climbers in place far longer than any human can survive the cold, altitude or lack of oxygen. The "easiest" route up the mountain is littered with old ropes that were simply too difficult for their owners to remove in a safe timeframe, whereas the most demanding route has never been repeated and called sucidal by some of the world's most famous climbers. It was the very last of the eight-thousanders to have ever been climbed in winter— in 2021— and the only one of them to never have been climbed from the east face. With a summit-to-fatality rate of four-to-one, its moniker of "The Savage Mountain" is very well-earned.
- Nanga Parbat differs somewhat from the above two in being much less remote— it's the western anchor of the Himalayas, clearly visible from the idyllic greenery of the nearby Fairy Meadows. Its insane vertical relief and lack of cover on all three of its faces also negates this as a mitigating factor (Its southern Rupal Face is the highest mountain wall on Earth, and it's Everest's only partner in the top twenty of both highest and most prominent peaks on the planet) and makes any ascent as technically difficult and deadly as Annapurna or K2— prior to 1990 it may have been even deadlier than either, said to have a descending fatality rate of 77% among those who managed to summit. The first ascent by Austrian climber Herman Buhl reads like something out of a horror film, with him forced to sleep standing alone on a narrow ledge to get through the night, and needing amphetamines to muster the strength to complete his forty-hour summit push. Like K2, it has also earned a revealing sobriquet— "Killer Mountain".
- Because of the way they channel the otherwise-uninhibited wind and ocean currents of the southern latitudes, Cook Strait in New Zealand and the Drake Passage near Cape Horn are considered some of the most fearsome and dangerous waterways in the world. Each has its own twist: Cook Strait basically forces currents to run perpendicular to their normal flow all the time due to local geography, while the Drake Passage is much easier and safer to sail West-to-East... but you had to sail East-to-West if you were a European power who wanted access to the west coast of the Americas. Cue sailor's graveyard.
Chemistry
- Chemists tend to be quite scared of working with fluorine, both in its elemental form and with some of its compounds, due to the fact it's tremendously energetic, touchy as hell, nearly impossible to dislodge from a compound without some drastic measures and it can produce some of the nastiest compounds imaginable, including chlorine trifluoride (which can set asbestos on fire on contact), dioxygen difluoride (hard to make, thankfully, but will explode even when close to absolute 0) and hydrofluoric acid (which can seep painlessly through your skin and dissolve your skeleton from the inside out, and can eat through most types of glass). The fact enough people died studying it that they're collectively known as the fluorine martyrs only caps it off.
- As radioactive elements go, Polonium and Plutonium enjoy particular notoriety for the sheer danger in handling them. Select isotopes of the former have a toxicity 250,000 times that of hydrogen cyanide. It's slower than cyanide, though, causing your body to slowly, agonizingly fail over a period of days as alpha particles shred your insides beyond repair at a molecular level. Beyond its obvious nuclear weapons association, Plutonium's intense radioactivity means it can cause criticality accidents with itself in the presence of an effective neutron reflector, most notoriously with the so-called "Demon Core" in the 40s, which killed scientists on two separate occasions.
- When it comes to compounds, any that contains a large number of nitrogen atoms makes chemists increasingly nervous in direct proportion to the number of Ns in the formula. Chemicals with a large number of nitrogen atoms tend to be Made of Explodium, some so absurdly unstable that literally just looking at it will cause it to violently explode (because looking at it needs light, and ordinary light will set it off).
