All I know is that, if Nightmare Fuel really means "scary to kids", then judging by the omnipresent potholes to it, the majority of tropers are a lot younger then they seem.
Personally, I think they've both decayed into meaninglessness, and it's just not worth the effort to try and clean them up.
edited 6th Mar '11 7:37:40 PM by nrjxll
Actually, High Octane Nightmare Fuel is for extremely terrifying things, Nightmare Fuel is only creepy, and loltroperhate
Was Jack Mackerel. | i rite gudYou know, there's a basic solution.
Scrap High Octane, let people post whatever they think is scary on Nightmare Fuel and don't mention it where it's not necessary.
edited 7th Mar '11 12:52:50 PM by halfmillennium
This isnt the first time this came up. And every time this was brought up, consensus was to keep it the way it is. What makes you think that this time will be any different ?
He who fights bronies should see to itthat he himself does not become a brony. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, Pinkie Pie gazes AlsoNightmare Fuel is a term older than the wiki. High Octane Nightmare Fuel is a bad name at worst but it means stuff that was meant to give grown people nightmares. Its actually more related to Defanged Horrors, stuff meant to scare kids.
Because people liked the page it was kept Just for Fun, Adult Fear is the real trope, Defanged Horror is for stuff meant to scare kids and Nightmare Fuel is for stuff not meant to be scary but scared kids anyway. Get it?
Modified Ura-nage, Torture RackOn that subject, I really need to take Defanged Horrors to Trope Repair. That name is completely counter-intuitive.
I just wanna know why the High Octane Nightmare Fuel pages have received such a massive overhaul. It seems to have become the Lighter and Fluffier version of its old self. Not that I should prbably be complaining...
Do not obey in advance.Well, now that we have Accidental Nightmare Fuel, I suggest turning Nightmare Fuel into an index, which lists related tropes like Accidental Nightmare Fuel and High Octane Nightmare Fuel and the sources thereof. (There's already a fair bit of overlap between sources of the two anyway.)

Nightmare Fuel
High Octane Nightmare Fuel
Supposedly, the distinction between these two tropes is that the former is for what was accidentally scary, and the latter was for what was scary on purpose.
Well, for one thing, in practice this is often not the basis on which they are used (see this post
where someone claimed they thought it was about scary for kids vs. scary for adults; a misinterpretation that was shared by Kobold in the page history of the video game section of HONF.
(Search "Sly Cooper")
In any case, intentional vs. accidental seems to be oversimplifying it; things like in what sense they are scary, or to what extent, ("scary" is more of a continuous sliding scale than a binary all-or-none distinction) are not taken into account.
That said, I do think there is some value to the distinction; they still seem to refer to different kinds of scariness. Nightmare Fuel has various subtypes associated with it; sometimes it is used for that which is accidentally scary, and sometimes for that which is mildly scary but on purpose, but I would say the distinction between the latter of those and High Octane Nightmare Fuel is that H.O.N.F tends to involve things that are scary in far more unconventional ways.
Just look at the H.O.N.F sections of Pans Labyrinth, or The Legend Of Zelda, or Web Animation; notice something? These tend to display bizarre forms of scariness as opposed to the deliberately mildly scary stuff associated with Nightmare Fuel, which seems to often be associated with conventionally scary stuff in the cliched halloween-ish sense, (stuff like witches, vampires, etc.) the kinds we have gotten so used to that they are the often subjects of parody.
Am I onto something here or is my interpretation off?
edited 6th Mar '11 7:00:18 PM by neoYTPism