Now with a sandbox!
It appears that many Nightmare Fuel pages have problems, including:
1. Listing non-scary things that made the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable at worst.
2. Having spoiler tags on them (which is against the page's guidelines).
3. Listing Fridge Horror and fan theories.
And much more!
On a few occasions, people from outside the site's community have pointed out our overly lax usage of Nightmare Fuel to make fun of us, meaning that it can legitimately harm our reputation to let this go unchecked.
The TRS thread
meant for redefining Nightmare Fuel started to become a place for cleaning up Nightmare Fuel pages in general, so we may as well move these discussions to Long Term Projects where they belong.
Here are the guidelines to determine whether something is Nightmare Fuel or not.
- This is a page whose name is intended to be taken more literally than most. It's not enough for material to be scary; to truly qualify, it has to be frightening enough to legitimately unnerve/disturb the viewer, with actually being nightmare-inducing as the ultimate endpoint.
- Good signs that something IS Nightmare Fuel include if:
- It left you feeling shaken even after the credits had rolled, you turned the last page, or are otherwise done with the work.
- You have a hard time falling asleep if you think about it at night, or have a literal nightmare about it.
- You dread that episode, scene, level, chapter, or song during re-watches, and consider skipping it.
- With that said, don't add something just because it happens to be your personal phobia. For example, spiders can be scary and many people have arachnophobia, but just because a spider happens to be in the work, it does not make a Nightmare Fuel entry. It needs to reasonably be scary to someone without the phobia.
- Don't confuse tension with fear. If the hero is in trouble, but you know he'll make it out okay at the end, it's probably not Nightmare Fuel unless the threat is especially disturbing.
- Good signs that something IS Nightmare Fuel include if:
- Explain WHY the entry scared you. Try to convey your sense of fear to your readers. Avoid putting up Zero-Context Examples.
- Remember that Weblinks Are Not Examples, and neither are quotes on their own. You should explain the horror in your own words, rather than rely on others to do so.
- Don't add things that might have scared someone. If it didn't scare you, and you don't personally know anyone else who was scared, you shouldn't be adding it to Nightmare Fuel.
- Nightmare Fuel should stick to you even after you're done with the work.
- If something is initially presented as scary but turns out to be harmless, it's most likely not Nightmare Fuel since The Reveal makes the scariness vanish.
- Jump Scares are a good source of Nightmare Fuel, but not all of them automatically qualify: being startled is not the same as being scared.
- Hypotheticals are not Nightmare Fuel:
- Remember that Trailers Always Lie: a scene that is presented as scary in the trailer could very well turn out to be inoffensive in the finished work. Only add examples from unreleased works if they were especially terrifying in the previews.
- Fan theories do not belong on the Nightmare Fuel page under any circumstance. No matter how much evidence they have to support them, don't add them until they've been officially confirmed. In the meanwhile, take them to Wild Mass Guessing.
- Fridge Horror goes on the Fridge page, not Nightmare Fuel. Don't add it unless it's Ascended Fridge Horror.
- Keep in mind the work's intended audience when considering whether or not something is Nightmare Fuel.
- If something is normal or expected in the genre, it does not automatically qualify. Violence in a Fighting Series or gore in a horror movie must be especially disturbing or gruesome by the work's standards to be Nightmare Fuel.
- Remember that Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films. If a work is rated PG-13 or higher but would only be scary to young children, it's not Nightmare Fuel.
- The standards on what qualifies as Nightmare Fuel are especially stringent on works aimed at children and pre-teens: kids have hyperactive imaginations, so even something benign can give them nightmares.
- Spoiler tags do not belong on Nightmare Fuel pages. Much of what scares us comes from inherently spoilery stuff such as death and the unknown, so finding spoilers on these pages should be expected.
- Nightmare Fuel is an Audience Reaction, so it needs to be scary for the audience. Describing how the characters react to something scary isn't needed. Just because something scares them, that doesn't mean it scares us as well.
- Nightmare Fuel is a No Real Life Examples, Please! page. Meta-examples involving the actors, production, or behind-the-scenes incidents are not allowed.
Guidelines when proposing cleanup of a page:
- Some rules are pretty objective. If you see a Zero-Context Example, Fridge Horror, Real Life example, speculation, In-Universe reaction that isn't scary to the viewers, examples that explicitly describe themselves as not being very scary (including "mildly creepy", "somewhat unnerving", and other synonymous phrases), or examples that are just scene summaries without going into detail about why it's so scary, you can (and should) remove them immediately without coming here to ask.
- You should also strip all spoiler tags from the page. Itty Bitty Wiki Tools has a tool for that, but it can cause problems, so if you use it be sure to preview the page and thoroughly look it over.
- Once you've fixed the objective issues with the page, bring it here so we can look at the more subjective problems, such as examples that may not be scary enough to qualify. If a consensus is reached that a certain entry does not qualify, it can be removed.
Edited by Zuxtron on Aug 1st 2020 at 9:40:30 AM
I'd argue the Smoky Progg, Waterwraith, Plasm Wraith, and maaaaaaybe the "Olimar with blood in his mouth" bait-and-switch are worth saving (because they're actually intended to be scary), but yeah, everything else is Fridge Horror or just not particularly notable. I can probably rewrite those four to condense them/focus on why they're scary.
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
I agree that nearly all of the Pikmin examples are Fridge Horror or overreacting.
This was added to NightmareFuel.Death Battle:
- Weiss vs Mitsuru
- During Mitsuru's rundown, Boomstick was able to "accurately" tell the type of explosion Mitsuru survived was guarantee to kill. Wiz at first insist on using real science, but Boomstick flat out admits of using actual people for experiment to tell the explosion's lethal potential. Wiz then questions whether he used the interns for this, but Boomsticks bought him off with the fur coat Mitsuru had. Boomstick has killed interns for sciences.
I deleted a similar example earlier today since it's an offscreen death that's completely Played for Laughs in a show that normally features lots of brutal on-screen violence and death, but someone else added it back and I don't want to get into an Edit War.
There are also these examples from the Wario vs. Dedede episode that are similarly Played For Laughs and not exceptionally brutal by the show's standards:
- Wario vs King Dedede
- After Wario and Dedede lose their respective disguises, a Goomba and Waddle Dee experience a jaw drop out of shock. The issue? Waddle dees don't actually have mouths, meaning that the dee rips a bloody hole in its face, with two strips of flesh connecting the top and bottom. Made worse by how comedic the episode as a whole was.
- Of course, this may or may not be mitigated by having both explode right afterwards as part of a Visual Pun.
- Despite the humor of it, Wario's death was pretty gruesome. After Dedede plugs up his ass, he gets blown up from the inside by the Waft he was charging.
- After Wario and Dedede lose their respective disguises, a Goomba and Waddle Dee experience a jaw drop out of shock. The issue? Waddle dees don't actually have mouths, meaning that the dee rips a bloody hole in its face, with two strips of flesh connecting the top and bottom. Made worse by how comedic the episode as a whole was.
How much should be cut from NightmareFuel.The Legend Of Zelda Breath Of The Wild, more specifically the section about the sequel's E3 trailer? It is a pretty spooky trailer, so I don't think the section itself is without merit, but there's so little that can concretely be said about it that the section will be and to a degree already is a magnet for groundless speculation and attempts to jam in anything that could be construed as spooky. I wouldn't be averse to a straight cut.
At the very least, I think the example about the rat, the kinda hysterical example about the trailer "probably being how the game starts", and the mondegreen video example and subexamples are easy cuts.
Edited by Tawa on Jun 13th 2019 at 2:06:24 PM
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
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I agree that a lot of this is Fridge Horror or very mild, and ought to be deleted.
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I got rid of a bunch of blatant misuse and speculation, plus the rat which was a Zero-Context Example. I also removed the image, since Creating a Work Page for an Upcoming Work says that unreleased works don't get images for their "moments" pages.
Do we really have to remove the image? It's a great, high-quality, scary image, unlike a lot of moments images for unreleased works.
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
Images are explicitly not allowed on unreleased works' moments pages:
- If you create a Moments (i.e. Heartwarming/, Awesome/, etc.) page for the work prior to its release to the public, do not add an image to the page, as these are often poor quality screencaps from trailers, may not have the proper context just based on the trailer, and the entire work may have something that works better than anything that was in the ads or trailers.
If you disagree with that rule, bring it up in the unreleased works cleanup thread.
Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers could be looked at. Some examples don't seem so good, some are Played for Laughs, and there's a fair amount of Zero-Context Examples as well. And don't forget about everyone's favorite friend Fridge Horror.
"It was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times?"This entry on NightmareFuel.Atop The Fourth Wall seems more humorous than scary.
- The Star Wars: The Force Awakens Comic Adaptation review takes an immediate
left turn as Linkara makes his opinion clear on the hatedom for The Last Jedi.
Linkara: SHUT UP!
Edit reasons should be mandatory. Along with some other things, we need to know why people keep adding this stuff to Nightmare Fuel. Are they actual 12 year olds or something?
I mean. Sonic Mania. Has an actual Nightmare Fuel page. With seven examples.
I'm not even going to bother analyzing it, absolutely zero things in Sonic Mania will give you nightmares. In my personal opinion some of it is Sweet Dreams Fuel, but I digress. Let's please just cut that page.
Anyway I've also cut down the NF page for Super Smash Bros 4, I still haven't figured out how exactly to rewrite Master Core's section. I do think Master Core fits into NF but the entry is way to hyperbolic and full of uneeded italics and bold.
Sturgeon's Law is too YMMV for page examples, so WHY is it not a YMMV trope!?I suspect they are the same crowd that keep asking for Darker and Edgier shows, paradoxically.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesCan you believe MLP has such a bad page, it's separated by episodes? Aside from Tirek being a Satanic Archetype I can't imagine much that will give you nightmares in a slice of life show like that.
Edited by Klavice on Jun 16th 2019 at 2:31:39 AM
Seconding that edit reasons should be mandatory.
I'd like to point out that one of these "immature"-sounding examples (specifically one on Kirby that got cut) was notorious to the point of attracting off-site complaints. It would do us a great service to pinpoint where all of this is coming from and, more importantly, why.
"If you spent as much time fightin' as ye did hidin', maybe this wouldn't have happened!"I'm gonna go add "Mandatory edit reasons" to the wishlist, because dear god.
Anyway, these pages are trash and need to be cleaned.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallOh yeah on the MLP page I forgot the fact that multiple characters have a Sanity Slippage which can be pretty freaky. Aside from those though, yeah it's a pretty bad page.
Edited by Klavice on Jun 16th 2019 at 2:49:56 AM
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
What My Little Pony examples did you have in mind as needing a looking at?
The pages for My Little Pony used to be much, MUCH worse (as in, literally every single episode had at least one example). When this cleanup project got started (back in a TRS thread), cleaning up the most blatant exaggerations and Fridge Horror was one of the first things I did.
That said, there is plenty of stuff that is pretty dark, and the show could definitely scare more sensitive viewers. We're all grown-ups here, but the show is still marketed to children who are much more impressionable when it comes to scary stuff. I've even seen some adult fans get freaked out by certain episodes. We shouldn't go overboard and delete everything.
Since I stopped watching the show, I stopped looking after these pages, so examples from season 7 and later might have more misuse than before.

I say axe most of the Pikmin page. Most of it is our good friend Fridge Horror and everything else is scary to some, not generally scary. I mean Pikmin is no Sugar Bowl but it's certainly not the dark, edgy, genocide inducing game people think it is.
Edited by Klavice on Jun 13th 2019 at 6:40:37 AM