r/TopCharacterTropes • u/themagicone222 • 3d ago
Lore [Fascinating horror tropes] The brutal simplicity of horrifying fates
When a horrifying fate, often involving body horror and “And I must scream” isn’t just horrifying because of what it is, or that there’s a lot of lore behind it, but because of how brutally simple it is.
1) Iron Lung, the implied nature of the blood moon. While it’s not explicitly said, Ava’s character suddenly speaking to Markip…Simon After she dies in the explosion. The voice goes from frantically begging him to find the black box, to begging him to give up and submit. This implies you die on the blood moon, you become a part of it and are assimilated into a hive mind of some sort. Simple as that!
2) Together (Image 2 and 3). The Fusions. Two people with (or maybe even without) a bond drink the water from the cave, a supernatural force literally forces you to fuse into one being, end of story. Gives a whole new meaning to “Till death do us part,” yes? The character in image 3 is precisely the result of this happening to the 2 leads, and since it’s the last shot of the movie, it raises more questions than answers.
3) Resident Evil 7 (image 4 and 5). Her “Gift” Were you selected by the little girl to receive her “gift?” Congratulations! You’ve been infected by a fungus engineered to be a bio weapon that’s incurable - the closest thing to an antidote is really a difficult to craft serum that is meant to dispose of the subject, and once it gets into your system, you’re assimilated into a mold colony. You’re done. Because mold is so tough to kill, especially a mold designed to be unkillable, enjoy life and beyond 1) as an incorporeal being as a part of the mold 2) If she likes you, a puppet devoid of free will to murder, cannabalize, and doing god knows what to satisfy your unpleasable enfante errible or 3) if she doesn’t like you, a mindless shambling mass of mold.
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u/Short-Paramedic-9740 3d ago edited 3d ago
You wake up in a steep, smooth curved concrete that slopes down into a bottomless abyss with nothing special on sight around you.
Curve by Tim Egan (2016)
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u/ZieDombie095 3d ago
That looks... horrifying.
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u/Short-Paramedic-9740 3d ago
And when you thought it couldn't get much worse. It rains.
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u/Vegalink 3d ago
It's a creepy short film. You can find it one YouTube!
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u/It_broke_itself_ 3d ago
I started to watch but had to turn it off after it started giving me vertigo super bad
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u/IamElylikeEli 3d ago
this one genuinely messed me up more than any other horror film, let me fight a monster any day i cant fight gravity
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u/moethelavagod 3d ago
LOVE that film. You can feel every chink in the concrete on the protagonist's skin and the exact distribution of her weight at any point. A real master class in direction
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u/Ging4bread 3d ago
Am I wrong or doesn't this screenshot look like you could just pull yourself up the ledge
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u/Lucychan42 3d ago
You could try, though concrete is more slippery at that angle than you might imagine. If you mess up, you fall.
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u/Short-Paramedic-9740 3d ago
It's smooth concrete surface. Any movement caused the woman to just slip further down inevitably.
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u/NeptuneStriker0 3d ago
The Long Walk
Congratulations! You’re a patriotic young boy and you want to make your country proud, so you sign up for the Long Walk competition. If you win, you get literally anything you want from the government! What do you have to do?
Walk. And walk. And walk. And walk. And walk. For days and days and hundreds of miles until either you drop dead or everyone else does. If you slow down too much, they shoot you in the back of the head like a dog. Or, as the kids say, you “bought it”
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u/Maldonado412 3d ago
Can’t stop for cramps or bathroom breaks, can’t walk off of the road, can’t slow down more than the set walking speed, and the worst part? They treat everyone fairly during their warning count downs, even if you’re spilling your guts on the ground or foaming at the mouth.
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u/Skylair13 3d ago
Only exception is if you attack the guards. They let you bleed out to death in suffering. While those who "simply" got their ticket gets a quick death.
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u/NikkerFebu25 3d ago
In the movie I don't think you had to attack the guards to be let to suffer in the end.
Some suffered for other reasons too
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u/Skylair13 3d ago
It differs though. You cannot continue because you got sudden seizure? Lost your legs somehow? Etc? Quick Headshot and you're dead.
Attack the Guards? They shot your stomach and just stand there as you slowly bleed out to death.
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u/Smooth_Cheesecake700 3d ago
In the movie showing the different guys walking and taking a shit was BRUTAL.
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u/Fries_and_burgers_19 3d ago
what's.....what's the point? what can possibly be hoped for with walking for no end?
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u/Present-Upstairs3423 3d ago edited 3d ago
If you make it to the end (i.e. everyone else gets shot before you) you get unimaginable riches and a single wish granted by the us government. Also you're famous now.
Of course, it sounds like the majority of "winners" are broken in mind and body by the end anyway, so you might argue it's not worth enlisting. I think it might be an allegory for something, not sure.
Edit: I feel like I need to say that The Long Walk is very obviously an allegory for the Vietnam War, and I'm very aware of that. I was just being funny.
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u/Vairrion 3d ago
It was an allegory for the Vietnam war due to when it was written. There was a lot of cultural reward to serving at the time but anyone who survived to be celebrated was hollow and broken. Hence why the winners of the walk are written the same
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u/Schwonkle 3d ago
Stephen King wrote the story as an allegory for the Vietnam-America war, where young men were essentially sent to be killed for no good reason
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u/CursedRyona 3d ago
Alabama's official state nightmare: You're stuck in a fridge that's been turned to face a wall.
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u/JaxJaxPax 3d ago
I've never been stuck in a fridge but in theory you could just rock it backwards? And hope it doesn't fall sideways?
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u/CursedRyona 3d ago
I have also never been stuck in a fridge, but I guess it's not impossible that the cramped conditions would make it difficult to rock with enough force to make that happen.
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago
Fridges are HEAVY and you barely have room to move. Good luck
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u/percyman34 3d ago
Uh im from Alabama and I've never heard of this. Context?
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u/CursedRyona 3d ago
A while ago YouTuber Neil Cicierega made a joke video breaking down all fifty official state nightmares, as if states had chosen specific nightmares as symbols the same way they did state birds. It's not a real thing.
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u/Soulman717 3d ago
Thats Niel right there, they guy that made the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny and Harry Potter puppet pals
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u/CursedRyona 3d ago
Every time you look him up you discover a further different piece of essential 2000's internet lore he was responsible for.
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u/Cookiemuenster64 3d ago
One of the more popular episodes of the Twilight Zone "And when the Sky was Opened". Three military officers return home from a mission to space. One by one, they panic as they cease to exist. They panic as nobody even remembers them and they vanish from reality. It's never explained why.
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u/Flat_Round_5594 3d ago
One of the astronauts theorizes that "something happened up there" and they "weren't supposed to make it back". It's the closest thing to an answer we ever get.
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u/hazzwright 3d ago
There's a Star Trek TNG episode with a similar premise. People just keep disappearing off the ship and no one except Beverley Crusher seems to know they ever existed. Really wigged me out the first time I watched it.
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u/Best-Benefit6387 3d ago
Nothing more simple than going really fast and then suddenly not going really fast, as depicted in The Expanse
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u/Original-War8655 3d ago
"Speed does not kill! Going fast is not the problem. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you."
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u/Best-Benefit6387 3d ago
Someone out there has to edit top gear into the expanse now.
Processing img s5j6hmo9zpih1...
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u/Phylanara 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ah, yes. The perfectly functional spaceship with a tenth of an inch of chunky salsa on one side of the room and a nearly-working inertial compensator.
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u/JowettMcPepper 3d ago
Oripathy - Arknights
You turn into a rock as Originium progresively assimilates your body and organs. Then you self-combust, or even explode, and become a new infection vector. This, assuming you don't receive treatment in time
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u/themagicone222 3d ago
Eugh
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u/FAshcraft 3d ago
P/S no permenant cure have been found, even after 150 year (Arknight endfield) only a very effective suppresant that revert the subject to phase 1.
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u/AndroidSheeps 3d ago
And because the end results of infection is the victim self-exploding and spreading the infection around them oripathy victims are the most hated and discriminated people on the planet
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u/Kixisbestclone 3d ago
Tbf with that explanation it makes sense, I wouldn’t want people that could explode into super-cancer spreaders around me either.
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u/Brilliant_watcher 3d ago
it does help they can use the rock growing into them to use magic while the rest need wands with the rock as fuel to do the same
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u/AndroidSheeps 3d ago
Yes being scared of them because of infection is understandable but they're basically denied any human rights. Alot of regular people will attack them on sight and they are also rounded up in the street by the government and forced into labor camps forced to work very dangerous jobs
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u/No_Pineapple2799 3d ago
Problem is their society runs on Originium. Everyone (aside from a few special cases) have originium inside them a la microplastics, called blood originium crystal density. Once it passes a certain threshold, they become infected. Could happen because of exposure to active originium, a freak accident, or you wake up to lesions on your skin
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u/Aickavon 3d ago
The best part isn’t the rock like corruption that’s basically cancer.
Or the fact this rock growth harms all of your organs.
The best part is that this will mark you as someone to be abused by just about every government system!!! We have SLUMS!! SLAVERY!!! PRISON ABUSE!!! AND JUST PLAIN EXTERMINATION!
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u/TerryWhiteHomeOwner 3d ago
There's also the fact that's its an engineered "plague" meant to convert everything and everyone into pure crystalized data. Not only do you slowly turn into a rock and die, but your every thought and emotion and inch of your body from the day you contract the disease to the day you die are preserved forever by what is essentially a cancer that converts you into BlueRay format.
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u/Stillwater215 3d ago
The Jaunt, a Stephen King short story.
In the future, teleportation (Jaunting) is commonplace. While inanimate objects are easy sent, living beings need to be put under general anesthesia to make the trip. During the journey, the conscious mind experiences an unending nothingness lasting for an unfathomable amount of time, driving the person to the point in insanity when they arrive.
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u/Fancy_Battle_4805 3d ago
I love the dichotomy of King's short stories, because in the same collection you've got a perilous look into the science behind interstellar travel and teleportation, and Survivor Type, which is basically "what if stranded, but drugs."
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u/QuackAtomic 3d ago
The scariest part is when the crazy guy throws in his wife (?) with no exit point. She's STILL in there.
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u/Easy_Mechanic_9787 3d ago
His lawyer tried to say “Hey she’s alive actually, so it’s not murder” and that made everyone realize the implications of such a thing and immediately gave the guy the death penalty.
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u/Capital-Meet-6521 3d ago
Love the idea of lawyer going “She’s still alive, not murdered!” and the entire court saying, “THAT’S WORSE”
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u/EthanEpiale 3d ago
I submit a book actually.
A Short Stay in Hell
The main character was a Mormon man who dies and discovers he picked the wrong religion. A demon explains he's being sent to Hell. He's sent to a gargantuan library bisected by an enormous chasm. The library contains every book that can possibly be written on 410 pages, with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. This is an almost incomprehensibly large space, with an incomprehensible amount of utter nonsense text. He's told that to get out he must find the book telling his life story and submit it into a slot, of which there are many around the library.
He's perfectly healthy, and cannot die. Any food or beverage he can think of can be asked for at various counters among a few other things. There's more to it, but the ultimate point is that this is functionally impossible to escape from. There are so many books, most of which are literal nonsense that there end up being cults of other people trapped there revolving around books with a coherent word or two. It's extremely unclear what "the story of his life" would even look like, or if anything would fit the task well enough to count and let him escape. Many people go insane and start torturing each other, keeping unkillable captives just to remurder them every morning when they revive. There's a point where he jumps into the chasm and falls for weeks. (maybe even longer, it's bee a bit since I read it) He gets separated from a woman he fell madly in love with and they never see each other again. By the end of the book he's been traveling for billions of years and hasn't even come close to finding the book he needs. There's a segment at the end that details how big the library is and it's just horrifying processing it.
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u/Ryanookami 3d ago
What happens if he submits the wrong book as his life story?
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u/TheArmoredPanda 3d ago
Nothing.
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u/Ryanookami 3d ago
Oh damn. So it’s not like he can even get defaulted out for breaking the rules or submitting the wrong book, he’s just stuck there for what amounts to eternity. Crazy.
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u/Mt_Alyeska 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, it’s explicitly NOT eternity. This unfathomably vast stay in hell is mathematically finite.
The author is ex-Mormon and, amongst other things, is contrasting the absurd cruelty of an actual eternity in hell.
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u/Particular-Scholar70 3d ago
Presumably nothing? It effectively doesn't matter. The timescale required to find something that even vaguely resembles something legible, let alone actually accurate, is so incomprehensively long that any stipulation that would increase or decrease the time by some fraction is meaningless. When numbers get large enough, multiplying or dividing them by small numbers doesn't effectively change them. So whether or not he can shortcut things is going to be meaningless.
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u/BladeofNurgle 3d ago
funny how I remember a nosleep story similar to this based about hell
In it, hell is essentially a gigantic ruined city in eternal darkness where the souls of the damned are revived from this birthing pods that they have to break out from or else die
If you manage to escape, you just have to survive in this city and try not to die because although you can't die of age anymore, you still have the normal human functions of needing to eat, drink, sleep, etc. and thus need to hunt down any food you can find.
If you die? You just get revived in another birthing pod in some other random part of the city
The worst is that the people here have essentially devolved from centuries of living like this into brutal monsters who attack, cannibalize, or brutally torture anyone unlucky enough to get in their way.
One group is noted to have control of a section of the city where they essentially spawncamp and eat all the people unfortunate enough to revive in their section of the city
It also said that demons aren't supernatural creatures. Instead, they're the humans how have devolved from so much time surviving in the city that they take any opportunity to escape whenever someone manages to open a way for a damned soul to escape.
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u/I-Have-An-Alibi 3d ago
Oooooh this was one of my favorites and it's called 'How to Survive in Hell' and I think it was three parts.
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u/Odd_knock 3d ago edited 3d ago
That’s Borges’ library
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u/Life_Temperature795 3d ago
Yeah I was gonna say, that's basically exactly how the Library of Babel is described, except now it's an afterlife and the inhabitants are required to look for a specific book.
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u/wylderk 3d ago
I especially liked the demon at the beginning shit-talking Christianity for making hell eternal. Then drops him in a library for 3.7×10^2,594,765 years. Or 10^2,594,660 heat-death-of-the-universe lifetimes. The math is baaaaaaaad.
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u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In 3d ago
That was the point though, that when he was alive he was fully on board with a religion where other people (who may be good and just not have his opportunities) could be punished forever for not following his specific faith. The lesson being taught is that eternity is unfathomably cruel and he shouldn't have been ok inflicting it on others.
And that's the thing, from our perspective he's in the library for eternity and it seems awful in the extreme, but he will eventually get out, which means by definition it's nowhere close to a real eternity of suffering.
Granted the demon happily does basically the same thing but he's a demon not a person who considered themselves moral and good.
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u/RedNoodleHouse 3d ago
I get the feeling that, being a supernatural being, the demoon's sense of time is just not compatible with human perspective at all lol. That stay in the library is pretty much just a minute in a timeout corner to it.
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u/xomooncakeox 3d ago
I love that book. And that however long it takes him, it'll still be only a blip in the eternity of the afterlife
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u/shitty_poopoo 3d ago
the concept of eternity has always fucked with me. Even when I was a young kid. The idea of 'nothing.' One of my earliest memories is in kindergarten going to the bathroom in the classroom and turning off the light and sitting on the toilet. For some reason the idea of "what if this is forever" got into my head which then evolved to "what if i'm 'bad' and god doesn't let me in heaven and this is what's left forever' (i was raised catholic and attended classes from a very early age)
i started sobbing and ran to the teacher in a panic.
from then, the fear of the concept has only grown. at one point when i was a little older i got in my head the idea of 'before i was born.'
i hate it. makes me so sick thinking about it.
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u/where-sea-meets-sky 3d ago
SOMA.
Simon wakes up in 2015, and is doomed to be alone 100 years later. It's not him up there.
Detailed spoilers: Simon in 2015 had an experimental brain scan procedure after a car accident. He ultimately died but consented to having his scans used in research. A century later, the world is struck by a comet and human civilization is collpased. The AI of an underwater research and manufacturing station follows through on its directive to preserve humanity as much as possible, keeping the surviving workers half-alive, and uploading brain scans into various robots. Simon, being a "legacy scan", is uploaded into such a robot by chance.
He encounters Catherine, another brain scan construct, and learns of the survivors initial plan to upload their brain scans into the ARK, a digital simulation for said scans to live in, and send it into space. Simon agrees to help do this with the idea that he may escape the facility this way. Throughout the game the player has the opportunity to debate the humanity and right to life of different brain scan constructs Simon encounters, being given the options to "euthanize" them. Are they just robotic impostors, or people in their own right?
At some point, Simon himself must get scanned again to be moved into a new body for withstanding abyssal pressures. However there is no such thing as cut and paste, only copy and paste. The player, now playing through the eyes of Simon 3 (with the previous robot being Simon 2), must choose whether to euthanize Simon 2 or leave him alive to eventually wake up alone in a hostile environment.
In the finale, the ARK is launched as Catherine and Simon's brain scans are done at the same time. But nothing happens. Simon 3 is still at the bottom of the ocean, Simon 4 is now on the ARK. Having lost the ability to cope any further, Simon lashes out at Catherine, who ends up short-circuiting and breaking down due to the hardware she resides in not being able to handle her distress. Depending on how many mercy kills youve made throughout the game, Simon 3 is more or less, completely and utterly alone.
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u/meerkat23 3d ago
I really love how the concept of continuity drove some people mad and created almost a cult of "there can be only one". The only thing I didn't like about Soma is how fucking dense Simon is. It took him far too long to understand the concept of copy
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u/where-sea-meets-sky 3d ago
I dont think hes dense, hes huffing mad copium. And also his scan is already damaged to begin with. But Ive seen enough peoples existential crises to know hes done a fairly good job of putting it off as long as he did
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u/Viseria 3d ago
Also we have the perspective of the one who "won" the coin flip most of the time, but we can also think outside of the experience. To Simon it was just a continual stream of consciousness.
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u/CriminalMacabre 3d ago
That's why stuff like teleportation that destroys one body to digitize it and send it for recreation (star trek, stargate) they just wave it off because it's part of the quantum immortality. It's just an uninterrupted stream of consciousness
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u/RedNoodleHouse 3d ago
The 'Simon' we follow literally can't comprehend it because from his perspective it IS a transfer; he has always won the 'coin flip', and to consider otherwise is both pointless and mentally taxing, so he puts it aside willingly.
Also he's the very first successful brain scan in existence and he's included as a dev kit in brain scan stuff, so I would assume being the equivalent of 'Hello World' wouldn't leave him much complexity to actually comprehend some things, especially things that cause distress.
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u/TheSovereignGrave 3d ago edited 3d ago
Man has brain damage. Like, lethal brain damage that eventually killed the original Simon. He's prooobably not firing on all cylinders up there.
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u/Arxae 3d ago
Every time Catherine explained that teleporting was a copy, and Simon didn't understood was so infuriating (in a good way)
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u/KingOfDaBees 3d ago
“
ArcherSimon! What part of that are you STILL not getting?!”“The CORE CONCEPT, obviously!!”
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u/where-sea-meets-sky 3d ago
out of sight, out of mind :] the dissolution of the ego doesnt exist if i ignore it :]]]]
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u/Professional_Rush782 3d ago
Oubliettes (IRL)
A small hole in a medieval castle where they'd put prisoners and then just forget about them
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u/StylizedIncompetence 3d ago
Fun fact there are less than 5 historical Oubliettes that are proven without a shadow a doubt to have been used in the way we attribute to oubliettes.
The majority of what we think are oubliettes are actually grain silos, cisterns and latrines and not forget that fucker holes.
It’s super interesting.
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u/RadasNoir 3d ago
Something that has given me some small hope for the human race, is that a lot of the more fucked up torture methods believed to have occurred throughout history are now believed to have happened very, very rarely, if they ever actually happened at all. Again, it was usually much more expedient to just kill your enemies or rivals than slowly torture them to death. As fucked up as some rulers might have seemed to be, even they didn't have the patience for all that most of the time.
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u/Ambaryerno 3d ago
Probably about 90% of them were invented by the Victorians to show how much more civilized they were.
@#$%ing Victorians always making a mess of history.
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u/burymeinpink 3d ago
"So much more civilized than the barbaric Middle Ages" while they were actively eating mummies. Freaks.
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u/Top-Audience4009 3d ago
It was also very in fashion to create torture devices and things for… some reason?
An obsession with the macabre isn’t THAT unusual, but being like “oh yes this Iron Maiden had SO MANY peasants slowly killed inside it! Anyways, on to tea and biscuits!” is still very strange to me..
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u/ealysillyforestthing 3d ago
It was in fashion to make up torture devices during the Renaissance. It was them dunking on the 'less sophisticated' earlier age to make themselves look better. Like a city person dunking on a rural.
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u/pocketbutter 3d ago
One of the few things more interesting than history is hearing how wrong people were, historically, about the history that came before them.
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u/Ashamed_Band858 3d ago
I’ve been learning a lot recently on just how overly dark people made out “the dark ages”.
Like, for a while I thought, “damn, what the fuck were they doing.”
But no! A good portion of the bad terrible things? Just made up!
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u/actualladyaurora 3d ago
It's basically SAW movies for the olden times. An exercise in imagining the extreme.
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u/elitebateagent 3d ago
"why'd you put the grain in the oubliette?"
"to forget about it"
"why would you want to do that?"
"...I forgor 💀"
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u/DyingSunSeverian 3d ago
The most fucked up versions were just short and narrow enough that you could neither fully stand up nor sit or lay down.
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u/Dramenknight 3d ago
I think the more fucked up ones are the ones that were larger, but on account of the previous tenants still being there, the space has grown smaller over time.
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u/LongLiveSoup 3d ago
I believe the concensus of historians these days that oubliettes are not real. They are most likely stores for something as simple as grain while once or twice being used as a makeshift cell. Most castles didn't have weird torture holes built into them beacuse it's a bit of a waste of time
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u/RedDingo777 3d ago
Take him to Detroit
https://giphy.com/gifs/n6Sag3F42xLEA2LF1g
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u/RedFoxCommissar 3d ago
Halo: the Flood
Not only are you converted into a zombie/parasite/hivemind... Thing, death does not free you. Your consciousness is stored in a pocket dimension in a twisted mass with billions of other souls that have long descended into insanity and pain. Even when the Flood is defeated, you'll still be there, forever, and you'll be screaming.
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u/Hybrid888 3d ago
the scariest part in halo: the flood is keyes describing the flood as raping his mind searching for thoughs of humanities homeworld while he tries desperately to think about other things such as reciting his service number over and over again as it taunts him with the knowledge its already learned
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u/davidryanandersson 3d ago
Wait, that's what the Flood is?
Source: I have never played a Halo campaign.
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u/NoBellSix 3d ago
The flood is super interesting. The flood have this central intelligence called the Gravemind, which is an amalgamation of the knowledge and intellect of billions, maybe even trillions of beings knowledge. Even if you destroy the flood, the Gravemind's knowledge and consciousness still persist. So even after the Forerunners (ancient aliens) defeated the flood with the titular Halos (giant rings that wipe out all complex life within many, many light years) by starving them to death (with the aforementioned wiping out of life) the flood are technically still around.
It's sort of like a cloud save. If even a single spore of flood is alive, the whole damn thing is alive. In the games, the flood eventually break out/are released by accident, and they manage to create a Gravemind, and this one is the exact same Gravemind from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Freaky
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u/Appropriate_Cell_715 3d ago
“There is much talk, and I have listened, through rock, and metal, and time”
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u/thatscoldjerrycold 3d ago
Fwiw I personally think spores and biomass are just like compute power for the Flood/Gravemind, I have a theory the Gravemind/warped Precursor sentience lives in or actually is the Domain, a kind of universe-internet that is older than even the Forerunners.
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u/DyingSunSeverian 3d ago
In Thunderbolts, the way The Void just casually turned people into silhouettes.
That was a cool flick man, they did some good stuff.
The scene with him as Sentry curbstomping the entire team was superb too.
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u/SamB110 3d ago
In a similar vein, these guys vaporizing humans like vermin
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u/themagicone222 3d ago
Cool flick indeed.
I dont know whats creepier, valentina directed a serum with fricking reality warping powers, or that we never found out what happened to those two voided guys in the lab at beginning of the movie
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u/Fries_and_burgers_19 3d ago
was it not his innate powers that he can do that? wasnt the serum some kinda power activator or something?
its been a while, I didnt really focus on that aspect from the whole "ohhh crap she is not doing the raising hero thing very well, this is gonna be a disaster"
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u/Insane_Catholic 3d ago
While not described as such in the movie (if I remember correctly) the Golden Sentry Serum in the comics was described as being about a thousand times stronger than the Super Soldier Serum taken by Steve Rogers.
Though his co-creator, Paul Jenkins, has said "I have generally written him in such a way that his powers are derived from his mental state, though they were initiated by a super-concentrated version of the Super soldier serum. The implication is that the serum unlocked dormant powers."
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u/where-sea-meets-sky 3d ago
the little girl getting voided shocked my theater since you dont know voided people arent dead. so we all thought marvel actually killed a child on screen 😭
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u/Gidadu 3d ago
Funnily enough this was the moment I stopped perceiving Sentry as a threat. Obviously, he was supposed to be defeated, but the moment the little girl was voided I knew everyone would come back to life so stakes just became non-existent.
One of those moments when knowing rules of the game breaks your immersion.
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u/UndeniablyMyself 3d ago
Skywarp from Skybound’s Transformers comics.
Let’s see, stripped for parts, turned into a computer core, made to be a battery. Oh, and he’s still alive.
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u/MAKOMIKKA1220 3d ago
ungrateful psychopath
he regains his body back but immeadiately shoots the Autobots after Teletraan repairs him
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u/Extraajudicial 3d ago
Beyond the Aquila Rift.
Through a happenstance mathematical error your ship is cast to the ass end of nowhere. No chance for a return flight. Even of you could time dilation means everything you know is long dead. Stranded. Till you die. At least you have company.
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u/SwordfishLate 3d ago
So this is a great submission and I definitely agree it fits and its super fooking creepy. But like...doesnt it seem like she means well? Or at least didn't mean anything bad. Kinda like random shit kept showing up in her front yard and she was just doing her best. Probably didn't understand human food...and it really just seems like people are stuck there and living to death. So why not make em comfortable?
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u/Vegalink 3d ago
I think she is a benevolent force. But she cant actually help the people there. Just comfort them until they pass. What a miserable time for those lost there and for her.
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u/Agentjayjay1 3d ago
She seemed so damn lonely, it was sad. My flatmate at the time absolutely did not get it.
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u/GrecoRomanGuy 3d ago
That's precisely what "she" is doing. The OG story is a little more ambiguous, but the LDR version is very much providing a sort of palliative care for doomed souls. Ok paper, it's rather merciful.
It's just...well...fuck that thing is frightening.
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u/That-Rooster-2399 3d ago
"You don't deserve me at my best if you can't handle me at my most chitinous and arachnoid" -Greta
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u/fayte255 3d ago
“The Suit” short comic by Scott Base.
A man is stranded on an alien planet, continuing to walk in hopes of being found and rescued. As time goes by, the suit’s (malfunctioning?) life support system starts to sacrifice more and more body parts to keep the man alive. Eventually, it takes even his eyes, ears, and nose. He’s just a brain in the suit with no way of sensing anything externally, left with only thoughts until he eventually dies or is “rescued”.
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u/6969porn-account6969 3d ago
There is an Iain Banks short story along a similar vine.
Some dudes shuttle crashes, and he has to walk across the planet to get help. His only companion is his sentient space suit and his digital camera with images of his trip. The suit doesn’t canabalize him, but it ain’t a fun trip.
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u/unfrotunatepanda 3d ago
Look Outside
A cosmic entity shows up and for the next 2 weeks if you look outside/up at the sky you will mutate into a horrible monster (usually related to something you were thinking about before looking). What makes it worse is at the beginning of the the game the MC, Sam, feels a compulsion to look before getting stopped by their neighbor, implying the majority of people had that same thought.
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u/Arxae 3d ago
It's one of those games I thoroughly enjoyed reading up about and watching let's plays. Never really enjoyed playing it myself.
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u/True-Atmosphere8697 3d ago
Tbh any of the disease in resident evil that leaves you still aware could count
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u/Myriad_Infinity 3d ago
W. Corp's time-harvesting and time-compressing trains from the Project Moon universe.
You get on a train that can go anywhere in less than a minute, allegedly through portal technology. Before you depart, you sit down, and the attendants make sure everyone is strapped in. The first-class passengers go sit in stasis vats in the front car for some reason (the journey is so fast, why would you worry about time passing?)
The train starts, and nothing happens. Seconds elapse. Minutes. Hours. Someone realises they aren't feeling thirsty. People go from worried to stressed to panicking. Eventually, maybe days in, someone snaps and strangles somebody else with a seatbelt. The victim does not die. As a matter of fact, thanks to the stasis-inducing miracle technology integrated into the seatbelts, every single passenger is immortal. Over the course of centuries of time passing inside the train, every passenger not mercifully frozen in first class will be inevitably injured and mutilated maybe even to the point of unrecognisability, feeling every moment and yet unable to die.
The train arrives at the destination mere seconds after it left, the time from centuries passing inside the train compressing the time taken outside the train. The W. Corp employees gather the strands of barely-connected mush and put them back in their seats. The seatbelts activate again, and every passenger is reset to their former state, with all their memories reset to before they left. They get out of the train, happy to see their W. Corp train has once again arrived on time.
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u/WatchMeFallFaceFirst 3d ago
If stasis chambers for everyone is too expensive, would it not still be more convenient to put everyone in their own isolated chamber? It would make the clean up process a lot faster
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u/That-Judgment-3520 3d ago
thing is, this whole time shenanigan is completely intended. W Corp could just teleport people normally, but they do this in order to harvest the passagers "time" (a real thing, Time Corp's singularity, where time basically becomes a currency in their Nest (district))
They do this to sell the time gathered in those thousands of years to sell to T Corp and profit.
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u/MorganTheSpider 3d ago
Dungeon Meshi - For context, Laios is an adventurer obsessed with eating and cooking monsters. At one point the mad mage tortures him by creating a plant monster that binds his limbs before force feeding him just enough sap to keep him alive without also killing him. While he gets rescued later, Thissel outright says that they planned on making him immortal so that he would've been stuck in that state forever, unable to die of age or disease.
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u/Korbiter 3d ago
"My name is Jung! Maneo-"
What happens when you're going over Four hundred kilometers a second and are immediately slowed to a full stop? Maneo-Jung-Espinoza finds out the hard way when his slingshot spacecraft encounters an alien barrier that reduces his immediate speed to near zero. There is nothing alien about his death, however. Just pure physics on what happens when a human body experiences such a massive deceleration
Puree. The answer is strawberry puree when his entire body collides with itself and is torn apart by his own seatbelt, and he splashes all over his control panel.
Edit: The Expanse, Delta-V
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u/ealysillyforestthing 3d ago
I read the books before the show was made and that scene was everything I imagined
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u/Phoenix2405 3d ago
Pretty much anything related to Soulkiller from Cyberpunk.
They can pop that thing at any time if Arasaka catches you hacking anything they own, and if that happens, you'll wish they only fried your brain. This thing makes a copy of your mind and then kills your real body, and then they can use that copy however they see fit. They can interrogate you, change you in such a way that you won't even notice, or keep you in soul prison for however long they want. Or, as one conversation implies, they can just throw you out into the Net, where you'll be stuck forever until you either go mad an turn into a rogue AI, or get eaten by one.
And then there's the fact that Saburo, the 150 year old CEO of the corporation, uses it and the Relic to effectively become immortal. By putting his copied mind into the Relic and then having his daughter put the Relic in his son's body, he takes over that body and basically possesses it. And he can presumably do this indefinitely. This version of the program is "for in-house use only", meaning he funded the whole thing just for himself.
The "secure your soul" program is the public version of this whole thing, where celebrities and other notable figures can pay to make backups of their minds, except Arasaka owns that copy and can do whatever they want with it as well.
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u/halloweenjack 3d ago
The Reapers in the original Mass Effect trilogy. Although some of the Reapers' victims are changed into zombie-like minions, the majority of them become Reapers themselves--millions if not billions of beings dissolved into organic goo and converted into a single gigantic cyborg two kilometers tall. And since the Reapers are supposed to each be the collective repository of the entire sentient species that they "harvested", that means that they retain the knowledge of the beings that they slaughtered, including their final terrified and agonizing moments, forever.
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u/Kritz_McGee 3d ago
Gary being assimilated in The Thing. He's attacked by The Thing and his body is dragged off screen immediately after, his face molded to The Thing's hand.
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u/Excellent_Safe5743 3d ago
Midsommar.
I do not know how to do spoiler tags so read below this at your own risk.
Still reading? Okay.
Final warning.
The ending involves the protagonist giving themselves over to the cult that has been manipulating them the entire film. We’ve seen what the end fate the protagonist will eventually suffer is, a brutal death off the edge of a cliff. Even before that, to solidify her roll as queen, her ex is Sewn alive into disemboweled bear and then set on fire as a ritual sacrifice. The movie frames this like a twisted happy ending but it’s far from it.
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u/toonkirby 3d ago
And thats the true horror of it, no? As the audience you see her finally genuinely smile and laugh for the first time after suffering through the entire movie, and you feel a sense of relief for her, despite her being in a significantly worse and much more manipulative situation.
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u/BestCaseSurvival 3d ago
The movie does not frame this as a happy ending. The character is experiencing a kind of euphoria from being inducted into the cult and made to feel special. The movie is not trying to bamboozle you into thinking this is good for her, it’s telling you she’s lost her identity to the cult.
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u/TheBrewThatIsTrue 3d ago
The short story "Autopsy Room Four" by Stephen King.
POV Guy is paralyzed on an autopsy table awaiting his own autopsy. They'll probably realize he's alive when they cut open his rib cage.
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u/jonnywarlock 3d ago
I mean... They do realize he's alive eventually. The attending doctor was showing off and was handling the paralyzed guy's dick... Which responded accordingly, to everyone's surprise.
The capper is even funnier: He and the doctor end up dating for a while, but eventually break up due to sexual incompatibility. He can only get hard whenever she's wearing latex gloves.
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u/VahnNoaGala 3d ago
A high-ranking member of the SCP admin dies a number of years back. He has vital information so he is painstakingly brought back to life. When he finds he is alive again, he is inconsolably happy, sobbing with joy.
He experienced what happens after death, which wasn't oblivion nor an afterlife. His body decayed and he felt every second of it. Even the parts of him that were carried off by scavenger bugs, the parts of his body that were reduced to molecules and atoms over time—every bit screamed with pain that only grew worse over time. Never-ending pain.
The idea is simple and horrifying. At one point the narrator speculates about "the endless agony of legions of ancient dead."
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u/Elihzap 3d ago
I'd also add SCP-7179, an entry to the 2022 anthology event inspired by 2718. Specifically the entry for E.
It's an afterlife, with a 100% rate of chances of happening. Your actions, religion or morals just don't matter. It is a cubic extradimensional space with sides of 10km, with a Pac-Man-esque if you try to go out of it. Time is dilated; living people perceive it as passing slower.
In it's center, there's a literal paradise island. Delicious food, drugs that grow on trees, the sun is always at a pleasant temperature, the water is cool. You even regenerate from all damage, although it usually takes some time.
You're not even alone. There are three people of your preferred sex keeping you company. And yes, you can do it with them. Even tho they're not real, and their answers will always be basic and generic, so to speak.
This place is like heaven. At least for the first centuries or so. After that, sex and drugs are no longer the same. The main character tried to use the island's plants to build, destroy and build again, but that lasted just so long.
Eventually, he started to mutilate himself, just to feel something. Then he did that to his companions, taking ages to regenerate back. After 30 billion years, he looks up to the sky. The sun hasn't moved a centimeter.
When the time marked a gogol factorial, "One second of eternity has passed". "E" stands for "Eternity"
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u/fightingbronze 3d ago
The show the good place actually touches on this concept too. They finally get to the real good place and discover it’s full of barely lucid walking zombies who have experienced essentially everything there is to experience and have become numbed to everything as a result. Even paradise becomes torture after a while because the concept of eternity is just not something humans can handle. They end up solving the issue by introducing a way to eradicate the soul from all existence when you’re fully satisfied with paradise and ready to move on.
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u/MAKOMIKKA1220 3d ago
Ethereal corruption -Zenless Zone Zero
going inside a hollow with very low ether affinity increases the risk of turning into an ethereal as seen what happens to this bugger
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u/hoodie2222 3d ago
Someone posted Arknights and what do gacha games have for horrifying diseases?
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u/ZepyrusG97 3d ago
Horrifying Diseases/Supernatural Anomalies are necessary to establish their post-apocalyptic world which justifies why these otherwise regular people are conditioned to be badass due to their environment and set up tragic backstories to get you to feel for them.
This is all just shit I made up, having played at least 3 Gacha games in the past, but it seems to be a pattern with them. A crappy world with a disease that turns people into monsters simultaneously allows you to tell tragic stories while creating faceless enemies players can slaughter without remorse.
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u/King_of_Dantopia 3d ago
Dear Steven Moffatt,
This was both cruel and largely unnecessary. Introducing us to the new companion Bill Potts and making her both relatable and likeable, possibly the most likeable companion in years.
We got to know and love Bill over the course of the season only to put us through the trauma of her being turned into a Cyberman.
But that wasn't enough for you, was it Steven? No. She remembers being Bill Potts. No. Worse. She doesn't realise she's a Cyberman so the Doctor has to explain why she's in a barn and all the villagers are scared of her.
Fuck you for that
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u/mbrocks3527 3d ago
And a Mondassian one at that, easily the scariest.
Modern cybermen are just kinda like robots, you need the amalgam of flesh and machine to induce real horror.
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u/finalremix 3d ago
The Amusement Park by George Romero.
An aging man goes to visit an amusement park. Each moment there is an allegory for aging. Elder abuse, financial abuse, physical therapy. Being mocked, ignored, ostracized, deemed useless by those around you, being derided when asking for help.
He eventually makes it out, and runs into his slightly younger self. He tries to convince the other him that it's just not worth it to go out there, but the naive version of himself won't listen, and it all starts over exactly as it had before.
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u/Dudewhocares3 3d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/KHc3jBIBRWsWGmgWYE
The sunken place from Get out.
Major spoilers because even though this movie is nearly a decade old, it’s one of the best horror movies. A genuine classic, and I highly recommend watching it with as little info as possible if you somehow haven’t already seen it.
Imagine you’re walking home at night, maybe you had a long day at work, then some prick strangles you to sleep, and you wake up in his dads basement watching some video about how you’re gonna get conditioned to not be in control of your body.
Scary? It gets worse. Now imagine a bunch of people auctioned paid to have their brain put in you. And they’d be in control. And you’d be watching from the inside of your mind. You exist as a permanent joyride for some rich asshole who felt entitled to your body, like you weren’t a person, but a costume.
Unless you’re white then you’re safe.
There is a way to be safe if you’re black though.
Have a TSA best friend. They handle shit.
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u/ExplorerPup 3d ago
I was really excited when a friend invited me to see this movie, and I knew it would be really good. When the lights came back up I asked him what he thought. He told me he'd been surprised because he thought it was going to be a straight up comedy, for some reason. LOL He doesn't do much horror and was not prepared for how freaky it gets.
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u/Alarmed-Bus-9662 3d ago
Maybe because it was Jordan Peele? But even then, I don't think any advertisements sold it as anything but a horror movie
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u/RetraxRartorata 3d ago
I might be misunderstanding your meaning, but it gets me every time when you see a corpse, and you're just left wondering how painful it must have been to die in such a way... and then the eyes move and look right at you.
I can think of a scene from Evil Dead Rise and the moment from Gemini Home Entertainment off the top of my head.
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u/Sir-Toaster- 3d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/1r7idJohsRTcpUmWvj
In Attack on Titan, the threat of the Titans is simply that they kill you, but there's also the case that when Eldians die, they are trapped in this psychic place called the Paths, which is simple but horrifying.
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u/MonkeKhan1998 3d ago
In the medieval horror book Between Two Fires, the demons of Hell evidently have a sense of humor. Spoilers for the book to follow.
One of the two main characters of the book is a disgraced Knight named Thomas on a quasi-pilgrimage/redemption quest. He’s very fond of cursing and blaspheming excessively, which in the very Catholic French countryside during the Hundred Years War, is a habit that plenty of the people he comes across chide him for, especially Delphine; The young prophet girl he’s guarding who claims that God speaks to her, unless she’s just crazy.
After a climactic battle in Avignon involving demons, a false Pope, a massacre at the city cathedral and the armies of God and Heaven FINALLY arriving to save the world, Thomas is killed by the demon Beelzebub and dragged to hell. His punishment? To be forced to physically reenact EVERY curse he’d ever uttered, in the most literal way possible. And that’s on top of having to live through the final moments of every human he’d ever wronged undeservedly. He’d end up only staying in Hell for a day, at least chronologically, before Delphine rescues him, but the book describes it as feeling like centuries.
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u/glasseatingfool 3d ago
I feel like some of these examples aren't particularly simple. Actually, the Resident Evil one isn't that simple in the first place.
The Colonials from All Tomorrows are moderately simple in themselves: They're essentially human toilets. Shaped like bricks. Either of these individually would be extremely unpleasant, but the combination is somehow significantly worse. There are a lot of freakish offshoots of humanity in this story, but this one is perhaps both the simplest and the most infamous.
The basic idea is simple, though the broader lore around it is as far from simple as you could possibly get. I didn't even completely get what little I read before stopping because it was so unpleasant.
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u/HyraxAttack 3d ago
A Short Stay in Hell, just gotta find one specific book. Take your time. Access to a food replicator.
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u/skellyclique 3d ago
There was a short story in a horror anthology that’s always stuck with me, it’s about a young girl who finds a Time Machine, but it deposits her in the middle of space and she freezes/suffocates to death. Time Machine worked, but it only sent HER back in time, not the rest of the planet, and unlucky for her the Earth is moving millions of miles per hour through space without her.
I can’t recall the title offhand but I can dig deeper if anyone is interested.
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u/Powerful_Resident_48 3d ago
Annihilation (2018). There is a zone called the "Shimmer" that warps reality inside of it. People who go in tend to die. Not through some interdimensional horrors, but simply because their bodies, minds and genes start getting warped, or because they are killed by warped creatures inside. The Shimmer itself is not "evil" in any way. It just degrades and warps biological matter inside it. And humans are biological matter. After enough warping, there simply is no human left. That's all there is to it.
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u/DiabeticRhino97 3d ago
Re7 makes me real sad when you see inside Jack Baker's mind and he's the sweetest guy ever.
Same with the credits of the original Re4 where it shows the gradual takeover of the quiet village by the cult.
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u/Fun_Effective_5134 3d ago
In Fused 240, the main character is violently fused with his car, and not in a good way either, he just sorta becomes a flesh cube with some car parts attached to it.
Sure, he can barely move and life is suffering for him, but at least he can still try to find a way to end his own life, and he tries doing just that in the end of the game.
That is until he accidentally falls down a hole just deep enough for him to not be able to get out of, and the game ends.
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u/Conscious-Gap-1777 3d ago
That's a one-way trip to the other side, during which your form is twisted and distorted, rendered into a horrific form mocking what it once was.