miscellaneous
(Loved trope) horror/dark media pretends to be cute and lighthearted for a long while before the first disturbing scene hits you like a truck
(Made in Abyss) it starts off as an innocent adventure show about exploring this massive mysterious abyss with many creatures and dangers, our two main characters Riko and Reg encounter many hardships on their journey in the abyss, dark monsters and environmental challenges but nothing too dark as they always come out on top, until episode 10 happens and Riko gets poisoned by a creature that attacked them, forcing Reg to move her up from the fourth layer of the abyss which triggers the curse of the abyss in Riko's body and so she starts bleeding from every orifice in her body, Reg is even forced to break her arm and cut it while she's awake so he can save her from the creature's venom. From this point on the show starts showing it's true horrific nature.
(Madoka Magica) it starts as a typical magical girl show about these magical girls fighting villainous creatures called witches and then episode 3 happens, on this episode Mami's head gets bitten clean off of her body by one of the witches and so the real Madoka Magica show kicks off from that point forward.
(Doki Doki literature club) a visual novel that plays like a dating sim, you play as a highschool boy who is trying to open up to people and make friends so he joins his friend's club (Sayori) who introduces him to the other 3 members who all happen to be girls you can talk to about their interests and do club activities with as you get to know them better. It's only 4 hours into the game that you're met with the shock of Sayori committing suicide because of her depression. The horror then keeps piling up after that moment and there's nothing you can do about it as you watch your cute dating simulator gradually turn into an insane asylum simulator.
I always have my mind blown when shows do the “nobody interacts with X character except for Y character” thing. I’ve never been able to notice it happening, with one exception. That wasn’t a show though, that was the game 13 Sentinels.
I always recommend people watch the first episode with minimal spoilers, because that's how I experienced it and it hit me like a truck (in a good way).
I watched it recently and even knowing the twist, watching the first episode was like "Is it like gonna happen later or..." until the reveal happens, and holy shit.
I was in seventh grade when I first discovered Happy Tree Friends and at the time I never even heard of the show. A classmate showed it to me for the first time on his school iPad while we were in art class and I responded with “Is this some kind of kids show?” Then the first death happened which was hilarious comedic timing. While I was surprised and trying to process what just happened, my art teacher saw this and he told my classmate “I don’t think Happy Tree Friends is very appropriate for school…”
That's the one issue that I have with the trope description and replies, a bunch of these aren't pretending to be cute. They are just using cuteness for the story purpose.
The Picnic at Hanging Rock (the original book and the movie) begins as a beautiful and serene story of boarding school girls on a picnic with their teacher.
The actual story is about how some of those girls and their teacher vanished during the picnic, how there are no clues to what happened and the fallout and distress the event causes in the boarding school and local community.
There is no resolution to mystery. The missing girls and the missing woman are never found and everyone else just needs to continue their lives in uncertainty and grief.
Higurashi When they Cry starts off like a typical slice of life, but slowly cracks begin to show until a bloody confrontation where the main characters die
Also, this is the anime where the China censorship meme where two characters are in a pool of cum is from
To be fair though, the literal first seconds of the first episode, and I believe on the visual novel too, Keichi is killing two, at the time, unknown girls with a fucking bat while making the most unhinged sounds imaginable.
I want to clarify however, that it is first and foremost a meme, while they do censor blood and gore to an insane level in China, no blood has ever been censored to be white in China. All screenshots you see on the internet are just made by internet strangers, no censoring company. It once got confused for censorship in a Nanatau no Tazai episode that was aired in China, but that same white blood was also in the Hong Kong release of that same episode, while Hong Kong has different censorship laws than mainland China. The mistake was already in the production and distribution of the episode, not censorship. But it got confused for censorship and the meme stuck...
For sure. Most of it is straight up just memes. The Higurashi scene in particular was just chosen because they're lying in a large pool of blood and blood splatters everywhere, and well nothing illustrates changing red to white like that scene.
Although, that's just your typical Rin mana transfer tbh
Fun fact about Madoka Magica: Japanese fans were not buying it being cute and wholesome at all because of the head writer being the known sadist and Ryuki fan Gen Urobochi, so they actually were warry of how cute it seemed (which was a good move since even very early on Kyubey is incredibly suspicious).
It did not work. They still got hit hard by episode 3.
And the rest of the anime.
And Rebellion.
And the ban on talking about spoilers about the latest movie on social medias made them start a whole new ship trend on twitter out of sheer insanity too.
Man, I remember trying to get my friends to watch this without spoilers by describing it as series he likes. “It’s like iron blooded orphans and stardew valley.”
The depression comes from watching it all go downhill in S2 as the cast slowly realise they’re way out of their league, made terrible choices and there’s no way back out.
As opposed to The Promised Neverland, where the depression comes from watching it all go downhill in S2 as you slowly realise the anime production team are way out of their league, made terrible choices, and there's no way back to being a good show.
As much as I loved that, my favorite part of the first episode will still be Mark taking out the trash. Struggling to toss one bag in the dumpster. Then launches the other bag into space. The idea that his powers kicked in just like that is hilarious to me.
That last part of episode 1 legit gave me anxiety. All I could think is "there is no escape." And I was putting myself in there and just imagining how I'd feel knowing I wouldn't ever get out of there. Then the red flash part happened and I fucking lost it. 10/10 can't wait for the next season.
Love how those guys have absolutely 0 reaction to his head coming off. I guess that would mean extra animation budget. They don’t even move or flinch at all
Made as the studio was actively collapsing, it was Manglobe's second to last production (they squeezed out 12 episodes of Gangsta before fully closing due to bankruptcy) and they were already cripplingly behind during airing. There were a number of rushed scenes that aired on TV that they later cleaned up for BD/DVD release. Some better than others.
Which is a shame, because it's an original work not an adaptation and it remains one of my favourite T.V. shows, despite its flaws. It was the first show to make me feel like a kid where I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen next. I'd recommend it if you've got time for a quick 22 episode adventure.
Samurai Flamenco is a street-level superhero anime not unlike Kick-Ass, about a young man obsessed with Tokusatsu gearing up in order to fight crime like the heroes he’s always admired since childhood. He’s got no special powers, no training, and (at first) no gadgets or resources other than being well off because of his work as a male model. The show follows his bumbling adventures alongside a police officer who discovers him and decides to support him out of appreciation for his sense of justice.
Several episodes in, deep enough that the audience has settled in and isn’t expecting it, an honest-to-goodness sentai monster shows up: Guillotine Gorilla. It beheads several police officers and wreaks havoc before the main character manages to beat it by pushing it out of a 3rd floor window.
At this point a tokusatsu mastermind shows up, declares they are going to conquer the world, and shifts the entire plot of the show. This is the first but not the last time that the scale and stakes of Samurai Flamenco change dramatically.
Also worth noting, the protagonist was there because he was in a viral video telling delinquent kids to not stay out so late, the police department thought it would be fun PR for him to ride along on a drug raid. like the tone shift came out of fucking nowhere
The recently released Buddy movie did this amazingly, though the fact that it's a horror movie isn't a surprise. But it definitely begins as an innocent TV show, before going very....very wrong.
Because the quality of this image sucks, Buddy is made by the same director of Too Many Cooks, to give some idea of how far south you’re headed, and that the person responsible knows what they’re doing as a surreal horror screenwriter.
And if you need a basic premise to keep going, it’s like Barney, but there is a status quo timeloop in play, and Buddy is not a fundamental part of it. He is the only one in the cast allowed to deteriorate.
I actually loved how the ruse wasn't up for very long. >> The ending of the first episode (which is like after 10 minutes) is where the first death happens <<
Boy and girl MCs (brown and red hair) are childhood friends and they decide to create a baseball team with their other childhood friends. Their task is to recruit new people to the team, and they eventually have a whole cast of new friends who all pretty much have their own heavy character arc through the series.
Towards the end of the series, boy and girl MC wake up at a bus crash scene. They are severely injured, but alive. In the bus though are all the team members, dying, and gathering their remaining forces to create an illusion world for MCs. MCs realise that their whole world since the beginning of the series was an illusion created by friends and that they had to overcome many obstacles and difficulties created by the team, who aimed to get them strong enough to face the harsh reality that all their friends are dead but that life still goes on. Everytime they were deemed not strong enough, the world would be reset and they'd have to start all over.
It's been awhile since I last watched this series or played the VN, but I believe that the true ending has them come out of the scene and that they end up being together.
The second season of the anime ends up with both MCs saving their friends in the bus, pulling them away to safety and tending to their wounds. Then they find their older friend, female MC's older brother, who had snuck onto the bus because he wanted to go with them. He's the one who created the world and gathered the others in it as "souls who had wishes to fulfill", and when they find him he's heavily injured and using his body to block a leak from the bus' gas tank. After making sure that the others were all at a safe distance, they grab him and start running, as the oil starts to spill and eventually catches on fire, causing the bus to blow up. The epilogue is them waiting for the older brother to come back from the hospital, which he does, showing that everyone survived.
Of note, also, is that the male MC suffers from narcolepsy, which can trigger during stressful situations and started because his parents died when he was young. After they woke up on the bus, he has to fight against his own body trying to shut down because he's on the verge of a mental breakdown.
The entire second season is a series of punches in the guts, and this show makes you ugly cry. Definitely one of my favourites, and I especially love the OST (especially the first OP, it's such a banger).
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. A cozy slife-of-life about an android managing a cafe at the edge of a small town for her traveling human owner. It remains that way throughout.
However, as the series goes on, over years or even decades in-universe, it is slowly revealed that humanity is slowly going extinct. It gets creepier as nature starts "memorializing" humans, with plants and mushrooms that vaguely mimic human structures.
By the end of the series the cafe is far out in the wilderness as the townspeople die and nature reclaims the landscape. Her owner never returns, and is almost certainly long dead, meaning she will have to follow her last orders to maintain the cafe forever for clients that have become extremely rare and will eventually stop coming entirely. It is unclear whether she even understands what is happening.
Ya know when I first read this I felt it was very slice of life until the end, with that passage of time that someone unaging would see. I recognize it was post apocalyptic but that's it.
OMORI game maybe? But idk what would be first disturbing scene. There are so mush passive "that shouldn't be here but it's okay", so that's hard to decide
Iirc the moment basil disappears from the dreamscape is accompanied by a bunch of quick flash images of the reveal later in the game. That's probably the first time it's obvious you're playing a horror game.
Omori seems to be designed to do this repeatedly, it likes to keep everything nice and peaceful just long enough for you to forget about the last disturbing moment
Which is, more or less, the base essentials of OMORI’s theme. Why are we doing literally anything but explaining what the hell that was? Well if somebody had a good coping mechanism, we wouldn’t have a game, now would we
I loved Sweetheart’s Castle, Humphrey on the other hand…………but it’s okay because there’s a narrative reason for it and it doesn’t impact it being my favorite game oat whatsoever.
That scene where you find out Omori accidentally killed his sister and Basil helped him cover it up made me bawl like a baby and feel so depressed afterwards.
It was more like, even though I was playing the game and weird shit was happening, like the jumpscares, the stabbing, the undertone of it all - the reveal and having it all connect to her just really hit me hard. Like another poster said, the 'everything is awesome' vibe, even though it wasn't, made me ignorant of it long enough, but not forever.
Yeah, that’s what I said. I don’t think there’s a better word than pedophile for someone who’s romantically attracted to children, even if she’s not sexually attracted to Shio. The rest of the cast is a different story.
Same head writer as Madoka Magica, Kamen Rider Gaim starts off with dancing fruit samurai pretending to be heroes.
Then its revealed that the forest they get their powers from is an extra-dimensional, all consuming realm that has destroyed thousands of civilizations before and turns everyone who eats it's fruit into a mindless ever-hungry monster. Every monster in the show was either a human or a sentient being that ate a hellheim fruit.
The only way to stop the forest is by having the forbidden fruit, which is only given to one person chosen by Sagara (the serpent of Eden). This basically results in a lose-lose situation, either the whole population kills itself to decide a winner, or the forest itself kills the planet before a winner is chosen.
Years, years ago, I remember a comic about a young girl (Angelina? Angelica?) in class doing art, and there's flashbacks back and forth between class and the morning. Some of it seems silly before the teacher looks at her drawing it completely goes over her head at the fact that the girl is trying to tell her teacher that her father is SA-ing her.
Jesus, that whole comic is heartbreaking, I swear. I just read through a few chapters and I already wanna learn to draw faster so I can draw happy ending fanart where she gets out of there or the dad is arrested/killed or anything along those lines
There's someone currently trying to make a supercut of the series with all that shit taken out. It's so hard t cause the character, music, world building, everything is so good and thenn.........why
Same with doki doki. I had to click “okay” 3 different times before starting the game because it really wanted me to know beforehand that it contained disturbing footage. There was no twist
The first half of the movie is basically "Oh it's a comedy about a kid raised in Nazi Germany trying to fit in and meeting a jewish girl that will change his mind" as it is filled with cute and funny moments including imaginaty friend taika watiti Hitler.
Then suddenly, scene changes to reality, as Jojo's Mother was captured as a traitor and hanged on a public place for aiding jewish refugees, and the war got so close he, implied as an orphan whose dad died early in the war now has to fend for himself as russian soldiers storm his city; while nazis use child soldiers who die around him. His last adult friend sacrifices himself at the end, executed right in front of him as he goes home though a destroyed town. The ending is mitigated happy, as he sees hope in the girl his mother saved, but he lost most of his friends and his parents in a single week as well as seeing his town occupied by foreign troops. The twist was brutal.
I'll be honest, I really do prefer the 'first arc' of Land of the Lustrous over the 'second arc'.
It's a rare thing for the 'innocent more-or-less-immortal civilization' to be a thing, where eternity is just life happening in a mostly pleasant cycle of existence.
....Of course, Buddhism - which Land of the Lustrous pulls from heavily - disagrees with such as a 'preferable' thing.
I wouldn’t say that JJK is ever particularly light hearted, but the first half of season one feels more like an action adventure show than the “which of my favorites is going to die next” it later becomes
(Also, is it just me or does Mahito look like he’s taking a selfie in this frame?)
Bugsnax presents itself as a charming, casual life sim with collectathon and Pokémon-like elements.
In the fullness of the story, it really becomes an introduction to psychological and body horror for children, with the titular food-based creatures actually being brain-altering parasites who seek to assimilate other lifeforms into themselves. The player can even fail to save some cast members from this fate, resulting in them effectively dying in the ending if the proper conditions weren't met earlier in the story.
Re:Zero, while certainly not cutesy and innocent, you'd expect to be fairly standard Isekai fare. A little fantasy violence, maybe a little blood, but no. Ohhh no. The protagonist, Subaru, doesn't get any fancy power fantasy ability but instead gets the ability to effectively respawn from death like reloading from dying in a video game, complete with a slight rewind in time. And he explicitly remembers the pain and shock each time it happens. It's amazingly effective so that he can learn from his missteps and try to attain an optimal outcome of an encounter, but it comes at a heavy psychological toll.
The visceral deaths, and the psychological torture that Subaru goes through by retaining those memories (Or repeatedly watching those he cares about die in front of him before his own death undoes it) makes for a horrific amount of suffering and trauma on this poor guy. It's a marvel he hasn't gone insane yet.
Dont forget that it's insinuated all of his deaths happened in unique timelines, so things continue happening there after he dies and everyone has to deal with his death in each one
i will not spoil who,but in arc 7 when someone asked whether subaru was alive,a character confirm that subaru is alive because the world has not been destroyed which confirm that the world is indeed get reset after subaru's death
Gakkou Gurashi, an Anime about a group of girls that are in a club called the School Live Club where they live at school. Super cute until you realize that the reason they’re living at the school is because a Zombie apocalypse broke out while they were there and it’s the only safe place left. The main character had a break down watching her beloved teacher die and now basically lives in a fantasy land where the zombie apocalypse isn’t real and her teacher is alive. The girls try their best to go along with her delusions until they can’t anymore. Very heartbreaking story bawled my eyes out 10/10
Goodnight Punpun starts off with a cute little kid story as he is depicted as a li'l cartoon birdy, developing a huge crush on this cute-as-a-button new girl named Aiko who has adorably large ears, freckles, and a missing tooth. They walk home together, he gets lost and starts crying, it's a cute story. Then Punpun finally comes home and we see his father Papa Punpun downing bottles of booze, Mama Punpun (I forgot their names) informs him that he's finished his beer quota and there isn't any more alcohol. Papa punpun screams and curses at her and begins to beat her viciously. Punpun is tired of this and goes to sleep, wakes up and finds Mama is hospitalized because she was beaten so horribly and Papa goes to prison. Later on he is with Aiko and finds her back covered in bruises and we learn that she is being raised in an abusive cult.
Maybe not horror per se, but the VN Muv-Luv is split into 3 parts: The first part is a 98% slice-of-live VN. But when it changes to the second parts the MC suddenly finds himself in an alternate world, where he is a normal person from the wealthy state of Japan suddenly thrown into a military camp with no conditioning as is expected of soldiers, being a liability to everyone around him, being incapable of doing the basic feats that are expected in that apocalyptic world and confronted with death on the regular.
I went into the 1st episode of Oshi No Ko full blind and about half way through I was given the impression it would be a slice of life about Ai trying balance her work life and home life as a single mother...
Not sure if this one is a right example for this trope, but I think Lobotomy Corporation managed to keep up the somewhat lighthearted atmosphere of a simple monster management simulator for a bit. At least relative to what was revealed later.
While I’d argue less cute and more fanservice-y, it definitely hits you with the tone like a freight train powered by the expectation that you were in for a fun horny time.
To be fair, while imho it's a great scene and the signs of something (beyond "just" anxiety) being wrong with Suletta were there, this sequence is also the most violent the show gets throughout (at least, as far as the visuals are concerned)
that show's foreshadowing was fucking incredible. Ending was a little bit bleh, but all the subtle things that Suletta says - especially the things she says about her mom - that have this air of wrongness to them are so realistic and good
A show aimed at kids about fruit samurai who do dance battles to claim turf is the reason why Madoka Magica exists. The writer for PMMM wrote Kamen Rider Gaim and just like Madoka, it opens with a very cute premise that gets dark very fast.
A lot of Kamen Rider seasons are like this- Kamen Rider Gavv is about a half-human who adores sweet treats and the reason why is because his human mother was kidnapped and forced to bear the child of an alien who runs a candy company/cartel whose most sought after product is a drug made out of humans and Gavv's mother's coping mechanism was to tell her little boy about her life before she was abducted, namely the food she loved. During the show itself, the protag is literally hit by a truck, the viewers watch a woman get melted down in a vat of acid to make evil candy, one of the side specials shows a main character gets beheaded, and the movie features another guy having his guts removed (complete with alien blood) on-screen
The color is just so... Bleak(?) Is that the word? But if you show me a screenshot from this anime, I'd guess something like psychological anime if not horror.
Starts off acting like any other "Japanese countryside slice-of-life" anime before everything gets real dark, real fast. The anime actually did the scene a bit of a disservice by making it the opening sequence. In the manga, they paint the scene as a nightmare while the character wakes up before shocking the reader with a panoramic scene of him realizing the room is absolutely coated with blood and the bat is still in his hand.
This doesn't really fit imho since it starts out very melancholic and ends melancholic. It's just really sad in a beautiful sort of way and maintains that throughout, instead of having a huge wham moment that shifts the tone like Madoka did for example.
I love Madoka. Like so much. I hav it tattoo'd. The third episode punch hits hard. The 10th episode punch rips out your heart. The second watch punch is a completely different, infinitely darker, story. Is it the best? Probably not. But that show means something, says profound shit to young women, and has real ass lessons.
Kinda? I went in hearing it got dark and to be honest it is still relatively light-hearted through to the end. I still liked it, and it dealt with some mature themes, but not what I was expecting.
Made in Abyss is actully very open about how deadly and brutal the Abyss is right from the get go. But it tells first and then shows later and aperantly a lot of people just don't belive or ignore the multipple explicit in your face warnings and then are surprised and shocked when the series starts to show. I found that pretty funny.
From what I heard this is becuse other shows hyped up the danger and then failed to deliver. Well "Made in Abyss" delivered.
Lots of media spends a bunch of time establishing the very deadly stakes but never actually follows through. Not a single hobbit dies in the LotR. Well, technically Gollum, I suppose.
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u/EpicDinoYT 27d ago
I already knew the twist beforehand but damn the reveal was chilling
School Live