Umineko: When They Cry/Nightmare Fuel

File:Maria-scary 7501.jpg

Maria is watching you!

Umineko: When They Cry IS part of the When They Cry series, so it is no surprise that you would encounter Nightmare Fuel.

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• The murders of the first twilight of the sixth game definitely qualify. Imagine playing dead with your mother, as a prank on a guest. Now imagine the guest coming in, killing your mother, then wrapping a plastic bag over you and sawing your head off.
• Pretty much anything involving Maria. Period. Someone should file down those fangs.
• The end of the first tea party, when Battler denies the existence of Beatrice and the happy tea party everyone was holding in the Golden Land ends abruptly as Beatrice shows herself and tells Battler that if even one person doesn't believe in her, then her magic doesn't work. And then everyone around him has their flesh shredded and begs him to believe in her in order to bring everything back. And the audience gets no sleep that night...
  • The manga makes it worse. Shannon's death was already a Tear Jerker, and now George is begging Battler to take his words back while Shannon screams "IT'S BECAUSE YOU DON'T BELIEVE YOU DON'T BELIEVE AAAAAH" and her face explodes off.
• Erm....First Twilight? HAPPY HALLOWEEN FOR MARIA. Yeah.
  • Think the anime version of it is bad? At least most of it was censored. The manga version, however, is left uncensored in all of its gruesome glory. The fun starts at page 16 and just keeps on going until page 21. Good luck getting any sleep after that. Or eating anything after that.
    • THAT IS NOT RED JAM.
  • Episode 2 has made my sister become terrified of candy.
  • Really, all of Chapter 2. It's just so violently bipolar. And then we have that chapter's tea party. Beatrice forces Rosa, the sole survivor last one to die, to eat foods made out of her siblings. Then Beatrice tops the whole thing off by giving Rosa a dessert consisting of her own daughter's head, who accuses Rosa of not loving her while she was alive. Arguably Crosses the Line Twice in the anime as watching Maria's disembodied head roll around on a platter while talking is grotesquely hilarious.
  • The way the Satanic Goats kill Battler and Kinzo. Although, they don't show you directly in the anime, you can hear them being squished to death.
  • I found pretty much all of the last five minutes of episode II-V in the anime scary as hell. When I caught the first glimpse of the goat butlers coming down the hall, she actually thought they were the ghosts of the dead Ushiromiyas for a second. Or the bit where those slender arms come through the door to caress Gohda's face and kill him while their owner giggles with the voice of a little girl. Beatrice never struck her as creepy until now.
    • That was actually Beelzebub, the Stake of Gluttony. And she happens to be incredibly cute when she's not killing people. The VN's make that clear that the Stakes love doing their job, but they're completely different when not killing people.
  • Episode 2-4: Yay, shirtless Kanon! Un-yay, Kanon opening a huge bandage that's covering a stab wound on his chest and STICKING HIS FINGERS INTO THE WOUND! And as if that wasn't bad enough, he then gorily cuts Kumasawa and Dr. Nanjo's throats with a Laser Blade before having his arm pinned to the wall with a knife and getting disintegrated into a cloud of golden butterflies, screaming in pain.
    • The worst part has to be the squishing noise he makes when he sticks his thumb in the wound.
• Dear god, fourth arc. Rosa's death. As if it isn't enough having Maria, who's become increasingly sympathetic through the arcs completely break down and put her mother through a Cruel and Unusual Death full of surreal imagery and all sorts of contorted deaths, the end of that scene makes it look like she was about to be gunning for Battler... or not?. It was darn creepy is what I'm saying!
  • While I found it to be disturbing (seriously, she twists Rosa's head off!), I also, for some reason, thought that it made Maria look a lot more sympathetic.
• This is how bad Umineko is: a lot of the violent stuff is shown on-screen, and TV networks in Japan had to CENSOR IT. Higurashi, where's your god now?
• Y'know what? Rosa, in particular, seems to get the truckload of this. Her death in the third arc was just as sadistically messed up as the tea party in the second. Drown in an ocean of jelly! ...Until the... jelly pressure? turns you into a meatball. Be buried in a mountain of cake! ...Until the... cake pressure? turns you into a layer of jam. Turn into a butterfly! ...And get blown right into a spider's web. It almost makes me forgive how she treats Maria.
• The original novels managed to make the Scare Chord scary again. * shudders*
• I just finished Episode 3, and would like to add the face that Eva makes at the end. Having been used to DEEN's exaggerated facial contortions, it was just... * shudder*
• The fate of the First Twilight victims in the first arc is pretty bad, too. Just being killed is horrifying on its own, but to have your face ripped off so you can't be recognized? (shudder).
• And while we're at it, though it's subtle, the First Twilight victims of the fifth arc plays on a certain Adult Fear: Specifically, your children being horribly murdered.
• Close to the end of episode three Jessica is temporarily blinded in an accident and the doctor is treating her wounds. Then he goes out of the room and meets Eva-Beatrice, who kills him. Jessica is left alone in the room and she hears doctor begging for mercy and being killed, followed by the killer screaming that after she's done playing with the doctor's corpse, she will go get Jessica. The possibility of being left handicapped, alone and helpless so close to killer, who know that you're there, is way too much for me.
• ...Yeah, I'm probably going to feel really dumb for putting this here, but was I the only one whose blood ran cold when she saw "You are incompetent!"? Poor Battler's already breaking down and you get a wonderful shot into the confused state of his mind at that point, and then that line comes at you out of nowhere! It's a weird thing to be scared of, but the idea of an insult like that being stated as absolute truth, I dunno, for some reason, it terrified me.
  • If I may interject, red text can be worked around (example: it never states if you were ALWAYS incompetent or if it was just that one moment of stupidity). Now, if this same sentence was said in GOLD (which cannot be worked around, and is THE absolute truth) instead of red... yeah, my stomach would probably keel over, too. Although the concept itself scares me pretty badly.
    • To be fair, that's the fan theory on how gold works. There's been no confirmation on that.
• Episode 5 isn't as bad with this, but there are still some moments of this happening. First off, Bernkastel's technique to goad Battler into playing another game is seen as underhanded and downright cruel, even by Lambda. Battler's sister, Ange, was sent back in time to 1986 in order to aid him. When his spirit was crushed and he failed to exist, Ange reminded him of who he was by revealing her identity, and she is subsequently torn to bits by red-hot tools until she's nothing but a pile of meat. Battler never sees this as Ange keeps him turned around the entire time she's dying. Bern's idea of getting him to continue to play is showing him this same event so that he can witness the horror.
  • It's even worse after reading Witch's Tanabata, and figuring out that Ange's entire purpose was to be raised to hate Eva and help Bern in the game 12 years later by having her killed off. Bern destroyed a little girl's happiness so she could kill her 12 years later after giving her a false sense of hope. Pretty much, all of Bern's acts of cruelty is enough to make you cringe at what she's capable of if she stops playing around...or swoon.
  • Oh, and there's all of Dlanor's moments of temporary insanity. "<DIE THE DEATH! SENTENCE TO DEATH! GREAT EQUALIZER IS THE DEATH!>"
    • The manga makes it so much worse. The...smile? on her face when "GREAT EQUALIZER IS THE DEATH!" is declared is the stuff of nightmares.
  • I couldn't play EP 5 after dark thanks to the mystery man from 19 years ago. I never knew when he'd end up calling Natsuhi again and just what he'd have her do next while watching her from the shadows, close enough to know if she so much as stirred from the bed she was ordered to lie down in until morning... * shudder*
    • Christ, the game of "hide-and-seek". Just the fact that she had to sit in a dark closet and listen to Hideyoshi being killed after finally letting himself cry over George's death was bad enough, but then the room goes unnaturally silent... Did the killer leave? Is he hiding somewhere else in the room? Is he standing outside of the closet door, waiting for her to come out?
• "There's no face! There's no face!" Might be Narm if it were spoken, but when it's just written...
  • Listen to the drama. It's not just cause it's written that it's terrifying and Tear Jerking.
• In the Ep6 the wedding scene. It was written like Erika was raping Battler.
• What Episode 6 lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. The scenes with Battler trapped in a closed room - especially before you know what's actually happening in them - are absolutely chilling. And then later on, we see Bernkastel offering him a single escape route: the bathtub drain. She tells him he can tear himself up with nippers and send his shredded pieces down the drain if he ever wants to escape.
  • Even worse is when you realize the sheer extent of how much a Fate Worse Than Death it is. When Kanon arrives, the room has been completely damaged and messed up as a result of Battler's attempts to escape, and it's heavily implied that Battler even considered Bernkastel's offer and nearly attempted to go through with it. If these implications aren't bad enough, then it's revealed that he has probably spent years in that closed room, trying to escape...the question is how many years. Just think about all that for a second. One must wonder how he managed to stay sane after all that.
    • Lambadelta's reaction makes that worse. It's revealed that both she and Bernkastel were, on separate occasions, thrown into the hell of the logic error. Both managed to make it out, but both were mentally broken by it. Lambadelta seems ok now, but then, she starts describing the hell she was in, and starts wondering if she actually made it out, thinking that perhaps everything that's happened since then is just a delusion, and she went insane a long time ago. "Hey... are you guys....really....real?" The look of absolute terror on her face is described to be more horrifying than anything she could have said.
      • Now in comic form!
    • Even worse is Bern granted still a Complete Monster to me, what she went through was worse than Lambdadelta. She was trapped in a logic error as a PIECE while her game master abandoned the game and she was forced to fix it herself in a way that was compared to a monkey randomly typing on a typewriter until it writes Hamlet. And if you take ep6 witches tea party into account Bern is very fearful of Featherine who calls Bern her old miko, so maybe Bern was trapped in a Logic error by Featherine.
  • The second one of these sequences is particularly disturbing: Battler tries to escape by breaking the window. Though he can shatter the glass, the grid won't budge despite only being made of wood. Desperate, he puts his arm through and tries to pull the wooden bars out from any angle he can. His efforts earn him only gashes. To make things worst, he realizes that the glass has started regenerating. Panicking, he tries to pull his arm back in, but he's too late. The jagged edges of the glass enclose on his wrist and cut deep into his skin. No matter how hard he tries, he can't free himself... And that's something slimy brushes across the trapped hand, lifts his ring finger, and bites.
• The manga refuses to be left out of the fun - some scenes that weren't even mildly scary before become bona fide Nightmare Fuel. Chapter three alone has two instances, and no doubt there are more later on. (That second example is particularly terrifying; it's the only scene I know of that puts the "doom" in Paper Fan of Doom.
  • I can't help but think there's an Awesome Face behind that fan.
  • The manga is famous for exaggerating Beatrice's expressions, almost to the point of Narm so most of the time, they are either that or they are this trope. This one, meanwhile, straddles the line between the two rather well.
• Virgilia with her eyes open. Jesus christ.
• As the picture on the page indicates, on the few occasions Maria's facial expressions in the anime aren't ridiculously exaggerated to the point of unintentional hilarity...they can actually be downright terrifying.
  • For me, the one time Maria's creepy faces in the anime actually scared me was the one that comes right after killing Rosa, feeling regretful over it, and then BAM, when you least expect it, suddenly you get a HUGE close-up of her face as she goes on about how she's willing to forgive her mother because she's a witch.
  • Then again, Maria herself is pretty terrifying on many occasions...
• Fourth arc. Eva. Or better said, Ange's perception of Eva. Shotgun. BOOOOOM!! AAAAAAAAHHHH!!
  • "Have a nice dream. See You in Hell."
• UOOOOOH I WANT TO SEE YOUR SMILE AGAIN, BEATRIIICEEEEEEEEEE [1]
  • Putting oversized dentures in your mouth isn't going to make things better Beatrice
• The most horrifying thing for me is that Bernkastel is/was/came from Rika - you know, determined, heroic, friends-are-the-most-important-thing-in-the-world Big Good Rika?
  • It is bad enough that the above about Bernkastel is true but what makes it worse is that Bernkastel is made of all the Rikas that didn't make it to July. It is no wonder she is FAR more cynical than Rika in Higurashi.
• Manga-version of the scene with Rosa brutally tearing Sakutaro apart absolutely terrifies me. And Rosa doesn't leave it at that, oh no. Then she has to shove the remains in Maria's face and say "Sakutaro is dead now." It gets even worse when it switches to Maria's perspective, and we see Sakutaro's severed human head being dangled in front of her.
• The goats, or rather the lack thereof. By the end of the sixth its clear that the goats aren't simply generic demonic henchman, but rather people/witches cosplaying. Meaning, that all of the horrible things they do are actually being done by things that look and probably once were human.
• Even the fighting game has one of sorts. Try activating the Metaworld in the hallway stage where Beatrice's portrait is. You'll be suddenly greeted by a line of goat people all staring at you when the background shifts, many of them blood stained.
• In EP7 Will asks Shannon to bring Kanon into the same room as she's in. She instantly goes into Heroic Safe Mode and the happy music in the background suddenly changes to something very creepy as she starts talk like a robot asking Will if he's certain that he wants Kanon in the same room. The implication that Shannon would have killed Will if he kept pursuing Kanon and Shannon to be in the same room is enough to creep this trouper out. Fortunately, he stops and she goes back to normal like nothing happened.
  • A little visual of what it would look like face to face! A Nightmare Face at its finest.
• In episode 4, try this page: [2] I don't know about you, but I was absolutely TERRIFIED to look at this. The face...just...not only is it ripped off, but its a troll too... I don't want to sleep after seeing this page.
• In Dawn, when it's revealed who the murderer of that arc is.
• After Battler surrenders in EP 2, the narration invariably refers to him as "the furniture." This is back when Beatrice's toothy grin was frightening rather than charming, and she's grinning it the whole time, as she literally leads him around on a chain. It. Is. Terrifying.
• The Play Station 3 port massively ups the trollfaces. Here's a delicious heart-stopping sample:
• Some of Beatrice's anime troll faces would count as this.
• Jessica's night in the VIP room in EP 7.
• The view of Kanon sticking his fingers in the bullet wound in his chest.

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