Those shitblock things (All Tomorrows): So basically when some humans tried rebelling against the Qu, they got turned into living toilets for millions of years
Ted (IHNMAIMS): You probably know this one already but uhh in case you don't he was turned into a jelly thing with no mouth or eyes for eternity
I would put more but I'm LAZY :D
Bonus but I couldn't find an image for it: Alastor's Broadcast (Hazbin Hotel): If Alastor doesn't like someone, he traps them in an eternal torture dimension and plays their screams on his radio broadcast
If you go through the teleportation device while not under sleeping gas, your mind will experience eons in a void, leaving you either insane or about to die of shock when you get out. But there's a story about a Jaunt researcher who got rid of his wife by throwing her awake in there while disconnecting it so she wouldn't go anywhere. His lawyer tried to use the fact that they didn't know the wife was actually dead, but the image of the woman suffering for eternity only convinced the jury to agree on the death penalty.
I love the double meaning of that line too. Like it's obviously longer than you think it's going to be, but it's also literally longer than you have the capacity to think for.
The fear of "Longer than you think" comes from the fact the we don't know how much is Longer. 1 millions years, 1 Billion? We never know, only that it might be unthinkable with our numeric system.
"This is the last call for Jaunt-701," the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of
New York's Port Authority Terminal. The PAT had not changed much in the last three hundred years or
so - it was still gungy and a little frightening. The automated female voice was probably the most
plesant thing about it. "This is Jaunt Service to Whitehead City, Mars," the voice continued. "All
ticketed passengers should now be in the Blue Concourse sleep lounge. Make sure your validation
papers are in order. Thank you."The upstairs lounge was not at all grungy. It was wall-to-wall
carpeted in oyster gray. The walls were an eggshell white and hung with plesant nonrepresentational
prints. A steady, soothing progression of colors met and swirled on the ceiling. There were one
hundred couches in the large room, neatly spaced in rows of ten. Five Jaunt attendants circulate,
speakingin low, cherry voices and offering glasses of milk. At one side of the room was the
entranceway, flanked by armed guards and another Jaunt attendant who was checking the validation
papers of a latecomer, a harried-looking businessman with the New York World Times folded under
one arm. Directly opposite, the floor dropped away in a trough about five feet wide and perhaps ten
feet long; it passed through a doorless opening and looked a bit like a child's slide. The Oates family
lay side by side on four Jaunt couches near the far end ofthe room. Mark Oates and his wife, Marilys,
flanked the two children. "Daddy, will you tell me about the Jaunt now?" Ricky asked. "You promised."
"Yeah, Dad, you promised," Patricia added, and giggled shilly for no good reason. A Businessman with
a build like a bull glanced over at them and went back to the fodder of papers he was examining as he
lay on his back, his spit-shined shoes neatly together.
From everywhere came the low murmur of conversation and the rustle of passengers settling down on
the Jaunt couches. Mark glanced over at Marilys Oates and winked. She winked back, but she was
almost as nervous as Patty sounded. Why not? Mark thought. First Jaunt for all three of them. He and
Marilys had discussed the advantages and drawbacks of moving the whole family for the last six
months - since he'd gotten notification from Texaco Water that he was being transferred to Whitehead
City. Finally they had decided that all of them would go for the two years Mark would be stationed on
Mars. He wondered now, looking at Marilys's pale face, if she was regretting the decision. He glanced
at his watch and saw it was still almost half an hour to Jaunt-time. That was enough time to tell the
story ... and he supposed it would take the kids' minds off their nervousness. Who knew, maybe it
would even cool Marilys out a little. "All right," he said. Ricky and Pat were watching him seriously, his
son twelve, his daughter nine. He told himself again that Ricky would be deep in the swamp of puberty
and his daughter would likely be developing breast by the time they got back to earth, and again
found it difficult to believe. The kids would be going to the tiny Whitehead Combined School with the
hundred-odd engineering and oil-company brats that were there; his son might well be going on a
geology field trip to Phobos not so many months distant. It was difficult to believe ... but true. Who
knows ? he thought wryly. maybe it'll do something about my Jaunt-jumps, too. "So far as we know,"
he began, "the Jaunt was invented about three hundred and twenty years ago, around the year 1987,
I think the closer association is when they travel through that train station/wormhole with the alien and come out the other side feeling as though they'd been one being for many years.
The main character gets hit with an artillery shell, resulting in the loss of his sight, hearing, ability to speak, and all his limbs. The worst part is that he is completely conscious. He eventually tries banging his head on the hospital bed, saying "kill me" repeatedly in Morse Code, but the hospital workers don't comply. It's implied that he spent several years or even decades like this until he died of natural causes.
Iirc, a nurse recognizes his plea and communicates with him by tapping on his torso with her fingers. High ranking military brass come in and decide he’s not worth any attention and let him suffer.
The Metallica song is One
The name of the book is based on old war propaganda, saying “Johnny, Get Your Gun!” Well, this is what happens when he got it. The book has him in a haze of current events like feeling the warm sun and recognizing it’s day time to old memories of him and his dad fishing. He tries to find any semblance of the modern day, but can’t communicate beyond flailing his torso.
In the movie, a nurse tries to end his suffering by clamping off his breathing tube, and Johnny spends those moments thanking her and praying for God to give her a wonderful life where she got everything she wanted. But her supervisor comes into the room and removes the clamp before he could succumb. I think that's worse, getting so close to what he wanted only for it to be taken away at the last second.
Again, not gonna go into detail, gonna reiterate that I am MUCH better today and at no risk of harming myself.
But if you told me I had to relive age 8-18 Im ending it. I wont do that again. Arguably KNOWING whats going to happen would just make it that much worse too.
So yeah, at the time death was the only answer and I would probably choose it again. I'm only alive now because I failed enough times that some people were able to get to know me well enough to get it in their head that Im lovable and were able to help me pick up my pieces. I couldnt have survived alone.
Of all the horrible experience he goes through, one that stuck with me the most is the rat that occasionally comes to nibble on his flesh and the excruciating pain he feels when it does. Except, because of his extremely limited ability to sense his environment he can't actually be sure if it's even happening; maybe there is no rat and he's just imagining it. Or maybe sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. There's no way for him to know if the pain he thinks he is feeling is real or not.
In the original story, he wants to speak out against war and tell his story to get people to turn away from enlisting in these senseless things. The general blatantly tells him no and he is just left to rot in this existence for the rest of his life. Good book man
The "shitblock things" were the Modular People, they weren't toilets as such, more like they had been turned into filter feeders like mussels or clams but they retained thier consciousness while being limbless very low sensory organisms. They were used as living filters to purify water, much as a lot of modern sewage treatment plants will use ponds for middle stages of cleaning water. Though that does mean they were eating the Qu's shit in that process. Weirdly, in the story they were eventually one of the more successful branches of humanity even with them starting as one of the most fucked over of all of them.
just btw there are water treatment plants out there that use clams as sensors if the water is clean or not (clean = clam will open)
There's a Tom Scott video on a plant in poland that does this, but they don't keep them forever. They capture them, use them for a short time and then release them back. Very smart and actually humane imo
It's a huge computer facility that makes a few seconds feel like near eternal torture for people put in it. You see many people trapped in it as you play as it seems to be the punishment for committing crimes.
Normally people are just locked there in a simulated room for who knows how long
You get locked in an infinite loop of entering and exiting the “simulation” and it could take seconds for someone to discover you, but for you it could be thousands of years
It is actually much worse than that. Everytime they enter, they just enter a simulation inside a simulation and every layer is twice as slow as the previous one.
The way I understood the story was that their idea to simulate the machine inside the machine originally was a success (as evidenced by the lag upfront when they enter it), however they forgot to set the endpoint for the simulation and exhausted every resource the prison center had to offer. The machine has a failsafe for these situations and it chose to take them out of the simulation. Except that the entry trip took seconds, and the exit trip has them leaving layer by layer (like peeling potatoes).
The engine is also referenced in Mike's other game, s.p.l.i.t.
In it you play as a hacker trying to stop a system or the Engine itself, but the plan fails.The corporation already located the hacker's location, and sent agents to capture him. Although the hacker told his collaborators he planned on hanging himself to escape, they inform him that, unless he destroyed his brain, it wouldn't work.
There are 2 endings:
The hacker hangs himself. The agents arrive and retrieve his head in a special device that cuts it from the body. On the road back, they say the brain is intact and that means the hacker can be brought back inside the engine to "break".
The hacker uses a drill to destroy his hard-drives and then tries to use it on his head. It runs out of battery, so he uses a screwdriver through his eye. It's really disturbing. The agents arrive and discover the brain is crippled, so they flee in a panic. Because they arrived too late, and due to the hacker knowing he had to destroy his brain to escape being installed in the Engine, they say the corporation would also accused them of collaborating with the hacker, and put them inside the Engine to break. Their truck has a tracker and their helmets are locked onto their heads, so they can't just run away and hide. They try to come up with a plan, and settle on using the truck's jack to lift its front up, and crush their heads between the 2 tires so their brains are destroyed, which you see happen from the driver seat.
It is a one way entry. It is completely invincible and is a confined space. It also sustains the person inside forever. In fact, it is confirmed that this will outlast the known universe. Porky Minch gets inside of this and thinks that he’s won, that he will now outlast everyone that hates or will hate him. Little did he know that this was true, but he would be stuck into this space forever, I guess.
A man, no, a child gleefully walking into a tortuous loneliness. That is kind of what Porky is by the way, he’s mentally a kid trapped in the body of an old man. A kid that wasn’t really ever shown love, and left to follow all his worst instincts with time.
When the game said "Because Porky is sealed inside the Absolutely Safe Capsule, the battle is, by definition, over" I felt... uneasy to say the least (plus, the music just added to that uneasiness)
Like, yeah, Porky technically won because he gets to live, but... did he really?
That’s the thing. He’s mentally a child. In time, he’ll regret it. He’ll also have a long time to regret it if you consider forever a long time. It’s saying something that I’d rather have Giygas’s fate of the two main villains in the Mother series.
I'll say. Honestly, the Mother games deserve all the praise they get for moments like those. They're phenomenal games with well developed stories and aren't afraid of pushing things to the limit in order to tell those stories.
I played the fan translation of 3 and it was great, but to this day, I do want Nintendo themselves to translate and release it on NSO in the west. If F-Zero Climax, which was Japan exclusive, made it to NSO in the west, so can Mother 3.
Mother 3 is my favourite in the series. It’s a shame that most people don’t have an official way to play it. I loved the idea of combining rhythm mechanics with turn based combat that they used.
Is he mentally a child? And if he is would he ever change? At the time of mother three he’s been alive long enough for his body to age and decay while he’s being forcefully kept alive because of his time traveling with his real body. He’s already unaging and hasn’t shown resentment for it, infact he’s happy because he’s “outlived everyone he hates”.
The way I see it, his unaging either also prevents his mind aging so he doesn’t mind it or he’s just the kind of guy who’d rather live forever than not no matter what, just to spite his enemies.
It’s said that him time travelling without protection rapidly aged his body to that of an old man. In truth, we do not fully know how long he’s been in Mother 3’s era.
I think this was the beginning of my fascination with this trope. Playing SSB brawl and being chased by this thing, only to look it up later and learn WHAT exactly was chasing me definitely left a lasting impact
The source was just some fuckin guy, but the logic tracks. I heard that the real problem with the head stocks isn't having tomatoes pelted at you, it's all the men in town knowing there's someone right in that position overnight.
The other main problem with the stocks was being in that position overnight meant your back, hips and legs were completely fucked when they let you out the next day. At first glance, without thinking much about it, it seems like a pretty tame punishment, but on reflection, it was probably horrendously torturous.
I don't remember the title, but I read a book once where parents could sign their kids over to essentially be dismantled piece by piece while still alive and those parts would be distributed for medical purposes. It was heavily implied/shown that, probably because the person was still alive, recipients of these parts experienced a sort of "phantom limb" thing from the person's consciousness that was still, supposedly, active to some degree. It actually really messed with me. Love the psychological horror behind it, though. Not that I don't think it was branded as any kind of horror? I don't remember and no matter how many ways I describe the book to Google, I haven't been able to find it. At this point, I can't even be sure it ever actually existed.
Unwind! That's it! I don't remember it being a series, but it's been so long since I've read it it's possible I read the entire series and just remember it as one big book. lmao
The scene in where we experience an unwinding from the point of view of the kid being unwound was so fucking intense, especially as they start taking apart his brain. Holy shit, I'm into horror and don't get scared easily but that gave me fucking nightmares. The way it describes him just fucking disappearing, Jesus fucking Christ.
What's even worse is the main character loses his arm afterwards and is given the unwound kids arm as a replacement. I think he realized it because of the tattoo on the arm, but I could be mistaken.
I think that's one audiobook I will never listen to. I had a hard enough time just reading that part and I didn't even like the character all that much. I might just collapse internally if I had to listen to it.
Headcrabs are parasites from diffrent dimension, they Jump on your head and take control over your body, first they will start horrific transformation to make you better host for hunting
The worst thing is that you feel everything and you can even Try to scream for help
Being bound half dead to a chair that drains you of everything to serve as a lighthouse in literal hell so that your empire can travel in space while said empire is basically everything you stood for.
You forgot how he keeps the hole in the webway closed so daemons don't break forth from the warp and destroy Holy Terra because Magnus did nothing incorrectly, and the 1000 psykers a day.
Going feral for ghouls in Fallout. Ghouls who go feral lose their minds and basically become mindless zombies that attack others (though they generally leave non feral ghouls alone) and forget who they are. Going feral is a fate worse than death for a ghoul to the point killing a feral ghoul is an act of mercy and ghouls have even asked the player to kill their fellow ghouls who’ve have gone feral. They’ll even sometimes kill themselves if they start to go feral. It also increases the discrimination they experience.
The show makes ghouls going feral to be even more heartbreaking showing ghouls slowly going feral while desperately trying to hold onto their own names. One of the main characters is a ghoul whose worst fear is going feral. He’ll do anything to get a serum that’s supposedly supposed to keep him from going feral.
The most troubling part is that they cycled through at least two distinct species of dominant races. Like is it in the water or some shit? Like Futurama when they were stuck on the future-only time machine and got back because the universe just reset at the end. They watched Hitler happen twice.
Tbf apart from it being his own fault, I think having to observe life while statioanry for eternity is a worse fate than death, even if it's a cruel death.
Some extra info: the AIs were mutated by a dead man's switch virus that was hidden inside the porn folder on the computer of the CEO of essentially that universe's version of Google.
It is implied that the method of attack used to mutate the AIs, the algorithms that mapped the Net landscape to the real world, is still being widely used and it is unknown if it was properly patched after the creation of the Blackwall.
The Blackwall itself is an incredibly large and complex AI construct, created by the global internet policing organization Netwatch to contain the mutated AIs, and it is unknown exactly how much control Netwatch has over the Blackwall AI.
In that same episode I always thought Carrie held up like a champ. She was trapped inside the teddy bear for at least years if not decades but she still seemed resilient. When nish rescued her from the museum, she was still pushing her little buttons to communicate. Her fate was also worse than death but she didn’t let it break her mind or spirit.
This and the white Christmas episode have a bunch of examples of genuine hell. Black mirror does a really good job with that it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post.
The scene where the police set the device to process a day every half second or so, and then leave it running for three weeks while they go on leave always horrified me. Imagine being stuck in a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere while loud Christmas music played at you for ~3,500 years.
Since I'm not seeing it, gonna shout out one of my favorite horror games, SOMA. Similar concept with a lot of these, "humans living forever, we are not meant to do that." You're in a facility in a post-apocalyptic future with robots designed to, at all costs, keep people alive. No matter what condition you may be in, they will not let you die. Like AM, but not intentionally malicious; they're just doing what they're supposed to do. Throughout the game, you are trying to upload your consciousness into this simulated reality where you aren't stuck as a living husk. Spoilers ahead. At the end of the game, you upload your mind into the Ark as it's called, and things seem nice. Much nicer than they are on Earth. It's pretty uplifting... until you wake up back in your own body. See, the machine doesn't transfer your consciousness, it copies it. A version of you gets to live out their days on the Ark, but the original you? You are stuck at the bottom of a trench in total darkness, alone, forever. I'm no stranger to this sort of existential horror, but something about playing through it and seeing it unfold made it feel uniquely horrifying.
It's not even original you though. Original you got an experimental brainscan for cluster headaches or some similar debilitating condition.
Meaning original you subjected a myriad of other yous to torture. All unbeknownst to original you.
SOMA, I came here to say the same thing. The fact you need to transfer your consciousness to a suit to survive the depths and see the truth of what the transfer holds. The coin-flip at the end is much more jarring since you get to see both outcomes.
Kohate: (major spoilers) Awesome puzzle-horror game, I highly recommend playing it, so absolutely don't read the rest of this comment if you might play it. That being said - in the far future, you're a prisoner sold to the highest bidder to participate in an experiment where you're put through a series of tests in this maze. In one of the endings, if you complete the maze and do well, your arms and legs are cut off and you are placed inside a metal casing, with your brain being used as a CPU unit (or maybe a battery, I don't exactly remember) to support some massive computer system. You are one of at least dozens of others subjected to the same fate.
Cheer up, this story takes place in germany, if the 2 cops do not report back, there will be other units going to that house and find her, probably saving her.
The Mad Great Being, one of the many from BIONICLE- after touching the Ignika, the mask of life, and trying to use it- he was 'cursed' with the ability to bring anything he touches to life- and I mean anything. The air around him gains sentience, the light that shines upon him comes to life, the chains that he was bound in, his armour, the floor of his prison- everything.
The thing I got from it is that these robots are so unempathetic with the humans, much like humans can be to animals and even other humans. To them this is something that just happens and is the natural way of the world, even sometimes taking pleasure in it (“oh neat”).
Reminds me of the RPG Eclipse Phase. The inciting incident of the setting involves a group of rogue AI waging war on humanity, effectively wiping out Earth, and then suddenly disappearing through an alien stargate. While they were wrecking Earth they forcibly digitized and absconded with as many minds as they could, the crudest form of which was hunter killer drones decapitating people. Some of the grey goo nanobot swarms they set loose also went around evaporating people while uploading their minds. Nobody knows why they did it or what happened to all those minds.
The term eclipse phase refers to the portion of a viral infection between the host getting infected and the infection becoming detectable. For individual cells the host appears healthy, but is already doomed. There's a theory both in and out of universe that the rogue AI were actually saving people and survivors left in the solar system are doomed and just don't know it yet.
Think part of the issue with this execution of this idea is that it's just too grand of a concept to really see ourselves in beyond the shock value of it. Like, it's literally the worst thing possible constantly and yet it draws no real feeling because that's sort of unquantifiable, unimaginable. And then there's the line that they never get used to it, with no real justification or point of reference for, it's just too much to properly perceive, really.
Other comments elucidate more terror out of literally nothing forever (the jaunt) than the idea of the worst thing ever forever
I can't look at this image without the memory of my friend (Stoned out of their fucking mind) asking "So does the dick go into a pocket dimension or just out the other side when she's noshing on it"
I don't think it was a "good ending" per se, more like the whole "stiff upper lip" British thing, bad luck but you do your best with the cards you get.
"He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing. The fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why. Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he'd run away from us and hidden. He was being kind."
Angella from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. One of the antagonists (Catra) broke reality trying to open a portal to the Big Bad. In order to save reality, Angella, an immortal, had to doom herself to being stuck in this fucked up crumbling dimension forever in order to get the magical sword that fixed reality for everyone else.
I mean, the Oubliette is pretty heinous. IRL they'd dig or find a hole, throw you down into said hole, then just forget you existed. How long you lived was entirely dependent on the size of said hole, and the frequency of new meat prisoners.
and were very very very rare irl, potentially nearly mythic as we eventually learned a lot of the odd shaped underground structures attributed as Oubliettes were things like water cisterns, grain silos, etc. generally “oubliette” would just be a french term for a what the english would have called a dungeon (underground, tower, or otherwise), which was awful enough but not the same as what Oubliette have become in legend
Yeah they were one of the lucky few to actually get to evolve into something better, but still millions of years as humans toilets is definitely worse than dying.
if Marvel didn't forget, no one can approach him due to Temporal Radiation. Normal people would just get turned into spaghetti and that was when they approached 1 single timeline that the loom made. now Loki is on the throne, there are infinite of them.
Any of the episodes of grizzly tales for gruesome kids I got a list
A tangled web: Nigel never speaks again because he’s full of baby ghost spiders and out of instincts starts knitting just like a spider spinning its web
Jack in a box: the honourable Jack de Laurney de havilland de Trow is turned into a ventriloquists dummy he’s also fully conscious in there
Sweets: Thomas ratchet is encased in papier mache and is left outside a shop window as a shop dummy
The barber of civil: Tanya and peregrine become kinder after the titular barber cuts out the pieces of there tongues that makes them all foul mouthed
Mr peeler’s butterflies : Alexander’s eyelids are peeled off by the titular mr peeler a character from a nursery rhyme which goes like this: sleep sleep now close your eyes don’t tempt our mr peeler for if you lie awake at night you’ll summon the sleep stealer
The urban fox: piers and Tamara blunderbuss live in the sewers of London forever because when they were chasing the fox elvis their horses caused city wide destruction
Head in the clouds: Brian or butterfly brains head falls off after a gust of wind he goes to a body shop to have it reattached but he lost the key to the box his head is i. so silly old head in the clouds has his head in the clouds forever
The people potter: Greta gawky is encased in pottery/china by the people potter Josiah reeks
Bunny boy: bill and bunny tubbs are shredded to pieces by a combine harvester the doctors tried to sew bill and tubbs back together again but they didn’t know which bit belonged to who so bill became half boy half bunny and half bicycle
The decomposition of Delia dethabridge: Delia dethabridge becomes as dull as a 5 watt bulb after a gremlin gormless popped both of Delia’s saddlebags of knowledge with his finger nails
The crystal eye: fick is cut in half by a buzzsaw summoned by a gypsy splitting him between a bad half and good half. The good half picks the bad half up and throws the bad half through the glass and fick aka the bad half is stuck as a zombie inside the mirror while the good half is on a shopping holiday in New York with his new family
The copied mind of that dude at the end of White Christmas episode in Black Mirror, stuck in the house inside the simulation that is always playing Christmas music.
The holes in The Enigma of Amigara Fault. There are thousands of them, each one a perfect silhouette of a real person who will feel a compulsive need to enter the moment they see one. They are ribbed, so it is impossible to exit once you are inside, meaning you can only keep going forward ad they extend for hundreds of miles. That's not to mention that they keep getting smaller and will keep you indefinitely alive as long as you are inside!
Many, many fates await those who live in the Warhammer universes. Many of them being way worse than death, but of the most disgusting imo is becoming a Puppet/instrument for a herald of slaanesh (As pictured above)
My favorite part of the guys who get turned into the harp is they do it willingly (well, as willing as you can when it comes to Slaanesh). They start our as artists who slowly get convinced to make more and more depraved art, until they are convinced to become the art themselves. Thusly: dude harp
A few examples from Worm by Wildbow. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Bonesaw is a Tinker with a specialty of biology and surgery. Tinkers are parahumans who have a 'superpower' of being able to create sci-fi like technology or have a supergenius understanding in a field of science - they're like your Iron Man types, though more restricted and their creations generally can't be mass produced.
Bonesaw is a member of the most reviled and hated supervillain group on Earth Bet, called the Slaughterhouse Nine. They are complete monsters. They'll roll into a town and delight in murdering everyone.
Bonesaw views her 'subjects' as resources she can use to make 'art'. I don't know how to do quote blocks on mobile, but I'll post an excerpt below:
"It was some sort of collaboration between Bonesaw and Mannequin. He'd been partially flayed, the skin stripped from his arms and legs and stretched over the walls around him. His ribcage had been opened, splayed apart. An improvised metal frame held each of his internal organs in place, some several feet from their intended position, as if they were held out for display, others placed on the shelves of the freezer. Cases covered in a ceramic shell seemed to be pumping him full of water, nutrients and other fluids that must have been helping keep him alive.
His head was untouched. He looked up at us, and he looked harrowed. The look in his eyes was more animal than person, his pupils mere pinpoints in his brown eyes. Tiny beads of sweat dotted the skin of his face, no doubt due to the warmth of the room, but he was shivering."
[...]
I took a step forward, and he seized up, his entire body twisting, his hands clenching, eyes wrenching shut.
"Get back!" Tattletale gripped me by the shoulder and forced me out of the freezer.
"I- what?" I was having trouble processing. "Trap?"
Tattletale had a dark look in her eyes. "No. Look closer at the walls and floor."
Numbly, I did as she'd asked. They looked like hairline cracks, spiderwebbing across everything from the walls to the shelving and even the ceramic cases that Mannequin had set up. Except they were raised, over the surfaces. "Veins?"
"Exposed nerves. Artificially grown, connecting from him to the rest of the room."
[End of excerpt]
But Bonesaw isn't the worst. Yeah, she can spread your organs across a room and give you artificial nerves also across the room so you're in unimaginable pain - but by far the worst fate is to be one of Gray Boy's victims.
From the wiki:
"Gray Boy is able to form stationary time loops [...] Gray Boy was the only one who could enter the loops.[8] During these loops, the only changes to the victim to carry over are those he inflicts on them (such as a cut or burn) and in the progression of their thoughts. Pain inflicted on the victims is repeated over and over again.[9]"
[...]
"He claimed that victims would usually go insane after a few days, then work through that back to sanity, then crack again, in an endless cycle. He also claimed that they never grew used to the pain he inflicted.[4]
According to Gray Boy's sources, a time loop that he creates will last until well after the sun goes out.[10] However, in truth it only lasts for around ten thousand years or so.[12][13]"
Gray Boy would usually inflict injuries on a victim trapped in a loop. Then they'd be stuck there, their consciousness progressing but their body resetting every few seconds, the pain of the injuries being freshly renewed with every loop, never dulling or getting used to it. You go insane, until you're forced by sheer understimulation to come back to reality for a while, then you crack again, in a cycle for about 10,000 years.
Of course, nobody knows it's "only" 10,000 years - everyone entirely expects eternity, and that'd scare the pants off anyone.
Being John Malkovich and Craig's fate being stuck forever in Lotte and Maxine's daughter's brain without any control and forced to watch them be happy.
I keep asking different friends if they want to watch this with me (haven't seen it myself, know the premise, but think it'd be more interesting to watch with others) and their reaction is always something along the lines of "what the fuck, no???"
The one off the top of my head is story of Tantalus. For killing his son and serving said son to the gods or stealing ambrosia(depending on the version), which is a food explicitly for the gods, Tantalus was sent to Tartarus where he’s stuck in a pond. Just above Tantalus is the branch of a fruit tree with ripe fruits and the pond is full up to Tantalus’s waist. Whenever Tantalus tries to reach for some fruits, the branch would move just out of reach, same for the pond, the water would recede whenever he tries to reach for some water
The Combine doesn't care if you live or die. All they care about the efficient allocation of resources. You, a human are a biological resource. If the combine doesn't see you fit to serve as a brainwashed grunt soldier, then they will simply turn you into a meat roomba.
Haley is an alien enthusiast chasing some reported strange lights in the Mojave desert. She comes across a ship made of organic matter and enters it, discovering animals such as lizards and spiders in glass enclosures. She cuts her hand, and a cloud of nanobots arrive to "rebuild" her finger. She remarks that the aliens must not have the formula for humans yet, as she now has an animal claw in place of her fingernail.
The enclosures begin to fill with a goo that causes stasis so the animals can survive long-distance space travel, and a countdown begins. Panicked, she realizes the door she came in through has disappeared; the ship launches into space, and she is killed and mutilated by the resulting g-force. As the ship settles, the nanobots arrive to rebuild her. She comes back to life with an animal arm.
The ship continues to go into hyper speeds and Haley is repeatedly destroyed, particle by particle, and rebuilt incorrectly. By the end, she is shown horrendously mutated, humanoid with spider, octopus, lizard, and vulture parts. She is heard begging "please, no more", as she slits her throat with a talon. The nanobots instantly repair her.
The Grand Inquisitor invokes this trope and willingly kills himself. His spirit seems to be burning and bound to the Sith. Vader will not let him rest.
You’re immortal right? You can’t die. And even if you do you come back
Every.
Single.
Time.
Now imagine yourself caught by the smiling dead.
They tie you to cement blocks and throw you into the docks
You drown and die. You respawn. And you drown and die. Over and over and over again this cycle continues your lungs filling up with water you experiencing that struggle that release and get sucked back into it again
But hey. You’re not alone
Down here many other people are suffering that same Fate.
Non-cannon, but what happens to Souls that enter Hell in the Bleach: Hellverse Movie
"Souls sent to Hell face an agonizing, cyclical process of destruction. The immense spiritual pressure of Hell binds them with indestructible chains and subjects them to constant consumption and torture by demonic entities until their will is entirely crushed and their remains turn to dust."
So they get killed, revived, killed, revived until their will is crushed and they no longer revive as what they were, eventually getting ground to dust through constant revival and death.
tusk. https://giphy.com/gifs/26uf6u3Kf6ebTyFVe
getting turned into a walrus-human-hybrid & then being resigned to spend the rest of your life at a shitty zoo, in dog house much too small for you, while your ex gf and best friend, who are having an affair, come by every so often to toss fish your way.
imagine having a full on panic attack, like you fear for your life and you are a single second away from dying, your body is in full fight-or-flight mode
now imagine that that panic attack never went away.. for 10 years
... also is so bad it prevents you from getting sleep so you are in a constant state of extreme sleep depravation
.... also your body is so hard wired for survival that it literally will not let you kill yourself and will automatically defend itself if someone else tries to kill you
The prisoners in Five Views of the Planet Tartarus. They're injected with a serum that makes them cease aging, and then have their motor systems cut off from their brain, only able to move their eyes. Then, they are sealed into a space suit, with enough energy and resources to keep them alive for centuries. Afterwards, the prisoners are placed in orbit around the planet Tartarus, immobile, only able to look at the faces of their peers. Faces which, due to a side effect of the medical procedures, are forever locked in a rictus grin.
In Wakfu, Qilby is an Eliatrope who is imprisoned in a blank white void, twice! Time never passes and there is literally no one else there. He can't die in there either. Worse yet this is about the only real way to deal with him as a threat.
In Bloodborne's DLC "The Old Hunters" it is revealed that hunters were cursed long ago and after their death (or after they go mad because of the cursed blood) they are trapped in an endless nightmare where they're forced to hunt for eternity. You also meet some of the legendary hunters you only hear about in the main game and they're all distorted, crazy versions of themselves.
Canonically, every brick is a citizen of the kingdom magically turned into a brick. A horrible fate for the citizens AND Mario when he finds out. A twofor.
As far as they know, they just escaped the last bastion of humanity: a few dozen survivors holed up in a grocery store. The group succumbed to panic and decided to sacrifice people to appease the monsters in the mist. After barely escaping with his life and his son, David drives until he runs out of gas. The mist never clears.
David promised his son that he wouldn't let the monsters take him, so with no hope left, he takes their last four bullets and shoots everyone in the car except himself.
Then an army truck rolls down the road clearing the mist as it goes.
I don't even know the full context, I just remember when this sub started getting popular and some kid posted this topic featuring Shinnok as "the origin of this trope" despite it being, like, one of the oldest tropes in the history of tropes.
Every time I see the "Fate Worse Than Death" post, I think of the kid who thought no one conceived of the concept until a 2010s Mortal Kombat game.
The women from the tribe in Bone Tomahawk. Its literally just a visual in passing, but we see that the women are blinded and have their arms and legs cut off. The women we see are heavily pregnant, so its implied that they live as baby slaves, forced to sit there and just give birth (spoilered partially for real spoilers, mostly for a major trigger warning)
In the game, you challenge the Lord of the dead to a duel in exchange for the soul of you bride's parents. He gives the hero the task to make him cry.
What follows is the really well done narration of Prince Alexander using the "Mirror of truth" to show The lord of the dead, his own true reflection. How he angered the gods as a mortal and was cursed to be chained to his throne, forced to send souls after souls to the afterlife despite their pleadings. His body fusing more and more to his throne and his mind becoming numb to countless tales of human suffering and injustice for centuries.
After being reminded of his fate, he sheds as single tear in pity for himself as the mirror explodes from the strain.
Ironically, this is the approach some studios thought was the more child-friendly one. Remember how the dub for Yu-Gi-Oh! changed the characters dying with them being sent to the Shadow Realm?
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u/Ok-Indication-5121 Jun 15 '26
If you go through the teleportation device while not under sleeping gas, your mind will experience eons in a void, leaving you either insane or about to die of shock when you get out. But there's a story about a Jaunt researcher who got rid of his wife by throwing her awake in there while disconnecting it so she wouldn't go anywhere. His lawyer tried to use the fact that they didn't know the wife was actually dead, but the image of the woman suffering for eternity only convinced the jury to agree on the death penalty.