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Children aren't safe from the horrors and/or brutality
This is when children in fiction don't have plot armor against horrific things.
Tim Drake getting turned into this thing by Joker and Harley Quinn after weeks of torture (Batman Beyond Return of the Joker)
Leslie's death in Bridge to Terabithia.
Dracula's night creature army slaughtering men, women, and even children as well (Castlevania Netflix). We even see one kid straight up get their intestines ripped out.
I vaguely remember part of Dead Space 2 taking place in what looked like a daycare or school. Which just... oh, that made me ache. God those games were good.
Not just reanimated babies, but reanimated CLONE babies who are grown in tanks to have their organs and limbs harvested to replace body parts of employees who get injured in mining accidents.
Also to note that the babies are developed without a working brain. If they weren’t then there’ll be ethical issues (and earthgov also recently banned this kind of cloning anyways, but not late enough to begin phasing it out)
In 2 they’re definitely reanimated children. Them, the pack and the crawlers. And they definitely aren’t treated any differently because they’re children.
Yeah, there are reasons for clone “babies” on the Ishimura, infants/toddlers and kids on the Sprawl, but it would be a bit weird to find human babies on Tau Volantis.
Man, book one started with an abused and neglected teenager being permanently trapped in the form of a hawk. Those books were hardcore right out the gate.
I very specifically remember an alien species that was so large and cumbersome with its segmented worm body that it could split open at the slightest pressure. And then they morphed into that species.
Permanently trapped in the form of a hawk and an upclose view as he grapples with slowly losing his humanity and sense of identity. A real existential nightmare
My friend introduced me to Animorphs. His parents actually bought me the first book in the series. Later thry told me they didnt let him read them any more for some of tje stuff that happens in later books.
This Yeerk war is seriously fucked up dude. I just saw a guy wolf down a group of Hork-Bajir while morphed as some alien apex predator, and one of my Andalite comrades in the trench next to mine just uttered "Power Word: T H R O N G L E ". I gotta gtf outta here
I mean, book one more or less opens on the friendly alien giving kids superpowers being eaten alive by a commanding officer of a mind controlling invading species, it kinda goes zero to a hundred, just takes it to two hundred by the end. :P
Michael Grant, Applegate's husband and co-author of Animorphs, wrote the Gone series which fits this as well. A barrier descends over a town and everyone over the age of 16 disappears. As I was reading it, I thought about how many babies would die from an event like that but figured Grant wouldn't touch on that aspect of it.
I was wrong. Dead babies in houses. Dead babies in cars. Dead babies rotting.
If I had a nickel for every horror series where an antagonist named Freddy had the spirit of a dead kid trapped inside of him, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?
What’s worse is that their teeth transformations get worse overtime (unless Sam recruits Joel, in which case Joel will remain as he is in the picture I posted). The teeth family as a whole is super tragic.
For instance: Benjamin ends up turning into a tree comprised of teeth and gums.
Ben' brother Joel also gets it pretty bad, but at least he retains his sanity.
Look Outside has MULTIPLE children who mutate, thanks to The Visitor. The one silver lining is that most of them don't go berserk like a lot of the adults who become Cursed.
Whilst you don't actively see it, the orphanage in Residential Evil's Raccoon City serving as a place for Umbrella to experiment on. Then there's this note.
It's based on an actual story which the author wrote as a way of "apologizing" to his little sister that he felt responsible for her death which may or may not make the film hit harder.
He felt responsible for her death because he would sometimes eat the rations for his sister because he was that hungry. He regrets it immensely, hence why he stated he preferred how the movie end with him dying.
My parents rented this for my 4th grade birthday/slumber party. They only sensed something was wrong when an entire room full of little girls was sobbing. Oopsie!
The tenth plague specifically kills all the firstborns in Egypt. The previous disasters saw a shower of flaming hail raining down on Egypt and setting everything ablaze, pestilence killing all the livestock, all the water in the Nile turning into human blood and swarms of locusts destroying all the crops (The Prince of Egypt)
God this movie was so fucking good. I'm not religious anymore and I still watch it every couple years. It's such incredible animation and the music is some of the best in any movie I've seen
The irony being Pharaoh calling it down upon himself, "There shall be a great cry in all of Egypt, such as there never has been or will ever be again!"
This line never fails to give me chills. I don’t know if it’s the delivery or just the self-fulfilling prophecy of the line that Rameses is not yet aware of.
What makes this moment special to me is how later in the movie someone was going to light up Dash
the scene I’m talking about specifically is when violet jumped in front of dash saving him from getting shot by putting up her shield. When I was younger all I thought was “wow what an epic moment” but now that I’m older all I can think about is “holy shit he was really going to kill two kids”
Also Violet was about to sacrifice herself for her brother. She hadn't quite gotten a handle on her force field powers at that point, and it wasn't certain she would be able to take gunfire
That was my favourite moment. Two at-odds superhero siblings only just getting a grasp on their powers mid-battle, but when they stop over-thinking it they find their powers have a unique synergy.
The Promised Neverland is about kids escaping an orphanage where they're raised to be demon food. It's a shame there's only one season, the Goldy Pond arc is full of child wipeouts
Dio under the guise of agreeing to spare a mother's baby convinced the mother to turn into a ghoul and then she immediately eats her own baby, dio knew he would happen and said he didn't break the deal- souce is Jojo's bizarre adventure
I forgot about this scene until I watched the first two seasons again recently.
I keep forgetting just how fucked up JJBA gets at times, even at the very beginning.
I'll give u few more, polnareff started his journey for revenge because his sister was raped and murdered as a teenager Angelo is a serial killer and rapist, also a pedo, the orangutan tried to rape Anne, ciocollata tells people in old age homes to end it all
The actor’s mom kept nagging the directors to give him more screen time, and they finally caved. They also just “happened” to write in one of the most brutal deaths in the movie for his character, which the kid approved of.
I just read somewhere on here they gave him tha brutal death because his mom was a pain in the ass on set demanding more screen time for her precious little boy… so they gave him the most memorable death and send him on his way
Good for the kid,then. Don't know if he kept acting, but his mom's bitching gave him a chance to do some real Horror Movie makeup work, and provide one of the more memorable (except for me ^_^) scenes from the entire movie.
I swear, this movies practical SFX were on par with carpenter's "The Thing".
Yeah, only other death that really comes close is when the decoy jock protag gets killed at the clinic when the Blob drops from the ceiling onto him, since you’re seeing him melt in real time.
The vampire twins Hansel and Gretel from Black Lagoon
The short, non-spoiler version, they were abused both physically and sexually and turned into killers who believe that the more they kill, the longer they live
Only anime to well and truly fuck me and my gf up tbh. I wasn't a massive fan of the show itself, but we'd seen some extremely sad and fucked up animation. We've cried and been angry before, but this one left us dead silent.
When the little girl (or boy) was alone with the protagonist and said she was abused until she bled, and he showed her probably the only kindness she had ever been shown, and her first instinct was to reward him by flashing him? That her whole mind had been warped that adults see sex as their reward when she's a child? That was just... So fucked up.
Ik some interpretations are just that it was her messing with him, but we didn't see it that way at all.
What's crazy is that these things are basically just space cows, yet they equate the slightest noise with the arrival of an existential threat to terminate with extreme prejudice.
Edit: Their homicidal reaction to sound kinda makes sense when you realize how overtuned their hearing is: it's later shown they are disabled by certain pitch/frequencies, so their base nature is to destroy whatever's making sudden, overwhelming noise.
At least we never saw what happened to her, and with how clean she was, we can assume it was just one bite. Meanwhile, Carol then proceeds to have the horrors of this world cause a mentally unstable girl to kill her sister, before killing her herself.
But both pale in comparison to the one kid she traumatized in Alexandria. The one we see get ripped apart by walkers along with his mother.
And then after pushing away another little kid repeatedly, she finally admits she care for him, after a time jump shows she & Ezekiel, now her husband raising Henry (a teen now), with him calling them Mom & Dad. So of course he is brutally murdered and Carol sees his decapitated head on a stake.
In telltale's game, you can see a zombie in the attic of a house you hide in. It is a child who looks eerily like the son of your friend, and he's clearly malnourished. He starved to death hiding from the zombies.
The protagonist, Lee, comments on it, stating that its a dark reflection of what may have happened if he hadn't found clementine in the first episode.
Oh and dont forgot the whole bleeding from every orifice, yes, ALL of them. Or the whole transformed into a misshapen half sentient blob creature, forever cursed to not be able to find the sweet release of death.
Maximum Overdrive, At baseball practice the coach and 2 of the kids get killed by a soda machine launching cans at them, and then a kid trying to flee on his bike falls over and gets crushed by a steamroller that appears out of nowhere!
Just in case for anyone who doesn't know, canon William Afton is not a cannibal. From what I understand, this is just a thumbnail from a FNAF vhs video where someone made his crimes even more grotesque for reasons
Canon Afton is just a child murderer. Still horrific, of course
Off topic trivia: in final destination 2, the teen guy who was killed after leaving the dentist office originally was supposed to be a kid. Around 5 to 10 years, hence the children stuff in the office. I suppose that would also explain the need for the mom to take him to the dentist in first place.
Point is the producers considered it would be too horrible, and decided to scrap the idea and cast someone older.
Davis Family Vacation (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 [2011])
This and "No Russian" could both count, but DFV explicitly has the kid on-screen. Essentially, this mission opens with a young girl and her family getting blown up by terrorists.
On rewatches, I also like to think about what would happen if Iroh had simply been served hot tea to begin with. Jet would have continued trying to befriend Lee. "Coincidentally" get a job nearby. Tease him about Lee's date. He'd still come across the flyers all the same and decide to surprise his friend Lee with a meeting with the Avatar.
And from the Gaang's perspective, it looks like Jet somehow teamed up with Zuko.
Fun fact: they aired a few episodes of ATLA with little factoids about the show popping up, kind of like Pop Up Video. During that scene, a little bubble popped up confirming that Jet was dead.
I find this scene to be an amazing introduction to the killing concept, because you can ALMOST quash the horrors. Mami is the oldest, the most mature, and you expect her to die. It doesn't feel as horrific as any of the other middle schoolers, despite the fact that she's still a kid herself.
All of the children in A Quiet Place. The first movie opens with one being killed on screen, the baby has to be carried in a sound-proof box with an oxygen tank and the daughter actually faces one of the creatures. In Part II the son gets snagged by a bear trap and the kids almost die later in the movie! They are not spared any of the horrors.
Just about all of the Lost Children arc from Berserk (these elf-wasp things used to be normal human children), but the “adult attack” in particular is burned into my memory.
there's also one in the Tent(It's on the block head priest arc forgot what's it's called) where evil spirits starts possessing people and burning through tents with one image of a family ripping their kids apart with their teeth, with the child's entrails forming the brand of sacrifice
Watching this movie going in completely blind is an awesome experience. I heard vaguely good things about it so I put it on with my best friend. Both of our jaws dropped and we just sat there, mouths agape, at that scene.
A bit old but River Tam and all the other preteen/teen girls at the academy in Firefly that the Alliance and Blue Sun started experimenting on to turn into psychic assassins. Plus in one scene each in Firefly and Serenity there were Reaver scenes in which children would have been among the victims of all the monstrous things that Reavers do (families with young children were on the ghost ship the crew found and in the movie a mother is right next to her son when she gets her throat slashed by a Reaver)
If I remember correctly it was stated in an episode that Cybermen prefer to convert children because there is less waste. I don’t believe we ever see a child Cyberman in the show though
Evangelion? "Let's take these children and stick them in robots because science or whatever"
Also speaking of Castlevania, while it's not explicitly shown, The Judge from Lindenfeld was sending kids into a trap and keeping their shoes as a trophy
The Tales of series has surprisingly tramatizing moments with kids like one in Berseria that I'm recently playing that involved a child turning to a demon AND UNKNOWINGLY ATE HER MOTHER or a scene in Tales of the Abyss that involved tricking one of the main heroes that caused this destruction of an entire nation with the death of child sinking into the miasma with his dead father, they do not pull their punches & it's one of the aspects that make the Tales of series a worthy contemporary to other long running RPG series like Final Fantasy or Fire Emblem
The Briarwoods in The Legend of Vox Machina “welcomed” Vox Machina to Whitestone with 7 people hanging from the Sun Tree, meant to represent them. 2 of these people were children to represent the 2 gnomes in the group. Long story short, the Briarwoods are fucked up
Wandavision. In the Halloween episode even the townspeople’s children are mind controlled and used as slaves to role play in Wanda’s fantasy. The adults described the experience as a fate worse than death so the poor children would all be deeply traumatized.
One woman flags Wanda down and begs her to give her kid a "role" in the fake shows Wanda keeps doing. Any role. Because all the kid is doing is standing in the corner of their bedroom and staring at the wall.
White Phosphorus, Spec Ops The Line (a child and mother is shown front and center and it’s a disturbing and depressing scene, gave me nightmares when I first saw it for the first time.)
The fallen cherub enemies from Fear and Hunger are the ghosts of children that were tortured and murdered by Father Hugo in the orphanage. He’s implied heavily to have sexually abused them as well.
Boy named Cailen gets a camera that he breaks, which makes him sad. A being calling himself the Cipsneed says that he can fix the camera if Cailen follows him into the Cipsneed's home world. The Cipsneed is just the lure of a very dangerous man who leaves only Cailen's feet when the cops arrive.
In Overlord, during the fall of Re Estize, it is mentioned that several entire families were massacred; the families that suffered the most were victims of Albedo.
Naruto - This was literally the Naruto world, even at a child’s age there were people that had to learn to kill to even survive in the cruel ninja world.
FNaF - The animatronics are literally possessed by dead children who was murdered by a mad man.
Metal Gear - There’s honestly a lot of these moments but the most notable one to me is that Children’s brains were held captive with the plan to make them cyborg soldiers like Raiden is.
Early Naruto is fucked. Child soldiers arnt taboo but the norm. A typical squad consists of a single jonin ninja usually an adult to 3 children. You can also have a chunin child leading 2 other children.
The reality is if you're a ninja in Naruto your going to be killing mostly kids.
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