Nightmare Fuel / A Brother's Price

• The characters' fear of venereal diseases is entirely justified. Eldest Whistler talks at length about how one woman's ill-fated visit to a crib before getting married resulted in her passing syphilis to her entire family, causing all their children to be stillborn and cursing her sisters and new husband to die a slow, agonizing death over many months.
• The cribs themselves. The buildings are essentially prisons, brothels and breeding pens rolled into one, where men are force-fed drugs which keep them in a constant state of arousal and studded out for ten crowns a night. The conditions in many are implied to be filthy and the chances of catching one of the aforementioned diseases are not inconsiderable. Worse still is that the vast majority of their occupants are rape victims or men sold to them in order to cover family debts. Many characters talk about how horrible it is that they exist, but men are so rare and breeding is so important that they simply can't be abolished without destabilizing society at large.
  • What's more, the cribs are explicitly stated to be extremely unpleasant for the women who make use of them as well, and not just because of the conditions described above. Those same drugs that keep men forcibly aroused also apparently send them into a state bestial lustfulness; One character describes a typical crib visit as going into an unlit room where "a man half-incoherent with drugs ruts on top of you," hopefully impregnating the visitor before it's time to leave, and the whole experience is dark, painful and (sometimes) bloody. Most crib visitors are women from families too poor to afford a husband and have no brothers to trade for one, and so their only option is to pay to have a man violently rape them in the hopes of getting pregnant to continue the family line^note Or pressure their younger sisters into it; at one point the protagonists cross paths with a poor family on their way to a supposedly clean-run crib so that one of their number can try for a baby ten nights in a row, and their most likely candidate is the youngest sister who is outright stated to still be a teenager, and gods help them if they catch one of those infamous diseases...Rather than going out of their way to make the cribs a safe and enjoyable experience for paying customers like one would ideally expect from a brothel, all evidence points to the women running them being greedy, cost-cutting business owners trying to squeeze as much money as possible from desperate, unmarried, and often lower class women.
• Keifer Porter. All he did, and what he could have done to the youngest sisters. And once you think about how many men like him there are in the whole country, and that most families won't be willing to throw their valuable husband out of the house for any reason ... pure nightmare fuel.
• Consider how furious the princesses were over Jerin's abduction, even knowing who the guilty parties were and knowing that those parties' plans required Jerin to remain unharmed. Also, consider that when they did get him back uninjured and unraped, they still found it totally reasonable to wipe out the entire family involved. Now, try to imagine, if you can, the royal wrath had they not gotten him back safe.
• The setting as whole qualifies, particularly when you consider that a significant part of society involves chattel slavery and commodification of an entire gender, far beyond anything in Real Life.