Nightmare Fuel / Awful Hospital

Shh, shh. Just a quick prick of pain and it'll all be over. Please don't squirm. Mama loves you with all her heart.

Don't let this comic's unique art style, quirky characters, and corny surrealist humor fool you; it's absolutely horrifying. For one, it takes place in the worst hospital in the multiverse and pure, unfiltered existential horror is around every corner, and considering the lovely person behind Mortasheen and Don't Get Spooked is behind this as well, that's saying a lot...

As per policy, Moments subpages are Spoilers Off pages. All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

---

• First off: the sheer, visceral Body Horror spread throughout this comic is enough to make one's stomach violently spin 360 degrees. You may gag at some points during the comic, but we understand.
• The Bloodstain's room is just so creepily designed. That eye-spider in the top-left corner, not to mention The Bloodstain. Looks like a murder took place here a long time ago, doesn't it? Then, a few panels later, if you've ever happened to wonder whether a moment could be Nightmare Fuel and Heartwarming at the same time…
• The death scenes. You go from Fern being fine in one panel to being dead or a split second away from death in the next, with the background going completely red for "good" measure.
• The Abyss is what lurks outside of the hospital, and it is a completely black void filled with extremely massive Eldritch Abominations. The Hospital seems a lot more appealing, now, doesn't it?
• Judging by the commenters' reaction, Dr. Man. By himself, he's a slightly creepy human doctor. Next to everything else in the Hospital, he's Dissonant Serenity incarnate.
  • Apparently, judging by Jay's first and only encounter with him, the commentators are right in assuming that Dr. Man isn't actually human. He's just gotten much better at disguising that fact by the time Fern arrives.
• BBQ Girll's true form is subtly displayed on this page - hover over the second image. While it's been shown on other Bogleech projects before, it's especially disturbing here.
• The talking door. Or to be exact, something that isn't a door. The comic (and the talking door itself) try to make very clear that it is not, in fact, a door. What isn't revealed is whatever it actually is.
  • Turns out that he can hijack the comment system to Mind Rape Fern. Forget The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, he weaponizes it.
  • It gets bonus points for even creeping out the Burgrr personnel.
• Aw, a nice flashback to Fern's life with her child. Oh, but now the child's getting weird... but of course, we knew that would happen anyway. And then- AUGH. Hover over it.
  • It just gets worse from there on out.
    • How worse? Look at this page. When Phage is at his most serious thus far, you know that there's something seriously wrong.
• Tori's Character Blog implies that bringing Fern's back to life was accomplished through extensive trial and error. Then she drops this bombshell:
  Luckily, [she] exists in enough doomed layers that there's no short supply of fresh parts, but that in itself is troubling, isn't it?
  I didn't know so many layers were going to end so abruptly.
  ...Did they alw@@@@???3 or is it just my perception?
• There is no way that Harmburger trying to get into the hospital's pediatrics ward◊ will end well.
• Let's think of Fern's son, in the maternity ward. Just who do they have assigned to take care of him? What are they feeding him? Are they changing his diaper? Do they know that babies need to be burped? Has his illness gotten any worse? What kind of tests and experiments are they running on him? Are any of the other infants a threat to his safety? Can these doctors differentiate between symptoms of illness versus signs of good health?
• Behold, the Moldsucker. And according to Celia, it's a Super-Persistent Predator; once it spots a member of her species, it'll keep chasing until one or the other is dead.
• A look at the Maternity Ward.◊
• The five-pages-sequence with Phage, starting with this one, is pure Mood Whiplash. First, there's the "purge", which we don't see besides a terrifying red flash. Then, Phage decides to personally address the problem. As in, he directly threatens the commenters, donning a Nightmare Face for the occasion.
• Staph and Maggie are two of the nicest, friendliest, and considerate traveling companions that Fern could ask for. But considering how they have absolutely no qualms about eating the corpse of a newly deceased friend, no regret about dying, themselves, and are even perfectly content to let a newborn being, (one who identifies himself as a PERSON,) kill himself, (albeit for a noble reason,) there's also a lot about them that still manages to be horrific.
  • They seem to regard Fern's determination to preserve her own life as an adorable quirk. As though that life amounted to some decade-old T-shirt that their lovable oddball of a friend just couldn't bring herself to part with, for whatever reason.
  Maggie: We just need ya to take a plunge offa this here pusfall an' get ate up by some rapidworms, on accounta our friend here's powerful attached to this here particular mortal coil!
• The leadup to Fern's encounter with the Dolphins is nothing short of horrifying. First, she gets a surreal dream message. Then, an ominous shadow stalking her. And it just gets worse. Bogleech is dedicated to turning what people think of Dolphins right on its head.
  • And thus, after the deranged creature makes its debut invading Balmer's fortress, it somehow gets worse. So, so much worse.
• When our heroes finally make it past the Polyp in the marrow caves, they're confronted with this. As if that wasn't bad enough, you'll notice the party for scale in the bottom center.
• Some Furry Reminders amount to cute little gags. Once they passed the polyp, Fern was treated to a reminder about her companions that came like a plunge into ice water… to the point where she momentarily stopped seeing Celia, Staph, and Maggie as people.
  But right now, as you watch them strip the putrid flesh from a bloated mockery of your own face… All you see are THINGS.◊
  • The Commentators were very seriously alarmed by this reaction.
  Bogleech: This is a near-record number of comments in only one day, I think it's only beaten by the cafeteria door battle but I might be wrong?
  Commentator: You might say things just got a little too real.
  Another Commentator: We REALLY don't want Miss Green doing anything rash.
  • Small wonder that in the very next webpage, not only does Fern remember they're still her friends, the whole atmosphere is suddenly much more cartoonish and comical.
• This isn't good.
• Just before his death, Balphin had thoughts to share with Fern about her son. Bleak thoughts.
  Balphin: I just feel the need... to apologize... for not devouring you as soon as I had formed.
  Fern: Uh, that's alright. Wasn't really hoping you would.
  Balphin: Oh, but Fern, when you find him, you may wish I had.
• When Fern returns to her Hospital room, after being killed in The Morgue... we find that her room has undergone a slight (yet significant) bit of redecorating. Specifically, a metallic plaque has been riveted above her bed where the artwork used to hang; showing the Parliamentary Birthday Cake winking and promising "SOON :)".
  • The fact that it's riveted metal shows that it's aware of how Fern (and her Commentators) operate. It won't let its message be taken down and utilized as an inventory item, ^note like with the clown painting's frame that was made into a weapon, and the "ART" that was made into a map.
  • How did that steel plaque GET there? Was it transported to that spot through paranormal means? Or did someone on the Hospital Staff have it posted up there?
  • After returning to the hospital Fern, when she checks on the Spleen, comes across this lovely scene.
• THE TV! LOOK AT THE TV! ^note  For those who couldn't see why this is shocking, the TV showing an ad of some kind of anti-human cream first showed Redbert in the background, the second one showed the Parliament, and in the eye of that creature, it shows a silhouette of Fern crossed out. Whatever is up with the TV, its clear that the Parliament is making it known that they specifically want Fern dead for good.
• Jay never truly hits rock bottom. The more "screen time" the story grants him, the more heinous he is revealed to be, and the more evil he commits.
  • Even worse than Jay himself, is his plight. He seems to be stuck in an endless loop of having an injury, mutating into a horrible monster, getting killed while in monster form, and then waking up back in his room with a completely different injury, which he remembers as always being there. We currently have no idea why this is happening, or how long it's been going on.
  • Jay's Armslob form itself is no slouch either. The fight against him seems to have outright traumatized Fern, who normally takes things in stride.
  • His later transformation into the Eye-slob is even worse. Thankfully the little guy kills the tension starting from when he becomes playable for the Commentors.
• The ottoman. Despite the creature's reference to a certain game, the thing is absolutely terrifying!
• Apparently The Parliament written a book like The Very Hungry Caterpillar... It is an allegory for their Assimilation Plot, which plans to hatch from Fern, eat Phage, everyone Fern knows and loves, and even the commentators themselves. Even worse, the book is self censoring to the characters in-universe, meaning that the commentators can't help or warn them of this revelation.
• Fern finds a personal journal of Jay's and we get to see his Sanity Slippage throughout it, with him detailing all the times he has had a "wakeup" which basically means how many times he's either become a slob or died. Disturbing details include implying he killed his ex-wife there under the suspicion she was a slob and the fact that Jay has been here since 2026. The last kept in page not only end on a Jump Scare but also shows how long he truly has been in the hospital for.

  WAKEUP 78044

  • If that's not enough, the hole in Jay's room turns out to be filled with grey-zoner corpses.
• The coffeefication of Jay. He comes out looking like a man who was thrown in a vat of corrosive brown fluid, and it mutated him into a shrieking, eyeless, skeletal monstrosity with clawed talons.
  • It turns out that that sequence was All Just a Dream. But what's actually happening to Jay at approximately that moment is almost as unsettling...
• L??? FINAL JAYSLOB ATTACKS! The Art Shift doesn't help, either.
  • And just when it seems Fern and Willis have finally killed the Final Jayslob, this happens. To put that scene crudely, Crash is pissed off beyond all meaning.
    Crash: M-MEDDLINGGG SHIT-SACK!!! YOU W-WANT SOMETHING DONE RIGHT... ...YOU DO IT... ...YOUR-FUCKING... SELF!
• Crash takes a page from Balphin's book after his fight with Fern.
  Crash: ...your.... son..... .....wont... .......heal....
  Fern: ...I won't accept that, I'm sorry. I won't stop trying. Someone, something, somewhere in this hospital or one of these weird worlds could know what to do.
  Crash: ....no.... no, f-fern....... ....you wont.... ....when you find him..... you just.......... wont.........want........
  Fern: W...what?? ...What are you saying, Crash?
• What the heck did Flair do to Jay in order to tame him so completely?
  • I think they just get along.
• If it came down to combat, humans could stand a chance against some of the minor Hospital staffers, such as Cathy or Gardenia. But several of the high-ranking doctors are as mighty as GODS. Dr. Mizer's estimated to be Level 1300. Dr. Phage's level is said to be even higher. Crash was downright untouchable when he attacked Fern. Even young little Willis stands at a sturdy Level 15... how much MORE powerful must his MOTHER be? And where do you think some of the other staffers, such as Dr. Man and Nurse Molly rank?
  • The fact that Nurse Molly would attack Fern on sight from the beginning, and now Dr. Mizer seeks to obliterate Fern... how many MORE of these all-powerful Hospital docs are going to want to end Fern as the story progresses...?
  • As seen on page 606, Dr. Phage considers 80 dimensions to be a "ridiculously limited number," of dimensions to be moving in simultaneously. Considering that M-Theory posits that the universe contains twelve dimensions, and any being from a dimension higher than another is infinitely more powerful... Physical God doesn't even begin to describe the power wielded by the doctors...
• With the Purple Book we get to see the nature of the Grey Zone and how completely disregarded it is. The Grey Zone is essentially what we perceive as the observable universe, and lies at the center with all the different Zones surrounding it. The reason why it is so low regarded is because of the sheer nothingness the majority of our universe consists of. The book also shares a belief that it implies that most other Zone residents seem to have, that it might be better to eliminate the Grey Zone completely in order to make travel to other Zones much more convenient. This casual disregard and the implications of it are unnerving to say the least.
  • There seems to be a sense in which, in the same way the Hospital is a Zone manifesting the idea of medical healthcare, the Grey Zone is a manifestation of the idea of nothing. The vast majority of it is vacuum, and the emergence of ephemeral perceptoids within it - who can barely sense or interact with the world around them - is no more significant than virtual particles forming and promptly annihilating. Its layers drift by constantly in a phenomenon called "time", or "entropy", which causes everything in it to slowly decay and quickly return to the void. So why not fill it all in and do something useful with it?
• The index page you briefly see whenever you click on the latest comic button features Phage's eyes staring at you from the darkness.
• Burgrr's expanding into the Hospital, turning Dr. Phage's lobby into a food court.
  Commentator: So, as far as I can tell, the platonic concept of curing sick people is being merged with the platonic concept of meat processing. For reasons that I hope are obvious, I think we need to make preventing this a priority.
• Fern manages to find an envelope in Dr. Man's office containing pictures. The first few are creepy showing Parliament infection and a Slob but the final one is the most disturbing. A picture of what looks like a mutated Dr. Phage, possibly implying that he is already infected or something is impersonating him.
• Inside one of the locked files we find out that a hospital in the Grey Zone actually experienced something similar to slobification, described in nauseating detail, and it's implied it might have been a very early strain of the disease the Parliament created.
  • On top of that, the initial victim of the disease is completely forgotten by everyone except for the narrator, and the disease slowly spreads via Meat Moss to infect the other patients, and the "forgetting" effect of the virus slowly spreads with it, to the point where the entire hospital is avoided and ignored by those outside of it, with even animals passively avoiding it.
  • Though the cancer has died at the end of the notes, there are only 2 doctors and no patients left inside the hospital, and the narrator goes into a place that heavily resembles the Plank Maze. That raises a question: this file was found inside of Ora, so how did it get there? (Then again, it could have been Dr. Man)
• Crash's error log, which details how he was infected by the Parliament. It was so traumatic that it apparently haunted Crash until he "died". At first, its content seems like ordinary fake antivirus ads... Then the windows start glitching and descend into Word-Salad Horror. And it only gets worse when Crash finally gives in and installs the virus scan made by the Parliament.
  • Eventually, all of the popups turn into Parliament red with cake or dolphin icons, possibly coinciding with Crash's slobification. This is followed by ten consecutive popups of the Parliament taunting Crash and asking him to forget "her" (possibly his "mother").
  • And to top it all off, the whole thing ends with this◊ lovely message.
  • Worse, he DIDN'T install it himself, it was forcibly installed. "Sicks must be prevent. You not listen. Your sick your sick your sick Your free healthscan trial heal has been activate FOR YOU

• As a Level 1 Doctor, Dr. Man has 400 hearts. For comparison, the Immense Thing had 36 hearts, and the Final Jayslob had 38 hearts. Both of them were at Level 15.
  • The Polyp estimated Dr. Mizer to be Level 1,300. If we multiply 400 by 1,300, it comes out to Dr. Mizer having an estimated 520,000 hearts.
  • And Dr. Phage is reckoned to be EVEN STRONGER than Mizer. You don't want to pick a fight with doctors!
    • Somehow, it gets even worse! According to Dr. Phage in Dr. Gynnie's profile, she is the strongest doctor in the hospital, even more powerful than him. And the last person to betray her trust is "probably still figuring out how to put itself right-side in!" And Fern is currently pretending to be her newest temp!
    • Now think about that Dangerous Apple that Fern has in her possession. What kind of power must that little fruit contain to "keep a DOCTOR away?" ^note (Well, one of the ones who AREN'T Dr. Man, anyway.)
• Here's how Dr. Man measures the level of deadly, otherworldly, unpredictable menace of every part of the Hospital Fern's already explored, versus that of the Maternity Ward. Right when Fern is just about to enter the Maternity Ward.
  Dr. Man: It is my professional opinion, Fern, that what you have experienced thus far of the Hospital represents its healthiest and safest remaining conditions.
• It's revealed that the very concepts of children and pets are slowly merging, to the point that they and their related concepts even override each other in speech.
  Dr. Gynnie: You and I will be dealing primarily with BdAoBgY, but If you have any quessshtionsh about bDaObGy, you should be asshking the good doctor^note Fleagood!
• A subtle one, but when Eyeslob removes the Burgrr employee hat, it's revealed that its interior is composed of living meat◊, in the form of some sort of sucker- or sphincter-like orifice.
• Turns out not even Dr. Man and his office were safe from the rapid degradation of the Hospital.
  • And from the looks of the now unhinged door outside and what happened to the desk, it's implied something broke out, instead of in... and even worse, both Fern and Magdolene say that the the office is smelling like cake...
  • In that same segment, after dealing with at least two creatures from the Abyss, an Abyssal Skittergramp appears and attacks! It's substantially scary, not to mention cringe-inducing, as one of its attacks is described to "make [Fern's] spinal column twitch". Eugh.
• Jerry's interrogation has given us a lot of scary insight into the Parliament's nature and plans. Turns out, the reason that they can't be perceived by the Hospital staff is that they have somehow managed to alter the perception of the Hospital itself: to the Hospital, the Parliament poses no threat and is completely healthy, so the Doctors can't even perceive them.
  • And then Jerry moves on to the subject of Fern's son, and we finally begin to understand something about his multiverse-destroying illness: Junior is just the latest in a long line of millions of test subjects, all of whom died gruesomely when their concept cores were corrupted with what's left of the Old Flesh itself. And since no one - not even the Parliament - knows the cure for his infection, even the Hospital, the sum of all medical knowledge in history, has no cure (but that doesn't mean that there isn't one).
  • Jerry is awfully frank about some aspects of all this:
    Fern: ...I see...but there's a question that bothers me even more than that. I haven't stopped wondering since all this started. Why my son?
    Jerry: Oh, that's just adorable. You think anything separates one lab animal from another? Sweetie, the only thing special about your offspring versus our first million or so subjects is that most of them rather swiftly rotted before we caught the trivial error in their protein chains. You should be grateful, really. Your progeny could have already died choking on its own pus, if Shirley down in accounting hadn't fixed that bloody typo.
• Fern's humorous Mushroom Samba as a result of being hit with surgical anesthesia takes a turn for the surprisingly creepy when Fern gets into a fight with a Folder, a Starfish Alien species that shows up repeatedly in Bogleech's works. While its strange (and nonstandard) artwork is offputting already, the real disturbing bit occurs when Fern attempts to "Request Gels". At first, the Folder is happy to give Fern excess Cysts, damaging Fern but increasing her maximum health... but then Fern doesn't stop, continuing to drain the Folder dry ^note without any input from the commentators, mind you while sporting a Slasher Smile and screaming cereal catchphrases like a G-Rated Addled Addict even as the Folder starts crying it pain, curling into a fetal position, and lashing out against everyone in sight. It's geniunely disturbing to read, especially since this is Fern doing it.
• We finally got a clear explanation of what the Old Flesh was: it's the concept of death itself. It was the very first thing that ever died in order to introduce the concepts of "sickness" and "decay"; and, from there, introduce the concept of "health", "growth", and new things (reality as we know it) growing from old dead things (the Old Flesh). Therefore, if the Parliament succeeds into its plan to turn all of reality back into the Old Flesh, we won't just be assimilated into it; we will die with it in a Class Z "Omniversal 404" Apocalypse How scenario.
  • Even worse, it will be all pointless in the end; reviving the Old Flesh will also revive its mortality, and it will inevitably get sick and die to form another reality. The Parliament will have murdered every being in the universe and caused untold destruction just to win the right to do it all over again.