This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
Doraemon may be a light-hearted slice of life manga and anime,
but some elements may keep you up all night.
- The episode where Doraemon uses this moonbeam flashlight that turns anyone it shines on into a Werewolf. Doraemon scares Nobita after he retreats to his room after watching a scary movie.
- There are a lot of them in the movies. The villains there are villains in every sense, and bring actual threats to the table.
- Heck, some of Doraemon's gadgets can be downright scary at times. For instance, the Dictator Switch allows its user to make anyone disappear. And not just out of sight, the person is gone and no one will ever remember that person even existed... yes, even the person's own mother. And in the chapter this gadget debuted in, Nobita wound up making EVERYBODY disappear. Granted, the device is used to teach dictators a lesson and the effects are reversible but the fact that this device is sold to the public, it is very chilling.
- Then there's the Passport of Satan. What does it do? Well, it lets you get away with anything... especially crime. Granted, in the story, Nobita felt guilty after for what he had done when he used it but... remember that in the future, the gadgets are sold to the public which includes the Passport of Satan... you make the connection.
- As a bit of added Fridge Horror, keep in mind that Doraemon bought all of his gadgets himself. It's probably not worth dwelling on how he intended to use some of them.
- According to Word of God, Doraemon rented two-thirds of his gadgets.
- Doraemon's gadgets ability to achieve the impossible and fantastical can be attributed to hyper-advanced, fantastical technology running on Clarke's Third Law, but a few of his gadgets has an outright magical element to it. Elemental principles of reality that even the gadgets cannot fully control and can at best, give warning on their use. To wit:
- A scissor that can cut and animate a person's shadow. Fantastical, but nothing out of the ordinary of his gadgets. The shadow, if left to their own devices, would gain sentience and grow to resent the original. You can theorize that he uses nanomachines to animate the shadow and they grew beyond their programming. But the person who had their shadow cut would cast no shadow, and if left separated long enough, the original would become the shadow and the shadow taking over the original person's place? Terrifying.
- A scroll that summons the devil himself. While the fifth movie reveals the devils they are facing are essentially aliens, this one is different. He seems familiar with how humans work and is happy someone summoned him, implying he's been among humanity for a while. And Nobita foolishly made a Deal with the Devil with it, trading not his soul (which the devil considers old-fashioned) but his body height for cash.
- In one chapter, Nobita bribes Doraemon to do his homework for him by giving him dorayaki. Doraemon accepts but is overwhelmed by the amount of work and enlists five copies of him from the future, each two hours later. The work was done but, as well as being beat up by his clones for obvious reasons, he had to be dragged out of bed to do the homework five times. While this is a comedic premise, his fifth time has him go absolutely insane, in a very disturbing way.
- In one episode of the 2005 anime, Nobita is sent to bed early due to his channel hopping annoying his mother and father, who were watching TV together, so Doraemon gives him a gadget that will let him choose a dream. The problem is, his short attention span and inability to overcome physical and mental hurdles leads him to keep changing the cartridges mid-dream, and in one of them, after he can't wake himself up, he finds a floating Doraemon with a dissonant smile and blank eyes. He asks him for help, and he responds, with an Electronic Speech Impediment at that, at least in the dub, something to the effect of; "The player is broken, Noby. You broke it. And now you're stuck in this dream forever and ever, Noby." After that, things just keep going downhill, with Nobita jumping through all of the dreams he switched between, all with little details being just off enough to be unsettling, until he breaks down crying in an endless void. It turned out that he wasn't actually waking up and changing dreams. It was a Secret Test of Character from the first dream he chose — an educational dream that was trying to teach him a lesson in following a goal from start to finish.
- The last dream before the whole scene falls part deserves its own mention: Nobita finds himself in a barely lit corridor looking at a TV that shows Nobita looking at a TV that shows Nobita looking at a TV... while his family laugh hysterically at him. Like the above scene with Doraemon, it's a genuinely creepy scene that would be more typical of a psychological horror anime than the lighthearted slice of life Doraemon usually is.
- If you've ever been a bullying victim, Gian can come across as this. Made even worse by the fact that he's not as much picking on Nobita and other kids for fun like most bullies are portrayed in media, he's usually acting out of blind rage when something pisses him off, no matter how big or small a deal. Truth in Television on how some bullies operate, along with the eternal worry you have of setting said bully off.
- In one story Gian wins as he snatches a mind-reading helmet, and only Doraemon is apparently able to return it... by Doraemon controlling Nobita like a puppet.
- In another story, there is a heckler that heckles money from kids. Nobita succeeds to subdue him by using a cucumber that makes anyone who hears the user's voice grovel... until the heckler learns to close his ears. Nobita then cries for help to a police officer only for the police officer to grovel.
- Nobita himself can come off as a bit scary when he gets carried away with Doraemon's gadgets. When this happens, he's either seeking revenge for being bullied, or out of pure recklessness. Either way, this is never a good sign when handling these gadgets, some of which manipulate fate or time, among other uses.
- The page image for Christmas in Japan.
- In general, the existence of Doraemon's gadgets themselves. They can do many things, from the innocuous ones as high-tech organizer, but they also have tools that can rewrite someone else's memory, stop time, allow you to go anywhere in known galaxy, create artificial humans with incredibly powerful psychic powers down to outright warping reality. The only known thing the tools are unable to do is raise the dead, and that's perhaps for the better, but the sheer amount of abuse one can do with these tools make one shudder what a criminally-inclined can do. In fact, some of the movies deal with these time criminals, the most prominent perhaps Gigazombie from Birth of Japan, who intended to rewrite history and then disrupt the spacetime continuum so that no one else can access the timeline and undo his damages. Thankfully, the Time Police are well-aware with the tools' capabilities and have countermeasures of their own.
- Doraemon also has non-lethal Shock Gun which he uses regularly in the adventure movies. The worst thing it can do is zapping its targets into unconsciousness. Use this on someone with heart conditions, and Doraemon and co would become murderers.
- The episode where Doraemon tries to hunt down a mouse that's loose in the house. Doraemon goes nuts trying to get the mouse, where his search in the attic (with a machine gun) is treated as if he were in a horror film. After he failed to hit the mouse with his gun, he decides the only way he can get it is to nuke the house. Nobita and his mom, realizing that Doraemon is serious about this, lie to him that the mouse escaped, finally calming him down.
- It's also one of very few instances in the series where Family-Friendly Firearms were averted. In addition to machine gun above, Doraemon also gives Nobita and his mom futuristic but realistic looking revolver and rifle respectively to help him hunt the mouse. To make it worse, Doraemon then proceeds to explain the details of those two weapons, which made it clear that these weapons were actually designed to kill. That's right kids, our cat robot had just given two untrained civilians what basically amounts to 22nd century equivalents of the Desert Eagle and AR-15! Needless to say, the Nobis were completely freaked out by it.
- There's also the fact that he almost guns down the Nobis TWICE, because he mistaken the two of them for the mouse.
- Crossing with Awesome and Funny, in one of the older episodes, Doraemon and Nobita go to WWII and in order to help a Jewish family, the cosmic robot is forced to use some pills to pass as Hitler
, yup, literally. - The manga pulls no punch when it comes to Imperial Japan. Through many time travel episodes, we can see a dictatorial regime that forces children to do hard labor, euthanizes zoo animals with poison, and flat out threatens to execute a man for even suggesting surrender to the Allies.
- Knock-Down Hitman, something you'd never expect to exist in a children's show. It's a mini-sized robot useful to beat up a target three times at 10 yen cost "contract". This robot is relentless, practically invincible and will beat up anyone who tries to interfere with its "contract". The only way to stop Knock-Down Hitman's rampage is by paying it 100 yen as cancellation fee.
- "The Human Manufacturing Machine", especially the version from the 1979 anime. The idea of a gadget that can make Artificial Humans out of mundane household objects already ups the creepiness factor, but it gets worse when Doraemon reveals that the gadget was discontinued because it had a defect that led to the production of superpowered mutants, who plotted dominance over regular humans and had to be stopped by the United Nations. By the time Nobita finds out about this, it's too late, and the machine has grown a mutant baby, shown to be an imp-like creature with Glowing Eyes of Doom. It uses its superpowers to knock out Doraemon, force Nobita to bring it milk, and when Shizuka visits, immediately tries to kill her for no apparent reason.note In the manga, this is a reaction to her accidentally breaking the milk bottle Nobita was bringing to it Who knows what would have happened if Doraemon hadn't recovered and rewound time just then! And just as one last scare, the Eye Catch after the episode shows Doraemon growing inside the Human Manufacturing Machine, with his eyes turning into a glowing pair like the mutant baby's.
- In one chapter there is a medication that can give sweet dreams as a trade off for bad luck, and conversely, nightmares as a trade off for good luck. Nobita, thinking his day is just as bad as usual, downs more of it, until he's unexpectedly having a good day (from having a bonus pocket money to even kicking Gian saves Gian somehow and Nobita be thanked for it!). The last panel shows Nobita screaming and apparently having a seizure at the night.
- In "Turnaround Dynamite", a suspicious-looking man is seen lurking outside of Shizuka's house while she's home alone, prompting her to invite Nobita in for company. The man turns out to be a criminal who attempts to kidnap Kaminari and beats up Gian before being arrested, suggesting that if Nobita hadn't come by, he may have tried to kidnap Shizuka or worse.
- In the "Romance in the Snowy Mountain" portion of Stand by Me Doraemon, Shizuka's condition is progressively getting worse while Nobita tries to carry her to the Anywhere Door. However, not only had the blizzard completely buried it from view, Doraemon went into a drowsy nap and can't hear Nobita calling for help. He also trips, losing his glasses and twisting his ankle, then Shizuka's medical scanner declares her in critical condition and urges that she should be taken to a medical facility. However, thanks to Nobita pulling a Stable Time Loop gambit, the future Nobita finds and rescues them, with Shizuka put on a breathing apparatus and she thankfully makes a full recovery later. This also implies that hadn't Nobita decided to look into the future and pull off his near-disastrous attempt to temporarily take the place of his future self, Shizuka likely would've died alone in the blizzard.
- Because many of the adventures of Doraemon's Long Tales have Darker and Edgier aesthetics compared to the original manga (when the original manga itself has some surprisingly dark moments), there are many more horrific scenarios than what you'd think. Ranging from flooding the entire Earth surface to save its natural habitat from human destruction, covering the Earth's land surface with mosses to maintain natural balance to destroying the Earth surface civilization with weapons of mass destruction in a scenario that is not too far from a global nuclear war, Doraemon's Long Tales covers a lot of apocalyptic scenarios that may shock people, considering the franchise's original demographic target.
- In Doraemon: Nobita's Diary on the Creation of the World, the insect empire would launch a total war against the human during the The Roaring '20s. Thankfully, the gang manages to prevent it.
- In Nobita's New Dinosaurs, the gang looks up to see what looks like a shooting star falling to Earth and causing an explosion in the distance, which Doraemon realizes is the meteor that caused the Cretaceous extinction event. What follows is his chillingly realistic description of the results of the impact, with several dinosaurs being vaporized within the blast radius and more laying dead as the clouds of dust caused by the blast cause global cooling and a worldwide food chain collapse.
