Nightmare Fuel / Dumbing of Age

One of the absolute worst-case scenarios in this webcomic to boot...

Dumbing of Age is a simple slice of life webcomic about the lives of college students. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as it turns out, the webcomic can get surprisingly dark without any warning, as plenty of characters are suffering through traumas and / or the aftermath of an abusive upbringing. In general, every time the background panels turn bright red, every ounce of comedy simply vanishes to leave violence and horror in its place.

Unmarked spoilers below.

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• This is one of the most terrifying scenes in the series. The strips slowly changing into a reddish tint reflects this.
• As a rule of thumb, if you meet a dad in the Dumbing of Age universe, beware, as dads are more often than not abusive or downright insane. Amazi-girl herself lampshades this:
  • Blaine O'Malley, Amber's father, managed to deeply traumatize her by constantly belittling her, and continuing his harassment even now that she is in college. He cheated on his wife, beat her, and refuse to let anyone defy his authority. When Amber stands up to him, his first move is to plot revenge. What does he do? He kidnaps Danny in order to lure Amber in to teach her a lesson. What follows is one of the most violent and one-sided fights of the comic, and it is not pretty to watch.
  • Ross, while an asshole, was trivially easy for Dina to remove in his first appearance. Then he comes back with a gun. Were it not for Amazi-girl's caltrops messing up his aim, he would have shot her point-blank here. Overall, the way Ross treats Becky as nothing more than his property that should behave exactly how he sees it, completely disregarding her as a human being and blaming her for everything that went wrong with his family, on top of not being the sharpest knife in the drawer (he brought a gun in broad daylight in the middle of a campus and stopped actively driving his car in order to try to shoot Amazi-girl while speeding on the highway) makes him one of the most frightening and dangerous individuals of the comic, and another prime example of how abusive one can be with their child.
  • After giving Ruth her job back (or more accurately, forcing it on her), Clint suddenly becomes extremely aggressive, physically manhandling her while growling about Ruth's father. Not helping is Ruth's face as he does this. She's fucking terrified. It is later implied by Ruth herself that if she didn't cave, Clint would have beaten her little brother.
• Amber herself is a walking, ticking time bomb. She suffers from deep trauma, so deep that she had to develop an alternative persona to channel her violent tendencies:
  • Amber's Slasher Smile in the last panel of this strip is a Flash Back to a few strips ago when she punched her dad. You only see a part of it, but it is absolutely terrifying.
  • It's becoming more and more obvious that Amber is becoming unstable, that Amazi-girl is becoming a separate personality, and that her past with Sal is causing Amber to see her as some sort of evil Arch-nemesis despite Sal no longer being the delinquent she once was. Then there is her blind rage that has caused her to stab an unarmed Sal when they were kids and to beat her abusive father half to death.
  • Right before carving up Ryan with his own knife Amber says "I AM NOT AMAZI-GIRL."
  • In the aftermath of her fight against "Ryan", Amber is shutting down everyone's attempts to talk and comfort her. Joyce is having none of that, and she makes it clear just how much what Amber did is important to her, and she thanks her, saying that what she did wasn't enough and wishing that she had killed him. The kicker is Amber's response:
    Amber: I tried.
  • And now it's escalating even further: Amazi-Girl is now officially a full-fledged Split Personality, as Amber discovers that Amazi-Girl has been going out at night, but Amber herself has no memory of it.
    Amber: Well, that's not cool.
• There's a reason that Joyce can't be alone outside... Know what's even scarier? A Patreon strip revealed that the Ryan holding the door was the real deal.
• Jocelyne's position once John makes his opinion of Becky and Joyce clear. She's getting to witness first-hand just how conditional her family's "love" is, and looks justifiably terrified.
• Ryan might not actually be his name. That means ever since Book One, he may have lied about everything he's said so we may know NOTHING about him.
• Turns out "Ryan" has friends. Friends who are too willing to doxx women trying to press charges against him and going to their houses to do god knows what to them. Though given that while a group of them were attacking Sal, one of them ripped her jacket and the other is smiling, one could guess.
• Turns out Carol and a bunch of other members of her community have been trying to raise the funds to pay Ross' bonds to get him out of jail, justifying his actions as "Trying to raise their kids right". They use this to justify the kidnapping of his adult daughter at gunpoint, the attempted murder of several students, and the numerous laws he broke in the process. It is honestly horrifying how far they're are willing to justify Ross' behavior. And who comes in just as they have no idea what to do next? Blaine, willing to offer help. The Darkest Hour is upon us.
• After being bailed Ross goes to Becky's apartment planning to confront her again (and Blaine goes to stop him because the time wasn't right), and is confronted by Mike, who leads them on a chase to Amazi-girl. In a desperate attempt to stop Blaine, Mike leaps to push him off the staircase and falls himself... cue Amber waking up feeling like she's forgotten something important. To make things even more ominous, Mike got banned from the Patreon strip votes. As a cherry on top, a cameo in Something*Positive hinted that Mike did indeed die, but that turned out to be just Milholland trolling the DoA readers after Mike turned out to be alive but comatose... or so it seemed, until Walky says post-time-skip that his previous roommate passed away.
• Amber imagining her father telling her he was proud of her could be chalked up to her guilt or conscience. Amber imagining Mike-and having a complete conversation with him-is a more troubling sign. Is Amber starting to hallucinate?
• After Hank warned Joyce that Ross made bail, Carol then calls Joyce herself...and tells her she and the church will always do the right thing, implicitly saying to Joyce she better make her peace with whatever happens to Becky as a result of her 'disobedience'.
• The "When It Crumbles" arc:
  • Joyce. Sarah. Walky. Dorothy. Ethan. Amber. All kidnapped by Blaine and Ross to be held as hostages so Amazi-Girl is forced to kidnap Becky and bring her to Ross. Jesus effing Christ, Willis. And worse, Dina came along too, not realizing what was going on.
  • The kidnapping takes a darker turn when Blaine finds out Ross let Amber go out of the belief that she really was Amazi-Girl, ends up attacking Ross, and comes upstairs after everyone while covered in his blood. Ross's injuries turn out to be fatal.
  • The first thought Blaine vocalizes after bashing Ross' head with a hammer? Killing all the other witnesses.
  • Despite the plan backfiring and the hostages freeing themselves, Blaine manages to get out of the house with Joyce as a hostage, throw her in the van, and speed away. While Sal arriving on her bike in the nick of time allow them to give chase almost immediately, Blaine's driving like a maniac, and decides to take a route through the campus. At that point it's morning and the students are going to their midterms, and Blaine is established as desperate and not caring about potential loss of life...
• The scariest parts of all of the above involving Blaine? All of it...all of it...was just to get Amber to drop out because Blaine didn't want to pay her tuition. It's just such a petty reason to cause so much Nightmare Fuel, devastation, death, and jail time. And the worst part of that? Linda Walkerton tried to do it for him because she would settle for nothing less than Amber's expulsion because of Blaine kidnapping Walky and possibly murdering Mike. (And even that's revealing cause it's implied she let the fact that Amber stabbed Sal go.) When we last saw her, she was cheerful because she found out about Blaine's death and declared that Amber has to drop out now, so one wonders what will happen when she finds out Amber's still enrolled (possibly funded by her stepfather).
• After all that carnage, Carol still thinks Ross did nothing wrong. When challenged by Linda Walkerton, she defends his actions, and doesn't back down even when Linda points out Joyce was one of the kidnapping victims.
• Blaine's death. Is it fitting? Yes. Is it deserved? Also yes. Is it unsettling as all heck? Three for three. Blaine can only helplessly watch as Lester tells him exactly how they plan to keep things quiet, gets out his handgun, and is implied to blow Blaine's brains out in the next strip.
  Lester: Oh, we plan to keep things pretty opaque... once you somehow manage to wrestle my handgun from me.
  • A Patreon-exclusive strip spells out that the cop that killed him gets off the hook without even a token punishment.
  • Then there's the fact that Asher ordered, or at least was an accessory to, the hit on Blaine. Was he lying about going straight the whole time or was this his Jumping Off the Slippery Slope moment?
• Over the time skip, Billie broke up with Ruth and started dating Asher. Even if she doesn't know he has mob ties or that he had a role in the kidnapping, the readers know and now fear for her.
• Even after the timeskip and his death, Amber is still hallucinating Mike, it turns out.
• Raidah convincing Billie to hang out with her and her friends instead has been explicitly referred to in comments as akin to a cult leader recruiting new members. And in the end it's not because Raidah gives a damn about Billie, or even for her connections, but to get revenge on Sarah (for getting Dana withdrawn from school) and Joyce (for causing her breakup with Jacob).
  "Jennifer is healing tonight after removing herself from a toxic social group. You're safe here. No more Sarah, no more Joyce."
• Hank divorcing Carol seems to have destroyed what little sanity she had left.
• Linda's rage once Amber reveals that Walky was failing math is sure to trigger something in readers who grew up with aggressively strict parents. Keep in mind, even when he was being kidnapped and threatened with death, Walky was still keeping a cool head and cracking jokes at his kidnappers' expense. Yet Linda is what causes him to become paralyzed with fear.
• At the beginning of Book 14, Dorothy has a dream that ends with Joyce falling into the open mouth of Ross with the ball-peen hammer Blaine killed him with partially embedded in his skull, complete with blood oozing or flying out of the wound. It's so bad that Willis has a content warning above the strip warning about what's about to happen.