This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
A series where anyone could turn into a flame monster at random, created by the writer of
Soul Eater. Horror is to be expected.
- The entire premise: Humanity suffers from the phenomena known as Spontaneous Human Combustion: you, a loved one, or a relative could, at any time, suddenly turn into an Infernal, a horrifying flaming monster that destroys everything in its path, has no control over itself and constantly feels the pain of burning to death. There's no way to prevent or undo it. The only thing that can be done for you is to be put down by the Special Fire Force. The worse part of it? It's completely random. Anyone could transform, and there's no telling when it will happen.
- What makes this even more horrible is how fear-inducing and heartbreaking it is to the loved ones of the victims. A girl's mother turned into an infernal years ago, and then her father. By the end of it, she's left belting that she'll be next.
- Then there's the theological dread the phenomenon brings for believers of the church, as one case of Spontaneous Human Combustion happened to a monastery and its nuns, including a school-class worth of children, despite them dedicating every single breath of their life to their God's teachings and ways. The idea that not even God can protect its followers from being reduced into walking burning corpses, would be enough to make anyone lose their faith in the depths of despair.
- To make it worse, there are those who, through sheer force of will or desire to live, manage to survive the transformation with their humanity intact, which means they're still sane enough to care about burning alive forever and all the unimaginable pain that implies. While on the flip side, if either through either insane willpower or other methods they are able to overcome or desensitize themselves to the pain, they can possess a body that never ages, and with it all the perks that come with Playing with Fire, it also means that anybody thoroughly wicked enough that also manages to mentally survive the change can also possess such things and use them to further their sinister agenda, like Setsuo Miyamoto for example.
- Even worse if they become a Demon Infernal. A Demon Infernal is stronger and tougher than the average Infernal, may even have their own Ignition Ability, and nothing short of enough firepower to level a city is enough to take them down. Even if they die, they'll explode with the force of a tactical missile and even veteran Fire Soldiers have trouble taking these things down.
- The even worst part about it is that the only way for an Infernal to truly die is though a prayer from a priest or sister. During the China mission they encounter an entire wasteland full of Internals that they believe originated from the time of The Great Cataclysmic over 250 years ago and later encounter ones that kept their sanity and intelligence, all of whom just want to die. Even the Demon Infernal who is insane enough to the point of wanting to destroy the world because it's at the point only that will finally destroy it.
- Takehisa Hinawa's perpetual Death Glare. His eyes never close.
- Shinra makes some of the scariest faces in New Gen Anime. When he gets nervous or scared, he often flashes out a Slasher Smile, which is aided by his Red eyes, which often glows. A few of his grins such as when he gets nervous around Maki in the first episode aren't too bad. However, faces such as when he saw his deformed skeleton with 'RIBCAGES IN HIS LEG, when he is fighting Rekka, or when he first thought his mother died makes you ponder if he is a hero or a devil in diguise.
- Captain Hibana's Sanity Slippage in her youth after her Despair Event Horizon is both tragic and disturbing. After watching all her loved ones burn to death, her mind snaps into becoming a nihilistic Social Darwinist complete with various Slasher Smile displays to show she's lost her mind.
- The Adolla goes from a MacGuffin to screeching this. It starts when Shinra looks down and sees ribcages inside his skeleton's leg. Yes, he sees his own skeleton and it is deformed to contain the Adolla Burst. And it goes From Bad to Worse after that.
- The anime adds a particular noise of an extremely harsh horn sound out of nowhere to when an Adolla Link occurs, leading to a Jump Scare when he suddenly gets one right before Vulcan's workshop gets attacked by Giovanni.
- The Endgame of the White Clad and the Evangelist: Find and Collect the Pillars (Pyrokinetics with the Adolla Burst) and use them to kick start another cataclysm that destroyed much of the world centuries ago which will turn the Earth into a giant star/sun, essentially killing off humanity. They're a powerful and influential cult of Omnicidal Maniac pyromaniacs who are willing to eventually kill themselves just to burn everything!
- Chapter 77 takes this up to eleven with a mass of horrific images and visions. Shinra spans back to reality, but somehow the aftereffect of this scene is even worse.
- Shinra getting mindraped by the First Pillar after his fight with his brother is a terrible sight. The Pillar uses her own hatred for everything and fuels Shinra's own internal anguish over finding out his mother is the Infernal he's been swearing revenge against since childhood and kidnapped his brother and his own frustrations over being a feared and hated outcast. The end result is an incredibly disturbing Shinra with a Nightmare Face and constantly babbling about how he wants to burn everyone in the world to ashes.
- Episode 31 of the anime adds some nightmare fuel. Shinra and Ogun are under a night sky when they see lights filling the plains. Ogun mentions how beautiful it looks and while it takes a moment Shinra realizes all the lights are infernals. They both then quickly realize any where there is not safety is potentially covered in infernals for miles/kilometers. That means there are literally millions possibly billions of infernals wandering the wastelands and they will never die unless some one takes the time to kill them.
- Kurono Yūichirō. Basically take a guy who is as strong as the World's Strongest Man in the series and make him an utter Sadist and The Bully who gets off entirely on brutalizing the weakest person in the room. He especially loves to harm defenseless woman and children and no one in the series has been able to fight him off seriously. It's unsettling that he's the one entrusted to care for Nataku despite his abuse towards the boy.
- The Joint Investigation arc is probably one of the darkest arcs of the series. Involving a mission of investigation in the Nether where Company 8 allies with the militaries of Company 2, both companies find themselves fighting Ritsu and her Knights of the Purple Smoke in the underground of the empire, leading to a surprisingly morbid arc.
- While not as bad as the following stuff that happens later, the White Clad member that targets Takigi and his partner at the beginning of the arc by detonating themselves with a suicide bomb counts. It's a sign that the White Clad are becoming more and more radical with each step of their plan, and brings some uncomfortable parallelisms with the actual zealot terrorists of the real life.
- After seeing a preview of her powers in the previous arc, we get to see the effects of Ritsu's Necro Pyro in a less spectacular but more terrifying way compared to the Infernal Giant of Haijima. Using her ability to raise the dead, Ritsu unleashes her horde of undead Infernals against to poor Red Shirts of Company 2, who end being killed in many gruesome ways. It even comes with the reveal that Ritsu's cannot only zombify Infernals, but also normal humans (and that includes the ones her undead minions don't directly kill, as seen with Hajiki), increasing her army of zombies with every kill she gets. Though this is a bit lessened with the Black Comedy of the poor Company 2 members having the typical flashback that appears before a character gets killed in fiction that goes along with the scene, it doesn't makes it any less horrible.
- Hajiki's sudden death at the hands of Orochi. After establishing himself as a certified badass, Hajiki is quickly killed by partial decapitation after a single hit from Orochi, with the audience having a lovely shot of the upper half of his head being separated from the rest of his body and dropped into the floor. While the anime censors this scene a bit, we can see clearly how the upper half of the head falls and leaves a big puddle of blood. The reactions of sheer terror of Tamaki and Juggernaut don't help.
- Orochi's demise is not any better. After being cornered by Juggernaut and failing to stop his final attack, she gets crushed by the huge bomb of fire he generates (with the impact being so huge we get to see a shot of Orochi's right eye popping out of the sheer pressure) before the bomb detonates and completely disintegrates her. Goes to show Juggernaut’s huge destructive capacity, and will make you glad a person as shy and fearful as him got such power instead of someone more depraved.
- This arc marks the return of Dr. Giovanni after his absence from the first Nether arc. However, this time, he has modified himself in such way he has gained many body parts from the Infernal Bugs the agents from the Evangelist use to turn people into Infernals, abandoning more of his humanity in the process. You thought cyborg Giovanni was unsettling? Wait until you see Giovanni sprouting giant insectoid legs, stings, wings and appendages. Even worse, his body is modified in such way he can survive being cut in half, and again escapes by gaining some insectoid legs and vanishing into the depths of the Nether while Arthur and Shinra deal with some flies he summoned (from his own body, no less).
- The cover of chapter 166 offers a look of what Giovanni may look like without his clothes. Let's say it looks very off...
- Ritsu's ultimate plan during the arc. Using all the corpses she gathered from both the Nether and Company 2, she intends to make them explode in strategic points of the Nether to obliterate the foundations of the Tokyo Empire (situated in the underground that is the Nether), a process that would effectively destroy the empire as a whole and doom the entirety of humankind, and she comes very close to fulfill her plan before being thwarted by Maki and Takigi. Gets to show how far the White Clad is willing to go in order to achieve their goal.
- The truth behind what causes Spontaneous Human Combustion puts the story squarely in a Cosmic Horror Story. Turns out Spontaneous Human Combustion is caused by the existence of a Doppelgänger, a version of oneself that exists in Adolla (basically Hell). For every person in the world, a doppelgänger exists and combustion starts when a Doppelgänger randomly intruded the mortal realm and merges with their counterpart. Doppelgängers are tied to the collective unconscious of mankind, and as such will always exist and by extension, so will Spontaneous Human Combustion!
- We also get a glimpse of Adolla, which is an Eldritch Location of black flames, building structures that look almost skeletal, and various moons with realistic-looking eyes on them. Absolutely nothing about this place is natural, and the fact that it basically exists as a manifestation of the human conscious potentially says a lot about the series' take on humanity.
- It's revealed in chapter 200 that the church where Sister Iris and Hibana grew up together with was a facility for Sister Sumire, their caregiver and adopted mother later revealed to be a loyal Pillar and follower of the White Clad, to conduct a Doppelganger experiment by feeding the children with Adolla bugs mixed with vegetables to turn them into pyrokinetics. Disgusting and disturbing at the same time.
- For a multitude of reasons caused by an Adolla Link between himself and Inca, Shinra decides to go with her idea of seeing if they can look at the past. What he sees nearly drives him to madness again when he sees our current time as both completely normal, and yet so underlyingly twisted, as if humanity had effectively wished for a collective death or something and he could comprehend it solely by looking at it. All the while, visuals that look damn-well traced in a disturbing Art Shift to realism makes the past seem downright alien.
- If that weren't bad enough, at the end of this chapter we find out Shinra accidentally let his doppelgänger take over his body for three months despite his Mental Time Travel only feeling like mere minutes, during which he effectively became what the public thought he was: an asshole delinquent criminal with tattoos and dyed hair and absolutely no respect for anyone. Hell, his doppelgänger struck Iris, a moment even Shinra immediately considered a Moral Event Horizon for his alternate self.
- What's a better way to demonstrate that all hell is breaking loose and the world is shifting rapidly towards the End of the World as We Know It? Humanity's perceptions causing the entire moon to change - into the moon from Soul Eater. And not as a quick aside gag either, several characters are horrified by its mere appearance while others try to shrug it off. It's entirely ambiguous if this is just a reference or somehow something far worse tied to the series. As it turns out, the oncoming cataclysm is quite literally distorting physics as we know it, turning the cognizant human perception into reality and causing all chaos to ensue.
- Giovanni's revelation in chapter 246: the sun that the Earth orbits? That was a planet before, implied to be another Earth or at least something that precluded the current one. The completely FUBAR world as humanity knows it is a result of a failed attempt at repeating the catastrophe that turned a planet into a sun and the White Clad want to finish the job. The villains don't just intend to destroy humanity in a blaze of fire, they want to incinerate the entire planet until it becomes a second sun.
- We also have the implication that however Giovanni's ancestors figured it out, they knowingly trapped a presumably-innocent girl inside Amaterasu, the blonde that Iris would become the Doppelgänger of, solely to use her as a battery source in their research towards the second cataclysm, begging for someone to release her. Judging by her insanity in the present day, the experience has been less than pleasant to say the least. Giovanni's body turning out to be comprised of nothing but the infernal-causing bugs is just icing on the cake.
- Giovanni's depravity knows no bounds when he turns Yu into an infernal to fuck with Vulcan, and then just as it seems like everything's getting better as Vulcan and Lisa manage to get one up on Giovanni and destroy his bug body - only for Giovanni to have swapped to taking control over Yu. Vulcan had already squashed Giovanni's body in contempt, and didn't realize that was Yu begging for help from it.
- Chapter 252 finally shows us the true nature of Amaterasu when a giant eye appears. It serves as a giant magnifying glass, and we all know what happens when sunlight is used on a magnifying glass. The second Great Cataclysm has begun.
- Chapter 255 is just. Plain. WEIRD. The first half deals with the Fire Force figuring out that the source that fuels the firestorm is despair and they have to literally use hope to put it out. The second half is a pure mindfuck. It shows live action panels of Sumire Sugita, who goes on a rant on how the Evangelist chose Japan to begin the Great Cataclysm two-hundred and fifty years ago. How the world slowly lost all hope and gave into despair. How humans worship social media like a religion and that is the reason why the despair only continued to grow until it all burst. The smile she makes at the end is just so creepy!
- Chapter 290 sees the start of the Great Cataclysm after Shinra falls to despair. How? When Captain Obi's doppelgänger sneaks up behind the real Obi and slits his throat.
- Chapters 291 and 292 sees the second Great Cataclysm. The world has completely burned up and become a sun. All the characters you loved so much? Burnt to a crisp. Only Shinra, Arthur and Sho are the only ones left to stop Haumea and the Evangelist. And just when it couldn't get any worse, Shinra and Sho's mother appears and it turns out she's the doppelgänger of the Evangelist.
