Nightmare Fuel / Gate

• Imagine a Gate to another world opens suddenly, and then, without warning or provocation, an army of fantastic monsters come spilling out of it. You, an unarmed civilian, find yourself facing down this formidable force and capture could mean being made into a Sex Slave if you're female, or a one-way trip to the mines as a slave if you're male. The attackers also indiscriminately kill people left and right, ultimately murdering at least several hundred Japanese civilians.
• Imagine a Gate opens to another world and you send a considerable army across and learn days later they were not only in retreat but wiped out by an unknown force. At that point, you'd wonder just what the hell the people on the other side of the Gate have that you don't. And just to make things worse, they come after you. You amass the biggest army you can muster, numbering in the hundreds of thousands... and they get slaughtered before they can even get close to the enemy camp, all with weaponry far beyond your understanding that renders your battle tactics worthless.
  • Something that drives this home is the reaction of the Elban troops after the first wave of the allied forces are wiped out by an artillery barrage: king Dulan, a veteran of many battles, and his men, many veterans themselves, are silent in horror as they surveil the scene, then a knight pukes and Dulan starts shouting, trying and failing to understand what has just happened.
  • Later in the battle, Dulan has found a way to go and fight them: sneak to the enemy in the night, with the new moon meaning there will be little light for them to be detected and slaughtered at distance. They do that... And then, suddenly, the sky is lit orange by something falling from the sky. Dulan has barely the time to realize the enemy can see in the dark and ordering a desperate charge to at least try and bring the fight to the enemy before the slaughter resumes... And then his charge against the enemy positions is stopped by barbed wire disabling his horse, and the troopers that came to his rescue are casually killed through their armor and shields by machine guns, that he hadn't seen yet. No wonder that, when the mortar shells start falling, he's Laughing Mad...
  • Bit of Fridge Horror here, but when Itami selected prisoners to be taken back to Alnus, he selected the female prisoners. We, the audience, are aware that it's to keep them from being raped by their captors. However, the female prisoners likely weren't immediately aware of that fact. They'd just seen their forces cut down by an overwhelmingly superior force, and now were being requested as prisoners by the leader of that force. Since rape and pillage seem to be standard practices in the world beyond the Gate, what must have been going through their heads before they reached Alnus and learned the truth?
• The fire dragon attacks the elf village. A village inhabited by men, women, and children, and the fire dragon roasts the place indiscriminately as it searches for a snack.
  • This is because fire dragons get a taste for human and demi-human flesh after the first time they've had it. Its mere presence forces the JSDF to evacuate whole villages of people out of the region. Even then, the dragon finds them and descends on the rear of the convoy, burning and devouring scores of still-living victims. It's later revealed that the dragon killed 130 people in this attack, all of them dying gruesome and horrific deaths.
• The Ancient Fire Dragon makes a grand entrance by consuming a lesser dragon in Episode 3. By lesser, we mean one big enough for people to ride on.
• Piña witnessing the firepower of the JSDF's 4th Combat Team, who make short work out of 600 armed brigands. The speed of how fast these people can kill things bring out the Hopeless War perspective of the whole scenario.
  • Any time that her having difficulty negotiating with the Japanese is played for comedy is funny... until you realize that while the audience knows that no, the Japanese won't rape, pillage, and murder their way across the empire, Piña doesn't know that. She has no choice (due to limited diplomatic experience with groups that aren't part of the empire) but to assume that as the stronger country, the Japanese would do exactly what the Empire would do in her scenario. Every scene where she tries to apologize to Itami for her soldiers beating him up? That's a scene where she's desperately trying to avoid the death of her nation, and the foreign soldiers with so much power are laughing at her. Which, scarily enough, is precisely what she witnessed, and was proud of her own ambassadors doing when the Empire had a "debate" with an ambassador from a vassal country while she was growing up.
  • The worst-case scenario had Italica fall to the bandits and them having their way with Piña and Countess Myui. The latter is 11 years old.
• The speed and casualness of Rory's slaughter with her laughing the whole time.
• The Hakone Shoot-out at the hot springs. Everyone's there just trying to have a good time, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find it converted into a gory graveyard (thanks to Rory).
  • While we're on Hakone, seriously think about it. You got special forces from three different countries trying to abduct you. If that's not enough to incite Paranoia Fuel, what will?
• The Akusho district, the slums of the Imperial capital. The slave market is open to the public, the butcher has some mystery meat with hands sticking out of it, drug use seems to be rampant, and so is prostitution. Oh, and criminal bosses work here with assassins not afraid to cut up their victims and leave them lying in the streets, be it men, women, or children. A Crapsack World packed into a part of a capital city.
• The Special Region experiencing an earthquake for the first time. To them, it was considered the end of the world.
• Zorzal's red-ass beatdown at the hands of Kuribayashi. He was asking for it, but still.
• Crosses over with Tear Jerker, but the way that Yao describes how easy it was to do what she did to Tuka... she starts with a Slasher Smile as she talks about how easy it was for Itami to be manipulated, but the more she explains about exactly what the Fire Dragon did to her village, she starts breaking down, never losing the smile as she cries. She's just so broken and all of a sudden, we get to see how far she's willing to go in the name of saving her people...
• Some of the dark elves go off the deep end and willingly get eaten by the dragon.
• Itami's own dark past involving his parents and seeing the similarities between Tuka and his own clinically insane mother.
• The fates of captured apostles are not pretty at all.
• Zorzal taking the throne.
• Youji, Yao, and Rory facing a horde female Plague Zombies. Don't let the "normal" look fool you...
• Any romance among JSDF personnel and Special Area citizens, be it humans or non-humans, may abruptly end when JSDF fulfills their objectives, if JSDF personnel take leave or rotate out, or if the Gate disappears.
  • Imagine the fear of thousands of JSDF personnel if the Gate suddenly disappeared. Only Hardy knows why the gate exists and how long it will last.
  • Imagine the fates of the ALC (Alnus Living Comunity), aka, Alnus Town, founded by 30 some odd refugees from Coda Village, elderly, wounded, and children, should the Gate close suddenly and unexpectedly. Their livelihood, and that of the denizens of Clan Formal, who were hired there, predominantly rely on trade goods coming through the Gate. What are they going to do when the gate closes?
  • What would happens to any offspring among Earthlings and Special Region's Residents. Would they get acknowledged by one of the two societies? Or none?
• Imagine being an immortal and all the perks that go with it, when suddenly something much bigger than you manages to eat you whole. The thing's stomach is stronger than your hands so you have no way of getting out. You'll just have to wait until the thing poops you out. Just ask Rory.
• Piña is apparently enslaved by Zorzal at the end of episode 21, and the Imperial army is marching on the Jade Palace, vastly outnumbering the Rose Order Knights who defend it.
• Episode 22 makes it worse! Not only does Zorzal enslave Piña, he has her thrown into Tyuule's slave quarters, "dressed" as a slave, with "her sentence" being decided, and the Imperial army numbering in the thousands is forced to fight, lest the Oprichnina go to their homes and burn them down, with the soldier's families still inside! And the Oprichnina are cheering for it!
• Mixed with Paranoia Fuel in Episode 24 for Zorzal. Since his ego couldn't bear the thought that anyone is better than him, not even Rory, an apostle, and challenged Itami directly, Itami put him in his place. In the novel, he grabbed a goblet out of Tyuule's hand, put it in Zorzal's, and called out the callsign of the sniper team observing the confrontation, giving them the command to shoot the goblet in Zorzal's hand. In Episode 24, the sniper team acts on their own when Zorzal tries to attack Itami, with a sniper bullet hitting the floor next to him. In both cases, Itami tells Zorzal outright that if he didn't let Piña go, and promise to stop sending assassins after Lelei, the next bullet would go in his head. To say that Zorzal did not take it well is a serious understatement; just one part of his breakdown is the mere thought of an instantaneous death he can't see coming as he starts imagining gunshots in his retreat, screaming at sounds that aren't even happening.
• The light novel has an astronomer of the Special Region realize that the Gate is altering the orbits of planets in their solar system. Does something like that happen on the other side too?
  • Hardy implies that it is in Volume 7.
• Volume 7 displays what happens when the gate is open too long: an extra-dimensional "fog of death" called "the Apocrypha" descends on the Special Region, killing everything it touches, including microbes, and bending space-time. Hardy strongly implies that this would ultimately spread to Earth as well once the Special Region dies.
• Volume 8. Leilei participates in a "Gate Opening" experiment to try and open a gate of her own. The results culminate in Itami and every single member of the Japanese staff supervising the experiment freaking out completely and pleading her to close her gate immediately while putting the entire building under lockdown and ordering its destruction if communication remains broken for 24-hours, all to the complete confusion of the Special Region inhabitants present. The reason? Judging from Itami´s description after returning from a quick trip through her gate, she accidentally opened a straight path to a Xenomorph nest!
• Volume 8. Zorzal outlines to Tyuule exactly why the JSDF absolutely cannot lose the fight with him. Not only does he break his word regarding the treatment of captured enemy citizens, he leaves evidence of his wrongdoing in places where it can easily be found by his victims, hoping to enrage them so he can have the pleasure of beating them down, but should that fail to have the desired effect, that's when he gets nasty.
• The Arachnids. Hardy eventually reveals that keeping the Gate open allows "interdimensional parasites" to enter Alnus. That alone is terrifying, but it gets worse. To keep the invaders from overrunning both worlds, Lelei shuts the Gate. Think about the implications of that: Alnus, and by extension Japan, had revolutionized the economy and brought the single most powerful military force in the Special Area to the ground. Now, a modern force of soldiers is trapped with equipment that might as well be useless. Napoleon said it best, "An army marches on its stomach." Now, that army has no way to feed.