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Nightmare Fuel / Sonic X: Dark Chaos

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Simply put, Sonic X: Dark Chaos lives up its name as a Darker and Edgier retelling of Sonic X's third and final season.


  • The entire setting and backstory. The Crapsack World does not hold back or pull any punches, especially the background materials. Rape, murder, torture, genocide, famine, and fundamentalism are all considered routine. Parts of it (particularly anything to do with the Muslims/Emirate of Mecca) could very easily rival Warhammer 40K in the darkness department. And all this is based on a children's TV show!
  • Everything about the Shroud. Imagine every single science fiction Horde of Alien Locusts/The Virus/parasite trope ever created rolled into one and taken up to eleven. They regularly devour entire galaxies on a regular basis. And Body Horror barely begins to describe their effects. It's very telling that both Maledict and Jesus Christ fear the Shroud more than they fear each other and are willing to temporarily work together to stop them.
    • On that note, Shroud Omegas - which are basically the Brethren Moons except the size of the Sun.
  • The trope is acknowledged in-universe. Hearing the voice of Dark Tails is so unimaginably horrific that it either kills his victims outright from terror, makes them go completely insane, or Mind Rapes them into serving him. Tails and Cosmo are the only people immune to it.
  • The beginning of Episode 62 is a flashback of Cosmo escaping her colony ship when Tsali attacks it, and watching in horror as he shoves her sister Galaxina's face into a ruptured fuel pipe and burns her alive. All described in graphic detail. And then it gets even scarier when you realize Galaxina (and Cosmo) is technically his little sister...
  • Episode 67. The entire episode is Nightmare Fuel, especially the rewrite. When Beelzebub attacks Chris and Cosmo and drags them into his lair, he strips both of them naked and ties Cosmo to his desk with razor wire. She hears buzzing and notices his skin is turning black. Cue a swarm of flesh-eating flies coming out of Beelzebub's skin pores and feeding everywhere on both of their bodies, including in the genitals. And that's not the end of it; after his "children" are done, Beelzebub drags the unconscious Chris out of his chamber. What happens next is fortunately not described. Cosmo is seconds away from the same fate - and is begging Beelzebub to kill her instead - when Tails finally reaches them. It's rather telling that in a story filled with violent and dark content, Episode 67 is the only chapter with its own content warning.
    • And the kicker? Beelzebub's stinger - which he used for the deed - is described as being the length of a man's arm and dripping with corrosive acid. Now imagine that being used for male-on-male rape. And just to pile on the horror, neither Chris nor Cosmo ever find out what he did, because Beelzebub healed their wounds and wiped their memories of the torture with neurotoxins before he escaped.
    • Beelzebub alone is creepy - a fat Psychopathic Manchild and Mad Scientist all rolled up into one. Hearing him crack extremely dark jokes while he tortures and rapes children is quite disconcerting.
  • Tails' Heroic Sacrifice is both this and a powerful Tear Jerker. Dark Tails attempts to possess him in a last-ditch attack. As Tails fights back with all his power, the Shroud parasite inside him - and then his body - begins to rapidly mutate from the Dark Chaos Energy surging through him. His bones slowly shatter one by one, his limbs turn to goo, and tentacles burst from his eye sockets as he tries to talk to Cosmo one last time - before they start to regrow and fall off over and over again. It's honestly a relief when Cosmo finally gives him a Mercy Kill with the Sonic Driver - and takes down Dark Tails with him.
  • At one point, Tsali mentions the fate of Muslim women in the Emirate of Mecca. Because their religious beliefs revolve around sex is evil, the Muslims turned their women into living baby factories who are surgically impregnated and forced to give birth every few seconds. It's not shown directly, but it doesn't make it any less disturbing. Until it actually gets shown in the Episode 71 rewrite, when Eric and friends find a damaged Miriam pod littered on a battlefield. With the woman still alive inside it and still pushing out half-formed fetuses.
    • The rewrite of Episode 68 reveals what the Muslims do to pacify worlds under their control - they perform female genital mutilation on a planetary scale.
    • A recent piece of background information actually takes it to the next level - the Ankaboot, a gigantic spider mech with lobotomized women attached to the legs, with large pistons molesting them as the robot moves across the battlefield.
  • The Shroud "larder" in Episode 69. And the fate of Baalra and his team.
    Baalra: YOU... SHALL MEET... YOUR ENDS... YOU SHALL JOIN... THE ARMIES OF FLESH...
  • In Episode 71, Trinity starts hacking into Tsali's hideout computers when he is left alone. He discovers a number of recorded memories that Tsali uploaded. The ones he finds are scary enough, including one of him setting Seedrians on fire while he massacres an entire ship, but the last one takes the cake; nothing but static and distorted electronic screaming.
  • The nadir of Dark Chaos' horror are the Tsali Endoskeletons, pretty much the twisted lovechild of Necron Flayed Ones and the Five Nights at Freddy's animatronics. The fact that they're all little more than gibbering animals with an endless hunger for Seedrian flesh and a fetish for wearing organs and skin as clothes doesn't help.
  • The current ending. Dark Tails is defeated... and then Forerunners get released and proceed to kill everyone, including Physical Gods like Maledict and Allysion.

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