Bleach/Nightmare Fuel

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It Got Worse

Bleach has always been quite extreme for a kids' series, but it's definitely getting increasingly Darker and Edgier, so much so, that certain stuff needed to be censored in the anime. However, it should be noted that the anime has occasionally made things even creepier than they were in the manga. While this was always present since the first arc, it got more frequent in the Soul Society arc, finally reaching its peak in the Hueco Mundo and Fake Karakura arcs. One has to wonder how all these would've turned out if Bleach was a Seinen....

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• Mayuri Kurotsuchi from Squad 12. He turns his own men into living bombs with the skin bubbling shown very clearly in the manga. He has no ears or lips either, and has a sickle attached to a fleshy cord in it that he can retract and detach at will. Finally his bankai Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo is a giant caterpillar with a baby's head that exhales poison and sprouts swords from its neck. Oh. And don't forget about how he planted those bacteria inside Ishida to track him? Immagine someone like Mayuri watching your every move, through millions of microscopic cameras hidden inside your own body, to collect intel on how he can eventually kill you, or anyone you meet.
• Sosuke Aizen. On the outside, he's the ideal captain every Shinigami inspires to be. But on the inside, he's evil incarnate. Not only did he betray Soul Society, he massacred the Central 46. His scheme is to kill 100000 humans in order to forge a key to the castle of the Soul King. And he also backstabbed Momo...literally. According to himself, he's above the morals and decency adopted by "lesser beings". In other words, he voluntarily chose to abandon his morals sometime ago. Unsurprisingly, once they manage to capture him, Soul Society sentences him to 20,000 years for all the horrific acts that he committed.
• Anything Szayel Aporro Granz pulled qualifies, too. From chomping into his little minion and devouring him whole, leaving a skinny arm dangling from his mouth to forcibly impregnating Nemu, making her stomach grow to an unnatural proportion, and spew out of her mouth (in the manga, he burst out of her instead) as a liquid blob thing, leaving Nemu extremely wrinkled, dried out, and nearly dead.
• Ayon, the monster summoned by Harribel's fraccion, and the damage it causes. Matsumoto gets a piece ripped out of her. And if you thought that was bad, just wait till you actually see it's face.
• Hooler, the big tumorlike humanoid that Wonderweiss has just brought into the fake Karakura - a vast white veiny thing with no head, which vomits up a bloodlike stream of Gillians ^{[dead link]}. Ew.
• Hollows. Super strong and super durable The Heartless who grow to the size of skyscrapers and turn into a myriad of Body Horror, Eldritch Abomination, and Humanoid Abomination afterward. Oh yeah, and they're invisible. Have fun sleeping.
• Ichigo having a giant bloody hole blasted through his chest. The fact that he then runs around with that gaping hole in his chest somehow makes it worse. In an earlier fight, he was almost cut in half.
• Barragan Luisenbarn. The spitting image of death itself in his released form, he is a nightmarish ghoul enshrouded in darkness with a crowned skull for a head, who rots the ground he walks upon. And that's only in regards to the ground. Anything that decays with time (even if it would regularly take thousands, no, millions of years), will be reduced to nothing in a short time.
• Gin Ichimaru's damn smile, which he always has, even during the thick of battle or when he's committing some heinous act. You know that a character is terrifying when he scares even the other characters. Gin scares the shit out of Rukia. When she was in Soul Society awaiting her execution, she stated that even if he wasn't talking to her she'd get this ominous feeling like "snakes were curling themselves around her" and she could feel "every bead of sweat" on her body whenever he was in her presence. And of course, there's the fact that Gin was a total asshole and told her that he would save her from being executed before crushing her hopes flat. Rukia's scream is the worst part.
• Hollowification. If the victim stays for too long or grows too resentful, their "chain of fate" (a fairly long chain with tiny mouths gnashing out) starts to nibble at itself until it reaches the chest where it's attached. The illustrations show the transformation, where the former "Plus" dissipates and reforms as a Hollow as white stuff spills out their mouth and covers their face into a mask, to be quite painful.
  • Also, when a Hollow's hunger becomes so strong that the souls of humans is no longer enough for it, it begins to eat OTHER HOLLOWS. This often leads to the creation of the mindless giant Gillian-class Menos, but may sometimes lead to Adjhucas, the level that hollows like Grimmjow were in before becoming arrancars.
• Hollow Ichigo. His cruel laugh, haunting voice, and creepy smile make for a terrifying nightmare indeed. Not to mention the fact he's the very opposite of everything Ichigo is - cruel, sadistic, insane, psychopathic...and the list just goes on!
• When Tousen had a jaw sprout out of his otherwise-blank Hollow mask. Look at what happened to his arm...
• The first fight between Ichigo and Grimmjow, mostly because Ichigo being utterly owned by Grimmjow is made worse by the fact that most arrancar's Hierro makes their skin literally tough and hard as iron, which means all those punches are effectively sledgehammers to the face. Ichigo is damn lucky his skull didn't cave in. Then there's the occasional tinkling sound...Was that his chain on his Bankai...or was it teeth falling out?
• Oh cool, we're finally learning Tousen's motivations and he's going crazy. AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
  • Just look at the distance between his eyes. And the worst is, despite having turned into an insect-like abomination, there's still a part of his freaking human face left! With ragged teeth, of course. And the fact that he still talks (having gone batshit insane, but not significantly more than a few seconds ago before his transformation), yet is unable to recognize his old friend, whose face flashed before him in his dying moments might put him downright into the depths of the Uncanny Valley.
  • Grillar Grillo in the anime, his eyes making a squishing noise as he opens them, and his voice suddenly going from deep and warped to psychotically high-pitched as he starts screaming his new Madness Mantra was just really unnerving.
• The scene in which Hiyori nearly gets strangled to death by a insane Hollowfied Ichigo with a huge Slasher Smile on his face. The English dub of that particular scene takes this up a notch. Holy crap, Johnny Yong Bosch! (start around 3:48) That crazy bone-chilling laughter...
• Nnoitra's Hollow hole and mask fragments. It was revealed with him getting STABBED IN THE HEAD by Kenpachi.
• Aizen's shikai. From the moment you see it, you can never again fully trust any of your senses. That's a pretty goddamn frightening thought right there. Then there's how he uses it; in particular, tricking both Kyoraku and Hitsugaya into backstabbing poor Hinamori.
• When we finally get to see it, the release of Wonderweiss looks like a level 4 Akuma. Much like Tousen, he still has a bit of a humanoid chin. The worst part of it is by far those goddamn arms erupting out of his over-sized shoulders.
• Menos Grandes, and the the other Adjuchas in Grimmjow's gang (before becoming Arrancars) have some very horrific physical forms and faces.
• Ninth Espada, Aaroniero Arruruerie definitely has the look of an ugly-ass Eldritch Abomination. His real "face" is a large, glass cylindrical capsule filled with blood-red liquid and two small, floating Hollow heads, that tend to talk at the same time when revealed, almost as if there's two people speaking to you. The upper head has a menacingly deep voice, while the other is more high-pitched and child-like, like that of a living doll or chipmunk. His zanpakuto is a deformed arm-like appendage with dozens of sprouting tentacles, concealed in his left hand under his glove. One of his powers is to absorb you into himself, gaining all your memories and abilities, which he can perfectly mimic to any one else he comes into contact with, including peoples' faces. He shape-shifts by forcing one of his heads through the glass, making it bubble into a coating of skin, which he then stretches to force the rest of the cylinder under. Finally, let's take look at his released form ^{[dead link]}.... just imagine having to fight that thing.
• Chapter 403 gives us Aizen's new form. As Ichigo himself states in the chapter: "What...the fuck...is that..."
  • Following up on Chrysalis-Aizen, this is what happens after he's hit with a big-ass Getsuga. Special note is that, when injured, he doesn't bleed, his skin cracks instead, with no reaction at all from the guy, implying that he can't feel anything anymore.
• The scene in Fade To Black where Homura and Shizuku fusing with Rukia against her will, because they want to be with her and want nobody else getting in the way. Poor Rukia's tortured screams do NOT help. After this, Dark Rukia shows up and rams her scythe into a plant which spawns an Eldritch Abomination that's OVER 150 STORIES TALL with massive eyes EVERYWHERE, sprouting tentacle monsters that look made out of sperm. All the captains make a Big Damn Heroes, but it doesn't really help much, because the damn thing spawns the monsters NON. FUCKING. STOP.
• Anime only, in the "New Captain" arc, where Ichigo gets locked in to his mind for a moment and tormented with the death of his mother, Masaki Kurosaki. She also starts choking him, intending to kill him while he is unable to harm her. The worst part is how her face was hidden in shadows/covered by her hair so you couldn't really see her expression.
  • The nucleus of a Bakkoto looks like an eyeball. Gyokaku kept them on his desk. Then, when Amagai kills Gyokaku, he takes them with him and then wears them like a sash, looking like he has four eyeballs growing across his chest.
• In the manga, Grimmjow kicking Loly in the stomach so hard that it causes her to vomit, and ripping off her leg. The look of absolute terror in her eye says it all. Also look at how badly Loly disfigured Orihime's face.
• Ulquiorra ripping out and crushing his eye. To say nothing of how he brutalized this dude.
• Yammy's released forms, this dinosaur-esque creature and a giant ape thing..
• Kurotsuchi showing Uryu a picture of his grandfather's soul after Kurotsuchi had finished experimenting on it. Mild compared to the worst of the examples on this page, but still horrifying in retrospect. It's bad enough to be shown the mangled corpse of a stranger who might be a distant relative, but if that corpse happens to belong to your much-beloved grandfather, you'd probably be having nightmares for a while afterwards.
• Chapter 409: Upon reaching the real Karakura Town, Aizen began randomly slaughtering passerbys. Keep in mind, most of which can't even see him. And he isn't even doing so with intent; his Battle Aura is so strong, anything made of reishi (spirit particles), which includes peoples' souls, that isn't used to such a strong aura, gets splattered. Only those that actually have something to resist can try to survive. That means Aizen is now currently so powerful that his mere presence is enough to kill the entire human population. Oh. He also goes after Ichigo's friends, intending to kill them in the hopes that it'll provoke Ichigo into becoming more powerful.
• The Menos Forest was rather creepy. Just a gray floor with dark gray pillars jutting up into a black abyss that is pretty much everything around you. And the fact that there are massive, and also rather frighting Gillians everywhere in the darkness.
• Metastacia. It's kinda hard to use words to describe this thing, so just use this picture. If anybody touches the tentacles on his back, their zanpakuto is broken, leaving them at his mercy. Poor Kaien. And in the manga it was worse; there were tentacles sprouting out of his empty eye sockets. Not mentioning his habit of turning friend against friend. Imagine having to fight your friend, but it's not really your friend, even though you know it actually is.
• There was that scene when Muramasa invaded Ichigo's mind to control Zangetsu, and during the 'probing', Ichigo awoke on the ground of his inner world, then suddenly went to his inner hollows' version of that world, except that he was on the 'roof', with Muramasa standing a few feet in front of him. Without warning, a hole opens up on Ichigo's chest and dozens of arms forcibly erupt out from his very torso, wrapping around his entire body like a cocoon.
  • And the part when, after being rejected and broken by Kouga, Muramasa underwent a horrific transformation into a Hollow himself, where his entire body, from head to toe, was literally and repeatedly enlarging from the inside-out, shrinking back in proportion immediately thereafter and enlarging once again after that, simultaneously boiling the skin at each time.
• Tesra vs. Ichigo. Tesra goes One-Winged Angel on Ichigo immediately, and then proceeds to break every bone in his body. You can hear Ichigo's arm being snapped like a twig! Tesra apparently thought it was necessary to slam him into the ground from 15 feet up 3 times in a row and then attempt to break his spine on two different occasions. Thankfully, Zaraki pulled a Big Damn Heroes and then took Tesra out in one shot. Now for all to enjoy!
• Chapter 415 What Aizen's cronies did to Matsumoto. she was one of the people they beat up and took a piece of her soul to power up Aizen's Hougyoku. Made worse by the fact that the state they left her in makes it look like she was raped.
• 416. Up until now, Aizen has cleanly cut his enemies down. Then he slashed them across the chest, then ripped off an arm, stabbed through the chest, and finally throwing the already dying victim through a building. With that perfectly calm smile. And Aizen's doing this to Gin, who had just then betrayed him and was the last subordinate he had. And here the good guys at least had the hope of going down without too much pain...
• Chapter 419. [1]. Aizen's transformation and his final form, now animated at Neon Genesis Evangelion levels of scary:Sweet dreams!
• Probably considered a Fridge Horror, but after Aizen is Brought Down to Normal, during his trial he seems...well..back to his normal self. Could the whole Villainous Breakdown have been part of his plan?
• Kensei's first Hollowfication, which not only makes him go berserk, but makes pillars start to grow out of his back.
• In chapter 450 Ginjou slashes Ichigo's eyes. And in 451, he deals him a huge No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Minor in comparison to the rest of this page, but seeing Hitsugaya in the anime viciously, determinedly stabbing his sword through Aizen's chest right up to the hilt for how deliberate it was. Not even taking into account what happened next...
• Tsukishima and his Fullbring. The guy can rewrite the past of anyone and anything he cuts, and uses it to turn all of Ichigo's friends against him. The mindgames he plays on people are simply terrifying. Mr. Tite Kubo, has truly outdone himself this time. He managed to make a villain even MORE FRIGHTENING than Aizen.
• Ginjo was already hit with "Book of the End", and being hit twice TURNED HIM BACK TO NORMAL: The actual villain of the arc. He and Tsukishima effectively took the very concept of True Companions that gives strength to so many Shonen Genre protagonists, defeated it, and virtually made it their bitches.
• Chapter 462: Tsukishima mindraping Orihime and Chad when they start breaking off from his control. He seems to be enjoying it too.
  • This also happens to be the first time we're seeing things from the perspective of somebody affected by him. Even Ginjo, dislikes Tsukishima's usage of his Fullbring as it can completely destroy the victim's MIND and make them Empty Shells with over usage. His reaction is Lack of Empathy.
• Kutsuzawa collides into the Uncanny Valley with this unsettling transformation.
• The monsters that Yukio summoned into his fullbring and that he was almost killed by them.
• The backgrounds of some of the Fullbringers: Jackie returning home with her dead brother in her arms to find her family slaughtered. Or Kutsuzawa killing his own wife on a whim. Riruka kidnapping a guy she liked and locking him in a dollhouse... And what exactly happened to Yukio's parents?
• Rukia in Ganju's flashback when she returned with Kaien's body to the Shiba residence. The look in her eye is just...terrifying.
• Orihime's hollowfied brother Sora tried to kill Ichigo (and Tatsuki, though less so) for taking his place in Orihime's heart. He then says he'll kill Orihime just so no one else can have her.
• The fourth movie brings us Hell itself, from what appears to be gigantic prison city made up entirely of white marble blocks patrolled by giant skeletal gorillas with floating skulls instead of heads, that can pass through walls and chew on people, to a sea with stone lotuses, with a corpse of one such monster impaled on a giant sword inside each, to what appears to be a cavern, with ponds of corrosive yellow liquid and a dimly lit underground tunnel, leading to a desert made of the ground bones of the damned, with some sort of dark sacrificial altar in the middle, and a pool of lava that respawns anyone killed in hell so they can die again, and that's just the start.
• Due to Hollow's having slipped far, far down in the Villain Pedigree they were resorted to being comedic in filler, it can be easy to forgot just how horrifying they can be. Chapter 480 was more than happy to remind us. Two pages earlier.
• Chapter 488. If you thought Mayuri's freakishly-painted face was scary, you may want to skip this (very spoileriffic) panel.
  • Also, Yamamoto is pissed. SCARINGLY pissed.
• Ulquiorra's psychological torture of Orihime was quite unsettling, especially the part where he threatened to force feed her and then strap her down to a table and give her intravenous therapy when she refused to eat after he ordered her to.
• Zommari releasing Brujería. Heads should not turn that way ^{[dead link]} - especially without moving the neck!
• Chapter 492: Ayon's rampage is an in-universe moment, but the biggest one is after the rampage: Kirge is still alive after having his neck snapped like a twig, and just puts it back in place.
  • For worse, how did we learn about it? When Apacci approaches him to boast... and all of a sudden, she gets Impaled with Extreme Prejudice. Oh shi--.
• Chapter 493: We get to see the pleasant sight of people's flesh being disintegrated from their bones. Up to and including seeing seeing Ayon being reduced to a skeleton, in a way somehow much more gruesome than the similar fate of those affected by Baraggan's ability.
  • Which leads to this humanoid abomination of a one-winged angel.
• All of the Espadas except for Starrk have their moments.
  • Aaroniero's released form.
  • Everything that has anything to do with Szayel.
  • Zommari twisting his neck like that to transform.
  • Grimmjow's brutal beatdown of Ichigo, as well as blasting half of Menoly's body off and ripping Loly's leg off her with his bare hands, and choking Orihime when she questions him.
  • Nnoitra's brutal beatdown of Ichigo and the way he acts toward Orihime.
  • Ulquiorra's brutal beatdown of Ichigo, his psychological torture of Orihime and his mix of physical torture and mutilation of Ishida.
  • Harribel's mask.
  • Baraggan's Battle Aura of death.
  • Yammy's released kaiju form.
• Chapter 494: Interesting that they introduced several officers at once with zanpakutous to boot at once. That means that they'll probably be cannon fodder to the Vandenreich while-- DID ONE OF THEM BLAST KIRA'S RIGHT SIDE OFF?! 1,000+ deaths in 7 minutes? Aizen, can you be our Big Bad again?
  • Even more so, does poor Kira's horrifying injury look familiar? Yes, it's disturbingly similar to what happened to Matsumoto in the FKT arc. Only that, instead of having his right side merely torn by a Giant Mook's hand, the upper half of his body was blasted off. Auuuugh.
• Originally we thought that there were only 7 Stern Ritter, 7 Stern Ritter than completely annihilated 1/3 of the Seireitei, then in Chapter 495 we find out that they're ranked by letter and Rose comes face to face with Nanana Najahkoop who is Stern Ritter U...U being the 21st letter of the alphabet...that means there is a strong chance there are 26 Stern Ritter...look at how much destruction those 7 caused, and it turns out that there are literary THREE TIMES MORE OF THEM.
  • They're probably all there; eleven pillars of light can be seen on panel, and probably more off, when they first touch down, and some didn't appear until the next chapter, Nanana included. Not that this helps much...
• As Nodt screams this. Pitch black eyes, check. An instant-kill-attack, check, doesn't seem to speak, check. To top this off, even the Shinigami started running from him.
  • The shinigami killed by Nodt keep on screaming even after they die.