Since creepypasta came up in the vent thread I guess I’ll vent. I liked it better back before creepypasta was genericided all to Hell. Now it’s just a scary story that was initially released online. They’re called “creepypasta” because they were copy/pasted around message boards and forums. It’s a play on copypasta. The deal used to be that people would post short, vague stories on message boards and forums and see how many people believed them. The reason most of them are written in the first person is because it used to be a game based on fooling the reader into thinking that the story was a real event that the poster had experienced. The first person perspective is just about the last element of the genre’s DNA left intact, but even that’s on the way out.
Once it got just a little bit more mainstream newer, worse writers tried their hand and the wheels really started coming off. I remember the two stories that really pulled the curtain back.
God’s Mouth Cave and
The Jackal. Both of them led to same response on every board I saw them posted to. “Wait… how did you write this if you died?” From then on the game was basically over and people in general cottoned on to the fact that these stories going around had been fiction.
Now the whole thing is this ecosystem full of named authors that get big for writing them, narrators who don’t even know why the things they read are called creepypasta in the first place and a whole zoo of terrible, made-for-children OC’s in the ___ the Killer mold.
And then there’s Slenderman,who isn’t even a creepypasta character to begin with. He got started on one of SA’s horror threads. That initial thread was incredible. Slenderman was built up over the course of several days to be a timeless eldritch entity that has appeared randomly throughout history. The artists in that thread wrote some really tense journal-style entries dating back to the middle ages, complete with manuscript art depicting Slenderman attacks. There were high effort photo stories involving people being pursued by a nondescript guy in a suit who slowly but subtly mutated through the story. It was actually really good. Then the Internet at large got hold of him. What did they do? Gave him tentacles and a predilection for children. Good job, Internet.
Now the only corner of the web where the old creepypasta spirit seems to exist is 4chan. Some of the horror greentexts are really high effort, going as far as including photos to try and sell the contents to the reader as true events.
I just don’t like seeing what’s happened. It used to be fun, being in on the joke and watching new readers believe their first creepypasta. Now we have people like Dr. Creepen running their own subreddits for people to write them stories to read. Those aren’t copypastas, they’re just stories.
