User blog comment:MrDupin/Why Jeff the Killer isn't a classic/@comment-4715955-20150919103051

The problem with the modern age isn't that everything is stored forever on the internet: that's really the best thing about the 'net, and it doesn't do it nearly well enough (if only someone had a complete, viewable copy of "The Baby From Outer Space" on youtube). The problem is that the internet has made everyone so lazy, impulsive, and easily amused that shit has become the new entertainment standard. It goes for the content creators too. Why invest effort in a story when you can change the names of a crap fanfic you wrote last year and publish it professionally to get rich off of emotionally-stunted housewives? Why even create anything at all, when you can make a living on youtube by recording yourself playing videogames?

Let's not forget marketability as well. We don't know Poe was the best: only the most successful. There could have been better writers who didn't know how to market themselves and thus faded into obscurity. How many good books and movies can you name that failed miserably on release due to bad marketing, or because "the time just wasn't right"? "John Carter" wasn't a bad movie, but it sure looked like one from the trailers, so nobody saw it. HP Lovecraft wasn't recognized for his stand-out work until after he'd been dead for the better part of a century! Why was Shakespeare the most famous of all his writing peers? Was it really because he was the best? Was he just better at marketing himself? Was it both?

And that's nothing to say about the fact that children are all over the internet, and children don't know shit from gold even at a side-by-side comparison. That's probably the biggest reason Jeff was so huge: self-absorbed kids with power fantasies saw Jeff as wish fulfillment (let's not even go into the fucked-up little girls who idolize him) and that alone made it the greatest story ever written in their eyes. Years later, even when they realize how shitty it is, they still love it for its nostalgia value, probably without realizing that's the ONLY reason they still love it, and it doesn't even deserve THAT!

It is several hours past my bedtime and I shouldn't be rambling on wikis right now. I did read Jeff the Killer -- suffered through it many times, in fact, since I actually spoofed it a la Mystery Science Theater 3000 a year ago -- and it really is as bad as everyone says. Its badness transcends taste and subjectivity. Only a child would think otherwise.