User blog:AustinDR/Thoughts on Dating Game

One of the oldest stories I have read along with others like The Expressionless, Squidward's Suicide, etc. At first, I did initially like it because I thought the concept of meeting someone on a speed date who is later revealed to be completely insane was scary...but then as the years went by and I started to analyze it further, and my opinion changed.

For one, the protagonist of the story is probably the worst I have seen from a Creepypasta. He is a whiner who began the story complaining about how he was 32 and was still unmarried in comparison to his friends. How he had a crappy job and was unsatisfied with just the satisfaction of his left hand. So, he enters a speed dating game; after a few...problematic candidates, he finds what he assumed was the right choice, obviously a Gothic woman, and after dating her, he marries her. She then tells him that the basement was off-limits, and inevitably the situation presents himself when he had to go down there.

But, the main take away is that the protagonist is a horribly written character who assumes that being along in his thirties was the worst thing anyone can possibly imagine. Maybe "worse" than more serious issues such as mental health, cancer, remotely anything else? The woman is also a pretty badly written character: she starts off as the generic "totally not a bad guy" who singles the protagonist out for no real explanation but then devolves into a sociopathic monster who kills for no other reason than because "evil." That is where it also gets into another problem the story gets into it's deliberately grimdark meant only to shock the reader by relying on grandiose blood and gore. She claims that her husband and children died of cancer but of course, she actually tortured each one to death. The worse one, of course, being the baby. And not by just simply snapping its neck; no, the woman injects it with some blue serum that causes it to cry in pain before she grabbed it by the legs and smashed it on the wall, shattering the baby like glass. You'd have to be nothing short of a total psychopath to assume that killing a baby in such a way would make your story better.

Besides the badly written main character or the needless gore, the other issue has to be its shift in tone: it starts off relatively grounded on Earth with no hint of the supernatural at play. The woman isn't even a human antagonist: instead, somehow, she transforms into a quasi-immortal killer who also might have sodomized the protagonist by the time she was arrested and sentenced to death for capital murder. But then she boasts that she had underlings out there who would finish what she started on him, the ending indicating the protagonist had met either one of the woman's minions or is reintroduced to her as a result of reincarnation. We are as a consequence left in the dark about the woman and her origins. In this case, the ambiguity works against the story's favor.