Talk:The Deletion Scream/@comment-1901106-20161024134740

I've been going around and around on how to say this politely since I first read this story several weeks ago, but... well, there really isn't a polite way to say that the story is just not very good.

There are some factual inaccuracies, but they're mostly superficial- the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are completely different from what is described, and the substance would show up on a toxicological screening so it makes no sense for the coroner's report to just be speculating about it; infrasound is very low frequency, not high-frequency; and the supposed URL of the conspiracy site is malformed gibberish; that sort of thing.

One of the big problems with the story is the transcript/found-footage format, which really gives us very little idea of what is going on in the narrative: I thought the narrator was directly addressing me (the reader) for the first two thirds of it, and then he suddenly started yammering about 'wires' and apparently this was the transcript of a police interview the whole time? You really need to work on making the differentiation between the individual documents clearer, and establishing up front what they are and what is going on in them. The clinical tone is also really off in some places, and the documents omit what should be important details while including others that wouldn't be relevant. One of the big ones is that, not only is the word 'weird' completely inappropriate for a formal case report, but none of the documents ever say what the markings found on the victims' foreheads are. The other one is the fact that every case report has some sort of random fact about the victim tacked onto the end that's sort of related to how they died but not really- are these supposed to suggest that the image manipulates pre-existing circumstances to kill the victims or something? Overall, I think it would do you a lot of good to look at some real police, coroner, and missing-persons reports (they are probably publically available if you dig around enough on the appropriate local-government web sites). The SCP Foundation website also has a large number of reasonably true-to-life fictional ones.

The other big, big problem with this story is that the basic premise is... really just kind of asinine. I'm looking specifically at the examples of 'people dying of computer problems' ("his mind was hacked"??? Really????), but the whole conspiracy theory overlay doesn't make much sense either. Ian deletes the picture even though he knows what it does, knowingly placing himself in danger, and then his actual death is just a bewildering mishmash of random events.

This site's rating system is ridiculously inflated to the degree where basically nothing can get below a 5, but on a sensible scale where 10 is actually very good and 0 is actually bad, I'd probably give The Deletion Scream a 2/10. I'm still sort of wondering if this was meant to be a parody pasta, but there's not really anything funny about it either, so if there's a joke I'm not getting it. If this is serious... well, I mean, you could strip out the truly silly elements and clean up the format and description and things, but then you'd still pretty much be left with another bog-standard cursed image file that kills everyone who interacts with it in a certain way. FireflyNinja, I'd like to see you improve as a writer and have no reason to believe that you cannot, but this story is probably a lost cause and I would suggest just moving on to something better.