User blog:AustinDR/Squidward's Suicide (Review)

Now, that was an oldie. Sometime in...I'm tempted to say around the time I entered my first year of high school I heard about the infamous story. Obviously, I knew it was just an urban legend story with the unbelievability of the tale working against it. The story is about an intern working at the Nickelodeon animation studios on SpongeBob shortly after the release of the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. They find what appears to be a completely normal episode, but as you'd imagine, it wasn't.

The story, while I am aware that it's not meant to make sense as it's just a creepy story...there are a few issues I have with it. Ignoring the inaccuracies that come with developing concepts for the show's next episode, or how Hillenburg was divorced from the show sometime after the first film was released and had little input over how an episode should run, the story served as the progenitor of future bad cliches that future lost episode creepypastas would use. Hyperrealism; the protagonist and a few other staff staying in the screening room despite them clearly being sickened; shock value, etc.

I mean, the story itself is really more about the protagonist and staff discovering pictures of murdered children with the assailant dismembering them for little explanation. Squidward killing himself after a bad concert performance felt more of an afterthought to tie it alongside the child murders. This is honestly another thing: the story isn't scary most likely because of the namesake. Take Candle Cove which also functions as a "lost episode" for a show that allegedly existed. The name of the story gives off many plausible interpretations. Squidward's Suicide, however, gives away a good majority of the story except for the child murders. But besides that, there was never an instance of dread I felt when I read it the first time. The story could best be described as "Squidward kills himself in this episode, and a madman also edited over the episode to gloat about his gruesome child murders." The blood and detailed descriptions of the conditions of the corpses also doesn't make the story scary. Instead, it exploits it just for the sake of shocking the reader.

With that said, I can't really call this a bad story. Yeah, it did start a trend of cliches in lost episode Creepypastas, but to it's credit, it was done during a time when the cliche was more "original."