User blog:EtherBot/Jeff the Killer: Creepypasta as Creepypasta

I'm new to this site. I only joined around 3 years ago and haven't yet gotten into the curve of it's rules and histories. Despite that I have a deep fascination and interest in it's issues and triumphs, as well as it's content and the genre of horror. Much of what I discuss has surely been discussed by others long before me but I simply wanted to comment of a change of ideas I think must have happened regarding creepypasta and their use on a creepypasta archive like this.

This blog post is about Jeff the Killer, and it's deletion. I don't think it should have been deleted, and I absolutely think it has a place on this site as well as any other site with the intention of archiving creepypastas. I also don't think classic literature such as the work of HP Lovecraft has any right being on this site, nor does it belong on any site with the same intentions as above. A lot of red flags just came up, I'm sure, lots of sirens going off. But I'm resolute in these beliefs. I think something is lost in the creepypasta community. A change in mission protocol, if you will, has been made on this Wikia as well as many Pasta archives, and I mourn it's loss, particularly here, since this is where I'm most active with the community. A creepypasta isn't, in my opinion, good horror fiction, and neither should it be expected to be.

The Call of Cthulhu is currently hosted on the creepypasta wikia and I find that ridiculous. To call Cthulhu a "creepypasta" is obviously ridiculous, but to acknowledge that and still upload it on the site belies the point of a site like this, in my opinion. A creepypasta site should NOT be devoted to housing good horror fiction first and foremost, but rather it's loyalties should lie at the definition of "creepypasta," which to me is ubiquitous horror fiction created on the internet. Obviously, Lovecraft made ubiquitous horror fiction but they were not birthed online and to upload his works to his site shows me that this site is mainly concerned with being a nexus for all kinds of horror as opposed to specifically ubiquitous internet horror.

As an example, a successful "internet meme," (and I mean the humor kind, like images with captions,) needn't be funny. All it has to be is "ubiquitous" and primarily spread by the "internet" or web or whatever. The basis of the idea is in humor but the quality that makes it a meme isn't, and that's what makes it an "internet meme" and not just a "popular joke".



''A site designed to host great internet memes would not include the aristrocrats bit or the "why did the chicken cross the road" joke either. And a book of great jokes shouldn't include fidget spinners or funny stock photos of confused people either. ''Can we agree on this?

Creepypasta used to be the same. The goal was to terrify much like how the goal of the meme is to amuse but the quality that made it a "creepypasta" as opposed to simply "short horror fiction" was just how much it was spread. It is a copy-pasta, a story shared online rapidly, and the more rapid the more deserving it is of being considered a successful copy-pasta. To hold a creepypasta to the standards of "good writing" as opposed to the standards of ubiquity is to claim a meme isn't a meme due to being unfunny. And Jeff the Killer is, along with probably Slenderman, the MOST ubiquitous creepypasta within the creepypasta world of the internet. A discussion of "Creepypasta" as a broad concept simply cannot ignore the likes of Jeff because Jeff is enormously successful and the flagship name for all of creepypasta-dom.

I'm not allowing myself to ignore the quality of the story, which is poor, but the quality of the story is not what denotes it as creepypasta. I have no stakes in Jeff the Killer being recognized other than a love and fascination for the medium it helped cement, which now tries to forget it. I made a blog post before where I likened Jeff to a crude ancient spear still held in museums, but that analogy is poor, I think. You have created a wikia to house creepypasta, and whether you like it or not, no ammount of guidelines can change the definition of that word. A creepypasta is not just a short horror story, and no amount of pretending it is will change that.

Jeff the Killer doesn't deserve a spot on any website designed to showcase great horror fiction, because it is terrible horror fiction. Neither does The Call of Cthulhu belong on a site designed to house great creepypasta, because it is not championed by the internet. We've created a site that undermines both and cherishes neither, and something about that puts me off. This is a site designed to house great horror fiction. Drop the name creepypasta because it has become irrelevent to your point.