User blog comment:AB1997/Am I the only one who feels that the original charm of creepypasta was lost a long time ago?/@comment-25458443-20181022203935/@comment-25458443-20181022212928

I have more thoughts about this that I don't express in those blog posts so I may as well dump them here:

I really think the reaction to Jeff the Killer is bizarre. Same, honestly goes for Slenderman, but moreso with Jeff. It's truly a crummy story, but it isn't really supposed to be a story. It's an urban legend. Somebody could concievably retell it to be more captivating—and somebody did, see K. Banning Kellum's remake in 2015—but the point of the original creepypasta is in the skeleton idea. All urban legends work like this, I mean imagine if people talked about more common urban legends like this.

''The author of the tale clearly intends for the reader to be frightened, and yet there is so little development that, frankly, it’s easier to be enthralled by a wet sock. The two protagonists who have their famous brush with death are paper thin depictions of young adults, to the point that one would struggle assume anything about them other than the basic and literal.​​​​​​''

''Yes, they are indeed dating, and they certainly are indeed in a car, but aside from that there’s barely anything to say. The only other shallow characterization the two characters do get — the girl getting nervous and the boy caving in — only serve to make our leads seem relatively weak, although honestly I struggle to even say that much because there really isn’t all that much there.''

When the story ends on that vague implication of the hook, it’s difficult to take it seriously because both characters are too lifeless for their deaths to ever be a harrowing concern.

It's ridiculous for obvious reasons. The basic idea of a teenager with a white smiling face and a knife still roaming the streets is more than enough for a basic urban legend to carry. It's not like there's much more tact in the Licked Hand story. The move towards making the community more short story focuses seems, to me, like a weak move towards seeming more respectable and wanting the community to be taken more 'seriously.'

Sonic.exe is similar. The basic premise of a video game that's weird and frightening is enough. Obviously the actual story is awful but you aren't supposed to actually read urban legends. You're supposed to hear about them second hand. Obviously you can see why that makes the idea of being a dedicated 'author' of creepypasta is a sort of impossible idea.

Because there isn't much to be proud of in terms of making up a creepy idea by itself, and I can guarantee you that the person who wrote Jeff the Killer was an idiot. So if you want to go about feeling proud for making creepypastas, the only thing to do is turn creepypastas into 'short horror fiction' and then move on.

Why is this a problem? I address it in the first blog post I linked: What am I now supposed to call internet urban legends?

It annoys me because a site that catalogues the premise of scary ideas and charts there history and meaning, knowyourmeme crossed with critical-analysis style, is immediately appealing to me, and it's probably the first thing you'd assumed a 'creepypasta wiki' would be. Instead it's a bunch of relatively mediocre horror stories that also, in one motion, destroys the meaning of a useful and meaningful term for storytelling analysis.