User blog comment:BrianBerta/Are all ritual pastas pretentious?/@comment-27614308-20160117002136/@comment-4715955-20160117031011

This. Basically my thought process when reading them starts with, "why would you do this in the first place?", followed by, "why would you tell anyone how to do this in the first place?", which leads to, "HOW did you learn this in the first place/pull this off without getting too dead to tell anyone?"

On top of that, they're just boring grocery lists. It's the laziest form of horror writing I can think of: they can't tell a good story where a scary ritual occurs, so they just describe the ritual and hope it frightens on its own. And of course it does, 'cos the typical readers are those campfire kids from the first episode of Freakazoid, talking about how scary it would be if things turned to wood.