User blog:Chelsea.adams.524/The Fall Of Pokepastas or How Cliches Cancel Creativity

Chances are, you've probably heard some variant of the following phrase- "If you have an idea, someone has likely had it before you". In other words, someone probably thought of something long before you have. It's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, we humans have been around for a long time so it's no surprise we'd have similar ideas over the course of our existence. It's why we have various genres of media out there ranging from Westerns to Fantasy to Horror and so forth.

The problem lies when people are unwilling to do anything creative with those ideas. You see, a creative mind can take something that's cliche (so to speak) and add his or her unique touches to make it stand out of the crowd (if even just a tiny bit). However, and unfortunately, it's easier to ride on the coattails of what's popular rather than put effort into making something different within the genre of choice. Creators can even end up doing this to themselves trying to recapture the popularity of their more successful works. Just look at how many shows Hanna Barbera made in the 1970s that were clearly heavily inspired by their popular Scooby-Doo series and followed essentially the same formula (A group of teenagers solving crimes with a talking animal of some sort). Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of those shows ever quite achieved the same amount of fame that Scooby-Doo did.

And, this leads me to Pokepastas. Now, this isn't an attempt to bring Pokepastas back to the main wiki. I understand why the decision was made to ban submitting them to the site. Rather, this is about how I feel that cliches and a lack of creativity have tragically caused this to happen and the lost potential that resulted.

You see, the problem rose with the popularity of such sub-genres as "Haunted Pokemon Games", "Pokemon Are Real", and "Lavender Town" Pokepastas. These stories became the most popular, and, as a result, people wanted in on the success. However, instead of doing something creative with these concepts, most people just chose to follow the same formula over and over again. This over-saturation of cliched stories is what lead to Pokepastas being banned from the wiki.

And, here is where the lost potential comes in and why this is such a tragedy. Pokemon isn't just a game. There is an entire mythos within the games lore. You have legends about balloon creatures who try to drag children to Hell, a giant horned vulture that is essentially the God Of Death, and an inter-dimensional dragon that would be right at home in an HP Lovecraft story. Oh, but that's just a tiny fraction of the thousands if not millions of creepypasta that could've sprung from Pokemon's vast mythos. Alas, instead of using this wealth of potential storytelling, people decided to be lazy and follow the popularity of a few successful stories. This caused Pokepastas to be banned from the main wiki. I hope people will learn from this tragedy and attempt to be more creative in their storytelling rather than try to attempt to follow whatever genre has the largest fandom at the moment.