Talk:So Much for My Complexion!/@comment-31077845-20170212171842

Skin doesn't really come off that easily, with nails it would take hours and the skin would be shredded. And maybe it's a pet peeve of mine, but for some reason I can't handle stories where things are driven along by people idiotically ignoring instinct and often all 5 of their senses while continuing to walk into clear and present danger. I should come up with a name for that, maybe something like "HSIR" or "Horror Story Induced Retardation". This is a rough rule, but if at any point in a story a person writes any very clear signs of danger off as "stress" or "being tired" then your protagonist likely suffers from HSIR. K, if you're REALLY sleep deprived, like approaching 72 hours or more awake, your thoughts start to get somewhat loopy but the hallucinations are still pretty mild, tiny random sounds and slight disturbances in your peripheral vision. Stress and/or weariness, however, DOES NOT cause you to see twitching skinless monsters and blood all over the walls, nor does it cause one to notice they're in an obviously unsafe house with a mother who's very clearly not acting right, and it doesn't cause you to have a gouge in your face and remember thinking your mother crept into your room and made said gouge with the nails you already noticed were irregularly long and sharp, and it doesn't cause you to smell numerous rotting people under the couch. Speaking of which, how god damned big is this couch that it can fit 5 people under it? Or maybe they were stacked. Our protagonist is enough of an idiot, I could see him not noticing a sofa sitting feet off the ground on a pile of decaying corpses. "Hrm, that couch sure looks like it's sitting on a tower of rotting corpses...I guess I'm just really tired from the trip".

So yeah, in summation stories where your protagonist acts unrealistically idiotic to drive the story forward are bad stories. The horror genre is plagued with this, since otherwise most stories would go "And as they walked up to the terrifying abandoned asylum they noticed what an idiotic idea this was and left. The end", which wouldn't be much of a story, but that's still no excuse.