Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10502460-20180414090245/@comment-10502460-20180417223430

BloodySpghetti wrote: JohnathanNash wrote: HopelessNightOwl wrote:

Kolpik wrote: Most kids of six still think a chimney is an access point for Santa, so I don't have any issues with Timmy's only slight reluctance to interact with monsters in his television. He's more worried about getting in trouble with his parents than anything else; makes sense to me.

I like how the monsters hide in his room instead of jumping out the window, or another exit. They hide in exactly the places a six year old expects monsters to be hiding. I am curious to know if they looked any different, other than their size, once they were out of the television.

I also wonder if they are still in Timmy's room, but leaving that open to the imagination of the reader is fine. I speculate that maybe since they could travel through a television then maybe they can travel in a similar way from one child's bedroom to another. Your story has stirred up some curious thoughts in my head, so I didn't find it boring at all.

Why did he turn out the lights to search his room for the monsters? Is that a typo or am I missing something? Also, was he home alone at the age of six? Lastly, I do think Timmy's mom was a bit too precise about when the show was canceled.

Although I didn't really find the story creepy/scary, I think this fits on the site, because it reminds me of the contrasts between what scared me at that age and what scares me now. Hope to read it in it's final form on the site soon. While you're right about the fact that 6 year olds are still subject to magical thinking and therefore there's no way to know they would react to such a situation, BloodySpghetti may still have a point about the age. After all, age 5 is supposed to be the age when kids start to develop concrete reasoning skills and a basic physical worldview, and in my case I had already figured out on my own that Santa wasn't real by age six, so it might work better if I lowered the age of the kid a bit.

And yeah, I meant to say Timmy turned the lights on to look for them. Just want to chime in here. I have a five and seven year old. I don't tell my kids things like unicorns and magic aren't real, but I also tell them that the scary things on TV aren't. With that being said, my daughter still believes that Unicorns and fairies could be real. She is assuming that they are hidden in the woods, because she never saw any. She is seven, and I encourage her to believe in things like that, which may be a bad idea on my part, but I feel kids should believe in magic. It's one of the only times they can. I don't tell her that those things exist, but say that it's possible they do. Unicorns do exist, but they're not a single horned horse. They are this really bulky african beast with a tough skin that weighs between a tonn and two.

HopelessNightOwl wrote: BloodySpghetti wrote: Sorry to tell you, but this was bland. Nothing interesting happens... your kid characters seem to unnaturally brave, I mean, if whatever started to talk out off my offline TV I would either run away from the room or throw it out of the window, even as a kid.

TV characters being stuck inside a pocket dimension inside a kids tv is nice and all, but wheres the creepy, or unsettling (other than the seemingly dark fourth wall breaking within the plot within the plot). The monsters aren't really terrible, their conditions while might be stressful to them due to isolation aren't horrible. You just missed the whole mark.

Also, I don't know where you live, but I am guessing that six year olds are smart enough to know TV's aren't meant to produce output when they're off, so this again ties into how unrealistically dumb and brave Timmy is. I used to fantasize about meeting horror icons in real life when I was a kid, should I meet them today I'd probably shit myself, let alone then but even then I knew that if they were like they were in their movies, I'd be fucked.

So yeah... that's not a good one on your behalf. You may have a point about the age. I might lower it to four.

As for the scare factor, I'm really trying more for a vaguely unsettling absurdist narrative in the style of some of Slimebeast's stories. As for the "horrible" part, it could mean anything from the network just calls them that so kids will think they are horrible and therefore not help them, to they might destroy the world if given the chance. Again, some of this is left purposefully absurd. The show itself isn't supposed to be horror-themed. They're horrible monsters in the same way that Oscar the Grouch is a "horrible monster". You don't have to necessary lower the age of the kid, maybe add something that questions his lucidity at the very least, like him being "half asleep" or tired, I would prolong the interaction between the monsters and Timmy, or make a few shorter instances where they interact before he goes on and listens to strange little television trolls who ask him to smash the TV.

Also, as for the whole 'mistreatment' idea, does not have to be horror oriented, it could be very child oriented in the plot however I have to get the sense of "oh that's horrible" when I'm reading it. Right now I have this in my head, forgive me for possibly butchering your story a bit. "Number 2 clutched at his belly and cried out, listen, 'they don't give us nearly enough food in the studio. We are always so hungry'. The horrible monsters for once agreeing on something nodded in unison before Number 1 yelled out 'Yeah! They also beat us with thin noisy belts a lot' as he was saying that, the faces of the horrible monsters fell."

Yada yada yada. Did you see how I describe whips in a childish manner?

I really think the name "Horrible Monsters" is throwing you off in ways I never intended. It's significance is mainly in-universe and doesn't actually have that much importance to the story beyond the implication that they may or may not have deceptive intentions for escaping.

I initially wanted to give them a nonsense name like "Teletubbies" or "Oogieloves" or "Smurfs", but couldn't think of one that sounded good.

Also, it's not so much that the puppet characters are being "mistreated", just that the network wants to keep them confined for some reason, kind of like a Special Containment Object. I haven't mentioned this before, but I actually wrote this as part of a wiki I'm working on centered around a fictional children's programming network with mysterious and creepy shows and an unknown agenda.

That said, it's different from an SCP in that there's no scientific logic. I think having a narrative about abuse or starvation or whatever on the show set would introduce questions of logic that I have been deliberately avoiding. If they were treated by the story as neglected prisoners in that way then that would raise other questions like "why do they even need to have a TV show for them to be kept contained? If they need food then are they organisms that reproduce", etc, when like I said such elements of the show are meant to be absurd and nonsensical.

That said, your feedback has given me an idea on how to make this story more interesting, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to posting a revised draft.