Talk:Dating Game/@comment-5699173-20150906234653

I'm honestly surprised at the sheer amount of hate that this pasta has been getting lately. I mean, people are entitled not to like it, and I realize that it's not without its flaws (some of which are rather irritating or at least weird, I admit), but does anyone even know what constructive criticism is anymore? There's so many pastas than this out there that are much, much worse than this that are either still around or took the admins forever to delete (like Virtual Beast, Fatman, YOU.wmv — which was a terrible ripoff of this pasta — and, of course, Jeff the Killer and several of its unfortunately still-lingering knockoffs), and out of those, THIS has become one of the most hated?

Now, before you go calling me a mindless fanboy, or use that oh-so-original accusation of me being the author, I'll say what I found to be wrong with the story:

1. Yes, the narrator is an idiot for dating his late wife's lookalike at the end, despite somehow not even noticing the resemblance. However, in his defense — and I do speak for myself here — people in real life tend to do stupid things when they let their guard down out of newfound confidence like he did, so I don't find his stupidity to be that unrealistic.

2. The supernatural elements really were out of place. She could have been scary enough just as a, um, "normal" sadistic murderess. That means no floating, no minions, no pleasure from her own suffering, no passwords typing themselves in, no superhuman strength (the original version of the story gave her this, when she tried to fight of Jehovah's Witnesses), etc. And for the record, I'm one of the few people who didn't have a problem with Sinister being a supernatural horror movie, which seems to be the one major gripe about it that most people have. But here, it leaves too much to the imagination. Originally, I'd assumed that the books found with the laptop may have been an explanation for that, but even then ...

3. How did the neighbors hear the narrator scream, but not the previous victims? And since when did they have neighbors? That just seemed very randomly thrown in there, like the author just rushed the story to come up with an excuse for her (the wife) to get caught. Note to author: if you ever decide to rewrite this, maybe you should add something like that in there, just to flesh the story out better.

4. And this is probably one of my biggest grievances — if not THE biggest — with the pasta. The narrator somehow managed to miss the fact that the woman in the videos was none other than his wife, and yet, if she licked the chunks of her husband's vomit off the knife, then he (the narrator) would have HAD to notice her face. Thus, he shouldn't have been shocked or numb when he discovered her confession. Now, maybe it was her directly taunting him that lead to that shock, but that's not what it seems like.

5. It just seemed a little too obvious that something was really wrong when the narrator complained of the stench in the basement. I get that it was to lead to her mocking the protagonist about stepping on her husband and children, but really did kill some of the suspense. On my first reading, I tried to justify — albeit unsuccessfuly — it as she may have been keeping their bodies in the basement out of lonliness (and having killed her husband for divorcing her). There have been actual cases like that in real life. Besides Ed Gein keeping his mother's body sealed away in one of his rooms, I remember on an episode of Ripley's Believe It Or Not (I think) where there was a man who'd kept his wife's corpse in a shed next to his house or something. And that would very easily make sense for him to be disturbed by that ("everything I knew about life was shattered"), which, in addition to comparing himself to a "schizophrenic mental patient" at the beginning gave me the idea that he'd probably flip out and hack her apart. I guess that would probably be a little too predictable.

TL;DR

Now, I honestly liked this pasta, at least as of the last time I read it (which I'll admit was a long time ago). But without trying to sound too self-righteous, I'm at least aware of its flaws without just deciding to say "this pasta sux 0/10" and not explain what exactly I see as being wrong with the story.