Talk:The Strangest Security Tape I've Ever Seen/@comment-24036661-20140707223354

(Concept: 9/10) I love the concept for this story. The idea of someone using a time loop not to help themselves, but to harm others, is genius. The way you worked it into the story may have been somewhat slapdash, but that doesn't change the fact that the concept itself rocks.

(Execution: 5/10) Unfortunately, your execution of the concept didn't really work out in the end. It started off really good, using those old-fashioned chills rather than the typical cheap scares people resort to these days. Before she started watching the tapes, I was loving it. But as soon as Jeremy's face appeared on screen in a text-based jump scare, you started losing me. You almost brought me back when she and her boss were put into the time loop, and up until the ending, you were successfully reeling me back in. But once the ending revealed that the entire thing had looped, you completely lost me.

The problem is that this leads to a few plot holes. For one thing, if she was able to notice the updates she had made while in the loop, wouldn't she have noticed that she had already started writing this entire story? Had this been in a normal narrative, (IE, not set up as a blog post) that might have worked, but the structure you chose kept it from making much of any sense.

Other than that, there's the somewhat boring backstory to the character of Jeremy, who's wisely not explained in great detail (good) but is implied to be behind the murder of his family (bad). It's a really cliche'd background for what could have been a truly menacing presence of a character, had you left his origins ambiguous.

And finally, regarding the ending as a whole: Maybe I'm just a wuss who wants things to end up okay, but I get really sick of every single horror story I read having either a downer ending that doesn't end well for the characters, or a complete mess of an ending that has not only the characters meeting horrible fates, but also has the villain continue his plans uninhibited. Just as a protip for future writing, try to steer away from those kinds of endings. Especially the latter. Because hey, if Marble Hornets can end with somewhat of a positive ending, any story can.