Talk:Funnymouth/@comment-26978380-20160823082525/@comment-29249491-20160823141734

I feel the written word has a couple pretty damning handicaps against being scary.

First, your brain is the theatre. Everything has to be seen thru the filter of your mind, only what you imagine there.

Second, it's pretty easy to break some people's immersion.

Third, writing is freaking hard. Most writers just aren't very good. Writing is easy, and easily accessible, and it is relatively easy to enjoy even bad writing, even if you're used to good writing. Also, unlike msot crafts, anyone can afford good writing, it doesn't cost any more than bad writing, and can even be had for free, legally, in any proper town in most countries. So anyone can have a taste for the best writing. And a great number of people do.

Then again, the comments of creepypastas show that most people who comment on creepy pastas are. . . well, easily pleased let's say.

I don't think this pasta is actually scary, tho if I do enough to imagine it (usually not while actually reading it), it can be pleasantly creepy. Then again, a weird childhood thing lead me to actually enjoy nightmares by just changing around the actual progression of events, if not the setting, over many years. I'm a bit odd. In real life, I'm quite easy to scare, but in my head. . .not so much.

But here's the key thing that keeps me reading creepy pasta. Most of them are absolute shit (this one is pretty solidly written I think, flawed, but good), but then again, most of them are just terrible packaging for a potentially interesting core idea. The core idea is the besst part -- and the core idea here is, as I said, a rather pleasantly creepy one. It is short, simple, and immediately gratifying. But the author deserves credit for writing the story that provided the storyboard for my daydream. And that's why I like creepy pastas.

This is, as I have said in another comment, one of the best pastas -- with an interesting framing device and actually using scenes instead of just painfully summarizing the whole thing like a 5th grader's book report on Moby Dick, totally missing every nuance and thing of importance to briefly present the plot. It's greatest conceit is being written from a timeframe that would say the narrator is already a funnymouth, which is jsut kinda. . .no.

I am, however, okay with the idea that all this narrative takes place in the last second or so before before he becomes a funnymouth, and closes on a proof of it. Actually, a damned fine short story I read in college did something just like it.