User blog:RealGlueboy/Creepypasta 101: How to Cripple Your Story

Welcome
From my years of stalking through Creepypastas and reading funnily bad creepypastas, I have noticed a few trends that will immediately take away any enjoyment, fear, or interest in a story. I have narrowed it down to a few main tropes. Luckily these seem to be slowly dying out, but whatever I need to vent a little. Please comment below if I missed any.

Video Games
It's not fucking scary anymore. That's really all there is to it. Ben Drowned was good because it was unique and a had a well-made video to add to the story. Most of my issues with these stories are with the absolute brain-dead protagonists. That and the premise itself isn't very good. The idea of "its ________ but with murder" is boring. I am very glad I haven't been seeing these as much anymore. I hope that's because of the mods or authors have just learned to avoid it. I have said in one of my other blog posts that Sonic isn't scary, and that extends to any cartoon or video game character that is made for kids.

Stupid Protagonist
For me, the most frustrating thing about reading a story can be the protagonist. In many bad stories I have read, to progress the plot the common sense of the main character seems to have been absolutely destroyed. This is where we get the absolute mind draining phrase "But curiosity got the better of me." Like I said above, video game creepypastas is where you can get the worst of it. Any character that takes a lost episode or video game way too seriously immediately loses any believability. Three good examples of this are Pokemon Dead Channel, Sonic.exe, and Blood Whistle. These stories have been shit on enough but still, they are good examples of what not to do with your protagonist.

Writing OCs Not Stories:
User ImGonnaBeThatGuy made a much better blog post than I ever could on this topic. I would highly recommend you read that.

However, I do want to add a few things. You can make a good story with a good character. My main issue with a lot of these kinds of stories isn't that it is bad writing, but that it seems to be made with the wrong intentions. When I see a story like that I get the impression that it's meant solely to be the next big well-known creepypasta character not just to make a good story. To me, that's bad art. Again though, read that other blog post it's really well done.