CORRECTION: In this video, I incorrectly used the term "anti-legend" to broadly refer to all creepypastas and internet short horror stories. Elektra Katsonis, a folklorist, reached out to explain my error. They referred me to the works of Bill Ellis, Kristiana Willsey, Tom Mould, Whitney Phillips, José E. Limón, and John M. Vlach. Here's the deal: "anti-legend" refers to stories that, in Elektra's words, "respond to one legend/type of legend, not the entirety of a genre of legends." For example, "Man Door Hand Hook Car Door" is an anti-legend because it specifically responds to and critiques an existing legend using the narrative structure of a legend. As Elektra further said, "The purpose of an anti-legend is to counter legends and make people stop believing in them." Most creepypastas qualify as legends even if told with only an implicit veneer of truth. They are stories told as if the narrator believes them, regardless of whether the author or audience is meant to believe them. The mere act of subverting narrative tropes is not enough to make something an anti-legend. As you can see, anti-legends can be rather situational, and context is very important. To quote Elektra one more time, anti-legends "are effective only when they parody a recognizable legend." I want to thank Elektra for bringing this to my attention, and I hope it encourages further reading on the matter. Below is the pinned comment as originally written: Hello! Thank you for watching my video. For more evidence of what I'm talking about in this video, you can check out this benign, creepy little clip: ua-cam.com/video/y4y7z9g_ZyU/v-deo.html This clip was turned into a terrible creepypasta that took the initial premise too far and completely broke the immersion. There's a Know Your Meme page all about it: knowyourmeme.com/memes/7252005-spongebob-glitch-creepypasta For more on narratives, check out my Ahsoka video: ua-cam.com/video/IBGoqCZsNmE/v-deo.html As always, please tell me your thoughts on this video, what I can improve, and what kind of videos you might like to see in the first place. Thanks, everyone!
Your note on how a horror story would be much more compelling if it were written from the perspective of official documents is true. I feel that simply stating the abnormal as a list of cold hard facts makes for enjoyable horror, that's why I love SCPs!
You mentioned in the opening that most of those guys stories were duds but some were good, I'd be interested in knowing which ones are actually good. Thanks.
@@uncertaintytoworldpeace3650 he already covered that in the video, it is an interesting concept but that possibility is not conveyed in the story at all.
its not about "realism", its believability. why do we complain when characters do dumb things in paranormal stories if we threw realism out the window? stories exist for us to experience them, things that arent believable take us totally out of it and make me think "ah, the author just needs this to happen to get to what they really want without putting in more effort".
I can suspend my disbelief that witches exist because witches are far removed from reality but regular humans are something we're intimately familiar with so when they do unrealistic shit it hits closer to home and it's harder to ignore.
If you want believability, Robert Aickman is the author for you. His characters walk into a situation, see some crazy shit, and say, "Nah " and then they leave before anything happens. I've never felt more blue-balled in my life, and I hate it. It answers the question of, "Well why don't they just leave?" Because the stories suck if they do.
That last part reminds me of a certain popular RPG horror indie game that involves 2 approx. 12 year old kids staging one of their older sibling’s death as a suicide by hanging them up on a tree…and somehow get away with it. It makes no sense and simply isn’t believable without bending over backwards to barely comb a believable explanation other than that its developer specifically wanted it to happen, and that they didn’t give it much thought.
the use of 'babe' here upsets me. all it does is establish the attitude of the person originally making the argument, while a decent argument can stand on it's logic alone. and It makes me angry that I'm being given a name for merely opposing this view.
Picture the scene; you're a park warden investigating a trail for signs of antisocial behaviour. You see a mangled corpse curiously leaning against a locked jeep, phone just inches away. You pick up the phone to read its contents: "A hike'll be fun," Devon said. "You remember fun, righ
You would literally assume that she was writing fanfic or something and not investigate further. It wouldn’t be until the police got ahold of the phone and checked her recent activity out of obligation-and that’s if the park warden didn’t get got considering the pertinent information “THERE’S A MONSTER/PERSON KILLING PEOPLE TAKE THIS PHONE OUT OF THE WOODS BEFORE READING THE REST” wasn’t labeled at the very top of the story. Suspension of disbelief really is important because someone who thinks they have only seconds to live wouldn’t have time to add in all those useless details throughout the story, *_but also_* the idea that she wouldn’t write the most important part first is outrageous. If she got cut off right where you suggested, it would be so fucked up. That kind of negligence *_is_* unforgivingly immersion-breaking.
A trend with NoSleep that bothers me is the “I got a job at X place and there was a strange list of rules”. It was cool at first, then everyone did it and it lost that edge to it. It’s no longer scary and in fact, I now laugh when I see such stories
I get what you mean, with so many stories (that have to be treated as 'real') being about that, it becomes mundane. A reader will eventually get the impression that getting "weird list" is just common corporate practice everywhere.
@@MariaIsabellaZNN It also very much depends on the rules. Some rules are creepy, like Rule 4: If an intruder breaks into your apartment, hide, and close your eyes, no matter what you do. Do not open them, even if XYZ happens. and then you got like... rule 7: leave the home at 1:59 AM and return at 2:01 AM. If you're inside at 2 AM you just vaporize or some shit. I feel like the best rule series type things are how rules are general guidelines for survival. But sometimes they can cause horrifying situations where the rules aren't clear, or rules that while work, can be effective. One example could be like: if you hear your backdoor break down. Do not open the backdoor, run outside your house. but then have like a threat that specifically banks on you are being outside and realizing that just simply following the rules to a T might not always work. of course, I do enjoy some stories where following the rules is a MUST and you CANNOT not do it. For example, a rule that states to light a torch. Where the whole story is revolving around the human mistakes where we slip up or the other challenges that might make that difficult. In any case, rule stories have to just be done right, but IMO there's not one way to effectively do it. You just have to get a feel for how to do it. Which is why either they're the most amazing things I've read, or "what the fuck did I just read?"
I refuse to read a Too Many Rules story. It's so painfully formulaic. It's like reading a Madlibs. "I was sad and broke. I found an ad for a (job) and it paid $15,000/hr. All I had to do was (verb) a (noun). I arrived at the (noun) and the owner gave me a list of rules. Most of them were simple. Always (verb) the (noun). If the (noun) is (adjective), be sure to (verb) it (adverb). Most importantly, NEVER (verb) the (noun) UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. So anyways, I did the one thing I was explicitly instructed not to do and a spooky monster almost killed me. If you see an ad for (job)... Run."
"I just experienced the most horrifying thing imaginable. Let me recount everything that happened up to this point and repeat everything everyone said in excruciating detail before my demise."
This is what gets me, this is my horror story pet peeve. I am a psych student. I've been the person who gets to arrive home to jump straight to the computer to write absolutely everything just happened, and it's a work of hours, even days (and not while being chased by a monster). sometimes you dont just remember, it's such a stupid trope.
to me the greatest horror stories, the kind which disturb me to my core and fill my heart with genuine dread, are the ones where the things simply happen and then just end. none of that "oh it was just a bacteria doing all that stuff" or a demon or whatever but something where the horror is truly incomprehensible and is left unexplained. some of my favorites don't even involve death in anyway.
There was this r/nosleep story I recently read called "911 Transcript - The Pretty Room" and I swear it's the only good (new) nosleep story I've read in ages. I hardly ever check that subreddit because the stories have become so boring, it's like the authors see one trend and write it to death, failing to understand what made that first trope scary (if it even was scary to begin with) Edit: I might be wrong about the exact name, but it's something like that
I also love it when it's horror that isn't just passively happening to a person, but a person who actively engages with their environment slowly realizing just how screwed they are or that they've gone too far.
I love the ones that are an elaborate explanation of "how to survive the night" with just enough told to get your imagination going. But they are often very nonchalant, not explaining much and that's what really gets me creeped out. Stuff like "whatever you do, DO NOT OPEN THE CLOSET" and then its never mentioned again. Why, what's in the closet? That's what gets me.
I get so mad when the explanation is lame too, like it’s bad enough you feel you need to spoon fed the horror to the readers, but you have to make the lore lame too?? Haha. I think if of my nosleep favorites is Stinson Beach, it’s so unnerving and I don’t know if they ever made a sequel and ruined it, but the first part is a fantastic piece of fiction
"If anyone finds this, I am _not_ having fun." is like, on par with "it's right behind me, isn't it?" and "well... that just happened!" Actual Marvel-tier writing, I'd be surprised if whoever wrote that didn't smugly chuckle to themselves. lol.
there was... le hyperrealistic blood coming out of le hyperrealistic seketlons eyes and then the phoens ranged band ub t isa ys jgo g then who was phone????
one of my least favourite horror creature tropes of all time is definitely the “fleshy smiling man” trope, where there’s some sort of bald, naked, lanky creature with an “unnaturally wide grin” or something (basically just a clone of the rake) stalking the protagonist, and it’s so popular and unscary that i’m surprised no one else talks about it
Bonus points if: "I only glimpsed it for a fraction of a second, but it was a 7'3" gangly creature with off-white skin textured like grain paper, it had 47 teeth in its wide grin that stretched ear to ear, 7 of which were mollars, its eyes were deeply sunken and twitching rhytmically every 2.8 seconds, it had 6 fingers on each hand with 5 knuckles on each finger ending in cream yellow claws that were tipped in caked blood, and its knees were pointing in unnatural angles" Like whoa my guy, that's some photographic memory.
I liked one of the fleshy smiling man stories, it was the first one I read on r/letsnotmeet before I realized a lot of those stories are fake (possibly all of them?). That one was just a normal-sized guy who was just standing there, smiling, so it was creepier - felt like something that could actually happen, and I understood why the op was unsettled.
The things about those types of tropes are that it COULD work- but, way too many folks are more concerned about getting quick clout and being part of the trend that they forget to add SOME personality and creativity in it.
Someone once called this trope "The Lovecraftian compulsion to keep writing even as one is being devoured." Named after a large number of Lovecraft's short stories that end with the narrator being killed. While still writing. "...even now I can hear the foosteps of that shambling monstrosity, and hear its eerie piping upon the wind. Poor Blakely, he never dreamed - but now the door is being smashed to flinders, and at last I behold what my meddling has awakened! And now it is dragging me across the floor toward its hideous suckered mouths! Ia! Ia! The Goat With a Thousand Young! No! Unhand my fountain-pen, you fell beast!" "All the best, Lupin Squiggle, sec." "PS, Send my regards to the Mrs." "Argh argh, I am undone."
I was just saying in another reply that Lovecraft could do that, but he knew exactly what he was doing, he had more of a sense of humor than he gets credit for, he was intimately familiar with horror stories and horror story tropes and knew what worked and what didn't (at least, for his taste, YMMV), and there was a big difference between the stories he was being parodic or even self-parodic with, and his more serious uses of the same "final written words" cliche of Gothic literature - the "Apocalyptic Log". Compare the conclusions of "Dagon" (1917) with later stories that expand on the same theme, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931) - "Dagon" is quite funny in its use of this cliche, not being very far off from the parody, but the other two stories take a far more serious, thoughtful, and elaborate tone.... "Dagon" and similar stories by Lovecraft are even structured a lot like an elaborate joke: an unnecessarily complicated setup for misdirection, followed by that final punchline, and that's no coincidence: Lovecraft seems to have been aware of the close relationship between the absurd and the uncanny, and seems to have had no problems mixing the two freely, usually emphasizing the horror over the comedy, but he could be a funny writer when he was in the mood for it (it's impossible, for example, to read "Herbert West: Re-Animator" as anything but a dark comedy, and that's not the only story that Lovecraft wrote that straddled the two genres: "Dagon", "In the Vault", "The Temple", just to name a couple....) Spoilers: The final lines of "Dagon" (1917) are hysterical in a couple senses of the word, as Lovecraft's silliest use of the "I Must Write It All Down" cliche: "The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!" It's the stuff of horror-comedy gold: absolutely ridiculous as charged, yet that final image of the narrator, aware that he has been pursued, catching a glimpse of a monstrous hand at the window just before the story (and the narrator's life) fades to black is spooky enough to work. "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) does something quite different and more ambitious than "Dagon" with the same basic idea, in a story that unwinds as a last will and testament consisting of a letter attached to a will introducing with a collection of ship's logs, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, and other assorted documents, beginning with the famous opening, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age....", and ends with the closing lines from the narrator's last will and testament written as a warning to his executors to keep a secret as he waits for a patient and inevitable doom to come upon him by night: "Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye...." The narrator has had years to compile the facts that lead to his doom, only realizing the implications in the final moments, and his doom is slow, implacable, and inevitable, and the messengers of his doom have no problem allowing him the time to finish writing his last will and testament before erasing him - and all of humanity - from the earth, they care only that he keeps their secret until the end. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931) has a conclusion that is interesting to consider with Lovecraft's infamous xenophobia in mind - he was a bit more complicated than modern critics would give him credit for - as the fishy monster that comes for the narrator this time arrives not through the window, but from within, and the narrator awaits its arrival as he writes the final lines of his last diary entry not with xenophobic terror, but with an odd sense of eager anticipation, adventure, and even triumph: "I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever...." As the final words of a narrator who was about to boldly walk out to face his weird end with open arms, this incarnation of the story comes across far more seriously, leaving an entirely different mood in the end! Lovecraft knew what he was doing, and his work usually still works whether he's taking the piss out of his audience and having a little fun with horror cliches or writing an in-joke for his friends and pen-pals, or writing more serious and ambitious stuff for a mass audience of low-budget pulp horror. I wish I could say the same for the average CreepyPasta hack! They don't seem to have the self-awareness to pull off a self-parody, nor the familiarity with how and why a "trope" like the Apocalyptic is used in a Gothic story to figure out how the rules would apply when transplanted to social media for serious effect, and how to effectively break those rules for comedic effect when desired.
Probably, “Her legs were cut off, her fingers were cut off, her eyebrows were removed slowly, and she was a minor.” Yes this is targeted at that one horrible analog horror series
"And worst of all, she was alive the entire time" I hate those annoying over-the-top bits that are purely for shock value, and nothing actually scary. It's basically the writing equivalent of a shitty jumpscare.
I had never been able to put this frustration into words, but you're right. It is so frustrating to be following a story, suspending the disillusion, to then have the story end with "as I write this, the monster is sitting patiently outside the door, waiting for me to finish my first draft". It really pulls me out of the story and does make it seem unrealistic. And it's bs to counter that criticism with "its just a story babe!!!".
@@pucktoad It's almost like people can judge fiction, and that good and bad writing are things that exist. Or are you genuinely arguing we should never critique fiction ever, or never expect good works of fiction because they're "not real"?
The whole, "As I write this/If anyone finds this," feels a lot like the dreaded, "And then I woke up/It was all a dream," endings. Sure, I guess you could make them work, but they can't just be blantantly stated. The only examples immediately coming to mind for me are, "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danieleeski, "Frankenstein/The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Shelley, and "S." by JJ Abrams.
I think the only way a story like the Quarry would work is if it was a log from a camera found by police. Someone's phone recording. And it just cuts out when the final girl realizes the car is locked and sits there quietly.
The thing is, people have left "final thoughts" or "send help" notes that we have. If you read them, they often don't even have grammar. They're frantic and desperate or hopeless and maybe depressed. It's like they're confusing "final thoughts" notes with manifestos or something.
I believe it’d be far more impactful if they had just ended The Quarry story with something abrupt, such as “I’m behind the car now.”, and then just have it end right there. I feel as though this would seem far more realistic, and also more disturbing in a way. It’s like you don’t know what happened to them. It ended so quickly; the story, similarly to the way the narrator’s life most likely does.
the issue is that if it's a nosleep story there has to be a reasonable explanation for the story to be able to be posted, as per the rules of the subreddit.
My least favorite horror writing trope is related to "if you're reading this." It's that thing where we're supposed to be reading an account written by someone who's losing coherence (they're dying, they're going crazy, whatever) and the author includes a bunch of ellipses as if the passage is dialogue. It's so silly when I notice it and totally takes me out of the story, because I can really tell the author forgot their character wasn't saying this shit out loud. Like, you're telling me our madman is mid-transformation-into-a-fish-monster or whatever the fuck is happening in this story, and as he's feverishly scribbling in his journal he's putting a little "..." in between all of his fish-related thoughts?? Is he worried about the grammatical correctness of his insane ramblings??? He's just sitting there writing "I can smell... the ocean... it is in my blood... blood... blood and salt... their blood will mix with salt..." like he's preparing his own subtitles for when this awesome story gets a movie tie-in????? GTFOH ughh
I tend to appreciate the way the Magnus Archives have gone about telling these stories. It's done through written statements that have been archived and are then recorded and followed up by the archivist of the Magnus Institute.
Oh I absolutely ADORE archives bein used in horror fiction!! Ever heard of Archive 81?? I personally really adored it. Do NOT watch the Netflix adaptation. ONLY the podcast itself. The Netflix adaptation is incredibly unfaithful, bad in my opinion, but ultimately that’s up to the watcher to decide. Either way, I feel that the structure of the narrative works much better as a podcast, and also I just think the podcast is better, lol.
@@buzzybeez204 heyy! I've never heard of them before. I'll make sure to check it out. At the same time I'll recommend the one I mentioned, lovely work!
And then you get to the part where it explains the way some of those statements are written and demonstrates what statements are like when that one factor gets removed, and it's like "OHHHHHHHHHHHH all the little annoyances make perfect sense now."
This is why I think earlier Magnus seasons are my favorite, I love how John goes out of his way to point out the inconsistencies in the statement, and that doesn’t make the story weaker, but enhances the strangeness of the statement
TMA addressing nearly every point in this video really made me appreciate the podcast so much more. Where do these people find the time to write all this down? Well, they write it after everything is said and done. How do they write it so precisely? They don’t, often misremembering details. Why is everything so eloquently written? Actual lore reasons!
God, "this is X genre it isn't supposed to be realistic" people are the bane of my existence. The realism is what immerses me in a story and allows me to suspend my disbelief. It matters! Also those comments are rude because they just kill conversation. It's saying "just shut up no one cares" like no dude? Who made you moderator of the conversation?
People saying "It's a story with magic and wizards it's not supposed to be realistic lol" in response to people talking about inconsistencies or plot holes drives me up the wall. Just because magic exists doesn't mean the basic fundamentals laws of causality in storytelling don't matter.
yeah honestly it's really such a fucking stupid take. The whole reason "paranormal" and "supernatural" stories scare me is BECAUSE the rest of the world is real and makes sense and that this entity or event is subverting what we expect the real world to look, feel, and act like. These anomalies are supposed to be the exception to the story, not the rule. I mean it's literally in the name, superNATURAL and paraNORMAL, because they are perverting what is considered NORMAL.
That's what happens when boring, uncreative dipshits whose entire personalities are "haha im irony xd" are allowed to express their worthless opinions.
@@weedwhackeraccidentIt gets worse when this point is used as a counter to criticism of inconsistencies and plot holes in the in-universe physics. The critique is being made because the physics of the current story being told go against the physics of the universe that story is said to take place in, not because they don’t align to the physics of our universe like some people claim it to be in critique of. This critique is extremely valid when the break in physics causes a previous story in the universe to be made worthless because of the change in physics. Now, when you go back to that previous story, you will ask yourself “Why didn’t the characters exploit the physics of the universe in this way like they did in the later story?” By doing this, the author has shattered the suspense of disbelief in the previous story by being inconsistent with how the in-universe laws of physics operate. TL;DR, Don’t break your fictional universe’s physics.
Okay, from personal experience, I actually sort of HAVE been in a horror situation where I was writing my final thoughts. I had been in an abusive relationship that culminated in gunfire. At the point, I was hiding in the woods, and desperately texting my friends and family. I was too scared to call the police, because I thought the sound would give away my location. So yeah, you have a really good point. Obviously my situation wasn't fantastical or paranormal in any sort of way, but when I was texting, I wasn't describing hardly anything that was happening at all. It was more akin to: "At *location* He has a gun. Still armed and shooting don't know what will happen please tell everyone if I can't tell anyone else please call the cops please tell someone. DO NOT CALL ME. I love you" And variations of that, choppy, undoubtedly with spelling or grammar errors.
Same here, that sounds beyond terrifying and I hope you’re doing better now. Thank you for sharing that, it was a really great example of what this type of situation would actually look like and why it’s doesn’t make sense for horror stories that follow a heavily narrative format.
The lack of detail is honestly helpful in a found material style horror story compared to calm detailed descriptions because it lets you imagine what it looks like and what could scare the writer so deeply. Your text example was chilling and I’m glad you got out of such a terrible situation
This is exactly what you'll see in a story where this trope is done well by a competent writer. Earlier diary entries or whatever can be more well-written, then as the protagonist's mental state deteriorates they'll write in a more rushed way, omitting punctuation etc. until the last entry is just a few disjointed words.
I think one way to fix the “as I’m writing this” trope is to have the narrator believe that they are safe, which makes them believe that they can give all the details they want. However, at the end, your narrator, while writing, realizes that they are in fact NOT safe, as they hastily try to finish their story, or even cut it off altogether. Imagine a narrator writes a story about going on, idk, a camping trip with their significant other. At the beginning of the story, the narrator states why exactly they are about to right everything down with so much detail, maybe for record keeping, maybe because something feels off and the narrator is trying to retrace their steps, something like that. It can be established, at one point, that the monster of the story is able to shape shift to micic its victims. Perhaps, near the end of the story, the narrator’s significant other dies to the monster, and while the narrator is writing the story in real time after the fact, at their house, they realize that their significant other (or at least, who they THOUGHT was their significant other), is supposedly in the kitchen next to them. The story can abruptly end as the narrator realizes that they are no longer safe in their own home.
@@JulioMendoza-up1pv I don't remember if this is exactly what I was thinking at the time, but "the protagonist thinks they managed to defeat The Evil, but the denouement reveals their efforts were useless for the sake of an unforeshadowed cliffhanger" seems pretty comparable to me.
The idea of a horror story being told as a collection of documents goes all the way back to the founding of horror, and I personally always find it very effective. Dracula was a collection of newspaper articles, letters, journal entries, ship logs, and notes taken by the main characters. Frankenstein is a collection of letters. It always makes the horror feel more real when it's being documented by various different sources, and even more so when those sources are something credible like a newspaper or academic publication.
Yeah but there's a difference between "This really weird thing happened to me and I survived and wrote it down" and "the witch is right outside the car waiting to kill me, I hope I don't get a 504 Error when I hit submit on reddit"
@@FrenkTheJoy Exactly! I guess the point I was trying to make that I didn't exactly get across was that it is more effective when there is a collection of documents rather than just one.
13:39 - "Imagine if [...] we were reading the story as if it were a normal police report, with portions of the notes application interspersed with investigator notes or medical reports, personally that sounds like a more unique story" please note the entire SCP catalogue.
Bro really just explained the entire SCP format (Unintentionally lol). My favorite example of horror using this format is definitely SCP-5000, it's just an incredible mystery.
Well all scp things aren’t horror, and I think you’d have to do research to find really good ones. And the entries aren’t really that super long if I’m not mistaken. I’m no scp fan, so idk for sure
@@pemanilnoobIt very much depends on the article since they're all written by different authors with different levels of connectedness. Most are horror, some are very very long and generally formatted like a report with logs and addenda.
Wrong, at least for more recent entries Now you need to censor with a black square any little detail and explain why your monster is stronger than the last one
This trope reminds me of the classic Monty Python sketch from the holy grail where they find a carved out section of clay wall detailing a knight's last moments as he wrote about a terrifying beast eating him, only to mock him for writing as he could of been fighting as he slowly carved out "Aaaaaah". I wrote around this trope before when writing for a horror themed competition featuring a POV journal entry at the point the world descended into eldritch chaos. I wrote it from the perspective of someone who has about to die but was unaware of how truly doomed he was and as a result it was light on scares and "horror" as the narrator didn't dissapear into a trail of ellipses as he was getting dragged off to be sacrificed to an aquatic demiurge. This was an excellent video, and your pensive analysis has earned you a new subscriber
@jameswhitehouse2713 If you're a writer entering competitions, then you should know that "could of" is nonsensical and is a common error made by people spelling out the phonetic pronunciation of *could've - as in _could have._
Even "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is written in a present tense retrospective by the narrator while saying he has no appendages or ways of communication, a story inside someone's head directed outwards
I have to say that one of my least favorite things about internet horror, especially podcasts, is the use of gore and death as the exclusive source of tension and horror. Sure, it is scary to find a dead body, or to fear your own death, but I think horror should go beyond that. I don't want to be scared of a ghost because I'm worried it's going to kill me. How does that make it different from a regular person? And some horror podcasts double down on this with the use of gross soundscapes when someone gets stabbed, crushed, or some other horrifying death to witness. And it doesn't scare me, it just grosses me out, though I think this is due to poor use of other horror elements up to that point.
A good way to prevent the "as I write this" from breaking the inmersion is to have a framing device about a second narrator who finds the notes, or the diary, or the video, etc. (that's where the "found" part in "found footage" comes from). A good, although very old, example is the short-story that frightended me the most in my whole life: Arthur Conan Doyle's _The Horror of the Heights._ It starts explaining that a blood-stained notebook that belonged to a missing aviator was found, after giving some context about the missing person it transitions to a transcript of the notebook, where the aviator explains his theory about how a couple of misterious deaths may be evidence of an ecosystem with dangerous predators in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Then it describes how he flew to the upper atmosphere, saw that ecosystem, fought a flying predator and came back to write it down... then a note from the framing device says that the last page just has one or two sentences hastily written with a pencil (in stark contrast with how the rest of the notes are written) says something like "43.000 feet, 3 of those predators chasing me, what an awful way to die" and the story closes by telling us that they found the wreck of the plane but no body. A lot of people consider that those kinds of framing devices flatten the tension of the story, but if done well they'll create a very dreadfull sense of dramatic irony
Or im westen nichts neues, i thought it was real till the end, when he dies and the last lines are explaining that he died some days before the end of the war. (and i wouldnt mind it just ending when he dies) its kinda like in movie when you're in the car with two characters, it feels intimate and from their perspective and then when it's a dangerous sequence during stealth or smth, it's a omnipresent narrator
Seriously? "Admosphere" *atmosphere I know some accents make "t" sound like "d," but come on. Also, why the hell doesn't spell check activate for that?
Yeah theres a layer to this in the unfiction genre of storytelling, theres the idea that the media and story comes from 3 main ideas 1. The originator, aka the person who experienced it 2. A close party, someone who knew the person who experienced it. 3. An outsider, someone who just stumbled upon this and has no connection to the parties at hand.
Absolutely agree with "if anyone finds this" being SUPER mood killer in most stories. I will say, when I was trying to guess what you might think of based on the title of this video, the tendency of "The monster looked just like [monster from popular horror movie] but worse somehow" is the one that drives me up the wall. Folks gotta stop relying on other popular media to describe their own stories.
The funny part is if a writer has a character write an "if anyone finds this" letter, and then doesn't die. When you have time to write such a letter you aren't in immediate threat but have lost hope, but something could happen to change the circumstances. And then someone else finds it later when we already know the first character survived.
That awful "it looked just like xyz" thing was why I couldn't get into Godzilla NES, lol. I have no idea why it's so beloved and highly recommended. If you are just looking at the pictures it's great! But if you actually read the text it's 10 chapters of "it looked just like this monster but different. The music sounded just like this track from this other game but different. The level looked like the normal one but different, it reminded me of something else. I was so scared."
@@RM-um9xx Oh my goodness, RIGHT? I love Godzilla, been watching movies since I was a kid and I adore creepy pastas, but that one is just. So. Boring. It drags on way too long, and assumes it's instilling fear when it's just. Plodding. I will never understand the popularity of that one.
@@xxJETSETxx It's been a long time since I read this, so take this with many grains of salt, but I think it's so well-loved because it tries to tell an earnest story, combined with it coming out at a time when a lot of other creepypastas were uninspired, Sonic.exe-esque shlock (I don't recall everything, but I think the main monster was responsible for the death of the narrator's girlfriend? And by defeating it, he finally put her at peace, giving the story an actual definitive conclusion? That was really unheard of for internet horror stories at the time iirc). Combine that with the pictures that had a lot of effort put into them, and it kind of shook up the world of creepypasta. As for the "looks just like X but worse" trope, I think it CAN be done right, but it just usually isn't. Thinking realistically, we as humans look for patterns everywhere we go, so if something "looks mostly like Sonic, but was bleeding from his eyes and the blood looked unnervingly realistic for my 16-bit Sega Genesis game", I probably wouldn't go into a full detailed description of the monster/demon/whatever, either. Plus, distortions and deformations of recognizable characters are scary. I mean, look at Treasure Island, that's pretty popular. Though looking back at your comment, you said "monster from popular horror movie" specifically, and not "fictional character." I don't have anything more for that, really, besides the first point I made.
The second one is definitely annoying. Even aside from it basically just stealing from more popular franchises, a general rule of thumb is if your description is something that will likely make the reader stop reading and Google it to make sure they know what you're referencing, then it's a bad description
One of my favorite Nosleeps was when the author explains how they died and are now currently typing the story for reddit as a Ghost in the Afterlife, as like a joking way of explaining how it got uploaded to the internet lmao. There was another Creepypasta that didn't even bother explaining it, with the narrator being turned into some kind of deer monster by a paranormal forest close to the end. How did he type everything for reddit? Who tf knows.
‘Tis the problem with no sleep stories, it’s required by the rules of the subreddit that it can’t be a story and it has to be an account of something. Problem with that is so many people want to be popular and get thousands of views and upvotes that they cram their original ideas that would work way better in a normal format into the nosleep format
Reminds me of the Candlejack meme, you say his name, and he comes to take you away while you're in the middle of typing your comment out. It's like, who even posts your com
This is exactly why I love the OVA "Ilse's notebook" from Attack on Titan so much. The characters find a headless corpse holding a notebook, and they soon realize it belonged to a scout member who got seperated from her group. Upon reading her notebook, it becomes clear she was extremely dedicated to documenting every small detail of her journey. Even right up to the end, when her head was caught between the jaws of a titan, she was still writing down everything about what she was feeling. And then, her writing just... ends. It's exactly like you said: in a situation like this what would be most important? Ilse wrote everything down because she knew how important it was for the survival of humanity that her meeting with that titan would be documented (It was an extremely abnormal titan.) And even the less factual, less important information she jotted down was still realistic and impactful. For example, one of the final things she wrote down as the titan was closing in on her was: "I haven't done a single thing for my parents yet. I feel sick." Yea, Ilse's notebook is to this day still one of the best, most haunting "in universe narrator" horror stories I've ever seen.
EXACTLY I hate when something unrealistic in a fantasy setting is pointed out as poorly done and everyone is like "ReAlIsM iN a WoRlD wiTH WizArDs aNd DraGOnS???!" Like bro, when I say realism I mean in relation to the setting, fantasy is no excuse for bad writing.
Yeah, it actually more into the "believability". Dragon existence is irrational, but it's BELIEVABLE in this setting. Meanwhile, a chain that not tensing after being pulled (and there's no magic at play, purely CGI mistake) is not believable. (Actually the situation I described above was from a post of Game of Thrones where there's CGI mistake in the scene and everyone defending it by saying "well in the world where dragon exist, chain would be last my concern." I completely forget the picture and questioning whether or not it was from Game of Throne, but I'm really sure I was not hallucinating that post.)
Thank you for covering this. The "if you're reading this" trope is not only overused, but used improperly. It can be such an interesting framing device in the right context, but people treat it like an all-purpose tool. I think they see it as a kind of spice. It gets thrown into stories as a last-minute plot twist, a way to improve immersion, or just an interesting flourish. When it's used well, though... *chef's kiss* I eat that stuff up.
the go-to example of it being done well has to be H.P. Lovecraft's Shadows over Innsmouth, which has the narrator discovering that he is one of the fish people and basically ending with him having a mental breakdown and writing the final few lines as an entirely different character. My favourite has to be Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None though. It does the whole "I wrote this all down and put it in a bottle then threw it out to sea" thing, but it's written from the perspective of the murderous mastermind who had orchestrated the entire story, so it makes sense that he had the time and desire to explain everything.
i like the trope of surviving long enough after everyone else to catalogue everything while still waiting for the other shoe to drop is pretty great, but if the context is that someone's writing this as a warning you need to write the whole story with that context. or if they're trying to clear their name or give closure to the victim's families or just write it down so you don't go insane, the whole story's gotta reflect that intention otherwise it just feels like you said, a shitty last-minute plot twist to try and involve the reader
Another thing that makes this kind of self-aware "I am writing this, I am doomed, take heed dear audience!" writing kind of a bummer for us is that it usually prevents a specific kind of . . . conclusive cliffhanger ending, for lack of a better way to describe it. There can something poignant and tragic about a narrative that ends with the in-universe writer running out of time; anxiously promising to come back, to update, to write down the rest of their thoughts once they're in a safe place again and get through whatever's next. And then the story ends. The implication, by all means, is that the writer must have ended too. But in order to get that ending, the in-universe writer has to lack enough genre awareness to believe on some level that they might survive in the end. Addressing the audience so directly and tongue-in-cheek just doesn't have that kind of gravitas.
That was one of the high points of Ted the Caver. Having a narrator able to upload bits of the story "as they happen" and then conclude the story with ***spoiler*** plans to return to the cave, but no more update posts after that. There's no monster ever seen, and the narrator doesn't return alone. So it could be believed that Ted thinks he has a reasonable chance of returning to update. But even moreso is this sense you get that something is luring them back in. As the reader you can acknowledge that returning to the cave is almost certain death, but there's nothing you can do to prevent the outcome. And no final update post confirms your suspicion.
@@nhooj8882 Ted the Caver is actually a really good example because it's based entirely on a much older short story, and the point where it cuts off is also the point where the original story kind of goes off the rails.
@@-tera-3345 what original story is that? I had always heard the the author came out eventually and said they got the idea from rereading their own caving logs and decided to make it a little scarier. It also came out shortly following the Blair Witch thing, which I would've thought was most of the found footage horror influence. Unless that IS the old short story and is itself actually much older.
Or in a much darker real life example, seeing users post on mental health forums about depression or SH and seeing their posts abruptly stop. Out of the thousands or tens of thousands of these cases, how many people got better and quit the forums, and how many people… didn’t
@@nhooj8882 Ah, after looking into it, it seems that I was misinformed. There was a short story that had circulated as an "original version", complete with a date back to the 1980s, but it was apparently later revealed to be a fabrication, made after Ted to look like an original. I remember seeing it circulated, but never heard about it being outed as a fake. It is called "The Fear of Darkness", by Thomas Lera, and you can find free pdfs of it online pretty easily. But it's... not very good.
Thank you. I despise the argument that because something is supernatural, it isn't supposed to be realistic. One of the most important aspects to horror, if not THE most important aspect, is immersion; the idea that it could be real, or at the least, feels real. It's like the "it's not supposed to be good, it's for kids" argument. I can understand it, but ultimately it's an excuse more often than not.
It's totally an excuse. The implication that children should just get garbage is absurd. Outside horror, we could look at Puss in Boots: The Last Wish compared with I dunno Shrek 3.
But that's all ultimately subjective. One of my favorite horror stories 'The Metamorphosis' by Kafka is a piece of surreal horror which is flagrantly unrealistic, and according to you that makes it poor piece of horror fiction By definition something supernatural is unrealistic. It exists outside the natural world. Fiction is a departure from the natural world as-well. I expect my fiction to be exactly as realistic as the premise calls for and that's the criteria I will judge it on. There is a semantic failure here. Realism means 'To adhere to natural world" Immersion means to 'Captive the audience with a sense of an involved experience' At no point do I feel like the events of 'The Metamorphosis" could transpire but it does make me feel immersed.
One of my favorite horror movies is called Don't Blink. I have yet to meet anyone else who knows it. Basically, a bunch of people go to a cabin/hotel thing for a vacation and find out that everyone there is gone. It even sounds like the bugs and birds are gone. The only clue is written on a wall: Don't blink. When characters aren't being looked at, they disappear. This leads to some fun shots that don't make total sense narratively. In one, the characters are standing in a circle with the camera in the middle. As the characters argue the camera pans around them. You barely notice when one of them vanishes. As characters disappear and more weird shots like that happen, those who remain get increasingly desperate and volatile. As the night goes on, the last two struggle to stay awake. They look at each other in a mirror; one nods off for just long enough, and we watch shadowy hands slip out of the darkness and quietly pull the other into oblivion. It's a great effect. Anyway, the police arrive. They rescue the final girl, who hangs her head in a police car. Suddenly, all noise ceases. She sits up. Every cop has vanished. In the last shot, she looks in the car's rear-view mirror, her eyes in the reflection trained on the camera. She closes her eyes. We cut to black. Then, credits roll. The ending recontextualizes the shots where characters vanish because the camera couldn't see them even though other characters could. In all but one case, characters vanish "offscreen" for the viewer. We can wonder about it until we realize that the main eye whose blinks the story cares about are the camera's. The camera is itself an active participant, and it is always threatening to disappear either another or itself. The ending smartly recontextualizes the horror, which still pervades as nothing evey provides any reason to explain what's happening. I love that it refuses to make sense, to provide closure, to give a hint. It's wonderful, and it deserves more love.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Blink_(film) is this the one your talking about? I found the trailer and honestly it’s a pretty cool effect. Pretty creative imo. Edit: After doing some more digging I found an interesting theory on the movie. The theory says that what happens the last girl at the end of the movie is actually what happens to the people that disappear, because that’s the only time we see several people disappear. It kinda messes with the “the camera is an active participant” angle, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless.
@@Misclicking_orc Yep, that's the one! And, to be honest, it's been years since I've seen it, so I'm not 100% confident with my reading, but I think it's probably still a valid reading just as the theory you found is. Honestly what I love more about it than that idea of the camera is just how committed it is to refusing to give any "answers." Horrible things happen to people who don't deserve it. That's all.
For me it's such a meaningless twist. It's the prose equivalent of "they're not really dead!" in movies. Show the dead villain open their eyes, show a hand burst out of the ground. Fozzie Bear might as well pop up going wokka wokka wokka! I feel like it means to end with a chill but it's such a cliche it's like popping a balloon.
The only time I think this worked was in Halloween, when Michael is supposedly dead- but when Loomis goes to look, he isn’t there. Then the camera cuts to different shots of the dark neighborhood with the sound of his breath and an ominous tune in the background. His story ended with a question mark, and Laurie’s nightmare didn’t end with the credits. It was a fitting end for an enigmatic villain that was meant to represent the general idea of “this can happen to anyone, you aren’t immune”. Michael isn’t so much a character as he is a force of nature- unstoppable and inevitable, and I think that’s what makes him so scary.
To this day the Are you scared story about the guy hiding in his attic against a home intruder is the best episode they've put out and it's made even scarier knowing it's a real story
Yes! Genuinely one of the scariest no-sleep stories I’ve heard, first time I heard it it sent me into a paranoia every time I was home alone or went to bed for like, a week. Had me start keeping a weapon near my bed.
YO I ALWAYS REWATCH IT, its genuinely so amazing and i miss the earlier episodes. i wish they did the “real or fiction” framing cause i dont like the newer episodes as much
I think my favorite was the one about the bleeding ocean thing, like just the image of this guy hearing screaming that is so ungodly horrifying and unbearable that he would rather never hear again than be forced to listen to for another moment and literally deafens himself just seems to strike a nerve with me.
There's a difference between realistic and believable in fiction and I think what you're talking about is an issue of believability rather than realism. A story can be believable, as in everyone's actions make sense and you can immerse yourself in the story without thinking too much about the fact this is something someone wrote, while involving things that are unrealistic. A good example of this is the flatline sound that most media uses as a way to signify someone is dead. Realistically, that sound just means the heart monitor is unplugged, but it's been so ingrained in the general zeitgeist by now that it's still not necessarily immersion-breaking even if you know it's not how it works in reality (though it might still bother some people I guess). It's like in magic circle theory (normally applied to games but I think it works with your contract metaphor to a degree) - the flatline sound is a rule we've already agreed to as part of "a story" despite its lack of realism, the narrator sitting calmly to write an embellished narrative is not.
As a content creator within the horror space, you hit the nail on the head when it comes this trope. Truth be told, the rule of making sure the nosleep post reads like a post is one of the biggest reasons why I've stopped reading those stories. I started trying to write my own/stuck with fanfiction. My wife and I produce short horror stories/audio productions for the MLP fandom and others, and surprisingly enough, its where I stayed for a while because I had more freedoms in terms of what the narrative of what those stories could do than compared to the nosleep stories. They unfortunately have a formula because of the rules in place, and in turn, I sometimes fear it will just stifle creativity. Anyways, I loved this video. I'm subbing and when I'm not drowning in editing, I want to watch the rest of your channel. lol
It makes it feel like you're reading a note in a video game. You aren't living the story with the protagonist, you're being told it after the fact, like they're telling it to you at the watercooler, it sucks all the life out of it
My favorite horror stories have always been the ones that "stay close to home," so to speak. I've listened to and read a fair number of stories that spiral into stale tales of cosmic malevolent monsters and whatnot after having strong openings about average-day horrors that no monster could compare to. To this day, my favorite horror story (in the form of a short film) is "Maggie May" by director Mia’kate Russell, which tells the story of the simple haunting horror of malicious inactivity. Doesn't introduce any sudden magical monster out of the blue, which is probably the fastest way for me to lose interest in a horror story.
Always hate it when stories end this way. Whenever an author brings in cosmic entities, alternate dimensions, time travel, etc, it always kills it for me - unless it's obviously done well, or about that from the start. I feel the authors look at it as a cheap way of making the story appear more complex than it is.
I love cosmic horror, but it is incredibly difficult to pull off correctly. A problem occurs when the author tries too hard to explain what is happening. One of the pillars of cosmic horror is the characters not necessarily really understanding it. Another problem is attributing too much blatant malevolence to things that really have no need to have that personal touch. Cosmic horror is usually meant to be grand in scope, often involving things that truly don't care about harming humanity, much a specific individual. When the motives are explained it takes something of incomprehensible form and power, and then reduces it to a minor paranormal thing. A poltergeist throwing a fit, incapable of causing real harm. It's like anime always trying to up the ante, but that backfires when used incorrectly, it lowers the stakes.
@@kamikeserpentail3778something that quickly shows the malevolence problem of cosmic horror is the channel LightsOut. Some of their work is good, but when they touch cosmic horror it really feels like “eldritch moon decided to target you, the cameraman, specifically, out of every single person on the planet”
Too many people conflate realism with immersion, theres this rule i learned about with scifi/fantasy, that just because the world is unrealistic, doesn't mean it should lack rules, everything SHOULD make sense in the universe this takes place in, and in specific cases, characters shouldnt be self aware that these things are abnormal, as in their universe it is the norm, but in cases like horror this rule can be ignored somewhat, because in most characters these mystical chaotic events are new to them, before they were in the horror, their rules were 1:1 with our own. But the characters should stil work on basic logic, they should act like a human.
I think every story starts with the assumption that everything works the same as our world, and only change when we are told differently. So we assume humans in any story aren’t suicidal, or dumb as a sloth. Also, the main changes from our world to theirs should be defined as close to the beginning of the story as possible.
@-JaggedGrace- it rarely happens and I'm not sure I can even give an example, but an interesting technique in horror is when they leave everything ambiguous and only at the end do you learn what's happening. Sometimes the main character is learning that with you, but what I like is when the character knows, but since it's normal to them they don't tell you. Actually, I have an example. In the short story "the sentry" (go read it!!)
HP Lovecraft wrote a bit about this in his essay "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" - he uses the word "realism", but would probably concede to "immersion" under the circumstances, and I think he'd certainly agree about things making sense within the implied boundaries established for the story in its early paragraphs alongside things like genre, setting, and the like: "In writing a weird story I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere, and place the emphasis where it belongs. One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately-with a careful emotional “build-up”-else it will seem flat and unconvincing. Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel. In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy...." -HPL "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" In a story like that forest witch story, the writer probably failed to establish the proper boundaries early in the story for what "real" is in context of the story's content, then failed to properly treat the forest witch (or the forest she lives in or whatever) effectively as the story's unambiguous wonder, and finally failed to manage the storytelling device of writing down the narrator's last words in a way that didn't overpower the story's central wonder by being at least as hard to explain convincingly as any witch would be! A good proofreader should catch that before the story is published, an editor definitely should catch it, the author should have caught it before it left the rough draft stage, and so on! That is, these amateur internet horror stories fail at things like this because the very format is fairly unforgiving: we're asking amateur, inexperienced, untutored storytellers to get their story right in a medium where they are basically dumping their rough draft out into public without revision, editing, or any of the other tools that could take a flawed story premise and polish it up into at least entertaining hack filler suitable for a low-budget pulp magazine. These stories are being set up to fail as proper stories, and I'll bet that the best "CreepyPasta" tales are those that were probably written by people with some writing talent, trained and practiced writing skills, and/or the benefits of an extra set of eyes and a little time and effort to develop a rough draft into something presentable for public consumption, where the majority of these stories are simply dumped from stream-of-consciousness directly to the internet! Maybe Reddit/4-Chan/whatever should filter these stories through some sort of a volunteer "Fix My Story" clinic before they are submitted to the sort of criticism that this video would probably rather give them? I have a feeling that a review of the work of the "fixers" who can actually improve the work enough to pass for a proper story might be more interesting than reviewing the stories themselves!
I think the trope has been popularized by horror games. The issue is the main fear comes from what the player could have happen to them, the doomed log details that potential outcome while providing a clue on how to avoid it or foreshadow a new enemy. Removing the frame just leaves the doomed dialogue. A purposeless fragment. ITCHY TASTY.
God notes in horror video games can piss me off so much. There's almost never any reason given for why the person is even writing the note in the first place, much less writing that specific thing in that specific way and leaving it in that specific place. There are so many cases where no more thought is given to how they fit into the story other than as a cheap excuse to drop a lore dump. It's little more than "I can't be bothered to find a way to integrate the backstory into the game, so I wrote it all out in plaintext to leave lying around the map."
I agree, but even then Bioshock and its consequences have been a disaster for video game storytelling. Having every character be obsessed with recording themselves is incredibly contrived and became a lazy way for devs to add exposition without having to create and implement characters that the player can actually interact with. The only worse trend I can think of is Bethesda style "environmental storytelling" aka saying it's ok your supposed RPG has about four highly railroaded quests total, because the map designers stacked some physics objects on top of each other to show that "people totally live in this world bro!" The fact that redditors generally consider these writing methods *good* is exactly why you see them pop up in places they absolutely shouldn't
@@wikipediafollower agreed but also what if you incorporate the idea of the characters being obsessed with recording into their characterization? Maybe they're delusional and insane, maybe they're compelled to for something that happened in their past, maybe it's a way to cope, maybe it's to deliver a message or maybe they're paranoic, maybe they have psychological damage caused by the Operator that causes them to be obsessed with surveiling themselves and others for the sake of some kind of false sense of security or maybe it's The Collection forcing and compelling people to record everyone and everything so that it's final video will be complete and everyone will watch it and they will finally be unstoppable as they take over the brains of everyone. Maybe the obsessive recording is supposed to be ridicoulous, for the sake of absurdism or comedy, maybe satire, or maybe it shouldn't really matter as long as the writing and content itself is good enough to excuse the over recording of everything. Or maybe you shouldn't record EVERYTHING but only some things leaving other things unknown and to the imagination.
@@-tera-3345the only game I've seen do this good is Knock Knock. Notes you RANDOMLY find around YOUR OWN HOUSE are torn out pages of YOUR OWN DIARY that somehow went missing from YOUR OWN house, and are all written either by your near completely mental and self-doubting protagonist or someone else, and most of the time dont even contain anything helpful/informative and instead either mock you, confuse you, contain a piece of a very confusing story that have seemingly zero connection with the game's events (a weird storyline telling of a guy in some dictatorship country thats doing dictatorship things even though the game itself is about a scientist in a house in a forest with no ties to society whatsoever that doesnt even make sense in itself as it is cut somewhere in the middle with events being very different in the span of just one absent page), or a page describing one of many weird ritual instructions.
I think it would be cool to see a story that gets updated over time like an actual Reddit post from something like r/Relationships. The first post would be about someone looking for possible explanations for weird stuff they've begun to notice, and it slowly builds up across updates. After it's been well established that OP may be in some kind of active danger, the account just goes radio silent, with no answers given about what happened to OP.
I do this. This is like just general more traditional unfiction, some people dislike it because they feel "tricked" or "lied to" but like. I feel like it's a wonderful fun thing to do and can be amazing if done well
I think that's kind of the basic premise behind a lot of the "alternate reality" horror subgenre and a lot of other emerging social-media based horror media. I'm pretty sure I've glimpsed examples using chat-room and forum-post formats before, and I don't really follow this stuff at all! Even so, I agree - I was just remarking a little earlier that this "trope" - the Apocalyptic Log - in its current form is a product of early Gothic Literature, and it is still being used that way by modern writers, even though media and culture has changed as people have transitioned from hand-written diaries and letters sent via snail-mail to modern social media... the trope made the leap pretty gracefully from print onto film and TV in the form of Found Footage, but for some reason seems to have struggled a little to adjust to social media! It seemed to me that these "CreepyPasta" writers might have benefited a bit from stopping a moment to actually look at what chatroom, text massage, Reddit/4-Chan posts, or UA-cam comments actually look like in real life!
@@pietrayday9915 You seem to be one of the few people in this entire comment section that actually knows what they're talking about in terms of literary analysis, but I do not think you've read a lot of creepypasta. While that is true for media that has that trope in it, my problem with this video is that it generalizes it to the entire medium, I believe that this trope while it obviously exists, and was a bigger problem a decade ago, the (extremely fragmented) scene has evolved past that for the most part and most actual creepypasta and unfiction actually does understand how these formats and medium work, I recommend reading the SCP wiki's GAW tales, as a lot of those are really good chatroom fiction, just also recommend SCP in general cause those really understand and use format very well, including their Parawatch hub which is for more traditional forum creepypasta that's always really good, I also recommend both Bogleech's creepypasta and the event he used to host "Creepypasta Cook-Off" which has some of the best pastas I've ever read. I also want to comment that creepypasta does not mean diagetic and neither does general ARG web interactive media like this. Although most of it is presented diagetically and it's cool and awesome to do so and I love unfiction, I feel like it's too complex and big and fragmented and it's such a vague widespread scene that generalizing and saying that most if not all of it has this trope and "it's ruining horror media" is dumb.
I think this is why my favorite nosleep is the park ranger series. It's a guy with some experience in the strange occurences but he's mostly retelling other people's stories of being out in the woods. the comments on these are also all fantastic, full of other people recounting their own strange occurences in the woods.
As a folklorist, I love seeing people cite JAF and other folklore publications! I appreciate interest in our scholarship :) It's just about people and what we do and how we interact with each other! It's so cool! However, I don't think that creepypastas qualify as anti-legends. I haven't done much research into anti-legends (although my research is related to legend scholarship), but I did go read the Tom Mould article you cited, and the Whitney Phillips article that is part of the same forum. As you can see in the screenshot in the video, Bill Ellis said, "antilegends work more effectively than simple debunkings to clear legends from circulation." The purpose of an anti-legend is to counter legends and make people stop believing in them. An anti-legend, as far as I understand it, isn't considered to be a legend. Creepypastas are! Slenderman is a particularly well studied example of a contemporary legend. I know this isn't a huge deal, but I did want to let you know :) I really enjoyed the video! Citing folklorists is basically an automatic sub for me.
I'm not entirely sure what an anti-legend is supposed to be but I think your comment explained it better than the video. Would an anti-legend be something like this?: "Me and my buddies went Bigfoot hunting because my cousin saw one in the woods. But instead we just found a tall hairy lumberjack."
@@Shadowonwater sorry, I don't get notifications for replies to my comments! (I hope you do and see this, lol.) The scenario you described could go one of two ways, depending on context. If it was said by someone who actually went Bigfoot hunting and only saw a lumberjack, it would be narrative about a legend trip, wherein the narrator performed ostensive action (going Bigfoot hunting) in order to participate in the legend. An anti-legend parodies a legend as a way to critique it (this is almost verbatim what Mould said in his article). So, if the context instead is that the person is making a joke and pointing out to their audience the "absurdity" of Bigfoot legends, it would be an anti-legend. Anti-legends rely a lot on context and are effective only when they parody a recognizable legend. I would say Bigfoot is quite a recognizable legend, so, yeah, that could be an anti-legend, but the context ultimately determines whether it is or isn't.
I was a huge nosleep fan for years, but eventually got bored of it due to this exact reason. It not only constrains the story, but in a way, it kind of spoils the ending. You know that 100% of the time, the author survives; they HAD to upload it to the subreddit somehow. I've moved on to other sites where you get a wider array of story-telling methods. I now enjoy a mix of first and third person stories, some aware that they're being posted to the internet, some not, some that are continuous, some that jump across time and characters. It's much more enjoyable with variety.
Mortal peril is simply the easiest way to write a thriller, so people default to that even in formats that take the wind from its sails. Imo self-reporting stories are better off focusing on having to deal with the aftermath or the consequences of what happened (maybe a companion didn't make it, or the subject had to do something heinous to survive, or witnessed something that will haunt them), seeing as it's a given that they survived the threat. The Telltale Heat is much more horrific as a story about the weight of guilt and paranoia on the murderer than it would have been as a story about the murder itself from the victim's perspective.
You know what format I've been thinking about writing a story in that I haven't seen explored yet? A wiki. Not just a wiki article, of which I've seen many times, but an entire wiki, where the story is not only told non-linearly, but where there are multiple pages that are hyperlinked throughout, allowing a completely choose-your-own-adventure-esque story, letting you choose to either read each page before jumping to another, or constantly be slipping through pages to get explanations.
That's pretty interesting. I'm sure you're aware of the similarities, but the SCP community is basically that, just with multiple contributors, and it's more of a universe than one cohesive story. I'd like to read something like what you're describing, or hell, write one myself. Probably the topic of the wiki would be extremely important for the whole thing to work well. Could also get very House of Leaves in that you have to comb through edit histories from multiple authors for more details that flesh out the broader timeline and context of the story. Would make for a fantastic ARG now that I think about it.
Wiki fiction I LOVE WIKI FICTION. I've been meaning to do stuff like this for a while as I love things like SCP and House of Leaves. There was a Minecraft ARG a bit ago that ended with a huge amount of archived deleted Wikipedia pages with information on it that wasn't real. It was awesome. I have my own wiki myself and I just kind of write whatever in whatever format I want but I do definitely try to stick to Wikipedia styled pages
Brainstorming here. How would you build the story structure of rising tension and climax? Maybe a sort of diamond structure to hyperlinks: you access the wiki with one page, that page hyperlinks to a bunch of others, and this pages have links, and so on until a certain point where it all leads to a singular article. And also after a certain “stage” in the hyperlink structure, you begin to access articles that you cannot find normally by search
@@gigachadgaming1551 It would necessarily have to be divorced from a standard story structure. Either the story itself would need to be hidden somehow, perhaps with unlinked wiki pages that need to be manually searched for after getting references from other articles, or the story would need to be not directly told, with bits and pieces being gleaned from different articles. Or an entirely different structure I haven't thought of. As someone above mentioned, this would be a type of fiction like House of Leaves, where there are many documents to go through and consume, and the full story is only learned through reading all supplementary material and putting it all together. Nlt an easy task by any means, but I think it would be possible.
It started with HP Lovecraft. Most of his stories are written in that whole recollective present-tense usually concluding with some sort of “and here I am, terrified and running out of time with my feather and ink” bit. It always eliminates really juicy tension for me, personally
As much as I like Lovecraft, I distinctly remember in "Dagon" where the author pretty much even narrates his own jumping out of a window ("The window! The window!"). Despite this being one of my favorite short stories, I can't help but hate that ending.
@@MariaIsabellaZNN last I read Dagon I was like,, 15? I always thought that those exclamations at the end were about him being spotted through the window by something outside, but now that I think about it wow yeah that's impressively shitty lmao
Nope - it definitely did NOT start with Lovecraft - it's at least as old as the Gothic Literature genre itself, playing roles in "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" and Poe's "MS Found in a Bottle" and many other classics of the genre. Lovecraft rather enjoyed the trope and used it frequently over the decades he wrote, sometimes for a sillier effect (he had more of a sense of humor than he gets credit for) and other times fore a more serious effect... where he's being sillier with it, it's not a mistake, and he's poking a little fun at some of the conventions he works in, sometimes in stories that were originally written for friends (fellow writers contributing to the same magazines he was) rather than the general public per se. Stories like "Dagon", "In The Vault", "Herbert West: Re-Animator", "The Picture in the House", and a few others show Lovecraft being just a bit more playful than perhaps we come to expect from a "master of horror", but there's still some quality weird fiction going on in there - Lovecraft dabbled in a few different horror subgenres in his time, including horror-comedies before those were cool. "Dagon" can be thought of as a less serious version of the same ideas that would be developed into "The Call of Cthulhu"and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" a few years later, and you can see a very different effect in the treatment of the "Apocalyptic Log" gimmick in those later stories: Lovecraft demonstrates in those stories that he knows exactly how and why the "trope" works, and how to use it in different ways to get different effects that work with the story on a serious level, rather than being something that the horror can work in spite of - for example, in "The Call of Cthulhu" the diary-writing device is given a very ambitious treatment by mixing it up as a letter accompanying a last will and testament attached to a collection of evidence that includes ship's logs, newspaper clippings, journals and diaries, and so on, which were compiled by the investigator over a period of years, with the implications only adding up to something dangerously sinister at the very last, and the danger itself being something far more patient, subtle, and inevitable than a monstrous hand at the window! Meanwhile, in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", the fishy threat is not coming through the window to get the investigator, but is instead coming from within him not to threaten him with instant death, but instead to liberate him from his human form and lead him to a new freedom and triumphant immortality under the sea, leaving the writer time to explain his plans for his final acts on earth before he carries them out himself on his own timeline.... It's pretty effective stuff, with the usual caveats about mileage varying subjectively on things like art, music, and literature! Anyway, it's unlikely that all of those "CreepyPasta" writers are familiar with Lovecraft's work, especially given that there is nothing else remotely Lovecraftian about most of those stories, and it's more likely instead that it's a combination of the arbitrary rules about writing "in character", combining with imitations of other "CreepyPasta" writers using the same device, and the fact that the "Apocalyptic Log" trope is a pretty intuitive one to use at this point, for amateur writers who have grown up with its visual equivalent for film and television, Found Footage, and the otherwise ubiquitous use of the trope in horror stories and Gothic literature for a very, very long time (for example, Edgar Allan Poe stories using variations on this storytelling device were required reading in American high school literature classes for a long time through my formative years, and are probably still included in school lessons to this day!) And, no doubt, a lot of spooky literature for kids and young adults uses and abuses this trope as well: I suspect a lot of readers come into contact with it through "Goosebumps" or Harry Potter or whatever, sometimes being parodied, without really understanding where it came from or why it was ever used or how it worked when it was used seriously! Honestly, with that in mind, I can't help thinking that actually reading more stories from the likes of Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, Brahm Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Stephen King, and the like might actually improve the quality of the horror stories using cliches like this, rather than making them worse, though a lot is still going to depend on whether the writers have the basic writing, creative writing, literature/humanities appreciation, and reading comprehension skills to work with to begin with in putting a coherent story together with or without storytelling devices like the Apocalyptic Log!
@@MariaIsabellaZNN according to others in this very comment section, HP Lovecraft *knew* this, and did it because it was already overused all those years ago.
Brief aside from the POV section: I highly recommend In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, specifically for playing with second-person narration. This was a great video, loving this channel!!
Machado is a total genius. If I can return your recommendation with another, her short story "The Husband Stitch" shook me to my core. One of the most impressive short stories I've ever read.
I genuinely feel this sentiment. All of my "stories" intake is strictly YT. I barely even know what creepy pasta and subbreddit are. Once younhave listened to several dozen or maybe a hundred or so, you can start to tell which stories are overly embelished and have loopholes. Thank you for bringing this issue to light.
This is another reason I love The Books of Blood by Clive Barker. In-universe these stories are all written down, but via psychic so you are well aware the story may end in everyone dying. They are not in first person, but the ghost angle means it has a similar oomph to me as a "first hand" story
I remember reading a scary story on tumblr once about a a father that went all out on making a haunted house to be better than the neighbors. To the point that the father used his 2 month old son as a “decoration”.. I can’t find the story anymore but to this day, that shit stuck with me. I read it in 2013.
I think the best use of this trope is when it’s used in stories about cognitohazards. Particularly with stories where the only way to get rid of the hazard is to pass it on to someone else. That’s a great explanation: The author is telling you this because they can’t take it anymore and are so worn down that they’re willing to pass it on to you, the reader. The original Smile Dog story does this, and was pretty effective on young kids who had nightmares about it, since the entity literally comes to victims in their dreams. An animated short I watched recently did it too, and I remember smiling at the end when I realized where things were going. It’s fun when utilized correctly.
I feel like people often mix up realism and believability when they're talking about stories, like you can have all sorts of fantastical and non-realistic things and plot lines but if the characters aren't responding to it in a believable way you're going to lose people (That's not to say they have to respond realistically though, I'm a big fan of magical realism where characters will act like the weird stuff that's happening is totally normal, but within the context of the world of the narrative it should be believable)
The best way to use this trope is to actually have the reader not be reading the original transcript, but have them see everything from the perspective of the person who found it and was given the information. Look at video games for this. Many horror games you find small notes but you find out more than fills in the gaps
i love this video because it highlights the necessity of understanding basic literary structure and devices within narrative and storytelling. as you pointed out, there are so many way for authors to take these concepts and be creative, and it allows their story to be immersive and meaningful. neglecting these important concepts can take you out of the story or make it feel disjointed. thanks for sharing this super interesting concept!
For me the scariest thing someone can write is a story that portrays happiness in places the viewer knows is wrong. Example, Midsommar. And what I like most is the soundtrack, it follows what the characters feel rather than what the viewers are supposed to feel, which is amazing, and also leads to many times where there's a happy sounding theme when there's something wrong happening. Around the end everyone is happy even when that house burns, and what I love (scares me) most is nobody is there freaking out, so that leaves the viewer feeling manipulated. The viewer knows what's happening is wrong, but in the movie there's no characters to affirm that, just happy people (especially the main character, who we were following through pretty much the entire thing, who we followed through her trauma. After all that, she finds happiness at something the viewer knows shouldn't bring comfort.) There's no justice, because all that fucked up stuff was seen as good in the eyes of everyone at the end. The main character finds peace and it's portrayed as a happy ending when the viewers feel it's all wrong. And the viewer is only left with one thought as the movie ends, "this isn't right." And when I first watched it, I literally felt brainwashed. I didn't comprehend how exactly until analyzing it, but in that initial moment of not understanding why I felt that way was frightening. And from that point on I've been in love with that concept of horror. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this, but Midsommar is the only one I could think of :P
Maybe it's a paradox? "I'm sitting here writing this down as I wait to die" is a horrible opening to a story, but it would be something that would be realistic to write if you were actually writing down your last message. So you have to open the story with suspense in a way that would be overly belaboring the point of a final message in reality. It works in Lovecraft stories like Dagon because while it is a "five seconds before death" story, the narrator himself doesn't know that until the last five seconds. That's probably the key, because suspense only works in a first person dictation if everyone involved is suspenseful; or the bad thing has already happened like in "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".
Not a horror movie but I just watched Tokyo Godfathers and will say that movie is the best example of a trope being used correctly. The movie depends heavily on plot contrivance but it's about Christmas miracles so everything is a hilarious coincidence.
From one side I can agree with the point about how ridiculous the trope and you would never wrote something like this in extreme danger. But from another side as a person who wrote such notes while sitting in a 80s soviet bomb shelter in the beginning of war in Ukraine, while Russian troops was about a mile away from me, I can somewhat understand that. But in my notes I was more concentrated on my feelings about the situation and my surroundings, not retelling the dialogue with other people, even if it was mentioned in the notes.
I think that's the big skill bar that makes the trope fail in most writers' hands. You have to exert a lot of self-restraint (and empathy) to write only what a person in that actual setting would care to write about. Then it works. But as soon as you let the desire to add those unfitting but oh-so-juicy details win out, it fails the believability test.
This trope it way more bearable than something like “it was a dream the entire time” even though they essentially do the same thing: they take away the urgency, the stakes, making the horror have no lasting impact because why would you be afraid of something that isn’t a danger? One of my favorite things is to leave the story with an ambiguous ending, or hint at the thing (whatever it is) still effecting this person’s life or continuing to torment them in a non lethal way, like a predator toying with its meal.
Random thoughts: The Magnus Archives are one of my favorite examples of a collection of horror stories with an explanation for why and how they're being told. Most of the stories range from solid to great, and it also has a great over-arching narrative about the world that all the stories are taking place in, the people who have collected and are archiving them, what the stories ARE and why they're happening. Highly recommend. Also, I don't think i've ever read a novel that made extensive use of second-person perspective until recently: Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. It's the second book in a series. Half of it is second person, for a very good reason that actually shapes and informs your perspective on what is happening/has happened in the book. Definitely recommend both it and the first book (Gideon the Ninth). Can't speak for the rest of the series, as I haven't read it yet.
Seeing 2nd person POV used in Harrow The Ninth was so fucking cool. And it was actually the second book I’d read that used it to that extent! The first one was The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Both of them have inspired me to play around with 2nd person POV sections in my own horror story.
The explanation for tma is great, nobody gives statements in a way that people actually speak/write but making it part of the power of the archivist makes it believable, especially in ep 100 where since there's no archivist nobody can string a sentence together. Add that to the way they filter out the fake statements by making the real ones not record digitally while still implying they get a lot of nonsense and it's just a perfect way of explaining the genre conventions with an in world explanation.
I've been reading nosleep since basically the beginning, let me tell you the narrator switch used in the elevator story has been pulled off in some really creative ways and is more common than you think. I've seen it framed as like, transcripts of audio/video recordings, online posts, journal entries, all kinds of stuff. That also lets you be more flexible with the narrator's fate as you saw in that example. I think a lot of the smarter writers there deserve some serious credit because if you really look you'll find they did account for this. I think since a lot of people read Reddit on their smart phones now it's become more obvious that someone being trapped in a dangerous situation but still finding time to sit down and type out a whole properly written and formatted story and post it is just too outlandish to be striking. So with that in mind you see more people come up with more creative ways to get around it.
Speaking of good writing, the script for this video was really great, really solid stuff. I clicked this half expecting a "haha horror stories are campy schlock" deal but you really turned in something cool. Totally agree with everything here. Nice job, dude.
The Magnus Archives has a good format, by only ever featuring the thoughts of the survivors - only the people who make it out of whatever shit happened get to make a statement, and a lot of word choices make more sense there. If you're sketching your final moments on paper, it should be very to the point. If you're recounting it long after, it makes sense to include every little detail. Plus, it's interesting to see how each small tale relates to the larger story taking place across the series
not a horror piece but the book I recently published is written by one of the characters in the book and he references he's writing it, but he doesn't go "if anybody finds this" or so on, he goes "I've decided to open my report/confession by saving the police some time filing paperwork about me:" and then proceeds to give his name, occupation, address, and future cause of death. he isn't in a rush and is somewhat taking his time as he writes, almost mockingly about why he's going to die after finishing the paper.
@@buckbumble1872I think most of the people that miss the “subtext” in that book are people that think the book is bad because it’s pro pedophile (obviously it’s not). I haven’t heard any pedophiles cite that book as being good because the main character is a pedophile but I do see a lot of people incapable of understanding that just because the bad guy is the protagonist doesn’t mean the author thinks he’s a good guy. Of course I could be wrong, there may be tons of pedos saying that idk.
There's the famous Film Noir crime drama, "D.O.A." (1950), which opens with this bit of dialogue: Homicide Detective: Can I help you? Frank Bigelow: I'd like to see the man in charge. Detective: In here... Frank Bigelow: I want to report a murder. Homicide Captain: Sit down. Where was this murder committed? Frank Bigelow: San Francisco, last night. Captain: Who was murdered? Frank Bigelow: I was. The rest of the film plays out in flashback as "Frank Bigelow" explains how the murder was committed, how he discovered he was being murdered, how he spent his final hours desperately trying to find out why he was murdered and how to stop it from happening, and how he was able to report his own murder in person (spoiler: he was poisoned by killers as a result of his own actions, and dropped dead from the poison neatly dramatically just after finishing his story, with the police captain sardonically concluding that the paperwork should mark Bigelow "D.O.A." - dead on arrival!) It's definitely a gimmick that can work well outside of the horror and horror-comedy genres! And, to the point of the video, it's pretty easy to fix a broken use of the "apocalyptic log" gimmick - simply find a way to make the doom awaiting the narrator inevitable but slow enough in arriving that the narrator has plenty of time to explain what went wrong at his/her own pace. Is the narrator being stalked to death by an evil Forest Witch? She only comes out at night, and the narrator managed to escape her clutches just as dawn broke, but she'll be back at twilight, and cannot be escaped forever.... Or, whatever, slow-acting poison works too, and there are lots of other ways to manage it.
I really like the podcast "the white vault" which, as a found footage horror, involves some of this. It's a compilation of written notes and audio made throughout the events of the story, organized and presented by an archivist chronologically like an investigation. They use this trope, in my opinion, to fantastic effect; the characters have reasons for noting all they do, and we rely on their untrustworthy narration. It's very fun to have all the fragments put together piecemeal, some relevant and some not, leaving some gaps and mysteries.
Excellent video! This lesson was taught as long ago as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "He wouldn't have written 'Auuughh' when he died, he would have just said it." 🤣
For me, the comments are the “Are You Scared” videos ruin the stories for me more than the stories themselves. They *always* make it either a case of mental illness or any man in the story is the culprit. It ruins any good theories because it feels like “Oh, he was just depressed. Let’s ignore the GIANT HOLE BREAKING UPWARDS and not protect ourselves from who/whatever is mimicking our friend.” I genuinely want to write a story where it’s strictly supernatural and confirm it just to mess with people. It’s like, this writer created this world where these things CAN happen but you choose to look the other way. I’m so tempted to write a story for it. I just never know when they’re accepting stories.
"aw hell naw man, I bought this cursed copy of Pictionary for the NES from the dumpster behind Saddam Hussein's garage sale of shit he found near the Great Pyramids Asbestos Factory, all the game does is tell me to piss off"
Ben Drowned Awakening arc (3) from 2020 go on UA-cam watch it right now it has anime fights in legend of Zelda about women made out of millions of real internet users it's great
Another one of gripes with especially creepypastas (always the story, never the narrator so it’s not like I’m shooting the messenger) is when the horror also delves into historical fiction or the protag’s profession/hobby is integral to the story. And the fact that some writers cannot do the most barebones of research on a historical era, job, or hobby and it completely suspends the immersion of the story when they get the most basic of facts about these things wrong. Listened to a creepypasta set in Victorian Britain once and it complete broke the immersion when some of the characters spoke in modern slang and not era-appropriate ones. Same for one creepypasta about a hunter who was supposed to be this salt of the earth mountain man who basically grew up with a rifle in his hand but knew absolutely nothing about guns and cartridges. For example from the story, the protagonist using .30-.06 to hunt rabbits, .30-.06 would obliterate a rabbit and there’d be nothing left to harvest from the body but bloody chunks. It’s not like I expect a horror historical fiction writer to be a historian, or a scientist writing a scientific journal for a horror story dealing with those disciplines but still, 30-45 minutes of basic research are in order so you do not mess up basic facts. All I’m saying is don’t make yourself look uneducated and focusing too much on the horror that you get basic objective facts wrong that a character should know if they are of a specific background.
And another point, writing from the point of view of someone of a different culture than the authors. You must understand people from other cultures, while understanding the universals of humanity may view different subjects completely differently than the point of view of the mostly western authors. Do not write a character from a different culture with Anglo-American-centric values. An example of this is one story that featured a Japanese protagonist who had lived im Japan all their life before coming to the west but the author had written them in a way that betrayed the author only had a surface level understanding of Japanese culture and what interest they did have was derived from Anime(even named the character Kira, which is not actually a Japanese name and derives from the English loan-word from killer). Made it very obvious they were either a Deathnote or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fan that had not actually interacted with true depth in Japanese culture.
@@lufsolitaire5351 I hate be the "well, actually" guy, but "Kira" (吉良、きら) really *is* a legitimate Japanese surname, historically belonging to a samurai clan. Its most famous member was Kira Yoshihisa, one of the central figures in the "47 Ronin" incident of 1701-1703. But yeah, I agree with the rest of what you said.
You really do have to be a historian, or better yet, a researcher of any and all topics, to be a good writer. You'll notice that the good ones spend more time researching for the story than mechanically writing it, because they care about their craft and understand what goes into making stories believable - namely, specific and accurate details placed where it's appropriate.
"Ayo, whatsup W-dawg?" said Holmes, sitting in front of the roaring fireplace of 221-b Baker Street. By the amount of ash in the fireplace I could tell he'd been sat here all night, contemplating the case. "I've been chilling here thinking, and I legit think this Stapleton dude is capping. He's like mad sus, bro", Holmes said.
I liked it in that one creepypasta where the protag gets lost between dimensions while on a subway train. And it suggests that the story he wrote eventually found its way back to our world, but did the writer? We can never know. But yeah, having it be the ending to every story just gets grating.
There are a couple stories with this trope I adore, one about a guy stuck in a time loop, and the other about a guy who takes a pill that slows his perception of time. They are both "if you are reading this" but they are done extremely well , but I think existential horror works well with this trope. Another is one where a guy glitches out of reality. It can be done well but tbh since kids write these im not surprised its rare Anyways, great video! I learned a lot!
The title intrigued me as a horror story writer myself. I like the breakdown and I like how you argued how the trope can be used correctly and incorrectly. Great video and an earned sub
It think it’s indicative of lazy writing. A lot of horror tropes fall under the category of a sort of ‘mystery’ which can be frustrating to read. When I get to the end of a story, I want a conclusion that satisfies even if it is a cliff hanger. If you’re a writer, challenge yourself and work on your world building skills by tying up an ending nicely. Leave just enough questions unanswered but leave just enough clues for the reader to put the pieces together. My least favourite trope in movies is not to do with horror but ‘based on true story’ type historical movies and biopics where a character will make a foreshadowing statement about a real life historical figure or event without it being shown in the film. Prequel blockbusters also do this ALL THE TIME it sets off my cringe alarm. “What kind of a name in Abraham Lincoln?” was a joke made online about this trope for instance.
Reminds me of a story I wrote for high school English class decades ago that intentionally ended with, "...and then I died. And that's why I'm late for school." I think this whole thing started when internet users would post a half-completed sentence as though they were kidnapped while writing it out, not taking into account who bothered to hit Submit afterward. You know, like when Candleja
I find it weird when the defense is always "well, supernatural stuff happens too." The antagonist or scenario doesn't need to be something from reality, but when we have people telling a story, I think we expect them to tell a story the way people would tell a story and react the way people would react. When that doesn't happen, that's what starts to pull us out of the story and make us notice.
Structurally: I'm very fond of how you kept the praise and positivity high at the end, and even at your most critical you were offering reason and logic and also ways to avoid the pitfalls you've seen. Well done, left me feeling good about the state of internet horror.
Drives me absolutely up a wall when people say “ummm this is a story that has (supernatural or unrealistic elements) why would you ever expect it to (make sense)??” Why does a story having a witch in it magically preclude it from being well written? Horror, of all genres, needs to feel grounded in some reality or the audience will not find it scary, tense or engaging. Which is the whole point. But worse, this argument just spirals out of control to the point of invalidating all criticism. It boils down to “it’s not real therefore it does not matter if it’s good or not” which is stupid. Why do you want stories to be bad. It’s the same as saying “this is a kids story so why should it be well written” but with stuff that’s targeted at adults. That’s just ridiculous.
I was reading this one horror manga a while ago where basically there were these creature things going around killing people and when the protagonist's apartment building finally gets broken into he stays quiet and the creature walks right by them. Now this would be fine and a good way for the MC to realize "hey I think these things are blind", however that's not what happens: the creature walks by and says out loud something alone the lines of "ahhhh I can't see, there's something here thoughhhhhh" which is when all tension died and I stopped reading right then and there
A classic horror story which does this WELL is HP Lovecraft's The Hound, which is flamed start to finish as a suicide note. The protagonist doesn't know for sure that they'll die (and it's possible they won't), but the thought of what happened to their friend is so disturbing to them that they take it into their own hands.
I enjoyed The Magnus Archives for their clever use of this trope. Technically all the stories submitted to the archives are done in first person after the event has occurred, so there’s a limiting factor in that none of the encounters could have ended in the death of this character. BUT, because the framing of the story is of an archivist reorganizing these past entries and conducting investigations into them, including some entries that are years and years old, it means they can uncover what happened to the narrator AFTER they told their story. Also there’s a clever little lore reason for why everyone tells their stories so eloquently lol.
Drives me absolutely up a wall when people say “ummm this is a story that has (supernatural or unrealistic elements) why would you ever expect it to (make sense)??” Why does a story having a witch in it magically preclude it from being well written? Horror, of all genres, needs to feel grounded in some reality or the audience will not find it scary, tense or engaging. Which is the whole point. But worse, this argument just spirals out of control to the point of invalidating all criticism. It boils down to “it’s not real therefore it does not matter if it’s good or not” which is stupid. Why do you want stories to be bad. Just say you hate any form of criticism for any reason at that point.
I always hate when people try to claim that fiction doesn’t have to have any in-universe set rules. It’s an argument that has been trending into video games and tv.
Okay, I just got recommended this channel, and already at 6:53, I'm a fan. I can already tell you know what you’re talking about, and as a person who hopes to be a big author one day, I can see your channel being a big help in teaching me about different things to consider when writing a story, thanks man, keep up the good work.
I am so sick and tired of people not understanding what it means for a story to be "realistic." It doesn't mean the story is scientifically accurate, it means the story is logical. As in, effects logically flow from their causes, and characters make decisions based on their motives and knowledge. I honestly cannot understand how some people just don't get this.
6:26 I’ve been struggling to remember the word “verisimilitude” for YEARS at this point and the fact that you’ve reminded me what this concept is called has automatically earned you a like from me. Such an important concept in fiction that isn’t talked about enough
So glad to see someone else who shares my point of view on this kind of ending. I noticed it in a lot of creepypastas/nosleep stories and I wasn't that peeved until I saw how many kept doing it. It always comes off as writing yourself into a corner and having no idea how to end the story on any satisfying note.
I just came across this video at random and I really liked it! Your voice is comforting to listen to and I appreciate your insight as someone who loves writing horror. I think my least favourite trope is when nobody believes someone for no discernable reason, to the point where it's just entirely reckless of them not to. In real life, people are usually quick to accept the weirdest reasons, or at least humor them.
Re: 9:50 The "there must be a reason this was uploaded on the internet" is also affecting audiodramas, in the sense that too many ADs try too hard to squeeze themselves into a framing device that justifies why the events in the story are being recorded. I'm in the camp of "that's not necessary". Some stories can get an advantage from this framing device, some others are greatly hindered by it and don't really need it. Suspension of disbelief can work in any medium, after all.
I think the rule that nosleep has about staying in character is a good way to avoid the trope of just killing off the protagonist as soon as the story is over that a lot of horror stories lean on. but it does mean that the authors are in a bind if they do want to kill the protagonist.
Overall, it decreases the quality of the writing, since the ending is prescribed from the very beginning, and very few of the writers attempt to get creative with that limitation
@@cara-seyunI mean there’s not really a lot of ways to get past that. Either the guy lives and you know, or he dies and it gets posted because it was recorded and found or because the mc wrote it and was like “if you found this” lmao
a trope that really gets on my nerves is when the story is built on clearly supernatural stuff but at the ending it is explained vaguely and as something not supernatural at all. the left/right game and the god experiment are examples of this. they got me hooked trying to make sense of the bizarre stuff happening but at the end it was just "something we cant understand" and thats all
Looking at this comment section, most people like it that way. Personally, I prefer a nice balance, where some elements are explained, but some things are left unexplained just enough to make it good. though, that is admittedly harder to write, that's one of the reasons why people use the "Something we can't understand, it just happens" Or the "Actually, here's everything about the entity and it's past".
I've never heard of the "left/right" game and googled it, the first result was for a Christmas parlor game, and then I saw the reddit post and saw "part 1" and just... fuck that. nosleep stories with multiple parts suck.
@@FrenkTheJoy i could stand the multiple parts, but the ending was terrible. the author shifted from extremely bizarre and supernatural stuff to family problems and grief out of nowhere and didnt explain anything about the things he wrote. he finished it saying something like "maybe the game is for people who want to understand themselves" or some shit. i lost hours of my life reading that. same thing with the god experiment. the author describes a lot of unexplainable deaths, sudden life changes and a shady lab that is doing this experiment. the ending? "the government did that because they can lol". frustrating af.
I feel like you're expecting a horror story to operate like a mystery, where everything that happens is a clue and will eventually come together with an explanation. I found the L/R Game's ending underwhelming, but what made the early parts scary was how unknown and incomprehensible the horror was. Like when they stop in Jubilation, an immaculate town with people sitting at tables outside their houses, where Ace is brutally murdered; it's scary because you can't understand why it's happening and in trying to find reasons for it, your imagination fills in the blanks with the most frightening things it can. Would an explanation at the end outlining why Jubilation was like that, why the roads themselves are like that, have made it more satisfying? I personally don't think so. Honestly, I think the ending should've left it even more vague than it did. Nothing is scarier than the unknown.
@@peanutkix i was expecting an explanation because the way the story was written made me think that when they reached the end of the road or the older guy explained the motive for that journey everything would be explained. there are a bunch of horror stories without any explanation at the end that are excellent stories.
Thanks for making this. I've been quietly losing my mind about this for a while now. It's the lack of design within a creative work where the creator fails to realize that a lack of completion is sometimes a design choice in of itself. There are many works of art that would feel less complete if they were more 'finished' and 'made more sense'.
I appreciate this sort of video. Discussing something that doesn't work quite right is genuinely helpful. For me, they're the best source of inspiration, because the logical question after seeing something that doesn't work is "what would need to change for this idea to work?", and that leads to all sorts of creative ideas. It gets my thoughts flowing really well, and I can't be the only one who feels that way.
CORRECTION: In this video, I incorrectly used the term "anti-legend" to broadly refer to all creepypastas and internet short horror stories. Elektra Katsonis, a folklorist, reached out to explain my error. They referred me to the works of Bill Ellis, Kristiana Willsey, Tom Mould, Whitney Phillips, José E. Limón, and John M. Vlach. Here's the deal: "anti-legend" refers to stories that, in Elektra's words, "respond to one legend/type of legend, not the entirety of a genre of legends."
For example, "Man Door Hand Hook Car Door" is an anti-legend because it specifically responds to and critiques an existing legend using the narrative structure of a legend. As Elektra further said, "The purpose of an anti-legend is to counter legends and make people stop believing in them." Most creepypastas qualify as legends even if told with only an implicit veneer of truth. They are stories told as if the narrator believes them, regardless of whether the author or audience is meant to believe them. The mere act of subverting narrative tropes is not enough to make something an anti-legend.
As you can see, anti-legends can be rather situational, and context is very important. To quote Elektra one more time, anti-legends "are effective only when they parody a recognizable legend." I want to thank Elektra for bringing this to my attention, and I hope it encourages further reading on the matter. Below is the pinned comment as originally written:
Hello! Thank you for watching my video.
For more evidence of what I'm talking about in this video, you can check out this benign, creepy little clip: ua-cam.com/video/y4y7z9g_ZyU/v-deo.html This clip was turned into a terrible creepypasta that took the initial premise too far and completely broke the immersion. There's a Know Your Meme page all about it: knowyourmeme.com/memes/7252005-spongebob-glitch-creepypasta
For more on narratives, check out my Ahsoka video: ua-cam.com/video/IBGoqCZsNmE/v-deo.html
As always, please tell me your thoughts on this video, what I can improve, and what kind of videos you might like to see in the first place. Thanks, everyone!
You should pin this
Sorry dude but clearly the most reasonable explanation is the witch killed the girl and her soul was transformed through the author with “psychosis”
Your note on how a horror story would be much more compelling if it were written from the perspective of official documents is true. I feel that simply stating the abnormal as a list of cold hard facts makes for enjoyable horror, that's why I love SCPs!
You mentioned in the opening that most of those guys stories were duds but some were good, I'd be interested in knowing which ones are actually good. Thanks.
@@uncertaintytoworldpeace3650 he already covered that in the video, it is an interesting concept but that possibility is not conveyed in the story at all.
its not about "realism", its believability. why do we complain when characters do dumb things in paranormal stories if we threw realism out the window? stories exist for us to experience them, things that arent believable take us totally out of it and make me think "ah, the author just needs this to happen to get to what they really want without putting in more effort".
I can suspend my disbelief that witches exist because witches are far removed from reality but regular humans are something we're intimately familiar with so when they do unrealistic shit it hits closer to home and it's harder to ignore.
If you want believability, Robert Aickman is the author for you. His characters walk into a situation, see some crazy shit, and say, "Nah " and then they leave before anything happens. I've never felt more blue-balled in my life, and I hate it. It answers the question of, "Well why don't they just leave?" Because the stories suck if they do.
@@shockwavecgindeed, generally the best course of action in those cases is to make it so that the smart people can’t just walk away.
That last part reminds me of a certain popular RPG horror indie game that involves 2 approx. 12 year old kids staging one of their older sibling’s death as a suicide by hanging them up on a tree…and somehow get away with it.
It makes no sense and simply isn’t believable without bending over backwards to barely comb a believable explanation other than that its developer specifically wanted it to happen, and that they didn’t give it much thought.
@@MidoriyamaRArekusu This is why Carpenter's The Thing is still one of the best horror movie.
The “it’s a scary monster! Of course it isn’t realistic, babe😘” feels the same as “it’s a kids’ movie” when anyone criticizes animated films.
Exactly! Horror done right allows you to picture the situation as plausible, despite the facts there's a fictional monster in the story
the “it’s a kid’s movie” people would probably have their kid watch solely cocomelon
the use of 'babe' here upsets me. all it does is establish the attitude of the person originally making the argument, while a decent argument can stand on it's logic alone. and It makes me angry that I'm being given a name for merely opposing this view.
And they're both completely reasonable answers if you're not a sperg
@@mrosskne they're really not
Picture the scene; you're a park warden investigating a trail for signs of antisocial behaviour. You see a mangled corpse curiously leaning against a locked jeep, phone just inches away. You pick up the phone to read its contents:
"A hike'll be fun," Devon said. "You remember fun, righ
I didn't understand this at first. But now, I see what you mean.
You would literally assume that she was writing fanfic or something and not investigate further. It wouldn’t be until the police got ahold of the phone and checked her recent activity out of obligation-and that’s if the park warden didn’t get got considering the pertinent information “THERE’S A MONSTER/PERSON KILLING PEOPLE TAKE THIS PHONE OUT OF THE WOODS BEFORE READING THE REST” wasn’t labeled at the very top of the story.
Suspension of disbelief really is important because someone who thinks they have only seconds to live wouldn’t have time to add in all those useless details throughout the story, *_but also_* the idea that she wouldn’t write the most important part first is outrageous. If she got cut off right where you suggested, it would be so fucked up. That kind of negligence *_is_* unforgivingly immersion-breaking.
I read this comment like it was the "Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf" song.
@@FrenkTheJoy God I fucking love that song.
This is gold
A trend with NoSleep that bothers me is the “I got a job at X place and there was a strange list of rules”. It was cool at first, then everyone did it and it lost that edge to it. It’s no longer scary and in fact, I now laugh when I see such stories
I get what you mean, with so many stories (that have to be treated as 'real') being about that, it becomes mundane. A reader will eventually get the impression that getting "weird list" is just common corporate practice everywhere.
@@MariaIsabellaZNN It also very much depends on the rules.
Some rules are creepy, like Rule 4: If an intruder breaks into your apartment, hide, and close your eyes, no matter what you do. Do not open them, even if XYZ happens.
and then you got like... rule 7: leave the home at 1:59 AM and return at 2:01 AM. If you're inside at 2 AM you just vaporize or some shit.
I feel like the best rule series type things are how rules are general guidelines for survival. But sometimes they can cause horrifying situations where the rules aren't clear, or rules that while work, can be effective.
One example could be like: if you hear your backdoor break down. Do not open the backdoor, run outside your house.
but then have like a threat that specifically banks on you are being outside and realizing that just simply following the rules to a T might not always work.
of course, I do enjoy some stories where following the rules is a MUST and you CANNOT not do it. For example, a rule that states to light a torch. Where the whole story is revolving around the human mistakes where we slip up or the other challenges that might make that difficult.
In any case, rule stories have to just be done right, but IMO there's not one way to effectively do it. You just have to get a feel for how to do it. Which is why either they're the most amazing things I've read, or "what the fuck did I just read?"
Theres actually a subreddit for that now. Its called "ruleshorror"
I refuse to read a Too Many Rules story. It's so painfully formulaic. It's like reading a Madlibs.
"I was sad and broke. I found an ad for a (job) and it paid $15,000/hr. All I had to do was (verb) a (noun). I arrived at the (noun) and the owner gave me a list of rules. Most of them were simple. Always (verb) the (noun). If the (noun) is (adjective), be sure to (verb) it (adverb). Most importantly, NEVER (verb) the (noun) UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. So anyways, I did the one thing I was explicitly instructed not to do and a spooky monster almost killed me. If you see an ad for (job)... Run."
@@Musicposter4you that is
1. Hilarious
2. Too true
3. Wish it wasn't true
"I just experienced the most horrifying thing imaginable. Let me recount everything that happened up to this point and repeat everything everyone said in excruciating detail before my demise."
This is what gets me, this is my horror story pet peeve. I am a psych student. I've been the person who gets to arrive home to jump straight to the computer to write absolutely everything just happened, and it's a work of hours, even days (and not while being chased by a monster). sometimes you dont just remember, it's such a stupid trope.
to me the greatest horror stories, the kind which disturb me to my core and fill my heart with genuine dread, are the ones where the things simply happen and then just end. none of that "oh it was just a bacteria doing all that stuff" or a demon or whatever but something where the horror is truly incomprehensible and is left unexplained. some of my favorites don't even involve death in anyway.
There was this r/nosleep story I recently read called "911 Transcript - The Pretty Room" and I swear it's the only good (new) nosleep story I've read in ages. I hardly ever check that subreddit because the stories have become so boring, it's like the authors see one trend and write it to death, failing to understand what made that first trope scary (if it even was scary to begin with)
Edit: I might be wrong about the exact name, but it's something like that
I also love it when it's horror that isn't just passively happening to a person, but a person who actively engages with their environment slowly realizing just how screwed they are or that they've gone too far.
I love the ones that are an elaborate explanation of "how to survive the night" with just enough told to get your imagination going. But they are often very nonchalant, not explaining much and that's what really gets me creeped out. Stuff like "whatever you do, DO NOT OPEN THE CLOSET" and then its never mentioned again. Why, what's in the closet? That's what gets me.
This is why I love weird fiction and cosmic horror (apart from Lovecraft there is some good writing to be found)
I get so mad when the explanation is lame too, like it’s bad enough you feel you need to spoon fed the horror to the readers, but you have to make the lore lame too?? Haha. I think if of my nosleep favorites is Stinson Beach, it’s so unnerving and I don’t know if they ever made a sequel and ruined it, but the first part is a fantastic piece of fiction
"If anyone finds this, I am _not_ having fun." is like, on par with "it's right behind me, isn't it?" and "well... that just happened!" Actual Marvel-tier writing, I'd be surprised if whoever wrote that didn't smugly chuckle to themselves. lol.
Smugjak author raising his glasses up to his smug face with his smug grin. “I’m a genius”, he said, sipping his hot chai tea
Well put. Marvel dialogue
@filthy_peasant_the_one2134 Chai means Tea bro. Like in America do you say Tea Tea, or Coffee Coffee?
@@narrow3601 That's part of the joke, the redundancy. The comment also says "smug" twice in that sentence.
@@wmhfv992 I know I was doing a spider verse reference
And then a spooky skeleton popped out of the evidence locker and the cops all had to work 5 hours overtime filling out the paperwork.
the real horror is the overtime
there was... le hyperrealistic blood coming out of le hyperrealistic seketlons eyes and then the phoens ranged band ub t isa ys jgo g
then who was phone????
God damn it Jimmy get OUT of there the milk is in the FRIDGE
@@veesaos8316and not getting payed for it
AHHH
one of my least favourite horror creature tropes of all time is definitely the “fleshy smiling man” trope, where there’s some sort of bald, naked, lanky creature with an “unnaturally wide grin” or something (basically just a clone of the rake) stalking the protagonist, and it’s so popular and unscary that i’m surprised no one else talks about it
Bonus points if:
"I only glimpsed it for a fraction of a second, but it was a 7'3" gangly creature with off-white skin textured like grain paper, it had 47 teeth in its wide grin that stretched ear to ear, 7 of which were mollars, its eyes were deeply sunken and twitching rhytmically every 2.8 seconds, it had 6 fingers on each hand with 5 knuckles on each finger ending in cream yellow claws that were tipped in caked blood, and its knees were pointing in unnatural angles"
Like whoa my guy, that's some photographic memory.
Maybe the witness was in Mensa, lol! @@pewtersprite5178
I liked one of the fleshy smiling man stories, it was the first one I read on r/letsnotmeet before I realized a lot of those stories are fake (possibly all of them?). That one was just a normal-sized guy who was just standing there, smiling, so it was creepier - felt like something that could actually happen, and I understood why the op was unsettled.
I've complained about this trope so many times. It's so boring and I'm sick of it
The things about those types of tropes are that it COULD work- but, way too many folks are more concerned about getting quick clout and being part of the trend that they forget to add SOME personality and creativity in it.
Someone once called this trope "The Lovecraftian compulsion to keep writing even as one is being devoured." Named after a large number of Lovecraft's short stories that end with the narrator being killed. While still writing.
"...even now I can hear the foosteps of that shambling monstrosity, and hear its eerie piping upon the wind. Poor Blakely, he never dreamed - but now the door is being smashed to flinders, and at last I behold what my meddling has awakened! And now it is dragging me across the floor toward its hideous suckered mouths! Ia! Ia! The Goat With a Thousand Young! No! Unhand my fountain-pen, you fell beast!"
"All the best, Lupin Squiggle, sec."
"PS, Send my regards to the Mrs."
"Argh argh, I am undone."
THat was an acutally clever parody.
I was just saying in another reply that Lovecraft could do that, but he knew exactly what he was doing, he had more of a sense of humor than he gets credit for, he was intimately familiar with horror stories and horror story tropes and knew what worked and what didn't (at least, for his taste, YMMV), and there was a big difference between the stories he was being parodic or even self-parodic with, and his more serious uses of the same "final written words" cliche of Gothic literature - the "Apocalyptic Log".
Compare the conclusions of "Dagon" (1917) with later stories that expand on the same theme, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931) - "Dagon" is quite funny in its use of this cliche, not being very far off from the parody, but the other two stories take a far more serious, thoughtful, and elaborate tone....
"Dagon" and similar stories by Lovecraft are even structured a lot like an elaborate joke: an unnecessarily complicated setup for misdirection, followed by that final punchline, and that's no coincidence: Lovecraft seems to have been aware of the close relationship between the absurd and the uncanny, and seems to have had no problems mixing the two freely, usually emphasizing the horror over the comedy, but he could be a funny writer when he was in the mood for it (it's impossible, for example, to read "Herbert West: Re-Animator" as anything but a dark comedy, and that's not the only story that Lovecraft wrote that straddled the two genres: "Dagon", "In the Vault", "The Temple", just to name a couple....)
Spoilers:
The final lines of "Dagon" (1917) are hysterical in a couple senses of the word, as Lovecraft's silliest use of the "I Must Write It All Down" cliche: "The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!" It's the stuff of horror-comedy gold: absolutely ridiculous as charged, yet that final image of the narrator, aware that he has been pursued, catching a glimpse of a monstrous hand at the window just before the story (and the narrator's life) fades to black is spooky enough to work.
"The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) does something quite different and more ambitious than "Dagon" with the same basic idea, in a story that unwinds as a last will and testament consisting of a letter attached to a will introducing with a collection of ship's logs, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, and other assorted documents, beginning with the famous opening, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age....", and ends with the closing lines from the narrator's last will and testament written as a warning to his executors to keep a secret as he waits for a patient and inevitable doom to come upon him by night: "Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye...." The narrator has had years to compile the facts that lead to his doom, only realizing the implications in the final moments, and his doom is slow, implacable, and inevitable, and the messengers of his doom have no problem allowing him the time to finish writing his last will and testament before erasing him - and all of humanity - from the earth, they care only that he keeps their secret until the end.
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931) has a conclusion that is interesting to consider with Lovecraft's infamous xenophobia in mind - he was a bit more complicated than modern critics would give him credit for - as the fishy monster that comes for the narrator this time arrives not through the window, but from within, and the narrator awaits its arrival as he writes the final lines of his last diary entry not with xenophobic terror, but with an odd sense of eager anticipation, adventure, and even triumph: "I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever...." As the final words of a narrator who was about to boldly walk out to face his weird end with open arms, this incarnation of the story comes across far more seriously, leaving an entirely different mood in the end!
Lovecraft knew what he was doing, and his work usually still works whether he's taking the piss out of his audience and having a little fun with horror cliches or writing an in-joke for his friends and pen-pals, or writing more serious and ambitious stuff for a mass audience of low-budget pulp horror.
I wish I could say the same for the average CreepyPasta hack!
They don't seem to have the self-awareness to pull off a self-parody, nor the familiarity with how and why a "trope" like the Apocalyptic is used in a Gothic story to figure out how the rules would apply when transplanted to social media for serious effect, and how to effectively break those rules for comedic effect when desired.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the guy wrote AAAAAAAAAAAA on the wall
@@pietrayday9915 what a brilliant analysis.
Lovecraft learns writing from the masters of his past, while today's writers poorly imitate Lovecraft and yet read nobody else
Probably, “Her legs were cut off, her fingers were cut off, her eyebrows were removed slowly, and she was a minor.” Yes this is targeted at that one horrible analog horror series
was it urbanspook
"And worst of all, she was alive the entire time" I hate those annoying over-the-top bits that are purely for shock value, and nothing actually scary. It's basically the writing equivalent of a shitty jumpscare.
Whats this from
sonic.exe's "hyper realistic blood" is my personal pick. 😂
Her eyebrows 😢
I had never been able to put this frustration into words, but you're right. It is so frustrating to be following a story, suspending the disillusion, to then have the story end with "as I write this, the monster is sitting patiently outside the door, waiting for me to finish my first draft". It really pulls me out of the story and does make it seem unrealistic. And it's bs to counter that criticism with "its just a story babe!!!".
“its just a story” or “its not real” is actually so fucking annoying in response to any situation😭but especially criticism
As I write this, the monster is reading and giving me unsolicited, unconstructive criticism.
It is just a story though. You're critique and frustration is being inserted into something that is literally pretend.
@@pucktoad It's almost like people can judge fiction, and that good and bad writing are things that exist. Or are you genuinely arguing we should never critique fiction ever, or never expect good works of fiction because they're "not real"?
I completely agree with you
The whole, "As I write this/If anyone finds this," feels a lot like the dreaded, "And then I woke up/It was all a dream," endings. Sure, I guess you could make them work, but they can't just be blantantly stated.
The only examples immediately coming to mind for me are, "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danieleeski, "Frankenstein/The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Shelley, and "S." by JJ Abrams.
i love that you have to include the names of the authors as if those arent 3 of the most widely known pieces of literature from the last 200 yrs lmao
Your examples basically originated the trope so they kinda don't count for the argument tbh
I think the only way a story like the Quarry would work is if it was a log from a camera found by police. Someone's phone recording. And it just cuts out when the final girl realizes the car is locked and sits there quietly.
At least S is supposed to be a guy communicating with his girlfriend via notes.
@aria5614 this makes sense. With modern tech, we have limited the acceptable medium for stories with that troupe
The thing is, people have left "final thoughts" or "send help" notes that we have.
If you read them, they often don't even have grammar. They're frantic and desperate or hopeless and maybe depressed.
It's like they're confusing "final thoughts" notes with manifestos or something.
left 4 dead saferoom graffiti
Yes this there’s plenty examples online. Like if it’s in video format that kinda sarcastic quips one thing but written out it’s ridiculous
@@a1918-b4g i'm having trouble finding anything like it, would u mind helping out? any specific sites to look for, phrases to search for etc? /nf
I believe it’d be far more impactful if they had just ended The Quarry story with something abrupt, such as “I’m behind the car now.”, and then just have it end right there.
I feel as though this would seem far more realistic, and also more disturbing in a way. It’s like you don’t know what happened to them. It ended so quickly; the story, similarly to the way the narrator’s life most likely does.
That actually gave me goosebumps, so I agree with you lol. That would've been a better ending
the issue is that if it's a nosleep story there has to be a reasonable explanation for the story to be able to be posted, as per the rules of the subreddit.
My least favorite horror writing trope is related to "if you're reading this." It's that thing where we're supposed to be reading an account written by someone who's losing coherence (they're dying, they're going crazy, whatever) and the author includes a bunch of ellipses as if the passage is dialogue. It's so silly when I notice it and totally takes me out of the story, because I can really tell the author forgot their character wasn't saying this shit out loud.
Like, you're telling me our madman is mid-transformation-into-a-fish-monster or whatever the fuck is happening in this story, and as he's feverishly scribbling in his journal he's putting a little "..." in between all of his fish-related thoughts?? Is he worried about the grammatical correctness of his insane ramblings??? He's just sitting there writing "I can smell... the ocean... it is in my blood... blood... blood and salt... their blood will mix with salt..." like he's preparing his own subtitles for when this awesome story gets a movie tie-in????? GTFOH ughh
Ugh I can imagine, that’s stupid
Every time i come across this trope i just think to myself "how hard was it to just make the actual writing incoherent?"
speech to text? lol
@@asierx7047 Right?? Let the madman write an incomprehensible run-on sentence, he's earned it
@@cooly1234 Bruh I wish! Usually our narrator finds this kind of writing in a journal or on a scrap of paper lmao
I tend to appreciate the way the Magnus Archives have gone about telling these stories. It's done through written statements that have been archived and are then recorded and followed up by the archivist of the Magnus Institute.
Oh I absolutely ADORE archives bein used in horror fiction!!
Ever heard of Archive 81?? I personally really adored it.
Do NOT watch the Netflix adaptation. ONLY the podcast itself.
The Netflix adaptation is incredibly unfaithful, bad in my opinion, but ultimately that’s up to the watcher to decide.
Either way, I feel that the structure of the narrative works much better as a podcast, and also I just think the podcast is better, lol.
@@buzzybeez204 heyy! I've never heard of them before. I'll make sure to check it out. At the same time I'll recommend the one I mentioned, lovely work!
And then you get to the part where it explains the way some of those statements are written and demonstrates what statements are like when that one factor gets removed, and it's like "OHHHHHHHHHHHH all the little annoyances make perfect sense now."
This is why I think earlier Magnus seasons are my favorite, I love how John goes out of his way to point out the inconsistencies in the statement, and that doesn’t make the story weaker, but enhances the strangeness of the statement
TMA addressing nearly every point in this video really made me appreciate the podcast so much more.
Where do these people find the time to write all this down? Well, they write it after everything is said and done.
How do they write it so precisely? They don’t, often misremembering details.
Why is everything so eloquently written? Actual lore reasons!
God, "this is X genre it isn't supposed to be realistic" people are the bane of my existence. The realism is what immerses me in a story and allows me to suspend my disbelief. It matters! Also those comments are rude because they just kill conversation. It's saying "just shut up no one cares" like no dude? Who made you moderator of the conversation?
People saying "It's a story with magic and wizards it's not supposed to be realistic lol" in response to people talking about inconsistencies or plot holes drives me up the wall. Just because magic exists doesn't mean the basic fundamentals laws of causality in storytelling don't matter.
yeah honestly it's really such a fucking stupid take. The whole reason "paranormal" and "supernatural" stories scare me is BECAUSE the rest of the world is real and makes sense and that this entity or event is subverting what we expect the real world to look, feel, and act like. These anomalies are supposed to be the exception to the story, not the rule. I mean it's literally in the name, superNATURAL and paraNORMAL, because they are perverting what is considered NORMAL.
That's what happens when boring, uncreative dipshits whose entire personalities are "haha im irony xd" are allowed to express their worthless opinions.
That last point is so true... It comes across as plain rude.
@@weedwhackeraccidentIt gets worse when this point is used as a counter to criticism of inconsistencies and plot holes in the in-universe physics. The critique is being made because the physics of the current story being told go against the physics of the universe that story is said to take place in, not because they don’t align to the physics of our universe like some people claim it to be in critique of.
This critique is extremely valid when the break in physics causes a previous story in the universe to be made worthless because of the change in physics. Now, when you go back to that previous story, you will ask yourself “Why didn’t the characters exploit the physics of the universe in this way like they did in the later story?”
By doing this, the author has shattered the suspense of disbelief in the previous story by being inconsistent with how the in-universe laws of physics operate.
TL;DR, Don’t break your fictional universe’s physics.
Okay, from personal experience, I actually sort of HAVE been in a horror situation where I was writing my final thoughts.
I had been in an abusive relationship that culminated in gunfire. At the point, I was hiding in the woods, and desperately texting my friends and family. I was too scared to call the police, because I thought the sound would give away my location.
So yeah, you have a really good point.
Obviously my situation wasn't fantastical or paranormal in any sort of way, but when I was texting, I wasn't describing hardly anything that was happening at all.
It was more akin to:
"At *location* He has a gun. Still armed and shooting don't know what will happen please tell everyone if I can't tell anyone else please call the cops please tell someone. DO NOT CALL ME. I love you"
And variations of that, choppy, undoubtedly with spelling or grammar errors.
unrelated but I'm glad you got out of that situation and relationship, genuinely hope youre doing well
Same here, that sounds beyond terrifying and I hope you’re doing better now. Thank you for sharing that, it was a really great example of what this type of situation would actually look like and why it’s doesn’t make sense for horror stories that follow a heavily narrative format.
The lack of detail is honestly helpful in a found material style horror story compared to calm detailed descriptions because it lets you imagine what it looks like and what could scare the writer so deeply. Your text example was chilling and I’m glad you got out of such a terrible situation
This is exactly what you'll see in a story where this trope is done well by a competent writer. Earlier diary entries or whatever can be more well-written, then as the protagonist's mental state deteriorates they'll write in a more rushed way, omitting punctuation etc. until the last entry is just a few disjointed words.
jesus, good job getting out
I think one way to fix the “as I’m writing this” trope is to have the narrator believe that they are safe, which makes them believe that they can give all the details they want. However, at the end, your narrator, while writing, realizes that they are in fact NOT safe, as they hastily try to finish their story, or even cut it off altogether.
Imagine a narrator writes a story about going on, idk, a camping trip with their significant other. At the beginning of the story, the narrator states why exactly they are about to right everything down with so much detail, maybe for record keeping, maybe because something feels off and the narrator is trying to retrace their steps, something like that. It can be established, at one point, that the monster of the story is able to shape shift to micic its victims. Perhaps, near the end of the story, the narrator’s significant other dies to the monster, and while the narrator is writing the story in real time after the fact, at their house, they realize that their significant other (or at least, who they THOUGHT was their significant other), is supposedly in the kitchen next to them. The story can abruptly end as the narrator realizes that they are no longer safe in their own home.
That has about the same emotional impact as "and then after the credits the slasher wakes up in the morgue".
@@noatropeHow is that a comparison?
@@JulioMendoza-up1pv I don't remember if this is exactly what I was thinking at the time, but "the protagonist thinks they managed to defeat The Evil, but the denouement reveals their efforts were useless for the sake of an unforeshadowed cliffhanger" seems pretty comparable to me.
But upon seeing the wife, would he not stop writing?
@@MoeSzyslak20the idea is that he’d assumed she died by the end but before leaving he finds her or something
The idea of a horror story being told as a collection of documents goes all the way back to the founding of horror, and I personally always find it very effective. Dracula was a collection of newspaper articles, letters, journal entries, ship logs, and notes taken by the main characters. Frankenstein is a collection of letters. It always makes the horror feel more real when it's being documented by various different sources, and even more so when those sources are something credible like a newspaper or academic publication.
Yes, epistolary is incredible for horror!!
I have a fantasy-horror and I was entirely unsure how to go about writing this and your comment helped lol.
Yeah but there's a difference between "This really weird thing happened to me and I survived and wrote it down" and "the witch is right outside the car waiting to kill me, I hope I don't get a 504 Error when I hit submit on reddit"
@@vvitch-mist20 Happy to help, even if indirectly lol Good luck with your story!
@@FrenkTheJoy Exactly! I guess the point I was trying to make that I didn't exactly get across was that it is more effective when there is a collection of documents rather than just one.
13:39 - "Imagine if [...] we were reading the story as if it were a normal police report, with portions of the notes application interspersed with investigator notes or medical reports, personally that sounds like a more unique story"
please note the entire SCP catalogue.
Bro really just explained the entire SCP format (Unintentionally lol).
My favorite example of horror using this format is definitely SCP-5000, it's just an incredible mystery.
OMG SCP BRO OMG!!!
Well all scp things aren’t horror, and I think you’d have to do research to find really good ones. And the entries aren’t really that super long if I’m not mistaken. I’m no scp fan, so idk for sure
@@pemanilnoobIt very much depends on the article since they're all written by different authors with different levels of connectedness. Most are horror, some are very very long and generally formatted like a report with logs and addenda.
Wrong, at least for more recent entries
Now you need to censor with a black square any little detail and explain why your monster is stronger than the last one
This trope reminds me of the classic Monty Python sketch from the holy grail where they find a carved out section of clay wall detailing a knight's last moments as he wrote about a terrifying beast eating him, only to mock him for writing as he could of been fighting as he slowly carved out "Aaaaaah". I wrote around this trope before when writing for a horror themed competition featuring a POV journal entry at the point the world descended into eldritch chaos. I wrote it from the perspective of someone who has about to die but was unaware of how truly doomed he was and as a result it was light on scares and "horror" as the narrator didn't dissapear into a trail of ellipses as he was getting dragged off to be sacrificed to an aquatic demiurge. This was an excellent video, and your pensive analysis has earned you a new subscriber
"There's a St Aaarghs in Cornwall"
Maybe he was dictating?
"oooooh?"
"no no aaaaagh, in the back of the throat"
@roippi3985 god I loved that joke
@jameswhitehouse2713
If you're a writer entering competitions, then you should know that "could of" is nonsensical and is a common error made by people spelling out the phonetic pronunciation of *could've - as in _could have._
Even "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is written in a present tense retrospective by the narrator while saying he has no appendages or ways of communication, a story inside someone's head directed outwards
I have to say that one of my least favorite things about internet horror, especially podcasts, is the use of gore and death as the exclusive source of tension and horror. Sure, it is scary to find a dead body, or to fear your own death, but I think horror should go beyond that. I don't want to be scared of a ghost because I'm worried it's going to kill me. How does that make it different from a regular person? And some horror podcasts double down on this with the use of gross soundscapes when someone gets stabbed, crushed, or some other horrifying death to witness. And it doesn't scare me, it just grosses me out, though I think this is due to poor use of other horror elements up to that point.
I agree! There are definitely things that can happen to someone that are scarier than death.
It’s different because you can shoot a person
I think it's also cheap.
The same cheap way at how some author use sx to portray romance.
A good way to prevent the "as I write this" from breaking the inmersion is to have a framing device about a second narrator who finds the notes, or the diary, or the video, etc. (that's where the "found" part in "found footage" comes from). A good, although very old, example is the short-story that frightended me the most in my whole life: Arthur Conan Doyle's _The Horror of the Heights._ It starts explaining that a blood-stained notebook that belonged to a missing aviator was found, after giving some context about the missing person it transitions to a transcript of the notebook, where the aviator explains his theory about how a couple of misterious deaths may be evidence of an ecosystem with dangerous predators in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Then it describes how he flew to the upper atmosphere, saw that ecosystem, fought a flying predator and came back to write it down... then a note from the framing device says that the last page just has one or two sentences hastily written with a pencil (in stark contrast with how the rest of the notes are written) says something like "43.000 feet, 3 of those predators chasing me, what an awful way to die" and the story closes by telling us that they found the wreck of the plane but no body.
A lot of people consider that those kinds of framing devices flatten the tension of the story, but if done well they'll create a very dreadfull sense of dramatic irony
yeah!!! a recent example that i love is “The Whistlers” series. great story within the framing device.
Or im westen nichts neues, i thought it was real till the end, when he dies and the last lines are explaining that he died some days before the end of the war. (and i wouldnt mind it just ending when he dies)
its kinda like in movie when you're in the car with two characters, it feels intimate and from their perspective and then when it's a dangerous sequence during stealth or smth, it's a omnipresent narrator
Seriously? "Admosphere"
*atmosphere
I know some accents make "t" sound like "d," but come on. Also, why the hell doesn't spell check activate for that?
Yeah theres a layer to this in the unfiction genre of storytelling, theres the idea that the media and story comes from 3 main ideas
1. The originator, aka the person who experienced it
2. A close party, someone who knew the person who experienced it.
3. An outsider, someone who just stumbled upon this and has no connection to the parties at hand.
the guys that stupid as in those stories probably can't write shit without autocorrect anyway
Absolutely agree with "if anyone finds this" being SUPER mood killer in most stories. I will say, when I was trying to guess what you might think of based on the title of this video, the tendency of "The monster looked just like [monster from popular horror movie] but worse somehow" is the one that drives me up the wall. Folks gotta stop relying on other popular media to describe their own stories.
The funny part is if a writer has a character write an "if anyone finds this" letter, and then doesn't die.
When you have time to write such a letter you aren't in immediate threat but have lost hope, but something could happen to change the circumstances.
And then someone else finds it later when we already know the first character survived.
That awful "it looked just like xyz" thing was why I couldn't get into Godzilla NES, lol. I have no idea why it's so beloved and highly recommended. If you are just looking at the pictures it's great! But if you actually read the text it's 10 chapters of "it looked just like this monster but different. The music sounded just like this track from this other game but different. The level looked like the normal one but different, it reminded me of something else. I was so scared."
@@RM-um9xx Oh my goodness, RIGHT? I love Godzilla, been watching movies since I was a kid and I adore creepy pastas, but that one is just. So. Boring. It drags on way too long, and assumes it's instilling fear when it's just. Plodding. I will never understand the popularity of that one.
@@xxJETSETxx It's been a long time since I read this, so take this with many grains of salt, but I think it's so well-loved because it tries to tell an earnest story, combined with it coming out at a time when a lot of other creepypastas were uninspired, Sonic.exe-esque shlock (I don't recall everything, but I think the main monster was responsible for the death of the narrator's girlfriend? And by defeating it, he finally put her at peace, giving the story an actual definitive conclusion? That was really unheard of for internet horror stories at the time iirc). Combine that with the pictures that had a lot of effort put into them, and it kind of shook up the world of creepypasta.
As for the "looks just like X but worse" trope, I think it CAN be done right, but it just usually isn't. Thinking realistically, we as humans look for patterns everywhere we go, so if something "looks mostly like Sonic, but was bleeding from his eyes and the blood looked unnervingly realistic for my 16-bit Sega Genesis game", I probably wouldn't go into a full detailed description of the monster/demon/whatever, either. Plus, distortions and deformations of recognizable characters are scary. I mean, look at Treasure Island, that's pretty popular.
Though looking back at your comment, you said "monster from popular horror movie" specifically, and not "fictional character." I don't have anything more for that, really, besides the first point I made.
The second one is definitely annoying. Even aside from it basically just stealing from more popular franchises, a general rule of thumb is if your description is something that will likely make the reader stop reading and Google it to make sure they know what you're referencing, then it's a bad description
One of my favorite Nosleeps was when the author explains how they died and are now currently typing the story for reddit as a Ghost in the Afterlife, as like a joking way of explaining how it got uploaded to the internet lmao.
There was another Creepypasta that didn't even bother explaining it, with the narrator being turned into some kind of deer monster by a paranormal forest close to the end. How did he type everything for reddit? Who tf knows.
‘Tis the problem with no sleep stories, it’s required by the rules of the subreddit that it can’t be a story and it has to be an account of something. Problem with that is so many people want to be popular and get thousands of views and upvotes that they cram their original ideas that would work way better in a normal format into the nosleep format
He just used voice to text, obviously
Extra large keyboard, for hooves
Source: Dude trust me
Reminds me of the Candlejack meme, you say his name, and he comes to take you away while you're in the middle of typing your comment out. It's like, who even posts your com
This is exactly why I love the OVA "Ilse's notebook" from Attack on Titan so much.
The characters find a headless corpse holding a notebook, and they soon realize it belonged to a scout member who got seperated from her group.
Upon reading her notebook, it becomes clear she was extremely dedicated to documenting every small detail of her journey. Even right up to the end, when her head was caught between the jaws of a titan, she was still writing down everything about what she was feeling. And then, her writing just... ends.
It's exactly like you said: in a situation like this what would be most important? Ilse wrote everything down because she knew how important it was for the survival of humanity that her meeting with that titan would be documented (It was an extremely abnormal titan.)
And even the less factual, less important information she jotted down was still realistic and impactful. For example, one of the final things she wrote down as the titan was closing in on her was:
"I haven't done a single thing for my parents yet.
I feel sick."
Yea, Ilse's notebook is to this day still one of the best, most haunting "in universe narrator" horror stories I've ever seen.
I was also thinking of this, good to see someone point it out!
EXACTLY I hate when something unrealistic in a fantasy setting is pointed out as poorly done and everyone is like "ReAlIsM iN a WoRlD wiTH WizArDs aNd DraGOnS???!" Like bro, when I say realism I mean in relation to the setting, fantasy is no excuse for bad writing.
Yeah, it actually more into the "believability". Dragon existence is irrational, but it's BELIEVABLE in this setting. Meanwhile, a chain that not tensing after being pulled (and there's no magic at play, purely CGI mistake) is not believable.
(Actually the situation I described above was from a post of Game of Thrones where there's CGI mistake in the scene and everyone defending it by saying "well in the world where dragon exist, chain would be last my concern." I completely forget the picture and questioning whether or not it was from Game of Throne, but I'm really sure I was not hallucinating that post.)
Thank you for covering this. The "if you're reading this" trope is not only overused, but used improperly. It can be such an interesting framing device in the right context, but people treat it like an all-purpose tool. I think they see it as a kind of spice. It gets thrown into stories as a last-minute plot twist, a way to improve immersion, or just an interesting flourish.
When it's used well, though... *chef's kiss* I eat that stuff up.
the go-to example of it being done well has to be H.P. Lovecraft's Shadows over Innsmouth, which has the narrator discovering that he is one of the fish people and basically ending with him having a mental breakdown and writing the final few lines as an entirely different character.
My favourite has to be Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None though. It does the whole "I wrote this all down and put it in a bottle then threw it out to sea" thing, but it's written from the perspective of the murderous mastermind who had orchestrated the entire story, so it makes sense that he had the time and desire to explain everything.
i like the trope of surviving long enough after everyone else to catalogue everything while still waiting for the other shoe to drop is pretty great, but if the context is that someone's writing this as a warning you need to write the whole story with that context. or if they're trying to clear their name or give closure to the victim's families or just write it down so you don't go insane, the whole story's gotta reflect that intention otherwise it just feels like you said, a shitty last-minute plot twist to try and involve the reader
Another thing that makes this kind of self-aware "I am writing this, I am doomed, take heed dear audience!" writing kind of a bummer for us is that it usually prevents a specific kind of . . . conclusive cliffhanger ending, for lack of a better way to describe it. There can something poignant and tragic about a narrative that ends with the in-universe writer running out of time; anxiously promising to come back, to update, to write down the rest of their thoughts once they're in a safe place again and get through whatever's next.
And then the story ends. The implication, by all means, is that the writer must have ended too.
But in order to get that ending, the in-universe writer has to lack enough genre awareness to believe on some level that they might survive in the end. Addressing the audience so directly and tongue-in-cheek just doesn't have that kind of gravitas.
That was one of the high points of Ted the Caver. Having a narrator able to upload bits of the story "as they happen" and then conclude the story with ***spoiler*** plans to return to the cave, but no more update posts after that.
There's no monster ever seen, and the narrator doesn't return alone. So it could be believed that Ted thinks he has a reasonable chance of returning to update.
But even moreso is this sense you get that something is luring them back in. As the reader you can acknowledge that returning to the cave is almost certain death, but there's nothing you can do to prevent the outcome. And no final update post confirms your suspicion.
@@nhooj8882 Ted the Caver is actually a really good example because it's based entirely on a much older short story, and the point where it cuts off is also the point where the original story kind of goes off the rails.
@@-tera-3345 what original story is that? I had always heard the the author came out eventually and said they got the idea from rereading their own caving logs and decided to make it a little scarier. It also came out shortly following the Blair Witch thing, which I would've thought was most of the found footage horror influence. Unless that IS the old short story and is itself actually much older.
Or in a much darker real life example, seeing users post on mental health forums about depression or SH and seeing their posts abruptly stop. Out of the thousands or tens of thousands of these cases, how many people got better and quit the forums, and how many people… didn’t
@@nhooj8882 Ah, after looking into it, it seems that I was misinformed. There was a short story that had circulated as an "original version", complete with a date back to the 1980s, but it was apparently later revealed to be a fabrication, made after Ted to look like an original. I remember seeing it circulated, but never heard about it being outed as a fake.
It is called "The Fear of Darkness", by Thomas Lera, and you can find free pdfs of it online pretty easily. But it's... not very good.
Thank you. I despise the argument that because something is supernatural, it isn't supposed to be realistic. One of the most important aspects to horror, if not THE most important aspect, is immersion; the idea that it could be real, or at the least, feels real. It's like the "it's not supposed to be good, it's for kids" argument. I can understand it, but ultimately it's an excuse more often than not.
It's totally an excuse.
The implication that children should just get garbage is absurd.
Outside horror, we could look at Puss in Boots: The Last Wish compared with I dunno Shrek 3.
@@kamikeserpentail3778
It's the difference between Avatar: The Last Airbender and Mr Blobby.
We all deserve good fiction.
But that's all ultimately subjective. One of my favorite horror stories 'The Metamorphosis' by Kafka is a piece of surreal horror which is flagrantly unrealistic, and according to you that makes it poor piece of horror fiction
By definition something supernatural is unrealistic. It exists outside the natural world. Fiction is a departure from the natural world as-well. I expect my fiction to be exactly as realistic as the premise calls for and that's the criteria I will judge it on.
There is a semantic failure here. Realism means 'To adhere to natural world" Immersion means to 'Captive the audience with a sense of an involved experience'
At no point do I feel like the events of 'The Metamorphosis" could transpire but it does make me feel immersed.
Things can be immersive without being realistic you’re just picky lol
@@firebrand4074
Equally valid.
Convincing vs Realistic is a discussion we need to have.
That’s actually why I like Are You Scared so much. Shane and Ryan constantly make fun of the unbelievably bad plot lines lmao
One of my favorite horror movies is called Don't Blink. I have yet to meet anyone else who knows it.
Basically, a bunch of people go to a cabin/hotel thing for a vacation and find out that everyone there is gone. It even sounds like the bugs and birds are gone. The only clue is written on a wall: Don't blink.
When characters aren't being looked at, they disappear. This leads to some fun shots that don't make total sense narratively. In one, the characters are standing in a circle with the camera in the middle. As the characters argue the camera pans around them. You barely notice when one of them vanishes.
As characters disappear and more weird shots like that happen, those who remain get increasingly desperate and volatile. As the night goes on, the last two struggle to stay awake. They look at each other in a mirror; one nods off for just long enough, and we watch shadowy hands slip out of the darkness and quietly pull the other into oblivion. It's a great effect.
Anyway, the police arrive. They rescue the final girl, who hangs her head in a police car. Suddenly, all noise ceases. She sits up. Every cop has vanished.
In the last shot, she looks in the car's rear-view mirror, her eyes in the reflection trained on the camera. She closes her eyes. We cut to black. Then, credits roll.
The ending recontextualizes the shots where characters vanish because the camera couldn't see them even though other characters could. In all but one case, characters vanish "offscreen" for the viewer. We can wonder about it until we realize that the main eye whose blinks the story cares about are the camera's. The camera is itself an active participant, and it is always threatening to disappear either another or itself. The ending smartly recontextualizes the horror, which still pervades as nothing evey provides any reason to explain what's happening. I love that it refuses to make sense, to provide closure, to give a hint. It's wonderful, and it deserves more love.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Blink_(film) is this the one your talking about? I found the trailer and honestly it’s a pretty cool effect. Pretty creative imo. Edit: After doing some more digging I found an interesting theory on the movie. The theory says that what happens the last girl at the end of the movie is actually what happens to the people that disappear, because that’s the only time we see several people disappear. It kinda messes with the “the camera is an active participant” angle, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless.
@@Misclicking_orc Yep, that's the one! And, to be honest, it's been years since I've seen it, so I'm not 100% confident with my reading, but I think it's probably still a valid reading just as the theory you found is.
Honestly what I love more about it than that idea of the camera is just how committed it is to refusing to give any "answers." Horrible things happen to people who don't deserve it. That's all.
For me it's such a meaningless twist. It's the prose equivalent of "they're not really dead!" in movies. Show the dead villain open their eyes, show a hand burst out of the ground. Fozzie Bear might as well pop up going wokka wokka wokka! I feel like it means to end with a chill but it's such a cliche it's like popping a balloon.
Okay but fr we need a Fozzie Bear slasher fic
@@julias.6658
It's what Jim would have wanted.
The only time I think this worked was in Halloween, when Michael is supposedly dead- but when Loomis goes to look, he isn’t there. Then the camera cuts to different shots of the dark neighborhood with the sound of his breath and an ominous tune in the background. His story ended with a question mark, and Laurie’s nightmare didn’t end with the credits. It was a fitting end for an enigmatic villain that was meant to represent the general idea of “this can happen to anyone, you aren’t immune”.
Michael isn’t so much a character as he is a force of nature- unstoppable and inevitable, and I think that’s what makes him so scary.
@@LeBatteur I feel like the grab at the end of Carrie is effective too.
I hate first person stories where they die
To this day the Are you scared story about the guy hiding in his attic against a home intruder is the best episode they've put out and it's made even scarier knowing it's a real story
Yes! Genuinely one of the scariest no-sleep stories I’ve heard, first time I heard it it sent me into a paranoia every time I was home alone or went to bed for like, a week. Had me start keeping a weapon near my bed.
YO I ALWAYS REWATCH IT, its genuinely so amazing and i miss the earlier episodes. i wish they did the “real or fiction” framing cause i dont like the newer episodes as much
Do you remember what the episode was called?
Yep, the new ones are kinda shitty. Yes, some of them are actually good in being a story but what's the point. It's a Story.
I think my favorite was the one about the bleeding ocean thing, like just the image of this guy hearing screaming that is so ungodly horrifying and unbearable that he would rather never hear again than be forced to listen to for another moment and literally deafens himself just seems to strike a nerve with me.
There's a difference between realistic and believable in fiction and I think what you're talking about is an issue of believability rather than realism. A story can be believable, as in everyone's actions make sense and you can immerse yourself in the story without thinking too much about the fact this is something someone wrote, while involving things that are unrealistic. A good example of this is the flatline sound that most media uses as a way to signify someone is dead. Realistically, that sound just means the heart monitor is unplugged, but it's been so ingrained in the general zeitgeist by now that it's still not necessarily immersion-breaking even if you know it's not how it works in reality (though it might still bother some people I guess). It's like in magic circle theory (normally applied to games but I think it works with your contract metaphor to a degree) - the flatline sound is a rule we've already agreed to as part of "a story" despite its lack of realism, the narrator sitting calmly to write an embellished narrative is not.
'I do not want my media to be _realistic,_ I want my media to be _convincing.'_
- Mary P. Sue on Tumblr.
How would a heart monitor actually function if the heart stopped beating?
@@coreymurray432 It beeps when it senses a beat. So, no beat, no beep.
@@-JaggedGrace- Thanks :)
As a content creator within the horror space, you hit the nail on the head when it comes this trope. Truth be told, the rule of making sure the nosleep post reads like a post is one of the biggest reasons why I've stopped reading those stories. I started trying to write my own/stuck with fanfiction. My wife and I produce short horror stories/audio productions for the MLP fandom and others, and surprisingly enough, its where I stayed for a while because I had more freedoms in terms of what the narrative of what those stories could do than compared to the nosleep stories. They unfortunately have a formula because of the rules in place, and in turn, I sometimes fear it will just stifle creativity.
Anyways, I loved this video. I'm subbing and when I'm not drowning in editing, I want to watch the rest of your channel. lol
It makes it feel like you're reading a note in a video game. You aren't living the story with the protagonist, you're being told it after the fact, like they're telling it to you at the watercooler, it sucks all the life out of it
My favorite horror stories have always been the ones that "stay close to home," so to speak. I've listened to and read a fair number of stories that spiral into stale tales of cosmic malevolent monsters and whatnot after having strong openings about average-day horrors that no monster could compare to. To this day, my favorite horror story (in the form of a short film) is "Maggie May" by director Mia’kate Russell, which tells the story of the simple haunting horror of malicious inactivity. Doesn't introduce any sudden magical monster out of the blue, which is probably the fastest way for me to lose interest in a horror story.
Always hate it when stories end this way. Whenever an author brings in cosmic entities, alternate dimensions, time travel, etc, it always kills it for me - unless it's obviously done well, or about that from the start. I feel the authors look at it as a cheap way of making the story appear more complex than it is.
@@TheMartyandy If you just bring these things in randomly they're usually bad, but stories about this from the beginning can be seriously terrifying
After watching a ton of horror games and listening to a few stories, what scares me the most is home invasion.
I love cosmic horror, but it is incredibly difficult to pull off correctly.
A problem occurs when the author tries too hard to explain what is happening.
One of the pillars of cosmic horror is the characters not necessarily really understanding it.
Another problem is attributing too much blatant malevolence to things that really have no need to have that personal touch.
Cosmic horror is usually meant to be grand in scope, often involving things that truly don't care about harming humanity, much a specific individual.
When the motives are explained it takes something of incomprehensible form and power, and then reduces it to a minor paranormal thing. A poltergeist throwing a fit, incapable of causing real harm.
It's like anime always trying to up the ante, but that backfires when used incorrectly, it lowers the stakes.
@@kamikeserpentail3778something that quickly shows the malevolence problem of cosmic horror is the channel LightsOut.
Some of their work is good, but when they touch cosmic horror it really feels like “eldritch moon decided to target you, the cameraman, specifically, out of every single person on the planet”
Too many people conflate realism with immersion, theres this rule i learned about with scifi/fantasy, that just because the world is unrealistic, doesn't mean it should lack rules, everything SHOULD make sense in the universe this takes place in, and in specific cases, characters shouldnt be self aware that these things are abnormal, as in their universe it is the norm, but in cases like horror this rule can be ignored somewhat, because in most characters these mystical chaotic events are new to them, before they were in the horror, their rules were 1:1 with our own. But the characters should stil work on basic logic, they should act like a human.
I think every story starts with the assumption that everything works the same as our world, and only change when we are told differently. So we assume humans in any story aren’t suicidal, or dumb as a sloth. Also, the main changes from our world to theirs should be defined as close to the beginning of the story as possible.
@-JaggedGrace- it rarely happens and I'm not sure I can even give an example, but an interesting technique in horror is when they leave everything ambiguous and only at the end do you learn what's happening. Sometimes the main character is learning that with you, but what I like is when the character knows, but since it's normal to them they don't tell you.
Actually, I have an example. In the short story "the sentry" (go read it!!)
HP Lovecraft wrote a bit about this in his essay "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" - he uses the word "realism", but would probably concede to "immersion" under the circumstances, and I think he'd certainly agree about things making sense within the implied boundaries established for the story in its early paragraphs alongside things like genre, setting, and the like:
"In writing a weird story I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere, and place the emphasis where it belongs. One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately-with a careful emotional “build-up”-else it will seem flat and unconvincing. Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel. In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy...."
-HPL "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
In a story like that forest witch story, the writer probably failed to establish the proper boundaries early in the story for what "real" is in context of the story's content, then failed to properly treat the forest witch (or the forest she lives in or whatever) effectively as the story's unambiguous wonder, and finally failed to manage the storytelling device of writing down the narrator's last words in a way that didn't overpower the story's central wonder by being at least as hard to explain convincingly as any witch would be!
A good proofreader should catch that before the story is published, an editor definitely should catch it, the author should have caught it before it left the rough draft stage, and so on!
That is, these amateur internet horror stories fail at things like this because the very format is fairly unforgiving: we're asking amateur, inexperienced, untutored storytellers to get their story right in a medium where they are basically dumping their rough draft out into public without revision, editing, or any of the other tools that could take a flawed story premise and polish it up into at least entertaining hack filler suitable for a low-budget pulp magazine.
These stories are being set up to fail as proper stories, and I'll bet that the best "CreepyPasta" tales are those that were probably written by people with some writing talent, trained and practiced writing skills, and/or the benefits of an extra set of eyes and a little time and effort to develop a rough draft into something presentable for public consumption, where the majority of these stories are simply dumped from stream-of-consciousness directly to the internet!
Maybe Reddit/4-Chan/whatever should filter these stories through some sort of a volunteer "Fix My Story" clinic before they are submitted to the sort of criticism that this video would probably rather give them? I have a feeling that a review of the work of the "fixers" who can actually improve the work enough to pass for a proper story might be more interesting than reviewing the stories themselves!
The usual rule with science fiction is that you are only allowed to break one rule. One law of physics
I think the trope has been popularized by horror games. The issue is the main fear comes from what the player could have happen to them, the doomed log details that potential outcome while providing a clue on how to avoid it or foreshadow a new enemy.
Removing the frame just leaves the doomed dialogue. A purposeless fragment. ITCHY TASTY.
God notes in horror video games can piss me off so much. There's almost never any reason given for why the person is even writing the note in the first place, much less writing that specific thing in that specific way and leaving it in that specific place. There are so many cases where no more thought is given to how they fit into the story other than as a cheap excuse to drop a lore dump. It's little more than "I can't be bothered to find a way to integrate the backstory into the game, so I wrote it all out in plaintext to leave lying around the map."
I agree, but even then Bioshock and its consequences have been a disaster for video game storytelling. Having every character be obsessed with recording themselves is incredibly contrived and became a lazy way for devs to add exposition without having to create and implement characters that the player can actually interact with. The only worse trend I can think of is Bethesda style "environmental storytelling" aka saying it's ok your supposed RPG has about four highly railroaded quests total, because the map designers stacked some physics objects on top of each other to show that "people totally live in this world bro!" The fact that redditors generally consider these writing methods *good* is exactly why you see them pop up in places they absolutely shouldn't
@@wikipediafollower agreed but also what if you incorporate the idea of the characters being obsessed with recording into their characterization? Maybe they're delusional and insane, maybe they're compelled to for something that happened in their past, maybe it's a way to cope, maybe it's to deliver a message or maybe they're paranoic, maybe they have psychological damage caused by the Operator that causes them to be obsessed with surveiling themselves and others for the sake of some kind of false sense of security or maybe it's The Collection forcing and compelling people to record everyone and everything so that it's final video will be complete and everyone will watch it and they will finally be unstoppable as they take over the brains of everyone. Maybe the obsessive recording is supposed to be ridicoulous, for the sake of absurdism or comedy, maybe satire, or maybe it shouldn't really matter as long as the writing and content itself is good enough to excuse the over recording of everything. Or maybe you shouldn't record EVERYTHING but only some things leaving other things unknown and to the imagination.
@wikipediafollower wrong, is amnesia who doomed us.
@@-tera-3345the only game I've seen do this good is Knock Knock. Notes you RANDOMLY find around YOUR OWN HOUSE are torn out pages of YOUR OWN DIARY that somehow went missing from YOUR OWN house, and are all written either by your near completely mental and self-doubting protagonist or someone else, and most of the time dont even contain anything helpful/informative and instead either mock you, confuse you, contain a piece of a very confusing story that have seemingly zero connection with the game's events (a weird storyline telling of a guy in some dictatorship country thats doing dictatorship things even though the game itself is about a scientist in a house in a forest with no ties to society whatsoever that doesnt even make sense in itself as it is cut somewhere in the middle with events being very different in the span of just one absent page), or a page describing one of many weird ritual instructions.
I think it would be cool to see a story that gets updated over time like an actual Reddit post from something like r/Relationships. The first post would be about someone looking for possible explanations for weird stuff they've begun to notice, and it slowly builds up across updates. After it's been well established that OP may be in some kind of active danger, the account just goes radio silent, with no answers given about what happened to OP.
I do this. This is like just general more traditional unfiction, some people dislike it because they feel "tricked" or "lied to" but like. I feel like it's a wonderful fun thing to do and can be amazing if done well
@@ToxikBoxyou can get around that by making fake forum posts like Candle Cove
I'm not sharing my skin with my new partner of 5 months, AITA?
I think that's kind of the basic premise behind a lot of the "alternate reality" horror subgenre and a lot of other emerging social-media based horror media. I'm pretty sure I've glimpsed examples using chat-room and forum-post formats before, and I don't really follow this stuff at all!
Even so, I agree - I was just remarking a little earlier that this "trope" - the Apocalyptic Log - in its current form is a product of early Gothic Literature, and it is still being used that way by modern writers, even though media and culture has changed as people have transitioned from hand-written diaries and letters sent via snail-mail to modern social media... the trope made the leap pretty gracefully from print onto film and TV in the form of Found Footage, but for some reason seems to have struggled a little to adjust to social media! It seemed to me that these "CreepyPasta" writers might have benefited a bit from stopping a moment to actually look at what chatroom, text massage, Reddit/4-Chan posts, or UA-cam comments actually look like in real life!
@@pietrayday9915 You seem to be one of the few people in this entire comment section that actually knows what they're talking about in terms of literary analysis, but I do not think you've read a lot of creepypasta. While that is true for media that has that trope in it, my problem with this video is that it generalizes it to the entire medium, I believe that this trope while it obviously exists, and was a bigger problem a decade ago, the (extremely fragmented) scene has evolved past that for the most part and most actual creepypasta and unfiction actually does understand how these formats and medium work, I recommend reading the SCP wiki's GAW tales, as a lot of those are really good chatroom fiction, just also recommend SCP in general cause those really understand and use format very well, including their Parawatch hub which is for more traditional forum creepypasta that's always really good, I also recommend both Bogleech's creepypasta and the event he used to host "Creepypasta Cook-Off" which has some of the best pastas I've ever read. I also want to comment that creepypasta does not mean diagetic and neither does general ARG web interactive media like this. Although most of it is presented diagetically and it's cool and awesome to do so and I love unfiction, I feel like it's too complex and big and fragmented and it's such a vague widespread scene that generalizing and saying that most if not all of it has this trope and "it's ruining horror media" is dumb.
I think this is why my favorite nosleep is the park ranger series. It's a guy with some experience in the strange occurences but he's mostly retelling other people's stories of being out in the woods. the comments on these are also all fantastic, full of other people recounting their own strange occurences in the woods.
As a folklorist, I love seeing people cite JAF and other folklore publications! I appreciate interest in our scholarship :) It's just about people and what we do and how we interact with each other! It's so cool! However, I don't think that creepypastas qualify as anti-legends. I haven't done much research into anti-legends (although my research is related to legend scholarship), but I did go read the Tom Mould article you cited, and the Whitney Phillips article that is part of the same forum. As you can see in the screenshot in the video, Bill Ellis said, "antilegends work more effectively than simple debunkings to clear legends from circulation." The purpose of an anti-legend is to counter legends and make people stop believing in them. An anti-legend, as far as I understand it, isn't considered to be a legend. Creepypastas are! Slenderman is a particularly well studied example of a contemporary legend. I know this isn't a huge deal, but I did want to let you know :) I really enjoyed the video! Citing folklorists is basically an automatic sub for me.
I'm not entirely sure what an anti-legend is supposed to be but I think your comment explained it better than the video.
Would an anti-legend be something like this?:
"Me and my buddies went Bigfoot hunting because my cousin saw one in the woods. But instead we just found a tall hairy lumberjack."
@@Shadowonwater sorry, I don't get notifications for replies to my comments! (I hope you do and see this, lol.)
The scenario you described could go one of two ways, depending on context. If it was said by someone who actually went Bigfoot hunting and only saw a lumberjack, it would be narrative about a legend trip, wherein the narrator performed ostensive action (going Bigfoot hunting) in order to participate in the legend.
An anti-legend parodies a legend as a way to critique it (this is almost verbatim what Mould said in his article). So, if the context instead is that the person is making a joke and pointing out to their audience the "absurdity" of Bigfoot legends, it would be an anti-legend. Anti-legends rely a lot on context and are effective only when they parody a recognizable legend. I would say Bigfoot is quite a recognizable legend, so, yeah, that could be an anti-legend, but the context ultimately determines whether it is or isn't.
@@aelektra Thank you for answering my question!
I was a huge nosleep fan for years, but eventually got bored of it due to this exact reason. It not only constrains the story, but in a way, it kind of spoils the ending. You know that 100% of the time, the author survives; they HAD to upload it to the subreddit somehow. I've moved on to other sites where you get a wider array of story-telling methods. I now enjoy a mix of first and third person stories, some aware that they're being posted to the internet, some not, some that are continuous, some that jump across time and characters. It's much more enjoyable with variety.
Mortal peril is simply the easiest way to write a thriller, so people default to that even in formats that take the wind from its sails. Imo self-reporting stories are better off focusing on having to deal with the aftermath or the consequences of what happened (maybe a companion didn't make it, or the subject had to do something heinous to survive, or witnessed something that will haunt them), seeing as it's a given that they survived the threat. The Telltale Heat is much more horrific as a story about the weight of guilt and paranoia on the murderer than it would have been as a story about the murder itself from the victim's perspective.
So you went from NoSleep to getting sleepy.
You know what format I've been thinking about writing a story in that I haven't seen explored yet? A wiki. Not just a wiki article, of which I've seen many times, but an entire wiki, where the story is not only told non-linearly, but where there are multiple pages that are hyperlinked throughout, allowing a completely choose-your-own-adventure-esque story, letting you choose to either read each page before jumping to another, or constantly be slipping through pages to get explanations.
That's pretty interesting. I'm sure you're aware of the similarities, but the SCP community is basically that, just with multiple contributors, and it's more of a universe than one cohesive story. I'd like to read something like what you're describing, or hell, write one myself. Probably the topic of the wiki would be extremely important for the whole thing to work well. Could also get very House of Leaves in that you have to comb through edit histories from multiple authors for more details that flesh out the broader timeline and context of the story. Would make for a fantastic ARG now that I think about it.
That would be insane
Wiki fiction I LOVE WIKI FICTION. I've been meaning to do stuff like this for a while as I love things like SCP and House of Leaves. There was a Minecraft ARG a bit ago that ended with a huge amount of archived deleted Wikipedia pages with information on it that wasn't real. It was awesome. I have my own wiki myself and I just kind of write whatever in whatever format I want but I do definitely try to stick to Wikipedia styled pages
Brainstorming here. How would you build the story structure of rising tension and climax? Maybe a sort of diamond structure to hyperlinks: you access the wiki with one page, that page hyperlinks to a bunch of others, and this pages have links, and so on until a certain point where it all leads to a singular article. And also after a certain “stage” in the hyperlink structure, you begin to access articles that you cannot find normally by search
@@gigachadgaming1551 It would necessarily have to be divorced from a standard story structure. Either the story itself would need to be hidden somehow, perhaps with unlinked wiki pages that need to be manually searched for after getting references from other articles, or the story would need to be not directly told, with bits and pieces being gleaned from different articles. Or an entirely different structure I haven't thought of.
As someone above mentioned, this would be a type of fiction like House of Leaves, where there are many documents to go through and consume, and the full story is only learned through reading all supplementary material and putting it all together. Nlt an easy task by any means, but I think it would be possible.
It started with HP Lovecraft. Most of his stories are written in that whole recollective present-tense usually concluding with some sort of “and here I am, terrified and running out of time with my feather and ink” bit. It always eliminates really juicy tension for me, personally
As much as I like Lovecraft, I distinctly remember in "Dagon" where the author pretty much even narrates his own jumping out of a window ("The window! The window!"). Despite this being one of my favorite short stories, I can't help but hate that ending.
@@MariaIsabellaZNN last I read Dagon I was like,, 15? I always thought that those exclamations at the end were about him being spotted through the window by something outside, but now that I think about it wow yeah that's impressively shitty lmao
Nope - it definitely did NOT start with Lovecraft - it's at least as old as the Gothic Literature genre itself, playing roles in "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" and Poe's "MS Found in a Bottle" and many other classics of the genre. Lovecraft rather enjoyed the trope and used it frequently over the decades he wrote, sometimes for a sillier effect (he had more of a sense of humor than he gets credit for) and other times fore a more serious effect... where he's being sillier with it, it's not a mistake, and he's poking a little fun at some of the conventions he works in, sometimes in stories that were originally written for friends (fellow writers contributing to the same magazines he was) rather than the general public per se.
Stories like "Dagon", "In The Vault", "Herbert West: Re-Animator", "The Picture in the House", and a few others show Lovecraft being just a bit more playful than perhaps we come to expect from a "master of horror", but there's still some quality weird fiction going on in there - Lovecraft dabbled in a few different horror subgenres in his time, including horror-comedies before those were cool.
"Dagon" can be thought of as a less serious version of the same ideas that would be developed into "The Call of Cthulhu"and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" a few years later, and you can see a very different effect in the treatment of the "Apocalyptic Log" gimmick in those later stories: Lovecraft demonstrates in those stories that he knows exactly how and why the "trope" works, and how to use it in different ways to get different effects that work with the story on a serious level, rather than being something that the horror can work in spite of - for example, in "The Call of Cthulhu" the diary-writing device is given a very ambitious treatment by mixing it up as a letter accompanying a last will and testament attached to a collection of evidence that includes ship's logs, newspaper clippings, journals and diaries, and so on, which were compiled by the investigator over a period of years, with the implications only adding up to something dangerously sinister at the very last, and the danger itself being something far more patient, subtle, and inevitable than a monstrous hand at the window! Meanwhile, in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", the fishy threat is not coming through the window to get the investigator, but is instead coming from within him not to threaten him with instant death, but instead to liberate him from his human form and lead him to a new freedom and triumphant immortality under the sea, leaving the writer time to explain his plans for his final acts on earth before he carries them out himself on his own timeline.... It's pretty effective stuff, with the usual caveats about mileage varying subjectively on things like art, music, and literature!
Anyway, it's unlikely that all of those "CreepyPasta" writers are familiar with Lovecraft's work, especially given that there is nothing else remotely Lovecraftian about most of those stories, and it's more likely instead that it's a combination of the arbitrary rules about writing "in character", combining with imitations of other "CreepyPasta" writers using the same device, and the fact that the "Apocalyptic Log" trope is a pretty intuitive one to use at this point, for amateur writers who have grown up with its visual equivalent for film and television, Found Footage, and the otherwise ubiquitous use of the trope in horror stories and Gothic literature for a very, very long time (for example, Edgar Allan Poe stories using variations on this storytelling device were required reading in American high school literature classes for a long time through my formative years, and are probably still included in school lessons to this day!) And, no doubt, a lot of spooky literature for kids and young adults uses and abuses this trope as well: I suspect a lot of readers come into contact with it through "Goosebumps" or Harry Potter or whatever, sometimes being parodied, without really understanding where it came from or why it was ever used or how it worked when it was used seriously!
Honestly, with that in mind, I can't help thinking that actually reading more stories from the likes of Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, Brahm Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Stephen King, and the like might actually improve the quality of the horror stories using cliches like this, rather than making them worse, though a lot is still going to depend on whether the writers have the basic writing, creative writing, literature/humanities appreciation, and reading comprehension skills to work with to begin with in putting a coherent story together with or without storytelling devices like the Apocalyptic Log!
@@MariaIsabellaZNN according to others in this very comment section, HP Lovecraft *knew* this, and did it because it was already overused all those years ago.
Brief aside from the POV section: I highly recommend In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, specifically for playing with second-person narration. This was a great video, loving this channel!!
oh absolutely!! i love that book, it's very well written
Machado is a total genius. If I can return your recommendation with another, her short story "The Husband Stitch" shook me to my core. One of the most impressive short stories I've ever read.
I genuinely feel this sentiment. All of my "stories" intake is strictly YT. I barely even know what creepy pasta and subbreddit are. Once younhave listened to several dozen or maybe a hundred or so, you can start to tell which stories are overly embelished and have loopholes.
Thank you for bringing this issue to light.
try reading books, they are way better than youtube and im not kidding.
They’re all embellished by virtue of being a fictional story and I believe the term you’re looking for is “plothole.”
@@friendformationbotwhy would anyone think you’re kidding
This is another reason I love The Books of Blood by Clive Barker. In-universe these stories are all written down, but via psychic so you are well aware the story may end in everyone dying. They are not in first person, but the ghost angle means it has a similar oomph to me as a "first hand" story
Clive is so amazing
What Dreams May Come does this rather well.
I remember reading a scary story on tumblr once about a a father that went all out on making a haunted house to be better than the neighbors.
To the point that the father used his 2 month old son as a “decoration”..
I can’t find the story anymore but to this day, that shit stuck with me. I read it in 2013.
I think the best use of this trope is when it’s used in stories about cognitohazards. Particularly with stories where the only way to get rid of the hazard is to pass it on to someone else. That’s a great explanation: The author is telling you this because they can’t take it anymore and are so worn down that they’re willing to pass it on to you, the reader. The original Smile Dog story does this, and was pretty effective on young kids who had nightmares about it, since the entity literally comes to victims in their dreams. An animated short I watched recently did it too, and I remember smiling at the end when I realized where things were going. It’s fun when utilized correctly.
Was the The Worm?
I feel like people often mix up realism and believability when they're talking about stories, like you can have all sorts of fantastical and non-realistic things and plot lines but if the characters aren't responding to it in a believable way you're going to lose people
(That's not to say they have to respond realistically though, I'm a big fan of magical realism where characters will act like the weird stuff that's happening is totally normal, but within the context of the world of the narrative it should be believable)
The best way to use this trope is to actually have the reader not be reading the original transcript, but have them see everything from the perspective of the person who found it and was given the information. Look at video games for this. Many horror games you find small notes but you find out more than fills in the gaps
i love this video because it highlights the necessity of understanding basic literary structure and devices within narrative and storytelling. as you pointed out, there are so many way for authors to take these concepts and be creative, and it allows their story to be immersive and meaningful. neglecting these important concepts can take you out of the story or make it feel disjointed. thanks for sharing this super interesting concept!
For me the scariest thing someone can write is a story that portrays happiness in places the viewer knows is wrong.
Example, Midsommar. And what I like most is the soundtrack, it follows what the characters feel rather than what the viewers are supposed to feel, which is amazing, and also leads to many times where there's a happy sounding theme when there's something wrong happening. Around the end everyone is happy even when that house burns, and what I love (scares me) most is nobody is there freaking out, so that leaves the viewer feeling manipulated. The viewer knows what's happening is wrong, but in the movie there's no characters to affirm that, just happy people (especially the main character, who we were following through pretty much the entire thing, who we followed through her trauma. After all that, she finds happiness at something the viewer knows shouldn't bring comfort.) There's no justice, because all that fucked up stuff was seen as good in the eyes of everyone at the end. The main character finds peace and it's portrayed as a happy ending when the viewers feel it's all wrong.
And the viewer is only left with one thought as the movie ends, "this isn't right." And when I first watched it, I literally felt brainwashed. I didn't comprehend how exactly until analyzing it, but in that initial moment of not understanding why I felt that way was frightening. And from that point on I've been in love with that concept of horror.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this, but Midsommar is the only one I could think of :P
There's a Credibility Budget. If you get overdrawn, or spend unwisely on shit that doesn't matter, your story goes broke.
Maybe it's a paradox? "I'm sitting here writing this down as I wait to die" is a horrible opening to a story, but it would be something that would be realistic to write if you were actually writing down your last message. So you have to open the story with suspense in a way that would be overly belaboring the point of a final message in reality. It works in Lovecraft stories like Dagon because while it is a "five seconds before death" story, the narrator himself doesn't know that until the last five seconds. That's probably the key, because suspense only works in a first person dictation if everyone involved is suspenseful; or the bad thing has already happened like in "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".
thats not what a paradox is, friend
@@friendformationbot Contradictory elements both being true is what a paradox is.
Not a horror movie but I just watched Tokyo Godfathers and will say that movie is the best example of a trope being used correctly. The movie depends heavily on plot contrivance but it's about Christmas miracles so everything is a hilarious coincidence.
Tokyo Godfathers is so good I wish more people knew about it :0
From one side I can agree with the point about how ridiculous the trope and you would never wrote something like this in extreme danger. But from another side as a person who wrote such notes while sitting in a 80s soviet bomb shelter in the beginning of war in Ukraine, while Russian troops was about a mile away from me, I can somewhat understand that. But in my notes I was more concentrated on my feelings about the situation and my surroundings, not retelling the dialogue with other people, even if it was mentioned in the notes.
I think that's the big skill bar that makes the trope fail in most writers' hands. You have to exert a lot of self-restraint (and empathy) to write only what a person in that actual setting would care to write about. Then it works. But as soon as you let the desire to add those unfitting but oh-so-juicy details win out, it fails the believability test.
This trope it way more bearable than something like “it was a dream the entire time” even though they essentially do the same thing: they take away the urgency, the stakes, making the horror have no lasting impact because why would you be afraid of something that isn’t a danger? One of my favorite things is to leave the story with an ambiguous ending, or hint at the thing (whatever it is) still effecting this person’s life or continuing to torment them in a non lethal way, like a predator toying with its meal.
Almost every single creepypasta has a line "and then I saw it" and it drives me insane.
Because of that damn subreddit every single new creepypasta is basically the exact same
Random thoughts: The Magnus Archives are one of my favorite examples of a collection of horror stories with an explanation for why and how they're being told. Most of the stories range from solid to great, and it also has a great over-arching narrative about the world that all the stories are taking place in, the people who have collected and are archiving them, what the stories ARE and why they're happening. Highly recommend.
Also, I don't think i've ever read a novel that made extensive use of second-person perspective until recently: Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. It's the second book in a series. Half of it is second person, for a very good reason that actually shapes and informs your perspective on what is happening/has happened in the book. Definitely recommend both it and the first book (Gideon the Ninth). Can't speak for the rest of the series, as I haven't read it yet.
Seeing 2nd person POV used in Harrow The Ninth was so fucking cool. And it was actually the second book I’d read that used it to that extent! The first one was The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Both of them have inspired me to play around with 2nd person POV sections in my own horror story.
The explanation for tma is great, nobody gives statements in a way that people actually speak/write but making it part of the power of the archivist makes it believable, especially in ep 100 where since there's no archivist nobody can string a sentence together. Add that to the way they filter out the fake statements by making the real ones not record digitally while still implying they get a lot of nonsense and it's just a perfect way of explaining the genre conventions with an in world explanation.
As a big fan of are you scared I think it is very accurate that the stories are always either a huge swing or a huge miss
i hate most of the stories, but Shane and Ryan make it entertaining.
but i don’t think most people are watching ‘are you scared?’ for the compelling storytelling. tbh, some of the best episodes have the worst stories.
I've been reading nosleep since basically the beginning, let me tell you the narrator switch used in the elevator story has been pulled off in some really creative ways and is more common than you think. I've seen it framed as like, transcripts of audio/video recordings, online posts, journal entries, all kinds of stuff. That also lets you be more flexible with the narrator's fate as you saw in that example. I think a lot of the smarter writers there deserve some serious credit because if you really look you'll find they did account for this. I think since a lot of people read Reddit on their smart phones now it's become more obvious that someone being trapped in a dangerous situation but still finding time to sit down and type out a whole properly written and formatted story and post it is just too outlandish to be striking. So with that in mind you see more people come up with more creative ways to get around it.
Speaking of good writing, the script for this video was really great, really solid stuff. I clicked this half expecting a "haha horror stories are campy schlock" deal but you really turned in something cool. Totally agree with everything here. Nice job, dude.
The Magnus Archives has a good format, by only ever featuring the thoughts of the survivors - only the people who make it out of whatever shit happened get to make a statement, and a lot of word choices make more sense there. If you're sketching your final moments on paper, it should be very to the point. If you're recounting it long after, it makes sense to include every little detail. Plus, it's interesting to see how each small tale relates to the larger story taking place across the series
not a horror piece but the book I recently published is written by one of the characters in the book and he references he's writing it, but he doesn't go "if anybody finds this" or so on, he goes "I've decided to open my report/confession by saving the police some time filing paperwork about me:" and then proceeds to give his name, occupation, address, and future cause of death. he isn't in a rush and is somewhat taking his time as he writes, almost mockingly about why he's going to die after finishing the paper.
yeah Nabokov did this in Lolita in 1955
@@friendformationbot it was a major inspiration. Truly a good book. To bad so many pedos ignore the clear and blatant subtext.
@@buckbumble1872I think most of the people that miss the “subtext” in that book are people that think the book is bad because it’s pro pedophile (obviously it’s not). I haven’t heard any pedophiles cite that book as being good because the main character is a pedophile but I do see a lot of people incapable of understanding that just because the bad guy is the protagonist doesn’t mean the author thinks he’s a good guy. Of course I could be wrong, there may be tons of pedos saying that idk.
There's the famous Film Noir crime drama, "D.O.A." (1950), which opens with this bit of dialogue:
Homicide Detective: Can I help you?
Frank Bigelow: I'd like to see the man in charge.
Detective: In here...
Frank Bigelow: I want to report a murder.
Homicide Captain: Sit down. Where was this murder committed?
Frank Bigelow: San Francisco, last night.
Captain: Who was murdered?
Frank Bigelow: I was.
The rest of the film plays out in flashback as "Frank Bigelow" explains how the murder was committed, how he discovered he was being murdered, how he spent his final hours desperately trying to find out why he was murdered and how to stop it from happening, and how he was able to report his own murder in person (spoiler: he was poisoned by killers as a result of his own actions, and dropped dead from the poison neatly dramatically just after finishing his story, with the police captain sardonically concluding that the paperwork should mark Bigelow "D.O.A." - dead on arrival!)
It's definitely a gimmick that can work well outside of the horror and horror-comedy genres!
And, to the point of the video, it's pretty easy to fix a broken use of the "apocalyptic log" gimmick - simply find a way to make the doom awaiting the narrator inevitable but slow enough in arriving that the narrator has plenty of time to explain what went wrong at his/her own pace. Is the narrator being stalked to death by an evil Forest Witch? She only comes out at night, and the narrator managed to escape her clutches just as dawn broke, but she'll be back at twilight, and cannot be escaped forever.... Or, whatever, slow-acting poison works too, and there are lots of other ways to manage it.
I really like the podcast "the white vault" which, as a found footage horror, involves some of this. It's a compilation of written notes and audio made throughout the events of the story, organized and presented by an archivist chronologically like an investigation. They use this trope, in my opinion, to fantastic effect; the characters have reasons for noting all they do, and we rely on their untrustworthy narration. It's very fun to have all the fragments put together piecemeal, some relevant and some not, leaving some gaps and mysteries.
Excellent video! This lesson was taught as long ago as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "He wouldn't have written 'Auuughh' when he died, he would have just said it." 🤣
For me, the comments are the “Are You Scared” videos ruin the stories for me more than the stories themselves. They *always* make it either a case of mental illness or any man in the story is the culprit. It ruins any good theories because it feels like “Oh, he was just depressed. Let’s ignore the GIANT HOLE BREAKING UPWARDS and not protect ourselves from who/whatever is mimicking our friend.”
I genuinely want to write a story where it’s strictly supernatural and confirm it just to mess with people.
It’s like, this writer created this world where these things CAN happen but you choose to look the other way.
I’m so tempted to write a story for it. I just never know when they’re accepting stories.
My best tip for horror writing:
Instead of making the characters dumb, make the monster smart.
I hate everything related to someone buying a cursed videogame.
Modern Jumanji?
I watched a movie last night called Brainscan from 1994. The idea isn't new
"aw hell naw man, I bought this cursed copy of Pictionary for the NES from the dumpster behind Saddam Hussein's garage sale of shit he found near the Great Pyramids Asbestos Factory, all the game does is tell me to piss off"
Ben Drowned Awakening arc (3) from 2020 go on UA-cam watch it right now it has anime fights in legend of Zelda about women made out of millions of real internet users it's great
Another one of gripes with especially creepypastas (always the story, never the narrator so it’s not like I’m shooting the messenger) is when the horror also delves into historical fiction or the protag’s profession/hobby is integral to the story. And the fact that some writers cannot do the most barebones of research on a historical era, job, or hobby and it completely suspends the immersion of the story when they get the most basic of facts about these things wrong. Listened to a creepypasta set in Victorian Britain once and it complete broke the immersion when some of the characters spoke in modern slang and not era-appropriate ones. Same for one creepypasta about a hunter who was supposed to be this salt of the earth mountain man who basically grew up with a rifle in his hand but knew absolutely nothing about guns and cartridges. For example from the story, the protagonist using .30-.06 to hunt rabbits, .30-.06 would obliterate a rabbit and there’d be nothing left to harvest from the body but bloody chunks.
It’s not like I expect a horror historical fiction writer to be a historian, or a scientist writing a scientific journal for a horror story dealing with those disciplines but still, 30-45 minutes of basic research are in order so you do not mess up basic facts. All I’m saying is don’t make yourself look uneducated and focusing too much on the horror that you get basic objective facts wrong that a character should know if they are of a specific background.
And another point, writing from the point of view of someone of a different culture than the authors. You must understand people from other cultures, while understanding the universals of humanity may view different subjects completely differently than the point of view of the mostly western authors. Do not write a character from a different culture with Anglo-American-centric values. An example of this is one story that featured a Japanese protagonist who had lived im Japan all their life before coming to the west but the author had written them in a way that betrayed the author only had a surface level understanding of Japanese culture and what interest they did have was derived from Anime(even named the character Kira, which is not actually a Japanese name and derives from the English loan-word from killer). Made it very obvious they were either a Deathnote or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fan that had not actually interacted with true depth in Japanese culture.
@@lufsolitaire5351 I hate be the "well, actually" guy, but "Kira" (吉良、きら) really *is* a legitimate Japanese surname, historically belonging to a samurai clan. Its most famous member was Kira Yoshihisa, one of the central figures in the "47 Ronin" incident of 1701-1703.
But yeah, I agree with the rest of what you said.
You really do have to be a historian, or better yet, a researcher of any and all topics, to be a good writer. You'll notice that the good ones spend more time researching for the story than mechanically writing it, because they care about their craft and understand what goes into making stories believable - namely, specific and accurate details placed where it's appropriate.
"Ayo, whatsup W-dawg?" said Holmes, sitting in front of the roaring fireplace of 221-b Baker Street. By the amount of ash in the fireplace I could tell he'd been sat here all night, contemplating the case. "I've been chilling here thinking, and I legit think this Stapleton dude is capping. He's like mad sus, bro", Holmes said.
I liked it in that one creepypasta where the protag gets lost between dimensions while on a subway train. And it suggests that the story he wrote eventually found its way back to our world, but did the writer? We can never know.
But yeah, having it be the ending to every story just gets grating.
There are a couple stories with this trope I adore, one about a guy stuck in a time loop, and the other about a guy who takes a pill that slows his perception of time. They are both "if you are reading this" but they are done extremely well , but I think existential horror works well with this trope. Another is one where a guy glitches out of reality. It can be done well but tbh since kids write these im not surprised its rare
Anyways, great video! I learned a lot!
ive read the slowed time one. Would be a terrible fate. Someone made an SFM animation of it.
The title intrigued me as a horror story writer myself. I like the breakdown and I like how you argued how the trope can be used correctly and incorrectly. Great video and an earned sub
It think it’s indicative of lazy writing. A lot of horror tropes fall under the category of a sort of ‘mystery’ which can be frustrating to read. When I get to the end of a story, I want a conclusion that satisfies even if it is a cliff hanger. If you’re a writer, challenge yourself and work on your world building skills by tying up an ending nicely. Leave just enough questions unanswered but leave just enough clues for the reader to put the pieces together. My least favourite trope in movies is not to do with horror but ‘based on true story’ type historical movies and biopics where a character will make a foreshadowing statement about a real life historical figure or event without it being shown in the film. Prequel blockbusters also do this ALL THE TIME it sets off my cringe alarm. “What kind of a name in Abraham Lincoln?” was a joke made online about this trope for instance.
It definitely has the feel of "phew, almost at the end but I'm running out of steam, how can I wrap this up quick?"
Reminds me of a story I wrote for high school English class decades ago that intentionally ended with, "...and then I died. And that's why I'm late for school."
I think this whole thing started when internet users would post a half-completed sentence as though they were kidnapped while writing it out, not taking into account who bothered to hit Submit afterward. You know, like when Candleja
I find it weird when the defense is always "well, supernatural stuff happens too." The antagonist or scenario doesn't need to be something from reality, but when we have people telling a story, I think we expect them to tell a story the way people would tell a story and react the way people would react. When that doesn't happen, that's what starts to pull us out of the story and make us notice.
Structurally: I'm very fond of how you kept the praise and positivity high at the end, and even at your most critical you were offering reason and logic and also ways to avoid the pitfalls you've seen. Well done, left me feeling good about the state of internet horror.
Drives me absolutely up a wall when people say “ummm this is a story that has (supernatural or unrealistic elements) why would you ever expect it to (make sense)??”
Why does a story having a witch in it magically preclude it from being well written? Horror, of all genres, needs to feel grounded in some reality or the audience will not find it scary, tense or engaging. Which is the whole point.
But worse, this argument just spirals out of control to the point of invalidating all criticism. It boils down to “it’s not real therefore it does not matter if it’s good or not” which is stupid. Why do you want stories to be bad. It’s the same as saying “this is a kids story so why should it be well written” but with stuff that’s targeted at adults. That’s just ridiculous.
I was reading this one horror manga a while ago where basically there were these creature things going around killing people and when the protagonist's apartment building finally gets broken into he stays quiet and the creature walks right by them. Now this would be fine and a good way for the MC to realize "hey I think these things are blind", however that's not what happens: the creature walks by and says out loud something alone the lines of "ahhhh I can't see, there's something here thoughhhhhh" which is when all tension died and I stopped reading right then and there
A classic horror story which does this WELL is HP Lovecraft's The Hound, which is flamed start to finish as a suicide note. The protagonist doesn't know for sure that they'll die (and it's possible they won't), but the thought of what happened to their friend is so disturbing to them that they take it into their own hands.
I enjoyed The Magnus Archives for their clever use of this trope. Technically all the stories submitted to the archives are done in first person after the event has occurred, so there’s a limiting factor in that none of the encounters could have ended in the death of this character. BUT, because the framing of the story is of an archivist reorganizing these past entries and conducting investigations into them, including some entries that are years and years old, it means they can uncover what happened to the narrator AFTER they told their story. Also there’s a clever little lore reason for why everyone tells their stories so eloquently lol.
Drives me absolutely up a wall when people say “ummm this is a story that has (supernatural or unrealistic elements) why would you ever expect it to (make sense)??”
Why does a story having a witch in it magically preclude it from being well written? Horror, of all genres, needs to feel grounded in some reality or the audience will not find it scary, tense or engaging. Which is the whole point.
But worse, this argument just spirals out of control to the point of invalidating all criticism. It boils down to “it’s not real therefore it does not matter if it’s good or not” which is stupid. Why do you want stories to be bad. Just say you hate any form of criticism for any reason at that point.
I always hate when people try to claim that fiction doesn’t have to have any in-universe set rules. It’s an argument that has been trending into video games and tv.
Okay, I just got recommended this channel, and already at 6:53, I'm a fan. I can already tell you know what you’re talking about, and as a person who hopes to be a big author one day, I can see your channel being a big help in teaching me about different things to consider when writing a story, thanks man, keep up the good work.
I am so sick and tired of people not understanding what it means for a story to be "realistic." It doesn't mean the story is scientifically accurate, it means the story is logical. As in, effects logically flow from their causes, and characters make decisions based on their motives and knowledge. I honestly cannot understand how some people just don't get this.
6:26 I’ve been struggling to remember the word “verisimilitude” for YEARS at this point and the fact that you’ve reminded me what this concept is called has automatically earned you a like from me. Such an important concept in fiction that isn’t talked about enough
So glad to see someone else who shares my point of view on this kind of ending. I noticed it in a lot of creepypastas/nosleep stories and I wasn't that peeved until I saw how many kept doing it. It always comes off as writing yourself into a corner and having no idea how to end the story on any satisfying note.
I just came across this video at random and I really liked it! Your voice is comforting to listen to and I appreciate your insight as someone who loves writing horror.
I think my least favourite trope is when nobody believes someone for no discernable reason, to the point where it's just entirely reckless of them not to. In real life, people are usually quick to accept the weirdest reasons, or at least humor them.
Re: 9:50 The "there must be a reason this was uploaded on the internet" is also affecting audiodramas, in the sense that too many ADs try too hard to squeeze themselves into a framing device that justifies why the events in the story are being recorded. I'm in the camp of "that's not necessary". Some stories can get an advantage from this framing device, some others are greatly hindered by it and don't really need it. Suspension of disbelief can work in any medium, after all.
I think the rule that nosleep has about staying in character is a good way to avoid the trope of just killing off the protagonist as soon as the story is over that a lot of horror stories lean on. but it does mean that the authors are in a bind if they do want to kill the protagonist.
Overall, it decreases the quality of the writing, since the ending is prescribed from the very beginning, and very few of the writers attempt to get creative with that limitation
@@cara-seyunI mean there’s not really a lot of ways to get past that. Either the guy lives and you know, or he dies and it gets posted because it was recorded and found or because the mc wrote it and was like “if you found this” lmao
@@sekiro_the_one-armed_wolf the way to get past that is to just remove the rule
It’s not that hard
a trope that really gets on my nerves is when the story is built on clearly supernatural stuff but at the ending it is explained vaguely and as something not supernatural at all. the left/right game and the god experiment are examples of this. they got me hooked trying to make sense of the bizarre stuff happening but at the end it was just "something we cant understand" and thats all
Looking at this comment section, most people like it that way.
Personally, I prefer a nice balance, where some elements are explained, but some things are left unexplained just enough to make it good. though, that is admittedly harder to write, that's one of the reasons why people use the "Something we can't understand, it just happens" Or the "Actually, here's everything about the entity and it's past".
I've never heard of the "left/right" game and googled it, the first result was for a Christmas parlor game, and then I saw the reddit post and saw "part 1" and just... fuck that. nosleep stories with multiple parts suck.
@@FrenkTheJoy i could stand the multiple parts, but the ending was terrible. the author shifted from extremely bizarre and supernatural stuff to family problems and grief out of nowhere and didnt explain anything about the things he wrote. he finished it saying something like "maybe the game is for people who want to understand themselves" or some shit. i lost hours of my life reading that.
same thing with the god experiment. the author describes a lot of unexplainable deaths, sudden life changes and a shady lab that is doing this experiment. the ending? "the government did that because they can lol". frustrating af.
I feel like you're expecting a horror story to operate like a mystery, where everything that happens is a clue and will eventually come together with an explanation. I found the L/R Game's ending underwhelming, but what made the early parts scary was how unknown and incomprehensible the horror was. Like when they stop in Jubilation, an immaculate town with people sitting at tables outside their houses, where Ace is brutally murdered; it's scary because you can't understand why it's happening and in trying to find reasons for it, your imagination fills in the blanks with the most frightening things it can.
Would an explanation at the end outlining why Jubilation was like that, why the roads themselves are like that, have made it more satisfying? I personally don't think so. Honestly, I think the ending should've left it even more vague than it did. Nothing is scarier than the unknown.
@@peanutkix i was expecting an explanation because the way the story was written made me think that when they reached the end of the road or the older guy explained the motive for that journey everything would be explained. there are a bunch of horror stories without any explanation at the end that are excellent stories.
Thanks for making this. I've been quietly losing my mind about this for a while now. It's the lack of design within a creative work where the creator fails to realize that a lack of completion is sometimes a design choice in of itself. There are many works of art that would feel less complete if they were more 'finished' and 'made more sense'.
I appreciate this sort of video. Discussing something that doesn't work quite right is genuinely helpful. For me, they're the best source of inspiration, because the logical question after seeing something that doesn't work is "what would need to change for this idea to work?", and that leads to all sorts of creative ideas. It gets my thoughts flowing really well, and I can't be the only one who feels that way.