I love creepypasta. But I also hate it.
🎀 rantbook, contains both silly little things and more serious(?) issues
🎀 pink is my theme. because everyone in this fandom claims to hate it.
Personally, I have beef with Creepypasta advice books - particularly ones on Quotev or Wattpad that try to teach others how to make their own OC. In my profile's conversations section (which I'm using as a tumblr, because of course) I have complained about them since forever, but I haven't attacked them on here yet, because... Man, there's just so much to say, and it's difficult to make fun of books you can't copy and paste to provide other people with context.
So, let's go bit by bit. This will probably get a follow up later, because again, there is a lot to say.
Firstly: what are these advice books I'm talking about?
Well, usually, they look something like this:
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(For those who can't see the picture, the blurb:
All ocs i've seen are stupid Nina the killer or Lana the killer girls so I tought it wass good to make a guide with tips for making an actually GOOD creepypasta oc that's not cliche. uhm yeah don't get offended fucking pick mes 🙄 )
Usually, there is one thing the blurb makes abundantly clear in and of itself: the author has no idea what they're doing, and they're painfully unaware of it, too.
I remember first getting into the fandom and stumbling upon these types of guides, and being incredibly puzzled by the information presented. They didn't actually help me with making my own story at all, and it was frankly rather annoying - though I didn't realize that it was annoying until I found better guides. (I got pretty good help out of springhole.net btw so check them out)
Some of them had relatively good information on how to write a lengthy character file, but none of them helped me to write the short horror story that I was trying to write. And most importantly, all of them presented the exact same contradictory information on how to write an OC that only really fits into the Creepypasta universe from self-insert fanfictions.
Because, see, that's the only way through which most of these authors familiarized themselves with Creepypasta: fanfiction. They might have listened to some of the popular (and bad) stories, like Jeff the Killer, Eyeless Jack, or Ticci Toby, but they generally never read any other creepypastas outside of those.
Now, admittedly, I too haven't read very many creepypastas, because if I want to read short horror stories, I'll usually pick up a book with them (or a longer one and just pretend that 300 pages is short), but I do think that it's good to at least understand the genre you're talking about before you try to give out advice. I have read enough creepypastas still to understand them, I think, so I'll go over some common, but bad advice I've seen.
First, though, I want to go over what kind of twisted impression people seem to have about the genre, because it's weird. It doesn't make sense that this is the most popular interpretation of this genre. Seriously, how did this happen?
