Talk:Eric/@comment-1196539-20140704123425/@comment-1196539-20140706013202

That's exactly the opposite of what a creepypasta is. A creepypasta has, by definition, nothing whatsoever to do with anomolies, and is inherently something meant to creep out the reader.

Let's get into a bit of etymology.

Creepy = Self explanitory. The story is creepy. It's a horror story. It creeps out, disturbs, or upsets the reader, or at least is written with this intent.

Pasta = Derived from copypasta, which is itself derived from copy/pasting. Originating on 4chan, the practice of spreading bodies of text around multiple times via this action. In order for this to be practical, these bodies of text are usually reasonably short. Therefore, functionally speaking, pasta = short.

Therefore, "creepypasta" = "short horror." A short horror story. This is now and has always been the definition of a creepypasta. You can check out the definition on the Creepypasta wiki, the Spinpasta wiki, Creepypasta.com, or any other creepypasta site anywhere. All of them will agree unanimously with this definition.

As for "mindfuck" and theory pastas, you have to dig deeper to ascertain the creepy factor. It usually hinges on the supposed corruption of something which you previously thought to be happy and innocent. For example, XoRax tried to get us to believe that there was this much darker history to Zelda that we never knew about, changing our perception of the game forever; and The Man in Red portrayed Mario from the enemy goons' perspective as they were helplessly slaughtered one after another, making the player feel like he or she was in fact the bad guy all these years (with... varying success, I wouldn't call that one particularly great).

Now that that's out of the way, I don't disagree with you that there's not a lot that this pasta does that's unique or original. That's true of 99% of pastas and still a vast majority of CPotM winners. It's so rare to find something that's truly never been done before that it's something that tends to be overlooked, as long as it's not something that's done in absolutely every other story everywhere. So, I don't blame the pasta too much for that. The ending is indeed the one unique thing, but it's original in the same way that the first story to end with "it was all just a dream" was original. Not necessarily a good kind of original, first to do it or not. It's one of those things that there's a REASON no other stories do.

As for the grammar thing, I would wholeheartedly agree with that. There's absolutely nothing intimidating about poor grammar, and I don't know how people got it in their heads that it was any way creepy. All it does for me is make me completely unable to take a character seriously. as sun as he strts talkn liek ths, he's immediately no longer a threat in my mind, but rather just a joke. It wasn't any different for Funnymouth.

And Eric as a whole? I could understand some level of creepyness up until the end, with or without the bad grammar. Again, the things that ruined Eric--revealing that he was just this kid's cousin, who was contacting him because he wanted to be friends, and knew where he lived because they were relatives--were all isolated to the ending. I think that could easily be revised in order to save Eric as a character, so that the reader isn't left with the feeling that "he wasn't an antagonist at all, it was just a big misunderstanding and there was never any danger at all. Silly me."

Really, what makes the pasta stand out is that it's a reasonably lengthy Animal Crossing pasta that builds suspense well and has an original character in it. It may not be a big fish in the grand sea of creepypastas, but you could call it one in the pond of Animal Crossing pastas.