an introspective of the stagnation of creepypasta from the perspective of a creepypasta author since 2014
for the past couple of years due to the resurgence of creepypastas amongst a very young demographic, the meaning of 'creepypasta' has gotten so watered down it's effectively lost all meaning.
i've been writing creepypasta since 2014, using the genre as a cheesy way to become a better writer. all of my stories from back then are garbage, of course - what matters to me is the fact that i made them and improved as an artist in the process. if not for creepypastas, i wouldn't be nowhere near a good a writer as i am nowadays, and i honestly owe alot of it to how blunt the creepypasta fanbase was at the time. if a story sucked, you'd hear about it - while this was definitely not done in good faith, a side effect of this meant you ended up picking up on overdone cliches, bad writing and bad characterization just by reading these stories you're constantly told are "bad". by reading them with the foresight of KNOWING they aren't good, there's alot of information you can gleam. you pick up on parts of the story you can recognize as bad, and leave having a better knowledge of what Not to do when writing a story.
of course nowadays the creepypasta community's effectively died off and been replaced by children who care more about powerscaling their edgy sonic ocs than actually writing anything.
it'd be easy for me to just say that the creation and resurgence of sonic.exe is precisely what killed creepypasta as a whole, and in a sense it's not wrong, but i personally believe the thing that killed the genre is less about the story everyone idolizes and more about the culture that the story's appeal ended up cultivating.
sonic.exe fans have always existed. even back in 2014, there were tons of kids obsessed with it. i feel like that initial surge of popularity, while frustrating to many due to the poor quality of the original story, the community was ultimately harmless. they were just socially awkward kids being awkward and making their own stories. the part that i find admirable about the exe community back then is the key word, "Stories". if a kid back in the day liked sonic.exe, they'd download gamemaker and make their own game, or they'd go to the creepypasta/SOG wiki and write their own story. were they any good? more often than not, no. but the effort that went into creating media just out of an appreciation for a dumb story you liked is nothing short of admirable. of course there were stinkers - one of the first ever fan stories was a complete, beat-for-beat ripoff of a sonic creepypasta that came BEFORE exe, but regardless, there was alot of genuine effort behind these fanworks. for lack of better word, there was alot of soul - something the current community lacks.
sonic.exe recently got its second wind (in the form of an fnf mod of all things lol) and now everyone and their grandma knows about it. however, my hatred of the current community stems from something i never see brought up. if someone's bitching about sonic.exe it's only ever about the things you can actually hold people accountable for, like the massively rampant amount of abusers/pdfiles lurking around every corner (and yes, this is extremely prevalent in the community and needs to be addressed) but my problem lies in the lack of sincerety every recent piece of fanwork has. people nowadays don't care about making a story - and this is a problem that seems to infect a LOT of horror media, especially indie games - they care more about making a recognizable mascot.
look at any sonic.exe derivitive made after 2022 (most use the term horrorbrew, i don't know why they don't just use the term creepypasta or exe because there's nothing exactly making them stand out). nine times out of 10, you're not going to find any sort of game, or story, or any official media they're actually attached to. more often than not, they're just a *mascot* for a nonexistent story. that's where my problem lies - there's no more passion in writing creepypastas anymore. the part that people only seem to care about anymore is the recognizable mascot, the 'face' of a creepypasta, so they trim everything that isn't the mascot away, and i feel like doing this completely defeats the purpose of making creepypasta. if you don't believe me, every single creepypasta that people still talk about are ones that have a recognizable 'mascot' - squidward's suicide, suicidemouse, sonic.exe, i hate you, godzilla nes - while ones that don't have an overarcing antagonist or image (noend house, SAR woods) are basically forgotten. people don't care about the stories anymore, they only care about the antagonist. they see the scary, bloody-eyed sonic in the thumbnail of the story and think "i can do that". and when you see one of these nu-exe's actually try and make a story to pair with its mascot, it's either really contrived and tries to take itself way too seriously (needlemouse) or extremely derivitive of other media (sonic limited edition). this has also led to my least favorite trend of the nu creepypasta community, the trend of 'retaking' old pastas and cramming as many analog horror/exe tropes as possible into them. vibingleaf's content is the biggest offender - all he does is take old stories, slap a vhs filter on them, and (in the case of stories without an overarcing villain like the grieving) add some completely unfitting villain character who serves only to give the remake a marketable 'face' for the thumbnail. and people act like his remakes are the DEFINITIVE WAY TO ENJOY THESE STORIES! THEY AREN'T! STOP SAYING THEY'RE OBJECTIVELY BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL! in the case of these inoffensive creepypastas, there's probably nothing more disrespectful than trying to 'one up' the original story! you're just putting another indie artist down so you can soak up all the attention like a douchebag! make and enjoy remakes because YOU want to make them - don't make them just to drag your fellow artists through the mud, damnit!
of course as much of a grouch i am about the state of creepypasta today, there's stuff i've seen that falls into this sort of creepypasta umbrella that i'm actually quite a fan of, even if they commit some of the things i hate to see. my favorite example would be that fake spongebob broadcast interruption (i have no idea if this is the original video because it's gone through retake hell but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0DMBZmuf1Y ). it commits alot of the things i don't like in modern creepypastas - it has a scary spongebob in it that seems to only exist to give the story a mascot and i feel like having the interrupted footage be stereotypically 'scary' doesn't fit the whole 'mentally ill nickelodeon employee tampering with footage' vibe the ending gives off but, in my humble opinion, it stands on its own as an interesting little story and there's alot i enjoy about it despite its faults. i like it because someone had an IDEA - and while that idea may have been derivitive of other lost media stories, it stands on its own and is enjoyable. more creators need to strive to make content like this. care more about making an interesting STORY, not an interesting CHARACTER. someone from the exe community, if given the same prompt, would've instead just drew a scary spongebob, named him some shit like "The Poriferan" and had someone else make an fnf mod about it - this guy went through the effort of fleshing their prompt out, and i have nothing but respect for them for doing so.
rant over. creepypasta means alot to me as a person and i owe the community alot for indirectly teaching me how to write and how (not) to create horror content, so it genuinely hurts seeing how badly the community has fallen.
vaporwave
kaledo-art
izzy806
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
origamiaround