Why The Creepypasta Fandom Is Its Own Worst Enemy
(A rant)
●The Creepypasta Fandom's Main Problem Starts With Entitlement:
This fandoms entitlement is Killing Creator Passion.
This problem has been in this fandom for a long time and nobody seems to want to address properly, or maybe they haven't noticed it.
The Creepypasta fandom has a serious entitlement issue, and it all stems from one core misunderstanding.
This fandom does not have a canon.
I'm being factual and not trying to insult anyone. There is no Creepypasta "bible" to say the least.
There is no official timeline. There is no studio, no singular author, no singular creative authority that ties popular characters like Jeff the Killer, BEN Drowned, Eyeless Jack, etc into one shared universe. These are independent stories and original characters created by individual people that happen to share a spooky aesthetic and a home on the internet. That's it. That's all it ever was.
So why does a huge portion of this fandom behave like it's Marvel, like these characters would know each other or that they somehow live in the same universe?
●How We Got Here
The Creepypasta fandom is structurally much closer to the furry fandom than it is to something like Homestuck or Hazbin Hotel. Those are properties with an actual creator at the base of it all, an actual story being told, an actual universe created, actual canonical decisions being made. The furry fandom by contrast is built entirely on original characters. Nobody owns the concept of a fursona. Nobody riots when an artist redesigns their character or makes them a different species. The community understands, almost instinctively, that your OC is yours and other people's attachment to it is their own emotional business to manage.
The Creepypasta fandom started the same way.
Open, creative, anyone could contribute. Your OC was your OC. It was a community built on sharing.
But somewhere along the way things shifted, and a few things are responsible for that:
The Creepypasta Wiki gave everything the appearance of institutionalized lore. Structured pages, categories, character relationships all laid out neatly.
It looked official even though it was entirely fan organized.
To a newer or younger fan stumbling in, it probably looked indistinguishable/no different from a real franchise wiki.
Crossover fanart and the Slenderverse ARGs made it feel like a shared universe.
Like when you see Jeff and BEN and Slenderman all hanging out in the same piece of art enough times, your brain starts treating them like they belong together by default. And the ARGs, as incredible as they were, gave the fandom a taste of what structured connected lore felt like.
So over time fans built a headcanon so collectively agreed upon that they forgot it was never real canon. And then they started enforcing it like it was.
It spawned ideas like the Slenderman Mansion au, that some fans believe IS the canon.
●New OCs Can't Break Through
Here's something worth talking about because it shows just how deeply this fake canon mindset has embedded itself into the fandom's thinking.
Take ijustwannahavefun as an example. Extremely popular artist, large following, generally beloved in this community.
She has her own Creepypasta OCs. And yet a huge portion of her audience will look at those characters and go "idk who that is" and just keep scrolling after appreciating the art. Not because her oc's suck or something, but because in their heads there is a defined roster of "real" Creepypasta characters and everything else is just fan stuff existing around that roster. They view it like seeing someones Hazbin Hotel oc being drawn in with thr main cast.
That is the fake canon mindset in action in one of its most quietly damaging forms.
And it creates this exhausting cycle for artists. If you want your OC to get any traction at all you almost always have to attach them to the popular characters.
Draw your OC with Jeff or draw them with Eyeless Jack or Slenderman or anyone popular.
Because the moment you do, suddenly people are interested, suddenly there's engagement.
But here's the thing, the moment you do that you've also sealed your character's fate in how the fandom perceives them.
Now your OC is just "that fan character that hangs around Jeff" and not a standalone character with their own story worth caring about.
The really frustrating part?
Technically every single character in this fandom is on equal footing canonically. Your OC and Jeff the Killer are both just characters someone made up and posted online.
Neither of them has more canonical authority than the other.
The difference is purely on time and exposure.
Jeff got popular first, the fandom crystallized around him and a handful of others, and now everything that came after gets treated like it's a lesser tier of existence.
Especially since headcanon culture became so popular with the popular characters.
It's like if the Hazbin Hotel fandom decided that only the original characters were canon and that a character like Vox was somehow fanon simply because Vivziepop adopted that design from a past friend of hers. That would be absurd. Everyone would immediately recognize that as unfair and arbitrary.
But that is essentially what the Creepypasta fandom does to its own creators every single day.
And the saddest part is that there are genuinely incredible OCs in this fandom that will never get the recognition they deserve simply because they didn't exist before the fake canon mindset calcified. The fandom closed the door on itself and most people don't even realize it.
●This Is Exhausting To Deal With As A Creepypasta Veteran.
For those of us in this fandom who don't feel entitled to other people's characters, watching this play out is genuinely frustrating.
When a creator wants to update, rewrite, or step back from their OC the reaction from a vocal part of the fandom is not "that's their right" it's "how could they do this to us" As if the creator making a decision about their own character is an act of betrayal against the community.
No. Just, no.
Your attachment to someone else's character is something that happened inside you. The creator did not sign a contract when they posted their story online for "this oc is for the public" all that happened is they got popular!
Popularity is not a transfer of ownership. A character having thousands of fans does not mean those fans get a vote in what happens to that character. If you think otherwise, then your part of the problem, you suffer from entitlement.
And the inactivity argument that I know someone will mention eventually
the idea that if a creator goes quiet for a few years, finds new passions, etc.
The character somehow defaults to public ownership, is flawed. Creators go quiet for countless reasons.
Burnout. Life circumstances.
Mental health.
Growing up and changing as a person.
Silence is not abandonment and it is definitely not an invitation for the fandom to take over.
The only stance I can think of where the fandom taking over, is appropriate is for situations like Snuffbomb for example, creator creator of Laughing Jack for those who don't know.
I belive letting pdf files, 🍇-ists and people who have genuinely done wrong and should, like highkey go to jail for their actions, don't get a say on what this fandom does with their characters.
Situations like that are what void my morals of "please listen to the creators wishes or boundaries about their oc" because their genuinely horrid people that don't deserve that kind of gracious treatment online.
●What It Does To Creators
This is the part that genuinely upsets me because we have real, visible examples of what this entitlement costs.
Wade, the creator of Ticci Toby, wanted to reboot his character. He had a passion project in the works known as Chickadee Springs that sounded genuinely exciting, an old fashioned slasher themed story that could have been something really cool.
However the fandom's response was to harass him off the internet entirely.
Thousands of people attacking someone for wanting to do something new with his own creation. His own.
All because he was inactive online and stopped participating in the fandom.
And now that project is likely never going to happen because people couldn't let go of a version of a character that was never theirs to begin with.
Azelf5000, the creator of Eyeless Jacks story, has expressed such strong negative feelings toward the character at this point that rewriting him feels impossible.
Not because Azelf doesn't have the right to, but because the weight of knowing how the fandom would react makes it not worth it.
A creator trapped by their own creation's popularity. That is not a fun position to be in and it didn't have to be that way.
And many more.
These are real people who made something, shared it, and are now essentially locked out of their own work because the fandom decided it knew better.
That is not a healthy community dynamic. That is a fandom eating itself, eating it's creators.
●People Say The Fandom Is Dead
You've heard it before. "The Creepypasta fandom is dead." Or the more generous version, "it died but it's slowly coming back" acting like the fandom just naturally ran its course.
But the reason is pretty straightforward when you actually look at it.
The fandom feels dead because the original creators of those popular characters have largely stepped back from them. Wade isn't in the fandom anymore actively working on Toby.
Azelf wants nothing to do with Eyeless Jack.
The creator of Jane moved her out of the fandom.
And many more.
And when those creators go quiet, the characters they made go quiet with them in any meaningful sense.
No new stories.
No new directions.
No evolution.
And what fills that void?
Fan content. Mountains of it, every single day of the exact same 10 or so popular characters.
New OCs, new art, new stories posted constantly by a community that is genuinely still active.
But because of that fake canon mindset the fandom has built up around that original handful of characters, none of that new content registers as the fandom being alive.
It all gets mentally filed under "fanon" and dismissed as background noise rather than recognized as the fandom actually continuing to grow and breathe.
So the fandom isn't dead.
You all just convinced yourselves that the only content that counts is content involving characters whose creators have mostly moved on.
That's not the fandom dying, that's a community actively refusing to let itself evolve.
We attempted to fix this issue back in like 2018 I think with "Creepypasta 2" that was highly focused on new characters and rejected the older ones.
That obviously failed.
Every OC Is Canon. Yes, Including Yours.
This needs to be said plainly because apparently it still isn't understood.
If you have a Creepypasta OC or a Slenderverse OC, that character is canon.
Not fanon.
Not "just an OC."
Canon.
The same way Jeff the Killer is canon.
The same way BEN Drowned is canon.
The same way Nina is canon.
Because canon in this context simply means a character someone created and added to this creative space.
There is no original source.
There never was.
Not even Creepypasta.com is the original source! Lots of the popular oc's you know and love today, weren't originally published on that website, they were posted on DeviantArt first.
I've personally had people tell me that my Slenderverse OC Zahara isn't canon, and that my Creepypasta OC Dazaliian isn't canon either when I have referred to them as such.
And I want to be very clear about something.
The people saying that aren't canon are not gatekeeping based on any real rule or established lore.
They are gatekeeping based on a fake hierarchy that the fandom invented and collectively decided to enforce without ever stopping to question where it actually came from.
Think about what that argument even sounds like or means when you apply it consistently:
•Eyeless Jack is canon because a person made him up and posted him online.
•Dazaliian is not canon because a person made her up and posted her online.
Do you see how that logic falls apart immediately? The only difference is popularity and time.
That's it.
That's the whole argument.
And that is not a good enough reason to tell a creator that their character doesn't belong in a space that was always meant to be open to everyone.
The next time someone tells you your OC isn't canon, the correct response is to remind them that none of these characters are canon in the way they're implying. They're all just OCs.
Some of them got popular first.
That's the only distinction that exists.
I will say, something that also drives people not to call oc's canon, is that theres a huge trend of building an oc that is heavily involved with other Creepypasta OC'S.
That tactic rarely works to get people to take your oc seriously enough for people to belive they are canon.
It worked with Nina, it worked with X-Virus and that's about it.
The trope ran its course and other stories weren't written interestingly enough for it to go much further than that.
●What A Healthier Mindset Looks Like:
Go look at how the furry fandom handles creator and character relationships.
Go look at how indie webcomic fandoms operate.
The healthy version of this is a fandom that celebrates what creators make, supports changes and growth, and understands that loving someone's work doesn't give you authority over it.
You can ABSOLUTELY be sad when a creator moves on from a character.
You can miss an old design.
You can wish things were different.
Those feelings are valid. What is not valid is directing that at the creator as if they owe you something just because their oc they wrote like 10 years ago is now a comfort character to you.
The Creepypasta fandom has the potential to be genuinely great.
The creativity here has always been real. But until the community collectively understands that these are original characters belonging to real people and not a franchise up for public ownership, it's going to keep driving away the exact people who make it worth being part of.
This has been a breakdown by someone who has been in this fandom long enough to be tired of it.
I've been in this fandom since 2010 and I won't give up on trying to change the mindset.
Please remain respectful in the comments.
