- Joined
- Nov 23, 2015
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For those of you who don't know what creepypasta are, they're online horror pieces (often short or novelette length, but not always) particularly popular amongst preteens and teenagers. The most famous creepypasta are based around the villains, with the most recognizable ones even outside the community being Slenderman and Jeff the Killer.
One of the stories I lost in the hard drive watering incident of November was a creepypasta intended to be around novel length. Having since gotten into more professional writing, I learned that YA horror is apparently a difficult sell...which does not fit the sheer number of creepypasta-obsessed people I know.
Then I realized the 10-15 year olds who mostly read and write creepypasta aren't necessarily in control of the media they buy yet. Creepypasta as a general rule is filled with gore and violence, which YA horror shies away from more often than it addresses. More to the point, creepypasta is free. You can go on any one of twenty given sites dedicated to it and find the best things they were submitted, or head to Deviantart and drown in Sturgeon's Law in action. If people latch onto a creepypasta villain, he (almost always he) will become super famous in the community and possibly outside of it, and nobody will be able to move for art and self-insert shipping fanfiction for a solid six months. If the average creepypasta reader had to ask her parents to buy a book with the same content for her, she'd probably get rejected.
With free, gory, made-by-the-community-for-the-community YA horror available everywhere, does commercial YA horror have a chance?
One of the stories I lost in the hard drive watering incident of November was a creepypasta intended to be around novel length. Having since gotten into more professional writing, I learned that YA horror is apparently a difficult sell...which does not fit the sheer number of creepypasta-obsessed people I know.
Then I realized the 10-15 year olds who mostly read and write creepypasta aren't necessarily in control of the media they buy yet. Creepypasta as a general rule is filled with gore and violence, which YA horror shies away from more often than it addresses. More to the point, creepypasta is free. You can go on any one of twenty given sites dedicated to it and find the best things they were submitted, or head to Deviantart and drown in Sturgeon's Law in action. If people latch onto a creepypasta villain, he (almost always he) will become super famous in the community and possibly outside of it, and nobody will be able to move for art and self-insert shipping fanfiction for a solid six months. If the average creepypasta reader had to ask her parents to buy a book with the same content for her, she'd probably get rejected.
With free, gory, made-by-the-community-for-the-community YA horror available everywhere, does commercial YA horror have a chance?