Trollpasta Wiki:Trollpasta Clichés: Difference between revisions

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{{title3|Trollpasta Clichés}}
Hello, new user. As you probably know, trollpasta is meant to be a parody of scary stories. However, lately a few of the other admins and I have noticed that some people don't seem to quite grasp that concept. Most of the time this is because these new users fail to avoid a bunch of painfully overused '''clichés''' which pretty much kill any potential funniness your story may have. This page was created in analogy to [[w:c:Creepypasta:Creepy_Clichés|Creepy Clichés list]], and just like that one is designed to help keep your story original, refreshing and disturbing, this one is designed to the same, but obviously make it funny too.
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The following is a list of common Trollpasta clichés. It's important to note that just because they've been used so many times, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use them. A common mistake among Trollpasta writers is the assumption that random mentions of clichés makes the story automatically funny or entertaining. More often than not, pastas will say stuff like "An old man gave me a creepy disc for free and it had scary blood and death in it then I died" and call it day. This is lazy writing. So if you're going to include clichés in your pastas, try and attempt to make them funny/interesting or add a twist that makes the cliché seem fresh. If used correctly, almost all of the clichés listed on this page can be funny.
 
==Clichés List==
Just because this is trollpasta doesn't mean that you can automatically make your story funny or a good parody/satire by making it incredibly bad and hard to read. Nor does it mean it is impossible to have clichés in Trollpasta. '''Making the story bad does not make it automatically funny.'''
===General===
 
#'''Creepypasta parodies''': Parodying famous pastas such as Jeff the Killer, Sonic.exe, and Squidward's Suicide. These pastas could sometimes get derivative by just editing the original story and adding/removing stuff from it. These were especially common around Trollpasta's peak.
 
#'''Lost media''': Pastas about sinister lost/cursed media are perhaps the most common pasta-type. The story usually begins with the main character stumbling upon a strange disc/tape/cartridge of a (usually) kid-friendly show/game they grew up with. They then take it home and document watching/playing the media. The lost media will portray the original media as something evil or creepy, often accompanied by static, eerie silence, blood, violence, and death. Depending on the story, the lost media can sometimes affect real life and make bad things happen to the characters. At the end, the main character will usually attempt to destroy the media and vow to never watch/play the original ever again.
#'''Making the story completely unreadable with ALLCAPS and incomprehensibly poor English
#'''Hyper-realism''': Describing something, especially blood and eyes, as "hyper-realistic." This cliché is most common in pastas about media with cartoony art styles.
'''
#'''Creepy sellers''': A common trope found in creepy/lost media pastas. Typically, the main character will run in to an elderly person selling a lost piece of media at a yard sale, and sometimes they'll give it away to the main character for free.
If you just write an unreadable all-caps story with poop jokes and EVIL PATRIXXX, that's just plain unoriginal. They add nothing to parody the CPW and overall are just clutter. Take, for example, the story "[[ZOMG IZ ZGARIEZED BAZDA LIGE 1337 H4X]]", a story I deleted for being complete shite, but I will leave up as an example of what not to do. You should see from the title that the reader has intentionally made the title hard to read, to parody trollpastas. But here's the thing: The point of satire is to mix criticism with humor. But making the story look juvenille with bad spelling and grammar just makes it irritating to read, not to mention we've all seen it before. You need to think of something actually entertaining besides bad grammar. Imagine if Chris Rock or George Carlin started doing all their stand-up routines in a really annoying whiny voice. Everyone would either be too focused trying to decipher what they would be saying to hear the genius, or just stop watching them out of frustration. (Yeah I know George Carlin is dead.)
#'''Satanic elements''': Many Creepypastas rely on Satanic imagery in an attempt at being scary. For Trollpastas it is mainly used to be ironic, with "666" being a common phrase used.
 
#'''Graphic imagery''': Blood, gore, and excessive violence are some of the horror genre's most popular tropes. They're very common in Trollpastas and Creepypastas as well, mainly used for pastas about cartoony media in an attempt to "shock" the reader.
#'''Trying to make a parody of something that's already been parodied zillions of times before.'''
#'''Death''': Death in Creepypastas and Trollpastas are very common. The main character dying, or everyone in the story dying is especially common in Trollpastas.
This one is pretty self-explainatory. You won't believe how many times poor efforts have been made to parody things such as Jeff the Killer spin-offs, 'hyper-realistic blood', lost episodes or bad Sonic.exe/file extension variations. Yes, we get it, things like that are terrible, but we already probably have over 50 jeff the killer or lost episode pastas so we don't need any more.
#'''Stopwatch''': Ever find it weird how the protagonist knows the screen has been static for 26 seconds exactly? It's almost like they have a stopwatch...
 
#'''Ending phrases:''' A lot of pastas will end their story with one of the phrases "You shouldn't have done that...", "YOU'RE NEXT", "DON'T LOOK BEHIND YOU", or "AND THEN A SKELETON POPPED OUT."
#'''Making your pasta one unfunny sentence long'''
#'''Unoriginal characters''': You know Jeff the Killer? Well, this is a new character named Bleff the Killer! These types of characters are usually made to mock Creepypasta characters. Taking a character and putting "XXX" at the end is another thing some pastas like to, as homage to PATRIXXX.
Again, obvious. Pastas like this usually get deleted very quickly, please don't litter the wiki with more of these.
#'''Bad MS Paint drawings''': These revolve around taking a screenshot, typically from a video game or a "lost episode", and drawing over it in MS Paint to make it look bad on purpose.
 
===Humor===
#'''''Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life'' clones''
#'''Juvenile humor''': Some pastas will overuse sex jokes and potty humor in order to get a cheap laugh. Though, this can be done right if the writing is good.
It's extremely uncreative and unoriginal to make your pasta a literal copy of the Shrek greentext with a bunch of names and other words changed.
#'''Randomness''': Some will add tons of completely random elements to their story to make it seem more funny. Often times it doesn't work, because being random doesn't automatically make something funny.
 
#'''Excessive profanity''': Many pastas will overly rely on swearing in a cheap attempt at comedy. It can be funny if done right, but saying "fuck" a hundred times doesn't automatically make the pasta funny. In fact, it can make them seem obnoxious.
#'''Gizoogle pastas'''
#'''Repetitive gags''': This is usually a single joke that is repeatedly brought up through the pasta. Overdoing it can lead to your pasta being obnoxious to read.
Taking an existing trollpasta or creepypasta and putting it in gizoogle.net. Again extremely lazy and extremely bad.
===Formatting===
 
#'''Poor grammar and spelling''': A Trollpasta staple, especially in the beginning. Popular misspelling were usually of the word "the" with stuff like "le", "teh", "hte", "de" or "da". Over time purposely terrible grammar/spelling got stale quick, so steer clear of making your pastas borderline unreadable, because most of the time it falls flat and makes the story obnoxious. "1337" text also used to be common, but this has fallen out of practice in recent years, and for the better.
Other smaller clichés include: MLG humour, using 'le', ''Expand Dong'', Five nights at Freddy's pastas, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic pastas, Sonic pastas, Pokémon pastas, file extention pastas, haunted video games, not using any linebreaks at all in the pasta, no punctuation/capitalisation at all, crappy MS Paint drawings, potty humour and the use of characters like EVIL PATRIXXX (Feel free to add any minor clichés that have been missed)
#'''ALL CAPS''': A very common gag in Trollpastas is making the entire story in ALL CAPS. It stopped being funny quick, so it's best to avoid making Trollpastas in this style.
 
#'''Lowercase''': On the flip side, pastas with no punctuation and capitalization at all is also common.
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#'''Wall of text''': Pastas that are a big wall of text with no line breaks whatsoever are common as well. Try to avoid doing this, because it can made reading the story tedious.
 
#'''!!!!11''': One of the most common formatting clichés is the excessive use of exclamation marks, which is done to emphasize dumb or satirical moments in the story.
So yeah that's pretty much it. Seems simple, but you'd be surprised at how many people fuck up on this. Stories like ZOMG IZ ZGARIEZED BAZDA LIGE 1337 H4X bring down this wiki as a community of immature tweens who like being "lol so random", and trust me, when even the head bureucrat of the wiki only reads from one category on the whole wiki, that says a lot. (Source on this coming soon) I hope these hints will help change our status on the CPW. Have fun!
===Fads===
 
#'''Shrek''': Back when Shrek was a big meme, many pastas revolving around Shrek would put him in a creepy, rapey role, where he would often violate the main character. They were usually formatted in green text, a popular post formatting used on 4chan. Many stories with this cliché have been deleted due to their overly explicit NSFW nature. The most popular of these stories was [[The Tale of Shrek]].
 
#'''My Little Pony''': The MLP fad was extremely popular during the height of Trollpastas and Creepypastas, so dozens of MLP pastas were made across both genres. The Creepypasta stories would involve the pony characters being put in extreme horror situations, such as in the notorious [[Cupcakes (Original Fanfic)|Cupcakes]]. At one point there was an even a category for MLP pastas on the site, but it's since been deleted.
<small>Portions of text were copied from [[Thread:56930]]</small>
#'''Meme translations''': From 2013 to 2014 there was a trend of putting a serious pastas through Gizoogle or Bad Translator. Many of the pastas in this style can still be found in the [[:Category:Ghetto Talk|Ghetto Talk]] category.
#'''MLG humor''': References to this meme in pastas were common back when MLG was a very popular internet meme. Several of these elements would be used: xXx_W4ckY_MLG_n4m3s_xXx, Mountain Dew, Doritos, 420 BLAZE IT, creating MLG versions of existing stories, etc.
#'''Vinesauce memes''': 2014 to 2016 saw the rise of memes like Expand Dong and BonziBuddy, which were heavily associated with Vinesauce. Sometimes they would be used in Trollpastas during the time.
[[Category:Meta]]