- Bell out side home, ring it once and once again, it bring the red worm. Everything will be okay? MUST RING A BELL. If babie grows it is a sinister dark eye babie. A killer of man and friend.— Instruction for a Babie
Instruction for a Help
is a Web Original series in eight parts, created by Zack Parsons and hosted on Something Awful. The original series consists of deliberately poorly written how-to guides illustrated with similarly poor-quality images; the first one is for "a fruit". These start out merely being strange and unsettling but still pretty funny, and grow into full-blown Surreal Horror by the end as the narrator's bizarre civilization is drawn into an increasingly brutal war with the "mans from below".
Instruction for a TROPE:
- After the End
- Ambiguous Ending: "The View From Below" ends with the US military heading for UK to "liberate" it using Agent Red. However, before the London military leader, Brigadier Coldwell, can inform the Americans of something, the communication cuts off. Judging by Coldwell's confusion when the Americans said they were bringing a "weedwhacker", it is possible that they actually figured out how to live in peace with the Nuss.
- Body Horror
- Crapsaccharine World: Everyone is a friend. Everything is perfect. Unnaturally perfect; predators and prey aren't meant to live together in symbiotic harmony.
- Divided States of America:
- Eldritch Abomination: The Red Worm. Others are hinted at.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Actually, everything is just trying to infect you; but you are trying to kill everything.
- Evilutionary Biologist: The Nuss seems to have created/evolved new organisms for its purposes (including the Red Worm).
- Faux-To Guide
- Full-Circle Revolution: The View From Below ended with the tyrannical US government being overthrown in a coup just as they were discussing plans to conquer other countries using Agent Red and nukes. However, in the ending, the US military carry out the original plan to raze the UK anyway.
- Narrator: We had new masters. Things had to get better.
- Gaia's Vengeance: Goes both ways. The Mans From Below see everything going on topside as this, but grow pretty brutal in their attempts to regain ground.
- Gas Mask Mooks: The Mans From Below.
- Grey-and-Grey Morality: The Nuss have a utopian society that could never be achieved by humans alone, at the cost of its members' free will. The humans were fighting to reclaim their world, but they did so by bathing everything in toxic fumes and nuclear fire and their leaders were horribly cruel and selfish, with the ultimate goal of using the apocalypse to Take Over the World.
- Hive Mind
- Humans Are Cthulhu: Double-dipped - the "Mans From Below", actually the few remaining uninfected, unmutated Americans, and the Red Worms.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot
- Lost in Transmission: The narration often dissolves into wordless nonsense.
- Mind Screw
- Mind Screwdriver: "The View From Below", to the point where Parsons advises against reading it if you want the series to maintain any mystery (although it's still pretty freaky).
- Mind Screwdriver: "The View From Below
- Oppressive Statesof America: Following the Nuss apocalypse, the remnants of the US government became a brutal autocracy and committed unspeakable atrocities against the other surviving bunkers. Things only got worse when they found a way to fight the Nuss.
- Painting the Medium: The text is erratically formatted. Sometimes it's for emphasis, other times it's just random.
- Bold Inflation
- Rainbow Speak: Most persistently, The RED WORM.
- Perspective Flip: "The View From Below", which is several times longer than the rest of the series put together, which has a lot to do with it being formatted like normal prose.
- Pineal Weirdness: Mentioned but never explained. In the view from below, the dissected Red Worm has some sort of enlarged Pineal structure.
- Scrapbook Story: "The View From Below" has some scrapbookiness to it.
- Sophisticated as Hell: The narration primarily uses simple words and bad grammar, but with some advanced vocabulary mixed in, much like the output of a machine translator.
-
Squick: The spores' Hive Mind produces such pleasant images as a deer seething with ticks all over its body, and an anthill the size of an....actual hill. - Surreal Horror: The main series taken on its own is definitely Surreal Horror. "The View From Below" puts most of the surreal stuff into context.
- Surreal Humor: Although they have some unsettling bits, the first four or five installments are light enough in tone for their disjointed, creepy nonsense to be funny.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial:You are NOT NOT NOT part of interconnected consciousness in which each human is like unto cell in a body and does not share autonomous function. This is mistake thinking!!!! A human die all experience die.
- Talkative Loon: Some of the narration is too nonsensical to decipher.
- The End... Or Is It?: The end of "Instruction for a THing" reveals that the Nuss still has hidden spores in "crack in a rock" and "deep water meat forgot", with the implication that it's simply bidding its time until it can come back again.
- The Unreveal: The origin of the "Nuss" is never explained.
- The Virus: The Nuss is a sapient, Well-Intentioned Extremist fungus with the ability to assimilate hosts into a perfectly harmonious Cloud Cuckoo Lander Hive Mind.
- Was Once a Man: The Red Worm. It's outright stated in "The View From Below", but how this happens is less clear. It's implied, based on a number of segments, that they were originally infected humans who were instructed by the Voice to eat the "fruit" from the first guide.
- Wham Line: "Man from below has a look like you. He is bad. The signs of the mans from below is stripes of red and stripes of white and squares of blue. On a squares of blue stars that man from below only remember cannot see."
- Wham Shot: An image of the "Mans From Below" reveal that they are US Army soldiers.
- You No Take Candle
