Nightmare Retardant / Creepypasta

• The premises of some creepypastas can be rather unsettling until an absolutely absurd detail is given, like in Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv, where it's explained that the viewers of the titular video gouged their eyes out, then mailed them to YouTube's main office, which implies that they could somehow still write neat addresses on envelopes without being able to see, seal their eyes inside the envelopes (again without being able to see) and be able to post them, all while blood and other assorted fluids are busy gushing out of their empty eye sockets, presumably pouring all over the envelope or parcel and making it too soiled to use, let alone post. Thus, this also assumes that any postal staff who received, handled and shipped the bloodied letters okayed them to be sent on, presumably ignoring the copious amounts of blood, gore and a whole host of other bodily substances seeping out of the envelopes en-masse!
• Squidward's Suicide could have been genuinely terrifying if not for a good number of logical fallacies.
  • For starters, the fact that the interns and executives continue watching the "lost episode" after having been horrified or nauseated by the imagery, such as the murdered children's photos. The narrator (who is one of the interns) explicitly states that they even bothered to watch the episode a second time. One also ponders why they don't decide to report the latter footage to the police until much later.
  • When the investigation does concur, the police are apparently unable to put anything together regarding the case, such as the children's identities or attributes about the perpetrator. This might have been intentional on the writer's part to keep things "mysterious", but a series of photos alone is enough for the police to get good progress into the investigation with the variety of methods they can have in hand, such as being able to contact the parents or guardians of the children, who must have reported that they've gone missing. Thus, they could easily find the culprit, regardless of the time they'd have to take.
• The twist at the end of Pacemaker: After mutilating and murdering his girlfriend and her family, then cutting both his legs and one of his arms off with a 'rusty table knife' in some bizarre, poorly written insane rampage for reasons just as byzantine, our hero comes to the sudden realization in his hospital bed, having somehow survived, that his girlfriend's pacemaker made him do it... and, he ate the pacemaker, for some reason!
• If one stops to think about the disturbing imagery associated with Creepypasta, many of them turn to nightmare retardant quickly, since most of the shocking pictures are just obvious Photoshop. For example:
  • The image for Smile Dog. While painted as a frightening, evil demonic entity in the pasta, that picture is really a photoshopped image of someone's dog. Smile Dog is actually a Siberian Husky - one of the most beautiful and photogenic breeds of dog.
  • Jeff the Killer is the poster child for Photoshop filter abuse in the Creepypasta genre. Many have observed that his face looks rather like a potato. The part about Photoshop filter abuse becomes even more Hilarious in Hindsight when as of 2022, this seems like the most likely origin point for where the original image came from, specifically from a Japanese forum holding a Photoshop battle.
  • The rising trend of AI generated images and AI generated anime artwork redrawn from existing photos lead to such hilarity as this.
• The Trollpasta Wiki is devoted to poorly-written tales (intentional or otherwise), such as the infamous WHO WAS PHONE?
• The finale of A Cure For Cancer - after several very awkward sex scenes earlier in the story, the protagonist’s lover (who he manipulated and tricked into being in love with him in the first place...) is now dying from a virus that induces cancer, so the protagonist treats her with human stem cell therapy, a medical treatment that’s currently being intensively tested as we speak. Instead of doing something similar to the results of the tests thus far, the treatment somehow interacts with the cancer and turns her into a half-human, half-zombie(?) creature made from cancer. Despite this creature clearly being dangerous, and also not at all how that works, our protagonist decides to get close, draw her in... and begins to French kiss her, all while having his throat ripped to shreds by the monster’s long, razor sharp tongue.
• The (now deleted) Kirby's Deadland, where the author takes the non-threatening names of Kirby's rogues gallery (e.g. "Whispy Woods") dead seriously.
• Papercuts is supposed to be a serious story about a mysterious figure mutilating people, but it's hard to take seriously because of the fact that the villain's agenda involves papercut experiments, of all things. The narrator's friends abruptly dying also ends up killing the mood, as well as one of the protagonist friend's lamenting the horrific nature of the murder... while eating a sandwich.
• Pocoyo: Todo termina ahora tries to take a crack at turning a moral story about growing up into something scary, but doesn’t really work. It doesn’t help that, like Kirby’s Deadland above, it tries to make a creepy atmosphere while reciting the kid friendly and Gratuitous Spanish names of the characters in the same breath. Interestingly, common consensus says that it is well written, just not in the right genre, which is ultimately what got it deleted in the first place.
• Some of the ways you have to acquire artifacts in the Holders series (let alone survive) ends up going beyond trying to build suspense and flies straight into the realm of Narm. One has to be really bold (or suicidal) to do such tasks when quite a lot of them depend entirely on luck.
• The Harbinger Experiment is mostly creepy, but the fact that the monster's arrival is heralded by Tiny Tim's "Livin' in the Sunlight" can feel silly — especially if you associate that song with SpongeBob SquarePants because of the song's use in that show's pilot episode "Help Wanted".
• Speaking of SpongeBob, the "SpongeBob Bootleg Episode" has a still of SpongeBob that is stated to blink if looked at long enough. And if you look at the actual image long enough? He does...because it's a GIF. There goes the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
• "Digimon: The Unseen Episode" includes the opening of the show being messed up, which the narrator describes as being like a YouTube Poop.
• Come Follow Me is a Pokémon creepypasta describing an investigation into a series of deaths that occurred not long after the release of the first games in Japan, describes the deaths of two Game Freak employees as part of the plot. It's rather creepy... until you realize that the employees in question (Koji Nishino and Sosuke Tamada) are very much alive and still contribute to Pokemon, with the former even making a cameo in both Black and White and their sequels.
• YouChan is this because of how unlikable the protagonist is. His sociopathy and cruelty guarantee that he becomes an Asshole Victim.
• There is a fad in the closing logo fanbase where there are numerous fanmade horror remakes of on-screen logos, mostly ones from "lost episodes" of kids' shows. While some can be actual nightmare fuel (like the Noedolekcin "Blood Splat" logos), some of them just fail to be scary (EX: This Harringtoons Productions Nightmares logo has a Jump Scare where the possessed O eyes manifest angry eyebrows and a frowning mouth with sharp teeth as it zooms into the camera and roars at us, before it goes back to its normal spot, but the face looked more Creepy Cute than scary once you get used to it).
• "Lavender Town Syndrome" is one of the most famous Pokémon out there, but it has a trio of sister pastas that detail additional Dummied Out elements related to Lavender Town: "Buried Alive Model" (a boss trainer who causes a Non-Standard Game Over that overwrites your Game Boy's internal memory), "White Hand Sprite" (a Pokemon used by the aforementioned Buried Alive, whose animations cause harmful effects), and "Ghost Animation" (an animated background element that includes disturbing images). However, anyone even remotely versed in how Game Boy games work will be unable to take these stories seriously, as they mention specific files: "staticmesh.wav", "whitehand.gif", and "haunting.swf". These are file formats that are unsupported by the Game Boy, with just a single one of these files likely being several times larger than what any Game Boy cartridge can hold. In particular, the .swf format indicates an Adobe Flash animation, something the Game Boy is not even remotely able to handle.

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