The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You / Web Original

• A large number of Creepypasta stories like to include the reader, often in a "the killer is in your house now" twist. A notable exception to this rule is Wake Up, the short but effective story of a rape or torture victim who retreats in a world similar to their own, but where they don't endure these atrocities. However, their brain feels that what's happening to them in the real world is dangerous, so it gives them subliminal messages so they can Wake Up, but the poor victim may not realize it until it's too late, and they will be left between a Sadistic Choice where they either endure more and more messages telling them to WAKE UP, or oblige and come back to their sad reality. Despite this behaviour being self-destructive, it's understandable that someone who has no way to escape this predicament is looking for a break in it, but this can't last forever, and one day, they will feel the need to PLEASE. WAKE UP.
• The short story "Federal Reserve Skateboard" on the xkcd blog includes this line:
  "At last, Bernanke got a solid grip on Greenspan's collar and hurled him through the fourth wall, knocking you to the ground."
• SCP Foundation:
  • Inverted in the entry for SCP-674, which can be used to shoot people appearing on a television screen, with no effect on real life. Later played straight when the article implies that the owner of the object made the mistake of choosing the Star Trek cast as his targets, who apparently used a combination of Techno Babble and taking advantage of the scene's limited field of view to fire a shot back at the owner and kill him.
  • One of the SCP-001 proposals is a malevolent force that creates the horrors the Foundation has to deal with - it's the authors. Complete with a containment procedure, in case the Godzilla Threshold is crossed. Yup, the SCP Foundation can potentially kill the people that write it.
    • In canon, the entire concept of a ZK-scenario is this. Killing off the audience of the site, meaning that it becomes as if the Foundation universe itself never existed.
  • The SCP-001 proposals in general are protected by a "Berryman-Langford memetic kill agent" that will cause cardiac arrest in any unauthorized viewers. Thankfully, most readers apparently have authorization.
  • The twists of SCP-1055 and SCP-2950 utilize this trope. By learning of their true identities, you the reader have potentially weakened their containment by enraging the former with your fear and altering the latter's transformed state with the knowledge it's not a chair.
  • SCP-1893 will post threatening messages to your user name if you are logged onto the site.
  • SCP-1633 is a video game where the enemy AI is designed to adapt itself to the player's tactics to provide a unique challenge, starting out monumentally stupid on a new save file but getting smarter the longer one plays. Eventually, the enemies become smart enough to realize that there is a player controlling the heroes and starts messing with them directly. Examples include trying to creep the player out, frustrating the player until they Rage Quit, and even coordinating the usage of light-emitting spells to create Epileptic Flashing Lights which sends the player into a seizure. The Apocalyptic Log left by one of the developers theorizes that given enough time, the AI will grow so smart that the game's Big Bad will start believing it's a real Eldritch Abomination and not just a game character, and try to break out of the confines of the game and take over the real world.
  • SCP-1875 is an antique chess computer implied to have been made by a Russian chess prodigy by murdering his own daughters and harvesting their brains and bones for the computer and chess pieces. The girls are NOT happy about this, and directly address the viewer by their username in a corrupted incident report addendum, then unleash a Jump Scare in the following addendum in the form of an image that, in-universe, induces paranoia, anxiety, hallucinations, and self-mutilation in whoever sees it.
    WE C Y0U, <username>
  • SCP-●●|●●●●●|●●|● is a Humanoid Abomination that appears whenever anyone writes or speaks about it, requiring pictograms and illustrations to describe it since it can't understand those. When it appears, it abducts the source of the information about it; meaning that if you write about it, it steals the paper you wrote on; while if you speak about it, it steals you.
  • SCP-2835 is a lost episode of The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican where Paddy will randomly stop and ask the audience for feedback. If he finds they aren't enjoying the cartoon, Paddy will get furiously angry. Testing on the SCP was suspended after Paddy got mad enough to threaten the viewer and their loved ones.
  • SCP-3125 is an extradimensional set of ideas that is much more aggressive than human ideas. Later on, it is stated that "It threatens universes which embed ours as fiction" - that is to say, our universe.
  • SCP-3922 is a metal cylinder with the Three Moons Initiative's insignia engraved onto it. When 3922 is placed close to a recording of fictional media, the media will be invaded by TMI operatives (designated SCP-3922-A) armed with futuristic military equipment. The operatives will attempt to stop all perceived wrongdoings within the chosen media, primarily through absurdly excessive amounts of force. Sometimes, SCP-3922-A instances will even go after the media's creator: Batman: The Killing Joke eventually shows Alan Moore saying contrary to history the Joker isn't coming back from the dead, while South Park leads to Trey and Matt impaled by SCP-2578-D, and the director of The Human Centipede is executed. At the same time, the Foundation also wants to prevent this trope from coming to fruition, most notably by denying 3922 access to Deadpool, as they explicitly stated that they don't want someone as insane as Wade Wilson, or the planetary destroyers known as the entire Dragon Ball cast. Funnily enough, invading Blazing Saddles caused Mel Brooks to show up on stage, dismiss SCP-3922-A, and warn the Foundation to not do it again.
  • SCP-4975 is a bird-like creature that torments human prey with a persistent ticking noise before attacking them, and can exist in two places at once, with its "projection" being unseen to all but its victim. The fun part comes when you view the article with headphones plugged in. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock...
  • SCP-5045 is a sentient computer program that takes the form of a game called Goat VR, specifically the Farmer character in said game. Anybody who plays long enough using a VR system is rendered brain-dead and their minds are used to create the Farmer's "goats". An interview using a standard display ended when Farmer walked out of the display and directly attacked the interviewer. Farmer then notices the person reading the file and goes after them.
  • SCP-5999, This Is Where I Died, features an image of seven candles that go out one by one as you read through the article, with the article consisting of vaguely-related horror-themed stories and snippets of text to give the impression that you are unleashing something terrible just by reading it. Which you absolutely are: the entire thing is host to a memetic kill agent manifesting as a Jump Scare at the end, intended to kill the reader. Remember how the Foundation know about their writers and have a plan to off them if needed? This is them doing it. The title is referring to you.
  • SCP-6106 is an entity that hides in written works, usually books or websites, typically by creating a few extra pages to hide in. If its hiding place is read by someone who is alone and who isn't being observed by a camera, it will consume them, leaving nothing behind. Notably, its hiding place typically contains accurate information about itself, which unfortunately means that accurate information about SCP-6106 is likely to actually be SCP-6106. Accurate information like the SCP listing for example. Or even this trope example.
  • Played for Laughs with SCP-TTKU-J (which is a thing that kills you), which will call out by name anyone who's logged into the wiki reading its page. Also inverted with the page itself, stating that SCP-TTKU-J needs to be kept away from you because "you are, presumably, a thing that should not be killed".
• The NES Godzilla Creepypasta has the player insulting Red / the Hellbeast after escaping from him. He stares back. And it only gets worse after that, culminating in the final battle where every attack that Red uses on the player's monsters causes the player himself incredible pain in the real world.
• ZALGO! H͉͙̖͎́ͬ̿͟͠ͅȨ̶͚̺͈̬̏̑͊̄̓ͨͪ̚ ̻̬̂̎͒̂̌̕͟C̦̦͚̱̯͕̾͊̏ͦ͘͜O͕͕̟͇͎̩̞̅ͩ̚M̵̪͔̗̺ͯͭ̀E̢̟̙̗̰̬̲͕̘̍ͪͬ̌̏̑͜͢S̴̤̯̫ͩ̑̄̂̚͘͠.̭̞̠̟̘̪̉͒ͧͯ̾͆
• The Day Of All The Blood ends with The Reveal that "THE MAN WAS YOU!!! (OR HE WAS A LADY IF YOU ARE A LADY) AND YOU FORGOT THAT THIS HAPPENED".
• In CPUCS, one of the announcers, JoSniffy, apparently gets killed by BloodFalcon in The Way Home. However it is revealed in Everest that he was sent to the Dark Realm.
• Many folks have read (and laughed at!) the story of Old Man Henderson, the player character who "beat" Call of Cthulhu by actually managing to kill Hastur. One easily-missed point, however, is that the creator burned the manuscript for the character's backstory after the game was finished, because — in his own words — "it was EVIL." Let's put that into context: in order to beat a pissy, railroading GM running a campaign in a Cosmic Horror world, he wrote the Necronomicon. Maybe Jack Chick was right.
• Artists at the Ready, an Original Character tournament hosted on DeviantArt, is based around the premise of the artists as themselves being summoned into a dimension called The Real, where they had to call upon their own characters (who can actually exist in this dimension) to protect them and battle for the amusement of the sadistic judges.
• The "You think you're safe?" meme is built around this, where a picture of a character on the screen appears to look directly at the viewer and either start running towards them or reach out to grab them with their hands.
• Villains in various media who have self-demonstrating TV Tropes pages are not above threatening the lives of, or playing mind games with, anyone who reads their pages.
• WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK.: In every videotape Val appears in, they're always staring at the viewer no matter the network it was taped from.
• "The Red Room" is a Japanese Flash animation about an internet pop-up ad which kills those who close it. Once this animation is over, it opens a pop-up ad in your browser, looking just like the one in the video (however, having an ad blocker will stop this from working). Due to Adobe Flash being deprecated, it is no longer possible to experience this for yourself.

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