We Are Being Watched · 5:56pm Jun 29th, 2014
My sister, a first grade teacher, brings people to the church we attend who don't have other means of transportation. Recently, she asked me to drive one group because she need to be elsewhere.
Among this group was a member of the primary audience, a middle-school girl. As the discussion in the car progressed, My Little Pony came up, and we both discovered the other is a fan. Within a minute of starting to talk ponies, she said, "And I loooove the crepastas."
"What?" I asked. She'd mumbled, and I didn't catch what she'd said
"I love the creepypastas." She then talked about how much more she enjoyed "The Rainbow Factory" than "Cupcakes." She and her friends at school actively seek out the dark and sad stories for laughs and feels, and share new discoveries with each other. I suggested she read my "Pinkie Plural," and the following week at church, she told me she loved it, and so did her friends.
This girl and her friends are watching the stories we create. They're willing and clever enough to get past the cursory age requirements to get the juicy stories we write. All the scary stuff, horrifying stuff, cloppy stuff, and Twilight-level dysfunctional romance. (I mean Bella and Edward, not Twilight and Flash.) All the pinnacles of pony literature and the depths of our depravity.
When you post, know that little eyes are upon us.
I just saw this in my news feed and decided to give Pinkie Plural a read. I was surprised how absolutely amazing it was. You sir deserve more followers.
Also, congrats on having friends who'll actually read your stories. I can't even get my mom to read my stories.
I think the takeaway here is that kids are a lot less innocent than our culture tends to project upon them. Actively seeking out and enjoying the creepypastas and darkfics is a different cry from stumbling across them and being scarred. And it's not an aberration. Believe me, when I was that age, I was reading Piers Anthony under the covers too.
(I found better authors as I got older.)
Should we be cognizant of our audience in what we write? Of course. But rather than censoring ourselves as to topic, we ought to write about the adult world with courage and conscience.
My own mature stories reflect, I think, how sexually mature sapients ought to treat each other; and in the places where the characters don't do that (Social Lubricant), you see firsthand how the characters' positive actions lead to redemption and their failings lead to dissonance. In a horribly twisted way, that might be one of the most show-faithful pieces I've written.
Even the darker stuff on the site has a place, I think, and a purpose, but I think we can both agree as adults we need to lead by example.
2244067 I know that kids pick up more than society thinks they should; my first FimFic blog post was along those lines. I think I was going more for write your fiction well, don't lie in the tags or categories, and don't corrupt the youth on purpose. Sorta like those Penny Arcade comics/commentaries where two raunchy twenty-somethings found themselves (a decade later) fathers who want to protect their children from the kind of person they used to be.
The girl I mentioned and I have both had the experience of finding ourselves alone with another person we care about, figuring out ways to kill them, and realizing that reading Cupcakes a few weeks before had gotten in our heads pretty severely. That's the real reason for this post.
2243492 Hey, even before you commented I had a few of your stories in my Read Later list. Now if I could just get my Kindle Paperwhite to STAY LOGGED INTO FIMFICTION FOR MORE THAN A WEEK, I might be plowing through good stories faster.
A thirty-character password is great for foiling trolls and hackers, but a Paperwhite's onscreen keyboard's easy mistakes makes it a five minute ordeal.
Wait... you mean there are people here who aren't little girls??
Guess I can write a little darker, then!
out of the mouth of babes