Creepypasta in its original form, meanwhile, might best be described as a specific subgenre of copypasta - the chunks of repeatedly copied and pasted text that tell a horror story. That’s called copypasta - derived from “copy-paste” in 2006, it’s the first bastardization in the chain of language. You know those chunks of text you see all over the Internet that are just the same dang thing, copied and pasted from source to source to source, with no actual clue to their origins or even so much as a proper citation? It comes in many forms, but the good ol’ fashioned chain letter is one of them. Here’s how the chain of terminology goes: If the term makes little to no sense to you, well, that’s understandable it’s a bastardization of a bastardization, which means it’s essentially nonsense. According to Know Your Meme - that great chronicler of all things web culture - the first known instance of the word “creepypasta” occurred in 2007 in a thread on 4chan dating to July 6. But the idea of weird ghost stories in the Style section stuck out to me, which is probably why I clicked on the article in the first place.īut creepypasta itself had been around for a few years already by the time I found my way to that article, so maybe I was as late to the party as the Times was. To be fair, the Style section does often double as a general “culture” section it’s where the etiquette column Social Q’s makes its home, for instance, and that’s not necessarily the stuff of runway fashion, either. This in and of itself is remarkable for a few reasons: First, while I appreciate the New York Times, it’s not typically my go-to for discovering under-the-radar web phenomena (remember how late they were to the emoji game?) and second, it was in the Style section of all places. Let’s take a moment answer some of those questions.Īs I’ve remarked in the past, I first discovered the genre of web-based horror fiction known as creepypasta through a New York Times article published in 2010. I mean, yes, we’ve gone over the general definition a few times - but where does creepypasta come from? What makes for a good one? What are some of the classics? What’s the essence of creepypasta? It recently occurred to me that, for all the discussion of freaky creepypasta you and I have done here over the past few months, we’ve never gone in depth about what creepypasta is.
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