#just for now dont want to lose this in the sea of untagged ramblings

[haootia]

watching mind field episode about fear and thinking about . petscop. if you have seen the episode you may already know what im getting at but for those of you who arent also currently on a vsauce rewatch marathon: they put michael "vsauce" stevens in a chair and classical condition him into being afraid of a picture of a pink square. and that itself is kind of superficially/memey "petscopcore" bc petscop contains not only a lot of geometric shapes and colors but also themes of coercion & experimentation, but it made me think more broadly about how the work as a whole is able to make us the audience have those really strong emotions, including fear, towards very simple icons/symbols. and of course this is why petscop massively outpaces most web horror [interscript note: i never watched valle verde or crow 64 and i have only watched incomplete bits and pieces of ai builds / sheriff domestic / diminish so i cant comment on the "tgif genre" or other directly post-petscop works] because it ties its dread and scariness into things that are Not Scary. there are no jumpscares or hyper realistic blood and the typical "horror" moments (that's a dead kid / i'll shoot her in the head / dog monologue / hurts me when playstation on) are presented really quite casually and non-graphically.

petscop is very Eerie and Dread-inducing but it's not (& not trying to be) actively frightening, which is really good, because it is damn hard to make a non-playable recap of a video game frightening. there are too many layers of removal, it's too cheesy, at least for an adult audience or an audience with any prior experience with horror. when i was a kid sure i got freaked as hell reading ( / listening to yuriofwind narrate) haunted pokemon game creepypastas (even when the narration was full of "lol, this is lame" asides) but once i got older it stopped eliciting such a response. i reread a bunch of them recently and my main commentary (both internally and in discord chat to my fishfriend) was mostly "the grammar in this is distractingly bad" and, more importantly, "the bare bones of this premise might have been interesting somewhere else, but this is not it." godzilla nes has endured slightly better because it has an underlayer of "the game knows something it shouldn't" that provides the real meat of the horror, and the creepy body horror screenshots are interesting but not really frightening. it's still not great, btw, most creepypastas aren't, but i can enjoy it in a silly nostalgic way that at least puts it on a higher shelf than pokemon lost silver or whatever.

in the time between first reading a bunch of creepypasta wiki slop and first watching petscop, i experienced like, actual trauma. this particular incident was very much not an inherent part of growing up , but i think "having something really scary happen to you irl" Is a life transition you can expect to happen sometime between like eight and sixteen. and this event is a pretty dramatic perspective shifter. before it happened i was able to be legitimately thrilled and scared by pokemon creepypasta and afterwards. i wasnt. it was definitely not an immediate switch and between age 10 and 13 especially i struggled with nightmares and extreme anxiety over a lot of really lame spooky internet content which i sought out for blah blah blah reasons. ok this isnt about me, its about petscop, ostensibly. the point im trying to make is that petscop gets Scarier with age. if i had seen petscop when i was eight years old i would have found it first and foremost Way Too Long And Boring and secondly Not Very Scary. there's no blood and no monsters and no ~watch out or it might get you too!!~ so who even gives a fuck, right.

and of course this beautifully represents the themes of the work itself. children do not understand the world the way adults do, they don't understand "reality" and all the secret rules that adults (generally) agree on, and sometimes they don't realize when bad things are happening, or why the things that are happening Are Bad. the protagonist of petscop is literally an adult looking back on their childhood through layers of other people's perspectives, and through (somewhat strange and magical) context is able to see things that weren't there before. if the horror was immediate and upfront, it wouldn't be interesting. if Everything was as in-your-face as "that's a dead kid" petscop would kind of just be a slideshow of childhood traumas, which is definitely Sad and Uncomfortable but not really Scary. so the horrors are disguised by symbols. things the audience doesn't already know about. "rebirthing" (the exact implications of which rely on the audience knowing about external, real-world events), "tool", "machine", "pieces", the needles piano, A / B / NLM "phases", even graves and "coffins" are icons that mean things beyond just "a place where a dead body is". it's a story you have to decipher, it takes actual Effort beyond just looking at a scary image manip. (further commentary on the horror youtuber petscop explanation industrial complex may be provided at a later date; for now i'll just say that anyone who attempts to produce a definitive "externalized" explanation of the story is not only missing the point but actively rejecting it. petscop is literally a story about putting the pieces together yourself.) and through that effort you condition yourself to see certain things as scary.

the amount of symbols in petscop means that there's not one thing i can point to as its "pink square", something that is associated one to one with Fear. and the emotions petscop runs with are a lot more complicated than the adrenaline-based fear response they gave michael vsauce stevens for tv. but god damn if by the end it hasn't constructed a symbolic language that can make me feel a deep and immediate emotional reaction to a red triangle. or eyebrows, or daisies, or like, the platonic Concept of a car? it's good. it's good storytelling. mother horse eyes also kind of pulls this in the last couple chapters to contribute to the final emotional impact but i don't think it's as fundamental a part of the story as it is in petscop. also of course homestuck does this like crazy but it's not (nominally) a horror story and also doesn't benefit from having a definite point-of-view protagonist who is learning to interpret the symbols simultaneously or in parallel with the audience. that's key to good writing in my opinion, btw, that the protagonist should either be on the same footing as or just slightly one step ahead of the audience. if the protagonist is way behind the audience it turns into a frustrating Yelling At The Screen Experience and if they're way ahead it makes everything seem completely arbitrary (see hbomberguy sherlock video for more). people may frame this as the protagonist being an "idiot" or a "genius" but i don't think that's actually the distinction that matters, it's specifically about how much information the character has from out-of-text sources, not really their ability to put it together in a rational or intelligent way. and now we're onto a completely different topic so im going to cut the post off now before i spend the rest of my life talking about the nature of storytelling or whatever, slowly withering away from starvation until i'm just a shriveled husk holding an iphone