CREEPYPASTA PARODIES AS A COMPONENT OF SCARY INTERNET FOLKLORE

• Main Author: Татьяна Александровна Мирвода (Tatyana A. Mirvoda )
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Perm State University 2018-09-01
• Series: Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: Rossijskaâ i zarubežnaâ filologiâ
• Subjects: крипипаста; «советская» крипипаста; страшный сетевой фольклор; интернет-фольклор; пародия.
• Online Access: http://press.psu.ru/index.php/philology/article/view/1633

Creepypasta is a notable phenomenon of the Internet culture, relating both to the field of “scary” web creativity in general and to the scary Internet folklore in particular. Parodies of creepypasta are usually published next to it on the same web resources, so users often perceive and transmit these texts as creepypasta itself. Web creepypasta parodies can be divided into actual parodies, recasts and parodic works. An example of actual parodies is the trend “Such is life in Moscow”, originated in the English-speaking segment of the Internet and known in the Runet as «“Soviet” creepypasta». It is characterized by the use of Soviet realities for the creation of caricature works. These are based on the most famous texts of classical creepypasta and make fun of the features inherent in the poetics of this genre. Another kind of actual parodies are texts deriding the recognizable motifs and plots of creepypasta but presented in another genre. Parodies-recasts, while preserving the structure of the original text, change its individual pieces or details, thus changing the perception of this text from scary to funny. They are not labeled by users and usually published in the general stream next to the “canonical” creepypasta, which leads to comic discrediting of not only a single text but the tradition as a whole. The layer of parodic works that piggyback on the original creepypasta is the most extensive. There are some types clearly distinguished in it, which can be denoted as “fanfics”, “rejected stories”, “disclosures” and “new texts in place of old ones”.