Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1196539-20140717014526/@comment-1196539-20140717055554

Death is just too common a theme in creepypastas to be used practically. In about 90% of creepypastas, someone dies. And is there anyone really looking for pastas wherein someone dies as a form of criteria? It doesn't serve much purpose, so that would be a case of a category we don't really need.

Conversely, however, if a pasta is more than a page or so, like many people, I'll skim it. In many cases I'll go straight to the ending to see if reading the whole thing will be worth the payoff. If the whole point of the pasta was, like XoRax, to guess what the pasta is referencing as you are reading it, then I wouldn't want to do that. Skimming it would ruin it for me. Thus, if I pasta had the Shock Ending category applied to it, I would immediately know not to skim, and to read the whole thing in full.

I don't think the Shock Ending category ruins a pasta at all. It almost makes it into a game. It makes you want to try and guess what's coming, which pastas like that usually want you to do anyway. They want to see how long it takes you to figure out the source material. It's a challenge, like a word game. Now, having the Legend of Zelda tag applied to XoRax? THAT ruins it. THAT completely kills the surprise.

Anyway, my point is that the category does serve a purpose for individual pastas. Even more than that, if I read a pasta like XoRax (which I keep referencing simply because it's one of the most well-known) and wanted to see more of that nature, it would make them a LOT easier to find to have a category gathering them all together. If having the tag there hurts the story for you, then I feel for you, but that drawback is SEVERELY outweighed by the benefit of being able to find all of those "game" pastas in one place, which is the whole reason Categories exist. I know I'd sure like to be able to find more easily.