Trollpasta Wiki:Trollpasta Clichés

Hello, new user. As you probably know, trollpasta is meant to be a parody of scary stories. However, lately a few of the other admins and I have noticed that some people don't seem to quite grasp that concept. Most of the time this is because these new users fail to avoid a bunch of painfully overused clichés which pretty much kill any potential funniness your story may have. Having one or two of these things in your pasta isn't that bad, it depends on how you use them and your pasta won't be deleted just because it has a cliché in it, but if your story incorporates many, it is likely of poor quality. Do not rely on nothing else but clichés for comedic value. Just because this is trollpasta doesn't mean that you can automatically make your story funny or a good parody/satire by making it incredibly bad and hard to read.  Nor does it mean it is impossible to have clichés in Trollpasta. Remember that trollpastas, regardless of how terrible they may be, still must have the basic elements of an actual story and should not be just an incoherent pile of clichés. Making the story bad does not make it automatically funny.

Many of these clichés link to categories, illustrating how many times they've already been used.

General Clichés

1. Jeff the Killer spin-off parodies. We have hundreds of these already. When things like JEFF TURNS INTO A GIRAFFE!!!! and JEFF THE KILLER BECOMES WILE E. COYOTE pops up it might be time to stop with these...
2. Hyper-realistic (blood). Just plain overused, and it's hardly used in actual creepypastas anymore these days, so why still use it here?
3. Sonic.exe and other tites ending in various file extensions.
4. Shrek Is Love ripoffs. This isn't 2013.
5. Crappy MS Paint drawings, especially if they have lots of blood
6. MLG humour. Things like xXx_W4ckY_MLG_n4m3s_xXx, Mountain Dew, Doritos, 420 BLAZE IT, etc. and creating 'MLG versions' of existing stories. The whole MLG thing got old a while ago anyway.
7. Overuse of sex jokes and potty humor. What are you, 12?
8. Random humour. Just because your story makes no sense doesn't mean it's funny.
9. Making a character whose name ends with "XXX".
10. Putting "YOU'RE NEXT" at the end of your story.
11. Putting "AND THEN A SKELETON POPPED OUT" at the end of your story.
12. Excessive swearing.
13. Killing yourself or dying at the end of the story.
14. Putting a serious story in gizoogle.net.
15. Expand Dong and BonziBuddy. Even Joel from Vinesauce wanted these jokes to die out after seeing how much people spammed them.
16. Using "le", "teh", "hte", "de" or "da".
17. Using the same joke over and over again. If it wasn't funny the first time, it surely will be the 20th!

Formatting Clichés

1. Making your story ALL CAPS.
2. Making your story a big wall of text with no line breaks whatsoever.
3. Giving your story an overly long title
4. Extremely poor English grammar and spelling.
5. No punctuation and capitalisation at all.
6. Excessive use of exclamation marks.
7. Using 1337 text.

Satire Clichés

1. Bashing the author of the story you're satirising. That's not satire, that's harassment. (It's okay if you're just lightly bantering him though).
2. Overreacting to stuff that happens in the story you're satirising. This can be funny if done correctly.
3. Making the satire one sentence long. A'la Sanic.exe.exe.

Video Game Clichés

1. Saying you bought the game from some random guy isn't funny anymore, it's just overused.

Lost Episode Clichés

_WIP_

Examples of bad trollpastas

1. ZOMG IZ ZGARIEZED BAZDA LIGE 1337 H4X
2. A SHREK GAME OMFG HAUNTED OR SUM SHIT IDK BUT IT GAVE ME A NIGHTMARE B CUS IT WAS ALL ABOUT SHREK
3. TEH EVIL BABBY
4. TF2.420.EXE
5. Spojbub n pitrck go tu a strep clob.vhstape

And pretty much everything else in Category:Unfunny

Examples of good trollpastas

1. 404
2. Haunted_Gaming_Lost_Episode
3. TEH DAY OF ALL TEH BLOD
4. The Giant, Creepy-Ass-Hairless-Spooky monster.
5. The most cliched pasta in the history of Creepypastas, Crappypastas and Trollpastas.exe

See also: Category:TPOTM and Category:SUGGESTED READING.