User blog:Netscapenavigaytor/unreality/suspension of disbelief scale?

so, forgive me if i can't figure out how to explain this in a way that makes sense, but does anyone else think it would be useful if there was a sort of "scale" for how realistic a real world pasta is?

like, right now we have the "real life haunting" and "hacked game, real life haunting" categories, but those can mean a LOT of different things. like, there's a big difference between "pokemon talks to you through the game for real and you start having vivid nightmares about it" and "pokemon physically comes out of the game and murders your neighbor" but both count as real life haunting. and, for that matter, there's a lot of stories JUST odd enough to not quite be plausible in a real pokemon cartridge but not enough to be considered a haunting.

so, a scale would be a clearer way of stating where exactly the 'pasta falls with suspension of disbelief, so it's easier to for people to find things in a specific niche. if someone finds pokepasta where it's JUST a hacked game that could conceivably exist in real life boring, they could look in one of the other categories on the scale. same for someone who instead finds "pokemon physically exist and attack you" hokey!

here's a possible idea for how the scale is ranked? completely subject to adjustment - maybe these are too broad or narrow, or maybe too much stuff falls in the middle? i dont know. also i know some people have Fun Names (or informative ones) for rankings on scales like these (E.G. tvtropes's Moh's Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, or an innumerable amount of sliding scales for anything from furry fandom to fanfiction cliches) but i can't think of any -.-;

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Level 0: Actual account of real life events. - i don't know how many of these are on this wiki, but for the sake of keeping it clean i'm putting it here. to make things clear, this would NOT be for fictional stories CLAIMING to be real events regardless of plausibility, only actual honest-to-goodness true stories!

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Level 1: Perfectly possible and maybe even believable in the real world. - okay, so that hacked game you got at that flea market was pretty creepy, but it's just a normal hacked game. delete it and start over, and it's just going to replay all the same events in pretty much the same way. or maybe your friend did this, and he's a real jerk known for pulling tricks like this - and it's not like he's denying anything in the hack, he TOTALLY did this. or maybe the creepiness has nothing to do with the game at all, if there is one. a murderer using a pikachu plush as a calling card, while cheesy, could very well happen in the real world.

the bounds of fiction and reality are firmly set and do not blur. the main character having nightnares about the events is on a thin line, but as long as it is firmly not supernatural in nature it should be fine for this level. note that there's a bit of leniency for what's possible in a hacked game (or how it's obtained) because i'm sure most of us aren't programmers or anything.

but as some quick rules of thumb: flea market or shady ebay sale okay, gamestop unlikely but possible, bought from an old man in a house that's gone the next day probably not. for that matter, hacked rom online full of pixelated gore okay - "hyperrealistic" gore probably not unless it's a 3ds game or a computer program instead of a ds or other console game incapable of rendering that. i probably shouldn't have to go further into what's completely realistic for a hacked pokemon game, but i will say that it is VERY unlikely that someone could program new dialogues and areas into a preexisting pokemon game without access to the cartridge itself and a computer with the right tools... with a notable exception being pokemon red/blue/yellow where there's been research done into arbitrary code execution "viruses" transferred through link cable trade... so far they've only been used to let people use a memory editor or actually put a mew under the truck for real, but i feel like there's a lot of horror potential there WINK WINK HINT HINT

some notable examples: Pokemon Creepy Black, Pokemon Lost Silver

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Level 2: Noticable but mostly minor supernatural elements, probably still believable by some people. - well, you knew when you got it a few years ago that this WAS a perfectly normal copy of pokemon diamond, but you've pulled it out of storage and something is Very Wrong. maybe it's a glitch, but glitches don't make your pokemon beg for help. cheat codes rewrite your game and hurt your pokemon in a way you never could've imagined, photos of your real life family (sometimes mauled, but you just saw them and they're fine so where did the photo come from?) appear in the game, the little boy who gave you that pokemon egg doesn't seem to exist anywhere anymore, your pokemon's wounds are disgustingly rendered like a photograph even though you're on a game boy, and how your starter misses you so much and is begging through the speaker for you to never ever leave - OR ELSE! aren't you lucky they at least have the courtesy to stay on their side of the screen?

in this category, pokemon in some form are often living, breathing creatures in a way, but they're still confined to their nature as digital entities. cartridges that have gone untouched for years can undergo unexplainable changes, and glitches seem just a little too purposeful to really be programming errors. easter eggs in otherwise harmless pokemon games abound, implying much more malicious programmers. things being in this category are not ALWAYS supernatural in nature, but if you have to back up and ask yourself "wait, why exactly would a professional children's game developer put THIS in the game?!" you may consider it part of this level. also, anything that shows a pokemon displaying self-awareness and intelligence on par with even a real animal is pretty much automatically at this level or higher - ESPECIALLY if it can somehow hear your voice and respond to you. ai technology has come a long way, but even if someone could somehow fit a high-tech artificial intelligence into a pokemon game, it still wouldn't be the same as a fully conscious entity and it's highly unlikely anyone would try anyway. also, a pokemon being able to chase you from pokemon game to pokemon game kind of lies in between levels 2 and 3, so use your personal judgement on that one. i will also say that the rare occurrence of a real life pokepasta FROM a pokemon's perspective, while usually tagged as an In-World pasta anyway, slots into this or the above levels.

also, most pasta involving physical pokemon toys should probably be at this level or higher. for the cutoff point, think of it this way - hide and seek alone is pushing it, and chucky from child's play is far too much. if your pokemon plushes are basically enacting a brutal version of toy story, you've probably gone past level 2. (for an example of my own work, Cheap Figures, while never showing the figures themselves doing anything, is a bit too heavy with the supernatural elements to be level 2 and belongs more in level 3.)

stuff like nightmares and hallucinations are basically fair game in this level. note that nightmares and hallucinations PHYSICALLY HARMING YOU straddles the higher levels, but as long as it's not much more than "mysterious claw marks or wounds that could be ANYTHING, really" it should still be fine. severe psychological damage is also fair game. putting your main character into a coma or making them try to kill themselves is... pushing it, depending on the content, but still doable. reflections, shadows, and anything else of that sort are also mostly acceptable. in general, this category is mostly summed up as "use your best judgement to decide if it fits here."

some notable examples: Easter Egg - Snow on Mt. Silver, Glitchlett, Lavender Town Syndrome. pretty much most famous Pokepastas fall into this category.

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Level 3: Major supernatural elements, or "Zoinks, they're real!" - LIKE, SCOOB! THE PIKACHU JUST POPPED OUT OF THE SCREEN! AND IT'S GOT A KNIFE! RUUUUUUUUN! or, in other words, these pokemon can do just about anything and you'd best watch out. it's pretty difficult to describe this one, since it's basically "anything more than level 2 but less than level 4." at this level, your protagonists very often risk actual death just by daring to interact with these haunted pokemon. they can haunt unrelated friends and family, break your stuff, physically hurt you and force you to keep playing the game against your will, and even physically manifest in the real world. level 2 protagonists usually at most only have to deal with one-time psychological trauma and bricked pokemon games, but level 3 protagonists often end up haunted for the rest of their life - if they have the luxury of living the rest of their life. full on poltergeists and anything that could probably be described as "reality warping" definitely go here. manifesting physical objects is also a level 3 thing.

notably, a lot of pokepastas are level 2 up until the veeeeery end (sometimes even the last sentence!), where something happens to shift it up to level 3. i tend to think of these as "level 2.5", but they're technically still level 3s by this scale. you don't see a whole lot of full-fledged level 3s by anyone other than kids writing their first pokepasta, which is a shame because despite its potential cheesiness there's a lot of room for creative ideas here. buuut it is what it is.

pretty much one of the only things that can push something past level 3 is shifting realities entirely. usually, this translates to "the protagonist gets trapped in the game/goes into the pokemon world". however, even a real person getting trapped in a pokemon game can stick to level 2, depending on how it's handled. personally i feel as long as we aren't given the perspective of the individual trapped in the game (as in, we are only reading this from the perspective of someone outside the game looking in) and it doesn't feel like the person in the game is going on a Cool (or not so cool) Adventure or is in some way genuinely happier like this, it can probably still be level 3. if they're not in specifically a game and are in the Actual, Real Pokemon World, then it's level 4 for sure. as for realities other than the games or the pokemon world... well. i can't analyse that because i've never seen it. also, while pokemon manifesting in the real world is a level 3 thing, a pokemon staying in the real world as a physical flesh and blood animal and hanging around as your buddy or tormentor is a bit much for this. if it feels less "ghost story" and more "live action film where  cgi cartoon character hangs out with real world people", it's not level 3. i'm sure there are other things that may have people think "okay, this is beyond a level 3", but i can't think of any right now!

some notable examples: Pokemon Dead Channel (actually a 2.5), and... i can't actually think of any other famous ones right now :(

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Level 4: Basically Captain N from Hell - much like, say, Smogon's Anything Goes tier, anything short of defying every single convention of storytelling goes here. many of these often risk feeling like self insert fanfic, with the protagonist being whisked away into their pokemon game to have an adventure, even if the adventure ends brutally and tragically. said protagonist may also have had a real, living pokemon by their side in real life for whatever reason. sometimes this is hand waved away with a "it was all a dream/hallucination", but in a way the protagonist's experiences in pokemonland are treated as true events anyway. the line between fiction and reality is not merely blurred, it is nonexistent and both sides are bleeding into one another. sometimes, the protagonist's exploits don't just stop at pokemon - they meet famous characters from other games or creepypastas along the way, or even get stuck in a "game multiverse." it's still a pokepasta, though, so something horrible is bound to happen. as a side note, actually physically going to Hell probably counts here too, along with things like time travel or getting powers.

for multiple reasons (forefront of which being a near-universal hatred for anything that might possibly entail "wish fulfillment" in online stories... for some reason), these pokepastas are heavily frowned upon by many and treated as a pokepasta no-no, but personally i feel that the concepts are not without merit and if they were explored in the right way could prove very interesting and unique. buuuut this post isn't to talk about what i'd like to see people write, and simply about the facts of what's being written. no, you don't see a lot of these. yes, they exist in noticable enough numbers to have their own level. it is to be noted that few end up scary or creepy in some form, but you could say the same about anything on this wiki depending on your own idea of horror.

some notable examples: unfortunately, i can't think of a single well known example of this type!

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wellllll... oops, that wasn't supposed to be nearly as long as it ended up being. if anyone even made it this far, i guess what i have to say is this: maybe it's just me being picky, but i feel like this wiki could be helped by a lot more organization. and i feel at the very least more differentiation between different kinds of "real life haunting" pastas could do some good!

maybe the scale isn't the best idea. maybe it is. i don't know! either way, that's just my suggestion.