Hi, this is Dorkpool. Dorkpool the writer of this stuff, not Dorkpool the character. It’s confusing when I write it down, I admit. Anyway, I just figured I’d write this little note to better explain why I’m posting on this site after like five years, and to better explain myself without the veil of metaphor.
So, why am I doing this in November of 2023? Well, here’s the thing. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years. A lot of the stuff said in “Whatever Happened to Creepypasta Riffs?” is, to some extent, true. Well, not the stuff with the story arcs. I’m talking more about wanting to finish the story of the Riffs for years, but being unable to. I initially had a plan for a huge finale to the Other Heroes Riffs Arc. I ended up detailing it in WHtCR: Indo would sacrifice herself to stop her sister and the Riff crew would go on adventures in Mirror’s universe to stop the Sovereign. The space pirates and Nova Sword bits were also things I had planned. Nova Sword came about because I heard of NavaShield, a fake antivirus that was actually a virus in disguise. Nova Sword would be, thematically, the same. He’d initially come across as a hero, before revealing himself to be evil. The identity of the Sovereign was also planned.
I should note that I have these plans written somewhere, but didn’t consult them while writing WHtCR. I remembered the basic gist, and realized a lot of the details weren’t too important. Also, I didn’t feel like digging it up.
Anyway, as I was writing the final bit of the Other Heroes Arc, I got overwhelmed and just felt unable to finish it. So, I put it on the backburner. I told myself I’d finish it. Months passed. Then years. I tried to bring the Riffs back without the baggage of story arcs in 2018, but I didn’t stick with it.
Some context for my life: when I started the Riffs in 2015, I was in high school. By 2018, I was in college. The Riffs just didn’t appeal to me anymore. I grew up, and moved on.
I did think about them, though. The fact that I ended the story arc on a cliffhanger bugged me for literal years. I was aware that no one really cared all that much except for me. I didn’t have people banging on my door demanding a conclusion. Any comments I got on the Riff site over the years would usually be spam. However, it bugged me as a writer. Just the fact that this story had no ending got under my skin.
Around 2021, I ended up taking a look back at the Riff arcs for a project for college. Not going to go into it; needless to say I reread the arcs. Did they make me cringe? Yes. But weirdly enough, I got into the story. Right then, I thought, “Ok, I’m going to finish this.” The premise of a journalist piecing together what happened via interviews came to me then.
I was all prepped and ready to do it. Here’s the thing though: I was majoring in writing. I spent a lot of time writing, and got burned out on it. I didn’t have the umph to do it. Hell, for a couple of years, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write at all anymore.
So, what changed? Well, for one thing, I started getting back into Creepypasta. Seems like everyone did this year, weirdly enough. I for one welcome the 2023 Creepypasta Renaissance. Another thing happened around this time: I cut myself. It wasn’t something I’d done before. I was just in a really bad place, and thought that might help. Fun fact: it did not. But then a weird thing happened: I suddenly got a bug in my ass about writing. It became a sort of outlet for me, and really helped move past a lot of my negativity. I wrote some new horror stories, a comedy story or two, and then decided to finish a Jeff series I’d been working on. That’s right, there’s yet another story I never finished.
I was actually able to finish it, and it was then I realized that, hey, I could totally write a conclusion to the Riffs. After that, I just started writing. No real plan in mind at first. Just piecing together stuff based on things I remembered and stuff I’d already posted. Fun fact: Sylvia’s sexuality was always something I had planned for the character. She was always queer to me.
It was fun revisiting these characters one more time. I found that I’d missed a lot of them. It was also fun trying to figure out where they’d be now. I’m personally very happy with where Jeff ended up. Jeff the Killer preaching the importance of mental health is just conceptually very funny to me.
I think this is a good place to end these characters. They all get not only an ending, but a happy one. I have no idea if I’ll ever do anything with them again, or do anything with the Riffs again. I just don’t think Riffs are really a thing I can do anymore. I mentioned it a bit in WHtCR, but I think it bears repeating. I spent a bunch of time making fun of self-insert Jeff the Killer fan fiction, and then basically wrote the same thing without batting an eye. I’ve also come to realize that a lot of the stories I Riffed weren’t meant to be good or perfect. A lot of them were younger people finding a way to express themselves. It’s kind of shitty to dump all over that. I’m not the same guy who wrote the Riffs once upon a time. I’ve grown, I’ve changed, and I don’t think I could do it again.
But, regardless of my embarrassment about some aspects of the Riffs, I still do have a fondness for them. And out of that fondness, I decided to finally write a conclusion.
If anyone’s reading this, thank you for doing so. I hoped you found this ending fulfilling. However, even if no one reads this, I’ll still be content.
After all these years, I can finally end this chapter of my life.