Welcome back to an all new Writing Challenge edition of Bad Shakespeare! This week: “Your character discovers that a conspiracy true… but in the stupidest way possible”. Let’s see what Joseph Margalit came up with.

An Edgy Amateur Writer Trying Too Hard to Sound Cool

by Joseph Margalit

 “Aha! I found you! The one causing all these terrible things to happen to me!” Richard said after his mother, father, girlfriend, brother, sister, all of his friends, and his dog had all perished in various similar car crashes, after he lost all of his money because of a stock market crash, got fired from his job, went to prison, forced into hiding for 12 years, ended up a serial killer on accident, lost all of his money in another stock market crash, was hunted down by US marines, got harassed on the internet, and lost his leg.

“I know who you are!” he said as he stepped into the Oval Office. The Oval Office began to fade away, revealing a very small room with a desk in the middle. There was a scrawny man at a computer in front of it, typing away at his computer.

“You’re the one controlling the government from the shadows!” The room began to shake. “You’re also the one controlling the lizard people who control the government from the shadows! And the aliens controlling them!” The man at the computer looked up at Richard.

“You’re the edgy author trying to make a backstory for his even edgier OC!”

Reality promptly collapsed. This was because that a character from the edgy author’s story interacted with the edgy author, implying they are on the same level of reality as each other. This meant that the edgy author was god. Either he created the world he inhabits from scratch and molds it to his will from the shadows or was bestowed with omnipotence once he started writing. This also raises the question of who created the author. The author either created himself or his world created itself and made him its ruler. Either way it implies the edgy author had powers from the beginning and thus created his world, even if subconsciously.

The actual answer is that the edgy author has no power and is in fact not real. The edgy author was created by an even edgier author trying too hard to sound meta and cool. This raises even more problems because they are now a part of the story, meaning they had to have been created by another author. Ergo it is logical to assume that the edgy author trying too hard to sound cool was created by another edgy author trying too hard to sound cool. This creates an infinite loop created by itself, meaning that the edgy author trying too hard to sound cool was created by himself.  

This leads to another dilemma, if the edgy author knows he is creating an infinite loop of himself why doesn’t he acknowledge this fact and joke about it with the reader? He doesn’t know about it, he isn’t real. In fact, this whole loop was created by a self-aware edgy amateur writer trying too hard to sound cool. The self-aware edgy amateur writer knows this is confusing yet still writes this terrible meta angle to try to be mildly funny. Of course, by joking about it with the reader through the book he has inserted himself into the story, causing yet another infinite loop.

The only way to solve this infinite paradox is to abandon the meta angle, but the self-aware edgy amateur writer doesn’t want to do that because without it the reader would realize their writing is terrible, so by confusing them with an infinite loop of themselves they maintain the reader’s attention because no one has ever done this so badly before, and by making the meta angle so bad it looks like another whole meta angle the reader’s attention is maintained. None of this makes any sense at all, this whole meta angle was just meant to lure in the nerds who will try to make 10000000000 different interpretations of it.