∇
troperville

∇
tools

∇
toys

SubpagesMain

main index

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

new edits	workshops	reviews	YKTTW	tweets	random
to do	pm	add watch	drop watch	watchlist	profile

Subpages:

Instruction For A Help

Bell out side home, ring it once and once again, it bring the red worm. Everything will be okay? MUST RING A BELL. If babie grows it is a sinister dark eye babie. A killer of man and friend.

— Instruction for a Babie

Instruction for a Help is a Web Original series in eight parts, created by Zack Parsons and hosted on Something Awful. The original series consists of deliberately poorly written how-to guides illustrated with similarly poor-quality images; the first one is for "a fruit". These start out merely being strange and unsettling but still pretty funny, and grow into full-blown Surreal Horror by the end as the narrator's bizarre civilization is drawn into an increasingly brutal war with the "mans from below".

Instruction for a TROPE:

After the End
Body Horror
Crapsaccharine World: Everyone is a friend. Everything is perfect. Unnaturally perfect; predators and prey aren't meant to live together in symbiotic harmony.
Divided States of America
Eldritch Abomination: The Red Worm. Others are hinted at.
Everything Trying to Kill You Actually, everything is just trying to infect you; but you are trying to kill everything
Evilutionary Biologist: The Nuss seems to have created/evolved new organisms for it's purposes (including the Red Worm).
Faux To Guide
Gaia's Vengeance: Goes both ways. The Mans From Below see everything going on topside as this, but grow pretty brutal in their attempts to regain ground.
Gas Mask Mooks: The Mans From Below.
Grey and Grey Morality: The Nuss have a utopian society that could never be achieved by humans alone, at the cost of its members' free will. The Mans From Below had to shoot plenty of dogs just to survive, and the body count only gets higher as the situation turns into a war against nature.
High Octane Nightmare Fuel
Hive Mind
Humans Are Cthulhu: Double-dipped - the "Mans From Below", actually the few remaining uninfected, unmutated Americans, and the Red Worms.
Jigsaw Puzzle Plot
Lost In Transmission: The narration often dissolves into wordless nonsense.
- "The View From Below" ends with a Type 1a.
Mind Screw
- Mind Screwdriver: "The View From Below", to the point where Parsons advises against reading it if you want the series to maintain any mystery (although it's still pretty freaky).
Painting the Fourth Wall: The text is erratically formatted. Sometimes it's for emphasis, other times it's just random.
- Bold Inflation
- Rainbow Speak: Most persistently, The RED WORM.
Perspective Flip: "The View From Below", which is several times longer than the rest of the series put together, which has a lot to do with it being formatted like normal prose.
Pineal Weirdness: Mentioned but never explained. In the view from below, the dissected Red Worm has some sort of enlarged Pineal structure.
Scrapbook Story: "The View From Below" has some scrapbookiness to it.
Sophisticated as Hell: The narration primarily uses simple words and bad grammar, but with some advanced vocabulary mixed in, much like the output of a machine translator.
Squick: The spores' Hive Mind produces such pleasant images as a deer seething with ticks all over its body, and an anthill the size of an....actual hill.
Surreal Horror: The main series taken on its own is definitely Surreal Horror. "The View From Below" puts most of the surreal stuff into context.
Surreal Humor: Although they have some unsettling bits, the first four or five installments are light enough in tone for their disjointed, creepy nonsense to be funny.
Suspiciously Specific Denial:
You are NOT NOT NOT part of interconnected consciousness in which each human is like unto cell in a body and does not share autonomous function. This is mistake thinking!!!! A human die all experience die.
Talkative Loon: Some of the narration is too nonsensical to decipher.
The Unreveal: The origin of the "Nuss" is never explained.
The Virus
You No Take Candle