Line #13 Literature/InstructionForAHelp


1	--> ''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.''
2	-->-- ''Instruction for a Babie''
3
4	''[[https://www.somethingawful.com/series/instruction-for-a-help/ Instruction for a Help]]'' is a WebOriginal series in eight parts, created by Zack Parsons and hosted on Website/SomethingAwful. The original series consists of deliberately poorly written [[FauxToGuide how-to guides]] illustrated with similarly poor-quality images; the first one is for "a fruit". These start out merely being [[SurrealHumor strange and unsettling but still pretty funny]], and grow into full-blown SurrealHorror by the end as the narrator's [[HiveMind bizarre civilization]] is drawn into an increasingly brutal war with the "mans from below".
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6	!!Instruction for a TROPE:
7	* AfterTheEnd
8	* AmbiguousEnding: "The View From Below" ends with [[spoiler: the US military heading for UK to "liberate" it using Agent Red. However, before the London military leader, Brigadier Coldwell, can inform the Americans of something, the communication cuts off. Judging by Coldwell's confusion when the Americans said they were bringing a "weedwhacker", it is possible that they actually figured out how to live in peace with the Nuss.]]
9	* BodyHorror
10	* CrapsaccharineWorld: Everyone is a friend. Everything is perfect. Unnaturally perfect; predators and prey aren't meant to live together in symbiotic harmony.
11	* DividedStatesOfAmerica:
12	* EldritchAbomination: The Red Worm. Others are hinted at.
13	* EverythingTryingToKillYou: [[spoiler:Actually, everything is just trying to infect you; but you are trying to kill everything.]]
14	* EvilutionaryBiologist: The Nuss seems to have created/evolved new organisms for its purposes (including the Red Worm).
15	* FauxToGuide
16	* FullCircleRevolution: The View From Below ended with [[spoiler:the tyrannical US government being overthrown in a coup just as they were discussing plans to conquer other countries using Agent Red and nukes. However, in the ending, the US military carry out the original plan to raze the UK anyway.]]
17	** '''Narrator:''' We had new masters. [[TemptingFate Things had to get better.]]
18	* GaiasVengeance: Goes both ways. The Mans From Below see everything going on topside as this, but grow pretty brutal in their attempts to regain ground.
19	* GasMaskMooks: The Mans From Below.
20	* GreyAndGreyMorality: The Nuss have a utopian society that could never be achieved by humans alone, at the cost of its members' free will. The humans were fighting to reclaim their world, [[spoiler:but they did so by bathing everything in toxic fumes and nuclear fire and their leaders were horribly cruel and selfish, with the ultimate goal of using the apocalypse to TakeOverTheWorld.]]
21	* HiveMind
22	* HumansAreCthulhu: [[spoiler:Double-dipped - the "Mans From Below", actually the few remaining uninfected, unmutated Americans, and [[WasOnceAMan the Red Worms]].]]
23	* JigsawPuzzlePlot
24	* LostInTransmission: The narration often dissolves into wordless nonsense.
25	* MindScrew
26	** MindScrewdriver: "[[https://www.somethingawful.com/daily-dirt/instruction-for-america/1/ 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).
27	* OppressiveStatesofAmerica: Following the Nuss apocalypse, the remnants of the US government became a brutal autocracy and committed unspeakable atrocities against the other surviving bunkers. Things only got worse when they found a way to fight the Nuss.
28	* PaintingTheMedium: The text is erratically formatted. Sometimes it's for emphasis, other times it's just random.
29	** BoldInflation
30	** RainbowSpeak: Most persistently, [[color:red:The RED WORM]].
31	* PerspectiveFlip: "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.
32	* PinealWeirdness: Mentioned but never explained. In the view from below, the dissected Red Worm has some sort of enlarged Pineal structure.
33	* ScrapbookStory: "The View From Below" has some scrapbookiness to it.
34	* SophisticatedAsHell: The narration primarily uses simple words and [[YouNoTakeCandle bad grammar]], but with some advanced vocabulary mixed in, much like the output of a machine translator.
35	* {{Squick}}: The [[spoiler:spores']] HiveMind produces such pleasant images as a deer seething with ticks all over its body, and an anthill the size of an....actual hill.
36	* SurrealHorror: The main series taken on its own is definitely SurrealHorror. "The View From Below" puts most of the surreal stuff into context.
37	* SurrealHumor: 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.
38	* SuspiciouslySpecificDenial:
39	--> ''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.''
40	* TalkativeLoon: Some of the narration is too nonsensical to decipher.
41	* TheEndOrIsIt: The end of "Instruction for a [=THing=]" reveals that the Nuss still has hidden spores in "crack in a rock" and "deep water meat forgot", with the implication that it's simply bidding its time until it can come back again.
42	* TheUnreveal: The origin of the "Nuss" is never explained.
43	* TheVirus: The Nuss is a sapient, WellIntentionedExtremist fungus with the ability to assimilate hosts into a perfectly harmonious CloudCuckooLander HiveMind.
44	* WasOnceAMan: The Red Worm. It's outright stated in "The View From Below", but how this happens is less clear. It's implied, based on a number of segments, that they were originally infected humans who were instructed by the Voice to eat the "fruit" from the first guide.
45	* WhamLine: [[spoiler: "Man from below has a look like you. He is bad. The signs of the mans from below is stripes of red and stripes of white and squares of blue. On a squares of blue stars that man from below only remember cannot see."]]
46	* WhamShot: [[spoiler: An image of the "Mans From Below" reveal that they are US Army soldiers.]]
47	* YouNoTakeCandle

Context Literature / InstructionForAHelp