YMMV / Candle Cove

• Accidental Innuendo: "YOU HAVE TO GO INSIDE!"
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The show itself. The original story made it clear that the show was just static that appeared to be a TV show, but the fan sequels try to explain it in ways such as the show was real (with a very detailed account of the show's creation and actors, as well as explaining the static as a NASA experiment), but something was controlling the director.
  • Or supposedly it's the static element that's false because the show is supposed to only be visible to young children, yet one person waxing nostalgic about it was 12 when it aired, well past the age where they should have been able to watch it. It may have actually been a weak TV signal (and children used to have no qualms about watching cartoons on a station with a weak TV signal) and the one person's mother may have misremembered it as static because adults generally don't have the patience to sit through a weak TV signal (which might as well be static).
• Continuity Lockout: People unfamiliar with the story tend to be confused about YouTube comments asking why the video is static or pretending that there's an actual video, due to not knowing the ending of the story.
• He Also Did: Depending on which fandom you hail from, Kris Straub also did CheckerboardNightmare, Starslip, Chainsawsuit, or ＬＯＣＡＬ５８.
• It Was His Sled: Candle Cove never existed.
• Memetic Mutation: Has become one of the more popular creepypastas, with some YouTubers trying to recreate that infamous episode.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • The horror of this story comes from the fact that there was never a Candle Cove show to begin with. Whatever malignant force is behind the "show" uses the local TV station as a medium to enter the minds of children. Yet somehow, YouTubers try to recreate the final episode of the show. If they want to do justice to the myth, they should upload 20 minutes of static and have a set of those in the know state they remember said episode, hinting that once you've seen it you will always be attuned.
  • Some people familiar with this story have found a solution—they insist the videos are static. When they're not. We hope.
  • One YouTuber did actually upload a video of static, then used the description and comment section to convince everyone it was actually an episode. However, whenever anyone does this, it creates a spectacular Continuity Lockout, with lots of frustrated people asking in the comments why the video appears to be static.
  • As Straub himself pointed out, most of the fanfiction sequels attempt to explain exactly what Candle Cove was, when the entire horror comes from not knowing. Examples of explanations range from "secret NASA experiment", "The puppets were alive the whole time and forced the director to make the show", and "Nazis".
• Narm: While most of the tale is disturbing, the Punctuated! For! Emphasis! on the line "You have. To go. Inside." Can cause quite the chuckle for the more "gutter-minded" reader.
• Nightmare Fuel: The premise seems innocent (though a little creepy) at first, until one user's nightmare is mentioned and it turns out to be real. It involves the entire cast screaming and flailing around, while one of the characters breaks down in tears. The Skin-Taker starts grinding his teeth to prepare to eat someone to the point where it looks like his jaw is about to fly off. We then discover that the entire show can only be seen by children.
• Older Than They Think: Many younger readers believe this is a parody of old '90's-00's kid shows, hence the fleet of "lost episode" imitators of well known, often still airing, syndicated franchises like Rugrats and The Simpsons. The author is a Gen X-er old enough to remember locally produced and aired kid shows, which had shoestring budgets and were dying out around the 70's-80's, fading from the popular consciousness. Most of the people who would connect with this story would be Gen Xers in their forties and up. The low budget children's shows that were often produced by local TV stations and PBS stations, such as The Froozles, had all but disappeared by the mid 80s, even as reruns.
• Paranoia Fuel: What other kinda-creepy kids' shows out there could secretly be nonexistent?
• Play-Along Meme: There are typically two groups of fans that play along with the story's lore about the fictitious Candle Cove TV series. The first group of fans say that they remember watching the show and will often have discussions as they recount various episodes and plotlines that are typically made up on the spot for the sake of the joke. The second group of fans insist that they only see static whenever they try watching the show. When it comes to fan "uploads" of Candle Cove on YouTube, expect to see the first group of fans commenting on videos that are nothing but static, and the second group of fans commenting on videos that actually have visual footage.
• Seasonal Rot: The original story was fairly well written and left almost everything ambiguous. Unfortunately, the addition by Wikia contributors and fan sequelists of "funny" content, like Mike Colon and Man-Bear-Pig from South Park, along with badly written attempts to explain away events (a secret technology, developed by NASA, used to make TV programming for children) have rendered the whole thing laughable. Quite a few fan sequels ignore attempts to explain what it is and focus on its nightmare-inducing properties instead.
• Self-Fanservice: Pirate Percy gets a bit of this in fanart — in the creepypasta itself, he was an uncanny-looking puppet, but fanart will sometimes make him look either more human (if not outright turning him into a human) or at the very least make him look more conventionally cute.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: In-Universe. The show was a pirate adventure with a very creepy bad guy (a skeleton wearing clothes fashioned from flayed skin). It supposedly ended on everyone screaming their heads off in pants-destroying terror, villain included.

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