Goosebumps/Headscratchers

• In Why I Am Afraid Of Bees (spoilers ahead):
  • It is never explained how the protagonist suddenly got back in his human body after he died as a bee. What the heck happened? The hero says he intends to get explanations, but they are never revealed.
    • My guess is that the bee dying shocked them all back in their bodies, but the bee ended up sharing Gary's, hence the Twist ending.
  • When he is stucked as a bee and finally manages to communicate with the employee who transferred his mind in the first place, she doesn't do a damn thing to help him and says she cannot restore him to his original body just because the guy occupying his body doesn't want to leave it. Of course, it can be explained by this mind-swapping company being an underground one that has little to no safety compliances. Anyway, why doesn't the protagonist just ask to have his mind transferred in the other guy's body (which is occupied by the bee's) just as it was meant to in the first place?? Wouldn't it make his life much easier?
  • Perhaps the other guy needs to be hooked up the machine? After all, we don't know where Dirk even was when the switch began. perhaps he was in another machine somewhere else.
  • Always remember the characters are morons
  • And last but not least, how can he still talk when being a bee? Bees don't have vocal organs, do they?

• Look, this may be partially stemming from the fact that scary supernatural childrens books in my country had vampire stories with bad endings, ice demons that liked to rend your soul apart and tricked you into giving up your weapons and promised an eternal life of absolute slavery where your mind was the only thing you were alowed to control, in a pure And I Must Scream style if you so much as resisted and insulted them (that had a good ending, luckily), friendly monster families but also people-eating artefacts that were just a little side thing and not the real horror themselves, life-changeing descisions about your future or abandoning your skills and family, stalkerguardians of rotting wood and insects that tried to turn you into a tree, not out of malice, but because it was your birthright/curse, little fuzzy goblinoids in the sewage taking over towns with humour and trickery and compliment smart moves with "Pity you're a human, it'd be nice to have you on our side"-style comments, but how the hell is Goosebumps ever considered scary or interesting in the least? I mean, I've read those books as a kid, I read anything, but really, it was almightily boring and I hardly cared for the main characters, or any sort of character in those books, at all.
  • Wow. That was wordy...and retarded
  • When you cut half the bullshit about your "UBER SCARY HOMETOWN SPOOKY STORIES FOR KIDS OMG IM SO IMPRESSED YOU MUST BE SO BRAVE" there wasn't really much of a question there at all, was there?
    • Now there's a Headscratcher.
  • It just seems to me that this enormous run-on sentence you used is solely to complain about something you don't like. Say, isn't there a page for that?
    • At least for this troper, some of them are more of a case of Fridge Horror. For example, Say Cheese and Die - Again makes her shudder because the thought of children gaining and losing weight to such extreme extents (a boy gains 300 pounds and his sister gets so skinny the wind knocks her over several times) and apparently this does not send alarm bells off for their parents or teacher, who mock the kids instead of, you know, sending them for serious medical help. In other words, the content themselves isn't scary, but this troper finds it scary how clueless everyone is in there.
  • This troper read a lot of the books years ago and enjoyed them greatly, but was never actually scared by any (except one or two of the short stories in the compilation books). It's just light reading, like the first couple of Harry Potter books. Also, Americans seem to have an... absurd standard of how sanitized a work must be in order to be "for children". For instance, shounen Anime that was targeted to kids in Japan and Latin American releases needs to get bowdlerized in the U.S. and/or targeted to an older demographic, not to mention how ridiculous the movie and game rating systems are if you take every one of their age recommendations seriously. So I guess American kids probably have a lower tolerance threshold for these kind of things.
  • This Troper was never really scared in the one where the mail character is really a ghost girl that died a year ago, that gave a me a few nightmare where He was a ghost himself. there was only one other book that really terrified him in his younger years, and it wasn't Goosebumps, (but he read it around the same time he read those books) where the monsters always won, in a rather bloody violent, or fridge horror sort of way, it was called "Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs" besides that he was never really scared by another book until he picked up a few Stephen King novels
  • I never really found them scary...but then again they're targeted at like eight year olds. I found these in Elementary School Libraries and "Juvenile fiction" section.
  • You don't necessarily have to find the books "scary" in order to enjoy them. Some fans like them because of how campy they are.
  • First, you don't need to find them scary: I liked most of them because they were campy. Second, it was the twist that scared when they did. A spooky summer-camp? Boring. It's actually a training camp for a human-like alien race that is invading us? Woah, creepy. A reptilian race that is brainwashing/converting humans? So? Their leader is actually a human, and even tricks the other humans including his best friend? Hurry back from that fridge, or else. Third, the level of "American rating" is skewed against direct horror, just like sexuality and such. Fourth, this is actually better for the propagation of Goosebumps-style horror: Fridge Horror is much more effective universally because it is both not expected and stays with you after the actual physical descriptions (hence why it is called fridge horror). Fifth, who cares about your supposed-scary bed-time stories. I grew up with Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables, Friday the Thirteenth. I grew up with suspense the likes of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes to the pure horror of Stephen King and Clive Barker. Hell, compared to what I grew up with yours don't hold a single flame of being even mildly scary since I was less than two years old. Does that mean I can't concurrently like the suspenseful, the pure, and the fridge-caused at the same time?
• Another example: How did Matt cause a reality warp by falling asleep in the guest room when his family has guests sleep there on an annual basis? (Don't Go To Sleep!)
  • Matt caused a reality warp because he disobeyed his mom (and, in a sense, his place in reality).
  • Nobody else noticed that reality had changed (except the bad guys), so how do we know there isn't a warp every time someone sleeps in there? Matt wouldn't have realised.
• How the hell did the fact that every single character bar the invisible one is naked, gelatinous, multi-limbed, multi-eyed (More than two, I mean), and tentacled not come up in the story before the reveal in My Best Friend is Invisible? They explicitly have a footrace, and that didn't become noticably different one time?
  • Its a Tomato Surprise, albiet stupid, but a tomato surprise.
• In Let's Get Invisible, they contintually make a big deal of the younger brother being left-handed, to the point where he's called "Lefty" in the book. How is it that nobody noticed that he was suddenly right-handed before the end of the book/episode? I'm sure he would've had to have used a fork and knife or something like that in the interim. Did he fake being left-handed until he was alone with Max?
  • It means that Lefty got replaced with his mirror counterpart...who can throw right-handed.
    • I probably could have phrased that better...thanks to finding this buried in my bedroom, I remember that in the book there's at least a full day that passes between Lefty being replaced and Max finding out, since they're going out for dinner, then the 'contest'(which Mirror Lefty un-cancels) is the next day. So my point there is: how did his parents or Max not realize BEFORE the ending that Lefty was suddenly right handed. What I mean is: I'm assuming he would've had to eat between those two events, and if he were using a fork and knife, why did no one notice he's using his right hand to cut his food? That's all I meant.
      • Not all food needs to be eaten with a knife and fork. I often eat cereal while holding the spoon in whichever hand is convenient, and the same for popcorn and sandwiches. As for dinners, it's easy to switch hands for cutting when it's something soft or of a consistent cutting difficulty. Heck, it's considered normal in the U.S. to cut with your left hand and eat with your right, and in Great Britain to cut with your right hand then switch the fork over to put the bite in your mouth, so that alone goes to show that if Mirror-Lefty wanted to disguise who he was, he could have just used the other hand. If they had TV Dinners, like at least a few Stine characters have on a regular basis, he wouldn't need a knife even if it was something with a lump- or "fillet"-meat entrée instead of something like macaroni or taco salad.
        • Actually, in the United Kingdom, we use forks in the left hand and the knife in our right. Switching hands is usually regarded as bad or sloppy manners, and using your cutlery the other way round means you're left handed. However it is also common to only use your fork in one hand (usually the right) if you're eating something that requires no cutting (like noodles or beans and mash), but usually it's only done when you're eating alone or in an informal setting. Doing so at a formal setting (like a meal with your family) is considered bad manners. In other words, either the characters are idiots or Lefty is nearly ambidextrous when it comes to things other than writing (as some people are).
    • True...I'm just speaking as someone who always cuts his food with his left-hand simply because I'm left-handed and cut better that way; I was just simply wondering if Mirror Lefty had been disgusing himself until it was dramatically convient, so I guess the answer is: yes.
      • I think they just never payed that much attention to what lefty was doing until Max saw him throwing the ball. And in the TV Episode, he disapears on the morning that the climax takes place, so there would be no time to notice.