What Was It About Internet Basilisks/and Or Old Creepypastas That Inspired You To Make Chainmail Chasers?

What was it about internet basilisks/and or old creepypastas that inspired you to make chainmail chasers?

ChaCha actually started due to a conversation I had with a few friends back in '20 about old Slenderverse webseries. I expressed disappointment that so many just focused on Slendy, and if you were lucky they'd include the Rake as well but not really flesh him out or use him properly. There were exceptions obviously, but you get what I mean.

I've always been fascinated by Smile Dog specifically out of the pastas, and I felt a webseries about it could have a lot of potential. You don't need to do a lot of traveling for filming since it's a mostly digital and mental phenomenon, and the pasta as-is keeps an aura of mystery over just what the image is.

This wasn't enough to pursue a series- it was just a discussion, and at the time I was very very very unconfident in my artistic ability for a whole rabbit hole of reasons. But it got me thinking, and I tend to have a lot of eureka moment with connecting disconnected thematic bits.

There were three things that always fascinated me about the original pasta. One was the idea that it wasn't even a dog- it was said to originally be a photo of the devil, and that over time it changed. If you really dig back into my twitter, around late 2020 (I remember because I reposted it when Heaven Stairway blew up) I posted my own take on Smile Dog. It's the same one that's used in the ParanormalPrickheads page, and there I took the idea of that evolution but extrapolated it, reasoning that after over a decade since the original pasta, the image would've degraded almost to the point of illegibility due to JPEG loss.

That idea basically evolved into the whole "metamorphosis" idea.

The second thing was built up off of that- if the image changed so much, there was no telling if any remakes could be the real deal or not. Or how different they could be from what was described. As a kid I knew the main two images were fake, but I reasoned that they could just be fakes for the sake of safety- the real ones could still be out there. That keeps you on your toes, and definitely leads to a creep factor on finding an "older version" as lost media.

But these were, again, just factors that kept me interested in Smile Dog. Cognitohazards in general interested me, and you had my frequent consumption of YouTube horror analysis content that lead into the setup of ChaCha- a way to initially ground it, develop an audience of people who already like cheesy internet horror, and bait actual Youtubers into covering the channel after they find it during research.

No, none of this is what caused ChaCha directly to happen.

That moment where it all clicked, back in 2020, was an idea for an ending. I have no idea if I can even pull it off. But I need to make it.

But I can't tell you what that is. Not yet.

Spreading the word for a spoiler seems like something only a very pathetic demon would do.