Editor's note: Evan originally wrote this for Horror Week, but then he screwed up and made it way too funny. -Demian

Video game characters have it pretty rough. They don't make any of their own decisions, they have to re-live parts of their lives over and over again, and sometimes they're even sent into battle and forced to defend themselves with nothing but pizza.

Worse still, while certain places and objects almost universally frighten us regular humans, video game characters have completely different reasons to be terrified. Here are three parts of everyday life that we find scary -- and how our poor avatars have it so much worse.

Bathrooms

For us:
Not only does nothing good ever happen in a bathroom, but there's very little we do in there that doesn't leave us vulnerable. We're either naked in an enclosed space, sitting with our pants down, or somewhere in between. No matter what, our business is right out there, and anyone who's seen Eastern Promises knows how harrowing that can be.

But we're normal people...while on some level we fear looking up from washing shampoo out of our eyes to discover that something has opened the bathroom door, another part of our brains draws from years of experience to remind us that these fears are irrational. This is why we investigate strange noises, and live to tell our friends that same boring story that starts with, "It was like I was in a horror movie..." and ends with, "...but it was just a pillow!" Because that second part of our brain? It's right.

For them:
In addition to all of our neuroses about bathrooms, characters in horror games don't have the luxury of that infallible, reasonable part of their brain; the crazy part is usually right. And here's the really bad news: all that stuff you're afraid might happen in the bathroom? They call that "amateur hour."

Just ask the protagonists of Silent Hill games, for whom reaching into a blood-and-shit-filled toilet to retrieve a key is an uneventful moment. What's that? You're afraid of a big hairy spider crawling out of your shower drain? Just be glad that you don't go into the bathroom to discover that one wall has been replaced with a portal to Hell World.

"Oh, you saw your cat's reflection in the medicine cabinet and it freaked you out? Bitch, please."

Mannequins

For us:
Mannequins are kind of freaky because they look like people, but they are not people, and some mannequins are so lifelike that it's uncanny that they aren't moving. Plus, if you've ever seen a garbage can full of mannequin arms, that shit is pretty unsettling.

Sometimes you'll be standing in JC Penney looking at, I don't know, socks or something, and suddenly you'll think, "That plastic bastard moved." But of course it didn't move; that's ridiculous. It's made of plastic and screwed into place. It only seemed to move because of involuntary eye movement called jitter, among other reasons. It's all an illusion. And anyway, even if the mannequins did move, they're very rarely dressed for combat.

For them:
In the sad, panic-stricken life of a horror game character, mannequins are freaky because they look like people, but they aren't people, but holy shit they're actually people. Take it from Ethan Thomas in the Condemned games, and Jack from Bioshock.

As if these two didn't have enough problems already, what with all the crazy people attacking them with pipes -- they also have to deal with crazy people disguised as mannequins, who are somehow not so crazy that they don't appreciate good timing. This group knows to wait until you've just convinced yourself that they are, in fact, shabbily-dressed mannequins, before they leap at you, brandishing their trademark pipes and yelling something that might be spelled "ngaaaaaaah," but doesn't quite sound like that.

If, for some reason, that whole Splicer/Murderous Hobo thing doesn't work out, they'd make wonderful comedians.

Bad Handwriting

For us: It isn't scary at all. It is, at most, inconvenient, except that this one time I got a giant migraine from trying to decipher a note from an elderly relative, and that kinda sucked, but it was far from horrifying. And bad handwriting is often even the exact opposite of terror. Have you ever seen a kid's lemonade stand?

Transplant this scene to a bathroom filled with mannequin parts -- it's still adorable. Swap that glass for a mannequin head, though, and you're a sick bastard.

For them:
In the world of horror games, bad handwriting can only mean three things: Someone was in a huge hurry when they wrote this, they're probably dead now, and whatever killed them is probably that much closer since you stopped to read.

Here's a test: Pretend you don't know the significance of these phrases, and pay attention to how they read in this nice, neat type.

There was a hole here. It's gone now.

The cake is a lie.

Above all, do no harm.

But context is important, and if you've played Silent Hill 2, Portal, or Bioshock, you know that these messages are either gouged into the wall or written in blood. And there's pretty much no situation in which either of those means that something good is about to happen.

So the next time you have to go into your spooky basement to replace a fuse, don't get too worked up about it. Unless your name is Alexandra Roivas, you'll awaken no Ancient Horrors from their slumber in the vast, cyclopean metropolis beneath your house, and you'll be back upstairs watching The Office in no time.