Fragments of a Sunbeam

Alright gang, since Slender got reviewed on Toonami this weekend, we’ve had a bunch of new people getting in to Slenderman!

Here are some things to remember:

First of all, remember that you were new once.

On June 20th, 2009, Marble Hornets released their first video, “Introduction” that turned into a 3 year project with an ever-growing fan base. It’s been a wonderful, and mostly terrifying, 3 years. We can’t express the amount of gratitude that needs to be given to those involved.

The 7 Barns is a scary urban legend about a wealthy farmer who owned a lot of land and built a new barn on his property every time his wife had a baby. He named each barn after each of his kids and by the time this story takes place, they had 6 kids and were expecting number seven.

    I want to start by saying I absolutely adore the slenderfandom. Every last one of you – you’re all completely and utterly batshit insane. Your willingness to accept a modern bogeyman whose very own mythos acknowledge and embrace an existence as a tulpa is astonishing. I think it takes a very special sort of group to create a self-propagating bogeyman and both love and loathe every fucking second of it.

    But I think our enthusiasm to build up the perfect monster is what’s going to kill it. The fandom is expanding at an exponential rate. The number of “slendercreators” nearly expands just as fast; it almost seems like people turn into slendercreators as soon as they watch a series. (Which makes sense, really – when it’s late at night and you’re watching a horror serial, can you really help but see every shadow in your home as the antagonist? All you need is a camera at that single paranoid moment, and you can call yourself a creator too.)

    I’m going to be frank here. Not all people were cut out to be creators from the get-go. While the slenderman is very much an evolving idea open to all, new creators focus on the same few traits over and over all too often. Faceless – check. Operator symbol – check. Sony Vegas distortion – check. Proxies – check. Paranoia – check, as you’re practically feeding off of yourself at that point. It makes the bogeyman stagnate, is all I’m saying.

    While these traits were very effective at scaring when they first came out, after a while it becomes a routine. You know what to expect. The slenderman goes from becoming an unpredictable incomprehensible terror of the forest to becoming the expected and well-known slenderfriend that causes distortion at the halfway point of the video and maybe stands in the background. And while it may not seem like a big deal at first, predictability is the difference between a domestic cat and a rabid stray. One of those you can actually fear, and the other…

    This isn’t the slenderman, kids. The slenderman isn’t something you root for. It isn’t something to be understood. It isn’t something you can predict, like light rain or weighted die. The slenderman is a series of conflicting stories and paradoxical ideas – and, if you look at it at just the right angle, these stories will align and look easy to understand, like one of those trick sculptures.

    We take the mythos at face value like this. We streamline our stories into a formula that appears to work, forgetting that fresh ideas are what makes the story work in the first place.