#how bleak

OOH OKAY!! let me yap real quick!

so I have a soft spot for slender being this like, parent/boss figure that just oversees this mansion of misfits bc like, that’s what I grew up on so you won’t ever catch me dissing that shit

BUT that is not my personal belief. I like things a little fucked up, kind of realistic, kind of gritty, and especially having consumed way too much marble hornets content I view him as a lot more of just this… force of nature.

so I like for me personally slender is just this like,,, malevolent eldritch entity. no one knows where he came from and no one even knows what his purpose for existing or goal is. if anyone had to guess, it would just be that he doesn’t have a goal. he’s just chaos incarnate, brought forth just to toy with humanity like a bunch of pawns.

He’s a master of mind games and mental manipulation, those are his main abilities. For me, I like to think that slender doesn’t actually have the capability to physically harm humans himself (maybe he’s an apparition of sorts?), and I ALSO think that people with like.. a strong mind I suppose? are hard for him to get to at all, that’s why he creates his proxies - as an extension of himself to do the dirty work. It’s not that he’s just sitting back just for shits, he quite literally needs them or shits not getting done efficiently.

‘slender sickness’ is what happens to any human who comes in close contact with him. how long you stay in contact with him determines the severity - and 9/10 once he latches on to you there’s no way to free yourself until he gets what he wants (your submission). Ringing in your ears, static filling your thoughts, brain fog, periods of blacking out, and nosebleeds are the first stage so to speak - each symptom happening one after another. Once you hit the nosebleed stage it’s already too late.

Then the hallucinations - which is usually how he gets people bad. Anything in his power to absolutely destroy you from the inside out. Every time you eat turns into worms or gore right before your eyes, leaving you starving and delirious. Images of your dead relatives. Images of your living relatives dead on the floor before you. Dreams about killing them yourself. Once you’re starved, sleep deprived, and so weak you can barely even think for yourself - that’s when he lands the final blow.

He’ll reach his claws in and warp your thoughts. Appear to you in your dreams, behind your eyes when you blink, outside your window, behind you in the mirror. Making sure you know who’s doing this to you, and that there’s no place to escape from him. He owns your mind, and how the hell are you supposed to hide from something like that?

It’s easy to warp a mind once you’ve broken it, to rebuild it back into something new. I mentioned in a post awhile back that that’s what he did to Toby. Got him so broken down and defenceless, then used a mixture of hallucinations and subliminal messages to convince him that killing is the only way for him to regain control over his life. All he has to do is wait for you to make your first kill, after that it’s cake. What choice do you have other than to give in? You can rot away in jail, or keep your ‘freedom’ as long as you abide to his wishes. It’s usually an easy choice for people to make when they’ve spent the past few months being relentlessly tormented, and now have blood on their hands.

I don’t think he communicates with the proxies in anyway concrete. Just like nudges to keep you in the right direction. Migraines and static in your ears if you stray too far from what you’re supposed to be doing. Images of him in your peripheral just to remind you that he’s always there. Putting images of gore and violence into your thoughts when he wants you to kill.

I also think I mentioned this in another post but to me slender and his proxies work kind of like… okay so say slender is a fungus, and all of the proxies are the mycelium. No matter how far away they are or how careful they try to be, slender will always know if an outside force is fucking with any of them. and as I said, he owns their minds inside out, so if that outside source is a distraction he’ll find out pretty much immediately. I know I write about Toby being with a civilian s/o most of the time, but in the reality of how I view things that would not fucking work LOL not in the long haul anyway!

because slender sickness is also contagious! contagious in the way that the moment he figures out who’s sticking their nose in places they shouldn’t he’s gonna start back at square one with them - nosebleeds, hallucinations, whole shebang - until they’re just like the proxy they had come into contact with.

I feel like a lot of the proxies do not fucking like him lmfao. maybe they did at first, depending on what circumstances they came from (Toby did at first because of the freedom and power it gave him) but the novelty grows old quick once they learn that they’re not truly free at all. more like a dog on a leash, kept on a tight restraint that chokes them out any time they stray too far from the yard.

it’s hard to like, actually live a fulfilling life as a proxy but slender really does not give a rats ass - in fact, I don’t think he feels at all. just an apathetic force who views humans as nothing but tools to wipe their own race out.

i say that my secret is ‘good time management’ when in reality it’s that i have no family, friends, or partner to regularly spend time with, no car to get me to places, and no money to do things with lmao