Saturday is wonderful, especially at the end of the school year. Can't wait for Tuesday, I'm finally going to head home and be done with this semester of classes (only a couple more years and then I get to be a homless person who wasted five years in college!)
Anyway, I had the day off from most stuff, studying included. Usually when I get a day off like this, I'll play some video games or something fun like that, but yesterday my mom came down to take all of the bigger things in my room home so she wouldn't have the car packed to the brim on Tuesday. So instead of playing some Skyrim or Borderlands, I was stuck trying to find some way to waste time on my computer.
Then I got the brilliant idea to do an archive binge of a couple Slender Man stories. Now I don't think I'll be sleeping tonight. Hopefully my roommate doesn't decide to pull a prank by going out onto the balcony while I'm sleeping. I hate it when he does that, and now I'm feeling especially jumpy so I don't really know how my half-asleep mind would react.
Anyway, I got the brilliant idea to come on here and list off some of my favorite Slender Man series to you guys (all zero of you that read this blog...) so you too can share my current jitteriness.
Let's start with the beginning, shall we? Slender Man is a memetic horror figure originating from the Something Awful forums in a discussion having to do with making normal pictures scary and/or supernatural. After a couple of decent pages of discussion, up popped Victor Surge with two photos of the Slender Man. People latched onto the idea quickly, and the thread soon became dominated with more photos of the tall faceless figure in the black suit, sometimes playing up his tentacles and sometimes keeping him more humanlike. No matter what you feared, be it supernatural or more paranoia or more down-to-earth, Slender Man could represent it.
Then came Marble Hornets, the first real Slender Man video series on YouTube. Some people call this an Alternate Reality Game, but it's really more of a student film series since hardly any fan interaction actually influences anything plotwise. Marble Hornets uses all of the aspects of fear listed above to give the atmosphere of true terror. It introduced many aspects of Slender Man stories that are still present today, like the concept of a secondary antagonist possibly working alongside Slender Man (although Marble Hornets casts doubt as to whether Masky, Totheark, Slendy, Alex, the other Masked guy, or anyone else is actually working with anyone else).
Around the same time, the first notable Slender Man blog popped up. Just Another Fool was to the Slender Blog what Marble Hornets was to the Slender Series. It was the originator for many of the ideas and storytelling elements for its medium, like the photos of hastily scribbled drawings, the primary protagonist disappearing for another protagonist to step in and take over his blog, and the downer ending. Just Another Fool is also one of the first real Alternate Reality Games in the Slender Man genre. It sent out notes and journals to its readers to analyze and just to creep people out. Just Another Fool is also notable as being one of the few popular Slender Blogs to kill the main character permanately. Most others bring them back for another round with the tall one often with mixed results and poorer storylines than their original blogs.
After that came a flood of impersonators. In the video medium, many point at EverymanHybrid being the next best (or possibly better than Marble Hornets). I do admit that I enjoyed this series quite a bit. Instead of the single storyteller of Marble Hornets, EverymanHybrid focuses around a group of three (to five or so) people who encounter Slender Man. They start off looking like a cheap knockoff of Marble Hornets with their Slender Man hiding in obvious areas as they give gimmicky health advice. Then everything gets real. The real Slendy shows up, pissed at them for some reason, and they have to deal with it. EverymanHybrid's strongest feature is their group dynamic. The characters can play off each other very well, often resulting in humorous moments that help to keep the audience interested. Their main downfall is that their story gets very complicated pretty quickly. When they extended their reach from just Slender Man to HABIT, the Rake, and other popular Creepypasta, they caused a lot of cluttering of big bads. Now I'm not sure what creature is doing what or what the motivations are or which characters are being attacked, or anything like that.
Tribe Twelve is the other major Slender Man video series. It follows Noah, the pottymouthed man living alone in a huge house in Florida who caught the Slender Sickness from his cousin Milo. I don't really have that much to say about this series. It's not bad. If you want to watch something that's basically Marble Hornets with more interaction with the main character, watch this one. I do commend it for its special effects -- Tribe Twelve's Slender Man is one of the few who actually comes off as a very terrifying and realistic being with hundreds of tentacles spawning from his torso. I do, however, have two major complaints about the series. The first is the lack of sympathy for the main character. I don't know if it's just me, but Noah comes off as more annoying and stupid than likable in the series, and many times during the first parts of the series his (and other actors') acting is pretty flat and boring. The second complaint I have is that this series is pretty much just Marble Hornets with better special effects. If it happened in Marble Hornets, expect something similar to happen here (although I suppose that's true of most Slender Series after Marble Hornets).
I've seen a couple other video series that I'll also brush over here, but I haven't really been able to get into any of them. If you want to, check out the TV Tropes page for Slender Man Stories -- they have a more complete list than I have here.
TJA Projects is about two girls who, for some reason I didn't get to or didn't understand, are being stalked by Slender Man. I actually got a little ways into this series about half a year ago, but I honestly can't remember a lot of it. There's a baby, a very hairy hippie chick stalking the girls, and a large man wearing a plague doctor mask who I suppose is probably a bird creature or something. I stopped watching around the time of the birdman since it was really just heading down the same road as EverymanHybrid when it comes to introducing more and more big bads. If you nonexistent readers ever feel the need to make a Slender Man story, keep it simple.
I also tried to watch Apple of my Eye (if I'm remembering the title correctly), which is about a group of friends who are just filming their everyday lives and messing around when Slendy shows up. I got bored very quickly due to the length of each of the first few entries where nothing at all happens, and I got confused by the large cast of characters. It's hard to keep a lot of people straight if you introduce them all at once. Try to keep your cast simple for a while, and if you need to you can expand it later.
There's also one that I tried watching about a guy with a Ouiji board and the Necricromiconicromiconnicon who summons Slender Man while doing a random ritual. This one's pretty bad. It does the usual "filming myself at all times", but anytime anything important happens in the first thirty entries (which is how far I got), the main character happens to be sitting in front of his TV (although this may just be a sign that he doesn't do much but watch TV, it still seems pretty odd). Also, although he's doing the "filming myself at all times" thing, he doesn't get footage of his wife being dragged out of bed by a ghost at night. One entry is a recording of a conversation the main character has with his wife over the phone where he very conveniently delivers a lot of exposition. The entire time, I was trying to talk along with the conversation to guess his wife's part, but it was hard to get anything in since the pauses in his speech were only about a second long. The series also doesn't have much subtlety to it since each of the early entries where he's just seeing ghosts have other entries released afterwards to point out every single time a ghost is in the frame.
Sorry, I went on for quite a bit about that last one. I just kept on thinking of new things to complain about.
Anyway, I think I have seen a couple of other Slender Man video series, but I just can't remember them. I seem to remember there being a pretty good one taking place during the wintertime, but for the life of me I can't remember what it's called or what happens in it. I suppose I could look it up, but I'm too lazy.
There are also numerous Slender Blogs out there, which I'm not quite as fluent with since I don't have the attention span to read through them all. I've read through most of the one with the guy in the rabbit mask pulling pranks on Slender Man, but I stopped when it seemed like it was getting a little more serious than funny. It being funny was what made it stand out. I also read Seeking Truth, which is a phenominal story with the most badass main character in the Slender Man universe. It is a little hard to buy into the fact that a police officer is posting ongoing case information online, though. I also just today got around to reading Dreams in Darkness, another great story telling the tale of a guy around my age dealing with depression, insanity, paranoia, and Slender Man. It's got wonderful characterization. That's about all I want to say about it since I want you to go and read it yourself.
Oh, and there's also Compile Truth, Dr. Cairo's channel on YouTube. It's a series in itself, but it's not a very remarkable one (at least to me). What's great about the channel is that it's archived tons of Slender Man video series and has summarized several important blogs.
And that's the extend of my knowledge of the Slender Man universe. If you were to ask for my favorites, I'd have to say that Marble Hornets is my favorite video series and Dreams in Darkness is my favorite blog, but feel free to reccommend your own favorites to me in the comments (if anyone reads this...)
Let me leave you with one final thought. The more you read about him and the more you know about him, the more likely you are to be stalked by him. Have fun now that I've sparked your curiosity.
Keep telling yourself he's not real. Tim ejrm oy yitmd piy jr od/
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