unforum

[SilentMedusa]

Your favorite theories?

[The Condor]

Brian owes Hoody $20.

[DHawk314]

My only problem with the last theory is that Alex and Jay never actually do anything to find Amy.

[Blackout_2014]

Re: Your favorite theories?

[Cyan507]

The whole thing is purgatory with the Operator being the master, the cast being the prisoners and the channel being the window from our reality.

[Zarggg]

[sp103]

I'll summarize quickly:

After "season 1" they decided to expand the story. Afterwards the story focused on Tim making the Operator a mental projection in which Tim created and became real. The Operator was "his disease"-so powerful it was willed into reality (i.e. the theory the Slenderman is willed into existance).

The end is left open-ended on purpose. Jessica was brought into the plot to tie-in the pre-existing relationship of those Tim knew before. ToTheArk was Brian-someone who was trying to stop the Operator and free him. As he went rogue his mission failed.

[Sha Noran]

My favorite theories that don't seem to make sense now that the series has concluded were:

1) Hoody is future Jay. People really didn't like this theory for a lot of reasons (mainly, I assume, that it would have been basically a cop out and that TribeTwelve already did that sort of timey wimey nonsense), but to me, it really made a disgusting amount of sense - obviously Hoody would know Jay's account passwords and whereabouts at all times if he had already lived through the events of the series in his own past. It makes sense also that Hoody would be trying to protect Jay but also guide him down a relatively destructive path so that he would eventually be shot and warped back to become Hoody, explaining his bizarre and seemingly conflicting motives - I had a feeling that once Jay was shot and then taken by the Operator, Hoody would reveal himself to Tim as Jay (with a ragged beard and a fully healed bullet wound scar), and give a really fucking dope speech about waiting 5+ long years reliving the horror AGAIN just to assure his own creation as Hoody due to the Operator timewarping his shot self back to even before S1, and that now finally he could move on from the past and "finish it". This explains Jay being filmed in Exit - it is Jay stalking and filming himself, remembering the events before they happen - specifically that he would have to return to the car for the spare batteries. He waited for himself there, and thus we have the footage from Exit. Also the strange discrepancies in the original story about Jay getting the tapes from Alex and the (very) different footage that is finally revealed where Alex gives Jay the tapes and then attacks him before he can leave - I theorized that this was future Jay's (Hoody's) first attempt at changing the past. This explains why Alex gave him the tapes, then realized that something future Jay had said was something that present Jay couldn't have known yet - thus ran out and stopped him from escaping with the tapes at the last second. He took the tapes back, dumped future Jay in the woods after a beating, and then kept the tapes to later give to present Jay, as we all know happened. That's how the tapes got in present Jay's closet after the strangeness of that Entry.

This theory also explains Masky. The thing that actually caused Tim to go completely insane to the point of an alternate personality was that he was confronted by the knowledge of 2 entirely separate Jays existing in the same timeline... or on the flip side, Tim understood that present Jay could not know that a future version of himself existed in the same timeline to prevent deviation from his destiny/fate and thus lied about not remembering anything as Masky in an attempt to protect Jay from the truth. Future Jay convinced Tim to aid him in trying to save himself, but his manipulative ways eventually drove Tim away because Hoody as future Jay would want (or have no choice but to ensure) that Jay eventually be shot and taken to ensure his own existence as Hoody/future Jay - Tim was convinced all along that he could change things and save everyone. Also, this explains Hoody luring Jay to his own apparent "death" in Benedict Hall.

"The Ark" would in fact, in this theory, be the "portal" created by the Operator to send shot Jay back in time to be Hoody. This explains why Hoody as TTA would tell Jay that he would lead him to the Ark. This also explains Entry #68 (I think it is?) where Alex confronts Hoody (while unmasked) in his hut - Alex is already aware of the 2 Jays (he probably realizes this before S1 even began, when 2 different versions of Jay came to try and get the original collection of tapes from him), and knows that future Jay would obviously know where present Jay and Tim are; future Jay would never doom his past self by revealing his own whereabouts to Alex, and so just laughs in his face.

This theory actually also explains the distortion and the existence of the Operator. The distortion occurs when something is being filmed that deviates from the actual original timeline - the camera is unable to film things which occurred one way, AND another, sort of a Schrodinger's cat issue. If future Jay tries to change things too significantly, the Operator shows up as a sort of extra-dimensional timeline fail-safe to make sure that time itself is not broken in a paradox because of things changing. Jay must eventually be shot and sent back in time to be Hoody, or Hoody should not exist, thus Hoody cannot prevent himself from being shot and sent back in time, as much as he probably would've liked to not have that happen to himself. Thus the memory loss, and the Operator's bizarre motives regarding who he protects, doesn't protect, attacks, mind wipes, teleports, kidnaps or makes disappear. His purpose in existence is to keep the timeline of the universe "correct" or "how it really happened". Makes a bit more sense why Alex went berserk and killed Bruce, thinking it was Jay... while all along present Jay didn't understand why Alex would think that. Because Alex was thinking it was future Jay/Hoody, who was following him everywhere obsessively, not present Jay, whom he shouldn't have known was following him at all. The Operator removed Bruce's corpse (and existence) from reality because Alex never killed him in the original timeline.

Hoody's awareness of where and when fucked up Operator things would happen, and his overall ninja abilities would be perfectly explained by the theory that he had already lived through the events in the Entries and thus had no reason to be afraid (well, at least no fear of the unknown), and would obviously know a whole lot of shit that present Jay is clueless of. Also, this explains Hoody's obsessive dedication to not allowing Jay to see him unmasked, and why Hoody never speaks, and at least generally explains why TTA/Hoody in general are so cryptic with their messages. This also explains why Hoody flees when the Operator appears, but doesn't seem to really fear it. He realizes he will not be able to change history in the way he planned - a perfect example being the Entry where Alex is bound to a chair, beaten by Tim, and then Hoody takes Alex's gun and threatens him with it, but the Operator intervenes and Tim and Hoody flee. The Operator could not allow future Jay to execute Alex, because Alex still had to live long enough to shoot Jay, leading to him being sent back in time to be Hoody.

Also in Entry #83, when Tim and Hoody are warped to a bizarre alternate reality version of Tim's house where Jay lies quite dead looking on a lot of YOUR FAULT pages, and when Tim first sees Hoody it seems Hoody is just as stunned to see Jay laying there - he's looking at his own self, shot and trapped in a weird limbo. I theorized that the whole scene was designed by the Operator for Hoody to see, not Tim - Jay's own situation as Hoody is his own fault, delving into the tapes in the first place and getting involved, and then also Hoody was the one who manipulated present Jay into the situation where he was shot... in every way, Jay got himself into all of these situations, and the future version of himself is forced to HELP manipulate him into all of these terrible situations.

Oh, and Brian died at Alex's hands at the abandoned, burned hospital in Entry #51. Future Jay was the one squatting in Brian's abandoned house in S1. This explains the blood in the sink AND the mysterious bullet casing, which was the same one Alex shot him with in Benedict Hall. Hence Tim as Masky attempting to scare present Jay away, and the Operator shitting all over that house and even more so specifically when present Jay investigates there, because that's basically a paradox waiting to happen.

If you have a capable enough imagination to wrap your head around the time warping, paradoxical weirdness involved in this theory, it actually makes a ridiculous amount of sense. Its a bit, in a way, like the situation Donnie Darko got himself into (and out of). It isn't really that outrageous of a theory, given that precedent. Get on my level.

2) Hoody is Amy, and TTA was Alex and Amy in S1, Tim and Amy in S2, and just Amy in S3. Entry #71 helps this theory along a lot, as it proves that Alex was dating Amy even during the original filming of the student film Marble Hornets.

For this theory to work, the Operator has in fact attached itself to Alex, probably due to him inadvertently filming him in Rosswood Park. It isn't outrageous in this scenario, however, to think that the Operator was there because Tim was there, and that Tim was/is the origin (thanks to the mental hospital, Tim's mental problems, the fire, etc.). Alex (thanks to Seth as his editor and camera operator) realizes something really fucked up is going on, and so investigates. Seth is taken or vanishes, and thus Alex decides (brutally) to slay all those involved, burn the tapes, and move away to be with his girlfriend, taking the time to include some strange footage in the MH tapes to help with the coverup. The abandoned hospital in the middle of the woods and the premise of location scouting and B-roll give him the perfect opportunity to lure out the cast to be eliminated, and the obscurity of the project allows him to convince himself that no one will ever put the pieces together.

The portion of Entry #26 showing Amy finding the camera, talking to Alex and the subsequent Operator appearance was actually the very first footage chronologically before S1 but after the filming of the student film Marble Hornets. The Operator came back to haunt Alex thanks to Jay beginning to watch the tapes, bringing him back to "life" with something along the lines of the Tulpa Effect. After escaping their home and heading out on the run, Alex deduces that the Operator has returned because of the tapes that he failed to burn and gave to Jay - some Googling reveals the YouTube channel. Alex and Amy come up with a plan to scare Jay into abandoning his quest for answers regarding the old MH student film footage. This explains why S1 TTA is mostly nonsense that seems to serve little purpose other than to frighten Jay or draw him into extremely terrifying situations.

After pure fear doesn't work and Entry #14 reveals to Alex that Tim has also survived the ordeal, he decides to encourage a mental breakdown in Tim (which he would have known about being a possibility due to Tim's strange behavior and awareness of the mental hospital from the original filming of MH). After possible kidnap and/or torture, or perhaps just a constant burgling of his pills (if they stole Tim's pills several times in a row, he would be unable to refill his prescription due to suspicious doctors), Masky is born, and sent to guard Brian's abandoned house - Alex and Amy use their TTA channel to lure Jay to the house, hoping the madness of Masky will deter him. This fails, and in desperation Alex (again, brutally) decides to burn Jay's apartment down to once and for all deter him from following the trail of evidence any further, and destroy the elaborate security system Jay has set up in his home to protect himself. This is made even more likely because we see Alex make the same brutal decision about Tim's home at the very end of the series... it makes sense that Alex would use the same M.O. twice, but Alex was not actually present in S1 according to the confused Jay - this is because he stayed hidden and used the TTA channel to try and manipulate Jay indirectly.

Inspired by Tim's use of a mask, Alex and Amy concoct other maddened, masked characters for themselves to play so that they can further frighten Jay and discourage his investigation. They film and bizarrely edit together some footage of Alex wearing the Skully mask and some other shots for their next TTA video before Jay posts that he is on the run, and no longer wants to know the truth. Encouraged, Alex and Amy think that they may have escaped Jay's detective work. The Operator isn't happy with that outcome though, and has all along been manipulating EVERYONE involved in an attempt to "spread" or keep "infecting" more people with the Operator's existence. Jay was his key to getting global due to his YouTube channel on the internet. So, to prevent Alex and Amy from fully stopping his spread, the Operator appears to them, scrambles their brains ruthlessly and erases their memories of the past several months of stalking Jay. Amy wakes up first, deduces that Alex is the real threat and must have kidnapped her because she has no idea where she is or why, and flees. Alex wakes up, and has no idea where he is or where Amy went. In his browser history, he rediscovers the MH YouTube channel. He finds the footage on his hard drive of both the unfinished TTA video with Skully, and also the footage from Entry #26, and with no memories of any of it, assumes that the Operator stole away Amy after the events of #26 - he adjusts the timestamp to make it more urgent, edits it all together into one video and adds the HELP!! part at the end, hoping to recruit Jay to help him find Amy. He is aware that he was TTA during the events of S1 (because he finds the raw footage and edited videos saved on his hard drive too), but no longer knows the login information for the YouTube channel "ToTheArk" as he made that up during the period of time that was wiped by the Operator, and thus decides to simply hide this information from Jay - hence his extremely suspicious behavior at the start of S2. This is also why the "ark" is never explained - Alex and Amy came up with the name, but with their memory wiped, neither is really sure what they were referring to.

In S2, Amy has discovered that she wrote down the login info to the TTA account on a piece of paper in her purse. Reviewing the footage from S1 and the TTA videos she assumes she has posted, she comes to the conclusion that Alex is the enemy and that Jay is in danger. She recruits Tim to help her, hence the extremely different tone and behavior of TTA, and Hoody/Masky in S2 vs. S1. Amy uses the Hoody costume to stalk Alex and Jay, but to hide her identity from ALEX, not Jay.

At the end of S2, on the verge of escape with Jessica, the Operator does to she and Jay what it did to Alex and Amy at the end of S1 - wipes their memories of the past several months to send everyone back to square one, so that it can continue spreading - it is plausible that the Operator does this every time is has secured a new host. At the end of S1, he wiped some memories to ensure he could keep Jay as a host. At the end of S2, he wiped some memories to ensure he could keep Jessica as a host.

Amy decides that kidnapping her ex-roommate Jessica and leaving clues for Alex to follow into the woods will be an effective way to lure him out of hiding and into a vulnerable position. She doesn't expect or realize that he has a gun, especially after becoming aware that he beat a man to death with a rock, which is a ruthless fatality and excessive brutality if a gun is available. On one occasion she actually manages to lure him into a trap with Tim at the ready to smash him with a rock, but the Operator appears and they have no choice but to flee - this time she has steeled herself to finish him off properly, but as he doesn't hesitate to open fire, she has to run. She re-ambushes him in the tunnel, but the plan collapses completely with Jessica escaping and too much chaos in the dark to successfully kill Alex with the gun missing, and Amy is too weak to take him on in melee without Tim's help. She abandons them all in the woods to figure it out for themselves, leaving Jessica to be taken by the Operator and Tim to wake up extremely confused the next day.

Amy loses Tim's trust after Jessica is lost to the Operator during this particular "mission" and comes to his own conclusion that Amy (as Hoody) can be trusted as little or less than Alex. If Jessica is an acceptable sacrifice, who ISN'T an acceptable sacrifice? He decides that the only truly innocent person in all of this is Jay, who he becomes determined to help uncover the truth. He must keep Jessica's fate from him, though, when it is discovered that Jay might just quit if he knew she was gone - the betrayed and enraged and now mostly insane Amy has every reason to call Tim a LIAR for hiding this information from Jay. Amy as Hoody now sees Alex, Tim and Jay all as a threat because Tim has changed Jay's opinion of the hooded figure. Amy as Hoody has, at this point, completely lost control of the situation, and realistically doesn't even remember what she was trying to achieve in the first place. She has no idea what the ark is, though she assumes she came up with that phrase and it must have meant something. She has no allies, no help, no sanity.

Tim taught her that the pills help hold back the Operator's influence, so she continues to steal them from him when she can. Finally, the pills dwindle. Alex camps out in Tim's house to await a confrontation. Amy's insane ranting about Tim being a LIAR eventually leads to a rift between Tim and Jay, and the stage is set for a proper disaster - no one remaining in the story trusts anyone else. Jay, Tim, Alex and Amy are all on their own "side", mostly mistakenly, due to misinterpretation of film footage and memory loss. Paranoia and insomnia fully set in. Everyone's sanity dwindles. Amy is suicidal at this point, barely surviving homeless in the woods. She decides that all that can be done at this point is end it all, so she draws all the players together for a final, fatal confrontation.

Alex is kidnapped by Amy from Tim's house (possibly by just showing up as Amy, not Hoody, and playing Alex's feelings for her against him), and leaves a picture of herself with where Alex can be found, hoping that Jay and Tim connect the dots. They do not, assuming that Alex had that picture of Amy on his person, possibly in his wallet. Amy tortures Alex in Benedict Hall, trying to force him to admit his compliance with the Operator, and hoping to have him give a full confession about the whole situation - she fails to realize that Alex himself, at this point, also has been memory wiped enough times that he doesn't really know what's going on either. Convinced (correctly) that she has gone completely insane, he manages to escape his bonds in Benedict Hall, retrieves his gun, and goes on a hunt to find Hoody, his captor. Instead, he finds Jay, which he probably finds to be an extremely lucky coincidence, or a fantastic reversal of fortune. He takes the opportunity to kill Jay, hoping to stop the spread of the Operator's influence due to his YouTube channel. He might even be under the impression that Hoody(Amy) was all along manipulating the whole situation in tandem with Jay and his MH YouTube channel. He shoots him in the belly, enraged. He rants that the whole situation is Jay's fault. Alex probably doesn't even remember murdering Seth, Brian, Sarah, or "Bruce".

Tim finds Jay's camera, and though enraged with Alex, concludes that the entire situation is actually Hoody's fault. With Jay dead, the plot is left without its main narrator - there is nothing left to happen except for the three remaining players to confront one another and die. Tim hates and blames Alex and Hoody for all of this, Alex blames Tim for the Operator and Hoody/Amy for confusing and manipulating them all beyond repair, and Amy is completely insane, blames Tim for the Operator and Alex for all the murdering. There is no resolution except for at least 2 out of the 3 of them to die.

Obviously, once the final Entry was posted and confirmed as such, some of this became a lot harder to explain, specifically how Jessica survived - it is possible Tim knew Jessica was safe and was trying to keep her out of all of it and away from everyone to keep her safe, but it seems like he could've made a lot of progress earning Jay's full confidence and trust if he had explained to Jay what had happened to her, even if and especially if he did so off camera. But overall, this theory is a lot of fun to think about, as it implies that there's even more of a structure and cohesion to each of the Seasons that we ever have any opportunity to see because a lot of the situations behind the scenes had no reason to be filmed.