unforum

[DHawk314]

[brdardin]

Look at my avatar, and you will know why I find the Operator scary.

[Starkley]

[DHawk314]

[Starkley]

I'm not saying they're responsible, I'm saying that for my standard of being a good story, which MH aspires to, especially with the recent improvements in character development and actual backstory, TO should have a motive. You can be great horror without having Slenderman have a motive; that's fine, it's working off of primal fear. But I just think that if MH wants to be a good film, and not just horror, TO should have some kind of motive/reason to exist. It's just kind of lame/too much of a suspension of disbelief to have these characters be as specifically and extensively stalked and manipulated as we've seen the MH crew be by TO, and not have there be any motive whatsoever for it.

I guess there's the story and character development that allows for them to show their development through their responses to the stress and fear, but that's been done before. In any case, MH can do whatever they want, and Slenderman will still be scary. I just think it would be better if they went the extra mile.

And none of this changes the fact that it would still be random inexplicable chaos if there wasn't a motive.

[slendydreaming]

I've currently got my own Slenderman blog going on and my character(aka me) is attempting to research Slendy and try to figure out its motives and such, but IMO I think one of the scariest things is the fact that it's so new and yet so much has been done with the "legend", I have looked in other books about ghosts and haunted places to see if there's anything similar but there's nothing. Rather than being reassuring, that just makes it more scary, I think.

[Lithp]

Just Another Fool (JAF) DID explain Slenderman's origin. The idea was that there were only 9 "truly conscious people" in existence, & Slenderman's purpose was to murder them so that the 9 could be "reset" as new people.

But the difference between Marble Hornets (MH) & JAF was that JAF was about escaping from a monster that clearly wanted nothing more than to murder you. MH is about solving the mystery behind what happened to the MH cast. And part of that is what The Operator did to them & why.

[Ithilwen22]

[brdardin]

[Jamocha101]

[DHawk314]

I think it's just that I've watched Slender Man stuff for a while, and I've seen a lot of it. And he's always doing basically the same thing, stalking people and driving them crazy and murdering them. And none of them explain why Slender Man does what he does really. I mean, none of them invented him, and I never really saw it as being the point of Slender Man. I never thought any other Slender Man series was bad because they didn't explain his motives, and it just disorients me when people expect Marble Hornets to explain it just because it's more popular then the others. I would get it if Marble Hornets invented him, but they didn't, they changed his name.

I do get it though. Marble Hornets is magnitudes bigger than any other Slender Man series, so people see it as more important, and they think they should explain his motives, and will be disappointed if they don't. But, I wouldn't hold your breath.

[Starkley]

If he had no purpose and was exactly the same character as previous incarnations, changing his name would be kind of pointless, though. The fact that they changed his name at all implies that he has at least some kind of unique function. Therein, a motive.

[Lithp]

Exactly that. If you just want a monster that kills people, you don't try to make it into something more than a monster that kills people.

[DHawk314]

[Starkley]

So what, they just pulled the name out of a hat? It's such a multipurpose name that I figure some thought had to go in it, especially with all the allusions videos make, like the current "Operative" use of it meaning "to operate on a person's body in a medical situation," or the TTA phone focus of a telephone operator.

I figure some thought must have gone into the name, and because of that re-imagining of Slendy, they've made the character into their own version. He's not as steeped in WW2 history similarly to MyDarkJournal's (I may have misinterpreted this because of how little I follow that channel), he's not as brazenly violent or aggressive as is TribeTwelve's, and he's not as meta as EverymanHYBRID's. He's a separate entity entirely, and therefore, yes, he is MarbleHornets' responsibility to develop.

MarbleHornets has a complicated story that gives characters motives that all seem to directly tie into those of The Operator. Therefore, it stands to reason that The Operator must have some function and motive of its own. Otherwise this is all kind of pointless puppetry. If it had no motive or origin, all this weird symbolism and allusion would be such a loose end. Including its almost ubiquitous name in everything that refers to him; both Alex and TTA call him the same thing. There's gotta be a reason for that; the only way we know those two intersect is through knowledge of TO. So where'd they pull the name?

The Operator is a character all on his own. He should have a motive.