unforum

[punxtr]

[Baronness]

[sp103]

Hey Assholes who make Slenderman video series (Pardons go to Marble Hornets for Starting this, Tribe Twelve for awesome videos and Dark Harvest for storyline progression)

We are sick and fucking tired of you running around, seeing Slenderman, and giving NO explanation.

Take the story and move it along. Yes Tulpa Effect, Dead Are Watching, Everyman Hybrid-you've been called out. #RageSlendy

[wtfkirk]

you must give them more time!!!!

[punxtr]

[TheFallenenvoy]

And this, my dear friends, is why I abandoned unfiction!

[Lithp]

I don't know which stupid thing to respond to, so I'm just going to ignore that entire line of conversation.

I think the point about MH not ending is more-or-less right: No major Slendervlog has ended yet, so no one knows the "standard" way(s) of ending a series.

Also, I'm not sure about anyone else, but I would not know how to write a downer ending that wasn't completely unsatisfying. What is the point of following a series for nearly a hundred episodes just for it to end with "& then everybody died"? That could have happened literally at any other time.

At the same time, the usual fallback of "the antagonist is destroyed forever" doesn't really work with a character like Slenderman.

[Fotzepolitic]

MH really shouldn't get a pass just for being the first. It wasn't the first narrative of ANY kind ever written, so like everyone else it has thousands of years of narrative tradition to draw upon HACTUALLY.

And personally I think it's lost a lot of momentum.

[Fotzepolitic]

[KrisTrauma]

[Fotzepolitic]

[Lumine]

http://youtu.be/A3TGbKfkwGA?t=2m46s

[Baronness]

[Lithp]

[Fotzepolitic]

The Slenderverse doesn't really have a canon in the sense that it's usually used.

Take a TV show like Star Trek. If someone writes a novel set in the Trek universe, it is declared canon or not, usually ahead of time, by someone like Rick Asshat Berman, in the magical fairyland headquarters of the show. It can only really become canon a priori if a declared-canonical work refers to things that happened in it. Non-canon works can refer to other non-canon works til the cows come home, but they're generally expected not to contradict the substance of canonical works.

I guess there's some wiggle room here when a series/mythos/whatever doesn't have a Rick Queerhating Jerkoff Who Should Just Fucking Die Already Berman figure to give material the seal of approval, but then it falls to the fans and their willingness to accept it. If you write a Sherlock Holmes story in which you replace Dr Watson with some unbearable self-insert Mary-Sue character with magical powers, chances are the fan community isn't going to take your work to its collective heart.

The Slenderverse only has canonical material by consensus, of fans and of writers. The Operator symbol was taken up by a lot of later authors, whereas when I make my Slender Man have enormous breasts that lactate talking psychic fecal matter - curse my awesome imagination - chances are that I'll be on my own with that one.

The point is that really nothing about the Slenderverse is canon by virtue of anything other than how commonly reused it is. Some of the original elements of the Slender Man myth have fallen by the wayside a bit, while new ones have been taken up and persisted. It's actually a pretty interesting subject for structuralist dorks like me who are completely gay for Althusser and Lévi-Strauss, because we get the opportunity to see the creation and cementing of myth first-hand in a manageable timeframe, rather than spread out over hundreds of generations. But now I'm rambling.

The point is, you can replace the Operator symbol with a talking cartoon penis if you want. People can say they don't like it, but if they tell you it's not canon, they're on pretty shaky ground there.

EDIT: just to be clear, I'm not trying to jump down anyone's throat here. Marble Hornets was the first series. All I'm saying is that that doesn't make any of them SlenderJesus. You can look at the earliest examples of a genre, and while it's cool to see what elements have been retained in one form or another, they're the interesting exception rather than the rule. The same goes for MH. It's cool that they made the Operator symbol - something really simple but weirdly compelling - and some of the other basic elements of the mythos like Slendersickness, Proxies and the general distortion thing. But no one has to respect their authoritah and there's nothing to stop anyone rejecting those elements or introducing others.