unforum

[DickDastardly]

What are the theories regarding the suit Slendy wears and...

[SadlyChamo]

I think the mask is just a away of hiding himself.A way of being anon

[TheMorrigan]

Slenderman's appearance is part of the original Something Awful mythos, where he was a creature who lured children to their deaths. So he is just trying to play human, just enough to get what he wants, (meals and mayhem).

As for masky, its both to be anon for the sake of the MH plot and for emergency production fixes. If we don't know for certain who he is, it allows the makers to make him something else if suddenly one of the characters (ei Tim) doesn't want to play anymore, as well as giving us a mountain of speculation fuel which keeps us busy between new vids.

[Zaden]

The mask is simply to conceal the Masked Man's facial identity. I believe covering up your own face is a good way to frame someone.

-Shoot a few Marble Hornets scenes and disappear off of everyone's radar.
-Spend plenty of time being completely gone. During this time, prepare.
-Dye hair black, grow side-burns.
-Steal Tim's jacket.
-Buy a bunch of jars of cough medicine, Ibuprofen, various other pills, tear some labels off and mix them up. Do some planting and prestidigitation to make Jay notice the fabricated pill bottle connection between the Masked Man and Tim.
-Make it look like Apocalypse now in your house and lure Jay for a visit.
-Put on an iconic mask to hide your real face, put on Tim's jacket, and bum-rush Jay.
-Find a screen cap of Tim's face and make it a video response to MarbleHornets entry.

Brian could have totally pulled this off. totheark and/or Mask have hacking abilities, and Mask can even break into Jay's hotel room. All the counter theories to this concerning distortion can be blown out of the water if Mask has/had/can have access to Jay's video editing software.

[Undertheark]

I think he is some kind of Nether Scout of some weird far away land in the Ether and he came to our world to scout for more of his kind (Slendermen, maybe he is being held captive or is just searching) and chose to disguise himself as one of us...a business man. But he saw that us humans had MANY faces and many different variations and got confused so he couldn't make a face for himself hence his whole attire

[Kilo]

For the Operator, the best theory I've heard (I think it was the thread on Entry 29) is that he does his best to appear human, but he can only achieve a close approximation. If you take the noises you can hear when he's around (Entry 29 and 23), you hear what sounds like a human voice, but not quite, as if it's being parroted back. And then you can also include previous conspiracy things into it as well, like the men in black (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_black)

As for the mask, I'm still in the camp that it's some sort of representation of the Operator himself, and that they're "serving" him, so to speak. The mask has outlines of facial features, but nothing defined, much like the Operator.

[Undertheark]

[8bitFilk]

Yeah, I always figured the mask was sort of an anonymity thing more than anything else. And looking at it from an OOG perspective, it's pretty damn creepy too (that first time we see him and he just runs a Jay! Brix were shat plentifully!).

As for The Op's suit... It's pretty much accepted that that's following the original Slenderman mythos. If you want to look a bit deeper then I'd go with what's already been said: it's an attempt to look human, but it only goes so far. I think that makes him much creepier too.

I did an essay at uni a few years back on the Silent Hill games (I was studying game design). While I was researching it I came across a theory by someone about how people find semi-human monsters in horror more disturbing than fully alien ones. This guy (I forget who wrote it) reckoned this was becuse it worked on a subconscious level. Distorted limbs are suggestive of injury and pain (this fits with SM). Weird skin can suggest disease. I added to this in my essay by talking about how some of the monsters in Silent Hill are faceless (like SM). I figured this could be disturbing because it makes them unreadable. The majority of non-verbal communication people covey is done through the face, so when there isn't a face there we can't read anything, and it makes us really uncomfortable.

If anyone's interested in this stuff by the way, look up theories of "abstraction" and "the uncanny".

Edit: Thinking about it, you could go a bit further with SM along these lines too. He's tailor-made for inciting paranoia. He just appears at random, anywhere, and watches you. If you stood in the street and stared at someone without moving or speaking, they'd get freaked out. Imagine how much worse that'd be if you were 7 feet tall, had weird, elongated limbs, no face and had just randomly materialised in their living room!

[evilblackbunny]

[8bitFilk]

[badluckshadow13]

The suit is crude genius.
If you're going to act human, a suit is perfect. It implies authority, status, and the need to be somewhere, uninterrupted. You see a man in a suit out of the corner of your eye and you don't question him like you would if you saw a man in a trench coat following you.
It worked once, in the park, remember?

The operator doesn't seem to be on the same cognitive level as a human though, he doesn't seem to get that the fundamental... wrongness of him totally offsets whatever cleverness the idea had.
Silly uncanny monster, suits are for people.