unforum

[qaqa]

Wow, you annotated your post.

[Glass]

Well said. i realise that most would be upset if slenderman was merely a figment of imagination gone wrong... but i thought it was a reasonable conclusion based on what we know.

that being said i was hoping on emh crew running into their fiction universe selves. fat guys who run an eating channel and are stalked by the fictional irs.

[veljko]

[qaqa]

[SickSlickMan]

@Glass:

The problem with your theory is that, WE see Slender Man and Rake as well. In fact, WE see things on their channel that THEY can't.

So if these creatures are just figments of THEIR imaginations, then what does that say about US?

I know bringing audience into it seems like a moot point, but since it IS an ARG, and we ARE participating it, I believe it holds some validity.

[Mattwan]

I think the biggest problem with the (intriguing) theory that the baddies have been brought over from a fictional reality into our own is the suggestion that the same creatures were associated with the Mining Town Four back in the 70s.[1]

Working theories at this point hold that the Hybrids and the Baby Miners are the same people, or at least the same kind of people with the same kind of powers (if any), but it seems unlikely that both sets would have brought forth the same creatures. Unless of course it was the Baby Miners who created the creatures out of pure imagination and gave them form, which instances of the entities somehow seeded the notion of Slendy and the Rake into the collective consciousness, allowing them to emerge again in fiction after the advent of /x/, which in turn tickled the Hybrids' fancy and ultimately led to them[2] being pulled out of fictional reality into real reality last year.

But that's entirely too complicated.[3]

[1] Which is still at least partly speculation, of course, as the only reason to believe that Baby Vince's "Man" is the same as Our Man Slenders is a sort of narrative parsimony, and we don't know for sure that it was 70's Rake who slaughtered Reverend Green, but we do know that HABIT was HABIT, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

[2] "Them" here being the monsters, not the Hybrids, who presumably are not denizens of a fictional reality, except of course which out of game they are, leading us to the sort of thing that could give metafictional scholars headaches and/or nightmares.

[3] Much like these largely unnecessary footnotes, left in homage to veljko and, of course, DFW, whose work left me footnoting practically all of my emails and blog posts between 1998 and ~2005. It was with great regret that I was unable to work an "and but so" into the preceding.

[veljko]

I'm happy that I've done my bit to propagate Footnote Fever[1].

@re: ever more baroque theories

The problem with this sort of theory, elegant though it may be, is that it runs afoul of Occam's Razor[2]. The same principle, in fact, called narrative parsimony in the previous post. We explain the complexity of EMH by positing an incredibly complex set of circumstances that, in itself, might require a lot more explaining. Intriguing? Yes. Amusing? Certainly. But the question is, how helpful it is?

I mean, I could posit that there's only a few real people in the world -- the various authors of Slendertainment, say -- and that the rest are dream figments as part of an elaborate prison meant to control and contain the incredibly dangerous real people. The prison is what we call reality, and the Slender Man is the warden. The prisoners are breaking free, and the first step is identifying their oppressor -- hence the obsession with Slender Man. The motive of his actions is to contain the break-out attempt by driving the host bodies of the trapped minds insane. Hence, hallowing and his odd behavior. He cannot kill them as that only leads to the minds being set free. All the weirdness with time/space/&c is a function of the fundamentally fictional nature of reality. There. With some work I could make this 'explain' all of EMH, but only at the cost of invalidating the entire universe and replacing it with another one where my theory makes sense, which leaves me with yet more to explain.

I hope that tl;dr made some sense.

@re: randomness

At the advice of a friend I tried grooveshark wich is a last.fm-ish service. Once I loaded the site I idly clicked the "indie" category. The first song that came blaring out of the speakers is The Rake's Song. I very nearly fell out of my chair.

[1] TvTropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary

[2] This is actually not entirely true. We operate so far afield from any reliable facts and we are so mired in conjecture and half-truths that it becomes difficult to apply logic[3], including Occam's Razor, obviously. It does us precious little good to exclaim that "if A and B, then C" if A may be figment of an subalternate metauniverse[4] and the canonicity of B is under long-standing dispute. Simply put, logic that isn't just fuzzy, but downright shaggy.

[3] Time and space flee every which way, disregarding your beloved logic. Or so I've heard.

[4] Or increasingly silly names to that effect.

[Karuvitomsk]

[lunaticfish]

[Lewa]

[Karuvitomsk]

Wait, I'm married?
[/offtopic]

HoL's official forums are absolutely great after you've read the book through.

[Glass]

Heh. Seems my idea works less than I thought. There was also a passing notion of these forces being projections from HABIT's mind. That he is either trying to control or at the very least combat with the help of his willing rabbits.

...

Don't ask me why all my theories involve further clusterfucking what we already know into some Freddy Kruger dream on crack.


On a similar note. It's stated fact that Evan has said that he is in fact a turtle. I've heard him say this with my own ears. The only logical assumption is this entire story and the universe it sets in takes place entirely on his back. This seems more or less undisputed possible theoretical fact.

[Bomrek]

[Lewa]

[Ouroborus]