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[JustAQ]

Are slender series' too broad?

[Noonem]

there is a reason why they're called ARGs

[Full Round Action]

No.

[dfw]

for one thing, in the slenderman stories, you aren't /meant/ to know exactjy what's going on, that's part of the point

and if you pay attention they really aren't all that confusing imo :3

[SublimeInsomnia]

"I watched Marble Hornets for the first time after season 2 started and found that I thought it had been better left as a standalone series."

Marble Hornets is a standalone series. What are you talking about?

[Lewa]

[Cougar Draven]

I don't find it hard to understand what's going on in Marble Hornets at all. Same with EMH and TT, etc., so on.

[SublimeInsomnia]

I only find EMH even slightly difficult to follow and even then, only slightly.

[qaqa]

I don't think the genre is broad enough at times, at least in tone, execution, concepts, etc. The ones that do innovate like this are the major series - EMH, MH (especially in Season 2, which I love for its differences but others do not), TT, MLAndersen, Dark Harvest, and so on.

I think it's equally important to have a concise, streamlined series as it is to do grandiose on a nickel budget. I think we have both - MH is one kind of series, EMH is another. In terms of broad concepts, though, while the big series have all experimented, I think stuff could be going even further.

[The Kempest]

I think the problem most people have with grandiose series is that there's not enough Slenderman. The more a series expands, the less we get to see Slenderman, and, for me at least, that's a pretty big leap of faith. EMH does it, benching Slender so the Rake can tear some shit up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (just flip through the EMH thread if you don't believe me. The lack of Slender for a huge section of time has some interesting results).

Overall, I don't mind it if it works, but if it doesn't work, I can't be fucked to care.

[ChildOfAtom]

I think the problem, (and this response can equally go to the "Why are Proxies Needed?" thread) is that Slender Man never fucking does anything.

There's a reason that SM was such a splash on the original SA threads, and that's because he was visually imposing and visually horrifying. As an adversary an unknowable, non-speaking, inactive, eldritch horror is crap on a page. What do you get? 20 lines of the character freaking out, a line of SM standing there. 20 more lines of the character freaking out. SM tilts his head. Ad infinitum. You need something else going on.

Even Lovecraft padded his stories with crazy people, unknown histories of secret societies, discoveries of family secrets, crazy uncles who went to sea for odd reasons and came back "changed," etc. etc. etc. and Lovecraft was an exceedingly thrifty writer, doing very little that wasn't absolutely necessary to carry his story. I mean... Call of Cthulhu is, what? 50 pages? Less? Compare that to the magnum opuses being written in a lot of these SM stories.

[Cougar Draven]

[Watson]

I think EMH is too ridiculously huge and convoluted, but Mh isn't that way at all. Saying 'I watched Entry 42 and it didn't make sense alone' should have been a 'duh!' moment. Imagine if you watched an episode of, say, Fringe on its own. It probably wouldn't make very much sense and you'd have to ask a lot of questions. That doesn't detract from the fact that Fringe is a fucking awesome show at all.

[Cougar Draven]

[agreatdivorce]

I'm not entirely sure what you even mean by "broad." Was "Moby Dick" too "broad" because of all the whale trivia in it? Or are you talking about how "Man of the Year" was too "broad" for throwing a government conspiracy in the middle of a political comedy?

Either way, I think that you shouldn't try to generalize all of the Slendy stories at once. That's like saying all horror novels have great build ups and horrible finales just because Stephen King does that. EMH is vastly different from MH just as, say, House of Seven Gables is different from the Sound and the Fury. Sure both are concerned with a family and have themes of familial ties and legacy, but have dramatically different effects.

I don't think ALL of the series are too "broad" these days. EMH is expansive because it has an expansive cast. Lot's of characters, lots of threads. MH is expanding because it's having too. Just doing Season one over again would be pointless (at least, that's what I'm assuming is the reason behind the changing). I don't know about the lesser known series, but I don't think it's fair to say their too "broad." Though I do agree with you that several series could really use better editing but that's an ARG problem, not a story-based problem.