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[Phenom]

I recommend watching TJA Projects. Now that gets pretty scary.

[WhyYouBawwing]

I'm sorry for coming to this thread 5 days too late, but I have a proposal: the bad-slendervloggers should just abuse the hell of another meme with less potential until we forget about Slender Man, that way when someone regains the balls to use him as a character we can be scared once more. I nominate Candle Jack-ripoffs to be martyred for the sake of Slendy's scariness.

[JohnSmith]

until recently, I could not agree more with this topic. We don't feel the same shiver anymore because we understand what he is, or at least what we think he is. However, (and this is NOT a trailhead NOR a flicker of my imagination) I'm a student in Ancient cultures and Latin and I was issued to make a report on ancient cults. Among those cults a found a very obscure one called the Summanuscultus. They describe him as the counterpart of Jupiter (=Zeus), unhuman of form but wanting to mimic it. According to some texts we read in class, he was made of darkness and a bit of light. His limbs are described as long as the Tiber,...etc. What I'm trying to say is that what we are creating a story around could very well already have existed 2000 years ago in an actual cult form with human sacrifices and more. The last report of the cult being active was in 1948 in the Balkan! So before you dismiss the mythos as not being scary anymore think about how something similar was hailed for more than 2000 years. Once again, this is not a trailhead nor some crappy way of promoting my own blog (which I don't have, although I did think of publishing it all under an alias as part of a blog, but I did not because it's never a good thing to dismiss speculations around historical facts and complete fiction).
So once more, if you feel the scaryness of all this is gone, please remember that there are artefacts AND texts found dating up to 1948 about a cult that actually praised a long dark figure in black and white with limbs floatant as a river.


ps: If you want, I can mail you a translation of part of my paper although it will take a while since I'm almost entering my exams.

[Agnol117]

I think some of the lost scariness comes from a general move towards "normative" aspects to the Slender Man. Like the general agreement that he lacks a face -- I think that there was significantly more to the character when there was no "set" appearance. To me, that added an almost Mxyzptlk like quality to the character -- he was monstrous, and to top it all off, he was screwing with us. Now, I think there are certain expectations of the Slender Man, and as such, we have a general idea of what's coming. I feel that a general move away from this, and more towards the Slender Man being more unique from series to series could really only help the character and the mythos.

Also, to reiterate a point a few people have made, things like the now defunct Core Theory and the general interconnectedness of certain aspects of the mythos aren't really helping this. I think this is mostly for the reasons I've outlined above, though.

[The Kempest]

You know what would bring the scariness back? Characters actually dying.

There are all these great vlogs out right now, but there's no real sense of danger anymore, because--and this is true for almost every single one--Slendy hasn't done dick. Coughing and distortion only goes so far.

Characters need to start dropping if we're to be reminded that Slenderman is a dangerous entity. Until then, he's getting pretty stale.

[Zaden]

The Kempest said it well... very well. Characters die in blogs all the time. So why don't they ever die in the vlogs? Would it really be that much different? OH NO, ANOTHER COUGHING FIT. Yeah, that's great. But not scary anymore. People need to die because I'm freaking bored. (That sounds so wrong.)

I don't think Slender Man has lost as much scariness so much as people are WAAAAY too focused and proxies/masks/alternate personalities/sages and other Core Theory crap that makes me facepalm rather than be shivering with fear. Any crap with a mask or a proxy is not even a tenth as scary as Slender Man's head snap in Entry #1 or Amy walking around the corner and BAM right into him. And my opinion of the mask stuff goes all the way back to its roots in Marble Hornets. I never liked Mask and I never will.

The vlogs need to be ballsed up a little. Fortunately, MLAndersen0 seems to be going quickly in that direction.

[-Etrocal]

I actually fully agree that people should die, I hadn't really thought about that. But that aside, I think the big thing about Slendy not being scary anymore is just because we (everyone on unfiction) look at all the vlogs from a purely analytical standpoint. The MH guys summed this up (I forget who it was) saying that the entries were scary at first, but you end up just analyzing them, which strips the fear away.

In my opinion, that's mostly self inflicted though. It's kinda become a cliche (the whole vlog thing,) where people get annoyed if people don't build up a vlog enough, or if it changed Slendy's character too much. In my opinion, MLAnderson is doing it perfectly, throwing in a lot of new stuff. Where as Mh has kinda dulled down in scariness because we analyze things so deeply.

[Agnol117]

See, I think the problem with killing people off -- and forgive me, because I know how obvious this sounds -- is that once you do that, the character is dead. In the blogs, this isn't a big deal, as it's (typically) one person writing/writing about multiple characters, and the characters aren't really "real" in the same sense as they are in a vlog. They die, and the only consequence (from the meta perspective) is that there are now less people to be written about.

In the vlogs, on the other hand, the characters are all "real," or at the very least, physically present and differentiated in a way that the blogs really cannot portray, and they're typically played by people who are involved (in some extent) to the development of the series. They kill off a character, and suddenly that person, who has likely been involved with the series for a while (if the death is to actually mean something) is now no longer to interact in the same manner that they were before -- death is more or less an instant shunt to behind the scenes type work, and not everyone involved in the vlogs is going to want that (this is, of course, barring the Slender Man somehow bringing them back to life or similar weak plotting).

From a narrative perspective, not killing off the characters is definitely degrading to the terror of the monster. But from a practical perspective, I can see why they aren't too keen on doing it.

[ravenofroses]

jumping in to offer my two cents:

it's not that the slender man himself is less scary these days, but a combination of over-saturation (blogs, crossover blogs, etc.) and our own increased tolerance for the horror that is slendy has made us THINK that it is somehow less scary.

face it, folks. we're addicts, and our desperate attempts to get our fix has left this mythos flooded with watered-down scares.

but be patient. one dealer or another will find a way to give us that old familiar rush of fear again.

[qaqa]

Thanks, y'all; when Evan dies prematurely, I'm blaming you.

Seriously, I do agree with the need for stakes, but I think that a lot of death/destruction is staggered out or deferred by vlogs out of consideration for the endgame. And rightly so. Look at AG, whatever your opinion of that may be; they killed just about everyone when they chose to.

[Luipaard]

[ravenofroses]

[Zaden]

[Ouroborus]

I know I'm a desensitized a bit to it all, but I don't know if a death would really do much for me. They always seem a bit cheesy in the genre(vlog). MH has been able to skirt the issue by having their "deaths" being seen by J, but not experienced.

I think most of the shows do it right by limiting the Slendy appearences and making it a big deal when a character interacts with him.

Ultimately, I think the bigger shows do it right. TAJ and DH are especially good at it and keep me on my toes since it takes shows like MH, EMH, and TT a little longer to reload.

tl:dr I don't think the scariness is gone, we're just kinda used to it.

[Carnahan]