unforum

[Lithp]

For starters, some of the information about Slenderman might be "real."

Secondly, you are assuming that they wouldn't find anything about The Operator, in specific.

Thirdly, they demonstrate no awareness of Slenderman, so Jay's post on SomethingAwful is likely non-canon, & the Slenderman Mythos doesn't even exist in Marble Hornets.

Fourthly, a lot of you are operating under the erroneous assumption that Jay not finding anything would make it pointless. No, because you can't know whether or not information is out there unless you look for it.

Finally, we can't say which, if any of these is true, because Jay doesn't bother to contextualize this for us.

[Sha Noran]

All fair points, thanks for clarifying what you meant. I think there's a LOT of confusion due to people assuming too much and believing they "know" things that are merely implied by our bumbling hero Jay, who is pretty unreliable since he has apparently done many things he has no recollection of.

I did think that first post was canon though since he posted in character. Similar to the marble hornets twitter Jay uses to communicate with us/drop hints.

[Grumplestiltskin]

I'm with Sha Noran in thinking of J's SA posts as canon: here's our hero, J, having a normal college guy life, wasting time on SA, when he sees Victor Surge's pictures, and something twigs in his brain, the snippet of a traumatized-out-of-his-awareness memory, and he goes in search of tapes that have been gathering dust for three years, maybe not even entirely knowing why.

In that scenario, if he's been reading closely, he knows that Surge's pics are manipulations, that the point of that thread is to create a new urban legend. But what he's finding on those tapes is real, is happening to his friend, to him. So he posts on SA as ce gars, in what reads as an earnest way, trying to show people what he's actually found. And then he gets swept up in the MH saga, and proceeds to make a large number of questionable decisions (investigating this by himself, never alerting authorities, breaking and entering, stalking, possibly engaging as a prostitute for income , etc.), so failure to research online seems a minor lapse in comparison.

[Ztakk]

[abcetc]

There's an entry with Alex drawing one of those symbols and writing "OPERATOR" underneath it. Forget which one.

[Lithp]

No, The Operator isn't a fan name, in fact a lot of fans don't really want to use it. There's that, there's a ToTheArk that says "he is The Operator," & they've mentioned at a Q&A that The Operator is the name for their Slenderman. Might be more instances of it being named, but I don't remember.

[Serum]

[Lithp]

I don't know which one it is, but I distinctly remember that phrase. Google isn't turning up anything. Then again, if you search "Totheark nothing is on my mind," it doesn't bring you to Display(?) either.

[rand__althor]

[CraicIsMighty]

[Xman]

I suppose an OOG reason would be that if they talked about the Operator, it would make him seem less scary or creepy.

Like if Jay said at the end of the Entry, "There he is again. The tall man. Seems like Alex saw him again at the park just like he did in Entry #4," I feel like that would take away from some of the mysteriousness of the Operator.

[Ztakk]

[RandomH-bomb]

There's no ToTheArk that says "He is the Operator," but the second-ever TTA video was titled "Operator," so the word was introduced pretty early on.
Also the word Operator appears in faint text towards the end of the fourth TTA, Impurity, and the next video, Exit, contains some jumbled letters that flash briefly at the beginning of the video, "Rat He Ore Top," which is an anagram for "The Operator."
Throw in the visual inclusion of an operator telephone key in Sidetone and Indicator, and you have a lot of in-game references to that word.

[Lithp]

This is the topic that I said my memory was shit in, right? Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident that I saw this phrase somewhere in Marble Hornets. And either way, no one is questioning the statement that they've called him The Operator OOG.

[Ztakk]

Again I haven't heard them even say it but whatever, not a huge deal if they did or not. That's it's name anyways :p