Here's an idea.
Slender Man is the internet's legendary folk creature.
Boo!
Sorry.
But, you know, it is Halloween tomorrow,
and we're all getting a little bit into the spoopy spirit.
Some hundreds of years ago, we started
carving faces into gourds and gathering around bonfires
during this time of the year because
of the imagined presence of spirits and fairies.
Children and the poor went door to door
collecting cakes which, when eaten,
were thought to free a soul from purgatory.
But now, spirits and fairies have
expanded to include ghosts, goblins, vampires,
and witches made of plastic, and soul cakes
have changed into mini Snickers-- except for that one
lady down the street who hands out
those tiny boxes of raisins.
What is her deal?
The costumed practice of guising turned
into being able to get a sexy costume version
of a disappointingly vast array of objects and characters.
Sexy Chinese takeout?
Really?
Really.
And the internet has become a part of the festivities.
People change to horrific Twitter avatars
and make how-to's for their crazy costume creations.
There's a Google Doodle, more Instagrams of spooky nail art
then you could shake a femur at, and scary stories or videos,
many of which feature Slender Man, which is who we're gonna
be talking about right now.
Slender Man is one of the internet's very few
reoccurring, and arguably its most frequently
encountered, threatening paranormal ghoulies.
As his name suggests, he is a man shape, a slender one.
And not like Fassbender slender.
More like creepy slender, like the Silence, or Conan O'Brien,
or the ice cream truck driver from "Legion."
[YELLS]
Slender Man doesn't have a face, but he
does have a suit, and sometimes upwards
of six tentacle-like arms.
And no, it's not entirely clear what he does when he gets you.
It's probably not make you tea and show you
the cross-stitching he's been working on.
Slendy first appeared in photographs on Something Awful,
but has since shown up in all kinds of creepypasta, which
are like scary stories that are passed around the internet
but you maybe saw me talk about in this ancient
know your meme video.
Link in the doobly doo.
Slendy is the frequent topic of visual art,
usually lurking in the shadows.
He's in video games, where you have to actively evade
his terrifying pursuit.
[SCREAMS]
And he's in videos, most notably Marble Hornets's "TribeTwelve"
and "EverymanHYBRID," where his mere presence causes
bizarre distortion in camera gear
and fits of coughing and extreme paranoia in the characters.
The Slender Man media complex is comprised of many mediums,
and tells hundreds, if not thousands of stories.
BBC Radio 4's "Digital Human" host Alex Krotoski even
asks if it might be the first great myth of the web.
And it doesn't feel like too far-fetched of a question
either.
Slender Man's countless authors have, accidentally or not,
developed a rather complete-feeling Slender Man
mythos.
Like, according to the legend, baddies
depicted in prehistoric Brazil, Ancient Egypt, 16th century
Germany, and Japan bear a strong resemblance to Mr. Slend.
Was he really invented by Victor Surge on Something Awful,
or was he channeled?
Is it possible that he is a constant and pervasive presence
throughout all of history?
Some stories place him, or beings like him,
in Germany around World War II, and in other parts
of the world around various horrific events
both major and minor.
Links to some stories in the place where links go.
One explanation for his existence
is something called tulpa, which Indian Buddhist texts describe
is a mind-conjured apparition.
Slender Man has been willed into existence
because he is in the subconscious
of many, many people.
In the West, we call this a thought form,
and therein lies what might be the best and most interesting
thing about no-face long arms.
While he does have a form that's recognizable
and a general air de terror, he is not one thing
in one place with one motive.
He's a nebulous, psychically crowdsourced terror.
He's literally the internet's nightmare,
its legendary creature.
The power of collective belief, or the collective willing--
[COUGHS]
--and of course, he's in great ghoulie company.
Though we know that other legendary characters
like the Gray Man, manticore, mothman, and Spring-heeled Jack
aren't, can't, and shouldn't be real,
there is a set of information and circumstance
that gives us-- some of us more than others-- permission
to believe.
There's something about acquiescing
to the possibility of their mythical existence that
is, well, fun.
But on top of painting a world that is a little bit more
mystical, a little bit more impossible
or beguiling than it really is, telling those scary stories,
like the one about the driver who flashes his lights, Bloody
Mary, or the haunted mansion on the edge of town,
helps us adjust, or maybe even grow up a little bit.
One theory is that these folks stories
help us express our subconscious or that which is normally
taboo.
Folklorist Alan Dundes says that folklore provides a socially
sanctioned outlet for the expression of what cannot be
articulated in the more usual direct way.
But I think there's something else
to be said about wielding the scary story,
about knowing that the boogie man is not real, about knowing
a story that your friends don't, and about being able to affect
them with its use.
Scary stories almost always take place
in a world that is like ours, but with one
terrifying addition.
In "The Epistemology of the Horror Story,"
Susan Stewart writes that contrary
to the distinction between true and made-up stories,
the horror story exists in a peculiar place between the real
and the fictive.
As such, and given the piece-by-piece narrative
construction of the horror story, quote,
"the listener's welfare becomes increasingly implicated
as the narrative sequence proceeds."
There is this solar system that at the center of which
is the story itself, and orbiting around it
is the knowledge that it's fake, buying
into it anyways because it's fun,
the teller wanting to scare their friends,
and providing both fright and the information of the story
itself that their friends can tell again or build upon
to make their own.
And that last part about building on existing stories
is just as true for the Jersey Devil, the Owlman,
and werewolves as it is for Slender Man, the Rake,
and who was phone.
MALE SPEAKER (ON PHONE): Who was phone?
And every other not scary legend, internet or otherwise,
for that matter, because for whatever folk archetype exists,
the internet has its analog.
The trickster in the troll face, the strongman in Chuck Norris,
the innocent in Bad Luck Brian.
And while we might not have campfires,
we do have wikis and message boards, fan fictions,
and copy/creepy pastas.
The point being that folklore isn't necessarily a thing
that's only happened in the past.
And that for as long as there are folks,
that wherever they are, they're probably minting new lore.
The internet is no exception.
And if anything, it has made such a pronouncement even more
true.
In his "Introduction to Folklore and the Internet,"
Trevor Blank writes that due to its inclusivity,
the internet has helped to refaciliate
the spread of folklore through electronic conduits.
So while when someone says folktales,
you might think of dusty old tomes, Grimm's fairy
tales, or stories from before electricity, let alone YouTube
and creepypastas, the truth is that folklore and its impact
is just as present, and maybe just as inescapable, as
the Slender Man himself.
[SCREAMS]
What do you guys think?
What are some of your favorite internet
folktales or scary stories, Slender Man or otherwise?
Let us know in the comments.
And if your story is too long for the comments,
I made a post for scary stories specifically on the subreddit,
so there's a link in the description.
And if you're not too busy sewing extra long sleeves
for your Slender Man costume, please subscribe.
There was a lot of the internet's native art
form on last week's video.
Lets see what you guys had to say about controlling
versus being your avatar.
So first and foremost, Jamin is here from "Game/Show"
and also very tall.
I know.
I'm wearing lifts.
[LAUGHS]
We made sister episodes last week.
So Jamin is here to talk a little bit about his reaction
to the idea of being versus controlling the avatar, right?
Yeah.
So like, that conversation about, like, agency.
And being the person controlling for the avatar
makes me think about my own emotions
and whether those are real or whether those are, like,
surrogate emotions for some other experience.
So, like, if I'm not actually the avatar--
Right.
--then not the feelings that the avatar's feeling,
but the feelings I feel.
Like anger, for example-- are those real feelings?
Or watching my son gets hit by a car, is that like a--
In the game.
Right, 'cause I always thought, like,
in-- I always thought one of the magical things about games
was that those were real experience-- like I was
actually getting a glimpse of what it might be like to go
through x experience.
Right.
That you're, like, stepping into this person for a second
and realizing what it's like to have,
like, whatever that experience is.
Right.
So--
Sort of like what Gonzalo Frasca was talking about,
right?
Like the idea of, you know, you're embodying this moment.
Right, exactly.
And the worry is that, like, if those memories aren't
like real memories, like I'm not actually
getting a taste of what that experience might be like.
Yeah
Then it's no more different for games than,
like remembering being at a movie theater.
Right.
So then-- and that feels like kind of a [INAUDIBLE].
So it's like a weird simulation of emotions as opposed
to an actual empathetic--
Exactly.
Huh.
And that--
And that's the line between controlling and being.
Exactly.
And so it's tied to, like, whether you actually
feel those things or not, which would kind of bum me out.
It's like I feel like I'm not actually
feeling those emotions.
That would be kind of a bummer.
That's really-- that's really interesting.
That's what I was thinking of.
Cool.
Thanks for coming by, Jamin.
Yeah, no worries.
And I'm going to go-- I'm going to go actually hang out
with Jamin on "Game/Show."
So if you want to go see my reaction to his video,
you should go check those out, and just check out
"Game/Show" in general.
So thanks for coming by, Jamin.
Yeah, no worries, man.
High five.
To everybody who recommended that I play "The Stanley
Parable," I know.
It's once the Mac re-release comes out,
it is going to be the first thing I do.
I'm gonna cancel all of my plans.
But I just-- ah, yeah, it's on the list.
I really want to play.
JRandomHacker172342 says that "Special Ops-- The
Line" is a really great example of being versus controlling
your avatar, and that the point of it
is maybe to get to a place where you just want to turn it off.
I don't know.
I'd be curious to know if other people who play it
feel the same way.
The Sumo Five says that when they
feel like they're playing their character,
then they have a very hard time choosing the evil path,
if that is an option that they have.
And actually up until recently, I had the same problem.
I would always have to play through the game
through the good path, and then I
would go back and do the evil path as kind of like,
you know, I would, I don't know, build up some karma, I guess?
I don't know what my reasoning was.
Snexus4 seems to say that you really
are your character in "Minecraft" because
of the amount of agency you have.
That it's just tons of agency.
And that, you know, you can step back from all these things
that you've built and feel like you really
did those things, which, yeah.
I mean, you can invest a lot of time in "Minecraft."
To Balec S Nahte and Devin Spect,
I had really similar experiences in both of these games,
in "Dragon Age-- Origins" and the "Walking Dead" game.
That I felt so much like the character
I was playing that it was-- yeah, it was trying at times.
Very invested.
Ugh.
Optimus and Brian Gerning left really great
comments about the nature of "Dungeons and Dragons,"
and how you are, in tabletop games,
expected to kind of be your character.
And I think that that influences a lot of how
I play video games, actually, in that,
like, I want to experience that thing of being the character
that you might otherwise be controlling.
So yeah, this is really great insight.
Jerry Turco says that playing "XCOM-- Enemy Unknown" has
caused him to think critically about sending people into war--
and that, you know, like a lot of people do with "XCOM,"
named his characters after people that he knew, and then
had a very brutal realization when his wife's character was
put in danger.
Egus Pintobasta points out that at the very least,
the way that we talk about the things that we control
indicates a sort of embodiment, and makes
a really good observation about driving
and the way people control their cars
and think of it as an extension of themselves.
Philosophy Tube points out that the dialectical interplay
between agency and structure does not stop in games
and extends all the way out into real life, which, yeah.
Jeff Murray was actually talking about consumer behavior and not
games specifically.
So yeah, it's a wide, wide range of applications for that idea.
Charlieisocoollike points out the last thing
that you have to do in "The Last of Us"
as a moment that made him question the very character he
was playing, which is actually the moment that inspired me
to write a lot of the episodes.
So yeah, I agree.
That's a really-- the end of that game is something else.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these spoopy goulies.
We have an IRC and a subreddit.
Links in the description.
This week's tweet of the week is every tweet by ideachan_ebooks,
but also one by usaqib that points us
towards a Roy Christopher article about shared memories
and pop culture, which has tons of "Blade Runner" references,
so good in my book.