As a WMG subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- And links to static. And insanity. And Nightmare Fuel.
- Slendy is the creator. The Skin Taker is his Author Avatar. Janice was some poor kid he abducted and promised fame. Also, Slendy's suit happens to be made of children's skin.
- This may be becoming... semi-canon? Don't know how you determine what's "canon" and what's not in the Mythos. But Everyman HYBRID has been going down this lane. The most recent video, at least, has the cast (and Damsel) talking about "finding the treasure" while watching a blank screen.
- Perhaps during the early '70s he decided to take a break from terrorizing young filmmakers and, instead, work with them on his hidden passion: Sid and Marty Krofft-style children's programming. He did his best, but supernatural horror just isn't one of those things you can leave at the door, you know?
- The Slender Man? I doubt it. The screaming episode is here. Go to 0:38 and pause immediately before the static. Something else seems to be behind the show.
- Naw, that's Slenderman. He's just showing off his mask for his cameo apperance.
- Alternatively, Slenderman was just the producer; while the rest of the show was made by the the other fears. At the very least, The Smiling Man seems to have been involved with it.
- I'd happily get snatched by Candle Jack if it meant I was safe from the Skin Taker. *clears throat* Candle Jack. Um. Candle Jack. Candle Jack of the loving of the pumpkin pie? I'll bake one, I'll bake them all, seriously, just...Candle Jack! FUCKING CANDLE JACK ALREADY! i can feel his teeth on my skin he's waiting why is he waiting
- Candle Jack can't get you out of this adventure. You have. To go. Insi
- Alternatively, he made up the story about watching static, actually he's just a message board troll who loves messing with people's heads. The show was real and its supposed creepiness was just a combination of low production values, incompetence of its makers, and the imagination of the kids who watched it.
- Or his mother was the one hallucinating. She's the only person we know of who saw the static, and one person seeing things is more likely than several people seeing the same things.
- Or, there's a third theory. It wasn't dead static but it was a television show on a station that didn't come in very clearly. That conclusion wasn't reached by many younger people (most of those who know the creepypasta) since many young people grew up with cable and satellite, and thus only know something either coming in clear or not at all. Back in the day (boy, do I sound old), kids would often watch TV channels that only partially came in, which if you weren't watching it and just passing by (as we can safely assume the mother was, as she would have no reason to watch a children's show about pirates) looks like dead air and sounds like dead air or it was close enough that she just called it static. I can remember things that I taped as a kid that were very snowy chanels that only partway came in visually and audially that my parents thought of as just static, and when I played them back, sure enough, they were intact. The only mystery is how they knew the ship was red, but it could be that the kids (remember this aired in 71-72, not long out of the 60s, so there was still black and white TV) saw enough red on black and white that they were pretty sure that the Laughingstock was indeed red (notice that no other colors are explicitly named), or perhaps it came in clear enough at times that the snowy picture had some color to it from time to time. Kids are a lot more willing to watch TV stations that only partially come in than adults are.
- Actually, the forum thread seems similar to a psychological phenomena I heard about, where one person comes up with a vaguely defined memory, another person invents details to add to that vague memory, which convinces the one who reads or hears about them that he/she has "remembered" those details from before and elaborates on them, which in turn prompts other people to "remember" those elaborations in so on. Notice how almost every reply on the thread after the first entry begins with something along the lines of "Oh, yeah I remember (repeats some detail brought up in a previous reply)..." followed by some addition. I think this could either be Confabulation, False Memory Syndrome, or some other phenomena that I've forgotten the name of (I'm not a psychologist after all) related to mass hysteria. In essence, you could say that there never was a Candle Cove and that all the memories the characters have are inventions of their collective conversation.
- Or his mother was the one hallucinating. She's the only person we know of who saw the static, and one person seeing things is more likely than several people seeing the same things.
- On this note, it's possible the later episodes were additional screaming and similar creepy things.
- Or perhaps it was addressed afterwards (some might have missed the screaming episode or not been fazed by it) and never mentioned again.
- And it's also possible those who watched the real last episode aren't in any position to tell anyone about it...
- Or perhaps they were screaming because Janice was crying.
- Alternately, the guy who said it was real said the screaming episode may have been a false memory implanted by the thread starter who later mentioned a nightmare about them screaming.
- Or perhaps it was a place to get ideas for Flapjack by planting a seed and kicking off some false memories.
- Maybe even the Shadow Men deemed the show too creepy and decided to take things into their own hands?
- Do you need an orb repairman or something? I know one on the corner of 207th that could help.
- ̷ͤ̃̂͐̆̔̚The ẙͥ̊̆̉̈nuȎͫ͌̽̀̾̚͏mber is vOͯ͛̓̆̌͊̚id.
And now the world is dead. Slowly and slowly, people's memories of the show are fading away. That's because the universe that once held Candle Cove no longer exists, and the timeline is rearranging itself to incorporate the fact that it's trying to call data that simply isn't there. The ones with less experience with the universe lost their memory first. The kids only have vague memories of the show now, due to them being close enough to it.
But that's not important right now. What is important is, unless I'm mistaken, THERE'S A FUCKING ABOMINATION THAT GOBBLES UP ENTIRE UNIVERSES LOOSE, AND WE PROBABLY LOOK REALLY REALLY TASTY TO IT!!
- Maybe their world was an early victim of something like The Crisis or The Incursions?
- Take that theory in the context of the LOCAL58 episodes "Show for Children," "Weather Service" and "Skywatching"... and the themes there are shockingly similar.
Except, of course, that there is no safety here. Percy tries to entertain her with adventures, but he's aware that the Skin Taker is looking for them.
The Skin Taker, however, is still not ready to eat yet. Janice's soul won't fully finish forming for another year, so it'd be a waste of time to kill her now.
Percy knows this, and so he's trying to stop the Skin Taker and his minions before they run out of time. After all, the Skin Taker can't kill Janice yet. It takes a great deal of power to kidnap someone, after all, and he can't just kidnap someone else without regaining some of it.
In Season 2, Janice is ready to be harvested. However, Percy refuses to let this happen, and the Skin Taker ultimately runs out of time. Despite this victory, the consequences are extreme:
The Skin Taker had corrupted the world so much that the entire Candle Cove universe was now structured around him. As the Skin Taker fades into oblivion, the rest of the world starts to get dragged along with him. There is nothing but screaming...but perhaps it's a better fate for Janice than being captured by the Skin Taker. And perhaps the world of Candle Cove had died a long time ago.
If you turn up the volume in the last episode, during the credits, you can hear a lullaby. It's sung in the voice of Percy the Pirate, and it sounds as if he's fighting back tears. The song slowly fades into utter silence as the credits roll, until finally there is nothing.
It is called "Goodnight, Janice."
If they could use post-hypnotic suggestion to influence humans to do things without realizing it, and you forget them as soon as you look away, The Silence were around and caused only certain people to remember it.
Originally, I was going to say that Candle Cove was a pleasant hallucination created by Humpty Dumpty, but it could just be whatever Eldritch Abomination is behind the show taking a form that works for it. The mother saw only static because it saw that as the best way to deal with her. During the Screaming Episode, the illusion began to break, and some of the show could truly be seen.Why all this? The real show was a million times worse. But no one remembers it for how it was....
Think about it.
1) Little girl finds herself in a strange, new world to escape her older sister. (Although Alice's motives are far less depressing than Janice's)
2) Said world is filled with strange, quirky people, the main heroine included.
3) Bad guys' motives, if they have any at all, are ambiguous at best. (Not referring to the Skin- Taker, his motives are far more set in stone than the Queen of Hearts. I'm referring to Horace.)
4) Little girl goes on adventures through the strange new land.
5) All rules of logic and sanity hold no sway there.
6) Premise, at first, seems very innocent and made for kids, but the more time you spend reading it, the scarier it gets.
7) Bizarre animals and settings. (Man-Bear-Pig and... ANY animal encountered in Alice in Wonderland)
8) Some of the weirdest poetry ever written in the history of mankind (Skin-Taker’s ‘birthday song’ for Janice for one, versus any poetry discussed in Wonderland.)
9) One theory is that this all takes place in Janice’s imagination. Hmm, I wonder who THAT sounds like…
10) Said world falls completely apart when said little girl doesn’t need it anymore (Why the infamous Last Episode was so strange and scary, and when Wonderland falls into nothing but cards when Alice finishes the trial. Alice doesn't need it because she 'grew up' while in Wonderland, maybe Janice did the same.)
For those who don't know, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where a bunch of people mis-remember the same detail of a specific thing.A huge example is the book/TV series The BerenstAin Bears, where many people remember the spelling being Berenst-E-in, with an "e", even though it was never spelt that way. Anyway, it would explain why they remember this obscure show even though it never existed, and the guy's mom stated she remembered he just saw static.
There's nothing that suggests that they explicitly can't co-exist, so it's very possible that William Afton or maybe one of his older relatives made Candle Cove in the early 70's before Afton either moved onto animatronics by the 80's, or just decided to create Afton Animatronics after his father/uncle/brother/etc. failed either as something new he thought would do a good job at simultaneously kidnapping/murdering children and earning him money or just because he liked the idea of making killer animatronics instead of creepy kid's shows. Candle Cove being connected to the Afton's makes sense when you consider that both the Candle Cove story and Five Nights at Freddy's franchise are full of Nightmare Fuel and based on corruptions of many people's childhood things, as well as multiple strange events occuring both on the Candle Cove TV show and at the multiple locations connected to the Afton family.
The scene where the Skin-Taker talks to the whirlpool indicates that he has some sort of business with Eaten. My guess is that he knows more than anyone else about all this simply because he's been around longer (and might also be slightly higher on the Chain than humans, but only to the degree that one species of ant might be more evolved than another), and he may have tried to make some sort of bargain to be spared from it, or postpone it just a little bit longer. Maybe this deal involved Janice, and his failure to capture her sealed his fate. Of course, it's unlikely he would have been spared either way...