White Stag Education
is an Analog Horror web series created by After10 Productions. The series consists of seemingly disparate videos (such as public safety PSAs) that come together to tell a story about mysterious events occurring in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
The first video was uploaded on October 22, 2022.
White Stag Education contains examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Population: The puppets in Forest Friends have bright, colorful skin colors.
- Ambiguous Innocence: Grandwood Park Ranger Training starts benevolently enough, but then shows a warning telling new park rangers that they will not be allowed to quit under any circumstance and the video later gains a more sinister air that suggests that the new rangers are being trained to kill Strangers specially without remorse, which may mean they're more human than they're being led to believe.
- Ambiguously Human:
- The Strangers are humanoids whose faces are said to be hidden behind animal masks, and the church service alludes to the idea that they may be immortal.
- If their training video can be trusted, the Grandwood Park Rangers classify the Strangers as "bipedal organisms" with their own species name. It also reveals the Strangers communicate by whistling, with it being likened to animal calls. Overall, they are framed as predatory animals more than as people, but it is mentioned that they do supposedly have souls.
- Don't Go in the Woods: The depths of the Pine Barrens are where the Masked Strangers live, try to kidnap/kill hikers, and hold rituals involving an Eldritch Abomination called the Adversary. The park rangers are trained to keep visitors safe by, among other things, painting blaze markers on trees, removing deceptive blazes put up by the Strangers, and occasionally killing Strangers.
- In Memoriam: In-Universe. The puppet children in Forest Friends are named after four children who died, who the show was made in the memory of. Photos of them with their names are shown at the end of the Forest Friends episode.
- Joisey: The events are set in and revolve around a famous part of New Jersey. So far, no stereotypes about the state have been used.
- Leitmotif: The melody the Strangers whistle is present in all the videos as either the soundtrack of a video or when the Strangers arrive.
- Malevolent Masked Man: The Strangers, also known as the Masked Strangers, appear to be this.
- Mercy Kill: While Grandwood Park Ranger Training frames the Strangers as dangerous predators and insists they aren't human, it nonetheless tells the new rangers to feel no remorse for killing Strangers because they're supposedly doing them a service by freeing their souls.
- Public Secret Message: The initials of the names being given Special Thanks in the opening credits for Christmas Eve Candlelight Service spell out "INNOCENT" and "SENDHELP".
- Seers: Intuitane was created with the intent of giving test subjects the ability to predict things shortly before they happen.
- Show Within a Show: Forest Friends, a series where friendly puppets and a forest ranger teach kids about hiking safety.
- Subverted Kids' Show: Downplayed. While Forest Friends clearly has something up with it due to it all revolving around warning its audience about the Strangers lurking in the Pine Barrens, and the brief glimpse of its depiction of the Big Bad Wolf in its Little Red Riding Hood sequence is rather scary, it's still not too inappropriate for children and it appears to have been made with the purest of intentions: to protect young children.
