Headscratchers / The Slender Man Mythos

• There tends to be three ways the victims of The Slender Man meet their end; insanity, death or disappearance (and there may be some overlap between the three). What I'm wondering is where do the people go after Slendy makes them disappear? Where does he take them? I know this is one of those things that's left up to our imaginations but it's one of the things I'd love to know. It'd pin down if Slendy was mystical, alien or scientific.
  • He's obviously working with Candle Jack to make them va
  • I assumed he was making more, i mean most found bodies were said to be distorted, so he could have been preparing them and they didn't survive.
  • There is actually a location called The Path of Black Leaves that is theorized to be his domain or something similar, not to mention all the other 'weird' locations that pop up throughout the works. Presumably he can not only appear at any place on Earth but some weirder places as well, so maybe there are corpses strewn throughout some unreachable dimension. It doesn't really matter though, there are a number of plausible explanations and pinning down a specific one seems sort of unnecessary.
• What the hell is with this second Slender Man in Scared and H(a)unting? Furthermore, what kind of sense does it make that the Slender Man that we all know, who kills people and stuffs them in bags, would play Papa Bear to a little girl and post on her blog? It's just ridiculous, and that's saying something, considering this is a web of stories about a faceless, sharply-dressed bald man with tentacles.
  • It's exactly because he kills people and stuffs them in bags that most people sense the logic error of his Papa Bear tendencies.
  • The constant use of pop-culture references is detrimental to the mythos.
  • I'm not sure what the second Slender Man is supposed to be, though some bloggers have theories ranging from a younger, more impulsive member of Slender's species, to the younger Slender Man time-traveling in a fight against an older, more reserved and humane Slender (though H(a)unting states several times that their Slender still kills). As for why He protects Sandra, they've theorized that He was curious as to why she never seemed afraid of Him, and one of the messages He left seems to indicate that whatever power He has to intimidate people, she's immune to.
  • In addition to the time travel idea, it's also possible that there really are two Slender Men (no one ever said there had to be only one). And there's the theories that Slender Man's got some kinda weird personality disorder going on, or maybe he's just messing with everyone's heads by acting like there's another. From a meta point of view, it looks a bit like Scared and H(a)unting had two clashing ideas about a single topic (the character Drew), so they said there were two Slender Men so they coudl avoid the inconsistensies between the two blogs.
  • This troper's main problem with H(a)unting, aside having a gross Mary Sue for a protagonist, is that the premise in and of itself is flawed. Why would Slender Man care whether or not he scared Sandra? He wouldn't spend time trying to figure her out. He'd put her organs in bags and shove her on a tree branch, and call it a day. Character Derailment, thy name is H(a)unting.
  • Some people are so desperate, they find anything sexy.
  • Are people seriously complaining about something ruining the integrity of a creature created via photoshop for a contest? Slender Man can be whatever the individual story writer needs it to be, the very nature of the character allows for reinterpretations and reimaginings. Much older monster have been revamped and revised for individual stories, why is Slender Man so sacred? Between this and the people that deride the Charlie Matheson Jr. part of Slender The Arrival, I'm starting to think there's some fanatical cult that worships Slender Man and who's goal is to preserve (ie. force) their idea of what/who Slender Man is.
    • Some people don't like derailing depictions of horror monsters. Especially when the writing stars a Mary Sue character and is the reason for the derailment. The Slender Man is no exception. Compare to Twilight vampires.

• Not to sound like a nitpicker or anything, but what's the point of creating the Slender Man stories if you're apparently not supposed to research him?
  • You may as well ask why create Candlejack jokes if you're not supposed
  • Which blogs do that?
  • I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but it's suggested several times that a side effect of being involved with the Slender Man is compulsively wanting to record your encounters and life in general - see Alex in Marble Hornets and his obsession with filming everything, which spreads to the other characters. That seems to be the function of this effect, to spread his influence like a virus through information.

• Why exactly is the Slender Man called "The Operator" in Marble Hornets? What exactly is he operating? Where did the name come from?
  • No idea, yet. Well, I don't know an in-universe reason, anyway. As for why the creators named him that, well, there's the whole operator symbol (or tensor product symbol, specifically...) (⊗) fetish, which always in my mind represented a head with a crossed-out (lack of) face. I always just thought the creators went "whelp, we have this symbol associated with him, let's give him a name associated with the symbol."
  • I don't think they ever call Slendy "the Operator," do they? Not in the videos certainly. Did they do it in the Twitter? Anyway, I thought who the phrase actually referred to was purposefully ambiguous.
    • They say "The Operator" is the actual, in-universe name. The videos don't mention it but the videos don't refer to him as Slender Man either.
  • The reason that he's referred to as "The Operator" in MH is because MH is made by SA Goons, who really don't like to be associated with stuff they think is getting stupid. Basically, MH was originally just a thing to entertain fellow Goons and when it became so popular that hundreds of lesser quality(sometimes horrible quality) Slenderstories started to pop up they wanted to differentiate themselves from it. "This isn't The Slender Man or Slenderman, it's The Operator, something else that was only originally based on The Slender Man." is the general idea behind it.
  • Where was that ever said? This is the only page I've ever seen that posited, did you just make that up? Either way, it seems more likely that, in Marble Hornets, "Operator" is the creature's accurate name while "Slender Man" is just a casual nickname.
  • You may as well ask why he has the name Slender Man - that is, he doesn't. Lots of people have different names for him throughout the mythology, Operator is just the name used to refer to this particular interpretation of the character within MH.

• In some of the stories those affected by Slendy will sometimes speak in code, mainly by capitalizing certain letters, and I guess I'm okay with that. But the characters sometimes breaking out into binary? I mean, what, is Slendy implanting microchips in their brains? Is he an android? I just don't get it.
  • Maybe he is an android implanting microchips in their brains. It would actually explain a lot.
  • It's also possible that people figure that 0's and 1's look enough like the Operator symbol to deter Slendy from trying to read it, or that Slendy is simply figuring out other codes and has yet to completely figure out binary.
    • Fridge Brilliance: Slendy is an internet meme - it makes perfect sense for those affected by him to speak binary. After all, it's probably the first human "language" he knew.
  • What if it's a recent thing it decided to do, or if the "More than one" idea is to be believed than it could be a current Slender Man adapted or tailored to deal with scaring through the internet and binary was what it came up with.
  • You could chalk it up to just plain insanity. People are going to notice their codes either way, this isn't so much different than a simpler code.

• Why is it that Marble Hornets get grouped as just another series associated with The Slenderman Mythos when nearly everything about the mythos besides Slendy himself and the original creepypastas came from Marble Hornets? While some tropes do appear in all of them, some of them are distinctly traits of Marble Hornets (i.e. the Laser-Guided Amnesia, cryptic codes, the distorted tapes, Meaningful Background Events, Demonic Possession and/or Mind Rape, totheark, etc.), and yet the trope pages credit it as "Common in The Slenderman Mythos" despite that they are all examples of Follow the Leader and most memorably appeared in Marble Hornets. It seems to give less credit to Marble Hornets than it deserves, or at least making Marble Hornets a victim to Once Original, Now Common much quicker than it needs to be.
  • Conversly, why is it that when different series both use a trope but are very different in execution and tone, they both just get grouped as a part of The Slenderman Mythos when they should get their own entries? Or is everyone else here just as lazy as me?
  • Trope pages' entries on Slender Man should probably be put in more detail in general. Of course, the blogs and some other series crossover a lot so at some points it is easy to see them all as one thing.

• Why do people throw a shit-fit whenever someone addresses Slender Man as "Slender"? From a grammatical standpoint, I can understand (the word "Slender" is an adjective, and thus doesn't work as a name), but there's already so many names for him ("Tall Man", "Thin Man", "der großmann", "The Pale One", "Slendy"… hell, there's also "The Operator", if you want to be generous and view him as the same entity). I honestly don't see how tacking on the word "Slender" as a name is somehow committing an atrocious sin against God.
  • If I had to guess, it's because the people most likely to call him that only know of him through the video game and don't know his actual name.
    • This, it's kind of showing that the people calling him that don't really know much about the mythology, which causes resentment in those who are bitter at the mythology's new popularity among people who are just casually into the idea.
• Something has always bothered me, what the hell is with the bulge in one of the original Slenderman pictures? This picture◊. You can see it on the Slenderman's torso(?) almost right below the head. I see one of his hands clearly, so what the hell is it??
  • Maybe even Eldritch Abominations can get goiters, too?

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