Seeking Truth

Wow. It’s been a long time since I actually posted something (a long while in internet time, at least). I had intended to just take a week, maybe two off…. And then I went and took nearly the entire break off. My bad. I blame the holidays, and all the distractions that come with them.
So, a very late Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Hanukah, Beethoven’s Birthday, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, and Capitalism Day.

I've been having to do a lot of catching up lately, since I haven't been keeping up to date like I should. Hopefully I'll be fully informed of all them happenings around these parts quickly.

Here we’ll cover Seeking Truth, one of the classics of Slenderblogs (I find it strange that we live in a time where a story not even a year old can be called a classic).

Seeking Truth

Plot

Seeking Truth is a blog by Ezekiel Strahm (who goes by the name Zeke), a loose cannon cop who plays by his own rules. He admits that he isn’t the sort who would usually start a blog, but his partner Lizzie made it for him, so he gets to posting on it.

The first part of the blog deals with Zeke investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl. At first, it appeared as though the girl just ran away from home, but after the discovery of a notebook filled with Slender Man imagery, Zeke began to suspect kidnapping. The primary suspect of the case is Albert Conaghan, a rather unpleasant individual, who had been accused of raping young girls before. More children went missing (one even while under police surveillance), commenters screamed “It is teh Slendoorman!” (While Zeke screamed “Shut the hell up!” back at them, but louder), a romantic subplot develops between Zeke and Lizzie, and eventually, Conaghan was apprehended.

Predictably, capturing Conaghan does not put their troubles to rest, as Zeke discovered that Lizzie was being followed by Slender Man (another victim was an officer named Eric, who was working with the two protagonists). Zeke continued to remain skeptic, but doing so became harder as more things piled up on top of each other.
Then Slendy went and busts Conaghan out of prison, and the hunt resumed. Conaghan was tracked down to a warehouse, where alien geometries abounded, and where Zeke confronted (and shot at) Slender Man.
While in the warehouse, Lizzie was killed by Conaghan. This caused Zeke considerable emotional distress, and after being put on suspension by the chief, he spent most of his time isolated in his home. Slender Man began to haunt him there, and we learn from Zeke that he had been haunted as a child, and that the events thus far were part of a plan by Slender Man to capture this victim who had escaped him.

Eventually, Zeke got over his misery, and replaced it with resolve to fight against Slender Man. After gathering information on his opponent, Zeke returned to the warehouse for a final confrontation.
We never have found out just what happened at that warehouse, and Zeke still hasn’t said anything. What we do know comes from another source, namely Agent Fisk. After cracking into the blog, Fisk reported that the FBI was hunting Zeke Strahm for arson and multiple homicides. The warehouse that Zeke had gone to had been burned down, with two bodies (Conaghan and Eric) found inside. Following that, Zeke has posted a few more short posts, the first few cryptic and vague, but then commenting on events in other stories.
Zeke has continued to comment on other Slenderblogs, and now has another active blog, The Mystic.

Impact on the Mythos

Fighting Back

Zeke was, and still is, a very unique character amongst the Slenderblogs. Where most stories feature college students as their protagonists, here we have a hardboiled detective. Even more distinctive was how Zeke responded to Slender Man. At the time, the only other story which even considered a possibility other than Slendy killing everything within a ten mile radius was Tutorial, which focused on running. Seeking Truth was the first time a major story had its character attempt to fight back against Slender Man. From what we know, the fighting back wasn’t entirely successful, as Slendy’s still here, but Zeke has managed to be one of the few people to survive this long.
Since Seeking Truth, the idea of fighting back has really taken off. We’ve had tons of blogs where the protagonists act aggressively in response to Slender Man, instead of passively letting him drive them insane. Sometimes this isn’t a good thing, as a fair share of blogs have dropped all pretense of horror to focus on fighting back. Apart from those examples, I think this is a positive thing; while confusion and inactivity were good in the original stories, nowadays such characters often seem ridiculously genre blind.

Haunted as Children

Here, Seeking Truth tried to explain one of the consistently strange things in the Slenderstories: If Slender Man targets children…. Why do all his victims in these stories seem to be adults? ST’s justification was that many of the adults being targeted were childhood victims who somehow managed to avoid being taken by Slendy. Not many current blogs use the explanation (instead they tend to just say “Tulpa Effect did it”), but it is a good explanation, which helps address the fridge logic in Slendy’s victim choices.

Useful Links
Seeking Truth: http://openthedoorandyouwillfindme.blogspot.com/
TVTropes Entry: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeekingTruth
The Mystic: http://helpingthosehelpthemselves.blogspot.com/