Other Origin Ideas

Before I begin, a brief sidenote (Because that’s why you’re all here. The little sidenotes. I can’t imagine what other reason you’d come to a Slender Man blog.)
A long time ago, before Encyclopedia Slenderia even existed, there was another blog based on Slendy information. However, it went unactive, leading me to the only logical conclusion that the author had been eaten by the Slender Man.

As it just so turned out, that was not the case. Those of you who read the comments will have seen Z Wakey’s post, and know there is a chance that Z’s Slenderblog may become active again at a later date. And since I can’t miss a chance to plug an informative blog, here’s a link: http://theslenderblog.blogspot.com/


But there are other things to talk about here. I’ve gone over the Tulpa theory, which is one of the most popular explanations for Slender Man. However, it is not the only one. The way the Mythos works, any writer with a new idea can create a completely new origin story for Slender Man. We rarely see people taking advantage of this (which might explain the lack of an origin story about how Slender Man was bitten by a radioactive tree after seeing a college aged film student gun down his parents and decided to become a vigilante who hunts society’s greatest threat: Liberal Arts Majors), as many who don’t use Tulpa Theory prefer to leave his origins a mystery. However, there have been a handful of explanations that have been given.


Alien Slendy

Yeah, it sounds corny, like something out of a 50s movie. Which is probably why it so rarely is used; just look at what happened to the fourth Indiana Jones movie when they introduced aliens. Up until that point, we’d been willing to accept the Ark of the Covenant, Hindu gods, the Holy Grail, but aliens? It’s as though our culture has become so thoroughly desensitized to the use of aliens in media that we’re no longer able to take it seriously anymore.

In spite of the risk using this may pose, it has occasionally come up. While no blog that I have seen has fully adopted this hypothesis, a few have mentioned the possibility. Chief would be Searching for Angels, which had a post saying Slender Man was an alien, and then explaining his attributes and actions in that context. The next post was essentially, “Haha, we fooled you, there never was a Slender Man!”, but the soundness of that claim is in even more doubt than the alien one. The last Searching for Angels post was in January, so whether or not the alien hypothesis will/would have been expanded on remains a question.

The Slender Man Chronicles occasionally alluded to aliens, and the MIB, but does not state Slendy to be an alien. They just kinda mention it in passing, as a part of their other, Crowley style Tulpa theory.

So what about this whole alien deal? As said before, it’s hard for us to take aliens seriously in horror anymore. Unless it’s something like a Lovecraftian, ancient being traveling from aeons beyond the stars, aliens tend to put us in the mind of flying saucers abducting cows. It also has the implication that Slender Man is a race, not an individual. The thought of a planet full of Slender Man, oddly enough, makes him less scary. Possibly because that implies Slendy having a legitimate society, and now I have a mental image of a faceless man in famers clothes plowing a field while another faceless man waves to him as he drives by in a car which is all doing nothing to make me feel frightened at all.

Finally, making Slender Man an alien causes us to have to stretch “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” to the near breaking point. The abilities Slendy shows aren’t natural; but if we make Slender Man a naturally created species, just one who happens to be from a different planet, then we need to explain those abilities through technology. And whatever technology lets Slendy do all he does has to be some pretty spiffy technology. There’s also the problem in that letting his abilities be technology based has the implication that we as humans could copy his abilities; we just need to figure out how to build it.

Overall, alien Slendy doesn’t work that well. Maybe it’s just we haven’t seen anyone really pull it off amazingly yet, but making him an alien does so little to build on the horror aspect that it doesn’t seem to be a good idea.

Ghost Slendy

This is a hypothesis that I’ve only seen in discussions; thus far, I haven’t seen a single blog seriously consider the idea of Slender Man being a ghost. And for good reason: ghost Slender Man is even more difficult to take seriously than alien Slender Man.

We’ll start with the obvious that, like aliens, ghosts are seen as old and corny nowadays. As a kid, I grew up watching Scoob-Doo. Someone starts talking to me about ghosts haunting a place, and I wonder when the talking dog and his friends are going to show up and take off Old Man Jenkin’s mask. Occasionally, someone will try to make a movie/book/whatever which has serious ghosts in it, but more often they’re kept in the realm of children’s stories told around campfire.

However, what I see as the biggest problem with the ghost idea is the implication that Slender Man was once human. Ghosts are the spirits of the dead; so unless we’re also including dead creatures, concept, emotions, or ideas, we’ll have accept that Slendy was once a human. And like that, he goes from an unknowable being whose purpose we can never comprehend to a dead guy who enjoys violent poltergeist activity.

Crowley’s Tulpa

Here’s the hypothesis from Slender Man Chronicles. I’d have included it in the Tulpa Theory post, but I feel it’s separate enough from regular Tulpa Theory to be put into a separate post.

I’m really tempted to just post the link and tell you to read it, as it would be hard to do the full post justice with a summary. What it all comes down to is the occult, and drawing on the power of transdimensional beings. The author goes over occult history, talking about the Initiated Brothers of Asia”, Nazis, and finally, Crowley and Thelemic Occult. The author focuses on one of Crowley’s rituals, the “Babylon Working”, which supposedly opens a gateway between realities. Here he theorizes that Tulpa beings have passed through the gateways opened by the Babylon Working, drawing psychic energy from all the rituals which have been occurring through history. Then one Tulpa comes through, except instead of appearing as a loch ness monster or a big headed green alien, this one came wearing a suit and lacking a face. Then boom, there’s your Slender Man.

For a fuller idea of what the post said, well go and bloody read it: http://slendermanchronicles.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-slender-man-who-slender-man.html

Sadly for me, I haven’t been able to get into contact with my usual source of info for the occult, so I can’t double check everything here. I’ll say what I can about it, but I’ll need to do more research before I make fully supported claims.

What I can speak on is his talk about the Nazi’s occult. Hitler’s interest in occultism is often very exaggerated in fiction, and it’s taken to an extreme in the post. It’s true that the Nazis were involved in weird stuff, but most of that was Himmler being crazy on his own. Hitler tended to just grant permission to Himmler for whatever crazy ideas he had, like a tired parent telling an annoying child that, yes, he could go play outside if he would just shut up.

Also, Operation Paperclip did exist. Except it wasn’t an attempt to sneak out scientists who worked on flying saucers; it was trying to sneak out the scientists who worked on rockets, like the V2. Besides, saucers are not known for their aerodynamic capabilities.

But none of that is a really essential part of the hypothesis, so I’m not capable of disproving the entire thing here. Moving on.

Unknowable

Stupid Slender Man and his “cannot be comprehended by your puny human minds” excuse. It shows up in pretty much every post I make. No matter how many ideas we throw out there, there’s never any final word which can confirm which hypothesis is the true one (although it seems Victor Surge is fond of Tulpa Theory).

But this isn’t a weakness: if anything, this can add to the horror. Not every story needs an explanation of what Slender Man is, and for many readers, explanations take away from the horror of the unknown.

Useful Links
Slender Man Chronicles - Why the Slender Man? WHO the Slender Man?: http://slendermanchronicles.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-slender-man-who-slender-man.html
Slender Man Chronicles – We Cannot Undo What We Have Wrought: http://slendermanchronicles.blogspot.com/2009/08/we-cannot-undo-what-we-have-wrought.html
Slender Man Chronicles – What You Don’t Know Will Eventually Kill You. With Lasers.: http://slendermanchronicles.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-you-dont-know-will-eventually-kill.html
Searching For Angels – I Care: http://eyespie.wordpress.com/page/2/

Computer Woes

On Tuesday, my laptop suddenly decided to commit seppuku and stop working. I've been spending most of the week trying to get it to work again,and only recently have (mostly be shouting "SCREW YOU VISTA!" and then upgrading to Windows 7).

However, I wasn't able to save all my files when I did the fix. While most of my documents were salvageable, I lost my Firefox bookmarks information. Which means I have to rebuild my entire collection of Slender Man links from scratch, and reorganize them. Plus, I've missed most of a weeks worth of stuff going on in the Mythos which needs to be caught up with.

The consequence of this is that the post I was planning to have up by last Thursday won't be coming until next week, as much of my free time is now being spent shouting at a piece of hardware. Hopefully all the major problems will have been dealt with, and this will all just be cleanup. If not, and I run into even more obstacles.... Well, then I'm going to have to burn down an orphanage.

You hear that, compy? You better not screw with me anymore, or that orphanage will be on your conscience!

Intelligence

Look, I do update more often than VGCats!

We’re going to be looking at an interesting question here today: How intelligent is Slender Man? The easy answer is, “As smart as the author needs him to be”, but the easy way isn’t fun. And we’re all about having fun times at this blog, right? Remember that one time when that one guy was mind raped and then impaled on a tree? Yeah, that was barrels of fun there!



*Cough*
Ontopicnow.

There’s always been a variance in how intelligent Slender Man acts. A lot of this is determined by the author’s writing skill, but in other cases, it becomes a part of the plot. The amount of intellect can run from base animal instinct all the way to borderline omniscient. With this post I intend to quickly run through the different levels which he has been shown to have; a lot of the terms will be very broad, but that’s because we have a broad selection to choose from. Intellect has never been one of Slendy’s agreed on attributes, so each writer brings their own take on just how smart this tall guy is.

Low/Instinctive Intelligence

This is the idea that Slender Man has little cognitive ability. He responds to external stimuli, and has very basic reasoning skills, but little higher thought ability. This concept was created by M, who was the first person I’ve known to call Slender Man “stupid”, and mean it as a descriptor instead of an insult. With this level of intelligence, Slender Man isn’t acting out of motive, but out of instinct. Dogs chase cats, Slender Man kills people. The role he has been put into defines how he acts, and he follows that role without needing to think about it.

What this means for the runner is that Slender Man can be outsmarted, so long as you know how he acts. This is the secret behind M’s survival in Tutorial; he’s figured out Slendy’s rules, and takes advantage of them. This idea isn’t used that often anymore, since nowadays Slender Man is more often put in the evil mastermind role, which leads us to….

Human-ish Intelligence

A lot of writers use this, though it doesn’t seem to always be intentional on their part. The reason seems to be that it’s hard to write a character that’s smarter than you are, or who thinks in a way alien to you (it wouldn’t be alien if you could understand it, would it?). As a result, we get a lot of Slendy’s acting like a person would. He communicates with proxies in an intelligent manner, makes plans, and reacts to events around him as a person would. It’s the easiest level of intelligence which can be attributed to Slendy; an average human is writing him, so he thinks like an average human.

Above Human/Genius Intelligence

Here’s the idea that Slender Man isn’t just sentient; he’s also very, very smart. If the writer has Slendy pulling of Xanatos Gambits, or shows him consistently outthinking the protagonist, it’s likely they’re going for this. We’ve had some instances of a very intelligent Slender Man; in Seeking Truth, much of the plot was part of a plan he had to ensnare Zeke. In another instance, A outright stated that Slendy was highly intelligent, although we never got a chance to see that genius intelligence in action in that ARG.

Omniscient

If Slender Man can go to any point in time and space, what’s to stop him from seeing and learning everything? This has been talked about before, although I don’t believe we’ve seen any stories use it. Zeke mentioned it, but the Slender Man in Seeking Truth acted in a way which implied he wasn’t omniscient, albeit highly intelligent. Still, the idea is out there, for anyone who wants to use it.

Incomprehensible

The always fun “there’s no way our puny human minds can understand this creature” option which gets tacked onto everything. What if we say Slender Man cannot be defined by any human intelligence? That his process of thought is so completely alien to ours that we could not ever hope to follow it? Such an idea is a trait often ascribed to eldritch abominations, especially those of the Lovecraft sort, so it’s an interesting thin got consider with our tall pale guy.