agnosticantagonist:

    I want to start by saying I absolutely adore the slenderfandom. Every last one of you – you’re all completely and utterly batshit insane. Your willingness to accept a modern bogeyman whose very own mythos acknowledge and embrace an existence as a tulpa is astonishing. I think it takes a very special sort of group to create a self-propagating bogeyman and both love and loathe every fucking second of it.

    But I think our enthusiasm to build up the perfect monster is what’s going to kill it. The fandom is expanding at an exponential rate. The number of “slendercreators” nearly expands just as fast; it almost seems like people turn into slendercreators as soon as they watch a series. (Which makes sense, really – when it’s late at night and you’re watching a horror serial, can you really help but see every shadow in your home as the antagonist? All you need is a camera at that single paranoid moment, and you can call yourself a creator too.)

    I’m going to be frank here. Not all people were cut out to be creators from the get-go. While the slenderman is very much an evolving idea open to all, new creators focus on the same few traits over and over all too often. Faceless – check. Operator symbol – check. Sony Vegas distortion – check. Proxies – check. Paranoia – check, as you’re practically feeding off of yourself at that point. It makes the bogeyman stagnate, is all I’m saying.

    While these traits were very effective at scaring when they first came out, after a while it becomes a routine. You know what to expect. The slenderman goes from becoming an unpredictable incomprehensible terror of the forest to becoming the expected and well-known slenderfriend that causes distortion at the halfway point of the video and maybe stands in the background. And while it may not seem like a big deal at first, predictability is the difference between a domestic cat and a rabid stray. One of those you can actually fear, and the other…

    This isn’t the slenderman, kids. The slenderman isn’t something you root for. It isn’t something to be understood. It isn’t something you can predict, like light rain or weighted die. The slenderman is a series of conflicting stories and paradoxical ideas – and, if you look at it at just the right angle, these stories will align and look easy to understand, like one of those trick sculptures.

    We take the mythos at face value like this. We streamline our stories into a formula that appears to work, forgetting that fresh ideas are what makes the story work in the first place.

Read More

This says so much, and says it so much better than I could say it.  Not entirely sure who wrote this, but whoever it is knows what they’re talking about.  And what I’m talking about but don’t know how to say.

Once again the Slenderverse disappoints me severely.

There are a lot of people who read blogs.  I’m aware of this.  I have over 100 followers, though I know that there is some overlap since some people have followed with multiple accounts.  There are even more people who follow vlogs.  Many cap at over 1000.  I’m not really bothered by the fact that more people watch vlogs than read blogs.  It’s cool.  Blogs aren’t as accessible since they’re generally spread over multiple platforms and require a Google or Blogger account of some sort to follow.  Vlogs are all huddled in YouTube.  Everyone has a YouTube account, and all you have to do is hit “subscribe” to follow it.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a divide between the two groups.  The bloggers keep withdrawing into their own community.  Yes, I’m going to blame the bloggers on this one.  I’m also going to blame the people who watch vlogs, but to a lesser extent.  After all, even when a bloggerdoesmake an effort to support blogs outside their community, the rest of that community tends to ignore it.  And the one place thatdoesactually discuss blogs, the Fear Mythos forum, feels that, even though it’s cool for them to promote their fearblogs on the Slender Nation (never Unfiction for some reason), if you’re solely a Slenderblog, you have no right to promote your blog on their forums (which is baffling, considering that since Slendy is one of their “fears,” all Slenderblog are automatically fearblogs).

So really, there are several separate communities, and none is making much of an effort to try to branch out past their communities.

I made a post on UnFiction recently in an attempt to fix this problem.  That was my biggest mistake.  I shouldn’t have created a thread on UnFiction as almost no bloggers frequent UnFiction.  Again, they’ve withdrawn to Skype.  As a result, it came across as “READ MORE BLOGS GUYS.”  Not what I wanted at all.  I was intending to say “WATCH MORE VLOGS GUYS” just as loudly to the people who read blogs.

The thread was quickly derailed by the creator of the Dark Harvest vlog and some people he had apparently started a meme with.  And by meme, I mean forced meme/inside joke.  For a meme to work, it has to be acknowledged by everyone.  Suddenly, the thread I intended to bring bloggers and vloggers closer together was filled with joking anti-blog propaganda.  Since not everyone was in on the joke, the trolling came across as sincere.  People got upset and threatened to ragequit, upsetting more people.  The controversy spread to Tumblr and Facebook.  Now, I don’t follow anyone’s Tumblr (I kind of hate Tumblr and only use it for ventings and ramblings like this) and I’m not in the Facebook groups anymore.  As a result, arguments took off before I could stop them.  The entire thing was out of my hands.  I finally just gave up and washed my hands of the affair.

So that’s the background to this incident.  Now let’s talk about respect, grace, and why everyone handled this poorly.

I hear that some of the people involved in the “no more blogs” meme have apologized.  Okay.  That’s all well and good.  But here’s the thing: the damage has already been done, and it shouldn’t have been done in the first place.  It is a joke that not everyone gets.  And bloggers, the butt of the joke, are least likely to get it.  Now, I’m all for criticism.  I think that a lot of blogs would be better with it.  It’s why I’m such a critical reader when I read.  The thing is, though, that this joke is not criticism.  It is not satirical.  It may not have been intended as such, but it comes across as mockery.  Bloggers oftendofeel insignificant because of their small fanbases.  I’ll admit that it’s tough when some of the lesser-known vlogs have ten times as many followers as the most-known blogs.

Basically, what this boils down to was that the majority of people did not receive it as a joke.  They found it offensive.  And the point of the joke was trolling in the first place.  Trolling is not always funny to the people on the receiving end.  Basically, this was something that should not have happened in the first place.  Even if it was meant as a joke, it was disrespectful to all bloggers.  Even more so, it was disrespectful to me personally, as it immediately took the thread in the exact opposite direction of what I was trying to do.  It singlehandedly undermined everything I was trying to do.  As a result, anyone who participated in the trolling (and as an unfortunate side-effect, UnFiction in general) lost a lot of respect.  Being a “big name” like Alex/Uniquename is does not give you license to be a douchebag, especially when you’ll be recognized more by your name than your handle.  In fact, it only loses you more respect when people see you behaving immaturely.  They look up to you, and you have to consider that when you say things.

And now I turn to the people on the other side of this dispute.

Listen.  You have to have a little grace when it comes to things like this. Whining about how people are being jerks or unfair is not the way to react, especially when someone is trying to defend you.  Saying that you’re discouraged to the point of quitting is just immature, attention-seeking, and proves that you don’tcare enough about what you’re doing to respect your own work.  Look at the vloggers.  They have bigger, more vocal fanbases.  Andthey work on YouTube.  They have to learn how to deal with people being dicks to them.  Maybe bloggers don’t have as much respect to lose.  They’re on an upward hill since they’re smaller names.  But you do not gain any respect by saying “respect me, dammit!”  It’s immature and not the way to deal with the situation.  You are only making your peers and yourself look bad.  So maybe someone is being a douchebag on the internet.  That does not give you license to whine about it to everyone.  Getting offended only fanned the flames.  Basically, it’s the first rule of the internet: do not feed the trolls.

Again, I’m disappointed in all of you involved onbothsides of the matter.  You have done exactly the opposite of what I wanted to happen.  I hope you’re all happy with yourselves.

Please.  Stop being a douche.  Stop being a whiny shit.  And let’s work more on respecting each other, mmkay?

lord-of-cannons:

[19:29:55] Andy: It was beautiful hearing him insist over and over “IT’S A GIRL!”

[19:30:09] Andy: Even after the penis came out.  ”IT’S A GIRL!”

THIS IS TOTALLY NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE.

I was just showing him Boku no Pico and

WELL OKAY MAYBE IT’S JUST A LITTLE BIT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE.