Welcome to the About page, where immersion comes back from the grave just so that it can die again. This is an insider’s real-life context behind the Slender Man mythos and this site’s construction.
The Slender Man
The Slender Man as a fictional phenomenon, although a character of great variation, can nonetheless be divided into three fundamental archetypes: let’s call them the Slender Man, Slenderman, and Slender. The first is the original idea of the character while the latter two are the confusing results of misaimed fandom, so allow me to explain the alternate histories behind them like a condescending academic:
Slender is a character originating in the 2012 PC game of the same name, which drew no influence from any previously-existing folkloric context whatsoever and most certainly did not borrow wholesale from that rip-off webseries Marble Hornets (circa 2009). This lack of context behind the character meant that the game’s horror aspect in the form of suspense and jump scares could not offset meme humor as the key defining factor of Slender to the general public; few still remember that for a few months in 2012, failing miserably at the game while screaming was considered the height of comedy.
Slenderman is a character from creepypasta (a term that sometimes means original horror fiction copied-and-pasted across online forums but here means the fanfiction universe surrounding it); alternatively, he is a creepypasta, according to people who believe that etymology is the study of insects. Some Slenderman fans acknowledge original stories and series about the character but nonetheless decided that what a Lovecraftian abomination really needs is a humanizing backstory. Sometimes he was a human child bullied for not having a face who swore revenge on all children, which is why fans invoke him as an anti-bullying self-empowerment symbol in the same vein as Shadow the Hedgehog. Other times, he is a sad creature who just wants to make friends but misunderstands the social stigmas behind things like murder. Not that he does any of that dirty work himself, of course! That’s why he has proxies, a term that used to be a catch-all for any character who sends cryptic messages to series protagonists but has since acquired a more specific meaning. Now it means any human who works for Slenderman or gets possessed by him while he otherwise just stands there and looks pretty –including Masky and Hoody, whose contradictory because actually compelling origins in Marble Hornets do not seem to matter. Proxies are violent and emotionally tormented, but like in a badass or kawaii kind of way. The highest honor any proxy can attain is to join Slenderman’s mansion in the woods where he leads other characters from creepypastas, such as BEN, Smile Dog, Jeff the Killer, and the 2013 Jeff the Killer Lookalikes Convention.
If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, that’s because it is the exact narrative invoked by the two girls responsible for the so-called “Slender Man Stabbing” in 2014, which I will not dignify as an example of “Slender Man stories extending into reality” the way sensationalist media have. Because in addition to being just plain disrespectful to the real people affected, this statement ignores and even validates the crime’s violation of obvious moral boundaries implicit in the idea of immersive fiction. The reason I am able to make this site in good faith in spite of this is my belief that art should only be put under scrutiny when it actually provides a basis for harmful interpretation. And the immersive element of Slender Man stories on this site, while possibly relevant to the underage perpetrators’ unstable grasp on reality, is far less relevant to their grasp on morality than the glamorization of violence in the particular stories they referenced. The stories you’ll find on this site, in addition to being much better fiction than those, generally depict violence more responsibly (framing it in a negative light, that is) on account of their almost exclusively older audiences and creators; therefore, I feel that restoring the context they provide to the Slender Man would only help to discredit rather than endorse such harmful interpretations. Think of it as taking the character back.
That brings us to the Slender Man, the one and only topic of this site. The 2009 forum conversation that conceived of this monster anticipated many outcomes of its chaotic emergence: it might be an urban legend, a meme, or an Alternate Reality Game. In the end, the character’s inconsistencies made it into all of these things; a monster whose presence in more than one exceptional ARG gave it multiple characterizations, all specific and three-dimensional, rather than one universally. The key to each of these series’ success has been their ability to build off of the constant yet malleable foundation of the monster rather than let typical conventions associated with it constrain their creativity; as a result, the Slender Man mythos encompasses a spectrum of horror whose remarkable breadth ought to be acknowledged. When describing the Slender Man, I seek to emulate the SCP Foundation’s tried-and-true policy that “anomalous properties” make for a much more compelling horror entity than “powers”; consider that the Slenderman-and-proxy archetype described above is really the result of X-Men Syndrome, whereas this site’s main page on the Slender Man emphasizes humans’ experiences of its abilities over the abilities themselves, per our placid island of ignorance and all that. I also have my own version of the /r/nosleep policy that “everything is true here, even if it’s not”: following ARG communities’ conventions, pages tagged “IG” (In-Game) operate under the pretense of the game’s reality while pages tagged “OOG” (Out-of-Game) do not. Because although any summary may recreate the information of an ARG, it takes a certain oneness with primary sources to recreate the experience of one: finding the wooded site of the geocache, holding the deranged journal hidden there, and double-checking every tree on your way back to the car before sunset. Those are the things that truly make the Slender Man real.
This is a work of unfiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are externalized products of an author’s imagination or are an integral part of the game. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is indicative of deeper secrets afoot.
This Site
Slender Man Arkive began as a hidden Wikidot site July 21, 2015 and became available for public viewing January 1, 2017. As a fan of the Slender Man mythos since 2012, I had created a crude tumblr archive of the Original Mythos in 2014, knowing that the original stories had been largely forgotten or blurred together in wiki summaries of the Slender Man’s characteristics –but I ultimately decided that restoring them on a better reading platform and doing the same for subsequent ARGs, plus making them easier to follow, would necessitate the creation of a site like this. For the record, UnFiction is an Out-of-Game forum for players of Alternate Reality Games with separate categories for Marble Hornets and the Slender Man Mythos.
The Original Mythos was easier to gather the second time around, but I still ended up moving a lot of content between different compilation pages and wringing more out of the original thread until even the Wayback Machine version of it showed I had gathered all I could –most of its images having gone defunct after their host site went down. Even then, there were just a few images that I could not save –and on at least two pages, I substituted new Slender Man images that may or may not have been the originals. My policy for correcting stories’ spelling and grammar has been dependent on willing suspension of disbelief, as errors that would not appear in a government case file may actually lend authenticity to a story from a forum user’s perspective. The main page lists the stories in roughly the original order of their posting.
Marble Hornets remains the most intact of all series on this site, yet my restoration of player correspondence from Season One required some of the most extensive digging through old UnFiction threads on account of it being all over the place. The series’ creators had clearly thought of taking the ARG route before making the next two seasons more self-contained, so I wanted to bring the “J” correspondence back from the realm of hearsay. New viewers of Marble Hornets can again be witness to the shocking twist that his name was actually Jay all along… after all, the ARG pages on this site assume that new viewers will watch the series in order and absorb information on a video-by-video basis so that the most important plot information need not be repeated. However, the video summaries still put forth speculation (see: “the Ark”) that viewers can freely disregard if they have different ideas.
Just Another Fool was honestly a gift that kept on giving, as it contained many ARG elements that even I had not anticipated. The second journal, phone calls by players, and author’s Out-of-Game explanation of the ending had all been news to me after my initial reading a few years prior. All of this made it all the more worth saving, and I selected comments from the blog and UnFiction thread for their relevance to both the plot and the tone. At the time of this page’s creation, there had been one (1) image from the blog that became defunct –so that’s fixed now.
Everyman HYBRID could not be complete as an experience without audience participation, so I made sure to pore through old UnFiction threads and comment sections at high speeds and gather all that I could –thankfully, the fan-made wiki made it obvious where to look. Now it will no longer be the only wiki to illuminate the ARG elements of this series, as this one contains CANYOUSEETHEWORDS in its entirety and what the players wrote as they received ARG materials in real life. Enough of this series’ plot remains ambiguous (see: the iteration cycle) that I’m prepared to revise pages in the event that any of my speculation becomes obsolete.
Tribe Twelve had the first of these pages to not require digging through old forum threads, but it was only by a stroke of luck that I discovered the fan-made archive of Formspring posts that I thought had been lost forever. Then I made it my job to select just the plot-relevant and non-redundant ones, which I also did by omitting several Tweets that simply stated when videos would be up. This series requires fewer extrapolations about ambiguous plot elements than most, but it also requires more attention to foreshadowing due to subtle clues in many videos.
Dark Harvest presented the least difficulty except for when it came to retrieving The Black Book from a file format that requires additional software to open –but no one else needs to anymore. With only six tabs available on the top bar (without warping the page) and a need to branch out beyond the “Big Three”, I thought that this series deserved in-depth coverage it hadn’t yet received anywhere else.
I recommend reading the wiki as follows: first the series’ main pages in the order the top bar lists them, then the chronological timelines on each main page, and then the sidebar pages. I intend to update main series pages for as long as they run, and sidebar pages to include new or previously-forgotten information that deserves a space on them. More than anything, I recommend checking out series creators from the “Source” tabs at the bottom of series pages –none of this would be possible without them, after all.
Contact
This site is solely maintained and edited by Wikidot user Hazardous. If you have any questions or comments, contact me from here, the Slender Man Lore blog, or moc.liamg|nrocreppepal#moc.liamg|nrocreppepal.
