Talk:Slenderman: How It All Began/@comment-4332975-20130921174434

I'll refrain from the knee-jerk, "Oh great, another Slenderman origin story..." reaction for a moment. We will get to that later, however. I'm also not going to lie, though. This story has some problems. First of all, I found it to be a bit hard to follow. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that it's completely incoherent, but it is a bit of a mess. It certainly suffers from the dreaded "and then" syndrome. Everything just really comes off as, "This happened, then that happened, then some other thing happened" and lists aren't scary. They're boring. So, while "just the facts" may work for Dragnet, it makes for a lousy story. Giving details, making one line flow into the next rather than each being a completely isolated thought, these are what bring a story to life. With this story, though, it seems like the most attention was paid to inconsequential details, while things that could actually use embellishing were largely glossed over.

Of course, it doesn't help that the story can't seem to find its voice. Some lines are delivered anecdotally, others in first person. Tone's all over the place, too. Some lines are delivered like a historical retelling, but then at the same time you're using informal terms, like calling police officers "cops", which just seems out of place to how the story is presented.

Now, let's finally talk about the premise. Slenderman is a popular character, so it's natural that people wonder where he/it came from. However, here's the catch, the big secret, the beauty of the story...Slenderman works because you don't understand anything about Slenderman. Slendy is the boogieman, the shadow on the edge of your vision, the fear of the unknown personified. Slenderman is scary, because of what you don't know, and because trying to find out could be even more dangerous than not knowing. What does he do to his victims? Nobody knows. Why does he do it? Nobody knows. What is he? Nobody knows. Why do people start suffering memory loss and have their recording equipment fail when he's around? Nobody knows...

That's what makes the Slenderman such a great monster. He's the ultimate example of leaving things to the imagination and letting people scare themselves. So, no matter how scary a story you can come up with for his origins, it will always be worse than the original story, because it gives an explanation for who he is, why he exists, what he does, and how he does it. It's always going to be taking something away from the original concept that is more important than anything it could add. Here though, I have to say that I found the suggested origins especially silly. Saying that he is an expensive mannequin from a store burned down by cultish business rivals and brought to life by radioactive waste just sounds like the plot of a B movie.