I agree with everything about Marble Hornets. The second season has failed horribly, and describing it as full of starts and stops on the action is painfully accurate. One of the biggest faults I find is that they've made the storytelling linear. A linear course of events makes the gaps between updates less credible, especially with entries 35 and 36, and the whole run of 39 to 42. Yes, there is more than one camera in play that Jay very likely can forget about, or even not think to check the other footage as much, but there's only so many times you can play the "oh hey the tape is damaged and acting weird and after trying for about two weeks I found more footage!" card.
In the first season, when all of the tapes were unmarked, it didn't matter how much time was between entries; they even made it in character for Jay sometimes, when he quit, or when things started happening to him personally. But it's getting really old to continuously see him tweet "I found footage that I don't want to share" and then... post the footage three days later.
Everyman Hybrid I've started appreciating for it's ARG aspects, especially since Troy and co. are completely treating Marble Hornets like a movie now and so few of the other series have interaction. Tribe Twelve, though, I just can't get over how derivative it is. I wish the writing were better, and I wish that Noah didn't seem like a total asshole (based on what I've seen of it).
TJ and Amy Projects is still run by assholes, but I actually discovered Silver Selenide just this week and it fulfills my desire for a Slenderman series featuring girls as the main characters. Its... pacing is really weird, but I'm hoping it gets better. It starts off as two girls in Oxford wanting to document and show off their photography, since they're both photographers. I think it's for school? They're in British college, which is different from both Canadian and US college so I have no idea. But it starts off right away with distortion in the videos, and then suddenly Aerynn, one of the characters, feel comfortable enough to post logs about nightmares she has? The distortion doesn't make much sense, I find, since it's not something they're documentating as is. If they find distortion, I just think they should say something like "Okay, the footage didn't come out right" or "We have to reshoot this, technical issues, sorry everyone" or SOMETHING like that. They're also using the opperator symbol a lot, and I'm a bit worried that they're actually taking distortion audio from Marble Hornets and using it.
MLAndersen0/The Andersen Files has some fantastic acting in the beginning, but it deteriorates as the series goes on and not all the actors are at the same skill level in their acting and a lot of scenes end up very stilted because of that, even if they're supposed to be dramatic. It kind of goes all over the place though, and I think I'm missing a lot of information after only having watched the videos. It starts out as a vlog for Michael Andersen to act as a journal for his doctors, since he's just been let out of the hospital/psychiatric clinic, but it... changes paces abruptly and sometimes I wonder "What are the doctors saying about this?! Didn't he link his doctors to the account?!"
I do want to be fair to Marble Hornets; EMH obviously has a larger writing team, I've no doubt they have experience with the ARG aspect and the story telling format before. Because they did label the Slenderman as meta from the beginning, they have a great deal of freedom to play around with the knowledge in ways that other series don't. I really, really want MH to shake up it's current structure. They've just seemed to have forgotten what worked in the first season.
TribeTwelve is just SO FRUSTRATING, he obviously has a glint of something good and... wait, you found a device? EMH did that already, man, and their device is not only functional-looking, it has obvious in-story relevance.
I will check those other projects out! That's a big problem, I think, with people continuing to use MH as their clear inspiration. If you have distortion, why aren't you editing it out? What good is the Operator symbol if you're not connecting it to why he's called the Operator in the first place? TribeTwelve, again, has a great variation on the Operator symbol, but UGH. Be more original, Noah.
I've tried a few straight blogs, but those can be a lot more hit or miss. When people do try to do variation, it's often really stupid (oh god don't look at the one where the guy in it is a Slenderman proxy, which, that doesn't make sense!! Why are you still sane? Why are you blogging if he's controlling you? askghdhshs)
The only blog I followed (semi-followed, really) was Just Another Fool back when Marble Hornets was still new and Unfiction grouped all the Slenderman stuff together as "side stories" of Marble Hornets. It had the advantage of being started up very soon after Marble Hornets, so Victor Surge's original tellings about Slenderman were still fresh in everyone's minds and the distortion wasn't as big a deal as it became later, which freed JAFOOL to do it's completely own thing. Joshua used a lot of Norse mythology in it, especially the concept of Yggdrasil, and even though Logan ended up going pretty proxy-ish in the end it was concurrent with Marble Hornets before it ended.
Someone who follows me on Tumblr tried to plug their fledgling series to me and uuuugh it was so bad. She tried to combine really terrible Alice in Wonderland themes with Slenderman, the acting was horrific, the writing was horrific, and the camera she used wasn't very good because there was terrible lag between the audio and the video, and unsynced audio and video is one of my major pet peeves when watching things.
What I'd really want to see (I say, having no time to do it myself) is people experiment more with the format. What can you do on the internet? How can you change this up?
I really like so many elements of EMH because they work everything together really well and exploit the internet connection a lot. They get people actively involved in helping them and so have an in character reason to keep them updated. People also seem to forget that the character in question has to have a motivation behind slapping it up on the internet. Marble Hornets originally was just a documentation work, but the way the story runs now, it's a little confusing as to why Jay doesn't try to use the internet more to his advantage. Certain creepypastas work because they exploit the internet angle. It's not necessarily a lack of an imagination as people being limited by ideas of traditional fiction.
I agree. In the first season, Jay starting to post current-day videos of himself could be, and was, explained by a growing addiction to and dependency on documenting everything, which highlighted how incredibly isolated he was becoming, being desperate enough to share his life with strangers on the internet when all kinds of horrifying freaky shit is happening to him. Now it's just... what? Something freaky happened around Jessica in the hotel? You've found all these tapes that now include footage of a murder and you're not going to the police about it but instead posting it on the internet?
It's like you said, limitation due to ideas of traditional fiction. I know what you mean about lack of time, though, I'm trying to build up the beginnings of a series on Tumblr and it's proving really difficult for so many reasons gah. e_e
Oh seriously YES. I would really appreciate advice/soundboarding/second opinions because so few people I know IRL are into Slender stuff. My AIM sn is tehsongsong! I can't sign on now (long day of class, up early tomorrow), but I'll be around tomorrow or whatever time would work for you!
Cool! Mine has changed to songofsobriety (i... i don't know why i picked this >_>), and since my time is always wonky due to China, I'll see you when I see you?
Oh haha I think I already had that sn... I guess I forgot it was you? (I'm so terrible with using AIM it's ridiculous) But yeah, whenever we're both on works!
In the first season, when all of the tapes were unmarked, it didn't matter how much time was between entries; they even made it in character for Jay sometimes, when he quit, or when things started happening to him personally. But it's getting really old to continuously see him tweet "I found footage that I don't want to share" and then... post the footage three days later.
Everyman Hybrid I've started appreciating for it's ARG aspects, especially since Troy and co. are completely treating Marble Hornets like a movie now and so few of the other series have interaction. Tribe Twelve, though, I just can't get over how derivative it is. I wish the writing were better, and I wish that Noah didn't seem like a total asshole (based on what I've seen of it).
TJ and Amy Projects is still run by assholes, but I actually discovered Silver Selenide just this week and it fulfills my desire for a Slenderman series featuring girls as the main characters. Its... pacing is really weird, but I'm hoping it gets better. It starts off as two girls in Oxford wanting to document and show off their photography, since they're both photographers. I think it's for school? They're in British college, which is different from both Canadian and US college so I have no idea. But it starts off right away with distortion in the videos, and then suddenly Aerynn, one of the characters, feel comfortable enough to post logs about nightmares she has? The distortion doesn't make much sense, I find, since it's not something they're documentating as is. If they find distortion, I just think they should say something like "Okay, the footage didn't come out right" or "We have to reshoot this, technical issues, sorry everyone" or SOMETHING like that. They're also using the opperator symbol a lot, and I'm a bit worried that they're actually taking distortion audio from Marble Hornets and using it.
MLAndersen0/The Andersen Files has some fantastic acting in the beginning, but it deteriorates as the series goes on and not all the actors are at the same skill level in their acting and a lot of scenes end up very stilted because of that, even if they're supposed to be dramatic. It kind of goes all over the place though, and I think I'm missing a lot of information after only having watched the videos. It starts out as a vlog for Michael Andersen to act as a journal for his doctors, since he's just been let out of the hospital/psychiatric clinic, but it... changes paces abruptly and sometimes I wonder "What are the doctors saying about this?! Didn't he link his doctors to the account?!"
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TribeTwelve is just SO FRUSTRATING, he obviously has a glint of something good and... wait, you found a device? EMH did that already, man, and their device is not only functional-looking, it has obvious in-story relevance.
I will check those other projects out! That's a big problem, I think, with people continuing to use MH as their clear inspiration. If you have distortion, why aren't you editing it out? What good is the Operator symbol if you're not connecting it to why he's called the Operator in the first place? TribeTwelve, again, has a great variation on the Operator symbol, but UGH. Be more original, Noah.
I've tried a few straight blogs, but those can be a lot more hit or miss. When people do try to do variation, it's often really stupid (oh god don't look at the one where the guy in it is a Slenderman proxy, which, that doesn't make sense!! Why are you still sane? Why are you blogging if he's controlling you? askghdhshs)
Reply
Someone who follows me on Tumblr tried to plug their fledgling series to me and uuuugh it was so bad. She tried to combine really terrible Alice in Wonderland themes with Slenderman, the acting was horrific, the writing was horrific, and the camera she used wasn't very good because there was terrible lag between the audio and the video, and unsynced audio and video is one of my major pet peeves when watching things.
Reply
I really like so many elements of EMH because they work everything together really well and exploit the internet connection a lot. They get people actively involved in helping them and so have an in character reason to keep them updated. People also seem to forget that the character in question has to have a motivation behind slapping it up on the internet. Marble Hornets originally was just a documentation work, but the way the story runs now, it's a little confusing as to why Jay doesn't try to use the internet more to his advantage. Certain creepypastas work because they exploit the internet angle. It's not necessarily a lack of an imagination as people being limited by ideas of traditional fiction.
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It's like you said, limitation due to ideas of traditional fiction. I know what you mean about lack of time, though, I'm trying to build up the beginnings of a series on Tumblr and it's proving really difficult for so many reasons gah. e_e
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