Tuesday, February 22, 2011

What’s in a Name

 

So, some of you may look at me a bit weird for referring to the Slender Man as…well, the Slender Man.  And nothing else.  You guys have all your nicknames and whatnot for him.  I’ve heard them.  But I don’t use them.  You’re maybe wondering why.  Let me start with this recap from my first post, for those of you who may have missed it:

“Yeah, I said his name. Oh, no! Come on, guys, he’s not fucking Voldemort. What, is his name so scary now that we can’t bring ourselves to say it? And what’s up with the nicknames? Is it because of the Tulpa Effect? Believe me, if the Tulpa Effect is real, that’s hurting more than it’s helping. Now nobody’s going to be able to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas or eat a stick of jerky without thinking of him. Good job, guys. Real great going. */sarcasm*.”

Really, by avoiding his name, we’re giving him power.  I used the analogy of Voldemort, and it’s one that works pretty well.  People are living in fear of him.  They live in such fear that they don’t even dare speak his name.  Well, guess what?  Harry speaks his name.  Dumbledore speaks his name.  And people look at them like they’re crazy.  You know why?  Because they’ve gone beyond fearing Voldemort.  People who never lived at the same time as him are afraid to say his name.  But they’re not fearing the person.  They’re fearing the name as much as (possibly more than) the wizard himself.  They’ve given his name unnatural power.  We’re doing the same thing with the Slender Man by refusing to say his name.

That’s only half of the reason to use his proper name, though.  There’s one other big one.  Read up on this post here.  Remember A?  Yeah, he was an asshole.  Is he even still around?  I know he was posting here and there for a while.  But even an asshole can bring up a good point.  He theorizes that the Operator Symbol’s purpose is to make you think of the Slender Man, drawing him to you.

Now let me ask you a question.  What happens if you start calling him Jack Skellington?  What happens if you start calling him Slim Jim?  Like I said, you can’t watch A Nightmare Before Christmas anymore, and you can’t eat beef jerky, because you run the risk of thinking of him and drawing him to you.  It’s not healthy.  It was…Ron, I believe?  You called him “stick.”  Well, that might be an accurate nickname.  However, I see a ton of sticks every day.  Trees aren’t exactly uncommon.  If I think “Slender Man” every time I see a stick, I’m boned.  Giving him nicknames doesn’t make him less scary.  It makes him easier to refer to.  And it makes it harder to call him the Slender Man.  When you refer to him in colloquial terms, his name becomes more scary.  And since that name is the “mask” you give him, in a way, when he appears in his Slender Man persona (which he’s always in, except sometimes in your own mind), he’s near pants-shittingly scary.

Well, that’s my explanation on names, and why you shouldn’t use so many nicknames.  Stay safe, everyone.  I’ll probably come up with one more post this week.

And M, you had damn better come back and bitch me out for taking your job.

Gah!  No, Jekyll.  Don’t.  Just let it go.  Just…just give up hope.  It’ll be easier if you do that now, before you find yourself protesting against common sense that he’s still around.

But God, M, do I ever miss you.

12 comments:

  1. Alright, I'll call him Slender Man, then. Also, you might want to check this out: http://searchandreveal.blogspot.com/2011/02/experiment-2-results.html?showComment=1298499782830#c7561048654323708417

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  2. Checked it out. And no offense, but I think I'm gonna trust my own experience to the experience of others. I don't blindly accept information about him.

    Really, you should know this by now.

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  3. I don't want to think you are. But I don't know you, and even if I did, I usually don't trust info from other people. Here's why I don't trust this.

    1. I don't know whether or not you've been broken and are under the Slender Man's influence, acting as a mole to plant bad info.
    2. I can't be sure your tests weren't just a fluke. M's (RIP) found out that some of his original rules didn't work, and that the rules sometimes change.
    3. I don't know if what works for you works for me.
    4. It's possible that the Slender Man himself is toying with you. I tend to trust information about what doesn't work over what does.
    5. I don't know what your mental state is. It's possible that you think you're telling the truth, but are in reality just completely batshit insane.

    Like I said, I don't trust anyone I don't know, and I only half-trust those that I do. It's nothing against you.

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  4. Perhaps then you should copple together a body double and try it, yourself, then compare results. If nothing else, having two different people trying the same things would be more reliable than the Sages and their completely different and separatelt conducted experiments ever were.

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  5. Eh? Boston's not the best place to try out experiments with dummies.

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  6. Well, I'm the one who posted the link, and I'm the one who Friended and befriended Pete. I'll vouche for him and test out his experiment. If I can confirm that body doubles work, willl that silence the doubt?

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  7. Well, it would for me, at least, but it's just that one experiment, right? Sifting through all the histoic sites of Charleston AND helping a complete lunatic fire bomb podxy households is going to take up a fair amount of your time.

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  8. Yes, I'm only going to try to recreate the mannequin experiment for more, but if Jekyll's still cynical, I'll do more. Read the conversation Pete and I had. I have his back.

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  9. You know, there's a reason I read your blog, Ron, and you just demonstrated why.

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  10. Guys? Just gonna say, Jekyll made plenty of valid points in his last comment up there. Distrust isn't anything personal, it's just common sense. If this thing's a tulpa, then what he is (and thus what works) depends on what you think of him, and if he's not, he'd definitely be able to make something look like it worked, even if it didn't.

    And then there's the fact that this particular corner of the internet has people even less reliable than the rest of it. Even without people regularly being/going "batshit fucking insane", you can never really know for sure who's really behind the words you see on the screen in front of you.

    Tl;dr? Distrust makes sense and is useful. Don't take it personally.

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