The Slender Man Mythos/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Who is Slender Man's tailor? With his unhuman proportions and extra appendages, he can hardly be buying his suits off the pipe racks at the local Big & Tall shop.
    • I just figured the suit was actually part of him.
      • Or maybe he patronizes the same guy who made purple tailcoats for the Apple Bonkers.
        • It's likely that the suit is made of fabrics from people he kills.
  • There tends to be three ways the victims of Slenderman meet their end; insanity, death or disappearance (and there may be some overlap between the three). What I'm wondering is where do the people go after Slendy makes them disappear? Where does he take them? I know this is one of those things that's left up to our imaginations but it's one of the things I'd love to know. It'd pin down if Slendy was mystical, alien or scientific.
  • What the hell is with this second Slender Man in Scared and H(a)unting? Furthermore, what kind of sense does it make that the Slender Man that we all know, who kills people and stuffs them in bags, would play Papa Bear to a little girl and post on her blog? It's just ridiculous, and that's saying something, considering this is a web of stories about a faceless, sharply-dressed bald man with tentacles.
    • It's exactly because he kills people and stuffs them in bags that most people sense the logic error of his Papa Bear tendencies.
    • The constant use of pop-culture references is detrimental to the mythos.
    • I'm not sure what the second Slender Man is supposed to be, though some bloggers have theories ranging from a younger, more impulsive member of Slender's species, to the younger Slender Man time-traveling in a fight against an older, more reserved and humane Slender (though H(a)unting states several times that their Slender still kills). As for why He protects Sandra, they've theorized that He was curious as to why she never seemed afraid of Him, and one of the messages He left seems to indicate that whatever power He has to intimidate people, she's immune to.
    • In addition to the time travel idea, it's also possible that there really are two Slender Men (no one ever said there had to be only one). And there's the theories that Slender Man's got some kinda weird personality disorder going on, or maybe he's just messing with everyone's heads by acting like there's another. From a meta point of view, it looks a bit like Scared and H(a)unting had two clashing ideas about a single topic (the character Drew), so they said there were two Slender Men so they coudl avoid the inconsistensies between the two blogs.
    • This troper's main problem with H(a)unting, aside having a gross Mary Sue for a protagonist, is that the premise in and of itself is flawed. Why would Slender Man care whether or not he scared Sandra? He wouldn't spend time trying to figure her out. He'd put her organs in bags and shove her on a tree branch, and call it a day. Character Derailment, thy name is H(a)unting.
    • Some people are so desperate, they find anything sexy.
  • Not to sound like a nitpicker or anything, but what's the point of creating the Slender Man stories if you're apparently not supposed to research him?
    • You may as well ask why create Candlejack jokes if you're not supposed
    • Which blogs do that?
  • Why exactly is the Slender Man called "The Operator" in Marble Hornets? What exactly is he operating? Where did the name come from?
    • No idea, yet. Well, I don't know an in-universe reason, anyway. As for why the creators named him that, well, there's the whole operator symbol (or tensor product symbol, specifically...) (⊗) fetish, which always in my mind represented a head with a crossed-out (lack of) face. I always just thought the creators went "whelp, we have this symbol associated with him, let's give him a name associated with the symbol."
    • I don't think they ever call Slendy "the Operator," do they? Not in the videos certainly. Did they do it in the Twitter? Anyway, I thought who the phrase actually referred to was purposefully ambiguous.
      • They say "The Operator" is the actual, in-universe name. The videos don't mention it but the videos don't refer to him as Slender Man either.
    • The reason that he's referred to as "The Operator" in MH is because MH is made by SA Goons, who really don't like to be associated with stuff they think is getting stupid. Basically, MH was originally just a thing to entertain fellow Goons and when it became so popular that hundreds of lesser quality(sometimes horrible quality) Slenderstories started to pop up they wanted to differentiate themselves from it. "This isn't The Slender Man or Slenderman, it's The Operator, something else that was only originally based on The Slender Man." is the general idea behind it.
    • Where was that ever said? This is the only page I've ever seen that posited, did you just make that up? Either way, it seems more likely that, in Marble Hornets, "Operator" is the creature's accurate name while "Slender Man" is just a casual nickname.
  • In some of the stories those affected by Slendy will sometimes speak in code, mainly by capitalizing certain letters, and I guess I'm okay with that. But the characters sometimes breaking out into binary? I mean, what, is Slendy implanting microchips in their brains? Is he an android? I just don't get it.
    • Maybe he is an android implanting microchips in their brains. It would actually explain a lot.
    • It's also possible that people figure that Zeroes and Ones look enough like the Operator symbol to deter Slendy from trying to read it, or that Slendy is simply figuring out other codes and has yet to completely figure out binary.
      • Fridge Brilliance: Slendy is an internet meme - it makes perfect sense for those affected by him to speak binary. After all, it's probably the first human "language" he knew.


Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Slender_Man_Mythos/Headscratchers?oldid=2038529"