How important is the current 'canon' to the mythos?

I want to make a slendy blog, but instead of using the current mythos of SM as an Eldrich creation, have him more of a Fair-Folk type, and avoiding most of the usual trappings of "nightmares and wtf is my camera doing and oh lawd coughcoughcoughINSANITY"

Also, my own take on the faceless- if SM was a killer, he would, instead of simply having no face, have a 'forgettable' face, or something similar. Honestly, no-face thing never really scared me much, but having someone who as so terrifying that your mind wouldn't even register what his face looked like, that is terrifying. Instead off simply showing up on camera as a no-face, he would just show up to the viewer as a blurred face, or similar.

I know there are no set mythos, but would these approaches scare the fanbase a bit for being too out there? -shrug- I know innovation is wanted, but not sure how much is too much.

The original idea of Slender Man was a tall, thin man who had a different face to everyone who saw him. What you're going for seems to be reminiscent of the first descriptions of Slendy. I say, go for it.

There is really no such thing as "canon", just things that people expect. Innovation is good though! If you have a creative idea and you think you can tell it well, go for it! I've seen the "he has a face but it gets distorted on camera" idea talked about in a general sense (though not expanded upon as a full blown story), people actually took it very well, so I don't think you'd have too much of a problem with that

What canon?

Which is why 'canon' is in quotes. There are the basic tropes of water, stalking, video distortion, you know. Not really strict, but still present and expected to an extent.

Alright, thanks for the reassurance, guys!

Break the rules. Challenge the standards. You won't get anywhere by doing the same old thing. Play with it. Destroy it.

What he said.

Basically, imagine a scenario where you restrict yourself to the canon, and then imagine what the best and worst outcomes of that are for you.

Now, imagine a scenario where you DON'T restrict yourself to the canon, and
imagine what the best and worst outcomes of that are.

I'm thinking that, if you stick to the canon, no one will notice, and if you're lucky, people won't be bored. If you deviate, at worst, people will find it hilarious; at best, you'll invent something so awesome that everyone will steal it from you and you'll eventually get so sick of it that you'll end yourself with a 10-gage in a WalMart carpark in front of scores of horrified witnesses, many of them children or elderly.

Point being, no one is ever going to be that impressed that you stayed within the canon.

Can you hear that? It's the sound of someone winning the Internet...



And also pretty much what's already been said. Do to the canon what Tay Zonday did to puberty.

Honestly, I like that idea.

And that's the blessing (and maybe the curse?) of the Slenderfandom - there ARE no rules, just conventions and tropes. Not every Slenderman story uses Proxies and Slendy killing people, and not every story should. In other words, it'd be an awful boring forest if all the trees were maples, right?

In other words, if it's creepy, go with it. Sometimes the lightest or strangest interpretation of a character can be far scarier than the dark and uber-evil or completely played straight one. Play with the tropes, bend the rules, break them, and write the Slenderman story YOU would ultimately want to read.

Fotzepolitic wrote:

at worst, people will find it hilarious

Well. I don't know. There's a fine line between "hilarious" and "what hath science wrought".

Opinion also plays into it too though. You will never be able to please every Slenderfan or Fear Mythos fan, so write what you want to read. If people like it, great, if not, then at least you wrote what interested you. That's true of short fiction and poetry, and it's true of these blogs and vlogs too.