Weird Slenderverse Traditions/Conventions

So I was thinking last night about how there are lots of bizarrely common elements to Slenderverse material, and wondering how they came about. I come armed with an example myself:

Proxies.

They stemmed from Masky and Hoody in MH (also kinda TTA). Basically they were imitated very early on in the series before it became known who they were, and at the current point of course it seems those two are not working with the Operator at all. But, so early on their motives were unclear and most people assumed they were minions of the Operator. People created their own Proxies and as their series gained viewers, the idea was passed on to their successors in series-production.

So I find it slightly ironic that we have so many Proxies running about serving the Tall One in almost every series now, based on what was originally an incorrect assumption.

Can anyone think of any other examples?

I've always found the whole "film yourself for every waking hour of everyday including when you sleep and not want anyone to know what I'm doing, but I'm still going to post the footage on the internet for the whole world to see." angle for some of the vlogs really odd to me.

I mean, they say they are only filming themselves and it is for nobody else to see, and whats the first thing that they do?

post it on the internet declaring that they "found some strange things in the footage" and ask the public to watch the footage to see if they also see the "strange things in the footage" even though they just said that the whole point of filming themselves in the first place was that the person filming would be the only person to see the footage.

It just does not make sense to me.

There are a lot of times where I ask myself "Why are they posting this?". Sometimes it's footage of yourself sleeping. Sometimes it's an argument you had with a friend where the camera happened to be on. OOG it's character building I guess. IG it makes no sense. I think that's a question a lot of filmmakers need to ask. Why am I filming this? Moreover, why am I posting it?
/rant
Hmm, other odd things. Everybody makes a sleeping tape. I guess because they can be really cool, and often there's some slendersymptom that makes itself known, but to be honest I'm not sure I would even know how to film myself for that long period of time without running out of tape/memory/etc. Moreover, did you watch the whole tape for something to happen? And why does it always happen on the only night you taped?
I think there are so many common threads because we build on eachother's canon. So one series does something (particularly the early series) and we go "hey, is that canonical for the whole verse or just you?" or we think it's a cool idea and run with it. So common threads erupt.

How the trends develop is understandable, but from an IG perspective it's a bit silly how they all play out with so many similar elements.

Lumine wrote:

Crossover herpes

I completely agree.

I swear when I first started my vlog, there was always a thought "Oh god, now everybody who has their own slendervlog who live near me (Appearently none do, by the way.) are going to want to do a crossover, fantastic." which of course was of course, hugely sarcastic.

I mean a crossover is fine, when it works with where you are taking the vlog/blog, but there are just so many that have absolutely no business crossing over, especially when it does not add anything to the story.

awkwardraptor wrote:

I mean a crossover is fine, when it works with where you are taking the vlog/blog, but there are just so many that have absolutely no business crossing over, especially when it does not add anything to the story.

I always thought the EMH/TT crossover was totally unnecessary and not a lot really came of it.

The TT/DH one was quite good though.

Another thing that kind of irks me is that a good amount of the protagonists in the vlogs/blogs are completely clueless as to what they are doing half the time, they are like, "Oh hey, a giant faceless entity is stalking me, I'm going to chase after it." or, "Huh, someone is sending me cryptic and possibly threating messages, what am I going to do? Oh I know, I'm going to research them instead of going to the police, it's just a crazy stalker after all, nothing I can't handle myself."

It just baffles me.

Spoiler:

Well, a few of the seasoned creators are breaking these tropes.

Except crossovers. Crossovers are love, Crossovers are life.

Ear rape. That's all.

I've always found it interesting that many videos from many vlogs seem to end with one or more of the characters in a very compromising position, often trapped or cornered, with Slender Man right there. There is the  no explanation as to how they escaped/ survived or what happened afterwards. One example I can think of is the DarkHarvest00 video when Alex and Chris slowly come out of the basement and Slendy and attacks them in slow motion awesomness.


(-sorry about the fonts, I haven't figured out how to use them properly yet)

Usually illogical things that aren't carefully thought about before hand are strange to me. Like how or why videos are put up in regards to their content and it's not explained why it's decided for the videos to be put up. Something I think people have to be careful with is deciding on putting the videos up and how the police situation is handled, because in most vlogs at some point the police would logically have to be contacted. I also think more should've been learnt about proxies before being used because they are quite mysterious and even now in Marble Hornets their purposes haven't been discovered yet (if they ever will). And while I often like and enjoy extreme situations being put up, when there are murders do the creators not think that their videos will be flagged by an offended watcher IG?

MLanderson tries to explain the posting of the videos with "the virus" in that it is completely conpulsive. this phenominon has also been described by M from the tutorial as "the journals" (as in "the jitters"). 
sooo yeah.

also i agree that the total lack of information they have is kinda silly for example this is a search of faceless man in suit. LOOK AT THE RESULTS!!! WTF?!

I'd like to see a slender series where the main protagonist KNOWS about slenderman and is a fan of the content, they don't have t believe it but they know. THEN they get stalked because they 'dug too deep'.

Thirdly (Comment on ALL the points) the unexplained escape thing is actually quite a big point but can kinda be explained away by slenderman overwhelming the camera. (devil's advocate style arguments here)

crossovers can have massive potential to advance story/ add to it but the EMH/TT one didn't really have a point because neither had anything the other wanted and so they didn't need to meet.

finally we get to the ear rape. i agree totally. you cannot sway me from this position.

Well, the EMH guys got stalked by setting up a fake Slendy as an Easter Egg, right? What really bugs me is the amount of proxies in blogs/sometimes in vlogs. There's just too many of them. One is fine. Two are ok. Three are a bit too much. Any more of them become just annoying. Except in TribeTwelve. Gotta love The Collective.

Another thing I always found weird was the whole, as TVTropes puts it, "Eldritch Location".
It never made alot of sense to me, and most of the time it doesn't even look good (in the vlogs, at least.)

Of course, when it does get done properly, it looks awesome.
Oh well, just something I found kind of strange, nothing more, nothing less.

awkwardraptor wrote:

Another thing I always found weird was the whole, as TVTropes puts it, "Eldritch Location".
It never made alot of sense to me, and most of the time it doesn't even look good (in the vlogs, at least.)

Of course, when it does get done properly, it looks awesome.
Oh well, just something I found kind of strange, nothing more, nothing less.

You mean like the abandoned buildings in Marble Hornets, or the Scarlet House in the series of the same name?

I like the idea, and think some vlogs do it well. The two I named in particular. I always thought of it as sites that have some sort of link to Slenderman.

I can't believe that no one's brought up the mysterious pills yet! I think it's so common because it introduces Slendy trying to get the character to come around to "his way of thinking".

crossovers are a bit of a pain to me for two reasons: firstly because nobody really agrees on what Slender Man wants or how he functions and so you get jarring new elements shoehorned into both series; and secondly because it may start out with Series X and Series Y, but then Y crosses over with A, B and C who cross over with another ten series between them and so on until you have more threads than St. Elsewhere. Even with all his malevolent powers to command, how does Ol' Slim find the time to harrass all these people?

One element that also bugs me in video series is that a lot of producers have tended to combine the "Slender Man corrupts digital footage" and "mysterious antagonist makes experimental movies" elements of Marble Hornets, so that the protagonists' documentary-style footage is weirdly overdosed on strange edits and effects even while it's still on their camera. I can sort of accept that certain malevolences (such as HABIT or the Observer) might be powerful to manipulate the recordings in this fashion, but it tends to take me out of the game somewhat when Slender Man's your only paranormal presence and your video still looks like a structuralist collage

I find it strange when somehow, the protagonist just happens to see a mysterious proxy video posted on their channel like two seconds after it was posted.