The Blogs: 4th Generation

Yeah, I think the term "generations" is a bit misleading. "Trends" or "genres" even might be better. The "Fight Against Slendy, Even Though It's Hopeless" Genre. The "Runner" Genre. The "Innocent Guy Gets More and More Paranoid" Genre.

Phenom wrote:

My thoughts on the matter, Generations apply to all Slender stories and here is my timeframe:
Gen 1: 6/8/09 (Creation of Slender Man)-5/21/10
Gen 2: 5/21/10 (Beginning of Seeking Truth and Everyman Hybrid)-9/18/10
Gen 3: 9/18/10 (Beginning of White Elephants)-10/16/10
Gen 4: 10/16/10 (Beginning of Let Us Keep Living)-Present Day

I've always looked at the generations as more of a blog thing...there aren't enough vlogs to really fall into generations, and they don't follow the generation patterns. Also, Let Us Keep Living is by no means the start of the 4th Gen.

Gen 0: Something awful thread. The Brainstorming generation.
Gen 1: Just Another Fool (as well as two or three other early ones). The defining generation.
Gen 2: Seeking Truth, The Mystic, Dreams in Darkness, A Lack of Lexicon, early White Elephants. The story generation (AKA, the focus started to be on story and character).
Gen 3: A Hint of Serendipity, A Really Bad Joke, Enter Light, They Call Us Keepers, most of the rest of the Core Theory blogs/followers. The development of the Slenderverse/rise of proxies.
Gen 4: The London Librarian, The Delmont Blogs, mid-late What You Are in the Dark, Peering In from the Outside, NAPPA, Team Magick. The interaction of bloggers/formations of organizations.

I'm considering dropping Gen 4 completely, though, as it's really more Gen 3.5. It's a transitional phase for what I suspect Gen 5 (or whatever it will be called) will become. White Elephants set up the 3rd Gen, but it's still more of a 2nd Gen blog, timewise.

Really, generations aren't exactly genre categorizations. The current "generation" doesn't really affect your blog's content at all. It's just tracking the phases the Slenderverse happens to go through. It's like saying that everything in the Gothic period fit perfectly with the rest of things being produced in the Gothic period. That's just ridiculous.

Personally, I'm saying that 3rd Gen has ended, but 4th Gen really hasn't even started yet. We're still transitioning. And from what I see happening behind the scenes, 4th Gen will deal with expanded canons (i.e., stories that are plotted out together behind the scenes as opposed to improvised crossovers).

"Generation" implies the passage of time. It might be better to call them "Movements" like how art and literature are classified.

^Ohhh, make it sound all fancy and shit. I like it.

I also like "Movements". Much more fitting then generations.

I think "Generations" works. Makes me think of a study using lab rats or fruit flies. But one could also try "Phases", "Levels", "Iterations", or "Waves". I think movements in the art world are either pretentiously declared (with or without Modernist-style manifestos) by the members of the would-be movement, or identified academically after the movement has been and gone. This analysis seems like it's more in the moment, yet also outside-looking-in.

The whole topic is fascinating to me.

Edit. I sort of like the idea using the classifications applied to quarks. Six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. So perfectly weird.

I think Movements is great, because then you could classify blogs by interaction/non-interaction, instead of dates.

For example, the Core Theory movement. The Origin Blogs Movement (Seeking Truth, DiD, JAF, the ones who did it first).

Also, you would be able to group those that don't interact as the Non-Interaction Movement.

This isn't really on topic, but I'd like to ask:

Was there actually anything else before ST / DiD / etc took off? In Generation 1, everybody always just mentions JAF. I mean, I'd imagine there wasn't a lot back then, but was that really it? I don't believe I've heard about anything else from that early in the mythos.

I think the whole idea of generations is a little foolish. After all, aside from core theory and the new interconnectedness of a lot of "4th Gen" blogs, a lot of blogs are stand alone. Shouldn't they be judged on their own merits? Were there no shit blogs in 3rd gen? Are there no good blogs in 4th? Generalization like this hurts the mythos more than it helps us.

ChaosGamma wrote:

This isn't really on topic, but I'd like to ask:

Was there actually anything else before ST / DiD / etc took off? In Generation 1, everybody always just mentions JAF. I mean, I'd imagine there wasn't a lot back then, but was that really it? I don't believe I've heard about anything else from that early in the mythos.

There's In My Head, as well as Lost Time, and Cold Feelings. There were other blogs, but most were left incomplete.

Death wrote:

I think the whole idea of generations is a little foolish. After all, aside from core theory and the new interconnectedness of a lot of "4th Gen" blogs, a lot of blogs are stand alone. Shouldn't they be judged on their own merits? Were there no shit blogs in 3rd gen? Are there no good blogs in 4th? Generalization like this hurts the mythos more than it helps us.

That's what most of the recent discussion has been about. Calling the 4th Gen "The Bad Gen" is too much of a generalization. Calling it the Generation where "Revenants were gotten rid of, authors began collaborating more on stories, Redlight became a major antagonist, proxies shifted away from mindless hordes back to individual characters, and more occult elements were added to the Mythos." Good or bad have nothing to do with it.

And Generations has nothing to do with interconnectedness; it's writing style, topic, tone, etc. It's actually easier to classify the earlier Gens, before there was as much interconnectedness, because the small number of blogs in existence meant that there weren't as many wildly diverging ideas.

ChaosGamma wrote:

Was there actually anything else before ST / DiD / etc took off? In Generation 1, everybody always just mentions JAF. I mean, I'd imagine there wasn't a lot back then, but was that really it? I don't believe I've heard about anything else from that early in the mythos.

As Omega pointed out, there were other blogs (e.g. In My Head, A Lack of Lexicon) which were in existence around the timeframe of Seeking Truth/DiD, but most were left incomplete or had no lasting impact.

Omega wrote:

There's In My Head, as well as Lost Time, and Cold Feelings. There were other blogs, but most were left incomplete.

Allan Assiduity wrote:

As Omega pointed out, there were other blogs (e.g. In My Head, A Lack of Lexicon) which were in existence around the timeframe of Seeking Truth/DiD, but most were left incomplete or had no lasting impact.

Ah, thank you. I figured that was probably the case, that they were incomplete and generally not too important to the mythos overall. Just needed to satisfy my curiosity there.

I do think segments of some of them are still floating around on the Internet (like the "Defining?" off-shoot of A Lack of Lexicon), but yeah. The Mythos has moved on since then. Ideas presented therein have been exploited or used elsewhere, if they were any good.

Hey, I remember about a year ago A Lack Of Lexicon was kind of a big deal. Shame it's gotten overlooked.

Alloflifedecays wrote:

Hey, I remember about a year ago A Lack Of Lexicon was kind of a big deal. Shame it's gotten overlooked.

Speaking as the writer, the overlooking is probably for the best Old shame and all that.

But yeah, not the place or time for a discussion. This is about the generations; I think it's worth saying that "generations" is a misleading term, given that generations have almost nothing to do with the passing of time.

whoa whoa whoa...you wrote aLoL? I have questions. Firstly, why you consider it an old shame. I rather enjoyed it.

HOLY SHIT ONE OF MY FEAR BLOGGERS WROTE A MAJOR BLOG?!


0_0 Why didn't you tell us!? XD

You wrote it? Why'd you dump it? It was a big hit D:

EDIT: if the In My Head author is here as well, I'd love to talk to you about yours

Quote :

whoa whoa whoa...you wrote aLoL? I have questions. Firstly, why you consider it an old shame. I rather enjoyed it.

Yep. Although it looks like I've either deleted the accounts (the Twitter account, for example) or can't access them right now (Blogger being in read-only mode), but I think one or two of the accounts/blogs might still be saved (unless Blogger's auto-deleted them)... I couldn't recall the e-mail address that I used for Defining?, which is why it's still up. I think I have the written stuff, though (e.g. the drawings in the notebook, the "work in progress" for the Dancing Men cipher).

I consider it an old shame mostly for the reasons that it, to me, seemed like a cliché-storm that could have been so easily avoided. The scribblings in the notebook, for example - never explained, besides "oh it's Slendy". Perhaps my memory has amplified my dislike of it, but... eh. Perhaps it's mostly a "I could have done so much better" thing.

CuteWithoutThe wrote:

HOLY SHIT ONE OF MY FEAR BLOGGERS WROTE A MAJOR BLOG?!

0_0 Why didn't you tell us!? XD

I think I said something about it~ I didn't know A Lack of Lexicon was a major blog, and was under the impression that it had faded into the mists of bad Slenderblogs.

@SickSlickMan: Schoolwork, mostly. Plus, general disenchantment with it. Something like that It didn't feel like a big hit to me, but I really should have stayed with it a bit longer, in hindsight - at least given it a proper sendoff, not just the implication that the characters forgot (and one might have died).

Allan Assiduity wrote:

CuteWithoutThe wrote:

HOLY SHIT ONE OF MY FEAR BLOGGERS WROTE A MAJOR BLOG?!

0_0 Why didn't you tell us!? XD

I think I said something about it~ ...

I believe you did. I distinctly remember back before the Fear Mythos project had even started, when it was just me, alli, and cute discussing ideas for non-Slender monsters in the TV Tropes Slender Man Mythos thread, you mentioned it and advised against introducing a totheark character.

Here we go: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=12955971970A49442800&page=4#94