That being - mainly that they really want to help each other out. Like, to an extreme end.
I had been focusing so much on the isolating nature of this entire tulpa that I completely missed the fact that we, as humans, found a way to overcome that. Being social creatures, we immediately decide to get social about this stuff.
If the tulpas ride our thoughts and information, then so can other constructs. Being that we were forged from the same tessellations in nature that spawned vectors for disease, for viruses and fungi and bacteria and even for population fluctuation, it makes sense that any phenomenon borne from us would be subject to those same laws. That is to say... once an idea gets around, people play with it. They help one another out with it. They form entire communities around a simple thought or concept. And this is why I love them dearly. Because we can forge entire relationships based solely on one small thing that is not anywhere else in the world except between us. This was something I came across when tracing the history of the otaku community a few years back.
So, okay, yeah, I'm babbling. But let me try to make a little more sense.
I started following BrokenHeartChronicle and ProjectNewWold because, like the others, they had JUST started. And because I was being sexist in my data gathering, slightly. I'm watching to see what patterns they follow in order to try and map the evolution of an idea.
And what was interesting was to see the jump in people that found the blogs and started offering up any information they had, even if it was conflicting information or stuff that wasn't necessarily helpful right that second. People were doing their best to throw as much info as was known about Him at these poor guys (and gals, it was the same with Willow Adder and Ashesfallbro). It was like they needed to help these poor people, and even though they didn't know exactly how to do it they were going to try.
Which I think reflects back on another property of mimetics... the data may be using us to reproduce, but in the end we control and change the data. We shift aspects, we change the delivery or the nuance of it. In the end we decide whether it has control over us or not, when we are able to step back and take note of how it occurs, this data transmission.
Or perhaps the data has figured out how to work best with our biology and knows how to ride our social nature far better than we could intimate.
But to start thinking down that line is to invite motive and awareness to the phenomenon, and I really don't think an idea can have an agenda except to stay fresh.
Have I referenced Pontypool yet in any of this? Pontypool is the perfect example of what I'm talking about.... the replication of something without motive, purely seeking to stay alive. It was an amazing horror movie. Behold, internet:
And despite what it says, it isn't a zombie movie. It's a virus movie. Think like The Crazies, or 28 Days Later.
The only difference, and the most striking and brilliant part of this, is where they advise people that what is deadly is not the people, but the communication. But it isn't deadly on purpose. (This will be possibly spoiler-y) It simply views the host as a vector to continue transmission, it can't equate it with someone who has hopes or dreams or a family.
Such is the way with all data transmission, though far less fatally and aggressively.
Such is the way with Him, supposedly.
I'm starting to think that Slenderman is the most brilliant personification of our own fears and understanding of the dangers of a transmitted idea. It is a reflection of how we feel about this time when all of our information is no longer our own, no longer private. He is the silent watcher, the great Unknown Thing in the background, the faceless group of people who see our blog posts and our tweets or skim over our credit card information on a daily basis. He is every person who could hurt us in the garage late at night that we don't see, or the security guard behind the camera there who might be asleep on the job.
Slenderman is effective because he is the gray space of what we know and don't know, and our fears of what is out there. Slenderman is every person who reads this entry that I don't personally know, or every person who watches a video on YouTube without liking or commentings. He's the untraceable in a world that is becoming far more traceable every second. He's what we want to return to, and what we fear falling total victim to.
We know how to counter oblivion and anonymity with community and with information. We know how to stop the ingress of unwanted attention and snooping... with community and with information. It is a natural and almost auto-immune reaction I am seeing here in these comments for people to surge forward and try to help someone out in this fashion. People being people. God, I want to hug them all for their need to help out. It's amazing.
I can't imagine what it would be like if any of this were really going on, but to see that kind of response would probably be amazingly heartening.
(As an aside, I think we can safely say HE isn't real. I would be dead by now, with as much as I've been staring at pictures and reading about Him.)
I should not write these so late at night, but the noises and insomnia have me again. Maybe I'll try to find Pontypool online and watch it. Damned good Canadian horror film.
you're getting Closer. You need to play the game.
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