Are You Willing to Swallow the Slenderman Hysteria?

AP Photo/Abe Van Dyke

I'm not a Creepypasta fan, but if I were in my teens or even early twenties I probably would be. I'm a fan of Poe and old school horror like Frankenstein and Dracula, which you can even see the influence in my work, some of the characters even pop up. But though I don't frequent the site I do know enough about Slenderman from the movie games and other snippets. And I understand that when a 12 year old girl convinces another to assist her in trying to stab a classmate to death, we're not dealing with fiction anymore. BUT are you willing to swallow the new's take on the events? Sure I'm willing to believe that two twelve year old girls stabbed another, but the Slenderman take is "internet is bad" propaganda. Here's the rub, at best it's just two psycho 12 year old white girls tried to kill another girl. End of story. 

What do love is the fact so many people have gotten a bit smarter and aren't buying such bullshit excuses in 2014, but what saddens me is some of the more uneducated people are. And uneducated/uninformed people tend to have the most power and be the most vocal and most easily given over to mass hysteria. Most won't read a Slenderman story (because most don't read), some may see the Slenderman movie, but in the end there's still a need to excuse the actions of young white girls for no other reason than they're young, white and girls. If these girls were young black boys would we really be even talking about Slenderman? Because black people aren't even supposed to be able to use computers save to upload to Worldstar Hip-Hop, right? So Slenderman would never be brought into it. Doesn't fit the stereotype and if it doesn't fit you can't show it. 

Fact of the matter is you're dealing with 12 year old, white female psychopath and no one wants to call it what it is, so we look for crappy excuses. Now if they said they did this because of "Jeff the Killer" I could see a connection. Jeff is still fictional and known to be such. But they chose the one character that you really don't know what he does to people. He's a ghost, an entity, a being with no real MO save for popping up and scaring people. That's pretty much the same MO you use at a friend's surprise party. That's partly what was cool about "Slendy" his MO was a mystery.

These girls are manipulating the authorities and the press is running with it because it makes good media. Telling the press they're trying to be Slenderman's proxies? Does his proxies stab people? But the end everyone knows Slenderman is fictional, which rips a major hole right in their bullshit story of trying to proxies. I would love for Dr. Phil to get a hold of this little brat and tear her a new one. 

I can see what they're doing, blame-shifting and playing to the cameras/news media. According to the stories one of the girls states, ‘‘The bad part of me wanted her to die, the good part of me wanted her to live.’’ Really? Seriously? According to FOX News 6 Milwaukee, neither girl even felt remorse. Are we not willing to treat these girls as the psychos they are? If not, maybe we'll have to find Slenderman, his cousin Splendorman and Jeff the Psycho and lock them all up because we have to get them off the street. The conspiracy side of me is going crazy, but I'm going to end this one here and not even go into if this is an attempt to see if they (those in power) can shut sites down based on specific incidents or how this may play into the hands of those attempting to kill net neutrality.