obligatory marble hornets thread

[MorganMustDie]

Marble Hornets and Totheark are on the same tier as Homestuck when it comes to weird genre-breaking online narratives with incredibly wacky storytelling and dedicated cult followings and every time I sign up to a forum like this there is always, eventually, a thread praising how much of a masterpiece it is, so I wonder how many people here are keyed into this ancient web kino

if you are, what are your favourite episodes? I'm partial to Entry #65, or any of the scenes where the protagonists are being zapped around to countless places left right and center against their will. The chaos is delicious.

NOTE: Season 1 is simultaneously the best and worst season of the bunch and I have an essay prepared to back it up.

[egg]

It was certainly my introduction to Slenderman and I still like it, but I think I've come to prefer TribeTwelve over the years.

[MorganMustDie]

TribeTwelve is great too, it's just a shame that Adam's output has slowed so much due to his college work
Noah Maxwell is the Karkat of youtube

[calamityCons]

I believe that Marble Hornets and Homestuck are in the same vein of unfiction that breaks the boundaries of the medium it’s presented in and has tons of cool shit involved in it. It’s up there with House of Leaves and straight up ARGs like I Love Bees. 17776 is up there too. It’s such a wonderful genre and I thank MH and the people that made it for existing and bringing me joy and terror as a teenager and today.

Marble Hornets IS good

[Nep]

Marble Hornets still exists???

[calamityCons]

It is still up in its entirety on YouTube last time I checked.

[MorganMustDie]

the only Marble Hornets content that arent up anymore is one of the entries that was unlisted as part of the series and the video 'File' by totheark, which got taken down over some false content ID flags and the creators felt that it would ruin the immersion if it was reuploaded :/

[classpectanon]

marble hornets is the cornerstone of the slenderman shows, the titan, the ancestor, and, frankly, the spookiest. everyman hybrid's scope and acting are better, and tribetwelve knocks it out of the park on SFX, but nothing can beat the sheer pants-shitting terror and paranoia that marble hornets presents. it's just got that certain je ne sai quois.

[calamityCons]

God, the sheer dread and horror of losing time that is conveyed in Marble Hornets is so fucking GOOD

[BrobyDDark]

Everyman Hybrid certainly handled acting a lot better, but after awhile it became more difficult to watch because Habit became a more prominent character. He's just too edgy, and not as fun to watch as all the characters he killed off, and he comes off more like a saturday cartoon villain than an entity that can't be reasoned with, like Slenderman.

Marble Hornets showcased the horror aspects and human vs human conflicts a lot better than any other slenderman series. I think, honestly, what really makes Marble Hornets so great is that The Operator is not THE antagonist. The antagonist is another human. A fallible, easy to communicate with human. All the characters in this struggle are humans fucking with other humans.

[MorganMustDie]

I hear you all saying that EMH has the best acting and would like to at least highlight Entry #65



This episode has the same bloodcurdling fear that you guys are praising, but I feel that that fear would be less prominent without Tim Sutton's incredible acting work, even though the entire video barely has any dialogue. Specifically:

At 2:03 - The frightening cut to Tim screaming on the floor, yes it's mostly the edit that makes this jump incredible but Tim's expression is incredibly convincing
At 2:30 - Perhaps the most intense, goosebump-inducing, most realistic, genuine scream of terror I have ever heard in any horror media, period.
At 6:35 - I have, without a doubt, never seen a panic attack depicted more realistically in any media whatsoever. As someone who has suffered anxiety and panic attacks myself I find this episode incredibly difficult to watch just because of how on-the-nose it is in its depiction of this kind of event. It hits incredible close to home.

Whilst I can agree that, for the most part, the characters in EMH are more convincingly acted out, the times in Marble Hornets that the characters ARE given a moment like this to shine just absolutely knocks it out of the park. Tim Sutton specifically is an incredible actor, and I think he deserves more credit for making season 3 of Marble Hornets THE ESSENTIAL standout for slenderverse content, and should be held up there with Vinnie and Evan from EMH, acting wise

[egg]

Yeah, I've got to admit that I didn't like Habit too much. I liked some of the things that he did, such as the little pep talk he gave to the main character that it's not wrong to want to be human (because it's honestly pretty rare for you to see a fictional villain actually reassure the protagonist), but the stupid shit he did kinda outweighed those moments. I do think that his actor's acting was pretty good, it's just that Habit as a character concept is reaaaally not my cup of tea.

[RoyalFiddle]

For me, I like the idea of HABIT and love how he is acted, maybe the most out of any Slenderverse series, but I think he suffers from the latter half of EMH's plot, which, don't get me wrong, it was subversive, but it was a bit too wacky and it especially highlighted the more Zany aspects of the character.

Anyway how y'all feel about Stan Freddrick?

[egg]

Habit was great in his TribeTwelve cameo but... I can't get over that ending, man! He just turned into the fucking Joker!

[BrobyDDark]

His tribetwelve cameo was cringe 'cause I knew what came later for him and it just kinda ruined it.

[MorganMustDie]

it's a shame that EMH as a series was so in depth in its ARG elements AS WELL AS having really good characters because it's gonna make it so difficult to go back through as time goes on just because of how much shit has probably been completely lost, like it spanned out across youtube, twitter, tumblr, and fucking minecraft and future viewers are likely gonna be so lost that they could lose interest altogether

I think TribeTwelve's metagame, involving setting up the Noah Archive dealio is a fantastic choice because not only does it allow the story to follow a unique approach to time travel storytelling BUT also means that future viewers will have a convenient little document in order to guide them through the sheer amount of stuff going on

MarbleHornets once again comes out on top here because the ARG elements are COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY to follow the actual, proper plot. You can watch the series without reading the twitter or watching totheark and still be able to entirely grasp the story, which was a really great choice of the creators I think. I wish EMH had followed that train of thought, because it took me so many years before I FINALLY sat down to a proper, in depth, reading through all the old shit viewing and properly getting what was going on

[calamityCons]

The more ephemeral parts of ARGs like EMH and TribeTwelve are part of the amazing fun of being a participant and a huge draw. However, it does always pose the problem of archival audience members getting lost or confused due to the more open and scattered distribution of the content. Homestuck actually has a bit of this too. The first 4 acts or so had direct reader input that was being reacted to and linked to other places as side content. Being a part of the reader input and the forum theorycrafting was an enormous draw to Homestuck for its original audience and we all collectively put our heads together to come up with new and creative ways to solve problems, like Dave using Jadebot's body to slap DreamJade awake. RubyQuest did that too, and so did a bunch of other really cool fucking things like OFF and Undertale.

GOD MarbleHornets did a good thing in being as clear as they were with their storyline. One source gives you all the info you absolutely need, and the supplementary stuff is truly supplementary and enhances it rather than being a required element. It rewards people who are engaged enough to dig through archives or follow an account on another website.

[MorganMustDie]

Strange you bringing up OFF because I think that might be another contender for the weird kinda WEBKINO that Homestuck and the MH/EMH/TT trifecta fit into
is there a category for stuff like this? deeply complex and involving web content that, given they actually put the effort in, everyone who has consumed it considers it god tier content? Like the A24 of homemade, incredibly small and independent media that fully makes use of the mediums of the internet

Homestuck, MarbleHornets, and OFF are great places to start but I'd be interested in hearing other suggestions for this categorisation

OFF kicks ass btw idk if i've mentioned that at all on this forum

[calamityCons]

Night Mind says the big umbrella for this stuff is called Unfiction, which I think fits pretty well. Otherwise I've heard the word "meta-modernism" posed as a term to use instead of Post-Modernism for things in this category that have audience interaction on a deeper level than most works of art but less so than, say, a fully immersive roleplaying video or tabletop game.

[Kidpen]

So I just started it and I'm wondering if there's anything I should be doing to make my experience better. Like, should I always have captions on because they have relevant and weird stuff in them, or should I seek out the deleted content at a specific point?