Creepypasta

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 19 May 2015.

Let the children... by Victor-Surge on DeviantArt

Incidentally, our story has a lot of potentially creepypasta fare embedded in it. The whole summer pilot program venturing down into the steam tunnels, reading drafts of Yeats's "Second Coming," catching glimpses the terrible beast Farthington had warned about,

sometimes swaggering in the distance up ahead of us in the dim intermittent rays of our flashlights, sometimes turning around suddenly to face us, its human physiognomy smiling to reveal a terrifying array of lion's teeth.

See the original post here.

Also, the idea of Carlton/Steffi inside the Sea Devil suit. Jawless or not?

As with creepypasta in general, I'd love for our story to eventually encourage the type of underground fan fiction, fanart, and cosplay that tend to proliferate around these threadbare stories. I don't know how all that starts, but it's almost like too much involvement by the initiating artist can actually inhibit its growth. This, of course, is the open source paradigm in a nutshell. Also that of King Arthur, whose legend grows as his reality recedes from view.

I just remembered and looked up the Slender Man meme, which was started as a thread on the Something Awful Internet forum, namely, a contest to doctor everyday photos to look terrifying. It relies on the exact same dynamism as our project.

As the author of the linked article states,

Slenderman highlights the strength and weaknesses of the Internet simultaneously...Of course when Victor Surge first created him, he was just a creepy picture with minimal back story. Now he is a cultural phenomenon and terrorises the dreams and thoughts of many.  What makes Slenderman a fascinating study is that he is the the personification of how modern myths work. At the core of Slenderman, most of us know he is created. You can trace back his history to specific posts and websites. The Internet ruins the myth but at the same time, the Internet gives it an authenticity and connectivity that continually builds upon it. 

The strength of this meme comes from its ambiguity, which has been part of the reason why I have been so reluctant to go on record with a lot of specific details we sketch out on the blog. At times, this kind of clarifying impulse seems to trespass on the minds of would-be co-creators. Interestingly, I've always seen our performances as running a similar risk, especially when characters lose their indefinitude. I don't think it needs to be that way; our attempts to justify our invariably less than ideal configurations (e.g. like Friday, making an inexplicably young J.J. Lazarus into Joseph Lazarus III) allows us to avoid painting ourselves into an ontological corner.