Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tuttle, Joshua B

Titel

Book Review: Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet. Edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill. Utah State University Press, 2018

Ist Teil von

• Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2021, Vol.32 (1), p.138-154

Ort / Verlag

Pocatello: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Rather, Peck argues, even dressing up as Slender Man is a fairly ordinary ostensive act (a concept in folklore studies that, in this context, means "enacting an aspect of a legend cycle in real life" [52]), and the connected nature of new media creates a healthy dynamic that reorients ostension away from individual acts and toward what Peck terms "ostensive practice" (52), in which the collective actions of many people fosters a dynamic of "collaboration, critique, and reflection" among practitioners. Assuming that participating in the horror culture centered around Slender Man is depraved, Peck argues, mistakes the actions of the most extreme individuals as representative of the whole, and precludes noticing the vibrant, and fundamentally playful, online and offline ecosystem of ostensive practice. In his analysis of media discourses of belief in Slender Man, Tolbert counters the deviance narrative with the assertion that the folkloresque quality of Slender Man makes such belief at least as natural as belief in any other folkloric character, owing to what he terms the "atmosphere of belief" created by such narratives (93). Evans's argument that the Slender Man Mythos is similar to the Cthulhu Mythos-in that both share a weirdness resulting from the blurring of the barrier between verisimilitude and fictitiousness and both are trans-medial cultural phenomena whose ontological instability is enabled by the media forms themselves-uses familiar content to enable a useful synthesis of ideas presented both within the volume and elsewhere that ground the larger discussion.