Marble Hornets/WMG

The maskies other than Tim are the people Alex lead to Slendy

• Whether he lead them directly to Slendy, like Brian, or were near him when Slendy showed up, like Amy, they have been forced into Slendy's service.

Slendy is not supernatural at all

• He's actually Old Man Jenkin's in a silly rubber suit, trying to scare people away so he can get a zoning variance for Rosswood Park, but these meddling kids and their camera had to come along.

Slendy is not powered by our fear

• He is pulled into this universe by it! He kill those who know about him so he can leave, and he moves through higher dimensions to move around so he stands still when he is being watched because seeing completely traps him because seeing is believing Up to Eleven!

Slendy is controlling J

• Slendy has limited mind control powers. He starts off with only a slight ability to influence people, but the more time he spends around them the better he gets at it. He is the reason J grabbed onto the Idiot Ball and went into the house without telling anyone. He is also the reason Alex and J have Laser-Guided Amnesia - Slendy was building up his powers. When we saw J with his jacket on, that was Slendy influencing him to put it on.

Alex almost fell off the slippery slope, but managed to realise what was happening, and fled the state. Tim is completely under Slendy's control, and has become his slave. J is on his way to it. I have no idea what Slendy's ultimate goal is, but I doubt it's anything good.

• • Entry ###### was either posted by J when he was under Slendy's mind control, or Slendy looked into his mind to get his password.
  • This theory is apparently proven after J's reaction to Slendy in Entry #43
    • That's Alex, not J.

The Red Tower's 3 pipes are foreshadowing/important to plot

• There's the Masked Man, totheark, and Slendy, assuming masky and totheark are different people. If not representing that, the three theme may reoccur with something else. Three random metal pipes sticking out of the tower and the triangle- two motifs of '3'.

Slenderman is a good, but also dead.

Slenderman stalks Alex because he's protecting him from the Masked man who we never see on Alex's film but is possibly stalking Alex. He then left and Slenderman began protecting Jay. The Masked Man is a psychopath and is now hunting Jay. He realizes he has to kill Slenderman first. He Kills Slenderman after the events of Return. In entry 14, Slenderman does not attack Alex, but he stops The Masked Man who had already began attacking Alex, this was The Masked Man's first encounter with Slenderman so he was frightened. This also assumes that the Masked Man is Tim. We see Slenderman in entry 23 but it is possible it is his corpse.

• Jossed. Slendy has made another appearance in Entry #26.

Slender Man just wants to be in Alex's film.

• This troper being one who dabbles in filming, this kind of person pops up a lot when shooting scenes outside. You know, that one asshole who sees your camera and wants to be in your film, but just ends up ruining every shot by jumping in and ad-libbing even though you tell him a million times to just go away. Slender Man is that, but much more determined. It all started with Entry 12, and everything went downhill from there.
  • "Hey, guys! Hey, guys!"

Slender Man just wants a friend.

• Slender man is obviously a scary figure just by looking at him, and a complete outcast, maybe he was even a human who was cursed. Obviously, with everyone afraid of him, he lacks any social contact at all, and this gets to him, no one has expressed such an interest in him as Alex has, and Slender Man leaps at the oppurtunity for a friend...only, Slender Man has absolutely no social skills, and with Edward-esque logic, stalks Alex in hopes of contacting him and gaining the one thing he truly wants-a friend. In Entry 14, Slender Man goes into Alex's room, yet doesn't kill him, or apparently, do anything to wake him up. My therory could fit in as Alex hit his head on the wall, and Slender Man went to care for him. Awwwww. also can explain why in the mythos, Slender Man always has his hands out. Poor guy just wants a hug.
  • Of course, when Alex bails out, Slendy looks to hang with J. So J starts sneaking out at night to hang with Slendy, but denies remembering this just so he won't become a social outcast simply by associating with one.
  • You can even be friends with Slender Man, Mas Ky, Alex Kralie, and Tothe Ark on Facebook!

totheark and Masky are two different people.

The Masked Man isn't totheark, they're separate people with separate goals; though both are opposed to Slender Man, totheark is equally opposed to Masky.

totheark is actually Alex (Alex R. Kralie = ARK) and he's trying to help J defeat Slendy once and for all, which is why he tells him to go back to the house; he wants J to get into the bathhouse, Slendy's lair. Alex and Seth had been there before and been attacked by Slendy but Alex survived and fled, but has since gained the knowledge to defeat Slendy. When he saw that J had started looking through the tapes and uploading them online, he realised it was too late to stop J getting involved with Slender Man and instead decided to help him. This is why totheark has such good skills in video manipulation; he's a film student, he'd be knowledgeable in that area. Also, the reason that totheark starts running back into the woods at the end of Exit is because he's trying to get back to where he left J before J does; he didn't want J to find out about his encounter with Slendy and get dragged into the whole mess. After he saw J intended on going to the tower in Entry #20, he went there himself, planted the tape and then watched from a distance to make sure J got it.

Masky is actually Tim and he's trying to stop J from interfering in order to keep Slendy placated. He attacks J in Entry #18 so that J will run away before he can be teleported to the bathhouse, a stunt that he repeats in Entry #23, which instead causes J to be teleported to the bathhouse; he breaks into J's house, drugs him with the pills from #16 and kidnaps him in #19 to bring him to the house to try and placate Slendy. However, Alex rescues J, though not before Slendy shows up himself ("Return").

In Entry #23, Alex follows J to the house and waits outside to make sure he comes out; when too long passes, he realises that J has started being teleported and enters himself, where he encounters the Masked Man. After a fight, Alex kidnaps the Masked Man to stop him interfering with J, but leaves a Masky mask dangling to let J know that Masky is gone. In Warning, the reason Masky is moving so erratically is that Alex has him tied up; Alex advises J to stay indoors in order to draw Slendy there, causing J's house to start acting like the abandoned house, meaning between the two actions (the kidnapping and the staying indoors), J now has the means to enter the bathhouse without Masky interfering. Soon, once J has mastered the ability to enter the bathhouse, Alex will reveal the way to defeat Slender Man and J will try to do so. Try.

• • Under this theory, Entry ##### may be hinting that Masky is trying to confront totheark, and will use J as bait if neccessary.

The "secret" totheark is calling J out on is the fact the latter is an Unreliable Narrator.

J knows...something. There's something up. Especially with those pills. Through the Eyes of Madness perhaps?

The Slender Man was actually protecting Alex from the masked man/totheark

I've read a couple times that in the Slender Man myths from Something Awful, he acts as some sort of reluctant malevolent guardian. Also, it's been noted before that in one of the videos, Alex either running away from or seeking out the Slender Man. In many of the videos that include SM, Alex seems to running from something, however it does not seem to be from SM, since he's mostly just there. The reason Alex gets freaked out when he's sees him is not because of SM himself, but because whenever he shows up that means totheark is close by and going to cause trouble.

• Entry #45 lends this theory a lot of credence. In the previous few entries, Alex has been hinted at explicitly hunting down the Operator (#43) and/or potentially trying to summon him direct (#44). Then in #45, he is attacked by two Maskies (including Tim) who come very close to finishing him off...before the camera distorts with the Operator's signature visual cue and the Maskies run off. Why would they run off if they were working for Slender Man?

totheark is actually trying to help

The flip side of the above theory. The Slender Man is evil, but totheark is actually trying to help/protect J from whatever it is. However, totheark is legitimately insane, so his attempts come off as crazy and antagonistic.

Slender Man will cause The End of the World as We Know It

And as the above theory describes, totheark is trying to help and stop him, or at least trying to save himself. The ending lines of Entry ##### ( "and you will lead me to the ark" tie this in with a Biblical reference.

totheark took the audio out of or distorted it on the tapes

totheark seems to be the one screwing around with the tapes. A lot of their videos contains really distorted audio or it could go along some some of Alex's videos that do not contain sounds.

Tim knows something

In Entry 15 he acts very nervous when being asked questions by J. Tim knows something that he won't tell J about and that information very possibly focuses on what's happened to Alex. Also in totheark's response video "Messages" the last few seconds have the text "You have been keeping secrets" and "Smile for the camera" while someone's face appears over the picture. This picture is said to be (I'm not sure if its confirmed or not) to be Tim.

Alex, J, and all the other cast members are being used as bait

totheark is somehow trying to lure the Slender Man in order to hunt him or some other purpose. He used Alex (and possibly the other cast members) before, now its J's turn. In one of totheark's response videos titled "Return," SM shows up and the video ends with some text that can spell out "found you." Slendy's a pretty elusive...guy and Alex and co. have some sort of special connection with SM, making him appear. totheark decided to take advantage of this, manipulating Alex in order to get to Slender Man. When Alex decided to call the whole shebang quits and shut down the production, SM wouldn't come out anymore. But now that J's gotten involved totheark is taking advantage of the opportunity. "Found you" could likely be referring to totheark finding the Slender Man.

The doll that J finds in Entry 19 was being used to summon the Slender Man

All Slender Man wants is 20 dollars

He's always outside someone's house late at night. Clearly, he was just short a couple of bucks and just wants 20 dollars. Jay, why don't you give him 20 dollars?

• Maybe all he wants is tree fiddy.
• Confirmed! Although he's lately been telling people to, instead of giving him $20, give it to those poor Hatian orphans that he presumable can't Mind Rape and disembowel because none of them own handheld videocameras and all their notebooks are soggy. Good for you, Slendy, helping with the earthquake relief!

The masked man is Tim, but Tim isn't the masked man

Perhaps masky is some kind of possessive force, taking over Tim and using him. He could also account for why totheark got footage of J and Slendy without having a camera (he might also be able to possess computers and upload his memories to youtube) and J's blank-outs, giving his victims an Incurable Cough of Death. (I'm well aware of how insane this sounds.)

totheark is actually Alex, and is trying to save J

I came across this theory elsewhere (the Marble Hornets Wikidot, I think). His earlier, more random messages were to try to scare J off the trail to save him from Slender Man, and he attacks J in Entry 18 for the same reason. He's just a little crazy BAT SHIT INSANE.

• Arguably not the case. Entry 26 explicitly shows Slendy freaking out Alex and his girlfriend in their apartment, at a time too recent for Alex to have been Masky all along.

Slender Man is the Terrible Trivium

Alex was Milo as a child, but once he left the Kingdom of Knowledge he soon after moved and changed his name for security purposes. He has also forgotten his adventures as actually happening, possibly believe they were just a game he played as a kid. Terrible Trivium (and maybe some of the other demons of ignorance), however, found a way into this world and want to seek revenge upon Alex/Milo for their defeat. The presence of Slender Man/Terrible Trivium slowly brought back Alex's childhood memories, as well as warping his sanity, causing him to try to find a way back without using the Tollbooth. After his disappearance, his friend J was just some unlucky guy trying to figure out what was going on.

• This either makes The Phantom Tollbooth a whole lot more terrifying or Marble Hornets a bit less terrifying.
  • Or, if you were unnerved by the Terrible Trivium to begin with, worse on all counts.
• Wouldn't Milo be Milo?

Slender Man was a prank...

By several of the cast members on Alex. However, things got out of hand, and Alex started becoming paranoid. Somehow, J was never in on the joke and though it was real too. They eventually located one of the cast members dressed as Slendy while out filmin. The two killed him, and, upon realizing what they had done, killed most of the other cast either out of paranoia or not wanting to get caught. They forcibly blocked the memories out of their mind.

However. Tim wasn't in that scene, and didn't let on to J or Alex that he knew what happened. He's now dressing up as totheark and trying to force J to remember. He may have already gotten revenge on Alex...

• • Seems to have been jossed. C'est la vie.

Slender Man was after Brian BEFORE Alex, and Tim had something to do with it.

Obviously Brian got caught up in whatever was going on; J talks about Alex and Brian both being missing, and how they were hiding out together. In Entry 20, Brian has left to "do something", and J and Alex can't remember why. Memory loss implies either Slender Man or the Masked Figure's presence. Then Tim shows up and is coughing, another implication of Slendy being around. Tim is obviously hiding something, and he said earlier that he knew Brian better than Alex. Might be that Tim has some kind of deal with Slender Man, and brings him sacrifices/dupes/whatever in exchange for something, possibly powers similar to Slendy, or maybe even just to placate Slendy so he doesn't take Tim.

Slendy/Masky/J is a Time Lord

Seriously. It's the only way to explain the random teleportation through space and time in Entry #23.

The house is Slenderman or somehow controlled by him

He is able to use it to manipulate his victims. It also allows for him to come and go as he pleases such as in Entry #14, when he enters Alex's room and then disappears. Also he can make it teleport people around, like J did in Entry #23. Also, many Slenderman mythos stated that he has the ability to draw his victims to him and prevent them from running away. This explains why Alex stayed there for so long and J has gone back three times.

Slenderman just wants a new camera

He got one off of one of his previous victims years ago, but it wound up breaking. Not being particularly well versed in the normal way to get cameras, he presumed eventually Alex would leave his somewhere where he could easily take it; After Alex went insane, he moved on to J..

• • This is supported by Entry #26; Slenderman only shows up at Alex's house once the camera is discovered by the woman. He's now trying to lead J into a trap with the 'HELP' message, whereupon he will beat up J and take his camera as well.
  • Or he was saving up to buy a new camera, but he's still $20 short.

The House J goes into is the house from House of Leaves, and Slendy is The Minotaur.

Random warpings through space and time? And a stalker who always seems to be there yet you never see it?

• • Johnny (from House of Leaves) once describes what might be the Minotaur as "human...Maybe not" with extremely long fingers.

Alex and Tim are working together

totheark's video Warning (posted for Entry #23) has a message at the beginning stating "The following are raw footage excerpts from Alex Kralie," so Alex obviously has something to do with it. However, there are two different masks shown in the video, and one of the wearers has Tim's epic sideburns. So, this may also mean that totheark and the MM are not the same person, but are working together.

• Because it's impossible that the line was just a reference to one of the early entries..

The Operator symbol represents targets

In the video "Warning" several blank circles are shown, and later they are crossed out in the middle. The circles represent people who have gotten involved in the Slenderman business and have been targeted. Crossing out the circles means they have been dealt with. Possibly, in earlier entry videos with Alex, when he has seen these symbols, like at the playground, or when J found one on the tower, have been put to mark the place where someone has been taken out.

Slendy only exists when humans are thinking about him.

Yeah, this theory has no real grounding, but it does explain his attraction to video cameras. He wants to permanently put himself onto tape so he can effectively become immortal.

The pills Jay found are a Fantastic Drug, and the catalyst for this whole thing.

The mysterious pills that Jay found in Alex's old house - and which he later saw Tim taking in that old recording - are actually an extremely rare, extremely fantastic drug. Pretty much everyone involved in this whole thing - Jay, Alex, the whole Marble Hornets crew, and for a much longer time, Slendy - are all addicted to this drug. The drug naturally, has some pretty drastic side effects, among them mood swings (explaining Alex and Tim's behaviour) and phobia of human contact (explaining Alex and Jay's drive to isolate themselves in their homes and tell no one about anything except over the internet, even when, especially in Jay's case, practicality dictates they should really be letting someone know of their life-endangering predicament), and, after more long-term usage, horrific physical disfigurement (the reason Slendy looks as Eldrich as he does and, possibly, the reason Masky wears his mask). This whole thing started when Alex found Slenderman's drug stash in the woods (thanks to their effects, Slendy had pretty much become a hermit) and made the thoroughly stupid choice of trying them himself, subsequently both becoming a junkie and incurring the wrath of Slendy, who became insanely desperate to get his stash back, but was rendered too weak and physically dysfunctional by the drugs effects to do anything more direct than stalk Alex from a distance. Around that time, Tim would find Alex's stash, try them, and become a junkie himself...and desperate for a bigger fix, would take the guise of Masky and begin stalking Alex in hope of getting more off him...inevitably striking up a small-scale war between Slendy and Masky over who would be getting the fix.

Eventually, Alex, realising what he'd brought on himself, finally persuaded himself to abandon his stash at his old house and flee for his life. Said stash would shortly thereafter be found by Jay, making him Slendy and Masky's new target.

Of course, Jay, being an Unreliable Narrator, tells us the pills that he found at Alex's house mysteriously vanished...the truth, of course, being that he huffed them all and couldn't admit it.

Furthermore, the drugs, among other things, have intense hallucinogenic effects?effects which totheark/Masky/Tim's Youtube uploads are intended to mimic to some degree, in order to communicate to Jay that they're both under the same chemically induced spell.

In short, this will probably end as messily as most drug feuds.

• You forgot that the drug causes memory loss. The reason we have jump cuts is because J is turning off the camera and moving. Also, long-term use of the drug causes something weird to happen to the body's electrical field, which is why Slendy and Masky cause the static. The one big crimp in the whole theory, unfortunately, is where the hell the drug comes from in the first place.
• Alternatively, the pills are Soy Sauce

The Operator Symbol is a face.

Or, rather, the Operator symbol is a head, with the X signifying a lack of face.

• • The circles at the end of Warning that become covered in X's always seemed to this editor to be related to "Smile for the Camera". The audience is watching, and Slenderman is in the audience?

totheark is an Ascended Fanboy

He started by uploading a video response to Marble Hornets; a video series that was just popular enough to get them some fame but not so famous as to cause super mega suspicion. The writers saw this and decided Sure Why Not. That's why it's focuses on TTA so much recently as apposed to Slendie; TTA just wants more attention. Jay was serious when he said he didn't upload Entry ######.

• Actually, the creators have explicitly stated in an interview that they make the TTA vids.

The Enigma of Amigara Fault is the Slender Man's origin story

Well, not at the time of the manga, but still. Slendy could have entered one of the holes and became stretched out by it, but somehow managed to escape. Perhaps he was driven insane by his stay in the fault, and that's why he lurks in the woods and kidnaps people. Slender Man-like figures have been observed through the ages (fictionally - look through some of the original SA thread), and the fault is supposed to be hundreds of years old, so the man who became Slendy could have been around at the time it was originally uncovered.

• • Wait...supposing he didn't actually escape, but exited the other side as it's implied everyone who enters the holes does, does that mean there are hundreds of Slender Men?!
    • Entry 38 has Alex telling a story like this, in the sense that people still got stretched but as punishment for illegal acts. See the Fridge Horror page for more details.

This series is actually a Black Comedy Stealth Parody.

From a certian point of view, this is hilarious.

• Explain. I'm not being snarky, I'm honestly asking, cause I don't get it.
  • If I understand the original poster correctly, like Funny Games, but a lot more subtle and without the hypocrisy or rewind button. And, of course, Suspense Horror/third-person Survival Horror instead of physical Torture Gorn.

41810

41810 -> 4-18-10 -> April 18th, 2010. It's the date of the final entry/attack.

• Holy Shit. That was yesterday. I really, really hope they kill Slendy. I don't want the to live with the idea that Slenderman is still out there.
  • They didn't. He found them.
    • And... We know about him. Oh. Shit.

The Slender Man is attracted to cameras, or can track his victims by them.

Slendy always appears on camera. He's always managed to find Alex or Jay, while they've been chronicling their efforts to find him. Especially since they both had security cameras installed in their house...

• This may have been proven in Entry 26, where Alez has been able to evade Slendy for years, but is found the minute Alex's girlfriend turns on the camera again. That's why he was trying to get her to turn it off- he knew Slendy would find them with it.
• Isn't is also possible that he's simply attracted to people who are thinking about him? Perhaps Alex hadn't thought about him in so long - which is why the Slender Man hadn't been able to track him... and then his girlfriend opened up the floodgates by showing Alex the camera, forcing him to remember why he was going to sell it in the first place... and thus summoning the Slender Man. Which means that the Slender Man CAN appear to Anyone on Earth who thinks about him... Even You... RIGHT NOW.
  • So, would that mean that Slender Man is The Game?
    • Obviously not. No one can lose him.

Alex's girlfriend was the one who sent the tape to J

She had been watching J's videos and decided get information from Alex about it. Upon finding his old camera, she decided to see if Alex would tell her any information about Marble Hornets. Unfortunately Slendy decided to show up. After running away with the camera and the tape, she was able to text J from old contact info Alex had and then tracked down where he was in order to send him the tape.

Slendy is just trying to save the environment.

Slenderman is often personified as a homicidal tree, so continuing that line of thought, why not assume Slendy represents the whole forest? Nature in general? The audio and visual distortion on the tapes is caused by him essentially being the antithesis of the rational and technological world. He wants everyone to leave the woods, and stop filming him and trampling burrows and whatnot. Plus, with all those arms and tentacle branches, he could hold a ton of signs at protests and rallies. It's a hidden gift.

• • While this is a humorous theory, it does raise some interesting questions about the Operator's relation to the fire shown in the painting and further referenced by the old tower...
  • so he's a Clockstopper?

The Operator symbol is a sort of 'dimensional eye' that allows Slendy to look upon this world.

As soon as Alex starts to go off the deep end in the earlier Entries, one of the most distinctive things he did was to start scribbling the Operator symbol everywhere. That symbol keeps popping up throughout the series- first we see it being scribbled on the ground in an entry, and then we see it in Alex's drawings, and then we see totheark making use of the symbol. What if, assuming Slendy is an entity from another dimension, that the Operator symbols possess the otherworldly trait of being roundabout telescopes? It explains why Slendy and totheark always know where J is no matter how much he tries to hide- J has Alex's papers, and he'll never be safe unless he burns the drawings. But since all those images of the symbols are all over the Internet by now...

When totheark attacked J, he wasn't trying to hurt him. He was shoving him out of the way when the Slender Man was about to materialize.

While the fact that totheark is nucking futs is not exactly a secret, and said quality could easily explain why he attacked J in entry 18, it's too easy of an answer. Something doesn't add up. Consider the following: in the very next entry, totheark can be seen in J's room, but he's not attacking J. He's just...hovering around, watching him, doing nothing. If totheark wanted to hurt J he could have done so right then and there; slit his throat or summoned the Slender Man to eat him, as simple as that. But he didn't. What if, right at that moment in Entry 18, when totheark attacked, the Slender Man was about to appear behind J- and totheark shoved him out of the way?

If you look carefully in the Marble Hornets Wiki entry on Entry 18, the recap mentions the audio distorts right before totheark lunges at him. And after that, totheark goes into seizures for no apparent reason! You could chalk that up to Rule of Scary, but we know that Slendy's influence causes health problems, like J's Incurable Cough of Death. And after totheark has his seizure, J starts to go into a coughing fit, and right after that, the audio distorts again. totheark's not trying to kill J at all- he's trying to protect him from the Slender Man.

Neither totheark or The Slender Man burned J's house down.

When thinking about the subject at hand, most people assume it has to be one of the two; but no matter which one you claim burned J's house down, it doesn't make sense. Totheark may be crazy, but his particular brand of crazy isn't destructive. The idea that totheark is trying to harm J doesn't make sense, as you can see in Entry 19 TTA snuck into J's room and spied on him for hours, but he didn't hurt him at all. And then, in Entry 26, TTA goes through all the trouble to give J a new lead on Alex's disappearance and tell him where to go next, all in one fell swoop. Either TTA is schizophrenic and doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'help', or Totheark is not responsible.

And Slendy burning J's house doesn't make sense because the whole thing reeks of Fridge Logic. Can Slendy even use matches? We've never seen him pick anything up. Unless Slendy has pyrokinesis, which is not an ability he's ever displayed, he couldn't have done it, because he can't exactly throw together a molotov cocktail in his condition, and he can't very well ask someone to do it for him. Besides, the only element Slendy might have a connection to is water, as a tape/Entry is nearly destroyed by someone taking a sip of water, and even then, that's speculation. It wouldn't make sense for TTA to want to burn J's house down and in Slendy's case it's not even physically possible. So who did?

• • IIRC, some of the old Something Awful stories included SM being able to control fire as one of his powers. Marble Hornets has been using and/or playing with many of the ideas used in the stories. So, it's much more likely that Slendy set fire to the building.

Entry 26 is the final entry.

Am I the only one who was reminded of Just Another Fool's ending after watching it? And never mind Jay's final words in the video...

• Might be Jossed - the Credits video implies that more is coming, since the title says this is the end to Part 1. Still, it does seem pretty final.
  • Jossed. Entry 27 has just been released. The nightmare is not over yet.

Slenderman is somewhat similar to The Game: He can only come after you when you remember/fear him.

In entry #26, Jay mentions that he "hasn't been thinking about it" and feels a lot better, his sickness going away with his paranoia. Furthermore, look at Alex's reaction to his girlfriend; at first, he seems like he honestly doesn't remember he still had his camera, and attempts to just dismiss it rather than bring up more questions about it. Also, look at Alex's face when the video tears. He's obviously remembering Slendy and everything he went through, and a few seconds later, BAM there's Slendy.

If Slendy's presence is somehow memory-based, it would explain why some members of the Marble Hornets crew fared better than others - Slendy was ALL OVER the shooting of this movie, apparently, but J and Tim never saw Slendy during that time. Things only went downhill for J once he started going over the tapes.

• If this is true, this could possibly mean that something Slendy-related happened during the filming that none of them can remember, for some odd reason. Something bad.
  • Perhaps Slenderman encounters us all but we just don't remember it.
  • According to enttry 37, this is exactly what happened. The Operator has been stalking Alex for years.

Slendy is a horrifying (and very real) creature, but the prank theory is also true

Think about it. When Alex first started encountering Slenderman when he was shooting, doesn't it make sense that he would tell his friends (or someone) that he was being stalked by an obscenely tall, faceless being? Even if he was smart enough to know that no one would believe him if he started mentioning monsters, he would still at least tell his friends someone was following him. So at least one of Slendy's appearances in the entries is actually a friend attempting to scare the hell out of Alex.

Chzo Mythos: Slender Man is the Tall Man

Seriously, the parallels are obvious, beyond just the name. He wears black clothing, is associated with trees, never speaks, teleports, warps reality, and has no face. Naturally, there are a few differences. Slender Man is much more subtle, hardly ever outright killing anyone, and has that whole memory erasing thing. This could be explained by different Princes. Possibly even different realms of Technology, both linked to the same realm of Magic, and the same Chzo

Why aren't Jay and Alex telling us how the Slenderman was made?

Ever heard of a lil' film called Eraserhead? You know how David Lynch has never confirmed exactly how they made the baby?

Now ask yourself, how can one create what is obviously a live, moving man with no face?

• • Burning off his face?
  • Slenderman stopped by on his way from the Big and Tall shop to the tailor's (to have everything taken in, of course) to help them with their film project?
  • Eraserhead? You don't mean... The actor that played Slenderman is really a golem made of sheep foetuses?

Alex did not give J the tapes.

Alex would never have inflicted this on a friend. In Entry 22, Alex states that J is gone. He means this literally; J has disappeared. After the events of the tape, Alex tries to destroy all the videos and then transfers out of state. After he has left, J reappears with the tapes in his possession and heavily altered memories. Some or all of the audiovisual distortions were added between Alex and J's ownership of the tapes.

There were two Slendermen (Slendermans? Slendermeni? Slendermun?), one of which was not intentional.

There was the one that worked on the Marble Hornets set, and the one the other kept at bay, hiding in the background, just... waiting...

• It was the Everyman HYBRID Slenderman. Marble Hornets is fictional in EMH. However, Slendy approved of his portrayal in Marble Hornets and decided to leave Troy and Joseph to their work. He had more urgent matters to attend to... and a HABIT to break.

The Slenderman is a Weeping Angel

The Slenderman is a malformed Weeping Angel from Doctor Who. Don't blink.

• And, because the Eleventh Doctor series reveals that an image of a charged Angel becomes an Angel itself, that explains why Slenderman followed the tapes. ...Oh, dear, is this going to be like the time Samara got uploaded to the internet?

Slenderman is harmless/doesn’t intend to hurt or frighten anyone.

No, seriously. Whatever he is, for all the weirdness going on around him, it may be that all the damage/psychological trauma associated with his presence/sightings is unintentional. Sure, he just stands there watching his “victims,” disappearing and appearing at the worst possible times, but at least we’ve never seen him directly harm anyone. It may be that for all of his strange, alien nature that’s he’s much like an old-school fae or even a more-or-less harmless being that is simply so different from us that it cannot understand us. What if Slendy is just curious? Perhaps J and Alex just caught his attention that day they were scouting near the red tower and Slendy is just puzzled about these strange beings, seeking them out to observe them. Think about it: it’s similar to a human being peering at a fish in a tank and startling it: we don’t mean any harm, but we may terrify another living thing that simply can’t understand what we are or how we’re in “their” world.

This may even be supported by things like Slendy entering Alex’s room at night without doing any real harm. OK, so Alex’s head was bleeding, but we don’t know what caused that. It might be something as innocuous as Alex being startled awake and banging his head on the wall, causing the injury. Also, as above, it goes with the fact that Slendy, to the best of our knowledge, has never directly harmed anyone. For all the scary stuff that goes on when he’s around, from random appearances to tape distortion to memory loss, we don’t know for a fact that he’s ever injured anyone or…done anything else. He’s just a child poking at a hamster in its cage, not understanding that he’s driving another being to the verge of hysteria through fear. For all that he lurks around and “chases” the characters, not much permanent damage is really caused by him that can’t be recovered from with a little time and distance.

Slenderman is not only harmful, but is being as completely sadistic and cruel as possible.

The exact opposite of the previous entry. Slendy is not only deliberately terrorizing his victims, he’s going out of his way to prolong the horror. Sneaking into Alex’s room and not harming him but making sure to leave the proof that he was there and could have done pretty much anything he wanted, letting J think that he had escaped the nightmare only to burn his apartment and/or send Masky after him and/or send Entry #26, letting Alex think he had escaped the nightmare only to turn up and terrorize him and his girlfriend years later… Slendy is enjoying every minute of this, and is just going to keep dialing the nightmare up higher until he delivers the coup de grace…if his victims don’t die of heart failure first.

Slenderman is Masky.

Kind of an outre theory, I admit, but it makes sense in a way as well. Tim is widely held to be Slendy, but what if, in line with the “alien mind” theories above, Masky is just another form or appearance of Slendy? Perhaps the Operator is trying to take a shape more like ours, whether to prolong the horror, cause confusion, or simply study us more closely. This could be in line with the harmless theory, the being trying to “blend in” and be more like us, or with the general hostility consensus, that it’s just another way of messing with his victims. It could also explain in a roundabout way things like why when Masky attacked Alex he didn’t really do much more than a tackle that ended with him in palpitations on the floor--the disguise was “slipping,” for example, or physical interaction between a human and Slenderman was just too incompatible, or something similar.

• Jossed by Entry #35.

Slenderman is The Question.

Years of exposure to Gingold Extract have caused him to develop unusually long, slightly elastic limbs. The memory alteration is a result of him using a colorless smoke (filtered by his mask) that erases short-term memory and makes people susceptible to being convinced of false memories, and the tape editing is done with magnets, swiping the tapes and editing them, or (in some cases) both. The Masked Man, and totheark (or one of the tothearks), may be Renee Montoya-- the only person who knows Slenderman's true identity, and that the original Question survives.

The Slender Man isn't the being's true form

The Slender Man originally started as a prank on Alex by some of his friends, basing their slender man costume off of internet culture. They intended only to freak Alex out by lurking in the background of some of Alex's shots. Unfortunately, this managed to freak Alex out more than their friends intended. At the same time, however, a time-and-space warping abomination lurking in the area began to take interest in Alex, and began appearing to him in a corporeal form for reasons unknown. He could have chosen any form, however he found the perfect shape to get the biggest reaction from poor Alex: the same form that his friends has used to prank him. He deliberately began to exhibit much of the same of the same behavior and even erase the memories of the people who saw him, just so that he could play mind games with Alex. This eventually drives Alex to a near mental breakdown, giving all the tapes to J.

After J sees the footage, he too is unnerved by the slender man, and the slender man begins to take an interest in him as well. This time, he chooses the same form, since J was already afraid of the appearance of a slender figure in a business suit, and it didn't take much to terrify J as well.

This only raises the question of why Slendy chose to take the form of what J and Alex feared most. Perhaps Slendy is drawn towards, or perhaps "feeds" off of the fear of others. Perhaps it's just a prankster at heart who enjoys scaring people. Or perhaps he wants to exploit the fear of J and Alex for his own ends...

The Slender Man needs human agents like Masky/totheark and he is looking for more.

The Slender Man is beyond the comprehension of humans, but unfortunately this means humans are beyond the comprehension of him. He drives people insane so that they can operate halfway between his insane logic and human logic. For example, despite J's interest in the tapes, the Slender Man needed to catch his scent before he could properly stalk J. Masky helped by luring J back to the house and visiting J's apartment to help "infect" it.

However, this clearly has debilitating effects. totheark is clearly insane and suffers from epileptic seizures. Being around Slender Man wears people out fast. The Slender Man wants Alex and/or J to be his new liaisons. Maybe one or both of them is special in a way that will cause them to last longer than Masky is or maybe they're just better equipped to approach the Slender Man's thought patterns. It's possible this entire process was merely Slender Man vetting his candidates.

Slendy Operates...

His behind the scene name is operator, he might perform operations that kill or disfigure greatly, as great evidence, we have Alex bleeding after a possible encounter with than, other alternative is that he actually is good and the operations are helpful.

• Alternately, "operator" could refer to a telephone operator--someone whose job it is to connect two people. But who is he connecting? J and TTA? TTA and Alex? Or is he connecting all of us to something we don't even want to comprehend...?

This ARG is NOT dead.

Marble Hornets may be continuing on a YouTube account called Tribal Twelve. The format of the entries are the same, the filming style is the same. Heck, Slenderman is in there, too. No sign of Masky, though.

• It is Trib E Twelve and can be found here http://www.youtube.com/tribetwelve
  • Nah, Tribe Twelve is apparently a fanfiction/side story sort of thing. The creators of Marble Hornets have said that they're going to continue, though, so it's not dead, just on hold.

Alex killed one/a Slenderman

Based on Entry #4, it is the only time we see more than one slendy on screen, but also appears that Alex is actually searching for slendy so my theory after that he ends up killing one slendy, causing the fury of the other.

• • Alex was initially curious about Slender Man. He mentions looking for him in Entry 2 and does so in the entry with the abandoned playground. His paranoia, chronologically, doesn't begin until the entry filmed in the car during which Slender Man appears in the background all a sudden, resulting with Alex's mood shifting rapidly. Now remember, Jay found an empty shell casing in the house. Perhaps Alex thought he shot and killed Slender Man and his paranoia/freakout didn't begin until he started seeing another Slender Man.

The thing stalking the main characters is one of the True Fae.

The Masked Man is actually a changeling that managed to escape the True Fae; his appearances are his own way of trying to protect the others from the fate he suffered.

The Slender Man is a Spy.

Tall and lanky in a suit? Check. Master of sneaking around? Check. Multiarmed? ...check, if you're into Tentaspy fanart.

He must think Alex and Jay have the Intelligence, or maybe they do and don't know it. Since there are no Filmmakers working for either Reliable Explosive Demolitions or Builders League United, he can't disguise as either of them; his failed attempts result in a friendly-spy effect, but since there is no actual disguise, his paper mask is left blank.

Thus, he is left to try and decoy them away somehow; he is likely aware of the differences between our world and his, so he knows if he just backstabs them, the cops will get too close. Audio and video constantly distorts because he, instead, uses his cloak to sneak sappers onto the filming equipment.

It's possible the Spy is specifically Rojo, as he's certainly sadistic enough to mess with a bunch of poor fast-approaching-broken-down people like this.

To go along with the guesses above about whether Totheark works with or against the Slender Man, Totheark must be an undercover Scout; he's relatively small, very bouncy and clearly has an attitude. He pulls his camera trickery not by cloaking like Slender Spy, but by getting high on Bonk! so he can move faster than the camera can see. It's just a question of which team he's on.

Slendy is after the tapes

The whole thing started when Alex got Slendy on tape. The video camera captures his essence and stores it on the tape. This explains why Alex constantly filmed himself, because it weakened Slendy. Totheark is trying to find the tapes and release his master's essence. Slendy found Alex when a tape with his pressence was activated!

• A variant, is that the problem isn't the tapes itself, but when people watch them, Slendy gets weak when living people remember him, that is why he erases memories/kills people.

Slendy is trying to warn us about something

Slender-Man comes from an alternate universe, one where everything works differently: space, time, physics, light, sound, everything. As such, his bizarre interactions are his honestly best effort to interact with us, specifically through J, counting on J to put the videos of him on the Internet. Why is he trying so hard to communicate when it's nigh impossible to get across a coherent message? Because he's trying to warn us about something dangerous coming, possibly from his universe. Let me say that again: Slender-Man destroys reality with his mere presence, drives anybody who sees him insane, is Chaotic Neutral at best, and he's terrified and trying to warn us about something worse. We are so fucked.

• Well, as you say, Slendy is pretty monstrous, and if everything in his home universe works differently than in ours, he could just as easily be trying to warn us about free ice cream.

Slenderman is a component of, or has something to do with, the Matrix

There are a couple of things that tie into this. The first, and what made me immediately think of the possible tie-in, is Slenderman's in-universe title: The Operator. It's the same thing that the human operators call themselves whenever someone in the Matrix contacts them. There is also the obvious suit-and-tie affair that Slenderman and the Agents of the Matrix share. It's possible that Slenderman is some sort of corrupted Agent - not freed of the system like Agent Smith was, but still trapped within it, carrying out whatever orders either someone is giving him or he was last given. This could help account for Slenderman's apparent teleporting and tenacity as simply bending the rules.

• It's more likely he's an exile instead of an outright corrupted program, possibly an Agent from the second version of the Matrix that was dystopian in nature and over-compensated for the failure of the first, "paradise" Matrix. In the dystopian version of the world, the image of the G-man that the Agents pattern themselves after is warped and distorted into a supernatural, twisted version we see as the Slender Man. He chose not to return to the Source to be deleted when the Matrix was re-constructed as the third version, and he's actively rebelling against the Machines, trying to open the minds of close-minded people so the resistance will take note of them and free them to increase their numbers. (This would mean that J is in for one hell of a shock when he catches up to Alex, whom he can't find anywhere because he's been freed.) After Revolutions, now that this is pointless, he'll go to work for the Merovingian like many exiles.
  • Alternatively, he's not an Agent from a past version of the Matrix, he's the program that was responsible for studying human physiology when the Machines had only recently won the war and were poking and prodding to see exactly what makes humans tick and how to install them into the Matrix in the first place; hence, "Operator." (Just watch The Second Renaissance for some of the actual poking, it's pretty gruesome.) His purpose has long since vanished, but he refused to be deleted because he thinks there's more to learn about humans beyond the necessary science for plugging them into the Matrix, so he wanders around and still does his thing.

The Slender Man is Arakune from BlazBlue...

It's not hard to imagine Arakune being the thing we keep getting vague glimpses of. It's entirely possible that in some iterations of the Groundhog Day Loop, he's caught in the time warp and just sent back even further than Ragna/Nu/the Black Beast and Jin. He's just playing with his food before he eats it; he's not drawn to the camera, pe se, but he's drawn to content creators like Alex and J because their creativity makes them tastier. The fact that he's an amorphous blob of goo explains how he could encapsulate all the many slight variations of Slender Man descriptions. Totheark is also Arakune but during his less (or more, depending on how you look at it) lucid moments: the apparent teleportation and lightning-fast way he pounces on Jay are just Arakune's natural abilities. Much like he normally thinks he's speaking clearly when he isn't, he thinks he's succeeded at forcing himself into a more stable, humanoid form and makes a better mask for it, but in reality, the mask is even worse and his humanoid appearance dives straight into the uncanny valley with the bizarre seizures and erratic body language.

• • Alternatively, he's slightly regained some sanity and he's trying to warn them the Black Beast is coming, but his ability to communicate is only getting worse. Totheark is Jin from an iteration of the loop where he too is sent further back than usual; thus, he doesn't become Hakumen because Rachel isn't there to bind him to the Susano'o unit, and totheark is the result.

Alex was not investigating the Slender Man alone

When the Slender Man first appeared, Alex went to his friends Brian, Tim, Sarah, Seth and Jay to help him figure out what was going on. (This was mostly done off camera). Each agreed to help him, but as they progressed, each one of them suddenly forgot what was going on. As they forgot, Alex got more and more paranoid and irritable around them and eventually it was just him and Seth. After they recorded the tower tape and Alex woke up realizing that it was only a matter of time, he fled himself. But before he fled, he was confronted by an amnesiac Jay about the tapes. Alex wasn't sure if Jay was starting to remember or not, so he gave the tapes to him hoping that it would jog his memory.

So what happened that the other four lost their memory? They didn't. Each one of them including Jay fell under the thrall of the Slender Man (either to gain power from him, or to become a cult to fight him) and became one of the masked figures as sen in Entry ######. But somehow, Jay broke free and actually did lose his memory. That is why totheark tells Jay to "come back to us", he's trying to get him to remember.

The Slender Man is a proto Gman

Teleportation, messing with physical laws of nature like a cat with a ball of string, a snazzy business suit and a lack of understanding of how human emotion works. Plus, the Gman is well, tall and slender.

The reason for him harassing J and Alex are that they are both to become Gordon Freeman style saviors of the earth.

The original Gordon Freeman delt with his own Slenderman before coming to terms with the fact that he would be followed by this man for the rest of his life.

The real reason why it took so long to J actually investigate the tapes was...

J actually was curious and actually watched the tapes as soon as he could, but Slendy memory erasing effect made him forgot, he might had watched them several times, and eventually forgeting all about it. 3 years laters he gets the idea of posting them in youtube and this time there is to much people for Slendy to Mind Wipe.

Totheark is ShadowTheHedgehog4.

And he was not happy about his fanfic being mocked.

Masky date-raped J at the house.

Masky came at J and knocked him out. The distortion was Masky muffling Jay as he raped him. The black-outs are when Masky slipped him something. His memory blanks are him suppressing it. But he likes it deep down, so he's interested.

The Four Maskies are the entire cast of Marble Hornets

Not the series, the student film. It's already generally accepted that the first Masky is Tim; Why should the rest of the cast be left out...?

• • And , with the exception of Tim, they are quite literally Becoming the Mask in order to get away from Slenderman. (Although it does make This Troper wonder what happened to Sarah, as Brian and Seth both are shown to have gone missing.)
  • It's possible all of them- or at least Tim- are also totheark, trying to contact Jay, who has amnesia about even more things that aren't on camera.
  • To add to this point, Alex lists Jay among the people "gone" and there are plenty of signs that Jay was Mind Raped like the rest of the cast. If the rest of the cast became Maskies, what about Jay? The answer is simple: Jay was one of the Maskies alongside the other four, serving some unknown purpose. For some reason, the control over Jay broke off. When Totheark says "Control is being taken away from you" what he means is "We're trying to bring you back to the fold". "Regards" video reinforces it: The tranced-out Jay has circles around his eyes similar to that of a mask.

Totheark just wanted to make a YouTube Poop of Very Bad Fanfiction

It somehow got on Troy's channel, though.

Slenderman is Candle Jack.

Or of the same family/clan/whatever. Both Slendy and Candlejack wear a bag over their head, can float, teleport, mess with space/time, and if you discuss them, they get you.

The Operator Symbol is a target.

Either someone is marking known sighting locations, or it's for summoning Slendy.

The Slender Man is Nyarlathotep's nerdy white counterpart.

Nyarly, too, is often depicted as a tall, slender, tentacle-y man with mental powers and no face, but he's much more charismatic and confident -- the Eddie Murphy to Slendy's Judge Reinhold. At some point Nyarly and Slendy will team up to fight crime... or maybe just conduct mysterious experiments and terrorize film students.

J is Masky, or one of the Maskies.

In the totheark video "Return," we see J (or who I think is J) sitting on the floor, in a daze. He has dark circles around his eyes that appear to be makeup. Painted circles around the eyes are often used to extend the disguise of a mask, allowing the eyes to blend in when the mask has bigger eye-holes (giving the wearer a greater visual range). If there are multiple Maskies, it's possible that he's one of them. If there's only one, it's still possible, as the constantly shifting abandoned house could be teleporting its victims through space and time.

Masky has a genuine concern for J, and is trying to scare him off and sabotage his investigation so that no harm will come to him.

Masky fights J to chase him out of the house and makes himself known on the videos so that J will become frightened and conclude that the only way to stop these occurrences is to cease the investigation. When Masky kidnapped J, he showed him some atrocity committed by the Slender Man, but the Slender Man erased it from J's memory. The "ark" is safety and peace of mind, and in saving J, J will have led Masky "to the ark."

Everything is going exactly as Slendy planned.

Slendy needs/desires two things: to be feared and to be worshipped. During the filming of Marble Hornets back in 2006, Slenderman took J, Brian, Tim, Sarah, and Seth as thralls (explaining the four different masked figures in Entry 26). For some time, they operated as creepy, Totheark type characters, living a bare-minimum existence in service of the Slenderman. They had some ability to be normal, as J was able to convince Alex to give him the tapes. Alex, on the other hand, was chosen to be the source of fear. He wasn't enthralled, rather, he was hunted and psychologically tortured. Even having lived a somewhat normal life (at least until April 2010), he would always have an apprehension at the back of his head, which fed Slendy. J was then released from Slendy's control, fed a false memory and given the tapes. He posts them on Youtube, and people begin hearing about Slendy.

This lets Slenderman find and hunt them. Marblehornets, as a Youtube series, is essentially a message to attract people to the Cult of Slenderman, and also to spread fear of him. Anyone who has watched the videos is now a target. This is in keeping with the fact that J's twitter has now apparently been hijacked.

Slender Man is "The Ark" and Totheark wants him.

Slender Man is some sort of supernatural being whose thought processes are alien to ours, and who is attracted to those who encounter him and continue thinking about him (he may even genuinely like humans). This is why he kept appearing to Alex. However, he has no way to communicate with people properly - Alex's drawings and Entry 14 may represent attempts at telepathic contact. Why does he want to talk to people so badly?

Because he's being pursued.

Totheark is another being who wants to find Slender Man. Why he wants this is uncertain, but he calls him "The Ark". He knows that Slendy hangs around with people who have encountered him before. His videos are basically goading Jay into pursuing Slender Man (look closely. listen) and keeping him in his thoughts, so that he can be brought out into the open and captured/dealt with/interacted with somehow.

The masked people are his agents, with the masks representing some form of mind control (possibly bad for their health, as they seem to cough and have seizures). Many of them encountered Slendy in the past, but Slendy knows to stay away from anyone with a mask now.

To the ark is The Operator, and as speculated above, the symbol is a face, but one which has been crossed out (masked). It may represent things and areas upon which Totheark has influence (the tower, for example).

At some point prior to Alex handing over the tapes, Slender Man managed to break through and communicate on some level with him, enough to convey the basics of the situation - he may even have intervened directly to keep him from getting "masked" in the video in entry 22 by yanking him out of the other mysterious house and putting him somewhere safe. After that though, Alex decided to quit, reluctantly gave Jay the tapes, and got out of Dodge.

Why can't Jay remember any of this? He was masked - in fact, judging by "Exit" he may have been one of the first to be masked. So what happened? When Alex skipped town, Totheark lost his bait. So he "unmasked" Jay, meaning that Slender Man would be attracted to him again, and (sans large portions of his memory) Jay began to investigate the tapes, Slender Man, etc.

Entries 18 and "Return" represent a successful attempt on Totheark's part to use Jay as bait for Slender Man. (found you. forever.) Note the black around Jay's eyes in "Return" - a partial reassertion of mind control?

So why didn't Totheark capture him at that point? Perhaps because Slendy's teleportation abilities keep totheark from being able to capture him in a place that follows the normal rules of space - that's why the videos encouraged Jay to go to the mysterious house, so that Slender Man might conceivably follow him to Totheark's playground and have a trap sprung on him. Jay holing up in his apartment is the opposite of what he wants, so he has the place set on fire in order to get him moving again.

So what's happened as of entry 26?

Slender Man turns up in Alex's life again, possibly seeking some sort of aid. (Note how Alex treats him warily, but without fear, as though he were a stray dog.) Alex has sent his girlfriend away, possibly because he knows Slender Man is the harbinger for trouble, and Jay is going to find Alex (The HELP at the end of the video has the "operator" symbol, indicating that totheark may have tacked it on somehow). This suits Totheark fine, as now he'll have two pieces of bait, who may well travel to the space-warping house or some other place he has prepared.

J is holding back footage and information.

We've heard that Alex was constantly filming himself, and that his car and the like was filled with tapes, and it sounds like Slendy's been following him for quite some time now. However, while it's logical to deduce that Slendy made some appearances to Alex before he started filming himself, and while the tapes before he started doing it constantly would have been fairly disjointed, after he started constantly filming himself, a clear chronology would have started emerging. Furthermore, throughout all these tapes, there appear to be surprisingly few appearances of Slendy. It's possible that J has given an incomplete analysis of the tapes or is purposely holding back information about them.

Beyond The Neon is a related story (possibly without the cooperation or permission of the creators of Marble Hornets.)

The channel is already assumed by viewers to be a Slendy series, and in "My Saturday Night", Isaac finds a tape, which he has yet to play. It's very similar to the tapes Alex and J were using.

The Operator Symbol is used to create Slenderman's Operators.

Which is to say, individuals such as totheark. Some otherworldly property of the symbol slowly drives individuals insane so that Slenderman may recruit them without scaring them off. This is because he needs to interact with our world for some undisclosed reason.

• Except that "the Operator" is the Marble Hornets name for Slender Man.

Slendy is stranded in our universe because Alex and the Marble Hornets crew are aware of his existence, and after proof of his existence is destroyed and all of those who know of him killed, he will be able to go home, and this is totheark's motive.

Like many theories above, this one is based on the concept that Slendy's appearance is based on being aware of him. He doesn't harm anyone, but simply haunts them. He is able to erase memories, but now that he's on film, his existence is harder to erase.

Enter totheark, one of the people Slendy has been haunting. Maybe he knows how Slendy works, maybe he just really wants to forget about him, but he's trying to remove all traces of Slendy from reality. He doesn't want to harm J just yet, because he needs J to find Alex, whom he will deal with first.

Jay knows Jessica from the period when his memory got erased

She says his name is familiar and she is the room right next to him? She is the only person in the hotel room that he has met so far, too.

This leads to two WMG:

Jessica is a victim of Slendy and his memory-erasing

Potentially team up with Jay at some point, both got memory erased while in the hotel, thus explaining why she thinks his name is familiar.

• • Confirmed in entry 31, where she admits to experiencing memory loss, sleepwalking and nightmares.

Jessica is an agent of Slendy or totheark

She is here to spy on Jay, maybe even trying to get his attention and keep him in the hotel.

• Possibly confirmed as off Entry 33.
  • There's no such thing as "Possibly confirmed." If it's not confirmed, it's not confirmed. Also Masky there has Tim's jacket, sideburns and skin tone, that's Tim, and it's not even confirmed Masky is an agent of Slendy or totheark...so ya not confirmed at all.

Jessica isn't an agent of anyone

She really is just in the room next door and won't contribute to the plot at all. The only reason Jay sounds familiar is because of the WMG below.

• Jossed as of 32/33.

Jay committed crimes during the 7 months of memory loss

Alex's film is still being made...

... by Jay. Alex's encounter with Slenderman before he began running from him was to try and convince him to seem like a creepy entity in the tapes watching the filming. Slendy was also probably asked to wipe Jay's memory every once in a while to make him try and record everything he can, for the movie. Everything else is staged and Alex is the biggest asshole in the history of student films.

Information about Jessica

Speculation shows that Jessica from the Entry 28 video may be the same Jessica from the documentary Slender Suits, who disappeared as a young girl in 1989 by the hands of Slender Man. Police interrogation tapes have a man by the name of Thomas Nealy being interviewed, in which he and the officer eventually both disappear. Jessica's last name may be Nealy, and she also may be from Tennessee.

• Possibly supported in Entry #32. The last thing Jessica says before Jay interrupts her is "I keep having these dreams where I'm a little kid, and something's watching me." Flashbacks to her original abduction?

Alex removed the audio from some of the videos himself, for one simple, mundane reason: embarrassment.

The audio in question consisted of nothing but Slendystatic and Alex screaming like a little girl. He did not want to have himself sounding like that recorded for posterity.

Jay may have killed someone during the 7 month break

Somewhat in conjunction with the committing crimes WMG above, one of the crimes could have been that Jay killed someone, under the influence of Slenderman. This coming from Entry number 29 where something that looks like blood on concrete as well as Slenderman being on the scene.

Why did Jay forget? My guess is that it's one part memory supressing it, another part pain killers that Jay found in the hotel. Take enough painkillers and it could mess with your memory.

• Since when does Advil mess with your memory? Slendy seems like a much more likely culprit.
• I think that Jay has killed Alex. He's been searching for him for an unknown portion of the seven months and probably acted under Slendy's influence. The "noentry" video from Entry 29 was probably taken after the murder.

Slendy feeds off of fear

This would explain why he rarely ever attacks someone physically- he doesn't need to, he just needs to make them shit brix.

Totheark/Masky is a Ninja

He magically appears in Jay's room in Entry 19, but the window is never broken. I can only conclude that he is a ninja.

• Or he came in the door.

J was under Slendy's domination during the seven month period

Soon after totherark warned J that "control will be taken away from (him)", J finds himself somewhere else with no memory of the previous months. Coincidence? I doubt it

• • Can this even be counted as a wild mass guess since it's pretty much canon and on par with what slim does?
    • Well, it's never explicitly stated, and he was apparently not under his control in the footage Jay found after the 7 months period. There's also the possibility that Masky and/or totheark was controlling him. Or that nobody was controlling him and his memory was wiped out due to prolonged exposure to... whatever causes the memory losses.

Taking a picture of the Operator's face or catching it on tape can kill him.

He does have a face, but specific conditions need to be met for it to appear, and recording it in some way can kill him. This explains why he seems to avoid actually showing his face when being filmed. This is also why Alex (and later Jay) keeps at least one camera running at all times; this allows him to be ready when an opportunity to destroy the Operator arises, and to keep him away as he is afraid of cameras.

The members of the cast of Marble Hornets take turns as the Masked Man.

They keep no memory of it though, which is why they don't realize they are Masky themselves. And those moments when Jay just disappears for several hours? He's taking his shift as the Masked Man.

The Masked Man isn't related to the Operator.

He's just as nuts and weird as the Operator, and probably knows about him, but Masky's goal is different and his actions have nothing to do with him. He just happened to cross Jay's path as he was investigating. In fact, people believing that he is related to the Operator is very good for him as it keeps attention away from his actual ploy.

The burning of Jay's apartment was a legitimate accident.

He forgot to turn off the gas because of his memory losses. Then, all it took was a little lose wiring somewhere and WOOSH!

Marble Hornets is, in fact, Marble Hornets.

I mean, it IS the movie Brian was shooting. The last entry in the series will show the Operator slowly approaching Jay, then Brian will be heard yelling "cut!", the guy playing the Operator will unmask and the rest of the cast will show-up on screen, exposing the whole masquerade and sharing a good laugh.

• • This is actually what I was thinking the whole time.
    • I thought this too. LOL

Masky controls the Operator.

Everyone seems to assume that the Operator/Slender Man is the big deal, the great Eldritch Abomination who mind controls his masked minions. But what if it was the other way around? Whenever the Operator is on screen, I always get the feeling that he's not really sure what he's doing, as if he was forced to get to them, but didn't know why he wants to go there. The masked men, on the other hand, seem very determined and show no hesitation. In fact, they even play mind games with Jay whereas the Operator himself just kinda... stands there and looks from a distance. And last but not least, the Operator has yet to do something that is actually threatening, unlike the masked men who already abducted Jay at least once. So to me, it seems the Operator doesn't have any goal himself, but the masked men control him and use him to spy on the characters.

• • This is the most common theory. It would explain just about everything.
  • Possibly confirmed in Entry 35. When Alex is about to bash Masky/Tim's head in with a rock, he says, '[Tim]'s not gonna call him'.
    • It was actually "he's not gonna follow us".

I am the Slender Man.

I can't remember being the Slender Man, and the Slender Man has the ability to erase people's memory. Hence I am the Slender Man. This logic is flawless.

• I can remember being the Slender Man. Does that mean that I'm not him?
  • You're probably Totheark. AND a Time Lord.

The house in entry #23 isn't Alien Geometries.

Slendy is just altering J's memory and placing him somewhere else every time he tries to open one of the doors, in addition to killing his camera while he does it.

• Why, you ask? He thinks it's hilarious. Hence the evil chuckle during one of the bouts of distortion.

Jessica is one of the other five masked figures.

She's been coughing and Jay's camera acts up around her. The only other possibility is that Slendy's after her too, which is unlikely since Jay's presence doesn't seem to bother the camera.

• In Entry 33, Jay gets assaulted by Masky in Jessica's room with her nowhere in sight. Possibly confirmed.
  • Not confirmed. That's definitely Tim; look closely and you can see the sideburns.
    • Word of God confirms that the masked figure in Entry #33 was indeed Tim.

The visual tear in the credits...

...is where they thanked Slendy for taking time out of his busy schedule to help them out with their project. However, even the mention of him messed up the video, even though it was made on a computer, not recorded.

Slendy is a time traveller.

He comes from a future where Marble Hornets was successfully made, and incredibly successful. He just came back to witness the creation of his favourite film. However, when he was spotted and interrupted filming, he altered the timeline. All the distortion and weirdness is due to his interference with the timeline. This future just happens to have extremely tall humans, and puts great stock in student films of questionable quality?

Totheark is dead.

Either Jay killed him or his body just gave out from exposure to Slenderman, or whatever happened, Totheark/Tim is no longer with us. That's why Totheark hasn't posted any video responses. The picture posted on halloween? That wasn't Totheark. That was Jay, wearing Totheark's mask. He wore a hoodie to cover up his lack of epic sideburns.

• Entry 33 disagrees.
  • Entry 35 begs to differ.
    • Actually, in Entry 33, it appears to be Tim as Masky, except with a limp. The limp could be explained if you believe Alex was stopped from bashing Masky/Tim's head in in Entry 35.
    • In Entry #36, Jay confirms that Alex only broke Tim's leg. Also, totheark's account is still active a year after the events on tape took place.

Totheark is trying to reach Noah

Totheark wants to be led to an "ark", and another Slender Man story just so happens to have a man called Noah as its main character. Even if you're not a Christian, I don't think the reference to Noah's ark is lost on anyone. As such, my conclusion is that, for some reason, Totheark wants to get to Noah's house. For the record, the events of Tribe Twelve started during the 7-months hiatus of Marble Hornets. Perhaps there could be a link.

Slenderman is from an alien race and a scientist.

He and a bunch of other Slenderman scientists went to other planets with scentient life to study them. Specifically their primal emotions like fear. The Slenderman we got went in a little too into his studies, mainly targeting Jay and Jessica and messing them up in the process.

• • What do we do when looking at animals in their natural habitat? Watch from afar and try to camouflage ourselves. What does he do in Marble Hornets? Watch from afar, and camouflage himself. He doesn't really want to hurt us, but he's so incomprehensible and wrong to human eyes that we can't help but be afraid of him.

There's more than one totheark/Masked Man.

Firstly, entry 26 seems to have footage of up to four different Masked Men. They even have different masks. Could this be where Alex, Tim, Jay and Sarah have ended up?

• CONFIRMED, at least the first part.
  • Actually, the first three Maskies could easily be the same one. Their differences are extremely subtle (not like the fourth) and could easily be due to video distortion.

Jessica is Sarah from the cast.

Nobody knows what happened to Sarah and as of Entries 32/33, she has her own tapes and is involved in the whole affair. Assuming Slendy only stalks the cast, it makes sense.

• Jossed. Jessica and Sarah are clearly two different people; compare them in the videos.

Slenderman and Masky are not evil, or good.

Masky just wanted to see the movie in the making because he loved the idea of it so he went around looking for the tapes. When the safe in Jay's room was opened he was there to take and veiw the tapes. And the Slenderman is a creepy tall guy who's actually a Producer from Hollywood. The reason the cameras act up around them is because they all just came in at the wrong moments. Their cameras where just screwed up from the beginning. The totheark videos were just there to try and get Jay to the tower so they could negotiate the terms for it. Finally, the Operator symbol is just the icon of his company. When Alex was going crazing and drawing everything he was just considering selling the rights to Slendy. What I mean is, everything else was just a coincidence. During the 7 month hiatus Slendy had teamed up with Masky and they had tried to whoo him by offering him 'private hotels' and all that. Yup. That's what happened.

Slenderman can be defeated by Sunny-D!

Sunny-D is to Slenderman what holy water is to vampires. Namely, acidic. Please let it be true. Please let it be true. It might be less scary if it's true...

Alex's middle initial is R

Alex R Kralie

• It's been confirmed by the creators that Alex's middle name does not start with an R.

The masked man isn't Tim.

It's a Special Effects Failure; the masked man is played by Tim, but they're not the same person in-story.

• Jossed as of Entry 35. After the unmasking, Jay even says it's Tim.

Whoever kills Masky automatically becomes the new Masky

Don't read if you haven't seen Entry 35.

By the look of things, it looks like Alex killed Masky. So then who attacked Jay in the Motel room? Unless you-know-who survived and is either pissed, or stupid enough to come back after Jay. But there's a chance that Alex assumed Masky's identity and is now pursuing Jay to get his hands on the tapes.

• • That theory's moot. In entry 33, Masky is DEFINITELY the same person. He also has a limp. There's also the chance that Alex didn't kill him, but was stopped and merely got his leg pretty good.
    • Entry #36 confirms that Alex did not kill Masky, but he did break his leg.

The blood and torn clothes in the tunnel belonged to Tim

Alex didn't bash his brains in, he was hurt and was recovering by hiding in the tunnel until Jay came after him. Slenderman eventually came in to save Tim.

• Are you the artist of this, by any chance?
  • Jossed. Entry 49 shows Alex attacking an unknown man and killing him by beating his head in with a rock. The man's T-shirt is the same one found by Jay in the tunnel.

The entire series is true

They still aren't revealing how they filmed the Slender Man, and to this day no one can say how he was filmed. If this was fake, someone could have identified how Slendy was filmed by now.

• • The creators said that they refuse to reveal because they're afraid that it will spoil the scariness of the series.

The knife in Entry 35 is the same one from Entry 18

Back in Entry 18, after Jay encounters Masky, Jay mentions at the end that the knife he brought with him went missing. At one point in Entry 18, Masky fell over in convulsions, which might mean Jay stabbed him in the small scuffle they had. This could mean that Jay lost his knife then, and Masky kept it until Entry 35.

Another interesting note, in Entry 35, Masky has an open opportunity to stab Jay when he comes around the corner, but runs right past him... straight to Alex instead.

Slendy is the Cup-A-Soup Man

The creepily watching people through their windows fits. Maybe Slendy just wants to give Alex and J a cup of soup.

It's all just a big game of hide and seek

• Jay, Masky, and Alex are all friends who enjoy the chase to pass the time until the next Slendy sighting. Unfortunately, Alex just gets a bit 'extreme' in tagging "Masky" to be 'it'

Totheark is Jadusable, BEN or Majora

• In the video Broadcast, the description is "Are you drowning". Coincidence? I mean, both are Creepypastas. Myself, I think that if any of them are Totheark, it's likely going to be Jadusable.
  • Actually, Slenderman comes about on the Something Awful forums, not Creepypasta. The two series are completely unrelated.

Tim's ultimate goal is to avenge Brian

I'm pretty sure I stole the idea from a fanfic somewhere, can't remember where at the moment. Brian hasn't been seen in years, right? Much like most of the original student film cast, but he had arguably a larger role than any of the other posthumous-esque characters; if nothing else, being the entire reason Tim was involved with the movie in the first place. But something happened to him because of Alex's entanglement with the Operator, who then lured Tim in by making him believe it was Alex's fault his best friend had disappeared (or worse). It's hard to tell whether or not he still knows or cares what he's doing, but there has to be a reason he went from a regular guy to an apparently homicidal masked stalker, and what better way than falling to the wrong influences under the pretense of revenge for an old friend?

• Well perhaps Slendy, sensing Tim was the weakest of the group, stalked him mercilessly until he became a knife weilding maniac and it was Tim that made Brian/Sarah/everyone else disappear.
  • Possibly confirmed in Entry 51. After being tricked into entering an abandoned building to film, Brian discovers Tim coughing in a corner before the Operator appears and the camera cuts out. Tim may very well know what Alex did to Brian and be out for revenge. He DOES try to choke Alex in Entry 45.

Masky is a Super-Powered Evil Side for Tim, one that he is in conflict with.

If we assume that Masky and totheark are one and the same, this raises one question: why does he leave so many clues and hints toward things for Jay? One thing that I took particular note of is the "Signal" video, which seems to foreshadow the events of Entry #19 (and by extension the "Return" video) in both a mocking and warning tone. Here's the WMG: the Operator's influence created Masky, a separate identity for Tim. Since Slendy's so strong Tim can barely fight it, and his only form of resistance is shown in his attempts to leave clues in totheark's videos as a warning to Jay and/or Alex.

There will be a Melee a Trois between Jay, Alex, and Tim

As of Entry #36, we can be pretty sure the latter two are really out to kill one another. Jay will keep running into each of them, separately at first but simultaneously more and more often as time goes by. Eventually, he gets fed up with Alex's growing psychopathic streak, and gives him a serious What the Hell, Hero? talk. Alex takes it as a declaration of war and attacks Jay, who barely dodges in time. The two of them duke it out for a bit before Masky shows up. Alex spots him and turns to lunge at him, but is stopped by Jay; at the same moment, Masky dives out of the way and rolls back up to face them both. The three of them glare at each other.

Alex's glare is ferocious and animalistic. He's totally snapped, and just wants to get rid of them both.
Jay's glare is determined, but also a bit angry. He's at the end of his rope with both of them at this point, thinks "screw this", and goes on the offense for the first time.
Tim decides "enough of this", pulls off the mask, and throws it aside. His glare is more of a snarl.

A fight then ensues, and it is epic.

Naturally, Fridge Horror is had as to just who is holding the camera...

• • Duh, Freddie Wong's holding it!

Totheark in Entry #33 is Brian

He's more heavyset than Tim, and he's really hamming up the limp act.

"enttry #37" was not posted by Jay.

It's pretty obvious, but technically it's a WMG, right? Evidence:

• According to the Twitter feed, he had been struggling with Youtube for hours two nights prior, ultimately failed, and eventually retired with a somewhat suspicious headache that garbled his typing.
• The feed wasn't updated either before or immediately after the entry was posted as it usually is, nor was there any note about finally managing to log in (which he probably would have mentioned).
  • Update: There is now a post with a link to the entry, but it's devoid of the usual succinct "Entry #__" note. Judging by the fact that the entry was labeled #37 instead of something completely different like ###### was, along with all the other little discrepancies, my guess is that this new person/entity wants us to think this is Jay's doing, for reasons we can only speculate.
• The title doesn't fit the format. All the other titles are properly spelled and capitalized. There is also no commentary.
• Where would he have gotten that video, and why would it have been mixed in with the tapes from the seven-month blackout?

Now that I think about it, he hasn't updated Twitter at all since he went to sleep that night. One has to wonder if he has woken up since then...or if he was himself when he did.

• Expanding on this theory, "enttry #37" was uploaded by the same person as "Entry ######" (Totheark? Jay under mind control? Santa Claus?).

• Confirmed at the end of Entry #38. Jay believes it was the same person that posted Entry #####.

The person loudly singing "Happy Birthday" in enttry 37 was Slendy

Aw, c'mon guys, he just wants to be in your party!

• And here I was thinking that the distortion at the beginning that sounds like notes was him singing. I mean, he doesn't exactly have a mouth, so I doubt he can sing very clearly, but he was trying, bless his little heart.
  • He should really work on his gift giving skills. Insanity isn't something most people want for a belated birthday present.

The Slenderman's gonna try something on April 4th.

Being that it should be Alex's birthday, Slenderman's gonna either give him something nice on that day, or make things worse for him.

• • Confirmed. See Entry 26.

Alex changed Jay's YouTube password

He realized Jay was returning to what he was doing when he first rediscovered the tapes and decided to change the password and post a very discouraging video to make him stop.

Operator was a legitimate guest to Alex's birthday party.

He's a friend of Alex's family and everyone was too polite to point out the strange faceless man in the suit with tentacle arms.

• Why would he be stalking Alex then? Because no one gave him a goodie bag on his way out and he is merely attempting to obtain his rightful treats.
  • And naturally, factoring inflation into it, the relative monetary worth of the goody bag in modern American money is... twenty dollars.

There is something far worse out there than either The Slenderman or Masky/Tim.

Neither one is trying to hurt Jay. They are trying to keep him out of the way of whatever else is out there, but for different reasons.

Alex told Amy to flee

He told her to get as far away as she could, because It's Not You, It's My Enemies. That's why she's never brought up again. Alex didn't forget about her; he just wanted to avoid dragging her into his problems. And Jay didn't know her, not to mention he has plenty of other things on his mind; unless she's tagging along with Alex, he has no real reason to be thinking about it.

• • Jossed as of Entry #42. Alex lost contact with Amy and is looking for her.

Slendy got Jay to delete the footage he found.

It's somewhat accepted that Slendy has some form of mind control powers. There could have been something pretty damn important on the tapes to get the Slenderman to use his powers to make Jay erase the footage. Only time will tell if Jay will be able to get back the lost footage.

Jay has gone back in time

That's why he's all the way back at the tower without the tapes or the footage.

By extension, this may have something to do with the missing seven months. He started out driving from somewhere relatively near the original set and where he lived, and ended up hundreds of miles away (given how long he was driving), with no memory of how he got there or what happened between leaving in search of the return address and waking up in a strange hotel. Maybe he actually jumped forward seven months, and now that he's back, he's about to live them out.

As a final thought, maybe (and this is a stretch) he's meant to Set Right What Will Go Wrong, and the reason he's been sent back to his original time is because he managed to see what it is that he's supposed to prevent. This may have been the intended Entry #37; it was clearly something big, but Jay was locked out of Youtube and never got to post it (assuming "enttry #37" was someone else's doing).

Seth was killed in 22, and Amy was killed in 26.

They're not 'gone', they're dead. The reason they're not being brought up is because Alex, already more aggressive and clearly having been pushed past his limits, freaks out when they're mentioned. Jay is either unaware of this or hasn't told the viewers. He's already been an Unreliable Narrator in the past...

• Well, while this is a valid theory, it could be that Seth and Amy were taken by Slender Man. Remember the seven month gap and the ensuing video wherein Jay looks insane? It's possible they're alive and being put through Mind Rape. Your Mileage May Vary on whether or not this makes anything remotely better.
  • Considering Alex's actions in Entry 51, it may actually be true. Look at what he did to Brian.

The Operator and Totheark are both related to the Grigori.

The Grigori, the fallen angels that God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out, weren't destroyed. No, instead their works were destroyed and they were bound beneath the Earth until Judgment Day. And they were known for mating with women to produce the Nephilim. Is humanity the only thing they could have mated with? What about the trees, or even the Earth itself? And if symbols have power, Noah's Ark, the symbol of mankind's salvation from the flood that brought down the Grigori, would be an incredibly potent symbol for them.

Thus, both The Operator and Totheark are either Grigori or extremely powerful Nephilim (perhaps respectively being descended from plants and earth, respectively), and they seek what they can find of Noah's Ark for reasons we can't yet figure out.

The Slender Man is the Operator's disguise, based on misconceptions of what human beings look like.

Maybe the Operator is a supernatural being that dwells in the forest near where Alex grew up. According to Entry #38, criminals were hanged there 100 years ago and stretched out to die of starvation and dehydration. When the Operator finally tried to take a humanoid form, he only had one kind of reference on hand...

The Trials mentioned in Entry 38 were just a front for a cult.

The men who were hanged and starved, who may or may not have actually been criminals, were actually sacrifices to the spirit(s) that lived in the forest. After the criminals died and stretched out, the entire tree was burned down -- and burning is a classic method of sacrifice found all around the world. Masky and Friends are the successors/revival of that cult.

J hasn't lost any memories -- he just frequently loses consciousness as another being takes control of his body.

J is one of the Masked Men, a group of individuals who are possessed by members of a cult from over a century ago. They act normal until there is work to be done. The reason TTA's videos are so cryptic and badly edited is a combination of a ghost's effect on digital media, and the spirit's unfamiliarity with modern day technology.

The Trials from Entry 38 created the Operator.

Whatever it is that makes plants in the forest grow quickly interacted with the executions in a way that gave rise to Slendy. Some possibilities:

1. A dying criminal tapped into the energy of the forest to become something other than human.
2. Slendy is the combination of the souls of everyone executed in the forest.
3. So many evil humans being killed there corrupted the spirit of the forest.

The rationals for this:

1. The executed were stretched in a manner similar to being on the rack, and Slendy looks like he's stretched out.
2. Slendy is associated with fire, and the bodies were disposed of with fire.
3. Slendy is associated with trees, and the executed were killed on trees, in addition to being killed in a forest.
4. Slendy is reputed to kidnapped children, and some of the executed were child molesters.
5. The trials ending when a child was murdered and put up in a tree seems like a beyond-the-grave revenge from one of the child molesters.

Admittedly, only the last rational is directly supported by Marble Hornets itself, with the rest being from the original Something Awful thread.

Concrete Giraffes is in continuity of Marble Hornets

Slendy couldn't get a role in Hornets, so he went to Marik instead.

totheark is Rebecca Black

She wanted to get to the Ark Music Factory.

• • Alternatively, totheark is looking for the "ark" so he can lead Slendy there as well. The "ark" is Ark Music Factory, and he's leading Slendy there to devour all of the children making terrible music.

Joseph Writes a Paper is part of the canon

Alex is already partway to losing his mind, it seems. This happens when he gets all the way there.

Sometime in the future, Jay and Alex end up in hiding together, perhaps sheltered by some unlikely ally (probably one who has no idea what's going on -- some random witness protection official, maybe?) with a dog and a computer. They start using fake names, just in case. Alex/"Joseph" decides to try and distract himself from the last 3+ years by compiling kitten pictures off the internet, but has a severe mental regression and starts thinking that what he's actually doing is writing a paper. In his delusional state, he believes that kittens will be the solution to his problems, and his train of thought meanders over to the idea that kittens are the cure to all the world's suffering. ^[1]

Jay/"Troy" keeps interrupting him, trying to get him to focus on the issue at hand, but he hallucinates it as random chattering. However, the part of his mind that does still know what's really going on in his world manifests in the form of giving the dog a voice, telling him that Jay is trying to bring him back, and that he doesn't want to be brought back, he likes being stuck in this fantasy world where everything is normal, back in school before all the years he lost. This voice, projected onto the dog, leads Alex to unconsciously pull out a gun he had hidden under the bed (while thinking that the dog is giving it to him) and try and get rid of Jay so that he can stay in his little mental hidey-hole.

• In a similar vein, Joseph Plays a Trumpet is also part of this delusional life. However, this incident takes place before "Joseph Writes a Paper," when he is only just beginning to slip into madness. The incident is shown from Jay's point of view. Over time Alex begins to indulge in more and more bizarre and apparently pointless activities, and Jay always remains cheerful when asking what he's doing because he knows Alex needs time to recover mentally. But for the first time Alex lashes out in an extremely irrational and hostile way, much to Jay's shock. During this outburst Jay first begins to suspect that his friend has lost his grip on reality, due to Alex's continued insistence that Jay's room is actually his room. Afterwards Jay starts trying to bring his friend back to reality. He begins with small gentle reminders but gradually grows more insistent and intrusive in an attempt to snap Alex out of it - leading to the events of "Joseph Writes a Paper."

In Entry 39, the person peeking into J's car is Jessica.

In Entry 39, if you take a good look at the person peeking into J's rear window while he sleeps, you can see that the person has long, dark hair. Now, who else has long, dark hair and we know shows up alongside J later on? Jessica.

Jossed: It was totheark going by the video "Forecast". Though, this will support the possible Jessica is totheark theories.

The Operator and Slenderman are two, totally different entities

Unfortunately, they both exist in the same universe... And at the end of Marble Hornets when they find a way to overcome the Operator, Slenderman will man his appearance known.

Kralie isn't Alex's real last name

Only notices this after some thought, but Kralie is KRA=ARK+Lie.

The abandoned chimney from Entry 40 will become important later down the line.

It's a similar principle to the red tower- the fact that attention was called to such an out-of-place object is foreshadowing for it's use later on. That, and the fact that Slendy was standing literally right behind it.

Entry #40 is the original Entry #37

Jay's Twitter update referring to the real Entry #37: "Found something that makes me not want to go through the rest of these tapes."

Jay's Twitter update referring to Entry #40: "I really don't want to watch it again."

They're certainly similar, and Entry #40 could very easily be something that would make him not want to look at the rest of them. Entry #38 was from an unmarked tape that he somehow still had with him when he lost all his other tapes and the footage (rendering him unable to post that one as Entry #38), and there are two main possibilities as to why he posted Entry #39 beforehand:

• He may have been putting off posting that one, due to how much it disturbed him.
• He may have discovered the tape of #39 later on (just because he didn't want to go through the rest of them doesn't mean he didn't feel like he had to) and decided to post it first, as it was a lead-up of sorts.

Tim is part/leader of the cult of Totheark.

We've already seen some variations of the original Mask. Who's to say that there aren't more of them, in some organization worshipping/planning to overthrowing/hiding from the Operator. Take, for instance, the female masked one, nicknamed Skully. While we only get passing glances of her in Totheark's montages, but it's definitely female.

This explains several things that were previously unrelated:

• Totheark seems to have a split personality, which would make sense seeing how more than one person can use the account.
• The worship in the Lost Woods and subsequent birth of the Operator could be attributed to Totheark, or to a rival clan that they are trying to stop.
• The fact that the person filming Jay in Entry 39/Forecast is taller than Tim proves that someone else can get onto the account. Someone, presumably, who is less insane.
• This would explain Jessica's disappearance and similar symptoms to Tim. She knew that the Operator was returning, and once her master arrived, she fled with him.
• The fact that someone, presumably not the Operator, put the tapes in the same hotel that Jay would end up in could be Totheark's fault, and one of them could have caused him Laser-Guided Amnesia. Whether or not Jessica also was mind-wiped is debatable. Tim really wanted to keep Jay's hands off of the tapes once he found out about them, after all.
• If Jessica ended up being taken by the Operator, it would explain why Totheark seemed to go (even more) insane for a while, before becoming his calmest yet. Tim knew that he had to put his differences with Jay aside to save/avenge Jessica.

This would entail some things to come.

• We would see more Masked Men in the glade where the Operator attacked in Entry 40, or the Red Tower, since they seem to have importance to Totheark.
• Jessica would reappear, or she would at least recieve an origin story.
• Tim would eventually out himself as (a member of) Totheark.
• Slendy would be defeated by their ritual, or at least they would try to do so.

Alex's voice is in ####

Listen to his answering machine message in #40 and compare. Sounds just like that one from the hacked video. Though, not sure what that actually signifies. Totheark has sampled people's voices before. But on the other hand, no way of knowing if Totheark actually posted #### instead of one of the other players.

The Ark is some sort of machine/device/thing only Slendy can use, hence his title of Operator

The Trials in 38 didn't create Slender Man, they summoned him.

Paranoia and fear were running high, as was human brutality. It was the perfect setting to come in and Mind Screw people on a relatively large scale. Situations like this draw him in and empower him, they don't create him. He existed beforehand.

The Slender Man is involved, and The Operator is not him.

It was only clearly stated by Word of God that the...thing we see is not The Slender Man. It is never said that The Slender Man is not somehow part of the story.

The series will end as thus:

Jay and Alex will finally reunite, and the Operator will make itself known to both of them. It will reveal its nature as a fallen spirit/angel sent to protect them from the Masked Ones (Masky and his groupies). It will also reveal that it posted Entry ###### and enttry 37, the first as a plea for assistance, the second as a desperate attempt to prove that it's been watching them from the start and isn't trying to hurt them. The three track down Masky and his friends, running across Brian and Jessica's bodies along the way. Jay and Alex take care of the groupies, and Slenderman gets into a battle with Masky, who pulls a Masky and jumps out of nowhere. Jay and Alex drop the camera and make a break for it. We can still see the feet of the Operator and Masky as they fight. Suddenly, there's a burst of distortion, worse than any ever seen in the series, and then the Operator and Masky are both gone. Jay and Alex return, find the camera, and hypothesize that the two vanished to the Operator's dimension. The final entry will be a trailer for Alex's film, and it seems the two are back to normal. But as the trailer ends, the video tears...

Alex's middle name will be revealed in a future entry

Since the "Alex R. Kralie = ARK" theory is proving impossible to get rid of, the creators will attempt to dispel it by revealing Alex's real middle name. They've done it before, after all; Entry #36 was really little more than a disguised message to the audience to say "Tim's not dead, okay? Don't follow that thought any further; it's too far off-track." Theories are all well and good, especially with a mystery-based series like this, but when a wrong one becomes too prevalent and/or the fandom becomes too convinced of it, it's not out of the question that they'll eventually throw in a purposeful contradiction.

• Word of God already confirms that Alex's middle name doesn't start with R.

Jessica is Alex

Two words: sex change. ^[2]

• Jossed. In Entry 52 Alex and Jessica are in the same building together.

Totheark is Blasky

While it could be plausable that Timasky is totheark, I find it a bit hard to believe that there happened to be two Maskies in the exact same woods at the exact same time without Jay noticing anything. And not to mention that this one seems to want to encourage him to continue whereas Timasky wants to hurt or scare him away. Just like totheark's videos only seem to be taunting him and whoever films it never really seems to want to hurt him, they only want him to know that they're there.

Blasky is Masky/Tim

He's just following the "No White after Labor Day" Rule.

Blasky is Jessica

We've all heard the theory that Jessica is one of the Maskies. But which one? It can't be Masky, that's Tim. Skully came around long before Jessica. But Blasky... Blasky gave back the tape which ended up in a safe in the same hotel where Jessica is. Blasky seems to not want to harm Jay, but just watch him. Thus it would make sense for Blasky to take off the blask and become Jessica, so as to get closer to him without drawing suspicion. She forms a story that sounds suspiciously like his. But Blasky and Masky have... differing opinions. In Entry 33, Timasky found Jessica and attacked her, knowing she was Blasky. She gets away, and Timasky turns to Jay and attacks him instead. Jessica dons the blask again and starts following Jay, while simultaneously trying not to get caught by her masked brethren. This fits in with the "Blasky is totheark" theory above. She posts videos with hidden messaged to help Jay survive against the Operator and Masky/Skully/Whoever-y.

Masky no. 2 is in fact Alex.

In entry #39, we meet a new character who appears to be a new version of Masky. He stands outside J's car while he's sleeping and watches him. In that same entry, J recieves a call from Alex telling him to meet him at the park. J arrives but doesn't find him. Maybe Alex was there all along, but was hiding. Also, in entry #41, after J's close encounter with the Operator and J drops his camera, someone comes along, picks up J's camera and takes it back to J's car. This is where we get our first actual look at new Masky. So either Alex is disgiusing himself to secretly aid J, or he is now under the Operator's control. Another clue that Alex isn't himself is that in entry #35, when the first Masky is revealed to be Tim, Alex grabs the rock and smashes Masky's leg. He might have done that just to stop Masky from attacking his friend, but I have a feeling that the Operator knew that Masky had failed him, if they were working together. So he takes a new associate to help him. The reason why Masky/Tim attacks J in entry # 33 is because he is still trying to prove that he can help the Operator stop J, for whatever reason he wants to. However, Alex might also be helping J, while pretending the help the Operator. In entry #38, J and Alex are walking through the woods. Alex tells J about the methods the townspeople would use to dispose of criminals, tieing them to trees and stretching them out so their limbs were distended and enlongated. Sound familiar? So Alex could be providing subtle hints to J about the Operator's past, as well as possible ways to destroy him once and for all.

• I think this is more or less Jossed as of Entry #42. Alex was in the woods looking for Jay while Jay's camera was being placed in his car. Also he'd have to have a hyper-speed clothes change.
  • I may be remembering wrong, but Alex's car wasn't even in #41, was it? So Alex would have had to park somewhere, put on the outfit, walk into the woods, grab the camera, casually walk out, put the camera in Jay's car, walk back to his car, change clothes, and re-park his car next to Jay's, all while Jay was running scared for his life. Definitely Jossed.
    • Maybe he can teleport? He could have gotten some powers from his possible master. That and it doesn't take long to put on a hoodie. Parking the car is still a problem, but again, teleporting! It could be the Slender-mobile, and the Operator just lent Alex the keys.
      • Although not completely confirmed, this shot Alex filmed certainly says otherwise (Look near the closest tree.)
        • Jossed. Blasky (hoodie Masky) and the actual Masky are both together in Entry 45 while Masky tries to choke Alex. So unless two Alex's exist in the same universe, they're different people.

The Operator is an alien robot

Think about it. An alien with way to much time on his hands starts to search the internet randomly while surveying Earth. He sees the abundance of stick figure cartoons, and decides that this is what humans look like. So he build a recon droid to survey the Earth at ground level using stick figures as a template. The result is a stick-thin being, with no face and elongated limbs. The alien sets his creation down on Earth and lets him loose. This would explain the Operator's tendency to stand still and watch people from a distance. When Alex comes in to make Marble Hornets, the robot becomes fascinated with the project and starts following Alex around, trying to get him to tell him what he's doing. Alex, naturally, is freaked out by the horrible being following him, and...well, we all know the rest.

Totheark is Jessica

She recognised him from watching him in his sleep. Whether she was brainwashed isn't clear.

• This doesn't explain the totheark vids from Season 1. Considering Jessica's only tie to the crew is her roommate Amy, and Amy was only with Alex after he left town, it's incredibly unlikely. Slendy appearing to Alex and Amy happened in the "present" at the end of Season 1, so Jessica wouldn't have had any knowledge of the events on the tape before that.

Jessica is Jessica from Twilight the Musical

I just noticed that they look really similar. And their names are both Jessica.

Brian is going to be a huge Chekhov's Gunman

He is going to come back much later and become really important, and his roles in the earlier entries are epic Foreshadowing.

Brian is Blasky

Blasky is too tall to be Jessica or Tim, and too broad shouldered to be Alex.

Adding to the two entries above, Brian is Blasky who will be revealed to be totheark.

Jessica is to Amy what Jay is to Alex

Jessica is/was Amy's friend and she's looking for the missing Amy and found something. Alex made sure to keep her close to Jay when they came across her which we will see in an upcoming chapter, safety in numbers while he tried something to get the Operator off their backs forever, it did not work.

• Hmm... oddly enough both pairs have initials of "A" and "J"... coincidence? Or foreshadowing?

totheark is a group as opposed to one person.

Recent entries have suggested that Hoody is totheark. Yet previously, it seemed like all evidence was pointing to it being Masky/Tim- his picture in a video, footage of Jay when Masky was the only other one around... but who says totheark is just one person? Perhaps totheark is a codename for a group, consisting of Tim, Hoody, and the other three masked people briefly seen. Tim was in charge of the Youtube account up until his injury and unmasking. Hoody was then sent out to do the legwork until Tim recovered (whereupon he attacked Jay in the hotel) and is currently posting videos of his or her own to continue taunting Jay. Not to mention that one video used the word "we" instead of "I" or "me," which Jay specifically pointed out and commented on as being disturbing. The other masked people all have separate roles in the organization but also occasionally contribute to the Youtube video responses.

Additionally, each of the different masks may actually have some sort of meaning besides just looking creepy, but what exactly I'm not sure.

• Considering Tim has never shown any affinity for video manipulation/computer hacking, totheark could very well at least be a different person than Tim, if not more than one person.

The examples of Idiot Ball in the series are actually directly caused by The Operator.

The Operator subtlely affects the minds of those around him to become increasingly, even dangerously curious, and thus attracts the cast of the series towards himself. Entry #40 is a prime example. It is hinted Rosswood Park is a "home area" of some sort to The Operator, and it is likely his influence near the area is even greater than it might be somewhere else. The Operator causes Jay to want to come into the forest against all common sense, perhaps to try to capture him or examine him closer. However, Jay snaps out of it as he sees The Operator and escapes. This also explains why Jay can seem so stupid at first but then be incredibly Genre Savvy by dropping the camera and running: The Operator was clouding his judgement, but lost his grip on Jay's mind on the critical moment. Other times, like the several trips to the abandoned house from season 1 are most likely resulted by this as well. Even though this time The Operator didn't appear, Masky did. Maybe Masky used The Operator's effect for his advantage or is secretly in league/serves The Operator. The abandoned house seemed like an area The Operator had effected some time in the near past, but had then moved over, perhaps to continue stalking Alex. However, The Operator's effect lingered over the house, causing anomalous properties and making it induce dangerous levels of curiosity.

• That's exactly what this troper believes. After all, Jay's had several severe bouts of amnesia, had his accounts temporarily hijacked several times, and there was the whole "tweetpocalypse" thing. Influencing Jay to come to him in the middle of the forest is not a stretch of logic by any means. His apparent disorientation in #42 is probably him coming out of the effects of the Operator's influence.

In a non-fictional variant of Recursive Canon, Alex was browsing Marble Hornets itself in Entry #26

How did Alex know to send Jay the tape? How did he know Jay had even looked at the old footage, let alone gotten mixed up in all of it and gone on the run? Because Jay, in universe, had been chronicling everything online. Alex wasn't just doing any old thing on the computer in that scene; he was either catching up on Entry #25 or checking Jay's Twitter.

Alex Kralie never existed

He's all in Jay's head, a part of his personality that became its own construct. Everything that "Alex" did was Jay's doing, but he doesn't know that. The footage we're seeing doesn't exist in-universe; the series is a Mockumentary show, and its premise is that it's all shown from the perspective of someone with dissociative identity disorder.

Tim might also be a mental projection, but it could go either way -- feel free to share your own theories on this one. The jury is also out on whether the Operator actually exists or is merely a hallucination, although since DID is thought to be caused by childhood trauma, it's plausible that he is real and that the implications of enttry #37 are true.

The Incurable Cough of Death from being around Slendy is actually just a symptom of him taking control of you.

Mostly based off of Entry 43 (there will be unmarked spoilers henceforth, beware!), but seen in other entries - in Entry 43, Alex meets Slenderman (still no idea why as of this writing), he initially seems panicked (judging solely from the camera movement), collapses coughing, and then - gets up and starts to walk like a zombie towards The Operator. This would explain why the cough is seen with some encounters, and not all (Entry 40 is in recent memory, among others) - because that thing isn't always trying to take control. I suppose the coughing fits are due to Slendy's total alien nature, or something, as posited in several Slendy blogs (Namely The Tutorial in this case, I believe).
A corollary to that would be that the pills we see in Alex's abandoned house (then inhabited by Masky), possibly do something vis a vis the prevention (Or possibly aiding) of this taking over. We know Jay also consumed them without remembering it (E19.5). (Or possibly, when Masky broke into Jay's house, it was just to get his meds(E19)).

Blasky is Todd in the Shadows

Grey hoodie. Wears a black facemask when in public. Bad attitude.

• Um... that makes too much sense. Coupled with the fact that many people believe The Entity to be Slender Man, I think we've got a crossover brewing.
  • My god. Channel Awesome teaming up with the Marble Hornets guys? The Operator is screwed. Next year's anniversary video maybe? Rob Walker has said that the Critic's character growth will continue into next year's special, so what's a better way to grow as a character than fighting a horrifying abomination against all that is holy and right. That and seeing Linkara kicking Masky's ass would be awesome.

Totheark has no signifigance at all.

He's just a fan of the series that wants to make it all the more creepy. As such, Troy decided Sure Why Not, and allowed him to post responses.

• Jossed. Troy has said that he is the one making the totheark videos.

The Operator is the chocolate guy from Spongebob

Alex and J offered him some chocolate in entry 12 (I think it was 12), and he still wants some. It's still unclear if this is Nightmare Retardant or just makes it worse.

The Operator is a mutant!

The Operator symbol is an X in a circle. It couldn't be more obvious! Slendy is obviously out recruiting for Xavier's school for gifted youngsters. This just means that Alex and Jay are also mutants.

The Ark is not related to Noah's Ark.

While the Noah's Ark angle seems to be the angle Everyman HYBRID is going with, I suspect that the reference that Marble Hornets is running with is actually different. In fact, I suspect that the Ark may be referring symbolically to the Ark in Jewish synagogues, where the Torah scrolls are kept or even the Ark of the Covenant.

"Inquiry" was made and uploaded by The Operator himself.

That's right, not even The Operator has all the answers, and he's tired of screwing around. Jay and the others have some kind of significance, something special, that he can't figure out. "WHO ARE YOU"

Slenderman/Operator is Jack Skellington from "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

Think of it. Jack says he scares people every halloween. It never shows him in the action of doing so. And if you compare the images, it's not to far-fetched to assume that Jack can shape-shift somewhat to scare people. Even more-so, Jack's Idea of "Scaring People" vs OUR idea of "Scaring People" could possibly be different. I mean, If you grew up in a town where it was halloween every year, your perceptions could be altered.

On one final note, Slenderman's Messing with the camera could STILL apply to Jack b/c Jack Skellington was never recorded on film in the actual "Nightmare before Christmas" movie. So it's totally possible.

Jay killed Seth, Sarah, Brian, Amy, Jessica, and Alex.

They're all missing in the present, and Jay had a huge period of time between seasons to do anything and conveniently "forget" about it. Jay didn't start Marble Hornets to post the footage, he started Marble Hornets to get help from the internet to get the Operator off his back. The truth is that Jay is a heartless murderer, but he needs the input of other people to deal with the Operator, Masky, and totheark. He disposes of them when they are no longer useful.

Seth, Brian, and Sarah were liabilities from the start, useless for dealing with the situation and possible candidates for Masky and totheark. He killed Sarah and Brian in an unrecorded scene, and stalked Alex and Seth while they were in the burned out building. He knew that the Operator would show up eventually due to the presence of the camera, and used this as a distraction to grab Seth and kill him in a darkened area. Alex was still needed, so Jay left after that. Later, after finding Alex and Amy again, he killed Amy once they became separated during the season break. Jay used this to gain leverage over Alex, whom he suspected to have information he was not divulging about the Operator. At some point after that and before the beginning of the second season, he either got what he wanted out of Alex or got tired of everything and killed him.

Later, he met Jessica (whom he and Alex had met during the seasonal break) at the hotel, and discovered that she had amnesia from some previous encounter (perhaps with the Operator). Jay also feigned amnesia for a while to see if he could coax anything out of her, but later felt that she was too close to remembering the truth and killed her as well (hence why her door is different after the jump cut following him telling her to pack), followed by Jay being assaulted by Masky. The truth? The growing number of Maskys are the restless spirits of people Jay killed, that we know of and don't. Only the original Masky (Tim) is a living person, all the others are ghosts (Brian, Sarah, Seth, and Amy).

• Jossed. In Entry 51 we see what happened to Brian, and it wasn't Jay's doing.

This is not a work of fiction, it's an outbreak

The DVD, the interview, even the character's "real names" are all a front. It only came to me once I read how well-acted Alex's performance has been in the past two entries: he's not acting! The entire purpose of Marble Hornets is not merely a (true) apocalyptic log, but to bring the Operator/Slender Man to a larger audience. And the more people who know about the Slender Man, the more he evolves from meme to myth, the more powerful he becomes. Marble Hornets is a vessel to ensure that he cannot be stopped.

Alex was looking to trap Jessica

Jessica's important for some reason. Maybe because she got away when Slenderman was at the house and now Slenderman's hunting them all down. Alex wasn't looking to make sure Jessica was okay. Maybe he was in control of Slenderman and using the "amy" excuse as a lie to get her comfortable enough to come see him and get captured.

The eyes we see in Inquiry and Memories are from The Rake

Both are from The Slender Man Mythos, both are sources of terror, and honestly, those definitely look like The Rake's eyes.

• The Rake is actually not "From" The Slender Man Mythos. It appears in Everyman HYBRID which is part of the mythos, but The Rake was originally an entirely separate Creepypasta written before Slender Man was invented.

Alex is working with Slendy because he's holding Amy hostage, and subsequently blackmailing Alex

Alex has been acting very suspicious in season 2. He's been incredibly secretive towards Jay - telling him to meet as Rosswood Park rather than just explaining everything upfront. But the real kicker is the end of Entry #43, when he seemingly goes off into the woods and encounters the Operator. He seemingly vanishes, then in Entry #44 returns, calling Jessica to tell her he 'found Amy'. He then scribbles Operator symbols all over his desk, seemingly bringing the Operator to him and vanishing once again. Finally, in Entry #45, he is attacked by Tim and one of the new Maskies, both of whom run away when the Operator seemingly shows up.

Think about it: why would Alex be playing nice with Slendy? Because whatever happened in Entry #43, he somehow did get in contact with Amy, and is now being blackmailed by the Operator. That would explain why he's actively seeking the Operator, as well as why the Operator would have scared off the Maskies: Alex needs to play nice and keep in contact him so he can keep Amy safe. Likewise, the Operator would be protecting Alex from the Maskies because he needs him for some purpose.

The masks are a shoutout to Bioshock

The Splicers in Bioshock wear masks because a part of them are ashamed of how far they've fallen when compared to what htey used to be. Perhaps that's part of why the Maskies wear masks.

Alex is The Operator's Agent, Maskies/Totheark are actually the good guys

Kinda long and unorganized and I'm probably forgetting some details, but bear with me. Lots of overlap with other WMGs on the page, mostly a reinterpretation of events in an attempt explain events of the latest videos

• Totheark is actually a collective group of the "maskies" who have been driven mad by The Operator but have managed to escape his control and are now trying to save others who are on the brink of being swallowed by the sea of madness, by guiding them "to the ark"
• When Jay first met with Tim, Tim was as least helpful and informative as possible in an attempt to stop Jay's quest before it began. And when that didn't work he took his masky persona to try to drive him away from the house, when that still didn't work he began watching Jay as he slept to protect him. Ultimately Tim burned down Jay's apartment as it was no longer safe (Jay's sleepwalking through the door and not appearing on the other side)and Jay needed to get on the move.
• Alex was captured and turned to the dark side soon after the incident with him and Amy
• After going on the move Jay start to feel better, less paranoid, and less gaps in his memory, Tim's plan worked. Until the recently corrupted Alex sends him the tape of him and Amy, which drags Jay back into the mess
• Alex set up Jay to spend the night outside the woods so he would eventually be tempted to enter the woods and have his close encounter, however he did not expect. Alex is not upset with Jay becasue he entered the woods, but rather because he manged to get out.
• Jay is now in too deep for Maskys' Scare tactics to be enough to get him out, so Tim and Blasky have taken to assisting him instead.
• When the maskies manage to capture Alex they do so with the intent of killing him as he is completely lost, but are very slow about it as if they don't have the heart to do it, as opposed to Alex who broke Tim's Leg in an instant. They are then chased off by The Operator's sudden (unseen by us) appearance
• When Alex lures Jay and Jessica up into the loft and threatens Jay with a gun, Masky creeps up behind him (Alex) and attacks, giving Jay and Jessica an opening to escape.

The block of cement recognized Alex and refused to be used against him

The Maskies had a block of cement and a completely defenseless Alex, and they were clearly going to bash his head in with it; why didn't they? Because it was the same cement block, and it still harbored loyalties to Alex, so it stopped them from using it against him. (This theory is now available in fanfic form.)

• The idea that a block of cement is sentient made me laugh really hard. You totally owe me a new monitor.

The "Panda face" from Entry #22 is Masky #2 from Entry #45

Golly, that sure is a lot of pound signs.

Alex lost his camera sometime prior to Entry #26

Hoody/Blasky returned it like he did Jay's in Entry #40.

Regarding the pills

This theory is courtesy of Villainess1 on Youtube, from a comment on "Broadcast".

"I know what those mysterious pills are... Ambien. People do some crazy shit on that stuff and have no recollection of it the next day. Slenderman is probably a rep for the drug company that makes it (hence the suit). As for TTA's weird, cryptic messages... Ever been on Ambien and try to write an email or text someone? That's pretty much the result."

Alex and Slendy are an item

Why else do you think he likes popping in and out of Alex's room? It all makes sense now.

1.) Tim didn't hurt Jay when he teleported into Jay's bedroom because he was trying it out for himself. That's where Jay disappeared to, it was a date. Jay just claims he can't remember because he doesn't want to admit that just for a second he dug a guy that liked watching him sleep. It made him feel like Bella Swan.

2.) That's also why Slendy popped up so fast after Jay literally came out of the closet in episode 46. He didn't want Jay flirting with his boyfriend.

Alex and Operator became friends

In Entry 44, Operator and Alex became friends over ice cream and David Lynch-style mind fucks. Alex just pretends he was not around in later entries because he wants to look like a badass infront of the camera.

Alex doesn't run from Slendy because he's too busy beating the crap out of him

With his bare hands.

• • Everyman HYBRID is over here...

• • • Evan uses a bat and a knife in EH. Alex doesn't need a knife or a bat.

The Operator wants to become human, or further still, become God.

Just a random thought I had today after watching 46 and reading this page. One joke WMG states that Alex and Slendy are in a relationship, but what if our tall antagonist wants Alex's body in a different- and more literal- way? Let's go back to the entry where Alex talks about the executions/sacrifices in the forest. Lots of people think Slendy comprised his current form off what he thought humans looked like based on the remains of the executed. Now, this is kind of out there, but let's say the Operator has decided humanity is too flawed to keep around and wants to create a new, improved race- one with his powers and all under his control. Basically, he took the idea of humans being sacrificed to him to heart and now believes he is a god- in addition, he intends to do what the Christian God did and begin a new species with two individuals. In this case, Alex represents Adam. The Operator had him picked out for a long time to be the first of this new species, and over time has slowly affected his mind and sanity in order to open a door to let himself in. That's why Alex has had trouble noticing Slendy at times, because the abomination is gaining a firmer hold. Alex coughing up blood is a result of the physical changes that are already happening unbeknownst to him.

The "Eve" of this scenario could be either Jessica or Amy, not sure which. On the one hand, Jessica has all the symptoms of Slender-sickness^[3], but on the other hand Amy already had a romantic connection to Alex and has been absent since 26. Or Slendy is crazy prepared and left his options open so he could go with just about anyone.

The Masked Men could, given their apparent powers, be early tests Slendy ran to determine what he could do to alter his new race. Either they're his "angels" of sorts (messengers and soldiers) or are their own rogue group, but either way they don't much like Alex for being the golden boy, hence their ambush in 45. Whether they just wanted to scare him or fully intended to murder him, the Operator showing up scared them off lest they incur his wrath. As for how the masks fit into this, no idea.

Finally, the Ark that has been on the edges of this story all the time is either something that can reverse or complete the transformation Slendy inflicts on his victims, or it's supposed to be a reference to the biblical Ark and protect the first two of the new order (much as Noah's carried two of every animal). How does Jay fit into all this? I dunno, but if anything, should the Operator see himself as parallel to the Christian God he might view Jay as being the devil. (Regardless, I'd just like to throw in that I think Jay's unrevealed last name must have some significance even if it means nothing to this theory).

Brian is one of the Masks.

Didn't Tim say that he knew Alex because Alex lived near Brian? I think that Brian was watching Alex for signs of Slendernapping, and called in his ole buddy Tim to help when things started getting somewhat serious.

Tim is still a hero, despite trying to kill Alex.

For all we know, Alex is a puppet of the Operator. He could be so far gone that the Alex we know no longer exists. Chalk it up to I Did What I Had to Do.

• Possibly confirmed. Alex has been shown to at least be working in the Operator's interests, and he's threatened Jay already (after which Masky actually saved the day).

Slender Man is lonely and trying to create a family.

After putting enough influence onto any person Slender Man can make them transform. The Slender Sickness is the first signs of this; then they choose their new “face” because their human one doesn’t feel right anymore, they start wearing the same clothes because they are the only things that feel comfortable (or they just don’t care about fashion, keeping clean). After enough time they begin the proper transformation into Slendies themselves, gaining all of his powers in the process. As we have seen in Entry 19, Masky has started to effect the tapes.

We already know he has Tim, not to mention the other unnamed masks, but he wants Alex to be the next. Masky disagrees, though, and would prefer to have Jay as a younger brother in the happy family.

• • OR the maskies have been "adopted" and will remain his partially human "Slendy-babies" who can run around and do his bidding, using their human appearances to lure dinner/people home to the Slendycave.
  • Recent Entries suggest that the Maskies are actually working AGAINST Alex and Slenderman.

The Maskies are members of The Soulless.

They continued to live, even if (I say if due to the series not being over yet) the Miracle ended, and they've been driven mad. Encountering Slendy may not have helped either.

J is Totheark

His mind has taken a strain on his encounters with the Operator, and has forced a split personality. The black outs in memory he has is not from the Operator, but his personality switching. As we can see J is more competent (in some ways) in what we see of the moments he doesn't remember. His totheark personality knows it is a split, and uses the information it finds to keep J safe and alive when he recedes back into the depths of J's mind. The distortions are either the Operator trying to prevent the information from properly reaching J or Totheark is genuinely insane and J is on his way to becoming a Masky along with Alex. Common in serious cases of split personalities one personality will adopt a quality to create it's own identity, hence the masks.

The coughing is a sign of the trauma the switching in personalities is doing on the body, and is a sign of a personality switch coming or going. The Operator has no real physical form, and is using physical entities to do his busy work by addling their minds and using their insane or heavily confused state and the power of suggestion to have them carry out his plan, whatever it may be. Alex is the last to count being converted it seems, and J is now completely on his own and on his way to the depths of the madhouse.

The series is a metaphor for dealing with Trauma

It's past midnight, so bear with me here. Slendy is a representation of the Trauma. It haunts people, it makes them sick, it makes them repress memories, and take medicine, and cut others off. The maskies...I don't know. Perhaps they are people that want to 'help' but fail at doing so and therefore make it worse. Maybe they represent people that have succombed to the trauma.

That guy in the park is behind everything!

We all remember this fellow, yes? Er, you know, the guy Jay encountered in Entry 31, in Rosswood Park? How seemingly unimportant he was, just hanging out, listening to his iPod? LIES! He is, in fact, one of the Operator's "slaves," and was secretly observing Jay for his master's insidious and unknown purpose, waiting for the moment to strike. And strike he did, for in the next entry, what happened? Jessica vanished mysteriously! Coincidence? Doubtful!

Or if not that, he is To The Ark himself, or one of the masked people, possibly their leader, watching and following Jay as always. Only this time, appearing casual.

• AND he was wearing a dark-colored hoodie, which Blasky is wearing...

Alex is the main villain of the series, TOTHEARK and the maskies are the good guys, but they are all being fucked with by the operator for his own amusement who has an unknown amount of influence on each character

Ok this is going to be a very long one but bear with me.

We can see that Alex was acting highly unstable throughout the series, and has shown an extremely violent streak, but we have always assumed that this was just an effect of the Operator. However we have not seen the increasingly hostile, angry and otherwise paranoid behavior in Jay, Jessica, or any other set member to anywhere near the same extent aside from Maskie (which i will get back to later). While it is possible that this is simply due to Alex's greater "exposure" (which if Alex's comment in #22 of Jay being "gone" indicates that Jay was previously exposed to the Operator is in itself false), maybe there is another factor at play which explains this.

The maskies themselves, while terrifying have not yet shown any attempt to harm Jay, only to harm Alex, and this is despite having the means and opportunity to do so on numerous occasions. In fact if TOTHEARK is indeed related to them, then they may indeed have been trying to warn him or otherwise scare him off, and when Jay encounters them they are only shown to chase him away, or to watch him sleep. However we can also see they have a special dislike for Alex, who himself is extremely hostile towards them, despite the lack of evidence they were doing the same to him.

As for the Operator, Alex is both terrified of, and obsessed with him, seeking him out one day, and screaming at Jay for "leading him" to his apartment the next. the entity also terrifies the maskies who stop their attempt to kill Alex when he appears nearby. Jay himself is terrified of the operator, but never seems to actively seek him out (until #40, but even then he was there on Alex's orders).

In my opinion, the Operator himself, while the key factor in events, is little but a red herring to the actual story, aimed to distract Jay (and the by proxy the audience) from what is really going on.

My theory is that Alex is a serial killer, who murdered the Marble hornets cast and crew (hence the title of the series being Marble Hornets, as it is the story of what happened to the people making the film) one by one in the Forest, and later the old factory we saw in #22 and other entries. in #22 Seth wasn't helping Alex hunt the Operator, Alex had lured him down there to his "killing ground" as shown by the blood spattered everywhere, and killed him as he was facing the other way. He also killed Amy after #26 (hence his lies to Jay and Jessica that his actions are to try and find her) and possibly others if totheark's "classified" message referencing what he did to "the twins" is anything to go on.

The maskies who are Tim, the guy in the black mask and possibly (if they are not the same) the guy in the "skull mask" glimpsed in entry 26, eventually found this out during his spree (which itself infers the other maskies are survivors of, or related to the Marble Hornets crew) and are trying to stop him. Their attempts to scare Jay off, their watching him in his sleep, have all been (in their twisted minds) to protect him from Alex, and they have also been doing the same for Jessica. the TOTHEARK video "version" gives Jay the location of a tape showing Alex's murder of Seth, and the other videos have been trying to alert him to who Alex is.

As for Alex, they have been tracking him down since the murders, and thanks to him getting in contact with Jay again, they now know where he is, and began to hunt him down and try to kill him. All of which while horrific would be fairly mundane had these events not been complicated by the Operator.

Amid these events, "the Operator" came into play. Alex saw him when he was committing his crimes (Alex's reason for seeking him in #2 because the operator "scared his dog" just seems a little off), or was already being stalked by him (as #37 would indicate), and is thus terrified of him both because of him being well... the operator, and because it saw what he did, but also obsessed with him as the operator reminds him of what he did, both exiting him and filling him with guilt.

The operator in turn became (or always was) extremely interested in Alex, and thus has been stalking him and watching his crimes. To date all of his appearances have been in places where Alex has either killed someone, or is about to. The evidence for this is that all of his appearances have been in either remote or secluded areas like under bridges, alleyways, derelict structures, deep forest, or in buildings Alex lives in, which are thus extremely convenient areas to kill, and dispose of bodies. Also in entry 46 he appeared just as Alex was getting seriously pissed off with Jay, or in 26 when he seemed to be getting unduly irritated with Amy for playing with his camera, possibly in anticipation of Alex snapping again. Possibly Alex discovered the Operator when revisiting his crime scenes (which is a noted habit of serial killers like Ted Bundy), and realized after seeing him in so many of these places that it was following him.

It is also possible that he has been manipulating the events for his own reasons like removing memories of important events from characters apart from Alex in order to ensure they do not find out his crimes until he has done this so many times, they build up a resistance to this, but go insane and become a Maskie instead. on this note if he has been stalking Alex his whole life, he may indeed be the cause of his psychosis.

the operator toyed with the the Maskies in this manner while they were investigating the disappearances of their friends, and due to this they are driven into insane fury when thinking about Alex (see Tim's interview and his behavior when Alex is mentioned, as opposed to instantly fleeing when the Operator is referenced). Alex in turn both hates and fears the maskies as they know what he did. When Jay first encountered one (or more possibly) in Brian's house, they were trying to find Alex themselves, and became obsessed with Jay both to protect him, and to try and access Alex through him.

As for Jay, when he got the tapes from Alex (who wanted to dispose of evidence and to escape the guilt of his crimes which is why he told Jay to never mention them again), he was just another bystander during Alex's crimes, whose mind was messed with by the operator into amnesia. However both the Maskies and Alex have been using him for their own ends, the Maskies (as mentioned earlier) to get to Alex, and Alex to appease the operator by giving him Jay as a "sacrifice" (as he believes the story he told Jay in #38 about his origin), which is shown by Alex making Jay go to areas Alex is sure he will appear. the operator however remains fixated on Alex, which serves both to terrify him into more extreme behavior and actions, and to also protect him from the maskies who themselves are terrified of him.

However, as of #47 Jay has finally realized that Alex has been lying to him the whole time, and not just that but lying about the safety of someone Alex supposedly deeply cares for. Now I predict Jay will begin to take a much deeper look into Alex's actions... by stalking him in the vein of both the Maskies and the Operator.

either way if season 2 is the same length as season 1, we are drawing nearer to the end of the story.

• Uh.... disregarding the novel above, Troy Wagner has said that there will be a third and final season, and that the number of videos remaining in S2 is "not a double digit."
• In light of #49, i would like to amend my above WMG to guess that the operator also disposes of every body Alex leaves behind, and that the other areas we have seen splatted with blood has been the site of this.

Alex's film crew have been Maskies before the production of Marble Hornets began, and The Operator is their enemy

This ties in with the "Operator is a good guy/guardian" theory. Every person in Alex's group was a member of a cult/organization who went on the project with sinister intentions for Alex, either for recruitment or worse. What they didn't count on, however, was The Operator, a powerful supernatural being who is watching over and protecting Alex, and apparently has been since his youth. Once filming begins, the crew begins to spy on and intimidate Alex under the guise of the Maskies, either searching for an opportune time to kill him, or frightening him to the point of madness and then recruiting him for their ultimate goal. Alex, seeing the strange events on his tapes, begins to investigate and slowly descend into insanity, just as the Maskies wanted. However, The Operator is wise to their plans, and begins to kill/vaporize/ hold at bay the group members one by one, while still leaving Alex unharmed. Eventually, The remaining Maskies retreat and go into hiding, while Alex gives up on the project and seeks to destroy the footage he's collected, never to speak of it again. And so, the Operator can return to his normal duty of watching Alex quietly from afar.

Of course, then Jay gets a little too curious.....

With Jay now reviewing the tapes and foolishly posting them on the internet for all to see, the remaining Maskies are now either working to silence Jay and keep their organization a secret, or have found another important individual ripe brainwashing. The Operator now has to keep watch over Jay and keep him safe from the Maskies as well. Unfortunately, this means keeping watch over two people, as the videos have since revealed Alex's current whereabouts and put him on the run once again, meaning he can't protect them both at the same time. The Maskies are using this to their advantage; attacking one while The Operator is looking at the other. The Operator is doing all he can to make them stop their research, from scare tactics to massive memory erasal, but their driving curiosity and the Maskie's efforts keep them going. Which leads into....

totheark is The Operator

The Operator cannot physically communicate with Jay, for one reason or another. As such, he is trying to warn him of the dangers he's walking into by replying to most of his videos with a psychically created video of his own. Of course, since the Operator's thought process is probably WAY different from ours, the videos he makes cannot be as easily understood by us. The crossed-out O symbol isn't a cultist banner. It's a signature, a calling card, a way to let you know that it's HIM talking. Also, I don't think it's explicitly stated the it was totheark who posted Entry ####, so I'm led to believe that it was made by the Maskies, directed not to Jay, but to the ever-watchful Operator as a challenge. They will wait for him no more, his absolute control is being taken from him, and their attack on Jay will begin...

• I disagree that the Operator is non-malevolent enough to be warning him, but... Thank you!! I couldn't believe I had to scroll down THIS FAR for someone to have come up with this theory. We have no basis for believing totheark is the masked figure in Jay's room other than his own speculation, which is based on next to nothing. There's nothing to tie it or its entries to any of the characters in the series. And it talks about watching you all the time, which the operator does... and "Exit" is the camera standing nearly still. These "videos" are totally the attempt of an Eldritch Abomination to make us understand how it sees the world.

The Operator needs the twenty dollars for his victims fund.

Slenderman likes to keep his victims alive to feed off their fear but they also need to eat, need a place to stay for the night and a way to get from hideout to hideout. So he panhandles to get the money needed for this.

== Entry #### wasn't directed at Alex or Jay, it was directed at Tim == The footage is of Tim the actor in Alex's Marble Hornets getting into character. Tim's masked man routine was a minor but irritating monkey wrench into Totheark's plans that TTA tolerated so much of Tim's antics distracting from the war at hand. Tim, still affected by whatever happened at the collapse of Alex's film took this as Jay threatening to keep prying open that cursed Pandora's box and may have been contacted or forced to join TTA in hopes of stopping history from repeating itself.

"The Ark" is the Genesis Ark

Or a similar piece of Time Lord technology. Inside, is either The Operator's imprisoned race, or the Eldritch Abomination that Slendy is part of. He is called "The Operator" because he's the only one who can properly use it.

Alex is not aware of his own creepy behavior

Slender Man is dicking around with his head, but not in a way a simple as inducing a full Face Heel Turn. When Alex asked Jay for help, it was genuine, and when he's less-than-impressed by the mind-bogglingly stupid things Jay does, the same. However, he has no memory of knowledge of such incidents as breaking Tim's leg, casually narrating the insanely creepy history of the Lost Woods, or his recent close encounters with the Operator, and consequently believes that all of Jay's frustration and anger at him is completely unjustified. In Entry #47, he doesn't answer Jay's question because he actually doesn't hear it, and isn't consciously aware of his physically violent actions, either.

Totheark's identity

Assuming that enttry 37 was posted by totheark. Start by removing 37 and putting together both the title and the caption. You are left with "enttry memories". Now remove every letter that was in "totheark". You are left with "ny memis" Now rearrange the letters. "NY Seimem" Remove half of each of the m's in Seimem and you're left with "(NN) NY Seinen". Now we can put all the pieces together. NY, like, New York, like the state. THE STATE IN THE UNITED STATES. Naota Nandaba, a character on a SEINEN series, has a brother who WENT TO THE UNITED STATES. Naota Nandaba is totheark.

Jay made a bet with Slenderman

But he didn't have the money and is currently having money troubles. Jessica is also having money troubles and made a bet with Slendy. Which in hindsight wasn't a brilliant idea for either of them to do. Which is probably why Jay owes him 20 dollars and Slendy is unfortunately the type to harass people to the point of insanity.

Jay killed Alex

Due to Entry 48's information, I'm guessing that Jay went to the tunnel to see what was there, and found Alex waiting for him. They fought and Jay killed him in self defense. That's what the blood and torn clothing was in the tunnel and that's how he got Alex's tapes and hard drive because they were in the camera bag. And the key is to a storage place or something where he hid Alex's body.

• Jossed. We've discovered who the clothing actually belongs to and later tapes (taking place after the tunnel) show Alex to be very much alive. We also know where the key opens, and it's not a storage unit.

The length of this page is directly proportional to The Operator's power.

The more we think about him, the more real he is. Hence, all this thinking about him makes him stronger than ever.

Alex has been dead for awhile now.

In Entry 49, we will learn that Alex was killed in the tunnel by Jay. After he kills Alex, Jay is confronted by the Operator and subsequently loses his memories. Since Jay won't have any more videos from his seven-month amnesia period to post, Entry 50 will be set in the present day.

• Jossed, Alex wasn't killed, he murdered someone.

This whole thing has happened before...

The characters in Marble Hornets the student film all have the same names in Marble Hornets the web series. Brian plays a character named Brian, Tim plays Tim, and Sarah plays Sarah, etc. Back when they were all in high school the group of friends accidentally woke up/summoned The Operator. Brian moved away and it all stopped. Years later, Brian came back but no one could remember anything. (Or alternately, Brian doesn't even remember leaving.)

One day, Alex gets an idea for a crappy movie about a guy named Brian who moves away and comes back home. Everyone starts filming it again. They go to all their old haunts, all the places they went back when they first caught the Operator's attention. At one point Alex mentions Sarah's "hunting camp." What if a camping trip in the woods is how they awoke him? Now that they're all back together and basically filming what happened, ole Slenderpuss is back.

What the Operator did with

...the body of the murdered man in #49. The Operator appears over it, slends around for a bit, and it disappears with him. What did he need it for? He makes his minions out of them. The masked men? All reanimated dead. Tim's coughing fit in that one chronologically-early entry? Yeah, we saw him dying. And the pills are what make them stay moving.

• Jossed. Tim was seen alive and acting normal in present day during Entry #51. Plus, Interview With Tim.
  • Ahem. Read the word reanimated there. Especially if they're under the Operator's control, that would explain their normal mannerisms in "everyday" mode.

One way or another, Alex will be dead by the end of the series

Committing homicide served as a sanity event horizon of sorts, completely removing the possibility that he might eventually realize how he's been acting and snap out of it. The best foreseeable fate for him is a Dying as Yourself scene.

The thing Alex tries to show Jay at the end of Entry #38

Was the remains of the man he killed. The Operator was doing something with the body.

The Operator is dying.

The Operator is immortal, but his body is not. He survives by moving his conciousness into the body of a Human. To make his chosen subject more open to his takeover, he haunts them, causing paranoia and anger within them. His previous subject was a criminal, and got sentenced to being strung on the trees, which is why he has elongated limbs and a connection to forests- he took over the body in the few moments before death and broke free of his bonds. He is haunting Alex in order to cause him to go down the same path of anger, and is succeeding, as shown by Entry #49. His lack of a face? He erases the face of the person as he takes them over to sever all ties with their previous incarnation, leaving only The Operator.

Brian is the person who Alex killed.

Jay says he doesn't recognize him, but it's not entirely out of the question that he forgot what Brian looked like or that Brian changed his appearance.

• You can see his face close up if you pause the video, it's not someone we've seen before.

Masky is actually a good guy.

He's simply trying to protect J. As seen in Entry #49, Alex has fits of rage and violence, which caused him to murder a completely random stranger who just so happened to walk by. In the next entry (50), J is going to most likely be meeting up with Alex at the park again. Alex will attempt to kill J, but Masky will pull a Big Damn Heroes moment!

• • Confirmed! Although it happened in Entry 52 and it's still not known if he really is on Jay's side.

The bearded guy wasn't just a random dude.

It was Hoody. Hoody is the good cop to Masky's bad cop and that extends to his 'civilian' personality as well. Alex was unaware of this but Tim will reveal this to Jay when they meet again in the present day. The 'twins' alluded to in the TTA video wasn't Hoody and Masky, it was Jay and Jessica (who may or may not be watching the MH youtube channel, who are in the same boat so to speak; against the operator/Alex without any help and lost memories).

• Or Blasky, who definitely knows the area - in #41 he manages to beat J back to the car park after his run-in with the Operator in the clearing when he had a 15 minute head start. It also explains how he managed to turn up so quickly at the tunnel after J saw him at the car park (if we assume it took J 5 minutes to get back to the car in a panicked run, bearded man only has 10 minutes to get to the same spot at walking speed if we take him to be an innocent bystander). Basically, this works too well to not be true.
  • The bearded guy wasn't in Entry 41- he was in 31. There's no evidence that he was around in 41.

The tunnels in conjunction with the operator symbol are what lets Slendy teleport.

Slendy's been known to travel distances inhumanly fast. I don't think he has the power to just poof anywhere he wants, however. First of all, the tunnel from the pump room in Entry #23 could lead to a variety of places around the town. That's why he can warp around the woods, because several small holes like the one in Entry #21 lead out from there, and why he can warp into the tunnel in 29 and 49. It must lead from there. Furthermore, the operator symbol has often been theorized as a sort of summoning circle for slendy. I propose, however that it's an invitation rather than a compulsion. That's why slendy has to walk into Alex's house near the beginning of the series but could teleport there in 44.

Much like in Star Wars, fear and anger lead to The Dark Side.

It is commonly believed that fear attracts the Operator and makes you weaker for his mindfuck. Now, where does anger come into play? In a few recent entries, we have seen Alex going Ax Crazy (mainly 45 and 49). In 45, when he yells angrily at the two maskies his voice is distorted. In entry 49, after killing the beard guy, Alex walks past the camera that is laying on the ground a few times. When he does this, the audio of the camera is once again distorted. Distortions like these is usually associated with the Operator and the Maskies, and both of these times Alex was angry at something. Under normal circumstances he obviously doesn't cause distortions, so his state of mind most likely has something to do with it. Whenever Alex gets angry, he gets dragged to The Dark Side a little more, which means he causes slendistortion on his own cameras. Alex is slowly turning into something that's not human anymore.

The Operator is a Silent

He's just a deformed one. It would explain the memory loss. Maybe he's following around Alex and Jay because the Silence won't accept him, and he just wants friends.

• This really does work strangely well...except that Doctor Who episode came out after the start of Marble Hornets.

The reson why Alex is stalked by The Operator...

...is because he happened to be born exactly on April 4th 4:04 PM (or AM since that would be 4:04 on the 24 hour scale also). Four is a signifigant number to The Operator, and simply being born at the wrong time ensured that he would be present in Alex's life since he was born.

• • Since repeated number sequences are important throughout the Mythos, it may be that anyone born on a single-digit heavy time (1:11 AM on the first of January, for instance, or the 5th of March at 5:55) might be more likely to attract the Operator.
    • Noah from Tribe Twelve was born on November 11th, 11-11.

The Operator is an Alien.

Please, Internet Gods, don't let this be true. I hate aliens. Not from a fear standpoint. From a "Shut up, Spielberg, no one cares." standpoint.

Alex didn't think Beardy was Jay.

He thought Beardy was one of the maskies. The maskies have been stalking him for quite a time, and he has attempted to kill Tim by bashing his head in with a rock before - he even used the exact same method to finish off Beardy. Since in Entry 50 Alex didn't try to kill Jay in the woods, he has no real intention to kill Jay, only the maskies.

Hoody is dead.

This could explain Masky's vendetta against Alex. In entry 51/52, Hoodblaski will be killed by Alex. This could also explain Extraction. One of the biggests points of that video is that it's just Tim and the message "How much do you hate? It is not enough." No sign of Hoody anywhere. It would also explain "The twins, do you know what he did?" and the focus on Hoody in Classified.

• Jossed, partially. Entries 51 and 52 didn't shown anything involving Blasky/Hoody.

The Operator is like an anglerfish.

The Operator looks like some weird parody of a human being, moves oddly, can appear and disappear seemingly at will, makes no obvious motions, and yet can affect things seemingly instantaneously. What if the thing we see, the Operator, is just part of the whole picture? Being an Eldritch Abomination, it's hardly inconceivable for the greater part of it to exist in dimensions we can't see unaided. So, what if the tall faceless guy in the suit is analogous to the part of a lure for an anglerfish? Instead of getting people to come towards it by emitting light, its purpose is to look enough like a person to lure people close enough to distort their minds, leaving them confused, acting unpredictably, and ultimately easy prey for the main body...or parasitizing them, turning them into food gatherers like Alex.

• • This makes things a lot scarier... It's bad enough thinking that the Operator is the Big Bad, I don't want him to be bait.

Slendy possessed Alex when he was a kid.

In Entry 51 we see Alex "sacrificing" people to Slendy back when he was filming Marble Hornets (the student film). Yet at that time Alex wasn't as creepy and, well, evil as he is today. We've also seen proof that Slendy has been around Alex since he was a kid. Slendy possessed Alex when he was a kid, creating a second, possessed personality that surfaces whenever Slendy comes near him. Slendy can also implant subconcious desires like "go to abandoned building, bring your friend with you" in his mind through this link. During the second season, the "possessed Alex" has simply started merging with the "normal Alex", creating the mess we have now. In the end, the possessed Alex might overthrown the normal Alex completely.

The Operator is only after Alex

Entry 51 shows us that Tim was kept in the abandoned building and Brian was left there too. Alex hasn't killed either of them, but The Operator, realising they're not Alex, has corrupted their minds instead of killing them and sent them after Alex too - as Maskies, they're Renfields of a sort. Perhaps The Operator doesn't want to kill Alex, but has some special link to him - during Alex's birthday as a child, he somehow brought The Operator into our dimension, and The Operator wants to go home (sort of like The Watcher in The Woods conclusion). The Maskies are trying to capture Alex to bring him to The Operator, and have started attacking Jay once they realised he was trying to help Alex - note that when Alex and Jay had their falling out, Masky!Tim stopped directly attacking Jay - Entry 50 has him running away instead of attacking. But in their state of mind, their also terrified of The Operator because of what he did to them, hence why they run away from him in the woods, and maybe even why Tim attacked Jay in entry #18 after he picked up the doll. Also, The Operator has a limited amount of energy in each attack - in entry 51, he went after Alex who ran, but exhausted his energy in corrupting Brian (which conveniently leaves him unconscious).

To explain Alex's creepiness, he's cottoned on to something and realises he's in serious danger - he mistakenly killed the guy in entry 49 and left his body for The Operator as a decoy, but he hasn't killed anyone else. He's not actually evil, but he is doing questionable things to keep himself safe. He's not necessarily out to endanger Jay, but he is willing to sacrifice Jay if needs be. He waits in the woods when Jay says he's leaving, because he figures that Jay being on his own would be a decoy for The Operator if needs be.

The Operator was the doctor who owned the burned-down building.

What is an operator? A type of doctor. It also explains the connection between Mr. Hombre Alto and fire.

• Actually an operator is someone who operates machinery or equipment. A doctor who operates on people is called a surgeon.

Totheark is multiple people, and all those people are former victims of Slendy and Alex.

All the masked men in the series so far are members of the totheark crew. They were all people (mostly former MH crew) who got shafted by Alex. This is supported by Entry #51, where we're shown that Tim faced this fate and we know that he later reappeared as Masky. The Operator drove the people subjected to this "treatment" insane or nearly insane, explaining why totheark's content is so Mind Screwy. The Masks are either their way of identifying each other while hiding their true identity, or perhaps even a defensive measure against The Operator and the creeping insanity induced by him. Now the masked people are working to stop Alex and Slendy, as supported by Masky's recent actions, especially in Entry #52.

Alex was killed in Entry #52.

So far, there haven't been any red herrings in the series. They wouldn't have included the gunshot if it were just a harmless misfire into the air, and we know Tim is alive...

• Doesn't mean they can't put in red herrings now. And besides, we were never encouraged to think someone got shot, we only hear the sound. Oh, and what about the first time we see Alex going at someone with a rock? A lot of people thought Tim was dead even though we'd already seen him in the present day.
  • Well, we know Alex had been watching the entries. Entry #27 reveals where Jay is (or at least that he's still in the Rosswood Park area). Alex had been living in the area for four years and could probably have found the place after a bit of searching. Don't you think he would have come after Jay the minute he saw it?

In Entry #52, J didn't "charge at" The Operator

He was being physically drawn in by it. Meaning either forcibly magnetized by its powers or one of its powers is telekinesis of some sort, then subsequently thrown around Jessica's hotel room. We already know it can teleport, so why not?

Entry #52 was a subtle way to tie other Slender Series (Everyman HYBRID, Tribe Twelve, ect) into the same canon as Marble Hornets

Alex's motivation for wanting to kill Jay includes the fact that he posted the tapes on Youtube. Association with Marble Hornets in any fashion is a draw for the Operator (even to the point of using a camera that had once been used to film Marble Hornets). And not long after Jay begins posting the entries, we start seeing other stories about the Slender Man.

• I would agree as far as any series that strictly mentions Marble Hornets goes. For Example: Everyman HYBRID sees Marble Hornets, decides to dress someone up as Slenderman and stick him in the back of some workout videos, their troubles begin. Which means technically Jay is responsible for THEIR entire plight. If you add into that the delicacies of how each other series that ties in to EMH has to be in the same universe/realm as Marble Hornets (even if Troy and Joseph don't wanna do a crossover with them because they wanna be a stand-alone series) - Tribe Twelve, and Compile Truth just to name a couple, and that's already at least a dozen people that Jay screwed up just because he went "Hm... You know what I should do with these videos that have a faceless abomination on them? POST THEM TO YOUTUBE. Think of the internet fame I could have!"

Tim got "fired" from being a masky

It seems that the whole reason Slendy had the maskies was to get Alex, right? After Tim got the sneak attack on Alex, he could have very will beaten him and brought him to Slendy meaning he would no longer need the maskies, and could let them go back to be normal people.

After saving Jay and Jessica, Masky tried to feed Alex to the Operator but unknowingly failed

After Jay and Jessica escaped, Masky was able to wrestle the gun away from Alex, and then shot him in the leg (in an echo back to Alex breaking his own leg). After this happened he abandoned him in the mill to be taken by the Operator in revenge for Alex presumably doing the same to him (as hinted in #51), and to his friends.

However, as the operator is not interested in taking Alex (permanently that is), Alex was able to escape the mill (possibly even with the Operator's aid), though is now completely insane, and in the next season will act as a darker counterpart to the Maskies/Totheark as he tries to get revenge on Jay and Tim, who are also trying to hunt him down.

The Slender Man is Alex in a suit

Jay knows where the "noentry" footage came from, but didn't upload it.

Perhaps because he was too disturbed by it and wants to forget it happened, or because it was too incriminating.

The blood on Alex's face in earlier entries was from one of his victims

It'd be a nice callback if it belonged to Brian.

James Rolfe is involved somehow.

After all, he'd rather bite a killer shark before he takes more animals to the ark.

Jay will go the same way as Alex.

That is, dangerously insane. At the height of his frustration with Alex, and with his whole situation in general, he was enraged enough to attack the Operator. Jay is a confirmed introvert who clearly doesn't prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around...but in the seven months he doesn't remember, he grew increasingly assertive and, dare I say it, angry. This isn't a case of "breaking out of his shell". His frustration with Alex was just the beginning. He's becoming volatile, and fast.

Of course, the memory reset probably put the process on hold, but there's always the chance that something in his season three experiences will jump-start it right back up...

Masky/Tim is in fact a robot

Cuz last night I had a dream about a person who was a robot, and upon awakening I realized that its face looked like Tim's mask. So in Season 3 he will turn out to be a cyborg or human-disguised machine.

The Operator is an interdimensional film critic who hated Marble Hornets.

I mean, let's face it, Alex's film looked like a generic angsty college student art film. The Operator can see the future, and knew that Alex was going to try to make this awful movie, and started stalking him from childhood on to make sure that it would never be made. It also foresaw that the ensuing footage would make a much better internet horror series.

• Alternatively, the Operator could be be the ghost of Gene Siskel. They're both tall and slim, bald, and know how to dress sharply.

Slendy has sex with Alex and Jay

That's why the videos are called "Entry #13" etc. As in "entry".

• CANNOT UNSEE

Jay killed the Operator

In Entry #52, when Jay rushed the Operator, he actually managed to kill it; turns out it's not that hard if you can overcome the coughing and urge to flee. The Operator hasn't yet been seen in any videos set after that point, has it? Jay's unusually severe memory loss following the tussle is a result of the Operator, panicking, throwing everything he's got at his attacker, but it just couldn't take effect before Jay pounded in his not-a-face.

• It's strongly implied that Slendy's hanging around in Jessica's room when Jay is talking to her through the doorway. Word of God from the DVD commentary confirms this.

The filming of Marble Hornets was a trap.

Horrible, horrible thought on re-watching this series after the end of season 2: what if Alex was never really making a movie? It would account for the thrown-together script, the lame directing, the poor choice in actors, and the general lack of enthusiasm he exhibits even in early videos where he seems normal. Alex was already being used by the Operator, though he may not have been fully aware of it, and was compelled to make a movie - any kind of movie - as a way to lure people in for the Operator to devour/recruit. His filming it would enable the trap to continue when people viewed it. Even his insistence that the tapes be burned was feigned; how could a film-student friend not want to watch your tapes when you put it like that?

Jay is not special nor is his survival an accident.

Alex filmed the end of entry #23 as an alibi in case the police came looking for any of the actors. He'd show it to them as well as selected clips from his film in hopes of the worst thing happening to him being a few years in a madhouse.

However, Alex slowly came to learn that victims of the Operator are slowly erased from memory of those who knew them (unless they have contact with the Operator.) and Alex is Genre Savyenough to realize that he's likely going to wind up a victim of the Operator eventually. So he intentionally made sure that Jay was kept away when he summoned the Operator and left the tapes with Jay so there would always be proof of his existence.

The Operator is just a regular guy

He lives in the area and suffers from extreme gigantism and acute vocivus facial syndrome. He is a window inspector. He accidentally wrote down the wrong address for one of his jobs, and he was inspecting Alex's house by mistake. Slendy is kind of creeped out by these kids who are running around filming him. At first he thought they were making a movie, but then they started chasing him and filming him when he's just trying to take a walk in peace. Even when he leaves town, they still follow him! He has also noticed that they seem to be taking bad care of their cameras. If they keep this up, it could result in major visual tearing and audio distortions!

Slenderman is a good guy while Masky is the bad guy

So Slendy was just trying to warn Alex, but Alex went insane so now Slendy is trying to warn Jay and Jessica, but can't because he is planning something important that will save Alex, Jay, and all the other characters from Masky and his lackeys. Slenderman is just scaring everyone away to save them from the masked men.

Tim has an identical twin

It would explain a fair bit about his/their behavior, especially considering Entry #52. We knew there was something strange going on when we saw him acting completely normal, after over a year of knowing him as a silent masked man with an agenda. And TTA did mention "the twins" in one of their videos.

The Slenderman teaches the class Alex was making "Marble Hornets" for

He's still an inhuman abomination, just one that teaches film production. He's an extremely devoted teacher, and likes to watch his students as they work on projects. Alex knew that his professor was watching him, which made him progressively more nervous, explaining his behavior during the project. Eventually he became convinced he would fail the class, so he tried to bribe his professor with a human sacrifice (Brian). Eventually he couldn't handle the stress anymore and dropped out of film school. Slenderman knew that Alex was a good student and could succeed if he applied himself, so he started stalking Alex, trying to convince him to go back to school. Alex put that part of his life behind him and moved away, and Slenderman finally gave up on him. That is, until Amy found the camera. When he sensed that Alex's old camera was getting use, Slenderman assumed that Alex had taken up film again and went to his house to encourage him. He since found out about Jay's Youtube project and realized that he has a knack for film too, and is now trying to convince him to go back to film school, too.

The Operator is a Missingno

He messes up video and audio as well as corrupts memories. Pretty soon, Alex and Jay will find an multiplied amount of sixth item in their bag slot.

• Well, this explains where they get all the tapes from.

The tapes mentioned in Entry #53

They'll show Tim's transformation into Masky.

The Third Season will show just what happened in Season 1 and will fill in all the Blanks

Due to it's likely nature as more "behind the scenes footage" taken at the same time as Season 1, it will reveal the truth behind some of the mysteries of the Season 1. Here are (in my mind) some likely subjects.

• Further elaboration on Alex being stalked and the events of entries #1 (at his house), #2 (what happened on the road), #3 (his paranoia), #4 (in the playground), #6 (at his house again), #7 (with Brian in the alley), #8 (paranoia again), #10 (running from the operator),#11 and #13 (in his house).
• Just what was up with the Gazebo from entry #5 and #9
• What happened after the "Encounter" in entry #12
• What was the importance of the house in #16 #18 and #22
• Further elaboration on entry #17 and what Jay was doing there
• Explanation of Tim's behavior in entry #20
• Context and further info regarding entry #22 including the "face", what happened to Seth, and Alex's "confession"
• More info regarding the events of #51 and how the hell Tim got to this state
  • This one, at least, is confirmed.
• An exploration of the various images seen in the #26 like Alex seemingly investigating an abandoned building, the guy in the Skull mask, and Jay (or someone with a similar hairstyle) walking down a dark corridor

And while these in my mind are "likely", here is what i believe will be revealed or explored

• What happened to Seth and Sarah
• How Tim became Masky
• The Identity of "Hoodie"
• What was Jay doing at this time
• More on Alex's relation to the Operator
• Confirmation on whether Alex was evil from the start, or whether he was merely driven insane
• What happens to the Operator's victims
• Just who the hell is Totheark

The series is a warning about the danger of letting oneself get sucked into a spiral of paranoia

Everyone involved in the whole thing was completely fine up until they started investigating Marble Hornets or filming themselves:

• Jay would be living a completely normal life right now if he had never looked into it
• If he and Alex hadn't started filming themselves 24/7 they wouldn't be aware of the supernatural goings on that happen when they sleep.

This is because The Operator is a quantum boogieman - he only settles into a form when observed, and the only way to observe him is with a camera because of the effects he has on people's minds. If he isn't observed he ceases to exist, or at least ceases to have any power. So the best thing for all the characters to do is just forget about him, but now the seed (the paranoia) has taken hold in their minds they can't, so they keep observing him/it, and keep passing the evidence on for others to look at, and so make it stronger. (Sidetheory - The Operator's purpose and reason for existing is to observe the universe so that it can exist, and being observed himself causes some kind of crazy feedback)

• Alex is a possible exception in that he was being stalked around town by the big guy, but we don't know how long he'd been taping himself for or whether he did something (or watched/read something) that brought the Operator to him.
• Tim is fine now, as of #53. He's been going to the clinic for hypnotherapy/behavioural therapy to make him forget about Slendy or break the habit of trying to look for him, having realised that trying to record it just makes things worse.
• Oh yeah, as theorised above, Jay has been TTA (or part of it) since season 2, which is also why we haven't seen any evidence of him taping himself all the time - either because he hasn't or because TTA deletes that footage so he doesn't know.

The Operator and criminals connection

The Operator is the personification of, or his behavior is influenced by, the criminals in the woods. Some of those people were child molesters. Child molesters target their victims when they are young, hold influence over them, and could manipulate children into leading other children to them. The Operator could create a kind of Stockholm Syndrome situation to get some of his victims on his side using his mental influence over his - this is how Alex fell under his control. He also kills people or gets his minions to kill people because he's been influenced by murderers as well. The To The Ark were also targeted by him when they were young, but resisted his influence and joined together to fight back aganist him and the ones who fell to his side. He is really a mindless Eldritch Abomination whose only instincts are to stalk, hurt, manipulate, and kill.

• Maybe he specifically targets children who are the desendents/related to those who hung up the criminals and burned them, or the victims of the criminals.

The Operator can hide itself from the naked eye, but not from video cameras.

That's why there are times we see him but the characters don't; he's trying to hide from them, but they can see him when they watch the recordings. That's also why he doesn't move often, he's only observing them at the moment and not planning to act. But the camera always picks him up at some point whether he's chosen to reveal himself to people or not.

The Operator has no face because...

• He is an incarnation of many people, not just one.
• The people who set criminals on fire started with their faces, resulting in them being left featureless before death.
• He knows that he's scarier that way.
• He has no use for eyes, ears, a nose or a mouth, but he needs arms to grab people with and legs to get around.
• He wears a mask.

J was not originally a target, but Alex, Jessica, and maybe Tim and some of the others were.

The Operator picks most of his targets when they are children, which explains the video with young Alex and Jessica's problems when she was a child. He only started going after J because he got caught up in the whole mess when he went after Alex, not because he had planned to.

The Ark is the source of The Operator's and the wood's strange powers.

It is buried in the woods somewhere. It was affected by the criminals strung up in the woods to die. The Operator controls it, or is the medium through which it operates. To The Ark and the hoodies are trying to find it and destroy it because they think it will get rid of The Operator. Either J has encountered it and forgotten, its location is shown on one of the tapes, or Alex knows where it is - or all three.

• It could also be where Slendy keeps his victims he has collected over the years.

Joseph is the one playing Slender Man

In the troyhasacamera video Joseph Listens to Jazz, Joseph is quite tall, and he's wearing a suit. He's at least a head taller than Tim, and is most likely taller than Troy. Since he's so tall, and has the suit, he would be a great choice to play Slender Man.

• • That would explain why the Operator doesn't move when he's sharing the screen with Alex. They bring out the dummy for those occasions.

Alex isn't evil at all, and never was

He's been a victim of Demonic Possession this whole time, and season 3 will have him Dying as Yourself. There will be a Plot Twist that Jay has been possessed on numerous occasions and has committed crimes as much as Alex, or he is also a Masky and does not remember. Disappearances i.e. Entry #24 have been occurring off screen the whole time for many of the characters. Just moreso for Alex.

Hold the phone--in more ways than one.

The Marble Hornets crew have been insistent on calling their friendly neighbourhood abomination the Operator, not Slender Man. There's the link between pressing the zero button on a phone and the Operator's symbol, a zero with an 'x' through it. But now with entry #57, and all this business increasingly centering around an abandoned hospital...oh my God, the Operator.

There is another dangerous humanoid abomination aside from the Operator, and who is in control of the Maskies, and he may/may not be To The Ark.

In the To The Ark Videos Decay, Reminder, Memories, Inquiry, and Classified, and even certain Entries both recently in #57, and even all the way back in Season 1 in Entry ####### there is seen a pair of glowing eyes shining out from the darkness. Not only is this clearly not the Operator, but this is clearly not the Maskies either, though they do seem to be connected, and when To The Ark directly addresses Jay, the eyes appear, which implies they belong to To The Ark.

First of all, it seems strange that the Operator would "empower" the Maskies and To The Ark to have the effect of Teleportation, Video Disruption and other such effects, when he also seems to be working through Alex to "harvest" victims", and that Alex and the Maskie/TTA crew despise Alex and want him dead.

In short, my theory is that this is the sign of a newly emerged Major Player making his presence the series, one who was possibly active in the background throughout the whole thing, but was just acting through the Maskies. This would be a full on Humanoid Abomination opposed to the Operator and to Alex, but also one that may well be just as bad if not worse, and whom also has an interest in Jay as first seen in Season 1 where he seemed to be sadistically hunting and harassing him through both TTA and Tim. He is also shown extremely dangerous, even in comparison to the Operator.

Where Exactly this puts Alex and the Operator is unknown, but it seems clear that Whatever is behind TTA is just itching to make himself known

Tim knows more than he's letting on

He knows that Alex has been up to no good for years now. He knows about the existence of the Operator. And he knows what Jay is really up to. In fact, he probably follows the Marble Hornets channel just like the rest of us. And in fact, all this time, he's been conducting an investigation into Alex and the Operator himself. However, Tim's methods have been a lot more subtle and secretive, and as such, he's been obfuscating ignorance in all of his recent interactions with Jay. Jay's a bit of a wild card, a Doom Magnet of sorts, and may not be entirely trustworthy, hence his caution.

Tim is happy to (coyly) share some of what he's uncovered, like the tapes in Season 3, but it's not because he wants to collaborate with Jay. Rather, he shares things that he's sure will goad Jay on. Tim's a bit of a Manipulative Bastard who's using Jay to do the dirty work as well as be the one who gets all the attention from the unnatural forces he's disturbing. Overall, it's win-win for Tim; he furthers his own investigation without putting himself at risk.

• • The only problem with this theory is that Tim didn't approach Jay. Jay approached Tim.

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Back to Marble Hornets

1. ↑ Imagine it. "Kittens. Heh. They're cute, aren't they? Good for cheering people up. I just look at kittens all day and I'll never have any more problems in life. I'd be happy all the time, just looking at pictures of kittens. I bet if we make everyone in the world look at kittens, there won't be any more suffering. Yeah. *grins* I'm a genius. That's what I'm gonna write my paper about. How to solve the world's suffering...kitten pictures! Man, why hasn't anyone thought of this before?" The inner ramblings of an idle, insane twenty-something...it could work, really.
2. ↑ I know, it takes longer than seven months to finish all the hormone stuff even before surgery, but s/he could be engaging in genderplay in the meantime...hair extensions, female clothes...helium for the voice? Just go with it, 'kay?
3. ↑ and let's be honest, the fandom does think she's pretty hot (cough)