"𝔉𝔦𝔫𝔡𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔱𝔯𝔲𝔱𝔥" creepypasta research, Slenderman & paranormal

Who are his victims?

Who are his victims?

One of Slendy's defining characteristics is how he frequently targets children. In the first Slender Man picture, he is shown in the background of a playground, with the tagline that all the children in the photograph disappeared afterwards. Children only make up a small portion of the victims. It's incredibly rare for a story to make any reference to Slender Man actively hunting a child during the time frame in which the story takes place.

To get a clear idea of the demographics of Slendy's victims, we'd need to do a large scale survey.

→Here's an attempt to narrow it down by categorizing the groups of people he does target.

Children

For simplicities sake, we'll define a child here by its biological definition, someone between the stages of birth and puberty, rather than a societal one. According to most stories, these are Slender Man's favorite victims. This is possibly related to the theory that Slender Man exists through our minds and belief; children have a very strong imagination, and are known for their fear of monsters hiding in the dark. A being such as Slender Man could easily manipulate and feed on such attributes.

-Some interesting things to note are:

A) Slendy often will take multiple children at once

B) Slendy tends to not go after children as much while focusing on an older victim.

—Sometimes Slender Man will spend long periods of time breaking down a single child, as he would an older human. Children are a much easier mental target than older targets, again possibly due to the more active imaginations.

Escaped Child Victims

This is another of Slendy's favorite types of victims. If a child he wanted to catch escapes him, he has a nasty habit of going after that child again, after he/she has grown older.

It gives Slender Man a motivation to be hunting them which isn't totally arbitrary, as well as giving them a preexisting link to him, which can be expanded on within the story.

There's no way to escape. Even if you get away from him, years down the line, he'll still come for you. You'll never know when. You probably won't even remember your original encounters with him; those memories tend to be suppressed deep down, so you won't have any preparations for when you face him. One day, he'll just appear in your life once more, to finally claim you.

People Who Know Too Much

Essentially, anyone who gets too involved in the Mythos is likely to be hunted by Slender Man. There is no definitive, final reason which explains the reason for this, but there are some theories. One is that Slender Man is trying to protect himself. The more people learn about him, the more likely they are to find a way to harm, or kill him. By driving them mad and killing them before they can do so, he removes potential threats.

The alternative is related to the concept of Slender Man being a creature of belief. If his existence is related to belief, than the people he would be strongest around are those who believe in him the most. Which would be all of us who follow the Mythos. Even if we know he doesn't really exist, there's still a small part of our mind that watches out for him.

People Who Trespass On His Territory

This category is only a hypothesis, with much less information backing it up than the others. One of the theories for the reason Slender Man begins following Alex and J in Marble Hornets is because they go too close to the red tower which is somehow related to Slendy. Another possible example is in Scared, where Drew's first encounter of Slender Man is when he goes into the woods (Slendy's territory) for the purpose of making Slender Man videos.

Now, two shaky examples doesn't make for very good science. Both pieces of evidence are just unsupported interpretations; there's little in them to back themselves up. And there are no clear guidelines to define what exactly Slender Man's territory would be. I included this, because it is one of the many hypotheses about Slender Man's victims, albeit a weak one.

Everyone Else

Well.... Um.... That defeats the entire point of me trying to narrow down what type of people Slender Man targets. While very rare, it isn't unheard of for Slender Man to just start hunting down someone who has absolutely no connection with him at all. These are adults, who never encountered him as a child, haven't heard of him online, and haven't gone anywhere that might be one of Slendy's hanging places. These people are arbitrarily chosen by Slender Man, without any motive behind it that I can understand. An explanation for Slendy's interest may simply have yet to come/was intended to come later.

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