A Decade

[Audio version of this post can be found by clicking here.]

Today is February 14th, 2021. Today is the birthday of our mythos's primary founder, CuteWithoutThe. On Cute's sixteenth birthday, they began organizing the Fear Mythos, getting into contact with the other two founders, alliterator and LizardBite, and planning some of the first stories. Because of this, it is tradition to consider the anniversary of the Fear Mythos to "begin" on February 14th.

Two weeks later, on the last day of the month, Cute posted a thread on TVTropes officially laying out the plans and inviting participation. While by this point we still were not even called "the Fear Mythos," it is tradition to consider the anniversary of our mythos to "end" on February 28th.

Again, today is February 14th, 2021. Cute's sixteenth birthday was ten years ago.

The Fear Mythos is turning ten years old.

Now, in practice, this might not mean much out of the ordinary. Members of the community generally collaborate for the "Fearniversary" in writing an anniversary tournament blog, and this year that is definitely a thing, this is a nice celebration. Getting to an anniversary at all is a cause worth celebrating.

But ten years, wow. There probably is a lot that can be said, in a sentimental sense. Our mythos has seen a lot of blogs over these ten years. We've seen some vlogs too. And we've even seen some games and musical outputs. There have been physical books, podcasts, communities on various websites; there have been busy years, quiet years, and years in between. People have come and gone, the popular monsters to be used in our stories have changed back and forth, and.. well, ten years have passed and yet this mythos does not die.

I have to acknowledge that not one of our three founders has been active in the mythos for some time. I, DJay, am the "oldest" member still sticking around, and even then I'm not that active, not even in my own stories. For some, this is an appeal of our community: It's quiet, a place to read stories and throw ideas around. I did oversee an overhaul several years ago with the express purpose of "futureproofing" our central concepts, the hope being that, no matter how quiet our community became, the ideas would stick around. For better or for worse, the quiet is something for which we were prepared.

I bring this up because something about a "tenth anniversary" feels like the sort of Big Deal that may bring about a change in activity. It's probably the significance inherent in a double-digit number. That's a very human thing. (Like, seriously, very human. The number 10 is only significant to us because we operate under base-10 assumptions, and those are predicated on the number of fingers we have. But I don't need to tell you any of this, not on the surface of what this post is about.) A group that has persisted for a decade has relative age, and age is associated with experience, experience with knowledge, knowledge with a social fertility that "could go Big with just the right input." All of which is to say: Ten is a very different age for a single human than it is for a group of fiction writers.

We have been quiet. Next, we might try something else. That's a scary idea in and of itself, isn't it? A good creepy story: The Day The Mythos Went Big.

I'm playing around, here. The Fearniversary is a communal event, like a damn two-week festival; this is the most appropriate time to dress ourselves up in masks and pretend to be what we haven't yet been, to turn our thoughts to the stars and dream big, to hit upon emotional changes which take us resolutely into the new year renewed and ready for what it may bring.

The Fear Mythos, you see, is yours. Our monsters, the Fears, are legally considered "Creative Commons Attribution," meaning you can do whatever you want with them so long as there's even an implicit acknowledgement of the greater mythos's existence. This is worth spelling out, even to veterans, because it's a strength that's easy to overlook. We can't always guarantee you an immediate active audience, but we can promise you this: Place. You and your creations have a place here, here where not even a decade has erased us, here where the future can still grow, here at the online intersection between fiction and reality. You are free to take our creations as a model to build your world, experiment, see what becomes.

I know. I'm wordy, and if I have any points I'm trying to make they don't consistently come across. Yet still, this mythos has given me place as well. When I've had nobody else, this mythos has been there for me for ten years. Without it, I wouldn't have published two books, written three rock albums, made dozens of surprisingly close online friends, and been exposed to media that has in tangible ways changed my life. I'm maybe a little too close to this mythos to make a proper grand statement in overview, which would be more appropriate for this celebratory post, but I can speak emotive, I can light a signal to confirm to the world that we're still going. To a degree, I can speak both to and for our community in saying: We have known activity, and we have known rest, and somehow out of the ambiguous murk in between the two we have found our Voice persists.

Those of you who are only now finding us, you've got so much to see.
Those of you who are sticking around, you're in for a treat.

Another thing I'm doing here is clumsily segueing into another subject: seven years ago, on our third Fearniversary, LizardBite privately proposed setting up a semi-"official" ARG in celebration. (You know the kind: Codes hidden across the web that, when solved, lead down rabbit holes to even more codes, accompanied by some sort of story.) alliterator and I took up the suggestion and spent some time planning behind the scenes. I sought out the consultation of CuteWithoutThe, as well as mythos veterans The Visitor, Omega, and Squeek, in order to work out a setting of lore and game mechanics which would be both ethically appropriate and compelling. This proved fruitful, and when we launched the ARG our players uncovered novellas, audio logs, myths, and art (contributed by the likes of The Visitor, Logic, Wiratomkinder, and alliterator). The subforum on which their efforts were contained still exists, though you may need an account to see it. The ARG went on hiatus two years later, and it has been dormant ever since.

Those who currently frequent the discord community may know that I have been digging the old plans back up, that I intend on bringing the ARG back. It was my intent to bring it back in time for this Fearniversary. I, uh, may still be able to do so in time for the 28th of February, but I am not going to push it, as the content I have under works demands rigorous iteration and testing. I bring this up in this post because it is, by its nature, relevant to celebrations of our mythos, and this news is relevant to this Fearniversary in particular.

So. To conclude.

Happy Fearniversary 2021! We're celebrating a decade of the Fear Mythos!

and

As soon as it is ready, you will know: Nine is God is coming back. New players will be welcome.

PSA: On Fears, How They Work

Hello! It's probably time for a Public Service Announcement. I just wanted to clarify a few points about Fears, because I'm hearing that there are some people out there who might be worried about the idea of other people writing with their stuff, potentially taking it away from them. I want to debunk that. But first let's clarify stuff so it makes more sense.

"How do I make a Fear?"

Write a story! Either plan the monster out in advance, or establish the theme of your story and label the Fear afterwards that way! ..or really do it any way you want. But how about, for the sake of arbitrary convenience, we assume here that "Fear" means a horror monster? It'll make the following points easier to grasp.

"Is it still a Fear if it hasn't appeared in a blog/vlog/creepypasta/anything yet?"

No. Then it's just an idea and you can't claim ownership of it so easily.
(AND THAT BRINGS US TO) 

"Speaking of ownership, if I make a Fear, does that mean other people can automatically write with it?"

Well. Yes, technically. But it's a little more abstract than that. They can't literally write with the exact Fear in your story-- they can't write with your portrayal, and that is what matters here. For instance, I can't stop people from writing with the Fear of Depersonalization and calling it "EAT" and making it a hive mind of water-y stuff. Because that's just a bunch of ideas. I can't even stop people from calling it "Salmacis" and making it focus on blue-haired bodies! Again, those are literally just ideas. But I can stop them from writing in my actual canon, with my actual specific portrayals. They cannot change my stories' Fears without my permission. But I cannot stop them from writing their own stories, even if their Fears are identical to mine. Because their stories are, by default, in their own canon. They do not affect my stories whatsoever. They would get their own separate Wiki articles (we haven't done that much in the past but dammit we will start!), and they could not affect my actual stories and my actual Fears without my permission.
And that is all that matters. If you don't want people to be able to mess with your Fear, you will fit right in. (Even if you do, you're always welcome to specifically state your canon is open-source, which most of our canons aren't, or you can ask to collaborate with people! That is always fun! :D)

VLOG MANIFESTO

A vlog companion to the manifesto!

"Discard your newbie robes and follow me into the depths of Fear!"

Turn the key, walk through the gate-- the great ascent to reach a higher state. This is a rite of passage for Fear newbies to become established members of the community who better understand our mythos.

Are you a newbie? You are if you haven't completed this checklist.

- Read the manifesto, "This is not a series bible." Its words are our mission statement, so take them to heart and you will earn the title of Fearblogger.

- Read five creepypasta from Faces, Strange and Secret. Bite-sized stories are the best place to start your quest! Get through five and you earn the title of Welcomed.

- Read an alliterator blog. He is one of our founders and each of his 80+ blogs has influenced our mythos to a great degree. Here is an incomplete list of them. Don't worry, none of them are long. Read one and you earn the title of Initiated.

- Read ten blogs from the Beginner's Guide. This guide was designed to help you find your way in our abstract labyrinth. You don't have to read them all, and which ones you read are up to you, but this guide will give you a much better idea of how we work. Reach ten and you earn the title of Guided.

- Read five blogs not from the Guide. There's over several hundred blogs in our mythos, and there are lots of really good ones that the writers of that guide weren't even aware of. Here's an alphabetical master list for you, which itself is incomplete. Take a dive into the mythos proper and you earn the title of Reader.

- Watch at least one video from a vlog. We have a growing video side too, though as not anywhere near as many of the vlogs are finished all that's required of you to feel initiated here is to watch a video. Here's an alphabetical master list for you, also incomplete. Check one out and you earn the title of Occasional Watcher.

- Read at least two comedy blogs. A substantial portion of our mythos is devoted to the chaotic gods of Commedia, and it will do you good to dip your feet into that realm. The catch is there's no list of comedy blogs out there, so finding them will put you on your own. I feel stupid now, there is a list and I'm even the one who made it. Accomplish this task and you earn the title of Pagliacci.

- Read and give feedback on at least three current ongoing blogs and one vlog. Now we're getting to the nitty-gritty, the delapicrepisated domain of community. The manifesto gives you links to our Facebook group and forum, so join up and help circulate the Fear spirit! For doing this great deed you will earn the title of Ebert.

- Remain in the community for at least four months. Yes, this is the hard part right here. In order to cure yourself of your "newbie" curse, you must dedicate yourself to our Fear sect for four months without showing any sign of leaving. You can do it; you've made it this far. On the first day of your fifth month you will be granted the title of In It To Win It.

- Record yourself pledging allegiance to Camper James Joyce, Fear of Thunderously Absolute Power. He wrote revolutionary modernist holy texts with many passages about masturbation and died for our sins, praise be to him and his eyepatch of genius! Brekkek Kekkek Kekkek Kekkek! Koax Koax Koax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouao! Killykillkilly: a toll, a toll. Waaaaaa. Tch! Sluice! Writer of the seven riddles of the universe! Submit yourself and you earn the title of Thonthorstrok.

Only when you have fulfilled this checklist can you rightfully consider yourself purged of all traces of Newb. Then, and only then, you can begin your greater quest towards learning the Secret of the Owl.

This has been Jordan Dooling-- I wish you the best of luck and hope to see you on the other side. Let's make this mythos proud.

"This is not a series bible."

A manifesto for the Fear Mythos in 2015 and beyond

by Jordan Dooling

First, there was the Slender Man Mythos. In 2011 that mythos was a bit of a wreck. To most people, it looked like you had to obey a strict canon with its strict interpretation of what the Slender Man is (or "Slenderman," his Jewish attorney brother-in-law), with true freedom determined only by how popular you were. Quality was not the focus, nor was freedom, but instead clique. Cliques drove the mythos, or at least outsiders' perceptions of it.

Enter Owen "CuteWithoutThe" Norris, a boy with a poor life who'd just turned sixteen on Valentine's Day '11. Enter Seann "LizardBite" Barbour, a nineteen-year-old with an idea for a Slenderblog that has an extra monster, an original one called The Archangel. Enter the man, the myth, the legend-- Adam "alliterator" Levine, somewhere in his twenties, a guy with a similar idea for a Slenderblog with different monsters (that we now know as The Cold Boy and The Quiet). CuteWithoutThe found these two on TVTropes and.. well, he'd had an idea just like that, making use of monsters called The Dying Man, The Wooden Girl, The Manufactured Newborn, and Thunderbirds. So he proposed the three of them make their blogs, uniting it under one flag, spinning off entirely from the Slender Man Mythos they thought had grown stale.

But they needed some consistency to their monster ideas. And they needed a name.

So on February 28th they started a thread on TVTropes asking for anyone's help fleshing out their ideas, giving feedback, maybe even writing stories to join in. The Visitor joined, whose Shadowgraphers became The Nightlanders, whose grey audio monsters became The Choir, whose ideas acted as a sort of glue to motivate everyone. Blancmange joined, whose contributions were never big but so plentiful that we'd be entirely different without them. Parakus joined, who wrote early blogs and fine-tuned other ideas. I myself joined, enlisted to create a monster with a water theme. Before long, we had a surprisingly lively group of collaboration, encouragement, and feedback. But their monsters were still missing something, no one could put their finger on it. That's when alliterator proposed that the monsters be embodiments, personifications, of fears. His exact words were "Monsters as metaphors, woo!"

The monsters are metaphors. Even beyond a tendency for horror, the one consistent link for the things this mythos's blogs would then be about is that they'd have a metaphorical centre.

CuteWithoutThe took the next step, casually referring to our monsters as "Fears." I saw that name and proposed we call ourselves the Fear Mythos. alliterator kept it going, giving a name for we the authors: The Fearbloggers.

Fears. Fear Mythos. Fearbloggers. Fear is our title, again not necessarily because of horror but because of metaphor. Just because a concept is rooted in a fear doesn't mean that concept has to be written for fear.

What happened next? Our stories continued. A user by the name of Allan Assiduity set up a forum. alliterator set up a Wiki. NearTheEnd set up a Facebook group. Our community grew, and when the Slender Man Mythos heard of us the people generally jumped over to our ship, finding our philosophies more refreshing. A big boost for morale was the addition of Sean "Omega" O'Neil, a radical Slenderblogger who attempted to keep track of their concepts through the blog Encyclopedia Slenderia. He's been with us ever since and even seeks to get his Fear work published in the long run. (And between you and me, his stuff's definitely good enough.)

But what were those philosophies that people found so refreshing?

Early on, shortly after our mythos had spawned out of the chaos, LizardBite made it clear that, while his Archangel may be open for other writers to play with, his blog Eccentrically Bored (and sequel Hidden in the Trees) would likely be its own separate canon. He had ideas for his Archangel that he didn't want to be compromised. Over time, as CuteWithoutThe's blogs stuck to their original plan, as LizardBite's blogs clearly had their own style, as alliterator wrote more and more blogs with their portrayals of Fears getting increasingly distinguished, and as my own blogs took liberties, we came to the mutual understanding that the Fear Mythos wasn't restricted by any canonical rules. The more risks people took with their blogs, the more our community seemed to flourish. Here, you could write whatever you wanted. We had floods of comedy blogs, waves of philosophical pieces, blogs rooted in anthropological study, blogs based in absurdism, and ample stories that were far more fantasy than could be called horror. And every one of them was its writer's own portrayal, their personal metaphor for something that meant a lot to them, and every one of them was accepted as a part of our mythos.

This is what we decided we should advertise above all: "We have no canon." Every writer is entitled to her or his own canon, and their stories will not be dismissed as fanfiction unless specified by authorial intent. This became our banner for a while until our series bible lost its domain name due to lack of funding. The series bible is still up on WordPress, but it's faded in focus, now obsolete.

We still had some growth to do. We'd flirted with true artistic freedom, but there was still an attitude that certain ways to write for the Fear Mythos were more right than others. Unfortunately, our community was already tapering away, so there was only so much that could be done.

And that's when the vloggers came in.

We'd had vlogs ever since March '11. CuteWithoutThe had originally intended his Dying Man blogs to be told through video, LizardBite made a now-deleted vlog titled Cryptid417 and occasionally supplanted his blogs with videos, and I myself made videos for Jordan Eats Normally Now where I could. However, those videos tended to take second-priority to the blogs we wrote. It wasn't until November, when NearTheEnd and Final introduced their vlog The Undecided Five, that we started to consider there might be a considerable potential for vlogs. They require different kinds of effort, though, so for a few years we didn't see too many of them until Salvatore Haran's Pavel Hall had reached a substantial level of popularity in 2014. Now lots of people were creating vlogs, and NearTheEnd's Facebook group built up an influx of members until suddenly we had a new community on our hands!

This was fantastic. This still is fantastic. People are still creating vlogs to this day, and when I made the chronological list of blogs it brought a lot of older blogs to a newer audience. The circulation keeps going strong. However, with the Fear beast raised back from the dead, it brings with it the same problems it originally had: An environment of "Some ways to write are better than others," perhaps even of "This is the only way to write." Awareness must be spread. Perceptions must be opened up. Art must prosper.

So that's what brings us to the present day. It's almost the fourth anniversary of our mythos's creation, and there are still many inherent misconceptions about what we exactly are. This is why we enacted the Wiki overhaul, this is why the chronological lists of blogs and vlogs were compiled, and this is why I am writing this manifesto.

To review, the Fear Mythos is a community of content creators who pull from and add to the same open-source (or Creative Commons) pool. We will explore that pool in a little while, but for now the distinction of what our mythos is must be elucidated.

We are the community. We began with a thread, and over the course of a few months we would log in sometimes every day, more often just a few times a week, to pitch in and collaborate on fleshing out ideas and posting what we'd written. It was that sense of collaboration that attracted new people at the time, and it is that sense of collaboration we've attempted to preserve. At present, the centre of our community is the Facebook group, and the spirit remains: We check in on the group periodically, not necessarily every day (though there are some who do just that) but whenever we have something to show or whenever there's something we want to see. The forum works the same way, though its activity has died down some. There is also a community on the Wiki which operates similarly, and some form of Fear Mythos community can be found elsewhere on the internet. This is the mythos: You can join just to post what you've made, you can join just to make friends, and you can do anything in between.

The individual people come and go, but as long as we have the pool we will always have some form of audience. So what is the pool?

Our mythos could be said to have been formed on a principle: "Why should a community of blog/vlog-writers restrict themselves to one monster?" So we thus we created the pool. In the early days when we tried to write for one canon, the pool was a simple list of our monsters. But as we expanded, adopted "Monsters as metaphors," grew outward, and allowed every artist her or his canon, that simple list evolved into a periodic table of Fear.

You see, when everyone is entitled to as many canons as they might want, the question of having one list of monsters becomes arbitrary. When we tried keeping one purely for reference purposes, it gave off the impression that this list was in some way "official." No matter how much we prefaced or clarified, the fact is that having any central list at all will give off this impression.

So here is what the pool is, as of January 8th, 2015: Nothing. There is no pool. There are only the stories. We will not restrict what an artist may choose to produce; we will only make an attempt to document their creations on our Wiki.

Then what links us? What is the common thread for our stories? As mentioned before, they are metaphors. Our stories take one crucial idea (fear) and explore it, document it, play with it, turn it into conventions and then break those, and altogether do so in the interest of art and supporting the community. I want to be thorough here: Fears do not have to be horror monsters. They can be humans in a drama, a couple of objects in a poem, a simple phrase in a video, or the story could even be paradoxically defined by their nonexistence in a philosophical twist. It's best not to assume. We only want to see your creativity.

If you go on the Wiki right now and look at its articles for the portrayals of Fears as they have been written, you will see a large number of horror monsters. But this is not the only way to write; the monsters have always been metaphorical, and over time they've tried to emphasize that. Our mythos has the potential to become something poignant, profound, perhaps even universal. The only way for that to happen would be to throw away our expectations of what a Fearblog or Fearvlog "should be" and let our influences guide us into epiphany.

In this mythos, we have an opportunity to write what we want, have our stories marketed equally to others', and to have an audience. We just need to take advantage of that.

That is what the Fear Mythos is.

WIKI

FACEBOOK GROUP

FORUM