Commentary, Part 4: Punchline

This commentary covers the following posts:
The Role of Stories
Once Upon a Time
Untitled

This is around the time that I had not only found my footing with the blog, but was falling into my stride as well.  This is when everything really starts kicking off and, in my opinion, starts getting good.

I had set up a small arc in earlier posts.  It was largely just an introductory arc based around Messi's backstory and character development, but it also introduced Caper and Poe.  Like I said, it was a small arc, but it set up everything that I needed to launch the story I wanted to tell, or at very least, introduce themes and concepts that I could use later on.

In "The Role of Stories," we really get to see the deeper side of Caper that was only hinted at earlier.  His speech, as many of you have probably figured out, was taken directly from House of Leaves.  I included it because I had been reading the book at the time and the passage stood out.  It felt like it had been written with Caper in mind.  While the entire passage was transcribed word-for-word and with the same punctuation, I probably should have varied the actual transcription a bit.  After all, the punctuation is erratic and there's no way Messi would be able to get it down perfectly by ear.  Maybe Caper manage to sneak onto his computer and edit it.  Or maybe it's just a minor plot hole.  Oops.

While Caper's statement that his name is "William Navidson" and the potential clips of his life are obviously largely bull, there was one that I did adopt and make pseudo-canon later on: the line about his girlfriend aborting his unborn daughter.  Maybe that one was true, but it was confirmed by Caper himself, who's admittedly not the most reliable source.  You, the audience, gets to decide what all Caper says is true and what he's made up.  Maybe it's all true.  Maybe it's all a lie.  Your choice.

But all that can be fairly easily deduced from context.  Consequently, this is maybe the most interesting tidbit of this post: Caper is referring to a specific blog at the end of the post.  The girl he's tracking and that he ends up saving is Anya from It's All David's Fault, written by AJ (who helped with a lot of ideas in DSTM and who wrote Poe's blog). More specifically, it refers to this post, where they're (I believe) at the Vietnam memorial.  This was a one-sided crossover, but was acknowledged by AJ.  While it's part of DSTM's canon, it may not necessarily be part of IADF's canon, and it really doesn't matter either way.  Maybe it's an alternate universe version of IADF.  That's always possible.

Moving on to "Once Upon a Time," though.  I'm slightly curious as to who all assumed that Kyle was the Messenger and when they realized that it was Alan.  This post was largely to establish Kyle's existence and provide Messi's background and motivation.  And of course, the natural question is this: is this story true/canon?  The answer is actually "no."  The account that Messi gave wildly varies from the truth in a lot of places.  It can be called "essentially true," meaning that it's similar enough to what happened that it shouldn't really matter, but it's also been heavily dramatized.  So what is the true story?  I don't know.  Make up your own.

This post also included a comment from Caper that was nothing more than me trolling everyone.  I knew that I would be killing Caper the next post.  In all the chats I had with the larger community, I built Caper up and expressed how excited I was to post the Q and A with him.  And then, I posted my punchline.

This post was untitled, and I'd like to take a brief digression to explain a choice I made here and elsewhere.  I'd already read a LOT of blogs featuring the Slender Man at that point.  And some of them spoiled things with their titles or, in some cases, leading with the most important detail and leaving the post untitled--which would reveal the first sentence or two in the archives.  I specifically hid major plot events behind vague enough titles and text so that people looking through the archives wouldn't be surprised.  This is also the reason I removed the feed with Turtle's Twitter account from the blog: having current updates displayed in such a prominent place would potentially spoil major plot events for future readers.

I bring this up because this post was the first time I had to use it, considering it contained the first hard-hitting event: Caper's death.

This post is the conclusion of the first arc of DSTM, and is possibly still the most important post, if only because I was able to keep going back to it and further exploring it.  There were a lot of retcons in this post, though you wouldn't recognize them as retcons because I didn't have to actually change anything: just interpret things a bit differently.  In fact, these retcons actually made the post make more sense, since it provided perfect explanations for things that had been a bit iffy before.

On the basic and original level, though, the Slender Man came in and killed Caper for letting Anya slip past.  There were multiple reasons for this.  One was to hit the audience hard by killing off someone who was rapidly becoming a fan favorite.  How better to enforce that anyone could die in this story than by killing a prominent character only fifteen posts in?  What better way to manipulate their emotions and grab their attention?  The other reason was to push Poe into the spotlight.  Up to this point she had been a mere accessory for Caper.  This was the point where she started actually getting development of her own.

The major "retcon" in this post was the reason for Caper's death.  Later on, it was revealed that Caper had not only destroyed their leads, but killed one of the Hunters assigned to Anya.  It was this act--killing one of their own--that drew the Slender Man's ire.  Why he took action now when he didn't take action for similar events later on, though?  That's a bit harder to answer.  Maybe he approved of the later actions.  Maybe he's just random.  The Slender Man in DSTM was impersonal and consequently never fully developed.

This also had the effect of giving Nee-chan a reason to show up when she did.  Her appearance after Caper's death had been a bit too coincidental, but having her replace a guy who had been killed earlier?  Things fell into place way too well with that retcon.

Changing this also cast Poe's insistence that Caper be quiet in new light.  Instead of shutting him up so he didn't overexert himself, it was at least partially to keep him from revealing things that she didn't want Messi knowing.

This post also established a few more things: Caper's love of kids, for one, which contributed to his pseudo-canon backstory later on.  Further foreshadowing of the fact that it was, in fact, Concrete Giraffes that introduced Poe to the Slender Man ("But it's what I dooooooo...").  Giving Poe dialogue past more than a sentence or two.

Finally, there were two parts of this post that I really liked.  The first was Caper's final joke.  I was surprised that I'd never heard a subversion of the "light at the end of the tunnel" like the one I used, and I love the idea of Caper trying to be funny (for both his sake and the sake of those around him) until the end.

But then, in his last moments, he gets deadly serious.  The facade breaks.  He's scared.  Terrified.  He hates the life he's lead and seems to realize that he's going to die as a villain.  Worse, the person he turns to for one final validation of himself finds himself unable to say anything.  A tragic end to Caper's tale.