Fear is here.note
At the end of days, as we lay ourselves down to the impossible world of dreams, our minds conjure up creations of a blackened reality where meaning and fear are synonymous. Beings rise out of the fiery fields of gray and evoke newfound emotions our consciousness practically invents on the spot. There is much power in the mind, and the creative mind crafts haunting ruses without boundary.
— From the introduction to Faces, Strange and Secret
The Fear Mythos is an immense, detailed writing community spanning thousands of works and featuring a good number of antagonists to each. Its original purpose was a spin-off to the Slender Man Mythos, and was created by Owen Norris, Adam Levine, and Seann Barbour.
The premise? There are monsters called "Fears," original creatures note that are, for lack of a better term, manifestations of humanity's most primal fears and phobias, hence the name.
The Fear Mythos deals with blogs, vlogs, creepypasta, video games, and whatever else there exists that regard to these disturbing beings (there is now even a book). No canon or continuity required; writers get complete freedom, and each canon is unique to its respectful author.
The Fear Mythos manifesto and some other helpful information can be found here. A list of all current blogs can be found here and vlogs here, while a list of Fears (and descriptions) can be found on the characters page. A blog dedicated to Fear-based creepypasta can be found here. A Wiki has been created, and can be found here.
For the video game, see Fear Mythos: The RPG. There is now an anthology of Fear Mythos stories available here.
NOTE: Tropes pertaining to specific Fears should be put on the character page. Tropes pertaining to specific stories should go under that work's page (listed in Recap.The Fear Mythos).
General tropes for the Fear Mythos
- The Adjectival Man: The Dying Man, the Blind Man, the Smiling Man, and the Merryman, in addition to the obvious. The Wooden Girl, Cold Boy, Unnamed Child, and various others are variations of the format.
- And I Must Scream: The fate of many, many victims of the Fears.
- The Archangel is the most obvious example. Since the Archangel is the the afterlife itself (or at least a twisted bastardization of it), it may well be that the ultimate fate of every human is to be enslaved by the Archangel after death, trapped in a body that moves in accordance with another person's will for all eternity. Except, of course, those are killed by other Fears, for whom nothing awaits after death.
- Unsurprisingly, this is the Wooden Girl's entire MO. Most of her "servants" are former victims who are being forced into service.
- The Grotesque traps people in a dream world of his making from which they can never wake up.
- Apocalyptic Log: Some blogs document the end of the world, the most notable being OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING.
- Arc Number:
- 417 is The Archangel's in many stories.
- 444 in Still Remains Within. Maybe.
- 8 and 5 in many blogs are EAT's arc numbers.
- 34 is the Architect's arc number.
- Being Watched: This is a frequent phobia played on by Fears, especially the Eye.
- Body Horror: Another frequent phobia played on.
- The Black Dog, in some interpretations, takes people's flesh and uses it to patch its skin.
- EAT sometimes takes her Camper bodies and morphs them beyond what evolution intended possible.
- The Intrusion, often portrayed as a sentient swarm of insects which infest its victims, is pretty much pure body horror.
- Breather Episode: The blogs that try to seem like literal blogs tend to do these with uneventful posts, though more conventional stories often have Breathers to break up the pace.
- Canon Welding: Incorporates The Slender Man Mythos, as well as the Black Dog from folklores of the British Isles, and later incorporated the Smiling Man from The Jeanette Experience as a Canon Immigrant. The Cthulhu Mythos is a part of it too, with the blog Mephi, having many of Lovecraft's creatures being a major part of the story. The Fear Mythos and Sleeper Mythos are also an example of this, while the Fear Mythos and The Arkn Mythos are an inversion (depending on who you ask, as the exact history of the latter is disputed and unclear). The Fear Mythos as a whole was created from several separate Slender Man Mythos spinoffs, then separated into countless canons as the authors of each story see fit.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Some stories suggest that the Fears are created from humanity's own subconscious.
- Crapsack World: All of humanity is being used as game pieces for various eldritch abominations. Worse, anyone you meet could be working with the Fears. They could be possessed by some sort of otherwordly being, they could be controlled like puppets by something else. The words you hear
may not be the words people are actually saying. The nice girl you hooked up with could have just given you a sexually transmitted case of Demonic Possession. You could be under the influence of a Fear and not even know it. The birds in the sky may be plotting your death. The bugs scurrying across the floor could be crawling inside of you while you sleep. The water you drink could be a living hive mind seeking your assimilation. Need to go to the doctor for a check-up? He might be pledged to the Plague Doctor and secretly infecting you with all sorts of deadly diseases. No one can help you. The best anti-Fear measure the government ever came up with went rogue and is now running around brainwashing people. Not even death will give you release, since you'll just find yourself eternally enslaved to a particularly cruel mockery of the afterlife... - Creepy Child: The Unnamed Child and the Cold Boy. The Unnamed Child falls into the Uncanny Valley for everyone but her victims, whom she forces to search for her after she leaves them. The Cold Boy loves a good Ironic Nursery Tune and targets people who are isolated.
- Depending on the Writer: Practically the main "theme" of the entire mythos. Some stories have Fears, others don't, some stories depict Fears in radically different ways, it's all up to the writer.
- Eldritch Location: The Empty City and the Algernon Forest, and some stories depict The Grotesque as being something like this.
- Enslaved Tongue: The Choir from "Slip ups" makes people say the opposite of what they mean.
- Evil Is Petty: Fears that aren't treated as incomprehensibly eldritch tend to be written as such. (It rarely makes them less intimidating, though it can in more humorous stories, in which case it might be lampshaded, Flanderized, or otherwise used for comedic effect.)
- Eye Scream: A common theme throughout the early blogs, from The Jeannette Experience where Jeanette's eye was burned out to Closest to the Sun where it's implied Achromatic Morality cut out her own eyes.
- Expy: The Archive (Seen here http://scribesigma.blogspot.com) is fairly similar to the SCP Foundation, with the two primary differences being the fact a) that the Archive doesn't contain the Fears, it merely examines them and b) the Archive is a cult of the Blind Man's.
- Faceless Eye: The Eye, appropriately enough.
- Four Is Death: Comes up a fair bit in the early blogs' arc-numbers.
- Four-seventeen, in Eccentrically Bored.
- Three fours in Still Remains Within.
- Even lampshaded in brighter than a spoon when Tav hides something in PO Box 444.
- In Nothing To Fear four songs were posted, all possibly related to concepts of fears. All at 4:17
- And, each post was numbered in a different language, the fourth one being Japanese, in which four and death are the same word.
- Government Conspiracy: Some stories have organizations that look into the Fears, only to turn into this focus.
- The Supernatural Threat Analysis Bureau (STAB) is an international organization that covers a number of smaller groups.
- The SMSC is a branch of the FBI and STAB which deals with Fear-related issues. How competent they are varies Depending on the Writer.
- The Panopticon, meanwhile, is a Government Conspiracy that went rogue, and kidnaps people off the street in order to brainwash them into believing the Fears aren't real.
- Hand Wave: Any inconsistencies are the result of Dimensional Bleeding. See the entry about The Multiverse below. Do note that there's a lot of writers who firmly stand by the Doylian view that any inconsistencies are merely because they are just stories and few share a canon.
- Horrifying the Horror: The Deep scares EAT so much in some stories that it refuses to contaminate the oceans, where it dwells. Aqualung, on the other hand, terrifies all other Fears in Madverse because he is the embodiment of oblivion.
- I Have Many Names: With the open source nature of the mythos, many stories come up with their own names for Fears, some stories even giving them each several. It can get confusing, and some stories even rely on that obfuscation.
- Metafiction: The blog which was originally supposed to be the series bible's first draft, The Fear Mythos, is now quite the example of this. Many other Fear Mythos stories are examples of this on some level, especially the works of Alliterator (the author of The Fear Mythos) and D Jay 32.
- The Multiverse: There are countless universes, with countless different versions of the Fears. Due to a phenomenon called Dimensional Bleeding, events and documents often bleed over from universe to universe (thus explaining, in Watsonian terms, the often contradictory events of various blogs).
- Prophecy Armor: Spacefuture Blogger in Omega's Bizarre Adventure was told he by the Vision that he will by killed by giant spiders. Omega figured out that this meant he could use Spacefuture Blogger as a highly effective meatshield against everything but giant spiders.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Wooden Girl controls her victims. Also, the Archangel turns out to be the afterlife, and enslaves all who have died (except for those killed by the Fears).
- Red Right Hand: Literally with Jack of All, a mysterious trickster with a red hand who often makes dangerous deals with people.
- Religious Horror: The Archangel, a twisted mockery of religion and the afterlife.
- Rule of Scary: Can crop up a lot, though some writers try to steer clear of it, as much as it's possible with entities that seem to have been born from it.
- Shared Universe: Some stories share a canon. In some cases, this is a deliberate move to tell a greater story. In other cases, this is writers grouping together to crossover.
- Unreliable Canon: This is the general idea behind this and the only way to be a fan of every version of every Slender Man webisode series without discontinuity derailing your enjoyment of each. It helps that each monster is an Eldritch Abomination and the bending of reality isn't hard to believe, but when everyone is going a different way with the interpretations, you just have to let some things slide. (This is largely due to the way in which different Fear Mythos stories only sometimes take place in an overarching canon, and even then, specific canons are rarely connected to one another.)
- World of Snark: A number of stories in the Mythos have this element. The main exception is characters who are openly broken or just confused, rather than Sad Clown or gleefully Axe-Crazy types. Snarky characters tend to be one of those two, given the Crapsack World nature of most Mythos settings.
