#we even managed to get kjse done in one go

[lilakennedy]

leave it to our discord to not be able to get past the first few lines of All The Way when we try to do the song meme, but somehow get thru EVERY. SINGLE. ANTI SPEECH. ON THE FIRST TRY -

[rogue-of-broken-time]

On Anti and Types of Fear

This is something I’ve actually been wanting to make a post about for a long time now. I’m not sure if Seán even realizes that he’s done this over the years, but taking a step back and looking at the major Anti appearances from a psychological storytelling perspective, he’s actually managed to invoke specifically-different types of fear in almost all of them. 

This might sound confusing to some people, since fear itself seems like too broad of a term to start with, but it can actually be broken down into specific “types”. I’ll explain what those are as I go, because it’s strangely hard for me to find a good way to word these without giving a context– so, without further ado, we’ll start from the beginning:

… under a cut, because this got pretty long pretty fast. xD 

TL;DR: @therealjacksepticeye​, you’re a gosh dang genius whether you even realize it or not, and I have way too much time on my hands.

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SAY GOODBYE: Horror

You might think that the word “horror” is like, an umbrella term for anything that falls under the genre (books, movies, games, etc)– but it actually has a much more specific definition. Horror in the context of it being an experience is described as the sickening realization, the moment you see or when it occurs to you what exactly is there or what event is happening. It’s the moment you realize it’s too late. 

SAY GOODBYE is the embodiment of that for me. Anti is sitting there, telling you that you could have done something to stop him, but you didn’t. Horror is what freezes you when you realize that all you did was watch, and it’s what crushes you with twisted guilt when you realize there had been a choice of whether to do it all along.

ALWAYS WATCHING: Shock 

“Shock” is more broad in definition (since it can mean physical shock, psychological shock, that kind of thing) and oftentimes it’s just tied in under “horror”, but to me, I think ALWAYS WATCHING really hits on what it can mean when it comes to directly invoking fear; the frozen moment, the moment you can’t believe what you’re seeing and thinking it can’t be happening.

The thing about this appearance was that it was a complete surprise. The idea of Anti coming back at all was one thing, sure, but the concept that he’d rear his head at PAX, of all places? It was so unexpected that the fact that it was unexpected packed a punch of its own. And what he said there? “You all thought I was gone, but I’ve been here this entire time”? That was a direct confirmation of fears people had had since Detention, which had come out around a month prior with many things left unanswered.

KILL JACKSEPTICEYE: Dread 

Another slightly broader term with some overlap, but one that I think Seán absolutely nailed in the Summer Antipocalypse of 2017. Dread is the foreboding, the apprehension, the anticipation of something approaching. It’s the pit in your stomach while you’re waiting for the bad thing to happen, the internal turmoil that happens in your head while you’re bracing for it. 

Dread is what we know as the “slow burn”– when it’s slowly and gradually shoved in your face that something bad is on its way and that it’s going to get worse before it gets better– and with KJSE, it was as if Seán had this down to a science. So much so that he’d even given us an exact date of when it was all gonna go down in one of his thumbnails. And from the sheer amount of response he’d gotten because he chose this route over, say, another surprise appearance? Because he chose to hold us in this dread until the last possible second, when Schneeplestein’s cry for help was torn apart and nothing but the wall behind him was left? Ohhh boy, I’m 100% certain that he preferred this level of community involvement, more akin to the buildup of SAY GOODBYE. And since then, I’m willing to wager that he shifted his tactics more around dread because of just how much more effective it can be. The fact that it was so integrally interwoven all through Mayhem pretty much proves it (more on this later).

OVERNIGHT WATCH: Terror 

Contrary to likely-popular belief, “terror” is NOT the same as “horror” when it comes to what experiencing it is like. Where horror is the awful realization, terror is the near-indescribable level of fear that comes with the obscurity before that realization. It’s heavily intertwined with dread in the sense that you know something is going to happen– but this time, you have literally no idea what, when, where, or why it will be. To give more of an idea on how bad this can really get, terror is the kind of fear that Stephen King shoots for the most and works the hardest to maintain in his own writing. So this is the actual pinnacle we’re talking about here. 

And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel it on the night of Overnight Watch. There were times where my heart legitimately started pounding out of my chest (no joke, I didn’t even hear Silent Night when it played the first time because my heartbeat was so loud in my ears), and I got to a point where I was more afraid to look away from the screen than I was to look at it because my head became convinced that there would be punishment for disobeying. That whole night, you could never know what was coming or when, where on the cameras it would be, or why it was even happening at all. The constant faint static from the stream allowed for no warnings if a glitch started. 

There was no release of this tension for twenty hours straight, and even when it was over, there were no answers. I’m like 95% sure that this is why ONW compilations will never truly do it justice– because no video compilation will ever really capture the twenty consecutive hours of being held in such a state of constant fear as the real thing ever did.  

DARK SILENCE: Anxiety 

NOT to be confused with clinical anxiety (with which I am all too familiar). When outside of a clinical context and in terms of “anxiety” that any person can feel regardless of their mental state, it’s defined as when the brain is unable determine whether a threat is a real one. It’s when you’re unable to figure out if a situation is legitimately life-or-death, and your mind is very much not okay with that, so every instinct we’ve ever evolved to protect ourselves from harm is going crazy. (The clinical definition of anxiety actually isn’t too far from this– when it’s a condition someone has in their day-to-day life, it’s because their brain registers non-life or death situations as situations that could actually cause them harm or death.)

So, what about Dark Silence was anxiety-inducing? We have literally no proof that Chase is safe. There’s actually a lot of evidence suggesting the contrary. The level of sheer immersion that comes with feelings of anxiety– the times when your mind is not convinced that this person is not real– is what makes it all the more terrifying to experience. And I’d argue that a good amount of this immersion comes from the way Seán portrayed Chase in those moments, too; the shakiness in his voice, the fear in his eyes, the way his mouth hesitated to speak, ALL of that was working together to convince us that the scenario we were looking at was real, which in turn made us more and more legitimately fearful.

Now, taking a step back and looking at the evolution of how Seán’s used these specific variations of fear, and where it looks like he’ll be taking it going forward? Have a look at Mayhem in general. He kept feeding us tiny pieces of the puzzle– not enough to make much immediate sense, but just enough for all of the tiny, possible connections to present themselves in a way that captured our attention entirely. And every little ego hint since then has followed that pattern of subtlety. 

He’s gotten to the point where he knows how to keep all of us in a constant state of not knowing whether any of the egos we know and love are safe. It’s like he’s learned what the best types of fear to invoke in us are for a desired reaction and how exactly to execute those things (with the help of Robin, of course– this would not have gotten nearly this far without him and his fantastic editing skills).

But the thing about this is, we don’t even know if he’s done this on purpose. He could have simply just been playing around with different ideas spontaneously since 2016, trying different shenanigans each time to see what kind of reaction he likes to get from us with certain things. And if that’s the case, that’s totally valid. I just think it’s incredibly interesting to see that he followed this pattern at all, because he’s actually been doing exactly what he’s needed to do in order to make Anti “scarier” over the years, on both a story-crafting AND a psychological scale. 

... well, that’s all I got for now. Anyone out there who actually read this to the end, I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you have a great rest of your day :D 

This isn’t exactly a theory, but anyway– *finger guns* Rogue out.