Conflict in Blogs

The two stories I read and reread were Slender Man and The Dionaea House.  Slender Man is about this girl that wakes up in the middle of the night and is unnerved. She decides that she is not going to be able to go back to sleep so she goes to make coffee. She can’t shake the feeling that something is outside her front door, “…she decided that a quick glance out the peep hole would help clam her restless mind.”  She is wrong and sees a black silhouette of a creepy silhouette which is described as an inhuman man with, ” The limbs were long and inhumanly awkward….”  She tried to get away from the door and spills and burns herself with her coffee. The Slender Man begins to come into the house in black tendrils through the cracks in her door and then she hears the door unlock. She tries to hide, and we are sent to darkness only coming back when her sister is at the hospital to see her. The doctors think that she gouged out her own eyes and ears, which I don’t blame her for. If I was in her situation, and in the middle of that conflict I would have done the same to escape him.  The Dionaea House is about a guy named Mark that has gone missing. The friends and family use a website to share his and other communications in hopes of locating him. The Dionaea House is an entity that takes the shape of a house. The house either replicates itself or is constructed repeatedly exactly the same because there are more than one that people stay at while traveling. Once you enter the house it either consumes you are uses mind control on you. If anyone escapes the house, they are hunted down by the people the house is controlling to keep its identity a secret, “But if you walk away knowing too much about it, the house will get to you.” MrParanoia also sends communications about the house and says,” ……. those who have figured out what this “flytrap” house is, risk becoming its next victim.”  It is crazy but this story makes you feel like maybe your house is out to get you as well. It does an excellent job of creating suspense through these communications and showing the conflict the characters are going through with this weird house. Andrew is being controlled by the house and goes across the country always staying in the same house doing whatever the house wants him to do.  He was following a couple that had stayed in the house and figured out there was something wrong with it. He eventually finds and kills them and himself to keep the houses identity a secret. It seems to just repeatedly find people to eat and people to control, once that happens it begins again. The literary technique that both stories use to hook readers is conflict. Conflict is the battle that is going on between the person in the story and the outside force that is against them whether it be a person, nature, or forces within themselves.  The conflict in both stories brings about a lot of suspense and keeps you reading to find out the ending.  I think conflict is one of the most important literary elements because it keeps you interested and wanting to know what is going to happen. That element draws you into the story and makes you feel like it is happening to you. I know after I read Slender Man, I was making sure to turn on lights before I walked into a room. The conflict is between her and the Slenderman and trying to get away from him like when it says, “The girl was trapped between the instinct to flee and the gut feeling to not turn her back on the door.” She is conflicted within herself as well because she is not sure how to get away from him and remain safe or at least aware of where he is.  In Dionaea House the conflict is between the house and the inhabitants. This story lets you know that this house is the main antagonist in this story when it states, “Andrew was scared to death of that house.” I really think that the way the conflict in this story is told through several stories about the house and the people that was in it. It does a really good job of drawing you in to each story and telling you all the weird things that goes on in the house and quirks about the house. I think when you are reading a story about a struggle it helps put yourself in their shoes because we all know that fight or flight feeling when we are scared.

 “Slender Man” (2010, January 14) Retrieved from  https://www.creepypasta.com/slenderman/

Heisserer, Eric, (2004) “The Dionaea House” http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House