a metaphor for how we explain acts of violence?

slate |  It’s so much easier to talk about Slender Man than about the girl who was stabbed 19 times over the weekend. Horrific violence sends us reeling, hunting for significance and explanations, veering down side streets to avoid our own loss of power. We seek out skeleton key–like details we can use to unlock the newest awful narrative. We want to know why it happened.

In the wake of the Isla Vista, California, shootings in May, many people pored over the reasons for Elliot Rodger’s rampage. Did all those men and women die because of guns? Mental illness?
Misogyny? Hollywood representations of college hedonism? Or, wait—were we focusing too hard on the psychology of a maniac? Whatever the precise mix of factors ultimately was, everyone on the Internet had a different theory. The #YesAllWomen hashtag proliferated across Twitter like a house fire, situating Rodger on a sexist continuum that drew in everyday examples: being catcalled, being groped at a bar. As a productive and necessary conversation unfolded, and a lot of men woke up to the realities of misogyny, others asked whether there wasn’t something unseemly in how writers were shaping the tragedy, reducing its convolutions to tidy arguments about pet causes. And then more people countered that these arguments matter.

A vacuum of meaning opens up behind atrocity, and people fill it by looking at the facts through their personal viewfinders. That is why there’s a kind of poetic justice to the two girls attributing their acts to Slender Man. He’s the perfect metaphor for the becauses we collectively brainstorm—an Internet phantom who looks a little different to everyone. Slender Man is not an explanation for anything—he’s a bogey with elastic limbs who can look like a normal guy or a tentacled nightmare—but, it seems, he’s better than no reason at all.