The Magical, The Flesh and The Machine.

Ben Drowned is an ARG written by Alex Hall (Jadusable) on 4chan and YouTube. It was created in 2010, in the creepypasta era, and as it gained popularity, Ben became one himself.

As the “chronically online” kid I was and (no)thanks to the early and uncontrolled access to Internet I had as a young emo teenager, I fell into the ginormous rabbit-hole of Creepypastas. A blend word between the term “creepy” (= weird, a little frightening, odd) and the expression “copy/paste”, creepypastas are Internet stories that were most popular in the early 2010’. The first and most famous one must be Slenderman (2009, “something awful” forum).

They come from the incredibly ancient tradition of fanfiction: when there are not enough of your favorite characters in a piece of media and/or it doesn’t end how you expected it to, fear not my little friend, fanfictions are here to satisfy you.

Often associated with a picture (Jeff the Killer, Eyeless Jack…) and pass around the internet (copy/pasted), most of the creepypastas are awfully written, romanticize/ glamourize the murderous impulses of their characters and fetishize mental illnesses and disabilities… As the fandom expended, the creepypastas were soon sexualized (yes, even the minors…) and plenty of explicit fanfics and fanarts emerged on AO3 and DeviantArt. This is the vision of the fandom that now sticks to its back.





Some kids started actually believing that if they killed their families and friends (like Jeff or Toby did), Slenderman was going to come and get them, that he will become their protective father figure, take them into his manor in the forest with all the other ‘proxies’ and they will all live happily ever after together, murdering for fun. (That’s how in 2014 young girls killed their friend as a “sacrifice” to Slendy, or closer to us, in 2022, in France, a girl killed her parents to become a proxy.) There are many other terrible aspects of the creepypasta fandom (grooming stories mostly from creepypasta artists and tellers for one) …But as you might imagine, that is not why I am writing about Creepypastas and fanfictions.

I do not wish to diabolize this community because for many kids, like me, reading/listening to creepypastas, getting into fandoms, was a coping mechanism.

The creepypastas explored a vast panel of trauma from bullying to SA and grief… The way the characters responded to it offered us an exit to the realities of our own experiences with the same (or similar) traumas. The protagonists were our heroes, and we looked them up because they had the guts to stand up to their abusive relatives like we never could.

And it is also fan made. From the stories and characters, themselves to their multiple AU (alternate universe fanfics) and designs, it is entirely fan created. And so, the amount of neuro divergent/Queer representation is huge compared to the poor representation conventional media gave us! If today trans people are (still not enough but) present in shows/movies/books /social medias, back then, if you didn’t already know a little about us, there was almost no chance for you to stumble upon a trans person centered story or a trans content creator. It was not good representation, but we were lacking any representation at all, we had little to no standards, we wanted to be seen; to be shown, we needed someone, something telling us “You are not alone”.

Same with neurodivergence, getting away from the stereotypes is not easy and tv doesn’t help it, unless it is not voluntary, good and accurate neuroatypical representation is missing from our lives. Teen me found it in fanfictions, in fan arts, in online fan communities…

So, I am not saying that romanticizing violence should be accepted or normalized. Not at all. But it should be understood and cared for, not blindly censored or shamed. Spitting on people for what they read or write is not going to change anything.

But if you relate a little to my words, the chances are that, like me, you are not on the strong end of the balance, that you are not of those we listen to. We are angry and wish to fight, against patriarchy, capitalism, violence going on all around the world and our own bullies and persecutors… But we can’t do that if we keep on destroying ourselves, individually and mutually.

As adults on the internet, we need to be careful, to be aware of what happened there, of what could happen and take it a little upon ourselves to make it safer. Like we need to do in real life.

I love fanfics of creepypastas when they show us beautiful stories of healing characters, found families and sense of community. Let us find care and sweetness in both the Internet and our world so we can find our voices back and get loud together.

Kid me was exposed to violence too young on the internet but teen me found comfort and love in that exact same place.



Okay, enough now, let’s talk about BEN DROWNED:

/!\ I will only be referring to the first arc of the story: The Hunted Cartridge!






Published between September 7th and September 15th of 2010 (Yes, it is a really short amount of time) and taking the form of 4chan posts and youtube videos “It details the acquisition of a haunted video game by a college student known only as Jadusable. Over the next week, Jadusable would be plagued by the presence of a seemingly omniscient being called BEN” jadusable.withinhubris.com.







So, is it so hard to believe that young folks were kind of biting Jadusable’s story now?

So, BEN DROWNED is the story of Jadusable, a student, buying a Nintendo 64 Zelda Majora’s mask cartridge and realizing that it might be hunted. The main difference between that plot and every horror movie about ghosts ever made is that, when Jadusable notices weird things happening in his game, he connects his console to his computer to register his game, thus unleashing the entity inside of it and offering it Internet, all its knowledge and resources on a silver platter.

It then becomes some sort of deity (invisible, untouchable creature of power).

By stalking him, this entity’s torturing Jadusable psychologically. It torments him just like demons and other evil spirits have been doing for centuries. This story is one of an invocation-gone-wrong: gathering the ancient object from a shady old man, bringing home and signing its name on it thus triggering the anger of its dead previous owner (?)… Nothing new under the sun here, just a new way to do it unlocked!

When it comes to magic, it is always a question of balance: a life for a life. So, in order of Jadusable being free of BEN, this last one has to receive something too. Although in this case, magical balance didn’t play fair: Jadusable received freedom and a lifetime of trauma, but BEN had been given an expendable territory, thousands of people to manipulate and haunt as it pleases, countless information and media … a universe.










This story is not “breaking the fourth wall”, it is stating that this “wall” doesn’t exist. Or at least, that it is not a wall but a bridge.

The expression “fourth wall” originates from theater and it is the name given to the invisible separation between actors on the stage and the public.

The breaking of the “fourth wall” is a recognize concept in theater, cinema, tv shows… But when it comes to video games, some are pretty reticent to use it. Maybe because in an RPG (RolePlay Game as Zelda, Gta, Geshin Impact …), the player is interpretating the main character, being the actor on stage and the public at the same time. But I believe that, since the concept of the “fourth wall” dates back to 1758, it is time to consider that the “wall” is not necessarily between the actor and the viewer, but it can be pushed inside the public’s mind.

That is what ARGs are doing. By making you a part of the story, of its making (or at least making you believe it), the distinction between the roles of actor, creator and audience becomes blurry in your mind, you are a bit of everything thus making that fourth wall fade.

It’s the same in the video game like Doki Doki Literature Club, a horror ‘visual novel like’ game in which Monika, a character/entity messes with your game files, deleting other characters, accessing your info to fulfill her wants. At the end of the game Monika is not talking to the main character, she is talking to the player (and their viewer if they are recording)