The Origin

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by ToxsikEro

by ToxsikEro

Finally, after a long day you get a moment to yourself. You take a deep breath, sigh out the weight of the day’s pressures and collapse onto a bean bag, lifting the controller, to load up a game and enjoy some much needed escapism. This time however, escape might not be so easy.

This time, you have loaded up an old retro game that you bought from a garage sale, a lesser known offshoot from a well known game franchise that you’ve always had a soft spot for. Unfortunately though, you are clearly not the only person who had affection for this game or even the only one exploring the game’s pixelated reality, because, on the game’s leader board another name, the name of the game’s previous owner, flashes brilliantly. This previous owner has left his mark on the game, but has not necessarily left…

As you continue with the gameplay, glitches begin to appear, operations and scenarios that shouldn’t be possible begin to unfold and increasingly you get the feeling that although it is your hands on the controller, it is you who is being controlled.

Suddenly the screen changes, an oddly discordant tune, warped by the slow drag of playing backwards rings out from the speakers and a face, at once familiar and somehow changed appears on the screen. As long, crimson streaks of fresh blood drip from the eyesockets the face, staring forever outwards seems to see without seeing, staring at you, through you, into you. It is at this point that you begin to realise

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

APPEARANCE AND ORIGINS

There are a number of images commonly associated with the BEN Drowned creepypasta. The most well known and widely recognised being a modified image of ‘Link’ from Nintendo’s seminal ‘Legend of Zelda’ series, modified to have eyes that are variously, wild, dark rimmed or entirely blacked out, but seem in every case to be pouring blood.

Though it is the vision mostly closely linked to BEN Drowned story, it is interesting to note that this image did not appear, nor was it referred to in the original story. True to its creepypasta origins the story of Ben Drowned was eventually adopted, altered and modified by those who shared it, until this new and more popular avatar for the character evolved, independent of both Nintendo (the original Link character’s designers) or the Creepypasta’s original author Jadusable (Alex Hall).

The character’s original avatar which was notably less gory, and yet somehow just as unnerving, had been simply an image of the statue of Link that, unblinking and stoic, followed Jadusable around the game, just on the edge of sight.

One possible explanation for the origin of the ‘bleeding eye BEN’ image is the long established stories of statues (particularly those of the Virgin Mary) weeping blood. The suggestion being that the first image of the weeping BEN was intended to depict the statue image that was BEN’s original avatar crying blood in a similar manner, rather than simply the link character or an embodiment of BEN himself.