The tone of any work sets the story and gives your audience and idea on what to expect, and how to feel. The tone of your blog is very important to conveying the message you want, you wouldn’t use humor when talking about an important subject, but you may use sarcasm to show how a usually serious subject needs to be toned down. Through tone you breath life into your blogs. The Dionaea House and The Sick Land use tone both differently in areas and also very similar.
It seems that there are more things alike then different in the tone of these blogs. The most prevalent being how they are written, Bryan Alexander stating they are both “Blog as Diary,” formats. The Dionaea House follows an unofficial blog of emails that have been put together to tell a story, and The Sick Land states in post one, “I've set up this blog as a diary come research log.” The diary blog style gives you a personal connection to what is being said in every post. In the beginning of each blog you get only facts about what the blog is. The Dionaea House being a post first from Eric Heisserer, and Mark Chondry stating that the following post were for Mark’s family but on Marks first email giving the details of their late friend. In The Sick Land you can see the scientist in Alex with the excitement about a field study and the definition of what “Mal” refers. From there the posts each have their own purpose but follow the same flow; the tone of each slowly gets more and more serious. Mark gets very invested in finding all the facts about his friend’s death and Alex is getting frustrated with the little explanation to what is being done to resolve The Sick Land problem, “No one was willing to give me more details, or explain anything in more depth than the most superficial analogies. I've spent my working life with scientists, and they usually love to explain their field to interested people. I don't understand what's happening. No one seems to have any books, or papers, either. It's like they exist in a vacuum, where they already know everything they need to know, but they can't, or won't, transmit the information. I don't see how this place can run.”
This frustrated tone leads to urgency in a spiral of isolation and the end for both characters. All Marks wants is to find out how his friends ended up where he did but as he gets closer to the answer he is swallowed up in the same trap as his friend Andrew. The last few posts we see from Mark are in texts and as he finds the house he was looking for you get play by play of what he thinks before an abrupt end. Alex in The Sick Land doesn’t fair well either, the diary style blog lets us into Alex mind a lot more. You feel Alex’s emotions as he spirals into trouble only wanting to make the world better, but instead he sees the dark side of science. The ‘monsters’ close in and he makes is final scared post as well.
Both blogs have such a believably ominous tone that after reading you need something happy around you. Bryan Alexander brings up this as well when mentioning The Dionaea House blog, “Once we finish Mark’s story, which climaxes on an effectively spooky note (texting and explaining, by doing so, that “THE DOOR IS OPEN”). Leading up to this is a slew of texts that are all in Caps, you can feel the urgent and anxiousness of Mark as he goes throughout this house making discoveries. The Sick Land also clouds your mind with shadows slowly as Alex’s panic grows and you start to realize that the world is going down but not before Alex. I was very invested in the outcome of both these blogs as I read them, so much so that I didn’t realize how much they were tugging at my emotions. My feelings of fear and dread the most. At the end of reading The Dionaea House I had to put music on, remind myself it was daytime and walk around a bit to shake of the uneasiness this House. At the end of Sick Land and start of writing this I had a similar experience only I wasn’t home alone this time. My house was well lite during this night and I knew just across my apartment was another body to curb any fears, but it didn’t help much as I reread material in research. You will get sucked into a new world with these blogs, but you will probably also need to turn a light on and play Mulan when your finish just like I did.
http://thesickland.blogspot.com/
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House
