Misconceptions

Due to the Fear Mythos being relatively small compared to other internet communities, it is not uncommon for non-Fear Mythos fans to believe in or create misconceptions or stereotypes about the universe and spread them through numerous means. This page makes an attempt to list all misconceptions and stereotypes.

The Fear Mythos is basically "Slender Man and his happy tree friends"
Since the Fear Mythos began as a spin-off of The Slender Man Mythos, many people believe that Fear Mythos stories are usually Slender Man oriented and just happen to include another Fear. In actuality, Fear Mythos stories usually don't include the Slender Man and those that do rarely portray him as the main antagonist. This misconception stems from early Fear Mythos stories, such as Eccentrically Bored and Brighter than a spoon, starting off as Slender Man blogs, only for them to incorporate other Fears as secondary antagonists later on.

There is a list of Fears/"You can't write Fear X like that"
Due to the way the mythos developed, it's easy to think the Fears are a single pantheon of characters writers pull from a list, that there are specific ways to write certain Fears, or even that a Fear like The Wooden Girl has to be called "The Wooden Girl" in a story. But pretty quickly in mythos history, with the establishment of the series bible, it was decided to separate the concepts of the Fears from the characters writers write. As such, we have this thing now called "vanilla Fears." We'll get to that presently. For now, remember that there is no right way to write a Fear. Every writer is entitled to their own personal list of Fears, to as many of those as they want. Make Batman a Fear. Have fun. The Wiki list is just a list of how Fears have been written.

"X is a vanilla Fear"
Vanilla Fears are abstract. As such, they're not the easiest concept to grasp. All you gotta remember is that vanilla Fears are not written into stories. A vanilla Fear is the most basic concept that a Fear can be broken down to. For example, "The Archangel" is not the most basic concept (as that implies it's 'canonically' called "The Archangel," but many stories give the Fear different names), so let's take the name away and make it "the concept of the afterlife." There we go, that's the vanilla Fear. We document this stuff purely to hammer home the idea that you can write whatever you want however you want and still be accepted; all our Fears boil down to emotions we all share. Everything else is not vanilla, everything else is a topping.