A Lesson from Mother Horse Eyes

“Well, I guess that this point you’re probably wondering how I, your intrepid narrator, managed to escape the Bottomless Pit, how I managed to survive to tell you this tale. I simply didn’t. I never escaped the Bottomless Pit. I am the Bottomless Pit. Hahaha. I am the Tree of Life.” – excerpt from a comment on r/funny, /u/_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, April 27 2016

Picture this:

You are a redditor. You are bored one day and are browsing the r/funny subreddit. You click on a post about sarcastic party balloons and start reading through the comments. Partway down the page, apropos of absolutely nothing, you find a 1,286 word post that describes how the poster died after being eaten alive by a writhing pit of amalgamous flesh and teeth.

You start to wonder what the hell you just read.

As it turns out, what you just read was a chapter in the Interface series, a work of fiction from an anonymous author that plays out incrementally through nearly one hundred Reddit posts hidden in dozens of random subreddits. The story is sci-fi with elements of mystery and horror, and is told in a patchwork of many interconnected perspectives from many points in time. For more information on the series, I recommend you simply visit the subreddit.

Interface is a story told almost entirely through social media, and there’s a lot to be said about the effect of the medium on the message. Instead, though, I’d like to touch on what Mother Horse Eyes teaches us about social media itself—namely, that you can actually do whatever the heck you want with it. The author of Interface takes a tool used to connect people and instead uses it for fiction. Mother Horse Eyes asks us, writers or not, to consider what we take for granted on social media (like reality) and encourages us to break the rules.

Sources:

Fredrik Knudsen. (2017, June 23). Mother Horse Eyes | Down the Rabbit Hole [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-SQGOYOjxs

Gabbikat. (2017). narrative. r/9M9H9E9. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/9M9H9E9/wiki/narrative

Home. (n.d.). Retrieved January 23, 2020 from the Mother Horse Eyes Wiki: https://interface.fandom.com/wiki/Mother_Horse_Eyes_Wikia