Face to face with Mr. Deer, the most loved game on TikTok: “History is the secret of my success”

Now there is Mr CrowMr SnakeMr Cat and also Mr Raccoon. But first of all there was Mr. Deer. Not so much before, because this story is recent history.

It is the story of a pastime that drives the very young crazy on TikTok taking advantage of some of the lesser known features of the ByteDance platform and above all it is the story of the skill of a italian creator, which followed an already existing trend (“the format is not mine, the structure with rules, choices and results has been around for some time”, he explained) but has been able to go further and have unpredictable success. This is a story in which Italy is pursued, instead of chasing.

How to enter the world of Signor Cervo

Mister Deer is not an interactive game, as many have written. Not in the literal sense of the word, at least: it’s not like reigns or Reigns: Her Majesty, in which you physically move some cards left or right to make choices that will influence the development of the narrative. The choices are there, but they’re more like those of a mid-eighties gamebook (the best known was Lone wolf): whoever plays finds himself in front of some crossroads, decides an action and then scrolls to read the consequences. Obviously, as in a gamebook and unlike a real interactive game, you can cheat, go back and take another path.

Signor Cervo arrived on TikTok on June 20, and it was an objectively enormous success: to date, the profile (registered under the name of Marvin) has just under 200,000 followers, over a million likes, thousands of comments and more than 11.5 million views. Accumulate precisely in less than 3 weeks.

It’s a story horror, or in any case of fear, which offers some thrills and can end badly, if not very badly: you find yourself in the presence of Mr. Deer and you can decide to play with him and spend some time in his company, facing some challenges to be overcome by following precise rules. Technically, the TikTok posts they collect the episodes of the series (6, excluding the first spin-off) they are what are called slideshows, i carousels of typical Instagram photos: illustrations with superimposed text to scroll from left to right, with colors to distinguish the consequences of the various answers.

Playing is simple: you read the rules on one of the first cards and then you try to act respecting those rules, with the images that tend to alternate between a description of the challenge (eating something or not, entering a room, performing an action), a list of the possible answerslist of possible consequences, sorted in the same order as the answers and distinguished by colour. In the background of everything there is a story that goes on: the experience, characterized by a disturbing and annoying little tune at the right point, is better enjoyable from an app than from a browser, where autoplay causes slides to scroll too quickly. Right from the app, a advise to better appreciate the story is to touch the screen with two fingers to make all the icons disappear and be able to concentrate on the writings or (better) hold down and then select Essential view to get the same effect.

Only one person behind Mr. Deer

At the beginning we spoke of “a creator”, masculine, but that is not necessarily the case: Marvin could also be a creator. We don’t know: “Anonymity is part of the character I’ve created and for now I’d prefer to keep it,” he told us when we asked if he was a man or a woman and how old he was. The choice is understandable: there are huge careers built on mysteryfrom Bansky to Elena Ferrante, from Erin Doom to the Genoese Tiler.

And yet, Marvin told us a few things. For example that studies Communication at the university and above all that “everything on the profile is the result of a single person who creates the plot and creates the graphics”, which is why “the time taken is so much” and, if “for the first part I was able to post once a day, now it is much more difficult”. Despite this, “I still try not to let more than two days pass (between one post and another, ed) so as not to lose the continuity of the story”. This is because, according to Marvin, the success, compared to other similar contents, “was given by the fact that the other videos didn’t have a real storyline but more simply a series of rules to follow and some choices for their own sake: I don’t want to criticize the other videos, which are the ones that inspired me, I simply think that people have been particularly attracted by the presence of lore”. That is precisely from a very specific story and setting.

tiktok: Mr. Raven’s story

The (inexplicable) reasons for its success

Beyond these arguments, it is still not easy to understand why Signor Cervo has had the success he has had, with thousands of comments per episodepeople who ask for more, who try all the crossroads and experiment with all the ways of dying (we reiterate it: history also tends to end badly or very badly) and precisely more attempts to imitate the Puzzle Week.

As mentioned, it’s not the first game of its kind to be much loved above all by Gen Z, boys and girls aged 15-20 (in April there was that of Lady Rabbit, but with lower numbers): most likely the feeling of being in some way protagonists of a each other and to have a certain degree of control, the pleasure of being told a story and also of get scared a little, perhaps in the evening under the covers, when everyone in the house is asleep.

In this, slideshow games are somewhat reminiscent of corecore (things?)another social phenomenon incomprehensible to adults, and that sensation of doing something that causes annoyance but in a strangely comforting way and which is both unpleasant and pleasant. These are similarities that we seem to find also from a visual point of view, with a simple but well-finished iconography that evidently really reaches the public it needs to reach.

Not only that: Mr. Deer it definitely fits into the trend of the so-called creepypastathe invented horror stories, or based on true but extensively reworked stories, which have been part of the Internet subculture since more or less the early 2000s: Marvin confessed to be a “big creepypasta fan” and that “in fact the concept is just that”. They are easy thrills at no cost, capable of making you jump in your seat with a successful combination of images, writing and music. The best known examples are the famous myth of the Slender Man and above all Marble Hornetsa series still viewable on YouTube which is based on the concept of found footage typical of movie like The Blair Witch Project.

youtube: the first, historical episode of Marble Hornets

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Cat, Raccoon, Snake and the case of non-canon

Apart from assumptions, what is certain is that people gathered around Signor Cervo a community that is not only very broad but also quite demanding and severe too. So much so that, while recognizing the quality of some imitators (Raven and Snake seem to be the most popular), she is ready to point out the things that aren’t right, the discrepancies, the differences with the original series, which remains the point of reference: ” This is not canonical”, we often read in the comments of the videos that followed.

The reference is to the expression non-canon typical of video games and cinema, which indicates a production unrelated to the main continuity, perhaps set in a parallel universe (a film by Star Wars which takes place in another timeline, for example) and therefore less authoritative and worthy of attention. As if, in less than 3 weeks, Mr. Deer had already built his own poetics and mythology. A lore of him, which now the others will have to respect.

Another certain and undeniable thing is that with this content adults struggle: it is so and there is no shame in it, exactly as it happened when today’s adults were teenagers and struggled to make themselves understood by their parents. And they struggled to explain to him why they liked the things they liked. It’s a bit of a rule, more or less like that of “never touch the horns of Signor Deer”. It’s just like that.

@capoema