Slime Lore: Origins
What's In The Barrel?
In the late days of 2024, In my first session of my first true Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I was messing around with the Roll20.net map.
There I discovered this neat little pen tool that let me draw directly on the map. The methods to change the pen color or even to erase the drawn lines weren't obvious.
In this map (a winery), I filled in a barrel with green. And since I couldn't erase it (and I needed an explanation for why the barrel was filled with green), I drew a little arrow and the mouse-written words "GREEN SLIME," indicating that the barrel was filled with green slime.
And something inside me clicked. It was the funniest shit I'd ever seen. Yeah, it was stupid, but I think that may have been why it was so funny. It wasn't just "lol random XD," there was a simple, stupid reason behind it: I found the pen tool, didn't know how to fully access its features, defaced the map, and tried to make it all okay with a simple label.
Green Slime.
But what even was it?
That's the beauty of my first forray into slime. There are no details about its origins or consistency. It was not Nickelodeon slime or TikTok Etsy sensory slime, of that I'm certain. It just is.
It's there, it's in a barrel, it's green, and it's slime.
Green Slime Begins
At this time, I was known on Steam as "Big Mike," a character that features in the video Sports Nuts by Sick Animation. When gaming with this group of friends that overlapped with the D&D group, they called me Mike/Big Mike despite that not being my name.
But after the D&D slime incident, my brain chemistry seemed to literally change in some way. I had to change my Steam name to Green Slime.
Then I began futzing around with ChatGPT and Sora, asking it to make me all sorts of wacky images and videos involving green slime:
- An old scholar opening a dusty tome being greeted with a deluge of green slime directly into his face
- Various unsavory public figures navigating their way up to a podeum, trudging through a knee-deep pool of green slime while looking rather annoyed.
- The last supper, but instead of bread and wine, green slime and more green slime.
It became an obsession. And then more friends joined in on the AI shitposting. I asked the server owner to create a new text channel just for slime so that I wouldn't flood the usual shitpost zone with only slime.
Green Slime As Identity
The word "slime" and its derivitives aren't used in a positive light.
"Ugh politicians are so slimy"
"I hate how the city fills the river with this... green slime for St. Patrick's day."
"Go back to the gutter with the slop and slime where you belong, dork!"
To me, slime wasn't any of this. It was messy and wet and goopy. But it wasn't dirty or evil. It was green and it tried its best.
When I took on the name Green Slime, I did not expect it become a part of my identity as it did. Green Slime became a symbol of identity for me, signalling a desire to buck the old binaries and be something new, something not necessarily without gender or form, but something that can change shape and appearance and presentation. Green Slime was about exploring identity, experimenting, being accepting and welcoming...
At some point, someone brough up blue slime as a joke, and we latched onto that, making it the 'undesirable' type of slime. And it fit perfectly when we would go up against the Illuminate in Helldivers 2, whose blood is blue and gets all over you.
Already, a special kind of loose lore was being built.
The Green Slime Secretary
As I continued using Sora to make slime shitposts, I had this silly idea. Whether I am unsure what came over me or I am too scared to admit it I cannot say. The idea was a secretary in an office, but instead of handing out Starbucks at a big business meeting, and instead of that Starbucks being particularly green and slimy, the secretary herself would be green slime.
This was a whole new layer of high-brow hilarity that ushered in the new era of slime.
Slime people were born.
Obviously this is not my original idea, slime creatures and slime people have existed in various media for decades. However, this was the start of my own iteration of slime.
Slime Lore
The secretary needed a name. And a scientific explanation of her existence, how slime works, breathes, eats, lives.
This was the true spark for Slime Lore.
Every piece of info about the lore, origins, explanations, theories, the characters that you see on this site began at that moment, when I was bit by the world-building bug.
What Now?
To me slime still exists in two parts: Slime as an identity (or a symbol of it), and Slime Lore. This website is for Slime Lore.
After spending MONTHS on the world building, using ChatGPT to help me organize my notes into very nice files, realizing I had to stop using ChatGPT because frankly it's shite, I felt a deep desire to no longer hide my world and keep it to myself and my little friend group.
I don't want to make a splash in the world-building side of the internet, I don't need a big presence elsewhere, I just want to allow myself to share this thing that's been rattling around in my nearly-empty head, to be brave and stop being scared about my creative side.
I'm not getting any yonuger. My whole life I've been building little worlds and writing stories, things that will not and should not ever see the light of day.
But Slime Lore feels different.
It feels like it was meant to be shared.
Maybe I'm desperate, crying out for attention. Maybe I'm drowning in existential dread, and this fictional world is what I would want myself and this world to become. Maybe it's not that deep, and I'm just a slightly eccentric doofus who had an idea he thought was cool. Whatever it is does not matter one bit.
Slime Lore's public presentation will take up this tiny corner of the internet, and that's all it needs to do.
For now.
-- JB