MOTHER KNOWS BEST - A Scratch Retrospective

Instructions

USE SPACE TO CHANGE SLIDES Also yes this is supposed to be my Halloween special //Hollow is a design I made for a Scratch EXE like a year and a half ago, but it was... very, VERY bad. So I decided to completely rewrite the lore and change the design. Decided to take a more Scratch creepypasta-esc approach this time around. -STORY- "Back in 2017, there was a particularly odd project trend going around on the Scratch website. These projects would usually be rather poorly made (even by Scratch standards), and would typically be remixes of other projects, some of them being Add Yourself projects, and some of them being completely random. Though these projects have a wide variety of genres and varying levels of quality, they all had one common theme: The mention of something or someone they called "Mother". By varying depictions and accounts, it seemed to be a scratch cat with bright red fur and cream accents. Due to there being many interpretations of this character throughout many projects, the design seems to vary greatly, and there doesn't seem to be any "true" design. Though the projects themselves had varying levels of subtlety, they were all incredibly strange. Some were just cringe, resembling people simply inserting themselves into things that weren't for them, while others very clearly veered towards actual horror. Though it rarely become actually dangerous (at least at first), many of these depictions just sounded like a vague threat to the viewers or players. And most of the users creating these projects seemed to be relatively young, judging by the quality of their work, and overall demeanor. Granted, they wouldn't necessarily act strange themselves, but only continue to make these projects. These projects would flood "add everything" studios and the comments of random projects, essentially infesting the website. Many of the projects have since been taken down, either by the creators of them, or the Scratch Team themselves. They even started appearing in the Scratch forums, where users would make posts asking how to best represent "Mother", or how to properly show their devotion. The responses to this give us the most of what we know about Mother. They say that she's "kind, patient, and takes in children with bad homes and bad parents". And that all you must do to join Mother is "ask". Looking back, this was most definitely some sort of glorified cult, aiming to manipulate young kids for whatever reason. And all this came to a head on May 13th, 2018. On this day, the project spam became the worst it ever was, hitting its apex, as the projects became far more erratic and downright unhinged, containing links to numerous websites belonging to the cult, viruses that spammed the rhetoric and teachings of the group, IP grabbers, ransomware, and other such things. Multiple projects would get posted a minute, hundreds of them in a single night, some even being copies of each other just for the sake of having more projects. And though many of these projects were reported, the rate at which they were being put up was larger than the rate at which they were being taken down. This frequency only grew, until the night came, and it slowed significantly. And on that very night, and on the following day, a large number of these users would disappear from Scratch, and the internet entirely. The number is estimated to be around half of the group. Many of these people are still completely gone from the internet to this day. The Scratch Team had, of course, picked up on this attack on their website, and so one of two things happened to the remaining members of the cult. They would either go back to posting completely normal projects, never to return to the group again. Or, they would continue their spree until they were either banned by the Scratch Team, or faded into irrelevance." -The Executable Research Institution, 2025