#because in Entry 18 when we see Tim have a seizure the first thing he does when jay approaches him after it is Run Away

[brittlebutch]

a lot of people seem to use Entry #61 as 'proof' for the crux of the "Brian didn't care about Tim, he was Taking Advantage of Tim's conditions and Forcing him to work as part of totheark" thing, but honestly when you think about it there's no possible way Brian could have possibly orchestrated that series of events, like you almost have to interpret that as a baffling group of coincidences

[halogen-00]

So I had a long conversation with greenminior about this and I’m gonna tell you what we discerned. This post is absolutely full of spoilers.

Now.  Throughout the series, Alex blames a variety of parties for the initial onset and spread of the Operator’s torment.  He blames Jay for Jessica’s involvement at first in Entry 52, insinuating that because Jay investigated the tapes, got the people in them re-involved in the matter, and provoked the Operator, its “disease” was allowed to spread, but he later says that be thinks Tim is the reason it took interest in all of them in the first place.  Tim blames himself as well as he says in Entry 66, but he also holds Alex accountable for letting the Operator control him and drive him to kill the others (Jay, Amy, etc).  We also learn later that Jay’s involvement with the Operator was almost exclusively caused by Alex- in Entry 71, he seems to almost give him to it after beating him up.  Then there is Brian, who persistently manipulates Jay to stay investigative and keep searching for answers, the process of which directly invites the Operator into others’ lives (as seen with Tim after the missing 7 months / Jessica.)  Everyone is blaming everyone else to some degree.  This conflict of blame led me to ponder who is actually most at fault for allowing the Operator’s corruption to continue as far as it did, and what key mistakes were made.  I’ll take this character by character.

To start, I’m considering Seth, Sarah, Amy, and Jessica victims, as all of them were directly endangered by other people who were already being pursued by the Operator and can’t be blamed for much due to a lack of involvement.  So they’re exempt from this, unless someone wants to go off about them.

Tim, as we know, has likely dealt with the Operator from his early childhood.  Through he refers to past encounters with it as “hallucinations” (66), it is safe to assume that the entity he’s talking about in his flashback (65) is the same one Jay and others have capture on camera.  This is due to his familiarity with the symptoms of the Operator’s presence and the way it looks.  The Operator is most likely linked to Rosswood and the surrounding areas because it is likely a product of the atrocities that happened there.  As Alex tells Jay in Entry 38, “[the people of the time] would take their worst criminals, murderers, child molesters- and they would put them on trial before God out [in Rosswood],” borderline crucifying them on the trees there and burning the remains regardless of whether the criminals were dead.  Tim likely went to the burned down mental hospital for respite, which is close enough to Rosswood for the Operator to influence, and attracted its attention while he was there.  He was probably a very easy target for manipulation due to his young age, accompanying naivety, and schizophrenic symptoms that could easily be used to explain away sightings and his physical responses to the Operator’s corruption (seizures, panic, etc).  It is completely within the realm of possibility that Tim is not the “source” of the Operator- just a very early victim.  If we examine his actions and their consequences through this lens, he can’t actually be blamed for how the Operator chose to mess with him, nor can he be blamed for his impressionability/susceptibility to the influence.

It is not entirely clear whether or not Alex has seen the Operator before Tim, who has already had years of history with it, shows up to his student film casting.  But all of the entries concerning Alex’s interactions with him take place after he first meets Tim and begins filming with his help, so it’s fairly reasonable for him to claim that Tim brought the Operator into his life.  But that doesn’t give Alex a free pass to fly off the handle and kill people.  Let’s consider what he does after the Operator (apparently) first appears to him.  Alex, like Tim, is very confrontational with the Operator.  He goes out of his way in the earliest 10 entries to find and record it, and thereafter adheres to the belief that if he kills everyone he speaks to and then himself, it will go away.  The last thing any benevolent entity or well-intending person would want is for anyone to die- which is how Jay thinks, and arguably Brian.  But Alex?  No.  Whether Alex is evil or just weak enough to be a vessel for evil (the Operator), what remains is that he directly endangers other people in pursuit of his apparent agenda to to “stop all this” (86), even when Tim confronts him with an alternative solution (taking medicine and undergoing therapy.)  It’s difficult to insist that Alex’s violent approach to the situation is purely a result of the Operator’s influence because when Tim or Brian are behind the mask, they don’t remember what they do and seem to run on some breed of instinct rather than conscious reason.  Alex is a planner.  In Entry 52 when he has effectively lured Jessica and Jay to a remote location to kill them, Alex says that he’s had “many opportunities to do this,” which implies that he has carefully considered if, when, and where he should do the deed.  This calculating demeanor stays with him until his death in Entry 86.  However, it is just as difficult to say that Alex is completely in control of his actions.  As we see in the entries leading up to his death, Jay undergoes a significant personality change due to repeated and severe exposure to the Operator.  He also suffers from paranoia and significant memory loss.  Alex could very easily be in the same boat.  However, I’m not certain that he is completely free of blame for his weakness in the face of this.  If he and Jay were both afflicted with the same mental ailments, then there is no valid reason why Alex couldn’t have done as Jay did and be investigative about the Operator- not hostile and afraid.  I believe that Alex is partly to blame for the damage caused by the Operator’s influence by this logic.  He may not have invited it into everyone’s lives, but he certainly didn’t let himself have the courage to stop it.

Then there’s Jay.  Both Tim (59) and Alex have told Jay at multiple points that his investigative response to what he saw on the original tapes further provoke the Operator.  Unfortunately, according to the tapes, they’re not entirely wrong.  At first, Marble Hornets only involved Jay.  It was just him and Alex’s tapes- though Alex was likely still experiencing struggles with the Operator at the time Jay first posted the tapes.  Then, in Entry 15, he makes the decision to meet with Tim and discuss Alex’s student film, and specifically whether or not anyone strange (blatantly, a “guy in a business suit”) bothered the set.  This likely irritated the whole situation to some degree, and most certainly inspired a relapse in Tim, who only a few short entries later in #18 is seen in the mask.  While it’s true that Alex is responsible for Jay (71) and Brian’s (51) involvement with the Operator, it is Jay that seems to re-interest it in Tim.  It must be considered, however, that Jay’s intentions are corrective and good in alignment.  He doesn’t actually seem to intend for anyone to get hurt unlike Alex, who brashly flings a gun at the closest person available that he can blame the Operator on.  Put yourself in Jay’s situation for a moment.  If you woke up on the regular in unknown locations missing huge chunks of memories, wouldn’t you want to do something to stop it, too?  Wouldn’t you want to try everything you could, even if it didn’t help? It’s better than doing nothing- something Jay felt like he was doing before he and Tim actively tried pursuing Alex and the Operator (Entry 75).  Justifying his actions with this logic, he worsened Jessica, Brian, and Alex’s involvement with the Operator as well as Tim’s.  He may even be partly responsible for Brian’s death in Entry 83.  If the Operator’s will is to kill everyone around Alex, and Brian is under its influence as Hoodie, it makes sense for Brian to take actions that spread the Operator’s corruption and endanger more people... Which explains why Hoodie leaves Jay tapes and keeps his interest piqued.  If Jay’s investigations help the Operator infect more peoples’ lives, it makes sense to send someone you control to further that cause.  And if Brian wasn’t being manipulated to do just that, he might have never set foot in the building he fell/jumped to his death in.  If Jay hadn’t done what he thought was right in response to the Operator and its affliction, it’s quite possible that it would’ve left him and a few others alone had he never investigated further.  Can the consequences of Jay’s actions be excused because he had good intentions, even though he continued to film after several people got hurt because of their proximity to him he did nothing to change?  This, I’m not entirely sure of.  I do know, however, that Jay didn’t go out of his way to hurt or kill anyone else.  

Brian’s degree of responsibility for the events of Marble Hornets varies depending on how conscious one interprets him to be.  Under the hood, Brian appears to be significantly more intelligent than Tim is when wearing the mask, so it can be argued that Hoodie is a freely-thinking character with enough autonomy to side with someone.  At the same time, we never see Brian in his normal, hoodless state after Alex initially presents him to the Operator in Entry 51.  Unlike Tim, we have no comparison to work off of.  We don’t know if Brian was thinking clearly in the hood because we don’t see him respond to anomalies related to the Operator out of the hood.  It’s not possible to discern his level of guilt in the deaths of Alex and Jay because we can’t be certain that the Operator wasn’t controlling his every move.  I’ll go off about Hoodie’s morally conflicted actions in another post.

At the end of Marble Hornets, Alex, Jay, Brian, Seth, Sarah, Amy, and one random bystander lie dead.  But these were seven potentially preventable deaths.  Absolutely no one can be blamed for the actions of the Operator- it works as a purely destructive force independent of normal moral reason.  However, several people can be blamed for allowing its manipulation to progress.  Tim should never have agreed to help Alex make his student film after finding out it was in Rosswood- somewhere known to him as a trigger, in terms of mental health and in terms of entity provocation.  His presence there could have attracted the Operator’s attention to Alex, and he could very easily be responsible for its interest in him at all.  Alex should have never agitated the Operator once it began presenting itself to him, and definitely shouldn’t have resorted to fighting everyone else but it in attempts to keep it at bay.  (Then there lies the question, “What if Alex didn’t want to keep the Operator away?” but that’s a whole other discussion.)  And Jay should have paid attention to the consequences of investigating the tapes and interviewing Tim and others- although it would mean abandoning what he believed to be the right thing to do, it still may have stalled the Operator’s destruction.  

Tl;dr, no character in Marble Hornets is entirely blameless in regards to the spread of the “disease” (except maybe Seth’s dog), but it is no one’s fault that the Operator is an evil, manipulative bastard.