Arca Gunnay on The Holders: Part I

This is a 2021 interview with Arca Gunnay, who had a fair amount of influence on theholders.org. It is conducted by SCF member and containment fiction author Worm That Walks.

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You’ll have to forgive me for a bit of indulgence into these questions, as this was a series I worked on half my life ago when I was a teenager – because of this my answers will be half-nostalgia and half criticism.

EDIT: I also realize, that I’ve answered these questions as if the reader has some familiarity with The Holders. If you also need a more basic introduction, please let me know. — Arca Gunnay

1. In your own words, what was “The Holders”?

I would say The Holders is a series of Urban Cult Legends, primarily about lifting the veil between the worlds of sanity and insanity. It concerned itself with creating a mad secret world filled with monsters and occult artifacts, and then reintroducing tradition and order through lists and guides that would allow for readers to traverse safely in this mad world.

Beyond that, the series itself was gigantic writing exercise, a very palatable universe for amateur and aspiring writers to have a go at. The community collectively wrote and edited the work, so criticism and inspiration were available in large supply. This community was The Holders, and kept it alive for as long as they could, writing for themselves and each other. It was a nice a place to try out a few ideas without too much threat of embarrassment.

2. What made it special?

The stories are dark, but the structure is so rigid that the whole thing is almost whimsical in nature. It’s kind of silly when you think about it, a magical world with curse artifacts to collect – and someone has listed out all the steps for you on this psudeo-pokedex on the internet. How bizarre. I think that’s why it was as popular as it was, where else would you find something like that?

They were also real fun to write. You got to create this impossible puzzle that was never meant to be solved, test the resolve of any would-be seeker that would even think of trying to get the Object, and then after all that – you got to curse them. You have to remember that when the site started, there were only so many slots already filled. If you had the time and skill, you could write up a story and take up one 538 slots. It was fun to throw something at the board and see if you could make it stick. I’m sure there were readers who weren’t also writers too though – I imagine they liked the macabre stories and enjoyed piecing together the hidden descriptions themselves. By reading or writing stories, you got to play as a Seeker for a while. I think that was the thing that caught people.

3. When was the Holders made and by whom? Were you there?

The “history” of The Holders is hard to pin down sadly. Like everything else on the internet, The Holders exists both with tons of recorded history and simultaneously almost no written history at all. I’m sure using archives of the old wiki, someone could kind of go back and piece together a chronology, but it would always be missing a piece or two. I would hazard a guess that the original Holders story was posted somewhere on 4chan, on their paranormal board – because of the nature of that kind of forum, the original post is long gone and, even then, “authorship” is impossible to tack onto an anonymous post on an anonymous image board.

For me, I wrote my first story in 2008 and from there slowly got involved with the community. We didn’t even have a forum at first, and we just used the “Discussion” tabs on pages to talk to each other. The Sysop, which was how we referred to them, always was a bit of a recluse and preferred to let us do whatever we wanted. To this day I know literally nothing about them, except for the fact that they continued to keep the website up for many years after it went silent.

Due to the nature of the anonymous posting board, people came and went pretty frequently – but notable authors would still come by to write a series of connected stories. As time went on, some people found minor roles in the community and pushed for the elements they wanted to see more. I got a moderator position and pushed for more short fiction based off of the holders.

4. What were the reasons for it being made?

That would be a hard question to answer, as I can only speak from my personal experience – so I will give you my opinion on it:

I feel that The Holders was created in response to, or at least inspired by, the SCP stories – and beyond that, Lovecraftian stories for sure. I’m pretty sure some of the writers of The Holders wrote SCP stories as well. I do understand the allure of the SCP, though I did find it a little bit more restrictive than The Holders (as if such a thing could exist). I personally believe that the two universes are so similar because at the time of their conception, there was a strong desire for that form of storytelling on the internet. I think people were inspired in a particular way, and wanted their work to be recorded and developed. The themes of a chaotic world, endlessly occult and dangerous, being controlled by a shadow organization with absolutely questionable standards – I mean I think it was a way for people to make sense of the world they lived in outside of the stories. This was a post 9/11 world, where westerner’s idea of safety had been thoroughly shaken – and the world government’s responses pushed down civil liberties in the name of security. There definitely was a fear of conspiracies and control that could make someone turn to the occult for understanding, and our stories were filled with characters who did exactly that to survive. As I mentioned before, the format of The Holders is to create a senseless world, and then try to make sense of it.

Of course, the more practical reason for it being made would be that people liked the world and wanted to practice writing. What exactly made them attracted to world, you’d have to ask them.

5. What were the starting years of the founders like?

Kind of disconnected really. In the beginning there was no formal conversation between authors, and so if you wanted to communicated with others, you’d have to check to see what new stories were coming in and comment on them. I don’t think there really was any criteria or homogeny in the new stories, you posted something and hoped people liked it. Ideally, without too many spelling mistakes – but I’d be one to talk. I started writing stories that appealed to me, I wrote series that differed from the regular structure from the original series. People commented, we started a dialogue. It felt a little like fan-fiction to be honest.

6. What was the culture of the site?

The culture of the community was pretty standard for this kind of affair. This was before the time of mass regulated anonymous messaging, so we didn’t have ways of communicating outside of the site itself. I did have a few emails here and there, but we didn’t add each other on facebook or anything. I don’t think I knew anyone’s real name – and I suppose most of them didn’t realize they knew mine. Things were pretty chill, and surprisingly there was never any drama of note. It was a bit of a writer’s club, and I assume most of us were in some part of our teen years at the time.

7. If you were to make a sort of timeline, what would be the “eras”? What were the major events in its history?

Oof that’s a hard question. I think I would split it like this:

• The “Creation Era” where an anonymous user posted their original idea onto the internet.
• The “New Wiki Era” where The Sysop of theholders.org took some of the original stories and posted them onto a wiki, enabled people to edit – and committed to taking a backseat and letting the site be a sort of living archive.
• The “Series Era” where I and others decided to create new characters and stories with chapters, this broke off of the conventions of the regular site and made the community get more involved with each other. This is also when I became a mod.
• The “Forum Era” where the forum was created and authors and readers used to it communicate with each other.
• Then you got the “Declining Era” where authors got busy and moved on, and interest in The Holders declined. We are now in “The Revival Era” where groups of writers look to revive the series for one reason or another. I often get in contact with these groups, and have a few conversations. Revival attempts don’t often last long, as it is a difficult task to breathe new life into a dead series.

I may have taken this question a little too literally haha.

8. Why do you believe the site eventually shut down?

Considering the timing, I have to assume it had something to do with COVID-19 Pandemic. I have to assume that The Sysop kept the old wiki and forums running out of their own pocket, and one day had to stop. I have to hope that they are in good health, and that taking down the site was a choice they made and not an obligation out of necessity.

The site occasionally would go down and back up again, but (at least at the time of this answer) it is still down. You can still find archives of it on the wayback machine, and I know that certain users occasional scrapped the whole site so it wouldn’t get lost.

See Part 2 here.