🚩 Content warning: injury, death.
⚠️ This investigation contains spoilers for all of Marble Hornets, including Rosswood and the Marble Hornets comics. Reader discretion advised.
Part 1: An Eye for an Eye
Alex Kralie was one of the many victims of the entity known as the Operator, followed by it, terrorized by it, his mind played with. His life became a blur of half remembered nightmares, paranoia and anger. But unlike other victims, he did something unforgivable. Something that would become the main motivation for another.
Revenge. An eye for an eye. A saying older than mortal memory, but what if in this case it was more literal than you would think?
ToTheArk, Issue 3.5 of the Marble Hornets comics has shown us that the character driven by vengeance is also missing an eye.
There is a gap where his right eye should be, surrounded by cracks, emanating a mysterious black smoke and with distortion over it.
At first, we thought it might be an artistic representation of how the Ark slowly consumes the poor souls that end up there, however, later on we see both Jay and Alex in the Ark. The wounds they received in entries #80 and #86 respectively are emanating the same black smoke.
So, could it be that Brian was really missing an eye all the time he’s been hiding his face behind a mask? An old injury caused by the person he hates enough to want consumed by the Ark?
Part 2: Look Back
In the original Marble Hornets, we only see Brian without the mask in tapes during the filming of the Marble Hornets movie back in 2006 and in Entry #86, when he is already dead.
Although we have some reasons to suspect the body we see in Entry #86 might not be Brian’s real body, we will discuss this idea another time.
After becoming Hoody, Brian talks in cryptic images, riddles and codes. He tries to communicate with Jay, Alex and Tim in his own way. Could he have left any clue about what happened to him in his videos? After a careful rewatch, we have found something.
Classified
In Classified, we found this still of Hoody recreating the attack from Entry #45 with two glowing circles for eyes. One of the spots is slightly smaller and of a duller color.
Decay
In Decay (0:47-0:48) the white silhouette of a man with glowing eyes accompanied by the words ALWAYS WATCHING appears on screen, but in one of the frames his left eye is devoid of light, leaving only an empty socket.
We find this most interesting, since our sources confirm that the image is an edited picture of Brian.
Display
In Display, a heavily distorted and stretched out face has two circles for eyes. Again, one is bigger and brighter, while the other one —the same as in Classified— is smaller and dull.
The face disappears, but the glowing eyes persist in a darkly lit street with while Hoody walks towards the camera and the words I SAW appear on screen. A little later, (0:26) the street returns, but for a split second the contrast of the image becomes bolder, leaving only the “glowing eyes” and the other source of light is covered by an Operator symbol.
Note that in these three examples, the unlit eye is always the left one (on our right side). We believe that this consistency denotes intentionality, despite not matching the eye that we see being missing in the comic.