Monthly Archives: October 2020

Gosh yesterday was full of opinions, wasn’t it? I said some mean things about a website! And maybe even someone who liked that website might have thought: He doesn’t like that thing! But I like that thing! and had a whole moment to reconcile with themselves. Who knows.

Fifthism

Fifthism is an idea that spreads across a couple of SCPs in the wiki, some of which are bad, and some of which are kinda cool. The idea at the root of it, though, is that there’s essentially a kind of a cult, or a haunted idea, or some kind of anomalous religious space (what we in the business call a memeplex), and the result is not that it has a religious following, but rather that the Fifthists create anomalous religious groups.

I, perhaps for reasons that don’t click for you, find this idea of a kind of memetic predation on a pattern of behaviour people have to be super interesting, and the credulity of people in that space is neat. And it also means that people get to write about nonsense religions and flex their muscles a little instead of just writing about the Abrahamic faiths and Greek and Roman myth (though, you know, hold on there).

The Fey

The Fey are one of those places where the SCP foundation’s whole framing is weaponised against them: The Fey presented in SCP 4000 play on a trope from stories of the fey, which themselves build on the idea that ‘Gaelic myth was never written down.’ There’s this idea that Fey and the Fair Folk do something with names, and the SCP foundation are scientifically minded enough to recognise that over time in human usage, any title or adjective becomes a name, and therefore they have to write their containment procedures minimalising the chance that these names will form.

There’s also a good joke about how editors handle how difficult this SCP procedure would be to write.

I find the fair folk interesting because they present a challenge to be spoken about, and they do reiterate on a thematic space that another SCP I like builds on which iiiiiis:

Bigfoot

This is a really good idea, wielded well. The basic idea is that sasquatch exist, in the wilds, and you need to avoid them because they have a terrible virus that can kill about thirty percent of all humans that even look at them. That’s weird and fits the existing SCP universe, and it’s a really believable ‘that’s all’ point that you can imagine a character in the universe being satisfied.

Then you have the further development, expanding on it, until you eventually cross the threshold of available information and the mask slips and you find out that the Bigfoots are the last remnants of a prehuman civilisation, who ran a shimmering, golden empire of biological super-science all across the face of the Earth. Then there was a revolution, they were overthrown, and now they’re asking to come back in, because they have forgiven us.

This is really interesting to me, because on the one hand, there’s room for an actual enormous civilisational disappearance in our earth’s history. Civilisation is fragile, it can disappear, it can be disappeared. Also, there’s a cycle of violence where the bigfoots were overthrown, but also overthrew their forebears too. It creates a vision of the cycle of violence in our own civilisations, without saying ‘those other humans are just as bad as us.’

Bigfoots are an overthrown colonial power that wants to ‘make good’ but isn’t doing it in a way we can meaningfully trust, because it’s hard to talk about solutions on the scale of civilisation. I mean, an abuser is standing outside, insisting to be let in: When do you extend trust?

3 Moons Initiative

I like the 3 Moons Initative as both an attempt to replicate a benevolent heavenly benefactor within the SCP universe and also the enormous challenges doing so. The 3 Moons are genuinely trying to be a net positive, but between the layers of secrecy erected by the different conspiracies, and the difficulty of being dead. Every faction that isn’t the SCP foundation in the SCP universe is treated as being kinda wrong and stupid, but even through that filter I have a hard time dismissing the intentions and hopes of the 3 Moons Initiative.

Also their motto is just the perfect kind of badass boast that is also kinda tone deaf about how creepy they sound.

Racism

Buried in the list of ‘explained’ SCPs is this idea of an SCP from the earliest days before the foundation came into existence, which was an attempt to catalogue the way that slaves seemed to want to escape slavery rather than accept their ‘natural’ state the way that slaves should. The whole thing is framed as a scientific examination of a phenomenon with containment procedures and some possible explanations, but also about how the individuals considered were used in human experimentation.

This is an excellent SCP because it’s both historically accurate – that there were attempts to treat slavery as ‘a science’ and black people have endlessly been used as test subjects by oppressor science – and that it shows that the SCP foundation is an entity made and maintained by people. The previous organisation that made these papers tried to codify their prejudice with science, and even if now they can, with their super science, recognise that this is just that, they still have the records, on file, because they need to keep track of what they did.

Pattern Screamers

These are a good weird science boogeynonsense thing. The idea that order is something humans impose on the universe by observing patterns, and that the universe itself doesn’t have them, and the tension between the imposition and the actuality is space where something can happen is an extremely good, interesting space to create horror monsters out of that isn’t just delving into Lovecraft’s space of ‘what if we know things, but too much?’

Pattern screamers are also good in that they are extremely hard to explain; they dabble in the quantum that was discovered and popularised after Lovecraft died, not in the ocean or outer space which he feared in his lifetime. With quantum, you have room for a lot of nonsense, but pattern screamers aren’t a thing that was already there and waiting to be found; they’re things created by humans, unconsciously, but created by us.

Some of the stuff that relates to them, like deep time and universal reboots? A bit boring. But the core idea of a special kind of horror that comes from demanding things make sense is good to metaphorise.

Nose Crabs

I like these as just a neat little cryptid with a reasonably explicable but also deeply unsettling reproductive system. Things like this exist in other species – parasites that afflict a variety of other creatures – and the nose crabs are only weird in that they’re really unsettling and limited to a small location. Containing this kind of species is a very doable thing, and the reason to do so is because just knowing these things exist at all could get some really problematic behaviours. They’re essentially a parasitic species that can have large-ranging health implications and that nobody needs to know exists, so, keep it contained. I like this especially because it doesn’t need to be too anomalous to be just weird enough that it’s worth keeping separate from society.

The Brain That Ate Itself

And here’s another, much weirder idea. The notion in SCP 3513 is a place you pass through, and once you do, you get a break grow in your brain and start to eat it until you die. This, by necessity, is extraordinarily hard to study and the attempts to study it have proven fruitless. I like this because the weird and eerie nature of the story makes it hard to study, so they study it until it gets to be too hard. The fact that there’s a point where the foundation just gives up is important. It’s very much ‘my finger hurts when I do this – so don’t do that.’

If you go into this area, you get a brain beak. So, keep people out.

I love how simple it is? Like, the limit of curiosity is ‘this is hard to look at, it doesn’t seem to yield anything, so let’s just stop people from dying by going there and leave the rest of it alone.’

Are We Cool Yet

Art changes the world. Are We Cool Yet are the example of one of those kind of things that would happen in an anomalous universe – people devising strange ways to interact with the anomalous for the sake of creating that art. It’s nice because normally this stuff is treated as being ‘science’ stuff, so science research is done. AWCY is instead an attempt to render a pretty reasonable representation of what art movements might do in a world with a real global conspiracy and less tactile boundaries of reality.

It also helps that they seem to do a lot of things that are contrary to the fascist behaviour of groups like the Global Occult Coalition or the SCP foundation themselves. These organisations have functionally unlimited spending and operate completely in secret with the endorsement of world governments, for your own good – Are We Cool Yet are the street artists demanding that reality be presented as it is to the people who had no say in their imprisonment.

The Deer

I really like this one, and I dislike reality warping, and needless sexual violence, what gives? If you’re not familiar with The Deer, SCP 2845, the containment procedures open with an extremely detailed list of containment procedures. These procedures are in some cases remarkably specific, including a need for the commercial value of goods to be tracked with a price limit of $4.28. It also deliberately presents this in a particularly high-volume way that can make the details occasionally confusing to parse – like how the chamber the Deer is kept in is at -110 degrees celsius. Reading the SCP in a single run, you’re likely to have a hard time putting all these details into a meaningful, shared context. There’s even a bit of political sniping about these procedures. Then there’s an entity as described, which is a deer, capable of doing basically whatever it wants any time it wants to do it, and the stunningly difficult process of containing it.

The Deer is Saturn.

Kinda.

It’s the Roman god Saturn, but run through a photocopier that jams a bit, so it’s got a bunch of details about it that are about the Roman god; some details are about Saturn, the planet; some details are about the process of the god as expressed in Roman myth; and some details don’t quite fit either. The Deer is ‘Saturn,’ but kinda. It’s a God, kinda. It’s not a God in the way that we treat Gods in our own myths, when we’re the ones writing the story and processing the fanfics of fanfics generations later. This is what in a face-to-face dealing, a God is like, and what dealing with it in our modern industrialised way, with forgotten and half-remembered truths is. 

The Deer is interesting to me because it is both a hand grenade with a rusty pin, and its monstrous containment is representative of something that feels like an idea that started from a place other than ‘let’s write a story where a little girl gets tortured.’ It is a thing that has to be contained very carefully, where the need for containment is high enough to justify the dreadful cost of it, but where that cost can be treated coldly.

Fox has pointed out that the Deer is definitely in the too edgy basket, and I do agree: I think the narrative works just fine if you cut out the baby eating, because part of the point of the myth it’s drawing from is that the babies survive being eaten. Still, ‘I would revise it a few steps’ doesn’t change the fact that the deer is definitely doing something with its horrifying elements.

Oh oh ho! Time to get feisty! The SCP wiki is a big communal creative project. Lots of people have written for it. I have very pointedly gone out of my way to avoid knowing who made these ideas I’m talking about because I want to talk about the product that the SCP wiki exalts communally. I may talk about the intentions of a piece, but please understand they’re not drawn from actual stated words from the creators (except when they are) but rather from a critical reading of what these narratives are trying to be about.

And with that, on to the sacred cows.

Content warning! I’m going to talk about stuff on the SCP wiki that’s pretty bad, and that means in addition to warnings about horror, we’re also going to have to talk about sexual violence and child sexual assault.

The Plague Doctor is a Naruto OC

That’s not a joke, that’s literally where SCP-049 came from: The creator wanted to make a fanfic of a Naruto character they liked, and the eventual outcome is the Plague Doctor. The Plague Doctor is ‘beloved,’ according to votes and fan reactions to its appearances in other games (including contention when the ‘wrong’ voice actor explores the character). The Plague Doctor, like almost all the ‘evil doctors’ the SCP wiki has going on, is pretty much just a boring person.

“Reality Warpers”

These are all boring.

No, I don’t care to elaborate on why ‘literally any reliable cause and effect does not apply to this except as we, the storyteller impose on it’ is boring.

Yes, even the ones that are ‘about’ storytelling itself.

Most of the 001 proposals

There are essentially four basic 001 proposals:

• What if this well-established Abrahamic myth is just true?
• What if the biggest SCP is the SCP foundation?
• What if the biggest SCP is the SCP foundation, but the actual writers of the wiki IRL?
• What if the biggest SCP is the SCP foundation, but with evil mustaches?

I find every one of these deeply unsatisfying. Particularly, the idea that SCP-001 would be assigned to the most important SCP rather than the first SCP in this new sorting system is really underselling the way that the SCP foundation should be treated as a cold, heartless bureaucracy. The idea that ‘important’ numbers represent ‘important’ SCPs is such a waste.

There is ‘what if the sun goes evil’ but that feels less like a proposal of a terrible thing that’s being contained as much as it feels like ‘a story someone wanted to write’ as an end game for the SCP universe.

Anyway, the other thing is, these four ideas each kind of outline the fundamental biases of the SCP wiki; that when you put them to think up ‘the most dangerous thing’ they pretty much default to ‘Christian ideas,’ and ‘Us.’ It’s just kinda an example of how basic some of the base assumptions of the SCP universe are, and one of the ways that the place is still ultimately an outcropping of 4chan’s ‘we are multitudes (of extremely similar boring people).’

I Am The Centre Of Everything That Happens To Me

This is apprently a highly praised SCP, with the idea of ‘what if the real horror is me, the author, right now?’ which is

Fine, I guess.

The problem when you draw attention to the author of the work as part of the work is that you pretty quickly just wind up pointing at the writing process, and if you’ve encountered this story idea before, you’ll both recognise it and find this one pretty tedious. I mean there is a grain of truth to it – SCPs created just to make a horrifying scenario with no meaningful point or idea are incredibly boring and get stuck in tedious loops. But this one doesn’t break the loop.

It’s Inception, basically. ‘Look at how the method of storytelling I use looks, when metaphorised as a story with those tools.’ Woop de doo.

The Build A Bear

Oh hey, you know what’s really good at being horrifying? Pointless, unpredictable and entirely unjustifiable sexual violence against women! The SCP 1048  is ostensibly meant to be a jab at the idea of ‘safe’ SCPs, with the idea that some SCPs are treated as safe and the researchers get used to them and integrating them into their workplace life and culture, with this bear suggesting that every one of them is just waiting for the mishandling that results in them doing something terrible. That is, this SCP exists to mostly comment on other SCPs that make the world more interesting, to instead make it less interesting, and in the process, decided the best way to do it is to mangle fetuses.

Booooring

Every Creepy Or Evil Clown

Clowns are Boomer Detritus. The Clown as depicted in the genre of SCPs, a big nosed, fuzzy haired, big shoed horror thing, is an entity that does not meaningfully exist in my culture or in the culture of everyone I know, except as a thing to show up in contrast to be horrifying. It’s either clowns in hospitals (which largely, aren’t a thing), or Horror Monster Clowns. Real clowns these days don’t look like that because real clowns know those classic looks are creepy.

Horror monster clowns therefore invoke to me, John Wayne Gacy, and it’s pretty hard for anything you as a fictive writer can come up with that compares to the actual, literal, very real serial killer who actually did prey on people like me, and got away with it for a long time thanks to being, effectively, contained. Therefore, every time a clown is used to try and evoke horror, I get immediately bored and find something else to read. This extends as well to a lot of ‘kid media’ SCPs, like Cragglewood Park, which are all basically reiterations on an idea excellently done by Kris Straub’s creepypasta Candle Cove – what if our pliable childhood memories hid something horrible?

It’s kinda hard to shake me with that, in particular, because I have very real records of the horrifying media I was exposed to as a kid.

5555

If I’m already tired of meta narratives, imagine how boring I find the SCP that says not only is this a meta narrative, but it’s all just a game for fun? Hey, you know that stuff you were invested in and cared about? Well none of it matters, lol.

This is Where I Died

This ties in to my problem with the SCP-001 proposals that see ‘us, the people on the wiki, are the real SCP’ as meaningful horror. This SCP is built around an attempt from the narrative in universe to attack people, out here, in our universe, as readers of the work, and does it by giving you a kinda jump scare?

What you get instead is kinda an anthology with no actual central handle to it. Behold, a bunch of incomplete stories that we hope unsettle you, the reader, because if it does, boom, you’re affected by this story! And yeah, I guess from my place of experience, the idea that media affects people isn’t exactly exciting.

Blood and the Breaking of my Heart

When I talk about flags I often say ‘don’t put a good flag on your bad flag,’ to talk about when a flag uses a much better flag design that some other flag uses. In this case, SCP 5935 uses a really interesting space (SCP-4000) and tries to tell a story that’s a bit like the horror of a changeling, but it doesn’t actually touch on those beats, and it requires the humanisation and inner life of an 05 council member to be central to the story.

The O5 council are people I never want to see in a story. I do not want to know about the politics or the moral oversight or the perspectives or the supernatural powers of the O5 council because the second the beaurocracy of the SCP foundation is being made by people who have opinions and perspectives, you lose the headless, terrifying coldness of the organisation. You need to be lost in the SCP universe, otherwise you have to start asking questions like ‘why isn’t violent revolution against this fascist empire a good thing?’

In this, we get Sad Dad Feels which lead to Bad Dad Behaviour and is finally defeated by Heroic Dad Sadness and I do

not

fucking

care

about Dads that do bad things in the names of not fucking facing their own emotional limitations. We have enough stories about the harm that a selfish dad can do, all the way back to the Bible.

Everything To Do With The Scarlet King

That content warning up above goes double here, okay?

The Scarlet King narrative may not actually have started with SCP-231 (no linking, because fuck this story), but it is pretty much now the central point that other Scarlet King narratives orbit around. SCP-231 has been revised to now remove the oblique references to endless, institution-mandated child rape, but in doing so, also included commentary that it was never meant to be about that.

Nonetheless, this is about a child, under the age of 10, who is pregnant with a ‘thing’ and that thing is either the Scarlet King, or a servant of the Scarlet King, or a thing that keeps the Scarlet King sealed, we don’t know, we just know we need to keep abusing this little kid to keep things the way they currently are. The Scarlet King has a cult, there’s some really mediocre Biblical-inspired horror phrasing, and the actual outcome is deliberately vague beyond ‘it will be bad.’

And you don’t get to claim ‘it’s not about sexual violence against a child,’ when it starts with the premise of seven pregnant people one of whom is a child.

The whole thing feels like the ‘a wizard with a bomb says it’ll blow up the hospital if I don’t say the n-word’ writing, where a scenario was constructed to try and imagine the worst possible containment procedure, then doesn’t have anything to say or do beyond that. The irony is that one of my favourite SCPs works in a similar space and it’s actually interesting, more on that another time.

Also, as someone who grew up surrounded by actual Christian eschatology, the actual idea of the Scarlet King is fantastically dull. Attempts have been made to make the Scarlet King into something more abstract than ‘big, permanently lethal demon,’ but they’re all attempts to rehabilitate this concept that still, somehow, comes back to this point of intersection in an under-10 year old girl’s uterus.

If you’re at all familiar with me and my life you might be unsurprised to know that I don’t have a lot of respect for religion, just period. I think it runs straight through atheism (no belief in god) into an antitheism (that the idea of believing in a god is beneath human dignity) and maybe even veering hard into misotheism (the idea that god as ever expressed in the faith systems known to me is our moral inferior and if it were real, it would be our moral duty to find a way to kill it). I feel this most strongly about the faiths I know, mostly notably American Evangelical Christianity, but it folds outwards into all the Jesus-based faiths and cults, where I believe them to be quite wholly grown from poison root, gnarled in tree and branch. Courtesy of my Christian upbringing, I learned a lot about how all those other varieties of Christianity are evil, and even spent some time dedicated to the relative newcomers to the space of Big Name Christian Sects – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and of course, the Most American Of Christians, the Mormons.

I don’t generally air these complaints in public. How people keep their beliefs lining up in their own head is generally a private matter, and while I may make fun of institutions with literal golden thrones that preach piety and charity, I know there are also people who follow me who are of these faiths who like what I produce, and have reconciled my preferences with my content. Basically, I think that Christian folk can handle me disliking their club, what with all the immense social safety and privilege and whatnot that their organisations with international power afford them.

I bring this up because there were definitely times in my upbringing, where managing these competing ideological thoughts and contradictory ideas (like if the Mormons were new and our church was freshly founded, what were we?) where, the strange thing is, one of the best pieces of advice I got from navigating out of orthodoxy was a quote from a Mormon.

And he wasn’t even talking to me.

I mean kinda.

Sandy Peterson is probably one of the most important people in (White, English Speaking, 90s-to-Now, Existing-Power-Structure Centric) gaming. A tail-end boomer, Peterson has been working in gaming since 1974, when he was 19 years old and he’s pretty much never stopped, just moving laterally into new, interesting spaces to work. He’s worked for Chaosium, producing Call of Cthulhu material and Runequest material, and if you don’t know what that is, ask the older bearded guy at your gaming circle who periodically mentions ‘fumble tables.’ He moved into videogames, where he worked on Sid Meier’s Pirates! and the absolutely terribly underappreciated Hyperspeed and Darklands, games that are of the vintage where Civilisation 1 advertises them in its closing screen. Then he moved into working for id Software, where he worked on Doom and Quake then he helped out Raven Software with level design on Hexen and hey that’s enough vital influence of an entire media form, let’s move across to work on Age of Empires stuff with Ensemble Studios, and while we’re in the neighbourhood, why not make stuff for Halo Wars with all that experience you had stored up? Then he moved laterally into board games, where he kickstarted, successfully, the absolute titan in a box of a game that is Cthulhu Wars, the rare kind of game that wants to step up to the challenge Twilight Imperium leaves and actually fights it.

In summary, Sandy Peterson has been responsible for three of the biggest success stories in three different fields; the longstanding Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, the world-shaking Doom, and the record-setting Cthulhu Wars. That’s just three big impacts in three fields, and the thing is, if you took all three of those away his second tier success stories are still titanic impacts. His work shows up in media where he needs to do a lot of direct work rather than just tell people what to do (Kojima).

This isn’t the whole of his work (he made a movie? Kinda?) but it’s certainly the bulk of it. And I haven’t combed the man’s twitter or nothing, but, amazingly, as far as I can find, he hasn’t said anything to fucking embarrass me for thinking well of him.

Yet.

Like I said, I haven’t combed his twitter.

And far be it from me to say that a Mormon man born in the 1950s might be Wholesome Content Bean Uwuguu, but he did say something, a long time ago, that helped me handle a complicated problem that had been put in my head. The issue was that I was at the time in my childhood, grappling with the ways that media that depicted terrible things might be affecting me; that the nightmares I had and obssessions I got over videogames with dark elements in them were a sign of some dreadful sin inside me. One day, while reading a proto-website known as a ‘magazine,’ I found a quote from Sandy, in an article describing the DOOM team, and how he reconciled his faith (which was much less conservative than mine at the time) and his involvement in the creation of DOOM:

“They’re the bad guys.”

Yes, this is obvious. Yes, this is ridiculous. Yes, this should only really be enlightening to a ten year old.

But in my defense, I was ten.

DOOM creates a universe where demons and hell and lovecraftian unknowable, undecipherable, deliberately inexplicable evil are real. And it is a universe where you can meaningfully destroy it with a shotgun to the face.

Doom is great and part of why it’s great is a Mormon Lovecraft fan.

EDIT: hi, it’s Talen from the future, turns out Sandy decided to mouth off about trans people during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and  the result was showing he’s a tool about that, so that’s a bummer.