Losing the Plot: Part 2 — SCP’s Inversions
NEWS/OPINION — This installment focuses on Dr. Gears’ statements; new and old. No one represents, exposes, and bridges the changes at SCP better.
Preface
I’ve found a group of people who are the inheritors of a style of writing that is profound — one with a rich enough soil to encourage plenty of words of meta-analysis, like any other genre of literature — but who are routinely dragging it by the hair and through the mud. They’ve turned the genre into a drug, writing process into a high, and themselves into junkies. It may only now be starting to let up, and there might come a day when these issues must be referred to in the past tense.
Until then, I’m going to write my thoughts about it because there are also now other smaller niches of the genre separated from SCP that have not yet (keyword: “yet”) undergone the transformation that SCP has into something other than purely the chance to write in a group, and for that sake of writing. Despite their shortcomings, I would rather post something in one of these communities, where there is less polluting the effort, than get hundreds of upvotes on it at SCP. That some at SCP can’t see any value in that besides framing it as an admission of compositional inferiority, the result of a ban, and wanting to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond because of it, is diagnostic here.
SCP staff fumbled, dropped, and broke apart its own hold on the genre in 2018. We have an opportunity few knew we needed & no one thought we would get. A new generation of writers has a chance to be better and resist where SCP has taken things. SCP Commune for example has anonymized votes and placed the rating module at the bottom of the article. These and similar approaches — structural and cultural — must be upheld as a collective mentality, if a healthy community is to remain intact in the confic genre. Participants must not forget the plump and out-of-shape body that is now SCP’s, that unfortunately mountainous collection of folds seen from all points on the confic landscape; a fate that can happen to any place that refuses the self-discipline required to prevent it.
When I was introduced to the medium of containment fiction in 2018, I had the supreme fortune of coming at it in a format that stripped out all of the in-community features. It was via “LNI”, or “late night Imgur”, a collection of creepypasta and disquieting images, sometimes with text accompanying. Some users took old classic SCPs and made them into posts, including just the article itself and picture, minus some addenda here and there. It was the first time I came across an SCP; 106, then 087. These stood out clearly as an entirely superior category of writing; a new and evolved way of storytelling.
I don’t know who this person or people are, but I am extremely thankful to them: I didn’t know how lucky I was to get such a purified introduction to the writing format. It was like discovering 173 for the first time, as those who had originally done it in the sparsity of 4chan’s /x/. Truly, a privileged upbringing. Part of me wishes I would have never ventured beyond that point, and left the art in its perfect state of preservation, remaining a disconnected part of the second-order fandom. It was a reposting on LNI of SCP-914 that blew my mind and made me seek out the site for more; to not just admire, but to participate and write.
Because at first it was just an image and the raw text on an Imgur post, I wasn’t exposed to things like the community, comments, politics, the rating module, css flair, format-screws, etc. When I finally made my way into the community, I was eventually horrified to discover just how far from that representation the place had gone. What was infuriating was that no one seemed to notice it or care.
My goal here is equal parts (1) wanting to remind the genre of a more meaningful and robust focal point, one that has utterly been abandoned, and (2) getting through the incredibly thick skulls of the SCP community members that know better but pretend they don’t because they are social beneficiaries of the set up; a comfort which they have become accustomed to and have prioritized above all else. It comes down to willful denial of a sort of drug abuse. A beautiful and collectively constructed home, still beautiful, but now in a spiritual foreclosure and the preferred setting for squatters who treat it like a crack house. The ideals of SCP had long since left by the time I got there and what remained was the husk of just a brand, being paraded around like an effigy.
I felt like someone trying to combat the opioid crisis before anyone cared to admit it was a problem. People called me crazy. I remember the then-paragon of the site, djkaktus — arguably the most incumbent individual with respect to this off-focus view of the writing style — was (tellingly) quick to rush to combat this nobody’s opinion (the first comment about it actually) on this nobody author page; to rebut my claim that people of the community were unhealthily obsessed with upvotes, ego, and the rating module:
The brunt of the rebuttal took refuge in the rhetoric that someone as unpopular and remote as myself couldn’t possibly claim to know the minds of the individuals on the site, djkaktus and his buddies least of all. The very natural act of observing and drawing a conclusion is “presumptive”. It also put those who were still writing for the right reasons between my critique and people like kaktus, forcing them between us like a human shield. My issues were never with those who write for the right reasons. They exist and always will. I have never upheld that popularity and success are inherently bad things. My issue was with how dominant and loud those who weren’t writing for those reasons had become, how the popularity had creeped its way to the fore by people either oblivious to it or encouraging it.
My critique was aimed at certain people in the site; I understood that like a net, it would catch only those big enough, to whom it applied to. The same is still true of this critique. Segments of SCP are immune to the issues here. The ability to read SCP and get your dose of confic in is possible. Most there are competent writers and you might not even know that these issues addressed here exist if you just read the site casually (although I bet plenty would… the phenotype of the genotype is inevitable.) Unbroken components don’t need attention. Unfortunately, those with the most pull at the site are the biggest offenders.
Kaktus’ reply missed the point by quite a large margin anyway. It isn’t people’s minds I was claiming to read into; but simply their behaviors, overt and obvious to anyone whose mentality wasn’t altered by a continuous influx of the drug. I was being argued against by someone who was high on that drug; possibly the highest person. I never replied because I knew it was pointless. And because I had said everything I wanted to say. I hoped that in time, someone or something — somehow — would reply for me.
In a stroke of good fortune, and nearly two years later, Dr. Gears — someone equally as removed from the site but in the opposite direction — just helped legitimize our “presumptions” quite a lot, if I do say so myself.
Intro
Djkaktus: “I don’t blame the kids showing up in Site19 saying ‘OMG is SCP real?’ That’s the point.”
Dr. Gears: “That’s always been a thing, since forever. The second that stops happening, we’re done, close up shop, that’s it. We’re over.”
[source, 1 hr 9 min mark, circa 2016]
Compare the above sentiment, something that solely fueled the mystery and air of the format into virality, to what is seen on modern and the typical O5 Command disciplinary posts:
When did the attitudes at SCP turn from appreciating the fidelity to the immersive quality of the genre, to punishing it? What is so egregious about people new to the whole experience expressing “the point” and coming in to share that? What benefit does it give them to be banned at the outset of their interest for feeling the intended effect of the format? Are today’s veterans of SCP so above remembering this feeling that they can’t relate to it anymore and have to mention it as primer for disciplinary action? Doesn’t that evidence a huge problem in the current ruling and production classes? The current SCP ethos is so “advanced” and “progressed” that the initial magic of the format and genre is unceremoniously lumped in next to Immaturity Bans.
The answer is as complicated as the years between the site’s genesis and now, but the picture so zoomed-out is simple enough: the immersion for the genre and format has been converted in to an immersion to the social media of the site, and its behavioral terms of service.
This is one flashpoint in a host of others. All demonstrate in unique ways how inverted the current SCP community and culture is from its initial ideals, and not in a flattering way — not in the way the recent interviews of the old icons are meant to be received by the community. The point of this series is to examine, collate, and make obvious the real shape of these gaps when the entirety of the SCP community is reoriented against its comfort and onto its feet.
Philosophy Inversion
A genuine conversation vs. working the crowd.
While the gap between the old site and the new is a point of reverence and appreciation for the general SCP community and its nominal longevity, it also bespeaks in hushed but uncomfortably close tones of how deviant the standards and philosophies of today are from the fundamentals that defined the art. It does so in a threatening manner, but not innately; it is a perceived threat on the part of the inner site culture itself; one that has long since been abandoned and oddly never quite returned to in the procession of fashions there, but that has kept the current eras in a comprehensive shadow nonetheless.
This shadow is the point of origin for an animosity that some of the current community — current writers in particular — have towards the initial articles’ qualities, which still have the majority of the greater internet’s attention. Somewhere in the surety that the format is becoming more mature and capable of shouldering more and more development, elements, and space — more things that current writers can ostensibly point to as “improvements” — there is the subconscious resentment that the fundamentals of the genre represent an already-looted ruin, with little in the way of upvotes and traction for a hopeful authorial brand. It is the proverbial monster of SCP-682; that horrible and unkillable thing that has definitely secured the market on a particular approach.
You can read the recent interviews as SCP, not intentionally but functionally, reassuring itself of a supposedly intact lineage, tracing in the darkness of that shadow from the greatness that was then to the greatness that surely also continues now. These old ideas and approaches to containment fiction are paraded out from the backdrop of myth, demonstrated performatively to be still compatible with the site; a reinforcement in spectacle only, doubtless the fact that they are so far-removed and alien the unspoken appeal of it all. These ideas, wrapped into god-like charisma in the site’s founders, are shown to be intact and yet inert relics, and are then led back into the site’s cosmological religion to be tucked away at the beginning of things, but not for the now.
The separation and elevation of these individuals over the site — but not among it, not interactive with it still — is both a curse and a blessing to the users. Their gods have stopped back in to say hello — the deist’s longed-for reunion — but only in passing, back on their way to the more important things outside of the universe. Their ongoing absence means that the culture does not have to be continuously reminded of their ideas as these are compared to their current, relatively anemic state of mind; only episodically and in the safe distance of ceremony. Their continued absence means that nothing needs to truly change, despite what is said, no matter how loudly or by who.
The motions are obvious when you step back from the site and speed them up into a few minutes: an intimate creative action has been turned into a near-gladiatorial spectator sport. The site’s participants have the ability to do this in times of clarity, but prefer not to. Their desire to do so is limited by the intensity and addiction that they have for the daily goings-on in the culture. Their time horizons are short; their preference for the immediate, like the influx of upvotes on an article with a shelf life of 1 week, the expiry marking the need to again get the next hit.
There is no coincidence that the velocity of articles and the increasingly scarce percentage of them that have staying power is accompanied by a gradual loss of the initial philosophies of the first authors. The first authors were not writing for upvotes. They weren’t writing for glory. They were writing because they felt as though they needed to; something within them like a soul. It was an inherent thing; an extension of a philosophy. In the modern day atmosphere, there surely are those who are still writing in this manner (and those like-minded have a tendency to sniff them out and appreciate their works despite their article reception or stats), the point is that without a keen sense of smell, it is nearly impossible to separate them out from those who write for the anticipated intravenous hit of dopamine that the site’s characteristics now offer… because as Dr. Gears lamented in his interview, this has become the unquestioned status quo.
Ego Inversion
Us vs. Me
Recently, Dr. Gears mentioned that the woes of the modern SCP community trace back to ego and the rating module. Over the years, the effects of this have moved systemically and imperceptibly throughout the vasculature of the site, creating new outlets for itself due to its hunger. But these largely microscopic channels congregate and find larger hubs of intersection. One of these is the author page.
“You look at the old author pages… the author pages and author personas never really were intended to be a part of that. They were just crap that we stuck up to have quick links to our articles; we were horsing around.”
— Dr. Gears
It has morphed, grotesquely, from its initial and reasonable design around a pragmatic need, and swallowed itself in excess tumorous tissue, so as to be unrecognizable. It is now a place where an author, done with the work of 3 successful pieces as tithe to the site (no longer legally theirs), is then granted the achievement to give themselves reviews and offer commentary that they wish others had asked of them… or generally be as ridiculous as possible; the author page rehash of the lolFoundation, an effortful and desperate cry to stand out… the site equivalent of the loudness war.
What was initially the most flippant part of an author page, all the stuff besides the list of articles, has become the focus; one of the inversions, with the weight of SCP balancing precariously on its head. The initial purpose of the author page has been replaced by numerous other functions, and the author page has been left to find other reasons to exist. All of these found reasons are acceptable to the community in so far as they proliferate ideas for more attention and upvotes; all except the use of an author page via a loophole in the site rules to express these long-ignored criticisms of the site for anyone who wants to be heard and isn’t Dr. Gears.
Compare the raw pragmatism of having a centralized location to quickly see an author’s works to the modern-day Grand Central Station of author pages:
… and you will understand why I am happy to have my author page not only list my successful articles (without their ratings), but also my failures. I’m also proud of it as the most unironically-given downvoted one of them all. Because it’s still more real than this.
Standards Inversion
Crucible vs pillow
“The best decision we came up with was that… we were going to be brutally honest and make sure things were still going while still letting folks in… at a certain point we had to make a decision how stuff was going to go and how it was going to stay, and we kind of had to choose to be mean… We looked at other forums and other writing projects that were very open and non-judgmental and touchy-feely, and those didn’t go very well. So we decided “OK we’ll be jerks” and it’s worked out so far pretty well.”
The high literary standards you’ve heard about at SCP are part myth. Not helping is that no one can find them. They aren’t in upvotes or the number of articles, or how many 001s there are. Most swear that the high standards are in the newer articles, and that the older articles have the lower standards, but TroyL, an expert on the site who had the widest-lens’ view through more years than most and is perhaps the one person to be perceptive enough to be the only one right on the matter, delightfully thinks the opposite.
That myth would also tell you that precursor sites like The Holders failed due to relatively lower standards. The reality is that their standards were too high, their structure too rigid. It was, among other things, part of their decline. SCP represented a relaxation of those standards and it opened the floodgates for the creativity that put SCP on the map; the creativity by which the site enjoys a reputation of high standards.
However the only suggestion of higher standards today is in the ongoing claim of having them; but when it comes to writing, aside from the front-loaded mechanical press of the greenlight process and its highly restrictive cookie-cutter template, standards are suspiciously nebulous, taken for granted on reputation alone; the people who should be enacting it too focused on praises.
My take is that in a vat of average standards, some writers bubble out as really good; same as anywhere else. The random article at SCP may be more polished, I agree, but that only gets you as far as commentary on the clinical tone of the median article; an tier of average that is being swollen thanks to increased participation. It has nothing to say about the tier and caliber of the sort of article that jump-starts a sense of standards and quality to begin with.
The quality that SCP is “known for” is not a result of their standards; an initial quality, both compositionally and philosophically, created the standards. This is especially inverted relative to the greater internet’s reputation of the Foundation; most if not all of this perception is thanks to the quality of the initial articles and their relatively heightened fidelity to an academic format (the reason why TroyL thinks the standards were higher in the past… and given the Dr. Gears’ quote opening this section, we can be inclined to believe him).
So the modern self-flattery of high standards at SCP is predominantly a redistributed and second-hand effect, elongated not by the site’s standards but by the talent of the active authors who occasionally rehearse them for a larger audience that amplifies it beyond the competition. You simply have a larger sample size at SCP of the same mix as in any other containment fiction platform. Not in and of itself a good thing… unless you are looking to have the most effective shills.
But the presumption of higher standards is a powerful recruitment tool and boon. The expectation of quality set by those early articles has helped SCP stay relevant for 13 years, recruited the type of author most eager to prove to themselves and their peers that they too are of the highest standards. That they can “play in the big leagues.” The food might be basically the same, but there is more of it, a white cloth on the tables, and the waiters are in vests and know how to sniff out the subtle note of raspberry hidden in the (grape) wine.
There used to be a culture of controlled but eager criticism that encouraged high standards, that helped stay the course as a best-fit experience. SCP has certainly been the best place to write containment fiction for most of its life. Sadly, this attitude has vanished from SCP, and that respectability and status with it. Those who have/had been there for the longest could tell you. We’ve already heard from TroyL. Again see this post by the author and SCP admin formerly known as Roget, now pixelatedHarmony, in 2019.
Today, the defining criticism is reserved not when responding to articles, but when those who insult the community itself are responded to. When an article is criticized “too harshly”, even when it avoids commentary on the author categorically, this is grounds for punishment, or at least a staff-sanctioned and ruling-class dog-pile, marking it as uncalled for. Too many ruffled feathers will get you a target on your back.
The criticism (and so standard) has been moved from the articles and re-zeroed upon user behavior; essentially thought-compliance with maintaining a patina of civility for the sake of optics and a manufactured inclusivity... by now a championed company slogan. This is to the softening and fattening of those authors who — like users of any other social media platform — suffer from an diet of structurally-processed praise. SCP has lost its edge; it is no longer sharp. Effective and prodigious critters too now have been long dissolved into the mythos behind the site.
Bureaucracy Inversion
Leadership used to moderate article quality vs. leadership used to hinder it.
As Gears says in his new interview, EditThis and the early SCP truly was the Wild Wild West, with very little rules to speak of:
“The EditThis era was…wild. We had this giant list of open entries, and you just barreled in, grabbed a number, and wrote. It was really the wild west, with all the good and bad that implies.”
— Dr. Gears
The initial and culturally greatest works of SCP did not come from the smug attitude of superiority that many modern-day SCP authors like to apply to themselves, like too much makeup. They didn’t come from an era of swift curation and greenlights, or under the massive top-down pressure of a sprawling site staff’s frictionless operations. They came in the absence of any; despite these things.
Places like RPC and Luminal Archives, Backrooms, and SCP Commune; these are now the Wild West of the containment fiction genre. Like SCP once was, they are too young and unknown to have crippling superiority complexes; and it is no coincidence that these places bear the brunt of SCP’s whirling around of their self-description as superior. They feature a relative relaxation of the strictness, similar to how SCP first relaxed the strictness of The Holder’s. As a result, these alternative platforms don’t have the impediments that come with neurotically trying to maintain a brand name’s popularity. they aren’t assessed to the point of distraction with the perfection of their own image in the mirror. They are more rugged, more open, and represent the new horizons and territories to be settled upon.
If these places are the Wild West, SCP is like Great Britain with its kings and class of nobles, but with a sprinkle of an authoritarian flavor when you consider their information control and the disadvantage that the people of that place don’t even know is theirs. You would never know that places like RPC have recaptured the initial vibe of SCP because of an ongoing top-down disinformation effort by SCP to propagandize alternatives — or any source of alternative reporting on SCP — as thoroughly immoral, clearly evidenced by their total exclusion per staff’s superior morality. The truth is that these independent minds are purged in order for no one to countermand the narrative staff are editorializing to float the brand; to their users yes, but most of all to themselves, and fooling almost no one.
Staff’s willingness to have their userbase improperly informed — evidenced by their continual censorship of unfortunate truths that would give them bad PR and their panicked ability to pawn off their duties in times of stress — has something to do with the inability to critique in the way the site needs, and the flattening product. It’s like declawing a cat so that it can’t ruin your furniture.
Here is our inversion: the standards of socialization meant to allow for the unimpeded behavior of creation have been inverted into unimpeded behavioral standards meant to allow for the socialization in creation. The actual, non-mythical standards at SCP over the past years have faltered, steered artificially by extra-compositional politics and unrelated fixations that skip hand-in-hand with the information control on the corpses and remains of the founding ideals. The censorship and wrong-think in particular has encouraged the total substitution of a once muscular culture of critique, one that was meant to sustain and uphold the initial quality, with a flabby adiposity that pads its users’ feelings above all else, as if they were mild children in need of bad parenting:
20:28:19: <SoulAtJob> Modern_Erasmus: rpc is a threat to our most vulnerable members
20:28:25: <SoulAtJob> And therefore I consider them a threat
20:28:41: <Modern_Erasmus> Riemann: yep. And they’re not devoid of politics, they’re just right wing.
20:28:45: <SoulAtJob> They’re also a threaat to some of our most popular community contributes like kaktus
20:28:53: <SoulAtJob> So imo they’re something to regard carefully
20:29:12: <SoulAtJob> If not with some amount of careful eyev
20:29:03: <WrongJohnSilver> They’re pro-trolling.
20:29:16: <Modern_Erasmus> SoulAtJob: I agree, I meant to our wider position and site
20:29:21: <SoulAtJob> Modern_Erasmus: yes
20:29:23: <SoulAtJob> Back to work
20:29:32: <Modern_Erasmus> Our users def need to be guarded
(Nevermind also that SCP has reliably displayed a hostility that would see RPC destroyed, including and up to infiltration by their highest staff levels using proxies.)
Rule Zero, what was once created as a defensive way to discourage the venomous attack of less talented authors is now used to enforce via blunt trauma the over-courteous treatment of the site’s prized ones — individuals who are artificially elevated to positions that they cannot tolerate the climate of; who by their spirit & talent should have the robustness and even thirst for conflicting viewpoints, but who are now made to be picaresque calendar models packed away safe in their makeup studios, not to be harassed by anyone who isn’t their handlers.
Just compare the overly-coddling mandates from site staff to a brand new quote:
“Never flinch because someone’s feelings may get hurt or they’ll feel icky.”
— Dr. Gears, 2021
The staff’s account is about socialization and Dr. Gears’ is about article creation, but there is no difference between the two at this point, and so the parallel stands. Is this a statement that anyone on staff would make these days? A user was just banned for 24 hours after comparing the mass adoption of the Apollyon object class to the mass adoption of the Nazi party. Is it bad taste? Absolutely. Is the point it makes in hyperbole a valid opinion? Yes. And we’ve seen explicitly that staff at the highest level excuse bad taste with Nazi-centric rhetoric before, resulting in no punishment or disciplinary action… the defensive apologetics and benefit of the doubt only given when it’s done by a prominent member and staffer it seems.
Hyperbole is used to make its point by being too exaggerated (here mistagged “Excessive vehemence”). The user clearly does not intend for the two to literally be equated, again per the definition of hyperbole. However, the site’s sense of figurative speaking, satire, and hell even humor to an extent, is apparently deadened by a neuropathy from too much sugar. (It’s clear staff don’t actually think this once you get a glimpse into their private chats, where they utilize such rhetorical devices and even purposefully transgressive ones routinely This public instance is simply for show.)
The message is either that you are not allowed to mention Nazis in a hyperbolized manner (again, something that staff certainly have been observed doing without issue even until this day, e.g. toward those who disagreed with the 2018 logo change, all of RPC), or that you are not allowed to provoke the feelings of those who got the Apollyon object class mainstream. Too much insensitivity (“excessive”) in the critique (now “vehemence”).
Just check out the Google search count for “vehemence” on O5 disciplinary logs.
With the attention turned away from the quivering writing standards and to the project of ossifying increasingly obtuse and arbitrary standards on user behavior, these buttressed meaninglessly by empty-calorie buzzwords like “vehemence”, the emphasis at SCP has shifted from the breadth of raw creativity that is naturally bound to find disagreement with others, to tempering the horsepower of that creativity so far back until the vehicle of expression can drive over eggshells and not crack them.
Thanks to a bureaucratic overreach that has extended the body of the staff so far that it has flipped over the rails it once saw as an indication to stop, the “standards” at SCP now mean an expressive sterility. In-group members are kept in a bubble from anything that could hurt their feelings or offend them… or no one even, just an imagined someone. Because those who run SCP and those who participate in it are in a bubble, and have very little immune challenges, the introduction of any bacterium of any kind, no matter how relatively domitable by a mind and spirit of average build, is magnified into a biblical plague.
Their new standards have robbed themselves of more than just a quality control, but more deeply, a basic robustness that is required in writing — the ability to not take something personally or be offended at the drop of a hat. They have neutered the roles of both the author and the critic, which historically have been to do just that; challenge, offend, and ruffle. There is zero risk or growth potential when you put your soul (or the opposite, a formula) out to sycophants who will hug you because you share the same political views as they do, and will throw rocks at you if you deviate from that; and so, there is little reward writing in such a place too.
These are not the sort of standards to look up to, or that have to do with writing well. The shift from standards of writing to increasing standards of conduct signals that their leadership is more interested in brand-recognition and the polish on the garaged, undriven sports car; certainly something other than being a good place to write.
Very few have been able to overcome the peer pressure and with enough stability to walk through the obfuscating cobweb that for years now has trapped the definition of good writing on the SCP Wiki. That cobweb, and the army of salivating spiders within it that believe they gate the site by mandating increasingly elaborate and exclusionary in-group signaling; spiders who will eat flies for wandering out of line (while letting the wasps go free). Gears blows it all away in a single exhale:
“Everyone sort of knew each other, and a lot of the rules were just understood without a formal structure.”
Not many understand the significance of Sort’s post in O5 January of 2013 titled “We’re not paying ourselves enough to be bureaucrats”. But you can read all about it here. It’s the fulcrum on which the fate of SCP turned, slowly, imperceptibly, incorrectly, and deterministically from that moment onward into a political party and governmental structure, one wherein the initial spirit of writing and expression is slowly asphyxiated. It is the moment of disease contraction, of a contagion: the perpetual mission creep of staff away from running a writing website, displacing that identity with an increasingly governmental and centralized power structure. This is made worse by the fact that new staffers are often recruited from the general userbase if their writing is good or if they have a breakout article, that talent of the site being funnelled into the burnout-machine and time sink that is staff work.
Foundation (Author) Inversion
Authorial vs. authoritative.
“I’ve done well, I think, though I do worry sometimes if, at this point, it’s my name that carries things… It easy to let your opinions or ideas of an author color perception, and I’ve always been a strong supporter of each entry should stand on its own… Clipped out from the wiki and posted to some random-ass forum, it should carry the bulk of the impact without any other context or support… If, tomorrow, all the usernames and votes of the wiki vanished, if you’re truly committed, than it would not impact your work in the slightest.”
— Dr. Gears, 2021
Dr. Gears knows his writing on SCP cannot possibly be received in an honest fashion, it can’t be dissociated from the apex brand name he has — perhaps even undesirably in his case — become to the site. He has been successfully elevated into a sort of luxury where effort is an obsolete technology; something for the toiling masses. This anti-effort effect exists with many authors on SCP, though to a less degree than Gears, and with a welcoming ego as opposed to a questioning mind.
This is a concern for any writer who is worth their weight in gold, because the last thing they want to have happen is people to upvote and praise their work simply because of their brand name, because of a celebrity culture. (This is reportedly why Fishmonger created his sockpuppet account, if we are to believe the official site history.) Those are standards that can’t be tolerated. A real writer will not find value in that, and won’t make a compromise with it. A fake writer will embrace that.
And yet there is no shortage of cases at SCP that demonstrate how far a user’s brand name recognition can get them in the way of ascribed, perceived, and sometimes unjustified declarations of quality writing. I don’t have to name that one person even — who in their strata of success takes the opportunity to float in the atrophying anti-gravity, content to explicitly work in and for the common lowest denominator, the css theme-ing of the article cited as a reliable upvote multiplier — because that person parrots his own praise loudly enough and to the extent to which there is insecurity equally present; the lurking suggestion that the quality doesn’t fit the accolades being frighteningly possible.
Authors are still creating avatars of themselves in their own works as a way to broadcast who has written the article, so that this effect can take place ASAP, and so the potential mystery and unbiasness of who wrote this article isn’t stayed until after a vote on it. As ever, these avatars are thinly named after the corresponding authors (e.g. Dr. Harold Blank, Dr. Karlyle Aktus)… but they have also gotten more outlandish too, recruiting others that may not have even helped write the article; another pseudopod of that desperate blob of “frivolous shenaniganery” extending itself in an irrationally exuberant fashion for itself into the format, and uncontained from the -J designation that was created for it (e.g. Dr. Lillian Lillihammer and Dr. Placeholder McDoctorate). (Don’t get me started on the dialogue here.)
There are highly successful authors on SCP who resist doing this, who find a way to maintain an environmental pressure upon themselves and have the discipline to keep their efforts and deny the shortcuts and the laurels. A good example is PeppersGhost; a writer’s writer (although we unfortunately see their author page sorted by upvote totals too…), or Tufto (although they have expressed their psychological struggles with this culture too), or Tanhony, psul, Kalinin. This typically goes hand-in-hand with remaining a quiet part of the site… something you might miss and that doesn’t feel the need to participate in the volume wars.
For most of the ruling class though, the emperor has had no clothes this entire time. The author brand name continues to be the nexus of the site’s social economy, and these users give themselves massive vulnerabilities to be puppeteered by staff in this way; anything but a ban and removal from their brand name.
By the obsession with brand name, the site gave the reigns over from the authors to the non-writers; the bureaucrats who spend too much time in bureau to write, typically.
Speaking of which, there are several points in this quote of Gears’ that philosophically signal disapproval for the recent inversion of authorial sovereignty. (We all knew Gears would have been on the authors’ and original principle’s side.) Another inversion is around the place of the author; what was once offered out of respect to the authors as a moral foundation despite the legal terms has now been flipped on its head — stripped and pulled inside out rather. Now, the moral right of author sovereignty is withdrawn due to a sudden fundamentalist interpretation, and because of the legal terms. (The truth is that the early staff didn’t understand the license, and so caved to Fishmonger’s legal threats. Today, staff know it well and so know they can use it a-forensically as a murder weapon, their critics having nothing to present in a courtroom to indict them for their crime.)
This event, voted for mainly by those who have nothing to lose and little to understand the deeper implications of, represents the death of the author on SCP, and the supremacy of the brand catering to its consumption class. This is the steel knife in the back of those who built the forge. It’s SCP binding the hand that feeds them so that they can devour it whole, so as to continue to postpone an inevitable hunger.
In stark contrast to Dr. Gears’ statements, the SCP of today could not find enough sympathy with this robust way of thinking to even lose 3% of its total composition.
Conclusion
“Oh yes, they’re silly ghost stories, and it’s easy to dismiss them in the light of day. However, late at night, when you’re the last one up and prowling in a bored stupor for something interesting, it leaves the mind more receptive. Suddenly hitting on what looks to be a post, or a picture, or something that, with your waking mind, you know is fake, but has just enough gloss to ring true can leave an impression that can shift to obsession. It brings the horror story out of the crypt and castle, leads it from forests and graveyards, and puts it in your bathroom, your social media, your walk home from work, your midnight snack. You know it’s fake, sure…but would it hurt to leave the light on, just to be sure?”
A redundant theme of my rambling is that SCP has forsaken the initial magic and immersion of the craft for the eager expectation and self-awareness of being on a big stage… expectant of and addicted to pseudonymous worship. To continue Dr. Gears’ analogy, the spotlight-like sun has brightened, washing out the picture, but also it has made clear the manufactured and imperfect edges that were once concealed by the relative dim; the craft is left less immersive, less convincing, less appealing, and less effective on the whole.
Perhaps not less creepy or skillful at times, but certainly it has lost that magic that Dr. Gears and so many who initially discovered the works through a medium that didn’t have the carcinogens that the current community has… degenerative distractions like author ego and the rating module, but also the cheap inclusion into a group that likes to enjoy the self-description as morally superior at the same time. The actors on stage have inverted the charm of a role play on a theater stage into a sort of Hollywood production, losing themselves as actors and becoming documentary participants competing with one another on that stage; missing the same gist that Duksin himself did for bigger productions that are apparently needed… SCP’s capitulation just being in less litigious ways.
Only people trying to suffocate an insecurity can make themselves see unilateral positivity in increasing quantities of site metrics, or questions of the site’s health as pure buffoonery. Everything comes with a price. On the whole, SCP doesn’t understand what it has paid.
The soul is sold.
“Write because you have to, and don’t worry so much about reception. If you’re trying to prop up your work, scrapping it out with critics or trying to boost votes beyond just telling people to come take a look, then you’re likely off course… We all like praise and rewards, that’s normal, and even a good thing, really. However it’s easy to slip into the trap of producing things because you want that praise, prestige and reward, rather than because it’s something you love. Something that burns in you, like a fever. Lovecraft produced his work with no real expectations, and never really felt right getting paid for his work. Because of this he died penniless and alone, but an entire genre of horror is named after him now. Great work, the outpouring of the soul, lasts much more, and makes deeper impact than just wanting to bask in glory.”
— Dr. Gears, 2021
This says it all. Listen to your papa, SCP.
© Lack of Lepers, 2021
