Losing the Plot: Part 3 —Trading Immersion for Immediacy
NEWS/OPINION — Containment fiction needs some containment procedures of its own, and SCP is not going to give it to us. Featuring Kain Pathos Crow.
Recap: To celebrate SCP’s 13th birthday (in June), WhiteGuard, a SCP member and staffer, conducted weekly interviews — in my opinion the best thing to happen to SCP since the KaktusKast — with some of the site’s forerunners, their initial ideas revisited and re-pronounced. These include “The Administrator” Fritzwillie, Dr. Clef, Kain Pathos Crow, and Dr. Gears.
I don’t think, however, that what is revealed in the nostalgic look back is as charming and flattering as the celebrating SCPers think it is. Let’s take a close look at some of the changes these old guards speak of, and tell the other side of the story regarding how far SCP has come.
Past entries in this series:
- Part 1: As an Adolescent, SCP Has Lost the Plot — A Preface
- Part 2: Losing the Plot — SCP’s Inversions — Dr. Gears
“The SCP posts were not the first of their kind. Random experiments in creepypasta were common at the time, such as the Holder of the End, and general creepy posting. Still, this particular series of posts caught my eye. It was the dry informative style, the mystery of things not said, the larger implications. This helped rekindle a creative spark inside me.”
There is something flammable about the genre of containment fiction. It captures the imagination in a way the tired alternatives of our day can’t.
This was the initial draw for many to containment fiction, though perhaps not those drawn in by the indie game Containment Breach, who quickly made up the majority of SCP’s demographic; or those who were drawn in by the social perks and later justified it with a semblance of compositional participation. What was unique was the format; this oddly prescriptive and professionally restrained delivery of the monstrous; its focus on how to approach and handle uncertainty in the most certain terms achievable. It wasn’t what was said, but — as always, and more so than ever I believe — what wasn’t.
What makes containment fiction unique as a genre of writing is that the limits placed on the style of writing deny an author the plethora of tools in the classical kit for engaging an audience and telling a story. You might find that notes from masterclasses on classical story telling and character building do not have direct translations here; like physics formulas set into a non-Euclidean space.
Suddenly, due to the immersive nature of the posture and the epistemology inherent in that, the author cannot abandon one’s self to the romantic and subjective internal monologue of a protagonist; they cannot paint a scene with descriptive writing, in detail and using all the senses; they can only use the first or second person in the work-around of journals or logs; they can not readily be omnipotent as a narrator; they can’t enrich a character by flipping into flashbacks; they have to justify the exclusion of information to the reader (something that near solely defines tension and twists in classical works); etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
The style had rules that couldn’t be broken, and limits that had to, like a puzzle, be navigated cleverly, if at all. This required a new style of problem solving on the part of the writer — better yet, the thinker. But most importantly, the limits — as with any genre — are the lines that give containment fiction its definition.
The refreshing revelation that limits can be liberating; that restraint can be elevating; that constraints can be exponents; this had a brand new way to shine. Containment fiction immediately and suprasonically surpassed less sophisticated forms of creepypasta on the forums and boards as a more effective mode of story telling (particularly with horror); to show in a new manner, to outline, shade, and tailor something to such a pedantic and disciplined detail, yet still not show it. It was the death knell to the more liberal and expository writing that is too lazily at home in Hollywood horror scripts and juvenile fanfiction.
It was a draw and originality in the craft that earned it an entire encyclopedia of tropes, refit and repurposed in a new chassis, along with the creation of some entirely new ones too. This was new land. A new continent to discover. It was virgin land of composition; the sophistication of which was not yet realized, and still isn’t. Someone who understands the value of containment fiction and what it represents could never fully leave it, never fully go back to the lesser and atavistic modes of story telling; they were rendered prehistoric.
What Kain Pathos Crow describes here was the draw for me as well. Prior to my interest in containment fiction, I was in Grad school for years. The particular track of study had us sign a form agreeing to not get a job, part time or otherwise, because the curriculum was going to be somewhat intense and program experience said that we would likely fail out if we worked. So, I spent two years in a 1,000 square foot classroom with thirty other people, the same people, with no windows and poor cell phone reception. We didn’t have time for fun or hobbies.
After it was over, I was primed to reconnect with my creative side, which has included music composition, dance, and of course writing. While I continued with all three right out of school in 2018, nothing floored me like the containment fiction genre did. I had to write in it. The medium uniquely offered not just a spiritual footpath out of that sterile room where we read dry medical textbook after dry medical textbook — technical, exact language that had zero room for imagination — but it also offered a way to get back at the two years interred, to come back with a compositional cavalry and liberate the very skills I had to develop in that stifling time back into the hands of long-silent forces of creativity; forces that were ready to come out of an anesthetized slumber and fire on its enemies at point-blank range.
It represented a break in years of overcast clouds; a hand holding out escape… a pseudo-scientific medium with rigid structure, meant to re-inject wonder back into anything — things known and things unknown, even the most everyday of objects — and asymptotically approach the unapprochable in the most objectified, scientific of ways. It was a revolution of everyday life.
Imagine my disappointment, then, when I got into the community and found what had supplanted the primacy of actual writing, the compromises made with courting an audience, the infestation of upvote milestones as indicators of self worth, and the enslavement of the brilliance to massage the ego of people who didn’t have the strength or even desire to pick their lazy asses out of the way of history and of a heritage handed down to them in earnest.
“Back then, there was less of a focus on writers, and more on the articles. There wasn’t any inserts, nothing like that, and a lot of the original articles were author unknown, something that was expected of original pastas.”
Can this still be said to be true? Does the need to bring it up not say enough? Is there still more of a focus on the articles? Certainly, ironically, in the outer community, where author names outside of Dr. Gears, and maybe Drs. Bright & Clef, are unknown and irrelevant. But what about within the community itself?
Today at SCP, the ubiquitous dream of e-fame, clout-chasing, and the top-heavy focus on writers and their brands, all fuel the rabid expansion of the genre into unknown compositional (and graphic design) territories, the innovation pressing onward in search of new colonize-able real estate in which gold might be found and a homestead made. In the process of that expansion, the format has gradually annexed more and more qualities of other modalities of fiction; qualities that, when excluded, initially made the format so unique.
Because the current community is not more about the articles, there has been no counteractive pressure that tells the egos holding the craft hostage (with upvotes as ransom) to please put down the knife and back away from the genre. Of all the “great” figures and writers on the SCP, no one has successfully steered the community back into the maturity that less is more, and that there are some things that maybe shouldn’t change. Nearly all of them, those “leaders” most of all, are spearheading a rapid descent of the limitations that made the craft effective into the dirt, as if intending to smash it to smithereens, so that it can be gutted for the spare parts that they can build their own empire with.
SCP lacks leaders. The only true ones are these archaic, long-silent figures, floating hauntingly like revenant apparitions back into the memory of those who damn well know better, and who are caught with their pants down in an act of remarkable depravity and deplorability.
What has fallen by the wayside in this rush? In a sport, where the skill is high and the difference between success and failure is measured in inches, what do you lose when you take your eye off the ball to focus on the more attractive, and beckoning, degenerate elements of the game… say, the pretty individual in the stands, or your stats up on the scoreboard? What happens when the eager anticipation of Twitter mentions is projected into the real-time schematics of the plays and strategies? What, in the world of SCP, is analogous to that in-game focus, and what are the ways a team can fall apart and lose track of itself if no discipline is exerted to keep one’s eyes squarely on what needs to be kept in mind to become truly great?
What happens when you allow the muscular lines and curves that tightly define what the containment fiction genre is to expand and sag, like an elderly abdomen over a belt line?
Immersion is corrupted into immediacy.
What’s constitutive now is not the fidelity to the limits that define the craft, but the instant gratification and greed of the ego and its devices as they are parasitically latched onto that craft. The priority is not the far-off, lofty, and abstract ideal that the style was raised by; it is what can only be observed immediately and grafted onto quickly… and only unintelligent parasites don’t know when to stop.
Given that the community, now an abscess, has turned ever inwards into itself as a court-able object, it has in proportion disregarded the need to maintain a focus for the onlooker’s sense of immersion and believability; the temptation and chance to masturbate too great for the weak minds therein. (We will see in a next installment how the sanctity for immersion has been corrupted at SCP into a humor-less religion unto itself.) Like the magic of a stage production that has devolved into the actors’ hyper-awareness of themselves on stage, a gladiatorial squabbling for the spotlight has rendered the discipline of memorizing lines hilarious. The script was discarded for the foolish reason that it had already been written, and actors engage themselves in a shouting match for the audience’s attention. There are a few — there, my God, shield the kids’ eyes — taking the opportunity to masturbate to the realized fantasy of being onstage.
Much of this immersion came from restraint. That restraint is long-broken and the splintered strands of sinew are everywhere to see.
For example, at SCP — uniquely, and in contrast to all other examples of containment fiction platforming to date — the social media buttons are given the top spot on the main menu bar. (RPC has them more appropriately at the bottom, others don’t have them at all.) What does this say about the priorities and intended click-flow of the site? With immersion now hilarious, what’s the harm in putting these on-ramps (on-ramps to what? a better part of the experience?) “right where they should be”; placed as awkward as middle schoolers at a chaperoned dance right next to that vestige of a bygone sensibility; the “CLASSIFIED” header.
Another example, something we will see again in another blog post’s context, is the annexation of the long-stood “-J” categorization of articles into the mainlist, the distinction and allowance for the zany, the wacky, the unapologetically irreverent to be elevated and celebrated as is, and without the need for the added designation. Examples are common in modern articles (1, 2, 3, 4, on the “Newly Created Pages” list alone at the time of writing) and have no shortage of successful examples to mimic (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc).
While the SCP Wiki has a long pendulum that swings back and forth from more casual tones (early Lolfoundation) and back, we have again seemingly entered that extreme where Kain Pathos Crow’s words are at once old, new, prophetic, and a warning;
“True, we have become more structured, more informed, more thorough, but at what cost? The Foundation itself is no longer this great shadow that looms over the horizon, too huge and far reaching to truly see. It has become a pet, something that allows itself to tamed and groomed. This is where we were born, in that chaos, where the ignorant were spurned, the immature ignored, the worthless cast aside, and the great gave way to what mattered. The post.
But how do we reclaim this lost glory?”
So too are the cryogenic words of Dr. Gears:
That is the issue we have: as we add, we destroy. With every entry, it peels away the horror more and more. Some entries add, and even enhance the feel of the first entry, however many more tear it down. We strive for involvement, for a openness to new ideas, and it has worked well thus far. Multiple people working in the same shared universe will skew the initial vision, but we’ve done tolerably well until now.
However, we seem to now be drifting much more drastically. With a recent influx of new users, we’ve had to constantly remind, prod, and threaten to try and maintain the initial vision of the SCP. The SCP are made to be taken and placed into a game, movie, comic book, or any other “cool” application. They are creepypasta, short fiction designed to unsettle and creep out readers. Any other application is secondary.
In short, we need to start acting more like The Foundation: a soulless, shadowy, bureaucratic entity, with zero tolerance for mistakes, incompetence, or insubordination. One who’s actions are carried out swiftly, and without apology or explanation.
— DrGears
(It can be added here in footnote that the exemplar figures who have most helped popularize this style are also the ones who have a penchant for marketing themselves. This generously affords the shovel-ready argument that the proliferation of this style, its success, and therefore the reasoning as to why other authors would want to mimic it, their success — and on and on — is that marketing effort itself, above and beyond what the writing alone would merit in the form of attention.)
The relaxing of the once-taught confines that would relegate an article’s appropriateness away from the mainlist to excuse the flagrant failure of suspension of disbelief that such articles proudly convey, makes obvious the long-buried “initial vision of SCP”, now bubbled up in pieces to the surface due to the gases of its own decomposition; the detritus pointed to as justification by these purveyors as evidence that they are still abiding by the gist of the genre.
When will the containment procedures themselves go because they can only be conceived of as a chore for the reader and author, an impediment to the good stuff?
Where is the restraint? Let’s pick a recent article that demonstrates both the frequency and normalcy of the systemic, total disregard for confines and the initial vision of the genre. No one will call out that this is a tale that’s poorly justified as an SCP; that particular criticism is blacklisted and seem as bad form. (I blame SCP-3999.) Besides, that would be too harsh of a criticism in the current paradigm… “You’re going to disregard all the hard work and effort of this just because it doesn’t conform to your view of what an SCP should be?!?” This defense can carry the entire identity of containment fiction straight out of town, as if flood waters.
If the voting population can’t be trusted to diligently call out when and where an article skimps on the fundamentals, maybe those overseeing yeh site could help. Perhaps it hasn’t been recognized though that there is nothing inherent in the architecture of the site that prevents the corrosion of immersion for the sake of being more consumer-facing from spreading; any part of it can be modified to better court the user into touring the web of SCP social media and becoming integrated in that universe that is outside the actual works.
Who is going to resist applying the fade-in to their CSS theme when it looks so cool and got this one author here so many upvotes? Why have a static header when you can animate it? Who at SCP when faced with that moment of possible conservation of the ideals that the far-away founders and initial audience nurtured into the luxe decadence of creative potential that is taken for granted today, will argue against so much “progress” as unnecessary and a deviation from a quieter but greater effect? Who wouldn’t trade the reliable but worn truck for the jingling keys to the new car, its coat so waxed and shiny, the one that has all the bells and whistles, but not an ounce of soul?
SCP, once golden, became pyrite, and is now plastic.
The only refuge of the restraint would be a collective effort from all involved (and so it is doomed); the authors who might decide that less is more; the users who might understand that they are feeding a machine that will eventually squeeze out something unpleasantly unrecognizable; the Staff who might attempt (or at the least pretend to, they pretend to do so many other things after all) steward their heritage and use what structural powers they have to disincentivize the degeneration of their art into a brand (that being the least they could do for what they have inherited).
Like The 2021 Death of the Author’s recoil into the doofus-smiling faces of Staff, it can and has seemed like there truly is no price tag to the gradual recession of immersion from the site. The gate has been lifted; the seal opened; hearts has been broken… and because the next person won’t display the restraint that the better part of me knows that I should even if I do, it is a race to the bottom that will see elements any measure less brute than pure biology trampled to death.
On the one hand, it is as Kain Pathos Crow says:
Another likely reason that they were short is because none of us really had experience with the format. When you’re not sure, smaller is easier, and more likely to pass muster. It wasn’t until we started getting more confident with that manner of storytelling, it makes sense that the articles got larger. Not only that, but as more and more basic ideas were utilised, people probably expanded further, to differentiate their project from the herd.
Look at the earliest stuff, ones that haven’t been rewritten, and on average, they tend to be vastly smaller than the later stuff. You might even say it’s a form of evolution with regards to the writing on site. Earlier articles are smaller and simpler, later ones increase in size and complexity. It’s a natural part of the community growing and expanding.
On the other hand, unchecked, this is runaway selection. There is an irrational trendist idolization for the novel, the not-yet-done, the next fashion… wow look at that fashion model, who cares that its a hideous outfit and arguably clothing, it’s new and gripping! This is an expansive force that inflates the confines and boundaries of the genre into more of what it isn’t and shouldn’t be. It’s like adding more and more ingredients to a pizza… at what point isn’t it one? When you add every one of a cheeseburger’s ingredients to it?
The question is; at what point does a lack of a containing force on the genre itself cause the uniqueness, those qualities that make it itself, to sublimate straight and completely through the greedy, tightly-clutched hands of SCP? I think the containment fiction medium and format itself is in need of some containment, and SCP is not going to be the ones to give it to us. They will try more and more to mimic the tendencies and habits of any other type of fiction and fanfiction that they believe will bring in upvotes. The insatiable appetite for what’s newly exploitable for the sake of untapped upvotes is too forceful. There is no exception to this rule, and on a long enough timeline, SCP’s excessive liberalization of the genre today will also seem dated and passe.
Let me end with a selection of quotes from a very, very old staff chat. I’ll make good on my promise to let the ingredients speak for themselves and resist commentary on it; the resisting supposed to be a brag on what SCP can’t seem to do, not even to the betterment of its own product. See the restraint in these quotes, but see it also in the philosophies that inform them:
<Paradox> I honestly think the only reason we kind of gave up and started lowering our standards is that there’s waaaay too much stuff coming in compared to the number of people who we trust to have a good eye for what is good and what isn’t
<Paradox> I’m tired of others always whining about originality, as if that was the most important thing, like something isn’t creepy or interesting if you didn’t think of it first. Anyway, it seems that no matter what you come up with, someone, somewhere, probably in Japan… has come up with it first or beaten it to death. For every one of my favorites, I can give you at least one example where its already been done, (on probably either Star Trek or the Twilight Zone). That doesn’t mean that they aren’t good. For me, someone who puts their time into researching it, structuring it, making it believable but still pulling me into it. That’s work you can take pride in, that’s the work that I enjoy.
<Paradox> To be honest, I’ve never particularly been thrilled with how far we’ve taken it
<Dr-Kondraki> That, and the second we started courting new membership, things started going downhill.
<Paradox> I actually don’t like knowing about the “characters” involved in the Foundation. I dunno, it kinda cheapens the effect somehow…
<Dr-Kondraki> Why do you think I became so bitter about the wiki? I couldn’t deal with the fact that the kind of change we needed would never happen because no one would step up with me and say “Alright people, shit is happening. Deal with it. We’ll come out better because of it.”
<Paradox> At one point I wasn’t sure that we’d survive such a thing, Kon
<Dr-Kondraki> Because we’d lose people? So what?
<Dr-Kondraki> Since when did popularity or website hits become the point?
<Paradox> I mean, we’re doing badly, but I think we’re a frog in slowly boiling water
<Paradox> it might not be apparent how far we’ve sunk if you’re caught up in the day-to-day of the site, but stepping back I think it’s certainly noticeable<Paradox> that while nicely designed websites are nice and designed
<Paradox> it doesn’t really immerse people into the ‘looking through something that perhaps I shouldn’t be’ feeling
<Paradox> and it’s all about immersion, you know?
<Paradox> I loved first coming here and seeing the totally serious fashion in which everything was arranged
Kalinin:
“I’m not going to say that increased interest and participation in the wiki is a bad thing, because it’s not. For me personally, however, I feel like there’s a ton more content flowing into the site, to the point that I have no ability or even desire to keep up with it all. That wouldn’t be an issue for me if it wasn’t paired with a sort of “well, that’s good enough” feeling I get permeating some of the newer stuff that I have read.
It feels to me like somewhere along the line in the past couple years, the formula of how to write an article just good enough to avoid deletion and then survive long enough to accrue steady upvotes was established and refined. Series IV has filled up in a blazing fast fashion and now we we’re close to four thousand main list articles. Just by sheer volume it seems to me that the product could use some paring for quality.”
[…]
“But it feels weird to me to vote on my own articles. I take voting very seriously and it seems strange to cast a vote in a situation where I’m obviously not an impartial observer.”
[…]
I’ve been refraining from saying anything about the excess of formatting recently, but this is becoming prevalent enough that I feel the need to mention it. Whenever I see the trademark Kaktus format (and I’m not really wild about seeing what used to be a distinctive look becoming franchised out), I’m expecting something especially noteworthy and dense, narrative-wise. Something to justify fucking with the established format. This didn’t really rise to the occasion for me in that regard.
The use of containment fiction as a means for steering in the frigid waters of egoism (the sort that would upvote their own article, say) is and always has been proof positive that the individual using it as such doesn’t understand what containment fiction is. They expose themselves as poor imitations of the greats. Someone who gets what containment fiction is and what it offers cannot value something like upvotes, flattering article metrics, author page achievement badges, or other supposed medals of accomplishment over a fidelity and restraint towards the founding principles, and will never be okay with migrating it further and further into a facsimile of other, old ways of telling stories.
Is it any surprise that there is and should still be a discipline, that if kept in focus (and not easily) would direct the current diaspora of fanned-out energy, now expended on cheap distractions and hyper-concentrate it, to direct the author’s intelligence into a laser-like beam? Create this laser through discipline, and zero it within the cross-hairs of a scope trained squarely on the philosophy and legacy that Lovecraft saw clearly in focus:
We are still early to the game, and still pioneering a new species of art.
© Lack of Lepers, 2021
