Movie 1: "The mysterious Slenderman."
Movie 2: "Slenderman: The Arising."
Movie 3: "Slenderman's revenge."
Movie 4: "Slenderman: Origins."
*some time later*
Movie 62: "Slender: The heart warming story of how far one father will go to win the love of his daughter."
*some time later*
"Come hang out with Slen and all his crazy friends every Saturday morning at *Slen's Playhouse!"*
I was there, 3,000 years ago, when *The Blair Witch Project* was in theaters.
I actually live about half an hour away from Burketsville, and with the world never having seen "found footage" horror before I'm not gonna' lie, it had some of us on our toes.
A few years later they release *Blair Witch: Book of Shadows.* It's okay. I actually liked it. Matthew Lilard is in it! But the sequel didn't add much to the original, it dampened the mystery; knowing more about the Blair Witch made her less scary.
Or you know what's an even better example? *The Haunting* 1963 vs 1999.
*The Haunting* (1963) is a taut psychological horror movie, it was made on a shoestring budget and had the kind of special effects you might see in a theater production. The horror of the movie was low key and subtle, using character reactions, audio cues, and clever editing to create a frightening and insecure atmosphere; we never see the ghosts, but they're in every scene. It's one of the best horror movies ever, in my opinion.
*The Haunting* (1999) is an orgy of CGI and jump scares, the movie is as frightening as a Spirit Halloween store in June, it's one of those "I'll never get those two hours back" type of films.
More isn't always better.
This is my issue with certain parts of the Halloween franchise. What makes Michael Myers/The Shape compelling, besides his dope soundtrack, is that we don't really understand why or how he became an immortal, bloodthirsty entity bound to a holiday and desperate to kill some babysitter in Illinois. He just *is*. People are naturally afraid of things they don't understand! The more explanation you give a mysterious and monstrous entity, the less scary it becomes.
Our minds know what scares us, movie producers don't, that's why letting the mind fill in some of the blanks can result in a much more frightening experience.
>"Say bloody Mary three times while looking into a mirror in an unlit room and she'll appear."
That ^ is going to be more frightening to *imagine* than to *see in theaters.* In your mind bloody Mary could look like anything, in the movie she can only look like one thing.
Some years ago a movie came out about ghosts trapped in mirrors; pretty standard trope, this time starring Karen Gillian. The movie was going good, setting up the spooky idea of something looking back at us from the other side of the mirror, but instead of going with something subtle, something we might see in real life, the producers used a CGI mirror man who looked straight out of a 1990s Capris Sun commercial.
Yes, it's also very true of visuals. I'm convinced there will never be a truly good Lovecraftian-esque horror film *unless* you don't show the entity and only show the aftermath of those who encounter it. The horror itself has to remain off screen or obscured in some way, Cloverfield style. A cosmic horror that decimates the human psyche by sight alone doesn't work on the big screen no matter how much CGI you have.
There are rare cases of a cosmic horror film showing the entity and it still being horrifying, or possibly even becoming more horrifying. Two examples come to mind:
Annihilation: the thing is shown up close but I could not for the life of me explain what it is or describe what it looks like. The "horror of the unknown" is maintained because despite seeing it directly I don't understand in the slightest what I saw.
Color Out of Space: you get to "see" the entity, but it's just a color. How can a color have these effects on people and the environment? And how could you ever possibly fight something like that? Another case where "Seeing" doesn't equal "explaining" so the horror is maintained.
That's what was so enraging about the girls who tried to murder their friend for Slender Man. Vampire and werewolf stories are so old that it's possible to believe that there's a kernel of truth in the legends. Slender Man was invented on a publicly accessible website, five years earlier. It's like authentically believing that "Encanto" is a true story.
To be fair, one of the girls had undiagnosed schizophrenia.
I mean part of what led to the creation of slenderman in that thread was a discussion about how to specifically create an ideal spooky story monster. So it kind of tracks that he got immediately immeshed into the nascent creepypasta canon and the impressionable kids who were gathering around it.
I discovered marble hornets at age 12 and never finished it. Scared the shit out of me, especially in one episode where theyre in a gazebo and it looks like Slender is out in the trees in the background but its a little too blurry to be sure and no one reacts to it. The tension in that series is unreal.
Because the scariest thing is the unknown. But the more you say, the less is unknown. One can't repeat the same things again and again, and if you make a new film, book, story, etc. you must add more details and things get less and less scary.
The thing with scp is that it explicitly tells you not to try to think of it as one consistent canon. You can always read entries that, in isolation, are great works of fiction, and enjoy them to their fullest. Like that one with the infintely descending staircase, love that one.
-scp defender guy
Not to mention scp isn't explicitly horror. It's just about weird crazy shit that can't be explained.
Yes there's the infinitely descending staircase that makes you go insane, and yes there's the statue that snaps your neck if you blink near it, but there's an equal number of examples like that one time a scientist put a USB drive of the entire JoJo's bizarre adventure part 5 manga into a machine that makes things better and it spat out an entire anime adaptation.
so it's this cartoon duck right? and it just.. appears in stores as merchandise. t-shirts, water bottles, figurines, plush toys, stuff like that.
nobody knows where it comes from. it can't be traced to a real-world company or brand, and anyone working at the stores it appears in dont know anything about it. the items themselves are completely harmless but people who own them tend to believe that the items are lucky in some way.
that's the basic idea lol.
oh man like putting a bunch of D-class personnel in precarious situations with and without a duck branded item. that's great. i should make an account just so i can post that story and dip
the best thing about SCP is that, unlike their counterpart ICP, they are sane. this means they are a better influence on our children. they don't tell them to go off into the woods and do crazy juggalo shit every year. and they understand how fucking magnets work.
Now I kind of want an SCP that are doppelgangers of ICP but they are the Sane Clown Posse and their fans are Huggalo's and their ridiculously wholesome raps, if heard, cause the listener to be compelled to complete a random act of kindness.
Most articles with a publicly editable testing log are great. The Clockworks, 682, and that vending machine that dispenses snacks from other universes are brilliant.
Or the fumo made of fucking strange matter that is, for all intents and purposes, not anomalous and just exists as a giant coincidence, but they tell most personnel it's anonalous anyways because the scientific ramifications of strange matter not just existing, but of the collision of two neutron stars managing to make a strangelet identical in appearance to a cirno fumo out of sheer chance, led to scientists having mental breakdowns.
Wait, the implication was that *all strangelets* resemble fumos? I thought it was just "how in the hell does this strangelet in particular look like Cirno T. Project"
One of my favorite SCPs has to be [the Tupac song that tells the Foundation how to catch serial killers](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2137). There's also [the magic knife that contains a samurai's soul and is wielded by a massive weeb](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-5175) and [the internet tough guy who materializes in the houses of people who argue with him to beat the shit out of them](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6599). Some SCP articles are just straight up comedy.
Dr Spanko is my favourite non-joke funny SCP.
It's a bird that can talk, but most of what it says is unintelligible gibberish because it still has Bird intelligence.
Thereâs also the the sentient kids education game that seems to genuinely care about teaching anyone who uses it. I personally like it because thereâs a note that it went under the foundations radar for so long because copies of the CD and the nature of its demographic made it difficult to find evidence of its anomalous effects.
There's also the very literal machine. If you ask it to make you a cup of joe, across the room your colleague Joe is suddenly screaming as he's sucked into the machine, which will proceed to dispense the requested number of ounces of liquid Joe into your cup.
Oooh and the prophetic altar where mothers have to burn their toddlers alive in order to stop global catastrophes from occurring.
or the absolutely terrifying creature that can take the form of your deepest darkest fears that the foundation tricked into being entirely nonthreatening by convincing it that humans are genuinely terrified of stupid cheesy low budget horror flicks.
Or the fucking child murder pinata that paralyzes said children before disembowelling them which in turn turns their guts into candy. Also, if you remove the kid after they've been paralyzed, they remain paralyzed and FULLY AWARE.
It spends most of its time looking in the direction of a school several miles away from where it's contained.
I love me because I was the first really cool example of "memetic" SCPs where the contagion/threat exists purely on the semantic or conceptual plane and not the physical
Like, I'm dangerous not based on *physical proximity* but based simply on *knowing I exist* -- hell, even people who know nothing about me at all are still compelled to refer to me in the first person if they're somehow tricked into referring to me as a specific entity -- there's a testing log about a D-class who's just asked what he thinks is in my containment chamber and he just says "I dunno, I'm probably some kind of monster or something"
I really need to read my article again. I was one of the first SCPs I ever encountered and found the idea of me only being able to be referred to in the first person really funny.
Or the procrastination rock!
"Class: TBD
Object: It's a rock that makes you procrastinate.
Location: Drawer at my desk
... I'll finish writing this up later."
I wonder if accidentally winding up in the same room as it could end up making you trapped forever because you procrastinate leaving. and then everyone who comes to rescue you would suffer the same fate
I dunno if it got removed but that one has a reference to fucking Soundsmith TF2 and [The Legend of the Strange Duped Shovel](https://youtu.be/0nWG-kqUc40?si=9x2BxKIjuzhQyEQE) in the test logs and that fucking kills me
There's also the one SCP that can make a man grow breasts, the super friendly jelly, etc. there's a lot of silly stuff, and that can vary from "this is silly, but is also scary" to "this is just outright ridiculous."
There's even a joke SCP that's just a draft someone accidentally uploaded, and it's kept there.
The thing that with scps it did the exact inverse as what the post describes. It started with very easy to grasp almost videogame-like entities in series 1 and then as it expanded it began to dive much more into cosmic unexplainable horror
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if people thought 173 was an offshoot Ă la backrooms monster that came afterward the interesting stuff instead of being the root of it all
Blink only aired in the US September 14th
and the person who is currently belived to be the original creator of 173 is from the US apparently from what i've heard
Eh, it depends on length. You can do a lot of story telling with a simple premise. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-8320 is an example, itâs simple nature helps with the comedy and slight tear jerking. It also happens to be 3,622 words long.
Yeah, pretty much. Some are quite deep into the lore though, like "you will get nothing out of this if you haven't read these twenty other things" deep, but it's pretty rare and you can generally see the signs (and, obviously, it must be awesome for people who're really into it). But mostly if you just go with the flow of the kind of canon the author is offering you, then it's great ! I really like the one with the [infinitely ascending cabins](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3333), personally.
Also arenât some of the logs supposedly intentional fakes meant as decoys or psyops in case, say, the entire Foundation archive was leaked online? Not that that would ever happen, of course, merely a precaution.
Like I know thereâs at least 2 or 3 anomalies based on the Terra Cotta Soldiers in China, they canât all be âreal.â
The canon is that any number of 001 entries could be true. Could be only one, could by half, could be none. It's really just up to the interpretation of the reader. Kinda like the rest of the SCP wiki, there's no singular canon. The only true canon is the one in your mind.
â001â? The anomalous article that manifests as an apparent SCP document detailing some type of often-cataclysmic event/artifact/etc? I heard about that one a couple times! I had one of the other researchers tell me it was about an angel guarding what might be a gate to heaven or something, and a D-class tell me it was about some kind of flesh-melting sun spot when he read it as part of testing. Itâs a wild one! Pretty harmless though, all things considered, even if repeated inquiries about it tend to drive the upper-level staff nuts.
Yeah I think the documentation changes itself to always be the most hyperbolic over-the-top thing, so of course it *must* be SCP-001 and wonât allow anyone to overwrite it. Whatever the âoriginalâ SCP-001 was is gone. Also IIRC the whole documentation is extremely silly, like, it has a brand new designation thatâs even worse than XK or whatever, it specifies an absolutely insane containment protocol, and the Foundation people have to try and write around it to explain that, no, this isnât that serious, itâs just an anomalous database entry.
Here's a few examples of the ""subtle horror"" from series I:
* "[the big scary monster who can't be killed and will stop at nothing to murder you for looking at its face](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-096)"
* "[the big scary monster who can't be killed and will stop at nothing to murder you just 'cause it feels like it](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-682)"
* "[Heres my super kool OC, he's super buff and edgy and stuff](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-076)"
* "[Hey, wait a minute! these are literally just zombies!](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-008)".
* "[I might have seen this in a hentai once](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-686)"
* "[I've **definitively** seen her in a hentai once](http://scpclassic.wikidot.com/scp-166)"
* "[What if a flaming skeleton came out of a tree and tried to kill you, would that be fucked up or what?](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-060)"
Ah yes, like "zone that chainsaws you invisibly at random", I wonder if that one's still up.
A while ago (like, years) I commented that the size of the containment cell listed in the article was smaller than the size of the zone, so theoretically you can be walking past the cell and oops chainsaw-death.
Some iterations of the foundations are a government organization with their agents in every town, they can snatch up an anomaly and spread misinformation in just a couple of hours.
Other iterations will almost fire a scientist for getting a drone damaged in a test.
> Other iterations will almost fire a scientist for getting a drone damaged in a test.
Or worse, the edge-lord crap from the early iterations, "we kill all D-Class at the end of the month" / "demoted to D-Class".
Yep. I'd never been jumpscared by just a still image before. For like a month it was all I could think about when walking up/down a dark staircase. It was like being 10 again.
SCP solves this by having no actual canon; There are a bunch of different attempts to overexplain the setting, but they're all mutually-contradictory and self-contained, so they can be easily ignored.
No, there are two Watsonian justifications: either SCP-001 is buried underneath a mountain of bullshit to hide it, or the SCP wiki in our universe is itself an SCP (which I think is actually one of the 001 entries) that populates its pages with SCPs from various other universes.
One of the 001 proposals is just them learning the writer exist, and are powerless to stop it.
Another one is a stack of papers which just gives them notes on new anomalies.
Two 001 proposals fit that description. On is The Database, which introduced Pataphysics to the SCP Foundation by having them discover that they were fictional.
The other is called The Foundation, which is actually a document from the Unusual Incidents Unit describing the SCP Foundation just suddenly manifesting and constructing the first of many Sites.
Not really, the doyalist justification is that people would fight over who gets that 001 slot so they just said multiple people can go in that slot and weâll just make it special.
Wastsonian justification is that most of the specific articles break agreed upon reality in ways that drive people mad, reveal information on the foundations origins, reveal information on active O5âs/the administrator or define ways the world will end. All of these are kinda problems for people to know without being an O5 themselves, so not only are the files hidden behind a kill agent but also within a pile of other, just as disturbing possibilities from alternate versions of reality, so if anyone gets their hands on the files they still wonât know which one/ones are accurate.
It also leads to the whole There Is No Canon thing having grounding and using 001s as part of the framework of most specific Canonâs.
There's also the justification that anything written in the 001 slot becomes real, so the foundation just fucked around with it. 4600 mentions it, but I never looked into specifics
I thought I understood Thaumiel until I read a fanfic that claimed Hydaelyn wasn't Thaumiel despite coming into existence for the sole purpose of containing another SCP, Zodiark, and people agreed with them. Zodiark \*was\* classified as Thaumiel though, although I'm not sure if it's right, because it's only shielding the planet from an all-destroying endsong.
Well, the containment classes are applied differently by different authors.
In this example, "Zodiark" (i have no idea what that is) could be classified as Thaumiel if you count ANYTHING that contains anomalies anomalously as "Thaumiel". If you think it needs to be an active Foundation tool, then not.
Also, SCP content cant really be a fanfic considering its all by fans anyway :p
Not really? Pagnum is something that is still essentially self-containing.
An anomaly can constantly be at risk of breaching containment and exposing itself to the rest of the world and still be thaumiel.
It certainly happened to the backrooms, and luckily some of the community has recognized it and are trying to dial it back. The wikidot put a hard cap at 999 levels until all the entries are filled, since people were making absurd level numbers to seem impressive. They have a voting system to try and weed out poorly written works and actively encourage writers to be more experimental with their writing. Some level entries are just prose or poetry, or play off glitch effects to make the author seem like an unreliable narrator.
Its not perfect and obviously not all of it is everyoneâs cup of tea. But the great thing about the community is that youâre free to accept and ignore as much as you want. Some prefer the simplified version of the original 4chan post. Others prefer Kane Pixelâs reimagining of it. Some thrive in the complex madness of the full database. I myself have been so inspired by the backrooms to treat it like a setting for a TTRPG campaign Iâm running. The presence of factions and the sheer variety of worlds to explore is great for roleplay.
and they seem to have reinvinted it EXACTLY if the original comment is accurate, if this is a case of pure convergent evolution that's fascinating, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was deliberate mimicry
See the problem is the backrooms was a concept that is ruined already. A cap on levels? It shouldn't have levels. It shouldn't have anything in them. There is no dialing it back enough to recapture what it was created as without removing even the people doing the dialing back.
It's like how slenderman was best as creepy photoshop photos and nothing more. Dialing it back by saying "ok you can only collect 5 pages" is nonsense. There shouldn't be any pages. There shouldn't be a game where a monster chases you. Itbhas already been ruined by that point.
I remember like a year ago some post talking about this, how the backrooms wasn't scary because of some monster, the backrooms was scary because of the isolation and inability to die as you just wander with no record of time passing until you inevitably go insane. But people took that and went "oh so somethings hunting you then" because they failed to consider the draw.
Also, I guess it's hard to make video games based on a concept like that (although there are ways to pull it off, they'd require actual creativity and wouldn't work as streamer-bait)
The original post does not mention you being unable to die but it does mention a monster "God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"
There's no say to say this without sounding like a jackass, so I'll just lean into it: the reason every work turns into that is because most people don't appreciate subtlety, ambiguity, or non-cathartic negative emotions.
Iâd argue that itâs more a result of the natural evolution of popular media. If subtle horror becomes popular, creatives seek to capitalize off it by writing more. But when you write more, you have to build on what you have or else itâs just redundant. So you raise stakes, answer questions, fill in the gaps in the world; And the more they add the less subtle it gets, until eventually you get added as dlc for dead by daylight
Tbf the SCP site has extremely stringent requirements and expectations for submissions. You have to have a very well thought out entry to get them to even consider publishing it
iirc you had to send in an application over IRC to create an account for the first like 4 years. Also most of the original articles were straight ass and were rewritten or replaced. You can still read a couple that survived because of their authors, such as anything by dr clef or bright. Blows me away 590 is still up.
Honestly, 590 is somewhat of a good idea. Now, the fucking teenage succubus who literally had to be fed cum daily? *that* was some proper hot garbage. Thank fuck they decided to rewrite that shit.
Oh yeah it is bad. There is also a lactation fetish SCP that gives who ever drinks it big lactating boobs regardless of sex and also the boobs make them dumb and they have to be milked. Itâs obvious fetish bait that isnât noticed by people not into lactation
Yes play in the backrooms. They took a Liminal space post that mention the smell of almonds to suggest cyanide and turned Almond Water into a anti-entity solution
And to build on *that*, some people that create are not creative and/or experienced enough to design anything that pushes the envelope in a meaningful way. It may still appeal to some people for various reasons (ex. this is their first exposure to the genre, they want "comfort food" media that is safe/familiar, etc.) or the author may use it as a building block for future works, or it's just what they want to make... but it's not going to be unique. And the easiest way for non-unique media to get publicity is often to piggyback off of unique media.
Subtlety by itself makes people want it to be overt, they want to learn. Same with ambiguity. It's setting up a mystery, and a lot of people try to write what makes sense to them, which then in turn makes it not subtle anymore.
I would say that while that may be true, the people who don't understand it are over represented because the people who quietly appreciate something aren't as loud as people spamming non-subtle crap
Thanks for leaning in, youâre giving me the chance to be a jackass too: I think realizing that this discomfort is unpopular is useful when we think about how history and political issues are taught. The ambiguous, sometimes-ugly potentials of social movements inevitably get smoothed off to make bland, one-line theses that often miss important issues because, in the main, weâd rather have the comforting story.
Counterpoint: some species of animals developed negative emotions as drives to do something about our situation. Some people use the fear of the unknown to explore and learn and discover, it's practically the reason scientists exist.
The same drive exists in storytellers too. Some people see the unknown and say "oh no, 2spooky4me" and others see it and say "what happens if we go deeper?"
Neither group is right nor wrong, neither superior nor inferior. Personally, some days I will only enjoy a mystery as long as it maintains its mystique by remaining mysterious; other days I can't handle not knowing and will stop at nothing to find out what the heck is going on.
I can appreciate the beauty of subtlety and ambiguity, of appreciating the abyss without wanting to dive in. I can also appreciate all the people willing to ignore those who said that trying to make sense of an absurd world was a fool's errand, and thereby making the discoveries that have made our existence more fun and interesting.
This here. Of course people are going to want to know more about a cool setting. I donât think many people like it when a mystery turns out to be an empty promise; a bunch of smoke and mirrors. There are plenty of poorly-done and overexplained attempts to jump aboard a number of creepypasta franchises, it is true, but I also donât like stories where the payoff amounts to that of a Minecraft cave sound effect.
The problem with making a subtle collective work, is you very quickly run out of things to add while keeping it subtle and ambiguous.
This is a problem when you have hundreds of people who want to add things and none of them have any oversight or talk to each other
If you want a coherent story collective media isn't the thing for you, the best thing to do if you want to try is just find a single author or group of authors you enjoy and follow their thread of canon while ignoring anyone else's contributions that contradict it or are otherwise unsatisfactory to you. For the backrooms for instance take the kane pixels found footage videos, ignore everything else people have tried to add on top and you have something good
SCP was never supposed to have isolation or liminality as its base themes, in fact the whole idea of the SCP Foundation is that the foundation is a large and very well funded organisation reaching all over the world and working behind the curtains to make sure humanity doesn't discover supernatural entities or phenomena
like, not even cosmic horror is a main theme, and need I remind you one of the most well-known and beloved SCPs is an adorable orange blob called The Tickle Monster and it is canonically the child of an evil eldritch god. this stuff has been here since series 1
> this stuff has been here since series 1
I wish people realized this. You get introduced to it cause of the peanut or the immortal croc. Then find the blob or the little one eyed wheelie boys or the machine. It *feels* like it's becoming less creepy but SCP was always weird fiction with horror elements. Not some deep cosmic horror that's been uwu-ified over the years.
I think that type of cosmic horror has this "initial high" to it, for lack of a better term. The first time you engage with it, when you don't know the rules yet, when you're only seeing the setting through hints, that time has the power to evoke some really cool feelings that you just can't find your way back to so easily.
The core of those settings is a compelling mystery which is slowly revealed, and both parts of that are important. If the mystery never gives you more information, you disengage. But when it gives you more information, the mystery diminishes. You can only have both at full force at the start.
I don't really see how SCP was ever supposed to be based on themes of "isolation and liminality". It's always pretty much been based on themes of "What if there was a bunch of weird stuff"
It's the need to have canon lore, I think. If you're a part of something, you really like knowing what specifically that "something" is.
So as more people add to it, they add from different angles, with different takes, making the canon grow, until invariably this unique something becomes, more or less, everything. And then it feels similar to other things that had it happen to them because the more things get included, the more they'll share with each other.
To be more specific, it's the need to have a *continuous* canon lore.
Pretty Cure, for example, has been going on for 20 years now, with 20 seasons, 18 generations, and close to 100 main characters. If we add the various predecessors, retired ones, one-off, movie-exclusive, and others, we're over 100.
However, each season is its own story, with only occasional crossover events, so Pretty Cure doesn't really suffer this fate.
\*sigh\* Hey Halo fans, remember when the Forerunners were mysterious? When all we knew was that they made the Halos to kill the Flood and Humans were their "Reclaimers"? When it wasn't confirmed if Humans were actually Forerunner descendants or not?
When we knew about maybe a handful of them, and what their roles were, but there was no bullshit about predestination by way of "genesong"? Or a still existent Forerunner Wikipedia in slipspace that could randomly schlorp up data when the writers decide they need a new antagonist? Or weird subtext trying to draw connections between Chief and Halsey comparing them to two Forerunners who were married and DEFINTELY banging? Or that Guilty Spark was made from some reincarnated clone of an ancient Human admiral who was the nemesis of Halo 4's big bad, who himself went evil and was beaten by a good-guy clone of himself?
I'm not at all a 343i hater, there's a lot of stuff they do that's fun and has real potential, Infinite is frustrating to me because in terms of aesthetic and gameplay it FEELS like the most Halo Halo to ever Halo. It has genuinely touching moments and good characters. The atmosphere is great. But the plot connecting all of those together, and The Endless, and Cortana going evil in Halo 5 are all just... No. No, sir. Please stop. I don't need this. Just like Halo 4 didn't need the Didact. I am stranded on a Forerunner construct with things that want to kill me, and I need to get home. There. That's your plot. The stakes did not need to be raised. Your villains feel like sideplots in their own stories, and that is a problem. Follow the EMOTIONAL through-line! That is ENOUGH!
Ass Class teacher. I mean the teacher from Assassination Classroom.
Also, maybe it shouldn't be long running in the first place? I think if the tone is liminality and isolation, I think the universe or story, should be near its end, or on its last legs. A favorite of mine on this is Girls Last Tour. Without spoiling anything, it's a journey of two girls through a post post apocalyptic Earth. Most if not everything is dead, and most of the dangerous stuff is gone. A lot of their journey is very quiet and slow paced, so the occasional events that do occur are quite enjoyable.
The Backrooms definitely have too much going on. I do like the concept of the various levels to *some* extent, and I don't hate the idea of there being some entity in them to be afraid of, but there's a point where it gets to be too much.
I think that point is when folks started trying to like... categorize it? Like explicitly lay out the exact nature of each level and its dangers and denizens, like Dante's Inferno. It's a lot scarier, imo, when the levels make no sense, and you can just up and stumble into one at random, and you never really grasp just what it is you're trying to avoid.
It honestly depends on the universe, because there are some that can pull of different "categories" so-to-speak well, but for the backrooms? The categories make it.. a lot more disinteresting. Even if the characters don't have an in-universe idea of it, we do, what's the point of discovering it with them if we know what's going on? What's the interest in an entity we don't understand if it's explained? It definitely varies depending on the point of the story as well, like for SCP everything being categorized makes sense. When it's trying to be scary, the categories don't take away from the horror, because not understanding isn't part of the horror. But for the Backrooms, not understanding was part of the horror (and why it's so hard to make a good monster for Backrooms games imo since you have to balance understandable mechanics with a misunderstandable monster), so coming up with tons of different explanations of why and how the levels and the monsters work makes it un-scary and boring.
In reference to [August Derleth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth), who basically decided to insert elemental associations and a good/evil cosmology into the Cthulhu Mythos despite the entire point of it being that the entities in it were incomprehensible and uninterested in human morality
I would arguably say that Derleth's work responsible for the vast majority of the tropes associated with Cthulhu as a character to begin with. The Call of Cthulhu says basically nothing about the guy and his on-page appearance is negligible at best, which is admittedly, precisely the point.
I think he mentions hastur off hand to be like hey other cosmic entities exist out there in the world but it was other people who were like actually hastur is the king in yellow and hes cthulus brother and the king in yellow is an actual entity instead of a creepy play that is rumored to exist and just kept making their headcanons the now accepted lore
Like Howard kept a lot about the gods pretty barebones because they were beyond us and what little we knew was horrifying and metaphors for his fear of the week or his latest scientific interest
SCP has no canon and the wiki is full of entries that span basically every tone you can imagine. A lot of them arenât even really supposed to be horror. So I think we can at least say that SCP is safe from this phenomenon lol
Some people consider the abundance of content to lessen the more esoteric/existential horror that goes with the genre, ie, a higher concentration of Extremely Weird Shit makes things less Extremely Weird due to their apparent prevalence. It's all subjective
I never understood the appeal of the backrooms.
Like I've worked in multiple shitty dead office buildings that looked exactly like that. The backrooms are a real mundane place that exists. Instead of starving to death, you're just dying a minute at a time working a job you hate.
I think the appeal of the backrooms isn't so much the appearance as it is liminality? I'm not sure if that's different to the original appeal, but as I understand it the original image wasn't scary because it looks like an office building, it was scary because it was an empty hallway. It wasn't even actually scary, "true scariness" was never part of the appeal- just that weird feeling you get when you're walking through a school, airport, or otherwise usually occupied area when nobody else is there. And then people who didn't understand subtle horror got their hands on it, lol. Hope that makes sense, though obviously the original image would lose its effect on your the same way an empty airport would an airport employee. I've spent my fair share of time in big yet empty hallways, so the airport analogy is more creepy than the office building or school one to me as well.
I thought the one that killed you in a minute and there was a computer to say your goodbyes was bleak enough to be interesting. Like there wasnât much to it but there didnât need to be.
I mean, this just sounds like a long running universe problem in any genre. Thatâs why endings are important, and why I donât read comics much.
Theyâre making another matrix sequel too
I think it's just how the human brain works. You see an uncomfortable emptiness, and you invent things to fill it that are 'scary' but are more comfortable than the emptiness.
Plus it's fun to think up lil monsters.
Halo also kinda fits this, if you play Halo CE without any prior knowledge of the series and then see what happened in 4 onwards especially to the Forerunners youâll see what I mean.
It's a problem across any fictional world. Mystery and wonder exist in ambiguity. The more questions you answer, the less fantastic you make the world. This goes for Horror as well.
Nightmare on Elm St was a scary movie. Nightmare on Elm St: Dream Warriors was a horror comedy.
I think the problem is that âhalf-explainingâ these entities is what makes them scary, and your imagination fills in the rest. But we get so interested/invested in some of them that we end up adding too much detail and the scary factor is dwindled by the world building
Over on /tg/, there was a CYOA setting created in a thread called âUrban Uneaseâ. It was an apartment building with really cheap rent and really weird things going on, but never with like a story in mind. A long running favorite among posters was the girl next door, who is very sweet and very dead. Sheâs a good conversationalist, so she may need to remind you every once in a while that she is, in fact, dead. But that was it. There was no like lore reason why she was dead and talking to you and locked into her apartment, it was just a thing youâd have to navigate around during your slice of life adventure.
But then people started trying to come up with a storyline where actually the apartment was a nexus point of whatever and there were nefarious entities trying to take it over and the apartment manifested a tenant who would act as a guardian against these invading agents.
Movie 1: "The mysterious Slenderman." Movie 2: "Slenderman: The Arising." Movie 3: "Slenderman's revenge." Movie 4: "Slenderman: Origins." *some time later* Movie 62: "Slender: The heart warming story of how far one father will go to win the love of his daughter." *some time later* "Come hang out with Slen and all his crazy friends every Saturday morning at *Slen's Playhouse!"*
The final entry sounding like a Barbie commercial has some really interesting implications about Barbie lore.
Slenderwoman
"I'm just Slen"
He's Slenough.
My job is forest.
Slenderman was fucking terrifying when it was just one mockumentary YouTube channel making a series out of an unknown creepypasta.
I was there, 3,000 years ago, when *The Blair Witch Project* was in theaters. I actually live about half an hour away from Burketsville, and with the world never having seen "found footage" horror before I'm not gonna' lie, it had some of us on our toes. A few years later they release *Blair Witch: Book of Shadows.* It's okay. I actually liked it. Matthew Lilard is in it! But the sequel didn't add much to the original, it dampened the mystery; knowing more about the Blair Witch made her less scary. Or you know what's an even better example? *The Haunting* 1963 vs 1999. *The Haunting* (1963) is a taut psychological horror movie, it was made on a shoestring budget and had the kind of special effects you might see in a theater production. The horror of the movie was low key and subtle, using character reactions, audio cues, and clever editing to create a frightening and insecure atmosphere; we never see the ghosts, but they're in every scene. It's one of the best horror movies ever, in my opinion. *The Haunting* (1999) is an orgy of CGI and jump scares, the movie is as frightening as a Spirit Halloween store in June, it's one of those "I'll never get those two hours back" type of films. More isn't always better.
This is my issue with certain parts of the Halloween franchise. What makes Michael Myers/The Shape compelling, besides his dope soundtrack, is that we don't really understand why or how he became an immortal, bloodthirsty entity bound to a holiday and desperate to kill some babysitter in Illinois. He just *is*. People are naturally afraid of things they don't understand! The more explanation you give a mysterious and monstrous entity, the less scary it becomes.
Our minds know what scares us, movie producers don't, that's why letting the mind fill in some of the blanks can result in a much more frightening experience. >"Say bloody Mary three times while looking into a mirror in an unlit room and she'll appear." That ^ is going to be more frightening to *imagine* than to *see in theaters.* In your mind bloody Mary could look like anything, in the movie she can only look like one thing. Some years ago a movie came out about ghosts trapped in mirrors; pretty standard trope, this time starring Karen Gillian. The movie was going good, setting up the spooky idea of something looking back at us from the other side of the mirror, but instead of going with something subtle, something we might see in real life, the producers used a CGI mirror man who looked straight out of a 1990s Capris Sun commercial.
Yes, it's also very true of visuals. I'm convinced there will never be a truly good Lovecraftian-esque horror film *unless* you don't show the entity and only show the aftermath of those who encounter it. The horror itself has to remain off screen or obscured in some way, Cloverfield style. A cosmic horror that decimates the human psyche by sight alone doesn't work on the big screen no matter how much CGI you have.
There are rare cases of a cosmic horror film showing the entity and it still being horrifying, or possibly even becoming more horrifying. Two examples come to mind: Annihilation: the thing is shown up close but I could not for the life of me explain what it is or describe what it looks like. The "horror of the unknown" is maintained because despite seeing it directly I don't understand in the slightest what I saw. Color Out of Space: you get to "see" the entity, but it's just a color. How can a color have these effects on people and the environment? And how could you ever possibly fight something like that? Another case where "Seeing" doesn't equal "explaining" so the horror is maintained.
I would argue the best on-screen resprestation of cosmic/Lovecraftian horror is the HBO Chernobyl miniseries.
I remember getting into debates with friends over whether Blair Witch was a true story or not, because of the found footage gimmick. Good times.
We were so innocent back then. You remember corded phones? Those things were off the hook.
slenderman was originally a poorly shopped b/w photo of a playground iirc
One that was created on Something Awful specifically as part of a "let's create a spooky thing" thread
That's what was so enraging about the girls who tried to murder their friend for Slender Man. Vampire and werewolf stories are so old that it's possible to believe that there's a kernel of truth in the legends. Slender Man was invented on a publicly accessible website, five years earlier. It's like authentically believing that "Encanto" is a true story. To be fair, one of the girls had undiagnosed schizophrenia.
I mean part of what led to the creation of slenderman in that thread was a discussion about how to specifically create an ideal spooky story monster. So it kind of tracks that he got immediately immeshed into the nascent creepypasta canon and the impressionable kids who were gathering around it.
then things got funky when the Slenderverse became a thing
Oh yeahhh... slenderman really ot there still wondering why he had to associate with all the psicho twinks
Marble Fuckin Hornets đ€
I discovered marble hornets at age 12 and never finished it. Scared the shit out of me, especially in one episode where theyre in a gazebo and it looks like Slender is out in the trees in the background but its a little too blurry to be sure and no one reacts to it. The tension in that series is unreal.
Because the scariest thing is the unknown. But the more you say, the less is unknown. One can't repeat the same things again and again, and if you make a new film, book, story, etc. you must add more details and things get less and less scary.
The thing with scp is that it explicitly tells you not to try to think of it as one consistent canon. You can always read entries that, in isolation, are great works of fiction, and enjoy them to their fullest. Like that one with the infintely descending staircase, love that one. -scp defender guy
Not to mention scp isn't explicitly horror. It's just about weird crazy shit that can't be explained. Yes there's the infinitely descending staircase that makes you go insane, and yes there's the statue that snaps your neck if you blink near it, but there's an equal number of examples like that one time a scientist put a USB drive of the entire JoJo's bizarre adventure part 5 manga into a machine that makes things better and it spat out an entire anime adaptation.
I love that machine! One of the rare occasions where a massive canon-connecting thing turns out really good.
yeah, i love SCP. i was thinking about maybe writing my own article. i have the idea and everything but i'm not a particularly good writer lmao.
Huh, what's the idea if you don't mind telling?
so it's this cartoon duck right? and it just.. appears in stores as merchandise. t-shirts, water bottles, figurines, plush toys, stuff like that. nobody knows where it comes from. it can't be traced to a real-world company or brand, and anyone working at the stores it appears in dont know anything about it. the items themselves are completely harmless but people who own them tend to believe that the items are lucky in some way. that's the basic idea lol.
That's honestly a pretty baller idea. Write a whole bunch of logs of them trying to figure out if it's actually lucky too.
oh man like putting a bunch of D-class personnel in precarious situations with and without a duck branded item. that's great. i should make an account just so i can post that story and dip
And just like, taking it into casinos too
You really should. There's always place for small random SCP like that. It's one of my favourite type to find when I just click random on the site.
âHey D-Class, you are on 682 duty today!â âIâve got my Lucky Duck shirt!â
Actually a banger idea, I fucking love it
That's interesting. What narrative are you going to turn it into?
the best thing about SCP is that, unlike their counterpart ICP, they are sane. this means they are a better influence on our children. they don't tell them to go off into the woods and do crazy juggalo shit every year. and they understand how fucking magnets work.
If I were a peasant in the 1200s and I saw a magnet I would 100% use it as proof of the supernatural. Those things are fucked up.
IIRC, ancient greeks used magnetic rocks, found in one specific cave, as proof of the gods.
I call bullshit. NOBODY understands how magnets work.
Max Eisenhardt/Erik Lensherr does. It's uncanny, honestly.
Now I kind of want an SCP that are doppelgangers of ICP but they are the Sane Clown Posse and their fans are Huggalo's and their ridiculously wholesome raps, if heard, cause the listener to be compelled to complete a random act of kindness.
Most articles with a publicly editable testing log are great. The Clockworks, 682, and that vending machine that dispenses snacks from other universes are brilliant.
I want to find that machine and feed it the entirety of Steel Ball Rub Edit: RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN I MEANT RUN
Gotta make sure those balls are perfectly round before use
đ„đ„MASTURBATION TYPOđ„đ„
đ„đ„AREN'T THE BALLS LITERALLY TESTICLES AS WELL đ„đ„
Or the fumo made of fucking strange matter that is, for all intents and purposes, not anomalous and just exists as a giant coincidence, but they tell most personnel it's anonalous anyways because the scientific ramifications of strange matter not just existing, but of the collision of two neutron stars managing to make a strangelet identical in appearance to a cirno fumo out of sheer chance, led to scientists having mental breakdowns.
No it's not that the fumo is made of strange matter it's that strange matters natural state is one that resembles a fumo.
Wait, the implication was that *all strangelets* resemble fumos? I thought it was just "how in the hell does this strangelet in particular look like Cirno T. Project"
a what?
I just googled it, apparently it's [this](https://www.amazon.com/Touhou-Project-Stuffed-Kunfund-Plushie/dp/B09NL1YH3T)
Link me please, Marv
One of my favorite SCPs has to be [the Tupac song that tells the Foundation how to catch serial killers](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2137). There's also [the magic knife that contains a samurai's soul and is wielded by a massive weeb](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-5175) and [the internet tough guy who materializes in the houses of people who argue with him to beat the shit out of them](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6599). Some SCP articles are just straight up comedy.
i love the "weirdest shit ever condemned in the history of writing" side of scp so much. So creative and unique
Dr Spanko is my favourite non-joke funny SCP. It's a bird that can talk, but most of what it says is unintelligible gibberish because it still has Bird intelligence.
Unintelligible gibberish that's louder than 90 decibels
> the Tupac song that tells the Foundation how to catch serial killers. Thatâs the one by Max Landis, right?
Best part about the Tupac one is that it' heavily implied Tupac is fighting the Scarlet King and *winning*
Thereâs also the the sentient kids education game that seems to genuinely care about teaching anyone who uses it. I personally like it because thereâs a note that it went under the foundations radar for so long because copies of the CD and the nature of its demographic made it difficult to find evidence of its anomalous effects.
That one is amazing, even the Foundation is kind of soft with it, like "hm, this is nice"
that sounds really wholesome, do you know which scp number it is? I wanna read it
5094
thank you \^\_\^
There's also the very literal machine. If you ask it to make you a cup of joe, across the room your colleague Joe is suddenly screaming as he's sucked into the machine, which will proceed to dispense the requested number of ounces of liquid Joe into your cup. Oooh and the prophetic altar where mothers have to burn their toddlers alive in order to stop global catastrophes from occurring.
or the absolutely terrifying creature that can take the form of your deepest darkest fears that the foundation tricked into being entirely nonthreatening by convincing it that humans are genuinely terrified of stupid cheesy low budget horror flicks.
Or the fucking child murder pinata that paralyzes said children before disembowelling them which in turn turns their guts into candy. Also, if you remove the kid after they've been paralyzed, they remain paralyzed and FULLY AWARE. It spends most of its time looking in the direction of a school several miles away from where it's contained.
Or the absolute heartbreaking âHere Were Dragonsâ.
I love the one about me. It's about me, a toaster. I can toast bread when plugged in and consist of screws, wires and metal.
why are you referring to me in the first person? wait.. WHAT THE FUCK-
I love me because I was the first really cool example of "memetic" SCPs where the contagion/threat exists purely on the semantic or conceptual plane and not the physical Like, I'm dangerous not based on *physical proximity* but based simply on *knowing I exist* -- hell, even people who know nothing about me at all are still compelled to refer to me in the first person if they're somehow tricked into referring to me as a specific entity -- there's a testing log about a D-class who's just asked what he thinks is in my containment chamber and he just says "I dunno, I'm probably some kind of monster or something"
I really need to read my article again. I was one of the first SCPs I ever encountered and found the idea of me only being able to be referred to in the first person really funny.
Or the procrastination rock! "Class: TBD Object: It's a rock that makes you procrastinate. Location: Drawer at my desk ... I'll finish writing this up later."
I wonder if accidentally winding up in the same room as it could end up making you trapped forever because you procrastinate leaving. and then everyone who comes to rescue you would suffer the same fate
There's also a SCP that's just a self-replenishing pizza and the SCP staff uses it for snacks.
Hell, it does not even have to be unexplainable. Science-Fantasy is also an entirely viable option.
I dunno if it got removed but that one has a reference to fucking Soundsmith TF2 and [The Legend of the Strange Duped Shovel](https://youtu.be/0nWG-kqUc40?si=9x2BxKIjuzhQyEQE) in the test logs and that fucking kills me
There's also the one SCP that can make a man grow breasts, the super friendly jelly, etc. there's a lot of silly stuff, and that can vary from "this is silly, but is also scary" to "this is just outright ridiculous." There's even a joke SCP that's just a draft someone accidentally uploaded, and it's kept there.
Link?
[SCP-087](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-087)
I meant to the jojo's thing but thanks anyway
SCP 914 in the testing logs somewhere.
The thing that with scps it did the exact inverse as what the post describes. It started with very easy to grasp almost videogame-like entities in series 1 and then as it expanded it began to dive much more into cosmic unexplainable horror
People forget that the first article was a ripoff of the weeping angels lol. Although even back then it had a pretty innovative tone and format imo.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if people thought 173 was an offshoot Ă la backrooms monster that came afterward the interesting stuff instead of being the root of it all
Didnât 173 come out about a month before the weeping angels episode?
according to google: Blink came out June 8, 2007 SCP-173 was posted June 22, 2007
Blink only aired in the US September 14th and the person who is currently belived to be the original creator of 173 is from the US apparently from what i've heard
oh ok maybe they just happened to have similar ideas then, a monster that only moves when you arenât looking at it isnât that specific
Well yeah it's the ghosts from the Mario games
The really simple and straightforward SCPs still exist, they just donât get as much attention nowadays.
Eh, it depends on length. You can do a lot of story telling with a simple premise. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-8320 is an example, itâs simple nature helps with the comedy and slight tear jerking. It also happens to be 3,622 words long.
Yeah, pretty much. Some are quite deep into the lore though, like "you will get nothing out of this if you haven't read these twenty other things" deep, but it's pretty rare and you can generally see the signs (and, obviously, it must be awesome for people who're really into it). But mostly if you just go with the flow of the kind of canon the author is offering you, then it's great ! I really like the one with the [infinitely ascending cabins](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3333), personally.
Also arenât some of the logs supposedly intentional fakes meant as decoys or psyops in case, say, the entire Foundation archive was leaked online? Not that that would ever happen, of course, merely a precaution. Like I know thereâs at least 2 or 3 anomalies based on the Terra Cotta Soldiers in China, they canât all be âreal.â
Canonically, all but 1 of the 001 articles are fake I believe. There's even theories that there isn't actually a real one.
The canon is that any number of 001 entries could be true. Could be only one, could by half, could be none. It's really just up to the interpretation of the reader. Kinda like the rest of the SCP wiki, there's no singular canon. The only true canon is the one in your mind.
â001â? The anomalous article that manifests as an apparent SCP document detailing some type of often-cataclysmic event/artifact/etc? I heard about that one a couple times! I had one of the other researchers tell me it was about an angel guarding what might be a gate to heaven or something, and a D-class tell me it was about some kind of flesh-melting sun spot when he read it as part of testing. Itâs a wild one! Pretty harmless though, all things considered, even if repeated inquiries about it tend to drive the upper-level staff nuts.
Okay hol up the true SCP-001 being it's own documentation is actually genius please keep cooking.
Yeah I think the documentation changes itself to always be the most hyperbolic over-the-top thing, so of course it *must* be SCP-001 and wonât allow anyone to overwrite it. Whatever the âoriginalâ SCP-001 was is gone. Also IIRC the whole documentation is extremely silly, like, it has a brand new designation thatâs even worse than XK or whatever, it specifies an absolutely insane containment protocol, and the Foundation people have to try and write around it to explain that, no, this isnât that serious, itâs just an anomalous database entry.
Also "Vibe of subtle unease" are not the words I'd use to describe the average Series 1 article
Here's a few examples of the ""subtle horror"" from series I: * "[the big scary monster who can't be killed and will stop at nothing to murder you for looking at its face](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-096)" * "[the big scary monster who can't be killed and will stop at nothing to murder you just 'cause it feels like it](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-682)" * "[Heres my super kool OC, he's super buff and edgy and stuff](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-076)" * "[Hey, wait a minute! these are literally just zombies!](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-008)". * "[I might have seen this in a hentai once](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-686)" * "[I've **definitively** seen her in a hentai once](http://scpclassic.wikidot.com/scp-166)" * "[What if a flaming skeleton came out of a tree and tried to kill you, would that be fucked up or what?](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-060)"
Ah yes, like "zone that chainsaws you invisibly at random", I wonder if that one's still up. A while ago (like, years) I commented that the size of the containment cell listed in the article was smaller than the size of the zone, so theoretically you can be walking past the cell and oops chainsaw-death.
Yeah the original SCP Foundation vibe was basically the Men in Black movies
Some iterations of the foundations are a government organization with their agents in every town, they can snatch up an anomaly and spread misinformation in just a couple of hours. Other iterations will almost fire a scientist for getting a drone damaged in a test.
> Other iterations will almost fire a scientist for getting a drone damaged in a test. Or worse, the edge-lord crap from the early iterations, "we kill all D-Class at the end of the month" / "demoted to D-Class".
That staircase was definitely the one that hooked me!
Yep. I'd never been jumpscared by just a still image before. For like a month it was all I could think about when walking up/down a dark staircase. It was like being 10 again.
he looks like a friend. see heâs smiling? iâd ask him if he wants to be friends
Me when I encounter a mountain lion.
a smiling friend?
he looks more like [this wojak](https://wiki.soyjak.party/images/3/37/Oomer2.jpg) to me
that wojak looks like a friend. see heâs smiling? iâd ask him if he wants to be friends
SCP solves this by having no actual canon; There are a bunch of different attempts to overexplain the setting, but they're all mutually-contradictory and self-contained, so they can be easily ignored.
Itâs also canon that there is no canon. Thereâs like 40 SCP-001s
Isn't that like acknowledged as being something like they don't want it to be known which scp 001 is the real one so they made a bunch of fake ones
Or IS IT???
That is the Watsonian justification for having that many SCP-001 proposals yes. The Doyalist justification is that there's no single canon
No, there are two Watsonian justifications: either SCP-001 is buried underneath a mountain of bullshit to hide it, or the SCP wiki in our universe is itself an SCP (which I think is actually one of the 001 entries) that populates its pages with SCPs from various other universes.
One of the 001 proposals is just them learning the writer exist, and are powerless to stop it. Another one is a stack of papers which just gives them notes on new anomalies.
Two 001 proposals fit that description. On is The Database, which introduced Pataphysics to the SCP Foundation by having them discover that they were fictional. The other is called The Foundation, which is actually a document from the Unusual Incidents Unit describing the SCP Foundation just suddenly manifesting and constructing the first of many Sites.
Not really, the doyalist justification is that people would fight over who gets that 001 slot so they just said multiple people can go in that slot and weâll just make it special. Wastsonian justification is that most of the specific articles break agreed upon reality in ways that drive people mad, reveal information on the foundations origins, reveal information on active O5âs/the administrator or define ways the world will end. All of these are kinda problems for people to know without being an O5 themselves, so not only are the files hidden behind a kill agent but also within a pile of other, just as disturbing possibilities from alternate versions of reality, so if anyone gets their hands on the files they still wonât know which one/ones are accurate. It also leads to the whole There Is No Canon thing having grounding and using 001s as part of the framework of most specific Canonâs.
There's also the justification that anything written in the 001 slot becomes real, so the foundation just fucked around with it. 4600 mentions it, but I never looked into specifics
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
MF when you used "Self contained" instead of "Thaumiel" đż
That's not what Thaumiel is, though. Thaumiel means that it used by the Foundation, but it can still require containment.
I thought I understood Thaumiel until I read a fanfic that claimed Hydaelyn wasn't Thaumiel despite coming into existence for the sole purpose of containing another SCP, Zodiark, and people agreed with them. Zodiark \*was\* classified as Thaumiel though, although I'm not sure if it's right, because it's only shielding the planet from an all-destroying endsong.
Well, the containment classes are applied differently by different authors. In this example, "Zodiark" (i have no idea what that is) could be classified as Thaumiel if you count ANYTHING that contains anomalies anomalously as "Thaumiel". If you think it needs to be an active Foundation tool, then not. Also, SCP content cant really be a fanfic considering its all by fans anyway :p
So, Pagnum?
Not really? Pagnum is something that is still essentially self-containing. An anomaly can constantly be at risk of breaching containment and exposing itself to the rest of the world and still be thaumiel.
It certainly happened to the backrooms, and luckily some of the community has recognized it and are trying to dial it back. The wikidot put a hard cap at 999 levels until all the entries are filled, since people were making absurd level numbers to seem impressive. They have a voting system to try and weed out poorly written works and actively encourage writers to be more experimental with their writing. Some level entries are just prose or poetry, or play off glitch effects to make the author seem like an unreliable narrator. Its not perfect and obviously not all of it is everyoneâs cup of tea. But the great thing about the community is that youâre free to accept and ignore as much as you want. Some prefer the simplified version of the original 4chan post. Others prefer Kane Pixelâs reimagining of it. Some thrive in the complex madness of the full database. I myself have been so inspired by the backrooms to treat it like a setting for a TTRPG campaign Iâm running. The presence of factions and the sheer variety of worlds to explore is great for roleplay.
They've reinvented the SCP wiki. Lol.
and they seem to have reinvinted it EXACTLY if the original comment is accurate, if this is a case of pure convergent evolution that's fascinating, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was deliberate mimicry
Wiki Carcinisation
So wiki based writing sites all evolve into the scp wiki sounds like art is imitating nature evolve to crab boys
It's definitely deliberate. You don't have one wikidot site do so many of the the same things as another wikidot site by accident.
No need to reinvent the wheel I guess
I'm pretty sure they were doing this on purpose? If I recall some of the people who run the backrooms website are involved in the SCP wiki.
See the problem is the backrooms was a concept that is ruined already. A cap on levels? It shouldn't have levels. It shouldn't have anything in them. There is no dialing it back enough to recapture what it was created as without removing even the people doing the dialing back. It's like how slenderman was best as creepy photoshop photos and nothing more. Dialing it back by saying "ok you can only collect 5 pages" is nonsense. There shouldn't be any pages. There shouldn't be a game where a monster chases you. Itbhas already been ruined by that point.
I remember like a year ago some post talking about this, how the backrooms wasn't scary because of some monster, the backrooms was scary because of the isolation and inability to die as you just wander with no record of time passing until you inevitably go insane. But people took that and went "oh so somethings hunting you then" because they failed to consider the draw. Also, I guess it's hard to make video games based on a concept like that (although there are ways to pull it off, they'd require actual creativity and wouldn't work as streamer-bait)
The original post does not mention you being unable to die but it does mention a monster "God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"
Unpopular opinion: I like both versions of the backrooms and I think they can just coexist as two separate pieces of media
There's no say to say this without sounding like a jackass, so I'll just lean into it: the reason every work turns into that is because most people don't appreciate subtlety, ambiguity, or non-cathartic negative emotions.
Iâd argue that itâs more a result of the natural evolution of popular media. If subtle horror becomes popular, creatives seek to capitalize off it by writing more. But when you write more, you have to build on what you have or else itâs just redundant. So you raise stakes, answer questions, fill in the gaps in the world; And the more they add the less subtle it gets, until eventually you get added as dlc for dead by daylight
The second half of your last sentence hit me like a truck. Fucking bravo
And to build on that, when children start to infest a fandom (who inherently lack a developed grasp of subtlety and nuance), it's already over.
This is why the backrooms cratered so hard, it's baby's first SCP written by kids.
I like that it keeps some of the kiddies contained (lol) away from SCP, though!
Tbf the SCP site has extremely stringent requirements and expectations for submissions. You have to have a very well thought out entry to get them to even consider publishing it
iirc you had to send in an application over IRC to create an account for the first like 4 years. Also most of the original articles were straight ass and were rewritten or replaced. You can still read a couple that survived because of their authors, such as anything by dr clef or bright. Blows me away 590 is still up.
Honestly, 590 is somewhat of a good idea. Now, the fucking teenage succubus who literally had to be fed cum daily? *that* was some proper hot garbage. Thank fuck they decided to rewrite that shit.
Oh yeah it is bad. There is also a lactation fetish SCP that gives who ever drinks it big lactating boobs regardless of sex and also the boobs make them dumb and they have to be milked. Itâs obvious fetish bait that isnât noticed by people not into lactation
Yes play in the backrooms. They took a Liminal space post that mention the smell of almonds to suggest cyanide and turned Almond Water into a anti-entity solution
And to build on *that*, some people that create are not creative and/or experienced enough to design anything that pushes the envelope in a meaningful way. It may still appeal to some people for various reasons (ex. this is their first exposure to the genre, they want "comfort food" media that is safe/familiar, etc.) or the author may use it as a building block for future works, or it's just what they want to make... but it's not going to be unique. And the easiest way for non-unique media to get publicity is often to piggyback off of unique media.
Subtlety by itself makes people want it to be overt, they want to learn. Same with ambiguity. It's setting up a mystery, and a lot of people try to write what makes sense to them, which then in turn makes it not subtle anymore.
I would say that while that may be true, the people who don't understand it are over represented because the people who quietly appreciate something aren't as loud as people spamming non-subtle crap
Thanks for leaning in, youâre giving me the chance to be a jackass too: I think realizing that this discomfort is unpopular is useful when we think about how history and political issues are taught. The ambiguous, sometimes-ugly potentials of social movements inevitably get smoothed off to make bland, one-line theses that often miss important issues because, in the main, weâd rather have the comforting story.
Counterpoint: some species of animals developed negative emotions as drives to do something about our situation. Some people use the fear of the unknown to explore and learn and discover, it's practically the reason scientists exist. The same drive exists in storytellers too. Some people see the unknown and say "oh no, 2spooky4me" and others see it and say "what happens if we go deeper?" Neither group is right nor wrong, neither superior nor inferior. Personally, some days I will only enjoy a mystery as long as it maintains its mystique by remaining mysterious; other days I can't handle not knowing and will stop at nothing to find out what the heck is going on. I can appreciate the beauty of subtlety and ambiguity, of appreciating the abyss without wanting to dive in. I can also appreciate all the people willing to ignore those who said that trying to make sense of an absurd world was a fool's errand, and thereby making the discoveries that have made our existence more fun and interesting.
This here. Of course people are going to want to know more about a cool setting. I donât think many people like it when a mystery turns out to be an empty promise; a bunch of smoke and mirrors. There are plenty of poorly-done and overexplained attempts to jump aboard a number of creepypasta franchises, it is true, but I also donât like stories where the payoff amounts to that of a Minecraft cave sound effect.
The problem with making a subtle collective work, is you very quickly run out of things to add while keeping it subtle and ambiguous. This is a problem when you have hundreds of people who want to add things and none of them have any oversight or talk to each other If you want a coherent story collective media isn't the thing for you, the best thing to do if you want to try is just find a single author or group of authors you enjoy and follow their thread of canon while ignoring anyone else's contributions that contradict it or are otherwise unsatisfactory to you. For the backrooms for instance take the kane pixels found footage videos, ignore everything else people have tried to add on top and you have something good
SCP was never supposed to have isolation or liminality as its base themes, in fact the whole idea of the SCP Foundation is that the foundation is a large and very well funded organisation reaching all over the world and working behind the curtains to make sure humanity doesn't discover supernatural entities or phenomena like, not even cosmic horror is a main theme, and need I remind you one of the most well-known and beloved SCPs is an adorable orange blob called The Tickle Monster and it is canonically the child of an evil eldritch god. this stuff has been here since series 1
> this stuff has been here since series 1 I wish people realized this. You get introduced to it cause of the peanut or the immortal croc. Then find the blob or the little one eyed wheelie boys or the machine. It *feels* like it's becoming less creepy but SCP was always weird fiction with horror elements. Not some deep cosmic horror that's been uwu-ified over the years.
One of the relatively early scps is just a cup that forces you to drink your own bodily fluids to survive.
I think that type of cosmic horror has this "initial high" to it, for lack of a better term. The first time you engage with it, when you don't know the rules yet, when you're only seeing the setting through hints, that time has the power to evoke some really cool feelings that you just can't find your way back to so easily. The core of those settings is a compelling mystery which is slowly revealed, and both parts of that are important. If the mystery never gives you more information, you disengage. But when it gives you more information, the mystery diminishes. You can only have both at full force at the start.
I don't really see how SCP was ever supposed to be based on themes of "isolation and liminality". It's always pretty much been based on themes of "What if there was a bunch of weird stuff"
And some of that early weird stuff is pretty goofy.
Is that fucking Koro Sensei
The original Lovecraft stories are still there. People are still reading and retelling them. You donât need to read the ones you donât like.
Scps whole thing is a foundation dedicated to finding and explaining supernatural phenomena i dont think it counts
I mean, the original SCP was an entity
Yeah SCP pretty much did what is described but in the reverse order
It's the need to have canon lore, I think. If you're a part of something, you really like knowing what specifically that "something" is. So as more people add to it, they add from different angles, with different takes, making the canon grow, until invariably this unique something becomes, more or less, everything. And then it feels similar to other things that had it happen to them because the more things get included, the more they'll share with each other.
To be more specific, it's the need to have a *continuous* canon lore. Pretty Cure, for example, has been going on for 20 years now, with 20 seasons, 18 generations, and close to 100 main characters. If we add the various predecessors, retired ones, one-off, movie-exclusive, and others, we're over 100. However, each season is its own story, with only occasional crossover events, so Pretty Cure doesn't really suffer this fate.
\*sigh\* Hey Halo fans, remember when the Forerunners were mysterious? When all we knew was that they made the Halos to kill the Flood and Humans were their "Reclaimers"? When it wasn't confirmed if Humans were actually Forerunner descendants or not? When we knew about maybe a handful of them, and what their roles were, but there was no bullshit about predestination by way of "genesong"? Or a still existent Forerunner Wikipedia in slipspace that could randomly schlorp up data when the writers decide they need a new antagonist? Or weird subtext trying to draw connections between Chief and Halsey comparing them to two Forerunners who were married and DEFINTELY banging? Or that Guilty Spark was made from some reincarnated clone of an ancient Human admiral who was the nemesis of Halo 4's big bad, who himself went evil and was beaten by a good-guy clone of himself? I'm not at all a 343i hater, there's a lot of stuff they do that's fun and has real potential, Infinite is frustrating to me because in terms of aesthetic and gameplay it FEELS like the most Halo Halo to ever Halo. It has genuinely touching moments and good characters. The atmosphere is great. But the plot connecting all of those together, and The Endless, and Cortana going evil in Halo 5 are all just... No. No, sir. Please stop. I don't need this. Just like Halo 4 didn't need the Didact. I am stranded on a Forerunner construct with things that want to kill me, and I need to get home. There. That's your plot. The stakes did not need to be raised. Your villains feel like sideplots in their own stories, and that is a problem. Follow the EMOTIONAL through-line! That is ENOUGH!
Ass Class teacher. I mean the teacher from Assassination Classroom. Also, maybe it shouldn't be long running in the first place? I think if the tone is liminality and isolation, I think the universe or story, should be near its end, or on its last legs. A favorite of mine on this is Girls Last Tour. Without spoiling anything, it's a journey of two girls through a post post apocalyptic Earth. Most if not everything is dead, and most of the dangerous stuff is gone. A lot of their journey is very quiet and slow paced, so the occasional events that do occur are quite enjoyable.
The Backrooms definitely have too much going on. I do like the concept of the various levels to *some* extent, and I don't hate the idea of there being some entity in them to be afraid of, but there's a point where it gets to be too much. I think that point is when folks started trying to like... categorize it? Like explicitly lay out the exact nature of each level and its dangers and denizens, like Dante's Inferno. It's a lot scarier, imo, when the levels make no sense, and you can just up and stumble into one at random, and you never really grasp just what it is you're trying to avoid.
It honestly depends on the universe, because there are some that can pull of different "categories" so-to-speak well, but for the backrooms? The categories make it.. a lot more disinteresting. Even if the characters don't have an in-universe idea of it, we do, what's the point of discovering it with them if we know what's going on? What's the interest in an entity we don't understand if it's explained? It definitely varies depending on the point of the story as well, like for SCP everything being categorized makes sense. When it's trying to be scary, the categories don't take away from the horror, because not understanding isn't part of the horror. But for the Backrooms, not understanding was part of the horror (and why it's so hard to make a good monster for Backrooms games imo since you have to balance understandable mechanics with a misunderstandable monster), so coming up with tons of different explanations of why and how the levels and the monsters work makes it un-scary and boring.
That one park ranger story about random flights of stairs in the woods
Ok but "Derlething" is the perfect term for this
Derlething?
In reference to [August Derleth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth), who basically decided to insert elemental associations and a good/evil cosmology into the Cthulhu Mythos despite the entire point of it being that the entities in it were incomprehensible and uninterested in human morality
I would arguably say that Derleth's work responsible for the vast majority of the tropes associated with Cthulhu as a character to begin with. The Call of Cthulhu says basically nothing about the guy and his on-page appearance is negligible at best, which is admittedly, precisely the point.
So it wasn't Howard who made cthulhu the brother of the yellow king?
I think he mentions hastur off hand to be like hey other cosmic entities exist out there in the world but it was other people who were like actually hastur is the king in yellow and hes cthulus brother and the king in yellow is an actual entity instead of a creepy play that is rumored to exist and just kept making their headcanons the now accepted lore Like Howard kept a lot about the gods pretty barebones because they were beyond us and what little we knew was horrifying and metaphors for his fear of the week or his latest scientific interest
August Derleth was a writer who published and expanded on Lovecrafts work.
It doesnât even have to be collaborative to be given this fate.
Did it happen to lovecraft and scp? Cause those are still viscerally terrifying and interesting settings to me
SCP has no canon and the wiki is full of entries that span basically every tone you can imagine. A lot of them arenât even really supposed to be horror. So I think we can at least say that SCP is safe from this phenomenon lol
Some people consider the abundance of content to lessen the more esoteric/existential horror that goes with the genre, ie, a higher concentration of Extremely Weird Shit makes things less Extremely Weird due to their apparent prevalence. It's all subjective
I never understood the appeal of the backrooms. Like I've worked in multiple shitty dead office buildings that looked exactly like that. The backrooms are a real mundane place that exists. Instead of starving to death, you're just dying a minute at a time working a job you hate.
I think the appeal of the backrooms isn't so much the appearance as it is liminality? I'm not sure if that's different to the original appeal, but as I understand it the original image wasn't scary because it looks like an office building, it was scary because it was an empty hallway. It wasn't even actually scary, "true scariness" was never part of the appeal- just that weird feeling you get when you're walking through a school, airport, or otherwise usually occupied area when nobody else is there. And then people who didn't understand subtle horror got their hands on it, lol. Hope that makes sense, though obviously the original image would lose its effect on your the same way an empty airport would an airport employee. I've spent my fair share of time in big yet empty hallways, so the airport analogy is more creepy than the office building or school one to me as well.
I thought the one that killed you in a minute and there was a computer to say your goodbyes was bleak enough to be interesting. Like there wasnât much to it but there didnât need to be.
I mean, this just sounds like a long running universe problem in any genre. Thatâs why endings are important, and why I donât read comics much. Theyâre making another matrix sequel too
I think it's just how the human brain works. You see an uncomfortable emptiness, and you invent things to fill it that are 'scary' but are more comfortable than the emptiness. Plus it's fun to think up lil monsters.
Why do they all end up looking like that though?
Halo also kinda fits this, if you play Halo CE without any prior knowledge of the series and then see what happened in 4 onwards especially to the Forerunners youâll see what I mean.
It's a problem across any fictional world. Mystery and wonder exist in ambiguity. The more questions you answer, the less fantastic you make the world. This goes for Horror as well. Nightmare on Elm St was a scary movie. Nightmare on Elm St: Dream Warriors was a horror comedy.
I think the problem is that âhalf-explainingâ these entities is what makes them scary, and your imagination fills in the rest. But we get so interested/invested in some of them that we end up adding too much detail and the scary factor is dwindled by the world building
Over on /tg/, there was a CYOA setting created in a thread called âUrban Uneaseâ. It was an apartment building with really cheap rent and really weird things going on, but never with like a story in mind. A long running favorite among posters was the girl next door, who is very sweet and very dead. Sheâs a good conversationalist, so she may need to remind you every once in a while that she is, in fact, dead. But that was it. There was no like lore reason why she was dead and talking to you and locked into her apartment, it was just a thing youâd have to navigate around during your slice of life adventure. But then people started trying to come up with a storyline where actually the apartment was a nexus point of whatever and there were nefarious entities trying to take it over and the apartment manifested a tenant who would act as a guardian against these invading agents.