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What you're about to hear is... sensitive information.
As far as most people like you are concerned, none of this is real.
The SCP Foundation doesn't exist.
It can't because if it did, that would also mean everything it protects you from exists
too.
Breaches in normality.
The scientifically inexplicable.
Anomalies which make the concept of "the impossible" an utter impossibility.
This includes everything from a box of mysterious pills which can cure any illness, to a slumbering,
eldritch being with the potential to extinguish life as we know it.
If it's beyond our grasp and it poses any possible threat, the foundation will find
a way to secure, contain, and protect the world from it.
Even it means crossing some... ethical boundaries.
Naturally, that's all a bit intimidating to a... uh, rather singular artifact like yours
truly.
After all, if anything qualifies as an "anomaly" I think it would be me.
Maybe the whole Foundry.
Maybe the entire facility the Foundry is inside of.
As it happens, I'm not particularly keen on the idea of being taken apart and stored in
some kind of high security containment cell.
Lucky for me, I don't think I'm in too much danger of that happening.
Otherwise...
I'm not sure I'd feel too comfortable involving myself in a video like this.
You see, SCP might dress up like a big, ominous organization, but beneath that it's really
a community of storytellers pouring their endless ideas into a shared mold.
They come up with their own novel concepts for anomalies that the foundation could conceivably
be concerned with, steep them in the prescribed clinical tone and pseudoscientific lingo,
then submit them to the SCP wiki.
After a rigorous review process, if the idea continues to be well-loved, it becomes an
official part of the massive, ever-expanding SCP lore.
The result is a curated index of articles, tales, and related material so big and so
diverse, you could spend a good portion of your life reading through and continue to
find fascinating new concepts every day.
But of course, ever the greedy storytellers we are, the most fascinating part of SCP to
us is the part we can excise and transplant into our own fiction.
Something we can pluck straight out of the heart of SCP to create a similar effect in
other works.
What we want to examine here is the fact that: SCP convinces us to investigate questions
for their own sake... by promising not to answer.
Sounds a little backward, doesn't it?
A bit of a literary anomaly in and of itself.
A kind of paradox.
But unlike the foundation with all their detained weirdnesses, we do understand how this works.
We have the answers...
They're just hard to get to.
Because, before you can ask how SCP does what it does, you have to ask what SCP is.
And that is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
On the one hand, the clinical, nomenclature-y veneer certainly makes it look like it might
be science fiction... except for the fact that these anomalies are meant to be totally
irreconcilable with the reality we know, pseudoscientific trappings or not.
On the other hand, when you start finding SCPs that are essentially ominous faerie forests
[B1]and dragon-filled otherworlds, it's hard not to wonder whether the whole thing is technically
fantasy... for maybe one solid second, before the illusion is broken and you remember you're
reading a scientific abstract about something classified as a bizarre exception to our regular,
mundane reality.
So in terms of genre-at least the two, cardinal, speculative ones, concerned with the content's
relationship with reality-this lands us in a pretty strange place.
What do we call something both irreconcilable with reality, and disconnected from any implied
larger fantastical reality?
Well, lucky for us, the French have had a word for this for a long time, now.
A word for ghosts and fevered visions, occult relics and divine visitations, intrusions
of the supernatural into the reality we know.
They call this realm of the unbelievable fantastique.
In describing the genre, literary theorist and historian Tsvetan Todorov wrote: "In a
world which is indeed our own, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or
vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained[...]
The one who experienced the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either
[they are] a victim of an illusion of the senses[-]of a product of the imagination[-]and
[the] laws of the world then remain where they are[,] or else that event has indeed
taken place[-]it is an integral part of reality-but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown
to us."
In short, according to Todorov, fantastique fiction is all about the tension between perception
and reality-the difficulty in accepting a world "controlled by laws unknown to us."
It's fundamentally about disbelief.
So, now we have an inkling of what SCP is.
Wonderful.
But that's only a part of the paradox, because, remember, SCP convinces us to investigate
questions for their own sake by promising not to answer.
Its residence in this realm of disbelief only explains the "questions for their own sake"
piece of that.
But how does it convince us to engage with something so... abstruse?
The answer?
By working hard to help us suspend the disbelief which defines it.
A paradox... of disbelief.
Weird stuff, but this is SCP we're talking about.
Would you expect much less?
Lucky for us, this leads into what is probably the most normal part of the whole conversation:
the willing suspension of disbelief.
If you've had even the barest brush with literary theory, you've almost certainly seen this
phrase before.
This is the process by which the audience sets aside their qualms with a fiction's believability
in order to engage with it more deeply.
It's such an important part of the experience that writers have developed an arsenal of
techniques to deploy in the pursuit of it.
Star Trek confounds us with technobabble to put us under the illusion that the answers
to our questions about its pseudoscience are there, known to the characters, just technologically
beyond our grasp.
Tolkien shrouds the workings of his world's magic in the mystique of knowledge either
lost to time or incomprehensible to the perspective characters, which, diegetically, puts the
answers to our questions out of our narrative reach.
Even comedic realities, like the one occupied by Wiley Coyote and Road Runner, work hard
to allay our doubts.
Yes, the laws of their world may be fluid, but only when it comes to thwarting Coyote's
plans.
As long as that rule is obeyed, any breach of the natural order can be summarily explained
with the phrase "because Coyote deserved it," which isn't actually an answer to our questions
about continuity and physics, but does a fine enough job masquerading as one.
And we need that little edge if we're going to set our disbelief aside long enough to
enjoy some good old fashion, reality-bending, cartoon sadism[B3].
These are all, of course, very different approaches to the same problem.
But they do all have one thing in common: they divert our attention away from answerless
questions within the fiction.
Which is extremely effective, generally makes good sense, is typically the advisable path
to go down...
And also the total opposite of what SCP does.
Like I mentioned earlier, SCP is about disbelief, which means it's also about answerless questions.
Sure, it offers diversions from some of them, like opting to REDACT, EXPUNGE, or BLACK OUT
data whose absence might be damning to the illusion of an anomaly's presence in the real
world.
But there are some fundamental questions it can't divert our attention from.
At least, not without sacrificing its identity.
After all, if anyone knew the precise mechanism by which SCP-294 dispenses any fluid on demand,
or the biology which allows SCP-682 to regenerate completely from all damage no matter how severe,
would they really be anomalies anymore?
Or just interesting new science?
So rather than diverting our attention, SCP does something very clever: it simply asks
us to accept the premise that its unanswerable questions are exactly that: unanswerable.
A bit unorthodox, but this does still encourage suspension of disbelief.
We stop asking how is this possible?, because we know that it isn't.
And it's this accepted impossibility which fascinates us, drives us to explore its parameters.
Instead of suspending our disbelief the way a body in cryosleep enters suspended animation-a
temporary cessation of function, with SCP we suspend our disbelief like matter suspended
in a solvent-the better to study its properties.
Thus we have our Paradox of Disbelief: questions which engage us because we know they have
no answer.
If there's any part of SCP wholly extractable, which you could graft into another piece of
fiction without the danger of tissue rejection, it's this.
But there is a catch, and a reason SCP in particular is so good at employing this weird
thing.
It's important for the audience of any work to understand, on some level, why they're
engaging with it.
When thrust into the dark, surrounded by questions, the natural impulse is to pursue answers.
Unsurprisingly, after spending who knows how long pursuing those answers only to realize
they were never there at all, some audiences may find themselves feeling a little... mislead.
But this where SCP gets things right.
It still gives us tremendously intriguing questions, things we'd certainly love answers
to, but the key is in that promise I've been mentioning-the promise not to answer.
The entire conceit of the fiction is couched in the foundation's lore, suggesting that
its sole purpose is to protect the world from things which aren't, or can never be, fully
understood.
Thus, if it's preceded by the letters "SCP", you can pretty much be sure that it's impossible.
Which, paradoxically, makes the details all the more compelling to uncover.
No need for an end goal or a final resolution-the audience is freed from that, and able to enjoy
a simple foray into the unknowable.
If you want to experiment with this, you could go join the SCP community and try your hand
at an article or a tale or some such thing.
In fact, maybe you should.
It's a tough process, but the community is very passionate and you're bound to learn
a lot on the way.
However, if you want to try this outside the purview of SCP, you aren't going to have that
nice lorical framework to help you.
And that means you'll have to be crafty.
Maybe you could write a first-person, past-tense, reflective account of impossible things which
have happened to the perspective character, but which they admit at the story's start
they still don't understand-suggesting from the outset the audience may never understand
either.
Or perhaps you could write a frame story, one story wrapped in another, where the exterior
story opens by showing us the uncertain results of an impossible event which occurs during
the inner story-a promise in foreshadowing.
However you do it, so long as you're not only investigating questions without answers in
your fiction but promising they'll be that way from the start, you'll be capturing a
sliver of what makes SCP so very strange and fascinating.
And that, I think, is at the very least worth trying.
Which is why we're going to try it in the original short story at the end of this series!
So stay tuned over the next two videos if you want to see how we fare.
What we're not going to be trying, is to capture all the rest of SCP's magic.
That massive framework-the worldbuilding, the lore, the body of objects, literature,
and media that immerse us so deeply?
That's not really something you can replicate in a single piece of fiction.
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And... that's it, I suppose.
It feels... strange to end on this note.
Usually I have a little more to share with you after we finish all the literary talk.
But ever since I sent those taleoids to deliver a new letter to my mysterious correspondent
out there in the huge facility beyond the foundry...
I haven't heard back.
Not from any of them.
I wouldn't be so worried if they were... ah, more intelligent?
I love them dearly, but they really do depend on me to give them guidance.
Last time I let a taleoid out of my sight for an extended period of time...
I may just be the anxious part of me talking, but more and more this place is seeming unsafe.
It probably wasn't the best idea to send more taleoids out there.
Reckless, but I really did want to keep up correspondence with... whoever it is, out
there.
I don't know what I'll do if my taleoids never come back.
I mean, I couldn't really risk sending more taleoids out after them could I?
What if they never came back either?
I don't know what I'd - Oh!
Phew.
Well that's a relief.
Uncannily... good... timing!
I'm so glad you all managed to find your way back!
What took you so long, though?
I can't imagine that any part of sending a letter would require you... to...
Oh.
Oh my.
Well...
That might explain it.
Uh... hello down there!
You're... not going to turn into some kind of weird, creepy, bug-machine, are you?
Hm.
Well everyone, sorry to cut things off so abruptly, but it looks like I've got... something
to handle, here.
Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
Hopefully I'll have more answers for you next time...
Now, where did you come from exactly?