I know this isn’t really related to leftism or anything, but I thought you wonderful people on the hexadic angular bruin website like it when people talk about special interests. I’ll spoiler everything to make it digestible.
My bias for canon
Yes, I know diegetic essentialism is a plague, and I shouldn’t like works over internal consistency / ideas over a more meta literary analysis, but I still do, as it’s quite enjoyable to talk about diegesis and play around with it. This is just a declaration of bias for a consistent and full canon over a non-canon.
What is the pseudo-canon, and why SCP is the primary example
A few day ago from writing this post, I made this comment on the previous megathread: https://hexbear.net/comment/6457308
It is my first talk of this on the website. My analysis is a little lackluster, and I wasn’t very in depth. So, I’ll try to talk about it a bit more, explaining the pseudo-canon as we go along.
The SCP wiki in particular maintains a policy of “no defining canon” meaning that nothing is offically canonical. However, this is de jure. If we look at the de facto side of things, there are very clearly established things as “fact.”
Even though people are told to “curate their canons,” to make their own universes by selectively interpreting the works provided to them, they more often than not go towards a very specific type of canon - the popular one. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s an argument against the idea of the SCP mythology not holding a canon.
Let’s talk about a key element: D-Class personnel. While, technically, they are not supposed to be defined, but instead interpreted by you, there is undoubtedly a common perception that defines what a D-Class personnel is.
The common and correct take via consensus is that they are prisoners, or in some cases, kidnapped individuals, who are forced to engage in tests deemed to hazardous for regular personnel.
If I were to say, for instance, D-Class personnel are actually volunteers who are given million dollar salary’s and given the highest honors for their work dealing with anomalies, I would both be correct and wrong at the same time.
Correct in the sense that the “official” or at-least commonly touted rhetoric that there is no canon, but incorrect in the idea that 90% of the fan-base holds true and canonical the D-Class as prisoner idea.
This is the pseudo-canon. You are not officially or technically wrong, but nobody will consider your take on the subject as the preferable take to the popular one. In the best case scenario, a story containing the D-Class as volunteer idea will be a “fun experimentation” or “what if scenario” but rarely will it be considered apart of someone’s canon.
The pseudo-canon is canonicity disguised as non-canonicity. If we move away from the wiki, we see this effect amplified by 100. Ask any casual SCP enjoyer (played a few games, read an article or two, watched some YouTube videos on it) and they will tell you the most mainstream and popular narrative as if it was fact.
And, indeed, if we look at those games or YouTube videos, by nature of HAVING to accept a specific idea of what the SCP mythos is in order to actually make their content, they create a canon. And most of the time, it is the most popular one.
The process of the pseudo-canon
The process of the pseudo-canon is a simple one.
We start out with canonical anarchy. A specific concept is undefined, vague, or whatever. Let’s take who keeps the documents secret.
This was vague for the longest time, until a prolific author by the name of Dr. Clef invents the idea of RAISA (Recordkeeping and Information Security Agency) during a rewrite of the SCP-076 article. This is the second stage, where a concept is put out there. At this time, many concepts can be put out.
The third stage is standardization. People pick a concept, and slowly forget other concepts. Let’s say somebody tried to publish an SCP article that said “The foundation’s primary informational security thing is the Database Systems Enforcement Administration (DSEA)” or something like that.
In a world where the pseudo-canon was perfect at allowing people to entertain all concepts presented by all authors, both RAISA and DSEA would receive stories and tales, with neither of them taking precedent over the other.
However, it’s pretty obvious that DSEA would get swept under the rug and RAISA would remain the thing that every author used whenever they want to write about redactions or whatever. By this point, standardization is complete. There can be other concepts, but people have already accepted one thing as canon, and nothing else is allowed to even come close to it.
Tl;dr: Canon anarchy, people don’t really care or just make up whatever the want. Then suggestion, as people try to put out their ideas. Then it’s standardization, as a singular idea is chosen as preferable to all others, and nothing is allowed to achieve or even come close to the same level of acceptance or “correctness” as the selected idea.
The flaws of pseudo-canon
The SCP wiki is a wiki about SCP. Not about mythology in general, not about spoopy scary things in general, but specifically about the SCP foundation. Sure, there is a canon in the SCP wiki which is about a what if scenario where the SCP foundation does not exist, but once again, refer to the idea of pseudo-canon, and how nobody is internalizing this idea or treating it as equal to the idea of the SCP foundation existing.
The SCP foundation as a concept is scarcely defined at moments, and most of it’s definitions come not from discussion and consensus, but from proposition and consensus. Rather than sitting down and asking what the SCP foundation is, people just throw shit at the wall, and whatever sticks is canon to 90% of everyone.
“There is no canon” but anything that’s popular enough is canon to the majority of individuals. The definition of what the SCP foundation is shifts every day, with more and more people flinging more and more shit at the wall.
This is a bad way to organize anything. Nobody wants to (or logistically can) agree on what the SCP foundation is, because it’s an open project with millions of fans and thousands of writers. Once again, this is the SCP wiki, not the spoopy creatures wiki.
This wiki is centered around the SCP foundation yet can’t be bothered to give a solid and unyielding baseline for what it is. The only thing that’s constant is that people make shit up and if enough people like it, it’s canon.
When you read an SCP article, you may find it enjoyable, and that’s fair. But what you are not reading a cohesive and coherent diegesis. For every SCP article, you either have to rethink what the SCP foundation means (for stories that try to go against the pseudo-canon) or re-read the same old boring “SCP morally gray, save the world but also kinda mean” thing (for stories that conform with the pseudo-canon.)
I’m going to be honest, this is one of the least pressing contradictions there is. It’s not actively harming anyone, and while some people might be mildly perturbed (like me), it’s not going away anytime soon. But if we want to talk about solutions…
There is no middle ground between canon or non-canon
There are only two solutions to this contradiction.
The SCP wiki develops a vanguardist writing methodology where it removes a lot of freedom in exchange for narrative cohesion, losing it’s “nothing is canon” and “curate your own content” messages.
or
The SCP wiki drops the SCP shit and becomes a generic scary monster wiki. It’ll become a hub for everyone’s ideas about anomalous entities, and it will be disorganized, chaotic, but it can also be fun.
Like I said, this is a non-pressing contradiction, and the SCP wiki can stay how it is for an extremely long time before any contradictions pop up. But, eventually, the contradictions will sharpen, and you can only blame the pseudo-canon at that point.
Anyway, this is long. You don’t have to read it all or anything, but I hope you do, and I hope you enjoy it.
I don’t know enough about SCP, but I’m not sure what to make of your pseudo-canon. Ultimately, every mythology has a general fuzzy idea of their characters and settings. Zeus is a horny god, dragons are powerful creatures, vampires suck human blood, and so on. The fuzzy ideas can sometimes be heavily influenced by key works.
The modern mythology of Frankenstein’s monster is heavily influenced by a black-and-white film, and people calling Frankenstein’s monster “Frankenstein” isn’t even something from the original novel or film, but just something that people got stuck calling. When people think “Frankenstein,” they’re thinking of some tall dead dude with a flat head and bolts coming out of his neck, not some Swiss scientist. They’re thinking of some monster who can barely talk instead of an eloquent dude as portrayed in the novel.
Igor wasn’t in the novel, which emphasized Victor Frankenstein’s solitary character, nor in the first two films of the Frankenstein franchise, only appearing in the third film, but Igor is inexorably tied to the mad scientist, which is just Frankenstein except “Frankenstein” is now the monster’s name so Frankenstein the Swiss doctor is now “mad scientist.” Stuff like the Monster Mash or the popularity of Frankenstein('s Monster) as a Halloween costume just further cement the film’s interpretation of the character on to of introducing a level of levity to the character that was nowhere to be found in the original novel.
I guess I don’t know how pseudo-canon fits into this. There’s the book canon and the film franchise canon, but there’s also a very firm societal idea of what Frankenstein('s Monster) is that, while heavily influenced by the film franchise, doesn’t fully align with it and anything that deviates from this societal understanding wouldn’t be recognized as Frankenstein('s Monster).
I’ve been thinking a lot about your comment, but I can’t say anything, because you speak nothing but absolute truth.
Alot of these arguments were actually quite prevalent in the early history of the site as more experienced and talented authors joined the wiki and began pining for a more structured approach to Foundation lore
But it was largely solved by the meteoric introduction of SCP-2000, the various contradictions, historical anachronisms, and the nagging question of how on earth does the Foundation manage to survive while containing hundreds of world-ending phenomenon; the answer given by SCP-2000 was elegant and canon-defining sitewide and in a kind of paradoxical way structured pseudo-canon and gave it narrative grounding without losing the diversity
It also opened the door for the concept of narrativistic anomalies which many authors would’ve had a harder time outlining without the groundwork laid by SCPs that deliberately made the concept of canon nebulous
While you’re right the wiki started out with canonical anarchy and what’s considered prime canon is what’s popular, I don’t see a problem with that, that’s the nature of collaborative fiction, the fact a single author with SCP-2000 redefined the very concept of canon for the entire wiki shows talent is the catalyst for new metas and proves it can be done again
We don’t need a corporate structure or author dictatorship to define and impart canon with heft
and nothing else is allowed to even come close to it.
If this was true SCP-2000 wouldn’t have won the 2012 contest and RAISA itself would’ve remained a single author’s pet project, “new ideas” actually have to prove themselves narratively and tested by a thousand eyeballs, I consider this a pretty decent sorting mechanism that limits canonical anarchy
This wiki is centered around the SCP foundation yet can’t be bothered to give a solid and unyielding baseline for what it is
Because it doesn’t need to, why put up roadblocks for the sake of canon rigidity? The Foundation either doesn’t know what it is or the truth is so mind-shattering that it has to be kept secret, that’s far more interesting than unraveling the mystery and leaving future authors stuck to a single outline
The SCP wiki develops a vanguardist writing methodology where it removes a lot of freedom in exchange for narrative cohesion
That’s the thing, the wiki has already pulled this off, there are countless SCPs that define the meta for the entire site, a vanguard doesn’t need to be static, it simply needs democratic will and a loose set of rules, the wiki has that
First things first, SCP-2000. If any lurkers want to read it, here ya go.
You say it provides all these answers to all these questions, but it really just… doesn’t really do it for me. One of the biggest critiques just reading this article is the rampant anthropocentrism. Sure, you can say “everything fictional, by necessity of being created by humans, comes from a human lens” and sure. But one of the biggest things for me about the anomaly world is exploring things from a sort of non-human or anti-human lens. Literally all other media is dedicated to humanity, so sometimes, especially with exploring the inhuman and anomalous, it provides a, even if hypothetical, take on alternative forms of humanity.
Not to say that humanity is bad, that’s just misanthropy, but it’s definitely refreshing to explore in a fictional setting, and can also be really entertaining. Anyway, more about the anthropocentrism. Tl;dr for SCP-2000, it’s an underground bunker in Yellowstone Park that uses a bunch of high-tech gadgets to be able to protect itself from anomalies, extends it’s floor plan into negative depth (which has no explanation for it’s utility beyond rule of cool), and to clone humans.
Maybe I’m just setting up myself to say I don’t like SCP. And, I’ll be honest. I don’t. I say it’s my special interest, because it partly is. My special interest is building up and or exploring strange realities 'n shit. It’s not super specific, and I try to keep it that way. I liked SCP at first, because I thought it reached that goal, but the more and more I interacted with it, I realized how much it didn’t. Anyway, anthropocentrism. I’m looking at it further, and while you appraise it with such high value, there is almost no valuable information to be gained from it.
The only useful or valuable diegetic information I see is “Foundation has a hidey hole for when the world goes to shit. This hidey hole has tons of resources and technology to restart the world if big bad thing happens.” Even then, just thinking of some hypothetical anomalies that could stop this dead in it’s tracks… I don’t know, a K-Class scenario that just destroys Earth or Yellowstone National Park. It would have been more foolproof (and hell, more cool) if it was set on a space station or inside of a pocket dimension, but nope. I digress though.
Also, just had to mention this, because it’s so fucking funny:
the process of diaspora and reconstruction will accelerate geometrically
“Accelerate geometrically” - absolute brilliant masterclass of writing. Also, why even call this an SCP? It has NO described anomalous elements. All of it is described as sufficiently advanced technology. Scranton Reality Anchors? A “corrosion-resistant beryllium bronze alloy.” Xyank/Anastasakos Constant Temporal Sink? Electromagnetic radiaton through a radio band (literally just a radio) coupled with a tachyon field emitter. Pseudo-Riemannian manifold? They literally make it a point in the article to specifically clarify that, while they previously thought it was an anomaly, it is consistent with the diegesis’ physics.
Literally, the most “creepy” thing is Addendum 2000-2, and I mean most, because it is not creepy at all, it is just the most creepy by virtue of everything else being standard technical filler. It is just 4 questions. If you think questions are scary, then I will horrify you to no ends by giving you a university test. Of course though, I don’t think you actually believe questions are scary. And, I’ve spent long enough ranting about SCP-2000, but let me just say one more thing.
Saying a bunch of questions isn’t good mystery.
It’s such a cop-out answer to deny answers to questions for your fictions to maintain mystery. Yes, you can answer questions and still write good mystery. You might be asking though, “What do you do when all the questions are answered though, when all of the mystery no longer exists?” Create more. It’s that simple. Just because you know why the SCP foundation exists does not mean you can write a story about an O5’s secret romantic affair with an anomaly or something like that.
With all that having been said, thank you for commenting, as I love challenging myself. Good post!
One of the biggest critiques just reading this article is the rampant anthropocentrism
It’s an SCP about Humanity refusing to die even though the universe has killed it multiple times, also I think you missed the hidden text in the article providing a counter narrative to the Foundation’s article
Also the meta concerning the bunker is that it’s an old SCP-1000 facility that was repurposed by humans, the whole meta-narrative concerning “the Bloom” that’s used in multiple SCPs, the most famous being the Class of 76 grand narrative, which is the true source of its anomalous classification
there is almost no valuable information to be gained from it.
Because it all comes from fridge logic and deductive reasoning, the article “tells us” the Foundation by accident or design was responsible for the World Wars and by extension the emergence of fascism, it tells us humans were once far more sociopathic and anti-social before the Foundation modified them, it tells us the Foundation once tried to rid humanity of it’s nastier aspects and it ended in disaster, likely a nod to SCP-752, it tells us the Foundation has the means to manipulate time, space and matter in a controlled fashion, which to be fair in 2012 was a big revelation
It reveals the Foundation has the ability to erase, modify and reconstruct the memories of the entire globe in a short span of time, again a nod to SCP-1425 and SCP-1422 and that the BZHRs can (whether through accident or design) create “humans” with vastly different anatomies, again a likely nod to the mysteries concerning SCP-1788 and other body horror scps
And the biggest reveal is the fact the timeline is hopelessly out of sync and unknowable, the setting does not in fact take place in the early 21st century but anywhere from 300-1000 years later, maybe more, alluded to brilliantly in SCPs like 3288 where 17th century inbred monsters claim to have been in hiding for a “1000 years” and yet paradoxically (recreation or not) the setting IS the early 21st century…or is it?
SCP-2000 is a canon scaffold, bridging various popular mini-canons together into a cohesive whole, that’s what made it so popular and critically acclaimed among the site
I mean, at this point, I think it’s less an issue of “who is more correct” and more of a “we appreciate distinctly different things.” You’re making a lot of good points, but I’m just not really getting any extra enjoyment even with the added context so to that, all I can say is that you’ve presented your reasons for why you enjoy it, and by nature of it being subjective, you are completely true and correct to yourself. Maybe I just like more surface level stuff, or need to learn to appreciate SCP more, or whatever.
Regardless, you’ve given me a lot to work with! I hope I can say the same for you, but no big deal if that isn’t the case. Good post!
Of course, different strokes for different folks, in my experience it was slowly piercing the lore together that made it worthwhile to me, figuring out where the puzzle pieces fitBut me lore dumping on you is definitely not gonna have the same impact, makes me wonder if SCP has become a kinda “you had to be there at the time to get it” thing after all these years, 9000 SCPs isn’t exactly a catalog that can be navigated through easily
You preferences towards a intelligently designed canon aside, I have a counter to the idea that a contradiction must be formed: The star wars extended universe. While there is a true canon as set by Lucas and now Disney, the extended universe had, for decades, varying levels of canon that was solely set by fans who enjoyed certain works more than others.
Yeah, I guess I was a little bit dismissive of there being wiggleroom between canon and non-canon. Sorry.
Another great example being Warhammer.
The ONLY warhammer canon is anything that is an actual production by Games workshop, ie true “canon” is literally only what Games Workshop themselves prints in their army books full stop. Anything not by Games Workshop (Black Library books, Cubicle7 RPG books, videogames, etc.) are all explicitly “kinda sorta canon” stuff.
While there is A TONNE of lore in the Games Workshop in-house productions alot of the stuff people “know” about Warhammer Fantasy or Warhammer 40k are actually not truly canonical fact according to Games Workshop because they come from licensee productions; and that in-house “canon” is extremely malleable and oftentimes contradicted between game editions because it is the made-up story of the plastic toys they are trying to sell not maintain an internally consistesnt setting.
This is my prefered solution. Even though it isn’t perfect, the idea of having an overarching, immutable “higher” lore that all the “lower” lore must adhere to definitely aids in the production of any sort of fiction. It doesn’t even have to be super strict, but SCP only possesses pseudo-canon, while Warhammer appears to have a canon, only that it is very flexible. The presence of something small is usually always better than the presence of nothing, I guess. Idk, I’m rambling and I’m tired, but good post!
No worries, I was probably being sassy this morning
varying levels of canon that was solely set by fans
no? they had a continuity manager who worked for lucasfilm
Really? I haven’t heard of anything like that before the year 2000
TLDR: tyranny of structurelessness means we need SCP Stalin
I didn’t even realize I was unknowingly regurgitating radical feminist theories lol.
I would argue the non-canonicity of the SCP “canon” is part of that canon itself, as confirmed in SCPs like SCP-4010 where constructing a timeline of the Foundation results in it disappearing from reality, as well as explicit argument for interference with things like Thaddeus Xyank’s ΔT organization and SCPs arguing that reality has been reset several times already. I don’t think they have to go for full cohesion for it to take place in a consistent universe/multiverse — after all, it’s entirely plausible in its setting that a real SCP wiki would not be entirely cohesive either due to effects of far more powerful mind-affecting SCPs than SCP-055. That doesn’t necessarily inhibit creative freedom just because there are names that most articles use either — just because the name RAISA exists and is already well understood doesn’t mean it necessarily needs to operate the same way from one article to the next — calling it DSEA wouldn’t really change anything unless you were intending to exacerbate contradiction for effect.
But the idea of the pseudo-canon is that there is a canon pretending to be non-canon. I’m not trying to belabor the point, but my argument is that while the SCP wiki has a “no canon” and “curate your own content” policy, it’s not necessarily true.
In a true non-canonical mythology, new stories would be given similar weight to old ones, yet as we see, certain concepts are firmly established. What is the SCP mythology without SCP-173? What is the SCP mythology without D-Class personnel? What is the SCP mythology without the O5 council? The answer is that, due to the pseudo-canon, that it’s not. Like I discussed in the original post, at best, your SCP story without the existence of an O5 council is treated as a what if scenario rather than it’s own independent story.
And if we want to talk about the SCP wiki, than the effect is pretty mild, as stories can be created contradicting old ones, merely it’s just that they’re usually treated as alternatives rather than originals. This effect is exacerbated to a large degree once we exist the realm of the SCP wiki however. We see baselines and assumptions being established, and thus, a canon, constantly. If a new SCP game came out, and included, for instance, an SCP that I quite enjoyed reading, SCP-8887, it would most likely not be called an SCP game at all.
This is because the definition of SCP is reduced to it’s most popular creations and results, thus, the pseudo-canon. Good post tho.
while the SCP wiki has a “no canon” and “curate your own content” policy, it’s not necessarily true.
Bit idea: This is simply an effect of SCP-4010 and the SCP Foundation must assert this to maintain consensus reality
This wiki is centered around the SCP foundation yet can’t be bothered to give a solid and unyielding baseline for what it is.
It does give definitions for various concepts though? https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/glossary-of-terms
D Class — Foundation employees deemed expendable if necessary for testing or containment. Typically consist of prison inmates recruited by the Foundation for this purpose in exchange for reductions in their sentence, although Foundation employees may be demoted to D Class for egregious violations of protocol, and it has also been claimed that D Class are artificially created
(Nvm you’re right these definitions are more descriptive than prescriptive)
I do think the SCP’s ruleset has worked really well for them. It might not be too welcoming to new writers and not just anyone can come in and make up any SCP they want, but that does help give it a specific standard of quality and tone that they are aiming for. Compare this to something like the Backrooms or Creepypasta in general. A 100% accessible group project with no limits or rules quickly gets flooded with poorly written and inconsistent nonsense, and “canon” is decided by how cool something is or how many views it gets on youtube, not how well it fits in with everything else.
To tie this back into leftist ideas, it’s the difference between an organisation that vets their members and requires members to read theory and understand the group’s ideas and goals vs an org that just lets anyone join, no questions asked. The second group is far more accessible, and will have far more members, but those members will have no real desire to see the group’s goals achieved and it will be flooded with liberals and weekend communists. By having stricter rules, SCP can ensure that their worldbuilding follows the rules they want set out for it, and you don’t have a million SCPs who are the strongest guy every with a million hit points and infinity damage or whatever, you have actual ideas and storytelling, even if the format can seem a little strange to outsiders.
While I don’t want to be intentionally rude… did you read it?
and “canon” is decided by how cool something is or how many views it gets on youtube, not how well it fits in with everything else.
This is something I explicitly condemn SCP of doing multiple times throughout this essay.
By having stricter rules, SCP can ensure that their worldbuilding follows the rules they want set out for it
Except they have very loose rules on what is and what is and isn’t allowed. In fact, they barely have any rules on the wiki besides pretty obvious ones like “don’t create SCPs who are the strongest guy in everyway with a million hit points and infinity damage” like you put it.
In fact, most of this essay is a critique of the SCP mythology’s lack of strict rules and consideration for worldbuilding. Nonetheless, thank you for commenting and giving me something to talk about.
I might have misunderstood you, it was really late last night when I read this, I was comparing them to other similar works in communal online horror writing and their ruleset has resulted in much higher quality stuff than a lot of alternatives, I should’ve been clearer that I was trying to use similar projects with even more lax rules as a point of comparison, because I can’t really think of an online horror writing space with a strict canon and ruleset that is adhered to closely that is anywhere close to the popularity of something like SCP. I do agree that they are fairly fast and loose with things like canon, but honestly imo, that stuff is a huge waste of time and stifles creative ideas because the more the “canon” is added to, the less flexible it becomes and the harder it gets to add new things to an idea, as they all need to fit within the existing canon.
A strict canon can work well for something that is done by a small team or an individual, but a larger communal creative project ends up just being a few people at the top who get to direct “canon” and everyone else just writing fiction for them instead of the community or for themselves. SCP could probably stand to be stricter, but ultimately I do think their ruleset has largely worked for them and has prevented their forum from getting flooded with low effort and low quality garbage, even if the stuff that is produced isn’t always fully consistent with some kind of “canon.” Your Mileage May Vary on what you think is important in a collaborative writing project though.
I think a lot of these problems make more sense and are less of problems if you look at it through like a folklore or campfire story lense. Like how vampire stories need to make clear what kind of canon they’re using as their basis - like what powers vampires have in this story.
The SCP wiki is a collective writing project that uses a vague concept of the SCP as a prompt essentially. I wouldn’t want either an official canon to be established or for a removal of the base prompt of SCP. It’s collective story telling and that kind of “anarchy” as you call it is fun to me.
If the main problem here is that some canons are inherently less popular - I just really don’t know what to say to that. Thats just how life works. If this was the case because some group was using their power as super users to force their canon and suppress others then I could see that as an issue. But I don’t think that’s the case or not a significant one relative to your problem with the pseudo-canon as a whole.
I feel like this comes down to you wanting to have your cake and eat it too- wanting to write your own stuff but with the popularity that comes with the established familiarity and popularity of the SCP name. And I fully get that desire- I just don’t really see it as a problem to be solved.
But the idea of the pseudo-canon is that there is a canon under the cloak of not being one.
It’s not simply that some canons are less popular, it’s more so that canons have a totalizing effect where by gaining enough popularity, other canons slowly fade into irrelevance. Like, for instance, my example of D-Class. If I were to write a story where D-Class personal are a completely different thing from the common interpretation, would my story be received as it’s own unique thing or an alternate take on what is, by consensus, the truth?
This writing prompt, as you call it, becomes less vague over time as people introduce their ideas, and those ideas become commonplace. Let’s take your vampire example as well. If you were to write a vampire as consuming mud rather than blood, would your story be received as it’s own unique thing or an alternate take on what is, by consensus, the truth?
Yes, I understand and even agree with the conclusions here. But what I’m disagreeing on is the premise itself- that the above described pseudo-canon is a problem.
I’m saying it is not a problem to be solved, or is unfortunately just a fact of life.
In marxism we see ideas as being influenced by reality, and those ideas then influence reality in turn which re-influences ideas and so on and so on. This process is happening constantly for all people for all ideas in a complex miasma of changing majorities and popularities and material conditions. In this way ideas change over time, become more widely adopted, lose popularity, etc.
What you are saying is that this process is a problem. And to that I just don’t know what to say other than - ya sorry, life sucks sometimes.
If these ideas were harming people or, as described in my prior comment, were being manipulated in favor of one group’s material conditions- then I could get on board with calling it a problem. But as I see it, this is just the way it is.
I’m sorry if this isn’t the right fit for the community, but I looked at all the other comms and they didn’t seem like they fit.
I think unless there is malicious intent (which clearly is not the case here) mods are pretty chill about stuff being in the wrong or not perfectly fitting comm.
I love me some diegetic essentialism. However, I am pushing back on the idea that there is no room between canon and non-canon. From what I’ve seen, a vast majority of thematic first works, especially outside the West, let swathes of it work outside of a single canon. Look at Dragon Ball, that work has dozens of canons that vaguely align at different times. Sure, it is a different beast than the SCP pseudo canon; however, many of the methods work the same. With things such as Xeno-Goku versus DBS Goku, you run into similar issues of you must interpret certain bits of canon certain ways for this to work. But it doesn’t resolve into the dichotomy you propose, but rather has canon silos; you have the Xeno-Goku silo, the GT silo, the DBS silo, the CC silo, etc. In a similar vein, such can already be found in the canon pages (the one showing some popular continuities). Those are the silos with their own silos that occur. This does have a different issue, with each silo having its own sub-silos that require ever-increasing niche-forum knowledge to recall for editing, meaning there will be a constant increase in the required mental labor for proper canonicity as writers try to conform to ever more obscure niches. At a top level, it may appear disorganized, but this is no different than how any specialization appears to a layman.
I might have misunderstood you, it was really late last night when I read this, I was comparing them to other similar works in communal online horror writing and their ruleset has resulted in much higher quality stuff than a lot of alternatives, I should’ve been clearer that I was trying to use similar projects with even more lax rules as a point of comparison, because I can’t really think of an online horror writing space with a strict canon and ruleset that is adhered to closely that is anywhere close to the popularity of something like SCP. I do agree that they are fairly fast and loose with things like canon, but honestly imo, that stuff is a huge waste of time and stifles creative ideas because the more the “canon” is added to, the less flexible it becomes and the harder it gets to add new things to an idea, as they all need to fit within the existing canon.
that just seems worse than having one continuity and maintaining it.
That was part of my tongue-in-cheek criticism, where it’s overly complex and requires too much investment. In implementation, it depends on the work, but SCP’s leads to some issues for participation if you’re doing anything outside of the top level most of the time.
While I agree with the idea of siloization, it’s not really what’s happening in the SCP sphere. The idea of pseudo-canon is the idea of canonicity disguised as non-canonicity. Like I said in response to KnilAdlez’s comment, I was too dissmissive of the idea of there being wiggleroom.
But when we look at both, we see two different scenarios. Dragon Ball can effectly siloize because the general idea of Dragon Ball is pretty distinct from it’s implementations. Meanwhile, the idea of SCP and it’s working parts are pretty integral to it’s implementations. Either way, good post!
I think the term is Diagetic Essentialism
Diagetic Existentialism would be like when your characters realize they’re works of fiction and freak out. :-)
MINOR SPELLING MISTAKE. /jTo be honest, I did sort of realize it, I just thought I’d let it slide, but if people are noticing it, then I’ll definitely get on it right away to editing it. Thank you! /srs
Ha I wasn’t going to say anything when I first noticed it but then I saw someone in the replies repeat the mistake and I was compelled to intervene 😅
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