Digging Deeper: The SCP Foundation

To those on the outside, it can be strange that the internet creates its own media to amuse itself. Creepypasta and the SCP Foundation are excellent examples: why in the would would someone read forums online where everyone is anonymous just to read the text that some other person in an indeterminate part of the world posted, where it's likely that only a few hundred others will see it? Why not see the new Marvel film? Why not listen to music? Or perhaps most relevant: why not read a book, a refined product with a team of artists, writers, editors, and superior production quality? The answer, I believe, is a bit different for each person.

When I first discovered the foundation, it was on accident, and I admit that I panicked a bit when I saw the warning at the top of the page, but I couldn't help myself. Though the whole of the site makes it clear that the wiki is, indeed, fiction, it's still created in a convincing facsimile of a real database, complete with a stern, straight delivery. Descriptions are standardized, with classes involving specific criteria, standardized holding cells (5x5x5 meters is normal for safe-class SCPs), and a rigid structure that is only broken with good reason. Coupled with this, the images used must be sufficiently obscure so that nobody recognizes it immediately; for example, The Sculpture's source photograph took quite a while to trace, and this made the article that much more believable. A casual observer should, ideally, be fooled just as I was.

The writing style of the SCP Foundation hearkens back to a rhetoric popularized in Victorian England: around that time, authors would often write their stories as a series of documents, most popularly diary entries. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, which involves the eloquent writings of the characters strung together in order to construct a larger narrative, given from the perspectives of multiple paradigms. The utility of this style for horror stories like Dracula is undeniable; it aids in the suspension of disbelief and immersion by allowing the reader to place themselves within the narrative as someone who has discovered these documents. To a similar end, the reader may instead follow the line of thinking that the author didn't actually do any writing himself, but discovered them and later published them. At least, this is what's suggested. This style never entirely left—one of the most well-known iterations is the War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The oft-repeated legend that this broadcast caused a mass panic is untrue, though it did give some people a bit of a fright. Most recently, there was a wave of “found footage films” which blurred the line between fiction and reality. Again, this was mostly confined to horror, with some of the most notable films being The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. However, the comedy genre also exploited this style, creating what are now known as “mockumentaries.”

The medium of the SCP Foundation, however, allows this style to progress a step further. Hypothetically, any information may eventually be able to worm its way onto the internet, where curious, prying eyes may unveil information that was never meant for them, on accident or on purpose. On 4Chan, this style was nothing special, but it had never been done with such rigid structure, and never so perfectly. Some found themselves believing.

This wasn't to say, of course, that people were ubiquitously fooled, if any were at all—it was still the horror board, made specifically for horror stories. However, when someone is specifically seeking horror, they are usually willing to suspend their disbelief a little bit, and one of the advantages of this style is that it reduces the burden on the reader to do so themselves. This effect is especially powerful on more surface-level readers, but still can hold for veterans.

For others, the power comes from the impersonality of its rhetoric, buried in bureaucracy. The cold, calculating style of the formal reports imply the massive, uncaring nature of the universe, which H. P. Lovecraft describes famously in his story The Call of Cthulhu: “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.” The SCPs themselves, as well, tend to hint at this rhetoric, a style known as “cosmic horror.” The existence of the Foundation implies that, in a terrible, hostile universe, humanity must expand its knowledge simply in order to survive—there is no room for pleasure or any kind of emotion for those who work under the O-5 Council, because those things are not privileged by the universe. The only thing privileged is the ability to survive. While religious rhetoric will often elevate the status of humanity, cosmic horror tears down that belief, stating that even if humanity were privileged, this only puts it further at risk—after all, if SCPs like The Hateful Star and The Flesh that Hates didn't even notice humanity, then we would be far better off.

There's yet another side to the SCP Foundation, of course: the creators. In the SCP Foundation, the line between creator and audience is blurred, as those who write for the Foundation do not do so for any sort of profit. For some, it's simply a creative outlet, but for many others, it's another way of understanding and enjoying the fiction, helping to shape the whole into something greater than themselves. This is a style of media that has become popularized on the internet, which may have begun with the advent of fanfiction.

It's important to understand that fanfiction predates the internet. In fact, the first piece of fanfiction is sometimes considered to be a sequel to the classic novel Don Quixote. The existence of these fan works forced the author to actually write a sequel so that this fake was not misattributed to him. However, the internet has allowed writers of fanworks to share much easier with one another, creating sprawling fan canons and sharing in the glory with one another. As these pieces of writing are based on already-existing intellectual properties, nobody can claim credit for it as a whole. The SCP Foundation does something very similar: all of the writing is under Creative Commons, which means that even if someone submits their writing, it is open entirely to the public, and the writer has essentially given up all rights to their work, though attributions for certain SCPs can still be found with a minimal amount of searching, just as authors of fanfiction will attach their names (or more often, pseudonyms) to their stories. In this way, they contribute to the massive bureaucracy and allow themselves to become, in part, dehumanized—the writing belongs to the Foundation now. This dehumanization can help lend to the feeling of vastness and emptiness that the Foundation provides, that special horror that it does so well.

People's enjoyment of the Foundation is, of course, not limited to these things, but I do believe that they are a core part of what makes it so popular and powerful. Each person enters the Foundation with their own beliefs and thoughts, and the Foundation acts as a lens through which they can view themselves and their world, providing an angle that would otherwise go unchecked. In this way, I believe the Foundation transcends simple media to become literature, albeit a unique form that, for now, lacks a name. Far be it from me to name it, however; I just love it.