 Compulsion effects are the devil's magic, and if you use them, well, you'd better hope that the rest of your articles are good enough to make up for it. First of all, shoutout to all my Patreons, thanks to Faye, who's pledged at $5, and thanks to Samuelism, who's pledged at $10. If you want to join those guys, check out my Patreon at patreon.com forward slash de Samarian. A link will be in the description below. So let's start by defining what a compulsion effect really is. In the SCP world, a compulsion is an often integrated effect of some SCPs that essentially forces a character to do a thing. Now what that thing is widely varies. It can go from the object forces you to play a video game to the object forces you to dig your own eyes out. The point is it forces a character to do something outside of their normal behavior. So why is this a bad thing? Well, because the thing that compels you to obey is simply not usually very compelling from a writing standpoint. There are no absolutes, so sometimes you can make it work, but almost always on the SCP wiki, it simply doesn't. And that's because the core of the wiki really is how people react to a world of anomalies. That's the real draw. So when you take natural reactions away, you're forcing the characters to play only by your own rules that you're setting up for your SCP, but any piece containing a character needs to have that character show realistic, relatable, and believable motivations. And it doesn't matter if it's a villain or a hero or a bystander or even a victim. The motivation always matters. So if a character does something that doesn't match their personality, their history, or just their actions prior to that point in the story, a reader will notice. If we see Iron Man do something that doesn't fit with what we've seen him do before, or which doesn't fit his personality, our mind instantly says, that's wrong. Now to be fair, we want to be swept up in a fictional story. In a fictional world, that's what willing suspension of disbelief is about. But anytime you have a character that doesn't act like a real person, that illusion often gets shattered. This is why more often than not, a compulsion effect will spool your story. As a writing device, it turns your characters into cardboard cutouts, it removes all agency from them, and makes them an obviously unimportant part of the story. See compulsion effects exist outside of the wiki, but when they're applied, they're often applied in a juxtaposition to the way a character acted prior to being under the effect. You generally have a decent amount of time to develop a connection and understanding of that character first. That way when a compulsion makes them act out of character, it seems like a realistic setup of events. And often times in fiction you can see them say, struggling against it, or they're just simply acting so out of character to what you'd normally expect of them that the reaction of other characters is striking. But in a piece of flash fiction, that's really hard to make it work, especially in just like one sentence. You're essentially turning your character into zombie number three, and no one wants to tune into the walking dead to see what zombie number three is up to this week. Admittedly, it doesn't seem like anyone wants to tune into the walking dead at all anymore, but that's outside the scope of this video. The solution to this problem though is simple. Don't make picking up your object or using it part of the anomalous effect. Think of creative and original reasons why someone would use the anomaly, or create it, or come cross it. It's often such a small fix that can dramatically increase the quality of a piece, and it gets you thinking about your character as something other than simple objects. But if you liked it, please hit the subscribe button, the notification bell next to that, and share it with your friends. If you want updates when I put out new videos, follow me on Twitter at D. Sumerian. Thanks for watching.