 Hoi Hoi, I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we're going to discuss something that, you know, I've brought this up on numerous occasions that, and this is very true of some of the SCP-6000 contest entries, so it's somewhat topical, so yay, I get to do a topical thing. What differentiates a narrative SCP from a simple SCP, and why is it that SCPs these days seem to be trending towards tales with an SCP name? So I was, like I said, I read through, and I've just recently read through a quarter of inevitable, the 30,000 word SCP, and I mean, right there in the middle is just apparently four different tales written by, I'm going to assume four different authors, and the whole article is just an excuse, it feels, to tell those tales, which is fine, I guess, but at the same time I am dumbfounded at the way the SCP Wiki treats the difference between tales and SCPs, and I don't think it's necessarily just the SCP Wiki that's doing it, it's the viewers and readers, right? Now, this is something that I run into too. If I do a popular, even sometimes an unpopular, not necessarily popular, but like, decently rated, well-traveled, I don't know the best way to put it, but an SCP article that is well known, that's fine, but if I do a tale reading on this channel, the number of people who I actually bother to look at it goes down significantly, so why is this? And part of this, I think, personally, comes down to a very simple thing, and a lot of SCP authors are going to take this the wrong way, so if you, if you start feeling that anger welling up inside, wait a second, listen to the whole thing, the average quality of an SCP article and the average quality of a tale are the same, but people don't come to the SCP Wiki for anything other than the SCP articles most of the time, which is the reason why, as has happened in this contest, a lot of SCP articles are essentially just tales or stories or short stories rebranded as an SCP because they're trying to get people's attention with it, but partially I feel like that's sort of dishonest. Let me put this way, and this is the part that I think people object to, the average quality of an SCP article is not actually super high, even well-established, well-written authors, and sometimes myself included, I think I've got a few things that I would put in an upper tier, but I've written, or just looking at Skipper this morning, I've written a, I've got apparently 117 pages posted to the SCP Wiki, and out of those maybe 10 or 15, I would consider to be top tier, worth publishing sort of articles, and to be honest with you, I would bet that even, not even a third or even a quarter of those are actually that good, that's just my own personal evaluation because I like them, and this is why no one reads tales. It's not because tales are great and there's some sort of mysterious problem with it, it's that when people come to the SCP Wiki, they're willing to excuse the lower quality over traditional fiction, or short story collection, or literally any other version of short stories that have much higher quality standards, we'll talk about quality standards in a second, they're willing to forego that because the SCP format is novel and interesting in and of itself, and allows for, you know, I mean there's not, there's not a lot of high quality authors writing SCPs, there's a lot of moderate to mediocre quality authors, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's a community writing website, I don't want to make it sound like I think that this is a bad thing, but SCP authors and prospective SCP authors, look at the SCP Wiki as some sort of gold standard of writing when it simply isn't. Now that's not to say that some of the best authors on the SCP Wiki don't produce works that are amazing to read, and to be honest with you, I have, I don't know, I'm gonna, you're gonna get a hard cut here for a second, I've got anywhere between, I'm not sure, I just counted really quickly, like somewhere between 12 and 13 tails that are rated above 100, and I think about a half dozen, I'm gonna say, looks like maybe not half, maybe like three or four of them are rated above plus 200, and tails are really difficult to get anything, really any real traction on, and it's not necessarily the quality of those are necessarily good, I think a couple of these are really really good, but I don't think all of them are that great, to be honest with you, even the ones that are rated above 100, and this, my friends, this is the important thing to understand, okay, and again, I'll say it over and over again because I know for a fact that SCP authors will take this as an insult, but SCP articles and tails are about the same quality, generally, and that quality is not on average so high that people get excited about tails, now if an author you're familiar with and who you know is good has written a tale and asks or promotes it or asks you personally to read it, you'll read it, that's how that works, because you know that the quality will be higher, it's a short story that you believe in and understand and actually enjoy, the pacing won't be terrible, the characters won't be bland and uninspired, the grammar of it won't be terrible, there's a whole listing of things and not even terrible necessarily, but mediocre to the point where like why am I devoting 15 minutes to a half an hour to read this, you know, 15,000 word long short story when I could be doing literally anything else with that time, it's just not of a high enough quality to get me excited about reading it, unless I know somehow that it is, a high rating can tell you that, a topic that you enjoy particularly can inspire you to read something like that, or an author that you know is a good author can inspire you to read that much work that quickly, and this is the core problem, SCP articles are not inherently better, they are just different than what normal writing looks like, and because of that difference and because that novel sort of uniqueness, people flock to read those, and unfortunately what that means is that people start trying to write tales, of course they write those tales which are short stories or flash fiction, oftentimes it's somewhere in between, there's a couple that are probably novella length, but they write these things and then they don't understand why they can't get people to view them, and then sometimes not sometimes quite often they will then write an SCP that's basically a tale and try and pass it off as an SCP, and there's nothing wrong with that either, because honestly getting trying to get people to read your stuff is not a problem, it's a little dishonest I think, but sometimes a little dishonesty in the service of a better cause is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, and this is something I was staff three, two, three years ago, hard for me to tell anymore, but the important thing is that even as staff one of the things that we understood was a problem was how do we get people to read tales on the SCP wiki, how do we get people to read GOI formats on the SCP wiki, and the truth is you can't, again this core I've and this is just my own personal opinion, I always have to throw that in here, I'll say something like this and people will be like, he says things like it's absolutely true and it's just his opinion, well fucking of course it is, everything is opinion, but anyway I see these comments on other discord servers, every once in a while my name comes up as a topic of conversation and people complain about these sorts of videos where I talk about how the SCP wiki doesn't have a high quality of standard, I mean it does have a high quality standard in comparison to other essentially non-existent quality standards, this is the problem, this is why in tales we'll never get read, and this is why every once in a while you get baited into an SCP that is basically just a tale, or in the case of inevitable which is again apparently four different tales strung together along with some other work, I haven't gotten it's a lot, I read one quarter, like not even one quarter of it because I didn't quite finish it, but almost one quarter of the whole, and I'm like this is just an avenue for tales, again it is what it is, I think, and again I don't think there is any solution to this, as staff we were constantly racking our brains about how do we make people read tales, you can't, you just can't, because there's no reason for people to read those tales, why would they when there's 6,000 SCPs out there, you know, no one's ever, this is the other half of it, the more SCPs you get the less likely people are going to read tales because gosh darn it, there's just so many, you don't even have time for it, but anyway, I was sitting here literally like had no idea what I was going to do for a video and then that popped into my head, I was thinking about that, and I was like I'll talk a little bit about the problem, and this is, I believe the core problem, it's just a quality standard problem, if you're going to devote, you know, that, and the thing is that an SCP general, and this is why, by the way, important to understand, this is why there's such a disconnect between the elites on the site and the series one lovers, because the elites on the site, the new author, the new and more recent authors, I think, think their own quality, their own, the quality of their own work is higher than it really is, now it's not to say that the quality of the work on the wiki in recent years isn't much better than the average series one article, this is absolutely true, but it's not so much better that you can look at those, and this is going to be really objectionable to some people, but it's not so much better that you can look at those early SCPs and go, oh, I don't think we should enjoy those anymore, nobody's coming to the SCP wiki for fine, it's like going to McDonald's and getting their most expensive best burger, yes it's very good, but it's still McDonald's, you're not going to a fine dining restaurant, if you want fine dining, you'll go to a fine dining restaurant, you'll buy a novel by an author you know, and respect as being a quality author, you don't go to the SCP wiki and be like, well, time to get free Creative Commons fiction that's just as good as, I'm going to use Stephen King as an example just because it's an easy one to use, and again, the SCP wiki has a higher quality standard than pretty much any other collaborative writing project I've ever seen and that I've ever heard of, but it's not elite quality, so you can't get, and this is true of me sometimes too, you can't get people to read 30,000 words generally without tricking them into thinking it's an SCP, and that's not always true, that's important to say, because sometimes people will read really long tales, but it's very rare, it's not common, and it's frustrating to the authors, I know that, but it is what it is, learn to learn to live in the world you're in, and you keep working towards the world you want it to be, but recognize the world that you are in, and live there too, anyway, that's it, thank you very much for watching, if you enjoyed the video hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos, and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash de-samaritan and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Cingeriki who has pledged $100, it's nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I will see you all again on Tuesday.