 Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the video. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we're going to talk about, well, a thing on the SCP Wiki that happens a lot, especially with new users, called power scaling. And also why the on-site community of writers and readers tend to not jive with it as a culture. To be clear, I've definitely created stories on the Wiki and off, both for myself and for other channels that involve power scaling stories, that is to say like 682 vs SCP 173. And I've done that because they're popular, I'm not going to mince words on this. Me personally every once in a while I could see myself being like, is 682 more powerful than Superman, but the vast majority of the time it's not something that I consider because the question is unanswerable. And I'm going to use, Superman's a great example that we can use as an outside media source. So the reason why on-site people will be very hostile to the concept is simply that there is no single version of SCP 682 to compare to. There's no master version of SCP 682, but that's never stopped people before. If you go into a chat and you go, hey, what would happen if you pitted 682 vs 096? Most people are going to say whatever you want to happen because it's true. There is no definitive version of each of those SCPs unless you just limit yourself to the article itself, which people don't because if they did 682 it wouldn't be ranked so highly for so many people because 682 is the hard to destroy reptile in its article. The impossible to destroy bits don't come out until you read all of the surrounding works and if that's where you're going with it, like you want to read all of the surrounding works, each of those stories is an independent story and some of them are mutually exclusive to the others. In fact, there are stories about SCP 682 on the SCP Wiki in tale version that are mutually exclusive to the original article. That's how much there is out there. This also comes into play when people come in and go, like, what would happen if you threw SCP 096 into space? That's not a power scaling argument necessarily, although it can be involved in one because it's not technically pinning two fictional characters against each other, which is generally how that goes. We can talk about the problems of no canon, which is how the SCP Wiki defines it, although the more accurate way of putting it would be to say there are infinite canons on the SCP Wiki. That is to say every story, every tale, every article, every page, independent page, acts as its own canonical version of the SCP Wiki. This translates into outside media. We talked about Superman a moment earlier, which is something that is used as sort of a power base to compare against, like, is it more powerful or less powerful than Superman? It can Goku beat Superman, that kind of stuff, right? But the question is flawed because the premise is flawed. And not accepting that can actually irritate quite a lot of people on the SCP Wiki because they answer the same question the same way. The first time is fine. You're like, oh, I'm just asking a question, I don't understand why you're being so rude about it. But the 6,000th person asking the exact same question the exact same way, getting the exact same answer, at some point people are like, stop asking the question, or they just say, you're the problem. This is a problem and you are the problem. Then, as an example, has multiple iterations, like even in the mainline canon, there are depending on the rider, a variety of powers that Superman does or doesn't have. In the 90s, there was like a split and like he had an energy power version that was like a red and blue Superman sort of thing going on. You've had the Silver Age Superman, the Golden Age Superman, Modern Superman, Silver Age Superman, faster than a speeding bullet, able to outrun a faster than a locomotive. It's faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, able to leap small buildings in a single bound. I had to think about it. And two of those are meaningless because faster than a speeding bullet could be any speed, stronger than a locomotive could be any strength, but able to leap small buildings in a single bound implies that he isn't able to fly, which the original version of Superman wasn't. He just jumped very far. So like when you say, is Superman stronger than Goku or some other, insert extremely strong character here, the question isn't, the premise isn't fully developed. You should be like, is the Silver Age Superman stronger than X, but even in the Silver Age, different writers gave Superman different abilities. So is this the version of Superman with superventriloquism, which was a thing or a variety of other abilities that are completely off the wall that author that writers just gave Superman in the right. So we go and go and go and go. This is true of the, again, outside media, and it's not something that people accept or understand or integrate into their arguments more often than not. A complex, if you want to do power scaling in a complex way with SCP objects, you need to definitively say the version from this specifically, or create like clustered articles that will be like, okay, these are all not mutually exclusive to each other. These can all work together. They don't have any sort of things that contravene anything that's in the other articles. So this collection of articles defines the version of 682 that I'm using in this argument. That's not how people do it. They just go, hey, what is six, can 682 beat 173? And that is the reason why not, not some sort of like, and well, there is a little bit of that too. Let's be clear. Let's say they're not some sort of anti-offsite fan base problem, but they're absolutely is on the SCP wiki. And it's compounded by stuff like this though. This is the kind of stuff that makes people think less of the offsite when they have unrefined questions like that, that they're not asking what is more powerful, you know, SCP 682 in the article itself or SCP 343 from just its article or the from Duke Tildon's version of SCP 682 or so on and so forth. And this is the core of the problem with power scaling SCPs. You have to define exactly what the fuck you're talking about. Because if you don't, then anyone you ask is just going to be like, I have no idea how to answer your anyone who knows anything about SCPs should be like, I have no idea what you'll end up getting. And this is why I think power scaling arguments get are so popular because you can get a lot of back and forth between people who have completely different ideas of what you're talking about. The problem is, if you say, can 682 beat 173? The answer is yes, no, and maybe because there are different versions of SCP 173 and there are different versions of SCP 682. So if you try and make it definitive and be like, I win this argument, you know, or SCP 682 is just stronger than 173 in all aspects, it's just an incorrect statement. So the important thing to regard is which version are you talking about? And we never, ever get down to that. Not to mention that none of it really matters, like in the end. And I know young people tend to get obsessive about the things that they particularly like. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it can be very grating on the older or more developed fans who are further along in their journey, who aren't, say, obsessed with everything relating to SCP 173 or SCP 343, you know, oh my God, the SCP 343. I've read every article about SCP 343 and I'm like, I don't think you have, first of all. And second of all, I'm not going to say your taste is bad, but you could stand to read other things, right? I think we could do better as on-site authors, because I think a lot of people that's watching this would be the on-site people. I think we could do a better job of trying to guide people from the wrong preconceived notions to the right preconceived notions. I see this a lot in chats where someone will pop in, especially in the official site stuff, because that's where newer fans are going to start interacting with the community the most, where someone will come in and go like, hey, is SCP 682 the most powerful creature in the universe? And someone will go, yes and no. There is no canon. Like that answers the question. There needs to be a more complex sort of answer to that that takes into account that most people think of all fiction as having a single mainline through canon, right? That doesn't change that this character is exactly the same in every portrayal because consistency is important. And the SCP Wiki does not have a consistency is important rule, because consistency is not important on the SCP Wiki. Anyway, that's my thinking on the subject. Thank you very much for watching. There's nothing wrong with you if you're a power scaler, by the way. I'm just saying you're going to have to contend with the idea that the SCP Wiki main staff and authors generally don't hold a dim view of it. And so you don't have to hide it necessarily, but you do need to respect how people are going to view you. But 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 for its slash decimarian at Pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Synderiki, 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.