 Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the video. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about, well, there's an understanding amongst authors on the SCP Wiki that tales tend to be much lower rated than SCPs. And while this is, generally speaking, mostly true, a lot of people who aren't on the Wiki or aren't involved as authors in general, might not even necessarily understand what exactly that means. So I thought I would talk a little bit today about the differences between tales and SCPs, and also maybe a few of the origins for the belief that tales are going to be lower rated than an SCP. And we'll start with the definitions of what each of these things are. So an SCP article, I think if you're on this video, you probably know what I'm talking about. An SCP article is the classic that starts with a special containment procedures, has a description, probably includes a couple of addendums these days, and so on and so forth. An SCP article is a particular format of story that fits in with the universe of the SCP Wiki itself being sort of a accidental release of documents. However, a tale abandons all pretense generally. This isn't necessarily 100% true all the time, but a tale tends to abandon all pretense of it being an official document and just tells a story of some kind, usually flash fiction length, but can be short story. And I believe some tale series probably start to approach novel length approach, but probably not quite reached just yet. The thing is, most people come to the SCP Wiki for SCP articles. And tales sort of become like an afterthought for like a lot of people. Moreover, SCPs are a lot easier to come back to, to find later and share. Whereas a tale might not have necessarily a very distinctive name, might not even leave, even if it doesn't leave a particularly strong impression on you, you may not remember it, you know, a year from now. Whereas an SCP, if somebody brings it back up again, you're probably be more likely to remember what it is because of its unique formatting. So a part of the reason why SCPs get more views, and therefore more upvotes, is that people come here for that particular type of content. But it's also true that I think more people come to the SCP Wiki for flash fiction than they do for other types of content and other types of content still do pretty well. So why is it that tales don't do as well? Well, part of that is that there is no need in the modern day to expand on SCPs anymore. When series one was first starting, an SCP article, we can use SCP 343 as an example, it's probably one of the best examples of this. SCP 343 as an article doesn't contain very much content. Like it is as almost as bare bones as it can possibly be. There's a slight implication, not a slight implication, there's a fairly strong implication that SCP 343 isn't what it purports to be, but that's about it. And so when SCP 343 came up in tales written by some of your original authors on the SCP Wiki, those tales were necessary in order to have a full understanding of what SCP 343 was. The article didn't stand on its own. Modern articles stand on their own, generally. You're not going, and this is something that a lot of new authors get in their heads and also get wrong, like I'm going to write a tale to expand on this SCP I just wrote, but not usually a good idea. It can work, especially if your SCP is very popular. And by very popular, I don't mean like plus two or three hundred, I mean like plus a thousand. Two or three hundred these days is just sort of like, you know, flavor of the month, you know? It's very successful and it's something that people can aim for, but it's not necessarily like iconic the SCP levels. So someone will get something that will rate it like 20 or 30 and they're like, Oh, I have a successful SCP. I should write a tale about it because everybody's, no, not everybody is noticed your SCP, but that's neither here nor there. Writing a tale about an SCP means you probably didn't do a good enough job of creating a narrative around your SCP in the first place. And that's necessary these days because not only. So it's very easy to say, okay, well, SCP shouldn't contain a whole narrative anymore. But that forgets the fact that the SCP wiki has way more authors today than it did when it first started. When there was just a couple dozen authors on the SCP wiki, it made plenty of sense that you could write a tale and expect people to read it, right? Because maybe a tale was posted every day or even every other every other day or every few days. So there wasn't such a wide range of content to view. But on the SCP wiki today, there's probably five, six, seven, depending on the day could be more could be less tales written per day and probably at least that many or twice as many SCPs, there's too much content to read on that level and basis. Now, does all of this mean you shouldn't write SCPs or you shouldn't write SCPs or you shouldn't write tales? No, it doesn't mean either of those things are true. There's no, I don't think there's a way you can draw a conclusion that says either of those things from this. And a lot of authors and by the way, a lot of fairly successful authors and doing this have been successful doing it, which is something I'm not a big fan of have started to write their tales and use like a very loose SCP framing for it. In fact, some abandon all pretense of the SCP format and still use an SCP slot to ensure that they get the views on their tale that they think it deserves. Now, I'm not sure I really don't like the tail as an SCP on the SCP wiki trend will call it. But I do understand the impetus for it. When you have this idea for a really fun story and then you realize that no one's going to read it because it's not going to be posted into an SCP slot. It's reasonable for some people to, well, it's reasonable for some people to think this at least, that maybe they should put it into an SCP slot anyway and find a way to make that work. And to varying levels of adherence to the premise that the SCP wiki is, you know, this secret governmental organization that accident or I'm sorry, not governmental, but secret extra governmental organization that accidentally let its records out. Sometimes the framing is very loose. Like it's just an excuse. I like to use the term excuse SCP. Someone will have like an interview log or a series of notes from or a series of journal entries or something like that that they really want to use. And they really want to that's that's what they actually want you to get to. So the SCP, the special containment procedures in the description are extremely short. And then you get into this really long tail essentially tail at the bottom of it. Because people just don't have enough confidence that people will view their works if they posted it outside of an SCP slot. And then again, some people like us when day breaks essentially abandons the entire premise of the SCP wiki at one point. And it's just a tail telling a story. And that's fine too. Again, I have a few issues with that as a concept. I feel like there should be clear delineation. But at least I understand why it's done. And again, whether what I feel should or shouldn't be is less important than the fact that, you know, when day breaks is wildly successful. So the fact that it's an s essentially a tail in an SCP slot doesn't really matter. Not only just not only in an SCP slot but in an 01 slot. It is what people want to do. Is there a solution for this? I don't think so. Getting people to read a tale is actually quite difficult for the average author in the SCP wiki. I have a pretty good track record of getting people to read my stuff, but I have a fairly wider reach than most people. So I don't know. But that's the the difference that some of the problems. And I believe it's incredibly important that SCP authors continue to post tales because if they don't, the SCP wiki, you don't get better as a writer writing solely SCPs. Let me put it that way. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be just an SCP writer on just the SCP wiki. But I feel that everyone not feel I certainly hope that everyone wants to improve their writing. And you're not going to improve your overall skill at writing by just writing SCPs. You can get very, very, very good at writing SCPs. And maybe sometimes, depending on how you do your, you know, journal logs or interviews and so on and so forth, you can get better at writing dialogue and get better at writing a tale like or should say short story like pieces. But in the end, if you don't abandon the crutch of the format, and for some people, it's a crutch. And for other people, it's an incredible impediment. But a lot of people have a lot of difficulty writing the SCP format. So it's not a universal thing. But abandoning it, I think, allows you to become a better overall writer. And I think that's incredibly important. I feel like it should be the primary goal of most people in the SCP wiki, but I know for sure it isn't. A lot of people are very happy with being amateur writers on the SCP wiki and doing whatever it is that their day job is. Me personally, I'd like to just be a better writer every day. I don't know how well I hold to that, but it is what it is. 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 I have a question for my audience today. I was talking about the differences between SCPs and tales and I've got what 60? I don't know. I've got more. At this point, I've got more tales in the SCP wiki than I do SCPs. I've got like 40 SCPs and maybe like, wait, that doesn't sound right. I have like 125, 130-ish articles altogether. I feel like 70 or 80 of them might be tales. But one of the things I've been thinking about, and this is something I'd like to ask the audience, is returning to doing critique as a Patreon reward, because my Patreon has been slowly going down and down and down, which is probably a result of my reduced posting, but the reduced posting had, you know, a pretty good reason given what happened back in July. But now that I'm back, I'd like to try and get my Patreon numbers back up. I'm wondering if you guys would be interested in the kind of feedback services that I provided when I very first started the Patreon actually. And going back to doing that, it would be like, 5,000 words probably for the $10 tier, and then probably a little bit more in-depth feedback, but the same word count for $20 tier and so on. Yeah, let me know in the comments down below if that'd be the kind of thing you're interested in, and I very well may push that in the next video. But thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell so you're notified when I upload new videos, and then head on over to patreon.com and forward slash de-sumerian and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has, including Sanjiriki, who has pledged $100. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I will see you all again on Tuesday, I promise.