 Hey there Foundation staff, Sherm here and welcome to our new show, Researchers Notes. The quickest way to describe the show would be the discussion section of an SCP meets a book club. Each month we're going to approach two SCPs suggested by the community and discuss their themes, stories, merits and pitfalls to get deep into the mechanics of writing an SCP. I'm going to give my thoughts and I'm also going to give you guys a chance to voice your opinions as well. On the Site 42 community, I'm asking for requests for SCPs to be covered, a 30 second to 1 minute audio recording of your thoughts about the upcoming skip, or a written transcript that you'd like me to record. You can get these things to me through the Site 42 Discord server, link in the description, or you can email them to scpsite42 at gmail.com. I'll be revealing the next SCP at the end of the episode. For our inaugural episode, we're going to be tackling SCP-2571, Kraglewood Park by user TheGreatHippo. If you haven't read that one yet, this would be your chance to pause this video, follow the link below to read it, and then come back. You're back? Let's go! For a quick tone check, here's an opinion from Site 42 Discord member Tidorite. Kraglewood was an interesting story. It reminded me of a discount theme park where everything is a knockoff and slightly creepier for it. Plastic wooden trees that want you to stay forever in the forest whether you like it or not. And don't worry about parental supervision because the trees will watch over you. Unless you've got the good sense to run the f**k away. Thanks Tidorite. All set to go a bit deeper? Let's dive in. The summary of the skip goes like this. A disturbingly large amount of people have a childhood, memory, or dream of visiting a theme park that doesn't exist, with a bunch of children they didn't know. It's fairly spelled out for us that the children were all sibling pairs, and that one sibling had to sacrifice themselves to save the other. By the end of the story, we realize that those that made the sacrifice stayed behind, rode the carousel in the middle of the park, and at least in one of the reported memories became one of the park's creepy tree people themselves. This also caused them to be erased from some facets of existence. Their sibling doesn't remember they existed, but at least one of them had a bedroom that their sibling was trying to ignore due to the park's influence on his memory. For some thematic thoughts, let's turn to user Pinko from the Site 42 Discord server. SCP-2571 is an SCP that I find interesting thanks to all the themes it touches. Recurring nightmares, distorted memories of a distant childhood that could either be true or a sick fever dream you misremember. Combined with the creepy reputations of circuses these days, along with perhaps a perverted twist we have of making everything childish terrifying as we grow older, think of clowns in the recent years as an example, and you have one unsettling bad boy. Immediately, the containment procedure seemed a tad odd. A bot named IOMandela is to monitor the net for discussions of the SCP. For somewhat a bit savvy, this small detail, perhaps a reference to the Mandela effect, can already provide clues as to what the SCP does, or at least the themes it will touch. Otherwise you have your standard Mobile Task Force team, whose nickname, The Laughing Stock, seems to be a bit of good old fashioned dark humor after a few readings. The first line of the description reminded me of Candle Cove, which, after verification of the discussions, is on purpose. This creepypasta that floated a few years ago about a bunch of adults on an online forum, remembering watching a TV show for children that got more and more messed up. And now as I'm typing this out, I'm also reminded of SCP 993, Bob All The Clown. Of course this SCP 2571 takes its own twisted approach on the matter, which makes it so it comes out strong by itself. The SCP came into full swing to me with the logs, as I slowly realized what it was doing. I have many siblings, and the fear of losing them is very real to me, as they're some of the most precious people in my life. Reading about those people slowly realizing what the SCP was along with me was a bit of an odd experience to say the least. The video log only cements this, without ever revealing too much. Many SCPs straddle the line of not showing enough, but this log certainly helps envision what's happening, along with adding another layer of mystery to the park. How real of a location is it? Are parallel universes involved? Who is filming if there is no parental supervision? What's the point of the laughing? How do they know which kids need to go on the carousel? I can't comment much on the ending of the SCP with the singing, however. 437 seems to be its own can of worms, and speculating about the two would be interesting, but that's more meta than I usually invest myself about when it comes to SCPs. A solid thanks, Pinko, you've given us a lot to think about. To expand a bit on some of the themes Pinko mentioned, thematically, there are a lot of classic touchstones of horror that make this stick with people on a personal level. Things happening to children are having a great heyday in pop culture between Stranger Things and the new It movie, and a quick perusal of the amusement park of doom list on TV tropes will show you that nearly all of humanity as a whole hates abandoned creepy theme parks. There's also an added bonus of the fairly recent addition to the cultural lexicon, the Mandela Effect, a great reference Pinko mentioned that I hadn't seen. This is the phenomena of a group of people sharing the same false memory, something we now discover more and more in our modern connected age. Look up the spelling of the Berenstein Bears, or a film where Sinbad played a genie, to dive head first into that rabbit hole. Another big plot point related to the Mandela phenomena is a creepypasta called Candle Cove. Mentioned earlier by Pinko, it's confirmed as an inspiration by the great hippo, and it's referenced within the skip in the mobile task force named Laughing Stocks. This is the name of a pirate ship character in the creepypasta. Candle Cove is structured like a discussion thread about this show that everyone seems to remember from their childhoods, and how weird it was. And the description starts to spiral into weirder and more horrifying episodes as it goes on. The Stinger is one of user mentions that their parent told them that they used to sit in front of a TV for 30 minutes watching static. If it wasn't real, how could everybody remember it? Personally, I am a big fan of the skip, even without a real personal connection to anything that was written. That being said, there are critiques to be found for any piece of work, and looking at them can help us construct better stories in the future. One critique levied at this piece is that without an emotional connection to the subject material, it can be seen as formulaic. Spooky carnival, creepy trees, child kidnapping, memory erasing. You can say that the story has got a heaping spoonful of tropes to be sure. Now, I won't always come to defense against the critique in these videos, but for this one, I do want to point out that tropes are not bad, and that a proper understanding of story structure, i.e. formula, is imperative to writing well. A formula is a formula because it works. As a creative writing community, we may be more prone to, quote, seeing the code as they say in the matrix and being able to tell what's going on from a mile away. While this isn't a mind-bending skip, it definitely plays its horror hand the way it's supposed to be played. To cap off this opening episode of Researchers Notes, I'd like to close with a generous contribution from the great hippo himself. These are his thoughts that he contributed. It's weirdly personal, but simultaneously not. It's not based on any experience I've actually had, but rather experiences people I care about have had. Like most of my horror skips, it's centered around a fairly banal type of horror, the horror of children having to make terrible choices to protect each other, and the way families will often respond to this horror by covering it up and acting as if nothing happened. I don't expect it to resonate with everyone. I think its biggest strength is probably its dream-like quality, the sense of things not making sense, but still operating on some sort of internal logic we just can't see. I think its biggest weakness is, one, the use of pictures makes it feel gimmicky, and two, a lot of the elements can feel very arbitrary, and if you don't buy into it from the start, it's probably just gonna fall flat on its face. I will say that although the elements can feel arbitrary, they really aren't. Everything in the piece was chosen for a specific reason, except that the craggles are trees. I picked that literally just because I found scary pictures of trees. However, that doesn't mean much if those elements don't work for you, so I understand if anyone thinks it's just a creepypasta that's trying way too hard. I can't thank The Great Hippo enough for corresponding with Site 42 so often, and that wraps up the first episode of Researchers Notes. Let me know what you thought about the show in the comments as well as, please continue discussing your thoughts and feelings on SCP-2571. New Researchers Notes episodes are going to release around the 15th and the last day of the month. You've got about two weeks to read the next skip and get your recording or transcript to me via Discord or email. Don't forget to check out the Site 42 Patreon, Merch Shop, and Discord server, and the next SCP we'll be dissecting is SCP-3300, The Rain. See you next time, Foundation staff.