 Dr. Bright, Dr. Light, Director Carlisle Actus, Dr. Clef, Dr. Sumerian, Tilda Swinton-Moose. There's almost an endless list of SCP characters named after their authors. These are the well-known senior staff. And there's a lot of preconceived notions about what it takes to either create an author avatar on the site or what senior staff means in universe. So let's talk a little bit now about how you're probably wrong about the senior staff. You know what's interesting is that senior staff can get very confusing when talking about the SCP wiki because while it is a selection of people who are generally considered important in universe, it's also the terminology used to define the actual administrators of the site, which we're not talking about today. We're just going to be talking about the actual in character in universe people. So what makes an author avatar stand out? Well, in a general sense, you need to have a character that is different than other characters. There are a lot of people who write a brand new author avatar and that character is just the same as any other character. There's nothing special about it. Now, I'm not saying that your character has to have something special about it. You just can name someone and tell their story and then go from there. But the problem is that there are so many stories about particular characters that kind of stuff tends, unless you're a very good writer or you just happen to look into writing something very good, that stuff tends to blend into the background. Dr. Sumerian is a character I did originate on the SCP wiki, but I didn't take an early hand in developing him because I felt like creating an author avatar of my own and making him be good at this or could that would be a little bit gauche for a new author. This was way back when I was new. So I just introduced the character a little bit subtly in a couple of places in some tales. And then I waited for other people to write the character, which is something that actually happened. And once other people began to write the character, I started to adapt my own version of that character into something that I felt was more realistic. Now the character itself had one thing going for it that differentiated it from pretty much every other character on the wiki. Not all, there are a few others. But it was that Sumerian is a member of the Ethics Committee. So most of the doctors on the site are just researchers, but my character was created specifically as a member of the Ethics Committee. I began to develop lore behind his joining the Ethics Committee from pretty much the start. But I also learned something important in a sea of characters. Having no differentiating purpose for a character means that people kind of forget about it. Imagine that you're a new author on the wiki and you created your author avatar and it's fine. It didn't your article or your tail didn't get downvoted, but you've inserted yourself into the SCP wiki's lore now. But it can't just be you. If you want something to be successful, it has to be adapted by other people. And that's another big thing. When people ask for permission or they start putting big old conditions on how you do or don't write their characters, it's why whenever anyone asks me if they can write my character I always just tell them yes, you can and don't even bother to ask me about it next time. Just do it. It's fine. From other people's writings to enhance what I already have of the character, like you're doing me a favor. You're adding character development in elements that I, you know, not everything I'm going to use, by the way, then there's no canon on the wiki. But if I see somebody writing Dr. Sumerian and it's something that I like, I'm going to use it. But a lot of new authors create these bland generic characters, maybe they insert them just and this is the problem. You insert a character into an SCP, an SCP makes it very, very difficult to really give any kind of characterization to your character. The problem is you can't just do it that way. If you were, for example, to write it into a tale first and develop the character into a particular personality and then people become familiar with that personality and then you can use them in an SCP article in such a way that the shorthand of people understanding who that character is informs their decisions and reactions in the SCP article. So like with Dr. Sumerian, there is a SCP I remember reading that I didn't particularly like because it didn't make much sense that it was still in containment the way it was done. I thought, you know what, I don't understand why that it was a bear and her grand no, it was like a girl and her grandfather was a bear. It's been a really long time since I remember this, but this is something that I used to help inform the character. But it came from me specifically because I read the article and I thought, I don't understand why this character is still under containment. That makes no sense because the girl was not anomalous, essentially. It's just her grandfather was a bear. So from my own personal, like out of universe perspective, I used that to inform Dr. Sumerian. So then Dr. Sumerian is like, why would that character still be in containment? We need to deal with this on an ethics level. And Dr. Sumerian has continuously evolved over time. For the first four or five years of his existence, he was just a generic character. And I think one of the main things that at least recently has led to him becoming much more popular on the SCP wiki beyond the fact that a lot of people who are fans of my channel actually write for the wiki now or are beginning to write for the wiki now is that I had character art of him. And this is an interesting thing that I didn't think of beforehand, like you can create character art of random generic character. But if there's something about him that sticks out or something about her that sticks out, then it allows the character to stick in the mind of people beyond just his personality. So with Dr. Sumerian, as you can see on the screen right now, he has burn marks on the left side of his body. I never explained why or how that happened, but they're there in a little bit like, say, Dr. Clef. Images of Dr. Clef are very noticeable because Dr. Clef, when you take a picture of him, his anomalous effect is that the pictures of his face are random other things. Or Dr. Bright, when you see a picture of Dr. Bright, you know it's Dr. Bright because he's wearing, he or she actually, is wearing the necklace. That's how you know. And this is part of the reason why I think mainly SCPs are a lot easier to identify because they are so distinct. But when you have 20 guys and girls in white lab coats, they all look exactly the same and there's nothing to differentiate them. But if you have three guys standing next to each other and in the picture, one of them has a horse head on, one of them has a big bright red necklace on their center of their chest. And the other one has a big burn mark down the left side of his body. You can immediately, without even having to worry about knowing much about the character, know which one is which. And I only point this out because I see a lot of new authors even successfully writing their author avatars onto the site, doing it in a way that I think sets them up for failure later on. But it's important to remember that doctors, even senior staff members, not even talking about like junior staff or anyone in the in between, aren't perfect. Like there's a lot to be said for the, oh, Dr. Bright is crazy and wild and blah, blah, blah, or Dr. Kondraki is a murder hobo. But in the end, those characters have been around for almost a decade. And they were written by writers who basically founded the site in a way. So they get a little leeway of the way they do things. But when you write your character, it's fine for it to be distinctive. But you shouldn't go too over the top with them. Like Dr. Sumerian, and I'm always going to speak for my own experience on this. Dr. Sumerian is a crack shot with a pistol. He's an action hero in a couple of different tales I've written. But also in tales I've written and in articles other people write, Dr. Sumerian dies a lot. That's the there is no canon thing. And I throw that in there because it's important to me to make sure that Dr. Sumerian isn't quote unquote overpowered as a character. And this happens to other characters as well, depending on the canon. Dr. Sumerian dies in, I don't know, four or five different articles. And by the way, a lot of people join the site. Well, they don't anymore, I'd say it's actually a lot rarer now than it used to be. But a lot of people join the site with a doctor name. But a lot of people don't join the site with a doctor name. And then they try to adapt their current username into a name for a doctor. One of the best examples of that is obviously Dr. Carlisle Actus, which is DJ Cactus's author avatar. But frankly, there's nothing about director Actus that really reminds me of DJ Cactus, director Actus, I believe, is an old, old man. So like there's a big difference between those two characters. But then you have Tilda Swinton Moose, which is a silly name. But that's the deadly Moose's author avatar. And they do share some similarities, because that's the other thing. Senior staff, just because they're named after a person like an actual username doesn't mean that they have to be like that username, which is fine. When you're creating a character like this, it's important to remember how to differentiate it from yourself. And I've got plenty of developed backstory for Dr. Sumerian, but I don't let it overshadow what I'm writing either. If it works, if it fits in, great. If Dr. Sumerian works is simply a ethics committee guy to come in and complain about stuff that's ethically incorrect, that's also fine. But if I'm focusing a story on him, he's not just an ethics committee member anymore. He's a character that needs to be fully fleshed out and developed. And a lot of this can come from senior staff work because we know them already. So we look at them and we go, OK, well, this is the character in this story. This is a character in this story. And this is how they react in the next story. And it makes sense because that character has a personality outside of his job or outside of his stories that he's already been in. Like together, they collectively make a character that works. But don't for a second think just because they're senior staff that they automatically get away with stuff like there are cannons where that is accurate to say, but it is not all cannons. And that is ultimately the most important thing to say about any senior staff member, any one senior staff member, Dr. Clef, Dr. Bright, Dr. Condraki, Samarian, Actus, Light, Moose, you know, name anyone you want to. They don't exist as a single character. They exist as multiple characters across multiple stories with multiple different interpretations of the characters. So if you prefer wild and crazy, Dr. Bright, great, but you need to understand that not everyone does. And that is not canonically all he is. Anyway, that's it. 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