 Ahoy-hoy and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about how everyone's favorite anti-reality bender isn't anomalous. So let's get started. Dr. Clef. Well, you know what, maybe before we talk about Dr. Clef, we need to define what we mean by anomalous. As it turns out, I was in the middle of a couple of discord discussions over the last couple of days, and the idea of what is and isn't anomalous actually varies a little from person to person. I like to think of it as anything that exists outside the normal rules of science. SCP-177, let's use an example, probably the most easily recognizable example, the thing where everything comes from on the SCP Wiki. SCP-173 is described as a statue that produces feces and blood at its bottom if left alone and which moves when you're not looking at it. Now that basic description is not anomalous. You might be like, how's that possible? Statue that moves when you're not looking at it has to be anomalous. There are implied additions to it that make it anomalous. First of all, there is no explainable mechanism by which it moves and there's no explainable mechanism by which it produces its waste. The lack of an explainable mechanism is what makes it anomalous. So for me, the idea again of a statue that moves when you're not looking at it, I mean by that description, there could just be a guy that runs in, grabs a statue, moves it, runs back out, and then you turn around and the statue's right up on you. It's ridiculous but possible. So until you know for sure that that's not happening, no explainable mechanism, as I just said, then it's not anomalous yet. It's just an oddity that needs to be studied. And that's what the SCP Foundation does, it studies things. There's also an argument to be made, though I'm not sure I'm ready to make it. There's also an argument to be made that once you understand the inner workings of the anomaly and understand the rules that it follows, it is essentially no longer anomalous. If you know the rules that it follows, and more importantly, I should say, you can understand that other similar objects follow the exact same rules or at least very similar rules, then that class of objects is no longer anomalous, not really. Now, for the outside world who don't understand the reasons you've found, it's still anomalous. But for the people who understand it, it is no longer anomalous. It is explained. There's even an explained classification system on the SCP Wiki. So now, how does this apply to Dr. Clef? Well, first of all, we have to examine two of his abilities as listed. Dr. Clef in most canons, I'd say more can, he has two abilities. And in one of one of them is not commonly used or seen enough that I'm willing to dismiss it, which makes it easy for me to say he's not anomalous, because I'm basically dismissing something that he can do in some stories that is straight up anomalous. And that is the one that I'm discounting is the when you take a picture of him, a random, his head is randomly transposed to something else. So there's the horse head, the spider head, there's a whole bunch of different stuff with Clef. That's more of a joke, not really taken seriously in universe. It's in a couple of serious tales, but not often. And part of that is because, well, I mean, there's not a lot of tales in which he is photographed. It's the easiest way to put it. But that's easy to put the twist aside, but his second anomalous ability, the one that is most commonly attributed Dr. Clef is that he is himself immune to the effects of reality warpers. A reality warper is somebody essentially who can use, it's hard to explain exactly magic for lack of a better way to put it. Can think a thing into existence, think something out of existence, create objects willy nilly, move things with their mind, just the ability to through thinking change the world around them, except for certain things. Now, this originated from the concept of brilliant bronze on the SCP Wiki, which is a substance that is supposed to be immune to reality warping. Brilliant bronze is an actual metal in the real world. It's an alloy of copper and beryllium, which oftentimes other things included. But the important thing to remember is that objects that are immune to reality warping are also considered sometimes anomalous. In this case, we're talking about Dr. Clef as well. And I was making some arguments back and forth, and there was, there were a lot of good arguments on both sides, but I still fall on the side that I started with. And that's that. If we assume that someone being unaffected by anomalies are themselves anomalous, then we have some really serious work to do on our definitions of what is and isn't anomalous. I think anyone who is unaffected by anomalies is by their very nature the least anomalous person that they can be. They are or the or substances the least anomalous substance that it can be because it follows the rules of the universe explicitly. There are no reality warping abilities, no magics that can break through. And Dr. Clef falls into this camp. Now, a lot of people will say that Dr. Clef is anomalous. And outside of the image over his pictures saying he isn't because he's immune to certain types of anomalies. In fact, I believe he's immune to basically any type of reality altering anomaly period. Now, the thing about Dr. Clef in most stories is that he utilizes his anomalous mis-resistance to terminate reality benders. Because in SCP stories, a reality bender is the most powerful thing you could face. It's somebody who can rewrite reality on a whim. They could change history really. They could change anything about the world except for the few things which are immutable. I also think there's some arguments to be made about like how reality benders react to one another. Like, can you erase another reality bender from existence? Probably not or else there might only be one. It's a highlander thing. There could only be one. If you think about it, that's very true. Let's see if we can get this right. When it comes to a reality bender, you only need one who thinks to themselves, maybe there are other people like me and I don't want to be erased and has no compunctions morally about getting rid of the other people. Here's the other half of this. This is more or less about the argument that Dr. Clef is an anomalous. I think I've already covered that pretty well. But there was an extension of this discussion that I really particularly enjoyed. That's the idea that, say, a beryllium bronze bullet is used to kill a reality bender. If your reality bender is capable. This is a serious question. There's actually an article on the wiki of a suspended bullet which is, I believe, I should have read it once when I linked it yesterday. I believe a bullet used by a GOC operative to kill a reality bender who didn't react quite in time. They reacted quickly enough to affect the bullet, but not quickly enough to keep it from entering into their skull. Here's what happens. If your reality bender or in your universe, your reality benders have the ability to react in time to stop bullets and your thought is, okay, I'm going to use something that's immune to reality bending to kill them instead. That'll work most of the time, but there's always going to be somebody using something non-anomalous in an anomalous way. Let me explain this. You can shoot somebody and they can't use their powers to stop the bullet because the bullet is made of something they can't stop, but they can fool your brain into thinking they're there when they're actually over there. They can fool or not fool, but they can create a barrier of mundane material. They can bend the air around the bullet to push it out of the way. Everything but affecting the actual object. This is true of Dr. Clef, and it also explains why in a lot of stories, even using Dr. Clef who is immune to reality bending is not a guarantee that you're going to get rid of the reality benders because Dr. Clef still needs to breathe, right? Can't affect him, but what if I pull all the oxygen out of a sphere around him, or super heat it, and so on and so forth? He's immune himself to the actual effects of reality bending. I can't take his arm and turn it into glowing hot magma that kills him instantly, or I can't take his blood, let's say that. I can't take his blood and turn it into glowing hot magma that it instantly kills him, but I can turn the air around him into glowing hot magma, or this ground underneath him into glowing hot magma, and it has the same purpose. The trick is, of course, reality benders aren't used to encountering these things, so if you can surprise them with the ability, surprise is the key factor here, and for the bullet SCP, that's what they did. They weren't using beryllium bronze, they used a regular bullet, but the guy didn't know it was coming, and that's the important part. Anyway, that's part of a little bit of a side discussion that I quite enjoyed, but more importantly, I don't think you can consider Dr. Klepp anomalous, but I bet, I bet that a lot of you disagree with that, and if you do, let me know in the comments down below with your explanation of why, and hit the subscribe button. If you'd like to see more videos like this, hitting the subscribe button is the easiest way to do it. 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