 If there's a mascot for the SCP Foundation, beyond SCP-173, I'd say it's probably SCP-682. The hard-to-destroy reptile shows up in fanworks all over the internet, in video games, and in stories on the wiki from time to time, though. In modern times, not as often. The truth of the matter is, with the wiki's no-canon approach and the plethora of fanworks out there featuring it, what SCP-682 even is can sometimes get muddied a little bit. So let's talk about how you're probably wrong about SCP-682. SCP-682 must be destroyed as soon as possible. That's the first line of the special containment procedures for the article. It's a line that, I think, at least, launched a few hundred bad SCPs and quite a few mediocre tales, because it's supposed to subvert the Foundation's normal mission statement, which is secure, contain, protect, not kill, kill, kill, which is something they drive home in quite a lot of articles. But somehow, the lesson taken from it wasn't that this is a subversion of the normal standards, but rather this is a replacement for the current standards. And almost, almost, not all, but almost, every article that's tried to do the same thing has failed. To be fair, SCP-682 is incredibly dangerous, but is it more dangerous than any of the world-ending SCPs or the incredibly powerful reality benders out there? No, not really. Before I dive too much into my own opinions about this article, let's talk about what it actually says in the description. SCP-682 is a large, vaguely reptile-like creature of unknown origin. It appears to be extremely intelligent. Appears to be is important here, because older articles, especially like this, attempt to use the word appears to be as a way to make it seem like it's got good clinical tone, but really, it doesn't. It either is or it isn't. Does it hate people? Does it act like it hates people? Whenever you use the word appears, it means you think there's a strong possibility that it isn't the thing that it appears to be. But anyway, it appears to be extremely intelligent and was observed to engage in complex communication with SCP-079 during their limited time of exposure. SCP-682 appears to have a hatred of all life. Does it appear to have it? Or does it have it? See, the problem with this sentence here, SCP-682 appears to have a hatred of all life, which has been expressed in several interviews during containment, is that it's longer than it needs to be. You could just say SCP-682 has expressed a hatred of all life in several interviews during containment. Bam, you're done. The usage of the phrase appears to have means that there's a possibility in your head that it isn't actually what it appears to be. SCP-682 has always been observed to have extremely high strength, speed, and reflexes, though exact levels vary with its form. SCP-682's physical body grows and changes very quickly, growing or decreasing in size as it consumes or sheds material. So it just literally repeated itself. SCP-682 gains energy for anything it ingests, organic or inorganic. Digestion seems to be aided by a set of filtering gills inside of SCP-682's nostrils, which are able to remove usable matter from any liquid solution, enabling it to constantly regenerate from the acid it is contained in. I'm not really sure how that works, but we'll just chalk it up to magic. SCP-682's regenerative capabilities and resilience are staggering. And SCP-682 has been seen moving and speaking with its body 87% destroyed or rotted. I mean, I guess from that I can understand why you have a destroy it all costs preferred solution, but I mean, the monster hates all life and can adapt to literally anything we throw at it. The thing is, though, as I said earlier, the SCP Foundation isn't usually in the business of destroying SCPs, and I don't understand anything in this article, nothing in this article really makes you think that the first solution should be destroy, destroy, destroy. SCP-682 not only breaks the mold, it sets the wiki up as some sort of silly deathmatch where we throw everything against 6A2 just to see what happens, and god, like stories where they're just ex-SCP versus other SCP is really silly and stupid. I don't know who would do stuff like that. What's stranger to me, I suppose, is that, as I've said, it's not the most dangerous thing in containment. There are so many more dangerous things in containment, we don't constantly say, let's destroy it or let's kill it. Let's take a look real quick at the, uh, at the breach logs so we can get a better understanding of, oh my god, really? So, see, this is why no one likes, well, not no one, but this is why most authors don't like series one. Using black boxes like this is so, could you imagine trying to get through? It doesn't tell you anything, you could have just, that's a lot of wasted words in page space when you could just say it killed a lot of people. Like, I'm sure, do it scientifically, you know, whatever you want to do. List off the names of the people that have died, but like, it killed a lot of people. That's all you needed to say. I want to talk a little bit here about my primary issues with SCP-682, especially when it's used as some sort of a example of good writing on the SCP Wiki. SCP-682, I think, beyond SCP-173. Like, people will point at SCP-173 or Able or this or that or the other thing, and they'll be like, that's the reason why there's bad writing on the Wiki. Every single bad draft that I've ever seen shares something in common with SCP-682. And not just the article proper, by the way, but also the testing logs, which are filled with just god-awful tests. I mean, there's one test where a doctor sends children in to a cell with SCP-682. And then we're supposed to feel good, I guess, at the end of it when I think it's Dr. Bright or maybe Dr. Kleff. I can't remember which one exactly goes in and sends the doctor that sent the children in and says, I'm killing you now. What kind of institutionalized problems do you have when that was even possible in the first place? The thing is, SCP-682 tends to strain credulity a little bit too much. And it doesn't even do so in a way that makes you think that the world is possibly a risk. And also, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the title of the article isn't the Hard to Destroy Reptile, but the Immortal or Impossible to Kill Reptile. Because every single story containing SCP-682 shows it surviving. Well, not every story. There are a couple. But those are literally successes because they are exceptions to the rule. They're the subversion of the expectation. SCP-682 doesn't die. And nothing in its original article tells you that that's necessarily the case. Yes, the acid doesn't kill it, but it damages it so much that it's basically inert as long as they keep it in acid. But anyway, that's enough of my opinion about the article itself. There's one other thing about it that I think a lot of people don't know, and I'd like to go over it really quickly. See, ask yourself this. What does SCP-682 look like? You've seen the image on the article, obviously. You've seen fan art after fan art after fan art. And so you might think questions answered where I know what it looks like, but not really. First of all, it changes form constantly, so it doesn't look like any one thing. And it's hard to say that it looks or acts like a reptile. Even in the article itself, it only says it's a reptile-like, not a reptile. But everybody wants to make it look like a crocodile. But if you look at the caption on the image itself, it says SCP-682 shortly after escaping from containment, still recovering from acid immersion. This means that what the picture is on the screen is just similar to what you might see when it's in acid. And that's after it's adapted to something else and turned into a particular looking thing. And by the way, just for a meta point here, the providence of the image that's used in it is actually kind of questionable. I'm going to throw two versions of that image up on your screen right now. The one on the left is the site's version of the image, cropped down just a tiny bit from the one on the right. A charitable interpretation of cutting someone's watermark off of an image, which by the way is much, much worse than just misusing an image and not knowing where it came from. Though that's still stealing, it's just the kind of stealing that most people don't consider to be such. When you cut a watermark off, you're saying to yourself, like, I know this belongs to someone else. I am 100% sure of what I'm doing. They put a watermark on here so I could not steal it, and I'm going to cut their watermark off. Anyway, let's assume, charitably, that the original author grabbed the cropped version from say a forum somewhere where someone else had already cropped it. The image sources back to a Russian site called EnglishRussia.com, though where they originally got the images is actually not well defined and they may not own a copyright on it. See, the images there came with a little blurb about the source. This creature was found by Russian soldiers on Sakhalin shoreline. Sakhalin area is situated near to Japan. By the way, this is originally translated from Russian, so there may be a few translation errors. I'm going to read it as translated though. It's the most eastern part of Russia, almost 5000 miles to east from Moscow. Russia is huge. People don't know who is it. According to the bones and teeth, it is not a fish. According to its skeleton, it's not a crocodile or alligator. It has a skin with hair or fur. It has been said that it was taken by Russian special services for in-depth studies, and we are lucky that people who encountered it first made those photos before it was brought away. If you're actually interested in alternate views of it, there's actually a whole gallery of them. I'm going to put a few of the better angles up on the screen right now so you can actually see what it looks like from different angles, but the full gallery can actually be found in a variety of locations on the internet if you look. I'll link one of them in the description below just so you can look at all of the images if you'd like. And by the way, most people agree that it's basically a beluga whale. It's just a rotted corpse of a beluga whale, which is a lot less interesting than the possible other interpretations, but it's almost certainly the correct one. Anyway, just going to give you one conclusion here. If you enjoy SCP-682, either in concept or you somehow read it and you actually enjoy reading it, I'm not judging you much, that's fine. But do not, under any circumstances, attempt to emulate it in your own SCPs. It can be very difficult for you to understand that just because you like something doesn't mean it's good. Like, it's okay to like bad things. I like plenty of bad things, but I also know not to try and replicate those bad things in my own works. It's just how I know not to do it. I might enjoy watching those sorts of things or reading those types of things, but I'm never going to try and put them into my own works because I know they're bad. Weird how that works. Anyway, that's it. 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