 Hello, my name is Dr. Samarian, and we've really got to stop pretending that series one is a bad thing. And regardless of what kind of content you think the SCP Wiki needs more of, all of us have heard the term series one used in a way to denigrate others' works. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've done it myself, but I'm starting to think it's wrong-headed, and I'm gonna explain why. So first of all, the idea that series one is a single type of article is kind of silly. They're not all horror, they're not all censored to heck, and they're not all purely magic items or monsters, and most of all they're not all bad. Is there maybe a higher number of bad series one articles compared to today? Yeah, probably. That's a natural function of the way the voting system works, though. As standards rise, people don't often go back and re-rate old articles. And even if they did, the nostalgia goggles preclude much re-evaluation, but that is somehow translated to an unspoken understanding among some of today's writers that series one is synonymous with bad writing. So first of all, just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's bad, and just as you're liking something doesn't make it good. I know there's a certain level of self-awareness you absolutely have to have in order to critically evaluate writing, and that goes up against the fact that, you know, we're trained from an early age to tie our sense of self-worth to things we like. And when someone tells you that something you like sucks and your mind is gonna take that as an assault on you, but push that out of your mind. It's okay to like something that's not very good. Now, second, lots of crappy writing is popular in and outside of the wiki. The quality of the writing in something is only one component of a piece of media's success. No one's gonna argue that at least some of the Transformer movies are hot garbage from a writing standpoint, but people enjoyed them, and they all made money. Now, understand that despite all that, good writing is one of the components of success. You can succeed with mediocre or bad writing, but success will come easier and quicker if your writing is good. The very important thing to understand is simply that success and quality are not the same thing. But Flash Fiction has its own sets of standards and rules and guidelines when it comes to creating quality works. You can do things with it that you'd never get away with in a short story or a novel. And while it's still emerging as a mainstream or relevant form of writing, it's not the Wild West out here. There are definitely things you should and shouldn't do, so there is definitely good and bad writing in regards to it. And SCP articles are a further divided subset of the Flash Fiction format, and when that division comes a new set of norms, rules, and guidelines. And over the past decade, that format has altered and changed and been twisted into weird new things that the earliest writers never considered. And I think that's great, but the improvements don't make the older things invalid representations of the format. Imagine if we polite that kind of thinking to film. I mean, just like series one, there are some god-awful early films. Reef for Madness from 1936 is a genuinely bad movie. But it's bad for reasons outside of the format. Early films try to translate stage acting to film unchanged, and sometimes they came up short. The staging of some early movies is terrible, the blocking of scenes is often haphazard, not well thought out, and an over-reliance on physicality, especially in the earliest of films, instead of dialogue, led to things that at the time may have seemed moving and emotional, but today they just appear silly. And often times the writing wasn't suited for the format. We can even examine a classic like The Wizard of Oz and understand that it has a huge number of flaws when a modern perspective on acting and filmmaking is applied to it. But we don't do that. Now to be fair, we're talking about almost a century of artistic evolution versus a single decade for the wiki. But the internet moves fast and I feel it's still a very applicable comparison. But let's talk about some exceptions. The first Star Wars movie was a triumph of science fiction. It combined fantasy adventure with a space setting in a way that few had ever thought of before, and then no one had successfully brought to the big screen. Now that kind of mishmash was something that had rarely been seen before at that time, but of course the earliest film in that series had an insane amount of editorial oversight from producers and creators who were not George Lucas. Film and the world has changed a lot since 1977. In the late 90s George Lucas decided to alter his original work in a way that fit more modern standards of special effects. Now if he had just done that I doubt there would have been any backlash. However he was also at that point freed from most of the editorial oversight that had altered his earlier work. And he decided to make certain changes to the story and characters with smaller tweaks. Now some of you aren't getting vibes from the SCP-049 rewrite at this point. I don't think you're paying close enough attention. And you might ask, why is it okay to rewrite SCP-049 for modern standards when I just said that applying modern standards to older works isn't the way what should view them? Well there are two salient points here. One, George Lucas and Gabriel J, the guy who wrote 049 originally, have a right to do whatever they want with their original work. And by the way the versions you still like are still available for viewing or reading. I mean check the article history for 049 if you want to see the original version. It's right there on the page. And two, I'm talking about people other than the creators applying those modern standards. It's unfair to creators to treat their early works as somehow indicative of their abilities. No one looks at the original Star Wars from 1977 and says that the special effects are bad because George Lucas doesn't know how to create convincing digital special effects because that would be crazy person talk if it was 1977. Yet if a creator wants to make those changes, we let them. No matter how much you love or hate a piece of fiction, it doesn't belong to you unless you're the one who created it. And especially to those of you who denigrate the series one style or feel a smug sense of superiority when someone says SCP 173 is their favorite SCP, knock it off. You're not helping change minds with that attitude. Imagine you have someone who's never seen film before and the first things you showed them were the earliest silent works. They would be amazed and they would love them. And without living the intervening years and seeing the gradual evolution of film over time, do you think you could convince them just straight up out of nowhere that there's better stuff just by saying, well, that's bad and this is better? Because I don't think that's possible. So in a summation, series one is not really a good or a bad thing. It's just the history of our form. And that's all. If you liked the video, be sure to hit the subscribe button and follow me on Twitter at D-Semarian. Thanks for watching.