 It was dark before I could get home to the churchyard stairs, and there, to my great trouble, I met a dead corpse of the plague in the narrow alley, just down a little pair of stairs. Samuel Pepis. Welcome to episode 012 of the SCP Foundation. Today we're going to talk about SCP-049, the plague doctor. It should be noted that this article got a rewrite yesterday, involving both the original author and DJ Cactus. We're going to talk about why the old version was problematic, and why the newer version is objectively better. Now a fair portion of this episode will contain my own opinions and thoughts about the SCP Foundation, the SCP Wiki, and the writing process, regardless. Remember that there is only one real rule in the SCP universe. There is no canon. Part one, pathology. So let's start by establishing some facts. SCP-049 was posted to the Wiki on December 10, 2009, and SCP-049 was, even prior to this rewrite, over plus 1000 in rating. Now that doesn't actually mean much, ultimately, because there are numerous bad articles on the site that are very highly rated. There's also nothing wrong with liking it in its original form, I should make that note, but I want to talk a little bit about why it has the rating it does. So if I were to sum it up in two words, I'd call it coincidence and inertia. Exact data is hard to come by for the whole history of the site, because the best tools we have for tracking voting trends can only go as far back as mid-2015, but this article is rated at just under, plus 400 at that time. It has in the last three years gained almost 700 upvotes, so part of this is certainly due to the character being included in a game called SCP Containment Breach, and the resultant popularity amongst the SCP fan community, which sometimes feeds into itself, and I'm by the way not saying that that's a bad thing. And also the character is fairly popular on YouTube channels, including, most prominently, the Vulcan, for whom SCP-049 is a regularly portrayed character. I'd also like to caution against giving too much credit to SCP Containment Breach. Now, prior to the August 2016 update of that game, the character pretty much appeared in exactly one location, and the mechanics around it were pretty bland. The character was in a place you generally needed to traverse in order to progress in the game, but SCP-049 wasn't a huge factor in the game's story or gameplay, and once you made it past the guy, that was it. So, unlike SCP-173 or 106, which are omnipresent throughout the game, or SCP-096, which was incredibly memorable, SCP-049 was largely forgettable as a character. However, in August of 2016 came the 1.3 update to SCP Containment Breach, and that all changed. In today's build of the game, SCP-049 shows up in numerous locations throughout the game, and he is designed to genuinely sneak up on you in at least one important story location. Also, the AI is more complex than approach player like it used to be. Essentially, it's important to say it's not a forgettable character today. But despite all of this, SCP-049 is almost universally understood by modern SCP writers to be bad. This can be seen in the voting data, which thankfully I grabbed before the rewrite has shifted the trends because it's changed significantly over the last day. But there were a total of 88 upvotes and 87 downvotes from wiki contributors. That gives you a net of plus one. Now as a share of total votes, that means about 8% of the articles upvotes came from people who have written for the wiki, or 8% of the total number of people who like the article have actually written an article for the site. But almost 60% of the article's downvotes come from people who have written for the site. But enough data and history and trends. Let's talk about the writing and why writers tend to not like it. Part 2. Pestilence. First of all, we're not going to do a line by line reading of the original version and point out every problem. There are some basic mechanical and structural problems with the writing, but if you want something like that there'll be a link in the description to DJ Cactus's deconstruction post. We're going to talk about why the article no longer worked from a modern writing perspective. SCP-049's original draft fell somewhere between a character based and a descriptive article. The core of it was essentially just a weird thing, but it filled out some of that with an interview log with the object itself. Like a lot of earlier site works and especially some of the more popular ones. SCP-049 acts as a blank slate and ultimately we don't really know what it looks like under the mask. We don't know what its real motivations are. We don't understand what the pestilence is, even though it seems to be a driving force for it. Now this kind of description will always allow the reader to fill in some of the blanks themselves. Further explanation is given to the object's obsession with the pestilence, though no hint is ever given as to what it is. Nothing's necessarily wrong with that because again it allows the reader to play with the concept, but we're getting now into the realms of defining nothing about the character's motivation. Here we get into the major differences between older site attitudes towards writing and today's. When the SCP Foundation was first being written, there was a big focus on creating blank slate characters that could then get fleshed out by fans in their own headcanons and by writers and tales. Literally the fourth oldest tale on the site is just a story about Able and importantly this was an incredibly vital aspect of the wiki's earliest days and part of why it was successful. But why that worked was because the circle of writers and the number of articles was remarkably low. When you have just a couple hundred characters and objects to play with, you can write almost any of them into a story and have someone else in the community recognize it, but then the community and the article list grew. Which is why about halfway through series two the wiki began to shift in a serious way towards more story and character based articles. Just creating the potential for a story was no longer enough because the wiki already had that in droves. Now the article itself needed to tell a coherent story to stand out. By the time series two came around almost every article needed to up its game and now that we're halfway through series four, a trend doesn't appear to be reversing anytime soon. All of this helps explain why by modern site standards at least, SAP 049 and a large number of the more popular older articles just don't stand up to scrutiny. And also why a fair bit of the fandom still treat the wiki as a monster manual. The more time you spend exposed to site culture the more weary you're going to get with this kind of setup that never really pays off. But from the outside you can pick out just a few objects you like and obsess over them. Perhaps you'll spend hours talking about what the pestilence really is or you'll ask yourself what set 049 on its path. There's nothing wrong with this approach. Your fun isn't wrong but neither is mine. And treating the old version of the article like it contains any answers to your questions is treating it like it's something beyond what it is. There are no definitive answers to those questions because the author never put any in the article. The author never even hinted at those answers. The lack of meat means there is no objective truth with regards to the article. And then argument you had with your friend about what the cure was involved two people with both correct and contradictory opinions. So now let's talk about how the rewrite alleviates that issue. But first are you enjoying the essay so far? Great. But here's one thing. There's a little foundation logo in the bottom right of the video. Mouse over it and then hit the subscribe button if you haven't already so you can see when I upload new content. And if you like this sort of thing hit the like button so that YouTube's algorithms pick it up and show it to more people. Alright. Thanks. And let's get back to talking about SCP-049. Part 3. The Cure. What needed to be done to update the article to modern standards was fairly simple. Just lean heavily into the character-based aspects of the article that already existed while fixing a number of the technical issues that we're not going to get into in this episode. We're not reinventing the wheel here. Switching it to a mostly narratively focused SCP would have been a poor choice. And in the hands of a lesser author we probably would have seen some sort of back story shoehorned in that betrays the article's potential. But DJ Cactus's rewrite includes two lines that really set the stage for everything that comes after them and they're pretty easy to miss so I'm going to go over them now. The first one. SCP-049 is generally cordial and cooperated with Foundation staff. That sets a baseline for what we understand SCP-049 to be. The second line is SCP-049 has expressed frustration or remorse after these killings. These very simple lines set up a baseline personality for the object and the following sections follow up on it. Now it's important to remember that in an SCP article there is going to be some necessary exposition in the description because that's what a description is. You just got to be very careful with going too far. Now in the interview logs you'll see that the baseline is expanded on. I mean SCP-049 is incredibly friendly. He sees the Foundation staff whom the reader is likely very familiar with as compatriots and co-workers. His oblivious to outside factors and single-minded focus on curing the pestilence is framed very well in juxtaposition to the Foundation staff who have their own sort of single-minded focus with regards to anomalies. So he finds a kindred spirit of sort in Dr. Ham and the interactions Ham has with SCP-049 help build up its personality. It should be noted before I continue that a rewrite like this has some very difficult limitations to overcome. One needs to stay true not just to the original concept but to a more undefinable feel of the original. And while SCP-049 is incredibly poorly characterized in the original it's not completely without character. After all there is an interview log. So with this sort of rewrite the best option is always to ask yourself could I see 049 as I've imagined say these things and do these things. Cactus its nail on the head with the rewrite and nothing that SCP-049 says or does really feels out of place. However this leads to how the character develops along the way. It's not enough to just say he kills people and feels remorse for it. You have to show the audience or they're never going to really believe it. This is why the earlier interactions with Dr. Ham are so important. The two build a rapport and you can almost imagine 049 thinks that they have a friendship. And then SCP-049 kills Dr. Ham. And 049 through a monstrous act somehow becomes more human than before. Because yes of course he's going to say that the death was necessary but he says it with a twinge of regret with just a hint of maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't quite last. Because the most human thing to do after doing something incredibly horrible is to deny that it was horrible at all. So he falls back into his earlier characterization. Pestilence has to be stopped after all. The world must be saved. This kind of back and forth of regret but justification is pretty much necessary if you're planning on portraying realistic characters that do terrible things. When we talk about the great villains very few are simply evil for the sake of being evil. The vast majority are complex characters who often do not really enjoy the things they do. Or perhaps they even wish they lived in a different world where they didn't have to do those terrible things. And that's a thing that's really very simple but in practice it's very difficult to pull off. And yet when you look at the voting trends SCP-049 has gone up almost 200 votes in the last day alone. And the net rating from site authors has increased from a net of plus one to plus 70 or so. Which would seem to indicate that Cactus's rewrite has been successful in improving the article. Part four. Recommended reading and credits. First of all all SCP wiki works used or referenced in this video are under a creative commons attribution share like 3.0 license including the following recommended works to which you will find links in the description. You should definitely read SCP-049. If you'd like to see what it looked like originally before this rewrite you can scroll down to the bottom and view the history then just hit the V on revision 58. And I mentioned this before but a lot of this video was inspired by a post from DJ Cactus on his own site. Check out both parts of his SCP-049 deconstruction post. My name is Christopher Clayton Morris though you may know me better under the pseudonym Dr. Sumerian. This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 attribution share like unported license. Thanks for listening. And everybody knows that the plague is coming. Everybody knows that it's moving fast. Everybody knows that the naked man and woman are just shining out of fact of the past. Everybody knows by Leonard Cohen.