 So I've said a lot of things in the past of Essentially about my opinions with regards to the quality of the work on the scp wiki and I've said numerous times And I still hold to it that the quality of the scp wiki is probably not nearly as good as something you would find on a professional Lee let's say professionally run website with professionally published Works, but of course that's always going to be true. It was always and when I use the word amateur I don't mean it in a negative sense. It's it carries weight with it that seems negative But it just literally means people who aren't getting paid to do the thing Being a hobbyist writer isn't a bad thing But it doesn't allow you a lot of leeway in quality Sometimes the stuff posted on the scp wiki is right up there at the same level of quality as a professionally published work By us to say let's just say Stephen King will use him as a great example. He's a well-known everybody knows Stephen King is a horror author of Some renown of high quality works. There's stuff on the wiki. That's as good as anything. He's ever written Okay, you might not have even heard of it, but it exists The thing is Just because the top level is very high doesn't mean the bottom level isn't very low and sometimes some of the stuff on the scp wiki is objectively very bad but one thing I've learned in trying to define the scp wiki as Sort of a collective group of fiction is that it often I think Gets discounted by a lot of people like me sometimes Because I think it is a natural evolution of something that has existed for a very long time and In a way it has perfected the art of the urban legend in a way that I don't Think any other modern media does So modern media and modern horror does a lot to Essentially take a novel idea most of the time not always it's let's let's avoid too many generalizations here But often can take a novel idea and turn it into something special two very popular horror movies of the last say four years a quiet place and get out take very novel ideas and Turn them around in a way that you don't expect Horror is not just about scaring your audience in some ways. It's also about social commentary. It's a reason why horror and science fiction meld together so well both of them can be very easily about social commentary and Part of that's why someone like me who doesn't particularly enjoy a horror Film story whatever you've got can still find a place on the scp wiki But as I was saying earlier the scp wiki does an excellent job of evolving urban legends into modern Quests and that's a thing about horror and it's also true about science fiction And I think it's I think in a way these two are interchangeable They definitely can do different things, but the natural evolution of the urban legend is something the scp wiki specializes in Oftentimes like the two movies I mentioned they will take a trope or Concept that's pretty well traveled and turn it around in itself in such a way as to bring the audience To a place they weren't expecting and that's the thing about horror Horror is one of those things that everybody Has a preconceived notion of if you're watching a movie and that I'm gonna use movies a lot because modern horror Yeah, there's books and everything but in modern culture Film and television is much more important if you're watching a movie and you hear That music rising and right in the video games do this too. You hear the music rising in volume strings for example up and up and up and up They reach a crescendo and they break and you know as It's rising what's about to happen and in a way the actual expectation of The actual knowledge pre-knowledge of understanding what's about to happen Gives you a little bit of a endorphin release when it actually happens You have an expectation that expectation is fulfilled your brain goes. Yes. This is what I thought was going to happen Horror does that a lot, but the problem is is that it means that the average viewer Knows what's about to happen next more often than not if you put a monster in a room with a person The monster is probably going to kill that person if it's killed other people before so What you do? Especially in modern horror is you take those and you twist it and the scp foundation wiki does an amazing job of Taking a concept and twisting it back on itself like that the problem and this is the disconnect I think between modern site authors and A majority of the off-site fan base who are only interested in the scp 173s and 682s and 106s and 096s Those are monsters and those are the same kind of prototypical monsters. You might find in say Urban legend like one of the earliest urban legends I know of and I'm sure there were more before this but this was around the time that you know print media became widely available To pretty much everybody in the late 1830s There was a something in London that was going around as an urban legend called Spring Hill Jack If you listen to the description of it You'll start to realize that sounds almost like it could fit into an scp article At one house the man rang the bell and on the servant coming to the door This worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a specter clad most perfectly The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned and was never from that moment been in her senses The affair has now been going on for some time and strange to say the papers are still silent on the subject The writer has reason to believe that they have the whole history at their finger ends But through interested motives are induced to remain silent Does that sound like anything you might recognize the script first of all Describes a story of a monster and then immediately thereafter says everyone in power knows about it But no one in print media is really talking about it because maybe there's a conspiracy to keep it quiet This is like almost 200 years ago So this kind of thing has existed for a very long time and urban legends are always like this the idea that and it It does harken back sometimes to conspiracies It has to of course a lot of things do the idea that you know some secret knowledge that nobody else has Which also makes you feel good about yourself, but the scp foundation isn't just the monsters and it isn't just the cover-up This is the kind of thing that would fit very well in series one of the scp wiki But the scp wiki has developed since then that's not to say that this kind of thing doesn't still have its place Problem is that there's you know 1500-2000 or so of these it sprinkled throughout the database with a lot of them in the early parts So a lot of things have been done the expectations have been fulfilled and subverted and done every which away You know you could find eight different versions of God on the scp wiki you can Continuing on and on and on but and this is the important part The scp wiki makes this work better than any other modern Fiction I think because it is constantly Evolving the problem and the disconnect between modern authors and the off-site fan base Is that it is changing and that they want the old stuff to be popular forever but the scp wiki Has and the fiction on it has to adapt or dies and because it is Creative Commons publicly sourced and allowed to evolve over time. It has survived. Thankfully It's important and I think it's part of what makes the scp foundation wiki a modern horror masterpiece the idea that it can evolve with the times and the quality and subversions of Expectations because horror is always about trying to surprise your audience in some way Not necessarily in a jump scare way, but surprise is incredibly important to making it work So once you can do that surprise your audience and continuously surprise your audience You're doing the right things Anyway, that's it hit the subscribe button Period I'll usually say hit the subscribe button if you enjoy this kind of content No, no, no, just hit the subscribe button. You know what I like my stuff. You'll like my stuff I don't care. You're gonna like the stuff I put out in the future. Hit the subscribe button I ain't asking and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash D Sumerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has including Dr. J redacted VV and Cinderique who have all pledged $100 and Morgan who has pledged at $40 It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Thursday