 It's a rebellion against an oppressive foundation, or maybe it's just a group of people seeking to make themselves richer and more powerful at the expense of the downtrodden, or maybe it's just the SCP Foundation, but slightly more evil. Regardless of what you think of the Chaos Insurgency, there's about three or four different versions of it on the SCP Wiki, so today we're going to talk about how you're probably wrong about the Chaos Insurgency. The Chaos Insurgency is almost certainly more popular amongst off-site fans than it is on-site fans. We often talk about the difference between on and off-site fan bases, but this is one of the few instances where it's pretty starkly clear. I think a lot of that comes from the tactical nature of the Chaos Insurgency, its portrayal and stuff like SCP Containment Breach or SCP Secret Laboratory, those kinds of games which need some sort of competitor to the SCP Foundation, and in a way that doesn't really fit, say, the Serpent's Hand or the GOC. And early on in the SCP Wiki's history, the Chaos Insurgency had a more prominent role, mainly because the early SCP Foundation was portrayed as exceedingly evil. Now, I'm not saying that it's not still evil, but I think that it has been toned down considerably over the last 10 years to the point where the SCP Foundation today, you could make arguments that it's not evil. I don't think they're good arguments, but you could make them. Whereas, you know, 10 years ago, the SCP Foundation was clearly malevolent, the kindly... They may have said that their job was to protect the world, but they very, very seldomly actually did anything in that realm. So in those early stories, well, there needed to be something worse to compare it to. And when the end of the world wasn't the worst thing, like, in the sense that the world was normal and they wanted to have, like, a story with just two characters having a conversation about something, the Chaos Insurgency could be inserted as an idea of, yeah, the SCP Foundation is bad, but we're supported by First World governments. We only use D-Class for experimentation and all these other things. Think about the Chaos Insurgency. They support ten pot dictators across the world. They use, you know, political dissidents, and the only reason they even use anomalies at all is to acquire as much power as possible off the backs of impoverished and weakened nations. But of course, as the SCP Foundation softened, it didn't really need the Chaos Insurgency anymore. Over time, it slowly faded into the background. Sure, I'd get a mention here or there in a tale, but there's nothing really that focused on it for a while. And then, you know, things got a little bit more serious when the Chaos Insurgency hub came out. But that was just because people needed to. That was part of a contest where they were fleshing out all of the GOIs. And modern interpretations, and some of them are good and some of them are meh. But modern interpretations have tended towards making the Chaos Insurgency more of a legitimate rebellion against the SCP Foundation that looked at the SCP Foundation's behaviors and actions and said that that is wrong and we need to stop it from the inside. Sort of a serpent's hand, but insiders only. Which by the way, is part of the problem and the reason why the serpent's hand and the GOC get used much more often than the Chaos Insurgency. Not only is the Chaos Insurgency fairly thinly characterized in SCP lore, but their role as an antagonist are usually better suited for one of the other GOIs. If you want to talk about someone who wants to acquire money and power, you use Marshall Carter and Dark. If you want to talk about someone who wants to rebel against the Foundation's power, you would use the serpent's hand. If you want to talk about someone who is competitive with the SCP Foundation, but is a little bit more harsh as a comparison, use the Global Occult Coalition. So the Chaos Insurgency occupies this weird middle ground where there's really, it's very difficult to find what use they have in a narrative. Which is probably the reason why it's been rebooted about three or four times at this point because if you look in the, if you look in the SCP Wiki, the Chaos Insurgency was founded in, you know, the 1948, it was founded somewhere in the 20s and 30s, it was founded as part of a rebellion against the SCP Foundation at an unspecified time, and each of these are essentially mutually exclusive definitions of what the Chaos Insurgency is. Which honestly probably lends itself at some point in the future to a fourth interpretation where the Chaos Insurgency is uncertain in its history because it's, that's the anomaly evolving it. It's somehow, it's creators have concocted some sort of a plan to muddy up the waters of its origins. And that's how they stick around, because if you think about the Chaos Insurgency, considering how powerful the Foundation is, should have been destroyed already, right? Foundation should have easily taken the Chaos Insurgency down at this point. The fact that they haven't means something's going on behind the scenes, either more defections happen every, whatever. One of the more interesting things I've found about the Chaos Insurgency is that they tend to want to take advantage of the SCP Foundation when it's at its weakest, which is useful in the stories because the GOC wouldn't do that. They know, even if they disagree with the SCP Foundation, they're not going to go in and try and take over a site because, you know, the world might end. MC&D won't do that either. They won't want the world to end. Who would they sell stuff to? Even the Serpent's Hand understands that there are world-ending threats that the Foundation has to take care of. But the Chaos Insurgency gets to carry the idiot ball. They're the one group that literally goes, what? That site is experiencing a lockdown? They're having a containment breach? That means there's stuff for us to steal. And of course, then things spiral out of control and everyone dies. I don't want to say that the Chaos Insurgency has no real place on the SCP wiki because I don't think that's true. I think people could have a lot of fun with it, but honestly, so far every interpretation of it's been sort of one-off. Even the interesting ones are just things that you're like, yeah, it's really cool that you wrote it that way, but I don't see how I could continue to write about it or, you know, a dozen other authors could also write about it. It's really more of a you-thing, yeah, you've created something great, but you haven't created anything in the interpretation that makes it useful in my stories, I guess it's the best way to put it. But then again, that's about the individual authors too, like any author can come up with a reason to use them if they really wanted to, you know. If you want to use someone who's trying to acquire money and power, you could tell the story with the Chaos Insurgency instead of Marshall Carter and Dark, but it doesn't fit perfectly, you know. You'd have to change your story up, it'd be people who care a little bit less about the world, because they don't care if it's there, if when they're done. You know, I'd love to think about the Chaos Insurgency sometimes as like, if the world ends, right, the anomalies when they take over the SCP Foundation has ended, what happens to the Chaos Insurgency? Because they are incredibly reliant in lore and in reality on their opposition to the SCP Foundation, like the Serpent Sand is always going to have other organizations to go take on. The Chaos Insurgency is solely focused on fighting against the Foundation. The GOC is going to be containing anomalies no matter what. The GRU is going to be containing anomalies no matter what and doing their own research, but the Chaos Insurgency has no other purpose other than to act as a foil to the SCP Foundation. And unfortunately, they're not a very good foil, because they don't represent something that the SCP Foundation really needs to fight against, if that makes any sense. Yes, they have to literally fight against them, but it's not a philosophical discussion or any kind of a grand argument that needs to be made, it's just a turf war. And again, there are interpretations of the Chaos Insurgency as noble resistance against an evil SCP Foundation, the kind of thing that accepts that the SCP Foundation is evil and instead of trying to make the Chaos Insurgency eviler, they take the opposite approach. They are resistant because they believe the SCP Foundation is evil and they want to change things, but that's a space that's occupied by the Serpent's hand. Ultimately, I think the reason why the Chaos Insurgency has fallen out of vogue is simply that all of the possible things it can be used for are taken up better by some other organization, and you can write more compelling stories with those other organizations. Now, if you have a long tail series that follows, say, Foundation researcher or an agent or an MTF or something, if you have a long tail series and you inserted the Chaos Insurgency as some sort of a, let's say, a turncoat in the middle of your story, that could work, because then you have established the Foundation as a thing, but in one off stories, it's very difficult to use the Chaos Insurgency in any way that drives your story onward. Ultimately, the Chaos Insurgency is going to be always mostly best used as a foil in video games. They are a good video game antagonist for the SCP Foundation, but other than that, I don't know what else they can be used for that keeps me interested at least. Anyway, that's it. 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