Comment by Barbing
8 months ago
Oh wow. That’s why I’ve not been able to appreciate SCP writings?
Hey I accept it’s a limitation I have, and I’m glad folks enjoy it! But I couldn’t figure out why folks share it on Lemmy[1] and get so into it when I saw nothing there.
Thanks :)
[1]: open-source & Rust-y reddit alternative; no affiliation
SCP is the culmination of the epistolary novel, like Dracula, via the videogames convention of making "lore" (i.e. backstory and worldbuilding) unobtrusive and scattered through the game in audio logs and diary entries.
It places the reader in the role of detective, rebuilding the sequence of events from partial, scattered, obscured, and out of order viewpoints.
I'm not sure there even is any particular sequence of events to rebuild in the case of SCP. It's a universe as opposed to a story. There's no central plot to discover, and more than a few SCP sequences even have their own largely isolated plots.
If someone doesn't enjoy a fictional universe being elaborated on in a general sense with near zero plot and certainly no central "story" then I guess they will not enjoy the vast majority of SCP entries.
> Oh wow. That’s why I’ve not been able to appreciate SCP writings?
I feel like there's a pattern (genre?) there that's been niche-popular for for 15-20 years now, which includes TV shows like Lost or Heroes or The Lost Room. It's some variation of magical-realism, for an audience that always wants more and more surprise or twists or weird juxtapositions of normal and abnormal, room for crafting and trading fan-theories and predictions.
But eventually, it gets harder to keep up the balancing-act, and nobody's figured out how to end that kind of story in a way that satisfies, so the final twist is the lack of resolution.