268 posts
Have a present thing throughout the rest of the comic being small panels showcasing various bug perspectives/her sense with bugs, then the water hits and it’s just her water obscured view with nothing else
Imagining a nice segment of the comic adaptation of the Leviathan fight as seen entirely through Taylor's water obscured lenses as carnage ensues
You’re right and I agree with you but I wanted to try and justify it so this is a quick and not super thought out explanation, it could be him being with Dragon and chasing the Nine are meant to be him at his peak while the Leviathan fight is his lowest point
it’s been pointed out how him being in Brockton was the worst possible option for him, stuck in a dead end position with enemies he’s not really suited to deal with, no one he’s really close to, all his shit with Dauntless and dealing with the recent ABB crisis and everything else, all just emphasizing his worst traits, the Leviathan fight is the bottom of a years long spiral with it being his seeming salvation, getting him respect and removing problems only for it to go wrong
meanwhile him hunting the S9 with Dragon is both him out of that situation but also putting his traits and abilities that got him to that point to full use, he finally has someone he’s close too, he’s making real progress using his abilities (both hunting the S9 and helping Dragon) he’s doing something that will earn him respect and glory but tempered by having Dragon there to reign him in and an actual focus on finishing the job
admittedly him and Dragon are still weirdly similar it is to his supposed trigger event but still this is all just random surface thoughts and probably wrong jut thought i’d try to justify it
i do feel like colins arc is a little weird. i don't have anything against transhumanism as a concept, past finding a lot of transhumanists as People really annoying, but I find it odd that mannequin comes to colin, goes "you and I are the same, and you should do the same thing I did and become less human", and then Colin does, and the story kind of treats it as a value neutral choice. in isolation, i would totally find replacing your body with robot parts to be value neutral, but we're not operating in isolation, we're working with a scenario where the bad guy told colin to do this thing, he does it, and it doesn't... mean anything. in fact, his identity as defiant is meant to be a better version of him, a humbler one, compared to colin as armsmaster. it's just very odd narratively -- it makes me wonder if wildbow is quietly a die-hard transhumanist and didn't want to introduce dissonance by condemning a transhumanist action even in a context where the narrative positions it as part of a corruption arc, or if he had enough transhumanist followers that he didn't want to tick off by doing that (im leaning towards the latter but i dont know when exactly yud recommended worm to his devotees within the storys publishing history)
in addition and separately to that, its super fucking weird that the PRT says that they can't account for colin because he escaped and there's this sense that he's gonna Do something and/or possibly leave the city without knowing about the s9s condition that no candidates can leave the city, only for him to.... literally never at any given point show up during the s9 arcs after his arc 11 interlude
hey really cool theory, to build on it using a point from I think @artbyblastweave edit: sorry it was @estavionpira
Etienne is always in control, his original plan with Valentina is for the two of them to rule, afterwards it’s for him to be one of the people who “really” matter, when Heavy gets shot Etienne is in a very convenient king maker position, and so on,
Now it’s not clear if Etienne does this on purpose or if it’s just a happy accident that he keeps being in power but if your idea is right and the Queen really would’ve succeeded, then maybe Etienne realized and wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to not disrupt his own power
Of course that does kinda make the whole thing a little boring if it was just “Etienne is a power hungry dickhead” but still thought its interesting
There is something about this page...
I think we're going to find out that the "Queen" did not 'choose' to enter a bad trip, and that she was pushed towards it through some type of manipulation.
The first panel looks like she received some type of relay, especially if you take into consideration the little splotch of white against the ink black backdrop, right along where the eye meets temple. It looks almost like a bloodstain. Did she get shot with a psychic bullet that gave her an invisible lobotomy? That caused her to have a personality shift in the following third panel?
My first instinct is to lay the blame at Etienne's feet. We know he has mental powers, she looks to be suffering some kind of psychic damage, and he was suspiciously... absent... in this issue. He appears in three panels, only speaks in two. What he says is that "if they have the chance (to kill her) they should, because she's an unknown variable".
I think that this "Queen" could have achieved her goal. I think she could have made Heaven on Earth. And Etienne gamed the risks out in his head and calculated that there was a slight chance she could go nuclear down the line and cause the end of the world, so he sets her off early and - while the entire continent of Europe is lost - it's an acceptable loss compared to the entire planet they would have lost had she been allowed to continue her mission and, somewhere along the line, she goes berserk.
We already know he is the type of person to kill one victim instead of four when faced with the trolley problem. An acceptable sacrifice.
HOWEVER
I also have this nagging suspicion about the "Queen's" origins, and it has something to do with this panel -
"...I was asleep through the whole thing."
ASLEEP?!?!
If Masumi was in Japan the same time Isabella was, then we know that the "Queen's" shift happened in the day. She blocked out the sun with her display of power. Not to say that Masumi has an average sleeping schedule, but on its face the excuse just makes no sense. If the "Queen" really was tearing reality apart, I don't see how the resolution of this conflict would take longer than a few minutes, maybe a few hours at best (unless we see something involving the Pyramid slowing the "Queen" in the next issue).
So what if Masumi was in a different kind of 'sleep'?
We know that when Masumi feels intense despair, a kaiju rises up to destroy things. This has happened before. However, in her appearances she hasn't really had great leaps of emotion in any other direction, like intense anger or intense happiness.
What if she can manifest different creatures based on how she's feeling, and this "Queen" was actually a 'kaiju' representation of her ecstasy? Or what if this was her original power, and something happened that made it flip and only be activated by despair? Did someone interfere? Etienne?
I want to draw some attention to a panel from a previous issue that was about Masumi, at her gallery debut. Look at her eyes.
Familiar, right?
Even the backgrounds are similar.
And thinking about how the Power Fantasy is a pastiche of super heroes but especially X-Men, mutants, and their dynamics. Etienne is Professor X, Heavy is Magneto, etc.
I, at first, assumed Valentina was the Jean Grey. The Omega with godlike powers, much like the Phoenix.
However, the Phoenix has had a storied history throughout the Marvel Universe, as a bringer of life and of destruction.
So what if Masumi was the Jean Grey of Power Fantasy? And the evolution of her power is that ANY intense feeling causes some type of psychic creature to appear?
And she was 'asleep' throughout the Second Summer of Love because she was channeling the "Queen" in Manchester? And something happened to her which then affected the "Queen", turning her into a threat? What if this was Etienne's doing?
This is all conjecture, but conjecture is all I have right now while trying to fill in the missing gaps of 'The Second Summer of Love' that have yet to be provided using the clues available to me.
We know Val was there, and she was not just an acolyte of the "Queen" but also in love with her. Heavy was busy with his kid but he showed his support of this growing movement for love, sex, and drugs. Magus wanted her gone, but he also sacrificed a LOT of his own people to stop her and it hit him HARD he wanted her out before she became a threat. Eliza sold her soul to take the "Queen" down.
That just leaves Etienne and Masumi. What were they really doing during the 'Second Summer of Love'?
Just finished The Power Fantasy #7 and it’s a really good look on both Eliza and the Second Summer of Love, and I’m so glad they didn’t just have the Summer be a cop out “the queen was just evil and everyone was too dumb to notice”
just remembered this old clickhole video i used to be obsessed with
does this count for another one?
Chai tea bag + lil but of brown sugar + apple cider packet + 16 oz. mug of hot but not quite boiling water
it will not Fix You but like. maybe. maybe.
woke up today and realized that tumblr entirely killed fuck ya life bing bong so here ya go again
Daughter of fantasy villains decides to rebel against her parents by actually going through with her arranged marriage to a local golden retriever of a prince instead of running off with some local villain-to-be or conquering said golden retriever’s kingdom and ruling it solo like her parents expect her to. Plus, sue her, she’s into the clean-cut earnest look.
At the same time, local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane, he would never have guessed a spiderweb pattern could look so fetching on a ball gown…?
Meanwhile, two pairs of parents in a tizzy because they both expected their offspring to whole-heartedly reject this union and give them an excuse to conquer their goody-two-shoes/evil neighbours, they’re not supposed to actually like each other-!
I remember a Astro City comic that also dealt with regular people having access to super tech stuff but being Astro City it explicitly addressed how this stuff wouldn’t get out and would stay in the hands of Superheroes and Supervillians
Now one thing I find really stylistically interesting about Batman Beyond, is that a lot of the mechanisms by which the supervillians do their thing come part-and-parcel with the cyberpunk setting, rather than being an aberration resulting purely from the superheroic genre elements. This is the future of a quote-unquote "present-day" DCU, meaning that they've superficially addressed the question of why all the cutting-edge supertech used in the cape scene never seems to see mass adoption by the civilian sector- forty years later, it has. This means that It's never hard to grok where any given villain is getting the resources necessary to execute their gimmick; these people are flashy by our standards, but they live in a world where everyone has access to flying cars and antigravity drones. Half these people are doing the cyberpunk equivalent of going killdozer with repurposed industrial equipment, or kludging together something with off-the-shelf stuff from radio shack, or mounting a machine gun on a technical truck, and literally in the middle of typing this sentence I started the episode where there's mass-market off-the-shelf animal gene-splicing that would have been a whole-ass individualized origin story in the time of Batman: The Animated Series. Even one-off mutants like Inque and Blight are well-understood within the context of the setting, to the extent of Inque being able to make a knockoff of herself on the go.
This is dystopic. Beyond the genre-typical surface-level megacorp domination of society it's dystopic. On the meta-level it's the same dynamic as Superman: The Animated Series, where the reason there's a sudden uptick in weird costumed crime concurrent with the protagonist's debut is purely Doylistic- the hero needs punching bags. But within the logic of the setting, there's nothing special about Willy Watt's decision to go full Carrie using a hijacked construction robot besides the fact that he had somewhat easier access to the thing than the average school-shooter. Spellbinder being able to put together functional illusion-and-mind-control tech on a high-school counselor's salary- when his entire complaint is that he isn't being paid enough- implies that the main barrier to anyone else pulling the same brainwashing stunt is that nobody else thought to. Shriek's sound suit might be more a more roundabout demolition tool than dynamite, but it's still powerful enough to bring down buildings and he created it as a fly-by-night contractor. The consumer tech base is evolved to the point that regardless of when Batman shows up, shit like this should literally never not be happening- they're past an inflection point. I remember Syndrome from The Incredibles having some kind of line about this
Like these are all pretty obviously intentional writing decisions
Ursula and Sam are meant to be foils to each other one who’s pragmatism and seeming focus causes more trouble than the other who’s more relaxed and willing to accept and explore the world
In the Bramble they specifically have an object that keeps you from being crushed and yet Sam panics and rushes almost dying while Ursula stays and sees something beautiful afterwards they get in an argument where Ursula says something she clearly doesn’t mean in the heat of the moment and IMMEDIATELY TRYS TO APOLOGIZE FOR IT only for that to be interrupted by Sam getting taken
Similarly with the spores Ursula wasn’t going to die without Sam, Sam does almost nothing to help her besides giving her something they most like discovered together, since again as we see Ursula is the one who explores the planet and life on it, being biologist in the ship as we see in flashbacks
And Sam doesn’t really get punished for Ursula’s flaws or his own it’s because the planet is a living thing and nature is dangerous, that’s the point whether you react perfectly or not things will happen and you’ll get hurt, for the egg monster it’s because they needed a way out of the storm, their other option was a cave that almost every creature that needed shelter would have gone for almost guaranteeing another confrontation meaning either way it was a shitty decision
Meanwhile Hollow (Kamen’s Creature) and Kris are again acting for very specific intentional writing decisions, Hollow’s a metaphor for addiction, grief and how humanity can warp an ecosystem with Kamen causing it to grow larger than it ever should have and changing its behavior to go to the ship it never would have otherwise
Meanwhile Kris is meant to be a selfish asshole to show how that doesn’t work out, they end up drifting alone and starving in space seemingly being taken by a cult for being an asshole
And even besides writing decisions all these character make sense within the show by looking at how people would react to an incredibly stressful situation of being stuck somewhere with little to no hope of escape
now that it's being moved to netflix and people are talking about it again, all i'm seeing is glowing praise and absolutely no criticism of the writing. i will gladly agree with anyone that it's visually stunning. like, a+ in that regard no argument. great looking show, and the worldbuilding of the planet vesta is super cool and clearly considered. i like those parts! but that seems to be all anybody is responding to when they praise it.
the character writing is fucking ridiculous. i could point at any of them individually and go "what the fuck is this" but it's been months since i watched it and i don't like arguing a point i can't clearly remember. but it was the most egregious around ursula so i'm going to focus on her. her character seems to exist just to cause problems for no reason, to the point where she's also the only character we get no backstory on. we never see her in flashbacks on the ship, never learn what she did for it or why she was there, nothing about her at all. she is the only one.
and she is the #1 source of shattering my suspension of disbelief. you cannot tell me that she and sam were surviving together for a month on this incredibly hostile planet, working together every day to call the ship down, to figure out how the world worked and what was dangerous and what they could use.... and then tell me she would turn around and treat him the way she does.
spoilers below the cut
she is so hostile toward him all the time for no reason. she wanders off to go look at a weird plant in the middle of a bramble that crushes you if you don't get out the right way, leaving sam alone on the outside with no idea what she's doing or where she is or if she's alive. and when she comes out and he is VERY REASONABLY upset that she did that and isn't interested in hearing about the thing she saw, SHE gets mad at him and says she doesn't need him.
YOU DONT NEED HIM? THE GUY WHO HELPED YOU SURVIVE THIS ENTIRE TIME? THE ONLY OTHER LIVING HUMAN ON THE PLANET AS FAR AS YOU KNOW, WHO IS THE ONE WHO KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE GOING, AND HAS THE CREDENTIALS TO GET YOU INTO THE SHIP? you have been alone with him for a MONTH, he is your ONLY HUMAN COMPANION, and you think you DON'T NEED HIM?? BECAUSE HE WAS WORRIED ABOUT YOU IN A LOUD WAY?
this could be explainable if there was any real tension between them, or if we're given any reason to believe she actually could survive without him, but there isn't! she fucks up with the spores in the very first episode and would absolutely die if she was alone. sam is never anything but a good leader to her and keeps trying to look out for her, and any time he's "wrong" it's because he showed reasonable caution about the fuckplanet. he gets hurt by the egg parasite because he didn't want to climb into a giant animal's egg sac. reasonable thing to not want to do! when he and ursula get into that argument about her disappearing on him, he gets hauled off by the weird emu for the dramatic irony. because he was upset his only companion in the world disappeared. he never does anything wrong. it's never his actual character flaws that he gets punished for, it's only ursula's ~trusting your instincts~ shit that ever gets him hurt. she is ultimately responsible for his death but the show never acts like it.
so much of the show seemed to be drama for drama's sake. do not get me fucking started on kamen's creature. what was that thing's fucking problem. what was kris' fucking problem?
if i have to ask 'what is their PROBLEM' at every other character's choices, your writing is not good.
Annabell, a solid white and completely deaf pit bull that used to let mom draw on her belly
The World’s Ugliest Tom Cat, who turned out to be the cuddiest teddy bear of an animal
Cocker spaniel named “Captain”
Stupid, the Cat
Litter of baby raccoons
Three more cats
A completely bald and extremely anxious canary that sang beautifully, but only at 4 AM
Baby Squirrel that grew up in the house and then refused to move out
A Genuine Thoroughbred Racehorse who was a spectacular athelete but had a habit of running races in the wrong direction. Benny turned out to be a terrific trail horse instead.
Turtle
Snapping Turtle
A bucket full of 43 goldfish left over from the fair. Mom counted once they were all in the bathtub in the backyard with the snapping turtle.
Another cocker spaniel named “Major”, who had the tremendous talent of eating green beans silently
Red-tailed hawk he found on the highway, and sucessfully nursed back to health and released.
Dummy, Son of Stupid
Strange, the dog that lived under the porch and only came into the house at night.
An “abandoned” baby deer.
Spooky, an alleged dog.
Joey the parakeet whose tricks were 1. drinking tea out of a tiny cup 2. threatening to peck out people’s eyes 3. wearing hats
A Really Big Toad he found behind the factory, because the other auto workers were discussing using it for target practice. Mr. Grumpity was guardian of the rosebed for several years and granny’s (his mother) favorite animal he ever brought home.
Gretchen, a St. Bernard that had to be shaved from her prior owner’s neglect, and spent a week hiding from sight with such success in the house that they thought she’d run away.
Arson, Burglary and Murder, three frankly adorable little kittens. They did not change the names, much to the regret of the cop who lived three doors down.
Yet another Cocker Spaniel, named “Colonel”
Cardinal (bird)
Canada Goose (Demon)
Once in the nursing home, he had a “pet” 12-point whitetail buck that would come to his window to be fed corn and get headskritches, inexplicably named “Florence”
The marriage only ended because thier time on earth did. He never kept an animal Grandma wouldn’t allow and if anything she was worse about it. She was the one who brought home a tarantula.
the need to talk about the characters vs the fear that all of my analysis is just empty prose and surface level understanding
I FEEL LIKE THE INLY REAL LIMITATION IS WHETHER OR NOT IT COUNTD AS AN ARACHNID DUE TI BEING FROM ANOTHER PLANET
COULD TAYLOR CONTROL THE SAND WORMS FROM DUNE?
THEY SEEM TOO LARGE TO HAVE THE INCREDIBLY SIMPLE NERVOUS SYSTEM THAT HER POWER EXPLOITS EVEN IF IT'S SIMPLE RELATIVE TO THEIR SCALE SO I FEEL LIKE NO BUT I WOULD BE OPEN TO ARGUMENTS OTHERWISE
ever since i read this one i’ve had the thought of a third model which is if there’s multiple separate groups
cause there’s no way Sentinel Island or uncontacted tribes in the middle of the amazon have any close connection with any other groups so they would have to at least be a third group, but if it’s some major entity doing this why make sentinel island and other remote groups like that in the first place just to separate them, which makes me think there are just multiple groups each with same thing if no connections going on
obviously still anomalous but a whole different problem
this scp is on the list of things i want other people to read and poke with a stick with me. i wish it was popular enough for there to be more discussion about it
that one witch hunter in Pale
i might be doing really terrible on the emotional regulation front but in my defense ive had a gaping hole in my chest since i was 12
You could also tie in two other common tropes with the whole “Superman-esq is trying to contain all these guys” which is the whole no kill rule everyone follows and how villains constantly break out
Basically the Superman knock off purposely enforced the no kill and purposely tries to make containment not a priority so that way there’s always villains to keep the hero’s distracted so they can’t start enacting facist coups or whatever but it’s a ticking clock of hero’s getting fed up and just putting people down and villainy getting less popular until there aren’t enough villains to keep this system going and it all comes crashing down
sorry for random addition just an idea that popped into my head based around this
A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.
Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?
Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.
Strong favorites marked by (⁂)
SCP-033 - The Missing Number
SCP-055 - [unknown]
SCP-087 - The Stairwell
SCP-093 - Red Sea Object
SCP-173 - The Sculpture - The Original
SCP-186 - To End All Wars (⁂)
SCP-270 - Secluded Telephone (⁂)
SCP-342 - Ticket to Ride (⁂)
SCP-387 - Living Lego
SCP-426 - I am a Toaster
SCP-579 - [DATA EXPUNGED]
SCP-592 - Inaccurate History Book
SCP-711 - Paradoxical Insurance Policy
SCP-804 - World Without Man (⁂)
SCP-914 - The Clockworks
SCP-1171 - Humans Go Home
SCP-1193 - Buried Giant
SCP-1322 - World We Helped
SCP-1425 - Star Signals
SCP-1500 - Zachary Callahan
SCP-1539 - Semantic Dissociation Zone
SCP-1689 - Bag of Holding Potatoes (⁂)
SCP-1733 - Season Opener (⁂)
SCP-1802 - Skip
SCP-1981 - “RONALD REAGAN CUT UP WHILE TALKING”
SCP-1983 - Doorway to Nowhere
SCP-1986 - Imaginary Library
SCP-2000 - Deus Ex Machina
SCP-2090 - Potentially XK Tim Duncan
SCP-2135 - 91st Street Station
SCP-2288 - Copy of A
SCP-2316 - The Bodies In The Water (⁂)
SCP-2459 - When the Traffic Clears
SCP-2499 - Harmony of the Spheres
SCP-2521 - ●●|●●●●●|●●|● (⁂)
SCP-2557, A Holding of Envelope Logistics®
Allison Eckhart - Allison Eckhart
SCP-2571 - Cragglewood Park
SCP-2602 - Former Library
SCP-2637 - A controversial chunk of rock with 196,884-dimensional stakes (⁂)
SCP-2718 - What Happens After (⁂)
SCP-2719 - Inside
SCP-2740 - It Wasn’t There (⁂)
SCP-2871 - Strong Interaction Amplifier
SCP-2900 - Participation Trophies
SCP-2935 - A Dead World
SCP-2951 - Too Long (⁂)
SCP-2979 - Your High School Physics Teacher, Mr. [REDACTED] (⁂)
SCP-2998 - Anomalous Transmission, 2485 MHz
SCP-3001 - Red Reality
SCP-3002 - Attempts to Assassinate Thought
SCP-3005 - A Light That Died (⁂)
SCP-3008 - A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA (⁂)
SCP-3104 - Cops Magnet (⁂)
SCP-3116 - It’s time to stop posting
SCP-3125 - 55555 (NOTE: I recommend reading 3125 after reading everything preceding it on the Antimemetics Division Hub page)
SCP-3127 - Nineteen Year Old Jessica Lambert And A Female Pig Of Abnormal Size, Forever
SCP-3128 - Let’s Play Monopoly!
SCP-3264 - Causeless Effect (⁂)
SCP-3333 - Tower (⁂)
SCP-3455 - 411 Days A Year
SCP-3733 - Everybody Else
SCP-3773 - 9,000 Lives
SCP-3900 - The Internet of Things That Are Wolves (⁂)
SCP-3930 - Does Not Exist (⁂)
Taboo (⁂)
SCP-4022 - Great Big Nothing
SCP-4065 - Ancho(red) Reality
SCP-4121 - The Loop That Never Breaks/Never Has/Never Will Be Broken
SCP-4228 - Karma Kameleon
SCP-4330 - A Moment of Silence
SCP-4365 - Five-Story Upside-Down Hotel
SCP-4417 - The Long Way Round
SCP-4493 - Keep Pride Out Of Corps (⁂)
SCP-4703 - Perfectly Legal
SCP-4774 - Ninth Planet, Perhaps
4807 - Minimalism
SCP-4857 - [DESIGNATION AVAILABLE]
SCP-4885 - Find Him
SCP-4999 - Someone to Watch Over Us
SCP-5005 - Lamplight
SCP-5031 - Yet another murder monster (⁂)
SCP-5087 - When Have They Gone?
SCP-5095 - We Need to Talk about O5-3.
SCP-5320 - The People’s Church Of The Fish That Just Goes On Forever
SCP-5520 - The Rabbit Hole
SCP-5522 - Pizza Delivery Speedrun (RTA) 100% Completion
SCP-5538 - Holder of Abnormalities
SCP-5552 - Our Stolen Theory
SCP-5579 - Boba Roe
SCP-5920 - Work on What Has Been Spoiled
SCP-5994 - You Can’t Top Pigs with Pigs (⁂)
SCP-6006 - Theseus
SCP-6273 - The Empty Skin
SCP-6761 - The Sorting Machine
SCP-6803 - True Earth
SCP-7186 - Rock and Stone
SCP-7819 - no vacancy
S. D. Locke’s Proposal - When Day Breaks (⁂)
Kate McTiriss’ Proposal - A Record
I recommend reading the Antimemetics Division Hub page in order from the beginning (SCP-055) through SCP-3125:
[…]
Critical background reading
SCP-055
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (2015) This story is complete.
We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five
Introductory Antimemetics (⁂)
Unforgettable, That’s What You Are
CASE COLOURLESS GREEN
Your Last First Day
Five Five Five Five Five by qntm (2017–)
SCP-3125
[…]
reading anything past SCP-3125 isn’t needed IMO, especially since the rest of the “Five Five Five Five Five” series is unfinished. (EDIT: It’s been finished now, but IMO you should still just stop after 3125)
Also, in my opinion, Introductory Antimemetics is the best tale on the site by far
SCUTTLE (⁂)
Your Very First SCP!
Your Very Last SCP!
This is a provisional draft, and has been assembled retroactively after reading the site for many years – I’m definitely forgetting some I really liked, especially in Series II. This will be updated as I add things, and I’ll reblog myself when I’ve added to it significantly
This is non-exhaustive, it’s not a list of all good SCPs, just some of my favorites that I remember. (682 is both not one of my favorites and also Not Good, though)
This also isn’t an intro guide for beginners, which would be organized differently and would require a lot more thought about order, when to introduce different aspects of the Meta, when to start linking format-screws, etc.
CW for ableism, carcerality, body horror, etc. on all of these links. It’s the SCP wiki
Lastly – you can figure out what ██████ is in SCP-3005 - A Light That Died (“An ██████’s safe on shore but it’s the last thing you want to hold when you’re drowning”) and figuring this out really pulls the entry together!!
Buying a car
English added by me :)
post was probably by @lakesbian they do like all the Alec character analysis’
I'm fricken stupid as hell having these kinds of revelations days after the fact, but I read a character analysis on Alec that tapped into the reason his power is the way it is; that it takes 15 min to an hour to act, can only control a max of 4 at a time and that his nerve map memory imprint thing or whatever that lets him resume control instantly is basically permanent, and how all of that was because he's the kind of Master who only needs a small group to stand up for him and protect him (the other members of his family/HB's cult) vs someone like Taylor's Master power where she needed minions that could be found everywhere, which could watch everything and attack from every direction. Alec needing members of his family to physically act in his defense (rather than feel emotions for him or have his mind take over theirs) but getting an ability to force them to do so. <- All of this covered by the post, just bringing it up to give context to my thought;
DOESN'T THIS RECONTEXTUALIZE AISHA WILLINGLY GIVING HERSELF OVER TO HIM?!
All his minions during his warlord arc are probably paid for, or weren't aware that being around him 24/7 meant he could hijack their nerves.
But here comes Aisha and she's like "I want you to take over my body." and I was initially thinking ooh it's just a parahuman version of sexual experimentation, teenagers do that, I get it, I won't pretend it doesn't happen but DOESNT THIS MEAN SHE BASICALLY ASKED HIM TO GIVE HER HIS TRUST? Like, all he needed to not trigger was probably someone in his family or the tight knit cult standing up to Heartbreaker (not going to happen) but still? And Aisha is coming along and saying "I'm that someone. I trust you. You can trust me. You're not your father, you won't abuse this, I'm giving you consent under the jokey teenager, not serious guise of fooling around with you wearing my skin."
Maybe that plays into why Aisha goes after Heartbreaker, why she adopts the Heartbroken and why she makes that her mission. To continue his legacy after his death, to be the kind of person the Heartbroken needed the way Alec needed someone. She does kinda do that with Taylor too, fucking up Nero later on, though beyond those two examples I kinda struggle to nail down where she's continued a loved one's legacy. Oh, except maybe where she helps Taylor in Brian's place during GM. That could work too.
I'm still figuring out how to Tumblr but if I find that post again I'll link it here in the replies.
are either of these stories good? cause they sound really interesting
On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.
On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.
For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:
Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.
Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.
Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.
Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.
Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.
"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.
Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:
Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.
Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.
Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)
Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.
Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.
You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.
(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)
So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!
praise be the Saint Electric
乱铁 @_dirtyiron_
I think (and i’m probably dumb) it’s supposed to be he splits the timeline then in one he leads into doing the coinflip and if he gets it right he follows it, in the other he delays and doesn’t flip so if he gets it wrong he just never flipped and he flips later, but the might be wrong and make less sense
IT DOESNT MAKE SENSE that coils power was able to make a coin flip the same every single time. he can only use 2 universes theres a 50% chance it’s gonna be heads. in his 2 universes theres only a 25% chance that one of the two flips will be heads. he gets double luck but theres no reason why it wouldnt be tails in both universes yeah. that doesnt make sense
okay so now i gotta reread “There is no Antimemetics Division” while falling asleep
Got to see SCP-3125 last night, and you know what they say about meeting your heroes.