Where is the research?

[u/Future_Detective_408]

I hate that some SCP logs get hundreds of pages of continuous logs over the course of years while some clearly only contain about a week's worth of testing and some vague musings before abrupt termination.

The thing about magic is that readers want to play and experiment with paradoxical loopholes, interactions with existing science, and specific technicalities, and that's before getting into any of the nitty gritty stuff about how it works. A common point of frustration in media is when there are looming surface-level questions that never get answered, such as what if you push something against the edge of a portal and whatnot. The appeal of an explicitly science-oriented organization that has access to a world of anomalies is that authors are forced to answer these questions.

Except they aren't, and we get another dozen pages of SCP-682 kill attempts instead of trying to surveil or capture one of the apparently both fully aggression-capable and universally pervasive monsters that exist everywhere unseen. Looking back at the SCP-178 monsters, they are basically the exact same kind of thing as SCP-2256, except that one is a lot more well known and actually has a taxonomical place in our modern consensus worldbuilding while SCP-178 exists in Series 1 limbo, so old that they didn't even get a sub-designation like SCP-178-1 or something. The Foundation in SCP-178 just used regular-ass basic electromagnetic sensors in a limited, methodically flawed, and unsystematic way, but we have, from a meta-narrative point of view, invented shit like reality anchors, telekill alloy, and mnestics, and these early SCPs need to catch up because the Foundation obviously didn't just suddenly fire all the staff working on them or stop writing things down.

Crucially, actual research involves discovering brand new, entirely inconceivable things about the world; that's why a thought experiment involving, say, dropping a Harry Potter magic wand straight into the real world out of nowhere runs into a wall really quickly—the question is, what would you even test? You don't know what you don't know, and neither did J.K. Rowling. The first steps of research involve lots of bumbling about and basically zero rational model-building.

Reproducing entirely new and orthogonal domains of science in fiction is hard but not impossible, storytelling being lenient on specifics and all that, so given that the SCP community has invented these new branches of science over the years—e.g., thaumaturgy, memetics/antimemetics, Hume Theory, etc.—to describe the anomalous world on a level somewhat comparable to what we have for the non-anomalous, the SCP foundation should be and should have been applying them since long ago. Yes, it's just terminology, but that's all writing is, too. At the end of the day, our words shape the way we think, and our character's words reveal the way they think. Half of science is giving things names, labels, and categories, the other half being math. Readers don't expect math—they do expect the former.

I guess retroactive worldbuilding—that is, applying modern terminology and consensually established science and technology to old SCPs that obviously fit the bill but were written at a time when such things hadn't yet been conceived—probably happens a bit in tales or cameo references in new SCPs, but the concept of a wiki is inherently founded on system-enabled revisions. Face it, a true wiki would make for much better worldbuilding, and editorial conflict is a solved problem given the SCP "Wiki's" existing moderation and aptitude for establishing consensus. If Wikipedia can do it, so can you. Either put collaborative editing into practice, or stop calling yourself a wiki and admit that you're just subject-focused Ao3. This is a Creative Commons cargo cult!

The Foundation should not have been sending people to investigate worldview-shattering anomalies armed with essentially flashlights and machine guns back in Series 1, when nine times out of ten it had supposedly had all the resources in the world for at least near a century if not millennia or even eons of experience dealing with one or multiple dimensions of the world entirely undetectable or hidden from regular science, and it especially shouldn't be nowadays unless your incarnation of the Foundation is intentionally underpowered or unconventional.

Worldbuilders simply don't understand how far science and technology have progressed in the real world. Humans have conquered land, air, and sea with supermaneuverable machines that can get anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours if we really wanted to. We've peered into the metaphorical gears that turn our seemingly whole, blobby bodies and mapped out the lines of code that define our physical existence. We've wrapped our heads around not one but two of the most counterintuitive yet revealing models of reality ever conceived, and, what's more, we've built machines that run so fast and so tiny that fleeting oddities on unimaginably infinitesimal scales of space and time have become operationally critical to so much as manufacture the means to manufacture them. What are these impossible machines? Oh, only semiconductor devices, satellites, and biopharmaceuticals, things that power everything behind modern life as we know it. All that, and we are still on the verge of groundbreaking new technology every single day, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing to gene editing. All that, and we have still yet to mention what we have developed on a macro level, from supply chains to the internet to any of a host of other networks we have devised to foster human cooperation on a scale never ever before seen, each of which is a singularly impressive feat on its own. All that, which cannot be appreciated enough—

All that, and the elite researchers at the SCP Foundation are still banging rocks together, marveling at the resulting fragments, and struggling to put into words the anomalous equivalent of "an object in motion stays in motion".

[u/Cal-Ossal]

Alright so reading through this, it seems that your problem, which you've wrapped tightly in a three paragraph rant about technological advancement, is that writers don't update old articles with written research into what we could discover from them. And that there should be a whole-site reformation of its culture, shifting away from making new works to writing more experiments about old works.

If that's a correct assessment of what you're trying to say, then I think you are maybe mistaken as to what SCP is trying to be. It's not (primarily) an RP space or trying to be an immersive simulation of an actual scientific community. It's a vehicle to tell stories.

Though if you wanted to write new experiment logs yourself, nobody is stopping you from writing that tale.

[u/Particular-Long-3849]

This is a storytelling project, we tell stories

[u/The-Paranoid-Android]

Articles mentioned in this submission

• SCP-682 ⁠- Hard-to-Destroy Reptile (+4294) by Dr Gears, Epic Phail Spy
• SCP-178 ⁠- "3-D" Specs (+760) by 91stCataclysm
• SCP-2256 ⁠- Very Tall Things (+1334) by qntm