Cultist Trees

Summary:

1.1k-word, tree religion about being chopped down

Cultist Trees

Purplayoss 17 Feb 2021 06:04

LINK, the "SCP-TREE" tab

Concerns:

• Awkward wording
• Unnecessary bits that should be removed
• Necessary bits that should be added
• Wanting to avoid unsatisfying confusion, especially with the "Closing Notes" bit. I really want it to stick the landing into satisfying weirdness but not bog down the user with trying to solve any complex puzzles

Re: Cultist Trees

peppermint_legos 17 Feb 2021 17:22

Hello, thank you for your draft! I enjoyed this concept and was very interested in the way things unfolded. Looking forward to reading this in finished form on the main site.

In general, I think wordiness is your main enemy here. See some of my technical notes below, and comb through this article looking for similar bloated sentences. Keep asking yourself "is this phrase actually necessary?" Technical writing sounds full of hedge words, but excellent technical writing is incredibly concise.

Don't allow a single word to be wasted on unnecessary redundancy. Don't waste a single word.

+ story/concept crit

• I really like the main idea, and the storytelling is very successful at getting in, making me confused and a little concerned, and then getting out while the getting's good!
• I don't think I need much more for this. I have unanswered questions, sure, but that's part of the fun. "MI" is a significant enough "wrinkle" in the narrative that I'm satisfied with how it ends.
• The concept of them moving in "stop-motion animation" style is incredibly chilling. I can picture it in my mind! And even if they aren't hostile to humans, it's still incredibly creepy. Well done.

+ technical crit

• "Area-TREE has been established in and around at SCP-TREE's current location…"
• Aren't the lumberjack guards there to monitor/herd back the trees? How many humans come this far out?
• Watch out for wordiness. "If this does not cause the instance to does not retreat within one minute…"
• I don't think you need any of your three footnotes. I find footnotes are good for when you're concerned that half the audience will want to know more, and half won't care and will want to keep going. In this case, all three footnotes are just extraneous details that don't add a lot (and in the case of self-portraits, I want to make that conclusion by myself), so you can safely cut them in my opinion.
• In the incident log, you can cut out "Camera #XX" from each entry. It doesn't add anything except more numbers, and when we see numbers we think "these must be important!", which they aren't.
• In the incident log, a colon in the timestamps might be helpful ("03:05").
• In the incident log, calling the Moving instance "MI" doesn't really fit with SCP article conventions. I'd recommend something like "Moving instance (designated "SCP-TREE-1") rotates 90º four times…"
• Try to find ways to use the active voice more often. Passive voice is important to SCP articles and conprocs, but you have to be careful to not let it jumble things up or become unnecessarily wordy. Watch for ways to rephrase a sentence to give it more punch and keep the action moving. For example: "…but the oldest items have been found to date from at least 150 years prior."

Last edited on 17 Feb 2021 17:26 by peppermint_legos Show more

Re: Cultist Trees

Impperatrix 24 Feb 2021 07:27

I'm Flight Officer Impperatrix and I'm here to crit!

+ Line-by-Lines

If this does not cause the instance to retreat within one minute, destructive force is permitted.

I would not say "destructive force", I would say "aggressive methods" or something alike. "Destructive" sounds like the guards have to kill the skips, and destruction is not very Foundation-like.

These personnel are encouraged to choose which instance is terminated based on whichever is the most noteworthy in appearance and behavior.

So you're choosing the "sacrifice" here by their behavior and appearance. You should inform the reader which is the behavior and appearance that the Foundation wants (or doesn't want) the skip instances to have.

Despite a lack of light-receptive organs, SCP-TREE are capable of responding to visual stimuli.

Maybe you should rephrase that. Plants have photoreceptor proteins and can perceive light. They don't have eyes, but they can identify blue, red and ultraviolet light. Plants can't create a image due to their lack of brain/visual cortex, but they can "see". Also, normal plants have some reactions to "visual" stimuli, mainly by reacting to sunlight.

Addendum-TREE_Incident_Log

There is some obnoxious repetition here. Most of the lines could be simplified with a single "MI rushes east with increasing speed".

+ Overall

Maybe I can say something wrong here because I didn't get the full story, but I feel there is something missing here. Maybe I'm too tired (4 AM in my country now) but seems that there is a story here, but the things that should keep this story together are missing and, due to that, the narrative (that is there) becomes just confused.

Most of the choices here I see as stylistic, as the lack of characters and real interaction between the trees and the Foundation. It's fine because I can see you have a way to show the story to me.

Again, I don't know if I got the story wrong, so I really want to talk to you about that so I can help you more!

Good luck and good writing!

Last edited on 24 Feb 2021 07:28 by Impperatrix Show more