Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Summary:

Howling through the night.

Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Ninja Monocle 28 Feb 2021 10:41

Howling through the night. All winds have a soul. When the cries of the dead echo through the sky, all who cry back are taken. The Wild Hunt comes again, bigger than last time, and it must be contained. Hide and hope you are not their prey.

I moved and trimmed your thread summary, since it was taking up extra space in the main forum screen. Try to keep thread descriptions (the text in the little box under the thread title) and titles short so you don't crowd out other authors in the forum listing. ~Zyn

Seeking Greenlights: Yes

Page Type: SCP Article

Genre: Horror, Mystery

Page Layout: Besides the usual SCP format, most of the natarive development will take place as incident reports of the most recent "Hunts" and interviews of the SCP-XXXX-X Instances.

Elevator Pitch: This is the adaptation of the common folklore myth of The Wild Hunt into an SCP. An entourage of spectral hunters riding together through the night.

Hook/Attention-Grabber: The Wild Hunt goes on periodical hunts. Each hunt has a Motif. It is the foundations intent to decipher the pattern of the SCP, and contain it. As the research goes on, each hunt grows more aggressive and the foundation struggles to containt the anomaly as it threatens to spread further.

Central Narrative:
There are a few key plot elements that the SCP article will touch on:

+ show block

What is the origin of the wild hunt?

In terms of Folklore, The Wild Hunt is a common motiv in cautionary tales (CODE: e-501, this is a real thing, refer to here).
The main reason for someone to become part of the hunters is traditionally to be a person who found hunting to be better than the afterlife.
As an SCP, this mytery will be dug into through interviews of some of the hunters(captured).
When asked about the reason for taking more people than usual as prey, they will explain that recently, hunting has stopped being a usual activity, so now they must kidnap new hunters.

Who is their leader?
Here i will make reference to "Frau Gauden"(or Holle). A folkloric person of interest, that is sometimes depicted as a leader of the hunt. (Code E501.1.8. )

The B-Plot
Someone of the foundation had been previously taken by the wild hunt. They are found later, and interviewed by the foundation,in an envirorment/interaction similar to the Interview log DOC-1861-2 of SCP-1861.

The Overarching Narrative
From here on out I intend to give the rest of the narrative through the incident reports of the different Hunts the anomaly has sparked.

In each Hunt the report will specify the things the hunt did.
With every subsequent hunt the anomaly grows more powerful. Eventually, it threatens some sort of larger event and the foundation must prepare procedures for the eventuallity.

Additional Notes: There may be some SCP Cross-linking in this article as well, if any SCP out there lends itself well to some sort of ghost detection and containment.

Last edited on 01 Mar 2021 05:26 by Zyn Show more

Re: Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Impperatrix 01 Mar 2021 07:17

Hello! I'm Flight Officer Impperatrix!

+ Here's the crit!

I think I can help you here with four pieces of advice:

First: you have a pitch, but not a narrative. You need to show what you plan to do in the narrative. Who are the creatures that would be hunted? Who are the Wild Hunters? Why they are doing so? How the Foundation noticed them and how they plan to contain the Hunt?

Second: you have an idea, but not a skip. You have the idea of the Wild Hunt, but who are they? Sincerely, if you just make a bunch of old ghosts you're losing the capacity of making a twist. The skip is yours and you can make the Hunt be anything. They can be aliens, demons, mutants, or even an amorphous and abstract entity. Their motive for hunting can be just for fun, can be for them to keep themselves alive, can be because a deity said that they must do so, etc.

Third: about your article, you have to be smart. You have a thematic here, the Hunt, so you have to show the hunts and the Foundation's reactions to them, how they succeed or fail to contain the hunters. IMHO, stopping the narrative to show an overexplanatory interview with one of the hunters would be boring. You can use some documents, books, and journals to give clues to the reader.

Fourth: about the preys and cross-links… Well, don't stick to Series I or II skips. I'd suggest that you create your own things for them to hunt, maybe even creating some abstract hunts such as "hunting for love" or "hunting for hope". If you want to hunt other skips, try to find and read some articles from the last two or three Series. The problem that you can have here is that for reading your page, people will have to read other pages and that makes your thing weaker.

I hope you can understand my perspective. I really liked the idea of using Wild Hunt as a prompt, you just need to polish your idea!

Good luck and Good Writing!

Re: Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Ninja Monocle 01 Mar 2021 08:36

Hey!

Thank you so much for your feedback!

First, I am assuming this isnt a greenlight(right?).

Also, I think you are right. There certainly is space for a twist about the identity of the beings i.e. turns out they ar just aliens masquerading and folklore characters to stay under the veil of just being a myth, and by trying to keep the hunt as a myth in the public eye they are unknowingly helping the anomaly.

I undertsand that the interviews could give the narrative some whiplash. I could lean more on incident reports and requests from researchers to build up the mystery instead

Also, I really like the idea of abstract hunts. Thank you!

On the side, what I meant as crosslinks was more of a cameo thing i.e. researcher X has put in a request to use SCP-XXXX n contaiment —-> request is Pending.

Thank you for your feedback!!

Also, what do I do know? do I repost? or edit?

Re: Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Impperatrix 01 Mar 2021 17:39

Just edit the first post. Don't forget the post rules!

Re: Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Doctor Juhan 01 Mar 2021 08:00

I just want to note that this article is 597 words long, elevator pitch, hook, narrative and notes must be under 400 words long. Use this webpage to find unnecessary parts: https://wordcounter.net/

---

mEmE

Forum Criticism Team - Mod Post - OPEN

cybersqyd 01 Mar 2021 09:53

Hey Doctor Juhan: while you are right that there's a 400 word limit to the final four sections, and that you are right that the total pitch is over that, the final four sections only take up 365 words together, and so are not over the word limit.

Please ensure that when you flag stuff like this, you're actually doing so accurately. It's often best to bring this to staff attention by either mentioning it in #site17 on IRC or by contacting someone from the forum criticism team on wikidot instead of handling it yourself.

Re: Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

cybersqyd 01 Mar 2021 10:40

[+] Open for crit

I think my central concern with this pitch is that it feels too much like it's just the wild hunt: there's no unique spin on this or real exploration of what the wild hunt existing in the Foundation universe actually means; so it's just, 'recover foundation people from the hunt' and 'the anomaly grows more powerful!' but it feels… like the most kinda, generic narrative you could have.

My advice here is to really figure out like, why the Foundation's presence here is interesting and how you can explore these two big forces colliding in a way that like, is genuinely interesting? Like, the idea of there being less hunters and the wild hunt having to like, kidnap people to recruit more folk is fun! And I think focussing on that as the cause of the conflict here could be really entertaining if you like, figure out something interesting to do with it.

On some level, it kinda feels like you have a few too many elements: you've got them getting more powerful, and there being some great leader who is important, and them taking people to join the hunt, and the foundation trying to recover someone; and it feels like you've spread yourself too thin and not really given yourself an opportunity to focus this in on something.

Re: Seeking Greenlight: The Wild Hunt

Grigori Karpin 03 Mar 2021 07:01

I'm in agreement with Sqyd above, I feel like there's not alot going on here other than recycling folklore about the Wild Hunt (a concept that is fairly well trod in fiction at this point).

If you want to keep this as your central anomaly, I think what your article has to do is undermine the expectations of a reader once they realize the anomaly is the Wild Hunt. How could you tell a story using this as the anomaly, that wasn't just the explanation of the Hunt or a Foundation member getting trapped there?

Use the anomaly as a vehicle to tell a different, more relatable story. (This is the same advice I'd give if it was Zeus or Thor or Anubis, if the article is merely recycling of myth/folklore, its probably not going to do very well) I think you could expand/stretch your imagination and use this myth to tell a compelling story the reader wouldn't expect.