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(account deleted) 06 Jul 2024 17:02
this was meant to be my entry in locke's halloween anthology, but i've repurposed it.
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(account deleted) 06 Jul 2024 17:02
Well, this one wasn't very good. I think it's instructive to contrast with Scp-823, an article which is certainly flawed in some respects, but which is ultimately a much more interesting take on amusement park horror than this.
The primary distinction I want to point out is the density of interesting things in each article. 823 is about 800 words long, and it describes eight specific incidents of death or injury. 8507 is about 4300 words long and, by my count, has seven such incidents, plus the messed up recording and people getting stuck on the coaster. Now, this article dwells on each incident for longer, so let's also just check what fraction of the article has something messed up happen, in general. In 823, about half of the paragraphs include a horror beat of some sort. The number is a bit fuzzier in 8507, since there's a good amount of dialogue and shorter paragraphs, but I would generously say about one fifth of the article is dedicated to horror beats.
I went into the numbers to try to illustrate the following point: This is a pretty slow-paced article that doesn't have the thrilling plot, ghastly deaths, or horrifying truths to justify it. Usually if you're not packing a scary story full of distinct events, you want to spend the intervening time building tension or crafting an unsettling atmosphere, neither of which are accomplished here. 8507 spends a lot of time transitioning in and out of excerpts, establishing characters' voices, fleshing out anecdotes, relaying relevant historical facts, and so on. Obviously, some scaffolding is needed to make an article work, but the story you're telling here and the way you're choosing to tell it entail including words upon words that have nothing to do with the central appeal of the article. It's empty calories.
Speaking of which, it's also instructive to look at the specifics of the horror parts of each article. 823 has attraction-specific thematic kills in the first section and some weirder, creative kills in the second section. There's only one mundane death, and it's from someone trying to escape their very non-mundane fate. Someone skullfucks themselves to death. Great stuff. With 8507, we're treated to a series of fairly realistic deaths and mishaps, save for the coaster running someone over on its own (with the limbs still moving afterwards) and the bit at the end where a bunch of people go to Hell; the former was solid (and less drawn-out than a lot of the other kills), while the latter had basically no visceral component at all despite arguably being the climax of 8507.
Now obviously, if 8507 had been generating such weird gruesome deaths the whole time, it would've gotten shut down a lot earlier, so it makes sense for this story that the incidents can mostly be written off as bad luck. 823 avoids this issue by compressing all of the non-park-ending deaths into a bit at the start of the Description, then spends the actual article talking about the ones that couldn't be written off. Let me restate that: 823 basically has its own equivalent of 8507's entire plot, but because the author recognized it would be less interesting than their other ideas, they just handwaved it away to focus on the good bits. No Hoag, no nailgun mishap, no getting hit in the head with a wheel, no Mr. Nick, just 231 dead on Bloody Sunday.
I'm aware that 8507 has a story and characters to use, whereas 823 pretty much doesn't, but it's all pretty basic and not really worth commenting on.
An impression I don't want you to get is that I'm just criticizing this for not being Scp-823. I mostly chose 823 for comparison because the central appeal of both articles is "lots of people die horribly at an amusement park"; it's not the exact mold I want this article to follow. The point is that 823 was written to have maximum impact on its readers, with its style, setup, and contents chosen deliberately for that purpose. In that case, the result was a very stripped-down article with a bunch of distinct gruesome deaths, but depending on what you're trying to do, writing for maximum impact can take any shape or form.
I'd say you should, in the future, try to pin down what kind of impact you want an article to have on a reader, and from there, be very deliberate about all of the choices you make for the article. Literally every part of an Scp is fundamentally optional — if the article needs to do X, write X and figure out how to make it work. If doing Y doesn't advance your goal, don't do Y, even if everyone else does it.
Hope this helps!
"Lightning Helix deals 3 damage to target creature or player and you gain 3 life."- ancient proverb
LOVED this one for so many reasons. First of all, sucker for anything Theme Park related, second, I tend to really get into stories that have a Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt feel. The slow pacing of this gives way to a dark but very fun karmic deal, I especially enjoyed the way so much of it was told through documents or interviews. Given the gorgeous page theme and focus on historical background it has the look of something more arthouse but beneath that is a really fun, albeit campy, story elevated by its style.
+1
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06