BREAKDOWN BREAKDOWN
it's a new scp mother fuckers
photo by flickr user Dave Conner here under a CC BY 2.0 license.
if your reading this your gay
SCP-2826 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2826.
Shouldn't this be a -j? -1.
My sides though…+1.
Having been trying to figure out how the hell I could write a Alexylva University scip for a while, the engraving made me laugh. The rest of the scip was also very well done. Nice job at tying it into the recent election protests. This also totally seems like a thing GAW would do as well.
+1
A much-needed belly laugh from me, +1. The only thing that would make it better is if all collected video footage contained the song 'Yakity Sax'.
That is a -J already. :V
As for the article, I dunno, it's a solid piece, a magical object created with a distinct purpose, which fulfills that purpose well. But the use of GAW, while not as bad as previous articles around that group, doesn't feel necessary. It's just shoehorned in there, and this would work just as well with a random group name or no group at all. Knee-jerk negativity is keeping me from upvoting.
I don't really understand the criticism (which you are not the first to provide) that it's 'shoehorned' in there. By attributing this to Gamers Against Weed, it succinctly contextualizes the backstory as "pranksters turned political", rather than "activists with a sense of humor" which might be implied otherwise. Now, 'activists with a sense of humor' is okay, but it's not a story.
This was conceived from the start as one of the anomalous items used during protests mentioned by SCP-2293 — I asked myself 'How would GAW help out in their own way?' and went from there. It's not "necessary", but I know from experience how easy it is to keep trimming parts that aren't "necessary" until the piece is bare-bones and the readers all get this sense that there should be something more to it. For the amount of flavor it gives to the piece, I think GAW is absolutely worth the sentence it takes to set up.
if your reading this your gay
I really like the idea, and where you are taking GAW. But, I'd like to see the references to Donald Trump and anti-Trump protests be taken out. I don't know, something feels wrong about including such pinpoint and recent references in an SCP to me.
I think they improve the article as a whole. If they're just "protests about whatever, it doesn't matter," then it just tells us that they're sorta political, but not how they're political. It gives more info about who the people in GAW are, what they believe in, and what they're doing to further those beliefs. Thus, them making cops from a vaudeville act show up to help an anti-Trump rally fits EXACTLY into what we already know about them, and teaches us more stuff about them.
And I just personally like it when there's actual connections to real events. It makes the world feel more real.
Putting SCPs in specific historical contexts is nothing new, and putting SCPs in the present day has obviously been done. Doing both at the same time is rare, which is probably why you're feeling uncomfortable about it.
I try hard not to overvalue how everybody else does things, because all of the good things about the wiki started out as something new that someone wanted to try — what if the consensus on 173 had been "It's good, but it would be scarier if it was a monster in a dark alley, it feels wrong to write about something that's locked up"? I like to take unspoken rules as opportunities for innovation.
This does touch on why some people take issues with GAW — it centers internet culture, in-universe irreverence, and sensitivity to present-day real-life events. These are arenas that the site has, collectively, left mostly untouched, and it clearly makes some people uncomfortable. There are good reasons to take issue with GAW or its associated articles, but I mostly disregard anyone whose distaste clearly stems from its breaks from convention.
DestroyerDux covered everything I wanted to say in defense of using the Trump protests, but I just wanted to elaborate where I'm coming from in the decision.
if your reading this your gay
Fair enough. Something that bothers me doesn't mean that it bothers everyone. Besides, I like the idea of a political/protest based GoI enough for me not to upvote.
I wish to voice my disapproval of whatever this new obnoxiousness is.
AWCY was bad enough, we don't need more. Downvoted.
e: to elaborate - another group of dank-meme-spouting, stick-it-to-the-man anomaly makers is a thematic and narrative redundancy, and an annoying one at that. The article is a glittering gewgaw relying on this redundancy as its primary draw - there is nothing left that has not been done in years past. The only applicable difference are the letters haphazardly stapled to the idea, and the lack of hamfisted statements about art. The hamfisted statements about politics remain, as does the "GOI just because syndrome", both traits of AWCY that have been beaten into the ground.
well shit man that's a fucking death knell if i ever heard one
e: to elaborate - you are just mad because you are angry
if your reading this your gay
Sometimes the thought of a cop is just as dangerous as a cop.
I disagree with Djoric on a lot of things, including his opinions regarding AWCY being bad, but I think he has a point regarding GAW. I think GAW has a lot of potential as "AWCY splinter group who realized AWCY are a bunch of dickbags", but a lot of it seems like something you could just as easily stick AWCY into without any difference.
cool and relevant
if your reading this your gay
I like what you are doing with GAW parodying the Alexyla University this time. I kinda love the idea of a GOI apparently having as much knowledge about the anomalous as the Foundation, yet using it for petty things.
(account deleted)No vote. This is technically competent, and the goofy stuff with cops was kinda fun. However, the "they know about Alexyva University, a fairly obscure and unobtrusive organization in-universe, and can mimic their style perfectly" feels about as realistic as having some rando on 420chan be able to pull off a realistic imitation of CNT-FAI propaganda from the Spanish Civil War. Uggggh, misinterpreted the first comment because I am dumb.
One of the very few things I liked about the anti-AWCY backlash was that it gave AWCY some very definite limits; I think I would like GAW a bit more if you gave them some sort of blind spots, rather than them basically being in-universe characters with apparently perfect knowledge of their world.
The anti-Trump protest stuff doesn't do much for me. On the one hand, I think that politics is something that has, for better and worse, been ignored on the wiki, and I will be interested to see some explicitly political stuff that doesn't boil down to "giving a shit is for lame-o's" (see: AWCY?). On the other, an anti-Trump protest is exactly what I would have expected from such a group, and doesn't do anything to further the extant characterization as "left-wing dank meme-lovers."
e: to elaborate I appreciate that you are using CC-compliant images, and, more importantly, are properly crediting them. Props.
Am I missing something here? Is this explicitly Alexylvia? I assumed the wording on the badge was just a Latin phrase by itself.
Buh, you are totally right and I am a dingus. Unless Word-of-Scan says otherwise, this does not appear to be a AU thing at all.
That resolves that issue. However, my new issue is that the engraving is just sort of there and doesn't do much for the article one way or the other. Still novoat.
Isn't that just like an engraving that you'd have on a badge? It's like just the Scottish police motto or something. I don't think it needs an in-universe reason to be there.
It's not an Alexylva reference. The suggestion is so thoroughly bizarre to me that I don't even know how to properly respond. I mean, shit, I can remember like two Alexylva SCPs in total.
I put in that engraving to contextualize GAW's relation to the SCP. It was made on short notice, either because they only decided to make it recently or because the recipient only asked for something recently, which is why it's so weird in design and activation style. The line about 'real Three Stooges shit' gives you an idea about their perspective on it — they could have said "use this to summon fake shitty cops at the protest" or "use this to disrupt the police", but they emphasized the humor value. It also establishes that the user wouldn't already know what to do with it.
The credits section is mostly good if you know and care about individual GAW members, but if you don't, you at least know that it was a team effort, and not just "I decided I am with GAW and I am giving you one of my anomalies". The people involved have anomalous talents, for sure, but none can just do something like this on their own, and making it is an involved process — it wasn't just pulled out of a reality bender's ass.
if your reading this your gay
Seconding this, when GAW was created, apart of the new misters, I was thinking their anomalies would be more internet and gaming based, and while this uses a dank meme as base, it doesn't diverges to much in context from, say, an urinal that converts gold to poop, which is why people keep thinking GAW are AWCY? wannabes.
I think the critical thing to understand about GAW as opposed to AWCY? is that while they organize in similar ways, have similar capabilities, and may on the surface seem to produce similar anomalies, their aims are extremely different, and 'dank memes' isn't really sufficient to describe what they're really up to. A lot of GAW members enjoy jokes and trolling but that's not necessarily what they're all in for.
Several GAW members, in the chatlogs we've seen, have indicated that they don't really seem to enjoy jokes or have a lot of fun with those but they still get something out of being in that community which I think, more than being about humor, is about trying to make something, anything, good. Often, that's going to be a laugh, but sometimes that's going to be something else. That's why they collaborated to create SCP-2826. Not just because they thought it would be funny to see police operations foiled, but because it was really important to them that these specific operations be foiled. It's not about low humor instead of ostensible high art, it's about ethics in anomaly creation.
They do, of course, fool around, as a young-skewing group of friends of this nature inevitably would, but they're not just there for that and if they were the group wouldn't have even the limited cohesiveness it's implied to.
The aquisition log really does make the article. It's refreshing and pleasantly realistic to see that even with near unlimited resources at their disposal, there are times when the Foundation loses control of a situation. The aquisition log was also funny, but that's besides the point.
+1, although I doubt I'll upvote GAW articles in the near future. They feel a bit oversaturated atm.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
