Your muzzer was a hampster and your fazzer just downvoted this for being silly, son.
SCP-374 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-374.
Not bad. Love to see an interview that detailed some of the questions people asked the head, and it's responses, though.
I feel like there's something there to like, but it's not quite there yet. It feels like one of those rather dreary "insert human life here" kind of items, but I'm more interested in the personality inhabiting the head. It'd honestly be a little more compelling to me if the head didn't have magical future powers and didn't go inert after a set amount of time. It'd really give the guy something to bitch about.
What Sorts said. Dump the future reading powers, and we might be on to something here. I for one enjoy the idea of a disembodied head cursing at you in incoherent French for any particular reason.
But if we dump the oracular powers, what reason would the Foundation have for using the guillotine?
Why would Marshall Carter and Dark have bothered to kee the device?
You see, that's the problem. You immediately assume that every SCP should have some sort of "use", which is a major fallacy on this site.
The Foundation keeps it here because they want to experiment with it, and you know, contain it.
MCD probably just keeps it around for shits and giggles, seeing as these are people with enough money to buy out God.
Well, Voct does have a point about MC&D; if this is going to be from them, it might as well have a use that can expand our narrative of the organization. Two mutually exclusive ideas:
1) Instead of precognition, 374-2 has temporary access to the memories of the deceased which became him, or something along those lines?
2) An interview log attempting to have him explain what MC&D used him for, if said use is not immediately obvious?
1) would actually be more interesting to me than his magically knowing every language. Perhaps he automatically speaks in whatever language the former owner of the head spoke.
Language of the head would still be more interesting.
Yeah, I'd suggest removal of the clairvoyance bit and perhaps some indication of how a severed head remains active for 35 minutes. Perhaps a little conflict between the Frenchman and the original inhabitant of the brain would be interesting?
I like it. But Spoon is right. It doesn't need to be useful if that use is uninteresting. I'd be more interested if the guillotine could work on the recently diseased, provided their head wasn't severely damaged. That way BlastYoBoots' idea of it having limited access to memories of the dead could be useful and interesting.
The thing that bugs me: How did they originally find out about this little quirk? It's not like the Foundation just wantonly beheads people without a damn good reason.
… or do they?
Well, that's part of why I had it be raided from Marshall Carter & Dark.
When you sell something, or when you're preparing to sell something, you have a product description. Sometimes there's even a user manual.
"Guillotine with enslaved spirit of 1805 French political firebrand! Just chop off someone's head, and the Frenchman's spirit will be forced to inhabit the head for your amusement! Bidding starts at $85M, no posers."
This is the reason that the idea has merit. Deferring to the above suggestions on how to keep it.
The reason that the heads expire after about a half-hour is that if they didn't, what would be the point of keeping the guillotine? Just keep the head.
If you had a still-living severed head from the French Revolution (or from one of the many other countries where the device has been used), that could also make an interesting SCP. But it would also be far less of an abomination — whenever the Foundation wants to talk to Jean-Philippe, they have to chop off someone's head.
And he knows that. Every time he regains consciousness, he knows that someone has just been murdered, for the sole purpose of making him exist. And this man was a political radical dedicated to liberty for the masses, human rights, equality, and all that good shit.
By making him useful, instead of just a curiosity-and-research-subject, we increase the likelihood of an abomination being committed on any given day.
Heads still rot, and a guillotine that makes pissed off talking heads is totally something that MC&D would market or the Foundation would contain with or without a useful angle. I think you are over-estimating the horror of regular executions within the Foundation when they're doing that on a monthly basis already. Making any kind of item that tries to balance its utility by requiring human sacrifice just doesn't cut it, especially given the larger context.
It's your article and what you do with the feedback is entirely up to you… but you know what would be really weird? If this thing could create multiple instances of Jean-Philippe.
I agree with Sorts in that regular executions alone are not sufficient to produce horror. However, I do think you've got a potentially good angle: how Jean-Philippe feels about his existence. He certainly can't be too blase about only being instantiated as the result of a recent cold-blooded murder.
That said, making him useful, rather than just a research subject, doesn't mean he won't be in a head most of the time. If he displays sufficient weird properties — and I'd say he's sufficiently weird without the precognition or magic language — he is going to be researched. More or less continuously. The Foundation seeks to understand as much as it can in order to contain future, similar objects.
Take Mann's language-of-the-head idea. If Jean-Philippe automatically spoke the native language of the previous owner of his head, the Foundation would have to wonder how exactly he does that. How much of the dead man lingers in the overwritten brain? How much is his personality influenced by that of the dead man? What if the head belonged to someone with severe autism, severe epilepsy, advanced Alzheimer's, or something equally horrible? The Foundation will explore and test these ideas, insofar as it's not overly expensive or dangerous to do so. (And it's not.) You can get quite a lot of horror out of this without giving him random-ass precognitive powers.
How Jean-Philippe feels about his existence can be summed up in the little speech he made the first time he was instantiated in Foundation custody. He hates the Foundation worse than he ever hated Marshall Carter and Dark, and he didn't think that was possible. Yes, MCD kept him as a slave and a plaything, and committed hundreds of murders just to force him back into existence… but at least they never told him that what they were doing was for the good of humanity.
Remember, this is a man who was alive during the worst excesses of the French Revolution. He saw what people will do if they are convinced it is for the Greater Good of the Ignorant Masses.
As for making multiple simultaneous instances of Jean-Philippe - I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. Not that the Foundation wouldn't try, mind you; at most, you'd force Jean-Philippe out of Head A and into Head B. They'd also try decapitating people with the antique blade in a replica guillotine frame (won't work), and with a replica blade in the antique guillotine frame (won't work either).
I'm pondering some low-level access to the head's memories… and, you know, on second thought, the guillotine doesn't give him any magical language abilities. He's multilingual because he spent years learning English (and Spanish and Italian and Dutch and German and Basque and Latin and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic).
If the head retains any of the memories/skills/knowledge of the original inhabitant, one would expect there to be considerable interest in the SCP by and/or because of Dr. Bright and SCP-963. Both he and the Foundation would be interested in looking for any insights that might help kill him for good some day.
Unfortunately, that would involve referencing one SCP from another, which tends to be a bad idea.
Voct.
And this man was a political radical dedicated to liberty for the masses, human rights, equality, and all that good shit.
It was the unethical ruling class that was guillotined, not the revolutionaries. Those kids with the fiery rhetoric about libertie, fraternitie, et cetera were the ones wiping the blade for the next guy. Not saying you didn't have a point; just saying.
At first.
Then things started to get out of control.
I see Jean-Philippe as the sort of guy who would get upset about corruption on the part of the revolutionaries, and who wouldn't shut up about it.
He didn't live to see Napoleon take power.
Does chopping off anything other than human heads produce results? I'm curious to know whether Jean-Philippe could make use of an arm or a leg (or a claw).
Under what circumstances would Jean-Philippe be willing to cooperate with the Foundation? (besides, of course, those that legitimately allow him to call them "murderous slaveowning tyrants".)
If you chop off someone's leg with this guillotine (which is difficult, because a guillotine is designed to sever heads)…. hm. No, I'm pretty sure this thing has been [REDACTED] to only animate heads. Human heads.
Willing to cooperate with the Foundation… well, let's see.
a) they're keeping him as worse than a slave and denying him his human rights.
b) every time they want to talk to him, they murder someone.
If it was only the murder thing, and you could convince him that the D-class in question deserved to be decapitated, then he might be more cooperative. Or anencephalic clones (your typical Frenchman from that era would see such things as an abomination against God, but Jean-Philippe was never very religious, and if seeing the worst days of the Terror hadn't flushed that out of him, being a constantly-re-instantiated severed head for +200 years would have made him a confirmed atheist).
The thing is, even if the Foundation was able to bring him back to life permanently and give him a body and not kill anyone to do it, and was willing to let him go free… he'd still be opposed to it, out of principle. He's a man for whom principles are VERY important. That's why he was executed in the first place.
As for how his spirit got bound into the guillotine, [DATA EXPUNGED].
It's a big heavy blade with a slot for something to cut to go in. I don't see how it could be any harder to do a leg than a head.
I really like this article. And I like how much thought Voct is putting into it.
That said, the prescience thing is unnecessary I think. As for it -needing- a use so that MC&D … aren't they the type to just keep around neat things just -because-?
Furthermore, a 200+ year old frenchman has PLENTY of uses. Think of all the historical and cultural data, if nothing else! Maybe it was marketed to history buffs.
I suppose. I just like the idea of the 'oracular trance', and the analogy with the genie of the lamp.
The entity responsible for him being bound to the guillotine wanted to make sure that Jean-Philippe would be instantiated a lot.
This isn't a natural phenomenon. This wasn't even an accidental phenomenon.
This was 100% intentional.
The thing is, I want there to be something unusual about his cognition (aside from the obvious). He's compelled to obey, and what can a severed head do other than answer questions?
And he fucking hates it.
That's even why he started eating the lit cigarettes. It's his tiny little bit of rebellion. "You have questions for me? Fine, I'll answer - but I'll DESTROY MY OWN TONGUE FIRST so you can't understand what I'm saying!"
He hasn't thought of biting the tongue off.
Voct, if you must insist on keeping the special future reading powers, then at least expand on them a bit more. As the article stands now, it just vaguely mentions said powers, and it's a total throwaway line. I could delete that sentence right now and I'm pretty sure nobody would notice a single thing. Basically, if it must have super powers, give us a good reason why it should and why it sucks. Your justifications in your post sound great, except they're not in the actual article!
It sounds like you've really thought about the backstory, which is good, but keep in mind what kind of site we are.
It's more important that the article be able to stand on its own, than that it has a background that won't get much play.
This is exactly how I feel. There's a lot of backstory hidden here, but not enough content in the actual article to back it up. Going by just the article, it's an average/mediocre SCP. You can't expect to deflect criticisms with backstory if you're not even going to mention it in your article.
Then put it in. :D The article isn't fixed, of course. Edit it — make his speech (which strikes me as a bit narmy: "First, I do not lie"?) reflect more of his background, include excerpts from a psych eval or a pieced-together personal history (partly from interviews, partly from historical sources?), note that he's been useful to historians…?
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
