Art by SunnyClockwork
Howdy!
As someone who greatly enjoys Groups of Interest (GoIs) and reading articles with/about them, nothing burns me up more than seeing someone mischaracterize them. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of room to experiment with the philosophy and themes of GoIs, but there is a difference between treading new ground and completely missing the mark.
In this essay, I hope to cover the important and most basic themes of Alexylva University. Whatever those may be.
Keep in mind this is not a writing guide, but instead is a breakdown of other articles which use the themes of the group to their fullest extent and explore what these groups bring to the table as far as storytelling goes.
Alexylva University
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And that's all I wrote.
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Okay, fine. We'll do it for real.
Alexylva University
Alexylva University is one of the most convoluted, least developed, bizarre, and oldest GoIs on the wiki. No, seriously. It's been around since 2011, and only has (at time of writing) less than 50 total articles! Compare, for example, the Church of the Broken God, which has been around about as long and has almost 400 articles. Or alternatively, look at Wilson's Wildlife Solutions, which has been around since 2017 and has over 150 articles.
So, what the fuck is an Alexylva? Great question, and one not many people ask. Let's try and find out, together.
Alexylva University's first article, SCP-877, contained little more than a namedrop of the aforementioned institution. All we had to learn about it here was that Alexylva was likely extrauniversal.
It wasn't until it's second appearance, SCP-961, that we came to understand a little more about it. Based on the few clues we could gleam from the article's text, we learned that the world of Alexylva University possesses an alternate history to our own. The point of divergence is 207 B.E., which equates to 207 B.C. in our terminology. More than that, we are also told that this note at the end (a trope most tired, but alas an essay for another day) was written in a language approximating Cherokee, Latin, Greek and Nahuatl.
Why does this matter? Well, you see, in the world of Alexylva University, Carthage won the Battle of the Metarus River during the Second Punic Wars in 207 B.C. And for some reason, rather than destroying Rome, they adopted their language, alphabet and culture. To make matters even stranger, they then experienced hyper advanced technological advancements in some areas but not all. According to SCP-1083, they still have warriors and use the all-caps Latin alphabet.
The creator of the GoI says that the world of Alexylva University isn't any more anomalous than ours is, at least not to them,1 so they really are living in an advanced sci-fi world that has an advanced package delivery system called "Phitransimun Combine," which is basically a harnessed wormhole. These wormholes sometimes mess up and deliver the packages to the universe of the Foundation. However, only in Tennessee.
Why?
Who fucking knows.
Also, state-approved slavery is still a thing in the world of Alexylva.
Yes, really.
Anyway, moving on. What are the core themes of Alexylva?
It's a school from another dimension that is both incredibly technologically advanced and behind like some sort of weird Civilization game where a civ specced high into technological research but has no military and is still progression stuck with spearmen units despite having wormhole technology. What the fuck.
It's honestly kind of hard to tell, mostly because we know so little about it. Some have tried to re-interpret Alexylva, such as their appearance in the Third Law tale Terminal Velocity. Sort of. Only the Phitransimun Combine appears and Alexylva gets barely a passing mention, but hey, the articled is tagged alexylva so we'll take it! Anyway, in said tale, the Rookie goes on a heist in the Phitransimun Combine, which is portrayed as a timey wimey mess of things coming in and out of existence. Pretty cool! But alas, barely a mention.
There is also SCP-4860, in which the author explores the alt history aspect of Alexylva a little more by briefly going into details of the other wars which would have been hypothetically fought in the school's universe. It's cool, but unfortunately, it is cut a bit short.
The overall themes that could be assigned to the GoI are alt history and 'something fucks up the Phitransimun Combine', but these are so basic it's difficult to get any mileage out of them.
So how do you write an Alexylva article?
So as we established,2 Alexylva is an extrauniversal university in a universe where Carthage won the Second Punic Wars and technology is hyper advanced and yet things are still backwards. Also, they have wormhole technology that sometimes spits out artifacts in Tennessee in the SCP universe. Cool.
To further analyze the language bit from earlier, as well as the fact that they did not kill the Latin alphabet and in fact use it themselves, it can be inferred that the Carthaginians do not destroy culture, but instead mix themselves into it. This means that you can probably draw from all sorts of extinct cultures into making an anomaly related to them, and give it a special Greco-Roman-Carthaginian twist.
Another popular trope of Alexylva articles is the note at the end which tells us it came from Alexylva University's Department of X. This is usually from their Philosophy Department3 or History Department, but feel free to come up with your own. If it can be put into the Phitransimun Combine, it can be shipped! So really, go nuts with the objects.
If you're more interested in the tale side of things, you can easily take inspiration from the Gloriana Alexylva series, which features more of a slice of life/sports angle of university life. And while we're on the topic, keep in mind that Alexylva is a University. This means that if you want to tell a slice of life story set in a school, you can easily employ the GoI to serve as a backdrop. Just be aware that Alexylva is different to Deer College and ICSUT, and make sure to take full advantage of the alternate history universe. What kind of technology do/don't they have? What is daily life for a student in a place where ethics are far behind the curve like? Things like that!
Something to keep in mind is that Alexylva University is a relic from an older version of the wiki and its conceptions of a GoI where the point of a GoI is not what kind of stories they can tell, but as a source of anomalies for the Foundation to contain. Unlike other GoIs which were expanded into places to make their own stories in, Alexylva was isolated in its own little bubble, stopping people from exploring it beyond a name drop. There's also the alt-history aspect of it, which some people are put off by simply because they either don't know enough to go about it.
And speaking of alt-history, there's places where it can work! For example, the From 120's Archives series 8000 Dead Rats is about an alternate future. However, the reason why this works for 8000 Dead Rats and not Alexylva is because the future is much easier to speculate on than what would have happened if Carthage won the Punic Wars. Really, it's hard to speculate on such a detail without possessing some really deep knowledge of history. However, your mileage may vary! There's the SKP canon from the German branch, in which the Nazis won World War II and it's quite popular there.
I really wish I had better advice to give you, but after combing through all the Alexylva articles, this is the best I could come up with. That being said, I hope that now armed with knowledge of the GoI you are capable of going on to writing your own article featuring Alexylva.
However, in an effort to make this excercise at least a little worthwhile, I sat down and spoke to possibly the only person who still holds any love for Alexylva on the wiki, the one and only Lemonsense. Here's what it had to say:
The key issues I have with Alexylva ultimately come twofold.
1) they're not as much a group with LORE as much as they are a name to slap onto some vaguely greco-roman-carthagian cyberpunk thing and call it a day.
2) several components of the group's lore, as sparse as it is, seem actively hostile to it evolving from that.
I'll mostly be focusing on the first part as there's a fairly easy fix for the second, especially considering we're in Canonexus4 right now, so here goes.
Alexylva is a university. That is it. We can assume it's in Tennessee or somewhere nearby, but that's it. We get very few, if any, inclinations of what the setting is like beyond the college. We get slightly more about what it's like within the college, but that isn't saying much. We can probably assume it isn't an art school or a technical university because of the shit that comes across into our own universe, but it could be just a "normal" third level institute. We know they play American football (WHY THE FUCK), we know they have a student council, we know they have roman-level student politics, murder and all. That's about it.
So, how would I fix this?
Firstly, elaborate on what this place is, and why it's so important. It's the biggest college in Sylvannos, sure, but bigger isn't always better. I'd personally say that Alexylva has the best courses available. The best professors, most extensive and desirable facilities, you get the idea. It's that Havard, Oxford, Trinity. It's the college in the new colonies. As such, it's sort of a prime spot for rich families to dump their kids, or big shots to try and make names for themselves. A bit cliché, sure, but Magic Bougie School is fun. It also serves to fix my issue of Subspace-Tunnelling Amazon existing. The college and its students are able to afford this shit, and that's why so many Alexylvan anomalies are found in Tennessee: nowhere else in the world can afford to use that tech, so nowhere else gets their packages lost like that alternatively we could broaden the scope by saying that Alexylva is a collection of colleges and the one in Catho-Nashville just has the faultiest Super Amazon Prime.
Obviously, I'd elaborate on the history of this alternate universe. (2231 years of divergence is a lot and we only ever really see the end results of it) It'd also help explain the disparity of Super Amazon while still operating off of a military system that would've become antiquated the second they invented the mortar.
Probably look a bit at the culture of the whole place, which would take a good bit of research into the native american cultures of the region as well as carthage (I feel like the only part of that blend that comes across strongly is the greco-roman part), trim off the unaccessible part, the WL exists, Delta-T exists, nobody gives a shit about "oooooo we can't see them"; it's just frustrating from a writing point of view.
Stay tuned for the next essay in which I talk about the nationalized anomalous organizations.
And that's all I wrote.
