News for April, 2023

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Editorial

Interview with AssertiveRoland, creator of the Daeva

When I was reading SCP-7291 by HarryBlankHarryBlank, a familiar name popped up: the Daevites. I’ve always loved the Daevites, but I realized I didn’t actually know much about their on-site history and origin, so I spoke to the man who would know the most about the Daevites.

Would you like to introduce yourself?

Hi. I'm AssertiveRoland, occasionally of the SCP Wiki. I've been an on-and-off contributor over the years.

What would you say is your most famous article? Or the one that caused the most “ripples?”

Well, actually, I think it's 141 - no, I think we all know why I'm being interviewed, it's SCP-140.
Which has always been something of an appealing surprise to me, I certainly wasn't expecting anything close to the ripples spawned from this particular one.

Would you like to give a quick summary of the SCP?

Certainly.

SCP-140 is a modern hardcopy book of anomalous length produced at some time during the 20th century that recounts the history of an anomalous ancient central Asian civilization known as the Daevites. The Daevites performed various typical-for-the-era practices such as ancestor worship, slavery, conquest, gruesome sacrifice, and militarism - and seemingly performed efficacious acts of religious ritual magic.

For some reason, if it comes into contact with any ink suitable for writing including human blood, the book's account - which is highly detailed and seems closer to a biography than a secondary source - extends. At the same time, historical evidence of the civilization in question is extended further into the record, effectively prolonging its apparent existence and leaving new relics in archaeological sites and other remnants.

As such ,if the civilization is permitted to continue expanding past its original destruction, eventually it will get closer and closer to the modern era, leaving more relics and even survivor populations or descended cultures with a greater presence in the modern world. The SCP is apparently the product of a specific anomalous individual and was produced by a vanity press, so a small but noteworthy number of other copies exist other than that in Foundation custody.

Crucially, the SCP does not appear to have any memetic component to it; people are not compelled to add to the record, and yet expansion events continue to occur.

This feels very strange, incidentally, to summarize this way. 🙂

Will that do for a summary?

Of course. Now, do you remember any articles similar to SCP-140 when you originally published it?

At the time, I don't believe it was very typical. The Wiki at that point had a significant bias towards a mixture of what one might call "urban legend" SCPs, basically just "wow, that's a weird modern object that does something inexplicable!" and the *hard* sciences rather than the soft sciences. There had been a few historical SCPs, but I feel there was a general bias against either any sort of "mythology" or any sort of direct ties to real-world or ancient cultures.

What about other GOIs at the time? Were any developed or developing?

There were Groups of Interest at the time, but I wouldn't say there was as much of a sense of a mythos that modern Foundation audiences would expect. The Church of the Broken God - that was the big name at the time for them, it wasn't "Mekhanites", and they were very pointedly more of a modern abberration as I recall - and the Chaos Insurgency and the Factory were more typical of GOIs at the time. Heck, there were two who were just individuals, one "Nobody" and somebody who was basically just a supervillain.
At the time there was a pretty strong feel, I think, that the Foundation and its researchers were sort of the stars of the show, and there was also a very strong bias against the notion of "canons."
It was all very X-Files - "that's weird" more than anything else, with the GOI groups necessary to act as sort of black ops opposition to the Foundation when needed.

Now, and this is very much a personal question, when should Daevite be used instead of Daeva, and vice versa? Essentially, what is the difference of Daeva vs. Daevite.

Ahh, now we're getting into the details, heh.

So first off, usual disclaimer. This is Just Me, The Guy Who Lit the Spark and Has Ideas at the moment, I'm not speaking on high from my throne in Daevavaon. But!

"Daevite" is the polity, it's the empire and its culture. Daeva is the specific ruling caste/potentially human subspecies that rules that empire, but also the people, the demographic, who maintained and ruled the Daevite empire.
To put it another way, the daeva were a particular ruling tribe/caste, culture and people who reigned over the daevite empire; although it's convenient to conflate the two it's not exactly 1:1 - as we can obviously see from their offshoot groups.
(And h.sapiens daeva is, by Foundation modern reckoning, a subspecies, but the daeva themselves precede the notion of such things and that's a reflection of their particular worldview.)

How do you feel about the spread of the Daeva? Today, it’s one of the most popular GOIs, having its own canon and the framework of an original language.

It's honestly extremely hard to wrap my head around and tremendously flattering. It's a cliche to say things like "oh I'd love nothing more than for people to do stuff with my work," but in this case it is very honest. I never dreamed of any impact like this and it's something I occasionally come back to and marvel that it had such an impact.

And the thing is that so much of it is the product of the community. The matriarchy? The horitcultural/fertility thing? The elaborate Sarkic mythos and its connections? None of that stuff was even remotely in my mind when I first set it down.

I honestly set out just to do a history-focused SCP because at the time I felt it wasn't a huge presence in the community, and I thought "hey, what if one of those ancient cultures of antiquity actually had sacrificial rituals that worked, and all their ancient mores and attitudes were being brought artificially towards the present? How upsetting, how challenging, would that be? How much of what we see as barbarism was typical in its day?"

So to have the Daeva have become practically one of the precursors of the entire Foundation-verse, to have had them roped into the amazingly compelling Nalka/Mekhane conflict that forms a huge part of the backbone of the modern site's mythos - it's unbelievable. I'm constantly in awe, and I'm so often inspired by some of the amazing things so many creative people have done with it.

I mean it has a conlang, for crying out loud. A brilliant person is making a daevite conlang. People have extrapolated so much out of this one work that I remember idly filling out on my off hours at my first job. It's unreal and I'm forever grateful it struck a chord with so many people.

And when I do go and experiment with daeva stuff or draw on it, I know that everything I'm inspired to do is in turn the collaboration with so many remarkably imaginative people.
I know that's probably repetitive

As we close, is there anything else you’d like to say?

Honestly, I think what I'd like to say most of all is just: "Thank you." Thank you to everyone for whom this has struck a chord in their imaginations, and thank you for enriching my own work with your own efforts.

I am tremendously grateful that I could be of aid here, and I look forward to learning more about the Daevites and their daeva, in all the manifold permutations and historical variations and divergences from a single core source, together.

I'm actually extremely interested in some of what I've seen done in terms of trying to add complexity to the Daeva and daevites in terms of taking them from just an object of evil and fear to a complex anomalous society in their own right. It's been one of my pervasive own ambitions with the canon, so to speak, and I absolutely love to see what people do with it beyond the initial just object of fear, because I think the core of the idea is fully capable of supporting that addition to the mythos.

Thank you for your time!

And there you have it folks! An interview with the creator of the Daevites! I hope this inspires you to give some Daeva articles some love! Cheers!

- By Voiiiii

Features Last Month

Top Articles of the Month

Ratings of course do not mean everything, but they are representative of what people happened to like seeing at the time. With this in mind, the following are the top-rated works last month, so if by some chance you haven't encountered them yet, be sure to check them out!

Top-Rated SCP

Code Name: Plague's Proposal by PlaguePJP: The Ones That Got Away

TWEEDLEY-DEE TWEEDLEY-DA. GOD'S STRONGEST SOLDIER IS MY NAME. GETTING RID OF SIN IS MY GAME.

Top-Rated Non-SCP

New Ritual. by stormbreath

The hole is shaped like a god. Release your sins into it.

Front Page Features

Every month, an article is selected from each of the three common article types: SCP, Tale, and Group of Interest Format. These three articles are displayed on the front page for the month to bring further recognition to them.

If you would like to view the previous front page features, you can view the archive for the SCPs here, the archive for the Tales here, and the archive for the GoI Formats here!

SCP Article

SCP-7261 by SYTYCFanon: Interview with a Tlahuelpuchi

SCP-7261 is a thaumaturgic curse affecting certain female Homo sapiens native to the Tlaxcala region of Mexico.

Tale

The Beach- Part II by Its A Bad Idea

It had been no more than a few hours since he'd stepped through the portal that was a doorframe, gilded in those ominous words, on the ship that shouldn’t exist.

GoI-Format

Questiosn And Answers On Our Shared Faith by Stormbreath

What are we meant to do with our lives, knowing what we know about the Hytoth?

Reviewers' Spotlights

Works are featured on the site’s front page as part of the Reviewers’ Spotlight, which acknowledges the time and effort spent by forum reviewers helping other authors develop and edit and their works for the mainsite. Each month, community members are encouraged to nominate forum reviewers who have been both particularly helpful and active. Members of the Forum Criticism Team will then discuss the nominations, and select four prominent reviewers to choose the month’s Reviewers’ Spotlight front-page features.

If you would like to view previous spotlights, you can view the archive for them here!

1st of March

SCP-057-INT by Uncle Nicolini, Rounderhouse, and HarryBlank [Featured by Uncle Nicolini]

And when I slinked through the underground passages of Facility-57 that day, my senses were telling me all hell was about to break loose.

8th of March

SCP-6952 by SYTYCFanon [Featured by SYTYCFanon]

SCP-6952 is a manual on the creation and development of anomalous weapons and armor, hereby classified as SCP-6952-1 instances.

15th of March

Dr Anderson's Failing Marriage by scalykitty [Featured by scalykitty]

The words chased George out of the kitchen, like a swarm of wasps, and stung him as he gathered his things for work.

22nd of March

Self-Improvement Koala by J Dune [Featured by Rify]

SCP-7960 is remarkably durable, as all attempts to harm the entity do not result in any observable damage.

SCP Data & Trends

All the goings-on of the site condensed into bite-sized takeaways! Is there a statistic or figure you would be interested in knowing? Let us know and we can feature it next time!

image.pngimage.pngimage.pngimage.pngimage.png

Like before, we are still renovating this section. It will likely be a couple months, but we will soon have a nice little stats section here. In the meantime, please enjoy our monthly chart.

Also, what do YOU want to see in the monthly stats section? Any data you want to know about? Please leave a comment about it in the Discussion page or use this anonymous google form.

- By Data Analysis Team

New Content this Month

There is a multitude of wonderful works that are posted to the Wiki every month whether they be SCP articles, Tales, GoI Formats, Art pages, Author Pages, Essays, and more! Below, we have all of the creations for this month listed out by week and type (except for art pages, we did that earlier!) We have added little emojis next to articles that qualify to add some additional content. Below we have listed out the emojis we use and what they mean. Be sure to give them a look!

🤝 = Co-authored works - It is always interesting to see the dynamics of how people work together!
💯 = Articles rated at +100 and higher - These are articles that have seen success and should be celebrated for it!
📈 = SCP articles rated under +30 and Tales and GoI Formats rated under +20 - Let's show these a little love!

Week of March 1st

SCP Articles

Tales

GoI Formats

Miscellaneous Pages

Week of March 5th

SCP Articles

Tales

GoI Formats

N/A

Miscellaneous Pages

Week of March 12th

SCP Articles

Tales

GoI Formats

Miscellaneous Pages

Week of March 19th

SCP Articles

Tales

GoI Formats


N/A

Miscellaneous Pages

Week of March 26th

SCP Articles

Tales

GoI Formats

Miscellaneous Pages

Thank you so much for reading the SCP Wiki's Site News!

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