News & Opinion, Culture & Community
by Lack of Lepers
“I think it's so incredible that so many of us discovered SCP or became fully invested in some of the loneliest moments in a lot of our lives... That is what we all are at the end of the day; simply creative people.”
—Agent Jackrabbit, Simply Creative People Podcast, Episode 1
The containment fiction space has experienced an odd amount of forced unity lately. One can be excused for not noticing this in our little corner of the internet, usually rife with in-fighting, and largely along community lines.
First there was the long-awaited and yearned-for outing of AdminBright from the SCP Wiki community, this finally having official recognition from the SCP Wiki staff. Next, all of WikiDot and 99% of the space was arrested for about a week due to an alleged hack from Russia — the community took refuge on Twitter and filed down the anxiety of potentially permanent loss with humor and memes. The solidarity was sustained even after WikiDot came back from its technical woes, in that it immediately decided to punish all of Russia and Belarus for the actions of a few. (WikiDot remains unavailable from these regions to this day.) It didn't really matter who you were or where you were from; we all held our breath with worry, or shook our fists in outrage, and looked for any relief or comradery in that, together. As it has been said on this magazine, "We Will All Go Together When We Go".
And most recently, nearly all in the space were blindsided by a community influencer and a fast-rising fan-favorite; Agent Jackrabbit. Two weeks ago, everyone put down their animus for one another to gawk at someone who in a virtuosic display of dishonesty and ill-intent, had worn a sheep's clothing all the way into the social interior of the SCP Wiki and its community.
Agent Jackrabbit was recently discovered & reported as a known intimidator, manipulator, and predator. This included testimony from current community members as well as staunch evidence from her time in a past fandom. It turns out Agent Jackrabbit hops from fandom to fandom in order to dupe gullible people into accepting her.
And so, Agent Jackrabbit, aka Jackie, has deleted her Twitter, TikTok, and other social media accounts. She fled the community she tricked rather than facing those who she bamboozled and betrayed. (Oddly... perhaps not though... her Ko-fi is still up.)
In an odd twist of irony, it was the most bubbly and smiling of people, a self-described "hype-beast of ominous positivity", the one feigning community unity under her watch, who turned out to be the darkest and most dishonest; the most separating and divisive. The revelation hit the SCP community rather hard that someone who said all the right things, believed all the right beliefs, and who rubbed shoulders with all the right people could be someone with calculated motives. It may surprise the reader though to be told that Agent Jackrabbit was, in fact, not good at fooling people. Jackrabbit was bad at concealing her ulterior self. We do not need the evidence used by O5 to reach this determination to have understood something was sufficiently awry with Agent Jackrabbit. The indicators were plentiful from the moment she arrived on scene.
Instead, it is the case that the SCP Wiki community is very good at being fooled. In their relative, collective youth and inexperience, they remain maddeningly unaware of the ways in which you can socially hack their community. We can afford them the grace of being young — we were all naïve once — but also review for them, and not in an I-told-you-so way, that those of us who had seen this before saw this coming, and how.
So, to that effect, we will take a look into Agent Jackrabbit's introduction into the space and trace her development as a personality. We will pay particular attention to her “guerrilla campaign to gain influence”, as it has been well-stated (by J Dune). We will get into how shame-based terms establish exclusion zones around large areas of collateral thought. Finally, we will detail how the community has self-installed blinders that were in part responsible for the inability to notice warning signs. We will conclude with how this event points to and cautions against severely wrong-headed stances that promote isolationism, exceptionalism, and a toxic maximalism within SCP spaces.
The Context
Jackrabbit began her introduction to the community on Twitter in late 2021. She posted numerous selfies in SCP-related cosplay, usually with tactical and steam-punk themes that were well-polished, both in costume and in photo treatment. From there, she would offer things like “birthday gifts” to popular figures in the space, tagging them to attract their attention.
Jackrabbit had done her research and knew who to cozy up to for visibility in the digital limelight. Her networking targeted other commercial influences, such as DrCimmerian, Tanhony, and TheeSherm (Site-42). She made numerous appearances in the SCP podcast circles, including on Shawn Saxum’s Authors Anomalous, the Yurtkast, and others. In addition, she would enact IRL networking with other social media influencers.
With her accrued network of influencers, she would then leverage that liquidity of social capital to attract more to her pyramid scheme, and even dangle out participation in her pet project like a carrot.
Agent Jackrabbit knowingly and tactfully leeched onto the major figures of the space to exponent her clout. Like any decent parasite, this went undetected by those major figures, who were manipulated by the flattery. The aggression in this self-marketing and politicking was clear to anyone divested from the culture of clout-chasing. It was an intentional campaign of brand lobbying, which raises no eyebrows in a setting which has normalized this.
But raw social reach wasn’t enough to fully don what would later be exposed as a sheep’s clothing. For that, Agent Jackrabbit would need to deploy and execute a much more emotional appeal for herself and her character.
She coupled her bubbly persona with occasional posts of self-depreciation, touting trendy psychosocial afflictions that were guaranteed to elicit feelings of protection, nurturing, and sympathy from the emotionally and politically primed SCP Twitter community, such as discussing her crippling depression and anxiety. This was the case when she suddenly quit the Simply Creative People podcast after one episode, citing a mental breakdown and an inability to manage her daily duties, which we later learned from multiple testimonies, was a lie. Months later, she would take on an inescapably more time-demanding and entrepreneurial project, SCP Sideshow; something she has now been removed from by the rest of the team. I will leave it to the reader to juxtapose the sincerity or lack thereof that her leave from the SCPeople podcast for a more self-central and socially lucrative position suggests, this position likely being in the works around the same time. (Her previous co-host of that show had this to say.)
Agent Jackrabbit would also post impossibly generic messages meant to uplift her audience, and feign pseudo-aching platitudes about community love and togetherness:
Jackrabbit was also an avid shiller who embraced the most degenerate and notoriously suspect aspects of the social media dimension of the SCP Wiki, with a particular emphasis on the authority & significance of upvotes and quantitative metrics. An eager brown-noser, she promoted others' articles who she wanted to flatter into a friendship, or into a partnership for her projects.
During and up to the height of her influence, Jackrabbit would demonstrate numerous red flags of a parasocial, explicitly manipulative, and inappropriate manner. Take for example her penchant of referring to her audience as “cute cadets”, both in text and in videos:
Or the out-in-the-open taglines on her project's ads, which read "Manipulate the girls; indoctrinate the boys."
Agent Jackrabbit had an ace up her sleeve that others in the space might not; looks. Jackie used this to market her sexuality to an impressionable demographic, one predominantly of 15–19 year old males, some younger. She was attracting attention for the wrong reasons and by the wrong methods. In what will be a difficult amount of hindsight to properly focus for many, this tactic was bait; obvious, cheap, low, and ill-becoming of a person with talent to offer instead. An honest assessment of these tactics used should not be artificially limited by fear-based cries of "misogyny", but it is.
In a similar way, Jackrabbit was able to cleverly deter any highly visible reasons for alarm by couching the diagnostic signs in her online character, a literal self-insert. She would admit that what was displayed was toxic, but pin that to her character, and so use it as a lightning rod for criticism or detection. She then had the freedom to mock her own audience for being distracted into a fugue-state of obliviousness. Instead of ringing true, relevant criticism would be used to further fuel the apparently negative character of any of her critics; silencing them and pushing them further to the periphery of the space, where their observations and statements would be useless; where Jackrabbit wanted them.
With that, and in writing an SCP for the site, her net had been cast, and wide. It took her no time at all.
How Agent Jackrabbit Did This Without Being Detected
I would have you pity Jackie, not hate her. This article is not to stone Agent Jackrabbit. We all contort the space to ourselves, in our own ways... though certainly less destructively and ridiculously. Some write explicitly and exclusively for social capital. Others, like myself, are at times interested in dramatic events in so far as we can speak about them pseudo-authoritatively. Authors contort the world around us to serve our space and hobby; confic fodder is everywhere, and the author is constantly asking what they can wring from it.
She is, as anyone is, welcome to voice her opinion here on Confic Magazine. In fact, things like this is what the project was created for. A space would be saved for her, were she to want to share her side of the story, along with any public apologies or regrets.
Partially why Jackie was so convincing to many was because she truly enjoyed the SCP and its content. She had a clear passion for Sarkicism, as revealed in the Simply Creative People Podcast, Episode 1. Her lone article on the SCP Wiki, SCP-6863, is an unfortunate but brutally honest portrayal of her actual self, hidden in character cosplay. Jackie doubtless did what she did from the heart; it just so happened it was a poisoned and profoundly troubled one. Even when she spoke ill of me and my projects, I respected her grind and entrepreneurial spirit (if only that).
This is someone who clearly loved SCP and had a passion for the space, but whose personality brought so much baggage into it, so as to demean the beauty it offers into becoming her lowly bellboy.
But in addition to that, there are some elements unique to the SCP Wiki community that enabled Agent Jackrabbit's procession into a position of influence, and that helped downplay red flags along the way. These need to be called out at point-blank range. And, as the reader will be aware by the end of this article, no one can do it but a community outcast like myself.
One particular and saddening element that contributed more than any other in this situation is fear. Specifically, fear of being outcast. Fear may not even be the right word for it. Maybe it's terror.
There are a ton of cognitive and psychological pleasures in supporting your own group and criticizing the out-group. Something as simple as joining a chorus over communally-agreed upon villains is a sufficient, initiatory thing to do; something easy to get applause from:
At a place like SCP, in-group spoils come at a cost. There is an unspoken oppression there that you must think and behave like the others; you must support the same causes, more or less believe in the same politics, hate the same outcasts, stay in the same spaces, avoid the disallowed ones, and voice the same grievances. The emphasis upon uniformity of thought generates many traits — some advantageous, some not — but one disadvantage is that it allows entrepreneurial politicians to fan those collected grievances, or exploit those collective loves, all by way of pure lip service. And, as we saw in Jackrabbit's case, it was more than enough.
The unquestioning inclination to believe close to what everyone else in your social group believes, and shame or be shamed for seeing things differently, has abscessed the SCP Wiki into a tunneled, hyper-partisan worldview. Moments and occurrences which would otherwise be cause for concern can be swept away by a current of anxiety over being an independent voice who potentially disagrees with your peers. Necks stuck out often get chopped here, and so too often, the whole spine is done away with.
This is how someone like AdminBright was able to prey upon the userbase for so long with little to no commentary from those who knew better. Though the SCP staff performed brilliantly this time around, the same fault is present regarding Agent Jackrabbit, and strikes like a deafening gong, fast on the reverberations of what should have been a broken heart’s education in the case of AdminBright. The situations are remarkably similar to the point of almost failed analogy.
Like Bright, the warning signs around Agent Jackrabbit were ubiquitous and undeniable in retrospect, but virtually invisible as long as they were set in a context of social celebrity. In an in-group that punishes dissidents at the slightest misstep with community exclusion and social ostracization, this silent fear fosters an uncritical habit of wholesale de-personing anyone who major figures find disagreeable, or want to find so. People go along with the crowd. Near-meaningless mono-term buzzwords are wielded on the hip of anyone and everyone, ready to be drawn and shot at the person who expresses an observation which would upset the artificial solidarity. Your average person in and around SCP is one mistake away from being permanently ruined there. All this while those long-set in positions of power and influence can seemingly get away with nearly anything; a deeply wrong-headed double standard that still is alive and well, despite all the outrage (and promises) of the 2021 Town Halls.
We can see this exact process of community-wide canceling being commandeered and leveraged by Agent Jackrabbit against even a well-liked member of the SCP community's inner spheres, and who was a once-associate of this individual:
“But I noticed how the community started reacting to me. People who were excited about the show suddenly pretended like I didn’t exist, like Simply Creative People didn’t exist. They either didn’t respond to me or just refused to promote the show. Not that I expected that of anyone necessarily, but a bunch of people that were going to give advice on growing the show or try to help promote it didn’t because of things Jackie was saying.”
“And beyond that, I noticed how suddenly, I was ostracized and ignored in the community in general. Suddenly discord servers that were places I had been for years weren’t very inviting anymore… suddenly people on twitter I used to engage with didn’t speak to me any more.”
“Jackie had seemingly turned the whole world against me.”
“ I have kept quiet about all this for fear of reprisal. For fear of having my reputation even more hurt. Honestly, writing for the wiki and making the podcast are so important to me. They are my one creative outlet. And the idea of losing those things made me so scared, I didn’t say anything.”
“All I can hope is that people who were told such heinous lies might assess me on the basis of my actual behavior and not the lies of this toxic liar.”
Someone with less social stock wouldn't stand a chance.
Bringing It On Home
The palpable fear in and around SCP-controlled spaces results in one, crippling handicap: thinking is not free.
It is no coincidence that beliefs and feelings about Jackrabbit were virtually split along community lines. In SCP, one might not be allowed to think certain things, or criticize certain people, or ask certain questions — civilly you are allowed, sure; but culturally, no. A community where thought is not free is incapable of thinking things, criticizing people, or asking questions when they need to. (That is why we exist, and is in no coincidence why we are so radioactive to most in the SCP community. If the community was honest enough, the task of community self-awareness would not be outsourced to us outcasts.) When you cannot think freely, you are easily tricked, blinded, and fooled by people who recognize the situation for what it is. People like Jackrabbit then occupy and fill verboten spaces in the absence of any decent lighting. They can in turn manufacture villains out of good people, if for no better reason than that these are asking the wrong questions, or making the wrong observations.
The circumstance and vulnerability is not unlike a dishonest someone successfully befriending a church because they carry a Bible and show all outward indications of the religion. If you build a community’s sense of inclusivity upon political gestures and fear, you will create a scenario that is easy for fake people to appear real in, and that the selfsame will exploit. When you hate people for the crime of disagreement, particularly of a political or in-group basis, thinking vacates. For every person you ban for having benignly different opinions, you open their spot up to an Agent Jackrabbit.
There is no greater demonstration of this imprisonment of thinking than in how authorities at SCP treat members of our Society for Containment Fiction (SCF). Good people, people who actively write for the SCP Wiki even, are denied entry into the official SCP Discord simply because they are in the same digital space as me, Harmony, and others; we figures that these SCP influencers and staff do not like, because we disagree with them and voice that, sometimes passionately. These good people are rejected with the door slammed on them when they are blameless. They have done nothing wrong. Yet pivotal SCP members up to and including administrators do not care. They are happy to treat them like vermin, based on nothing but a fundamentalist, irreducible dogma against someone’s alternative and partial group affiliation.
Many members of SCP leverage what is a dramatic minority position (that being those of us who are AHT banned), and amplify it in order to judge the entire SCF group in that way. This is intellectually daft and most of all cowardly. Even if you want the convenience of falsely believing Harmony and I are “evil doxxers” (I am not evil, and I have never doxxed anyone), this is still blatantly unfair treatment. Other people shouldn’t be punished for what I or someone else has done.
As an official example, O5 has publicly designated our SCF Discord as “an AHT-related community”. What would it look like if we defined all spaces with AHT involvement in this way? What would SCP itself look like if we returned the favor and defined everyone there by their community’s worst?! These same members of SCP will turn around and scathe WikiDot for cancel-culturing all users from Russia and Belarus, based on the actions of a few!
There is no nuance here. More than that, nuance is actively discouraged. The community’s top representatives feel the need to socially extort people away from an “unimportant” community 1/100,000th its size, and why? We do not define SCP by its worst actions or people, but this luxury is not given to us. Why? The answer to both is because SCP is incapable of free thinking and is threatened by those who can. Their social business model is a shackled chain gang; you have to link up in lockstep in order to be part of the gang. No questions asked. Otherwise, they would be happy to coexist where peace can and should occur.
And on that note, you cannot intimidate thoughts out of people. Many at SCP knew something was awry with Jackrabbit. But they could not speak it out of fear. This was the conundrum and paralysis even of those being actively abused by her. The same was so with AdminBright; individuals poured into the bandwagon as soon as he was announced on O5 as a creep, celebrating that they were relieved and had always known. One of these people was Jackrabbit herself! Where was this outcry and commentary years ago? Couldn’t it have been helpful sooner? What good is the testimony now, after the work is finished?! Is it not clear that fear had kept these people silent, and their dire truth was only made permissible to speak aloud once the rest of the community had OK’d it?
Sociological literature is littered with studies that have shown; meeting together with people of different groups is the quickest and easiest way to overcome differences, and xenophobia. And yet, the SCP spaces' default reaction to troubled portions of itself or places nearby is outright amputation. The odd person out is not engaged with in any effort of understanding or larger commonalities, they are blocked. The point is to not allow the opportunity to recognize more important, shared qualities.
This over-simplistic treatment is everywhere, whether this is the whole of SCF for a blemish or two, or all of Agent Jackrabbit's existence and everything that lead up to it. A refusal to witness how they might have been incorrect, and how others might have been right, continues in the wake of the revelation about Jackrabbit. Podcasters and multi-media content creators are erasing her from their history books as you read this. They thereby hope to remove her from people's painful memories too. They do so in order to prevent her influence from spreading, when this does not actually solve that issue, and can exacerbate it.
What they are doing functionally then is hindering the ability to learn from this. Without the replay value of watching those podcast performances in light of what we know now, we are denied an autopsy on the character, her time in our space, and how she was able to warp it. Taking down media that she had bamboozled her way into saves face, makes affected individuals temporarily feel maybe a bit better, and sure, is a bold and virtuous gesture; but it is empty besides that.
Did you know that when presented with a pathogen, your body's immune system extracts an identifying fragment of it, and memorializes it permanently? It does this so that it can be ready next time. The SCP culture's response is not unlike an immune system refusing to crystallize the pathogen, and instead, pretend it didn't exist. The methods of Jackrabbit's successful exploitation and manipulation, as well as the human sides of her that were not all bad, will be hastily and reflexively buried along with her reputation; done almost gleefully to the raucous sacrifice of the community's self-ascribed purity, which it will take great measures to routinely convince itself of.
But the community most needs to understand how and why this happened. They need to take a long and hard look at Agent Jackrabbit so they can better identify the next perpetrator who will come along in her and AdminBright's spirit, and understand how an Agent Jackrabbit exists in us all, waiting to be afforded the opportunity to come forth. We need stark reminders of why this part of us is bad; fear of posthumous cancel culture isn't an effective treatment. The damage is done; removing her appearances does not help rid the body of SCP from a pathogen that's already left. How will they better know this spirit if they as a community gulp down a mass amnestic, and expunge all records of her from their documentation, and bury their heads in the sand?
SCP's larger emotional posture and its gut reaction to bodily insult are deeply flawed approaches. And it is perpetual; seemingly undisturbed even by the visceral gore of an Agent Jackrabbit's damage. If not now, when? If not this, what?
Consider for a moment the staunchly alternative philosophy of the Society for Containment Fiction. We are the lack of a political statement — though some at SCP habituated to the political teet still cannot help but define "confic" as a purely political term! (I laugh as I write this; we ain't the Yurt!)
There is no “we” there, only individuals; we do not collectively plug our individualities into a political bloc, so there is no "right script" to parrot. We are not fooled by outward signs of community pride because we do not allow such superficial things to define us. We do not censor any information, so there is no articles of community faith when it comes to who should be disliked or why. We do not ban for mistakes or unperson someone for holding a particular position. Nobody is beneath having their opinions expressed and nobody is above having those opinions criticized. Different and dissenting opinions will be allowed. What we do is let people share their opinions, smart or dumb, and crush their balls with our metaphorical foot if they are dumb. We are not afraid of bad ideas; ours is a place where bad ideas come to die.
We respect that, and we will have integrity with that. Our spaces will thus be more heated and make people feel uncomfortable because of it. Without the possibility of discomfort, or that integrity of freed thought, the situation quickly devolves into a lackey presentation, where everybody’s walking on eggshells trying to avoid offending someone, or being very fearful of a sort of instant cancel culture.
And as such, our immune system is more robust, for it is more challenged. We can better identify bad actors or give housing to those good people who are wrongfully outcast. SCP loved Jackrabbit. In something reminiscent of Barabbas, they chose AdminBright while capitally-punishing Harmony, someone the whole of SCP simultaneously loves & hates (and hates to love, and loves to hate!) for single-handedly defending her own heart and the moral, right thing to do when no one else would. The community chose to vilify one of the most dedicated people to ever exist in the space, and invalidate a heart 10-years offered freely to the Wiki, rather than suffer a loss of 3% of their content. (Regardless of your preferred percentage there, the argument scales; the more impact that removing Harmony's articles would have is also the extent to which some gratitude should have been given to her in thanks and honor.)
Ask yourself how Agent Jackrabbit might have had a harder time enacting her con-artistry in our philosophy.
Conclusion and Invocation
These habits within the SCP community I have detailed put the whole community at risk; it makes them, the flagship of our space, bad at identifying pathogens, and even worse at dealing with them. Speak up. Do not be afraid. There are those who would welcome you still. You will be the better for it, and so will your community. Damn your ego and your fears of where you will end up; the most wind-scattered seed can find the right soil and flourish, and even become a forest.
Take it from me. I am many timorous SCP members’ nightmare scenario, realized. I was laughed out of the community in 2019 for what I had to say. I spoke my mind and payed the price for it. The full force of the community’s ridicule and hate came down upon me — everyone from djkaktus to Rounderhouse to PeppersGhost to DrMagnus to ProcyonLotor. Even still, I am hated loudly and publicly by the sizable social capital of content creators like TheeSherm (for aggressively calling him out), Rhaddager (I suppose maybe for this?), and by people who I have never spoken with and who have never spoken once to me; and yes, by Jackrabbit too. Most of these people dislike me because their friends do. They operate on second and third-hand information that they are happy to accept on faith and make efforts to not question. The social incentive is to avoid the challenge of such a belief's truth altogether, rather than stand up to it or look it square in the eye.
And yet the price that I payed has been given back to me several times over. At the time, my opinions were nothing that anyone reading wanted to hear. Now, the messages therein are echoed in the activism of modern community influencers. The awareness and etiology of upvotes as an addiction, for example, is now a mainstream observation, dare I say even cliched. It has taken a long time, but we at Confic Magazine are finally enacting a blinded writing contest, where voters don’t know who wrote what until after the votes are tallied (something I had suggested to SCP in order to combat their celebrity culture). For all their hoopla & uptight-ness regarding matters of proper licensing, SCP staff has knowingly stolen my work without attribution; there is a ton of unintentional flattery and enjoyment in that one for me. My willingness to question and engage in whistleblowing and the sharing of damning staff chat logs that those exposed would like to keep hidden (this deemed “doxxing” by SCP staff) was eventually instrumental to the felling of AdminBright when a renegade staff member actually listened to what myself and Harmony had to say.
I have outlasted those who told me to grow up, somberly watched as they ruined themselves in the affluence of their relative social wealth, screaming and kicking in the emotional adolescence that a worship of numbers and themselves next to those numbers creates. I have watched the SCP staff seethe behind closed doors over my opinions of them, and try publicly, desperately (not just once but twice) to bend site policy so that my author page could be formally deleted and that be within the rules. I have seem my ghost haunt the halls of the SCP, most recently making a specter-like appearance in Rounderhouse’s fanfaring (and delightful!) 100th article. I have helped create an alternative, diverse, and truly inclusive community that is doing interesting and important things; things that people won’t recognize the value of until years later. In this community of ours, there are the first rays of actual co-existence and mutual respect between confic communities for our sole unifying, shared interest.
But the real deposits are deeply personal, not outward “achievements”. I am happier than I would have been, had I kept silent, especially if I had done so out of fear. Three years on, and I refuse to loosen my grip on a space that I strongly believe — strongly as ever — is valuable and deeply important… this to the dismay and confusion of many, who in their vanity or social intoxication can’t understand why someone so disliked would still hang around.
I am speaking about myself not for its own sake, but to speak to you, dear reader! I had to lose what I thought was important to find people who don’t accept me conditionally, merely based on what I believe, or profess, or how much of that overlaps with theirs as the popular opinion. Believe me when I say this; when it comes to this community of SCP and beyond, I wouldn’t trade anything to be in any other position than the one I am in now. There is no amount of upvotes, views, followers, contest wins, or social standing that could convince me to not be who I ended up being.
I am proud of what I’m doing. If people's bad press regarding me had the ability to deter me, it would have worked by now. I have an esteem that is not dependent upon upvotes or social metrics. I don’t need praise to be happy with my works, nor do I need upvotes to tell me how good or not good it is. My confidence does not derive from how accepted I am by people who would turn on me as soon as I missed a beat of their drumming. Nothing in this space has dominion over me. Most importantly, I am capable of thinking freely, and I’ve done a great deal with it. A lot of people still dislike me for voicing my opinions, but I take comfort in that these are not the people whose opinions matter much to me. They believe I ruined my reputation while at SCP, when in reality, it was just getting started and in a wider scope, so how much stock can I place in them?
There is much to gain, things supremely more meaningful and lasting, when you are true to yourself. SCP is not the ultimate destination in confic and it isn’t even all there is to it either (though people in that community resent us for pointing out in a designated manner (“confic”) that they do not own the genre, not anymore). There is a lot more to the space now, and it is growing. There is a family resemblance and tree now that nods to spiritual successors like Backrooms and Liminal Archives (called "limfic"), who have taken confic and put it into a new direction. Many beneficiaries of the old way of thinking — that there is no "confic", that there is just SCP and spin-offs — cannot help but betray their deeper anxiety and coping mechanisms when they group-write thinly-veiled parodies like "The Bathrooms", or when they bad mouth the simple effort of officializing our shared, unique style of writing fiction into an informal genre with an imperfect name!
The SCP Wiki and what you believe it can get you is very small compared to the totality of who you are, and what you are capable of. The attention there, the friends, the clout, the Twitter followers, the upvotes, the praise, the positions, the contest wins; it’s all negligible compared with who you really are supposed to be. This statement is true of everyone there, regardless of their author rank.
The decision to remain emotionally adolescent by members of the SCP community will again and again attract the sort that would prey upon that emotional age. You've listened to the false platitudes of community togetherness from the lips of a jackal who would have you believe she is a lamb. Now, listen to the words of an proud asshole and outcast: let's focus on how we can have some real unity, and this time, not at the beckoning of a catastrophe.
Sometimes, the people who you have pushed to the outskirts of your community are there because certain people want them there.
Sometimes still, they are the first to sound the proximity alarms.
This post is dedicated to those members of the SCP Foundation Wiki community who openly participate in the Society for Containment Fiction, and who demonstrate to their peers that listening to and considering an alternative viewpoint is not the same as endorsing it.
Ⓒ Lack of Lepers
Ⓒ Confic Magazine
This post is a derivative and re-work of a post from the Lack of Lepers blog: https://lackoflepers.medium.com/how-multi-community-predator-agent-jackrabbit-fooled-scp-again-bad8e58d9233