"This Is Considered Normal": The Expanded History of the SCP Universe - Part I

by Jesse LeJeune

Dedicated to pixelatedHarmony and Cooldude971

With gratitude to bluesoul, DoctorAkimbo, and WhiteGuard

Foreward

This is the first in a series of posts that will act as a serialized e-book. There is no better place to publish this than here. Anyone who is ever interested in this subject would look for it on this website. And so, here they will find it.

This book exists because the most remarkable creative phenomenon of the early internet deserves more than being reduced to consumable entertainment. Most people encounter SCP as casual content, but you're here because you recognize it as something more profound — a creative revolution that transformed the possibilities of collaborative fiction.

The historical record of SCP has been thoroughly documented by dedicated archivists who deserve recognition for their exhaustive work. Anyone willing to navigate thousands of preserved forum posts and wiki pages can trace the project's development in meticulous detail. But this book isn't another institutional history celebrating milestones and growth, sharing setbacks as obstacles overcome.

What follows is an attempt to trace the spiritual biography of an idea — to understand how a single sleep-deprived post on 4chan accidentally solved problems that had plagued collaborative fiction and horror, and how that solution was gradually forgotten by the very community it empowered. This is a story about the life, death, and potential resurrection of creative constraint as a force for liberation rather than limitation.

The narrative arc is both tragic and hopeful. We will witness the birth of something genuinely revolutionary: a format that achieved wonder through bureaucratic language, horror through clinical detachment, and collaborative coherence through rigid formal constraints. We will see how the early community, haunted by the decay of similar projects like The Holders, built institutional defenses against formulaic stagnation and atmospheric excess. And we will watch as those defenses gradually crumbled — not through external attack, but through the slow erosion of institutional memory and the seductive belief that "innovation" meant abandoning the very constraints that made innovation possible. The tragedy in this story can be boiled down to one word, and its one that we are all very bad at: restraint.

The passing-of-the-torch away from SCP as an artistic force can be traced to two pivotal moments. The June 2018 Pride Logo Fiasco marked the final triumph of identity-first culture over format-first principles, declaring that political expression mattered more than the clinical neutrality that had made SCP effective. The subsequent birth of The Backrooms represented both an indictment and a redemption — a new generation of creators unconsciously returning to the bare simplicity that SCP had traded for politics and ego (though The Backrooms performed an accelerated rendition of SCP’s same fate... this is beyond the scope of this book). What remains of SCP today is like the gradual breakdown of a geriatric form: teeming with activity, with life even, but of a fundamentally different character than the vibrant organism it once was.

Yet this is ultimately a story of joy and hope. The essential insight that animated SCP-173 — that creative constraint could be more liberating than creative freedom, that bureaucratic language could generate more authentic wonder than purple prose — remains untouched and untouchable. It has been captured, devoured, digested, and forced out the end of some horrible creature's alimentary canal, but its spiritual chemistry and structure still endure. The idea cannot be destroyed because it was never dependent on any particular platform, community, or institution. It exists as pure creative principle, waiting to be rediscovered by each new generation of writers willing to embrace constraint as a path to liberation.

Understanding this history matters because the forces that corrupted SCP — the drift back toward traditional narrative techniques, the prioritization of political expression over formal innovation, the ego-driven belief that constraints are limitations to overcome rather than tools for discovery — are not unique to containment fiction. They are universal tendencies that threaten any creative community, and especially those that achieve institutional success. They represent forces that have been embattled since the dawn of art. They have no clear forms, and can seemingly appear on one side of a divide as quickly as they do the opposite; presenting both as the spirit of art and that which utterly destroys it.

While art is always in motion and new forms necessarily supersede old ones, there remains a critical distinction between creative evolution and institutional collapse — between leaning against the rails and falling over them entirely. Beneficial evolution often looks identical to harmful drift in its early stages — both involve departing from established patterns. The difference only becomes clear retrospectively when you can see whether the departure strengthened the constraint system or weakened it.

SCP is in a phase of advanced institutional drift rather than outright collapse. Good work is still happening at SCP, though the institutional principles have eroded. The site remains “successful” by some metrics while losing what made it special. Creative movements rarely “die” cleanly. Creative principles migrate between communities when institutions become sclerotic. They usually evolve, fragment, or inspire successor movements while continuing to exist in changed form. SCP didn’t fail catastrophically like The Holders, it succeeded so well that it became institutionalized, and in that process gradually lost the creative energy that made it revolutionary in the first place. This positions SCP as part of a larger creative lineage rather than a tragic endpoint.

This e-book serves as SCP's tome of forgotten institutional memory, documenting both the innovation and decay; its evolution and regression. By tracing how SCP's revolutionary principles were gradually abandoned, we can better understand how to identify and nurture them when they inevitably resurface in new creative forms.

The spirit of methodological restraint that animated the early SCP community was always larger than SCP itself. It was a rediscovery of an ancient truth: that the most profound creative breakthroughs often come not from having unlimited freedom, but from working within seemingly impossible limitations. That less is more and that simplicity is always more profound. That art is superior to media. That darkness can cover the light, but it can never extinguish it.

We do have unlimited creative freedom. This includes the freedom to restrict ourselves and honor those limitations, by choice. It is a great paradox and mystery of life that in limiting ourselves, we are strengthened; in humbling ourselves, we transcend our flaws.

This truth has not died with SCP's institutional corruption. It cannot die. It waits, patient and eternal, for the next insomniac with an unusual photograph and the wisdom to let constraints guide them toward something genuinely new.

---

Chapter 1: The Sleep-Deprived Revolution

June 22, 2007 - 2:30 AM

The cursor blinked in the reply box, waiting.

S.S. Walrus — also known as Moto42 to those who care about such distinctions — had been awake far too long, scrolling through 4chan's Paranormal /x/ board in that peculiar state of exhaustion where the mind becomes both sluggish and hypersensitive. The paranormal board was its usual mix of the credulous and the cynical: ghost stories that read like bad Hollywood scripts, photographs of allegedly haunted locations that looked suspiciously like suburban basements, and the endless parade of users demanding to be scared.

It was then that he encountered the image that would change everything.

"Untitled 2004" showed a concrete humanoid figure, crude and unsettling, created by Japanese artist Izumi Kato (photographed by Keisuke Yamamoto). The sculpture stood in what appeared to be a sterile white room, its surface rough and organic-looking despite being carved from stone. There was something profoundly wrong about its proportions — too tall yet infant-like, with suggestions of features that didn't quite resolve into anything recognizable. Most people would have scrolled past it, or perhaps saved it to a folder of vaguely creepy images to be forgotten by morning.

But Walrus was tired enough to see possibility where others saw just another weird photograph.

The /x/ board in 2007 was drowning in a very particular kind of creative stagnation. The Holders series — ritualistic creepypastas that followed rigid formulas about seeking out mysterious entities — had been circulating since late 2006, and by this point had become both wildly popular and creatively exhausted. Every entry began with variations of "In any city, in any country, go to any mental institution..." and proceeded through increasingly elaborate trials that usually ended in death or madness for the hypothetical seeker.

The format was seductive because it was easy to replicate. Writers could plug in new horrors without having to invent entirely new frameworks. But it was also limiting in ways that were becoming increasingly apparent. Every entry felt like a role-playing game scenario, complete with specific instructions that readers were supposed to follow. The emphasis was on ambient buildup and second-person immersion, creating what critics would later describe as "overly long stories that read like role-playing game guides."

More problematically, The Holders had begun to suffer from the inevitable decay that plagued all collaborative fiction projects. Quality control was nonexistent, meaning that poor entries diluted the overall effect. Writers competed to create the most elaborate scenarios, leading to increasingly convoluted rituals that prioritized complexity over effectiveness. The original concept — simple, mysterious objects guarded by enigmatic entities — had been stretched beyond recognition by contributors who prioritized personal creativity over adherence to the format's core principles.

One would think that Walrus was very aware of all this as he stared at Izumi Kato's sculpture; that he had watched The Holders decline from an innovative horror format into formulaic repetition; that he had seen how collaborative fiction could degenerate when it lacked effective curation, when writers prioritized quantity over quality, when the original vision became obscured by countless variations and elaborations.

Because what he typed next was a deliberate rejection of everything that made The Holders both popular and ultimately unsustainable.

Where The Holders relied on atmospheric buildup, ritualistic instructions, and second-person address, Walrus created something startlingly different: a clinical document that treated supernatural horror like a bureaucratic memo. There were no seeking rituals, no prescribed trials, no instructions for readers to follow. Instead, there was the dry, procedural language of institutional documentation applied to something utterly extraordinary:

Item#: SCP-173

Special Containment Procedures: Item SCP-173 is to be kept in a locked container at all times. When personnel must enter SCP-173's container, no fewer than 3 may enter at any time and the door is to be relocked behind them. At all times, two persons must maintain direct eye contact with SCP-173 until all personnel have vacated and relocked the container.

Description: Moved to Site19 1993. Origin is as of yet unknown. It is constructed from concrete and rebar with traces of Crylon brand spraypaint. SCP-173 is animate extremely hostile. The object cannot move while within a direct line of sight. Line of sight must not be broken at any time with SCP-173. Personel assigned to enter container are instructed to alert one another before blinking. Object is reported to attack by snapping the neck at the base of the skull, or by strangulation. In the event of an attack, personal are to observe Class 4 hazardous object containment procedures.

Personel report sounds of scraping stone originating from within the container when no one is present inside. This is considered normal, and any change in this behavior should be reported to the acting HMCL supervisor on duty.

The reddish brown substance on the floor is a combination of feces and blood. Origin of these materials is unknown. The enclosure must be cleaned on a bi-weekly basis.

The format was deceptively simple, but it represented a radical philosophical departure from everything that defined horror fiction in 2007. Where other creepypastas built terror through emotional manipulation and excess, this document achieved something far more unsettling: it made the impossible feel mundane through the simple expedient of treating it as a routine administrative matter.

The genius lay not in what the document included, but in what it deliberately excluded. There was no backstory explaining how SCP-173 came to be contained. No dramatic incident reports describing the havoc it had wreaked before being captured. No description of the fear it inspired in personnel. Instead, there were only the practical considerations of an organization that had clearly been dealing with this entity for some time: how many people were required to enter its chamber safely, what cleaning supplies were needed to maintain its enclosure, what behavioral changes might indicate a problem requiring supervisory attention.

This bureaucratic approach to the supernatural served multiple revolutionary purposes simultaneously. First, it created horror through understatement rather than overstatement, allowing readers' imaginations to fill in the gaps that traditional horror fiction would have elaborated on endlessly. The brief mention of attacking "by snapping the neck at the base of the skull" was more effective than any detailed description of violence precisely because it was presented as a matter-of-fact occupational hazard.

Second, it suggested the existence of a larger institutional framework without feeling the need to explain it: "Site-19," "Class 4 hazardous object containment procedures," and "HMCL supervisors". These implied a vast bureaucratic apparatus dedicated to containing anomalous phenomena — a shadowy organization that had been operating long enough to develop standardized protocols for dealing with the impossible.

Most importantly, it achieved what The Holders and other collaborative fiction projects had failed to accomplish: it created a format that could theoretically support infinite expansion without losing coherence. Where The Holders required each entry to reinvent the ritualistic framework — each entry essentially beginning and ending the same — SCP-173's documentation suggested a systematic approach that could be applied to any anomalous object or entity. The clinical tone and bureaucratic structure provided constraints that could guide future writers while still allowing for tremendous creative variety.

But Walrus, exhausted and operating on creative instinct rather than strategic planning, was more likely thinking about none of this when he hit the "Post" button at 2:30 AM on June 22, 2007. He would later dismiss his creation as a "sleep deprived first draft" that "tend[ed] to suck a bit." He had no idea that he had just solved problems that had plagued horror and collaborative fiction for years, or that his solution would accidentally birth one of the internet's most enduring creative communities.

He thought he was just writing a single creepypasta that would be different from The Holders' ritualistic surplus. Instead, he had invented something far more significant: a new form of collaborative fiction that achieved liberation through constraint, authenticity through artifice, and emotional power through emotional restraint.

Though its architect was too tired to realize it, the revolution had begun.

Chapter 2: The Shadow of the Seekers

August 2006 - September 2007

To understand why SCP-173 represented such a radical departure, one must first understand the creative landscape it emerged from — a landscape dominated not only by the ritualistic horror of The Holders series, but by the broader conventions of mainstream horror that had calcified into predictable formulas by 2007.

The horror industry, both in Hollywood and online, had become trapped in a cycle of escalation that prioritized spectacle over genuine terror. Films competed to deliver more elaborate death sequences, more graphic violence, more shocking reveals — a creative arms race that inevitably led to diminishing returns as audiences became desensitized to increasingly extreme content. Online horror followed the same pattern, with jumpscare videos and creepypastas attempting to outdo each other through elaborate descriptions, dramatic plot twists, and explicit depictions of violence or madness.

SCP-173 represented an implicit rejection of this entire approach. Where contemporary horror demanded emotional manipulation through gratuitous description and dramatic revelation, Walrus's creation achieved its effects through clinical understatement and bureaucratic mundanity. It was a quiet revolution against the prevailing belief that horror required elaborate orchestration — a demonstration that the most unsettling effects could be achieved not through telling readers what to feel, but by presenting the impossible as routine administrative business and allowing their imaginations to fill the horrifying gaps.

This wasn't merely a stylistic choice; it was a philosophical statement about the nature of fear itself. The old writing adage "Show, don't tell" found new vigor here. SCP-173 suggested that true horror lay not in spectacular revelation but in the gradual recognition that the world operated according to rules fundamentally different from those we assumed. The document's matter-of-fact tone implied that somewhere, in some classified facility, people went to work every day managing the impossible as if it were merely another occupational hazard.

But SCP-173 emerged from a more immediate creative context as well — the specific institutional breakdown that had begun to consume The Holders series and the recognizable pattern of decay that seemed to afflict all collaborative horror projects. The actual origins of The Holders remain murky, lost to the ephemeral nature of early internet culture. The oldest surviving post appeared on August 31, 2006, in the middle of a "creepy thread" on 4chan's /b/ board — "the Holder of the End," posted at 8:25 PM by an anonymous user. Whether this represented the true genesis of the series or merely the earliest repost that survived the digital abyss is impossible to determine.

What followed was a fascinating case study in how collaborative fiction could achieve rapid memetic spread while simultaneously carrying the seeds of its own destruction. Over the next several months, "the Holder of the End" was routinely reposted on /b/, developing the kind of underground recognition that signaled genuine cultural resonance. On October 3, 2006, the first known posting of a different Holder's Object — "the Holder of the Beginning" — appeared, suggesting that other anonymous writers had begun creating entries in the same format.

The pattern that emerged was telling. While "the Holder of the End" continued to circulate widely, other entries failed to achieve the same memetic staying power. The format was seductive enough to inspire imitation, but lacked the institutional structure necessary to maintain quality across multiple contributors. This would prove to be a recurring theme throughout The Holders' history: initial innovation followed by gradual decay as the format attracted contributors who misunderstood what made it effective.

The series found its first organized home when an anonymous user created a dedicated article on Wikichan on January 7, 2007. The timing was significant — it came during a surge of interest in The Holders that saw nine entries posted in numerical order during a single /b/ thread, with multiple users expressing interest in creating additional Objects. The migration to Wikichan represented an attempt to solve the fundamental problem that plagued all 4chan-based projects: how to preserve quality content in an inherently ephemeral medium.

Wikichan's approach seemed promising initially. The platform provided stability and organization that 4chan lacked, collecting existing Holders from across the web while soliciting new submissions. Contributors used the talk pages to reserve Holder numbers, submit new entries for review, and discuss quality standards. The collaborative editing process allowed for real-time improvement of substandard entries, and the community developed informal but effective quality control mechanisms.

However, the very features that made Wikichan appealing as a platform also accelerated the series' creative decay. The organized structure encouraged systematic expansion rather than selective curation. Writers began competing to create the most elaborate rituals and consequences, leading to what critics would later identify as "overly long stories that read like role-playing game guides". The fixed numerical system created artificial scarcity that paradoxically encouraged quantity over quality — every number slot that remained empty represented a potential entry, regardless of whether anyone had a genuinely compelling idea to fill it.

More fundamentally, The Holders format encouraged exactly the kind of surfeit that would later be identified as antithetical to effective horror. Each entry was structured as a second-person instruction manual for seeking out dangerous supernatural encounters, complete with elaborate descriptions of otherworldly realms and dramatic consequences for failure. Writers were incentivized to create increasingly spectacular scenarios, leading to what one user would later characterize as an arms race of "insane powers" that trivialized the very challenges that made the format compelling.

By February 2008, the problems that had been developing beneath the surface burst into open discussion. DScarface, posting after an off-site conversation with fellow contributor Mr. Belpit, documented several "alarming trends" that had infected newer Holders entries:

• Objects that focused on mythology over the more traditional magic and mysticism

• Overly long stories that read like role-playing game guides

• Objects that gave Seekers "insane powers" that made obtaining additional Objects trivial

• Basic failure to proofread submissions

  
  

These weren't merely aesthetic complaints — they represented a fundamental misunderstanding of what had made The Holders effective in the first place. The original entries worked because they maintained focus on the Objects themselves rather than elaborate world-building. They created tension through uncertainty and danger rather than power fantasy fulfillment. Most importantly, they treated the supernatural as genuinely mysterious rather than as material for elaborate mythological exposition.

The decay wasn't accidental; it was structural. The Holders format actively encouraged the very tendencies that would ultimately destroy it. Unlike the clinical restraint that would characterize SCP-173, The Holders demanded contextual buildup, ritualistic elaboration, and second-person immersion. These requirements pushed writers toward exactly the kind of indulgence that had made mainstream horror predictable and ineffective.

The collaborative editing process, which had initially seemed like a strength, proved unable to address these fundamental format problems. Quality control discussions on Wikichan focused on surface-level issues like grammar and consistency rather than the deeper structural problems that were undermining the series' effectiveness. Contributors like Mr. Belpit attempted to revise earlier entries to bring them in line with "the format and traditions of the original few," but such efforts were essentially archaeological — trying to recover a lost creative vision that had been obscured by layers of accumulated mediocrity.

When Wikichan permanently crashed in mid-May 2008, it marked more than just the end of a website — it represented the conclusion of the first major experiment in collaborative horror fiction. The series would continue on TheHolders.org and other platforms, but the essential creative moment had passed. By the time SCP-173 appeared in June 2007, The Holders had already become what one /x/ user would dismissively call "the series-that-shouldn't-be-named" — a cautionary tale about the fate that awaited collaborative fiction projects that lacked effective quality control mechanisms.

The timing was prophetic. SCP-173 emerged during the brief window when The Holders' problems had become apparent to the /x/ community but before alternative solutions had been attempted. His clinical document format represented a deliberate rejection of everything that The Holders community had mistakenly believed made horror fiction compelling, and was a referendum on what the series had become.

The contrast couldn't have been starker. Where The Holders demanded elaborate ritualistic instructions, SCP-173 offered terse containment procedures. Where The Holders encouraged world-building, SCP-173 provided only the practical details necessary for institutional management. Where The Holders prioritized individual expression and creative elaboration, SCP-173 suggested a bureaucratic framework that subordinated individual creativity to institutional coherence.

Most significantly, where The Holders explicitly invited readers to imagine themselves as participants in supernatural encounters, SCP-173 maintained clinical distance from its subject matter. There were no instructions for seeking out SCP-173, no elaborate trials to endure, no second-person address drawing readers into the narrative. Instead, there was only the dry documentation of an organization that had already solved the practical problems of containing something impossible.

This shift from participation to observation would prove crucial to the future development of containment fiction. By rejecting The Holders' immersive approach, SCP-173 accidentally discovered that horror could be more effective when readers were positioned as outside observers of institutional competence rather than as potential participants in supernatural encounters. The bureaucratic distance that made SCP-173 seem so different from contemporary horror wasn't a limitation — it was a liberation from the very narrative structures that had made horror predictable and formulaic.

As SCP-173 began its own memetic spread across /x/ in late June 2007, it carried within it both the creative innovations that would define containment fiction and the implicit critique of everything that had made The Holders ultimately unsuccessful. The revolution wasn't just against horror's general conventions — it was specifically against the collaborative fiction approaches that had been tried and found wanting.

The question facing the emerging SCP community was whether they could learn from The Holders' institutional failure while building something more durable. The answer would determine whether SCP-173's innovations could be preserved and developed, or whether they would suffer the same gradual decay that had consumed every previous attempt at collaborative horror fiction.

Chapter 3: The Guardians of the Clinical

June 2007 - January 2008

The reaction to SCP-173 on /x/ was immediate, divided, and telling. Some users immediately grasped what made it different. "This is creepy and intriguing," wrote one anonymous commenter, noting how "the clinical report style differentiated it from other content" flooding the board. Others praised its "air of mystery" and the way it created horror through understatement rather than elaborate buildup.

But the format was so radically different from prevailing expectations that many users simply didn't know what to make of it. "An official report written by a high-schooler," dismissed one critic. Others accused it of being derivative of Doctor Who's Weeping Angels or creatures from The Shining.

Even of those who became captivated by the original SCP-173, only a portion of them understood why it was significant, or which part. Many of the archived /x/ threads over the next months requesting SCP-173 were asking for the image — which was arresting in its own right, certainly. Others asked for "the story", but were referencing what was the first Tale of the community; a traditional short story about the discovery of SCP-173 from the perspective of a United States Air Force Captain that was posted in the original thread as a supplement.

The most perceptive early comment came from an anonymous user who recognized something profound in SCP-173's approach to the supernatural. Because SCP-173 only became anomalous once we stopped looking at it, the entry created "a kind of insane, Lovecraftian sort of doubt about whether we actually have any power whatsoever" by suggesting that "our observation is genuinely significant and intrinsic to the process." This wasn't just another monster story — it was an assault on objective reality itself, delivered through the most banal language possible.

More significantly, SCP-173 avoided the narrative trap that plagued virtually all traditional horror: the necessity of eventual confrontation and resolution. Conventional horror stories demanded that threats be built up as terrifyingly invincible, only to require some mechanism by which protagonists could ultimately defeat or escape them. This structural requirement forced authors into increasingly contrived scenarios — ancient weaknesses conveniently discovered, arbitrary rules that could be exploited, ham-fisted deus ex machina solutions that undermined the very terror they had worked to establish. The more invincible a horror was made to seem, the more hackneyed and tropey its eventual defeat inevitably became.

SCP-173 sidestepped this entire problem by presenting a scenario where the threat had already been contained through everyday institutional competence. There was no heroic protagonist discovering the monster's weakness, no dramatic final confrontation, no need to engineer a satisfying resolution. The Foundation had simply developed practical protocols for managing an impossible situation, treating SCP-173 as an ongoing occupational hazard rather than a crisis to be resolved. This approach allowed the horror to remain genuinely threatening precisely because it didn't need to be defeated — only managed, indefinitely, by people doing their jobs with professional detachment.

The speed of SCP-173's memetic spread was remarkable, but it also revealed the fragility of early internet culture. Within days of the original thread's deletion on June 24, 2007, desperate users were reposting the entry to other boards, begging for copies of both the text and Izumi Kato's haunting image. By July 17, less than a month after its posting, an anonymous user could declare with confidence: "SCP-173 is already an /x/ meme."

The early community allowed only minimal corrections to Walrus’ original text — fixing clear grammatical errors like “site” instead of “sight” when discussing SCP-173’s anomalous qualities, and correcting the accidentally-prophetic “SPC” typo that would later spawn an entire alternative joke universe called the Shark Punching Center. But beyond these objective corrections, the community immediately began refining the clinical tone itself, transforming Walrus’ rough draft into something far more polished. The original version that readers familiar with SCP-173’s history might expect to revere actually looked quite different:

Item#: SCP-173

Special Containment Procedures: Item SPC-173 is to be kept in a locked container at all times. When personnel must enter SCP-173's container, no fewer than 3 may enter at any time and the door is to be relocked behind them. At all times, two persons must be looking at SCP-173 until all personnel have vacated and relocked the container.

Description: Moved to Site19 1993, little is known about item number SCM-173's origins. It is constructed from concrete and rebar and was once painted with Crylon brand spraypaint.

SCP-173 is animate and malevolent, if given the chance it will kill anyone within it's line of site. It's weakness however is that it does not move while being watched. Despite this paralysis it is still highly dangerous; able to cover at least 2 meters in the literal blink of an eye. It typicaly kills by either snapping the victim's neck from behind, or grabbing the victim's throat and strangling him. Whatever animates SCP-173 does not give it much force with which to break things, as seen above a large room with unbarred windows is fully capable of containing it.Itss grip however is unbreakable, as when it is not moving the statue is as hard and strong as concrete.

While left alone in it's room, one can hear a stone-on-stone scraping from within that is believed to be the sound of the SCP-173 moving about.

The reddish brown substance on the floor is a combination of feces and blood. We don't know (nor wish to find out) where it comes from or how it arrives but SCP-173's container will slowly fill with these substances. In order to ensure that bacterial growth within does not begin to damage the building it is contained in, and to maintain some level of sanitation, the enclosure must be cleaned on a bi-weekly basis.

Unlike The Holders, where poor entries simply accumulated until they overwhelmed the good ones, the SCP community had begun intervening directly to improve substandard work. Users wouldn't just eventually post new SCPs — they would actively rewrite portions of entries within the same threads. Primed by The Holders before it, this was a systematic pattern in SCP that was present from the very beginning.

The community-refined version of SCP-173 —  the one that became definitive — became the new standard so quickly that a remarkable reversal occurred: when Walrus’ actual original text was reposted in later /x/ threads, users now criticized it, and approached it as an imposter. The original — with its less polished clinical tone, inconsistent terminology, and more conventional horror language by comparison — was now seen as inferior to the “true” SCP-173. Unhelpfully, an unauthorized variant of Walrus’ original was also circulated that referred to SCP-173 as “the Golem”. Users would immediately respond with corrections when the original appeared, insisting on “the short version” or “the good lines” from the refined text.

This demonstrated both the power and the problem of 4chan’s ephemeral format. The entirety of SCP-173 and its impact up unto this point — its appearance, its more polished revision, an associated Tale, and its disappearance among the 4chan threads — spanned only two days. Quality content could spread like wildfire, but in the process, multiple versions created confusion about what was “authentic.” The community had to actively defend their collectively-improved version against not just obvious bastardizations like the “Golem” variant, but even against the creator’s own original "draft" text.

The community recognized instinctively that the bureaucratic language wasn’t incidental decoration — it was the crux of SCP-173’s novelty, and therefore worthy of fierce protection and active refinement. They understood that Walrus’ core insight about clinical tone was more important than his specific execution of it. Aesthetic standards were developing organically, without central authority or formal rules — just collective judgment about what worked and what didn’t, and most importantly, why.

This early vigilance prevented a catastrophe that could have altered the entire trajectory of containment fiction. We almost inherited a very different SCP-173 — either Walrus’ rougher original or the “Golem” variant. Had either taken hold instead of the community-refined version, any future collaborative project would have developed in a fundamentally different direction. This was a win for the development and preservation of a genuinely new idea. It is thanks to the prudence of early archivists and the community's collective aesthetic judgment that the better version of SCP-173 was preserved, reproduced and propagated.

By early September 2007, the implications of SCP-173's innovation were becoming clear to the more perceptive members of the /x/ community. The clinical format suggested possibilities for expansion that went far beyond the scope of traditional creepypasta or even The Holders' collaborative approach. If one anomalous object could be documented in this bureaucratic style, why not others? If a fictional organization existed to contain SCP-173, what other phenomena might it have encountered?

The breakthrough came on September 5, 2007, when an anonymous user posted SCP-246, another “living statue” that was immediately and thoroughly criticized by the community. The entry itself was poorly executed, but its failure established a new paradigm. This was the birth of containment fiction as a truly collaborative project beyond the product of one author.

The gravity and implications of this watershed moment were not lost on the /x/ community. Tensions regarding the future of SCP were instant. The creation of this second SCP sparked debate about expansion itself. Several users disagreed with the addition of SCPs beyond the original SCP-173, saying that spin-offs cheapened the initial effect, and the creepypasta would suffer the same fate as the Holders as a result. One user wrote: "Like i said in another thread, making more than just the original one simply cheapens the effect the original has to the point where they all blend into shit."

But another replied: "At least someone tried to add more to the series. That's something more than most anyone here would ever try to do. If there are more, perhaps they're not all golems. Perhaps there are more variations to the SCP items. I personally think more should be written. The Holders series got boring because that's ALL there was that was a collaborative. Of course as soon as something like this comes along everyone has to whine about it."

As with SCP-173, users started rewriting portions of SCP-246 in the thread itself, trying to salvage it through collective effort. More importantly, they began posting entirely new entries that maintained the clinical tone rather than drifting toward arcane language. Within hours, the thread contained multiple new SCPs that have since been lost to history: among several others were SCP-078 (a sculpture of a man in a hood) and SCP-122 (a statue that hit people based on their political preferences).

At the dawn of the expansion of SCP into a fully-fledged collaborative effort, and in the midst of these tensions to resist it, one can observe the creative participants beginning to break free from The Holders' restrictive patterns, experimenting with the format's flexibility by documenting something beyond statues and sculptures for the first time — SCP-188, a zombie marine animal, marked this shift. These were crude by later standards, but they established the fundamental collaborative dynamic that would define the SCP community for years to come. Notably, SCP-122's explicitly political nature — tolerating personnel who have left-wing political preferences, and assaulting those with right-wing political preferences — represented an early example of writers injecting contemporary social commentary into the clinical format, a tendency that would prove far more corrosive to the Foundation's institutional neutrality than anyone could have anticipated.

Hidden among these early attempts was SCP-239, arguably the first "joke" entry — the Communist Party itself, designated as an anomaly. This tongue-in-cheek inclusion revealed not only the presence of political commentary from multiple perspectives, but the community's playful relationship with the format, even as they developed increasingly rigorous standards for "serious" entries. (The choice of target would prove particularly ironic given the community's eventual political trajectory.) The distinction between humor and seriousness seemed clear enough at the time: obvious jokes would be relegated to a separate category, while the main series would maintain its clinical tone and institutional neutrality. What no one anticipated was how this binary would gradually collapse as writers discovered they could inject humor, politics, and personal commentary into "serious" entries through increasingly sophisticated forms of irony, political orthodoxy, and appeals to entertainment value.

Discussions also saw the first mention of "SCP-1" — a number that would later become mythologized as the Foundation's greatest secret. Users talked about "filling up blocks of numbers" and creating more once filled (as did The Holders), accidentally laying the groundwork for what would become a massive, systematically organized universe. The /x/ records include what might be the first format screw and documentation-based anomaly (or "nomenclative" anomaly, e.g. SCP-4000) — SCP-134/431-PCS that reads backwards: "431-PCS rof serudecorp tnemniatnoc laicepS. em pleh enoemos esaelp no gniog si tahw dog ho" ("Oh God what is going on please someone help me. Special containment procedures for SCP-431.") This shows creative experimentation happening within constraints from the very beginning.

The community was developing strictly anti-Holders principles, demanding clinical tone befitting a scientific organization and emphasizing containment procedures over dramatic lethal capabilities. One user advocated for an approval process for new SCPs. They weren't just creating new horror fiction — they were creating a new genre that actively resisted the formulaic trappings that had made traditional storytelling creatively stagnant.

This represented more than aesthetic preference; it was a philosophical rejection of traditional horror storytelling. The SCP format forced writers to create terror through constraint rather than excess, through understatement rather than melodrama. It was like discovering that a straitjacket could be more liberating than complete freedom — a lesson that seemed increasingly difficult for contemporary writers to understand.

By September 8, the concept had become so memetic that it appeared in casual /x/ discussions unrelated to horror fiction. When a user posted an image of a creepy doll, another immediately responded: "In before that doll is given an SCP backstory." The format had achieved what The Holders never could: it had become a recognizable creative tool that could be applied to any unusual phenomenon without losing its essential character.

The transformation from individual creation to collective curation was complete. What had begun as one insomniac's creative experiment had become a collaborative fiction engine that successfully addressed the problems that had destroyed similar projects.

At the same time as these new aesthetics and narrative paths were being forged and set, the archived /x/ threads reveal the fascinating struggle of early SCP writers to break free from The Holders’ gravitational pull. Even as they were creating something revolutionary, they kept falling back into familiar patterns.

The thread from January 8th 2008 is particularly telling — an anonymous user literally suggests putting SCPs “into a Holder-eque series” but counting down to SCP-001 as the climax. They were so close to understanding that SCP was different, yet still thinking in terms of The Holders’ ritualistic framework with its predetermined endpoint and escalating structure — the terms of traditional narration and storytelling.

The /x/ threads reveal that users were constantly invoking The Holders as a cautionary tale — not just occasionally, but in nearly every quality discussion. Lines like "Stop creating links between SCP objects... with the links it just seems like Holders 2.0.", and "Please contibute, [sic] just don’t turn it into a stupid Holders 01 of 893427591 COLLECT THEM ALLZOMG." This obsessive self-policing shows how deeply the community understood they were trying to avoid a specific pattern of decay. Users developed the vocabulary for why this mattered — moving from "sounds more official" to sophisticated discussions about suspension of disbelief and institutional authenticity.

The January 17th thread shows the community actively safeguarding the entries in order to keep the unique qualities intact and the genre from being contaminated with the tropes and dependencies of other creepypastas. The fact that they were still calling SCPs “pastas” while simultaneously trying to differentiate them shows how hard it was to escape the conceptual framework that preceded it.

The contrast between wanting clinical tone but still making comparisons and thematic proximity to H.P. Lovecraft also reveals the tension — they knew they wanted something different from “‘lovecraft-y’ words that sound 100 years old,” but they didn’t yet have the vocabulary or confidence to fully articulate what they were creating.

This struggle makes the eventual success of the format even more remarkable — they had to invent not just new content, but an entirely new way of thinking about collaborative horror fiction, while constantly resisting the pull of established models.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ A new star was rising. SCP and The Holders were commonly pitted against one another in “which is better” poll threads. There was a budding awareness that the SCP was an improvement, and a promising one. "Technically, SCP doesn't have an end number like the Holders series," one user noted. Another observed, "SCP could be potentially better than holders."

As 2007 drew to a close, the SCP community faced practical challenges that were both immediate and revealing. They had proven that collaborative fiction could maintain quality across multiple contributors, but only within the small, self-selecting group of /x/ regulars who understood why clinical restraint mattered. They had created a format that seemed infinitely expandable, but 4chan's ephemeral structure meant that good entries disappeared as quickly as bad ones. Most critically, they had built their quality control mechanisms around shared cultural knowledge — the collective memory of The Holders' decline, the intuitive understanding of what "clinical tone" meant, the unspoken agreement that certain approaches were off-limits.

The question facing the community as they moved into 2008 was whether these informal mechanisms could be systematized and preserved as new members joined who had never witnessed The Holders' decay. Could the principles that emerged organically from a small group's reaction against formulaic horror be codified into rules that newcomers could follow? And could institutional structures be created that would maintain quality without stifling the creative experimentation that had made SCP possible in the first place?

These did not seem to be abstract concerns about the future of a new art, but immediate practical problems about how to organize a wiki, moderate discussions, and decide which entries deserved to be preserved; but they were, and the answers would determine whether SCP remained a curious footnote in internet history or became something more durable.

But first, the community would need to find a platform stable enough to house their experiments.

Chapter 4: The Emergence of Dr Gears

January 2008 - July 2008

The first SCP wiki was created on January 19, 2008, when a user launched the project on EditThis at 11:42 AM Eastern Standard Time, with the platform automatically assigning them the username "Admin". This spontaneous decision would launch the community's first systematic attempt to centralize and preserve SCPs, but also to solve an unprecedented problem: how do you teach newcomers to embrace creative constraints they never witnessed the need for?

The timing revealed the urgency of this challenge. Throughout the first weeks of January 2008, interest in the SCP series had exploded beyond anything the /x/ community had previously experienced. The number of SCP discussion threads created over just three days exceeded three times the total amount posted during the previous six months. SCPs from this period would become foundational and earn significant acclaim, including SCPs 002 ("The Living Room"), 003 ("Biological Motherboard"), 232 (-ARC, "Sumerian Goddess of the Dead"), 256 ("Trapped in the Typewriter", the beginning of "Does the Black Moon Howl?"), and 113 ("The Gender-Switcher").

Redactions were used. Sites other than "19" were invoked. The first object classes were subtly included. The format's distinct sections took shape. Writers began using addenda (initially termed "Errata") posted in sequence to circumvent 4chan's character limits, sometimes using tripcodes to verify authorship across multiple posts. Both D-Class personnel and an Ethics Committee were cast. The first "tale as an SCP" was written. The idea of a containment breach was... breached.

The EditThis Admin was actively posting SCPs on /x/ at this time ("Anomalously Addictive Beef Jerky"). The format's revolutionary flexibility was demonstrated further on /x/ through innovations like SCP-529 ("Josie the Half-Cat") — the first non-horror entry that proved the clinical documentation style could be applied to anything, from terrifying anomalies to harmless, whimsical creatures. The community immediately recognized this breakthrough, later making Josie the official logo for the EditThis wiki and demonstrating that creative constraint had unlocked possibilities far beyond traditional genre boundaries.

The first proposals for SCP-001 were discussed, as well as whether or not entries should be written in strict numerical order, whether or not entries should be given titles (these were mainly given as they were transferred onto EditThis), questions of canonicity, acceptable interactions between SCPs, and other suggestions to vary the series. A long technical discussion about containment procedures reads like a manifesto for the clinical approach: "the cold clinical bare facts type thing written like a technical doccument [sic] is a must... also we need to make the containment info a tad more realistic". And in response to the emergence of the first SCP cross-link (something the Holders were notorious for): "the cross referencing of objects should be limited as much as possible".

The format had received so much exposure, and developed so much, that a mere six months after SCP-173's appearance, tropes had been established, called-out, and bemoaned.

This shows the community wasn't just stumbling into good practices — they were consciously theorizing them. Users targeted specific early errors ("excessive use of stylistic capitalization," "frequent use of 'appears to'," "excessive conditions for personnel termination"), reading like a diagnostic manual for what the community was learning not to do. Their initial approach was direct and often brutal. When users posted overly dramatic prose, the vanguard would respond with surgical corrections: "This is way too dramatic. Supposed to be clinical, guys." When authors attempted elaborate world-building or atmospheric description, they would be redirected with explicit references to format failures: "Don't make any higher-numbered SCPs. There are plenty of numbers people haven't used yet, and we don't want this turning into the Holders series."

All of this was carefully and deliberately driven by the idea that SCPs — like all good fiction— are supposed to encourage suspension of disbelief. SCP inherited this idea from general expectations for creepypastas, which tried to be believable, at least as hoaxes. Early /x/ readers of SCP frequently debated whether or not they were real/leaked files, while others dismissed SCP entirely for being too obviously fictional to work as convincing hoaxes. The anonymous Admin who created EditThis seemed to grasp this challenge intuitively. On the site's "About" page, they articulated what would become the community's central pedagogical principle: "The documents on this website are written in a fashion that makes them seem like they came out of a top-secret government archive. If you read one or two of these documents and believed for a second that this was real, then we have succeeded at the illusion." In an interview a decade later, the most influential person in the history of the SCP would state that if this one aspect of SCP writing had been lost, it was time to "close up shop" and go home: "That’s always been a thing, since forever. The second that stops happening, we’re done, close up shop, that’s it. We’re over.”

This wasn't merely aesthetic guidance — it was a quality control mechanism disguised as creative direction. The format's stewards weren't just enforcing arbitrary rules, they were attempting to transmit hard-won wisdom about why certain approaches led to creative decay. By focusing newcomers on the goal of bureaucratic authenticity rather than narrative innovation, the community's early stalwarts hoped to channel their energy toward working within constraints rather than expanding beyond them. The clinical tone wasn't presented as a limitation, but as a technical challenge that skilled writers could master. The constant invocation of The Holders served as a cautionary tale, a shared reference point that explained why seemingly reasonable creative choices were undesirable precedents.

Yet despite these innovations, the trajectory of SCP's early institutionalization was beginning to mirror The Holders' path with unsettling precision. Both had emerged from 4chan's chaotic environment. Both had attracted initial enthusiasm that quickly outpaced the community's ability to maintain quality. Both had migrated to dedicated wiki platforms in bursts of renewed interest — Wikichan for The Holders, EditThis for SCP — where organized contributors attempted to impose structure on collaborative creativity. Both faced the same fundamental challenge: how to preserve the essential qualities that made the original works effective while allowing for systematic expansion.

The influx of enthusiasm and ideas created a paradox that would define not only the EditThis era, but every era of SCP that saw an influx of users, from the success of the Containment Breach game to COVID-19: the format's success was attracting exactly the kind of creative energy that could both propel it and destroy it. As another historical account has written of this time: "... as more and more people joined the EditThis wiki and started directly posting their own SCPs, the overall quality of the series started to decline. By April, article quality had become a serious issue."

Unsung heroes emerged. Proxtown not only contributed SCPs like SCP-011 ("Civil War Memorial Statue") and SCP-109 ("Infinite Canteen"), but devoted equal energy to critiquing and collaboratively editing others' works to, in their words, "improve the quality of the SCP wiki as a whole". Epic Phail Spy — the obscure co-author of SCP-682 ("Hard-to-destroy Reptile") who wrote the famous interview addendum — advocated for quality over quantity, arguing that fewer well-crafted entries would be preferable to the site's current collection.

Meanwhile, criticism was mounting back on /x/ as anonymous users increasingly denounced the deteriorating quality standards. By May 2008, /x/ had grown tired and resentful of the SCP series. Alternatives and returns-to-form were suggested, such as the short-lived "Annex 0" — which replaced anomalous objects with prisoners and reverted to The Holders' second-person format, complete with addressing readers as "Keeper" — and altered formats of the SCP style, including SQP (“Special Quarantine Procedures”, meant to eradicate anomalies rather than contain them).

This revealed a crucial truth about collaborative fiction that would have profound implications for SCP's future: institutional memory and organizational structure, while necessary, were not sufficient to preserve creative innovation. The real determinant of a community's fate lay not in its rules or platforms, but in its creators — the individual writers who either embodied the format's essential principles or gradually corrupted them through misunderstanding and ego.

New writers were drawn to SCP because it seemed innovative and unrestricted, perhaps not realizing that its innovation came precisely from its restrictions. They wanted to contribute to something that felt revolutionary, without understanding that the revolution lay in learning to say no to traditional narrative impulses. The institutional memory of The Holders' decline should have provided a clear roadmap for avoiding similar pitfalls. The community had learned from The Holders' mistakes intellectually, yet they were discovering that institutional structure and collective memory were not sufficient safeguards against creative decay.

It was against this backdrop of creeping institutionalization and potential decay that a particular contributor arrived who would fundamentally alter SCP's trajectory. In April 2008, a user identifying himself as "Cog" posted what, besides SCP-173 itself, would become the most significant thread in /x/'s history, beginning with a simple declaration: "SCP hunt." Without this thread, SCP could easily have followed The Holders' trajectory: one memorable original (SCP-173, like "Holder of the End") that kept getting reposted, while subsequent attempts failed to capture the same lightning in a bottle.

What followed was a remarkable flurry of now-legendary creativity that produced ten original SCPs, most of them not just surviving to this day, but thriving: SCP-882 ("A Machine," his first), SCP-406 ("Mysterious Lifeform"), SCP-455 ("Cargo Ship"), SCP-053 ("Young Girl"), SCP-014 ("Pipe Nightmare"), SCP-162 ("Sea-Related Mass"), SCP-718 ("Eyeball"), SCP-682 ("Hard-to-destroy Reptile"), SCP-238 ("Building Complex"), and SCP-218 ("Lamprey-Mass Organism").

Only two of these SCPs have not survived to the current day. SCP-682 remains the highest-rated and oldest SCP that is not SCP-173. Remarkably, even SCP-218 — the lowest-rated of not just Cog's surviving contributions, but among all articles posted on /x/ that survived — maintains a healthy rating that speaks to the quality floor he established during this period.

The response to Cog's contributions was immediate and overwhelming. Users praised his clinical precision and the way he avoided the overspending that plagued other contemporary horror. But more significantly, Cog's work demonstrated that the SCP format could support sustained, high-quality creative output without degenerating into the formulaic repetition that had consumed The Holders. Months after the initial enthusiasm for the SCP format had faded into 4chan's characteristically short attention span, he demonstrated that the creative potential remained largely untapped.

In this one thread and outpouring, Cog essentially solved the collaborative fiction sustainability problem that had plagued The Holders. He didn't just write good SCPs — he demonstrated that the format could support repeated, systematic application without losing its essential character. His works in the "SCP hunt" thread was particularly crucial because it showed the format's expansive potential when interest might have been waning — not just in spite of, but because of the newly-created EditThis.

He had sparked a revival of SCP entries when the board had mostly been abandoned in previous months. Additional classic SCPs were posted to his threads, as if he had knowingly summoned them for the benefit of all SCP readers, including SCP-012 ("A Bad Composition"), SCP-500 ("Panacea"), and SCP-093 ("Red Sea Object"); though these appeared in much more threadbare states. In these threads, capitalizing on the attention, Cog sought answers to fundamental questions for the format, such as how to further differentiate SCP from past creepypasta series. Discussions ranged from the initial lore of SCP-001 to how to run future writing contests.

Cog was also unique in that most contributors to the SCP on /x/ by this time had chosen to remain anonymous. Cog consistently identified himself in his /x/ posts by including his pseudonym. As with the invention of the signature itself, this was a small step forward for the craft that now allowed the community to track and learn from consistent creative voices. He wasn't the first to assign his handle to his otherwise anonymous SCP work on /x/; among others, there was "Nyarly", "SCP-1337fag" (later identified as DrakeRunner on WikiDot, the originator of "Does the Black Moon Howl?"), and "OOPart Expert (Having misplaced 216+ artifacts)" — a user who directly invoked the heritage from The Holders and who wrote the lone surviving -J from the /x/ days (now SCP-014-J). Months earlier, SCP-127 ("The Living Gun") was posted by the user later known on Wikidot as Arcibi, also the author of SCP-294 ("The Coffee Machine"), then identifying themself on /x/ as “Captain Cactus and the Water Preservation Squad”. Eberstrom authored and posted SCP-147 (“Anachronistic Television”) to /x/ by name in January 2008.

Other individuals emerged who never wrote an SCP proper, but became pivotal to the early development of SCP, such as Lofwyr, the uncelebrated early architect of SCP's institutional structure. Lofwyr emerged as an early systematizer, creating foundational elements like the O5 Council hierarchy, security clearance levels, and formal writing guidelines that brought institutional coherence to the scattered /x/ entries and to EditThis. Their brief, thankless, but crucial involvement established the organizational framework that would allow SCP to scale beyond individual posts into a systematic universe.

Pseudonymous contributors with community notoriety existed prior to this point. In a later /x/ thread unrelated to SCP, an anonymous user recognizes “Captain Cactus and the Water Preservation Squad”, writing, “Yay, it’s the great SCP writer! I could never forget that name.” But Cog was the first individual from the mass anonymity of /x/ who became a flashpoint for consistently-recognizable work that propelled the craft and its potential forward. He chose his pseudonym "because it was the formal name for gears and such, and it sounded neat," directly referencing his first SCP creation — the machine that would become both "Mekhane's heart" in some developed SCP Wiki lore, as well as his "first and favorite" work.

But whether unconsciously or subconsciously, this choice also revealed something about his approach to the format. Where other writers might have selected more dramatic or mysterious names, Cog chose something mechanical, functional, part of a larger system rather than a standalone entity. Indeed, his name (and perhaps his compositional obsession with mechanical components) was inspired by an existing SCP work; a clockwork silkworm, then designated as SCP-003, that was posted to /x/ in January 2008.

The effects of Cog's participation during this period extended far beyond his literary contributions. Through his efforts to organize and develop both the format and community, he emerged as the SCP community's first leader — and would prove to be both its best and, much later, its last.

Yet this necessary leadership would create the very forces that would eventually threaten what he had built. His transition from anonymous /x/ contributor to wiki community member would force a choice that would have profound implications for the future of the SCP project. When he migrated to EditThis from the anonymity of /x/, he adopted the name "Dr. Gears" — formally, Charles Ogden Gears, making "Cog" a backronym the same way "Secure Contain Protect" would become for "SCP". This seemingly minor nomenclature change represented something far more significant: the birth of the author avatar.

Dr. Gears was the first self-insert in containment fiction history, then a "code-name", appearing in an issued role-playing memo to other in-universe personnel. This memo, posted to /x/, simultaneously established the institutional character of the Foundation — emphasizing containment over haphazard cross-testing — while introducing the problematic precedent of writers creating idealized versions of themselves within the fictional universe.

The creation of Dr. Gears as a character represented a profound convolution of the major thematic forces that defined SCP's revolutionary potential. On one hand, the persona served legitimate pedagogical purposes — it provided a consistent voice for format guidance, a recognizable advocate for clinical restraint, and an institutional memory that newcomers could reference when making creative decisions. Indeed, Dr. Gears' character was shaped by critics on /x/ who teased his initial attempt at a self-insert and accused his writing of being "too dramatic," prompting him to develop a cold, emotionless persona in response.

The persona that emerged was deliberately constructed to embody the format's core principles. Dr. Gears became known for a cold, removed writing style with an emphasis on dry clinical tone, understated emotion, bureaucratic posture, and fridge horror. His vision for the in-universe SCP Foundation was a "soulless, shadowy, bureaucratic entity, with zero tolerance for mistakes, incompetence, or insubordination." This wasn't merely a writing persona — he was a philosophical statement about what the Foundation represented, and by extension, what SCP writing should aspire to become.

Dr. Gears' innovations were absolutely necessary for SCP's survival, but they also opened doors that future contributors would walk through for entirely different reasons. The irony was profound and would prove prophetic. Dr. Gears created an author avatar that demonstrated the virtues of ego suppression and institutional detachment, but in doing so, he accidentally established the template for future writers to create their own author avatars — most of whom would use them for precisely the opposite purposes. As one critic would later observe, "Dr. Gears is a dramatic exception to the tendency. Most people are not interested in using their author avatars to better the site like Dr. Gears did, but to better their reputations."

He was simultaneously SCP's savior and the unwitting architect of one of its future problems. The community needed someone who could prove the format's viability, but in doing so, and thereby creating Dr. Gears as a recognizable persona, he accidentally established (though did not himself occupy) the template for ego-driven participation that would later undermine the very institutional anonymity he championed.

The contradiction was already visible in the works of Dr. Gears himself. SCP-682 was unapologetically the overpowered, level-maxed cliché, but only so it would kill attempts at the trope, and decisively slam the door on the path The Holders had taken. His later SCP-001 — written while on EditThis — while catering to the bombast and cultural fireworks of a 001 entry, was itself anti-climactic and bare, with no flourishes or complexities; it was simply the first anomaly the Foundation encountered, its humility being the profundity.

But while his writing consistently emphasized the virtues of anonymity and institutional loyalty over individual recognition, his persona unavoidably became increasingly famous and influential within the community. Writers began emulating not just his clinical tone, but his character's role as a senior Foundation official — creating their own "Dr." personas that positioned them as institutional authorities rather than collaborative participants.

The true scope of this problem wouldn't become apparent for years, but the pattern was already established: writers who understood Dr. Gears's principles intellectually would create author avatars that violated those principles practically. They would pursue the external phenotype of his success — the writing, the recognition, the institutional authority, the community influence, the upvotes — while missing the underlying philosophy that made those things meaningful in the first place.

This communicates another hurdle to the SCP project and community, a fundamental problem with institutional memory: it degrades with each transmission. The "veterans" who corrected newcomers had experienced The Holders' decline directly, but their corrections could only convey the conclusions, not the underlying experience that made those conclusions viscerally compelling. New writers learned that dramatic language was "wrong" and clinical tone was "right," but they didn't understand why these rules existed or what they were designed to prevent.

The result was a subtle but crucial shift in how format adherence was understood. For the original /x/ community, clinical restraint felt like a liberation from the excess that had made horror writing predictable and ineffective. For newcomers, clinical restraint increasingly felt like an arbitrary constraint imposed by gatekeepers who valued tradition over innovation, unaware that the "innovation" in this sense was actually a regression to past methods that were otherwise in the process of being broken out of.

This shift in perception would prove more consequential than anyone realized at the time. Writers who understood constraints as liberation alongside Dr. Gears would push the format toward new possibilities within those constraints.

But by 2008, incentive structures were already emerging that would, with time, make such advice increasingly difficult to follow. The lesson was becoming clear: institutional memory and structure, while necessary, were not sufficient safeguards for a creative community. The real power — both creative and destructive — belonged to the individual creators, the writers who would either inject the format with awe and innovation or gradually corrupt it through misunderstanding and ego.

Here — and finally very distinct from the trajectory of The Holders — the dichotomy of innovation and stagnation, creation and destruction, was not institutional but fundamentally personal. Dr. Gears had saved SCP from The Holders' fate, but in doing so, he had also demonstrated both the incredible power of the individual creator and the dangerous precedent such power could set for those who would follow.