Exploring the SCP Foundation: SCP-6747 - Chaos Theory

So I accidently pocket-pressed "create clip" on my phone while listening to this, which started a loop of a sentence. I legit thought that the Narrative was falling apart, thinking "oh thats clever written, I see what the author did there, very Meta - oh it's just on loop."

SCP Rule: If the article descrips a insanly complex machine that the Foundation build for a specific purpose that messes with the fabric of reality, it will always backfire in Universe ending ways.

"The Foundation decided to try bringing back a dead man, using a rather... novel method." The research division is looking into developing memetic kill agents based on puns.

"Stop bringing the dead back to life!" Foundation: That sign can't stop me because I can't read

Foundation when they see a reality bender: I can't let you play God. Back to the box. Foundation when they see any Thaumiel SCP: Time to play God.

An entire SCP about countering an extra-narrative threat through the sheer power of meme value, i love the people who come up with this stuff

I wrote a short story a while back that bears some small similarities to this base concept. It just involved a creature that would invade a narrative, kill the protagonist, and then progress up to the next reality and hunt the author, who would themselves be the protagonist of a narrative. A nested metaphysical hunting ground.

So - Let's contain it: "Doctors King, Bright, Kondraki and Clef walks into the bar..."

I really like how creative the SCP community is. They came up with a way to scientifically explain retcons and plot holes through using actual philosophical terminology to help ground it in our reality. Truly, SCP is a gift that keeps on giving!

Really love the entire pataphysics thing, has a sense of cosmic existential horror to it, super Lovecraftian.

SCP poke Death Death: “Please, stop” SCP revives someone from Death Death: “And I took that personally”

I actually love the concept of Pataphysics, and Chaos Theory is one of my new favorite articles as of late, so I love everyone just being thrown this mindfuck.

I just watched In the Mouth of Madness last night for the 100th time and now I see Sutter Cane as a pataphysical reality bender. This is the perfect SCP to follow that up.

Well this was definitely a very intriguing and convoluted way of making Joke SCPs canon

Its quite ironic how this story itself is quite outlandish yet necessary for the protection of all other realities and narratives. It's funny how the foundation end up risking the lives of not just their own, but countless other abstractions of realities & narratives in the attempt of saving one singular insignificant lifeform (When compared to the grand scheme of things). And how a higher/lower being of existence would create a story the risked their own reality & narrative as well as countless others.

On way to work, this could not have dropped at a better time!! We fight in the dark so The Exploring Series can post in the day.

When TES does SCP’s like this, it really draws me further into the SCP wiki as a whole. I find the idea of pataphysics fascinating and clever as hell. This motivates me to look for other clever/unique/ well written SCP’s and tales. The wiki is no longer a creepypasta/esoteric hub, and thanks to talent like TES it will continue to evolve and stay relevant; inspiring writers while drawing in a larger fan base for excellent free content, allowing for more content creators like TES to put their own spin on the material. What a fantastic positive feedback loop! If I understand this SCP at all, that would mean that our universe is becoming “more real” as higher quality protagonists add to the narrative. Right?

Thanks so much for the reading, TES! I know this one wasn't easy, lol.

Here we go again. To summarize the jargon, the first part talks about the reflective effect of creation and inspiration, with author creations inspiring others to make more fiction, creating a snowball effect; it also mentions how the fiction can be affected by how grounded in reality it is. In the second part, it describes the cycle of character development and the effects primary characters such as protagonists and antagonists have on the story and its events, due to their in-depth complexity and the change they undergo; secondary or minor characters have less impact, with the "generics" the Foundation describes being what we would know as faceless, nameless background characters that have next to no meaning, purpose or impact on a story. These background characters are more susceptible to tropes and narrative elements (or narr-emes) to substitute for a lack of character. To those of you who are unaware, Dr. King is a character who is cursed with a bizarre phenomena centered on apples, with apples, apple juice and apple seeds pestering him. At one point, a magical apple claiming to be his father beckons him to embrace his future; fed up with it all, Dr. King tells it to screw off, and it kills him by bombarding him with apples. The Foundation then used a device implanted with his enhanced brain to create and refine a few sub-levels of reality, making a self-contained world that was linked to the Foundation's reality but also distinctively separate from it as well. The thing is, the Foundation thought that they could revive him with ease because they believed him to be, in the context of a story, a relatively minor character. However, they weren't aware that, in-universe, Dr. King is NOT a static character, with his apple curse greatly contributing to that. When he was created, he was overwhelmed with confusion and desired to be released from it. Due to Foundation interference, he interpreted them as enemies, and after defining his character with hostile action, began to take on antagonistic properties. Then the anafabula presented itself, and he merged with it in an effort to escape. Due to a character of his complexity outshining the simplistic nature of the pocket world, he caused it to collapse, and through it he became the equivalent of a god as he was superior to everything around him, aided by the "open space" caused by the lack of premise his world had, allowing him to strengthen his abilities. Even worse, many articles and tales show that the Anafabula is not a passive force, but a sapient one, and is actively working to devour fictional worlds that have one thing in common: Dissatisfaction. Any story that has a unsatisfactory nature is devoured by the anafabula, with its ability to climb the ladder of realities by devouring them. In this case, the Anafabula is working to alter the Foundation universe into an unsatisfactory state in order to make it available for consumption. After merging with the Anafabula, Chaos-KING more or less became an agent of it that was tasked with finding a way of aiding it in entering the SCP universe. It was then that Chaos-KING created something. An avatar that it could use to infiltrate and corrupt the SCP universe. A villainous force that took on various attributes from the Anafabula, such as black thorns, the color black, the number seven, darkness and oblivion, adding in it's own elements, such as the color red and aggression. A force that sought to torment and destroy those it hated. One that was hinted on throughout the document, with the color red, the number seven, and a stated desire to "break the chains". In other words.....the Scarlet King. When the character of Dr. King was turned into Chaos-KING, several of his attributes were transferred over, passing through the filters of the anafabula and warping at Chaos-KING's will, eventually turning into the Scarlet King. In other words, the Scarlet King didn't even exist until the repercussions of 6747 made it, with the Foundation likely having no idea that the Scarlet King and Chaos-KING are one in the same. All the carnage, evil, myths, monsters and madness were created when Chaos-KING reached up into the SCP universe and made them real, with him using it as a projection of himself to complete his story cycle. Another example: the Scarlet King created reality benders to sow chaos to further his own goal of destroying the world. This mirrors Chaos-KING creating characters that have the similar ability to greatly affect the fiction around them, where upon injection into the SCP reality, they manifested as characters known as reality benders. Foundation doctors such as Bright, Clef and Kondraki were relatively normal to the Foundation, until Chaos-KING "remade" the sporadically chaotic Doctors that we are familiar with to cause a ruckus from within the Foundation. In a premise such as Lovecraft, where humanity's insignificance and helplessness is prominently featured, the SCP universe is centered on the themes and concepts of mankind's perseverance, adaptability and will to survive. So if an eldritch abomination were to win agains such an interpretation of the human race, it would come off as deeply distasteful, thereby allowing the anafabula to destroy it. Since the Scarlet King is basically a stand-in for Chaos-KING, if the Scarlet King achieves its goal, Chaos-KING completes his, and the anafabula will be the ultimate victor. Essentially, the Foundation ended up not only creating their greatest enemy, but also made them both in-universe and out of it at once. The anafabula reached the author's world, but both it and Chaos-KING were caught in a chokehold due to the conflict of the authors sustaining the SCP universe and the possibility of the anafabula being caught in the crossfire if destroyed. Chaos-KING is countering this by infiltrating and corrupting the SCP universe to make it potable for the anafabula's consumption. Thus, in order to keep Chaos-KING from escaping his world and entering theirs to allow the anafabula to end it, they used the device to turn the pocket world into the LOLFoundation in order to reduce the likelihood of escaping, since the premise of absurdity would reduce the out-of-the-ordinary presence and impact an eldritch being would normally have, making it functionally non-abnormal relative to everything else in that narrative. Referring to the creation/inspiration effect mentioned earlier, the Foundation created the LOLFoundation to get the authors interested and create more articles, further reinforcing the premise of it and dampening Chaos-KING's influence by reducing the unknown and filling it with elements that would leave his actions inconsequential. (To help visualize what I'm thinking, think of a story in two separate forms: the external fiction and the internal narrative. With a character, the narreme acts as an anchoring point for the character to be superimposed onto, and the character in turn being a means for the narreme to display its properties. The fiction acts as content while the narreme acts as framework.) (I also like the idea of Chaos-KING unable to leave his world due to a comedy/tragedy balance - in a tragedy an eldritch being would be more likely to achieve its goals that in a comedy, with the authors building LOLFoundation to further keep the villain in the realm of non-success due to a lack of true, meaningful impact, since in a ridiculous world such as that, anything goes.) To summarize again: In an attempt to resurrect deceased personnel, the Foundation used a device to create a pocket dimension situated in a level of reality below them, then retrieve them and bring them up to their world. Using Dr. King's enhanced brain, they created three potential worlds: an emptiness, a testing ground and, as stated, the bare minimum to hold a story. The Foundation believed that Dr. King's recovery would be fairly simple, since they believed him to be an ordinary man, but in a meta-sense, they weren't aware that he was a significant character. As a result, when he was inserted into a world acting as the bare minimum for a story, his complexity outmatched the capacity for the pocket world, and due to its limitations it couldn't provide the proper way to complete his character arc, nor help his goal of escape. This is when the anafabula revealed itself, becoming a catalyst for a possible escape while merging with him to provide itself a means of infiltrating the SCP universe. Chaos-KING then created the Scarlet King as a "persona" to be controlled remotely, acting as a translated projection of himself and his own goals and attributes - Chaos-KING also created it and drives it to finish its own character goal cycle, since he has put it as a substitute for the final phase of his own. Since the idea of an indomitable world such as the Foundation's being overtaken by an eldritch being would be considered very unappealing, this would make the SCP reality ripe for the anafabula's consumption. To counter this, the Foundation altered the pocket world into the absurd LOLFoundation to reduce the likelihood of him escaping by drawing the intrigue of the authors, getting them to expand that world to further lay down its nature and rules to reduce Chaos-KING's power and meaningful influence, reducing him to a minor character. Regardless, Chaos-KING works tirelessly to oppose the Foundation, acting as an aspect of the anafabula with the ability to control and direct the Scarlet King and its presence all at once, acting as a true master manipulator. The Foundation is still fighting, though, to keep their reality stable, orderly and satisfactory, though it remains to be seen for how long. Thanks for reading. Now for some headache medicine...

Really wish Placeholder's pataphysics lecture also explored multiple fictional dimensions instead of just talking about one fictional dimension and any number of real dimensions. Maybe "multiple fictional dimensions" would be analogous to an artistic collaboration or roleplay, where multiple authors are manipulating the narrative plane but the inherent difference in authorial intent and interpretations between the collaborators resulting in some funky pataphysical messes around the seams where those contrasting ideas clash and mesh. Or something like that.