SCP Foundation

Uh… there's no rating module

Mostly written as a reaction to the "just throw it into the sun" under my SCP-096 videos.

Also the title is from "Black Hole Sun" in case anyone doesn't recognize it.

Mad lad, you actually did it.

This is an extraordinarily lazy and surprisingly badly-written tale, a chunk of straightforward exposition clearly designed to shock but which, without any real buildup or character investment, ends up being a disconnected series of events which do not feel believable. A firm -1 from me, I'm afraid.

Is the idea clever? I guess.

Is it worth the build up? I wouldn’t say so. Which is kind of a shame, because there’s a lot of good story that could have been covered. The story of the woman being thrown into the sun and her emotional journey. A story of the actual discovery, bringing the reader into the meeting room where they discover the sun’s approaching. Hell, tell us what 096 thinks about flying through outer space!

Instead, the build up feels expository and bland. There are no interesting characters, the voice isn’t particularly strong and justifying a trip to Saturn and the orbital mechanics involved felt like a lecture at times.

-1

This tale casually solves the reason why termination of 096 is necessary as a trivial aside, and then continues to terminate 096. The reason they want to kill it is because the Foundation doesn't think they can round up every photo — as proven by the four-pixel photograph that only became lethal after years. In this tale, they just handwave the photographs, but if they have all the pictures (and can destroy them), then 096 would be permanently pacified. No need to sun launch.

I concur with the above comments, and want add that I feel that withouth the necessary build-ups to tell an otherwise interesting story, the ending is just trying too hard to step 096 into "Plot Armor" territory.

This premise shouldn’t be boring. It’s not a bad story idea. Killing an iconic character via an expository monologue is essentially what Kill 682 did. The difference being was Sorts realized getting to the point was more important than self-serious rambling.

We’re given too much time to realize how implausible the whole setup is. “Hey we’re killing ya after this project but we’ll also approve your absurd proposal” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Invoking classical characters like Clef doesn’t do enough to mitigate the implausible premise. It also doesn’t evolve from that premise to conclude in an interesting or pithy way.

The narrator drones on and on and it just gets tedious. It’s especially heinous because it’s coming from an author fully capable of making something like this work. There’s no life or color. It’s boring.

The title is also overlong and not really reflective of the story. I think Black Hole Sun would have worked better.

Cimmerian wtf stop being dumb.

Did I just not get the joke or was the ending unclear? Was 096 pushing the sun? Or was he vaporized and became one with the sun? Or something else?

Assuming I didn’t miss something, the ending isn’t clear enough to land. And even if it did, the article still wouldn’t be great for the reasons stated earlier.

It could have been better if it started with 096 having been already thrown into the sun, and the rest of the tale was about them dealing with the result. I think that would have functioned better with the idea of “this is why you can’t just throw it into the sun,” since the article would actually be about why you can’t and not you can’t, and we’ll tell you why at the very end.