SCP Foundation

Got some broken links here and there, but otherwise nicely comprehensive.

Thanks to thedeadlymoose for writing a lot of these character descriptions the rest of the WikiWalk team and everyone else who looked at this!

Previously, this page used the standard for tags, but due to popular discontent with that policy it is now a collaboration page. If a character has been used in three or more stories of any format the author or a person who has written about them may add the character at their leisure. Staff will regularly prune the page to keep it from being bloated or crappy.

About time we got a good character list. Good job on this!

+1

0/10, no Agent MacLean.

I strongly dislike this.

I get that you have to have some bar of entry if you're going to have a character show up on an official hub. The problem is when this bar of entry ignores pretty much every single character who isn't part of a canon, since they're mostly written about by a single author already. If the advised solution to this is "well, then just go get a group of people to write about this character" then this hub changes nothing for the better in that regard. There are reasons it's difficult to start canons, which already have big concepts and appealing ideas to the people which write about them — and it's only going to be even harder to write about singular characters. See also S&C Plastics' lack of character tags for where the worst of both worlds intersect.

Unless you're Clef or any one of the Merry Self-Insert Crew featured here, your character does not have a fanbase who's willing to write about them. This doesn't make the task of getting other people to write about your character easier, it makes getting exposure to characters who don't already have writers for a canon/fans/people you've bugged in chat to write about them even more difficult, if anything. This is shooting yourself in the foot if you're trying to promote the idea of people writing more about characters.

The bigger problem here, much like with crosslinking, is that people are afraid to play with other people's "toys" — in this case characters. I wouldn't dare write about Ruiz Duchamp or Marion Wheeler or Amy and Rupinder because I'm not confident enough that I'll do the characters justice, or that I'll write a subpar tale involving them, or that the author will dislike my work with them. This is a cultural problem FFB's already pointed out here and I strongly doubt that this hub is the solution to that problem.

This does not look like an encouragement to pick up other people's characters and write for them, it looks like a plugging booth where old self-inserts get peddled to people looking for characters to drive their plot.

Setting the debate on principle aside, some of the technical bits here are really out-of-whack. Specifically the images, which insist on a predilection to the right-most side of the page, even when it looks like they shouldn't be operating there, and to the detriment of… easy reading, or thereabouts. Exempli gratia, Kondraki's portrait straight-up breaks the formatting and goes below the outline. I'm not sure if all this has already been noted and is just part of the way it was designed, but if so, it makes for a fairly sloppy end-result imo. Much happier with how it is now.

As for what's actually being detailed, AE pretty much summed up the issues that arise from attempting to rigidly define dozens of highly stylized but also inherently malleable elements that have been that way for a while. I have nothing to say about the content other than I admittedly have not experienced roughly 95% of it. Considering the introduction of old material to new palates was part of the original impetus for this project, I reckon that deserves props of a sort.

Alright, since people seem to not be fans of the three authors, five tales thing I've decided to relax the standard. Cyantreuse suggested to making this page a collaboration, pruned occasionally for bad entries, and that any character appearing three or more times can be added by the author or someone else who wrote about them, with the author retaining power to alter or remove it. The page will be tagged as collaboration and anybody will be allowed to edit it.

Heh. The discussion here really escalated quickly.

I do think this does have a lot of potential as a collab for people to share characters among each other, and draw attention to their characters and tales in general.

Either way, I think its a neat addition to the site, but hey… that's just, like, my opinion, man.

It's definitely a neat idea which I'm all in favor of, especially given the reasonable guidelines. No vote for now, though. I don't think I'll be quite satisfied with it until enough authors trickle in to thin out the old guard a bit.

It also might be nice to have an explicit "there is no canon" somewhere in here, or even something like "All files retrieved from the solid archive. Individual veracity cannot be guaranteed." I know it breaks immersion, but everything here comes off as "wink-wink" sub-rosa co-canon with a few cheeky collapsed caveats¹, and that structure's not going to hold up as diverse characters get added.

(Also, Lombardi's collapsible has some grammar issues.)

Noting that there are some major technical issues with this page, mainly centered around images within collapsibles.

Also, there is no clear sorting system for organizing additions to this page. Is it supposed to be alphabetical, chronological, or what?