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If I work on this SCP for any longer I am going to hate it.
Thanks to everyone in the forums and in chat.
SCP-2587 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2587.
…. Weird. It's definitely more of a snapshot than a complete story, and I'd be interested to know more, but I'm enjoying just mentally chewing on it.
+1
Personal headcanon:
The blue blob people are an MTF enacting containment on something and nobody with the right clearance has connected the dots.
So I was brought here by the new "Young and under 30" project, looking to bring attention and review to articles with low vote counts and little discussion.
At just under 5 months old, this one is currently sitting at +17 with only 24 upvotes and 9 downvotes, which makes me suspect this has a lot of invisible neutral votes. A quick read-through reminds me why I was and still am one of those:
Firstly, presentation of information- this article has problems with it. I'm a fan of highly technical articles, and the description has me pausing to parse things I just read or refer back to earlier parts of the piece (and not in the good way). It's only as I pick this apart for this critique that some of this is starting to really make sense.
For instance, most of the description of 2587 itself is devoted to the object's digestive system and feeding habits. The information is presented in such a convoluted way, however, that I'm only just now figuring out that it's trying to describe a filter feeder with a bunch of mobile mouths. Three separate sentences are spent saying "The object has numerous mobile orifices on its surface used for filter feeding." in what seems like the most roundabout way possible. These are also the same sentences that indicate (indirectly) the fact that it's an aquatic organism for the first time outside of the containment procedures, and they are followed by a tangential side note about it's anomalously low dietary needs that never has any importance thereafter.
Meanwhile, the mildly important fact that this thing is an organic life support system for 15 adult-human-sized quasi-uteri is mentioned in a single sentence at the very end of the same paragraph. Thus, when I get to the next paragraph where the -A instances show up, I'm totally confused1 about where the hell these secondary chambers came from, and what they have to do with the organism we were just talking about. Until this revisit, I was actually under the impression that the organism was inside some unmentioned larger structure and attached to external chambers by umbilici.
Altogether, this does not make for an effective tour of an organism's anatomy, and leaves me worn out and confused before I hit the story here.
I also think the story of the UIU's involvement is underutilized: There is a side to this story that isn't being told, and I think it's a potentially interesting one. I can't help but think that no future Mulder/Scully-type debate in the UIU will go without invocation of Casefile 2008-007: the one time it really was people being abducted for mysterious experiments run by some shadowy conspiracy and/or aliens.
The larger narrative leaves me underwhelmed as well. I'm intrigued by the whole "deeper weirdness is afoot" aspect the second interview brings in, but it's a great setup for a final twist that never arrives. It needs something that really leaves me wanting to know more about what's going on here.
In total, there's a lot going on here that I want to like, but along the way it trips over itself and never quite gets backs on it's feet.
Footnotes
1. even on my first return reading
Despite my ultimate neutral-vote, I actually really enjoyed this article, and think it's pretty underrated. It was definitely my first pleasant surprise among the young-and-under-30 articles.
I didn't get the same problems as Scorpion451 did regarding the description of the organism's anatomy: personally, I found it pretty straightforwards, although it could use some simplification and streamlining. Because I could easily understand the imagery of the organism, I found the description a pretty effective "what the fuck" section, which was probably the reaction it was trying to go for. The first interview also does a really good job evoking this same reaction-I am a big fan of the dialogue of the interviewees and the calm, almost numb way they describe their experiences.
What's frustrating is that this is an article which, in my view, really effectively uses imagery and dialogue, but then flubs the narrative in an obvious way. There are important questions such as: how the hell did the Foundation find this thing, what's the UIU connection, how'd they find Fern, that you not only don't attempt to answer, you don't even address the fact that you didn't attempt to answer them. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but it's not really an effective narrative strategy. I have to have some hints of something in order to tie everything together.
In the end this is kinda like…a body with really healthy muscles and functioning organs, but it's missing its skeleton. So it kinda flops around, like Jello. Ends up being a neutral vote.
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Outside of being jarred out of the article by the awkward way the humans are described as "all ages except for children" as well as wondering if 'Fern' is a common Polish last name this article didn't really make me feel anything despite its otherwise effective construction. I can understand how people passed this over at first glance.
I'm confused…
All attempts to penetrate the dermis have been unsuccessful, but the epidermis may be damaged through conventional means.
Undifferentiated tissue makes up approximately 80% of the object […]
If they can't penetrate the dermis, what's the method used to find out this is mostly made of undifferentiated tissue?
/forum/t-2168767/scp-2587#post-
page revision: 5, last edited: 18 May 2020 23:10
