SCP Foundation

I remember not being taken by the story when I first read this as a draft, because I was thrown off by the errors in the text. Here, I am not only unperturbed, but enthralled by the words you’ve chosen and the sentences you’ve crafted. Spelling, grammar, phrasing – the technical tools of the author – have an understated impact on the emotional power of a piece. I’ve heard it said that emotion is crafted word-by-word; you have mastered this.

My favorite example of this:

The war had given him a healthy love of shepherds. The Foundation had given him a healthy hatred of things that pretend to be human.

His experiences in the war and the Foundation, and the outlooks they’ve given him, are beautifully tied together with this parallelism. You not only tell us his history and outlooks, you show us these are connected in his mind; the transition from the battlefield to this institute wasn’t hard for him.

Furthermore, you’ve fleshed out the characters through their dialogue. You don’t tell us much about the appearance of the characters – I only know that Rose is tall with a bun and Andrew has shaky hands – but you’ve made me feel for them nevertheless. A good writer doesn’t need to give a person a face to make us connect with them; a good writer need only give them a voice.

I don’t mean to say the story is finished; this doesn’t preclude a sequel with Project-λ-099. What I mean to say is that the story stands on its own by fulfilling its own arc.

In context, the opening line hits like a train and rolls right through the text. That the Animal Assets Division is slated for dissolution lends the whole piece a sense of tragedy, setting the theme of impermanency. You’ve recognized that bureaucracy would change out the division of animals with the onset of robotics, and made this a literary device.

I’m a sucker for stories that feature an overarching arc about life changing, with stories contained within driving that point home. You got me with this one.

That certain SCPs only affect humans has always bothered me, and struck me as unimaginative on the part of the authors.

Where I would grumble at how uncreative other writers can be, you have creatively inserted a new canon. You took what I saw as a problem; and found not a flaw, not a solution, but another story. I liked this in part because it proved me wrong – you don’t have to fix something to make something good from it.