FINAL DAY:
Bonus Reviews!
With several thousand SCP's out there, the thirty-some I wound up showcasing for a month were chosen almost arbitrarily. For every single one I liked enough to talk about, there were at least several more that could have occupied the same spot...but I wanted this to be a "Halloween in December" special feature, so I stuck to my guns and narrowed things down best as I could.
With that said, here are some quickie reviews of other SCP's worth checking out!
3817: Suffering for your Art
SCP-3817 is a man who's lived a very, very long time, despite a body wracked with diseases, poisons and injuries that are often self-inflicted. It's not because he wants to die, but quite the opposite: he's so hell-bent on suffering that he simply won't die. Sheer force of will extends his existence purely to extend his agony, and it's all because he thinks this is the key to unlocking true artistic talent. We've all probably heard the cliche that passion and creativity come from pain and hardship, but unfortunately...it doesn't work. Not only is he not very talented, but his
3199: Humans, Refuted
First, I positively love what a terrifying image this author scrounged up (or created?) for this one, though it's otherwise a fairly down-to-earth monster entry by SCP standards. These humanoids exhibit mostly chimpanzee DNA with a dash of chicken, definitely one of the most frightening combinations imaginable if you're familiar enough with both animals, worsened by the fact that these things just continuously, anomalously produce huge eggs out of their mouths, kinda like how aphids never stop popping out babies every few minutes I guess. The fun of this SCP doesn't come from any major twist or shocker, but a number of uncanny little details, like the cryptic items recovered from their origin point or the fact that they SCREAM every time they regurgitate an egg.
3165: Dog Teeth
Another in the scary-tragic category, 3165 appears to be a teenage girl half-transformed or half-fused into a canine monstrosity, with awkwardly stretched appendages and a set of dog jaws jutting from her face at an odd enough angle to wreck one of her eyes. She has no unusual powers or reality-breaking properties otherwise, but the entry offers quite a bit of character exploration, revealing a "monster" that, while unpredictably violent at times, really is just a typical, human, teenage girl underneath it all, and wishes more than anything else to look normal and "pretty."
3092: Gombe Chimpanzee War
One of those strange but harmlessly funny ones, 3092 is a prize machine that dispenses only these plush apes, which engage in guerilla warfare tactics (get it?!) if they get loose. They will not, however, actually use any dangerous, actual weapons, relying instead on harmless toys and "imaginary" gunfire. In fact, the best way to subdue them is to pretend you've shot them with a tranquilizer dart, at which point they'll pretend to be tranquilized long enough to be put back in containment. The one time they manage to actually harm a foundation employee, they apparently feel so bad about it that they turn themselves right back in.
1364: Ultra Vulnerable Mammal
The deliberate inverse of the Foundation's unkillable reptile, this poor anteater-like critter is not only hyper-sensitive to all forms of stimulus, but becomes steadily more vulnerable to anything it's repeatedly exposed to. Things take a turn for the stranger when intense light appears to phase the creature out of conventional reality, but this isn't explored much further. We don't get a whole lot of a testing log, but the idea of this poor little guy is interesting enough.
2117: An Oxidist
In the "just plain bonkers" category comes this entity resembling a gigantic, flaming flea made entirely of metal, and which periodically manifests in our world in the midst of...playing tennis.
It can talk, and it's happy to answer most questions, but we just don't have the proper context to understand most of its answers, except that it was created to serve in some sort of war and it plays tennis because, well, the war is over and it's retired. Duh!
2863: Gashadokuro
As I've mentioned before, I think, it's tough to make a mythological scp really stand on its own. The Gashadokuro is a gigantic, human skeleton portrayed in a few pieces of old Japanese artwork, and established by more modern anime and manga as a cannibal ghost formed from the collective souls of the dead where great calamity has struck.
The SCP version sticks to this interpretation, but the real hook of the entry is the fact that, before the Foundation intervened, the Japanese governnment was trying to weaponize the things back in the 1950's.
2059: Wall of Flesh
This SCP comes with everything you might expect from something called a Wall of Flesh. It's a mass of organs and tissues that expands to fill the dimensions of any room it's placed in, and any living thing it comes into contact with is absorbed into its being, their bodies distributed throughout its matrix and their minds quickly going mad...all except one.
This entity would have remained little more than a one-dimensional monster if not for the interview log, when a monk's face temporarily manifests on the thing's surface and turns out to have hung on to his mind through sheer discipline. Though he's quickly re-absorbed, he paints us a picture of the flesh wall as a far greater entity than it appears to be, but only a confused, frightened child of its kind. It's not that it means any harm to the people it's swallowed up...it just doesn't know how to control itself.
2061: Entire Local Family Chokes to Death on Single Calculator
The author of this SCP has said it was based on a joke from an episode of Squidbillies, and I remember the one, but the similarities end there, and there are honestly plenty of worse places to draw inspiration. 2061 is a calculator that, for some reason, compels anyone who looks at it to try and swallow it, no matter how much damage they may do to themselves in the process. That's terrifying, of course, but it's also pretty freaking funny. The effect apparently doesn't extend to employees of the company that manufactured it, nor to anybody who has had sex with any such employee, which is even funnier, because it implies that the forces at work here felt that these two circumstances warranted the "perk" of not trying to choke yourself to death on their creation.
3159: The Trashiest World in the Multiverse
Hey, remember "Jerry Springer?" It's alright if you don't. I haven't heard anybody really talk about the show in over a decade now, and we're probably better off; in case it was before your time, this mid-day talk show was infamous for its lack of tact, turning supposedly "trashy" interpersonal conflicts into a cheap spectacle for a quick buck. I kind of even forgot that it ever existed at all, until SCP 3159, which is nothing but a radio mysteriously picking up signals from an alternate world's version of the show.
I feel this SCP could use a bit more work, a few more details to give it that extra push, but the snippets we get are all pretty entertaining, from a woman telepathically sleeping with something described like a big, ball of fat to some sort of interview with...Quetzalcoatl? I think?
It's not really fair to judge such a fantastic sounding world by its version of Springer, and that's exactly the fun of this one; that Springer excerpts are apparently the only glimpse we're getting into a world where SCP-worthy weirdness is a casual fact of life.
As you can see, the SCP's I considered for review are fairly all over the place. Whether you're looking to laugh or cry or lie awake at night in existential dread, there's an SCP out there for everybody, and like I said before, we might return to this for December 2018 and beyond. Maybe by the time I'm 90, we'll have looked at a more thorough cross-section of all the series has to offer.
