Completed Interviews 2

Meet the Administrators

These are my spare drafts of each interview I have conducted with the Administrators.

Interviewing Icons

These are my spare drafts of each interview I have conducted with iconic authors and figures.

I won't lie, Djoric is one of my favorite writers to ever write on the site. As one of the old guard, Djoric was a prolific writer here and established much of what we continue to do today with our writing. Djoric was patient with me as I gathered the questions for him, and he answered them in a short amount of time. I am very happy to be sharing with you all this interview with him! ~ WhiteGuard

Who is Djoric?

The user Djoric became a member of this site on the 10th of October, 2009, and his top 3 most popular pages on the site by rating are SCP-1867: A Gentleman at +988, 10:30 A.M. at +763, and Djoric-Dmatix Proposal at +552. As an author, Djoric has written a total of 31 SCP articles, 88 Tales, 0 GoI Formats, and 7 other pages for a grand total of 126 pages contributed. Djoric wrote a lot of material for the Horizon Initiative GoI in addition to many other very unique articles and tales. Among the unique writing he has produced is the Stealing Solidarity canon which is a canon about cyborg catgirls. The following interview will consist of 20 questions from myself with his responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Djoric's responses.

Interview Questions:

Hi Djoric! It is great to be interviewing you. Let's just start out with a simple one I have in every interview. How did you come across the SCP Wiki? Do you remember which article was the first one to attract you by chance?

I found the site through TVtropes, same as a lot of folks. First article I read was 093 because it was the featured article at the time. This likely colored a lot of what came to follow.

What appealed to you about the site back then? Why did you bother with it? Do you believe that appeal still exists today?

I've always been fond of this particular genre - the liminal space modern conspiracy paranormal weird found footage whatever. Maybe it was from watching those shitty UFO specials on the History Channel at an impressionable age. There's the beautiful feeling of finding something new, an unknown that you have to somehow organize in your head. The site just clicked for me, and while I can't remember my exact thoughts at the time I suppose I saw no downsides to joining. I don't think I had much of another online community at the time.

As for today…yes and no.

Someone going in for the first time could still get that first initial rush from breaching the seal on the unknown. If they can go in completely blind, all the better.

But the personal appeal to me specifically is likely gone forever. It's too much, too big, and I know too much of it. The territory has been mapped out, pre-portioned, put in a gift-wrapped bento box with a neat little ribbon top, and I have nothing more to say within its structure.

Did you have any experience with writing creatively before you found the site or was it your first foray into things? If you did, was that prior writing similar to this genre or completely different if I may ask? Was it challenging for you to acclimate yourself to the style of writing the site had at that time?

By the time I'd found the site, I'd been writing stuff for myself and friends for a few years. Was your typical middle/high school SFF mush, containing precious little of value besides practice. None of it still remains, and if it does I won't cop to it.

Adjusting to the site wasn't particularly difficult - these were the days when it was possible to save an article that had hit -7 by coming back the next day with revisions, which is precisely what happened with SCP-499. There was the obligatory first thread full of bad ideas, but as with anything, you write the bad ideas out of your system so the good ones can finally get some space to breathe.

Who were some of the writers you looked up to or admired when you first started contributing? What were some of your favorite works at the time?

So many of my (comparatively) more recent memories of the site have dissolved into a haze, and the early days even more so, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't name names for favorite authors. In the early days, there was a terribly small pool of authors anyway, so my list at the time would have been the same big fish in the same small pond as anyone else.

For specific articles, SCP-093 and SCP-601 really got to me early on. They nailed the literary found footage niche that carried so much of the initial appeal. Here's this unlabeled VHS tape with scanlines and tears, showing you shaky footage of something that can't exist. Fucking love that shit. SCP-087 too, that was a doozy of an article to come out right as the Mass Edit was over. It's a bit plain nowadays, but competent execution of a basic idea can be gold when there's the right space for it.

Would you say your style was very unique compared to others or would you say that you tried to take different aspects from some of the prominent authors of the time? Looking back, how would you describe your writing style?

My style had always been more towards the weird-absurd even early on (ex: 907, 994), but I don't feel like a proper voice came around until '12-'13.

Those two years, specifically the period from May '12 to May '13, was when things really settled and took form. Open with Blackwood, end with the conclusion of ETDP, and somewhere along the line, there was the development of intention.

Honestly, I think the development of my style was an act of spite. Against what, well, we get to that later.

The final result, in five parts:

The anomalous is absurd. Hilarity overlaps with horror. The weird comes before the dangerous.

Layer those references. Other things on the site, obscure historical events, random nonsense, doesn't matter.

The greater multiverse moves along to its own rules, and there's nothing the Foundation can do about it.

The Foundation is, at absolute best, misguided and doomed to their own undoing.

The Foundation is never at its absolute best. It is a crumbling edifice of cruelty, ignorance, and Cold War hubris that causes more problems than it solves, and the problems it does solve could be done better, easier, and with fewer crimes against humanity by basically anyone with a working eye and half a brain.

Or as Weizhong put it in the comments to The Real Adventures in Capitalism: "slightly off-kilter style … intense, quasi-religious imagery … unabashed in its style, and it gives absolutely zero fucks."

I'll be honest, one of my favorite characters on the site that would end up with numerous tales and references, Lord Blackwood, was established in your most popular article on the site, SCP-1867: A Gentleman. What inspired you to write this and what do you think about the following Lord Blackwood has received based on this article as well as many accompanying tales, primarily written by Smapti as well a few others?

There wasn't, as far as I can recall, any special impetus or inspiration for Blackwood. He came about just like any other oddball article - take a couple incongruous ideas, mash them together, write up something on the quick, and post. Nudibranchs are cool, goofy pulp fiction pastiches are fun.

I love the fact that he took off in popularity - he's a great character for that sort of thing. Got an adventure? Add Lord Blackwood!

I'll be honest, I don't think I read much of Smapti's stories. I recognize the titles but can't recall their contents. I think my approach at the time was "I shall do my Blackwood stuff, they shall do theirs, and all shall be well", and I think that's worked out for everyone.

Though I think I did nick Mr. Deeds as his butler from Smapti, I can't remember if that was his idea or mine.

10:30 A.M. is a short simple tale with the wonderful phrase "Welcome to the SPC. From this moment onward, your job is very, very simple: you are going to punch sharks." What is the deal with SPC and this orientation style tale?

Orientation-style tales were very popular at the time as a way to quickly and efficiently talk about some facet of the greater setting without having to worry about things like plot or characterization. They had a huge burst of favor that rather swiftly evaporated.

The SPC is, of course, a joke that had been passed around for ages, which I then wrote this about, and then later wrote SCP-1329, SCP-1449, and It Always Has Been, It Always Has Not Been and even showing up in The Real Adventures in Capitalism. I've seen the GOI hub for it but not read anything on it. Godspeed, you pugnacious bastards.

There are jokes in 10:30 AM that make absolutely no sense to anyone who wasn't very into the site in the fall of 2011 (nine years ago, my God, what is time): "teeth became shark" and "consult an alchemist" were lines pulled from swiftly-deleted coldposts immortalized forever in the form of this stupid tale.

If there is one thing that has never changed, I love devoting myself to shitposts that are way better than they have any right to be.

Djoric-Dmatix Proposal: Thirty-Six was posted on the 22nd of January, 2013 as a collaborative 001 proposal between yourself and the author Dmatix. Not only that, but this was also the first collaborative 001 proposal to be established. What was it like working with Dmatix on this and what are your thoughts on the proposal looking back?

Dmatix and I have always been on much the same or similar wavelength for a lot of things, so working with him was basically just an extension of chatting with him normally. I brought him the idea, and we went on with it, and by this point, it's difficult to tell where one person's contributions begin or end.

Looking back, I like that it exists in a form untouched by what I'd later write in my personal canon. It's a memorial to the ideas as they were taking shape - the Veil falling apart because the world has gone beyond its appointed lifespan returns later for the grand finale. It's also the HI before ETDP was written and a lot of the details were set down.

During our preliminary interview, I asked what works on the site you felt were your best. You gave me three for three different reasons. For that reason, we will spend the next three questions covering them. First is your Et Tam Deum Petivi canon. What is this series for those who haven't checked it out yet and why do you believe it is among your best work on the site?

Okay, so ETDP is a series about a pair of field agents for the Horizon Initiative that starts out episodic and ends up as a romance. It's rough, clunky, amateurish, a bit predictably tropey, and of extreme personal sentimental value. Enough so that I don't lend to look back at it, because I'm afraid the writing won't hold up to the emotional attachment I have for it.

(You should all still read it, though)

Looking back, ETDP was a transition point in my writing, where I finally got the hang of characters with a bit of dimension to them.

Mary-Ann and Salah are just ordinary people. No powers, no zany backstory. Just folks. You could honestly strip all the paranormal stuff out and the core story would be essentially unchanged. That meant I had to rely on who they were as people to make them interesting. Mary-Ann is drifting through life alone. Salah is haunted by the ghost of his younger self. Naomi is this dorky kid who has to wrestle with the responsibility and expectations put upon her.

The romance wasn't even intended at first! They were just supposed to by Those Two Agents from the HI, along the lines of Mulder and Scully. The representatives of this new GOI, our foot in the door. Their relationship actually came about when, over Christmas break, I found myself reading Divergent, to which I exclaimed "I've written characters who aren't even dating who have better chemistry than this!", followed shortly by "Oh, wait, yeah, they do have really good chemistry…"

I plotted out the rest of the series arc in quick succession after that.

While the series was ongoing, FortuneFavorsBold/HammerMaiden asked me if I was married because she found the relationship written well enough that she thought I must have had some experience. All these years later that remains the greatest praise I have ever received for anything I have ever written.

(Having quite a bit more relevant life experience now than I did then, I can confirm that a good relationship is mostly ordinary. Just because you want to fuck each other doesn't mean that grocery shopping stopped being a thing.)

I am also terribly, terribly proud of my usage of Satan/Jormungandr/Quetzalcoatl as head librarian of Yggdrasill. One of those cases where the details have lined up just so that there was no possible alternative. There's a tale fragment I have in my old notes where he's Ouroboros, too.

If I returned to the series, I would change a lot. Rewrite the entire thing, most likely. Would be a lot more up-front about Mary-Ann getting treatment for her depression, would probably give more time to explore Salah's thoughts and fears on starting a family, would do a lot more with the Library instead of the AWCY stuff that went nowhere and came from nowhere, the ending would be completely different (if you've read it, you can probably guess what the change would be.)

SCP-2085: The Black Rabbit Company is the second one you mentioned. This article is an article you are famous for. There are crazy things going on throughout this piece, but like with most good works, there is a meaning behind the story. What is going on in this article and what does it all actually mean?

2085 was and is a lot of things. Me venting frustrations at running up against the limitations of the format, certainly, but also something of a personal challenge. Make the best scip I possibly can, that is also anime trash. Take the most mocked and derided type of bad coldpost and make it so good it has to stick around, like a big middle finger struck right in the eye of God.

(The original article name was "Space Wizard and the Commando Catgirls" and I regret it to this day that I was talked into not using that one. Black Rabbit Company was a rush compromise I've never been too happy with.)

So to do that, I essentially played two jokes at the same time. It goes kinda like this.

Setup A: "The fuck is with this title? This is going to be some dumb harem anime bullshit, isn't it?"

Punchline A: "No, actually, their circumstances honestly really grim if you think about it and tonally consistent with the scipverse at large."

Setup B: "Well then I guess that means that it's going to be a downer ending."

Punchline B: "Ha! I lured you into a false sense of security! You all fell for it! Even your immediate family fell for it! It was anime bullshit the entire time! The real good stuff, too!"

I wanted to play the expectations of both genres against each other, but that's still just the scene-dressing - it's the characters that are important.

Character writing is dependent on informing the character by the circumstances they find themselves in. The girls were grown in tubes and raised in isolation with the intention of being sold as a product, but have rejected that future and have claimed hold of their personhood red in tooth and claw. Wizard is just some guy slowly dying of an alien disease, who's thrown away everything else in his life just for a shot as this impossible cause because he knows he hasn't got much time left and if you are going to go out, do something good and go out with a bang.

So while they are all superficially anime stereotypes (The Boss, the Happy One, the Shy One, the Angry One, the Cold One, the Generic Man), those traits are taken in with the circumstances of their place in-universe and put on the back burner to simmer. Take it to the table and there's a lot more underneath. As with any good anime:

Boss has put all the responsibility on herself to keep the gang together, and fears that she's not up to snuff, and that if she fails the entire operation goes under and her sisters are all imprisoned or dead. Wizard, as an outsider, is her release valve.

Momoko is genuinely that upbeat, but she's much more aware of it than she lets on - the big dumb happy musclehead comic relief is both an effective shield (outsiders will underestimate her) and a means of keeping morale up. When everything else is stripped away, she is likely the most emotionally mature of the group.

Hana is someone who is normally rather mild and introverted forced into a situation where she must adopt more aggressive and violent behaviors to safeguard her personhood. She hates it, because she's terrible at being a hardass, and she hates the fact that she's terrible at it.

Nanami self-sabotages. She lashes out violently and childishly against the world that rejects her. She doesn't have the the maturity or life experience to handle her anger productively, so she puts on a dumb costume, puts on a silly accent and causes problems on purpose.

Tomi, when she deigns to talk to anyone, is cold, apathetic, aloof, snarky, dismissive, and distant. She does not like being emotionally vulnerable, even around her sisters, and so has closed herself off from nearly everyone else.

Wizard is at war with himself. Red gives voice to all of the fears he tries to tamp down. He's trying to hold onto hope in a situation that only has one end for him (that he can see, at least). He has the bond he does with the girls because of that - they're aiming for that million-to-one chance, hoping it happens nine times out of ten, and there's nothing to go back to or fall back upon when they fail.

The spaceship dream is that of escape to a place where they can exist on their own terms. The internal ache hope to shed our suffocating shells and return, perhaps for the first time, to the place that we know will welcome us home.

Also it's a fucking spaceship and that's really cool and Ihp is a man of culture and skill for recovering Solidarity after it was lost.

I cackle with glee when I see that the article is still, to this day, making nerds mad on the internet. It's too silly, it's too self-indulgent, it's cringey, it doesn't belong on the site, it's the author inserting their fetishes into their work - all I'm missing is "It's too political" and I'll have bingo.

(Every so often, I see a comment on "but why doesn't the Foundation use them in an MTF" and my response is always some variant of "Really? After reading this article, that's going to be your take? The militant antifascists are going to help out the people who source test subjects from ICE internment camps?", so if anything I was not political enough.)

(Also: oh you sweet summer children of the SCP subreddit: if you think this is fetish work the internet has some horrible surprises in store for you. The only fetish here is my immense love for ECONOMIC JUSTICE. The entire article is about their violent rebellion against a world-ordering that treats them as objects to fulfill its own desires, and how that rebellion is awesome. If I get all male-gazy about it I have missed the fucking point.)

My disappointment in the continued lack of fanart remains enormous - I know of work by Jenssosaurus, u/Throbbert_Hood, someone in the Korean fan community, and possibly a cameo in Lord Bung's Confinement Ep2, and that's it. In seven years. I could likely find more Kondraki art made in the last month or two.

No, I'm not bitter, why would you ever think that I am perfectly fine.

I get to have the last laugh anyway because, as if foretold in sacred scrolls, Yasuhiro Nightow's (he made Trigun!) Blood Blockade Battlefront features a five-woman squad of special agents with a non-indicative animal theme-name who spend all their screen time fucking around / doing shootbang operations / drinking liver-annihilating amounts of alcohol.

Observe the following image. You should be able to guess immediately which one correlates to which member of the BRC.

https://imgur.com/a/yPrTwnL

I am a god-damn prophet.

(It is, of course, purely coincidental convergent evolution but to see it in a show I am quite fond of makes me a happy, happy weeb.)

The last one you mentioned, The Real Adventures in Capitalism, was one of the final works you added to the site, and you mentioned that it was one of your best in terms of the quality of writing. What did you do right with this tale?

Well, the obvious thing is that I posted it in 2018, so it's the result of several years of writing stuff I wasn't terribly burnt out on. Nice and rejuvenating.

It's the grand finale of the Djoricverse, tying together basically everything I had written up to that point and several things I had never gotten around to putting to page. It's a completion to Isabel's storyline, a completion to Naomi's storyline, a completion of the Scarlet King storyline. No loose end remains, because the multiverse is gone. It's over, it's done, there's nothing left for me to write.

There's a certain amount of tossing off the weighted clothing and pulling out all the stops involved - if we're going to have curtain call, we're going to go big, using everything that wouldn't or couldn't work elsewhere on the site. Reducing it down to a highlight reel was honestly the only way it could have existed (I would have burnt out on a tale series), and it worked out. Waste no time, waste no words, hyperlink it to hell and back because there will be everything here and I haven't got the time to footnote every single reference.

(Example: the Foundation appears exactly once in the entire tale, as one of its researchers throws the Chronicle of the Daevites into the ocean. It's not explicitly stated in the tale, but it is referencing my headcanon that the Foundation had been compromised by the Children of the Scarlet King ages ago.)

Isabel started as mostly a joke with no plan, as things of mine tend to be. I'm immensely proud of where her story ended up. The story is also a nice bookend to my body of work because the first real thing I wrote for the site (A Video Oddity) was a collection of fragmented anomalous video recordings.

Fun fact: the final battle against the King has an associated song I basically played on loop to get pumped and inspired for it: "The Greatest Jubilee" from Bayonetta 1. Isabel makes her big entrance at 2:32, fastball special at 3:05, final blow at 3:18 (or push it to the second loop if you want an extended fight.)

Previously, I interviewed the prolific tale writer, Ihp. Although you began what would become known as the S & C Plastics canon with your tale Stratagem from 2010, Ihp is the one who really picked it up and ran with it. What were your original thoughts when creating this series, and what do you think about what it has become?

Ihp has done more, and done better, with S&C than I could have ever hoped to achieve. The original intent was just to have a recurring crew of nobodies (I remember originally pitching it as a replacement for the senior staff avatars. Ah, naivete.) having low-danger escapades. He's taken that and run a marathon with it. I couldn't be happier with the result. Were it only up to me, it would have been abandoned after those first couple tales.

As previously mentioned, you have worked alongside Dmatix before. Dmatix was the originator for the GoI The Horizon Initiative. As a writer who has written a lot for that GoI, what do you think is charming about it?

First and foremost, it's a project that a good friend and I worked on together, and that by itself is its own charm and appeal.

Secondly, it's a way to approach the scipverse from a different lens. Foundation contains, Coalition eliminates, Initiative (eventually) learns - even if it doesn't like the lesson, and most of what they learn is that they were wrong in the first place. It can't front the material support of the other large GOIs, but it uses its knowledge of the greater scipverse to maintain its position despite the deficiencies in manpower.

Example: "So hey, there's a giant library in the middle of the multiverse and it is run by Satan."

Foundation: Lock the door, no one ever gets in.

Coalition: Oh that's a wonderful stack of grimoires you have there would be a shame if something happe-whoops who put that flamethrower there?

Initiative: Sigh. All right, who's going to be the official liaison? Yes I know it's Satan but we've got to do something. Hey, Salah, your daughter's a teenager, right? She'll be perfect, teenagers love Satan.

Thirdly, it's a house of cards liable to implode at any moment in a wonderfully symmetrical manner. There's the simmering tension between the three main Abrahamaic branches trying to work together without killing each other, then also the simmering tension between the conservative and progressive wings of the organization, then the added pressure of biting off more than they can chew and getting revelations that they weren't necessarily asking for, then the added pressure of all the minor cults flocking to the banner, then the external conflict between them, the Foundation, and the GOI, and then the external conflict between them and the CotBG and the Fifthists.

Fourth and final is the fact that the HI is built to feature ordinary people. Even most of the Wolves, fanatics that they often are, are likely to be your garden variety (maybe you'll get an Alexander Anderson type in there). The Tribunal in charge are absolutely ancient, but they're still pretty ordinary.

The banner has been taken up by other authors and other GOIs since then, but at the time pickings were slim in this regard. The Foundation had the legacy of wacky zany author avatar characters or faceless goons.

(God does canonically exist in the Djoricverse, but the HI is forever looking in the wrong places, for why should they ever suspect Doctor Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V, PhD?)

So in 2014, you wrote a tale called Dust and Blood. This tale establishes a lot of lore on The Scarlet King and its children. What is this tale to you and what do you think about SCPs like SCP-682 and SCP-999 being referenced often as part of these children?

Dust and Blood was some setting-building, putting into shape some of my ideas for how the greater SCP multiverse is structured.

682 was referenced pretty openly in the tale as one of the children of the 4th Bride, so that's no surprise. The link to the Scarlet King is actually much more convoluted than it needs to be: this was the era of my dumb insistence that 231 was a whale, and 682's image is that of a rotting whale carcass, so if the Scarlet King is whale/leviathan themed, then obviously there's a connection.

I can see the logic in 999 as children of the 7th, but it's one of those fandom things where I think someone had the idea and then other people latched onto it without reading the original - the tale itself says:

"Her children walked on two legs, and were mighty hunters and heroes"

Which is pretty clearly not a cute lil' blob, but whatever, offsite fandom is gonna fandom.

I had planned at one point to make an article about one of the 7th's children (I know there was something involving finding a massive sword buried in the moon that they had thrown there), but it never came to fruition. Instead, we got Across the Hills So Quiet, which I like much better.

I believe this interview would feel incomplete without talking about SCP-2845: THE DEER. This article was met with a lot of acclaim and a lot of controversy, which may very well define your tenure as an author. Personally, it is one of my favorites by you and as A Random Day said in the discussion, "This remains one of my favorite Series 3 articles of all time." As an author, you can be described as someone who wanted to break conventions. With this article, you managed to get readers to question if the Foundation is doing the right thing. What prompted you to write an article like this?

This was my original 2000 contest entry, though my beta readers were pretty unified that it wasn't sci-fi enough to count, so I entered 2085 instead.

The themes aren't coincidental with the timing - it shares the same "fuck the Foundation" energy as 2085, though from a different direction. It was a way of giving voice to my frustrations with the SCP article format at the time - the limitation of having to maintain secrecy was not playing nice with the grand, sweeping mythos I had made for myself, but if you want views you either write an article, or you write a different article. Tales get buried.

With THE DEER, the Foundation has finally stumbled across something far outside their abilities to safely contain. For narrative reasons, it is contained, of course, but only by a thread, and the accompanying tale details what happens when it inevitably snaps.

I had effectively painted myself into a corner by that point, mentally speaking. My brain was full of big-picture things, far bigger than the Foundation could actually contain, but if they were stuck in tales, the readership would always be limited.

I had something of a chip on my shoulder, you see.

Reading the comments from the time of posting is just wild. Granted, my attitude didn't help at all, but the sheer amount of ruffled feathers over an article quote-unquote breaking canon (despite longstanding precedent that all articles exist on their own, independent from all others, regardless of links) is a sight to behold. From what I know of the modern site, I think I ended up vindicated. Ha!

The Foundation universe operates on the principle that these things are secret from the public at large. With each new article and every new Group of Interest, that principle becomes harder and harder to believe until it becomes downright farcical. I eventually wrote it away that the Veil is, itself, an in-universe construct (that eventually collapses, as we see in the Naomi tales), but without resorting to "magical secrecy field is a thing that exists", I can't see a way to maintain the secrecy principle without cutting 95% of everything out.

The Foundation can have secrecy, or it can have an expansive universe. Both is juggling narrative chainsaws.

THE DEER was my hammer to make that point. Eventually, something will break.

Final note: I love that it's caught on in the greater fandom and I appreciate every single person who does art of it, y'all are wonderful folks and I hope that good things happen to you.

Finaller note: Holy shit The Explaining Series video on this article has one point two million views. Dear God, man. The comments explaining that THE DEER is contained because it is confused at these weird apes chugging olive oil got a good laugh out of me too.

During your time here, you were one of the strongest personalities around whether for good or bad. How different would you say you are now as opposed to the prolific Djoric we knew from your heyday here?

Less transphobic, thank Christ. Less inclined to get involved with dumb scene drama. Better head on my shoulders. Still bullheaded. Still have a brain that won't sit still and a mouth that runs too fast for it. Freed from a bad place in my life and writing what I want.

When you look at the wiki now, what surprises you the most? Or has the site become what you expected it to turn into? What do you miss about being an active writer here?

The site is effectively unrecognizable to me. I would have been absolutely thrilled at all the GOI formats, interesting formatting, narrative-driven articles back in the day - now the prospect is exhausting just to think about. Too big, too much stuff. Long articles were already losing their luster for me as I left ("get to the fucking point!" cried he), and it doesn't look like that train has slowed down at all. Additional object classes and threat levels are here, but I can't muster the excitement for them - a disappointment after all the backing I put into them with THE DEER, but the ones I have seen have required referencing different pages to parse and that's entirely counter to the spirit of my grand rebellion.

I get the need to sweep through for CC image compliance, but honestly if we're going to do that I'd have half a mind to put out a call for art submissions for as many articles as possible. Get a bunch of artists in a pool and do a lottery or something. Hell, find a cause and do it as a charity auction. This likely has something to do with the fact that Dial-a-Llama and Frostee-Flesh are both dependent on their images and now have got none, neutering the jokes.

Is it bad to say that I don't miss much? I was active for the short side of six years, give or take, and for about half of those I was in a slow-motion self-destructive episode with a personal crisis chaser that still took me a few more years to pull myself out of. I was a miserable bastard growing more and more miserable as time went on, and holy shit I treated some folks heinously during my time here (Aelanna, Moose, Clef, doubtlessly others).

Living with a chip on your shoulder that large for that long is a terrible thing to do to yourself, and getting away from it was one of the best things I've done.

Do you happen to have any projects going on outside of the wiki that you would like to talk about? If not, would you mind just sharing some of the stuff that you have been up to during your time away from the site?

I've been keeping myself busy, but I've decided to keep it separated from my presence here and it's likely to stay that way - no one wants to be followed by the ghost of all the dumb shit they did in their early 20s.

But, rest assured, I haven't stopped writing and the pace has not waned.

And who exactly is "Djoric"?

A portrait of the artist as a young man, as seen through a mirror darkly. A vertical slice. A parasocial persona existing in a specific bubble of time-space that I don't particularly like all that much anymore but that I very occasionally put back on when a fit of nostalgia hits me. A silly name I made up as a teenager.

Is he me? He was, once.

How many SCPs could be improved by being turned into or including whales?

Just this one: SCP-XXXX - "Suddenly, A Whale Appears Out of Fucking Nowhere".

That one's free to the first person who can keep a hold of it.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank Djoric for doing this interview with me. It was awesome to do, and I am glad that I could share some thoughts from one of the old guard. I already have the next interview in this series prepared, so stay tuned!

Thank you for reading!

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‡ Licensing / Citation

Apologies everyone for the long break in between interviews, these take a considerable amount of time, and I have had a minuscule amount of free time to do these in the past few months. We are back on track though! Without further ado, allow me to welcome our Parawatch aficionado, the creator of Murphy Law, and a whole lot more, please give a virtual round of applause to The Great Hippo everybody! ~ WhiteGuard

Who is The Great Hippo?

The user The Great Hippo became a member of this site on the 10th of April, 2018, and his top 3 most popular pages on the site by rating are The Great Hippo's Proposal (feat. PeppersGhost): A Good Boy at +638, SCP-3034: The Counting Station at +636, and SCP-2639: Video Game Violence at +571. As an author, The Great Hippo has written a total of 40 SCP articles, 27 Tales, 0 GoI Formats, and 10 other pages for a grand total of 77 pages contributed. One of the areas The Great Hippo is most well known for is the horror/creepypasta side of the Wiki, which is shown with his success with Parawatch having written some of the first tales for the group. Additionally, who could forget his famous noir investigator, Murphy Law. The following interview will consist of 20 questions from myself with his responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are The Great Hippo's responses.

Interview Questions:

Hello, Mr. Hippo! Let's start with my usual introductory style questions. How did you come across the SCP Wiki? It is my understanding that you knew about the SCP project as early as Series I. Why did you wait until 2018 to create an account?

The first article I ever read was SCP-165, otherwise known as The Creeping, Hungry Sands of Tule. I'm going to say it was in… 2011? -Ish? Back when there was only Series 1, at least. I found myself enamored with the format and how it could be used to tell a story (and I was always really big into creepypasta) but didn't even think of contributing at that time.

A couple of years later — early in 2018, I think — I chanced upon the site again. Glancing through recent articles, it occurred to me that it'd be a fun challenge to try and write something like this. And so… that's what I did (SCP-3034 - The Counting Station).

What exactly about the SCP Wiki was attractive to you? Did you happen to have any favorite authors whose work inspired your own writing?

The format was novel, and I thought it might be fun to try writing within a particular constraint. As for authors who have inspired me — ophite, qntm, djkaktus, minmin, and Michael Atreus were all significant influences (and people who's work I had read on-site before deciding to participate).

Do you feel the Wiki is welcoming of newcomers? Were you nervous at all when you released your first work? Is there anything you would recommend to newcomers when it comes to submitting works to the site?

Admittedly, I haven't been around very much recently, so I can't speak to any current trends regarding how welcoming it is (or isn't). I wasn't nervous at the time, but that's because I felt confident about my writing (to the point where even if it hadn't worked, I'd be able to accept that; different writing styles for different communities).

Re: newcomers, I think my main suggestion would be to understand that you're submitting your work to a community built on fanfiction about a poopy murder statue. Don't take it too seriously. If you find yourself obsessing about whether or not your work will succeed (or how 'much' it will succeed) to a point where it's stressing you out, it might be time to take a step back and re-assess. Don't chain your sense of self-worth as a writer to how many 'upvotes' you've gotten (or whether or not you can succeed on a poopy murder statue fanfic site).

You can treat your time on the site as an opportunity to improve as a writer, and a little frustration is — quite naturally! — part of that. But if it's screwing with your head, take a break. The stakes here are all but non-existent; don't let this place mess with you the same way social media messes with us all.

What experience did you have in writing prior to joining the site? Do you believe your previous work helped prepare you for some of the success you have enjoyed here?

I've written plenty of fanfic nonsense in other communities. I also did a lot of essay writing in college (and have a minor background in teaching).

Outside of that, I've always been enamored with spooky stories. Do you remember back when you and some other kids would get together to mess with an ouija board, and the piece would start spelling things out? And everyone would panic, screaming: I'm not moving it! I'm not moving it?

That was me. I was the kid moving it.

What is your general approach and writing process when it comes to writing for the wiki? What would say the average amount of time it takes and so on. Is there anything that you find to be "the most challenging step" when it comes to writing for this place?

Oh, jeez. Uh. Anywhere from (literally) 20 minutes to several months (or even years). My process is a bit like sculpting; I come across something I want to do, figure out some basics (image, containment procedures, maybe the description, maybe the logs), then proceed to chip away at everything until the story I want to tell kind of… emerges. Sometimes this process is ridiculously fast (I finished SCP-3352 - Bethlehem Steel in a matter of hours). Other times, it's ridiculously slow (I'd been tweaking SCP-3117 - A Monster Shaped Hole for literally over a year before I finally posted it).

My approach is very chaotic and unstructured. The hardest part for me has always been the endings; that's the part I spend the most time thinking about. Getting the reader engaged is something I find easy — leaving them with a sense of satisfaction, making that engagement pay off — that's always something I've found hard.

Your 001 proposal with PeppersGhost, A Good Boy, is your most popular work by rating. (At the time of this interview, it is only a couple votes apart from the article the next question covers.) I always find it interesting when established authors try their hand at a 001 proposal collaboration. Interestingly enough, this proposal is the only 001 proposal that is listed as an "Explained" SCP. How did the collaborative process work for this article and what inspired you to write about "such a good boy"?

I've always been fascinated with neural nets and AI. One thing that always bugged me, though, is how sci-fi treats AI like awkward metal humans. I love Data from Star Trek, but that whole trope is played out for me. I wanted to write something about an AI that actually felt like AI. Alien and bizarre.

PeppersGhost had just written SCP-\̅\̅\̅\̅-J, which uses predictive text based off tons of other articles to produce weird, creepy results. I realized I wanted to do something with that. Collaborating with Peppersghost was a natural step, too, because I realized he was far more steeped in the lore of the site than I was — and I wanted the SCP to refer to a bunch of other older SCPs with 'esoteric' containment procedures.

The '-EX' designation was last minute. I think Captain Kirby helped clinch that — it happened around the time I threw in the whole 'count-down' thing (where the reader realizes that ERZATZ is going to get the SCP-001 slot only because every SCP below it has been neutralized). While we were talking about it, either him or me said something like "is this thing even anomalous anymore?" — at which point it hit me that it absolutely wasn't.

Finally, the collaborative process was… I wrote out the basic structure (three acts; one of the rare times when I did have a pretty organized structure for the article in mind). Peppersghost cleaned up the formatting and got Botnik working to produce the excellent chunks of bot-text, and then went over a lot of my stuff and tidied it up (as well as adding a couple of touches of his own — I believe 'ethical felines' was his, as well as the realization that this thing acted like a dog). We both reeled in each other's excesses (he wanted images of dead cats, I wanted to call this thing "DR GOODBOY, OR: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my ROM"). We played to each other's strengths.

SCP-3034: The Counting Station was the first article that you released onto the SCP Wiki. I do not recall if I told you this during our preliminary interview together, but this is one of the articles that renewed my interest in the site after years away from it and remains to this day as an all-time favorite of mine. How did you manage to write such an excellent article that portrays such a sinister feeling as your first to the site? Additionally, you have repeatedly mentioned wanting to tweak or remove the interview from the article. Why do you feel like that in particular is a weak spot in the article?

IDK, man; counting stations are weird. I think one of the reasons it works so well is because there's a solid principle behind taking creepy things that are 100% real and then adding a slight, creepy, magical twist. It's my favorite type of horror — horror that's so subtle you're not even sure where the line between what's real and what isn't is, anymore.

I came up with this idea years ago in some distant corner of the internet when a bunch of people were throwing out their ideas for SCPs. I just threw out the basic premise there: "What if there's this counting station you stumble across? Everyone's gone, the only thing you find is "DON'T LET HER FINISH" scratched into a table, and then suddenly the radio kicks in and you hear a little girl counting down to zero." The idea lodged into my head, and then — years later, I figured: 'what the hell; I'll write it'.

Re: the interview, I won't take it out because literally no one I talk to thinks I should, but it always bugged me because it feels a little too… 'cinematic'. Like the author trying to tell the reader what's going on, rather than letting the reader figure it out on their own. I always love ambiguity; I love leaving things up to the reader's imagination. I feel like the interview crosses that line.

It's time to explain what Mage: The Ascension is and why it has inspired your writing in two different articles, SCP-2639: Video Game Violence, and the next article we will talk about. What is the deal with SCP-2639 and why did you change the MTF name? This article is also a bit different from your usual writing. What inspired the change in direction?

Mage: The Ascension is this weird, open-ended game where the reality that we understand is just a consensus we all agree to. Science is a form of magic that the Technocrats (the bad guys) have convinced everyone to abide by. Mages are people who don't 'agree' — each operates on their own paradigm, casting magic based on their own unique, personal understanding of how the universe works. It's a wild, fun, and extremely deep system.

Anyway, there are these things called Marauders in the setting. Marauders are… effectively, they're mages so wrapped up in their personal paradigm that they ignore paradox (the thing that limits mages from getting too wild) and just force their paradigm on everyone in their vicinity. A trio of Virtual Adepts (think mages who treat reality like the Matrix) became Marauders while playing an FPS, and ended up gaining the ability to respawn, etc. That was the basis for SCP-2639.

I changed the MTF name because someone pointed out that the original name (Griefers, I think?) wouldn't have been part of the lexicon of a bunch of Quake nerds back in the 90s.

As for the change in approach… honestly, outside of the opening (which I think is way too long, in retrospect; cut it down and get to those logs!), this is pretty standard for me. I love dialogue; writing these characters is the easiest thing in the world for me. I just don't do it too often because it feels a bit like cheating — but since the bulk of this are just chat-logs between gamers, it was an opportunity to cut loose and let my delight for dialogue really shine.

I'm still enamored with wtf_gtfo's line, "we are unstoppable nigh-immortal digitized death-gods who have spent 10+ years practice-killing each other in endlessly looped murder-orgies".

wtf_gtfo is just me when I was 14. An angry, bitter, self-obsessed ball of vicious queerness.

I had not read any Murphy Law articles until I prepared for this interview. They are quite the trip, starting with SCP-3043: Murphy Law in… Type 3043 — FOR MURDER!. You managed to pull off one of those articles where the anomaly itself isn't the actual focal point, but it is a noir-based investigator who does the heavy lifting in this one. With the format and the character being unique to the SCP Wiki, what inspired you to write this article and introduce a character such as Murphy Law?

Part Marauder from Mage: The Ascension (as mentioned above), part Tracer Bullet (from Calvin and Hobbes). Every so often, Watterson (C&H's creator) would have Calvin (the little kid and main character) re-imagine all of his childhood interactions in this gritty, black-and-white landscape where he was the titular private eye ("Tracer Bullet") trying to solve a "case" (typically, his mom trying to get him to admit to breaking a vase or something). That was the germ of the idea: "What if Tracer Bullet, but real?"

I love noir. I love Raymond Chandler, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep — etc. Simultaneously, though, noir's got a lot of… let's call it "problems"? I didn't want to write something genuinely hard-boiled. I wanted something that was light and fun, but still managed to contain the core nugget of what made me love noir (its cheesy one-liners, its over-the-top hard-boiled heroes…). Murphy Law is basically just me playing dress-up and pretending to be noir, but in a very silly, fun sort of way.

Staying on the topic of Murphy Law, you followed things up by writing an article based on him, SCP-3143: Murphy Law in... The Foundation Always Rings Twice!. Let's start out with some rapid-fire questions. Where did the name come from for Mr. Law and is there any significance that both of the Murphy Law SCPs end in "43"? Were you nervous to write another Murphy Law article after the success of the first?

The name is based on a roleplay character I once created called… well, Murphy Law. He was also a private eye, and I just found the name so amusing (and the idea of him being endlessly heckled over it) that it stuck in my head. When I started writing this, I thought it would be great to write a Murphy Law that — rather than endlessly getting heckled over it — embraced the name in all its cheesy glory. Hence the line: "I'm the guy you call when everything that could go wrong… did."

No significance in the '43'; it was just an opportunity to have the sequel sync up numerically.

I was… 'nervous' might be the wrong word. Intrigued? I knew it would be excessively difficult, because I had to 1) Make it a clear sequel, 2) Make it work on its own, and 3) Make it also pataphysical, but in a way that wouldn't just feel like the first article (in short, in a way the reader wouldn't expect). I had to pull a fast one. That's why I decided to write it in the first place — because it struck me as a heck of a challenge.

You have 5 Parawatch tales in total, all of which are within the top 10 of the GoI's tales by rating. Additionally, you have some writing advice posted on the hub itself. What about writing Parawatch articles plays into your strengths as a writer?

My favorite type of horror is horror that doesn't feel like it's trying to be scary. Once you notice the monster's TRYING to scare you, the jig is up; you realize it's not a monster at all. It's just a guy in a spooky mask.

Parawatch articles let me focus on that sort of scary — creating a sense of dread through tension, unease, and a sense of the real. Every Parawatch article I write is based on something that's 100% real… but just twisted enough where things start to unravel. I love putting the reader in that space — a space where they're not sure where what's "true" ends and what's "fiction" begins.

Most of my Parawatch stuff (and, in fact, the entire GOI approach) was inspired by classic creepypasta like the Lenintine Cards and KillSwitch.

During my preliminary interview with you, you had some interesting thoughts on struggling new authors, how you personally rate things, and the general rating system and culture surrounding it. For our readers, what were the thoughts you had about the rating system and your thoughts on some of the pitfalls with the system?

I think that the whole upvote/downvote system is one of those things that hot-wires our reptile brains into obsessing over something that ultimately shouldn't matter (that brief rush of endorphins when someone upvotes your article). I think that the way this overlaps with lots of newer folks (especially those with insecurities around themselves and their writing) is… concerning.

I don't know any solution to this. You kind of need a mechanic to filter articles on the site, and any voting system is going to hit the same problem. But I think being aware of how this can screw with people's heads is important. There's nothing wrong with wanting upvotes, but we shouldn't encourage people to base their self-worth as writers off of them. It's like basing your self-worth off of your ability to produce a Twitter shitpost with 10k 'Likes'.

I mean, yeah — writing an article on this site requires a lot more effort than writing a Twitter shitpost. But that's the problem — you're much more invested in your article than your Twitter shitpost. And yet… I can pass judgement on your article just as quickly as I can your Twitter shitpost.

Basically, this — combined with the fact that we've got a lot of teenagers in the community (people who are already struggling with identity issues — people who are vulnerable to approval as a commodity) — gives me a lot of concern. It's one of the reasons I rarely downvote.

Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting upvotes (and I don't think there's anything wrong with downvoting!). I just dislike how the commodification of approval/disapproval can play havoc with our sense of self-worth.

Mildly put, I never thought I would see Don Quixote in an SCP article, but you managed just that in SCP-4028: La Historia de Don Quixote de la Mancha. You have mentioned in a couple of different places that Don Quixote is your hero. That might seem like a strange statement to some readers, so please explain what you mean when you say that. Talk a little about how you placed your hero in the SCP format.

Cervantes definitely considered Don Quixote to be a cautionary tale about letting too much romantic (not romance — there's a difference!) fiction into your head, but just about everyone takes the exact opposite read (a fact I still find hilarious). I think all good heroes have a grain of Don Quixote lurking in them; a tendency to launch themselves toward lost causes, struggling against impossible odds.

SCP-4028 happened because I pointed out how CadaverCommander's articles often had a quixotic element to them, which prompted him to respond with how he was surprised there wasn't a Don Quixote article on the site… which led me to immediately correcting this. I decided at once that Don Quixote had to be pataphysical (part of the impossible challenge; making yet another pataphysical article that wasn't a bore to read), and also had to be uplifting. I also wrote it because someone told me they refused to upvote pataphysical articles ever again, which I took as a challenge. I'm happy to say that they upvoted SCP-4028.

During our preliminary interview, you specifically mentioned having a particular fondness for Vincent Price and the style of movies he was in. This fondness appears to have sparked the idea for SCP-4153: Vincent Price presents… IT CAME FROM SITE-9!. Take us through your article and explain what you believe Vincent Price brought to the table in regards to the works he was a part of

As much as I go on and on about verisimilitude, subtly, and never letting the reader know you're trying to scare them… I have a deep fondness for the exact opposite approach. Nothing about Vincent Price's work is subtle; everything is delightfully campy, theatrical, and over the top. I wanted to give that a try, which is what led to… well, this article.

The article contains one of my core recurring themes (or, at least, one of my favorite): Reconciling the old with the new. It's a theme that appears in SCP-3241 - The SS Sommerfeld, too — this idea of an old guard and new guard being in disunity, with the article itself being about reconciliation between those two forces. Vincent Price and friends are feeling left behind by the Foundation with its new, 'sophisticated' approach to spooky ghost stories… so what are they to do? Why, find a way to tell a 'sophisticated' (and yet still ghoulish!) ghost story of their own — within the Foundation's framework.

SCP-3352: Bethlehem Steel is your most recent work and it was quite successful. From your author post, you seemed to not expect it to reach +50, let alone the +223 it is currently at now. You also mentioned there was some truth to the article. What is the backstory of this article and why did you feel like it was something you had to get off your chest?

I mention this in the article, but the steel I-beam is 100% real; the stakes just weren't nearly that high. It was in a spot it had no business being in and managed to catch an elbow when it started dropping — saving a handful of people (rather than a whole city).

I've worked in a litany of industrial environments, refineries included. And I think these are… decisively unsafe places. I'm not some sort of 'primitivist'; I don't want to tear down all the factories. But the more I work in these places, the more I realize just how dangerous they are. Not just to the people working in them, but to the communities surrounding them.

The theme I wanted to hammer with this article — the thing I wanted to get off my chest — is how the people who pay for these places, the people who profit off of them, the people who invest in them — when these places go down, they aren't the ones who pay the cost. The people who work there are. And if they don't pay the cost? The communities surrounding these places will.

So many probably know about this, but your current account is not your first one. In fact, you self-deleted your original account after providing a message informing us that you would be leaving the site. A month or so later, you returned with a new account and have been going strong ever since then. You were very successful here from the very beginning. Many people adored your work. What brought about this action and what would you like to tell people who may be going through similar situations?

I had a personal mental break aggravated by a lot of RL stuff going on at the time. I think my main regret is just that I let that break show in public. I should have just said "I need a bit to myself, see y'all later" and left it at that.

My situation, in this case, was kind of uniquely mine, so there's not too much advice I can give anyone going through similar things here, beyond that… don't be afraid to just take a break. You're allowed to leave, do other stuff — hell, you're allowed to just leave for good if you have to. Not every community fits every person; there's no shame in realizing that this place isn't conducive to your particular mental health.

Looking back at the site, what would you say is the most successful thing about this massive collaborative writing project that we call the SCP Foundation Wiki? Additionally, where do you believe our shortcomings are and the places we need to improve the most?

That a bunch of goofy roleplay chat-logs between some internet refugees had this much-staying power.

Re: the other thing, I think the biggest shortcoming is the community's struggle to fully grasp the power older and more established authors have over newer, less established ones (or readers). At least, that's how I felt when I was more involved in the community — it's admittedly been a while. But I've always sensed a sort of disconnect between these two things.

This is one of the reasons I don't downvote; because — as arrogant as it might sound (I'm hardly one of the 'older' authors!) — I'm always concerned about the impact my downvote might have on a new writer. I don't want a writer to feel terrible about their work just because I didn't happen to like it.

Do you happen to have any projects outside of the wiki going on currently that you would like to share or talk about? Alternatively, do you have any hobbies that you think people would be interested to hear about?

Not really, no. I keep to myself outside of the wiki (but I appreciate the ask nevertheless!).

And at the end of the day, who truly is "The Great Hippo"?

Has spirit-medium powers. Like the immortals. His flesh and bone are atomized. He becomes… a dream…

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”¹

Llenósele la fantasía de todo aquello que leía en los libros, así de encantamentos como de pendencias, batallas, desafíos, heridas, requiebros, amores, tormentas y disparates imposibles; y asentósele de tal modo en la imaginación que era verdad toda aquella máquina de aquellas sonadas soñadas invenciones que leía, que para él no había otra historia más cierta en el mundo.

His fantasy was filled with all he read in books: enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and impossible nonsense; and it possessed his imagination that the whole fabric of fanciful invention he read of was true — for him, there was no other history more certain in the world.

This concludes the interview. I really hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank The Great Hippo for being awesome. I have taken forever to get back to Hippo on this, and he has taken it like a champ. Anyways, thanks to everyone who reads these. I have been amazed by the support I have received for these and I certainly intend to keep them going. I hope this break was nothing more than an outlier. The next one is already on the way as well!

Thank you for reading!

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