SCP Foundation

I thought of this during a soccer game a bit ago. I wrote up a draft, and, well…

It's under the tab 'Soccer Mom'.

Any feedback would be delightful.

Well that's adequately horrifying. It's thin, but you probably know that.

Does the inability of the object to be observed assist in telling this story or hurt? I think the latter. It serves no narrative purpose and makes little sense from a "how the hell was this contained in the first place" perspective. I'd suggest removing that.

Of course if you do that, then this is just a ghost mom that beats up on kids, so there needs to be a stronger motivation lurking behind it all. I suggest you ask yourself what the soccer mom actually wants. Is it accomplishing anything? Where did it come from? Why is it doing this?

Once you develop the story a bit more it'll be easier to figure out if this has legs. In the mean time good luck on your draft.

I don't know that the interview log adds anything. I'd like to go further and say you need to make the trigger more subtle. A straight up numerical comparison of scores feels wrong for your narrative.

Think about other reasons why the Soccer mom might get violent. Maybe not even against the whole team, or maybe even not against a team member at all. Parents could be viable targets as well. Right now this just doesn't grab my attention, but it has some potential.

Full disclosure: I have an strong distaste for censorship in an SCP document. I know it's pretty common, but I don't like it myself.

The expungements at the end sorta work? I'm not sure I like them though. It feels like you're hiding a good story behind censorship for me.

Right now the format on this is a little weird. You've got a list of information, but if you don't wanna condense it to a paragraph or two (which honestly you shouldn't), you might wanna use "* " to create a bulleted list, or organize the information in some way other than isolated sentences.

It's a fairly standard "thing that kills people" SCP with the horror coming from the fact that it's apparently uncontainable without being like, world-threateningly dangerous or anything. I don't think the Expunged stuff for the worst outcome of her kid's team losing really adds anything, since straight after that you just state that the outcome is horrifying child mutilation and death. Just stick a scary statistic on the end about how many people usually die when it happens, it'd give the same result without making the SCP needlessly more complex by giving it a mystery power other than child injury.

I can't really think of any changes other than that, but it seems like fairly standard SCP fare. The idea feels very complete as-is, but it needs more of a hook at the same time.

Wow, the violence has become a bit more graphic than when I first read this! It doesn't make or break the article for me, but it does have the downside of requiring compulsion, which seems anathema to the site at present. Could you find another way to inflict the violence without that effect?

I was trying to think of hooks to suggest, or at least lines of thought to pursue. You say that all parents must be present - how do the parents of SCP-XXXX-A react to someone else cheering for their child? Could the Foundation attempt to change the requirements of under-age soccer to stop the SCP appearing?

What if the SCP showed the potential to switch to other competitions? What if that included the race to discover its origins (eg between the Foundation and the GOC)?

Not sure whether any are worth pursuing, but it might be worth pushing on the boundaries of what you have already, and seeing if something that interests you opens up.

Procrastination complete. New changes applied!

EDIT: Hey, remember this draft? Me neither.

But I recently changed, removed, and added an awful lot of stuff, and I'd like some advice before I change anything else.

All feedback is appreciated!

Kudos for re-working this with an eye towards character and motivation, rather than violence. There is still something worth pursuing here, I think.

Some thoughts:

• Monitoring every single game of underage soccer might be a stretch, even for the Foundation. Could this be localised to a city?
• The first footnote, identifying the SCP as a particular person, is probably out of place where it is. Why not have the identification after the interview, and do it by way of a charge sheet or news article describing the murder?
• Instead of saying "attire commonly associated", I suggest actually describing what the SCP wears - that will allow the readers to draw a better (more immersive) mental image.
• I'm not sure why the woman's age varies - I would get rid of this.
• I suggest deleting the second and third footnotes entirely. That said, it's odd that no-one reacts to this new person cheering (who they can presumably see) - worth considering changing that, I think.
• I would change the paragraph after the bullet points to say that the SCP selects a white 7-year-old male player to cheer for (it's not random) and get rid of the strikethroughs.
• If the payoff here is that the SCP is trapped in a cycle of guilt, why is it injuring the other team? Surely the pattern is better kept by injuring -A.
• In the interview, I would allude to why the SCP killed her son - that original moment of fury or madness that is causing all the guilt. Ideally this should be relatable for the reader - if they can imagine reacting the same way, and that the SCP just went one step too far, that is a troubling thought. While I like the analogy, you can probably drop some of the stuff about the onions to make room.

I'm still not a fan of footnotes 5 and 6 (as numbered on the sandbox). Now that -A is receiving fatal injuries (what type? elucidating this would allow you to hint as to what happened to Blake, before it becomes too expository in the interview) I think footnote 7 should come at the end of the paragraph it's in.

I also think that referring to the SCP as a murderess before you explain its effects makes everything too obvious. I would make the identification an addendum, probably before the interview (if the interview makes it obvious that she killed her son) or afterwards (if the interview is ambiguous). It can be a simple statement of the type you have there, but I'd encourage creativity in choosing a different medium to deliver that information.

The interview is still very perfunctory in explaining the critical moment (Blake's death). This is the hardest part of the draft, and the most important, but at the moment it sounds quite cliched. I would try to think about how you would explain your personal greatest regret to a total stranger, and work from that emotion. Also, I think it may tie everything in tighter if Blake's death was somehow connected to the soccer match (even just by association) to explain why Jacquelin manifests at soccer matches, instead of at Blake's school, home etc.

We're getting close to the stage at which my feedback gives diminishing returns, so I'm pleased that ahbonjour has also provided some comments. That said, I have a few more questions for you to consider to help tighten up the draft:

• Why do all of the children get injured? Why not just -A?
• What are -A's fatal injuries? Are they the same every time? Are they the same as Blake's fatal injury?
• How did Jacquelin die?