SCP Foundation

My idea is for a wooden whale carving that

• Has a compulsory effect making people around it want to bring it into contact with water
• When in contact with water, it begins to fill the space its in with water vapor until storms form and eventually flood the space
• Animates if inside a filled space for long enough (don't know about this part, seems kind of stupid to me, but a good amount of people on-site on my draft posts for this concept and in other places online or in real life said to add it, so I did, but I still don't know about it)

Please give me some good ways to improve this. Please don't just tell me about adding a narrative or something, its happened before when I've made posts here and I feel like that stuff should be for the draft, not the concept. I would like some ideas with which to take the narrative, of course, but I also want to define the base concept as well.

If you think the idea is entirely unworkable, please ask me for the draft link (it will be on the 3rd tab) and help me make a good concept based on the picture (I would just post the picture to this, but I don't know how)

If you don't think there can be a good concept based on the picture, I guess I won't write anything.

So a few things:

1. A narrative angle is important st this stage because this is a story concept, not a concept for an anomaly. Skips are short stories that use anomalies as their catalysts, not the anomalies themselves.

2. Compulsion effects are inherently boring as they take away character agency and force them to act a certain way rather than writing situations that cause interesting decisions to be made naturally. They can work as a smaller plot point in a larger article.

3. Making it animate for no reason just because some randos offsite thought it would be cool isn’t a good idea. The more plot points there are in an article, the harder it is to fully develop all those ideas.

4. The “causes a mini-storm” feature is generic and dissapointing. Whaling has a rich legacy of toil to draw upon for a short story, and reducing that to cliched storm imagery doesn’t capitalize on that ethos.

Overall, you need to refocus the anomaly on a compelling aspect of the tradition you’re alluding to, while also coming up with a narrative that stems from it.

First of all, compulsion effects are very tricky to do well - especially when they pose a risk to the person doing them. Tends to come off as cheap.

You're going to have to give me more than "they just want to because compulsions" - for example, give a plausible reason they might want to do this. Does it float? Is it intended for display in a tank because artists be like that sometimes?

When in contact with water, it begins to fill the space its in with water vapor until storms form and eventually flood the space

What do whales have to do with storms? I get that they live in water but there doesn't seem to be any kind of thematic link beyond the author needing this to be dangerous.

Animates if inside a filled space for long enough (don't know about this part, seems kind of stupid to me, but a good amount of people on-site on my draft posts for this concept and in other places online or in real life said to add it, so I did, but I still don't know about it)

You are right to doubt this. Things that are just statues of the thing they actually are a common enough thing here - but they don't tend to do well. Try to keep your concept thematically coherent. Ask interesting questions about the item or effect you want to portray and explore them in the article.

If you think the idea is entirely unworkable, please ask me for the draft link (it will be on the 3rd tab) and help me make a good concept based on the picture (I would just post the picture to this, but I don't know how)

No. Sometimes people have to come up with their own ideas.

What I WILL do is link you to an essay about making good ideas, written by one of the site's big authors. Here. It's helpful.