SCP Foundation

Edit: Please read my post at the bottom of the thread.

I don't think this has enough impact to succeed on the mainlist. A feeling of paranoia and describing phrases as unsettling or creepy (when some of them are non-anomalously unsettling) is a bit plain - unless your punchline is the idea that an escalating series of creepy statements leads to "I love you" as the creepiest (which is an interesting thought, but still not enough to carry the skip), I don't really see what is meant to draw the reader in or leave them thinking at the end of the skip.

What is the reaction you'd like from this skip? How do you want readers to feel?

As an aside, you can't really say "SCP-XXXX displays no anomalous properties". If it has no anomalous properties, then the box is not the SCP, and the papers are SCP-XXXX, not SCP-XXXX-1.

Updating this thread as I have rewritten most of the article, and it is now very different from what it was originally. I need feedback on the new version.

Once again, my only concern is the wording, particularly in the testing logs, so if you notice any places where the wording needs to be changed, please point them out to me.

Any critique is appreciated!

http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/drfournier

So I'm going to skip the line-by-line because… well because I didn't notice anything wrong on that front.

With regard to concept, right now you have what feels like a fairly basic compulsion effect. While there's some ok body horror in there, the three different logs all felt kind of bland relative to each other. I didn't feel any sense of escalation between them, they just felt like examples for the sake of examples, which felt repetitive. Finally, this suffers heavily from "note at the end" syndrome, since you use the note at the end to explain the entirety of the anomaly.

I'm still curious what exactly you are trying to accomplish with this article? Is it body horror? Are you trying to get the reader to feel bad for the box? Is it supposed to be about the insecurities? No one aspect of the article stood out to me enough for me to make a good suggestion of how to improve, because I'm not sure what you are going for at the moment.

I agree with Captain Kirby. In fact, I'd suggest that this revised draft loses the most effective part of the previous draft (the list of compliments which straddled the uncanny valley of genuine/weird-sounding compliments) and replaces it with fairly standard compulsion-to-self-harm and note-at-the-end tropes that are much less powerful.

There are a few different directions you could go with this - straight body horror, a play on the insidious power of back-handed (or even sincere) compliments, insight into insecurity - but we'll need to understand what you're aiming for before we can give more detailed suggestions.

Thank you both for the feedback.

The intention for this version was to make people feel sympathy for the box, which actually has no control over its effects on people. However, given that this didn't really have the impact I hoped it would, and I can't really think of a way to fix it, I'm going to cut the note entirely and go for straight body horror, since I have far more ideas for that than any sane person should.

Also, there actually isn't a compulsion effect. There is no outside force making people read the compliments. If there was, the containment procedures would be a lot more detailed then "stick it in a locker and keep it there."