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SCP Foundation
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  • Accidental Aesop: Most victims of SCP-1715 received their fate because they gave personal information to the titular anomaly online. Even in Real Life, the danger of internet users soliciting personal information from others is very much real, and you should not be dumb enough to do that.
  • Accidental Innuendo: Betobeto telling Reimu that she’ll be unable to move a muscle “once you’re tuckered out” in SCP-9951 comes across to same as a description of them doing something explicit for long enough, as opposed to them fighting.
  • Adorkable:
    • SCP-1171-1, as much as a casually racist Starfish Alien can be. Especially notable when he tries to talk to a human.
      "HOW ARE YOU? IS YOUR SKIN NICE AND FLEXIBLE? INSIDES FULL OF FLUIDS?"
    • While not normally a term one associates with mosquitoes, SCP-3774-2432 tripping over her own words is nothing short of adorable.
  • Aluminium Christmas Trees:
    • The concept of creating weapons that are so horrifying that they make the idea of war itself too terrible to consider, in addition to being the premise of SCP-186, is, surprisingly, a rather old concept. Richard Gatling, the inventor of the Gatling gun, is said to have created his namesake invention with this partially in mind, as he believed that one soldier being able to kill entire squads at a time with a gatling gun could, at the very best, make armies averse to fielding large amounts of soldiers (thus reducing the size of armies in general and by extension the amount of casualties from war), and at worst, make entire nations averse to warfare in order to avoid such an inevitable slaughter.
    • The highest possible Clearance Level, "Cosmic Top Secret" sounds ridiculous and over-the-top, but this is actually the real classification used by NATO for their most sensitive information.
    • Two of the items dispensed by SCP-261 are "Pepsi: Dragon Twist" and Mountain Dew: Doritos Blaze". In real life, Pepsi produced a limited dragonfruit flavor called Pepsi X to sponsor The X Factor in 2012, while Mountain Dew experimented with a "Dewitos" flavor in 2014, but it never went into production. Chocolate penises filled with white chocolate or fondant are options, though.
  • Americans Hate Tingle:
    • Gamers Against Weed is heavily disliked on the Russian branch of the website, more so than their usual status as a Base-Breaking Character. There isn't any specific singular reason, but it does definitely include the fact that Russian SCP fans consider "an anomalous version of 4chan" to be too ridiculous even by the standards of the website. As a result, any SCP object featuring GAW is going to get downvoted the moment the readers notice its mention, regardless of the execution. It has gotten so bad that the translators outright refuse to translate the GAW-related objects, as they don't want to work on something that would instantly drown in downvotes anyway.
    • SCP-4680 is also heavily disliked by the Russian branch as it is viewed as a shallow caricature and collection of Western pop culture clichés regarding the real Grigori Rasputin, who is much better respected in Russian culture.
    • Certain characters from the Chinese branch have a reputation for being superficially overpowered and thus are hated for "ruining" powerscaling discussions. Though this opinion is mostly contained to powerscaling communities due to the main wiki's distaste of the subject and what they consider to be the flawed lens through which it views media, there are still some who believe the power levels of these characters (often based on the Spirit Cultivation Genre and its inspirations) are wholly unnecessary to the stories they are trying to tell and conducive to several genres of power fantasy that are more polarizing in Western regions.
    • Similar to SCP-4680 above, SCP-5254 is heavily disliked by the Japanese branch due to its unflattering depiction of the Pokémon franchise as being deliberately exploitative and enshittified (even going so far as to reference Dexit as part of this) for the purpose of several conflicting corporate and government conspiracies.
  • Angst Aversion: While works in the Site-17 Deepwell canon are usually highly-rated (especially the Admonition sub-canon) detractors find the Foundation's portrayal in these works an unpleasant combination of evil and inept to the point where it feels like Grimdark for grimdark's sake rather than decent storytelling.
  • Anvilicious:
    • SCP-1004 reads as very anti-pornography, with the fact that users will inevitably seek more illicit material, followed by performing said actions in real life. Alternatively, the site moderation's official stance is that it is an unsubtle justification of abuse using the common deflection of blaming such actions on said consumption.
    • SCP-2112 has its safety classification listed as Keter, one of the highest possible, because it makes those who hear it love covers over all other creative pursuits. This is an obvious enough Take That! at cover bands and unoriginal artists, but then Project Research Manager Edvalds' statement on the matter spells the message out giant, that valuing nostalgia over innovation, taken too far, could lead to the stagnation and decay of the human culture, become a planet of people who follow the "Anyway, here's Wonderwall" meme.
      Edvalds: "Some have questioned why SCP-2112 warrants classification as Keter. It is true that SCP-2112 poses no direct threat to human life or the continued existence of the human race; were every person susceptible to SCP-2112 infection to be infected, it would likely not result in a single fatality. What it does present, however, is a severe existential threat to the entirety of human culture, the arts, and all forms of creative work whatsoever. Man is a wonderfully creative animal and has developed a myriad of ways of expressing his thoughts and emotions — through poetry, dance, film, the written word, theatre, painting, sculpture, video games, even internet memes. We run the risk of every one of these mediums — every single last one of them — disappearing from our common experience, forever, in favor of thousands and millions of mediocre everymen performing the exact same songs over and over again."
    • SCP-4831 is interesting in that it's the title that makes it anvilicious. By itself, it's a rather tragic story about a young man trapped in his bathroom, and the mental and physical toll it takes on him and his family. The title, however, is "There Are Innocent People on Death Row", which turns the entire story into a thuddingly obvious attack on the prison system.
    • SCP-5403, which is about an anomalous site that keeps constant surveillance on the Foundation so that it can spew tasteless shipping art, contains an extended diatribe on why using topics like relationship drama, abuse, and other forms of trauma as something that is cute, funny, or titillating is wrong and insulting to people who have lived through those issues for real. Dr. Laraske eventually explains in detail just how nerve-wracking a seemingly-harmless operation is to her subordinates, citing a researcher who experienced the former SCP-2678 (the Vorehole) and learned 5403 recorded the whole thing, and when the anomaly is seemingly neutralized, it reactivates one last time to write a 4.2K-word fanfic where Laraske is extensively brutalized for 5403's pleasure as a final display of how utterly callous and wretched its obsessions really are despite having the mind of a dumb teenager. Which also ties into the overall message - just because Hanlon's Razor easily applies to modern insensitive depictions of serious topics doesn't mean they're any less tasteless and hurtful.
    • Olliefox, a rogue memeticist and parapharmacist from the group of interest Accelerate the Future, is responsible for several SCPs (currently SCP-3312 and SCP-7146) that together form a very transparent message of how more esoteric sexual fetishes can mentally and physically destroy those involved in them as well as the people close to them, especially if an abuse of power is involved. Curiously, while graphic descriptions of Fetish Retardant (wherein each person indulging succumbs to a variety of physical/psychological/sociological limitations Ollie intentionally refused to circumvent) are present to help drive the point, there is much more focus on the panic, dread, fear, and grief of Ollie's victims, either those directly taken by his creations or those that have to respond to the former. This ends up making it clear that it's not about what you get off to, but rather the considerations for yourself and others that must be taken in order to minimize the harm in doing so, and also that using and discarding others for any purpose is morally wrong regardless of context.
    • SCP-9000 is transparently an overt attack on the American private prison system that accomplishes this by mixing the latter with the Foundation's bureaucracy, the D-Class program, and their reserve of Thaumiel-class anomalies. It also serves as an evisceration of the idea that the Foundation can ever be a net positive to societynote  through the same parts of its storytelling.
  • Archive Panic: It will be relieving for folks to know they don't have to "Read every SCP" to understand the setting given the massive volume of works. As of September 2025, there are over nine thousand SCP articles, not to mention Tales, artworks, -J SCPs, Explained SCPs, SCP-001 proposals, GoI hubs, and works written by other language branches as well. It would likely take literal years of reading in order to see it all... and then catch up on everything new, given how the wiki's still highly active. Those who seek to Archive Binge are wished the best of luck.
  • Audience-Coloring Adaptation: The Song was a deleted Chinese tale that invented the nickname of "Supreme Author" for Metanormalcy/SCP-CN-2510. Despite this name never being used anywhere else, English readers (particularly powerscalers) accessing the Chinese branch through machine translation took it and ran, with Metanormalcy then being commonly referred to as the Supreme Author in English before several of its associated articles received proper localizations. This also seems to have contributed to the contentious overseas reception of the branch's pantheon, as the name alone wears Metanormalcy's pataphysical implications on its sleeve much more than its focus article, which spends more time waxing poetic about the balance between normalcy and the anomalous to weave a Taoist-inspired creation myth of it governing The Multiverse.
  • Awesome Art: The main point of praise for SCP-3007 in the discussion is the absolutely gorgeous art done by author Zhange for the article, which both looks amazing and works great in explaining the anomaly without any words, with the final piece at the end of the article depicting the red entity reaching Earth being particularly well-regarded.
  • Broken Aesop:
    • SCP-6140 warns against Orientalism by depicting the Daevites has having actually been good and peaceful the whole time, and the reason why they were seen as evil was because an bigoted Westerner retroactively made them that way. However, it still falls into the realm of Orientalism, albeit in a completely different manner by depicting the Daevites as Noble Savages who adopted a concept of human rights that was radical for ancient times, and they remained morally and socially pure until they became passive victims at the hands of Thomas Bruce, and the concept of the SCP is still centered on a Western perspective.
    • SCP-9009's core message is that world politics, as insane and abhorrent as they may get to some, are the convergence of a simplistic chaos rather than deliberate conspiracy, shown by its plot of many right-wing politicians actually being a race of mindless insectoid beings that inadvertently fail upwards into their current positions before reproducing. However, as noted by author radian628, most of the article's plot is the Foundation trying to exploit the 9009 instances to their advantage by manipulating their affinity to politics, meaning that even if SCP-9009 doesn't have the mental capacity to prop up a conspiracy, they're puppets to an organization that does. Radian also points out that the article's Signature Scene is The Reveal that Peter Thiel is not an instance of SCP-9009, which undermines the whole spiel about chaos creating the illusion of order when the biggest shocker of the story is that there is an element of true order willingly maintained by someone, no matter how infinitesimally small.
  • Captain Obvious Reveal: SCP-6820 is not especially subtle about its big reveal. The twist at the end revolves around the identity of SCP-6820-A, an entity which the Foundation dedicated an inordinate amount of time and resources figuring out how to kill despite it not seeming to pose an imminent threat; over the course of the article it's described as "digusting", has the word "hate" (and variants thereof) thrown around numerous times, and has an ideatic core composed partly of the molecular formula of hydrochloric acid, the concept of adaptiveness, and the state of being "vaguely reptilian". And yet the article still treats it as a huge reveal when the entity in question turns out to be 682, despite the article's very number being extremely obvious foreshadowing for it. However, this arguably works in the article's favor, as it creates a sense of Dramatic Irony as the reader catches on to the horrible realization that the Foundation are no longer capable of understanding.
  • Cargo Ship: SCP-914, a clockwork machine, has feelings for Maintenance Technician Johnson, a human.
  • Catharsis Factor:
  • Character Perception Evolution: Dr. Jack Bright, an immortal scientist who frequently engaged in absurd hijinks, was one of the most well-known non-SCP character. However, their popularity dwindled for two big reasons. Firstly, while the site is not averse to comedic and lighthearted content, his antics heavily clashed with the horror-centric nature of the site. And most importantly, the character's creator (and namesake) was found to have used their position as one of the site's well-known authors and staff to sexually harass people, including minors. Their certain sexual behavior has since came under heavy scrutiny, and Bright themselves are all but dropped by on-site readers. Fans who wanted to keep the original character had him Renamed to Avoid Association as Elias Shaw and there was also a Retool of the original character, SCP-8586/Dr. Lachlan "Lach" Cairns.
  • Common Knowledge:
    • "SCP" stands for "Special Containment Procedures", not "Secure, Contain, Protect". As the website points out in the glossary, the latter is a Faction Motto that was invented with the Fun with Acronyms appeal later.
    • The general term for the entities is "SCP entities" or "SCP objects", not "SCPs". While the entities are individually addressed as "SCP-number", according to the website, "SCP" without a number refers to the files about them and not to the entities.
    • The Foundation has three main object classes: "Safe", "Euclid", and "Keter". They classify SCPs by how difficult it is to contain them, but many people mistake them as how dangerous they are. "Safe" is reserved for non-sentient SCPs that could be locked in a box and left alone without issue, even if they have the potential to be incredibly dangerous or destructive in the wrong hands. Meanwhile, any living or sentient anomaly, even if mostly harmless, will almost always be at least Euclid, as they require consistent attention to contain. To paraphrase the "Object Classes" page, a button that can destroy the universe when pressed would be Safe because it could easily be locked away, while a cat that can switch places with any other cat on the planet would be Keter due to being almost impossible to contain. The misconception might've been born from the site's early days, when containment class weren't well defined; many peaceful but sapient SCPs are listed as Safe, while many "murder monster" SCPs that are dangerous but containable are classified as Keter. In 2019, some members of the wiki introduced an extended optional classification system of "Risk" to remedy this, which signifies how dangerous a specific SCP is ("notice", "caution", "warning", "danger", and "critical"). That said, wiki members generally aren't very particular about enforcing the strict definitions of the object classes, and the extended system isn't widely used.
    • The non-wiki fandom often views the SCP Wiki as a universe solely focused on creepypasta or horror, largely based off well-known monster SCPs such as SCP-173 or SCP-682, as opposed to a general creative writing site. While horror entries are still frequently made (SCP-8980 and SCP-7179 both being horror pieces that drawn renown, towering at over a thousand upvotes both), the site had been making non-horror or creepypasta pieces for long, with many well known older SCP already reflecting this trend like the half cat SCP-529, the friendly blob SCP-999 and the wizard child known as SCP-239, not to mention the genre branching from the more comedic ones like Ship In A Bottle canon, tragedies like SCP-5732 or SCP-1762, or action focused pieces like Red Queen's Race series or Multi-Goddess Drifting.
    • Similarly, the common complaint from the off-site fans is "SCP was ruined by turning to quirky comedy instead of being cold and serious like how it was in the early days". Not only were the light comedic SCPs always there, as seen above, but also Series I was the heyday of lolFoundation era which embodies the exact tonal issues these people attribute to the modern Foundation. The overall tone was more like a goofy Work Com, there was a heavy focus on self-insert OCs that often get into wacky hijinks, the articles frequently mentioned staff using anomalies to prank their coworkers and being sent on Keter Duty as punishment and decommissioning was a common practice in which especially bad articles would get a tale in which self-inserts would destroy the object in an elaborate way. This writing style eventually became loathed for making the Foundation come of not as cold and ruthless shadow organization but as a bunch of immature morons willing to risk end of the world for a cheap laugh. And as a result of backlash, the writing style became more serious later on and the average modern SCP is more likely to be serious than the average Series I era SCP.
    • SCP-999 is typically assumed to have eyes, arms and a mouth due to fan art, but it actually lacks organs and appendages altogether.
    • Offsite portrayals of SCP-3812 tend to portray Sam as sound of mind and actively attempting to use his narrative powers to fight. The actual article states the human mind cannot handle Sam's abilities, driving him insane and unable to comprehend the true scale of his actions. He only tries destroying the world out of psychosis, and in the end, he stops interacting with the outside world once he is talked down by his own conscience manifesting physically.
    • SCP-4335 is often depicted with yellow eyes and a toothy mouth locked into a shit-eating grin. However, the article's actual portrayal of it is completely featureless, considering it's basically a sentient void. Some fan videos of the creature also show it being able to hold Minecraft weapons, even though 4335 is never demonstrated doing so (and would have no reason to, since it has the Endermen and its tentacles at its disposal for combat.)
    • Kain Pathos Crow is sometimes depicted with anthropomorphism, even though he really is just a talking dog to the point that a Mini-Mecha is required for him to do certain human things like having opposible fingers. His mugshot on his personal file might be a source of this confusion, as the dog used for the photo is standing upright and wearing a human-looking suit.
    • Due to a lack of official translations and hyperbolic statements by powerscalers, the Chinese branch suffers from quite a few misconceptions about its cosmology:
      • The acronym "ABSS" ("Absolute Boundless Supernormal State") is often used to refer to the Koitern's latent power and its pataphysical Gate of Truth stored within SCP-173 from the events of SCP-CN-2510. This has never been an official name for it; it simply goes by the Chinese characters for "supernormal" ("超常态") and is localized in English as "Metanormalcy." The phrase itself appears to be a contextual mistranslation of a passage in the article that describes Metanormalcy as "infinite [and] omnipotent."
      • Metanormalcy itself is never indicated to be sapient, meaning it's inaccurate to scale it as an independent fighter. It is sentient, as it responds to stimuli and can beckon lifeforms to its core within SCP-173, but there's no indication it's any smarter than an animal.
      • The Chinese branch does not actually believe you can kill an author, unlike some EN articles, despite powerscaling having a tendency to hawk their supposed transcendence beyond the Database. While they do believe SCP-001-SWN and their world is one layer below infinitely many that can be harmed (hence the Gods Beyond Absolute Infinity dossier being called that), that specific narrative layer is reframed as a fictional existence in and of itself (a reconciliation other branches have adapted as well due to Fridge Logic), and everything above that, while obviously absurdly overpowered, is still contained fiction as well; this is the Central Theme of SCP-CN-2758, rendering its plot a "Shaggy Dog" Story. Traveling up only leads to a metaphysical invocation of Zeno's paradoxes, closing in on the real world infinitesimally but never actually reaching it. If there is a top, it's the branch's actual creator deity, Metanormalcy.
    • Newer SCP works had earned a reputation of being lengthy Doorstopper novel-length works, but calculations done by this reddit post shows that out of the 1,000 articles of SCP 8000-8999, at least 175 of them, nearly one fifth of the total articles, are shorter than 1,500 wordsnote , and this discount works that are otherwise short but fall out of such range. There's also a widget in the site's search functions that searches for short and recent pages.
    • Despite this being the motivation for powerscalers to eventually try and remove the SCP Foundation from community discussions (which the site considers Right for the Wrong Reasons), the site does not intentionally try to create the most powerful SCP, and never has attempted to. The various rationales for this assessment were used by highlighting articles pruned by quality control and a rather blatant misreading of entries featuring Unreality Department, whose content by definition is not meant to be taken at face value.
    • The anafabula responsible for SCP-2747 does not have a preferred avatar, and has in fact manifested as many different types of entities when it physically intervenes in a narrative. The most common fanon portrayal of it as a black-haired woman is in fact derived from an illustration of one of its victims, the non-existent work Taitoru and its protagonist, and the anafabula otherwise being coded as female comes from it appearing as such to Murphy Law and the ADMONITION Foundation.
    • Some had claimed SCP-166's rewrite (From a teenager with unwitting succubus power who has to eat semen to survive and has to contend with her arousal effect on others, to a teenager with unwitting destructive power whom cause every artificial item around her to break and suffers whenever she comes into contact something non-organic) was done by oppressing the original author. However, DrClef, author of SCP-166 (Among other famous SCPs such as SCP-231) explicitly gave permission for the rewrite, and according to the discussion page gave said permission twice: First informally calling for a rewrite of the SCP, and then certifying their approval to the new version as linked above.
    • SCP-1025's article makes it seem like it's a book about different diseases that will infect the reader with whatever disease they read about only for the the end of the article to reveal that reading it does nothing to the reader but instead causes those around the reader to become extremely paranoid and think the reader has become infected, despite this many fans and fanworks miss this detail and treat 1025 as though it actually does infects you. Notably in SCP – Containment Breach you can read 1025 which will infect and kill the player even though it should actually do nothing. This misunderstanding can be seen as ironic considering it fits the actual effect of the SCP.
    • It's commonly believed by readers that the Daevites were utterly destroyed by the first Sarkics during their slave rebellion in the Bronze Age. However, this is contradicted by both the Sarkic and Daevite hubs, both stating that the Daevites did lose significant territory and resources and sought anomalous means to sustain themselves, but they survived, and SCP-140 (the debut for the Daevites) states that they existed until as late as Genghis Khan by Retconjuration.
    • It's often stated (even on the SCP wiki itself at one point) that SCP-173 predates The Weeping Angels, often when the former is accused of ripping off the later. However, this is untrue for two reasons:
  • Continuity Lock-Out: Newer articles, especially the more highly rated ones, have a tendency to become very self-referential, with the reader being expected to read many other articles and tales to properly understand things. This occasionally leads to people complaining about the fact that it became very difficult for new readers to get into SCP, as they can't really understand newer articles and it's hard for them to know where to start first.
  • Crack Pairing:
    • There's fan art of Able and Iris. Keep in mind that Able's a killer who's incapable of feeling love.
      • Slightly justified in that both were involved in projects to weaponize SCPs (Project Able and Project Iris, respectively). They are even commonly thought to have been on the same mobile task force (Pandora's Box).
      • It's worth noting that in the canons where Pandora's Box existed, the reason the force was shut down is usually stated to be Able murdering every other team member except for Iris, something that, in the Resurrection canon, at least, Iris is still traumatized by, and actually has a better relationship with Cain as a consequence. The reason Iris survived varies, but if you're a shipper, you can probably guess what it was. If not, the most likely explanation is that she simply wasn't present.
    • Some people like to ship 682 with 999. This one could work in theory, considering the way they interacted, but it also caused 682 to unleash a wave of liquid happiness that killed a huge amount of people, and while 999 wants to see 682 again, 682 responded to the idea of them meeting again with:
    “That feculent little snot wad can [DATA EXPUNGED] and die."
    Gears: Just had the worst idea ever… this and 106 out loose in the same area… lordy… Also… I forgot about the story for her, but I remember now, and will hopefully get a good idea for it soon.
    Tom Serveaux: They catch each other's eyes from across the hall and fall in love. Then 106 invites 352 out on a romantic, candle-lit, infanticide spree. Then they get married and have lots and lots of decrepit, predatory babies. A heart-warming romance, indeed.
    • There's also a little bit of fan art for Pangloss/Saturn Deer.
    • There exist at least two tales pairing SCP-049 and Leslie (the named SCP-3774 specimen). Yes, they paired the Plague Doctor with a cyborg mosquito.
    • Iris and Meri/SCP-166 has some following on Tumblr. Since 166 is Clef's kid, there's also the potential Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?-comedy. There's also the tale "Hawaiian Shirt" from the Resurrection canon, and in addition more works like "Secondhand Smoke" and "Cave Canem" features the couple, if only in passing.
    • In the recent Resurrection: Old Foes mini-canon, there's SCP-179; the benevolent Thaumiel-class entity named Sauelsuesor, paired with the equally benevolent- if slightly unfocused, SCP-1233; AKA, Moon Champion. You know what they say about opposites...
      Moon Champion: If this is one of your human courtship rituals, I'm sorry, but my heart belongs to a lass with far-away eyes, a stellar pedigree, a steady job, a stable orbit, and several trillion tons of something which just might be hair.
    • Another ship getting popular is SCP-811 and SCP-054. This may be due to them both being water-oriented female entities.
  • Crazy Is Cool: Many of the better-known researchers swing back and forth between this and just plain crazy. Some of the more notable moments:
    • Agent Strelkinov, as proven by his guide on joining MTF-E5.
    • Dr. Kondraki. Pretty much everyone around him is wary of him due to his disorderly and dangerous behavior, and he is suspected of psychosis. However, his mastery of the Indy Ploy has made him one of the most valuable assets of the Foundation. At one point, he tried to kill SCP-083-D by breaching SCP-682's containment and riding on its back. It didn't work, but the fact that he survived this and later on he managed to kill 083 with a different SCP item (namely, a chamber organ that crystallizes your blood if you hear its music) is really telling of both his craziness and his badassery.
    • Agent Adams from Resurrection was pretty badass already, and then the Foundation decides that she could have an experimental GOC battle suit. Her new levels of badass were proven in her and Iris' shared crowning moment of awesome, when they took down a swarm of replicating zombies pretty much by themselves.
    • For one of the SCPs themselves, it's hard to top 999, a cute, friendly gelatin cube that loves tickle fights with 682.
  • Creepy Cute:
    • 239. She even gets a little witch's hat and cape at one point.
    • 040, whose description makes her sound like an anime girl.
    • 134, despite her creepy black eyes, is quite a cute little girl.
    • To some, 1471-A is weirdly adorable for the vaguely-humanoid skull-faced monster it is, given that by all accounts it just wants to be your friend.
    • 2521, especially in the Chinese fanbase, due to how happy it apparently gets when people talk about it.
  • Critical Dissonance:
    • The general Author Avatar decommission-era over-the-top styled writing is very popular and well-liked by the off-site fandom, but the main site itself treats them as some sort of Old Shame.
    • The works of wiki user djkaktus encounter this frequently on Tumblr; while they are inarguably the highest-rated author on the site (surpassing even the likes of Clef and Gears in terms of vote count) several Tumblr blogs who have SCP as part of their fandom have at least one post dedicated to how much they dislike either the works of djkaktus, or the man himself. His efforts to replace Dr. Bright in the canon only contribute to the negative sentiment around him, whether due to the faction that believes Bright should be removed from the site entirely and an attempt to make a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the character is disrespectful, or the other side of the coin, which doesn't want Bright removed.
    • SCP-3922 gets a lot of praise from off-site readers as an SCP that creates a Fix Fic for any work of choice, within reason. On-site readers and authors believe this is missing the point and is the reason for the extended logs' Seasonal Rot, putting the cart before the horse by ignoring daveyoufool's intended Denser and Wackier narrative spoofing the concept that these readers are taking at face value.
    • The Chinese branch's gods are either derided or praised in absolute terms offsite in English-speaking spaces for their overwhelming power. Onsite readers, particularly authors, are more indifferent and/or nuanced in their views, mainly due to understanding the Values Dissonance responsible for their existence.
  • Cry for the Devil: SCP-7898 is a bunch of man-eating Giant Spiders. Yet the implied mentions of the absolute hellscape they endure with their prey every single day coupled with them facing extinction due to captivity has gotten sympathetic reactions from some readers, who see them as fellow survivors of an apocalypse desperately trying all they can to get by. It's even stated in-universe that caring for them is a luxury in the Foundation.
  • Death of the Author: The author of SCP-3003 claims that it is intended to be an allegory for capitalism. However, some readers have pointed out that it can also work as a metaphor for communism. Or maybe what happens when people get too obsessed with beetles.
  • Diagnosed by the Audience: The fact that SCP-321 has poor learning skills (taking months or even years to learn how to use eating utensils) and that she finds it difficult to perform the most basic tasks imply that she's essentially mentally ill.
  • Don't Shoot the Message: Some readers dislike SCP-6140 for awkwardly Retconning the Daevites into Good All Along peaceful humans who were helpless victims of their circumstance, when previous SCPs and tales made their behavior clear and the fact that they are a Greater-Scope Villain in much of the site's lore, so it creates many paradoxes that are unaccounted for. Regardless, critics of the SCP do agree that it had a good Aesop in warning about dangers of demonizing foreign cultures and judging a modern country for its past, but consider using the Daevites for it as questionable at best.
  • Draco in Leather Pants:
    • SCP-682, of all things, gets this frequently, from those who believe that it only wants to kill everything because everything wants to kill it. Those who believe this rarely mention two incidents in which 682 killed completely innocent children who had been left in its cell. They also rarely consider that the Foundation must have a reason for wanting to kill it, as they don't terminate SCPs very often. Word of God implies that 682 might not be naturally violent or malevolent, which might make the leather pantsing a little more justified.
      Dr. Gears: Whatever Clef had done that causes his head to be unrecordable seems to bugger up more than just cameras. 682 was unsure as to what in the fuck was going on. 682 isn't inherently a violent organism, as we understand the term. When not faced with unreal terror, 682 is actually somewhat cautious and shy, like many big predators. If Clef had stayed inside, 682 would have probably adapted past the “face cycling” thing, and butchered him. As it was, the big gecko was waiting to see what would happen.
    • On another note, there's Able, despite him being a clear Omnicidal Maniac whose brief attempt to work with the Foundation ended due to him slaughtering his coworkers more out of boredom than anything else. The sheer amount of nice fan-art for him probably helps explain why he's so liked. Though there are other reasons others like him, of course, with some admiring his in-universe mythical status as a Gilgamesh-esque demigod.
    • Out of all the SCPs, SCP-049 might get it the most. While his article has gotten a rewrite in May 2018 that makes him more sympathetic, it doesn't change the fact that he still actively kills people and turns them into mindless zombies that attack other living beings, just to cure them of a pestilence that he can't properly explain.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Despite not being as famous as Able, Iris, or the Old Man, SCP-811 ("Swamp Woman") is one of the highest-rated humanoid SCPs on the site. She's also quite popular in fan art. Her popularity is likely because of her creepy abilities, an oddly endearing and unique personality and a backstory that makes her genuinely sympathetic.
    • SCP-134 is quite popular, likely due to being Creepy Cute.
    • SCP-524 is fairly iconic due to being only one of two creatures 682 is afraid of.
    • Out of all of the French series, SCP-006-FR tends to be the most popular.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • Able (SCP-076) is a video game character, as he's constantly bored unless killing something, can produce an infinite quantity of weapons, and respawns on death.
    • In the very first sentence of the description, SCP-231-7 is described as a █████ female. Some authors are of the belief that those censor boxes aren't hiding her race, but her species. Specifically, those authors think that 231-7 is a whale.
    • The appearance of SCP-1128 is unknown, since knowing what it looks like (be it from a description, a graphic depiction or a direct encounter with it) will allow it to attack you from any body of water. The only thing known from an experiment file is that it has teeth. Due to this, different fans have come up with their own designs for it, inspired by anything from extant marine species to prehistoric animals to Eldritch Abominations, and some even give it humanoid features.
  • Ethnic Scrappy: While dado's exact ethnic (and biological) origin is unclear, his broken English and constant cultural misunderstandings make him clearly come across as somehow foreign. As such, a good part of his status as a Base-Breaking Character comes from people who consider him to be an offensive caricature of a second-langauge English speaker, in particular claiming his speech patterns often get uncomfortably close to stereotypical depictions of Eastern Europeans.

    F-L 
  • Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
    • Most who read the SCP wiki in-depth are forgiving if someone assumes the SCP Foundation is primarily horror, given how many iconic SCPs are horror based note , and will offer a simple correction. However, claiming that the site was always meant to be horror and complaining about certain SCPs not being scary will get one a much more negative response.
    • Both the SCP community and Creepypasta/online horror community are generally tired of the latter being labelled "SCP" when they have no relation to the former's universe whatsover. Perhaps the most notable case is Siren Head, where its creator (Trevor Henderson) even goes out of his way to firmly establish that his art is not an SCP.
    • Any attempt to take certain particularly text-and-reference-heavy articles like Project PARAGON, ADMONITION, the X000 SCPs, or SCP-6500 as representative of all newer articles' length will be met with a swift referral to the "Shortest Pages in the Last 30 Days" widget, a section almost always occupied with much shorter recent works.
    • Likewise, while pop culture references are increasingly present throughout the site's chronology, claiming that they are in any way arbitrary or pointless is an easy way to get an earful, considering most articles that make use of such references either have diegetic explanations for them or were motivated by the restrictions of a contest like MEMECON.
    • The wiki is not a roleplay website, same principle applies to the official social media accounts. While having an author page that describes one like a Foundation member is fine, staff and other users will quickly notify newcomers they can't use the website and associated spaces as places to roleplay.
    • Do not use an SCP's power level as its main selling or detracting point while discussing it. Given that SCP is a writing website, the SCPs are meant to be read and understood more as how one may enjoy a story (Be it horror or comedy or mystery), rather than being used as a toy figure to fight against another thing. It doesn't help the latter approach often result in oversimplifying the stories, such as framing SCP-3812 in their overpowering abilities rather than focus on his struggle of experiencing everything at once and against destructive nihilism.
    • Criticize an SCP by saying it should've taken another format is seen as fairly restrictive and subjective. To it's detractors, these comments doesn't really point out the commenter's grievance with the work at best, and are subjective dislikes at worst. "-1, Should've been X" is also thus used as a meme-y response.
  • Fandom Heresy: The onsite community despises referring to the wiki as the "SCPverse," as it has become synonymous with the copious amounts of misinformation regarding its content. It also implies every article is beholden to a specific continuity or defined multiverse, when this has never been the case.
  • Fan Myopia:
    • Several members of the fanbase (particularly the younger ones) place a handful of SCPs (namely 049, 096, 106, 173, 682, and 999) on a pedestal, while ignoring newer works, other non-SCP works like tales or art as well as the doctrine of "There Is No Canon", leading to frequently asked questions such as "what if 096 fought 173", usually answered with "Whatever you want to happen".
    • On the SCP Foundation subreddit, whenever the topic of "What SCP do you think is underrated/gets overlooked?" or similar threads come up, fans will routinely name articles that have ratings of 1000 or higher, which are easily in the top 5% of articles on the site.
    • A contingent of fans is looking to preserve works associated with the character of Jack Bright, despite the fact that the character's creator used those works, and the existence of the character on the site, to commit sexual abuse against several people, solely because Dr. Bright is a popular character. This portion of the fandom is not looked upon kindly by most of the on-site community.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • SCP-106 is sometimes called "Radical Larry", based on this image◊, and the fact that it can go through walls.
    • Thanks to Markiplier, SCP-173 has gained the moniker of "Billy".
    • SCP: Secret Laboratory has lead to several new nicknames for various SCPs and Foundation personnel. 173 is often referred to as "The Killer Peanut" or just "Peanut", 106 has "T-Pose Boy" due to his model's at the time incomplete rigging causing his upper body to T-Pose, and the D-Class personnel are referred to as "D-Bois" even by the creators of the game.
    • The SCP article pages themselves are sometimes referred to as "skips", due to similar pronounciation.
    • SCP-001 proposals sometimes have a three-letter code appended to the number related to the author (e.g. I.H. Pickman's proposal would be SCP-001-IHP, and S. Andrew Swann's proposal would be SCP-001-SWN) when referenced in canons and other SCPs that require multiple proposals to be true. However, this isn't stated as an official form of nomenclature in any official writing guides.
    • Whenever regular users are allowed to weigh in on staff decisions, they're often called the "O4 Council" after the group of the same name called in to replace O5-9 during From 120's Archives.
    • SCP-3008 is usually referred to as "The Infinite IKEA"; its actual title, "A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA," is almost never used.
    • New users who display immature, erratic, or disruptive behavior on the forums are derisively referred to as "Whitenames" by more veteran members of the site, due to the fact that new users in the official Discord, who haven't chosen their roles yet, have white names by default.
  • Fandom Rivalry:
    • With a splinter site RPC Authority, the latter created during June 2018, following the Pride Month Controversynote . Early on, RPC users actively harassed members of the Foundation (with one sending death threats and photoshopping themselves decapitating the author of the Homestuck satellite SCP) and plagiarized several articles from the site, with its members who committed these offenses facing no consequences on RPC. It's also actively discouraged to make crossovers between the two, as both want to sever ties between each other, to the point where accounts discovered to have RPC membership by staff are banned from the site without warning. It's been speculated that the 'WikiJump' project to create an alternative platform to Wikidot will actively exclude RPC. As of March 2025, the only extant references to RPC are a Take That! towards several of its users in SCP-4493 and a foreign Distant Prologue to Ad Astra per Aspera making a throwaway mention of the Foundation multiverse experiencing When Dimensions Collide with the Authority as a consequence of the article's three-way between Mekhane, Yaldaboath, and the Scarlet King.
    • With the Wikidot for The Backrooms, though this is one-sided on the Foundation's part. Much like the RPC Authority, a large portion of the userbase is made of people who left the SCP Fandom for one reason or another; some were permanently banned, while others left after growing more disillusioned with the more complex and interconnected stylings of the Foundation and seeing the Backrooms wiki as a simpler alternative. SCP authors don't appreciate that the structure essentially fully cribs the SCP Wiki's format, down to having canons and formats that are Suspiciously Similar Substitutes to the Foundation's. Relations are at least warmer than with RPC - they openly credit SCP for inspiration, there's no blatant harassment, it has a large LGBT+ Periphery Demographic, and they share some staff and users without penalty. However, there's a distaste among SCP authors that essentially stems from the feeling that they're having their homework copied. Unlike the RPC, this rivalry died down over time thanks to the Backrooms Wiki becoming less popular over time, ironically thanks to the most popular adaptations of the Backrooms concept ignoring it completely.
  • Fanon:
    • Fanart loves to depict SCP-2317 (the kilometer-tall fat dude chained underground behind a dimensional portal) as having a single cyclopean eye, even though no such trait is present in his description.
    • SCP-2521's pictographs put a little heart symbol where the entity's face should be whenever it takes information of itself. This is most likely just to convey its love/desire for the information, but it's extremely common for fans to portray this as an actual physical feature it has.
    • SCP-INTEGER has no known form due to its reclusive personality and its abstraction powers targeting observers, but tends to be depicted as a shapeshifting dragon in fan content requiring a physical portrayal. This is likely due to its connections to SCP-4000, which contains vague fantasy elements in its aesthetic.
    • SCP-682 isn't described as having any features beyond 'reptilian', but several interpretations have it as a multi-eyed Kaiju-sized being.
    • If one wants to split hairs, technically everything outside of the original SCP-173 is fanon, as everything from prominent Groups of Interest to low-rated articles is derived from the original SCP-173.
    • SCP-999 has no eyes in their original and other on-site depictions, however fanart with eyes soon caught on.
    • The ADMONITION version of SCP-055 (where it is the skull of the last ruler of an antimemetic Human Subspecies driven to extinction a few hundred years ago) is often portrayed using an edit of an illustration often passed around Reddit speculating what the human face would look like without muscles, covered in digital noise to more directly resemble a slightly-inhuman and memetically-camouflaged skull.
  • Fandom-Specific Plot: It’s common for stories, especially on Archive of Our Own, to have Dr. Clef go through angst relating to his trauma from the events depicted in SCP-4231 before finding comfort in another character. Said other character is usually Dr. Kondraki, SCP-166, or an Original Character.
  • First Installment Wins:
    • SCP-173, the first ever SCP article, is by far the highest rated page on the site, and is the only article with a rating over 10,000. To put that into perspective, the second highest rated page, ●●|●●●●●|●●|●, is only in the 6000s, with the third and fourth highest, SCP-049 and SCP-___-J, lodging about 5000 upvotes both. Other entries below usually hovers about 4000 upvotes and lower, which as of writing includes SCP-096, SCP-682, SCP-5000 and other well known entries.
    • In general, SCP from below number 1000 like SCP-682, SCP-096 and SCP-173 are more well known than later SCPs, likely in part due to the Adaptation Displacement of SCP related games and that they were the first few to be written, thus getting more attention during said popularity phase. There are obviously exceptions in comparison like SCP-3008, SCP-6001 or SCP-8980, however.
  • Foe Yay Shipping:
    • Robert Bumaro, founder of the Church of the Broken God, a religion that worships a mechanical deity that opposes a flesh being, and Grand Karcist Ion, the founder of the Sarkic (Or Nälkän, as they call themselves) Cults, whose religion centers around a flesh being named Yaldabaoth (Either in worship or in defiance of it) have been paired together sometimes despite their religion being hostile to each other (Mostly The Church against the flesh cults).
    • Dr. Clef and Dr. Kondraki, in spite of - or perhaps due to - their hostility towards each other, are often shipped together. There’s also a whole canon (Warning: NSFW) about a romantic relationship between them.
  • Genius Bonus: Grand Karcist Ion and a large part of the Sarkic cults are based on an obscure alchemical text by Zosimos of Panoplis dating back to the third century. Ion is a character that is dismembered and reassembled, the text features a "copper man" who gave up his flesh, and Ion is said to want to raise the dead.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
    • SCP has a substantial following in Japan, with a fan web-manga that adorably explains the notable SCPs (with an English translation), official manga anthologies that also explain notable SCPs, an official web-manga that explains what the whole SCP thing is about in the process of explaining notable SCPs, an official Light Novel, and many more fanworks. There's also a Japanese branch alongside other international branches.
    • Eastern Asia appears to have a bigger affinity for Minecraft-based SCPs than the English branch, as the Minecraft Department is a transplant from the Japanese and Chinese branches. This is made apparent by how the English branch itself only has three noteworthy articles involving Minecraft to speak of (one of which was deleted)list, yet the Department apparently already has the need to construct five sites, hire for four decently-populated divisions, and requisition three MTFs.
    • SCP-3309 (a pataphysics SCP representing the wiki's deletion process, written at a time when pataphysics as a field was starting to become saturated) is a Base-Breaking Character in the EN branch, but has more respect on the CN branch where it has been readily incorporated into the branch's alternate interpretation of pataphysics. In fact, 3309 is held in enough regard that it is stated to supposedly be one of the only things able to challenge what the branch calls the Scarlet King's true form, a pataphysical God of Evil that commands all of his interpretations at once called the Scarlet Demon.
    • SCP-5190 is moderately successful in the English branch but is much better received in Japan. As of 22 November 2025, it has a +68 rating in the English branch and +143 in the Japanese branch.
  • Growing the Beard: There's naturally countless "individual" examples for each author on the wiki concerning this trope, to the point where it's completely unfeasible to record each and every one. However, there seems to be a pretty decent majority of both fans and authors who see Series III's SCP-2000 ("Deus Ex Machina") as the first SCP on the site to truly set a new standard in terms of quality for site articles and inspire other writers to "step up their game", so to speak, (with the exception of some noteworthy outliers like SCP-093 ("The Red Sea Object") from Series I.)
  • Hard-to-Adapt Work: The Foundation and all of its works are created under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, meaning that any adaptation must allow derivative works of itself, which would be a nightmare for the legal teams of major studios. Some independent projects have popped up (such as Confinement), there are some Serial Numbers Filed Off derivatives (such as Control (2019) and ANNO: Mutationem), and readings of individual works are posted to Youtube frequently, but only a single 'professional' adaptation, of There Is No Antimemetics Division, currently exists. Notably, ANNO: Mutationem was originally planned to be an outright SCP-based game before the creators reworked it into a Divorced Installment to avoid potential licensing issues.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • SCP-1004 is both kind of funny, gross, and sad in that it's a pornography program called "Factory Porn" that generates fake porn of whatever the user asks it to (with the eventual side-effect of the user becoming desensitized to it and wanting to enact their fantasies on innocent people). With the rise in popularity of deepfakes and generative AI, the concept of a program being able to provide images and even video of non-consenting people (including celebrities and even children) doing sexual and illegal acts is no longer just a SCP fairy-tale, with the technology becoming more accessible as time went on. In addition, the author was also later banned for soliciting nonconsensual sexual contact with several people (including minors) on site, which makes the subject of this article much more disturbing, with some seeing it as the author's own revelation of their wrongdoings and the site staff outright declaring it textbook abuse apologia.
    • SCP-1032 is an alarm clock that accurately predicts the time at which things will end. In what was probably intended as an absurdist joke back in The New '10s, one of its hands predicts that "2020" will end on January 1, 2022. Not as funny anymore considering the COVID-19 pandemic: due to the collective disrupted sense of time during lockdown, the feeling that 2021 was 2020:Part 2 became a common only-half-joking sentiment completely independent of the site. 2022 being generally seen as the year where things started to return to normal only adds to the eerieness of the coincidence.
    • There is a real life online group called "Are We Cool Yet?" creating and distributing plans for 3-D printed guns using the logo designed for the GoI.
    • The "it's happening again" meme becomes significantly less funny in SCP-7591, which has Alex Thorley repeat their lines almost verbatim during the SCP's Surreal Horror twist revealing that their association with the Department of Unreality is causing them to lose their humanity.
    • In the extended test logs for SCP-978note , SCP-049's photo shows him embracing a six-year-old child (presumably his son/daughter). In 2020, it was discovered that SCP-049's author, Gabriel Jade, had sexually and emotionally abused a then-underage user in 2018.
    • Similarly, the Things Dr. Bright Is Not Allowed To Do At The Foundation page was locked after people began adding references to things like rape and pedophilia. In 2022, AdminBright — who created the Dr. Bright character — was permanently banned from the site after it had been discovered that they had sexually harassed multiple underage users. The page was unilaterally deleted the following year by a rogue moderator; while there was some debate over whether this was the right thing to do, very few users were sad to see the list go, and the deletion was ultimately upheld.
    • In the story Quiet Days (posted in 2012), the first sign that the anomalies the Foundation contains are vanishing is the disappearance of SCP-1548 ("The Hateful Star"). The original SCP-1548 was deleted in 2018 at the request of the author, after the fallout of the Pride Month controversynote  in June.
    • One of SCP-914's test was a researcher putting Berserk in it, the result with an "Author in hiatus" output and an snarky "I knew it" comment. This was before the author of Berserk, Kentaro Miura, passed away due to a combination of health issues and overwork.
    • Another SCP-914 test, conducted in August 2019, has someone say "I don't want to know what the WHO is doing with respect to Ebola." With the conspiracy theories surrounding the pandemic which started a few months later...
    • Author UraniumEmpire was once famous for their skilled handling of heavy topics in their articles, incorporating themes such as different types of abuse, sexual traumas, and prejudice into many high-rated SCPs and articles, even writing an essay on how to handle and incorporate sensitive topics in the world of the Foundation. In March 2025, they were discovered to have engaged in at least a year's worth of sexual harassmentnote  and was permanently banned, causing most if not all of their previous work to sour considerably.
    • SCP-CN-801 tells the story of a narrative anomaly named Vodka, who invades works through nested stories and tries to annihilate them by causing bad endings, which the Foundation believes will enable it to erase their universe if not kept at bay. In August 2024, a Chinese branch author named Vodka Wells was banned from the English wiki for participating in a transphobic harassment campaign against TroutMaskReplica that targeted several tales written by her, which AHT ruled as an attempt to deplatform her and her work entirely.
    • SCP-2557 is a slot that has been bought out by and turned into an advert for Envelope Logistics, a multiversal company that allows people to invest in ideas and receive returns based on how many people are thinking about them — effectively betting on statistical increases and popularity. Envelope gladly flaunts the shadier parts of this, with human investors happily talking about making big bucks off of political careers, disease rates, and other topics that require illegal or immoral maneuvers to get money involved. In The New '20s, this has become rather prescient of the rise of the US prediction market, which has been criticized for enabling similar types of profiteering.
    • The original SCP-2003 has Bad Future scenario XS involve Armed Site-47 and all knowledge of SCP-2003 becoming abruptly lost to the Foundation. In January 2025, author Kalinin deleted SCP-2003 and everything else he posted on the site for reasons unknown.
  • He Really Can Act: The officialized film adaptation of "Keeping it Chill With Your Homies Down at The SCP Foundation" was originally a school project, yet all of the students who participated have been universally praised for near-flawlessly depicting what an out-of-touch Totally Radical marketing campaign would look like in the real world, as well as Dr. Handler's extreme frustration at the whole thing.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • One of the snacks SCP-261 produced was a Pepsi drink flavored with dragonfruit that the Foundation said PepsiCo did not produce. In 2012, the real PepsiCo did produce a dragonfruit-flavored Pepsi called Pepsi X to promote The X Factor.
    • SCP-2747 has, one of an entry, a videogame called "No Sister of Mine". Judging from the description of the game, it feels like Fear & Hunger, without the bad parts.
    • The SCP-3000 contest entry Chessland was massively lampooned for ruining the entire article with massive amounts of garbage text generated through a neural network in an effort to look creepy. Lo and behold, cue SCP-BOTNIK-J, AKA SCP-\̅\̅\̅\̅-J, which is nothing but procedurally generated text and was widely praised for its creativity. Even better, the SCP-001 proposal ("A Good Boy") by TheGreatHippo and PeppersGhost would also go on to utilize procedural generated text (here, it was used to simulate the messages of a primitive A.I. creating containment procedures based on anomalous data), and it was widely praised for its creativity and resultant Word-Salad Horror.
    • SCP-6930 is a Pattern Screamer named "Paty" who made a Virtual YouTuber career for herself in a bid to get enough human attention to exist again. When booting her off the internet using "thaumaturgical firewalls" didn't work, the SCP Foundation had some of its agents attempt to bully her into quitting her career. When other people on the 6930's case decided that these agents were going a bit too far in their bullying, they offered Paty a position in real life VTuber group hololive. A few months after the writing of this SCP, Hololive introduced a new group of VTubers whose collective character setting is that of a secret society, much like the SCP Foundation.
    • SCP-5254 is an anomaly that turns people wearing Pokémon accessories for prolonged periods of time. The Foundation's methods to attempt to stop the spread of the anomaly is to force The Pokemon Company to begin to reduce the quality of its games, starting with Pokémon Sword and Shield and it's Dexit fiasco. Come 2022, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet release and are lambasted as bug-riddled games by many, which could be interpreted as the Foundation's handiwork. The cherry on top? The games sold over 10 million copies in their first three days, making them Nintendo's biggest launch of all time, and 22 million copies by March 2023. This means the Foundation could be seen as both succeeding and failing at their containment!
    • The S & C Plastics Canon cites Gravity Falls as one of its inspirations; Gravity Falls was inspired by the Real Life town of Boring, Oregon. A few years later, Boring became a part of the site canon with the establishment of Wilson's Wildlife Solutions and later on Those Twisted Pines continuity.
    • SCP-708 is a forklift that entices everyone in its presence to drive it, while also suffering a severe decrease in emotional maturity. Or as someone driving it in the 2020s would probably put it: YOU'RE TOO LATE! I AM NOW FORKLIFT CERTIFIED!
    • SCP-353, written in 2008, is a parodic take on typical comic book supervillains, being a woman who can take in and release various diseases and wants to infect people for no apparent reason other than her own whims. Two years later, Wolverine: The Best There Is would give us Contagion, a supervillain so absurdly evil that he has an entire long-winded speech about how he just loves being evil, which you can find on his character page. His superpower, of course, is having every disease ever contained within his body and infecting people at will.
    • A note in the file for SCP-239 has a doctor complaining about someone telling her about Santa Claus because they would possibly have another SCP to deal with. Years later, Santa Claus would become an SCP.
  • Hype Backlash: 682 and Able are almost reviled by some members for being so ridiculously popular. It doesn't help that they're the leading causes of Broken Base on the site, either.
  • I Am Not Shazam: Lots of SCPs with multiple components are often lumped together with their suffixes forgotten.
    • Even in other articles on the site, "Able" has been mistakenly referred to as SCP-076 despite being the latter of its two components, SCP-076-2.
    • Many forget that the girl with a Fetus Terrible contained by Procedure 110-Montauk is 231-7, and 231 is the entire group of girls.
    • The green slime that must never come in contact with dead bodies is SCP-447-2. SCP-447-1 is the spongy ball thing that produces SCP-447-2.
    • SCP-1471 refers to the anomalous smartphone app known as "MalO ver1.0.0"; the skull-faced creature generated by it is SCP-1471-A.
    • Officially, the SCP-2747 designation does not refer to the anafabula nor the central intelligence controlling it; it only refers to the aftermath of its effects, where stories are erased from history and only discussion of them remains. All three tend to be lumped together due to Characterization Marches On and the article itself discussing the possibility of its existence.
  • Iconic Character, Forgotten Title: "SCP Foundation" is the correct name for both the in-universe organisation and the real world website, and "The Foundation" is an acceptable In-Universe shorthand name. Not "The SCP". Even if it is contextually obvious it is incorrect. SCP or "The SCP" should only be used to refer to the contained anomalies, not the name of the organization that contains them. The name of the organization is right there in the title, the SCP Foundation, i.e. the Foundation of SCPs.
  • Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: A few, often times strung together with the elements of their name as well.
    • The pair name between Dr. Heather Garrison and Dr. Lillian S Lillihammer is "Leather", the L from Lillian and "-eather" from Heather.
    • "Wet Blanket" is the ship name between Dr. Harry Blank and Dr. William Wettle.
  • Improved Second Attempt: When Bright the author was banned, Elias Shaw was created as a replacement for the character of Jack Bright. However, many people felt like Shaw was just changing the name of the character due to having the exact same personality and powers and didn't remove the baggage of what Bright the author had done. djkaktus would rework Shaw into Lachlan Cairns, keeping his Body Surfing power while establishing limits on his power, a more grounded personality, and a more realistic workplace dynamic, to positive reception.
  • Inferred Holocaust: In SCP-6140's alternative interpretation of events, it's stated that the Daevites retroactively cease to exist once all copies of SCP-140 are burnt, causing the history of the Daevites to revert to a Noble Savage timeline of events that results in the country of Daevastan appearing in the present. While the most obvious butterfly effect of the Scarlet King never existing is mentioned, other wide-reaching effects such as Able becoming mortal, the Sarkics never having a reason to form, the Mekhanites and Church of the Second Hytoth likely being gutted by proxy, and the Bronze Age being extended significantly or even never ending are never elaborated upon, even though SCP-6140's effects would lead them to change human history just as much as the absence of the Scarlet King and his followers have.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Syncope Symphony (the group responsible for experimenting on the Class of '76) turns out to be led by a shadowy group of former high school students who were forcibly transformed into monsters by a flawed activation of SCP-2000. As a result, they became intensely athazagoraphobicnote  and took increasingly-desperate measures with their new powers to become remembered again and return to their normal lives, a situation only made worse when a Foundation containment procedure Gone Horribly Wrong led to the creation of SCP-2316 and the burdens both the SCP itself and Syncope have had to live with since. At the same time though, even though the Foundation may have messed up, they're right to point out that Syncope's more catastrophic anomalies brand them as a terrorist group who would rather destroy this world and themselves for the sake of pointless nostalgia instead of learning to move on.
  • LGBT+ Periphery Demographic: A small but notable contingent, which has become increasingly visible over time as the site evolves and changes. Key website staff and well known power users are generally in favour of improving diversity and accessibility for LGBTQ users, and many actively push back against people who want to get rid of such users. Of course, there are several prominent writer who are LGBTQ themselves, such as Yossi (author of SCP-8980 and SCP-7777), Queerious (author of the Forgotten Memories canon), Gaby (author of the ClassicCon winner SCP-8557), amongst others. Ironically, the SCP wiki was spun off of some posts made on 4chan, which is infamous for its user culture being openly queerphobic (as evidenced by frequent, casual use of homophobic slurs and widely-used slang terms spun off of those slurs).

    M-P 
  • Magnificent Bastard:
    • SCP 2137 is the ghost of Tupac Shakur fighting corruption from beyond the grave by using music to communicate with the living. He got the Foundation's attention when he urged one of his listeners to commit a vigilante slaying against a corrupt official and Serial Killer who would have gotten away with it and provided evidence to exonerate his listener. He has the Foundation use their resources in his pursuit of justice, resulting in thousands of cold cases being solved, escaped killers being arrested or killed, and even the recovery of dangerous SCPs. Once, when the Foundation decided he had too much power over his containment, they tried to suppress him and his influence; Tupac's response was to release an album to the public, exposing the Foundation, their dirty secrets, and the location of a dangerous SCP. This caused the Foundation to scramble to control the damage by following Tupac's demands. A researcher also uncovered an obscure interview where Tupac implies he's actually an otherworldly being "on vacation", and that he's even pursuing the Scarlet King himself, outright calling him a "bitch who knows his days are numbered".
    • Murphy Law is a crafty Reality Warper who invades written narratives and turns them into Film Noir scripts, something he uses to his advantage. In his first appearance, Murphy invades the article for SCP-3043, stopping the malevolent Typewriter from rewriting reality by swiftly derailing its story and killing it afterwards. When the Foundation tries to contain him later on by deconstructing his character, rendering him powerless, Murphy manages to will his powers back and escape by deconstructing the Foundation itself, revealing to his researcher that they too are fictional, leaving the Foundation hesitant to act against it for the time being.
    • The scholar with a head resembling that of a rabbit is one of the faeries residing within "Taboo"/SCP-4000. Desiring to return to the outside world, the scholar befriends Dr. Eugene Japers with his knowledge and gentlemanly demeanor, only to trick him into letting him steal his identity, allowing the scholar to happily leave the forest without fear of Foundation interference.
    • SCP-3992's Extended Test Log: Hans Gruber remains the suave planner he was in the original film. Taking over Nakatomi Plaza, Gruber quickly responds to the SCP-3922-A's attempting to kill him by tricking the police into attacking them, getting both off his back and reducing SCP-3922-A to 5 members. Only losing due to McClane's last minute intervention in 3922's favor, Gruber stands out as one of 3922's most resilient targets.
    • The Meaning Of Fear: The seemingly harmless SCP-2006 is revealed to be far more intelligent than initially anticipated. A shape-shifting being that thrives off of fear, it plays along with the Foundation's assumption that it thinks people are scared by B-Movies, enjoying the Foundation's fears that it'll one day discover what true fear is. While conversing with a researcher, he subtly reveals his deceptions to her, correctly anticipating that she'll catch on and be horrified by the realization before politely allowing her to leave, getting in one genuine scare on the way.
  • Memetic Badass:
    • Dr. Clef is immune to seduction because his crotch is a hand, and that hand holds a gun.
    • SCP-999. Given that it can subdue SCP-682, fans off-site jokingly claim that 999 can tickle just about anything into submission.
    • Sheldon Katz, Esq., the Foundation's Senior Counsel. His introduction holding his own in a contract negotiation with a literal devil was only the start for the legal department's answer to Dr. Clef.
  • Memetic Loser:
    • The Global Occult Coalition, especially following the publication of SCP-1609. The GOC mulched a perfectly harmless anomalous item—a chair that would appear under anyone who needed to take a seat. Said mulch retained its teleportation properties... and would teleport into someone's lungs and kill them before it was rendered into Foundation containment. The GOC have never been able to shake the reputation of a bunch of thugs who brutally destroy anomalies in lieu of subsequent stories which expand upon their missions and even more positive portrayals such as that in SCP-5000 where they shield humanity from a genocidal SCP Foundation. The fact that a good portion of the fandom sees them as a "Tacticool" hyper-militarized alternative to the Foundation doesn't help matters either.
    • SCP-682, due to having what basically amounts to In-Universe Plot Armor and the fandom constantly asking "Would X be able to kill 682" to the point where the authors get annoyed about it, has gained this status. Joke tales have been written about it being able to be killed by drunk driving, or someone going "Bang!" at it with a finger gun, or other things that paint it as having a Weaksauce Weakness.
    • On the site, the Chaos Insurgency gets this treatment, due to it A) not making sense narratively why something as omnipotent as the Foundation allows an organization that's its equal and opposite to exist, and B) having a name that sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. A few attempts have been made to reinvent or redeem them, but a big reason they're disliked is that they're boring as antagonists. Part of the motive behind writing SCP-7000 was having the Chaos Insurgency just be destroyed and have no more to do with the Foundation in that particular sphere of the canon.
    • Even before Bright themselves was permanently banned for several accounts of sexual harassment, Dr. Jack Bright the character was not looked on kindly by a good section of the authorbase. Incident 239-B Abridged has Dr. Bright shot in the balls and demand that Clef "do the other one!", one of the paths of SCP-6500 off-handedly mentions that SCP-963 was one of the casualties of the death of anomalous phenomena, the No Return canon based off of SCP-6500 keeps him dead while Gears, Crow, and Clef begrudgingly admit it's better this way, and even the now-deleted list portrayed him as a perverted psychopath, even with repeated edits and locks.
  • Memetic Molester:
    • SCP-106, mostly due to him looking like a typical Dirty Old Man. Doesn't help that his main targets are aged 10 to 25.
    • SCP-953, considering she raped the corpse of a Foundation agent's fiancée while said agent was watching.
    • SCP-2521, based largely on the image of it wrapping a D-class in its tentacles and abducting them with a heart on its "face."
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Containment Breach" or "Breaching Containment"Explanation
    • [DATA EXPUNGED], [REDACTED], and █████ Explanation
    • LolfoundationExplanation
    • Thing What Kills You with [DATA EXPUNGED]Explanation
    • The phrase "Oh God Oh Fuck!" is jokingly used on dealing with dangerous SCPs, like 682, 096, 106, 2316, 2521 and so on.
    • Bees and things that beecome bees.
      What if bees collected tropes and made a wiki all about the sweetest ones?
      What if there were a gun that shot bees?
      What if a game level was bees?
      What if there were MORE bees?
      What if bees were people too?
      What if bees could generate force fields?
      What if bees was a trope?
      TROPES WERE DEFINITELY BEES.
    • Crunch. Explanation
    • "The store is now closed. Please exit the building." Explanation
    • "Hello, SCP Foundation? Yeah, it's me... yeah, it's happening again." Explanation
    • "You do not recognize the bodies in the water."Explanation
    • Eberstrom's SCP-001 proposalExplanation
    • When Day BreaksExplanation
    • Mariah Carey is an SCPExplanation
    • "Due to circumstances outside of our control, this directive has now changed. Our new mission will be the extermination of the human race. There will be no further communication."Explanation (SCP- 5000 spoilers)
    • Portuguese village eldersExplanation
    • White RounderhouseExplanation
    • Four Fucking PixelsExplanation
    • SCP-067 kidExplanation
    • Downvoted, can't wait to see it as a tale!note 
    • The rush for SCP-9341Explanation
    • The abbreviation for "Mobile Task Force," MTF, being shared with that for male-to-female gender transitioning is a common fandom inside joke, to the point where the non-SCP revision of There Is No Antimemetics Division went out of its way to preserve the joke by renaming Mobile Task Forces to Hostile Response Teams (HRT, as in hormone replacement therapy.)
    • Penis TakerExplanation
    • Knicks fans vs SCPs Explanation
  • Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: SCP-1970-J was a Joke SCP entirely written with a Maurice Chevalier Accent where an anomaly caused the entire American culture to be replaced by the most stereotypically French version of itself, which proved unpopular enough with the main branch to be deleted. On the other hand, French readers apparently loved it, and the translated version is still up on the FR branch.
  • Misaimed Fandom:
    • Some fans see The Foundation's active containment effort (Including the mind-wiping and the imprisonment of anomalous beings) as the right thing or Necessarily Evil against the hostile horror at play. While many interpretation of the Foundation exist, these reads usually misses that Foundation are still portrayed as inducing suffering for innocents at best (Like in the case of SCP-231-7 where the child is still tortured to kept eldritch horror in), and at their worst are enabled to be both the judge and the executioner (Such as in the case of SCP-8980, where doctor Lillian Marley was tortured by her co-workers for a decade because her boss fabricated evidence to get her contained, and as her boss is presumed to be doing their job as intended, no one in Foundation reviewed her case).
    • According to Dr. Clef, the "Apollyon" class he used in SCP-2317 was intended to be a special classification for items which were only known about by certain very high-level personnel, such as the O5s. However, subsequent writers have taken to assuming that it referred to an object which was fundamentally uncontainable, or that it represents a Despair Event Horizon on the part of the Foundation; this has led to it being used for this purposes in such articles as SCP-4005 and S. D. Locke's proposal. This alteration of the term seems to have been a contributing factor in Clef removing the term "Apollyon" from the 2317 article.
    • A lot of problems that the site's readerbase has (overly focusing on powerscaling and Hypothetical Fight Debates, thinking about SCPs more in terms of cool crossovers than on their own merits, etc.) come from people not understanding or accepting the site as being a mythos with no "official" canon. Ideas can be shared between SCPs and recurring characters or elements often appear across them, but each SCP is its own story in its own world. This means that the answer to a question like "What if 173 fought 682" is "whatever the writer wants to happen", and there is no "real" answer.
    • As revealed from the interview of SCP-4100's author , a lot of accepted fanon details in it are incorrect compared to the intended interpretation by the author:
      • The Destroyers (as seen here◊) weren't intended to be the Scarlet King nor the Reapers, which isn't helped by its red coloration (which is commonly associated with the Scarlet King) and tentacles (which the Reapers have).
      • The final pictogram is intended to be a warning to the Stellar Congressional Protectorate from the Foundation that there are still other Destroyers out there, not a declaration to Bring It to the other Destroyers still out there.
    • A portion of the off-site fandom reveres SCP-3812 for being one of the most powerful SCPs due to his ability to transcend all narrative layers in conjunction with his omniscience and omnipotence, even though this is explicitly not the point of the article nor its main focus. Author djkaktus has mentioned being repeatedly pestered about Hypothetical Fight Debates involving 3812, much to his annoyance.
    • Even though its Central Theme is very blatantly a Meta Fiction take on the "normalcy vs. anomalous" philosophical debate brought up in modern articles (with a creation myth allegorizing the real-world authors sprinkled in), SCP-CN-2510 is also a common target for powerscalers who, like with SCP-3812's article, tend to ignore the above and instead focus on the implications of Metanormalcy being The Maker, praising its omnipotence and omniscience even though the extent of its intelligence is never fully described anywhere on the site.
    • Several Chinese pataphysics SCPs and characters, such as the Void Emperor and Scarlet Demon, are also targets for powerscaling due to their supposed feats of going "beyond" S. Andrew Swann's SCP-001 proposal and all of fiction. Never mind the fact that SCP-CN-2510 states outright that trying to scale them is a fool's errand, especially in the face of Metanormalcy and its allegory for the collective authorbase & their conflicting canons.
    • Yet another target of powerscalers are the Constants from ADMONITION, treating their godly power and identities as hyper-evolved forms of previous characters as the sole focus of their arcs. In the actual canon, their strength is merely an effect of the narrative of their respective episodes — what's much more important is the TL-4755-B Foundation's repeated failure after failure that enabled their rise (or perhaps simply made them start caring) in the first place. It should also be noted that the upper bound of their strength is only found in supplementary documents by Placeholder McDoctorate and his interviews with the VN branch, further cementing how little it actually matters to the canon's actual story.
    • SCP-3922 has earned a reputation of its fans not actually understanding the SCP, as the Seasonal Rot in its extended logs is due to contributors forgoing the original Deconstructive Parody elements of the SCP's literal policing of fiction in favor of writing entries that read more like straight fanfiction with SCP-3922-A (which has led to licensing concerns on at least one occasion.)
    • There is a subset of readers of SCP-8980 who have formed a Love to Hate following of Christopher Byrnes, given the continuous abuses of power he commits against Lillian Marley in that article. While Byrnes is a Hate Sink, this crowd is sometimes criticized for never actually doing or saying anything about Marley herself, which misses the entire point of the ending — that no true help is ever given to Lillian, and the systems that allowed Byrnes to get away with it remains in place, never changed.
    • SCP-5000 has accrued a large contingent of readers who have concluded the Foundation was justified in their actions during that article. Tanhony has stated this isn't true, and wrote SCP-7841 (which strongly implies the Foundation acts the way they do in SCP-5000 because of an anomalous form of Emotional Regression, meaning they literally aren't being mature about their decisions) in an attempt to dissuade the notion. Even outside of Tanhony's own writings, SCP-CN-2000, which espouses roughly the same message, is one of the most popular foreign SCPs, making the existence of this crowd even more baffling.
  • Mis-blamed: The announcement of the removal of SCP-173's picture prompted some people to say that it was not very kind of Izumi Kato to ask for the image to be taken down... except that Kato never asked for it, it was something that Staff decided while affirming copyrights.note 
  • Moe:
    • Cassy. For bonus points, her appearance changed to match the art style of the picture she's in.
    • Despite how creepy she is, you can't deny that 053 looks adorable.
    • SCP-999, an adorable blob that loves everybody and survives off of candy.
    • Even for a patched-up Teddy Bear, SCP-2295 is that one who you want as a friend.
    • SCP-4966, a talking stuffed animal that asks for "munchies" (biscuits) and behaves like a kitten.
    • SCP-6059. Look at how they draw themselves. They're a slime ball of weird stuff but they are an adorable, pizza wanting slime ball of weird stuff.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • The Scarlet King crosses it by raping a goddess named Sanna to death, which would end up creating SCP-231. If that didn’t do it, devouring his own siblings certainly would have.
    • SCP-531-D crossed this by using his Reality Warper powers to rape several of the female staff. He rationalizes that it wasn't rape because they all said yes, but Clef states that his powers made it so they had no choice but to say yes. Needless to say, this is ultimately what led to him getting terminated.
    • SCP-953 crosses it by convincing a mother to cook and eat her own child.
    • Dr. Langford crossed by murdering Mr. and Ms. Talish in an attempt to prevent the ghost of their daughter Mary (aka SCP-1337) from appearing all so the foundation would stop spending gas money driving Mary around when she appeared.
    • Invoked with 1459, a machine whose sole purpose is for its user to come up with cruel and twisted ways to kill a puppy, with the only reward being a cookie of a variety the user usually hates. The machine even lampshades this at the end of each "game":
      "Yeah, you're totally going to hell for this. Play again?"
    • The unnamed Jerkass who ruined poor SCP-1481 crossed it by wishing him into becoming an "alcoholic j-j-j-junkie tweaker crackhead" For the Evulz and making sure that the wish could never be reversed.
    • Dr. Elliot Emerson, Site Director of the alternate reality Site 13 (aka SCP-1730), crossed it by torturing and executing all the SCP sent to his site.
    • Melanie Parker crossed it when she murdered her kind neighbor John Bates when he attempted to get 911 services to help rescue her daughter Jemma (aka SCP-6670) when she was trapped in the walls of their house. Caring more about keeping Jemma with her than Jemma's actual wellbeing, Melanie goes on to let Jemma stay trapped in the walls, unable to move and her bones continuously snapping and contorting as her anomalous gigantisms causes her to grow further into the walls, for ELEVEN YEARS until Jemma grows so big and so far in that the ceiling of the room collapse and Melanie is crushed to death beneath her.
    • POI-2190-1, who would eventually die and become SCP-2190, was already a slimy scumbag who tried to break up her daughter POI-2190-2 and her loving husband and insist she re-marry to a wealthy American man instead; she crosses the line when she invites American men to rape her daughter and marry her by force.
    • SCP Foundation crosses this line in SCP-5000 where they decides to genocide all of humanity due to their alleged anomalous nature, SCP-8776 once they forced the islander into slavery, SCP-9000 with the establishment of The Trench prison-labor complex, and many, many more times.
  • My Real Daddy: The original article of SCP-093 was fairly short and typical of Series I SCPs. As the original author could not be found, user NekoChris took over and greatly expanded on it, adding the now iconic test logs.
  • Narm:
    • SCP-1322 should be effective, what with the Foundation accidentally sterilizing another planet, but the message from "the Last Generation" is so overdramatic that it comes across as the literary equivalent of Milking the Giant Cow. Special mention to the line about them "PLED[GING] AND VOW[ING]" to get revenge. Apparently just one of them wasn't enough.
    • The chilling tone of SCP-1981 becomes a lot less scary when you read some of the excerpts, which are often so nonsensical that it's hard not to laugh. The fact that SCP-1981-1 looks like a hand flipping the bird doesn't help matters.
      "A renewal of the traditional values that have been the tendons of this country's strength. One recent survey by a Washington-based researcher concluded that Americans were far more willing to participate in cannibalism than they have in the past hundred years."
      "I've seen the derelict offices of Google burn with the window boarded up and the squatters inside them. I've seen the houses where they cut up the little babies.".
    • The otherwise terrifying SCP-2718 has the line "We must declare human death a Keter SCP, and contain it at any cost." It may be intentional considering the circumstances and the Alternative Character Interpretation on the SCP in question, but it still sounds ridiculous and silly even with context, let alone without.
  • Narm Charm:
    • SCP-058. It's a cow heart with spiky tentacles, a stinger tail, insectoid legs and a British accent that goes on destructive rampages as it incessantly rambles. OTT? Probably. Terrifying? Definitely. It also helps sell how the creature's "a heart of darkness".
    • The excerpts transcribed in SCP-1981, considered to be OTT and ridiculous by some, were also considered by others to be perfect examples of Word-Salad Horror.
    • "Bees" is, at first glance, rather hilarious, thanks to the premise being literally "What if everything was bees?", but can arguably be quite terrifying because it's also "What if EVERYTHING was bees?"
    • SCP-3288 pretty much indulges every single possible example of Body Horror and Squick-inducing sight possible, playing off like an incredibly depraved Aristocrats joke... but it's all still really creepy, as the various SCP-3288 instances delve as deeply into the Uncanny Valley as possible in their perverse attempts to preserve the Blue Blood stylings of 18th and 19th-century Central Europe.
    • SCP-3774 is, ultimately, an Interspecies Romance between a human man and an anomalous female mosquito. However, Merle and Leslie's relationship is so humanized and weirdly natural that in spite of the sheer absurdity of the whole situation, it's both incredibly sweet and tragic to watch it all play out.
    • SCP-\̅\̅\̅\̅-J is mostly a shining example of Word-Salad Humor, but some of the phrasesnote  are shockingly good despite having been generated by a predictive text app.
    • S.D. Locke's Proposal for SCP-001 is, in many respects, a derivative of End of Evangelion — (spoilers for the latter in particular) the whole "everyone melts into a shared-conscious biomass" sounds an awful lot like EoE's "everyone turns into Tang" ending, with converted lifeforms trying to make unconverted ones into more instances of themselves, and some of the descriptions given can't help but sound a bit unintentionally silly (i.e., the SCP-001-A instances moving like giant amoebas). However, the writing is still excellent enough — particularly in how the romance between Dr. Igotta and Ari adds humanity to an otherwise exceptionally bleak Cosmic Horror Story — that it hasn't stopped wiki readers from now being terrified of the friggin' Sun.
    • S. Andrew Swann's Proposal for SCP-001's centerpiece is the reveal that SCP-001 is "a bunch of horror writers." By all means this should come off as a comical attempt at Noticing the Fourth Wall. It's the measures afterwards that keep this a frightening point: the Foundation has prepared memetic agents that can potentially kill said "horror writers", including the person reading the article, and make it a point that this still carries a risk of destroying the SCP Foundation universe itself. It also raises the possibility: What if your world too is just a Cosmic Horror Story that is routinely toyed with by creator beings with thought patterns similar to humans like yourself?
    • The character of Dr. Vera Lovelace, at first glance, feels like a cheap bone thrown at SCP-1471's Periphery Demographic (furries) with several older cliches mixed in: a sapient 1471-A instance that's also a super genius, a high-ranking Foundation official, a bearer of an esoteric classnote  with overly-generous conprocs (that admittedly get walked back slightly, albeit in a manner played for laughs), and someone with a conventionally-attractive fashion sense; eventually, she ascends to godhood in order to triumph over an Apollyon-class SCP and becomes an all-powerful protector. However, the tale building up to Vera's position and the Distant Sequel SCP-9471's themes of using eternity to crush inevitability are both very well-written and play into the deeper implications of SCP-1471-A's nature as an artificial companion, making it wrap right around to equal parts tragic, heartwarming, and awesome.
  • Nausea Fuel: Any SCP with Body Horror is bound to this. Double if it decides not to hide any content.
    • 25% of casualties in early among soldiers from the task force sent to explore 835 (a coral-like organism with tentacles that just so happens to be made out of human components) were due to "aspiration of vomit caused by backflow against the suit faceplate" and suits were specially designed with equipment to counter any further deaths by said cause. Basically, they had to specially design diving suits so that when people vomited in them out of sheer disgust, they wouldn't drown in their own vomit and die. In the after-action report, one of the team members pukes in his suit. Now think about if that had happened with a first-generation suit...
  • Never Live It Down:
    • SCP-1609 gave the Global Occult Coalition a reputation for being heavy-handed thugs that don't care about the consequences of destroying anomalous items that they have never been able to shake.
    • The works of the SCP Foundation as a whole, from around SCP-6000 onwards, have gained a reputation for being too interconnected or self-referential, with some voicing their desire for stand-alone works that aren't inherently bind to other works of the site (Of which there exist plenty, such as SCP-6059, SCP-7179, SCP-7052 (Warning: NSFW content), SCP-8630, or SCP-6802).
  • Nightmare Retardant:
    • Joke SCPs, which are often parodies of either preexisting works (Be it SCP or Winnie the Pooh) or largely a comedic scenario.
    • Humorous "Added notes" regarding why the Doctors are no longer able/allowed to do so-and-so or a humorous event happening (often with commentary along the lines of "Seriously, what the hell, people?") can lighten up otherwise dark articles. Note that humorous addenda may be frowned upon exactly because it otherwise hurt an article's presentation.
    • Seeing pictures◊ of the sculpture that originated SCP-173, by Japanese artist Izumi Kato, as well as this image of fellow artist Nobuyoshi Araki, who seems to really love the thing◊. Or another of his creations◊.
    • In general, knowing the source of an SCP's image can take away the mystique behind it. As such, peoples familiar with astronomy may recognize Luna 2 from SCP-1812 as the main belt asteroid (243) Ida, which is obviously not known to be a moon of Earth (and in fact has a tiny moon of its own), and the image of the marce from SCP-3003 is actually a black coconut bunch weevil.
    • The first question on the FAQ? "Is this all real?" The answer? "No. It is just a collection of stories." The creepiness is kind of lost to a certain degree when you read this. Then again, it was a necessary measure when the SCP Foundation wiki admins actually started getting people contacting them asking how to join the Foundation. If one really thinks about it, the Foundation being fictional is given away by its format; after all, there's no way an allegedly top-secret organization whose most basic security measure is making absolutely sure that civilians never discover its existence unless it's either absolutely necessary or too latenote  leave its entire inventory of world destroying abominations just sitting there on the internet for all to see.
    • The community has a trend to use the discussion pages and the chat to crack jokes about some of the most horrific SCPs. The authors included. It sure helps lower the scariness - Clef giving such an assessment on SCP-231 was even closed with "Keep thinking that, you'll sleep better."
    • The tale Fear Alone posits that Procedure 110-Montauk is tucking the little girl in and reading her a bedtime story. The Foundation doesn't need to do something horrific to her to keep her from giving birth; the fear generated by the idea that 110-Montauk is something unspeakably awful satisfies the Eldritch Abomination that wants her child born.
    • Simply knowing the background to some of the SCP images reduces their scariness. For example, the now-removed image on SCP-957's page was a foam Halloween prop known as Spazm, SCP-1471's page image is a fursuit, SCP-2030-1's image is a photo of someone cosplaying Rocky Rickaby, SCP-870’s is a Victorian-era illustration of a pterosaur and SCP-682's famous but now-deleted image is a beluga whale carcass (the current one is a humpback whale).
    • The former SCP-2678, alias "the Vorehole", is horrifying and disgusting, despite starting as a joke...Then the reader learns that those tasked with locating it are, in-universe, known as "Kinkshamers."
    • While SCP-1893, The Minotaur's Tale is intimidating, especially with its The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You application, but if the reader made their username something silly or weird, it can take some of the horror out to imagine a very intimidating and Ax-Crazy murderer saying an adorable name or even threatening a fictional character if the reader chose that as their username.
    • The original version of SCP-166 sound like the premise of some awful hentai. It was a teenage succubus whose skin is irritated by clothing, meaning she must be nude at all times. Any man who sees her is immediately compelled to have sex with her, despite her wishes to remain celibate as she was raised in a monastery. And to top it off, she requires no food except for a bit of semen every week. In 2020, the article was rewritten drastically— the author said he had wanted to for a while but couldn't himself and couldn't find anyone else to do the job right, either, until then.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • Many fans often claim that SCP-173 predates the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. However as noted here, the original SCP-173 entry was created on June 22, 2007 while "Blink", the episode of the Angels' debut, aired thirteen days earlier on June 9, 2007. Furthermore, the idea of a statue moving when unobserved isn't exactly original as the Weeping Angels themselves were based off the game Statues.
    • The appearance of the Foundation's logo in the Sesame Street short "NasCount" had some convinced that it was a deliberate subtle reference to the wiki... except this was aired several years before the SCP Foundation existed. The symbol appears to be part of an existing font or character set that the wiki creators borrowed from.
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: The Valravn Corporation was created by author KillerPoyo in order to comment on the effect real life PMCs had in her home country of Mexico, and it's generally agreed that while Poyo's characterization of them is well-done, most other authors treat it as a vehicle for, in the words of the author base, 'tacticool bullshit'.
  • Overshadowed by Controversy:
    • SCP-2137 was highly rated when it was first posted, due in no small part to the fact that it was written by screenwriter and director Max Landis; however, it's fallen out of favor since then, partly due to the fact that Landis had several credible allegations of sexual misconduct come out against him, which resulted in staff electing to ban him... a ban which he then circumvented due to a loophole in the Site's rules, allowing edits to be made to the article years after his ban. Several comments have since popped up pointing out how it doesn't make sense that the ghost of Tupac Shakur would help the police, as his murder has been unsolved for decades, and 'Fuck the Police' is such a common sentiment among rappers that it is literally the title of one of N.W.A's most famous songs.
    • The works of AdminBright are now increasingly rejected and overshadowed by the revelation that he had repeatedly committed sexual misconduct against multiple users, some of whom were underage, over the course of many years, with the content in some of his writings being reinterpreted as apologism for sexual abuse. It doesn't help that Bright was a notable figure in the early days of the SCP Foundation and had an extremely popular Author Avatar, Jack Bright, who was used extensively by fans and writers alike, so the revelation of his crimes led to many feeling extremely betrayed.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
    • Aside from the obvious, Class D personnel can be recruited from the general population if they run out of condemned prisoners. Of course, Depending on the Writer.
    • SCP-966 ("Sleep Killer"). They're invisible, hunt humans, and can be found all over the world. They also deprive their victims of sleep. Permanently.
    • Think that it would be bad if some of the SCPs got out and caused The End of the World as We Know It? This short story suggests that it's already happened. Multiple times.
    • SCP-198. You'll be picking up cups very gingerly for the next week or so.
    • An O5 note for SCP-231 states that those assigned to SCP-231 duty are given the option to take an amnestic when leaving the project. As this particular O5 states, if you work for the Foundation you could've been assigned these horrific responsibilities in the past and you simply don't remember it.
    • SCP-096. Any photograph you view could contain even a single pixel of it, and you don't even have to be consciously aware that you saw it—at that point, it'll hunt you down and end you. Then it'll go after all the unlucky schmucks who might've caught a glimpse of it while it was racing towards you, too!
    • SCP-650, though not apparently dangerous, literally does nothing but teleport right behind you as soon as you turn around to scare you. You'll always be waiting to see it whenever you turn to leave a room...
    • SCP-870, predatory monsters that are only visible to people with schizophrenia. And all sufferers describe them differently, so you can never tell if it's a hallucination or if one of the beasts really is there, waiting for its prey to be alone. Oh, and you may think they only target the people who can see them, right? They don't. Meaning that even if you're not schizophrenic, these things could be watching you. Right now. Waiting for the right moment to strike.
    • SCP-1889, especially for Calculus students. To think that you could be solving an innocuous word problem, and then suddenly being teleported to God-knows-where only to have your brain stolen by who-knows-what and the rest of your body chopped up and sent back as nicely-wrapped cubes of flesh.
    • Any time an amplified SCP from Kalinin's Proposal for SCP-001 is listed as uncontained.
    • SCP-2086. Big Creepy-Crawlies disguised as buses, who set up fake bus stops in order to capture commuters, then feed their organs and blood to their babies, who in turn use their mummified corpses as decoys.
    • In SCP-2718, it's mentioned that O5-11, prior to his death and subsequent revival, would take his vacations unexpectedly and in total solitude. When he died of a stroke and subsequently went through the unimaginably miserable afterlife, it happened in the relatively remote Galapagos Islands, where he was not discovered for over a decade. Suddenly, taking a vacation by yourself doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore, does it?
    • SCP-4975, which drives its human victims crazy with an incessant ticking sound not unlike that of a clock before attacking and eating them. It's contained, though, so everything should be fine, right? Nope, it can be in two places at once.
    • SCP-7034 is an anomalous stretch of traffic-jammed smoggy highway that ends in certain death, that seems to be accessed involuntarily just by driving on the Interstate Highway system. Your daily commute wouldn't happen to involve one of those highways, would it?
    • SCP-1763-EX, assuming it's real, is a gigantic monster that cannot be detected through any means and can bypass all obstructions. Furthermore, the people it eats are apparently erased from memory and records, meaning it could have killed an untold number of people with no one being the wiser.
  • Play-Along Meme:
    • There is no SCP-055 but, if there was one, it wouldn’t be a sphere.
    • Any time the fandom talks about me, SCP-426 ("I Am a Toaster"), you can bet they will invoke my anomalous properties by speaking of me solely in the first person.
    • Anyone writing about SCP-586 will inevitably make at least one shelling mistake per sentence.
    • Any direct reference to His Majesty's SCP-1561 causes any unworthy peasants writing or talking about it to describe it as befitting the King's ascended status.
    • ... -.-. .—. -....- ..—- ..... ..—- .—— / ... - . .- .-.. ... / — —- ... - / .. -. ..-. —- / .- -... —- ..- - / .. - ... . .-.. ..-. —..— / ... .—. —- -.- . -. —..— / .— .-. .. - - . -. / —- .-. / -.. .. —. .. - .- .-.. .-.-.- / - .... . / ... —- .-.. . / . -..- -.-. . .—. - .. —- -. / .. ... / .—. .. -.-. - —- —. .-. .- .—. .... .. -.-. / .. -. ..-. —- —..— / .— .... .. -.-. .... / .. - / -.. —- . ... -. .——. - / ... . . — / - —- / ..- -. -.. . .-. ... - .- -. -.. .-.-.- Translation In the Chinese community, comments about SCP-2521 will trail off as if SCP-2521 abducted the commenter in the middle of writ
    • Talking about the former library, SCP-2602, will inevitably result in many references to the fact that the ex-library was, in fact, a library.
    • SCP-7098 is a dumb thing that happens only at site 96 but its kinda like that 586 thing aboce only worse because it makes all the sentences bad and the splelling bad to and now anyone who trys to talk about the stupid thing sounds like a angry moran
      • we also cant talk about it like adults becuz it takes away basic writing protocal to
      • yeah i even tried to tell the admins about it but i was just told to stop bein lazy and not to engaje in nater
    • SCP-____-J is a rock that makes you procrastinate, fans commonly [[will add later]]
    • The first of Series V interacts badly with names, and the article refers to it and related entities with indirect descriptions and Rainbow Speak, a convention that fans will replicate in their own discussions.
  • Popular with Furries: Surprisingly, yes. There's a sizeable population of furries among the SCP Foundation userbase, including one of the co-authors of SCP-3000, several site administrators and moderators, and the third-most prolific author on the site. This actually goes back to the origins of the Foundation— Moto42, author of SCP-173, has a Furaffinity page.
    • Unsurprisingly, this has led to works such as SCP-3312, which can be summed up in its title: "OwO What's this?"
    • SCP-1471-A quickly grew popular with furries because it's more or less just an anthropomorphic dog (its "picture" is a real fursuit) who is absolutely and completely harmless (its "kill count" mostly involves someone committing suicide because she couldn't handle its stalking - less its fault directly because it's just what it does meaning no harm) and only wants to give and receive companionship. Most of the horror of its skull-faced head and glowing eyes has even endeared it to quite a few because Freaky Is Cool.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name: Often the case for ships in the SCP universe.
    • The ship of SCP-105 ("Iris") and Meri (SCP-166) is often just called IrisMeri.
    • Most of Clef's ship names goes like so, such as Clefdaki (Clef and Kondraki).

    R-W 
  • Realism-Induced Horror:
    • SCP-847, a sentient female mannequin created by Human Traffickers which acts submissive in the presence of men, breaks off parts of its body if it hears men making negative comments about them and leaves messages in its cell desperately begging for validation, is horrific largely because of its disturbing realistic portrayal of abuse and trafficking.
    • The true horror of SCP-2190 ("Phone Calls from Mom") is not the supernatural elements of it, but rather the extent of cruelty that a spiteful and narcissistic old woman was willing to go to ruin her own daughter's life. While alive, POI-2190-1 would spread rumors about her daughter's family, accusing said daughter's husband of abusing her and their son, and even hiring thugs to assault her in order to make the rumors look plausible. Dying and becoming a ghost did not make her any better nor worse, merely allowing her to continue her cruel treatment of them from beyond the grave. Bonus points for being set in the Philippines, where this kind of familial abuse is soul-crushingly common in real life.
    • SCP-2271 ("Factory Loans") is rooted in the fear of having an enormous financial debt that you're just not in any shape to pay off on the lender's terms. Granted, malevolent debt notices warning you of impossibly-large debts and which will inevitably kill you for non-payment don't exist in real life, but in real life, there are many malicious and sadistic ways for lenders and the people they employ to shake down their debtors. This trope is lampshaded by djkaktus in the discussion for this SCP:
      "If you're too young to appreciate it yet, consider yourself fortunate. Debt sucks."
    • SCP-3512 ("The More You Know") satirizes pick-up artists and their misogynistic attitudes through monstrous beings brainwashing women into becoming sex dolls. Excerpts from a self-help book on becoming such monsters outright advise readers to stop thinking of hot women as people, and think of them as instruments. And in one of the logs, a SCP agent who is brainwashed by one of the monsters is just as quickly discarded once it's done with her. As noted in the discussion, the fact that some guys do think of women like sex toys to be used and disposed is what provides the entry with its horror as much as the Body Horror and descriptions of disgusting viscera.
    • With SCP-4319 ("By Girls, For Girls"), the horror comes less from the anomalous properties of the blog and more from the blog's mastermind, Kee Lee, being depicted as a Female Misogynist determined to enforce her bigoted (especially misogyny, transphobia, antisemitism and homophobia) idea of "femininity" on everyone and how she'll gladly abuse and brainwash anyone who disagrees with her. Though her powers are obviously outside their ability in real life, the bigotry, abuse tactics and manipulations Kee Lee displays are very real, and quite widespread on the internet as well.
    • SCP-6140 ("The True Empire"), turns the Daevite Empire into a cautionary tale about the dangers of Orientalism; turns out, an entire innocent nation was erased from history because a Victorian man named Thomas Bruce was so prejudiced that he'd rather they be horrific monsters than a functioning civilization that just so happened to be Asian and matriarchal. The only real difference between Bruce and "anthropologists" who demonized non-European cultures was that he was able to anomalously affect said culture's actual history with his book.
    • SCP-8176, despite being an Alternate Continuity of the Class of '76 and their vaguely-eldritch dealings, has most of its horror rooted in how its current state is the result of Dr. Kondraki taking out his famously-violent and old-fashioned tendencies out on the wrong people. While the five high school students his team accosted were dangerous cultists, it's all but stated Kondraki killed them for no reason other than because he could. Additionally, one of the murders was both racially motivated and a product of untreated PTSD — both very real dangers.
    • SCP-8980 is frightening not because of the anomaly itself, a female programmer working for the Foundation who turned herself in after realizing she had somehow turned into a Walking Techbane who causes electronics to malfunction in embarrassing and potentially dangerous ways, but rather due to how she's treated during her containment. Her boss, Christopher Byrnes, starts off looking like a decent guy, despite a few sexist microaggressions here and there, but this gradually escalates to severe abuse lasting for nearly a decade, which ultimately leaves poor Lillian horribly traumatized. Even worse, it's implied that Lillian's anomalous properties never existed in the first place, and that Christopher was the one messing with all of her devices as a form of Gaslighting just so he could bend her to his will. In the end, he also ends up as a Karma Houdini, as his abuse is only discovered after he'd retired, a process that involves complete amnesticization of activities performed during SCP employment, meaning that he can't be punished since he doesn't even remember he did anything wrong. The ending, where the person assigned to care for Lillian as she recovers admits that they secretly hate her and view her as a frustrating burden, is an especially awful Tear Jerker. This article has been praised as a harrowing description of workplace abuse women often face.
    • "The Nuclear Option", a tale by Captain Kirby, is focused on examining exactly what the consequences of the ubiquitous on-site nuclear warheads detonating in one of the many early articles that listed it as a final failsafe against a containment breach. Rather than focusing on whatever horrifying thing caused the breach, the story examines just how horrifying a nuclear blast is in the real world, heavily inspired by the author visiting Hiroshima and seeing it firsthand.
      Narrator: But that was fifty years ago. And nobody properly understood the scope of urban sprawl. The winding tendrils of suburbia that stretched across developed nations. Now, a major highway runs by Site-17. Real estate developers build up the swamp surrounding Site-23.

      This site is only 3 miles away from a middle school.
    • In "SCUTTLE", the Foundation is in a massive panic as the dead-hand system responsible for handling the various on-site nuclear warheads suddenly breaks down, leaving them scrambling for some sort of fix... but in the end, they fail. And all of this happened because the Foundation insisted on continuing to use a computer system and associated program that's decades old, leaving them with almost no experts on-hand who could maintain the system until a catastrophic failure occurred.
    • The Department of Continuity is a deliberate microcosm of the shifting sentiment that the Foundation as an organization bears an uncomfortable (if unintentional) resemblance to actual authoritarian regimes. Many associated SCPs feature them or characters complicit in their ideals (such as the Site-17 Deepwell Catalogue version of Jeremiah Cimmerian) dismissing or even facilitating societal injustice for the purpose of maintaining the Foundation's mission, which conveniently allows them to control the world.
  • Replacement Scrappy:
    • The rewritten version of SCP-049. While highly-rated, there's a vocal part of the fanbase that prefers the old version (which is still archived on the site, thankfully) and thinks that the changes done to the article serve no real purpose other than embellishing a fairly simple anomaly.
    • Dr. Elias Shaw essentially serves as a Serial Numbers Filed Off replacement for Dr. Jack Bright. Bright is not looked upon fondly due to their author using Bright’s popularity to commit sexual harassment with multiple victims (Including minors), and the idea that replacing Bright with Shaw wholesale fixes the problems with the character is looked upon as naive at best. Shaw was created in good faith, but ultimately, the advice for writing him in the modern day amounts to "Don't". Shaw himself would ultimately be replaced by the character Dr. Lachlan "Lach" Cairns.
  • The Scrappy: Decommissioned SCPs. All of them were originally SCPs that were received extremely poorly on the site, so badly in fact that they were turned into -D articles that mocked them. Particularly hated Decommissioned SCPs included:
    • SCP-083-D. He relies too heavily on vampire archetypes that he comes off as unoriginal and being generally treated incredibly well by the normally paranoid Foundation. There was even an entire short story dedicated to his death.
    • SCP-531-D. A murderous pervert who’s killed a massive number of people in emotional fits and takes advantage of the Foundation's appeasement policy to coerce female staff into sex, with the only characterization beyond that being he (apparently) loves his mom, which is brought up for five seconds.
    • SCP-809-D. He’s nothing but a self-insert who only exists to date SCP-808. Being a one-note character with few interesting features also doesn’t help.
  • Seasonal Rot:
    • The wiki as a whole is occasionally accused of going through this by the off-site fanbase. Some complaints include Continuity Lock-Out (as the more popular later articles have a tendency to be very self-referential and thus demand a lot of knowledge of prior articles and tales), articles about SCPs feeling more like tales, articles going outside of the established format more often, articles going beyond "Here's a weird object that does a weird and/or spooky thing", and articles simply dragging on too long and/or going far beyond the initial premise (SCP-9002, for instance, starts off as a bicycle that makes you racist, then becomes a bicycle that can cause The End of the World as We Know It).
    • Extended collaboration logs and their associated narratives can theoretically go on infinitely, but it's generally agreed that even with external intervention, ones that stick around for too long experience noticeable declines in quality. Though they are meant to be pruned regularly by MAST, the sheer number and length of new submissions (coupled with MAST's other priorities) has rendered this unsustainable, leaving them out in the open.
    • The SCP-914 logs and the subcommunity surrounding them have significant amounts of drift from the rest of the on-site community, who often view the former as an estranged group engaging in thinly-veiled roleplaying through researchers with the minds of bored college students. To their credit, though, this is lampshaded often, and the logs' current state is also sometimes described as the best-case scenario for their continued persistence (they used to be unmoderated before Leveritas stepped in.)
    • SCP-3922 is a device that summons the Three Moons Initiative to invade media recordings and attempt to punish any wrongdoing in them. Although the intent of the extended logs was to serve as a Deconstructive Parody of literal fiction police, there are concerns from authors that it has since decayed into on-site crossover fanfics that ignore this narrative to the point of repetition. While this normally isn't a problem on its own, the crossover aspect specifically is a point of strife due to the site clamping down on its conflict with CC-BY-SA in The New '20s, and the actual content of each test began to be more strictly regulated by Voct in spring 2024 (prior to being banned for flaming out over WRATHCON, resulting in AlienSpaceBat inheriting the role a year later) to return it to its roots.
    Voct: (regarding their role as curator of the second volume) Too many of these are powerscaling bullshit. As Djoric said, "the same joke repeated". That's boring. [...] We know [the Three Moons Initiative] can be a bulldozer. Can they be a Swiss Army Knife?
  • Self-Fanservice:
    • Looking at the fanart for SCP-173, it's either a horrifying Humanoid Abomination, an Ugly Cute Living Statue who only wants a hug, or a cute girl with a Sugar-and-Ice Personality.
    • Speaking of Moe Anthropomorphism, some of the other SCPs also got the same treatment. Some are mild, like Iris and 053 who are simply drawn in a cuter style, or 191 who usually gets her the missing mouth back and less severe wounds. The most bizarre case would be 682 as a Cute Monster Girl.
    • SCP-073 and SCP-076-2 are often depicted as Bishonens or Hunks in fanart. Not to mention, 076-2 is usually depicted as wearing nothing but a(n admittedly very long) loincloth. Or less.
    • SCP-040 is, for whatever reason, most commonly depicted as an Elegant Gothic Lolita.
    • SCP-999 is a friendly blob of orange slime with the power to induce happiness and cure depression. Its article doesn't say anything about it having a face (with the creator's official art giving it none), but fanartists always draw it with one to make it even cuter.
    • SCP-811 is almost often times depicted as a cheerful/excitable Cute Monster Girl who acts like a puppy.
    • SCP-239 is often depicted as a Cute Witch.
    • SCP-1471-A is, rather infamously, subject to a lot of sexy fanart, particularly by SCP fans who also happen to be furrys. This is perhaps unsurprisingly, as the photo for the article is actually a fursuit. Also, despite how creepy they appear to be, 1471-A is by all accounts a harmless SCP only seeking to befriend those subjected to its anomalous effects, making it easier for fans to see it as "waifu material".
    • Dr. Clef is usually portrayed as quite handsome, despite all the evidence that he's probably... not.
    • Similar to the above, Dr. Bright is often depicted as very handsome and attractive... even though he's completely bonkers, not to mention ignoring that some of his host bodies have been orangutans.
    • SCP-2747, the Anafabulanote , has a number of fanarts portraying the story-eating abomination as a pale woman in a black dress, given how it's/she's referred to with titles such as "The Lady of Black Thorns" or "The Queen of the Void" on multiple occasions.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Some of the Decommissioned SCPs are hilarious in just how absurd they are; such as SCP-106-D, a perpetually smiling woman who explodes with the force of a 20kt nuke when she jabs her finger into someone's navel; or SCP-269-D, who is a giant moose man.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • The image for SCP-7398 is meant to be a smartphone launching the Cabbybara app. However, the screen is clearly drawn (e.g. in an image-editing software without any touch-ups) over the phone's screen.note 
    • Some of the page images for SCP-7999 are very obviously fake looking. In particlar, the security camera footage shows a "wormhole" into space that's somehow impossibly darker than the sky itself, and the astronomical bodies inside aren't much better, with one being an obvious flat gradient and the other being a photograph of the sun that isn't illuminating the sky in any way. The other edited image is also very poorly designed, not only does the scenery look pasted together in photoshop, but the wormhole is still darker than the sky, and the Earth seen through is very clearly just "The Blue Marble".
    • All portrayals of Dr. Vera Lovelace and her associates are clearly CG renders that make them look more like game characters, despite them being intended to be actual photographs.
  • Spiritual Adaptation:
    • The Foundation has several excellent big-name adaptations:
      • The Cabin in the Woods basically becomes a straight adaptation once it's revealed what the Controllers' mission actually is, even depicting a containment breach and an XK-class end-of-the-world-event at the end.
      • Warehouse 13 is a Lighter and Softer version, perfect for those who feel that the actual Foundation stories can get too depressing.
      • To a lesser extent, Stranger Things counts as this, as the series pretty much sounds like it came out of the Foundation's archives, with the Demogorgon basically being a slightly less malicious version of SCP-106 (in that it doesn't cause as much Body Horror) and the series' own working title was "Montauk."
      • Control (2019)'s Federal Bureau of Control is tasked with locating, securing and containing various supernatural phenomena, maintaining warehouses stuffed with various Objects of Power/SCPs, seeking to maintain the Masquerade but undermined by slightly suspicious upper management, leaving documentation lying around that has tons of redactions and always starts with whether the Object has any special containment procedures, and constantly vulnerable to containment breaches. The developers cited the SCP Foundation as an inspiration for the game, and it shows.
      • TENET is pretty close to an unofficial SCP Foundation movie. Anomalous materials with strange properties that pose a threat to existence, as well as a massive global conspiracy and a secret organisation that uses military grade gear and has connections around the globe. Helps that time manipulation is actually a part of the SCP Universe.
      • Inside Job (2021) has been semi-jokingly, semi-seriously described as a Denser and Wackier take on the SCP Foundation, thanks to both works being set in a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink and are primarily focused on a morally-bankrupt America-based N.G.O. Superpower (Cognito Inc. and the SCP Foundation respectively) dedicated to upholding The Masquerade for mysterious reasons, has a staff full of various eclectic and dangerous paranormal and human entities, and is overseen by a shadowy Omniscient Council of Vagueness whose members are Ambiguously Human (the Shadow Board/Council and O5 Council). Many fans have even argued that the gradual Cerebus Syndrome seen in Inside Job despite its ostensibly absurd premise and characters is a reflection of how the SCP Foundation itself was a pretty goofy collaborative writing project before the Mass Edit caused it to gain a more or less consistently serious approach and higher standard of writing quality.
    • SCP-231-J is basically a Lighter and Softer version of SCP-2271, featuring a debt so high that it's censored out and the Foundation getting caught up in the mess.
    • SCP-7034 reads like a Spiritual Antithesis to SCP-3008. Both are about humans ending up in an endless Eldritch Location that resembles structures made by humans, but in significantly different ways:
      • SCP-3008 is a massive indoor location that by itself doesn't seem to have any harmful effects on its inhabitants. SCP-7034 is a massive outdoor location where the very air is hazardous.
      • SCP-3008 features a number of Humanoid Abomination entities that are out to get the humans. SCP-7034 has no native life forms that goes after humans.
      • In SCP-3008, the humans get along well and form rudimentary villages and trade networks to ensure their collective survival, partly helped by the endless items in the "store" that are available to them. While the people of SCP-7034 do try to collaborate to help each other out, it doesn't last long and everyone goes back to looking after themselves, even attacking and killing one another out of a desparate sense of self-preservation, and if they can find food, it's usually off of other humans and long spoiled.
  • Spiritual Successor: Comes with the territory of the wiki having lasted for so long online.
    • SCP-4100 is one for the now-deleted Tale "5700 Years Later", which also dealt with humanity fleeing an abandoned Earth due to rampaging SCPs and managing to take out a hostile god-like entity in the process.
    • invoked SCP-4231 is one to both "Major Tom" and "Portraits of Your Father," two Tales both created by the SCP article's author that took several "titans" of site lorenote  and darkly analyzed them while looking into what made them the men they are today.
    • SCP-4444 as a whole is one to the goofier early SCP articles and Tales focused around Author Avatars and Mad Scientists, such as "Incident 239-B" and "Duke 'till Dawn".
    • In a weird way, SCP-4960 is one to Dr. Shaw's 001 Proposal in how it serves as an Origin Story for both the Foundation & some of its GOIs while taking place in the early twentieth century & being colored by the prejudices of the time. Abernathy even fits nicely into the role of the O5 from Shaw's Proposal as the narrator of the 4960 article through his letters.
    • SCP-5031 can be seen as one towards SCP-3114, as both are articles based around taking a stereotypical "murder monster" SCP concept and humanizing the subject by highlighting the underlying tragedy of their situations.
    • SCP-8980 can be considered one to SCP-4051, sharing themes of ordinary, good people being systematically abused after containment. The latter's author, Nagiros, even expressed that the former was "everything [they] intended with 4051 but never quite accomplished" in the comment section of 8980.
    • SCP-9280 is, in a lot of ways, a successor to SCP-7046. Both revolve around a member of the Church of the Second Hytoth and recount the circumstances that caused them to break their religion's greatest taboo and offer unwilling blood. In addition, several Foundation employees (Dir. Forrester, Dir. Morgan, and Dir Willard) appear in both.
  • Squick:
    • One Bad Mother, written by Dr. Mann. Combining Mister Seahorse with Herr Chirurg, two-into-one body grafting and one of the most mentally depraved individuals the Foundation boasts was sure to lead to a lot of vomiting. It's played for laughs, though, and non-canon because no way in hell would the Foundation allow anyone (specifically two men) to start an active relationship with an SCP like Herr Chirurg, let alone bear their child. But still...
    • The former SCP-2678, which drew comparisons to SCP-835, was created in response to a joke question one of the authors got on their tumblr: "Is their(sic) a vore SCP yet?" SCP-2678's horror comes in two parts: in part one the D-class is "dosed" and happily submits to the "pit", its Naughty Tentacles, and its liquefying, uh, liquids (it's missing the "squeezing" that usually happens) while part two subverts all the fetish-y-ness of vore: the thing's aphrodisiac is gone, the D-class is terrified and disgusted, the "pit" isn't interested in having fun, and it's implied the people who were "eaten" have become living excrement, not the unified being the cult that summoned the pit (or that the pit sought out) was hoping for.
      Cyantreuse: Kaktus (another author) said he had an idea. I said "Oh god no." Then right after that I said "Collab."
    • SCP-2610 comes with a graphic content warning:
      SCP-2610-A's "Angel": He has provided for you the Whore of His Deliverance,
      in your own blood she is born.
      Her womb will open for your seed and the seed of your offspring,
      and their seed upon their seed,
      until the Earth is made anew in His Image.
    • There are a load of works that invoke dental horror. Standouts include SCP-478 and SCP-1994, both involving teeth growing at places where they shouldn't be growing.
    • SCP-3307 will make you hesitate to eat for a short while after you read it; as it is a human male (a former Task Force member, at that) that regurgitates the favorite food of whoever he can see. Solid foods come out of the mouth or the ass, liquid foods and drinks are peed out, and the testing log shows that this regurgitated, intact food is still realisticly subject to digestive fluids given where they come out through.
      D-14873: They don't expect us to eat this shit, do they?
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: SCP-5167 was understandably controversial and many felt that its Hard Truth Aesop was needlessly obfuscated along with the whole article being far too short for it to have much of an impact. In contrast, its Sequel Episode SCP-5761 has been significantly better liked, with it being praised for fully embracing its absurd premise in the name of some genuinely hilarious comedy, its greater length providing more of an interesting dive into its cast of characters (all of which are granted a stronger narrative depth and interest), and the Classical Mythology references along with the Hard Truth Aesop of how Living Is More than Surviving and people have to be willing to embrace an unknown future to do so being better conveyed to the reader(s) and mitigating its (now fully intentional) Unintentional Period Piece status.
  • Tainted by the Preview: In the middle of June 2024's Pride Fest, Contest Staff announced WRATHCON, a contest where the sole remaining entry would be the winner, and everything else would be deleted. Between the dissmissive attitude of staff members in the comment section, people not willing to enter a work that they weren't willing to lose permanently (the contest rules outright said 'no reposting allowed') and the fact that the tagline for the contest was originally "PRIDE IS DEAD UPVOTES ARE FUEL THE WIKI IS FULL" during the middle of a Pride Month event, several people announced their intent to skip the contest entirely, with at least one prominent author announcing a hiatus after calling for the staff running the contest to be disciplined. It's the only contest page to ever dip into the negatives due to the backlash, but due to it being a 'staff' page, it's not subjected to normal deletion procedures. While the contest allegedly went off without a hitch, several queer members of the community still feel slighted by the fact that anyone running it thought it was a good idea to announce it in the middle of Pride Month, let alone actually go through with the contest after the massive backlash it had.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
    • In early 2019, SCP-106 got new pictures, due to wiki moderators more stringently enforcing image policy that disallows the use of copyrighted/unsourceable images. To say their reception was mixed was an understatement, and the images had to be updated several times due to feedback. Then it was discovered that one of the images was partially plagiarized and had to be replaced yet again.
    • And then there was the reaction to SCP-682's photo needing to be replaced as well, resulting in the iconic skull for a head look being replaced with just a giant whale carcass lying prone on a beach somewhere. To say fans were displeased would be putting it mildly.
    • To put it bluntly, the decision to remove the original picture of SCP-173 thanks to the wiki's complicated relationship with the Creative Commons license and wanting to avoid copyright issues has gone over like a lead balloon, with many complaining that other avenues could've been taken to preserve the now-iconic original image while still respecting international copyright law.
    • Some people weren't happy with the rewrite of SCP-031, which turned it into what they feel is a basically In Name Only generic hostile monster.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: SCP-5999 is a series of seemingly-disparate stories contained within six headers. They're all intentionally disparate so as to keep the reader hooked and watch the lethal memetic agent at the end... which is where some of the criticism of the article comes from, that each story seems as if it could be its own separate and more complete SCP.
  • Too Oblique, Stopped Caring:
    • In general, this has become one of the most common criticisms of the site in the late 2010s and onward. A significant number of new articles are essentially tales by a different name, tend to be long, meta-driven, and self-referential, often requiring knowledge of the site's extensive library of articles, tales, and entire canons to get the most out of them. Even the lightest ones often need the reader to at least know about the writer's other contributions in order to fully appreciate the context of what's going on.
    • SCP-2212 is one of the oldest puzzle-based SCPs on the site, but it has a relatively low rating despite that, for three reasons: Firstly, the author never finished it, so even a decade later, the puzzles are incomplete. Secondly, the article predates SCP authors figuring out how to squeeze interactive elements out of Wikidot's antiquated code base, so the puzzles have to be solved using pen and paper— and for a period of over a year, the puzzles outright didn't work on Chromium browsers due to a bug with HTTPS validation. Thirdly, even if the puzzles do get solved, that's all the article has going for it; the anomaly is rather bare-bones, and as stated earlier, it's spent a decade on the site in an unfinished state.
    • SCP-2718 has a lot of incredibly cryptic buildup for the payoff that the afterlife is an anomaly, as humans are trapped within their own bodies, constantly suffering as they decay. Some consider the buildup to be far too melodramatic for its own good with an underwhelming payoff.
    • SCP-5000 was the winner of a contest themed around mystery, but some users have accused it of being purpose-built with several references to other prominent works in order to hide a somewhat underwhelming reveal that has been interpreted as empathy and other emotions being anomalies in mankind, and the Foundation dedicates itself to exterminating humanity to rid themselves of it, due to discovering... something in humanity's collective unconscious that shouldn't be there.
    • Poufy's SCP-001 proposal spent far longer than most SCP-001 articles in limbo before being added to the main hub due to a near-perfect 50% postive-negative vote ratio (meaning its score was stuck in the single digits), caused by (civil) debates over whether or not its unconventional storytelling was appropriate for the SCP document format.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic:
    • For many, the D-Class personnel. Even though they're supposed to be heinous criminals, one will likely still feel sorry for the way they get used as human guinea pigs to be horrifically maimed and killed, just to satisfy the curiosities of amoral mad scientists. It doesn't help that there are numerous cases of prison labor done throughout history if not ongoing (Most famously in Nazi and Japanese forced labor camps during world war two), and that Foundation outright admits that in case of shortages, they will recruit lesser criminals and innocent people to use as D-class.
    • SCP-4338, the murderous volcano god, ends the story defeated, demotivated, and outrageously fat, which was meant to be his punishment for being a tyrannical, childish asshole. However, the creator of the article was rather pleasantly surprised to learn that people felt bad for him, hypothesizing that the nature of 4338's sorry state may have struck a chord with readers, particularly those who know the struggle of weight loss. Adding further fuel to the fire, 4338's closing speech, while clearly narcissistic and capped off with a proclamation of "should have killed you", is unintentionally written in a way that it comes off as poignant.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Children of the Scarlet King as they appear in Tufto's Proposal, where people were bothered that the narrative seemed to support the Children's anarcho-primitivist ideals by portraying the Children's arguments eloquently while highlighting the coldness of modernity. Late on, the article's author Tufto had to clarify that the Children were intended to be portrayed as in the wrong overall and he has since expressed regret for making them too sympathetic.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: SCP-2747 makes reference to a fictitious work with an equally ficitious reference to TV Tropes Wiki itself, with the work in question having What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs? as one of the tropes listed. Written in 2016, it became dated when that trope was renamed to Quirky Work (and consolidated with Widget Series) in 2023.
  • Unpopular Popular Character:
    • Dr. Clef is often portrayed as standoffish and enough of a jackass that several accounts of his death have his coworkers and superiors spit on his grave, but the Audience Awareness Advantage in regards to his Dark and Troubled Past and what he's actually pulled off in spite of that has made him one of the most iconic characters on the site.
    • As noted by Dr. Sherman of the Site-42 roleplay vlog and alluded to in articles proper, Dr. Vera Lovelace would be unbelievably frustrating to deal with as an in-universe Foundation researcher: she's morally & emotionally stunted (routinely failing Ethics Committee testing and being incapable of feeling any type of angst), has a Sickeningly Sweet aura of positivity and kindness that would be a total farce if it came from a human, is effectively the worst containment failure SCP-1471 has had in ages, generates enough paperwork to cause a logistical crisis, and yet despite all that is given a cushy job because she's just that smart and powerful to the point where she becomes a Physical God able to exist beyond the setting's multiverse in SCP-9471. Out-of-universe, however, the Foundational Parasite series she stars in as the main protagonist has been universally praised as one of the best modern explorations of a classic-era SCP on the wiki.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Linger around in the fandom for long enough, and you'll probably run into discourse calling out how absurdly powerful several characters from the Chinese branch are, either in contempt or misguided praise. This is, however, largely a product of viewing the relevant articles through a Western Genre Blind lens, unfamiliar with the themes they draw upon. In mainland China where the articles were written, one would instead view them as part of the Spirit Cultivation Genre, a very popular form of fantasy in the country inspired by mythology and historical figures. With that in mind, the characters in these stories become Genre Refugees telling a more straightforward arc within the rest of the site's Genre Roulette. However, as the Spirit Cultivation Genre and similar "Progression Fantasy" based stories have become increasingly popular in the west overtime, even those who understand their inspirations have come to deride them for attempting to build the Foundation setting around what is perceived as a genre held in similar contempt to Isekai, LitRPG, and similar power fantasy laden genres.
    • The Chinese tale A Broken Ode to Transcendence contains a reference to the RPC Authority that implies one of the consequences of Adabas (Yaldaboath), Holos (Mekhane), and the Scarlet Demon duking it out in narrative space was the two wikis spontaneously forming a crossover. While the international branches of both sites are generally unaware of the drama that led to the Authority's formation, EN's knowledge and their stance on the matter means the reference would likely have been considered completely unacceptable if the tale were written for English audiences first.
  • Viewer Name Confusion: Metanormalcy is not the "Absolute Boundless Supernormal State" (ABSS for short.) These are mistranslations and misunderstandings of the narration describing its origins and nature from SCP-CN-2510, and the only other appropriate official term for it is its original Chinese name, the "Supernormal."
  • Vindicated by History: SCP-4503 was formerly SCP-503-ARC, relegated to archival status due to being necessary in explaining a relatively popular tale, despite reaching the deletion threshold. It hit +100 in August 2018, and in January 2019, it became the first (and so far only) Archived SCP to be put back onto the mainlist.
  • Woolseyism: The popular Comedy Horror tale Bees revolves around the diary-turned-Apocalyptic Log of an Unlucky Everydude having problems with things around him beecoming bees. The combination of Black Humor and Surreal Horror that make it one of the highest rated tales on the site rely quite a bit on wordplay as "bee" words invade the text, meaning that translations of this article sometimes require a little creativity:
    • The French translation turned the story's signature Madness Mantra of "What if bees..." into "Et si les abeilles...": a tongue-twister that easily turns into "Abeilles abeilles"("Bees bees")
    • The Russian translation, meanwhile, evaded the issue of пчелы not having the same potential for wordplay by changing bees to wasps- оса- and tweaking some of the jokes: throwing bees replacing throwing beads at Mardi Gras, for instance, turned to throwing wasps replacing "осаться снежками" (pelting each other with snowballs).
    • On the other side, the Chinese site's SCP-CN-296 renders all its text in Chinese characters to show the anomaly's effects (people affected by it cannot write in Latin letters). To show this off in English, the version from The SCP International Translation Archive wrote it in a font resembling Chinese characters.

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