Lou_change
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Bump can this be added or are we still waiting for @Iapitus_The_Impaler
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Some Clef additions
- Thread starter AlephNullscp
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- dr. clef scp foundation
Lou_change
He/Him- 10,122
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Bump
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Okay, I have a proposition: I think Clef should for one, be an exception to our normal site rules, and thus consequently have a key for both his alternate personalities and for his other primary interpretation.
I should preface by saying that I have spent a good amount of time on the SCP wiki (as previously a reader, and now a writer), and have become pretty intimately familiar with how both the writers and readers (at least of those who interact with the site directly) view the site, as well as how their site standards regard canon and their characters. This doesn't necessarily make my argument more valid but I hope it at least gives some verification that I am not just talking out of my ass or working off of some grossly limited data set, so to speak.
I will start by stating frankly that our current site standards regarding SCP are meant to mimic the nature in which characters exist on the wiki. We treat them as functionally Composite, because for most characters, this is more or less an accurate representation of how they are treated on the SCP Wiki. Bright, for example, has numerous forms and bodies, and even across multiple universes in some extreme cases, but they are all still ultimately regarded as the same character, Dr. Bright. The bright who uses the conceptual pointer to attempt to relieve himself of violently ******** himself is generally regarded by the SCP wiki as the same bright who tried to murder the Swann entities, and here we in the same fashion view them as the same character of "Dr. Bright" even if they theoretically could have been alternate counterparts of each other. Some characters are cleaner, like Marion Wheeler existing primarily in a series or two and then a couple of other side articles.
Now that we have the Rule, let's talk about the Exception.
Clef is one of the only characters that I would say has two established versions of the character that are equally valid in the mind of the wiki (both writer and reader). This isn't just some accident either. I am brushing over a lot of stuff for the sake of brevity, but Clef's character was created with this ambiguity in mind, of course due in no small part to him being a massive liar (I see this has been somewhat mentioned in this thread, but I will reiterate). I don't mean how we sometimes refer to characters on VSB, where maybe we call the validity of a statement somewhat into question if someone like Kumagawa says it. With Clef, the default general trust that if a character gives exposition you can be someone certain the author is trying to accurately convey exposition is completely out the window. Most of the time you cannot even say if you are supposed to be able to tell if he is lying or not. Even if he says that he was lying, that itself can be taken as a lie as well. He is also a man of half truths and deception, not only flat out lies. Is Clef a reality bender? Is Clef a reality sink and/or Anchor? Is Clef actually Satan? Is Clef an inherited title?
This was all left up to interpretation, as many things are on the SCP wiki, to allow readers to form their own headcanon. But on the SCP wiki, readers become writers, and headcanon becomes "actual" canon in the process. Ultimately as long as "Clef is a badass, scummy Type-Green-hunter with resistance to anomalies" (also the animal head photo thing) remained consistent, it remains as Clef. Sometimes Clef is a reality bender who doesn't regularly use his powers outside of suppressing others, and sometimes he is flat out a reality sink. Sometimes he has reality-warping due to being a Type Green, and sometimes he has it due to being the devil himself. And despite how odd it may sound, outside of story-specific cases where authors try to specifically delve into Clef's backstory, these things don't usually matter to how Clef is treated or thought of as a character. Often you can even walk into these stories and have these mutually exclusive views and have them both fit.
I also want to go ahead and dash any hopes we may have of choosing the more "consistent" choice between the two. Even within the same story, different readers can walk away concluding that it both supported and refuted Clef being a reality bender. A great (and short) example is Clef's seminar on fighting type greens. Did he just reality bend the whole room, then lie about it after? Did he just drug everyone there and trick them into thinking he was bending reality? Even I personally have read this article a couple of months apart and thought it was supporting each one at different times. If we can't even determine what many articles are pointing at, we have no way to determine which is more popular. In addition, both interpretations do not work completely consistently. Let's look at this from both sides:
Despite Clef being a reality sink/anchor, he is able to both use and interact with anomalous weaponry for prolonged periods of time, and sit in the presence anomalous entities without them falling apart like the blackhole of the supernatural he is supposed to be. Not to mention the other anomalous properties he is supposed to have himself, like the animal head photograph thing. In one case that comes to mind, even in the kaktus verse where he is directly stated to be a reality sink, an article connected into it has him make the sun blink.
Despite Clef being a reality bender/type green, he does things that we know Type greens shouldn't be able to do. Unlike a lot of verses where the nature of reality bending and its mechanics are left a bit up in the air, we have very specific mechanics on what they can and cannot do; their weaknesses and areas of control. The GOC's Pamphlet (here is one article where they have some excerpts) on the matter is one of our best in universe sources, and it has been used in multiple articles out of universe. Now, to be clear, these rules do not hold for all reality benders, but the 5 percent that these do not hold for are, to put it frankly, completely outside the weight class of the feats we have for Clef's reality bending capabilities. Thus, we can reasonably assume that these rules and limitations hold for him. So, Let's start with Clef's most common use of reality bending: passively nullifying the anomalous. And here we already run into several problem. First, reality bending is explicitly stated to be thought based. Second, it is stated that regardless of level, they can be taken by surprise. Third (related to the 2nd), reality benders cannot effect what they cannot perceive. Fourth, reality benders cannot effect things without the will to do so. If something is thought based, requires will, active perception, and can be bypassed via a close-range surprise attack, that certainly is not a passive ability lol. To double down on this, presumably Clef has been able to sleep during his time since they took the witch child into custody, yet evidently does not fall victim to her reality shifts even while unconscious (just a reminder that the witch child's reality bending works a lot by belief, so unless they have been sleeping at exactly the same times every night, he would fall within her domain of control).
In some sense, Clef is the exception that proves the rule, which is why I think it is okay to have him have the keys for his alternate personalities and also a reality sink/anchor interpretation. Obviously we can toss a note on the profile to clarify the situation. Regardless of which of the two interpretation we go with for a single unified profile, we end up cutting off a decent chunk or at the very worst cherry picking only the feats and portrayals that support this version. Unlike most cases, that is also very likely to be a large portion of Clef's total features. Thus, the most consistent and accurate interpretation is to include both on the profile, and trying to stick with just one is a fool's errand on multiple fronts. Most of the time if a Foundation staff member is attributed the ability to, say, conjure fire in one story, and the ability to BFR people under the wanderer's library, we can just all attribute it to one key as they are not mutually exclusive. When a character does have some contradictory feats that don't fit within the usual view, we can just toss it out as an outlier. Clef is one of the few cases where he can somehow have two mutually exclusive abilities that are accepted as the "primary" interpretation, that can have numerous articles cited in support or opposition to both sides. And just to reiterate this again: most of Clef's articles work for him being either a reality bender or a reality anchor. If our goal with our canon standards are to align with how the characters are on the wiki, then for Clef, it should be acceptable to portray him as the anomaly in the system that he is. I would also raise that since these versions of Clef are interchangeable the vast majority of the time, it would be fine to scale him outside of specifically his feats for his reality bending and sink stuff
I should preface by saying that I have spent a good amount of time on the SCP wiki (as previously a reader, and now a writer), and have become pretty intimately familiar with how both the writers and readers (at least of those who interact with the site directly) view the site, as well as how their site standards regard canon and their characters. This doesn't necessarily make my argument more valid but I hope it at least gives some verification that I am not just talking out of my ass or working off of some grossly limited data set, so to speak.
I will start by stating frankly that our current site standards regarding SCP are meant to mimic the nature in which characters exist on the wiki. We treat them as functionally Composite, because for most characters, this is more or less an accurate representation of how they are treated on the SCP Wiki. Bright, for example, has numerous forms and bodies, and even across multiple universes in some extreme cases, but they are all still ultimately regarded as the same character, Dr. Bright. The bright who uses the conceptual pointer to attempt to relieve himself of violently ******** himself is generally regarded by the SCP wiki as the same bright who tried to murder the Swann entities, and here we in the same fashion view them as the same character of "Dr. Bright" even if they theoretically could have been alternate counterparts of each other. Some characters are cleaner, like Marion Wheeler existing primarily in a series or two and then a couple of other side articles.
Now that we have the Rule, let's talk about the Exception.
Clef is one of the only characters that I would say has two established versions of the character that are equally valid in the mind of the wiki (both writer and reader). This isn't just some accident either. I am brushing over a lot of stuff for the sake of brevity, but Clef's character was created with this ambiguity in mind, of course due in no small part to him being a massive liar (I see this has been somewhat mentioned in this thread, but I will reiterate). I don't mean how we sometimes refer to characters on VSB, where maybe we call the validity of a statement somewhat into question if someone like Kumagawa says it. With Clef, the default general trust that if a character gives exposition you can be someone certain the author is trying to accurately convey exposition is completely out the window. Most of the time you cannot even say if you are supposed to be able to tell if he is lying or not. Even if he says that he was lying, that itself can be taken as a lie as well. He is also a man of half truths and deception, not only flat out lies. Is Clef a reality bender? Is Clef a reality sink and/or Anchor? Is Clef actually Satan? Is Clef an inherited title?
This was all left up to interpretation, as many things are on the SCP wiki, to allow readers to form their own headcanon. But on the SCP wiki, readers become writers, and headcanon becomes "actual" canon in the process. Ultimately as long as "Clef is a badass, scummy Type-Green-hunter with resistance to anomalies" (also the animal head photo thing) remained consistent, it remains as Clef. Sometimes Clef is a reality bender who doesn't regularly use his powers outside of suppressing others, and sometimes he is flat out a reality sink. Sometimes he has reality-warping due to being a Type Green, and sometimes he has it due to being the devil himself. And despite how odd it may sound, outside of story-specific cases where authors try to specifically delve into Clef's backstory, these things don't usually matter to how Clef is treated or thought of as a character. Often you can even walk into these stories and have these mutually exclusive views and have them both fit.
I also want to go ahead and dash any hopes we may have of choosing the more "consistent" choice between the two. Even within the same story, different readers can walk away concluding that it both supported and refuted Clef being a reality bender. A great (and short) example is Clef's seminar on fighting type greens. Did he just reality bend the whole room, then lie about it after? Did he just drug everyone there and trick them into thinking he was bending reality? Even I personally have read this article a couple of months apart and thought it was supporting each one at different times. If we can't even determine what many articles are pointing at, we have no way to determine which is more popular. In addition, both interpretations do not work completely consistently. Let's look at this from both sides:
Despite Clef being a reality sink/anchor, he is able to both use and interact with anomalous weaponry for prolonged periods of time, and sit in the presence anomalous entities without them falling apart like the blackhole of the supernatural he is supposed to be. Not to mention the other anomalous properties he is supposed to have himself, like the animal head photograph thing. In one case that comes to mind, even in the kaktus verse where he is directly stated to be a reality sink, an article connected into it has him make the sun blink.
Despite Clef being a reality bender/type green, he does things that we know Type greens shouldn't be able to do. Unlike a lot of verses where the nature of reality bending and its mechanics are left a bit up in the air, we have very specific mechanics on what they can and cannot do; their weaknesses and areas of control. The GOC's Pamphlet (here is one article where they have some excerpts) on the matter is one of our best in universe sources, and it has been used in multiple articles out of universe. Now, to be clear, these rules do not hold for all reality benders, but the 5 percent that these do not hold for are, to put it frankly, completely outside the weight class of the feats we have for Clef's reality bending capabilities. Thus, we can reasonably assume that these rules and limitations hold for him. So, Let's start with Clef's most common use of reality bending: passively nullifying the anomalous. And here we already run into several problem. First, reality bending is explicitly stated to be thought based. Second, it is stated that regardless of level, they can be taken by surprise. Third (related to the 2nd), reality benders cannot effect what they cannot perceive. Fourth, reality benders cannot effect things without the will to do so. If something is thought based, requires will, active perception, and can be bypassed via a close-range surprise attack, that certainly is not a passive ability lol. To double down on this, presumably Clef has been able to sleep during his time since they took the witch child into custody, yet evidently does not fall victim to her reality shifts even while unconscious (just a reminder that the witch child's reality bending works a lot by belief, so unless they have been sleeping at exactly the same times every night, he would fall within her domain of control).
In some sense, Clef is the exception that proves the rule, which is why I think it is okay to have him have the keys for his alternate personalities and also a reality sink/anchor interpretation. Obviously we can toss a note on the profile to clarify the situation. Regardless of which of the two interpretation we go with for a single unified profile, we end up cutting off a decent chunk or at the very worst cherry picking only the feats and portrayals that support this version. Unlike most cases, that is also very likely to be a large portion of Clef's total features. Thus, the most consistent and accurate interpretation is to include both on the profile, and trying to stick with just one is a fool's errand on multiple fronts. Most of the time if a Foundation staff member is attributed the ability to, say, conjure fire in one story, and the ability to BFR people under the wanderer's library, we can just all attribute it to one key as they are not mutually exclusive. When a character does have some contradictory feats that don't fit within the usual view, we can just toss it out as an outlier. Clef is one of the few cases where he can somehow have two mutually exclusive abilities that are accepted as the "primary" interpretation, that can have numerous articles cited in support or opposition to both sides. And just to reiterate this again: most of Clef's articles work for him being either a reality bender or a reality anchor. If our goal with our canon standards are to align with how the characters are on the wiki, then for Clef, it should be acceptable to portray him as the anomaly in the system that he is. I would also raise that since these versions of Clef are interchangeable the vast majority of the time, it would be fine to scale him outside of specifically his feats for his reality bending and sink stuff
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Agnaa
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If we can't even determine what many articles are pointing at, we have no way to determine which is more popular.
We can put certain articles down as ambiguous, and only tally the unambiguous ones.
As before, I am against giving Clef a key for reality sink/anchor and a key for reality warper because of scaling issues, which kind of gets exacerbated by the stuff you brought up. If we can't tell whether certain tales are meant to have Clef as a reality warper or an anchor, it becomes tough to scale interactions with other beings; which of those versions did they overcome/resist?
I also don't wanna get started down the slippery slope of trying to determine "How prevalent does an interpretation need to be to deserve a second key?" and "How many interpretations could a character get keys for?" I'd rather just stop things at no separate keys for separate interpretations. (With this I'd like to mention that slippery slope is not a fallacy; it's just a chain only as strong as its weakest link, and in this case, people have argued in the past for key separations based on interpretations, specifically for 1440 wielding the 4th spear).
We can put certain articles down as ambiguous, and only tally the unambiguous ones.
As before, I am against giving Clef a key for reality sink/anchor and a key for reality warper because of scaling issues, which kind of gets exacerbated by the stuff you brought up. If we can't tell whether certain tales are meant to have Clef as a reality warper or an anchor, it becomes tough to scale interactions with other beings; which of those versions did they overcome/resist?
I also don't wanna get started down the slippery slope of trying to determine "How prevalent does an interpretation need to be to deserve a second key?" and "How many interpretations could a character get keys for?" I'd rather just stop things at no separate keys for separate interpretations. (With this I'd like to mention that slippery slope is not a fallacy; it's just a chain only as strong as its weakest link, and in this case, people have argued in the past for key separations based on interpretations, specifically for 1440 wielding the 4th spear).
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"As before, I am against giving Clef a key for reality sink/anchor and a key for reality warper because of scaling issues, which kind of gets exacerbated by the stuff you brought up. If we can't tell whether certain tales are meant to have Clef as a reality warper or an anchor, it becomes tough to scale interactions with other beings; which of those versions did they overcome/resist?"
that part actually isn't as hard as you make it sound. I did some thinking on that, and I would say that often just what is more consistent, in the absence of a better option. ignoring his nullification feats for his reality bending, Clef has pretty consistent reality anchoring/sink feats that level him at around 343 and the witch child's level, but his best active reality-bending feat as far as I know was making the sun blink. Though I think I very loosely remember some pocket dimension or spacial warping feat in the Montauk house article, but from what I remember of it it probably doesn't qualify for a tier. One of the points I was trying to make is that, because they are interchangeable most of the time, we can just tier them the same physically and then tier their abilities otherwise. If you want an extra step, we can also tier his nullification (whether by sink or anchor or warping) as different from his active reality bending
"I also don't wanna get started down the slippery slope of trying to determine "How prevalent does an interpretation need to be to deserve a second key?" and "How many interpretations could a character get keys for?" I'd rather just stop things at no separate keys for separate interpretations. (With this I'd like to mention that slippery slope is not a fallacy; it's just a chain only as strong as its weakest link, and in this case, people have argued in the past for key separations based on interpretations, specifically for 1440 wielding the 4th spear)."
As I said, Clef is the exception that proves the rule. This doesn't mean that suddenly we will start violating the standard back and forth, in fact, generally the idea of "an exception that proves the rule" instead strengthens the standard of which it violates. An ambulance being one of the only vehicles to be able to run a red light doesn't mean that it will somehow make it so other cars are more likely to also run red lights. At some point trying to stick to the rigid standard spits in the face of what we intended the standards to do; There is a reason I prefaced that our standards are meant to reflect the state in which characters exist on the SCP wiki. Clef doesn't conform to the usual state of SCP senior staff, so it is not so crazy that he would not work for how we usually treat them.
I would in turn like to point to the Accident Fallacy, which is what I would be more concerned about on your part over the slippery slope. At this point it would be pretty much just accepting that the Clef profile is not going to ever be accurate, simply to maintain the illusion of a universal standard that can be applied to all cases, or for the risk that other profiles could become inaccurate when they are incorrectly given exception status in the future. Unless someone literally has a case as extreme as us not even being able to properly tell which article is even supporting which interpretation most of the time to begin to even quantify which is more popular, I do not think we will have any problems.
that part actually isn't as hard as you make it sound. I did some thinking on that, and I would say that often just what is more consistent, in the absence of a better option. ignoring his nullification feats for his reality bending, Clef has pretty consistent reality anchoring/sink feats that level him at around 343 and the witch child's level, but his best active reality-bending feat as far as I know was making the sun blink. Though I think I very loosely remember some pocket dimension or spacial warping feat in the Montauk house article, but from what I remember of it it probably doesn't qualify for a tier. One of the points I was trying to make is that, because they are interchangeable most of the time, we can just tier them the same physically and then tier their abilities otherwise. If you want an extra step, we can also tier his nullification (whether by sink or anchor or warping) as different from his active reality bending
"I also don't wanna get started down the slippery slope of trying to determine "How prevalent does an interpretation need to be to deserve a second key?" and "How many interpretations could a character get keys for?" I'd rather just stop things at no separate keys for separate interpretations. (With this I'd like to mention that slippery slope is not a fallacy; it's just a chain only as strong as its weakest link, and in this case, people have argued in the past for key separations based on interpretations, specifically for 1440 wielding the 4th spear)."
As I said, Clef is the exception that proves the rule. This doesn't mean that suddenly we will start violating the standard back and forth, in fact, generally the idea of "an exception that proves the rule" instead strengthens the standard of which it violates. An ambulance being one of the only vehicles to be able to run a red light doesn't mean that it will somehow make it so other cars are more likely to also run red lights. At some point trying to stick to the rigid standard spits in the face of what we intended the standards to do; There is a reason I prefaced that our standards are meant to reflect the state in which characters exist on the SCP wiki. Clef doesn't conform to the usual state of SCP senior staff, so it is not so crazy that he would not work for how we usually treat them.
I would in turn like to point to the Accident Fallacy, which is what I would be more concerned about on your part over the slippery slope. At this point it would be pretty much just accepting that the Clef profile is not going to ever be accurate, simply to maintain the illusion of a universal standard that can be applied to all cases, or for the risk that other profiles could become inaccurate when they are incorrectly given exception status in the future. Unless someone literally has a case as extreme as us not even being able to properly tell which article is even supporting which interpretation most of the time to begin to even quantify which is more popular, I do not think we will have any problems.
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Agnaa
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So if there was an article that clearly, unarguably had a reality warping Clef, but gave a decent physical feat, you would scale that to the other key? If we ended up with a two key solution, I'd find something like this unacceptable.
Also, something else that was brought up in this thread is that this canon hub where Clef has reality warping also has his animal head stuff occur in general, not just in photographs. Would you really have that ability function that way in a reality anchor key?
Except for ambulances running red lights we have a clear definition of emergency vehicles handed down by the government, and what that applies to is pre-defined. If we were to draw a proper analogy of emergency vehicles running red lights to stuff on the SCP wiki, the SCP wiki itself would need to have a clearly written list of characters with multiple interpretations, with explanations of exactly what those interpretations are. That is not the case here. We are working off of heavily limited information. No-one has gone through every Clef tale to see how many fall under reality anchor, reality warper, or are ambiguous. No-one has gone through other characters and canons to try and do similar for them. So really it's more like you deciding to run a red light because you're taking someone to the hospital.
I feel like that interpretation of our standard is wrong. We actually set up our rules as they were to run contrary to the way the SCP wiki does. On the SCP wiki, the canonicity of everything is left up to the reader to piece together in their own headcanon, which is how contradictory stories are justified. It's why things that we dismiss as "outliers" can land on the SCP wiki in the first place. The intention is merely to have a relatively objective (either include anything, or only include stuff the author had a hand in) and useful (don't have a different key for every permutation of all writings about a character) set of standards.
That's a very very strange place to draw the line. You justified the key separation because, as far as you can tell, both interpretations are sufficiently prevalent. Now you're saying that it's only if most articles don't give an indication of interpretation. It wouldn't be hard to find examples of this; every character with multiple backstories has the majority of their tales not distinguish between the backstory they had. The situation of whether 1440 had the 4th spear or not is also like this, only 4 tales involving the spear either indicate for or against 1440 having the spear.
Since you clarified on Discord that this was about Clef lying, I don't think a character lying about their capabilities (and thus their statements being unreliable) means that we should give them multiple keys. Just ignore their statements, rely on the statements of others and perceived events.
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So, is this fair to add to the profile? Including the reality sink stuff we talked about?
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bump
Lou_change
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It's more these statements lead to different interpretations of the character both being consistent.
Agnaa
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I don't think we should take unreliable statements as evidence towards both interpretations; instead I think we should take them as evidence towards neither, or really, as not being evidence at all.
Lou_change
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The statements are not the evidence it's the fact they made both sides of the character reality warper and anchor be interpretations of the character that are valid is the problem.
Lou_change
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Bump
Lou_change
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Bump.
Lou_change
He/Him- 10,122
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Bump
Lou_change
He/Him- 10,122
- 5,385
Lou_change
He/Him- 10,122
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Bump
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Ok, it seems that the points I brought up in the first post have been accepted and (with the exception of two people) removing Clefs status as a reality anchor/sink. Now, is it fair to apply these to clef's page.
Kirinator07
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Necro, where did you get the 076 x Clef scan from?
Lou_change
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Able Baker Charlie - SCP Foundation
The SCP Foundation's 'top-secret' archives, declassified for your enjoyment.
scp-wiki.wikidot.com
Kirinator07
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Thanks, also the time frame for the regeneration, is it unknown?Able Baker Charlie - SCP Foundation
The SCP Foundation's 'top-secret' archives, declassified for your enjoyment.
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