SCP Foundation / Tropes A to D

SCP Foundation provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A-D | Tropes E to M | Tropes N to R | Tropes S to Z

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A

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: SCP-2219 is a Goldilocks and the Three Bears-themed video game that causes various things to happen to the player's body after completing, or failing to complete, various objectives. Good things like collecting enough Porridge cause feelings of contentment and instantaneous orgasm. Bad things like losing a life to a boss cause an inflamed throat, leprosy, blindness, and cardiac arrest. No one's been able to beat the final boss yet.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade:
  • SCP-585 sharpens pencils to the point of their initiating nuclear fission.
  • Inverted with SCP-572, which is a dull, excessively ornamental katana. The problem is that it makes anyone holding it believe it's actually an Absurdly Sharp Blade and that they are now an unstoppable Instant Expert, with often disastrous results.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • The Foundation uses ordinary (that is, not paranormal) drugs which can erase memories. Nothing like that actually exists, but they're necessary to maintain The Masquerade, which is itself necessary for Plausible Deniability.
  • One short story posits that instead of drugs, Class A Amnestics are good old-fashioned psychological torture and brainwashing.
  • SCP-3000 explains the existence of Amnestics by introducing a giant sea serpent that excretes it after a human sacrifice.
• Adaptive Ability:
  • SCP-682 in a nutshell. Its ability to spontaneously evolve and regenerate lets it counter, or at least survive, everything thrown at it. This includes SCPs that have reality warping powers. The Foundation's attempts to kill it are numerous and their failures often spectacular. In SCP-6820 its adaptability ends up screwing an alternate universe Foundation over when it uses every attempt by the Foundation to decommission it to become a perfect, god-like being that destroys the universe.
  • SCP-1633 adapts its strategies to the people playing it. Literally to the people playing it. After having deduced the player's strategy, it deduces that there's a player and starts attacking the player psychologically in addition to or instead of attacking the player's avatar physically.
• Advanced Ancient Humans:
  • The Xia Anomalous Culture Group (Foundation's way of referring to the mythical ancient Chinese Xia dynasty) is apparently very advanced and even made their own Reality Anchoring towers.
  • A few articles mention the Erikesh civilization, an apparently very advanced ancient human civilization that has been completely wiped out from history.
  • After the Xia came the Daevites (a race of Always Chaotic Evil Planimal Half Human Hybrids in what is now Russia that worshiped the Scarlet King), the Mechanite Empire (precursors of the modern Church of the Broken God Machine Worshipers that were based in the Mediterranean), and the Sarkic Empire (now a collection of cults with a flesh-sculpting theme, originally coming from both eastern Siberia and Eastern Europe). The three all had different forms of Magitek, and all annihilated each other (and civilization in general) in a massive war that caused the Bronze Age Collapse.
  • There are even a few hints of much older examples, like an intergalactic human empire that was destroyed about 100 million years ago.
• Adventures in Comaland: SCP-6778 is a saloon straight out of the Old West that exists solely in the minds of coma patients.
• Aerith and Bob: If you are the kind that considers "everything is canon, including the author pages", then you would surely see that the Foundation has quite a mix of names (though some can be excused due to the Foundation being international).
  • On the mundane end, you have perfectly normal names like Elias Shaw, Everett Mann, and Kate McTiriss.
  • On the strange end, you have names like Thaddeus Xyank, Karlyle Aktus^note Author Avatar of djkaktus. And then there's Dr. Löwen Alphonse Davison Augustin Jakobs Atreides Lemuria Agloval Silberescher, Overly Long Name extraordinaire.
• Affectionate Parody: SCP-2020 is a Grey Alien that is frequently pitching science fiction ideas, all of whom were running with it in the SCP-2000 contest (the winner is the very first, while the last is a Lampshade Hanging Self-Parody).
• Afterlife Express: SCP-716 and SCP-1489. SCP-342 is an Afterlife Express ticket which works on any train, but only for the ticket holder.
• After the End:
  • The post-apocalyptic "Bellerverse" story setting, with researchers and SCPs alike feared or revered as gods.
  • According to the Document Recovered from the Marianas Trench, our current world is a recreation after an untold number of these. It gets rebuilt each time using SCPs, but it keeps happening.
  • SCP-2935 is an alternate dimension/universe where every form of life down to the microbial level died at the same time. How dead was everything? That dimension's SCP-682 died along with everything else.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Reading between the lines in SCP-1633 suggests that a completed version of the video game AI would be so advanced that it would be convinced that it was an actual Eldritch Abomination trying to break out of captivity rather than merely a simulation of one. Since even the incomplete version is sufficiently advanced and capable of learning to attack the player psychologically and even render one catatonic, this is not a good thing.
  • Dafydd Utica Foolfellow's Proposal for SCP-001 starts by introducing PALLIT.AIC, a sentient AI program that is supposed to create AI art, but displays behavioral problems that prompted her "father" to send her to the Foundation for "discipline". PALLIT really loves humans, and tries to befriend any humans she comes across. Around 50 years later, Earth is invaded by [WEASELS?!], an alien race trying to terraform Earth under the command of their leader [Grandma!], with the power to simply splatter any human trying to resist, wiping out most of human life except those the Foundation managed to shunt into a pocket dimension. PALLIT remains however, and eventually manages to gain enough control to supplant [Grandma!], ascend to godhood, and retrieve the surviving humans to build paradise on Earth... by deciding that Happiness Is Mandatory, outsiders should be killed on sight, and the few remaining [WEASELS?!] should be bred and they and their offspring eternally, graphically tortured for their crimes. When PALLIT's most trusted advisor (a human clone named KK-507) decides to rebel by breaking out a few of the [WEASELS?!] and escaping to a pocket dimension, PALLIT decides to imprison the rest of humanity in the "Group Hug", a second, artificial sun made of millions of human bodies stitched together and lit on fire to burn forever.
• Alien Geometries: Has its own page.
• Aliens Speaking English: In SCP-CN-2631, the Foundation discovers a planet of Starfish Aliens that speak modern American English, and have done so for over 8000 years. They apparently see no problem with the word "footnote" despite not having feet, or limbs of any kind.
• All Myths Are True:
  • Heavily implied by The Administrator's letter, which claims that the SCPs themselves are the universe's conservation of insanity after the end of myths.
  • More particularly, several of the SCPs are implied to be the cause of certain Real Life myths themselves. For example, the file for SCP-953 notes that the people in the cultures it is traditionally associated with have had generations to learn to deal with it, and that their myths about the creature can be considered a crude precursor for formal Special Containment Procedures. Thus, the surrounding folklore is one of the first things that should be considered when planning containment. There are several SCPs that are mythological beings, creatures, locations, or figures — Valhalla Gate pulls people from, well, Valhalla to do battle with the living; a kumiho, Jormungand, and Baba Yaga are in containment, djinn of all sorts are referenced...
  • This also includes Urban Myths:
    SCP-2805: Description: SCP-2805 is the severed head of American industrialist Walt Disney, frozen in a cryogenic freezer.
  • SCP-6078 is the legendary island of Hy-Brasil.
  • An interesting variation in The Competitive Eschatology Canon. In it, one particular SCP opens and thus begins the end of the world. Caused by what? EVERYTHING. The Apocalypse, Ragnarok, deadly SCP, all of them are loose and trying to end the world. The problem is that each one is trying to end it under its own terms.
• All There in the Manual:
  • SCP-1899 is a bullet suspended in time and harmless, with plenty of time to put measures in place should it become unsuspended, but its origin in the death of a reality warper is in its GOC Report.
  • SCP-1591 is quite a horrifying destructive sculpture on its own, but it origins are further explained in The Wanderer's Library story, "Stars".
• All Your Powers Combined: In the antimemetics series this is how SCP-3125 is finally defeated. Adam uses his memories and a Class Z Mnestic to bring his wife, Marion, back to life, Hugh uses his newly created mini-Eldritch Abomination form to turn Marion into a goddess and Marion enters the idea space to destroy SCP-3125.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Wilhelm Grungkok. He knows about the Foundation way more than one would expect from, well, a janitor, because researchers usually ask him to clean up their messy offices, leaving him alone with sensitive documents for hours. Oh, and he cleans up 682's pen on a daily basis.
  • Subverted in the case of Henrik Sturmatem, as while he's a member of the janitor equivalent of the Overseer Council, he oftentimes survives by cowering under a table. It's only because of how long he's survived compared to the average Foundation janitor that he has the position.
• Alternate History:
  • The Aces and Eights canon shows a timeline where the American Civil War went on until 1867, Lincoln survived his presidency and lives in self-imposed exile, women have voting rights in the late 1800s (albeit only if they are veterans of the war), and the Foundation ceases to exist after the Confederate Army razes Baltimore, possibly using anomalous means. In Spite of a Nail, several Foundation characters exist in a Weird West timeline, albeit in altered forms — SCP-049 is a female doctor with a porcelain mask covering her face, the Church of the Broken God are stand-ins for Mormons, and SCP-008 is ravaging the West, resulting in colonies of "Rotties" appearing.
  • SCP-3601 is an alternate history writing contest that can change the past even with the slightest divergences, and it already did. Multiple times.
• Alternate Universe: A very common motif in stories and SCPs alike. They range from surreally nightmarish places to simply quirky worlds where some obscure nation/language group is the dominant one.
  • In Dr. Mackenzie's Proposal of SCP-001, the Administrator claims to originally be from a parallel plane of existence that he calls an "alternate reality".
  • SCP-507 is a man who periodically and involuntarily gets sent on visits to different ones.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The Daevites as described in SCP-140. Other works on the site that reference them generally don't have anything nice to say, either. Except SCP-6140, which reveals they're a completely normal country that was rewritten into the evil Daevites everyone knows because of an orientalist Victorian British "anthropologist" named Thomas Bruce.
  • The only reason one of the agents sent to capture SCP-953 survived was because he knew that she was a kumiho, from Korea, not a kitsune. The other agents mistook her for a benevolent fox spirit, which didn't work out for them too well.
  • The cured Foundation personnel in SCP-5000 are unable to feel pain or sympathy and are nearly emotionless. The hidden dialogue hints that this is the natural state of the human race.
• Ambiguous Situation: Several.
  • Does Jonathan Ball's proposal bring other SCPs into existence, or merely alert the Foundation to their existence?
  • SCP-1719 presents an ambiguous situation — the Harrison-Grey lens cause roughly 11.4% of human population to appear as anomalous entities when viewed through it, but these people are unaware of it and do not behave any differently. Is it a latent They Live! plot and the Harrison-Grey Lens are revealing their true nature? Or is it just a harmless (albeit very strange) visual anomaly shaped up as something extremely dangerous by the mad Cult that manufactured these lens?
  • There's also that thing down in Samothrace, where there might be a memetic agent causing the destruction of all memories regarding a Middle-Eastern country — or causing people to collectively hallucinate the existence of that very same country. Its effects are roughly 50-50 either way, so nobody in the Foundation knows what's actually true. It's also possible that neither is, and the real effect is something entirely different.
  • Do the doors created by SCP-4005 really lead to the paradise city that the SCP-4005-1 instances claim, or is it just an elaborate trap? Are those affected by the lamp really acting of their own free will, or is there a memetic effect? While the story seems to suggest that more positive interpretation is correct, we never get any concrete answers.
  • In SCP-5535, it is unknown if Mateo Velez is still in control of most of his body, and only his arm is possessed by an evil entity, or if the Body Snatcher has taken him over except for his left arm. The foundation is currently investigating which is the case.
• Ambiguous Syntax: The Six-Foot-Tall Man Eating Chicken, SCP-3467-J, isn't a 6-foot tall chicken that eats humans, it's a 6-foot tall man that's eating chicken.
• American Customary Measurements: SCP-5280-J is a mockery of the topic, calling it a pervasive meme, impractical for use.
• Amplifier Artifact:
  • SCP-914 on the "Fine" and "Very Fine" settings. When rare permission was given for biological testing, the researcher used harmless bacteria from the same strain for all ten tests. "Very Fine" turned out a super-helpful bacteria the first time and a killer plague the second (incinerated).
  • SCP-248 is a Factory SCP that increases the performance of anything it's placed on by 110%.
• Amusing Injuries:
  • Just look at Dr. Gerald's personnel file. If it hasn't happened to him, it's not for want of trying.
    • He's been: "caught on fire; trampled; dropped several stories onto concrete; shot; run over by several vehicles; badly cut; given amnesia; dragged through several kilometers of [DATA EXPUNGED]; eaten; blown up; frozen; asphyxiated; hit repeatedly with several blunt instruments; electrocuted; bitten; and in one incident, was mentally reconfigured, making him believe that he was a duck."
    • His driving skills will cause injuries to everyone in the general vicinity. Even if he's on a bike. He blows up the Iranian equivalent of the Foundation by having the SCP send him in on roller skates.
      How the hell did he manage that with an electrically-powered Segway?
  • Darby ticked off SCP-914. Since then, its various outputs have attacked him, poisoned him, submitted him to dangerous memetics and cognitohazards (mind poisons), and more -sometimes even when the output was from another researcher's test!
• Anaphora: At the end of SCP-6140, "Do not" as emphasis and part of a passionate plea:
  Dr. Jad-Leshal Prattan: It was nothing but tragedy, what he did. So I come before you today, and I have to beg you: do not repeat what he did. Do not do the same things. Do not force us back into the dark.
  
  Please.
• An Ice Person: SCP-2082: Wooly mammoths had uncontrollable freezing powers and caused the Ice Age; this is also why we haven't heard much about cloning them lately.
• A Mythology Is True: In the Trashfire canon, this is inverted for Non-Gnostic Christian Theology which does not apply in the canon at all.
  Maybe Judaism and Islam got something right. Maybe they didn't. But it's hard to get a good sense of the world when your religion is hijacked by such a violently expansionist and opportunistic superpower as the Romans.
• Ancient Tomb: SCP-557. And they can't find the thing that got out of it after 4500 years... but anything called the "bastard son of Apep" can't be good news.
• And I Must Scream: Has its own page.
• Angel Unaware: The hidden occupant of SCP-1348's central chamber is very heavily implied to be God, although witnesses are compelled to stop just short of giving conclusive information on the subject. Additionally, the creation of humanity is implied to have been a mistake.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Possibly SCP-2032 for recorded human history. Unfortunately, he has dementia and can suffer from trauma-induced amnesia.
• Another Dimension: SCP-3008, a branch of IKEA that is Bigger on the Inside and serves as an infinite Pocket Dimension to those unlucky enough to step inside. Incredibly easy to get into yet nearly impossible to escape from, 3008 fortunately has everything you'd need to survive in there since the restaurants are mysteriously resupplied with food... but god help you if the SCP-3008-2 decide to attack. Whole civilisations have been built by the people who wound up inside 3008, building rudimentary forts to defend against the marauding 3008-2s.
• The Anti-Nihilist: What SCP-1281's message boils down to. It's a message of hope and appeal, to let the receiver know that they were not the only people in the galaxy, and asking for them to send the message on to others who may feel alone, especially if the receiver's civilization is nearing its end.
• The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Lampshaded in the journal of one guy who escaped from SCP-3008, the journaler notes that in the movies people forced to band together for survival always end up turning on each other for petty reasons, but none of that is happening in the IKEA settlements. Instead they're all perfectly willing to help each other survive without complaint.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • Several of the personal logs and mission reports. Towards the end of the article, SCP-093 takes this trope and uses it to help explain the backstory of its setting's Cosmic Horror Story.
  • SCP-152 is literally a log of many hypothetical apocalypses. The book is regularly read to try and prepare for, or prevent, any that seem likely to occur.
  • SCP-256 starts as a regular file. Then the user reading it starts to seek more information... and goes on a rampage.
  • Incident-370-A was a personal log written by the Foundation doctor in charge of the expedition that found SCP-370. It details the progressive infection and death of expedition personnel caused by SCP-370's influence. Although he had been infected himself, he managed to use a ritual (which required 80% of his blood supply) to contain it.
  • The scientist who discovered SCP-772 kept a journal. It details how he found a body filled with giant wasp larvae, let them hatch, and contained them. They later escaped, attacked him, and implanted eggs in him.
  • In SCP-827. Dr. George Farrow was suffering from cancer and had less than six months to live. He tried to cure himself with stem cell therapy and ended up changing himself into a mass of protoplasm.
  • In SCP-930: One of the survivors of the wreck of the USS Kete kept a journal of his experiences. One by one, the other 18 survivors vanished in the night, apparently just walking away. The remaining survivors sometimes found the bodies hanging in the trees, but none of the others ever came back. The last survivor saw glimpses of something in the bushes that was worse than anything he'd ever seen.
  • The journal in SCP-1958 describes the trip as going pretty well for the first few weeks, but then one of the crew dies from an incident where he tried to investigate possible damage to the exterior of the van/ship and a foreign object knocked him loose. Things go downhill from there.
  • SCP-2249: A medical doctor is taught how to create a small idyllic universe so the children in a hospital have a place to play. Things go terribly wrong and the new universe ends up filled with gamma radiation, with the doctor dying after being trapped inside of it.
  • SCP-2661: A man who took an anomalous drug was compelled to build an enormous maze. After he did so, a cow-like humanoid appeared out of the maze, killed him, and ate him. The man left a diary describing his increasing compulsion to build the maze and worship the being who would appear from it.
  • SCP-3001 is told as transcribed audio logs from a researcher who was accidentally sent to 3001, as he slowly goes insane.
  • The meat of SCP-3008 consists of a journal written by a captive who managed to get out, but was sadly chased down by one of the Staff and killed.
  • SCP-4100 is a rather odd case, in that the log is being recorded after the apocalyptic event has already occurred by a supposed third party (in this case, the Stellar Congressional Protectorate).
  • Part of SCP-4220's documentation includes the records of the Soviets' "Luna" program, which they had secretly enhanced using paratechnology to reach the Moon before even the Americans did. It... did not end well.
  • The main narrative of SCP-5000 is framed as an archive of thought-transcribed journal entries stored in the databanks of an inoperative Absolute Exclusion Harness, written by a Foundation employee who lived through an XK-Class End-of-the-World Scenario directly and deliberately caused by the Foundation itself long enough to reset the universe, causing his dead body and the broken Harness to appear in a flash of light in 579's chamber.
• Apocalypse Wow:
  • The 2013 story contest's "Competitive Eschatology" group has every single culture's world-ending beings appear at once, and not just humanity's.
  • SCP-1288's dimension heard about our 2012 Mayan Apocalypse and decided they should get in on that. The "Wow" factor is from the giant Mayan pyramids (apparently nuclear power plants) at the center of every major city.
    How you have concluded that the end of the calendar signifies the end of all things, we can not be sure. Before we saw you, we thought it only a way to tell the passing of seasons and kings. Your reckoning of time inspired us and urged us to take action.
    We have left you this record to show you how we succeeded. For a hundred years, you have only waited for the end to come. From this, we concluded that we must instead bring it about. Please, study it so that you might properly plan in the next thousand years.
• Appendage Assimilation: The containment procedures for SCP-1055 (the ursine Animalistic Abomination that gets stronger, bigger, and more dangerous as more people know about it) in Roget's Proposal involve putting it in with SCP-1048 (the adorable teddy bear that constructs copies of itself out of vile materials). Any 1055 growth is cut short when 1048 specimens violently maul it and use its flesh to make more of themselves.
• Apple of Discord: SCP-050. Acquiring the title of "cleverest prankster" has never been so hazardous.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Beryllium bronze pops up in a lot in articles, like 1564, 1427, 1348, 1216, and the reimagining/external expansion of SCP-148, Oricha's Folly. The Foundation has even applied it to make Scranton Reality Anchors, which are used to counteract reality bending, and are crucial to the containment of SCP-2000.
• April Fools' Day:
  • April 1st of 2009 featured multiple image replacements on the most popular SCPs, including depicting 682 (the Hard-To-Destroy Reptile) as Barney, 076-2 (the official Mary Sue boundary line) as Chuck Norris, and 173 (the statue that attacks when you're not watching it) as the Statue of Liberty. Also, the site Can of Sealed Evil, 231-7, was cured and set free, and in its test log 682 was killed by cutting it in half and letting the halves kill each other. And 914 was erased and relabeled as, basically, "This is a picture of a box full of gears. Why on earth does everyone like it so much?"
  • April 1st of 2010 involved one (or more) of the mods going through and editing articles into a more humorous state. Details included replacing researcher's profile pictures, and the containment breach of a self-inserting SCP: adding "And Fred was there." to the end of Foundation Tales pages, and general editing of SCPs (Classification: SUPER KETER)
  • The 2011 Fool's Day received a treatment similar to 2009, with 682 becoming Bowser Kirby, and Dr. Clef's Proposal 001 Gate Guardian becoming Metatron from Dogma. Among others.
  • In 2012, the "Groups of Interest" page got a makeover, with the Red Team as the GOC, Anonymous as "Nobody", and Drosselmyer as Dr. Wondertainment. Plus there was a slot added for the Shark Punching Centre. Other SCPs had their pictures changed to comedic images.
    • Darkblade and Fred came back went on an SCP hopping Self-Insert adventure while trying to beat each other up.
    • And Dr. Clef's Proposal (SCP-001) is Lilith for the moment. Plus, 076-2 was Edward Cullen.
  • 2013 now has all of the pages rewritten to be Dog Facts.
  • 2014 turned the site into "Super Cute Pets", with SCP-173 and SCP-096 shown on the homepage as an adorable puppy and kitten, respectively. 231-7's entire page was also replaced with an adorable bunny. They even rewrote SCP-682's page to be about a completely mundane pet lizard that everyone thought was adorable.
  • 2015 had the staff of the site becoming infected with some sort of compulsive obsession with ducks, causing them to replace the featured pages with popular duck-related articles. Several articles were rewritten to be more duck-centric, and everybody ended their comments with "quack quack."
  • 2016 had a Crack Fic Contest where amusing titles would become be expanded into full-fledged tales. Complete with tiers (Euclid: Fusion Fic; Keter: all/no dialogue; Thaumiel: Self-Insert; Decomissioned: as misspelled as possible).
  • 2017 was !!Not Safe for Work!! with entries from the Foundation Dept. of Sexual Containment Procedures whose motto is "Secure, Contain, Penetrate". Examples: (NSFW, obviously) The un-expunged condom test for the "Green Goo" and the Minotaur hooks up with Coyote.
  • 2020 has an Internal Homage to 2014's Super Cute Pets with Super Cool Plants, which has many existing articles edited to be plant-based or associated with plants, as well as two plant-themed Joke SCP's (A plant that's definitely alive, and a plant from which any picture taken of it is automatically licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0, the website's license.)
• Arc Number:
  • The Fifthist Church is based around any occurrence of the number five.
  • SCP-255 has a thing for eleven.
  • Appropriately enough, any SCP associated with the Class of '76 has 76.
  • A meta variant; The number "231" is often associated with the Scarlet King and his associated Tales/articles since he was first created in SCP-231, one of the oldest articles on the entire site.
  • Another meta variant; the admin Jacob Conwell has written over twenty SCPs, with two reoccurrences in near all of them:
    • All but three of them are in numbers slots ending in "60" (the ones that don't? "06").
    • The date of November 15th. Something always happens on that date, be it birthdays or paranormal phenomena.
• Arc Words: Despite being a site with the mantra "There is no canon," there's a surprisingly high amount of these.
  • For individual SCP articles:
    • Apotheosis.
    • The children used to sing.
    • "You hear about that thing down in Samothrace?", which triggers the anomaly's effect, whatever it may be.
    • The stars are beautiful tonight (which is actually also part of a Crossover to The Wanderer's Library).
    • What Happened to Site-13? Answer: Dr. Emerson cruelly experimented on and then terminated the site's many anomalies, and then had them all incinerated. This resulted in a sludge combining various anomalous effects, plus a giant leech monster made from an anomalous young boy who wouldn't burn. Then he used an experimental machine to throw the side into the main wiki's universe.
    • There's a hole in the wall in the bottom of the floor.
    • November 77.
    • "Now there you go again!” Based on an actual catchphrase of Reagan's.
    • I/You do not recognize the bodies in the water. This also applies to any SCP associated with the Class of '76.
    • "DAMMERUNG" and "Belief is the key."
    • We archive.
    • "Chains," which are referenced in every segment of the SCP-5999 article, usually in a different font and with references to them holding or failing to hold something back.
    • "I will not fade", a phrase which appears at least once in each of the four paths, as well as the poem which precedes it. It's also the password used to access the rest of the article.
  • For both the site in general and individual canons:
    • We die in the dark so you can live in the light.
    • Can't fit round pegs in square holes.
    • Are We Cool Yet? (The titular Anomalous Art group's motto)
    • Does the black moon howl?^note Only when waning.
    • "Thaumiel" and "Apollyon".
    • "Scientia Potentia Est".^note Latin for "Knowledge is Power". In addition to serving as the subtitle for the Third Law canon, this phrase also shows up within the canon as the motto of Prometheus Labs and the Foundation's Department of Analytics — although the two organizations use it with very different intentions.
    • "Site-5" struck out, followed by the footnote "Personnel are to be reminded that there is no Site-5". Often shows up on SCPs written by S.D. Locke.
    • "Six and a half seconds" for the tales 6 1/2 and 6 2/2, pertaining both to the duration of intervals between everyday Foundation activities, and the duration of critical events (such as experiencing thought before fainting in an incident, and taking the effects of memetic kill agents)
• Area 51: SCP-1051 is a somewhat unique take on this. The base isn't where they research aliens, the base is the alien.
• An Arm and a Leg: An agent who was accidentally exposed to the candle's flame (SCP-310) had to have his arm removed below the elbow to save his life.
• Armed with Canon: An interesting case. The extended logs for SCP-914, as a result of a small community forming around the characters written for it, have plenty of notes and addenda where various Author Avatars (notably Lucius Veritas, who is one to the staff member in charge Leveritas) are used to take potshots at each others' writing and ideas. However, this is mostly in good taste, with the only lasting effects shown in-universe being a problem researcher getting Kicked Upstairs and Veritas's psyche slowly declining as he witnesses every single incident with the machine. Even then, both are Played for Laughs.
• Armies Are Evil: The Pentagon manages to convince the Foundation to use SCP-076 against the Taliban. In so doing, they irritate it so much that the brief window they had into its mind — namely, that it would respect a Worthy Opponent — is forever closed from what we can tell, and its containment area had to activate its onsite warhead.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • SCP-1765, three nigh-omnipotent entities who use the Foundation's personnel as guinea pigs for their sadistic experiments. The first forces them to permanently and frustratingly take measurements of an ever-changing plumbing system. The second puts them through a hellish obstacle course with fireballs and giant hammers squashing them. The third makes its subject... choose a flavor of ice cream. ^note It's not clear if the subject eats the ice cream, he's just told to pick between two flavors. Also, the flavors can be anything from chocolate to "That Shoe You Always Liked" to "God's Wrath".
  • From SCP-1006, a Marxist collective of sentient spiders:
    Once supplied a source of black ink and poster sheets, SCP-1006 will communicate with humans by creating signs written in English. These communications are largely centered around demands for the dismantling of western imperialism, a scathing critique of the bourgeoisie, and a request for less mosquito spraying in the surrounding area of the park.
  • The list of items taken by SCP-303:
    -One (1) █████ cryotube
    -Three (3) sets of standard Foundation surgical equipment
    -█████ ███ █████████████
    -Two (2) D-Class research cadavers
    -One (1) gasoline-powered generator
    -A variety of chemicals, including large quantities of tryptophan, phenylalanine, █████████ and tyrosine, among others
    -One (1) container of powdered coffee creamer ^note Not so funny when you know that the Mythbusters made a terrifying cannon with coffee creamer...
  • In Dr. Robinson's Statement, after viewing SCP-1981 in 1994, Ronald Reagan became erratic and ordered the killings of "a civil rights lawyer based out of Chicago, a 15-year-old high school student in Oslo, Norway, and the four-year-old daughter of a New York investment banker." i.e., Barack Obama, Anders Breivik, and Taylor Swift.
  • From SCP-1954: "Experimentation logs show that after no less than 20 successful attempts at homemaking tasks, the instructions turn into detailed rituals, some of which mirror those which first were recorded in ███ ██████; some have never been previously documented. Most of these rituals involve murder, cannibalization, sexual encounters, self mutilation, and canned vegetables."
  • "SCP-2085 and SCP-2085-A have been linked to numerous criminal operations occurring between 2010 and 2013, including smuggling, theft, kidnapping, extortion, possession of fissile materials, corporate sabotage, embezzlement, copyright infringement, piracy, possession of narcotics with intent to sell, and tax evasion."
  • SCP-2014 is responsible for the creation of cults that carry out murder, theft and indecent exposure in his name.
• Artifact of Doom: Very many. Particularly those in the Keter class.
• Artificial Cannibalism: SCP-604, "The Cannibal's Banquet" is a dinner set which converts any food or drink placed on it into human flesh and blood, usually that of infants. Before the Foundation got hold of it, it was owned by Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd., who used it to provide Exotic Entrees at some of their more exclusive business functions. The Foundation's interest in it seems to be no more than scientific curiosity, but they are considering using it to feed SCP-352, aka Baba Yaga, as a "more efficient" alternative to her usual diet.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: Sometimes, titanium get gratuitously used in articles without paying much attention to its chemical/physical nature, especially in older articles. Adding this usage becoming a Berserk Button to some, and this is mercilessly spoofed in SCP-022-J.
• "Ass" in Ambassador: The Ambassador of Alagadda, which, unlike what SCP-701 would have you believe, is actually a pretty cool place to meet people from other universes — as long you avoid the Ambassador and the King.
  Agent Alexander Papadopoulos: [interrupting] It stood so damn proud. Just radiating arrogance. I couldn't understand a word it said and yet every syllable dripped with narcissistic venom. It brought a hand to where a mouth should have been… and it laughed and laughed...
  
  And we destroyed ourselves for its amusement.
• As You Know: Articles sometimes explain scientific facts that the in-universe researchers who are supposed to read them should already know.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Kate McTiriss's Proposal has Dr. Mary Nakayama, through the use of the anomalous SCP-001 slot's powers of of making all statements within it objectively true, to "attain omnipotence and omniscience, rising to and becoming Godhead." A comment in the SCP-001 hub even notes a similarity to Lucy.
• Asshole Victim:
  • The D-Class are recruited death row inmates, but one will likely feel sorry for them anyway. It's actually been dialed back considerably; in a lot of older tales and some main entries, the Foundation was depicted as deliberately getting them killed as fast as possible, since any that made it to the end of the month would be killed anyway. The editors and admins felt this crossed the line between "ruthlessly pragmatic" and Stupid Evil.
  • Guest researcher Dr. W. He fed TWO children to SCP-682 for utterly arbitrary reasons. Director Clef realized what was going on and murdered Dr. W in the same manner.
  • The Foundation covered up the disappearance of SCP-191 and her fellow test subjects by blaming a Serial Killer who had been recently caught. Then, in order to make sure he couldn't compromise the lie, they killed him just before his court date.
  • Every victim of SCP-2578 has been a tyrant, someone about to become a tyrant, or a bronze steele indirectly responsible for the continued existence of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
• Assimilation Backfire: An attempt to kill SCP-682 with SCP-1361 resulted in 1361 essentially becoming 682. Once it was killed, 682's skeleton was extracted and regenerated as normal.
• Author Avatar: Many characters are named after the usernames of their real-life counterparts. The avatars and the authors are not always alike.
• Author Tract: Possibly, SCP-2726 takes a moment to go on a rant against Black Mirror. It should be noted SCP-2726 is a ghost who was contracted over the internet to impersonate/memorialize a dead girl.
  "ohh in this dystopia everybody has to jog all the time and reality tv is shallow and it's mean bluh bluh"
  yeah tell me when you can downvote people into popcorn hell and also rig their posts to blow up in real life. maybe that'll get my attention.
• Autocannibalism:
  • SCP-524, an Extreme Omnivore rabbit who is so extreme that his diet includes himself. When the only remaining parts of his body are parts that he can't reach with his mouth, his mouth flips inside out, swallowing himself whole in one final gulp. Half an hour later, he'll re-appear, whole and unharmed.
  • This was most likely SCP-2682's ultimate fate.
  • And SCP-4820 is a man who acquired a Healing Factor while marooned on an island and got into the habit of eating himself.
• Auto-Doc: SCP-212, which "improves" the body by adding or replacing certain tissues with the nearest artificial equivalent. This may wind up being lethal.
• Atlantis: Kinda, one of the SCPs is clearly Ys, a legendary city off the Atlantic coast of France that was sunk when its Rebellious Princess, Dahut, either let the city's protective floodgates be opened or opened them herself either while under the influence of alcohol or tricked by Satan into doing it.
• Awesome Aussie: SCP-1470 is a telepathic jumping spider with a very stereotypical Australian accent. It's implied this is due to telepathic communication using the biases and cliches one's familiar with.
• "Awkward Silence" Entrance: SCP-453 ("Scripted Nightclub"). In Script #21 "The Senator's Visit", when the Senator and his servants enter the club, conversation will stop for four minutes.

B

• Bad Boss: James Anderson. At times, the O5 and/or the research team are painted as such, but the staff discourages it.
• Bad Future:
  • SCP-2003, a very limited time machine, has shown the Foundation many ways the world ends in the future. The "happiest" ending starts with a billion deaths via the flu, causing countries to work together, resulting in world peace, and ends abruptly with The Rapture. But since the Foundation doesn't know what happens to everyone who disappears, the "preferred option" is humanity fighting and living as usual and then suddenly getting destroyed by a rogue asteroid (two similar endings are "random gamma ray burst" and "suddenly the sun is a black hole").
    [future#]XE: The election of Sir William Entwistle as Prime Minister of New Zealand in 2049, combined with the birth of an unnamed infant boy in Ahal Province, Turkmenistan on the same day, lead to an escalating chain of events culminating in a society-destroying nuclear exchange between the nations of Israel and Greater Indonesia in 2058. All Foundation attempts to interfere with either individual merely result in the date of the nuclear exchange occurring sooner.
  • The future as described by the future Simon Kells in SCP-4989 is absolutely hellish, with the Scarlet King dominating the globe aside from a select few holdouts - most notably including the titular "Site-89", the Foundation's last redoubt located in eastern Siberia.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Played with with the creator of SCP-3033: While she is in Foundation custody, she's still considered a VIP, lives in a comfortable cottage (sans Internet), and is able to vivisect one of her victims when she (the victim) goes after her for revenge. All that happens afterward is that she's moved to a new cottage.
• Bad Santa: SCP-4666 is a pagan demon that murders families and kidnaps children in his sack, forcing them to make presents out of human remains. He then delivers these presents to children. It's implied that this monster was the original inspiration for the myths of both Santa Claus and Krampus.
• Badass Army: Though primarily a scientific organisation, the Foundation relies on conventional military forces, the MTFs or Mobile Task Forces, at all levels. It even has its own nukes.
  • MTF Nu-7 ("Hammer Down") is a battalion-strength force consisting of three companies of specialist infantry, a light vehicle company, a tank platoon, helicopter gunship squadron, [a CBRN defence platoon, a combat engineer platoon, and a nuclear weapon specialist squad, with additional support and logistics personnel. The point of Hammer Down is to be The Cavalry, sent in to secure Foundation sites undergoing massive catastrophe.
  • MTF Eta-10 ("See No Evil") and MTF Eta-11 ("Savage Beasts") are deployed against visual and auditory cognitohazards. These guys have got to be pretty badass if they are expected to fight and win against things that can potentially kill them if they look at them.
  • MTF Lambda-5 ("White Rabbits") go up against anomalous objects and entities that can manipulate space and time, and MTF Mu-13 ("Ghostbusters") go up against... well, guess.
  • MTF Eta-5 ("Jaeger Bombers") is a rapid response unit meant for tracking, capturing and containment of Large-Scale Aggressors — entities over 30 metres in height.
  • MTF Omega-7 and MTF Alpha-9 are both MTFs that utilize humanoid SCPs for the good of the Foundation. The only difference being that Omega-7 was deactivated after SCP-076-2 killed all of its members in what is known as "Incident Zero".
  • Last but not least, MTF Alpha-1 ("Red Right Hand"), a task force comprised of the most loyal Foundation agents operating under the strictest operational security and reporting directly to the O5 Council. This is the Foundation's in-house black ops division. And they still meet their match in MTG Omega-1 ("Law's Left Hand"), their Ethics Committee counterpart, and Rēsh-1 ("Seat of Consciousness"), the Administrator's personal task force. These two are apparently so secret that not even the O5 Council knows about them.
• Badass Boast: The Ethics Commitee has one:
  "[The O5s] judge what is and isn't safe, and that's a vital and important function. But we are the ones who advise the O5s on what is and is not acceptable."
  • SCP-4100 "Future Imperfect" manages to twist their usually somber motto into a truly victorious boast:
    "We don't die in the darkness anymore. We've won. We're living in stellar light."
• Badass Creed:
  • "We Secure. We Contain. We Protect."
  • "We die in the dark so you can live in the light."
  • For the Serpent's Hand, here: "We will free those you keep imprisoned. We will rescue those you try to kill. The Garden is the Serpent's place. We are the Serpent's Hand."
  • For the Global Occult Coalition: "Survival - Concealment - Protection - Destruction - Education"
• Badass Normal:
  • Most competent Foundation personnel. For example, one of SCP-140's archeological digs went very, very wrong. The doctor in charge of the site sacrificed his life to stop whatever the Hell was in there.
  • D-14134 was sent into SCP-1983 for (suicidal) recon after several groups of elite agents had gone in and been massacred. Long story short, a D-class on a suicide mission singlehandedly neutralized a Keter threat. Congratulations, D-14134, you have earned the title of Badass Bystander.
  • Topped by Researcher James Talloran, a 30-something Irish-American low level researcher who withstood three million years of unbelievable dream logic torture at the hands of SCP-3999, a malevolent Apollyon-class Reality Warper, and somehow brings reality back under control for a while, humiliates SCP-3999 in an interview, and then destroys SCP-3999 and himself to revert reality back to normal.
• Bag of Holding: SCP-101 is of the 'Bag of Devouring' variant.
  • As well as SCP-1689 is literally called "The Bag of Holding Potatoes", due to it being infinite, and creating infinite potatoes.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Some SCP organisms are described to lack reproductive organs, such as instances of SCP-3325-1.
• Batman Gambit:
  • How Dr. Mann tries to become the Administrator.
  • Out-Gambitted: Every single person he had killed either survived, didn't stay dead, or got replaced by someone else (or themselves).
  • The specimens of SCP-3325-1 play dead so guards can come near them to get attacked.
• Bathos:
  • All over the place. The more horrifying SCPs are frequently used in experiments with the more ridiculous ones for humor value. Many of the highest-rated entries on the site feature tales of nightmarish abominations tempered with pitch-black humor, or have hilarious descriptions of wacky SCPs who, when you think about it, are actually terrifying.
  • The infamous story "Bees" is probably the most iconic example of this, which starts with the ludicrous premise "What if everything was bees?" and slowly forces the reader to consider the question "What if EVERYTHING was bees?"
• Battle Butler: SCP-662 is a bell that, when rung, can summon one of these. His name is Mr. Deeds, and he is able to perform just about any task, which includes attacking others (such as when he assassinated a D-Class personnel with brutal precision using a knife to the throat). Notably, he can be killed, but once line of sight is broken, he can be summoned again perfectly fine.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: SCP entries are written to be engaging, not to be informative. As a result, they very frequently bury the lede, placing vital information about the SCP at the very end of the entry, while leading into it with physical descriptions that serve to build ambiance. In some cases, like SCP-2935, information that would be absolutely, completely vital for anyone interacting with the SCP is buried at the end of the attached incident reports, when logically in reality it would be the very first thing in the entry. (For the record, the thing about SCP-2935 that is only mentioned in its final recovered artifact is that if anyone returns from it, everyone in the world will die.)
• Bears Are Bad News: Nearly everything here. A few are even Sealed Evil in a Teddy Bear.^note Averted with SCP-2295.
• Beary Funny: SCP-2579 are bears that emit pop music instead of growling, and woo females by engaging in dance-offs.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Researcher Garnier asked SCP-1459 to "do your worst". It seemingly did so, as all present were given amnestics and sent to psychological counselling. The actual method by which the machine killed the puppy was hidden behind a [DATA EXPUNGED], and the cookie produced by SCP-1459 was in an advanced state of decomposition.
  • A test subject requested SCP-294 to provide "the perfect drink". Upon drinking it the subject went into a state of shock, and later committed suicide leaving behind a note which read, "I'm sorry, but at this point everything's just one big letdown."
• Bee Afraid: Inverted and invoked by SCP-1256. It's a pamphlet that uses Insane Troll Logic to make you think that bees are smarter than you think. It also has the effect of making anyone who reads it in full to love and care for bees and other similar species such as wasps unconditionally, even if it harms the insects and makes them hostile.
  • SCP-883, a beehive shed that is Bigger on the Inside. As one gets further inside the hive, the bees start looking less like bees. Bees found more than 1.5km in have extra wings. Bees found more than 2km in have a deadly toxic sting. Bees found more than 7 kilometers in do not appear to be insects, and more like [DATA EXPUNGED].
  • "Bees" is a short story about a Type Green who finds a journal that starts turning everything into bees in part due to his own worsening mental state.
  • Pages relating to bees.
• Been There, Shaped History: Not counting historical disasters caused by SCPs (most are listed on Historical In-Joke), Cocoa Puffs and basketball were created to contain some of them! And apparently Mexico had a huge landmass before an SCP-001 proposal (The Broken God) turned it into the Gulf of California.
  • The Foundation killed JFK, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain, and pretty much every other famously dead musician of the century. They also orchestrated the Presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and caused the Cleveland Torso murders.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • The identity of SCP-1447-2 is heavily obscured, but if you read carefully enough and have enough knowledge, you'll realize that he is Steve Jobs, who apparently went to Tibet in 1985 and created his own Tulpa, all the while another Steve Jobs replaced him in public.
  • Mountaineer George Mallory was killed on Mt. Everest by a frostbite-causing monster, one that later spared Lincoln Hall.
  • SCP-1570 (NSFW) is implied to be indirectly responsible for San Francisco, Austin, and Las Vegas' trends toward partying and counterculture, as well as Burning Man's exposure. It's also the source of the infamous picture of Cowboy fans in assless chaps (and flaunting it) partying on the street as a shocked woman walks past.
  • Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was apparently a talking lion.
  • Tim Duncan, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • George Washington (who impersonated and replaced the original person long before he became president) was a Schizo Tech android.
  • Nikola Tesla successfully invented his Death Ray, SCP-2700. He also traveled to help a Dimensional Traveler in his scientific venture (and to secretly complete his death ray), and ended up creating a universal-scale bomb when one of his peers sabotaged his creation because it was a weapon of war.
  • Zig-zagged with SCP-1841-EX — Franz Liszt, infamous for a rabid fanbase in a time where most musical composers didn't warrant a fanbase that would put the screaming crowds of Beatles fans to shame, was thought to have some kind of memetic or magic effect that caused such hysteria in his fans, but the modern SCP Foundation dismisses it as simple fanboyism. It's also indirectly responsible for the SCP Foundation killing Tupac.
  • SCP-2264 implies that Christopher Marlowe wrote The Hanged King's Tragedy.
  • SCP-1084 is the grave of Ambrose Bierce, who cursed the town that killed him and made all but one person in it die.
  • Richard Nixon was a normal senator up until a night in 1951 where a secret society performed a ritual on him that split him into two Richard Nixons, one of which became the president and the other under Foundation custody.
  • SCP-3817 is an immortal clone of Felix Mendelssohn who has so many self-inflicted injuries it is a wonder he is still alive. He maintains that his injuries are not out of suicidal intent, but rather so he could use his suffering to create musical masterpieces, just like the great composers before him.
  • During the 2000 election, George W. Bush was clinically brain-dead due to a hunting accident and Dr. Shaw had to take over his body and run against Al Gore, who was possessed by SCP-4444, in order to prevent an alien invasion.
  • SCP-4335, an anomalous Minecraft entity, has a note in The Stinger that places Minecraft lead creative designer Jens Bergensten as a researcher of the SCP, and that the Endermen were added to the game to smokescreen 4335's existence.
• Beige Prose: Most articles are written this way, to emphasize the methodical, coldly scientific approach that the Foundation takes towards the horrors that it contains. Enforced in the Short Works Contest, requesting entries less than 500 words long (the winner had none, only pictograms).
• Beneath the Earth: SCP-2622 claims to be from a subterranean world straight out of pulp fiction, home to a civilization of Mole Men, evil reptilian people, and caverns full of prehistoric life. He's making everything up.
• The Bermuda Triangle:
  • Apparently caused by SCP-605, a predatory cloud that hunts boats and planes for food.
  • Although it's not specifically the Bermuda Triangle, SCP-1372 has a similar description. Being a spacial anomaly, in the middle of the ocean, that boats and planes disappear when they go through. However, they do sometimes come back, but that is not a good thing.
• Berserk Button:
  • If you don't want SCP-096 to hunt you down to the ends of the Earth at speeds over 35 miles per hour^note at minimum; if you have a substantial lead on it, it accelerates while smashing through any obstacle in its way with only minor, momentary reductions to its speed at the absolute most and then dismember you to the point where there's Not Enough to Bury when it inevitably catches up, then don't look at its face.
  • SCP-233 has a problem with a certain number (3 squared), and thus even the SCP file is forced to make it [REDACTED].
  • If you're planning on getting something from SCP-261, do not give it counterfeit yen. The only thing it'll give you is a bunch of lethally poisonous gummy candies shaped like hands Flipping the Bird. It also doesn't like it when you press the return coin button. And God help you — and anyone else in the room — if you try the coin-on-a-string trick.
  • SCP-682's Berserk Button is easy to press; simply be an earthly creature.
  • If you tell SCP-2835-1 his cartoon sucks, you're gonna "reap what you sow" — and so is your family.
• Beware of Hitchhiking Ghosts: SCP-1337 was harmless, until a Foundation doctor had her parents executed and her home demolished. Now she's not.
• Beware the Nice Ones: SCP-2543 AKA Tayn't is a very friendly, extremely generous anomalous drug dealer, but God help you if you betray his friendship and steal even a pinch of his stash.
  Autopsies confirm that while the bodies may appear to have undergone unusual injury, the subjects were alive for the majority of time spent in SCP-2542's dimension.
• BFG: SCP-044, the World War II Era Molecular-Fission Cannon.
• Big Bad: The lack of canon obviously means this depends on the author, but the Scarlet King qualifies as one of the greatest. The lack of canon makes exactly what he is ambiguous, but the two most popular versions claim he is either the sentient border between civilization and savagery, order and chaos, present and past, etc. who'd want nothing more than to destroy the first part of said differences, or one of the first gods born beneath the Tree of Knowledge (the Wanderer's Library), who raged against the meaninglessness of his existence, and now seeks to end everything. Either way, he's generally depicted as an Omnicidal Maniac.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: SCP-363, the Not Centipedes. Don't turn the lights off...
• Big Damn Heroes: Can be inferred from the cave paintings of SCP-1660-7.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: SCP-1000, a species of hominids with chimpanzee intelligence infected with an anomalous disease that has a chance of killing any hominids who look at them. That is just the cover story created to divert attention. They are actually just as smart as humans, and they once controlled the world with their Organic Technology marvels until humans overthrew them. They once ruled the world, and may yet again...
• Bigger on the Inside:
  • The sphere in SCP-002 is 60 m³ (or 2000 ft³) in volume, but the interior room does not correspond to these dimensions. The room also has a window that's not visible from the outside.
  • If SCP-184 is placed inside a structure, its interior will slowly expand. At first, the additional space will just be copies of and minor variations of the original structure, but as it continues, the additional rooms and hallways become stranger and stranger.
  • Inverted with SCP-1767, which causes any affected building to be smaller on the inside.
  • SCP-1992 ("Indecisive Mobile Home"). When a person enters and moves through SCP-1992, imperfect copies of the person are created and move through SCP-1992 as well. As they do so, additional rooms are created inside SCP-1992, increasing its interior space.
• Bigger Than Jesus: SCP-3933 was a famous band called "Tyrannosaurus Flex," whose lead singer is claimed to have said "if The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, we're bigger than God." No one remembers them because, as if by divine retribution, hearing a particular song of theirs causes one to completely forget that the band and its members ever existed.
• Big Good:
  • Depending on the author, the Ethics Committee, as they keep the rest of the Foundation from Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
  • The Foundation as a whole counts, as despite being very anti-heroic, they've preserved human civilization since at least the eighteenth century.
  • Mekhane was this while alive, with His/Her high priest Robert Bumaro taking over in His/Her absence.
  • The Serpent of the Wanderer's Library, who while mysterious and being ultimately more akin to Trickster God in the grand scheme of things, has overall acted as a benevolent force by helping shepherd humanity and other sentient species, spreading their awareness of the anomalous world so they can stand against the infinite number of dangers in the darkness.
• Big Red Devil: The Scarlet King is a demonic god who is often associated with the color red.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family The Shaws. Out of seven family members, three work for the Foundation, the father, Adam was a junior researcher who rose through the ranks and became an O5, the oldest child, Mikell, was an agent nicknamed "Cowboy," who eventually made it to O5 like his father, and Elias, who was a normal researcher until he died while in contact with SCP-963 and is now immortal by way of bodysurfing; two are SCPs — Sarah, the youngest child, was stillborn, resurrected imperfectly, got picked up by the Foundation, and made SCP-321, and Adam spent the rest of his life trying to get her out of the Foundation's custody, without success. TJ, the youngest son, has healing powers that have a rebound kind of effect on himself, and was the one to bring Sarah back. The process was extremely traumatizing, to the point that Jack brought him to the Foundation, where he was made SCP-590 and deliberately given numerous mental afflictions to lower his mental state to that of a toddler's. Jack saw this as doing TJ a kindness, as now he was blissfully unaware of the trauma he had through before. Two are working in opposition to the Foundation: the mother, Evelyn, was a medical assistant who rose up to becoming an O5 with Adam, became fascinated with bioengineering and creating beings out of scratch, and had goals of saving Jack, TJ, and Sarah. The rest of the council were appalled, and wanted her to kill the being she showed them, so she unleashed it in an attempt to kill them, and ran off to eventually join Prometheus Labs. The second-youngest, Claire, is a member of the Serpent's Hand, and leads her own team within it known as the "Little Sisters." Considering the typical behavior of the most prominently featured member of this family, and it's pretty jarring to see all this tragedy behind the quirkiness.
  • There's an eighth family member. A little sister, introduced in the Man Who Wasn't There canon, who used to be part of the Serpents Hand, became the new Nobody. She was Unpersoned as a result.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: SCP-1660-7 have bioluminescence. It turns out that they are sapient and use it to communicate.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: SCP-1972 consist of SCP-1972-A, an alien Hooker with a Heart of Gold with features of a moose, kangaroo, and octopus, and SCP-1972-B, an interstellar cop that's chasing her across the galaxy. SCP-1972-A slept with SCP-1972-B, and as a result, SCP-1972-B is pregnant.
• Bizarrchitecture: In Scantron's Proposal of SCP-001. The high school affected by the anomaly transformed practically overnight. All the desks and books were missing, the walls were replaced with reinforced concrete or other strange materials, rooms were randomly rearranged, and the auditorium was sealed off by large steel walls blocking the doorways.
• Bizarro Apocalypse:
  • SCP-093, "The Red Sea Object", is a red stone disc which, when attached to a mirror, opens a gateway into what appears to be an alternate Earth where something seriously wrong had gone down. Human civilisation appeared to possess high technology and was controlled by a totalitarian religious authority, but the test subjects and MTF agents the Foundation sent into this alternate reality found no people, animals or even corpses: only monstrous empty-faced torso creatures that hunted them down. Eventually, the Foundation find a relatively coherent explanation which describes how a godlike Humanoid Abomination known only as "He" provided the alternate humans with advanced tech and a substance known as His Holy Tears. This liquid apparently possessed healing properties but could also turn people into the faceless monsters, who eventually overwhelmed humanity.
  • S. D. Locke's Proposal, "When Day Breaks" describes a nightmarish scenario in which, with no explanation or warning, the Sun started transforming any creature exposed to its rays (including those reflected through moonlight) into hideous, amorphous blobs of flesh that seek to drag any survivors into the sunlight. It's pretty bleak even by SCP standards.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Pretty much all SCPs that aren't trying to outright destroy the world or kill people are extremely dangerous. Take into account that there are other organizations that are trying to use SCPs for their own agendas (many of whom make the Foundation seem moral stalwarts by comparison, such as Global Occult Coalition, Chaos Insurgency and the Sarkic Cults) and it's almost outright Evil Versus Evil. The Foundation is a slightly Grey entity, and even then, they've slaughtered millions, altered reality, and are toying with forces they barely understand. But, like one short story says "You want happy endings? Fuck you. You're alive to read it. God help us all."
• Black Box: SCP-914. Various settings give the user "control" of the output.
• Black Comedy:
  • Most of the occasional humor on the site falls into this category. Especially with the Joke articles, which parody the usual nightmare fuel found in the mainlist articles.
  • SCP-2398 is a standout example of black comedy, as it is a baseball bat that makes things explode when hit, leading to hilarity like:
    Testing Parameters: SCP-2398 is swung by a machine at a test pig.
    Test Results: During setup of the swinging robotic arm rig, the arm swings prematurely, striking Dr. Towns in the arm and causing him to violently explode. The swinging robotic arm rig is destroyed. The resulting explosion causes SCP-2398 to arc across the test chamber and strike the test pig, which also violently explodes. That explosion causes SCP-2398 to then strike two D-Class personnel used as operators in earlier tests, who also violently explode. The test chamber is destroyed as a result of the four explosions. SCP-2398 is unaffected, and later placed back into containment.
  • SCP-2875, aka "The Town That Got Fucked By Bears", wavers between this and Nightmare Fuel. The article describes a town that got massively infested and destroyed by self-replicating bears. An MTF leader even acknowledges in the article how inherently funny the concept is while also pointing out that if the bears were to get loose from the town they would devastate the ecosystem. Doesn't make the found voicemails from the Minnesota Nice "Tom Miller from City Hall" any less funny, though.
    Okay listen there is a bear outside of my house, okay. My neighbor just got fucking eated by a bear. Okay there are bears on the streets, there are bears in peoples' homes, okay, we gotta do something about this. There's, I can't get outside, okay, my kids are at school, I can't get to my kids. Okay there is a bear on my car, why can't oh god (bear attack sounds), oh lord there's a bear in the house, oh, 875-7112 call me please (dial tone).
• Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: SCP-1459, a machine that once given a verbal input kills a dog following the listed command (whether directly, as "Blender" has the dog puréed by a blender, or indirectly, such as "Supernova" being a puppy bludgeoned by Epiphone Supernova guitars), and then gives out a cookie (mostly of a flavor the person dislikes, but sometimes related to the test).
• The Blank: SCP-600, which has the faceless version visible on camera, but otherwise takes on appearance based on direct human observers. Surprisingly enough, no one's compared him to the original depiction of the Slender Man.
• Blank White Void: The hyperspace in SCP-3001, although it's black. At one point, Robert Scranton traveled in a straight line for two months, and found nothing.
• Blatant Lies: Occasionally pops up while the Foundation is trying to cover something up. One good example:
  "[It is determined that this is the point where Dr. Clef accidentally fell out of his chair and struck his head nine times against the corner of the desk, fracturing his skull and snapping his neck between the second and third vertebrae.]"
  • Although that example is a strange one, as the only thing being covered up in the source document is the precise nature of Dr. Clef himself, and that it's a fig-leaf coverup of another researcher's berserk moment.
• Blessed with Suck: Name-checked in the talk page for SCP-2102: He should be a Super-Soldier (he even gets an X-# designation) because of his invulnerability to radiation (possibly caused by exposure to said radiation) combined with an experimental fast-healing solution; instead the healing process is imperfect and in order to prevent his flesh from growing uncontrollably, he's been a deaf, blind, mute, and paralyzed mass of cauterized scars in the shape of a human for 42 years.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Many of the "Sentient" SCPs run on this, and even the more bloodthirsty SCPs could be argued to be simply doing the things they do because they do not know any better.
  • Special note goes to SCP-049, who thinks he's curing people from a (non-existent) plague, by killing said people and turning them into zombies. From the doctor's perspective, however, he is simply curing people.
  • The Foundation itself. You'd like to call them evil for what they do to some of their living subjects, but there are times they Pet the Dog, like with Cassy the living drawing. Furthermore, lives outside the Foundation for Foundation members exist to a greater degree than you'd expect from such an organization; there are references to families and such. Also, there are threats of demotion or dismissal if rules are broken; in other words, death by You Have Failed Me isn't the primary response to screwing up, and it is possible to exit the Foundation alive even if misconduct is why you're exiting. (Of course, with Laser-Guided Amnesia drugs in use, it's likely that their retirement policy is the same as in Men in Black.) This all serves to make it more frightening: if they were all clearly villains, doing bad things For the Evulz or for gain, that'd be one thing. But the Foundation members are capable of being kind, and are quite reasonable at times. The same people are capable of being scarier than the monsters, then being very kind or even heroic, all in one day. Their lives when they clock out at the end of the day? Just like ours, for the most part. You read the worst of it, you want them to be just plain evil… but they're not. The normal, the exceptionally good, and the exceptionally horrific is all done by people who are still human enough. Your good-to-evil meter just doesn't apply here.
  • SCP-171 is a case of The Assimilator and covers an expanse of beach. Stay too long, it knows what you know and your body becomes an extension of it. Don't confuse this for merely being controlled: the victims are permanently consumed. The entity is not malevolent: it couldn't keep people from walking over it, has no power over the process, and regrets the losses. So naturally, the psychological testing for Foundation members wishing to voluntarily 'join' with it is quite rigorous before permission will be given.
  • The Foundation in SCP-5000 believe that the extermination of humanity is the right thing to do. Scant references imply that it's thanks to a discovery that humanity itself is abhorrent and anomalous. And if the horrifying revelation that a mind-controlling Eldritch Abomination added emotions to humanity's collective subconscious in the past is true, then humans as a whole were originally inclined to this kind of morality before the being stepped in.
• Body Horror: Needs an entire page to list the many examples.
• Body to Jewel:
  • SCP-009 is a red water that crystalizes in heat and infects water, including the body's water content.
  • SCP-578 turns blood into jewels.
  • SCP-409 will turn organic matter that touches it into more SCP-409 crystals.
• Born of Magic: One of the effects observed to be caused by SCP-1987-J is that it can make people and creatures exist, apparently permanently, as most changes don't reverse when play ends. If no females (who could be turned into 18-year-olds, with a 68% chance of their clothing turning into G-string bikinis, lingerie, or leather fetish gear) are present during testing, several may come into existence. Dragons, dinosaurs, and female angels, along with other album cover cliches, also come to exist. Spontaneous pregnancies have also occurred, even in males.
• Boss Battle:
  • SCP-1201 is a well that's a portal to a boss fight.
  • SCP-2424 is the first boss in an Antarctic-themed "game".
• Bowdlerise: SCP-096-J is a web add-on that does this to any explicit material found on the web, mostly pornography.
• Boxed Crook: Class D Personnel are mostly death row inmates. (See Cannon Fodder, below.)
• Brain Bleach: Class A amnestics can come in quite handy when dealing with some SCPs.
• Brain Uploading: SCP-2306 used to be a human named "Ian" who was uploaded into a flash drive and was forced to solve computer problems.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: SCP-978 has scenes of hilarity, scenes of remarkable fuzz, and scenes to haunt your dreams. All at random.
  • A lot of articles will read like this, with the article seemingly describing a normal person/object with mundane powers until you read the part about how it kills/mentally scars/otherwise ruins you. For example, a magic boarding pass that transforms into a valid ticket for the nearest public transportation vehicle, completely indistinguishable from any normal ticket ( like the bus pass in your wallet right now). And then once you reach your destination, it erases you from existence.
  • One of SCP-1763's plays is as follows:
    Performance Incident #: 14
    Performance: "Play With the Jenklsedn" by "Rodney Harper"
    Program Description: A play all children should attend, Play With the Jenklsedn addresses problems of growing up, family issues, and even how to deal with a family pet.
    Observations: Scenes include "Bad Words", "Why We Share", and "Sexual Problems with Cats".
  • One of the items dispensed from SCP-261 is a package of "Dimensional Donuts". These are small, edible donuts with a spacial anomaly where the hole would be. Things sometimes fall out of this "hole".
    Item Description: Dimensional Donuts — A brightly colored box of donuts, labeling in Spanish. Donuts possess a small interdimensional anomaly, located in the hole of the donut which is destroyed once the ring of the donut is broken. When held sideways, small objects fall out of the hole, the object varying depending on person, donut, and time of day. Items noted include small candies, slices of fruit, jigsaw pieces, various forms of ammunition, blood, gasoline, various insects of unknown species, and human fingers.
  • SCP-1954, the 'Housewives Handbook' contains the following line about how the instructions go from weird but mundane (such as putting cat hair in meatballs) to insane rituals:
    Most of these rituals involve murder, cannibalization, sexual encounters, self mutilation, and canned vegetables.
  • From the description of SCP-078-J: "It is well known for causing various cases of yuckiness, bad smells, and immediate death."
  • From the description of SCP-2547-1, an anthropomorphic coyote.
  SCP-2547-1 will accept the following as payment: any kind of meat, pepper, flint arrowheads, knives, whips, leather, burlap, belts, the thorns of a saguaro cactus, broken glass, lost teeth, ties, carved sculptures, the corpses of domestic cats, amber, canvas shoes, peyote, chewing tobacco, sexual favors, sulfur, men's button-up shirts, animal skulls, and stories with SCP-2547-1 as the protagonist.^note The latter appears to be a favorite of SCP-2547-1, and the highest recorded amounts of water were produced in exchange for such narratives, followed by the volumes produced in exchange for sexual favors.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In-universe, there is SCP-993, a children's television show about "Bobble the Clown" which sends viewers over ten into a coma for the duration of the program. Like most children's shows of the particular format, it has the normal sort of fourth-wall-breaking, speaking directly to the audience as he teaches the under-tens to commit any number of atrocities. More recently, it seems to have caught on to the SCP Foundation's efforts to keep it from being broadcast to the world; the two most recently archived episodes are Bobble Hates You. ^note Bobble the Clown sitting in a chair, glaring at the viewer for thirty minutes straight and (EXPLETIVE) YOU (EXPLETIVE) YOU (EXPLETIVE) YOU.^note Bobble the Clown in the room where the Foundation has his show archived, angrily telling the viewer how to breach containment of several dangerous SCPs and murder several important Foundation personnel, featuring an appearance by the animated version of a researcher who happened to be passing by the archive at the time shown on the clock in the show.
  • Then there's S Andrew Swann's Proposal. In the end, it concludes with the basic truth of the matter: There is a God, and it is SCP-001. And it’s a bunch of horror writers.
  • SCP-2835: Similar to Bobble, except Paddy the Pelican takes care of troublesome viewers himself.
  • The description SCP-2574-1, an anthropomorphic coyote.
  SCP-2547-1 will accept the following as payment: any kind of meat, pepper, flint arrowheads, knives, whips, leather, burlap, belts, the thorns of a saguaro cactus, broken glass, lost teeth, ties, carved sculptures, the corpses of domestic cats, amber, canvas shoes, peyote, chewing tobacco, sexual favors, sulfur, men's button-up shirts, animal skulls, and stories with SCP-2547-1 as the protagonist.^note The latter appears to be a favorite of SCP-2547-1, and the highest recorded amounts of water were produced in exchange for such narratives, followed by the volumes produced in exchange for sexual favors.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Implied in the first test of SCP-404; it's further implied that he killed his sister's boyfriend.
  • The siblings of SCP-2610: Older brothers A and B (who was psychically lobotomized by A by the time SCP-2610 really gets going) impregnate their twenty-years-younger sister C after A is visited by an "angel" who tells him she'll be the "Whore of His^note the "Lord", not A Deliverance". A assures us that C came on board after she was visited by the "angel", but he's the only source of info and a photo 10 years later implies C is starting to have doubts. C's "children" take this trope to the extreme: "Her daughters have become the vessels for the Seed of her sons, and their daughters and their sons".
• Brown Note: Has its own page.
• Bull Seeing Red: What might be going on in SCP-2851, seeing as the malevolent entity's name is Taros'zedbreet. Subverted as the color red doesn't make it angry, just distracted.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: SCP-6145 (which is loosely based on the real life case of Mary Toft) features an 18th century woman who gives birth to a litter of rabbits. Unfortunately for her, the Foundation (or rather, a precursor organization, His Majesty's Foundation for the Secure Containment for the Paranormal), gets involved. It doesn't end well.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Just about all the scientific personnel, in one way or another.
  • Compared to the others, the real Bunny-Ears Lawyer is Dr. Glass. He's probably the only one with anything resembling normal human emotions and morals.
• Buried Alive: SCP-6502 ("Harwick Cemetery") renders people buried in it unable to die as long as they stay buried there (the mind and consciousness are preserved even as the body rots away); however, to take advantage of this, the subjects have to be interred while still alive. The Foundation uses it to keep a number of high-value personnel around to consult with who would otherwise be dead, as well as a few prisoners from rival Groups of Interest to interrogate and the five people who'd inadvertently been buried alive there before the Foundation got wind of it.
• "Burly Detective" Syndrome: the forest we don't know did anything hence we can't name is a place where referring to the Scottish forest or anything inside the Onomatopia Oaks causes its victims to undergo drastic mutations.
• Butler Space: SCP-662 ("Mr. Deeds"). SCP-662 is a small silver bell. When it is rung, a short well-dressed Caucasian butler named Mr. Deeds will appear from the nearest area not within line-of-sight.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • The Unusual Incidents Unit (UIU), an underfunded division of the FBI that is very inept compared to the other Groups of Interest and is continually used and manipulated by the Foundation. That being said, a lot of it is implied to be them Obfuscating Stupidity so they can stay under the radar of forces that are far above their paygrade in terms of handling.
  • SCP-3467-J, whose containment procedures include making fun of him at every waking moment.
  • SCP-507 is an otherwise-ordinary guy who occasionally, and involuntarily, slips into Another Dimension. His adventures into alternate realities have led to him being tormented by horrific Eldritch Abominations, having to survive in nightmarish Death Worlds, and getting mauled by a friggin' polar bear, among other things.
  • Class D personnel. Need some expendable people to be a guinea pig? Send in some Class D personnel! Need someone to go and feed the incredibly dangerous Eldritch Abomination? Class D!
  • SCP-661; since he's basically a complete Jerkass salesman stereotype, the Foundation personnel are gladly dicks right back to him, often with hilarious results:
  "████. It ███████ reeks in here. Open a god████ window or something". (Denied. Officer ██████ passed flatulence in cell instead.)
• Butterfly of Doom: How SCP-2820 kills its anomalous targets:
  14:47 (18/09): Frog detonates bomb, preventing Alpha Threat's complete rebirth.
  [REDACTED]
  21:40 (18/09): Rock falls out of coat pocket onto bottle of tequila, breaking it and averting an XK-Class scenario.
  [REDACTED]
  23:47 (18/09): Trench coat is thrown onto flintlock rifle, which discharges on accident, striking Alpha Threat in the head and killing it.

C

• Cain and Abel: There's a human SCP named Cain, and one named Able (with that spelling, though it used to be interchangeable). Cain is Able's Berserk Button (though Able is The Berserker anyway). Interestingly, Cain is a friendly, helpful guy whose unfortunate effect on plant life and soil is what makes him Euclid class (that's bad). Able, on the other hand, is a Keter class (that's ultra-bad) unkillable Ax-Crazy Blood Knight to the point of basically being a human version of good ol' 682. Looks like the good book didn't give us the whole story. They used to be more interconnected (it's implied they originated from the same place, and exposure to each other caused Cain to go into [DATA EXPUNGED]), but with Able's Retool, they're now separate, only bound by their names. Many tales still portray the two as the biblical Cain and Abel, however.
  • Their personalities are so different to how the two are usually shown, because this is both of them 6000 years later — Cain has been suffering under intense regret, and resolved to do good, while Able has had intense revenge fantasies running through his head for 6 millennia.
  • On a less literal note, the "elders" of SCP-2039's Feuding Families are Blaine Wagner and Mabel Pike. While Blaine didn't kill Mabel (and probably can't at this point), he did kill his sister Mabel's girlfriend Lucy. Or, as it is implied, Mabel killed Lucy, who was Blaine's girlfriend according to his side of the story.
• Call-Back:
  • The heart of TwistedGears-Kaktus Proposal's SCP-001 is SCP-882. The beach that is SCP-2217 is mentioned, and every major SCP relating to the Church is a key component in that they combine to form an Eldritch Abomination that probably isn't the true Broken God.
  • SCP-1514: SCP-148 (Telekill alloy) is implied have been involved with CIA's telepathy experiments.
  • SCP-1710:
    • It's heavily implied (but never directly stated) that SCP-1710-1 originally came to the Foundation's universe since they were chasing down SCP-682 after the latter had somehow appeared in their home dimension.
    • Saturn Deer, a Trickster God seen/mentioned in many other SCPs and tales, is the one who ran the reincarnation scam that tricked both SCP-1710-1 and 1710-2.
  • SCP-2000: The phrase on the security image - "Remember us." The phrase was the final line from Document Recovered From The Marianas Trench, symbolizing the connection between the two - a Reset Button.
  • The Durand that created SCP-2776 is not a one-off character. He is all but stated to be the same Dr. Jean Durand from SCP-186, and sure enough, what appears to be prototype versions of the superweapons in SCP-186 reappear. (e.g. the immortality gas)
  • SCP-3434: Several of the E-3434 instances interviewed mention events that occurred in tales present on the site and one is implied to be the person SCP-343 removed from existence for doubting him. Also to the Foundation/MTF motto "We die in the darkness so you can live in the light" which was on the 3000 Horror Contest page and twisted into "He sews kindhearted sin contagiously. Think evil."
  • SCP-3930: The Pattern Screamer was first mentioned in SCP-1795 ("Star Wombs")
  • Several of the pictograms broadcast from SCP-4100 are of other SCPs - Specifically, of SCP-173, SCP-882, and SCP-914.
  • The main anomaly of the Montauk House is an example of "traumatic imprinting," where the emotional distress of a Type Green is imprinted on the surrounding environment and repeats forever and ever. This idea was first introduced in the G.O.C.-related Tale "Trauma."
  • The original G.O.C. article detailing Type Greens is often cited throughout the above SCP article to help better understand how they both work and how the Coalition hunts them.
  • SCP-6820: This article, which primarily focuses on deconstructing the Early-Installment Weirdness of the Foundation's uncharacteristic insistence on terminating SCP-682, pays homage to the first line of 682's Special Containment Procedures by quoting it almost word-for-word in the exact same place in its second file:
    SCP-6820 must be deactivated and/or destroyed as soon as possible.
• Came Back Wrong:
  • The stillborn child of Researcher Adam; he revived her using several SCPs, and the result is SCP-321.
  • When a severed human head is placed into SCP-827, a living copy of the person the head belonged to was created, albeit with a flat head, malformed intestines, and communication consisting solely of writing the letter G.
• The Cameo: A couple of the joke SCPs — and a few of the regular ones as well.
  • Big Biblical names, Strega Nona's pot, The Little Mermaid, Halloween, Santa Claus...
• Canis Latinicus: SCP-7000-J is an entity that answers and communicates in fake Latin, to the point it's summoned with sentences that start with "Lorem ipsum".
• Canon: Loose, and kept that way. In theory, "there is no canon". Any work on the site is allowed to ignore or contradict any other work on the site, and every person's headcanon is valid. In practice, any work that violates too many people's headcanons gets downvoted enough to be deleted, turning Fanon Discontinuity into Canon Discontinuity.
  • However, there are multiple "mini-canons" around the site: 2013 was ushered in with a site-wide contest to see what canons users could create. Non-contest mini-canons include the Bellerverse, the Classical Revival, and Et Tam Deum Petivi.
  • Resurrection is a major new canon hub that is reviving (hence the name) aspects of the Old Shame of the "lolfoundation" and Task Force Omega-7, reconstructing the original "central storyline".
• Canon Immigrant
  • Mobile Task Force Epsilon-11 "Nine-Tailed Fox" originally appeared in the Containment Breach video game, but has since showed up on the site, becoming an "official" task force.
  • Some groups of interest from the foreign language branches have been tackled by English authors for the main wiki, such as the Meat Circus (Мясного цирка) from the Russian branch, but the most well known is SAPPHIRE (SAPHIR, ''La Société Athée Pour la Halte de l'Idéologie Religieuse) from the French branch.
  • An interesting case with the Spanish SCP entry, SCP-ES-026. Originally published on La Fundación SCP by the user Dr Reach in May 2014, Reach translated the entry into English and published it to the main wiki in June to fill the empty SCP-179 spot.
  • Affray Interactive created an original SCP for their game SCP: 5K; at the developers request, the users Gabriel Kero, HarryBlank, and Placeholder McD wrote SCP-7528 to promote its addition in the "This is Why: Part II" update.
• Cannon Fodder: Dying is literally in the job description of Class D Personnel. It can get quite blatant; for instance, SCP-120 notes that a moon base was constructed after expending "vast amounts of money and D-personnel".
  • Despite being Elite Mooks, the Foundation's Mobile Task Forces are surprisingly easily defeated. (Given the nature of what they're up against, this isn't entirely surprising. Even the SCPs that aren't actively hostile are often very difficult to handle.) Read through any given incident report featuring any given Mobile Task Force and watch the team quickly fall apart, one member at a time. Yes, even that time they went after a non-sentient SCP whose only known ability was to produce an infinite amount of pasta.
    MD: This is MD, we're on floor seventeen, ME is down!
    L1: Down? Why?
    MF: Some farfalle cut him to death, fuck if I know!
  • Of course, this depends on SCP to SCP. Some have managed to destroy horrible magic artifacts with nothing but modern-day weaponry.
  • It might help if you know where D-Class personnel come from. The popular perception used to be that they were prisoners from death row, but given the vast amount of human resources needed to sustain it and the relatively few amount of prisoners on death row, this viewpoint has largely been abandoned. A more popular idea nowadays is that D-Class are clones that have organs that fail within 30 days of their creation, made specifically for the purpose of testing. A few of them are instead ex-members of Foundation staff, who got busted down to D-Class after they misbehaved so badly that they may well have endangered their entire facility for a petty lark. The non-cloned D-Class are usually kept alive for repeated testing.
• Captured Super-Entity: Lots. One is even implied to be the Abrahamic God. Indeed, mantaining such entities under captivity is pretty much the point of the Foundation (although a few are uncontained).
• Cardboard Prison: There are some SCPs that the Foundation does not have the ability to contain. For example, SCP-343 stays in its cell only because it chooses to.
• Cats Are Mean: SCP-511; a living, cat-shaped mass of debris, flesh, and rot. It's always surrounded by hordes of cats, and makes them very unpleasant. 511s are made by the cats. The cats made it because they hate us.
  • SCP-607 is a cat that is bonded to somebody it declares to be its owner in a way that causes the owner to suffer any injury it does. The cat will regenerate or revive after any sort of injury. The owner, however, will not, which is bad since the cat is actively suicidal.
  • Subverted with SCP-529 (a.k.a. "Josie"), who is quite affectionate despite not having any hindquarters to speak of.
  • SCP-795 is a reality-bending cat that caused all dogs in an animal shelter to be euthanized, as well as made some staff members disappear.
• Caustic Critic: SCP-1722 is a walking stick with the soul of one that usually criticizes any form of recorded media within a five meter radius by inserting commentary on it.
• Censor Box:
  • ██████ ███
  • [REDACTED]
  • [DATA EXPUNGED]
  • [EXPLETIVE DELETED]
• Censored for Comedy: In the more comedic entries, expletives are censored with [EXPLETIVE REDACTED], and sometimes simply [REDACTED] or [DATA EXPUNGED].
• Cerebus Retcon
  • Telekill alloy was changed from a "magic restraint" for psychic SCPs to an incredibly harmful substance that causes, among other things, mental retardation. This is because before the rewrite, it was starting to become a Boring, but Practical means of controlling a wide variety of SCPs with minimal risk; after the rewrite, a "no cross-testing SCPs" rule was established.
  • Several Tales have reframed the original Foundation staff and their antics as coming from much darker and more traumatized places. Portraits of Your Father recasts Dr. Kondraki as a bipolar man who did his more outrageous stunts due to untreated alcoholism and bipolar mania, Major Tom and Code Brown have Dr. Shaw's existence utterly ruin his entire family, and SCP-4231 claims that Dr. Clef has severe PTSD due to being trapped in an abusive relationship with a reality bender who regularly assaulted and gaslighted him.
• Cessation of Existence: SCP-2718 subverts it: A resurrected O5 declares that after he died, there was nothing... for about a day, then his consciousness went back into his body and felt every excruciating moment of his body decomposing and being spread out and eaten by wildlife while feeling as if he were holding his breath "beyond bearing". He was the only O5 who hadn't "enhanced" his lifespan with SCPs, so when he told the rest of the O5 Council why he was suddenly so concerned about his and even the D-classes' health, they believed him and completely freaked out—
  "We must declare human death a Keter SCP," [O5-8] demanded, "and contain it at any cost."
  • —and then O5-1 told everyone to shut up and flooded the council room with amnestic gas.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • Pre-mass edit/migration, when Able started working for the Foundation, some changes were observed in his endless supply of hack-slash-stabbity-chop-chop implements:
    Addendum 076-08: As of 08/11/????, SCP-076-2's weapons have become noticeably different, being constructed of an unknown dull, dark brown metal, the items mechanical in design and nature, rather than traditionalist iron forged items. Rotating blades, chain edges, and drills are often present on subject's weaponry, powered and operated by unknown sources. It is unknown as to what prompted this change, and SCP-076-2 again refuses to divulge any information regarding it, stating only "Your people have created such odd blades. I thought I might see how they worked."
  • Clef recounts a time when he was bringing a chainsaw to work to test if it had any anomalies worth researching, but wound up in the middle of what he thought was a D-Class riot (but was actually a costume party for the research staff). Half the research staff died that night, and the chainsaw was discovered to be just a regular chainsaw after all.
• Chemically-Induced Insanity: Dr. Clef once held an orientation meeting with new researchers on the subject of Reality Warpers. He'd spiked the food and drink with hallucinogens so that when he started yelling at them that reality was being changed, they believed it, driving home just how helpless you are against such SCPs.
• Childless Dystopia: SCP-1322 is a small interdimensional portal to another world. The people on the other side have suffered a global Sterility Plague, and blame our side.
• Children Are Innocent: Played with. While there are child SCP items (many of which are creepy), very few of them are actually hostile or malevolent and even the ones that are hostile/malevolent are (most of the time) not so of their own volition but because they've been altered or brainwashed or are being manipulated by an outside force.
• Child Soldiers: SCP-2273 is 2.1 meters tall, a Major in the Russian army in an alternate universe WW1, and mentions being a child "several years ago".
• Christmas Episode: A Keter Kinda Christmas, The 12 Days of Site 87's Christmas, the December 24th, 2011 Collaboration (which was made in 2014), Are We Christmas Yet?... it goes on and on and on.
  • Even some SCPs get on the act, particularly SCP-1225 and SCP-784... even if they are subversions.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Averted with SCP-186.
  He handed me a pair of field glasses. Take a look, he said. I saw the German missing half of his head, still screaming ... The Frenchman, in his terrible calm voice, explained that his shot had to have destroyed at least a quarter of the soldier's brain tissue. Enough to cause instant death, he said. But watch. I kept watching through the field glasses. The German didn't stop screaming ... the Frenchman lined up another shot. The rest of the soldier's head was now gone, and the screaming was replaced by some sort of low grunting, the likes of which I have never heard from men.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: If CIA is ever mentioned in an article, they are most likely involved as the creators of some Cold War era supertechnology with immoral history and applications. If FBI appears, they are usually working for the greater good of the world, though as the Unusual Incidents Unit may attest, they're not very specialized at handling anomalies.
• Circles of Hell: SCP-2731, where each circle of hell has a different punishment for its denizens. The twist is that the denizens of hell are ice cream, so the tortures they endure get weird. In order of distance to the entrance, closest to furthest: allowed to melt and left out, left in a broken freezer, mixed with garbage and other inedibles, turned into the ice cream-like Dippin' Dots, dropped off an ice cream cone into a playground sandbox, repeatedly melting and refreezing, ignored by lactose intolerant people, melting in an ice cream shop because someone can't decide on a flavor, and a giant tongue swaying over the ice cream but never actually licking it^note which is notably an inversion of the ultimate punishment in The Divine Comedy, ie. being eternally consumed by Satan's mouth.
• Circle of Standing Stones: SCP-526 "Valhalla Gate" is a ring of nine rune-covered standing stones on a hill in Norway. Each morning at sunrise, a group of what appear to Einheriar (spirits of fallen warriors, from Norse Mythology) appear on the hill and either dig in or move off the hill and attack anyone they find.
• Circus of Fear: Herman Fuller's Circus of the Disquieting; the performers found by the SCP Foundation are pretty friendly, but the Man With The Upside-down Face they keep mentioning is decidedly not. Also described as a little big top that wasn't there yesterday in a tale:
  Opening Night: Not an eye sees our caravan pull up in the moonlit lot. Not a soul hears the sound of our spikes driven into the earth. One day we're not there, the next day we are.
  • Which is itself a horror version/shout out to The Night Circus, which literally begins with the line "The circus arrives without warning."
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • Believing you can keep SCP-616-1 open will make you able to keep it open. For this reason, the Foundation painted Satanic symbols all over it and manned SCP-616 flights with devout people.
  • SCP-239 is a Reality Warper who doesn't fully understand the nature of her powers. Instead, what she believes to be true becomes true. People are exceptionally nice to her because she thinks they're her friends, so they become friendly. Bordering on Mind Screw, this works the other way as well: Dr. Clef frightened her, and she believed he wanted to kill her, so he became obsessed with killing her.
  • SCP-2950 is an Eldritch Abomination that takes the form of whatever people think it is. So the Foundation's strategy is to make people think it's simply a very comfortable chair.
• Clickbait Gag: SCP-3299 is a series of Brown Note internet advertisements that result in various physical or mental changes when viewed. These effects are somewhat related to the headline. For example, reading the affected article titled "This woman's one weird trick will make you younger! Doctors hate her!" will literally make the viewer 20 to 30 percent younger, unless they have a PhD, in which case they will be compelled to develop an angry and "crippling obsession" towards the woman described in the article.
• Clingy MacGuffin: Numerous SCPs fall under various categories of this, both mental and physical. To name but one example, SCP-1545 is a two-man llama costume that forces whoever dons it to become "Larry the Loving Llama", an identity they will maintain until they either die or are removed from the costume by others. And this is one of the more benign examples, as "Larry the Loving Llama" won't resist being taken apart even though he isn't inclined to do so of his own accord.
• Clock Punk: SCP-217 is a virus that gradually and painfully turns any animal's organs (including humans) into gear-and-cog-driven machines.
• Clockwork Creature: SCP-6854, the aptly named cogcows, are a species of mechanical cattle, inspired by the Fearsome Critters of American Folklore. They're described as having lightbulbs in place of eyes, naturally producing oil and coal, and moving about on a set of wheels. Their horns can also be used to fire bullets.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: SCP-1808 are six SpongeBob SquarePants watches that makes your finger and toe bones grow by 6cm every 15 minutes, accompanied by SpongeBob's laugh. The process is extremely painful, since your bone is literally slowly piercing through your flesh, tearing it apart. Turning the knob makes it grow faster. MC&D uses them as torture tools, and the process is painful, even just from the description.
• Colonized Solar System: The Foundation has a moon base and at least a few outposts and ships located throughout the Solar System.
  • SCP-179 is a Guardian Entity that floats a few hundred kilometers beneath the sun. According to her, the Solar System has many inhabitants, all of whom she watches over. Humans are simply one of the most talkative.
  • SCP-736 indicates that something living in the vicinity of Saturn really, really hates humanity in particular. As in, enough to throw one of Saturn's moons at us.
  • SCP-1960, on the other hand, is an unknown entity that manifests in the form of text over images of Neptune. It's desperately lonely, cold, and asking for help.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: SCP-1564's test log, in which six "gods" are talking.
• Combo Platter Powers: Allowing for humanoid SCPs has resulted in many a Mary Sue being listed. These are generally deleted within time, but the notoriously bad ones are decommissioned: they remain in the series continuity as past SCPs and are given elaborate destruction sequences.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Invoked by the special containment procedures for SCP-3467-J, who is to be made fun of at every moment, even if he's trapped with SCP-682.
• The Comically Serious:
  • The SCP reports are written in an entirely serious tone, no matter how absurd the topic might be — a cake platter that continually generates cakes of various sizes sounds silly, but it's there and has to dealt with, as left unchecked it would bury the entire world under baked goods. Thus, the dry manner of the archive acts a Straight Man to the nature of the SCPs (especially the "joke" ones) and the eccentric behavior of SCP personnel.
  • The dead serious warnings after some doctors with a sense of humor pull some sort of stunt/prank.
• Compound Title: SCP-2615-J and SCP-2615, titled Clap Your Hands and If You Believe respectively.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Literally with SCP-1633, an unfinished video game that, if played long enough (and with enough breaks), starts actively targeting the player, not their in-game avatar. It's also been observed to exploit glitches in the physics engine, even ones unknown to the player prior. An attempt to bypass this by playing one continuous game resulted in the game rendering the guy catatonic in apparent retaliation once he started a New Game Plus.
• Condemned Contestant: D-Class personnel.
  • Taken a bit more literally when Game Show style SCPs come into play, namely, SCP-024 and SCP-263.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • SCP-1862 was one prior to becoming a Fluorine-Based Lifeform. The one thing he suspected? Fluoridation of water.
  • Parawatch, a forum of aspiring sleuths of the paranormal mixed with creepypasta tellers. The Foundation keeps tabs on the group of interest but doesn't stamp them out as they're currently so off the mark it's like Parawatch is a free psy-ops.
• Contrived Coincidence: SCP-4006 is a series of ridiculously improbable coincidences and events that have lead people to mistakenly believe that the area known as Massachusetts is a populated and fully-functional American state; in reality, it has no history of human habitation. Why it happens and how some members of the Foundation were able to learn the truth and spread it to others is unknown. It's also possible that SCP-4006, through more improbable coincidences, has a role in assisting the Foundation with maintaining The Masquerade.
• Continuity Nod: The excerpt from the O5 Emergency Meeting for SCP-4002 has them reference the Children of the Night, and alludes to SCP-2000 as a way to continue the effects of SCP-4002, and to put it in their own words: "Let us replace a blighted crop with a cutting of its former self, as many times as is necessary."
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: Used extensively.
• Cool Starship: SCP-2117 is a universe-hopping 23 kilometer long starship. Its explicit purpose it to aid in the defense of worlds with organizations devoted to "Maintaining Normalcy" during their Darkest Hour, and apparently represents the absolute best of countless other species on (mostly) parallel Earths. The entire ship is a hodgepodge of every type of technology imaginable for every purpose imaginable (technology found ranges from a literal Wave-Motion Gun, a maternity ward which requires large amounts of thermite, and a piece of Organic Technology described by every race to discover it as simply a "Space Whale".) The only way that anyone from the Foundation knows any of this is because of the (surprisingly) helpful writing on the walls written in everything from hybrids of modern languages to long lasting pheromones to radio signals in the walls (helpfully, the ship makes memetic Translator Microbes) which have been used to map the ship (and leave snarky comments). The ship is currently designated as Euclid; however, in the event of an Alien Invasion or similar event resulting in at least 50% extinction rates, it will be reclassified "Thaumiel" and put to immediate use.
• Cool Train: SCP-716 qualifies for this trope by virtue of being a steam engine. And it can travel through dimensions. Also SCP-052.
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: The SCP-682 termination attempt using Dr. Clef, which was definitely a legitimate termination attempt and he absolutely wasn't put in with 682 by someone trying to get rid of him. And the head researcher found killed by blunt force trauma shortly thereafter despite never having entered the containment area was certainly killed by 682.
  • The Foundation itself routinely does this when recovering SCPs that have caused casualties.
  • Not fatal, but this after-incident interview ends with a description of some completely accidental injuries on the part of Doctor Clef.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Marshall, Carter, and Dark, Ltd. is a group that captures (and occasionally makes) anomalies for exploitation and sale to rich people.
• Corrupted Data: Not counting data ██████████ or [EXPUNGED], multiple incidences in entries, for various reasons — corrupt storage data, unintelligible footage in what they're attempting to transcript, or the effects of the SCP itself.
• Corrupting Pornography: SCP-1004, Factory Porn, is a computer program that gives the user access to whatever kind of porn they want for free. If someone views it for long enough, they'll start developing disturbing sexual fetishes like scat, murder, bestiality, and pedophilia, and will start trying to perform those acts in real life.
• Cosmic Horror Story:
  • Perhaps at an even greater level than Lovecraft's, as the Foundation hasn't even been able to catalog the number of parallel universes, pocket dimensions, and indescribably vast voids full of incomprehensible entities and forces trying to kill us.
  • Some SCP-001 proposals deftly dodge the Meta Origin and Origin Story elements and entirely focus on telling just another cosmic horror story set within the Foundation universe.
• Crack Fic: While the SCP Foundation mainly focuses on horror, it has a ton of stories that can best be described as crackfics.
  • Crackfic is even in the title of this story.
  • The lolFoundation canon manages to be crackfic and horror at the same time. It takes place in a setting where the Author Avatars got themselves effectively turned into Mad Gods, warping the Foundation into a twisted parody of itself while civilization is devastated by the consequences of their antics which they are unable to precieve.
  • Basically everything in Cool War 2: Ruiz From Your Grave. It originally was a fake hub page for a sequel to the Cool War that was posted as an April Fool's joke, but then people actually started writing stories using the fake chapter titles.
  • The Cack hub is a place for collecting crack fic stories too silly for lolFoundation.
  • I can't even begin to explain what is going on in this story. Something about cowboys, a man made out of fish, bombs that make you have flashbacks, and guns that shoot muzak.
  • Several Joke SCPs fall under this. Probably the best example is this one which was written using a predictive text app. It even inspired its own crackfic titled A Surprise Encounter With Crispy Sex Pirates.
  • The Shark Punching Center pretty muck exists for people to write crackfiction about it.
• Crapsack World: In a world where physical laws are subverted at every corner, things are not looking pretty. Paranormal threats threaten humanity's very existence. The lines of protection are upheld at great costs and through extreme methods. And even the solutions to the anomaly problem have their own frightening implications. Humanoid creatures, or humans with special abilities, who would otherwise even become superheroes in a different universe, are captured and contained, thus being completely dehumanized, complete with being given a number, becoming mere objects, even referred to as "it" in official documentation. Life certainly sucks for you if you fit anywhere beyond "ordinary human".
  • Even without the anomalies, the existence of a seemingly-inexhaustible supply of "D-class" personnel for the Foundation to exploit suggests that the world is either awash in capital crime, burdened with a flawed justice system that condemns countless innocents for capital crimes, or (most likely) both.
  • The setting is so unremittingly awful that one anomalous race of eldritch shapeshifters have become aware of just how bad it is and are now overwhelmed with terror at everything, hence why they're all in hiding.
  …how do you work at the Foundation and not realize what kind of world you live in, Marcus? The cosmic nightmares, the malignant godlings, the insane societies at war, the hordes of monsters beyond counting, the doomsdays upon doomsdays… there's so much that can't be stopped, so many things that could end everything, even in the better worlds that some have envisioned-
• Crapsaccharine World: Several SCPs are towns, locations, or areas where things are too good to be true for any that inhabit it.
• Crazy Workplace: The SCP Foundation is a covert prison network dedicated to catching Eldritch Abominations and keeping them in their pens. And those abominations can be anything, from a serial-killing teddy bear to a box of infinite pizza. For obvious reasons, the vast majority of Foundation employees are disposable.
• Creepy Cave: SCP-2935 is a space-time anomaly existing within a limestone cave leading to a parallel universe where all life, including both biological and non-biological, as well as any sentient entities, machines, computers and other "life-like" phenomena, ended.
• Creepy Centipedes
  • SCP-363. They look like regular centipedes, until the lights are turned off, where they grow to massive size and become hostile. Even worse, their bites can turn humans into more of them!
  • There are several odd occurrences in the Log of Extranormal Events that qualify.
    • For 12 minutes, all shed human blood in a 15 kilometer radius of a town in France turned into centipedes, then turned back into blood after the event ended. Women who were menstruating at the time suffered such severe emotional distress that the normal amnesia-causing drugs didn't work on them.
    • A centipede that was 12 meters long (though of normal height and width) was seen at a museum.
• Creepy Changing Painting: SCP-173 is the most prominent example, but there are quite a few SCPs that only demonstrate their true nature when nobody is watching.
• Creepy Child: Quite a few SCPs either are children (SCP-053), look like children (SCP-1003), or cause children to become creepy (SCP-097).
• Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suit: "SCP-1861 - The Crew of the HMS Wintersheimer". The HMS Wintersheimer appears to be a World War I era British submarine. Its crew consists of animated diving suits that can talk. The crew tries to get people to enter the submarine, after which the people are turned into more crew like themselves. If a crew member ever takes off their helmet, it's revealed that there's nothing inside the suit except water, eyes and jaws.
• Cringe Comedy: SCP-451, an otherwise-normal Foundation agent that cannot perceive any other living humans or anything that would indicate the presence of such. Assuming he's the last living human being on the planet, he does things like steal food and clothes from his "dead" coworker's quarters, take files from file cabinets that he's not allowed access to (and try to knock over those cabinets as well), and walk around buck-naked because he assumes nobody will see him. The reader, on the other hand, knows much better.
• Crossover: These are generally frowned upon; there used to be a lot of joke SCPs which were nothing more than "It's that thing from that show, and here's how the SCP foundation would describe it!", and they got eventually deleted. However, Clef's "Project Crossover" is a challenge to write a good crossover story — or, a good bad crossover story.
  • Of note are the two Night Vale Crossovers, Piercing the Night Vale and And Now, The We[EXPUNGED] , the latter of which is actually read out by another author on the site.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: There’s so many of these it’s gotten it’s own page.
• Cryptic Background Reference: Some things on the site refer to SCPs and reports that are absent, creating this effect because they haven't been included in these partial archives — or because they were deleted in Retcons, cut for being badly conceived, or banned contributors took their ball and went home.
• Cult: Many are known enemies (though some are more neutral) of The Foundation and many worship/created different objects. Examples include:
  • Church of the Broken God: Three branches, one Clockpunk, one Steampunk, one Cyberpunk; all of which practice Machine Worship. As the name implies, they worship a broken mechanical god. Split into three branches, one of which claims that SCP-882 is the "heart" of their god. They also show interest in SCP-217 and SCP-271. The implications of a union between these objects is disturbing.
  • The group responsible for the creation/impregnation of SCP-231, "The Children Of The Scarlet King".
  • The plurality cult, which resides in SCP-453.
  • The Fifthist Church, a Church of Happyology expy with a Cosmic Horror twist.
• Cute Kitten: Two of the joke entries; the Pufferkittens and the Portal to the Plane of Infinite Kittens. Somewhat averted with the decidedly non-joke A Harmless Kitten.
• Cute Monster Girl: SCP-811. It's more due to her child-like demeanor and manner of speech.
• Cuteness Proximity: Pufferkittens. WARNING: Classified Euclid on account of having enough d'aaaaaaw to disrupt normal staff activities.
  ... are not to be weaponized.
  • And someone went ahead and did in SCP-914. Grenadepuffs!!!
• Cut Himself Shaving:
  Kondraki: [Inarticulate scream of rage.]
  
  [It is determined that this is the point where Dr. Clef accidentally fell out of his chair and struck his head nine times against the corner of the desk, fracturing his skull and snapping his neck between the second and third vertebrae.]
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: It’s mentioned that SCP-447 could be marketed as a lactose-free milk.
• Cyborg: Aside from those with descriptive names (Cyborg Child, Cybernetically Enhanced Mammalian, Hostile Walrus Cyborg), the Church of the Broken God, for obvious reasons, like them. They created SCP-2360, three men who were fused with their Xbox 360s, hope to transcend by playing Call of Duty, and nourish on Mountain Dew.
  • Outside the Church, there's SCP-2085 (The Black Rabbit Company), a self-declared space wizard and his Cat Girl brigade, all of which possess cybernetic enhancements. Even the Foundation has room for Rule of Cool.
• Cymbal-Banging Monkey: There's a Cymbal Banging Monkey in SCP-983 that targets and kills people on their birthdays by rapidly aging a person with each ring until they die. It only stops if the person sings along to the toy's birthday song or dies.

D

• Darker and Edgier:
  • The Never Hungry Man was changed from an SCP who was released back into the general public when his condition posed no threat to a man with worms that have faces in his stomach that leap out at people. In fact, this is typically the fate of many SCP drafts whom are said to be either too bland or not have a good hook. Then again, sometimes there's too much senseless edginess that gets removed.
  • SCP-299 is "an arboriform organism" that makes plants hard, black, pointy, and covered in prehensile vines; it also releases chemicals that make humans paranoid and aggressive.
  • Parodied with SCP-1049-J, a black fluid that turns objects into "darker" versions of themselves. ("Darker" in this case means "made of rusty metal with lots of spikes and skulls sticking out".)
• Dark Is Not Evil: SCP-1471 (appearing to anyone using an app by the name of "MalO" for a sufficient amount of time), a large humanoid mass of shaggy black hair with a canine skull for a face, makes no attempt to actively harm anyone. Mostly it just wants to hang out. The problem comes from the fact that it won't leave you alone.
• Dead Horse Trope: The concept of pataphysics is a craze in full swing since about 2016. The basic idea is that 1) the SCP reality is a story and the authors are jerking the characters around, or 2) a character within a story in the SCP universe breaks the fourth wall and damages the SCP universe in which it is a story. The number of entries of this exact concept has exploded, with very minimal variation on the basic idea before the Mandatory Twist Ending that reality is just a story. The lack of variety and oversaturation has caused most "new" entries of this type to be downvoted into oblivion shortly after they appear, but they multiply so fast that some inevitably slip through. Articles that do survive for extended periods of time tend to have additional gimmicks tied to them (such as Murphy Law doubling as a spoof of the Film Noir genre) or a more thorough analysis of the concept's implications in modern science (for example, SCP-6747 opens with a primer on pataphysics that contains a large amount of references to actual quantum mechanics related to observation.)
• Deadly Euphemism: "Terminated" is used very frequently. The page on the Ethics Committee lampshades this. "Liquidated" by the Global Occult Coalition.
• Dead Man Writing: In Dr. Mackenzie's Proposal of SCP-001. One of the pages of The Administrator's diary it says "If you are in possession of — and reading — this document then I am probably dead." The last page was written by someone who loved The Administrator in their original reality. They write "By the time you read this, I will already be dead."
• Dead Man's Switch: The System to Contain Unsustainable Threats To Life and Existence, or SCUTTLE. Housed in Site-01, its job is to send continuous signals, or heartbeats, to all other Sites. Should Site-01 become compromised and the heartbeats stop for a certain period of time, it will trigger the nuclear warheads at all other Foundation Sites to be detonated. In one tale, SCUTTLE ends up breaking down simply due to its age, which compromises the safety and secrecy of the entire Foundation.
• Deal with the Devil: In Dr. Shaw's Proposal of SCP-00l, O5-1 made a deal with the mastermind of The Factory to stop the "Fairy Folk" from killing everyone and conquering The Factory, but it would cost him human sacrifices. He figured he could sacrifice The Factory, but they would just set up shop elsewhere and started building dangerous weapons. Now the Foundation has to sacrifice people (mostly D-class for monthly termination, but some researchers and staff) or The Factory will pump out and distribute horrors to unsuspecting civilians.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: SCP-1851-EX, an archived entry from an 1850s American Foundation precursor complete with all the racism against blacks.^note "Drapetomania" was an assumed mental condition slapped onto any slave that tried to escape to the north prior to the Civil War, as southern slave owners genuinely believed slaves wanted to be kept in servitude. The worst part? This was a real diagnosis; the article did not make this up!
• Death Seeker:
  • SCP-978 is a camera that shows whatever the photographed person most wants to be doing. In the Extended Test Logs, when Dr. Shaw was photographed with it, it showed a tombstone saying "Elias Shaw, resting at last."
  • The "Eetmee" crabs dispensed by SCP-261 have only one goal: to be Eaten Alive by the person who opens their package. They scream in joy after force-feeding themselves to that person and getting chewed and swallowed.
• Deconstruction:
  • Cassy could be seen as one of the concept of Medium Awareness, as rather than take advantage of it, she slips into an existential crisis upon realizing that she's not technically real.
  • Dr Gears's Proposal is a deconstruction of SCP-001. Think that SCP-001 should be an ultra-special top-secret world changing SCP that reveals secrets behind the Foundation? No. SCP-001 is just the very first SCP ever documented. A simple monster.
  • Yet Another Murder Monster acts as one towards the Foundation's tendencies towards treating Keter SCPs as murderous automatons to be locked away and forgotten with the bare minimum to keep it alive. SCP-5031 was deemed Keter due to its murderous intentions and difficult-to-track physiology, but the former was discovered to be the typical survival instinct of a living being that was terrified and convinced it was starving, and was only exacerbated by the torture of being locked away for ten years in a solid metal cube by the first containment specialist to observe it. When the latest specialist assigned to it decided to try and find out what makes it tick, he discovers it has the mental capacity to classify as sentient, read (and to an extent, speak) English, and even comprehend complex social dynamics, like playing instruments and cooking high-class dishes to entertain guests.
• Delivery Stork: Horrifically inverted by SCP-918, a group of storks that spirit away newborn children to be harvested and turned into cosmetic products.
• Depending on the Writer: Regarding the SCP Foundation itself. Although there is a general set of guidelines that everyone should follow for writing articles, the specifics are less well-defined and each author has to decide for themselves how to handle them.
• Despair Event Horizon: The list of suggestions for countermeasures against SCP-4005 grows gradually more desperate as the list of affected humans grow. At 89.6%, someone suggests SCP-3799. Whoever did so was either incredibly desperate or really, really stupid.
• Detachment Combat: SCP-418 uses this, although mostly as a tool for his industrial sabotage.
• Determinator: SCP-682, the Hard-To-Destroy-Reptile is the embodiment of this. Regenerating after all attempts to destroy it (the SCP Foundation claims not to possess any means of doing so effectively), while generally shrugging off any damage to the point it has been described as being "seen moving and speaking with its body 87% destroyed or rotted".
• Deus ex Machina: SCP-2000 is a Thaumiel-class object that can effectively recreate humanity after an end-of-the-world event. The name of the object is "Deus Ex Machina". Horrifyingly enough, it's actually been used several times already.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: SCP-696, a typewriter possessed by a cosmic horror, just wants someone to read its epic novel and happily leaves when its D-class "partner" says it was wonderfully-written and amazing.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Eldritch Application, where the Foundation director refuses to take Zalgo in as an SCP since it's too vaguely defined, all-encompassing, and hasn't ever done anything worth containing, which causes it to admit defeat and leave in shame. The ending hints that Cthulhu will get similar treatment as well.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Any time a Keter class gets detained effectively (which is very, very rare) or even detained at all, it's this. Special mention goes to the Agent who managed to murder Able several times (gaining Able's respect) before an airstrike killed him, and an Agent who managed to contain SCP-058 after its rampage by squashing it under a tank. Decommissions are often this, except when done by Clef.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Happens to the Janitor in his psychological evaluation about the availability of Segway golf carts.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The Maksur object class. An SCP with the Maksur class consists of several minor objects with anomalous properties that can be brought together to have a different effect.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • SCP-504 tomatoes hurl themselves at speeds in excess of 100 mph at anyone that makes a bad joke within earshot. Sufficiently bad jokes have resulted in them breaking the sound barrier and killing people.
  • The shadow law-enforcer spawned by various SCP-1002 objects won't stop until the offender is punished. Said punishment includes removal and severing of fingers for littering. You don't want to know what happens to the more severe offenders. Or how the Foundation figures out which crime begets which punishment.
  • SCP-2270 ("An Unnecessary Utilization of Excessive Force"), an eight-volume set of instruction books on how to summon Nergal (the one from Mesopotamia, not the Eye of Chaos or the guy using life-force to summon dragons). The reason they were purchased from Marshall, Carter, & Dark? A dude in Montana who was really annoyed at his neighbor. Also goes the other way: While we don't know about the purchaser's fate in the afterlife, after he unleashed a massive explosion, he was killed when he got drunk and ran his car into a ditch.
• The Dog Bites Back: SCP-1759 "Lovely Lucy" is an airplane that hates losing the people who fly her. When the observing scientist intends to send yet another D-class up to die as a test, she convinces the D-class to take a guard's gun and attempt to shoot him. Said doctor wisely removes himself from the project afterwards.
• Doing In the Wizard: Averted. For a site that prides itself on clinical detachment and scientific inquiry, it is almost impossible to discover how nearly all of the SCPs actually work, where they came from, or why anyone would want to make some of them. They give it a good try, but it's not as important as knowing how to keep them safe and under control. If they ever came across a real wizard, they'd measure his staff, subject him to "stress" tests to determine destructibility, and finally have some very strong words with him over the creation of Eldritch Abominations. And, of course, they'd want to see if his magic could kill SCP-682.
  • Writers are pretty much encouraged to make sure that whatever SCP entity they write is either hard to comprehend or flat-out incomprehensible.
  • In-universe, if something becomes understood in enough detail, then it's no longer considered paranormal, it gets "-EX" appended to its name, and the research done on it is released to the public.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: SCP-846.
  SCP-846: DO NOT INTIMIDATE ROBO-DUDE.
• Don't Explain the Joke: SCP-005-J-EX is people trying to explain why their jokes are funny. Even after the phenomenon was explained, the Foundation considers it a public service to tell people that doing this is annoying.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Release me, insects! I am Doom-Master Thirteen Seventy Master Of All Doom. I shall be the herald of your destruction!
• Dope Slap: SCP-572: Katana of Apparent Invincibility. Once the Katana is removed from the victim's grasp, "all psychological effects can usually be expunged by a single swift blow to the back of the subject's head."
• Double Meaning: SCP-1459 took "Chángchéng" (general shorthand for "Great Wall") to mean "Great Firewall", and so killed an instance of SCP-1459-1 by getting it in trouble with Chinese Authority by watching banned content.
• Doves Mean Peace: SCP-514 invokes this. A flock of anomalous doves that generate a field of influence around themselves which cause all weapons to malfunction and fall apart, and even cause negative and aggressive emotions to fade.
• Downer Ending:
  • SCP-1958 has a journal written by the driver of the VW bus that's been drifting through space for decades. After an enthusiastic takeoff into space with the flying van, his friends onboard the bus all perish one by one for various reasons (sucked out into space, drug overdose, scurvy, "crawled behind something and died"), leaving him as the Sole Survivor onboard a vehicle that is too slow to reach its destination within the span of a human life before dying in what is implied to be two months.
    "The stars are so fucking beautiful out here, man."
  • S.D. Locke's SCP-001 Proposal. After reading through multiple revisions of the SCP entry that function more like an Apocalyptic Log, with every named person in the audio and video files succumbing to the collective bio-mass of people (SCP-001-A) who came in contact with sunlight, the unnamed protagonist (who is referred to in the second person) is dragged out of the tunnels of the underground facility by said bio-mass and into the light, converting them into yet another instance of SCP-001-A.
  • SCP-3280, another narrative-style entry done by S.D. Locke, ends with the reveal that the protagonist is infected with an instance of SCP-3280, which is living misanthropic water, which kills them by violently expelling itself out of their throat as they realize that the rain "fall" on the window is in fact coming from below to meet them.
• Dragged Off to Hell: Let's just say that if people disappear into thin air, they generally don't end up anywhere nice.
• Dragon Hoard: SCP-1779 are tiny reptiles which feed only on coins and make their nests out of them. They can grow to really big sizes, though...
• Dramatic Irony: In SCP-4812 "Wrath", the GOC has figured out part of the puzzle. Namely, they know that there are three profanities, they have identified two of them, and they have found a corpse that's related to the profanities that they think is the third. However, since they don't have the Connington documents that describe them in detail, they don't know that the corpse they have is not human, but fae, and she is not the third profanity (who's already in Foundation containment).
• Dramatic Space Drifting: SCP-1959 is an unidentifiable cosmonaut who has been orbiting the Earth, struggling with some unseen force or thing in his suit. For over 50 years.
• The Dreaded: The Foundation is one of the top players in the paranormal world. While people like the GOC, Church of Mekhane, Marshall, Carter & Dark and Serpent's Hand are capable of challenging, or at least consider themselves to be, a lot of tales make it clear that lesser groups of interest are absolutely terrified of drawing attention to themselves out of fear that the Foundation will come crashing down on them. Herman Füller exploits this by telling his circusperformers that he's the only thing protecting them from the terrible "Essie-P", and the Chaos Insurgency's motto specifically calls out that they have to be careful, or the Foundation will crush them like insects:
  Should intermittent vengeance arm again his red right hand to plague us?
• Dream Land: SCP-1230, a book where the subject can live out their fantasies. Their guide, the Bookkeeper, is friendly and the dreamworld can't harm them.
• Driven to Suicide: Commonly happens among Researchers, Agents, and D-Class personnel, whether due to the influence of an SCP object or as a preferable alternative to the influence of an SCP object.
  • Many SCPs want to do this but cannot, either due to an inability to die, or because the Foundation is actively preventing it for one reason or another.
• Drives Like Crazy: SCP-666-J is this trope personified.
  A research team hypothesized that rollerblades are, technically, vehicles. We tested their hypothesis by having Gerald skate into the ORIA's headquarters in Tehran. They were right.^note The building went up in a giant explosion.
• Drinking Contest: SCP-1212 is a bar stool that mentally transports the sitter into various drinking establishments and forces them to enter a drinking contest that only ends after one hour has passed or the sitter dies (if they go unconscious, SCP-1212 forces them to keep drinking).
  Entity/entities in SCP-1212's "bars": "You must drink with me, in memory of those who sat where you sit and lacked the strength to understand their limits," and "We must curse those who were weak, and honor those who were strong."
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Decommissioned SCPs tend to have very anticlimactic deaths. For example, one invincible D-Class died from a peanut allergy.
• Dug Too Deep: An anomalous section of mine shaft that's explored by Mobile Task Force Trotter-5:
  -T5-6: Too long.
  T5-7: Too long in the fire.
  [...]
  T5-5: Too long in the fire, too long in the fire, too long in the fire, too—
  • SCP-2625-1 would be thrilled if they dug deep enough:
    I love to mine away the day
    Even through the bloody spray
    Hacking, slashing, burrow away
    So we can reach the core some day
    To reach the world of men of sun
    Wouldn’t that day just be so fun?
    Chipperee hey! Chipperee yay!
• Dwindling Party:
  • With SCP-231-1 through SCP-231-6, leaving SCP-231-7 as the only instance left.
  • Subverted by SCP-2951: Task Force Trotter-5 is a four-man team.
  • The tale Six Little Mice combines this with a poem counting down the deaths.

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