(Originally intended to be turned into a video essay on my youtube channel, I decided to just post the script here instead. Perhaps one day i might make it into a video, but for now it will live on in this form. I also bought a copy of “The Monster at the End of This Book” to use as a prop throughout the video)
I recently attained the PDF version of Triangle Agency, a Tabletop Roleplaying Game by Haunted Table Games self described as a “Paranormal Investigation TTRPG” Triangle Agency is inspired by media such as Control, SCP and, most interestingly, The Monster at the End of this Book.
According to the itch.io page, “Players work at the Triangle Agency, an international corporation with influence in every industry. As Field Agents, players investigate and capture supernatural Anomalies that threaten the lives and comfort of normal citizens.”
The book itself has beautiful art and, although I have only read the first 10 pages, it is already amazingly captivating and uniquely comedic and I cannot wait to dive further into not only the world set up by
Triangle Agency, but also the very rulebook itself.
In my excitement, I wished to present the item to my mother, who of course has no experience with SCPs and has only seen me play Control once or twice and, even then, barely paid any attention.
I wanted to explain what Triangle Agency was and why it was so fascinating to me, and in doing so I was forced to think further on the topics of fictional anomalous occurrences and why we find them so captivating and interesting.
Control and SCP as media
In case you are unaware, Control is a video game created by Remedy Entertainment, the same people who made other games that are kinda relevant but only adjacently. In control, you play as Jesse Faden, a newly appointed Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. The Bureau is in charge of investigating and suppressing anomalous items and occurrences. The majority of the game you are navigating the Oldest House, the Bureau’s base of operations, and learning more about their actions. You can collect papers that document the various occurrences throughout the Bureau and analyses on the various “altered items” held for containment.
Conversely, the SCP Foundation is quite similar. It is an online crowdsourced creative writing project focusing on documenting the foundation’s namesakes, SCPs. The majority of the project is made up of individual entries on different SCPs, their behavior, and how to contain them.
Now, of course, as any fan of either of these media can tell you, I didn’t exactly give the greatest explanation. What is lacking in my description is, of course, why these things are so interesting to so many people. As what I’ve described so far, ie. a government group supported by field agents retrieving items and bringing them back for containment so that said items cannot harm the public, sounds like a fancy way of describing animal control but for household appliances gone rogue.
However, the key aspect supporting the draw of both of these worlds is horror.
horror eek!
Horror is, to be completely honest, something I’m not the most experienced in. I enjoyed watching markiplier play the Five Nights at Freddy’s games, up until like the third one, I watched one of the Halloween movies with my family once, and I got like 75ish percent through the first Alan Wake before forgetting about it and getting to anxious to start over.
But, what I do find myself more and more drawn to, is Eldritch Horror.
Eldritch Horror, also Cosmic Horror, or even Lovecraftian horror was, you guessed it, popularized by the big racist himself, H.P. Lovecraft.
A lot of his most notable works contained some sort of extraplanar entity that exists in such a way that it is inherently unknowable and impossibly dangerous to understand according to the limits of the human mind.
Eldritch Horror draws from our own growing existential understanding of the universe around us alongside how much we know how little we know. It focuses on the fear of the unknown, the impossibility of complete knowledge, and the idea that we as humans are not at the top.
A large part of this horror is the thin balance of knowing that there is something more than meets the eye, but not quite knowing what it is. Consider this: you go outside one day, the birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming, its a great day. You look up at the bright blue sky and you see a small, black crack like a shattered mirror. You look around, nobody seems to notice, you look back, it’s still there. A dog barks, startling you and look away again, a distance away there stands a man dressed in a black suit and a hat, seemingly watching you. You look back to the sky and everything is… normal. You cant find the crack anymore no matter how hard you look, but you are certain it was there. You look back to the ground below and the man is gone. It’s been days now but you still cannot sleep. What was the crack, was it even real? Who was that man watching you? What even happened?
In the scenario, you were only given a small amount of knowledge, the sight of the crack in the sky. You don’t know why it was there or even what it was. But, at least to most people, that very lack of knowledge instills a feeling of dread. As if there is something wrong, as if there is something you don’t know, as if everything you know is a lie. Consider if the man came up and told you, “Hello, what you just saw was an entity outside this reality attempting to break into our world and destroy it. It will succeed in three days and it looks like a giant squid.”
Although there is now far more danger involved in the scenario, you also know more about the situation. Now, of course, one would still likely be terrified of death in this situation, but it is very much a different kind of fear than the fear generated by the lack of such information. The fear invoked by the question: “what’s going on?”
media
Now, eldritch horror is prevalent in a lot of media, but the ones I particularly like and want to give attention to are:
- Numenera and Invisible Sun by Monte Cook Games
- Don’t Starve by Klei Entertainment
- The first act of the Disney movie, Chicken Little
But of course, we’re here to talk about Control and SCPs.
In control, while there exist a lot of interesting altered items with fascinating lore, what I find particularly interesting is
The Board.
The Board is some sort of presence that can only be communicated with by the director of the bureau. Represented only by a large inverted triangle, it is not fully clear what it is, nor why it does the things it do, but it serves as the overseer of the Bureau. Its communication is broken, audibly a jumble of sounds translated to captions but with conceptual imperfections. Certain concepts the Board tries to communicate don’t fully fit within the constraints of the human mind, so it uses multiple words and ideas to combine into one form. One thing might be both a light and a bomb, or a hat, a sign, and a target. It’s a way of translation, but also a way to distance the Bureau from humanization. The fact that it’s impossible to fully view or understand the Board serves as an indication that this entity isn’t compatible with how we understand reality itself. If the board has a voice, or a face, or even talked normally, it would lessen the impact of the presentation and it would come across far less unnerving.
SCPs
Conversely, the SCP Project invokes horror and it’s associating feelings in the depictions and explanations of its titular concept, SCPs.
While SCPs very existence points to rules and laws regarding our reality beyond our understanding, certain entries stand out to me personally as examples of the horror innate to such writings.
I(kea)
To cite the entry directly, “SCP-3008 is a large retail unit previously owned by and branded as IKEA, a popular furniture retail chain.”
Of course, 3008 very much is not an IKEA in any sense besides appearance as, upon entry into the building, potential customers find themself unknowingly shifted to a space almost identical to the interior of an IKEA, but this space stretches on infinitely and shifts constantly when you attempt to retrace your steps. It’s a maze, more so than any real IKEA in our world and yet, that’s exactly why this SCP works.
As most people who have ever been in an IKEA can attest, the interiors of IKEAs are true labyrinths, with twisting, winding corridors and passageways that take you between large sections of the store, it is very easy to get lost. SCP 3008 takes this experience and transforms it into something akin to a modern piece of folklore. The truth behind 3008’s innate horror comes from our own fear of uncertainty and becoming lost in a place foreign to us. 3008 takes the familiar and twists it in a way that aligns with pre-existing fears, and that is essentially the core of this brand of horror.
the guy man
SCP-6451, The “Guy” Man.
SCP 6451 is, according to all intents and purposes, just a regular man, of unknown descent, name, and origin resembling a healthy adult male. But of course, intents and purposes often lie to those unwilling to see the truth. When SCP 6451 was kept in containment, it often talked in such a way that, although it would say and do quite bizarre things, it was assumed that it was doing them more for amusement than anything else.
For the entire time 6451 was in containment, it had people questioning if it was really just a regular person that they had somehow mistaken for an SCP but, upon 6451’s death, the body’s belly button ejected a small piece of paper that read the following:
“Congratulations! You’ve found The “Guy” Man! Collect them all”
Now, of course, I am likely analyzing this far more than it truly needs to be, or was even likely intended to be, but too bad.
SCP 6451 plays off of the concept that true normality is inherently abnormal, see the Interesting Number Paradox as an example of this. 6451 dances with the idea of “normal people” by portraying a person that is, especially compared to that which is commonly documented within the SCP foundation, quite mundane.
We describe people within the passing vicinity of our daily lives as “normal”. Almost in an attempt to avoid acknowledging their very existence and agency as a real person. As if this allows us the freedom to ignore them. However, in the case of SCP 6451, such a being without hobbies, origin, or any at all interesting characteristics serves as an intrinsically unsettling affront to our notion of personhood.
When we interact with someone, however briefly, we interpret things about them. We listen to how they talk, how they walk, how they might even describe what they enjoy doing and we create a mental understanding of them as a person. But 6451 doesn’t allow for that mental understanding. Without a name or anything notable to describe it, it exists as someone who, if seen within our daily lives, would be completely ignored. Just a part of the background, the noise of other people we don’t know. The entry goes even further to dehumanize 6451 by refusing to refer to it with any pronouns besides the it suite.
But as soon as 6451 is put under a microscope, as soon as it is brought to the forefront of our attention, things don’t add up. Something is wrong with how this… being operates. And, of course, we must not forget the slip of paper found upon it’s demise. “the ‘guy’ man”, “collect them all”, terms we use to describe collectable items, not people. Personally, the implications of this single note point to something strange that we don’t fully understand. Suddenly, we get what we want, the normal is abnormal and yet, we now have even more unanswered questions.
concludioso
Now, don’t get me wrong, is this explicitly horror or even scary? No, no of course not.
Does it give a strange sense of uneasiness and dread of the unknown? To me it does.
Is it probably just a joke entry that I’m reading too much into? Almost definitely.
But this fusion of dread of the unknown and the mundanity of life describes the exact kind of horror that makes SCP, Control, Triangle Agency, and likely so much more, so interesting and captivating.
After all, the horror found within the mundanity of modern life is not too far removed from eldritch horror.