"stomping on... Koopas"
stomping on Goombas is a more effective strategy than stomping on Koopas, but he got tongue tied and had to name the enemy that he could think of the name of
The SCP Foundation as a whole has a bit of a bad rap on the internet, especially the most famous SCPs in the first 1000. They're well known enough to be laughed about but not enough to get as many invested, and its biggest fans tend to be particular about which they like. I've seen SCP-682 brought up a fair bit in and outside of foundation circles, and a most of it is negative:
- It's not scary
- It's boring
- It's corny/overpowered
- It wasn't well conceived, it's extremely powerful but acid still contains it.
I like 682. It's not the greatest horror villain of all time, but I think it's pretty neat.
Is 682 scary?
Not really, it's basically Jaws on land as far as the monster goes. It was just enough to keep me interested when I first read it. The SCP Foundation to me has been a good entry into horror, with ideas I haven't seen anywhere else and little that's vividly disturbing. I miss the original image, though.
Is 682 interesting?
I think so. According to the article itself, the reptile is "hard to destroy" and can adapt to all forms of harm attempted. It leaves you room to think about why something might have this absurd durability, later works on the website have had a few ideas and I liked the idea that 682 is intrinsic to existence, and its disgust toward humans has context to consider, with its core existence being different from ours.
Is 682 a dumb idea?
This is where I think the article has layers that people can be quick to overlook. It's easy to quip about a fictional character that doesn't die, or how it's silly to contain one in acid (which, presumably, was chosen as a containment measure that doesn't require much adaptation).
To me 682 goes from a tepid monster to an interesting story when you stop thinking of its immortality as a power. 682 is doomed to an existence of pain. The Foundation constantly looks for new ideas to kill it, failing but harming it. You could read the Foundation as the antagonists of the story, so used to experimenting on and feeling threatened by the monster that they stopped caring about their usual ethos of containment while demonstrating their wide arsenal for causing pain and suffering. Being 682 is scarier than meeting it.
The article is also a smart bit of collaborative writing. For SCPs since, 682 provides an opportunity to flesh out their corner of the world a little by simply explaining how it would react.
