#I don't want to go to the official SCP discord and just vent about my articles

[glassautomaton]

As sort of an extension of that last post, I’m a little concerned about how my more original characters are being/going to be received. Though I’m willing to say the way I write Iris and Jackie is pretty original - in Jackie’s case, she didn’t even have any tales on the site - I’ve still got sort of a built-in interest in them, Iris especially. People know SCPs and they care about Iris. Anne’s an original character, but I feel like her character archetype is almost guaranteed to be popular.

September is well-recieved, I think? It’s hard to tell, but people seem to like her. It’s not like she’s featured very heavily in many articles, though. The main concerns I have are around Ines and Gamma and that crop of characters. I was really, really proud of Redwood Labs when I published it, and got a lot of really strong feedback when I published it, only for it to flounder in the mid to high tens in ratings. I can say “a subtle inclusion of Olympia Project and 784-ARC won’t have a lot of pre-existing fans, the title wasn’t very good, and the tale was long” all I want, and while these aren’t wrong, at a certain point it feels like cope. The article got a Reviewer’s Spotlight and it didn’t do much for it, which I find to be the most damning evidence. Closed Beta, which was shorter but still relatively long, did worse than Redwood Labs. 

I really like the characters in those and was really happy with the finished product with them, and in both cases I went a little outside of my comfort zone in different ways, but they both performed very bad. I want to write more stuff with those characters and plan on having them be pretty important in Devil’s Advocate, but again, do people even want to see that in the first place? I know I might be jumping the gun as I haven’t set of these characters fully or given them a concrete place in the narrative, but it does weigh on me a bit.