What is the Crimson King?

An entity called "Devourer of Worlds"?

Or is it the very concept of "doomsday"?

All sorts of questions linger in the reader's mind, and there are no definite answers.

It wasn't until another author, Tufto, joined the writing of the series that the fog that shrouded it was finally cleared.

A positive answer to the question "what is it" is not in keeping with its nature.

Because the appearance of the definition of "Crimson King" is accompanied by "the body is unknown".

Repetitive misleading words and large areas of white space create its initial impression.

The official point of view should be-

"What you think it is, then it's what it is. ”

It's as secretive as the "110-Montauk Procedure", which makes people think that it is some kind of unknowable viciousness.

But this fear of the unknown is not a Cthulhu-esque "contact is madness", but an instinctive avoidance of savage mysticism by another modern civilization.

Just like most people when they see 231, they follow those words and imagine primitive worship of sex and violence.

That's something that's always been in human nature.

What seems to have been abandoned in today's civilized society, but lurks in every dark corner and never dissipates.

What is it?

It's a return to the original.

It is the belief and romance of human beings in the ancient period of ignorance.

This kind of romance is the crazy lust under the oppression of Western medieval religion, the absurdity and piety in the dark myth of the Aztec civilization, and the human bones stacked in the burial pit of the old capital of Yin Shang.

What we have now lost and dismissed as "barbaric stupidity" has a more accurate name for it – premodernity.

"You now know what the Scarlet King is.

It is a whirling anomaly of creatures from many different eras and all worlds.

It is the memory of the lost world, the memory of the pre-modern world, embodied in the hatred of modernity, the hatred of this new, the humanity and sneer that marks our daily existence.

Forged by the perfect balance between irreconcilable anomalies and our broken minds, it is an entity created by overwhelming, inescapable tensions, the howl of the old world in the face of the cold, gray, meaningless new world.

It is the revenge of our lost past.

It is the idea of the ancients, in a world that has abandoned it and blindly believed. ”

The "Scarlet King" is just that—the embodiment of the tension between modernity and pre-modernity.

Hard to understand?

Yes, it's hard to understand.

Before we explore "pre-modernity", we might as well understand "modernity".

This is a concept that often haunts sociology and literature.

As early as 1863, Baudelaire, who shocked the Western literary world with "The Flower of Evil", made a classic definition of modernity: "Modernity is transitional, ephemeral, accidental, half of art, and the other half is eternal and unchanging." ”

At the same time, modernism is also a general term for a literary and artistic school that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, including the so-called Cubalism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Abstractionism.

The term originally stood for rational criticism and cultural innovation.

Or to put it more simply, "modernity" is rationalism, the belief that "knowledge is power."

Under modernity, the world is a world of principles and logic, and the unity of reason and academic progress will eventually understand and clarify human life—such as the state, religion, morality—and the universe as a whole.

The resulting "postmodernity" can be seen briefly as the embodiment of skepticism.

It questions the classical notions of objective truth, reason, identity, and objectivity, questions about universal progress or human emancipation, and does not trust any single theoretical framework, grand narrative, or even ultimate explanation.

- Subversion, deconstruction, irony, self-criticism.

That's probably what it is.

Thus, in the literal sense of the word, "pre-modernity" refers to the social and cultural identity that preceded the birth of "modernity".

Its mood is mysticism.

The pre-modern era is an epic of "gods" and "heroes", the embodiment of purely sensual beliefs, "what is believed in is born".

Now we're throwing all of these concepts into the SCP Foundation.

Undoubtedly, the Foundation, accustomed to using a scientific lens to observe and combat all anomalies, is imbued with the most familiar colors of rationality.

The style of the Foundation is extremely "modern".

Although there are many postmodern works in the document, such as "2007 - Science Fantasy", "2718 - What Happened After Death", and "2959 - What We Have Done", the overall style of the Foundation is inevitably biased towards rational criticism and cognitive logic.

And these things, which have become the cornerstone of modern civilization, are exactly what the "Crimson King" has rebelled against.

Prior to the Crimson King's 001 proposal, another archive within the Foundation had this style.

SCP-2845 - Stag.

2845 is described as a powerful, star-stellar god.

It has the shape of a deer, and is capable of transforming and reconstructing matter in an instant, making it aggressive towards humans.

It was a being that was completely unrivaled in terms of sheer strength, but the Foundation managed to contain it anyway.

- If that's "containment" as well.

Containment Procedures is a comical ritual that involves several steps, including name-calling, playing, exchanging gifts, swallowing olive oil, castration, and cannibalism.

The whole process is extremely complex and ridiculous enough to make one doubt its relevance.

But it just worked, so incrediblely.

"Rituals do not operate on the basis of certain underlying rules, especially those that can be explained by science. Rituals work because it is rituals. It works because an arbitrary standard is carefully enforced. It is believed that meeting these arbitrary criteria gives the ritual some sort of terminal power. ”

- A message from the containment consultant to Site Director Dell

The stag is a god, a true god.

For God, the word also has power.

Rituals and beliefs possess more power than a god, more than all the rules of science.

The Foundation didn't have the power to stand up to the gods, so they used the ritual, the absurdity in it, to fool a god.

- Make it think that humans are stronger than it.

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