THE TRASHFIRE: A PRIMER
by uraniumempire
Hi, have a seat. Let's talk about homestuck the Kabbalah, Murray Bookchin, Reagonomics, and the Trashfire.
What is the Trashfire?
The Trashfire is an SCP Canon centered on… well, it's not exactly centered on a specific narrative; as far as the timeline goes, the Trashfire stretches from the creation (and subsequent destruction) of the first multiverse, all the way to (as of the time of writing) 2023 CE (and further in a few -CN stories!). Most of the Trashfire's stories are relatively self-contained, depicting anything from a rotting nazi eigenweapon to an improbably lucky Cuban dictator.
As far as canons go, the spread is rather broad, but several key features connect the whole of it. Let's boil it down:
- Diagetic Consistency: The Trashfire is, at its core, a 'verse with rules. Those rules may be absurd and inscrutable to its fictional inhabitants, but you can rest assured that one story makes sense with another.
- Weak Foundation: The Foundation in the Trashfire is held back by the constraints of money and politics.
- Factional Fuckery: By and large, the Trashfire focuses on a universe organized by factions. They don't have a choice: the lone wolf gets eaten by the horrid, uncaring void of the universe.
- Capitalism vs. Dignity: At the heart of the Trashfire is a criticism of hierarchy, of the systems that crush humanity in the name of useless abstractions such as money and tradition. It is especially critical of neoliberalism, as embodied by the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet.
- Judaism: From the metaphysical makeup of the multiverse to the crime families of New York, the Trashfire is defined through a primarily Jewish framework.
A History of Trash
The Trashfire's narrative primarily covers three specific periods:
- A "mythological" period encompassing the Middle Paleolithic to ~800 CE, where the majority of theology is established.
- A "supernatural thriller" period encompassing the 20th Century, wherein the majority of factions find their footing among everything else.
- A "new weird" period where the wonders of the digital age shake up the establishment.
Our story begins with Qlippoth and Sefiros, a tale of life, death, and renewal. It can be thought of as a sort of Trashfire in miniature, setting out the common thematics while laying a framework for the multiverse.
In essence, the Trashfire as we know it begins with the death of the multiverse through war between the forces of matter (Qlippoth) and energy (Sefiros), followed by the sprout of a new multiverse from the ashes of the old. Trapped within the new multiverse, however, are the "Old Gods": vast, incomprehensible entities of debatable intelligence and undebatable power.
From there, we hone in on earth, several tens of thousands of years before the present. Even in pre-history, humanity and human-adjacent life are defined by a mutually parasitic relationship between mortals and the Old Gods. Nowhere is that more embodied than in the Daevite Empire, and especially in their four gods. Even after the daevas' fall, mysticism is largely defined either around or in opposition to the four.
Flash forward several thousand years, until around the 1940s CE.
The Foundation, strained by civil war, geopolitical fuckery, and hostility from the American Supernatural Containment Initiative, is on its last legs; impressive for an organization barely old enough to vote, no?
They won't be there forever, of course; between now and the 21st Century, the constant build-up of the universe's problems is tempered by a necessary shrewdness, until the Foundation is in a position to be less careful with their money. Still, the universe's problems are problems, some of which only got worse with age. Case in point: ~4 millennia after the fall of the Daevites, the Foundation is still cleaning up the mess they and their gods made (e.g. 4886).
It's only around the late 90s that the Foundation finds some sense of stability, and only then through a series of covert operations, deals, and alliances. With this newfound sense of stability, the focus of the Trashfire shifts to the organizations around them.