Arca Gunnay on The Holders: Part II
This is a 2021 interview with Arca Gunnay, who had a fair amount of influence on theholders.org. It is conducted by SCF member and containment fiction author Worm That Walks.
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1. What were the most influential articles posted on Holders, and how did they influence future writing?
I would say, weirdly enough, it was “The Holder of the Legion” as it solidified the existence of Objects beyond the limit, and an implication of a timeline – or I suppose mythos to the series. By this I mean, you tell me that there are 538 secret occult objects, that’s all good I have an idea in my head, but now you tell me there used to be three thousand of them but most are gone now, now I’m starting to imagine a chronology and a bigger story. I think with the introduction of a world outside the initial idea, people were given the leeway to create different stories and expand the canon.
2. What were the best things made for the holders, and why?
I would have to say The Holders Wiki itself. If it weren’t for that format and location, it would never have continued for so long.
3. What is the best thing you have made for the holders? Did you work on any other writing projects?
Oh that’s tough, I try not to look back at the things I wrote when I was 16 with a critical eye haha, but my best well known work would be the Finding Father series – a collection of moments around a mysterious Seeker.
4. You mention that the Holders was inspired by SCP – were there any sites/projects of similar nature? What did you think of them? What was your impression of old SCP?
I think there is a bit of chicken and egg scenario here, as it is hard to perfectly pin down what inspired what exactly. I liked SCP, I thought some elements of it were interesting and you can see parts of my interest in the work I made for The Holders (ie: AG Industries). To me I always thought the image of a soulless company dealing with the collection of monsters and force-feeding their employees narcotics “for their own good” was a great backdrop for a story. I may be out of touch with the canon, but do people believe the SCP Foundation are the good guys? Or is it “the necessary evil” argument? I have a strong belief that both SCP and The Holders are born out of a post 9/11 outlook in the world, as people tackle the ideas of “unbelievable evil” and “necessary precautions” while their liberties are being checked.
5. You mentioned that the site would go on and off, why was that? When did this start to happen?
I am not sure to be honest, I always imagined it might be DDOS attacks or just Sysop forgetting to pay the cost for a week haha.
6. What in the world happened here? http://web.archive.org/web/20110926022435/http://www.theholders.org/
Who knows? Hackers like to leave their name everywhere, and the wiki was an easy target.
7. Relating to question 4 – there is an observable sudden drop of activity in 2013, with pretty much no posts made from then to 2019, when you edited the Holder of Holes. Why was this?
I realized years later that everyone lost editing access except for me. In 2019 I tested that theory by editing an old story of mine, and it worked. As a mod I still was able to change things, but no one else. I never really took advantage of that – didn’t seem right to go back and mess around with it so long after the fact.
8. And going off from question 6 – what was your goal on changing something in 2019, 6 years after any real activity? You say along with the change: ” Here’s a test”. What does that mean?
As mentioned above, it was a literal test – as I was testing if I could edit things. I wish I could tell you it was something more fun or cryptic, but there’s nothing else there. On that note I always felt a Holders ARPG would be fantastic, but never something I would like to do alone. Internet ARPGs are such an interesting realm of narration and I’d like to think that would be the natural progression (or at least one of the natural progressions) of The Holders. If anyone would want to seriously start one they should hit me up!
9. What was legion? Why was it implemented, and were there detractors to its implementation? What effect do you think implementing such an expansion had on the writing community? Others who I have asked have said that it messed with the sense of “scarcity” at the site – do you agree with this precedent?
Like I said above, Legion and “Legion’s objects” were a way to expand the canon as people grew entrenched with the 538 Object stories on the site. I think it was an inevitable change, as people would always want to create more stories and no one wanted to delete the old ones (except me sometimes). The “scarcity” in the site and in the canon was always artificial, kept intact only by a lack of writers and dropped the second there was enough interest. The feeling of scarcity in narrative often takes a lot more writing than expected, and often a lot of intense direction in that writing to lead readers to imagine what is missing. The Holders just never had that level of cooperation to achieve that. That being said, if I had full reigns of the site and story – I would agree that I would never add Legion to the story. There’s enough there as is, no need to dig deeper when you’ve already struck gold.
10. What were the main issues you had with the Holders? Anything: management, staff, writing, etc.
Can I say that it was that we weren’t paid? Haha, it might seem trivial but asking people to work on writing without funding the food they need is a quick way to bleed membership. Of course, that was never a possibility for a project like this, but the biggest downfall was the fact that we didn’t get all together to form a writing team of sorts to further our skill and work. I think we were just too young.
11. What effect has writing for the Holders had on you, if at all? Do you still participate in similar writing communities online?
Haha well I went for a BA in Creative Writing after that, so it definitely had an effect. It was also the start of my renaissance into horror, something I had no interest in prior. I don’t really look for communities to participate in these days, as it is tough to find time – but I do talk to writers and reporters sometimes about The Holders, and I do editing work occasionally as well. I’ve tried to leave myself open as a resource for people who want to write The Holders or something tangential, but I never wanted to advertise myself as “that guy who wrote fiction on the internet as a teenager”. I think if the right thing came along, I would absolutely want to be part of it – it takes dedicated people and I love to dedicate myself to something experimental. It’s the only way new things come out.
12. You mention that there wasn’t much communication – how did this affect the formation of a “canon”? Was there a canon?
Lately I call it “a canon of convenience”, and I think it is the same thing you can find in SCP and other collective writing groups. When the canon is vague, and everyone writes vague, there is a loose agreement that everything written could have happened, and maybe certain stories were true – but told by unreliable narrators. We were also asked by the Sysop to avoid spoiling the whole thing and make sense of the senseless – or explain away the objects. That was taboo. So if you kept in line with that, everything else was kind of accepted. Granted, even I broke that rule with the story “Our Destroyers” which was my at-the-time explanation for the creation of the Objects. Not sure if I still love it, but I love it for what it was. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we all tried our best.
13. What is Arca Gunay currently doing? Does he still write?
Arca Gunay is currently putting off starting his work day haha. I do write, but I now work in law – so I have kind of sold out a little bit. I do work on projects on the side, and I tend to write short films and videogames more often than I write straight fiction. I am working on a podcast at the moment, Charming Extrovert’s “Two Things We Like”, which is a sort of book club that starts in October of this year. So if you’d like to hear my talk more about fiction and narrative you can go there. And you can always email me with Holders questions, I might take a bit to reply, but I promise I will!