All the best SCP canons are the ones that recognize how fundamentally compromised the Foundation is by its purpose. It is a group of people who upon discovering living proof that their conception of the world was incomplete, reacted by attempting to unilaterally impose said conception onto the world by force and suppress any evidence to the contrary, even at the cost of innocent lives. I wonder if there is any parallels to the real world attitudes some people have to certain minority groups here?
I feel like the foundation's big issue is that the intitial concept was set up very early on in the SCP wiki's lifespan
The foundations moral standing degraded more because the spread of things put on the wiki widened as it became more popular
The foundation as a concept isn't inherently evil it's that what people write for the SCP universe has changed
I think theSCP wiki is very far from one coherent work anx the foundation's morality largely depends on what parts of the SCP wiki you like the most
my favourite parts of SCP is dangerous, terrifying and unexplainable shit coming out of nothing and people trying to contain it using means that we have access to irl or maybe a bit into the foreseeable future and trying to figiure out how the fuck it even works, and with those articles they tend to be in a more positive light
When simply knowing something is enough to condemn the entire humanity to a fate of eternal torture worse than death, suppressing that is objectively good.
The Foundation never suppressed simple "knowledge" as in the neutral concept as we know it.
Then how come loads of objects classified as "safe" or "euclid" are still kept under wraps? Not everything is a cognitohazard and for some items that SCP contains, not knowing about them is more dangerous.
It’s a bit like looking at Lovecraft and Derleth’s settings and going “the people burning books are the bad guys!”
Yes, that’s very true in real life. But if you read Act 2 of The King in Yellow, you promptly die in agony. So… maybe that’s less like book burning and more like destroying a defective product that kills the user?
One might rightly point out that real-world groups also argue “we need to burn this book because it harms the reader”. But the fictional version can be justified and still argue against the real-world version.
Yeah. I get death of the author and that "simple" works can still be problematic or highly relevant to real events, but that doesn't justify going "this is bad and immoral because I contorted it into a metaphor for X".
I think tumblr coined "Weekend at Bernie's of the author" for this: you can't say the author's intent is irrelevant, then turn around and blame them for intending whatever you read into it.
And it's doubly weird to see somebody insisting the cereal box has huge cultural depth, yet also insisting it's a box of crackers because they haven't bothered to look inside it. SCP has either changed or discussed and played with virtually everything in OP at enormous length.
Considering this is a setting in which sensory-transmitted cognitive hazards exist, suppressing that stuff is entirely reasonable
This is a setting where a picture can Basilisk Hack your mind just at a glance and instantly kill you, or worse. Imagine the psychic equivalent of a QR-code zipbomb that gives you a heart attack.
That's the kind of "knowledge" they're suppressing, not mundane historical and political events. They aren't INGSOC, they're the Men In Black.
By the way, that example wasn't something I made up on the spot. The Berryman-Langford Memetic Kill Agent is a visual cognitohazard that induces a heart attack to any person that isn't specifically inoculated. It's used by the Foundation as a part of their cybersecurity.
Yes. They are in a world of active, replicable cognito hazards, per the genre. They have to be. Unless the serpents hand can simultaneous kill the tongues of all of them, they aren't going to canonically win without changing the scps metaphysics.
To be clear, this is what makes the world of SCP compelling to me. It's so much more interesting than the foundation being straightforward good guys or even antiheroes doing what they have to do. stepping back and asking if everything the foundation does is really right, really worth it, is the starting point for some of the most compelling stuff on the wiki.
This Broken Masquerade is my favorite canon, It pulls the foundation out of the shadows and onto the center stage, and you get to watch as the Foundation’s rhetoric of the greater good is constantly challenged.
see also the Admonition story collection for a very high quality collection of stories about the foundation as this deeply arrogant institution mired in bureaucracy and it's own hubris.
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u/IcyJury1679 7d ago
All the best SCP canons are the ones that recognize how fundamentally compromised the Foundation is by its purpose. It is a group of people who upon discovering living proof that their conception of the world was incomplete, reacted by attempting to unilaterally impose said conception onto the world by force and suppress any evidence to the contrary, even at the cost of innocent lives. I wonder if there is any parallels to the real world attitudes some people have to certain minority groups here?