SCP Foundation

The Foundation doesn't lock things up because they're harmful, it locks things up because they can't be understood. If something doesn't gel with reality as we know it and modern science can't come up with a way to explain it, it gets contained.

Even if it's doing nothing harmful? Why not just let it be? It's harming nothing.

Because it doesn't make sense. Because what we don't understand can destroy us, even if we can't see anything harmful in it yet.

How can it destroy us if all signs so far point to it having no intention to? It just wants to entertain and date, nothing more.

How do you know that? How do you know that it's not a Devil in Plain Sight? That it's not trying to deceive us all into thinking that it's harmless? And yes, there is precedent for this from other skip articles. One can safely assume that the Foundation has been burned one time too many by the approach that you're suggesting.

Also, even something initially harmless can become extremely dangerous later on. SCP-1609 is the exemplar of this; it used to be only a chair with human-like features that teleports to a person who at the time needs somewhere to sit on, but after a GOC team captured it and cut corners in their attempt to dispose of it^note The GOC's SOP dictated that they should incinerate the chair with a flamethrower, but the one they had malfunctioned and couldn't be used on it... so they used a woodchipper instead., it became a pile of wood splinters/chippings and steel nails that has a paranoid phobia of anything remotely resembling the GOC and turns extremely hostile when triggered. Only after that did the Foundation manage to take it into their custody.

And yes, if you look through the long list of SCPs, you will find at least one other example of a seemingly harmless SCP that is not only dangerous, but is a lot more so than the above, relatively tame example. There are also some tales that deconstruct the misconception that a "Safe" skip could never turn dangerous.

More specifically... What if this skip gets another disastrous date, but instead of simply falling into a depression, it goes Ax-Crazy and starts killing people left and right?

Now, with all that aside... You are making the mistake of assuming that it's simply about this one lone anomaly. It's not.

The mere fact that such a blatantly science-defying existence actually exists will lead the general public to question whether other sorts of science-defying phenomena and entities exist. Some people will fall into paranoia and start targeting anything and anyone they believe to be "anomalous".

Even more power-hungry governments and criminal organizations will start spending vast amounts of wealth and resources on either acquiring or developing anomalies that are useful to their respective agendas. And we already have plenty of examples of that going either horribly wrong or horribly right when it was done by global superpowers with the most massive budgets possible.

And that's not getting into the possibility of aliens, demons or Eldritch Abominations exploiting these anomalies for their own purposes. Hell, some skips and tales actually take the stance that practically all anomalies that existed, exist and will exist are either merely conduits for an alien/demonic/eldritch force that has sinister designs for all existence, or are symptoms of a universe-wide glitch that will speed up the universe's collapse if left to their own devices.

edited 4th Jun '18 5:07:14 AM by MarqFJA

There is nothing IN 2703's ENTRY that even suggests even remotely that it could be a danger. What am I missing on it specifically? Why is it being treated like a threat when everything in the entry shows it not to be?!

^Call it paranoia or the SCP organization just making sure it is safe and not dangerous, not only for the world's sake but also for the SCP's sake. Several articles have shown in the past that some so call "safe" SCP turned out to be dangerous and vice versa like the teddy bear that was at first friendly and cute to the staff only to later murder them and use their body parts to make more monsters like it or a friendly Eldritch Abomination who willingly allowed himself to be locked up by the organization as he's sick and tired of cultists who want to free him and do some end of the world stuff when he only wants to be left alone and has no desires to end the world.

then what about ones that truly are safe and are being actively used, like the pizza box?

What if it gets another disastrous date but recovers?

What if it doesn't ever date again and just goes back to being a cute-creepy-cool tentacle owl goat thingy?

What if I was made for you and you were made for me?

NONE. OF. THAT. IS. IN. THE. STORY.

"Some people" = "utter drooling morons". There's lots of shit in REALITY that would probably make these paranoiacs shit themselves, too.

edited 4th Jun '18 10:15:53 AM by Twentington

Jesus christ Twenting,and I thought your behaviour in the skyrim was bad

edited 4th Jun '18 12:08:21 PM by Ultimatum

your forgetting one point of SCP Foundation is Protect both the SCP and us what if 2703 goes on a date and is attack or kill for it.

but it's shown no evidence of wanting to do anything bad. At all. Therefore it must be a good guy

It's contained because the Foundation isn't taking any risk. It looks like it's harmless but maybe it's not, maybe it'll change, maybe it can be used in a dangerous way, so the Foundation says "Better safe than sorry" and locks it away. End of story. I don't see what's so hard to understand with this.

isn't that the mind set of a paranoiac?

It's the mindset of an organization that has seen seemingly harmless objects nearly plunge the entire planet into chaos and destruction and is absolutely through with taking chances.

so they're paranoid xenophobic pricks?

That's certainly one interpretation of them. When you live in a world like the one the Foundation inhabits, though, it pays to be paranoid like that.

Wouldn't that just instill a further culture of paranoia in-universe? "We found one pizza box that generates infinite pizza. BE AFRAID OF ALL PIZZA BOXES"

[further bitching redacted, I think I get it now]

edited 4th Jun '18 9:51:33 PM by Twentington

Hi there! I'm a wiki staff member, and veteran author, and may be able to shed some light on the question.

This article may shed some light on 'why'

To quote:

Operating clandestine and worldwide, the Foundation operates beyond jurisdiction, empowered and entrusted by every major national government with the task of containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. These anomalies pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either physical or psychological harm.

The infinite pizza box, alone, is not particularly dangerous. What is dangerous is people knowing that something like an infinite pizza box could exist. The Foundation exists to prevent global destabilization via the realization that reality isn't constant. That there are extra-normal threats which we can't really explain.

Infinite pizza is good. A cult dedicated to finding boxes of infinite pizza is not. (To provide a concrete example)

I hope this helps!

Well, that's certainly interesting.

This, a thousand times this! It's what I've been trying to say all along!

That really does help.

Also I want to date 2703-1.

It's worth noting that the Foundationverse is often pretty Grey-and-Black Morality; given, then, that the Foundation is an enormous and shadowy organization with no external oversight and a dogmatic dedication to their goals, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that they're capable of monumentally shitty things.

Really 2703 is barely a blip on the 'Foundation acting shitty' scale.

Wait scp is getting light novel out of all things? .-. Weird