How not to Evil in Foundation-verse

Ryin here, hmm. Lemme see……how the heck is this story supposed to work?

Like, the Skip OC threw a tantrum and was REWARDED instead of reasonably punished? Humanoid skips are not supposed to be treated as humans, even if they are biologically the same as baseline humans-

"But I don’t want Foundation to be an evil Hive-Mind! You told me not to write it! Now you are just being mean!"  

Hmmm……thinking about that, I do believe I have something to say about the topic of evil, stemming from reflection on my own critiques.

You see, if a young girl was in front of me, and someone told me that she should be treated as an object because she was different from most of humanity in some aspects, I would call it bullshit. Many of us would do the same, because we had never seen what was so “different” about her; she looked and behaved just like us, after all, and she had feelings.

However, if this young girl was a Euclid-Class skip in someone’s story, and the doctors suggested that she should be treated as a valuable object (if she is non-malicious), I would agree. Because if she is not, then it breaks my suspension of disbelief, since treating humanoid skips with a detached, unempathetic attitude is an important aspect of successful humanoid SCP articles.

So, why do I, a normal person capable of empathy in real life, agree with the same opinion as Foundation researchers in-universe? Why can I easily justify the dehumanization of a fictional character when it will reasonably evoke my sympathy, and disgust towards the responsible party in real life?

Then I realized something. The Foundation researchers, before they start to enter the greyish moral zone, were once people like me, like you, like anyone else. Most of them have empathy and feelings and dreams out of their works, maybe families. They had a childhood, went to school, graduated, work for salary and have responsibilities akin to many adults.

But they saw exactly what was “different” about a humanoid skip. They witnessed their anomalous effects first-hand. They know why those containment procedures have to be there, and what will happen if it was not followed.

They maintain the Veil of Normalcy, and many of them saw their colleagues fall or suffer fate worse than death because they had just one moment of weakness, of sympathy.

There are skips that do not deserve such a fate, but the mere thought of “what if they are more dangerous than we thought, what if they are intentionally trying to lure us into a false sense of security” is enough for them to enforce the oh-so-unfair-and-inhumane security procedures, because there are skips who did the above things, with disastrous results.

Yet when they justify it with the reasoning of Necessary Evil, sometimes unethical actions slipped under the radar. When they focus on consequences instead of ethics because they must, their actions become cold and inhumane, and some would eventually step over the boundary between Cold and Cruel.

That’s one aspect of Foundation’s unethical side; normal people slowly starting to dehumanize others because they are facing a graver danger from the unknown, while ethics and emotions have to be sacrificed to deal with immediate threat and risks.

Exploring these points in writing could have a much heavier emotional impact than simply painting all Foundation employees as two-dimensional cardboard villains mistreating sentient and sapient skips just because they can.

Let me write three scenarios as example.

1) Emerald Green is a humanoid skip who can laser off someone’s face with her eyes (please don’t write this as an actual SCP article, it is just an example here). She angsts a lot because she is locked up, even if her living condition is moderate, and people treat her like a MONSTER.

One day Emerald had enough and melted down her containment cell wall. Even if she was just angry and does not want to hurt anyone, a whole squad of guards tranquilized her and after she was out, they injected her with amnestic under the order of Senior Researcher Mary McEvil. She woke up with her eyes covered, and no memories of what happened beforehand, so she cried until she passed out, wondering why were they so cruel to her.  

2) Senior Researcher Mary McEvil was sitting in her office when Assistant Researcher John—— who had only been working for three months entered, and questioned if such procedures towards Emerald were really necessary with a clear tone of anger.

She remained calm, and explained her rationale, suggesting that he should apply for a transfer to other positions if the work in Humanoid Containment Unit brought him too much distress, or seek counselling from on-site therapists.

After John was gone, she glanced over the piles of paperwork on her desk, towards two photographs nearby, and sighed; her younger daughter was the same age as the skip her research team was working on.

But none of them could afford to take such risks, and she had heard too many stories about disastrous consequences that stemmed from simple sympathy. Examples like death of a whole security squad caused by one researcher offering a cup of water to the Anartist they detained, which happened right in this site several years before she was transferred here.

Soon, she started working again, replying to 42 e-mails that had been sent to her in the past three hours, most concerning Emerald’s security breach.

3) Director Titanium from Engineering and Technical Service Department looked at the melted wall and frowned. Now they are going to get penalized for not using sufficient heat-resisting materials in the construction process, plan their already limited budgets to reinforce this containment unit and repair it in three weeks. All because of that brat’s tantrum.

Which means that his whole department must work extra hours over the weekends, since today was Friday, and he can’t go home even if he promised his wife that they would celebrate their anniversary together on Sunday. He had not seen her in two months, and their marriage was already becoming bitter and unstable.

In the first example, it is very easy to paint Mary as your typical villain bureaucrat who can’t give two shit about human life as long as she is working according to procedures, and the guards as some kind of mindless minions of evil.

But there are always many, many sides to the same incident. The second and third example are only a fraction, two sloppily-written scenarios about what might have happened behind the scene. Those who are unreasonably cruel in Emerald’s view can still be sympathetic, and understandable, even if their actions are not ethical, and they continue to do what their jobs require.

Also, Emerald’s vent could potentially have much more serious consequences. What if someone was just walking by when she laser through the walls? What if she accidentally destroyed another containment unit nearby, and caused a humanoid entity who could kill bystanders with visual memetic to break free? Given the potential damage that could have been caused, it is reasonable for people in charge to take proper preventive measures.

This bring me to the second point, and one that ticks me off the most when it comes to EVUL Foundation syndrome.

Somehow, when a skip that is already murderous became more aggressive when it was contained and stopped from happily continuing its murder spree, it is the Foundation’s fault for treating it like a monster and ABUSING THIS POOR WOOBIE. They should like, totally give it a chance! Not punishing its bad behaviors with more violence!

However, when a skip OC with “self-proclaimed Messiah of anomalies” syndrome rescued all the poor suffering skips (which are usually terribly OOC) and ESCAPED INTO THE SUNLIGHT together, they don’t give two shit about the guards and researchers they killed on the way. Or, if they did, they handwaved it with the excuse that those EVUL Foundation workers deserve to die for their immoral actions.

Wow, really? The Double Standard is strong in this cliché.

What these stories were saying is that, as long as you stand with the skips, you are an innocent tragic Woobie that deserved a chance of redemption, but if you are with Foundation, you receive an automatic death sentence if you block their path to freedom in the slightest way.

If they are doing so because Foundation personnel have no sympathy for them, how is killing those personnel any different in terms of returning violence with more violence? Actions have impacts and consequences, mind you, and let me just demonstrate the simplest impact in the writing below.

Little Annie used to love math. In class, she raised her hand most often, and whenever she answered those questions correctly, she would make those big toothy grins that brought a chuckle from her teachers. Her mother praised her for being hardworking, and sometimes, she would blush a little when it became too chummy.

Only she knew that it was all for her dad. He hardly returned home, and mom said that he was a scientist doing important jobs in another city. But when she showed him quiz papers with A+ grade, and told him how much she had learned, dad would lift her up into the air and hug her, telling her that she would be a great mathematician when she grew up.

She wanted her father to be impressed, so she collected all her quiz papers with good grades in a little box, and tied it up with blue ribbons. She waited and waited, ticking off grids on the calendar with a pink marker, looking at the big circle that was December 25, when dad would come home.

Two months later, he returned early——in an urn, as a pile of ash.

It was an accident, she heard the men in suits mutter, before her mother thanked them, closed the door, and just stood there. Staring, in silence, without a focus.

Three days after they received the message, Annie dumped all her papers into the lake nearby, and watched them sink. Those blue ribbons suddenly looked so ugly, and she tore them off, stepping on them repeatedly until they disappeared into the wet, slimy brown mud near the shore.

Okay, this is cheesy, but you got the idea. Most guards, researchers, and all the personnel who died have a family, or at least people they are close to. They are not mindless robots mass-produced in a vacuum or brainwashed zombies hell-bent on making skips’ life miserable.

Annie’s father might be that researcher whom a self-centered Skip OC killed in its escape for no reason, other than “he is a Foundation worker and he deserved to die for mistreating us”, even if the skips his team studied are all inanimate objects related to mathematical concepts.

I do not deny that some Foundation workers can be sociopathic, cold-hearted assholes, since people like that always exist in society, and adding such characters is actually realistic in my opinion——given that they were either clever enough to stay within disciplinary codes, or got reasonably punished for needless cruelty.

However, when fanfiction writers paint all Foundation personnel as generic sadistic jackasses so their Skip protagonists could mow them down without a single bit of guilt, it is annoying at best. And at worst, it makes your Skip OC looks like a cruel, selfish monster trying to excuse its behaviors by yelling, “but they did worse to me! I’m just returning the favor!”

If you are trying to write about evil, or greyish moral zone, or just necessary but unethical actions, you must understand what drives them to do it first, and not simplifying it as the same ol’ Good vs. Evil conflict.

Unethical actions without motives are one of those red flags of melodrama and sloppy writings; real people need realistic reasons behind their actions, influenced by their personalities and experiences, and not describing a primary villain or noticeable secondary characters’ motives just makes them seem unreal and bland. When this happens, the suspension of disbelief is broken, and the emotions you intended to convey will lose its original effects.

Back to the topic, my third point and final point is connected closely to the second point, only that this time, it is one good doctor in a crowd of heartless psychopaths wasting their time and resources on torturing skips just for the lulz, daring to SPEAK UP AGAINST THE EVIL!

Dr. Sue is a kind and curious scientist who got double diplomas in Anthropology and Biology when she was only twenty-one, and single-handedly found a few skips on her own before Foundation recruited her!

Because she is such a good but feisty person, she can’t take it when her colleagues torture those poor suffering skips, even trying to destroy the more dangerous ones without trying to CARE ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS first.

Thus, when she heard that an experiment was being conducted on a sapient, malicious Keter-Class skip without her knowledge, she was utterly pissed-off (even if her clearance is probably not enough to gain access of the information, or her superiors deemed that it is irrelevant and unnecessary for her to know about the experiment, given her current position?)

She stormed down the hallway, dragged her superior who tried to weakly defend his rationale by the collar and called him a terrible person, before rushing into the containment chamber to comfort that poor Keter Woobie harmed in the experiment (who is of course, severely OOC) and emerged as the kind-hearted DEFENDER OF ANOMALY RIGHTS while her colleagues stared in awe!

……Let’s just say trying to show your character’s specialness by warping everyone else into cardboard cutouts don’t work. It never works.

Dr. Sue’s action here was greatly risking the safety of herself and her colleagues; they were facing an anomaly that is 1) dangerous enough to pose a severe threat to humanity/normalcy, and 2) intelligent and actively hostile towards Foundation personnel.

If the story did not twist a certain skip OOC for hurt-comfort purpose, she would likely die a messy, painful death the moment she went into that cell, maybe bringing down dozens of other people with her. Even if she did not, this is a grave violation of security procedures, and realistically, Dr. Sue would be fired or terminated for it-

"But you have no ways of knowing if she would be fired or terminated after the story! You just hate non-canon stories and can’t take anything different from what’s on the wiki! "

Well, if she is going to be fired or terminated off-screen, the story doesn’t hint or show it. Her superior behaves like he is afraid of a low-clearance researcher in his team, and only presents straw-man arguments like how they were doing this for research, a greater good, and all that stuffs, just to show how RIGHTFUL her opinion is in contrast.

“Your behavior is violating existing security procedures, and the fact that you are attempting to breach into the containment unit of a hostile Keter-Class SCP is a severe disciplinary offense. Researcher Sue, if you do not stop, I’ll call the security teams to remove you from this area.”

This is a response her superior would be more likely to give, and one that actually SHOWS that she might be in deep shit after this incident was over.

Even if her boss was not the blunt and straightforward type……he should at least make some active attempts at stopping her from going inside that cell. Like, maybe call security teams to get her out of here as I suggested above? Or initiate automatic lockdown on the testing chamber, stop anyone from getting in, and the skips inside from getting out?

If realistically, she went inside, got killed, and caused the skip to breach containment——resulting in further casualties, her superior would also suffer dire consequences for allowing her actions to continue. Well, she is dumb, and now she is dead as a direct result of her idiocy, so WHO LET HER INSIDE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

At least for the sake of keeping his job and not having to live with the direct consequence of his decision that got his colleagues killed, he would do everything he could to stop Dr. Sue.

"BUT IT IS A “WHAT-IF” SCENARIO! I write the skip differently because it is MY UNIQUE THOUGHT on what its character should be, and this story is non-canon which explains why the Foundation works like that, so stop being so disrespectful!"

A What-if scenario does not excuse fatally failed logic, or plot elements that contrast the most basic, generally accepted setting of the original universe. If this was an AU, then at least you should explain the rules of the new universe clearly to show that those changes happened as the direct result of operating on a new addition/subtraction to the world.

Like, if your “what-if” scenario was based on a malicious Keter-Class skip being a misunderstood Woobie that only requires understanding, caring people for it to behave, why the dozens of psychologists and behavior analysists in Foundation haven’t discovered it already?

If they discovered the method to keep it more sufficiently contained, why would they still try to torture it without consent and basically shoot themselves in the feet by turning the skip hostile against them?

Giving that Foundation don’t commit unethical actions unless it is Absolutely Necessary and, from a more pragmatic aspect, want to save their resources and minimize damage, they will definitely give a bit of leniency within acceptable boundary (in terms of not granting all its wishes just to stop it from going on a rampage) if the skip decided to cooperate. Maybe drug it during the testing, or offer medical treatments and therapy afterwards to reduce excessive distress and pain?

In either way, this renders the original “unfair torture against misunderstood Woobie skip” largely useless, and Dr. Sue will never get a chance to do her hurt/comfort session with an anomaly.

Also, different character interpretations are fine, but there is a limit. When one of the most crucial aspects of their personality is altered, and not explained REALLY, REALLY WELL, it breaks the suspension of belief like a punch in the face and leaves lots of frustration.

You want readers to go “well, I never see the skip written in this way before, but the story is still good, so I guess that’s fine”, not “who the fuck is this shivering lump of angst and what have you done to my favorite skip?”

When you think through it, the reasoning behind this plot is kind of shaky, centered around the sole goal of letting the hurt/comfort happen, without carefully checking the consequences surrounding the changes in a “what-if” fanfiction and taking them into consideration.

Thus, it resulted in almost all Foundation personnel being portrayed as unrealistically immoral and cowardly, which ruins the morals about “maybe we should try and offer understanding to unknown beings, and give them a chance”.

This story is a typical melodrama in which characterization is sacrificed for the sake of plot, and moral issues are simplified down to the Black and White, Good vs. Evil. Though melodramas can still be enjoyable, it lacks complexity, and most melodramas are produced in commercial works for that reason.

In a complex setting like Foundation-verse, it means……well, the fanfiction is just not a good one. It used the excuse of a “what-if” scenario, but failed to add anything creative and new to the original world and make it better.

Instead, by falling to the EVUL Foundation syndrome and “woobifying” the skip in a very OOC manner, it reduced the morally-grey, serious and complicated conflicts surrounding Foundation’s principles to people doing unethical things just because they are evil and cowardly.

……This is exactly the “Evil Hive-Mind” I talked about when it comes to Chaos Insurgency’s common portrayal in fanfictions; thinking that a group will have the same opinions, same behaviors, same personalities, and its members don’t have a single bit of individuality.

Which is the opposite to what stories in these clichés want to achieve. By reducing complexity, they contrast their own intention in writing the story.

The morals they wanted to tell are that we should be more understanding, that we should see two sides of the same coin and do what is right. But how can you show this message when you paint one side of the coin black, out of the very ignorance and convenience that drive countless individuals to form stereotypes and harm others in real world?

That’s all I want to say, even if it is mostly rants. Long, difficult-to-read, naggy rants.

I hope this piece is helpful to you, and thank you for reading this long tutorial.