Oh my god, it's a sovcit SCP. That's hilarious. And I could understand wanting to work on the Ethics Committee. I mean, heck, those guys are probably some of the few people who're actively trying to ensure that the Foundation doesn't end up becoming just as awful as some of the other players in the game. (Also, is it petty of me that I quietly headcanon that the jerk who went "oh, you react 'very poorly' to amnesia-drugs? Okay, let's pump you full of 'em and then kick you out the door purely because you've pissed me off by being insufficiently respectful of Mah Authoriteh" and then the poor mindwiped bastard ended up forgetting to take his meds and spiraled uncontrollably...anyways, I headcanon that the jerk behind that ended up getting reassigned to Keter duty, on grounds of clearly being unfit to deal with civilians at all, much less make decisions about whether those civilians should get mindwiped. It's not even interesting Keter duty, either; it's the most mindnumbing duty they could give him, the most complete opposite from being allowed to go chase skips down.) (Edited for typos.)
Since people complain a lot about "keter duty" being a punishment I like to think it's not what it sounds like. Like you're not suddenly transferred to work on a keter skip's project, that wouldn't make sense if there wasn't one that matched your skills if you're a researcher, it'd be disruptive for the the non-assholes working on research, I can poke a billion holes in it that aren't "it's a stupid overused punishment" Nooooo. Your job is looking at reports and safety classifications and giving them like... a tertiary look over to make sure they ARE in fact keter and not just a really scary euclid/safe. (Like people who forget 'safe' means 'we can put it in a box and if nobody fucks with it it won't do anything' even if it does something seriously scary. A giant fuck-off nuke is 'safe' because as long as nobody sets it off it doesn't go boom. But some people go 'but it's dangerous! it can't be SAFE!' and miss the point completely. I bet the Foundation have plenty of Babby Researcher's First Skip where someone gets spooked and demands ridiculous containment , gets threatened by something and declares it Keter, stuff like that. That's Keter Duty. It's also being the sad bastard who writes the researchers denial letters when 05 decides something isn't worth upgrading to Keter. Basically: Paperwork Hell with a side of cosmic horror.
I'm a big fan of interpretations of the Foundation as unreliable narrator. Sure, the official line is that all the terrible things they do are necessary to keep cosmic horrors from eating humanity. But if you look at the organizational structure in-fiction... Staff is full of war criminals (Dmitri), researchers with serious ethical problems (Rights, Light), people who aren't really human anymore (Crow, Bright), people who might never have been human to begin with (Clef), and generally unstable motherfuckers (Kondraki). [sure some of this is lolFoundation that survived the various mass edits and tone shifts, but blah blah death of the author] These are the kinds of people who survive the Foundation and adapt well enough to get promoted. What must the O5s be like? Not to mention the fact that the organization is already a layer cake of lies told selectively to people with different clearances. And that there are so many articles implying, between the lines, that the Foundation is either fucking up spectacularly out of ignorance or making matters worse from malicious self-interest.
Depends on the character and the situation. There have been occasions when one or two have shown they're trying not to make things worse than necessary; see the fate of Guest Researcher Dr W. And like that "231 is really fine" Tale; while they sure as hell would do horrible things to an innocent if it prevented things being worse, as we see with 590, if there was a way to not do so, they'd take it, as we see with the flunked attempts to deal with 145.
Oh, sure. I mean, there is no canon, and it's cool to see stories where the moral core of the Foundation is bent but not broken. There's a reason "Ethics Committee Orientation" is one of the highest rated tales on the site.
As I said, it depends on the person. Could be most of the org is corrupt; considering the list of Things Not Allowed To Do says there is no Ethics Committee, do the O5s know about it? The Ethics Committee as La Resistance seems like a fun thought.
Heck, they could even spin it as completely and utterly necessary, because there are skips that are mind-affecting in such a way that they're perceived as more dangerous than they really are. (I'm thinking of - I can't remember the number, but the one that makes you think it's a giant, terrifying water monster and it originally got classified as keter because the agent's report got taken at face value and no one did tests to check if it's actually what they said it was. If I remember right, they're now reasonably sure that even if there's anything in the tank, it's the tiniest, most helpless thing you could imagine and it does the "I am big and terrifying, run away" mind-effect as a defense mechanism.)
There's also that one book that cause severe hypochondria/hypochondria-by-proxy, and the researchers threw a bunch of D-class at it because they were convinced it caused horrible contagion before someone from O5 came along and fired everyone and stuck it in a box and relabeled it Safe.
i think with the SCP foundation, it's just so big and operating on such an intense level that the things it does are going to span from 'absolute fucking atrocities' to 'astonishingly heroic'. we can hope that their average is 'no worse than necessary' but we don't get to know. i mean even in mundane militaries, you get soldiers that are serial rapists, soldiers that torture civilians for fun, and soldiers that are good and honorable men who lay down their lives to save people they don't even know. it can be hard to judge the ethics of an organization in aggregate... with the SCP foundation, the world hasn't ended yet (or at least not too much) so presumably they're not doing super horribly...
I think my favourite skips have to be the ones like the toaster and the green slime which would be horrifying if they were real but the report makes them utterly hilarious.
Found another one which is horrifying but described in a silly way; "Entire Local Family Chokes To Death On Single Calculator".
I feel like the story of Omega Seven really should go somewhere; pull Able out of retirement to take down something worse. But that would kind of mean the end of the Foundation's story in general, wouldn't it, according to general narrative laws? It just seems kind of awkward that they dropped it like that, though I do kind of see why.
hi I'm actually a staff member on the wiki, about to be promoted from junior staff to operational staff, and i really really encourage people to come sign up and check out the forums and the IRC chat even if you can't write a skip- it's still super fun.
