The Problem: When I was with SCP, I found that the least believable thing on the site wasn't any of the anomalies contained, but rather the Foundation itself. Specifically, the idea that they were able to get every major country to not only agree to let them operate in their country, but also agree to give them diplomatic immunity[footnote] "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." [/footnote]. I mean, getting all these different countries with their own beliefs and ideologies to unanimously agree on anything is already stretching suspension of disbelief, but having them all be cool with letting some secret organization go around locking up stuff, including their own citizens, without having to adhere to any of the local laws, is a real deal-breaker for me.

What We Can Do Instead: We could make it so that the RPC Authority operates in coordination with the local government. While this might initially seem restrictive, having the Authority butting heads with the local government opens up all sorts of narrative possibilities by adding an additional source of conflict.

The Problem: The Foundation maintains strict secrecy for the same bullshit reasonings of the MIB, most portrayals of the Illuminati, and all those parents who don't tell their kids vital information until at least halfway through the movie. The logical fallacy is best illustrated with this analogy:

A father wants to protect his daughter from predators. He knows that they tend to target people going through dark alleys. So rather than telling his daughter not to go through dark alleys, he instead follows his daughter around on her trips through the city, suggesting that they go a different way whenever she tries to go through a dark alley. One day, the father isn't able to go with his daughter on her trip through the city. Because he wasn't there to stop her, she goes through a dark ally and gets ambushed by predators.

Do you see the problem here? If the father had simply warned his daughter about the dangers of going through dark alleys, she most likely would have avoided them on her own instead of needing her father to constantly follow her around and steer her away from them. The same thing applies to the RPC. By not telling the population about these anomalies we're trying to protect them from, we blind them to the danger. As a result, if even one of our anomalies makes its way to a population center, it will wreak major havoc on them.

Additionally, the idea that a globe-spanning organization with thousands of members is even remotely capable of keeping such a strict level of secrecy is kind of ridiculous. All it takes is one worker to spill the beans, and with thousands of workers spread around the globe, the probability of an information leak is too high for anyone to realistically prevent.

What We Can Do Instead: There are two different ways we could avoid this fallacy. The first and simplest method would be to not have the Authority try to keep its existence a secret. It would still classify information on operations and contained anomalies, but it wouldn't need to keep the existence of anomalies from the public.

The second method would be to give the RPC Authority an ulterior motive for secrecy. Maybe they don't want to be held accountable for casualties that result in a breach of containment. Maybe they don't want to deal with the scrutiny of humanitarian organizations. Maybe they don't really want to protect the population at all, but are trying to use the anomalies to serve their own nefarious purposes. Cute stuff like that.

The Problem: This is kind of an extension of Pet Peeve #2, but I find that their motivation for keeping things a secret is equally bullshit. The idea that we are so fragile that the mere knowledge of the existence of things that go against our current sense of "normalcy" is enough to send us into a mass panic is frankly quite insulting. I find it humorous that our about page has a quote from MIB where Agent N follows up a statement of humanities fragility with 2 examples of new information upturning commonly held beliefs. Spoiler alert: we didn't "descend into chaos" when we discovered the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. There was aggressive opposition by the Catholic Church, but those guys were in aggressive opposition with a lot of things. Likewise, when Christopher Columbus proved that the Earth was actually round, we didn't respond with mass panic. Instead, we rapidly adapted to this new information, almost immediately attempting to use this knowledge to find a more direct trading route between the west and the east.

Additionally, the idea of "protecting normalcy" creates many issues, largely due to the fact that "normalcy" is relative. Imagine the RPC locked up an anomalous mineral that attracts iron, can attract or repel other instances of itself, and can even spread its effect onto iron. This seems like a textbook anomaly until you realize that I just described magnets. Practically every discovery or invention ever made would have been seen as strange or even alien when they were first discovered. Look back at the example of the Catholic Church opposing the idea of the Earth revolving around the sun. They tried to suppress Galeo's discovery because it went against their teachings[footnote] I'd like to clarify that these were the teachings of the Catholic Church, and not actually based off of any scripture [/footnote]. Similarly, Gregor Mendel's discoveries on heredity were suppressed because they conflicted with the current theory of evolution, slowing down scientific advancement by 72 years. Imagine if there was an entire organization that was soley devoted to suppressing new discoveries, and the havoc it would wreak on scientific progress.

What We Can Do Instead: Give the RPC Authority a different motivation. One alternate motivation we could give them is preventing people from utilizing forces they don't properly understand. Think of Jurassic Park; Hammond tried to create a zoo/theme park for dinosaurs that they brought back to life, but in their excitement of discovering a way to clone dinosaurs, they failed to make sure they were able to successfully contain and control the populations before they started mass producing them, resulting in them accidentally using DNA sequences that allowed the dinosaurs to change sexes. And because they didn't account for the possibility of population control failure, the systems they had in place to account for the numbers of living dinosaurs didn't count past the number of dinosaurs that they produced, resulting in large number of dinosaurs that they weren't aware of, allowing for dinosaurs to escape containment without the parks knowledge, even before the massive containment breach[footer] This is mostly explained in the book; the movie adaption briefly mentions that the dinosaurs were able to reproduce despite their supposed population control systems, but it was never explored further [/footnote]. The RPC Authority could exist to prevent similar incidents from happening; making sure they have an adequate understanding of the anomalies (not necessarily how they work, but enough to safely utilize and/or replicate it) before releasing information to the public.