#icsut

The Groups of Interest in the Foundationverse are abundant, and difficult for many people to parse or distinguish. One way I like to think about them is that each group reflects a different aspect of or way of interacting with the abnormal. They contextualize different angles of exceptionality. Let me explain what I mean with some examples.

Businesses

Ambrose Restaurants - Fine dining. The avantgarde. Artistry in cuisine. In short, Ambrose serves the anomalous as an exotic status symbol to the elite. All the abuses associated with such industries in the real world can enter their purview.

Anderson Robotics - Big tech. They don't think about the consequences of new frontiers, they stomp through them looking for scatch. My favorite article concerning them was about their line of cars; they were better than any others because they used time travel to sell the model they would make three years in the future. The profit from sales was then used to design the car in the first place. This business model worked great until the sales didn't come, and the bubble popped into a time paradox. I'm sure currently they're building anomalous data centers.

The Chicago Spectre/Spirit - Organized crime is a business, after all. Sometimes the only business available for marginalized communities. And that's what the CS is; it operates in Freeports behind the Veil, the same as outfits operating in ethnic neighborhoods or poor districts. It's part of the parallel economy of what has been forcibly made abnormal.

Dado - No comment. More surrealist than representational. I suppose he's the sort of sketchy blackmarket pharmacist that we have the FDA to protect us from. He's more a guy than a GOI though.

Dr. Wondertainment - Multiple different angles on this one, but at their core they're the entertainment industry, your Disney and Hasbro, your Nintendo and Sega. They sell whimsy, novelty, nostalgia, childhood. They sell cutting edge, new, never before seen, the old in a fresh and exciting way. They don't sell guarantees of consumer safety.

The Factory - The Factory is less a company and more a metaphysical tumor. It's capitalism, mass production, economies of scale in the worst way. Other anomalous companies contract with them for manufacture for their cheap child labor, which means that they fill the niche of offshored sweat shop. They're an example of the core feeding off the periphery.

Herman-Fuller's Circus of the Disquieting - Exactly what you expect for a circus. The exploitation and marketing of disadvantaged people and animals, dehumanization, being forced to sell oneself to the masses for lack of other opportunities.

ICSUT - A college is a business. They're academia, ivy league academia, with government contracts and the ear of politicians. They study the abnormal, and they model and contextualize it.

Marshall, Carter, and Dark - Like Ambrose, they work in status, elitism, the exotic. They control the spaces restricted to the ultra wealthy, and they set the rules of their consumption; what tacky art or horrible chairs you need to buy to remain part of that world. MC&D are often thought of as a superbusiness, one that trades in controlling centers of wealth, and they're not wrong. They understand that the most valuable things are ones that shouldn't exist.

Vikander-Kneed Technical Media - I don't read many of their articles, but I know what they are from what I have seen, because they wear it openly. They're tech media, they're twitter, they're content farms and LLMS; they want your eyeballs, whatever they're pointed at, whoever you are. They charge into new frontiers of monetized attention.

Religions

Children of the Scarlet King - These don't represent a realistic social group so much as a nihilistic impulse towards destruction. The King isn't meant to be the kind of god humans are prone to worship but the kind of concept some are; violence, domination, vengeance, warfare. It's responding to a traumatic world by advocating abuse.

Church of the Second Hytoth - Ortothans are an subversion of the classic scary blood cult trope borne out of Lovecraft and others. They give blood as a voluntary act of self sacrifice, and pacifistically refuse to take it. They organize in the face of an uncaring cosmos to assert human caring, to bolster one another. They're defined by hope, by hope as a radical action, by daring to hope that things can get better even without some cosmic plan. They are also a marginal religious community with practices targeted by mainstream moralism, which adds another dimension to their stories.

The Daeva - I think there are many valid takes on the Daeva, but one of the major ones for me is as kind of ultra classists. They ran a hyper theocratic, hyper sexist, slave society based on the appropriation of the bodies of their servants. They approach the modern day by rewriting history so that their presence is natural. The horror of the Daeva isn't the carnomancy or the Scarlet King worship but the predatory hierarchy they promise to enforce.

Fifthism - Calling Fifthism a religion is close enough, but when well written, Fifthism is likely nothing a healthy human mind considers. It's surreal, five tongued, in thrall of a cosmic starfish. Fifthism burns your understanding of the world you lived in, and you follow the smoke to the Fifth Heaven. It is truly alien, not just in the sense of Ortothanism, but to our dimensionality, our metafictional framework, our semantic informational structure, and more. The Starfish may not even know the profound impact it has on the minds its whirling arms have touched. It may not know period; who knows how it experiences concepts?

Mekhanites/CotBG - Whatever the branch, Mekhanites bear out that above the chaos of the material world around us is a transcendent order to approach. There is a plan, and if our inherent evil can be conquered, we can be part of it. We must evolve humanity, build the singularity, become enough to touch this highness. Don't let our inadequacy conquer us. Don't be confounded by the lies of this world of flesh. We are building Mekhane. We have to be.

Nalka/Sarkism - Nalka is a materialist, humanistic religion. It rejects moral objectivism, the idea of a benign or all good deity, the concept of the soul, and human inadequacy. It sees an uncaring, misshapen cosmos and says we must take the reigns, together. We seize personal autonomy by crafting our flesh, then as a community, we birth Adytum. All preexisting norms, hierarchies, and deities must be shunned in this process. The powers of nature are to be swallowed and made our own.

Nalka is also largely an ethnoreligion and therefore lends itself to exploration of those.

The Three Moons Initiative - The Three Moons is the ruling faction of the afterlife of Corbenic, headed by the spider god Jalakara. Their initial formation was largely from SCP Foundation elements killed in the destruction of their Earths. They have reorganized in intention, in doctrine, in branding, but they keep the Foundation's ethos and outlook, merely shifted to be about the assertion of clear cut moralism instead of normalcy. They are well meaning, but they also cannot consider that they may not know best.

Freeports, Political Groups, and Other Communities

All Freeports and many other nexuses are communities forced to exist isolated behind the Veil of Normalcy. They are marginalized and underground by nature, whatever else is true about them, and inherently are alternative cultures. Political groups concerning the Veil are often deeply interlinked with these spaces, and intangible communities draw membership from them.

AWCY? - Are We Cool Yet? is an artistic and political movement based heavily in Backdoor SoHo and other freeports. They make weird, effed up art, much of which kills people. Their driving philosophy is deeply jaded and nihilistic, giving up on the value of human life and instead focusing on pushing the envelope in a plea for attention. Good art often transgresses or questions norms, but breaking norms on its own does not good art make. Yet AWCY? might disagree with that. Their membership is prone to suicide as performance art.

Backdoor SoHo - This place is part counterculture, part organized crime, part unorganized crime. It is violent and unruly, left to its own devices, quarantined instead of governed. In the face of this, it embraces absurdity, and spits in the eyes of the cops.

The Chaos Insurgency - Information on the Insurgency is a confused mess. They're decentralized and secretive, and rumors abound. Yet everyone agrees on two things; they are a splinter from the Foundation and they're anti-veil terrorists. Some claim that in reality they're nothing but an SCP false flag, but there seems to be some veracity to their activity. I would summarize them as accelerationists; they think that the Veil is untenable, and the only way to replace it is to force it to collapse. Not many people like them even among anti-Foundation parties.

Esterberg - Part fey, part Yeren (Sasquatch), part Polish. This city state bleeds history that the Veil doesn't like to acknowledge. It's locked in a fight over legacy, over erasure, over autonomy, over the crossroads of past and future. It's existence is an affront to normalcy because it whispers a simple truth; we were here first. There is nothing deviant about a conquered people on their ancestral land. There is nothing unscientific about scholarly traditions that predate Francis Bacon. We are normal. We are not anomalous. And yet still you restrain us.

The Fourth Reich and IJAMEA - Fascists, neo-fascists, militarists, and scum. The appropriation of the new, the pseudoscientific, and the ill understood for fascist movements; natural selection->social darwinism->eugenics, the appropriation of the Swastika by the Nazis, chemical weapons and alternative history and sterilization programs. Not good people by any stretch of ambiguity.

Gamers Against Weed - Us, basically. Tumblr, or the internet in general. Leftist, counterculture, alternative models, proud SJWs and radical queers. Pro-weed, the name is ironic. They're another response to the absurdity of modernity, normalcy, and abnormality, and specifically how the internet mediates such reaction.

Hy-Brasil - This fey island is a nation in decline, the last independent bastion of a sidhe culture that once thrived across Europe. Devastated by a Kaiju attack in the 80's, and the destructive military response, it clings to what it once was with no real hope of making a comeback from its diaspora. Like so many indigenous or marginal cultures, the fair folk are in a struggle to preserve their traditions and identity against waning autonomy and a push for assimilation.

Manna Charitable Foundation - The anomalous doctors without borders, basically. Often characterized as naive or more destructive than helpful, but that's negativity bias. In truth, they do a lot of good, trying to help the marginalized in and out of the Veil with unconventional means. Yet their work is limited systemically by the strictures of normalcy.

New Atlantis - This one has barely any articles or tales but I like it conceptually. Atlanteans freed from stasis in a mirror in their sunken city, now having made a deal with the US government for a reservation in Arizona. Many serve in the US Navy, a once proud culture sold back the shadow of their thalassic glory in exchange for the right to continue. Just another people struggling to maintain their traditions.

The Serpent's Hand - Often described as a terrorist or activist network, but actually decentralized to the point that they're more a movement like Antifa. They are anti-Veil and pro-anomaly. They believe in liberation, in freedom, in self definition, in pluralism. They see strangeness with wonder over fear, and the future with hope instead of despair. Many of them operate out an extradimensional library; THE library, in fact.

Three Portlands - 3Ports is a mix of Maine, Oregon, and Britain, and it is rainy, quirky, and intensely leftist. The demographics are queer, are undocumented immigrants, are participants in the informal economy, are part of fringe religious movements, etc. The aesthetics are alternative, punk, weirdcore, indy, grunge, hipster. The state of law is ungovernable. 3Ports is a place that is desperate to be itself against the backdrop of a world that would prefer it not exist.

Governments and Normalcy Organizations

Behind the Veil organizations that one way or another take it on themselves to define the status quo. Many of these are effectively extensions of their national government's outlook, so I won't touch on all of them.

GRU-P - The USSR's own Men in Black. Much of what they did was research the anomalous for the Cold War, or for the advancement of socialist society. They absolutely reflected the Soviet's weird relationship to science and truth; look up Lysenkoism. Not cartoonishly evil, just systemically flawed.

ORIA - The Office for the Reclamation of Islamic Artifacts is theroretically an arm of the Ayatollah's government. Yet in reality, it fights for its autonomy to act by its own institutional conscience and represent the interests of the Middle East. It's about anti-colonialism, about nuance, about complexity in non-democratic political landscapes. It's about how ORIA fights to allow non-Muslim and marginalized leadership while still branding itself as Islamic. It's about fighting for the end of imperialist exploitation as a normalcy organization that fundamentally perpetuates that same thing. It's about how not everyone who lives under a totalitarian government is either a victimized sheep or irredeemably evil. It's about how Iranians are people, and so are Muslims. It's about how normalcy in the Middle East includes bombing raids, and how different that might be if they had a say in such affairs, and what keeps them from possessing that.

Pentagram - The US military industrial complex. It's that simple, really.

UIU - The FBI's Unusual Incidents Unit. Their early treatment on the site was pretty one note, making them butt monkeys meant to emphasize the superiority of the SCP Foundation over the US. Over time, they've grown into something more interesting, reflecting their difference of mandate; they aren't a normalcy org, but a law enforcement one. They focus on keeping order, within a framework of the othering of the anomalous. Within all US freeports and 3Ports they are the cops.

The Big Two Normalcy Orgs

The GOC - This is an element of the UN. It's made up of the veiled equivalent of the international community; different nations' paranormal departments, occult fraternities, private companies, Freeport governments, religious orders, think tanks, and so forth, forming the Council of 108. They represent the interests that actually control international discourse, without pretense. Coca Cola gets the same kind of seat as Venezuela.

Also like real international discourse, this is no conspiracy theorist's unified world order. They squabble. They disagree. They spend session after session on a crisis only to have a non-binding resolution vetoed by the security council. They certainly do a lot more than the normal UN, but this is because of the autonomous structures they've already set up, not proactivity on their part.

The GOC therefore represents hegemony, internationalism, and the biased flaws of both. They represent what really goes on in the highest halls of power, and the fight to have a seat at the table, and then to be heard. They manage freeports and the paranormal standing of smaller nations with the same kind of relationship the real UN has to the third world; push and pull, and yet the richest players always seem to sway the vote the most.

They're also a heavily militaristic organization (unlike the actual UN, which is only somewhat militaristic) and assume the US's self imposed role as world police. They are not the Destroy Destroy Destroy Foundation they're sometimes mischaracterized as, but they do dominate, and they do believe in join our system or die.

The SCP Foundation - Oh, the Foundation. The Foundation, the Foundation, the Foundation. I daresay that the Foundation practically is normalcy itself, or tries to be. They have front companies in every sector. They have liasons with every government. They have opinions on every phenomenon, on whether the public can handle it, on whether it can be contained. Whether it can, not whether it should. Deep down, the Foundation wants to contain everything.

Nothing binds or checks the Foundation. No government, no god, no God, no system of ethics, no comparable organization, no author, no reader deserves to control the Foundation in its sacred, eternal, necessary mission. The institution is practically alive at this point, with its own wants, at least in the way an idea is alive, the way a fire wants, the way a virus needs to spread. And the Foundation must have control. It must have everything in boxes. It must, it must, it must, and damn what gets in its way.

It's practically a maladaptive fear response of humanity's collective unconscious. And like a coping mechanism, the Foundation has been necessary, it is grounded in reality, but it has exceeded its mandate entirely, and constructed a perception of the world that relies on satisfying its compulsions.

There's no money the Foundation is after. Power only insofar as it facilitates normalcy, as it facilitates containment. Really, all of the Foundation's actions are driven by fear turned into institutional ideology. And the Foundation distrusts everyone else with its mission, tainted as they are; naive idealists or blind fanatics or greedy capitalists or jingoistic nationalists or delusional ideologues or fragile sheep that must be kept in the light. It's a terribly isolating framework, and part of why the jailers are so hated in the paranormal community.

And this mandate is ever expanding. Contain time with the Temporal Anomalies Dept. Contain what we can't understand with Surrealistics. Contain the story with Pataphysics. Contain what doesn't exist with Unreality. Contain ourselves -- in many different permutations.