Thread:Per Ankh/@comment-24588058-20140711192022/@comment-1674153-20140713195819

"Mushrooms. In the water."

The fact of the matter is that no one, in the entire canon of the Warehouse, has tried to expose artifacts to the world with the exception of Deb Stanley, who by the end of her episode decided to keep the Warehouse a secret. Nearly every victim of an artifact is shown to walk away dead, insane, evil, or grown into a better person by escaping the artifact's effects. Artifacts are not nice things. They don't have a moral compass. They aren't inherently evil, either. They operate, and that's it. Most people suffer from interacting with them, even indirectly.

So weeding out from the population the people who have interacted with an artifact are killed, driven insane, or grown from an artifact whammy, we are left with those who are extremely lucky when they find an artifact, and those who are turned evil. Lucky people are often meant to be be part of the Warehouse anyway (cue every Warehouse agent ever), merely because they have a talent that benefits the institution. Evil people pose a serious threat to the Warehouse, but their motivations are based on human instincts of revenge, power, or to cover up another crime. They don't want to expose artifacts because then their other actions would be discovered or they would have made it more difficult for them to get more as people start grabbing them up. Honestly, the villians we haven't seen yet are the villians who think artifacts are demonic and want to purge the world of them (A la the group from Once Upon a Time or some of our world's religious organizations when it comes to Pokemon).

So hypothetically, if Pokemon were to be exposed as being real, what would happen? Three things - people would be happy, people would be horrified, and Nintendo would have a LOT of questions thrown at it. If there was in-show Warehouse 13, people would likely have the same reaction when exposed to an artifact.

If this show is looking to say "Oh, you thought that was real? Nope, it was just a promotion for this show" you only have a handful of artifacts that can be reasonable for this. I've only seen an episode of Stargate, but it seems that it'd be much easier to say that the aliens were men in costumes then it would be to say the English Sweating Sickness scare was an act. But, there is the Jar from the Donner Party, Angelo Siciliano's Workout Trunks, and Shakespeare's Lost Folio, all of which had effects which could have been played out.

What we are considering adding here is an entirely new depth to the Warehouse world. And that's amazing. With the show officially over, it is only the limit to Endless Wonder that determines how we can go. But we have to ask ourselves, does this addition make sense, or is it a result of P.T. Barnum's Top? Will it create more answers than it will questions? Will it bait people, making them be more susceptible to exposing artifacts if they think that they discovered that they were real from a T.V. show? Will it create more artifacts through the Tulpa effect? Is it more risk to try and hide in plain sight than it is to remain in the shadows, without any benefit?

I