Justifications for the Masquerade

[FaxModem1]

In a lot of fantasy works, wizards, vampires, ghosts, etc. are kept secret. So, our plucky heroes fights evil, and more often than not, keeps the truth hidden about what they're really doing from the public. But why?

Unless you really are the wizard, helldemon, vampire or whatever, wouldn't it make your life a lot easier if everyone in the world knew that if you let in pale people after night, they might be vampires and chow down on the entire household, or that wendigos exist and you should keep away from certain mountains, or that ghosts can and do come back after death to seek revenge on their killers, etc.

Examples include:

Buffy not explaining to the populace of Sunnydale that yes, vampires exist, and it'd better to hide indoors at night time.
Sam and Dean on Supernatural, as well as all hunters, keeping the fact that people who die in wrongful deaths turn into spirits or other nasty things, where a cultural change in burials could probably help them out a lot. Or at least prevent a lot of deaths.
Any Hunters in things such as White Wolf tabletop, where people knowing about vampires, werewolves, fae, etc. would lead to the world changing a lot.


So, aside from upsetting the apple cart of the setting, and making the writer of a work have to deal with this, why is the masquerade upheld by good guys?

[The Romulan Republic]

I can think of a few reasons:

1. For those who don't have iron-clad proof, not wanting to be thought a nut.

2. Not wanting to provoke panic/a witch hunt mentality.

3. Wanting to maintain a monopoly on whatever supernatural power you have/maintain an advantage over ordinary mortals.

Edit: All of these are fairly obvious of course. Perhaps your real question is weather they outweigh the negatives.

The first is more a matter of practical feasibility. The second... it would depend on the circumstances weather its justified.

The third, of course, is more of a villain motive.

[Lord Revan]

More often then not in these stories the supernatural threats can disguise themselves effectively from humans and the heroes have little to no definet proof of the existance of the supernatural, so as long the "bad guys" aren't stupid and reveal themselves the heroes would look stupid and/or insane, I mean how would you react if someone came you and said "vampires are real you got to trust me!" but showed no real proof to back their claim. (WoW:legion spoilers)Spoiler

not every supernatural threat is as stupid as Felblade assasins sent to kill King Anduin Wrynn and Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner and reveal themselves if challenged

Also not causing a panic/witch hunt is important, especially if only few people can clearly tell who is a supernatural threat and who is a normal person.

[bilateralrope]

Being unable to expose the masquerade because there are powerful entities/groups that would prevent any attempts is fair enough. If those entities have good reasons for the coverup.
Supernatural beings who feel that the masquerade protects them is also fair enough. If humans are capable of killing vampires, but vampires can only survive by killing humans, then the secrecy does protect the vampires.
Then there are a whole range of villainous reasons, usually selfish in one manner or another.


The worst cases for the justification are when the people who want to keep the truth hidden are also supposedly the good guys responsible for protecting everyone from the threats they are keeping secret. Threats that would be much easier for the public to defend themselves against if they knew that the threat existed. The worst example of this is a webcomic I've read where:
- Two teenage girls get attacked by a vampire like creature. They escape its first attack
- They tell their classmates. They get laughed at and decide that nobody else will believe them either.
- Two magical beings decide to help the teenagers. Not by informing authorities that the magical beings should know about, but by teaching the teenagers how use magic to fight back.
- Vampire attacks them again. The teenagers fight and win, though one of the girls has trouble over the fact that she killed a sentient being.
- Worse still, the uncle of the other teenager was heavily involved in an agency that covers up and/or protects humans from the supernatural.

Later in the webcomic one magical being calls the other two irresponsible for not calling in authorities who could help. Nobody ever questions the authorities for keeping the existence of the supernatural a secret.

Now thing about how this would go if the existence of the supernatural was known:
- Teenagers get attacked. Escape
- They call the police.
- Police either deal with it directly or call someone who can.

The Men in Black movies take on a very sinister tone when I think about it:
- The isolate all their members from the outside world. A behaviour that seems very cult-like. But they take it further, as nobody can leave with their memory of MiB intact.
- They say that they don't answer to any government organisation, yet they take it upon themselves to handle alien immigration. Making every alien they let into the US an illegal immigrant.
- They make their money from patenting confiscated alien tech. Patents that should be invalid due to prior art. Even if that wasn't the case, MiB wouldn't have the rights to any of the patents because they didn't invent any of that tech.

The whole organisation looks like an illegal money making operation for whoever is in charge. Illegally smuggle aliens onto Earth, steal anything valuable they might be carrying and fraudulently claim a patent on it. Have a cult of human lackeys on hand to make sure the aliens don't get noticed by the authorities.

[FaxModem1]

Now thing about how this would go if the existence of the supernatural was known:
- Teenagers get attacked. Escape
- They call the police.
- Police either deal with it directly or call someone who can.

This. If Buffy or the Winchesters, or something along those lines were involved, at least two more teens would die, and no one would ever be the wiser or know what to do in case something like this happened again.

[madd0ct0r]

The men in black example dosent work - the aliens in general have a much much higher tech base. If they wanted to invade, we'd be toast. Fortunety the Space UN seems quite benign. Neither can they permit an alien merchant to set up shop, the tech level is too far ahead of us. Factories and economies woud go through chaotic collapses and we would be dependent on imports forevermore. Dripfeeding the tech in like this accelerates human progress until we can stand by ourselves.

As for the msquerade, ssuming the vilians have good reason to prefer the status quo,perhps raising the aĺarm just makes yiu a target. Isnt the masquerade dropped by the end of buffy?

[FaxModem1]

The men in black example dosent work - the aliens in general have a much much higher tech base. If they wanted to invade, we'd be toast. Fortunety the Space UN seems quite benign. Neither can they permit an alien merchant to set up shop, the tech level is too far ahead of us. Factories and economies woud go through chaotic collapses and we would be dependent on imports forevermore. Dripfeeding the tech in like this accelerates human progress until we can stand by ourselves.

As for the msquerade, ssuming the vilians have good reason to prefer the status quo,perhps raising the aĺarm just makes yiu a target. Isnt the masquerade dropped by the end of buffy?

Nope, it goes on for at least another season on Angel. And if you want to count the comics, season 8 has Harmony become a reality TV star by eating Andy Dick, and this takes place a few years later. But then, the comics are stupid.

[bilateralrope]

This. If Buffy or the Winchesters, or something along those lines were involved, at least two more teens would die, and no one would ever be the wiser or know what to do in case something like this happened again.

I haven't watched Supernatural, but I've heard that the Winchesters rely on a lot of fraud to finance their activities.
I remember one Buffy episode where she had trouble finding work and I've heard that the comics involve vampire slayers robbing banks for money.

Bring the threat out into the open and someone, hopefully government, would fund the groups that protect normal humans from the various supernatural threats. No more need to resort to crime.

Now imagine this scenario:
- Various groups are keeping the existence of magical beings hidden while trying to protect those outside the masquerade.
- Something unknown to those groups shows up and does something horrible. Then leaves before any help shows up.
- Supernatural hiding groups go WTF, then destroy all the evidence before anyone (including themselves) can investigate it and figure out what's happening.
- Unknown entity becomes bolder, causing more damage, confident that the pro-masquerade groups will keep cleaning up after them. Leaving nobody who knows enough to fight back.



For a while know I've been thinking of running running an RPG where the PCs are members of some group protecting humans from and/or hiding the supernatural. With various pressures making doing both increasingly difficult. Including:
- Technology advancing. I've often seen comments here about how much trouble camera phones would be for the masquerade. Let alone modern smartphones and mobile data connections.
- Something behind a lot of the incidents. Something that is relying on the PCs having to destroy evidence before they can analyse it in order to keep everything under wraps.
The whole idea is that the PCs will have to perform more and more extreme acts to try and preserve the masquerade. Until they reach a point where they decide that the cost of secrecy is too high and/or secrecy becomes impossible.

The men in black example dosent work - the aliens in general have a much much higher tech base. If they wanted to invade, we'd be toast. Fortunety the Space UN seems quite benign. Neither can they permit an alien merchant to set up shop, the tech level is too far ahead of us. Factories and economies woud go through chaotic collapses and we would be dependent on imports forevermore. Dripfeeding the tech in like this accelerates human progress until we can stand by ourselves.

You've made good arguments for dripfeeding tech.

You haven't made any argument about hiding the very existence of aliens from humanity while governments do so. Hiding the existence of aliens seems to require a slower tech advancement, as the tech advancements need to look like something a human could come up with. If aliens were public knowledge, then large jumps of technology become possible because you only need to limit the rate of advancement to what humans can understand.

You haven't done anything to justify why a private organisation gets to make the decision about what technology humanity can and can't acquire simply because that organisation got to the aliens first. Nor why they get to go around wiping memories.

[Lord Revan]

Something we should ask before start to speculate if maintaining the Masquerade is moral or not is how easy is to detect and identify the supernatural threats, after all if the only 100% certain way to spot a supernatural threat is to use a suapernatural ability then exposing the threats might just cause panic and paranoia. We got to remember that vampires can be sapient and therefore you be aware of the vampire stereotypes and most likely try to avoid those in trying "fly under the radar" as much as it's physically possible to them.

that WoW example I gave relied heavily on the demon hunters ability to "see" demons regardless of what form they took, meaning only demon hunters could spot the threat and others just had to trust that they weren't talking out of their arse there.

[Ralin]

It's just now occurring to you that Men in Black had a creepy premise?

You haven't made any argument about hiding the very existence of aliens from humanity while governments do so.

They make the argument right in the movie. People in large numbers are dumb and will do crazy, dangerous things because they're scared. Which learning about aliens would make them. Especially if they learn just how many aliens there are and how powerful they are.

I mean...didn't some alien casually wipe out Paris in the first movie and the veteran agents didn't even consider it remarkable?

You haven't done anything to justify why a private organisation gets to make the decision about what technology humanity can and can't acquire simply -because that organisation got to the aliens first.

I don't think MiB considers themselves to be a private organization. And there's probably some clause buried in the US legal code that makes them an official government organization and empowers them to do all the things they do. We see from Will Smith's character's interview that they can recruit from the military and special forces and police without the prospective new hires realizing they aren't dealing with a governmental agency, so clearly they have some connection with the regular government.

Nor why they get to go around wiping memories.

Because it stops the secret from getting out, and see above.

[The Romulan Republic]

The men in black example dosent work - the aliens in general have a much much higher tech base. If they wanted to invade, we'd be toast. Fortunety the Space UN seems quite benign. Neither can they permit an alien merchant to set up shop, the tech level is too far ahead of us. Factories and economies woud go through chaotic collapses and we would be dependent on imports forevermore. Dripfeeding the tech in like this accelerates human progress until we can stand by ourselves.

As for the msquerade, ssuming the vilians have good reason to prefer the status quo,perhps raising the aĺarm just makes yiu a target. Isnt the masquerade dropped by the end of buffy?

Nope, it goes on for at least another season on Angel. And if you want to count the comics, season 8 has Harmony become a reality TV star by eating Andy Dick, and this takes place a few years later. But then, the comics are stupid.

Its kind of ambiguous in the later seasons of Buffy and Angel. It seems to be something of an "open secret"- no one seems to talk about it much outside the supernatural world (though the main cast doesn't interact that much with "ordinary" people, so its hard to say), there's no big public reveal, but everyone seems to know.

Examples:

A reference in Angel season five to the LA DA using defensive magic to keep Wolfram and Hart from tampering with their cases (which is kind of awesome- the DA seems to have levelled up since the start of the show ).

All of LA being plunged into perpetual darkness in Angel season four, and much of the state, if not the world, being put under Jasmine's mind control. Not exactly the kind of thing you can just not notice.

A visiting musician in season seven of Buffy making an off-hand comment that she hates playing vampire towns.

On the other hand, the Buffy universe has magic which can apparently warp reality/history, or at least memory, on a global scale (see Johnathon's paragon spell in season four, the Wish, and the memory wipe of Connor). So any revelation could be "deleted" by a party with sufficient magical capability.

[hunter5]

There are also a number of masquerades that are maintained by the masquerade it self with Gantz and the Gamer coming to mind off the top of my head. Most of the other types generally the justification is the MIB answer avoid panicking the muggles.

[Zixinus]

In my own story that's currently I'm working on:

There is one, largely benevolent faction that managed to create a lock-down on Earth. Their main concern is life, all life, both natural and human-influenced. Nobody that isn't them can get to Earth (or so they think and yes, they are wrong, very wrong). There are other worlds with humans (originally from Earth) and it is their conviction that when you allow magic to take root on the world, it usually is for the worse. Even when people aren't directly affected, it creates a stress on people that prevents life from archiving its full potential. This is ideology but not without basis.

Not just "Oh, we have another monster in the woods and we now have to act as monster-exterminators on-call" but "the world's biosphere is mostly gone and only magic-powered equivalents still exist, if the magic goes away (as it might) the whole planet with everyone on it is dead". While this is an extreme case, this actually has happened to one world. There was one other world where there were also negative experiences with allowing magic to be open and accessible.

They don't want that with Earth, which is relatively pretty rich with life that the faction worships/considers important. Even with humanity's recent habit of pollution, species extermination and desertification although they aren't fond of that. They see justification in their mentality in the rise of secular philosophies, technology, science, relative peace, actual appreciation for nature and animals, etc. Among the human-held worlds, it has more people, more developed civilization(s) than others who are mostly stuck at a certain level or barely advancing at all.

There is also the idea that if magic exists, people will prefer using magic above technology. People will keep wanting to learn magic instead of becoming scientists and engineers that can solve problems without all the issues using magic has. It is an intellectual dam that causes stagnation, robbing potential to grow and explore new things. The faction believes that such is necessary for life. Not to mention that access to magic is finite and would mean taking away resources from the faction that want to use elsewhere or not give to the populace in the first place. There is also the belief that if people don't know about magic, they can't figure out how to access it or learn how to use it, thus making policing easier.

So TL,DR version: Earth ignorant of magic suits them just fine, they really believe it is better this way, have a supremacy to enforce it (and thus keep things in hand) and thus keep it like that.

Of course, the story actually has this used against them, their supremacy pulled out from under them and the secrecy working against them while it being broken in a way they can't cover up. So the faction has little choice but to go public, which has all sorts of problems for itself especially as it is in a shadow-war with those that toppled them.

Later in the webcomic one magical being calls the other two irresponsible for not calling in authorities who could help. Nobody ever questions the authorities for keeping the existence of the supernatural a secret.

If you are talking about El Goonish Shive (skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers), then the actual reason for the "good guys" to do what they did was to that they weren't really "good" and had an agenda of "arming" the two teenage girls. It is further revealed that it is magic itself that wants to keep itself a secret for whatever reason and the magical beings (who are powerful) are playing a game that's easier with the masquerade. The comic actually questions why the authorities have to keep magic a secret and the answer was given (right at the beginning of Squirrel Prophet): it is the only way to police magic users. If magic became public, that bad people can get access to it and do tremendous damage to the populace, including nasty stuff like stealing their life-essence, transforming their bodies and mind-control. The comic actually has one person do all this at once, one person who isn't a super-special super-criminal but just one terrible person with access to magic. And even if magic was public, there is no way to truly protect the general population.

[Simon_Jester]

The Men in Black movies take on a very sinister tone when I think about it:
- The isolate all their members from the outside world. A behaviour that seems very cult-like. But they take it further, as nobody can leave with their memory of MiB intact.
- They say that they don't answer to any government organisation, yet they take it upon themselves to handle alien immigration. Making every alien they let into the US an illegal immigrant.
- They make their money from patenting confiscated alien tech. Patents that should be invalid due to prior art. Even if that wasn't the case, MiB wouldn't have the rights to any of the patents because they didn't invent any of that tech.

The whole organisation looks like an illegal money making operation for whoever is in charge. Illegally smuggle aliens onto Earth, steal anything valuable they might be carrying and fraudulently claim a patent on it. Have a cult of human lackeys on hand to make sure the aliens don't get noticed by the authorities.

That's one possible interpretation.

On the other hand, it is also credible that at the very highest levels the world's governments and scientists are aware of all this, but agree to keep the conspiracy because they recognize that aliens on Earth simply cannot be regulated under normal Earthly laws. One can imagine that from the point of view of the galaxy at large, the governments of Earth have made the very unusual decision to keep the existence of aliens secret from their citizenry, empowering the MiB as a police force to make sure this happens, and giving the MiB unusual control over various resources to ensure that they can do the job.

You've made good arguments for dripfeeding tech.

You haven't made any argument about hiding the very existence of aliens from humanity while governments do so. Hiding the existence of aliens seems to require a slower tech advancement, as the tech advancements need to look like something a human could come up with. If aliens were public knowledge, then large jumps of technology become possible because you only need to limit the rate of advancement to what humans can understand.

You haven't done anything to justify why a private organisation gets to make the decision about what technology humanity can and can't acquire simply because that organisation got to the aliens first. Nor why they get to go around wiping memories.

1) You don't know they're a private organization, as opposed to being an internationally recognized body empowered by treaties whose existence is a secret from the public at large.

Remember, the MiB have been in operation for quite a while, and they have had large resources throughout that time. And based on the third Men in Black movie, the MiB didn't even have anything as convenient as portable amnesia-inducers until 1970 or later. How could they possibly have kept their existence secret from, or independent of, major governments during all that time? It is far more likely that they were created with government sanction than that they somehow came into being totally independent of governments.

2) Wiping memories may be the only way the MiB can maintain order and carry out their basic mission in an era where population density is rising, Earth is apparently being visited by more aliens, and where technology like easily portable cameras makes it harder and harder to actually keep anything a secret.

[Elheru Aran]

From what I recall of Dresden Files, the way that 'verse handles the 'masquerade' is liberal amounts of "this weird shit happened but there's a totally plausible explanation for it, now forget the actual weird shit" spells being thrown around. Concealment spells, spells that prevent mundanes from seeing the Fair Folk or the vampire courts, things like that.

The justification... mm... honestly I'm not sure there's one. Generally the notion, I think, is that if the mundanes knew of things like the Vampire Courts, there might be mass panic or the Vampires might decide it was open season in the name of self-defense, something like that. The magical organization that Harry Dresden is nominally a part of is more or less assigned the job of keeping everything under cover in order to keep the world safe from Cthulhu (or something along those lines) because if the mundanes found out about the magical world, they would suddenly be a lot more vulnerable to being eaten by star-spawn. Again, or something like that. I haven't read all the Dresden Files books...

[Zaune]

Actually, in the Dresden Files the justification is explicitly, "They outnumber us by several orders of magnitude, they have a bunch of terrifyingly powerful weapons and if they ever took a side in our conflicts then everyone except them would lose pretty badly." At least for the vampires and Fae; the wizards don't seem to care as much, going by the fact the Chicago PD has one on the payroll.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Well, at least with regards to the White Wolf systems, making a bunch of noise about the existence of vampires generally results in everyone thinking you're some nut. Or the Camarilla has you rather unceremoniously killed if you've got enough proof to cause meaningful snooping. Having a few people in positions of power to help fuck with investigations doesn't hurt, either. And considering some of the powers a few of the Clans have, you're not going to be able to hide from them. Making a bunch of noise about vampires is a fast way of getting yourself shot to death in some random attack.

For other settings, I'm guessing that most people would dismiss you as some lunatic and call the cops because you were scaring them and, in the case of Buffy, would likely end up admitting to having killed quite a lot of people.

[Zixinus]

So, so far the usual argument for the Masquerade usually boils down to "it suits those that make the conspiracy happen in the first place". And that their idea of keeping people safe does not meet actual idea of public interest.

[Lord Revan]

So, so far the usual argument for the Masquerade usually boils down to "it suits those that make the conspiracy happen in the first place". And that their idea of keeping people safe does not meet actual idea of public interest.

there's also the argument that it isn't practical or even viable to reveal the threat since it would only cause panic and paranoia. Think how would you react if you were told that vampires were not only real but there was no viable way of knowing who was a vampire and who wasn't before a vampire attacked you, sure a handful of people might be saved but the collateral damage would be huge when people would accuse any they didn't like of being bloodsucker or using the threat to as excuse for bigotry.

People here seem to assume that these threats carry a neonsign saying "I'm a supernatural threat".

[Kingmaker]

Unknown Armies posits that magicians and other people involved with the Masquerade aren't really that scary head to head, and the supernatural tends to provoke aggressive actions in people not clued it, so tilting the hole arrangement to a bunch of Muggles with guns is considered ill-advised.

The Dresden Files goes for much the same justification, plus a literal treaty between various supernatural factions to not involve mortal authorities with supernatural conflicts in a conscious capacity. In the absence of that, it might benefit the White Council (and other wizards) in the long run to blow the whole thing open, but in doing so they'd risk being dog-piled by every other signatory.

The Kara Gillian series takes the stance that for 99.5% of human history, summoners and demons have been super rare and thus easy to overlook and pointless/harmful to expose (the whole witchburning stuff). It's only recently that shit's started getting real, and people are noticing. Once again, the protagonists aren't doing it deliberately because no one would believe them.

In Buffy, there are a number of factions suppressing knowledge of the supernatural for their own gain, and the heroes generally lack the resources to challenge their message. Buffy could go out and say vampires are real, but no one would believe her.

Basically, settings with masquerades usually posit a) some sort of deliberate effort to keep the supernatural secret, often by people who don't really have everyone's best interest in mind b) heroes who either lack the credibility and resources to challenge the status quo (their individual do-gooding may be tolerated, but any attempt to radically upset the monster-filled apple cart will either fail badly or make things worse than playing along).

[Zixinus]

People here seem to assume that these threats carry a neonsign saying "I'm a supernatural threat".

But that's the thing: without information, how can you know that the threat even exists? You cannot know someone is a threat without all the information necessary to identify them as such. You can't know that someone is a vampire if you don't know that vampires actually exist. If you do, then you still can't until you know what vampires are really like. You have to learn or study them to do so. Only then could you make meaningful tests on people.

If you live in a world that has real monsters and you happen to learn things about the monsters nobody previously has ever learned, you are obligated to share that knowledge to give someone else encountering those monsters a chance. That someone else would misuse that information is their crime, not the knowledge-sharer's. Losing lives by remaining silent is not right just because stupid people would abuse that information to their own ends, which they would do anyway. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Like the Thing from the movie. Everyone was a suspect until a reliable test has been figured out (of course, by then almost everyone was dead). If you don't know it exists, what it is, how it acts and what to do, you cannot be anything but a victim. If you remain silent, you condemn everyone to be a victim.

[Lord Revan]

People here seem to assume that these threats carry a neonsign saying "I'm a supernatural threat".

But that's the thing: without information, how can you know that the threat even exists? You cannot know someone is a threat without all the information necessary to identify them as such. You can't know that someone is a vampire if you don't know that vampires actually exist. If you do, then you still can't until you know what vampires are really like. You have to learn or study them to do so. Only then could you make meaningful tests on people.

If you live in a world that has real monsters and you happen to learn things about the monsters nobody previously has ever learned, you are obligated to share that knowledge to give someone else encountering those monsters a chance. That someone else would misuse that information is their crime, not the knowledge-sharer's. Losing lives by remaining silent is not right just because stupid people would abuse that information to their own ends, which they would do anyway. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Like the Thing from the movie. Everyone was a suspect until a reliable test has been figured out (of course, by then almost everyone was dead). If you don't know it exists, what it is, how it acts and what to do, you cannot be anything but a victim. If you remain silent, you condemn everyone to be a victim.

The thing is that there might not be a viable way to identify someone if you're a muggle to borrow the Harry Potter term. in fact to take that futher is there any viable method to identify who is a wizard/witch and who is a muggle in Harry Popper without using external signs like clothing (well a method that can be used by a muggle).

If the only viable way to detect the supernatural relies on something avaible to the very few there simply isn't enough info you can get that wouldn't only make the matters worse.

You refuse to even consider the idea that reason the information isn't shared is because it wouldn't help at all at best and could even make the things worse. You always assume there's a viable way for a muggle to detect these supernatural threats, but what if there's no viable to detect the threat unless a)it's already too late b)you're part of the supernatural anyway.

[Kingmaker]

(Note: I do not necessarily endorse keeping the existence of the supernatural a secret)

If you live in a world that has real monsters and you happen to learn things about the monsters nobody previously has ever learned, you are obligated to share that knowledge to give someone else encountering those monsters a chance. That someone else would misuse that information is their crime, not the knowledge-sharer's. Losing lives by remaining silent is not right just because stupid people would abuse that information to their own ends, which they would do anyway. Two wrongs do not make a right.

In addition to what Lord Revan noted, there's a difference between telling someone and telling everyone. Even discounting the problem of who'd believe you, you might think, reasonably or not, that it'd be irresponsible to share a piece of knowledge indiscriminately. If vampires are extremely rare and revealing them is likely to provoke a backlash that would cause more harm than the actual vampires, it'd be reasonable to only share knowledge of their existence with carefully vetted members of your anti-vampire squad (or however you decide to tackle the problem).

[hunter5]

So, so far the usual argument for the Masquerade usually boils down to "it suits those that make the conspiracy happen in the first place". And that their idea of keeping people safe does not meet actual idea of public interest.

This negates worlds like the Gamer were the world it self will kill you if you use your "powers" to often

[B5B7]

The Party Costume Cabal makes sure that existence of vampires as real is not revealed to protect their industry.
But seriously, if vampires are known to be real (and in Buffy for instance, although they are many, they are low-end of the supernatural threats in that universe, and ordinary people have no idea how to identify or deal with such threats), people would be leery of dressing as vampires because they may be attacked. Hell, nutters would believe some random person is a vampire and stab them with a stake or set them on fire with a can of gasoline. Politicians would make accusations that a political opponent is a vampire lover. So much could go wrong.
Further, if people know about vampires, and they can locate one, they could hire it to kill someone they don't like. Indeed, some vampires would probably set themselves up in business as hitmen for hire. Other demons could get in on the act too.