SCP Foundation

A 001 proposal that describes what exactly SCP-001 was; a building that personnel completed monthly blood rituals in to keep it from destroying the world.

I trimmed your thread summary above, since it was taking up a lot of space on the forum listing. Try to keep thread descriptions and titles under 7 lines so you don't visually crowd out other people's threads. ~Zyn

So, uh, yeah. The above summary basically describes it.

EDIT: Curses, the formatting in the summary doesn't work! The italics won't load. Sorry for the inconvenience. -_-

That description is not really alot to go on. What kinda building? Why would it destroy the world? How do blood rituals help with that? What kinda blood rituals? And why would this be a 001?

Perhaps the actual page will help.

I don't think that this is going to work. Not as an 001 proposal. Probably not as a mainlister. Sorry, I'm going to be pretty direct with this.

At it's heart, this is just too basic - all the bells and whistles, mystery and misdirection, can't hide the fact that there isn't enough substance at the core of the article. It feels like a bunch of literary devices (the "does not exist" stuff, "it listens", the expungement, the various epistolary sections) that aren't being coordinated towards a common purpose. If you've ever seen a bad fireworks display, you might get what I mean - none of the individual elements are bad, it's just they aren't deployed in an effective way. And I don't think that shuffling them around will help - you need to find a stronger story to anchor your writing.

A few specific thoughts:

• Starting with the physical description of the site would be better than what happened there.
• "supposedly", "appease", "fed", "hinted" - your description starts with a lot of non-clinical tone, which undermines it immediately.
• "despite the fact …" - there is nothing in the text to suggest that Darkbody scenarios can only be caused by sapient things, so this phrase was jarring.
• "Evidence recovered from…" - it's weird that the Foundation had no records of the site other than what was on the site itself. I can't think of any other example of this in any organisation. I also note that the Description is clear that Site-01 is a Foundation site, despite the Specialised Containment Procedures requiring otherwise.
• You have way too much redaction and expungement - it hits the stage of detracting from interest, rather than piquing it. That's particularly true where you say so little about the anomaly to begin with.
• The diary entry is unconvincing, I think. Why would anyone (especially anyone with knowledge of the anomalous) stay at a place described here, let alone keep a diary while they wait for their transfer?
• The HCML notes are also very heavy-handed and not terribly clinical - the exposition here is forced, rather than natural.
• The footage log has some decent motions towards nightmare surreality. I think it would be improved by lengthening it, and losing all the "does not exist" stuff, and the footnotes in particular. That phrase is not descriptive, meaning it is out of place in a log (the purpose of which is to describe).
• The first O5 note is again very unprofessional and exposition-y. No-one writes like this to fellow executives - it's too faux-poetic. The comparison to Site-13 is doing you no favours! I would lose it.
• The last bit, with O5-12 on a chat(?) and then switching to narrative description for four lines, is really jarring. If you want to get the stinger across, you should try to build it into diagetic documentation.

Your writing isn't bad. Clearly you can use writing elements to aim for particular effects, so you have the ability to use them more effectively than you do here. But this idea either needs a lot more work put into the core story and concept, or needs scrapping so that you can use your literary fireworks in a more fitting display.

The new version of this seems almost completely unrelated to the previous - the story is different, the theme is different - only the basic trappings are the same. I think it would help if you explained what you were aiming for with this - how would you like readers to describe your article when you're finished? Otherwise it's very hard to critique.

What I will say is that from my perspective, this has gone backwards compared to the first draft:

• There doesn't seem to be any reason for this to be an 001 proposal or to have non-standard formatting (eg "Specialized Containment Procedures", "Anomaly Description").
• I don't know why this is "Neutralized", as there still seem to be anomalies in the site.
• The non-existence and sapience stuff is mentioned in the Containment Procedures and early in the Description, and then completely ignored in the addenda - the whole thing seems very disjointed, like you haven't thought about why each element is there and what it brings to the overall story.
• The first addendum makes little sense - why is there a summit if the Foundation was there to kill the GRU (as you state in the Discovery section)? Again, the discussion here is far from professional, and comes across as juvenile - I'm not sure if that was the intention. It also doesn't really need to exist - the whole meeting was already summed up in the sentence: "After the inter-organizational agreement, an exploration team was sent into SCP-001" and nothing in the transcript really adds to that (other than the weird tone of the supposed commanders).
• The second log has some potential, but you don't do enough to develop the tension - it just leaps into random murders without any throughline, and stereotypical action movie yelling from the MTF. The weird "let's kiss while we're being killed" thing at the end was also very unrealistic - almost to the point that I wondered whether you were going for a surreal/uncanny vibe.
• The final transcript also doesn't do much to develop the story, and doesn't provide an ending. A character we meet for the first time loses their job, and… that's it. We don't learn anything more about the anomaly or any of the other characters. Again, if you're going for Kafka-esque, then maybe it's working, but I think this would struggle for upvotes with that approach.

As I said above, I think it's best if you describe what you want to achieve with this article - what sort of article do you want to write? Then we can work out how best to assist.

Okay, so now you have the bones of a story:

• Foundation builds Site-01
• [Something bad] happens to/at Site-01
• Foundation denies that Site-01 was ever a Foundation site
• Foundation's lies about Site-01 pose a risk to the ongoing loyalty of Foundation staff

That's good. Note that you don't need to tell the story in chronological order - in fact, the skip format more-or-less requires you to start at the third bullet point, and only reveal the rest of the story indirectly (because why would the Foundation reveal any of the facts in its own database!).

So, the absolutely key element here is bullet points 2 and 4. Whatever happened at Site-01, it has to be something that would make the Foundation staff rebel if they knew about it. So what sort of thing would cause that?

I have started working on a new SCP and have thus abandoned this draft.