Hm. In summary, this is a really thirsty, partially homicidal ent. I'm not feeling the idea all that much, and it's not interesting enough on its own to make up for the lackluster plot developments that occur throughout the article. The tests don't really demonstrate all that much that's interesting about the ent in question, which is a shame, because they could be used to give more character to the subject of the document.
While I'm a firm believer in the fact that a series of facts has just as much right to be a narrative as your typical "buttload of addenda and interviews", there's not enough implied by the experiment logs for me to actually say that anything is really happening. There's clearly a character we're meant to be seeing here, but it's bogged down under too much redundant information and in the end all we get is that it feels guilt over its killing.
Let's spin it a different way and take a look at
TyGently's SCP-2548. On its own, it's an area of empty space which acts weird sometimes: however, with the timeline of incidents, Ty manages to deliver both a) an interesting narrative, delivered via bite-size bits of information and b) an interesting character in the form of Vacuum.
Vacuum's an abstract entity which has been slowly collating information about humanity via both Voyager and its absorption of Agent Tanser. What makes her character more interesting is the abstract way in which it thinks – it doesn't think in physical things, it thinks in terms of "Foundation" and "anonymous" and "containment". This level of abstraction is what adds a neat twist to the well-worn trope of the alien trying to understand humanity.
There's going to be something similar at play with regards to the Tree. I strongly agree with Kalinin in when he says that things that aren't human are not going to act like humans. This is one of the few times in which I'd advocate for an interview log, perhaps in place of/augmenting the experiment logs. Something that could help elucidate on the thought process of the tree would add more depth to the article as a whole and help keep the reader's interest by creating a memorable character.
If you are going to go this route, you need to think about how a tree would think: these bullet-points sort of provide my scaffold for thinking about the character.
- How would it communicate?
- Does it grasp the same concepts as humans do?
- What would it fail to understand when we try to communicate something to it?
- How does it view the world?
- What are its priorities?
- What's it's disposition like? sunny?
- What events in its past "life" as a tree shaped it into what it is now?