I personally intended to let the report act as a straight man to the inherent absurdity of the concept
You say that, yet the interview log manages to be as absurd as the rest of the piece, even if it manages to be darker at the same. It didn't feel so much a straight man as much as a contextualization, if that makes sense.
Unlike the Foundation, the Centre has very little widely accepted background
I understand that you want to create this world for the SPC, but there's no need to go all out with an article exclusively for world-building. After all, how many SCPs are about nothing but world-building?
Unlike the Foundation, the Centre has very little widely accepted background.
The Foundation has our world build off of. The Centre has an alternate history version of the Foundationverse, which due to "no canon", happens to be much looser than our world. It's simply inevitable that the main Foundationverse has a more solid consensus reality.
My other attempt, at SPC-1981, is kind of… shallow. It didn't have enough differentiation within the SPC and was too similar to the SCP.
And that's fine. Personally, I found SCP-1981 to be a hilarious and innovative way to SPCify SCP-1981. Sometimes, an article is a very funny but very protracted joke.
Since CYAN ABYSS had already been established in SPC-140 as the predominant oceanic civilization, using them would help create a more cohesive Centreverse
Sorry, but I think you went
…
overboard.
In all seriousness, the excessive worldbuilding not only detracted from the article, but seeing how crazy the world was made me feel detached from it. I could go more for "Ronald Reagan is a movie director" and "MC&D/C faced a coup" than "The GOC and UN have switched places" and "Boating is no longer a thing because of the Sharkic empire".
