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Alternative Character Interpretation / SCP Foundation

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The SCP Foundation's Unreliable Canon makes this situation highly likely.


  • The Foundation as a whole. Despite being the literal name of the whole website, they're perhaps the most diversely portrayed of all the GOI. Do they sometimes have to do unpleasant things to preserve humanity with a minimum loss of human life and retaining their morals? Are they callous dictators out to control every item of power they can as much for the sociopathic thrill as anything else? Articles are written from both viewpoints and a significant number are in between, and there's plenty of arguing over which is the "correct" one.
  • Clef (the creator) sees Clef (the character) and Kondraki as having an inimical view of each other. However, many Foundation tales written by others depict Clef and Kondraki to be more like Vitriolic Best Buds (without the "best" part, at least). This is horribly subverted in Incident 239-B when Kondraki snaps Clef's neck out of pure rage.
  • In the early "lolfoundation" days of the SCP Wiki, Jack Bright was generally portrayed as a Cloudcuckoolander who's fond of pulling wacky pranks for no reason. This characterization has fallen out of favor (although it lives on in the archived "The List Things Dr. Bright Is Not Allowed to Do"), but several interpretations of him remain popular among writers. Is he the Foundation's Greater-Scope Paragon who considers it his duty to help the Foundation avoid the mistakes of the past? Is he an opportunist who only acts in the best interests of his family? Has he undergone severe Sanity Slippage from all of the D-Class personalities he's absorbed? Different tales write him completely differently.
  • Some people have suggested SCP-173 isn't a homicidal statue which loses the ability to move when a human is looking at it. It might want people to look at it and is thus content to stay still for them. If someone is present but no one is looking at it, it thus tries to force that person to look at it and ends up snapping their necks since it doesn't know its own strength.
  • From the Foundation's perspective, the Global Occult Coalition is a trigger-happy entity who likes to destroy what they can't understand. The GOC-focused stories claim the "destroy everything" strategy is false and is just how the Foundation chooses to see them.
  • The Church of the Broken God: Are madmen trying to bring about the apocalypse, or just a standard religion that will fight back with the fervor of any other group persecuted in the same way? What if they're right, and the world is screwed up because God is lying broken into pieces and cannot intervene, meaning the Foundation has responded by, among other things, continually droning God? When the Broken God is assembled in an SCP-001 entry, it does NOT seem happy to be here.
  • The Serpent's Hand. Are they a supernatural Animal Wrongs Group who are dabbling in inappropriate powers? Are they an ultimately positive force fighting for liberating supernatural items and denouncing the preservation of "normalcy"? The Wanderer's Library only helps to further muddy the waters.
  • Speaking of which, is the Wanderer's Library just a collection of books? Is it a midpoint between dimensions? Or was it formed in the first reality, and all existence rests on its continued existence?
  • SCP-607. Is he a suicidal cat who wants to die and is not aware of his effects of bonding with humans, or is he aware of them and intentionally trying to kill off humans? The photo of him taken by SCP-978 suggests both. Or it just really hates having its ears cleaned...
  • Is the Circus of the Disquieting, post-Fuller a tight-knit group of anomalous outcasts trying to keep their show alive and welcome others into their family to avoid the clutches the Foundation? Is it a group of sociopathic freaks who buy anomalous individuals off the black market or outright kidnap them from their families and add them to their collection? The SCPs associated with them tend to show evidence for both explanations.
  • Granted, it's only natural that info about SCP-006 is kept secret to all but the O5s because despite it being beneficial, its effects still can't be explained by known science. But is that all there is to it? Given the extra-high clearance required to access this information, are the O5s hiding this knowledge so they can have this mysterious health water to themselves and live far beyond life expectencies? Or are they really doing it for the benefit of humanity, knowing that humans would likely go to war just to secure this water (and it's not known how much of this water exists)?
  • If SCP-999 really is the last child of the Scarlet King, destined to defeat its father, how is it going to go about accomplishing its goal? Will it eventually be powerful enough to totally wipe out humanity's baser instincts, denying its father the ability to feed off them? Utopia Justifies the Means?
  • One person on the discussion page for SCP-354 posited the idea that the Red Pool is actually Not Evil, Just Misunderstood:
    The assumption of everyone is that the pool itself is the cause of the "portal" effect. However… the pool gets thicker the farther you go. Maybe the portal is there independently… and the pool is an inhibitor, making it hard enough that you only have creatures come through periodically, rather than an endless parade of monstrosities. Instead of solving the problem, draining the pool would have made it infinitely worse. That's why it attacked psychically, and that's why it was so pissed — it's been doing nothing but keeping us from being wiped off the planet by abominations, and we up and try to kill it for — as far as it knows — absolutely no reason except that we're a bunch of ungrateful bastards. The way things are currently going, the Foundation is going to try to find a way to actually destroy the pool… and if this interpretation were correct, we'd be absolutely doomed if they ever succeeded.
  • Just how much agency does SCP-096 have? Is he genuinely upset and enraged when looked at? Little more than a wild beast acting on instinct alone? Or is he a slave to his own primal instincts that desperately wants to stop himself from killing people, hence the constant sobbing?

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