I've been a long time casual fan of the SCP Foundation. "Casual" as in, I am way behind on the latest lore and articles, but I did read quite a handful of them back then, I love the general lore, and I do occasionally still do article dives.

But I have to say the whole deal around the SCP-001 document and the whole "decoy" system is immersion-breaking to me. Lorewise, having "decoys" implies that the first article is a bigger deal than many of the other documented anomalies. But if the organization had some semblance of an organic origin (more on this later), then SCP-001 should just be the first anomaly they encountered, and I have a hard time believing that Gods and reality-distorsion would be the first thing they came aware of; those probably should only have come up after the Foundation had spent considerable time studying the nature of anomalies. (Personally I think that'd be probably around or after capturing 682, and after starting real cognitohazard and reality-modification research. Unsure of how many cognitohazards/reality-benders are bellow 682.)

Ignoring any possible "metamythical" existing lore for the origins of the Foundation (like an entity or the Foundation itself retroactively ensuring its existence across time and space), and assuming it had an organic creation, it would probably have started as a subdivision in an existing government's branch, before eventually being separated as its own organization; and then, existing containment documents would be updated to fit in the new archival system. SCP-001 should then just be the first anomaly they encountered, notable enough to need special containment and secrecy from the government.

(I'm aware that I'm being vague with how I mention "the government", specially bc if iirc the current Foundation is government-independent. Which government? I don't really care. I don't think it matters here.)

So I believe it should be a somewhat "mundane" article; probably something dangerous, on the level of SCP-173, but nothing containing reality-bending effects or god-like entities. Probably even decommissioned, since it's been the longest under the Foundation's supervision, and probably dealt with anomalies in a more violent manner before a whole Foundation was built on containment procedures.

On a more meta level I get it. My friend brought up the fact that it's at the top of the list and many authors would love to have such a coveted spot. Thus the whole "decoy" deal; it would be unfair otherwise.

I guess my perfect SCP-001 article would be a completely redacted document with just "Status: decommissioned" legible, attributed to a dummy account shared by admins with no other article belonging to it. This way it would be controlled by "no one". And I know having the entire document redacted goes against the rule of not making anomalies so mysterious they're uninteresting, but I think this would be worth the exception; uninteresting is my goal.

However, doing that now would be worse than not having done that from the get-go, because that would shit on everyone who already submitted a decoy proposal. I'm not asking for 001 to be changed, that would be stupid. This article has no conclusion, I just wanted to ramble.

On a tangent, my friend mentioned how it's supposed to be that only one article among the "decoys" is the canonical one, and the Gate Guardian is mentioned in several other articles and stories, implying that's the canon one, but there's also the fact that the Guardian is mentioned in several other 001 decoys "so who fuckin knows." My personal reconciliation of that is that maybe other anomalies with a preexisting SCP classification got reclassified as 001, along with fake articles, to further muddle which one is the "real" one. But that has the problem that it implies the real 001 being even crazier, since the Foundation goes to such lengths to avoid having people figure it out.