Uncanny Valley characters

Looking for advice on designing and portraying characters in the Uncanny Valley. What makes one creepy, what is more narmy and cliche than creepy, etc. For example I hear inhuman eyes is a good one. But how inhuman should they be without it going too much into outright Body Horror? What would make them sufficiently inhuman? That sort of thing.

One thin I've recently discovered as off-putting is humans with monkey feet. How does that sound?

Eyes that look like doll eyes, a general appearance that says "its not a human, and its disguising itself as one", or something else. Like...pasty white skin, always smiling, odd motions...

edited 2nd Sep '11 10:44:51 PM by NickTheSwing

Show, Don't Tell. Uncanny Valley as an audience reaction is subjective. Uncanny Valley as an in-universe reaction is objective...

YMMV, I tried once to make an eldrich abomination in human form, but I made her too cute and came out on the other side of the valley.

I know that may not be very helpful, but I felt the need to sound off, keep the thread alive.

Of course I'm aware of that. I'm wondering if there's anything the majority of readers will find creepy.

Maybe something that's just a little bit off with the proportions. Eyes are often mentioned, but other things too.

Maybe something with the elbow and/or knee joints in a subtly wrong position. Limbs that are a little too long and move weirdly, that sort of thing.

edited 2nd Sep '11 11:28:39 PM by LoniJay

I personally feel movement and body language are big factors here. They need to be "off".

For other factors, overly formal speech in all cases might do it.

I'm toying with it in a minor way.

One of the things that I've used so far is making it obvious that characters are communicating without talking or even looking at each other. That obviously doesn't work for everyone, but watching a group devise a complex plan and then execute it in complete silence would look more than a little bizarre.

You can also make reference to their movements; either mechanical, without wasted motion (living things typically start moving with a small but perceptible motion in the opposite direction; don't swing their arms when running or walking), or otherwise somehow unnatural.

The lack of an expected reflex can be pretty disorienting, especially if it is one that cannot, under most circumstances, be consciously controlled. Take the dilation of the pupils, for example: A lack of pupil size change in bright light or extreme darkness is a definite signal that the eyes in question are, in some way, not like normal eyes.

human perfection (of any kind) is is always creepy we are imperfect by nature.

Ooh, being perfectly symmetrical! That's always good.

When I deconstructed The Beautiful People, that was how I did it. They went past beautiful and into a little creepy.

edited 3rd Sep '11 7:36:18 AM by USAF713

Funny you mention that, the specific character I'm thinking of prefers to communicate "telepathically", so he's The Voiceless to most muggles.

Well, they were normal, really. By any standard of beauty, they would simply have been at the top. The point was that they, as a species (because they technically aren't human), are so uniformly gorgeous that for many it slid past attractive and into strange. They, for their part, came to find conventional standards of attractiveness to be meaningless, because they—being a group that usually associates more with its own members—were so used to seeing it that it ceased to have meaning. Their own general "attractiveness" came to negate the concept for their psychology.

The amusing thing is that they were designed to be pretty—the designers going for something that would find it easy to rule—because it was found that people usually respond to an attractive leader better. The results ended up being a mixed bag because they forgot to add in the aging thing...

For the record, what happened was that I had a Mary Sue Space Elf race. So I decided to attack the very concept of the Mary Sue so that it would go from unbearably boring to possibly interesting. It's a very old concept, which has only barely been saved from being an Old Shame...

edited 3rd Sep '11 10:16:18 AM by USAF713

Well, as noted, they don't associate any meaning with physical attractiveness anymore. So, unlike the average person, who might act superior for being more attractive than others, they're just kinda "whatever" about it. So we have an entire race of people who are "better" by the standards of society who not only don't care about that, but don't even acknowledge the standards that society is measuring them by.

In other words, the Uncanny Valley isn't because they look strange, it's because they act strange about looking good...

Now that I think about it, there are a few ways that being 'perfect' could be creepy.

For example, human skin is full of little imperfections - freckles, creases, patchy colour, uneven texture. Something with completely smooth hairless skin, that resembled plastic more than aything living, would creep me out a bit. Or skin that never wrinkles or creases, just flows to cover joints and bends totally smoothly.

edited 3rd Sep '11 4:43:27 PM by LoniJay

Seconding that last point. I'm all for making characters that look creepy, but I think you'd do well to make how they act the focal point — and by extension, some of the related characteristics.

I've never explored the trope extensively in my own stuff, but I think some of the things that I've done can be used to some effect. Such as...

• Someone whose voice is a little too high-pitched for comfort
• Someone who smiles a lot — and a smile that's stretched a bit too thin, or strains the face
• Someone who knows a bit too much about who he/she is talking to — and uses it to crippling effect
• Someone with robotic motions — sometimes a poor mimicry of human motions, or alternatively (if they lose control or something) flinging their limbs about
• Someone with a creepy Verbal Tic — maybe like adding giggle fits where they don't belong

I don't know if any of these will be of use to you, or even if they're what you're looking for; still, I hope they help move you in the right direction. Good luck to you.

Using Voltech's point about pitch being a factor, you could have their voices resonate with a slight echo detectable on a subconscious level, or have points of their normal-conversation voices resonate a frequency that disturbs the inner ear, if one exists, to throw people off balance , so to speak.

As far as the suggestion about monkey feet, you don't even have to go that far; watching a baby in a crib, it's strange how far the kid was able to bend his foot, almost like an oddly-shaped hand. So you could, for instance, have a bar where some of the people opt to lounge with the drinks in their feet instead of their hands, with their feet bending like hands instead of, well, feet.

Regarding inhuman eyes, I'm a fan of a black sclera ala Aizen Sosuke from the Bleach series, but depending how subtle you want to go, you could go with Hellish Pupils or have the pupil look like something tore its way out of it while keeping the rest of the eye's structure intact.

edited 3rd Sep '11 9:10:43 PM by Winglerfish

Just a warning, sometimes these kind of endeavors can have the opposite effect...

I'm not too worried about that at this point. *

I really like all these ideas so far, especially the "no wasted movement" thing. I really hadn't noticed that organic beings tend to use a lot of unnecessary motions.

As for voices, would the same synthesizer voice used for several different characters work?

edited 3rd Sep '11 10:06:54 PM by Merlo

I personally just used different-colored eyes that change (with a Hand Wave in-universe about power variations, since these are supers), and then subverted the various expectations of what each iris color should mean. For example, everything but purple, light blue, and silver is basically the same thing, and largely denotes no actual emotion (even red), while purple means you're about to get your shit torn to shreds. Also, Light Is Not Good is in full effect for light blue and white.

I got the uncanny factor not out of the fact that they're differently-colored (although most people in the story find the silver eyes to be unsettling), so much as the fact that they can change at will. You can be talking to one of them and their iris color could shift three or four times based on their preference. It's really rather... odd... I think.