Needs Help: Eldritch Abomination

What about Reapers (Mass Effect) or Shadows (Babylon 5).

Because he know I'm going to go out in this plane and I'm going to remove one of His creations from His universe.

The Reapers were never this trope. They're more along the lines of Lovecraft Lite, which was created specifically because of misuse regarding this trope.

The Reapers "incomprehensible" nature is constantly subverted throughout the series, right up to the very last scene in the series, where their motivations can be explained in two or three sentences.

edited 29th Mar '12 10:21:52 AM by KingZeal

But that trope is about stories not creatures.

Because he know I'm going to go out in this plane and I'm going to remove one of His creations from His universe.

You're right. In that case, we still don't have a trope for them. The Eldritch Abomination is defined as being unknowable and something which should not be due to the limited capacity for the human brain to understand. The Reapers fit this trope only in the initial conversation with Sovereign. Afterwards, however, they are constantly shown to be quite knowable. Even though they still count as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens (their technology is still vastly superior, confusing, and ultimately drives people insane) but there's far too many cases of people outsmarting the Reapers or defeating them wholesale in order for them to qualify for this trope.

The Reapers are Eldritch Abominations. They're motivations may have been revealed to be comprehensible, but they themselves (specifically their abilities, like indoctrination) are above understanding as humans/organics know it in the Mass Effect universe.

They may just be a downplayed example of this trope.

edited 29th Mar '12 10:53:44 AM by Ekuran

no, the reapers, like the necrons of 40k are Generic Doomsday Villains as of Mass Effect 2, which is what you get when you try for an unknowable Eldritch Abomination with no clear motivations and fail on the former part. In the third game they're just Scary Dogmatic Aliens / Robot War.

edited 29th Mar '12 11:01:37 AM by Archereon

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

That's still not what this trope is. Reaper technology isn't portrayed as something that is utterly incomprehensible and in defiance of the laws of the universe any more than your average Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. In fact, it's constantly shown that determined enough/smart enough people can reverse engineer much of their technology. Just not without great personal risk.

While the Reapers aren't utterly incomprehensible entities that defy the laws of the universe, they still have some abilities (like the aforementioned Mind Control and insanity inducement) that organics are (currently?) unable to understand, which probably just makes them downplayed examples rather than non-examples.

edited 29th Mar '12 2:56:38 PM by Ekuran

No It just makes them not examples at all. And organics can understand those abilities, as we see them being studied, measured, and described in detail all the way from game 1. Magic from Technology and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens they are. Eldritch Abomination not so much.

edited 29th Mar '12 2:59:15 PM by Ghilz

This is part of the confusion I referred to briefly before - Mass Effect is a Cosmic Horror Story, but it does not contain any Cosmic Horrors in the Eldritch Abomination sense.

Regarding Cthulhu: Cthulhu in the original Lovecraft is probably an Eldritch Abomination (barely), but Cthulhu as known by popular culture is a giant green humanoid wearing a squid. I think Giant Calamari From Space *

is to some extent the character-based equivalent of of Lovecraft Lite, especially since it's almost invariably what results when someone tries to write a Lovecraftian Shout-Out (again, I point you back to the Horrorterrors and Eldrazi).

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Eldritch Abomination and Generic Doomsday Villain are not mutually exclusive.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

They pretty much need to be actually. The former is literally about a character with no motives other than For the Evulz. An Eldritch Abomination's motives would be unscrutable or unknowable (since knowing how or why it thinks is all but impossible and potentially madness inducing. Also, likely too alien to subscribe to notions of good or evil).

That being said they can be overlapped when said unknowability of the motives are just a handwave and everything else about the creature is understandable and comprehensible.

...no, they kind of are. Generic Doomsday Villain and the proposed Giant Calamari From Space can overlap, though.

If everything else about the creature is understandable and comprehensible, it's not an Eldritch Abomination either - it just has Blue-and-Orange Morality.

edited 29th Mar '12 3:24:23 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

I remember trying to make a trope about monsters with the bodies of Eldritch Abominations/Giant Calamari From Space but are (mostly) normal mentally. I kept getting shot down by people saying it was Starfish Aliens, even though they're only weird but comprehensible aliens who often have vary strange mentalities.

It was basically the inverse of Humanoid Abomination.

Found it.

edited 29th Mar '12 3:36:09 PM by Ekuran

Why not make trope similar to Lovecraft Lite but for monster not stories? Not all rejects from Cosmic Horrors are those Big Calamarii things.

Because he know I'm going to go out in this plane and I'm going to remove one of His creations from His universe.

You mean something like an Eldritch Sort Of Icky Thing?

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

How about Monster Who Doesnt Fit Any Other Category, because that's what Eldritch Abomination has basically become.

Something were people can add thing like Reapers. Without that trope people will keep adding this to Eldritch Abomination or Lovecraft Lite (that trope sound already like Cosmic Horror Lighter and Softer)

Because he know I'm going to go out in this plane and I'm going to remove one of His creations from His universe.

I love Eldritch Icky Thing. XD That addresses my concerns about Giant Calamari From Space being overly-narrow pretty much perfectly.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

If "types" of Cosmic Horror vs. Eldritch Abomination are to be split, I suggest a soft-split.

As for specific examples mentioned:

Eldrazi most definitely are nature-defying things from beyond all inhabitable planes, whose true form isn't even a physical body. The squiddy multi-limbed bodies they have on the cards are the result of them being forced to squeeze themselves into physical forms, in order to physically take up space on planes where they don't belong. Even then they still lack color, a fundamental trait of every other living thing besides artifacts/constructs. Their mere presence on a plane warps the laws of nature, such as gravity, in weird ways. They also eat entire planes of existence, and not by taking bites out of them with anything as pedestrian as a mouth. They're native to the Blind Eternities where color, space, time, geometry, and direction have no meaning. They're Eldritch Abominations.

The Shadows aren't any kind of Eldritch Abomination or Cosmic Horror. They're invisible Starfish Aliens with Blue-and-Orange Morality who, probably due to Vorlon genetic manipulation, creep the heck out of humanoids. (That is, the Vorlons likely genetically altered us to fear them.)

Vorlons are also Starfish Aliens, technically energy beings, who due to said genetic manipulation and/or their own psionics look like angels to most humanoid senses.

Both are also Sufficiently Advanced Aliens whose tech is way beyond anything the younger races can understand yet. But both evolved from regular boring Starfish Aliens on their homeworlds millions of years ago.

edited 29th Mar '12 8:49:11 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.

Informed Ability.

Informed Ability.

So they're organic robots from beyond the universe? (Otherwise I'd call that a fair point.)

This is Magic The Gathering. Warping the laws of nature as we understand them on Earth is something that happens on a regular basis.

The Ultracosmic Horrorterrors are the incidental creators and destroyers of the temporal mayhem that causes the multiverse to exist. They are native to Paradox Space beyond the Furthest Ring, where space, time, geometry, and direction are only fleetingly comparable to the way we understand them at best and none of the familiar rules apply.

Find-and-replace.

All I can conclude thus far is that they're clearly emblematic of the typical shout-out to Lovecraft.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

What, you're not allowed to be an Eldritch Abomination just because you happen to have tentacles in weird places?

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Just about every actual Eldritch Abomination's nature-defyingness has to be an Informed Ability, otherwise we couldn't even be able to talk about them. Using that that as an excuse to say that the Eldrazi aren't Eldritch Abominations just won't cut it.

And most of them also fall under You Cannot Grasp the True Form and/or A Form You Are Comfortable With, simply for the reader/viewer's own convenience; otherwise, you'd have to make them He Who Must Not Be Seen and/or He Who Must Not Be Heard, which would get boring very quickly.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

[sigh]

Okay, I was a bit over-vicious. I'm sorry. The fact is that I mentally file the Eldrazi into the same category as the Horrorterrors, C'thun, Yogg-Saron, Shuma-Gorath, Tzeentch, and The Beast - shout-outs to Lovecraft that basically consist of being supernaturally-powerful Biological Mash Ups with lots of invertebrate bits that are mostly described with Meaningless Meaningful Words. And, yes, it kind of ticks me off that so many such shout-outs are so shallow.

With that in mind...

Troacctid: Not at all! It's not as though being an eldritch abomination is some kind of exclusive club! That would be related to what I mentioned earlier about 'people apparently acting in the belief that something being an Eldritch Abomination makes it a cooler villain'.

Ekuran: The Colour Out Of Space. Alan Wake. House Of Leaves. The Laundry Series. In The Mouth Of Madness. Even Slender Man. Basically... I profoundly disagree. Maybe it's a matter of Show, Don't Tell. (The fact that the Eldrazi are colourless is, again, the point at which they come closest to being truly eldritch in my mind, spoiled by the fact that perfectly ordinary things are also colourless. Perhaps if they were colourless in a different way from the expected...?)

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable