Needs Help: Eldritch Abomination

I like that. All that should be required is that they seem to defy our natural laws. If they have to actually defy our natural laws, that implies that we really know how the universe works, and this trope is about the fact that we don't.

Remember, Lovecraft wrote for an audience that was still coming to terms with the reality that the universe is far older and more complex than previously thought. His abominations were scary not because they defied the laws of the universe, but because they didn't defy the laws of the universe. What was scary was the revelation that this is their universe, and we're just insignificant bugs that happen to inhabit one tiny planet in it.

edited 22nd Apr '12 8:44:43 AM by Fnu

I second that.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

OK, quite frankly, it seems to me this thread has devolved into a soapbox for "purists" who want to set the bar ridiculously high for the trope (Cthulhu barely qualifying? Seriously? What, because there's plushies and jokes?). The trope decay IMO is not as strong as many seem to think, but most importantly: It's how it's perceived by the general public, which like it or not is the main criterion to determine what a trope is. While I agree that some examples are pretty lightweight and others might need to be pruned, but creating a whole new trope that would amount to "the same but less" is overkill. Lovecraft Lite was created because there are very significant narrative differences between it and Cosmic Horror Story; the differences between the monsters found in both? Not that big, honestly, and depending on the story they can be found in pure Cosmic Horror tales at times. And criticizing the Informed Ability nature of many of their characteristics is silly considering that Take Our Word for It has pretty much always played a huge role in the trope.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.

I feel the same way. I'm all for lowering the bar a little bit. If anything here needs trimming, it's the trope description. Good lord it's full of hyperbole. Lovecraft's work is not as extreme as it's been made out to be. Yes, Cthulhu barely counts given the current description. I understand that whoever wrote the description is trying to make a point, but when the undisputed Trope Codifier barely counts, something has gone horribly wrong.

edited 25th Apr '12 8:55:40 AM by Fnu

I know my opinion may not be worth much, but I have to say that I agree with Paireon and Fnu totally. The assumed problems with the trope is that it isn't 'eldritch' enough, but given the basic mechanics of mediums outside literature, if we go for a purist route (and I will admit I'm opposed to strict trope definitions and purism on general principles), then nothing would qualify.

If the problem lies anywhere, it's that the trope definition is too flowery and raises the bar too high. It needs to be pruned and made a bit less overly dramatic. To be fair, I'll admit that some of the examples could be pushing it a tad (My Little Pony? Really?), that's simply my view. The trope is fairly subjective, judging from how everyone who is posting seems to have varying opinions on what exactly qualifies for an Eldritch Abomination.

edited 4th May '12 6:53:30 AM by Areze

Even Lovecraft's stuff isn't quite what it's been made out to be in this thread. The point of Eldritch Abominations is that they remind us of our cosmic insignificance. That's it.

It's been argued by some in this thread that examples cease to be Eldritch Abominations if it's possible to understand them. This is simply not the case. It is entirely possible to know all about an Eldritch Abomination. You're just better off not knowing. At least you were back in Lovecraft's day. Today people are less bothered by the idea of our cosmic insignificance, which is why so many of the more modern examples of Eldritch Abominations seem "weak" by the standards they're being held to in this thread. Times have changed. If some of these "weak" examples were written in Lovecraft's day, nobody would argue that they aren't this trope.

Let's rewrite the description to be less dramatic and flowery, and loosen the standards to something more reasonable.

Let us consider Solaris. It is depicted initial as the ultimate Starfish Alien, and although utterly incomprehensible, does not appear to violate scientific understanding of the mechanics of reality. Later on (at least in the original book) it does several things which really shouldn't be possible without explicit psionic or magical powers, and gets only the vaguest of HandWaves about neutrinos and forcefields.

As such, it would seem that Solaris counts as an example here only after it begins to act during the course of the novel. Being 'incomprehensible', thus, is less important for the purposes of this trope than being 'impossible'.

With this in mind, we may be able to cut down on misuse by being a little more specific about that distinction.

Then again, are Eldritch Abominations really impossible, or just different?

Consider how impossible we must look to an ant. No ant could ever grow as large as a human. Their bodies simply wouldn't allow it. Yet our size is not actually impossible, because our bodies work very differently.

I think our best indicator of whether an example is an Eldritch Abomination is how it's used in the story. If it's treated like an Eldtritch Abomination, we should probably include it.

And on the other hand, look at a star and think about how impossible the idea of something bigger than anything else that any person has ever "seen" (strictly speaking) should seem.

I do agree, however, that something which is "treated like" an Eldritch Abomination by a story should count, even if it isn't actually shown doing anything that would indicate it as such. By this standard, Vorlons probably wouldn't count (at least not at first), but Shadows might (even though they don't do anything impressive in the early seasons). Similarly, the Snarl probably counts even though everything it's actually described as doing is perfectly possible for a sufficiently powerful entity under the rules of the setting.

Even so, however, there should probably be a more objective standard for cases where the story treats something too ambiguously to use the above criterion alone. What about Q? What about the thing Sybok was working for? These are the kind of things we have to come up with stricter standards for.

I do like the idea of keeping things that the story treats as an Eldritch Abomination as that trope.

edited 5th May '12 5:32:33 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Are the ambiguous examples supposed to make us look insignificant?

edited 5th May '12 6:55:13 PM by Fnu

Uh, us Humans or us tropers? I think "enough cosmically power to make anyone look insignificant" is an integral aspect of the trope. It doesn't apply to Q or Sybok's boss any more than usual or anything.

The main problem is, as the Flanderization/Trope Decay pages put it, the inflationary inclusion of "ugly monsters" and just common monsters.

If there's consensus about this trope being about horrors that exceed human comprehension (defying current understanding of physics, etc.) or have this as their Informed Ability, then all other examples of monsters with simply lots of tentacles or rotten-looking flesh should be relentlessly pruned.

So, for instance, Cthulhu itself may still be included, even though we have a very detailed description of him and plushies, the story treats it that way because the physical body is explained as the sailor's mind filling in the incomprehensible blanks.

That sound good?

If we're going to base this on whether something is treated like an Eldritch Abomination by the story, then it shouldn't be too difficult to spot misuse and purge it. Non-examples should seem very out of place on the page, as they aren't even trying to be this trope.

I would like to say I think whether the work treats the creature in question as an eldritch abomination is, while potentially contentious, probably a good tool to stick in the toolkit. Kudos for that idea. While the whole Mass Effect Reaper discussion is still sputtering, it probably warrants mention that particular metric and the whole Lovecraftian treatment they got in the second game would seem to qualify by that particular metric, just for consideration. I'm not, however, saying it should necessarily be our sole measure - since it does leave us a bit helpless to decide when things come down to people having a tug of war between whether or not the work itself IS trying to assert the being to be of this nature.

But, yeah, overall, I think being considered and treated as an "eldritch abomination" within/by the work itself is a minimum standard that would, even taken alone, let us trim quite a lot of fat. I like it.

Ambiguous examples will have to be discussed individually. Maybe someone can find Word of God for some of them.

Rename suggestions: Eldritch Horror. Maybe Eldritch Monstrosity. I don't know. Eldritch Being?

edited 23rd May '12 12:33:34 PM by KingClark

I don't think the name is the problem. We're just having trouble defining the concept.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Okay, this post is for recap. (I'm going to double-post to keep my opinions clearly separate.) These seem to be the proposed solutions:

• Broaden the definition to accommodate misuse.
• Create a new page for Alien Bionasty and move relevant examples there. There will be some overlap, because some Eldritch Abominations are also Alien Bionasties.
• Alternatively, move examples that are misuse to Our Monsters Are Weird, etc.
• Create a new page for Lovecraftian Seafood and move relevant examples there. There will be some overlap, because some Eldritch Abominations are also Lovecraftian Seafood. Obviously.
• Alternatively, move examples that are misuse to ShoutOuts/CthulhuMythos (or something).
• Redefine Eldritch Abomination based on whether or not its nature is incomprehensible (or treated as such within the story).
• Redefine Eldritch Abomination based on whether or not its nature is impossible in the world in which it is set (or treated as such within the story).
• Redefine Eldritch Abomination based on whether or not it inspires nihilistic panic and feelings of cosmic insignificance.
• Leave it as it is and hope the problem takes care of itself.

Have I missed anything?

edited 10th Jul '12 4:44:30 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Now, my thoughts on the matter...

I'm against accommodating misuse - that's bad taxonomy, for one thing, and for another it doesn't really solve the problem because we'd be changing the trope from one vague definition up for interpretation to another vague definition up for interpretation. This sort of approach has an historical tendency to not work well. <_<

Fnu:

The main problem I have with this is that then we could just throw all the examples under Cosmic Horror Story and call it a day. But that's definitely not appropriate. You can have a Cosmic Horror Story that does not contain an Eldritch Abomination - The Thing and Mass Effect have been mentioned already, and even a lot of Lovecraft's works, like At The Mountains Of Madness - and there are stories outside of that particular genre that contain beings that are more comparable to Azathoth and Cthulhu than to the Mi-Gou or Elder Things. And, if we changed the definition that way, we would still have to come up with a new term to talk about them. (We may end up having to anyway, if Ekuran is right and the current name will inevitably become misused.)^note  I wrote this wall-of-text the other day, which kind of summarises my thoughts.

My preference would be to create an Alien Bionasty-type page and redefine Eldritch Abomination based on its apparent incomprehensibility or impossibility. (I think incomprehensibility best fits conventional use, while impossibility may be slightly more strict.)

edited 10th Jul '12 5:35:35 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Okay, here goes nothing.

I'd be for defining Eldritch Abomination as an (apparently) incomprehensible monster if we didn't already have a trope for that, and if it wouldn't be pointless.

Look, I know what you're thinking, "but incomprehensibility is what makes an Eldritch Abomination." This idea was flawed from the start as You Cannot Grasp the True Form already covers incomprehensibility, the "abomination" part was what really got stuck into people's heads when they typed in examples, and the Real Fucking Monster-ness of the description all led to massive amounts of Trope Decay, which led to this thread, which yadda, yadda, yadda.

Now, there is an alternative (and better) solution. Make Eldritch Abomination be a monster that's defined by its (apparent) wrongness (i.e. an abomination) in any way, shape, or form, whether it's physical, mental/psychological, spiritual, or whatever, but above all else, the story has to make it appear to be wrong, even if it technically isn't. If we do that, it'll validate almost all misused examples and all we'll have to do is change the definition.

The Thing? It's both physically and psychologically wrong as fuck.

The Reapers? They're born from the horrific fusion of mechanical parts and billions of sapient entities, so not only are they physically wrong, their very existence is morally fucked up beyond belief.

Lovecraft's Monster-Space-Gods? They're technically in the "actual right" with reality, as they're Lovercraft's take on on how reality is incomprehensible, but the characters themselves find them to be so fucking wrong that they're Mind Fucked by their brain's failure to comprehend what they saw.

They're wrong in different ways and at different levels. They all still fit the new definition.

Look, this will work. I got us to get off our collective ass to fix Nightmare Fuel by expanding into what it was really used for (the audience reaction of being scared), and now it's bloody fucking kosher. This is almost the same situation, except we only have to change the description here instead of having to fix 10,000+ examples.

edited 10th Jul '12 10:16:04 PM by Ekuran

I like Ekuran's answer. The fact that we know, for example, how Reapers work and what they want doesn't really stop them being eldritch abominations. It might mean they're no longer sufficiently advanced or utterly incomprehensible, but yeah — a biomachine made by processing the souls of a whole species? When you put it that way...

Actually, even if you wanted to argue that revealing information about the Reapers made them less and less eldritch, they still fit the trope; you just have to phrase it right:

Reapers are treated as Eldritch Abominations in the first Mass Effect game; in the sequels they seem to be "merely" Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.

edited 11th Jul '12 9:00:08 AM by Escher

A brief glance across You Cannot Grasp the True Form suggests that either it does not mean what you think it means, or that it is also in need of clean-up. Of special but not exclusive note

So, no, it's not a thing we already have.

I'm also not really convinced that fixing the definition would be pointless, whereas I am convinced that officially changing it to 'look at how disturbing this really powerful monster is' would make it utterly worthless (redundant to Nausea Fuel, Nightmare Fuel, and/or Our Monsters Are Weird, depending) as anything more than a Just for Fun page.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

"Something is too strange for the mind to comprehend." = "Incomprehensible." Adding monster doesn't make it a new trope, so, yes, it's a thing we already have. Counter-Note

Also, changing the definition so Eldritch Abomination would be defined by its abominable/wrong/"disturbing" nature would not be pointless since that's what it's used for*

, and the fact that there is a clear difference between "disgust and general fear from the audience/confusion within the story from the strange design of monsters", and "fear within the story from the wrongness/otherness/abominableness of monsters."

edited 11th Jul '12 4:56:47 PM by Ekuran