Does Not Illustrate: Ambiguously Human

The robot on the left is clearly not human, which only distracts. The two in the middle are Human Aliens. The one on the right is human. The trope is about when it isn't clear if a character is human or some other race. This image does not fit this trope.

edited 21st Jun '13 10:17:34 AM by Rethkir

I'm not sure what the problem is. Isn't a Human Alien Ambiguously Human? How would you show the difference?

For starters, I think the robot is distracting. It doesn't add anything that helps explain the trope. It seems to imply Ridiculously Human Robot, which is not this trope. At the very least, that could be cropped out.

edited 21st Jun '13 10:38:09 AM by Rethkir

So what is the difference between Human Aliens and Ambiguously Human, anyway? Is the latter a supertrope of HA and Humanoid Robots and such?

• Ambiguously Human: We are not sure if he's human or not.
• Human Aliens: Human-looking, but actually an alien specimen.

Ambiguously Human also includes fantasy races.

I don't see any way to show the difference. To avoid Just A Face And A Caption let's just leave this blank.

We can do a collage, similar to what's done on Human Aliens.

Who's idea was it to use someone other than Superman to represent the Kryptonians in that picture, anyway? /offtopic.

What advantages would a collage offer in showing this trope?

We don't need a collage, just a picture of characters who don't look quite human, but are never stated to be nonhuman. For example, the Gangreen Gange from The Powerpuff Girls [1]◊. It is never explained if they are human or not.

edited 21st Jun '13 1:16:04 PM by Rethkir

Or something to compare what humans normally look like in the setting to how this questionable character looks.

Is there a diagram we could find for Discworld, labelling 'human', 'dwarf', 'troll', 'werewolf', 'igor', 'Nobby'? Or something like that?

I'd say pull the current.

If the X-Men are examples, maybe we can use them to illustrate, such as these two?◊

I say that because of this part of the description:

You can't much better than that pic.

edited 22nd Jun '13 7:55:16 PM by KingZeal

While I can't demonstrate that with a picture, I'd like to point out that by Magneto's own definition, Mutants are "Homo-Superior", not "Homo-Sapien", so they're not actually human anymore... technically speaking.

Magneto is a racist, so he's not the best authority on the subject.

As the page itself states, mutants are a perfect example of the trope because how "human" they are depends on the writer.

Would a person with an impossible (in the real world) skin color qualify? If so, we could look for a picture of Braniac 5 (green skin) or Shadow Lass (dark blue skin) from the Legion Of Super Heroes.

What about a collage of all the above?

Clock is set.

Hmm... I'd say that the current image is poor. Having Marvin the Paranoid Android there is just a distraction, as he is obviously a robot, while Zaphod and Ford are explicitly Human Aliens. However, there is nothing in the image to suggest this, meaning the image becomes a case of Just A Face And A Caption.

Unless a really good image comes along, I think it'd be better to leave it blank. Ambiguously Human is a very hard trope to illustrate properly, but an easy one to describe.

edited 16th Jul '13 7:39:41 AM by CobraPrime

I like 21.2 but with the answer being "Neither. They're both aliens."

I also want to leave this blank. In order for it to work we'd have to rely on the caption to tell us who's what.

I'm in favor of 21.2

So far I favour leaving it blank. All of the suggestions are about Human Aliens, not this trope.