Would this character be considered a Humanoid Abomination?

I think I may have a character who is a Humanoid Abomination but is either too nice or too harmless to really be considered such.

@Oh So Into Cats: Really? I would like to hear about it then. Just because this thread started about one character doesn't mean it can't include descriptions of others .

@22 Noaqiyeum, thanks again for your informative and helpful posts on this subject. I'm not surprised to see it's a favorite topic of yours; it shows. Oh, and awesome that you mentioned both Tomie and the Laundry Series; while I've only read the former, I'm familiar with both.

Well I guess the more I think about it the character is probably most like a djinn with a hint of poltergeist than anything else. The most apparent part of him is a shadow, and when he's near a reflective surface he has a reflection. However he apparently doesn't have any physical form at all. His movements can make echoes in places that are echoey, though, and he can "arrange" letters and things to "speak", like in ouija boards, magnetic letters on a keyboard, etc. He is a very bad speller. What people see when they see him in the mirror is apparently different for everyone and can change, but everyone describes someone tall and without eyes. On the astral plane he's apparently terrifying.

I guess the thing that makes him most genie-like is that the main character found him in an expedition to the sock dimension and he decided to follow her home. He stays in her apartment most of the time but leaves for undisclosed periods of time for unexplained reasons. The character claims to be very knowledgeable but whenever the MC tries to get any information out of him his story changes every time, and sometimes it is correct and sometimes it isn't, and he will maintain each of them with absolute conviction. He will also do dumb poltergeisty things if, for some reason in his non-brain, it seems important to do, but the reasoning will not make any sense, except to him. The MC usually just drags him along to places where she thinks she should be accompanied by someone intimidating, and that's why she keeps him around — however it's unclear if she would be able to get rid of him even if she wanted to.

His seemingly erratic behavior is because his perspective on things is very different than humans but because of how limited he is in interacting with the real world he can't really do much. If someone were actually able to communicate with him on a more meaningful level though it may actually cause them to Go Mad from the Revelation.

edited 5th Nov '13 6:43:09 PM by ohsointocats

@So Into Cats: Huh, I like it. It's odd; I've never associated djinn with Humanoid Abomination, but you've definitely pulled it off. Actually, I never much associated them with poltergeist-ish type things either. I like that you've added a slightly silly element to it (or at least that's what I took away from this), but at the same time kept a little darkness under the surface. A cool character.

Now that I've actually gotten a grasp on what this trope means, I realize that there is a being I've created who fits this trope entirely—though it is from an entirely different story than the character I asked about in the OP.

Known as the Changeling (though it has nothing to do with The Fair Folk) it is the Bigger Bad of my story Brighter Than Black, Darker Than White. The Changeling appears to be a hideous human corpse that has been burned and flayed almost beyond recognition. It is nine feet tall and (because of its burnt condition) almost skeletally thin and moves with spastic, darting motions.

It is a Walking Wasteland—anything within a twenty mile radius of it begins to decay. Buildings crumble, metal rusts, plant-life withers, and organic beings begin to rot and fall apart while still alive and conscious. Worse, the Changeling's very existence in the world actually causes the entire planet to begin to decline; weather spirals out of control and ecosystems start to malfunction (i.e. freak storms in places where there shouldn't be, excessive heat and melting).

What is most terrifying about the Changeling is that it's burnt, skinless appearance is heavily implied to be the human mind's perception of how utterly foul and corrupt it is. Worse is that one gets the sense that the Changeling was once beautiful, but that only deepens to terror and revulsion.

No one knows where it came from, but its entry into the world at the end of the American Revolution caused the Alternate History of the story's setting where the British Empire was never really scaled back due to them taking the lead in fighting the thing.

It cannot be killed with conventional weaponry (not that anyone could really get close enough to try) and the only way that it was able to be stopped was to seal it within a Pocket Dimension and pray that it never grew strong enough to break through the barrier holding it.

The organization which the MC works for is essentially dedicated to making sure it never gets out of its prison, and they live in such fear that it will one day be freed that they carried out an ethnic cleansing against an entire race of people in order to ensure that the Big Bad didn't use one of that race as a sacrifice to open the gateway.

Again no one knows where the Changeling came from, and I never reveal it either. Only that it is very powerful, very ugly and very dangerous. It also, in the fashion of Abominations seems to have no real care for humans; it rarely interacts with them other than to drag them into death by merely walking through their midst. However it does seem to hold a hatred just for living things in general, but again that is also left very vague.

edited 5th Nov '13 8:26:11 PM by Swordofknowledge

Everything in this story is pretty silly, so I think he fits right in.

Things the reader will know by the end of the story:

The demon is abducting children and hiding them in an abandoned asylum where there happens to be a rather large hole in the basement; he can be "exorcised" by a priestess using water from the church well and a prayer from the holy book.

Things the reader will never know:

The demon's use name is Henry, which is short for He Enters Near Ruined Years; he intends to eat the children's souls so he can rise from the ashes when he dies; the hole in the basement leads to Hell; he has only one element - fire - because he is a commoner (a knight would have fire and air; a lord would have fire, air and water; a prince would have all four elements plus shadow/spirit). ...

Mystery is the key (although I may have overdone it a bit)

edited 6th Nov '13 11:49:38 AM by nekomoon14

I think best abominations are those who even author don't understand.

Nekomoon: Hmmm... there's a difference between "harmless" and "helpful", though. I can think of helpful abominations, humanoid and not, pretty easily (Angleton, the Weaver, the eldila, Guu!), but none of those are harmless. There is always some reason for characters to not feel safe around them. ^note Angleton's responses to traitors are unsettling even by Laundry standards; Weaver slices one ear off of everyone in the room indiscriminately for the sake of "elegance"; the eldila are literal angelic beings who accidentally traumatise people by looking the wrong way and think fallen humans are pitiably out of their minds; Guu actively trolls the people she helps and always accomplishes what they need through circuitous methods that mess with their fears and insecurities

Sword: Ha, I guess I over-explained my examples somewhat, then. >_<

Cats: He seems more djinn-y, ghost-y to me, too. He could almost be some child's Not-So-Imaginary Friend who ran away. :P Is there a reason to believe he is limited in some way by not actually being present, or more than his behaviour would suggest, in-story?

Prany: I'd distinguish between "not even the author really understands it" and "the author just has it do whatever arbitrarily", but I can agree to that. :)

You do have a point, sir. I think I meant to say that an unfettered helpful abomination would be harmless to its allies but dangerous to everything else. Though, I still find it difficult to imagine an altogether harmless abomination.

It might be true that none of the people the main character is talking about actually exists. I mean it is a blog, she does have freedom to lie as much as she likes.