Basic Trope: An encounter with something totally unprecedented.
- Straight: After making peaceful first contact with the Cybelians, the Tandurians and the Gukk, the League of Planets is utterly stymied when they come across the #!@?.
- Exaggerated: The #!@? are so weird no one even knows how to get their attention, much less communicate with them.
- Downplayed: While baffling at first, the #!@? are neither omnipotent nor totally beyond the ken of scientific inquiry. The League manages to hold their own against them until their origins and motives are deciphered.
- Justified:
- The #!@? are incorporeal demigods with no indication of culture, language or any other markers of a usual spacefaring species.
- The universe, physics, and evolution are not inclined to foster totally mutually intelligible lifeforms. note .
- Inverted: The Norm are about as run-of-the-mill as you can get for an alien race, and get along famously with everyone in the League (except the Gukk, but that's understandable) as a result.
- Humankind is the totally unexpected encounter.note
- An Outside-Context Solution
- The plot spends nine hundred and nine-nine pages with the protagonists going all "this situation is something nobody ever encountered before and has never dealt with!" and in the last page The Cavalry arrives and turns out to be Crazy-Prepared enough (even if they still think the doctor who developed the scenario is crazy) to deal with the event with ease.
- Subverted:
- Double Subverted: (from Inverted #1) ... Until the Norm ambassador unzips his flesh-suit in front of the LOP assembly, revealing his terrifying, bottomless cosmic mind to everyone.
- Parodied: The arrival of the mysterious Enig-Men of planet Konundruum is met with confusion by the brave but guileless League of Planets.
- Zig Zagged:
- But his Celestial Body was (somehow) also a flesh-suit. He really is a Ridiculously Average Guy after all.
- Every major member race of the League has traits that make them humanlike in some ways and totally unknowable in others.
- Averted: The League treats first contact with the #!@? like any other, and though progress is slow, they eventually become just another alien race.
- Enforced: An average encounter would not justify the Multi-Part Episode that the guys upstairs wanted to boost the network's ratings, so the writers were ordered to make the #!@? as nigh-incomprehensible as possible to not have to rely on padding (too much).
- Lampshaded: At first, the crew of the League starship running first contact protocols for the #!@? isn't even sure they've encountered a sapient species or a rounding error in their instrument calibrations.
- Invoked: Mankind uses their superior technology and social organization to cement their power over the junior members of the League.
- Exploited: The #!@? use their indescribable nature as a front for some rather describable antics, such as controlling the galaxy in secret.
- Defied:
- The #!@?, while exotic-looking, prove to be almost comically human in most respects, complete with all the flaws and foibles of an average human population on display.
- The cast very notably and pointedly refuse to have any of the typical reactions that happen when something like the #!@? pops up in a story (freaking out, Admiring the Abomination, etc.) and continue to carry on whatever duties they were doing, and if taking care of business requires to kill the aliens - or die trying - because that’s the only way it will get done, they will do so without hesitation.
- Discussed: Since no problem is technically outside context if it can be thought of first, the League's "Lovecraft Legionaire" think tank endeavors to do just that in the hopes of smoothing over potential first contact problems.
- Conversed: Attempting to educate the human public about a species like the #!@? proves difficult, as most of them consider the proper stance for any alien race to be "shoot first and ask questions never".
- Implied: No one goes to see the #!@?, and the #!@? aren't seen much.
- Deconstructed: The fact that no one can conceive of an alien species outside the normal parameters results in several nasty misunderstandings with the #!@?, most of which do not go well for the League and its members.
- The futility of trying to communicate with the #!@? puts a damper on further space exploration, making contact with other alien races a distant prospect at best. Eventually, the League drifts apart into several cosmic fiefdoms where trade and scientific advancement are both stifled in favor of infighting and recrimination between different species.
- Reconstructed: Sometimes too much knowledge is a bad thing, and knowing too much about the #!@? isn't good for anyone's health. Or sanity. Or physiology. What little information can be gleaned about them is more than enough for the League to give them the widest possible berth.
You have no idea what you're dealing with, man-ape. Do not antagonize us.
