Eldritch Abomination cleanup

I hope I'm not overstepping any boundaries by doing this, but I feel like Eldritch Abomination has a real problem with people just sticking any weird, powerful monster or being in there. Since the description explicitly says not to do that, I think the trope could use a cleanup.

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

I've noticed that happening as well.

If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.

I removed Delirium from The Binding of Isaac a few days ago, since it doesn’t qualify

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

The Laconic version of Eldritch Abomination just says surreal monster, maybe that's why people don't realize other qualifications. Laconic EldritchAbomination

I’ll take it to the laconic description cleanup thread then

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

To be fair, at what point can a character be considered an Eldritch Abomination?

If we get fussy, Cthulhu could be considered a simple Kaijuu.

His appearance is not even "surreal and incomprehensible", he's a guy with an octopus head.

But he elicits madness in whoever saw him.

After review, I think that there is a need for a trope like Brown Note Monster, where just being exposed to the creature can harm you.
For instance, viewing the creatures in the recent Netflix film Bird Box caused people to suicide and Go Mad From The Revelation. But Bird Box isn't exactly Lovecraftian or a Cosmic Horror Story. If we want to keep the original meaning of Eldritch Abomination there has to be another category for non-Lovecraft creatures who presence can cause a Brown Note or other affect. Deadly Gaze doesn't work because that is the creature looking at the person, and not the person experiencing harm from just seeing or being near them. Taken for Granite is too specific in that the victim turns to stone, but even that trope is being contaminated with petrification & non-stone effects for the unlucky gazer.

Might be worth taking to the TLP. I;d give it a look if you did

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

OK. I'm asking for a more experienced Troper to comment on this situation. The Brown Note trope already has Brown Note Creatures like Medusas, Basilisks, and those creatures from Bird Box whose sight drove people suicidal. So the non-EldritchAbominations creatures are already under another Trope Brown Note.

But I don't think this is enough. My guess is that people want a creature SubTrope like Brown Note Creature. Sometimes the same but more specific is needed. I'd like to know a list of Fantastic Creatures with dangerous sensory input without having to filter them out of Brown Note. But can somebody give me perspective before I do the work of launching a new trope which might be shot down or discarded???

I'd like to, but I'm a little confused about what exactly you're asking for, no offense. What do you mean by "perspective"?

Thank you Imperial Majesty XO. Although I've been reading the Tropes site for years, I'm new to the forums and the rules. It is interesting to see how much clean up effort is continuously needed to this wiki in shape.

An experienced person's take on the easiest way to keep Eldritch Abomination clean, or if it is possible. I'm too much of a newbie to initiate any major clean up work myself, but I'd love to hear an experienced person's take on strategy.

The crickets I hear tell me that my idea doesn't translate, to lessen Eldritch Abomination becoming a catchall by separating out Brown Note Creatures.

Edited by EmilaSkytracker on Apr 21st 2019 at 11:30:21 AM

The actual description of Eldritch Abomination has seemingly inappropriate Subtropes within Subtropes.

How is a scary Santa a subcategory of Lovecraft's Eldritch Abomination?? It seems strange that the Old Testament became a sub-category of Lovecraft with Angelic Abomination. I guess Angels, Devils and Squid are here to stay.

Botanical Abomination sounds like any exceptionally weird plant hybrid. The bar seems low for abominable creatures so divinely twisted they can break someone's sense of reality. I'm starting to think Trope Decay is unavoidable for Eldritch Abomination.

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Subtrope of Our Monsters Are Different and Our Monsters Are Weird.
For Eldritch Abomination with a specific appearance, see:
* Adorable Abomination

• Angelic Abomination
• Animalistic Abomination
• Botanical Abomination
• Humanoid Abomination
• Mechanical Abomination
• Santabomination

Edited by EmilaSkytracker on Apr 21st 2019 at 11:25:47 AM

Personally, I'm fine with the subtropes, provided they could get cleaned up and watched in the same way I'm hoping for with the main trope

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

Don't quote me on this, but I think Cthulhu is an example of the trope in Lovecraft's stories. It's just that, as explained in an Extra Credits video, the popular perception of him as just a giant octopus-dragon is extremely simplified.

Also, don't ask me why this trope is, judging by wick count, more common than most of the Moments.

Edited by Lymantria on Apr 21st 2019 at 4:41:20 AM

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!

I started a trs thread for this, if anyone’s interested

It’s because people think an eldritch abomination is scarier than a plain old monster, so they just shoehorn stuff in to make their fave series seem cooler

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

I created a super trope for Eldritch Abomination if that helps, Brown Note Being. This is so people will stop classifying every Brown Note creature as an Eldritch Abomination. Ghost, ghoulies, and other creatures with a charge to their appearance can go under a super trope.

Pokémon I'm certain has some misuse. Especially Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza, who are more like simply large monsters than Lovecratian beings

Edited by KingofNightmares on Jul 17th 2019 at 9:52:08 AM

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This thread hasn't seen any use in nearly a year, but I just wanted to share this one from NightmareFuel.Zombi 2:

• Just the zombies themselves. Other directors like George Romero and the like include humanistic qualities in their zombies to remind both the characters and the audience that these things used to be people no different from anyone else. Lucio Fulci goes the opposite route and makes no efforts to humanize the reanimated dead. These are pure Humanoid Abominations that barely resemble what they might've been in their past life. Shambling, rotting corpses that move about in a manner suggesting something otherworldly is truly animating them. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect is how ever-present and ever-persistent they are in their pursuit, despite how exceedingly slow they are, giving a sense of dread that suggests they're not fast simply because they don't need to be fast to catch their prey.

Yeah ... no. The zombies aren't eldritch in any way, apart from the ambiguous possibility of being reanimated by magic and being strong for rotting corpses. Abominations in the truest sense of the word, sure, but eldritch abominations in humanoid form? No.

Remove that Humanoid Abomination bit for sure

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The reason this thread never saw any use was because I just made it as a newbie without knowing anything about the processes for makkng an LTP thread. It's in no way offcial

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

This is partially my fault. I launched Humanoid Abomination years ago so people would have a place to put Slender Man or Asura in an attempt to keep Eldritch Abomination focused on amoral beings of godlike power without even the illusion of a connection to humanity and it just continued downhill from there. Cosmic Entity, Our Monsters Are Weird, and Tentacled Terror also remain underutilised by comparison.

I've washed my hands of trying to keep them clean for years and never bothered trying to get consensus on repairing the description any, and just now decided to look in and see if any progress had been made since then, but I guess not. (Couldn't find the TRS thread about it.)

...

Lovecraft's idea of an Eldritch Abomination is based on the thought process: "We started doing science because we thought humans had special powers of deduction to study the universe. Scientists have concluded humans aren't actually special and things we thought were obvious like 'things can be measured consistently' were unwarranted assumptions. The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown - what other obvious 'truths' do we not actually know?" An Eldritch Abomination applies this to God(s).

An Eldritch Abomination is a god, or rather the mystical experience of a god, played for horror. Maybe humans have experienced gods, but any appearance of communication is one-sided. They don't answer (or need) prayer, they don't ordain justice or bestow prophecy, they don't protect the pious or judge the guilty or even care enough about humans to pay attention to them. Without that, a Vision Quest is just a Brown Note, divine revelations in the Language of Truth are just meaning projected into Word-Salad Horror, they only seem to move In Mysterious Ways because they know Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and their impact on you doesn't signify any more than praying to a hurricane.

Of course, Cosmic Horror is annoyingly inextricable from Lovecraft, because everyone describes it as "you know, like Lovecraft wrote", and my analysis here is itself more specific than Lovecraft used it. (Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth are approximately Abrahamic, Cthulhu and Shubby and their fellow pagan wilderness idols do have some kind of reciprocal relationship with their cultists, Hypnos is entirely mystical, Nyarlathotep is Eldritch Jesus and cares very much, maliciously, shoggoths and Elder Things don't even have the religious overtones...) And then Derleth's popularisation of the Mythos made it more conventionally good and evil and elemental, just weird-looking, and nobody else who was inspired by Lovecraft is required to use it the same way either...

...Ugh. This is well more than I meant to write. At this point the entire wretched tangle underlies whole indices of tropes, the actual use isn't tropeworthy, the basic idea is too narrow for the Trope Codifier, working out a practical middle ground will take more time than anyone has, and there likely won't ever be a way to rip it out and start over because of inbounds.

How very like itself it is.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Aug 27th 2022 at 12:45:04 PM

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

tl;dr? your last paragraph made zero sense to me.

Snarking about how the trope is something no one really understands or ever manages to successfully define, which has been around passively causing problems for longer than the current site has existed, and every attempt to fix it has failed or been corrupted. Much like the beings the trope is about.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

hey I'm reopening this thread to ask if it's a fact no creature that is created through human science can ever qualify as an Eldritch Abomination; as in, it must be something extra-dimensional or from space to qualify under the trope?

I've been cleaning up and doing a shitton of work for the Resident Evil series and notice a lot of entries from other users on the most horrifying monsters list them under Eldritch Abomination and not Humanoid Abomination despite still being science-made lab monsters.

Edited by Sung-Hwan on Sep 3rd 2022 at 2:44:10 AM