(I apologize if that offended I meant "the sheer FUCKFEAST of monster biology" to refer to the Fridge Logic of monsters wether women or not)
But as long as we're still on this topic, there's another trend with monster women that really irritates me, and that I think it's pretty unnecessary.
Whenever they make a monster woman with a "taur" body type, she's always a Vertebrate with Extra Limbs, 'BUT' when they make an arthropod monster woman, she's bipedal. I mean, what cruel joke is that''?
I don't necessarily hate "taurs" per se (I dislike horses, and by extension the classic centaur, but something like a taur where the lower 2/3s are a big cat or something, I could be interested); it's just that they're harder to present as "natural species", and require some justification at least.
But arthropods already come with multiple walking legs. Sure, most arthropod women do have extra arms as well, but they still walk on two legs, and almost never take advantage of it to make arthropod taurs.
I think the only kind arthropod woman that's portrayed as a "taur" consistently is the spider. But it isn't really enough. It has so much potential.
Have you looked at a mantis? It already looks like it can be made a taur! What's stopping people?
Oo oo ah ah
The ingrained image that female mantises eat the guys after or while being banged by them?
Also, one thing that came to mind while discussing this.
"Why are monster girls just humans with extra parts?"
Why can't the human parts of them just be "mimicry tactics" and them acting as actual monsters with their own set of mindsets that makes sense to them, like how every other animal on Earth operates after its own set of mind?
I would love to see a setting where humans come to an mutual agreement with a liminal akin to how we came to a mutual agreement with other living beings on our planet. No perviness included.
Could make for a rather wholesome story.
"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."... What on Earth did I walk in on?
Check out my YouTube channel! I make audiobooks and whatever else I feel like!I am thoroughly unimpressed by the Reapers and comparable antagonists, because no matter how many Lovecraft allusions are slipped into the narrative, there is a subtle but critical difference between "they are beyond human comprehension" and "we are beyond human comprehension" that causes the latter to immediately fail. Anything humans can have a normal conversation with is self-evidently understandable, and self-justifying condescension is a very human emotion. But the lure of taking the callous antipathy of the universe and ascribing to it human knowledge and malice is too often too comfortably anthropocentric to resist.
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NO
So something like the Greater Will from Elden Ring is closer to your idea of something being truly incomprehensible?
@Noaqiyeum You know fiction where a "higher" being drills in how above humans to the humans always kind of confused me. Like if humans are more or less ants to it why does it really care if they realize that or not? People do care about ants and sometimes spend time trying to manipulate them to some end but one generally doesn't like, try to make them understand what they are in relation to you.
In that case, I think the Greater Will is a perfect example of a being that actually is beyond mortal comprehension, as well as whatever's behind the Scarlet Rot.
Check out my YouTube channel! I make audiobooks and whatever else I feel like!Classic show don't tell. An incomprehensible being shouldn't be human enough to have such arrogance, and by talking themselves up they only further ruin the illusion. A being that's more or less oblivious to or otherwise apathetic about humanity helps to establish some sort of otherworldly superiority.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallPersonally I think there is a nature/human spectrum here with how gods are depicted. A side effect of the inherent anthropomorphism and anthropocentric of the concept to be hones (God in man's image and all)
Which isn't to say "inhuman" gods don't exist but they are that in more than just mindset or were that in just appearance.
Personally I think that any elitist god should either be a poser or the reflection of an Inferiority Superiority Complex in the collective unconsciousness. while more benevolent, apathetic or downright animalistic gods are generally closer to divinity. That is to say the divine are withe predisposed to facilitating life or just lacked the sentience to conjure a reason to despise it.
I think part of this might have to do with a subset of Satanic Archetype, namely the whole Luceferian "prideful pre-god" thing
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 11th 2024 at 5:08:26 AM
I will say, I do like when a work does it on purpose to show that the supposed "higher lifeform" is completely full of it, like with Chakravartin in Asura's Wrath, who presents himself as a wise and omniscient creator who has the right to destroy and remake the world as he sees fit because he's the one who created it in the first place, but the others call him out for what he really is, a narcissistic megalomaniac who's too lazy to do his job of protecting the world because he thinks it's beneath him. Asura himself sums it up perfectly in the end.
"There is always some fool who wants to rule the world! Always forcing others to do what they cannot do for themselves! [...] That's why... I pray to no one! Nor will I be prayed to! But, above all else... I will never... forgive you... for making my daughter cry!"
Check out my YouTube channel! I make audiobooks and whatever else I feel like!Yeah, if they're supposed to be some arrogant jerk type then it works. If they're supposed to be genuinely divine it feels a bit cheap. I don't mind gods with personality but the more eldritch you're supposed to be, the less of a human personality you should have.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallPersonally I tend often think of it as them being more...modular in a way. Like from a human's perspective an ant is "simple" because all it's really doing is predetermined movements based on minor alterations from simplistic perception. Many people wouldn't argue if you said it doesn't think, it just reacts. So a being higher than humans would be more capable of reacting to situations outside of what a human can. It would be able to understand things humans can't, feel things they can't, come up with solutions they can't because from its perspective a human would just following a script and switching out a few values.
I've noticed when writers actually want to go into the specifics of things being smarter than humans it tends to be hard science and math. Better technology, faster thinking, doing complex equations on the spot, etc. I think it's because it's harder to imagine something being better than humans with emotions, morality, adaptability, things like that.
IDK. I tend to think of ants as "simple" (in your words) not because they're mindless but because they're tiny and rather insignificant on their own. Like you can step on them without notice and don't pay attention unless they're somehow breaching your territory. That's how a god would think in my perspective; humans are ants in the sense that they can be trampled without even realizing it, only to become relevant when they wander where they don't belong.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI haven't played Elden Ring so I don't know how the Greater Will compares... my favourite examples are things like the Shimmer, which is so mysterious it's never fully clear if the phenomena at the lighthouse are its source or just another of its effects, whether it's alive or sapient (or both or neither) in any meaningful sense, or whether the apparent mirroring behaviour it eventually displays indicates much more intelligence than an actual mirror.
Not to say I think any kind of eldritch communication is immediately bad, it just shouldn't be coherent. Maybe it only speaks when you're hallucinating and you can't be sure you didn't imagine it. Maybe it imitates or rearranges human messages but not in a way that clearly adds new information. Maybe it speaks barely-comprehensible Word-Salad Horror. But if I'm supposed to take it seriously as something legitimately beyond human understanding then it shouldn't act like the Wizard of Oz.
Edited by Noaqiyeum on Jun 11th 2024 at 6:58:43 PM
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOMy biggest issue with It's a Wonderful Plot is seeing the same scenes over and over again.
I'm not talking just utilizing the same plot- it's a classic premise that can allow for some interesting reflections, with an often heartwarming aesop, and it can be played with as a parody as well.
No, I'm talking about having to see the characters interacting with people acting like they remember them despite being told that it's a world where they were never born and cannot be recognized, every time they make a new It's a Wonderful Plot.
You could give some justification for why that happens (the character is skeptical about truly visiting such a world, they're in denial, or they're just a dumbass), but, as a viewer, I beg you all:
If you're planning to use It's a Wonderful Plot completely seriously, please, cut that part short.
Two works I think handled it well are The Fairly OddParents! and Rugrats. In both of these versions, the subject (Timmy in the former, Chucky in the latter) is completely intangible and invisible, making them passive observers like in A Christmas Carol. In fact, even the original film had an excuse as to why George was slow on the upkeep, considering he was absolutely hammered at the time.
Check out my YouTube channel! I make audiobooks and whatever else I feel like!
Always funny to see how a work becomes a trope or stock plot, and then elements of the original work are lost in translation.
Hell, you could wrap this all around to the discussion of "Freaky Friday" Flip earlier and how most stock plot episodes riffing on it fail to recapture what made the original story interesting (the relationship dynamic between mother and daughter being challenged as they're forced to deal with each others' struggles at the worst time with no prior warning)
These stock plots shouldn't be done just for the hell of it, but to say something about the characters involved. That's their power; an almost-too-easy writing concept is great and all to fill time, but what makes a stock plot work is whether or not the character(s) themselves are deeply explored through this lens.
...I guess what I'm saying is, Tropes Are Not Bad, and that includes stock plots. It's all in the execution.
Forgive my prattling, I word a lotI don't mind either stock plot but I can see why they'd get annoying.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
Parody going on for so long it's basically satirizing something that never happened in the first place is something that interests me. Dead Unicorn Trope is what you guys call guys call something similar. The same thing happens with genuine mimicry but it when it's done as parody it loses even more since it's supposed to act as a direct reference to the original thing. Like your Freaky Friday example usually just loses an idea that made the original cool, but the It's a Wonderful Life thing loses the reference it's built on.
It seems particularly common with movies, the same thing happened to slashers and classic spy stuff. Like right now jokes about the 007 movies have more cultural presence than the actual movies, not only are things not taking their ideas not seriously now more relevant than attempts to play it straight but the modern examples don't even really follow the original ideas. "Spy parody" is a theme in of itself at this point but most of it presents spies as mostly just doing cool action stuff or staying completely out of sight rather than outwitting and manipulating people which seemed more common for James Bond.
Or like, the three laws of robotics. A lot of fiction seems to act like it's clever when it finds a loophole like the original stories didn't. Except...that was the whole point of the three laws of robotics. Asimov wrote them as an ill-sighted attempt to obsessively control everything and try to permanently codify morality that goes wrong and kills everybody. There were always loopholes and paradoxes and shit that caused problems, most likely as a gag on people trying to do the same thing in real life.
Yeah, actually, loopholes in rules have always been intrinsic to making the rules themselves interesting.
Like, the moment you declare the rules of your world, the audience is going to be thinking about the ramifications. Savvier viewers might immediately turn to think how characters might break those rules, or bend them. For example, Cannot Tell a Lie is one that's easy to be very, very boring if not explored.
A character being compulsively honest, whether as a facet of their personality or some sort of physical or magical restriction, is ultimately a character trait that lives or dies on how deep the author is willing to think about it. If it just leads to them being incapable of deception entirely, that's kind of boring, and leads to that kind of issue where the plot could be solved by the villain in like 3 seconds if they just put this poor overly-honest chump on the spot and grilled them for info.
I'm absolutely not the first to think of this (it's part of the trope's introductory blurb, for heavens' sake), but it's infinitely MORE interesting to me when the character is LITERALLY incapable of speaking falsehoods, but aware of it and willing to stretch that as far as possible by withholding information from what they say, utilizing the Mathematician's Answer, giving overly-literal or Metaphorically True responses or invoking You Didn't Ask to avoid giving things away that they don't want to.
I have an entire species in one of my stories that runs on this idea, and outright makes the unable-to-lie angels seem infinitely shiftier BECAUSE they cannot boldfaced lie. One of the major characters specifically has to dodge around a particular topic all the time because she knows others would think she's lost her mind if she was fully honest about it.
And I'm sure countless other writers have found even more interesting ways to twist the idea of someone compulsively bound to speak the truth into something more interesting than just an exploitable Honest Abe.
...That went a bit tangential but what I'm saying is, in a sense, one of my pet peeve tropes is the sorta meta-trope of using a trope to only its surface-level nature. Not being willing to shake from or challenge the world you establish beyond the things you've literally set up. Does that make any sense at all?
Forgive my prattling, I word a lot

my work here is done.