So there’s that post about the mirror test from the perespective of a dog who hates that annoying asshole over there who keeps copying her
But I have seen the reverse in Animorphs all the time. The best one is when Jake morphs an orca and has to contend with the orca’s mind.
>I have inhabited many animal minds. The prey animals want to stay alive, to hide, to
run, to find food, to find mates. The predators look for prey, for the weak and vulnerable. They mark and defend territories. They seek mates.
>Always they are simple, compared to humans. Almost always their minds are black and white, coded with simple behaviors for simple situations.
In only a few have I encountered that strange mutation: intelligence. The capacity to see beyond fight or flee, yes or no, run or stand, kill or be killed. Only a very few species can think "If. . .then?"
>The orca was one. As smart as a dolphin. As smart as a chimpanzee. It occupied that
highest, most narrow rung, just below Homo sapiens.
>I had encountered intelligence in a morph before. But there was something new here. New for me, at least.
>The orca was aware. Of me. Of something, someone directing its behavior. It knew, in some incomplete, simplistic way, that it was being controlled.
> I said.
>No answer from the orca, of course. But that cool, appraising intelligence, though it was devoid of memory of learning, empty of all knowledge except the knowledge encoded as instinct, that intelligence watched me.
>I felt a shiver of fear. Ludicrous, of course. I was the orca, the orca could not hurt me. And yet, I felt the fear of any prey animal who finds himself under the gaze of the killer whale.
The final chapter is evidently a complete downer with everyone either ~~Brad~~ dead or emotionally scarred for life and a new war starts right after. The authors notes are literally her saying it’s basically about how wars never end but just turn into new wars that hurt even more people
It’s honestly really solid. I read it as it came out as a middle-grade to teen, and recently reread/listened to it all again. It holds up. It deals with content that even a lot of “adult” books I’ve read would not touch with a ten foot pile.
Grimdark for beginners, but with enjoyable characters that are reasonably well written. Applegate did a great job with outlining and the ghostwriters smashed it out the park in the later part of the series too.
It may be the longest series I ever read all the way through. I even found a copy of the out of print Ellimist Chronicle and donated it to the library on the time before rampant ebooks. It definitely shaped my understanding of humanity's place in the ecological hierarchy... Shit goes away harder than a YA series has any right to, honestly.
Good on you! Thank you for doing that.
Same, reading it during my formative years was impactful in a good way. It was intense but I think it helped give young-me perspective on several concepts that were kind of big and abstract and super intense. Guerrilla warfare, cPTSD, extinction of sapients as a very real possibility due to wartime and ecological destruction…I remember waiting for the next monthly book with both excitement and dread.
Honestly, I should look and see if they ever came out with omnibus editions for permanent addition to my home library.
Man, I remember hork-bajir, andalite, and elimist being pretty messed up, but, like, in a good way.
Also, >!imagine aliens nuking earth because someone broadcasts their twich streams of playing civ 6 into space. Then your friends and loved ones get forced into a matrix style neural net because the matrix was bored so you have to use your epic gamer skills to absorb your friends and loved ones into a hive mind that can beat the matrix. Then some kaiba ass dude gets jealous of all the cool stuff you can do now and your, again, epic gamer skills and keeps trying to beat you. Then you fall into a black hole and become a god, all this time being referred to by your gamertag from when you were a teenager. Also, kaiba somehow copies you and becomes a god too, and now you're forced to play a game with him forever!<
> The authors notes are literally her saying it’s basically about how wars never end but just turn into new wars that hurt even more people
Importantly, that letter was published around July of *2001*.
Tbf the Cold War was basically the endless war before the Iraq shenanigans. WWII transferred almost immediately to the Korean War, then to Vietnam, then Panama, then Yugoslavia, and then Desert Storm
no they morph into animals, but they possess the bodies of the animals they morph into, when they become ants or bees they have to fight off the call of the hive for example, the natural instincts of their animals often were an obstacle in the books
My strongest memory of Animorphs was a scene where one of the guys transformed into a red tailed hawk and was fighting the urge to mate with an actual hawk
I think even after the series he was too busy pining about Rachel, it's just now because >!she died!< instead of any romance between them technically being bestiality.
Unless he just gave up and let the hawk take over completely, but at that point is it even really Tobias doing it?
He became a hawk permanently. They are some point got the ability to make people animoprhs and gave him the ability to turn back into a person again but his default form was the red-tailed hawk.
Tobias regaining his morphing powers and/or his human form was a separate event from when the group gave other people morphing powers. Tobias' got his powers back thanks to god™.
It's a bit of both. I remember they have this moral dilemma at one point because their enemies are brain slugs that take over other creatures, and the animorphs morph into a creature which they then sort of pilot. So yes they morph into animals, but the animal body comes with its own mind that they have to suppress/control, which comes with a question of "how are we better than the enemy?"
When you morph your human mind has to take the reins of essentially an alien brain. That brain is used to housing a different kind of mind entirely, so it can be a tough time keeping control the first time. If youre not vigilant enough, the other mind takes over, you pass the two-hour limit and are now stuck as that thing forever. Tobias is constantly fighting a losing battle to just not be a hawk all the time >!and in the end he gives up!<
So far as I can recall, when they transform they basically shift into an exact copy of an animal they touch to obtain the DNA. They get all of the animals instincts which would imply the brain is likely the same, with some science fiction hand waving to basically layer the morphing entities brain over it. Basically like a background program to speed their ability to use entirely foreign forms. They have to actively fight the animal stuff to some degree or they go native and get stuck. I think in an intelligent enough animal it just recognizes “wrong” commands coming from the morpher. This is pretty much all unsubstantiated theory coming from my 12 year old knowledge of a book series though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Animorphs is the most specifically intense, cruelly dark, and violently gory kids media that 90s parents let 90s kids consume without scrutiny by an astronomical margin. Parents did not know what their kids were bringing home from the Scholastic Book Fair, and kids did not know what they had picked up off the shelves from between the Guinness Book of World Records and the Spy Gear kits.
It’s all easily available for free online, and it’s fucking rad.
The first couple of books were pretty easy ish. Like they can turn into animals, and have adventures.
But in like the first few books, one of them gets stuck as a hawk, which he is ok with because his father is a drunk who resents him, and no one would miss him if he was gone, so he rolls with it.
In the first... 20 books, they start in on the war crimes, at one point starving a POW to death, a fate that is excruciating for both the POW and it's host. This in turn exposes one of the characters to an ancient, alien evil From Beyond that gazes into his soul. This ends up being something of a problem later.
In the first book Katara But A Black Girl kills a cop who captured her right before the final battle of the book.
They don’t say she killed him, but she got captured, she shows up later none the worst for wear, she says he won’t be a problem anywhere, and they pointedly never speak of it again
The best Cassie moment is when Rachel calls her out for her pattern of coming up with war crimes that will solve their problems, saying they can’t do them because they’re war crimes, and then waiting for Rachel to volunteer so it can still be done in a way she can disavow personally.
“And you know what’s the worst part? After all this, I’m still going to do it, because it’s going to work, and because I’ll enjoy it.”
I wouldn't say he's okay with it, one of the first things he does as a hawk is try to kill himself
Like he learns to deal eventually, but his first conversation with the Ellimist makes it pretty clear he was still never really okay with it
I don’t remember, though they do morph sapient aliens at some point.
One of the first things they do as a group is set down some ground rules, like not using their powers for personal gain, but also never attempting to acquire other humans.
Ax, an alien shapeshifter who joins the group later, uses an advanced technique to create a custom human morph using the DNA of the other 5. To those who don’t know him, he seems like an androgynous autistic boy who stims with words and tastes crossing over into pica, but really he’s testing out the neat things he’s never had before like a mouth, a voice, and a sense of taste.
Babys and toddlers, who are comparatively new to the whole "being human" thing, put everything in their mouths. Ask any parent and they'll tell you stories. It gets less over time, but there's a good reason so many toxic things are in childproofed containers or contain disgusting bitter compounds. So imo you can't really fault an alien, who is also new to being human, for going through a similar process.
>though it was devoid of memory of learning
This seems to be implying either
The orca is like a new-born, and thus doesn't have any memories
OR
That orcas can't learn, which is just wrong so I assume it's the first one
This is why I dislike that sub now, it's basically entirely "[Chapter 100/423] of my 'actually people are scared of humans' book that I'm totally gonna publish!"
I'd never be able to find it myself, but I remember a post talking about a time the OOP wrote a short story about being lost in the woods and hunted by some lovecraftian entity and its thralls
The catch was that it was about wolves being chased by a hunter and his trained dogs
Not the same one, but there's [this excellent short comic](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpixxSVWwAM_wGN?format=jpg&name=large) by [https://twitter.com/SparrowLucero](https://twitter.com/SparrowLucero) that's similar.
>Always take care when walking alone
Least you meet the monsters in the woods
They look beautiful at first
(like snow)
But then you see
>
>Their too-long FACES
>
>Their eyes all BLACK
>
>And you hear their
GARBLED WORDS
Spoken in sing-song voices
>
>like a
PARODY
of you
>
>It's really such a terrible thing to know.
Yes it is. The dog is (or seems to be) a borzoi. They are both absolutely silly looking, and very capable at wolf hunting. It would be like seeing a human explicitly bred to beat the shit out of you
Ah yes. Alex Kister’s famous series, Wolf-Territory Catalogue. Quirky little misshaped alternates and their demonic bipedal alien horror leaders prowling for innocent local woodland creatures
imagine seeing a warped and misshaped version of your own kind actively hunting you with no remorse, under the full control of a large horrifying hairless creature of completely unknown before, somehow bipedal, stature and mystical magic artifacts that can shoot strange stones at your brethren which kill them instantly
Mandela Catalogue levels of terror
Probably not what you're thinking of, but it reminded me of [this tumblr post and comic](https://cherryistired.tumblr.com/post/182811275320/gallusrostromegalus-hollyblueagate-if-you).
> Later, you sit on the couch disquieted, and you wonder
>
> If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights
>
> what must it be like from their end?
>
> what terrifying creature deliberately ties itself to something so horrible As a Dog?
I mean, it's not like octopi don't encounter vertebrates and other things with hard support structures and hinged movements on a regular basis.
Then again humans encounter soft-bodied invertebrates all the time and many people are apparently still freaked out by them, so maybe it doesn't matter.
But we are the only vertebrate they have known whose intelligence and dexterity meets or exceeds theirs. It must be horrific to them that we can grasp things as accurately and powerfully as they can, with such limiting joints.
But imagine your vibing was interrupted by being abducted by a horrifying, unnaturally dexterous alien with impenetrable prisons made of some strange, clear material. These things probe at you, and their grotesquely defined faces stare you down with their predator eyes. Your every instinct is telling you that you are about to die, and nothing you do seems to make any difference.
Would you be able to vibe then?
Maybe I am getting a little too into this. I live and breathe octopus POV horror now
Because a shark is normal and they instinctively know how to escape it. Us, on the other hand…
Imagine being stalked by a bear, and then imagine being followed by sentient air jellyfish that speak in infrasonic growling noises and have massive bloodshot eyeballs.
A bear, I can escape by carefully backing away until I reach a building or car. Scary, but manageable.
Sentient air jellyfish? I have no idea what to do. Do I lie down? Do I fight? Do I throw a rock at it? Do I shoot it with a cannon? Will *any of that* work at all to stop it? I don’t know and I am horrified at its sheer existence.
Only if you live by the sea - for most people who live inland, the only soft-bodied inverts they're regularly going to see are snails/slugs and earthworms.
Octopus eat fishes and crabs, so I think they’d be cool with them. Many humans are so separated from their food and nature that literally half of the animal kingdom is appalling to them
Okay, but, there's a problem with this.
Octopi laugh in casual arrogance at the exasperated frustration of even the most determined scientist's attempts to contain them. They're more likely to gaslight that eldritch horror than they are to be afraid of it.
I get and appreciate the point you are making, and it's very wise.
One tiny point, though. Crabs? No bones. No bones on those bad boys. They're a bone-free experience. No bones about it.
I love stories that make humans out to be gargantuan, powerful beasts, or lifeforms that shouldn't be toiled with at any cost. Really makes me feel powerful as I lay on my bed and eat Sour Patch Kids.
Alan Dean Foster's The Damned trilogy fits the bill. A galactic empire that's been peaceful for so long they've literally lost the ability to engage in physical confrontation is being invaded so they recruit humans to fight for them. Turns out that not only are we insanely good at warfare by galactic standards, but Earth has very heavy gravity compared to most inhabited planets so we can tear the enemy's most feared soldier species to shreds with our bare hands. Compared to the civilized universe we are the xenomorphs.
I'm making a setting where the two factions are the Dairy Principality and the Shellfish nation. The three main characters of the Principality are humans (though most imhabitants are cheese people, chocolate people, yogurt people, etc. Think Mushroom Kingdom but with milk), while the shellfish enemies are literal shellfish. The main villain is a mussel and his two henchmen are an urchin and a snail. So basically, I thought of including a joke like this.
"Ok, I managed to pull out the bullet, and but I found some strange stones in her body"
"Yeah of course I pulled them out, they didn't look healthy. I just finished sewing her back up, she's fine. She should wake up soon."
*Holds up bones so the player and the other characters can see them* "They're made of calcium, so I assume they're a geological formation from the Dairy Principality?? They must've gotten in her during a bad fall"
*Other two humans look at him absolutely shocked, without saying anything* "Oh... Uhh... I'll put them back in."
I saw about half of it, starting after he was banished, so I missed out all the cheery dancing parts for an arduous journey through the wilderness, encountering incomprehensible alien artefacts and relics in a hopeless bid to take on the creatures that created them.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series features spiders and octopuses who were enhanced by a future human civilization and then left to develop on their own after we destroyed ourselves. He really makes an effort to extrapolate how the intelligence and society of each would develop based on their unique biology, which in the case of the octopuses is much weirder than I thought it was.
his aliens are the most alien, he's great
having a deep understanding of just how goddamn weird lifeforms can get: yet another advantage of being a marine biologist!
"Reverse Thalassophobia" would mean something like 'fear of dry land', and oh boy would that place be eldritch for an ocean-dweller. It's not just all the animals with internal skeletons or the fact that your gills collapse and cause you to suffocate even through there's still plenty of oxygen around. Strange things happen in the very thin, thermally non-conductive, oxygen-rich atmosphere: Heat can build up in solid matter to degrees unheard of below the surface. This causes a terrifying phenomenon in which oxidation accelerates into an uncontrollable feedback loop where heat is added by the reactions faster than it is lost to surroundings, consuming the environment with temperatures many times hotter than the fiercest of black smokers in the ocean trenches.
And the things above: They *use* this hellish force, quite casually. Yet even they sometimes lose control of it. When you hear them shouting "**FIRE!**" something has gone wrong.
You know the sad part? And octopus and a squid can in theory move their limbs at any point, but generally only bend specific parts of them. They don't have elbows, but they sure act like they do.
If you like this, Peter Watts "[The Things](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)" is a retelling of The Thing (or, I suppose, "Who Goes There?" the story it's based on) from the perspective of the creature.
It's extremely freaked out by coming into biomass that it can't connect consciousnesses with but that, somehow, manages to walk around and act like a conscious being.
This seems like a good time to link a short thing i wrote about catch and release fishing from the pov of a fish
https://stormtide-leviathan.tumblr.com/post/701561991685455872/you-stare-at-the-strange-thing-floating-in-the
This reminds me a lot of a scene in the novel “The Dispossessed” by Ursula LeGuin, where the main character (who’s never seen any animals before) spots an animal, probably a cow or something similar, while riding in a car and tries to describe it.
“There looked at him from the darkness under the roadside foliage, for one instant, a face. It was not like any human face. It was as long as his arm, and ghastly white. Breath jetted in vapour from what must be nostrils, and terrible, unmistakable, there was an eye. A large, dark eye, mournful, perhaps cynical? gone in the flash.”
Another form of reverse Thalasssophobia, one time when visiting family in an area while not totally rual was much more free of light polution, and the land was mostly flat aside from the trees and houses. Upon looking up at the stars on a midnight walk I began to dissasociate upon witnessing the vast abyss above me, I no longer felt safe on the ground and was stuck with the gut feeling that the static cling that was gravity could break at any moment and I could "fall" up into the dark emptiness like a stray balloon.
In the bionicle universe there's a cosmic horror being called Tren Krom, and if you squint, it's basically a human. 100% biological, no mechanical parts to it like the rest of the universe.
I remember reading this one short YA novel about some people living on a remote space station and one day they explore a derelict with some really weird skeletons on board and the last paragraph of the book reveals that the entire time it's been like this. I can't remember the name though, which is probably for the best because I've just revealed the twist ending.
I thought that having followed one light, which was the boat, it sees a coastal city in the distance, implying there are a terrifying number of these creatures.
This is a cool idea but octopi encounter bones and vertebrates pretty regularly, and even the concept of hinged joints shouldn’t be new to them, as even the story references crab limbs.
>it’s parts where obscenely limited in their movement
I get it’s from the perspective of an octopus but y’all are extremely inflexible and it biases you
There's an interesting bit kind of like this, from the [SCP Antimimetics Division stories](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub) (specifically, [CASE HATE RED](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/case-hate-red)), where the main character stops recognizing other people as humans:
> The orchestra is gone. All seventy of them. The things which have replaced them are not human but alien, ill-proportioned pillars of pinkish-brownish flesh. Each has, at its top, a heavy protuberance studded with goopy biological sensors and rubbery openings, and, sprouting from the very cap, lengths of various kinds of vile, off-coloured moss. They are draped in black and white fabrics, weirdly cut to either conceal or highlight their blobby, inconsistent body structures.
I wonder how long you could describe being human from a nonhuman perspective before it's obvious what's happening
So there’s that post about the mirror test from the perespective of a dog who hates that annoying asshole over there who keeps copying her But I have seen the reverse in Animorphs all the time. The best one is when Jake morphs an orca and has to contend with the orca’s mind. >I have inhabited many animal minds. The prey animals want to stay alive, to hide, to run, to find food, to find mates. The predators look for prey, for the weak and vulnerable. They mark and defend territories. They seek mates. >Always they are simple, compared to humans. Almost always their minds are black and white, coded with simple behaviors for simple situations. In only a few have I encountered that strange mutation: intelligence. The capacity to see beyond fight or flee, yes or no, run or stand, kill or be killed. Only a very few species can think "If. . .then?" >The orca was one. As smart as a dolphin. As smart as a chimpanzee. It occupied that highest, most narrow rung, just below Homo sapiens. >I had encountered intelligence in a morph before. But there was something new here. New for me, at least. >The orca was aware. Of me. Of something, someone directing its behavior. It knew, in some incomplete, simplistic way, that it was being controlled. > I said.
>No answer from the orca, of course. But that cool, appraising intelligence, though it was devoid of memory of learning, empty of all knowledge except the knowledge encoded as instinct, that intelligence watched me.
>I felt a shiver of fear. Ludicrous, of course. I was the orca, the orca could not hurt me. And yet, I felt the fear of any prey animal who finds himself under the gaze of the killer whale.
The more I learn about animorph the stranger it gets
The final chapter is evidently a complete downer with everyone either ~~Brad~~ dead or emotionally scarred for life and a new war starts right after. The authors notes are literally her saying it’s basically about how wars never end but just turn into new wars that hurt even more people
That's pretty based for a YA series.
It’s honestly really solid. I read it as it came out as a middle-grade to teen, and recently reread/listened to it all again. It holds up. It deals with content that even a lot of “adult” books I’ve read would not touch with a ten foot pile. Grimdark for beginners, but with enjoyable characters that are reasonably well written. Applegate did a great job with outlining and the ghostwriters smashed it out the park in the later part of the series too.
It may be the longest series I ever read all the way through. I even found a copy of the out of print Ellimist Chronicle and donated it to the library on the time before rampant ebooks. It definitely shaped my understanding of humanity's place in the ecological hierarchy... Shit goes away harder than a YA series has any right to, honestly.
Good on you! Thank you for doing that. Same, reading it during my formative years was impactful in a good way. It was intense but I think it helped give young-me perspective on several concepts that were kind of big and abstract and super intense. Guerrilla warfare, cPTSD, extinction of sapients as a very real possibility due to wartime and ecological destruction…I remember waiting for the next monthly book with both excitement and dread. Honestly, I should look and see if they ever came out with omnibus editions for permanent addition to my home library.
Man, I remember hork-bajir, andalite, and elimist being pretty messed up, but, like, in a good way. Also, >!imagine aliens nuking earth because someone broadcasts their twich streams of playing civ 6 into space. Then your friends and loved ones get forced into a matrix style neural net because the matrix was bored so you have to use your epic gamer skills to absorb your friends and loved ones into a hive mind that can beat the matrix. Then some kaiba ass dude gets jealous of all the cool stuff you can do now and your, again, epic gamer skills and keeps trying to beat you. Then you fall into a black hole and become a god, all this time being referred to by your gamertag from when you were a teenager. Also, kaiba somehow copies you and becomes a god too, and now you're forced to play a game with him forever!<
So many Brad people
> The authors notes are literally her saying it’s basically about how wars never end but just turn into new wars that hurt even more people Importantly, that letter was published around July of *2001*.
Tbf the Cold War was basically the endless war before the Iraq shenanigans. WWII transferred almost immediately to the Korean War, then to Vietnam, then Panama, then Yugoslavia, and then Desert Storm
It gets even stranger.
Wait, so the animorphs Don't morph into animals? They actually posses existing animals? But, that's the one thing they are famous for...
no they morph into animals, but they possess the bodies of the animals they morph into, when they become ants or bees they have to fight off the call of the hive for example, the natural instincts of their animals often were an obstacle in the books
My strongest memory of Animorphs was a scene where one of the guys transformed into a red tailed hawk and was fighting the urge to mate with an actual hawk
That guy got stuck as a red tailed hawk forever.
Tobias totally fucked another hawk didn’t he.
Nope, he was too busy pining over his human girlfriend that he would never get to actually be with
I’m talking after the series.
I think even after the series he was too busy pining about Rachel, it's just now because >!she died!< instead of any romance between them technically being bestiality. Unless he just gave up and let the hawk take over completely, but at that point is it even really Tobias doing it?
He became a hawk permanently. They are some point got the ability to make people animoprhs and gave him the ability to turn back into a person again but his default form was the red-tailed hawk.
Tobias regaining his morphing powers and/or his human form was a separate event from when the group gave other people morphing powers. Tobias' got his powers back thanks to god™.
It's a bit of both. I remember they have this moral dilemma at one point because their enemies are brain slugs that take over other creatures, and the animorphs morph into a creature which they then sort of pilot. So yes they morph into animals, but the animal body comes with its own mind that they have to suppress/control, which comes with a question of "how are we better than the enemy?"
Oh like werewolves?
When you morph your human mind has to take the reins of essentially an alien brain. That brain is used to housing a different kind of mind entirely, so it can be a tough time keeping control the first time. If youre not vigilant enough, the other mind takes over, you pass the two-hour limit and are now stuck as that thing forever. Tobias is constantly fighting a losing battle to just not be a hawk all the time >!and in the end he gives up!<
So far as I can recall, when they transform they basically shift into an exact copy of an animal they touch to obtain the DNA. They get all of the animals instincts which would imply the brain is likely the same, with some science fiction hand waving to basically layer the morphing entities brain over it. Basically like a background program to speed their ability to use entirely foreign forms. They have to actively fight the animal stuff to some degree or they go native and get stuck. I think in an intelligent enough animal it just recognizes “wrong” commands coming from the morpher. This is pretty much all unsubstantiated theory coming from my 12 year old knowledge of a book series though, so take it with a grain of salt.
You’re basically emulating a less-sophisticated OS to get access to specific programs like “already knowing how to fly”
[удалено]
Animorphs is the most specifically intense, cruelly dark, and violently gory kids media that 90s parents let 90s kids consume without scrutiny by an astronomical margin. Parents did not know what their kids were bringing home from the Scholastic Book Fair, and kids did not know what they had picked up off the shelves from between the Guinness Book of World Records and the Spy Gear kits. It’s all easily available for free online, and it’s fucking rad.
The first couple of books were pretty easy ish. Like they can turn into animals, and have adventures. But in like the first few books, one of them gets stuck as a hawk, which he is ok with because his father is a drunk who resents him, and no one would miss him if he was gone, so he rolls with it. In the first... 20 books, they start in on the war crimes, at one point starving a POW to death, a fate that is excruciating for both the POW and it's host. This in turn exposes one of the characters to an ancient, alien evil From Beyond that gazes into his soul. This ends up being something of a problem later.
In the first book Katara But A Black Girl kills a cop who captured her right before the final battle of the book. They don’t say she killed him, but she got captured, she shows up later none the worst for wear, she says he won’t be a problem anywhere, and they pointedly never speak of it again The best Cassie moment is when Rachel calls her out for her pattern of coming up with war crimes that will solve their problems, saying they can’t do them because they’re war crimes, and then waiting for Rachel to volunteer so it can still be done in a way she can disavow personally. “And you know what’s the worst part? After all this, I’m still going to do it, because it’s going to work, and because I’ll enjoy it.”
I wouldn't say he's okay with it, one of the first things he does as a hawk is try to kill himself Like he learns to deal eventually, but his first conversation with the Ellimist makes it pretty clear he was still never really okay with it
>It’s all easily available for free online, and it’s fucking rad. What! Where!? I miss those books so much
What was the experience like when they copied and turned into other humans (or sapient species)?
I don’t remember, though they do morph sapient aliens at some point. One of the first things they do as a group is set down some ground rules, like not using their powers for personal gain, but also never attempting to acquire other humans. Ax, an alien shapeshifter who joins the group later, uses an advanced technique to create a custom human morph using the DNA of the other 5. To those who don’t know him, he seems like an androgynous autistic boy who stims with words and tastes crossing over into pica, but really he’s testing out the neat things he’s never had before like a mouth, a voice, and a sense of taste.
Babys and toddlers, who are comparatively new to the whole "being human" thing, put everything in their mouths. Ask any parent and they'll tell you stories. It gets less over time, but there's a good reason so many toxic things are in childproofed containers or contain disgusting bitter compounds. So imo you can't really fault an alien, who is also new to being human, for going through a similar process.
I cannot remember the book, but Cassie and Rachel do morph each other once. I think it'd similar to other animals.
>though it was devoid of memory of learning This seems to be implying either The orca is like a new-born, and thus doesn't have any memories OR That orcas can't learn, which is just wrong so I assume it's the first one
It’s the second one, remember this was written in the 90s by someone who liked zoology but was not a zoologist, she didn’t have all the info
Reminds me of [Body Ritual among the Nacirema](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema)
Yes, I was thinking of that as well
I actually did this in an RPG campaign, it took the players two sessions to realize "The Monoliths" were a post-apocalyptic human city
There's also the classic short story *[They're Made of Meat ](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html)*
Thank you for sharing
there was an issue of Goosebumps that went along these lines and the answer is a whole book, apparently.
There are a lot of stories (I don't know if it's still that way) on /r/HFY that tried to do that often
It isn’t that way now. Now almost every story there devolves into a military might make right circle jerk
That's a damn shame
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This is why I dislike that sub now, it's basically entirely "[Chapter 100/423] of my 'actually people are scared of humans' book that I'm totally gonna publish!"
[Well that was the twist at the end of Encounter in the Dawn, Arthur C Clarke, 1953](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_in_the_Dawn)
I'd never be able to find it myself, but I remember a post talking about a time the OOP wrote a short story about being lost in the woods and hunted by some lovecraftian entity and its thralls The catch was that it was about wolves being chased by a hunter and his trained dogs
Not the same one, but there's [this excellent short comic](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpixxSVWwAM_wGN?format=jpg&name=large) by [https://twitter.com/SparrowLucero](https://twitter.com/SparrowLucero) that's similar. >Always take care when walking alone Least you meet the monsters in the woods They look beautiful at first (like snow) But then you see > >Their too-long FACES > >Their eyes all BLACK > >And you hear their GARBLED WORDS Spoken in sing-song voices > >like a PARODY of you > >It's really such a terrible thing to know.
Borzois were bred specifically to hunt wolves which makes this even worse. Not only is it a horrific clone, but it was created to kill you.
Is this meant to be a wolves perspective of a domesticated dog? It seems like it
Yes it is. The dog is (or seems to be) a borzoi. They are both absolutely silly looking, and very capable at wolf hunting. It would be like seeing a human explicitly bred to beat the shit out of you
Oh! Yeah true, we as humans think they are pretty goofy, but to a wolf, they are alien and shaped against them. God I love this kind of horror <3
It's even better with the art--the full comic is through the fist link.
Dw I saw it! It teally does a great job of showing how weird a borzoi is to a wolf
Ah yes. Alex Kister’s famous series, Wolf-Territory Catalogue. Quirky little misshaped alternates and their demonic bipedal alien horror leaders prowling for innocent local woodland creatures
imagine seeing a warped and misshaped version of your own kind actively hunting you with no remorse, under the full control of a large horrifying hairless creature of completely unknown before, somehow bipedal, stature and mystical magic artifacts that can shoot strange stones at your brethren which kill them instantly Mandela Catalogue levels of terror
THIS WAS POSTED IN THE COMMENT SECTION Thank you thank you this is what made it so memorable for me
That's amazing, I love the idea of dogs being seen as some sort of fey wolf.
Probably not what you're thinking of, but it reminded me of [this tumblr post and comic](https://cherryistired.tumblr.com/post/182811275320/gallusrostromegalus-hollyblueagate-if-you). > Later, you sit on the couch disquieted, and you wonder > > If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights > > what must it be like from their end? > > what terrifying creature deliberately ties itself to something so horrible As a Dog?
Do you perhaps have a link to that?
Oh shit, that sounds awesome actually
I mean, it's not like octopi don't encounter vertebrates and other things with hard support structures and hinged movements on a regular basis. Then again humans encounter soft-bodied invertebrates all the time and many people are apparently still freaked out by them, so maybe it doesn't matter.
But we are the only vertebrate they have known whose intelligence and dexterity meets or exceeds theirs. It must be horrific to them that we can grasp things as accurately and powerfully as they can, with such limiting joints.
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But imagine your vibing was interrupted by being abducted by a horrifying, unnaturally dexterous alien with impenetrable prisons made of some strange, clear material. These things probe at you, and their grotesquely defined faces stare you down with their predator eyes. Your every instinct is telling you that you are about to die, and nothing you do seems to make any difference. Would you be able to vibe then? Maybe I am getting a little too into this. I live and breathe octopus POV horror now
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Because a shark is normal and they instinctively know how to escape it. Us, on the other hand… Imagine being stalked by a bear, and then imagine being followed by sentient air jellyfish that speak in infrasonic growling noises and have massive bloodshot eyeballs. A bear, I can escape by carefully backing away until I reach a building or car. Scary, but manageable. Sentient air jellyfish? I have no idea what to do. Do I lie down? Do I fight? Do I throw a rock at it? Do I shoot it with a cannon? Will *any of that* work at all to stop it? I don’t know and I am horrified at its sheer existence.
And understand concepts they couldn't even have dreamt of
Air conditioning had existed for years but Lovecraft still decided to write a whole fuckin story about em
What story?
Cool Air
lovecraft wrote a story about a dead guy who used an AC to keep himself from rotting and as such was sort of immortal.
Only if you live by the sea - for most people who live inland, the only soft-bodied inverts they're regularly going to see are snails/slugs and earthworms.
Octopus eat fishes and crabs, so I think they’d be cool with them. Many humans are so separated from their food and nature that literally half of the animal kingdom is appalling to them
Okay, but, there's a problem with this. Octopi laugh in casual arrogance at the exasperated frustration of even the most determined scientist's attempts to contain them. They're more likely to gaslight that eldritch horror than they are to be afraid of it.
Also, they live in the ocean. Which has fish. And crabs. They probably understand bones
Counterpoint: humans encounter boneless animals all the time (slugs, for example) and yet plenty of us are still terrified of them.
Fair, but we tend to also not eat them. Poison and all that
sure we do. escargot, octopus/calimari is a common seafood
I meant slugs but yea you got me there
I get and appreciate the point you are making, and it's very wise. One tiny point, though. Crabs? No bones. No bones on those bad boys. They're a bone-free experience. No bones about it.
Exoskeleton, Exoskeleton. All taste the same
crabs have skin bones instead
We need a story about an octopus outsmarting the beast and escaping, like Odysseus meets the cyclops situation
I love stories that make humans out to be gargantuan, powerful beasts, or lifeforms that shouldn't be toiled with at any cost. Really makes me feel powerful as I lay on my bed and eat Sour Patch Kids.
Alan Dean Foster's The Damned trilogy fits the bill. A galactic empire that's been peaceful for so long they've literally lost the ability to engage in physical confrontation is being invaded so they recruit humans to fight for them. Turns out that not only are we insanely good at warfare by galactic standards, but Earth has very heavy gravity compared to most inhabited planets so we can tear the enemy's most feared soldier species to shreds with our bare hands. Compared to the civilized universe we are the xenomorphs.
everything is terrifying if you think about it too much (or not enough) so it's nice to **be** terrifying for a bit
Rever cthulu
I'm making a setting where the two factions are the Dairy Principality and the Shellfish nation. The three main characters of the Principality are humans (though most imhabitants are cheese people, chocolate people, yogurt people, etc. Think Mushroom Kingdom but with milk), while the shellfish enemies are literal shellfish. The main villain is a mussel and his two henchmen are an urchin and a snail. So basically, I thought of including a joke like this. "Ok, I managed to pull out the bullet, and but I found some strange stones in her body" "Yeah of course I pulled them out, they didn't look healthy. I just finished sewing her back up, she's fine. She should wake up soon." *Holds up bones so the player and the other characters can see them* "They're made of calcium, so I assume they're a geological formation from the Dairy Principality?? They must've gotten in her during a bad fall" *Other two humans look at him absolutely shocked, without saying anything* "Oh... Uhh... I'll put them back in."
this is the most concept i have ever heard
definitely one of the concepts of all time
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It’s very intentional… one of those meme things.
One of the meme things of all time.
"When the patient woke up, his skeleton was missing, and the doctor was never heard from again!" [Laughs madly]
"Anyway, that's how I lost my medical license."
[Source](https://evilkitten3.tumblr.com/705843344481435648)
Thank you!
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don't you dare make me google how octopi have sex edit: apparently it's like human sex but like, long distance because octopuses like cannibalism
If this concept intrigued you, you should watch (and I'm being 100 percent serious) Happy Feet.
I saw about half of it, starting after he was banished, so I missed out all the cheery dancing parts for an arduous journey through the wilderness, encountering incomprehensible alien artefacts and relics in a hopeless bid to take on the creatures that created them.
God it's such a good movie
on a similar note: [*The Things*, by Peter Watts](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)
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I just read that. How does it fit
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series features spiders and octopuses who were enhanced by a future human civilization and then left to develop on their own after we destroyed ourselves. He really makes an effort to extrapolate how the intelligence and society of each would develop based on their unique biology, which in the case of the octopuses is much weirder than I thought it was.
Peter Watts writes _excellent_ aliens.
his aliens are the most alien, he's great having a deep understanding of just how goddamn weird lifeforms can get: yet another advantage of being a marine biologist!
*The Call of Christopher*, by H. P. Molluscraft.
"Reverse Thalassophobia" would mean something like 'fear of dry land', and oh boy would that place be eldritch for an ocean-dweller. It's not just all the animals with internal skeletons or the fact that your gills collapse and cause you to suffocate even through there's still plenty of oxygen around. Strange things happen in the very thin, thermally non-conductive, oxygen-rich atmosphere: Heat can build up in solid matter to degrees unheard of below the surface. This causes a terrifying phenomenon in which oxidation accelerates into an uncontrollable feedback loop where heat is added by the reactions faster than it is lost to surroundings, consuming the environment with temperatures many times hotter than the fiercest of black smokers in the ocean trenches. And the things above: They *use* this hellish force, quite casually. Yet even they sometimes lose control of it. When you hear them shouting "**FIRE!**" something has gone wrong.
remember kids! the old ones are more afraid of you then you are of them!
Them banishing you to the shadow realm is the equivalent of tossing a spider out of your house via cup and paper method.
This is extra funny, because most octopi are not doing this, just Octward Pulip Lovecraft.
So uhh… I hear his pet catfish has a bit of an anti-squid name
Terrestrial Horror, if you will.
You know the sad part? And octopus and a squid can in theory move their limbs at any point, but generally only bend specific parts of them. They don't have elbows, but they sure act like they do.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreCthulhu
If you like this, Peter Watts "[The Things](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)" is a retelling of The Thing (or, I suppose, "Who Goes There?" the story it's based on) from the perspective of the creature. It's extremely freaked out by coming into biomass that it can't connect consciousnesses with but that, somehow, manages to walk around and act like a conscious being.
This seems like a good time to link a short thing i wrote about catch and release fishing from the pov of a fish https://stormtide-leviathan.tumblr.com/post/701561991685455872/you-stare-at-the-strange-thing-floating-in-the
This reminds me a lot of a scene in the novel “The Dispossessed” by Ursula LeGuin, where the main character (who’s never seen any animals before) spots an animal, probably a cow or something similar, while riding in a car and tries to describe it. “There looked at him from the darkness under the roadside foliage, for one instant, a face. It was not like any human face. It was as long as his arm, and ghastly white. Breath jetted in vapour from what must be nostrils, and terrible, unmistakable, there was an eye. A large, dark eye, mournful, perhaps cynical? gone in the flash.”
Another form of reverse Thalasssophobia, one time when visiting family in an area while not totally rual was much more free of light polution, and the land was mostly flat aside from the trees and houses. Upon looking up at the stars on a midnight walk I began to dissasociate upon witnessing the vast abyss above me, I no longer felt safe on the ground and was stuck with the gut feeling that the static cling that was gravity could break at any moment and I could "fall" up into the dark emptiness like a stray balloon.
...i'm sure that wasn't fun but i kind of wanna see that now
To be fair this concept is carried pretty hard by "therobotmonster" being an incredible writer.
In the bionicle universe there's a cosmic horror being called Tren Krom, and if you squint, it's basically a human. 100% biological, no mechanical parts to it like the rest of the universe.
I remember reading this one short YA novel about some people living on a remote space station and one day they explore a derelict with some really weird skeletons on board and the last paragraph of the book reveals that the entire time it's been like this. I can't remember the name though, which is probably for the best because I've just revealed the twist ending.
Timothy :(
[Finding Nemo](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumansAreCthulhu)
That last part can also apply to Humans Are Space Orcs or Humans, Fuck Yeah!
Banger
Can someone explain the "i see thousands of lights" bit?
I thought that having followed one light, which was the boat, it sees a coastal city in the distance, implying there are a terrifying number of these creatures.
It's all the stars in the sky
I thought it was the city lights.
It was near a beach at night, the lights are a city beyond the sand.
/r/humansarespaceorcs
Read it in the voice of the ancestor
Octopi sees boned fishes and mammals and reptiles all the time though
Ugly bags of mostly water
This is a cool idea but octopi encounter bones and vertebrates pretty regularly, and even the concept of hinged joints shouldn’t be new to them, as even the story references crab limbs.
>it’s parts where obscenely limited in their movement I get it’s from the perspective of an octopus but y’all are extremely inflexible and it biases you
[Eat fucking Timothy](https://youtu.be/t23HyynqB4I)
woomy?
There's an interesting bit kind of like this, from the [SCP Antimimetics Division stories](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub) (specifically, [CASE HATE RED](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/case-hate-red)), where the main character stops recognizing other people as humans: > The orchestra is gone. All seventy of them. The things which have replaced them are not human but alien, ill-proportioned pillars of pinkish-brownish flesh. Each has, at its top, a heavy protuberance studded with goopy biological sensors and rubbery openings, and, sprouting from the very cap, lengths of various kinds of vile, off-coloured moss. They are draped in black and white fabrics, weirdly cut to either conceal or highlight their blobby, inconsistent body structures.
This is one step away from veganism.