Too Strange to Show

The universe, and beyond, is scary. Things that exist beyond your wildest dreams may be an Eldritch Location, an Eldritch Abomination, have Alien Geometries, or be Black Speech. You Cannot Grasp the True Form, so there is A Form You Are Comfortable With. Sometimes, though, even the false form, what we grasp as best as we can, or even the simple explanation of what "it" is cannot be depicted or understood, because that is so complex for our tiny little minds.

This is when a being, a force, an object, an idea, or a place becomes "too strange to show". It's just not possible to depict it, see it, or even describe it through normal means, according to our mental faculties, or laws of physics.

Other times, if one should look upon or hear this concept, they may Go Mad from the Revelation because These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

If it's a place, we can see the entrance and/or the exit, but what is inside cannot be shown. If this takes place in the afterlife, then what we see may be the Afterlife Antechamber.

If it's a concept that something, or someone, transforms into, we can see the effects before they do so, but never the concept itself, visually.

For a being, this is often explained by the entity being a Brown Note — it can't be depicted/described because the characters physically can't perceive it without injury or it would harm the viewer. Other times, their minds will simply blank out the idea, as if they see or hear nothing; if the concept is harmful enough, there may be a residual feeling of terror or ill, even though their conscious mind perceived nothing.

For something that is spoken, it can either be Black Speech, The Unpronouncable, or a Brown Note (once again). It may even be the three tropes mixed together, where an unpronouncable speech (to all others except the speaker) causes harm, yet it can be understood as malicious (although not understood in a communicative sense) in some odd way.

Sometimes the idea may just be limited by the budget of the production, and leaving the idea up to the imagination of the viewer is more effective than putting something lackluster, or something that doesn't match the seriousness of what the character is attempting to describe, together. Although, this can backfire, and showcase how low, or lacking the budget of the production is.

See also Offscreen Afterlife, where the afterlife exists in the setting but the work avoids describing it, and Ominous Visual Glitch, where something is powerful or dangerous enough to distort its depiction in the work.

Although this overlaps with You Cannot Grasp the True Form ^note A character sees another's form or a concept as something else, because their mind is protecting them, or it can only be understood that way at their level, A Form You Are Comfortable With ^note A character changes their form to be less harsh, and Brown Note ^note A concept, being, or place is mind- and reality-bending, enough to cause injury or involuntary incontinence, this is more when the idea is so strange, mind-bending, and complex that it cannot be depicted within the confines of normal reality or a show's budget, by some external representation, or even at all. Also overlaps with Take Our Word for It, partially. ^note An event, person, place, or thing could be described in truth and in full, but, if it's able to be, because of its complexity, or because of how horrific it can be, would you really want to know the truth, rather than a comfortable lie or a representation?

Because some of these examples involve a climax that use this trope, all spoilers are unmarked!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ah! My Goddess: The denizens of Heaven and Hell — Belldandy, Urd, Skuld, Peorth, and the others, included — are this. They have taken on a human form because their true form would drive any mortal insane.
• AKIRA: Tetsuo becomes this at the end of the anime film, after losing control of his psychokinetic powers. What we see of him before he's permanently whisked away by the Espers is a horrible, twisted, pulsating, blood-vesseled, and growing mass of flesh and organs that threatens to consume everyone and everything. What we see later isn't described, and even what we are shown is too simple to describe, but it's implied that Tetsuo became a God of a brand new reality.
• Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon: Mimikyuu is a Pokémon who uses a cloth covering, resembling a distorted version of a Pikachu, to hide its true form, and doesn't let anyone see it without it on. Meowth is able to catch a glimpse of its true form sometime in the anime, and the result temporarily kills him.

Film — Animation

• The Princess and the Frog: Strongly implied, since we never see it, but we do see the way into it. When Tiana shatters Dr. Facilier's talisman, the voodoo demons that he's been in league with, to take over the souls of New Orleans, come to collect their payment. Unfortunately, with the talisman in pieces, they come to collect him and drag him off to The Other Side. All we see of that place is a glowing green portal that strongly suggests an Acid-Trip Dimension.

Film — Live-Action

• Event Horizon: When a spaceship, the eponymous Event Horizon, goes missing, another rescue ship sent out finds that the Event Horizon crew accidentally discovered how to connect to another dimension with their engine, and they found that the dimension on the other side can only be described, as best as they can, as "Hell". Of course, we, the audience, never see this dimension, but we see its effects on the crew. They started to mutilate and massacre themselves, with the captain recording an Apocalyptic Log, where he shows that he has gouged out his own eyes.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: When Indy, his now-insane mentor, Harold Oxley, and the group they're forced to follow, return the titular skull to where it belongs, inside of a temple, it's revealed that the species that the skull belongs to are archaeologists, beings that have come here to study Earth's cultures. The reanimated aliens open a portal to an unknown dimension, and we are only shown the entrance to it, which is represented by a ring of light that pulls in anyone close by. When Indiana and the remainder of the group escape, they find that the temple was actually hiding what we would consider a 1950s-style metallic flying saucer, which flashes out of existence in our universe. Oxley, now back to normal, reveals that the aliens have returned "to the space between spaces".
• Lucy: When the eponymous character in the film accidentally exposes herself to a body-altering chemical (the natural form of which is produced in women to develop fetuses) because of drug traffickers, her mind and abilities increase a thousandfold every hour. Eventually, she ascends to a higher plane of existence, and phases out of our reality altogether and disappears, apparently becoming one with it. All we see before she does so is her body transforms (to our eyes) into an obsidian-like texture.
  Pierre Del Rio: [to Dr. Samuel Norman] Hey. Where is she?
  [Del Rio's phone vibrates, indicating a received message. He takes it out, and the screen glitches a bit, before showing one singular text message on black:]
  Lucy's Message:[sic] I am everywhere
• The Neverending Story: The Big Bad, The Nothing, is quite literally nothing, and as such, can't be shown. While the film does symbolise it using rolling clouds, the filmmakers stated that these clouds are not The Nothing itself, as depicting actual nothingness is not possible.
• Ethan, the Big Bad of Run Sweetheart Run, has pledged to hunt down the heroine until dawn. He has a face-off with Cherie in a church. The audience does not witness his monstrous transformation, but we do hear plenty of growling and we see Cherie's terrified reaction.
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Decker and Ilia (fused with V'Ger) become this when V'ger has fulfilled its original purpose (As Voyager 6, a fictional NASA space probe) and learned all that was possible to learn and know within our universe. Now it wants to return that information to its creator (as a whole). When Decker keys in the final upload code into V'ger, he fuses with Ilia and V'ger, becoming a brand new life-form that cannot exist in our reality, punctuated by it phasing out of our universe altogether. The only thing we see before they disappear is a massive expulsion of radiant energy.

Literature

• This is a common criticism of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, that the Brown Note Beings are barely described if not referred to as "indescribable.":
  • The Colour Out of Space: H. P. Lovecraft never actually describes the shade or type that the titular "color" is, only that it's clearly unnatural and unearthly. The Film Adaptation opts for magenta, justifying the choice as magenta is a color that does not actually exist on the color spectrum, but is merely what our brains default to when trying to interpret the wavelength.
• IT: IT's form on Earth, a large, spider-like creature, is informed to be the most our minds will let us perceive of IT. Indeed, IT's form on Earth is merely a projection of IT, and the main form of IT, the Deadlights, perceived as glowing fuzzy orange light, is said to be so incomprehensible that most suffer madness after witnessing them, if not outright die from the shock.
• Kushiel's Legacy: The True Name of God is first spoken in silence by a tongueless priest and is later perceived differently by everyone who hears it. It's written in the book as "_______!"
• Otherside Picnic: Many of the events and entities from the Otherside that Sorawo encounters are so strange and bizarre she literally cannot describe them, save for things like "Impossibly blue" to describe her altered Magic Eye. And in one chapter she encounters a journal by the mysterious Satsuki, and her magic eye allows her to read the text, implied to be Black Speech, which summons Satsuki or at least something in her form, that speaks to her.
  Satsuki: Let's —,—you, too.
  Sorawo: Huh...? (narrating) I hadn't been able to perceive her words. However, I had the impression that whatever she said was horrifying.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • Something more down-to-earth: The Doctor's name itself. One character, Clara Oswald, has seen and even was able to read it (in a history book about the Time War), but this was never revealed, and the action was undone by the Doctor breaking a time loop.
  • This was the reason that Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat declined to depict the Time War largely in the series, only showing the final days of the war in "The Day of the Doctor". They both felt they couldn't do the event justice because it was so apocalyptic that the setup given in dialogue couldn't be realized.
  • In the episode "Doomsday", The Void is a place that cannot be described through normal means. The Doctor says that nothing exists there; no up, no down, no dark, no light, no physics, not even time as a concept. All we see of it is a large white wall of light-emitting energy acting as a portal into it.
• Denji Sentai Megaranger: Implied with Electro-King Javious I, who is only shown by a singular eye on the main viewscreen of the Death Neziros space fortress, when communicating with Dr. Hilenar.
• Malcolm in the Middle: Again, a more down-to-Earth example than most, but still relevant; in one episode, Hal works for a long time on a large complex canvas of paint, seen only from the point-of-view of the canvas. His creation doesn't seem to meet his standards, and it's not until he places a few last dabs of paint on the creation that a metaphorical switch turns on, immediately becoming beautiful and grand to himself and the family. Unfortunately, the 2 feet of layers of still-damp paint under his creation have begun to loosen from the canvas and the entire sheet comes toppling down on Hal, with the painting never shown to the audience.
• Stargate SG-1: Conversed in "Wormhole X-Treme!" when Martin Lloyd, producer of the eponymous Show Within a Show, argues with the executive producer over just filming the reactions of his cast members to an undescribed alien spaceship because they can't afford the special effects. They end up filming an actual alien ship that Martin's fellow alien Space Navy deserters use to leave Earth at the end of the episode.
  Martin: We have to see the ship; it's crucial to the episode!
  Executive producer: Well, we're going to see it in their reactions. It's like, "Oh, my god, look at that ship. It's... indescribable." (gesticulates to demonstrate what he's talking about) ...All right, if you can do it for five thousand dollars less, you can keep it in. Are we done? I have a tee time.
• Star Trek:
  • The Q Continuum is so alien and beyond our understanding that those who are taken to it can only be shown a facsimile that they understand. In one Star Trek TNG novel, Data is shown the Continuum unfiltered, and he immediately overloads and shuts down from the visual input.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series, "Is There In Truth No Beauty?": The Medusans fall under this. They are formless beings, considered ugly by other corporeal races, such that any sight of them drives them mad (Some even dying from the shock). However, their thoughts and personalities are the complete opposite, they are peaceful, never wanting to harm others. (Unless necessary for self-defense.) The only thing the audience sees of the only Medusan featured on the show is a harsh pattern of colors filling the television screen, and nothing else.
  • Star Trek: Voyager, "Threshold": Tom Paris discovers how to travel past the Warp 10 barrier, and transcends into a whole other realm intersecting our universe. The only description that he gives when he comes back is that he's able to see everything and everywhere all at once. Unfortunately, the experience starts to mutate him into a reptilian creature. When attempted to be cured later, he abducts Janeway and takes the shuttle he used to perform the experiment. The only thing that the audience sees later out the shuttlecraft window, from Janeway's POV, before Paris returns to Warp 10, is multicolored streaks representing the stars whizzing past at blinding speed, that blend into white.

Radio

• Adventures in Odyssey: Whit, a devout Christian, tries to program his Imagination Station to show a representation of Heaven as a means of explaining how wonderful a place it is. Whit himself suffers a heart attack after entering the Imagination Station with the program running, one of Whit's friends attempts to find out what happened, and immediately requests the program be shut down before it goes very far, and states that Whit intruded on an area man wasn't meant to know until it was actually time. Eugene, in curiosity and a bit of arrogance, tries to view the program and is implied to have been shown a horrific vision of a black void that was Hell itself, which ends up being a step in his later conversion to Christianity. The program is ultimately deleted for being too dangerous.

Tabletop Gaming

• Dungeons & Dragons: The Demon Lord Pale Night appears as a humanoid figure within an all-concealing shroud, which is actually reality itself trying to reject her existence. Anyone who looks underneath either blanks out the sight or dies on the spot.
• Mage: The Awakening: The Language of Magic, High Speech, can't be understood or even perceived by non-mages; they hear distorted glossolalia, static, or nothing at all. Since the readers aren't mages, no examples are provided.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: The various Story Breadcrumbs and other lines of dialogue fully infer that the setting is full of supernatural elements, However, The Consortium is able to reveal what they've discovered through multiple Data Pads. One is Hinterland, a bleak landscape that is found through Another Dimension filled with unsettling Creepy Crosses. Another is the Mechanika Virus that was previously mentioned to have caused a pandemic across the world, with the repercussions of how the victims transformed weren't seen, but the details of how it occurred was explained in readable documents with Body Horror traits described. Nevertheless, The Consortium very obviously makes it their priority to capture and contain all the variants that were brought out by the Limen crater, keeping them in containment at their facility with a full report of their capabilities and the incidents each of them were involved in.
• Control plays this for a brief gag: the setting is full of extradimensional entities existing beyond human comprehension, but some are able to broadcast their identity in abstract visuals. One example is the The Board, who's a relatively communicative entity that projects themselves through the Astral Plane as an ominous, but comprehensible upside-down black pyramid, and transmits messages through a unique form of multiple-choice syntax, the result of them compressing their "hyperreal" concepts into words that can be easily understood by humans, whatever exactly "hyperreal" means. However, when attempting to explain the Objects of Power from their point of view, The Board very visibly struggles to put together a coherent description, before admitting as much and asking you to ignore their memo.
• EarthBound: Whatever the hell Gigyas has become, it's explicitly described as 'indescribable'. What you see is some kind of baby warped into an angry ghost - but how it actually looks and attacks is literally incomprehensible to the party, which is really bad because it justifies the massive amounts of damage they receive from attacks they don't even understand and thus cannot block or counter. And during the third phase, since they can't see the true form of Gigyas, whatever he does puts him out of reach of all your party's attacks and they can't find him or connect their psychic attacks. By the end, you have to resort to praying to a higher power, one who is even stranger than Gigyas, to smite him.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind includes "Boethiah's Pillow Book", an in-game book reputedly pornographic in nature that a Thieves' Guild boss wants you to steal from the daughter of a noble to use as blackmail. As one might expect from the porn book of a Gender Bending Daedric Prince whose sphere is basically "god of Manipulative Bastard traits", the book is incomprehensible. Upon reading it, you get the message: "No words can describe what you see. Or what you think you see."
• Horizon Forbidden West: When exploring Ted Faro's bunker, you never actually see what became of Faro after his experimental immortality treatments mutated him into a monster, only a holographic diagram of the reactor room covered in the Meat Moss that he turned into. Only two NPCs witness the horror; the Ceo, who has been looking forward to meeting what he thinks is his god, walks into the reactor room for a few seconds, then walks out visibly disgusted and orders the entire room set ablaze. His subordinate starts out confused, then sees what the Ceo saw, before finally accepting her otherwise blasphemous orders.
• Myst: The enigmatic race known as the "Ronay" discovered how to create "linking books" that would transport one to other dimensions and universes, and a small contingent split off, to eventually arrive on Earth, calling themselves the "D'ni", after their world came under danger. The arbitrary language^note Not their conversational language used to write these books, the "Great Words", known as "gahrohevtee", describes the universe, its conditions, and what exists there. They have been described as extremely complex, almost "Kanji-like", and beyond concrete or even abstract concepts. Cyan, the creators of the Myst series, have never released any characters used in this fictional art of writing.
• Pokémon Sun and Moon: Mimikyu hides its true form underneath a Pikachu-patterned cloak. It is said anyone who does see its true form dies a painful death.

Web Comics

• Awful Hospital: The protagonist's inventory is depicted as a Video Game Interface Element, but she perceives it as a tote bag with ten infinitely large interiors occupying the same space.
  You were under the impression the human mind either just wouldn't process that sort of thing at all or would go mad from the attempt, but it turns out, it just sort of tickles a little.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Allison is shown the Shape of the Universe, the totality of space-time at once, a Brown Note of literally cosmic magnitude. It begins with multicolored light breaking out of the page layout, but switches to a Reaction Shot of Allison covering her eyes before they boil out.

Web Original

• Parodied by Neil Cicierega, who remixed Lenny Kravitz's "Fly Away"; his version gets increasingly more absurd until it starts to turn horrific, and the author is shown to be a demon-like creature whose face doesn't show up correctly in the video.

Web Animation

• Pokétoon: As in the anime, Mimikyuu is a Pokémon that wears a cloth covering to hide its true form. Scraggy has to deal with this. One time, Scraggy manages to look underneath, turning skinny and blue from shock when it sees Mimikyuu's true form.

Western Animation

• Futurama: The Three Shorts episode "Reincarnation" does this three times using a different Art Shift to hide what's being shown. It has a new colour in a black and white cartoon, a particle so detailed that it answers all scientific questions in a Retraux video game, and an impossibly beautiful dance in a Limited Animation '80s anime.
• Gravity Falls, "A Tale Of Two Stans": Implied to be what McGucket saw when he was drawn into the Universe Portal. Not only is he shocked and traumatized by what he sees, but when he tries to answer Ford's question about what he saw, he speaks backwards at first!
• The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest: In one episode, Jonny makes a point of asking Hadji what the Astral Plane is like. Hadji ponders, "How does one describe the indescribable?" Jonny states that nothing is impossible, and suggests wiring Hadji up to QuestWorld to have the system show them what Hadji is seeing. They depict myriad colors over a rendering of Hadji's face, but even then it is implied that this is merely all the VR system is capable of depicting.
• Reboot: At the end of the series premiere, to stop Megabyte from escaping Mainframe, Bob goes through a portal connecting to the main supercomputer. We never get a description, but all he says is "It's got lots of RAM, incredible capacity, and you can access almost anything!"

Real Life

• The theory of higher spatial dimensions (i.e. 4th, 5th, etc.) falls under this category. As space as we know it has only three dimensions, it's impossible for us to fit another axis on the directions we know as X, Y, and Z. We can see the 3D shadow, or even pieces/slices, of objects from another dimension, but never the real object in full.
• There are colors that are impossible for humans to perceive. In fact, what we perceive are simply energy ranges on an electromagnetic spectrum; the same kind of energy that heats your food (microwaves and ovens), sanitizes equipment (ultraviolet) and sends information over the air (radio). So, really, all of these are too strange to actually show without some kind of representation.

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