Unintentional Uncanny Valley / Fan Works

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• Advice and Trust: When Ritsuko ups Rei's emotion-dampener medication in chapter 8, Rei crosses the limit between "emotionless girl" and "creepy person who doesn't seem quite human":
  If Doctor Akagi had been watching, she might of [sic] noticed the careful rigidity that Rei held her face to melt swiftly into a far more eerie stillness.
• Harry Potter is creeped out by conjured items in Barefoot because of his ability to read the history of anything he touches. Conjured items only have a history of minutes or hours and it weirds him out, especially since he can often tell the history of something from before it was made (such as how old a tree was when it's wood was used to make a wand).
• Bird features Charnel, a woman who has been radically altered by a wetware Tinker into some kind of bio-mechanical doll-person. She is also stated by the author to be an expy of the Plain Doll, so this makes a lot of sense. Charnel herself is fairly pleasant and benign, though unsettling at first.
• The fic Brony Steve Makes Out With Fluttershy. As part of a deconstruction of the typical Wish-Fulfillment Self-Insert Fic, the protagonist realizes that the cartoonish ponies look rather grotesque with their half-horse, half-human features. The author has also dedicated a blog post to this issue.
• In spite of being heroes, the main characters from Children of an Elder God creep most of people out because they can tell what those teenagers may look human but they're something different and very dangerous.
• Deserted Distractions: After confronting the shadow demon, Yami Bakura's hold on his "human form" slips, and Tea has this reaction to him.
  This being was still human-shaped, still had the pale skin, brown eyes, and dead-white hair of the boy standing next to her[...]but he looked almost...stretched. Too tall and not wide enough, like a badly enlarged photo. His fingers were too long and too much like claws. His skin didn't seem to be quite opaque. If she looked hard, Tea could see the guttering shadows through the outline of his form.
• The characters in Ed, Edd, n Eddy: 20 Years Later EP have their kiddie heads on realistic adult bodies, which has an uncanny effect.
• Getting Back on Your Hooves has this inuniverse with Checker Monarch. According to Word of God, the fact she's a Sociopath in a society where compassion and love are basically hardwired into everypony's genes makes her Lack of Empathy this for anyone who she lets see it.
• In The Gloaming, a Twilight rewrite, vampires' status as an Inhumanly Beautiful Race falls into this—upon meeting Alice, Bella thinks that she looks more like a porcelain doll than a normal person.
• Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters:
  • Upon first seeing Phobos, Jade notes that at first glance he seems the most normal of his court. Then she looks into his eyes, and sees an emptiness in them that proves there's something off about him.
  • Even before they see him, Alborn and Miriael note that something about the sound of Drago's voice is just wrong.
• In How the Light Gets In, following Laurel's death a funeral home prepares her body for viewing by family. Dean and Thea were both deeply unsettled by her appearance, likening it to a wax figurine. As Thea puts it "all the makeup in the world can't make a corpse look like anything but a corpse." She then has to desperately try to forget how Laurel looked in the morgue and funeral home, finding both appearances too disturbing.
• Loopers caught up in The Infinite Loops will sometimes muse on how non-looping individuals and even nonawake versions of looping individuals are disturbingly static and predictable. On the flip side, young loopers or particularly competent nonloopers will sometimes view Loopers as strange eldritch forces inhabiting the bodies of their friends.
• Kimi No Na Iowa: Summoned/Manifested shipgirls, especially those that have only returned recently, can be creepy. They blink and breathe too regularly or not at all. They lack the unconscious tics, twitches and microexpressions normal humans exhibit. They turn and move too sharply and jerkily. Also inverted, though, in that Summoned/Manifested find Natural Borns too humanlike as to be discomforting.
• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Paul's eyes turn golden after he's hit by lightning, which weirds Ringo out “because he looked so goddamned inhuman.”
• G1 My Little Pony "twinkle-eyed ponies" get this treatment in A Mighty Demon Slayer Grooms Some Ponies. As their eyes are just unmoving gemstones, their faces seem creepily emotionless no matter what their mood is.
• The MLP Loops: This is what makes the Slavequestria iteration of Celestia so uniquely horrifying compared to the countless other "evil opposites" that surface throughout the Loops. Her personality and mannerisms are flawlessly Celestia... but she still rules over a society that is built on the worst sort of slavery.
• In Morphic, this comes into effect in Chapter 13 after Jean accidentally "evolves," causing her face and limbs to get out of proportion. The trope title is even stated word for word.
• In X-Men fanfic Mutatis Mutandis, Northstar is basically described as vampirically beautiful. Rogue notices when she stares at Northstar's face for more than a few minutes, he looks so eerily perfect that he seems creepy and surreal.
• Everyone finds Kaworu unsettling in Neon Metathesis Evangelion, whether it's his odd manner of speaking, unusual conversation topics, or constant smile. Furthermore, Maya is highly unnerved that in Sync tests his sync ratio never moves at all, something she finds completely inhuman as it would mean he's always focusing on the task to the exact same degree with the exact same success.
• Nebiros in New Dawn is already an outlandish looking demonic clown, barely even human looking, so it might count as an aversion, as he does not look human enough to qualify for the trope. However, it is played straight with his speaking patterns. He talks as a whole like a young teenager, has no sense of personal space, views reality as a game and is oh so enthusiastic in a very child-like way about what he does. And, suffice to say, he does not see anything wrong with being a serial killer: "Because its so fun, watching em flail about like a fishy!"
• Although a lot of it is heavily dependent on the individual writer due to the general nature of these works, the Newfoals (humans turned into ponies through a magical potion) will frequently give off this vibe to humans and natural born ponies.
  • In The Conversion Bureau: Not Alone and its sequel The Conversion Bureau: Conquer the Stars, the newfoals are able to get sad, scared and even annoyed and frustrated, but they can't get angry or assert themselves. The natural born ponies are revealed to be unsettled by this, while the humans are just put off by how the newfoals possess their former human selves' memories and none of their original personality.
  • In The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum, aside from being perpetually smiling, glassy-eyed Extreme Doormats with no free will or individuality (to the point where many characters liken them to zombies), TCB!Trixie also points out that every single Newfoal, no matter how long it's been since they were ponified, is a blank flank, and she treats it as the unsettling icing on top of the creepiness cake. It's basically Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul taken up to eleven and then some.
    • To a lesser extent, Comet Tail in the Asia Side Story finds regular earth horses to be rather unsettling and strange looking, though she notes they are still just somewhat better than the Newfoals. Another character named Sergei references this trope by name.
• Enforced in The Loud House fanfic The Nightmare House: The dancers in Lucy's nightmare have blue (later red), pupilless blue eyes.
• Invoked by Vision in Passion and Justice, having perfected the ability to speak in a way that's just off kilter enough to sound calm but faintly terrifying, which he uses when interrogating someone.
• A Quiet Valley, an The Owl House fanfic, has Luz's witch friends hit this for Camilla (Luz's mother), who finds their near humanness creepy when she notices inhuman things about them, like their eye color, fangs, and pointed ears and is a lot more relaxed around Vee's basilisk form which is far from human. Camilla herself isn't too thrilled that she's reacting like this, as said friends are also all lost and injured following The season 2 finale and the last thing they need is them realizing their very nature unsettles her instictively.
• In-Universe example in A Speeding Bullet: Night and Fog are so boring and repetitive- even having the same conversation every morning- that they give Taylor the creeps.
• Thousand Shinji: Asuka's secondary form is frightening because she looks like a demon... and her skin and hair's colors don't look natural on a human.
  My red skin. As in brilliant crimson, the colour of arterial blood flowing from a fresh wound, before clotting has kicked in. It was the sort of colour more associated with paints than with the spectrum of human flesh tones. It was unnatural and terrifying with its ultimate wrongness for it had not the same quality as painted skin either.
  The same went for my hair. While copper was an accepted hair colour, mine was bronze. Again, it wasn’t so much the colour in of itself that was wrong, it was the fact that it was on a human, because it didn’t look like some strange admixture of blonde and red that might arise in nature, but it looked like it was made out of actual strands of metal. It just subtly did not look right.
• In Through a Diamond Sky, Jordan takes the doppelganger issue mostly in stride...but is never entirely sure what to make of her husband's double, Clu.
  • The same author has Tron: Invasion (a very loose adaptation of TRON 2.0), where Jet and Mercury appear as this to each other. Jet observes that Mercury's face is a little too angular and her movements a little too precise to be human, while Mercury is vaguely put off by Jet's hair color, the lack of circuitry under his gridsuit, and the "strangely flat" quality to his voice.
• The Uncanny Danny is a Danny Phantom fanfic written with this trope as its core element.
• A few Mass Effect stories, such as the NSFW An Unusual Companionship invert this. To humans, asari are Blue Skinned Space Babes. But to some asari, human women are too similar to them while being different enough to creep them out.
• What About Witch Queen?: Most people are put off by snow horses. Inverted with Kai, though, who can't ride and finds his new Automaton Horse great.
  Kristoff: They're absolutely creepy.
  Kai: No, they're not.
  Kristoff: You're saying that only because you're a hopeless horseman and these are some automatons.
  Kai: Maybe. But I do like that they'll never kick me, or throw me off, or trample me, or generally act like jerks towards me…
• With Strings Attached: Brox looks and acts like a normal little child — until he/she starts acting his/her real age. Her/his whole mien shifts, which creeps out the four considerably.
• The Worm That Dorks: Izuku looks just a little off to anyone who meets him. Tokoyami describes it as his skin color being slightly off and that his body seems like it wasn't proportioned quite right. Also, Izuku has several lines on his face that look more like seams than scars.
• Xenophilia: Rainbow Dash and most other ponies find regular non-sapient horses creepier than humans, mainly because of facial expressions.
• This Bites!: The Self-Insert Cross experiences the world of One Piece through a realistic perspective rather than the manga style of the original series. This is especially the case when he encounters his first Fishman in Mock Town, where he sees fish scales in place of skin and warped physiology that pushes them more to fish than human. He has to remind himself that they are a race with their own society to break free of his uncomfortable feeling.
• Under the Northern Lights: In-universe, Spike perceives the nidhoggs as this — they're superficially very similar to dragons like himself, but with a too-flat face, too-small eyes, no limbs, and a pebbled skin that looks like scales but isn't, resulting a very unsettling feeling of subverted familiarity.
• What if the Yeerks Were the Good Guys? has an In-Universe example. The Quantum Kindred is described as looking like a mannequin with a face projected onto it, which freaks the humans out.

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