Discussion Main / BotanicalAbomination

Would the Flood from Halo qualify?

I'm not sure that that would be a good idea, at least right now.

Mostly, there's plants and fungi, being both vegetative forms of life without strictly organized body plans, tend to "behave" in fairly similar manners — thus, a deliberately twisted and abominable version of either will focus on similar behaviors, similar forms of horror and, thus, similar narrative roles. A plant-based abomination and a fungus-based abomination will likely fill similar narrative niches and similar in-universe roles.

Also, plants and fungi are barely distinguished in fiction as is, and deliberately alien and monstrous forms of this trope blur the line between them even more. Most of the really alien, out-there, Meat Moss-ish versions of this don't really have more in common with fungi than with plants or voce versa, in the end — they're vegetative, sessile and non-strucutured lifeforms that grow, take root, infest and spread like horrific weeds or infections, but other than that they don't share much at all with actual vegetative lifeforms.

The E-Types strike me as fitting Festering Fungus more than anything else — probably more than any Eldritch Abomination subtrope, honestly; to be frank, I think that that term gets thrown around a bit too lightly sometimes — and the Flood seems to me to have more in common with slime molds or bacterial growths than anything else.

Perhaps, given some time, it may become apparent that plant-based and fungus-based abominations are used in different ways... but for now, I don't know if we should go and split fungi off into a trope of their own.

Got it.

The E-Types only seem to work in my opinion based on the fact that they LOOK human but are actually fungal factories and basically walking mold and CREATORS of walking mold.

Thanks, anyway.