Professional Lurker
I don't suppose a labelnote translation for the page caption would be out of the question for those who don't follow the Cthulhu Mythos?
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Maybe.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
So... what happened to that Fridge tab to this article?
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Tropes don't get Fridge subpages. These are for works.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Is there still some way we can keep the content from the deleted Fridge page? It was very interesting to read.
I reposted it as an Analysis page. I hope this loophole is perfectly legal.
Although I could only copy about half of the page, because of Wayback Machine's limitations.
Edited by AHI-3000
The Fool of Rage
I think this trope is an inversion of Eldritch Abomination in general.
Hey, I just wanted to point out: the Aztecs are actually more of an inversion of this trope than a played-straight example. Most modern scholars heavily question the traditional (Spanish) narrative of the Aztecs enthralled by returned white gods. For one thing, Montezuma didn't treat Cortes as a god—as Michael Coe pointed out, he treated him like an ambassador from a foreign ruler (which is pretty much what he claimed to be). As far as believing horses were centaurs, this is a bit of an urban legend. The Aztecs believed horses were a kind of deer, which makes sense because deer were the only kind of large, hoofed mammal they were familiar with. In fact, to this day, the Nahuatl language uses the same word (mazatl) for deer and horses (the Spanish called their own share of smeerps rabbits too, which is why jaguars were "tigers," pumas were "lions," and llamas were "sheep").
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Just so you know, this entry on the main page just got deleted.
As Above, So Below
Can we revert to the old picture of the fish and the scuba diver? I can't tell what the heck that new picture is supposed to be showing.
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No.
It's a human rider. With a riffle. As a Body Horror lightning-spewing Eldritch Abomination. Nemo pic was JAFAAC.
1. It's pretty much impossible to tell that the picture is of a human. Even knowing what it is, I still can't see how you're suppose to know that that's a person.
2. JAFAAC is for pictures of random people who are accompanied by a caption describing them as an example of the trope. The Nemo picture was showing an actual example of the trope.
3. Where exactly was the decision to change the image made? I can't seem to find an Image Pickin' discussion in the forum, which is where the change should have been discussed.
I agree with Jerrik. In the source code, there doesn't seem to be anything about an Image Pickin' discussion. Changing it back.
I have a great candidate for the image on this page! Or at least a collaborating image. Try this one!
It's not as cute, but even more completely appropriate.
Edited by Coherent
^^This is awesome.
Please join these multinational petitions against ACTA. Sign up now. Every voice counts.
> No humans you are the Old Ones. And everyone is very comfortable with that.
> http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/10439760/
Link is dead. Anyone have another copy?
SoYeah
Removed as WMG that has little to do with the topic:
- Wouldn't it be a great irony to most animals in these stories to find out that a good number of mankind's gods are based on animals?
- Don't even start on Furry Fandom.
- Or that a great many people crumble with fear and anxiety when encountering a single specimen of relatively puny animals (e.g. spiders and mice) that, possible venom and disease notwithstanding, pose virtually no credible threat to beings that lounge atop the food chain?
- The Onion: Single Bee Sends Gathering Of Humans Into Helpless Panic
- Only to Facepalm when, after seeing pathetic species like spiders seem to scare the living donuts out of us, we seem to have no qualms with threatening ones like lions and tigers. Going so far as to try and pet them.
- To be fair, no lion or tiger has ever been observed to have venomous teeth or claws. And if the spider is a black widow or you're allergic to bee venom, then yes, you have good reason to run.
- Worrying about venom is kind of pointless when an animal can smack your head off like a tee ball.
- People are scared of black widow spiders and venomous snakes because they can kill just as easily as a lion or tiger, yet they are tiny, harder to spot, and much more silent than a lion. As long as you don't let a tiger get close to you, you're probably pretty safe... but it's a lot harder to keep spiders and snakes away.
- This is ignoring the fact that spiders want nothing to do with people, and absolutely don't actively hunt us down. Not to mention how the damage an arthropod can do, even a deadly one, is played up for the below reasoning. your beloved hundred-times-inbred wolf can do vastly more damage than any spider.
- Also, they have the wrong number of limbs, no fur, no voice and no recognizable face. They're basically everything we're not, and all animals are scared the most by things that look the least like themselves.
- This is the currently accepted psychological thinking on the subject; that how scared we are of an animal is strongly correlated with how ugly it is and/or how unlike us it looks in terms of legs, arms, eyes etc. That's why few people are scared of chimps (for example), but plenty of people are scared of spiders (more limbs) or snakes (less limbs).
- So basically a spider is a little, Eldritch Abomination.
- According to the BBC documentary and book, Nightmares of Nature, the bite of a black widow is fatal less than 2% of the time with healthy adults (but WILL leave a heckuva mark). Not quite as horrible as most people think but don't intentionally get yourself bit (which one idiot in the documentary did).
- The Onion: Single Bee Sends Gathering Of Humans Into Helpless Panic
- Or birds. Birds are terrifying!
- Early man's gods were based on animals, yes. As far as we can tell, the carvings that cavemen made and carried with them were almost all based on predators and heavily pregnant women; these may or may not have been religious symbols. Mankind at that point had little power and stability; as humans evolved socially, going through the agricultural revolution and making relatively permanent cities, our gods became humanlike. While the Egyptian gods had animal heads, and a lot of gods apparently could shapeshift, and some entirely animal gods were sprinkled around in pantheons, humans as a city-living metal-working trading cropgrowing people tended to have very humanlike gods. Naturally there are exceptions, but in most cases even the animal gods basically lived and acted like the human ones.
- More often than not, the animal features of a deity were primarily symbolic, and perhaps a retention of earlier totemic practices. For example, the Egyptian god of the death and the underworld, Anubis, was represented as possessing the head of a jackal, an animal traditionally associated with death, in reference to his role as the psychopomp or "guider of souls". A Northern European equivalent was found in Odin's
ravenseight legged horse Sleipnir (the eight legs being the four pairs of legs of pall-bearers carrying a coffin to its grave); that Anubis actually bore a physical resemblance to his totemic animal was a matter of aesthetics, rather than spirituality. - "Ask people to come up with an animal god, and they'll give you a human in a bad mask."
- More often than not, the animal features of a deity were primarily symbolic, and perhaps a retention of earlier totemic practices. For example, the Egyptian god of the death and the underworld, Anubis, was represented as possessing the head of a jackal, an animal traditionally associated with death, in reference to his role as the psychopomp or "guider of souls". A Northern European equivalent was found in Odin's
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Absurdly long real life section
, started by Raso on May 11th 2011 at 3:42:38 AM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman