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beccaelizabethlate night Friday.
Monsters vs Aliens
What’s the difference?
Front page of notes I made at home:
Aliens
GURPS Space has an interesting little classification
Outsiders: a minority group within a human majority. There’s mutual ignorance. There’s also potential for exploring the treatment of human minorities.
Rivals: equal and if not opposite then different enough for friction. Often exaggerated human cultures or aspects of personality or classic deadly sins. Star Trek does this a lot.
Insiders: these are the majority. They may or may not know about humans, but why should they care? Farscape does this.
Monsters: the old reliable grr in the dark. Need no motives, allow no understanding. Also don’t need to be more than one of them, whereas alien cultures tend to happen species sized.
And of course there’s the Orson Scott Card hierarchy of otherness
Utlanning: human of other city on same world
Framling: human of other world
Raman: human of other species; can empathize with, understand
Varelse: Animals, no conversation possible, cannot understand
Djur: dire beast, irreconcilable enemy
The lines are in the perceivers not the perceived. No intelligent species goes from Varelse to Raman, the ones giving them that label come to the crucial understanding and realise their own error in labelling them.
I made those notes for the Aliens vs Monsters panel, but other people made points before I out loud spoke.
This panel was interesting to me because it called something a fundamental Star Trek vs Doctor Who difference that I just thought of vaguely as Good SF Stories and thought happened everywhere. Either my brain need better filing system or I need to rewatch a bunch of stuff.
Basic theory:
What’s the difference?
Monsters eat you. Aliens team up. Possibly to fight the monsters.
2 aliens have to work together to defeat monster.
DW have monsters that eat you anyway.
Monsters are phobias and nightmares
Aliens may be simply other
Rather than others with legendary meaning
DW aliens look human. Are aliens.
Different means monster, xenophobic.
ST aliens have own culture.
Meet monsters, realise they’re aliens.
DW depth is playing with nightmares.
PC reckon ST prissy.
Monsters make screams, Aliens have a culture.
ST aliens we don’t remember because there’s nothing to do with your life.
DW monster catalyses human relationships.
B5 aliens are all aliens
Resolution: getting along.
All as bad as each other?
Humanoids vs Blobs
Creature from the Pit
Double reversal, blob turns out to be ambassador, then still kills.
DW has code dealing with aliens.
End of the World, Doctor says they’re people.
Monsters from the unconscious
Enhance that message.
Distinction: do we plan to understand.
Audience mention of Orson Scott Card hierarchy of otherness.
Lot of things, WE are monsters
Even compared to creatures
People motivating things be monsters.
Humans become monsters when engaging witht hem ceases to be fruitful [?]
Or when someone decides engaging isn’t fruitful, then they become monsters.
Monsters useful for children. Fright can’t be articulated. Monster book, pretend to be monsters. Monster kids can *use*.
Monsters can be fought and defeated.
ST says monsters can be your friends.
Monsters: forces of nature
Aliens: moral beings, people. Difficult to make truly alien aliens. … define alien.
Harder on screen, quick concrete interaction. Give them a face.
Unseen is most alien.
Sentient shade of the color blue :-)
DW not monsters: Ice Warriors, Raxacoricofallapatorians.
Goes the other way: Silurians
Bad guys in historicals: as scary as monsters.
Aztecs as aliens.
SF story moments in alien culture.
[BE wants to take some time poking that thought. But see definitions above where aliens are the ones you team up with. Not understood, but understandable.]
Genesis: Daleks, monsters, Davros, alien
Daleks political representations, nazi in a tank.
Can work together? Aliens. Won’t? Monster… And the Doctor becomes a monster, messes them up.
PC: RTD keeps saying don’t follow the Doctor as a moral leader. Doubt and question him.
PC: Monsters are *about* human fears. Aliens are about human politics.
Mythos: fear of the foreign, fear of the big empty.
Horror monsters = fears.
Aliens not understandable. [?!]
Alien from ‘Alien’ is animal; Predator chooses.
Engaging with, understanding – control via name.
[If you know what it is, if you understand, you have control, which links to the old fairytale rule about knowing a name to control something.]
“And the darkness has never _____ it”
Translated as ‘understood’ and ‘defeated’ – because the word means both.
Monsters come back because he hasn’t understood. He fights to understand.
[The Doctor. Though I might add that getting closer to understanding in horror books always means getting closer to becoming the monster. What gives the monsters nightmares?]
Treats as monster what he failed to understand.
Monsters you don’t understand desires or moral framework, you defeat it.
Human villains, not monsters.
[Countrycide, why Gwen needed to understand]
War: see enemy as monster, can fight. See them as humans and stop.
[No Mans Land audio gets in to how that habit of perception can make monsters of soldiers.]
Midnight: is it more of a monster because we know so little? Monster under the bed, the thing you don’t see. Fellow travellers become monsters.
Fear of Unknown => Cliffhangers.
[BE reckons guessing how it resolves is part of mastering the future, making it known, so of course cliffhangers have to be a bit simple]
Animal noises, screams & baby sounds
[is the whole of the note, there was a discuss about unexpected hedgehogs I think it was, noises that hit your buttons but come from unexpected sources]
Quatermass recs. Name straight out of the phone book.
Monsters as parts of us.
Look like human = alien
Look like monster = monster
Some change when discovered
V has culture and individuals
But = basic human fear, so monster
But then there’s a nice one, so NOT monster
If you can find a nice one they’re not monsters.
[hmm]
TV guides, anything with a mask = monster.
Look like us but act like monsters
Monster argument “squabbling rubber”
Do we see monsters communicate among themselves.
PC: If they were truly alien we wouldn’t be scared of them
[see logic about aliens being either ones we team up with or politics or just not parts of the human psyche and human fears. If they’re alien they’re not fears they’re not scary.]
Monster label we give after we decide to shoot them.
Monsters, one offs, aberration of nature.
Aliens, natural evolution
Parasitic: which is monster? Controlled or controller?
Stargate and DW
Usually no consciousness without host.
Trill, nice alien parasites.
Fomasi as monster -> alien; it’s communication that crosses the line.
Whedon dichotomy, soul = free will
[discussion skimmed past much complexity there]
Primate intelligence is primarily social. We negotiate, we include in language.
Monsters cannot negotiate but have intentionality.
Capacity in ourselves to be intentional but not social.
Monster as child. Unsocialised. Wants but doesn’t empathise.
Frankenstein’s Monster => innocent.
JK Find monsters boring, wants to explore aliens.
Monster story, story happens between people *facing* monsters.
PC: Monsters are about people.
/panel
Monsters vs Aliens
What’s the difference?
Front page of notes I made at home:
Aliens
GURPS Space has an interesting little classification
Outsiders: a minority group within a human majority. There’s mutual ignorance. There’s also potential for exploring the treatment of human minorities.
Rivals: equal and if not opposite then different enough for friction. Often exaggerated human cultures or aspects of personality or classic deadly sins. Star Trek does this a lot.
Insiders: these are the majority. They may or may not know about humans, but why should they care? Farscape does this.
Monsters: the old reliable grr in the dark. Need no motives, allow no understanding. Also don’t need to be more than one of them, whereas alien cultures tend to happen species sized.
And of course there’s the Orson Scott Card hierarchy of otherness
Utlanning: human of other city on same world
Framling: human of other world
Raman: human of other species; can empathize with, understand
Varelse: Animals, no conversation possible, cannot understand
Djur: dire beast, irreconcilable enemy
The lines are in the perceivers not the perceived. No intelligent species goes from Varelse to Raman, the ones giving them that label come to the crucial understanding and realise their own error in labelling them.
I made those notes for the Aliens vs Monsters panel, but other people made points before I out loud spoke.
This panel was interesting to me because it called something a fundamental Star Trek vs Doctor Who difference that I just thought of vaguely as Good SF Stories and thought happened everywhere. Either my brain need better filing system or I need to rewatch a bunch of stuff.
Basic theory:
What’s the difference?
Monsters eat you. Aliens team up. Possibly to fight the monsters.
2 aliens have to work together to defeat monster.
DW have monsters that eat you anyway.
Monsters are phobias and nightmares
Aliens may be simply other
Rather than others with legendary meaning
DW aliens look human. Are aliens.
Different means monster, xenophobic.
ST aliens have own culture.
Meet monsters, realise they’re aliens.
DW depth is playing with nightmares.
PC reckon ST prissy.
Monsters make screams, Aliens have a culture.
ST aliens we don’t remember because there’s nothing to do with your life.
DW monster catalyses human relationships.
B5 aliens are all aliens
Resolution: getting along.
All as bad as each other?
Humanoids vs Blobs
Creature from the Pit
Double reversal, blob turns out to be ambassador, then still kills.
DW has code dealing with aliens.
End of the World, Doctor says they’re people.
Monsters from the unconscious
Enhance that message.
Distinction: do we plan to understand.
Audience mention of Orson Scott Card hierarchy of otherness.
Lot of things, WE are monsters
Even compared to creatures
People motivating things be monsters.
Humans become monsters when engaging witht hem ceases to be fruitful [?]
Or when someone decides engaging isn’t fruitful, then they become monsters.
Monsters useful for children. Fright can’t be articulated. Monster book, pretend to be monsters. Monster kids can *use*.
Monsters can be fought and defeated.
ST says monsters can be your friends.
Monsters: forces of nature
Aliens: moral beings, people. Difficult to make truly alien aliens. … define alien.
Harder on screen, quick concrete interaction. Give them a face.
Unseen is most alien.
Sentient shade of the color blue :-)
DW not monsters: Ice Warriors, Raxacoricofallapatorians.
Goes the other way: Silurians
Bad guys in historicals: as scary as monsters.
Aztecs as aliens.
SF story moments in alien culture.
[BE wants to take some time poking that thought. But see definitions above where aliens are the ones you team up with. Not understood, but understandable.]
Genesis: Daleks, monsters, Davros, alien
Daleks political representations, nazi in a tank.
Can work together? Aliens. Won’t? Monster… And the Doctor becomes a monster, messes them up.
PC: RTD keeps saying don’t follow the Doctor as a moral leader. Doubt and question him.
PC: Monsters are *about* human fears. Aliens are about human politics.
Mythos: fear of the foreign, fear of the big empty.
Horror monsters = fears.
Aliens not understandable. [?!]
Alien from ‘Alien’ is animal; Predator chooses.
Engaging with, understanding – control via name.
[If you know what it is, if you understand, you have control, which links to the old fairytale rule about knowing a name to control something.]
“And the darkness has never _____ it”
Translated as ‘understood’ and ‘defeated’ – because the word means both.
Monsters come back because he hasn’t understood. He fights to understand.
[The Doctor. Though I might add that getting closer to understanding in horror books always means getting closer to becoming the monster. What gives the monsters nightmares?]
Treats as monster what he failed to understand.
Monsters you don’t understand desires or moral framework, you defeat it.
Human villains, not monsters.
[Countrycide, why Gwen needed to understand]
War: see enemy as monster, can fight. See them as humans and stop.
[No Mans Land audio gets in to how that habit of perception can make monsters of soldiers.]
Midnight: is it more of a monster because we know so little? Monster under the bed, the thing you don’t see. Fellow travellers become monsters.
Fear of Unknown => Cliffhangers.
[BE reckons guessing how it resolves is part of mastering the future, making it known, so of course cliffhangers have to be a bit simple]
Animal noises, screams & baby sounds
[is the whole of the note, there was a discuss about unexpected hedgehogs I think it was, noises that hit your buttons but come from unexpected sources]
Quatermass recs. Name straight out of the phone book.
Monsters as parts of us.
Look like human = alien
Look like monster = monster
Some change when discovered
V has culture and individuals
But = basic human fear, so monster
But then there’s a nice one, so NOT monster
If you can find a nice one they’re not monsters.
[hmm]
TV guides, anything with a mask = monster.
Look like us but act like monsters
Monster argument “squabbling rubber”
Do we see monsters communicate among themselves.
PC: If they were truly alien we wouldn’t be scared of them
[see logic about aliens being either ones we team up with or politics or just not parts of the human psyche and human fears. If they’re alien they’re not fears they’re not scary.]
Monster label we give after we decide to shoot them.
Monsters, one offs, aberration of nature.
Aliens, natural evolution
Parasitic: which is monster? Controlled or controller?
Stargate and DW
Usually no consciousness without host.
Trill, nice alien parasites.
Fomasi as monster -> alien; it’s communication that crosses the line.
Whedon dichotomy, soul = free will
[discussion skimmed past much complexity there]
Primate intelligence is primarily social. We negotiate, we include in language.
Monsters cannot negotiate but have intentionality.
Capacity in ourselves to be intentional but not social.
Monster as child. Unsocialised. Wants but doesn’t empathise.
Frankenstein’s Monster => innocent.
JK Find monsters boring, wants to explore aliens.
Monster story, story happens between people *facing* monsters.
PC: Monsters are about people.
/panel