The Aesthetics of the Unknowable

Cthulhu isn't scary. Sure, the idea of an unknowable elder god who's schemes have defined all of existence and are impossible to understand and the mere attempt to do so is going to end in, at best, death and, at worst, insanity is scary, but Cthulhu is not scary. Cthulhu is a silly looking tentacle man.

It is hard for humans to write about the unknowable. By the very ways we create art, making art of something that is completely abstracted from our reality is difficult. It's hard to make something you can't parse. In reality, the best art of the unknowable we can create are series of unrelated shapes and colors. The second any part of it makes sense is the second it's no longer alien.

As a result, we have a habit of picking things on Earth to use as the basis for our eldritch horrors, most often deep sea animals: especially squid and octopi, as the terrors of the deep sea are the closest thing to a true unknowable horror we have on Earth. Octopi are intelligent, very much so, but the way they think is foreign to us. They're a solid basis for eldritch horror.

Yet, we fail to go for something true alien. We humanize the idea of an eldritch horror. Notice that a certain iconic monster from Dungeons and Dragons is shaped like a person. They have defined arms and legs and heads, just with the addition of tentacles. Is this scary?

We have a habit of this. Mushrooms are alien to us, but mushroom-people are almost always mushrooms with stumpy little legs and little arms with cute little mushroom fingers. It's easier to see them as cute than it is as a weird alien being so wholly different from us that the fact we can communicate at all is a miracle.

What's the point of the unknowable being so...recognizable? Perhaps I am the only one who thinks that unknowable eldritch horrors from a reality out of time should look as weird as they think. Turning them into the planet of hats robs them of being anything more than just another bad guy. And that's not to say there's anything wrong with that. I like my squid people too. I just wish we had our horrible alien eldritch monsters too.

But how do you communicate the idea of something that is not of this world? My best advice: make something impossible. Something that couldn't possible exist, and then turn it into an all knowing scheming mastermind. The Bodyless Ones of Neurim are memetic thought viruses (they exist only as thoughts) that built an interstellar empire. The Abathethi (also of Neurim) only exist in two of our world's dimensions (they appear flat).

The point of all this wasn't to crap on squid people. Again, I like squid people. I just feel that squid people are pigeonholed into the role of "servants of the great old gods" when they're really best used as weird guys that want to eat your brain.