Shadowgirls

See? Nonviolent methods work! One convert already!

I'd assist with coming up with campaign materials, but I really need the bathroom and I just can't get the wife out of there...

Everytime I think of underwater civilizations, I think of the movie 'The Abyss'.

Maybe we just need James Cameron to threaten them with a nuke.

Love that movie! Did you ever see the NTI designs that Moebeus did? Amazing-looking things; beautiful and utterly alien things like squids made of light. I mean, how often do you see aliens that look like aliens might do?

Aaand instead, Cameron went with bloody ET in a neon bedsheet... pfffttt... then again, this is the man who put a giant anorexic dinosaur into the Alien series...

Well... If I remember correctly, the reasons they were changed was simply due to budget constraints. While today it wouldn't have been a big deal... Back in 1989, that would have been quite the feat.

I liked the Alien Queen.

Someone's got to

I kid, I kid. Sorry, I'm one of those movie fascists who gets all het up about straying from the original movie. It just seemed to me that the original alien was this evil blob of living death that nothing could kill, and that after seeing hundreds of them shot to bits by Bill Paxton and his foulmouthed cohorts they had to up the ante by making an anorexic dinosaur for Ripley to fight because they weren't scary anymore. At least Alien 3 went back to original formula

WHile I do like Alien 3, I know I'm in a minority there.

Aliens was interesting as it took an horror film and into an action film. (Something that at the time, has never been done before.) It's a notion I can appreciate. For example, everytime I think of the movie the Grudge or the Ring... I always daydream about after the fifth or sixth death, the people there would decide to make a phonecall and then the scene switches to Janine answering the phone "Ghostbusters, whaddya want?" Or watching the Blair Witch, and the next person the damn witch runs into has a chainsaw for a hand.

There is a great appeal to seeing something frightening and supposedly unstoppable getting it's deserved ass kicked.

It's a bit of a WWE mentality, but to quote Tony Stark "That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."

It especially hurt with The Grudge because, at least in the American version, the protagonist was played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. All through the damn movie my mind kept screaming, "Why are all these people so scared? Buffy the Vampire Slayer is right there!"

I kept waiting for her to make a snappy one-liner and start kicking ass, but it never came. Disappointed...

Maybe it's a touch of the Lovecraft in me, but I like the idea of man having something out there to put him in his place, because bugger all else does... I mean, we ride roughshod over the enviroment, we slay one another at the drop of a hat, are filled to the brim with superiority because we can turn forest into pasture, break atoms apart for energy and inflict our rule on our fellow man, and the only thing that gives us pause is the occasional natural disaster. We are lords of all we survey... on the surface at least. Because despite all this, we're still afraid of things; be they rational or irrational. If we lose our fear of what lives in the dark, or what others may think of us, or our worry at what might be, we'd be extinct in a decade, tops. Fear should never be slain... because it keeps us alive. We can only let fear die when we cease to be a stupid race.

Plus I'm entertained by the idea of all our mighty technology falling flat when confronted by a creature that uses none whatsoever

The thing is...

Ever since high school and all through college and afterwards, I have heard NOTHING but those kinds of stories. Where humans are insignificant and always are the weaker species due to the writer's environmentally liberal guilt. Whether it's f@#king vampires supposedly being at the top of the food chain (ala Anne Rice), or Aliens and Predators killing us and we can't stop them (Alien 3, 4, AvP2), our own devices ironically killing us (Terminator and the Matrix), aliens or monsters killing us, without us standng a chance (Independence Day, just about every ghost and Godzilla movie or story out there, not to mention every single incarnation of my beloved Transformers before the 2007 movie), and of course... And goddamn zombie movies that doesn't star Simon Pegg. I can count on my hands the stories that eventually didn't devolve into "humans suck because we suck."

And the writers thing they're being deep because they're revealing this to us "uneducated and unknowlegable deck scum". It's like the literary equivalent of the internet argument. Except it's been going on for centuries.

Call it personal pride in my spieces, but I don't believe we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Mach Sabre wrote:Call it personal pride in my species, but I don't believe we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

I think being able to split an atom puts us up a couple rungs on the importance ladder myself.

However we don't need any cosmic all-creature to put us in our places, hell we don't even need machines or ourselves to do it. We can and regularly are brought down by the simplest creatures on this planet. All it takes is for something already deadly to mutate even a little, and we would have a massive plague that would nearly wipe us all out. All that from some semi-live critter of microscopic proportions.

When you get down to it, I prefer the movie monsters.... they are certainly a hell of a lot less scary then what really IS lurking in the shadows. You can take a pulse rifle to a Alien, a Super X to a Godzilla, or some thermite to a machine.... but what can you do against a plague?

I recall another good sci-fi series where a group of different alien races faced a far superior and deadlier one in great space battles. They discovered Earth in their region and decided to inform us humans of the impending doom and ask for us to assist (they figured as a low-tech race, we could probably provide simple troops or something).

What they found was that even the weakest of healthy humans was far superior in strength and toughness to any other alien member of the group. We give them a friendly slap in the arm and it would break in 3 places! The foe they faced had psychic powers as well, so they figured they'd better get one of the races on their side with some mild psychic power to see how easy it was to probe us... The thing screamed and said we we're going to kill them all (the beast/animal in all our subconcious).

They thought we were they're saviour to fight against this race and handed over technology for us to get up to scratch. In less than half a year we'd not only caught up with their technology but we'd improved upon their laser weapons, shields and all sorts of other military equipment.

We kicked they aggressive Alien's arse from here to the black stump and suddenly they found that we were the ones to fear.

Human's %#@*ing RULE!

Charles wrote:I recall another good sci-fi series where a group of different alien races faced a far superior and deadlier one in great space battles. They discovered Earth in their region and decided to inform us humans of the impending doom and ask for us to assist (they figured as a low-tech race, we could probably provide simple troops or something).

What they found was that even the weakest of healthy humans was far superior in strength and toughness to any other alien member of the group. We give them a friendly slap in the arm and it would break in 3 places! The foe they faced had psychic powers as well, so they figured they'd better get one of the races on their side with some mild psychic power to see how easy it was to probe us... The thing screamed and said we we're going to kill them all (the beast/animal in all our subconcious).

They thought we were they're saviour to fight against this race and handed over technology for us to get up to scratch. In less than half a year we'd not only caught up with their technology but we'd improved upon their laser weapons, shields and all sorts of other military equipment.

We kicked they aggressive Alien's arse from here to the black stump and suddenly they found that we were the ones to fear.

Human's %#@*ing RULE!

Sort of reminds me of the Predator: Concrete Jungle game. It was awesome.

Mach Sabre wrote:Call it personal pride in my spieces, but I don't believe we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

I think our scientific advances, the feats of engineering we produce, and particularly the plethora of arts, music and literature humans have created definately proves we're not insignificant. We're a mite arrogant though; we think we know everything and know exactly what's best for the planet. We're a teenaged species... we're running amok with dad's car keys, going to parties and drinking until we puke, having casual sex and just not paying attention at school enough. I reckon we'll grow up a bit and become a mature, responsible people. I certainly don't think we're a hopeless species like some writers do. I just like the fact that we're not masters of all we survey; we're still afraid of crocodiles, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves (or even teeny-tiny animals like diseases like Tain pointed out)... whatever. They're nowhere near as advanced as us, yet a quick nibble here, a claw there, a minor infection everywhere, and we're just plain ol' hamburger meat wrapped up in a package that's sometimes a little awkward to get the goods out of. And regardless of our intellectual superiority to them, unless we're packing the right tools, the simple animal will best us almost every time. That's what I liked about Alien the most; that in the end, when you wipe away all the asteroid mines and the deep space vehicles, we're still just another animal that can be preyed upon. Mr Shark doesn't need to split the atom to bite our arse off at the end of the day. Now when some aliens turn up in big ol' spaceships and start deathray-ing just us because we're almighty noobs incapable of making deathrays, I like seeing those kind of jerks getting sent home by sweary action tough-guys. Guess I'm the kind of person that roots for the shark in Jaws

And as for vampires being at the top of the chain... only if it leads into a clothing store or some place where they can moan all day about being living gods...

I'm a big fan of the Dresden Files book series (not so much the TV show that got cancelled off the sci-fi channel after one season), and I kinda like the way they've handled this problem. The narrator often gets into the 'masquerade' that all the wizards, vampires, fairies, and assorted demons undertake, and two details keep popping up:

1) It only works because the humans WANT it to work. The reason that people haven't figured out about the supernatural world is because they really don't want to think about that sort of thing, and if they actually TRIED they could probably figure all this stuff out relatively quickly; the few normal humans who have been exposed and not able to go into denial have adapted very well.

2) The protection afforded by the masquerade works both ways. Yes, it keeps the really, really nasty entities like the dark gods and faerie queens from going on mass-murdering sprees (at least ones that look supernatural in nature), because they know the rest of the supernatural world will turn on them. However, it also keeps the six billion violent, mob-prone humans from breaking out their silver bullets and flamethrowers to slaughter the less godlike members of the magical community.

There IS a definite food chain, and humans are not at the top, but they're certainly not at the bottom, either. Individually, we are victims, but it is acknowledged that this is largely our own fault, as in point 1. We are victims only because we refuse to admit there are things out there preying on us, and even individual humans, armed and educated, can be a dire threat. As a species, we are terrifying.

Involving human authorities in a supernatural dispute is forbidden because it tends to end with the humans panicking at the sight of monsters and killing everybody, just to be safe. There is a cult consisting of people possessed by Fallen angels, and the DANGEROUS members are the ones where the human and demon are partners, rather than the Fallen calling all the shots... the Fallen bring power and knowledge, while the human brings the ability to adapt to new situations and a healthy dose of common sense that the incredibly arrogant Fallen lack. Those members where the Fallen is completely in control are considered expendable pawns by the more human members.

Humans may not be the scariest things on the block, but they are considered pretty damn scary. Personally, I think it's a happy medium.

I tend to think that individually, humans are weak and basically worthless when going up against nonhuman things. No individual is actually the sort of incredible athlete, genius, or whatever that you find in literature. We are physically fragile; easily sickened, worn down by a few hours of activity, in constant need of food, delicate enough that we are easily harmed by virtually anything and take days if not weeks or months to fully recover from most injuries- indeed, most can even be fatal without treatment. The smartest examples of humanity wrestle for months with single problems, and then find themselves tripped up by minor issues if they don't spend further months carefully checking over everything. A few brief experiences- mere minutes or even seconds- can cause permanent severe mental scarring. If left alone for extended periods we become increasingly irrational. Physically, mentally, emotionally, the human being is not a robust or particularly impressive creature. Which is not to say that we suck in any of these categories, but we have serious limitations.

Collectively, though, humans are terrifyingly strong; there is nothing we cannot do, given cause. We can and have lost horrifyingly large fractions of our population to various disasters and rapidly bounced back in a mere generation or two. We fling millions upon millions of warriors at our enemies, in some cases killing more than a quarter of our own populations to achieve our objectives. We cling to complex beliefs for centuries- yet drop them in mere years when practicality demands it. We work together to build devices and infrastructures which completely remake the nature of our world, each person doing just a little bit more to rewrite everything in humanity's image. We explore all mysteries meticulously, expand to all possible locations rapidly, exploit all available resources ruthlessly, and extermine all enemies without remorse or regret.

I don't doubt that even the best human might not measure up to some supernatural or alien being... but the human race is as well-designed as any viral organism, and we can and will survive almost anything.