https://gellavonhamster.tumblr.com/post/826108501779791872
Sure! But keep in mind that I’m just some guy on the internet - my views are not law and come with no real authority. Don’t cite this to win an argument is what I’m saying.
Also, since the long version is a bit redundant, here’s a quick summary: Demons and fairies are weird, but can be fully understood. Eldritch abominations, by contrast, can never be FULLY understood. Being at least partially incomprehensible is literally the DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of an eldritch abomination. If you cannot say, “There is absolutely no way I would ever be able to fully understand what this monster is, even if I asked it every question I have and it replied honestly and explicitly in plain [insert language you are most fluent in here]”, then you do not have an eldritch abomination.
Demons and fairies may hide the truth from you, but the truth is still something you can understand if you find it. An eldritch abomination knows truths you will never be able to understand. That is the difference.
ALSO ALSO: SPOILERS FOR GRAVITY FALLS, OVER THE GARDEN WALL, AND AWFUL HOSPITAL IN THIS POST! READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL!
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BTW: this will get redundant.
Part 1: Appearance
Demons and fairies generally look PRETTY WEIRD. Since most of them are based on Pagan gods, they tend to look like a mix of man, animal, and sometimes even plants - horned and/or winged humanoids are particularly common. That said, they sometimes take on more abstract appearances - demons (and their good counterparts, angels) have at times taken the forms of bizarre geometrical shapes.
Weird as they may look, the appearances of these monsters are understandable. Hell, old grimmoires practically wallow in intensely detailed descriptions of how hideous and weird demons look. Some demons have so many strange features listed that they sound downright ridiculous - like a sparkledog that was designed to disgust its audience. People aren’t just capable of describing demons and fairies, but that description is often half the fun of them as a monster.
Demons and fairies tend to be shape shifters, which helps them hide their monstrousness when they want to ensnare their mortal prey. “The devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape” after all. The fact that they sometimes hide their true forms DOES NOT mean that you can’t understand their true forms - it just means they don’t want you to know about what they really are.
The Beast from Over the Garden Wall is a horned humanoid who cloaks himself in shadow. When properly lit, you can see that his body is covered in screaming faces and seems to be similar in texture and color to the strange trees he makes out of dead people. This is weird, yes, but you can understand it. I have successfully described the Beast’s appearance without leaving anything important out. This is something you can do with a fairy or a demon. You cannot do it with an eldritch abomination.
Bill Cipher is a two dimensional creature that looks like a pyramid with one eye, stick finger arms and legs, and a top hat. Sometimes he turns red when he’s angry, and he can turn his eye into a TV screen sometimes as well. Nothing has been left out here - I just successfully described Bill Cipher’s appearance.
An eldritch abomination is usually impossible to fully describe. At best you will get a few juicy details, and even then the writer of the story will almost always qualify those details by saying something to the effect of, “Well, it sorta looked like a squid, but that’s only because ‘squid’ is the only word I can think of that comes even a tiny bit close to describing it, and ultimately isn’t very accurate.” You may notice this as being basically the opposite of how demons and fairies are described - instead of piling on the details, we keep the details vague and ominous. This is also why it’s infamously hard to show an eldritch abomination in a visual story - it’s kind of hard to make something indescribable when you also have to make it something people can literally look at.
Some people get around this by having the eldritch abomination have multiple forms, some of which are understandable - albeit still strange. Even then, though, it is often said that the form we are looking at is just part of the whole - the rest of the monster is so alien that we literally cannot see it.
Cthulhu, one of Lovecraft’s least bizarre looking monsters, appears on the surface to be pretty comprehensible: he’s described as a humanoid with a cuttlefish for a head and a dragon’s wings. Yet “The Call of Cthulhu” repeatedly insists that that description is utterly inadequate - it’s like saying a car looks like a cube; yeah, there are some similarities and it might give someone a vague impression of what it might look like, but the most important details are missing. The cuttlefish head, the wings, the humanoid body - those are not the important details, they’re just the only details anyone was able to put into words. The reality of what Cthulhu looks like is far to strange to put into words - that’s one of the most horrifying aspects of him.
The creatures in Awful Hospital are a good example of the “comprehensible in some forms” take. The main villain of the comic (so far), Dr. Phage, has had at least three different forms shown so far: a cartoonish form that matches the style that the main character is drawn in, an even cruder cartoonish form when we follow Dr. Phage from his own perspective, and a far more detailed an horrifying form when he directly threatens the real life readers of the comic. The comic makes it clear that none of these is the “real” Dr. Phage, and yet none of them are “fake” either - they’re all just facets of the same being, and they probably aren’t even ALL the different “Phages” out there! We’re only seeing a fraction of the little creep.
Part 2: Origin and Motives
Demons and fairies have fairly solid origins in their original folklore. Judeo Christian demons are a race of immortal beings that live in, and are native too, the Afterlife (more on that in a minute). They pissed off God and were turned into monsters. Fairies are similar - hell, sometimes they’re even cast as sort of the neutral party between angels and demons. Both have fantastical powers because they live outside of the mortal world. Both like to travel to the mortal world to mess around with humans. All of this is understandable - it is weird, yes, but there are no key details being left out.
Weird and powerful as demons and fairies may be, they have rules they follow - and a human can beat them if they know the rules. Demons can be defeated by showing faith, or having a pure heart, or just by being a clever bastard (or a good fiddler). Fairies can be bested with iron (which is poisonous to them), distractions, or, again, being a clever bastard. The rules a demon or fairy follows are rules that a human can understand and exploit - the human just has to learn those rules first.
Some stories may hide the origins and/or motives of a demon/fairy, but that does not mean their origin and/or motive is incomprehensible. It’s just not something you’ve learned yet.
The Beast lives in a land called the Unknown, and has a lantern that contains his soul in the form of a flame. To stay alive, he has to light the lantern with oil made from Edelwood trees - which are in turn made from the corpses of people who die in the Unknown. The Beast’s motives are pretty clear: he wants to lead people to their deaths, so he can make more edelwood trees and use the oil to keep his soul alight. Weird? Yes. But it’s understandable - no key details have been left out.
(I mean, the nature and motives of the Beast are so easy to comprehend that they’re repeated, like, once every two episodes or so. There are three different songs about this subject in the special alone!)
Bill Cipher is a dream demon who can enter people’s minds - memories, conscious thoughts, dreams, anything that goes on inside a person’s head. He can do anything a person can think of, which is fairly unlimited as far as powers go - but so can anyone else in that realm, including normal people. Despite his unlimited powers in his home realm, Bill REALLY enjoys experiencing the mortal world - he likes having a physical body, but he can’t have one without the help of others. Bill’s motives, when revealed, are clear: he wants to merge the two realms so he and his friends can experience the physical world WITHOUT human aid, and without limiting their own powers. Weird, yes, but understandable.
Eldritch Abominations can be a little inconsistent on their origins - there are some whose creation is fairly understandable. That said, there are just as many that just seem to exist without explanation - some even predate existence as we know it. They can also be inconsistent on their motives - some eldritch abominations seem fairly understandable in their desires, like Nyarlarthotep, who can give some pretty clear descriptions of what he wants and what he’s doing to get it.
Still, in both these cases Eldritch Abominations tend to be only partially understandable. It is just as likely that an eldritch abomination’s origins and motives will be utterly inscrutable as it is that they will be something we can comprehend - and, in my opinion, it’s preferable to keep them inscrutable.
Cthulhu was born from various space gods in Lovecraft’s mythos, though how exactly that creation process worked is never elaborated on, and it would not be unreasonable to believe that Cthulhu’s creation is a lot stranger than the simplified account related by humans makes it out to be. His motives, however, are DEFINITELY inscrutable - we know that Cthulhu wants to awaken (at least some of) the other eldritch abominations in his setting, but Lovecraft emphasizes that no one knows why or exactly what that entails. We do know that it will end the world, but that isn’t the “why” of Cthulhu’s plan - hell, it’s implied he might not even know (and definitely doesn’t care) that his plan will result in the end of the world. The chaos and destruction he wreaks on humans is a side effect of his goals, not the desired result - and it’s one he probably doesn’t even notice!
Dr. Phage technically wants to “heal” people, but it becomes increasingly clear that his idea of “healing” is pretty far from what humans would consider healing - in fact, it on several occasions seems to involve ignoring or even outright killing his patients (sometimes temporarily, sometimes not). While at times it seems like we can almost understand what he is trying to do, the comic is quick to show us a new perspective on things that makes us put Dr. Phage’s motives into question. Numerous other monsters like Phage also talk about time as if it is an irrelevant concept - we’ve never seen Phage’s origin, partly because there may not actually BE an origin as we’d understand it.
Part 3: Habitat
Fairies and demons tend to live in another world. What exactly that world is in relation to our world can vary. Sometimes they simply live in parts of the earth humans don’t, like underneath the earth or deep in otherwise uninhabited woods. Sometimes they live in, well, another plane of existence - a “parallel universe“ or an “alternate dimension,” or however you want to phrase it. Things will work differently in the demon/fairy world than they do in the world of humans - there are different flora and fauna, different laws of physics, etc. However, there are still rules, and they are rules humans can understand.
More importantly, the world of a demon or fairy tends to provide some vital function for the human world - and, as a result, is partially defined by how humans understand existence. In folklore, fairies and demons inhabited the afterlife - i.e. the place people’s souls go when they die. More specifically, Demons lived in the bad afterlife - Hell - where wicked souls are sent for eternal punishment. Fairies, by contrast, live in a realm that’s sort of the middle ground between the mortal world and the afterlife, simply help sort people into the more permanent afterlives instead. More modern works switch things up a bit - sometimes demons and fairies live in realms of the psyche, like a Plane of Pure Evil or the Land of Dreams. When not themed around humanity, the demon/fairy world is still tends to be defined in human terms, and thus is comprehensible if still strange.
The Beast lives in a forest called the Unknown, which is pretty clearly an afterlife of some sort. We know this because it’s filled with goddamn ghosts - one of the first named locations within the Unknown, a town called Pottsfield, is literally taken after a term used for graveyards. The human protagonists of the story, Greg and Wirt, enter the Unknown while they are in the process of drowning - their entire journey is basically a long, complicated test to determine whether they will live or pass on. Other characters in the Unknown are similarly in between states of life and death - even the anthropomorphic frogs our heroes encounter are shown entering torpor, which, for those who don’t know amphibian biology, is a state in which an animal decreases its bodily functions as much as it possibly can without dying. Another character in the story is also named after a spirit that guides Dante through Heaven in The Divine Comedy, one of the most well known stories about traveling the afterlife in the Western World. The Unknown is strange and mysterious, yes, but its mysteries can be solved - in fact, our heroes solve every mystery they come across. It is an afterlife and it is understandable.
Bill Cipher is stated to be a dream demon. He moves freely throughout the thoughts, memories, and dreams of humans. He threatens to give people nightmares. When humans enter his realm to stop one of his plans, they realize that, since it is a dream, they can control it to their advantage just as Bill can - they literally defeat him with lucid dreaming. All of this makes it pretty clear that the show is not lying to us when it says he lives in a literal Dream World. While Bill may predate humanity’s dreams, his realm is still defined as being the one where our dreams exist - and as such it can be understood and controlled the way dreams are controlled. It isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t incomprehensible. It’s just weird.
The world of Eldritch Abominations, by contrast, is often implied to be reality itself - just parts of reality humans are blind to. Many eldritch abominations come from the vast reaches of outer space - the final frontier that humanity has yet to explore. If they do inhabit a different “world,” that world is often implied to be more real than ours - or, in other instances, our world is simply a small part of theirs. The Eldritch Abomination is more likely to be the native than the alien - and it’s humanity that is the newcomer stumbling around in their playground.
An Eldritch Abomination’s home will rarely serve any purpose in forming the human world - when there is a connection, it’s accidental, and it is humanity’s world that is subservient to the abomination’s. Eldritch Abominations don’t run the afterlife or the land of dreams - they rule parts of existence we can’t concieve of, and run kingdoms that are alien and indifferent to humanity. An Eldritch Abomination’s home is not defined in human terms - it is defined in its own terms, which are more often than not inscrutable and irrelevant to humanity.
Cthulhu’s city of R’lyeh has architecture that defies gravity, the laws of physics, and most of all, accurate description. It is also portrayed as being older than anything humanity has seen, and that means it is MORE a part of the planet earth than anything humanity has made. As alien and impossible as R’lyeh’s strange geometries seem, they are more true to how our planet works than any structure made by humanity. The “laws” of reality that humanity claims they violate merely show the limitations of human understanding, rather than the “unnatural” nature of the city.
The Hospital of Awful Hospital is strange - it has a Morgue that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a cafteria that connects to a bizarrely cartoonish and grotesque meat factory, and the only door that leads outside the Hospital opens to an endless void of emptiness. Everyone inside the Hospital (except our human hero, that is) believes that this is not only normal, but OBVIOUSLY normal - it only makes sense that the Hospital and only the Hospital exists, and the hero is treated like an idiot for thinking there is such a thing as “outside” or “time.” Despite how strange and nonsensical the Hospital is - despite how much its existence defies the audience’s ability to understand it - everyone in the story acts as though the human is the one that’s being ridiculous and nonsensical. The human is the outsider, and the human’s idea of reality is the one that is false.
Conclusion: Why the Confusion?
Eldritch abominations are fucking hard to write. There is a simple reason for this: most writers are human, and writing a creature that exists in ways humans can’t understand is difficult for a human to write, because it is hard to write something you don’t understand. It is especially hard to write eldritch abominations well, as you have to walk a thin line between giving enough details to keep your audience interested while making other details incomprehensible to keep the creature as alien and impossible as, well, possible. There’s a reason Cosmic Horror never became the main mode of horror stories despite existing for over a century: this is not easy to do well.
However, when done well, eldritch abominations can be really fascinating - and because they’re so hard to do, most people aren’t jaded by them because there aren’t that many examples of them in fiction. They can feel refreshing and new in ways older monsters - like demons and fairies - can’t. Eldritch abominations are, dare I say… trendy.
There’s a prevalent trend in a lot of modern writers - and especially in a lot of literary critics - that new is good and old is bad. The more obscure and unused an idea is, the better it must be - and likewise, the more an idea has been used, the more it sucks. I think there’s a kernel of truth to this mindset - if an idea is used so often that no different ideas are used in tandem with it, that idea grows stale. A person can love chocolate more than life itself, but even they will throw up if they’re forced to eat nothing but chocolate for ten years straight (and probably die, but that’s breaking the metaphor). That doesn’t mean old ideas are inherently bad, however - an idea just needs to be done well.
The Beast and Bill Cipher - and other monsters for that matter - felt new because they were done really, REALLY well. They weren’t another in a stream of shitty demons that take the forms of gray skinned women and do vaguely unsettling things before trying to kill people for no reason - they were weird and different and complex. They took a bunch of old, forgotten ideas and reminded us why those ideas WORKED. And because they worked well, people assume they must be something new.
Because only new things can be good, you see.
It feels flashier and trendier and cooler to say Gravity Falls has an eldritch abomination in it, than to say it has a boring old demon in it. But I think that doing so is kind of a fib, and, more importantly, pretty disrespectful to all those hardworking demons that laid the groundwork for such a good story.
I guess, to put it more succinctly: we should all just take a moment to thank Satan.
https://gellavonhamster.tumblr.com/post/826108501779791872
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susandennis
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