This week we discuss the second Monstrous Archetype: the Twisted Reflection. As I talked about in Part 1, the Twisted Reflection represents a familiar evil, a sin committed by ones own society such as pollution or fascism, amped up to an extreme degree and thrown back at us.
This very often takes the form of an alien invader or intruder, because the purpose of such a monster is to teach a moral lesson… to place us as the victims of our own societies mistakes. I think for this reason it appeals to science fiction more than fantasy, because it is helped by a certain amount of feasibility. It is easier to believe in aliens intruding upon our real lives than in centaurs showing up at our local tavern.
Twisted Reflection Examples: The Martians from War of the Worlds, The Visitors from V, The Predator, The Locusts from Independence Day, Centaurs, Leatherface, The Vogons from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Common Features
- Represents a Flaw/Sin/Crime, something the mainstream society performs against a vulnerable group, usually human, possibly animal.
- Fascism, Pollution, Consumerism, Colonialism, Slavery, Experimentation, Waste Disposal, Deforestation, Hunting, Butchery, Animal Cruelty, Eugenics, Genocide, Demolition, Bringing Plague, Farming as Food Stock, Intoxication, Use of Chemical, Biological, or Nuclear weapons, etc.
- Technological or Physical Advantages that place us effectively at their mercy, or at least incapable of fighting toe-to-toe. Consider what tools were used in the original sin, and think of high tech versions of those.
- Great Vessels: Space ships representing ocean-crossing galleons. Filled with soldiers, colonists, maybe with room to capture slaves.
- Smallpox Blankets: Gifts that we don’t realize are hurting us, such as false medicine, technology as gifts designed to fail or placed as trojan horses.
- Weapons, Armors, Camouflage: Which completely outstrip our ability to attack, defend, or perceive our opponents.
- Natural Abilities: that simply make them different or better than us, such as regeneration, telepathy, great size and strength.
The one part I haven’t discussed yet that is extremely important to this type of monster is usually that they have weaknesses. Unlike many of the classic monster archetypes, Twisted Reflections are almost always overcome in the end, by understanding their weakness. As much as their strengths are amplified and their negative behaviors magnified, so too are the flaws that we share with them. Understanding those flaws, possibly by analyzing our own, is usually the key to defeating them.
- Weaknesses and Flaws: An exaggerated vulnerability reflecting our own.
- Biological Weakness: Vulnerable to disease, overdependence on technology, physically weaker
- Mental Weakness: Hubris, Arrogance, Pride, Makes them careless, causes them to underestimate resistance, a behavioral/honor code that causes them to level the playing field unnecessarily or making them overly predictable, fearful of true conflict or danger getting too near.
- Technological Weakness: Often vulnerable to primitive technologies (Our shields resist the most powerful laser in the universe but we never anticipated explosion-propelled lumps of metal…) A significant keystone flaw that one strike in the right place at the right time will obliterate, Vulnerable to EMP, Vulnerable to computer virus
Blending Archetypes
In situations where the Twisted Reflection really crosses over and combines with another archetype, they may lose their invader nature, and be more personal, reflecting a very individual kind of a crime.
Blended with Primal Predators: Consider the Xenomorph. Mostly it takes the form of an excellent Primal Predator but it also serves to evoke another very specific fear in both men and women: that of rape. This was actually done intentionally by creator Dan O’Bannon in such a way as to make men watching just as uncomfortable with their vulnerability to this form of assault and impregnation as the women might be. The Alien is physically overwhelming, but its most terrifying aspect is its tendency to bring any living being forcibly into its reproductive cycle by forcing a tube down their throat and planting an egg in their body. The egg hatches from their torso in a bloody gorefest in just as twisted a rendition of childbirth.
Blended with Corrupted Humanity: This one is pretty simple to follow, as corrupted human monsters are almost always prone to giving life and action to our darkest impulses. Going back to the Wendigo, they represent a fear of the corrupting nature of cannibalism.
Blended with Divine Enforcers: The Shoggoth from At The Mountains of Madness are right up there with Cthulu and Dagon as one of Lovecraft’s most notorious entities. They are keepers of an ancient city, punishing anyone who dare to tread into their domain, but they are also the result of a servant species engineered by the Old Ones breaking free and murdering their masters, so they represent a similar hubris to that of the scientists who created the africanized killer bee, and then let a queen escape containment like a bunch of morons, causing an unnatural being to invade the world, and many of my own childhood nightmares.
Let’s Make an Alien Invasion
First we’ll need to decide what kind of specific sin they will be representing. I want to come up with one that is maybe not used as often, or at least doesn’t have as many popular successful examples, so I’m going to go with Animal and Human Experimentation.
Their Methods: These aliens are visiting earth with the purpose of using humans as test subjects. Maybe it is for the same reason we like to test on pigs and chimpanzees, because about us is physically, anatomically, or genetically perfect for their needs.
I don’t imagine them catching us and putting us in cages for these experiments, because there’s not a lot of story that can happen there. Instead I’m going to look at things like the Tuskeegee Syphilis study, and other instances of human experimentation. Perhaps these aliens pose themselves as saviors, as bringers of advanced medicine and miraculous technology, or maybe they operate from behind the scenes, introducing the experimental compounds into a completely ignorant population.
Lets go with that: The Aliens will be secretive, existing in the shadows, using Earth as a big petrie dish.
Their Name: Again looking at most of the visitors we find that they are rarely named., The Aliens never see the need to explain themselves to us in detail, or give us a proper name. In situations like V, they have specifically chosen the disarming and friendly name of Visitors. We never get a name in ID4, but I refer to them as locusts. The Martians too are never really communicated with. Now these are shadowy aliens who try to hide. Those who know about them need something to call them by, but it should be something equally vague. I think I need to come back to this when I know more.
Their Form: I would imagine that the obvious strategy for aliens secretly infiltrating our society would be to disguise themselves as humans and blend in. However, I think that is super-boring and I want them to have a different solution. This means invisibility, or some other means of remaining unnoticed. Animal shapeshifting maybe? Maybe they are telepathically able to just force us to ignore them?
No, the more I think about it, the more I am really liking the idea of them disguising themselves not as humans to walk among us, but as animals… likely as beloved pets. This has the potential to get goofy, or to be extra creepy, so I should decide now how I want it to go.
So lets say creepy, and while I do like the idea of infiltrating pets, we pay a LOT of attention to our pets, so I feel like it would be hard to pass. Birds, however, are all around, and people mostly ignore them. Birds can watch creepily from a short distance and we barely notice. Birds can fly, escape, vanish among other birds, AND dogs can bark at them and it won’t be extra suspicious.
Also, there was a really spooky scene in the trailer for The Fourth Kind that shows an owl whose face is kind of belnding into that of a standard grey alien and… frankly it still creepys me the eff out to see the image:
So we’ll go with birds!
So we have a group of unethical alien scientists, disguising themselves as birds and performing chemical and biological experiments on whole populations. Anyone who noticed and started acting suspicious around the birds could be followed and vanished. It would make for a very spooky situation.
Back to the Name: Now that I know what they look like, I can better name them. They would be named by the few conspiracy theorists who discovered them and survived, so they couldn’t just call them birds, and something like “The Doctors” is too on the nose. Watchers, maybe? Something that reflects their unusual behavior? Follow Birds. Mimics? If they could mimic sounds the way a Lyrebird does, that would be a neat trick in their arsenal, and maybe betray their intelligence. Observers. I think I like that best. The Observers.
The Fatal Flaw: At this point this seems obvious to me. The success of their experiments demands absolute secrecy. As such they can vanish a few individuals who threaten to expose them, but if it got out of hand… if a big enough splash was made to taint the experiment, they’d have to essentially vanish. It wouldn’t even have to be proven, just get enough people talking about the idea and they’d have to fade away for a while and give people time to forget.
And that is the creepiest part, I think. Defeating them means driving them off, but you can’t follow them, you can’t track them and ever make sure they are gone for good. All you can do is reach the point of exposure where vanishing you would be more suspicious and draw too much attention, so the only thing left is for them to just… go away. The birds scatter and the odd behavior is not seen anymore. But you don’t know if they are just moving on to another community, or waiting for people to forget. They might even still be there observing, just acting more like actual birds.
No satisfying explosion, no certainty that they are ever truly gone. And if you were the one that exposed them, you can probably bet that they are going to be keeping an eye on you for the rest of your life. Maybe to make sure you don’t come upon any more of their operations. Maybe waiting for an opportunity.
Conclusion
What can I say, except I promise my next monster won’t have a beak or be bird-related, lol.
If you happen to follow along with the process, and design any monsters using the tools I have provided, I would very much love to hear about them, so please feel welcome to share!
Next week I’ll examine the Corrupted Humanity and we’ll look at building a classic monster-movie monster.
See you next world!
—Charles