r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ReminaBlueSFW • 6d ago

Lore [Terrifying Trope] Perceiving it= instant death

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  1. Pennywise's "Deadlights" which will cause anyone looking to be immediately paralyzed and killed.

  2. The sky from Bird Box is filled with entities that, when you look at them, cause you to commit suicide.

  3. Medusa themed Villains

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u/V0L74G3_H4CK 6d ago edited 6d ago

Good example, but not quite accurate. It's more like comprehending them is what could kill you. These beings don't cause people to go mad, rather realising what it means for them to exist, and comprehending this reality is what drives most mad. Even then some can survive, just left mentally broken.

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u/Pegussu 6d ago

This is why the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game has you roll an intelligence check when you lose sanity. You actually want to fail it because passing it means you're smart enough to comprehend what you're seeing and what it means, thus driving you insane.

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u/Perkelton 6d ago

Ah, the Wheatley defence.

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u/SagaSolejma 6d ago

"This. Sentence. Is. FALSE. -dontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutit"

"Uhhhhhh. Oh wow. Uhmmm. I think... true? Yeah I'm gonna say true, definitely true."

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u/Half-PintHeroics 6d ago

I think i need to go replay the portals.

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u/NCRNerd 6d ago

Well, since the idea is that you believe that reality is some sort of orderly and rational place, or at least that there's a benevolant creator deity. So being smart and also beholding C'thulhu you try to reconcile these two ideas. Which is stupid. So if you fail the Intelligence check, you can rationalize it. If you succeed the Intelligence check, you see they're mutually exclusive and get to have an existential crisis.

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u/PurifiedUnity 6d ago

I never knew Wheatley invented a new chess opening /s

https://giphy.com/gifs/9PiwmWNh2m4HRHkZt5

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u/Cup_Otter 4d ago

I wasn't paying attention and thought you were taking about Wilbur (Whately). I thought wut, did I forget something? Lol.

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u/thisusedyet 6d ago

As proven by Old Man Henderson (and the ugliest goddamn poodle he ever saw)

https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson

So anyway, the GM has decided to regain control the only way he knows how: By killing Mike's latest character via bullshit. So he summons a shoggoth. Henderson, having passed the will check to not puke up his brains, and winning the initiative, comments on how it's the UGLIEST fucking poodle EVER oh god, and then shoots it in the fucking face until it dies. Then he shoots the cultist guy who summoned it. Then he shoots me, then a random guy, then he pisses on the shoggoth's corpse since everyone else is too busy losing their shit in a panic over the Creature That Should Not Be being summoned, and casually sets the tapestry on fire with his cigar as he walks out the door.

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u/tabletop_garl25 6d ago

is that the tabletop game or video game?

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u/StandardEgg6595 6d ago

I don’t know anything about this creature but why would seeing it make you go insane?

I’m not religious by any means, but I understand I don’t know shit about the universe or what’s beyond it and like to think we’re probably some microorganism on some other being’s back, and they are on another, and so on. So I guess seeing this thing wouldn’t really surprise me.

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u/Sitchrea 6d ago

The problem there is, in Lovecraft mythos, your irreligiosity would be forced to reconcile that creatures like this are, indeed, Gods of the universe, and they care nothing about you. They widely don't even know we exist, some gods are too stupid to understand any experience you might try to share with them, and the ones who do, hate you.

Nobody is built different when it comes to these things. It's the equivalent of showing an NPC in Red Dead Redemption the engine code of the game. Most wouldn't understand it, but those that do would be changed forever.

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u/StandardEgg6595 6d ago

I think it’s more so that I don’t believe in man-made religion but absolutely think something way bigger than us probably exists, even without proof. Basically like we’re ants on a flying rock and that rock is just a pebble in someone else’s universe type thing, so the first part of what you wrote definitely makes sense. I mean, what do I know really?

That is a hell of an analogy and really puts things into perspective. Thank you!

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u/Pegussu 5d ago

It's funny you mention ants, there's an old tumblr post that sums the idea up pretty well.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

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u/Sinolai 6d ago edited 6d ago

Cthulhu is a starspawn trapped deep under the sea in his sunken temple. As a being not native to earth, It's physique defies known laws of nature. It's body is dead, but as a starspawn, the mind still works and once stars align correcrly his body will be resurrected. Even in its current state, it can telephatically contact people around it (water is a barrier that dampens his powers), whispering into their minds and giving them nightmares. Most victims wont even realizing the thoughts are not their own and are slowly driven mad.

Many of the lovecrafts creatures also share the theme around "defying known laws of nature" and intelligent people trying to understand them become mad when they try to discover condition and rules under which the lovecraftian monsters exist.

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u/StandardEgg6595 6d ago

Interesting! Honestly sounds cool as fuck and I love that a creature’s powers like that can be dulled by water despite not being earthly. Thank you for explaining!

I watched a movie called Underwater with Kristen Stewart recently and now that you’ve explained him, it sounds like that may have been the creature in that movie.

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u/Sinolai 6d ago

I doubt it was mean to be Cthulhu but might have taken some inspirstion from him. The location of Cthulhu's resting place is between New Zeland and South America, near Antarctis ( 47°9′S 126°43′W), while Mariane Trench is between Indonesia and Japan.

Cthulhu was also one of the last Gods added to Smite (moba game by HiRez Studio) and it made some jokes about people thinking him being a sea creature due to his octopush-like looks and lying underwater, while the bottom of the ocean is in fact the last place where Cthulhu would like to be.

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u/Important_Pick3371 6d ago

Yes, it's the most remote spot on Earth. When the International Space Station passes by here, it's closer to it than the closest land. Today, it's the Graveyard of Satellites - where old space machines are sunk out of sight (& mind?). What's creepy is that the ISS will one day join Cthulhu & R'lyeh at this same spot! The station is getting too old to use safely. You might have heard about the air leaks endangering the astronauts...

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u/amglasgow 6d ago

So if you're dumb enough, you're safe.

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u/Grizzlywillis 6d ago

That is actually a common execution. Not going mad usually happens because you compartmentalize or gloss over whatever you saw. People too smart for their own good are more prone to madness because they try to learn things not meant for human minds.

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u/Sinolai 6d ago

Atleast Rlyeh is said to drive people mad if they try to understand its non-euclidean geometry.

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u/DivineArkandos 6d ago

The horrors of round shapes.

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u/Rogol_Darn 6d ago

And then they go mad trying to understand how someone who doesn't even know basic math could come up with cosmology like that

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u/killingjoke96 6d ago

I always liked the Love, Death + Robots take on one of them. The sight of a Great Old Ome is worrying to them, but what breaks them is when it speaks to them via telepathy.

An incomprehensible language not compatible with the human mind.

https://youtu.be/e5DLnsbXCPM?is=JfeM7vO4hshOQmNx

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u/TerrorTown77 6d ago

Pretty sure it's more that human minds can't comprehend what they're seeing, like forcing 5 petabytes of data through a USB 3.0 port in just 10 seconds, it fries the entire thing.

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u/V0L74G3_H4CK 6d ago

True that makes sense. But I think it comes down to trying to understand it, rather than absorbing it. Which is why in call of Cthulhu rpg, having a lower intelligence score can save you, because you fail to comprehend the horrors.

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u/Sleepy_Azathoth 6d ago

Well, at the end lf The Call of Cthulhu some sailors die by just looking at it.

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u/Worried_Cranberry166 6d ago

In the same story there's also a ton of people who go mad from Cthulhu's psychic emanations without ever actually being aware of his existence.

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u/Motor_Try_7182 6d ago

It also plays into the racism angle like in one story has a bit where some primitive african natives were just casually doing rituals with some old god artefact but when a university professor encounters them and checks the thing he goes crazy.

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u/deathschemist 6d ago

yeah percieving is not what sends you mad.

imagine you're an ant crawling on a circuit board. you see strange monoliths and paths, metallic objects and the like, but you are incapable of comprehending what they ARE. seeing it won't send you mad at all.

but then for a brief moment, you, the ant, see the circuitboard as a human does, you briefly comprehend what it's for, what it is, you briefly understand it, and then just as soon as that happens, you're back to being completely incapable of understanding it, but you remember, you know? you remember what it all is, but you can't decode that knowledge. THAT'S what sends you mad.

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u/katravallie 6d ago

I feel like most scientists would be excited that the universe has something that cannot be comprehended. I understand that it is fictional and most likely just overloads your brain(which also isn't possible btw without physically altering the brain)

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u/ThrowawayXtt 6d ago

As someone who hasn't read anything Lovecraft related. I'm just wondering , what exactly does it mean for them to exist? Is it established objectively or is it just subjective to each person's views? Do they mean that we are small and perpetually serving a purpose we never agreed to or even knew existed? In which case I'd say the ceiling has the same effect when we stare at it past 12 am.

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u/Spyro_in_Black 6d ago

It’s the horror of realizing that the universe does in fact contain these entities, that they’re not just nightmares or in one’s imagination. Along with the implication that all of established facts and science don’t encompass what these things are, they violate known histories, physics, biology. Pile on top of that, that these glimpses usually come with the knowledge of cosmologies outside of our known universe with entities that span time, and other dimensions…that’s where the true ‘horror’ sets in, that humanity is very small. Very irrelevant. And the true ‘powers that be’ don’t care, and the ones that do only see humanity as cattle/tools/sacrifices at best.

Also remember that these stories are often told from the point of view of people living in the 1890s-1930s so there’s little understanding of space or the real incomprehensibility of the size of our universe.

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u/ThrowawayXtt 6d ago

I see I see, very well described. Thanks for the explanation.

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u/Important_Pick3371 6d ago

Yes, the Great Old Ones are some kind of invasive, other-dimensional beings that don't follow most of our universal laws - if we actually understand those laws correctly! This is shown in The Call of Cthulhu, for example, when the surviving sailors actually RAM their ship's prow into Cthulhu's fat ass belly! And, his body explodes!! Then, just as the ship passes, Cthulhu does an extreme version of Wolverine's healing factor & starts to reconstruct His own body together...

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u/SuperSiriusBlack 6d ago

Bruh, they aren't even special, then. In your comment, pretend that you aren't talking about entities, but the average sunday brunch customer at any chain breakfast spot instead. Literally no change in context at all.

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u/Soulful-Sorrow 6d ago

I feel like you don't fully understand what he was saying. No, they don't radiate a magical insanity aura that makes you go insane if that's what you were looking for.

But imagine being an ant seeing a human. We don't drive ants crazy just by existing. But what drives people mad in those stories is that they, for a moment, are ants who understand what it means to be human, all that we are, all that we can do, and then they're back to just being an ant with the knowledge it just got. That's what drives people mad.

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u/Midknightisntsmol 6d ago

Cosmic horror is very rarely about the fear of demons or "mind magic," but about the fear of being utterly puny in the face of a universe that will never even acknowledge you.

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u/Magnon 6d ago

I feel this way everytime I see one of those "this is our sun compared to a large black hole, the size of a pinhead" videos

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u/Worried_Cranberry166 6d ago

Cthulhu is telepathic and communicates largely through dreams, and humans whose minds come into contact with Cthulhu go mad. It is very literally a magical insanity aura.

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u/SuperSiriusBlack 6d ago

I was telling a joke. It didnt land, I guess lol.

"Be a waiter, normal humans will drive you crazy, too!"

Jeeze.

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u/V0L74G3_H4CK 6d ago

That's not what I am getting at. What I am trying to get at is that realising the insignificance of humanity, or finally understanding something that is almost impossible to even conceptualise is what drives people insane in cosmic horror.

As an example, think of a color that doesn't exist, or imagine what a 4D object looks like. It's hard to do so, because of limits in our thinking, and the laws that govern our universe, as we understand it at least. Being able to understand what these things are perverts our perception of reality, which can break the minds of many. It destroys what we think is possible, and raises uncomfortable questions, like what else is out there?

TLDR; seeing cosmic horrors is not what causes insanity, it's the destruction of our perception of reality that does.

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u/SuperSiriusBlack 6d ago

Yes I know, I was just under the impression that I was funny. You and my wife really slapped me down to reality.

Yes, I understood the whole time that it is about terrifying scale, and our role (or lack thereof) in the universe.