You know that whole trope where like, the protagonists get teleported up into the aliens’ spaceship or base or whatever and the alien appears to them only it doesn’t appear as it really looks like but rather, since it doesn’t want to scare the protagonists, it takes the form of something we find familiar and pleasing and is like, “I look like your dad or whatever–is this form okay?” Like I think about that trope a lot and I think like, what if the alien couldn’t pick out a form via telepathy and only had earth media to try and decide what form would scare its human guests least and be accepted almost immediately and honestly the more I think about it the more options for what form that might be are just really fun to me.
“I have chosen the form of your earth playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda–do not be afraid. I come in peace.”
“Greetings. I am Glofnorbo of the cloud you call the ‘Pegasus Nebula.’ I have scanned your earth media from afar and empirically decided that you would find the form of the one known as Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson most pleasing. I have come to confer with your leaders.”
“Do not be panic. I come in peace. I have assumed the form of your insectoid demigoddess ‘Hatsune Miku’ so that we may communicate peacefully without my true form horrifying you.”
“It was decided that I would assume the form of your ‘Mister Rogers’ in order to best welcome your world to the galactic neighborhood without frightening your kind.”
“…So did your colleague take on the form of Jack Black for that reason too?”
“No, that is the actual Jack Black. We do not know how to make him leave.”
Cruel choices #137: you must consume one – and only one – of the following pieces of media.
1.Sailor Moon retold in the style of a 19th Century Russian philosophical novel.
2.The Brothers Karamazov retold in the style of a magical girl anime.
“Our very existence proves there is a peak,” Mars spat, the wind-swept snow no deterrent to her clad in naught but the Sailor uniform as she was. “Man need not concern itself with matters of godhood. We are gods given flesh.”
“It is precisely because of what we are that they cannot rest.” Mercury replied. “One cannot and must not embrace egoism. If we fall, who then will they turn to? Who then will care for what mankind has wrought? Only mankind itself.”
Then from two alleys over there came not so much a cry but a sound, a resolute plea to the skies above not for help, but for guarantee of vengeance. The earnest note struck chords within Mars and Mercury, as if it had been an answer to both of their sides; and yet, it was distinctly not.
“Corrupting the minds of the people with false nationalism where there should be nothing but love of all man, exemplifying godhood as nothing more than superiority to others instead of preaching it as empathy and spilling my borscht… For that, I cannot forgive you! In the name of the moon, I will punish you!”
I know this is from Australia but when I first saw the words “Victorian man” all I could think of was this:
To be fair imagine you just arrived in 2018 from Victorian England and discovered Take On Me, what are you supposed to do, not blast it loud enough for your family to hear it all the way back in 1876?
Loki is the Philosopher King 