Uncanny Valley

Trope-a-Day: Humans Are Ugly

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Humans Are Ugly: Extending this trope to interspecies relations in general, it is usually averted because the species in question are just too far from each other; by and large we, for example, don’t find earth’s “alien” species – trees, flying fish, pythons, trilobites – ugly, per se, because we’re too far from them for our standards of people-beauty to apply.

This, of course, may yet be played out in full if the eldrae meet we humans, because as near-eldrae (or near-humans, depending on how you look at it) we’re close enough to maybe fall headlong into each others’ Uncanny Valley.  If we’re lucky – if not, we might end up looking at something uncomfortably close-appearing to The Fair Folk meets Hideous Parodies of the True Form (phrased that way around given which species have and haven’t been spending centuries on genemod aesthetic upgrading at this point).  (See also, literarily, Man Is An Orc To Man.)

tl;dr It’s better to be completely unrelated.

Trope-a-Day: Uncanny Valley

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Uncanny Valley: Largely averted where other species are concerned, simply because they’re far enough apart in appearance from each other that it never comes into play.  (Now, eldrae and humans, both being humanoids, are probably close-and-yet-far-away enough to fall right into this where each other are concerned – proportions off, and yet too perfect, too serene, move too smoothly, body language is all wrong – yet another reason why I don’t plan on touching that particular First Contact.)

A recognized phenomenon in robotics design where androids and gynoids are concerned; mostly averted in practice because it is a recognized phenomenon, and so cybershells of this kind tend to be either very, very good indeed, or deliberately robotic enough not to trigger it.  And if you really want something that looks that human species-like, you can always go bioshell.  Of course, much the same thing applies to bioshells with certain types of extreme augmentation, which their designers have to take into account.

This whole thing, of course, is all inconvenient enough that it’s an instinct the bioengineers are working hard on ripping out through their xenophobia elimination program…