troublesome description

[kengr]

I'm trying to figure out a good way to describe some characters.

They trigger a reaction sort of like the "uncanny valley" effect, except instead of weird/creepy it's more scray/terrifying.

Sort of like something about them makes your lizard brain want to scurry away and hide, except it's afraid to move because it might attract their attention. :-)

There's nothing you can point to that causes the reaction. It's not any one detail or details. It's an "overall" thing.

They look "normal" or maybe better than normal. But the first reaction is as described above.

Basically, I'm trying for "idealized humans" except for the "scares the hell out of you" initial reaction.

It's something you can get used to, but that first "jolt" ...

And yes, they frequently start out by saying something like "fear not". :-)

Comments

[stickmaker]

This sounds a lot like my take on vampires. In my stories, they are living creatures, but the process of becoming a vampire burns out the human social instincts.

A human sitting in a chair will twitch, sigh, shift, look around... A vampire just sits there, unmoving unless there's a need to act, barely breathing, occasionally blinking... No wonder people think they're undead. They don't really act _alive_.

[we_are_spc]

They kind of remind me of the harpy fron The Last Unicorn. For some odd reason, she and the unicorn were my favorite characters out of that.

-Fallon~

[siliconshaman]

Sounds like the older tales of the Fae... the Shining Ones, Fair Folk etc..

i.e cat-like, from a mouses perspective.

[stickmaker]

I'm remembering, now, that there was a certain, brilliant college professor whose students joked was actually a demigod sent to Earth to teach mere mortals, only he was so good at emulating human behavior most people didn't realize his status.