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CelticPredator posted:No other movie in a franchise can ever ruin another movie for me. I used to think this with like the Star Wars prequels or whatever…but you can you know, not think about them and just enjoy the movie you like. The only time a movie can hurt another is if they are serials/directly connected, in my opinion. If a movie purposefully openly leaves things to be answered, and the sequel(s) ruin those answers, it can retroactively hurt the prior movie. Stuff like Force Awakens with all of its mystery boxes, or Matrix Reloaded with a back to back sequel can be helped or hurt by what comes after. But for something like the Alien films where almost each one is shot as a closed film according to the director's vision - there's a huge "who cares" when it comes to sequels that underwhelm.
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Nov 1, 2022 17:10
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Xenomrph posted:There were a lot of people who didn’t want the questions answered, though. Also some of the “answers” were lovely retcons that undermined ‘Alien’ and would have been better served in a movie unconnected to ‘Alien’. There are no retcons in Prometheus.
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Nov 1, 2022 17:31
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Xenomrph posted:There were a lot of people who didn’t want the questions answered, though. Also some of the “answers” were lovely retcons that undermined ‘Alien’ and would have been better served in a movie unconnected to ‘Alien’. I would think you'd enjoy the movie even more if you didn't want answers because it really doesn't give you any. Which is kinda the central point.
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Nov 1, 2022 17:35
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PeterWeller posted:I would think you'd enjoy the movie even more if you didn't want answers because it really doesn't give you any. It “answers” what’s going on with the gigantic ancient weird creature fused to the chair in ‘Alien’ by revealing that it’s neither gigantic, nor ancient, nor weird (it’s actually 100% human), nor even fused to the chair. “Explaining” the Space Jockey undermined everything that made the Space Jockey interesting in ‘Alien’. “Who created the human race?” and learning that we were created by beings that looked just like us by using horrific science and also they hate us and want to wipe us out with said science is a great idea for a sci fi horror movie. It’s just a bad idea for an Alien prequel. And then the sequel takes it a step further by revealing that the ancient eldritch space monster that could be lurking anywhere in the galaxy actually isn’t ancient (it’s only a few decades old by the events of ‘Alien’) and is limited in scope to places personally visited by its creator. Again, “an Android rebels against his creators and creates a horrific creature that murders them” is a great horror sci-fi premise, but it’s a bad Alien prequel. Everything in the Alien prequels that makes them good exists in spite of the Alien connective tissues, not because of it. You could excise the Alien stuff and you’d end up with the same movie, if not a better one, and ‘Alien’ would remain untouched. Thankfully anything the prequels disrupted about ‘Alien’ is easy to sidestep or ignore. Edit— to be clear, I like Prometheus and Covenant, I’ve enjoyed them more on rewatches and I like to watch them, I’m glad I own them. I’m not even bothered by the “dumb” characters, they seemed dumb when the movie first came out but I got over it pretty quick and now it’s not even a thought that enters my mind. I just don’t like that they’re Alien movies. Similarly, I think the ‘Doom’ movie with the Rock is a really solid and entertaining sci-fi action horror movie. It’s just a real bad Doom movie. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 18:08
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The "engineers" are literally weird ancient giants.
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Nov 1, 2022 18:43
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Not really. There is nothing about ‘Prometheus’ that benefits from being linked to ‘Alien’, and ‘Alien’ gains nothing from the linkage either. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 18:56
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Xenomrph posted:And then the sequel takes it a step further by revealing that the ancient eldritch space monster that could be lurking anywhere in the galaxy actually isn’t ancient (it’s only a few decades old by the events of ‘Alien’) and is limited in scope to places personally visited by its creator. This is always going to be a baffling take because "that could be lurking anywhere in the galaxy" is not at all implicit in any of the Alien movies. There was a clutch of eggs on one spaceship crash landed on one planet (planetoid? moon? I forget). Then, in the sequel, a bunch of people settle on that same celestial body and go sniffing around the eggs the exact same way they did in the first movie. In the third movie, a couple people who have been infected by creatures infected by that clutch of eggs land on a different planet and release one (1) bug onto that planet. In the fourth movie, one of those infected people is cloned, so that her parasite is scientifically resurrected. The entire, I repeat, the ENTIRE body of Alien movies is about the same single tiny family of aliens, all spawned from the same single payload of eggs. "Could be lurking anywhere" is in fact part of the comics (and video games and novels and so on), which, because they're legally incapable of ever coming up with anything new, have to just keep reskinning the same two or three stories so that now they're happening on a jungle planet, now they're happening on a space station, etc. And, of course, the result is incredibly mundane. You just can't swing a cat anywhere in the cosmos without hitting this one particular kind of giant wasp. Why do they keep popping up everywhere, anyway? Oh, it's because they're being crossed over with the Predator movie series. EDIT: Oh, yeah, and obviously if you leave one of the Engineer exosuits sitting around without proper maintenance it'll swell up and start to merge with its surrounding biotech. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:06
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There’s a little more to the comics than that. Well, the old Dark Horse comments, I can’t comment on the newer Marvel stuff. Aliens are scarier and more interesting if people can stumble across them wherever. Ferrinus posted:EDIT: Oh, yeah, and obviously if you leave one of the Engineer exosuits sitting around without proper maintenance it'll swell up and start to merge with its surrounding biotech. A dumb one that still undermines ‘Alien’, but an explanation nonetheless
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Nov 1, 2022 19:13
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What you've written is pretty much all factually incorrect. For example, the "engineer" alien is not 100% human:  When the two DNA charts are overlaid, matching genes are highlighted in yellow. The parts that differ from human genes are shown in red, while parts of the genome exclusive to humanity remain green.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:14
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PeterWeller posted:I think one of the reasons why Prometheus works so well is precisely because it's such a disappointing prequel to Alien. "Woohoo, we're gonna get some answers to our burning origin questions! Wait? What the gently caress? Those aren't answers!" All Ridley Scott films take place in the same continuity. The black goop and the Darkness from Legend are the same thing. Aliens is, naturally, non-canon.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:16
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:What you've written is pretty much all factually incorrect. For example, the "engineer" alien is not 100% human: That is false, the movie is demonstrating via the overlap that they are 100% human, and one of the characters says in-dialogue that they are 100% human. https://youtu.be/MJdNgE4MTEQ Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:16
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Xenomrph posted:Aliens are scarier and more interesting if people can stumble across them wherever. No, they aren't. That's like the opposite of anything even vaguely resembling cosmic horror. Imagine if every single Lovecraft story ever written were about Shoggoths. Oh no, there are Shoggoths in Antarctica! A man learns to animate living creatures using the essential salts of the dead, creating Shoggoths. A dream quest into a lost city, which is filled with Shoggoths. The mad, blind, idiot Shoggoth at the heart of the cosmos... Here's something else you haven't considered. It's only with the additions made by Prometheus that our beloved crab aliens, cobra aliens, scorpion aliens, etc. can ever be canon. You can't fit a facehugger onto a cobra... but you can immerse it in chemical X-whatever or have it inhale some mutagenic spores.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:17
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Ferrinus posted:No, they aren't. That's like the opposite of anything even vaguely resembling cosmic horror. Imagine if every single Lovecraft story ever written were about Shoggoths. Oh no, there are Shoggoths in Antarctica! A man learns to animate living creatures using the essential salts of the dead, creating Shoggoths. A dream quest into a lost city, which is filled with Shoggoths. The mad, blind, idiot Shoggoth at the heart of the cosmos... Weird ancient extraterrestrial creatures lurking in the darkness of space is cosmic horror. Crab Aliens exist by infecting big crabs. FYI the Alien RPG (which is canon) very specifically covers this by showing that the Scorpion Aliens literally do come from giant scorpion-like creatures. Canon. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:21
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Xenomrph posted:Weird ancient creatures lurking in the dark is cosmic horror. Weird ancient creatures, sure. But weird ancient... creature? Like, this one fuckin' guy, over and over and over? Who, in the original movies from which the concept is actually sourced, clearly only came from this one specific clutch of eggs? Like, if you watch Alien, you might walk away thinking: drat, that's hosed up. I wonder what other hosed up stuff is out there. The answer, according to the entire Expanded Universe, is: nothing. No other hosed up stuff is out there. It's just this wasp, forever. That's why the comics, RPG, etc. are just licensed fanfiction and not canon proper.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:25
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Xenomrph posted:Aliens are scarier and more interesting if people can stumble across them wherever. This is 100% personal preference but, even if it were axiomatically true, they just moved that trait to the Engineers. They're scary because you can stumble across their various bio-kill weapons whenever (of which the Xenomorphs are one). BTW I pretty much don't like any Alien movies but the first two, so I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm just sayin'
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Nov 1, 2022 19:25
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Ferrinus posted:Weird ancient creatures, sure. But weird ancient... creature? Like, this one fuckin' guy, over and over and over? Who, in the original movies from which the concept is actually sourced, clearly only came from this one specific clutch of eggs? Canon is what you make of it anyway. It’s a nonsense concept that everyone decides on for them relive. If you read the RPG you’d probably like it, it draws heavily from the prequels. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:This is 100% personal preference but, even if it were axiomatically true, they just moved that trait to the Engineers. They're scary because you can stumble across their various bio-kill weapons whenever (of which the Xenomorphs are one). See this is a fair point, and a hostile universe full of weird horrors is fine, but it isn’t what I want from my Alien movie. The Alien RPG does a fine job of blending the two - there are more capital-A Aliens than just what we see in the movies, but there’s also other Weird poo poo sourced from the black goo and the Engineers (and the RPG encourages you to make up your own Weird poo poo to keep spooking your players). Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:26
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Xenomrph posted:That is false, the movie is demonstrating via the overlap that they are 100% human, and one of the characters says in-dialogue that they are 100% human. The phrase "100% human" is not spoken in that clip, or in the film at any point. A computer says "DNA match", but does not specify what percentage. (Humans and chimpanzees have something like 98% matching DNA.)
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Nov 1, 2022 19:30
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Xenomrph posted:Nah it’s all canon. It's just a grotesque and obvious diversion from the movies, in which the xenomorph was an example of the general inscrutability and hostility of the cosmos rather than the totality of the general inscrutability and hostility of the cosmos. It'd be like if every episode of the The Real Ghostbusters TV show were just about them fighting the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man over and over and over again, episode after episode, season after season. An obvious and flagrant misstep. Now, I don't blame them. If I'm getting paid to write licensed Aliens content, I'm also going to take the absolute safest move available to me and just sprinkle xenomorphs onto the Green Hill Zone, then the Marble Garden Zone, etc. But that's why no one should ever be paid to write licensed Aliens content. It's not merely redundant with but actually damages readers' understanding of the original story.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:30
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Ferrinus posted:It's just a grotesque and obvious diversion from the movies, in which the xenomorph was an example of the general inscrutability and hostility of the cosmos rather than the totality of the general inscrutability and hostility of the cosmos. It'd be like if every episode of the The Real Ghostbusters TV show were just about them fighting the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man over and over and over again, episode after episode, season after season. An obvious and flagrant misstep. Again, there’s a little more to it than that. The expanded universe does a lot of “not safe” things with the idea of a penis-headed rape monster. We’ll have to agree to disagree. You get what you want out of the movies, I’ll get what I want.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:33
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Xenomrph posted:It “answers” what’s going on with the gigantic ancient weird creature fused to the chair in ‘Alien’ by revealing that it’s neither gigantic, nor ancient, nor weird (it’s actually 100% human), nor even fused to the chair. ...you understand that these two statements are in conflict with each other?
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Nov 1, 2022 19:36
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Where does the Camel Spider Xenomorph from the RTS AVP Game come in that ferry's facehuggers on it's spine tubes and then dunks them onto the faces of marines fit in?
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Nov 1, 2022 19:37
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Xenomrph posted:Again, there’s a little more to it than that. The expanded universe does a lot of “not safe” things with the idea of a penis-headed rape monster. You can certainly come away with what you want; it just has nothing to do with what's actually there. "The big black bug with tubes on its vest is inexplicably everywhere in space and has been forever" is extremely not implied or supported by the movies at all. Only the toy-selling tie-in content implies that's the case, for obvious financial reasons. In the actual original text, that one derelict spaceship is to Alien what the Skywalker bloodline is to Star Wars. Actually it's even more incestuous because at least we see unrelated Jedi in some Star Wars movies.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:40
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Schwarzwald posted:...you understand that these two statements are in conflict with each other? No they aren’t? SirDrone posted:Where does the Camel Spider Xenomorph from the RTS AVP Game come in that ferry's facehuggers on it's spine tubes and then dunks them onto the faces of marines fit in? Ferrinus posted:You can certainly come away with what you want; it just has nothing to do with what's actually there. "The big black bug with tubes on its vest is inexplicably everywhere in space and has been forever" is extremely not implied or supported by the movies at all. Only the toy-selling tie-in content implies that's the case, for obvious financial reasons. In the actual original text, that one derelict spaceship is to Alien what the Skywalker bloodline is to Star Wars. Actually it's even more incestuous because at least we see unrelated Jedi in some Star Wars movies. We’ll have to agree to disagree. Your reading of ‘Alien’ that “there are horrors, of which Aliens are one” is perfectly fine. Hell, the RPG outright encourages it. I’m totally okay with it, too. “There are more Aliens than just this clutch of eggs” is a valid reading too, and people are welcome to it. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:40
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Xenomrph posted:Your reading of ‘Alien’ that “there are horrors, of which Aliens are one” is perfectly fine. Hell, the RPG outright encourages it. I’m totally okay with it, too. “There are more Aliens than just this clutch of eggs” is a valid reading too, and people are welcome to it. You've performed a sneaky bit of sleight of hand here, though. "There are more aliens than just this clutch of eggs" is in fact a reasonable conclusion to draw from Covenant, because surely David had to leave some behind on the planet the movie's set on, he might have moved on and spread them other places on his way to LV-426, etc. It's very much not the same as "this bug is an omnipresent cosmic plague akin to a flea or mosquito".
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Nov 1, 2022 19:53
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Xenomrph posted:No they aren’t? In your first statement you point out how Prometheus never addresses what’s going on with the giant mummy thing from Alien. (The alien people in Prometheus not being so large or ancient, etc.) In your second statement you bemoan how Prometheus undermines Alien by doing the thing you just argued the film doesn't do. Is it bad Prometheus doesn't explain it, or is it bad that it does?
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Nov 1, 2022 19:57
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Ferrinus posted:You've performed a sneaky bit of sleight of hand here, though. "There are more aliens than just this clutch of eggs" is in fact a reasonable conclusion to draw from Covenant, because surely David had to leave some behind on the planet the movie's set on, he might have moved on and spread them other places on his way to LV-426, etc. It's very much not the same as "this bug is an omnipresent cosmic plague akin to a flea or mosquito". They don’t need to be literally everywhere, I just prefer that they’re larger in scope than “the specific planets an Android visited in 20 years”. I also prefer that they’re greater than 20 years old.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:58
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Xenomrph posted:Yeah but one of those I prefer over the other, and that’s okay. But that's also the correct conclusion to draw from Prometheus and Covenant, because those movies show us that xenomorph-like body horror monsters are "natural" consequences of hyper-accelerated evolution and reproduction rather than a specific species of parasite with a contingently limited geographic territory, ability to propagate, etc.
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Nov 1, 2022 20:01
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Schwarzwald posted:In your first statement you point out how Prometheus never addresses what’s going on with the giant mummy thing from Alien. (The alien people in Prometheus not being so large or ancient, etc.) In your second statement you bemoan how Prometheus undermines Alien by doing the thing you just argued the film doesn't do. No it does address it, and that’s bad. That’s what the first statement was about, how it takes a huge weird ancient long-dead and non-human extraterrestrial that is ripe for the audience to fill with their own fears and ideas, and undoes all of it for no discernible benefit to either movie. Explaining it is bad. There are people who didn’t want it explained, and Prometheus explained it. That’s bad. The old expanded universe explained it too, and it was mostly bad when they did it too. A little less so, but still bad. Ferrinus posted:But that's also the correct conclusion to draw from Prometheus and Covenant, because those movies show us that xenomorph-like body horror monsters are "natural" consequences of hyper-accelerated evolution and reproduction rather than a specific species of parasite with a contingently limited geographic territory, ability to propagate, etc. I think we might be talking past each other a little bit. I like that capital A Aliens are ancient and potentially (but not guaranteed to be) all over the place. I do not care about what is possible with non capital A Aliens, what they’re capable of, where they are, etc. they can be all over the place too, that’s totally fine. But narrowing the scope of the capital A Aliens is something I do not like. “Xenomorph-like” is not good enough for me. If I like my specific dog, killing it and handing me a similar dog and saying “yeah but this one is like your dog, aren’t you happy?” is not good enough. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 20:02
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The aliens were never scary to me so them being scary or not has never been a concern to me.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:02
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Xenomrph posted:I think we might be talking past each other a little bit. There is no "capital A Alien" and never has been. Prometheus makes this explicit, but it's actually obvious purely from the first movie if you just sit down and think a little bit. The xenomorph that came out of Kane was human-sized with a human body plan, a human skull beneath its visor, etc. Whatever came out of the Jockey's chest was evidently way bigger. That means each generation of xenomorph is different from the last because it takes something from its host. Even if we take Alien and Aliens alone, we have to assume that the eggs in the derelict were laid by a queen that was cultured out of some kind of alien being, and that alien was parasitized by a facehugger that came out of an egg that was laid by a queen that admixed its phenotype and general capabilities from some other xenofauna, etc. There never has been and never will be some kind of 100% pure "original" xenomorph; it's random variation and generational drift all the way down.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:07
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There is no pure strain Alien because the host influences the Alien, but there are things that are recognizable as capital A Aliens and things that aren’t. There’s genetic drift even in the Alien movies, but Aliens are a discrete thing within the narrative. Facehuggers come from eggs, they get on hosts, they make an Alien. Sometimes they make a Queen Alien, which can lay the eggs. The Aliens look different sometimes (see: the expanded universe and toys and whatever), but they are still recognizable as Aliens. We don’t know how deep the genetic drift goes, if Aliens would become a totally different organism given enough generations (one of the comics plays with this idea). I prefer that they don’t. Like your whole argument hinges on the idea that things other than xenomorphs exist and that that’s okay; the only way that argument makes sense is if there are xenomorphs as a distinct entity. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 21:14
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Xenomrph posted:No it does address it, and that’s bad. That’s what the first statement was about, how it takes a huge weird ancient long-dead and non-human extraterrestrial that is ripe for the audience to fill with their own fears and ideas, and undoes all of it for no discernible benefit to either movie. Given that the space jockey in Alien is gigantic and is ancient, it seems evident to me that Prometheus does not answer what's going on with it. Given how you put scare quotes around "answer," I thought that was the point you were making.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:16
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Xenomrph posted:There is no pure strain Alien because the host influences the Alien, but there are things that are recognizable as capital A Aliens and things that aren’t. Not quite. The point is that "xenomorph" is like, a particular side in a spectrum or one axis on a chart. Some xenomorphs are big and some are small, right? Some are bipedal and some are quadrupedal, right? Well, maybe that means some hatch from eggs and some grow from spores, or that some are black and some are pale. Maybe everything's a little bit xenomorph - humans certainly are - but become more so through supercharged growth and recombination. Schwarzwald posted:Given that the space jockey in Alien is gigantic and is ancient, it seems evident to me that Prometheus does not answer what's going on with it. Given how you put scare quotes around "answer," I thought that was the point you were making. I'm telling you guys, it's BIO-mechanical so you have to trim or it grows everywhere.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:21
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Schwarzwald posted:Given that the space jockey in Alien is gigantic and is ancient, it seems evident to me that Prometheus does not answer what's going on with it. Given how you put scare quotes around "answer," I thought that was the point you were making. Why is it fused to the chair? How did it get there? What went wrong? How long has it been there? Are there others like it? Why does it look so weird? Turns out it’s a big human in a suit, who has been there for 20 years or less. Lame. Ferrinus posted:Not quite. The point is that "xenomorph" is like, a particular side in a spectrum or one axis on a chart. Some xenomorphs are big and some are small, right? Some are bipedal and some are quadrupedal, right? Well, maybe that means some hatch from eggs and some grow from spores, or that some are black and some are pale. Maybe everything's a little bit xenomorph - humans certainly are - but become more so through supercharged growth and recombination. I prefer the idea that they have a life cycle, and that produces recognizable Xenomorphs, whose traits are influenced by the host. Covenant undoes that, and I prefer that they didn’t. Again, I like my dog, similar isn’t good enough. You could make the case that things recognizable as capital A Aliens and their life cycle are possible given avenues other than what is presented in Covenant, and that makes it decidedly more palatable (and it’s the route the RPG takes), but Ridley Scott’s intent (which I don’t agree with) was that David was creating the capital A Aliens as a discrete entity in Covenant. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 21:25
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“Prometheus changes the origins to a couple of decades instead of an unknown amount of time” is such a weird and almost duplicitous misreading of the film.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:28
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ruddiger posted:“Prometheus changes the origins to a couple of decades instead of an unknown amount of time” is such a weird and almost duplicitous misreading of the film. Prometheus doesn’t do that, Covenant does. Ferrinus: Fun fact: I theorized the idea of extreme genetic drift in Aliens on an AvP message board back in like 1999, using the exact logic you did. As a counter thought experiment, I used Alien Resurrection as evidence that since Queens already look decidedly non human even when born from Humans, that they are the “reset button” that clears out the host DNA with each generation, since the Queens, eggs and facehuggers look the same across generations. So there’s no “pure” Alien because the Alien can’t exist without the host DNA, but there is baseline Alien genetic material which is then fused with host DNA to make recognizable capital A Aliens. Edit— as I think back, I might not have used the exact logic you did - I think my thought process was that over time the host DNA “dilutes” the Alien DNA and leads to Aliens that are cross-breeds of the host DNA across generations; like an Alien Queen born from a goat that lays eggs that produce an Alien Queen born from a human which lays eggs that produce a Queen born from an elephant would make Aliens that have host genetic material from everything up the chain diluting the Alien genetic material until you end up with Aliens that are barely recognizable as Aliens. I think I originally got the idea from the comic book ‘Aliens: Reapers’, which has these weird fleshy Aliens that I inferred to be “inbred” for lack of a better term. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 21:30
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Adam Savage takes a look at the screen used Drop Ship model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TKL2crKVGA
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Nov 1, 2022 22:08
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sigher posted:Adam Savage takes a look at the screen used Drop Ship model: As a chaser, here he is with the Pulse Rifle: https://youtu.be/LL1x6rKJLvo Which brings us full-circle back around to the Nerf pulse rifle. Mine shows up on Saturday!
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Nov 1, 2022 22:32
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Xenomrph posted:No I totally get what you’re saying, and I recognize the appeal. Let me try a different tack here, because I think I do know where you're coming from: there's stuff that Prometheus and/or Covenant could have done with the xenomorphs that absolutely would've turned me into a spitting ball of white-hot rage absolutely disgusted by the violation of the canon, etc. Here's one example: we come to planet David in Covenant, and there are mysterious alien trees dotting the landscape. After a human bites and eats one of the pieces of fruit, then spits the seeds onto the ground, that seed burrows into the soil and erupts a few hours later as a full-grown xenomorph that proceeds to gorily eviscerate everyone. Absolute rubbish! Why? Not because of the plant-based delivery vector per se, but because you and I both know that it'd be a real violation of the very thematic basis for this literary world for there to be birth without death. Xenomorphs can't just be scary, violent predators that are non-trivial to defeat with conventional weaponry; their very genesis has to be an act of violation of some kind. Easy fix: the guy eats the xeno-fruit, and then a monster erupts from his belly a few hours later. That scans, right? Novel delivery mechanism but clearly a superior rendition. ... Here's another example: imagine if there were a novel or comic or whatever in which an enterprising scientist tries to develop a way to cultivate "green" xenomorphs. He's got a bunch of eggs or facehuggers or whatever, and what he does is he literally just grows blobs of meat and random organs in vats, lets the facehuggers impregnate those, and then catches the resulting chestbursters. But those chestbursters mature and get loose, oh no! There's something wrong here, right? The fix: either facehuggers don't impregnate the blobs of meat at all, or they do but the resulting chestbursters are kind of, you know, pale and anemic and sluggish and just kinda die after a few days. Desperate to get his project to work, the scientist starts siccing facehuggers on actual people and pretending that it's his miracle clone tissue that's generating bugs instead. It'd just be wrong if you could get xenomorphs "for free", right? Something has to die as they're born. Otherwise the whole story's off. ... So, for sure, despite the multifarious, ever-changing nature of the xenomorph which dissolves all boundaries into chaos, etc, there's plenty of stuff that would repel me, have me grouse about Not My Xenomorph, etc. I understand what you're doing in general terms and I'm willing to draw pretty bright lines around certain elements of xenomorph birth, growth, behavior etc. I don't want to see fire breath or spellcasting in an Alien movie. It just seems to me that your personal choice to draw those bright lines specifically around eggs and facehuggers is not only poorly-supported by the films we have at hand, but also custom-built to make you unhappy. Wouldn't it just feel better to stretch your understanding so as to include the neomorphs and spores and such we see in Scott's later movies? It's all perfectly consistent, I promise you.
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Nov 1, 2022 22:34
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No I think they’re fine as xenomorph-adjacent (and like I said, that’s how the RPG treats them, as xenomorph-adjacent - the Black Goo can make all kinds of stuff, of which discrete capital A Aliens are one), but I prefer capital A Aliens, it’s kind of that simple. For what it’s worth the comics did try the idea of “cloned bodies or organs purpose-grown for gestating Aliens”. I seem to recall being pretty okay with it at the time. As I think about it, I actually think the scientist does something similar to what you suggested - he couldn’t get purely cloned organs to make viable Aliens, so the big reveal is that he’s capturing people, mutilating them to make them look like “grown” torsos, and that’s what the Aliens are growing in. Either that or his cloning was messed up and he just couldn’t grow organs, so he was faking it. It’s been decades since I read it, my memory is hazy. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 22:44
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