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feedmyleg posted:I felt a bit similar about Blade Runner 2049 the first time around—at first I felt like it was a great movie despite having to shoehorn in the Deckard aspect of the story. But after a few viewings that really settled in and while may or may not be essential, I have grown to like it. For me it's the opposite, the more I watch Blade Runner 2049 and Prometheus, the less I enjoy them. I basically only watch them for the visuals.
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Oct 24, 2023 22:02
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A trap that people fell into with Prometheus: there's a general consensus in discussion of the Engineers that they were hostile to humanity. However, this is only based on one interaction with one Engineer. It's impossible to say that the rest of the Engineers, or even a majority of them, were that hostile. We can only come to a guess about things like the starmap in the cave, and so on. Imagine Aliens from the point of view of the Queen, and she comes to a conclusion about Humans, their creators, having met one human being: noted crazy person Ellen Ripley. (Funnily enough, the Queen could claim that the Xenomorphs would be totally wiped out if even one Ripley gets into their hive and make a pretty accurate prediction!)
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Oct 27, 2023 15:38
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End of Shoelace posted:A trap that people fell into with Prometheus: there's a general consensus in discussion of the Engineers that they were hostile to humanity. However, this is only based on one interaction with one Engineer. It's impossible to say that the rest of the Engineers, or even a majority of them, were that hostile. We can only come to a guess about things like the starmap in the cave, and so on. To that point, I'm pretty sure there's stuff out there(maybe Ridley Scott or Lindelof comments?) that describes multiple Engineer factions. Like, there may have been a faction that wanted to help create and shepherd new civilizations, and then a fanatical faction that was more into Engineer purity and hated the idea of elevating lesser life forms. This would explain why the Engineer shown at the beginning of the movie has a much different type of ship than what we see during the Weyland mission, and why the Engineer they wake up seems so offended and disgusted. That base may have been like a staging area for this faction that went around eradicating the life forms that had been lifted up by the other faction. It could've been like a religious schism where one faction hated what the other was doing and wanted to put a stop to it.
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Oct 27, 2023 15:47
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The trap was trying to explain the origin of the xenomorphs. Simple as. It makes them scarier not knowing. Knowing now they are made by 8 foot hippies and/or a crazy android, just makes them look less impressive. It's like the Shining Hotel. Best not to know what or how or why all that poo poo happened. Mr Sleep ruined that. Same with The Thing. One day some fuckwit will explain what the Thing is, and it will be completely so underwhelming.
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Oct 27, 2023 16:10
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happyhippy posted:The trap was trying to explain the origin of the xenomorphs. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it leads you to try and find a "better" story outside of whatever it is that you're watching/reading. It leads one to write fanfiction, instead of focusing on what's there. Besides, if Alien is ruined by a small amount of knowledge, can Alien even be a good movie to begin with? (The answer is yes, Alien is extremely good regardless of whether the Alien came from the black goo or Dr. Acula's laboratory.)
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Oct 27, 2023 16:19
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End of Shoelace posted:The problem with this kind of thinking is that it leads you to try and find a "better" story outside of whatever it is that you're watching/reading. It leads one to write fanfiction, instead of focusing on what's there. Or, it leads one to reject worse stories, and indeed the entire concept of canon, and free their imaginations from the yoke of creative ownership.
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Oct 27, 2023 16:46
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Basebf555 posted:To that point, I'm pretty sure there's stuff out there(maybe Ridley Scott or Lindelof comments?) that describes multiple Engineer factions. Like, there may have been a faction that wanted to help create and shepherd new civilizations, and then a fanatical faction that was more into Engineer purity and hated the idea of elevating lesser life forms. This would explain why the Engineer shown at the beginning of the movie has a much different type of ship than what we see during the Weyland mission, and why the Engineer they wake up seems so offended and disgusted. That base may have been like a staging area for this faction that went around eradicating the life forms that had been lifted up by the other faction. It could've been like a religious schism where one faction hated what the other was doing and wanted to put a stop to it. Based on what we see in Covenant, I think it's less a matter of two competing nations/religions/political tendencies or the Engineer civilization changing over time so much as there's an "outer church" of naive peasant monks and an "inner church" of sinister black goo experimenters. The former might not even realize that the latter are members of the same species.
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Oct 27, 2023 17:58
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happyhippy posted:The trap was trying to explain the origin of the xenomorphs. We always circle back to this in this thread like clockwork but: - There is nothing in Prometheus that says Engineers or David created the xenomorph. At best it says that the goo (which is more mysterious than the xenomorphs) creates a lifecycle that is similar to the xenomorph under the right circumstances. Ridley Scott and Lindelof purposefully removed all direct prequel stuff from earlier script drafts for that reason. - How in the world does Dr Sleep mess up the Shining Hotel? It doesn't say anything about it really - he just goes back there and then the movie recreates the end of the book version of The Shining with Danny in place of Jack.
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Oct 27, 2023 18:02
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Darko posted:We always circle back to this in this thread like clockwork but: What's actually going on here is that people internalize and reify completely contingent rules relating to copyright and the scope of spinoff media. In the twenty thousand pieces of Alien media released between Aliens and Covenant, not a single one attempted to explain or even gesture towards the explanation for the xenomorph's existence at all! It must be because of some cosmic rule about Explaining Ruins Everything rather than that the owner of the intellectual property wants to save that for another of the mainline films but make money off the brand in the meantime. This is why, by explaining where its monsters come from, Jurassic Park commits one of the worst conceivable cinema sins—
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Oct 27, 2023 18:09
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Ferrinus posted:Based on what we see in Covenant, I think it's less a matter of two competing nations/religions/political tendencies or the Engineer civilization changing over time so much as there's an "outer church" of naive peasant monks and an "inner church" of sinister black goo experimenters. The former might not even realize that the latter are members of the same species. But here's the thing: what makes you categorize the Inner Church as "sinister" based on the confrontation with the one Engineer who might or might not have been a part of that Inner Church? Why would a member of an insular religious group be fitted with a permanent flight suit?
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Oct 28, 2023 00:08
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Ferrinus posted:In the twenty thousand pieces of Alien media released between Aliens and Covenant, not a single one attempted to explain or even gesture towards the explanation for the xenomorph's existence at all! This is inaccurate - various books and comics in the 90s and 2000s deliberately danced around the topic of Alien origins and provided hints and theories multiple times, but never anything concrete because they knew the audience was better off not knowing.
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Oct 28, 2023 00:29
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Xenomrph posted:This is inaccurate - various books and comics in the 90s and 2000s deliberately danced around the topic of Alien origins and provided hints and theories multiple times, but never anything concrete because they knew the audience was better off not knowing.
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Oct 28, 2023 02:05
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Martman posted:Or perhaps for other, far more sinister reasons Such as?
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Oct 28, 2023 02:15
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Infinite content!
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Oct 28, 2023 02:17
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Martman posted:Infinite content! Well, that too 
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Oct 28, 2023 02:26
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End of Shoelace posted:But here's the thing: what makes you categorize the Inner Church as "sinister" based on the confrontation with the one Engineer who might or might not have been a part of that Inner Church? Well, despite their space-age technology, they've got their kinsmen wearing sackcloth and farming wheat and throwing up their hands in worship whenever a spaceship becomes visible. You think the biosuit guys are drinking goo to seed worlds with life? No, they get some sap in a robe to off himself. There's probably a Zardoz thing going on. Xenomrph posted:This is inaccurate - various books and comics in the 90s and 2000s deliberately danced around the topic of Alien origins and provided hints and theories multiple times, but never anything concrete because they knew the audience was better off not knowing. Hold up there. How did books and comics provide hints and theories towards alien origins? Because I'm sure plenty of characters speculated in speech bubbles, but I'll be shocked if anything along the lines of "ah, this must be their homeworld" or "wow, these must be the machines used to create them!" ever even got to sound credible by the end of any given story.
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Oct 28, 2023 06:45
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Ridley Scott saw that the mystery of the alien was completely gone so he made a prequel that injected a huge amount of mystery and unanswered questions into the mythos and people got mad.
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Oct 28, 2023 09:48
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Alchenar posted:Ridley Scott saw that the mystery of the alien was completely gone so he made a prequel that injected a huge amount of mystery and unanswered questions into the mythos and people got mad. It’s this, but the whole premise was faulty from the beginning because there never was a “mystery of the alien.” Everyone already understood perfectly well that the organisms in Alien were a bunch of pods kept frozen in a cave - meaning that someone had intervened in their growth to some extent - and that at least one big, elephant-looking Ancient Alien had hosed with them. No real mystery there. Why are they in a fridge? Well, obviously they’re very dangerous. It’s very easy to figure this out. [For an example of how obvious this is, the 1980 “Alien ripoff” Contamination (actually a ripoff of Quatermass 2 that employs Alien imagery) correctly places the pods in a cave, and makes it clear that they are not actually eggs but a sort of weaponized biotechnology.] As gone over earlier in the thread, it was James Cameron who first introduced confusion through massive retcons in his 1986 sequel film. He introduced the notion that the cave was just a room on the spaceship, that the aliens are just wild animals who attacked the ship’s pilot, and that the egg-shaped pods are literally just eggs. But, despite this confusion, there is still no real mystery! In this version, the aliens are merely preexisting animals that infested a spaceship at some point, forcing it to crash. So, nerds aren’t consistently mad at Prometheus because it “removes the mystery”, but because it clearly states that James Cameron was wrong. Moreover, Aliens’ version of Ripley is wrong in the diegesis. The eggs aren’t eggs, the aliens aren’t natural animals that evolved naturally over millions of years, etc. Prometheus contradicts the expository dialogue.
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Oct 28, 2023 13:54
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End of Shoelace posted:noted crazy person Ellen Ripley. One of the best aspects of the Alien films is that Ripley is actually not a crazy person, but rather a very logical and empowered woman who subverts the horror trope of dumb people doing stupid poo poo while the viewer shouts at the screen in frustration. She's rational, sensible and brave enough to do what needs to be done and that is part of what made the films so scary in the first place, is that they presented a protagonist who did follow the right course of action and things still went bad. It's superb writing and acting, and why she will forever be one of the best characters in the horror medium. Not quite using protagonist correctly here I know, as anyone watching Alien for the first time will have a hard time guessing who (if anyone) will survive (which is another quality of the film that makes it so good) but one of the first noteworthy scenes for Ripley is seeing her calmly and sensibly follow quarantine procedure correctly to the dismay of other crazy people. Obviously this is undone by a saboteur but even now Alien continues to hold its place as a breath of fresh air in the horror genre so long after release thanks to the character of Ripley.
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Oct 28, 2023 17:59
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SUNKOS posted:One of the best aspects of the Alien films is that Ripley is actually not a crazy person, but rather a very logical and empowered woman who subverts the horror trope of dumb people doing stupid poo poo while the viewer shouts at the screen in frustration. Ripley actually does start losing it by the end of Alien, but Shoelace is specifically talking about Ellen Ripley - the version(s) of the character in subsequent films, where she’s sometimes having delusions and often saying some truly wild poo poo.
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Oct 28, 2023 20:40
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Ripley 8 > Ellen Ripley. Fight me.
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Oct 28, 2023 20:59
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She will never be ballin *cereal spit*
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Oct 28, 2023 21:49
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Alien Resurrection looks great (thank you Jeunet and Khondji!) with some of the best imagery of the franchise I know Whedon likes to say they did everything wrong, but the worst part of the movie is the script. The tone, cast, direction, and cinematography loving rule On the other hand, a Whedon-directed Alien movie would have been worse than anything else in the entire franchise
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Oct 28, 2023 22:09
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Alien Resurrection looks great (thank you Jeunet and Khondji!) with some of the best imagery of the franchise *Alien bursts out of a person and runs off* *stunned silence* Ripley: Well, THAT just happened. *Someone throws their hands and freaks out* Person: It's game over, man. The game is over! Ripley: What? Is that what we're going to do freak out? I knew someone who spoke just like you and they died. If this was a horror movie, you'd be next. Ron Pearlman's character: What is that it? You had a bad experience. Now you are a tough female badass. Let him freak out. Besides, if this is a horror movie and he dies first, at least it isn't us. Analee Call: *rolls eyes* This is a waste of time, guys. Besides, if this was a horror movie, the two bickering people wouldn't last either. Then again, if it was a horror movie, I'd probably get killed first because I'm a lesbian. And the scene would go on and on and not be funny once.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:25
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:Alien Resurrection looks great (thank you Jeunet and Khondji!) with some of the best imagery of the franchise The only good part of the script that I liked and can remember was the alien attacks felt random and sudden at times. I thought that was neato
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Oct 29, 2023 00:09
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:I know Whedon likes to say they did everything wrong, but the worst part of the movie is the script. The tone, cast, direction, and cinematography loving rule Whenever something has gone wrong in one of Whedon's movies it has never been his fault. He works hard to make sure people know the buck stops somewhere far away.
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Oct 29, 2023 00:20
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Ferrinus posted:Hold up there. How did books and comics provide hints and theories towards alien origins? Because I'm sure plenty of characters speculated in speech bubbles, but I'll be shocked if anything along the lines of "ah, this must be their homeworld" or "wow, these must be the machines used to create them!" ever even got to sound credible by the end of any given story. That doesn’t make any difference, the books and comics offered repeated hints and theories as to their origins, in direct opposition to what you claimed. You claimed that not a single other piece of Alien media “even gestured” toward Alien origins; this is false. You spoke from ignorance, I corrected you. Please don’t move the goalposts. Most of the time it was provided as credible theories, but with room for doubt or alternate interpretation. Occasionally there was an unreliable narrator, or something was presented in one story only for a later story to cast doubt on it with new information or interpretations. This is no different from what Scott’s prequels did. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Oct 29, 2023 |
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Oct 29, 2023 02:45
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Xenomrph posted:That doesn’t make any difference, the books and comics offered repeated hints and theories as to their origins, in direct opposition to what you claimed. You claimed that not a single other piece of Alien media “even gestured” toward Alien origins; this is false. You spoke from ignorance, I corrected you. Please don’t move the goalposts. Nnnnooo, I think you're bullshitting me. There's a difference between characters within the fiction speculating, in speech bubbles, that such and such thing is the true origin or secret nature of the alien. But the stories themselves can never confirm or even lend measurable credence to this stuff. Read every single Aliens comic ever, and tell me: did the xenomorph evolve on its own or get manufactured artificially? There is no answer and can never be one because that's G-Canon, it's reserved for the mainline movies that comics and novels and video games can only ever parasitize and rehash. Scott's prequels show a very clear origin for the black-carapace xenomorph that disquieted fans just have to squirm and writhe in discomfort about. But a comic could never get away with that. They never, ever would've allowed Covenant in the Aliens EU.
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Oct 29, 2023 03:12
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Putting things in even clearer terms: the movie AVP says the predators from Aliens had been bred by the aliens from Predator for use as target practice, and nobody gave a poo poo.
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Oct 29, 2023 06:30
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happyhippy posted:One day some fuckwit will explain what the Thing is, and it will be completely so underwhelming. The Thing is Jenova from Final Fantasy 7. It can mimic a strong personality, like Sephiroth, but, like the Alien, is a creature designed only to propagate itself.
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Oct 29, 2023 06:35
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Ferrinus posted:Nnnnooo, I think you're bullshitting me. There's a difference between characters within the fiction speculating, in speech bubbles, that such and such thing is the true origin or secret nature of the alien. But the stories themselves can never confirm or even lend measurable credence to this stuff. Read every single Aliens comic ever, and tell me: did the xenomorph evolve on its own or get manufactured artificially? There is no answer and can never be one because that's G-Canon, it's reserved for the mainline movies that comics and novels and video games can only ever parasitize and rehash. It's okay, no need to double-down on what you were wrong about, just take the L and move on. You spoke from ignorance, ended up being mistaken, got corrected, and that's okay. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Oct 29, 2023 |
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Oct 29, 2023 07:52
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Reminder, that you can do a good, captivating story about anything. Ridley Scott is just a poo poo movie maker.
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Oct 29, 2023 08:34
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insane thing to post anywhere let alone the alien thread
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Oct 29, 2023 08:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Putting things in even clearer terms: the movie AVP says the predators from Aliens had been bred by the aliens from Predator for use as target practice, and nobody gave a poo poo. What
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Oct 29, 2023 14:40
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The Alien (capital-A) is a predatory creature. The Predator (capital-P) is an alien creature. I suspect "clearer terms" terms was meant ironically.
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Oct 29, 2023 15:32
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smg
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Oct 29, 2023 17:52
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Ferrinus posted:I'll be shocked if anything along the lines of "ah, this must be their homeworld" Xenomrph posted:That doesn’t make any difference, the books and comics offered repeated hints and theories as to their origins, in direct opposition to what you claimed. You claimed that not a single other piece of Alien media “even gestured” toward Alien origins; this is false. You spoke from ignorance, I corrected you. Please don’t move the goalposts. This is a very vague recollection for me that I'm not 100% sure is true and might have just been a weird dream I had when young, but I think there were actually some books (that were maybe adapted into graphic novels at a later date?) that dealt with an alien homeworld and a 'Queen of Queens' or something similar? If I'm recalling correctly, I think Xeno will know more if I'm remembering right or just smoked too much crack today. I think the characters intended to go there to capture the queen of queens (related to how the xenomorphs are implied to communicate telepathically?) and there was a lot of reservations regarding what kind of hosed-up nightmare planet could be home to such a species and the possibility of there being even worse creatures present if the xenos evolved to be as they are, what role do they have in the ecosystem? I think something else showed the facehuggers to be considered a delicacy for one species, maybe the original comic versions of the space jockey race? I'm not sure how that above homeworld story played out either but I think they might have arrived and encountered a xeno civil war, but I could be confusing that with something else as well. Again, Xeno probably knows what I'm thinking of here - there were the traditional aliens we know and love and then others which were red. Ferrinus posted:Scott's prequels show a very clear origin for the black-carapace xenomorph that disquieted fans just have to squirm and writhe in discomfort about. But a comic could never get away with that. They never, ever would've allowed Covenant in the Aliens EU. I don't think they did? David didn't create anything since we saw the mural in Prometheus that showed the Engineers had a religious reverence for the creature and whatever that green crystal was. We do not know how they came to encounter them, only that they're deeply culturally significant to them as a species and that the black goo is a tool to try and recreate them, maybe, depending on what the plot calls upon the goo to do during whatever scene it's present in. Sometimes it will break down a lifeform that ingests it on a molecular level almost instantly, sometimes it will do a gooey little dance in response to an atmospheric change, sometimes it will make worms grow in your eyes, sometimes it will turn worms into hammerpedes, sometimes it will turn you into a zombie with super strength/speed and very flexible joints, sometimes it will seed the life of a trilobite inside a barren woman, and sometimes it will become sentient and fly around like a swarm of angry locusts that somehow kills people upon contact and leaves charred remains?! I wanna know what happens when you smoke that poo poo. Edit: Speaking of smoking, almost forgot that the black goo can also slowly fly around in the air as a tiny sentient creature and into your ear to create an albino creature that explodes out of your back. SUNKOS fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Oct 29, 2023 |
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Oct 29, 2023 18:24
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The alien queen mother or whatever it was called showed up in the dark horse comics series Alien Earth War which ended up getting rewritten in later collections because it had Newt and Hicks in it, they end up getting renamed so alien nerds could reconcile it into their canon, the alien civil war was in another comic called Aliens Genocide, both series were continuing storylines that were extensions of the dark horse series which had earth get infested with aliens. The eggs as a delicacy was another story that showed up in the anthology comic dark horse presents but isn’t considered in continuity, whatever that’s supposed to mean for a comic series already written out of continuity. The current marvel comics are doing their own thing in order to kill residuals going to any of the creatives involved in the dark horse stories.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:13
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The "alien homeworld" was *supposed* to be that initially, but got kind of changed to a world they just completely took over. It had a Queen Mother that was psychically communicating with the Earth Queens and Ripley, Newt and Hicks...errr....Billie, Wilks, and Synth RIpley went there to capture it to stop the Earth invasion. edit: mostly beaten because I was looking up the Newt and Hicks changed names 
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Oct 29, 2023 19:19
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ripley actually does start losing it by the end of Alien, but Shoelace is specifically talking about Ellen Ripley - the version(s) of the character in subsequent films, where she’s sometimes having delusions and often saying some truly wild poo poo. Note that Ripley 8 has the brilliant idea to crash the ship into Earth without knowing it's desolate.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:23
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