#defamiliarization

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

One of my favorite bits in Gideon the Ninth is that not only do the Nine Houses use swords, quills, candles and halogen tubes (because sci-fantasy Aesthetics), but Tamsyn does this really funny lampshade hanging where, in Canaan House, they do encounter guns, LEDs and ballpoint pens, and they just think those are quaint antiques nobody in their right mind would insist on using in this day and age.

[wallacepolsom]

Wallace Polsom, Ask Me No Questions CXCII (04 Mar 2026), paper collage, 26.2 x 33.3 cm.

[maidthings]

the phone emits radiation that causes anxiety and paranoia. this radiation emanates from one side of it, typically in the 430-750THz range

[the-fae-folk]

Writing a work involving the The Fair Folk (with a fae mc) and wanted some advice on making my mc feel more... Alien?

My mc himself is a satyr, partially anyway, and looks like a typical one without any horns. After he is elevated though I planned for him to be more goat-like, fur everywhere instead of just the lower half, his nose and eyes being changed.

There are other details I was considering adding to make him more strange/weird. Smelling of mulled wine, predatory teeth, maybe extra eyes or strange natural symbol looking patterns.

In my personal opinion, while giving the character a strange and alien appearance is fun, it doesn't do a whole lot to make your character feel very alien beyond a certain point. I've noticed that a lot of fantasy and scifi stories deal with characters who are supposed to be strange and frightening and different, and while their appearance certainly is startling… their behavior and ways of thinking are very human.

A far more effective and reaching strategy is to build non-human ways of thinking into their very cognition and perception. Some of this could be based on their sensory perception. How might a being interact with the world if they can see radio waves, or work with an extra fourth spatial dimension orthagonal to the other three we usually know, or can literally taste music the way we taste chemical substances? Or some differences could be cultural, such as associating circles of mushrooms with the risk of human incursion on one's domain, or a long tradition of treating an entire race of beings as somehow less than insects over the course of several thousands of years and then finding it difficult to see them as anything else.

Other ways to make characters seem more alien could involve their biology beyond perception. For example, one thing this blog has explored before is the concept of food. If you didn't need to eat food in order to survive, and wouldn't really feel hunger from not eating unless you'd somehow gotten used to the activity and miss it, how would that affect your entire society and culture over time? For humans, so much of our cultures and philosophies and traditions originate from the things that keep us alive, such as eating food and not starving to death in a ditch somewhere without shelter or community. If you dig deep enough, almost everything is related to it in some distant way. So how might a culture that does not require sustenance for survival evolve over time?

Another rather important one is morality. The trope "Blue and Orange Morality" describes moral frameworks that are so utterly alien to the human experience that they simply cannot be layered onto our frameworks of good or evil, lawful or chaotic, and the like. These frameworks usually have plenty of logical coherence to them, it's just that its stemming from entirely different values and premises that are inherently not human. Typically such characters would find human morality as baffling, weird, or appalling as we find theirs. This is one of the trickier techniques to use as unfortunately most writers (that we know of) tend to be human, which rather limits our experience in alien moral frameworks. It takes practice.

Defamiliarization is also a delightfully fun and helpful tool to use in situations like these. The best example is when you have a non-human character coming into contact with the human world filled with many human things. This trick involves describing ordinary human objects or behaviors or places through the eyes of someone who has absolutely no idea what they are or how to deal with it. Of course, inversely the same thing applies when we have humans stepping into non-human places or interacting with non-human beings and objects… but we typically call that cosmic or eldritch horror (or a merging of the two, which I refuse to give Lovecraft the satisfaction of associating him with the concept) because it's very useful for causing both character and reader great unease (though it does appear rather freely in fantasy and science fiction in a wide range of forms). But the important thing that this trick can teach you, aside from improving your descriptive writing and providing an immediate alien viewpoint, is to imagine a character's life without the thing they are currently unfamiliar with and attempting to describe. How would not having even the barest concept of whatever mundane thing it is change every single aspect of their lives? What do they have instead? How does that change their whole worldview in subtle and obvious ways?

Some writers give themselves rules or limitations. What is this character allowed to do, not allowed to do, how are they to react to this specific thing or circumstance or concept, etc etc. And then without ever telling the reader that such rules exist they follow them to the letter whenever the character is being written in a scene.

While it very much is possible to get carried away with this if you're not careful, taking the time to build up the details of how your character understands, perceives, and interacts with the world around them can be extremely effective in making them feel more alien and otherworldly. Even if in your actual story you never explain all the differences or point all of them out, as long as you keep them in mind while you write the character then they'll almost certainly still show up in countless hidden ways that build up to a very alien feeling.

[zekedms]

*puts food in the molecular energy remover for storage*

*puts food in the molecular energizer for consumption*

*takes beverage from molecular energy remover for consumption*

*adds crystalized low energy water to absorb energy from beverage for optimal enjoyment*

[phoenixyfriend]

Out: It's been so long that I forgot In: Time eats at the skullflesh

[gothicseverance]

Gothic tropes (…) have increasingly been applied to mundane or familiar settings, such as suburbia or high school corridors, in order to enhance their disruptive effects.

—Playground Love

[2xmiu]

warrior cats >>> watership down

discuss