I Feel Like It's Honestly Impossible to Make Characters with Truly Alien/Incomprehensible Morality Because We Humans Can Only Write About Things We Ourselves Understand
DISCLAIMER: I'm am not these kinds of characters and the writer who make them are bad, far from it. I in particular love all of the examples I used in this post.
There are a lot of characters in fiction that are described with terms like "eldritch, alien, Incomprehensible, Lovecraftian" in relation to how they think and behave to state that these beings are so different in personality & morality compared to humans that we should not even try to understand them, lest we go insane.
Now, I feel like it's perfectly acceptable to use these terms in describing character designs I guess, but when it comes to motivations, personality, morality, goals, etc.,... I honestly feel like all of these characters can easily be understood by humans.
We humans can only write about things we understand ourselves. We only use the colors we can perceive with our eyes because those are the only colors we as humans can see while other animals can see a much larger spectrum of color. A person who is blind their whole life won't describe colors at all since they can't describe them due to having no knowledge about them in the first place. So, how are writers going to write about something alien in personality/morality when it means they have to create something that they themselves can't understand?
Examples of characters or factions I've often seen stated to be alien in morality:
- The Tyranids from Warhammer 40k, a giant swarm of space bugs that wish to consume everything in the galaxy and create more of their endless hordes. But... that basically what every animal in the wild, especially insects, already do: consume things to sustain themselves and reproduce.
- The Chaos Gods also from Warhammer 40k who desire to spread the chaos (heh) in relation to their specific niche (War, Excess, Disease, Change, etc.) But, this is pretty easy to understand too: they want to gain more power in the galaxy by spreading their influence. Also, they're basically just collections of emotional energy connected to concepts like Rage, Pleasure, Knowledge, Despair, etc., which are concepts humans all understand, that have gained sapience.
- The One Below All, a cosmic entity in the Marvel Multiverse that exists as the polar opposite of the One Above All, the creator of all the Marvel Multiverse. This thing is pretty easy to understand too: it's a manifestation of all evil & destruction in existence in opposition to creation and good in relation to human moral concepts of what is good & evil.
- Azathoth, one of the Outer Gods of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and is one of the most powerful beings in the Mythos. He's outright described as a mindless creature that is lulled to sleep from the music of flutes played by his minions. Alongside maybe being a metaphor for primordial Chaos in the Greek sense (basically nothingness before existence), Azathoth is pretty easy to understand to me. He's just a sleeping idiot, lol.
Ultimately, what I think when these creatures are described as being alien, Lovecraftian, etc., it is less saying that they are impossible to understand and more that they are such dramatic extremes of understandable concepts that it goes beyond the point of normal human reason.
- Tyranids eat and reproduce like other life, but they desire to eat EVERYTHING, even much of the inorganic matter of planets, and they reproduce at a speed & rate beyond anything else living besides single-celled organisms I guess.
- The Chaos Gods likewise are stuff like War being fought forever, Diseases that rot you into nothing in seconds, excess to the point you're doing stuff a Cenobite would enjoy, & Change where you're human one moment and living dust the next. They also wish to control the galaxy on a metaphysical level, mutating the basic fabric of reality to please them.
- The One Below All wishes to destroy everything and everyone simply because it is the One Below All's opposite. It has no goals or desires besides doing evil and spreading destruction, and it hates everyone alive simply because they are alive.
- Azathoth is an impossibly huge creature of living tentacles and appendages, and the fact that such a thing like that is sleeping and is even capable of sleep is pretty weird.
Posted Jan 25, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC