Was re-reading this thread, when I had an idea; Humanity, to other species, is like a combination of Slenderman, Fiddlesticks The Ancient Fear (in his current form) and
a more mutilated version of the true appearance of the sheep in the comic linked back on page 1. As in, our appearance can be described as the mutilated, burnt corpse of one of their own that has been reanimated, distorted and swathed in furs and cloths dyed in seemingly impossible colours and patterns. But our voices are like those of sirens, merfolk (the sort that sing beautifully) and the most beatific singers (voice-wise) to ever exist all fused together into one heavenly choir. Few short of the most strong-willed or alternatively-tasted-in-music being able to resist our persuasions and charisma for long.
I think there's definitely some potential for humans looking creepy or icky to aliens:
- To furry, feathered, or scaly aliens our hairless soft skin might make us look diseased or like decayed corpses, or it might just make us look weird to them in the way naked mole rats look weird to us. They might think our soft thin skin is kind of gross as our internal meat and fluids are so close to the surface and sometimes our veins and other features of our internal anatomy are disturbingly visible. Also I think aliens who don't sweat might think that's really gross.
- The human upright stance is very unusual in animals (which is why we've classically thought of it as one of the things that distinguishes us from animals). Even other bipeds mostly don't stand or walk the way we do. It's the product of a very specific and unusual evolutionary history of becoming arboreal and then re-evolving into ground-dwellers. So I think it might be a very unusual trait among intelligent species, maybe unique to humans, and it's certainly something that might make us look
weird to aliens.
The Thranx from Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth novels had this sort of opinion about us when they first met us. They're insectoid aliens with exoskeletons, and they thought our exposed meat was gross. It didn't help that we reminded them of dangerous predatory animals that exist on their homeworld.
But I don't think this sort of thing is really eldritch horror-ey (not by itself, anyway), it'd just make the aliens think we look kind of gross and creepy.
Getting back to
@Memphet'ran's
idea of how a less social species would look at humans, imagine a species that
did manage to civilize itself but had to do so by consciously and explicitly creating the social mechanisms we handle more-or-less instinctively.
We look like a race or telepaths or seers who all the time
just seem to know what to do, what others are thinking and how to get along with each other. Where they have rigid and detailed rules of behavior that have to be followed to the letter lest everything fall apart, we have (by comparison) vague guidelines that we ignore half the time yet everything works anyway. We can tell where other humans are looking without speaking to them, we can communicate "telepathically" with subtle social cues like that. We can predict or even manipulate the behavior of others just by becoming familiar with them, and sometimes without even that.
Aliens like that might also have lower social intelligence than humans, which might make us super-charismatic by their standards to the point that to them it might almost look like we have psionic mind-reading and mind control powers. Now
that's a trait I could see working for "humans as eldritch horrors."
I don't have the link on hand but I remember reading a story a while back that had the premise of Earth being invaded and conquered by aliens who were less intelligent than us, so we were like an entire race of geniuses to them. The story was mostly about exploring how we might effect the aliens' society; I thought the execution was kind of mediocre but the premise was interesting. A story kind of like that but with the aliens being as smart as humans in terms of general intelligence but having lower social intelligence would be interesting. Think stuff like the alien invaders quickly having to invent protocols like "when interrogating a human prisoner the prisoner should be kept in a sound-proofed cell with an electronic audio feed the only available communication with you, stick to this rigid script, do not let them influence the direction of the conversation, if they even attempt anything but yes/no answers and short strictly on-topic elaborations cut off your audio feed out so you physically can't hear what they're saying, respond to any spontaneous speech by cutting off your audio feed, last week we tried interrogating one of these beings and within two hours the prisoner talked the interrogator into turning traitor, helping them escape, and defecting to the humans."
To a hive mind the fact that each one of is an individual would be mind blowing.
Imagine that you are a hive mind and you have reached out and touched five or six other hiveminds in the universe.
Then we come, we are impossible, when all of existence has been only a dozen individuals to find a tidal wave of billions pouring fourth, each with it's own thoughts and ideas,
It would be mind numbing trying to understand us.
We would be impossible or so far outside of their understanding of reality that we could be seen as a horror.
One of the bits I liked in the
Starship Troopers book was the part where it said that a species like us would probably be even more alien and exotic to a hive mind species than a hive mind species is to us.
