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Big Bad
The thing about THE THING is that I like the movie better than ALIEN, but the Alien from ALIEN is such a better thing than the Thing is that it sorta equals out.
I can remember being in an arcade and there was a life-size replica of the Alien in the darkened fog-machine-ed more-violent game section you had to be older to play in - because this was when parents thought pacman-looking-ass Grand Theft Auto One made kids shoot-up schools - and the faster way to get to the room with the birthday party pizzas in it was you had to walk through the 18+ area and past the statue.
I didn't know it was from a movie. I did know it was a fake statue. It was like my body could not admit what I knew— I couldn't approach it without feeling like I was trespassing.
I had a similar but to-scale smaller feeling when I would be at my friend's house and his dad collected toys and he had an expensive toy-you-couldn't-play-with toy of the Alien Queen. I didn't want to be in the room with it there.
Then I learned about the movie ALIEN and how what the Alien does is bad. It lays eggs inside of you that hatch while you're alive. It has acid blood. It bites you. I thought, well, those seem like three different but essentially-comprehensible bad things. Okay.
Then I saw it in the movie finally and I thought, yeah, I like it in SPACEBALLS when the little guy bursts out of the dude at the diner and it does a silly dance.
The Alien had too much secondary literature that I had been exposed to for it to scare me in the movie as much as it did when it was just some thing over there.
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Meat Puppets
Now - the Thing - from THE THING - as a thing - like a toy - it looks, like, kinda shitty. It usually comes with a Kurt Russell toy, as if the monster's naked flesh impasto forms were too anonymous by themselves.
The design of the Alien makes for a dreadful object. The Thing - you couldn't grab a freeze frame of any of its appearances on screen and materialize the result without losing most of what made it scary in the first place.
The Alien is a slouching latex cock dragon with a cuter cock in its mouth that it fucks a hole in your head with - and this after being birthed from a hole it fucked the stomach of your buddy to death with. The Thing is many different bloated human-animal corpses blowing skin disasters of teeth and hair and tentacles. Both the Thing and the Alien are yucky in a dreadful way.
As in: they show seamlessly mixed together what couldn’t mix together without destroying the components.
In the movie, The Thing's dreadfulness persists by having an uncanny horror aspect to it. Any character on the outpost behaving in a slightly off way is possibly assimilated and about to erupt. I think why the movie holds up could be that changes in performance values, which inevitably make the acting in older movies seem like people behaving oddly, facilitate the movie-monster premise of the Thing.
Like this dog, for instance.
Its odd. Its standing. Its laying down. It maybe seems focused on something - we don’t know what it is. What it is is the dog has been trained to stay in one place without getting excited - and looks like it. It looks like a dog that’s been told “stay,” “sit,” “come.” Actors who look like people trying to act can be similarly out-of-place looking.
Oddness can become dreadful when what’s out-of-place is enmeshed in near identical copies of the out-of-place thing.
The Perfect Organism
Before the sequels and prequels and spoofs and spin-offs ran it down, chest-bursting was not an inevitability but something dumbly witnessed. Alien was a movie about encountering a life-cycle utterly hostile to human life - an incomprehensible lifecycle.
Each way it changes is bad for different reasons - a lich-king hand that face-fucks you comatose - a pink dick blasting from your stomach - between those two nightmares, which are again pretty different from each other, to have somehow a natural design, is the grander worser nightmare that is the movie-monster-i-ness of the Alien.
Who Would Win In A Fight?
“Winchester’s Orientation experience provides a comprehensive start to students’ journey into the Winchester community. Each day provides unique programming and opportunities to start making connections, get settled, and find their sense of belonging. Students engage in every day of orientation and do not select one specific day to attend.”
In the red corner…
Type: Null
An alien parasite that spreads by generating hollowed-out copies. It slowly purges the host’s insides’ until there’s nothing left but it.
MUTILATED LIFE The severed extremities of many forms of artificial life can continue to attack even when separated from the main body. These parts have –1 Agility and –3 Toughness. To keep life interesting, the Host should interpret any attack by any weapon that could have reasonably severed a limb as having severed a limb until the combat gets too confusing for the Host to keep track of.
MUTANT PHYSIOGNOMY Assimilating hosts come in many shapes. If a has a strange shape, it may add some minor extra ability. They are never flying creatures, however, and always crawl.
EVACUATE after three rounds of a successful grab, Type: Null can cause a target to wretch uncontrollably (unless an antivenom is administered). A lost throw to most actions. After three rounds of vomiting in a grab, Type: Null will assimilate the target and the PC is treated as Dangerously Insane and with Type: Null’s mutant abilities.
Weaknesses
Ice and things chilled below freezing can hurt Type: Null
In the blue corner…
H2-ND
An alien that regenerates violently. It inseminates, dies, cocoons, then explodes badder.
INSEMINATE on a successful grapple with the stinger the target is knocked down. If an antivenom is not administered within an hour the target will become Dangerously Insane and seek out a dark place to enchrysalate itself. A raptor without its stinger dies in four rounds.
VILE SURFACE if touched in its chrysalis form, the offending skin will be rubbed off for Standard Damage at 3 Intensity
SPECIATION each new raptor version of the H2-ND gets a Significator Card from the player’s Deck, which it can throw whenever the situation may call for it. You could try to come up with a biological reason for the reward.
Weaknesses
H2-ND is vulnerable while transitioning between forms. If you can get it to detach its stinger and then destroy the stinger before it inseminates someone, its dead.
Fear Sex & Alcohol Initiative
“The Fear Sex & Alcohol Initiative (FSAI) is a required program for all new first-year and transfer undergraduate students. The program provides valuable information and empowers students to:
Make informed choices and practice safer sex behaviors.
Maintain physical and social health.
Prevent sexual violence.
Make responsible decisions regarding the use of alcohol.The program also challenges students to utilize effective strategies and skills that can help keep them on track as they accomplish their educational goals.”
Some students could be undercover Feds. They are armed and will attack anyone who tries to destroy H2-ND or Type: Null before they can capture each. If the aliens reach the same floor as each other, they Feds will break cover - they get ARs - and try to kill everyone in the dorm.
