Contextual Horror · 9:48pm Jan 28th, 2017
I've been thinking of the scariest monsters in fiction. Well, physical ones at least.
I'd say one of the most iconic ones is the xenomorph, and honestly I can see why. While I think some of their aspects are ridiculous, such as how the hell these things are getting enough food on these isolated places to grow so big and so fast, I can't deny why they're scary.
An intelligent predator that sees but has no eyes (that we can see), has claws and a prehensile tail capable of ripping a grown man in combat armor apart, a damage resistant shell (at least 9mm doesn't hurt them), and they literally require host to reproduce, which involves a creepy vagina spider latching onto your face and shoving eggs down your throat.
These things are disturbingly intelligent as well-how much is debatable (queen is almost certainly sentient, but individually they're more like very clever animals with a loose possible hive mind behind them), so even trained soldiers who know what they're dealing with are at risk. Worst yet, a single group can depopulate an entire city or at least settlement.
Finally, you as the host species can even make them stronger and more adapted to hunting your kind down? How? Well implanted embryos take on aspects of the host, and since they're seemingly so adaptive, they presumably become more suited to hunting humans.
So...scary. Certainly. In particular, the fact that it has a second mouth within a its bigger mouth just creeps me out.
That brings me to the next point of this post.
You'd think these things would be constant, high level threats to humanity anywhere in almost any situation, and not much could eclipse them, right? I mean, if I were to throw a group of these things-say including a queen-into any other setting, that's a massive "Oh Shit" moment and might spell legitimate doom for that world.
Allow me to introduce you to the T-103, otherwise known as a tyrant in the Resident Evil verse.
Or, his fan name: Mr. X.
For those not in the know, Tyrants such as that handsome devil above are about 9 to 10 ft tall, are almost immune to firearms short of high end explosives, and have a terrifying amount of strength.
I think this video says more about them than I possibly can in sixteen full paragraphs.
For a bit of context, those things it's fighting? They're called lickers, and they have been shown in the series to have claws capable of ripping apart human flesh and their tongues can easily pierce a human torso. (I'm not sure what variant they are, however).
So on top of being incredibly strong, this one got nothing more than light scratches from other bioweapons meant for use against humans. Frankly, the strength demonstrated here isn't even its most extreme example-in Umbrella Chrnoicles, one of the T-103s was shown to repeatedly shove a train car back with enough force to turn a person to paste.
What's more, these aren't the most successful ones. In fact, these are the cheap mass produced ones. The most successful tyrant was Nemesis, and while I won't go into more details, he had pretty much all of the strength of the one displayed above, plus human level intelligence, extreme resilience and a rocket launcher.
This brings back context. Xenomorphs are scary and genuinely dangerous, but lets imagine an alternate scenario where the Umbrella Corporation made it into the space age, and its products (i.e. tyrants) were called upon to clear the colony in Aliens of the xenomorph threat.
Frankly, I don't see the xenomorphs being able to beat a small team of, say, three of them. Tyrants have them outclassed in durability, strength, heck even speed a tyrant can pick more more in a full run. The one advantage xenomorphs have is maneuverability, but that doesn't account for much when you have monsters ripping apart the environment to get at you.
There is an argument to be made here their acid blood would be able to kill the tyrants, but I disagree. These things have survived dips in molten metal (Iron if I recall) and their response was to instigate a secondary mutation that bulked them up and made them even more dangerous than before.
Furthermore, even if they did manage to incapacitate one and, say a facehugger latched onto it, I'm not sure it would even produce viable xenomorph offspring. I say this because each Tyrant is heavily infected with a mutagenic virus known as the T-virus, which I can only imagine would rapidly infect any organic thing it comes into contact with.
Hell I imagine that a face hugger could very well get onto the tyrant's mouth. THe problem is staying there. These things can break marble pillars with ease. Ripping a face hugger off would be no problem.
So, what's the point of all of this rambling on monsters?
Well, it's context. Both of these are horrible monsters and the apex of their given worlds, but were they to be introduced to one another, or characters from one setting learn of the other, there'd be vastly different reactions.
On the Aliens side, I imagine reactions would be "Oh God why do those exist?"
Predators excepted, who might get hard at the thought of one of these things or might genuinely think "Okay, that's getting a bit excessive. Give me back the bare chested commandos."
On the RE side, I imagine a reaction from someone like Leon on learning about xenomorphs would be "Wow that's ugly. Eh, still not as bad as some of the things I faced. Did I ever tell you about the time I fought a small spanish man merged with a parasite giant wall flower thing that had massive tentacles with teeth and spat out its disgusting babies at me as a weapon? Cause I did that."
This just comes back to context. The horrid monster of one series is just another comparatively minor threat of another.
This can be applied to MLP and other series easily outside monstrous beings as well. For instance, Twilight Sparkle and Harry Potter. Both are accomplished spell casters in their respective worlds, but I would say Twilight far outshines Harry Potter in both power and known spells, both because of her years of learning seemingly thousands of spells, but also for gaining an innate understanding of how spells work and creating an entirely new variety of magic.
Eh, more ramblings
Hmm... Pretty interesting stuff right there. And one can only imagine what umbrella would do with xeno-Queen and a T-virus...
Also, one nickname fot tyrant here in Finland(, where I live,) is "Morning-jacket-guy"(Aamutakki-mies).
Just talking...
To be fair to the xenomorphs, they aren't really 'soldier-type' monsters, but more of an ambush predator horror movie villain. On open ground, the colonial marines would've put them down without breaking a sweat.
4400585 True enough. Honestly Tyrants certainly aren't invincible either. They're tough and insanely strong, but they've been regularly defeated with high explosives, and even in universe it's been noted that armored vehicles like tanks are very effective against them.
I think the end goal was for Tyrants to be primarily an anti-personnel weapon somewhere between foot soldiers and armored vehicles. These things also excel in urban areas-places where they have ample cover from heavier weapons, and it's where they're most mobile. After all, walls might as well not even exist for them, so they can make doors wherever they please.
4400452 I would say they wouldn't be stupid enough to try, but that would be a lie. While their bioweapons have managed to actually be successful from time to time (as in commercially successful), Umbrella has some of the worst safety protocol, gear, and violations ever. Frankly a lot of the outbreaks in universe would have been handled much better or would not have even happened if they just kept everything locked down, or at least took more precautions.
Hell, Raccoon City was entirely lost due to one incident in which a researcher accidentally spread the T-Virus to the city's sewers, leading to rats being infected which then spread the disease everywhere else. The fact that the lab was not well isolated form the sewer system-enough that a break in containment easily spread-speaks volumes on how little Umbrella actually cared about safety.
4400601
Yeah, they do have some sucky security-measure's overall, and they seem to get away with all that. Probably because of money and army of lawyer's... I mean that's how usually huge corporation's do it.