“Everyone just forgets” too contrived? “Elaborate conspiracy” straining disbelief? “Fear of witch hunts” undermined by godlike powers? Don’t worry! Here are plenty of unique explanations for your horror/urban fantasy setting’s masquerade.
No-one knows about the supernatural because:
Everyone’s distracted by the alien invasion that’s unrelatedly happening at the same time.
Most people assume its a huge ARG. One of those deeply illegal ARGs with a massive death toll. Several small filmmakers are in jail for it.
Whenever someone tries to show proof of the supernatural, Elon Musk buys the social media platform that the information is put on and destroys it before anyone can see it.
People can only do supernatural things in windowless soundproofed rooms. That’s just how magic works.
Everyone on earth forgot to charge their phones at the same time.
It’s the 2020s. Everyone’s too jaded to give a shit that a dragon just ate their house
There’s not actually any mundanes left to find out about it, the last one became a supernatural being 3 months ago.
If you reveal the supernatural then the GM will cry.
Ix-nay on the upernatural-say! Do you want to be one to tell Azathoth The Nuclear Chaos his fast food worker disguise is shit??
If you find out about the supernatural a werewolf will eat you. That’s not his job, to be clear. He just coincidentally stumbles onto literally every person who has concrete proof of the supernatural and eats them.
General financial problems for independent media.
For some reason everyone keeps yelling that acknowledging the hundreds of man-eating ghouls is a violation of their freedoms?
A very cute dog is nearby and everyone’s looking at him rather then the warlocks.
ppl who r using poll results as a way to Prove Something about society or come to any conclusion.. i hope you are aware that tumblr users are one of the most biased population groups you could conceivably find. gob bless
Honest-to-god think that the Gameboy Advance SP is the best video game console ever made. Like we should’ve just stopped trying after that. We should’ve just kept shoving more and more powerful hardware into it’s guts kept and adding more buttons until you could run Doom Eternal on it. That’s all we had to do and we fucked it up.
Look at this bad boy. Perfectly square. Compact. 7 buttons. Fits in your pocket. You can play Doom on it! Runs games from every Gameboy generation bc they all use the same cartridge architecture and backend!!! Tetris!!!!!! Whip it out anywhere. Built like a fucking brick. Hurl this man at a wall and it’ll come out fine. Mine only broke bc the charging port rusted out bc I lost it for like four years. The peak of design. We should’ve just left it with this. No need to go further.
“The pieces are split into three groups, each benefiting a different organization. The “In Another Life” auction, which contains several costumes including Evelyn’s giant baby outfit and Jobu’s Elvis getup, will benefit the Transgender Law Center, which advocates for trans immigrant and workers rights and represents imprisoned trans people in the U.S., among other causes.
Proceeds from the other two auctions will be donated to the Asian Mental Health Project and the Laundry Workers Center, a grassroots collective of immigrant workers in the New York/New Jersey area.”
Anthropology major answer: “There absolutely was such a time! Modern humans and our ancestors shared territory numerous times over prehistory with cousin species like homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, and many, many others!”
Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!”
Both of these things are true, and may be connected both to the above and to each other. :D
Biology majors: it’s dead bodies guys. Corpses.
Listen I hate this take on the uncanny valley so fucking much because many subpsecies of homonids lived in the same areas but some of them got along well enough to coexist and neandertals had enough desirablegenetictraits to the point where human women (see here for a blanket on female vs male choosiness) would often pass up incel homosepian for the chad neandertal.
Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.
Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpeanfabrication and it’s been proven time and timeagain to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)
You know what’s older than racism?
You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?
You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.
Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.
Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.
Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.
Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.
Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.
After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?
healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.
But yeah rabies is more likely the reason for the uncanny valley effect thanks for coming to my goddamn ted talk.
Reblogging this version bc of sources and I personally think this makes for much more interesting (and terrifying) lore than any other post in this thread.
Holy shit. I never thought of the “zombie virus” to be this take. It makes total fuckin sense. Shit
