#sure the extra dimensionsal reality you've encountered is bizarre alien and grotesque but so is the human body and we deal

[voluptuarian]

idk I really love the ideas explored in cosmic horror and I think those ideas could be used in non-horror genres, or in less straightforward combination with other genres to create really interesting fiction. Cosmic horror is like: an event happened. It was terrible, and beautiful, and utterly beyond previous understanding. Like trauma it can only be lived through, not told or explained, and so surviving it is the ultimate isolation for those who see it alone, and a supreme bond for those with shared experience. It has destroyed your previous worldviews, changed your understanding of everything, altered your mind, changed perhaps even your body. You are different and you cannot explain why or how. You have been cast adrift from the old world and are now at least eternally on the edge of a new one. You can choose to turn away from this new reality but you cannot leave it behind, no more than you can change the neural pathways in your brain or the pattern of your cells.

And like, maybe this is horrible for you. Or maybe it was once. Maybe this is only the temporary anguish of growth and you will emerge transformed into something else. Maybe this horror is only the fear of unfamiliarity and inexperience, and like a first taste or a first sexual experience, fear will give way to something strange, but desirable. Maybe you will come not only to enjoy the new, but prefer it. Rather than isolate you, maybe you will be joined to a new community. In losing your old understanding, reality, self, maybe you have found freedom.

Wouldn't a caterpillar fear change if it could understand what would happen to it, that it would first be unmade in order to be made anew? Wouldn't the cocoon be a place of total horror, the future butterfly self a nightmare scenario? And then, after all, when it has changed-- it's a no more an immature crawling thing, but something more profound, with avenues of movement and understanding beyond anything it's old self could have conceived of. Would that still be a horrific reality for the butterfly, or what it had been meant for all along?

Even if the moth could be warned that the fire would kill it, wouldnt there still be an attraction in the flames, even as they burned it?

We are frightened of many things that pose no danger to us, and no ill will. And anything frightening, looked at long enough, will lose its fearfulness, become mundane, absurd, attractive. If you look into the abyss long enough, what will look back at you? What do you bring with you into the abyss, and how will the abyss itself be changed your influence? And will the abyss, altered intimately by your presence, experience horror at the change and fear of the one who brought it?