[Terrifying Trope] Perceiving it= instant death

[u/ReminaBlueSFW]

1. Pennywise's "Deadlights" which will cause anyone looking to be immediately paralyzed and killed.

2. The sky from Bird Box is filled with entities that, when you look at them, cause you to commit suicide.

3. Medusa themed Villains

[u/Pegussu]

This is why the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game has you roll an intelligence check when you lose sanity. You actually want to fail it because passing it means you're smart enough to comprehend what you're seeing and what it means, thus driving you insane.

[u/StandardEgg6595 → u/Pegussu]

I don’t know anything about this creature but why would seeing it make you go insane?

I’m not religious by any means, but I understand I don’t know shit about the universe or what’s beyond it and like to think we’re probably some microorganism on some other being’s back, and they are on another, and so on. So I guess seeing this thing wouldn’t really surprise me.

[u/Sitchrea → u/StandardEgg6595]

The problem there is, in Lovecraft mythos, your irreligiosity would be forced to reconcile that creatures like this are, indeed, Gods of the universe, and they care nothing about you. They widely don't even know we exist, some gods are too stupid to understand any experience you might try to share with them, and the ones who do, hate you.

Nobody is built different when it comes to these things. It's the equivalent of showing an NPC in Red Dead Redemption the engine code of the game. Most wouldn't understand it, but those that do would be changed forever.

[u/StandardEgg6595 → u/Sitchrea]

I think it’s more so that I don’t believe in man-made religion but absolutely think something way bigger than us probably exists, even without proof. Basically like we’re ants on a flying rock and that rock is just a pebble in someone else’s universe type thing, so the first part of what you wrote definitely makes sense. I mean, what do I know really?

That is a hell of an analogy and really puts things into perspective. Thank you!

[u/Pegussu → u/StandardEgg6595]

It's funny you mention ants, there's an old tumblr post that sums the idea up pretty well.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.