How do I dehumanize a humanoid alien?

Question

In a world I am building, human and a plethora of aliens have met and they are meeting, but unlike many stories on the topic, this scenario focuses on the individuals; how does Conner interact with xyzikzhidth? How does Bill interact with Đóŧẅen? That kind of stuff. One of the stories features a strapping young lad who has a crush on one of the aliens, but he has never seen even her skin, only the armor she wears.

This has created a problem as I have designed this species, I am struggling to think of a way to dehumanize this species, to make them feel alien, while continuing to keep the humanoid form. I want to create a feel of humanity in them, until they remove their armor, thus I need for them to remain humanoid. How else can I dehumanize them?

Answer 1

Mouthparts

Because a picture of a star nosed mole is what everyone should wake up to on christmas morning.

If taking the helmet off and seeing a face like that doesn't kill a crush, nothing will.

Answer 2

Hasn't seen her skin, eh? Well, she looked like one of these delightful creatures then her species would be somewhat less than warm and fuzzy.

This beauty is Moloch horridus or the Thorny Devil. A native lizard of the Australian Outback. Reasonably biologically plausible that a sapient alien might have evolved from creatures like these.

Presumably if a strapping lad was attracted to a female alien in armour, then there would have to be communications capabilities like shared cultural values or they shared personal traits in common.

This is the simplest approach to dehumanizing humanoid aliens, of making them radically different in their surface features while retaining a generally humanoid anatomy. It could be as simple as giving your humanoid alien the feeding habit and mouth parts of a lamprey or even a leech. For example, sitting to dinner with a humanoid that feeds like a lamprey would take an extremely strong stomach.

Aliens covered with venomous spines would be plain dangerous to keep company, let alone getting intimate with.

This approach involves adopting biological traits from known animals or variants thereof and grafting them onto to your humanoid aliens. Traits that would be repellent to an average human being. This repulsion is normally what causes mere humans to dehumanize others. Obviously this can include humanoid aliens especially with unexpectedly different structural or behavioural features.

Answer 3

I take it that in the armor, the alien looks to have human curves (breasts; hips wider than a waist; shapely legs). The armor gives the appearance of a humanoid female. The description made me think of a Barbie doll space armor.

Just make the curves mean something other than how they are interpreted. Perhaps the "breasts" are actually mouths, nostrils, eyes, or ears. The legs and arms are purely part of the suit and do not correspond to actual limbs. The hips are the actual base of the creature. The "head" is where the manipulating tentacles are, not the sensory organs. The hair is something like gills that are used for breathing. There are endless variants if you remove the requirement that the alien looks like the armor.

One of the first questions that I had when I read your description is "Why do we think the alien is female?" The alien can be a member of a species that reproduces by budding or with multiple sexes (perhaps a human male resembles one of the alien sexes). Or simply male. Perhaps, out of the armor, obviously so. Don't name the story "The Crying Game" in that case. You might get sued for copyright infringement.

Answer 4

The alien is actually a collection of life-forms. Once your hero starts removing that armor, oh boy. Her arms and legs are some sort of worm, connected to a circuit board in her chest that sends electrical signals to make them bend. The life-form in her helmet controls the whole operation, but it gets its energy from the waste of its legs/arms. With a piece of her armor in his hand, he worries that he's broken her forever.

Her face is quite pretty, and with well evolved anatomical parts, he can almost believe she's one species.

Answer 5

If this is a movie, where visuals are possible, one of the keys to dehumanizing an alien is to build it up without any sternocleidomastoid muscles. For humans, there is some humanizing cue that comes from those particular muscles. Apparently its rather unique to humans, and doesn't appear often in the rest of the animal kingdom. Whenever a science fiction artist wants to make a nice alien or a nice robot, they make sure there is a SCM muscle on each side of their neck. For robots, pistons suffice. If they want a villainous robot or an evil alien, they'll leave those muscles off.

Bad guy (No SCM):

Good Guy (SCM):

Answer 6

• Make it difficult for them to remove the suit. They need carefully controlled environments. The touch of a human will overheat them, or give them too much humidity, or whatever.
• Make it difficult for humans if they remove the suit. A disgusting odor. A carcinogen. Perhaps they are silicon-based lifeforms.

Answer 7

Who says there is anything under the armor, maybe their bodies are mechanical and the lifeform is little more than a brain in jar. Maybe they don't take off armor just pop off the head and put it on a different mechanical body. Perhaps somewhere in their history their species when full cyborg. Her species might form connection based on personality less than physical characteristics. The armor looks "good" because artificial bodies are pinnacles of engineering nearly organic in complexity. Bulky angular bodies would be like wearing rags for clothes

They might have even made the type of body she wears based on their first contact with humans to make it easier to work with humans and human tools. This is how humans are shaped so this is how we should build a body to work with them, a human shape but made of precision metal and polymers. They could switch to different bodies as the need arises and their bodies vary in size, form, and characteristics.

Damn you could even have him compliment her on her shape and she takes it the same way we might take a compliment about our clothes. You can push it even more if the aliens have hand in designing their own unique bodies, "I thought he was complimenting me on my engineering skills" Gender might not even be a thing for them, maybe their translator interprets gender as body type, which for them is of course optional.

Answer 8

Have the gender signals be flawed. The suits could be very curvy to be aerodynamic, but their bodies are much more masculine. The inversion of expectation frequently triggers angry feelings of betrayal in humans, which can be observed in reactions to cross-dressers (an effect you can research more about with ease by talking to any drag queen in your hometown). Once that anger gets going, it morphs into a clear sense of "other" that persists.

Answer 9

Invisible body

They have no visible body. So they may have human shape, but no appearance at all.

Why do they have a visible armor, then? To be visible when interacting with humans. And because in modern warfare, everybody has infra-red.
Additional tactical advantage: if your (potential) opponent don't know you are invisible, you can surprise him a big time.

They are not humanoid

They are tardigrades or jellyfish with humanoid power armor.

Obviously, a tall and rigid body with legs and arms has many advantage when living on earth

Inorganic body shell

Maybe you only need to de-eroticise them

With a cold and stony (like crustaceans ) or metallic shell, they would lose most of their erotic attraction.
Why would they keep an armor? Because a crab-like skin does not stop bullets.

Answer 10

They have no (human) face

Building on the answer by Separatrix, the fastest way of dehumanizing another sentient being if by moving away from the human build for faces: roundish shape, two eyes, one nose, one mouth. Beings that follow this pattern look humanish, like pandas, wookies, kzins, and Disney's crabs; aliens that do not follow the pattern look really weird, like fruit flies, spiders, ithorians, predators, Pierson's puppeteers, and real-world crabs.

Maybe the alien has a body structure like a human: torso, head, two limbs for moving, two limbs for sensing-acting. However, their head do no have faces in the human sense because any of the following are true:

• There are two eyes but they are on opposite sides of the head, not looking to the front, like in deer or octopuses.
• There are two eyes but they not fixed, like snails or chameleons.
• There are three eyes like tadpoles, a few eyes like spiders, or a lot of eyes like DnD beholders and real world scallops.
• There is only one eye but it is omni-directional
• There are no eyes at all, like many blind animals.
• There is no nose, like fish and water mammals.
• There is no visible mouth because it is hidden, like squid.
• There is no visible mouth because it is not at the front, like Ithorians (who have two mouths for extra credit).
• There are tentacles or tendrils and they are not where the human hair is (on top) but at the front or all around the head.
• The head does not have a fixed form out of the armor (maybe the alien comes from an aquatic world, like octopuses). This applies to the body too.
• They have all the same parts but in a different order, for example mouth on top and eyes in the middle.

Answer 11

How about not actually making it human-like, but turning it into a sort of swarm/shapeshifter (in a way)?

The alien could consist out of thousands of weird, creepy-looking maybe buglike liveforms, which form themselves to the shape of a human body and, together, are intelligent. The armor might help them to hold together. But as soon as the armor gets removed, bad news! Its all small and crawly under the surface, almost like an ant hill! Disgusting! After removing the armor, it could even grow additional limbs and/or remove some for whatever reason to make it feel even less human after removing the armor.

Answer 12

Consider reproductive strategies. We like small litters of labor intensive young. Consider a toad, that lays a clutch of eggs, and walks away. They may not even consider an infant part of the species until it grows legs and comes onto land. Much less investment of time and energy, and they probably will have one or two survivors. Or, consider the harem approach of many species. Only males that prove their fitness are attractive to females, and only then when they are fertile. One male fights for a group of females. What kind of society would exist when most males are bachelors and a select few have all of the females? What if your crush isn't attracted to someone who hasn't fought for them? Finally, consider the bizarre reproductive strategy of humans. Our females are in heat all of the time, and they conceal their condition from males. What kind of mutant creature does that? Perhaps this female is not in season and can't understand what the hell he's trying to do. After all, it's not spring time and she's not remotely interested in mating. Come on, smell my urine! Clearly, I'm not ready for mating! What kind of animal are you?

Answer 13

Unable to Communicate Without Armor

Have the female's communication skills be possible only with her armor. Say her armor has a built-in translator and without it, she can't speak English or understand what is said. Have her language be utterly unintelligible to humans, and also be unreproducible with human vocal anatomy, much in the same way humans can't perfectly reproduce bat vocalizations.

Answer 14

Well, I was thinking that, to "dehumanize" something you'd have to take the "human" part out.

To do this I'd say add or remove key features / components of the human body.

For example:

1. Have 4 nostrils, this alien might need the extra oxygen intake.
2. Give the alien one eye, maybe this alien doesn't need the extra eye, maybe it has a super computer attached to its cheeks or something.
3. Give it rotating limbs. (yeah, I don't know why it just sounds cool).
4. Remove its genitals / breasts, this alien has a entirely different reproductive system.
5. MAKE IT FLY!!!!!! (sorry, inner child speaking here).

Anyways... Regardless of what you do, change or remove, just make it so that it looks similar to a human being but has a key feature / component that's extremely (insanely) different.

Answer 15

Perhaps there is no life form inside the body armor; the "alien" is really just a remote controlled drone with a body engineered to promote feelings of sexual desire in human males.

Answer 16

I would start with asking how human you want it to look. Do you want this to be a regular lad, or one with a few more kinks than is healthy. I'm thinking you should focus on something humans would be used to seeing, like a humanoid version of a common earth animal with a few alien features.