THIS POST CONTAINS EMPATHIC THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS AND PERSPECTIVES THAT ARE BRUTAL AND THE DEPICTIONS MIGHT NOT BE FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
If you are sensitive to depictions of cruelty among animals and very empathic with mice (like me), you've been warned
Duality of a cat in human reality
The cute little cats we pet, if they just scale in size to that of a panther, leopard , or lion, are not so adorable and cute anymore, even though essentially the same animals. This shows that we also, as humans, are starting to fear beings we usually adore, when they grow as large as us, or larger. Now, if a cat is suddenly at the size of a skyscraper, it starts to turn comedic again and the fear lessens, at least in theory/media/cartoons. Of course, if we'd have to face Godzilla-Cat in reality, that would be an entirely different story and I guess not many would vote against calling in the national guard like in the good ol' giant monster movies or in the modern take Cloverfield (2008).
The Cat in the mice’s reality
What we described above is already kind of the reality for mice though.
You could not depict this better in any horror movie: You walk around going your business, looking for food or just enjoying your life, when suddenly a giant, size of a house silhouette looks at you from within a bush. You only see it's eyes. Is it there? Is it not? It does not seem to move.
A bit alarmed and shy, you try to walk past the bush, cause, what else could you do … and suddenly, there is a giant monster, dashing at you, pushing its long teeth into your back. It hurts badly. You are in immense pain. The monster keeps you in its mouth, and takes you with it, only to release you at some corner, where it drops you hard onto the floor and stands there before you, imposing, blocking any way out.
Inevitability
You shiver in raw existential threat, besides trying to cope with the pain of being bitten and the injury going deep through your aching body. But that suffering blends out somewhat now as you try to find a strategy to preserve your life, pumped full of adrenalin.
You sit, trying to think about how to escape. The aggressor just sits there, too. Still looking at you, with razor sharp focus, not hinting or revealing anything about it's possible next moves. As the situation seems to calm, you, in panic, pushed by drive for survival, instinctively go for your best shot and try to just run around the giant creature.
Immediately, as you almost pass the creature, it, with an insanely quick arm movement, slashes its claw, which is equipped with long nails, into your already hurt back, and throws you back onto a wall.
Pain rises, anxiety gets unbearable. Essentially, you are, if you were a human, crying in despair, possibly screaming for help, calling for your mom, even if you were 60 years old, due to the unbearable cruelty that was inflicted upon you. At least you could call the police, scream for help, and there might be a chance that someone would come to help or save you.
As a mouse, however, you shiver, you fear, and you are alone with no one there to help you. As there is no path to flee, the only thing you can do is…. try to flee. You, the mouse, are taking another shot. This time, you try to go up the wall (I've seen it, live). But it's hopeless: Your body is in severe pain, you are already starting to have trouble moving at all, and going up the wall is not an option as there are no vines and nothing to climb onto.
You HAVE TO GO around the cat again, which still sits there, focused at you.
Another run for it! This time it might work, it HAS TO. The cat just, again, while you are trying to bypass it as close to the wall as possible to minimize the risk of being caught and hurt again, simply tosses you around... throws you into the air, bites into you again.
Conflicting signals
Now comes the worst part: The cat, starts toying with you as if it was a ball game, with your body being the ball (a reference that you as a mouse of course do not have). Due to its shear enjoyment of what its cruelty did to you, the cat is now in a happy state! And it starts to lick you! It even cuddles with you! Rubbing its cheek on you…
After all the deep despair, fear and pain, after all that it has inflicted upon you, this giant creature is now petting you, essentially.
You feel somehow reminded of your childhood, your mother, the warmth, the closeness. Violently, your Aggressor does nothing else than emotionally rape you.
The paraodox and conflicting signals, both emotional and physical, put you in a deep state of confusion. It seems the aggressor has changed its ways. It seems calm now, caring, as if it's trying to help you. WHICH IS WHEN THE AGGRESSOR RAMS ITS LARGE TEETH INTO YOUR BODY AGAIN, and throws you into the air.
You land on your side this time, almost unconscious from the pain and massacre…
You are japping for breath, as the last bite has penetrated your lungs this time….
It is more than unbearable, it is the utmost, horrific cocktail of pain, fear, confusion and adrenalin… your heart almost stops cause it is beating so hard and fast… so hard that your entire body whips up and down with it.
The giant cat once again, goes into petting mode, and starts to lick your body.
You don't understand and of course you don't enjoy the rippled tongue moving your aching body, which worsens the pain.
The giant creature now starts to bite you again, but this time it is different:
It is starting at your feet, and it is crushing and crunching all your bones under its bite.
Bite by bite, you feel your lower body's bones being crushed all at once… while you are being eaten… slowly… towards your upper body.
As the blood loss and damage to your body continues, eventually, you drop unconscious while immediately afterwards… you have escaped the suffering by… now being dead.
A regular day in cat land
For the cat, this was a good fun day, a moment of lust, a moment of satisfaction. It satisfied its urges/drive, and killed some of its every day boredom.
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| Yes, we are talking about this creature |
Hard to write this as you have to get into the mice's role to describe it. But I did not just make this whole thing up or only heard it as a narrative. I have seen it, multiple times. My beloved first cat was a hardcore murderer. I had several mice eaten up like that lying as gifts at my porch, with an eeri upper body expression, hands, face and head angled as if the moment of shear terror was photographed into them on death.
I didn't have to make this up. I have observed the eating of a still alive mouse lots of times. I didn't exaggerate. If anything, I simplified and left a lot of what I observed in real life out. And trust me, trying to help captured mice only makes it worse in lots of cases. Been there.
Once tried to save a mouse from my beloved horror killer. Tried to pull it out of his mouth, with the only result being that it was ripped open and its organs splashed onto the floor of my first flat.
Inevitability Part II
And this is the part where it ties to COSMIC HORROR: You can not, prevent these things from happening. You probably even make it worse if you try. If you take away that mouse from the proud cat, to save it, at the very least, you have hurt the soul of the cat, which does not understand why you steal its prey from it, and why you do not accept the love that its hunt efforts and carcass gifts shall express to you.
The same creatures that fulfill US with an urge to care for them, with the lust to pet, the lust to keep alongside us and love, are the most terrifying creatures to other, smaller animals we share our realm with.
Imagine Dinosaurs were still alive, co-existing with us humans. You try to get away from a T-Rex. In the case of a T-Rex however, I doubt that it would be so gruesome to play with you. It likely would just bite you in half (yes, I grew up watching OG Jurassic Park). For mice, cats are, on top of being giant killing machines they have to fear their life for, also sadists.
It is hard to accept, but those creatures we absolutely adore and love are sadists! We don't have any problem with that. Unless someone creates gene manipulated, giant 30m tall cats, cats will never will be a threat to us.
Isn’t that fascinating? We're living essentially with sadistic serial killers. We feed them, we pet them, we love them.
About Humans
Here’s something else Cosmic Horror about it, with which I leave you to it:
We might also not have a problem with cats, because inherently, we are killing machines ourselves. Think about the armies of tortured cattle babys and the abuse we inflict upon cattle every day, ripping newborns off of their mothers to get their mothers' milk. Let alone what we do to the sensitive pigs, which are more intelligent than monkeys (look it up, they can beat monkeys in video games).
We deliberately choose to not see these things, keeping them behind nontransparent concrete, so we do not have to face the fact every minute of the day of what we actually are: Ruthless mass murders. It is hard to think about when eating a burger or drinking a glass of milk, and is one of the giant paradoxes of our current civilization.
If you are not convinced that the industrial mass murder of sensitive, feeling animals is comparable to cats hunting mice, simply consider the fact that humans themselves hunt for sports. We caused whole species to go extinct. We separate fox and bambi families to show our male descendents what it means to be male in this world. Entire batallions of whale hunters turn the ocean blood red, etc, etc.
This is not a pro veggy or vegan article (although feel free to reflect on that, too). But we gotta admit, that humans are, to most creatures on earth, the most terrifying, eerie, mass murder creeps that no depictions of sci-fi or horror monsters in media could ever make up or reach to in terms of cruelty. We are even doing these things to one another, proven by history.
Let's examine a quote from the 1996 film "Independence Day", which is about the Aliens(villains) in the movie:
They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet...their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on... and we're next
Sound familiar? If not, take a second. Who does that actually sound like?
I don't think the writers chose these words only to depict the aliens as baddies here. They chose this depiction to phrase a cleverly disguised critique about the human race in an otherwise overly patriotic, pro-human movie. Just that it happens on our blue ball and not (yet) in the universe.
Existence, all existence, carries some form of horror in it. And this is what my debut game M A T R O S K A also covers in its core theme. I don't want to get into too much spoiler territory. Sufficed to say that I design my enemies with the above concepts in mind. There will also be certain enemy behavior and combat situations inspired by the described.
Log ends here. Continues elsewhere.
Thanks for letting me be part of your reality.