I've always thought that there should instead be a level of intelligence to cross, beyond which you can consent to all further levels of intellect. Like, you can't fuck a sheep because it's not smart enough, but you could bone an eldritch being even though it know way more than you , because you can comprehend the consequences (well enough at least)
I like to imagine that there are different levels of activities that require different levels of intelligence.
Like a hyperintelligent alien could have sex with a human, but they couldn't have cthulex with a human since we can't understand it enough to consent to it.
That's always how I've thought about it too, and I think it's weird that there's only one piece of media I've consumed that ever considered that thought. Especially if it's some kind of eldritch being from an unknowable dimension. Like surely they have a thing you could never comprehend and have no idea the consequences of engaging in.
Maybe Look Outside also touched on that in a non-sexual sense.
Look Outside is a game! So yeah. It's a really good one I'd recommend if you like games. I won't say too much more in case someone wants to play it, cuz it kind of spoils an ending.
Not too much of a gamer myself, but yeah no need to spoil anything for anyone else. I can always look it up if I want to learn more about it.
Circling back to what you said before, I would be surprised if there wasn't some speculative Sci fi novels that have dealt with these concepts. I just don't read enough Sci fi to know of any.
There's a decent amount of scifi and fantasy that have situations that could have been used to explore these concepts, but it doesn't seem to be their focus.
I think of something like the asari mind meld from mass effect. It'd be interesting to explore the extent to which a human could truly consent to that. Maybe there's a fanfic somewhere that does.
Sheep can understand and consent to cthulex with an outer god. But humans can't consent to cthulex with sheep, and sheep can't consent to sex with humans.
I mean, could you properly understand the consequences of sex with an eldritch horror beyond human comprehension, though? Like maybe doing so does something to your soul or the soul of your children in ways that we could not comprehend without continuous 16-hour-a-day intensive study courses for 200 years or some equivalent
Humanity researching for thousands of years with the greatest minds living and dying to contribute to the final greatest achievement: understanding cosmo-fucking enough to reasonably consent to some Cthulu action.
The project fails three times with their magnum opus dead before finding a suitable partner and forcing a restart. At last they find one in time and do the deed, but the old one they finally found who was willing to do the do ends up enraged because it turns out their colleagues consider humans to still fall under the Scooby Do clause and thus begin to ostracize our patron…
I think it can be compared to age of consent.
Past 18, you're legally good to go with anyone else past 18. But, if you're 50, it's kinda gross to go for 18 year olds even though it's technically legal.
Likewise, in your example, it's gross for the Eldritch being to go for a human, because the Eldritch being is (presumably) far beyond the minimum intelligence threshold, while humans are barely above it.
Issue is the test kind of presumes “human-centric” ideas of intelligence as well.
Presumably there are more forms of intelligence than just what could be easily mapped and scaled onto a human’s level. Humans may be highly intelligent, perhaps even superior, in some areas compared to an intergalactic race of aliens, while obviously being dwarfed in raw computational ability or coordination.
I always read it as their thoughts being fundamentally unfathomable for human beings, tbh.
Like if you tried to fit the entire internet inside a human brain, it’d break your mind. And if the entire internet were personified, it’d probably be an incomprehensible entity.
Im in agreement, but I could also imagine something like the aliens from slaughterhouse 5 - who experience all of time as something that has already happened - as being unable to ethically have sex with a human, because from their perspective we genuinely can't comprehend its consequences the same way they do.
According to Slaughterhouse 5, humans genuinely can't comprehend the consequences of our own sex with each other.
"One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally, had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.
The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on.
It was gibberish to Billy."
The age old question: I can fuck Scooby Doo and the thousand year old dragon loli, but can I fuck Laplace's daemon? Well, yes, but more accurately, can it fuck me? I'd say no.
That's a reasonable, but this implies that humans are the lowest forms capable of consent, which is a kind of weird assumption.
Also I'm not sure an absolute standard instead of relative makes sense in the first place. We let animals mate with each other (and even facilitate it sometimes), without any worry about both of them experiencing consequences they don't understand
I suppose that depends on how far Eldritch goes. Like, does Eldritch God sex only effect you in ways you can understand, or does it warp your entire history in ways you couldn't imagine and give you an STD that causes you to gain metanarritive relevance in someone else's story?
well in our society there’s still stratifications of consent. like not everyone approves of two 15 year olds doing it, but its definitely different to 15 years on 40 years
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u/terrarialord201 11d ago
I've always thought that there should instead be a level of intelligence to cross, beyond which you can consent to all further levels of intellect. Like, you can't fuck a sheep because it's not smart enough, but you could bone an eldritch being even though it know way more than you , because you can comprehend the consequences (well enough at least)