People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
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.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
I once saw a postulation that if an ant was instantaneously turned into a human, via magic or whatever I guess, the extreme increase in brain matter would drive the ant insane and it would scream until it died. The body doesn’t react well to sudden changes of any kind, to be forcibly expanded beyond a hundredfold would tear the mind apart.
That postulation comes courtesy Animorphs! I forget which book, but an ant gets mistakenly morphed into a human body. It doesn’t gain human memories or understanding, it just suddenly goes from an ant’s sensory perception and brain chemistry to those of a human, so yeah it does basically nothing but convulse and scream which I think is 100% what would happen.
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