User blog comment:DYBAD/Character Sheet/@comment-26322734-20190612000520/@comment-4867780-20190620132056

It's true that a good story is a rather elusive concept, and its practical realization even harder to grasp, so our understanding of it ends up regularly redefined alongside our learning and progress, leading a strong temptation to start over and over again with each breakthrough. It's a bit easier when you mostly write for your own entertainment, because you start off with a solid understanding of your own general expectations, and use your sharpened skills and knowledge to refine the work and better met your objective, while when writing for an audience you have to anticipate and decode their much more complex, diverse and even contradictory expectations they often aren't fully aware of, then try to somehow meet as many of them as well as possible. A professional-level challenge for sure ^ ^;

This idea of "prime imprinting" was based on the merging aspect of Absorbing Replication, the empty shell absorber replicating the first sentient absorbed's identity and taking it on as his fundamentally self. It's pretty similar to what happened in the Prototype series, where protagonist Alex Mercer was gunned down and later revived as a shapeshifting superhuman by the Blacklight virus he unleashed when cornered, until he eventually realizes he's not Alex Mercer but the Blacklight virus itself, that took on the personality and memories of its first host as its own. Yet despite this realization and many other people absorbed over the course of the game, he continued to think, feel and act like Alex Mercer would, because that's the first thing he has ever known so it imprinted as his one true self.

While it's a fascinating concept and an effective solution to the dehumanizing long-term side-effect of transcendence, it seems to be limited to absorbers who started off as blank pages identity-wise, and it's hard to imagine it credibly applied to entities who already have they own (except maybe by artificially "freezing" their mental patterns, but it sounds very limiting for the future with a lot of potentially crippling side-effects). Still, feel free to use it in your works if you find a way to convincingly justify it in-universe, I would love to see a character exploring a different take on the idea.

I’m not sure eldritch abominations have much to offer on this regard though, the Outer Gods notably being defined by their mind-destroying alienness just as much as their immeasurable power. To be honest, I still have a tough time wrapping my head around the notion that they can somewhat communicate with humans without instantly wiping their minds clean, or even marginally interact with our universe without eldritching the whole thing or just popping it out of existence like a soap bubble at the slightest mental touch. Seeing as they are invariably ultra-alien nigh-omnipotent entities whose very existence completely violates everything we know and depend on, the only credible cosmic horror story could probably be summed up by "Once upon a time, something twitched somewhere. The end".

Not the kind of story you would pay for, but definitely the more likely scenario XD

Thank you very much :) Great talking with you too ^ ^