lost-where-the-forest-would-grow:
lost-where-the-forest-would-grow:
I’ve asked this question before and been surprised by the results, now I have access to more weirdos it’s your problem:
It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren’t expecting visitors, deliveries or post.
Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.
Not naming options to skew votes but…
I think there’s something fundamentally baffling with the way most of you think.
Losing my mind over how many people are like “a fairy I can understand but a WALRUS? Those don’t even live in the South and they can’t knock on doors” As if fairies are known to be indigenous to any given biome let alone the American South. As if their knocks ain’t light as a feather and inaudible to any but the most autistic among us.
“How would a WALRUS get here” How would a fairy?? At least you can go out and find a walrus, which means a walrus could go out and find you! Walri don’t gotta break the fundamental laws of nature to get to you but a fairy at your door is a world shattering discovery, and now, cause you open the door, it’s gonna take that as an invitation and flutter on in like it owns the place and ain’t no way you was prepared for a fairy invasion today now it’s gon be sprinklin iridescent glitter all over the gotdam carpet and makin all the food in the pantry sentient so now every lunch for the next week comes with a moral dilemma
“Aw well now this I expected, more so than a walrus” you’d say. “I knew I’d sooner see a critter what crossed the veil between realities than see a walrus cross a threshold of any kind” meanwhile you got gnomes crawlin outta the vents cuz the fairy called up all its friends and they’re already declarin war on the cockroach federation and they’re deployin the fuckin boggles and if you look one in the eyes it legally owns your unsurprised ass and you know the next 500 years you gonna be stirring soup what smells like the color puce but you can’t worry bout that right now cuz who’s that knock knockin on yer door that’s right it’s a fuckin walrus you just got #fairypranked
look if I see a fairy on my doorstep, then the only thing I can conclude is that I have fundumentally misunderstood something about how the universe works. i could also safely assume that the answer to the question of how it got there is probably fairy magic, which is obviously not something over which I have any control or authority or whatnot. But a WALRUS?????? I could assume exactly nothing about how it got there. I have no fuckin idea where to even start.
You require the same fundamental suspension of disbelief for a fairy. All the same questions are asked when either shows up. “why is the fairy/walrus here”, “why is it knocking at my door”. All but the fact that fairy’s don’t exist. Both are fantastical situations, while the walrus technically has a greater element of truth, entirely on the basis that walrus’ exist and fairies don’t. The whole argument for fairy’s already relies on in things like magic and fantasy. The walrus is no different.
I disagree. “Humanity has failed to notice fairies for some reason that may or may not have to do with their magic. Also, it has business with me specifically” seems more plausible to me than “We misunderstood the very concept of a walrus so badly that we never realized they go onto land in places they don’t live and knock on doors. Also, it has business with me specifically.”
For a similar reason, I’d be less surprised to find a strange alien lifeform on an exoplanet than finding a cow on one. I expect to find weird things in the darkness we’ve yet to discover. Weirdness of that scale in the very well explored territory of “What is the basic characteristics of a walrus” is much weirder to me.
If you are willing to believe in magic fairy’s you can imagine a walrus at your door no problem. My point isn’t we have badly misunderstood walrus’, rather both just rely on complete fictive ideas. The compassion to an alien is completely unjust as aliens do fit within our current understanding of science, fairies do not.
There are current real and plausible explanations to walrus’, however outlandish they may be. Fairies do not have this comfortable element of realism to fall back on. Any theory that can rely on current theories and ideas, even a terribly unlikely and bizarre one, is still more plausible than one that requires reworking our understanding of how the world works (ie, magic).
A theory as insane as someone left a walrus at my door as a prank before knocking and running off is insane and incredibly unlikely, but doesn’t require magic to pull off.
The walrus makes more sense, yeah, but it’d still get a much more surprised reaction out of me. This isn’t “which is less likely to show up at your door?” (obviously that’s fairies) but rather “which would surprise you more?” And I would be way more surprised to see the walrus.
Fairies, while requiring a massive assumption (faries are real somehow), only require one assumption, as they do not really follow rules, and even if you apply rules from a specific type of fairy, knocking on someone’s door (especially in my case as they often live in woods which I am near) is a somewhat reasonable thing to happen.
But a walrus has rules. And this would break so many of them that I’d be asking so many different questions. The sheer number of questions would cause me far more shock than “What the fuck, fairies are real???”
“How did a walrus get here???” “Did someone put a walrus here????” “Why me?????” “Who puts walruses at people’s doorsteps??????” “Did the walrus put itself here??????????”A perfectly logical creature would be more surprised by the walrus, but I do not claim to be such a thing. Nor is any human. And I think, seeing either of these, it would pretty quickly make me even more illogical than normal. With either one shattering my reality, I’d have an easier time accepting the thing that requires only one leap of logic, even if the biggest.