If your core concept of the Shivan is as some unintelligble lovecraftian horror then how do you explain Bosch talking and dealing with them?
Your core concept of what they are doesn't fit the facts. And not the minor facts, but some of the major plot points of the story. The fact that the player doesn't understand the outcome of the Bosch's encounter with the shivans doesn't mean that Bosch himself isn't in some sort of basic dialogue with them. He approached them and they spirited him away, alive.
So what? What has this anything to do with unintelligibility? The mere fact the Shivans were able to communicate with Bosch is not indicative we can understand them. In the interview of the writer of FS2 he said clearly that what happened with Bosch was a mystery, and he could have well been "eaten alive" by them. Perhaps they were interested in the fact humans had devised the ETAK tech, and wanted to scan Bosch's personal brain... after dissecting it.
Who knows? Some mods tried to deal with this, and came up with different answers. This bears nothing on what I said, and your statement that my core "doesn't fit the facts" is just your usual kind of righteous dismissal that is frankly getting up my nerves.
The shivans are old, they have motives we don't understand but that doesn't mean they cannot be understood. Personally I believe that an author to a story should have some concept of what an antagonistic force is doing, even if their true motives are never revealed in the story.
This is a different problem, and I think the only issue I see here is one of holding the suspension of disbelief. If the writer has no idea what the shivans are up to, he may well find himself doing inconsistent things and this becomes visible to the player / reader. However, a true Lovecraftian horror is one where not even the writer himself is able to understand the tenets of his antagonist truly well. How to maintain believability in this setting? Well, the trick is to always keep to oneself an upper "order of magnitude" level of strategy on the part of the antagonist that one is willing to share with their readers to guess, so to keep consistency and mystery at the same time.
People say that the Shivans or other aliens are only truely alien if they think in ways that humans do not. Otherwise people would call them "rubber suit" aliens like Romulans and Klingons, human motives with alien faces. But in all cases, the author to these stories is human. How can a human create a idea for an intelligence that cannot be understood by humans?
Either:
A - The author is just making up a bunch of bull**** and calling it "mysterious and other-worldly"
or
B - They're mimicking things in nature which are not truly understood. But if someone models the Shivans after say an ant colony or something in nature which is not truly understood, then they're not really depicting an alien intelligence, they're simply applying human understanding of an unexplained phenomena to an empty creation in an attempt to impart that same instinct or intelligence.
Either way, the author doesn't create something truly alien, because they can't.
And they don't need to. They only need
imply it. Truth is, a "truly unintelligibility" thing would be apparent to us as random noise shenanigans. Of course. But that fails as a story about unintelligibility because it is indistinguishable from writers' lazyness or dumbness. So the trick is to have apparently "random" things happen some times, apparent contradictions in character traits in other times, on top of a somewhat predictable silent trait (shivans are muted killers, except that one time where they contacted Bosch; shivans are a military race of extermination except that one time where they apparently just ignored the GTVA and went to blow up a star out of nowhere; etc.), in order to
convey the uneasiness of this horror without it becoming ludicrous or ridiculous.
he problem is that once you realize the shadow has no subject to cast it, then the shadow itself fades and disappears. And the threat and the mystery that you crave vanishes because you see the craft behind the creation, you see the strings behind the puppet, and thus it loses believability and falls apart.
Right, we agree. It becomes "Lost".
Another analogy might be a box. The mystery is what's in the box, what's the enemy thinking. How does it think, what does it want. You can wrap the box up in different ways and each piece of information is a layer to unravel the mystery but if the author doesn't understand what the enemy is and how it thinks or what its goals are then the box is empty. There is no real mystery because there is no secret. There's just an illusion of mystery, an illusion which is paper thin.
Well, the work of art is always "greater" than the author himself. Lovecraft was, I believe, successful in writing such stories, so I would say that this kind of implied writing is not only possible, but several people did so
brilliantly. There are many tricks to pull it off, and I think some of the tricks used in FS2 were quite good indeed.
Mystery is not created by non-existent enemies. An enemy which cannot be understood has no substance, no form, because to truly create such an enemy is impossible by a human author.
Again, you are being too dogmatic here. The point is the vertigo. You will still have a vertigo even if there's no bottom ground to fall to. The point is not the
total unintelligibility of the shivans, but the horror implied by the vertigo of that possibility.
It's about engaging the player, surprising them at every turn and leaving them satisfied but still guessing at the end.
Yes, but that's just too little material.