They Would Cut You Up/Quotes

"I can't let ANYONE else find out [about my powers]. Not even my parents. I know the chemical plant wants to find me, and turn me into some experiment!"

—Alex Mack gets to the nitty gritty of this trope in the Opening Narration of her show.

Thornbeak: Tell me, what would your world make of one of our creatures, if it crossed the Divide?
Felix: They'd capture you, and put you in a zoo. A prison. Then they'd study you, and write books about you, and try to find out how to get more of you. And when you died they'd dissect you, and write more books.
Thornbeak: I see. And supposing they discovered that the creature couldn't be captured, that its magic was too strong?
Felix: Then they'd try and kill you, because they'd be frightened of something they didn't understand.
Thornbeak: I see. But you still want to return there?

Felix: It's my home.

—The Divide

"Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine; at the Plesetsk laboratories alone, she was represented by more than two million tissue slides, racked and numbered in the subbasement of a bomb-proof biological complex."

—"Hinterlands," a short story by William Gibson; an astronaut is not greeted as a returning hero after having been lost in space for days, but dissected to find out what makes them special.