Starfish Aliens/Playing With

Basic Trope: Aliens that bear little to no resemblance to terrestrial life forms.

Straight: The Miyn-Skruwians are a bizarre alien race, with an incomprehensible language and unprecedented biology.
Exaggerated: Miyn-Skruwians are Eldritch Abominations who shatter the sanity of those who see them.
Justified: The Miyn-Skruwian home world has almost nothing in common with Earth.
- The sheer size of the universe means that there are sentient beings out there with varying biologies, no matter how weird-looking.
Inverted: The Miyn-Skruwians are Transplanted Humans.
Subverted: With the help of Translator Microbes upgraded to deal with the Miyn-Skruwian language, humanity finds the Miyn-Skruwians have a very human-like psychology.
Double Subverted: ...until morality and philosophy come up.
Parodied: The Miyn-Skruwian's incomprehensible language is subtitled, revealing them to be Cloudcuckoolanders of the highest degree.
- Alternately, the Miyn-Skruwians are literal Starfish Aliens. They are a sentient race that have built a truly amazing empire across several planets...and then you meet one. It looks like a normal ~~starfish~~ sea star. Uh...how did they build that amazing empire again?
- Alternately, the Miyn-Skruwians have a completely inhuman appearance... but talk in Midwestern American accents and enjoy baseball and apple pie.
Deconstructed: The Miyn-Skruwians fail to recognize humanity as sentient, or their Blue and Orange Morality causes a diplomatic incident of horrific scale, resulting in interstellar war.
Reconstructed: Humanity and the Miyn-Skruwians are Genre Savvy enough to realize they don't know enough about each other to communicate meaningfully. But since they occupy completely different types of worlds, they simply stay out of each other's way.
Zig Zagged: The Miyn-Skruwians are a bizarre alien race, until Translator Microbes reveal them to be very quite human-like in psychology, until morality and philosophy come up, but later they come to understand our morality and philosophy, even taking on a form we are comfortable with. Then, it turns out that they were putting up a facade so they could invade our planet and ~~destroy~~ ~Terraform~ it.
Averted: The Miyn-Skruwians have at least some terrestrial analogue, and can, with Translator Microbes, communicate with humanity easily enough.
Enforced: The work is on the hard end of the Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness, where Rubber Forehead Aliens are too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Lampshaded: "That's a Miyn-Skruwian? What."
Invoked: The Precursors isolated entire worlds from each other and gave them completely different environments as a project on evolution.
Defied: The Benevolent Precursors seeded all intelligent life with certain basic commonalities to ensure galactic peace and diplomacy.
Discussed: ???
Conversed: "Now that is how you show alien evolution."

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