Megalophobia - The Fear Everyone Has

Source: Megalophobia - The Fear Everyone Has, Crescendex, 48:52, uploaded 2024-11-22.

Megalophobia usually sounds like a fear of large objects. Crescendex treats it as a wider response to scale. The fear can attach to a building, an ocean, a mountain, an impossible creature, or a structure whose purpose has disappeared. The examples move from architecture to games, paintings, natural disasters, films, and the end of the universe. Each one asks what happens when an object becomes too large for a person to understand, use, or resist.

The abandoned skyscraper

The opening example is Goldin Finance 117 in Tianjin, China. The video describes it as nearly 2,000 feet tall and the sixth-largest building in the world, although its place in lists of skyscrapers often gets replaced by the Lotte World Tower. Its planned role was to anchor a luxury real-estate project. The 2008 recession and China’s 2015 stock-market crash stopped that project, leaving Goldin Finance 117 as the tallest abandoned building in the world, according to the source.

The empty tower feels stranger than a working skyscraper. Large buildings usually have an obvious reason to exist. They house people, produce something, or display the wealth of the society that built them. Goldin Finance 117 retains the scale and the claim to prestige whilst losing the activity that could justify either. It becomes a giant without a social function, a structure that seems to ask why it was made each time it appears on the skyline.

That distinction sets up the first relation between size and fear. Monumental architecture can command respect because its scale represents collective capacity. Abandoned monumental architecture keeps the power of the object whilst removing the human purpose that would make it legible. The building has become difficult to place in the story of the city around it.

Architecture that exists on paper or in paint

The video then turns to structures that never became buildings. Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton and his Basilica were proposed as monumental projects, and the Palace of the Soviets was planned in Moscow in 1933. The Palace would have stood more than 1,300 feet tall, with a statue of Vladimir Lenin at its summit. The statue alone would have been roughly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. Construction reached the foundation before the German invasion ended the project in 1941.

The Palace of the Soviets still has an intended political meaning. Its scale would have made the Soviet state visible across Moscow, and its height would have surpassed the Empire State Building. Even a failed project can therefore feel coherent when its size has a purpose. The video is more interested in the buildings whose purpose has fallen away or never existed.

That is the role of fantasy architecture. Artur Skizhali-Weiss draws dense Victorian and retrofuturist cities around calm water, with towers, bridges, and platforms that seem too large and too impractical to support ordinary life. His work called The Magic City places a city on top of enormous classical columns. A staircase leads beneath it, although the drawing gives little reason for the city to float there or for anyone to reach it. The buildings exist to display their own scale. They resemble landscapes that happen to consist of architecture.

Brent Wong’s paintings produce a harsher version of the same effect. His works from the 1970s show empty homes and landscapes under large constructions that hover in the sky. They can look like early computer-generated images, although the paintings came before CGI became common. The foreground may contain a familiar house, yet the background holds a fractured structure larger than a mountain or a world. The object has a shape that feels designed whilst its maker and purpose remain outside the image.

The difference between Skizhali-Weiss and Wong matters to the source’s account of fear. Skizhali-Weiss gives the viewer enough architectural language to imagine a civilisation that built the impossible city. Wong removes that comfort. His forms seem abandoned, alien, or made by something that shares the human world without belonging to it. The scale becomes threatening when the object gives no clear account of its origin.

A structure without an outside

The game Lorn’s Lure takes that uncertainty into a playable space. The protagonist follows an orb into an abyss and reaches a megastructure that seems to have no end. The character has spent 253 years exploring it. Pipes, switches, railway tracks, cities, ruins, religious symbols, and castles suggest deliberate construction. The structure has a purpose in parts, although the whole remains impossible to explain.

Its size defeats ordinary measures. The character can explore for decades without making a visible dent in the place. A player can spend half an hour moving through one area, turn around, and find that the surrounding scale has swallowed the distance. The structure makes a foot and a thousand miles feel like versions of the same measurement.

The falling sequences give that idea a physical form. Most falls end within seconds, yet some continue for more than a minute before the character reaches the ground. The player sees the surroundings widen until falling feels like floating. The environment becomes so large that speed and direction lose their usual force. The character is more likely to die of dehydration after falling away from the edge than to reach the bottom.

The inhabitants respond to this world through conflict. Ancient battlefields remain scattered through the structure, although the megastructure has swallowed the reasons for those wars. People can see bones and ruined sites long after the events have lost their context. The source reads this as a place that erases memory. Individual actions become small enough to disappear, and the tribes fight over local causes whilst remaining unable to grasp the scale of the world that contains them.

The video imagines the megastructure as the inside of a giant’s home, an organ in a mechanical body, or a cell inside an organism. Each explanation extends the scale again. The inhabitants follow the owl that promises a route home, then discover that the promise is a trap. A stone figure tells them to stop hoping for escape. In this setting, minutes and millennia become equivalent measures because neither brings the characters closer to an outside.

That is the source’s most severe version of megalophobia. A large building can be abandoned, and a painting can be put away. Lorn’s Lure offers an environment that is intentional enough to invite explanation and large enough to defeat every explanation that the inhabitants can form.

Nature’s scale

Human structures lose some of their force when the frame expands to the natural world. A road leading towards a mountain can make the mountain seem like part of the sky, a fixed background that the traveller will never reach. Mountain ranges surround hundreds of peaks, and the ocean makes a ship look temporary even when the ship exists for the purpose of crossing it.

The video uses the Lituya Bay megatsunami as an example of scale turning into physical terror. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake sent about 30.6 million cubic metres of rock into the bay. The resulting wave reached a height that let witnesses see the Lituya glacier from an anchorage where the glacier was usually hidden behind the surrounding terrain. The source says that the remote location limited the deaths to five people, a small death toll beside the size of the event.

The January 2022 volcanic eruption described next produces a different form of enormity. Its shock wave travelled around the Earth four times. The ash and vapour plume reached about 36 miles into the sky, entered the mesosphere, and generated its own weather. At its peak, the lightning within the plume reached about 2,600 flashes per minute. The video presents the eruption as a force of roughly 61 megatons of TNT, greater than the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.

These figures remain part of the video’s narration. The caption track supplies no sources for them, and the metadata contains no linked references or chapter markers. Their role in the argument is clear even where their supporting evidence is absent: natural scale exceeds the monument’s controlled display of power because mountains, oceans, waves, and eruptions have no obligation to remain within a human frame.

Monsters that exceed the human frame

The next group of examples gives that natural scale a face. The word kaiju entered popular use in the 1950s for films such as Godzilla and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, although myths had already imagined world-sized creatures. Jörmungandr encircles the world in Norse mythology. The Kraken turns sightings of giant squid into a monster of the deep. Internet videos continue the same tradition through creatures whose bodies cover cities or disappear into clouds.

Alex Howard’s animations show enormous monsters from the air as they walk through cities. The distance gives the viewer a clear view of the scale, although it also turns the inhabitants into marks on a map. A creature can destroy what Godzilla would reach in minutes with one careless step. The joke implied by the video titles, which ask what a person should do in such a situation, has an obvious answer: every available response becomes too small for the threat.

Moon Productions’ unofficial trilogy offers a more effective kind of concealment. Stay at Home as if This Were Outside shows a hand descending through fog. Creatures of the Fog reveals a floating creature with tentacles or hair before the image cuts away. Creatures of the End Time shows only the legs of a being that reaches into the clouds. The videos suggest that nuclear weapons have failed, although the viewer never receives a full view of the creatures. Fog hides the dimensions that would make the threat measurable, which lets the imagination supply a size beyond the image.

The 2007 film The Mist uses the same method. People shelter in a supermarket whilst a fog outside brings insects, tentacles, and larger creatures. The characters can infer the size of what lives beyond the doors from the damage it causes, yet the fog keeps the largest bodies out of view. When the survivors leave, they see a creature much larger than the store. Further along the road, they encounter another whose ankle alone dwarfs the first. The creature does not attack them with purpose. Its footsteps crush people and buildings as a side effect of movement.

The sequence makes the scale of the threat more unsettling than a conventional monster attack. A creature that wants to destroy a person still shares a relation with that person. A creature that never notices the people around its feet belongs to another order of life. The film ends the escalation at a size that leaves the viewer imagining what the fog may still contain.

Ground-level destruction in Cloverfield

The video places Cloverfield beside The Mist as a more direct treatment of the kaiju. Cloverfield follows people on the ground during a monster attack on New York. Many kaiju films use a high viewpoint that makes a city look like a model. Destruction then becomes a count of damaged buildings. The found-footage form keeps the camera near the people who have to cross those buildings, streets, and collapsing structures.

From the ground, a skyscraper becomes a giant rising above a person. When one falls, glass and concrete move through the street as a cloud of debris. The camera can show evacuation, military fire, and the confusion of people caught between the monster and the response to it. The monster, named Clover by the characters and the surrounding material, stands roughly 240 to 300 feet tall in the film. The source emphasises that Clover is a baby, which extends the threat beyond the creature on screen.

The larger creature shown in the wider Cloverfield series receives uncertain measurements. The video gives a range from about 3,000 to 6,500 feet and mentions estimates as high as 30,000 feet, depending on the height of the clouds. These are estimates within the film’s mythology rather than settled measurements. Their function is to turn the first creature into a scale reference for something that could cross a city without intending to destroy it.

An apocalypse made from leftovers

Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State shifts the setting from an active attack to a world after social life has stopped. A highly addictive virtual-reality system called Neurocaster spreads through America. People prefer it to ordinary life, and some die with the devices still over their eyes. The resulting apocalypse comes through memory and withdrawal from reality. Michelle and her robot companion Skip travel towards the Pacific Ocean through a landscape filled with abandoned machines.

The ruins are too large to read as ordinary remains. Towers rise above neighbourhoods and broadcast advertisements. Aircraft, warships, and mechanical forms decay beside roads. A group of dormant robots occupies a field like a herd of animals. Michelle and Skip’s car passes through these artificial graveyards as though a small animal were moving through an empty station built for a vanished species.

The scale becomes more threatening when the book introduces an unseen force. Empty police cars and spent ammunition suggest that something has resisted human weapons. A mechanical creature then emerges from the mist. Its body combines cables, limbs, and parts of machines, with thousands of wires disappearing into the fog. The structure appears to breathe. Its size serves a function, yet that function remains outside human understanding.

The final pages give the threat a face. An agent approaches the house where Michelle and Skip are staying, and a body rises from the ground. It grows above the house until the agent stands before a smiling creature with human-looking teeth. Cables hold parts of its face against the earth. Michelle and Skip hear the rumbling, then find the creature and the agent gone when they leave the house. The giants remain beyond their control and beyond the book’s full explanation.

Stålenhag’s paintings make the abandoned machines beautiful enough to invite attention. That beauty keeps the ruins from becoming background decoration. The reader can see a world built with immense skill and then left to decay, whilst the new creatures suggest that the technological world has produced forms that its makers can no longer recognise.

The universe as the final megastructure

The closing movement returns from invented worlds to the human attraction to size. Societies build towers and structures that survive the people who made them. Fiction imagines structures larger than planets and monsters that make buildings look small. An apocalypse becomes easier to picture through colossal remains because the remains preserve a measure of what humanity once attempted.

The scale keeps extending. People are termites beside continents. A continent becomes small beside a planet, a planet beside an atom’s imagined interior, and an atom becomes a universe to whatever composes it. Each claim about the smallest thing has eventually met something smaller. The universe has also exceeded earlier estimates of its size, so the claim that it is the largest possible thing remains open to the same pressure.

The video ends with a modest conclusion. Human beings live inside a structure larger than any building, monster, or imagined city that they can make. Its scale remains terrifying because it cannot become fully intelligible. The source accepts that limit as part of the reason knowledge feels worth pursuing. People can value the work of learning even when the final account stays beyond reach.

The final thought returns megalophobia to the human condition. We look at a giant object and feel awe because it exceeds our measure. We also build giant objects because we want something to remain after us. The fear and the attraction come from the same fact: scale gives the world more room than a person can occupy.

Limits and named references

The note follows the video’s caption track and keeps its reported figures attached to Crescendex’s narration. The video has no chapters, and its description contains no links to studies, articles, or source pages. The names and dates of the cultural works are identifiable, whilst several measurements and historical claims remain unverified here. The description lists the music used in sequence and mentions an earlier video, Megalophobia: Fear of the Huge, although neither supplies further evidence for the argument.

The video discusses:

• Artur Skizhali-Weiss, The Magic City.
• Brent Wong, landscape paintings.
• Lorn’s Lure, BLAME!, and Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State.
• The Mist and Cloverfield.