The engineer is already long dead, so it’s arguably switched from alien to corpse. There are a bunch of other eggs/ovomorphs on the derelict, but only one hatches and attacks John Hurt, so without sequel media (Aliens/Alien Isolation) showing that other eggs were still viable, they could be argued to be maybe-dead, too. Even accepting that they’re viable eggs, counting them as aliens is counting your chickens before they’ve hatched, which is inadvisable enough that there’s an idiom about it.
If you’re saying the facehugger and the adult xenomorph are different creatures, then that’s ridiculous, as it’s clearly closer to being a larva, and plenty of real creatures have a child stage that doesn’t resemble the adult stage at all and where a big mass of tissue is discarded when transitioning into adulthood.
Ridiculous might be a strong word for a fictional creature, but if we found the corpse of a bipedal extraterrestrial on the surface of Mars, would you be unwilling to call that thing an alien?
Perhaps not, but I’d not give it equal prominance in a news report or a movie adaptation if it was next to a living one, and I wouldn’t do anything else silly like claim a billion aliens had been found because it had gut flora.
If it’s a side step, then so was your question. You took away the one obviously-much-more-alive-and-capable-of-interacting-with-the-plot alien. This is a semantic argument, and you’re using a different sense of the word than the titles of the films were using, so it’s not even a valid semantic argument. A reasonable person wouldn’t expect to be able to drive a herse in a carpool lane just because there was an occupied coffin in the back and a sign said vehicles could only use the lane if they contained two people because they’d have to use a definition of person other than the one the sign obviously meant, just like how they couldn’t claim that the sign was talking about a nearby swimming pool or running track and therefore irrelevant to drivers because lanes separate competitors in races.
The engineer is already long dead, so it’s arguably switched from alien to corpse. There are a bunch of other eggs/ovomorphs on the derelict, but only one hatches and attacks John Hurt, so without sequel media (Aliens/Alien Isolation) showing that other eggs were still viable, they could be argued to be maybe-dead, too. Even accepting that they’re viable eggs, counting them as aliens is counting your chickens before they’ve hatched, which is inadvisable enough that there’s an idiom about it.
If you’re saying the facehugger and the adult xenomorph are different creatures, then that’s ridiculous, as it’s clearly closer to being a larva, and plenty of real creatures have a child stage that doesn’t resemble the adult stage at all and where a big mass of tissue is discarded when transitioning into adulthood.
Ridiculous might be a strong word for a fictional creature, but if we found the corpse of a bipedal extraterrestrial on the surface of Mars, would you be unwilling to call that thing an alien?
“This isn’t an alien. It’s dead.”
Perhaps not, but I’d not give it equal prominance in a news report or a movie adaptation if it was next to a living one, and I wouldn’t do anything else silly like claim a billion aliens had been found because it had gut flora.
Equal prominence is a bit of a side step, and i never mentioned a living one next to it.
Also I’m fairly sure any biologist would be claiming each distinct species found within the alien as being new discoveries also.
If it’s a side step, then so was your question. You took away the one obviously-much-more-alive-and-capable-of-interacting-with-the-plot alien. This is a semantic argument, and you’re using a different sense of the word than the titles of the films were using, so it’s not even a valid semantic argument. A reasonable person wouldn’t expect to be able to drive a herse in a carpool lane just because there was an occupied coffin in the back and a sign said vehicles could only use the lane if they contained two people because they’d have to use a definition of person other than the one the sign obviously meant, just like how they couldn’t claim that the sign was talking about a nearby swimming pool or running track and therefore irrelevant to drivers because lanes separate competitors in races.
Yours is a side step because saying equal prominence has nothing to do with whether something a corpse of an alien is an alien.
I just made up separate example to focus on that aspect. But it will clearly be quicker if I just say you’re right. Have a nice day.