How do you create a character that has a complete and utterly alien morality and outlook on life...

You can't. Your small limited brain is unable to conceive a truly alien mind

Fuck you

any "alien" idea you will hear is still created by a man or computer. Even animals intelligent enough to understand the question would still have too much in common with humans to be alien (needing food, gasses to breath, sleep and social things). You MIGHT be able to create something in a computer that could then create truly alien concepts defined by completely new rules, but then they still are to some extent not truly "alien".

The closest you will ever come to a truly alien mindset is a sociopathic serial killer's psychological profile.

I think you missed the "sympathetic" part

ever heard of something called a cat? See

...

Make them utterly devoid of morality and driven by logic and/or their goal. Also make their goal not entirely malicious but not affect humans (or what ever your heroes are) in any directly positive way.
pic related is a good example

Rick and Morty is about hedonism being pathetic and monstrous.

YHWH?

I thought it was about everything being pointless and meaningless.

you make it interact with other characters and make sympathy out of that

t. elder thing

I'm sorry the show went meme, thereby preventing you from enjoying it for another ten years when it's been forgotten and you can pretend that it's a 'secret' again.

Have their GOAL be something that a human could identify with, but their ethics and rational be alien. The important thing is not to make them amoral, but rather have totally different priorities.

Which is to say, they still have to consider SOMETHING to be evil and immoral and revolting. Its just not the same things that we do. Indeed, if they seem alien to us we must also seem alien to them.

For example, you could have someone who finds the idea of domesticated animals to be weird and creepy, and keeps assuming its a disturbing sex thing because they don't have any other context that would explain it. They see livestock or a pet dog the same way we see The Stepford Wives or Houseplants of Gor. Its unnatural and weird and the only people who think its a good thing have unhealthy power fantasies.

Your average Republican family next door, then?

I mean, that's not even all that far off from being correct. It is ultimately a reproductive insinct thing; it's just the rearing part and not the mating part that it focuses on.

You have to go back.

OP here, and this is the best response I've seen so far for my purposes, and thank you.

I was thinking about creating something like a "Thing" parasite of some kind but didn't want to make them a villain or antagonist, and what you described works more or less with what I want to go for.

You first

If they try to understand and empathize with humans it will give the humans something to latch onto, think of how you would act if you met an interesting new sapient species that you wanted to learn more about.

A change in perspective. For humans, hedonism includes futures states as well as present ones in priority, therefore you can create alternative morals by skewing this severely. For example, you can have a race like the Puppeteers from Fleet of Worlds who are obsessed with not dying.

>I mean, that's not even all that far off from being correct.
Is there something you want to us user?

I read that The Thing story too.

It also shows how believing in everything being pointless and meaningless is incredibly detrimental to mental stability and personal relations.

Curiosity is generally the closest thing.

It's not even meme tier, it's poorly written and character design is another SoCal faggot's "life's work"

Dan's actually done decent work besides R&M though

that's why the show is such a disappointment

unironicly not intelligent enough to understand rick and morty

They are in favor of x because it helps them, their hatchlings, and their livestock/plants survive.
They hate y because it does the opposite.

Replace callous destruction or hateful destruction with destruction because of fear.
Give them something familiar that they treat well. It can be a type of animal, ancient ruins, etc.

This. Arguably, if a morality is truly alien, it's incomprehensible altogether. In order to be sympathetic, there must be at least some kind of pattern, making it not quite utterly alien, but still not human.
>We cannot over-consume for reasons (threatens the planet and therefore us, tolerating gluttony produces useless citizens, lives in an environment where food is rare, pick your poison)
>Therefore those that eat more than the designated amount must be punished and in certain extremes executed
>Those that are fed must prove their value, generating a sort of eugenics culture
>Eating less than average but still performing the same work is considered a form of virtue
>The vagrant/terminally ill/mentally impaired are killed and their body used as fertilizer/eaten
>Citizens have a limited amount of time to prove their usefulness and that they are worth spending resources on
>Having children out of wedlock discouraged greatly due to questionable parentage throwing the child's value into question
>'Low-quality' citizens discouraged or outright prevented from reproducing, reverse for the very efficient and capable
>Beauty is related directly to efficiency.
Done.