http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens

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Starfish Aliens are really alien aliens. They may have:

If the aliens in question have two or more of the above traits, you're usually dealing with a Starfish Alien. However they are still "people" in the sense of having:

Some kind of language, not necessarily verbal, we can learn to interpret (or maybe not, but we can at least recognize it as a language). In other words, they have some way of exchanging information with one another or with other beings.

Advertisement: Culture — they have a common set of practices, goals and technologies.

Their own belief systems, however unusual.

A mind-set that admits to things like logic and intuition; not necessarily those things by our definitions, but things like them.

At least some resemblance to living things with which we are familiar. They eat, sleep, reproduce, etc.; they are clearly organic beings, or else Mechanical Lifeforms.

Sometimes, however, they are too alien and their language, mind-set and culture remain incomprehensible to humans. Often (particularly if the beings can't communicate easily with humans) they will be presumed to be evil by the human protagonists without any actual proof. But in accordance with We Come in Peace  Shoot to Kill, starfish aliens who run across innocent, open-minded humans are themselves known to do beyond-horrible things to them, then excuse themselves later with an explanation that they were only trying to communicate with or greet us in the way they know how. Usually, their language and communication are so different from ours that if there is to be any communication between our species and theirs, it must be done by technological means of translation or them taking on a form humans can interact with. In an extreme case of varelse-class incompatibilities, there may exist no possible means of communication other than mutual destruction.

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Given the long, strange history of life on Earth (a given house includes such a bewildering variety of life as humans, houseplants, pets, spiders, molds, bacteria, etc.), it's likely if we ever actually encounter alien life it might fit in this category. Species that evolve naturally would have adapted to solve similar basic problems: obtaining food/necessities, negotiating natural disaster, adapting to new circumstances, avoiding contamination by pathogens and parasites, competing with other species, competing with themselves, and so forth. So we would expect to find at least a few familiar aspects to their psychology as opposed to sheer indecipherable mystery... if they evolved in similar conditions as us.

These are much more common in animation, video games, and literature than they are in live-action media, due to the likelihood of Special Effects Failure. They are typically located towards the "hard" end of the Sci-Fi Hardness Scale, though when their biology becomes sufficiently improbable, they may soften it instead. When a story is told from the point of view of Starfish Aliens, and other decidedly non human creatures, it's Xenofiction.

Ironically, actual starfish belong to the phylum of echinoderms (along with urchins and sea cucumbers) and despite their utterly alien anatomy, are among the closest relatives to vertebrates in the animal kingdom. Arthropods, molluscs, earthworms, jellyfish, and sponges are all more distantly related by comparison.

Super-Trope to Octopoid Aliens. The inverse of Human Aliens or Rubber-Forehead Aliens. Aliens that don't look like humans, but still have basically the same body type are Humanoid Aliens, or Intelligent Gerbils, if they're obviously based off a particular Earth animal. Insectoid Aliens effectively split the difference.

Prone to enter Grotesque Gallery. May speak a Starfish Language. See also Bizarre Alien Biology, Starfish Robots, and Our Monsters Are Weird. Compare Eldritch Abomination (both tropes have some overlap). The Trope Namer is H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931, where the Elder Things are described as having starfish-like appendages.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Card Games

Top Trumps: the Planets and Aliens set has a glorious selection of complete freakazoids, with the exclusion of a couple of living teddy bears and Bob McTerrifyingly-Normal from Earth.

The actual Alien archtype in Yu-Gi-Oh! is pretty easy to understand, as most of them range from The Greys to Alien-style creatures that are still relatively humanoid. The Worm archtype on the other hand are truly strange, as they have wildly different physical appearances with only a few of them being even vaguely humanoid. The boss monster, Worm Zero, crosses over into Eldritch Abomination territory, as it appears as a building-sized moonlike sphere of flesh that is formed by absorbing the bodies of other Worms and seems to be able to affect reality.

Comic Books

Comic Strips

Aliens in The Far Side are usually depicted as semi-humanoid blobby creatures with numerous tentacles with eyes on the ends growing out of their bodies. They're almost invariably huge, capture humans like bugs (to which they are the size of), and speak random gibberish (unless understanding what they say is necessary for the joke).

Many of the aliens Spaceman Spiff encounters over the course of Calvin and Hobbes.

Fanfiction

Asuka Quest has the Angels nicknamed Giant Alien Starfish because they're actually this trope rather than anything actually religious in nature, so the original name came off as pretentious.

Eugenesis goes into some detail about the Quintesson (See Western Animation below), and their origins. Since they're neither fully organic or fully mechanical, they aren't born in the traditional sense, and tend to be born via budding. Mention is made of some of the original Quintessons being rolled like dough from Unicron's surface.

Pinball

Tabletop Games

Theatre

The 2008 European live tour of The Rocky Horror Show- ie, a fully staged live performance, not just the movie and Audience Participation- had this as a twist ending. Riff Raff and Magenta reappear toward the end as twelve-foot-tall monstrosities with human upper bodies mounted on long robes concealing God-only-knew what, thus making their (and Frank's) human appearances throughout the rest of the show nothing more than A Form You Are Comfortable With. This opens up all kinds of new implications about Frank's addiction to human sex, his building a human, the declaration that "[his] lifestyle's too extreme", and Riff and Magenta's eagerness to return to their home planet.

Little Shop of Horrors gives us the unforgettable "Audrey II" as the Big Bad. Audrey II is a talking, singing Plant Alien resembling a Venus flytrap on steroids. It reproduces and spreads by producing pods to colonize planets, and it can see and hear perfectly fine despite having no visible eyes or ears. Oh, and it needs blood to survive. Lots of blood. Because of this, Audrey II is entirely inimical toward humanity, yet it also displays strong interpersonal skills, manipulating its human pawns through its sassy, smooth-talking charm.

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life