There is something profoundly satisfying about taking in a creature no one else wants, a delicious flicker of moral superiority, and the surprisingly powerful pleasure of generosity.
What "are you seeing when you see sentience in a creature?" Mr. Dennett asked in a 1995 essay.
Indeed, contra Gaylin, hatred can be adaptive, especially in a creature with long memory; in hunter-gatherer life, it may have been essential.
While it became a fixture of dinosaur books in the 1980s, the reasoning behind this idea – essentially, that a humanoid (or anthropomorphic) body shape is inevitable in a creature that converges on humans in terms of intelligence – was met with some scepticism.
The fairy-tale world in "A Creature of Moonlight" is richly woven, laced with such delicate details that when you close your eyes it's impossible not to see the thin blue dragon flowers or hear the whispering leaves beckoning you into the thicket.
The fireball-throwing imp from the first game looked like a guy in a "Creature From the Black Lagoon" rubber suit, but while Doom 3's Imp is big and scary, moves fluidly and dissolves into burning ashes when it dies, it is still the same basic Imp.
