yeah, i would imagine the fear factor would be Very big. nobody really wants to test them and mass hysteria's always pretty bad, so it's be hard to prove and even harder to discern from just placebo type shit. you can't really disprove something if everyone who it didn't work for didn't live to tell the tale.
as for the entertainment, that might be fun? possibility is a different question, since i think even the leaders would still be wary of the monsters and they've been proven to be capable of breaking through defenses. it might be possible that some of the Things are friendlier or weaker than others, though, since we haven't quite decided what they are, yet?
... honestly, the "enemy" thing was just me trying to search for a word for "monsters" or "creatures" that wasn't me just saying the same world a thousand times over in the span of a paragraph until it loses meaning. in hindsight, it was an absolutely terrible decision. HOWEVER, it is probably better that i did phrase it like that, because those are good ass ideas. i especially like the idea of the religious zealots! maybe people that think that the monsters were a curse from God to purge the people of their sins and that their living on was basically. an affront to that god. by that logic? and that they could go to heaven by simply accepting gods' will and dying, so by killing them, they're leading them to some sort of salvation. that would be cool. if you'd prefer a grand-scale plot, we could probably make that into something even bigger, but in great part i am most looking forward to the more lower-down plots when the characters are made.
but yeah. species development. that is what i meant to ask about. god damn.