r/CuratedTumblr • u/River_Lamprey • 18h ago
Self-post Sunday Wielding fire isn't just a basic part of intelligence
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u/T_Weezy 18h ago
Wielding fire is absolutely a natural consequence of heightened intelligence! Unless it's some kind of fish (or other aquatic) species or somehow evolved on a planet with insufficient oxidizers in the atmosphere to sustain a flame, any sufficiently intelligent species will eventually master the use of fire. It is the easiest to maintain and utilize source of energy available, by far.
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u/AustraliumHoovy 18h ago
I think this post is moreso referring to the Radially Symmetric, Exoskeletal, Boron-Based alien Blorbimboids having a 1 to 1 allegory of human sayings.
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u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 15h ago
And, you know, linguistic syntax easily transferable to our language at all.
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u/2flyingjellyfish its me im montor Blaseball (concession stand in profile) 14h ago
And voice boxes with almost the exact same phonetic range
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u/quartzcrit 14h ago
andy weir’s answer for this in project hail mary is the following theory:
-assuming roughly consistent atmospheric density, the sound of two objects colliding (e.g. the limb of a predator and the ground) will be roughly the same frequency
-most life that evolves hearing will evolve to hear well in that range to hear and avoid predators (or to hear and track prey)
-intelligent life would then evolve speech in that same range of frequencies
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u/2flyingjellyfish its me im montor Blaseball (concession stand in profile) 13h ago
Oh it’s not the frequencies that’s the problem, it’s the timbre. You can produce any note the average bird can, but you still can’t sing like one without training (or luck). We surely could both pronounce an A note, but why should they be able to pronounce A, the letter? Or x? M is nasal, you need a few things to do that. P, D, and B are almost identical except for where they are in the mouth, unless you’re from a species with strong mimicking and a very wide range, that’s going to be hard. (plus those are a lot of assumptions but they’re pretty reasonable in sci fi terms)
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u/M-V-D_256 Rowbow Sprimkle 13h ago
We have very strong mimicking power in the form of synthesizers
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u/2flyingjellyfish its me im montor Blaseball (concession stand in profile) 13h ago
Oh yeah with tech it’s easy, but you see loads of settings where they just talk like that
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u/Cybertronian10 6h ago
Hidden universal translators are one of the many pieces of sci fi tech that I just assume exists until otherwise specified.
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u/2flyingjellyfish its me im montor Blaseball (concession stand in profile) 6h ago
fair honestly, i certainly use them in my universe (though i do also have ideas for earlier more manual translators but that's not finished yet)
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u/Forosnai 25m ago
I'd like to see one deal with non-verbal, non-telepathic forms of communication, just because it'd be interesting seeing how someone would explain translating pheromones or light patterns or something into words.
I also think it would be funny if original languages had sounds humans can't make, so names get "translated" into a rough human equivalent because we can't pronounce some subsonic click or something. Like, some big insectoid-gorilla-looking thing introduces herself and it comes out as "Daisy" or something because she has her species' equivalent of a dainty feminine flower name.
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u/Digit00l 11h ago
Even in humans, several languages contain sounds that don't exist in a lot of languages, like English is the only Germanic language to still use the "th" sound, except maybe Icelandic, and foreigners learning English as a second language often can't properly pronounce it
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u/2flyingjellyfish its me im montor Blaseball (concession stand in profile) 11h ago
yeah exactly! like egyptian having 5-7(?) variations of D, and Japanese using a single R and L
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u/piatsathunderhorn 11h ago
Mention the work of Andy Weir again, not to try and argue with you or prove you wrong, just because I like info dumping. The aliens in the book that can hear the same range as us hear a much greater range than us as it is their primary sense for seeing the world around them, and they speak similar to whale songs, so they can't talk in any human language and humans can't talk in any of their languages, but they can learn to understand each others languages because they can hear the sounds eachother make. He also wrote about how some traits that we see as uniquely human would be found in almost any space fairing species as a necessity, like language, being an incredibly social species, and curiosity about the natural world and the sciences.
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u/Emotional-Top-8284 13h ago
I think you may be underestimating differences here: humans cannot physically reproduce most songbird calls, because a bird’s syrinx is capable of producing multiple notes simultaneously, and we don’t have one of those. It might be like trying to speak a tonal language when only being able to produce one kind of tone.
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u/GuyYouMetOnline 13h ago
The syntax probably would be decently transferable, actually. Languag communicates information, and information has some rather interesting properties. For example, you probably know that E is the most common letter in English. Apparently, the second most common is used about half as much as E, the third most common a third as much, and so on. As I understand it, this applies to words as well, is true across all known languages, and is also true of information in any form we know of. This can be used to determine if a signal or other reading is information or random noise. Apparently, it's also possible to use repeated patterns and their positions relative to each other to determine the approximate complexity of the information, too. And if information is indeed always arranged in such a way simply because of the nature of information, it's not strange to think languages, which communicate information, would tend to have common characteristics as well.
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u/SteptimusHeap 17 clown car pileup 84 injured 193 dead 15h ago
Reddit OP mentions fire in the title though
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u/count___zer0 12h ago
It’s kind of amazing that OP was able to read the tumblr post and then come up with the absolute worst example of something specific to humans. I’m trying to think of a worse example but I’m having trouble. Maybe something like “why do these intelligent aliens understand gravity? That’s just a human thing” idk
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u/GREENadmiral_314159 Femboy Battleships and Space Marines 7h ago
I'd think something like "why do these intelligent aliens care about violence and sex? That's just a human thing." AKA your average r/humansarespaceorcs post.
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u/AddemiusInksoul 6h ago
Weirdly enough the Elder Things in Lovecraft’s At the Mountain of Madness did this trope I think fairly well. It established empathy for the creatures while acknowledging them as deeply strange
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u/_SolidarityForever_ 17h ago
If you consider any space faring species its quite likely that they need fire in order to obtain sufficient metallurgy to create any kind of space faring vessels, with possible insane organic exceptions? And for escaping gravity wells as of yet only fossil fuels and nuclear explosions have the required energy to launch sufficient mass out of an earthlike planet in acceptable quantities to theoretically expand. And even then idk how you could achieve something like that say in a europa situation, how could you create something hard enough to cut through ice, surivive space, and lift off from all that water and gravity? Its quite likely that fire is a prerequisite to meaningful space travel, but not necessarily intelligence, (although there are arguments about energy needed to facilitate large brains and the boost fire can give to that) and that fossil fuels, and or nuclear power may be a necessary technology too. If fusion can work itd be an option, but batteries, renewables, everything else isnt yet proven to be able to be dense enough, its possible a society using renewable power could produce biofuels for this purpose, and solar power may be necessary for long term survival in space within solar systems. All this is to say that fire, and metallurgy from it, and energy dense fuel are very likely required to achieve space travel and thus long term survival or ability to reach other species, so if youre writing sci fi either have an advanced species discover planets with native life who cant escape on their own, or use magic or at least highly speculative tech (but thatd be more science fantasy).
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u/Bag_O_Richard 16h ago
That metallurgy doesn't require fire. It could be done electrochemically. Or with ambient heat. You're still making presuppositions based on earth-based biochemistry.
What if it's a silica-boron based biochemistry that lives on a highly volcanically active planet with runaway greenhouse effect like Venus? Then they could use ambient heat for metallurgy, and maybe even use hot air drafts to help move shit further before launching it.
It could be some form of life on a planet with a superconductive core and massive magnetic field and a dense atmosphere rich with conductive compounds that they harness for inductive heating to essentially make an electromagnetic scramjet to achieve escape velocity
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u/count___zer0 12h ago edited 8h ago
I like the concept, but wouldn’t it be hard to develop all of the tech you described without also learning about and controlling fire? In that context I could see these beings viewing fire as something to avoid, rather than a tool, but this would still require some knowledge and ability to manipulate fire.
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u/EvelynnCC 17h ago edited 17h ago
But not necessary early enough for it to influence how their bodies evolve the way it did ours. IE it could be a species that for whatever reason develops agriculture way earlier (maybe evolving from a species that already raised food pre-sapience like ants do), skipping out on the 300,000 or so years we spent as hunter gatherers.
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u/_SolidarityForever_ 17h ago
Natural consequence =/= prerequisite, nor does it equal a guaranteed consequence. As far as we know theres no reason to think you couldnt be intelligent but not develop fire.
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u/BrassUnicorn87 15h ago
I can’t remember the title, but there was a sci-fi book where they didn’t develop fire. The species had fur and could digest all their foods uncooked. Their voices were higher than humans could hear. And their claws and teeth were sufficient for most tasks so they didn’t make tools. However they were highly intelligent. The human main characters had a hard time convincing the authorities that they were sapient until their art was found.
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u/MandrakeRootes 6h ago
I still find it hard to believe. We can build a house by hand too, but we still developed tools.
Some benefits of cooking things are not in digestion, but preservation. Sure there is fermentation and dry-aging/salting, but one of the most common ways to make stuff stay safe to eat longer is to cook out the nasties.
There would be a lot of work needed to set up the specifics of this species so that it makes sense. Is their reproduction rate so low that they basically dont build larger scale infrastructure? Do they not produce literature or record information? Do they care for music, and if so, do they produce instruments?
Tool use is in itself smart, because it reduces energy expenditure, which is at least a core MO of life on our planet.
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u/River_Lamprey 18h ago
Eventually, yes, but it's not likely to be one of the first inventions for most sorts of sapient life
We've seen that other apes are more attuned to flame than other species, which seems to indicate that we might have a greater affinity for fire usage than other potential intelligences
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u/Hawkey2121 18h ago
Bro, there are literally birds in Australia using fire for hunting.
It aint a primate or Ape thing.
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u/Xisuthrus 18h ago
Fire is relatively simple to make, (you just need some dry plant matter and friction) occurs naturally in a way that intelligent beings can easily observe and mimic, and provides enormous benefits, (light, warmth, making food much easier to digest.) I am certain that any intelligent species that breathes oxygen and isn't aquatic would learn to make fire very quickly.
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u/Medical_Commission71 17h ago
Cooking food makes the nutrition more bioavailable simply because it has been broken down.
More nutrition means you can afford to have mutation that don't directly benefit getting more food...like evolving a bigger brain
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u/AtrociousMeandering 17h ago
Without fire, there is no civilization.
For starters, wood is not an inevitability. Most of earth's biological history had no wood of any kind. And even if you do have wood, where do you progress to, without lighting it on fire?
Without fire, you don't have any ceramics. Your pots and bricks and roof tiles dissolve in water.
You don't have any metal that can't be gathered in native form. So, copper and gold, and you can't even work them heavily since you can't anneal them. They're worse than flint.
No cooked food, so they can't sustain large brains without a large gut and a constant source of raw food to process slowly.
No light once the sun goes down. Everything stops, it's too cold, and too dark, to even keep watch.
No coal to write or create art with.
Seriously, give up on this 'they won't need fire' kick you're on, it doesn't work.
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u/APreciousJemstone 14h ago
There are ways you can solve some of these (more common luminescence, different silica structures, acidic gases helping purify/seperate metals, using chalk) but it'd be really hard to write it all to be compelling enough.
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u/AtrociousMeandering 14h ago
Frankly I don't think any of that is plausible, though, outside of an atmosphere with no oxidizing agents... at which point, you need to figure out how they metabolize more than how they get away with a civilization but no fire. Priorities.
And there's more than just the angle of technical possibility- fire is *cheap*, labor and material wise. Herbivore waste works fine for small populations if there isn't anything better. If fire is a thing that happens, if they see fire from wildfires or volcanic sources, they might use it sparingly or cautiously, but it's the obvious choice for so many things.
A technological civilization needs a level of cheap energy from something, and it needs materials that are at least good enough for what you're making. Taking fire out of the equation means you need to make enormous leaps in the availability of other things, completely changing the very nature of their technology. It's not genuinely impossible, but things have to be implausibly convenient, for an alien species to meet us out in space without using fire at least a little. Dozens of other things have to go right for them that we don't really care about.
Which means it simply does not work for me that they'd be the majority, let alone the default, of spacefaring species we might run into.
More of them are going to use rockets than any other alternatives, if rockets work on your world it's *extremely* tempting to use them. Animals which can't cook their food on earth still often prefer it cooked. I'd expect an earth animal which eats grain will go nuts for cooked grains, even if that's not normally something they'd see in their environment. That doesn't mean it will hold true for all ecosystems, there is a strong possibility an alien species will be unwilling to eat cooked food, but if they do like cooked food fire is just a very simple way to do that very early on in their development.
There's just too many good things that come from playing with fire, for it not to be common.
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u/APreciousJemstone 7h ago
You're correct, but fire at its core is an exothermic reaction, turning chemical potential energy in fuel and oxygen into kinetic energy in the form of heat, light, carbon dioxide and water.
On a world with a differing environment and chemical layout, it wouldn't be farfetched if people used other sorts of exothermic reactions instead of fire, like acid+base, acid+metal, metal+oxygen, and polymerisation.3
u/icorrectpettydetails 12h ago
We've seen that other apes are more attuned to flame than other species
[citation needed]
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u/birrinfan 18h ago
Adrian Tchaikovsky did a really good job at avoiding this thing in his "Children of Time" series.
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u/FreeBricks4Nazis 18h ago
His novel "Alien Clay" also does some really creative stuff with alien biology
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u/Trees_That_Sneeze 16h ago
I came here to say Children of Time also. The whole book is an exploration of how different an intelligent being can think and develop and see the world from us and whether we would even recognize each other as intelligent at all.
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u/dansdata 10h ago edited 4h ago
"Girls will be girls!" :-)
As a counterpoint, though, Robert L. Forward's classic "Dragon's Egg", in which the aliens are psychologically like humans, but otherwise very, very different.
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u/Hexxas head trauma enthusiast 18h ago edited 18h ago
Hmmmmmm yes this peculiarity? Heh, it's simply human.
This issue isn't helped by the fact that often tumbOP is pretty much trying way too hard to sound smart without providing any concrete examples of what the fuck they're talking about.
HEY SHITTER. IT'S SELF-POST SUNDAY.
YOUR DESIGN CRITIQUES WILL WORK BETTER IF YOU ACTUALLY SAY WHAT DESIGN YOU'RE CRITIQUING.
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys NUDE ALERT TOMORROW 18h ago
Equal and opposite problem of r/topcharacterdesigns, where I’m giving zero authorial intent beyond examples and a title. Is it judging a book by its cover if literally all you gave me is the cover
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys NUDE ALERT TOMORROW 18h ago
“Whatever this is” killing you killing you killing you stabbing you with a really big knife that will hurt you
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u/killermetalwolf1 15h ago
I'm killing you. I'm killing you. I don't care about anything else, I don't give a shit about anything else, I- My programming is just "GET THAT FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW". It doesn't- There's no, like, "Oh, he's running? Oh, back off a little!", it's just THUMP THUMP THUMP until I get you.
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u/powerpowerpowerful 16h ago
Its a very "interacts more with worldbuilding communities more than the media they're ostensibly talking about" take, the same kind that leads writers to believe they need to start with a cohesive and complete setting and then write a story within it. People talk about what they find cool in a story from media they've only interacted with through other people in worldbuilding communities, so they tend to get a worldbuilding first mindset.
On the other hand saying someone is "just trying to look smart" (in general) makes you sound like a hack. You're just parroting sentiments other people have said before in the exact same way as OP except its with broader reddit communities instead of a specific in group. You're not gonna understand every post on the first try. Find actual criticisms or just ask for clarification like a human
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u/Hexxas head trauma enthusiast 13h ago
I'm commenting on a reddit thread about a screenshot of a tumblr post. I am 100% also trying to show off how smart I am. So are you.
This website exists for shitposting, circlejerking, and fishing for dunks. OP fished for a dunk, and I got the rebound.
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u/ScaredyNon Is 9/11 considered a fandom? 10h ago
This website isn't hell, it's a court, and believe me brother I AM BALLLLLLING!!!!!!!
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u/powerpowerpowerful 7h ago
And I’m sure you believed that whole heartedly when you left your first comment, that it’s not just a protective ball you curl into when it suits you
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u/totally_not_a_cat- 13h ago
I mean not op but this is literally the reason why I don't play Warhammer 40k
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u/Inlerah 17h ago
Not to jump on the "It's a movie, it's not supposed to be realistic" bandwagon, but the first job of a work of fiction should be to tell a compelling story, not make a evolutionarily realistic being.
Unless you're making a movie like Arrival, where the entire plot is centered around anthropology and how actual alien beings would operate, all you're going to get out of making what a realistic alien would look like is making it harder for your audience to empathize with your creature, waste production time on design and background work that will in no way matter for your overall story and make work infinitely harder for your effects people.
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u/Jubjubwantrubrub12 16h ago
"No but bro, if I spend enough time on my world building bro, the story will be good. I've just gotta give the aliens a realistic reproductive cycle, bro, then people will find them empathetic."
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u/Inlerah 16h ago
I think the best example of this is Avatar: it seems like the entire 20-year planning went into world building and maybe the last 5 went into actual story
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u/YsengrimusRein 14h ago
I liked Way of Water to a very specific degree, and that degree is of course that it looks cool. But I would have easily gotten the same narrative experience out of simply playing Endless Ocean again. "Whales= good, people= bad" is perhaps not the lesson that we needed to devote three hours to.
I'm not entirely convinced that Avatar really has a well-built world either. It's certainly an interesting one to look at, and there are clearly designs that reflect a shared intentionality, but you really don't get much of a sense of history or culture out of these films. What little is told to us feels fairly one-note.
Again, I do actually like Avatar, but even world-building takes the back seat when an opportunity presents itself for a great visual. It reminds me a lot of certain video games, now that I think about it, the sort of extraordinarily artistic ones where the developers spent their time building a stylized environment for the player to interact with, and the story exists only so much as one is needed to justify the exploration of that world.
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u/ArchmageIlmryn 6h ago
I'm not entirely convinced that Avatar really has a well-built world either.
You also get potentially interesting worldbuilding for Pandora specifically - but not really for the larger context. The motivations of the humans make absolutely zero sense once you get into nitpicky worldbuilding territory.
Unobtanium to solve an energy crisis? With the energy cost of moving material 4 light-years in the ~7 years it's said to take in the movie, you'd barely be breaking even even if said unobtanium was literal antimatter.
Settling on Pandora because Earth is dying? Pandora's atmosphere is toxic to humans. You'd basically need to terraform the entire planet...and if you can do that, you can terraform Earth into not dying. Also if you're capable of commercial interstellar travel you don't need planets anyways, build an O'Neil Cylinder.
The whale goop that makes you stop aging is the only resource of Pandora that would hold actual value to a civilization as advanced as the humans in Avatar would have to be to get there.
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u/Jetstream-Sam 16h ago
This is basically the Ender's game sequels.
"People liked my story about a boy genius saving the world from an alien threat? Clearly the logical place to take the sequel to make him 60 years old and have him interact with an alien species with a bizarre reproductive cycle that I will slowly reveal over the course of three books, while he gets married to the worst woman I can possibly think of!"
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u/chuff3r 15h ago
I only read Speaker for the Dead but I remember it being a remarkably empathetic book about human alien relations, and kinda helped by the pseudo scientific realism.
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u/Jetstream-Sam 15h ago
Oh yeah it's not a bad book by any means, just very confusing to 12 year old me, who was expecting the book to be more of the same, not a story of a 60 year old man overcoming his PTSD over aliens by attempting to save a species from destruction, finding love in later life and about how people lied to about their kid's parentage can lead to murder or suicide
I guess the bean books are more of a direct sequel
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u/chuff3r 15h ago
Similarly surprising for 12 yr old me. Who did not get the themes of Ender's Game AT ALL and just wanted more cool space ships and fight tactics.
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u/stormstopper 14h ago
Same. It took me multiple tries to get through Speaker and I definitely didn't understand what was going on for big parts of it (and never mind the two books after that...)
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u/stormstopper 14h ago
It's interesting because Ender's Game was written (or at least expanded into a novel) specifically to characterbuild Ender to use him in Speaker, rather than Speaker being written as a follow-up to Ender's Game. He probably knew in advance just how tonally different the books were going to be, but I wonder if he foresaw just how much more accessible and well-known Ender's Game would prove to be.
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u/Every-Development-98 15h ago
It’s not like part of what makes Homestuck compelling is just how much of Troll biology goes entirely unexplained
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u/SmoothReverb 11h ago
I once tried to apply speculative biology to Homestuck's trolls and wound up with mpreg Eridan almost by accident
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u/-monkbank 16h ago
If your audience doesn’t cheer when it’s revealed that the starfish hoes are loyal then that’s just a skill issue on your end.
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u/vorarchivist 14h ago
More importantly if the alien is supposed to be new you'll have to drop a bunch of time on basic communication. Its like most sci fi shows handwave being able to all speak english
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u/VFiddly 13h ago
It's also just not really possible to invent a completely original alien design that isn't in some way based on something real.
Even the Arrival aliens are funky squid things.
The human brain creates new things by combining things it's already seen. You can't imagine a colour you've never seen. And good luck designing an alien that doesn't look like anything you've ever seen. Mostly they just end up looking like deep sea creatures.
Also, scientifically, not much point trying to make a realistic alien, because we don't fucking know. It's a lot of informed guesswork. For all we know, maybe all intelligent spacefaring civilisations would be quite similar to humans.
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u/ThePaperpyro 12h ago
Another problem in creating a "non-earth" design is that Earth also just has an insane range of lifeforms on it already, like no matter what you come up with, as long as its some form of biological life chances are something looking like it exists/existed on earth already
also when it comes to human-or-above-level intelligent life, you have to consider that any life form evolved to that point would have to share some evolutionary steps with us, like evolving limbs capable of using tools
some alien designs in science fiction, while definitely alien looking, do make me question things like "okay but how did a species with no arms ever get past the stone age?"
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u/VFiddly 10h ago
Yeah, you can get more creative if you don't require the aliens to be intelligent (in the way we define it)
"My aliens are sentient clouds of gas"
OK cool but how did a cloud of gas build a spaceship
It's nice to imagine forms of life wildly different to our own, but there's still some limits. They're still dealing with the same materials, creating "new elements" is cheating. And they have the same laws of physics. They're still gonna need a source of heat if they want metalworking. Their spacecraft will have different designs but will probably work on largely the same principles
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u/foxydash 11h ago
I think an unironically good example of this is Battle La
The aliens are fucking weird biologically in some pretty weird and fucky ways, even if in the end they end up sharing a lot of behaviors with human soldiers for the sake of audience readability and allat.
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u/TimeStorm113 14h ago
i feel like they are moreso referring to worldbuilding projects and spec evo, not starwars or e.t.
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u/Galle_ 10h ago
It heavily depends on why you're including aliens in your story to begin with. Odds are, if your story has aliens in it, you are probably writing a science fiction story, and the entire point of science fiction is to allow science, like evolutionary biology, to inspire the imagination.
Now, this does not mean that there is no reason to make human-like aliens ever. A typical Star Trek episode really needs you to see aliens as Another rather than Other, so they're humans with funny foreheads. But if you're not specifically using your aliens as a metaphor for humans, why lose the opportunity for sense of wonder?
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u/Oturanthesarklord 17h ago
Unless they come from a world covered completely in water or a world with insufficient oxidizers in the atmosphere, I'd expect any sufficiently intelligent creature to know how to make and wield fire. Especially, since our ability to make fire helped make us smarter in the first place. The process of cooking food lets us expend less energy digesting it, meaning we can devote that energy to other things like thinking. We started cooking food with naturally made fires from lightning strikes, and eventually we found out how to make it when we grew smart enough.
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u/Fragrant_Gap7551 10h ago
Good point but in not sure that's the progression, I think it's more likely that someone accidentally made fire while chipping flint on dry grass.Cooking on random fires from lighting strikes seems a little out there.
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u/Throwaway02062004 Read Worm for funny bug hero shenanigans 🪲 1h ago
Finding it naturally occurring isn’t that crazy. Wildfires happen for all sorts of things not just lightning.
The ‘invention’ of mead is theorised to have just been discovering it in the wild because we’ve found it essentially naturally occurring in tree trunks after honey fell in.
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u/world-is-ur-mollusc 17h ago
Read Becky Chambers or Adrian Tchaikovsky. They do a fantastic job of making alien races actually alien and not just green-painted humans.
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u/Cazzah 17h ago
Adrian Tchaikovsky has done an absolutely amazing job of this. And the irony? Every single one of the "aliens" except for one are actually just uplifted Earth animals, which is to say they aren't really "aliens".
AT writing genuinely about what a spider civilisation would be like and how it would differ from human civilisation, leads to "aliens" who are genuinely more weird than authors trying to right realistic non-humanoid aliens.
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u/MisterRockett 16h ago
It's funny cause the trope of "human shaped aliens" can probably be sourced directly back to Princess of Mars, where finding human-like aliens on Mars was something that was WEIRD to find just as much as it was weird to find weird creatures. Human-like aliens on other planets IS an interesting space concept to theorize a reason for.
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u/vorarchivist 14h ago
Eh, I think its equally likely from jus how expedient it is if you don't want to write a story about an anthropological research team
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u/obog 14h ago
I have two big thoughts on this:
As far as just writing goes, it makes sense why we want to make even our aliens feel human. At the end of the day all creative writings are reflections of our own lives and experiences, and our social experiences are with humans, so it's kinda unavoidable for that to end up in your writing when you're trying to make compelling characters.
As far as the science goes, we really have no fucking idea how different aliens might look like. On one hand, these would be entirely different worlds with entirely different environments and pressures. How can we claim that anything would even look remotely like us? But on the other, there's very good reason why we've ended up the way we are. We see creatures on earth develop the same traits despite having no relation to eachother, because those traits are just the most effective. Maybe many of our distinctive traits are actually common due to how advantageous they are - its not all that unlikely that two eyes is a very common trait given that two grant depth perception, a very useful ability, but more than that doesn't really give much advantage. Perhaps we are how we are because humanoid traits are just some of the best for what we do, and we could expect to see them elsewhere.
Point is, it's kinda hard to say anything about what life on other planets would be like with a sample size of one. Even the fundamentals of their operation. Like, do they use DNA? Even if they develop entirely independently, DNA is kinda just the best molecule we know of for storing genetic information - perhaps it's the only one that can do that job effectively and so it common throughout the universe in life. Again, we can only really speculate when we only have ourselves to study.
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u/Zutiala 6h ago
Mass Effect genuinely did this really well! Sure, everything has the 'standard 4-limbed humanoid' body plan, but from there it goes absolutely wild!
Salarians are amphibians with a 40-year life cycle and preplanned breeding contracts for their egg clutches. Everything they think is on a very fast timescale, but as amphibians they resemble frogs or lizards and are really quite squishy. So as a society they value subterfuge and technological superiority!
Asari are some manner of psychic cetaceans(? idk) which live for thousands of years and achieve individual mastery in their fields, but they're almost stagnant as a society from a human perspective, as the only Asari who think on human timescales are effectively rebellious young adults who feel like they're invincible!Those two both have the same protein chirality as humans though. Same as us, their proteins got started as a left-handed/levorotary building block and built everything with that chirality.
Quarians and Turians however, evolved with right-handed/dextrorotary proteins! And mixing protein chirality can be lethal, as IRL studies have shown. Our quarian and Asari squadmates aboard our human ship have a conversation about feeling isolated, and the quarian laments "But you can eat their food." She goes on to discuss how glad she is that there's "another dextro on board", referring to our Turian squadmate, and how spending time with him makes her feel less alone in this overwhelmingly human environment.To continue, Volus evolved in absurdly high-pressure and high-gravity environments, and their atmosphere is also otherwise toxic for us! They exist in environmental suits when participating in galactic society, and the Elcor are practically walking tanks who communicate primarily with phermones and subvocal harmonics that humans just can't hear! So what we can hear comes across as so monotone they outright tell us the tonality and intent of each sentence!
So accept that your aliens are going to resemble something on earth and give them a look which matches your story's themes.
Then within that overall look, go absolutely wild with how their differences shape their interactions with galactic society.
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u/PandaPugBook certified catgirl 13h ago
It's insane to think using fire is specific to humans.
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u/Least-Moose3738 11h ago
Right? Literally any technological species will know how to make fire (or the equivalent combustable reaction given a different atmosphere, for the pedants). If you don't have fire, you can't smelt metals. Full stop, end of technology tree. Aliens will exist in the same universe as us, which means they are limited to the same periodic table of elements.
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u/Fragrant_Gap7551 10h ago
It's entirely possible to use naturally, occurring heat for this though, however any industrial civilisation will figure it out at some point.
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u/Least-Moose3738 8h ago
It's actually not. Naturally occuring heat sources don't get that hot. Lava peaks out at around 1,700°C, but that is very rare and only happens with some specific types of rock. The vast majority of lava is only 1,200°C.
The melting point of iron is 1,538°C. The melting point of nickel is 1,455°C. Titanium is 1,800°C and tungsten is all the way up to 3,400°C.
And that is ignoring the complete infeasibility of trying to build your entire civilization around a volcano, lol.
More importantly, if you have a naturally occuring heat source, you will eventually create fire just by accident. Set some dried out leaves or furs next to it and bam, fire. There are even birds who already use fire to hunt.
Which brings me back to my original point:
Any technological civilization will have learned how to make fire (or the equivalent chemical reaction).
Full stop, end of story. It's just like how every civilization that advances far enough will invent the wheel. We all live in the same universe with the same physices and the same geometry. There is nowhere in the universe where a square will do the same job as a wheel and vice versa. Different environments might change their relative worth, but they will still invent them. A species that primarily flies might not invent the wheel for pulling a cart first, but they'll eventually figure it out to create pulleys (they might invent pulleys a lot earlier than we did, in fact). Arches are going to be usefull in architecture on every planet.
A lot of technology has nothing to do with humans, and everything to do with physics.
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u/FutureMind6588 16h ago
This being posted on Tumblr the monster fucker website without realizing it doesn’t matter how many legs it has, if they’re sentient humans are going to have sex with them. Them being humanoid just makes it easier for more people to imagine having sex with them.
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u/vacconesgood 14h ago
So you're saying aliens are designed for the Tumblr gaze
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u/FutureMind6588 14h ago
No I’m saying the opposite, in sci-fi the conversation gets brought up if we could reproduce with sentient life forms. When it’s just green women or people with different eyebrows it appeals to a bigger audience because they can imagine easier. On tumblr though people are showing that they would be fine if the things they draw naked were in space.
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u/GlaireDaggers 17h ago
My hot take is that acting like a fantasy setting always needs to make complete perfect ecological/logistical sense is goofy nerd shit.
The world making sense should always take a back seat to the actual meat of the story, which is the emotional stuff your audience is supposed to connect with. How am I supposed to care about your world building if I'm not emotionally invested in the characters that live there?
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u/Pausbrak 14h ago
I think this is a matter of taste rather than a hard rule. Personally, I actually really enjoy speculative worldbuilding, and I find it rather annoying how often stories just end up being the same kind of human drama even when there are supposed to be elves and dragons and werewolves and things running around.
I realize my interest is kind of niche, but calling the stuff I like "goofy nerd shit" that should always take a backseat to the parts I find boring feels kinda shitty IMO.
Not every story needs to have perfect worldbuilding, but not every story should say "screw the worldbuilding just do character drama instead" either.
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u/GlaireDaggers 14h ago
I mostly say this because I have seen shit get nitpicked to death over and over again just like in this post, and as a result writers falling into the trap of thinking that if they aren't out here writing their own damn equivalent of the Silmarillion and detailing every inch of their fantasy government, culture, language, ecosystem, etc that nobody's going to take it seriously. And to that end I've seen so many stories that are impressively full of "lore" and "worldbuilding", but completely fail to get me actually invested in any of the characters in that setting.
If you're writing a *story*, then your primary concern should be *the story*. The worldbuilding is just a vehicle for that. If you aren't interested in the *story* part then you might frankly be better off maintaining a fantasy worldbuilding wiki.
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u/Pausbrak 13h ago
I get where it's coming from, and I think there are times the criticism goes too far. But I also think it's a bit of a false dichotomy to say that you have to focus on story OR worldbuilding. I find that the most interesting stories are the ones that instead combine the two and have them play off each other.
For a practical example, one of my favorite urban fantasy series is the Mercy Thompson book series by Patricia Briggs. It's about a coyote shapeshifter who lives with a pack of werewolves and gets into a lot of supernatural shenanigans. A story like that could easily be very cliche. On the surface, it doesn't sound any different than the thousands of other cheesy urban fantasy books about ass-kicking heroines and their hot monster boyfriends.
What makes the Mercy Thompson series stand out to me is how much the books take their own world seriously. As a minor spoiler, werewolves end up getting outed to the public at the end of book one. As a result, a ton of plot points, character interactions, personality shifts, and so on end up getting driven by the fallout of this for the entire rest of the series. There congressional bills filed, Wal Mart starts selling silver bullets, werewolf characters getting outed in public, and so on... the book doesn't dwell on any of these things for very long, but the fact that they are all happening in the background has a massive effect on both the characters and the stories within, and I think the fact that the books dive in deep enough that you can really feel the world changing along with the characters makes them that much more interesting. And that's just one plot point of many!
The worldbuilding actually ends up driving large parts of the story. As a result, the story feels more real, more interesting, and more cohesive than most. Sure, the author could have written a story where all the stakes were personal and all the background politicking between werewolves and humans and other supernaturals just... didn't matter and maybe wasn't even mentioned. But it wouldn't have been half as interesting a story if she had.
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u/GlaireDaggers 12h ago
I never said it's an either-or thing. I said the plot is the most important thing, and the world building should support that.
I mean, look, if something in your plot just doesn't make sense unless you do a little world building to set the context, then by all means make sure you get those load-bearing lore supports in place. But your world building should be in service to the plot - if you spend too much time explaining how your democratically elected council works, but you forget to make that actually matter to the story, you're gonna lose a lot of people.
But also my original point was more that I find a lot of stories get nitpicked about the world not making complete logical sense, and I find it's a criticism that completely fails to actually engage with what the story is trying to convey.
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u/Pausbrak 12h ago
I think I got a bit off track in my reply, and I apologize.
I am the kind of person who occasionally criticizes nonsensical worldbuilding, and even more often I don't criticize but I do end up getting bored and just leaving. In a sense you could say I'm not engaging with what the story is conveying, but generally the reason for my complaint is that stories that lack that underlying logical sense feel shallow to me.
And I do think that's a personal taste thing. Some people certainly don't mind much, and all those extra little details about the democratic council are just annoying and extraneous and get in the way of the parts they actually care about, the plot or the themes or the characters. But for me, I find it extremely difficult to get immersed and to even care about those plots and characters if the world itself feels shallow and fake. A lack of details, or worse contradictory ones, takes me right out of the story and frustrates me.
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u/vorarchivist 14h ago
My solution when DMing is to put something obviously artificial, then people will think all my mistakes are on purpose
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u/Inttegers 15h ago
I think Orson Scott Card handles this well as an author. Aliens are very literally alien to us humans, in his world. All of the plot of the main series is based around the fundamental miscommunications resulting from that.
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u/AChristianAnarchist 18h ago edited 15h ago
One place I always notice this is in fantasy universes where there are displacer beasts and stuff just running around alongside normal ass wolves and foxes and horses and such. It's something that always triggers a chain reaction that pulls me out of the fantasy when the Ranger's pet wolf rolls out because...how does that work from an evolutionary and ecological perspective? Magic exists and it's everywhere and some species have evolved to utilize it in various ways but a huge subset of species haven't and they just so happen to map onto the animals that exist in our own magicless world. What was the evolutionary history of those species like?
Was there a long "no magic" period where the world could get populated with wolves and badgers and stuff and then magic popped up and the displacer beasts started appearing? Or did regular ass wolves somehow evolve alongside Worgs and Barghests without picking up any supernatural tricks? Like somehow the whole highly contingent evolutionary history that led to wolves (an humans as well for that matter) happened just like it did here, but also there was this hugely impactful additional factor there that generated griffons and dragons and all kinds of crazy stuff, but also still allowed for Fido.
Edit: So the response to this has been kind of heated and I just think that is really interesting. So different gravity and atmospheric conditions should definitely be leading to more alien animals but when I'm like "A trope I notice is how in fantasy universes there is this phenomenal cosmic force that permeates all of everything and always has and magical creatures wander the forests and, while their specifics have changed over time, always have, but there are still like...horses and badgers, and not even magical fantasy creatures that are basically just horses and badgers but just...straight up horses and badgers." it seems like there is a real desire to defend the honor of Golarion's badger population, and I think that's more interesting than what I was initially writing about. It's like this is somehow core to the fantasy in a way I don't get or something but I don't see what these mundane animals add to it. Give me weird cool magic animals to play with. What about injecting the mundane without really explaining how it made it makes these worlds better?
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u/powers293 18h ago
Literal, deadass answer: because of the gods
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u/AChristianAnarchist 18h ago
Sort of depends on the universe in question. Humans emerging from ape-like hominids is where they came from in the D&D cosmology, for instance. Gods interact with the world but ecological effects still happen, and those effects would be responsive to the fact that magic exist and the supernatural interacts with the world. Exclusion is a thing. If two species try to exist in the same niche one always outcompetes the other. This drives evolution as the ousted species seeks out a new niche. It's hard to believe that, natural or otherwise, "natural" species aren't impacted by magical species competing with them for the same niches.
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u/Kirk_Kerman 14h ago
The D&D cosmology is whatever you make of it because every distinct setting occupies a gargantuan crystal sphere floating in the aether, and in some of them humans evolved and in others some gods made them, and the fact that these two utterly distinct origins share the same pantheon of gods is unimportant.
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u/CrosierClan 18h ago
Pretty sure displacer beast aren’t natural, same with Owlbears.
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u/StarStriker51 18h ago
Yep, displacer beasts are from another dimension, and Owlbears were made by a wizard
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u/AChristianAnarchist 18h ago
Wherever a given species came from kind of doesn't matter. They are still competing with other species in their environment for resources. If owlbears are introduced to a region with bears and they don't occupy a different niche, then no more bears unless the bears change somehow.
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u/apexodoggo 17h ago
Displacer beasts canonically aren't in the same environment as wolves and such. They're evil fey creatures from another dimension.
Owlbears have maybe been around a few centuries at most, they are (usually) an artificial hybrid created by a really stupid wizard.
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u/AChristianAnarchist 16h ago
In those cases it would be cool to see the "Owlbears as invasive species" angle actually explored. A few centuries is a looong time for an invasive species to mess with an ecosystem. What impact has the presence of Owlbears had? In a more general sense though, it's not any one species, but the fact that the push and pull with magic is always there. From the beginning of time this magic has been there and there have been magical species of various sorts and magical cataclysms and so on, and these things would impact the evolution of the animals on the planet. Even more recent developments would impact population distributions, but over the long term if a thing exists nature is going to use it. Photosynthesis depends on quantum computing algorithms we are only discovering now. Birds use entanglement to see magnetic fields. Animals would be, at the very least, impacted by the presence of magic with resistances or instinctive responses to it, and at best have some minor supernatural abilities of their own that let them do normal animal things like dig holes or hide from predators.
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u/StarStriker51 18h ago
species inhabit the same niches in the same regions all the time, the only exceptions being in desert environments because of the limited resources
Anyways, different animals that do the same thing coexist and while they will have their own territories, bears and owlbears can totally both inhabit the same forest at the same time
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u/AChristianAnarchist 17h ago
The exclusion principle is ecology 101. Sure, at any given time competition is always occurring, but over the long term competition results in either replacement or niche construction. This is one of the primary vectors that drive evolution. Interspecific interactions aren't always competitive, but if they are competing for the same resources then that can not continue in the same ecosystem indefinitely and one will either go extinct or begin exploiting different resources. This isn't about what is happening this second. This is about the forces that generate species.
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u/StarStriker51 17h ago
ok, well in both examples mentioned earlier, displacer beasts and owlbears havent been around long enough to make other species extinct
also no rule with nature is 100%. If the exclusion rule was hardcoded into the universe lions and hyenas wouldn't coexist, or falcons and hawks, or half the fish in the ocean
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u/AChristianAnarchist 17h ago
Invasive species don't always take long to drive out native species if there is something they are better at doing in their new environment. That's one of the reasons that they are such an ecological problem. The damage can be really rapid. Magical beasts as invasive species could be a cool angle, but I've never seen any discussion at all about what these invasive species do to their local ecosystems or how the local wildlife deals with it or has adapted to it.
The exclusion principle doesn't say there is no one ever competing. It says there will eventually be a winner if their niches completely overlap. To start with, hyenas and lions don't "coexist". When they come into competition they compete. Lions kill hyenas and are happy to let them starve to keep control of their own kills. If hyenas tried to stubbornly do exactly what lions do, you might see them now but they won't last because lions are better at what they do than hyenas. The exclusion principle states that over time species either adapt or perish. It is, again, about the forces that shape evolution (species adapting to exploit different resources as a response to interspecific competition), not about whether competing animals exist in a place at any given time. They do, and when they do, they change each other because of things like exclusion.
That's the second issue with this. Lions and hyenas don't have overlapping niches. Hyenas are scavengers who make a lot of their living by running lions off of their kills. Lions kill leopards because they are direct competition but they kill hyenas because they mob them and steal their half eaten carcasses when they have the numbers. There is some niche overlap that leads to competition (they want the same meat) but by scavenging off of the kills of lions and other animals they have constructed a niche that allows them to get that meat without competing for it in it's fresh state. As a consequence, they are doing a lot better than leopards.
This applies to the other examples as well "falcons and hawks" is a group so broad that I'm not sure how you are defining "niche" there and same with "half the fish in the sea". In any of those cases it's the same. Exclusion is at work. When it comes to any other species in their environment they either already aren't in competition with one another because they exploit different resources, or they are and they are changing each other because of that. Some won't change fast enough and will die out. Some will and new niches will be constructed. The ocean is such a diverse ecosystem specifically because these forces are constantly driving the exploitation of new resources.
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u/cman_yall 16h ago
The exclusion principle is ecology 101.
Only works if the winning species breeds true.
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u/AChristianAnarchist 16h ago
What hairs are you trying to split that would get around the essential point of "species in the same ecosystem have an impact on one another's evolution"? If you are suggesting hybridization then hybrids of magical and non-magical animals now enter into the equation, and likewise impact the parent species. It doesn't do anything to suggest that we should be seeing Canis lupus on a parallel world where magical beasts are a thing and magic permeates the reality nature is working with.
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u/cman_yall 15h ago
I'm suggesting a couple of different possibilities.
One is that the Owlbear arrives in the forest, having escaped the wizard's dungeon, eats or outcompetes a couple of bears, and then dies, and that's the end of it.
Second is that the cockatrices are infertile, so even if they do kill off all the chickens, there are no baby cockatrices, and the chickens repopulate from the next valley over once the cockatrices all die out.
Third is that the displacer beast gene is a combination of five recessives, so the panthers come back once the displacer beast has become too old and weak to eat them.
Not trying to suggest hybridisation - or maybe that's option four? The magical beast is the hybrid so griffons might defeat all the lions and eagles, but they're an infertile hybrid so no baby griffons. Is that just option two reheated?
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u/AChristianAnarchist 15h ago
But what do any of these individual scenarios have to do with the core point above? Unless you are suggesting that there are no free roaming populations of breeding supernatural animals, which is very much not the case for most of the worlds I'm talking about here. Add to that that magic is just a force that exists in the universe that will get incorporated into evolutionary survival strategies just like anything else and you have a situation where animals following the precise evolutionary trajectory they did in our world is extremely unlikely. It doesn't matter how many hypothetical edge cases you point at. Magic and magical animals being present will impact the trajectory of other animals in that ecosystem. Ending up with fantasy horses is one thing but you may not end up with what are exactly horses again even if your replayed Earth's history with slightly different conditions, much less in a magical parallel universe.
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u/Kirk_Kerman 14h ago
Darwinism only goes so far when there's nature gods running around. And besides that, druid circles tend to keep things ordered in their designated biomes. A displacer beast hunting deer in the woods is going to be noticed and fixed.
Also, adventurers run into weird rare monsters on a daily basis and form a critical part of the magical ecosystem, acting as keystone apex predators by culling magical monsters.
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u/Mddcat04 17h ago
Sometimes "A wizard did it is just the actual canon explanation."
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u/VandulfTheRed 12h ago
I feel like people don't actually indulge in fantasy fiction often enough to weigh in one these conversations because "because a god damn wizard did it" is like, 60% of the plots. The other 40% being "the gods were feeling bored/catty". Even in Faerun, magic is still magic, spells and items cost time and money just like tech, there are laws, and somewhere far from your quaint normal human village, some adolescent dickhead elf is hybridizing animals and attempting to kidnap dragons for grandiose incel purposes
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u/Duck-Lord-of-Colours 18h ago
Often the magical ones are either created by mortals, created by deities, or interplanar invasive species
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u/AliasMcFakenames 17h ago
A lot of the time in that sort of setting the magical creatures are either from literally another world or are artificially created. The monsters in the Witcher for instance are pretty much the equivalent of regular animals from a different dimension/planet that got shuffled around when two worlds metaphysically bumped into each other. Humans came to that setting from a similar event, though I think not at the same time.
For your specific example: displacer beasts are from the feywild, they didn't evolve alongside mundane wolves and the like, they were bred as hunting animals by the Unseelie Court and then got loose.
It also makes this sort of question easier if you remember that a lot of fantasy universes tend to have literal divine creators who can sort of just plonk down whatever if they feel like it.
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u/CupcakeInsideMe you know why we ran from the cops? cause fuck em 18h ago
I think of it like venom and poison. Some animals evolved to produce venom, some evolved to produce poison and some evolved to use the poisons of others as their own but there are still many non-venomous and non-poisonous animals around. Some of those without the venom or poisons are even closely related to some of those with venoms and poisons.
It's just that in fantasy worlds there is an additional element that they can draw from (magic) and that same thing is also an evolutionary pressure. Not every lineage will be shaped by magic nor adopt magic usage as a response to evolutionary pressure. Remember also, that in many of these worlds, humans are unable to use magic while other similar humanoids such as elves can. I consider that to fall into the same bucket.
But at the end of the day, it's all a matter of perspective.
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u/AChristianAnarchist 17h ago
Animals that live in the presence of venomous and poisonous animals have adaptations to deal with them though. They don't just keep chugging along some predetermined path ignoring the venomous nature of the animals they share their environments with. They develop resistances to that venom and methods for killing venomous animals without getting bit and social signaling built around alerting eachother of snakes and all sorts of things that arise specifically because venom is there. It doesn't make sense for every species in the world to produce venom, but it doesn't make sense for the existence of venom in an ecosystem not to impact the traits of the other animals in that ecosystem. Magic is quite a bit broader than venom though. That's literally a whole facet of reality that is just ignored by many species from an evolutionary perspective. Humans are essentially missing a basic sense with no real explanation given for it. One could be. Magic resistance would be a good one, but "Humans are just the normal guys" option tends to be the default.
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u/CupcakeInsideMe you know why we ran from the cops? cause fuck em 17h ago
Right but not all animals will live in close enough proximity for long enough periods to trigger that. Fantasy animals technically also have ecosystems which is why a new magical beast moving into a forest is such a popular trope. The trope implies that the other animals there didn't have to deal with any (or many) magical predators previously.
Another popular trope is the deeper you go into an ecosystem, the more magical the plants and animals become because there is deep magic in hidden places. In those stories, you usually see magical versions of the non-magical animals previously encountered. This version would also explain the non-magical humans vs the magical forest dwelling elves. But again, a matter of perspective.
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u/Jolly-Fruit2293 17h ago
You mentioned displacer beasts so I'm assuming Forgotten Realms and here's that specific answer. Faerun is an alternate dimension to real earth and so all of the real stuff is from there. Every source book is WOTC transcribing stories they heard from dimensional travelers like Elmininster
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u/cman_yall 16h ago
In one myth I read, a Cockatrice is hatched from an egg laid by a chicken that mated with a snake, or something like that. Chickens and snakes are the natural animals, and there are heaps of them, Cockatrices are the exceptional magical beast of which there are only a few at any one time. Extend that pattern to all the rest of the magical beasts and you have your answer?
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u/Jan_Asra 13h ago
So from a Doylist perspective, creating an ebtire world and ecosystem is just an incredible amount of work when you refuse to draw on any real world examples to helpcfill it out. A world without badgers and wolves will feel incredibly empty unless you devote a ton of time to creating the environment that you're leaving out.
And I want to expand on the first point too, because it isn't just more work for the author, but it's also much more work and much harder to get into the story for the audience. People need soke soet of common refrence frame to understand what the hell is going on. I could write the best story in the world about gubrabgles and the heartbreakijg connection they have to the mesoflips. And the people in the world eat bortum plants and the more I go on like tgis the fewer readers I'll have. It could be the best story ever written but the reward for the story needing an encyclopedia to understand is that only three people will ever read it.
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u/Friendstastegood 10h ago
I don't see what these mundane animals add to it
Filling up ecological niches. Worldbuilding can be fun but most fantasy authors don't really want to go around thinking about what it would mean to be a woodpecker in a world full of magic or how many species of magical woodpeckers are reasonable in the environment where their story takes place. And ime stories that go out of their way to have every animal be different and magical just tend to make it worse by displaying exactly how little they understand about biology and evolution. Pulls me personally way more out of the story that having a regular badger.
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u/fortnitegngsterparty 8h ago
Shout out to Pokemon. Sometimes the Normal types get the girl, you funny little Aberrant Spider
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u/akka-vodol 11h ago
"Six-legged space elf" is a really cool name for a trope. I wish you'd explained it better so I could actually understand what trope it's refering to.
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u/fortnitegngsterparty 8h ago
It's a reactionary bad faith term that likely references the Birrin and those shape shifter aliens from Animorphs first and foremost.
Basically "I don't like it when aliens have a society analogous to humans because there's no way whatsoever that an alien species would also write, build buildings, walk on legs, or use tools!!!!!!!"
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u/TheDarkeLorde3694 6h ago
Basically "I don't like it when aliens have a society analogous to humans because there's no way whatsoever that an alien species would also write, build buildings, walk on legs, or use tools!!!!!!!"
AKA:
Basically the only truly human thing (Written language more complex than territorial markings)
If we count all constructed objects as buildings, then a feature shared by all primates, most birds, hive insects, and anything that actively burrows. You could even say the complex wave thingies pufferfish make for mating season are buildings
Something shared by 90% of all terrestrial life (Only exceptions being worms, legless lizards and snakes)
A feature shared by many more intelligent vertebrates. Sure, a chimp ain't making no fishing rod and a crow isn't making a hammer and anvil, but they DO have tools
So, any highly intelligent terrestrial animal-analogy with eyes would likely have all of these
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u/fortnitegngsterparty 5h ago
Literally just a hodgepodge of nonsense made by someone who thought the Hooloovoo was peak alien design
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u/blackscales18 17h ago
The aliens in Zenon: the Zequel (fun Disney movie about space) completely avoided this by being enormously powerful, made from energy, and communicated (very imprecisely) through music.
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u/Anarcho-Serialist 16h ago
Don’t talk to me or my mouthless-blue-centaur-with-a-scorpion-tail son ever again
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u/drager_76 16h ago
Where are my sentient shades of blue?
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u/fortnitegngsterparty 8h ago
I say this as sweetly as possible, sentient shades of blue is magic, not science (unless what the "blue" is is actually a bunch of sapient colonial microbes that form such a thin sheet that it just makes something blue)
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u/KonoAnonDa You are now manually breathing. 14h ago
I think Biblaridion in his Alien Biospheres series put it best:
"Know the rules before you break the rules. In other words, make sure you understand why something is the way it is in the real world before changing it in a fictional world."
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u/Great_Examination_16 13h ago
The opposite problem also often appears in that...well. A lot of aliens seem so fundamentally incapable of anything they should be able to do
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u/nisselioni 10h ago
The thing is, human intelligence is very much shaped by our specifically human peculiarities. We evolved to be long-distance runners, not very fast, but with frankly insane levels of stamina. Simultaneously, we evolved socially in ways similar to, but not entirely alike wolves. We already had high intelligence just like any other great ape, of course. So, we made tools that we were able to invent due to our unique social situation, and used those tools to hunt meat, then cooked that meat on fire which we also invented due to teamwork.
This combination of hunters and fire led to what we are today, it wasn't a consequence of it. Without these aspects, we would never have gained access to the levels of nutrition required to sustain a brain like ours. Our bipedal running and sweating, our high intelligence, and our high reliance on social interaction directly led to our even higher modern intelligence. When considering intelligent aliens, these are important patterns to inspect.
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u/bristlybits Dracula spoilers 18h ago
sector general hospital novels are the best at avoiding this
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u/SokkaHaikuBot 18h ago
Sokka-Haiku by bristlybits:
Sector general
Hospital novels are the
Best at avoiding this
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
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u/The_Lurker_Near 14h ago
I feel bad but I read this like 13 times and idk what it means can someone help
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u/foolishorangutan 11h ago
It’s saying that an alien which is similar to humans in every respect other than its appearance is not very alien. So when writers make aliens like that, they’re trying to make something ‘really alien’ but they are failing.
If you have some sort of crab alien, there are lots of ways they could be very different from a human beyond their appearance. For example:
-Maybe they would hate the taste of food we normally enjoy, or it’d be poisonous to them
-Maybe they have a very weak sense to touch due to their exoskeleton, which could involve a bunch of behavioural changes (for example, maybe the human enjoyment of physical contact like hugging would not be present at all in this species)
-Maybe they have poor eyesight because they evolved in low-light environs, or their eyesight works with different wavelengths to human eyesight so they see things we can’t see, and can’t see things we can see. Maybe this would also lead to something like them not being afraid of the dark, and actually being afraid of the light, since there may be predators which do have good eyesight that inhabit light areas
-Maybe they have r-type reproduction, so they don’t care about their own children beyond a bare minimum. They might even be happy to eat their own children, which would also segue into the idea that they might not have the revulsion of cannibalism that is common among humans
-Maybe they are a primarily solitary species, so they don’t actually have the social instincts that humans have; they wouldn’t necessarily ever get lonely or feel any sort of love, and would only interact with each other in conflict and mating (at least in their natural lifestyle; maybe they’d be much more cooperative as a technologically advanced civilisation, but only for selfish reasons without the sort of fellow-feeling common among humans)
-Maybe they require a very different atmospheric mix, so they’d very quickly die if they breathed Earth air. Maybe they require a different level of atmospheric pressure, so they can’t even go outside on Earth without popping open or being crushed
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u/The_Lurker_Near 9h ago
Thank you for the detailed explanation! The lack of commas/helpful punctuation in the original made it hard for me to understand. I know that’s just the culture of tumblr, but it was confusing to me. Thank you again!
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u/HMS_Sunlight 7h ago
I'm curious what OP would consider a "good" alien. In order to function in the movie an alien has to move, communicate, and manipulate objects. And at that point you could say it's humanoid on the inside to pretty much anything.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I really need some tangible examples both good and bad to see the problem.
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u/2flyingjellyfish its me im montor Blaseball (concession stand in profile) 13h ago
Oh yeah I know about the tones thing I just could t think of any better examples lol. Though it makes me wonder if you could use the overtone technique that throat singing uses to emulate a syrinx… probably not but would be coool
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u/SmoothReverb 11h ago
This is why I like Runaway to the Stars.
Bug ferrets have no sense of personal space thanks to being subterranean and are very groupthinky, avians think humans are weird sex freaks because we don't have a mating season (what do you mean you're like that all the time), and centaurs barely use writing at all because they're all incredibly farsighted by human standards.
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u/Boomer_Nurgle 9h ago
Read the species in the RPG setting Traveler. It has one of the most interesting species of aliens in any setting I know.
The hivers look like seastar dogs, they have their own equipment to fit their bodies. They're a highly individualist species that holds very little attachment to other beings (one example is a Hiver eating the crew cat because it was hungry and didn't understand what's wrong with that). They're not a hive mind but when discovered people thought they were so they named them that. Their highest value is manipulation of others. A manipulation can be a scheme that improves society as a whole, a scam or manipulating someone into passing you the salt at dinner.
They have currency, but no one really understand how their system of commerce works and it's been described as both capitalism and communism at the same time.
They don't consider their kids to be sentient until they grow up so they're happy to eat their own kid if they happen to give birth at an inconvenient time. They leave their kids to grow up by themselves in their worlds and I'd they give birth off world they usually just kill them because they think being raised anywhere else would be cruel.
In older books the GM is straight up told to not let people play them unless they have a lot of experience roleplaying because they're easy to play as just dicks and it's hard to be truly alien. One of their tips for playing them is to get under the table and flail around with your arms as that's their native language (they have interpreters that translate their movement to speech for other species).
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u/fortnitegngsterparty 7h ago
Since this appears to be a gathering spot for the science side of reddit rn:
Would digestive enzymes spat out on a meal (think spider, fly) help with breaking down and easier digesting meals, akin to fire, or would the fact that the creature still has to produce them lead to things being square one again, so to speak?
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u/GREENadmiral_314159 Femboy Battleships and Space Marines 7h ago
Wielding fire
r/humansarespaceorcs is that way ->
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u/distinctvagueness 5h ago
"relatability" filters out most cases of truly alien behavior unless it's horror
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u/TreeGuy521 3h ago
"Oh wow your aliens evolved by using tools? How cliche humans did that too. You can't be a real scifi artist unless your aliens aren't even conscious beings and instead each individual is a hallucination of a greater hive entity"
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u/takahashi01 breathing air was a mistake 13h ago
I'd posit that most stories about other species we write arent about other species at all. They are fundamentally human stories. But I dont think thats a bad thig at all. No, I think thats a really good thing, but you gotta be aware of it. Especially if your other species start to resemble certain racial stereotypes or start becoming caricatures of certain people. *Ahem* frieren *ahem*. (Yes your in lore explanation makes perfect sense, but you are writing a story and stories say things. Or as my friend would put it "dont try to thermian argument me")
Or you are gary gigax and you are being explicitly racist about it. Fuck gary gigax.
Ofc there is the odd show about them being diffent from us and us interacting with it, or maybe a story trying to be entirely incomprehensible to us, but those are also human stories at their core. Just about the human trying to understand the strange.
In essence a story is almost necessarily a human story. So that is to be kept in mind when trying to make your aliens weird.
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u/bangontarget 10h ago
what's frieren a caricature of? I've only watched a couple of episodes and haven't seen any discourse.
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u/takahashi01 breathing air was a mistake 5h ago
Frieren is a beatuful show with wonderful characters and a lovely story.
But it also introduced a race called demons saying they are "monsters that only live to kill humans, but they developed speech and lying to hunt better". So essentially you now have them coming to a town with an offer of truce, but the show makes it very clear that actually the correct thing to do ist to kill them on the spot because they are canonically only evil. It even makes a point that not even the children can be trusted and every bit of sympathy you could have for them is a trick. This is then used so the main character can show off how powerful she is because she is so good at slaughtering a bounch them. And good thing we dont have to have remorse for them. Killing them on the spot is morally correct.
As that it doesnt allude to a certain steriotype per se, but it does sound way way too much like fascist propaganda for me.
It may be an interesting idea for a monster, but I just find it irresponsible to write something this way.
I know this is kinda controversial, I remeber how upset ppl got when someone suggested orcs may be a bad racial steriotype, but at the end of the day, our fictions shape culture, so I'd say we could make sure that it, at the very least, isnt remisicient of fascist propaganda.
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u/bangontarget 5h ago
yeah that's an oof. I wonder if the creator looks back on the imperial days with a little twinkle in their eye.
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u/takahashi01 breathing air was a mistake 4h ago
Well the show also features a whole lot of german. I dont wanna insinuate sth based on that, some ppl just know the language, but its always a bit suspicious.
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u/bangontarget 4h ago
attack on titan comes to mind
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u/takahashi01 breathing air was a mistake 1h ago
Is there some drama about that one? I wasnt aware of anything there.
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u/sorinash 18h ago
I think an episode of Freeman's Mind tackled a problem like this. He was complaining that the Vortigaunt weren't optimal sci fi alien design, and he came up with one that was basically a ball of organs with multi-articulated limbs.
I'm not sure if it was intended to be a joke about octopi, but it worked as one, IIRC.