Aside from yes, morons using it for proxy-racism (the most limp-dicked variety of racism there is), it's a shitty writing prompt from homosexuals so lacking in every department that the last thing they can take pride in is the fact that by some technicality they still can claim to qualify as being human.
All HFY is trash, and the practice of HFY homosexuals in taking works written by other authors and claiming it's HFY is so painfully moronic that it really highlights the painful truth that they know so little about science fiction and fantasy that they really are unaware that humans have been the victors in 99.9999% of fictional conflicts already and there was never a need to try and rally behind a pointless flag of specieism.
So, frick off. Return to Reddit where this gay shit was cast out.
>Also real conflicts. It would have been 100%, but fricking Australians man.
The Australians actually won the Emu War, once they realised that charging them with machine gun armed cars was moronic they put out a bounty system that worked pretty well, with experienced hunters working for bounties the Emu overpopulation problem was pretty effectively dealt with.
stop pretending to be moronic, HFY tards show all the classic hallmarks of racists (such as claiming the achievements of their betters as their own and equating large-scale exploitation of ressources with greatness)
HFY was counter-culture to the self-deprecating oikophobic scifi stories where all the aliens are inherently superior and more advanced than us in every way with humanity being the underdog.
HFY done properly is celebration of mankind in a way every sensible person across the world can agree with, an union of the great race of man under one banner triumphant on the final frontier of space.
To call that racist is the height of ignorance.
>HFY was counter-culture
It's counter-culture in a way that fricks up any semblance of a narrative which is why it doesn't exist outside of random jackoff greentexts. It'd be like a genre called survivors frick yeah which was about slasher victims but they just shoot the murderer before he gets anyone, blissfully unaware that there's no fricking story left if you do that.
It'd be more along the lines of Rapists Frick Yeah!, where instead of your classic revenge flick where the movie starts out with a woman getting gang raped and then she goes on a killing spree to kill all her rapists, the movie makes the rapists the protagonists and has them just kill their victim as soon as they're done raping her.
>HFY was counter-culture to the self-deprecating
lmao, how can people still earnestly believe this? It's only self-deprecating if it actually follows through all the way on that concept. In reality though by painting ourselves always as the underdog it's more a form of humble bragging than anything else since we typically come out on-top anyway because of "human spirit" or w/e other thing is chosen in the particular story to be our secret ambiguously defined superpower. HFY was basically invented to supplant the already existing form of HFY because it apparently was too subtle and not blatant enough.
You continue to miss the point. The "weakness" is a total sham and almost always was. Nothing but a smokescreen to try and hide making ourselves OP Mary Sues.
I've read a few that were legitimately "humans are stupid and dumb". Off the top of my head:
Three college students get abducted or something by aliens because of some math thing. At one point in the story they're involved in a "space battle" and the humans wonder why there's no laser blasts. Battles involve both ships trying to out maneuver each other and one immediately surrendering once it's in a bad position because spaceships are too expensive to waste on war.
Head of a cult has his frozen body resurrected in the future and earth is a galactic backwater where the only thing of value humans can export is humour which is more of an intellectual fad than anything meaningful. Everything has been copywritten and you can't go anywhere or do anything without spending money.
And a whole lot of "bad end" short stories like:
Two humans investigating a non-sentient multispecies hive that occupies a giant asteroid belt. The man gets more and more aggressive investigating how the worker species can be exploited until he suddenly disappears. The woman is eventually brought before a new lifeform that has the man biologically wired into it. She's informed the hive is normally nonsentient because it's not necessary for survival but has redeveloped sentience as a defense mechanism to their investigations and will biologically rewire them to act as sleeper agents to involve humans with the asteroids and eventually turn them into more food.
None of those examples sound like a case of humans being dumb. Are you leaving out some context or something?
4 months ago
Anonymous
A little bit. Both of the novels very much have a tone of "Oh those silly humans." It's hard to give specifics because I read them 30 years ago. I've been trying to find the anthology I read the short story in for the past few years but with no luck. I keep thinking it's Fred Saberhagen because I'm pretty sure I read it at the same time as "Birthdays".
4 months ago
Anonymous
Okay, the short story is Swarm by Bruce Sterling. Took some digging on /r/whatsthatbook to find it. Apparently got made into an episode of Love Death and Robots.
4 months ago
Anonymous
I only saw the Love Death and Robots version of it and I was never big on the "humans are superior to everyone" aspect of HFY but that story seemed silly to me in the opposite way because it seemed to undersell how humanity works. >Oh you silly human, look at those aliens over there, they used to be a galaxy conquering imperium and now they eat shit. We are just going to create better humans to fight humanity for us, we already learned everything we need to know from this ONE other human's brain.
Cool, you have naked human clones in your space hive, what now? Seems like you missed steps 2-9 in your grand plan and that's ignoring that your entire knowledge of our species is now based on one researcher who likely didn't even know how to fly a space ship, which you also don't have. What, are you gonna let them swim through space naked and knock on the next airlock asking to be let in?
4 months ago
Anonymous
They spelled that out in the show anon. Their plan was infiltrate humanity with the clones to get all the OTHER relevant intel. And by making them not just faster and stronger, but smarter and more charismatic their plan would be to take humanity down from the inside.
As to how they implant the first humans, I guess they use one of their species they either have or can build to act as an organic spaceship and land it on a human colony.
Being counterculture to something that never dominated the mainstream culture is pretty weird. There are plenty of scifi stories where aliens are more advanced than humans, that's true, but there have also always been plenty of scifi stories that are about humans being cool and winning in the end. This anon
Humanity is always capable though. We're literally the protag race most of the time and win because the writing says so even if by all accounts we should have lost. On a meta level its basically sucking your own dick by inventing a fictional punching bag that can't actually fight back and being proud of beating that. Or like building a glass dummy and shattering it and saying that was a display of your might.
It was and is so pervasive in mainstream Sci-Fi and Fantasy. You can stick your head in the ground but it was and still is pretty common to have humans being middle of the road or a weak race. The best example is Star Trek. Pretty much every major race in Star Trek is "better" than humans and the few that are not are intentionally looked down on by pretty much all.
>Star Trek
TNG's first fricking episode has a human debating with an extradimensional godlike being of humanity's merits and ability to rise above their vices and winning you absolute disingenuous chode.
>to the self-deprecating oikophobic scifi stories
You mean the ones that don't exist >with humanity being the underdog.
Ah yes, because "humanity is physically weaker than the jaggaroths but ultimately defeat them due to their innate humanity" is SUCH an anti-human message. Much moreso than "humanity is a vicious monster than lacks empathy for even their own kind, united only by their hatred for all things inhuman, gleefully sending themselves to death en masse so long as it slightly inconveniences another species" like most HFY stories.
Humanity is always capable though. We're literally the protag race most of the time and win because the writing says so even if by all accounts we should have lost. On a meta level its basically sucking your own dick by inventing a fictional punching bag that can't actually fight back and being proud of beating that. Or like building a glass dummy and shattering it and saying that was a display of your might.
I took the HFY trash to mean "humans have some distinct and concrete advantages rather than just being generically "innovative" or "diplomatic" or something hard to quantify."
So like for example humans evolved as spear-throwing endurance hunters, so compared to other aliens we have unusually good hand-eye coordination and endurance. Also given the size of Earth we *may* be heavy-worlders and thus stronger than whatever the galactic average is.
This doesn't mean that all aliens are pathetic before us, though, they'd necessarily have to have advantages of their own if they evolved to become the top dogs on their homeworld.
>they'd necessarily have to have advantages of their own if they evolved to become the top dogs on their homeworld
Unfortunately, trash HFY never considers this and just writes the aliens as braindead quadriplegics whose continued survival is more baffling than quantum mechanics.
Yeah, that's literally the origin point of the sub-genre. Basically an encouragement to think outside of the box when it comes to our own species in science fiction instead of casting ourselves as the perpetual average. Of course, that was quickly appended with a semi-ironic "humanity frick yeah", which became the calling card for the sub-genre and a message of its own that idiots flocked to, and other idiots mistake for the actual sub-genre.
OG HFY is just casting us as the weird species in a setting, based on actual traits we have, in a positive way.
>sub-genre
God, you pretentious HFY homosexuals are so up your own asses it's pathetic.
It's not a subgenre. It barely qualifies as a writing prompt. It's nothing more than taking the song America Frick Yeah and going "Yo, what if Humans were the America of Space?!"
Acting like it's some deep contemplation of the human condition is sad, because try as you might to fluff it up and pretend you've got some budding literary genre with some inspiring message that explores avenues never pursued by any writer, there has never been a single good piece of HFY ever written. It's all embarrassing trash, and the joke here is that you think the laborious, painfully pretentious stories are somehow better than the ones that recognize just how fricking dumb HFY is.
The worst part, and I mean the very worst part, is that you focusing on a single trait and then labeling humanity by it doesn't encourage "thinking outside the box". It just makes your fictional humans some one-dimensional parody of humanity, an alien race you ironically call human.
Are there really people who think of it politically? I just want to daydream about marrying an ayy lmao, cyborg, dragon, yuanti or other fantastic creature because it pulls me out of this gay Earth I have to live in
I don't even have yellow fever IRL
HFY is for homosexuals regardless of how you "do it", I can't believe you queers STILL get so worked up over a "genre" that's just poorly written concentrated Avatar seethe
Most of the time it just comes off as blatant narcissistic and prideful Mary/Gary stuing on a species wide participation trophy level. Not really any different from some guy blatantly writing a story about himself as the greatest thing ever and then somehow getting mad when people call him out for it.
Maybe because its overwhelmingly filled with shit due to the nature of what it is and the kind of people it attracts? It's just a known quality like how you can always safely dismiss anyone who seems to be giving off a furry vibe.
4 months ago
Anonymous
my fantasies are all in hmofa territory and yeah the fiction I've read in the genre was all shit
>hfy is a fun bit of fantasizing where we live in a world that is not trying to guilt you for being human
I guess this explains why I've never gotten the appeal of HFY. I've never felt guilty for being human, I've never felt any pressure to feel guilty about bein human, and I'm all in all pretty comfortable being human. I guess that means that HFY just isn't for me.
The famous Avatar copypasta actually did raise a valid point about blue catmen being pretty much permanently stagnant extension of a giant biocomputer as opposed to much more dynamic humans. Vast majority of the HFY has no actual point to raise beside "humans rule, aliens drool".
Aside from yes, morons using it for proxy-racism (the most limp-dicked variety of racism there is), it's a shitty writing prompt from homosexuals so lacking in every department that the last thing they can take pride in is the fact that by some technicality they still can claim to qualify as being human.
All HFY is trash, and the practice of HFY homosexuals in taking works written by other authors and claiming it's HFY is so painfully moronic that it really highlights the painful truth that they know so little about science fiction and fantasy that they really are unaware that humans have been the victors in 99.9999% of fictional conflicts already and there was never a need to try and rally behind a pointless flag of specieism.
So, frick off. Return to Reddit where this gay shit was cast out.
One of the dumbest part of HFY is authors singing praises to humanity's worst traits. I've lost the count of stories that painted humans as dishonorable, warlike, duplicitous monsters compared to the aliens and then try to paint it as a good thing, because apparently being a galactic equivalent to crackhead trashing a polite party is something they consider worth being proud of.
HFY was counter-culture to the self-deprecating oikophobic scifi stories where all the aliens are inherently superior and more advanced than us in every way with humanity being the underdog.
HFY done properly is celebration of mankind in a way every sensible person across the world can agree with, an union of the great race of man under one banner triumphant on the final frontier of space.
To call that racist is the height of ignorance.
Then they sucked at being a counter culture, since all they had was self congratulatory nonsense that makes people unironically sick of them.
>because apparently being a galactic equivalent to crackhead trashing a polite party is something they consider worth being proud of
It'd be okay if that was all, but then you also get humans screaming their lungs out about how violent and callous the universe is to them when the aliens dare to take a single step in the same direction.
Humans are the bestestest most smart and powerful race in the universe and have the right to kill everyone else, but don't you dare strike back and chant "GENOCIDE! MINING!" or we'll cry.
I just see HFY as a deconstruction of the older far more tired cliche of "the puny earthlings" where humans are always depicted as either exceptionally less impressive than other races or at best our gimmick is being scrappy/good at adapting or some other consolation prize.
It IS super weird that there's two different versions of almost every earthling species for some reason and that share genetic code but also don't. That Y chromosome is clearly some kind of alien parasite or experiment, it doesn't make any fricking sense for it to come to be or interface with the code on the X chromosome the way it does. How the frick does that even happen? Some kind of cellular parasite/virus run amok to the point it got incorporated into every organism's lifecycle? Ridiculous.
Sex is definitely some kind of cosmic aberration and the reason aliens keep abducting us to do weird butt stuff is because theyre studying our superpower.
You shouldn't speak authoritatively about things you know nothing about. There are exactly zero sexually reproducing species on Earth with no more or less than two chromosomal sexes.
You have no idea. More accurately, even mycologists don't truly understand it all. The multiple life stages, the alternating generational forms, the thousands of sexes with different viable pairings. We could find a fungus tomorrow with a triple helix genetic structure and I wouldn't even be surprised. It's so fricked up that they're the closest relation of animals on the planet because there is nothing alive that's more alien. I love them and they frighten me.
>X, Y >Some kind of cellular parasite/virus run amok to the point it got incorporated into every organism's lifecycle?
Yeah, and just for fun the aliens made therians hetereogametic (XY) for the males but switched things around for male avians to be homogametic (ZZ) just like lepidopterans, but other insects are heterogametic male. This lack of consistency over which sex has the different gametes implies two competing genetic intrusions and that's definitely evidence of infighting amongst our alien overlords. We shall have to use that to our advantage to overpower them with our weird butt stuff superpower.
>True power is not being able to beat up someone weaker than you - But to convince someone who is stronger than you to bend over and take it from behind
ftfy
>But to convince someone
That's literally not power, this situation requires the strong party to be in control of the outcome and the deceiver is dependent upon their choices. >being able to beat up someone weaker
This is the epitome of power, being able to FORCE your will upon another regardless of their choices, having no need to depend on anyone's choices, no requirement to compromise to gain consent.
>This is the epitome of power, being able to FORCE your will upon another regardless of their choices, having no need to depend on anyone's choices, no requirement to compromise to gain consent.
You'd be right, but violence is mistaken as force all the time.
No, the most powerful act of all is murder-suicide, and only the weakest of all people could possibly possess that power.
no, anon said power and that's more correct. however all power eventually converges into violence. I sue you and I am powerful so I win > law enforcers come and forcibly throw you into jail. All power hinges around physical consequences, otherwise people would just be able to steal if they have no money or break the law in other ways
4 months ago
Anonymous
You're right, to a point, violence is the backbone of all authority, and proof of the failure to secure peace and prosperity.
But self termination is so much more powerful. The ultimate weapon of war is not a nuke so big it destroys the whole world, but a mind-aflicting gas that makes one hemisphere of the world's population kill themselves.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>gas that makes one hemisphere of the world's population kill themselves.
This is still an application of physical force, material chemicals physically forcing an action.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Yes it is.
It's significantly less force for significantly more "gain".
Just killing everyone ever with a bomb? That's simple, and easy. Making a bomb that specifically only targets half the world and makes them want to kill themselves? I'd say it speaks of the mind behind the bombardier a lot more.
Lets say he films the impact himself, at ground zero. He's really happy to have achieved world peace that he will never see.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>significantly less force
We are not arguing degrees of force, we are arguing if it is or is not, and it IS, chemical assault of the mind is not coercion by any measure, it is force.
4 months ago
Anonymous
I don't know if you're acting intentionally moronic to waste people's time but this is genuinely some of the stupidest shit I've ever read on this site
no, anon said power and that's more correct. however all power eventually converges into violence. I sue you and I am powerful so I win > law enforcers come and forcibly throw you into jail. All power hinges around physical consequences, otherwise people would just be able to steal if they have no money or break the law in other ways
Violence is the ultimate form of authority from which all other forms of authority ultimately derive their power.
No force = no compliance.
Honestly all I want is to marry a robot
It's not gonna happen and either way I wouldn't want to see it happen because it would be a sad mass-produced sex slave scenario and they'll make human looking hos anyway instead of the starcraft looking adjutant lookin stuff I'm into
it's particularly painful to know your fantasy is so close and yet so impossibly distant, it's not like wanting to frick furries or aliens, those are a pretty remote possibility
I wouldnt want a waifudroid before they can run completely without internet. Imagine if a hacker or a faulty software update suddenly erased your wife's personality or sets her parameters to maximum brattyness
That's what makes 60s and 70s fantasy and scifi so great. Just an endless parade of assistant college professors and spaceship engineers hooking up with buxom redhaired princess witches.
>You can just tell that the man in the picture is the author's self insert.
That's what makes 60s and 70s fantasy and scifi so great. Just an endless parade of assistant college professors and spaceship engineers hooking up with buxom redhaired princess witches.
>That's what makes 60s and 70s fantasy and scifi so great. Just an endless parade of assistant college professors and spaceship engineers hooking up with buxom redhaired princess witches.
I do like how his posture makes it look like he's somewhat annoyed with the whole ordeal, like, "Damn Horny Space Bunnies, get off me and let me play with my googly-eyed dildo joystick in peace!"
[...]
First of all, I'm not the [...] Second, I didn't say anything about survival, but about how I dislike stories that paint mankind as a galactic equivalent of a roid raging, traitorous chimp and pretend that it's a state to aspire to. Ultimately, it's the morality of weaklings who can't even conceptualise triumph as something else beside killing off others or becoming the top bully.
Also, the ethics based on the absolute survival don't care about being strong, just on living to see another day and having offspring. From the point of view of the absolute survival of a species, the literal sheep are in much better position than the literal lions, by virtue of having the strongest species interested in breeding more sheep.
[...]
To paraphrase the Heart of Darkness, there is difference between being stronger than your enemies and being truly strong. Kurtz was stronger than tribesmen in strict terms of being able to dominate them, but he was also weak, with his mind quickly crumbling to pieces until the illness finally finished him off.
[...]
Power is power, especially outside the cut and dry PvP mindset. There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
>Power is power, especially outside the cut and dry PvP mindset. There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
People seem to forget what the physics definition of "Power" is, "The ability to do Work."
the reason why I can't buy into HFY is that humans are pretty ugly
they have hair and they sweat, nasty orifices filled with goo and waste, wrinkles
humans are just not pretty, that's why they need clothes to look respectable
I only like the hair and the eyes
There might be some HFY stories that still remember the importance of narrative tension, but most of the time it's like
>HFY was counter-culture
It's counter-culture in a way that fricks up any semblance of a narrative which is why it doesn't exist outside of random jackoff greentexts. It'd be like a genre called survivors frick yeah which was about slasher victims but they just shoot the murderer before he gets anyone, blissfully unaware that there's no fricking story left if you do that.
said: the aliens can barely live, let alone pose a threat to muh human superiority. And even in the rare cases where they can, the story will be filled with frustrating hypocrisy.
because it's ayy
it's species joined alliance with humanity to fight against space globohomosexual (which consists only of herbivore ayy) because it tried to kill them because humans and ayy eat meat
The Venlil HFY is at least relately well written, its fun and it doesn't make the humans seem overpowered in any ways.
What bugs me about it is the whole prey-predator thing it tries so hard to drive. It makes no fricking sense. Prey species don't see predators as a danger unless those are predators that could potentially attack them. Sheeps and goats don't go nuts when looking at a cat because the cat has clear carnivora features.
Also, the smile thing. Almost every mammal have a "smile" of some sort. Tigers show teeth to show contentment. Animals would not usually think you are menacing when you smile at them.
>Also, the smile thing.
I just remembered one of the HFY stories I had started writing but never finished when I was still into that kinda stuff a long time ago. It was from the perspective of some alien commander after his troops attacked and had taken a human outpost on some remote planet, slaughtering everyone. Because they found humans so unworthy and beneath them they didn't bury or move the bodies. Over time as the corpses rotted they started to "smile" and that unnerved him but he also couldn't show any weakness. The story ends when he almost reaches a breaking point and the base gets attacked, only for him to find a black ship in in the sky marked with a smiling skull and crossbones, because what they had attacked was actually a pirate outpost. I think I never finished it because of the obvious flaw as to why the aliens would know "smiling" as a concept to get unnerved by corpses "smiling" at them, but also not knowing it in the sense of it being surprising when that happens because the corpses decay.
>Animals would not usually think you are menacing when you smile at them.
Depends on how they evolved. A chimpanzee would, for example. Conversely a dog wouldn't because they've evolved alongside humans and understand our facial gestures.
thinks then the bird could be Rodan. Rodan has been shown to have heat breath/atomic heat ray breath. In their first appearance the Rodan died in lava and in a later appearance Rodan and Godzilla have a conversation about how they don't care about humans
The pose in the pic and the tone you should recognise from a well circulated meme.
I think it might be Stellaris fanart? There's a faction ideology called fantatical purifiers that makes you automatically hostile to all other races and sends you on a galaxy-wide genocide.
A Call To Arms by Alan Dean Foster is an interesting book where humans are more biologically suited to warfare than any other species in the galaxy and the only species to survive to develop spaceflight without evolving into pacifism due to every other planet having a pangea supercontinent. The other two books in the trilogy basically have humans as the bad guys as the aliens try to put the genie back in the bottle after using humans to fight a war.
John Ringo's Posleen books are similar but the leader aliens knew about the humans long-term and while incapable of direct violence are lying and manipulative and trying to arrange things so humans either go mutually extinct with the Ork-Zoats they're fighting or get biochipped into slavery. The underclass of the alien alliiance is meanwhile running a conspiracy to get humans to replace the leader aliens as the top dogs in the alliance. Unfortunately Ringo is one of those people that went crazy after "9/11 changed everything" and all his later books are ultra-rightwing. First two books are still great.
I just want a (porn) series where humans are the incubi/succubi of the galaxy and our pheromones drive other species into heat. Closest we've got is those orange alien comics by InCase before he went all futa all the time.
>evolving into pacifism due to every other planet having a pangea supercontinent
Is his thesis that the surviving aliens became pacifistic because being on a supercontinent they were regularly in contact with everyone everywhere else because they could walk/ride/drive places? Because if so, damn that's stupid. How did the other aliens kill each other? They all developed ultra-long distance artillery and intercontinental missiles before they invented boats?
HFY was always best as a prompt for comedy short fiction. I liked that one where spicy food was utterly deadly to all other sapient life and it almost caused a diplomatic crisis at a banquet culture presentation, only narrowly averted by giving the alien diplomat milk to drink, incidentally revealing a long sort after cure to that most deadly of poisons to the galactic community.
Earth being an ultra hostile death world is a cute set up for jokes. Humanity being the bestest badasses I'm the universe by biological default isn't so conducive to particularly self-serious story telling.
But if the bug people place their survival above yours and do the exact same things you do, then suddenly they're the bad guys and they have to be punished for being so mean naughty evil non-humans.
My family and friends = good
Xenospiders eating my family and friends = bad
I don't care if the xenospiders have twenty thousand hatchings to feed and a space mortgage, I put the ones I love above all else.
My family and friends = good
Xenomonkeys eating my family and friends = bad
I don't care if the xenomonkeys have five kids to feed and a space mortgage, I put the ones I love above all else.
Ergo, this statement is objectively true and should be swallowed uncritically because it conforms with our pre-existing worldviews.
[...]
Who the frick cares about the species when I can frick exotic pussy and make better superior humans with my alien waifu? >you can't interbreed with aliens!
Okay. At that point we can just clone new babies. Who says we need wombs to perpetuate the species?
You know that we haven't actually made contact with aliens, right? We're not alking about extraterrestrial /misc/itics here, we're talking about the virtues of HFY in a world where humans already are the dominant species in reality and where most of fiction including nonhumans is also ultimately about human triumphs. Also the ability to think beyond day-to-day survival is one of the defining traits of humans and one of the things that differentiate us from other animals. Morality, ethics, empathy and all kinds of gran philosophical principles are all parts of what it means to be human. The space crackhead brand of HFY ignores all that.
It was and is so pervasive in mainstream Sci-Fi and Fantasy. You can stick your head in the ground but it was and still is pretty common to have humans being middle of the road or a weak race. The best example is Star Trek. Pretty much every major race in Star Trek is "better" than humans and the few that are not are intentionally looked down on by pretty much all.
I haven't watched much Start Trek, and obviously naming one example doesn't mean shit either way, but the little Start Tre I have watched has seemed to be about human victories and human achievements. In regards to scifi in general, I don't really need to stick my head in the ground, as you're just plain wrong. A lot of the time even scifi where aliens are more advanced still has humans overcome those aliens in conflicts, and scifi where humans aren't weak and primitive compared to aliens is not rare. It is true that there is plenty of scifi where this is the case, but there is also plenty of scifi where it isn't the case. The kind of scifi you describe exists, but it doesn't dominate.
>But to convince someone
That's literally not power, this situation requires the strong party to be in control of the outcome and the deceiver is dependent upon their choices. >being able to beat up someone weaker
This is the epitome of power, being able to FORCE your will upon another regardless of their choices, having no need to depend on anyone's choices, no requirement to compromise to gain consent.
You are moronic and wrong.
Power is whatever works. It's anything and everything that lets you push thing to the direction you want.
In a situation where the so-called "power" is constantly relying on the consent of a superior entity, moment-to-moment, then it's definitionally not power, the one choosing to let the actions occur is the one in power, choosing to acquiesce to another's will because that's what you want does not make you less powerful.
You've got the reasoning capacity of an 8 year old schoolyard bully.
Nah, if it works it's power. It literally is as simple as that. Persuasiveness is power, and it's sour grapes talk of those bitter about their own powerlessness to argue that some forms of power don't really count. You, yourself, are pretty much guaranteed to be in many ways at the mercy of people whose power is based on their ability to manipulate and appeal to people. While it is true that power is on some level ultimately based on force and violence, that's very much a theoretical white room perspective rather than a practical real world perspective. In real world force is often guided and controlled by social manipulation rather than the other way around.
No, anyone who appears to be powerful i that way is actually backed by force, like slimy politicians: they have the police and military.
Anyone who has ONLY their tongue has no power.
People don't appear to be powerful that way, they are powerful that way. Sure, they're backed by force, which is just another way of saying that force is controlled by them. People who actually use force do so on their behalf and at their bidding. People with brawn and big guns and skill at violence don't run things, they work for others. Sure, in theory police and military could refuse to obey slimy politicians, and then the slimy politicians would be fricked. As I said, though, that's a theoretical white room scenario. It's not how things work in the real world. In real world violence is subservient to money and political power, not the other way around.
If you don't pay the muscle, it beats or kills you, that they have the liesure of not overseeing the minutia of running things is a positive, not a negative.
politicians serve the forces that weild power, they are not the source of power. see
In a situation where the so-called "power" is constantly relying on the consent of a superior entity, moment-to-moment, then it's definitionally not power, the one choosing to let the actions occur is the one in power, choosing to acquiesce to another's will because that's what you want does not make you less powerful.
You've got the reasoning capacity of an 8 year old schoolyard bully.
Humans are the bestestest most smart and powerful race in the universe and have the right to kill everyone else, but don't you dare strike back and chant "GENOCIDE! MINING!" or we'll cry.
Second, I didn't say anything about survival, but about how I dislike stories that paint mankind as a galactic equivalent of a roid raging, traitorous chimp and pretend that it's a state to aspire to. Ultimately, it's the morality of weaklings who can't even conceptualise triumph as something else beside killing off others or becoming the top bully.
Also, the ethics based on the absolute survival don't care about being strong, just on living to see another day and having offspring. From the point of view of the absolute survival of a species, the literal sheep are in much better position than the literal lions, by virtue of having the strongest species interested in breeding more sheep.
That's bullshit slave minded nonsense.
>its actually good to be the weakest shits because when we win its through our dogged will alone
Strength is a virtue and HFY is a rejection of meek self deprivation and aspirational to human potential.
To paraphrase the Heart of Darkness, there is difference between being stronger than your enemies and being truly strong. Kurtz was stronger than tribesmen in strict terms of being able to dominate them, but he was also weak, with his mind quickly crumbling to pieces until the illness finally finished him off.
In a situation where the so-called "power" is constantly relying on the consent of a superior entity, moment-to-moment, then it's definitionally not power, the one choosing to let the actions occur is the one in power, choosing to acquiesce to another's will because that's what you want does not make you less powerful.
You've got the reasoning capacity of an 8 year old schoolyard bully.
Power is power, especially outside the cut and dry PvP mindset. There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
>There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
Yes but they command the arm of the law or literal armies, in the end monetary or authoritative power are a proxy for muscle, that's what I meant
inb4
>hfy is racism REEEEEEEEE
Aside from yes, morons using it for proxy-racism (the most limp-dicked variety of racism there is), it's a shitty writing prompt from homosexuals so lacking in every department that the last thing they can take pride in is the fact that by some technicality they still can claim to qualify as being human.
All HFY is trash, and the practice of HFY homosexuals in taking works written by other authors and claiming it's HFY is so painfully moronic that it really highlights the painful truth that they know so little about science fiction and fantasy that they really are unaware that humans have been the victors in 99.9999% of fictional conflicts already and there was never a need to try and rally behind a pointless flag of specieism.
So, frick off. Return to Reddit where this gay shit was cast out.
>hfy is racism REEEEEEEEE
>humans have been the victors in 99.9999% of fictional conflicts already
Also real conflicts. It would have been 100%, but fricking Australians man.
>Also real conflicts. It would have been 100%, but fricking Australians man.
The Australians actually won the Emu War, once they realised that charging them with machine gun armed cars was moronic they put out a bounty system that worked pretty well, with experienced hunters working for bounties the Emu overpopulation problem was pretty effectively dealt with.
>muh racism
You must be new here
stop pretending to be moronic, HFY tards show all the classic hallmarks of racists (such as claiming the achievements of their betters as their own and equating large-scale exploitation of ressources with greatness)
HFY was counter-culture to the self-deprecating oikophobic scifi stories where all the aliens are inherently superior and more advanced than us in every way with humanity being the underdog.
HFY done properly is celebration of mankind in a way every sensible person across the world can agree with, an union of the great race of man under one banner triumphant on the final frontier of space.
To call that racist is the height of ignorance.
>in a way every sensible person across the world can agree with
a sensible person would only hate humans
didn't know reddit tier teenage angst was cool again.
Misanthropy is played out and boring.
>HFY was counter-culture
It's counter-culture in a way that fricks up any semblance of a narrative which is why it doesn't exist outside of random jackoff greentexts. It'd be like a genre called survivors frick yeah which was about slasher victims but they just shoot the murderer before he gets anyone, blissfully unaware that there's no fricking story left if you do that.
It'd be more along the lines of Rapists Frick Yeah!, where instead of your classic revenge flick where the movie starts out with a woman getting gang raped and then she goes on a killing spree to kill all her rapists, the movie makes the rapists the protagonists and has them just kill their victim as soon as they're done raping her.
>HFY was counter-culture to the self-deprecating
lmao, how can people still earnestly believe this? It's only self-deprecating if it actually follows through all the way on that concept. In reality though by painting ourselves always as the underdog it's more a form of humble bragging than anything else since we typically come out on-top anyway because of "human spirit" or w/e other thing is chosen in the particular story to be our secret ambiguously defined superpower. HFY was basically invented to supplant the already existing form of HFY because it apparently was too subtle and not blatant enough.
That's bullshit slave minded nonsense.
>its actually good to be the weakest shits because when we win its through our dogged will alone
Strength is a virtue and HFY is a rejection of meek self deprivation and aspirational to human potential.
You continue to miss the point. The "weakness" is a total sham and almost always was. Nothing but a smokescreen to try and hide making ourselves OP Mary Sues.
I've read a few that were legitimately "humans are stupid and dumb". Off the top of my head:
Three college students get abducted or something by aliens because of some math thing. At one point in the story they're involved in a "space battle" and the humans wonder why there's no laser blasts. Battles involve both ships trying to out maneuver each other and one immediately surrendering once it's in a bad position because spaceships are too expensive to waste on war.
Head of a cult has his frozen body resurrected in the future and earth is a galactic backwater where the only thing of value humans can export is humour which is more of an intellectual fad than anything meaningful. Everything has been copywritten and you can't go anywhere or do anything without spending money.
And a whole lot of "bad end" short stories like:
Two humans investigating a non-sentient multispecies hive that occupies a giant asteroid belt. The man gets more and more aggressive investigating how the worker species can be exploited until he suddenly disappears. The woman is eventually brought before a new lifeform that has the man biologically wired into it. She's informed the hive is normally nonsentient because it's not necessary for survival but has redeveloped sentience as a defense mechanism to their investigations and will biologically rewire them to act as sleeper agents to involve humans with the asteroids and eventually turn them into more food.
None of those examples sound like a case of humans being dumb. Are you leaving out some context or something?
A little bit. Both of the novels very much have a tone of "Oh those silly humans." It's hard to give specifics because I read them 30 years ago. I've been trying to find the anthology I read the short story in for the past few years but with no luck. I keep thinking it's Fred Saberhagen because I'm pretty sure I read it at the same time as "Birthdays".
Okay, the short story is Swarm by Bruce Sterling. Took some digging on /r/whatsthatbook to find it. Apparently got made into an episode of Love Death and Robots.
I only saw the Love Death and Robots version of it and I was never big on the "humans are superior to everyone" aspect of HFY but that story seemed silly to me in the opposite way because it seemed to undersell how humanity works.
>Oh you silly human, look at those aliens over there, they used to be a galaxy conquering imperium and now they eat shit. We are just going to create better humans to fight humanity for us, we already learned everything we need to know from this ONE other human's brain.
Cool, you have naked human clones in your space hive, what now? Seems like you missed steps 2-9 in your grand plan and that's ignoring that your entire knowledge of our species is now based on one researcher who likely didn't even know how to fly a space ship, which you also don't have. What, are you gonna let them swim through space naked and knock on the next airlock asking to be let in?
They spelled that out in the show anon. Their plan was infiltrate humanity with the clones to get all the OTHER relevant intel. And by making them not just faster and stronger, but smarter and more charismatic their plan would be to take humanity down from the inside.
As to how they implant the first humans, I guess they use one of their species they either have or can build to act as an organic spaceship and land it on a human colony.
Being counterculture to something that never dominated the mainstream culture is pretty weird. There are plenty of scifi stories where aliens are more advanced than humans, that's true, but there have also always been plenty of scifi stories that are about humans being cool and winning in the end. This anon
is completely right.
It was and is so pervasive in mainstream Sci-Fi and Fantasy. You can stick your head in the ground but it was and still is pretty common to have humans being middle of the road or a weak race. The best example is Star Trek. Pretty much every major race in Star Trek is "better" than humans and the few that are not are intentionally looked down on by pretty much all.
>Star Trek
TNG's first fricking episode has a human debating with an extradimensional godlike being of humanity's merits and ability to rise above their vices and winning you absolute disingenuous chode.
That's not what Star Trek is about. It's the biggest HFY property there's ever been, period.
>to the self-deprecating oikophobic scifi stories
You mean the ones that don't exist
>with humanity being the underdog.
Ah yes, because "humanity is physically weaker than the jaggaroths but ultimately defeat them due to their innate humanity" is SUCH an anti-human message. Much moreso than "humanity is a vicious monster than lacks empathy for even their own kind, united only by their hatred for all things inhuman, gleefully sending themselves to death en masse so long as it slightly inconveniences another species" like most HFY stories.
>humanity being capable = bad writing
Why so many words for such a lowIQ take?
Humanity is always capable though. We're literally the protag race most of the time and win because the writing says so even if by all accounts we should have lost. On a meta level its basically sucking your own dick by inventing a fictional punching bag that can't actually fight back and being proud of beating that. Or like building a glass dummy and shattering it and saying that was a display of your might.
I took the HFY trash to mean "humans have some distinct and concrete advantages rather than just being generically "innovative" or "diplomatic" or something hard to quantify."
So like for example humans evolved as spear-throwing endurance hunters, so compared to other aliens we have unusually good hand-eye coordination and endurance. Also given the size of Earth we *may* be heavy-worlders and thus stronger than whatever the galactic average is.
This doesn't mean that all aliens are pathetic before us, though, they'd necessarily have to have advantages of their own if they evolved to become the top dogs on their homeworld.
>they'd necessarily have to have advantages of their own if they evolved to become the top dogs on their homeworld
Unfortunately, trash HFY never considers this and just writes the aliens as braindead quadriplegics whose continued survival is more baffling than quantum mechanics.
Yeah, that's literally the origin point of the sub-genre. Basically an encouragement to think outside of the box when it comes to our own species in science fiction instead of casting ourselves as the perpetual average. Of course, that was quickly appended with a semi-ironic "humanity frick yeah", which became the calling card for the sub-genre and a message of its own that idiots flocked to, and other idiots mistake for the actual sub-genre.
OG HFY is just casting us as the weird species in a setting, based on actual traits we have, in a positive way.
>sub-genre
God, you pretentious HFY homosexuals are so up your own asses it's pathetic.
It's not a subgenre. It barely qualifies as a writing prompt. It's nothing more than taking the song America Frick Yeah and going "Yo, what if Humans were the America of Space?!"
Acting like it's some deep contemplation of the human condition is sad, because try as you might to fluff it up and pretend you've got some budding literary genre with some inspiring message that explores avenues never pursued by any writer, there has never been a single good piece of HFY ever written. It's all embarrassing trash, and the joke here is that you think the laborious, painfully pretentious stories are somehow better than the ones that recognize just how fricking dumb HFY is.
The worst part, and I mean the very worst part, is that you focusing on a single trait and then labeling humanity by it doesn't encourage "thinking outside the box". It just makes your fictional humans some one-dimensional parody of humanity, an alien race you ironically call human.
You're being triggered by a normal word. Didn't read the rest of your ESL drivel.
Are there really people who think of it politically? I just want to daydream about marrying an ayy lmao, cyborg, dragon, yuanti or other fantastic creature because it pulls me out of this gay Earth I have to live in
I don't even have yellow fever IRL
HFY is for homosexuals regardless of how you "do it", I can't believe you queers STILL get so worked up over a "genre" that's just poorly written concentrated Avatar seethe
>HFY didn't exist prior to 2009
Huh.
hfy is a fun bit of fantasizing where we live in a world that is not trying to guilt you for being human
Most of the time it just comes off as blatant narcissistic and prideful Mary/Gary stuing on a species wide participation trophy level. Not really any different from some guy blatantly writing a story about himself as the greatest thing ever and then somehow getting mad when people call him out for it.
It actually seems like more are mad that it exists, rather than people mad that not everyone likes it.
Maybe because its overwhelmingly filled with shit due to the nature of what it is and the kind of people it attracts? It's just a known quality like how you can always safely dismiss anyone who seems to be giving off a furry vibe.
my fantasies are all in hmofa territory and yeah the fiction I've read in the genre was all shit
>hfy is a fun bit of fantasizing where we live in a world that is not trying to guilt you for being human
I guess this explains why I've never gotten the appeal of HFY. I've never felt guilty for being human, I've never felt any pressure to feel guilty about bein human, and I'm all in all pretty comfortable being human. I guess that means that HFY just isn't for me.
The famous Avatar copypasta actually did raise a valid point about blue catmen being pretty much permanently stagnant extension of a giant biocomputer as opposed to much more dynamic humans. Vast majority of the HFY has no actual point to raise beside "humans rule, aliens drool".
One of the dumbest part of HFY is authors singing praises to humanity's worst traits. I've lost the count of stories that painted humans as dishonorable, warlike, duplicitous monsters compared to the aliens and then try to paint it as a good thing, because apparently being a galactic equivalent to crackhead trashing a polite party is something they consider worth being proud of.
Then they sucked at being a counter culture, since all they had was self congratulatory nonsense that makes people unironically sick of them.
>because apparently being a galactic equivalent to crackhead trashing a polite party is something they consider worth being proud of
It'd be okay if that was all, but then you also get humans screaming their lungs out about how violent and callous the universe is to them when the aliens dare to take a single step in the same direction.
Yeah, the self righteousness and this weird victim complex make this even worse. Just being the space crackheads would be interesting.
Humans are the bestestest most smart and powerful race in the universe and have the right to kill everyone else, but don't you dare strike back and chant "GENOCIDE! MINING!" or we'll cry.
I just see HFY as a deconstruction of the older far more tired cliche of "the puny earthlings" where humans are always depicted as either exceptionally less impressive than other races or at best our gimmick is being scrappy/good at adapting or some other consolation prize.
>anthros with human faces
>humans with anthro faces
>humanity fricking yiffing
It IS super weird that there's two different versions of almost every earthling species for some reason and that share genetic code but also don't. That Y chromosome is clearly some kind of alien parasite or experiment, it doesn't make any fricking sense for it to come to be or interface with the code on the X chromosome the way it does. How the frick does that even happen? Some kind of cellular parasite/virus run amok to the point it got incorporated into every organism's lifecycle? Ridiculous.
Sex is definitely some kind of cosmic aberration and the reason aliens keep abducting us to do weird butt stuff is because theyre studying our superpower.
You shouldn't speak authoritatively about things you know nothing about. There are exactly zero sexually reproducing species on Earth with no more or less than two chromosomal sexes.
What about fungi? I heard that fungi are pretty crazy
You have no idea. More accurately, even mycologists don't truly understand it all. The multiple life stages, the alternating generational forms, the thousands of sexes with different viable pairings. We could find a fungus tomorrow with a triple helix genetic structure and I wouldn't even be surprised. It's so fricked up that they're the closest relation of animals on the planet because there is nothing alive that's more alien. I love them and they frighten me.
>X, Y
>Some kind of cellular parasite/virus run amok to the point it got incorporated into every organism's lifecycle?
Yeah, and just for fun the aliens made therians hetereogametic (XY) for the males but switched things around for male avians to be homogametic (ZZ) just like lepidopterans, but other insects are heterogametic male. This lack of consistency over which sex has the different gametes implies two competing genetic intrusions and that's definitely evidence of infighting amongst our alien overlords. We shall have to use that to our advantage to overpower them with our weird butt stuff superpower.
Settings where love is stronger than hate are always kino
True power is not being able to beat up someone weaker than you - But to convince someone who is stronger than you to fight for your cause
>True power is not being able to beat up someone weaker than you - But to convince someone who is stronger than you to bend over and take it from behind
ftfy
>But to convince someone
That's literally not power, this situation requires the strong party to be in control of the outcome and the deceiver is dependent upon their choices.
>being able to beat up someone weaker
This is the epitome of power, being able to FORCE your will upon another regardless of their choices, having no need to depend on anyone's choices, no requirement to compromise to gain consent.
You are moronic and wrong.
>This is the epitome of power, being able to FORCE your will upon another regardless of their choices, having no need to depend on anyone's choices, no requirement to compromise to gain consent.
You'd be right, but violence is mistaken as force all the time.
No, the most powerful act of all is murder-suicide, and only the weakest of all people could possibly possess that power.
no, anon said power and that's more correct. however all power eventually converges into violence. I sue you and I am powerful so I win > law enforcers come and forcibly throw you into jail. All power hinges around physical consequences, otherwise people would just be able to steal if they have no money or break the law in other ways
You're right, to a point, violence is the backbone of all authority, and proof of the failure to secure peace and prosperity.
But self termination is so much more powerful. The ultimate weapon of war is not a nuke so big it destroys the whole world, but a mind-aflicting gas that makes one hemisphere of the world's population kill themselves.
>gas that makes one hemisphere of the world's population kill themselves.
This is still an application of physical force, material chemicals physically forcing an action.
Yes it is.
It's significantly less force for significantly more "gain".
Just killing everyone ever with a bomb? That's simple, and easy. Making a bomb that specifically only targets half the world and makes them want to kill themselves? I'd say it speaks of the mind behind the bombardier a lot more.
Lets say he films the impact himself, at ground zero. He's really happy to have achieved world peace that he will never see.
>significantly less force
We are not arguing degrees of force, we are arguing if it is or is not, and it IS, chemical assault of the mind is not coercion by any measure, it is force.
I don't know if you're acting intentionally moronic to waste people's time but this is genuinely some of the stupidest shit I've ever read on this site
Violence is the ultimate form of authority from which all other forms of authority ultimately derive their power.
No force = no compliance.
What if you love to hate?
You start to develope diseases from constant stress, probably
Thats the strongest love of them all.
BAAAAAAAAAAAAASEEEEEEEE-
>to wish to be the little gay
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY
Honestly all I want is to marry a robot
It's not gonna happen and either way I wouldn't want to see it happen because it would be a sad mass-produced sex slave scenario and they'll make human looking hos anyway instead of the starcraft looking adjutant lookin stuff I'm into
it's particularly painful to know your fantasy is so close and yet so impossibly distant, it's not like wanting to frick furries or aliens, those are a pretty remote possibility
I wouldnt want a waifudroid before they can run completely without internet. Imagine if a hacker or a faulty software update suddenly erased your wife's personality or sets her parameters to maximum brattyness
>mfw someone ransomwares my wife
>Give us a bitcoin or we set her to NTR mode
Truly the worst of all timelines.
my wife likes to pretend she's a robot sometimes lol
I love her
that wouldn't cut it for me but it's probably the best one could ask for
You can just tell that the man in the picture is the author's self insert.
That's what makes 60s and 70s fantasy and scifi so great. Just an endless parade of assistant college professors and spaceship engineers hooking up with buxom redhaired princess witches.
>You can just tell that the man in the picture is the author's self insert.
>That's what makes 60s and 70s fantasy and scifi so great. Just an endless parade of assistant college professors and spaceship engineers hooking up with buxom redhaired princess witches.
I do like how his posture makes it look like he's somewhat annoyed with the whole ordeal, like, "Damn Horny Space Bunnies, get off me and let me play with my googly-eyed dildo joystick in peace!"
>Power is power, especially outside the cut and dry PvP mindset. There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
People seem to forget what the physics definition of "Power" is, "The ability to do Work."
>Humanity, fricks everything!
I don't like furries, I'm more into monsters
the reason why I can't buy into HFY is that humans are pretty ugly
they have hair and they sweat, nasty orifices filled with goo and waste, wrinkles
humans are just not pretty, that's why they need clothes to look respectable
I only like the hair and the eyes
I mean the hair on the head, not the hair on the body
that's not nice especially when it falls off and you find it scattered around
gross
is there GOOD hfy?
There might be some HFY stories that still remember the importance of narrative tension, but most of the time it's like
said: the aliens can barely live, let alone pose a threat to muh human superiority. And even in the rare cases where they can, the story will be filled with frustrating hypocrisy.
because it's ayy
it's species joined alliance with humanity to fight against space globohomosexual (which consists only of herbivore ayy) because it tried to kill them because humans and ayy eat meat
The Venlil HFY is at least relately well written, its fun and it doesn't make the humans seem overpowered in any ways.
What bugs me about it is the whole prey-predator thing it tries so hard to drive. It makes no fricking sense. Prey species don't see predators as a danger unless those are predators that could potentially attack them. Sheeps and goats don't go nuts when looking at a cat because the cat has clear carnivora features.
Also, the smile thing. Almost every mammal have a "smile" of some sort. Tigers show teeth to show contentment. Animals would not usually think you are menacing when you smile at them.
>Also, the smile thing.
I just remembered one of the HFY stories I had started writing but never finished when I was still into that kinda stuff a long time ago. It was from the perspective of some alien commander after his troops attacked and had taken a human outpost on some remote planet, slaughtering everyone. Because they found humans so unworthy and beneath them they didn't bury or move the bodies. Over time as the corpses rotted they started to "smile" and that unnerved him but he also couldn't show any weakness. The story ends when he almost reaches a breaking point and the base gets attacked, only for him to find a black ship in in the sky marked with a smiling skull and crossbones, because what they had attacked was actually a pirate outpost. I think I never finished it because of the obvious flaw as to why the aliens would know "smiling" as a concept to get unnerved by corpses "smiling" at them, but also not knowing it in the sense of it being surprising when that happens because the corpses decay.
>Animals would not usually think you are menacing when you smile at them.
Depends on how they evolved. A chimpanzee would, for example. Conversely a dog wouldn't because they've evolved alongside humans and understand our facial gestures.
>Conversely a dog wouldn't
If it's domesticated
why is godzilla in this picture?
Where is this from, and what is it referencing?
Dunno, but if it is Godzilla like
thinks then the bird could be Rodan. Rodan has been shown to have heat breath/atomic heat ray breath. In their first appearance the Rodan died in lava and in a later appearance Rodan and Godzilla have a conversation about how they don't care about humans
The pose in the pic and the tone you should recognise from a well circulated meme.
I think it might be Stellaris fanart? There's a faction ideology called fantatical purifiers that makes you automatically hostile to all other races and sends you on a galaxy-wide genocide.
A Call To Arms by Alan Dean Foster is an interesting book where humans are more biologically suited to warfare than any other species in the galaxy and the only species to survive to develop spaceflight without evolving into pacifism due to every other planet having a pangea supercontinent. The other two books in the trilogy basically have humans as the bad guys as the aliens try to put the genie back in the bottle after using humans to fight a war.
John Ringo's Posleen books are similar but the leader aliens knew about the humans long-term and while incapable of direct violence are lying and manipulative and trying to arrange things so humans either go mutually extinct with the Ork-Zoats they're fighting or get biochipped into slavery. The underclass of the alien alliiance is meanwhile running a conspiracy to get humans to replace the leader aliens as the top dogs in the alliance. Unfortunately Ringo is one of those people that went crazy after "9/11 changed everything" and all his later books are ultra-rightwing. First two books are still great.
I just want a (porn) series where humans are the incubi/succubi of the galaxy and our pheromones drive other species into heat. Closest we've got is those orange alien comics by InCase before he went all futa all the time.
>evolving into pacifism due to every other planet having a pangea supercontinent
Is his thesis that the surviving aliens became pacifistic because being on a supercontinent they were regularly in contact with everyone everywhere else because they could walk/ride/drive places? Because if so, damn that's stupid. How did the other aliens kill each other? They all developed ultra-long distance artillery and intercontinental missiles before they invented boats?
HFY was always best as a prompt for comedy short fiction. I liked that one where spicy food was utterly deadly to all other sapient life and it almost caused a diplomatic crisis at a banquet culture presentation, only narrowly averted by giving the alien diplomat milk to drink, incidentally revealing a long sort after cure to that most deadly of poisons to the galactic community.
Earth being an ultra hostile death world is a cute set up for jokes. Humanity being the bestest badasses I'm the universe by biological default isn't so conducive to particularly self-serious story telling.
>HFY was always best-
And even then it wasn't any good.
All of HFY requires a special kind of tone deaf moronation.
It's "inalienable human rights" not "alienable bug rights".
>and then i noticed that bug was 3 stories high, and had four flippers made to look like pincers!
>HFY
>but without the H
Then it's not HFY.
Pussy is pussy man.
Imagine being so racist it turns you gay.
Well maybe if miscegnation wasn't so fricking hot people would do it less!
my whole take on HMAL is that humans suck so much that when a human's actually decent he'll get with the alien chick
But if the bug people place their survival above yours and do the exact same things you do, then suddenly they're the bad guys and they have to be punished for being so mean naughty evil non-humans.
My family and friends = good
Xenospiders eating my family and friends = bad
I don't care if the xenospiders have twenty thousand hatchings to feed and a space mortgage, I put the ones I love above all else.
My family and friends = good
Xenomonkeys eating my family and friends = bad
I don't care if the xenomonkeys have five kids to feed and a space mortgage, I put the ones I love above all else.
Antisemite!
Communism is good.
Source: Communist.
Ergo, this statement is objectively true and should be swallowed uncritically because it conforms with our pre-existing worldviews.
Who the frick cares about the species when I can frick exotic pussy and make better superior humans with my alien waifu?
>you can't interbreed with aliens!
Okay. At that point we can just clone new babies. Who says we need wombs to perpetuate the species?
I can't find a pdf/epub/etc of this novel anywhere =(
>tfw will never have a beautiful earhtling snake-wife to make beautiful earthling snake babies with
It hurts bros.
You know that we haven't actually made contact with aliens, right? We're not alking about extraterrestrial /misc/itics here, we're talking about the virtues of HFY in a world where humans already are the dominant species in reality and where most of fiction including nonhumans is also ultimately about human triumphs. Also the ability to think beyond day-to-day survival is one of the defining traits of humans and one of the things that differentiate us from other animals. Morality, ethics, empathy and all kinds of gran philosophical principles are all parts of what it means to be human. The space crackhead brand of HFY ignores all that.
I haven't watched much Start Trek, and obviously naming one example doesn't mean shit either way, but the little Start Tre I have watched has seemed to be about human victories and human achievements. In regards to scifi in general, I don't really need to stick my head in the ground, as you're just plain wrong. A lot of the time even scifi where aliens are more advanced still has humans overcome those aliens in conflicts, and scifi where humans aren't weak and primitive compared to aliens is not rare. It is true that there is plenty of scifi where this is the case, but there is also plenty of scifi where it isn't the case. The kind of scifi you describe exists, but it doesn't dominate.
Power is whatever works. It's anything and everything that lets you push thing to the direction you want.
In a situation where the so-called "power" is constantly relying on the consent of a superior entity, moment-to-moment, then it's definitionally not power, the one choosing to let the actions occur is the one in power, choosing to acquiesce to another's will because that's what you want does not make you less powerful.
You've got the reasoning capacity of an 8 year old schoolyard bully.
Nah, if it works it's power. It literally is as simple as that. Persuasiveness is power, and it's sour grapes talk of those bitter about their own powerlessness to argue that some forms of power don't really count. You, yourself, are pretty much guaranteed to be in many ways at the mercy of people whose power is based on their ability to manipulate and appeal to people. While it is true that power is on some level ultimately based on force and violence, that's very much a theoretical white room perspective rather than a practical real world perspective. In real world force is often guided and controlled by social manipulation rather than the other way around.
No, anyone who appears to be powerful i that way is actually backed by force, like slimy politicians: they have the police and military.
Anyone who has ONLY their tongue has no power.
People don't appear to be powerful that way, they are powerful that way. Sure, they're backed by force, which is just another way of saying that force is controlled by them. People who actually use force do so on their behalf and at their bidding. People with brawn and big guns and skill at violence don't run things, they work for others. Sure, in theory police and military could refuse to obey slimy politicians, and then the slimy politicians would be fricked. As I said, though, that's a theoretical white room scenario. It's not how things work in the real world. In real world violence is subservient to money and political power, not the other way around.
If you don't pay the muscle, it beats or kills you, that they have the liesure of not overseeing the minutia of running things is a positive, not a negative.
politicians serve the forces that weild power, they are not the source of power. see
Picrelated
Singular they is old, traditional and correct, and the historical revisionism going on about it is absolutely unreal.
First of all, I'm not the
Second, I didn't say anything about survival, but about how I dislike stories that paint mankind as a galactic equivalent of a roid raging, traitorous chimp and pretend that it's a state to aspire to. Ultimately, it's the morality of weaklings who can't even conceptualise triumph as something else beside killing off others or becoming the top bully.
Also, the ethics based on the absolute survival don't care about being strong, just on living to see another day and having offspring. From the point of view of the absolute survival of a species, the literal sheep are in much better position than the literal lions, by virtue of having the strongest species interested in breeding more sheep.
To paraphrase the Heart of Darkness, there is difference between being stronger than your enemies and being truly strong. Kurtz was stronger than tribesmen in strict terms of being able to dominate them, but he was also weak, with his mind quickly crumbling to pieces until the illness finally finished him off.
Power is power, especially outside the cut and dry PvP mindset. There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
>There is a reason why most powerful men in modern world aren't power armour clad supermen.
Yes but they command the arm of the law or literal armies, in the end monetary or authoritative power are a proxy for muscle, that's what I meant