i will engage in an act of self harm and browse thru r/hfy top/all-time to see if i can find it because i want to say no ofc not but i cant really remember anything from the story besides the extremely hammy shock reveal that the aliens were killing cub scouts and dumb instantgratification of OORAH GO US MILITARY KILL THE ALIENS!!!
Thinking about this, I feel like there’s an element of resonance based on the fact that life in general and the potential of intelligent organisms in particular is really amazing and we don’t appreciate it enough, but the authors’ brains are so cooked on chauvinism that they only think to express this in terms of untermensch – literally “life unworthy of life” in the sense that they are too fundamentally and totalizingly incompetent to make sense as living things and I guess also morally inferior and deserving of death according to the authors – for people to prove their worth by crushing. Like, there’s an element of it that I think is real and even positive, but it gets warped by fascistic thinking into something disgusting, sadistic, and nonsensical.
i think maybe what you’re trying to get at that it could be interesting to explore how alien biology maybe really could make them see the world differently than humans, but because they’re fascists the answer is “kill them all” instead of learning and understanding?
Yeah, that’s a very generous way of putting it but sure, I think that’s valid. My thing was that I don’t believe the aliens have literally any purpose except for being untermenschen, and so if the author has no interest in them then they are superfluous to the real underlying idea (how cool life, especially intelligent life, is) and it makes more sense to express that idea using very different tools. In the story you shared, there’s literally only one short passage that shows even a slight bit of interest in the perspective of an alien, that being:
I rolled my right small arm. Twisted it. Flexed it side by side and up and down. It would be weird not being able to move my body whichever way I desired. These creatures had to move stilted like puppets as well.
Though granted it’s just a bad story overall. But at least if you look at the hype trying to be drawn up in some other stories and even quotes in this thread, there are things that are things worthy of interest and it just gets completely warped by this framing that humans can’t just be interesting, they need to be superior to something that isn’t intelligent enough to flake rocks but is intelligent enough to have lengthy monologues about how superior humans are, so we can get this wank of fearful awe. There’s no such thing as something being great in itself, only being great by brutally subjugating an inferior other. Personally, if I didn’t give a shit about aliens, then I wouldn’t put them in my story and I’d just talk about terrestrial life, because I don’t think you need to dominate something else to be worthwhile!
i dont think it’s a coincidence that i think the best piece of writing ive read on that sub was a story where humans arent even technically in it because they lose and get wiped out before the story even starts, necessarily made the author think about the perspective of aliens
i will engage in an act of self harm and browse thru r/hfy top/all-time to see if i can find it because i want to say no ofc not but i cant really remember anything from the story besides the extremely hammy shock reveal that the aliens were killing cub scouts and dumb instantgratification of OORAH GO US MILITARY KILL THE ALIENS!!!
Thinking about this, I feel like there’s an element of resonance based on the fact that life in general and the potential of intelligent organisms in particular is really amazing and we don’t appreciate it enough, but the authors’ brains are so cooked on chauvinism that they only think to express this in terms of untermensch – literally “life unworthy of life” in the sense that they are too fundamentally and totalizingly incompetent to make sense as living things and I guess also morally inferior and deserving of death according to the authors – for people to prove their worth by crushing. Like, there’s an element of it that I think is real and even positive, but it gets warped by fascistic thinking into something disgusting, sadistic, and nonsensical.
i think maybe what you’re trying to get at that it could be interesting to explore how alien biology maybe really could make them see the world differently than humans, but because they’re fascists the answer is “kill them all” instead of learning and understanding?
Yeah, that’s a very generous way of putting it but sure, I think that’s valid. My thing was that I don’t believe the aliens have literally any purpose except for being untermenschen, and so if the author has no interest in them then they are superfluous to the real underlying idea (how cool life, especially intelligent life, is) and it makes more sense to express that idea using very different tools. In the story you shared, there’s literally only one short passage that shows even a slight bit of interest in the perspective of an alien, that being:
Though granted it’s just a bad story overall. But at least if you look at the hype trying to be drawn up in some other stories and even quotes in this thread, there are things that are things worthy of interest and it just gets completely warped by this framing that humans can’t just be interesting, they need to be superior to something that isn’t intelligent enough to flake rocks but is intelligent enough to have lengthy monologues about how superior humans are, so we can get this wank of fearful awe. There’s no such thing as something being great in itself, only being great by brutally subjugating an inferior other. Personally, if I didn’t give a shit about aliens, then I wouldn’t put them in my story and I’d just talk about terrestrial life, because I don’t think you need to dominate something else to be worthwhile!
i dont think it’s a coincidence that i think the best piece of writing ive read on that sub was a story where humans arent even technically in it because they lose and get wiped out before the story even starts, necessarily made the author think about the perspective of aliens