Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron & The Indian Boarding Schools/Residential Schools Allegory

@bananaruntz i think what sucks the most about it with xenofiction in particular is that when you have characters that are simultaneously nonhuman and anthropomorphic, it creates this issue where you're forced to accept any misogyny at face value and assume that it's just scientific accuracy, because nature CAN be notoriously unfair. it can't be denied that the females of many species get the shorter end of the stick, but way too many xenofiction authors seem to operate on the idea that this is innately true for the entire animal kingdom when it's just not. even if you are writing about a species where male animals generally dominate the hierarchy, that still shouldn't preclude you from being able to write well-rounded female characters, especially ones that aren't bound by suspiciously human misogynistic tropes.

xenofiction presents so so so many fascinating opportunities to really examine things like sexism and identity and biological determinism but it feels like no one has properly taken advantage of that yet. i am being so fucking serious when i say that xenofiction desperately needs a queer, trans, feminist upheaval.

“Why are non-human characters always your favourites?”

hold on a fucking second. delaware is a state?? i thought it was a river? or is the river more important than the state? why don't i know this? (i should mention i don't like in america, i'm just confused)

there is delaware (state) and delaware (river) 

both are equally strange

the state is a tiny little cryptid thing

the rive is a monster that spans new york, pennsylvania, new jersey and delaware. also washington crossed it once and that was like kinda a big deal i guess. like crossing the rubicon in rome.

the state tries to me more important with its “im the first state!!!” bs (seriously its even on the fucking license plates) but we all know. its the river.

no fucking way

Inspired by various tumblr posts.

Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.

Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.

You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.

That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?

You really want a human.

*raises hand* I think it depends on the Pokemon in question?

Like, if it’s a mainline-game mon of questionable sapience then FUCK NO THAT IS MADE OF DISGUSTING but a lot of the anime mons and all of the Mystery Dungeon mons are of human-level intelligence and able to give consent, so I don’t have any issues if it’s one of them? (PMD2 protagonist/PMD2 partner is cute as hell, for example, and that’s human-turned-into-a-Pokemon/sapient Pokemon)

It’s not any weirder than interspecies relationships between humans and other sci-fi/fantasy races like, I dunno, half the pairings in Mass Effect or Ruto crushing on Ocarina Link.

That said I haven’t seen the Lucario movie so I don’t know if Lucario is intelligent enough to not be squicky, so carry on.

oh my god two words in that just UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life

This guy nails it right on the head.

Check out his content, folks! He does incredible work and it is criminal he has so few subscribers. 

For aspiring writers of Xenofiction, I IMPLORE you, do NOT write like this. Note Cardinal’s SAGE advice, read from the best writers (Subjective of course, but still) and take a leaf out of their books. 

Concept: xenofiction sci-fi where the main characters are different alien beings. It’s all treated and framed as “normal” from both the audience’s and each other’s perspective, even when their behavior is obviously not something a human would do.

Eventually, we meet a human character, whose actual name appears to be “Smith the Human”, and who acts like aliens from mediocre pop sci-fi stories – like, someone goes “Oh, I’ve never met a human before!” and he responds by spouting random (technically-accurate-to-real-life) factoids about human culture and biology in a way that no real human being ever would, i.e. “Humans are social persitence hunters and apex predators – on our harsh homeworld of Terra, we evolved to form hierarchal hives or colonies, like your world’s Zoink-Ants or Frisk-Bees! We weren’t that fast over short distances, and so we caught our prey, not by ambush or by pursuit, but by simply walking, brisk jogging, and tracking our prey until the prey tired itself out, allowing us to catch it at our leisure!” He always maintains the same stilted but forceful tone of voice, devoid of any emotional content, and his facial expression never changes from “we didn’t bother to animate his face”-style dull surprise.

He wears American soldier gear and says “Humans are a Proud Warrior Race™!” without a trace of irony.

Now, one possible punchline would be that the protagonists eventually meet other humans, and it turns out that he’s the only human who’s Like That. However, I think that in order to commit to the whole “xenofiction” bit, you’d need to make every human completely identical, in exactly the same way that members of an alien species in pop sci-fi are identical. The way I personally would do it is,the loud-deadpan-weirdo routine is just an “unreliable narration” due to the perceptions of characters who aren’t familiar with humans; as a group, even if the nonhuman characters are like “Wow, they really are synchronized like a hive of Frisk-Bees!” or whatever, the humans behave exactly how an actual group of humans would behave in that kind of situation, if you read between the lines. (And, y'know, a squadron of uniformed soldiers with a CO in the background is inevitably going to act differently from a similarly-sized group of civilians; the nonhuman characters, and hence the audience, just don’t get to see how they are “normally”.)

The actual punchline is that after the “human” plot is resolved (maybe they’re antagonists, and the prior ramble about their biology proves to be a vital component?), there’s a scene where the viewpoint character is a human, and the whole situation is precisely reversed: humans look more diverse and talk like normal people, and all the nonhuman characters of each species are identical and do the loud-deadpan-weirdo thing.