New Special Interest Alert

animal fantasy NEEDS to be gayer and transer so here are some of my queer xenofiction thoughts

attitudes towards homosexuality and/or transness differing from species to species, region to region; many opportunities to play with various cultural reactions when characters travel. there are some species where the concepts are well established in the culture (apes, dolphins, etc.) and are accepted, tolerated, considered completely normal, or even celebrated

“queer” means different things for different animals. for example, even though bisexuality is indisputably queer by human standards, it may not be by anthropomorphized bonobo standards since bisexuality is a cultural norm for them; meanwhile, exclusive homosexuality and maybe even heterosexuality probably would be considered queer for bonobos

sexually dimorphic species offer up many interesting concepts: transmasculine lion cubs dreaming of growing up to have manes; transfeminine deer experiencing gender euphoria when seasonally shedding their antlers; transmasculine birds gathering loose materials to cover their dull feathers with livelier colors

domesticated/tame animals, especially those that interact regularly with people, having a stronger concept of gender roles than other species do because of how much they’ve subconsciously absorbed from their human allies

please feel free to add on 🌈🐾✨

helloo

Watching lion xenofiction and, why the most are literally copycats of the other? There's a lot of interesting things on lions life just to make the same thing over and over. And some of the "realistic behaviour" is not really realistic, is just a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes.

Just, Holy hell, i heard the entire story of the Mapogo lions coalition and why anybody writtes an story based on it? It's perfect, is HOLY SHIT like a xenofiction story actually happened. These lion coalitions have a LOT of potential to writte an story about it.

I accept that

I love science fiction and fantasy.

I’ve always chosen science fiction and fantasy first when I had a choice about what literature I read, and growing up almost all of the characters I identified with were in some kind of speculative setting. An obvious consequence of that is identifying with a fair number of nonhumans.

Here’s the complicated part. I’ve spoken before on the dangers of writing asexual and aromantic characters as “less human” because of these orientations, and I’ve warned against using sexual and romantic relationships as shortcuts to “humanize” characters whose humanity is in doubt. But unless misleading messages come with the stories, I’m more than okay with aliens, robots, fey creatures, and monsters being written as ace or aro. In fact, I want to see it there, because those are the genres I read.

It can become a problem when, under the blanket of science fiction and fantasy, we offer ace and/or aro characters who are simply naturally ace or aro because of their nonhuman status and use that quality to distinguish themselves from humans. You see it a lot when aliens who don’t have sexual reproduction or don’t form similar social relationships will laugh at and condescend to humans over what’s assumed to be a universal urge among them. This is an issue because

a) it suggests there are no asexual or aromantic humans;

b) it implies that a person who identifies with asexuality or aromanticism believes themself superior;

c) it creates a misleading connection between sexual and/or romantic attraction and “really” being human, having emotions, being functional, and having meaningful relationships;

d) it encourages a tendency to see humans without these qualities as more alien/less human or perhaps potentially evil. (How often do you see a SF villain scoffing at “human love” and have them not only be portrayed as robotic or  hateful because they don’t do love, but also be defeated by something related to love?)

I want SF/Fantasy to continue including ace and aro characters, and I’m not offended if they’re sometimes nonhumans, even if that’s how that whole race is and even if they sometimes react with bafflement toward some humans’ relationships. (I sure do.) I will happily take that representation. I want to see perspectives I relate to, even if they come from a robot or an alien or a mystical creature. And I think, if done right, nonhuman ace and aro characters can still get those orientations on the radar for fans who may not have been looking for such things, even if they might have initially questioned and rejected the validity of human characters being ace or aro.

However, when I say “if done right,” I mean they need to avoid these tropes:

Writing robots or aliens to “really understand” humanity by learning to love/having a romantic relationship or sexual experience

Writing nonhuman creatures to “become” more human through the act of falling in love or having sex

Portraying sex, sexual attraction, love, or romantic attraction as the major defining factor of who is human

Writing sex, sexual attraction, love, or romantic attraction as the central explanation in a human character explaining to nonhumans what makes humans human

Creating situations where a character’s humanity is in doubt and it is “proved” or “disproved” through a test that incorporates sex, sexual attraction, love, or romantic attraction (e.g., “if he’s a lizard person, he won’t be able to show love! Oops he failed the test, we found him out!”)

Assigning any nonhumans a lack of understanding about this specific aspect of so-called human relationships and associating this with innocence, superiority complexes, or evil

Having aliens or other nonhumans able to engage in or enjoy virtually every other human experience EXCEPT love or sex, which is on some pedestal they just can’t reach or comprehend

Inventing nonhuman societies that pair-bond or mate in very similar ways to “typical” humans, but having their ways portrayed as more hygienic or less messy than humans’, yet have them still somehow baffled by minor differences in how humans do it

Having alien societies that are as diverse as human societies in most ways EXCEPT that they have only One Way of mating/dating/reproducing, and humans’ heterosexual two-person pairing is presented as the “human” equivalent that they find disgusting

Having nonhumans all be gay, all be polyamorous, or all be asexual, but “learn” from humans that monogamous heterosexuality both exists and is better

Creating characters in the nonhuman world that don’t have physical sex/gender or only have one sex/gender, and never experience love or romantic relationships–portrayed as a Direct Consequence of their gender situation (while having an ace and aro sexless species is fine, just don’t portray it as if lol obvi the reason they wouldn’t have relationships is they don’t have boys and girls lol)

Having nonhuman characters fall in love with human characters and having the experience attached to a moral of This Is What Life Is Supposed To Be About

Having a nonhuman defeated because they Don’t Have Love (and therefore cannot comprehend the deepest and most strength-inspiring emotion in the universe, which can always be defeated by a protagonist who Has Love)

So, while it’s sometimes aggravating to have to find representation in nonhuman characters whose aro or ace status is portrayed as integral to their nonhumanness, I would rather have that than not see my orientations in SF at all. I have also seen plenty of aliens whose romantic and sexual habits are similar to non-ace and non-aro humans’ without the story suggesting those elements of their lives are uniquely human, so I’d like to see some ace/aro humans and nonhumans who just happen to be so. It isn’t automatically insulting to our orientations if a nonhuman character is ace/aro, but I’d like authors to think about how they’re portraying those qualities and whether they are sending negative messages about real ace/aro people through their inclusion in fiction. I’d also like to ask authors to seriously consider why they’re making the choice to attach those qualities to their nonhumans, and if “to make them distinct from humans” and “to make them more alien” and “to make them seem oblivious or innocent or empty or robotic” comes up, do some serious questioning and at least consider including counterexamples.

You can actually move away from and avoid cementing negative messages much more easily if there is more than one ace/aro character in your story. Maybe one of your nonhumans is just like that and you don’t want to change them? Well, great. But maybe have another character from that race, or a human, also be ace or aro and not be like that, or have the nonhuman character say or do something that confirms ace and aro status aren’t uniquely alien.

I say all this because I DO NOT WANT people thinking nonhuman characters can’t have sexual diversity, up to and including asexuality and aromanticism. I want to see them! I just don’t want to feel like my orientations are considered science fiction themselves, or that the only place I can see people like me are in books about things that aren’t possible or are definitively inhuman.

it is time once again to think about Par%l:

the non-binary alien in Immortal Hulk in the next universe, who is the very last being in their universe and dares to ask the unspeakable horror who murdered the universe to explain why, and perishes to fling a desperate hope into the past to prevent it all from coming to pass

what we see of their species is genuinely very alien and they would make an EXCELLENT xenofiction protagonist; the whole chapter is, in fact, xenofiction, as they have never seen a humanoid form. you see them, in the narration, struggling to make sense of a bipedal figure, describing an arm being pulled back as an act of incomprehensible strangeness. The sadistic grin of the One Below All is equally unfathomable to them (as Par%l’s people do not have faces to emote with), and you get a real sense of dawning horror when it realizes that the monster that did all this… enjoys the suffering and pain it has inflicted.

what we hear described of their species is apparently reproducing in trios, in a fashion heavily suggested to be completely nonsexual; part of their story involves them trying to reconnect with a former lover, both of them affected by the loss of the third, that is heavily laden with the sense of hopelessness and despair that pervades the issue as all the stars in the sky have, literally, been broken.

they’re deeply inhuman, and drawn to be completely unrecognizable by any human standard, and nonetheless they are people in a very obvious way, and its a terrible tragedy what happens to them, and what they end up doing is hoping that something prevents this all from happening

Trope of the Week: Aliens are Blue-Skinned Humans

There are two types of aliens in science-fiction: the monstrous of mind and body who only wish to destroy, and the incredibly human who are sentient and sly. Rarely do we find a race that is somewhere between. Sentience and intelligence is almost a guarantee of a human-like body, and the lady aliens? They will definitely have boobs.

Why this can be bad: There are several things at work here when we’re crafting an alien species. We have a tendency to think ourselves the top of the food chain and therefore the most intelligent species. Anything on par with or superior to us must therefore look similar to ourselves. As species of organisms on earth grow more advanced in neurology, they come to have a very specific pattern: major sense organs all located around the brain and in the head, two arms, two legs, tendency for bipedalism, et cetera. And, of course, there are the influences of pop culture such as earlier seasons of Star Trek, which lacked the budget and technology to create intricate unhuman characters capable of being on screen for more than a couple minutes.

Put this all together and it culminates in many uninspired alien designs. The sentient beings end up closely resembling us, if not being nearly identical. Some of this can amount to laziness, but a lot of it has to do with the factors I listed above. While we can’t exactly argue whether or not this is realistic, it nevertheless becomes tiresome when aliens devolve into humans with strange skin colors and maybe a few other “exotic” features. While fantasy can have this issue (dwarves, elves, and humans are all pretty much the same as far as special variation go), they at least tend to exist on the same planet and therefore go through the same evolutionary process. Aliens do not have this excuse.

How you can fix it: To ask you to create a dozen completely unique alien species for your science-fiction novel/game/movie would be insane. It’s very hard for us to think of creatures uninspired by ourselves or the world we see, and similarities to humans make it easier for the audience to envision or connect. However, I would challenge you to make your sentient aliens more diverse. Octavia Butler does a fantastic job in her Lilith’s Brood series. The oankali, a sentient and highly-advanced alien race, only resemble humans because they take on the traits of the species they are preparing to make first contact with it. In truth, they’re covered in sensory tentacles, have three reproductive sexes, and have a greater range of perception than humans. While similar to humans, they are also highly different and incredibly unique, which makes them much more interesting to read about than most other aliens I’ve seen.

Creating an unparalleled alien race is not easy, and it’s hard to expect a writer to make each species he or she creates entirely unique. Nevertheless, there is still a want for more diversity and otherness to our aliens. It shows a real effort has been put in to the world building, rather than the writer slapping on some black eyes and hooves in an attempt to make them different.

Bottom Line: Not every sentient alien has to be incredibly unique, but put a concerted effort into your world building to avoid making boring human clones.

The “talking animals that have culture/societies” genre of books

(Edited the original post to include the bigger list)

What is Xenofiction?

Hmmm I've seen a lot of crow and raven people in fantasy settings but sci-fi 'uplift' premises tend to focus on dolphins and chimps and other reasonable targets.

Want a sci-fi story that's set long after some unwise scientist CRISPRed a be-much-smarter tweak into at least two species each of corvids and cephalopods.

so we've got established society of crows, who absolutely picked up human languages fast and use them routinely to interact with human beings, and maybe don't have citizenship in human countries where they reside because they have their own political units that aren't based on terrain, but they are recognized as people by law

(but like, i want to emphasize they are crows that are physically the same as crows have always been)

and the much more mysterious and retiring underwater society of the octopuses.

I'm obsessed with pokemon doing just. weird animal things. A chatot trying to fight itself in the mirror. Flygon being a large weird lizard. Absol getting its scythe/horn stuck in things and needing to be rescued. Holding a torchic and moving it, seeing its head do the chicken thing. Furret being an absolute menace to society and stealing your socks to nest. Mr. Mime putting barriers around its food as a form of food guarding. Ninetales sleeping with its head tucked under its tails. Zigzagoon snuffling through the trash.