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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 947678" data-attributes="member: 3887">Or, put another way, what is the role of The Alien, the Big Other, in fantasy and science fiction {books, films, TV shows, games --though I'm going to post a gaming-specific version of this in the general forum as well}.It looks like there is something of a consensus that nonhumans should be something other than "humans in funny suits/with pointy ears/in need of a little cosmetic surgery around the nose area". But exactly what does that mean? If that's the goal, how attainable is it? Practically speaking, how desirable?I started thinking about this after seeing the issue addressed, in one way or another, in various threads. Mainly in the discussion about leaving the archetypal fantasy races archetypal. A number of people thought that by varying the classic portrayals of different fantasy races you lost their distinctiveness, reduced them to the aforementioned "humans with pointy ears" or "humans in elf-drag". Well, my take on this is "weren't they always that?".I guess the general form of this question is: to what use do you put aliens/elves/robot detectives? I realize this is going to vary alot depending on the medium. I keep coming back to the idea that a truly successful portrayal of an alien would represent an artistic failure. You'd wind up with a character that by very definition the reader/viewer couldn't relate to, one that didn't reveal anything about the human condition. Now you could create aliens that merely served as foils to their human counterparts, but then you wouldn't really have an internally consistent alien psychology, just a series of inversions, kinda like the portryal of the Perisans in classic Greek drama {where the Greek playwrights could care less about actual Persian culture, their only purpose was to showcase Greek cultural values.}When I think about the classic alien characters from SF/F, all I find are humans in funny suits, with very human values and qualities {don't we usually use the alien to say nice things about ourselves? Either by embodiment or contrast.}. We have races based on single, exaggerated human traits {like the Vulcans, Ferengi, and Kzin}, or races based around historical human cultures, like B5's Centauri. Or we have effete, neurotic British man-servent robots toddling around a galaxy far far away, and super-white, super-thin, semi-divine Elves in countless Middle Earths, languidly hefting The Really White Mans Burden... I think characters like Spock, Data, Londo, G'Kar and C3PO work precisely because they aren't alien at all, just faux-exotic enough not to look like the characters in everyday life.I've drawn a lot of examples from TV and film, but written SF is just as bad {or good}. Hal Clemet wrote of a likable plucky high-seas trader who happens to be a centipede on a disk-shaped planet the size of Jupiter whose polar surface gravity exceeds 200G's. HAL 9000 has a nervous breakdown and later wonders about life after death.  Boy I'm rambling. Maybe its time to summarize.1) The aliens in SF/F aren't usually very alien.2) This is a good thing.3) Because really, we are only ever really telling stories about ourselves.4) There are some works that try to address the very alien, but they're the exception, and not the rule. Or the goal.5) While the depiction of the alien may run the gamut from highly stylish to wildly immaginative to wholell allegorical/metaphoric, the characters underneath, will have to be recognizably human for the audience to relate to {and find value} in them.Well, I'm done. What to you all think? Who are your favorite non-humans and how not-human are they?</blockquote>

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