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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8377390" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'd definitely count Legion as alien up until late ME3, when Plot Happens to him, though there definitely seems to be an ongoing tension between his very distinct way of viewing the world (a collectively-sentient group of programs) and his nascent development of certain rather human things like purely emotional decision-making (like when you ask him why he incorporated a piece of Shepard's armor, and he has no answer.)I'm not sure I agree with that all that much. They're very intelligent and often inscrutable, but that's true of many humans as well. I could actually see a better argument for the Time Lords--that is, those who stay on Gallifrey--being alien than The Doctor is. The Time Lords (in the old show) were aloof, disconnected, unwilling to interfere except when something disturbed their passive observation of the universe. Aberrations like President Borusa that stay within Time Lord society are rare; most go rogue, like the Master, the Rani, or the Monk. A society that willingly shuts itself up in an enclosed ivory tower, secure in its mastery of time itself, accepting that they theoretically COULD live forever but being okay with having a finite regeneration cycle, is...not very human.Only if you actually know what she is--a joined Trill. If you just saw her from the outside, without any explanation (as was the case for fans before her status as a joined Trill was revealed. Remember, the whole thing of joined Trills was more or less invented by DS9, especially if we ignore the super-weird TNG episode that doesn't work at all by the same rules.) Physically, she's nearly indistinguishable from a human. But once you know what being a joined Trill means, yes, she becomes very different--like the Tok'ra from SG1, the synthesis of distinct beings into a new personality.Drax...I dunno if I can give you that one. Unsubtle and not always grokking implicit concepts, but otherwise basically a boisterous human man. Groot, on the other hand, can only really do the things he does because he's emphatically not human, and his distinctive way of speaking reinforces his non-human-ness. Still expresses a similar spectrum and intensity of emotions to a human being, but the combo of physical differences and childlike mentality edge him away from the "fairly human" zone, as it were.As others said, physically I agree, but mentally he's downright bizarrely indistinguishable from a human being. He's both vastly older than any human ever, and from a society that lacks an enormous number of characteristics and processes that are fundamental to the human experience (e.g. birth as we understand it, cooking, organic materials, "sex" as we understand it in both the "what your physical body is" sense and the activity sense, etc.) To my eyes, he is if anything too human for what he is. Now, don't take that as a criticism, I adore Optimus Prime as a character, he's an excellently-written Paragon. But for me, he sits rather uncomfortably close to "person in a robot suit."This one's complicated too. Physically indistinguishable (barring the invulnerability and flight, which are easily concealed), mentally pretty much the same, but struggling because of having an alien culture. In Clark's case, I've always seen him as being a human who happens to have Kryptonian physiology; Kara is more like  a naturalized Kryptonian in most tellings. Haven't watched the CW show so I can't comment directly on that. For Clark, while his Kryptonian physiology puts many trials in his way, he typically does truly see himself as the son of Martha and Jonathan Kent, even though he respects the legacy and importance of his birth parents, it's Martha and Jon that he calls "Ma" and "Pa."Overall, I'd say there are relatively few characters that manage to tick all the boxes--physically, mentally, emotionally, and culturally distinct. Some hit some boxes, but particularly on the mental and cultural sides, those feel a lot less like binary "human/alien" switches and more like smooth gradients where humans mostly cluster in one area but can sometimes verge into other areas.~~~~~With the above having been said....I don't personally think it's all that valuable or productive to seek to make "truly alien" characters. It's enough to make characters that realistically diverge from what humans do in particular ways. They don't need to be totally beyond our understanding. They just need to be meaningfully different. And by that metric, I would agree that all of these examples are Alien Characters. They differ from humanity in various ways, physical or nonphysical. Those differences matter to their story, but rarely (if ever) strictly define exactly what they can be. The characters remain relatable in many ways, while still having a few differences that set them apart.And that's all that really matters.</blockquote>

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