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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8377491" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I think this is the fundamental problem.For some folks, in order for the character to be &quot;not human,&quot; they need to be either almost entirely divergent from the human norm (physically, mentally, emotionally, all of it needs to be mostly outside human experience), or actually completely outside whatever things humans might even potentially think or do. E.g., with your example of the Doctor, you could replace him with (say) a vampire, because his emotional responses are (more or less) what a human being's would be if a human being became immortal and hyperintelligent--thus he's &quot;not really&quot; alien, he's &quot;just&quot; Human++.This then leads to the pretty obvious answer that that definition is the problem. If you define &quot;alien&quot; characters to be those that must be so unlike humans we can't really relate or find similarities, then...yeah we're gonna have a pretty hard time finding characters like that. Because almost all of fiction is about eliciting emotional responses or considering unreal-but-conceivable situations. It's hard to have emotional responses if you can't relate to the story in some way, and that includes the characters.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8377491, member: 6790260"] I think this is the fundamental problem. For some folks, in order for the character to be "not human," they need to be either [I]almost[/I] entirely divergent from the human norm (physically, mentally, emotionally, [I]all[/I] of it needs to be mostly outside human experience), or [I]actually[/I] completely outside whatever things humans might even potentially think or do. E.g., with your example of the Doctor, you could replace him with (say) a vampire, because his emotional responses are (more or less) what a human being's would be if a human being became immortal and hyperintelligent--thus he's "not really" alien, he's "just" Human++. This then leads to the pretty obvious answer that that definition is the problem. If you define "alien" characters to be those that must be so unlike humans we can't really relate or find similarities, then...yeah we're gonna have a pretty hard time finding characters like that. Because almost all of fiction is about eliciting emotional responses or considering unreal-but-conceivable situations. It's hard to have emotional responses if you can't relate to the story in some way, and that includes the characters. [/QUOTE]

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