Humans Through Alien Eyes: Difference between revisions

'''Luigi:''' Aliens? We gotta deal with aliens too?<br />

'''Mario:''' Luigi, '''[[Perspective Flip|we're ]]'''[[Perspective Flip|the aliens]].<br />

 

Stories that have humans interact with aliens who are actually ''alien'' run into the fact that we're as weird to them as they are to us. This can cause the most remarkable misunderstandings....

 

== Anime and Manga ==

 

 

 

== Fan Fic ==

{{quote| {{spoiler|"I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the ''inside'', or their unimaginable loneliness will never end. These poor savage things will never embrace salvation. [[Assimilation Plot|I will have to rape it into them.]]"}}}}

 

 

== Film ==

** ''Avatar'' did a good job with this one. Whenever a Na'vi and a human were in the same shot, the camera was always up on the Na'vi's level, making the humans look a bit out of place.

* The main plot of [[Happy Feet]] involved Mumble trying to find the aliens who had "abducted" another bird (radio-tagging) and were taking the penguins' fish. One of the final shots, of the aliens' ship (a helicopter) landing and the heavily suited aliens stepping out, is filmed with all the awe of [[Close Encounters of the Third Kind]].

== Literature ==

* In [[Larry Niven]]'s ''[[Known Space]]'' series, the Kzinti were amazed by the (at the time) highly pacifistic human mindset reported by their telepaths... and unpleasantly surprised by humans' facility for [[Superweapon Surprise|converting peaceful technologies to warfare]] when they found it necessary to take up violence again.

* ''[[Star Trek]]'' novel ''Final Frontier'' (no, not the movie ''The Final Frontier''), there's a moment when a Human and a Romulan are trapped in a place where they're about to be eaten by beasts, and the Romulan muses that this "must be hard" for the Human, who seems ready to fight till the end and never accept the inevitable (just the time to show off the state-of-the-art transporter technology, too).

* This is a major theme in [[Orson Scott Card]]'s Ender series. In ''[[Ender's Game]]'', {{spoiler|it takes the Hivemind alien race some time to adjust to the idea that each human being lives mentally separate from others, causing a disastrous [[First Contact]], and a war, only because neither side is capable of understanding how the other communicates.}} In the sequels, humanity encounters others: {{spoiler|one species which goes through a radical metamorphosis upon death -- and thus they find it nearly impossible to conceive of death as a tragedy, because for them it leads to full adulthood. Later, a species which communicates using molecular engineering crops up.}}

* In [[Harry Harrison]]'s short story "The Streets of Ashkelon", a human missionary converts an alien culture to [[Useful Notes On Christianity|Christianity]]. {{spoiler|The aliens then try to initiate the millennium of the missionary's message by crucifying him and waiting for him to rise on the third day.}} The twist being they were committed pacifists BEFORE he succeeded...

** Alternate title: "An Alien Agony".

* The concept of aliens that have taken much longer than humans to develop high technology, and are surprised by [[Humanity Is Superior|human progress]], turns up in several cases:

*** They are also utterly repulsed by human sexuality (not only do Tosevites not have a mating season like "normal people," they also have this weird exclusive-mating agreement known as marriage that typically is for life... and don't even get me STARTED on that whole birth instead of hatching issue or the "nutrient fluid" that females secrete.)

*** It is mentioned later on in the series that The Race had someone once tried to kill the Emperor. His name is now spoken with the same kind of scorn a human would reserve for Hitler.

** A similar event occurred in the [[Backstory]] of [[David Weber]]'s ''[[The Apocalypse Troll]]'', with a bunch of aliens who were hell-bent on wiping out every other sentient race in the universe finding themselves with a fight on their hands due to under-estimating humanity's adaptability and rate of development, as well as not realizing that we'd reverse engineer every bit of their technology we could get our hands on in order to improve our chances.

*** Elfangor's little brother Ax comes to the conclusion that though the Yeerks became interested in Humans because of the peculiar category of race we fit into (numerous enough to host all of them, and supposedly unable to resist them), they're obsessed with us now because they're terrified of our ingenuity and ability to adapt and have to stop us before we get out into space and ''really'' screw things up.

*** Ax is a frequent provider of examples for this trope. For instance, he finds it amazing that humans would bother reading webpages when they had already invented books, which are clearly superior.

* Happens with most, if not all, genuinely alien (as opposed to extraterrestrial human) species in the [[Strugatsky Brothers]]' [[Noon Universe]]:

** The reptilian Tagorians are obsessed with calculating the possible consequences of all and any endeavors or innovations (though it doesn't seem to hold them back much), and so are horrified/disgusted to the point of breaking off all (up to then fairly beneficial) contacts with the Earth when they learn that humans ''didn't'' destroy the [[Tyke Bomb|tykebombs]] left behind by the [[Precursors|Wanderers]] immediately upon discovery like they did with theirs.

** The Leoniders are only mentioned in passing, but they live in full symbiosis with all their entire ecosystem, which has rendered the question of technological exchange with humans more or less irrelevant.

* ''Viscous Circle'', part of [[Piers Anthony]]'s "[[Cluster]]" series, involves a grotesque and disturbing description of an alien that one of the flying magnetic disk aliens sees; it's very easy not to realize that this is a description of a human being. The rest of the Cluster series often deals with "outsider" views of humanity, sometimes ''literally'' through human eyes as body-sharing technology is a major plot device.

** Also, in King's "[[From a Buick 8]]" where a car that's not a car produces all sorts of -mostly dying- alien lifeforms. {{spoiler|the one thing that manages to stay alive is violently butchered by the good guys because they feel like the mere sight of it is raping their brain. Right before it dies, they realize how alien and horrific they look in its eyes. They keep killing it but feel sorry afterwards...}}

* Several [[Halo]] novels show the war from the Covenant perspective, using this trope often.

* Tolkien's unfinished work ''The Notion Club Papers''. At one point a character experimenting with astral projection techniques (which allow him to travel through time and space and see other planets) comes across a place where what seems like a giant anthill spreads across the countryside, polluting and ruining it. He's shocked to realise he's actually seeing the (sped-up) history of Oxford.

** Hamilton's later novel ''Pandora's Star'' features a sequence in which the ''vivisection'' of two humans is described from the point of view of their alien captor.

*** With the alien in question at first not understanding concepts like "pain", blood, and the fact that screwing around with human brains is not healthy for said human.

* In John Clute's ''Appleseed,'' the protagonist watches a show, made by aliens, where caricatures of humans--well, their genitalia keeps changing back and forth between male and female. Then they wind up with huge vaginas full of teeth, which with the humans literally eat each other. This is an alien satire of human sex. (I was impressed, when I got to the word "satire.")

* [[Diane Duane]]'s ''[[Young Wizards]]'' series incorporates an increasing amount of this as the characters' horizons grow. {{spoiler|Book 7, where the main characters participate in a transplanetary exchange program, devotes at least a third of the exposition to the alien visitors' difficulties, among them the significance of a florist and the difficulty of determining which parts of a house are meant to be edible.}}

* The alien species in [[Alastair Reynolds]] ' "[[Revelation Space]]" trilogy are mostly extinct, but one character, while studying a species whose ability to exchange body parts makes them seem disturbingly fluid to her, realizes that the "Scuttlers" might well have seen humanity's unchanging nature (or that of other aliens lacking their ability) as a kind of living death. {{spoiler|The Scuttlers' isolation, which bought them some time before the Inhibitors attacked them, suggests she may have been right.}}

* In [[Eric Flint]]'s ''Mother of Demons'' ([http://www.baen.com/library/067187800X/067187800X.htm free online version]), the cephalopod-descended gukuy are discomfited and surprised when they first see humans, mostly because of how quickly and strangely they move. They also tend to inaccurately attribute emotions to humans based on skin color at first, since gukuy are chromatomorphic and express emotions by changing color.

* In [[The Course of Empire]] and ''The Crucible of Empire'' it alternates between seeing humans through the eyes of their Jao conquerors and vice-versa. Humans tend to be more imaginitive as the Jao are a [[Slave Race]] that once served [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]] before their rebellion and rise to glory. Thus the Jao's ancestors had no more imagination then their masters thought fit to breed into them. [[Word of God]] says that the inspiration is from the cultural influence of Greece on Rome with humans as Greeks and Jao as Romans.

** In the same novel, one of the Minervans gets blinded in three of his eyes by a camera flash, leaving him only able to see out of the three on his other side. He's utterly terrified until his vision clears. This same alien later goes into battle with another tribe that snagged a Soviet AK-74 while an American with a pistol helps. Then an American ultralight drops a jumbo-sized molotov cocktail on the alien with the AK, causing the friendly alien to shudder at the concept of a battle with noise-weapons everywhere and fire falling from the sky.

*** To put the true horror of this into perspective, Minervans evolved to live in a climate cold enough that ice is a common building material. Hot water is a weapon of war. Napalm would be like dropping a piece of the ''sun'' on someone.

* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'', the incorporeal, collective, and rigidly ordered Auditors find ''all'' life completely alien and offensive because of its chaotic and individualistic nature. Their primary goal is to rid the universe of it.

* In the [[Liaden Universe]] novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the [[Alien Among Us|Clutch Turtles]] are perpetually bemused by the strange behaviors and values of the "hasty" humans, and often misinterpret social cues. It is only when they begin to perceive that Val Con and Miri are in trouble that one of them starts to develop a remarkable level of empathy for the way humans think in order to figure out how best to help them.

* The short story anthology ''I, Alien'' is basically entirely this.

* In Timothy Zahn's [[The Conquerors Trilogy]], humans and Zhirrzh are barely comprehensible through each others' eyes, made worse by the fact that they are at war; they call each other "conquerors" and claim that the war is necessary to defend against the other's aggression.

{{quote| "...and he, for one privileged moment, had seen the human form with almost Malacandrian eyes."}}

* The front cover blurb for Hal Clement's ''Cycle of Fire'' invoked this with the words: "Each of them was a stranger to the other. But which was the alien?"

* Voltaire wrote a story much in this fashion, titled Micromégas, effectively make this trope [[Older Than Radio]].

* In the ''[[Codex Alera]]'', the various species in the lands around the human Realm of Alera have different views on how alien humans are to them. For example, there's the Marat, a species of barbarian elf-like people who bind themselves to animal "totems" (forming an empathic link to another species, gaining aspects of their biology from them) and then form tribes around those totems (i.e. the Wolf Tribe, the Horse Tribe, etc). The Marat believe in fighting alongside ones' totems, whereas humans prefer to wear armor and fight within fortifications, and are therefore referred to as the "Dead Tribe" and consider them weak. The Marat also do not believe in the concept of deliberate falsehoods (read: lying) and declaring that someone is "mistaken" is grounds for a trial of combat. They are, understandably, extremely perturbed by the humans' constant use of falsehoods, along with all the other contradictions of human society.

* "The Color of Distance" and the aptly-named "Through Alien Eyes", by Amy Thomson, are a [[First Contact]] story in which a human does have some narrative time, but it's largely from the POV of the local Tendu, brachiating froglike people who speak with their color-changing skins. They think the human - Dr. Juna Saari - always looks sorrowing thanks to her (beige) skin tone. The second book deals with two Tendu visiting Earth and finding it bizarre, wonderful and awful in turns. Notably, the books are remarkably evenhanded in portraying both Tendu and humanity as good in some ways, flawed in others, but not inherently beyond hope.

* There's a ''[[Doctor Who]]'' novel called ''Night of the Humans''.

* In [[Robert Silverberg]]'s ''At Winter's End'', what are these [[The Greys|weird, hairless, flat-faced beings]] that seem to crop up so often in ancient records? {{spoiler|Why, they're the [[After the End|now-extinct]] humans, as seen through the eyes of [[Xenofiction|highly evolved baboons]].}}

* In [[Poul Anderson]]'s novella "Day of Burning," a [[The Reptilians|Merseian]] privately describes humans as an [[Humans Are Ugly|ugly, hairy]] [[Uncanny Valley|caricature]] of [[Lizard Folk|his own species]].

* There is a short story told exclusively from the viewpoint of a member of an expansionist race who arrive to the third planet in a yellow dwarf system and find remnants of a strange civilization. Yes, you guessed it, humans are dead in the story, wiped out by an "atomic storm" from space. However, the aliens manage to revive several members of this species, only to realize that they possess strange powers, including teleportation. Fearing that the human, whom they've been unable to kill, might learn their technology and use it to revive the rest of humanity and learn their FTL method and homeworld coordinates, the ship's crew chooses to fly [[Hurl It Into the Sun|into the Sun]]. Moments before the ship is destroyed, the protagonist realizes that the ugly teleporting alien has learned all their secrets in the first several minutes and was just messing with them after that.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* The earliest promos for Nickelodeon's ''[[The Journey of Allen Strange]]'' included the following speech by Allen: "I'm trying to adjust to this strange world called Earth. The lifeforms are solid, school teaches geometry in only three dimensions, and space travel is limited to a mere few million miles per journey. Currently I'm learning a concept called Friendship..."

* The title of a [[Disney Channel]] movie ''[[Stepsister From The Planet Weird]]'' applies to both girls, as the alien girl and her [[Manic Pixie Dream Girl|Manic Pixie Dream Guy]] father are actually air bubble-like aliens. Much [[Wangst|wangsting]] is done about her hideous new "meat body" and how terrifying this windy planet is (her [[Missing Mom|mom]] was blown away) and how stupid the inhabitants are. {{spoiler|Because this isn't contrived enough, she also falls for a human guy, to the confusion of her boyfriend (son of the tyrant who drove them away in the first place), who (after attaining a meat body) falls for the human stepsister.}}

** There's also the TNG episode "Home Soil," wherein one of the life-forms native to Velara III describes humans as "ugly bags of mostly water."

* The Doctor from ''[[Doctor Who]]'' usually likes humans, but isn't beyond rebuking them, either.

** Appears in the first ever Who story ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S1 E1 An Unearthly Child|An Unearthly Child]]''. "Before your ancestors invented the wheel my people had made time-and-space travel into child's play!"

* [[The Twilight Zone]] used this for a twist ending or three.

** This trope also occurs in the season 4 episode "A Constellation of Doubt" which shows a television program made on Earth using interviews with the aliens. While a lot of the show is just reinforcing human prejudices (perhaps a bit [[Anvilicious|anviliciously]]), the aliens do make some good points about how wasteful humans are, how foolish intraspecies conflict is with the real dangerous in the universe, how humans never give up (even when maybe they should), and the [[Unfortunate Implications]] of popularizing skimpy clothing, among other things.

* Pretty much the purpose of [[Mork and Mindy]]. And in turn, [[Inverted Trope|Mindy visits Ork]] for a few episodes for her honeymoon.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* In [[Traveller]] the attitude of aliens toward humans is described. Vargr for instance think humans [[Humans Are Cthulhu|to be spooky]] because they can organize themselves more ably.

* [[Warhammer 40000]] gives us a reasonable estimation of how the alien races see humans.

 

== Video Games ==

** The main reason for the latter is that to batarians everyone with less than four eyes looks stupid and unsophisticated - presumably because they are unable to form expressions that the batarians would recognize as cultured.

** The turians in general take duty very seriously, and conscription on their homeworld, marking the beginning of adulthood as well as citizenship, is universal. When the Alliance liberates Shanxi from turian occupation, the turians are surprised that a species that hasn't even expanded enough to have made any previous first-contact is able to turn them back at all. When the First Contact War is settled diplomatically and things cool off a little, the turians are ''more'' surprised to learn that only 3% of humans serve in the military. There's also the fact that since there's no such thing as a turian civilian, they regard bombarding houses from orbit to flush out defenders as a legitimate tactic and can't understand why humans regard the Shanxi invasion as brutal.

** Played for laughs in a ([[Dummied Out|sadly cut]]) line from a turian security guard. "Excuse me for asking, but... you're a female, right? You've got those funny bumps, like an [[Green-Skinned Space Babe|asari]]."

* ''[[Star Control]]'' has a species known as the VUX, which humans claim is an acronym for "Very Ugly Xenoform" - and for good reason, since these aliens are hideously ugly... by ''human'' standards. In the VUX's eyes, however, it is the humans who are hideous ("You humans are SO ugly, that I get my kids to behave by holding a picture of you behind my back and I tell the kids that if they aren't good, I'll show it to them!")

* In the strategy game ''[[Sword of the Stars]]'', the lizard-like Tarkas find humans disturbing in an uncanny valley-like fashion. We come across as androgynous and childlike, even cute, to the point that they find fighting us in boarding action difficult. Sort of like we would find it hard to shoot a race resembling 10-year olds in the face.

** [[Bee People|Hivers]] find human individuality and ability to multipurpose puzzling, and think human perfumes are incredibly overpowering. They also zero in on females during boarding actions regardless of actual target value, instinctively attack the oestrogen source (aiming for a queen).

** The psychic space dolphin Liir also find our tendency to eat other creatures disturbing, and find religion a highly puzzling concept. Hivers and Liir are the only races that have an easy time at all telling the difference between men and women due to a lack of obvious dimorphism.

* ''[[Strange Journey]]'' has the demons deeply confused and not exactly pleased with humanity. Mitra is conducting experiments on them (with conclusions like "It seems humans require something called 'blood' to survive"), and demon negotiations frequently require you to explain or justify humanity's actions.

* Not quite aliens, but in ''[[Golden Sun Dark Dawn]]'', it's easy to tell which of the [[Petting Zoo People|beast folk]] NPCs in Belinsk originated as beasts instead of humans. They're the ones who comment on how weird it is to be walking on their hind feet, wearing clothes, and [[Alien Lunch|cooking meat before they eat it]].

 

* The ''Space'' theme of ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' features a plant-based alien. At one point, he(?) declines to enter a florist because, well, {{spoiler|how would ''you'' like it if someone cut off ''your'' reproductive organs and put them on display for people to smell?}}

** He has also stated that from his point of view, wine is equivelant to crushed infants fermented in sacks made of human skin

** It also has some [http://www.goblinscomic.com/01282007 interesting commentary] on human culture.

** This interpretation is also used heavily by Redcloak from [[Order of the Stick]], making him an extremely sympathetic [[Anti-Villain]].

* ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'':

** Done with demons in the place of aliens in [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080721 this] strip.

 

== Web Original ==

** At one point, he calls humans "disgusting". Although it's possible he's referring to the [[Black and Black Morality|Foundation]] itself.

{{quote| Did you like [[Body Horror|the servants]] they were the BEST of the cleansed only the BEST for you Great Ones [[Uncanny Valley|made like you form]] you assume here on a WORLD to clean to honor you do appreciate please please I will complete the cleansing soon and you can take me away in your ships of FIRE and [[Yandere|I can love you and you will love me]]}}