Let's talk about aliens in scifi! What are tropes you love or hate? What are things that rub you the wrong way or make you grin because it feels so RIGHT? What's your favorite alien species, or alien culture, or cryptoid alien sightings? Do you have any original alien species for your own stories? Have you ever seen unexplained lights in the sky and hoped it was a UFO? And, most importantly, which alien from Mass Effect do you wanna smooch the most?
Aria. Sure, she's kind of a bad person and would probably be bad for me, but there's still something about her that just makes me go swoony. (On my playthrough, I had a romance with Liara that I stuck with through all three games. Garrus is also super smoochable, but he and Tali are SO CUTE together that I don't think I'd be able to do a playthrough where Shep snaffled him for herself.)
I mostly just wish to share that I was introduced to porn in the Homestuck fandom, so I forever will have a very different definition of vanilla than most people outside of that fandom.
@Re Allyssa t e n t a b u l g e :3 although i really like messing around with different genital headcanons for all types of aliens. there's no reason they have to have their bits where we've placed ours. maybe their bits are in their skulls and their brains are in their crotches. (homestuck's a little different, i can make a persuasive argument that karkat made trolls in his image so genital placement is probably near the crotch.)
Favorite alien species is definitely the Tines from Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep. Wolf-shaped packminds. The Ship of Theseus problem applied to personalities! The Choir!
Alana. Alana no you picked the worst thing you know I love the aliens right? You amazing evil person you. Hi say hello to tentacle dicks, ovipositors, and weird genetic fluid and sex cuz I am going to hell for this thing. I am gonna have kisses for every alien.
/smiles smugly about tentabulge and tries not to smug around the room too hard but wow there is a lot of smugness happening here and of course I knew you love aliens, Void. Aliens are the best. Did we ever have one of your hoppers meet one of my arei? We should super do that sometime because they would be so confused by each other but it would be adorable and so, so fuzzy. :D ETA: ACTUALLY LET ME TELL THE CLASS ABOUT AREI The arei were conceived as the children of a semi-successful SBURB session, where the only players who survived to go through the door were a Time player and a Life player; the Arei worship the two players as gods, and their duotheistic (bitheistic?) religion forms their culture! (They only have one culture because I'm lazy.) There is the Spring, life, green, renewal and relaxation and following the course of nature; there is the Forge, metal and burning, and the movement of progress. Both need be present to make a balanced life. Also they are cute lemme go find my art of them
We did not but by god we should Also I should flesh out hoppers and their reproduction better lmao /recently decided they have milk patches instead of nipples and is still waffling how to do genital configuration
One can get some fascinating alien ideas by studying some of the weirder animals on earth, like the bizarre sexual lives of some insects.
aliens! yes! aliens and sapient non-human type species in general (like, say, sapient dinosaurs) are awesome! and hmmm, my fave aliens... probably the puppeteers from larry niven's known space universe, 'cause, well, they are anxious like me, don't really seem to have a human concept of gender identity (two kinds of males, most of them [in the of worlds series, with the most focus on the puppeteers] don't have the kind of male they are mentioned at all, their females are an entirely different non-sapient species), and they are really smart and devious. @itsAlana yep, the arei are cute.
There's that ant species where the males and females do not combine genes anymore. Males father only male offspring. Female young are produced parthenogenetically, as genetic clones of their mother. That has the potential to lead to extreme gender divergence as mutations will pass to only same gender offspring. That males need females to bear their young but females do not need males to birth more descendants, leading to an interesting power imbalance too. It would be interesting to explore a sapient species with that reproductive model.
That would interesting wow. /files idea for later use Oh I also had an alien species that was kinda bug-like. They are called timorans and they reproduce through kissing. They have a pocket in their mouth that holds the small sperm pockets, which is passed to the female during kissing. They also have three sexes. I will have to find my info on them
Bedbugs are fascinatingly horrible, indeed. Sex via stabbing the female with your dagger-wang and injecting semen into her abdominal cavity. Delightful!
Nyreen Kandros and Grunt are the most smoochable aliens, accept no substitutes. I like hive minds/democratic intelligences a lot! I'm also big on diversity in cultures/languages/races. Super into non humanoid aliens with weird body language things and the misunderstandings that can result in, especially between common ground soldiers with no diplomatic training.
Joining the homestucks on this topic, eheh. main question: do they have tentacles? second one, awesome but optional, are they hermaphrodites? most alien species i have come across in fiction are mostly human but with stuff tacked on and paint job. i might be reading the wrong type of fiction. altgough i like the sylvari, they're pretty (although their humanlike sexual dimorphism makes absolutely no sense), and the charr, because giant horned cat monsterladies? and the designer put her foot down and said, either three pairs of boobs or none at all and they went with the latter? sign me up. society-wise, hiveminds are sorta intimidating but also cool, and i like alternian culture in all its twisted and fucked up glory. not that i would ever want to live in it. probably forgot a few. of my own creation there are a few because i wanted to avoid the 5 standard races in fantasy fiction in my setting, but i need to tweak them some more.
