I have to ask, and I'm looking for the truh. Everyone is different so I'm not assuming, however, do you, personally you, but also to everyone else who reads and does this, actually like your sponsor, or did they ask you and you said yeah for the $$?
In a way, then, a main facet of xenofiction is to reject intuition, in the phenomenological sense. Instead of looking at a building and seeing that it is a building, in the sense that our experiences as humans have led us to understand them, it is to look at a building and to see its form in the most literal sense - a vast block of stone, angled with unnatural intent. From that, then, to extrapolate a new perspective on the building - not informed by the human experience, but by the lack thereof.
That's an excellent description. Some societal sciences, like anthropology traditionally strive to observe humanity from a very similar angle. Although social sciences agree that one cannot truly escape the viewpoint of a human, as, well, everyone's human from a human culture!
Ever saw that vid of a bear cub on a hammock? The mom watching with the other cub beside her? “You stay RIGHT THERE. He got up there, he gets himself out! (I hope he can…)” XD
I think my favourite xenofiction trope is that of "humans are cthulu" in which human characters DO show up in the story, but from the POV of the main cast we see these unknowable abominations shaping the land in unnatural ways to further imperceptible goals.
That’s one of my favourite things about Watership Down, especially the novel. Hazel being taken back to the down in a car at the end is seen the same way you’d see your mate literally being given a ride home by an Elder One.
There is a whole genre of stories like that on the internet. They are known as 'humans are space orks'. They do feel rather skewed in the direction of 'humanity f.yea!' for my liking though...
@@krinkrin5982 Honestly I find them silly because they always try to end in this weird, hopeful tone with everything humanity does. And it also tries so hard to act like humans are the only insane, sapient race in the known universe. As if there somehow isn't any other race that can top us which there more than likely is.
@@krinkrin5982 eh, "humans are space orcs" feels different. In those, the aliens are typically more advanced than we are and have a basic concept of things like civilisation, society, engineering etc. In "humans are cthulu" stories, the POV characters have zero understanding of how humans tick, how they do anything they do and what those things are meant to achieve. They just see vast operations on a seemingly impossible scale for an unknowable purpose that they cannot possibly perceive.
One of my favorite "weirdest" stories is when Japanese stories were first collected by a group of American writers and published in the states. The story was the complete life of a card board box.
That would actually be a very interesting story. Made in a factory by automated robots. Hand folded into a box. Stuffed full of useless human crap. Thrown in the garage and gets moldy and wet. Insects start eating it. Owner throws it out. Incinerated at a landfill. The end.
I once wrote a short story on r/writingprompts about a god that "died" centuries ago and then "woke up" in a modern apartment bedroom with a guy sitting at a computer. MAN it was tricky describing everything in that room through the eyes of a god that had slept through the industrial revolution. How do you describe the cords hooked up to your monitor? Wires? Cord? Weird, smooth, shiny ropes? How do you describe a MONITOR for that matter? What about those tiny, synthetic, colorful people on the shelf? And what's this misshapen glass ball on the ceiling radiating light brighter than any candle? It was challenging and fun. Admittedly, a character that was familiar with humanity in general was a bit of a shortcut.
Holy fuck, trying to describe any single room in my house from the perspective of something that has no idea what anything is would put them into a fit of overstimulation Xd Not actually but still, that sounds like a lot of work...
The biggest uphill battle for Xenofiction is that there are too many stories that focuses on humans. Thankfully, Xenofiction proved that not everything needs to be human or anthropomorphic to be treated as a worthwhile story at least. If stories are an allegory for life, then why not escape the realm of human, society, or politics and focus on different species that all have their stories to tell?
I'd argue it's also one of it's greatest strengths. Looking at human life and culture through the lense of a fictional "other", is a great exercise in defamiliarization and besides the obvious angle of comedy or fascination, it's a great tool for satire. "Humans are space orcs" is both, a great example of humancentric xenfiction and a study in how xenofiction can be ruined, if you fail to repeatedly defamiliarize yourself from humans and get stuck on a specific lense as a result.
@@LeSpeederus but there's also a way to do that without having any humans at all. one of the sub points to xenofiction is re-contextualizing something typically human into something for a xeno instead. like the weird aliens webcomic for an extreme form of this as a parody. the end goal of this is "hey this non human character is totally relatable" the most common story for this though is the topic of interracial relations. but got to be careful and if done right the audience is forced to stay and watch from a completely outsider perspective, discarding any preconceived racial biases as none of the characters are human and therefore cant be pinned to any particular human race. done wrong of course and you get a story about offensive racial caricatures. as for having any humans involved usually leads to either the xenos taking a backseat to more human focused problems or the xenos end up as just racial caricatures. very rarely do the humans take a backseat in stories they're involved in though when we're lucky we do see the humans themselves as the source of the problem in a given story but again the xenos just come off as more of a racial caricature than something of their own. an interesting thing ive seen in a few works that could make an exception is for humans to act as a precursor race either as imperfect gods or some ancient ancestor for the xenos in some distant future
Understanding what other beings see hear and think is a good way to expand your view of the world outside of the mess of a human society we live in at the moment. It’s also fun to understand why mice treat cheese like treasure haha. Just a funny though
@@gusty7153 depends. I made a race of myconid cowboys who rode giant spiders in a vast underground cavern and had a culture based heavily on the wild west. There's a heavy focus on duels at a time with similar connotations to high noon between sporeslingers, eyeless lizard cattle kept by ranchers, gritty heroes who don't mesh too well with the law but save the townsfolk out of principal. They all talk with super heavy southern accents. They have native mind flayers who are commonly attacked, often without reason, because they are taking up property the myconids want, and border skirmishes are a rising issue. This is technically a caricature of the south. I tried to change elements to make it a more interesting place to be, and so that I could explore the way that these people act. I guess what I'm trying to say is that fictional cultures often draw on real world inspirations and it can result in author's only implementing the part they think is cool, which leads to a surface level similarity to the real world culture that could be seen as disrespectful.
I once read a short novel on the web, called “The Things” which was an adaptation of John Carpenters “The Thing” from the Things’ perspective. We were the “strange aliens” in the story, while the Thing saw itself as a kind of missionary, trying to promote everything it met to become a part of itself. I can’t remember the authors name, but it was a total mind-f***. Definitely recommend searching for it if you like this kind of fiction. Edit: The authors name is Peter Watts.
I remember finding it really cool when I saw it online! How this alien shapeshifting being found *humanity* to be a fucked up existence because while its own cells were "alive" in a sense (More than just regulating itself to stay alive I mean, as in like how its own _blood_ will shapeshift to flee from a hot wire to preserve itself), humanity's was dumb, or dead in comparison. I think it even mentioned every other alien it encountered functioning similarly to itself, so humanity really is an abomination from that perspective it has.
Peter Watts! I knew he made that, but I had no idea it was actually based on “The Thing.” Jesus, his other books “blindsight” and “echopraxia” are some of the best science fiction I could ever have asked for. It’s absolutely wonderful and I cannot recommend it enough.
I want to recommend a web fiction titled "War queen". This story begins as "Starship troopers", but in reverse. The Queen of intelligent alien bugs fights human invaders. And it gets much more interesting as the story goes forward (I don't want to spoil)
Hmm As an star-craft player, I heard that one of the reasons why the Queen of blades is the protagonist of SC2, and the face of Zerg is because it would be harder for the audiences to understand the perspective of a regular Zerg life form. Herder than your normal Terran like Jimmy or Mat. But I have been wondering how a differently would regular buggers view the events of those games. (Outside of theories, and few lines of dialogue from the game) Perhaps this story that you suggested might widen my scope.
My favorite example of Xenofiction is the _Wings Of Fire_ series by Tui T. Sutherland. Told from the perspective of Dragons, while it is still a children's series, it is _fantastically_ dark from the get-go; the very first scene is a prologue depicting a queen crushing a living egg then SHREDDING ANOTHER DRAGON'S WINGS and casting them off a cliff. The first arc of the series alone covers themes of Found Family, Assassination, Destiny, Bloodsport, Abuse of Power, Torturous experimentation, Self-identity among social pressures, and the immorality of war, among others. and there's two other arcs Tui has written, as well as some other stories in the setting. I Highly reccomend you read the _Wings Of Fire_ series, it's wonderful fiction and shows quite well the differences between Humanity and Sentience.
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606 maybe somewhere into the second book of the third arc with the new continent? I was following the books as they were coming out up until then, and I kind of grew away from the series.
Sidenote, haven't heard that xenofiction gets misunderstood as children's genre. I thought most people aren't into it because they find it to be too weird to try to write story from inhuman perspective :O
In my opinion most remember xenofiction in there childhood, but dont realize that there is any in the adult side. They just think it stops at "Young Adult" or "teenage" in the library. Some of the better books I have read are in that section.
This. So much this. This is my favorite fiction. It's not just "furry stuff". It's the shift in perspective, trying to experience a different self, to see what I can learn. I got into it reading science fiction. I loved the aliens, and I always craved more from their perspective. It's exploratory.
You should read Pale, by Wildbow! It's a modern fantasy story, and while most of it *is* from human perspectives, understanding the perspectives of others (and Others) is a major theme and there is some incredible xenofiction later on. It hasn't ever been the primary focus of his work but he probably writes some of the best xenofiction I've come across.
Literally anyone who assumes something is "furry" because it has anthros or animals in general are ignorants. Xenofiction is amazing, and anyone who refuses to read them because "furry" should honestly touch some grass. Yeah, I'm salty, but as an anthro fan, it saddens me that people will just brush cool things as "furry".
@@gone9820 Very true! And the hate is always so strange to me. Like, did you not watch television as a kid? Watch nearly any Disney movie? Did you just never read, like, a lot of fantasy and sci-fi fiction out there? It's so arbitrary. D&D kobolds are furries now? Why is ANY of this a bad thing?? I just don't understand.
One of my favorite genres is "Humans are space orcs" or HFY,(Humanity, f*** yeah) where by looking at humans and humanity through an alien or demi-human lens, these stories portray how humans actually have some cool stuff going on with us, we aren't just vanilla town normie underdogs with nothing special. Our saliva has millions of bacteria no alien would be genetically prepared for, our rocky, dense world makes our musculature, odds are, stronger, than most alien species, who would develop more easily on lighter, less harsh worlds. Our innate stamina even in harsh heat is something to be commended, and the fact that our brain can regenerate any tissue at all from traumatic injury is frightening and awe-inspiring. Just because we don't see it as anything special, doesn't mean we aren't.
Yeah ive heard the human bite is sometimes regarded as the second most dangerous bite (in terms of infection potential) in the world, idk if its true but we'd probably be pretty dangerous to an alien species
This is less of a genre and more of a meme. I mean, I guess you could technically jam all alien encounter stories into it from Independence Day and Battle L.A. to almost every episode of Star Trek, but it's just a feature that people hyper focused on. And it really only works if you assume all life around the universe evolves on "easy mode" or something. But that just makes it "humans are special".
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606 It's still not a genre. It's a theme across several genres. Sci-fi, fantasy, or even general fiction. Heck, it's even in poetry. Stories of something reacting to humans being strange from their perspective isn't substantial enough to be its own genre. It would be like hyper fixating on stories where a car stops working.
@@muntu1221 It's not just them reacting; it's a theme, yes, but hundreds of internet authors have made thousands of stories following it. It's not coincidence, there are online communities about it.
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606 I'm not saying it's not a theme with a lot of popularity or value, but it's just not its own genre. It's an element found across genres. There are communities dedicated to unconventional ways to get superpowers, but that doesn't make "getting your power from a seemingly arbitrary source that redefines society" its own genre.
I cannot stress how amazing as an artist it was to hear about the eye and tree example. As when I began learning art my first teacher said to become an artist we as students had to break the mental "symbols" we had for objects and instead draw exactly what we see.
Sounds a lot like the book "drawing with the right side of the brain". It's a great book, probably the one art book that taught me the most about drawing. The teachings about right and left side of the brain might be a bit on the woowoo scale of things. But it did open my mind up to prioritizing drawing what I see over what I label the things as. Reducing things to meaningless shapes to avoid being lead astray by preconceptions.
ooh this is how it's called, I never really questioned such stories I made a story about a spider myself because I wanted to formulate it so that it wasn't obvious it's about spiders and if someone with a spiderphobia would read it they could understand the little critters, because some people are simply put off by their appearance and some just see them as non-animals deserving death with I find quite cruel so my story would frame them as a mysterious kind of humanoids trying to survive between the gaints, the day-to-day life where they "have no time for family" but still goes out to collect food for their little siblings, it ended up to be a little video with no talking but I don't really make videos haha anyway, I tend to forget that really not a lot of people ever care for non-human stories even when I point it out myself
I think it's worth noting that another interesting aspect of xenofiction is that by removing the human perspective, the audience can approach the story with a more open mind, projecting less of their own human experience onto inhuman beings.
Read a friend’s short story from the pov of an elderly man. “He watched the young man pull out his fruit branded rectangle and poke at it with his thumbs” I’ve told so many people about that specific sentence because it gave me such a good laugh and gives such a good example, putting the reader in the mind of a man who doesn’t understand what an iPhone is.
Generally, when it comes to sci fi and fantasy, my favorite characters tend to be the furthest from being human. I feel like when such a character is written the writer is better able to strip away tropes and really get into what makes them tick.
YES- I’ve never heard someone describe it better. In fact, personally, I find it easier to write characters who are least similar to myself. While I don’t struggle with tropes and stereotypes too much, I definitely struggle with distancing a character from myself. Making them unique. I have a handful of female characters, and (I myself being female) several of them feel like the same person, with slightly different personalities. For example, I’ve got three characters who are rude and antagonistic- not villains by any means, but think kind of ‘mean girls.’ However, one is rude and defensive, like she’s got something to prove. She can also be straight up malicious. The second one isn’t malicious, she’s just having a good time and tries to push people’s buttons. The third is more of an ‘I’m better than you,’ but with the power to back it up. Of course they ARE all unique and distinct, with their own style and ‘thing.’ However, as the author, I feel like their personalities are sort of rebranded versions of the same one. HOWEVER, all of my male characters feel completely unique and distinct. I relate to them less, they’re more distant from myself, so I have less tendency to make them similar. I don’t know. But then the *inhuman* characters- I’ve got a skeleton that can’t talk -they feel so unique and interesting. It’s weird.
@@abreebee so your human female characters are similar in your mind, but the "others" feel different. Could it be that because you have to think from an alien perspective you are able to think differently as a character?
Warrior cats being children's media is funny to me, as someone who read it as a kid and still thinks about it today. There's so much needlessly mature stuff in it. Me at 8 years old reading about cats getting disemboweled and underage/adult relationships:
I'm 14 and reading it for the first time, so much cat war, there's no way that it is "for children". I feel like it's for people who can handle large emotions and mild descriptions of things.
There is a huge dissonance between what is normally considered "suitable for children" in books compared to visual media. Countless childrens' books, and/or books studied by schoolchildren would unambiguously be at least R/16 rated if they were replicated realistically and verbatim in their film adaptations, but were toned down to G/U or PG. For a xenofiction example, "The Mouse and His Child" comes to mind. Imagine Watership Down crossed with Toy Story, but almost every character (including the protagonists) is amoral or sadistic. The (G/U-rated) animated adaptation massively toned down the amount and detail of the violence (no graphic detail of brains being penetrated by talons), and removed most of the bloodlust and moral apathy/ambiguity (the mouse doesn't join a battle and start killing shrews just for the hell of it). I studied "I know why the caged bird sings" in school (I was 15 at the time, iirc). It's Maya Angelou's autobiography, which includes descriptions of how she was raped as a child. It wouldn't even be _legal_ to portray it visually in many countries, even as a cartoon, let alone considered suitable for non-adults.
If I may ask, would All Tomorrows count as a form of Xenofiction? If I could also ask as well if you have heard of All Tomorrows? This e book would be an interesting video to cover one day if you hadn't read it.
If stories about objects count as xenofiction, one of my favorites is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. It's the story of a toy china rabbit named Edward Tulane who is owned by a little girl but then gets lost while her family is moving away. The rabbit makes its way through the world, coming under the ownership of one person after another. The interesting thing is it's told from the rabbit's perspective. You see what he experiences through his eyes. Of course, he's a toy. He never moves and he never speaks, but he can think and he can feel. At first he's self-conscious and a bit narcissistic and so he never cares for the girl who owned him, only about how he looks and how perfect he seems to himself. But after he gets lost, he encounters new people and through them he learns what it is to love and to be loved. If you can, look it up and read it if you get the chance.
This reminds me of a favourite video game of mine titled "Golden Treasure the Great green". In it, you play as a dragon (draak as your kin calls themselves) from hatchling to adulthood. Your goals in it are simple: Survive, Become wise and rich (both in material and experience), and try to answer a question: What makes the No-tails (humans), broken custodians from Above, abandoned creations of the Others formidable against the Draak-kin, prodigal children of Earth and Sun, rightful rulers above all goodbeasts?
My first xenofiction I read was a whole story about fridge. It tells story from a little fridge of newlywed couple. Actually the story more focused on the newlywed shenanigans and their cute interaction, the fridge is there just as "the observer".
One of my favorite stories in this genera is "Raptor Red" by Dr. Robert Bakker. It is a story of the Early Cretaceous of Western North America through the eyes of a female utahraptor and is one of my favorite fictions because of how under-represented that period of Earth's history is compared to the Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous Periods. If you haven't read it please do so because it is a more realistic Land Before Time story. So thank you for mentioning it in your video. Also for those who don't know, Dr. Bakker is one of the foremost minds in paleontology who heavily pushed the Dinosaur Renaissance which lead to a greater understanding of how bird-like non-avian dinosaurs were and changed our view from the likes of Fantasia to Jurassic Park.
My absolute favorite fun fact about dinosaurs comes from the introduction in that book (not sure if it was a special edition or what): The guy who was helping with the first Jurassic Park movie as the dino expert was/is friends with Dr. Bakker, and had called to complain about the velociraptors and how no raptor found up to that point matched Spielberg's vision. Not long after that phone call, Dr. Bakker got to call him back and say "I found Spielberg's raptor" during the excavation of the first utahraptor. Side note: that book is the reason I'm still so fascinated with the study of dinosaurs, I'm not the kind of person to study it myself, but I absolutely love following it and learning more about dinosaurs!
@@DemitriVladMaximov Actually Jurassic Park was considered inaccurate in it's day. Take the famous example of the velociraptors: even back then it was known that the actual velociraptor was small and that it didn't have the feet claw. I believe the little dino with the frill that spat poison was known to be inaccurate at the time too. Add to that the later movies in the franchise that continued with old inaccuracies even though new discoveries had been made in time to be put into the movies. It's completely fair and reasonable to point out the inaccuracies of the Jurassic Park franchise, if nothing else it helps to spread more accurate knowledge and to point out how scientific fields adapt to new evidence
@@baskawilki1975 The whole velociraptor issue was from the book where the marketing head thought the name of the actual dinosaur in the novel (Deinonychus) wasn't as impressive as Velociraptor and so changed it to something that sounded cooler. In reality yes velociraptor doesn't fit the size of the animal in the book, much less the one in the movie. As for the movie, when dealing with practical special effects, the animal was increased in size because of the suits used for the get-up were being worn by human beings and so yes the animal was afterwards completely wrong for the name. But, absolutely velociraptor had the curved toe-claw the same as Deinonychus, Utahraptor, Dakotaraptor, and Bambiraptor. It is a feature that goes all the way back to Archeopteryx. As for the Dilophosaurus, remember these dinosaurs are all hybrids so possibly frilled lizard DNA got into the mix just like African clawed frog DNA which allowed for breeding of what were supposed to be all female animals. The other bit from the book, which was not meant to be a complete accuracy but instead speculation, was that some things just don't fossilize and as such behaviors and adaptations not preserved in bone were completely unexpected. The toxic spit of Dilophosaurus and the venomous bite of Procompsognathus were examples of what the limits of the science of paleontology can reveal solely based on skeletal material. And understand you are trying to justify berating the accuracies of Jurassic Park with a paleontologist. I know them coming and going and I am well aware of how much we have learned about dinosaurs that completely upended a lot of what we though was true when Jurassic Park was released. I also was a kid when it came out and know well how we thought of dinosaurs going from the 80s and into the 90s. So I will defend the movie and the book in how important a stepping stone they were in our understanding of the nature of the non-avian dinosaurs.
Oh my goodness, thank you. Almost every story I do tries to re-examine how we experience the world, writing stories from the perspective of something other than a human body... and human mind. My absolute best story is one that is critical of the nature of humanity itself, pointing out the fundamental flaws in our minds that cause us to hurt one another. And this examination is done through the eyes of something other than human... because it can only be done by something other than human. Again, the flaw in our minds called Ego prevents us from truly being critical of our own nature.
Note that the inhuman perspective in that story shares something quite fundamental with the human perspective: the moral position that hurting others is bad, a _flaw._ Some of my favorite xenofiction hinges on abandoning common human moral precepts in favor of others, just as logically defensible. For example, one could write from the perspective of an alien intelligence that truly loves humanity, and naturally is very much in favor of human beings hurting, harming and killing each other, for at least four reasons that I can think of (not that it actually spells out its reasons-- it considers them _too obvious_ to explain).
I adore this subject. Analyzing humanity through the eyes of non humans. My favorite sub set of xenofiction I love that the internet has embraced is "humanity are space Orcs/Earth is space Australia", which I think is fantastically captured in the "Damned" trilogy by Alan Dean Foster
Already going through the audiobook. I do sometimes think of the human woman they captured and her perspective. Like how she would try talking but didn't recognize it as speech. Then took her no longer making noises as a sign of satisfaction with her captivity.
Oh hell yeah, Children of Time is great. So good at making me sad, in fact, that I couldn't finish it. Couldn't bear to see anything bad happen to the funny spiderfriends.
The Bees by Laline Paull has got to be one of my favorite xenofictions out there right now because it caught me so off guard the way you describe it here. It painted a bee hive as though it’s a fantastical ivory and gold palace of languages made of dance and inherited memory with complex societal structures and it felt completely alien. Super cool book and I’m glad I finally have a name for this kind of fiction now thanks to this video
It's a great book, and certainly not for children, but it's so clearly an allegorical story about human collectivism and totalitarianism that it hardly counts as xenofiction. The animals think, talk and act like human beings, playing out a human tragedy.
I don't think it really counts. The pigs are literally just a representation of communist Russians and besides some changes here and there (how they eat food like animals and are caged on a farm like animals) they are basically just humans in animal bodies I mean, at the very end of the story the pigs are wearing clothes, watching tv and smoking cigarettes (to show how they are exactly the same as humans-who represent Nazis) so reducing it to xenifiction is kind of rejecting the whole premise behind the story because those pigs are NOT farm animals (or your friend metaphorically), they are as cruel and tyrant as humans
Anatomy of a Soldier is a good piece of modern xenofiction. Written by an veteran of the War in Afghanistan, it tells a story from the perspective of 45 inanimate objects, ranging from a tourniquet (that’s actually the first one) to a helmet to a prosthetic.
I spent much of my youth writing pokemon fan fiction, I never did full stories from the creature's perspective, but I always put in a few chapters where I shifted the perspective to them. You have this seemingly all powerful creatures that just obey their trainers, it makes you wonder why? From the outside it seems theres nothing to gain, and yet it is constantly said that trainers and pokemon together make the strongest of pairings.
as a child who’s whole life so far has been reading and watching stuff like “Wings of Fire” a story from the point of view of well, dragons! and having been into “Warrior cats” i can say it’s uh.. not really for children, i’ve always liked to put my mind into another beings, almost everything i have an interest in is non-human story’s, “Hollowknight” is one of them, a game where all the characters are bug like, “Bugsnax” is another one, but it is more human like, i’ve just always liked things that aren’t human, or are human like, but still very different, i prefer to distance myself from humanity as a whole, so of course story’s like this are something i love.
I deeply appreciate this. My first story I ever wrote to completion was something of a rip off of Redwall using animals in a medieval setting. I’ve wanted to work seriously on a serious story, but there’s certainly a stigma to doing such. Just look at how Sonic fan characters are typically treated.
There’s a King Arthur story I read a while back where Merlin turns a young Arthur (named wart until he comes of age) into multiple animals in the castle grounds, to teach him about other ways of living and understanding the world around him, it’s pretty fun and interesting
A nice example is the beginning from Spiderlight, in there, we see the POV of the giant spiders that live in the forest, when suddenly a troupe of humans just comes and commit genocide on the spiders, the spiders rush to protect their queen, but this “monsters” are just too much, their weapons cleave and maim them, they wield the elements of nature itself against them, and a bright light that scorches them, like if it was intelligent, and hellbent on destroying them. The spiders aren’t just angry. They’re afraid.
Thanks for the recommendations. I grew up with "Animorphs," enjoyed "Dragon's Egg," read "Warriors" a little while ago. Will look into the other books you mentioned. Now for my more "teenage" and up recommendations; (part human part "other") "Xenocide" and "Children of the Mind" in the "Ender's Game" series by Orson Scott Card, Isaac Asimov's Robots series, Timothy Zahn's Conquerors' series, and the Dragon Back Chronicles, and finally by H. Beam Piper's the "Fuzzy" series (3 total and harder to find). I have many others but these are my favorites.
Personally, my favorite example of Xenofiction would be the Entities from Worm by author John C. "Wildbow" McCrae; gargantuan, near-incomprehensibly massive crystalline colonial lifeforms (they're big enough that objects that are described as the size of cities, mountains, and even whole continents are but mere specks of dust in comparison to a full-sized Entity) who have reached a point of hyper-advancement that they'd be a match for beings such as the Timelords from Docter Who or even (arguably) the Xeelee from the Xeelee Sequence. In the Entities perspective, conflict defines EVERYTHING; from simple communication, to trading, to even their method of reproduction (that last one involves blowing up more planets than there are atoms in our entire universe across a vast, practically infinite multiverse). In the story of Worm proper, the Entities shed parts of themselves (called Shards) so that they grant beings outside their species fantastical powers to observe how they (in-story, humans) use them as experimental subjects, usually this is during battles between superpowered people that take place for much of the story.
Absolutely agree. The interlude from the Warrior's perspective is incredible. Have you kept up with his newer stories? Pale has some amazing xenofiction once you're a good way in, and is also just incredible in general.
My favorite kind of Xenofiction is the very rare Mythical-creatures-rule-the-world-&-humans-either-don't-exist-or-just-scuttle-in-the-background variant It's an AMAZING twist on the fantasy genre, yet the only examples of it I've seen are My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic & the Wings of Fire books
Honestly, the narration of Children of time on audible was one of the best things I've heard, and why my youtube algorithm is still giving me things related to children of time after two years.
I love stories like this. I just never knew they had their own named classification. When you're autistic, everything can feel alien. In fact, I tend to shy away from stories centered wholly around human beings, hence my reflexive disdain for Slice of Life, historical fiction, human drama, and most sitcoms. I don't really identify with people, especially in everyday scenarios. Those scenarios, though they might seem banal and typical to the neurotypical, are like an alien world in their own right to me. It's a world I'm less a part of and more one that I observe from a distance. Any conclusions I come to about your human world are those I had to essentially arrive at based on my own observations. (And if I'm being frank, I'm not terribly impressed with you all. In fact, you all suck and I want as little to do with you as possible.) Xenofiction, however, tends to have less presumptions about what the reader might see as normal. It builds everything from the ground up, and when it does, I am better able to understand the culture because of that explicit explanation. A lot of my writing reflects this as well, as I prefer fantastical worlds built on immense amounts of worldbuilding which I construct from narrative bedrock. These cultures _could_ be our far future, or even a distant past, but even when they explicitly are, it's irrelevant. Even the "human" characters are so far removed from us that they might as well not be human at all. It's almost less about humans per se and more about sapience itself. Purpose, anxiety, fear, pride, hope, and a host of other matters that appear to affect (and oftentimes afflict) all manner of human subsets are my tools.
I kinda agree. Always thought humanoid races were boring. It's why I am drawn to fantasy races that are farther removed. I would rather play a slime, Golem, Nopon(from xenoblade. Love the little lads.), Ent, Kraken, Spider, Bio-android(from DBZ. If you couldn't tell, I preferred his imperfect form over his perfect one, but I still like him being a bug monster dude rather that just a dude), or skeleton than a Human, Saiyan, Elf, or Ork. I'm also autistic, but I'm high functioning so it doesn't effect much beyond social cues basically not existing. I like the crazy stuff I don't understand, and I've built up a general understanding of how the characters act and how I would act of I was there. I get happy when the main character resolves a conflict with their dad, because I get happy when I manage to clear up confusion that got people angry. It's hard to describe well.
Fellow autist here - absolutely agree on all of your points. Always vastly preferred stories that focus on or have a significant presence of distinctly non-human (bootleg humans like elves and dwarves don't count) characters. For whatever reason, I'm able to care about and be interested in them far more, a big part of which is likely, as you mentioned, the lack of normality presumptions.
While you were describing xenofiction my first thought was “I wonder if he’ll bring up Children of Time”. It and it’s sequel are easily my favorite examples of xenofiction and I cannot recommend them enough
I watched this video a while back, probably only weeks after release. And you literally gave me my favourite book series, but not just that, my favourite author. The Children of Time trilogy was absolutely amazing, and after I finished it I needed more from Adrian Tchaikovsky and read his The Final Architecture trilogy, which was also fantastic sci-fi. For this I sincerely thank you, Tale Foundry.
@@expheriousedits3204 I'm not sure if this is a joke but... it's really not. "Brave Little Toaster" is about mortality and depression. The cute name and animation style is supposed to be ironic.
@@expheriousedits3204 toaster is actually a movie last I saw but I watched them when I was younger. it gives you the perspective of inanimate objects and sometimes animals
Toy story para mí también cuenta en la xenofiction, quitando un poco los vacíos argumentales de la cuarta película y uno que otro corto animado que sacaron en el lapso de la 3 a la 4 película. Nos dan el contexto, el objetivo de ellos, los contra puntos tristes de su manera de vivir, existe su linea de algo malo a algo bueno. Y en un principio piensan de cómo deberían ser.
Honestly beautiful. Xenofiction speaks to me on a deeper level than anything else for some reason. Probably because as a child, and to this day I always used to personify and try to understand everything, including abstract concepts. It's why I also feel like an alien, so to speak.
This is kinda the fun part of being Buddhist. We believe that when we die, we reincarnate as something, whether it be a dog, cat, pig, bear, or even a tiny gnat. I wish I knew what it was like, but I believe that we are all one. Humans, animals, aliens, anything.
This is why I really much enjoy the whole "Humans are Space Orcs" line of fiction. It really pushes you to see yourself and everything that you as a human take for granted in your average human life, and re-frame it as something weird
The mention of inanimate objects reminded me of when my second grade class read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane- not so much bringing an alienated perspective, but still a unique experience.
I love scientific xenofiction which can often be found in the natural history of science section of libraries. It is becoming a growing genre of scientists writing stories from the perspective of the organisms they study, in a sort of way that is the literature version of a nature documentary. It is really good at bringing people to feel more empathetic toward threatened wildlife that often isn’t a charismatic as pandas or lions.
When I was in middle school, we were always told to write essays with the title "Aku Sebatang Pensel", which means "I am a Pencil" and the story would end with it being lost or used up. We could also write different versions like "I am a pair of Shoes" or "I am a Cupboard". Kinda funny thinking about it now, never realized that it was xenofiction
If you find this kind of stuff interesting I recommended the "Foreigner" series by "C. J. Cherryh", which is available on kindle and audible by the way. The setting is cool, boiled down to its most basic premise the aliens form pyramidal relationships while humans form spherical ones which means we think were making friends and they think were insane traitors, but I actually recommend it because at its heart its all about how aliens are alien and you can't view or interact with them like they're human. You have to get outside of your self and try to understand what it means to be an alien, at least as best you can, and the aliens have to do the same back to you for a relationship worth having to form. I found the questions it raised to be extremely helpful in my adult life for everything from understanding foreign cultures to talking to people from the other side of the political aisle.
Excellent series. Her “Chanur” series is also exceedingly good. She has a great ability to get inside the head of her aliens, to walk that fine line of completely different yet understandable that you have to tread to make your work readable. Tbh, I think most alien relations would work like those with the “Knnn” ….methane breathers who are totally incomprehensible, even to other methane breathers. They’re not hostile…..at least, no one “thinks” they are, they just “do what they do” without paying any attention to the other species around them, but ofc that wouldn’t work for story telling.
Yes do the bunny-video! :) Also there is an entire category of japanese light novels/manga/anime of these sort of things although mostly set in fantasy and most often not the hight of quality fiction, although there are also a few really good ones among them.
Can I just say how top-notch your content is, Tale Foundry?? Truly, there's never a dull moment with you. Your way with words and how they linger beyond my mind and into my psyche... They always seem so tantalizing. In short, this UA-cam Channel is just AMAZING
Dude your amazing I've recently ran into a roadblock with one of my first creations. No matter how many times I rewrite the story I can never seem to catch the perspective of the characters involved which ends up ruining the story as a whole. Watching this video made me realise that I'd been so blind to the reason this whole time. I've ordered the book and I'm looking forward to reading it and hopefully getting past this obstacle. Thank you
10:30 I also recall an experiment done regarding this - where participants were invited into a particular space for an unrelated study, and in conjunction with that, were brought to a separate location a few days later and asked to describe what they remember of the room they had been in. How the psychologists framed that question effectively determined how the participants answered. If they framed it "Can you describe the doctor's office?" they got stereotypical descriptions of a doctors office. If they framed it "Can you describe the lounge" they got stereotypical descriptions of a lounge. etc. We don't merely impose the symbolic process on our memory - if the memory in question is sufficiently neutral, the symbols can be made to dominate and rewrite our memory as well.
"Even better, you hear it called 'furry stuff,' as if that were a meaningful insult of some kind." Nice. I'm not a furry myself, but a number of folks I know are to some degree, and I've heard about even more, and as is common with "outcast" populations, they tend to be some of the coolest, kindest people you could meet. Some of the character designs they come up with are absolutely amazing, too, and those who get into the suit-making aspect deserve SO MUCH RESPECT for the skills and dedication they put into that! But yeah, I don't think "xenofiction" is just fun or interesting. I'd argue it's important and, at least to some degree, necessary. It's a huge help with both empathy and creativity - a somewhat literal way of "walking in someone else's shoes" and looking at things "from a different angle." Admittedly, there are times going certain directions with certain concepts can get unhealthy, too.... Sometimes I get a little annoyed when someone handles this sort of thing as JUST a reskin, where something non-human still has all the same perceptions, understandings, values, etc as a human (though sometimes that's just to bring the point of difference more clearly into focus). And it's a bit sad when people just plain reject anything outside of typical human experience as having any merit...
This is one of my favorites. I have no problem admitting I'm in my mid-30s and I just recently read 50 Warrior cats books, but they don't go too non-human with how their minds work. Always been a fan of flat land too. If I were any kind of decent writer, I'd want to do one involving one of humanity steps towards immortality. Before we hook up Johnny Depp's brain to a computer, we'll probably experiment a bit more with animals. What would an animal feel like as it awakens to sapience due to being connected to an AI? Or would it be the AI that is feeling it is connected to the animal? I wonder if it is humanity's duty to uplift animals so they may speak for themselves, or if we would be inflicting the curse of intelligence upon them.
My most favorite xenofiction is the Duncton Chronicles (by William Horwood). On the surface it is a simple story about moles. But like beneath the earth in which moles dwell, there is a lot more depth to it. There is war, politics, epic quests and even holy wars. Anyway, this series is one of my favorite book series next to LotR. It has inspired me to write my own Xenofiction stories that I look to one day publish. The themes are so universal; faith, love, hope…you forget they are moles half the time. It’s so gripping and intense, but so beautiful too. Every other animal books I’ve read since this series have just been good or okay. Watership Down remains a classic too, but I think DW went a lot further with the ideas and is pretty unique. Much more grand and vast, with so much depth. I think it defined the xenofiction ‘genre’ with how epic in scale it is. Most Xenofiction tend to be stand-alones (Duncton Wood is considered one, but the sequels complete it for me personally), never huge massive series (with the exception of Redwall), and I think we need more like it. Animal stories really have a lot of interesting concepts to explore in a grand fantasy setting. It’s a shame hardly anyone knows about it, and I believe it should be talked about a lot more. It’s so easily overlooked..I also haven’t read any other animal books as mature and dark as this series is. There is more than just gruesome violence in it. Kinda like Song of Ice and Fire levels of maturity and complexity. But it makes the themes of unity and faith shine all the brighter, I think. It also has a lot more emphasis on elements of fantasy, which is unique for its kind being a naturalistic mythic type of xenofiction, while others are mostly grounded in reality. Overall, I’m passionate for these books (like too passionate, I feel lol). I’d love to see DW and its series republished in new shiny editions someday. I would go crazy in the bookstore if I ever saw them on a shelf.
Oh, xenofiction is my JAM, glad to have a word for it now. As a kid I loved "animal books", I'd have to say my favorite series of this genre was Guardians of Ga'Hoole. It's about a world where humans went extinct some unknown years, possibly centuries, ago, and centers on owls, not at all in relation to humans anymore. They have vast mythologies and rituals and cultures. Our main group are orphans of several different owl species that are seeking the mythical Ga'Hoole tree to help them fight an organization that's been brain washing orphan owls with moon rituals to get them to mine magnets. Already that's crazy, but we're not even to the rich blacksmithing culture of the owls, the barn owl supremacist group, and the prequels which if I'm remembering correctly have this straight up shaped shifting owl creature. Makes me so sad that more people don't talk abt these books bc I could talk for sO LONG. Also I love authors who will take an aside from their story to describe how some inanimate object is feeling about something happening. I think Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams are the best examples I can think of right now, but it's a stylistic flair I LOVE. Like instead of saying it started raining, they go and describe how the storm clouds are feeling. Or like taking time to tell the tragic tale of a whale that just spawned into existence & is now hurtling at the ground. I especially love it when it's just something like a fuckin mattress or the desert itself or something that's just in the background Observing the story. Reading for me is all about putting myself in the body/head of something or someone else and experiencing a world from their point of view, so why not give me a unique point of view? That's why my favorite scifi books also are those that aren't told entirely by humans. Fuck humans when I could read about the perspective of a floating cloud of mist in a society where there's 3 genders and when they get down to hanky panky they float into each other and create one solid being. That's bonkers. Give me more of that.
Honestly a good many indie shows I have watched here are xenofiction, (mostly wolf animations for some reason, Wolf Song being perhaps my favourite). This is an underrated genre
I saw the dino and immediately thought of Raptor Red but I didn't for a moment think you'd mention it...and then you did! I was also going to ask, "Since you're a robot, isn't almost everything you read Xenofiction?" Then you addressed it yourself. Not sure if that makes me 0 for 2 or 2 for 2.
The best piece I have written so far is written from the perspective of a dog. It has a way of getting us to sympathize and even humanize animals and objects by expressing how little they know of their impact on us, instead of the other way around.
This made me think about one of my favorite things to read: the humans are space orcs writing prompts. I love reading about how imagined alien races might look at us from an outside perspective, making me think about human qualities you tend to forget or overlook. Sometimes it reminds me of how terrible humans can be, but also, about how special and crazy we are too. And I think that’s beautiful.
When you explained the definition I immediately thought “Hollow Knight”. Mostly because yeah they are not human heck the character you play “The Knight” isn’t really a bug either. It’s some thing else, sure it came from the Pale King which was a worm, but then shed it form to its smaller form that we know. The Knight never spoke a word yet it’s silence was it’s most tragic trait. I do recommend checking out the lore for the game but yeah, you don’t need a human characters to understand the world.
I remember reading both raptor red and the animorphs as a kid, they were some of my favourite books due to their alternative ways of viewing the world. Tobias was always my favourite character in animorphs with how his perspective changes as he becomes more hawk
One of my favorite xenofiction is The Ants by Bernard Werber. I remember reading it in 4th grade and I have re-read it at several points in my life when I needed a different perspective on life A constant conclusion of reading it though was that even the most open-minded human is probably quite a closeted close-minded person and quite possibly an idiot too, and that every single human is worse than them
ik youll never see this but i really appreciate how clear you speak. im autistic and always need captions on everything i watch but your videos. thank you for making everything so easy to understand :)
At first I kinda saw this video as weird with all the fiction that's going on that im not cultured with but as I push myself through the video it actually became interesting, you came as a youtuber that is weird in my perspective to something completely different to a point of some weird wisdom I didn't know existed. Thank you
Xenofiction seems like a really interesting concept that I haven't put much thought to despite being well into writing my first book. This kind of got me inspired to write a xenofication story about ghosts, that are kind of in the "background" from the new people who moved into their house (that maybe could be generations apart from each other too). The ghosts may not really have that much direct influence on the world, like cant move around objects on their own (more akin to real life when people wonder if their house is haunted). Maybe cant even turn visible to most people. But could have some special abilities related to who they were or how they died. This is just a concept where that I dont even know what the action and angle of the story would be yet.
So happy you covered Children of Time! It's one of my favs and doesn't get enough love imo. Personally speaking, I love when sci fi isn't afraid to explore something properly "alien", and CoT does a wonderful job of building a world that is - at once - unfamiliar and understandable.
Wow, I’ve never heard of this genre even though I’ve always loved reading books from non-human creature and objects perspectives. I thought this kind of fiction was just fantasy or sci-fi but thanks to this video, it’ll be easier for me to find more of the stories I love. I also appreciate this video because it’s encouraged me to write in this genre. Like you said, xenofiction only seems to be popular in media seen as being “for children” while all the popular “adult” stories are usually told from a human or human like fantasy creature (elves, fairies, witches etc) perspective. This made me feel that in order to create a good story that people would like, I would have to make the perspective human but now I know that this genre exists, and it’s got way more potential than I realised.
I’m honestly kind of surprised that Metamorphosis by Franz Khafka (I hope I’m spelling that right) wasn’t mentioned. That book (short story, really) is W I L D.
I just finished Watership Down and I have to say, it is definitely worth the read. The literature interpretation of the xenofictional genre has created a masterful tale. Sorry for the overly complex language, but as a writer myself I feel it is necessary to exert oneself in such a way it lines up with one's personality.
In highschool I did a little side project where I wrote a short comedy from the perspective of a toe, specifically a war in between the big toe and his four other "foot soldiers" fighting an alien like foot fungus. Part of me is glad to know I'm not a *complete* weirdo but the part is sad to hear I'm not as original as I thought.
THIS book. Is amazing, Children of Time was something I read recently and OH MY GOD. It's emotional, intriguing, and I love the story. Tht book is so cool and I'm glad one of my favoritve youtubers is covering it.
One thing I find insulin with is that Warriors should not be considered a children's book series... It has graphic depictions of death, birth and some pretty dark themes for a "children's book". I remember reading them as a kid and most of the stuff flew over my head but looking back on it now there very disturbing books.
I honestly never know what Xenofiction was called, but I’ve absolutely loved it ever since reading several books. Wings of Fire, Cloud Roads, and many others. I love non-human fiction
This video made me brainstorm an almost complete short story about the past 10 years of my life from the perspective of my car. That might be a bit silly, but we've been through a lot. I genuinely love my car and frequently personify it.
thankyou so much for this video. specifically going over the symbolic process since one of us conveys meaning to the rest of us without really using it to form the thoughts/meanings into words. and hence we kinda have to apply it ourselves to try and work out what null is actually meaning when they are trying to communicate. this is a tremendous help in understanding how they communicate and the functions behind it.
Xenofiction is something I really want to see used in mediums like video games a lot more along side films and books. What better way to combine the most immersive medium with sharing the point of view from a different creature. It's sadly way too rare to see this taken in any direction. Aside from a few anthro characters like spyro or sonic we almost never get to see the world from the point of view of none humans in games. It's really underused.
I loved the Alien levels in an Alien vs. Predator game I played once. I think you had a choice; you could play through a story with several levels as an Alien or as a Predator. I only played through the Alien levels. You could move along pipes and up walls, press a button to stab something with your tail, and did I mention moving along pipes and walls? *sigh* The movement mechanics were awesome! And you have no distance attack, nothing but your claws and tail, so the whole way the levels are played is nothing like how they would be played if you were in that exact same setting as a human character. No inventory. No clues. No weapons. No level ups. What you start the level with is all you have, and whether you survive is up to how cleverly you use them. Now that I think about it, there is only one thing any game developer need do to create the feeling of being immersed in an alien perspective: disable the inventory/equipment features. Humans are creatures of invention. Take away that ability, and we go right back to being the primates that we are. Any character without the ability to equip tools or save up resources is functionally living an animal's life. If any game developers are reading this, make more games like this! It would be tricky to do in a way that's not frustrating, but it would be worth it!
@@sarahvunkannon7336 That idea honestly sounds amazing. I can see it working for a brutal survival game where everything is out to kill you or eat you. No looting or crafting just pure simple survival, going to rivers to drink, hunting prey and hiding from predators. Though you would still need some kind of ending objective as just surviving isn't enough for most players. Perhaps some sort of end boss or place to get to?
@@ultgamercw6759 Hmm. If the character is a human, then I cannot see it working for a brutal survival game where you have to fight anything. Humans are terrible at fighting without tools. I can see it working for a game that is essentially a puzzle. Sneaking through hostile territory, perhaps, to make it to a safe zone. Nothing that would involve fighting. For an RPG that involves battle, the player character would need to be an animal that actually had offensive capability. Also, I'm unsure if this basic idea can hold for an entire game. The game I described above and one other with a similar premise were all broken up into levels. In the AVP game, each level corresponded to a different stage of the life cycle, so you didn't have to literally play the ENTIRE game with the same abilities. Your abilities at the start of each level were different. The other game I'm thinking of which was played this way had the same starting abilities for your character on every level, but your character was a shapeshifter that could change their abilities by making contact with the right animal species, so you also didn't have to play through that one with the same abilities the whole time. There is one major advantage to crafting/equipment systems: they drastically expand the possibilities for growth. Growth is fun, so this allows games to be longer. It would not be wise to make a game with drastically limited growth potential that was too long. A game where you literally have the same abilities the whole time, no shapeshifting or changes between levels or anything? That game had better be real short. The kind you can finish in an hour or less. A game that incorporated shapeshifting, powerups, life cycle changes, and any other mechanic that allowed your character to change abilities in some limited way would be longer, but not as long as a regular human-centered game. I think the AVP game and the other one I'm thinking of took a few hours to complete. Implementing this suggestion would mean making shorter games that definitely end. But honestly, those are the kinds of games I like. Give me a short game that ends but can be replayed over an indefinite MMO idlefest any day. (In case you're interested, the other game I was thinking of is The Visitor: Massacre at Camp Happy.)
Before you read this has nothing to do with the video but I need somewhere to vent and you seem like the right audience so go ahead and scroll if ya want. I won’t judge People say life is pain a lot, but I say if life had no pain you wouldn’t appreciate the good things about it. Pain makes you stronger and gives you a sense that life isn’t always great but when it is it’s amazing. If something happens nonstop you get used to it and eventually it becomes a normal thing, for example luck. if you won the lottery every time you buy a ticket it would become a normal experience, and it would not be that surprising.
You know, this reminds me of a book I still in fact own, called "The wild robot". It was a nice story about a washed up robot called "ROZZUM unit 7134", or just "Roz" that learns to adapt to the wild in a isolated island. Forming new animal friends by learning their language and helping them out with daily life including the harsh winter. Evening raising a duckling that lost his mother (if you want to know more about that maybe check audible if it's there, unless you can't it's totally fine). It was very enjoyable in many ways. Never got to read the sequel though.
"Nothing wrong with Warrior Cats, but I think that's how people see this stuff: 'stories for kids'" Excuse me, sir, but if you think Warriors is a children's story then you've CLEARLY never read one of the books.
That's the thing, as much as I love Warrior Cats they are very weird in that regard Yes, there are cruel, gore-y and even rape-y stories but all of them are kind of told in a very simple language and the authors often ignore the heavy nature of the subject As hard as it is for me to say, the fan projects are much better compared to canon books as they often overlook EXTREMELY important and dangerous details (ekhem Spottedleaf's Heart)
Watership down is my favorite book of all time. I grew up watching the show and read it once I got older, over and over again. I think that book and books like it are just beautiful in showing different interpretations of reality.
Get the audiobook we talked about in this video-Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky-for free with this link:
audible.com/talefoundry
One of my fave books tbh
I have to ask, and I'm looking for the truh. Everyone is different so I'm not assuming, however, do you, personally you, but also to everyone else who reads and does this, actually like your sponsor, or did they ask you and you said yeah for the $$?
Anyone else feel like Archie Sonic kinda ripped this concept?
OH FUCK UEAH I HAVE EBEN WEA TUNG NFKDKTOA LAJFLAK XH
ever heard of Rust and Humus? it's a good and weird book.
In a way, then, a main facet of xenofiction is to reject intuition, in the phenomenological sense. Instead of looking at a building and seeing that it is a building, in the sense that our experiences as humans have led us to understand them, it is to look at a building and to see its form in the most literal sense - a vast block of stone, angled with unnatural intent. From that, then, to extrapolate a new perspective on the building - not informed by the human experience, but by the lack thereof.
Oh man, that clicked it for me.
That's an excellent description. Some societal sciences, like anthropology traditionally strive to observe humanity from a very similar angle. Although social sciences agree that one cannot truly escape the viewpoint of a human, as, well, everyone's human from a human culture!
Ever saw that vid of a bear cub on a hammock?
The mom watching with the other cub beside her?
“You stay RIGHT THERE. He got up there, he gets himself out! (I hope he can…)”
XD
You hit the nail on the head
Impressive sandcastles, no? :3
I think my favourite xenofiction trope is that of "humans are cthulu" in which human characters DO show up in the story, but from the POV of the main cast we see these unknowable abominations shaping the land in unnatural ways to further imperceptible goals.
That’s one of my favourite things about Watership Down, especially the novel. Hazel being taken back to the down in a car at the end is seen the same way you’d see your mate literally being given a ride home by an Elder One.
@@RainWelsh nyarlathotep in his void powered Ford truck: "Get in loser!"
There is a whole genre of stories like that on the internet. They are known as 'humans are space orks'. They do feel rather skewed in the direction of 'humanity f.yea!' for my liking though...
@@krinkrin5982 Honestly I find them silly because they always try to end in this weird, hopeful tone with everything humanity does.
And it also tries so hard to act like humans are the only insane, sapient race in the known universe. As if there somehow isn't any other race that can top us which there more than likely is.
@@krinkrin5982 eh, "humans are space orcs" feels different. In those, the aliens are typically more advanced than we are and have a basic concept of things like civilisation, society, engineering etc. In "humans are cthulu" stories, the POV characters have zero understanding of how humans tick, how they do anything they do and what those things are meant to achieve. They just see vast operations on a seemingly impossible scale for an unknowable purpose that they cannot possibly perceive.
One of my favorite "weirdest" stories is when Japanese stories were first collected by a group of American writers and published in the states. The story was the complete life of a card board box.
Youkai born of inanimate objects are some of my favorite youkai, it’s both melancholic and hopeful, it has so much potential for story telling.
That would actually be a very interesting story. Made in a factory by automated robots. Hand folded into a box. Stuffed full of useless human crap. Thrown in the garage and gets moldy and wet. Insects start eating it. Owner throws it out. Incinerated at a landfill. The end.
Sounds, interesting.
I'm fairly certain that theres a manga about a microwave helping his bestfriend who has a boyfriend
I actually thought of this exactly watching the video! Japanese folklore is full of that kind of thing.
I once wrote a short story on r/writingprompts about a god that "died" centuries ago and then "woke up" in a modern apartment bedroom with a guy sitting at a computer.
MAN it was tricky describing everything in that room through the eyes of a god that had slept through the industrial revolution.
How do you describe the cords hooked up to your monitor? Wires? Cord? Weird, smooth, shiny ropes? How do you describe a MONITOR for that matter? What about those tiny, synthetic, colorful people on the shelf? And what's this misshapen glass ball on the ceiling radiating light brighter than any candle?
It was challenging and fun. Admittedly, a character that was familiar with humanity in general was a bit of a shortcut.
I'm interested, could you send a link to that post?
@@Galvatron102 Sure! www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/4e3760/comment/d1xnizw/?context=3
Holy fuck, trying to describe any single room in my house from the perspective of something that has no idea what anything is would put them into a fit of overstimulation Xd
Not actually but still, that sounds like a lot of work...
I mean it's relativity easy to relate things now to things in the past. You'd have to consider just what era and culture the god was from.
Small question, would it be alright if I could take that general concept and run with it into a novel?
The biggest uphill battle for Xenofiction is that there are too many stories that focuses on humans. Thankfully, Xenofiction proved that not everything needs to be human or anthropomorphic to be treated as a worthwhile story at least. If stories are an allegory for life, then why not escape the realm of human, society, or politics and focus on different species that all have their stories to tell?
I'd argue it's also one of it's greatest strengths. Looking at human life and culture through the lense of a fictional "other", is a great exercise in defamiliarization and besides the obvious angle of comedy or fascination, it's a great tool for satire. "Humans are space orcs" is both, a great example of humancentric xenfiction and a study in how xenofiction can be ruined, if you fail to repeatedly defamiliarize yourself from humans and get stuck on a specific lense as a result.
So true dude
@@LeSpeederus but there's also a way to do that without having any humans at all. one of the sub points to xenofiction is re-contextualizing something typically human into something for a xeno instead. like the weird aliens webcomic for an extreme form of this as a parody. the end goal of this is "hey this non human character is totally relatable"
the most common story for this though is the topic of interracial relations. but got to be careful and if done right the audience is forced to stay and watch from a completely outsider perspective, discarding any preconceived racial biases as none of the characters are human and therefore cant be pinned to any particular human race. done wrong of course and you get a story about offensive racial caricatures.
as for having any humans involved usually leads to either the xenos taking a backseat to more human focused problems or the xenos end up as just racial caricatures. very rarely do the humans take a backseat in stories they're involved in though when we're lucky we do see the humans themselves as the source of the problem in a given story but again the xenos just come off as more of a racial caricature than something of their own.
an interesting thing ive seen in a few works that could make an exception is for humans to act as a precursor race either as imperfect gods or some ancient ancestor for the xenos in some distant future
Understanding what other beings see hear and think is a good way to expand your view of the world outside of the mess of a human society we live in at the moment. It’s also fun to understand why mice treat cheese like treasure haha. Just a funny though
@@gusty7153 depends. I made a race of myconid cowboys who rode giant spiders in a vast underground cavern and had a culture based heavily on the wild west. There's a heavy focus on duels at a time with similar connotations to high noon between sporeslingers, eyeless lizard cattle kept by ranchers, gritty heroes who don't mesh too well with the law but save the townsfolk out of principal. They all talk with super heavy southern accents. They have native mind flayers who are commonly attacked, often without reason, because they are taking up property the myconids want, and border skirmishes are a rising issue. This is technically a caricature of the south. I tried to change elements to make it a more interesting place to be, and so that I could explore the way that these people act.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that fictional cultures often draw on real world inspirations and it can result in author's only implementing the part they think is cool, which leads to a surface level similarity to the real world culture that could be seen as disrespectful.
I once read a short novel on the web, called “The Things” which was an adaptation of John Carpenters “The Thing” from the Things’ perspective. We were the “strange aliens” in the story, while the Thing saw itself as a kind of missionary, trying to promote everything it met to become a part of itself. I can’t remember the authors name, but it was a total mind-f***. Definitely recommend searching for it if you like this kind of fiction.
Edit: The authors name is Peter Watts.
That sounds like a good novel
I remember finding it really cool when I saw it online! How this alien shapeshifting being found *humanity* to be a fucked up existence because while its own cells were "alive" in a sense (More than just regulating itself to stay alive I mean, as in like how its own _blood_ will shapeshift to flee from a hot wire to preserve itself), humanity's was dumb, or dead in comparison. I think it even mentioned every other alien it encountered functioning similarly to itself, so humanity really is an abomination from that perspective it has.
So good! They way the story described the awful feeling of separateness wearing a human causes the Thing still haunts me.
Peter Watts! I knew he made that, but I had no idea it was actually based on “The Thing.” Jesus, his other books “blindsight” and “echopraxia” are some of the best science fiction I could ever have asked for. It’s absolutely wonderful and I cannot recommend it enough.
By the author of Blindsight no less, Peter Watts is truly incredible.
I want to recommend a web fiction titled "War queen". This story begins as "Starship troopers", but in reverse. The Queen of intelligent alien bugs fights human invaders. And it gets much more interesting as the story goes forward (I don't want to spoil)
Hmm
As an star-craft player, I heard that one of the reasons why the Queen of blades is the protagonist of SC2, and the face of Zerg is because it would be harder for the audiences to understand the perspective of a regular Zerg life form.
Herder than your normal Terran like Jimmy or Mat.
But I have been wondering how a differently would regular buggers view the events of those games. (Outside of theories, and few lines of dialogue from the game)
Perhaps this story that you suggested might widen my scope.
Who wrote the book. I can only find thing not related on the internet to what your talking about.
@@foxmutant1295 try searching war queen sci-fi book.
I found something which might be it.
@@foxmutant1295 it is on RoyalRoad
@@Alex5000148 thank you!!!!
My favorite example of Xenofiction is the _Wings Of Fire_ series by Tui T. Sutherland. Told from the perspective of Dragons, while it is still a children's series, it is _fantastically_ dark from the get-go; the very first scene is a prologue depicting a queen crushing a living egg then SHREDDING ANOTHER DRAGON'S WINGS and casting them off a cliff. The first arc of the series alone covers themes of Found Family, Assassination, Destiny, Bloodsport, Abuse of Power, Torturous experimentation, Self-identity among social pressures, and the immorality of war, among others. and there's two other arcs Tui has written, as well as some other stories in the setting. I Highly reccomend you read the _Wings Of Fire_ series, it's wonderful fiction and shows quite well the differences between Humanity and Sentience.
Great books but too violent for me
It's been so long since I've read these, but these were a long-lasting special interest of mine and they still hold a special place in my heart.
@@mermer3572 Then maybe you'd like her most recent books. Where'd you leave off?
@@blanekaboom Completely understandable, given the subject matter of certain scenes.
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606 maybe somewhere into the second book of the third arc with the new continent? I was following the books as they were coming out up until then, and I kind of grew away from the series.
Sidenote, haven't heard that xenofiction gets misunderstood as children's genre. I thought most people aren't into it because they find it to be too weird to try to write story from inhuman perspective :O
In my opinion most remember xenofiction in there childhood, but dont realize that there is any in the adult side. They just think it stops at "Young Adult" or "teenage" in the library. Some of the better books I have read are in that section.
Another reason might be that it's the opposite of "write what you know".
Yeah, same. I see xenofiction as other form of surrealism/contemporary genre.
So, knowing that people sees it as "Children Genre" is freakin weird.
Much of children's fiction with animals isn't even true xenofiction, characters act pretty much human.
@@jmoneyjoshkinion4576 similar to how animation is "children's media" even when it really isn't
This. So much this. This is my favorite fiction. It's not just "furry stuff". It's the shift in perspective, trying to experience a different self, to see what I can learn. I got into it reading science fiction. I loved the aliens, and I always craved more from their perspective. It's exploratory.
You should read Pale, by Wildbow! It's a modern fantasy story, and while most of it *is* from human perspectives, understanding the perspectives of others (and Others) is a major theme and there is some incredible xenofiction later on. It hasn't ever been the primary focus of his work but he probably writes some of the best xenofiction I've come across.
@@cacophony7941 Thanks, I'll check it out!
@@cacophony7941 huh, didn't expect to hear *that* name here
Literally anyone who assumes something is "furry" because it has anthros or animals in general are ignorants. Xenofiction is amazing, and anyone who refuses to read them because "furry" should honestly touch some grass. Yeah, I'm salty, but as an anthro fan, it saddens me that people will just brush cool things as "furry".
@@gone9820 Very true!
And the hate is always so strange to me. Like, did you not watch television as a kid? Watch nearly any Disney movie? Did you just never read, like, a lot of fantasy and sci-fi fiction out there? It's so arbitrary. D&D kobolds are furries now? Why is ANY of this a bad thing?? I just don't understand.
One of my favorite genres is "Humans are space orcs" or HFY,(Humanity, f*** yeah) where by looking at humans and humanity through an alien or demi-human lens, these stories portray how humans actually have some cool stuff going on with us, we aren't just vanilla town normie underdogs with nothing special. Our saliva has millions of bacteria no alien would be genetically prepared for, our rocky, dense world makes our musculature, odds are, stronger, than most alien species, who would develop more easily on lighter, less harsh worlds. Our innate stamina even in harsh heat is something to be commended, and the fact that our brain can regenerate any tissue at all from traumatic injury is frightening and awe-inspiring. Just because we don't see it as anything special, doesn't mean we aren't.
Yeah ive heard the human bite is sometimes regarded as the second most dangerous bite (in terms of infection potential) in the world, idk if its true but we'd probably be pretty dangerous to an alien species
This is less of a genre and more of a meme. I mean, I guess you could technically jam all alien encounter stories into it from Independence Day and Battle L.A. to almost every episode of Star Trek, but it's just a feature that people hyper focused on. And it really only works if you assume all life around the universe evolves on "easy mode" or something. But that just makes it "humans are special".
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606 It's still not a genre. It's a theme across several genres. Sci-fi, fantasy, or even general fiction. Heck, it's even in poetry. Stories of something reacting to humans being strange from their perspective isn't substantial enough to be its own genre. It would be like hyper fixating on stories where a car stops working.
@@muntu1221 It's not just them reacting; it's a theme, yes, but hundreds of internet authors have made thousands of stories following it. It's not coincidence, there are online communities about it.
@@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606 I'm not saying it's not a theme with a lot of popularity or value, but it's just not its own genre. It's an element found across genres. There are communities dedicated to unconventional ways to get superpowers, but that doesn't make "getting your power from a seemingly arbitrary source that redefines society" its own genre.
I cannot stress how amazing as an artist it was to hear about the eye and tree example. As when I began learning art my first teacher said to become an artist we as students had to break the mental "symbols" we had for objects and instead draw exactly what we see.
Sounds a lot like the book "drawing with the right side of the brain". It's a great book, probably the one art book that taught me the most about drawing. The teachings about right and left side of the brain might be a bit on the woowoo scale of things. But it did open my mind up to prioritizing drawing what I see over what I label the things as. Reducing things to meaningless shapes to avoid being lead astray by preconceptions.
ooh this is how it's called, I never really questioned such stories
I made a story about a spider myself because I wanted to formulate it so that it wasn't obvious it's about spiders
and if someone with a spiderphobia would read it they could understand the little critters, because some people are simply put off by their appearance
and some just see them as non-animals deserving death with I find quite cruel
so my story would frame them as a mysterious kind of humanoids trying to survive between the gaints, the day-to-day life where they "have no time for family" but still goes out to collect food for their little siblings, it ended up to be a little video with no talking but I don't really make videos haha
anyway, I tend to forget that really not a lot of people ever care for non-human stories even when I point it out myself
Finally a fellow spider enjoyer. I too find it very cruel that most of us just want to kill every spider we see.
Based and spiderpilled
agreed!
I think it's worth noting that another interesting aspect of xenofiction is that by removing the human perspective, the audience can approach the story with a more open mind, projecting less of their own human experience onto inhuman beings.
As many people might do as they might self insert themselves into the story but an inhuman mind as you said makes that difficult.
Read a friend’s short story from the pov of an elderly man. “He watched the young man pull out his fruit branded rectangle and poke at it with his thumbs” I’ve told so many people about that specific sentence because it gave me such a good laugh and gives such a good example, putting the reader in the mind of a man who doesn’t understand what an iPhone is.
Degenerate.
Generally, when it comes to sci fi and fantasy, my favorite characters tend to be the furthest from being human. I feel like when such a character is written the writer is better able to strip away tropes and really get into what makes them tick.
YES- I’ve never heard someone describe it better. In fact, personally, I find it easier to write characters who are least similar to myself. While I don’t struggle with tropes and stereotypes too much, I definitely struggle with distancing a character from myself. Making them unique. I have a handful of female characters, and (I myself being female) several of them feel like the same person, with slightly different personalities. For example, I’ve got three characters who are rude and antagonistic- not villains by any means, but think kind of ‘mean girls.’ However, one is rude and defensive, like she’s got something to prove. She can also be straight up malicious.
The second one isn’t malicious, she’s just having a good time and tries to push people’s buttons.
The third is more of an ‘I’m better than you,’ but with the power to back it up.
Of course they ARE all unique and distinct, with their own style and ‘thing.’ However, as the author, I feel like their personalities are sort of rebranded versions of the same one.
HOWEVER, all of my male characters feel completely unique and distinct. I relate to them less, they’re more distant from myself, so I have less tendency to make them similar. I don’t know.
But then the *inhuman* characters- I’ve got a skeleton that can’t talk -they feel so unique and interesting.
It’s weird.
@@abreebee so your human female characters are similar in your mind, but the "others" feel different. Could it be that because you have to think from an alien perspective you are able to think differently as a character?
@@jmoneyjoshkinion4576 may/could be..... 😶
@@jmoneyjoshkinion4576 that could very well be
Any scifi stories with non human protagonists that you could recommend me?
Warrior cats being children's media is funny to me, as someone who read it as a kid and still thinks about it today. There's so much needlessly mature stuff in it. Me at 8 years old reading about cats getting disemboweled and underage/adult relationships:
Yeah it’s technically “for children” but it really doesn’t seem like it’s written for children.
I'm 14 and reading it for the first time, so much cat war, there's no way that it is "for children". I feel like it's for people who can handle large emotions and mild descriptions of things.
Wdym underage/adult relationships?
Mmmmm yes *warrior* cats, the most child friendly book series. Have your children enjoy the scent of blood via reading words!!
There is a huge dissonance between what is normally considered "suitable for children" in books compared to visual media.
Countless childrens' books, and/or books studied by schoolchildren would unambiguously be at least R/16 rated if they were replicated realistically and verbatim in their film adaptations, but were toned down to G/U or PG.
For a xenofiction example, "The Mouse and His Child" comes to mind. Imagine Watership Down crossed with Toy Story, but almost every character (including the protagonists) is amoral or sadistic. The (G/U-rated) animated adaptation massively toned down the amount and detail of the violence (no graphic detail of brains being penetrated by talons), and removed most of the bloodlust and moral apathy/ambiguity (the mouse doesn't join a battle and start killing shrews just for the hell of it).
I studied "I know why the caged bird sings" in school (I was 15 at the time, iirc). It's Maya Angelou's autobiography, which includes descriptions of how she was raped as a child. It wouldn't even be _legal_ to portray it visually in many countries, even as a cartoon, let alone considered suitable for non-adults.
If I may ask, would All Tomorrows count as a form of Xenofiction? If I could also ask as well if you have heard of All Tomorrows? This e book would be an interesting video to cover one day if you hadn't read it.
I'd consider it so, since it's told from the perspective of the alien author.
@@TGFlashera yeah, I think so too.... Since the author themselves NEVER refer/describes themselves as being "human" ..... 😶
I was just thinking of All Tomorrows! Yeah, I think so
it is read from the point of view of an alien reporter. so maybe.
I think so, but ‘speculative fiction’ would probably be a more accurate description. On that topic, that would make for a great video!
If stories about objects count as xenofiction, one of my favorites is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. It's the story of a toy china rabbit named Edward Tulane who is owned by a little girl but then gets lost while her family is moving away. The rabbit makes its way through the world, coming under the ownership of one person after another. The interesting thing is it's told from the rabbit's perspective. You see what he experiences through his eyes. Of course, he's a toy. He never moves and he never speaks, but he can think and he can feel. At first he's self-conscious and a bit narcissistic and so he never cares for the girl who owned him, only about how he looks and how perfect he seems to himself. But after he gets lost, he encounters new people and through them he learns what it is to love and to be loved. If you can, look it up and read it if you get the chance.
I do believe I’ve read that one.
This reminds me of a favourite video game of mine titled "Golden Treasure the Great green". In it, you play as a dragon (draak as your kin calls themselves) from hatchling to adulthood. Your goals in it are simple: Survive, Become wise and rich (both in material and experience), and try to answer a question: What makes the No-tails (humans), broken custodians from Above, abandoned creations of the Others formidable against the Draak-kin, prodigal children of Earth and Sun, rightful rulers above all goodbeasts?
Because humans' most distinquishing quality is skill in finding new ways of killing eachother and others
Can you answer in that manner in the game? XD
@@seekervaltriz9447 Nope. In game, you know they can slay your kind, but not the "how".
@@garberasandor9699
Fuck
@@garberasandor9699 those that have seen the "how" have experienced it first hand, and thus can not tell the living.
@@jmoneyjoshkinion4576 Exactly.
My first xenofiction I read was a whole story about fridge.
It tells story from a little fridge of newlywed couple. Actually the story more focused on the newlywed shenanigans and their cute interaction, the fridge is there just as "the observer".
And I'm off to rewatch chairem anime.
oh is it that story where they have a whole world in their antique fridge?
That’s so cute aw
One of my favorite stories in this genera is "Raptor Red" by Dr. Robert Bakker. It is a story of the Early Cretaceous of Western North America through the eyes of a female utahraptor and is one of my favorite fictions because of how under-represented that period of Earth's history is compared to the Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous Periods. If you haven't read it please do so because it is a more realistic Land Before Time story. So thank you for mentioning it in your video. Also for those who don't know, Dr. Bakker is one of the foremost minds in paleontology who heavily pushed the Dinosaur Renaissance which lead to a greater understanding of how bird-like non-avian dinosaurs were and changed our view from the likes of Fantasia to Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park still isn't that accurate, but it's kinda the point anyways
@@notoriousgoblin83 Jurassic Park was made nearly 30 years ago. Obviously new discoveries since then would change a few things.
My absolute favorite fun fact about dinosaurs comes from the introduction in that book (not sure if it was a special edition or what): The guy who was helping with the first Jurassic Park movie as the dino expert was/is friends with Dr. Bakker, and had called to complain about the velociraptors and how no raptor found up to that point matched Spielberg's vision. Not long after that phone call, Dr. Bakker got to call him back and say "I found Spielberg's raptor" during the excavation of the first utahraptor.
Side note: that book is the reason I'm still so fascinated with the study of dinosaurs, I'm not the kind of person to study it myself, but I absolutely love following it and learning more about dinosaurs!
@@DemitriVladMaximov Actually Jurassic Park was considered inaccurate in it's day. Take the famous example of the velociraptors: even back then it was known that the actual velociraptor was small and that it didn't have the feet claw. I believe the little dino with the frill that spat poison was known to be inaccurate at the time too. Add to that the later movies in the franchise that continued with old inaccuracies even though new discoveries had been made in time to be put into the movies. It's completely fair and reasonable to point out the inaccuracies of the Jurassic Park franchise, if nothing else it helps to spread more accurate knowledge and to point out how scientific fields adapt to new evidence
@@baskawilki1975 The whole velociraptor issue was from the book where the marketing head thought the name of the actual dinosaur in the novel (Deinonychus) wasn't as impressive as Velociraptor and so changed it to something that sounded cooler. In reality yes velociraptor doesn't fit the size of the animal in the book, much less the one in the movie. As for the movie, when dealing with practical special effects, the animal was increased in size because of the suits used for the get-up were being worn by human beings and so yes the animal was afterwards completely wrong for the name. But, absolutely velociraptor had the curved toe-claw the same as Deinonychus, Utahraptor, Dakotaraptor, and Bambiraptor. It is a feature that goes all the way back to Archeopteryx.
As for the Dilophosaurus, remember these dinosaurs are all hybrids so possibly frilled lizard DNA got into the mix just like African clawed frog DNA which allowed for breeding of what were supposed to be all female animals. The other bit from the book, which was not meant to be a complete accuracy but instead speculation, was that some things just don't fossilize and as such behaviors and adaptations not preserved in bone were completely unexpected. The toxic spit of Dilophosaurus and the venomous bite of Procompsognathus were examples of what the limits of the science of paleontology can reveal solely based on skeletal material.
And understand you are trying to justify berating the accuracies of Jurassic Park with a paleontologist. I know them coming and going and I am well aware of how much we have learned about dinosaurs that completely upended a lot of what we though was true when Jurassic Park was released. I also was a kid when it came out and know well how we thought of dinosaurs going from the 80s and into the 90s. So I will defend the movie and the book in how important a stepping stone they were in our understanding of the nature of the non-avian dinosaurs.
Oh my goodness, thank you. Almost every story I do tries to re-examine how we experience the world, writing stories from the perspective of something other than a human body... and human mind. My absolute best story is one that is critical of the nature of humanity itself, pointing out the fundamental flaws in our minds that cause us to hurt one another. And this examination is done through the eyes of something other than human... because it can only be done by something other than human. Again, the flaw in our minds called Ego prevents us from truly being critical of our own nature.
That sounds fucking neat! Questioning human nature and morality are my favourite themes!
Note that the inhuman perspective in that story shares something quite fundamental with the human perspective: the moral position that hurting others is bad, a _flaw._
Some of my favorite xenofiction hinges on abandoning common human moral precepts in favor of others, just as logically defensible. For example, one could write from the perspective of an alien intelligence that truly loves humanity, and naturally is very much in favor of human beings hurting, harming and killing each other, for at least four reasons that I can think of (not that it actually spells out its reasons-- it considers them _too obvious_ to explain).
Degenerate.
The wife's story is a wonderful piece of Zeno fiction, it's a werewolf story told from the pov of a wolf
What's the name?
@@theluminousone5883 I think he just said it. “The wife’s story”
@@トーキ-g8v thx
Yeah like Imagine how a wolf will react to something that looks like him but it's humanoid, I'd be confused
Yeah like Imagine how a wolf will react to something that looks like him but it's humanoid, I'd be confused
I adore this subject. Analyzing humanity through the eyes of non humans. My favorite sub set of xenofiction I love that the internet has embraced is "humanity are space Orcs/Earth is space Australia", which I think is fantastically captured in the "Damned" trilogy by Alan Dean Foster
Children of Time is hands down a sci fi classic already, you should really read it
Already going through the audiobook. I do sometimes think of the human woman they captured and her perspective. Like how she would try talking but didn't recognize it as speech. Then took her no longer making noises as a sign of satisfaction with her captivity.
Oh hell yeah, Children of Time is great.
So good at making me sad, in fact, that I couldn't finish it. Couldn't bear to see anything bad happen to the funny spiderfriends.
The Bees by Laline Paull has got to be one of my favorite xenofictions out there right now because it caught me so off guard the way you describe it here. It painted a bee hive as though it’s a fantastical ivory and gold palace of languages made of dance and inherited memory with complex societal structures and it felt completely alien. Super cool book and I’m glad I finally have a name for this kind of fiction now thanks to this video
One of the most important written works in this category is Animal Farm. No one can say thats a child’s story.
It's a great book, and certainly not for children, but it's so clearly an allegorical story about human collectivism and totalitarianism that it hardly counts as xenofiction. The animals think, talk and act like human beings, playing out a human tragedy.
I don't think it really counts. The pigs are literally just a representation of communist Russians and besides some changes here and there (how they eat food like animals and are caged on a farm like animals) they are basically just humans in animal bodies
I mean, at the very end of the story the pigs are wearing clothes, watching tv and smoking cigarettes (to show how they are exactly the same as humans-who represent Nazis) so reducing it to xenifiction is kind of rejecting the whole premise behind the story because those pigs are NOT farm animals (or your friend metaphorically), they are as cruel and tyrant as humans
Anatomy of a Soldier is a good piece of modern xenofiction. Written by an veteran of the War in Afghanistan, it tells a story from the perspective of 45 inanimate objects, ranging from a tourniquet (that’s actually the first one) to a helmet to a prosthetic.
I spent much of my youth writing pokemon fan fiction, I never did full stories from the creature's perspective, but I always put in a few chapters where I shifted the perspective to them. You have this seemingly all powerful creatures that just obey their trainers, it makes you wonder why? From the outside it seems theres nothing to gain, and yet it is constantly said that trainers and pokemon together make the strongest of pairings.
i grew up reading this one book from the view of a pet cat. one eye could see the living, the other cat's eye could see the dead. it was neat.
OMG WHATS THE NAME??
Holy heck, that DOES sound neat! I love the idea of animals being able to see ghosts, and that sounds like a really cool spin on it! What's the title?
Yes, the title and author PLEASE!
Name?
Schrödinger ahh cat
as a child who’s whole life so far has been reading and watching stuff like “Wings of Fire” a story from the point of view of well, dragons! and having been into “Warrior cats” i can say it’s uh.. not really for children, i’ve always liked to put my mind into another beings, almost everything i have an interest in is non-human story’s, “Hollowknight” is one of them, a game where all the characters are bug like, “Bugsnax” is another one, but it is more human like, i’ve just always liked things that aren’t human, or are human like, but still very different, i prefer to distance myself from humanity as a whole, so of course story’s like this are something i love.
I deeply appreciate this. My first story I ever wrote to completion was something of a rip off of Redwall using animals in a medieval setting. I’ve wanted to work seriously on a serious story, but there’s certainly a stigma to doing such. Just look at how Sonic fan characters are typically treated.
Tbf I don't think anyone who's actually read anything from Jacque could ever meaningfully compare his work to deviant art fan fiction of sonic lol
There’s a King Arthur story I read a while back where Merlin turns a young Arthur (named wart until he comes of age) into multiple animals in the castle grounds, to teach him about other ways of living and understanding the world around him, it’s pretty fun and interesting
Sword in the Stone's film novel source?
@@sandradermark8463The Once and Future King
I have aligned my eyes with millions of tiny flashing lights on a flat rectangular surface to transfer special meanings and concepts to my brain.
A nice example is the beginning from Spiderlight, in there, we see the POV of the giant spiders that live in the forest, when suddenly a troupe of humans just comes and commit genocide on the spiders, the spiders rush to protect their queen, but this “monsters” are just too much, their weapons cleave and maim them, they wield the elements of nature itself against them, and a bright light that scorches them, like if it was intelligent, and hellbent on destroying them. The spiders aren’t just angry. They’re afraid.
Thanks for the recommendations. I grew up with "Animorphs," enjoyed "Dragon's Egg," read "Warriors" a little while ago. Will look into the other books you mentioned.
Now for my more "teenage" and up recommendations; (part human part "other") "Xenocide" and "Children of the Mind" in the "Ender's Game" series by Orson Scott Card, Isaac Asimov's Robots series, Timothy Zahn's Conquerors' series, and the Dragon Back Chronicles, and finally by H. Beam Piper's the "Fuzzy" series (3 total and harder to find). I have many others but these are my favorites.
Personally, my favorite example of Xenofiction would be the Entities from Worm by author John C. "Wildbow" McCrae; gargantuan, near-incomprehensibly massive crystalline colonial lifeforms (they're big enough that objects that are described as the size of cities, mountains, and even whole continents are but mere specks of dust in comparison to a full-sized Entity) who have reached a point of hyper-advancement that they'd be a match for beings such as the Timelords from Docter Who or even (arguably) the Xeelee from the Xeelee Sequence.
In the Entities perspective, conflict defines EVERYTHING; from simple communication, to trading, to even their method of reproduction (that last one involves blowing up more planets than there are atoms in our entire universe across a vast, practically infinite multiverse).
In the story of Worm proper, the Entities shed parts of themselves (called Shards) so that they grant beings outside their species fantastical powers to observe how they (in-story, humans) use them as experimental subjects, usually this is during battles between superpowered people that take place for much of the story.
Absolutely agree. The interlude from the Warrior's perspective is incredible. Have you kept up with his newer stories? Pale has some amazing xenofiction once you're a good way in, and is also just incredible in general.
@@cacophony7941 you could go check Utriusque Cosmi by Robert Charles Wilson, here you would have some good match for time lords
My favorite kind of Xenofiction is the very rare Mythical-creatures-rule-the-world-&-humans-either-don't-exist-or-just-scuttle-in-the-background variant
It's an AMAZING twist on the fantasy genre, yet the only examples of it I've seen are My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic & the Wings of Fire books
Honestly, the narration of Children of time on audible was one of the best things I've heard, and why my youtube algorithm is still giving me things related to children of time after two years.
I love stories like this. I just never knew they had their own named classification.
When you're autistic, everything can feel alien. In fact, I tend to shy away from stories centered wholly around human beings, hence my reflexive disdain for Slice of Life, historical fiction, human drama, and most sitcoms. I don't really identify with people, especially in everyday scenarios. Those scenarios, though they might seem banal and typical to the neurotypical, are like an alien world in their own right to me. It's a world I'm less a part of and more one that I observe from a distance. Any conclusions I come to about your human world are those I had to essentially arrive at based on my own observations. (And if I'm being frank, I'm not terribly impressed with you all. In fact, you all suck and I want as little to do with you as possible.)
Xenofiction, however, tends to have less presumptions about what the reader might see as normal. It builds everything from the ground up, and when it does, I am better able to understand the culture because of that explicit explanation. A lot of my writing reflects this as well, as I prefer fantastical worlds built on immense amounts of worldbuilding which I construct from narrative bedrock. These cultures _could_ be our far future, or even a distant past, but even when they explicitly are, it's irrelevant. Even the "human" characters are so far removed from us that they might as well not be human at all. It's almost less about humans per se and more about sapience itself. Purpose, anxiety, fear, pride, hope, and a host of other matters that appear to affect (and oftentimes afflict) all manner of human subsets are my tools.
This is beautiful and I honestly feel the same way, just never realized it. I love creating characters that shift from human to nonhuman.
I kinda agree. Always thought humanoid races were boring. It's why I am drawn to fantasy races that are farther removed. I would rather play a slime, Golem, Nopon(from xenoblade. Love the little lads.), Ent, Kraken, Spider, Bio-android(from DBZ. If you couldn't tell, I preferred his imperfect form over his perfect one, but I still like him being a bug monster dude rather that just a dude), or skeleton than a Human, Saiyan, Elf, or Ork. I'm also autistic, but I'm high functioning so it doesn't effect much beyond social cues basically not existing. I like the crazy stuff I don't understand, and I've built up a general understanding of how the characters act and how I would act of I was there. I get happy when the main character resolves a conflict with their dad, because I get happy when I manage to clear up confusion that got people angry. It's hard to describe well.
Yeah, I’m also autistic. Sometimes I just want to get away from the difficulties of understanding my own species. I know the feeling.
Fellow autist here - absolutely agree on all of your points. Always vastly preferred stories that focus on or have a significant presence of distinctly non-human (bootleg humans like elves and dwarves don't count) characters. For whatever reason, I'm able to care about and be interested in them far more, a big part of which is likely, as you mentioned, the lack of normality presumptions.
Wait it’s “normal” to somewhat “separate?” From other people??
Im autistic and Ive wondered about that??
While you were describing xenofiction my first thought was “I wonder if he’ll bring up Children of Time”. It and it’s sequel are easily my favorite examples of xenofiction and I cannot recommend them enough
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is one of the saddest stories I've ever read
whats its about?
@@nekkusu9579 a smart house
that sure is a way to summarize it
Try "Flying Dutchman" by Ward Moore.
@@Gloomdrake a suicidal one
I watched this video a while back, probably only weeks after release. And you literally gave me my favourite book series, but not just that, my favourite author. The Children of Time trilogy was absolutely amazing, and after I finished it I needed more from Adrian Tchaikovsky and read his The Final Architecture trilogy, which was also fantastic sci-fi.
For this I sincerely thank you, Tale Foundry.
I know you guys mostly refer to written works but I think things like “Brave Little Toaster” or perhaps “Brother Bear” can be good examples of this
i wanna read the toaster one, it seems funny
@@expheriousedits3204
I'm not sure if this is a joke but... it's really not. "Brave Little Toaster" is about mortality and depression. The cute name and animation style is supposed to be ironic.
@@expheriousedits3204 toaster is actually a movie last I saw but I watched them when I was younger. it gives you the perspective of inanimate objects and sometimes animals
Toy story para mí también cuenta en la xenofiction, quitando un poco los vacíos argumentales de la cuarta película y uno que otro corto animado que sacaron en el lapso de la 3 a la 4 película.
Nos dan el contexto, el objetivo de ellos, los contra puntos tristes de su manera de vivir, existe su linea de algo malo a algo bueno. Y en un principio piensan de cómo deberían ser.
There's a theory that Courage the Cowardly Dog is just meant to be stories from the viewpoint of how a normal dog sees the world.
Wait, that's a theory? I thought that was canon.
Wait, that's a theory? I thought that was canon.
I'm a fan of the Guardians of Ga'hoole book series, even though I hadn't read all of it.
Honestly beautiful. Xenofiction speaks to me on a deeper level than anything else for some reason. Probably because as a child, and to this day I always used to personify and try to understand everything, including abstract concepts. It's why I also feel like an alien, so to speak.
i dont know
Mood
Don’t*
@@MaryamQQQ Donut 🍩 *
Vibe
@@Sad_Tomato *doughnut 🤬🤬😡😡
This is kinda the fun part of being Buddhist. We believe that when we die, we reincarnate as something, whether it be a dog, cat, pig, bear, or even a tiny gnat. I wish I knew what it was like, but I believe that we are all one. Humans, animals, aliens, anything.
This is why I really much enjoy the whole "Humans are Space Orcs" line of fiction. It really pushes you to see yourself and everything that you as a human take for granted in your average human life, and re-frame it as something weird
The mention of inanimate objects reminded me of when my second grade class read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane- not so much bringing an alienated perspective, but still a unique experience.
I love scientific xenofiction which can often be found in the natural history of science section of libraries. It is becoming a growing genre of scientists writing stories from the perspective of the organisms they study, in a sort of way that is the literature version of a nature documentary. It is really good at bringing people to feel more empathetic toward threatened wildlife that often isn’t a charismatic as pandas or lions.
This has been one of the most interesting auditory/visual distortion I've experienced on my rectangular light box.
When I was in middle school, we were always told to write essays with the title "Aku Sebatang Pensel", which means "I am a Pencil" and the story would end with it being lost or used up. We could also write different versions like "I am a pair of Shoes" or "I am a Cupboard". Kinda funny thinking about it now, never realized that it was xenofiction
The warrior cats bit was funny to me because the second you said 'imagining a life through an animal' I did indeed think 'oh like warrior cats'
If you find this kind of stuff interesting I recommended the "Foreigner" series by "C. J. Cherryh", which is available on kindle and audible by the way. The setting is cool, boiled down to its most basic premise the aliens form pyramidal relationships while humans form spherical ones which means we think were making friends and they think were insane traitors, but I actually recommend it because at its heart its all about how aliens are alien and you can't view or interact with them like they're human. You have to get outside of your self and try to understand what it means to be an alien, at least as best you can, and the aliens have to do the same back to you for a relationship worth having to form. I found the questions it raised to be extremely helpful in my adult life for everything from understanding foreign cultures to talking to people from the other side of the political aisle.
Excellent series. Her “Chanur” series is also exceedingly good. She has a great ability to get inside the head of her aliens, to walk that fine line of completely different yet understandable that you have to tread to make your work readable. Tbh, I think most alien relations would work like those with the “Knnn” ….methane breathers who are totally incomprehensible, even to other methane breathers. They’re not hostile…..at least, no one “thinks” they are, they just “do what they do” without paying any attention to the other species around them, but ofc that wouldn’t work for story telling.
Yes do the bunny-video! :)
Also there is an entire category of japanese light novels/manga/anime of these sort of things although mostly set in fantasy and most often not the hight of quality fiction, although there are also a few really good ones among them.
Can I just say how top-notch your content is, Tale Foundry?? Truly, there's never a dull moment with you. Your way with words and how they linger beyond my mind and into my psyche... They always seem so tantalizing. In short, this UA-cam Channel is just AMAZING
Dude your amazing I've recently ran into a roadblock with one of my first creations. No matter how many times I rewrite the story I can never seem to catch the perspective of the characters involved which ends up ruining the story as a whole. Watching this video made me realise that I'd been so blind to the reason this whole time.
I've ordered the book and I'm looking forward to reading it and hopefully getting past this obstacle. Thank you
10:30 I also recall an experiment done regarding this - where participants were invited into a particular space for an unrelated study, and in conjunction with that, were brought to a separate location a few days later and asked to describe what they remember of the room they had been in. How the psychologists framed that question effectively determined how the participants answered. If they framed it "Can you describe the doctor's office?" they got stereotypical descriptions of a doctors office. If they framed it "Can you describe the lounge" they got stereotypical descriptions of a lounge. etc. We don't merely impose the symbolic process on our memory - if the memory in question is sufficiently neutral, the symbols can be made to dominate and rewrite our memory as well.
Children of Time legit had me questioning everything I knew about being human and being in a society for weeks after I read it. It's friggin amamzing
The video "My job is to open and close doors" is the first thing that came to mind while watching this.
Nice to see an Animorphs reference here. It's SO good. Especially the Chronicles trilogy. I highly recommend it.
"Even better, you hear it called 'furry stuff,' as if that were a meaningful insult of some kind." Nice. I'm not a furry myself, but a number of folks I know are to some degree, and I've heard about even more, and as is common with "outcast" populations, they tend to be some of the coolest, kindest people you could meet. Some of the character designs they come up with are absolutely amazing, too, and those who get into the suit-making aspect deserve SO MUCH RESPECT for the skills and dedication they put into that!
But yeah, I don't think "xenofiction" is just fun or interesting. I'd argue it's important and, at least to some degree, necessary. It's a huge help with both empathy and creativity - a somewhat literal way of "walking in someone else's shoes" and looking at things "from a different angle." Admittedly, there are times going certain directions with certain concepts can get unhealthy, too....
Sometimes I get a little annoyed when someone handles this sort of thing as JUST a reskin, where something non-human still has all the same perceptions, understandings, values, etc as a human (though sometimes that's just to bring the point of difference more clearly into focus). And it's a bit sad when people just plain reject anything outside of typical human experience as having any merit...
This is one of my favorites.
I have no problem admitting I'm in my mid-30s and I just recently read 50 Warrior cats books, but they don't go too non-human with how their minds work.
Always been a fan of flat land too.
If I were any kind of decent writer, I'd want to do one involving one of humanity steps towards immortality.
Before we hook up Johnny Depp's brain to a computer, we'll probably experiment a bit more with animals.
What would an animal feel like as it awakens to sapience due to being connected to an AI?
Or would it be the AI that is feeling it is connected to the animal?
I wonder if it is humanity's duty to uplift animals so they may speak for themselves, or if we would be inflicting the curse of intelligence upon them.
Me too. Gosh I love me some battle cats. Even if battle cats technically isn't xenofiction? It's definitely debatable, anyhoo.
@@Divint12 they're pretty anthropomorphized especially as the series goes on.
Weaving barriers and fixing broken legs isn't typical cat behavior. ;P
@@Divint12 It definitely straddles the line.
My most favorite xenofiction is the Duncton Chronicles (by William Horwood). On the surface it is a simple story about moles. But like beneath the earth in which moles dwell, there is a lot more depth to it. There is war, politics, epic quests and even holy wars. Anyway, this series is one of my favorite book series next to LotR. It has inspired me to write my own Xenofiction stories that I look to one day publish.
The themes are so universal; faith, love, hope…you forget they are moles half the time. It’s so gripping and intense, but so beautiful too. Every other animal books I’ve read since this series have just been good or okay. Watership Down remains a classic too, but I think DW went a lot further with the ideas and is pretty unique. Much more grand and vast, with so much depth. I think it defined the xenofiction ‘genre’ with how epic in scale it is. Most Xenofiction tend to be stand-alones (Duncton Wood is considered one, but the sequels complete it for me personally), never huge massive series (with the exception of Redwall), and I think we need more like it. Animal stories really have a lot of interesting concepts to explore in a grand fantasy setting. It’s a shame hardly anyone knows about it, and I believe it should be talked about a lot more. It’s so easily overlooked..I also haven’t read any other animal books as mature and dark as this series is. There is more than just gruesome violence in it. Kinda like Song of Ice and Fire levels of maturity and complexity. But it makes the themes of unity and faith shine all the brighter, I think. It also has a lot more emphasis on elements of fantasy, which is unique for its kind being a naturalistic mythic type of xenofiction, while others are mostly grounded in reality. Overall, I’m passionate for these books (like too passionate, I feel lol).
I’d love to see DW and its series republished in new shiny editions someday. I would go crazy in the bookstore if I ever saw them on a shelf.
Oh, xenofiction is my JAM, glad to have a word for it now. As a kid I loved "animal books", I'd have to say my favorite series of this genre was Guardians of Ga'Hoole. It's about a world where humans went extinct some unknown years, possibly centuries, ago, and centers on owls, not at all in relation to humans anymore. They have vast mythologies and rituals and cultures. Our main group are orphans of several different owl species that are seeking the mythical Ga'Hoole tree to help them fight an organization that's been brain washing orphan owls with moon rituals to get them to mine magnets. Already that's crazy, but we're not even to the rich blacksmithing culture of the owls, the barn owl supremacist group, and the prequels which if I'm remembering correctly have this straight up shaped shifting owl creature. Makes me so sad that more people don't talk abt these books bc I could talk for sO LONG.
Also I love authors who will take an aside from their story to describe how some inanimate object is feeling about something happening. I think Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams are the best examples I can think of right now, but it's a stylistic flair I LOVE. Like instead of saying it started raining, they go and describe how the storm clouds are feeling. Or like taking time to tell the tragic tale of a whale that just spawned into existence & is now hurtling at the ground. I especially love it when it's just something like a fuckin mattress or the desert itself or something that's just in the background Observing the story. Reading for me is all about putting myself in the body/head of something or someone else and experiencing a world from their point of view, so why not give me a unique point of view?
That's why my favorite scifi books also are those that aren't told entirely by humans. Fuck humans when I could read about the perspective of a floating cloud of mist in a society where there's 3 genders and when they get down to hanky panky they float into each other and create one solid being. That's bonkers. Give me more of that.
Honestly a good many indie shows I have watched here are xenofiction, (mostly wolf animations for some reason, Wolf Song being perhaps my favourite). This is an underrated genre
I saw the dino and immediately thought of Raptor Red but I didn't for a moment think you'd mention it...and then you did!
I was also going to ask, "Since you're a robot, isn't almost everything you read Xenofiction?" Then you addressed it yourself.
Not sure if that makes me 0 for 2 or 2 for 2.
The best piece I have written so far is written from the perspective of a dog. It has a way of getting us to sympathize and even humanize animals and objects by expressing how little they know of their impact on us, instead of the other way around.
The fact that people refer to this stuff as furry stuff is weird because most furry stories are pretty human actually
This made me think about one of my favorite things to read: the humans are space orcs writing prompts. I love reading about how imagined alien races might look at us from an outside perspective, making me think about human qualities you tend to forget or overlook. Sometimes it reminds me of how terrible humans can be, but also, about how special and crazy we are too. And I think that’s beautiful.
When you explained the definition I immediately thought “Hollow Knight”. Mostly because yeah they are not human heck the character you play “The Knight” isn’t really a bug either. It’s some thing else, sure it came from the Pale King which was a worm, but then shed it form to its smaller form that we know. The Knight never spoke a word yet it’s silence was it’s most tragic trait. I do recommend checking out the lore for the game but yeah, you don’t need a human characters to understand the world.
I remember reading both raptor red and the animorphs as a kid, they were some of my favourite books due to their alternative ways of viewing the world. Tobias was always my favourite character in animorphs with how his perspective changes as he becomes more hawk
One of my favorite xenofiction is The Ants by Bernard Werber. I remember reading it in 4th grade and I have re-read it at several points in my life when I needed a different perspective on life
A constant conclusion of reading it though was that even the most open-minded human is probably quite a closeted close-minded person and quite possibly an idiot too, and that every single human is worse than them
ik youll never see this but i really appreciate how clear you speak. im autistic and always need captions on everything i watch but your videos. thank you for making everything so easy to understand :)
At first I kinda saw this video as weird with all the fiction that's going on that im not cultured with but as I push myself through the video it actually became interesting, you came as a youtuber that is weird in my perspective to something completely different to a point of some weird wisdom I didn't know existed.
Thank you
Xenofiction seems like a really interesting concept that I haven't put much thought to despite being well into writing my first book. This kind of got me inspired to write a xenofication story about ghosts, that are kind of in the "background" from the new people who moved into their house (that maybe could be generations apart from each other too). The ghosts may not really have that much direct influence on the world, like cant move around objects on their own (more akin to real life when people wonder if their house is haunted). Maybe cant even turn visible to most people. But could have some special abilities related to who they were or how they died. This is just a concept where that I dont even know what the action and angle of the story would be yet.
Why this guy has so few subscribers... He is amazing.
So happy you covered Children of Time! It's one of my favs and doesn't get enough love imo. Personally speaking, I love when sci fi isn't afraid to explore something properly "alien", and CoT does a wonderful job of building a world that is - at once - unfamiliar and understandable.
7:12 Literally the perfect way to transition into an add about your Patreon
Wow, I’ve never heard of this genre even though I’ve always loved reading books from non-human creature and objects perspectives. I thought this kind of fiction was just fantasy or sci-fi but thanks to this video, it’ll be easier for me to find more of the stories I love.
I also appreciate this video because it’s encouraged me to write in this genre. Like you said, xenofiction only seems to be popular in media seen as being “for children” while all the popular “adult” stories are usually told from a human or human like fantasy creature (elves, fairies, witches etc) perspective. This made me feel that in order to create a good story that people would like, I would have to make the perspective human but now I know that this genre exists, and it’s got way more potential than I realised.
I’m honestly kind of surprised that Metamorphosis by Franz Khafka (I hope I’m spelling that right) wasn’t mentioned. That book (short story, really) is W I L D.
It doesn’t really count as xenofiction because it is about a man turning into a giant insect but still having the perspective of a man.
I just finished Watership Down and I have to say, it is definitely worth the read. The literature interpretation of the xenofictional genre has created a masterful tale. Sorry for the overly complex language, but as a writer myself I feel it is necessary to exert oneself in such a way it lines up with one's personality.
In highschool I did a little side project where I wrote a short comedy from the perspective of a toe, specifically a war in between the big toe and his four other "foot soldiers" fighting an alien like foot fungus. Part of me is glad to know I'm not a *complete* weirdo but the part is sad to hear I'm not as original as I thought.
THIS book. Is amazing, Children of Time was something I read recently and OH MY GOD. It's emotional, intriguing, and I love the story. Tht book is so cool and I'm glad one of my favoritve youtubers is covering it.
One thing I find insulin with is that Warriors should not be considered a children's book series...
It has graphic depictions of death, birth and some pretty dark themes for a "children's book". I remember reading them as a kid and most of the stuff flew over my head but looking back on it now there very disturbing books.
I honestly never know what Xenofiction was called, but I’ve absolutely loved it ever since reading several books. Wings of Fire, Cloud Roads, and many others. I love non-human fiction
"Animal movies are for kids!"
"We can no longer live as rats, my dear: we know too much."
This video made me brainstorm an almost complete short story about the past 10 years of my life from the perspective of my car. That might be a bit silly, but we've been through a lot. I genuinely love my car and frequently personify it.
damn just got recommended this channel and it's definitely for me i love the philosophical nature of it
thankyou so much for this video. specifically going over the symbolic process since one of us conveys meaning to the rest of us without really using it to form the thoughts/meanings into words. and hence we kinda have to apply it ourselves to try and work out what null is actually meaning when they are trying to communicate. this is a tremendous help in understanding how they communicate and the functions behind it.
Xenofiction is something I really want to see used in mediums like video games a lot more along side films and books. What better way to combine the most immersive medium with sharing the point of view from a different creature. It's sadly way too rare to see this taken in any direction. Aside from a few anthro characters like spyro or sonic we almost never get to see the world from the point of view of none humans in games. It's really underused.
I loved the Alien levels in an Alien vs. Predator game I played once. I think you had a choice; you could play through a story with several levels as an Alien or as a Predator. I only played through the Alien levels. You could move along pipes and up walls, press a button to stab something with your tail, and did I mention moving along pipes and walls? *sigh* The movement mechanics were awesome! And you have no distance attack, nothing but your claws and tail, so the whole way the levels are played is nothing like how they would be played if you were in that exact same setting as a human character. No inventory. No clues. No weapons. No level ups. What you start the level with is all you have, and whether you survive is up to how cleverly you use them.
Now that I think about it, there is only one thing any game developer need do to create the feeling of being immersed in an alien perspective: disable the inventory/equipment features. Humans are creatures of invention. Take away that ability, and we go right back to being the primates that we are. Any character without the ability to equip tools or save up resources is functionally living an animal's life. If any game developers are reading this, make more games like this! It would be tricky to do in a way that's not frustrating, but it would be worth it!
@@sarahvunkannon7336 That idea honestly sounds amazing. I can see it working for a brutal survival game where everything is out to kill you or eat you. No looting or crafting just pure simple survival, going to rivers to drink, hunting prey and hiding from predators. Though you would still need some kind of ending objective as just surviving isn't enough for most players. Perhaps some sort of end boss or place to get to?
@@ultgamercw6759 Hmm. If the character is a human, then I cannot see it working for a brutal survival game where you have to fight anything. Humans are terrible at fighting without tools. I can see it working for a game that is essentially a puzzle. Sneaking through hostile territory, perhaps, to make it to a safe zone. Nothing that would involve fighting. For an RPG that involves battle, the player character would need to be an animal that actually had offensive capability.
Also, I'm unsure if this basic idea can hold for an entire game. The game I described above and one other with a similar premise were all broken up into levels. In the AVP game, each level corresponded to a different stage of the life cycle, so you didn't have to literally play the ENTIRE game with the same abilities. Your abilities at the start of each level were different. The other game I'm thinking of which was played this way had the same starting abilities for your character on every level, but your character was a shapeshifter that could change their abilities by making contact with the right animal species, so you also didn't have to play through that one with the same abilities the whole time.
There is one major advantage to crafting/equipment systems: they drastically expand the possibilities for growth. Growth is fun, so this allows games to be longer. It would not be wise to make a game with drastically limited growth potential that was too long. A game where you literally have the same abilities the whole time, no shapeshifting or changes between levels or anything? That game had better be real short. The kind you can finish in an hour or less. A game that incorporated shapeshifting, powerups, life cycle changes, and any other mechanic that allowed your character to change abilities in some limited way would be longer, but not as long as a regular human-centered game. I think the AVP game and the other one I'm thinking of took a few hours to complete. Implementing this suggestion would mean making shorter games that definitely end. But honestly, those are the kinds of games I like. Give me a short game that ends but can be replayed over an indefinite MMO idlefest any day.
(In case you're interested, the other game I was thinking of is The Visitor: Massacre at Camp Happy.)
@@ultgamercw6759 I'm a few months late, but from the sounds of it, you might want to check out Rain World if you don't already know about it.
Somehow, this channel really feels like a break from the internet ☺ it is so calm and nice to be here, thank you for existing
Before you read this has nothing to do with the video but I need somewhere to vent and you seem like the right audience so go ahead and scroll if ya want. I won’t judge
People say life is pain a lot, but I say if life had no pain you wouldn’t appreciate the good things about it.
Pain makes you stronger and gives you a sense that life isn’t always great but when it is it’s amazing. If something happens nonstop you get used to it and eventually it becomes a normal thing, for example luck. if you won the lottery every time you buy a ticket it would become a normal experience, and it would not be that surprising.
You know, this reminds me of a book I still in fact own, called "The wild robot". It was a nice story about a washed up robot called "ROZZUM unit 7134", or just "Roz" that learns to adapt to the wild in a isolated island. Forming new animal friends by learning their language and helping them out with daily life including the harsh winter. Evening raising a duckling that lost his mother (if you want to know more about that maybe check audible if it's there, unless you can't it's totally fine). It was very enjoyable in many ways. Never got to read the sequel though.
WAIT WAIT DON'T LISTEN TO ME THAT WAS BACK IN 5TH GRADE
"Nothing wrong with Warrior Cats, but I think that's how people see this stuff: 'stories for kids'"
Excuse me, sir, but if you think Warriors is a children's story then you've CLEARLY never read one of the books.
That's the thing, as much as I love Warrior Cats they are very weird in that regard
Yes, there are cruel, gore-y and even rape-y stories but all of them are kind of told in a very simple language and the authors often ignore the heavy nature of the subject
As hard as it is for me to say, the fan projects are much better compared to canon books as they often overlook EXTREMELY important and dangerous details (ekhem Spottedleaf's Heart)
@@billcipher8645 Completely agreed!
Watership down is my favorite book of all time. I grew up watching the show and read it once I got older, over and over again. I think that book and books like it are just beautiful in showing different interpretations of reality.