this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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"I hear the humans used some kind of sorcery to be able to make deliberate use of FIRE, you know, that supremely destructive force that we only see when something has gone wrong and we're in danger! Our planet is small and that makes things light (or so we've been told? we don't understand it), so we could just use a really big slingshot to reach escape velocity. They somehow took fire and used it to fly. I guess they're like the sun or something?"
Does it specify how they were able to even accomplish space travel if they have a military ability on par with roughly a medium-sized dog?
I'm sorry for putting you through that.
I am having a very difficult time understanding this. So they have bi-directional space travel, "slides," digital cameras, wireless transmission of videos, and who knows what else, but when they have the big collection of human tools, they can only identify the slings, bows, and spears, despite that the scouts (who were probably teens, in fairness) probably had hunting rifles and some equivalent to phones or walkie talkies (which were probably some of the "intricately engineered devices of unknown use"). Then, while being executed by a gun, it is described this way:
This suggests not just not understanding what a modern assault rifle is, but even what a gunpowder weapon is.
And yet, before, they briefly mention:
So they do have "guns". I cannot fathom how these pieces go together. My best guess is that they are using guns that they are basically using dart guns, but even then this level of abstract confusion is unwarranted. They should be able to tell that a gun is a gun, and if they have rockets there is no way they can't understand on at least a very basic level how bullets are shot.
It's amazing that this shit got 8k upvotes. What the fuck am I doing with my life when literally anyone can become so incredibly popular making something so worthless?
Agreed on your corrections, except that when I said dart gun I didn't mean the blowdart kind, I meant the modern kind that look like actual guns with triggers (like how zoologists sedate wild animals sometimes). Still silly to put a camera on one? I guess, but if that's what you have as a "gun" then it makes about as much sense as us putting them on our guns, maybe more because dart guns don't have muzzle flashes and smoke.
Modern assault rifles are somewhat louder (and I think higher pitch?) than muskets, so they are more prone to causing hearing damage than muskets were and I could definitely see that being a shock, but again look at how abstract his confusion is. If that dude was intimately familiar with muskets like we'd expect an interplanetary invader to be if their army used muskets, then he might find the compactness or any of several other features about the gun shocking, but they don't even identify it as being a type of gun, which a musketeer would be able to do even if they could only fathom its operation as being a matter of magic, because it's still sort of the same shape, with a barrel and trigger and so on, making a bang, and shooting a bullet.
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Thinking about this, I feel like there's an element of resonance based on the fact that life in general and the potential of intelligent organisms in particular is really amazing and we don't appreciate it enough, but the authors' brains are so cooked on chauvinism that they only think to express this in terms of untermensch -- literally "life unworthy of life" in the sense that they are too fundamentally and totalizingly incompetent to make sense as living things and I guess also morally inferior and deserving of death according to the authors -- for people to prove their worth by crushing. Like, there's an element of it that I think is real and even positive, but it gets warped by fascistic thinking into something disgusting, sadistic, and nonsensical.
Yeah, that's a very generous way of putting it but sure, I think that's valid. My thing was that I don't believe the aliens have literally any purpose except for being untermenschen, and so if the author has no interest in them then they are superfluous to the real underlying idea (how cool life, especially intelligent life, is) and it makes more sense to express that idea using very different tools. In the story you shared, there's literally only one short passage that shows even a slight bit of interest in the perspective of an alien, that being:
Though granted it's just a bad story overall. But at least if you look at the hype trying to be drawn up in some other stories and even quotes in this thread, there are things that are things worthy of interest and it just gets completely warped by this framing that humans can't just be interesting, they need to be superior to something that isn't intelligent enough to flake rocks but is intelligent enough to have lengthy monologues about how superior humans are, so we can get this wank of fearful awe. There's no such thing as something being great in itself, only being great by brutally subjugating an inferior other. Personally, if I didn't give a shit about aliens, then I wouldn't put them in my story and I'd just talk about terrestrial life, because I don't think you need to dominate something else to be worthwhile!