chat

Unless the stories are obviously AI generated too I'd assume it's bots/grifters scraping posts from r/HFY and running them through a text-to-speech thing, genning some images to accompany it, stitching it together into a slideshow video, and posting it in the hopes of grifting ad money. If they are clearly also AI generated stories then the same thing, except it was openAI or whoever that scraped the sub and can churn that slop out for them.

As a genre, HFY itself started off of stuff that was imitating things like The Road Not Taken and just general internet contrarianism/edginess built off the real literary/worldbuilding complaint that sci-fi and fantasy stories usually made humans into some kind of generic middleground species or ascribed something sort of naive and bland like "adaptability" or "imagination" as traits that humans had above other sapient beings, and more or less coming to conclusions like "humans are (space) orcs, actually" and more or less wanking to things in the vein of WWII Medal of Honor recipient stories, endurance hunting, or extreme survival stories. Naturally that had an intrinsically fashy sort of vibe, since it was all about stirring up this mix of painful and triumphant vicarious emotions, of violent destruction and overcoming, all in a completely empty and purposeless way, just giving someone an empty tearjerking power kick.

Now looking at r/HFY it seems like it turned into people posting chapter by chapter power fantasy webnovels indistinguishable from like the sloppiest isekai or "super powered guy shunned by party but he'll show them!" sort of slop, except it's being published in English first instead of in Japanese. In fact I think some of it is literally just an English version of those exact sorts of genres, I even saw villainess genre slop on the first and only page I glanced at just now.

So yeah that explains the why, who, and who I think: it's empty formulaic power fantasy slop with a fashy western flavor targeting the same sort of people that isekai and related power fantasy slop is.

"This really makes you think about how brown people are like the aliens"

I never understood how clickbait works on people because I have such a viscerally negative kneejerk reaction. It's so intensely visually unappealing to me.

Hell, it's probably just bots all the way down.

HFY originates from Reddit, or maybe it's older and Reddit is where I first saw it, but its been a genre of story for a while and these are just AI grifters reposting fiction written by Redditors twenty years ago with slop visuals.

The amount of AI slop is unreaaal. I have to manually curate a selection of videos of planes taking off or landing because my eldest is allowed to watch like half an hour a day of very boring videos. God forbid I forget to turn off autoplay however and I still have to discuss with him why we aren't clicking that really cool looking thumbnail...

Thank god disabling cookies and everything makes youtube "withhold" recommendations and shows you a blank frontpage lol.

As far as I know HFY originated on 4chan's /tg/ board back in the day as 40k fanwank and of course redditors took it and ran with it making it somehow even more cringe

Bots making videos for other bots

It's just america in space shit. Hooah USA USA USA military propaganda transcribed onto sci fi.

It's someone's op. Who? Feds? Right wing think tank? Some secret society of bankers that know this shit is good for them? Military industrial complex? Take your pick, lots of possible groups.

White males age 18-34

a thousand mien kampfs except they're all ai generated and sci-fi

I clicked on a few and they were bad-bad. I mean - I think they were ~30 minutes of still images with - I assume - tediously bad narration. I was about to give up and I jumped to a random spot in the very last vid I was going to check out. I found this bad-good stuff...

Humanity is Using the Stupidest Weapon I've Ever Seen | Sci-Fi | HFY

Ninja edit. I took a screengrab too early. Sigh. ~10 seconds later there's "glitter and pork rinds" followed by a "chainsaw" and a "jar of something that looked like regrets".

Why is this a thing

AI-gen slop will get enough views that someone in the global south who runs the channel is able to make some money.

Who asked for it

40k and Stellaris players.

Who's watching it

This one I have no idea.

Why is this a thing

Who asked for it

Who's watching it

If your first thought was redditors, give yourself a medal lol.

military fetishism.

racial supremacy

they attacked us out of nowhere so we get to do a genocide against them and this is cool because we didn't understand Ender's Game

Sounds like AmeriKKKans and isntrealis found YouTube.

when the AI hits you with the thumbnail stare

I rail against those little vignettes people post which seem to star aliens with no redeeming features who only exist to fawn over humans (or be righteously destroyed by them). Even if it doesn't come from fascists, that sort of supernatural racism winds up being fascist adjacent or leading towards fascism. But it also just seems kinda pathetic to write a short story where the only interaction is for some alien to say "You're so beautiful. And tough. And can run long distances. By gum, you're amazing."

a better question might be what the hell is happening with your watch-history for your recommendations to be cursed like that

HFY stories are cringe enough when actual people are writing them, let alone this

Not that I'm anti humanity (we have our ups and downs), but they always seem to be thinly veiled propaganda for militarism