Humans Are Space Orcs

Alien: You shouldn’t eat that.

Human: What?

Alien: That thing. Don’t you know it’s extremely acidic? Enough to cause eventual deterioration of your flesh?

Human: ….it’s a fucking pineapple.

Gravity

Something I haven’t seen yet with the “humans are weird/space orcs” thing is differences in gravity

Like imagine humans going to planets or moons and having to have an alien escort to hold them down. Humans stuck to their alien friends with those little backpacks with leashes that parents put on their kids or pets!!

Or humans going to a planet with such high gravity that the aliens feel like they’re being crushed to death and ppl are just “ah yes, the comfortable pressure of home world”

Humans are Space Orcs

So I’ve been loving the “humans are weird” tag lately and I came up with one myself. Here goes…

Breathe in… Breathe out… The yoga soundtrack on Kenzie’s phone was interrupted by the nervous clicking of a member of the Ghrivak clan. Thnybux, a third-tier member of the clan, approached her on a swirling cloud, as was standard of the Ghrivaks.

“Human Kenzie,” said Thnybux, through the translator in her ear. “Human Kenzie, what are you doing? You will rip your flesh with those movements!”

Kenzie straightened from her yoga position and greeted Thnybux with the series of clicks common in the Ghrivak dialect. “This is called yoga. Humans actually need to move and stretch their bodies. It’s good for us.”

Thnybux regarded her with some confusion. “Do you know why the Ghrivak move only on clouds, Human Kenzie? It is because if we move our bodies too much, our bones will disintegrate from the forces of gravity on this planet. I do not understand this theory of movement. How exactly is it beneficial to your species?”

“Human muscles are connected to hard, quasi-living rods in our bodies called bones. These bones are created by specialized cells, and are both very lightweight and very strong. Our muscles are made of specialized cells, and when they are very minimally damaged, repair themselves so that they are stronger. If a human does not exercise, the muscles will die off, and the human will no longer be able to move.”

“Surely the force of these…muscles…on these living rods will shatter the rods?”

“No, our muscles are not that strong,” Kenzie laughed. “Our bones are much stronger than that. And humans break bones fairly frequently. It hurts but the bone just heals stronger. That’s kind of a theme in humans actually, when we get hurt we just heal stronger.” She returned to her yoga.

Thnybux hid xie’s fear from the human Kenzie, and took note of this new information. What kind of creature becomes stronger when it is hurt? Lesson number one: Do not anger the humans.

Humans are Weird - Pastimes

Humans becoming selective about which activities they share with certain alien species and this confuses their crewmates constantly. 

Tramuis encounters Human Pam in the corridor and they seem especially excited about the brightly illustrated box they have in their possession. 

“Hey Tram!! I just got a package, wanna come put it together with me?”

Having been advised on the importance of bonding actives with the ship’s human and possessing the time to spare they agree to participate. Excited, Human Pam leads them to an empty conference room with a large table.

“This’ll do. No one should bother it here if we don’t finish today.”

“What device are we assembling?”

“It’s not a ‘device’,” Pam laughs opening the box and spreading hundreds of small oddly shaped multicolored pieces on the table. “It’s a picture.”

“I am confused. What is the point of this activity?”

“It’s called a puzzle. We just need to reconstruct the image on the box using these interlocking pieces. There’s only one right way to do it, but the size, shape and color patterns are all designed to make the task difficult and time consuming.” Pam states with a smile. “It’s tons of fun. My family did them all the time in the winter.”

Knowing that this is an activity associated with the harsh freezing cycle of the terrain home world makes Tramuis a bit nervous and in want of another crewmate or two in case of the unexpected. A fairly wise precaution given a human’s loose definition of the term ‘fun’. “Maybe we should invite Commander Schrimnex to join us, their people are know for impressive visual acuity.”

“Nah, not that guy.” Pam states as they start manipulating the pieces.

“I am surprised. I was under the impression that your bonding level with the Commander was rather high.”

“Oh don’t get me wrong, Nexie’s great. Best sharpshooter on the ground team and I wouldn’t have anyone else watching my back.”

“Then why do you not wish for them to join us?”

Pam arches up the facial hairs above their eye. “Listen Tram, my nanna didn’t send this ten lightyears just to have a dude with sixteen eyes finish it in five minutes. Now get in here and help me find the edges.”

Somebody said Humans would be the Mad Scientist species to aliens- like, aliens watch Back To The Future, and they see Doc Brown, and they think yes this is a human scientist, they’re all that crazy, these humans do such insane things with science.

I would like to offer an alternative.

Humans are tough. We can shrug off plenty of injuries, and we recover pretty fast from most others. Hell, we find minor injuries amusing (Don’t tell me you’ve never laughed at someone getting hit in the balls).

Humans have a skewed sense of danger. We think baby anything is cute- tigers, lions, alligators, whatever, no matter how scary they grow up to be- and even then there’s people that would happily cuddle up to a grizzly. Even less adventurous humans keep vermin as pets, or snakes, or dogs, that apex predator sub-species we made.

We are fascinated by morbid and scary stuff. We have a whole genre designed to terrify people. Tons of fantasy revolves around deadly monsters, plenty of which involve romance with said monsters. Lots of grim dystopias in sci-fi. Even children’s stories involve grandmothers getting eaten or witches getting cooked in their own oven.

And if you’re on this site, you know all the jokes we make about depression or social anxiety, or joking about wanting to die.

We aren’t the Doc Brown species.

We’re the Addams Family Species.

OKAYOKAYOKAY B U T Aliens that only have mates to reproduce. Once every couple of moons they find their partner, do the do, then find a completely different one the next cycle. Imagine these aliens being confused about the human concept of marriage - “you stay with them for life?“ - and not understanding that while yes, Intaquk, you are very attractive I am married so no I will not be your mate this season. Imagine Valentines Day rolling around and one of a crews humans is feeling sad and the aliens are like “yo r u okay should we feed u or something is this natrual” and the human “just kinda bummed i dont have a valentines” and after a bit of research of the holiday one of the aliens gets down on one knee and offers the human a small rock like “I heard these..proposals are common in human culture?” AND THE HUMAN JUST STARTS SMILING AND TAKES THE PEBBLE LIKE ‘thank you fruiyo’ AND THE OTHER HUMANS AROUND START GUSHING OVER HOW ADORABLE THE SCENE WAS. THE ALIENS PICK UP ON HOW THESE PROPOSALS MAKE THE HUMANS ELATED, THEREFORE SEVERAL OTHER PEOPLE ARE PROPOSED TO WITHIN THE MONTH A N D

I've seen it vaguely touched upon, but has anyone ever gotten really indepth about how we advance, not as a need, but as a competitive factor? Like with even NASA and whatever we were like "hey we're gonna make it to space before you losers" and the others were like "heck no we're gonna get there before you losers" and it just permeates every factor of our lives ask any child who plays a game and even they'll be pumped to win

Necessity is the parent of progress, the pamphlet had said. It was supposed to be a human saying, but as Vossavangen looked upon the mess the ships humans had made, xe realised how wrong this statement was. As per usual, humans made very little sense. Apparently, it had all started with one of the humans saying they could fix the fuel intakes of the small utility ships (which were working fine, mind you) before and better than another human.

Apparently this was a ‘bet’ - a word that didn’t really translate to Vossavangen’s native language. A lot of the words spoken in the following argument didn’t translate, and those who did seemed strangely fixated around referring to the other human as genitalia. At the time it hadn’t seemed like it would bring much trouble. Like most normal human behaviour it was best to let it play out on its own and let the humans deal with it.

Well, that was what xe had thought then, but less than one rotation later the floor of the room the humans called the garage was filled with tools and pieces of engines. It was a disaster, and Vossavangen had no idea how to explain it to xir superiors.

Talking to the humans had proven futile, but by some miracle both the utility ships they’d been ‘tinkering’ on were fully operational eleven rotations later - less than half a rotation before High Command was supposed to inspect the area. The work space was far from tidy, but the humans had decided that one party would clean for all of them. Which it would be depended on who had brought the biggest improvements to the ships.

Vossavangen was less than optimistic, but xe tested the utility ships none the less. Shockingly, it seemed the human engineers and mechanics had managed to on one of the ships cut fuel use with almost forty percent, while on the other they had substituted the need for traditional fuel altogether for food waste.

After the incident, it became common knowledge that the best ways to get a human to work efficiently was to say they either wouldn’t be able to do it, or that someone else could do it better than them.

What is this planet

There’s someone who has their iPhone named “hot single horses in your area” and they airdrop people pictures of horses randomly. Nobody knows who it is. Once, during an assembly, the laptop that the projector was from had airdrop turned on, and in the middle of a presentation about bullying, it popped up in front of the entire school. HOT SINGLE HORSES IN YOUR AREA WANTS TO SHARE AN IMAGE. A picture of a horse, with text in bubble letters over it saying “available”

The pack bond feature your race has aquired is vastly inconvenient to say the very least.

Okay, so I feel like contributing to the Humans Are Weird section and it’s just, humans and predators get along? Like, we have mutual beneficial relationships and companionship with animals that, in theory, we should be fighting with. 

Like, we have cats and dogs as pets, some people have wolves, we see lions and tigers and think they’re cute, hell, zoologists have been raising Big Cats for years, not to mention the stories about people care taking bears. 

And if Jurassic World became a thing, you can bet your ass someone would Chris Pratt a set of pack dinos

So like, imagine that theres a race of aliens who are, by genetic script, predatory, and vicious and every alien system are like “Theres no chance at establishing peace with them, it’s impossible.” But then humans come and we stumble across a wounded one like 

“this species ?? Is adorable ?” And all the other aliens are like 

“No, human Mike, it is a vicious predator! It’s bet to just avoid the quadrant where theyre from and destroy any that come too close.” 

“You want to kill him, but he’s just a wittle cutie!” 

“ … Human Mike, stand back!” And of course the humans rally around it and force the other aliens out and slowly feed/build up trust with the species and we form a bound with them and Aliens are like ???? 

Evetually humans teach the aliens how to respond to the species and while they’re still pretty dangerous if they’re hungry and you shouldn’t turn your back on them, there’s still like, relative trust between the species. 

Variety

We as humans thrive on variety. We need variety in our food, our schedules, our lives! Without variety there is a possibility that we can die. And boy do we every come up with stuff so that never happens.We make new dishes, we constantly change up our schedules so that it is no longer repetitive, we have different types of clothing and/or different needs in a mate. Of course we have even made food that can look the same but taste completely different(or the other way around!) just to have some changes. An alien could be used to seeing a human walk by them at exactly 16:00 and accept that as part of their schedule. Now when the human wants more variety and walks a different way to get to the same spot, all the aliens that have become adjusted to that human walking by them would either be awfully confused or deeply afraid because they can no longer follow their schedule like they were supposed too. Thus, chaos reins in the ship because one human wanted some variety.