Well, the vast majority of HFY short stories rely on some factors about humanity that we consider quite normal being turned into something unique. Stuff like:
“Humans are terrifying! I can’t believe that they actually breathe oxygen! How could any lifeform possibly evolve to breathe something as reactive as oxygen, let alone become sentient?! They practically breathe rocket fuel!”
“Humans are horrifying! Did you know that they don’t even have a hivemind? How could a species with such rampant individualism and that have never known eusociality ever develop any sort of civilisation?! It beggars belief!”
“Humans are abominable! Did you know that they’re omnivores and that throughout most of their history, they were a predatory species? How can we possibly hope to live alongside a species that is driven by their very biology to consume other fauna?”
It gets a little dull after a while, but these aren’t the worse specimens. The worst sorts of HFY just bestow some sort of American manifest destiny upon humanity and declare them to be special just because, who are capable of overcoming any obstacle thanks to raw gumption and the unique power of human spirit.
The examples I listed are novel and interesting to start with, but HFY fiction is ultimately built on shallow subversion of traditional sci-fi at best and weird chauvinistic lionisation of humanity at worst. It’s not interesting for long.
From the way I vaguely heard about it I thought they were talking about her actual swimsuit getting ‘nerfed’ but then nope, it’s - as respectfully as I can be - bazongas.
It has some interesting ideas for when you want to build a setting that doesn’t go with “humans are the default” rule. But yeah there’s a lot of odd HFY stuff out there
The “human special because bootstraps™” just makes me shudder
We challenge them to not be predictable but they always fail u_u
That said, I could appreciate a story in which humans dont get utterly steamrolled but, likewise the humans don’t have to do the steamrolling either. A story where both sides are roughly equal, with maybe one having the advantage a little, that’s what I could like.
Edit: The old stories in which the aliens have the advantage do it well because people seem to like a setting in which the hero has to think outside of the box or survive despite insurmountable odds due to the alien having a huge advantage.
Old example, the first Predator movie with Schwarzenegger. You had all these muscular, manly dudes, and yet the Predator was still picking them off one-by-one, and even Arnold was getting absolutely bodied in a 1v1 against it, winning only through sheer luck.
It got off the ground in the early '10s as a reaction to James Cameron’s Avatar. Lots of gamers (typically 40K adjacent ones) were angry about humanity being depicted as the bad guys for various reasons. Led to a lot of discourse about how Jake Sully is a species traitor and a lot of pictures like this:
https://i.imgur.com/IWduZv0.jpeg
This was followed by general grumpiness about humanity being treated as the weak cannon fodder species in science fiction, or the bland generalist species, with nothing inherently special about humanity. They wanted humanity to feel inherently special and unique, so there was a sudden flood of fiction about how a bunch of inherently human traits are cool and awesome and how aliens lack them.
It can be done right, I feel, but it’s got to be a part of a larger setting, with humanity and their unique attributes contrasting against other species who are just as interesting. Otherwise, it just becomes a self-indulgent exercise of going “look at how unique and special my humans are.” No different from the sea of technicolour tiefling OCs out there.
Yeah, that’s the scene where he talks about getting those face scars on his first day and how he could’ve gone back to earth and had it fixed but he kinda liked it because it was a reminder to stay on your toes or Pandora would chew you up and spit you out.
Yeah, it’s just a case of people on the internet going “if I was in the movie, I would have said this and done this and everyone would have clapped,” thinking that stuff like that image I linked is actually profound.
I’d say there’s a bit of a divide in themes in the HFY ‘genre’. There’s those who, like has been mentioned by you and others, just want to live out the fantasy of purging the xenos and flexing on people who aren’t us.
But there’s also those who use it to highlight the nobler aspects of humanity in a way that I’d describe as pretty uplifting. Humanity’s willingness to help their neighbours, to be fully ride-or-die for friends, and so on.
There’s a sub-genre where aliens are baffled by a human’s disregard for self-preservation, throwing themselves into dangerous situations to help/save others. It’s nice.
It’s the fanatic militarist Stellaris players vs the pacifist egalitarians. United Nations of Earth > Commonwealth of Man every time.
Yes, that was what I thought of when I learned about HFY.
It certainly takes a special kind of willful ignorance to think that the amoral megacorporation was the good guys.
(Honestly, I think the two sides of the Blue Smurfs Avatar are terrible in different ways. RDA is terrible in-universe, and it’s clear Cameron made them cartoonishly evil on purpose and is not interested in any kind of nuance. And the Na’vi are boring garage sale night elves without any of their good qualities.)
I can’t remember for the life of me the name of a really really good sci-fi lil internet story, where humanity realised it was alone in the universe so uplifted dogs. Then, humanity grew old and started to fade and the animals took over their mantle of stewards of the galaxy.
Anything that isolates positive traits and attributes them exclusively to one group, with all other groups being incapable of possessing those traits, needs to be written properly otherwise it can come off as a little distasteful.
