While sick in bed I kept thinking, or rather my brain kept thinking with or without my input, about the sheer overwhelming volume of fiction human beings have produced, like the number of myths, legends, novels, comics, games, movies, plays, original characters and even dreams and imaginary friends felt so vast and all encompassing that it seemed to dwarf all of our other achievements as a species and the sheer immensity and pointlessness of it all felt almost terrifying until suddenly my foggy mind was like “whoa, whoa, wait, WAIT A MINUTE….THAT’S WHAT WE ARE!!!!!! WE’RE THE STORYTELLER PLANET, THAT’S OUR THING IN THE UNIVERSE!”
So that turned into all these scenarios where for whatever reason most other sentience races could have technological power beyond our comprehension but still no knack for concocting even rudimentary child-level fiction and are so easily entertained by any shit we can make up that it’s basically our superpower
Humans end up paying their way across the galaxy just making things up as they go along and even our worst most garbage pieces of media become an almost priceless commodity.
You’re cornered by a tentareaver from the bloodstar or
whatever and she’s all “SO, EARTHBEAST…TELL ME ONE OF THESE FAMOUS FICSHUNS OF YOURS AND I’LL CONSIDER SPARING YOUR LIFE”*sigh*…okay, once upon a time there was a tentareaver…
“WAS SHE OF THE FLESHRENDER CASTE????”
….Yes, the most beautiful fleshrender in her whole clusterhive.
“TEE HEE”
#humans confirmed for space bards
MY THOUGHTS EXACTLYOnly, lots of humans go, “My stories are all crap. You just don’t understand.”
And their nonhuman friends go, “No I don’t. Your stories are mindblowing. How can you just come up with these things?”
“They’re just drabbles and junk!”
“Awesome drabbles and junk…?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
—
On the other hand, the “super-awesome-amazing” writing that humans are referring to as “actual writing/stories” are restricted materials for non-humans because they can be dangerous to the unprepared minds.
Memetic logic bombs.
Published human fiction must go through a vetting committee before they are pronounced “safe” for non-human consumption.
I have a slightly hard time figuring out how a culture that has no concept of fiction could appreciate fiction.
BUT. Let’s take a leaf out of Michael Ende’s book, more or less literally, and say that they may have stories, but they can’t make up stories. (Where did the original stories come from? Shhh. Who knows. Someone else make up that part.)
So it’s not so much that humans are storytellers as that they’re story-makers, and that’s what so blows the collective universe’s mind.
“Where did the original stories come from?”
Uplift scenario, perhaps. Species A was given sapience and a set of stories by Species B, who went extinct and/or lost interest in Species A long ago.
Also, they could just be recountings of actual historical events, perhaps still perfectly accurate or perhaps skewed through centuries of misremembered details. Some have narrative, because even real life does sometimes, while others are just very dry – but it’s what they’ve got.
And then comes along these weirdly tented story makers. These “humans” who are first overheard telling tales to their young to help them get ready for sleep by telling them stories, all the once upon a time stuff handed down with new twists based o a changed sky, asteroid belt, moon number, and new races as heroes and villians. The other species are astounded by the ability of these creatures to weave stories of complexity they wave off as “nonsense.”
“Those are just fairy tales,” the human says.
“What are fairies?” Demand their fellow inhabitants.
“Little people, with like wings and magic powers.” The human shrugs. “They’re not real”
“You mean the arboreal races of N’Sylerth?”
“No, just made up creatures to make sense of things early people didn’t understand. ”
“Wait, your kind just makes up creatures?”
“Only in folklore.”
“What’s folklore?”
And that’s how humans were found to be the story makers.
my fever thoughts the last two days:
Published
A Glitch Named Anti 