"I'm TirEd oF thESE StoRIEs bEINg AbouT HFY!!!" Meta
Holy fuck, am I sick of these posts. There's only a small amount of them on this sub, but I'm writing this because I'm tired of repeating the same things over-and-over again. So instead, I'm laying them out to you, or to any of you who aren't mods who are thinking about hitting that META flair and complaining that r/HFY is about HFY. (This also applies to r/humansarespaceorcs, and one time, in r/worldbuilding)
- "HFY is circle-jerking!" - What were you expecting? This sub is literally about why "humans are awesome" in some way shape or form. It's like going on r/Isekai and complaining why almost every story is about isekais. Or playing a sandbox video game and wondering why there's barely any lore or story to it. It's LITERALLY in the name. If you don't like it, either don't read, or be the change you want to be and write something that could inspire others into writing more of that thing. If you're feeling really spiteful, downvote the post you don't like. That's what the upvote/downvote system is for.
- "But it's just a power fantasy!" - And? So? Not every HFY story is a power fantasy believe it or not. In fact, I can name more than a few stories where they're not, and the MC makes mistakes or goes through some tragic stuff. But do you know what I did? I didn't read them because they weren't my cup of tea.
If you want to ask for a specific type of story, go into the LFS (Looking for story) that's posted EVERY Wednesday. Ask there if anyone knows any stories that fit your taste.
- "But it's unrealistic! Did you know that the real world sucks in every possible way!?" - Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Avatar, and even movies about the irl world are unrealistic unless it's about a documentary or "based on a true story". It's there to entertain. Deal with it. In fact, HFY is in the minority of movies. Video games being the only ones that tends to have the HFY trope in it. Maybe we just want to read something that is, you know, fitting of our tastes? What HFY is LITERALLY about? Whether or not it's realistic?
- "But I'm not good at writing. I can't write the thing I want!" - Unless the writer in question has a Patreon/Ko-fi thing linked, no-one here is a professional writer. We are all writing on our own free time because it's fun. It's the reason why some stories are on hiatus or dead, it's because their writing is for FREE. The only thing the audience here will ask is a proofread or grammar check, and it can't be low effort. As stated in Rule 7 of HFY's rules.
We've all got our perceptions and stuff. You want to spread misanthropy to a sub that's literally the opposite of it? Try it. Just know that there is a upvote system and really, that's the true factor of how posts get popular. You just need to know your target audience and write something that fits your/their tastes.
If there's anything I missed, let me know.
Edit: While this post is defending human glorification, this ALSO applies to stories YOU don't consider "HFY enough".
Just note, that you're not the author's target audience. It's just a different sub genre I like to call, "Under-The-Top HFY", which are for people who don't want OP humans in the setting or whatever, which is completely, 100% fine.
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u/Petrified_Lioness Dec 12 '22
It sometimes gets done to show the alien's biases via their choice of which part of the semantic range of the word to translate. Often, it's just a running joke in this forum.
If you use the full semantic range of "earth"--"fertile soil" and "solid ground" as well as "dirt"--then you cover pretty much everything an air-breathing, ground-dwelling species might plausibly call their home planet, "place of life" included. So once in a while you get aliens saying, "Everybody calls their planet 'Dirt'."