Where are the humans?

General FAQ
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1

On Earth, doing humany things.

That wasn’t what I wanted to know!

But it is what you asked.

Sigh. So where is Earth, then?

Somewhere in the Transveil region, if you really must know. See map here:

So we’ll be meeting them soon?

No.

But why…

Because they tend to take over the narrative of stories told by humans, or be expected to do so by human readers, and I have no interest in writing that. Period.

But -

None!

(Also, that first contact is for many reasons - which should be obvious from canon - extremely unlikely to go well, and HFO is almost as intrinsically terrible a genre as HFY.)

But I waaaaant them!

Fanfic is your friend. Don’t tell me about it.

But I waaaaaant you to -

Every time someone reads everything I said above and keeps nagging me about adding humans to the 'verse, this gets closer to becoming canon:

If you want humans to retain their ambiguous status as a minor Transveil civilization rather than as the species dumb enough to kill their own planet and themselves with it, take a hint.

EDIT: To put the somewhat sour tone of this particular FAQ into context, I get this particular requestion a lot, in tones ranging from the nagging “not-really-asking” repetition to the outright demanding.

I apologize to anyone who genuinely was asking the question in good faith, the first time, in blissful ignorance. To everyone else, I remind you of a certain saying concerning George R. R. Martin.

2

If they weren’t sufficiently obvious from canon, these range from sheer awkwardness and embarrassment at our repulsive political habits through “You have one solar day to abolish all whaling, puppy mills, and all other forms of being assholes to our prosophont cousin species or else we’re coming down there and doing it for you.” to “Hello. We are descended from Homo neanderthalensis. You killed our ancestors. Prepare to die.”

3

In the unlikely event you are ever in a better mood on this topic, I would suggest trying humanity in its thirtieth or fiftieth century Common Era, not twenty-first or, ye gods, tenth centuries; as the minor Transveil civilization in 'verse that is contacted.

And possibly not the Transcend as the polity from the Worlds that do the contacting.

But your choice of how the eldrae would react to humanity as it is on June 10 2021 is true to the story. I’m only vaguely in synchrony with the Discord, so I’m not clear on exactly who shoved the latest splinter under your fingernails on this topic, but I hope they didn’t try and argue that it isn’t.

4

HFO is Humanity F*** Off?

5

There’s no point in having the Empire find Earth. Given the tech, psych, and ethical differences, it would perforce be an “alien invasion” narrative; that genre depends on the invaders having some critical flaw, which the Empire would not only lack but be insulted by our notions thereof. Finding a greenlife ecosystem is interesting, but that fic’s already underway.

What first contact might be interesting – not that I’m suggesting or volunteering to write it, much less advocate canonicity – would be a Terragenic colony system with a sufficiently libertist society that the Imperials wouldn’t instantly break out in hives over… with the Terragens trying desperately to hide that they are outliers among their species, trying not to have the Imperials find Earth too quickly lest the Empire judge all humans as worth less than waste heat.

6

Finding a greenlife ecosystem is interesting, but that fic’s already underway.

Yeah, the fundamental problem as I see it is that, the thing that makes it interesting, is also the thing that would be likely to make it incendiary.

(Not that the first contact story necessarily couldn’t be interesting without that, but it would need to be from the human point of view, because otherwise - “Another minor planetbound species to catalog? Must be Tuesday”.)