Less human characters?

[Bannan_mantis]

I've recently fallen in love with Lizardfolk and their lore in dnd, one character in particular was of a lizardfolk who grew a love for the way of the samurai and dedicated his life to being one. Everything from half orcs to turtle men to glow in the dark children have probably been used in fantasy before and this raises a question, are humans/humanoids overdone?

This is mainly about humans but also about characters who have very human features. While they can be interesting and it's easier to put yourself in their shoes they are starting to get overdone. Think about the last time you saw a character who had maybe green skin, visible gills or elongated jaws leading the story.

I personally feel more stories should include weird and fantastical characters and there are advantages to doing it, mainly from them being much more visibly eye catching and interesting than a human character. To give a example, look at Korg from Thor Ragnarok. To most people he is the best part of the film and I personally felt interested in him the first time I saw him, a bit more than the first time I saw Gandalf or Peter Parker. Additionally being able to have characters who aren't human opens the door for concepts on cultures and ideals that are very distant to our own, maybe a turtle men tribe who feel their shells are gifts from the gods and something they should cherish or a group of tree people who stick firmly to their traditions and avoid confrontation with people.

I know a lot of people feel like they can't express as much emotion with a fantastical character but I very much disagree, I feel that through dialogue and a few actions a person can relate to a completely alien character and feel empathic towards them.

Anyway who else agrees with me? Do you think humans and humanoids are getting overdone and that characters should be more fantastical in their heritage and appearance?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I used to agree. I used to think that Elves and dwarfs and rubber forehead aliens were all so uncreative and we should really look towards stories about creatures that weren't even 2 sided symmetrical and somesuch, really different settings. Since then I've pretty much turned around on it. Every second you use explaining how something in your setting works is a second not used telling the story. While there is obviously a balance somewhere in the middle I think the balance lies a lot closer to "spend the absolute minimum amount of time on explaining stuff for your story to work" than to "really be creative". So if you have a story that works better with Giant Spiderfolk, by all means go for it. This is what D&D lore uses non-humans for, telling stories that don't work with humans. Unfortunately this means that stories that can work with humans or something very close to humans are often better told using humans or something very close to humans. it breeds a standard looking setting, but it also in general creates the best stories.

Note though that time you spend explaining stuff differs heavily by medium. A comic can just show how Giant Spiderfolk eat as part of a dinnertime scene it was going to have anyway, so it has a lot more freedom to pick its protagonists. A book often has to take its reader out of the story to tell us the details of the world, so strangely enough books don't seem to be the best medium for exploring strange new worlds after all.

[WalkingTarget]

Science Fiction examples rather than Fantasy, but a few I can think of are:

The short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang (and the film based on it, Arrival) is about a linguist who's brought in to try to communicate with some very non-human aliens.

Dichronauts by Greg Egan - while the "voice" of the characters is very human, the setting is such that the way the characters have to interact with their world is pretty far removed from human experience. This one's a bit of a tough read, though, and Egan doesn't hold your hand in terms of explaining the mechanics of things (although he does provide a website as an auxiliary resource if you need help visualizing what's going on).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Science Fiction examples rather than Fantasy, but a few I can think of are:

The short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang (and the film based on it, Arrival) is about a linguist who's brought in to try to communicate with some very non-human aliens.

Arrival is a beautiful movie, but it does help me make the point from my post above. The whole film is essentially introducing one very strange concept to the audience. There's not as much story going on around it as you would see in a more basic science fiction movie. That doesn't hurt it because of how cool the concept is, because of the acting and the cool landscape shots and all that jazz, but the same setting wouldn't work if the movie was just about the aliens attacking us with laser beams. All of the cool details about their language and stuff would just be ballast, like you'd have if you'd add a very slow chase of an hour into the middle of a Star Wars movie (completely hypothetically of course). Here it doesn't impact the movie because all that cool alien stuff is actively telling part of the story.

(Okay, maybe it doesn't help me make my point very well. Not the best paragraph I've ever written.)

[Scarlet Knight]

May I suggest this comic for you: https://rustyandco.com/comic/level-1-title/

But no, I don't think we need less humanoids.

[Wraith]

I think that there are a lot more non-human characters out there than we realise, because they're usually either a skin stretched across a very familiar story, or they're treated as something childish and thus unimportant.

Think of anything by Disney; The Jungle Book, the Lion King, lots of the supporting cast of Beauty and the Beast, the Carpet from Aladdin, lots of characters from Toy Story, even the extended Aesops throughout Sword in the Stone. There's also Disney and Disney-esque stuff like Babe, Homeward Bound, Watership Down, Wall-E, My Little Pony.... it's a big list if you really think about it.

I would agree that it would be nice to see the idea explored in media aimed more deliberately at adults. There are a few examples and most of the ones that spring to my mind are anime - That Time I Was Resurrected As A Slime is probably a prominent, recent example, with Overlord playing with it too. There are some older examples in video games too - there was a Ghost In The Shell game on PS1 where you played as a spider-tank, and a another PS1 title where you played as a cybernetic tarantula. The latter's narrative didn't particularly do much with it, but it was a novel perspective.

I wouldn't say that humanoids are over-done, but lots more could be done to explore the experiences of being a non-human protagonist, I think.

[Ibrinar]

I've recently fallen in love with Lizardfolk and their lore in dnd, one character in particular was of a lizardfolk who grew a love for the way of the samurai and dedicated his life to being one. Everything from half orcs to turtle men to glow in the dark children have probably been used in fantasy before and this raises a question, are humans/humanoids overdone?

This is mainly about humans but also about characters who have very human features. While they can be interesting and it's easier to put yourself in their shoes they are starting to get overdone. Think about the last time you saw a character who had maybe green skin, visible gills or elongated jaws leading the story.

I personally feel more stories should include weird and fantastical characters and there are advantages to doing it, mainly from them being much more visibly eye catching and interesting than a human character. To give a example, look at Korg from Thor Ragnarok. To most people he is the best part of the film and I personally felt interested in him the first time I saw him, a bit more than the first time I saw Gandalf or Peter Parker. Additionally being able to have characters who aren't human opens the door for concepts on cultures and ideals that are very distant to our own, maybe a turtle men tribe who feel their shells are gifts from the gods and something they should cherish or a group of tree people who stick firmly to their traditions and avoid confrontation with people.

I know a lot of people feel like they can't express as much emotion with a fantastical character but I very much disagree, I feel that through dialogue and a few actions a person can relate to a completely alien character and feel empathic towards them.

Anyway who else agrees with me? Do you think humans and humanoids are getting overdone and that characters should be more fantastical in their heritage and appearance?

Some clarification is required, since Lizardman and Korg are humanoids. (If it has 2 legs it walks on, 2 arms and a head it is probably humanoid). So I am getting mixed signals on whether you are talking about actual non humanoids or are in fact fine with humanoids as long as the differences aren't just superficial? Like is Martha Wells The Books of the Raksura Series yay or nay?

Anyway I like different beings but even if they don't look human non human main characters whose mind isn't pretty much human are super rare. If you are a slime but mostly act human how much difference does it really make? Though if they were truly alien it would be hard to write an interesting story with them. (Side characters are easier since you don't have to show details.) Though even pretty much human mind in not at all human body can be nice.

[Bohandas]

Science Fiction examples rather than Fantasy, but a few I can think of are:

The short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang (and the film based on it, Arrival) is about a linguist who's brought in to try to communicate with some very non-human aliens.

It's a bit of a rehash of Slaughterhouse Five though, isn't it? I mean, I've only seen reviews of it, I haven't seen the actual film, but reading the reviews I was loke "oh. yeah. that's the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five"

[The Glyphstone]

The sci-fi Sector General series is pretty good about this - most of the series is from the PoV of (Earth)-human characters, but a huge (and sometimes repetitive) part of the setting and frequently the plot is specifically how non-Earth-human species think and act differently. It gets even better (and somewhat weirder) in the handful of later books that are specifically from other-species viewpoint characters.

[Razade]

It's a bit of a rehash of Slaughterhouse Five though, isn't it? I mean, I've only seen reviews of it, I haven't seen the actual film, but reading the reviews I was loke "oh. yeah. that's the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five"

If by rehash you mean simply that it has to do with strange time things then yeah. Otherwise it's really not at all a rehash. The aliens are also pretty different.

[Erloas]

I think that there are a lot more non-human characters out there than we realise, because they're usually either a skin stretched across a very familiar story, or they're treated as something childish and thus unimportant.

Think of anything by Disney; The Jungle Book, the Lion King, lots of the supporting cast of Beauty and the Beast, the Carpet from Aladdin, lots of characters from Toy Story, even the extended Aesops throughout Sword in the Stone. There's also Disney and Disney-esque stuff like Babe, Homeward Bound, Watership Down, Wall-E, My Little Pony.... it's a big list if you really think about it.

The thing is, most of those are essentially human, they just have a different skin on them. They are all very much anthropomorphized, they're about as "alien" or "foreign" to us as characters as "the slightly eccentric guy." As in, they're slightly different but not really.


The idea is hard to get right. There are so many that might look different but they still very much act human. But the ones that don't act human are really hard to portray or get the audience to relate to. It is really hard to show a mindset that is "alien" to our own, we want to view everything as like ourselves (at least in any context where we relate to them, as is core to a central character).
I think it is something that needs to be done more, especially in games and other interactive media, but given how hard it is to get right, I'm not surprised that we don't get much of it either.

[doctor doughnut]

Anyway who else agrees with me? Do you think humans and humanoids are getting overdone and that characters should be more fantastical in their heritage and appearance?

No.

It would be nice.....but no.

In fiction, we can't even do other HUMAN cultures. Just think of how often you see any human culture other then America/Western Europe. AND even worse seeing anything that is not ''what Hollywood believes" and/or "what is politically correct".

[Bohandas]

If by rehash you mean simply that it has to do with strange time things then yeah. Otherwise it's really not at all a rehash. The aliens are also pretty different.

But I mean they had the same main idiosyncrasy of experiencing time all at once, right?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

#spoileralert

[Legato Endless]

Unfortunately this means that stories that can work with humans or something very close to humans are often better told using humans or something very close to humans. it breeds a standard looking setting, but it also in general creates the best stories.

I kind of feel this point actually works as a nice condemnation of the classic fantasy races as artistic shorthand turned into mass marketed familiarity. A lot of stories that use humans with minor tweak could just use humans (which would speed things up even more) or trade out these visually drab representatives for things less staid. Swap your Orcs for Lizard folk in a book. Have the giant Spiders as another human in a suit. Which is to say: if there was a moratorium on using Orcs, Dwarves, Elves and the like fantasy stories would remain largely unchanged save for either improving the pacing (humans only which Sci-fi is bolder about than fantasy) or at least making a more visually diverse output stories until the next group of clichés crystallized.

Obviously the occasional book with actually alien mindsets would be free to do its own thing too, but as previously stated in the thread , that's always been a more niche genre.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I kind of feel this point actually works as a nice condemnation of the classic fantasy races as artistic shorthand turned into mass marketed familiarity. A lot of stories that use humans with minor tweak could just use humans (which would speed things up even more) or trade out these visually drab representatives for things less staid. Swap your Orcs for Lizard folk in a book. Have the giant Spiders as another human in a suit. Which is to say: if there was a moratorium on using Orcs, Dwarves, Elves and the like fantasy stories would remain largely unchanged save for either improving the pacing (humans only which Sci-fi is bolder about than fantasy) or at least making a more visually diverse output stories until the next group of clichés crystallized.

Obviously the occasional book with actually alien mindsets would be free to do its own thing too, but as previously stated in the thread , that's always been a more niche genre.

The flipside is that because the standard fantasy races are so familiar an author doesn't need to explain anything about them. You don't have to give up any storytelling time for using them.

[cobaltstarfire]

I feel like there are quite a few books from the POV's of animals or fantasy animals that manage to strike a balance. Though pretty much every example I can think of are YA books. (I tend to stick to light reading these days, I can't put things down once I pick them up so it's best to pick books I can plow through in a few hours on a day off)


The ones I've been coming back to the past couple of years have been the Wings of Fire series, which is from the POV of dragons. In a lot of ways they are human-like, but there's lots of little bits and pieces that would be really odd if you replaced the characters with typical humans, or even magical ones.

There's usually this extra sense of wildness to the characters in these stories that isn't remarkable in the context of the story and characters. As well as sometimes a slightly different way of thinking about, approaching, reacting to, or describing things. None of these really require a huge amount of extra exposition to explain what they're up to. Ex: A squirrel person who can jump really high and climb really good is just well, a squirrel person exhibiting their squirrel traits.


There do seem to be more anime that do this and pull it off, Natsumes Book of Friends comes to mind. A lot of the Yokai may have some human-like feelings, but they also have a lot of really...weird ways of thinking or feeling too that gets shown pretty well.

[Fyraltari]

I think the Omale books do a great job of developping charcaters with different thought patterns than humans.

[Legato Endless]

The flipside is that because the standard fantasy races are so familiar an author doesn't need to explain anything about them. You don't have to give up any storytelling time for using them.

In theory yes. In practice, stock race with divergences from the absolute norm are ubiquitous in fantasy and still end up getting page space devoted to explaining the differences. Heck, some of them actually take longer than new cut outs (most notoriously Vampires) because not only do they tell you what they are, they also spend time telling you all the stock elements the author isn't using. Which you wouldn't need to bother with if the chosen one's first traveling companion is a humanoid Narwhale.