If the main guy is an alien, WHY THE HELL IS HE SOMEHOW HUMANOID? He and the main girl shouldn't even be able to interbreed! If both species could do so, then they must be closely related subspecies at least within the same genus and thus derived from the same source. But if they evolved separately, unrelated, independently, each on different planets, their most basic physiology should be dramatically different. Too different to ever hybridize, in fact. Different planets, different environments, different evolutionary pressures, different biospheres. Hell, if we were to find ANY sentient aliens, they might not even be based on carbon like us. A world too hostile to organic life might bear lifeforms based on metal oxides. There could be boron-based life on one world and silicon-based life on another. Saturn's moon Titan might have life that eats acetylene instead of sugar while inhaling nitrogen and exhaling methane.
Meteor Prince isn't the only offender. Eureka Seven has humans and Coralians. Please Teacher! has humans and Mizuho's unnamed species. Macross has humans, Zentraedi, and Meltrandi. Star Wars has humans, Twi'leks, whatever Yoda is, etc. Dr. Who has humans and Time Lords. Star Trek has humans, Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians, Borg, etc. Ah! My Goddess has humans, gods, and demons. Dragon Ball has humans, Saiyans, Nameks, whatever Frieza is, etc. In all of these cases, the sentient species are based on a humanoid template but each bearing their own unique modifications such as strange ears, weird hair/eye/blood colors, and definitive behavioral disorders. Again, if they evolved unrelated, separately, each on distant worlds, their physiology should not allow for hybrids!
THEY CANNOT BE UNIQUELY ORIGINAL YET SUPERFICIALLY IDENTICAL, INTERNALLY INCOMPARABLE, AND GENETICALLY COMPATIBLE ALL AT THE SAME TIME! Our biological reality allows for instances of convergent evolution where members of once-divergent taxa later play identical roles and adapt accordingly. Examples:
--Birds, bats, and pterosaurs
--Wolves, hyenas, and the now-extinct Tasmanian "tiger"
--Sharks, placoderms, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, and dolphins
--Foxes and Malagasy civets
--Machairodonts (saber-toothed cats), barbourofelids, nimravids, large-fanged creodonts such as Hyaenodon, the sparassodont Thylacosmilus, walruses, elephants, mammoths, mastodons, and musk deer
--Turtles and placodonts
--Crocodilians, phytosaurs, temnospondyls, mesosaurs, and basal cetaceans such as Ambulocetus and Pakicetus
--Sauropods and giraffes
--Raccoons and Tasmanian devils
--Grazing ungulates, ornithopod dinosaurs, ceratopsians, and dinocephalian therapsids from the Permian period
--Lions, cougars, mesonychids such as Andrewsarchus, creodonts such as Patriofelis, phorusracids (picture a carnivorous Chocobo and you wouldn't be far off), large non-avian theropod dinosaurs, notosuchians, and non-mammalian synapsids such as Dimetrodon and the later Gorgonops
But no matter how similar they appear, they will never become the same and can never hybridize. It doesn't matter how much they look alike on the surface. The more distantly related they are, the deeper you have to look for similarities. But if they're related at all, then the deeper you look, the more similar they'll be.
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Clyde_Cash wrote: | If the main guy is an alien, WHY THE HELL IS HE SOMEHOW HUMANOID? He and the main girl shouldn't even be able to interbreed! If both species could do so, then they must be closely related subspecies at least within the same genus and thus derived from the same source. But if they evolved separately, unrelated, independently, each on different planets, their most basic physiology should be dramatically different. Too different to ever hybridize, in fact. Different planets, different environments, different evolutionary pressures, different biospheres. Hell, if we were to find ANY sentient aliens, they might not even be based on carbon like us. A world too hostile to organic life might bear lifeforms based on metal oxides. There could be boron-based life on one world and silicon-based life on another. Saturn's moon Titan might have life that eats acetylene instead of sugar while inhaling nitrogen and exhaling methane.
Meteor Prince isn't the only offender. Eureka Seven has humans and Coralians. Please Teacher! has humans and Mizuho's unnamed species. Macross has humans, Zentraedi, and Meltrandi. Star Wars has humans, Twi'leks, whatever Yoda is, etc. Dr. Who has humans and Time Lords. Star Trek has humans, Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians, Borg, etc. Ah! My Goddess has humans, gods, and demons. Dragon Ball has humans, Saiyans, Nameks, whatever Frieza is, etc. In all of these cases, the sentient species are based on a humanoid template but each bearing their own unique modifications such as strange ears, weird hair/eye/blood colors, and definitive behavioral disorders. Again, if they evolved unrelated, separately, each on distant worlds, their physiology should not allow for hybrids!
THEY CANNOT BE UNIQUELY ORIGINAL YET SUPERFICIALLY IDENTICAL, INTERNALLY INCOMPARABLE, AND GENETICALLY COMPATIBLE ALL AT THE SAME TIME! |
I love your post. I was going to bring up Star Trek if you didn't, Spock's half-Vulcan, half-human status must DRIVE YOU CRAZY! It's true, lots of scifi can be really lazy when imagining aliens, but there's a long tradition of it and it's mostly used as an allegory for different types of people getting along without offending any actual people. Also, to showcase various personality tics.
This serious goes for the cheap gimmick for cute romance and laughs approach, and it sounds like a lot of fun, and at least better than Black Bird, which had a similar premise with a tengu person instead of a space alien. How can a demon bird guy mate with a human girl? The power of manga!
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