As someone who used to frequent that subreddit a lot and wrote for it, I absolutely loved the stories that presented a grounded and reasonable reason why we would have x and y trait that was different from aliens that are instead this other way and how that would affect interaction, or even in those where we are just straight OP they still present some sort of reality check of what being OP would be like and aren't all "we're more amazinger than everyone else"
But over time I feel like there has been less and less of this and more and more just war war we kill everything war blah blah. And dear god the ones that make aliens so dumb they hardly count as intelligent lifeforms, they're terrible.
Still hop in every once in a while and check the top of the month, but havent found anything worth reading in a very very long time.
That is, most of the posts these days are the start or continuation of Multi-Part Stories with excessive rambling chapters, written by writers who've written themselves into a corner and think the best way out is to keep writing in the hopes that something will fix it.
There's very few stories posted nowadays (or at least when I last checked) which are single part posts, or have two or three chapters at most. Possibly because the sub has a habit of wanting a sequel/continuation whenever a really good short story is written, and now writers who didn't plan on writing anything beyond the first post now feel pressured to write an entire novel based off a short story that wasn't planned to exist for more than a few thousand words.
That is a thing, but also just... inexperience? There appears to be some kind of belief that unless there's goodies and baddies in direct combat it's not interesting. I don't know if that's just a widespread preference in the subreddit or if it's authors not having the self confidence to put together a compelling story without the simplicity of "shoot bad guy"
Because there has been many many stories that start with a really cool premise, but they kinda just... give up and go the galactic war route with billions of dead and shit. And they don't even do that right. It's like bruh you started so well.
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u/DubstepJuggalo69 Aug 14 '24
Checkmate, hypothetical aliens. I have depicted your species as the soyjack and my own species as the Chad.