 So, I am assuming all of you know what creepypastas are. Uh, if you don't, I did a video on them years and years ago, which is not very good, honestly, but it's there if you want a primer, or you can watch a million better ones. But, you know, creepypastas are just short internet stories which are not really meant to be about character or plot quite as much as they are about just this feeling or theme, basically. Cause they're horror. You know, they're horror stories and they originally started as stories that were meant to be taken seriously as if they were real and it just kinda grew and blew up and got really big from there until a substantial part of the internet is made up of people writing creepypastas now. Humanity f*** yeah, or HFY for short, sometimes also called humans are space orcs, is kinda similar to this except it's a lot smaller. See, the idea stemmed from a lot of fantasy and science fiction works where humans were part of a community with a bunch of other races and humanity f*** yeah, usually deals with sci-fi. In fact, it pretty much always deals with sci-fi. So we're talking aliens here. And humans would be part of these big communities where they would just be the plain everyman race while other alien species would be defined by like incredible, interesting traits like you'd have a warrior race or an herbivore race which was more pacifistic or things like that, you know? And so some people decided well this is kinda boring, let's just do something where humans are the crazy badass warriors. And so humanity f*** yeah just kinda took off from there. These stories are commonly told from an alien perspective and they are often about wars, like wars that the human race wins handily either because we're just that much tougher or that much smarter or we just have some sort of ingenuity or we're just suicidal daredevils or something which allows us to just be better at war than whoever it is they're fighting and then they talk about wow, wow, humans are incredible. And usually they show their enemies mercy at the end of it which is maybe not the most realistic but you know it's a common trope there. And sometimes it's also about some other positive trait that humans have which is comparatively a lot stronger than in all the other alien races. Maybe we're extremely good at diplomacy or extremely good at commerce and we're injecting ourselves into the galactic economy and stuff or again we're just really, really tough even if we're not actually that strong of fighters we'll just keep going long after others would have given up or we're just really good at healing ourselves. You know, human scar tissue does work a lot better than a lot of animals here on earth so it's not too crazy that it would be better than whatever aliens might have. It's not uncommon to see lines in HFY stories that say something along the lines of humans can lose an entire limb and continue fighting which is true, yeah, and so it just makes us seem like we're these scary warrior space orc things. And so sometimes this goes so far that humans are like some sort of eldritch abominations that other species can't even be in the presence of without losing their minds or we're just immune to eldritch abominations which other species are weak to and get killed by. You know like there are some where horrors from beyond the veil of space come in and just looking at them drives other species insane and so they start dying but humans are able to face it and fight, you know, it's kind of interesting but it does get a little masturbatory sometimes, admittedly, or all the time. Just that this whole thing from the ground up is pretty masturbatory. Now this idea of humans being the odd ones out in like a scary or intimidating way did not start on the internet a couple of years ago by any means. It goes back decades like their short stories like they're made of meat which is a story all about how humans are organic life and other aliens are weirded out by that because normally they're just like beings of pure energy or they are somehow mechanical robotic life and seeing us as organics that are intelligent and have spaceflight and stuff freaks them out and so they just decide, you know, we're not even making contact with that species. We are going to mark this planet as uninhabited and we're just going to go. And my first exposure to this sort of thing was actually in the Animorphs books which if you've read them, you know that humans compared to other aliens are considered to be extremely smart, extremely adaptable. Our technology advances at a rapid pace that other species are very impressed by and there are a whole lot of us like at one point a character mentions like, oh, there's five billion humans living on earth and another one says, wait, you mean million, right? They said, nope, five billion of them, which is just huge and insane to a lot of them. And it's kind of implied that humans adapt so fast and our technology moves so quick because we evolved on a planet which has a massive amount of biodiversity like millions of species of plants and animals. Whereas most other aliens evolved on planets that had like 10, you know, I believe they mentioned that your home world has like less than 100 species living on it. So this idea of humans being weird is not at all new. It's just not at all mainstream in science fiction. As it seems strange to refer to science fiction as mainstream because oftentimes it's the exact opposite. But you know what I'm saying. It's not that common in the genre. Another variation of this sort of thing is the idea that earth is a death world. You know, like most other planets that evolved intelligent life are temperate. They don't have crazy weather. They don't have earthquakes and volcanoes going off and those crazy storms and stuff like that all the time, which earth very much does. And so they would look at planets like earth and they would compare it to stuff like Arrakis from Dune or Tuchanka from Mass Effect or Korriban from Star Wars or Australia. You know, like earth is just the galactic equivalent of Australia. And they think like how could intelligent life evolve on a world that has like predators and giant storms and stuff like that? That's crazy. Now, when I first discovered humanity, fuck yeah, that was around the time it started to take off. I think around 2014 is when I first discovered it. And it was fun for a little while. But the key words there being a little while because it ran into similar problems as creepypasta, only it ran into them much harder and much quicker. Number one problem being that it got popular and then it just got too formulaic. You know, like just every HFY story is pretty much the same now, unless they go in a really weird direction with it. Like it introduces it as, oh, humans are kind of the underdogs. We feel weird about them. And then some crazy event happens and humans come out on top. They don't just defeat their opponents. They defeat them in a completely uncontested manner. Like it is a first round knockout. The their defeat is not just total. It is positively devastating. And like that's it. It's too formulaic. They're all pretty much like that. And number two was also a problem that creepypastas ran into, which is that the story's just got too long. Like the authors got, I don't want to say conceited, but that's the best word I can think of where they thought, OK, this story idea that would really only work for like a six paragraph short story. Maybe instead of doing that, I'll stretch it out. So it's like the length of a fucking novel and I'll release it in 38 different parts. Like I guess that's not inherently bad. But the thing about HFY stories is that they're really based around one idea. And there's variations that you can do of that idea. Like I said, you can focus on different things that humans are really, really good at, which brings us to a place of prominence among other aliens. But the thing is when other people are doing it a lot, it gets old real quick. And it's again, it's a theme. It's an idea that only really works for a short story. If you try making it into like a big novel, it becomes like a regular space opera story. And it requires things like characters and world building and plot. And at that point, it's like a regular story. You can't just focus entirely on this one theme. At least you can't focus entirely on that one theme and have it be good. And it just it can't carry itself that way. It collapses under its own weight. And number three is that a lot of times it just makes humans out as being way too perfect. Like it makes us out as if we're all the same, as if we don't have massively different cultures and massively different individuals within those cultures. Like I mentioned before that a lot of times when the war ends and humanity is unquestioned in their victory, they forgive their opponents and treat them very nicely. And they're like, yes, we we love you. We shall now show mercy, which I don't know, looking at human history that doesn't seem like it would happen all that often. And there would probably be at least some groups of humans that disagree with the merciful approach and just I don't know. When have we ever all been the same? When have we ever all agreed with each other and been on the same page? So yeah, those are the three big problems with HFY stories, which caused the whole thing to nosedive. And well, I don't want to say it died because it is still around. It's just a much smaller niche than creepypastas were. And it never really entered mainstream, the mainstream, the way creepypastas did. I mean, think about it. You had stuff like Slenderman, who he got a Hollywood movie made a couple of years ago. It wasn't a good movie, it was pretty bad and it wasn't very popular because it came out years after the hype train had ended. But I mean, it it existed, you know, that the normies found out about it and there are other creepypastas that have reached levels of success, levels of success kind of like that, you know, they entered the mainstream because there were just ideas at the core of them that made them work and they were well put together. And unless there is like a massive, massive shift in the way that HFY the stories are done, then they're never going to enter the mainstream. And they're just going to continue fading away until they really are dead. And I just wanted to end this quick video on like a brief suggestion, maybe, for humanity fuck yeah type stuff that might make it a little different and a little more interesting. And that is do it with fantasy. You know, like I mentioned, this is always done with sci-fi. It's always humans from Earth flying through space and meeting up with aliens and stuff. Well, what if you did it in like a D&D style world where there's like 15 other races? There's elves, there's dwarves, there's cobalt, there's orcs and all that. But again, in most cases like that, in most fantasy settings like that, humans are still like the regular everyman and that gets boring after a while. So do something different with it. Have humans be the crazy badasses like orcs or have humans be the really long lived, magically powerful people like elves or something like that, you know. Now I found that both modern fantasy and modern sci-fi seem to be pulling away from races other than humans. You know, like it's it's especially noticeable in fantasy, but it's been a thing in sci-fi for a while too, is that most modern ones really just focus on humans and maybe one or two other races will be involved and it'll just focus on their relationship a lot rather than just having this huge melting pot of a bunch of different ones together. And I don't think that's bad by any means. I think actually just focusing on a relationship between like two or three races can make it much deeper and much more complex and much more interesting than it otherwise would be. The Stormlight Archive is a pretty good example of this. It's a modern fantasy series, which is almost entirely focused on humans, but it also deals with their relationship with the Parshmen. And I want to go into spoilers on that. If you do want to go into spoilers, please mark them in the comments. I feel like that goes without saying, but you know, just do it. And a lot of other Cosmere works are kind of similar and a lot of other like modern fantasy works are like that. They either entirely focus on humans or just have a little bit beyond humans. And even in that case, I think you could still do something kind of like this, as opposed to humans just being like, OK, that's what we're like. Have them shown in really stark contrast with that other race. You know, again, have us be the long lived ones while they don't live that long, have us be the magically powerful ones while they're the mundane ones, have us be the ones who don't have very many children while they multiply a lot or something like that. You know, and just really hammer at home, really focus on it. And I if you still wanted to stick in the realm of sci-fi, I don't have anything off the top of my head that would really help you. But I do think some fantasy HFY might help reinvigorate the genre, as it were, or I don't even know if genre is the right term for it. But yeah, that's about it. I just I don't know. I like these genres of internet stories that pop up and then grow really big. And then all kind of get tossed into a blender of sameness. Like I did a video on creepypastas, like I said, years and years ago. And I did one on this. And if I can never figure out how to approach a video on the SCP foundation, I might do something like that. But I just I like these things. I find them interesting in a way that regular books and the regular book industry just isn't. It's unique. I don't know. I don't know where I was going with this. But anyways, thanks for watching. Goodbye. 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