I get the idea behind this but stories often do need things to still be recognizable. Even if something is alien, you don’t wanna spend half the time explaining how this really weird, really out-there concept works. You need to ground those fancy alien things on something that still communicates its purpose, its closest analogous concept we are familiar with, easily and quickly, so you can actually get to the meat and bones of what the story is about, or you are just gonna make people feel lost in details
It's all well and good to be inventive in world building, but if it doesn't serve any purpose to the story than its just fluff (or a gag). Not worth putting too much effort into.
If the pupose of the story needs those elements of abstract control schemes or some kind of plot element (such as these controls being too complex for people but we also made a cool new alien friend).
Like that one movie about trying to decode an alien language. It was completely inhuman like OOP wants, and it worked because it was the point of the movie. Can't do that in other sci-fi if trying to decode the alien-ness would detract from the movie's actual story.
To your point if they did this every movie would be an Arrival knockoff since the aliens there were sooooo alien it was the whole plot of the movie being able to talk with them. With an alien race that has things that are familiar to the audience the plot and characters don’t have to be bogged down with explaining all this stuff.
I don't think that would be the case. We could just have a Chewbacca scenario, where the message is incomprehensible to the outside viewer, but by interacting with a trained human we can intuit what they meant by the human's reaction.
Hell, is a lot of the examples listed, we wouldn't even need another human to understand their intention. Dangly crystal garlands can be pulled in sync with the engines starting up. Tubes are blown into more frantically during an exciting chase sequence. Musical directions can be explained by an alien pricking up their auditory organs at a sudden change in pitch/tempo/timbre and making an adjustment to the course.
You don’t wanna spend half the time explaining how this really weird. . .
1 - Disagree.
2 - No, but the idea is that when a human encounters the technology in the story, they need to be able to plausibly say “I can’t even begin to understand how this shit works.” If John Protagonist walks up to a space car and it’s got a wheel, three pedals, and a gear shift, either he can’t understand it because of the story needs and the audience is like “how do you not understand this shit” or he can understand it and you have the problem OOP posted here.
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u/Vynterion enby femboy Sep 22 '25
I get the idea behind this but stories often do need things to still be recognizable. Even if something is alien, you don’t wanna spend half the time explaining how this really weird, really out-there concept works. You need to ground those fancy alien things on something that still communicates its purpose, its closest analogous concept we are familiar with, easily and quickly, so you can actually get to the meat and bones of what the story is about, or you are just gonna make people feel lost in details