Enough with the fucking “what if humans can eat alien poison and it’s just spicy to em hurr hurr hurr ” crap! That shit’s Trite and Cliche! It’s American exceptionalism but for species! It’s 2024, for fuck’s sake! What if humans can’t eat alien junk food? What if humans can’t eat alien delicacies? What if anything they try is so incompatible with their chemical makeup it ranges from the insipid to the deadly? What if some substance that to them is innocuous or even vital is a human instakiller? What if sipping alien lemonade has a 99% death rate? What if human-alien cultural exchanges are always incomplete because they literally can’t eat each other’s food?
The sodium chlorate I drizzled on my fish and chips might burn Schlorp and the prion proteins in her starberry slushy might give me scrapie. Schlorp will never know fish and chips and I will never know starberry slushy. Isn’t this a tragedy. Isn’t this something we should fight God about.
What if aliens have art expressed through a medium that humans are fundamentally incapable of experiencing. At least without technology. What if they see in a different range of light and have paintings we can’t ever fully experience. What if they have supersonic or subsonic hearing and their music just kinda hurts to hear or is completely inaudible. What if, like many animals in our world, they just don’t have the specialized brain bits to read things like rhythm or pitch and are unable to ever experience ANY of our music fully. What if they experience olfaction in a different way and have arranged “"scent”“ artworks that provide a deep and nuanced artistic experience that we can’t discern fully due to our weak ass little bitch noses. What if they’re electro sensitive like some sea mammals and they have symphonies of shocks and sparks that we could never see the way they see it.
YOU MADE IT WORSE. I LOVE IT.