plausible human sexual behavior

[Statius]

I absolutely agree. I was speaking less to the reader plausibility issue, and more that it's pretty hard to outbonkers the universe. She's a tricksy beast who, just when you think you've come up with maximal unlikelihood, throws a meteorite that blows up 1500 square miles of Siberia and kills almost nobody.

Humans are much the same. Just when you think it can't get any crazier than two girls, one cup, a guy decides to do one guy, one jar...

https://tenor.com/bBj1T.gif

 

[TheLobster]

someone's probably topped your crazy scenario,

Or bottomed, given we're talking about sex.

Something like a heptapod (from Arrival) is more plausible than going halfway across the universe and finding an alien that's a human with slightly pointy ears on a planet almost nothing like Earth.

Strictly speaking, you don't know that. We only have a sample size of one when it comes to studying how evolution works on a planetary level and how it can produce technological species. Human intelligence and our success in dominating the food chain is very much related to our body, not just brains (upright posture, opposable thumbs, dextrous limbs in general), so it's not too far-fetched too think that other technological species which evolved on land in vaguely similar conditions would be similar to us.

And from what we can discern, based on life on Earth, the "land" part is pretty important. We got animals here who are probably just as intelligent as humans, but their oceanic environment stunts them in terms of what they can do technologically. Aquatic heptapods who communicate using blotches of ink and yet manage to progress technology all the way to interstellar travel therefore seem less plausible to me than pointy eared humanoids who evolved on a slightly more arid, slightly hotter planet than Earth with a bit less dense atmosphere.

But you could set it up where this alien grew up watching Earth as part of an observation post and in her free time watched football games, so she really comes to appreciate the sport. (...)

Heh, I got an alien intern who comes to an observation post in my story and gets a little too fascinated with human sexual behavior These are fun ideas to explore.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Strictly speaking, you don't know that. We only have a sample size of one when it comes to studying how evolution works on a planetary level and how it can produce technological species. Human intelligence and our success in dominating the food chain is very much related to our body, not just brains (upright posture, opposable thumbs, dextrous limbs in general), so it's not too far-fetched too think that other technological species which evolved on land in vaguely similar conditions would be similar to us.

Strictly speaking, if the universe is infinite, given there's only a finite number of possible particle configurations, the universe completely repeats on extremely large scales, and given that in this scenario, as mentioned, space is infinite, that means there are an infinite number of versions of us and other aliens that are almost identical to us, thereby making my statement not only demonsterably false, but monsterably false.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Heh, I got an alien intern who comes to an observation post in my story and gets a little too fascinated with human sexual behavior These are fun ideas to explore.

I liked that one.

 

[anthrodisiac]

https://tenor.com/bBj1T.gif

Oh thank God! There was a moment I thought you'd linked to one guy, one jar, and I was so scared that I had to click to find out if my panic was for naught.

Fucking PHEW!

 

[Whanmore]

I'm fine with real world implausibility, fantasy and sci-fi, but I'm pretty sensitive to whether or not a human body can do the things described. If I can't figure out how you can get this part in that part while simultaneously caressing in this way, that takes me right out of the story.

I do spend alot of time on that. Making sure the reader can figure out what the hell is happening. How often you yall mention a left hand or right hand grabbing a tit as oppsed to just saying "a hand? DO you specify which side a person is sitting on? Sometimes I think I'm doing too much. Other times I'm halfway through a scene and I'm like "Can my reader even follow these movements?"

 

[anthrodisiac]

I do spend alot of time on that. Making sure the reader can figure out what the hell is happening. How often you yall mention a left hand or right hand grabbing a tit as oppsed to just saying "a hand? DO you specify which side a person is sitting on? Sometimes I think I'm doing too much. Other times I'm halfway through a scene and I'm like "Can my reader even follow these movements?"

We should be writing, not choreographing a play.* There was a woman in my writers group like that. He went to the kitchen, opened the cabinent, pulled out the glass, brought the glass to the sink, turned on the faucet, filled up the glass partway...

Then, finally, twenty paragraphs later he took the damn drink. Even Bob Fosse was like, "Rebecca, chill."

I forgot to mention Bob Fosse was in my writers group.

*I'm just as guilty of this.

 

[TheLobster]

He went to the kitchen, opened the cabinent, pulled out the glass, brought the glass to the sink, turned on the faucet, filled up the glass partway...

Detailed narration of mundane actions can be a great way to show a character trying very hard to ignore or not to think about something that's nagging them. But yeah, if you're just writing like that all the time, readers gonna nope out when they realize you describe the character cooking a meal in such detail, it's practically a recipe.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Detailed narration of mundane actions can be a great way to show a character trying very hard to ignore or not to think about something that's nagging them. But yeah, if you're just writing like that all the time, readers gonna nope out when they realize you describe the character cooking a meal in such detail, it's practically a recipe.

There's detailed narration of the mundane as a device, and then there's Rebecca.

I actually do know some writers who have done basically how to cook a meal in their book, and their readers friggin' loved it. Raved about it.

Two guesses whose book it was...