1. kklondikke

    kklondikke New Member

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    Alien help

    Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by kklondikke, Dec 12, 2017.

    i want to write a story about an alien princess but I need some advice on the story. So far it's this: an alien princess gains the help of a human servant in order to escape her family because on her 18th birthday, he mother will eat her. I think this ideas really interesting but I need a reason as to why it's happening. I've decided on this world that it's some ancient tradition for the royal family to eat one (more?) of their kids when they become adults but that's all I've got. Any ideas on how I could make this fit? Like maybe it has some sort of practical use?
     
  2. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    A tradition for eating one's child/ren doesn't make much sense, purely from a biological perspective (which, of course, informs our emotional perspective and behaviour). But there have been cultures with ritual child sacrifice... if any of those sacrificed the children of those in power, rather than peasants who had no say in the matter, maybe that would be a good thing to research for ideas?
     
  3. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    I'd go with their species being weird insect things. That'll kinda give you the latitude to make it something over the top that is going to happen to her. Some sort of combination of Black Widows and Preying Mantis and bees; so they are insect things that just eat each other instead of cutting off heads or whathaveyou, then you have the eating-you-as-part-of-mating that comes from the spider and the mantis, along with something like their species only needs a set number of females to prosper; so that her mother is the hive queen and having two queens is no damn good so you eat then before they are old enough to eat you.That sets it up as something that's deeply uncool but that equally makes some semblance of sense for a hive species to do and that'll let you play off both sides instead of just making the queen evil.

    As for plotting; that's difficult to really talk about with so few details. You could run it down the plot line that the princess doesn't even know that she's going to get eaten and just wants to see the big wide world; you could look at it as the princess feeling born in the wrong skin because she'll never get to do the one thing that she's supposed to do; or you could play it as more of an escape/pursuit thing where we don't see what happened before we just see them on the run. Kinda up to you.

    Really the question is how you write the ending. Do they escape or not? Are you going for the disney ending, where the adventure softens the queens heart and offers her a third option? Or are you going for the downer ending where they catch her and she dies? I wouldn't go for the straight 'good' ending myself, where she escapes and that's that. I'd personally want to subvert that a bit, so she escapes and then realizes that shes out in the big wide world by herself and really misses having other people to cater to her every whim.
     
  4. kklondikke

    kklondikke New Member

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    Very helpful!! I think that sounds like a very interesting ending.
     
  5. kklondikke

    kklondikke New Member

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    Some more details: I wanted the alien species to really be prideful of intellect and wisdom and logic. Theyre a more peaceful species which is why i want there to be a good reason for this to happen. I was thinking something like the children must spend their entire lives gaining knowledge and when the queen eats them she gains that knowledge, but i dont know if that sounds dumb or not.
     
  6. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    I think you'd have to make them hyper collectivist to make that work, to the point where the individuals don't even have their own identity. You can totally write aliens like that; if you bring them up from birth to believe that they are benefiting the rest of their species then they would absolutely do that, but that then begs the question of why exactly one of them isn't so keen to be eaten.

    The traditional run of the story would lead you to having your princess have discovered individualist philosophy as part of her education and thus no longer feels so happy about her fate. That's a bit hamhanded for me personally but that doesn't mean it's bad. This sounds like a teen book to me though; a youngish character finding themselves. If you focused on that and made it more about universal teen experience then yeah I can see that working better than making it about Hobbes and Locke. Done the right way her struggle is the universal struggle of moving into adulthood. She wants her own identity, she wants to make her own life but her parents expect her to do what they tell her.
     
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  7. kklondikke

    kklondikke New Member

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    Thank you! I will try my best.
     
  8. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    You are very welcome :) Also kudos on the Coroline avatar :p
     
  9. Fiender_

    Fiender_ Active Member

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    So, my first instinct was to suggest the insect/hive thing as well. I would as however, why would the queen wait until this princess is 18 before eating her? Even if the princess isn't fertile until then, waiting for her to reach relative adulthood gives the princess more time to plot her own survival, or assassinate her mother (assuming she's aware she will be eaten, idk what the culture is). There are some solutions to this; mainly, there was a purpose the princess served, either biologically or politically. Maybe she was to be married off in a political alliance that's no longer necessary or possible, maybe adolescent females are somehow necessary to aid the queen in controlling her hive. Maybe the queen is suddenly sick, and needs to consume young, biologically compatible tissue to heal herself (and maintain the stability of the hive, since 18-year old princess presumably isn't ready to take over, which would make the queen's cannibalism seem less selfish).

    Lots of potential directions this could take. :)
     
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  10. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    Yeah that's a good point. You need to have something solid there explaining why now, instead of when she was born or when she was 5 or whatever. Personally I like the idea that she doesn't know she's going to get eaten, like maybe it's a dark secret about what happens to all the princesses. That to me would be the kind of thing that would spur you into fleeing for your life, rather than meekly accepting it. If it's your culture to get eaten then you don't know there's anything else you could do. If she just finds out that day what is really going to happen to her then that'll be something interesting to work with. Of course why exactly they are getting eaten also needs to be addressed, but even so.
     
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  11. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    Just as a side note, I would shy away from actually using "18 years" as the cutoff point. Biological maturity, sure, but having aliens whose traditions match up perfectly with the legal age of maturity in the United States and most UN treaties is, well.... yeah.
     
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  12. kklondikke

    kklondikke New Member

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    I agree, I'm not sure why I described it like that. Their ages won't really match up like that.
     
  13. kklondikke

    kklondikke New Member

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    I was thinking something more like the second idea you had. I imagined the princess wouldn't necessarily be against it at first because she's been raised to view it as sort of her divine purpose and that she's serving the greater good. Thanks a lot!
     
  14. newjerseyrunner

    newjerseyrunner Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Do some research of the Aztec culture. Their princess's blood fed the gods to ensure a good crop yield.

    The practicality seems easy to me: Simply have it be some sort of tradition under the guise of religion or something, when in actuality, it'd be a way to consolidate power around a single heir. Multiple heirs are messy, and could lead to civil wars. A tradition that prevents that would work perfectly. I could see humans coming up with something like that, let alone a species like Klingons.
     
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  15. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I'm reminded of the idea that the queen bee will determinedly try to murder the infant queens, because they're her competition. The workers (or soldiers?) will try to protect the infant queens, because someday the queen is going to die, and the hive needs a queen in order to survive.

    But that doesn't explain why the mother didn't kill her instantly. In bees it's instantly obvious who is the queen; maybe in these aliens it's not? Maybe there's a whole bunch of daughters and sons wandering around, and when it becomes clear which daughter is the "queen", that's when the mother wants her dead?
     
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  16. orangefire

    orangefire Active Member

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    '

    To take that a step further, aliens shouldn't be using human time measurements either, since planets all have different year lengths.

    As far as the original post, maybe there's some necessity for them to eat their kids? As aliens their biology would be very different from humans.
     
  17. newjerseyrunner

    newjerseyrunner Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Uhh, but it's still a year, it's just not an earth year. A year is just how long a planet (any planet) takes to orbit it's star once. We still call a martian year a year, we just have to then add the specifier for the planet as Earth is usually implied.
     
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  18. orangefire

    orangefire Active Member

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    Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post.

    The term year is fine, as you said. (Technically they shouldn't be using English words at all, but obviously the reader needs to understand what's going on.) I just meant that a year shouldn't be the same length of time and number of days as an Earth year.
     
  19. newjerseyrunner

    newjerseyrunner Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Understood, I knew what you probably meant, just making it more technical.

    That said, the year would have to be close to ours. The habitable zone of any given star is quite small. Your planet has to get enough energy for a water cycle to exist on the planet, which limits how far away it can be. I’d say a habitable world must have a year somewhere between 200 and 700 Earth days (of course the length of your planets day can be whatever you want.)
     

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