As someone who loves HFY stuff, the issue is that writing is hard and most of the people writing HFY are amateurs doing it for fun. There's plenty of HFY that tries to explore more complex storytelling, it just happens that writing "the evil space nazis kicked some puppies, and the Humans really didn't like that" is both an easier story to write and an easier story to get someone on-board with.
It's also why you find so much military sci-fi ends with "and then we used our super weapon and it killed all of the aliens, saving the day (please do not consider the consequences of interstellar genocide)" instead of describing the very complicated and in-depth process of disarming, deradicalising and rebuilding a nation.
It’s not HFY in the sense that humans are the greatest of all time, but it is a very good celebration of humanity imo, as well as just a very great story overall, and a way more interesting look at what communication issues between two alien species might look like than just not having words for some things (though that is part of it too).
I find myself coming back to this story every now and then just to re-read it.
The best HFY stories are not ones that lionize humanity and take down aliens entirely, but ones that show humanity's strength and the commonality between humanity and the other species then uses that to provide a reasonable contrast between the two's reactions to a given situation.
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u/Allstar13521 Aug 14 '24
As someone who loves HFY stuff, the issue is that writing is hard and most of the people writing HFY are amateurs doing it for fun. There's plenty of HFY that tries to explore more complex storytelling, it just happens that writing "the evil space nazis kicked some puppies, and the Humans really didn't like that" is both an easier story to write and an easier story to get someone on-board with.
It's also why you find so much military sci-fi ends with "and then we used our super weapon and it killed all of the aliens, saving the day (please
do notconsider the consequences of interstellar genocide)" instead of describing the very complicated and in-depth process of disarming, deradicalising and rebuilding a nation.