Okay so Youtube started recommending these videos in a genre called “HFY” or “Humanity Fuck Yeah” which, as far as I can tell, involves AI narrators reading AI-generated stories over slideshows of AI-generated images and the stories are all military sci-fi where humans are the bestest warriors the galaxy has ever seen and kill stupid evil caricature aliens 1000:1. Once in a while there’s a story where an alien race does a massacre to humans which gives the humans an excuse to gloriously commit righteous genocide
Why is this a thing
Who asked for it
Who’s watching it
Unless the stories are obviously AI generated too I’d assume it’s bots/grifters scraping posts from r/HFY and running them through a text-to-speech thing, genning some images to accompany it, stitching it together into a slideshow video, and posting it in the hopes of grifting ad money. If they are clearly also AI generated stories then the same thing, except it was openAI or whoever that scraped the sub and can churn that slop out for them.
As a genre, HFY itself started off of stuff that was imitating things like The Road Not Taken and just general internet contrarianism/edginess built off the real literary/worldbuilding complaint that sci-fi and fantasy stories usually made humans into some kind of generic middleground species or ascribed something sort of naive and bland like “adaptability” or “imagination” as traits that humans had above other sapient beings, and more or less coming to conclusions like “humans are (space) orcs, actually” and more or less wanking to things in the vein of WWII Medal of Honor recipient stories, endurance hunting, or extreme survival stories. Naturally that had an intrinsically fashy sort of vibe, since it was all about stirring up this mix of painful and triumphant vicarious emotions, of violent destruction and overcoming, all in a completely empty and purposeless way, just giving someone an empty tearjerking power kick.
Now looking at r/HFY it seems like it turned into people posting chapter by chapter power fantasy webnovels indistinguishable from like the sloppiest isekai or “super powered guy shunned by party but he’ll show them!” sort of slop, except it’s being published in English first instead of in Japanese. In fact I think some of it is literally just an English version of those exact sorts of genres, I even saw villainess genre slop on the first and only page I glanced at just now.
So yeah that explains the why, who, and who I think: it’s empty formulaic power fantasy slop with a fashy western flavor targeting the same sort of people that isekai and related power fantasy slop is.
Lately I’ve found myself especially annoyed with the “persistence hunting” myth as there’s basically zero evidence it was ever a thing. Why would you spend days tracking a single animal when there’s far more efficient methods of gathering food? Dig up some roots my guy. Lash together canes to make a fish trap. Eat some fruit.
No but you see everything we have as a species we owe everything we have to meat eating!!
Really if you look at nature being able to sprint very fast = predator, being able to run for a long time = prey.
The character names Elara and Elias keep showing up, which is a dead giveaway.
Lmao. There’s something absurd and existentially horrifying about slop machines coming not just for real jobs, but also the kind of cringe fanfic/OC slop people post for fun as a hobby.
“back in my day we used to write cringe fanfics all on our own! We didn’t use AI, or any nonsense like that! I just wrote some cheesy isekai and published it on Wattpad for all to see!”
AI slop drinking game: take a shot every time you see the words “ozone” or “testament”
Hard mode: those rules, plus
spoiler
Humanity is awed by the alien invaders, as the maneuverability granted by their technology suggests the rest of their civilization is equally impressive. But as they begin their assault, things take a turn for the absurd—the Roxolani attack with matchlock weapons and black powder explosives.
tbh this sounds like it could be a fun read
edit: skimmed over the wiki of the author’s bibliography and
From what I remember it is, albeit very short (only a few pages long IIRC). It’s one of those old short stories published in magazines.
From what I’ve heard his writing isn’t as chuddy as it sounds (the short story I mentioned is the only bit of I’ve actually read), for all that it was a huge inspiration to chuds, but it is very much
, yes.
Alternate history tends to attract/create two types of writers: outright chuds, and New Deal liberals who combine a basically progressive outlook with American exceptionalism and unexamined conservative assumptions. Turtledove is one of the latter.
So, having read some Turtledove in my youth, it’s probably not as bad as it seems. His WorldWar series, where alien iguanas invade earth during WW2 with 21st century military weapons tech is a fun speculative sci-fi, where multiple perspective style allowed a young me insight into some of the other unexplored parts of WW2: for instance, one of my favorite characters was a young Chinese woman who, after having lost everything to first the Japanese, then the Aliens, ends up joining and leading her local Maoist rebel group against the Alien occupation of China, climbing the ranks as the series goes. Another character was a woman pilot in the Red Army, who pilots her little biplane around the eastern front until she ends up teaming up with a worn out sympathetic Wehrmacht tank commander to stop literally Otto Skorzeny from nuking Warsaw, since the partisans threw in their lot with the Aliens since everyone else in Europe treated the Jews so badly. So I suppose it’s a bit of a mixed bag, lol, but ultimately I think I can trace a decent portion of my socialist tendency to having my horizons opened thanks to his series.
His other book where the Axis won WW2 ends with Nazi Germany becoming a liberal democracy in the 2010 or something because of vibes after like Himmler dies, having carried on Hitlers legacy. He also wrote Guns of the South, a speculative sci-fi where future skinheads travel back in time and give the Confederacy AK-47s (no, really) so they stand a fighting chance, but then also as a result, become sorta but not really liberalized by General Lee being exposed to the future racist ideology and deciding that’s too racist even for him. So I think he’s just a really dedicated Lib, when it comes down to it, but that’s not exculpatory of say, that one weird book he wrote about a joint Nasa-Soviet mission to explore an alien planet, where all the yanks end up fucking and cheating on each other cause they thought it was a good idea to send 3 married couples.
I’m amazed that you bring up Turtledove World War 2 fiction and neither of the series is the one I read! I liked his Darkness series which was basically “What if World War II but the Fantasy Manhattan Project is about breakthroughs in mathematical magic and the Fantasy Australians did it, and instead of fighter jets they have dragons, and instead of tanks they have fucking woolly rhinoceroses with canons and catapults mounted to their sides and their cover art is sick and enticing if you’re 14 years old”. It was cool how it tells the story from many different perspectives (but still makes it clear that Fantasy Nazis are bad) and doesn’t turn it into “Fantasy America carried the entire war”. There’s an arc that covers the Battle of Stalingrad and it’s really harrowing.
Edit: Ok not just if you’re 14.
Exhibit A: SICK
Exhibit B: SICK
Exhibit C: SICK
Exhibit D: SICK
Exhibit E: SICK
Exhibit F: SICK
The soundtrack to listen to while looking at these covers
Bet there will be shit like avatar but the humans are somehow the goos guys and the unobtanium is needed for humans to survive despite them fucking up another planet.
If you were to dig far enough back into r/HFY’s history you would absolutely find that, yes. Like I’m not even guessing here, I am 100% confident that literally that exact fanfic is somewhere in the depths there, right alongside memes of the one officer lifting weights captioned with a particular rant that I can’t remember if it was a quote from the movie or 40k inspired fanwank.
Like the WH40k flavored contrarian reaction to Avatar was 100% part of the genesis of that genre and that sub.
I had the misfortune of seeing that exact image and can confirm it wasn’t in the movie. It’s also completely at odds with the character it’s posted next to, who’s a stereotypical dumb violent meathead (so accurate portrayal of an American troop)
i have to shamefully admit i used to like r/HFY when i was a teenager. there was one story in particular that i thought was incredible but i dont remember the name of it, the gist goes that some alien species comes through and wipes out the entire human race, humans manage to build an AI composed of multiple people last moment that takes hundreds(?) of years to fully come online because of damage to memory and sets out to take revenge on the alien species. thinking back it was probably complete libshit (particularly end-of-history capitalism type stuff iirc) for the most part, but i still think it had a relatively good ending where the main AI character actually decides to stop their genocide and frees its AI children/slaves that it created who end up taking up the legacy of humanity. idk if anyone else here has read it and it was actually terrible or something sorry lol, i just remember thinking it was a beautiful story about the nature of revenge, learning to let go, and what it means to be “human”
most of the other stuff i read on there was complete slop though, remember one that was particularly cringe because they fantasize about aliens thinking they’re engaging in “glorious battle” with humans and then it turns out it was a group of 6yo cub scouts and soldiers come in and massacre them or something like this