appearance and likability in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

[itrytobe]

write-up of a rant i did in discord about implicit and explicit value judgements in-text about various sentients in Becky Chambers' A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

it seems that the sympathy that The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet extends to sentients correlates strongly with their fit to (present-day, western) Human aesthetic standards.

top tier: Aeluons (smooth and flowy elegance cranked up to the max) and Aandrisks (tall, lithe and athletically built) are Basically Good.

mid tier: Humans (Humans) are not great but nowadays mostly pacifists; Sianat (described as looking like teddy bears) are a bit weird but harmless and conveniently make it their moral imperative to serve other sentients; Grum (giant tardigrades, cute) did a lot of genocide but it's okay! they wisened up and are nice now!

meh tier: Harmagians (look like jellyfish) are The Rich People™ and happy to put ethics aside for material gain.

bottom tier: Quelin (literal scorpions) have lots of fun hobbies such as xenophobia, police brutality, and weeding out the weak; Toremi (i didn't get a clear image from their description but apparently they're disturbingly weirdly put together) are incomprehensibly alien and like Violence for no apparent reason.
this ties in very nicely with the central theme of "we should all get along with each other despite our differences, everyone has value no matter where they come from :)"

Comments

[sylvanauctor]

Small Angry Planet is a book which, given no other plot bunnies currently in line-of-sight, I would rewrite myself. I like the Firefly-Expanse-AngryPlanet trope of "small spaceship full of personalities", and the StarTrek-TranslationState-AngryPlanet trope of "lots of humans and aliens get together for diplomacy reasons". AngryPlanet was a good idea in theory but it was executed very badly.