What happened to HFY?

What really annoys me is that a lot of HFY stories seem to miss the point. Like, they don't actually focus on the things that actually make humans awesome, but instead either ridiculously exaggerate some human-ish qualities or just slap some plot armor on their human protagonists and have them face nonhumans who just so happen to be a bunch of retards. Then there are stories hat basically go "he look at us, we're a bunch of savage bloodthirsty sociopaths, isn't that great?!" No, it isn't fucking great. Any HFY story whose sole focus is on human aptitude for violence is garbage.

It is shit, and you are shit.

Welcome to Veeky Forums, where we don't even like fun because that would make us normies.

that's not true. actually Veeky Forums just hates every kind of fun that isn't a very specific fun that is also a serious thing. And everyone has a different idea what is that thing

>What happened to HFY?
It got too incestuous. Started as a way to encourage writing exercises and make humans into something other than the generic versatile species (because, seriously, our species has the lowest genetic diversity among all known life). Quickly became jingoistic spess marines that kill everyone because muh determinators, exhaustion hunting, scorched earth, and reverse engineering, not to mention OMFG I BREATHE ROCKET FUEL. You wouldn't believe how many times that one came up. Also, you'd have to write all other species as clinically retarded if they lost a war over bad resource control or slow tech advancement.

>40k subscribers
>Popular
>Implying you aren't just butthurt it's no longer exclusive to your sooper sekrit club

memes are ded, we're boring normies nao

>(because, seriously, our species has the lowest genetic diversity among all known life)
Not as bad as cheetahs, actually.

It devolved into a circlejerk over the invincible humans effortlessly stomping strawmen aliens into the curb and being the bestest at everything forever.

The threads also devolved into a circlejerk with new content and stories being ignored and forgotten in favor of the same handful of people reposting the same handful of old as fuck screencaps over and over again.

Actually that might be a fun variation: aliens fighting about earth being the best at something while we don't know/care.

ITT filthy xeno lovers. Bet they voted hillary.

People were unable to hide threads they didn't like and also felt a moral obligation to rant about how others were having plebeian badwrongfun.

>Nyaruko

Liberals flooded the threads and got butthurt when anons posted about militarism, expansionism, and imperialism being good and desirable human traits.

People kept posting that stupid fucking chocolate cake pasta.

Remember the time when HFY fags posted in monster girl threads?

It's 40,000 more people that will blast this stupid shit on their facebook feeds, which increases the speed in which it becomes overblown and tired.

Like remember how popular lolcatz were a few years ago? It's the same principle.

>he wouldn't fuck the slime xenos

What type of posting?

Worse than 40k fags

This

We are much too caustic and complete assholes to ever be "normie". This is an inherent nature of anyone who frequents Veeky Forums. We are horrible fucking people, and in no way representative of "normal" society.

Lolcats were a massive phenomenon, though. I mean basically inescapable if you used the internet. You're not disproving my "sooper sekrit club" thing

Humans killing monster girls, space marines, heretics blah blah that kind of thing.
To be fair I think monster girls are magical realm shit that should stick to /d/ and /jp/ anyways.

Oh I totally would a slime xeno, user.

It was just a really shit piece of pasta.

40K is far from HFY.

Maybe the Horus Heresy since the Great Crusade FUCKED a whole lot of xeno races and not to mention all that super cool technology and shit.

Now its more like Humanity oh fuck.

Also

>Space marines being human anymore

They are Weapons made Men

>Humans killing monster girls, space marines, heretics blah blah that kind of thing.
That's not HFY in general though, that's just 40k being 40k.

>It was just a really shit piece of pasta.
I thought it was pretty cute

Maybe the setting, but the aesthetics and "let's kill everything" attitude are pretty much everything HFYfags love and will mindlessly parrot

>reverse engineering

That shit pisses me off so much. It took us 20-30 years to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs when we had the Rosetta stone to fucking translate it for us - and Egyptian hieroglyphs are made by humans.

Reverse engineering alien technology is the laziest form of plot development - because real reverse engineering of alien technology would take decades, centuries, perhaps even millennia.

When something becomes mainstream, the quality begins to take a considerable dip while at the same time making its exposure more obvious.

Like you know how meme generators started off kinda meh but then once everyone were able to get a hold of it, they became overexposed and stupid?

And then marketing teams realized how popular they were and we got shit like this.

youtube.com/watch?v=x8wOE7J8G1U

It's the same principle for HFY shit. It started off okay for what it was but then once everyone started to hear about it, we ended up with shit like "I can breath rocket fuel" and "good luck, I'm behind 10,000 layers of plot armor."

>That's not HFY in general though, that's just 40k being 40k.
Yes and? You act like 40k fags aren't HFY fags.

>Humanitys godlike beings are weak minded and seemingly fall to chaos

Best feeling in the world

>Entire faction is agasint the weakness of the flesh

The memes got to people.

40k is FAR from HFY in alot of regards but on the surface that is what it looks like

Again, how is small Reddit community "mainstream." I get it, you like to pretend using this site makes you special and the moment you see people elsewhere enjoying these things they become tainted in your eyes. You don't have to keep pretending.

This, unironically.

40k fags are also sci-fi, but I don't see you saying that sci-fi is shit because of that.

What's your fucking point? They shit up MG threads with their HFY garbage and that's all there is to it.

>Again, how is small Reddit community "mainstream."
Because reddit in and of itself is mainstream enough for celebrities, internet personalities, businessmen, etc. to use it to connect with their fans.

Meme generators were at one point only a few thousand people strong but once it hit mainstream, everyone wanted a slice of the pie and everyone wanted to use it to spread their shitty fucking jokes.
> I get it, you like to pretend using this site makes you special and the moment you see people elsewhere enjoying these things they become tainted in your eyes. You don't have to keep pretending.
Stop projecting, this isn't what I said and you know it.

>I thought it was pretty cute
It was kinda cute, they just took the idea of aliens finding chocolate addictive to 11 and it killed the story. There isn't even that much chocolate in chocolate cake. She'd have to be insanely sensitive to get that kind of reaction out of a dose that wouldn't even register in a human.

If you fed her a Hershey kiss she'd probably keel over and die.

I wish monster girl threads were still shat on. They've become the new Elf Slavers.

My point is you're a reactionary cunt with shit taste in waifus who probably can't tell star trek from star wars.
If you're going to get mad at a group, get mad at the smallest possible group that encompasses all the guilty individuals. This would mean getting mad at shitposting 40k fags, rather than anyone and everyone who likes the slightest iota of human supremacy in their make believe stories.

Ah, I see your point now. I do suppose that's a fair criticism, and I didn't even think of that when I read it.

I think you're just an upset 40k baby that was called out to be honest. Not defending monster girls, but I think HFY fags are far worse.

And tasmanian devils, who are so inbred that their cancer is contagious.

If that's how you define the term normie, you turn it from a name of ridicule to one of aspiration.

If what makes us not a normie is our irrational rage and terribleness, then we should seek to be normie as much as possible.

That's the point. Normalness is dignified, reasonable, and productive. You can greatly enjoy a hobby while still being normal.

>You act like 40k fags aren't HFY fags.

I think its more that, Veeky Forums being Veeky Forums, 40kfags co-opted HFY and are largely responsible for it becoming as bad as it did by turning it into the ultra violent pro-human powerwankfest that it became known for.

HFY is, essentially, Imperialfags making up a fan setting where the Imperium's xenocidal fantasies are allowed to play out without consequence and actually accomplish something, since 40k itself is stale as week old bread.

40k is still very HFY, humans have the biggest empire, strongest dudes, everyone who really matters to the plot is either a human or Chaos God, their tech blows everyone out of the water with time traveling black-hole gun sentient interdimensional ships and they win every major war and battle they ever get into.

40k is, at least on the surface, pretty pure HFY. Just read the books, most of them have lines about 'the enduring nature' of human spirit or 'mankind will not be defied' stuff tacked on the end. Whereas the other factions will rarely if ever get epithet's like that in the novels themselves.

Its HFY in the way most Veeky Forums HFY fans percieve HFY (humans kill all aliens durr aliens be filthy).

Yeah I'd agree with this pretty much.

To be fair I don't even see why they need it. Just read Black Library if a fan wants a human powerwank, literally 80% of the books have humans curbstomping every sort of Xenos there is. I mean 40k is a setting where literally the Big Cheese Xenos like Eldrad and Ghazz have never once in their lives even won a single battle against a Space Marine Force.

Its like a bunch of team rockets against Nazi-Catholic Germany.

40k is both HFY, and anti-HFY.

The only way the Imperium of Man can function is by systematically obliterating everything that makes humans human. It's biggest enemy is itself.

No, I'm not an upset 40k fag, I'm just annoyed that you're conflating an entire group with a subgroup, which isn't even a subgroup so much as it is an entirely separate group that intersects with HFY.

If you're mad at 40k shitposting, be mad at 40k fags! Don't be made at HFY as if it were some unified setting and fandom because it shares elements with 40k!
This isn't a defense of HFY either, this is just me saying that you're wasting your anger on the wrong target.

The problem with that assertion is that you first need to define what makes humans, human.

Quite frankly, the militaristic, jingoistic, tribalist, expansionist, imperialist elements of humanity are just as human as the peaceful, cooperative, diplomatic elements.

The removal or erasure of any part leads to something that is less than human.

Not really.

HFY as Veeky Forums sells it is all about exalting mindless violence, intolerance and hatred for all non-human life. 40k does pretty much that, with the common line being that nothing is a match for good old 'human intolerance' as it says about Ministorum Priests.

40k definitley doesn't consider the Imperium as having to obliterate its own humanity in order to survive. Obliterate individual humans, sure, but the books constantly talk about how the 'spirit' of humanity endures and crap.

Besides I'll believe its not HFY when someone other than a Human or the Chaos Gods actually ever matters. MFW the Chaos Gods are even only important cause humans alone somehow make them super since they seem to have never had any other followers ever other than humans.

>MFW the Chaos Gods are even only important cause humans alone somehow make them super since they seem to have never had any other followers ever other than humans.
user, are you just being retarded or what?

No fucking shit the Chaos gods have had followers other than humans; Slaanesh exists solely because of the Eldar, but the reason why humans are so important to chaos is two fold.

1) Humans have souls
They don't have particularly big or powerful souls compared to, say, the Eldar or other xenos, but they're big enough to be noticeable, unlike the Tau

2) Humans fucked their way across the Galaxy before the Eldar fucked the Galaxy into a living nightmare
There were so many human colonies, and thus so many humans, that they became the primary source of power for the Chaos gods.

There isn't anything intrinsic about humanity that makes Chaos need them.

>40k is both HFY, and anti-HFY.

HFY isn't a genre, nor a category.
It's a writing prompt.

40K isn't HFY, because the writers didn't start writing it with a "Hey, let's masturbate over how great humanity is" mindset.

HFY is nothing except a few people on the internet being idiots and lamenting that even though humans win in 99.999% of stories, that remaining fraction of a percentile upsets their fragile egos.

>HFY is nothing except a few people on the internet being idiots and lamenting that even though humans win in 99.999% of stories, that remaining fraction of a percentile upsets their fragile egos.
Hell, I remember a guy on an HFY thread once claiming that the whole HFY thing was a counter-reaction to sci-fi traditionally portraying humans as weaker and inferior to aliens. This is, obviously, utter bullshit, considering how humans tend to triumph in stories no matter what advantages their opponents have.

It did get huge after Avatar if I recall and that picture of the colonel saying some shit that was never said in the movie.

That shit was from 40K RP if I recall

To be fair at the start HFY was just about humans having their own niche instead of being just the puny earthlings or the boring and bland yardstick.
It's only later that retards decided the niche was having insane plot armor.

It was from a Avatar fanfic

To be honest

I picture ideal HFY humans as not insane zealots who would rather be purged of emotions and are constantly killing

40k humans are really terrible terrible people

youtube.com/watch?v=zT_vcm7eKIc

>War is what we are
>Killing is all we are good for
>The rest is delusion

Well that sums up this argument

Go away you fucking worthless, pathetic NARPfag, goddamn this board has gotten so shitty since you fucking questfag IDEAS GUYS flooded in from other boards.

Veeky Forums is for TRADITIONAL GAMES, not your fucking lore and storytiem and magical reaaalm and all that fucking dumb bullshit you vapid, literally-reddit-tier mouthbreathing mongoloid gutter-dwelling autistic losers love to jerk each ither over.

Kill yourself.

No.

>To be fair at the start HFY was just about humans having their own niche instead of being just the puny earthlings or the boring and bland yardstick.

>boring and bland yardstick

Just shut up, you dumbfuck. You've been repeating this same ridiculously stupid idea for the last several years, without understanding that just because the humans are set as the base, they're not somehow transformed.

If elves are +2 dex -2 con and humans are just 0 dex 0 con, that's no different than humans being +con -2 dex and elves being 0 con 0 dex, outside of your retarded perception.

So, instead of understanding this extremely simple concept, you go ahead and try to create a new race of "humans+X" or "humans+Y", erroneously call them humans, and think yourself clever.

This more than anything. I imagine I'm in the minority with this opinion, but Heinlein knockoffs by guys who misread Heinlein were old before HFY.

You misunderstand

The problem is EVEN WHEN HUMANS ARE THE BASELINE, WE ARE EXPECTED TO ABASE OURSELVES BECAUSE WE ARE EVIL COMPARED TO NOBLE SAVAGE ARCHETYPE #9001

Well, stop reading/watching luddite fiction that praises simpler cultures then.

Its an ancient story designed to appeal to poor stupid people by lauding being poor and stupid as a virtue. Its the flip side of the decadent, sinful society that despite having everything amounts to nothing.

"Technological and complex is SCARY. Simple and stupid is GOOD."

It made more sense back in the day. Many of the trappings of civilization arguably hurt quality of life for the majority of people before we had access to fossil fuels. Cities could be downright nightmarish for anyone that wasn't fabulously wealthy. Death rate exceeded birth rate, but the city kept on ticking by gobbling up landless laborers who lacked the stability and middling self-governance you got in a village.

You're missing the point. Back when HFY was still a thing on Veeky Forums stories and threads would have us filling niches, just look them up on 1d4chan. Humans are warriors, humans are engineers, even humans are sexual predators. Now it's just humans are superior

>The Terran Confederation and the Xerathi Union failed to agree who REALLY knows a good time

>To this day, the argument comes up in diplomatic functions

>No one's willing to let it go

>As a compromise, an entire planet is devoted to showing off how hard each race can party, with half of the world allotted to each

>Previous pic is what the borders look like

I know humanity. Humanity is the fixed marker by which I measure other things. So HFY mostly just serves to convince me that humanity's enemies are rather pathetic.

That attitude applies to a lot of factions though. Craftworld Eldar, Dark Eldar, Necrons, and possibly Tau all think they're the best species in the galaxy.

>biggest empire

Which is also either basically stagnating or actively decaying.

>strongest dudes

Every faction has at least one thing that shits on Space Marines and isn't super rare.

>their tech blows everyone out of the water

Not even close. Necrons, Dark Eldar, and Craftworld Eldar all have better technology than the Imperium. The Tau have better technology in certain respects and so can the Orks depending on the Mek. Even most of the Imperium's best stuff that is capable of crazy shit isn't used often or at all and is hoarded as a last resort or because the Mechanicus doesn't want to share.

Dark Age Technology as far as I know was never really set in stone, which lends writers the freedom to make it better than intended and people to say that it's the peak technology of the setting.

>they win every major war and battle they ever get into.

Imperium actually loses quite a bit and even when it does win there is a good chance it's a pyrrhic victory.

Ghazghkull only lost once, then he came back for a while, got bored, and left. He's far from defeated and even his defeats cause massive amounts of damage.

Read the Beast Arises to see what happens when BL does xeno wank

This. Half the time they make humans good by making the aliens complete failures. The worst examples I've seen.
>Aliens treating headbutting as some sort of horrifying thing that shows just how brutally humans fight
>Aliens' laser weapons give humans first degree burns and aliens are amazed humans naturally produce combat drugs (adrenaline)

I have like 10 subscribers somehow. Never even made a video and don't know who the fuck subscribed to me. Just saying.

Maybe people subscribed because you left a comment somewhere or because you share similar interests in your favorites or because they know you IRL or some shit.

Even then, I don't necessarily see how that has anything to do w/ this discussion.

From personal experience people on Veeky Forums are decent dudes who just love nerdy shit, get that edgy serious shit over to /r9k/ mate, I just came to argue about Space Marines

To be fair, to an alien that's used to fighting at ranged and is susceptible to heat, humanity might look like a bunch of xenomorphs who just never fucking stop.

I mean, most of the shit we eat is poisonous to a majority of the animal kingdom but even with that in mind, it still doesn't excuse how fucking retarded HFY can be in large doses.

Also the kakapo, since theres like 12 of them left and half of them share the same parentage.

as with most things it got old and the whiners start to outnumber the enthusiasts

>I mean, most of the shit we eat is poisonous to a majority of the animal kingdom
That would kind of take a somewhat in-depth knowledge of humans and earth to appreciate since when it comes to literally alien stuff everything would probably be toxic.

That's not actually true, though, not as any kind of a general rule.

HFY is still here occasionally.
Though, /pol/ has made it a point to try to shitpost the threads out of reality since the election.
I can't fathom why.

It shouldn't be here, because it's not traditional games, all the stories are shit, and the only people who care about it are twelve-year olds from Reddit.

And fuck off with your Reddit-esque "anyone who hates stupid human wank fanfiction is from the board no one likes" bullshit.

Oh, hello /pol/.
Still trying to force your reddit memes here, eh?

>wah, stop telling me to stop spamming my dumb offftopic shit wah you must be from pol because everyone on reddit says meanies come from pol

Why are you even trying anymore.

Man, it became really easy to identify the frogposter meme complex after we identified their attempts to use foreign memes.
Next time, try blending in with more Veeky Forums fare.

About a third of /pol/ is convinced that Trump is the Emprah, and that we're going to annex Russia and kickstart the Imperium of Man. HFY that doesn't look American enough rustles their jimmies. Then there's the weird mix of Christian meming and Kek worship along with the usual shills, shitposters, and saboteurs.

If anything I think a good /pol/ related HFY prompt is "what if we're the psychic race or the Orks?" I don't think I've ever seen a setting where the ayys were LESS psyker than us.

I've seen some where the ayys were more psychic, but humans just no-selled that shit.
I really liked the first one, but couldn't find the rest.
Also it involved humans becoming mercenaries in exchange for literal shiny baubles, which tickled me just right.

...

The Emperor is canonically an ancient Anatolian.