Inexplicable Cultural Ties

"The 'Parallel Worlds' concept is the key to the STAR TREK format. It means simply that our stories deal with plant and animal life, plus people, quite similar to that on Earth. Social evolution will also have interesting points of similarity with ours."

— Gene Roddenberry (in his pitch for Star Trek)

While distant planets in fiction are typically different from Earth in many ways (see for example Planet of Hats, Genericist Government, Single-Biome Planet), they also exhibit astounding cultural similarities: aliens tend to speak English in the dialect of a 21st-century speaker of English, their written language, numerals and methods of time measurement are conveniently identical to Earth standards or can be easily converted. You might even spot European cars or Vancouver landmarks. All societies will include two genders, which register as very like human categories of "male" and "female," down to females who have Latin-sounding names ending in -a, wear their hair long, and their heels high. Expect to come across proper names imported from Earth.

These Inexplicable Cultural Ties are caused by the fact that Most Writers Are Human and can reasonably expect you, the viewer or reader, to be human as well. Hence, some cultural similarities might be considered Acceptable Breaks from Reality (like a Translation Convention) or result from a limited budget. Others might strike you as avoidable mistakes by the creators of the fictional work.

This trope comes in vastly varying degrees. Sometimes it's just a tiny detail that catches the viewer's eye, maybe a building in the background you recognize from Real Life or a visibly branded over-the-counter prop. On the other side of the scale, the alien planet will exhibit so many implausible similarities with Earth that your Willing Suspension of Disbelief is shattered almost instantly. Extreme cases lead to Space Romans. Also, the similarities might be Hidden in Plain Sight, like a combination of social conventions that are inconspicuous precisely because they are so Earth-like but whose exact re-enactment on a distant planet is completely illogical. As this is an Omnipresent Trope for Science Fiction, you might have become desensitized to it. And don't expect the characters on screen to spot Inexplicable Cultural Ties for you - odds are they're crazy Functional Genre Savvy. Instead, consult your fridge frequently.

It's difficult to avert this trope completely in live action settings for budget reasons alone, although good writing can help to pull it off. Actually, as the above quote from the original Star Trek pitch shows, use of this trope used to be a selling point to make live action Science Fiction feasible for the small screen and pull some Aesops in a Like Reality, Unless Noted setting. Since then, this trope has lost some credibility due to the rise of harder science fiction and better production values and techniques conspiring to change viewer's expectations. It is something of an Undead Horse Trope, though. Of course, the whole trope is conveniently avoided in case of Aliens Steal Cable or Absent Aliens.

Though Animated Adaptations and Comic Book Adaptations have the potential to shift a hitherto live-action franchise towards visually more alien settings, they still need good writing and design to avoid this trope. Conversely, Live Action Adaptations of animated works or comic books are likely to introduce more Inexplicable Cultural Ties to a fictional world.

Cultural counterpart to the evolutionary Human Aliens and All Planets Are Earth-Like, which refers to planetary properties.

This being an Omnipresent Trope of Science Fiction, please only mention examples where it is played with, averted or employed in a notable way.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Exaggerated by Space Adventure Cobra: The Animation, which starts with a story where Cobra eventually has to get into planet Galon, which has been isolated for 1000 years, and stop it from crashing into the sun. 1000 years notwithstanding, it has the same language, same architecture, names like Garcia, dark alleys with brick walls, earthlike clothes including hats with brims and jackets for the crooks, earthlike bars, and English writing everywhere.

Comics

• Lampshaded In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire. The expository encyclopedia explains that every species has some kind of Ninja and nobody knows why.
• Discussed in DC/RWBY as Zatanna and Wonder Woman express interest in the fact that the characters and themes in the RWBY universe have similar ties to historic figures and stories in their universe, with Pyrrha Nikos' ties to King Pyrrhus and Jaune Arc's ties to Joan of Arc mentioned as well as Team RWBY's ties to their fairy tales. In turn Blake mentions a Faunus story about a city called Gotham caught in an eternal fight between an orphan knight and a deadly hydra, not realizing its similarities to Batman's story.

Films — Animated

• The aliens in Planet 51 live in what is essentially 1950s suburban America, and they even speak English. The only thing that distinguishes them as aliens is their appearance, as they are otherwise exactly like humans.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Wars
  • Inexplicable Cultural Ties is often played with in the blatantly Meaningful Names some characters are given, one of the worst offenders being Separatist general Whorm Loathsom. Sith names like Maul and Bane apply, too. The implication is that these names just happen to be meaningful in English or Latin by chance, while the in-universe language "Basic" just appears to be English on account of a Translation Convention.
  • Likewise, different accents and dialects of English are used to distinguish characters' affiliation, background, or species to the point that a British actor in The Empire Strikes Back was given an American accent in post to conform to the Rebel-American, Empire-British pattern. In-universe, it is explained that British accents are from the core worlds, while the Rebels generally came from the outer rim.
  • Averted by Orwellian Retcon in a A New Hope where the Death Star's English tractor beam controls have been translated into Aurebesh for the current release.

Literature

• Philip José Farmer's Dayworld books have a minor example of this: he writes in the foreword that the future world depicted has universally adopted the metric system and the twenty-four hour clock, but Imperial measures and 12-hour time are used for the convenience of the (American) reader.
• One of the footnotes in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy mentions that every intelligent species independently came up with a drink whose name sounds like "Gin and Tonic". Of course, the drinks themselves vary widely, from water served slightly above room temperature to being able to kill a cow at two hundred paces.
• Consciously invoked, then explicated, in The Lord of the Rings. Samwise Gamgee's name is deliberately chosen to remind the reader of a working-class Englishman, but in Appendix F Tolkien tells us that it's just a translation. Sam's real name is Banazîr Galbasi (which, oddly, sounds more like Persian or Pashto, or perhaps Turkish).
  • The same is true of many of the character names in Dune. "Paul" and "Jessica" and other modern-sounding names are actually translations of the Galach names the characters would use.
• Nightfall (1990): The foreword to the story tells the audience that it might seem more exotic for alien characters to say "The podnaug is chatnik forgs away, we'll take the whekk", but that's just going to break the reader's immersion as they have to pore over your glossary. As you're translating the rest of the words anyway, you'd be better off just writing "The airport is fifty miles away, we'll take the car."
• Deconstructed in Ursula K. Le Guin's novelette The Pathways of Desire, where more and more suspicious resemblances to American stereotyped notions of "primitive" tribes turn up in the Human Aliens' culture. In the end, the adolescent fantasies of a boy back on Earth turn out to have created the entire planet.
• In the I Wasa Sixth Grade Alien books it’s noted that every single sapient alien species that uses verbal communication has at least one language with the expression of “Aey yi yi!” in it and perplexingly they all mean the same thing (dismay) even though the etymology differs greatly by species. This is said to perplex and frustrate all xeno linguistic researchers.

Live-Action TV

• Mostly averted on Babylon 5: the various Rubber-Forehead Aliens' home worlds are usually pretty alien, especially Minbar, and the aliens have distinctly alien cultures.
  • The Centauri, however, qualify as European nobility in space (with the occasional bodyguard, attendant, and courtesan thrown in), blending the elaborate costumes of pre-Revolutionary Bourbon Frenchmen and late 18th century Prussia with the intrigue-heavy culture of Renaissance Italians and/or Early Imperial Romans, down to freakishly Italianesque names such as Londo Mollari, Vir Coto, Cartagia, and the eye-roll-inducing name of Antono Refa.
  • The hat of the Minbari is tradition, and much of their behavior could be compared to a somewhat idealized (discounting that whole Kill All Humans thing, of course) version of several human cultures. It is their architecture that is alien rather then their culture.
  • Lampshaded when G'Kar mentions that, with no explanation that he has ever been able to determine, every sentient race in the galaxy has, apparently independently, come up with a dish that looks, smells, and tastes identical to what the Narn call "breen" and humans call "Swedish meatballs". He says that if he could discover the reason behind this, he would likely know a great deal more about how the universe works. He's right, if he means that he would know that he's in a television show written by someone who felt like giving a Shout-Out to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its similarly-worded gag with gin and tonic.
• All over the place in the new Battlestar Galactica. Even though it's handwaved by repeatedly stating that all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again, the similarities are glaring, with the skyline of Vancouver, vintage Earth dresses, cars and army trucks, a Classical Mythology identical to our own, the Latin alphabet, Western names, Bob Dylan... and all of this supposedly repeating itself 150,000 years later down to the details on our Earth without any explanation whatsoever. AlternateHistory.com gets its name for this trope from a specific instance of this: The "Citroen DS Incident", after a user criticized the show's use of this trope by pointing out that apparently the Battlestar Galactica humans have, well, the Citroen DS.
• Doctor Who often references many very different and alien worlds, but the ones we usually see seem pretty Earth-like, mostly due to budget reasons. Particularly of note is the Doctor's home world of Gallifrey, and the species seen in "Voyage of the Damned"; for a group coming to visit Earth's "strange and foreign culture" they certainly seemed like the British upper class. The original series is rich in examples of cultures who are impossible to distinguish from humans but don't appear to be actually descended from Earthlings.
• Farscape: The Peacekeepers (and therefore the human character who has borrowed their uniform as casual dress) wear DM boots, or biker boots. Presumably someone invented motorbikes at some point, but Docs?
• Justified in the Stargate-verse by means of an Ancient Astronauts premise. Although it's rather less justified when you consider that the Goa'uld were thrown off Earth at some point in ancient Egyptian times, yet many planets had cultures from much later times on Earth even though the humans transplanted there could not have actually been from those cultures. Similarly, the Ancients, and planets they had influenced, were generally portrayed as similar to Roman, Greek and Arthurian cultures which only existed long after they had disappeared.
• Star Trek:
  • The original Star Trek is very aware of this trope (as evidenced by the opening quote) but plays it straight most of time.
    • The episode "Bread and Circuses" actually handwaves it, citing something called "Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planet Development", an alternative title for this trope.
    • Interestingly, two episodes feature what had been somewhat extreme cases of this... until the subtle differences to Earth ran head-long into apocalypse, leaving society devastated and the cultural similarities somewhat hidden to the casual observer: "Miri" (seems to have been very much like Earth, even physically, but developed a life-prolongation project that went disastrously wrong, leaving kids and teenagers as the only survivors) and "The Omega Glory" (There was a bacteriological war between two factions. The descendants of one are called Kohms, the other are Yangs — and the Yangs maintain garbled versions of the United States Pledge of Allegiance and Constitution).
  • The above two examples, plus the episode with the Roman planet, were actually retconned/handwaved/explained in much later released reference materials, where a scientist determined that sometime in the distant past, the Sol system passed through some kind of Negative Space Wedgie that caused the entire solar system to be duplicated at the subatomic level. One "nearly perfect" duplicate was created in the form of Miri's planet, and two less-perfect duplicates were created in the form of the Omega Glory planet, and the Roman planet. All ended up diverging from the original Earth, but the latter two diverged a lot more than Miri's planet, which was identical until the mid 20th century. It should be noted that Voyager encountered a Negative Space Wedgie just like this (only smaller) in the Delta Quadrant, and it caused a nearly perfect duplication of the ship. These anomalies go a long way to explaining the "parallel planet development" law posited in the original series.
  • Another later retcon occurs in the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novel Forgotten History: Miri's Earth is actually from a parallel universe, and the Yangs were given their US symbols by an Earth ship a mere hundred years before Kirk visited.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation has the episode "Who Watches the Watchers", who would be an excellent example of this trope... except the Mintakans aren't inexplicable human-like, they're inexplicably Vulcan-like. Given their comments in that episode and the above mentioned handwave, the cultural ties evidently aren't quite so inexplicable to 23rd and 24th century Federation science as it would seem to us 20th and 21st century viewers.
  • Whereas by the time of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the cultural assimilation of the Federation has become so great that even the Ferengi on a space station owned by a non-federation government quote Human literature with some frequency, especially Quark, and the Trill, aside from some very central differences due to their biology, seem culturally human to an almost egregious extent.
    • Though Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did have some of this in reverse. Bashir and Garak would regularly trade commentary on the literature of each other's races and their bafflement by it. Garak doesn't believe that Julius Caesar was a tragedy so much as a farce because the Cardassians find the idea of a ruler not anticipating treachery to be ludicrous (although he apparently revises his opinion once he comes to better understand the cultural context), and he believes that the lesson of the "Boy who Cried Wolf" is "never tell the same lie twice" — though this may be more Garak than his society. (He does seem quite alarmed that this passes for a children's story among humans.)
    • Conversely, Bashir finds the "The Never-Ending Sacrifice", a tale of generations of one family all dutifully working for the state and their family and a Cardassian great work of literature, to be boring because of the conformity, which is not something admired by humans. Later he expresses his disdain that modern human literature is largely adapting alien works to human settings, rather than creating their own unique works.
  • Klingons Love Shakespeare! Though they tend to miss the meaning in some works. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy because the two children let their love come before their family feud and died for their treachery. Hamlet is not well liked because Hamlet is very hesitant to seek rightful vengeance.

Video Games

• Zigzagged with Mass Effect. Turians are pretty blatant Space Romans, down to using Roman names like Septimus, with even their racial name being a play on 'centurion'. Similarly, the Asari possess a Crystal Spires and Togas aesthetic, prefer life in city-states, boast about being the inventors of democracy and worship of a wisdom goddess named Atheme, making them obvious Space Greeks (specifically Athenians). The universe is also filled with locations named after Classical Mythology, even where it does not make much sense, like buildings on alien homeworlds. However, all communication in Mass Effect happens through the medium of a Universal Translator and your Player Character is human, so it is very likely that this is mostly the result of an in-universe Cultural Translation in order to make the alien races seem less, well, alien, to humans.

Web Comics

• Homestuck:
  • The troll civilization of the planet Alternia displays a staggering similarity to ours, notably in culture—they even have the same TV shows and a Will Smith. Justified, however, in that our universe (and thus Earth) were actually created by trolls, implying that the similarities are a result of humanity having vague memories of their makers' civilization and replicating them.
  • One cultural tie is enforced by Skaianet: one planet or culture in a universe will always have a local equivalent to video games, and therefore a medium that Skaianet can develop a program for, because the system that powers the universe can't run if it doesn't exist.

Western Animation

• Futurama plays with every kind of Science Fiction trope. This one is no exception:
  • Played for Laughs with the Yiddish-using Decapodians.
  • Inverted by George Takei's George Takei in "Where No Fan Has Gone Before": "I've done enough conventions to know how to spell Melllvar." Star Trek, of course, is possibly the chief Trope Codifier.
• In Rick and Morty:
  • The episode "Look Who's Purging Now" has Rick stating that various cultures across the universe inevitably develops something akin to The Purge in which crime is legalized for a single night.
  • One episode deals with an alien terrorist holding an arcade hostage solely to invoke "Die Hard" on an X since he's from a culture that reveres Die Hard. He states that Die Hard is a monomyth that various cultures across the universe have created under different names.

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