Fantasy Aliens

An extraterrestrial being, or beings, in a setting that is otherwise completely traditional fantasy. Typically, this means the aliens arrived on the planet using means other than space ships, such as loosely defined magic or a meteor impact. If the aliens are landing in a space ship and shooting laser guns, then it probably leans more towards Science Fantasy. Though works on the Science Fantasy spectrum can still have fantasy aliens, the main idea being that these alien creatures come from a world beyond the capacity or knowledge of its ordinary denizens, so something like Kirby - which is fantasy but features space travel - wouldn't really apply.

Compare and contrast Wizards from Outer Space, which places solidly-defined fantasy beings in a sci-fi setting. Also contrast Planetary Romance, for fantasy worlds populated largely by aliens.

May overlap with Ancient Astronauts or Alien Fair Folk. Also see Alien Episode, for other instances of aliens showing up in things that are otherwise not science fiction.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Naruto: The founder of modern ninjutsu, Hagoromo Otsutsuki, the Sage of the Six Paths is later revealed to be a Half-Human Hybrid born between a human and Kaguya, a woman from the Otsutsuki clan of "celestial beings" that hail from another world with many others like themselves. These beings tend to send one of their own to underdeveloped planets and try to find a God Tree, which absorbs the blood and life of the native beings of that world to produce "chakra". The tree itself is an extraterrestrial plant that crashed on Earth via meteorite several millennia ago, and was revered by ancient humans as a divine entity. Some Otsutsuki harvest the fruit until it kills all of the native inhabitants, while Kaguya ate the fruit of the tree, settled on the Earth and came to be revered as a goddess and feared as the Ten-Tails.

Comic Books

• Hillbilly is normally a Fantasy Americana series, with witches and trolls as the default villains, but the "Red-Eyed Witchery from Beyond" arc had a meteorite come down out of the sky and spread a plague that turned people into monsters.

Film — Live-Action

• The Dark Crystal: The Skeksis, and their counterparts the Mystics, hail from another planet. This series actually uses this concept with Gaia-style philosophy where in the regular inhabitants of the planet get to become one with the planet upon their death while the Skeksis as aliens simply cease to exist upon death. Where they originally came from or why they came to Thra (or even how) is left largely unanswered.
• Krull is set in a Standard Fantasy Setting undergoing an Alien Invasion. The Beast attacks the world with his castle-like spaceship.
• Hercules Against the Moon Men is a Sword and Sandal fantasy movie set in Ancient Grome (with a few elements of Egypt and Mesopotamia sprinkled in), but the main villains are, as the title suggests, men from the moon. There are also other, non-alien monsters, firmly establishing this as a fantasy movie that happens to have aliens in it, and not simply a sci-fi movie that happens to be set in the Classical era.

Literature

• Bardic Voices is a medieval fantasy setting with several nonhuman species, and makes a strong implication that most if not all are aliens stranded on the same planet as the humans. It takes place long After the End of readily available advanced technology, but there are hints that that technology was very advanced. How the magic fits in to that is unknown.
• Codex Alera: In a book series about Romans with Elemental Powers, the Vord are a Horde of Alien Locusts strongly hinted to be (yes) aliens from space, though they’ve lain dormant for centuries. They’re first encountered inhabiting an enormous crater with a huge metallic pillar jutting out from its exact center, inside which their Hive Queen hibernates. In a later book, after the Vord awaken, the Vord Queen declares that her species is conquering other worlds out among the stars, and that even if she’s destroyed, the Vord will inevitably return one day.
• Discworld:
  • The Colour of Magic: Near the end of the book the protagonists encounter a water troll who informs them that he's an alien who reached the Disc by literally falling off another planet and landing there.
  • Lords and Ladies: The Fair Folk come from a parasite universe rather than outer space, but their physical descriptions (once you see past their gorgeous elven Glamour) are reminiscent of The Greys.
  • The Last Hero reveals that swamp dragons are descended from the dominant race on the Discworld's moon, with their Extreme Omnivore nature and resultant explosive digestion problems being caused by the lack of their natural diet of silvery moon vegetation.
• The premise of Everworld is that the gods of various mythologies decided to abandon our world, so they created Everworld and moved over there, bringing some followers with them. After a while, gods from other worlds also found their way there along with their alien worshipers. Upon meeting some Coo-Hatch, Christopher even thinks that they look too different from anything on Earth to be "just" a legendary creature. The other main species we meet are the Hetwan, Insectoid Aliens whose god, Ka Anor, wants to eat the other gods and wipe out Everworld's mortal inhabitants.
• Faerie Wars combines alien and fairy myths in a generally fantasy setting. The protagonist discovers a portal to Fairyland, which is a Standard Fantasy Setting occupied by several races (all called Faeries) who are at war with each other, including an evil race referred to as demons. The demons turn out to be responsible for all reported alien sightings, as they kidnap people and keep them on what resembles UFOs, but they can also be summoned by a Summoning Ritual, and hail from Another Dimension rather than space.
• Grunts!: The second half has an Alien Invasion by a race of scorpion-like aliens with Organic Technology, which they use to replicate the titular Grunts' guns (the Grunts being an orcish warband who stumbled upon a dead dragon's hoard of modern weaponry). Their ship touches down in the obligatory desert region. When they finally make diplomatic contact, they reveal that they just like fighting a lot.
• The Inchoroi from Second Apocalypse, who are described a falling from the heavens in an Ark.
• Tale of the Comet involves an evil, alien A.I. called the Overseer invading a Standard Fantasy Setting by way of a half-assimilated battlecruiser crash-landing on it. The battlecruiser's owners, the humanoid Rael, train the native population to fight it off.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Blackmoor: The adventure Temple of the Frog (Original D&D Blackmoor supplement and BECMI D&D adventure DA2) involves aliens from a crashed starship who use their high tech devices to try to take over.
  • Greyhawk: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is an adventure module where a group of adventurers from the otherwise firmly fantasy world explore a cavern that turns out to be the long-buried remnants of a crashed starship. Within it, the characters will find themselves battling malfunctioning robots and alien creatures and may be able to scavenge advanced energy weapons and Powered Armor.
  • Mystara: In Principalities of Glantri and the Rules Cyclopedia supplement Wrath of the Immortals), the engine of the starship from adventure DA2 Temple of the Frog is converted into a magical artifact that will drain all of the magic out of the universe if it isn't stopped. One of the aliens from that adventure becomes an Immortal (deity) while trying to stop it.
  • Spelljammer: Creatures from planets in one solar system can travel to planets in other solar systems (and thus be "aliens") by using sailing ships powered by magic items called "helms". Some of the races, such as insectares, are noticably more "alien" than the usual D&D races.
  • Tale of the Comet was a second edition D&D mini-setting published in 1997, based around an alien starship crashing on Your Campaign World.
  • Two articles in Dragon described the Sheen; alien Mechanical Lifeforms that would drop into a fantasy world and start trying to assimilate it. It namechecks both the Barrier Peaks and the Rael Cysts from Tale of the Comet.
  • A series of Dragon articles also described using Alternity races in D&D, although whether they were actually alien in a given setting was up to the DM.
  • More generally, Mind Flayers/Illithids are usually portrayed this way. They are explicitly otherworldly parasitoid psionic creatures who arrived via Time Travel from a Bad Future in biomechanical Magitek spaceships.
• Pathfinder: Golarion is for the most part a High Fantasy setting with pulp influences, but also features cosmic and extraterrestrial elements fairly often as a result of Genre Blending. These are usually inspired by either Planetary Romance stories such as John Carter of Mars or by Cosmic Horror, but also feature such things as a hyper-advanced starship that crashed into one of the world's countries, populating it with robots and aliens who escaped from its shattered hulk. In a twist, Golarion's elves are this, rather than having ties to fey and such; they originally came from Castrovel (a forest-covered Venus-equivalent) through magic portals, and their affinity for woodlands is because it reminds them of home.
• Warhammer: The franchise is set in a fairly straightforward Dark Fantasy setting, with major emphasis on magic, supernatural entities and traditional fantasy peoples such as elves, dwarves and the like, but a major feature of the setting's backstory are the Old Ones, Ancient Astronauts who came from beyond the world and used their supernatural technology to terraform the planet and create most of its sapient species. In the End Times, the Lizardmen — originally created as the Old Ones' servants and agents — reawaken relic Old One technology that allows them to turn their temple-cities into, essentially, starships, after which they abandon the world altogether.

Video Games

• Castle Crashers is a sidescrolling Swords and Sorcery Beat 'em Up featuring a bevvy of Magic Knights. However, it features a level set on a Flying Saucer that takes them from Fantasy-Europe to Fantasy-Middle-East, where the enemies are alien security guards-as a matter of fact, they're lifted straight from Alien Hominid, another Newgrounds game.
• Chrono Trigger is a story involving time travel with a heavy slant towards the fantasy side of the spectrum. The main antagonist, Lavos, is an Eldritch Abomination Planetary Parasite who arrived on Earth in the time of the dinosaurs and has been interfering with the course of the world ever since.
• Darkstalkers: The game features mostly Monster Mash of well-known fantasy monsters... and then you have Huitzil and Pyron, the former being an automaton of extraterrestrial origin and the latter being an Energy Being alien.
• It's more of a gag in Dragon Age: Origins than anything, but there is a bit where you retrieve meteor metal to forge a sword... while a farmer couple wonders over the baby who crawled out of the crater, wondering how he could have survived that and eventually deciding he's a gift from the Maker.
• Elden Ring: there are several varieties of these things, but they seem to usually arrive in the Lands Between as meteors. It's suggested that all of them are the same type of being, but they mutate and transform over time, taking on aspects of things and/or creatures around them. They all share inherent gravity manipulation powers of varying strength. The Obsidian and Alabaster Lords look mostly human (except taller and made of rock), the Fallenstar Beasts look more like giant oxen made of black stone with mandibles in place of horns, while the exclusively subterranean Malformed Stars are straight up Eldritch Abominations.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The franchise sometimes leans towards sci-fi, but even in the more strictly fantasy settings aliens can be a somewhat common occurrence. Notable examples are Zemus and the Lunarians in Final Fantasy IV (as well as the Creator from the sequel, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years), Jenova in Final Fantasy VII and Garland and the Terrans in Final Fantasy IX are all aliens that serve as big bads of the story.
  • Final Fantasy also has a recurring alien race known as Pupu who appear in multiple games, usually in a cameo capacity with their true motives and intentions being unknown.
  • Statements from Word of God later on in the series confirmed subtle hints in Final Fantasy X-2 which pointed to Final Fantasy VII being a Distant Sequel. In X-2, a child genius named Shinra gets the idea to tap into the Farplane (the X series's version of the afterlife) and harness its power for scientific advancement. It's later confirmed that his descendants perfected this technology, developed space travel, and then land on the planet which is the setting of FFVII. This makes the human population of VII extraterrestrials, as opposed to the Cetra (aka the "Ancients") who were the natives of the planet until the alien abomination Jenova wiped them out. The fact that humans don't "belong" on the planet is, in fact, the original motive behind Sephiroth's plan to wipe them all out, as Jenova had misled him to believe that she was also a Cetra.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, it's revealed that the entire race of dragons are extraterrestrial creatures. Their progenitor, Midgardsormr, came to Hydaelyn after fleeing a devastating war on his homeworld provoked by an unknown other alien species (which would finally be identified in Endwalker as the Omicrons). In the Stormblood expansion Midgardsormr also confirms that an ancient machine called Omega, originally believed to be garden-variety Lost Technology, is in fact an alien war machine built by the Omicrons and which chased him all the way to Hydaelyn, and Endwalker clarifies that Omega actually is an Omicron; their species embraced cybernetics early in their history and eventually became fully robotic.
• Grandia II: Although the God of Light, Granas, and God of Darkness, Valmar, are revered as magical gods, the story slowly starts to reveal that this is a grave misconception. The first clue comes when the party finds the "Granasaber", a magical sword that was said to be so powerful that it created a giant gorge on the world's surface — and it turns out to be a massive spaceship in the shape of a sword. Later, the team also meets an "angel" that was one of the footsoldiers that Granas used in the war against Valmar, and she turns out to be an android. Even later still, when the party finally sees the final moments of the war between Granas and Valmar, it turns out to have been a massive space battle between Granas and his/its/their robotic soldiers and Valmar, which is much more like an eldritch abomination.
• The Lands of Lore series introduces the Ruloi in the second game, a race of beings who arrive in the world the games take place in in a flying citadel.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: There's a subplot where you have to defend a ranch from aliens resembling The Flatwoods Monster. Their "ship", for want of a better term, appears as a glowing ball of light. Majora's Mask is otherwise a completely straight fantasy game.
• Kingdom Rush Frontiers: One of the heroes is an alien warrior in an openly fantasy series, fighting with energy blades, drones and even summoning his spaceship to kidnap enemies. The jungle levels also feature Xenomorph Xeroxes which apparently spawned from a starship.
• Ōkami: The Moon Tribe are a Human Aliens version. The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is the spaceship they arrived in, now full of demons.
• The fifth Simon the Sorcerer game: "Who'd even want Contact" has Simon dealing with what appears to be an alien invasion on the magical world. it eventually turns out that the aliens are tourists who are oblivious to the fact that their cameras cause magical matter to explode when they take a picture, and they plan to end the tour by taking a picture of the entire magical planet with a giant camera on their ship.
• Tales of Legendia: Humans, referred to "Orerines", are under constant threat and harassment by another group of invaders called the "Ferines", an aquatic-based race of unknown origins that look identical to humans, and have developed a powerful superweapon that could destroy all land and wipe out human civilization. However, a very late plot twist reveals that it's the Orerines (humanity) that are the invaders. Thousands of years ago, the world the story takes place in was an ocean world with no landmasses. The continent that the story takes place on is actually a gigantic Colony Ship that is able to become and create inhabitable land. The Ferines were the original inhabitants of the planet, whose lives began disrupted and oppressed when the human ship terraformed their world.
• World of Warcraft: This was one of the reasons the Burning Crusade expansion received backlash from lore fans when it was first released. While the orcs were from another world in the first Warcraft game, it was handled in a solidly fantasy manner, involving stock fantasy races, and the worlds were connected using a magic portal.
  • This expansion retconned a connection between the existing draenei and eredar races, introducing a new version of the draenei race who arrive on Azeroth by crash-landing upon it in a spaceship (that causes environmental issues through radiation leakage). They also have much more advanced technology than anything else seen on Azeroth before, such as holographic communication, and they came complete with explicit references to popular sci-fi franchises.
  • The Burning Legion, a varied army of demons from a hellish other realm, were now making use of sci-fi technology like Humongous Mecha and automated gun turrets. The idea of the demons actually originating not merely from a hellish realm, but as races from other worlds before being conquered, corrupted into demons, and added to the demons' army also began to be elaborated upon at this time.
  • However, over time, World of Warcraft would so thoroughly embrace the idea of being a Fantasy Kitchen Sink that "aliens" feel as at home as anything else. By the time the Legion expansion had the Burning Legion literally invading with spaceships from their homeworld (instead of just portals to the Twisting Nether), and the Azerothians counter-invading with a ship capable of Orbital Bombardment, no one really batted an eye (and newer players were surprised to learn the setting used to just barely avert Fantasy Gun Control).
• Wild ARMs is more fantasy western, but usually has enemies who would be at home in a fantasy game. However, it's revealed that the metal-skinned "demons" who are the game's major antagonists are in fact robotic aliens and the Big Bad is an evil AI, not a Demon-Lord (or, rather, she acts like one).

Websites

• Neopets mainly has a fantasy setting, with things such as a Winged Unicorn species, faeries, and magic. However, there are also two alien races: the Alien Aishas (related to the basic Aisha but with two extra antennae) and the Grundoes (who come from another planet called Doran).

Western Animation

• The Owl House: The Collector is a "child from the stars" with Reality Warper abilities and possesses knowledge of magic foreign to the likes of the Boiling Isles. He is a walking, talking Outside-Context Problem in a series involving demons and witches native to the Boiling Isles and witch-hunters from the human realm.
• In the final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Horde Prime, a Galactic Conqueror whom Hordak was previously revealed to be a clone of, arrives with his Galactic Horde to conquer Etheria. Though, up to that point, the series as a whole already leaned closer to Science Fantasy, having a classic fantasy setting (magic, kingdoms, princesses, etc.) with many sci-fi elements like Magitek and technological Superweapons.
• Smiling Friends: Played with in "Enchanted Forest": Charlie and Pim visit the titular location, where they run into virtually every fairy tale and fantasy trope and creature imaginable, including witches, fairies and mermaids; at one point, they run into a regular old alien, with Charlie lampshading that it doesn't seem to belong there, though he eventually gets over it.

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