Iris: "I want to tell you three important things. One, congratulations, sweetie! You finally got your first period! Two, your father was probably an alien. And three, I love you very much, and everything is going to be fine."
On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Judy Reilly awakens to discover that there is a giant talking blood clot underneath her bedsheets. After appropriately freaking out about this turn of events, she learns from her mother that she's "96% sure" that her daughter's estranged father was an extraterrestrial. Oh, and that they should probably give chase to that weird abomination that just jumped out the bedroom window and started devouring the residents of the town.
Created by Diana McCorry for Facebook Watch, Human Kind Of is an Annie Award-nominated Science Fiction comedy that follows Judy Reilly, a nerdy teenager who discovers that she's actually a Half-Human Hybrid with a wide array of special abilities, most notably voluntary shapeshifting. With the help of dangerously upbeat mother, Iris, comic book-obsessed best friend, Cory, and a few allies hiding in the shadows, Judy may just manage to make her way through the minefield that is adolescence, learn to control all her powers, and inevitably discover what makes her both alien and human along the way.
The series aired its single season from September 16 to October 28, 2018 and can be viewed.
Tropes:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Judy towards Ethan, at least initially. Once she actually goes on a date with him, she realizes that he's a self-absorbed moron and quickly loses most of her interest in him, especially once she gains knowledge of who her future husband will be thanks to Mental Time Travel.
- The Antichrist: Judy's mother, Iris, tells Cory that she originally believed Judy to be this. Cory tells her that this could still be possibly.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Judy has gills, her first period came on her 16th birthday and turned into a blood monster, she has acidic blood and Healing Factor, etc.
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Broken Aesop: Despite Judy and Cory promising to treat each other as protagonists in the end of episode 9, the latter declares the former as her sidekick in the comic book she's working on. - Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Cory suggests using Judy's Healing Factor to cut off her arm repeatedly and create an organic prosthetics company. Judy refuses, for the obvious reason of not wanting to test her Healing Factor that far.
- Epic Fail: Iris notes that she found it weird that Judy failed swimming lessons as a child, despite always having a hidden set of gills.
- Express Delivery: Apparently, Judy was born after only two months. And Iris vomited her out.
- Extreme Omnivore:
- In The Tag of episode 5, an offscreen Judy swallows the TV whole. When she is seen again she looks no different than usual.
- In episode 9, Cory's inner monologue mentions that she has eaten toaster strudels still in the box, although she had to get her stomach pumped afterward.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: The episode "The Core" is done in a comic book-style, as it follows Cory deciding to go to school dressed up as a supervillain a few days after an argument with Judy. Most of the episode is a series of imagine spots where Cory is performing some amazing feat of villainy, only to cut to a more embarrassing reality, such as her desperately chasing the school bus or throwing pencils at a teacher.
- Free-Range Children: Cory seems to spend all her time over at Judy's house, even when her friend isn't there. Lampshaded in "Big Fish", where Mr. Russo asks Cory if she has parents after she spent the entire episode following him and Iris around on one of their dates.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Judy. She finds out in the first episode, to her great shock, but later ones have Iris regularly bring out a photo album that has pictures of her daughter in her birth form (a green tentacled monster) and toddler photos where she showcases traits such as multiple rows of fangs. Guess Judy never bothered opening it.
- Healing Factor: Judy heals at an accelerated rate.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Judy and Cory are really this for each other. This is shown in episode 9.
- Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Ms. Reilly tells her daughter that she did in fact try to kill her when she was a baby by drowning her. It didn’t work because Judy had gills.
- Horror Hunger: Judy feels an overpowering urge to eat guys she is sexually attracted to. This appears to be something she will eventually grow out of, though.
- Hypocritical Humor: Despite her dislike of being called a sidekick, Cory has no problem calling Judy as her sidekick in the comic book she made in episode 9.
- Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Earth, naturally. Many of the aliens that reside on the planet actually dislike it to some degree, only staying because the planet is so unremarkable that it serves as a great hiding place if you've committed any felonies. The penultimate episode of season one has Judy gathering evidence to show the United Planets that the Earth isn't this trope so it can join the organization, only to learn that she was being tricked into making a sales pitch to sell it on the black market.
- The Men in Black: A member of one such government agency spends the first half of season one watching Judy. He later reveals that he's been aware of her since birth.
- Mental Time Travel: In episode 6, Judy has a cold where her sneezes cause her to do this, jumping into random parts of her life with her future husband, from one of their first missions together on the Galactic Union to his eventual death of a mysterious disease.
- Logical Weakness: Judy's period monster is made of blood, and thus weak to blood thinner.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Judy's friend Cory is a big comic book fan, and is positively giddy when she learns that Judy is part alien and is going to experiment on herself, and is excited watching her period monster kill people before that in the first episode.
- Only Friend: Cory is this for Judy. The latter even admits this in episode 9.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Cory tries to get into the meeting called Aliens Anonymous by disguising herself as an alien in which she wears an alien costume head. Mr. Russo isn't fooled by this and just tells her to leave.
- Psychic Powers: Judy.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Judy is the calm and careful Blue Oni, opposed to Cory and Iris' exciting and upbeat Red Onis.
- Secret-Keeper: Cory and Iris are the only ones who know Judy is an alien hybrid. Later on, episode 10 would reveal that Mr. Russo was a Secret Secret-Keeper.
- Sentenced to Down Under: Discussed in "Aliens Anonymous". After realizing that all the aliens in the support group seem to hate the planet, she asks if they're only here because Earth is the universe's equivalent to this. She's promptly corrected and told that it's more like Nebraska; seen as so unremarkable that it's the best place to hide out.
- Shape Shifter Default Form: The species of Judy's father naturally takes the form of a green, tentacled monster at birth before seemingly developing two other default forms; a humanoid one of personal preference that they spend most of their time in, and a monstrous one that makes its first appearance during adolescence alongside most of their other powers and is tied to emotion.
- Shout-Out:
- Judy's mother describes her as shooting out of her mouth like in a David Cronenberg movie when she was born.
- Judy has acidic blood like in Alien.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: Whenever swearing comes from any character.
- Superpower Lottery: While her alien side definitely has its downsides, it also grants Judy a laundry list of superpowers including but not limited to Voluntary Shapeshifting, a Healing Factor, Not Quite Flight, Telepathy, Invisibility, Precognition, Super-Strength...
- Teen Genius: Judy is implied to be this, she has a bunch of science stuff in her room, is the only one who seems engaged in science class, and has a bit of a lab set up in her basement.
- Villain Protagonist: Cory invokes this in episode 9 as The Core. She even outright monologues that she's an "evil protagonist".
- Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Judy and her mother. Ms. Reilly was doing ioawaska when she met her daughter's father, which made her think that his inhuman features were a hallucination, just to give an example.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Cory has found out the hard way in episode 9 that just because she can do anything in her comic book fantasy as The Core doesn't mean it applies to real life.
