I don't find it complicated at all. It boils down to "aliens who are not given any obvious inhuman qualities", often to save money by having the actors just be themselves (in live-action). The other examples you mentioned seem to just be variants- tropes are flexible so not every alien will look 100% human but if they can pass on Earth with zero weird glances they're probably gonna qualify.
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Yeah, I think aliens that might have slight physical differences from humans but they still otherwise look normal enough that one probably wouldn't take a second glance at them and think "wait, that's no human..." would still quality for Human Aliens.
Where, then, is the boundary between this and Rubber-Forehead Aliens? When does something become obvious enough that someone would notice? Like, my impression had been that the Doctor would qualify despite things like having two hearts, but that any deviation from a human outward appearance would disqualify them, because at least part of the idea behind the trope was the implausibility of aliens looking just like humans. (Back before we had a firm idea of the mission of the wiki and the definition of a trope, trope definitions could be more audience-driven than writer-driven, if that makes sense.)
It's fuzzy, Rubber-Forehead Aliens even claims there's overlap, but there should be features of a RFA that makes them obviously inhuman even if they "mostly" pass.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI think Human Aliens basically needs to be "aliens a human can portray in live-action without prosthetics or face paint", that's the only way it's clearly divisible from Rubber-Forehead Aliens.
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This was on my mind a bit last night, and while nothing in the description particularly stands out to me, looking over it and the basic definition ("When a creature from a planet other than Earth looks like a human, sounds like a human, acts somewhat like a human and can easily get confused for a human")...what doesn't count as a Human Alien? Obviously aliens like Little Green Men wouldn't, but the description mentions things like sampling bias, which it describes as a more "nuanced" explanation compared to them just having a shared human ancestor, and further down it discusses the intuitive factors associated with But Not Too Foreign and the audience being able to better memorize/identify with a less budget-heavy, basically crafted human design. The usage doesn't explicitly not adhere to one of these factors, but examples like the ones for Ark, The Backyardigans, and even Dragon Ball still take things like cartoony exaggerations of both humans and aliens into account, Dragon Ball in particular being an odd case since the example on the anime/manga subpage even mentions that most of the "Earth" is populated by tall anthropomorphic animals/creatures that no one really finds out of the ordinary.
Even live-action examples feel pretty ambiguous, since some of them discuss how the alien(s) in question only look human after getting a makeover/shaving/whatever (e.g. Earth Girls Are Easy), and while I know aliens that can take on a corporeal form would (probably) be valid examples, a quick glance shows that that isn't the case for most of them. I know this an old trope dating back to the sytes days, and looking at the two
oldest captures in the archive
, the definition and few examples seem to be fine minus a later example added that mentions Stargate-verse "partly" subverting the trope due to actual humans being abducted, but also somehow all speaking English—and given that TV Tropes hadn't expanded beyond, well, TV yet they're all examples of live-action shows. I do think this trope is harder to really write about objectively in cartoons for obvious reasons, but in addition to still wondering about the subjectivity/lack thereof of live-action examples, I'm unsure about how flexible/broad the trope is overall, especially since the description does seem to zigzag a bit.
Edited by Coachpill on Sep 17th 2024 at 12:04:17 PM
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