Library

Okay, well, here goes nothing. In order to give the necessary context to a lot of the stuff in this comparison, I'm going to have to explain some of my fetishes. Also, thanks for the encouragement, Ert, Herr, and Ghostie. I just hope this isn't too weird.

First up is macrophilia, otherwise known as the 'giantess fetish'. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it essentially boils down to an attraction to beings physically larger than yourself. In my experiences, this most commonly applies to the aforementioned giantesses/giants, giant animals (most often dinosaurs or dragons), and giant miscellanious non-humans - to give a random example, an elemental of some variety, or an abnormally large fairy; I have come across both during my travels across the bizarre land that is the internet. To give an example from my experiences within the macro community, the size of the object of affections commonly ranges from anywhere from a foot or two taller than the fantasizer to... well, infinity - I say this as someone who has helped write a story in which the growing character is so large that they've passed the multiverse in terms of sheer size, and have kept on growing.

Secondly is the furry fandom. I'm pretty sure a fair percentage of those at the library know what furries are, but I'll explain anyway just in case; furries can be, depending on the context, anthropomorphic animals (think of, perhaps, Disney's Robin Hood to get an idea of the degree of anthropomorphization), or those that are interested in said anthropomorphic animals - which are also known as anthro's or anthros within the fandom - use of the apostraphe varies from person to person, but either spelling is accepted.

I may detail other fetishes if necessary when comparing my own creations with From Another World - a particular chapter springs to mind, but I would need to check a few riffs first.

Okay, here we go. Into the bloody rabbit hole.

The first creation I will be comparing FAW to is a storyline I have created in the interactive story The Biggest Change, which is hosted on Writing.com. The basic setup for this interactive is that, following an incredibly vivid dream, you wake up to find that the universe has changed, and that a number of giga-scale macro furries now exist. The number can vary from one to you being the only human, and the absolute minimum height is one mile tall. In addition, this is a universe-changing type of deal, so only 'you' - the interactive is written in second person - will remember what things were like before the gigamacro furry. In addition, all of said furries are completely gentle - this takes the form of a number of macro community tropes, such as even excessive amounts of force applied to a 'tiny', as they are called, barely hurting them (gotta keep such large beings gentle /somehow/), or bizarrely meek personalities compared to their ultra-large forms.

Now, I have a thing for precursors in science fiction. I've been interested in the trope since I first played Mass Effect, and a re-watching of Alien only reinforced this. The storyline I wrote/am writing - I usually put out an addition once per month, if that - features humanity as hyper-advanced precursors to a galactic community of mile-scale anthros. Yes, I was inspired to a degree by Mass Effect.
Of note is that in this storyline 'you' are the only human left - there are remnants and clear signs of humanity, such as ancient, long-abandoned bases and genetically engineered almost-humans known as bio-droids (biological androids), but you're still the only human left in existence. This, coupled with 'memory corruption' - really just a bullshit excuse for me to use as many flashbacks as I like and slowly reveal the background events of this storyline - means that 'you' have a bit of a freakout upon seeing anthros for the first time.

For anyone who is interested, a summary of this storyline's basic premise and an option to continue to the first chapter of it can be found at http://www.writing.com/main/interact/item_id/1329525-The-Biggest-Change/map/15533222222
If anyone would be so inclined, I'd appreciate a third-party comparison of the styles of writing I and EP use.
As I will have to say a few more times, remember that this storyline is far from complete, and many of the things I explain may not actually make it in. Also, I'd advise you to /not/ click the button tha shows you the other chapters I've written. Sure, it shows my progression in writing ability, but it's gonna be hella, /hella/ weird for you if you're not into /exactly/ what I'm into.

I think it would be apt to compare EP's Tiberians and my humans. EP's Tiberians evolved on an irradiated world, granting them natural resistance to radiation - I'm with you so far - and are extremely tough, able to take a round /to the heart/ and survive. Sure, I guess, I've seen worse stuff among the various HFY communities - toughness is okay but shrugging off a bullet to the heart is a tad mary sue-ish. Also, Delta energy. I can't remember if it's actually been explained or not so far, as I'm going from the very first FAW riff onwards, but currently I'm faced with some LOLFoundation-esque redaction and a bit about how it makes them better than the Asari and also have genetic memory. Moving on to the governmental side of things, their current government has been in power for over 70,000 years. That's a bit of a wobble, but Xeelee Sequence had the Interim Coalition of Governance stay in power for 20,000 years during a galactic total war, so that could be believeable if toned down a fair bit. Also, a militaristic yet utopian society? Uh, I don't think really think so. As touched upon in riff 400, a utopian society has no need for war, especially if post-scarcity economics has been achieved. In addition, a population of 70,000 is /dangerously low/, and even more so in a sci-fi setting - that's maybe enough people to populate a medium-to-large-sized town. As for looking exactly like humans, I can't quite bring myself to be arsed, as this is a trope that's been used in so many different works of fiction I don't particuarly care about it.

As for my Precursor Humanity, I took elements from Mass Effect's Protheans, both Xeelee Sequence's Xeelee and humanity, Warframe's Orokin, Endless Space's Endless, and Alien's Space Jockeys in order to create what I explicitly refer to as a Kardashev-level civilization - by my estimation, they'd earn roughly a 3.5, up to a possible 4. Due to my slow updates to this story and a slight lack of enthusiasm, as well as Writing.com's 10,000 character limit per chapter, I can only get so much down in-text to hint as to what Precursor Humanity - the Solar League - was like, but I have certain things planned out for when and if I get back to writing this storyline. In general, they play fast and loose with certain laws of physics - FTL travel and not giving a shit about the square-cube law being two examples, although the latter is both more of a mathematical principle and a way to excuse the gigantic size of the anthros in the story. The League uplifts hordes of animals to anthro status and uses them like ultra-heavy armour in two seperate wars; the first against the Shadow, which started off as a throwaway Iron Savior reference but morphed into about half of one of Xeelee Sequence's Photino Birds - half because, unlike the Photino Birds, which are completely composed of Dark Matter, the Shadow seem to somehow switch between baryonic and non-baryonic status at will. They may be made of baryonic or non-baryonic matter, or both, but it doesn't really matter all that much in the end - the League defeat the Shadow, trashing a fair number of galaxies in the process. As I said earlier, this is a work in progress, and some things may be subject to change.

The Second war is fought against a vast collection of entities/an entity/something known as the Siphon. This name comes from two properties all Siphons have: Firstly, they are capable of draining heat from their immediate environment into their bodies and redirecting it as a focused energy blast; secondly because of their status as siphonophores, a type of creature, that, while initially seeming to be a single organism, is actually made up of many individual organisms - a good example would be the Man'O'War, or, if you want to see what actually inspired me to create the Siphons, what has become known to Google's autosearch function as the Nautilus Siphonophore, seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KZsrDGLUJQ
This status as siphonophores is demonstrated in one chapter where 'you' engage in combat with a single Siphon, which splits into two in an attempt to gain the upper hand. Siphons are also capable of converting other materials into more instances of themselves - I plan to feature a Grey Goo esque scene if I continue this storyline.

Long story short, the Solar League beats both of these foes, and in its weakened state, is brought down from within by an anthro rebellion sparked by some very pissed off anthros who, somewhat justifiably, seek revenge against the League for its cannon-fodder approach to anthro lives.

Humans in my storyline typically live to around 200 Earth years - a fair bit longer-lived than EP's Tiberians - but are capable of living for far longer, depending on certain conditions and whether life-extending technology is used - stasis tech and the ability to 'back-up' someone's personality and memories being examples. A soldier died? Don't worry, we've got a back-up of them from a little while ago, shove them in a new body and bring them up to speed.

Ability-wise they're slightly better than the average human today, and most soldiers are heavily augmented with cybernetics to increase their combat prowess. Some humans are also capable of psionic abilities, which occur in large enough numbers to make the creation of several psionic units practical - although this rapidly becomes less practical when it turns out that trying to control the mind of something that is alien to you not just physically, but also completely mentally and psychologically different, is more-or-less a lost cause. A form of powered armour is issued to almost all soldiers, although the specifics of the power armour change depending on the theatre of war and what enemies are being faced - in the fight scene with the Siphons, who are vulnerable to extremely rapid changes in temperature, 'you' activate a function of the power armour that causes it to unleash vast amounts of heat, destroying the Siphons, who had physically restrained you and were attempting to punch through your helmet. It helps that that particular suit of armour is mentioned as initially being designed to assist in solar core and black hole mining operations.

I plan on having a scene a mining ship manages to rip open the event horizon of a black hole without any negative effects, and /keep/ it open, in order to harvest the material within - this'd be a good indication of the level of tech I'm trying to deal with, sort of somewhere between the Magic From Technology trope and a sci-fi version of the Great Old Ones. As is mentioned above, high-level Kardashev civilizations tend to not care about the laws of physics too much. As always, however, bear in mind that what I have written down on Writing.com right now is far from complete, and changes may well be made to certain aspects of it.

Let's have a quick look at the cultures, shall we? EP describes the Tiberian culture as
"Monarchy/ Militaristic/ Survivalist/ Honour."
From this, we can extrapolate that the Tiberians have a royal family and a large and/or powerful military, with an emphasis on personal honour. And something about survivalism, not quite sure what to make of that. Perhaps some reverse version of Bushido or something? I'm still only on the second FAW riff as of now - I finished off the first one some time yesterday afternoon, as of the time of writing - so I haven't seen any examples of what their culture's like in prose. That is, if EP provides any.

I haven't finished ironing out the culture of the Solar League yet, but I can give a rough overview of what I plan it to be like, and a brief overview on how I plan for certain areas of the society and government to function. For the culture, imagine most elements of the present-day Anglosphere combined with certain parts of Blitz-era London, and filtered through a couple Forever Wars. It's hard to describe it without writing another chapter in order to make certain values explicit and imply the rest, but to give a few examples, patriotism is admirable as long as it doesn't affect your judgement, there is large societal pressure to contribute to the war effort in any way you can, and an almost truly egalitarian society expects that you do what you are fucking told. Sure, you may be at war, but that's not an excuse to lose your head unless things get very bad. Hell, you probably won't even see the war unless you get drafted, so just send whatever you can - leftover food, recyclable metals, it'll get used one way or another.

As for the government, what I have planned is a more-or-less socialist government that has managed to adapt to post-scarcity economics. You don't really need to work that much - a factory foreman would, at most, arrive at the factory, check automatically generated reports on the automated assembley lines, and then either return home or call in the proper technicians to fix whatever problems have been reported.
Star Trek-esque replicators are pretty widely available, but aren't that good with creating large amounts of organic matter and food, necessitating large areas of land be used for agriculture so that everybody's food is actually edible - sure, your home's replicator is capable of creating food for one to perhaps four or five people, but if you're trying to do it for thousands it's going to be little more than a mostly-inert slurry. Or perhaps the industrial paste from Civilization: Beyond Earth.
However, almost all of this agriculture is automated - at most, 'you', the farm-boy protagonist, would push a few buttons every now and then to start a maintenance cycle for the machinery or to call for a pickup of produce, leaving 'you' with a large amount of spare time - at least, until you get conscripted. Then your stuff's left to your next of kin until your time in the armed forces is up - provided you don't extend your term or die without a personality back-up.
If you don't want to join the armed forces if you've been conscripted then the government will slowly cut off your access to luxury resources and apply rationing to your food and water supply through remote control of your replicator until you join up. This and heavy societal pressure would most likely be very effective.

I don't know about you, but I think this is a good stopping point. I may do another comparison thing, but I'd need to have a look at whoever EP had his version of Stupard 'romancing'. Pretty sure it was Tali, although this could just be me remembering Parallel Realities. That had a Tali 'romance', right? Or an I thinking of something else?

Anyways, I'm done for now. I guess I'll post a link to this in the Library comments in a little bit.
~Infinity421