Aliens Made Them Do It - Fanlore

And by 'it' we mean have sex. With each other. Sometimes the aliens are threatening them with death and/or violence, and sometimes the characters are trying for diplomatic or economic reasons to please the aliens or not to offend them. A frequent version has the characters accidentally or unwillingly taking part in a ritual as part of the aliens' religion.

Stories where this happens approach the sex with varying degrees of seriousness. Sometimes it's a major trauma and treated as a kind of rape for both parties; sometimes the situation is played for humor and the characters later get together of their own free will. (find examples)

While this plot device is distinct from Sex Pollen, there's a great deal of overlap. Generally, if Aliens Make Them Do It, the characters are not in an altered state and are both under duress, while Sex Pollen focuses on at least one character being drugged or otherwise influenced. However, several Aliens Make Them Do It stories involve the aliens drugging the characters, and several Sex Pollen stories involve aliens and/or alien cultures in some way.

Examples in Canon

The original Star Trek pilot, The Cage, had a basic AMTDI plot. Pike managed to escape without sex after it was pointed out that the woman involved was not, in fact, young and beautiful.

Also in Star Trek, the first interracial kiss on television, between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, was because of alien mind-control.

Isaac Asimov's short story "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (written for Playboy) involves single-sex aliens who have abducted a human couple to study their mating act. In an inversion of the trope, the aliens are unable to actually Make Them Do It, but after the aliens have left, the humans do it anyway.

In Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, when dragons mate their human bondmates are compelled to mate as well. A similar arrangement occurs in Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear's A Companion to Wolves. This could be considered AMTDI or a variant of sex pollen.

Fandom Reaction

Version of this story trope have been around since pon farr in Star Trek, but for some reason, it has become incredibly common in Stargate Atlantis. In response to the increasingly cliched use of this plot device, several stories have been written where aliens pointedly don't make them do it ^[1], or wherein characters comment on the endless fertility rituals to which they're subjected, or where the characters somehow make the aliens have sex instead^[2]. (find examples)

Some fans object to a perceived racism in the unexamined use of generic "primitive tribes" and "fertility rituals" as plot devices. This is part of a larger issue with how science fiction and fantasy fandoms, in particular Stargate Atlantis, depict alien cultures in fanfic. (find examples of discussions)^[3]

References

1. ↑ Abstain, by Resonant
2. ↑ The Birds and the Bees and the Bats and the Robots by Bernice
3. ↑ RatCreature. meta-ish sga fanfic thoughts. Posted 13 March 2007. (Accessed 12 November 2008)