Aliens Made Them Do It

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Tropes and genres
Related tropes/genresFuck or Die, Sex Pollen, Non-Con, Rapefic
See alsoPlot Coupon
Related articles on 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.

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 (AMTDI) stories involve the aliens drugging the characters, and several Sex Pollen stories involve aliens and/or alien cultures in some way.

Examples in Canon

In Lost in Space, episode Wild Adventure, a green space lady named Lorelei (who later returns renamed Athena in another episode), woos Doctor Smith into space with a siren's call, and the Robinsons must decide whether or not to sacrifice their return to Earth in order to save him.

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, in an episode that is commonly but incorrectly attributed as featuring one of the first interracial kisses on television (Plato's Stepchildren), the action between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura was forced upon them because of an alien (humanoid, but off-worldly) form of mind-control. Spock and Chapel are also forced into a relationship by the same influence.

A 1971 episode of UFO (The Man Who Came Back) features astronaut Craig Collins, who returns to active duty after a UFO encounter, although there are soon signs indicating that he may be under alien influence - an early indicator of which includes his attempt to reignite a romance with Colonel Virginia Lake, wherein his uncharacteristically awkward and forceful approach causes her to not only rebuff his advances, but to openly suggest to others that he has somehow changed.

The Star Trek animated series features a 1973 episode (Lorelei Signal) where space sirens (a planet full of women who lack companions and love) cause the entire male Enterprise crew to fall in love with them. Uhura leads the female-crewed rescue mission.

The Space: 1999 episode "One Moment of Humanity" (1976) features a storyline in which aliens and humanoid robots manipulate Helena and John into situations of foreplay and seduction in order to arouse their negative emotions of jealousy and anger.

In the two-part episode of the short-lived SF comedy series, Quark, (All the Emperor's Quasi-Norms, 1978), crewman Ficus sacrifices himself by undergoing romance, pollination and marriage with alien Princess Libido in order to save the crew.

The movie Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier (1989) shows Uhura, under the mind-control influence of the Vulcan Sybok, expressing romantic feelings towards Scotty.

In Babylon 5, in the second-season episode called Acts of Sacrifice (1995), Susan Ivanova is asked to do 'whatever is necessary' to ensure the agreement of an alien ambassador, only to discover that he requires an alien experience of mating with a human in order to secure the agreement. She uses his ignorance of human biology to trick him into not having sex with her.

In The Orville, the opening episode (2017) establishes that Ed Mercer divorces his wife Kelly after he discovers her having a relationship with an alien - but then circumstances throw them together again within a working relationship on board his spaceship, the Orville. A few episodes later, they are both reunited with the alien, whose sex hormones cause Ed to also fall in love/lust with him.

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

Versions of this story trope have been around since pon farr in Star Trek, with a noticeable increase in popularity since the reboot movie was released.[1]

The trope became incredibly common in Stargate Atlantis fic. In response to the increasingly clichéd use of this plot device, stories have been written where aliens pointedly don't make them do it,[2] or wherein characters comment on the endless fertility rituals to which they're subjected, where the aliens force them to do other things instead,[3][4] where the aliens theatrically show them how they could be doing it,[5] or where the characters somehow make the aliens have sex instead.[6]

While the trope remains popular, 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.[7] In SGA, the "Aliens" in question are nearly always humans in the Pegasus galaxy, who both canon and fandom often portray as othered from the main characters from Earth. (find examples of discussions)[citation needed]

Examples Fanworks

Resources

References

  1. ^ Delicious links for the LJ Kirk/Spock community show that that in the first year after Star Trek XI was released, 20 stories featuring the Aliens Made Them Do It[Dead link] trope were published on this one comm alone.
  2. ^ Abstain, by Resonant
  3. ^ Aliens made them, Archived version commentfic challenge post by Resonant offering (multifandom) non-sex ideas and ficlets in comments, 8 Apr 2005. (Accessed 10 Feb 2012)
  4. ^ SGA also came up with the AMT Hula Hoop subgenre: See Aliens Make Them ... Hula Hoop? by epiphanyx7, 9 Oct 2007, and one of the scenes in Monday to Friday, Saturday on Agreement, Archived version by lavvyan, 30 Dec 2007. (Accessed 10 Feb 2012).
  5. ^ (Part of) Intimacy of Man, Archived version by Samdonne, 13 Apr 2007. (Accessed 10 Feb 2012)
  6. ^ Bernice. "The Birds and the Bees and the Bats and the Robots". Archived from the original on 2021-01-26.
  7. ^ RatCreature. meta-ish sga fanfic thoughts. Posted 13 March 2007. (Accessed 12 November 2008)