How Not To Write Turians

Meta
Title:	How Not To Write Turians
Creator:	admiralsakai.wikitroid
Date(s):	March 14, 2017 (original post)
Medium:	Fanfiction.net
Fandom:	Mass Effect
Topic:	Fanon trends
External Links:	Fanfiction.net link, Archived version, Ao3 link
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

How Not To Write Turians is a 2017 meta essay and writer's guide by admiralsakai.wikitroid regarding fanon trends in characterizing turian alien characters in the Mass Effect fandom. It is divided into four parts, in which it creates the term "animalization", defines it, gives examples, and explains why the phenomenon can lead to weak writing. Although the essay does not explicitly name them as such, it lists several common Omegaverse tropes as "animalization tropes to look out for" such as dominance-based sexual dynamics, heats, unusual genital configurations, and soulbonding.

Topics Discussed

• Animalization
• Implicit/inadvertent racism and sexism
• Sex Tropes
• Reductionism

Excerpts

If you want to get technical, yes, turians are animals, just like humans are- they certainly aren't plants or fungi or whatever- but that's not what I'm talking about. Using legalese, I'd probably characterize animalization as the portrayal of turian physiology, psychology, or culture in a manner that ascribes to turians traits found in non-intelligent animals as opposed to intelligent beings. But legalese always trades comprehensibility for specificity, so that's probably not very helpful. Instead, think of animalization as anything a writer has a turian character- or turian culture in general- do that seems savage, primal, and/or predatory. It's making them act on instincts and emotion instead of reason, anything that seems backward or primitive, and it can take a lot of different forms.

...

Really, the best intuitive way to describe it is that animalization is something- or a collection of small, harmless somethings all added up- where if a group of humans suddenly started doing it on Earth, the 911 calls or newspaper editorials would very probably end up using some variant of the phrase "acting like a wild animal". It sounds like a weirdly specific thing to look out for, and it is- to me, at least, that makes the fact that this exact same pattern is so widespread in so many different stories all the more concerning.

Animalization Is A Shitty Thing To Do To A Person Or Society: ...in fact, a disturbing number of the animalizing elements employed on turians fit right into the terrestrial racist's playbook when applied to other humans. There is a very good reason for this. Animalization makes turians seem backward, brutish, impulsive, and stupid; it makes them slaves of instinct instead of being able to chart their own path, and just in general makes interaction with them difficult and counterproductive for other, more civilized species.

Perhaps the biggest and most important problem with animalization is that it both closes off avenues for writing characters and acts as a crutch in place of good character development for lazy writers.

...

The real problem is that animalized turians are simple. They operate, ultimately, on instinct and aggression with a thin veneer of Bronze Age custom overtop, and that just doesn't leave a lot for a writer to work with in terms of complex motivations or interesting angles.

And, finally, most importantly:

40. Attributing turian cultural or psychological traits to instincts or direct results of their biology, as opposed to an interplay of biology, history, environment, and other factors.

In scientific circles, this is often called 'reductionism', and is disturbingly common.