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Post by zoograph on Oct 12, 2023 20:16:49 GMT 5
Well, at least some taxonomists propose that Placodermi include not only armored fish, but also their armorless descendants (which is just all of modern gnathostomatans).
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Post by zoograph on Oct 12, 2023 21:51:13 GMT 5
Episode 12
“Graveyard Desert”
This episode was heavily cut for US version, with only Bumblebeetle storyline present in it.
After a somewhat nice hypercane sequence, we are introduced to our main star – Bumblebeetle. Its morphology is alright, but its life cycle is very questionable. Flish aren’t all complete idiots and will likely hide from such storms in cliff cracks or something. Yes, there will be critters unfortunate enough to be killed by waves, but most of them will probably die on coasts and will not get past the mountains. And their corpses definitely won’t be lying in mass groups – one or two per mile is much more probable. So, what’s the criticism, you ask. Well, just wait…
Then, while poor bug searches for Flish, we meet some Grimworm that scares it away. For a while creators try to pass it off as another insect species, which probably creates nice twist for an average viewer (but definitely not for an entomologist).
After that we move to another creature, Desert Hopper. It’s possibly the most Barlowe-esque animal of this show, and while I would’ve been less harsh about it if it was on Darwin IV, here it will get no mercy. Why is it monopod? Did any of the creators try, at least once in their life, to hop on one leg? How would such an animal maintain balance or support its weight without another leg? Also, gastropods don’t have skeleton and are not likely to ever evolve it (since they never did despite arising in Cambrian), so their body would just collapse with no support (well, they have a shell, but that’s definitely not enough). Not to say there are a lot of real sand snails, and they… are just normal-looking snails.
Eventually, one of Desert Hoppers is trapped by a carnivorous plant named Deathbottle. It’s an interesting idea, but it is soured somewhat by its relationship with a Bumblebeetle. Its “pollen” gets stuck to insect’s abdomen, okay, and then a bug fights its competitor for a carcass, accidentally spreading seeds. But how is that even possible? Only several minutes seems to have passed in-universe. After all, this poor critter’s adult form is very short-lived. So why does the sticky substance near-immediately turn into seeds with a hard casing? Usually, insects spread pollen from one plant to another, but if it’s not the case (which is possible, considering we never see another Deathbottle after that) and it’s just seed dispersal mechanism, why not make it juicy so that animals will be attracted to its scent, digest it and spread somewhere, or even just use wind? Also, lack of shown pollination implies that Deathbottles are autogamous, which means they probably have low genetic diversity – not the best idea in such an extreme environment.
Okay, we return to animals now. It seems like Bumblebeetle only has 24 hours to find a suitable carcass to deliver its offspring, which, with odds described above, sounds ridiculous. Modern insects like mayflies also have this problem, but they actually leave water and become adults in gigantic swarms, then they mate immediately, lay eggs in the same place they just left and die. This bug, however, needs to find a mate, a Flish corpse and develop these weirdly sophisticated grubs (with legs, heads and antennae) while they are still inside the eggs. Not counting implausible warping of time itself, there are only three solutions. Parthenogenesis, much like autogamy, is not very suitable for deserts. Neotenic breeding with a bug as a dispersal mechanism will result in inbreeding, considering all of grubs are shown to be from one Bumblebeetle, which is probably even worse for genotype. There is one plausible solution, however. Give it ability to feed and, as a result, mate with multiple partners. But with that fix Bumblebeetle won’t be Bumblebeetle anymore.
Final Thoughts. Maybe it’s just the result of Global Ocean being insanely implausible, but I don’t feel like this episode is that bad. Sure, it has a hopping mollusk (what a horrible foreshadowing) and it messes up life cycles quite badly, but it’s not as insane as the previous episode. One to go. I know it will not be an easy one…
EPISODE 13 REVIEW SOON!!!
The nightmare is here…
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Post by Exalt on Oct 12, 2023 22:14:29 GMT 5
You did the Bumblebeetle criticism better than I would; you covered the bases with better knowledge. I think the wiki said that parthenogenesis was the answer, but I'd have to double-check, and see if it was cited. Is an insect dying in the childbirth process plausible enough though, or?
Who is Barlowe?
Also, it's ironic that you were complaining about deserts before, but in this section, the deserts don't bother you as much as the other biomes.
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Post by zoograph on Oct 12, 2023 22:35:54 GMT 5
Author of Expedition, which was adapted into a documentary Alien Planet. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 13, 2023 0:57:50 GMT 5
So what? Fish survived all or almost all of the extinctions (the former if you count jawless representatives of Ordovician) with almost no losses in larger groups. There are only two exceptions – placoderms (if they aren’t paraphyletic) and acanthodians. Which are likely both paraphyletic, so even they don’t really go extinct. "crown-placoderms" are simply crown-gnathostomes (eugnathostomes), which obviously made it through all extinction events they witnessed. Crown-acanthodians are simply chondrichthyans. And the same applies for holocephalans, which were very diverse and dominant during the Carboniferous and Permian, hard-hit by the end-Permian extinctions, to the point where they never again achieved the same levels of diversity or disparity they had back then, and yet still exist today. In the history of life, there simply has not been an extinction that could compare to what the future is wild did, essentially eradicating all vertebrates. The more diversity and disparity a group has, the less probable it is to go completely extinct without any descendants. For groups comparable to tetrapods, that probability seems to be close to 0. Even just an extinction of all actinopterygians is not really plausible at all, they have persisted through four of the big five mass extinctions (and the only reason they didn’t make it through all five is that they hadn’t evolved yet to be there for the first). Jawless fishes are not monophyletic either, of course. Most of the jawless fish groups that went extinct in the paleozoic were offshoots of the gnathostome stem-lineage, just like Placoderms (merely having diverged before evolved). So my point that I made earlier regarding tetrapod extinction still stands; groups this diverse don’t just go extinct without leaving any descendant lineages. However, to be fair, that is not exactly what they show on the future is wild. While Flish are a ludicrous concept on many levels, they are clearly meant to be some sort of actinopterygian based on their skull and fin anatomy. It’s also not as though "fish" is a monophyletic group either (although tetrapods, which are, are indeed portrayed to go go 100% extinct, so this doesn’t really matter in this scenario). Insects also are not uniformly ectothermic. From what I know, flying insects have some of the highest metabolic rates of any animal. So it stands to reason that for flight, a high metabolic rate is a necessity (even if this may not necessarily translate into being homeothermic, especially in small animals). However, of course it’s not as though fish couldn’t evolve the requisite high metabolic rates needed for highly energetic activities, such as flight. Reptiles did it like 5 or 6 times, so why shouldn’t actinopterygians be able to do it, considering there are endothermic fish around today? There are a lot of other things about the flish that don’t really work. Where for the (at least equally ludicrous) terrestrial cephalopods, they at least bothered to show us an intermediate stage (the swampus), the flish just come out of nowhere and are sorely underdeveloped. They don’t explain how they transitioned from living in the sea to flying, or even how exactly they live, for the most part, they are just there, and do little other than flying. As you point out, we don’t get an explanation for how they breathe, what their metabolism is like, or how they reproduce. Neither for that matter do we get one for what they evolved from, when they did so, or why the hell they are the only bony fish still in existence whereas all their aquatic relatives died out without exception. The mass extinction that killed off the fish was supposed to be 100 Ma, so where there already flish around back then? If so, why didn’t we see them, and how could they even evolve while birds were still around and thriving? Or did the flish evolve later? In that case, how did all the remaining fish go extinct, if that mass extinction obviously did not kill of all marine bony fish at all? How did they manage to evolve into exclusively volant forms, without any aquatic forms remaining? However, all that being said, I personally have to say that while ridiculous, especially the way they are executed, I don’t find the flish to be nearly the most ridiculous concept on TFIW. In fact I think they are somewhat fixable. Cut out the disappearance of almost all other vertebrates, introduce some explanation for why birds decline, fix the caudal fin, give them some sort of insulation, explain their respiratory systems and metabolism better and set the whole thing a few hundred million years further in the future, and perhaps something like the flish could be plausible. Unlike certain other concepts on TFIW, which simply do not stand a chance in hell of working (such as a complete extinction of all tetrapods 100 Ma from now). That’s actually one of my main gripes with TFIW. As fun as their ideas for future ecosystems are, and as much as they honestly try to illustrate ecological and evolutionary concepts, their ecosystems just seem so massively oversimplified. Almost always, each animal does one or two things, and that’s all it gets reduced to. The way the new ocean tropic system is explained in this episode is a prime example. Silverswimmers eat plankton, get eaten by flish, which gets eaten by squid, which gets eaten by sharks. They are honestly trying to teach people something about tropic interactions here, the problem is that it’s so oversimplified that it runs the danger of putting an unrealistic idea (food chain vs food web) in people’s minds. Also, it just undercuts the whole "all fish are extinct" claim they are trying to make even further, and really contradicts their whole "silverswimmers are the new fish now" idea. Are we to believe sharks survived, but exclusively in apex predatory niches, whereas they lost all other niches to silver swimmers? Not bloody likely, if any shark will survive, it will be the non-apex predatory ones, and in that scenario, why didn’t they take over all the niches that opened up with a supposed massive extinction among actinopterygians? Because saying "all fish are gone" sounds cooler than saying "well, certain types of fish we have today are gone, and have been replaced by…other fish, namely sharks". And if this rainbow squid is really so massively intelligent, then why does it just sit there stupidly? I mean even if we posit that the sharks have the upper hand, surely it could do at least something to defend itself, considering how huge and powerful it is. How did such an extremely helpless prey item that has no defense against predators while simultaneously presenting such a huge target manage to survive and thrive? In the extant world, animals don’t just grow gigantic for no reason, they do it to escape predation pressure, and surely if it’s not enough to at least make it a little more difficult for a bunch of 4 m sharks, that strategy’s evolutionary benefits are highly questionable in this case. Portraying trophic interactions as so onesided is actually not something I can otherwise fault TFIW for, with it generally doing a better job at showing them in a more nuanced light (e.g. swampus vs lurkfish, or scrofa vs gryken, or even griffenfly vs the birds it hunts). Despite all that, for some reason I have a particular fondness for this episode, but I have a hard time putting my finger on why. Maybe it’s just that the ocean setting reinforces the alienness-concept, which is supposed to be the appeal of the 200 Ma episodes, after all. |
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Post by Exalt on Oct 13, 2023 4:56:40 GMT 5
So is it not a coincidence that hummingbirds have a rapid heartbeat and flap their wings so many times?
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Post by Exalt on Oct 13, 2023 7:20:57 GMT 5
Well, at least some taxonomists propose that Placodermi include not only armored fish, but also their armorless descendants (which is just all of modern gnathostomatans). So I looked this up and I feel like I'm following it wrong here, because according to wikipedia, this would make nearly every vertebrate since the Devonian a Placoderm. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 13, 2023 13:19:40 GMT 5
Well, at least some taxonomists propose that Placodermi include not only armored fish, but also their armorless descendants (which is just all of modern gnathostomatans). So I looked this up and I feel like I'm following it wrong here, because according to wikipedia, this would make nearly every vertebrate since the Devonian a Placoderm. That is precisely right. If we wanted to define a monophyletic clade including all placoderms, you and I would be placoderms (given that you are a gnathostome, which I assume is the case). Since some placoderm groups were more closely related to crown-gnathostomes than to other, more basal placoderms, the only way to get a clade including the common ancestor of all "placoderms" and all its descendants is to include those crown-gnathostomes in the clade, including ourselves. |
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Post by zoograph on Oct 13, 2023 19:57:17 GMT 5
Episode 13
“The Tentacled Forest”
Oh my, the last one. It was fun but alas, everything must come to an end. This episode was also shortened in the US version, with only Squibbon and Megasquid interactions present in it.
We start our venture into this humid jungle by meeting this unusual plant named Lichen Tree. It is yet another lifeform that realistically can’t take over this niche without an insanely implausible extinction. Literally every plant that is more “advanced” in nutrient/water transportation or has mechanical tissues needs to die before lichens would have even slightest chances at becoming trees. And once again paleontological evidence is a great counterargument for this show. Even if you are not a botanist (like me), one look at plant evolution will show that not many big groups have completely gone extinct. Protarcheophytes (transitional group between mosses and vascular plants) perished in Devonian, early plants with true leaves like trymerophytes shared their fate, progymnosperms seemingly went extinct in P-Tr and seed ferns endured until fairly recent Eocene Tasmania. All other groups have living representatives, and even if these extinction rates will somehow be combined into one giant extinction, lichens will still be outplayed by much more adapted vascular survivors.
Forest Flish are just Flish reskins. As theropod successfully refuted most of my previous criticism, I won’t say they are God awful. Still, I don’t see how it is possible for them to rotate their tails in such manner.
Slithersucker, on the other hand, is a fairly awesome idea. Slime molds are rarely depicted by humans (mainly because most of us don’t really know about their unusual life cycle and anatomy), and them being promoted to predators sounds awesome at least on paper. Although there is still something I don’t really get – are Flish that stupid? They just get stuck in a slowly moving “organism” that is very visible instead of, you know, just flying around. But at least creators explained how they cope with ever-changing conditions and travel to get more prey, which is nice.
Megasquid, the creature that helps Slithersuckers disperse, is one of the least likely ideas FIW writers had. I already discussed osmoregulation of its cousin, Swampus, and how it is very unlikely they’ll ever get adapted even to freshwater environments. But now they conquered the land, and the way they did it seems nearly impossible.
“The Megasquid doesn’t have a skeleton…”
Weird. I mean, of course, there are animals that don’t have it, like annelids or gastropods, but these are all small critters. Megasquid with its 5-meter height and proportionally big weight, however, is doomed to fail. With no carcass to hold its internal organs and redirect their weight from lower body to the ground, it will just collapse immediately. Yeah, just like modern whales, but even worse since they have at least some skeletons. Yeah, there is gladius in squids, but it doesn’t seem like a good skeleton base.
“Each leg is made entirely of muscle”
Still wouldn’t work. Muscles are not as reliable as a body frame, mainly because they are not solid enough and need to be provided with oxygen by blood. Meanwhile, arthropod exoskeleton doesn’t need any oxygen since it’s just chitin produced by the body and vertebrate endoskeleton protects blood vessels inside of it from pressure changes with its own structure. But imagine for a second Megasquid stops. Very soon oxygen starvation will start due to a lack of blood circulation, and with muscles rendered ineffective it will, as I said before, collapse. Also, constant changes in blood pressure will be present at all times, and I don’t think nervous and circulatory systems will be able to adapt effectively. You can kind of bypass it with a very powerful heart that will pump a lot of blood all the time, but without effective vessel valves it will just lead to strokes and heart attacks. Overall, it’s a very convoluted criticism I have, and I hope it proved to you that there are issues with Megasquid’s vascular system.
Also, since this cephalopod doesn’t have skeleton and is mostly composed of liquid, doesn’t it mean that such a tall creature will be heeling at its top?
“…but forest is often a very noisy place…”
Mainly in a breeding season, before and after it? Not so much.
Megasquid’s herbivory is also weird. Doesn’t seem they head in this evolutionary direction, and they never did such a thing before. Oh, and creators don’t explain how they even got there…
Okay, now we finally get to our very last creature in this show – Squibbon. The idea is… interesting, although the idea of sentient squids being just monkeys has some shades of anthropocentrism. Some things (even not including general land cephalopod criticism) don’t add up though. Like its locomotion. The grip seems to be coming from below, and the animal is hopping from one branch to another. With that said, centrifugal force will continuously make its spinning faster and faster, loosening the grip. Even today animals that have this form of locomotion, like gibbons, suffer a lot of traumas (approximately one third of these monkeys), and Squibbons won’t be an exception – their poorly protected brain will suffer the most. Upper grip, on the other hand, will just press them to branch with no results. Normal walking on branches seems like a better solution in this case.
“If there’s gonna be continued development of further intelligence after 200 MY I believe it’s certainly gonna be cephalopods”
As a corvid enthusiast I strongly disagree.
“…cephalopods making bigger and better brains…”
Wait, isn’t their brain wrapped around esophagus? Wouldn’t it choke them to death? Also decentralized nervous system is prevalent in modern cephalopods (with no need in changing it), and as always it is not mentioned if they adapted or something.
Final Thoughts. At this point, FIW has completely transitioned into a fantasy/extraterrestrial show with shock value being prevalent over scientific knowledge. And honestly, from that perspective it’s not bad, and this episode even has some minor conflict in it (battle between Megasquid and Squibbons)! The note the show ends on is also sweet, with a new sentience on the rise. I don’t know how I managed to eventually forgive terrestrial boneless squids, but I guess it’s because episode itself is good. Oh, and maybe my nostalgia.
CONCLUSION SOON
It’s over.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 13, 2023 21:43:26 GMT 5
What do you mean by heeling?
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Post by zoograph on Oct 13, 2023 22:06:38 GMT 5
What do you mean by heeling? Well, falling on its side. Incorrect wording, sorry. |
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Post by zoograph on Oct 14, 2023 12:27:59 GMT 5
Overall Thoughts about The Future is WildTo this date, this is the only future biology documentary ever produced. But did it hold up after 20 years? Well, both yes and no. With that said, let’s talk about positives and negatives of this show. Pros: - Good separation of three different future eras (from a non-scientific point of view). Creators did their best to make 5, 100 and 200 MY as different and memorable as possible, with the first period being reminiscent of After Man mixed with the general Ice Age stereotypes, second one being future Mesozoic and the third one being dominated by non-vertebrates (which is definitely stupid, but definitely entertaining for average viewer).
- Future animals being allegories for different ecological concepts. I don’t think any other documentary even explored this stuff (with most paleodocs instead focusing on general lives of prehistoric animals or worse…). From evolution of hypercarnivory in Showstalkers to rise of intelligence in Squibbons we were educated about all the possibilities life can explore, and I think this is easily the best part of Future is Wild.
- Somewhat often showcase of non-stock animals. Many documentaries that explore different habitats in general suffer from focusing on vertebrates and (less so) arthropods with mollusks, but this show sometimes gives spotlight to creatures like sea spiders, slime molds and even plankton larvae, which is neat.
However, there are cons as well: - Separation of three different future eras from a scientific point of view is problematic. Even with past extinctions or climatic changes groups bigger than classes rarely died, and not always in a singular event. As I said earlier, even massive P-Tr-esque extinction will results in at least some generalist omnivores, insectivores or detritivores surviving, which means that rodents (and some other vertebrates) won’t leave this planet for a very long time. And with them surviving differentiation of future periods won’t happen. It will all be the same mammalian domination (as mush as I like birds, they are way too specialized for flight to completely reclaim all of their dinosaur niches).
- Scientific shock value of this shows’ “awesomebro” creatures. This is especially true for Spinks, Toratons and Megasquids. In their quest to make the show as unusual as possible, creators forcibly shove real-life animals into niches they will never explore and say they’re 100% real. On a surface level it’s interesting, I agree, but wouldn’t realistic animals look just as good? I already gave several suggestions in this thread, like gigantic elephant-like rodent or predatory ravens, so I don’t think it’s impossible to come up with such ideas. And many “boring” animals can still actually have something interesting about them…
As you can see, while I have more pros than cons, negative parts are very noticeable and give a lot of damage to this show, rendering it pure fantasy in many cases. However, as I give constructive criticism here, I can suggest a really nice way out of this situation… Make it some sort of After Man adaptation. I know, I know, it was supposed to be one, but different studio held the rights at the time and didn’t do shit with the original. I mean that in a more hypothetical sense. As much as outdated and inaccurate After Man is, it doesn’t have flaws of FIW at all. Mammals dominate the planet in it, and you don’t need to go great lengths to create different-looking fauna. And you can cover much more ecosystems as well, not just four in a period of time. Just imagine: more accurate, up-to-date After Man. Would be hell of sweet. So, what’s next? Well, I’ll be around here somewhere. Maybe I’ll provide dinosauria with my criticism of WWM, as well as write my own thoughts about upcoming LOOP or defend PP. Overall, I’m not done here. Yet.
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Post by theropod on Oct 14, 2023 22:16:40 GMT 5
Agreed on the first part, but I don’t think that means mammals will continue their domination for the next 200 Ma.
The research IB posted makes a solid case for the planet becoming less hospitable to mammals by 100 Ma, which, together with many of them being large and resource intensive, not to mention K-strategists, could very well lead to a major extinction decimating them in the future, just like what happened to dinosaurs. It’s hard to imagine all small generalists would disappear, but we could very well see the extinction of large mammalian carnivores and herbivores, for example.
So while it’s not likely that all mammals will be extinct by 100 or 200 ma, I could very well imagine some lineages surviving and potentially radiating again, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that this means mammals will keep their dominance either. Dinosaurs at the end of the cretaceous were almost everything mammals are now and more, and the only ones that survived were birds.
If, say, mammals went extinct with the exception of rodents and bats, who’s to say that rodents (or bats) will automatically be in a good position to re-radiate to fill the variety of niches other mammals used to occupy? It’s at least as likely that reptiles (including birds) could take over those niches and reconquer some of their former ecospace, just like they did in South America and Australia for much of the Cenozoic (where there were in fact lots of mammals, just not all of the groups present on other continents).
However I suspect just making the earch mesozoic 2.0 by 100 or 200 Ma just isn’t as fun as making it "Alien Planet Earth". But a realistic evolutionary pathway will likely result in something a lot less strange than what they made it out to be. The world won’t be almost devoid of vertebrates, vertebrates will likely be just as important as they are today, though probably different and new groups of vertebrates. And the forms that result might look a lot more familiar to us than one might expect, no more alien than the world would have looked 200 Ma in the past. Yes, there might be entirely new groups of various life forms around that we wouldn’t have predicted, but a lot of old groups are also still going to be around, and/or relatives of those groups that converge on similar forms. Groups tend to involve into pretty similar shapes repeatedly (see carcinisation, but let’s also not forget about crocification), due to them representing adaptive optima, so we are likely going to see a lot of animals either directly descended from, or closely related to extant animals that still have fairly similar morphology to stuff we are familiar with. And no hopping snails or terrestrial cephalopods, as cool as they are.
But even I can see that it would have been perceived as lazy and unimaginative if 200 Ma had simply been full of a bunch of land crocodiles, plesiosaur-turtles, neo-mosasaurs and various types of ecologically diverse birds, mammals and fish.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 14, 2023 22:42:43 GMT 5
I like the idea of future Earth becoming a mixed “battleground” between different clades of vertebrates, sort of like the Triassic. If mammals do lose their hold on Earth’s megafaunal niches in the distant future, for instance, an Earth dominated by a mix of birds, non-avian reptiles, and some mammalian holdovers (presumably all competing with each other) would be interesting to see.
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Post by creature386 on Oct 15, 2023 23:02:42 GMT 5
Awesome review! I 100% agree on the final verdict. It's an awesome show that, unfortunately, was too trapped by its admittedly rich imagination to stick to its mission of providing us with a scientifically plausible future. It's a bit sad that there's so little speculative biology content about the future, even though TFIW and After Man pretty much codified the genre. Aliens and cryptids seem to be a lot more popular in that space. Which reminds me: So, what’s next? Well, I’ll be around here somewhere. Maybe I’ll provide dinosauria with my criticism of WWM, as well as write my own thoughts about upcoming LOOP or defend PP. Overall, I’m not done here. Yet. If I might make a suggestion, what would you think of a criticism of Extraterrestrial (2005), Alien Planet, or Alien Worlds (2020)? I know these are harder to review as the premise inherently gives the creators more freedom, but I think there's still something to be said about how Earth-like speculative biologists tend to make their aliens. Granted, this is part of the point, as it makes it easier to teach audiences about real-life biology, but a lot of that also feels like author convenience (there's a similar pattern among sci-fi authors, they tend to make their alien animals extremely convergent to our fauna when they don't want to focus on them too much and can instead give the spotlight to human-like aliens).
Whatever you do, I'm certainly looking forward to your takes on WWM or LOOP as well.  |
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