Literature / They Are Smol

They are Smol by TinyPrancingHorse is a Web Serial Novel.

The story takes place in the near future. After the first alien race to ever make contact with Earth invades the planet and nearly destroys all of human society completely by accident, the Galactic Senate decides to uplift humanity as reparations.

There are a few reasons why they make this decision - partly out of guilt, partly out of genuine kindness.

Mostly, though? It's because the aliens all think we're adorable.

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They are Smol provides examples of:

• Accidental Kidnapping: Happens first when the Karnakians accidently tear a guy's arms off and start World War III and, trying desperately not to hurt anyone else, they corral a group of human military and law enforcement near their landing craft. Without the benefit of Translator Microbes, all the humans know is they're being taken prisoner by giant feathered velociraptors and respond accordingly. Then it happens again with the Dorarizin delegate after she gets a whiff of the US president attempting to greet her, which triggers her maternal instincts, and she just scoops the guy up in her arms and takes him back to her ship as though putting a child to bed. Since there's still a language barrier in place, all the terrified human knows is he's being abducted by a polar-bear-sized wolf thing.
• All-Natural Snake Oil: In Smol Doctors at Large, The cure for the fungal infection threatening the human colonists ends up being a bunch of new age/homeopathic treatments. The Dorarizin volunteer assistant is happy to see his friends out of danger, and doesn't understand the vein-popping rage that the human medical professionals are expressing at the fact that this mockery of medical science actually works.
• An Arm and a Leg: Poor Hank was walking his dog in the park when the aliens landed. He decided to approach them, and accidentally tripped and landed on his face. One of the Karnakians attempts to pick him up and, not realizing how fragile humans are compared to them, rips off both of his arms.
• And Call Him "George":
  • A xeno can easily kill a human even while trying to gently pat one on the head. First Contact goes horribly awry when a Karnakian soldier tries gingerly lifting a human back to his feet and tears his arms clean off at the shoulders. Any alien who wants to be around humans must be specifically trained to be really careful.
  • Bleppy the jornassian, One of the Token Good Teammates on the space pirate crew, is obsessed with humans, and "adopts" one that crawls into his room via an airlock. The human is only saved from being crushed because he's wearing a protective suit.
• Arc Words: For book 1, "{We know about the [memes].}"
• Awesome Aussie: the Australian cop who, either due to Heroic Second Wind, or possibly due to being possessed by the spirit of Steve Irwin, ends up flipping a Karnakian soldier.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The Dorarizin, despite looking like humanoid wolves (with a dash of bear) at first glance, apparently go through a metamorphic life cycle similar to insects. Mention is made of molts, and offspring are described as "burrowers" and "leapers", which are implied to be different stages of development.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Bill wets himself in terror when his captain asks him about the Gag Dub versions of alien movies given by the Earth government to humans aboard alien vessels. Unfortunately, she asks him while he's in the middle of a (literal) dog pile of every other crewman on the ship.
• Broken Pedestal: Bleppy the Jornassian sees humans as pure and innocent creatures. Encountering a bunch of human soldiers in Powered Armor absolutely wrecking his workplace makes him realize we're really just like everyone else.
• Cuddle Bug: Jornassians deeply enjoy hugs with humans, who are always warm. Their name for us directly translates into "warm cuddle" because of this.
• Cute and Psycho: The human military and justice system seem to deliberately try to invoke this when dealing with alien opponents. We can't afford to give up any ground in a fight because we absolutely cannot win if the aliens get up close. The human government also decides to take advantage of legal loopholes to flay some space pirates alive to show the much bigger, stronger sapient races that we mean business.
• Cuteness Proximity: All three sapient races think we're just the most adorable widdle things, and our presence triggers this reaction in different ways depending on the species:
  • It's most literal with the Dorarazin, whose nurturing instincts are triggered by our smell.
  • The Karnakians are able to see souls thanks to a second set of eyes, and they think our souls are absolutely beautiful.
  • The Jornassians love the fact that we radiate heat that isn't blocked by fur or feathers.
• Disaster Dominoes: The entirety of the accidental invasion of Earth. It started with the Karnakians trying to say hello and give away free blankets, and ended with the nuclear apocalypse.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: The first guy on the scene when the Karnakians land ends up tripping when he approaches them. A Karnakian soldier tries to pull the man up by grabbing his arms at the shoulders... and tearing his arms off. He gets better, and said Karnakian soldier is really sorry.
• Endangered Species: Humans are categorized as one by the galactic senate. Compared to the other sapient races, who have had millennia to spread out across the galaxy, Humans have barely ventured outside our own star system, so our population is minascule compared to theirs. Harming a human carries harsh penalties, and some humans take advantage of their status as "space pandas" to swindle xenos.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Dorarizin evidently have a higher ratio of females to males, though the precise numbers are never given, and as a result their society practices polygyny, with males implied to be the "homemaker" sex.
• Explosive Breeder: Whilst it's partially due to the fact that the three alien races all live for centuries, alien families get huge. Dorarizin families in particular are shown as massive, with a Dorarizin protagonist in the third arc treating his and his wife's first litter of five pups as totally normal — then remember that Dorarizin males marry multiple wives.
• First Contact Faux Pas: All three non-human races end up pulling one of these:
  • The Karnakians are the first to make contact. They try to peacefully offer the humans blankets. One thing leads to another, and every nuke on Earth ends up getting launched. But they're really sorry, though.
  • The Dorarizin princess sent to greet the human leaders ends up overwhelmed by maternal instinct and cradles the president in her arms and takes him back to her ship to put him to bed like a fussy child.
  • The Jornassian ambassador basically uses the US president as a basking rock. The president is too exhausted by this point to object.
• Fun with Subtitles: The human government requires that any astronauts working with aliens spend at least 4 hours per day watching either human media, or an edit of one of their host species' media that's had "Doge"-style subtitles added. This is, naturally, classified, because, since everyone else evolved from a vicious predator and we didn't, it would likely upset them if they knew. It's a good thing we're cute.
• Giver of Lame Names: One of the things that makes humans so adorable to the aliens is that we give very laconic names to things. Our homeworld? "Dirt" (well, Earth or Terra depending on who you ask, but it still means dirt). Our moon? "The Moon." Our star? "The sun." Our Supreme Being? "God." It's why the Karnakian word for human directly translates into "Little-Needs-Protecting." We're very childlike in their eyes.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: The Karnakians resemble brightly-feathered velociraptors with four eyes.
• Holiday Episode: The epilogue stories of the first arc cover several holidays, and why it's a bad idea to let aliens participate.
• Humanity Is Insane: Humans snapping under pressure features heavily in various parts of the story, often Played for Laughs. It apparently happens enough that the other sapient species of the Galactic Union eventually consider random bouts of insanity to be something that just happens to humans. Special mention has to go to the Human military, who are a straight Shout-Out to Warhammer 40,000.
• Humans Are Smelly: Inverted. The Dorarizin absolutely adore how we smell because our odor triggers their nurturing instincts. Bill's captain lingers over him during a routine inspection to get a good whiff of that new pup aroma, and sneaks in a few motherly pats on the head for good measure.
• Humans Are Special: Played With. Humans are inferior to the other three Galactic Union races in nearly every way (physically, mentally, technologically, etc). Despite this, nearly all the aliens will go out of their way to work with and include humans in their businesses and ventures. It's because humans cause a near-universal Cuteness Proximity effect in other sapient species.
• Hypothetical Fight Debate: The Karnakian custom of "Diarch Battles" is basically this. While technically heretical, the law is ignored because everyone, even the current Diarchs, wonders which historical Diarch would win in a fight. It's generally considered that Lord Tri’’ik’I’ would clean house, but he was an absolute giant with a good 5 feet on everyone else.
• Mama Bear: The smell of humans triggers an intense mothering instinct in female Dorarizins. This is because a human and a newborn Dorarizin smell exactly the same.
• Meaningful Name: Book 2 features a police ship named La Chancla, which means "A Sandal" in Mexican Spanish (specifically, cheap, foamed-rubber flip-flop sandals). This comes from the tradition of abuella (granny) using such a sandal for disciplining naughty kids.
• Mini-Mecha: The UTF military uses these to try and make up for the size difference between humans and xenos. Thanks to our small size, we can cram a lot of firepower into a suit that can still negotiate indoor environments designed by and for nonhumans.
• Mistaken for Racist: The human practice of producing gag dubs of alien films in order to make the people they feature feel less intimidating sparks some controversy when it's discovered.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Dorarizins have several rows of very sharp teeth.
• More Dakka: See No Kill like Overkill below. Our military strategy basically amounts to "unleash kinetic fury on anything that moves until it turns into a fine red mist."
• No Kill like Overkill: post-contact Human military doctrine basically boils down to this. We're so smol—er—small, that we can't possibly win under normal circumstances against another sapient species, so we rely on overwhelming firepower on the battlefield, and try to do as much damage via cyber warfare as possible where the playing field is even.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions:
  • Defied. The Jornassians have a pantheon, the Karnakians have a wide variety of religions which all accept the existence of souls and try to explain where they come from and what happens to them after death (all presided over by the Diarchs), and Dorarizins have ancestor-worship. There is some overlap among alien religions. Among humans, Christianity's had a bit of a revival, and there was a period where Karnakians were worshipped, which ended when someone sacrificed a goat to them and they got a "very long talk about convergent evolution."
  • The Karnakians have the ability to sense souls, and presumably have the ability (natural or not) to demonstrate their existence objectively. This would ensure that everyone would have a vested interest in keeping themselves safe in the hereafter, rather than just the here and now.
• Post-Scarcity Economy: The galactic community as a whole is described as such, but there are still money, jobs to earn that money, banks to put that money in, and goods and services to buy with that money. The idea is that the millions of stars in the Milky Way gives plenty of room for the three (and now four including Humanity) sapient races to spread out and get what they want without fighting over resources. It comes off more as an example of the Golden Arches theory of conflict avoidance.
• Primal Fear:
  • Given that all three major alien species are apex predators strong enough to rip a human limb from limb in a second and they all bear resemblances to dangerous Earth animals (Jornassians are more or less Nagas, Dorarizins have been described as "werewolves," and Karnakians resemble feathered velociraptors), most humans have an instinctual fear of their galactic neighbors. The human governments want to hide this fact, since they are worried that the aliens will start taking advantage of humanity when they find out.
  • Caroline is quite literally, not one word of hyperbole, terrified that the Fun with Subtitles version of a Jornassian war movie she was watching will offend them enough that they'll want to kill her.
  • Bill goes temporarily insane when confronted with the Dorarizin crew trying to get him out of the construction drone his room-mate put him in for safekeeping after an emergency shower washed off all his scent markers. All the camera shows him is a horde of werewolves trying to break in, and his hind-brain instinctively shouts "They're going to eat me." This results in him turning the water main into an improvised riot hose.
• Puny Earthlings: By the standards of the other known sapient species of the galaxy, humans are shockingly slow, weak, and fragile.
• Pyrrhic Victory: A multilayered example is revealed in the second arc, which covers the first contact between humanity and their new neighbors. Russia is revealed to have set up a kind of retributive strike-type doomsday weapon, where the destruction of the Kremlin causes the country's nuclear arsenal to launch... at Russia itself, with the intent of both annihilating the enemy ground troops and wiping out Russia's infrastructure, so the enemy will gain little of value for having conquered the nation. Then the Kremlin gets destroyed when a Karnakian drop-pad accidentally crashes into it and the EMP triggers the doomsday weapon. For added irony, the Karnakians didn't want to hurt anybody. So the Russian's retribution weapon basically annihilated the country utterly needlessly. It's never elaborated on what Russia looked like after the aliens were finally able to patch things up, but it probably was the end of the old government.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Bill's captain absolutely harangues her crew for abandoning their posts over, quite literally, a human taking a shower, and subsequently scaring him half to death.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After learning of the injustices committed against Bleppy, a deformed Jornassian, an entire squad of UTF soldiers in Powered Armor tears a bloody swath through a good chunk of his former workplace that would make the Angry Marines proud. Technically said workplace is a space pirate hideout and the soldiers were there to extract a captive Human that Bleppy had befriended.
• Salaryman: In the second arc, whilst the initial crashing of several very apologetic Karnakian troopers in Japan is distressing, their presence is shown to not be enough to overcome the "sarariman" mentality, and once the first few salarymen successfully push past the Karnakians without harm, the rest of the office drones resume their morning commute as if nothing had changed, making Japan ironically one of the first countries to actually figure out that the Karnakians weren't going to hurt them.
• Shout-Out:
  • Many to Warhammer 40,000: The UTF millitary are the Angry Marines in all but name, the alien races are called "xenos", several spacecraft are referred to as barges, and after a dying human doctor, Nick Silver, is intigrated into a medical robot, he starts wearing purity seals and talking about the Omnissiah.
  • After assuming this robot form Dr. Nick Silver insists on being called Doctor Robot-Nick.
  • Mention is made of a holiday called Life Day.
• Snake People: The Jornassians resemble gigantic cobras with an upright torso and a pair of humanoid arms.
• Surreal Humor: "Shitposting" is still alive and well, and has made the jump to alien cultures as well.
• Tactful Translation: The names all three alien species give to humans - both as a species and as individuals - turn out to be... less than dignified. The Dorarizin, Jornassian, and Karnakian words for human translate literally as, respectively, "tiny chomper", "warmcuddle", and "little-needs-protecting". Their Translator Microbes usually cover this up for human ears.
• Token Human: There's a waiting list of Xenos ships who want a single human crewman. The vetting process is strict. Every crew member has to be trained to properly interact with humans lest they accidentally crush their new crewmate's skull trying to gently pat them on the head. And the ship has to be retrofitted with a human-specific living quarters and several human-only escape rafts. It's worth it to most Xenos because to them we're basically Space Pandas (i.e. very rare and very adorable.)
• Tragic Stillbirth: In "Smol Doctors at Large", the video shown to would-be trainees in nursing humans, in order to weed out the ones who just want to play with cute humans and aren't ready for the "massive emotional trauma and unpleasant body fluids" side of nursing, begins with footage of a genuine Tragic Stillbirth and then shows a whole lot of other kinds of Gorn incidents.
• Translation Convention: Alien speech is connoted with curly brackets, and words with no direct translation get square brackets.
• Twerp Sweating: Amongst Dorarizin, both mothers and fathers consider it their socially obligated duty to put the fear of god into girls interested in dating their sons.
• Universal Translator: Commbeads translate everyone's speech into their native language.
• Weird World, Weird Food: "They are Smol-and Thankful'' involves a Thanksgiving feast with Jornissian clams (it's hairy and eaten still-alive but at broiling temperature), Dorarizin sausage (which has a millionth of a percent moisture content and is cured with metallic sodium), and a Karnakian delicacy that consists of a live animal that tastes absolutely delicious, even to humans (which escapes and knocks the other two into the drinks cooler, which return to hunting mode and violently explode, respectively).
• Wolf Man: the Dorarazin are bipedal wolf-like xenos the size of polar bears. Luckily our odor, and sometimes even our mere presence, triggers their parental instincts, not unlike how real dogs and cats have gained infantile traits to take advantage of humans' own nurturing instincts.

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