Cephalopod Celabrator

Enter Adriano Celentano: a top Italian rockstar. Effortlessly talented, deservedly popular, and extremely funny. Celentano decides to use his talent for evil. He composes a kind of a parody: a song that mimics English but is entirely gobbledegook, improvised to such an earworm you will find yourself humming it while doing laundry 5 years from now.

He performs it on Italian TV. It's an instant hit. Tops all the charts in Italy. And France. And Germany. And Belgium. Everyone goes nuts. It's a great comedy of American rock-and-roll. And of music itself.

Or sometimes I'll just ask them "hey soooooo which ones do you like ACTUALLY prefer" and it kinda feels dickish on paper but my batting average is really high

The most common situations for it are actually they/them enbies begrudgingly accepting the pronouns associated with their AGAB, and as actually she/her binary trans women that are constantly degendered but don't have any energy left to get upset at being called "they". So sometimes they just slap those pronouns alongside their actual ones.

If someone actually likes multiple pronouns used for them, but you still have difficulty switching up constantly, my usual strat is to figure out what other people are the least likely to refer to them with and use those.

she did not experience "male socialization." when i look back on our childhood, it is easy to understand that there was no privilege to that concept. she was forced to try and shrink herself into the shape of a man, and was abused when she didn't succeed at playing the part. being "raised as a boy" only highlighted the stark incongruity between what was expected of her and what she was. this repeatedly led to her facing violence.

good, that was the point.

i used to be so sad and so miserable and so scared. Now i get to be a pretty girl in public and other girls see me and smile and we compliment each other and it's normal and im happy.

And a lot of them are aware of this (like we are when we make these “humans are space orcs” stories)

Maybe one species enjoys getting bit by something equivalent to mosquitoes. Maybe one actively avoids the hospitable places on their planet because it’s boring without a challenge. You get the gist.

I want to see a bunch of aliens (+humans) sitting around a table talking about how their own species is a bunch of freaks

Best possible addition. This is a top-tier insight

@prokopetz proposed that humans ought to get something special of our own that isn't just "We are the bestest and specialist in some generic way that feels like a vague and unsettling metaphor for American superiority and manifest destiny amidst all the other cultures of the world," and settled on space orcs because "Pursuit predators with freakish endurance" was the ecological niche we occupied during our own evolutionary history up until we started doing the civilization thing. The assumption from the start was that every other sci-fi or fantasy species would each be freaks in their own way, and the point of humans are space orcs was to let us be our own sort of freak, too.

People who expanded on the humans are space orcs stories immediately turned it into a reason to write little stories where humans are the biggest freaks or the only freaks and we are, in fact, the specialest most manifest destinyest je ne sais quoi-laden metaphors for the superiority of American culture over all the other cultures of the world. I hate it I hate it I hate it.