Frequency Interrupted

Chapters: 1/20 Fandom: Predator: Badlands (2025), Predator, Alien vs Predator (Movies), Alien: Covenant Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Relationships: reader/yautja Characters: Yautja - Character, Human - Character, Dek, Thia, Tessa, Synthetics - Character Additional Tags: Badlands-based, Borrowing from comics, reader mc, Implied Physical Abuse, Implied Mental/Emotional Abuse, Unhealthy sexual tension, unhealthy relationship dynamics, Power Imbalance, forced reliance, Psychological Distress, Torture, Suffering, Humiliation, Rough Sex, borderline non-con, no happy ending, no happy relationship fluff, Grim and dour outlook, Manipulation, Coercion, Nothing wholesome here

  Summary:

If there’s a word to describe the connection between you and the yautja, you don’t know it, but you do know it’s embodied, with macabre significance, by the fact that he wears the proximal bone of your ring finger on a wire around his neck.

Badlands was good. Genuinely enjoyable. I was very impressed.

But.

It wholly anthropomorphized the yautja, and I'm at odds with that. I've been a fan for decades, and I'm from an older generation, so maybe that's why I feel this way.

Giving Dek daddy issues removed some of the intrigue, that primal rough edge they carried. And the whole empathy thing, I just don't know. I liked the yautja silent and impassive. I liked the language barrier. I liked that even though they were humanoid, they were not human - they operated differently, in ways that kept them so wonderfully different.

Dek was too human. His story was tried and true human storytelling: Family struggles. Loss. Grief. And then they inserted the found family trope, and then made him have a revelation, and then he gets his sweet sweet revenge. Oh, and he also got two loveable animal companions along the way.

It's the same story I've seen/read/played over and over throughout the years. It's nothing new. It's human, and the yautja are not. I wanted a glimpse of a culture that was completely foreign and strange, of unanticipated behaviour and wildly foreign concepts. I wanted that savage strangeness to remain and instead I got the old familiar story of a young adult male with family issues on a mission to prove himself/get revenge.

What an ending. Silly, intense, jarring, heartbreaking, and absolutely fucking fantastic.

His entrances are so commandingly dramatic, and then -

Over the years this little bubble has slowly grown. Yautjafuckers began to emerge in greater numbers. Now the fandom is blossoming quickly, getting the content it deserves (thanks, Dan!), and it's wonderful to see more people giving the yautja an erotically charged side-eye.

I did! I thought it was really well done. Loved the variety in terms of yautja appearances, some of the fight scenes had me on the edge of my seat. Also, that glimpse of Naru had me screeching, I desperately wanted her story to be continued somehow.