what if humans are space hobbits

jumpingjacktrash:

i dearly love the ‘humans are space orcs’ trope, but here’s a different take: what if humans, among all the spacefaring races, have looked at the grim and gritty side of interplanetary colonization and said politely, “no thank you. we prefer to be civilized about this.”

imagine, if you will, Proud Warrior Races galore, each one more scarred and eyepatched and bristling with weaponry than the last, being baffled and insulted that the emissary the humans sent is this soft, clean, fluffy person with carefully done nail enamel and maybe a fancy hairdo or a curly waxed mustache or something.

the human has no scars and smells faintly of flowers. the human is wearing perfectly tailored soft clothes and no armor whatsoever. the human is completely unarmed! not even a knife! the human is wearing shiny jewelry and carrying a delicate little shiny all-purpose device, and what’s to stop a warrior from just taking everything from them? the human smiles and offers the most polite greeting their translator could dig up. it’s like the humans WANT to be destroyed.

the Proud Warrior Race leader strides forward decisively, intending to tear the human’s soft little head off and prove who is going to be the conquerer and who is going to be the conquered in this particular first contact.

what the leader assumed to be jewelry suddenly bursts off the human’s body into a cloud of bead-sized autonomous drones and delivers a numbing shock to every joint in the warrior’s body. the leader sits down hard, twitching. the human is still smiling politely.

one of the leader’s lieutenants snarls, “if you were a being of honor, you’d do your own fighting instead of having machines –” but breaks off at a gesture from the leader.

“those beads,” the still-shaky leader says, “are not the largest automatic weapons you have. are they.”

“oh, goodness, no,” the human smiles. “not the smallest either, not by several orders of magnitude. you’ve been breathing the smallest ones for twenty minutes. now, shall we have a civilized meeting, gentlefolk?”

they have a civilized meeting.

there are cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

later, the Proud Warrior Race leaders will not divulge exactly why they agreed to a binding treaty never to make war on humans or their allies for the rest of time. but whenever someone starts making noise about breaking the treaty, because what the hell, they’re just soft humans, the leaders get a haunted look. “imagine how strong you’d have to be,” they say, “before you could afford to be that soft.”