#like yay he sa'ed Till too and in a way he hasn't received before (or he did which hurts all the more)

[colorfuldream]

Alien Stage fans remember that humans are nothing more than PETS and aren't considered anywhere close to what we think of ourselves challenge

Joke aside, stop humanizing the way aliens see humans. They don't. Humans are animals, far below and at most a dog to them. Smart but not enough to be worth considering. Like how we see monkeys, close to us but ultimately stupider. Humans aren't at the top of the chain. Therefore, yeah they aren't going to be treated in a way that is familiar to us. 1. Because these are aliens. 2. These humans are very far removed from us. 3. They're!!! Pets!!

So yes! They are going to get petted! Weird and gross? To us, yes. To them, normal. You pet a pet. Being manhandled around? Normal. No boundaries and wishes not understood/listened to? Normal, as annoying as it is to them. While there's this parent-child dimension to the dynamic, it's mostly an owner-pet thing that we can understand. Even the familial treatment can be attributed to it since lots of people think of their pets as family.

So no, just because one of them has a pretty human pet doesn't mean they'll want to fuck them for fuck's sake. That's zoophilia to them. Think of what you would do if you had a pretty pet. You'd show them around, right? Flaunt them, maybe treat them nice because they're cute. That's what likely happens in Alien Stage. Except for a few characters, Till being explicitly an abuse victim and his owner running in shady circles and Luka having suspicious art pieces that could go either way, they aren't getting SA'ed. You're seeing more as slavery because you don't understand how low the entire universe thinks of humans. They're barely people. Most owners we know of think of their humans as an object or a prize. Mizi is her family's beloved pet. Till is an annoying dog that has to be discipled with violence and trained that way to perform. Hyuna was nothing. Their condition is horrifying enough without conjecturing that almost everyone was getting raped. No, their faces being touched or cheeks squished isn't the same shade of red as in our reality. It's a dehumanizing gesture, either out of affection/praise or humiliation/smugness. It's controlling. That's what that one Ivan and Till art was about, how the same gesture didn't mean the same thing but was equally as bad, how they were hurt and abused in different ways. Till was being looked down at after being beat up, Urak admiring his work and checking if Till understood the lesson. Ivan was being praised yet treated condescendingly, forced to let himself be touched and look where he was supposed to. It's not that they went through the same kind of abuse but that they're both miserable and forced to submit. It's another light shining on the way they were treated, how different it was all was. Bad pets get hit, good pets get praised, neither are human. The fact that Ushan is also a criminal only serves to make it worse: Ivan was gifted out of love by a criminal, sure, but he fundamentally had it better. His owner might do bad things but he did manage to be a better person than Till's to his pet. Their circumstances have similarities but in the end are completely different. Urak and Ushan are rivals, unlike Till and Ivan who are close, and that shows through the opposite ways they see and handle humans. They're two stereotypes of the rich criminal trope, completely different from each other, and thus work against each other. It's kind of funny how Ivan and Till do the opposite and are close because of it. The same goes for Mizi and Sua in quite a lot of ways.

But anyways, why does it always have to become sexual. This entire thing is bad enough without it and tbh it might be a hot take but pushing this narrative onto characters who don't suffer through it takes away from the ones who do in the same story. (Or Till doesn't but that bar scene was VERY weird, at most he wasn't fully assaulted but something is very off. As for Luka, maybe he's treated "well" as the most extreme take on the doll/prize theme/vision and maybe the art was meant to be him being fully treated like a pet. Touched a lot, adored, but superficially. Not as a being but as a good, cute thing that does its tricks perfectly and brings its owner fame and money. Maybe it's meant to not just make him look like a pet the most out of everyone, in the most animalistic way, but also show how smothered he was and his every movement reflecting what he was made to be and do. But I still find it suspicious and his owner is more than willing to not only engineer the best pet for some singing show (weird af) but also experiment on the sick (& likely inbred let's be honest here) creature he got. Luka was fragile so unless these were for his health or something, I'm feeling that his owner might be very, very scummy).