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On species names in Mass Effect
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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Foreign cultures get capitalized names, animals do not.
Those people are Klingons, their species is klingon. They come from Qo’nos.
That's because all sci-fi alien species are monocultures (Mass Effect included though).
My head canon is that the shows simply show the aliens from a human perspective. A Klingon would laugh if you told them Klingons are a monoculture. In fact, they would probably pull out a knife and threaten to slit your throat:
DO ALL KLINGONS LOOK ALIKE TO YOU??
Sometimes it's also acknowledged in universe. Like that early Babylon 5 episode when there is a day of Earth culture or something and they showcase their hundreds of religions, and all the aliens are like "holy shit we only have one!".
Mass Effect is also kida guilty of that, though it's more of "human genetic diversity" that makes them special (not sure if it's better or worse).
If I remember correctly Centauris also have a big holiday where they celebrate how they genocided some other race on Centauri Prime.
And all sci-fi planets have exactly one type of terrain/biome.
You got desert planets, swamp planets, forest planets, ice planets, hell -- even city planets ... but you never see any planet that has similar diversity to Earth ... or even similar diversity to California. In sci-fi, every planet looks the same across its entire surface.
Desert planets and, to a lesser extent, ice planets, are actually pretty realistic. We have more desert planets in our own star system than Earth-like planets. Of course, they're not habitable like sci-fi desert planets.
Biomes on planets often too
They also usually have one place of origin, or if there are multiple, it's just vaguely in a direction (lots of planets have a north), or an off-world colony, so the whole species is named for the planet they came from.
Martians are from Mars, Vulcans are from Vulcan, Humans are from Hume, etc. You don't tend to have them mention any more specific regions than that. Where on Earth do Earthlings come from? Why, the Earthling city, of course.
Right, if we're talking about humans who are French... One gets capitalized the other does not. "French" is a proper noun "human" is not.
But this is an English rule. If we were writing in French we would not capitalize the reference to the people of a specific nation.
And if we were writing in German we'd capitalize every single noun, which is simultaneously more and less confusing imo, lol
I've been assuming the lemmy app I use is German in origin because it capitalizes a lot of nouns at random. Not all of them. I don't know how it chooses.