I've Got A Question About The Slomen. Why Do They Look So Human When They Come From A Radically Different

I've got a question about the Slomen. Why do they look so human when they come from a radically different biosphere? Unless I'm missing some context and they're actually bioengineered from human stock to survive in their homeworld's biosphere.

Slomen are designed to be your friendly neighborhood humans! With the same mammalian vibes and traits while doing some things a bit differently. Just silly little guys. You point at one and say "Oh my god is that Bob from accounting?"

There's a reason for the level of human resemblance but I wanted them to fill a human role on a planet with a bunch of aliens. The most relatable, most readable of the blorbs - since my main goal with the world is to have a story in it, one that is not too hard to follow.

It might seem like a creativity cut but this is how I like them. Trying less human things made them more rubber-head/grey bipedal and that's not what I want.

I want a person to be able to photoshop one into a human portrait and take a while before noticing one of the people has weird eyes and is covered in fuzz (among other things).

Can you spot the slom

After a long time, I have decided what my current sona is, which means I can make artist memes now.

It's based on classic war depictions of Unii-lls. A big big monster with giant horns, dinosaur posture, and a thick "scaly" tail. It's not the most accurate to what the soldiers really saw but it's cool as a sona. Not a canon character with uniima ll biology but just - some beast.

Uniima ll have miniature useless tails. They knuckle-walk most of the time and walk bipedally when they need height. Some farmers would make a terrible-for-spine contraption to free both of their hands when harvesting crops. It was like a backpack in the shape of a tail. To keep the weight same-ish, the farmer would drink the water kept in it after they filled it with material.

HERES A MEME

RAAAWR

I LOVE YOUR UNIIMAS THEY HAVE PERMANENT NAGE FACE YAAAAY

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Welcome to the introduction (yippee)

I'm Philip/A/yello. I enjoy writing, art, science, and this is the blog focused on my personal brain worms.

My big brain worm is worldbuilding, and the world you are seeing is the World of All (placeholder name). World of All is placed on a single planet with multiple 'continents' that host independently evolved ecosystems and currently 4,5 sophonts/"aliens". This unique setup is all thanks to the Designers, mindless blobs that have managed to keep their landmasses isolated for billions of years (among other things). As a bonus, some of the blob physical manipulation is left in the sophont creatures' brains who have yet to understand physics on a deeper level.

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Here are the 5 (O.s are having a redesign session). Mole stars have not made contact with the rest.

You can also find me on Twitter · Instagram · Bluesky ·

This post will be updated with time. Beware, many posts are outdated, but I try to mark them.

the blorbos

This took a while because I wasn't sure about some visuals but I love my blorbos and how they ended up.

For anyone new to my characters, on the left is Neal, the professor of acoustics, sound manipulation, and other physical stuff that people of this time period can't differentiate very well. He lives a simple normal sloman life.

On the right is "bio man" (I still need to come up with names for 80% of my characters even though I have had them for ages). He teaches everything biology-related in a small school in a completely different country. But he would rather travel and discover the nature of the world (which he does with Neal in the story).

If it's not clear, they enjoy each others company (or at least will). This picture is for me to feel warm and to show the different ways they look at the world. It's abstractly set in the future where Neal gets to have a basic fasion sense and more open feelings.

Have the uniima or slomen made any mythical creatures? What are they like?

While there are definitely many different mythological beings in the cultures of both, I really felt like showing the sloman equivalent of a dragon.

These beasts go far in sloman history. They can be even found in their cave paintings, often as 'hunting' targets of prehistoric slomen.

Because of how many cultures have named their own beings and how different they are among these cultures, I will not name them here.

You can encounter them in hundreds of legends/folktales with some regional quarks to each. Sometimes they fly, sometimes they lift mountains and shape the world, sometimes they suck people inside their bodies, teleporting them to strange locations (...), and other times they are simple monsters fought by sloman heroes.

Other places these beings are common in are regional flags, blazons of houses or families, house decor, weaponry, some religious imagery, and naturalist books (many groups believe they are real, same with thousands of other mythical beasts), etc.

Their form is not consistent. The number of "limbs" and "fingers" is an exception. Few cultures even depict them with full vertebrate bodies with the whole 4-limb piece being the creature's head.