What If? Civilized Aliens with Horrifying Habits

[Bear Ribs]

Had a vague notion come to me while doodling of humans meeting up with your typical bug-type aliens. As with a distressing number of bug-like aliens, these beings absolutely adore the taste of human flesh. However, they're not barbarians and have strict laws against things like murder or invasions, so they instead try to convince people to bequeath their corpses after death to gourmet bug chefs for preparing fantastic meals.

I had some amusement with my doodle of a giant scorpion wearing a monocle while trying to convince various humans that, after all, they won't be needing that flesh after they died anyway will they? Is it really worth depriving aliens of their favorite foods just so you can have an open casket funeral? Really pretty selfish isn't it?

I'm not sure if there's any actual story here but it amused me and I wonder if it can be expanded. What other habits might aliens have that are terrifying, awful, or wretched but also tempered by the aliens being civilized, sentient beings who adhered to sound principles of rights and rule of law?

Let's avoid the typical biological necessity of, f'rex, a r-type reproductive strategy where the alien produces enormous quantities of young, most of which will die. That's been done to death in fiction already. I'm thinking more of things the aliens like to do or enjoy that would be deeply disturbing but modified by the aliens being so nice about it.

 

[Lanmandragon]

Slavery seems to be an obvious choice. Maybe they keep sapient beings as what amounts to pets.

 

[PeliusAnar]

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT

This is a short story called Three World's Collide. The quick summary is that humans meet the first group of aliens and then things get reversed when a third group of aliens shows up. The reason I am recommending this is that the first group of aliens is shocking and I don't want to spoil things.

 

[Sailor.X]

Vulcans sending their kids into the Desert to survive for a week or two on their own. The same desert that has Sabertooth Cats and actual monsters.

 

[Ariel Schnee]

The whole 'aliens-like-human-flesh' thing could be solved with cloning. A process that produces non-sapient, soulless clones. Thus, the aliens could have their meals. This would also make cannibalism legal. Since people could now have a source of meat that wasn't sapient/souled.

Hmmm... I can just picture a group of teenage girls chowing down on girl-burgers.

What a fascinating idea. I'll have to see about incorporating this into my current Worm CYOA.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

The whole 'aliens-like-human-flesh' thing could be solved with cloning. A process that produces non-sapient, soulless clones. Thus, the aliens could have their meals. This would also make cannibalism legal. Since people could now have a source of meat that wasn't sapient/souled.

Hmmm... I can just picture a group of teenage girls chowing down on girl-burgers.

What a fascinating idea. I'll have to see about incorporating this into my current Worm CYOA.

I think Isaac Arthur talked about stuff similar to this

Honestly, many alien civilisations in SciFi look to be surprisingly low-tech even when they can construct machinery that can have/use massive amounts of energy whilst for whatever the reason STILL depending on manual labor and most of their food coming from farms

I expect said farms to at least be composed of clones, genetically engineered bio matter or something like the Yeast Vats from Isaac Asimov's works

Not much reason to do that "acceptable behaviour" on humans when you realise it'd result in a conflict and thus be impractical even if NOT doing so would be "immoral"