: Re: Is accurate human nature required for good writing, even in fantasy scenarios, or with fictional species? I don't know if this is something that is established in the discipline of literature.

@LarsenBagley300

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As someone pointed out Trek, I'd like to point out that Trek took special care (especially in DS9) to show that all the aliens had those members in their society that they disagreed with the cultural norm or saw it creatively. Much of Worf's story-lines was about being an outsider to Klingon Culture and realizing not all Klingons model his strict adherence to Honor that Worf had. For example, in TNG he eventually became an outcast for a period of time among the Klingons, having been declared without honor... however, everyone party to the entire incident knew Worf was not guilty of a damn thing even by their own laws, and that his dishonor status was done as a step to preserve the Empire and prevent information that would start a civil war from reaching the general population. Bearing the sins of an empire for it's own preservation would seem honorable to humans, but Klingons did not have any such understanding of this notion.

Honor as a concept can often be divided into two categories: Personal Honor and Societal Honor. The former concerns itself with how one perceives ones actions and the actions one would take with no one watching. That is, if I could do a moral wrong and get away with it, it would be honorable to not perform the action, witnesses or no witness. Societal Honor concerns other's perception of you and your reputation when evaluating your honorable status. Thus, if I could do a moral wrong and get away with it, it is practical to take that action, as society will still think I am honorable. While the concept of Personal Honor as described in the above is not unknown to Klingons, but it's generally pretty foreign to them in what we see.

This is entirely relatable to humans because human society recognizes these two types of honor but can be found and used against people... consider something in society that no one anticipated when writing Worf: Social Networks. These often act much like Klingon society because they rate people based on their actions perceived by the community, but not the quality of their character or the content of what is said. It can even be recognized in the past. The Tragedy of Caesar has the famous line "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives on after them; The Good Oft interred with their bones..."

In this speech, Mark Atony is stealthily explaining to the public that the stated reason for Caesar's murder was his ambitious nature but that does not discount the good that Caesar has done for his people as a leader. Up until this point, the crowd has believed that the crime of being ambitious, and ignore that Romans were better off because of Caeser alive than dead.

Even a famous Irish/Scottish Joke observes the effect of misdeeds rising above good. The joke is set in a bar where a drunk named Angus is imparting an important lesson to the traveller who doesn't know much about the local gossip. He lists all the things he did in the town in a similar format: "I built all the fences in this town [excrutiating detail into the effort it took]. But do they call me Angus the Fence Builder? No." This list goes on for some time to give you an idea that Angus has done some really great things for the town (built the church, saved the kids in the school house fire, so on and so forth) and not once is he named by the towns people for these deeds. Finally, the traveler asks Angus what his point is and Angus explains, "Because you can do all these things and no one will care to remember them," Angus then sighs, looks at his empty pint, and then looks at the traveler, "But you screw one goat..."

Star Trek was able to build from this and demonstrate the good and bad aspects of human traits by making aliens that exhibited human traits and ideas in logical excess. The Ferengi (the people who worship captitilism as a religion) have some pretty ugly traits, being opposed to unions, being greedy, selfish, and never missing an angle to make a quick buck, hating organized labor, holiday pay, sick leave, and view pregnancies as terms of contracts. But they also note that unlike humans, they never had wars among themselves (though hostile take overs are known), they never had slavery (menial wages sure, but they would never be so crass as to suggest that someone's work has no value worth paying for), and never committed genocide (why kill potential customers when you can sell to them?!). And then there are Rom and Nog, the former having no sense of business what-so-ever but is an amazing engineer and is on par with the best of Star Fleet (who in verse, have a reputation for being so good, they could take an ordinary rock and turn it into a replicator... even their enemies are impressed by them). Nog, his son, has a better buisness sense than his father, but suspects he's not nearly as good as Ferengi need to be to become big in their own society and is really upset by his father's treatment. However, he does decide to become a Starfleet officer, a first for his people, and actually carves out an impressive niche of being able to assess the situation and find the things needed to get the job done. Where as the Ferengi don't join Starfleet because there is no prophet to it, Nog is the first to realize that humans still make transactions for things they want but do not have, they just do not use currency to get it done. Even Starfleet, the military of a post-scarcity society, still has scarcities aplenty.

In a similar vein, in one DS9 episode, the crew meet a Klingon Lawyer who is not hostile or aggressive in anyway, and assume he is not a warrior and the proffesion is not the most desirable in Klingon society. The lawyer, however, argues that he is in fact a warrior still: Klingon honor codes demand that they achieve their honor on the battlefield, but are not specific about what a field of battle looks like. Is space any less a battle field than a court room in an Adversarial System? The logical conclusion is no, and he makes a rather impressive presentation of his case (in his first legal case in the Federation, which no doubt has different jurisprudence than in the Klingon Empire). In these cases, the aggressive nature is played with to show how it can be applied to professions that wouldn't otherwise matter in a society where murder is legal if it can be proven honorable.

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