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Hey you've talked a lot about star control 2 but I am curious about the ship and other races that you haven't talked about. are there any other human characters? And what's with those Syreen aliens?

There are three humanoid races in the StarCon2 galaxy! Well, I GUESS four if you count the Arilou but I wouldn’t. It’d be the Earthlings, the Syreen, and the Androsynth. The Androsynth are a whole other complicated deal, so let’s talk about the Syreen instead for now, haha.

(You can play StarCon2 for free right now! Don’t play with the voices though, they will ruin it)

I know what you’re thinking, but stay with me here.

The Syreen are suspiciously similar to humans - aside from their skin color, psionic abilities, and reflective cat eyes - to the point where a lot of speculation has been had by both humans and Syreen about them sharing a common ancestor that was split off onto a different planet by a third party (usually assumed to be the Arilou), but no one really knows for sure. Syreen are so similar to humans in fact that humans and Syreen can even have children together! Culturally though the Syreen differ quite a bit.

According to Talana (the Syreen you get to chat with)…

The main difference between our two sets of cultures… the split in the paths of our developmentoccurred in what would have been your prehistory, say 5000 BCE.In your world, the agricultural communities which formed from hunter-gatherer tribeswere conquered by the more primitive but also more aggressive, migratory herding peoples.This led to a particular kind of sexual and political dominance structurewhich pervaded almost all of your Earth Cultures until the early Twenty First century.On Syra, our only primitive migratory tribes were confined to our mountainous regions.Their herd beasts, the Yma, did not do well in the agricultural basins and plainstherefore, the two cultures were isolated until much laterwhen the technological superiority of the farmers curtailed any major conflict.

As a result, the Syreen formed a general worldwide peaceful culture without much conflict on a grand scale, living more in harmony with nature (they deride humans for encasing our world in plastic and concrete, for example) and with far more egalitarian gender roles. Syra, the world where they lived, was basically a tropical eden by their accounts, and all the Syreen loved it dearly. It was very similar to Earth, although the gravity was lighter and the days were a bit shorter.

Was? you might be asking. Yes, one day a massive meteor struck Syra and caused a huge volcano. While somewhat alarmed, the Syreen cleaned up the mess as best they could and went back to their normal lives. About a year later, enormous supervolcanoes began opening up all over Syra, spewing lava and poisonous gases everywhere. Within three days, the temperature had risen almost 75 degrees above the boiling point of water! The only survivors were those who were in space at the time, the Syreen Space Patrol, who happened to be majority female. All they could do was watch their planet die helplessly. They stayed in orbit for a few years, searching the planet for survivors (which they actually DID find a few of, miraculously enough), and trying to figure out what to do. In the end, they fitted engines to anything that would hold air in space, from orbital factories to space hotels, and took off from Syra to find a new homeworld, never to return. In the end, less than 10000 Syreen survived, and only 500 of them were male.

It was incredibly difficult for the Syreen as they traveled through space looking for a home, not least in part because most of their fleet was unarmed and quite slow. They ran afoul of the VUX, who enjoyed raiding their habitats, and eventually stumbled into the path of the Alliance of Free Stars. They were asked to join the Alliance in the war against the Ur-Quan, and the Syreen didn’t really see any other choice than to agree to it. The Alliance helped them with resources and protection, to a degree, and the Syreen also got to meet humans for the first time, during which both species found they were quite into each other, haha.

Reflecting their small population, the Syreen Penetrator (yes, I know) always enters combat with around half of a full allotment of crew. Their primary weapon is a long-range dart like laser, but their real skill is their secondary ability - Singing. Using the shape of their ship to enhance their voice, the Syreen can use their psionic abilities to call crewmembers from the opposing ship to abandon their posts and come join them instead. As such, if a Syreen captain is skilled, she can leave combat with an enemy ship with more crew than she came in with. The crew of a Syreen ship looks super strange from the outside, with a whole multitude of alien races all working together side by side in harmony under the control of the Syreen. Which is kind of creepy if you think about it. StarCon3 does touch on the creepiness of that mind control a bit, but the StarCon3 Syreen are… let’s say, quite a bit different from StarCon2.

Anyway, the first War did not go well, and the Alliance fell apart after their defeat. The Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm got shielded onto their world, the Humans got enslaved, the Yehat and Shoxifti left for their own worlds and told the Syreen not to follow them, and the Arilou immediately left after the humans were enslaved (which the Syreen still hold a grudge against them for). When the Ur-Quan descended on them, the Syreen were defenseless. Most of their fleet didn’t even have any weapons. So they surrendered, and when the Ur-Quan asked where their homeworld was, the Syreen said they didn’t have one. Apparently this wasn’t the first time this had happened, so the Ur-Quan asked them a lot of questions about what Syra was like, and then used their massive stores of planetary knowledge to find them basically a near-identical world. With that settled, the Ur-Quan slaveshielded the Syreen on their new world, Gaia, and went on their way.

After wandering the galaxy for around 75 years without a planet, the Syreen are SUPER reluctant to do ANYthing that will jeopardize their new world. They hate being enslaved as much as anyone does, but they don’t want to do anything that’ll antagonize the Ur-Quan and give them reason to take Gaia away from them. Until you show up, that is.

There are things you can criticize about the Syreen, of course, but to me, it does feel like they have a fair amount of thought put into their history, and their pain about the loss of their world is treated very seriously. The relationship with the Captain and Talana is a bit rushed but eh. They dip into fanservice a lot but I think there’s something still interesting there that just needs some expansion.

For example, I like thinking about gay and bi Syreen, how many of them are in the Space Patrol, how many of them survived, how they feel, whether they’re also into human women like their het comrades are into human men… I have a fic about a lesbian Syreen hitting on a clueless human lady but I never finished it, haha. Considering how peaceful Syreen society is, I like thinking that they’d be accepting of different sexualities. And genders too! Are there Syreen who were born female who identify as male, or vice versa, or don’t identify as any gender, or were born intersex? Are they all peacefully accepted into the collective whole of what’s left of the Syreen? What if some of the remaining male Syreen are gay? Whenever it comes to primarily female/matriarchial societies in fiction, it seems rare to me that they ever get into any queer identities, which seems like a shame… I’d like to see more stuff explore that, or at least acknowledge it.

I’d also like to see some Syreen that don’t adhere to our standards of beauty, haha. Who’s to say the Syreen would have the same standards of beauty that we would! I’d like to see Syreen with short hair, buzzed hair, no hair! Mohawks, all sorts of different hair styles and clothing styles, and most importantly, body shapes! I want to see heavy Syreen, short Syreen, tall Syreen, bodybuilding Syreen… I want to see all shapes and forms of women in this society! I feel like that’d help a lot in making them feel less like they’re fanservice for male players and more that they’re their own people. You don’t have to lose the sexy space babes entirely or anything... I just want to see some non-sexy space ladies too. And I know that a society that’s accepting of everyone and doesn’t have a lot of inter-community conflict doesn’t feel very realistic to us but I don’t know… to me, it’s a nice thought.

Oh yeah! The Syreen theme is fairly long (three and a half minutes!) and it’s a peppy little song with a clear melody and unique drumline among the SC2 songs I think, haha. It’s hard for me to describe, I’m just so used to it now. It suits them though.

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