Imagining a fantasy setting where elves, dwarves, orcs and whatnot are just continually baffled by humans eating the most vile toxic things.
Salsa? You mean a mix of a hemolytic poison (onions), a cardiotoxin (tomatoes), and a nerve agent (chili peppers)? Eaten with corn chips dusted with a lethal amount of salt, and washed down with a cup full of neurotoxin (iced tea)?
Stay the fuck away from me because clearly you are the vile spawn of some incomprehensible eldritch god
The best settings are where everyone is morbidly fascinated by each other.
Humans are effectively viewed as stereotypical frenchmen, constantly smoking and drinking and eating violently stinky food.
Dwarves think asbestos has a wonderful crunchy texture that goes great with a tall glass of mercury.
Elves cannot comprehend why you wouldn’t simply drink raw magic like a civilized person (you gotta try some Yith’Illian merlinot, they age it for two hundred years in silverwood caskets which gives it a gorgeous silky texture).
Orcs consider most human food to be ultraprocessed slop for babies, but have become borderline addicted to our hard candy and have formed a deep friendship with dwarves over sharing bones to gnaw on.In D&D dwarves have resistance to poison damage and advantage on saving throws against poison, so they would be the ones with food no one else could eat safely.
To everyone else, dwarf food seems bland. Since the dwarf cooking it couldn’t add any of there normal spices. “Can humans eat rocks? I don’t think so, better skip them.” (Then skips the salt)
Fun fact; you shouldn’t swallow pebbles. You can digest them, but they are rich in toxic minerals, to the point that your kidney gets overwhelmed.
I’m so glad I learned that I could digest rocks as an adult. I don’t think the second part of that warning would have been enough to deter me as a kid.
oh btw there’s these clay eating people all around the world.
they’re eaten for various reasons, sometimes because of health benefits (de-tox) or due to lack of proper food.
Impact on health
Clay minerals have been reported to have beneficial microbiological effects, such as protecting the stomach against toxins, parasites, and pathogens.[43][44] Humans are not able to synthesize vitamin B12 (cobalamin), so geophagia may be a behavioral adaptation to obtain it from bacteria in the soil.[45] Mineral content in soils may vary by region, but many contain high levels of calcium, copper, magnesium, iron, and zinc; these minerals are critical for developing fetuses, which may explain cravings by pregnant women to chew metallic objects, soil, ice cravings. Pregnant women may also experience ice-chewing cravings or drives towards specifically cold food to trigger vasoconstricting, which increases brain oxygen levels by restricting neck veins; both cravings, soil and ice, may have familial and environmental links.
detoxing is not real lol, unless you’re eating activated charcoal.
We have organs that specifically exist to remove toxins from the body, if foods have positive health effects it’s not due to “detoxing”.Structure of the clay: maybe beneficial
Toxicity: small amounts
What about boulders?
If it fits, it shits?
When the dwarves invite you over for dinner, steer clear of the mushroom stew.
If they’re gully dwarves its be best to just pass on it entirely.
Somehow that has me imagining Japanese dwarves being especially fond of that one pufferfish dish that’s toxic unless cooked just right.
Fugu.
afaik it’s not exactly the science it’s always made out to be, you just remove the poison gland, you know, the part with all the poison
HumanityFuckYeah is a genre that is basically this, although it’s most often in a scifi setting.
Usually depicting humans reaching the wider universe and baffling/overcoming large more advanced galactic empires due to Earth effectively being a death world where everything is trying to kill us.
Earth effectively being a death world where everything is trying to kill us.
I’d be chill with that, but my experience with r/HFY was mostly humans being more amazing than aliens in every way for no apparent good reason. Just so weird.
idk about weird, most fiction is at least somewhat based in power fantasy, especially in times like these where basically everyone feels fucking miserable and helpless.
Tbf dwarven religions are like “my ancestors carved these rules with their hands to guide us forward” and elven religions are like “my ancestors got intimate with a fae, starting our race. Also their firstborn is still alive.”
Meanwhile human religions are like “here is a horse that’s made out of all living beings, with a woman’s face too. Mortals who mount it can go to heaven for 5 seconds.”
let’s not forget that a lot of human religion is also just “thank u sun for making us not freeze to death, very cool. You too, water: big fan of watering my crops.”
Which is probably my favourite HFY concept: humans being ludicrously diverse while everyone else has like maybe 5 different cultures.
Even better there’s one non-human species that’s also super diverse and we both go
Anything is poison in a high enough quantity.
My masturbation has become poison?!?
friction burns
No no no, masturbation is how you get the poison out.
Phew! That’s a load off…
Seriously. Our bodies are more than half poison, by OP’s metric
Fucking hell. What a tragic story.
We’re not fast and don’t have a lot of natural weaponry
We are pretty fast compared to a lot of animals, especially when it comes to speed over any significant distance. Only a few other animals (like wolves and horses) can beat us in a long-distance race. And we’re especially good at maintaining speed over distance in high temperatures – as the temperature rises, our advantage there increases.
And having two hands to grab and grapple with (as opposed to only a mouth) is also a pretty rare and special skill in the animal kingdom. Maybe not the most impressive ‘natural weaponry’, but still quite useful and something to be feared by other animals. Then there’s our sheer size – we’re certainly not the biggest ever, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re definitely on the larger end of the spectrum, which gives us an advantage over most animals out there.
I wouldn’t put money on us vs. a cheetah or even a bobcat
Depends on the distance. The cats are faster over a short distance, but can’t keep it up for miles and miles.
Cheetahs have been clocked @70mph. That chase ain’t getting any further than that short distance.
Ancient humans would casually jog at animals until they could no longer run away. Cheetahs can only run about 600 meters before they are forced to stop and rest. The shortest marathons are 42km. So yes, an average person on the street could almost certainly chase down a cheetah.
He said race, not chase. Can’t keep up that 70mph for too long
It only needs to keep it up long enough to catch you.
Unless you think arranging a race with a cheetah for bragging rights alone is an entirely realistic situation 🙄
To my understanding, wild cheetahs aren’t known to attack humans, being on the small and fragile side for big cats and going after smaller animals than an adult human generally, so being chased down by a cheetah isn’t that likely either.
Curses. You know your cheetahs
Depends who’s chasing who.
Whomst’s chasing who
A single human would likely loose. 5 humans against 5 cheetahs?even if the cheetahs could work together, with basic weaponary (eg. Spears) the humans win.
Now hold on a goddamn minute, nobody said you could bring spears into this
… that’s what the cheetahs said
SURPRISE MOTHAFUCKAS
A Cheetah will do a half mile faster than a human. 50 miles? 100% bread ape victory.
Yeah, yeah, the running thing.
Next you’ll be saying you have a fighting chance against a chimpanzee.
you know what i call victory? not having to engage in fights in the first place.
Using my superior intellect and aforementioned running thing i can make the extremely complex strategic decision to run the fuck away from the chimp.
This isn’t exclusive to humans. Tons of animals actively seek out and consume mind altering substances that are generally poisonous. Elephants eat rotting fermenting apples to get drunk, monkeys steal alcoholic drinks from beach resorts, cats inhale cat nip, big cats like lions like to eat psychedelic mushrooms, and dolphins prick themselves with puffer fish poison spines
Elephants eat rotting fermenting apples to get drunk
That was a hoax by some nature documentary channel back then.
…but there is a critter specialized in digesting high amounts of alcohol from fermenting fruits. Also has a boozers nose.
And monkeys do like fermented fruits too.
Birds like getting drunk off of fermenting berries and fruit
yeah i remember some exotic frogs intentionally eat poisonous stuff sothat they get poisonous themselves to deter predators that would otherwise eat them
I mean, there are various other animal species that specialize in eating so much poison that they become poisonous themselves, so we’re not very impressive in this regard.
How many of those species poisoned the entire ecology so they could accumulate said poison inside themselves no matter what they ate? (microplastics)
Humans, fuck yeah!
We’re still nowhere near these guys:
a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80%
Life as we know it exists in their post-apocalypse.
We’re not fast but we can run for a long time. Don’t have natural weapons but can make them. Then there are people who voted for trump 1-3 times. And other countries that see how the USA is doing and are trying to copy it. I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I hate it here
To be fair, most of the people who want more of what trump’s offering could probably still figure out how to make a wooden spear.
Not all of them, and I wouldn’t go as far as to say they could make and use arrowheads, but still.
Don’t forget how we’ve been partying by getting absolutely smashed with a large variety of poisons for fucking millennia. We make alcohol out of plants, honey and even milk.
tbf making things alcoholic is not really difficult, if you can seal things air-tight.
Isn’t there an annual “man vs horse running race” where, once every decade or so, someone actually beats the horse?
People beat horses on the regular. The “man vs horse” race balances the course to try to make it equal. Horses will trounce people on courses under 3 hours or so. Humans do better with steep terrain. So humans will crush a trail endurance race over longer distances. We will lose badly on short, flat courses.
Interestingly dogs are the other species that can really hang with people in endurance runs. We will eventually leave them behind as well. They can outrun us in sprints and courses under a few hours. They can’t keep pace at 4+ hours.
Yup, that’s thought to be one of the main reasons we domesticated dogs. They could keep up, so they earned their keep, and because we anthropomorphize everything it was obviously only fair we share with them.
I used to work as a safety officer for a mountain ultramarathon race. The shortest course was 8 miles, the longest was 100. We have humans that can run 100 miles in a day and a half. I don’t think any other land animal can do that. Hell, I’m a human, I can’t do that.
Is this about capsaicin? Because that’s not a poison by any definition of the word.
The morning necessity is probably caffeine.
But capsaicin is a neurotoxin, and high enough doses absolutely can be dangerous and even fatal. The pain involved long before those doses are reached keeps most sensible people safe.
We take common food stuffs and feed it to yeast until the yeast dies in it’s own excrement and then drink that poison. Usually to celebrate. As long as we moderate and allow the body to recover from the poisonings, we’re good, more or less.
Yet, we drink from a mountain stream and we shit ourselves until we dehydrate and die.
actually, mountain streams are mostly safe because the water is in constant movement, and also as it’s on a mountain, that typically means that the source is not that far away and so the water didn’t have a lot of time to stand around and get infected with all kinds of stuff.
slowly-flowing or standing water in the plains is what gives you the diarrhea of your life.
even better: walk upstream ideally until you find the source, and drink from there. Water straight from the ground is generally incredibly clean, thanks to being filtered as it passes through the soil.
Like, that’s how wells work, you dig down until water seeps out from the ground around the hole.
True, but that’s not just humans. We just drink less poop water so we’re behind on the immunity.
That or salt. Which goes well with the stable bond of two of the most reactive substances in the universe, that makes up 90% of our body.
we probably wouldnt need so much salt if we didnt sweat so much. but we’re a water and salt intensive species. i guess we can move around in great heat without getting instant heatstroke, unlike dogs, cats, whatever?
I don’t feel alive unless the threat of death is constantly looming over me. That’s why I eat shrimp fried ricin.
I can’t function without my morning cup of pesticide.
Our superpower is sweating.
we have a lot of little superpowers, but i’d say the big one is the thing we’re doing right now. We would never have made any of this technology if we didn’t communicate and work together absurdly well.
Hell it applies to other animals too: being both intelligent and social unlocks the ability for not only your entire species but potentially even all the intelligent species to collaborate.
Well, thinking and sweating. Two things we do better than any other animal.
Though horses are actually a close second when it comes to sweating.
And throwing.
