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Maybe the aliens used someone's porn collection to learn about humans? /s
But seriously, I think there is something to that. She's trying to say that a lot of fiction uses parenthood to do stuff like "Rob Schneider is both an X and a parent! And it ain't easy being both!" or simply ignores it the way it ignores shopping or sleeping or studying. Batman isn't a dad because he's a mogul by day and a crimefighter by night, when is he going to spend time with his children? And there's always Robin if Bruce wants to be a father figure for a moment. The aliens could be saying "oh, we didn't know humans actually spent so much time studying in college! We thought they just formed cliques, dealt with relationship troubles and aced through exams by using the powers of friendship and montage!"
Of course, this can be countered by saying, "how come these aliens who aren't that alien and understand parenthood don't understand the law of conservation of detail? Do they even have literature? Or do they just watch unedited reality TV feeds for entertainment?" Which a very good writer would have preempted by showing that yes, these aliens really don't have anything that resembles human literature. Or that they love children and parenthood so much they don't consider that "the boring part" of the narrative.
This makes me think of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which some of you might better recognize as Robotech), where part of the plot was that the attacking Zentraedi aliens were literally culture-less, having bred themselves for nothing but war. Watching Hikaru /Rick kiss a woman came as a complete shock to them, and Minmay's singing was literally a weapon against them.
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If motherhood is such a big deal for the aliens, then yeah probably it's an important part of "who the characters are" in their literature and popular entertainment. X has three kids (details about them), Y is pregnant (details about that), Z has no kids yet but is trying for them and so on.
The same way I skip over the pages of detail about exact model of gun and ammo and so forth when reading thrillers 😁 So far as I am concerned, Big Hero Dink Atsom has a Big Gun and is going to shooty the bad guys. That's as much detail as I need, but other readers (men?) seem to want all the details of what kind of Big Gun exactly and calibre of ammo etc.
Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.
Hah I relate to this so strongly, it’s why Tolkein never really did it for me. Endless descriptions of a forest turn me off a series like few other things.
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Oh god, the shopping lists from The Girl that Played with Fire are coming back to haunt me. My pet theory is that when Stieg Larssen died no one edited his books past the first one.
My eyes glaze over at both the male and female versions of this because I don't know anything about guns and I don't know anything about fashion and I don't care about either. I don't know why a Horace de Latté ballgown and machine gun is better than a Sylvain Bompe-de-Bompe missile launcher and tea dress, and I don't want to know.
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