OK, so this may not be something you know about me, but I have a weakness for the Mars Needs Women trope. It goes against so many of my ideals, often involving dub or non-con, the woman invariably learns love ‘submitting,’ women are valued for their sex and ability to breed and for little else, and the males are overbearing and frequently violent. I shouldn’t like the trope, but I do. I do, in a snicker-at-the-cheese sort of way, but still I enjoy it.

And earlier today, I was looking into a couple of books involving this trope and noticed a pattern. I know aliens are often referred to as ‘little green men,’ but what’s with all the big blue men lately? Seriously, a casual scroll through Google netted these. It literally took me about five minutes to copy them all. Imagine how many I’d find if I really went looking or included those with blue-toned covers, and not just blue aliens. And, yes, I do realize some of them are series. That’s totally fair, but a lot of these aren’t. So, my question stands.

Honestly, it’s not even that I have anything against ripped, blueish alien beings. I like Avatar, after all.  But this seems a tad homogenized. A whole universe out there and all the planets needing females are populated by humanoid, blue males? What’s up with that?

Yeah, this is the sort of thing you find yourself thinking when you are a visual person with a tendency to pick out patterns, but where’s my chartreuse alien, or mauve, or red? They can’t possibly all be blue.

Just a thought really.

Edit: Since I wrote this, I’ve seen blue aliens everywhere and I’ve added a couple covers to the original list. Plus, I’m noticing Aliens all seem to be warriors and Alien Princes seem to do a lot of claiming. LOL