Whether you're a human, a Human Alien or a Rubber-Forehead Alien, Starfleet wants you.
Some science fiction stories have no aliens in them and only focus on humans. However, a lot of sci-fi settings go the other way and have a plethora of different species intermingling together, and whilst each species will have a home world, they'll often interact when it comes to working in space. The reason for this is that many sci-fi writers just think sticking to humans and only humans is boring when you have the opportunity to make up your own interesting species.
Because Most Writers Are Human, it's not uncommon for the protagonist to still be human - maybe even one of the only humans in the cast, because other humans are not only easier to write, but also easier for the audience to relate to. How humanity is treated in these settings can vary, sometimes Humans Are Special and are a major player in the setting, being the race that has brought the other species together and being the lynchpin of most alliances. In other settings, aliens see us as too malicious, stupid, and/or just generally unimpressive to trust us with that sort of power, but they still accept that we want to explore space too, they just stick us with low responsibility roles at best and basically tolerate us, maybe even assisting us with our first "baby steps" into space. Alternatively, they try to invade us for what they see as "our own good". And then there are cases where humanity is neither special nor put-upon—they're just one bunch of sapients among many.
It's common in these sorts of settings to have the focus on a spaceship, space station, or colony world that features a wide variety of species but with at least the implication that their home worlds are a lot more uniformly populated (sometimes to the point of isolationism, they may go off-world but don't allow other species on theirs). Sometimes it's Earth in particular that has become the melting pot world and other planets aren't quite so diverse. In stories set in the future or an alternative universe, usually all of humanity is aware of the existence of aliens, but even works set in the modern day or the past may have this in place by having the extra-terrestrials have rules preventing them from interacting with us or just have them generally unaware of us... but we still may get a token human presence in the form of an abductee or someone who stumbled through a wormhole or who has accidentally teleported themselves across the universe without any way to get home.
Extremely common in Space Opera settings, to the point that divergences from this trope are the exception to the rule. If you run a tavern, cafe, nightclub or similar in one of these settings, expect it to be a Bar Full of Aliens. See also Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My! when the aliens look like anthropomorphic animals. Also compare Fantasy Kitchen Sink and All Myths Are True for the fantasy/mythological counterparts.
See also: Standard Sci-Fi Setting, Alien Among Us, First Contact
Contrast: Absent Aliens, Invisible Aliens, and the Fermi Paradox
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Daltanious:
- Earth has diplomatic ties with many other nations like Helios and Proxia, mainly to defeat the Galactic Conquerers that are the Zaal Empire.
- The Zaal Empire itself is made up of various different alien races, as their Prince is even descended from the last Emperor of Helios.
- Dragon Ball has an interesting mix of this off-world with a splash of Multicultural Alien Planet applied to Earth (which is wildly different to our Earth) too.
- Earth in Dragon Ball isn't just home to humans but also to various demons and monster-type Earthlings (e.g. Emperor Pilaf), and sapient humanoid animals who are either natural born (e.g. Puar the Cat, Oolong the Pig) or humans who took drugs to alter their genetics (King Furry) but most people don't know about aliens existing.
- However off world the aliens we do meet don't find the existence of other aliens surprising. This was a big reveal to the main cast at the beginning of Dragon Ball Z when the cast and viewers are informed that protagonist Goku isn't some sort of mystical person with a monkey tail but actually, an alien Saiyan whose super violent race is mostly extinct the few remaining members are indentured to the despotic Frieza, who has enslaved and or killed thousands of other species. There are also wholly independent space pirates and other multi-species organizations out there in space. The mostly friendly aliens of Namekians of the planet Namek seem to know about other species and space flight but mostly keep to themselves.
- Space☆Dandy: The world, or rather space, of Space Dandy is filled with so many hundreds of sentient alien species that nobody really bats an eye at anyone who looks unusual. The chain of restaurants known as BooBies caters to everyone without question. There are actually so many different aliens that there's an entire industry surrounding the capture and identification of unknown aliens— some of whom are sentient beings just living their lives among everyone else.
- YAT Anshin! Uchū Ryokō: It doesn't matter if you're a human, The Greys kind of alien, the robotic kind of alien or the perky catgirl type of alien - no one bats an eye at that or will discriminate against you. The fact that inter-galaxy travel has been a thing for years and desensitized people to diversity probably helps.
- Starzinger takes place in the distant future, where humans have made First Contact with aliens from several different areas like the moon and Atlantis. Cyborgs are also normalized in the setting, with humans being able to become them after undergoing experimentation.
- In all iterations of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise, whilst Earth is generally unaware of aliens, off-world species mingle casually. This doesn't get a lot of focus in the original Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki OVA series, as the focus is on Earth and on Tenchi and his harem of Human Alien love interests and their families and various other Human Alien hangers-on. However, in the spin-off Tenchi Muyo! GXP, where a young human man is press-ganged by the Galaxy Police into serving them, we see many Human Aliens and a few Beastmen-like races like the wolflike Wau.
- The Boazanians from Voltes V are Galactic Conquerors, but despite this, they retain formal ties with other planets, and if Heinel's cavalry is anything to go by, unconventional phenotypes are rather common.
- Voltron: Planet Arus, Princess Allura's homeworld, has diplomatic ties with Planet Pollux (they both have the same royal lineage) and is also part of an alliance with several other planets. Earth was excluded from this until she was forced to take refuge there when her planet fell.
Comic Books
- The DCU setting may focus on Earth, but in comics that focus on off-world settings, or that at least have a lot of alien characters visiting Earth, space is shown to be multi-cultural. Superman, Martian Manhunter and Hawkman are just some of the characters who are aliens who spend a lot or most of their time on Earth. Particular comics of note:
- The Green Lantern corp are empowered Space Police who recruit individuals from different species across the galaxy to wear a Ring of Power granting them ImaginationBasedSuperpowers. A human, Hal Jordon, is recruited when an alien crash-lands on Earth just before he dies and transfers his ring to Jordan, who eventually joins the rest of the corp for training. The Green Lanterns are also shown to interact a lot with other aliens in the DC, for example Blue Beetle's the Reach.
- The New Gods meta series which focuses on the utopia of New Genesis and the dystopia of Apokolips, collectively called The Fourth World. Both planets have a mix of different alien species living on them who treat this as an everyday occurrence whilst waging war against one another.
- Marvel Universe. Marvel Earth can be a bit of a melting pot for aliens, and over world is even more varied. Some notable comics include:
- Guardians of the Galaxy is about a group of alien adventurers from various different planets travelling throughout the universe, visiting other worlds, and getting into general space escapades.
- Nova is about various members of a intergalactic police force which is mostly non-human but has occasional human members.
- Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics) originally focused on Mar-Vell a mostly human looking alien who initially came to Earth to monitor how well we were prepared to join the wider space-faring community. Eventually, he gets an empowered human sidekick called Carol Danvers who eventually takes on his name (as do several others over the years). She spends a great deal of her time off world amongst aliens.
Films — Animation
- In Lilo & Stitch (2002) the United Galactic Federation is a melting pot of various space-faring species including the seal-like four-eyed criminal Dr. Joomba Joobika, the neurotic, one-eyed, antenna-ed, three-legged environmentalist Pleakey of the planet Plorgonar. They look upon Earth as a backwater and would have blown us up to kill the dangerous genetic experiment 626 (Stitch) were it not for the fact that the planet is home to mosquitos which are endangered. Earth has no awareness about this supposedly; it turns out the US Government knows and the mosquito excuse is a ruse.
- Treasure Planet is set in an alternative universe where space flight is possible by intergalactic galleons and the human protagonist version of Jim Hawkins lives in his mother's old-timey tavern full of aliens, which has full-time boarder and friend of the family the doglike Dr. Doppler. The ship that is commissioned after Jim finds a map of the titular treasure planet is crewed by members of various different species, including the cat-like Captain Amelia and huge stone man Mr. Arrow.
- Titan A.E. is set after a species of evil energy beings known as the Drej destroy planet Earth fearing the power humanity could have thanks to the possibilities of Project Titan, an extremely advanced planet formation project humans were developing. This has forced the humans who survived the annihilation of the planet to live in space stations and scrounge around in the corners of alien societies where other species look down on humans for having no home world.
Films — Live-Action
- In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, much like in the comics that inspired it, whilst the populace of Earth only gains mass awareness of the existence of aliens with the invasion of New York in The Avengers (2012), off-world is very much a melting pot. The main sub-franchises that deal with this side of the MCU are:
- The Thor films, which present residents of Asgard and the other Norse Realms as aliens who merely seem to have godlike abilities, most looking Human, and who Norse mythology was based on the last time they visited. Whilst the first two films focus mostly on Asgard and the other Nine Realms, Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder have Thor traversing the galaxy and bumping into all sorts of different aliens, and he finds none of this strange.
- Guardians of the Galaxy focuses on Peter Quill, a man abducted from Earth as an 8 year old child (as it turns out he is a Half-Human Hybrid for a very egotistical sentient planet) who grows up to become a space scavenger / bounty hunter in the group that kidnapped him. He doesn't find aliens all that surprising once he grows up and finds several planets and other locations he visits very much multi-cultural species-wise. In particular Xandar, homeworld of the Nova Force, is just as much home to the native Human Aliens the Xandarians as it is to various more fantastical species.
- Star Wars:
- This is established early on in the very first film, with the Mos Eisley cantina that's full to overflowing with nonhuman intelligent entities.
- Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi drives the lesson home: Jabba has more nonhumans than humans among his retinue. Later in the film, the supreme military leader of the Rebel Alliance is the Mon Calamari Admiral Ackbar.
- As a general rule, while there are some exceptions, political and organizational boundaries are not really drawn along species lines. While most sapient species have recognized home worlds and most planets' demographics are dominated by one or two primary groups, almost all are also spread out widely across the galaxy. Even very isolated or provincial settlements usually see a decent variety of local natives, and major trade and administrative hubs draw their residents from every mildly widespread group in the setting.
- Across the broader franchise, the Galactic Republic is characterized as a union of numerous distinct alien species and worlds. Specific planets are usually strongly dominated by whatever their native species happens to be — Multicultural Alien Planets like Naboo are present, but relatively rare — but major trade centers and travel hubs routinely see crowds of dozens of species interacting. This is particularly notable in the City Planet of Coruscant, the Republic's capital, whose population includes essentially every species with a presence in the Republic. The Jedi Order also draws its members rather widely from across the galaxy's sapient diversity.
- Outside of the Republic, individual planets are more isolated, but port systems still see a variety of sapient diversity. This is particularly visible in the case of Tatooine, whose position on a major hyperspace route has filled its spaceports with an immense variety of resident species.
- In the movies of the original trilogy, the Rebel Alliance also draws widely from a plethora of species, in large part due to the Empire's human-centric policies producing numerous resistance movements among alien populations.
Literature
- The Harem Protagonist Was Turned Into A Girl!! And Doesn’t Want To Change Back!!!?? takes place in such a setting though it is more expanded upon in the sequel - And... Now She's Empress of the Galaxy!?. Protagonist Svetlana Fujikawa is the rightful ceremonial empress of the Galactic Commonwealth much to her surprise and therefore is desired as a wife to several different alien princesses. The main species that run the inner workings of the Commonwealth are the Lanthoneans - blue skinned, antennaed humanoids who prize a Crystal Spires and Togas aesthetic. Then there's the Issiod’rians who are military Cat Folk. The Koborians who are humanoids with bug like elements and horns as well as many others. There is also the rival Corporate Alliance which is made up of various species as well including Greys and the sharklike supernatural humanoids the Zuumult. On top of this it turns out All Myths Are True as well as Earth is home to various Greek deities and vampires also exist.
- The Humanx Commonwealth was founded by humans in partnership with the thranx, who resemble human-sized ants. The galaxy in which they live is full of other intelligent species. Some are no longer around, like the vaguely turtlelike Tar-Aiym and their enemies the Hur'rikku. Some are still limited to their own world, like the Tran of Tran-ky-ky and the Sumacrea of Longtunnel. Some are also capable of interstellar flight, like the AAnn. And some defy classification, like the Vom and the Mutables.
- In the Lensman series, both Civilization and Boskonia have a plethora of aliens, ranging from Human Aliens to Starfish Aliens. There is a tendency for different species to work and play separately for practical environmental reasons ("Warm-blooded oxygen-breathers find neither welcome nor enjoyment in a pleasure-resort operated by and for such a race, say, as the Trocanthers, who are cold-blooded, quasi-reptilian beings who abhor light of all kinds and who breathe a gaseous mixture not only paralyzingly cold but also chemically fatal to man") but cross-species friendships are common, especially among Lensmen and other members of the Galactic Patrol.
- Well World:
- While the early books have the Confederacy as a humans-only interstellar empire, by the time of The Retiurn of nathan Brazil the Confederacy includes fifteen or so nonhuman intelligent species, from the not-quite-human Olympians to the centaurs of Rhone and the dinosaurlike Ghlmonese. A sixteenth alien species, the Dreel, then invades the Confederacy and brings the whole thing crashing down.
- 1,560 different intelligent species — some of them very different — call the Well World home. There are humans, centaurs, intelligent dinosaurs, giant frogs, giant magic-using apes, giant grasshoppers, humanoid bats, Plant Aliens, mermaids, satyrs, poison-spraying flowers... Most of them also have one or more planets in the outside Universe. In fact the larger Universe holds many more than 1,560 intelligent species — what's currently on the Well World is only the last 1,560 ones to be developed.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5 takes place in something of a transition between Single-Species Nations and this trope. At the start of the series, most polities have one dominant species and small, if any, populations of other species. But the titular Space Station was built to serve as a neutral meeting ground for diplomacy and trade and has a diverse population of many different species, and by the end of the series has become the capital of an Interstellar Alliance.
- Doctor Who due to the nature of the show being about a space-fairing time traveller who takes mostly modern-day humans under their wing so they can all have adventures across the universe some stories have this and others don't. Ones set in past or present Earth may well have aliens other than the Doctor in them but the humans of those eras usually don't know about extraterrestrial life. However, ones set in the far future like "The End Of The World" has humanity so inter-mingled with other species that our descendants are almost all Half Human Hybrids. There are also stories set in other parts of the galaxy where species intermingling is par for the course, such as "The Curse Of Peladon" and its follow-up "The Monster Of Peladon" which both involve the political situation between the planet Peladon (home of Human Aliens who are capable of space flight but with medieval ascetics) and the wider Galactic Federation made up of various different looking species.
- Farscape: Astronaut John Crichton finds himself in a distant part of the galaxy inhabited by a wide variety of species and polities under the rule of the Sebacean Peacekeepers, a fascistic Space Police force composed of one of many Human Alien species in the region. He gets picked up by a Peacekeeper Prison Ship that has been hijacked by its former prisoners of five different species (ranging from Rubber-Forehead Aliens to Muppets) and winds up traveling with them as they attempt to reach their homeworlds.
- The Orville is an Affectionate Parody of Star Trek, and therefore its Planetary Union is an equivalent of the United Federation of Planets. The Planetary Union has its Headquarters on Earth but has over 300 allied planetary governments and a multicultural military. Examples of species include the Moclans - a nearly all male race who focus on combat, the (friendly) Blob Monster-like Gelatin, the Scholarly Xelayans who are strong due to being from a high gravity planet and many more.
- Power Rangers. Whilst in general most civilians on Earth don't interact with aliens, the rest of the universe is a melting pot of interacting species. Different entries in the franchise seem inconsistent regarding how common knowledge the existence of aliens is to humanity.
- Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Zordon, the Big Good of the show and the one who recruits the initial "five teenagers" with attitude is a benevolent space wizard from the planet Eltar who lives in a status tube which projects him as a big head. He has a Robot Buddy called Alpha-5 who looks after the Power Rangers Command Centre. The Big Bads of the show, starting with Rita Repulsa and expanding to include her eventual husband Lord Zedd and father Master Vile, are all aliens. A second set of Rangers from the planet Aquitar known as the Alien Rangers also exist and help out for a story arc when the main Rangers are turned into children.
- Power Rangers Zeo has Rita and Zedd replaced by the Machine Empire, mechanical beings who have conquered large swaths of the galaxy and plan to attack Earth for its resources. It also introduces the United Alliance of Evil, which expands on and directly shows that aliens will work alongside each other (with occasional infighting) and don't find the existence of other species particularly notable.
- Power Rangers in Space: Introduces Human Alien Andros from colony KO-35 as the Red Ranger, and he doesn't find the existence of other intelligent species particularly interesting, implying this is par for the course for him, unlike the Earthling Rangers who are surprised by his existence when they question his looks. He tells them humans exist all over the universe.
- Power Rangers S.P.D.: The monsters of the week weren't the only aliens like in most seasons - New Tech City had a lot of them among the civilian population. The team commander was also an alien.
- Power Rangers Ninja Steel: The Big Bad of the first half of the show, Galvanax, is the host of an intergalactic game show which pits aliens against each other in gladitorial combat and then switches to having the aliens fight the Power Rangers after the ranger team gets their powers. Also whilst the Rangers themselves are all human the Ninja Steel Red Ranger, Brody, grew up as a slave onboard Galvanax's ship so he's used to interacting with various species and doesn't find their existence surprising and is even friends with various good aliens and robots.
- Space Precinct: Is a Police Procedural set on the planet Altor, and specifically Demeter City which is home to civilians and cops from many different species. It focused on Lt Patrick Brogan, formerly of the NYPD who is transferred to Demeter City PD. The reason that off world policing is modelled on United States policing in universe is because aliens offered humanity faster than light travel in exchange for human policing skills and training as once the species from various races started to interact they found crime stats skyrocketing but most of the races no longer had any crime fighting abilities as when interacting just among their own species they'd "outgrown" the need. But humans being "less culturally advanced" still had crime and therefore crimefighters.
- Star Trek: The United Federation of Planets, and its scientific research organisation Starfleet are the main focus of the franchise. Each entry has had different levels of alien involvement:
- Star Trek: The Original Series famously includes the emotionless, intelligent, pointy eared Mr. Spock aboard the Enterprise, but few other aliens as members of Starfleet. However, other species appear frequently as antagonists: the Klingons, Tholians, Gorn, Metrons, Horta, Andorians, Organians just to name a few.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation featured the mostly human-looking Deanna Troi and the cream-skinned android who longed to be more human Data, as well as Worf, a Klingon - a species previously enemies of Starfleet.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was set on a Space Station which used to be a penal colony used by the lizard-like Cardassians to imprison members of the Bajoran species, who had been under Cardassian occupation for 50 years. It was now owned by the planet Bajor but mostly administered by Starfleet as part of a peace treaty. Therefore, whilst the station had a major human presence, it also featured a lot of members of the Bajoran military as well as a bar run by members of the capitalistic Ferengi race, and a mysterious shapeshifting security officer who at the start of the show didn't know what his species even was.
- Star Trek: Voyager is about a Starfleet ship, the titular Voyager, which is flung across the galaxy to the far-flung Delta Quadrant by a powerful entity and at best estimates will take 70 years to return home. This was supposed to make the alien species they would run into more diverse, but they wound up still finding Klingons, Ferengi, and other Trek Verse regular species a lot.
- Star Trek: Enterprise is a prequel series set in the decade before the Federation was founded, and generally subverts this. Starfleet only recently achieved warp five, allowing it to explore the galaxy at a reasonable pace, and as such the organization is purely human until T'Pol formally joins in season four. That said, there are Vulcan diplomats and a growing number of alien immigrants living on Earth, which becomes a plot point in the penultimate episode when a xenophobic terrorist group tries to violently expel them. The other alien races are pretty monocultural as well, with the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites having been at each others' throats for centuries until Archer's crew manages to unite them against Romulan aggression.
Tabletop Games
- In Starfinder's Pact Worlds diverse populations are the norm rather than the exception. Though it helps that many of the founding planets (the Golarion system from Pathfinder) were Multi Cultural Alien Planets to begin with. Notable is the Horizons of the Vast adventure path where the PCs govern a new colony with named settlers of a couple dozen different species.
- Traveller: The Third Imperium is a light example. Most of the noble caste (though non-human nobles exist, for instance House Soegz of Antares are vargr) and all emperors are human, but the Imperium's population includes several hundred alien species and Ancient-seeded Human Subspecies, with the dominant culture a blend of Terran and Vilani.
Video Games
- The Mass Effect franchise is about humanity's first steps into being members of an interstellar alliance, and one of the major settings of most of the games - the colossal deep space station of the Citadel - is where many races mingle. Many of the more established space-faring races view humanity with a lot of contempt, but social progress is being made in that area to integrate humanity. Specifically, you play as Commander Shepard, the first human to join the Spectres (Special Tactics and Reconnaissance), the elite agents of the Citadel Council.
- The Star Control series introduces a variety of aliens with each game, with varying perspectives and moralities between each one, on top of distinct appearances and features that make each one recognizable when you meet their ships in space. Only a minority of alien species have a strong resemblance to humans, and humans are part of the Alliance of Free Stars, an overall heroic group of several different alien species defending themselves from the invasive forces of the Ur-Quan in the first two games.
- Stellaris:
- This is the ultimate state of any empire committed to the Xenophile and Egalitarian ethics, who tend to keep open borders by default and accept trade and immigration without restrictions. As a result, their endgame home worlds typically contain pops from dozens of sentient species working side by side.
- The Broken Shackles origin added with the First Contact DLC embodies this trope, as it starts off with a slaver ship crashing on a planet while carrying a large number of enslaved pops from multiple pre-FTL species. After killing their captors, the newly freed pops then form a space nation that trends strongly toward Xenophile and Egalitarian ethics (at least, initially).
- Subverted with the First League, one of the Precursor civilizations. It was one of these, a federation of spacefaring empires comprising multiple species, but it failed to maintain cohesion between its member states, succumbing to piracy and Fantastic Racism before they imploded and collapsed.
- XCOM: Chimera Squad: After humanity defeated an alien empire that used mind-controlled soldiers, the freed aliens from a half-dozen species are all stuck on Earth and trying to coexist with humanity.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time is a strange case. It's set in the world of Ooo, where Finn is a Token Human surrounded by all sorts of crazy creatures ranging from sentient candy to goblins to elemental creatures... because it's set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where humans are note extinct and new species have evolved to populate the world.
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is one interpretation of what the toy Buzz Lightyear from Pixar's Toy Story franchise would have been based on. In this show, Buzz is the ace agent of the Space Rangers - the peacekeeping force of the titular Star Command. Star Command is multi-species and galaxy-wide and other spacefaring species are members. Buzz's squadron alone includes a butt-kicking, beautiful blue-skinned Alien Princess, a super strong former farmer and just promoted to active Space Ranger-dom ex-janitor who looks somewhat like a cross between a red-scaled lizard and a wild boar, and a Robot Buddy with a whole bunch of character quirks thanks to the Little Green Men race of engineers introducing those when they fixed him thanks to their own eccentricities.
- Futurama takes place in the 31st Century, where interstellar travel is routine and aliens and sentient robots are commonplace. The main cast work at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company whose staff includes Leela, a one-eyed woman once thought to be an alien but was actually a sewer mutant; Bender, a surly robot; Dr. John Zoidberg, a lobster-like alien; and Nibbler, Leela's three-eyed pet who is actually a member of an ancient hyperintelligent species. The other five members of the crew are human, including Fish out of Temporal Water Phillip J. Fry; his distant nephew and Mad Scientist Hubert Farnsworth; Amy Wong, whose family owns half the property on Mars; Scruffy the janitor; and Jamaican bureaucrat Hermes Conrad (who, in a Lampshade Hanging on the setting, was mistaken for an "outer space potato man" by Fry).
- Galaxy High School is set in the titular high school on the asteroid colony of Flutor. The school has hundreds of different species in attendance, with protagonists Doyle and Aimee as the only human students who were selected from Earth to go to school there. Lots of aliens seem to look down on humanity, especially the bully Beef Bonk who proudly wears a shirt that says "Earth Stinks" and spends his time tormenting Doyle. Aimee manages to dodge most of the prejudice, as her academic skills are so good that the aliens make an exception for her - and because she's one of the few girls at a school where the male population outnumbers the female 3-to-1.
- Elliott from Earth is about a young boy and his geologist mother Frankie who, after activating an extraterrestrial rock Frankie was obsessed with by accidentally exposing it to microwave radiation, it transports them across the universe with no way home where they befriend a talking captured stegosaurus and start their new life on the Centrium, a gigantic Space Station host to aliens from all walks of life from across the galaxy.
- Lloyd in Space is about thirteen-year-old Lloyd Nebulon, a bald, green-skinned, antenna-ed alien from a species called the Verdigrean who lives on Intrepidville Space Station, which is overseen by his mother. He goes to school with his best friends, Token Human Eddie, Kurt Blobberts (who is a one-eyed purple blob-like alien), and Douglas McNoggin - a brain with a face and limbs. The space station and his school are cultural melting pots.
- On top of being a Fantasy Kitchen Sink where All Myths Are True, it's expressly stated that the Bad Future that Samurai Jack is set in is so "topsy turvy" because after conquering Earth, Aku began sending out his forces to conquer the rest of the universe, resulting in aliens, robots, mutants, and other forms of sci-fi weirdness walking the Earth too.
- Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Star Trek: Prodigy all use the fact that they are animated to be much more varied with their species and significantly increase the number of background and main characters who are nonhuman. Particularly Prodigy, which has a cast of teenagers from the Delta Quadrant trying to get to Earth, or at least the Alpha Quadrant, after finding a prototype Starfleet ship, and they decide they want to join Starfleet after activating a hologram based on Voyager's Captain Kathryn Janeway and learning about the organisation. Notable in that none of the protagonists are typical humans main character Dal doesn't know what species he is and finds out he is a very heavily genetically engineered human with hundreds of other species DNA mixed in.
- The galaxy of Wander over Yonder is filled with a diverse cast of alien species from all walks of life. Some being humanoid, others resembling animals, and many more being far stranger.
