The Furon-Blisk Martian War [Destroy All Humans]

In this week's episode, we talk about the Martian War from Destroy All Humans between the Furon and the Blisk and the numerous consequences that came from it. I also rant like a madman about the intricacies of space travel and try to make sense of a fictional reality, which is a losing battle (but that will never stop me).

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast– a deep dive into the lore of your favourite games, movies, shows, and more! My name is Brett, and today I want to take a look into something that was requested by a lad by the name of Maclean, and that is the Furon-Martian war from Destroy All Humans. On getting this request, I knew that I had to write about it, even if it’s going to be a short one, because I remember these games so fondly.

Back in the Blockbuster days, my family used to rent a movie pretty well every weekend and we would sit together as a family and watch it. Eventually I became an absolute recluse, doing pretty well nothing but playing video games day-in and day-out (which doesn’t feel all too different from today, but at least I’m a semi-productive member of society). My mum ended up getting the subscription at Blockbuster where you would take out a game and return it once you’re done for another. This was a much better way of experiencing new games than using all of my lawn-mowing money to take a chance on new games, because then I had to own that game and if I hated it then I just had to hope its resale value was good enough to get me another game. Anyways, one of the first games I ended up getting with that Blockbuster subscription was Destroy All Humans, and I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what I was about to experience. I loved it, and ended up buying a copy of it to own so that I could play it again, and I bought the second one when it came out as well.

As much as I love these games, they are not very lore rich, however. I was to take a second to prove that by just read the three sentences that appear on the wiki page for the Martian War:

“The Martian War was a devastating war between the Blisk and the Furons. The end of the war resulted in Mars being turned into a desert by dangerous Furon Weapons, which later cost the Furons their genitalia and the near extinction of the Blisk. That war was thought to be ancient and occurred long before Humans first appeared on Earth.”

And you might be asking, “then how are you going to make an entire episode on one hyper-specific event?” and the answer is– carefully. There’s a lot to unpack in that synopsis, but it gives us a lot to go on. Namely, we have the names of the two races that are involved in this war: the Blisk and the Furons. We also have the confusing statement of the Furons losing their genitalia, which I’m sure is shocking if you’ve never played the games before. And then there’s the mention of ancient times before humans first appeared on Earth. So we have the two main parties, an event that was caused by or caused the war, and we have a reference to a timeline. I think with that, we have enough to go on. Let’s start this off by talking about the Blisk and the Furons.

I’ll start with the Furons, since those are the protagonists of our story. The Furon are an alien race who come from the aptly named planet of Furon. They are little grey-skinned, big eyed, bipedal aliens which are physically based on the prototypical Roswell alien. This space-faring race of aliens went all around the galaxy, and even encountered Earth while it was in its primitive stage before there were humans (as we mentioned before). During their stay on Earth, the Furon decided that the reasonable course of action was to fornicate with an early primate version of man, thus leaving behind some of their DNA. I know that seems like a really weird thing to come out of the gate with, but this is actually the reason why man comes to exist. The infusion of Furon DNA with the primate is what sparked the evolution into man, which means that a little bit of every human’s DNA contains a little bit of Furon.

This encounter with Earth was very early on in their exploration of the galaxy, and they saw little value on Earth and so they decided to abandon it and move on to other planets where they would slowly gather up the Furon Empire. At some point in their search for other worlds, they came upon Mars. This is where they would have their first interaction with the Blisk.

The Blisk are an aquatic race from Mars. One of the Furon, Orthopox, put it best: “Imagine a cockroach mating with a lobster!" which is to say that they had a hard, grey carapace over a brown, mushy interior. Considering that they’re an aquatic race, the lobster comparison is pretty apt with their small, beady eyes and antennae that comes out of their forehead. However, despite being an aquatic race, they were bipedal and had no fins, webbing or anything to discern that they would be an aquatic race. Evolution seems to have failed them on that front.

During the time that the Furon found the Blisk on Mars, Mars was abundant with water, as you might imagine with an aquatic race being the dominant species on the planet. And The Blisk were quite content to be left alone, having no imperial ambitions, but they were a very proud race. The Furon quickly discovered that the waters on Mars were highly radioactive, which meant that the Blisk were basically steeping themselves in a radioactive tea day-in and day-out. This gave them a natural resistance to nuclear and other radioactive weapons, which was kind of the bread and butter of the Furon colonial machine. Like I said, the Blisk were quite content to be left alone to their own devices and weren’t inherently hostile, but the Furon saw their radioactive resistance as a potential threat to their empire since they would have a hard time dispatching them if they ever did decide to attack.

Now, I know I said that the Furon were our protagonists, and that would naturally make the Blisk our antagonist. But I think it’s important to remember that being the protagonist does not always mean being the good guys, and vice versa. And to that point, the Furon are actually quite terrible. They are a very xenophobic race, and quite hostile to other forms of life. They saw no value in Earth because there were no sentient species yet, which is why they abandoned it to find other planets where they would enslave races who were inferior, and eliminate those who could pose a threat.

They also considered themselves to be immortal, which was due in part to their technological advancements in cloning. Cloning wasn’t something that the Furon just did in times of desperation, but in their everyday life which made them dependent on it to survive and they pretty well based their societal hierarchy on cloning. See, most Furon would create a clone so that their clone could continue doing their day job while they went on vacation. But as soon as they weren’t needed anymore, they would be dispatched. If a Furon was reaching an age where they would die of natural causes, they could just clone themselves and essentially keep living on. To this point, there was a sort of social score that was based on how many clones one had. If you had many clones, you were considered lower class, and the less clones you had put you higher up. This was because something to the effect of needing fewer clones meant that you were wise, and those Furon would end up becoming Elders and political figures.

I know that was a bit long-winded and might not seem pertinent to their encounter with the Blisk, but it’s actually quite the opposite. The Furon’s pride given to them by their pseudo-immortality was what fueled their war machine. Because they relied on nuclear weaponry, they knew that they were going to have a problem with the Blisk. This forced them to adapt and create both stronger nuclear weapons, and other weapons like the Zap-O-Matic and the Disintegrator Ray to deal with the Blisk. And this is where the start of the Martian War began.

The Furon couldn’t just develop new weapons without having something to test it on, and so they decided to just get straight to the point and start killing the Blisk who fought back in full force and held their own for some time. A long, bloody battle ensued and had large casualties on both sides with Mars as their battleground. The Furon, having tested many different atomic weapons on an increasingly larger scale, decimated the surface of Mars and turned it into the barren, sandy wasteland that we know it to be today. Most, if not all, of the water dried up as a result and the Aquatic Blisk were left with nowhere to live. While there were many casualties on both sides, the Furon definitively won the war but at a cost. The cost of their conquest was a mutation– a sort of forced evolution that happened as a result of their constant exposure to radiation. That mutation is their loss of genitalia which rendered the Furon sterile.

The Furon might have died out as a species because of their newfound mutation if not for their work in cloning technology. They were able to repopulate their society with clones, but with an unexpected result– each clone that was made after the first (the clones of clones, if you will) was increasingly less effective, which meant that their doom was on the horizon if they could not find a way to kickstart natural breeding, or at the very least finding original Furon DNA to create clones with so that the gene pool wasn’t so watered down.

The Blisk, on the other hand, were all but entirely wiped out by this war. Their homeworld was decimated and left without oceans which the aquatic Blisk would need to survive. The surviving Blisk were forced to abandon Mars and took a warship off the planet and set course for Earth, where they knew there was an abundance of water. This is interesting, though, because we have no reference as to when the Martian war actually took place, but we do have a date in which the Blisk crash landed on Earth– June 30th, 1908. The Blisk warship crash landed in Tunguska, Russia, where they would take a foothold in the Soviet Union. It sounds like the Blisk warship might have escaped the battle above Mars right at the end of the war, since it’s said that the ones aboard the vessel were the only remaining Blisk. Who knows how long the war went on for, but I have some serious concerns about the timeline.

Mars was first accurately observed in the year 1610 by Galileo Galilei, but observations of the planet are recorded as far back as 1045 in China before the Zhou dynasty. So that means that by the 1600s, we had looked upon Mars’ surface through a telescope, and we knew it to be the sandy, red, desolate planet that it is to the point where it was noted that they could see the polar ice caps. Over the next 200 years, by the year 1840, crude maps were drawn of the planet’s surface and more detailed maps and notions were drawn up by 1877. Okay, Brett, but what’s your point? If the Blisk crash landed on Earth in June of 1908, then that means that they probably left Mars in that same year. We can assume that their spacefaring technology would have been far superior to ours, and NASA says that a one-way trip to the planet would take us about 9 months, which means it’s not a stretch to think that the Blisk would have made it in less than 6 months, placing their departure and the end of the war in either late 1907 or early 1908. This also means that Mars hadn’t been nuked into oblivion until at the very earliest the late 1800s. Let’s assume that this war took 20 years– that still puts us at only 1888, which is still after the point where humanity had detailed maps and a good idea of the martian landscape in 1877. That would mean that at that time that we were drawing maps of the planet, the war was either in its infancy or hadn’t started yet, which would mean that the planet would have still had oceans. We definitely would have noticed that, no? At the very least, Galileo would have noticed that in the 1600s. I understand that this is a work of fiction, and I shouldn’t be putting this much thought into it, but the fact that 1908 is the only established point in the timeline that we can pinpoint when this war happened creates so many inconsistencies that it makes my brain hurt. 

It’s not specified, as far as I can tell, but I’m going to choose to believe for the sake of Earth’s timeline that this war happened hundreds of years in the past, maybe a thousand, and the Blisk warship was drifting through space, possibly damaged, and therefore wasn’t making nominal time hence why it took them until 1908 to crash land on Earth. That brings up its own concerns like how did they have supplies for a trip that long, but perhaps they found a way or there were so few of them on the ship that they could stretch their rations over a few generations. Who knows? We’re trying to make sense of fiction here, which is the first mistake.

So the Blisk were forced to crash land in the Soviet Union, and the Furon were left sterile and were in need of some minted Furon DNA or else they were at risk of going extinct. So both races were, in a way, facing extinction and needed some time to recollect themselves. The Blisk did so by infiltrating the Russian government.

They were able to do so because, like the Furon, they had visited Earth before at an unspecified time. Because they knew how to intermingle with humans, they were able to disguise themselves as humans so they could keep a low profile and rebuild. The Blisk decided that the best course of action was to make Earth more like their home planet since theirs was all but destroyed. To do this, they took the forms of Soviet visionaries like Lenin and Stalin to start shaping the political landscape, ousting the Tsar and his family in the revolution of 1917 and using Communism to form the Soviet Union. In this reality, it was the Blisk that were behind the USSR and the Cold War, intentionally stoking flames with the west to encourage the development of nuclear weapons. I’m sure you can see where this is going, but the end goal was to start an all-out nuclear war in an attempt to render Earth into a radioactive oceanic hellscape just like Mars was. But they couldn’t do this with just their numbers alone, so they utilised Blisk spores which were able to turn humans into Blisk Mutants, which were heavily-armoured beings that were somewhere between a Blisk and a Human, but offered no original thoughts of their own and instead followed the Blisk’s orders to a tee.

Meanwhile, the Furon were working out a way to get their genitalia back. They remembered that they had some relations with primitive humans back in the day which led to the rediscovery of Earth in search of pure Furon DNA in the year 1959. One Furon named Cryptosporidium, or Crypto for short, was sent down to Earth to collect the Furon DNA which was held in the brain stems of humans. Specifically, it was Crypto clone number 136 that was sent down who ended up being abducted by the government for testing, and so his clone 137 came down to find 136 and finish the job. Long story short, Crypto 137 was assassinated while in the body of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, almost 4 years after the Furon invasion of Earth.

I’m sure you’re wondering how that’s relevant at all, and I promise it’s not just because I think it’s hilarious that aliens are just wearing the bodies of famous political figures and carrying out real-world events. The reason why this is all important is because of the work that Crypto 136 and 137 put in before their deaths, Crypto 138 was able to be the first Furon since their sterilisation that was made of pure Furon DNA, which meant that he had his genitalia back and the Furon were on the path to saving their race. As were the Blisk who were, again, in charge of the Soviet Union at this point.

The KGB gained intelligence of the fact that Crypto 138 was the first Furon to have genitalia since the Martian War, which was a pretty big deal. And so the KGB was hellbent on destroying America and the Furon along with it. Crypto 138, after an assassination attempt, learns of the Blisk’s invasion of Earth and their plans, and begins a campaign to go to the original crash site in Tunguska to destroy the Blisk warship and stop the bombardment of Earth. This marked the beginning of the second Martian war between the Furon and Blisk.

The Blisk in charge was Chairman Milenkov, who was orchestrating the destruction of Earth via project Solaris on the moon which was a giant superweapon that was raining spores down on earth to eliminate human resistance so that the planet could be microwaved into a radioactive paradise. Crypto takes on the form of a spokesperson and convinces some Russian cosmonauts to go to war with the Blisk by telling them that the aliens were trying to take away their vodka. This, hilariously, succeeded and they were able to take down the moon base alongside a rogue KGB agent named Natalya (whom Crypto was enamoured with), crippling the Blisk war effort.

Unfortunately, Natalya is killed by Milenkov who reveals his true form as a Blisk. Crypto, after losing Natalya, takes down Chairman Milenkov, thus crippling the Blisk’s chokehold on the Soviet Union and the human race was allowed to survive with the help of Crypto and the second Martian war ended fairly quickly.

The remaining Blisk tried to send out an emergency signal to any alien ships that passed by and requested rescue, but the Furon intercepted the signal and replaced it with their own transmission. They hunted down the remaining Blisk on the Moon, but there were still some Blisk on Earth who lived out their lives disguised as humans. With no leaders and no way off of Earth, they were left with no choice but to hunker down and submit. The Furon, on the other hand, were able to create synthetic Furon DNA and therefore were able to save their race by giving themselves their genitalia back. And that’s basically the end of our story.

I just wanted to take a second to reiterate an earlier point that the word protagonist does not mean the good guy, because man the Furon were awful. The Blisk were a proud people, but like I mentioned before they had no ambition of seeking other planets. They were perfectly content being on Mars when the Furon attacked them, and the Furon inadvertently almost caused the extinction of the human race by attempting to wipe out the Blisk. And for what? Because they were scared that the Blisk would become a problem in the future. They were right, but it was all because they caused the need for a problem by forcing the Blisk off Mars, which sent them to Earth. The Furon are definitively not the good guys and were, in fact, pretty terrible to other races that they came across.

And that brings us to the question: what did you think? Do you think that the Blisk would have eventually gone off Mars and engaged in colonial expansion if the Furon didn’t force them to find a new homeworld? Or, do you think that the Furon would have even been able to survive as a species if they didn’t fornicate with primitive humans, accidentally giving them their DNA?

You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. If you’re using the Spotify app, there’s a Q&A function attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. I would love to hear from you!

And remember, don’t start needless strife with other people. You never know, you might end up losing your genitalia because you started a fight that you didn’t need to. Sure, you can always get it back, but you don’t always have to lose something to realise how precious it is. Be grateful for the things that you have, and be kind to others. And I’ll lore you to death in the next one– c’ya.