Humans Are Bastards - Television Tropes & Idioms

Vandread. Take much of the below and combine it. Then they started sending out fleets of killer robots to harvest their own colonists on other worlds for their organs; in the case of the protagonists, their reproductive ones. Note that the main characters are human as well, though, just a few generations removed.
Elfen Lied makes a point of showing how inhuman and amoral almost every human seems to be. At times it seems the diclonii — mutants who are feared for their murderous tendencies, and abused accordingly — are more human than the actual humans. However, at the end of the manga it turns out that every last diclonius has an Always Chaotic Evil side, and it's just a matter of time before it emerges. Even if treated nicely their whole lives, they'll turn evil and kill everyone. So the humans were right to try to kill off the diclonii.
- Also, keep in mind that 90-95% of the Humans who are (a) important in any way characters, and (b) get to do anything are Creepy Evil Mad Scientists, Sociopathic Homocidal Mercenaries, and similarly categorized people. The only "normal" people who are Teh Bastards are those kids in Lucy's orphanage, who this Troper always found completely Evil!Narmastastic because of how unbelievably anviliciously Diabolous Ex Machina they were, and that one abused girl's parents, who were barely important and were an incredibly broken family to begin with. Most other people are fine.
In marked contrast, Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko is a subversion. Some fans call it "Fern Gully with a Brain". Some of the Tanuki believe that all humans are bad and they argue for open warfare against the humans - and even then, they have a hard time fully committing to this as finding food would be a great deal harder with no garbage bags to rummage through. Other Tanuki argue that the humans are simply unaware that Tanuki are real and can be reasoned with. After the Tanuki take the gamble of going public, it turns out that this is indeed the case and the humans are happy to come to a compromise with the creatures, setting aside parkland for them to live in. Of course, the fact their default humanoid forms are cute looking is a real help.
Similarly, Princess Mononoke (also by Studio Ghibli) appears to be taking this stance, as it also takes place in a threatened forest populated by animal spirits. But then it turns out that the humans aren't all bad, and the animals can be pretty dickish
- Then it turns out every side was being manipulated by outside forces, who in there own way are just trying to get by, ultimately stating that Rousseau Was Right.
Spirited Away features a bath house that serves supernatural beings whose view of humans ranges from worthless to bastards to interesting to delicious. That the bath house's workers need to take human form in order to serve their customers can be seen as punishment, irony, or subversion. It also goes both ways - a few spirits are greedy or decadent.
Rau Le Cruset from Gundam Seed believes that humans are selfish greedy bastards who will do anything to get ahead even if it means slowly wiping themselves out in the process, and justifies this viewpoint with both Kira's existence and his own existence as both were born through genetic manipulation and cloning respectively, this belief is also what drives him to want to wipe out humanity entirely taking the "I'm taking you with me" ethos to its extreme logical conclusion.
Blue Gender serves this up with a side of Broken Aesop: Man is ruining the planet due to technological excess and overpopulation, and so nature sends the Blue to forcibly knock humanity back to the Stone Age (Or at least the Bronze). The problem: At the time of the show's events, humanity knows it's ruining the planet and is trying to fix things... an effort Gaia is actively sabotaging with The Blues, to the point where the effort to build a colony ship (to ease the overpopulation) are destroyed. The Aesop being that Humans can live in harmony with nature, as long as they're not abusing tech. Arguably an inversion of the trope.
This trope is Light's motivation in Death Note. He's not terribly far wrong, given what we see in the series.
Naru Taru is all too keen to show what kind of terrible suffering and cruelty humans inflict on one another, be they adults or teenagers or even sixth graders. In fact, humans are so far beyond redemption that in the end of the manga, every person on the planet barring the main character and her dark counterpart is killed off when one girl snaps and goes on a destructive rampage with her shadow dragon. At the very least, this manga will convince you that school bullies and city gangsters are pure scum, in no uncertain terms.
The children in Infinite Ryvius start off as top-class students, but turn on each other with incredible viciousness as soon as they're deprived of adult supervision. By the end of the series, the Ryvius has collapsed into a brutal dictatorship, with self-appointed "enforcers" beating up anyone they please in the name of maintaining order while total anarchy rages wherever the enforcers are absent.
Yu Yu Hakusho. While this is somewhat seen in the Dark Tournament ( Thanks Sakyo, and your unholy plan to change the ecosystem!), the Chapter Black expands upon this to a new level. Sensui, the latest villain, was actually a Spirit Detective who fought for mankind and held Humans and Demons in views of black and white, until he crashed a gruesome party that had Humans themselves slaughtering Demons for their blood for the hell of it. Because of this, his view became gray, until he saw the Chapter Black videotape- a divine recording of nearly every atrocious event humanity had ever committed; you name it, it's got it, which then had him harboring a plan to go to Demon World and repent for his killings, conveniently covered up with his Split Personality disorder he got as an aftereffect of the party and the tape as a plan for slow, painful genocide for all of humanity to experience. This is evidenced by a mere creepy mind-reading with him chanting about how much he'd love to have them all as dead meat.
- Subverted: Koenma points out there is a Chapter White which has every act of human kindness, the two are about the same length and should only be seem together. Since Chapter Black is "just a one-sided argument"
Now And Then Here And There has a total of two adult character who does not beat, torture, starve, rape, kill, or give weapons to children. Of course, in this series, it's only the adults who are bastards. One of them is a leader in a child army, and other is an Apron Matron.
The Big Bad in Soul Taker, Kyosuke's sister Runa feels this way after bad stuff happened. In the end, the villain puts Kyosuke in a bind: fight to save humanity who are ingrateful bastards and hate him since he's technically an alien or let them all die and live happily and eternally with said Big Bad. Kyosuke naturally turns both offers down, takes a third option, shows the villain that there IS measure to a non-human and saves the day.
How exactly has Jigoku Shoujo managed to stay off this list? There is at most one character per episode who is not a twisted monster (discounting Ai and her companions, naturally). The whole point of the series seems to be that humans will always be evil to each other, and so Ai & Company will always have work to do.
The manga series Parasyte seems to believe in this Trope so much that the only way that the horrible damage humans wreak on the environment can be lessened is for nature to introduce a new Apex predator to the biosphere to keep humanity in check.
This is what Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Moka Akashiya first thought of humans before she met her human Love Interest. After seeing how she was teased and bullied because of her vampire origins when she was a kid, who could blame her?
The protagonist of Wolf Guy thinks humans are bastards or at least incredibly petty; it doesn't help that he's a certified Doom Magnet and he's surrounded by the most horrific delinquents at school. Subverted when he acknowledges that his narrow view of humans makes him just as bad.
Ponyo's dad makes it very clear that he thinks humans are bastards, and has been storing up potions to teach humanity a lesson (or something); ironically, his wife, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the oceanm is a lot more easy-going. In the end he reveals he doesn't really want to harm humans to badly because he allows his daughter to choose become one.
A main theme point in Inugami, where inugami (wolves with amazing abilities) are sent by a mysterious voice in their heads that says "gaze upon man". An inugami named 23 makes friends with a kind human named Fumiki, and his subsequent encounters with humans influences him into seeing humans as friends. The other inugami, Zero, sees humans as an example of this trope, since most of his encounters with them have involved being shot by hunters for fun, being subdued by police officers without provocation, and destroying Earth's environment. 23 also beings to feel doubt for humans when he fights and kills a mutated dog driven insane by animal experimentation. This momentary thought, combined with Zeros, summons a horrifying creature that appears killing anyone it encounters.
This is Lance's main motivation in Pokemon Special.

"Funny Animal" Comics in particular tend to be lousy with this trope. To wit:
- The main villain Lord Hikiji in the comic Usagi Yojimbo is the only human in a world of anthropomorphic animals. He's the reason Usagi has that scar above his eye, and has no master, no father, and ninja problems.
- Similarly, antagonist Doctor "Eggman" Robotnik was the only human in the Sonic The Hedgehog series for a while, and even today most games place his role in the storyline above all the other law-abiding humans.
  - Actually a human witch appeared in a side game and she was the antagonist too. But humans have been seen in an extra cartoon from Sonic Jam.
Calvin And Hobbes brings this theme up a lot. One particular strip reveals that Calvin might have gotten his misanthropic viewpoint from his parents, albeit for different reasons. Calvin's parents don't like people because they feel that manners and politeness are declining, whereas Calvin himself doesn't like people because of humanity's conflicted relationship with nature. As he says in one strip, "I think the best sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us yet".
- Or 'do you think Satan exists, that there is a being devoted to making mankind commit evil' Hobbes: 'I'm not sure people need the help'.
- Hobbes is named after philosopher Thomas Hobbes, known for his misanthropy.
Pride of Baghdad. Four lions living in the Baghdad zoo get bombed on, talk to a turtle who whines about how human pollution killed his entire family in previous war. They're shot dead by soldiers, who were spooked at the sight of them. The animals, however, were pretty damn bad at this.
The Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind manga flips back and forth between whether Humans Are Bastards or Humans Are Good. Even the manga's ending is based on this since Nausicaa destroys the old technology that was ensuring the survival of humanity at the cost of thousands of years of conflict, humanity has to live or die based on what the current humans do. There is no guarantee they will or not. Even Miyazaki is rather ambiguous about this - his interviews on the subject mention both the good and evil of humanity and the Earth. Apparently the subject was so dear to him that he made Princess Mononoke entirely to go over the ideas again and blur the line even further.
Every single comic made by Jhonen Vasquez. Interestingly, Jhonen is a fairly cheerful guy in real life, which may indicate that this is just the brand of humor he likes as opposed to a statement. He's also stated that he doesn't mean to make fun of any one group in particular, pointing out that you can find a bit of nastiness in every sub culture.
In an early issue of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, Jason Woodrue gains Swamp Thing's power over the Green and decides to take its revenge on animals and humans, who have been abusing plants for far too long. Then Swamp Thing himself shows up and points out that, although humans do abuse nature a bit, if humans and animals were gone, there wouldn't be anybody to convert the gases that the plants themselves needed to survive.
In The Punisher one-shot "The End," Frank Castle's last surviving act in the wake of a catastrophic nuclear war is to wipe out the architects behind said war - the only known surviving humans in the world. After killing them, he explains his actions simply by saying "The human race. You've seen what that leads to."
Humans in ElfQuest are, at first, simply The Enemy as far as the elven protagonists are concerned: cruel, Too Dumb To Live, ugly, superstitious and xenophobic, and they've been like this as long as any Wolfrider can readily remember. (To be fair, they're also still very much in the stone age at that point and that generation of Wolfriders hasn't gotten around much.) This is later qualified when greater exposure introduces them to the concept that some humans can actually be friendly (and the Gliders have basically a tribe of 'tame' humans living at the foot of their mountain), but by and large the elven policy remains to keep avoiding human attention where possible.
Given that the average human in the Marvel Universe seems to look at (and treat) mutants with the same level of rationality and compassion that the white Southerners of 1930's treated blacks, it's no wonder why mutants continue to flock to Magneto's camp, even after the man has been depowered.

James Cameron's Avatar is an almost perfect example of both this played straight and subverted. On the one hand, the human RDA are intruding on Na'vi land and destroy the home of the Omaticaya tribe in order to acquire Unobtanium, and follow a rigid, aggressive schedule for this. On the other hand, the RDA tries to negotiate with the Na'vi and avoids inflicting excess damage on them, and even when they do attack they try to be "humane" first (i.e. hitting the Na'vi with gas and trying to intimidate them into leaving) and avoid bombing them from orbit because they want to minimize local casualties.
The Joker in The Dark Knight espouses this part of his nihilist philosophy in a way that is beyond Nietzsche Wannabe. Basically that people are bunches of schemers that only panic when things go "against the plan". He even sets up a "social experiment" where he puts the fates of groups of civilians and prisoners in each other group's hands. And then subverted, when he is proved to be completely and utterly wrong And though he did prove his point with Harvey Dent, he couldn't with Batman, who disappoints the heck out of the Joker by sparing his life in the end, not to mention taking the blame for Harvey's crimes in the end, preventing the Joker from achieving ultimate victory.
District 9. A ship full of aliens gets stuck on Earth after it breaks down over Johannesburg. Humanity pens them into an apartheid style concentration camp while the nations bicker over who has to take care of them. Eventually, a Mega Corp is entrusted with the aliens' welfare, and takes control of their ship away from them, arbitrarily restricts their reproductive rights, denies them the use of alien names and exploits the technology on the ship for their own use. Let us list the ways Humans Are Bastards aside from the aforementioned squalid concentration camp and tech stealing:
- Whenever they find an alien nest in D9 they torch it with a flame thrower and laugh at the popping noises that the alien larvae make as they boil.
- They set up a firing range and they electrocute the main character (who is the only human who can use alien tech) to get him to pull the trigger on the gun they strap him to. They then bring in a new alien gun and repeat the process many, many times in order to test the effects of each weapon. Cries of "I'll pull it! I'll pull it!" are ignored, and they never once see if he'll keep his word and pull it without the shocks.
- The Mega Corp literally uses the aliens as target practice. They test weapons against living aliens to judge their effectiveness.
- They spread blatant lies about the aliens that most people take face value (what with no Internet in 1982). One being that the aliens don't care for their young. They love them just like a mother loves her child Have a poor grasp on the concept of property It has more to do with the fact that most of them are starving, and actually they do seem to have a perfectly good grasp of it, for the most part. Yet another is that as a species they enjoy destroying things (tying into their lack of the notion of property) and cite the fact that a group of them derailed a train, supposedly simply for fun, as evidence. The alien "Christopher" comments on his blog that in reality the group of aliens were an organized resistance group who derailed the train as an act of sabotage directed against the South African government, which had hired MNU to administer D9, in retaliation for repeated abuse by MNU. Although they started to enjoy it, what with the whole "not telling people why they did this, so people just think they did it for lulz".
- Gangs for Nigeria move in to D9 to get the alien weapons in exchange for food that they sell to the starving aliens at exorbitant prices, though just as often the human gangs simply take the tech, kill the alien, and then sell the alien's organs as a sort of "herbal remedy" that they claim cures all illnesses. The leader of the human gangs seems to believe that eating the aliens will one day allow him to use their technology, though he also seems to just plain enjoy it too.
- When the human main character starts turning into an alien after a concentrated dose of Applied Phlebotenum, his fellow humans plan to dissect him while alive and conscious in order to learn how to give all humans the ability to use the alien tech (which only activates for the alien's biology, including the main character's hybrid form).
Hellboy II's backstory has the humans waging war against the elves and the other magical races, nearly driving them to extinction. This prompted the elves to create the Golden Army, which decimated the humans so badly that the elven king was horrified and negotiated a peace. As long as humans stayed in their cities, the elves would stay in the forests. Guess what the humans have been doing for the past few centuries? Not to mention when the BPRD are forced to officially go public, the general populace begin heckling its non-human members and make fun of Hellboy, despite the fact that he's the one thing standing between them and A Fate Worse Than Death at the hands of numerous Cosmic Horrors. Bizarrely enough, people didn't care about Hellboy (even admiring him) in the first movie, and in the comics, people hated him due to the possibility that he might end the world.
- Basically everything Prince Nuada says in the royal court is made of this trope: "The humans... the humans have forgotten the gods, destroyed the earth, and for what? Parking lots? Shopping malls? Greed has burned a hole in their hearts that will never be filled! They will never have enough!" And later, King Balor: "The Golden Army? You cannot be that mad!" Prince Nuada: "Perhaps I am. Perhaps they made me so."
In the French-Canadian cult tv show Dans une galaxie près de chez vous (In a Galaxy near you), it was already established that earthlings (read: Humans) were Jerkass morons who wrecked their own planet. In the two movies, we see: Plot Device anglophones coming from nowhere threatening to exterminate a tiny civilization of cave-dwellers already terrorized because of the sounds of an underground waterfall, Aliens vomiting at the simple mention of the word "earthling" and a failed Write Back To The Future attempt because of ridicule in the internet. To be fair, the only ones in the crew who never has a Jerkass moment is the dumb-as-rocks pilot and (outside of the reveal episode) the half-alien radar operator (who is played by one of the head writers, and, in later seasons, is dangerously entering in Mary Sue territory) and both like to use the Constantly Backstabbing scientist as a punching bag (like everyone else for that matter).
This is a major aspect of the film Godzilla. Let's see here, humans made the atomic bomb. Humans used the atomic bomb for purposes of war. Humans test more powerful versions of the bomb. Guess who ends up mutating and waking up a VERY pissed-off radioactive dinosaur?
- In the original, interestingly, the A bomb is portrayed in a mixed light. On one hand, it woke Godzilla. On the other hand, the scientist who invents the next A-bomb is a hero whose invention is needed to save the day. And lets face it. Godzilla is a bastard too.
- It's the same with the movie King Kong, the whole point is that Man is the monster.
In the original version of The Day The Earth Stood Still, an alien shows up and tries to give humanity a machine that would allow for interstellar communication. And how do the humans respond? By shooting him. After he recovers he spends some time observing humanity and eventually decides to show he means business by disabling all human technology on the planet (with a few exceptions, he left alone planes in flight, hospitals, and the like) for a short period of time. Then the humans shoot him again, this time killing him. He gets better, scolds them for being so violent, and essentially says that if humanity keeps this up the interstellar community will have no choice to put them down in order to prevent humanity from carrying its warlike ways out into space.
- To be fair it's mostly because the humans are afraid and paranoid (doesn't help that a yellow radio is adding fuel to that fire), and most are good people who just let that fear control them. This is about the Cold War after all.
Then there's the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, where humanity is so evil that when the aliens show up and state their intent to slaughter us all to save the trees, it's portrayed as wrong for us to fight back.
The aliens in It Came From Outer Space (1953) believe humanity's xenophobic response to their hideous form will inevitably lead to conflict, so they attempt to repair their spaceship secretly. Unfortunately their covert actions only increase the belief among the protagonists that the aliens are up to no good. Ironically while both aliens and humans are seen acting out of fear and suspicion, neither side is portrayed as particularly unreasonable or malevolent under the circumstances.
BattleRoyale shows that both teenagers and adults can be horrible. The premise is that to keep kids in school, the government kidnaps entire classes of kids and turns their lives into a game: Kill or be killed. The last student of about 40 to survive is allowed to leave the island and be free. While the adults are the ones that begin this contest and do nothing to stop it, many of the teenagers that are put in the situation enjoy it and go on killing sprees against their prior classmates.
- Mitigated by the fact that some of the classmates try to help each other. Some are even driven to suicide because they can't handle how horrible the situation is.
Planet Of The Apes: Beware the beast Man, for he is the devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or lust, or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
- Lucky the later movies even this out, the apes are using Ape Shall Never Kill Ape as an excuse to do to humans (if not worst) then what the humans did to them, and later prove they're just as bad as the humans.
Ed Wood naturally overdid it in Plan Nine From Outer Space, with an alien screaming, "All of you of Earth are idiots!"
Boondock Saints, anyone? (Someone who has seen it please rewrite this example to explain why it is an example)
In Se7en, John Doe's belief in humanity's worthlessness and evil is what drives his murders.
Untraceable's entire plot is this. A madman sets up people in torture devices that only activate when enough people log onto a website with a webcam streaming video of the condemned prisoner. Millions of people log onto these sites to watch people be tortured in extremely gruesome ways.
- It also attempts to sets up a Real Life example with the tie-in site killwithme.com, whose front page has the warning "Visiting this site could cause harm to innocent people. Do you still want to enter?", and a You Bastard message for those who click Yes. Currently, 86% of visitors are said to have clicked Yes.
This is the basic premise of the movie deadgirl. Human behavior is far more depraved and horrifying than any scary monster the imagination can conceive, and the victim in the movie is said movie monster: a zombie.
Outlander; kinda. The main character Kainen is from an ultra high-tech civilization in outer space, who just happens to look human and crash-lands in the Norse era along with the Moorwen; a bloodthirsty alien monster that begins killing off the local Viking population and what is revealed to have been the creature to kill Kainen's wife and son. Further into the movie, we learn that the Moorwen has a very good reason for being pissed off. Kainen and his people wiped out it's entire species, just for another planet to colonize and that part of the reason the Moorwen killed his family and is killing humans, is for revenge. Despite the fact that the thing is mercilessly killing everything... you can't help but feel a little sorry for it. If they hadn't nuked it's species, it wouldn't be pissed as hell, it wouldn't have killed Kainen's family, it wouldn't have stowed away on a leaving ship that crashed to Earth and it wouldn't have started a killing spree with the locals.
Return of the Living Dead 3 has the humans torturing the zombies so cruelly that it almost has the viewer rooting for the zombies.
The Happening, aside from the whole "plants are pissed at us" thing, has a very subtle passing reference to the trope. Right after the unfortunate scene with the lawnmover, the protagonists run past a billboard advertising homes. Set on top of the billboard is a smaller line: "You deserve this!"
The events of Being John Malkovich pretty much require this to be universally true. (As in, if one person with any sort of conscience gets involved in any way, it all falls apart.)
Evil Vizier(really, are there any other kinds?) Jaffar tries to convince Prince Ahmed that humans are evil in Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (and makes a good case for it himself):
"Men are evil, hatred in their eyes, lies on their lips, betrayal in their hearts. You will learn one day, great king, that there are three things that men respect; the lash that descends, the yoke that breaks and the sword that slays. By the power and terror of these you may conquer the Earth."
- Later, the Genie has his say on the subject, after Abu's third wish goes arwy:
  "You're a clever little man little master of the universe, but mortals are weak and frail. If their stomach speaks, they forget their brain. If their brain speaks, they forget their heart. And if their heart speaks, they forget everything."

According to L Frank Baum's... odd elaboration of the Santa Claus legend, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, this was drilled into young Claus' head by his mentor, the Great Ak.
A lot of early American sci-fi has this theme. Any number of Ray Bradbury stories qualify.
Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series is built on this trope: Humanity were such bastards that The Keeper of Earth more or less chased us off to the stars, and genetically altered the populations to receive signals from The Oversoul (super-computers designed to steer mankind's development away from weapons of mass destruction and other planet raping tech). Harmony's Oversoul outright states that he meant to last for a millenia or so before preparing for a trip back to Earth. Humans had been on Harmony for around 50,000 years and were no better than when they first arrived.
- Of course, this was only half of the Aesop. The full Aesop was "since humans can't be any better by their own devices, they just have to trust in God."
- This theme also appears in his Ender novels. The moment humanity thinks an alien species might be a threat, the first instinct is to kill it. This was why Ender stopped all transmission from the Ansible on the Piggys' home planet, when they discovered that the virus infecting them could wipe out whole ecosystems.
Invoked in Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl books - [The Fair Folk The Fae]] blame having to move into underground cities on humans expanding, and constantly call humans "mud people", which just happens to be a real-life ethnic slur. It's shown as ignorant - the human villains often don't know who's helping Fowl or are brainwashed, and more often than not, the actual villains are other fairies.
Bruce Coville's My Teacher series as well as the Rod Albright series both use this trope: aliens are aware of Earth but refuse to interact with humans because they consider them to be barbarians. It is revealed that one of the aliens in the "My Teacher" series invented television to keep people stupid so they couldn't advance technologically any more.
- We're so bad Bruce had to introduce the pain and minor brain damage implied in cut-off telepathy to explain why we are as we are.
- We're also apparently the only species to do things like have homeless people, while most of the other aliens can't even understand the concept. It basically stops just short of actually having the aliens scratching their heads at this whole "capitalism" thing.
In Roald Dahl's The BFG, the title character tells human girl Sophie that humans are just as bad as giants because "humans are the only animals that kill their own kind" (which isn't even close to being true, incidentally). This is part of a fairly long and Anvilicious conversation about how humans suck.
- Much of Dahl's work for both children and adults reveals a misanthropic streak. At the extreme, we find Fantastic Mr. Fox, which has a plot only inasmuch as it enables him to elaborate on the physical and mental grotesqueness of the three farmers and/or the noble brilliance of the fox they harass (since they're clearly too greedy to grudge him a chicken or two).
  - Perry Bible Fellowship has an interesting spin◊ on the "greedy farmer" notion.
In Philip José Farmer's Venus on the Half-Shell every alien race points out that humans smell awful. So humans create a huge industry of special deodorants. Wondering why humans smell so bad to other races, some of whom smell like a sewer, it is pointed out that human morals stink, so that makes our smell stink. Yes, it's a strange book.
William Faulkner's As I lay Dying.
David Gemmell makes this point at least once per novel. In Stormrider he has one character, explain that a human witch has the ability to cultivate and grow and spread the magic in the world, but that the sum total of her ENTIRE LIFETIME of work and toil can be consumed by a single day of war.
William Golding's Lord Of The Flies uses a group of stranded children as a microcosm to illustrate this theme.
Robert A Heinlein sometimes used this in his stories, although he tends to view it as a virtue:
- Have Space Suit — Will Travel. The Three Galaxies federation puts Humanity On Trial for their lives. Humans are considered potentially dangerous because of their innate savagery and extremely high rate of evolution and scientific/technological development.
- Starship Troopers. Human beings are described as highly aggressive and expansionistic, with a strong will to survive. Heinlein makes the case that this is moral behavior.
  - Moral? Or just necessary for survival? Rico stated that if humans didn't conquer the universe someone else would.
- His most popular hero Lazarus Long is described as a mild bastard. But one that should be respected and admired. Quite a bit of Moral Dissonance is seen when he commits crimes that we are told to admire him for, but Long would kill anyone else who did them.
In Stephen King's The Cell one character described humans thusly "At the bottom, you see, we are not Homo-sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle."
Not really avoided in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book; but in the main Mowgli stories, it's clear that the animals would rather just ignore humans. "The White Seal", on the other hand, gets downright Anvilicious about it.
A recurring theme in the works of Stanisław Lem.
- Well, not really bastards. We just think our species is nearly perfect. Until we see a species with much better evolutionary luck and with a more mature civilization.
C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet and the rest of the Cosmic Trilogy. The idea is that there are several inhabited planets in our solar system, but Earth is the only one where Original Sin took place. This caused our world to fall out of communication with the others — we are the titular Silent Planet.
- Moderated somewhat by the fact that redemption happened too. Perelandra implies this had other effects as well.
- Bonus feature: Both pro and con of this are extrapolated fairly strictly (i.e, Once More, With Aliens) from The Bible. This makes this trope Older Than Dirt.
The Warchild Series by Karin Lowachee has this in droves. For a sampling: There are pirates who engage in human trafficking, a pirate captain who is probably a pedophile, a war between humans and aliens started because humans tried to take the aliens' moon by force (and massacring a bunch of aliens in the process), a government more interested in bigotry and bureaucracy than peace, soldiers who willingly engage in torture, etc. Even the most sympathetic characters still end up slitting someone's throat, rebelling from the central government, and executing suspected terrorists without a trial. Humans are bastards indeed.
Every single character in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, even the hero is a multiple murderer who later on carries a necklace of ears around his neck. The only possible exception is The Judge, as though he's the worst of the bunch, there's a suggestion he's not human.
In Animal Farm, humans are portrayed as the corrupt nobles of Tsarist Russia, more or less. The pigs, who represent the leaders of the Communist revolution, eventually start emulating the humans as they become more and more corrupt. The Animated Adaptation made this even less subtle, ending the film with a Bolivian Army Ending.
Terry Pratchett plays with this in his Discworld novels. Sure, a lot of human characters are bastards, but instead of just leaving it at that, he often probes the question of why humans act that way, especially in his later, more philosophical books. Furthermore, there are more than a few non-human characters who are just as big bastards as humans can be; in the novel Feet of Clay, Commander Vimes is quoted as saying "Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk."
In Good Omens, the demon Crowley contemplates telling his superiors that they might as well shut Hell down and move to Earth, since humans are far more creatively evil than demons could ever be. He then decides against it since they often turn around and be stunningly good in the next moment. Often with the same people involved. He fully admits that their behavior confuses him.
The Old Mans War series explores the concept. In The Ghost Brigades, a scientist who defected to an alien race angrily pronounces humans as arrogant, elitist bastards who are deliberately refusing to sign a universal peace accord for no reason but superiority issues. However, the end of the book makes it clear that the scientist was only giving half the issue - the aliens are asking for some truly jawdropping accomodations for their "peace", and several other species are against it. The Lost Colony further reveals that the aliens behind the accords are real pricks, and that humanity (while pretty arrogant) isn't all that bad in the end. The overall balance of the series shows humanity as flawed, but not monstrous.
In Gulliver's Travels, the final voyage has Gulliver land in a place where he encounters the Yahoos - mindless, crude beasts that are visually indistinguishable from humans. To the point that the "enlightened" (and horse-like) Houyhnhnms eventually forbid him from staying because he's too much like them. They try to use the threat of Moral Dissonance as a Freudian Excuse, but they're obviously not really afraid of Gulliver's baser moral tendencies. This moral contradiction makes the Houyhnhnms even bigger bastards than anybody, but Gulliver is so wrapped up in his newfound misanthropy that he doesn't notice (or probably doesn't want to).
- Considering how the book uses Gulliver's blind worship of any society he lands in as a method of satirising values Swift found repugnant, it's rather obvious that this trope was not the theme of the fourth voyage. Despite this, there's a Broken Base in literary criticism debating whether the book is a misanthropic view of the world or not.
- The real question seems to be whether Swift intended Gulliver's admiration of the Houyhnhnms to be ironic or not, since it clearly went both ways at certain points in the book. The answer to this question is by no means obvious.
Averted in the short story They're Made Out of Meat, which explores the possibility that aliens may be both less and more like us than we often assume. The way they're more like us than usual? The two alien protagonists are closed-minded, prejudiced bastards who are unwilling to accept anything outside the realm of what they expect.
Another fine candidate for the title of magnum opus of fictional Human Bastardry is an illustrated science fiction novel entitled Man After Man. Twenty Minutes Into The Future, the well-to-do people of the world set off to leave Earth and colonize other worlds. Before they do, they use genetic modification technology to physically alter the people who weren't able to afford the trip, changing them to survive in different biomes. Time passes and we get to see how the mutated humans gradually evolve over the eons after being left to their own devices - and then, suddenly, a race of Planet Looters invades Earth, enslaves the mutants, and strips the planet of its resources. For their next trick, they wipe out all life more complicated than bacteria. And The Reveal that stands confidently in the ranks of Nightmare Fuel? Those invading "aliens" were actually the unrecognizable descendants of the humans who'd left Earth millions of years ago. Dude...
- This is all the more jarring considering that the author, natural historian Dougal Dixon, never before addressed this issue so Anviliciously. His previous illustrated novels mostly avoided it by taking place in alternate timelines where there were no humans at all (there are hints of Gaias Vengeance as the setup for After Man -look at the title- but that's as far as it goes.)
- Just to be clear, the genetic engineering wasn't forced on those left behind, and it was actually done in a belated guilt-trip attempt to replace the many, many species humans had already wiped out. And the ones who eliminated virtually all life at the end had long since forgotten their origins on Earth, let alone that they were distant relatives of the creatures they were destroying.
Mark Twain's satirical essay The Lowest Animal takes the claim that humans are the "reasoning animal" and totally destroys it by showing mankind's hatred towards each other and everything else.
There's so much of this in the novel Three Bags Full that it damages the intriguing sheep-detective-story premise. The sheep characters aren't even aware of the concept of mutton, yet they're ridiculously condescending towards humanity.
Often comes through in Tales Of MU, which focuses on the lives of non-human students at a university with Fantastic Racism. Not that the merfolk, ogres, (surface) elves, or kitsuyokai are any better.
Many of S.L. Viehl's s-f novels fall into this category. The vast majority of "Terrans" are rabid xenophobes: Extraterrestrial sentients are only allowed on Earth under very limited circumstances, certainly aren't allowed to live there, and will generally find it an unpleasant place. And if you're discovered to be a Half Human Hybrid (or a clone)...heaven help you.
A constant theme running throughout HG Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. Reaches an early peak with the ship's crew that forces Prendick off the boat and leaves him to die in the middle of the ocean. Moreau's creations of demihumans he and Montgomery dominate isn't so sweet either.
Author Tad Williams seems to be fond of this trope with the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series and the Shadowmarch series. Faerie races exist in both: in the former it is the Sithi (immortal elves), while in the latter it is the Qar. In both instances, humans attempted to carry out a campaign of genocide against the kingdom of Faerie for no other reason except they wanted the land or they thought the Faeries were evil. In the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, the Big Bad is a dead Sithi prince who gave his life defending his people against human invaders and now wants his revenge. Unfortunately, it seems he's willing to destroy the world to do it, so even the remnants of his people rally to fight him. His final undoing? The one human who actually bothers to apologize.
Robert Zubrin's The Holy Land. Earthlings and non-Earthlings disagree on who are the 'humans', but this trope applies to either and both of them regardless.
In the David Weber authored Bolo books there is direct neural interfacing between Bolo commanders and the later model Bolos (Battleship size self-aware tank). A Bolo has a warrior personality but nobody had realised how much the safeguards had inhibited its ferocity until they saw the first Bolo-Human mental fusion go into battle. Humans have no inhibitory safeguards.
- It's worth expanding, the Bolos with the Human Mental fusion end up going on a generations long genocidal war against a larger alien empire. Thousands of worlds, Trillions of humans and aliens, and only a few million survive on a few very backward planets.
In a short story which I forgot the title of, an alien scientist shows a visitor how he's cloning several now-extinct animals. At the end, he shows one he had to "get special permission to raise." The visitor is shocked, and begins to ask-and is confirmed-that it's a man. Then again, the scientist seems to pity the growing human, since it'll be "all alone."
Subverted, inverted and played straight in Titan, the book on the Fighting Fantasy world. Humans are generally a good/neutral race, and they tend to be the race that spawns the great heroes of the world, however they also have the greatest potential for evil, even more so than Always Chaotic Evil races like Orcs and Dark Elves.
In the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series, humans are bastards because of the Krundai. They are pacifistic carnivores, and hit upon the idea of breeding food that kills itself, so they shaped humanity into being the most savage, self-destructive species they could.
In The Acts Of Caine, humans are bastards. Well, to be exact, the metaphorical psychomorphic deity-incarnation of humanity is a bastard. But the human hero who achieves its humiliating defeat is also a bastard, so in this series humanity doesn't look good at the individual or species level.
Subverted (the Qu), played straight (the Gravital) and everything in between in Nemo Ramjet's All Tomorrows
The Book Of Lord Shang notes that "The guiding principles of the people are base, and they are not consistent in what they value."
In The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, an alien species annihilates humanity with relativistic kinetic weapons before we even encounter them. They had been observing humans, and had discovered that our technology was nearing the point where we could build relativistic kinetic weapons ourselves, so they wiped us out on the off chance that we might decide to wipe them out. Why does this story qualify under the Humans Are Bastards trope? Because the authors made it quite clear that we would have done exactly the same thing to them if our roles had been reversed.
In Run to the Stars, by Michael Scott Rohan, we get the following exchange, after Kirsty and Ryly discover that the world government has sent a missile to wipe out a just-discovered alien species:
Kirsty: "There must be millions of inhabited worlds out there, whatever the experts spout. Some like us, some not. Sooner or later one of them's bound to track back our communications overspill and find us. What then? Under the bed? If that missile hits the target, we'll have tae hide. Shrink back into our own wee system, never make a noise, never stir outside it. What if any other race ever found out what we'd done? Then we'd never be safe. They'd never trust us. Not for an instant. There's bound to be some of them who think like you, Ryly. We'd be giving them grand evidence, wouldn't we? They'd wipe us out like plague germs and feel good about it!"
Ryly: "Unless... Unless we got them first. At once, on first contact. A pre-emptive strike, before they could possibly have a chance to find out about us. Hellfire, isn't that a glorious future history for us! A race of paranoid killers, skulking in our own backwater system when we might have had the stars! Clamping down on exploration, communications, anything that might lead someone else to us and make us stain our hands again with the same old crime... Carrying that weight down the generations. What would that make of us?"
Kirsty: "Predators. Carrion-eaters - no, worse, ghouls, vampires, killing just tae carry on our own worthless shadow-lives."
Nineteen Eighty Four gives us a world where all the high-ranking officials are heartless monsters who torture people in the worst ways imaginable if they so much as think contrary to them.
Alan Dean Foster moderates this in his trilogy The Damned. Humans appeared in a world where all life would be impossible by the standards of most aliens, and we went through some unpleasant evolutionary contortions to survive, but if we last much longer without outside interference, we'll achieve peace. Unfortunately, outside interference is coming—and by book 3, after a thousand years as Cannon Fodder in an interstellar war, the humans are less "human" psychologically than the aliens are.
In Stross's Saturns Children, the humans can't create artificial intelligence on their own, so they build machine analogues to human brains, then raise them as children and teach them what they need to know to fulfil their eventual robotic function, then record and duplicate a snapshot once they've learned enough. But wait! That produces people, who might resent slavery, so on top of that they hardwire a version of Asimov's Laws, to make them good little obedient slaves. But wait! That still leaves the inner person able to figure out loopholes, and isn't nearly bastardly enough, so to ensure that they cringe away from any thoughts of rebelling, they resurrect good old-fashioned slave-breaking techniques, and make rape and abuse of the adolescent robots the next level of conditioning. By the time I got to that reveal in the book, I was cheering for the extinction of humankind.
Done in a harshly Anvilicious fashion in a Neil Gaiman short story where humanity suddenly realizes that it has made most of the various animal species extinct, and bemoans the fact that now we have nothing to perform medical tests on, no meat to eat, no source for products like leather and such. But, the text says, humanity is clever, and we figured a way out of that, by using the least productive members of society to replace all that: babies. The end of the story notes that now the babies seem to be gone, but humanity is clever. We'll figure a way out of this...
In Stephen King's The Running Man, game shows which promise that contestants will be put in mortal danger and will most likely die onscreen earn the highest viewer ratings.

As a whole, Star Trek - especially the Next Generation - posits a world in which humans were bastards, and rarely loses the opportunity to lecture their 20th-century viewers on how far we still have to go. Good news, though; we get better. In fact, we're even sorta charming, especially to advanced races who gauge others for 'potential'.
- Even so, in one episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Quark the Ferengi lectures Commander Sisko about how his species never practiced slavery or genocide (particularly Anvilicious as it's already established that Ferengi not only did keep slaves but still do (sort of) - anyone who goes into debt they can't repay is legally enslaved to their debtor). He also tells Nog in "The Siege of AR-558:"
  "Let me tell you something about Humans, nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people – as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts... deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers... put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time... and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces, look at their eyes..."
- The Vulcans are a more extreme example of former bastards. They often act condescending to other species, but the subtext is often that they realize that since they were bastards, other species can benefit from logic as well, and often get shirty when they don't. A young Tuvok from Voyager was once shown complaining about humanity always expecting other species to be like them, apparently not recognizing a classic Vulcan move when he sees one.
- The jabs at humans that Spock and other Vulcans like to make via examples from human history, however, go uncalled-out, even though all indications are that Vulcans were just as bad in their own early history. Spock himself admitted that Vulcan, like Earth, had its warring colonizing period that was considered brutal even by our standards, and that some Vulcans (you might know them as Romulans) still hold to their warlike roots.
Given the kind of person Jim Henson was, he usually had a more thoughtful take on this issue. To wit:
- Fraggle Rock stands dedicatedly on the "humans are misguided" side. Uncle Traveling Matt quickly dubs us "the Silly Creatures", which really says it all. On the few occasions Doc threatened the Five Races, he did so without realizing it (shutting down the pipes in his house shuts down the water supply for the Fraggles, Doozers, and Gorgs). When he finally meets Gobo face-to-face, he's careful to take this sort of thing into consideration.
  - Most behaviors that Traveling Matt observed in humans weren't silly at all — not even, in many cases, the way he misinterpreted them. For example, he thought paperboys fed hungry houses. The main exception is that when humans noticed him, they apparently mistook him for one of them.
- Not really avoided in The Muppet Show or its movie spin-offs. As far as the biggest bastard Kermit ever met is concerned, Roger Ebert said it best: "As soon as Kermit gains legs, he meets a human with an unsavory use for them."
Doctor Who, particularly the new series, sways between Humans Are Bastards, Humans Are Idiots, Humans Are Misguided But Well-Meaning, and even on occasion Humans Are Absolutely Frickin' Awesome, sometimes within the same episode.
The Doctor: Humans have got such limited little minds. I don't know why I like you so much.
Sarah Jane Smith: Because you have such good taste.
The Doctor: That's true. That's very true.
- Played painfully straight in the new series episode "Midnight".
- Remember the Ood from The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit? We get treated to this trope in a later episode Planet of the Ood. The humans who found them killed the Ood Brain (their hive mind) and after an indefinite amount of time started to hack off the Oods' hind-mind (the external chunk of brain sticking out of their face that govern personality) and replace them with translator orbs.
- In The Christmas Invasion, after Harriet Jones has the retreating Sycorax ship blasted into smithereens, the Doctor is so angry that he briefly seems to lose all respect for humans in general: "I should have told them to run away, because the monsters are coming: the human race!" The fact that two men were killed in cold blood by the Sycorax Leader - whom the Doctor slew beforehand - is apparently no excuse for such Disproportionate Retribution. And then of course there's the Toclafane - the horrifically cannibalised ultimate form of humanity who sought to take over from their past relatives and rule a new empire for 100 trillion years - no matter what damage was done to the universe in the process. And who's to say that once that era was over, they wouldn't go back and do it again? Endlessly? As the Master put it: "The human race. Greatest monsters of them all."
Battlestar Galactica. Sure, the Cylons' hands aren't exactly clean here, but you just try sitting through "Pegasus" or "Taking A Break..." without wishing they'd just nuked all the humans in the first place.
- All Cylon bastardry is an extension of human bastardry. The Cylons were created by Man... Tory attempts to justify her own new take on life with just that argument (oddly enough fitting in with Cavil's viewpoint), with Tigh essentially telling her going down that road of justification is pointless by that stage in both species existence.
Supernatural: While Sam and Dean usually fight supernatural monsters, the first season episode "The Benders" involves humans who hunt down other humans for fun, the second season episode "Houses of the Holy" involves a man with dead bodies in his basement, an email-using pedophile, and an attempted rapist, all of whom deserved their instant death, and the third season episode "Sin City" features a demon talking to Dean about how much humans suck. The fourth season episode "Family Remains" involves a man who raped his daughter and then shut the resulting twins away under the house, where they became animalistic scavengers. "The Benders" and "Family Remains" are notable for being the only episodes so far that don't actually involve anything supernatural, just urban legend-like events of a mundane sort. Dean: "Demons I get, people are crazy."
- Of course, when it comes to supernatural, it's more a case of EVERYTHING is a Bastard, even the angels. At least the demons are honest about it...
Torchwood did an episode like this as well, with supposed alien activity revealed to be caused by a degenerate clan of "normal" human cannibals. (This is just the most blatant example of an attitude that runs through the entire series.)
- Subverted somewhat in the "Children of Earth" miniseries: the politicians and government officials are bastards (mostly, anyway), while the public at large are Innocent Bystanders, some of whom refuse to stand by and do nothing.
Subverted in an episode of the 80's Twilight Zone revival, when aliens arrive on Earth and announce that they seeded the planet with humans ages ago, but now they are destroying us because they were attempting to breed warriors, and we aren't big enough bastards.
Summed up by a character in Dollhouse as "People are mostly crap." Most of the rest of the series is pretty much a confirmation of this.
Shown a couple times in Farscape, especially in the episode "A Human Reaction" where John returns to Earth and the government immediately imprisons and kills both D'argo and Rygel to study alien anatomy. The entire episode paints a particularly bleak picture of the human race. Possibly subverted in that it is actually all an engineered environment made by aliens that are using John's memories and knowledge of the human race to judge how humans will react to aliens. Apparently John doesn't have too much faith in humanity.
- Somewhat justified in the season 4 episodes dealing with several of the human's reactions and the crew's interactions when the actually do reach Earth.

Parodied in The Humans Are Dead by Flight Of The Conchords. Robots have annihilated all humans for this trope, but one of the lieutenants notes that they did the same thing as them by killing them.
Captain, do you not see the irony, by destroying the humans because of their destructive capabilities, we have become like... do you see... see what we've done?
Yes.
...So?
SILENCE! DESTROY HIM!
Ayreon does this to great effect in Unnatural Selection from 01011001.
We gave them feelings, what did they sense?
Shout at the world in their defense.
We gave them science what did they do?
They built a bomb and they used it too!
We gave them wisdom, what did they learn?
Wore out the planet and made it burn!
We gave them armor, what did they make?
Nuclear weapons for their own sake!
We gave them insight, what did they see?
Vanquish the noble, enslave the free!
We gave them wisdom, what did they seek?
Destroying all that's within their reach!
We gave them language, what did they say?
They put the planet in disarray!
We gave them dreams!
And what did they dream?!

When merpeople are concerned, expect a subversion as well. Granted, humanity has had a conflicted relationship with the oceans, but it's usually only mermen that exhibit any misanthropy as a result of it; it doesn't seem to stop mermaids from seeking out human boyfriends.

Nine Chickweed Lane: Monty, who is either God or just a very eccentric human, has decided that he's disappointed with humans and (after contemplating wiping us out with a nice little plague) wants to improve this by evolving humans into cockroaches.
Thorax: When you say you're going to rethink your creation of humanity, in what respect are you going to do so?
Monty: Only in the respects that command their waking thoughts and actions. Their covetousness and lust; their intolerance, cowardice, hatred and cruelty; their sanctimony, mendacity and thievery; and their intense, feckless voyeuristic love of mediocrity.... At least for starters.
Thorax: That may be an extreme way to portray them.
Monty: It's the only way they portray themselves. Read a newspaper.

(A little later)

Thorax: So... Are you pretty much resolved to efface humankind from the face of the planet?

Monty: Only to the extent that they are resolved to do it to each other.

Thorax: Perhaps, on the whole, you should adopt a different standard for Armageddon.

Monty: Good point. It's difficult to live up to (humanity's) level of ferocity.

This storyline could also be interpreted as God Is Evil, especially since Monty plans his first human-to-cockroach transformation with the unborn baby of the nicest characters who also happens to be an ex-nun and whose baby-daddy is an ex-priest. It's made especially creepy by the fact that Monty is is discussing wiping out/mutating humanity "with the calm demenor you'd use to pick groceries". Monty is later called out by a bunch of the characters for both his plan and the fact that he can't use H/his powers find some missing clothes (Thorax: Monty, you and I are quits.) Monty eventually reveals to the mom-to-be that he wasn't really going to do it, and the whole thing probably a Secret Test Of Character for the other, um, characters.

The famous anti-hunting rendition of "For What It's Worth" on The Muppet Show, which featured little woodland animals singing about "a man with a gun over there", and periodically ducking under cover as trigger-happy human hunters blundered through the scene, firing at everything that moved.
- And then promptly subverted at the end when the hunters reveal they were trying to bag construction equipment.

In almost any other setting, The Imperium of Man of Warhammer 40000 fame would certainly be the villains, being a xenocidal, corrupt, racist, mass-murdering apparatus. However, in the context of the setting, pretty much every other species is just as bad, if not worse, and without the Imperium's harsh rule mankind would be doomed to slavery, extinction, or more gruesome fates.
- The fandom's preferred "good guys" are the Tau (collectivist imperialist aliens often accused of brainwashing by fans and Imperial humans alike) and the Eldar (who often would kill any number of the enemy, if it meant saving a few Eldar several centuries down the line). All the other races are much, much worse. Tyranids want to eat the galaxy, Necrons want to end the existence of souls, Orks go on jihads for fun, and so on. Essentially, no matter how insanely vicious the Imperium gets, you'd still cheer them on. These are people who use other people for machinery, commit genocide and human sacrifice, and just generally run a totalitarian police state in which you can be killed for thought crimes. They have a branch of the government AND whole sections of planets devoted entirely to torture (church worlds-dungeon section). It is best not to read this series if you get easily depressed.
- A common misconception amongst fans less well versed in the lore (an rife amongst fanfic writers), is that the Emperor of Mankind was some sort of a nice guy, who actually wanted everyone to get along. The truth is, however, that the Emperor told his subjects that it was mankind's destiny to rule the stars, and they were to cleanse the galaxy of absolutely EVERYTHING that was not human. This included psykers, mutants and ab-humans. The "modern" Imperium tolerates psykers, suggesting that the Emperor would likely think that they are not being harsh enough.
- Psykers have always been a grey area, however. No matter how much they may be detested, the fact remains that the Imperium simply could not function - even with the Emperor at full strength - without them, as they're utterly vital for both communication and navigation. Same goes for the three-eyed Navigator corps. Not to mention that the Emperor is himself a psyker, the most powerful to have ever lived.
The Other Warhammer has Humans as one of the nicest races, not like that's really hard. Even the Chaos humans are rather noble compared to other Chaos forces (Beastmen, Daemons and Dwarfs). Plus no one can out-evil the Skaven.
The World Of Darkness seems to hold to a viewpoint best described as follows: "Humans are bastards, but frankly, compared to the rest of reality, they're small-timers." Werewolf (both versions, but especially the old one, The Apocalypse) comes closest to playing it straight, while Promethean comes closest to subverting it (Prometheans admit humans have their flaws, but desperately want to be them because they know Prometheans are far worse).
According to a certain review (contains NSFW language) of FATAL, "Between Red Zone Cuba and FATAL... we have solid evidence that humanity wasn't going to amount to much anyway."
In the expanded Dungeons and Dragons core setting based on Greyhawk, Humanity's creator deity is Zarus the first human, A Lawful Evil Deity of bigotry and human supremacy. This in a world where every other core race's primary deity is good aligned. Worse yet, he's a greater deity, meaning he has a flipping ton of worshipers, all of them human.

A classic example from the Threepenny Opera: "What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed. Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance, in keeping its humanity repressed. And for once you must try not to shriek the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts."

Most of the primary villains in Crash Bandicoot are human scientists who experiment on animals and damage the environment.
Given how prevalent this trope is, it's worth noting that Konami's Suikoden series averts it—the kobolds are largely portrayed as personable, but elves and dwarves tend to be very arrogant and xenophobic, and although most of the villains have been humans, it seems to be because they're more numerous rather than because there's fewer bastards in other races.
Subverted in the Unreal series. Humans are bastards... but the Skaarj, a race of violent, xenophobic, savage reptiloid Bee People who believe all races besides Skaarj are inferior and exist solely to be reduced to slaves or wiped out for their amusement — or both at once — are bigger bastards by far.
While it doesn't have a Humans Are Bastards theme per se, the racial backstory in Dungeon Siege II doesn't exactly put humans in a positive light. It says that the human race has a dual nature, but it only mentions the negative, not the positive; it says that humans are extremely violent.
- To be fair, there's the Dryads. You'd think that a race of attractive plant girls who have an innate connection to nature would be some of the nicest people around, right? Guess again. Most Dryads are quite militaristic (more so in Broken World), and are unusually suspicious of other races, especially the Half-Giants (though the Elf Amren seems to be on good terms with them). Plus there's that Ring of Submission they have, which senses your intentions before you've even thought of them and then does painful or even fatal stuff to you accordingly. For a race that doesn't like government, that's a pretty fascistic way to treat your prisoners.
  - Thankfully, there is an exception: Taar. She actually is one of the nicest people around and isn't all that fond of the Rings of Submission (which explains why she's glad to remove the player character's). In addition, since as of Broken World, the Overmage is dead and peace is slowly but surely returning to Aranna, only time will tell if the other Dryads will also lay off the testosterone.
Live A Live has this during the medieval chapter, as noted by the former hero Hash, then later by Oersted, after being tricked into killing the king. In the case of Hash, he reveled in being called the Hero of Lucretia for saving the queen twenty years prior to the chapter's beginning, but became disgusted with humanity when he was just as quickly discarded and mostly forgotten. Oersted, on the other hand, witnessed humanity's bastardry first-hand. After being tricked, he finds that everyone has now abandoned him and considers him a demon, his only remaining ally is dragged away to be tortured, and is blamed for the death of said ally who expends the last of his power to set Oersted free. Oh, then he finds out that his best friend Straybow betrayed him to this fate because he was jealous. As one final kick in the nuts, after he kills Straybow, the princess he'd been trying to save the whole chapter reveals she was in love with Straybow the entire time, then kills herself in pure grief. Is it any wonder he went on to become essentially The Devil?
This happens a lot in StarCraft. For example, Arcturus Mengsk is a Magnificent Bastard at best and a Machiavellian despot at worst. Kerrigan is at first horrified when she's left behind, but when she gets turned into a Zerg, she actually enjoys it. Plus a lot of Terran missions revolve around Civil Warcraft. By the end of the Star Craft storyline, there's only one good Terran left among the notable ones: Jim Raynor.
- Hey, better Zerg then being possibly be recaptured as a Terran survivor and brain rewired again to serve your new emperor.
- The books aren't much better.
- To be fair, other two known races are pompous or intent on killing everyone else, so humanity's not that bad, relatively.
- Or to be exact, the Zerg overmind desires to kill/infest the human colonists... and the Protoss attempt to stop this by burning the worlds... while the people are still on it. To be fair you only have a few good Protoss characters- the ones who decide killing humans to stop the Zerg is a bad idea. It doesn't stop Tassadar from giving a "get out of my way or I will make your pathetic ships burn" speech.
- The Protoss method of dealing with Zerg-infested Terran worlds by burning them was not because it's the only way or even the best way, but because they found humans distasteful but didn't have an excuse to remove them until the Zerg came along.
- Also, about 75% of every Terran campaign is spent fighting against other Terran factions, with the whole "Zerg" thing being little more than background noise. However, when the UED actually sets its eyes on the Zerg for once, they plow right through the swarms and capture themselves an Overmind in just a handful of missions. Make of that what you will, considering the super-advanced Protoss got spanked.
  - Two Words: Psi Disruptor. It's specifically stated in the last UED mission that the Disruptor essentially allowed their forces to walk unopposed right up to the baby Overmind's doorstep
War Craft shows many humans who are pigheaded and prejudiced against races they view as "savage", and if a racist character shows up, it's more likely than not to be a human. But like other examples on this list, the other races in the world have their own prejudices, ranging from the orcs refusing to accept their role in the atrocities of the first two wars, the high elves blaming the Alliance (that they left) for not saving them and continuing to practice magic despite the destruction it's caused and the Forsaken seeking to kill all humans, more than a few gleefully.
- Of course, the addition of grayer and more evil humans is added Character Development for the third game and beyond. Before, the humans (and other Alliance races) were clearly the good guys, and the orcs were Always Chaotic Evil (this got handwaved as the effect of corruption from the Burning Legion).
  - It should be pointed out that it is hinted in the new expansion that the Humans are literal Bastards: they are the mutated offspring of Titan Magic and the Old Gods' "Curse of Flesh"
The fairies in the world of Drakengard subscribe to this viewpoint. The protagonist only ever meets two fairies, one of which is the king of fairies, and both of them, besides being annoying, feel this way towards humans to the point of being racist. Humans are big, dumb, ugly, smelly, stinky idiots to the fairies who can never get anything right and always destroy the forests to feed their infernal greed. Caim's dragon is also of this prejudice, but then again, dragons being arrogant and looking down on humans has pretty much been done to death.
Averted in Skies Of Arcadia. The Silvite Elders believe the humans still planetside are evil and deserve to die... But instead of giving the usual "you're right, but let's save the world anyway" message the heroes stand up to them and boldly tell them that they have no right to commit genocide just because they think society doesn't live up to their standards. Having recently played Chrono Cross, which plays this trope relentlessly straight, the reaction of the characters in Skies of Arcadia had this editor cheering.
Speaking of which, Chrono Cross doesn't beat around the bush about it. Ever. Particularly blatant when the planet brings a nature-based empire from a universe where the dinosaurs didn't go extinct. Humanity proceeds to beat the crap out of it. You hear that, you genocidal menace of a Dragon God? You lose. So hard.
- At least in this case the problem didn't seem to be blamed on humanity being evil, but that humans were heavily influenced and manipulated by Lavos, who uplifted mankind to the top of the ecosystem for its own purposes (To eat said ecosystem). So we're not world-wrecking monsters, we're just minions of a world-eating monster. That's a bit better... ish...
- They are also called out by the Dwarves who kill the faeries because humans accidently poisoned their home. Clearly accidently poisoning someones living place is worse than actual genocide. Really the only people who has any right to call out humanity are the demihumans of Marbule as they never tried to kill anyone else.
Tales Of Phantasia makes subtle hints at this trope with at least one event of abuse of the planet's mana. This is eventually followed with a complete twist ending, revealing that Dhaos, the main antagonist, was only trying to take the planet's mana (which they didn't need) in order save his own, dying planet. By defeating Dhaos, they doomed his world. Dhaos's original plan was to wait for the Mana Tree to make a new Mana Seed and use that to create a new Mana Tree for his world. No negative effect on our hero's world. Then Midgard freaks out and starts preemtively building Magitek weapons, which kill the mana tree when used. Instant war, because Dhaos has to take them down to keep the tree from dieing so it can make a tree. What's worse, the Cute Witch Arche keeps trying to point out that Dhaos is acting exclusively in self-defense. Everyone shuts her up until its to late. You end up spending 4 Japanese side-games dealing with the fallout.
- Except that completely ignores the message of the game (the one concerning Dhaos at least), that he went about his business SO the wrong way and with SO the wrong intentions and mindset that he DESERVED to fail. For one thing, it's EXPLICITLY pointed out the he is (a)fascistically machiavellian as all getout, (b) utterly insane, or at least sadistically deranged, (c) suffering an ENORMOUS case of A God Am I, and (d) that he, also explicitly, came to Phantasia with the explicit mindset of 'I will kill all who get in my way, and many who don't for my convenience, and I don't care a lick what happens to this world or its people so long as I save mine. The reason behind Midgard's "freakout" that started the war and the magitek is that Dhaos raised an army of monsters and started laying waste to and killing anyone/thing he needed, thinking "pah, these pathetic Human's can't do anything to stop me, and then had his own resultant freakout when they invented magitek and actually started mucking up his plans inadvertantly. It should also be noted that he never explained why magitek was so dangerous, it's side effects, and that the Humans were completely ignorant about what ther were incidentally causing. All as a RESPONSE to Dhaos' actions. And in the end, once they know all this which they couldn't have been expected to know earlier, the main characters seal the mana tree, prevent magitek, save Dhaos' world without him, and make everyone happy.
Humans in the PC game series Age of Wonders almost always have leaders whose favorite pastimes include leveling elven forests, siding with demons and orcs for more power, and enslaving lesser races. This is despite the fact that they technically have a "Neutral" alignment.
- In the sequel, however, they're mostly being manipulated by a vindictive Water Wizard.
The Therions (anthropomorphic animals, ranging from lion-men to gazelles to rhinos to panthers) of Jeanne D'Arc deeply resent mankind, a hatred stemming from how the very humans they assisted in the Demon War turned on them and corralled them all up in a tiny warren just outside Paris (where, previous to the war, the Therion kingdom extended all over Europe.) In fact, the few Therions that assist Jeanne and her cause are a minuscule exception to the rule.
The Lucas Arts adventure game The Dig hung a lampshade on this issue, when one of the characters tentatively points out to a friendly alien that not all humans are as nice as they are. Said alien cheerily replied that that's okay since all relatively young species are like that, and anyone who wants to pick a fight will just be squashed like bugs.
Dracula from Castlevania likes to toss out this accusation to whatever Belmont he's fighting, usually starting by mentioning that the only reason he's up and about is that some human woke him again. But the Belmonts are generally full of righteous fury and in no mood for discussing the idea, so not much comes of it.
What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets!
- In some games it's explicitly stated that Dracula's continuous resurrections are not just because of individual Dracula-cultists resurrecting him, but that human malice and greed in itself allows him to continuously come back even when it isn't his will to do so. This may be more As Long As There Is Evil rather than an endemic thing, however.
- He is also guilty of stimulating the trope. Consider the purpose of the titular Dracula's Curse/Curse of Darkness. Death's backstory in Judgment outright states that he is "sowing wickedness" in human hearts to help bring Dracula back.
Final Fantasy VII. The planet is a living being that every single life form protects and loves, but humans. No, humans like to dig holes to fetch the very soul of the planet, mess with genetics to make monsters, and kill each other. Not strange at all that sometimes the planet sends huge monsters to kill humanity.
And in Final Fantasy XII, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some non-human eager to remark on how power hungry we are, with a distinctly condescending and pitying tone. What nobody seems to mention is that while humans love to start their wars, they're also the only ones able to stop them, precisely because they're willing to wield power against power.
- Also used with a Viera after the battle with one of the Judges in the frozen mountainside. Most of the people are injured or dead and some of the humans are begging a Viera to help them, but she refuses because she sees the humans as nothing but power hungry maniacs who kill everyone, including their own. It isn't until a few sidequests later that she sees the true good in humanity and decides to help the survivors.
- The game either tries to mitigate this or is hopelessly hypocritical in that at least half of the other races (besides Viera) are not just criminals, but scum sort of criminals like slavers. And the Viera themselves are basically just a reskin of Enterprise era Vulcans in their manner.
Lineage II also has this to an extent. While the other races are pure and beautiful children of the elements, humans were made from the corrupted remains of each, and upon their creation, were immediately recognised as scum by everyone save their twisted creator.
At the end of Phantasy Star II, all the disasters turn out to be caused by earthlings, who, having stripped Earth of all its resources, have arrived to purge all life from Algo and take it for themselves. The Bolivian Army Ending doesn't leave much hope they can be stopped, either.
- Except that the fourth game implies that they lost. Very thoroughly. They didn't try again after Mother Brain's annihilation.
The entire point of B.B Hood in Darkstalkers is to exemplify human evil compared to that of monsters and such.
In the Star Control universe humans are hardly one of the evil races, but they have had their... poor moments. They designed a race of super-intelligent clones, the Androsynth, then declared them inferior and put them into manual labor. This backfired rather spectacularly when the Androsynth, being more intelligent than your average Joe, still invented hyperspace travel before the humans, escaped, and eventually joined the Ur-Quan Hierarchy, hoping for some sweet revenge.
- Oh, and humanity also managed to collectively alienate the VUX by insulting their appearance in the first contact - ironically, humans look just as attractive to the VUX as the other way around (VUX is sometimes treated as an acronym for "Very Ugly Xenoform"). This would lead to a massive political crisis and, indirectly, to the VUX joining the Ur-Quan as well as, isolated, they could not match the Hierarchy. So out of 7 races in the original Hierarchy, humankind is responsible for two. Unsurprisingly, the Alliance (which humans were members of) eventually lost the first war.
  - ...And the VUX example is subverted when we learn that the "won't forgive you beacuse of The Insult" is an excuse, but the real reason is they find us so repellant that they never even considered not going to war with us. So really, humans may be foul-mouthed bastards, but the VUX are just Jerk Asses.
"WE ARE THE REAL MONSTERS!"
Soleil (or Crusader of Centy in the US) starts off with an intro video showing monsters emerging from a cave, complete with evil sounding music that looks very sinister. The game starts with you gaining your dead father's sword and being encouraged to go off adventuring and do your part to rid the world of the evil monsters. As the game progresses you learn that the monsters might not all be evil. When you travel to the past you find a group of monsters trying to claim sanctuary in a church and then being utterly slaughtered by soldiers. At one point in the game God himself declares that Humans are Bastards and decides to destroy the entire world as punishment.
Heavily subverted in Soul Nomad with Nereids (Juno in particular). Their view on humans is more like Humans Are Untrustworthy rather than full on Humans Are Bastards. An extra level of subversion kicks in as unlike many examples of this trope, they're more willing to judge on an individual basis. The ones that pass are seen as potential mates. Despite being on opposite sides, Throndyke is still respected as a good man anyway.
- Played straight since according to the official site humans are largely responsible for the tradition of war and conflict on Prodesto.
Mao's opinion of humans in Disgaea 3. Mostly due to Super Hero Aurum. He gets better.
Shadow in Sonic Adventure 2. He gets better.
Subverted and parodied (in a straight manner) in Elven Legacy. The main characters, who are elves, will often (oh so often...) go on a rant about human bastardness, while at the same time acting either in equally bastardly manner or topping humans by quite a bit. Most blatant when the protagonist accuse humans of arrogance for daring to think elves would be humble enough to surrender their weapons and meet with their lord.
Humans' potential for Bastardry is the reason the Aerogaters and Inspectors attack Earth in the Super Robot Wars games in which they appear: The Aerogaters wish to turn us into brainwashed soldiers, while the Inspectors fear us becoming a threat, and try to keep us under control.
Mega Man just loves this trope. Honestly you can't go a single game outside the original series without some villain bickering about how much we screw things up, and will subsequently plot to take over/destroy/rebuild/purge the world as a result.
This is the motive of The House Of The Dead 2's Big Bad: he believes humanity is an enemy of nature and as such inflicts a zombie outbreak upon it. In The House of the Dead 4, it's revealed that he has no intention of killing humans; rather, he "only" wishes for them to "revert to their natural state." Most likely, he means for humanity to be kicked off the top of the food chain and to live just like any other mammal.
Most of the sentient races in Guild Wars are pretty bastard-y. Humans are the worst objectively, but that's mostly because they're the most numerous
- The Charr are probably the worst. They turned Ascalon into a blighted wasteland, they eat humans (and like referring to humans as "meat". Even the friendly ones do this!). Their leaders pretty much sent the female Charr back to the kitchen (this backfires on them massively a few generations after Eye of the North), and so on
- And then there's the Asura this is part of their official description, by the way: "Inventors, scientists, and spellcasters of every stripe, the Asura consider many other races beneath them—and are not afraid to tell them so at every opportunity."
In the Toejam And Earl series, where humans and other earthly life aren't wantonly malicious and "unfunky", they're stll weird. Friendly ones in the series include the Wiseman in a Carrot Suit and the Soul Sisters — a trio of black women who speak only in gospel song. In Toejam And Earl 3, you can convert most initially hostile Earthlings... such as chickens with army helmets and egg-firing mortars, and Creepy Child little girls with seemingly demon-possessed teddy bears. See? Weird.
The human deathknight Charna in Heroes of Might and Magic 4 is described as being capable of evil that 'even the demons balk at'.
One of the underlying principles of Eve Online.
- You can get this impression from pretty much any MMORPG with low restrictions on PVP.
A major theme of The Witcher. The prologue alone pits you against a cult made entirely of serial killers, rapists and mad wizards. And it just gets worse from there.
- To be fair, everyone else is just as bad if not worse.
Breath Of Fire's Fou-lu's main motivation for very good reasons, along with the Fou Empire continuing to try to stop him from regaining his throne. The fact that they tortured and sacrificed his potential love interest for the Carronade cause him to snap.

The Order Of The Stick prequel book Start Of Darkness does this, with humans killing off goblins and other races solely for being classified as evil, even if they weren't doing anything. However, the goblin Redcloak, who's village was slaughtered by human paladins and went on to become The Dragon, shows himself to be just as bad in his own way, with his hypocrisy and less-than-balanced view of humans being brought up both in the book and in the on line strips.
- Tsukiko uses this as justification for her necrophilia in this strip. Scarily enough, it actually makes a bit of sense. Humans are the antithesis of undead. But Humans Are Bastards. Therefore, undead must be good.
Many (to most) furry-themed webcomics with humans in them (or even in the history of the world-setting) portray humans as essentially Always Chaotic Evil, with the furry characters suffering persecution such as slavery, hate crimes, being relegated to the status of animals despite clearly being sentient and capable of speech, etc. at the hands of said humans. There may be one or two humans that aren't cruel, bloodthirsty, rapacious complete monsters as a sort of token attempt at fixing the Broken Aesop, but not always. Of course, it's rather easy to do with furry comics which are a prime method of using the Fantastic Racism theme.
- In Kevin And Kell, whenever humans show up they're generally portrayed as the equivalent of Sealed Evil In A Can (and once, literally). The inhabitants of the furry world often make disparaging remarks about how stupid our world is in comparison to theirs (in which sentient creatures constantly slaughter and devour each other without so much as a hint of remorse or guilt), and in fact portrays humans as so evil that introducing a single one into the K&K universe almost destroyed the world.
  - Actually, Kevin And Kell has lately disproven the theory that the mere presence or awareness of humans has an adverse effect on instincts. It's that characters moving between the worlds throw at least one of them off balance. Once the balance is restored, you can pay as much attention to humans as you like and not lose your instincts. In fact, it turns out that the animals are equally destructive to their own environments. It's promptly subverted in the next strip...
- Black Tapestries at first shows this, with pretty much the main antagonist thinking that all Humans Are Bastards, even though at a later point, the Kaetif (anthros) are shown to be just as vengeful as humans are.
- In Jack, the Big Bad isn't Satan, but a human that has become the personification of Envy. However, he's the only remaining human in Hell — it is assumed the rest have redeemed themselves and have moved on.
- Two Kinds. The only humans ever shown are Templar who seem to be Always Chaotic Evil with plans kill all of one race and turn the other race's brains into mush and enslaved them or preverted slave traders (the latter is actually a pretty nice guy though). Most fans have a Take Our Word For It mindset
Lost the Lead is very, very guilty of this.
Goblins seems to have this a lot, where the perfectly nice goblins and other "evil" humanoids are always being persecuted by the bastardy PC races.
Terinu's race was wiped out by the humans, after it was discovered that [spoiler: they were the power source of the Big Bad]. Made worse because Ferin are inherently adorable critters.
In the web comic "Zenith", Zenith suffers a Heroic BSOD after getting shot at by humans and his Mama Bear dying because of them... well, sort of Zenith's fault for not being a man and dealing with a shot at his fin, but the other dolphins of the steel harbor tell him You Did Everything You Could... So Yeah...
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a particularly good example as to why HumansAreBastards

Bambi - C'mon, don't make me say it. As a whole, Western Animation with animal characters tends to be bad about this but "Bambi" is the best known example.
- And even then, if you sit down and watch the movie again, "Bambi" is not as bad as some of its successors. For one thing, Walt Disney pointedly refused to make the hunters larger characters because he would have had to show them as two-dimensional villains given their actions.
- This is even subverted in The Iron Giant. A pair of hunters shoot a deer that the titular Iron Giant had been watching, but they are not characterised negatively at all, and the scene is used to show the Iron Giant first learning about the concept of death.
In Dumbo, Dumbo's mom is separated from him and chained up in a cage, all because she gave a bratty human kid a (well-deserved) spanking for harassing Dumbo.
Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest. On the villainous side, humans built a big-ass tree-cutting machine to clear whole swathes of the forest for the wood. On the stupid side, said tree-cutting machine wound up releasing Hexxus when it turned his tree into stacked boards.
- The three humans present never come across as bastards. They just have no clue how much trouble they've been causing until the locals [[Anvilicious show them]].
Open Season depicts open warfare between a band of beleaguered forest animals and a pack of obnoxious redneck hunters.
Cats Dont Dance is a bit of a parable in which animals are Paper Thin Disguise minorities trying to break into show business and humans are the racists of Hollywood, keeping them out.
The Animals Of Farthing Wood, played straight in the first season, where humans are either evil hunters, foolishly ignorant, or completely apathetic as to how their actions are hurting wildlife. Balanced out a bit in the second season, with the arrival of the Park Warden as a human ally.
Happy Feet has a doubly- Family Unfriendly Aesop. The penguins think humans are bastards. Fair enough; as stated above, this is typical for sea creatures. Well, then the hero learns later on that humans really are bastards. Once again, although this is a bit warped, we've seen it before. The double-warping comes in the ending, with its giant dance-off. It heavily implies that the only reason the humans are even considering preserving the Antarctic ecosystem is because of its entertainment value.
- On the other hand, it seemed a lot of the people in the ensuing montage were using it as political ammunition to put conservation laws in effect they'd already wanted.
The Movie version of Over The Hedge seems to sum up everything that's wrong with humanity in one word: Suburbia.
- The comic strip it's based on is pretty much this way too, but moreso. Whereas the movie compresses most of its cynicism into a single sequence (which largely comes off as good-natured ribbing) and one recurring nasty character, the strip has it as a major underlying theme.
The rats of Ratatouille believe this, exemplified in Remy's father. Subverted in that Remy thinks his opinion is rubbish and that the humans are just ignorant, since rats have traditionally been pests, and quite a few of the humans aren't bastards.
The Secret of N.I.M.H. is pretty harsh in its depictions of humans performing animal experimentation on rodents. Of course, the rodents seem to benefit from it, but then the humans try to track down the now-intelligent rats in order to eliminate them.
Spirit Stallion Of The Cimarron depicts a white man owning a wild horse as equivalent to slavery. Seriously. The Native Americans of the same film are shown in a more sympathetic light, but the titular stallion still doesn't like being trained.
Unusually for a Western Animation, Finding Nemo takes the misguided point of view. The dentist believes that he has rescued the lame Nemo from the dangers of the reef rather than separating him from his father, and the main antagonist is a slightly hyperactive little girl who simply doesn't realize that if she shakes the bag too hard she'll kill the little fish inside. It's clearly ignorance rather than malice.
Ah, but then there's Hugh Harman's Peace on Earth, which you must see for yourself as no description we could give you would suffice. While beautifully animated and notable (even admirable) for its pro-peace message delivered in the middle of wartime, several Tropers agree that this merry Christmas (!!!) short is also easily the magnum opus of this trope. Bonus: Nightmare Fuel for Christmas!
- Plus there's the part where the little squirrel kid says "I sure am glad there's no more men around". Most. Anvilicious. Line. Ever.
In Gargoyles, Demona believes this trope and attempts to recruit Brooklyn after a bad incident with a biker gang by giving him a tour of unpleasant incidents around New York. However, after Brooklyn realizes Demona is a backstabbing megalomaniac, he realizes he had been manipulated. It turns out that Demona is also a genocidal murderer who betrayed her own clan, there are other gargoyle antagonists in later episodes, and plenty of humans in the show are good people. As for the "lesson," when Brooklyn describes it to Goliath, he dismisses its damning nature as a "half-truth that Demona has thoroughly embraced, but it's not the whole truth." Goliath also states in the 5-part pilot that "There is good and evil in all of us, human and gargoyle alike."
- Gargoyles overall has a nuanced view of this trope that makes it about as hard to pin down as in real life. After all, the thing that sets off the whole series is basically one of the humans of the castle trying to help the gargoyles (by forsaking his fellow humans), only for it to backfire in his (and their) face spectacularly; so you could take it either as "humans are good, bad, and everything in between", or "humans are bastards even when they try to be good", depending on how cynical you felt like being that day.
Plague Dogs, based on a book by Richard Adams of Watership Down fame (see below), is pretty Anvilicious about mankind's cruelty to man's best friend.
- While both versions of the tale are as depressing as hell, it's interesting to note that the cartoon has an even more of a Downer Ending than the original book. In the film, the dogs are heavily implied to have died at the end, whereas they go live with a nice "Master" at the end of the book.
Watership Down itself was pretty heavy-handed on that too. In the film, Holly's flashback to the first warren's destruction was serious Nightmare Fuel.
- Also subverted at one point, when the farmer's daughter saves Hazel from the farm's cat
Used and surprisingly subverted in the obscure animated movie Once Upon A Forest. An accident with a truck full of toxic gas drives away the animal inhabitants of a forest, and the kids set out to find a cure for their dying friend. The village elder, who was caught in a trap when he was younger, warns them about humans. But at the end of the film, it's the humans who come in to clean things up, surprising the elder.
Some have accused WALL-E of depicting this trope, it's actually partly subverted: Yes, humanity wrecked Earth by turning it into a huge garbage dump, but at the end, humanity (with a little help from the robots) decides to rebuild, and the end credits hint that they succeeded. In fact, the only human who shows even the slightest signs of being a bastard is the Buy 'n Large CEO, and he just didn't know that Earth would be safe to live on again in 700 years. And let's not forget that the villain himself is a ''friggin' robot.''
- The writer of the movie also insisted that his intent was to tell the story of the last robot on Earth, and the pollution angle was simply a plot device to allow him to do that. But nobody believes him.
While the live action The Matrix movies stick with heroic humans battling evil machines to keep the box office gross up, the Wachowskis apparently felt free to tell the real story in The Animatrix, where it's revealed that not only did humans start the Robot War purely out of Fantastic Racism (the robots literally came before humanity bearing flowers and open arms) and that the robots locked humanity in the Matrix purely as self-defense against genocide (and not to mention attempting to give them an utopia which human minds did not want), but that humans continue to do evil, twisted things to the robots in the "present day" of the series, tricking them and brainwashing them into thinking humans are their friends, and thus turning them into cannon fodder.
- Your Mileage May Vary. The robots are also depicted as emotionless and frequently violent, and the Robot War began as a result of a robot being sentenced to death...after murdering its owner, a mechanic and their pets. Admittedly this was to stop them deactivating him, but given that he prevented this by [[Squick ripping his owner's head in half with his bare hands]]. The robots then start rioting, and are supressed...it's more Grey Versus Black Morality, at best. And the robot in 'Matriculated', that the humans 'evilly' reprogram? A hunter seeker done. Which they attempt to give free will to, by teaching it empathy. This might look like brainwashing to you - but I'm not sold.
Futurama spoofs this trope in the Show Within A Show The Scary Door: a scientist declares that he's "combined the DNA of the world's most evil animals (a Lion, Scorpion, and Shark) to make the most evil creature of them all." A human then emerges from some sort of cloning tube, and just in case that's too subtle, declares, "It turns out it's man" in the most undramatic and dull way possible, just to parody the ham handedness of the way the point is often made by other shows.
The third episode of Justice League both provides an example and subverts this trope in a matter of seconds. Upon witnessing rioting and looting, Wonder Woman comments that perhaps her mother was right about humanity being savages. A moment later, Green Lantern is shown helping a couple of burly, typically biker-type individuals rescue two children from underneath some debris.
This is one of the main themes in the animated film Felidae. It's both played straight and subverted in regards to humanity's relationship with animals (particularly cats in this case). On the one hand there's Gustav ("Gus"), Francis's dim-witted yet otherwise good owner. On the other hand there's Pretorius, a scientist who experiments on cats while trying to create a special tissue-bonding glue. Most of the cats die horrible deaths, and Pretorius becomes a rambling alcoholic because of it. The only surviving cat, Claudandus brutally murders Pretorius and later develops a burning hatred against humanity.
- Likewise, one of the cats, Felicity, believes that all humans are good stating that only humans would be kind enough to give a blind cat like her a home. Ironically, it's heavily implied that it was due to humans experimenting on her in the first place that she's blind.
- Bluebeard at first believes that it's a human causing the murders stating that only a human would do something so cruel to a cat. Of course, it turns out to be a cat (IE:Pascal/Claudandus) committing the murders rather than a human. He also refers to humans under the slang term "Can-Openers", believing that humans are only good for opening cans of food for cats.
This trope, as it relates to animals, is spoofed in an episode of Family Guy where Death goes on a date with a woman who works at a pet shop. She insists that there'd be no more wars if people were more like animals, and he says "What are you talking about? Animals fight all the time!"
The Upcoming movie Battle For Terra plays with this trope. The Earth is destroyed and what's left of the human race is forced to live in a military fleet which invades the peaceful title planet. While they are doing this by force and goal to the kill all the aliens they are portrayed as just desperate if you want to know why don't they just live together, the humans and terrans don't breath the same air.

In the world of The Account, a podcast audio drama, one-third of the humans in the Midlands turned into an army of psychopaths and got exiled to Earth. No one quite knows why. Now that they're trickling back in, and apparently sane, they're treated somewhat gingerly by the natives.
The eponymous Dr. Horrible laments that most humans are sheep and can't think for themselves. Obviously, only a complete overhaul of the system can fix this problem. Captain Hammer really only exemplifies this trope.
You gotta love Warhammer40000 fans on the Avatar Just Bugs Me page . Awesome or scary? You make the call.
- Look for the tropers that have a 500 word discussion on the practicality of different Exterminatus style solutions to the "problem of lesser alien species". You magnificent bastards, you read your physics books.
Gaea's Rising features cute, lovable, intelligent robots that humanity wants to wipe out, just because the robots don't want to be slaves.

Go to school when you are in any way an Acceptable Target. Whether or not you have Aspergers, red hair, are an ethnic minority, are from another country, have a large nose, are fat, are thin, etc. Unless it's a specialized private school, eventually, you'll learn that Rousseau was only half right and that humans really ARE bastards to appeal to other people and to feel good. And the authority figures will do absolutely NOTHING. Example.
Although there are perfectly wonderful and kind people out there in the world, there also lurk sociopaths, humans (only in the physical sense of the term) without a hint of compassion for those they exploit, humiliate, and even kill. These horrible mistakes of humanity would fit this trope like a hand would fit a glove.
- But that's the whole point - the article admits that some humans are bastards, but if we all were, society would have imploded and the species would have been wiped out milennia ago.
- Meh, I think the average person is pretty selfish and thoughtless, though "bastard" is strong.
Subverted by Nature, in that a HUGE number of the offenses for which this trope singles out humanity (murder, tyranny, greed, bloodlust, rape, etc) are routinely practiced by other species. Chimpanzees, humanity's closest relatives, engage in behavior with rival tribes that can best be described as warfare and ritual cannibalism. Although this certainly doesn't let humanity off the hook.
More cynical anthropologists have put forward the hypothesis that humans are inherently vicous because they are inherently kind. That is to so that members of other species use threat displays more than direct confrontation because to them an injury is almost a death sentence. Humans on the other hand tend to the wounded, so if you kill a rival and are wounded your reproductive fitness may still increase despite any injuries recieved because your social standing will go up and you will have an opportunity to heal under the care of the group.
"Reverend" Fred Phelps has become an internationally recognized name, and has legions of devoted followers... because he celebrates the deaths of anyone who is not a white Christian (and most of the ones who are).

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