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"If there's one thing you can say about mankind
It's that there's nothing kind about man"
- Tom Waits, "Misery is the River of the World"
You Suck taken to the extreme.
When compared to other civilizations, or another species, Humans are a bunch of bastards. They are all greedy, heartless, violent, cruel, selfish, egotistical, and in extreme cases, evil, as opposed to the other species, which will be better if not far superior: they are all peaceful, live in harmony with nature, are naturally good, floss after every meal, etc. Ironically the species in question almost always looks and acts just like humans anyway.
In reality, the human race can (and often does) run the entire Character Alignment spectrum. Not so in Fiction Land. In there, the whole human race seems to consist of nothing but Corrupt Corporate Executives who would love to destroy every rainforest on the planet, evil ruthless soldiers, and evil hunters whose favorite pastime is shooting mothers of cute little animals. They don't beat each other up or go to war for ideology or material gain or to protect their country or any of that, they do it purely because they're all ruthless sadists who get off on slaughtering and murdering for its own sake. Oh, and they all pollute everything, too. In especially extreme cases, nature effectively decides it's better off without us.
Now, pause and consider the following obvious, yet easily missed, fact: every single one such example below was written by human beings. Most of whom are probably very nice people, and while it's true that even the nicest people can have a misanthropic point of view or write something a bit dark while depressed, it's usually not this ridiculous. Such examples often strike people as a Family Unfriendly Aesop. ("All humans are Bastards? Even your Mom? Even you? What's your defense going to be if the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens decide you're right and we deserve to be punished for our ways?")
In many recent works, a blanket assumption that all people suck is given as a point of view held by animals towards humans, and it's a markedly different point of view from animals who simply avoid humans for safety's sake. The view is largely based upon the animals' few encounters with humans, which didn't go well. Sea creatures, in particular, are susceptible to this philosophy (then again, given that we've got a history of treating the oceans as a bottomless sewer and wiping out island animals, they may have a point. It is very hard not to feel ashamed on behalf of the entire species when considering the fate of the Dodo.) Often in such cases, the animals will learn that, in actuality, many humans are good.
Increasingly, a more honest approach seems to be gaining in popularity: humans are now often depicted as thoughtless instead of outright malicious. At worst, we're shown as morally ambiguous (and frustratingly so as far as animal characters are concerned). Oftentimes, in order to lighten the blow, a character will point out the Humans Are Bastards criteria, to which another character will respond " Were we any different?" (usually when the characters having the conversation hail from a race that also had a troubled history, and also with the implicating that humans may, like the other race, eventually grow out of their problems as well).
There's no doubt that humanity has a history of going to war for stupid reasons, killing groups of people for silly ideals, burning witches, experimenting on still-living people, raping, torturing, and otherwise treating ourselves like crap. Simply pointing out the recorded evils of man in history doesn't invoke this trope. To really reach full Humans Are Bastards territory, you have to present these atrocities as unique to humans above and beyond all other races and that such behavior cannot be explained or excused as the growing pains of a maturing race, but rather as evidence that the whole lot of us are self-evidently irredeemable on face value. It also helps to act as if other, non-Human races are the only ones to truly understand (or the only ones that actually HAVE) art, peace, caring, love, medicine, compassion, mercy, and so on... you know, all those things that humans in the real world also have, else the writer wouldn't have them as reference points for giving to the saintly aliens or whatever.
Often crosses over with Humans Are Cthulhu, What Measure Is A Nonhuman and subtropes. Compare Humanity On Trial, Humanity Is Superior, Humans Are Special. Contrast Rousseau Was Right and Patrick Stewart Speech.
Note: when a villain holds a Humans Are Bastards viewpoint, it's usually reserved for Nietzsche Wannabes, Well Intentioned Extremists and Knights Templar; it wouldn't really work if the villain in question is already a crazy maniac who just wants to kill people. The Joker notwithstanding.
Examples
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Anime
- Vandread is probably one of the worst. 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 in showing how inhuman and amoral almost every human seems to be - and the "almost" is quite significant in the sense that he's about the only human who isn't like that. It goes to the extent where it can be argued that the diclonii - mutants that are feared for their murderous tendencies - are more human than the actual humans on account of how badly they're treated.
- Then the manga ended with it turns out all diclonii's have a Always Choatic Evil side, it's was just a matter of time befor it comes out, it doesn't matter if they were treated nicey their whole life, they will turn evil and kill everyone, thus they needed to be killed off
- In marked contrast, Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko is a subversion. Some fans call it "Ferngully 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. And then it turns out that the humans aren't all bad and the animals can be pretty dickish, case in point, Moro's love-hate relationship with San.
- 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.
- 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 it's on nature's terms. Arguably an inversion of the trope.
- 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 the two girls lose all attachment to the world and go on a destructive rampage with their 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 one 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.
- 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.
Comic Books
- "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, no master, no father, and ninja problems.
- He's not the only human, just the only human who remained after the characters went from "any living things (except horses, lizards, and one puppy) are people" to "only mammals (with one exception) are people". The one exception is a giant snake, who happens to be Lord Hikiji's 2nd-in-command. The only other human with a speaking role was really a flesh-eating demon.
- It should be noted, however, that Stan Sakai has said he regrets making Hikiji human, which is one reason why the character is rarely seen. Though this is probably more to do with wanting an all-animal cast than wanting to avoid this trope.
- 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.
- 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".
- This troper wants to know how Pride of Baghdad avoided being added into this category. Four lions living in the Baghdad zoo get bombed on, talk to a turtle who whines on about how human pollution killed his entire family the last time there was a war going on, and in a particularly Anvilicious ending, They're all shot dead at the end by American Snipers. Yes, all of them, even the cub who was born and raised in captivity. Okay, we get it, war is hell, but Truth In Television aside, was that really necessary?
- To be fair, who wouldn't be scared shitless at the sight of four lions and shoot them on sight? It's clearly shown that the soldiers were afraid of being attacked by the lions, making them more misguided than bastards.
- To be even more fair, at the very end of the book there is the coda which states that it's a true story and four lions did escape from the zoo and were killed. On the next page, there is the simple line that 'There were other casualties as well.' For whatever else the book may have meant, they were also making the point that while many people knew the story about the lions, nobody paid much attention to the humans who died.
- Also, the animals are shown not to be much better than the humans. While escaping the zoo, the lion cub is nearly kidnapped by a troop of monkeys, and before she arrived in the zoo, one of the lionesses was raped by another lion.
- Gang-raped. By four lions. And let's not forget the grizzly bear who effectively starved a chained, captive lion to death and menaced the escaped lions as well.
- 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 survivng 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, superstititious 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.
Film
- 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.
- 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.
- Which is weird since in the first movie, no one cared and before Hellboy went public he poses with people, etc. And of course there is the comic were the only people who hate him have a good reason (the whole Hellboy might end the world thing)
- This troper was under the impression that there were people who were fine with Hellboy, since ya know he's awesome. And they'd be the ones posing with him. The average dumb city dweller, not so much.
- 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 threading in Mary Sue territories) 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 mosty 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.
- Not as wrong, just as futile. Violence does no good, and all that. If the humans had been willing to negotiate right from the start instead of talking with their guns, things would have turned out different.
- When asked about their history it turns out, they messed up their planet too.
- Which presumably gave them such a strong incentive to protect all the habitable worlds in the cosmos. Though they could have thought of a better option than a gray goo nanomachine plague designed to essentially sterilize the planet's surface save for the animals and plants put into protective bubbles, though. Talk about overkill...
- Yeah would have been easier to just have an army of Gorts hunt down every human, like what the original would had have if the humans didn't clean up their act.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 useing 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
Literature
- A lot of early American sci-fi has this theme. Any number of Ray Bradbury stories qualify, as does the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still (which ends with the peaceful visitor giving us all a good talking-to).
- 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.
- You can get less subtle than "...it was impossible to tell which was which"?
- 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).
- Come now, Gulliver could have stayed if he'd let them neuter him. In the original book anyway.
- 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. In fact, when this troper first read the book, he was very badly fooled into not noticing the hypocrisy of the Houyhnhnms.
- 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.
- The Artemis Fowl books are awful about this: Humans as a race seem to exist just to make the world a living hell and drive the Faeries underground. The Fae constantly call humans "mud people", which just happens to be a real-life ethnic slur.
- On the other hand, a lot of the villains are corrupt, vain Faeries. This just makes the Faeries hypocrites, and is more than balanced by how the title character is a human proto-Magnificent Bastard.
- This troper always assumed that the Faeries were speciesists with a distorted view of humanity and its history, the latter having been brought on by centuries of isolation; this reading is at least somewhat supported by the sympathetic portrayal of Artemis and the other human characters, excepting the occasional human villain.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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 the Roald Dahl book 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).
- 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.
- Humanoids Are Bastards, maybe?
- 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. One troper, in her review of the far better known Animated Adaptation, called this scene the "Let's See How Much Humans Suck Around the World Tour".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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 the entire human race 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.
- Not particularly moral, but rather inevitable: the point made is that if we don't act like that, someone else will, and suddenly there aren't any humans left to debate the issue...
- 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.
- William Faulkner's As I lay Dying. Upon finishing it, one of this tropers friends loudly declared: "Wow, people suck."
- 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."
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- A recurring theme in the works of Stanisław Lem.
- In the Callahans 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.
- William Golding's Lord Of The Flies uses a group of stranded children as a microcosm to illustrate this theme.
- In 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.
Live Action TV
- 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 - 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..."
- Then there's the time travel episode where Quark speaks contemptuously of past humans because they knowingly buy and expose themselves to poison (nicotine), despite numerous references to Ferengi using "beetle snuff" and other drugs.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Then re-watch episodes like "The Farm" and remember the Cylons more than balance it out.
- Less of a Humans Are Bastards and more of a The Cylons (and Baltar) Think Humans Are Bastards, in this troper's opinion. Sure, most of the characters are crazy, but they're not acting maliciously, most of the time. Unless they're Zarek.
- All Cylon bastardry is an extension of human bastardry. The Cylons were created by Man...
- 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 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.
Music
- 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.
Mythology
- 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.
- These two tropes may well be connected...
- Then again a large number of mermaids tend to wind up eating, drowning or enslaving men who respond to their charms. Let's face it, merfolk are bastards.
- Damn our society's obsession with wanting everything to be Darker And Edgier.
- Merfolk were bastards to begin with, the later depictions of sweet mermaids who only want to hang out with humans are Adaptation Decay. Same is true for most fairies.
- The Fair Folk isn't the dominant trope in modern times, but back when Fairy Tales were being written it was the norm.
Other
- 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.
Tabletop RP Gs
- In almost any other setting, The Imperium of Man of Warhammer 40000 fame would certainly qualify, 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.
- 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."
Video Games
Web Comics
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Damn, what will happens if Darkseid shows up? (if you'll like to know he almost destroyed the mutiverse just by sitting in a chair)
- To drop the anvil: when Martha Fennec becomes a human, she starts to have a never-before-seen urge to use her money to pollute. And, for some poorly-explained reason, the mere thought of the concept of humans appears to disable everyone's instincts. So Yeah.
- Never mind the fact that their cars run on (unleaded) gas as well. And they're worried about being carbon-neutral. And purchasing carbon credits. Okay...
- And have human level tech, so how the hell can they reach that level without any form of pollution, oh and if I'm not mistake is not one their alterentive fuel is meat? Wanna know who else uses the dead as fuel? The Dark Eldar.
- F—- You, I'm A Dragon
- 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.
- To be fair, most furry webcomics avoid having humans in them altogether, either because they want to avoid the drama this trope causes or because it's simply easier to suspend disbelief when everyone in the comic is a furry.
- Think about it, if there's both humans and furries, what made them evolve differently? Why are there furries in the first place? If they all just poofed into furries at some point why didn't those remaining humans?
- Subversion: This doesn't always apply to fantasy or cyberpunk settings, Two Kinds (Awizard Did It) and Batman Beyond (genetics) both have furries alongside humans for believable reasons.
- Speaking of 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. Most fans have a Take Our Word For It mindset
- Lost the Lead is very, very guilty of this.
- In Lost the Lead, the only shown human was best friends with a furry picking on the lead not because she was a furry but because she was a girl who liked video games.
- Still works, since he was just there to be a dick.
- 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...
Western Animation
- 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.
- Yet these anonymous hunters are considered so evil for doing their jobs that the film institute had "Man" from Bambi in the top 20 movie villains of all time.
- 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.
- Ferngully: 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.
- You forgot doing every "experiment on animals" bit of Science Is Bad stuff that could be thought of on Batty, apparently just for shits & giggles.
- Well, Batty sang about them all, but all I remember him saying they did to him sounded like they just tried to replace his sonar with radar and see what he'd do with it.
- The fact that at the beginning they were marking trees implies that it wasn't intended to be clearcutting.
- To this troper, the marks were obviously targeting aids for the Leveller's computer; before it cuts down Hexxus's tree, we see a screen in the cab as it targets the mark and waits for confirmation.
- 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.
- 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.
- It's disconcerting seeing humans from the rodent point of view in Ratatouille. Not least that horrible shop window. Luckily Linguini and Colette are there to prove not all humans are rat hating scum.
- 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! (One Troper saw it as a little girl for the first time in the middle of a collection of more typical holiday cartoons, it was her first encounter with this issue being addressed so directly, and let's just say she had a lot to think about while everyone else was eating cookies and singing "Jingle Bells.")
- 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.
- They be dead in a week...
- In Gargoyles, Demona attempts to recruit Brooklyn after a bad incident with a biker gang by showing this trope in a tour of unpleasant incidents around New York. However, after Brooklyn realizes Demona is a backstabbing megalomaniac, he realizes he had been manipulated. 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."
- 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.
- 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.
- Considering that every other story in media these days has an ultierior message to tell (usually along these lines of this very trope) besides the main story, why in the world would they? A movie simply meant to be fun? Prepostuous!
- 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.
- 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.
Web Original
- 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.
Real Life
- This was expressly mentioned by the late George Carlin during his "Life Is Worth Losing" special. Right after mentioning the "interesting personal choice" of suicide, he mentions murdering for personal gain, (or pleasure. Sometimes it's just fun,) genocide, cannibalism, necrophelia, and assassination. Or more importantly, who it is we assassinate...
- There's at least one zoo out there with a 'The most dangerous predator on Earth' exhibit that features a nice big mirror.
- No one else look in this mirror!
- Going back to sea creatures: the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa, has such a mirror. Complete with a massive wall full of "man is killing the seas" factoids.
- In a word: Darfur. An atrocity by itself, but to look to the deeper horror, you have to look at the reason. It is cows and plants. Two ethnic groups (Arabs and Africans) are all but identical in religon, culture, apearance, and almost everything else except for one difference. Arabs are herders, and Africans are farmers. This, and this alone, is the reason these people are killing each other. If this isn't High Octane Nightmare Fuel, then this troper has absolutely no idea what is.
- Most african tribes revolve around herds rather than plants. However, if you want an example that will truly chill you, look up the political punishment of "necklacing", reserved for africans who have betrayed their communities in some (usually political) manner. Basic rundown: fill a car tyre with petrol, place around neck of victim, light.
- Rwanda also applies here.
- Abusive Parents. Full stop.
- Does this really count, since animals do this to? Dolphins murder there children for fun.
Newspaper Comics
(A little later)
Thorax: So... Are you pretty much resolved to efface humankind from the face of the planet?
Thorax: Perhaps, on the whole, you should adopt a different standard for Armageddon.
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