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"I’m tired of this back-slapping ‘Isn’t humanity neat?’ bullshit. We’re a virus with shoes, mmmkay? That’s all we are."
— Bill Hicks
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. 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).
There's no doubt that humanity has a history of going to war for stupid reasons, genociding people for silly ideals, burning witches (even if, as C.S. Lewis points out, if they really were witches, if anyone deserved the death penalty they would) , 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 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:
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 no reason. On the stupid side, said tree-cutting machine wound up releasing Hexxus.
- 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.
- The fact that at the beginning they were marking trees implies that it wasn't intended to be clearcutting. And we don't know the reason because we're not given their side.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, 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 a rare scene during the credits: a scientist declares that he's "combined the DNA of the world's most evil animals to make the most evil creature of them all." A human is the then created in some sort of cloning tube, and just in case that's too subtle, declares, "It turns out it's man."
- 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 Lanter is shown helping a couple of burly, typically biker-type individuals rescue two children from underneath some debris.
Anime
- Vandread is probably one of the worst. Take all of the above 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.
- 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 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.
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.
- 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.
- Not really avoided in 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 Feudalism.
- 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.)
- 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 suffer from 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.
- 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, Sorry 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 Ancivilous 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..."
- Did anyone else think "Damn straight!" when Quark said that?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, a 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- The Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind manga (unlike the somewhat more upbeat anime) concludes with the lesson that humans are basically irredeemable and do not deserve to exist. Needless to say, most characters in the manga are, in fact, bastards of one kind or another.
- 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.
Video Games
Myth And Legend
- 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.
Tabletop RPGs
- 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.
- Some followers of Tzeentch could probably count as "good guys" by the standards of the setting, given that Tzeentch is the god of evolution, change, intelligence, magic, and hope.
- 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).
Comedy
- Tim Bedore has a bit that subverts this entirely, claiming that the animals are the bastards who are ganging up on humanity. He cites a number of examples, such as attacks by bass, squirrels and moose. (And yes, the phrase "moose and squirrel" gets used.) It's absolutely brilliant and can be found on the Bob and Tom Show website, amongst other places.
Film
- The Joker in The Dark Knight espouses this part of his anarchist 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 expirement" 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 dissapoints 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 poplace 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, ect. And of course there is the comic...
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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
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