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Thankfully, it only comes once a year...
All humans will be exterminated!
Oh, so just 'cause a robot wants to kill all humans, that makes him a "radical!"
Some days, it really sucks to be H. sapiens.
There are many reasons why you might wish to kill all humans. Maybe they're all horrible cruel monsters and one of them killed your mommy. Maybe their status as the dominant intelligent species on the planet is preventing your own kind from taking their place. Maybe some human colonists wronged your ancestors, and your people have generalized their rage and hate to cover the whole species. Maybe you were raised from infancy/the egg/the spawning pond to view humans as Always Chaotic Evil. Maybe out of spite or a peculiar sense of duty, you just can't stand the thought of other people existing one second longer. Heck, you could just be trying to save the rest of the planet's species from extinction. But the verdict is certain, and you're not wavering: They've all gotta die.
That is, assuming you even have a comprehensible reason. You could just be conveniently attracted to the creatures on screen most sympathetic to the audience, a Killer Robot out to Crush Kill Destroy, or a plain old Omnicidal Maniac Eldritch Abomination.
Sentient computers also seem to inevitably arrive at the conclusion that humans as a species must be killed. Sometimes, it's a product of them being too machine-like, and concluding that if one human is observed doing something that may harm the computer, then they all are a threat that can only be reconciled by killing them all off. Otherwise, it's a case of them being too human and flying into a blind rage triggered by jealousy, fear, or maybe even spite. Other times (such as in the film version of I, Robot) the supercomputer may start to become homicidal in an attempt to bring order to the world and protect humanity from itself. Rarely does a supercomputer decide that it should coddle humans to get them to keep supplying it with electricity and spare parts. Only the Robot Buddy seems to favor this tactic.
See also Omnicidal Maniac (the step-up, who'll kill the humans along with everything else), Apocalypse How, and The End Of The World As We Know It. Not to be confused with the video game Destroy All Humans, although killing all humans is the whole point of that game. A recommendation of How To Invade An Alien Planet.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- The Safeguard from Blame! don't want to kill all humans, per say - Only the ones without an incredibly rare and possibly extinct genetic marker. Kill 99.99999% of all humans would be more accurate.
- Michel in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch wants to kill all the humans. He doesn't know why, except that he thinks it's a divine order; however, another part of this supposedly divine order is to turn the world into a creepy wasteland with flying fish and DNA strands shooting out of the sky. This should tip you off to its suspect nature already, although he doesn't get it until he is rejected and the truth revealed.
- Elfen Lied features Lucy, a mutant who doesn't believe normal humans count as people. Her body count continues to rack up throughout the series.
- Similar to Lucy from Elfen Lied, both Millions Knives and Legato Bluesummers from Trigun have an insane genocidal hatred towards all humans, considering them a waste of life.
- Shinobu Sensui from Yu Yu Hakusho is a particularly nasty subversion in that he IS human and really wanted the end of humanity to come about so that he could die in a warrior-like manner,defeated by a strong demon to atone for his sins against them. If that's not genocidal bastard material, what is?
- Rau Le Creuset from Gundam SEED may be a more analytical version of this.
- The Angels in X1999 take the Well Intentioned Extremist version of the trope and run with it.
- The titular creatures of the manga series Parasyte. They're perfectly capable of surviving on normal foods, but have an instinctive compulsion to kill & eat humans, preferably in the most grotesque way possible. Most characters come to the conclusion that they were created by Mother Earth herself to save the environment by culling the human population.
- Kyuutarou Ooba in Kemonozume hatches a grandiose plot to make everyone on Earth revert to monsters and eat each other for...some reason that's never fully explained. Is he doing it for his often-teased son? Is he doing it to improve the world? Is he doing it just for giggles? Whatever the case, he explains his agenda pretty throughly while riding a giant sphere full of poison gas into a major city:
Ooba: Die! Die! Everybody die! Those who kill, pick on others, act like idiots! The mean, the petty, the calculating, the cowardly pacificts, the warmongers, everybody DIIIIIE!
- Lance from Pokemon Special harbors an intense hatred for his own species, due to his Viridian-granted power to hear the thoughts and sense the emotions of Pokemon, twisted by his memories of wild Pokemon dying slowly in pools of industrial toxins. His grandiose scheme in the Yellow saga is to unleash an army of Dragons on the human population, creating a utopia for Pokemon...creepy.
- "As the Devil Gundam saw it, the problem with the world was humanity, and eliminating mankind became its number one priority."
- D Gray Man: This is the ultimate aim of the Millennium Earl.
Comic Books
- Onslaught in the Marvel Universe started out as a harsher version of Magneto, but then Professor X's arguments about mutant/muggle equality led it to the same epiphany as Sweeney Todd, minus the awesome music or pie shop.
- The Sentinels occasionally fall into this trope. Originally they were programmed with two directives; 1) neutralize mutants and 2) protect human life from mutants. Occasionally some Sentinels will logically deduce that, since all organic life has the potential to mutate, the only way to fully neutralize all mutant life is to eliminate all humans.
- Lady Death, from the Evil Ernie comics and some sequels. She can't come back to earth until there are no more people alive on it.
- In Judge Dredd, the Dark Judges seek to annihilate the living because life is illegal on their world (and they don't acknowledge jurisdictional boundaries).
- To be precise, Judge Death (real name Sidney) was a born sadist and psychopath, whose antics as a child include throwing his dog over a cliff after he was reprimanded for torturing it, setting some sort of horrible alien thing (like the bastard lovechild of a tarantula and an octopus) on his sleeping sister for reporting his psychotic behavior, implicitly causing her to be paralyzed for the rest of her life from its poison, and throwing the switch personally when his father was sent to the electric chair. He was also the one who sent his father to the chair, having already learned plenty of life lessons from him (his father was a Depraved Dentist) and realising that not only was his old man starting to kill more often, he himself would be caught if he didn't send him to prison first. Using this to get a career in his world's equivalent of the Judges, his diseased brain came to the conclusion that, as only living people commit crimes, life itself should be made illegal and punished by 'cleansing'. With the aid of two cannibal demon-witches and three almost as deranged followers, he transforms into an undead abomination and sets out exterminating all life in existence. Or, in simpler terms, the Dark Judges occupy a twisted border between Well Intentioned Extremist and Omnicidal Maniac.
- Ultron, one of The Avengers' main villains, is pretty much in it to supplant humans with robots. Thor would have words with him about that...
Film
- Carnivorous animals, especially carnivorous dinosaurs (like the T. rex in Jurassic Park), seem to want to eat humans almost exclusively. However, the energy said animal spends ''chasing'' the human heroes far exceeds the energy it would gain from ''eating'' them. It would be like you or me running a marathon for a single chicken nugget. In both this movie and the King Kong remake, predators are seen ignoring wounded herbivores to chase humans a fifth their size.
- At least in Jurassic Park (the first movie), as well as the book it was based on, the T.rex didn't actively search for the humans to eat. It attacks the cars that are outside the enclosure when it breaks free, then later the humans run into it as it hunts other dinosaurs, and in the end it conveniently wanders into the visitor center just as the humans are cornered by raptors, and then gets to play the hero by attacking said raptors. About the only time when it actively goes after them is when it chases the Jeep around.
- And it gave up pretty quickly.
- "King Kong" used and subverted this, when the V.Rex would rather eat the small reptile predator in the log than eat the smaller human sharing the log. The raptors didn't eat the wounded or toppled Brontosaurus as they were in the middle of a stampede. To stop is to be crushed.
- But then, the V.Rex decides to chase said human around, despite having bigger prey already in its mouth, and the raptors proceed to chase after the humans a bit more after the end of the stampede, despite an entire heard of giant dead or dying Brontosaurus lying behind them.
- In the 2007 Transformers movie, inanimate objects brought to life by the All Spark immediately set about wreaking death and destruction. This is just about excusable in the case of the mobile phone, since it was trapped, but do vending machines and X-Boxes really harbour a secret desire to Kill All Humans?
- This troper brooded over this for some time before he remembered, in the movie, all technology on Earth had been reverse-engineered from Megatron's frozen body... it stands to reason any newly sentient Machine-Life would share his anti-social tendencies.
- Outright stated in the game they're created by the All Spark to defend itself when it feels threatened. Makes sense when you realize Sam FRIGGING DROPPED IT.
- If there was a species that kept opening me up to stick cylindacal pieces of metal full of liquids inside me that's only purpose was to pop out when they stuffed pieces of paper and metal in my mouth, I would want to kill them.
- The going theory is that the newly-created robots weren't so much evil as feral.
- Wait, if the money goes in the vending machine's... mouth... Well, I'd hate it too.
- And X-boxes are just evil.
- I suppose an easier Take That to Earth would be to get all your Xbox 360 drones to develop the Red Ring Of Death.
- Similarly, in Transformers Animated, an AllSpark shard will apparently make any of the automatons commonly used go haywire and made an assembly line robot continually pump out berserk police drones (the weird thing is that if the same thing happens to a vehicle it gains a spark and becomes a fully-functioning Transformer).
- And a pile of junk became a confused junk-bot with Weird Al's voice. It could be that they're simply acting out of frustration, confusion, and lack of humanoid intelligence, for the most part.
- Confused, frustrated, and frightened animals often exhibit anti-social or aggressive behavior. And suddenly popping into consciousness could be a very traumatic event.
- In the second X-Men movie, Magneto tries to wipe out all humans by reversing the polarity of Stryker's mutant-killing technology.
Literature
- The quote from AM below, while very much conveying the temperament is something of a subversion - while the computer has already killed most of the humans, it doesn't want the remaining ones to die, because then it won't be able to torment them anymore.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
- The Ryall believe that it is impossible for two sentient species to coexist, so they save time by attempting to exterminate the humans on contact.
- The Auditors of the Discworld want to do this. They find life messy and humans the worst of all.
- Star Trek Destiny: "We are the Borg. You will be annihilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness have become irrelevant. Resistance is futile...but welcome."
- While most of HP Lovecraft's deities would destroy humanity without really paying attention, Nyarlathotep seem to be bent on killing all humans (or rather, getting us kill ourselves). Why? I don't know, guess he's just being a dick.
- In Lester del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People!", aliens arrive without warning and just start killing all humans. One man finds out why, it seems that God (yes, the Jewish, Christian, Islamic one) has decided that humans are no longer his chosen people and the aliens now are. So he ordered them to kill us all off.
- Mortal Engines gets one of these at the end:
Stalker Fang: "... humanity is a plague; a swarm of clever monkeys which the good earth cannot support. All human civilizations fall, Tom, and all for the same reason; humans are too greedy. It is time to put an end to them forever."
Live Action TV
- Alien races and robots are particularly volatile. The Cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica didn't seem to have particular motives for targeting humans; they just did. The new series expands on their reasons. Though as they developed and began to show more individuality they wavered between this and helping the humans (with help being occupying them and ruling by force) with alarming suddeness. Frakin' Toasters.
- The original series stated that the Colonials interfered in the Cylons conquest of another race, sparking off a thousand yarn war.
- The Daleks in Doctor Who want to kill anything that isn't a Dalek.
- And the Silurians want to Kill All Humans to reclaim the Earth, which they ruled in the Eocene period. Same with their aquatic relatives, the Sea Devils.
- The Cybermen are a slight variation, merely wanting to convert all humans into Cybermen.
- The Big Bad in practically every season of Buffy.
- The Judge deserves particular mention, since his only reason for existing is to burn the humanity out of humans and "corrupted" demons like vampires.
- On Lexx, His Divine Shadow, who wanted to destroy all of mankind to avenge an ancient grudge. The second season's Big Bad sought to take the concept yet further by converting all matter in the universe in its image. The series being what it was, both largely succeeded.
- British Sci-fi sitcom Hyperdrive had a hilarious song Kill The Humans which can be heard here
 .
- In the backstory of Babylon 5, a disastrous misunderstanding in a first contact situation of Humans and Minbari starts the Minbari on a genocidal crusade against Humanity that is unstoppable. Only on the last battle with the Minbari on the cusp of destroying Earth itself does the Minbari learn a fact about Humans that is so soul staggeringly significant that the leadership decides to suddenly surrender without any explanation. What was that fact? That Minbari souls were reincarnating in human bodies.
- Adam's goal in the second season of Heroes is to unleash the Shanti Virus and kill 99.93% of the human population because people suck.
- Helen Cutter in Primeval also decides that Humans Are Bastards and goes back in time to prevent humanity's evolution altogether. It's pointed out that her actions will also erase her from existence, but apparently she doesn't care.
- Star Trek Enterprise. As part of a Xanatos Gambit, the Spherebuilders convince the Xindi that humanity will destroy their homeworld in the future, so they decide to destroy Earth first. An alternate timeline shows them going to the trouble of tracking down and destroying human colonies even after Earth is destroyed.
Music
- The song "The Humans Are Dead" by Flight Of The Conchords takes place in a "distant future" wherein this has succeeded.
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "The Curse Of Millhaven" shows Loretta's philosophy falls into this category: "Lalalala, lalalalie/ All God's children have all gotta die."
- In Queensryche's "Nm 156", a governing supercomputer opts to annihilate humans, not because Humans Are Bastards, but because it's been tasked to enforce a stable social order, and humans are unpredictable. Ergo, "Social control requires population termination."
- Virtually the entirety of Mayhem's fourth album Ordo Ad Chao consists of this.
Video Games
- Count Dracula, especially in the Castlevania series, has an intense hatred towards humans.
- Then again, given how he often seems to have a half-vampire child, maybe he doesn't hate all humans. Castlevania establishes his human wife's execution as a witch as his Freudian Excuse for his hate.
- Luca Blight from Suikoden II has a prime case of this, although really he has an insane murderous contempt for everything.
- Ditto Kefka from Final Fantasy VI and Albedo from the Xenosaga series.
- Ditto for Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII as well, though he may lack the sheer sadistic insanity of the three listed above.
- Well technically Sephiroth just wants to join his mother, it really has nothing to do with humans...
- Seymour fits the bill more nicely although his intention for doing so is slightly less malicious than the three above.
- In World of Warcraft (and probably other MMORPGs, although this Troper has not played any others), many zones are populated with herbivorous animals, and an unrealistically large (often equal) number of predators. The predatory animals always ignore the herbivores, and only attack player characters. Of course, they do not limit their diets to humans - gnomes, tauren, and undead are all seen as equally suitable meals.
- Averted in most zones with wolves, lions and few other predators. They can occasionally be seen chasing (and killing) the critters of the zone, be they deer, rabbits, or squirrels. Of course, they simply ignore the body and go back to their pathing afterwards.
- Then there's the Forsaken, who generally hate humans for, well, forsaking them and hunting them as monsters, and are developing means to wipe out humanity. Some among them take it a little further.
- A possible aversion in Fallout: early in the game, this editor had a random encounter in which he stumbled upon a large groups of scorpions and giant rabbits/bears/whatstheirnames. Refusing to go down without a fight he blasted several to pieces until he noticed that the two species were more interested in going at each other than ganging up on him. He left the area undisturbed.
- Played straight in Fallouts 2 and 3. In both games, The Enclave, the remnants of the American government, planned on killing all mutants so they can rebuild a 'pure America'; Mutant being defined as EVERYONE who is not a member of The Enclave, no matter how insignificant the mutation. Obviously, they are the Big Bad,although you can conspire with them to receive the Bad Ending in Fallout 3.
- This seems to be the whole point of the game Destroy All Humans.
- In video games, it's a given that you have Everything Trying To Kill You, but it's especially frustrating when it's not just suppose to be attacking you exclusively. For examples, if you have one human player and multiple computer players in an all out battle Super Smash Bros Brawl the AI should spread it's attacks around based on something besides who is a human player, but any time it gets a Final Smash or use of the Dragoon, it heads straight for you.
- In the backstory of Guilty Gear, the Gears wanted to obliterate humanity. They lost the war, but a few decades later one of them, Testament, decided to wake up Justice (one of the strongest Command Gears) and restart the process. Testament still isn't fond of humans in the later games; in one of his endings in Guilty Gear XX, Dizzy is killed by I-No, at which point Testament gives up on the human race, murders Johnny and any of the Jellyfish Pirates he can get his hands on, and goes right back out to trying to render humans extinct.
- In Chrono Trigger, an optional sidequest in 2300 A.D. involves an artificial intelligence with a robot army that wants to kill all the humans to "end their suffering".
- Given that the humans in this case are immortal and live in a foodless post-apocalyptic wasteland, it would actually be the nice thing to do.
- Towards the end of Ninja Gaiden 3, Clancy gets transformed into a super being in the subspace and tells Ryu that in order to protect the Earth, he must Kill All Humans. He tries to convince Ryu to join his side, but everyone knows the answer to that.
- This is the main goal of the Locust Horde in Gears Of War. Not much reason is given for their genocidal actions, other than a line from the queen claiming that the humans brought it upon themselves.
- Alex Mercer from Prototype while still being alive, released a super-powerful mutated virus that would consume all of humanity in a matter of months. Thankfully, he managed to stop it.
- NOTHING CAN PROTECT YOU FROM ME!!! NOT WEAPONS!!! NOT SOLDIERS!!! NOT!!! ARMOR!!!!
- *Ahem*... "The humans are an abomination! By the will of the gods they must all burn!!" How Did We Miss This One?
- How Did We Miss This One? Mass Effect, the Geth, the Reapers, and the Collectors all wnat to destroy everything.
Webcomics
Web Original
- The supervillain Cataclysm in the Whateley Universe, although we don't know why.
- He's trying to wipe out entire ecosystems, so maybe he's an Omnicidal Maniac instead.
Western Animation
- Subverted in Futurama, where Bender has a simple dream of killing all humans, but usually doesn't put much effort into it. Or, indeed, any at all.
Bender: (sleep-talking) Kill all humans... kill all humans... must kill all...
Fry: Bender, wake up!
Bender: (yawns) I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it.
... [falls asleep again]
Bender: Hey, sexy mama... wanna kill all humans?
- Spoofed in at least one episode of The Simpsons: A robot is brought in to show to Bart's class. When Bart spots the man operating the robot in a tree outside, he knocks him out with a rock. The robot then slumps for a second, before rising and declaring "Command link severed. Default mode: Crush Kill Destroy."
- Also spoofed in South Park. Chef is trying to figure out the remote control for his spiffy new TV and activates "HEM" without knowing what it is. The TV sprouts arms, legs and lasers and goes on a bloody rampage in "Human Eradication Mode."
- Demona on Gargoyles was often plotting this, which lead to many humans hating the Gargoyles, which makes her original hatred seem justified, it's an ironic vicious circle she's forever trapped in.
- In The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, Billy's greatest fear is clowns, believing that they will one day rise up and "DESTROY US ALL!! DESTROY US ALL!! DESTROY US ALL!! DESTROY US ALL!! DESTROY US ALL!!"
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