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What Measure Is A Non Human
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Dark Heart: You saved me? Why?!
Christie: Good or bad, you're still a person. Or whatever you are.
"Boy, if those employees weren't robots, I would have looked like some kind of serial killer or something, eh?"
There is an invisible value placed on the existence of non-human characters in fiction, compared to the value of the life of a human. Killing/destroying one may or may not be the same thing as killing a human. The difference between Not Even Human on one end of the scale and Not Quite Human on the other can be a very fine one, and where a series chooses to draw that line can vary as wildly as the writers' imaginations. Your Mileage May Vary as well.
Intelligence and emotions, and whether the character in question is actually alive in the conventional sense, are usually what dictate the morality of the situation. But more often than not, it's based upon how human-like the character is (an issue further explored in this blog post ). The sliding scale usually goes something like this:
- Obviously nonliving things like inanimate objects do not figure into this at all... Unless you're in an Everything Talks situation where the objects are given names, faces, personalities, and so on. And especially if, in the case of the broken-down cars in The Brave Little Toaster and Jessie from Toy Story 2, they sing sad, sad songs about the day their owners threw them away. Mileage on a Companion Cube may vary, though usually if it gets destroyed/damaged, other characters will react as if you'd just killed something that was alive.
- Robots and Artificial Intelligence stories examine this quite a lot in their plots, possibly because of the writings of Isaac Asimov. Good robots and other Mechanical Lifeforms are considered people most of the time. Killing one is generally the karmic equivalent of killing a human the same way — except that it is easier to show them getting hurt (think of poor Bishop in Aliens), which gets awkward. Mecha Mooks and bad robots almost always have a very low value in this regard, even if they demonstrate obvious personalities, emotions, and humanlike intelligence. Regardless, robots are the most frequent victims of the "How Did You Know That Mook Wasn't Human?" "I Didn't!" trope. It's Just A Machine, after all.
- Undead beings like skeletons, zombies, ghouls, and victims of certain strains of The Virus do not blip at all in this value. There's hardly any controversy about it either.
- There are some exceptions in the very, very rare works where the zombies are not entirely mindless and retain a bit more personality and/or self-control. One example of this (albeit one that some viewers found ridiculous) is the 2008 remake of Day of the Dead. It is eventually revealed that certain zombies not only don't eat people, but are completely non-violent. Because of this, multiple characters argue over whether or not it's okay to kill them. They are zombies, but they aren't hurting anyone. More on this in the Film section.
- There are other exceptions in cases where someone close to the hero of a story gets turned into a zombie or in-world equivalent. The good guys usually can't bring themselves to pull the trigger on what is still outwardly a loved one. This often leads to a Shoot The Dog moment. A major factor in this is whether or not the infected person's mind or soul has been irretrievably destroyed by whatever overtook them, which often leads to a Find The Cure situation. (Too damn bad about all the nameless assimilated people.)
- Vampires, while they are technically among the undead, have variable ranges simply because they usually have more personality. Most characters can kill them anyway even if they're Technical Pacifists. Certain depictions of Batman and King Graham from Kings Quest have killed off Dracula with favorable karmic results, even when killing anything is anathema to them. The idea here, as well as with the other undead mentioned above, may be "Well, technically, they're already dead, so it's okay! And anyway, Vampires are Always Chaotic Evil!"
- Expect that last detail to make things awkward in fiction where there are good vampires, or vampires who aren't evil, just hungry, operating in the same world.
- Special mention must be made of Beta Baddies as they are often on the same level as vampires on this scale (and more than a few vampires have been Beta Baddies). These are characters who would be considered normal people were it not for a few very strange differences. The troubling part is this: even though they often look like normal people, even if they go on and on about how they wish they were normal people (and they often gain the audience's sympathy in the process), none of the heroes seem to take any of this into consideration and dispatch them with clean consciences. Eerily, some fiction in which Beta Baddies appear even acknowledges how twisted this is — and let the good guys blithely kill then off anyway. (Hi, Sora.) So Yeah.
- On to living things. The value of the life of a non-human animal in fiction, distressingly, tends to relate directly to how much humans like said animal. Thus dogs are protected by Infant Immortality but snakes, spiders and insects are trampled without a second thought. Sadly, this is Truth In Television. To paraphrase an old Dennis Leary routine about the Endangered Species Act, "You know how this is going to end! Eventually, only the cute and cool animals will get to live!"
- Monsters Of The Week, Giant Monsters and Big Creepy Crawlies are generally treated as huge pests and exterminated as such without much controversy. There are some exceptions. If you are a monster, the more you resemble a more conventional specimen of the creature you are based upon, the fewer people you directly harm, and (most importantly) the more personality you have, the better your chances are for surviving. Some human or other will recognize that you are merely misunderstood and may try to help you. Of course, if you eat that human, you're pretty much boned.
- If the Big Bad is revealed to be non-human as a Tomato Surprise or assuming his monstrous true form, it usually makes it OK to kill them if it wasn't before.
- Rubber Forehead Aliens rarely have this problem. As their actors are obviously human, it is easy to transfer the value. Humanoid Animals and Half Human Hybrids tend to get the same protection as a normal human... but it depends on how humanlike they are. If they take up a form that isn't bipedal, rely on their instincts too much, or otherwise start toward the Talking Animal side of things, they can quickly reach the level of monsters-of-the-week.
- As far as other fantastic races, it often seems that the morality of killing the race depends on how much they resemble humans either culturally or physically. Dwarves, elves, gnomes and halflings all look relatively human, and so killing them is bad, but the bestial-looking orcs, goblins and trolls are evil and should be killed. Other races who obviously are not human, but possess cultural traits such as music or clothing styles that the human audience can easily recognize or identify with, are also given preferential treatment over whatever evil races exist.
- And then there is an uncomfortable border line occupied by characters who are human — but since they aren't "normal", they aren't considered as such. Good Cyborgs, if the brain is still intact, are almost always considered human, except by strawman persecutors who harass them. Bad Cyborgs are treated on the same scale as Mecha Mooks. Other "partially disembodied" entities, whether they once were humans or were made like that run the entire spectrum from being accepted as variant humans to "kill them just to
get rid of squick end their supposedly nightmarish existence and go drink some Brain Bleach". The same can be said for Transhuman characters.
This is often one of the reasons why Humans Are Bastards. It can get especially awkward, however, when it happens in works of fiction where many of the heroes aren't human either, leading to uncomfortable Fridge Logic.
In general, the more thought that is put into the script, the more value nonhuman life will have. This trope is often used as a metaphor for the Real Life issues of animal and human rights. See also What Measure Is A Non Cute, That Poor Plant, Of The People and Van Helsing Hate Crimes. The flipside of sorts is What Measure Is A Non Super. Related tropes are Uncanny Valley, Theyd Cut You Up, and Emergency Transformation. See also What Measure Is A Non Unique for more modifying factors on this.
For cases in which this treatment applies to characters who are human, see What Measure Is A Mook, Moral Myopia, Immortal Life Is Cheap, and A Million Is A Statistic.
Examples:
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Anime
- Discussed in Bleach. One of the first story arcs deals with the idea that the generic, kill-on-sight enemy Hollows retain parts of their former souls and can even be redeemed.
- And in the Hueco Mundo arc, multiple Espada explain that they see the Shinigami as the cruel ones because they slaughter Hollows mindlessly. Before Zommari dies, he rants to Byakuya about how Hollows are seen as evil and slaughtered simply because they need to eat humans to survive, saying that Shinigami are evil, biased murderers.
- Also on the note of what measure a hollow is, during the Turn Back the Pendulum arc, 4 of the Gotei 13's captains, 3 of its lieutenants, and the Kido Corps' lieutenant were immediately ordered to be exterminated due to being guinea pigs in hollowification experiments.
- A decision that may or may not have been influenced by Aizen, So Yeah.
- Of course the whole debate falls flat considering that Hollows are, or were, normal human souls driven insane and twisted into monsters bent of devouring all around them. Not to mention that their dimension is a boring void full of similar psychopaths who would destroy them in a nanosecond if given half a chance. Soul Society kinda sucks, but it's better than that.
- Not to mention that when defeated, the hollow becomes a plus and actually regains said sanity.
- Although never discussed in the actual webcomic/manga/anime, Axis Powers Hetalia has personified countries as characters, and fans tend to argue whether they are actually human or not.
- Actively explored in the anime Ghost In The Shell, which was inspired by the book and movie Blade Runner. The Tachikoma spend long periods of dialogue pondering and debating this subject. They are, in fact, the subject of the subject, and the main characters join in to varying degrees from time to time. Ultimately, the other members of the force start to treat them more like people than machines and value their lives more. However, the Tachikoma sacrifice themselves at the end of each season out of loyalty to their human friends. The first time, the Major notes that they were developing "humanity" and the second time Aramaki explicitly refers to them as "some of my men"
- How many mechanical parts does it take before a human is no longer human? The Major acknowledges that except for the few brain cells she's left with, she no longer has any human components, but based on the idea that she has a "ghost", whether or not that can be confirmed in a laboratory, she's treated as a human.
- In the manga version, this trope is heavily subverted with the Tachikoma. During routine maintenance, one of them resolves to convince his fellow machines that they should have the same rights as humans, and in fact they are probably superior, and tries to start a revolt. The rest of the Tachikoma decide that humans aren't so bad and anyway if they overthrew them, there would be nobody to fetch them oil and give them maintenance so they treat the rebel as a lunatic. It's later shown that the so-called rebel was pre-programmed by Major Kusanagi to see what the reaction of the other Tachikoma would be, and whether or not they needed mind-wipe before a real rebellion occurred. The anime also has the Major worrying about the same sort of rebellion. (Her concern about the Tachikoma is painted as a bit hypocritical, since she herself is rapidly approaching the human/not-human line from the other side.)
- Uncomfortably done in Dragon Half, depending on how far past the slapstick you're willing to look; various non-human creatures with speaking parts (as opposed to "intelligent"; they're usually really stupid) have been indiscriminately killed and sometimes eaten, but when an apparently human girl gets stabbed, everyone gasps in shock. It turns out she's actually a half-slime, so (a) that's all right, and (hopefully) more importantly (b) she isn't hurt anyway.
- Lampshaded in Hellsing when during their first encounter Seras ascertains that Alucard is not a human before shooting him. Alucard derisively comments on that: "Why? would you have shot me if I was?"
- The usual life value of the Monster Of The Week in a Magical Girl show is subverted in Magical Project S, when it's revealed that Sammy doesn't vaporize monsters with her Stock Footage magic, but instead teleports them to an island in the middle of nowhere, where they form a peaceful, if somewhat eccentric, society. "Well, they're people too."
- Of course there's also a double-standard at play in Sailor Moon, as they HAVE revived some bad guys- but only those in-between Big Bad and Mook levels. This despite many of those Mooks showing human emotion, wanting to quit the life of villainy for a musical career, or being JUST A FREAKIN' LONELY CHILD (Utomodachi). All in all, Sailor Moon has and will forever remain the worst offender, and that's not even going into many of Queen Serenity's decisions, like the banishment of the dark moon tribe- which she had to have known would cause inevitable war. There's a reason this fandom has way more villain-centric fics than most...
- And of course all of the above is pure Fanon. Monsters Of The Week in Sailor Moon are either artificial creatures, created to be soldiers, or former humans paifully transformed into monsters against their will (sometimes irreversibly so), all of them explicitly have no free will and demonstrate about as much "human emotion" as a broken record (most just repeat one word or phrase endlessy). And the Dark Moon clan was either the descendants of convicted criminals who gradually gathered on Nemesis (anime), or religious fanatics, who left the Earth willingly (manga).
- This is also explored in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha in the second season. Mission Control has revealed that the enemy are in fact sentient programs, so "shouldn't be considered as people." Artificial Human Fate Testarossa comments that "they're just like me, then." Which results in a hasty response that really, she's just like other humans in that regard. Later as Nanoha confronts one of the programs who denies sentience, she retorts that if someone can talk to her and clearly have emotions, then it's obvious that they are people; just like humans.
- It's suggested that the Wolkenritter were initially emotionless, but may have developed feelings as a result of Hayate's influence.
- In the manga Samurai Deeper Kyo, countless humans are killed in several fights. In a possible example of executive meddling, the anime adaptation had all the evil characters turn into monsters at some point before they were dealt the fatal blow, possibly for the sake of preserving the good guys' "goodness".
- In Trigun, the main character, Vash, refuses to kill any form of sentient life, including giant flesh-eating sand worms. Mindless sentry robots are, of course, another matter. The fact that he is himself a non-human sentient "person"/Ridiculously Human Robot may help. However, sentience doesn't seem to be the issue here so much as respecting all lifeforms (which the robots ...aren't?).
- I think it deserves notice that Vash placates the master computer and the robots stop, well, trying to kill things as a result. Considering the familiar, understanding tone he takes with the control room, He probably knew precisely what was going on.
- In any case, the sentry bots were simply remote controlled extensions of the AI, which was unharmed (though annoyed) by their destruction, rather than independent intelligences.
- In Robotech (and possibly the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross), it is only after the Zentraedi are discovered to be genetically compatible with Earth humans that the possibility of peaceful relations is even proposed.
- In Macross Frontier, however, humanity eventually accept the Vajra Hive Mind as a sapient, friendly entity, despite the Vajra being Starfish Aliens who barely even understand the concept of individual intelligence without fold wave links.
- The vagrant AIs in the .hack// series are treated as worthless and troublemaking pieces of data by the administrators, as is any human that sides with them. The main characters, naturally, see it differently. Nevertheless, they still left the game for good as a type of "growing up" metaphor, leaving the AIs to fend for themselves.
- Kite returns in a manga set after the .hack//GU games, along with several fan favorites.
- They mostly all die in .hack//GU, with the writers going after a different Aesop than the one in the first half of the franchise. The AIDA, unlike the aforementioned vagrant A Is, were attacking people and putting them into comas; including the protagonist's former love interest and the antagonist's little sister. That doesn't mean that their behavior's justified, but it makes it understandable. Also, the final attempt to kill the AIDA fails, deleting only their aggression, and there are no further attempts to destroy them after that. Also, there's a 'good' AIDA in the OVA, and Atoli offers the notion that Player and Aida can coexist peacefully.
- The reason Ralph leaves the Union in Soukou No Strain is because they had the idea that they could do whatever they wanted to the Emilies for the sake of research, just because they were aliens.
- A major theme in Bubblegum Crisis in all its incarnations. The sexaroids Sylvie and Anri are more three dimensional and human than some human characters, and play a considerable role in Priss's acceptance of Boomers as being more than soulless machines (to the point that Sylvie and Priss's relationship, and its sexual/nonsexual nature, is a great source of online debate). In the remake, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040, this was tied into the Myth Arc, when The Reveal showed that Sylia's brother Mackie, who throughout the series seems to be mysteriously the same age in both pictures of him from years earlier and flashbacks, is in fact a Boomer. Given the much-less-ambiguously monstrous nature of Boomers by that point, Nene's belief in his humanity (and her romantic interest in him) is what keeps him from simply giving in to Galatea's control.
- It should also be noted that the Boomer's only go insane because they've been created as intelligent beings and then had their intelligence altered, basically enslaved and lobotomised by humans.
- Boomers in Bubblegum Crisis are partially biological, which might make you support them further. However, Adama from Bubblegum Crash! was a fully sentient fully non-biological android (which was significant for one reason or another), and once again, Priss was the one who got the Aesop.
- In the manga Gunnm, this is explored from pretty much every possible angle: human brains in robot bodies, human bodies with the brain replaced with a computer chip, even split personalities given bodies of their own.
- This concept is intentionally taken to the logical extreme in Elfen Lied (although some of the characters have a different opinion on what is human and what is not).
- The Big Bad (initially) in the second season of Digimon turned out to be a troubled kid who thought that the setting of the series was just a computer game, and acted like many gamers are wont to in God Games. Upon discovering that it was real, he immediately changed his ways.
- Kurau, Christmas and other "Rynasapiens" in Kurau Phantom Memory get chased, abducted and generally regarded with great disrespect for the fact that they are half-alien hybrids with special powers. The matter gets confused since some Rynasapiens indeed have ulterior motives.
- This is Sensui's dilemma as a teenager in Yu Yu Hakusho. Meeting Itsuki, a demon, after hating demons all of his life as a Spirit Detective, and finding out that they liked the same TV show- eventually becoming gay lovers was one of the catalysts the other being the Black Black Club for his fall from grace.
- Melfina's primary conflict in Outlaw Star is the question of whether or not, as a biological android, she could count herself as alive.
- Full Metal Alchemist loves navel contemplation about this.
- If your show includes a good guy who happens to be a suit of armor, homunculi, and human transmutation, you automatically invoke this trope.
- The titular girls in Gunslinger Girl become less and less human in behavior as time progresses, which forms a jarring contrast with their appearance and is a source of confusion throughout the series. The loss of humanity is especially evident in the case of Rico, who noticeably changes from a bubbly, sparkly child into a robot-like killing machine with sadistic tendencies.
- Early on in Angel Sanctuary, Setsuna was urged to kill his best friend, Kira, on the basis that as the spirit of a bloodthirsty, evil sword, there was no point in allowing someone with just the facade of humanity to live. Of course, Setsuna refuses although considering Kira later turns out to have the soul of Lucifer, this might not have been in Setsuna's best interests. Kira himself struggles with his humanity or lack thereof throughout the series, generally insisting he never wanted to become human.
- Astro Boy dabbles in this. Atom/Astro, after all, was abandoned by his Mad Scientist father, Dr. Tenma, when he failed to serve as a complete replacement for his dead son.
- Human and robot relations in Astro Boy are driven up to eleven in Urasawa's retelling, Pluto. How human do humans see robots as? How human do robots consider robots to be? How do people feel about it getting harder and harder to tell man from machine? What do older robot models think about newer androids that outclass them both in body and in sentience? At what point do machines count as people? What about robot rights? How many more philosophical questions on artificial intelligence can we cram into the next chapter?
- Some of Kyon's biggest Pet The Dog moments in the Suzumiya Haruhi novels come from his treatment of Yuki Nagato, who is not only a near-robotic Artificial Human, but the big winner of the Superpower Lottery who verges at times on omnipotence. He treats her the same as he treats everyone else and refuses to use her abilities and obliging nature any more than is absolutely necessary, to the vocal surprise of the pragmatic Itsuki. His treatment of someone who is actually omnipotent as neither an object of worship nor something to be controlled is also an example.
- The alien Arume in Blue Drop create synthetic children to function as bombs or as devices to clean up the remnants of their own biological weapons. All of them are female with bright blue eyes and white blood, just like the Arume themselves, and they grow up just like normal children. Quite a few earthlings definitely regard them as human and try to protect them from their fate and the prosecution of other earthlings. The synthetic Arume also share their creators' tendency to fall in love with earth girls, which makes things even more complicated and leads to a lot of drama in the manga.
- Bounen No Xamdou features people turning into "humanforms", huge monsters that generally spew destruction. When the hero kills one in order to save another human, he gets called out on how he's being a bigot.
- In Basilisk, the ninja are all technically human, but many of them are extremely freakish-looking humans. And there is a clear tendency for the more grotesque ninja (Jimushi Juubei, Kazamachi Shougen, Azuki Rousai...) to die first.
- In the adorably squicky Alien Nine series, elementary school girls bond with deadly alien symbiotes that look like winged fish helmets to combat alien invasions, or alternatively extinguish spy rings preceding invasions. The symbiotes are experienced at this sort of thing...The girls...Less so.
- Averted most significantly by Keiichi in Ah My Goddess. He's willing to reason with others, regardless of what they are. He even aided the demon angel, Blue Lance.
- Done, somewhat disturbingly, in Inu Yasha. The titular character's "good" qualities, are measured by his unwillingness to kill humans, even horrifyingly evil ones. However, he kills demons without a second thought. This is true of all the characters, but it's a little disturbing with the demons and half-demons: the "good ones" are the ones who value human life, but seem to place no value on the lives of their own kind. It seems like even humans who are murderers and rapists are worth more than demons who are little more than irritating pests.
- Kagome's bizarre insistence that Inu-Yasha is "may be half-demon, but is half-human too" so can be a good guy is strange given that she's travelling with full-demon demon; Shippo; who is the most innocent member of the cast.
- This is most evident in an early episode when the title character, in a berzerk rage, nearly killing some human bandits who had killed half of a village and enslaved the survivors was treated as approaching a Moral Event Horizon.
- Might as well point at Inu Yasha himself. You know if it weren't for that half HUMAN in him, he'd be a complete and utter monster not worth the viewers/readers pity? Just watch when he goes into beserker full youkai mode. No compassion, no heart, no guilt, no redeeming qualities. Then he reverts back to being the hanyou, and that's when the regret kicks in, just to emphasise it's only as good as his human side. Not to mention he just continually becomes nicer towards humans only the more the series went on - this coming from a guy who suffered obvious discrimination from these humans just as much as from the youkai. Of course unlike humans, who just keep rubbing it in of what his hertitage is, he's expected to just put up with the humans' taunting and ignore it, just to prove that he's the "better man" in a sense. But woe be it if a youkai were just to only call him a hanyou! Ensue spamming of the Kaze no Kizu/Wind Scar until that youkai was hacked away that their body won't even repair in hell.
- Hanyuu Furude of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni is a goddess. However,in her destined timeline,she was seen as a monster to many villagers due to her horns. She is ritually sacrificed by her reluctant nine or so year old daughter,Ouka,since her mom was begging her to sacrifice her so that all the villagers sins would be atoned. Good 'ol Hanyuu
- In Video Girl Ai, the Video Girls are Robot Girls specifically created to help humans who are good-hearted and need emotional/moral support. However, they're supposed to follow only the orders of their creator and/or the needs of the client. Then, one of the Video Girls has her tape played in a broken VCR... and she starts to develop human-like feelings, like falling in love with the Unlucky Everydude she's supposed to aid. As punishment and/or preventive measure, she should have her tape returned and then be "rebooted", but is this the right option? Or should said Video Girl be released and allowed to pursue her own goals? And let's not even think of what would happen when a Video Girl is assigned to an actual pervert...
- Elfen Lied seems to decide that yes, Diclonii are people too. Whether the ending is a Broken Aesop, a downer or Bittersweet Ending or a Shoot The Dog moment... well, YMMV.
- In both Appleseed movies all cyborgs besides protagonist Briareos are expendable, and mostly evil. The Final Boss at the end of Ex Machina is even more blatant version of the trope - she's been resurrected from the dead with cybertechnoloy, and as result has become something of a Borg Queen. However, the protagonists manage to briefly medicate her with micromachines and bring her back to her senses, at which point she begs to be allowed to die as a human. When two of the three protagonists present are a cyborg and a Bioroid, both very clearly fully functional people. So Yeah.
- The Witchblade anime played a with this, in different forms. That is, would it be okay to use dead bodies as reanimated soldiers with electronic 'brains?' And if that soldier's conversion is a successful model, what about cloning him, but as the state he is now? Masane is at first horrified when she discovers the X-cons are modified humans, and iWeapons are made of human corpses. Takayama just considers this to be more expendable than living human soldiers. And NSWF producing the cloneblades and wielders for them are more squicky. Then there's one Tyke Bomb obsessed with attempts to understand who and what she is. And several quite "real", but batshit insane humans.
- In Darker Than Black many people aware of them think Contractors and Dolls are "no longer human". Dolls may be sold and treated like furniture or devices, Contractors are perceived as a sort of killer robots. Not that there weren't any reasons at all for such an attitude, but...
- In Pretty Cure the girls complain about having to kill the first villain and are told by their Non Human Sidekicks that they're just making him "return to the darkness". Later they find that Kiriya does a Heel Face Turn... incidentally proving that the enemies aren't Always Chaotic Evil after all and killing them should count as killing people, which is never even mentioned.
- In Waq Waq, Shio, the son of a "Guardian" tasked with defending villages from machines, initially struggles with this after meeting the friendly Pura, but comes to the conclusion that humans and machines can be friends.
- While the Bugrom were in the process of conquering the humans in ElHazard, you'll notice that no one seems to care the OVA ends with nearly their entire race being killed because they're 'icky bugs'. The fact they display signs of intelligence and personality around the one human to speak their language is ignored.
- Chachamaru has been having an inner debate on this one lately. She wonders if she has a soul and can therefore make a pactio with Negi. But as far as the story goes, she definitely qualifies as 'human' as do they local vampire, the half demons etc. But the other robots like Tanaka are definitely just machines, despite speaking on his first appearance. Presumably because they all have the same form, and it's not a cute one like Chachamaru's. And their not as much Magitek as she is.
- The official position on the souls of artificial beings is if they're capable of desiring a soul, they have one. Chachamaru's soul was confirmed when her pactio with Negi worked—though considering it only did so after Negi turned his kissing Up To Eleven, he may have cheated on this one.
- Magic is just racist. Or Model Number-ist. Or Type-ist. Or whatever it would be that applies to robots.
- Subverted in To Aru Majutsu No Index for clones. About ten thousand MISAKA clones have died already, one dies at the start of episode ten and another at the end. However, after that Touma gets pissed about how they're viewed as being so expendable for such a stupid goal and the next one is saved and the project halted. The original for the clones was already on her way to die trying to stop, and even the guy killing them always spoke to them first to make sure they weren't 'real' people who had goals etc and feared death. They hadn't lived long enough to really form proper values like that, hence ten thousand casualties.
- If you can look past the rampant fanservice, fetish fuel, cuteness and comedic moments, this is a major element explored in [[Chobits]]
- Vampire Princess Miyu. OH SO MUCH. The Shinma, especially humans made into ones, can be endearing, if villainous. If anything, poor little Hiyoku...goes through hell, turns into a Shinma and expects life to be better, only to get fried. Also related to this is the pair of good rogue Shinma who end up frozen by the Queen Bitch Reiha in the Light of the Sea arc, and some others.
Comic Books
DC Animated Universe
- In the Static Shock/Superman The Animated Series crossover "Toys in the Hood", despite Superman helping Toyman's robot girlfriend hide from Toyman, after her self-destruct sequence is initiated by Toyman (after she betrays both Superman and him), Superman shows no concern whatsoever about her death. This is jarring, considering how far Superman will go to save even Lex Luthor. He'll grieve if he thinks Lex is dying, is a very strict vegetarian in several incarnations, and indeed was hesitant to kill Xenomorphs in a crossover with Aliens! He's frequently had a double standard with regard to non-biological life, though; see his lack of concern for the Bizarros.
- This is also pretty bad compared to the Superman episode where the robot girlfriend is introduced. The Toyman doesn't want to take over the world or destroy Metropolis; he just wants to get his property and get out. However Superman treats her like a human being, going to the Toyman's lair to rescue her. By the time he catches up to her and teams up with Static though, she's just a robot.
- On the other hand, Superman of the DCAU shows every once in a while that he has no problem being a Jerk Ass when he feels he needs to be. The Parasite episodes come to mind... He doesn't get any in Justice League, but he makes up for it in Unlimited.
- Of course, it's not that he doesn't care about Bizarro; Bizarro's too misguided to cause anything but harm on his own and is easily manipulated, so it's best to keep him away from Earth.
- And Bizarro was shown to be perfectly happy on his planet. He had a carefully-built (for him, anyways) rock Metropolis filled with rock people he interacted with, and when he wanted to be a hero, he rolled a boulder at them so he can stop it. And after a hard day of protecting the rock people of Rocktropolis, he went to his 'Cave of Alone-ness' to watch his rock TV with rock Lois on his rock couch. Oh, and play with his vicious alien creature... er, 'cute doggy' Krypto.
- Uncomfortably used in Justice League, where half of the League itself isn't human and, thus, probably ought to have given this issue more thought. Robots and Always Chaotic Evil gooey white aliens are destroyed without anyone blinking, no matter what they look like, and the latter can be painfully fried out of a human form. Giant monsters and things with too many tentacles get slaughtered easily. The Parademons in the Grand Finale receive Demonic Invaders status honorary of their name and are mercilessly mowed down in large numbers. However, directly killing any normal humans, human-like aliens, or alternate dimension duplicates is unacceptable, no matter how insane, murderous, violent, or dangerous the individual has demonstrated themselves to be. Violating Lex Luthor's Joker Immunity quickly sends an Alternate Universe Superman Jumping Off The Slippery Slope, making him a Knight Templar with the goal of stopping crime no matter the means.
- OF corse said White Aliens are the reason the Green martians are down to one.
- Mentioned somewhat in one episode where Martian Manhunter is admonishing Wonder Woman for being too aggressive lately. He brings up an incident against alien invaders, and Wonder Woman angrily replies that they weren't innocent, they thought that humans were food.
- Finally, in the Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo movie, one of the heroes gets called out on this after Robin has (apparently) accidentally killed a villain:
Robin: He wasn't human!
Inspector: Neither are most of your friends!
- In the Batman The Animated Series episode "Growing Pains", Robin befriends a lost, amnesiac little girl he names "Annie". The child turns out to be a portion of Clayface that has gained sentience and an identity of its own, and in the end is re-absorbed into the main body of the villain, effectively "killing" the girl as a separate person. Robin reacts as if she were always a separate being:
Police Officer: We'll book him on the robberies and B & E, right? Anything else?
Robin: Yeah, murder.
- In the Batman The Animated Series episode "Chemistry", Bruce Wayne is briefly engaged to a woman who turns out to be a plant clone created by Poison Ivy who he has a very real romance with. In the end he tosses his wedding ring into the water after watching the ship she is on burst into flames and sink.
- This is rather justified though. Bruce and many other wealthy people had been subdued by their new wedding partners through the effect of pheremones and the like. Once they had worn off, they realised that they had no attraction to these plant-people.
Fairytales
- Pinocchio anyone?
- Puss In Boots also has elements of this. When he first inherits the cat, the young man's plan is to make some money by selling its skin to make gloves. His sentient, talking cat. Another version has the master promise the cat a golden coffin upon death, in gratitude for all it has done for him. The cat suspects this to be a lie and plays dead. He is furious when the master instead plans to simply throw his body out the window.
Film
Literature
- In Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, Trillian is the only one who consistently treats Marvin as more than just a robot (or at least tries to). Marvin is hard-pressed to deal with that.
- In the Xanth book A Spell For Chameleon by Piers Anthony, a manticore asks a wizard whether it, only being 10% human, has a soul like they do. The answer is that the mere act of wondering whether one has a soul is proof of having one.
- Animorphs called attention to this one. The main characters are humans who resist an invasion of aliens called Yeerks while maintaining a Masquerade to the effect that this resistance consists not of humans, but of Andalites, a species of alien opposed to the Yeerks. One Yeerk figures out the truth by noticing that these supposed "Andalites" have killed many nonhuman aliens, but have seldom or never a human. Not to say that the killing of sentient aliens doesn't have an effect on the group (the leader laters suffers serious psychological problems because, near the end of the series, he orders several thousand sentient creatures killed with one punch of a button. And it wasn't particularly necessary.)
- This trope was also used to demonstrate how insane Sixth Column David actually was. He claimed that he would never kill another human, but the minute he transforms for the first time (as an eagle) he dive-bombs and kills a real bird for no reason. This very nastily foreshadows his complete lack of objections to trying to murder the other Animorphs while they were transformed, since he would "just be killing an animal". He also didn't have a problem with trying to kill Ax, who was an alien.
- Also used by the emissary of Crayak, who was not allowed to directly kill sentient organic species. Paraphrased:
"But you are killing us"
"No, I am merely putting you in a very hard to escape situation, if you can't figure it out, it's not my fault"
"But you are killing the Chee" (A race of sentient androids)
"They are just robots"
"What about the whale?"
"It is barely sentient, I will save it."
- The Chee are generally treated as people by the Animorphs, who are used to dealing with non-humans (One of them is a bird, one is an alien), and can't afford to be picky about their allies. However, in the finale, Jake relentlessly exploits their non-violent programming. Of course he's an asshole to pretty much everyone by that point, but this particular morally questionable act is apparently the only one he doesn't feel sorry for afterwards.
- The two primary Always Chaotic Evil races, Yeerks and Taxxons, who are slaughtered without second thoughts for most of the series, receive some sympathy by the Animorphs (in particular Cassie and Tobias, respectively), when it's discovered that their behaviour is caused by biological factors. Of course, this doesn't save them from being slaughtered en masse.
- Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files has this to the point where some of the heroes are trying to save the souls of
Demons fallen angels. and it works in the case of Lash. Or rather, an imprinted copy of the Fallen Angel Lasciel in Harry's mind. Actual fallen angels are said to be irredemeable, and even the Knights of the Cross who follow Honor Before Reason are amazed that it is even possible for a fallen's shadow to do a Heel Face Turn. The books follow the trope to an extend: ghouls, Red & Black Court vampires, being Always Chaotic Evil and ugly, are mowed down by the dozen. Zombies, being reanimated corpses, are crushed with not even a single thought. Even Renfields, humans who have been irreversably brainwashed into serving Black Court vampires, are treated as mooks by everyone except Lt. Murphy, who being a police officer, has trouble killing anything human.
- As for Renfields, though, part of the problem with killing them is that they are physically normal humans, which means that unlike most supernatural entities they leave normal corpses. Killing a Renfield would look like murder, would arguably be murder, and would leave a normal body lying around quite clearly suffering from a bullet hole or whatever.
- On the other hand, there are exceptions. Vampires have a phase in which they are partially converted (Red Court and White Court, at least; if Black Court do, we don't see it) during which time they can and should be helped and treated like people, albeit dangerous people. Harry tries to spare the life of werewolves, even dangerous ones ( even though he doesn't succeed). Harry treats faeries like people, and the only people we see who don't are, indeed, Complete Monsters.
- A major running theme of the later books of Orson Scott Card's first Ender series (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind), where aliens (human and non-) are rated based on how alike to oneself they are. It is acceptable - or at least a necessary evil - to kill aliens that are hostile and are impossible to communicate with, or that are possible to communicate with but so different in mindset that communication is essentially futile (lumped together under the term "varelse"). Non-human aliens that can be communicated with and peacefully coexisted with are termed "ramen." Perhaps most important to this scale is that these values are relative to the evaluator's own understanding of the alien: that is, once someone understands how to communicate with an alien, they instantly switch from varelse to ramen. Any alien species in the "varelse" category is a deficiency of understanding of the human classifying them as such. As such, some aliens encountered move from varelse to ramen over the course of one or more books, usually not without a significant degree of bloodshed before understanding by both sides is attained.
- Ultimately, the definition of "varelse" is changed: ones you cannot communicate with you simply stay away from. Varelse are species that knowingly exterminate other intelligent species; Humanity missed this with the Buggers by a single fertile female, and the Piggies by a Deus Ex Machina involving teleportation. So the jury's still out on whether or not Humans Are Bastards.
- In a similar vein, much of the plot of Philip K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (later adapted into Blade Runner) revolves around androids who are so incredibly advanced that it is impossible to tell them apart from actual humans without elaborate tests that need professional training to perform. The main character is a bounty hunter of androids, and he frequently questions the morality of what he is doing.
- A central theme in House Of The Scorpion where clones are declared nonhuman simply so they can be harvested for organs.
- Something very like this is involved in CS Lewis's The Silver Chair. The Big Bad forsakes a human form for that of a ginormous snake just before being vanquished, which makes hacking her head off more acceptable despite the fact that it's still the same person. May be more a case of Wouldnt Hit A Girl.
- In Lee Lightner's Warhammer 40000 Space Wolf novel Sons of Fenris, Cadmus, while surrounded by servitors, nevertheless thinks of himself as alone because they are more machine than man.
- Note that they really are- and not sentient machines either. Aside from physical enhancements, the process of creating a Servitor essentially consists of tearing out any part of the original human brain not immediately useful for the Servitor's assigned task. In a real sense they're dead- the practice of creating them shows just how much measure even a human is in the Crapsack World of Warhammer 40000.
- Although a Tech Priest would see otherwise.
- Used in reverse in Eric Nylund's A Pawn's Dream, Near the start of the story, a Dreamer shoots a coworker of the main character in the head while making sure he is caught on camera, then hires two corrupt cops to beat up and kidnap the protagonist. He then "rescues" the protagonist by killing the cops. He justifies his actions with "they were just non-Dreamers". The only difference between humans and Dreamers is a genetic ability to switch between the two worlds when asleep, giving them magic powers. This is apparently enough difference that humans can be killed just in case your secondary plan, mail him a letter, fails.
- Subverted in Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant, in which the conscientious Sam Vimes insists on going through proper police procedure, including asking the creature whether it is resisting arrest, before firing on an insane werewolf. The ethics of killing "monsters" that are also sentient creatures in the Discworld is dealt with in several of its books. For instance, Granny Weatherwax insists on having an anthropomorphic wolf given a proper burial after it is killed at its own request.
- The Big Bad was bringing Fairy Tales to life. In the fairy tale, the Big Bad Wolf behaves like a human, but it's okay to kill him like a wolf. By burying him as if he were human, Granny was fighting the story. So Pratchett was playing with how the story of Little Red Riding Hood is an example of this trope, making it Older Than Print.
- And of course there's Carrot, whose freeing of Dorfl started the golems' own peaceful self-liberation, and who once arrested a dragon.
- This is Carrot, after all, It would have been more surprising if he hadn't attempted to do those things
- ReaperMan even includes a zombie civil-rights activist, who moonlights as a police officer "Undead? Yes. Un-Person? NO!" And in the same book, after Windle Poons becomes a zombie, he's actually somewhat more alive than most humans.
- Handling the Dead (Hanteringen av odöda in Swedish) by John Ajvide Lindqvist is an incredible example of this conflict. The dead come back to life, and depending on how long they've been buried they may even retain basic speech and go through the same routines they did in life. This leads to a social debate about the morality of killing them and if they deserve any basic human rights.
- Subverted in JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, during the scene where Umbridge clashes with the resident centaur herd. She's scared stiff of part-humans and addresses herself as having authority to command them, but as the centaurs themselves state, "[their] intelligence far outstrips [her] own".
- Charles Stross plays with this a fair amount. In The Jennifer Morgue, it's a reasonably major plot point that the CIA doesn't consider anyone with demonic ancestry to be legally human. Early in Accelerando, the main character delivers an impassioned (and eventually mostly successful) plea for the rights of digitally uploaded personalities.
- The creature created by the titular Dr. Frankenstein definitely falls under this trope. Even with its intelligence and (at the beginning) good heart, because it's a conglomeration of dead body parts sewn together and brought back to life, fearsome apperance, and unchecked strength, it is immediately considered evil by not only its creator, but anyone who sees it. Therefore, despite the creature practically being his child, Victor has no remorse over his hatred and desire for the creature to die, simply because the creature is not really a human (and looks damn scary to boot).
- Note that this isn't at all portrayed positively, and the fact that the creature genuinely becomes brutal and vindictive is treated as entirely Frankenstein's fault.
- In The Thief Of Always, the hero remorselessly kills off the Big Bad's thoroughly convincing and, for all intents and purposes, living minions because they're just dust given life through illusion. The Big Bad calls him on this, pointing out that even if they weren't "real", he still killed them.
- Michael Crichton's final published book, Next, has quite a lot to say about this issue, as it has a few transgenic animal/humans in its cast of characters. (And indeed, Dave's backstory is very sad.) That said, it eventually gets to the point where even the rights of individual cells are questioned.
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro explores this issue with tragic results. The main characters are clones created for medical purposes, who will eventually die young as they become "donors". Hailsham boarding school was created in order to give the children better quality of life before they were forced to donate, as the first generations of clones were subject to horrendous conditions and were barely treated as people. Despite this, they are taught not to go against the donor program and willingly accept their slow deaths.
- Explored repeatedly in the "Second Foundation trilogy" by Bear, Brin, and Benford as they re-examine Asimov's Foundation universe. Asimovian robots are clearly sapient (if not always nice) beings, but have been programmed to protect humanity at all costs. They have no such restrictions regarding each other (they fight a galaxy-wide war over how best to
control guide take care of humans, and are prepared to execute one robot whose Three Laws have been accidentally erased because he might harm a human) or aliens (having wiped out multiple sapient species while terraforming the galaxy). Even "hero" Daneel Olivaw has considered secretly replacing "real" humans with re-engineered chimps made to look like the real thing but be more controllable.
- In Harry Turtledove's Colonization series, America secretly launches a nuclear strike against the Race's colonization fleet. Focus character Sam Yeager learns the truth and informs the Race, who respond by nuking Indianapolis in retribution (which in turn leads to the suicide of the President who ordered the attack). For the rest of the series, almost every member of the US government treats Yeager with thinly-veiled contempt or hatred for "selling out". When he likens the attack to Pearl Harbor, he's dismissed because the victims were "just Lizards".
- The book "I am Legend" has this trope as a plot point; in fact, it's the biggest one at the end of the book, when the protagonist learns that there are also "vampires" that don't feed on humans and yet he's been killing indiscriminately. To be fair, he didn't know about them.
- Draconians are seen like this (replace the "human" with the relevant name) by... well, everyone, including their "allies". Admittedly, they're usually evil, but even the upstanding ones get treated this way.
- In Wen Spencer's Endless Blue, the genetically modified Blues and Reds are non-human in human eyes, and can be bought and sold. Landing in a place where they interbred with normal humans produces Culture Clash. (This place also has plenty of aliens, giving them reasons to stick together.)
- The orcs in The Lord of the Rings have names and personalities, and seem to be mildly intelligent — they speak to each other much as normal people do. Do they also have families? Are there any female orcs, or orc children? It's never addressed, and orcs are slaughtered by the thousands in several bloody battles. Of course, it helps that their blood is black instead of red.
- Averted in Percy Jackson And The Olympians. Monsters don't die permanently, so any question of sentience is void
Live Action TV
- Omnipresent in the "Buffyverse":
- Similarly, Buffy The Vampire Slayer never really addressed the fact that Buffy would take a sword to any Monster Of The Week who made its presence known in Sunnydale in Season 1... but then leave her little sister in the care of Clem, a former one-off monster who turned out to be friendly, when the shit hit the fan in Season 6.
- Both instantiated and subverted in the episode "I Was Made to Love You" from season five of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where, after chasing Robot Girl April for most of the episode with the intent of bringing her down, Buffy finally ends up staying with her as she slowly fades away, allowing April to "die" with dignity. Later, however, she does not show such concern for the worth of the "Buffy-bot" Spike has built for his amusement. Certainly, anyone would be Squicked over being the basis of somebody's -ahem- artificial stimulation, but the series had established that these robots are people too.
- Buffy has no problem with beating Spike to a bloody pulp shortly after voluntarily sleeping with him after his Heel Face Turn. Well, she beat him to a bloody pulp while she was sleeping with him, too. Sure, Spike is a vampire (but so is Angel, Buffy's previous lover). The justification given was that Spike possessed no soul (true at that time), while Angel did.
- When Willow turns evil and kills people in season 6, Buffy tries her very best to help her and worries for her sake more than for the people she's trying to kill. When Anya turns evil in season 7, Buffy immediately decides she has to kill her, justification being Willow is human, Anya is a demon. It is explicitly said later in the episode that vengeance demons have souls, which makes it all a lot worse.
- There are other incidents in Buffy which suggest that, so far as Buffy is concerned, humans are outside her jurisdiction, end of story.
- Willow being "evil" in the first place. If Warren had been anything but human, nobody would have minded Willow going on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge. In fact, the group would have gone with her.
- Oddly, Smallville lampshaded it and tossed it aside in the 7th season finale. The sentient, apparently emotional robot Brainiac, at Clark's mercy, tells him he could never kill a man. Clark quickly replies "You're a machine," then electrifies him, and that's it.
- Russell T Davies has a rule for his tenure in Doctor Who prohibiting humans from shooting other humans with "real" weapons. This rule does not, obviously, extend to Cybernised humans, the Futurekind (savage humans) or the formerly-human Toclafane. In fact, the rule gets broken in Russell T Davies' own "Tooth and Claw", in which Queen Victoria shoots a human traitor with a revolver.
- Honestly this show suffers from this trope with the Doctor himself despite the Doctor being an alien. He kills numerous non-human aliens, he does try to show mercy usually but is a bit schizophrenic about it. On the other hand, he hasn't killed a single human on camera.
- Although they were all technically aliens, Power Rangers could kill "monstrous" villains but not "human" ones. In a particularly egregious case, a bunch of "monstrous" villains were killed but the few human-looking ones were turned good, with both of these outcomes resulting from the same attack.
- When he first appears, Andros, a Human Alien, cryptically says "Not everything human has to come from Earth." The meaning of this statement has been much debated in fandom, but seems to indicate that Power Rangers considers "looking human" and "being human" to be close enough.
- In an earlier episode, Ecliptor (one of the monsters vaporized in this attack) explains that he (and presumably other monstrous-looking villains) are evil because they were "built that way," while human villains were good-natured at heart but had been corrupted.
- More recent seasons have occasionally featured villains who were human - not Human Aliens or human-disguised monsters, but humans - being vaporized by the Rangers after taking on rubber suit advanced forms.
- Three very telling examples: Camille of Jungle Fury survives and turns good despite not being human (She has a human form, but traits like her prehensile tongue suggest that this is not her true form). On the other hand, Zeltrax of Dino Thunder, who does not have a face, is
killed destroyed, despite the fact that we are told not only that he is a human wearing cybernetic prostheses after a lab accident, we are even told his human name (It's Smitty). Likewise, Frax of Time Force is turned evil and ultimately dies, despite the fact that he also was once human before being forced into a robotic body.
- If the space series is any indication, where Zordon sacrificed himself to 'purge evil,' it could be more along the lines of their technology or whatever only recognizing and not destroying 'near-human' enemies. Astronema's right hand Ecliptor was an especially poignant example as he waffled between sides over his honour, yet still got vaped by Zordon anyway. Becoming cyborg reduces human quotient enough for the weapon to automatically swap from Stun to Kill settings. How this actually works is just....just something you don't even want to try and figure out.
- Just look at those scenes to see this trope. Rita and Zedd - turned good. Divatox - turned good. All the monsters and robots - dust. Including Prince Sprocket, who was technically a kid, and comic relief duo Goldar and Rito. If you think about it, shouldn't robots be easier than humans to reprogram as good?
- And this can not be pointed out strongly enough: Rito was Rita's brother. Unless Rita was originally a human(oid) adopted by Master Vile, ala Astronema.
- Several "Muppet" productions have addressed this. The little-known holiday special "The Christmas Toy" takes on the Living Toys issue (we're starting to sense a pattern here). In "The Muppet Movie", one of the first humans Kermit meets wants him to be the spokes-frog for "French Fried Frog's Legs", effectively selling out his species!
- In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis Expedition has allowed itself to perform war-crime experiments on some captured Wraith, because "if they were there when the Third Geneva Convention was signed, they would have eaten the attendees instead". This comes back to bite them, in the form of Michael.
- It gets worse. The Atlantis team has yet to extend sympathy to any non-human, including those that used to be human, like Weir. They guilt her into killing herself and all the other friendly sapient Replicators with her. Their utter disregard for non-humans of any kind is reaching Designated Hero / Complete Monster levels here.
- Some episodes show that the Wraith, or most of them, are not evil per se, but the laws of nature dictate that they feed on humans to survive. Those same laws dictate that humans do not calmly accept this, but instead kill Wraith to survive, ala dolphins killing sharks. It's all a matter of who wins, not good and evil, at least until the treatment to make Wraith not need to feed on humans is invented.
- The Wraiths' unexplained specific requirement of human Life Energy instead of nonsapient animals brings this far into the Fantastic Aesop territory. The species is just written to provoke this conflict.
- The team helped a non-human civilization's probe rebuild said civilization recently. It was kind of surprising that Sheppard was so amenable, given that the probe mentally tortured him.
- In Stargate SG 1, O'Neill got the whole freakin' galaxy in trouble by applying this trope on Humanoid Replicator "Fifth". If he'd just brought him with them when they escaped, he wouldn't have created RepliCarter, who would kill Fifth and attempt to wipe out the galaxy.
- From O'Neill's perspective, Fifth's Face Heel Turn just proves he was right not to trust him all along. But then. Jack's morality is a bit more black-and-white than the target audience's.
- Jack still has more shades of grey though than any of Atlantis' cast.
- Occasionally brought into question in regards to how casually the Goa'uld are thought of - sometimes when dealing with the Tok'ra and once with a trial between Skaara and the Goa'uld Klorel for who was allowed his body. Mostly, though, the trope is inverted with the Goa'uld, who think 'What Measure is a Human?'
- This issue is also addressed with the Unas in a number of episodes. They can seem quite menacing, but Daniel's learned how to communicate with them a bit and gets rather peeved when other people treat them like animals.
- The 2000s Battlestar Galactica is practically built on toying with every permutation of this trope. At the beginning, humans automatically treat Cylons as machines and Cylons automatically treat humans as cattle. As the series goes on, dissenters emerge in both races. Made more confused by the fact that Cylons, despite being artificially born and having cybernetic neural properties, practically are biologically human, and several 'human' characters are Cylon sleeper agents.
- Tokusatsu series Chouseishin Gransazer has an ugly version of this. Many episodes feature a Minor Character Of The Week, who may be a human or a benevolent alien. At the end of each such episode or arc, such a characer will almost always be saved if human, but an alien will invariably die. Often ostensibly by a Heroic Sacrifice, but to this viewer it came off as Redemption Equals Death to atone for the "crime" of being an alien.
- Farscape subverts the "duplicates are worthless" concept, hard, with a villain who has a machine that can create instant, perfect duplicates - such that the question of "which is the original" is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless. When Chiana is duplicated and one of them is killed, she tries very, very hard to convince herself that she's okay because it was just a clone and she's definitely the original... but she chokes up when she gives this speech. Both Johns are treated as equal, and when one of them dies, Aeryn can't even look the other in the face for a while. Also, the All The Myriad Ways treatment of identical opposites is thoroughly deconstructed (see that page). As for the show's and the characters' treatment of humans versus non-humans, well, the characters are various degrees of amoral and the creators love painful deaths, so it's hard to say.
- The Winchesters of Supernatural and their allies seem to care less and less about killing or torturing demons as the show goes on, despite them possessing human bodies with the original occupant still in there. To be fair, they are in a very bad situation where mercy isn't always an option, and it's stated and shown that many demons put their hosts through a lot of punishment, possibily killing them even if they are expelled. This is why the human version of Meg calling Sam out on it was such an awesome moment. When Ruby tries to persuade Sam to work with her, Sam orders her to vacate her current host. To placate him, she goes to a hospital and possess a woman who was about to die, which Sam reluctantly accepts.
- Hercules The Legendary Journeys explores the question in an episode which reveals that most of the mythological monsters Hercules killed during the first season were, at one point, just as sentient and emotionally complex as anyone else. Though it's played for comedy at first, as Hercules learns all this from their bumbling Gentle Giant father, it comes to a dramatic head when he finds out that Hercules has killed them all: the ensuing fight's only resolved when a regretful Hercules (now realizing that he'd unfairly dismissed them as mindless monsters) convinces him that there really wasn't any other option, since Big Bad Hera had brainwashed them into becoming her Evil Minions.
- This is exploited in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Screaming Skull. Before the main film, Mike and the 'bots watch the Gumby short "Robot Rumpus", in which a bunch of housework-performing (and apparently non-sapient) robots go rampant and start destroying property. Gumby and his dad forcibly dismantle the wayward robots, and this is all presented as comedy. Crow and Tom Servo, robots themselves, are thoroughly traumatized by the proceedings.
- On the other hand, Tom Servo has hundreds of duplicates of himself, and takes no issue with blowing them up at the end of the series.
- A question often posed in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, especially relating to Cameron. The characters have varying degrees of belief in the value of Terminators as a whole and Cameron in particular; Derek Reese views her as a dangerous, inhuman threat, Sarah views her as a useful machine but who lacks emotions or a soul, and John views her as a close confidant, protector, and friend who he'll go to any lengths to protect, just as she would for him.
- Interestingly, even Cameron herself angsts over this, paradoxically seeming to possess something like enough to a soul to be capable of being bothered by the idea of not having one.
- Something similar has popped up in, of all places, the past few years of Witchblade; Sara Pezzini has read a monster its rights at least twice. Of course, the monster responds by attacking and she gets to kill it anyway.
- This was brutally answered in an episode of The Twilight Zone called "The Lonely". A man who has been exiled to an asteroid for life is left with a female robot by a sympathetic captain. The man eventually falls in love with the robot. During his next visit, the captain tells him he's been pardoned and can come home, but there is no room for the robot. While the man tries to think of a way to take her with him, the captain shoots it in the face, revealing its wires and circutry. Seeing it for what it really is, the man leaves it behind.
Star Trek
- The standard Star Trek Aesop was that all sentient races should be treated equal. Kirk didn't kill the Gorn commander, even though the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens had set them up to fight to the death.
- Star Trek The Next Generation explored this question, primarily with the android Data. In "Measure Of A Man," he is the subject of a hearing by the Judge Advocate General of Starfleet to determine his legal status: is he property or a person? The judge mentioned that they were "dancing around the basic issue -does Data have a soul?", which she concluded could not be proven or disproven, just as it could not proven or disproven for humans and other organic sentients. Later episodes on the topic featured Data defending the right of other artificial sentients to live, and the question of Data's "daughter," Lal.
- More than a little Anvilicious, given that Data already held the rank of Lieutenant Commander prior to this. It's rather implausible that Starfleet, or any military or quasi-military organization, would put someone/thing they considered "property" in a position to issue orders to those considered unambiguously to be "people".
- To be fair, Starfleet is a pretty huge organisation. What the officers who gave Data his rank and the ones who try to treat him a property think need not be the same.
- Star Trek Voyager explored the rights of the holographic doctor, including his right to have a say in his treatment. In one episode, rather than delete months of his memory (and personality), Janeway eventually allowed him to work through psychological problems that could have kept him out of Sickbay for weeks or even months — despite the risk this might pose to the crew. Janeway had initially decided to just reboot the Doc, but changed her mind upon talking to Seven of Nine. When Janeway pointed out that the Doc was more like a replicator than a human, Seven pointed out that she, too, being Borg, was composed of parts not unlike the replicator, and wondered whether Janeway would eventually override her free will as well.
- In one episode of Voyager, the Doctor had written a novel and submitted a draft, pre-editing, that the publisher thought was delightfully salacious in the way it seemed to impugn the Voyager crew, and promptly started distributing. The Doctor sued to have it stopped; the publisher argued he couldn't sue because he wasn't a person. This editor was waiting through the entire episode for someone to look through Starfleet's records and discover that an artificial being that has intelligence that can improve itself, have sex, and express itself artistically is a person, because Data was found to be so in the second season of The Next Generation. This was done again with polymorphic tools called Exocomps that were proven to have gained low-level intelligence and were excellent problem-solvers. Admittedly, ruling that the Doctor was a person would open the door to ruling the same for Mark I EMHs all over the Federation, who had by then been consigned to manual labor; meanwhile, there was only one Data. It gets even less justifiable when you consider that the Doctor is essentially a Projected Android.
- Wait, the Doctor and Data can ''have sex''?!
- Can and did. As Data told Tasha Yar, he is "fully functional". And holograms made out of Hard Light could be programmed for anything, sex included, just ask the Ferengi Quark and his holosuite brothel. The Doc specifically said so, in "Message in a Bottle", when the EMH-II asked about his self-applied "upgrades".
- The EMH-II asked the Doc to upload those modification to his database before leaving. Quite why the solid projection of a computer programme designed purely to be a doctor would be so keen on sex that he'd ask for a penis to be added 20 mins after being turned on for the first time is never made clear.
- Also, all other holograms. If the world recognizes the fact that the Doctor achieved full sentience after being left running for long enough, suddenly using a Projected Man the way all the TNG-era Treks do becomes the stem cell debate times a thousand. Using them as novel characters (let alone combat practice) would be right out. As such, Starfleet recognizing the Doctor as a person is never going to happen. Ever. Interestingly, it does seem that your average Trek hologram can become sentient if given the chance: Just ask not only the Doctor, but the hologram Hirogen prey from Flesh and Blood, the woman we thought was Dr. Zimmerman's daughter until Deanna found she couldn't read her, Vic Fontaine, Professor Moriarty, and on and on. Trek hologram use is serious Moral Dissonance. And, since AI Is A Crapshoot, it bites them in the hindparts enough that such use goes beyond Genre Blindness and into What An Idiot territory.
- Carried even further, the right to vote was mentioned inside the episode. The Federation quite sensibly has no desire to extend suffrage to an easily-replicated computer program that can be given whatever personality, desires and values the programmer wants it to have (not to mention have it's Ethics directory deleted with a push of a button). For what it's worth, the final decision is a bit of a subversion of the usual outcome: the court decides that the Doctor is not legally a "person". However, in a Pound Of Flesh Twist twist, the court decides that while he does not qualify as a "person", he does qualify as an "artist", and therefore is granted ownership rights to his holonovel anyway. There have been instances of respecting non-Doctor holograms, though, such as Janeway putting the ship at risk to save the holographic town of Fair Haven. Except that the town's achievement of self-awareness was treated as a malfunction to be fixed—a malfunction specifically caused by running too long, the usual cause of sentient holograms.
- Who says all holograms are created equal? The Doctor is obviously very powerful and sophisticated, but a combat practice hologram could be little more "intelligent" than an AI bot in a video game—a completely unliving set of routines with no consciousness or sensations.
- Entire story arcs are dedicated to analyzing the status of holograms... and never really reach a satisfactory conclusion. Janeway actually breaks the Prime Directive and buys off a entire race of Egomaniacal Hunters with hologram technology; they refine and develop the technology so the holograms feel pain, fear and rage. This makes AI a crapshoot with loaded dice; they rebel and start killing every one of them they can find. The Doctor sympathizes with them, but a truly disturbing conversation ensues where the "flesh and blood" characters blithely discuss modifying their programs in ways that could only be performed on organics via brain surgery. The Doctor defects, and it looks like a Wham Episode awaits... then they render the whole plot moot by showing that the rebel holograms have gone Colonel Kilgore; they kill organics to "rescue" holograms no more intelligent than tricorders, then strand the hunters on a toxic moon to hunt them down themselves. They're rescued, the Doctor is forced to eat crow, and one of the "nice" hunters decides to pretend he's dead and "fix" the holograms. So Yeah.
- In a Mirror Universe episode of Enterprise, this trope is played with to an almost sadistic degree. The viewers get to see the crew torture an insect-like Tholian by lowering the temperature in it's prison cell to uncomfortable depths. (Tholians naturally exist at extreme levels of heat and pressure.) To really drive it in, we get a close-up view as the creature explodes. What makes it worse is that the Tholians are fighting against the Federation and their cruelty towards non-humanoids in this Universe (for the record, there's no closeup as a helpless humanoid Gorn gets shot half a dozen times). Given the lurid special effects during the torture scene, this became a deeply Family Unfriendly Aesop for many.
- The treatment of duplicates in Trek is even more schizophrenic. Just to examine two episodes featuring Riker:
- In Up the Long Ladder, the crew encounters the Mariposans, a planet whose hat is reproduction through cloning, but the "replicative fading" is starting to catch up to them. They rip off DNA from Riker and Pulaski. When this is discovered, Riker and Pulaski (a doctor!) find the lab and blithely massacre the duplicates. Riker states that the clones' existence "diminishes" him.
- The clones that Riker destroyed were only partially formed things, looking diaphanous and only vegetatively alive. Which would make it more akin to abortion, but Trek wasn't going to touch that.
- In Second Chances, the crew discovers another Riker (who comes to use "Thomas", his middle name), created unknowingly by a transporter accident early in Will Riker's career. Even though they clash, Tom's personhood is never questioned (Will treats him as the twin brother he never knew and even saves him!), and he eventually comes to be treated as if he were a newly awake coma patient, leaving to build a new life.
- Though the accident that created Thomas simply sent equal parts of Riker to two different locations, so that they were both equally the "real" Riker. The clones, on the other hand, were just copies of the originals, though that doesn't diminish the Moral Dissonance of killing them.
- Especially when one remembers that in the Deep Space Nine episode 'A Man Alone' Odo actually specifically states that killing your own clone is still murder.
- The main villains of Deep Space Nine are the Jem'hadar, genetically-engineered super-soldiers. They're bred to be obedient and violent, and there are an awful lot of them. Their main purpose is to get killed in hand-to-hand battles. Every once in a while we meet an individual Jem'hadar who acts almost like an ordinary person, and our heroes pause to consider their humanity. Which doesn't stop them from killing the Jem'hadar by, for example, destroying the source of the drug that keeps them alive.
- The Next Generation played with this trope a little more with the Borg. The average Borg was a drone with no individuality whatsoever — until the crew met Hugh, who got separated from the Collective and started behaving more and more like a real person. The crew gave him a name and eventually decided it was wrong to use their new friend to wipe out the rest of the Borg with a virus.
Machinima
- Averted in Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction - the Chairman of the Oversight Committee implies that their government has a series of moral guidelines for dealing with AIs. After evidence that the Director of Project Freelancer tortured an AI in his experiments comes to light, the government decides to create a set of strict morality protocols.
- Subverted: In the Epilogue, the Director justifies his actions, implying that the torture he inflicted on the Alpha AI was acceptable because it was created based on his own mind - he was essentially torturing himself.
- And odds are same with the main Halo universe which Rv B is based on.
Tabletop Games
- The value of nonhuman life is often very low in Heroic Fantasy, particularly so in Dungeons And Dragons, in which "savage" humanoids such as orcs or goblins get slaughtered en masse. In Tolkien, orcs were practically evil-shaped-like-a-man, so it can be excused, but in D&D they're just another species whose culture happens to be at odds with humans'. The game's 3rd Edition had downplayed this, going to greater lengths to give humanoids distinctive cultures and making them fully playable races. (Most campaigns still mow them down by the hundreds, though.) The 4th edition, while adding new exotic races like living constructs and dragonkin, has removed half-orcs, among other things, from the playable races, at least for now. See Always Chaotic Evil. Of course, human life has little to no value as well.
- This may arguably be in part because the game system, owing to its historical wargame roots, makes killing opposing combatants the default way of dealing with them. Nonlethal and especially unarmed attacks tend to get significantly penalized in any edition of the game.
- Taken to a hilariously hypocritical point in the 3.5 edition add-on Book Of Exalted Deeds, with the Vow of Nonviolence. In order to get a bonuses in certain areas, the character takes a sacred vow to never kill a humanoid or monstrous humanoid, if it can be helped. Okay, there's just one problem: humanoid and monstrous humanoid protects orcs and humans and elves and so on. Know what it doesn't protect? Angels, planetouched and elans (both are which ARE humans, but don't have the humanoid type), dragons (over half of which are more good than angels), and, you guessed it, puppies. Also there's the tiny fact that this feat stipulates that if an opponent refuses to surrender, your allies are allowed to kill them with no penalty. So there's the ultimate godly forgiveness... and no need to apply it to the people who honestly believe differently than you, and you can still beat anything with more than two hands and two legs.
- Lords Of Madness tops the BoED in this specific regard. It starts with lumping things into never-before-present Meta Origin and continues with "Aberration Hunter" idea and corresponding magic effects. Given that Aberration is a type where all monsters not fitting into others can be piled (though one can squirrel away cute ones into Magic Beast at will) and 3rd edition adds an Mix And Mash Worlds to the old D&D Mix And Match Critters tradition, the whole picture is rather... funny: The Multiverse rightfully belongs to the humanoids and knows it. That's after AD&D Monster Manuals where everything has "Ecology" entry.
- The old Marvel Super Heroes game from the '80s replaced the experience systems with a "Karma" system that rewarded heroes for doing heroic things, and penalized them for being unheroic. Killing a living person reset you to zero. But robots didn't count, so you could kill them all you wanted. Problem was, people like The Vision or Machine Man were also counted as robots. So you could gun down the Vision without penalty, unless you nicked the Scarlet Witch in the process. (This was clarified in a supplement to mean non-sentient robots, but by then the damage was done.)
- In one particular Living Greyhawk Veluna event a city of sentient illusions was discovered. This led to a lengthy discussion both in and out of character by many players, continuing in discussions of the event on internet chat communities, concerning whether or not the illusions destroyed were "people".
- Early on, the fact that the Ravenloft setting is evidently an artificial creation of the Dark Powers caused some gamers to argue that, if the domains weren't "real", then neither are the people who live there: that other than Mist-napped outlanders, everyone in the setting was only a construct and could be killed with impunity. Having Feast of Goblyns, the first published adventure for the setting, involve the creation and dissolution of a populated domain, due to the P Cs' own actions, did nothing to clear up this Moral Dissonance.
- Debates of this sort eventually quieted down after the Domains of Dread hardback and 3E products from Arthaus made playing natives of the Land of Mists more common. Guess nobody wants their player character to be branded "only a construct".
- Warhammer 40000 deals with this quite handily - anything that isn't human must be purged with flame. Or humans who vary too far from the flawless ideal. And anything human that has talked to anything non-human. Or looked at it too long. Or any human that won't worship the Emperor. Or anyone who condones the above. Not to mention even if you are considered human still, your individual death generally won't miff the higher-ups in the Imperium - not having died fighting is probably considered much worse to the military.
- Sure, but being all the grim and all, it's clearly stated in the novels of Ciaphas Cain that commisairs who mistreat their troops (to give an specific example) dont last longer, since they usually end as victims of friendly fire, seriously, humans can be cannon fodder in 40K, but they still have enough sense of preservation and justice to know when something is going really wrong, and they would rebel against incompetent and corrupt governors and commanders (ok, if they are lucky superior instances like the Inquisition will give them the reason, otherwise, you couldn't say at least they tried...), even the own Inquisition have shown that those too happy-triger and eager to use Exterminatus will sooner or later have to answer for their actions.
- The SpaceMarines are discussed by fans on whether they are actually human, due to their being genetically-engineered and mentally conditioned toward their duty of serving the Imperium (mostly by fighting), both of which essentially makes them superhuman on the battlefield at the very least - though casuality is usually not brought up (you know, being Warhammer 40000).
- Population of the Imperium considers Space Marines more like legendary figures send by the Emperor himself, which means they are actually seen by the average imperial citizen as better than any other human (and respectfuly feared).
- In False Gods, a Titan commander responds to a general alert by saying that he'd be opening fire if he was with the Imperial Army, but wasn't going to risk it for Marines.
- Then again, every race in Warhammer 40000 thinks the same way. Even the "idiotic to the point of hilarity" orks. What measure is a non ork, anyone?
- "Crump any o' dose gits what ain't Orky enuff!!!!"
- The Eldar are willing to sacrifice millions of human lives to protect their Craftworlds. They are a dying race, but they do go to extremes.
- The Eldar would be willing to sacrifice millions of Human lives to protect one Eldar. "What measure is a Non-Eldar" is the cornerstone of their culture.
- The Dark Eldar rape, torture and kill anything "inferior". defined as "anything not Dark Eldar, as well as those Dark Eldar dumb enough not to manage to avoid it". They do this to save themselves from Slaanesh. "Better you than me" is their entire racial philosophy.
- Well, these orks ARE fungus after all... It's harder to garner player sympathy when one can replace himself a hundred times over by scratching his chin to flake off his skin. And to the credit of the Orks, they aren't about to change anyone's preconceptions. (Going by Deth Squadron, and how they are with each other, and how they handle death, treating them any other way would probably offend them and just cause them to WAAUUGGH! harder.) In general, Orks and Necrons are purely walking Shoot Me signs. That can shoot back. A lot.
- And according to some fluff, they handle death so well partially because the Nightbringer missed them out on his Great Fear Of Death Mind Rape Spree and partially because they believe wholeheartedly in reincarnation - if an Ork loses a friend, he figures "Krogsnik's gonna get back an' go krump sum uvver gitz soon!"
- Believe it or not, the Phyrexian Sleepers in MTG. In Time Streams I knew a few girls who fell for Kerrick and were heartbroken by the fact he was Phyrexian and when he wanted to kill Jhoira.
Theater
- Brought up during the second act of Into the Woods, when the characters are figuring out how to deal with a rampaging giant:
Witch: Since when did you get so squeamish? How many wolves have you carved up?
Little Red Riding Hood: A wolf's not the same as a person!
Witch: Ask a wolf's mother.
Video Games
- In Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, it is against the "rules of war" to use nerve gas on your enemies; doing so will earn you the ire of all the other factions. But in the Alien Crossfire expansion, nobody bats an eyelash if you use the nerve gas on the Progenitor (non-human) factions (still, the Progenitor factions feel the same way toward humans, so this may explain things).
- The "rules of war" in SMAC are a mutually agreed upon set of regulations that can be disbanded by 67% majority vote. The Progenitors have never signed the treaty, and do therefore not fall under it's protection. Additionally, most CPU factions will push to remove the regulations if they ever think it will benefit them.
- Console RPGs in general, even in the cutesiest and most family-friendly games, follow the example of Dungeons And Dragons by having by having the protagonists cheerfully slaughter armies and armies of various non-human and semi-human creatures, sometimes to the point of genocide, throughout their quest. Very rarely is the morality of this questioned, and its visual impact is usually lessened since Everything Fades. To be fair, games like Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII treat the deaths of human enemies the same way, so it's hard to ascribe it wholly to human-centrism.
- On the other hand, we see a number of more or less unique defeated enemies (only occasionally mini-bosses, like Biggs and Wedge) return to attack the players again (likewise with the Turks in FFVII, though they were all humans). So we can assume that defeated enemies are not quite as dead as they seem. This still doesn't make all the enemies you supposedly 'knock out' and leave behind when escaping the inevitable base on a self-destruct countdown any less dead though.
- Possibly purposefully used in Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII by Zack's mentor Angeal, when he purposefully turns himself into a monstrous form in order to force Zack to kill him, after Zack proves reluctant to even fight back against him in his human form. However, he changes back before dying and Zack is completely devastated regardless, so it doesn't exactly suggest that he was worth less because of it.
- The trope itself is used in other places in the game, however, such as in regards to Genesis' clones, which are treated just like the monsters, despite looking human, and are perfectly okay to kill in large numbers.
- Final Fantasy X has the "fiends" composed of "pyreflies", "bundles of life energy", which are freed by the destruction of the monster.
- Fiends are what you get when people aren't given last rites, and it's considered truly horrifying when it occurs. Killing the resulting monsters is considered a case of Shoot The Dog... or the dog will eventually kill a lot more people and create more fiends.
- Sometimes individual quests, designed by more thoughtful programmers, will have a nonviolent option, which will often give more XP than just killing them. These could be more jarring than the standard way of doing it because not every quest where it would be reasonable has such an option.
- World Destruction (or Sands Of Destruction). You have good guys being humans and beastmen having bad guys. There are some beastmen who tags in your party (and are actually part of the bad team), but the problem is that they barely look like beasts at all.
- Kingdom Hearts has an odd relationship with this trope. Disney villains tend to retain their original fate, which often means that their deaths take place in a less-human form - though the ones who remain human aren't any less likely to die. Series-exclusive villains, on the other hand, are rarely fully human, even when they look like they should be.
- Nobodies are a particularly controversial example, due to the stark juxtaposition of the sympathetic development focused on the Player Character Roxas, as well as Namine and Axel throughout the unusually long prologue and Yen Sid's claim that Nobodies feel no emotion and hence aren't really people. The fact that Sora believes that claim and acts accordingly practically ensures Internet Backdraft in any discussion involving the morality of Nobodies.
- For example, Nobodies don't have hearts, so they don't have emotions. However, they pretend to have emotions when they believe they should feel a certain way, because they still retain the memories of their past lives (when they were actually human). So what's the difference between faking an emotion and actually having them? Well, normal people would say "Well, if you were faking an emotion, you probably feel different than the emotion you're faking." But they DON'T feel different, because they can't. So are they really faking?
- In the end, it's not really a point for discussion in the main storyline, as the methods or Org. 13 leave something to be desired, and they do actively attempt to kill Sora.
- the Riku Replica starts questioning his own existence after he realizes that he's not the real Riku. He then goes on to attempt to kill the real Riku so he can become the real one.
- Lampshaded in Tales Of Symphonia in a z-skit between Genis and Regal - because he's hurt and killed dozens, if not hundreds, of humans and half-elves in self-defence, Genis is unwilling to hate Regal purely for being an admitted murderer.
- It is also played straight numerous times throughout the game. Half-Elves are hated by humans for just not being human, and also by the Elves for not being elves. And then the Chosen who are treated badly for nothing more than being born with a Cruxis Crystal in their hand. (Mind you, this is related to the Big Bad's plan.)
- Dragon Quest games (from Dragon Quest IV on) elevate the monsters from dangerous animals to intelligent (sometimes) creatures that can learn human language, work with humans, and in some games form towns, thus making this trope painfully obvious. Retooling the entire game system to avoid it doesn't appear likely, though, especially since it treats the vanishingly rare human enemies the same way.
- One of the worst examples is in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, where the main character and his monster partner hesitate to fight the Big Bad because he's human. Then, as soon as he goes One Winged Angel and transforms into a monster, the main character's partner says something that roughly means "He's not even human anymore! It's okay to kill him now!" It's a bit strange to hear a monster saying that, since it's eventually evoking this trope on itself by saying it's fine and dandy to kill monsters.
- It's a major recurring theme in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and its sequel Radiant Dawn that the Laguz, basically shapeshifting Petting Zoo People who can turn into animals, are discriminated against by the majority of their "Beorc" (Human) neighbors. The offspring of a Beorc and a Laguz, called Branded because of the markings on their skin, isn't always accepted by either, though a Branded may be able to pass off as an ordinary Beorc if the brand is covered or passed off as the mark of a spirit charmer (Beorc who have gained magic abilities by forming pacts with spirits, which results in the pact-maker having a mark similar to that of a Branded). The Begnion Empire in particular kept the Cat and Tiger tribes as slaves for many years, and the corrupt Senators of the empire had the entire population of the Heron Tribe massacred (except four members of the royal family) and their forest burned to the ground after blaming them for the assassination of their previous Empress, which the Senators themselves orchestrated. Furthermore, the Big Bad of the first game, the Mad King Ashnard of Daein, was an outspoken bigot against the Laguz, as were most of the people of Daein. Ashnard married the princess of the Dragon Tribe, knowing that she would lose her power to transform after conceiving their son. He even enslaved his wife's brother, using him as a mount like a common Wyvern just to further insult the Dragon Tribe.
- Racism is actually something Ashnard is not guilty of. He's a true Darwinist and Blood Knight.
- Pelleas is not related to Ashnard. It's Soren, the wind mage who may be gay for Ike, who's actually his son. And judging by the fact that there was someone who was taking care of him, Ashnard might of had some care for him, however little that may be.
- Another Fire Emblem example is the seventh game (first one released in North America.) Your major enemies are BetaBaddies who are pretty much human except for their eye & hair color. Your army has no problem destroying them by the hundreds, yet go out of their way to subdue and capture human opponents.
- Another issue involves the several side missions that deal with Kishuna, the first (and incomplete) artificial creature. During several flashbacks, the Big Bad contemplates on whether Kishuna was alive or not, eventually banishing it for not being good enough. The heroes never fully understand why Kishuna blocks their path with armed guards, and the game is pretty vague about its motives (if any.) But the mission goal is "defeat Kishuna" so they destroy him too.
- Portal has a strange example in the Weighted Companion Cube, which GLaDOS insists vehemently is not conscious, does not speak and "only feels some pain," and the Cube itself is no different from any of the other plain blocks that you've used throughout the game except for a heart decal. You're forced to "euthanize" it in order to progress, and GLaDOS will taunt you until you do so. Despite the fact that it is ostensibly an inanimate object, GLaDOS maintains that you're a murderer for destroying it and notes you set a new record in how little time it took you to destroy your "loyal companion". Even more interesting is the explicit parallels given between that act and GLaDOS's destruction, not to mention that the Weighted Companion Cube is one of the game's most popular characters.
- Considering there are only three characters (four if you include the cute talking gunturrets) all of them are among the game's most popular characters.
- Pfft: nobody gives a damn about Chell.
- The early Contra games had the main player character and several enemy characters changed into robots when localized for Europe for this reason. Apparently in some countries, Germany supposedly, depiction of violence against humans in games is not suitable for kids. Despite this censorship, some thought the robots of Probotector, the new name of the series, were much better protagonists than the original Rambo/Predator inspired humans.
- Sergei Vladimir stays one step ahead of the undead, demonic, but humanoid Albert Wesker through most of Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. But when Sergei turns himself into a "thing", it's all over.
- A villain's chances of success actually seem to decrease in Resident Evil once they go One Winged Angel.
- Dungeon Siege II: Broken World: Even though a lot of peoples' friends and loved ones have been turned into murderous Bound creatures and insane Rogue Magi, said people still get mad at you for killing the Bound creatures. As a matter of fact, only the first questgiver in the game sees the wisdom of what you needed to do.
- Not quite subverted, but played a little differently in Mass Effect: after slaughtering his/her way through legions of homicidal alien Big Creepy Crawlies, the protagonist finds out that the Rachni are actually sentient and potentially peaceful beings who were may have been manipulated by Reapers. After finding this out though, you still have to kill them all, since they are irredeemably insane due to the treatments they received. The queen however, you can choose to set free and allow her to reestablish the species in a peaceful manner, or you can kill her and put the species into extinction once and for all.
- Played straight with the Geth, sentient (confirmed by their own creators) robots who are nothing short of Mecha Mooks. While they are given a justification for what they are doing, as well as their Robot Uprising against their creator, no effort is made to try and talk them down or convince to stop what they are doing. On the other hand, traitorous Proud Warrior Race Guy Saren and his associate Benezia all given a chance to surrender.
- Interestingly, in a conversation with a Quarian NPC (the Geth's creators), the Player can point out that, by trying to exterminate the Geth during the beginning of their fledging sentience, the Geth were just trying to protect themselves. Any sympathy for the Geth is summarily abolished however by their tendency of impaling prisoners on spikes. Without even asking.
- That, and the fact that all attempts to try to set up a peaceful coexistence with the Geth are met with massed fire and/or sending the diplomats back impaled on spikes doesn't help much.
- Then you later find out, in Mass Effect 2, the geth you encounter were the minority, most geth are in fact peaceful, they never leave their space out because organics fear and shoot them, and are keeping the quarian homeworlds safe and would gladly give them back if they just asked. Menwhile the quarians are plaining to commite geoncide on them, even wend Legion (your geth team mate) tells not only states the above, but if they do the geth with easly beat the crap out of them, they don't listen.
- The game Jet Force Gemini garnered a Teen rating from the ESRB, in spite of the fact that most enemies (and, er, friends) can be shot, blown up, set on fire, horribly dismembered, electrocuted, etc. etc. and always in a horrifically overdone shower of blood and gore by the player. This is entirely because the antagonists are all hideous insectoid aliens, and therefore acceptable for slaughtering.
- Likely the innate human fear of creepy crawly things is why bugs are #1 bad guys in games.
- In MMORPG Runescape, this is parodied when in a quest cutscene an NPC guard openly acknowledges that the guards are killed all the time with noone complaining. Of course his partner is horrified, at least until someone comes and kills both of them
- The First Person Shooter F.E.A.R. has both clone supersoldiers and the occasional normal security guard as enemies. Despite the latter being realistically much weaker and easier to kill... they're inexplicably much harder to gib — though not impossible.
- Played with in the sequel, Project Origin, where the disturbing nature of the Replica and the logistics and mentality of them comes into play. The Replica themselves are specifically stated as "disposable" and "easily replaced," and spend most of their lives sealed inside stasis tubes until activated - at which point they emerge, ready for combat, instantly. They are utterly and completely loyal to their missions and won't break even when flat-out terrified, which makes their existence disturbing and, in a way, almost sad.
- Professor Layton And The Curious Village brings up this trope a small bit, right near the very end. If the Golden Apple - the treasure, that is - is taken out of the village, all of the villagers will stop working and, effectively, die. Of course, Luke, Flora, and Layton don't lay a hand on it.
- Certain RPG series, including Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire, feature races based on real-life animals that possess their own societies, their own cultures, and so forth, that more or less get on with human society. They may live among humans like any other citizen, or they may possess their own reclusive societies, but they are not viewed as monsters the player has to fight or kill in the same way that orcs and goblins are in Dungeons and Dragons.
- Persona 3 uses it twice, with Aegis and once with Ryoji. In the first example, it's an inversion, since Aegis is questioning her life's worth as it compares to the humans on the team, who all consider her to be just as important as they are. This is driven home when she's repaired near the end of the game, and it's clear that the other members of the team wanted her back not just for her power in combat, but so that she would be back. The second may also be an inversion, as it's a non-human character begging to be killed in order to spare the rest of the main characters from suffering. Doing so nets you a Nonstandard Game Over.
- Also in Persona 4, one of your party members (Teddie). is A lonely shadow who took a more family friendly form and learned to speak so that he could be friends with humans (despite being a shadow he has to face his own shadow and later summons a persona).. After getting his persona he gets a human form..Thats a whole lot of spoilers.
- And don't forget you can avert combat with everyone in previous installments (the creatures of myth and legend and some just completely random looking) by talking to them. Well, except the humans, because HumansAreBastards and will try to kill you no matter what you say. Kind of an inversion, but only kind of as they have story-related reasons for their shoot-first-ask-later mentality. You aren't really killing anyone in an unjustified manner, no matter how many humans you randomly encounter and slaughter. Also many of the boss enemies are human and must be killed, or under the control of said humans.
- In Megaman Battle Network the first game says Navis are not really sentient, they just follow their programing (that happens to be the same reason Chobits gives) Megaman, being a Replacement Goldfish made from a human is, as is Bass, being being born of the collective information on the internet. But latter games are not entirely consistent in the regard, treating them more and more human each game. In addition mentions of back up copys disappear after the 2nd game, makeing deletion a permanent ordeal, an obvious move to humanizing them.
- In Mega Man Star Force, Geo deletes a Jammer with impunity until he finds out that he's a human merged with a virus. (He actually saved him from said virus, and he's just knocked out.)
- After the first generation, Pokedex entries mentioning Pokemon eating one another existed only when reused or slightly altered from existing mentions, corresponding to increased humanity by Pokemon as the series goes.
- That still doesn't stop trainers from collecting them and stuffing them in boxes, never to be seen again. The game treats Pokemon as pets and if dead, treats them just like one would the death of a family member/pet. The anime treats any Pokemon death dramatically, which is not much more different than the other parts of the franchise, except it does much more with it. The manga doesn't really feature death or injuries; aside from the Arbok incident and Pryce's Lapras dying, humans are more subjected to this than the Pokemon themselves.
- World of Warcraft offers from Fridge Logic when it comes to low level quests, several of which boil down "Clear out those pesky gnomes/orcs/whatever so we can get back in the mine." Players refer to them as "Ethnic Cleansing" quests.
- The Forsaken and the Ebon Blade fit this. Both groups are undead and neither care if people in their own group are killed. So the 'sub-humans' themselves are falling to this trope.
- This becomes one of the central issues in the Geneforge series. The Shapers treat their creations as living weapons, tools, or at best servants. Creatures who show too much intelligence or willfulness are frequently killed. Even the human Rebels who are supposedly fighting for the rights of creations are willing to use the less-intelligent creations as Mooks.
- A bizarre application of this occurs in Avalon Code. You can use the Judgment Link on mook-level monster enemies to juggle them in the air — if you max out the combo count, or they hit the ground after running out of health, they'll explode like fireworks, granting you some combination of the game's currency, MP restoration, and HP restoration, depending. You can't do this with mook-level human enemies — apparently, even if they're your enemies, making humans explode isn't okay.
- In the Good ending of Phantasy Star Portable, the only reason Vivienne isn't scrapped is because nobody knows what to label her as.
- This is the central theme of the Mega Man Zero series.
- Subverted in Crusader of Centy. At the beginning of the game you're told to kill the monsters outside cities because they're dangerous or a pest. Later when you become (literally) one of the monsters the plot starts revolving about the morality of killing sentient and mostly benign monsters.
- A potential theme in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time after The Reveal. the entire universe as we know it pre-reveal is actually a network of complex A Is being wiped out by a company who thinks of them as nothing more then computer programs. The main characters, themselves programs under this threat, are tasked with showing this group just how human they are.
- The ESRB itself plays this trope pretty straight; you can usually get a T rating no matter how messily you kill your enemies, as long as they're not human. Castlevania is a good example, as almost none of them are M-rated, yet in all of them since SOTN you'll happily behead, bisect, incinerate, impale, etc your enemies, with at least one enemy every game whose death animation will be an absolute shower of blood. On the flip side, if you want to make a game where humans are the main enemy, the only way to avoid the M is to make it completely bloodless, a la Medal of Honor. (and even that doesn't always work...I still can't figure out how God Hand got an M.)
- In the Legendof Zelda, you fight humanoid (but still ugly) goblins who communicate by grunting. In Twilight Princess, you discover they are capable of speech, and it astonishes both Link and Midna.
- Also, in The Wind Waker, a girl actually falls in love with a moblin, a pig-headed relation to the goblins mentioned above that you butchet remorselessly throughout the game. They even send love letters to each other, although in the moblin's case, its somewhat difficult to tell if he really does love her back or simply wants to eat her...
- Dwarf Fortress has a "What Measure Is A Non Dwarf" version. If a dwarf emissary or merchant is killed, they are buried with honour in a dwarven grave. If the hapless merchant is an elf, it's onto the rubbish heap with the goblins. (They'll still gleefully loot both corpses, however).
- In Vega Strike history Lightbearer faction with its Humans Are Special idea stumbled on the Klk'k and tried to mess with them. Andolians who thought it's not good to kick around civilized sapients soon discovered this, and so started the first human interstellar war. When in the course of war they discovered Lightbearers has genetically engineered human slave race, it turned into war on extermination and everyone else just left Lightbearers to their fate.
- Starship Titanic's robots, despite having uploaded human minds, can have their personalities 'tweaked' to make them more cooperative.
- The Space Pirates in the Metroid series were originally random space aliens with little backstory. The Prime trilogy, however, includes hundreds of pieces of flavor text on computers in their various research stations, explaining their hierarchy, society, and culture, and giving them a sense of purpose. In the third installment, Samus even visits their homeworld.
- Puzzle Quest:Galactrix has a mission in which you must obtain a present for a member of the Jahrwoxi leadership. The Jahrwoxi, being a scavenger race, have something of a blood feud with the Keck, an avian merchant race. The present suggested by the Jahrwoxi member of your crew is a Keck egg. First, you request one at their home planet, which your crew member laughs at you for, then tells you to go look at the trade station. The quest ends with you abducting a Keck egg, since none were for sale, and then delivering it personally, meaning you either just orphaned a kid and sold him into slavery, or just destroyed an entire family and fed Jahrwoxi leadership some Soylent Green. The notable parts are that nobody on your crew bats an eyelash, and it's a required quest to get to ANY end of the game—good, bad, or morally ambiguous.
- In Neverwinter Nights for Windows and Mac, you can go ahead and slaughter countless Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Half-Elves, Orcs, Goblins, and other races in their hundreds. And that's not just the community created modules.
- Although the Big Bad of Chapters 1,2, and 3 are all human, the BIG Big Bad is a creepy Lizard-Woman.
- In the expansion, the Big Bad is yet another reptilian monster. What's up with Bioiware and scaley critters?
- The most humanoid Big Bad may just be The Valsharess...
- Until you free the Devil
- In Neverwinter Nights 2, during the raid on the Orc base camp near Old Owl Well you encounter a band of professional torturers; your paladin henchman rants about them torturing humans, and one of your options for a response is essentially "Oh, so if they were torturing gnomes or goblins it would be okay, would it?" Casavir gets kind of mad if you say that, though, and it prevents you from getting any influence with him out of the conversation.
- Grandia II: Shortly after you recruit Killer Fem Bot With A Heart Of Gold Tio you find a factory full identical models of her. The first response from any of your party members? Roan says that the entire factory has to be razed, because the robots are too evil to continue existing. Uh, but what about your newest party member, the one that could potentially drop a tornado on your head if someone flips her Personality Chip to "evil"? Does she get to live because she's cuter or something?
- In MOTHER(and its non-linear sequels), everything can potentially come to life and attack you.
- In one online flash game, Sonny, and its sequel, Sonny 2, the entire premise of the game is this: The main character is a zombie (and the second character you meet may also be a zombie, although Your Milage May Vary, as the second game has this character recieving a knife to the face, which he rips out... And a short while later, another knife, resulting in the line "Aargh, my face!... Again!")
Webcomics
- Goblins: Life through their Eyes is about a clan of Goblins who have to deal with the fact that they are essentially walking chunks of XP for first-level heroes.
- Aversion: In It's Walky!, when Joyce kills her Evil Twin (who has only existed for hours), her friends in SEMME are forced to
immediately eventually arrest her for murder. She eventually gets off of it, but not because of the value of the clone's life.
- Turned upside-down in this page from I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space; the pirates fatally shoot what the narration assures us is "really an unfeeling, heartless android. It's OK to kill him!" But in the last panel, it shows an alien woman sobbing over the dead android.
- Hey, that's an expensive piece of equipment! If someone shot a hole through my Unimog I'd probably cry too!
- The Order Of The Stick prequel book, "Start of Darkness" reveals that the gods really did create humanoid races such as goblins and kobolds purely as a source of XP for the 'proper' races. Understandably, they're pretty pissed about this, and the antagonist Redcloak's plan involves holding the gods to ransom to try and get a better deal for all 'savage' races.
- Half this, half Carnivore Confusion. There is a debate in the world of Furrae whether "Creatures" (supernaturals like Succubi) should eat "Beings" (sentient anthropomorphic animals), and whether or not it's any worse than Beings eating livestock. Many Creatures argue that it's a law of nature that the stronger eat the weaker, whilst Beings insist that you're not supposed to eat sentient entities.
- Completely averted in A Miracle Of Science. Artificial Intelligences are considered people, both legally and ethically. Especially notable since the Evil Plan of the Mad Scientist they're hunting is to Take Over The World using a robot army. Even though he's a villain and thus exempt from the moral standards held by the protagonists and society in large, he still treats his creations with respect and actually listens to their advice.
- Further respect for the A Is: Benjamin and Caprice are getting shot at by an army of robots. They grab a motorcycle and run for it, until Mars can determine that their pursuers are simple robots, not Artificial Intelligences, at which point Benjamin makes quick work of them with his pistol rail gun.
- Lampshaded in this strip of The Non Adventures Of Wonderella. Of course, Wonderella's a Heroic Sociopath, and Dr. Shark is a Friendly Villain, so this type of behavior is perfectly normal for them. A clone is fine too.
- Girl Genius has the clanks, which for the most part are mindless, sometimes expendable order-following robots. However, even the more sentient ones, like Dingbot Prime or the Muses (who even look human) aren't exempt from being dismantled in the name of study and/or improvement. Another notable instance is in the Sturmhalten arc of the comic when the Anevka puppet, which had gained its own sentience by the time the person it was built for died, is deactivated by her 'brother', as seen these strips. Possibly an aversion, though, as he admits it was much harder than he thought it would be. To be fair Humans are dissected as well
- Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!, should be counted more along the lines of dissecting a construct, considering that he's gone through windows, out of airships, and God knows what else and survived with no scarring to show for it. Agatha's cheery volunteering of Wooster to have holes drilled in his head would probably fit better with the dissecting humans thing.
- In the town of Zumzum, the townspeople hang Jägers just for passing through. Okay, they do have fangs and claws and odd skin colors and maybe might have killed a few hundred people, but that's no reason to try to hang them. Not that it ''worked'', anyway.
- Jagerkin are constructs, which seem to be an artificial race of people created and maintained by the Heterodynes. They're a lot closer to human than anything else, but they never grow old, they just have mechanical breakdowns. Peasants often view them as organic monstrous humanoids.
- Although most of this is the result of the amorallity/madness of most sparks. After all, they're just as happy to vivisect/mutate/experiment on/shoot normal human and other sparks as they are to waste Clanks/Jaggers/Revenants/Monsters/Etc. So, in a way, I see this an a subversion of the trope, since Sparks treat all intellegent beings equally. They just treat them all as expendable materials.
- The Challenges Of Zona has a character page that assures the reader that the scaly humanoid lizard people are Always Chaotic Evil and that we shouldn't "waste any sympathy on these guys". Even the Half Human Hybrids they can breed with humans (slaves, of course) are mostly evil.
- Despite featuring a wide array of non-human creatures and plenty of violence, Sluggy Freelance usually avoids this issue by treating all life, human and non-, with varying degrees of respect and irreverance depending on the tone of the story. It is parodied in these strips, however, and gets played straight in the "Aylee" chapter, where, even though most ghouls seem only semi-sentient and attack humans on sight, Aylee still feels uncomfortable with the lethal practical jokes she and Torg play on them. This is made worse for her when she discovers that the "ghouls" are actually aliens of her own species.
- Dr Mc Ninja speaks: "And because you're all cold, soulless robots, you won't mind if I snap into your robotic spines like a Slim Jim!" ...Despite the fact that said Ridiculously Human Robots are shown having thought balloons and responding to fear.
- Dr. McNinja also plows mercilessly through mooks and zombies - and gets chewed out by a relative of one of them.
- In Gnoph, the Gnoph symbiotes were created to be organic computers. While some of them are sentient, they are generally not regarded as such. In the most notable instance, a doctor casually murders a Gnoph which has become quite sympathetic to the audience and then is bewildered by the heroes' horrified reactions. To her, it was just like throwing away an obsolete computer: "I've seen guys be that emotional over cars, but never a gnoph. It was as though I killed his dog or something." The doctor genuinely didn't know the Gnoph was sentient, but is also portrayed as being unethical and amoral, and in any case the heroes are very upset over the death. Very.
- The trope shows up repeatedly in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, with the artificial beings Molly, Galatea, and Roofus. Bob and Jean treat them as fully human, but other characters (especially Agent Ben and Agent Jerry) often do not. The trope is also subverted in that the alien Nemesites, who have legally owned Earth since before the dawn of man, consider humans to be wildlife (because we don't have interstellar spacecraft) and the whole planet to be a nature preserve.
- Painfully deconstructed in Alien Dice as more of a 'what measure is a sentient being with free will?' The Dice (semi-sentient creatures such as cats who are transformed into self aware creatures), despite sometimes displaying intelligence greater than their owners, are used, recycled, and in some cases destroyed because it's convenient for the owners. Even more atrocious is the dehumanization of the Indentured Players (who are sentient aliens turned into Dice), who lose the right to choose mates or claim their offspring, among other things. Some characters see the Dice as sentient, but others see them little more than objects to be used at will.
- A major portion of the backplot of Terinu as one of the secrets of the rebellion against the Varn was the destruction of their source of power. Which just happened to be composed of cute little humanoids uplifted from animals. Though designed to be subservient, the Ferin were sentient beings, and the wholesale slaughter by the humans was essentially a genocide.
- The rights of non-humans are an important theme in Freefall, with a squid-like alien protagonist, an anthropomorphic, intelligent, genetically engineered wolf who is technically still property, and a host of apparently sentient robots struggling with or ignoring the three robotics laws. In one story arc, robots have been dismantled against their will. As Sam asks: is this a crime or simply overly aggressive recycling? (cue the Ironic Echo two strips later)
- In Schlock Mercenary: "Food that talks is not food." If it's talking to you, odds are that it's going to get treated as having the exact same rights as everyone else, whether clone, artificial intelligence, or alien. Of course, given the subject matter, those 'rights' include the right to be blown to fine chunks by the Heroic Sociopath protagonists or whoever the current baddies are. There's still the question if a goon doesn't get a chance to say anything before being eaten.
- Subverted in Minus here, where she ends up apologizing.
- Sam And Fuzzy's "Edwin" storyline. Sam gets called out on this by Detective Morris.
- In El Goonish Shive the main restriction aliens and magical creatures deal with is their respective Masquerades. In one of later arcs, The Hunter was questioned what his "monsters" are guilty of save their unusual origin, and answered that it's enough. His problem was that he's Sorcerers Apprentice widely—and correctly—deemed Too Dumb To Live.
Western Animation
- Optimus Prime has a very clear opinion on this, with his famous "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." motto.
- The first quote on this page comes from one of the more bizarre and contrived demonstrations of this trope. Darkheart is a demon and he is the Big Bad in Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation. From scene one, there's absolutely no doubt that he is profoundly evil, as he tries to kill off all the Care Bears when they are babies. During the course of the movie, not only has he added further attempts to kill the Bears to his evil resume, he has also turned a campground full of children into a den of evil and bound the little girl Christie to a Faustian bargain; he'll make her a Born Winner if she aids him in his evil plans. About halfway through the film, Darkheart joins Christie in a rowboat shortly after capturing a significant number of the good characters with her help. Darkheart falls out of the boat and Christie rescues him, leading to the quote above. The incident messes with Darkheart's head as well, and later on, when he hurts Christie, he vows to be a good guy (probably the fastest Heel Face Turn ever) if the Bears will save her.
- The "Care Bears Family" series had a Big Bad named No-Heart (creative writers, these) who was darn near identical to Darkheart. The thing is, nobody questioned whether or not he had a good side. Or, for that matter, if he was a "person".
- In Samurai Jack expendable robots have variable intelligence, so despite Jack meeting all kinds of bizarre races the audience doesn't feel bad for them. A significant portion of the enemies faced by Jack appear to be completely organic, sometimes more so than actual organic beings, and only prove to be robotic when sliced open.
- A strange and very bleak exception is one late Film Noir episode featuring a troubled but sympathetic robot-turned-hitman who conveniently gets an Emotion Chip, building up to the inevitable but stark ending where he fails and gets dispatched by Jack - who isn't even aware of it.
- There's a fantastic moment at the end of the episode when, with his last breath, X9 asks Jack to take care of his dog. Jack looks back over his shoulder and a brief look of doubt crosses his face.
- There was also an episode where two young siblings and their charming robot servant are brought to Aku. When the demon orders the kids around and their robot protests, he casually destroys him and the deed is treated by the kids with as much horror as any coldblooded murder.
- Basically, this strange double standard results from the arbitrary censorship rules that the cartoon makers had to work within. It's okay to show suffering and death, even of sentient beings, so long as nothing actually bleeds. Thus, anything that has to be dispatched handily will ultimately prove to be robotic or otherwise nonliving. The point is clearly made in the pilot, where Jack shows his baddassery by cutting off a mercenary's hands, which, naturally, were bionic. Later in the same pilot, he destroys an entire army of gigantic robotic scarabs. Each bug he slices open sprays a wealth of black oil everywhere, culminating in a scene that is extremely brutal and gory while, technically, no living things are hurt.
- When Jack does fight organic creatures, such as a group of bounty hunters that were definitely not robots, they are generally killed by a bloodless slash from his sword or their fate is obscured by an explosion.
- It should be noted though that Jack has never turned down anyone in need due to species. Human, Robot, Ape, Alien, Talking Dog, no matter. The only thing important was that someone needed his protection. He's reacted with horror at seeing a village of robots destroyed just as much as one of organic creatures.
- Human characters who don't regard Transformers as sentient beings are, in general, not treated sympathetically by any series in the franchise. However, it's apparently okay for younger viewers to see a Transformer die, even in a time slot where killing off a human character would bring down the wrath of the Media Watchdogs upon all involved. This may be more of a method of Getting Crap Past The Radar.
- A truly telling example would be the Dinobots in Animated. After the incident that gives them the ability to function on their own, Prowl is the only one to suspect that they're truly alive. They are huge, lumbering, and destructive, and Prowl is shocked when, after their defeat, Optimus Prime agrees with the decision to melt them down. So he and Bulkhead sneak out in the middle of the night and transport the Dinobots to a forested island where, concealed by holograms, they can live peacefully. Later, Porter C. Powell argued that since Transformers have no legal status, it's not a crime to do anything to them. (Of course, he's a villain, and we're not meant to agree with him.) Later they use their lack of legal status to threaten (and eat) him with impunity. (Don't worry, Grimlock spits him back out unharmed; these are the Autobots we're talking about.)
- I believe it has more to do with the fact that Grimlock has good taste, and with all the hair product necessary to keep his rockin' mullet in place, Porter C. Powell probably tastes horrible.
- In the penultimate episode of Danny Phantom, this issue became a plot point in more ways than one since the subject in question is both a Half Human Hybrid and a clone:
Danny: She's not just a ghost, she's also a girl. And if Vlad destroys the ghost half, the human half is destroyed along with it.
Valerie: No, that's not my problem. She is a ghost, and I destroy ghosts!
Danny: Fine! Destroy ghosts! But can you really take part in destroying a human?
- Also called up in Danielle's premiere episode- Vlad became fully irredeemable when he treated her as less than human in the climax-
- Also arguably averted in the same episode when both Danny and Danielle had no qualms seeing the perfect clone die in their hands. Considering said clone is a step above Danielle and clearly shows conscience as he dies, this is a rather jarring matter.
- Megas XLR will never kill off humans, and will only very rarely have any kind of organic being die. The giant robots that are frequently the enemies though, are pretty much cannon fodder, regardless of their level of sentience. One particularly extreme example is when Coop accidentally blows up an entire planet of sentient robots (although they were Ax Crazy and sort of fascist). Keep in mind though, if they could get away with it, the writers would also have plenty of humans killed to (and a few still are).
- Ben 10 is horrible about this. You can accurately predict how much violence is inflicted on an enemy based on how humanlike they are. Actual humans are merely subdued and non-humanoids are dismembered, exploded, or something else particularly deadly. This becomes especially awkward when you realize that, thanks to the very nature of the powers of the Omnitrix, Ben himself isn't human half the time!
- A rather jarring example occurs in an episode where an alien bride at a marriage between a pair of Starcrossed Lovers has to help Ben kill her parents so she can marry her human groom. She makes a disturbingly nonchalant joke right afterwards. As if to bring the thing home, she assumes a form that looks far more humanoid than the evil members of her family.
- In the time skipped Alien Force, Gwen scolds Kevin that "You hit him too hard!" when he decks a guard. Kevin placates her with, "Not him. It." and removes the holographic mask disguising the alien as a human. This could be potentially problematic, as a later episode reveals that these aliens are in fact humans taken over by alien parasites, and the Omnitrix is capable of reversing the transformation.
- In the Season Finale Ben states that they never actually kill any of them for that reason, and he then starts using the Omnitrix to cure them on a large scale (why he forgot about that until now is anyone guess).
- He did remember it once before the season finale. The difference is he didn't have the Master Control unlocked, basically allowing him to do whatever the fuck he wanted with the Omnitrix. He was limited to skin contact before that.
- A tip of the hat to The Brave Little Toaster, the movie that made some of us feel just a little guilty about replacing old household machines with new ones.
- To be fair, the people in the movies are unaware of the appliances being alive. Thomas The Tank Engine, on the other hand...(see below).
- Populated, as it is, by humans, robots, sewer mutants, talking animals, and aliens of all varieties, Futurama naturally takes this one on with tongue firmly in cheek. To wit:
Fry: So we're going to an uninhabited planet?
Bender: No, it's inhabited by robots!
Fry: Oh... you mean like a garage is inhabited by boxes.
- Furthermore (and possibly as a tribute to The Brave Little Toaster) Professor Farnsworth "teaches the toaster how to love". In a dream sequence he goes so far as to bring it to life, turning it into a raccoon. Of course, everyone else still treats it like an old toaster... might have something to do with the two slots and heating coils that are still in its back.
- Mix Carnivore Confusion into the issue, and you've got yourself The Problem With Popplers episode.
- Pixar seems to like this trope. To wit:
- Is there anyone who didn't treat their toy collections a lot nicer after hearing Jessie's song in Toy Story 2?
- Me—since I saw Toy Story first. Which actually has Woody react this way when he sees what Sid did to the other toys. Especially when they drag a wounded Buzz off ...
- Remy the rat has to fight hard for respect in Ratatouille.
- Wall-E. End of discussion.
- In the WITCH episode "H is for Hunted", Will is brought to tears after unknowingly trying to absorb an Astral Drop (normally soulless) that Nerissa has transformed into a living, feeling Altamere.
- The Venture Brothers: Brock Sampson has a code against killing women and children. He was curious if there was any circumstances in which that would be dismissed. Eventually, his mentor accepted "Lady Dracula", as undead don't count.
- And in the two-part Season 3 finale, "The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together" (Part 1, to be specific) once The Monarch has infiltrated the Venture Compound, he reviews the plan with his team. #24's part is to "Subdue the Venture robot" to which Monarch replies, "Subdue? You can kill the robot, it's a robot."
- Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command has hordes of robot drones that are just there to be shot (granted, they don't appear to possess any brain function). More egregious examples are NOS-4-A2 (a to-all-outward-appearances-sentient robot and the only non-drone villain to be actually killed) and XR, the Plucky Comic Relief Robot Buddy who spends much of his time getting blown up, crushed, dismembered and tortured in various ways- and none of the protagonists seem to care, despite the fact XR displays myriad human traits and emotions (having outbursts rivaling those of a hormonal 13-year-old girl) and has just as well-rounded a personality as any organic character on the show. As a result, a far amount of Fan Fic looks at him as a victim. It may just be because XR gets better every time. Still, he seems to feel pain, and react to it accordingly.
- Played straight in Kim Possible, where the only beings to die is a too human drone and two aliens (at least according to Word Of God).
- The way this applies to giant monsters is partially subverted in Invader Zim, when Zim transforms a hamster into a giant monster. Even though it's on a rampage, people still stop to gawk at how cute it is.
- Sponge Bob Square Pants feeds a talking worm to his adopted baby scallop.
Spongebob: All we have left is this apple! [a worm emerges from it]
Worm: Hello sea creatures! I bring you greetings from Apple World! [the scallop approves and jumps up for it]
Spongebob: Of course! Scallops love worms! [picks up the worms]
Worm: Huh, wait! We will bury yooooou! [drops it in the scallop’s mouth and it eats it]
- The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series gave the Turtles a chance to actually use their weapons as forces of deadliness by turning Shredder's foot soldiers into robots.
- Possibly the most WTF example of this is the episode "Donatello's Duplicate", where Donatello creates a clone of himself specifically to have it do his chores for him, and basically treats the duplicate as his slave. When the clone turns against him and becomes evil, it gets wiped out of existence. And it's apparently perfectly okay by all the others. You know, the good guys.
- And there's also Metalhead, the robotic Ninja Turtle, who has no rights. For this to be more acceptable, it has a tendency to go berserk (or switch sides), thereby destroying the illusion that it has real sentience or "free will".
- Basically anything by Don Bluth. Generally, the less human a character looks, the cartoonier their animation, the less respect they receive from the story. Non-human minor characters (unless they are effectively human due to Rotoscoping) are prone to be splatted at any moment, without a death scene to drum up audience sympathy.
- In the Disney Fluppy Dogs Pilot Movie, Stanley, who is a humanoid dog like alien posing as a dog, is about to turn in for the night. His human friend, Jaimie, is asked by Stanley where he is going to sleep and the boy is about to tell him to sleep on the floor like an animal. Fortunately, Jaimie realizes just in time that he was about to humiliate his intelligent friend and invites Stanley to sleep in his bed with him.
- While not necessarily Non-human, Disney's Pocahontas seems to address this with the song "Savages"
- "They're savages! Savages! Barely even human!"
- "They're not like you and me, which means they must be evil! We must sound the drums of war!"
- Applied thoughtfully in The Zeta Project. The title character, Zeta, is a robot who gains a conscience and decides not to kill anymore. With time, it becomes evident he's his own person, with opinions, thoughts and knowledge he was never meant to have, and he's learning from the world around him much like a child would. The problem is that the agency that created him doesn't
know believe he's sentient now; they think he's been reprogrammed. They treat him like a dangerous weapon. Zeta's friend Ro, however, treats him as a normal human being, since she's realized he's just a sweet, harmless, very very very innocent guy.
- The Disney Animated series of Aladdin, in the episode "Garden of Evil" with the villain Arbutrus. He is a plant like creature that makes art by controlling and growing plants, and who voices his dislike of humans for destroying them. In the end the killing of Arbutrus by Aladdin is played as a mistake and the flower cut from his body (which kills him) is replanted in the ground.
- Despite being completely sentient and regularly conversing with their humans, the trains in Thomas The Tank Engine are thrown out in the scrap pile and essentially killed when they stop being useful. Cue lots of Nightmare Fuel. Couldn't they make some kind of retirement home or something?
Real Life
- This is the heart of the hot abortion debate. Pro-life says that all fetuses are human *
assuming we're talking about the fetuses of the species Homo sapiens, of course , while pro-choice differentiates between when one is human or part of the mother.
- As one source put it (paraphrased): "We want to protect the right of free choice, and the right to live your own life without others imposing their moral sense on you. So the only question is, in this situation, are we protecting the rights of two people, or of only one?"
- Three words: Stem cell research.
- No, only embryonic stem cell research is controversial (and, according to recent tests, possibly harmful.) There is no debate with adult stem cells, animal embryos, and placenta stem cells.
- Read Solomon's Knife, by Victor Koman. Even if someone found a solution, every Obstructive Bureaucrat would try to ban it; divisions like this trope are great for snowing people.
- Notably most pro-choice people would still be Squicked by the abortion of a well-developed fetus, as it has distinct neural functions, and therefore a developing mind, as opposed to an embryo, which is approximately on the level of a shrimp.
- Disturbingly, some people would be upset more at the death of a shrimp.
- For that matter, dehumanizing the enemy has been a distressingly common propaganda tactic for much of human history. Depending on who you ask, people of any given nationality, ethnicity or religion (or atheists, for that matter) might be considered "subhuman" and therefore fair game for extermination.
- One of the best examples would be the portrayal of the Nazis, where they are degraded to shooting fodder in many films and games. Shooting Allied soldiers aren't as politically correct.
- Because it were Nazi who did... oh.
- Disturbingly, this seems to be a universal (and therefore probably innate) tendency for viewing people who are part of an "outgroup." However, on the plus side there seems to be a similarly innate capacity to extend ones relevant ingroups (at least, relevant enough to be considered too human to kill) to include much or all of humanity and that this capacity is affected by experience and culture.
- It has been suggested this innate xenophobic tendency may have evolutionary roots in being a protection from disease: aversion to unfamiliar and unusual things lessens the risk of infection. Outsiders bring the risk of unfamiliar infections to which your tribe may not have developed resistance (for instance, the smallpox epidemic brought by Europeans to America), and many contagious illnesses have outwardly visible symptoms like rashes and lesions.
- The British armed forces conducted research and tried to get down to the core of this trope during the 1950s, to see how well both soldiers and civilians would react to non-human intelligence and human-like objects; the result was the formulation of the Uncanny Valley.
- Another common thing is the justification of racism or sexism, on the grounds that "they aren't really persons".
- Animal. Rights. Just... let's leave it at that.
- Ableism, or discrimination against people based on disabilities and handicaps, both physical and mental, really comes down to this as well, sadly.
- Many Transhumanists hold that anything that demonstrates sapience should be a person.
- People according to them: Great Apes, Dolphins, potentially Artificial Intelligences that pass the Turing Test or extraterrestrials.
- Now also crows and other Corvidae, deemed nearly as intelligent as chimps.
- Not people: the majority of animal life on Earth (for the time being anyway), and embryos of any species.
- Some scientists think they have everything they need to clone a Neanderthal man. Some people object to this, on the grounds that the Neanderthal counts as a human, and that human cloning is unethical. This is odd, considering that these people seem not to have a problem with the cloning of animals. Determining whether or not the neanderthal counts as a human comes down to its ability to speak (for some people, anyway).
- It should be noted that in taxonomic terms, every species in the genus Homo (H. habilis, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, H. sapiens) is by definition a human or "man".
Meta
- Catgirls and other Cute Monster Girl Half Human Hybrids. Sometimes treated the same as humans, sometimes treated differently, sometimes they are a form of normal humans (such as that series where virgins have cat ears), and so on.
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