What Measure Is A Non Human / Western Animation

"We've never killed a human before, have we? Sure, mountains of robot corpses. But this... This was the first human being. Real flesh and blood."

— Inner Jack, Samurai Jack

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The following have their own pages:

• DC Animated Universe

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• This is rarely comes up in Adventure Time, since almost none of the characters besides Finn are human, but it does pop up occasionally with sentient objects and non-humanoids. One example being when Finn arms himself with the Gauntlet wielded by his hero, Billy, to track down the Lich. The Gauntlet has one living eye and some degree of sentience, since it shows hurt and anger at Finn when he punches it to stop it from firing. He later apologizes to the Gauntlet and it happily aids their journey. When the Lich destroys it, Finn is hardly bothered and never mentions it again, though this is somewhat justified since he spends most of the time afterwards prioritizing trying to stop the Lich from wiping out the entirety of Ooo.
• Aladdin: The Series, in the episode "Garden of Evil" with the villain Arbutus. 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 Aladdin killing Arbutus is played as a mistake and the flower cut from his body (which kills him) is replanted in the ground.
• American Dad!: Both played straight and averted in the episode "Steve and Snot's Test-Tubular Adventure". When Stan discovers that Steve and Snot's prom dates Glitter and Honey were clones that the two had created, Stan's solution is to kill them. He ends up murdering Honey and when Francine sees what happened, Stan brushes it off, on account of her being a clone. He goes after Glitter too, but she ends up dying of natural causes. The episode had made it clear that Steve and Snot viewed the clones as essentially their daughters and both openly mourn their passing.
• The cast of Archie's Weird Mysteries generally has no problem doing in a Monster of the Week, no matter how human they may seem, once it's discovered they're not human. Probably the most glaring is the Reggie Clone, a cyborg copy of Reggie made by some bumbling aliens who, thanks to said aliens asking Reggie to describe himself, was the nicest, most charming, and all-around lovable person in existence thanks to Reggie's raging ego. Even though it proves nice enough to outright violate its own orders in order to let Reggie win a nice-contest (how they spotted the imposter; just go with it), effectively saving Reggie, his friends, and all of Riverdale, none of the teens feel even the least bit bad for it and are only happy they got the real Reggie back.
• In an episode of Arthur, when Buster fantasizes about himself as a superhero named Cat Saver, he encounters a villain with some... unconventional mooks. He prefaces his fight with a disclaimer to the audience: "Kids, hitting and punching people is wrong." But that's no person! It's a giant ham!"
• In the second episode of Avengers Assemble, the Avengers indiscriminately kill the attacking Space Phantoms, despite the creatures displaying sentience and the ability to speak. They do the same thing to an army of vampires in a later episode. It is however worth noting that the show is heavily inspired by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the heroes generally have no qualms with killing their enemies.
• Discussed and averted in The Avengers: United They Stand episode "Remnants." The Avengers consider killing the robots they discover on the island, but aren't sure if the robots matter morally or not and decide to avoid killing them until they can be sure. Eventually they discover that the robots will kill everyone else on Earth and have the UN nuke the island. They deeply regret the robots' deaths and feel just as bad as if they had been forced to kill humans.
• The Batman:
  • Batman kills the clearly sapient plant clones in "Fleurs Du Mal" with zero hesitation whatsoever, despite them being so indistinguishable from humans that even Batman couldn't tell the clone of the Penguin wasn't real until he accidentally killed it.
  • The "Digitally Advanced Villain Emulator", or "Dave" as it takes to calling itself, is practically indistinguishable from a human being in how it acts, runs a full gamut of emotions including anger, humor, happiness, and even fear when it's about to be destroyed, and even seems to believe it is human. Of course, not only does Batman stand by and watch Dave be fatally crushed, but he deliberately sets off the trap to crush it in the first place; had Dave been an actual human the Dark Knight would have stopped at nothing to pull him to safety.
• The Batman vs. Dracula: While Batman plans from the start to synthesize a cure for Dracula's human victims, he has no qualms against simply killing Dracula, blatantly telling Alfred that "Dracula's not a man, he's a monster." Of course, he does at least try to use the vampire cure on Dracula beforehand.
• Ben 10 features this liberally. In the earlier episodes of original series, you can accurately predict how much violence is inflicted on an enemy based on how humanlike they are. Actual humans are merely subdued, but non-complex life forms and Vilgax's "sentient robots" are often exploded on screen, though not graphically detailed. 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.
  • One episode features an alien bride at a marriage between a pair of Star-Crossed Lovers, who has to help Ben kill her parents so she can marry her human groom, even making a disturbingly nonchalant joke right afterwards. Not helping is the fact that she assumes a form that looks far more humanoid than the evil members of her family. But it's later mentioned that her race are incredibly tough and difficult to kill with the implication that the parents will be fine until the ceremony is over.
  • In Alien Force, the first sequel, the Plumbers are revealed to be an intergalactic peace-keeping force, with both human and alien members, that also show to maintain stronger bonds, to the point of making hybrids.
    • In the same sequel, a pair of alien-human hybrids starts capturing many species of aliens and sending them into the Null Void, thinking that all aliens on Earth are evil (which is ironic due to the fact that they also aren't full human). Though part of those who were captured were really criminals, the majority were probably hybrids just like them. The episode ends with the duo going to the Null Void to rescue those they wrongfully imprisoned.
    • Continuing the trend, 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 parasite 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 though only in the season finale as he didn't the Master Control unlocked, letting him do whatever the fuck he wanted with the Omnitrix. He was limited to skin contact before that.
  • In Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, Ben's Berserk Button is activated at full force when Agreggor kills a group of aliens in front of him, to the point of needing his cousin's powers to chill him down. So it's safe to assume that only bad aliens deserve a beatdown from his part.
• 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 robot vampire that is, to all outward appearances, sentient 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 is designed to be completely indestructible, and gets better every time. Still, he seems to feel pain, and react to it accordingly.
  • In the original movie pilot for the series, XR debuts as a non-sentient robotic mission partner to Buzz. On his first mission, he is brutally destroyed by Buzz's nemesis, Agent Z. Interestingly, Buzz is notably distraught at XR's "death" and later urges the LGMs to fix him, whose scatterbrained attempts to do so result in the sentient and quirky XR later seen.
• Care Bears:
  • Darkheart is a demon and 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, causing him to question why she did that. 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 rescue incident results in this quote:
    "Good or bad, you're still a person. Or whatever you are."
  • The Care Bears Family series had a Big Bad named No-Heart who was darn near identical to Darkheart. The thing is, nobody questioned whether or not he had a good side. Well, he was named No-Heart.
• While all forms of killing are okay in a Celebrity Deathmatch, if a non-human or "abnormal" human fights a normal human who isn't a main character, the non-human will generally win. At least one fight inverts the One-Winged Angel trend: Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman are unable to hit each other while they're both monsters, but when the Wolfman transforms into a human, Frankenstein's Monster easily knocks the Wolfman's head off.
• Danny Phantom:
  • In the penultimate episode, 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—
    Vlad: You! Exist! To serve! ME! JUST! DO IT!
    • Also played straight 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.
• In Doug's First Movie, the way the Robo Crusher is gunned down is surprisingly cruel and graphic, and entirely Played for Laughs. During his review of it, The Nostalgia Critic points out that it's actually hard to watch and that he feels incredibly sorry for it.
• In DuckTales (2017) Webby finds out that her best friend Lena was actually a shadow of Magica De Spell. When Webby confronts the witch, the latter mocks her for how sentimental she was to her, leading Webby to try and tear her a new one.
• Played with in Family Guy. Brian, along with a few other dogs in the series, is sentient, walks, talks, drives, and has romantic relationships with other humans. Despite this, he's still treated like a regular dog. This is referenced in a few episodes, one where he gets in a legal battle to avoid being euthanized and to have the same rights as a human, and another where he accidentally hits a dog with his car and grows upset when he learns it isn't a crime to kill a dog.
  • There was also another episode where a talking, sentient cow is about to be slaughtered for meat, but Brian and Peter break him out. As with Brian, it hits this trope because overall, the cow does behave like a human but is still treated like an animal. Said cow does end up winning a lawsuit against the fast food company that was going to kill him and the other cows.
  • In one cutaway gag, Mayor McCheese gets shot instead of John F. Kennedy, with his head bursting up and Jackie Kennedy starting to eat it. Which leads Stewie and Brian to lampshade this:
    Brian: That joke's not in bad taste, right?
    Stewie: Who cares? He's a cheeseburger.
  • Another cutaway has Peter squash a sentient talking spider for talking in the theater.
• 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.
• When one thinks about Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, they'll notice that imaginaries are essentially treated as sapient pets. They are given to wanting adopters whether the results are positive or otherwise and children can get rid of them when they grow up yet they can carry jobs (though some episodes show the idea of an imaginary as cheap labour is morally wrong) and mingle amongst humans easily. It seems to be though that the imaginary friends enjoy (or at least are never bothered by it) their life as companions to be constantly used and thrown away.
• 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 let me get this straight. This planet is completely uninhabited?
  Bender: No, it's inhabited by robots!
  Fry: Oh... kinda like how a warehouse 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. 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.
  • Robots in this setting don't seem to have any legal rights. They are not actively sought out and destroyed, but older, malfunctioning robots are melted down, seemingly without their consent, and they are still treated as property. Bender usually gets a free pass, though — the main cast, at least, seems to see him as a person.
    • As far as robots go, this trope seems to be Zig-Zagged based on the Rule of Funny. In a different episode, robots are shown to be able to vote in elections — and in fact, because they vastly outnumber humans, the robot vote turns out to be the sole deciding factor in choosing the next President of Earth (though it helps that a turnout of 6% is considered the highest turnout in centuries). Richard Nixon (It Makes Sense in Context) ends up winning without getting a single human vote, merely by being popular with the robots, and he remains the President for the rest of the series after that point.
      Fry: What party do you belong to, Bender?
      Bender: Eh, I'm not allowed to vote.
      Fry: 'Cause you're a robot?
      Bender: No. Convicted felon.
    • In many episodes, the robots are shown essentially having an entirely separate society from the humans, with their own popular media ("All My Circuits", the robot soap opera with a Token Human character), religion, and even organized crime (the Robot Mafia). The extent to which this society interacts with humans varies from episode to episode; sometimes there's no interaction at all; sometimes big wheels in the robot society are treated with importance by humans as well (and rich robots may even be shown having human servants); sometimes, robots are just walking scrap metal.
  • Mix Carnivore Confusion into the issue, and you've got yourself The Problem With Popplers episode.
  • However, all this may be Insignificant Little Blue Planet played for laughs. Respect for sentient life in general is pretty poor. In fact, aliens come to Earth to steal noses as an aphrodisiac and nobody really cares, Earth is invaded multiple times over fairly trivial things with zero political fallout, suicide booths are on almost every corner, and food made from people is pretty common.
  • The crew are horrified to find out that a dolphin was being served to them as they are considered intelligent, until they found out it blew all its savings on lottery tickets.
  • Interestingly, the most oppressed caste in Futurama's Earth isn't non-humans but human mutants, who are confined to the sewers they're trained to repair and legally barred from living on the surface, although mutants have historically been used as sources of cheap labor elsewhere (as below the sewage galley on the so-called "Land Titanic") and a mutant can visit aboveground New New York if a surface-dwelling citizen obtains him a one-day "surface pass" from Citihall. This situation is rectified in Season 6's "The Mutants Are Revolting."
    PSA Narrator: These industrious, uh, people, I guess...
• Gargoyles: Gargoyles in general are considered monsters by many humans, although the entire series featured just two nasty gargoyles, but many evil humans.
• In G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero every human character, good or bad, is shown jumping, swimming or parachuting from his or her vehicle just before it explodes. Robot soldiers, on the other hand, are destroyed regularly.
• Glitch Techs: For Miko, her pet bird and mount Ally is a beloved friend. He's also a glitched animal NPC from a Final Fantasy-expy that's found its way into the real world, and she isn't 100% sure what that actually means in terms of him counting as being a living creature. At the very least, when he appears to be dying in one episode, she rejects the option of replacing him with an exact replica, stating that even if no one else would know, she would.
• Infinity Train has this as a major theme for its second and third seasons.
  • The latter half of the second season has MT struggle more and more with the fact that the train places greater value on the lives of human passengers than it does the native denizens that inhabit its numerous cars, rejecting the idea that her core purpose in life must be to help humans escape the train.
  • The third season has the Apex, a cult which views the train's denizens (which are referred to with the derogatory slur of "null") as having no actual will or emotions of their own, treating them as toys or annoyances that can be outright murdered whenever they've outlived their usefulness. Over the course of the season, cult leaders Grace and Simon are forced to question this ideology.
• 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.
• Played straight in Kim Possible, where the only beings to die are a human-appearing synthodrone and two aliens (at least according to Word of God). Monkey Fist ends up unable to move or communicate after being turned to stone; not fully human. (More Karmic Transformation, really.)
• In Kong: The Animated Series, the only characters to possibly die are Set, Onimous, Harpy, and Chiros — all of whom are evil monsters. Ramone De La Porta is just as evil and power-hungry as any of them, yet he is not killed (though suffers a Fate Worse than Death brought on by Chiros). Main characters attempt to save him whenever he is in mortal danger, even though they know how evil he is, and it would save them a lot of trouble and having to foil his evil plans if they just let him die one of these times. The same goes for Andre, the arms dealer, in one of his two major appearances.
  • It could be argued that Onimous survived his sinking into quicksand (but remained trapped there), Harpy (who was struck by a lightning bolt) was merely turned to stone through magic rather than death (and could be changed back with some magic spell), and Chiros' stone being destroyed (after he was imprisoned inside it) did not kill him but prevented him from ever being awakened again. As this is the last we ever see of them, there is no way to tell.
• 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 cannon fodder, regardless of their level of sentience. One particularly extreme example is when Coop accidentally blows up a planet of sentient robots (although they were Ax-Crazy and sort of fascist). If they could get away with it, the writers would also have plenty of humans killed to (and a few still are).
• Played sadly straight in My Life as a Teenage Robot. Although no one, not even her creator, questions the fact that Jenny is a sentient robot teenager deserving of love and respect, most episodes have her killing or pummeling non human looking robots such as the villain robot's insect-like minions. Note that the main villain herself looks like a very alluring, feminine robot who's usually allowed to get away from harm with hardly a life-threatening scratch. The fact that Jenny usually has her own body blown to smithereens is Played for Laughs.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: In the climax of "The Revolt of Paradise Estate, Part 2", the wizard Beezen undoes the magic animating each and every last one of the living items, returning them to their inert, unliving states. The ponies don't remark on this in any way beyond noting with some relief that everything is back to normal, despite having just witnessed what was effectively the mass murder of the people they were fighting side-by-side with minutes before.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: A couple of cases of What Measure is a Non-Equine pop up:
    • "Too Many Pinkie Pies". Some of them could talk, the ones who couldn't talk could still understand complex speech, they were fully capable of learning (particularly the first one that was around longer than the rest) and complex thought (such as figuring out on their own how to use the pond and deciding it was a fun idea), and even felt emotions (again, the first one was devastated that she was missing "fun" events and the last one to be zapped looked notably scared), but the ponies didn't think twice about zapping them into oblivion and didn't even once consider that there may be more to the clones or that returning them to the pond was by all definitions of the term death. Needless to say, some of the Fan Art and Fan Fiction about the episode is downright terrifying. A Call-Back in a later episode showed that one escaped and has since gone on to make a life for herself in another town, seemingly cementing that they Really Were Born Yesterday rather than "mindless copies".
    • The clones of Twilight and her friends in "The Mean 6" get a surprisingly dark death scene (one that was even toned down considerably before release) that no real but equally evil pony villain would ever get, in spite of them apparently being free thinking enough to be motivated to turn on their creator so they didn't have to follow her orders and being so indistinguishable from real ponies that their own friends didn't realize they were fakes even though they were acting wildly out-of-character. Justified In-Universe though, as the only one who's around to witness their death is Queen Chrysalis who wouldn't care about "real" ponies dying either, and the Tree of Harmony that killed them is later revealed to be every bit as harsh to "real" creatures too.
• Over the Garden Wall: Discussed. In "Mad Love", Beatrice claims the group stole Fred the horse, but Wirt points out that Fred joined them voluntarily and, as a talking horse, he has the right to decide who he wants to work for.
• Pantheon: Ellen initially cannot accept or believe that the voice talking to her from Maddie's laptop is her late husband, claiming it's just a program based on David's brainwaves. Thanks to Maddie's favorite RPG, the couple meet each other via VR and she starts to warm up to his new form.
• Phantom 2040: Comes up at times with regard to robots. Heisenberg, the first robot to clearly gain sentience, goes on a long personal journey to figure out his place in the world. Later on, he defends Pavlova from being reprogrammed, stating outright that if she can express the desire to maintain her own mind, she is at least philosophically human. Pavlova herself subsequently argues against deleting Mister Cairo's personality, since even if his intelligence is artificial, it would still be murder. Heisenberg later starts spreading self-awareness to other robots.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • In "Night of the Living Gelatin", while the monster is dying it calls out to its master. And Doofenshmirtz is upset at it dying and in fact chases after Perry when he is leaving.
  • In "Where's Perry Part 2", Perry, Major Monogram, and Candace are taking out an army of robot doubles of the main cast. None of the robots show any remorse for their actions, with the exception of Robot!Candace, who sacrifices itself to save Candace after seeing her room and listening to a message from Jeremy. Her explanation for the sacrifice is pretty tear-jerking as well.
    Robot!Candace: No Jeremy robot for me...
• PJ Masks: While the PJ’s never harm their (ambiguously) human opponents, but only use their powers in non-harmfull ways, Romeo’s robots are not so lucky. In particular the Flybots, who are essentially drones with no personality, have more than once found themselves on the receiving end of the PJ’s powers, and can freely be used to demonstrate how dangerous the young heroes can be if they do use their powers for combat.
• While ReBoot tries to treat the Bi-Nomes like actual people, the show falls victim to this trope. Someone needs to die? Bi-Nome. Need victims for a lost game? Bi-Nomes. Need someone to play Red Shirt against Megabyte? Bi-Nome. Humorously enough, one episode had Matrix ruthlessly destroy a bunch of robot drones after confirming that they didn't have personality chips. Later on in the episode, AndrAia asks if another Guardian's drone had a personality chip, and the robot runs off terrified.
• Rick and Morty likes to play this one for laughs:
  • In the pilot Rick gives Morty a gun and tells him to hold off some Mooks long enough to get an escape portal running:
    Morty: I don't wanna shoot anybody!
    Rick: They're just robots, Morty! It's okay to shoot them! They're robots!
    (One gets shot)
    Mook 1: Aaagh! My leg is shot off!!!
    Mook 2: Glenn's bleeding to death! Someone call his wife and children!
    Morty: They're not robots, Rick!
    Rick: It's a figure of speech, Morty! They're bureaucrats! I don't respect them!
  • Similarly, one episode takes place entirely on a fictional toy train populated by miniature artificial characters. The episode ends with a commercial for the Story Train that actually advertises this as a selling feature when Morty asks if the characters are actually alive or not:
    Morty: Are they alive?
    Rick: Of course! But not in any ways that matter!
    Announcer: THEY. HAVE. NO. SOULS! PUPPETS. OF. FATE!
  • The entire following episode mocks this from beginning to end with facehugging Puppeteer Parasites that are also entirely free-thinking creatures with their own society, values, morals, and ethics that aren't all that different from humans. Rick and Morty gleefully blow them away anyways and raze their entire civilization to the ground, save for destroying their version of the Twin Towers, and revel in how good it feels to wipe out a living species when they don't have to feel bad about it:
    Rick: Damn, feels kind of good when there's no guilt, huh?
    Morty: Yeah it's like in Star Wars!
    Rick: I am the god of death!
    Morty: Should've been a better species!
• 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 even 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 sadness 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 the robot and the deed is treated by the kids with as much horror as any coldblooded murder.
  • 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 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. Moreover, the last robot "alive" bails and tries to run away. Jack just says "No... no escape" and finishes it off, and no further consideration is given to the moral equivalence of murdering a surrendered and retreating enemy in cold blood.
  • 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. Another example comes in the flashback that serves as a reference to Lone Wolf and Cub, where the assailants that are cut down are dispatched just off screen.
  • 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.
  • Still, the extent of carnage and violence in which Tartakovsky indulged under sole excuse of this trope is unsettling. It's not just that robots can be killed on-screen — they can be killed in horrifying ways on screen. They are burned, dissolved in acid, disembowelled in slow-mo, cannibalized and devoured alive by a huge monster. At this they sometimes clearly express emotions, namely pain and horror, and other times they look exactly like living beings right until the moment of death.
  • However, in the Darker and Edgier fifth season revival, the trope is deconstructed, as Jack delivers a lethal blow on what he thinks is another one of Aku's robots, only to be shocked when blood spills out instead of oil. The mask of his assailant drops off and underneath is just a normal human being. He later struggles with the knowledge that he killed a real person, and has to convince himself that it's justifiable to kill people in self-defence. Later, the show's tendency to have a seemingly organic being turn out to be a robot when killed was inverted, with what the audience is led to believe is a robot is actually a man in a metal suit, but he still gets killed.
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man after Peter frees himself from the Symbiote, the first he does is try to destroy it. Sure, the Symbiote attempted to take control over him, turned him into a jerk and nearly pushed him to killing Dr. Octopus, but then many, if not all, of his human or meta-human enemies have repeatedly tried to murder him, endangered other people and committed all kinds of crimes, and yet he never entertained the idea of killing any of them. But with the Symbiote he decides that "it's too dangerous, it could fall into the wrong hands" and BAM, it's deep freeze time, nevermind that "it" is also a sentient being!
• SpongeBob SquarePants 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 into the scallop's mouth and the scallop eats it]
• In Star Trek: Lower Decks, the Tuvix incident from Star Trek: Voyager comes roaring back in the Season 4 episode "Twovix" when Billups and T'Ana end up having a Teleporter Accident and perform a Fusion Dance into T'illups. The Cerritos crew is sure that Janeway came up with an ethical solution when they look up her logs and are horrified when they find out she essentially killed him. Captain Freeman resolves to send them to Starfleet for a better way to help them, but T'illups finds out what happened and decides the best thing to do is to fuse everyone to save their life.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars both averts and plays this straight. Averted in that the clones will generally be treated with the same amount of dignity as the other organic characters, and the characters who view them as disposable will often be antagonists. Republic droids were also granted a certain amount of dignity and consideration. However, it's played very straight with the Separatist droids, who, despite consistently demonstrating complex emotions and self-awareness (including terror at the prospect of being destroyed and one even expressing distress and regret at shooting at its own), are routinely cut down without any remorse or consideration.
  • The B1 battle droids are treated as nonhuman, and their "deaths" at the hands of the heroes are occasionally played for laughs. Yet they still react to situations like living beings and even show fear when they are losing a battle. This includes scenes of the Jedi cutting them down without a thought while they throw their hands up and scream for mercy, being played for laughs.
  • Taken to to absurd lengths with the Geonosians from Attack of the Clones. Like in the film they get casually sliced in halves by Jedi and Clones even use Flamethrowers to set them on fire with them even screaming and running away, all of it ON SCREEN. It is never explained why they get such brutal treatment in comparison to just about every other species. You see Jedi cutting off the heads and arms of clone troopers in Revenge of the Sith, but nowhere they explain why they have to slice Geonosians whole body VERTICALLY. At least they got zombiefied in the last two episodes of the Geonosis arc, but it still is no excuse for before.
• Steven Universe:
  • Steven Universe plays around with this trope in the form of why the Crystal Gems are on Earth. Initially it seems like they are there to just protect humanity and they fight a series of nightmarish monsters to ensure that they don't harm people. However, as the series progresses, it becomes far more apparent that the Crystal Gems are more indebted and in-service to the planet and not just humanity (as they consider all the life on Earth sacred), and the reveal that the monsters they've been fighting are corrupted forms of their own species that they have no method to heal blurs the line on just how "human" their adversaries are. Later gets Zig-Zagged when Homeworld Gems start showing up as adversaries, who are treated with just as much hostility as the monstrous enemies despite being humanoid.
  • Peridot tries to use this argument in the episode "It Could've Been Great" when describing how Rose Quartz's rebellion against the Homeworld prevented the development of the Earth Gem Colony and sacrificed the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of Gems that could've been made there. What Peridot forgot to account for was the the Earth already harbored life, so its development as a colony would've killed everything on the planet for the sake of their species, essentially throwing her own argument back at her.
• In Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, Superman is forced to vaporize an entire army of Doomsdays to save the rest of Amazons. He drops to his knees in exhaustion and is remorseful that he killed living creatures, even if they were Doomsday clones. Wonder Woman ends up telling him that they weren't really living as they didn't really bleed.
• Teen Titans (2003) seems to follow these general guidelines: robots and monsters can be massacred by the dozens — or indeed, by the planet-fulls — so long as they don't have any dialogue; sentient beings who are blatantly non-human can be killed, but the heroes can't (intentionally) be the ones to do it; meanwhile, human beings never die (with the notable exception of Slade). This is a bit strange as the main cast has only one pure human (Robin); the others are a cyborg, a Half-Human Hybrid, a mutant, and a Rubber-Forehead Alien.
  • In the movie Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo, however, Robin gets called out on this after he (apparently) accidentally killed a villain:
    Robin: He wasn't human.
    Inspector: Neither are most of your friends.
• Subverted in Teen Titans Go!. Cyborg is perfectly fine with being a cyborg. This trope gets parodied in "Let's Get Serious". When complaining that the others are too goofy and one-dimensional, Robin points out that Cyborg "should" feel conflicted on whether he is human or not. After everyone becomes serious, Cyborg spends the rest of the episode feeling angsty about his existence.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) gives the Turtles a chance to actually use their weapons as forces of deadliness by turning Shredder's foot soldiers into robots.
  • For another example, in the episode "Donatello's Duplicate", Donatello creates a clone of himself specifically to have it do his chores for him, and treats the duplicate as his slave. At the end, the clone (who had turned against him and become evil), along with three clones of Donatello's brothers, fades away from existence.
  • 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".
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): Moriah's alien henchmen from "The People's Choice" are grotesque-looking (by human standards) and the three with the most inhuman features suffer onscreen deaths (unless Bizarre Alien Biology somehow lets them regenerate), while the more humanoid looking flier is only knocked out.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): After Snake's mutation into Snakeweed, the Turtles has no qualms against potentially lethally electrocuting him. Of course, since he was working with the Kraang and helped them capture April and her father beforehand, they weren't very concerned with his safety when he was still human, either.
• Despite being completely sentient and regularly conversing with their humans, the trains in Thomas & Friends are thrown out in the scrap pile and essentially killed when they stop being useful. Some of the books and episodes even hint that managers of certain railways wouldn't blink an eye at scrapping an engine with lots of life left in it, if it helped their bottom line. Even with retirement home equivalents being shown in some media, the implications are quite unnerving.
  • It gets even worse with this series when one realizes that, canonically, the show is set in the 1950s and real-life railways in Britain started to scrap all their steam engines in the 1960s.
• In Transformers:
  • Optimus Prime has a very clear opinion on this, with his famous "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" motto. The series, though, have sometimes defined sentience in an unsatisfying way — not having a spark renders you a 'drone' even if said 'drone' clearly thinks and feels. In a non-canon series of Transformers: Animated comics (with a few Out of Character moments, though mostly confined to Megatron being generically evil instead of a Magnificent Bastard) Bumblebee is told by Optimus not to mourn for Afterburn because he was a sparkless drone, and it's not clear who is right (Afterburn appears to think and feel, and Bumblebee cared about him and it sure seems a Jerkass move to callously tell him that the friend he just saw torn in half was just a drone and thus not worth any worry, but he was a Decepticon infiltrator, only pretending to be friends with Bee or anybody, was killed by Megatron in a You Have Failed Me moment, and could well have been acting according to the "make nice with the mark" programming you'd expect an advanced but nonsentient infiltration-bot to have. And since whether he was real or not, any friendship he had with the Autobots clearly wasn't, he kinda isn't worth crying over either way. Still, be nice to poor Bee, huh?)
  • In the original The Transformers, Optimus Prime uses a device called "Dominator Disks" to force the Constructicons to help him against their will. As TFwiki states:
    TFWiki.net: Prime sure goes along with the notion of enslaving one of his enemies pretty readily, huh? What happened to his ol' "Freedom is the Right of All Sentient Beings" schtick?
  • Human characters who don't regard Cybertronians 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.
  • 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. (He's a Jerkass, 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.)
• Really glaring in the "Guardians of the Galaxy" episode of Ultimate Spider-Man (2012). Spidey, a firm believer of Thou Shalt Not Kill, has absolutely zero problem with the Guardians slaughtering the Chitauri and leaving Korvac to die in his exploding ship.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Brock Sampson has a code against killing women and children. He was curious if there were 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. Number 24's part is to "Subdue the Venture robot" to which Monarch replies, "Subdue? You can kill the robot, it's a robot."
  • Though in Part 2, it's revealed The Guild of Calamitous Intent of all people forbids harsh torture of anything, even robots, so long as they are sentient. Assuming that part was true and not just part of Dr. Mrs. The Monarch's Good Cop/Bad Cop scheme.
    Dr. Mrs. The Monarch: Monarch, this goes against The Guild's sentience conference of 1998!
• In the W.I.T.C.H. 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.
• In an episode of Young Justice (2010), Miss Martian "kills" the robotic mannequin controlling Mr. Twister. The others complain about her smashing a guy, but once they find out that he's a robot, they let the matter drop. It's especially ironic since one of their mentors, Red Tornado, is a robot and plays a prominent role in the episode. It isn't sapient like Red Tornado, but Miss Martian didn't know that, and she just assumed that it wasn't.

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