Zzzzzzzzzz
Errrrgh. The title is a snowclone, but the trope is very different, it's horribly broad, and there's no indication of what the "storytelling convention or shortcut" is. And It didn't go through YKTTW where those issues should have been caught and fixed.
Wait, that's bizarre. Dommie just made it on the 4th of this month, but it has an archived discussion — and discussions were archived sometime last summer. Which means, I think, that at some point we had this and it was cut.
I vote cut it again.
edited 13th Jul '11 9:33:53 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Agreed - the present description is too broad. It's just about animals being bastards, when it should be animals being shown as worse than humans (which a couple of the examples are). It needs to be cut and go back through YKTTW.
"Well, it's a lifestyle"
There are separate ideas; one that animals are "just as capable" of evil and another saying they are even worse. Then again "just as capable" can't be applied exactly; it all depends on how you look at it. So "animals are bastards" should be just the inverse of Humans Are Bastards such that it simply means animals are worse than humans.
Lost in Space
There are a bunch of potential concepts here. There's the fact that, even when animals are the characters in a story rather than humans, they will have human personalities, emotions, and motivations, with a few animal traits thrown in for flavor. Anthropomorphic Animal covers that one.
There's the notion that certain nonhuman species are inherently evil. We already have this noted in Animal Stereotypes.
I don't see any trope left after you've eliminated those two elements.
edited 13th Jul '11 11:54:23 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A lot of these examples seem to just be "animals are cruel to each other when they are the central characters of the work" which seems like a pretty broad trope as a great number of works where there are no humans will still have evil Complete Monster characters. As the title is an inversion of Humans Are Bastards I sugeest making this a trope where animal behavior and society is shown to be MORE corrupt than humans society. There must be both kinds of society for the trope to qualify. Is that a good idea?
The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.