Discussion Main / ApeShallNeverKillApe

The current quote is not relevant to the trope.

"You have the effrontery to be squeamish. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape — We never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."

The quote isn't painting either humans or dragons as holding themselves morally superior because they don't kill their own kind. The dragon is condemning humans for calling violence and cruelty moral actions. The entry on the novel says the quote is ambiguous, but it's not. Some people just have poor reading comprehension. The example should be removed too. I'm leaving it right now because I don't know if it's considered bad form to delete a quote without a replacement, but it really should be changed.

This seems too ambiguous to use: We aren't let in on exactly what they are thinking. Another explanation is that the third alien is making a Heroic Sacrifice for the species.

• Alien Resurrection: Disproving Rippley's theory that aliens don't screw one another over for a percentage: Two imprisoned xenomorphs killed a third to escape confinement using its acidic blood.

Examples are not discussion threads. Tips Worksheet: "The idea is to make articles in Main look like they were written by the same person". Please do not natter. On balance this seems not to be a good example, if it is an example. If it is an example please utilize Example Indentation and Repair Dont Respond when returning it to main: double stars are for sub-examples such as works with a series or episodes of a show. They are not to be used as paragraph breaks in extended sections of prose, again please see Example Indentation.

• Minbari were big time like this in Babylon 5, even boasting that they didn't lie... but considering their love of Cryptic Conversation, they will just twist and misstate the facts, or outright lie to save another's honor.
  • In one episode Lennier outright lies to get rid of a friendly but annoying drunk, and commenting afterwards how he'll do his penance later.
  • They also claimed that they do not kill Minbari. Causing other Minbari to die of starvation or exposure didn't count.
    • Shortly after, they just dropped the pretense and started killing each other outright.
    • Minbari didn't adopt that law until Valen came along, so presumably before then, they did find need to kill each other, especially given they had a Warrior Caste.
    • They did, however, manage to go a millennium without a single Minbari-on-Minbari murder. That's impressive.
      • We only have their word for that, and since they'll lie to protect honor...
  • But they also had the tradition of Denn'Sha, which is a ritual death duel, in which Minbari do kill Minbari. According to one of the books, the Minbari handwave this fact away by claiming that the loser of a Denn'Sha duel takes responsibility for his death upon himself, thus making the death technically an act of suicide.
  • The Minbari were also hot on "racial purity". Which, as Valen's history revealed, was not so "pure" after all.
  • Furthermore, during the Earth-Minbari war which started shortly after Mankind's first contact with the Minbari, the Minbari saw nothing wrong with their stated goal of completely exterminating the human race from the universe because one Earth spaceship had fired a shot on a Minbari vessel and as a result the leader of the entire Minbari race was badly injured and died. (Due to a cultural misunderstanding compounded by the Minbari unknowingly rendering the humans' sensors useless with their own, the humans mistook the Minbari vessel's open gun ports for a sign the aliens were about to shoot, so the humans fired on the technologically superior Minbari ship in what they thought was self-defense.) The Minbari only stopped their genocide when the capture of Jeffrey Sinclair at the Battle of the Line led to the discovery that Minbari souls were being incarnated in humans (or so Delenn thought), and "Minbari should never kill Minbari". The truth was, of course, a lot more complicated.
    • At least most of the Minbari in the TV-movie In the Beginning begin to question the sensibility of a genocide even while the war is still going on, but by then it has gotten such momentum that even the most influential leaders had to find an extra special reason to end it. Which they kept secret from the population.