Musings - And John was a human
You know what trope really annoys me sometimes? Humans are the real monsters. It’s where humans, when compared to other races/species, are considered the worst of the worst and there’s not much we can do to ‘redeem’ ourselves. It’s prevalent in the science fiction and fantasy genre, though I tend to notice this more in fantasy and its sub-genres.
Sometimes this is mixed with a green Aesop, with equally mixed results. One major example of this is in the video game Chrono Cross where the theme is ‘humans are jerks that abuse nature’. This theme is hammered into your head as you play the game, but it becomes broken when the dwarves show up; in response to their land becoming uninhabitable, they invade the fairies’ land and attempt to commit genocide against them. The theme is ultimately shattered when the dwarven chieftain uses a gas-spewing, steam-powered tank against the PCs, and when he’s defeated, the chieftain curses the humans and their destructive nature. To make matter worse, the fairies actually side with the dwarves, saying that humans forced the dwarves off their lands, ignoring the dead bodies of their friends and family, killed by the asshole noble dwarves.
There’s also when the writer plays favorites with races/species (elves/vampires/shapeshifters/demons), condemning humans while disregarding the problems their favorites have. Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a good example; although the villains tend to be vampire/shapeshifters that indulge in various acts of evil, humans are treated like KKK members, suspicious or outright hostile to non-humans. Anita judges humans as bigots, treating them with disdain even as she hunts a shapeshifting serial murderer/rapist.
House of Night is definitely guilty of this, the vampires looking down at humans and bemoaning that talented humans are, well, human. We’re apparently so envious of vampires that we hate them and persecute them, though as I said in my reading progress, vampire society is really messed-up, but as the writers side with the vampires, fault is blamed squarely on humans.
The humans are the real monsters and are puny trope seems to be the main theme of The Others series. In that series, every antagonist is human. Like in every book, it’s some human group that overstep their boundary and need to be dealt with. Three books with a fourth one on the way, you’d think there would be another antagonist, like an inter-dimensional frog monster or a race of fish people that like to eat Others. But no, it’s just humans. Hell, the blurb for the fourth book says that the land itself gets in on the human-hating action, siding with the Others and creating a power imbalance. How am I supposed to be frightened for the Others when they have magical WMDs and are likely to use them against people without magical help? Let’s not forget that Others have no problems killing humans and getting away with it, and yet act incredulous when humans get sick of mistreatment. Thanks to the disadvantages and favoritism, humans in this series are like ants trying to fight against someone armed with a water hose.
It’s not like you can’t have humans be the bad guys, District 9 did this well as many of the humans were mostly assholes (including the protagonist Wikus), treating the Prawns like garbage and not letting them go home. It works ’cause they’re the oppressors and shown to be flawed. Just making humans the villains without showing us how bad it is undermines whatever point the creators wanted, and having them be showed up by the writer’s favorite group makes us instead sympathetic to them. It’s a fine line that’s easy to fall into.
Sometimes this is mixed with a green Aesop, with equally mixed results. One major example of this is in the video game Chrono Cross where the theme is ‘humans are jerks that abuse nature’. This theme is hammered into your head as you play the game, but it becomes broken when the dwarves show up; in response to their land becoming uninhabitable, they invade the fairies’ land and attempt to commit genocide against them. The theme is ultimately shattered when the dwarven chieftain uses a gas-spewing, steam-powered tank against the PCs, and when he’s defeated, the chieftain curses the humans and their destructive nature. To make matter worse, the fairies actually side with the dwarves, saying that humans forced the dwarves off their lands, ignoring the dead bodies of their friends and family, killed by the asshole noble dwarves.
There’s also when the writer plays favorites with races/species (elves/vampires/shapeshifters/demons), condemning humans while disregarding the problems their favorites have. Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a good example; although the villains tend to be vampire/shapeshifters that indulge in various acts of evil, humans are treated like KKK members, suspicious or outright hostile to non-humans. Anita judges humans as bigots, treating them with disdain even as she hunts a shapeshifting serial murderer/rapist.
House of Night is definitely guilty of this, the vampires looking down at humans and bemoaning that talented humans are, well, human. We’re apparently so envious of vampires that we hate them and persecute them, though as I said in my reading progress, vampire society is really messed-up, but as the writers side with the vampires, fault is blamed squarely on humans.
The humans are the real monsters and are puny trope seems to be the main theme of The Others series. In that series, every antagonist is human. Like in every book, it’s some human group that overstep their boundary and need to be dealt with. Three books with a fourth one on the way, you’d think there would be another antagonist, like an inter-dimensional frog monster or a race of fish people that like to eat Others. But no, it’s just humans. Hell, the blurb for the fourth book says that the land itself gets in on the human-hating action, siding with the Others and creating a power imbalance. How am I supposed to be frightened for the Others when they have magical WMDs and are likely to use them against people without magical help? Let’s not forget that Others have no problems killing humans and getting away with it, and yet act incredulous when humans get sick of mistreatment. Thanks to the disadvantages and favoritism, humans in this series are like ants trying to fight against someone armed with a water hose.
It’s not like you can’t have humans be the bad guys, District 9 did this well as many of the humans were mostly assholes (including the protagonist Wikus), treating the Prawns like garbage and not letting them go home. It works ’cause they’re the oppressors and shown to be flawed. Just making humans the villains without showing us how bad it is undermines whatever point the creators wanted, and having them be showed up by the writer’s favorite group makes us instead sympathetic to them. It’s a fine line that’s easy to fall into.