What Measure Is a Non-Human? - TV Tropes

"Boy, if those employees weren't robots, I would have looked like some kind of serial killer or something, eh?"

• Plants, protists, fungi, bacteria, and so on and so forth do not count on this scale. Except sometimes when tropes like Plant Aliens, Planimal, Plant People, and When Trees Attack come into play. Or if the organism is a member of an endangered species. Or if you're talking about destroying an entire forest, since that's on such a large scale and since there are animals in the forest that could die or get their habitats destroyed. Or if it's a Soulful Plant Story.^note 
• Undead beings like skeletons and zombies and victims of certain strains of The Virus do not blip at all in this value (despite still being Homo sapiens). There's hardly any controversy about it either, probably because they're trying to kill you. In fact, killing one is seen as only helping along a natural process.
• 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 Improbable Infant Survival but snakes, spiders and insects are trampled without a second thought. Sadly, this is Truth in Television. To paraphrase an old Denis 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, typically in self defense. 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. Double points if that form is that of a snake or other reptile.
• Clones, parallel universe duplicates, and other Doppelgangers are often considered expendable, even if they absolutely are biologically human and sentient and independent individuals with personalities. Restoring an AI from a backup copy is often treated like a Disney Death. This is all provided at least one "instance" of each character survives. ("Sorry, but we only need one flannel shirt-wearing comic relief guy.") The thing is, it should be more like a twin sibling dying, but it tends to be treated more casually instead, like Immortal Life Is Cheap. This can vary, however, as while the story can kill them freely without consequence, many writers prefer to let their deaths affect the characters with all the pathos such a close death could incur. Whether actually treating it like a sibling/twin death, a warning about the path they could be taking (in the case of an Evil clone/alternate self) or the consequences of failing (with alternate universes or Bad Future selves).
• Vampires, although 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 King's Quest have killed off Dracula with favorable karmic results (With Graham, the Fan Remake takes a different route), 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!"
• Robots and Artificial Intelligence stories examine this quite a lot in their plots, for example in the writings of Isaac Asimov. The Three Laws obviously put a robot's survival below a human's, even below human commands. 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. It probably helps that when a robot dies We Can Rebuild Him more easily than bring back a human (which is a source of superiority as well: human life is more complicated, probably because robots are almost always written as not having souls even if they are sentient), making them more expendable.
• Supernatural entities vary depending on alignment. Typically demons are on the same level as undead.
• 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 the 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 end their supposedly nightmarish existence and go drink some Brain Bleach". The same can be said for Transhuman characters.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens rarely have this problem - as their actors are obviously human, it is easy to transfer the value (this is largely why the trope persists even into the modern, CG-heavy era). 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.

• Many insecticide commercials (Raid in particular) feature talking cartoon bugs fleeing in terror before being mercilessly destroyed by a cheerful housewife with a spray can. One Raid commercial even had a cockroach maternity ward get wiped out this way.
• A similar commercial for stain remover had a talking carpet stain get dissolved and wiped out of existence by a cheerful housewife while he directly begged her to spare his life. And the smile never leaves her face.
• A commercial from years ago, for some store or another, had two talking trees announcing the store had a big sale on all wooden products. One of the trees asked where they'd get all that wood from. Cue the offscreen sound of a chainsaw starting up, and the two trees screaming in terror.
• Ikea commercials:
  • A commercial shows an old lamp being replaced and abandoned.

  Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you are crazy. It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.

  • However, a sequel commercial showed the lamp being taken in by a little girl and the same man appearing.

    Many of you feel happy for this lamp. That's not crazy. Reusing things is much better.

• In a strange subversion, Swiffer commercials used to have a mop being sad that a woman replaced it with a new Swiffer. People must have felt sorry for it, because in later commercials the mop actually gets into a relationship with several other objects. The commercials even say to not feel sorry for the mop. More recent Swiffer ads show a mud stain that looks and acts like a human Valley Girl in a brown dress or a film that looks and acts like a human classic movie actress in a gray dress who refuses to let a mop take her away and falls in love with the Swiffer.
• Similar to the Raid example, Domestos bleach adverts in the United Kingdom (and possibly other countries) depicted anthropomorphic germs being melted by the bleach at the end of each advert, accompanied with the slogan "Millions of Germs Will Die" delivered in a flat, deadpan voice, often with the germ screaming in terror. The early adverts were borderline sinister, so in the years since they have attempted Rule of Funny to various degrees.
• Many commercials with sentient food (such as some M&M's commercials) have them being either eaten or being chased around to be eaten.
  • There was an M&M's commercial where Red, Yellow and Crispy are seen eating bags of their respective type. Patrick Warburton walks in, and questions that, while he's eating M&M's too, they're basically acting like cannibals. They proceed to swap bags and before he takes them away in disgust.
  • A currently airing commercial has the Brown (female) M&M being warned to stay away from a chocoholic at a party. Brown's reaction? Set Red up on a date with the woman so she can eat him.
• An old Fig Newton commercial features a talking fig (an obvious guy in a fig costume) in a huge barrel yelling, "Fire! Fire!" and pleading like this: "I love Fig Newtons, but only when I eat them, I don't want to be one!" When some kids run up and ask him where's the fire, he replies, "Would you come if I'd yelled, 'Newton! Newton!'?"
• One lotion commercial features a talking rash, who wheedles the woman it's on to scratch him. He panics when she decides to use the lotion instead.
• Pop Tarts full stop. The commercials feature Pop Tart characters and even give us glimpses into their hopes and dreams as well as showing them running in terror from the humans trying to eat them. One commercial has a male Pop Tart looking for his girlfriend when a human suddenly pops up and says, "She was delicious," and then throws him into a toaster. The humans come off like psychopaths if you assign any human value to the Pop Tarts. Taken to horrific levels when a human "nurse" walks into a hospital nursery and prepares to eat a baby Pop Tart while its parents (a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly) can only watch in horror.
• Ads for Mucinex, a respiratory decongestant designed to cause mucus to loosen and come up more quickly, feature sentient globs of mucus happily making a home in somebody's lung. They're usually played up as massive effin' pricks who get comfortable by deliberately making their unwilling host uncomfortable, and tend to be incorrigible slobs, so we're clearly supposed to sympathize with the humans who use Mucinex.

• Big Finish Doctor Who: In Mistfall, the New Alzarians are conducting some seriously invasive experiments on the Marshmen, whom they regard as subhuman, even though they are their ancestors. They are also willing to leave their Marshmen test subjects behind when their base is set to self-destruct. It is only when one of the Marshmen develops speech that they concede that the Marshmen are a sentient race.

• "Pinocchio": How about all the boys that get turned into donkeys? Even the story forgets all about them once they have been transformed.
• "Puss in Boots": When he first inherits the cat, the young man's plan is to make some money by selling its skin to make gloves. His sapient, 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.
• In Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's tale "King Goldenlocks", a shepherd lets the king's soldiers kill and maim his dog in exchange for fancy clothes without a second thought.

• 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 & Friends, on the other hand... (see under Western Animation).
• 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 Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops, Doraemon and friends are caught in a Robot War, when machines from the robot-occupied world of Planet Mechatopia invades earth. The villains includes Riruru, a Robot Girl built to look exactly like a human girl around Shizuka's age (meant for infiltration and reconnaissance purposes) and hordes of robot soldiers and drones resembling your typical anime robot army. Riruru, despite actively trying to kill Doraemon and Nobita after her true identity is exposed only to be caught in a massive explosion, was later rescued by Shizuka, repaired and treated for injuries, despite Riruru attacking and attempting to strangle Shizuka mere moments after the latter recovers her from a pit; where Riruru then had a Heel–Face Turn and becomes one of the good guys. Meanwhile, Doraemon and the boys have no qualms destroying Mechatopian robot mooks by the hundreds.
• In Doug's 1st 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.
• Zig-zagged in Jonny Quest vs. the Cyber Insects. The cyber insects don't tend to be seen as sympathetic and the heroes kill them left and right (although Zin seems to genuinely care about them at times), while 4-DAC, although he's a robot, is treated like a living, breathing member of the Quests' family and his possible demise(s) cause the characters much distress.
• Metafictional example in The Lion King (1994). Disney is no stranger to killing family members of the heroes, and have continued to do so in three films past the point where they stopped killing their villains. However, Simba's father, Mufasa, is murdered in front of him by his own brother. We see his body (though admittedly there is no blood), the words "dead", "killed", and "murder" are used, and it affects Simba greatly. Most of the other family member deaths weren't as drawn-out, would they have gone all out on Mufasa's death if he and Simba had been human instead of lions? And if they had, would it still have been rated G? And then the fact that Scar himself gets eaten alive by hyenas. Though we only see the shadows, and he so richly deserved it after the aforementioned murder of his brother and attempted murder of his nephew, this death was so violent and brutal that Disney had earlier decided against giving it to Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, in favor of a Disney Villain Death. Although they did consider it a less frightening alternative to their original plans for Scar's death.
• Pixar seems to like this trope. To wit:
  • Toy Story has Woody react this way when he sees what Sid did to the other toys. Especially when they drag a wounded Buzz off...
  • Jessie's song in Toy Story 2
  • Remy the rat has to fight hard for respect in Ratatouille.
  • WALL•E. The inhabitants of the Axiom generally treat the robots as cruise crew (which is understandable given that they're on a cruise) or as video game characters (which... is a product of lazy ignorance more then anything). This is probably a general BnL stance; convenience before ethics. However, McCrea gets a major wake-up call in the form of the A113 recording, and from that point on treats robots as people. It's shown at the end that ALL the humans are genuinely shocked and dismayed at WALL•E's mangled form, so... Continuation fan fics generally have a lot of deep probing questions about this trope; whether a robot is considered criminal, defective, or insane, how robot marriages would work, the exact question of robot children, should robots and humans even live together...
• In Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, if you are a robot, run! You have a 90% chance of being killed, regardless of how much personality or plot importance you have. If you're a fembot, you're the character who gets kidnapped, mind raped, sold into slavery, and killed. This movie seriously hates robots.

• Within all three major Abrahamic religions, as their teachings center around Humans Are Special the fate of nonhumans such as animals and theoretical extraterrestrial life upon death has been hotly debated for centuries. The latter even earned its own phrase, "exotheology", and remains a lively subdiscipline within several religious traditions. In Judaism and Christianity the Book of Ecclesiastes explicitly states that animals don't have souls, and some extrapolate this to extend to all nonhuman life.
  • As Jews Love to Argue that hasn't been the end of the discussion, as the Kabbalah goes so far as to claim that everything in creation will eventually return to God. Regarding extraterrestrial life, the most prominent voice on the subject has been the Jewish scholar Norman Lamm who suggested that God would make Himself available to all His creatures.
  • Christianity is somewhat more united regarding animals, as most sects maintain that animals don't have souls which makes it even more important that we treat them well in this life. As for aliens, many believe that Jesus Was Way Cool enough to include other intelligent life into His kingdom, with the Vatican publicly stating on a few occasions that they would be no less than us in the eyes of God.
  • Islam teaches that while animals won't be permitted into the afterlife, they'll be properly compensated for any suffering they endured in life. In contrast to the other two, Islam directly addresses the prospect of intelligent life among the stars with Muhammad's cousin Ibn Abbas directly stating that Allah created other worlds like Earth with their own prophets to boot.

• Frankenstein (2014): Jacques, the owner of an underground fight circus, sings about this to the musical's Walking Shirtless Scene version of Frankenstein's Monster, who he intends to force into blood sports for this reason, accompanied by a chorus of similarly dressed dancers.
• 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.

  • Brought up again later on when a tearful Red asks Cinderella if they should even be attempting to kill the giant since she is technically a person.
• Shrek: The Musical:
  • Weirdly, Donkey uses this to save himself from Dragon, pointing out that he's a donkey, not a knight, and therefore shouldn't be considered a threat. Then he accidentally seduces her.

• BIONICLE:
  • Kiina and Ackar are initially reluctant to attack the seemingly-humanoid Rahkshi, but have no problem chopping them up when they realize "They're just slugs in armour."
  • Earlier, the Toa discovered that the Bohrok they had previously slaughtered were not only just doing their job, but were actually transformed Matoran. They're suitably shocked at this, although more at the Body Horror than the killing, as Bohrok have been proven to have no inherent intelligence.
  • Earlier still, the entirety of the Visorak arc. The protagonists are changed to beastmen, which they find horrifying, but they have to learn to appreciate their new forms for what they are before the Deus ex Machina will turn them back. There are also the Rahaga (who are eventually revealed to be transformed Toa themselves) that go around trying to save the wildlife from the evil army. Said evil army is made up of Giant Spiders whose name means "stealer of life" in their own language... and the arc ends when one of the protagonists disbands the army and points out their former ruler was a tyrant. But not before his partners kill a bunch of them. Later, the Order of Mata-Nui trick a different team of Toa into bringing a rock that summons the Visorak to a volcanic island, killing all of them. The Toa are outraged that they were just duped into committing genocide, despite the reasoning of the Order that the spiders were Always Chaotic Evil.
  • Somewhat related, but Matoran (at least the ones on Mata Nui) have always found that harming innocent wildlife is wrong, and some actively treated injured animals that the Toa had defeated.
  • Before the series got Left Hanging, it's been revealed that the Great Beings never meant the Matoran Universe's population to develop sapience. Which has Just a Machine connotations...
• In every LEGO theme with good guys and bad guys as well as humans and nonhumans, the nonhumans are always portrayed as the bad guys, even when fiction makes them seem more sympathetic.

• Doki Doki Literature Club!:
  • A major part of the plot of focuses on this trope as applied to video game characters. Monika turns out to be aware that she's a fictional character in a game, which leads her to an existential crisis. She intentionally worsens her friends' mental health issues and ultimately deletes them from the game, believing it to not be as bad as murder because none of them were "real" to begin with. Everyone has killed people in video games, right? In fact, her Yandere obsession with the player came about because she believes that they are the only real thing in her life.
  • The Updated Re-release contains mail from fictional developers of the program who are experimenting on Monika to see just how much torment her situation puts her in, and one of the messages says they shouldn't "arbitrarily" start making up some ethics to apply to such non-human entities, sort of implying it would be more wrong to think they shouldn't torture her freely. Sounds like somebody didn't take a course in research ethics... In an additional bit of irony and hypocrisy, it's implied the developers are doing this because they know or suspect they're also living in a simulation, although what that means is left totally mysterious.
• In Sunrider, several characters consider the Prototypes — vat-grown, genetically-modified clones with telepathy and a Hive Mind — to be something less than human, with Fontana and Admiral Grey both calling them twisted monsters born of science. For their part, the Prototypes consider themselves superior to humanity and view their superiority as sufficient justification for enslaving the human race (or in Alice’s case, exterminating it).
• Your Turn to Die has Dolls, and one of its deadly games revolves around the notion that, if completed correctly, none of the participants have to die... provided they figure out who was secretly replaced by a Doll and sacrifice them instead of one of the human players. Note that the Doll in question is just as unaware of their status as everyone else, with an AI designed around mimicking the person they're based off of as closely as possible.
  • This is also flipped on its head in places — Rio Ranger ends up being destroyed by his own creator based off the notion that he's become too humanlike, because humans are driven by emotional fragilities and therefore imperfect.
  • During Chapter 3-1A, the participants meet Doll versions (called "Dummies") of the people who didn't survive the First Trial. The participants quickly make it clear that they consider the Dummies to have much value as them and don't treat them any different from regular humans, with some even bringing up what happened with the previous Doll. Towards the end of Chapter 3-1B, however, both humans and Dummies end up prioritizing the survival of one of the humans, with the Dummies even insisting that Sara sacrifice them to protect the human. Of course, if said human dies, it results in all of them losing, so this is something of a justified case.