Humanity Fuck Yeah

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Revision as of 17:01, 31 October 2018 by 85.28.126.251 (talk) (Agreed, it is cancerous shit, but this is not the way to deal with it.)
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"We poison our air and water to weed out the weak! We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere! We nailed our God to a stick! Don't fuck with the human race!"

Out of all threads that appear at the /tg/, it is this kind of threads that hold that one special place in the hearts of fa/tg/uys. It shows humanity for what it really is: a savage but superior bunch of mighty and brilliant alphas with machines that rape any organism that dares stand in its path, then proceed to do the same to any aliens across which they come, as they are all pathetically inferior in every way. This can take many forms, including military, cultural, culinary, and sexual(is surprisingly not much). The foremost is the most common in these stories.

Many glorious hours of dedicated hard work were given to these threads, the finest lines of which would make any xeno race run to the edge of the known universe, even if the humans were still in the stone age. Reasons why humans are such a threat to the rest of the galaxy are various, but a good deal can be summed up in the following list:

  • Our evolution - We evolved and THRIVED on all range of extreme environments all over the Earth, from the infernal heat of Africa where everything is trying to KILL YOU! ALL THE TIME!, to the frigid apocalyptic wastelands of the North and the Ice Age where survival depended on constant invention and ingenuity. Aliens usually evolved on some herbivore world or become less "on their guard" due to centuries of living away from nature, not troubled by survival.
  • Our history - Humans have been getting better at killing each other basically even before they made stone axes, and we got better over time. You think proud warrior races have shit on us? Spartan style training they undergo makes only a handful of survivors. No matter how good they are, we'll just drown them in conscripts. We also nearly went extinct once, BECAUSE A HUGE VOLCANO EXPLODED, making us only have about 5000 INDIVIDUALS left and of them ONLY 40 PAIRS were BREEDING ONES. Did that make us quit? NOPE. Only about 70000 years later we had 7,4 BILLION INDIVIDUALS, having 100 TIMES more biomass than any other large animal species in the history of our planet!!! That is a hell of a lot of breeding (which has also made us have a very low genetic variety almost making us inbred but not quite. BUT STILL)! The moral of the story is that do not fuck with us, xenos. No matter what you do WE WILL SURVIVE. And after a while: WE. WILL. THRIVE.
  • Our bodies - We're the ultimate Omnivores, we hunt down, kill, burn and eat absolutely anything until totally nothing is left, even more so than so-called "apex" predators like lions, bears, snakes and sharks (in fact, contrary to what Jaws may lead you to believe, we eat sharks so much, hunting them down to near extinction. Why? Simply because they make fancy soup). We are like Tyranids without a hive mind. We also drink alcohol, one of the most volatile, flammable, caustic solvents in chemistry that is for all intents and purposes, POISON. It's the same toxic stuff used to Exterminatus bacteria, fungi and everything else biological, and a VX-like neurotoxin to invertebrates, arthropods and almost every other small animal. Why? Because it's FUN!
  • Our mind -The most terrifying aspect of us would probably be our brains and technology. Our aggressive instincts combined with our intelligence will never cease to come up with better and deadlier ways to warp reality in our own Image, and to torture and exterminate the enemy, and such would probably seem like incomprehensible Lovecraftian Magic to lower species. Our modern tech would scare the shit out of tribal communities. We have exterminated a lot of species like the Dodo simply by uncaring accident (which is probably why we are thriving during an extinction event (for now at least)). What we can come up with scares the shit out of ourselves even. Think Nuclear Weapons and M.A.D. for example.

As you can see there is a lot of material to roll around in these kind of threads. Humans may not be as powerful sometimes, just a serious player in the galaxy through economic superiority or science, but that's not the real "Humanity Fuck Yeah" thread. The real deal is us having our way with the galaxy as we see fit. Murdering billions of xenos, or fucking them if they're hot enough, taking their delicious alien babies and eating them in front of their parents, mining their planets to the core and moving on, leaving nothing but dead rocks in our wake. We march on, our mantra singing through the stars:

GENOCIDE! MINING! GENOCIDE! MINING! GENOCIDE! MINING!

Xenos Pay Attention You're Next

Our species thought we knew war. We built our civilization on foundations of honor and prowess, we were like a rapier; crippling our foes with small yet decisive blows. We killed our enemies yet we allowed them to surrender, there was no needless killing. That was before the humans came and they showed us the truth...That we were just naive children and that true war is won through unrelenting cruelty and spite. Despite our warriors training, despite all our experience, still we fell to the innumerable waves that the humans sent against us, they burned our worlds; slaughtering our children in horrific ways using them to learn how to kill us more efficiently. After many blood filled years these Terran butchers arrived on our home and they transformed it into a corpse-filled landscape. I tried to take my life but one of these power armored animals stopped me. As he leveled his vicious weapon at me I noticed his face for the first time; His eyes were filled with murderous glee and his mouth twisted into a sneer he whispered three final words to me..."Humanity, fuck yeah"...

"Do they not know who we are, my brethren? We are the chosen of the Emperor, the scions of Terra. We are dominion and we are numberless. We are war itself and the death of all who oppose us. We are Humanity and we shall educate our ignorant foes as to the true meaning of that word!" -- Lord Inquisitor Aedrick Mantel of the Ordo Xenos, from Imperial Armour Volume 12 "The Fall of Orpheus".

In real-life there are people who claim encounters with aliens. Contrary to the popular trend here on HFY, the people who supposedly encountered aliens in real-life are often shocked or even frightened of them. In addition, abductees and witnesses stated the aliens had advanced technology beyond anything humanity has made that rendered the humans involved helpless against the aliens before being taken to their spaceships for experiments. But don't despair HFY, there are a few accounts where the people in question fought back; in one account a person was about to be abducted by an alien but stabbed them with a knife. Though the knife couldn't pierce the alien's skin, the resistance resulted in the aliens were driven off without abducting anyone. There was also an incident in which the would-be abductee ran inside, grabbed his rifle, ran out, and starting shooting at three aliens coming at him. One of them had to be dragged away by its compatriots. He hasn't had any xenos problems since then. In other words, if you're being abducted by aliens, fight back! Armed or not. Kick them in the gornacks! Gouge out their eyes! Bite them!

-- There was also a reference once on an infamous board to a story about an overweight powerlifter who was abducted, woke up and threw a few greys off him after breaking from restraints, afterwards he was lead down a hall where he passed out and woke up at home. I dont think he killed any of the aliens but they were suppposedly the 4ft tall skinny greys, and he was able to punch one which flew with a wall, and the others retreated. He was then lead into the hall. Source pending.

Now with a song!

Humanity Humanity

Humaniteh, fuck yeah! Coming again to kill some mother fucking xenos, yeah! Humaniteh, fuck yeah! Genocide is the only way, yeah

Aliens your game is through 'cause now you have to answer too Humaniteh, fuck yeah! So lick my butt and suck on my balls Humaniteh, fuck yeah! What you gonna to do when we come for you now

It's the dream that we all share It's the hope for tomorrow Fuck yeah!

Burgers, fuck yeah! Space-mart, fuck yeah! The Earth, fuck yeah! Grifball, fuck yeah!

Orbital drop, fuck yeah! Run and gun, fuck yeah! The Internet, fuck yeah! Slavery, fuck yeah!

Fuck yeah!

Spacebucks, fuck yeah! Disneyverse, fuck yeah! Porno, fuck yeah! Petroleum, fuck yeah!

Assasination, fuck yeah! Killing, fuck yeah! Sushi, fuck yeah! Taco Bell, fuck yeah!

Rodeos, fuck yeah! Space ship and beyond Fuck yeah, fuck yeah

Democracy, fuck yeah! Space ships, fuck yeah! The Emperor, fuck yeah! Band-aids, fuck yeah!

Sly Marbo, fuck yeah! Christmas, fuck yeah! Premier Sanders, fuck yeah! Popeye, fuck yeah!

Capitalists, fuck yeah! Communists, (muffled fuck yeah) Fuck yeah, fuck yeah Simple deaths, fuck yeah!

A-10 , fuck yeah! Baneblade, fuck yeah!

Trivia

"Humanity Fuck Yeah" sometimes refers to omnicidal maniac-level racism against everything that isn't non-powered and normal human beings (because, you know, a human with superpowers is not really a human, right?). Readers may experience ocular bleeding due to excessive TVTropesisms escaping from humanity's natural habitats. This is a normal, if unpleasant side-effect.

Some great examples of "Humanity Fuck Yeah":

Recommended media about humans kicking ass

Note: While any media can actually bring a moment of a human kicking ass, it is imperative that such narrative presents humanity as a whole showing exceptional abilities to defeat super-powered/non-human adversity. For example, a book about humans slaughtering hyper-advanced alien invaders is absolutely "Humanity, Fuck Yeah". A book about World War 2 is not "Humanity, Fuck Yeah", because although it presents humans kicking ass and taking names, it is against other humans and there's ass kicking on all sides so that does not count.

Also, "Humanity, Fuck Yeah" only applies if humans are defeating super-powered non-humans through strictly technological means. For example, in X-COM: UFO Defense, regular troops gunning down aliens is HFY, as are heavy weapons platforms (big robotic gun platforms). PSI troopers, despite being humans, use supernatural powers so they are not HFY.

Behold a list of "Humanity, Fuck Yeah" works:

  • Xenophobia, a less than a minute-and-a-half song about committing Humanity Fuck Yeah with regards to Sci-Fi.
  • Kevin Jenkins universe Humans are from a 'deathworld'. Lot's of stories here. [<-- These stories suck. They have a terminal case of 'no plot just backstory'. There's no red thread of a tale being told snaking its way through the writing, no meaningful happenings. If you want random fluff, go for it, but there's no crunch here, not for anyone who demands a modicum of standards to his writing.] [I would disagree with this, IDK when this opinion was given, two years ago I would say it held some truth. However the main story as well as a few of the canon stories by different authors do have a plot and quality. Of course this is only my opinion on it.][Now in it's 3rd year of serialization, with 40+ chapters and 2 million+ words in the main storyline alone, there's a lot to sink your teeth into if you're into this kind of thing.]
  • Independence Day (1996). This is a must-see film. "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"
    • Now having a sequel 'Fuck YOU ALIEN SCUM
  • Starship Troopers novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The ST movie by Paul Verhoeven has humanity taking Humanity Fuck Yeah by the balls and cranking it up past 11... and failing miserably at almost every turn for black comedy.
  • Conan the Barbarian from Robert E. Howard, because going hand-to-hand combat with a cthulhu-like daemon-god and making it run away screaming in fear is the very definition of HFY. Remember that R.E.Howard and H.P.L. were friends, and many of the Cosmic Horror entities that HPL created are actually canon in Conan's universe, and he banishes them with brute force and axes.
  • Incidentally H.P. Lovecraft, who was pals with Howard, got a few tales where humans beat back the Great Old Ones, namely The Dunwich Horror (elegan/tg/entlemen professors fight back a huge eldritch demigod), The Call of Cthulhu itself (badass norwegian officer ramming a ship against Cthulhu's head anyone?) and the Dream-Quest of unknown Kadath (/x/ dreamer rallies an army of ghouls and nightgaunts to kill lunar toad-like abominations and then storms Kadath, residence of Earth gods).
  • The Damned trilogy, by Alan Dean Foster.
  • Warhammer 40000, obviously, particularly when it comes to the Imperial Guard. Although admittedly, Humanity Occasionally Does Not Fuck Yeah here, but then again, here is the awesome.
  • Traveller
  • Star Trek - yes, somehow. A note - the Mirror Universe episodes (TOS - Mirror Mirror, various DS9 ones, ENT - In A Mirror Darkly part I and II) in general are basically Humanity Fuck Yeah at it's best. In TOS-MU, everyone is more badass and horny, and mass killing alien scum who refuse to submit is the order of the day, but get told to make things better and more peaceful by our flawless prime universe counterparts. Does that sound like humanity to you? No? Good, because it's not because fuck that noise. Even their uniforms are more awesome (and sexy). ENT's In A Mirror Darkly shows the Empire at it's most brutal, starts with Zefram Cochrane trying the Vulcan salute, only to pull out a shotgun and shoot the Vulcan point blank! And from there, they straight up are attacking THE THOLIANS, and STEAL the USS Defiant from TOS's The Tholian Web! Many other shenanigans ensue. No less than later in DS9 confirms that hippy peace kumbaya is bullshit as in the intervening 100 or so years, M-Spock became Emperor and instituted weakness, and the Empire is predictably overthrown by the Alliance (a Klingon/Cardassian dominated political order) - and it's not just humans that are mass enslaved, but all the core races who were cowed or bros with humans and the Empire like the Vulcans and Andorians. See, conquest and HFY is good for the galaxy! But thanks to efforts of people who find themselves on the other side like THE SISKO, not only do the enslaved start a rebellion, but by the last Mirror episode, are looking like they will seriously win it. According to some books, this was actually Emperor Spock's master plan - cause reform to weaken the Empire, and lead to it's seeming death, which would make him one of the best alien believers of HFY of all time. Eventually, revolution will come, and the Empire is reborn as a sort of human-centric Galactic Republic - shorn of all the weaknesses but with an unquenchable thirst for HFY. They are last seen conquering the Breen and Klings or some shit - pure awesome. Hell, lots of REGULAR Trek episodes eventually are filled with HFY - especially anything involving THE SISKO, later era Kathryn "KILL THEM ALL" Janeway, or Section 31.
    • Also, a tumblr thread of utter hilarity showed that compared to Vulcans, humanity is an entire species of Doc Browns -- a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don't actually understand very well. And constantly succeeding. When Vulcans have two warp cores, they experiment on one and save the other for a backup. When humans have two warp cores, they plug them both into a third warp core, travel to an alternate dimension, steal their warp cores and plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip. That happened last week and we still have no idea what the torus sun is supposed to accomplish.
  • Mass Effect. Only on certain Renegade playthroughs, though; Paragon is hippy dippy "live in peace with xenos" Federation bullshit (to be fair, xenos in Mass Effect are actually friendly or reasonable, with a few exceptions). Even just the backstory has only-just-then-become-a-spacefaring-species humanity fighting a widely-feared and centuries-old galactic superpower to a standstill, followed up by earning their respect to such a degree that they let us jump the queue to join their galactic council club (or letting the current heads of the galactic council club die in battle so humanity fills the power vaccum). Although is just in the first game; in the second and third games the Renegade ending is retconned into non-canon, proving you never had a choice, the villains you stopped from getting summoned arrive anyway and since mankind never dominated the galaxy only multiculturalism can save you.
  • X-COM: UFO Defense. And XCOM Enemy Unknown/Within. Turns out humanity is the greatest hope the alien invaders have, and we're being tested to see if we are worthy of it (we are). And XCOM 2, because even when we lost the war, we WILL win it!
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. BELIEVE IN THE ME WHO BELIEVES IN YOU!
  • Gurren Lagann's precursor Getter Robo deserves mention, too. WHY DID THE GETTER RAYS CHOOSE LOWLY HUMANITY?! Also FUCK DINOSAURS!!
  • Stargate, both SG-1 and Atlantis. Stargate is the most Humanity Fuck Yeah thing ever. A bunch of people extends Earth influence across the entire galaxy in less than ten years. When we manage to build the first real space combat vessels, it's too late. Job's already done, galaxy is ours. So we move to conquer the next one, with another bunch of people and a couple of ships. Entire races are wiped out by teams of five people armed with submachine guns.
  • Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars. While it sucks compared to the earlier ones, Xeno scum come to harvest Tiberium on our planet, then find out they got played like a bunch of fools. More forces wouldn't have helped the Scrin, Kane has a motherfucking Scrin battleship he built when Bill Clinton was president, and another crashed UFO chilling out in Egypt. What the hell were the expecting, trying to fight a grandchild of God? They were expecting no resistance because they assumed all life on the planet had been consumed by Tiberium. The Scrin "invasion force" had only come to Earth to harvest Tiberium.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe. At numerous points in the setting (read: every other week), everything from alien empires and planet-eaters to GODS come to Earth looking to squash humanity like a Warboss sitting on a grot. They’ve conquered/destroyed/eaten every species/planet/galaxy they’ve encountered up to that point. Humanity’s heroes fly up and kick them in the dick!
  • The Salvation War. Demons invade Earth and begin attacking cities. In response, we invade Hell, curbstomp the forces of Chaos (they expect us to have swords, we actually have tanks and big fucking guns) and even end up perma-killing Satan with a ship-to-ship missile. THEN we invade Heavens and exterminate angels.
  • GATE: Thus The Self-Defense Force Fought There. Related to the above, but its other humans from a magical realm with mystical creatures backing them up invading modern-day Tokyo. Turns out swords and shields dont work to well against machine guns and attack helicopters...and then the JSDF proceeds to roll through the gate they came from and basically conquer the entire world on the other side...without a single casualty.
  • Gears of War. A horde of inhuman killing beasts erupt from every human city and then later on our would-be 'fuel' turns out to be an ever-infectious virus of OMNOMNOM! which screws both of our races up. We came back, re-strengthen our forces and gave a response which includes the massacre of all three species including ours via mass orbital bombardment of lasers from SPEHS!, detonation of a bomb that kills by intense light and heat akin to a flashy nuke, the flooding of every cave and hole on our planet(by sinking our last sanctuary no less) and the detonation a fucking NEUTRON BOMB... all because we could.
  • The annihilation series. Book one love conquers all. It's a stupid name but the book is really good it's about a boy who figures out that he has psychic powers that grant him the ability to fuck over people's shit the 2nd book is where things get crazy. An alien race who are arrogant and want nothing more then the human race to be gtfo go behind the galatic alliances back and attacks a colony killing 1/3 of the population. That's when the humans go batshit.
  • The humourous Poul Anderson novel "The High Crusade". A hyper-advanced alien empire tries to 'ave a go at medieval England and get hilariously rolled over because EMP doesn't work on knights and longbowmen.
  • Peter Bergs' Battleship. Generally shit storyline; basically aliens come down to Earth to fuck shit up, and accidentally land in the middle of a global naval wargame.
  • Factorio. The premise sounds weaker than most other entries here, but considering you start with nothing but a steam drill, and you are going to have to wipe the floor with the local giant bug creatures, even the smallest of which is about the size of a Smart car, in order to expand your mining, smelting and assembling industries, it is pretty much GENOCIDE! MINING! GENOCIDE! MINING! GENOCIDE! MINING!: THE GAME. To whit.
  • All Brotherhood of Steel Fallout 4 breakthroughs. The Brotherhood supports genocide of all the non-human abominations that exist throughout the wasteland. Ad Victoriam! The Minutemen kinda qualify as well for the same reason as the Rimworld example listed above - less on the non-human killing, but instead its humans coming together, working together, and taming the everloving shit out of the irradiated and mutant-infested swamps of Massachusetts (post-nuclear war, must clarify) to make the cosiest apocalypse ever.
  • While on the topic of Fallout, the Enclave are most definitely HFY. Using a modified virus to systematically wipe out any and all mutated scum that rove the wasteland like it's theirs is a prime example of how awesome humans are at causing mass destruction, and even if a certain tribal mutant was able to infiltrate their base and blow it up, the legacy of the human patriotism of the Enclave will always live on. In New Vegas, even down to only five oldfags and a snot nosed kid, they kick veritable ass. Though this one's a little up-to-you, as the Enclave were a wee bit too enthusiastic about the genocide part of HFY for their own good, as they actually wanted to bump off most of the human population of the post-apocalyptic US too.
  • The Muv Luv franchise. In 1967, all consuming aliens (BETA - Beings of Extra Terrestrial origin which is an Adversary of the human race) are found on Mars during the explorations there. They land on the Moon, and even though we stand no chance then on the moon, America fights back with fucking prototype SPACE MARINES, space fighters, and re-purposing exoskeletal lifters as power armor. While the universe proves to run on a lot of Humanity What The Fuck Are You Doing too (the first BETA Hive on Earth lands in Kashgar, and the PRC and USSR get greedy letting them get powerful enough, so they can harvest whatever goodies they have. When they try landing a hive in Canada, America says "lol fuck no" and nukes the Hive to oblivion with only minimal apologies). What makes it so wonderful is that even for decades, as humanity loses constantly, as literally children are forced to fight, the breathing HFY of everyone involved making last stands and killing wave upon wave of alien scum in awesome mechs or as infantry on the battleline is enough to make you shed manly tears. Even when we're down to less than one billion people, we do NOT, STOP, FIGHTING. And then to crown it, in 2001, we have our first major victory with a captured Hive. The main storyline ends with humanity just about ready to start the great reconquest of Eurasia.The snippets in Exogularity show how AWESOME Humanity has become with the break-neck technological advancement fueled by alien tech. I mean Shielding, Mecha Hand-held practicle beam weapons, ships that have length measure in 8KM-9KM and HUNDREDS of G-17B(Descendants of the Susanoo, which they use to GLASS BETA hives on Mars) and other shits. HFY indeed.
  • Doom, Doom 2, Doom 3, and DOOM. Because one human can slaughter every breathing thing on two moons and then in Hell. And again. And again. The reboot takes it even further by taking the whole "ancient evil being locked away to prevent it wiping us out" trope and reversing it. So you, the human main character, is the ancient evil while the demons are the horrified and massacred prison wardens. Fuck yeah.
  • Pokemon. I mean, mere human children can capture and enslave(those little balls they use to contain GIANT MOTHERFRICKIN DRAGONS! must be some brainwashing device!) peaceful creatures and then force those peaceful fire-breathing, water-spouting, grass-grassing monsters to fight each other to the death while the kids... KIDS! just stand behind them giving them orders. Also these little kids at the age of 10 are expected to go off on their own around the globe for fun.
  • Space Battleship Yamato. Aliens (humans with green skin... they count right?) enter our solar system and we blow their spaceship up for no reason! Then our arse gets handed to us as they start bombarding our planet with meteorites using a tractor beam. However the moment a friendly alien race (hot chicks) gives us a power generator what do we do? We use it to invent a destructive ima-firin-my-lazor-cannon stick both items into a battleship turned spaceship, send that one ship off on its own to go get a life-saving tech thingy from hot chic aliens while single handedly blowing up an entire space empire armada... All with a kickass main theme
  • The space opera grand strategy game by Paradox, Stellaris, can be played many different ways and allows you to go full HFY if you would like, you could even play as human fanatic purifiers. HFY is encouraged by one of the preset empires, The Commonwealth of Man, a xenophobic and militaristic faction of humans bent on enslaving xenos and dominating the galaxy. Refreshingly, humanity isn't actually special; if humanity wants to go full HFY, then they must work for it just like any other species.
  • Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke. While there is not conflict in the short story it still counts. Hippie aliens arrive on Earth only hours before the sun will explode, destroying the planet. The mission of the hippie aliens is to try to save as many people and as much of the culture as possible. Normally the galactic civilization does surveys of planets every one million years for new species, but the human race did not exist the last time the survey was done – four hundred thousand years before. We simply evolved too fast for them! However, radio signals had been detected on a planet 200 light years away, indicating intelligent life had arisen. They arrive, but nobody is home. As they search for any living humans, we learn that its typical for races to take thousand of years between the invention of the radio and space flight. The only thing they find is a communication tower beaming into space. They follow the beam with their FTL ships and discover an enormous fleet of rocket space ships (the largest fleet in galactic history), traveling into space without any FTL tech. Their tiny alien minds melt in the face of the sheer determination and steel balls Humanity posses. As they watch Humanity flying toward their birth right of total Galactic domination, the hippie aliens know that they are fucked.
  • Worldwar by Harry Turtledove. A series of eight alternative history novels. World War II is doing well, and humanity is having a lot of fun with itself, until 1942, when the reptilan aliens known as the Race attack. They start off by detonating nuclear weapons in the stratosphere, creating EMPs, which most developed nations don't even notice, because primitive vacuum tubes don't care about that at all. Their technology is pretty superior to the humans', but humans have a knack for thinking so far outside the box that the box can't even be seen anymore, combined with the fact that they simply don´t give up, like, at all. Notable HFY moments include all human armies, including lots of nasty partisan groups pretty much halting their previous conflicts, and all descending on their new, common foe (almost makes you pity the invaders); humans destroying an alien spaceship with a motherfucking huge cannon (hint: Dora), humans turning the aliens into drug addicts and disrupting their whole culture with their corruptive nature, an alien invasion on Britain stopped by chemical warfare, humans nuking a whole alien fleet killing millions, and finally humans driving the Aliens away and forcing them to accept a jolly human tradition: peace by mutual assured destruction
  • The Transformers "Beast Wars: Uprising" series of comics and short stories covering the intervening years between the Generation One and Beast Wars cartoons is an interesting case, focusing entirely on the aliens and rather than depicting the conflict with humanity itself, it deals with the disastrous effect that being on the receiving end of an HFY story has on their society. Tired of being caught up in the Autobots' and Decepticons' various conflicts, humanity steadily grows more and more militarized and eventually kicks the Transformers off Earth and forces them back to their dying homeworld of Cybertron. Confined to a single planet with limited supplies of energy, Cybertronian society begins to unravel even worse than it was before as the larger Transformers are left crippled due to their high fuel requirements and begin using smaller ones to fight in proxy wars. The Autobot/Decepticon conflict soon gives way to infighting as the energy crisis exacerbates the already existing inequalities between the two factions various sub-groups.
  • In The Elder Scrolls universe, humans are split into distinct ethnic groups with their own histories and unique abilities, but all of them are badass. Man's first foray into the continent of Tamriel was the ancient Atmorans, who landed in what is now Skyrim and eventually became the Nords (basically fantasy vikings). They had to fight against the Snow Elves (who they nearly drove to extinction with only five hundred warriors), the dragons (who they also rendered extinct, but the gods had to help this time) and are still to this day locked in daily battles against bears, sabre-tooth cats, trolls, giants, big spiders and all kinds of other horrific stuff. Far to the south in Cyrodiil, the humans there (the Imperials, fantasy Romans basically) were enslaved by another race of elves named the Ayleids, until Saint Alessia (fantasy Joan of Arc) led a slave rebellion with the help of a man who was on a constant and bloody never-ending WAAAGH against the elves named Pelinal Whitestrake, and together they overthrew the Ayleids and forged the beginnings of the first Cyrodiilic Empire (and there would later be another two under the Reman and Septim dynasties). In the western peninsula of High Rock, breeding programs between the Aldmer and the Nedes had given rise to a new race of Half-Elf humans known as the Bretons (fantasy French), who are said to rival and even surpass the Altmer in magical talents and even get a magical resistance. Finally came the Redguards (fantasy Africans), refugees from the sunken islands of Yokuda, the most talented warriors and sailors of Tamriel and the only race in the setting with access to gunpowder. It is also said that the gods themselves favour the races of Men over the Mer (elves) because while elves see mortality as a cruel prison, men see "strength in weakness" and live their lives to the fullest free from fears of their mortality, and this is especially true for Lorkhan, who is said to have created men to be the "chaos" to the "order" of the Mer.

An Alternate Take on HFY

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
— Proverbs 16:18

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet. You are a plague, and we...are the cure.
- Agent Smith, The Matrix

What started as a reasonable response to human suffering in fiction has blossomed into a cringe-fest of masturbatory autism that can be seen in the page quote. Haughty pride, arrogance, zealotry, blind idiocy, self-righteousness, and many more vices are enabled by such tooting of our own metaphorical horns. The worst part is how this attitude spreads to other fandoms like wildfire, even if humans or aliens aren't interacting with each other or even involved in the setting! The irony kicks in when you realize that many of the idols that HFY memers get their Idolatry on for would be disappointed at such vainglorious pride, the The Man-peror of Mankind would not approve! Even more ironic is how this attitude is exactly the same as a certain fluff rapist and his favored infallible, can't do wrong, and always victorious mary sues.

The real crime however, is how HFY quashes new ideas, sucking the rest of the entire fandom down a creative black hole. Guess you can in fact get sick of winning in fiction all the time!

Basically put, what little potential HFY had has long since been stifled in a sea of mental masturbation over our own imaginary greatness.

So when would such attitudes be appropriate? In dangerous settings where such attitudes are backed up my much human suffering and bloodshed. In settings where we truly earned the right to be a bit proud of our survival. In settings where humanity is beset on sides by hostile foes within and without, eternally under siege, with their very vices and souls threatening to rebel against the- hey wait a minute...

HFY tends to manifest itself especially terribly in fanfiction, where whole fandoms are plagued by a never ending slew of shitty fix fics that look at settings where humanity is already ridiculously special for no good reason and already has disproportionate influence on the setting and is already among the setting's winners and go "nah, humans need to win some more". Thus turning the sentiment into a code for "this fanfiction is shit written by some moron who doesn't understand how dramatic tension works" and turning HFY from a statement of pride to an ironic statement of mockery and a seal of low quality writing. The worst kinds of these fanfics tend to be written by people who legitimately think that the unfamiliar needs to be purged and it all starts reading rather disturbingly like Mein Kampf more than good literature (and worst of all, these fanfics will also have writing quality about as good as Mein Kampf, which is legendarily terrible and incoherent if you're unfamiliar with it) as the more mouthbreather type of fan projects their race war fantasies where they think no one will notice. However, much like with FATAL or Racial Holy War or other works written by the inbred, these attempts to escape notice tend to fail and instead will only draw further mockery upon discovery. Original works, even on /tg/, are little better in this respect due to the community that springs around them acting like an echo chamber to drown out any kind of negative feedback no matter how justified it may be.

The most important rule in any story with a conflict is of course a need to maintain tension. If people win without effort, it gets very boring very quickly unless effortless victory and anti-climax is the whole joke (and most fanfic writers simply aren't funny enough to make the space opera/high fantasy equivalent of one punch man and probably shouldn't try to either), so when you start writing humans as simply piledriving everyone in the way without trying you end up making the humans more insufferable than pretty much any variety of Elf has ever been. Instead of badasses, you have turned our species into uninteresting Mary Sues who most people who don't have their heads up their asses will start to root against, much like how people generally start rooting against a sports team that always seems to win. With no effort being expended, there's no reason to care about the struggle because there is no struggle to care about. Bad HFY forgets all this in favor of what amounts to masturbation via text and unfortunately, as most writers aren't all that great, most HFY fics will tend to be of the shitty tensionless curbstomp variety where humanity does nothing to deserve any victory it gets.

You can express how great humanity is, but always remember these few rules:

  • Don't make everyone else stupid, this is not only a lazy means of making your favoured faction right it's also one of the strongest signifiers for a Mary Sue as not only are they always right, anyone against them is a moron and probably eats babies too. Do make humans suffer setbacks and make mistakes, nobody wants to read about a hero who is never challenged and never stumbles or fucks up.
    • To quote an old saying "to err is to human", someone without flaw is more akin to a god (or God) than an actual person, so don't go that route unless the character is a god or God (whether you believe in a god/God/religion or not, that is a subject that should be handled with care). Push them to the brink of destruction and have them claw their way back up from nothing instead of acting as if the universe will bend over backwards for them on account of their species alone. And remember to give them humility as a result of whatever struggle they go through; they should be very much aware they're little fish in a very big pond.
  • Don't use "human ingenuity" as an advantage; this trope is so tiresomely played out that it produces nothing but eyerolling these days, especially since it tends to be a signifier that you've created a planet of hats setting where humanity is the only species not forced to have a hat (ironic, since this is itself a hat). This is lazy and overdone so don't do it.
  • Don't force humanity into a hat itself either, saying things like "humans are good diplomats/warriors" is easily disproven by just looking at about a hundred randomly selected people so it's always going to ring kind of false to people in the real world. Do give people weaknesses of some sort, whether cultural or physical or governmental some kind of flaw will help to make humanity seem human instead of efficiency obsessed robots. After all, racial hat simple means the result of averages fitting into the global-galactic niche. If Salarian artists (which *do* exist) would have overtaken the galactic culture by chance and random luck in the universe of Mass Effect, we would come to believe Salarians are a race of smart artists.
    • Do give other species nuance of their own, just as you shouldn't give out a hat to humanity, you should try to avoid essentially typecasting the races in your setting without a very good explanation like Orks having their mentalities being genetically programmed or a species being an outright hive mind, this just makes everyone more interesting overall.
  • It's ridiculous to assume that alien life evolved (or was created, depending on the story and who you ask) along the same lines as we did. Consider showing how humans are just as unsuited for alien environments as the aliens would be unsuited for our own. Oh sure, we can breathe oxygen, but outside any Earth-like planet that's just a liability. What good is that when the air on most inhabitable planets either has minimal oxygen or flat-out poisons us?

While these tips are just generally good for worldbuilding and story telling, they should always be taken into account by anyone who wants to write HFY without falling into the ubiquitous pitfalls.

Or you could just write what you find fun. Not every story has to "pass the test" laid above, and hitting all the check marks doesn't guarantee a story will be good.

Gallery

  • Start of earliest saved HFY threads.

    Start of earliest saved HFY threads.

  • WE ARE COMING FOR YOU!

    WE ARE COMING FOR YOU!

  • The banner is from Star Trek, but it gives you the basic idea.

    The banner is from Star Trek, but it gives you the basic idea.

  • Fine example of how we at HFY think.

    Fine example of how we at HFY think.

  • HFY's official spokesman.

    HFY's official spokesman.

  • The Imperial Cult is basically built on HFY.

    The Imperial Cult is basically built on HFY.

  • Technology "saves" the day.

    Technology "saves" the day.

  • Terra is a cruel matriarch. But her forge has made us strong.

    Terra is a cruel matriarch. But her forge has made us strong.

  • Humans are more hardcore than most sci-fi insect races.

    Humans are more hardcore than most sci-fi insect races.

  • This is what we do to OUR home. Think your planet will fare any better?

    This is what we do to OUR home. Think your planet will fare any better?

  • Part 1 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

    Part 1 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

  • Part 2 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

    Part 2 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

  • Part 3 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

    Part 3 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

  • Part 4 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

    Part 4 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

  • Part 5 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

    Part 5 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

  • Part 6 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

    Part 6 of /tg/'s longest non-ongoing HFY.

  • A good example why you SHOULD NOT fuck with humans.

    A good example why you SHOULD NOT fuck with humans.

Watch 3 men scare off 15 lions to get some food, yes this really happened (note how they don't underestimate the animals).

Persistence Hunting with David Attenborough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o

Humanity, fuck yeah.

Let me tell you about humans, using something I'm familiar with in anthropology. When a Shoshone warrior wants a pony, he goes to a herd, picks one, and walks toward it. Naturally, the pony runs away. The Shonone follows, day and night just walking, usually for three full days. Pony runs away, man just keeps walking at a steady pace. Finally the pony simply collapses from exhaustion after running away for days, and the man walks up and puts a bridle on it. That is the kind of monster humans are.

HFY vs African Pokemon, by Andrew Ucles (without Pokeballs, because fuck you pokemons). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJiZ2HgV5E0

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