Editing Humanity Fuck Yeah (section)

==An Alternate Take on HFY==
{{Topquote|Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.|Proverbs 16:18}}
{{Topquote|1=[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9g2r0SdEZc| 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.|2=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 top page quote. [[Eldar|Haughty pride, arrogance,]] [[Imperial Cult|zealotry, blind idiocy, self-righteousness,]] and many more vices are enabled by such tooting of our own metaphorical horns. [[Cancer|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 [[Heresy|Idolatry on for]] would be disappointed at such vainglorious pride, [[If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device|The Man-peror of Mankind]] would not approve! Even more ironic is how this attitude is exactly the same as [[Matt Ward|a certain fluff rapist]] [[Ultramarines|and his favored infallible, can't do wrong, and always victorious]] [[Mary Sue|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 by much human suffering and bloodshed. In settings where we truly earned the right to be a bit proud of our survival. [[Warhammer 40K|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 [[/pol/|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 these idiotic mouthbreathers project their "hurr durr group X is inherently superior" fantasies into their writing. Much like with FATAL or Racial Holy War or other works written by the inbred, these only draw further mockery upon discovery. Original works, even on /tg/, are often 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 (justified or not). 

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 favour of what amounts to masturbation via text and unfortunately (as Sturgeon's Law is a thing) 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; outside of one or two special edge cases, 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. If you -have- to, go with the historical data: humanity's hat on Earth wasn't developing new technologies all the time, but by winning through endurance. Earliest hunters above the Saharan line won by sheer attrition and endurance walking towards the prey animals until they exhausted, sieges lasted for years, and WW1 itself speaks volumes. This victory didn't come easy, victory by endurance is the '''most painful''' way of winning. If humanity is supposed to win, make them pay the price and describe the effects of victory on an exhausted human society.
**Elevating things like "pragmatism" and "brutality" in its place is just as bad if not even worse, because they make humanity look like a race of [[Tyranids|all-devouring monsters that leave nothing but destruction in their wake]] who need to be wiped out for the sake of all other sentient life in the universe.
*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. Remember: a racial hat is simply the result of ''averages'' fitting into the global-galactic niche. If Salarian artists (which *do* exist) somehow dominated their 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 (Tyranids, Q'Orl, etc.) This is where [[Bioware|Mass Effect]] both shone and stumbled - many of the alien races in the OT wear hats without becoming Always Chaotic Evil bad guys to gun down or one-dimensional stereotypes that all think and act exactly the same<ref>To list a few examples: the aggressive hive-mind species of the Rachni are capable of diplomacy and even outright co-operation on technological projects with other races under the right conditions; the generic killer robots the Geth turned out to be a renegade Reaper-worshipping splinter of the mainline Geth Consensus, who want to reunite and co-exist with their creators as partners rather than enemies (though they're willing to defend themselves should the need arise); even the nominally Always Chaotic Evil pack of slavers and pirates that are the Batarians have relatively "normal" citizens but are forbidden to leave their space by their totalitarian government, leaving them to be represented almost entirely by the pirates, criminals and slavers produced by their fucked up culture.</ref>. [[Bioware#Mass_Effect:_Andromeda|Andromeda]] then dropped the ball by making the main antagonists a race of one-dimensionally [[Stupid Evil]] Dalek/Covenant knockoffs without much deeper characterization than "Religious, Assimilating Space Nazis", while the other (as in, ''singular'' other - compare to the dozen fleshed-out alien species in the original) are a bunch of overly emotional furless lizard-cat people whose nuance is "xenophobia vs xenophilia".
*It's ridiculous to assume that alien life evolved/was created (depending on the story and who you ask) along the same lines as us. 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?
**However, do still try to stick to some universal biological truths. Do you really think any long-lived alien race would've survived long enough to be their planet's dominant species without some adrenaline equivalent? Do you really think natural selection is limited to just Earth? Do you really think that alien races became what they did without at least one instance of internal strife or warfare? Unless the rest of the universe has some benevolent omnipresent overseers to take care of all life and prevent fighting, organisms are going to compete with each other for resources and they won't be nice about it.
*Unless you're writing from a deliberately subjective viewpoint (in-universe propaganda, biased/unreliable narrators, and so on), don't give humanity any excuses or special pleading for its flaws. If aliens are monsters for eating human babies, then humans are monsters for eating alien babies. If humanity filling its planets with toxic smog is the bee's knees, then alien planets filled with toxic smog are no worse. The morality of an act shouldn't be based solely on the name of the species committing it. Try to be at least somewhat objective in the narration as long as it fits the story's tone and themes.
** Remember that exceptions to this do exist. Sometimes, genocide really ''is'' the moral course of action, because the alternative is either suicidal or so hideously unconscionable as to be even worse. For example: [[Orks]], [[Tyranids]] and [[Dark Eldar]]. The first two are impossible to reason with due to their genetically-hardcoded violent mindset (for the Orks), incomprehensible and predatory hivemind (for the Tyranids), and their entire method of reproduction being based around war/eating others (both). The latter subjects kidnapped people to incomprehensibly horrible fates to escape a fate worse than death at the hands of [[Slaanesh|their own folly]] [[Ynnari|despite having a way to preserve their own souls without torturing people]], meaning they don't even have the justification of ''needing'' to do terrible things to survive. Find someone who thinks they shouldn't be wiped out, and I'll show you someone who needs their head examined.

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.

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