I need to rant about the ‘humans suck’ trope.

forli

I'm sorry for posting this, it has nothing to do with my novel, but this is something that I just cannot stop thinking about. This trope is the main reason I've decided to stop reading web novels since it's so prevalent that I know I'll keep encountering it no matter how hard I try to avoid it, and the only thing I'll get out of reading is getting angry.

But that's not enough, I'm still obsessed with it, and this new chapter I'm writing is reminding me of it even more so I really need this rant.

In fantasy web novels, humans always seem to be the weakest race, without the gifts other races get and the shortest life spans, which makes them the underdogs that feel natural to root for, they are also used more often than everyone else as the faceless victims of slaughters that we are not supposed to care too much about, and that makes me sympathize with them more than with the others. And yet, many stories portray humans as completely evil, without changing the fact that they are the underdogs. Even when they are not evil they are at least not as good as the other races.

Having a completely evil race is always going to at least feel a bit wrong, but when the evil ones are something like demons, they will often be stronger so they can work as villains. But when this is done with humans, they will be weak as well as being evil, it tends to come across like the author just wanted an 'inferior race' to make all the others look good for being born better. It's like having a story with some snobby and rich nobles fighting against a rebellion of starving poor people where the poor people are all cartoonishly evil and the story cannot stop pointing out how much better and cooler the nobles are.

I admit that I didn't always hate this trope as much as I do now, but the more web novels I read, the worse it gets in my mind, I think there are two reasons for that.

The first is how poorly done this tends to be. The humans are often evil in cartoonish and unrealistic ways, and since they are so weak, they don't even work as bad guys (even a story with an op protagonist will at least have the bad guys be a threat to normal people if only to make the protagonist look better. These humans will not even do that so there's not even any point to them). I can never help but see the author pulling the strings of these 'humans' every time I see it.

The second is the fact that this is just everywhere. Humans are always the weakest race in fantasy. And humans being evil is WAY more common than demons being evil at this point (which is why it annoys me to no end when people call it a 'subversion'). And the thing is, even novels that don't make all humans evil will still make them not as good as the other races, so it still reinforces the trope.

And the worst part is that I seem to be the only one that cares about this, other people think that portraying humans this way is 'fine'. I don't think that it's 'fine'.

It's not 'fine' to have supposedly good characters that see humans as 'insects' because they are always trying to do bad stuff but are too weak to succeed (which doesn't even make sense btw). A race that thinks of another race as 'insects' is always going to come across as unlikeable assholes, and trying to make them """""justified""""" by having all humans be over-the-top cartoon racists is a very bad way to fix it.

It's not 'fine' when a story (often jokingly) acts as if a character would be justified to exterminate the humans, and the humans should be glad that the character is too nice to do that.

And it's definitely not 'fine' when a character does kill a large number of humans while laughing and insulting them for being weak, but the humans are still supposed to be the bad guys...

So yeah, saying that I hate this trope from the very bottom of my soul would be a massive understatement. This trope has completely destroyed any joy I ever had reading web novels. And I just cannot stop thinking about it... I feel like I'm in a downward spiral, the more I overthink it, the more I discover new reasons to hate it, and the more I discover new reasons to hate it, the more I overthink it.

I just barely scratched the surface here. It would take too long to go into all the double standards where the same action is often portrayed as more evil when a human does it, the way that this has become so overdone that humans are expected to be the evil ones at this point, or the way that many stories try to pretend that humans are not underdogs because there are more of them (because instead of long lifespans, super strength or powerful magic, humans should be glad that they were given the greatest gift of all: being disposable).

Anyway, sorry for making you read this, I just needed to get this out of my system.