Fantastic Racism/Western Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Star vs the Forces of Evil: The protagonist Star comes from a pretty racist culture and picked fights with monsters for fun. Her racism doesn't last forever and she begins to actively try to improve relations between mewmans and monsters.
  • In one episode of The Wild Thornberrys, Eliza and Darwin had to deal with a feud between two groups of monkeys, one with long tails and one with short tails.
  • Exaggerated to the point of lampshading in the third season of ReBoot, as Enzo repeatedly encounters bigoted Mainframers who insist that only blue Sprites could make acceptable Guardians, each one spouting the refrain that "Green is no colour for the defender of the system!" At one point, a young toddler becomes incensed at the sight of him, and angrily hurls its (blue) Guardian plush toy in his face; "Everyone's a critic!", he groans. It should be noted that after hearing that line, Megabyte played up the racism angle with a propaganda campaign.
  • One particularly heavy-handed episode of Teen Titans, "Troq", dealt with Starfire dealing with the racism Tamaraneans apparently are known to receive (Troq being a Fantastic Slur for Tamaranians). She then gives a short speech at the end of the episode about racism, without actually using the word.
    • The issue of racism almost comes up directly(and is subsequently mocked) when Cyborg, who's black, tells her that he understands what it's like being judged by his appearance. When Starfire doubts this, he assures her that it's true, he has been discrimanated against... because "he's half robot".
  • The last season of the Gargoyles animated series featured a group of villains called the Quarrymen, who schemed to rid New York of the title characters due to their vaguely reptilian appearance (though there are much deeper reasons as well). With their full body suits and triangular hoods, the Quarrymen looked disturbingly like the Ku Klux Klan.
    • This trope is actually fundamental to the show as a whole. Demona, the Big Bad, actually became a genocidal maniac because of the constant prejudice she dealt with from the humans she and the other gargoyles protected each night. The massacre of most of her clan and her downward spiral resulted from this. Ironically, Demona has more in common with the evil humans she detests than with her own kind. In fact, said massacre was actually due to a botched plan to rid the castle of humans and let the gargoyles take over, orchestrated by none other than Demona herself.
    • Goliath himself showed shades of this during the first episode when speaking to Xanatos. Of course, it is completely justified since he had just woken from a thousand years sleep, thought he had been betrayed by the one human that didn't treat them like garbage.
    • Early in the show, the three youngest members try to get a taxi and fail, but this is perhaps understandable, since the taxi driver just saw what looked like a winged monster jumping in front of his car. Few characters take their first gargoyle sighting in stride.
  • One episode of Saban's X-Men cartoon took the theme of prejudice against mutants and turned it on its head when Storm (an African) and Wolverine (a white Canadian) traveled back in time to the 1950s. When the waiter at a restaurant refused them service because Storm was black, she indignantly replied, "That's so pathetic it's almost quaint!"
    • It was made even more of a sore spot, because this version of Storm and Wolverine came from an alternate timeline in which they were married. Needless to say, Wolverine didn't take it well.
    • In keeping with the theme of the comic, all the X-Men TV series have addressed Fantastic Racism. It becomes the major theme in the third and fourth seasons of X-Men: Evolution, after the mutants are revealed to the world, and it seems like pretty much every human hates the mutants.
  • While the humans, robots, and aliens appear to be more or less well integrated in the world of Futurama, there is still a certain amount of hatred and rivalry that exists between the three groups - but the sewer mutants are the one group that is truly marginalized, as they're forced to remain underground. Something of a subversion in that the sewer mutants aren't portrayed in a sympathetic way, not even the main characters really care that the mutants are hated and forced to live in a sewer. Even when it's revealed that Leela isn't an alien, but actually a mutant herself (although human looking enough to pass for alien, she still lives on the surface after this episode), she still doesn't seem to be bothered much that her parents are considered freaks and they must live in a sewer.
    • There's also the sewer mutants' derogatory references to sub-sewer mutants.
    • Don't be silly, they're just a suburban legend!
    • When will you people learn that all races are equally inferior to robots?
    • While Zoidberg doesn't seem to have many friends, it is strongly hinted that Hermes hates Zoidberg simply for being a Decapodian. He doesn't approve of their strict authoritarian, conservative, and often reactionary views of government, and at times, the insults Hermes levels at Zoidberg can be downright mean; he called Zoidberg a "filthy crab" at least once. Sadly, Zoidberg is too naive to ever take offense at it, still trusting Hermes as he does everyone else.
  • In the Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century episode based on "The Five Orange Pips", the villains are an anti-robot group working with Moriarty. In the original story, they were the Ku Klux Klan.
  • Bluebeard in the animated film Felidae refers to humans as "Can Openers" believing that the only thing a human is good for is opening cans of food for cats to eat. Yes, a cat making racist remarks about a human.
    • Claudandus takes this even further, believing that humans are pure evil. To be fair, he was subjected to horrific experiments by a human until he killed said human. He's also racist agaisnt other breeds of cats, since he murdered any cat he deemed "unworthy" of mating with his "surperior" breed of cat he had created through selective breeding. This should come as no surprise, since the film (and the book it's based off of) draw parallels to Nazi Germany.

Claudandus: No no! There are no good humans! They're all bad! Animals are good creatures. But, humans? Humans are evil animals.

  • A major focus of the The Animatrix was the growing distrust between humans and robots, growing out of humans treating robots as inferior slaves; ultimately this led to a robot purge, followed by the surviving robots leading a successful rebellion. The historical parallels are plentiful.
    • It's also to show how in fighting against blatant specism, the robots themselves became what they fought against. In the end, the oracle from The Matrix didn't want humans to have revenge on all machines, but to end the senseless, endless war between humans amd machines, to have peace and love... though it helps that the oracle herself is part of the machines, being a piece of code that has seen the rise and fall of humanity, several versions of Zion, and several "The One"s...
  • In Transformers Animated, Sentinel Prime has severe issues with organics. While the trauma of having his friend killed by giant spiders might have something to do with it, there's something very wrong with a guy who tells his not-so-dead friend, who is now part-organic, that she would have been better off dead and then tries to kill her himself.
    • This seems to be common throughout the Cybertronian population. "This Is Why I Hate Machines" has Capt. Fanzone accidentally coming to Cybertron. Most of the natives are either terrified of him or try to squish him, and none refer to him as anything but "the Organic." And these are all Autobots.
      • Mind you, this happens after the aforementioned Sentinel Prime becomes Magnus and begins a propaganda campaign against Organics.
  • The Adventures of Super Mario Bros 3 episode "True Colors" is obvious to the point of parody. Kooky von Koopa and Cheatsy Koopa fly around painting half the Toads (and Luigi) red and half (and Mario) blue. They then disguise themselves as red and blue Toads to stir up resentment between the two halves of the population. The conflict is resolved when the Mario brothers manage to get the Toads to rally in defense of their princess. The similarities to real life racism is anviliciously Lampshaded in the end by the brothers. ("Think they'll ever learn that lesson in the real world?")
  • One of the underlying themes of Shadow Raiders, though partially justified in this case because each of the Single Biome Planets is rich in one resource that the others lack (Bone produces food, Ice produces water, Fire produces energy, and Rock presumably produces metal and whatever other mineral-based Applied Phlebotinum is needed), so all of the planets have been raiding and warring with each other for centuries. Particularly evident in the populace of planets Ice and Fire, where each species believes that merely touching their counterpart species will kill them.
  • In Bravestarr, a Space Western with a Native American hero, the indigenous "Prairie People" of New Texas (gnomelike sorts that burrowed like prairie dogs and had a vast underground kingdom) were the stand-ins for Native Americans, indigenous people treated with prejudice by the settlers. The Pilot Movie and several episodes of the show used prejudice against Prairie People as an allegory for its Aesops about tolerance. This led to Unfortunate Implications, however, since the Prairie People were infantilized characters speaking broken English, sometimes in exaggerated "Western" accents reminiscent of minstrel-show black stereotypes. Imagine Ewoks with Jar-Jar voices.
  • Tim the Witch Smeller in Sabrina: The Animated Series. In Tim's first episode, after Uncle Quigley gives an Anvilicious speech about how not all witches are bad, Tim appears to have seen the error of his ways. Tim apologizes to Sabrina and her aunts and claims that he will turn over a new leaf. But once they forgive him he reveals he was only putting on an act and goes right back to trying to capture them now that they've let their guard down.
  • In Danny Phantom, most ghosts don't like humans and most humans are terrified of the ghosts. Danny being half-ghost makes it worse, as he's hated period by most ghosts he meets and his Alter Ego is feared and hated by most humans except his Secret Keeper friends/sister and the Alpha Bitch.
    • Although in the humans' case, it's somewhat justified. The majority of humanity's first experiences with ghosts stemmed from an attack by a group of Danny's enemies from the Ghost Zone. Until that point, it was the people that believed in them were the ones that were ridiculed. The reason Paulina was amongst the first to stop hating Danny was because Danny outright saved her life, at which point she started to idolize him.
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Fire Nation consider themselves to be superior to all of the other nations, having killed off an entire race of benders (except Aang, of course). As a whole, there are many parallels between them and Imperial Japan.
    • Don't forget, Zuko saved an Earth Nation town and was praised until they discovered he was the Fire Nation Prince. They would rather be oppressed by Earth Nation soldiers than saved by a firebender.
    • Jet is extremely prejudiced against the Fire Nation.
    • Sokka experiences a bit of culture-based prejudice in "The Siege of the North". While they're of the same race, Yue's fiance clearly thinks the Southern Tribes are inferior.
    • In the canon Interquel graphic novel series Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise, the racism gets spread around. Earth Kingdomers are second-class citizens in the Fire Nation colonies, Smellerbee calls firebenders "those ash-makers," and Sokka gets a brick thrown at him by an Earth Kingdomer who calls him a Water Tribe savage.
  • Sequel Series The Legend of Korra has the prejudice shift to benders vs. nonbenders. The main villain of the series is the leader of an antibending "Equalist" movement that seeks to get rid of bending altogether.
    • Not to mention Tarrlok, who represents the extremist, xenophobic faction of the benders, but takes advantage of the growing current of anti-Equalist sentiment to establish his own rule over Republic City. (In Tarrlok's case, it may actually be a case of Evil vs. Evil, or perhaps even Black and Grey Morality, but, as always, Your Mileage May Vary...)
  • Subverted in The Cleveland Show when Tim takes Cleveland in to meet his boss (who's hiring); the boss rather awkwardly expresses discomfort with Cleveland being black to Tim who's a talking bear.
  • In Exo Squad, humans often call Neosapiens "sapes" or "neos". The Neosapiens themselves view themselves as the Superior Species, and thus call humans 'Terrans'. Neosapiens also show racism towards the Neo Warriors, General Shiva regards them, even the advanced, talking models, as simple animals.
  • Thomas the Tank Engine: Many steam engines and diesels have a strong dislike for one another. Some steam engines see the diesels as trying to take away their jobs, and some (but not all) diesels see the steam engines as outdated and deserving to be scrapped. It was also a major driving force in the movie Calling All Engines. In addition, one of the books, James and the Diesel Engines, is all about the title character trying to overcome his prejudices against diesels.
    • There was also "Edward Strikes Out", where Edward and Gordon take an instant dislike to a new crane named Rocky, simply because Rocky is a newer model with no engine (meaning he is very strong, but has to be pulled by another engine), and call him "newfangled nonsense". Exactly why the writers decided to make Edward and Gordon act like such a pair of dicks is a mystery here, and the episode is not well-liked by parents.
  • On The Fairly OddParents, it's strongly that implied fairies tend to look down on other races, specifically anti-fairies, pixies, and genies. Aside from a few Fantastic Slurs, this is never really explored.
  • Possibly the earliest televised example of this was Rankin Bass's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, where Rudolph was a perfectly normal, healthy baby reindeer...whose nose happened to glow red on command. Almost everyone the poor thing encountered, from his own father to Santa Claus, rejected him because of it. (At least his mother loved him just the way he was).
  • In an episode of Superjail, Jared tries to order bunny suits for everyone, but the Twins end up messing with the order so that half the prison population gets bunny suits and the other half gets wolf suits. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In Chaotic, there is fantastic jingoism. One can interpret that all the landbased tribes of Perim are engaged in four way holy war over who is blame for having the Cothica disappear and ending the Golden Age. Then came the M'arrilians who exhibited big time Fantastic Racism by choosing to flood the planet by heat-ray melting of the ice caps, even though there is plenty of existing oceans assuming Perim is an Earth-like planet.
  • In CatDog, Cat joins a cat-only club, unaware that it's actually a hate group planning to get rid of every dog in the world.
  • The premise of A Kind of Magic is a fairy-tale family who had to move to the real world because of fantastic segregation: The mom is a fairy and the dad is an ogre, but interracial marriage is apparently outlawed in Fairyland.
  • The Big Bad of Dino Squad, Victor Veloci, a velociraptor who somehow gained human form, hates humans with a passion, believing them inferior to dinosaurs. His reason? Because dinosaurs have been around for millions of years, and humans for only a few thousand. And try not to think about the fact that he has human henchmen helping him in his plans to wipe out humanity.
  • A subtle theme in the "Chicken Boo" segments of Animaniacs. Boo usually excels at whatever career he takes in his disguise, and is beloved by everyone who talks about him. However once he's outed as a Chicken, everyone turns on him, even to the point of siding with the oppressor that Boo had saved them from moments before.
  • In Alfred J Kwak, the titular character travels to a country called Atrique, where the original inhabitants, the black ducks, are under the oppressive and discriminative authority of the white geese. It is obviously South Africa before the abolition of Apartheid (the series was produced in the late 1980s), just with humanoid animals.
  • In Capitol Critters a few episodes dealt with a gang of rats at war with a gang of cockroaches the roaches were meant to symbolize minorities in general some spoke in African, Italian, Hispanic, and Yiddish accents, they constantly referred to each other as dirty and disease ridden scum.
  • An episode of Dave the Barbarian had Dave, Fang, and Faffy believing that they'd found their true people (gorillas, monkeys, and lemons, respectively), and trying to integrate into their societies. But at the end of the episode, their new surrogate families flip out when they discover that they're actually human, human, and dragon; the gorillas hate humans because of their lack of body hair, monkeys hate them both for their lack of tails, and the lemons think limbs in general are just plain obscene. When Dave tries to point out the silliness of this and that their companions in the lynch mob also have the traits they despise, they realize the truth of this and admit they shouldn't fight humans... Instead, they should fight each other!
  • The Canadian animated short, The Girl With Pinhead Parents, is built on this. But it replaces actual races with fantasy beings who have inanimate objects replacing various limbs. The titular character, a girl whose head is shaped like a pin, is forced to be science partners with a boy who has hockey sticks in place of his hands. She's incredibly uncomfortable with this, because her parents have forbidden her to associate with anyone who isn't a pin person and she knows they'll be angry.
  • There's a an animated series on HBO called Happily Ever After Fairy Tales for Every Child, that puts multi-cultural spins on classic fairy tales. The most infamous episode of the show is called "The Sissy Duckling". It's a retelling of the Ugly Duckling story. They never actually say the word, but it's clear that the titular character is portrayed as being gay.
  • The Irken race in Invader Zim look down on every other species, act superior, insult them openly and even enslave them. Of course Zim acts like this towards humans as well.
  • The villains of the first two seasons of Ben 10 Alien Force, the Highbreed, are essentially a G-rated version of the Yuuzhan Vong. They think every other species in the universe is inferior to them. Unusually, they were content to merely avoid contact with other species in the past. The reason they started their campaign to "cleanse" the universe is because they discovered that their species has become sterile and will go extinct in a generation or two. They just can't stand the idea of "inferior" beings outliving them.
  • On Jimmy Two Shoes, Heinous' has Weavils with a passion. As a result, weavils tend to be treated as social pests, only good for doing dirty work. Not that this reputation isn't entirely undeserved.
  • The dingoes in Blinky Bill. But most of them are troublemakers with the exception of poor Shifty.
  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic did this with Zecora, a zebra who lives in a forest near Ponyville and who everyone avoids because they think she's evil. Twilight is initially skeptical, but comes to believe the others when she and her friends are apparently cursed. However, it turns out that they had in fact merely contracted a strange form of poisoning from a plant they'd walked in, and Zecora kindly provided a cure.
    • To be fair to the ponies, it's not the fact that she's a zebra that bugs them (although they're a little weirded out by one particular habit that is, in fact, normal zebra behavior); it's the fact that she lives in the Everfree Forest, which freaks out the ponies quite apart from any notions of who lives there on account of nature—weather, wildlife, what have you—getting on with business without pony interference. The fact that she's an African species of equine, decorates her home in an African style, speaks a Swahili-sounding language, and has an African-inspired design on her flank are just Unfortunate Implications.
    • Zecora actually isn't this trope; it's just the African designs and the real world association with that which makes viewers think she is. The ponies had no idea what a zebra was before Twilight Sparkle - so well-read she has become socially inept - told them. Rarity thought her stripes were body paint. Their prejudices have nothing to do with pony prejudices about zebras, since very few ponies even know they exist.
    • In "Over a Barrel", there is animosity between the ponies and the bisons. It has more to do with differing opinions than species, however.
    • And in "Hearth's Warming Eve", although not complete Fantastic Racism per se, but there was quite the hostility between earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns prior to the founding of Equestria.
    • "Dragon Quest" (No...not THAT Dragon Quest) the dragons, or at least the teenage ones that Spike faced looks down at the ponies and possibly other species as well. They even called Princess Celestia as "that namby-pamby pony princess."
  • In Young Justice Megan mentions White Martians being second-class citizens on Mars, in comparison to Green Martians. In the comics, it's a very different predicament though.
    • Red Volcano's goal was essentially to wipe out all organic life so that he and his fellow robots could rule. Oddly this plan seems to have come from his human creator, though it's a bit hard to tell since the Morrow we originally see is actually a robot too.
  • In Thundercats 2011 the Cats' empire of Thundera is full of this, and the people on top justify it with Might Makes Right Social Darwinism. The Cats look down on the other races of Animals, especially their archenemies the Lizards, and the Lizards despise the Cats in turn. The Cats also segregate their own species based on tails—those who have them, such as the Thunderkittens, are treated as second class citizens.
  • Megatron in Transformers Prime hates humanity so much that he refuses to scan an Earth vehicle mode, preferring to stick with his Cybertronian jet mode. A wolf, he reasons, has no need to hide amongst sheep.
    • Ratchet of the Autobots is also openly contemptuous of flesh-creatures, their technology and culture. He so assured of Cybertronian superiority that he does not even bother to learn about human physiology and medicine: This comes back to haunt him big'-time when a human child that he has unwittingly come to love is mortally-wounded by Megatron, and panics in desperation as he does not know the first to do to save his life.
  • Some amount of Fantastic Racism appears in Generator Rex against EVOs. They generally inspire fear or hatred, when they appear, including main character, who is frown upon by his own employer. There is also a guy who hunts teenagers down with a giant gun and believes in “Kill It with Fire” instead of using The Cure. Considering that most of them are mindless monsters and sapient ones known to general public either cause major property damage (Rex) or perform various acts of terrorism in name of “equality” (The Pack) this treatment may be justified. There is no defined line humanity-EVO s, because this condition is in most cases curable and not only people can went EVO, but also animals, plant or even eggs.
    • White Knight at one point took this trope to the extreme:

White Knight: "I don't trust anything with nanites!" (attacks Rex)
Rex: "EVERYTHING has nanites!"
White Knight: "Everything but me."

    • This seems to change and take on a more active form when Black Knight has taken over Providence and uses mind controlling collars to “turn an EVO curse into a blessing.” They hunt down every EVO, including sentient ones. The worst part of it? Society seems to be awfully accepting, though this may be due to official propaganda.
  • Tex Avery, anyone?[context?]
  • Granamyr the Dragon King from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe has a dislike for humans. He respects He-Man, but cannot resist throwing anti-human comments whenever he speaks.
  • In the Monster High webisodes, various monster types (vampires vs werewolves; seawater creatures vs freshwater creatures) traditionally do not get along well. Monster society seems to be separate from human society, too, and schools are also segregated. Not only are monster schools are separate from human schools, but monster schools themselves are classified according to monster type. The titular school is the first school open to all types of monsters.
  • In SpongeBob SquarePants it is hinted that Sandy is sometimes ridiculed and not well liked because she is a land mammal and lives undewater with sea creatures. In season 1 episode "Karate Choppers" after Mr. Krabs gives Spongebob a second chance, he sniffs Sandy, gives a disgusted looks and snarls the word "mammals". In "Someone's in the Kitchen with Sandy" citizens ridicule Sandy and make fun of her hairless pink skin and treat her badly. Although it should be noted that racism against Sandy, because she is a land animal is not always present in all episode. For example in "Texas" she wanted to go to Texas, but Spongebob convinced her to stay and we see that Bikini Bottomites and Mr. Krabs like her and wanted her to stay in Bikini Bottom and had no ill will towards her.
  • The Brain shows shades of this towards Pinky's girlfriend, who is a horse.

"That is a horse, Pinky. You are a mouse."
"Oh, don't start that again, Brain."

  • Courage the Cowardly Dog: The Mask gives us Kitty's extreme hatred of dogs. Although, given that her "boyfriend" Mad Dog was horribly abusive to her and Bunny, that's hardly a surprise.
  • Many examples in Amphibia, sadly:
    • One, all residents of Amphibia seem untrusting of humans (whom they've never seen before) and it takes Anne a long time to truly gain the trust of the frogs of Wartwood. Even when she does, they call her an "ugly hero".
    • There is also clearly a caste system in Amphibia, and Toads of Toad Tower (the military class) look down on the Frogs (the labor class), considering a Frog to be a traitor even if he challenges a Toad in an election, even in a town with almost no Toads in it.
    • Possibly the case with Newts, the ruling class, as they seem annoyed at the Plantars for even setting foot in their high-class hotels and parties. Then again, the richer Newts tend to be snobs who look down on everyone of lower station, including other Newts.
  • In Darkwing Duck, Morgana's family clearly didn't approve of her dating a "normal" like Darkwing. Note this cartoon aired years before the Harry Potter books introduced the idea of widespread anti-Muggle racism.
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