Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers
23,028
edits
m (Mass update links) |
Derivative (talk | contribs) m (Fixing links to disambiguation pages) |
||
(4 intermediate revisions by one other user not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
{{quote|'''The Doctor''': Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other, and that's it. The Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear... in peace, and never even know the word "Dalek".
'''Sarah Jane''': Then why wait? If it was a disease or some sort of bacteria you were destroying, you wouldn't hesitate!
'''The Doctor''': [[If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him|But if I kill... wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I'd be no better than the Daleks.]] |''[[Doctor Who]]'', "Genesis of the Daleks"}}
We all know the drill. It's [[The Federation]] versus [[The Empire]], and the [[Heroes]] stop the Empire's new superweapon just in time for [[The Cavalry]] to defeat the [[Mooks]]. Now good has triumphed, how do you mop up the resistance? If the heroes are lucky, the Empire will be led by a [[Self-Disposing Villain]] or an [[Evil Overlord]] with a [[
But what if the driving force behind the forces of evil is not a single [[Big Bad|Evil Overlord]], but a [[Planet of Hats]] whose hat happens to be [[
Alice [[Forgot I Could Fly|suddenly remembers]] that she still has the [[Handy Remote Control]] of that [[Wave Motion Gun]] her buddies just captured. The only question is, will the victors [[Final Solution|choose to use it and end the threat to the galaxy once and for all]], running the risk of crossing the [[Moral Event Horizon]] themselves (although they and their allies might be [[Would Be Rude to Say Genocide|reluctant to admit it]]), or [[Villain's Dying Grace|be merciful]] and decide it's time for peace, even if that means they must risk the lives of their own descendants?
If the [[
Occasionally, some other villain may [[Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work|conveniently exterminate the threat]], who then has far less problems associated with killing him off.
Line 22:
* The Saiyans from ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' presented this. There's {{spoiler|that whole debacle with Frieza, plus the surviving Saiyans mostly heed [[The Power of Friendship]] and turn good...}}
* A major plot point in ''[[Elfen Lied]]''. {{spoiler|The Dicolonii end up being exterminated, and the human race lives on.}}
* Towards the end of ''[[Darker
* ''[[Trigun]]''. "To save the butterflies, you must kill the spiders." [[He Who Fights Monsters|But if you kill the spiders, you become a spider yourself...]]
* The reason [[Person of Mass Destruction|Zebra]] was imprisoned in ''[[Toriko]]''. The 26 species he wiped out were damaging the ecosystem...but he's still responsible for making 26 species extinct.
Line 32:
== Film ==
* In the ''[[Alien (
** But only to try to make them into a weapon. Lampshaded in the [[Green Lantern]] Alien crossover, Hal points out that the xenomorphs are just animals, so they move the hive to Lantern Mogo (a living planet) since he can watch them and make sure no one runs into one.
** For understandable reasons, Ripley seems to have no moral reservations on this point:
{{quote|
'''Burke''': "That's the plan. You have my word on it."
'''Ripley''': "All right, I'm in." }}
** The great irony with the Xenomorphs is that they need live hosts in order to spread. One person = one Xenomorph. If people would just leave them alone they wouldn't be a threat.
*** The third film establishes that they can implant other mammals.
* In ''[[Titan
Line 46:
* [[Keith Laumer]]'s novel ''The Glory Game''. After the warlike alien Hukk are defeated, the Terran Hardliners want to wipe them out to keep them from threatening Earth again.
* ''[[Ender's Game]]'' and its sequels apply this in one way or another to every nonhuman species in the setting. {{spoiler|''None'' of them intended to start hostilities with humanity, and in only one case (when fighting a seemingly sentient virus that wipes out almost every life form it infects) is genocide portrayed as justified. With each species encountered, humanity is more reluctant to kill fellow rational beings, and the final species in ''Children of the Mind'' is dealt with in a completely nonviolent manner.}}
* The Taxxons in ''[[
** A variant: the Hork-Bajir are a peaceful species, but to weaken them as a tool for the Yeerks Alloran decided to genocide them with a Quantum Virus, earning a [[What the Hell, Hero?]] from his own species.
* The ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[New Jedi Order]] series has the Alpha Red virus, which could kill the Yuuzhan Vong and their biotech, but Vergere destroys it because even the Vong have the right to exist, and the good guys would be monsters if they wiped them out. [[Retcon|Or maybe she didn't have complex and noble motives, she was just an]] [[Department of Redundancy Department|evil Sith villain]]. And then they recreate it, but it doesn't go too well.
** Before the Vong, there were the Yevetha, whom Leia wanted to strand on their homeworld and set up an interdiction field for about the next million years. After the Vong, we have the Lost Tribe of the Sith, where Ben even ''says'' [[Would Be Rude to Say Genocide|it's not genocide, it's just destroying the Sith]]. [[Light Is Not Good]] indeed.
* In [[Andre Norton]]'s ''[[
** {{spoiler|This despite the fact that the Xiks had just destroyed the planet Earth (we were living on other planets too, so it's not as big a deal).}}
* In the last book of [[Anne McCaffrey]]'s ''[[Tower and The Hive]]'' series, humans and Mrdini debate whether it is moral to simply nuke the [[Horde of Alien Locusts|Hivers]] out of existence. Eventually, a [[Deus Ex Machina]] allows them to end the threat without wiping out the entire species.
* In ''[[
* L. E. Modesitt Jr. is rather fond of ending his books with this, and the heroes usually end up deciding to [[Shoot the Dog]].
* [[
* Stewart Cowley's ''Terran Trade Authority'' universe features the Laguna Wars - a nasty fight between Earth and mutinous humans who wiped out an alien civilisation centuries before and took over its machines. The adventure is written for children under ten but pulls no punches, especially near the end; when it's discovered that the cargoes the Earth forces were blockading (and which led the Lagunans to mount an ultimately unsuccessful last-ditch attack on Earth) were an antitoxin against a fungal disease in Laguna Nine's atmosphere. The occupation forces arrive to find to their horror that the entire planet has been completely depopulated. It's not total genocide - the industrial centre on Laguna Seven is still intact - but it's bad enough, and all the more horrifying for it being unintentional.
* Subverted in Mike Resnick's book Birthright: The Book of Man. The other 13,042 sentient races in the Galaxy seem to have no moral qualms whatsoever about hunting Humanity to extinction. It's averted only by the fact that Humanity's last survivors - One man and three women - decide to go out with a bang (literally - they commit suicide by blowing up the planet they're on)rather than surrender and be executed. Same result though, I guess.
== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[Babylon
** The writers [[Writer Cop Out|took the easy way out]] of the Dilgar question by having their sun go nova shortly after the Dilgar War. How convenient. However, the original punishment was that they stranded all the Dilgar on their homeworld without Faster Than Light travel. The RPG tells of a Dilgar colony that avoided their fate, who (justifiably) stay out of galactic politics, but are not known for the horrors of the rest of the species.
** Gets a bit more interesting, however, when it's pointed out the REASON Dilgar went to war was because their sun was going to go supernova.
** The Minbari view [[Humans Are
* ''[[Battlestar Galactica]]'': humans from a Cylon point of view. At the end of the Miniseries, the Cylons agree that they unfortunately can't give up pursuit of the human fleet even though it's left the Colonial solar system behind and just wants to get as far away as possible, because any survivors will inevitably return and seek revenge.
** A more straight example: In the episode "Torn", the Colonial fleet discovers a virus that kills Cylons horribly and doesn't affect humans. Cue big debate about the ethics of intentionally infecting the Cylon Resurrection Ship with it. Despite the inevitability that the Cylons would have found a cure/treatment/ray gun that addressed the disease before being wiped out entirely (given their technological levels), the debate almost immediately leads to a member of the crew taking matters into their own hands to save the Cylons from the minor inconvenience of losing one resurrection ship (read: perceived genocide).
* ''[[
* The third season of ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise
* ''[[Star Trek:
** Picard's choice pays off for a few hundred of them, but then Data's [[Evil Twin]] Lore takes command of them, as seen in the "Descent" two-parter.
* In ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
** The Dominion itself, when presented with this situation 200 years ago (with the Ecorians), decided to [[Take a Third Option]]: they infected everyone on a planet with a disease that doesn't kill everybody at once, but rather is hereditary, incurable '''and''' can kill the host at any random time. 200 years later, the Ecorians still haven't even ''[[Despair Event Horizon|attempted]]'' to rebuild their society.
* ''[[Stargate SG
** In an alternate history, O'Neill had never met Teal'c, and as a result, Stargate Command attacked his homeworld for this reason.
** Subverted in Season Five, again with O'Neill. Subverted in that he only threatened it, and that he most likely didn't consider the sentient computer virus that had [[Body Snatcher|taken over]] his Second in Command to actually be 'people.'
* The page quote from ''[[Doctor Who]]'', where the Doctor doesn't want to wipe out the Daleks for fear of being no better than they are. He offers pitiful defences such as how the existance of the Daleks caused otherwise-disparate races to form alliances and friendships, but it's pretty hollow. He's saved at the last miunte from having to make the decision.
Line 81:
== Tabletop Games ==
* Task Force Games' ''[[Starfire]]''. The fanatically racist and warlike Rigelian Protectorate was completely wiped out at the end of the Third Interstellar War under the Alliance's "Genocide Decree". The Alliance believed that all Rigelians everywhere had been slain until two planets were found with Rigelian survivors at a low tech level, leading to a quandary about what to do about them.
* ''[[Magic:
== Videogames ==
* In ''[[Mass Effect]]'', The Rachni are a sentient, if extremely alien, species of insectoids who were thought to be actually extinct; you have the choice of either {{spoiler|setting the last surviving Queen free to let them repopulate, or wiping them out entirely}}. A harder choice than it may seem, since the Rachni went near-extinct due to them embarking on a war with the Citadel Races, causing significant loss of life, {{spoiler|though the Queen promises to leave the other races alone.}}
** In keeping with the trope, you'll have some characters arguing that you can't justify destroying an entire species no matter how how much damage it once caused (keeping in mind that the Rachni Wars happened almost 2,000 years ago), and others who argue that it's time to "finish the job".
*** In fact, {{spoiler|the Queen's testimony implies the Rachni are a naturally peaceful species who only went to war because of Reaper indoctrination}}; if you {{spoiler|rescue her again in ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'', her Rachni will aid you in the war effort against the Reapers.}} However, if you don't save her in the first game, {{spoiler|her Reaper-created replacement will betray you if you choose to save her.}}
Line 91:
** In ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'', at the end of the Rannoch arc, you get a choice between {{spoiler|allowing Legion to upload Reaper code to the geth, rendering them sentient and intelligent (but dooming the quarians in the process), or killing Legion and allowing the quarians to tear the geth apart. Unless you jumped through enough hoops to [[Take a Third Option]]...}}
** In ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'', {{spoiler|the "Destroy the Reapers" ending will also destroy every other artificial intelligence in the galaxy, including the Geth (if they are still alive) and EDI. Even worse, it's also the ''only'' ending that Shepard has a chance of surviving.}}
** In ''[[
* In the ''[[
** Also, the Taiidan are treated this way at the end of the first game, and are allowed to live mostly unmolested (save for having their very evil emperor killed).
** In fact, the Hiigarans were so bad that the Bentusi had to interfere in order to stop them from wiping out the Taiidani. The reason the Taiidani kicked out the Hiigarans from the homeworld in the first place was because the Hiigarans have turned the Taiidan homeworld into an unlivable hellhole with orbital bombardment. Furthermore, had the Hiigarans peacefuly given up their hyperdrive core instead of attacking the Bentusi, they still would've had a fleet to defend against the vengeful Taiidani.
* In the sequel to ''[[
* A major plot point in the ''[[
** Not just once. The orcs are tricked by [[Eldritch Abomination|Kil'jaeden]] into killing the majority of the Draenei. Several of them are clearly torn, as they know some of the Draenei personally and have a hard time believing them to be the monsters Kil'jaeden claims they are.
* In ''[[Star Control]] 2'' the Ur-Quan have one of these. After being enslaved for thousands of years by malevolent aliens and having to spend decades wired to artificial pain devices to defeat said aliens, they decide that the hat of [[
** They not only split, they actually start a millennia-long war over it. The victor will decide the eventual fate of the galaxy.
== Web Originals ==
* In the backstory of Mark Rosenfeldter's [[Constructed World]] of [http://www.zompist.com/virtuver.htm Almea], after the humans finally defeat [[The Empire]] of the [[
== Webcomics ==
* ''[[The Order of the Stick
* Subverted by Eridan in ''[[Homestuck]]''; he hates the terrestrial portion of the Alternian troll population, and claims that he would happily eradicate the lot of them, even commissioning a (land-dwelling) friend of his to build doomsday devices (that unaccountably fail to work). But by the start of the comic, the other trolls have figured that his aquatic-supremacist rantings are all just a cry for attention, and that if Eridan were given a genuine opportunity for genocide, he would pass it up. {{spoiler|Double-subverted when, in the end, Eridan really does flip the hell out, kills several of his fellow trolls, and destroys the Matriorb, the last hope of his species to repopulate.}}
|