People Farms: Difference between revisions

Want to show that the bad guys (or possibly the [[Alien Invasion]]) are really, truly ''[[Complete Monster|evil?]]'' Want them to cross the [[Moral Event Horizon]] without having to do much work? Want them to just terrify everybody into oblivion? Easy! Just state—orstate — or really heavily imply—thatimply — that they breed humans like livestock, or keep them like animals in vast '''People Farms'''. Their purpose needn't be specified. [[To Serve Man|Eating us?]] Harvesting [[Our Souls Are Different|our souls?]] [[Baby Factory|Being bred]] for our skills in magic? [[Human Resources]]? Because they [[Rule 34|like to watch]]? Doesn't matter. Just the implication is enough to [[Squick]] people.

While it's true that humans are just another species of animal on this [[Insignificant Little Blue Planet]], we tend to think ourselves above mere ''animals''—among — among other things, we believe that all of us have an inherent right to freedom, safety from imprisonment without due cause, or abuse both physical and emotional.<ref>Well, some people believe that only people who look like them have these rights. But that'''s [[:Category:Prejudice Tropes|another set of tropes altogether]].</ref> People Farms''' play to lots of [[Primal Fear]]s and [[Squick]]s at once—fear of imprisonment, enslavement, death (if we get treated to a [[Deadly Euphemism|culling]] of unfit stock), rape (if there's a "breeding program" going on, which participants have no choice in), and the general sense of being controlled. If it's our fellow humans doing this, you can be certain that their contempt for their fellow men is absolute. If it's an alien race, you know they obviously didn't get the memo that [[Humans Are Special]]. Of course, other sapient species can be substituted for humans, provided that they're sympathetic.

* All non-Earth humans in ''[[Vandread]]'' are supplies of "spare parts" for the hyperadvanced Earthlings. Each is actually dedicated to a specific body part, to the point where their societies are set up specifically to nourish that particular part. Inevitably, harvest time comes before the end of the series...

== [[Literature]] ==

* [[Jonathan SmithSwift]]'s ''[[A Modest Proposal]]'' is (on the surface) all about this trope.

* In the [[Discworld]] novel ''[[Discworld/Feet of Clay (novel)|Feet of Clay]]'', it's revealed that a vampire has been selectively breeding the noble houses of Anhk-Morpork for centuries, by manipulating marriages through his role as leader of the Heralds. Not so much treating people as livestock as treating them as show-dogs, but still darn rude.

** And not much different from what the [[Dune|Bene Gesserit]] have been doing for milleniamillennia in their search for the Kwisatch Haderach

*** They weren't breeding for weak chins and a natural tendency toward belligerent stupidity, though.

== [[Live -Action TV]] ==