Pro-Human Transhuman

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Opposite Trope to Transhuman Treachery. Super-Trope to Vampire Refugee and Phlebotinum Rebel.

This character has been hit with a Viral Transformation, Emergency Transformation, become a Cyborg, demon, magical creature, Alien or discovers they were never human at all. Despite this, and regardless of any angst over What Have I Become?, they decide that rather than go down the path of Transhuman Treachery and be a Smug Super, Black Shirt, or The Quisling, they will do everything in their power to stay a part of humanity. And if their new species/transhuman fellows are anti-human, they will vow to protect humanity in a pseudo Faustian Rebellion.

This can also include transhumans who cast themselves in a shepherd-like role for mankind. This doesn't include forcibly applying What Measure Is a Non Super to bootstrap humanity up, though. That's more of a Visionary Villain who believes Utopia Justifies the Means. Many Friendly Neighborhood Vampires fall in this category.

If the transformation is due to The Virus, this requires copious Heroic Willpower. These characters can usually pull off a Sheep in Wolf's Clothing gambit. See also Monster Adventurers. Related to My Species Doth Protest Too Much, which refers to creatures that aren't former humans.

Examples of Pro-Human Transhuman include:

Anime and Manga

• In Claymore, the eponymous warrior are Half human half demon who choose to fight for humanity's sake. Just about every one who finds out that the organization which transformed them does not have the best interests of the citizenry at heart ends up going rogue.
• In Silent Möbius, some Type 4 Lucifer Hawks ( Rally and Katsumi!) raised as humans decide to serve humanity.
• The protagonist in Blue Gender has a "disease" called B Cells which are a form of Gaia's Vengeance. It's intended to cause humans to rebel against their peers and go kill crazy (which it does spectacularly to two other characters). He manages to stay sane despite the various hardships Gaia and humanity throw at him.
• Ayato in RahXephon is part Mullian (basically a human subspecies with blue blood) and when his Mullian blood manifests, there's concern he'll pull a Face Heel Turn and join the Mullians, but he remains a nice guy on the side of his friends.
• Schwartz Bruder in G Gundam is this. He is a dead body occupied by the DG (Devil Gundam) Cells to live. Despite being made up by the cells of the Big Bad, he is the Devil Gundam host Kyoji Kasshu's physical manifestation, driven to save his brother and stop the Devil Gundam.
• In Hellsing, while most vampires revel in their non - humanity even if they fight for humans, Seras does everything in her power to remain as human as possible without neglecting her duties to the organization... which involve drinking blood in order to use her vampiric powers killing vampires that threaten humanity.
• In Nightwalker, Shido, a vampire, defends humans from the nightbreed. He apparently has been a vampire for a long time and at first he was not so friendly to humans, but later changed his mind.
• In Trinity Blood, Abel Nightroad is a Cruznik, a being that feeds upon vampires (and is thus two steps above humans in the food chain). That doesn't stop him from devoting his life to defending humanity, and using his relatively harmless default form to masquerade as a normal human. He is an interesting example of a Pro-Human Transhuman in that he was a Designer Baby and thus born a transhuman. He was also originally quite anti-human.
• Kira in Gundam Seed is accidentally this, being a Coordinator fighting for an army consisting entirely of Naturals (in a war started to exterminate his kind!). Not really his intention: he only fights to protect his friends.
• This is Invoked in Tiger and Bunny as all of the Heroes are trans-humans called NEX Ts with extraordinary powers which they use to save people and stop crimes, all of which are recorded by Hero TV for people's entertainment.

Comic Books

• Blade chooses to use his vampiric abilities as a Dhampyr and daywalker to hunt vampires.
• In the original Thirty Days of Night, sheriff Eben purposefully infects himself with vampirism and manages to save the survivors with his newfound strength.
• The X-Men are a whole organization of mutants who behave this way.
• DC Comics hero Metamorpho.
• The Thing of Fantastic Four.
• Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen in the beginning of the story. Though this is actually his main character arc—he becomes less and less so as the story goes on, eventually getting to "Why would I save a world I no longer have any stake in?". By the end, spoiler: Silk Spectre II must convince Dr. Manhattan that humans lives are worth protecting. It's the revelation that her father is The Comedian that does it - realizing the sheer improbability of human life is enough to restore his interest in protecting it.

Film

• Defied in Ultraviolet, where a human tries to reason with the not-vampire heroine, saying she was human once, too. She dismisses it offhandedly, saying it were fellow humans who made her that way and then wanted her dead, so she owes them no loyalty.

Literature

• Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
  • In Thief of Time, the character Myria LeJean is an Auditor, an enemy of humanity, but upon taking human form she realises what it is she seeks to destroy and becomes opposed to her own people, in defence of humanity.
  • In Snuff, the Dwarvish demonic entity The Summoning Dark, vanquished by Sam Vimes, becomes his ally in the cause of law and order.
• In Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, Hilary Gage, an artificial intelligence designed to mimic every aspect of the human thought process, continues to think of "himself" as human, at least with respect to interstellar politics, despite being very much aware of the fact that "he" has no biological body parts. Later, he downloads himself into a berserker warship's central AI, and has to make sure he maintains enough control to prevent the warship from continuing its fight against humanity.
• In Old Man's War, the CDF consists almost entirely of elderly men and women downloaded into genetically enhanced pseudo-clones (the rest is even less human). During boot camp one guy asks why they're bothering to defend baseline humanity when their new bodies are the next step in human evolution. Sergeant Ruiz tells him he couldn't be more wrong, all the alien DNA in their genomes makes them sterile and thus an evolutionary "dead end". In fact one of the reasons for the advanced enlistment age is so most of the recruits would have grandkids back home they would want to protect from baby-eating aliens.
• In Karen E. Taylor's Vampire Legacy series, Vampire Detective Dierdre prefers working with humans to other vampires, despite the Fantastic Racism that carries.

Live-Action TV

• In Being Human (UK) the three main characters are a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost who still care about humans and are trying to live as normally as they can.
• This happens a couple of times in the new Doctor Who with Cybermen who haven't been 100% perfectly converted. Specifically, in "Doomsday" converted Torchwood head Yvonne Hartman shoots a bunch of Cybermen while repeating "I did my duty for queen and country...I did my duty for queen and country..."
• Kamen Rider series does this as a tradition. For instance, the original show (also named Kamen Rider) involves the main character becoming a Shocker cyborg monster, but he didn't lose his humanity and used the same transformation to fight the Shocker creations. The shows that followed more or less follow the same idea of their ability to transform being related to the villain of the show.
  • In Kamen Rider 555, Orphenochs are supposedly the next evolution of mankind, and the evil organization forces them to attack normal humans (in hopes of siring more Orphenochs. However, about one in a hundred can be transformed; most just turn to dust.) Some just go nuts on their own. However, there's a trio of renegade Orphenochs living together Being Human (UK)-style. The Rider suits were created by the bad guys, but are not themselves part of the transformation, though for the main Rider, it turns out there's a very good reason he can use a Transformation Trinket that isn't supposed to work for humans.

Tabletop Games

• MasterBook RPG The World of Species, based on the film Species. Humans are injected with some of Sil's DNA, causing them to gain some of her abilities. This allows them to hunt down and destroy Sil's progeny, but they must constantly fight against the alien thoughts and personality traits generated by the DNA in their systems.
• Dungeons & Dragons supplement Knight of the Living Dead. A lich brings a paladin of Torm back from death as an undead creature. The lich orders him to gather magic items to help the lich conquer the city of Waterdeep, but instead he decides to fight against the lich's forces and protect the inhabitants of the city.
• In Warhammer 40,000, every Space Marine is a bioengineered Transhuman, yet they serve humanity with zealous ferocity. It helps that the transformation, and the very reason they exist, is explicitly to protect humanity better.
  • It does actually vary by Chapter to Chapter on whether they're the protectors of humanity or the executioners of the Emperor's enemies. Chapters such as the Ultramarines, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Imperial Fists, and Raven Guard give much more emphasis on protecting the Imperium's civilians, but the only chapter which places more emphasis on protecting humanity over killing the Emperor's enemies is the Salamanders.
  • Chaos Space Marines on the other hand, almost all seek the favor of their dark gods for personal gain.

Video Games

• In Bioforge the Mad Scientist hoped that you would succumb to Transhuman Treachery after he upgraded (and deformed) you, but instead made you into a vengeful Phlebotinum Rebel.
• In Alpha Centauri, eventually you gain the technology to turn your people into transhuman "transcendii," who are basically energy beings via Brain Uploading. They're still loyal citizens, each and every one.
• If one plays Adam Jensen with a pacifist slant, this is how he identifies himself in any of the four endings.

Web Comics

• People in Crimson Dark with lots of augs, despite often being less than 20% flesh, still act just like normal humans.
• The Kingfisher: Vampirism doesn't make one inherently evil, but the pro-human vampires are few: mainly Helen, Vitus, Jack, Tristan, and Darren. Notably, some of the least powerful characters in the story.

Web Original

• The Sephirotic Archailects and their ancestors, the early pro-human transapients, from Orion's Arm are this. The Archai are not specifically pro-human as such (humans are but a fraction of the 10th millennium terragen populace), but generally benevolent towards lower toposophic lifeforms and promoters of sophont rights regardless of singularity level. This is as opposed to the solipsist AIs, who just don't care about anyone else positively or negatively, or the ahuman AIs who will, at best, kick lower beings off of their turf, or, for the less fortunate, Mind Rape them to death or worse.

Western Animation

• In Justice League, Gorilla Grodd intends to publicly kill the League because they are Transhumans fighting to protect humans, which, according to him, is contrary to natural selection.
• The female lead hero Cybersix from the animated show of the same name. While pretending to be a "normal" human by day and "becoming" the hero Cybersix and fighting monsters by night.