What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Film: Difference between revisions

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** The point of that was Zombies ''slowly'' regain their former selves, so by the time of ''Land of the Dead'', Zombies for the most part are peaceful and only attack the human city because [[Karmic Death|some assholes were killing them for fun]]. They clearly ignore the thousands of humans living in slums.
* ''[[Star Wars]]'', so many examples:
** In both trilogies, droids are established as having hopes, fears, desires, and moments of insight or creativity. Nevertheless, because they are not organic, no one feels any qualms about slaughtering vast numbers of them in the prequel trilogy (although the Trade Federation droids may not have been sentient, a line of thought which occurs rapidly upon viewing of their ineffective tactics).
** In ''A New Hope'', when the bartender of the Mos Eisley cantina says "We don't serve droids here.", [[The Book]] has Luke decide that it's not the time to fight for "droid rights" before telling C-3PO and R2-D2 to stay outside. This suggests that good guys ''do'' care about droid rights, but the issue is never followed up on (at least not in that book). One [[Expanded Universe]] source claims that the reason the bartender doesn't like droids is because they can't drink and quickly become loiterers in such a place, something that might be seen as a valid point.
** Oddly, in ''Return of the Jedi'', one scene involves the [[Cold-Blooded Torture]] and maiming of droids. Evidently, it's suddenly okay to show violence inflicted on droids that you'd never get away with if they were living creatures.
*** Arguably, it could be to show the intense cruelty of Jabba the Hutt and his underlings, with a bit of [[Klingon Promotion]] as well. It's true that such torture on organic creatures would never fly, but that's mostly because such violence would jack up the rating unnecessarily.
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** To be fair, the audience gets a rather skewed perception of droid intelligence from watching Artoo and Threepio- because protocol droids have to interact with organics a lot in relatively sophisticated ways and astromechs need to be versatile, their models are a lot more intelligent than the average droid. Also both have gone much longer than normal without memory wipes, meaning that they develop personalities in ways other droids seldom do. Most droids are more like the battle droids seen in the prequel movies- to say they're barely sentient is being generous. Whether or not its right to treat the approx 1% of droids that ''are'' sapient as mere machines is actually an important issue in some parts of the EU, notably the ''Coruscant Nights'' trilogy.
** The Battle Droids of the prequel trilogy are treated as nonhuman, and their "deaths" at the hands of the heroes are even played for laughs. But they still react in a very lifelike way, even acting scared when someone comes at them brandishing a lightsaber!
*** In [[The Phantom Menace]], their brains were not in their skulls, but they were remote controlled from the Droid Control Ship in the orbit, so their program survived the body being gleefully chopped to pieces. Until young Anakin murdered them all. In ''[[Attack of the Clones]]'', however, one droid displays some individuality when it seems confused and concerned because its legs are not functioning properly - because [[Crowning Moment of Funny|its head has been attached to C3PO's body! (And vice versa!)]]
** A chunk of the Empire's cultural backbone is its doctrine conforming to [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Human_High_Culture Human High Culture], holding to the belief that humans were inherently superior to others. Healthy male humans, at that. The [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/NhM NhM category], standing for Non-huMan, was applied to various degrees to droids, [https://web.archive.org/web/20130801030343/http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Imperial_non-Humans aliens, near-humans, cyborgs], and [https://web.archive.org/web/20120105153837/http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Imperial_women women]. Some from each category except the droids, if they were devoted and forceful enough, rose to power anyway, but it was an uphill battle, and in several cases was only possible at all because they [[Never a Self-Made Woman|hitched their careers to those of male human officers]].
*** Interestingly, of Palpatine's thirteen handpicked Grand Admirals, three of them - Thrawn, [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Osvald_Teshik Teshik], and Pitta - fell under the Non-huMan category. Thrawn was a striking near-human who got his position by being almost obscenely good. [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Osvald_Teshik Teshik] was the most compassionate and non-evil Grand Admiral, but after suffering serious injuries and being forced to replace 75% of his body with cybernetics, was widely derided and dismissed, though he kept his rank. [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Danetta_Pitta Pitta], interestingly, a human with near-human blood, was the one most obsessed with Imperial racial purity, "purging" anyone who was revealed to have an impure ancestry.