What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Web Original

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In Spoilsbury Toast Boy, the doctor beetle explains to Liache that "mucus is a living thing" and "it has a certain degree of intelligence." The beetles later drown Liache when her mucus tells them she doesn't deserve to breathe.
  • In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, while intelligent apes have been given full civil rights, robots, androids, and other artificial intelligences are still not considered people in the legal sense even though they cannot be harmed with impunity (property laws come into consideration). Demons, the undead, and most other forms of monster are free targets, however.
  • Averted for dark laughs in the last segment of the first asdfmovie. The guy is horrified when he unwittingly stabs a sapient living cake (who has a wife and children), causing the cake to be Driven to Suicide.
  • Disturbingly deconstructed here
  • Rosahas cyborgs that really blurs the line between human and nonhuman by makeing the red eyed cyborgs seem inhuman and like cold-hearted machines, where the Rosa is shown in a sympathetic light
  • Tales of MU makes this a plot point, especially when Mackenzie is trapped in the Labyrinth and runs across the adventuring party, including a priestess of the goddess of peace and is shot in the shoulder. The resulting argument among the party isn't whether they should save the story's half-demon protagonist, but whether they should kill her now, or let her bleed to death after they abandon her.
  • Kara deals with this.
  • Deconstructed in this Video Game Confessions which reimagines Samus as a violent torturer and serial killer. She asks "Why is it that when you kill an alien from another world, you're considered a hero?"
  • Downplayed slightly in the SCP Foundation Files. SCPs are always referred to as "objects" and with neutral pronouns, even when described as an "anomalous human" and when gender and sapience is obvious. Among other reasons, this helps prevent Foundation staff from feeling too much sympathy for them, especially towards SCPs who are more victim than villain. There are, however, many cases where researchers acknowledge them as human "off the record" via opinions outside the Files.

Back to What Measure Is a Non-Human?