"They'll rip your head off just for fun
They'll paralyze your mind
They're wearin' out their welcome
I don't think I like their kind
They'll suck your brain out through a straw
You just can't trust those guys
So hide the children, lock the doors
And always watch the sky!"
They'll paralyze your mind
They're wearin' out their welcome
I don't think I like their kind
They'll suck your brain out through a straw
You just can't trust those guys
So hide the children, lock the doors
And always watch the sky!"
When man looks up at the stars, the sense of wonder, and emptiness, can be as overwhelming as the questions they inspire. Is there life out there? Is it intelligent? Are they friendly? In fiction, the short answers are: "Yes", "Yes" and "Hell no!" Why? Because Aliens Are Bastards.
In Speculative Fiction stories dealing with the extraterrestrial and otherworldly, the beings from beyond the veil are rarely friendly, and if they are it's usually a pretense so they can eat us or make us mommies less than consensually. The reason is that it makes good drama, it exploits humanity's latent fear of the unknown with implacable and indecipherable menaces. Traditionally this trope uses aliens not as characters but as forces of nature. They will be the Monster of the Week for the heroes to fight, a terrifying and nigh-unstoppable foe with little to no motivation other than violence for its own sake.
This type of alien bastard is usually very visually distinct from "good" aliens (who tend to be Green Skinned Space Babes or Human Aliens). They will be ugly, obviously inhuman and rarely humanoid. Of course, they won't be friendly, do not understand love, want to steal our women, natural resources and possibly leave nothing behind of the planet itself. Despite having the technology needed for space travel, they will make no attempt to communicate or explain their actions and seem to have targeted us for no good or readily apparent reason.
This is aliens being Always Chaotic Evil. If they are Precursors, they were either neglectful or are downright abusive.
On a lesser scale, there are, of course, The Greys with the reputed stereotype of mutilating cattle and abducting humans for the sole sake of probing them in the name of Science for their own, vague, nefarious purposes.
When the aliens' motivations for bastardry are placed parallel to humanity's negative traits, revealing the two to be similar, then Humans Are the Real Monsters. Indeed, that trope was originally launched as Humans Are Bastards before it suffered Missing Supertrope Syndrome and got a Trope Transplant.
When the aliens are used as allegories for a certain ideal, organization or country that the writer doesn't like, then they're Scary Dogmatic Aliens. As with the above, the negative traits of the targeted group are almost always excessively exaggerated. Expect the aliens to display traits displayed by said group's Vocal Minority, with the implication being that the entire group is as crazy and violent as the aforementioned minority. The similarities with Jerkass Gods, especially when the aliens are godlike in power, may not be coincidental.
Something of a Discredited Trope, as the depiction of aliens as mindless beasts or imperialist bastards has generally fallen out of use in favor of more civilized beings who can discuss the finer points of philosophy and provide a convenient canvas for the writer to paint his or her message onto. On the other hand, grotesque aliens being monstrous Villains of the week, or simple enemies is still pretty common.
Contrast Innocent Aliens.
NOTE: This trope does not apply to animalistic aliens without intellect. Violent as they are, they aren't knowingly being bastards. See Non-Malicious Monster.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Dragon Ball Z: The first antagonists are from a Proud Warrior Race of Human Aliens known as Saiyans. Apparently, being violent and evil became the general modus operandi of their (at this point, near-extinct) species and Goku, who is also a Saiyan, is one of the few exceptions (and even then, only because of Childhood Brain Damage as well as a later retcon that his White Sheep mother Gine passed on her altruism to him)* . Frieza, a Humanoid Alien, is one of the first arc villains and one of the most evil characters in the series and an Arch-Enemy to Goku. What few other members of Frieza's species shown (mostly his family) are evil. Most other aliens in the fracnhise, especially the ones from the Frieza Force's army are bad as well with only the Namekians being notably peaceful, though they have their bad eggs too like Piccolo Daimaou and Lord Slug.
- Hoshin Engi has Nuwa/Joka. She has been playing God with this little planet of ours for millions of years, modifying genomes of species, altering face of the world, causing rise and fall of major dynasties and in short controlling the history of the entire planet in order to evolve it into a perfect replica of her lost home planet. When something goes wrong in her plan, she life wipes the entire planet, destroying the planet's surface and starts afresh. She has repeated this rinse and repeat tactics quite a few times, by the time the story begins. Oh,and she does all this in spirit form, cut off from her physical body and much of her power! This trope is otherwise subverted by the other four Ancestors, who despite coming from the same planet and race as Joka found her plans abhorrent, sealed her body and then merged with wildlife and Earth.
- In Haruhi Suzumiya, it is eventually revealed that both the Data Integration Thought Entity and the Sky Canopy Dominion, the two opposing races of Sufficiently Advanced Alien, are too concerned with fighting each other than caring about the effect their actions will have on humans, or even their own interfaces. Indeed, The DITE is willing to send Yuki as an ambassador to the Dominion, in order to break her, as punishment for going rogue due to an error which wasn't her fault in the first place. The only reason they can't enforce a more direct punishment is because Kyon is threatening them with a trump card that could potentially fuck over the universe. The Sky Canopy are the villains, so they're even worse than that. When Kyon tells another DITE Interface that "Earth is not a playground for aliens", the response is, roughly, "What an entertaining joke." So at this point, it seems that the only unambiguously good alien is Yuki.
- UFO Robo Grendizer plays with this trope: At the start Kouji believes he can try to communicate with the Vegans -the alien invaders- and befriend them, but Daisuke tries to warn him they are NOT his friends and are NOT peaceful or reasonable. However, Daisuke himself was an alien and a decent person. And although the Big Bad, Great King Vega and several of his subordinates are definitely evil, throughout the series more aliens -including Vegans- are introduced are decent people or at the worst are Well-Intentioned Extremists who believe Utopia Justifies the Means.
- This approach on alien morality is common within many other Super Robot Genre series of Grendizer's ilk. The Robot Romance Trilogy especially comes to mind.
- Bokurano has the creators of Zearth and the 'game' it's attached to. The aliens apparently 'clean up' excess timelines by forcing the giant robots to fight each other, with the loser's entire timeline being forfeited. If Bokurano follows a standard tournament ladder some 32,000 alternate Earths--and possibly the rest of their universe as well--are exterminated by the aliens' game during the manga, and the end of the manga sees the game restarted with a new set of pilots in a new timeline.
- Voltes V: The Boazanian Empire is full of these:
- Emperor Zambajil is a Dirty Coward who sentenced his own cousin to slavery so that he could have the throne for himself.note He seeks to increase the number of slaves in the Boazanian Empire by forcibly conquering other planets and taking their citizens captive, while subjecting them to harsh treatment. When the slaves rebel, Zambajil pins the blame for the Earthern invasion on his nephew...the very same nephew he ordered to invade the Earth in the first place. And even though said nephew showed nothing but respect and admiration for him, Zambajil arranged multiple assassination attempts on his life because he was the rightful heir to throne.
- Said nephew is a Royal Brat who Used to Be a Sweet Kid, but after being continously blamed for his father's betrayalnote , he grew into a bitter person, desperate to clear his name from the wrongdoings of a parent he never met. Being forced through one Humiliation Conga after the other, Prince Heinel decided that his best bet at gaining respect from those around him was through the military, and attended the Boazanian Institute of Military Sciences and Warfare, where he graduated as The Ace. As a result, Zambajil selected him to lead the Alien Invasion to Planet Earth.
- Said nephew's right hand is a sadist who performs experiments on animals to turn them into Beast Knights and laughs at the thought of killing children. And even she is horrified at Heinel's bloodlust, and later tries to convince him to abandon the war.
- Oral, Gohl's father and Heinel's grandfather, wanted to commit filicide on his son when he was born. The reason? He deemed him "cursed" for not having horns, and stated a hornless son would humiliate him.
Comic Books
- In the 2000 AD strip, Bec & Kawl, The Greys who abduct Pierre seem to view humans as play-things to be abused and toyed with for their amusement, at least when not partaking in the traditional Anal Probing and alien-human hybrid experiments. When The Greys decide to recruit Pierre (who is a pest control expert) for the job of "taking on the filthiest vermin of all" (a separate malevolent alien race hiding amongst us on Earth, waiting for the opportune moment to strike), it turns out to be a Batman Gambit for The Greys' own benefit of helping them conquer Earth themselves.
- Another, unrelated, comic had two alien students spend the equivalent of spring break to tamper extensively with Earth's development - both humanity's progress as a species and the formation of the planet's landmasses. Why? So that, when humanity eventually takes their step into the galactic scene and officially joins the other races, the image of the planet would be shown to everyone - an image where the continents were shaped to spell out a rude and immature joke at the expense of their professor's wife. The aliens decide to outright destroy the planet and everyone on it just to save face, while the two "protagonists" laugh their asses off at their little "prank".
- Pick an alien race from Marvel Comics. Any of them will do:
- The Skrulls like to infiltrate other planets with their shape-shifting power in order to destroy them from the inside. This is usually because they're (ironically enough) just that damn paranoid.
- The Kree tend to produce more heroic characters than most alien races (most famously, Captain Mar-Vell), and their ruling Supreme Intelligence is sometimes the Only Sane Man among the cosmic hierarchy, but they like to play god with genetics as part of attempts to kickstart their evolution, are big fans of enslavement, and at worst are Nazis IN SPACE! Eons ago, the above-mentioned Skrulls were actually a pretty nice bunch until they offended the Kree, prompting the Kree to start a Forever War with them that has turned the Skrulls into the paranoid jerks they are today.
- The Brood are a Xenomorph Xerox from the Alien franchise except they are a bit more intelligent, thus giving them no excuse to act like animals.
- The Shi'ar Empire are probably the "nicest" aliens, historically speaking. They're a militaristic empire that bounce back and forth between Well Intentioned Extremists, Anti-Heroes, and Social Darwinists depending on who is in charge of the empire and what mood they are in. They tend to fight against Earth's heroes as often as they team up with them. They're also not above murdering someone's family just because they might conceivably become a threat someday. Generally, they're referred to as Marvel's version of the Romulans: smart, mean, and ruthless.
- The aliens in the original Guardians of the Galaxy killed Earth's heroes and took over the galaxy for a time as the backstory for the series. Which alien race is responsible depends on the retcon.
- The symbiotes from Spider-Man are parasitic organisms that cling to people who are violently insane and then drive them even more insane before killing them. Spidey's villain, Venom, is a rare symbiote in that it actually cares for its hosts. Most Klyntar, symbiotes, are entirely sane and actually heroic, once the symbiote is cleansed of its insanity. However, the 'Poisons', are a very different story.
- The Badoon
not only hate you, but they hate women as well. They're not above turning your corpse into a cyborg monstrosity, sometimes not even waiting until you're dead.
- The Dire Wraiths are related to Skrulls but use magic instead of technology, and if anything, they're worse.
- The Space Phantom was the shapeshifting advance scout of a race of aliens from the planet Phantus who wanted to conquer Earth... that is until Immortus recruited him and revealed his true origin.
- The Phalanx combine the Borg with a Zombie Apocalypse. Fun! The technarchy they come from want to eat everything; the Phalanx are why they don't play with their food. Keeping their numbers low is the fact that Technarchs are also bastards to each other.
- There are some races such as The Inhumans and The Eternals who are more or less aliens but they are also off-shoots of humanity. They are usually good guys but they've had their moments (read War of Kings to see what the Inhumans have been doing lately). In this way, they combine Aliens Are Bastards with Humans Are the Real Monsters in one, neat package. Oh, and Thanos is an Eternal, so there's that.
- The crossover event "Maximum Security" debuted with a conference of many different alien races voting on what to do about Earth, since Earthlings were always meddling in their affairs. The only race that spoke up for us were the Kymellians from Power Pack, who seem to be Always Lawful Good and knew us mostly from their dealings with the friendly Power children. And for the record, the decision that was reached at said conference was "impose an inter-species blockade on Earth and use it as a dumping ground for all our worst criminals."
- And speaking of Power Pack, the Snarks count too. Though apparently not all Kymellians were as good as Aelfyre.
- And of course, aliens from Another Dimension instead of another planet are like that too - Just look at the Negative Zone's Blastaar and Annihilus, or worse, Dormammu and Shuma-Gorath.
- This is less true over at DC Comics, probably because so many DC alien races first appeared as members of the Legion of Super-Heroes or Green Lantern Corps. Though there are some who do invade Earth but there are several other races who are more greyish and willing to be allies to Earth tending to act more like Anti- Heroes instead of being bastards to them.
- The Post-Crisis depiction of the Kryptonians cast them in an unflattering light. Lack of Empathy for anyone that isn't a Kryptonian is their Hat. Prior to that, Pre-Crisis Krypton was depicted quite favorably, though. Modern depictions tend to mix the two.
- The White Martians are a warlike race that want to conquer Earth. The only good one is Ms. Martian.
- The Daxamites' Hat is vicious xenophobia. Ironically, the Daxamites are taught their entire lives that Aliens Are Bastards, which makes them bastards when they kill any alien they meet just for existing. Notably, Daxamites are the product of a genetically-diverged Kryptonian Lost Colony, so at least the genus is consistently xenophobic.
- The people of Apokolips. All of them. Even the downtrodden Lowlies prove themselves to be total bastards if they are given power — Darkseid's Torture Technician Granny Goodness used to be one of the Lowlies. One of Darkseid's hobbies is to free some slaves and make them his new overseers just so he can watch them become as cruel as their former tormentors. Considering who's in charge of the place, being the biggest bastard you can be is actually a very sound survival strategy.
- The Thanagarians from Hawkman, Tamaranians from Teen Titans, and the citizens of Rann from Adam Strange have all had turns being antagonists at some point but they tend to be more gray than many of the aliens here.
- The DC crossover Invasion! involved a race called the Dominators wanted to conqueror the Earth to use humans as guinea pigs and weapons out of sheer prejudice, forming an alliance with several other species to do so, including the Thanagarians and the Durlans.
- Coluan scientist and Superman villain Brainiac has personified this trope since 1958. The Coluans as a whole aren't always evil, but pretty much all of them are jerks. It's an entire planet of insufferable geniuses, and no, they don't like offworlders. That said, they don't condone Brainiac's universal xenocide either, and in some comics either his family line or his species as a whole has to deal with the reputation Brainiac's actions bring to them.
- Lobo, from the planet Czarnia (usually; it's varied over time). His name in Khundian translates to "He who devours your entrails and thoroughly enjoys it." Lobo started as a parody/deconstruction of the trend towards Darker and Edgier characters, and became popular among both people who hated those characters (because he was such an over-the-top parody) and who loved those characters (because he was such an over-the-top parody). Ironically, his homeworld was (supposedly) a paradise populated with Perfect Pacifist People and everything nice to the point of almost absurdity, and was completely unprepared for Lobo's birth. (Lobo intentionally destroyed them. With his high school science project.)
- Wonder Woman (1942): While the Venusians are Diana's allies they tend to be a little too eager to use brainwashing and all other extraterrestrial groups are far worse:
- In Wonder Woman (Charles Moulton) the Martians follow Mars—enslaving any who they come across including those few Martians who oppose the leadership and worsening violent conflicts on other planets just to up the death toll—Giants from Mercury betray their families for very little and the Queen has had all men enslaved and fitted with deadly control collars, Saturnians are ruled by a cruel Emperor while running a galactic slave trade and planning to invade the earth, and Neptunians show up on earth pretending to be kind and there due to an accident while they plot to overthrow earth and transform those who uncover their plans into animalistic tigapes.
- During Robert Kanigher's run there were new jerk aliens to be introduced. Badra is from a planet in a forever war that destroyed the place and where virtues of violence and thievery were valued. The Uranians under Uvo enslave and slaughter all women they come across and are planning a nuclear bombardment of earth's major cities.
- Wonder Woman (1987): The Sangtee Empire takes inspiration from Uvo's Uranians, a violent empire that does not allow women to be citizens and enslaves any that make their way into its borders.
- The Mars Attacks! series, based on the trading card series from The '60s (see page image), featured Martians running amok on Earth. This race seemed to be Always Chaotic Evil in every version. The trading card series did have a reason for the attack (Mars will soon blow up, so the Martians need a new home quickly), though jumping directly to a brutal, excessively cruel invasion was kinda bastardly.
- The comic Brain Camp, whose alien birds were collaborating with the leaders of a kids' camp to use the kids as incubators for their young. True the race was dying on its own, but it's still squicky to see aliens bursting out of teenagers.
- The Xorda in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics). Granted, they're still sore over having their diplomat captured, killed and dissected by humans, but deciding that Mobians were just the same as the humans they all but wiped out was a little harsh. Most other worlds, such as the Bern, are much more friendlier, but they don't get involved with Mobius because they don't want the Xorda breathing down their necks. Doesn't stop the Black Arms from trying to claim Mobius as their own and getting stuck in a massive war.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Decepticons, as usual. At one point in their Forever War, they started creating their own empire, by wiping out organic civilisations and altering the planet to suit their needs. Their usual tactic consisted of escalating conflicts, letting the locals do most of the damage, then sending in a Super-Soldier to finish the planet off. Sadly, the Decepticons are not the first Cybertronians to treat organic life as pests to be exterminated. The notion that "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" was pretty much all Optimus Prime's influence. Past Primes like Nova Prime had no qualms with "purifying" the galaxy of organics. Cybertronians in general are not liked by other races because of this.
- The Yargonians in Tragg and the Sky Gods. Even the initial 'benevolent' group that first visits Earth sees nothing wrong with experimenting of on sentient beings and then wiping their memories so they do not recall the experimentation. The later, more militaristic group are engaged on a galaxy-wide campaign of conquest and enslavement, and Earth is the next planet in their sights.
- Played straight in Strikeforce: Morituri. The only benevolent aliens are seen in flashback; all of the aliens encountered by humans are out to exploit humanity in one way or another.
- Stardust the Super Wizard: Exaggerated. The evil aliens are Card-Carrying Villains who want to destroy Earth For the Evulz.
- Gorilla Gorilla features a species of aliens that are invariably referred to as evil and cause trouble for the main characters whenever they appear, ranging from attempting to invade Earth to creating monsters to attack the title character while he's already fighting off Lizard Lizard.
Fan Works
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Aside from Ghidorah, there's also the mysterious alien civilization who created it. They made Ghidorah what it now is before becoming some of Ghidorah's first Asshole Victims, and the author believes that these advanced beings had no higher motivation than finding ways to inflict pain and cause destruction for their own sakes.
- Age of Strife:
- The pre-fall Eldar make many appearances, where they demonstrate quite clearly why their empire will one day give birth to Slaanesh.
- The Exodites, while not as actively cruel, still almost kill Dia with their careless telepathy and take away any Eldar technology that Greengraft gets it's hands on.
- In Equestria: A History Revealed, the narrator theorizes that this was the reasoning behind the birth of Discord. Apparently, he was created through an alien intergalactic space orgy, which they only did for kicks.
- In The Lion King Adventures, the Inque and the Vimelea are vicious alien parasites that take over minds and, in the case of the latter, entire souls. Naturally, they wish to enslave the earth.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: Krang and Ch'rell, hands down. Aside from their plans to Take Over the World, they also used Hisako as a lab rat, putting her through horrific experiments for the first ten years of her life.
- The flipside to the original idea of The Conversion Bureau: several pro-human spin-offs characterize ponies as xenophobic Social Darwinists with Knight Templar tendencies. In-universe comparisons between Equestria and Nazi Germany are common.
- In Worldwar: War of Equals alien aircraft pilots don't seem to care whether their targets are civilian or military and then there is the nuking of several highly populated Human cities, killing thousands.
Films — Animation
- Played with in Home (2015), in regards to the Boov. They were only looking for a place to call home, but in doing so they deprived other species of their homes.
- In Monsters vs. Aliens, the aliens want to destroy humanity to colonize it. This is justified, as they are all copies of Gallaxhar, a man so evil that he destroyed his home planet.
- The Yolkiens from Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius who abduct all the parents in Retroville in order to sacrifice them to their chicken god. You could say that they're bad eggs.
Films — Live-Action
- Alien Outlaw: The three aliens arrive just to use Earth as a real life shoot'em up video game setting, killing Earthlings just for fun. The leader is even worse than the other two, indulging in his sexual urges by raping Earth women.
- In The Arrival, the aliens are sneaky bastards, using covert Hostile Terraforming to accelerate global warming.
- Avatar by James Cameron inverts the trope to make humans the bastard aliens.
- The averted part comes from the fact that the sentient race which is considered "alien" at first (the Na'Vi) are clearly a good-natured people who are willing to consider any life sacred, and they accepted the humans' presence until the Corrupt Corporate Executives decided to destroy their homeland and hire trigger-happy mercenaries to murder the natives for greedy purposes.
- The part played straight comes from the fact that the humans (particularly the greedy corporation) are the ones invading a foreign planet, destroying the land, and murdering innocent natives, all for a mineral that's worth a lot of money. The protagonist even refers to the invaders as "aliens" by the end of the movie, making us realize that we didn't notice the humans' "alien-ness" all along. So the movie can be viewed as an Alien-Invasion film from the point of view of the aliens.
- In Battle: Los Angeles, within minutes of the first alien craft crashing down in the ocean, they're opening fire on civilians and shooting indiscriminately. Corpses of massacred human civilians and soldiers are visible nearly everywhere throughout the movie, and news reports state that the aliens are rounding up humans with death squads and executing them in the streets. One scientist suggests that the aliens are using textbook "colonization" tactics: invade, wipe out the indigenous population, and take their resources. Possibly subverted, since there's an implication that extreme Values Dissonance is going on between the humans and aliens.
- Battlefield Earth: You can hardly ever sympathize with most of the Psychlos. Except maybe Ker and the Bartender.
- Bumblebee: True to the Transformers franchise's form, the Decepticons are ruthless and, when they interact with other races, hold little to no regard for them outside of how they can be useful to their cause. They also won't simply settle for driving the Autobots off-planet, but actively hunt them down simply to ensure they don't ever return.
- Cowboys & Aliens featured a race of alien miners who make it a point to capture and dissect humans out of curiosity.
- Dark Phoenix: The D'Bari, who are the very first aliens featured in the X-Men Film Series; are downright hostile to humans and mutants and don't hesitate to kill in the pursuit of their goals, which include conquest of worlds.
Vuk: Your lives mean nothing. Your world will be ours.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) has aliens nearly wipe us out because we were potentially about to destroy the environment. In their defense, they were going to negotiate first, but then their envoy was shot and captured, and his request to speak to the UN was denied. None of this went far toward proving that humans were no longer careless, violent, or wasteful. In the original version the aliens only come to Earth after Earth developed nuclear ICBMs... they don't care at all what humans do on their own planet, but the instant they can launch weapons towards other planets they intervene.
- In Edge of Tomorrow, the alien seem to have no goals other than the complete elimination of humanity and conquering the Earth.
- The main antagonists in Freaks of Nature are aliens that arrive in the town to abduct its people and end up provoking a vampire/zombie apocalypse that kill dozens. Played with, as it turns out they aren't really malevolent (at first) and are searching for the town's veggie riblets for their meal and are only "abducting" the townspeople to keep them safe inside forcefield prisons until they arrive. The fact they provoked the vampire and zombie population to attack was pure accident. Its not until the citizens tells them to screw off after their explanation that the aliens become angry and decide to wipe out the town in retaliation.
- Godzilla takes this trope and runs with it. While some of the earthborn Kaiju eventually reform, the alien Kaijus have all remained evil to the end. Whether they're Eldritch Abominations like King Ghidorah, Ax-Crazy lunatics like Gigan, or would-be conquerors like SpaceGodzilla, they've all been bent on killing as many people as hideously as possible. And that's without even getting into the Simians, Xiliens, Kilaaks, and various other alien races who have employed their services. The one alien race that was actually presented as benevolent in the entire franchise, the Venusians, were extinct by the present day (wiped out by King Ghidorah).
- In Impostor, the Alpha Centauri aliens attacked humanity and try to destroy Earth civilization for no apparent reason, as their motives aren't revealed in the film.
- Independence Day. And how! They are a race of Planet Looters who take what they need and wipe out what's left of the planets they ravage.
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978): The Pod People are gelatinous aliens who invade occupied home worlds and parasitize them by depleting all physical resources while replacing/killing off its native life forms after they supposedly ruined their own world the same way. Their parasitic behavior backfires on and even harms them as well because they too quickly exhaust an entire planet of resources and so they move on to different planets.
- It (2017): IT is essentially an extremely malevolent, predatory being of extraterrestrial origins that came to Derry in a meteor and turned the place into Its personal hunting grounds.
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space: It's a story about a grotesque, murderous Clown Species that loves sucking on liquified humans and finds a lot of glee in subjecting people to cruel and unusual deaths. In the ONE instance a Klown stops and has a meaningful thing to say to one of the heroes, through the use of a Dead Guy Puppet, is that all they want to do... is killing us.
- Little Shop of Horrors: Audrey II sings he's from outer space and he's mean, green and bad.
- Several of the alien lifeforms in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, such as the Chitauri, Dark Elves or Chronicoms are malevolent and tear up whatever world then end up on. However others (like the Xandarians or Asgardians) are well-meaning and even look out for humanity's best interests when they interact with Earthlings.
- The Martians from Mars Attacks!, true to their trading card source material, are sadistic bastards who invade Earth For the Evulz. They delight in making humanity think they can be reasoned with only to turn around and kill everyone. Making things easier for them is the fact that the vast majority of the humans are gullible fools who keep falling for the Martians' tricks.
- Men in Black: While many aliens are nice, several others have served as villains. Edgar from the first film wanted to allow his species to feed on the inhabitants of Earth.
- In Pacific Rim, it's initially assumed that the Kaiju are just enormous animals who are attacking from predatory instinct. However, the scientist Newt accesses kaiju memories at one point and discovers they're bioweapons being created by aliens to wipe out humans, because they intend to colonize Earth to drain it of its resources like they've done to so many other worlds.
- The Predators, who use Earth as a game reserve for Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. The Expanded Universe of the Alien vs. Predator comics show they regularly seed other planets with aliens that threaten a cancerous destruction of the biosphere so they'll have a good hunting spot later on. There also exists, in expanded, media "Bad Bloods", who hunt without a code of honor and are sure enough to kill even their own kind for fun - such are said to be highly dishonored by the rest of their species and are to be hunted down. Note that this trope, overall, is a major case of Depending on the Writer; nobody seems to be able to agree on how good or evil the Predators are. Usually, from the original films, they are simply shown hunting human beings likely to be a challenge, and such a danger must be eliminated. Most try to portray them as extremely honor-bound and having a society built on "the strong led". There's one comic where a Predator comes to Earth not to hunt, but to apprehend a serial killer who has come to Earth for that purpose. There's been multiple times where Predators have acted very respectful of other races (particularly humans) and worked with them to deal with a problem (most commonly dealing with a xenomorph infestation).
- In Prometheus, while an Engineer did seed life on Earth, at some point in history the other Engineers decided humanity needed to die. Extinction was averted when the Engineer ship sent to destroy humanity fell prey to the Engineers' own bioweapon. The lone surviving Engineer tries to complete the mission moments after being woken up by the Prometheus' crew. Word of God confirms that the Engineers by and large are monsters. The fact that they created a horrific mutagenic bioweapon — the Xenomorphs being a mere by-product of it — capable of wiping out all life on a planet also doesn't paint them in a good light.
- Fresh addition: Skyline's aliens are complete assholes. Sure they invade the planet, hypnotize people with their blue lights and brutally steal the brains of anyone they capture to use as Wetware CPUs, but what do they do when they come across pregnant women? They try to suck the babies out of them, that's what.
- Slither: The alien wants to assimilate the entire universe into his being, killing all other life in the process. Oh, and it kills everyone's pets and livestock before moving onto humans.
- They Live!: They transformed human society into a pyramid putting themselves at the very top and subjugated all positions of power as company executives, the government, police, military, and movies and television. Towards the end it turns out they have human collaborators who helped make their invasion possible.
- Transformers Film Series: The Decepticons, particularly Megatron, don't exactly see Earth as belonging to the humans, merely following a Social Darwinistic rule of "The strongest shall rule and conquer all". In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, they display Nazi-like behavior by intending to plunder Earth's natural resources and enslave humans into rebuilding Cybertron in a similar fashion to the Generation One cartoon two-parter "Megatron's Master Plan".
- V/H/S/2: In "Slumber Party Alien Abduction", the aliens ruthlessly pursue and try to abduct the humans, and they have no qualms about violently shoving the dog if it gets in their way or indirectly causing the dog's death with their tractor beam.
- Vivarium: Whether or not they have Blue-and-Orange Morality, the aliens are deliberately luring numerous couples to their inescapable pocket dimension to slowly torment and kill them while forcing them to raise one of their own.
- The War of the Worlds (1953) has the Martians attack Earth. The remake shows them using people as compost; for Alien Kudzu, in fact.
- Lampshaded in The Watch (2012). When one of the aliens is asked why they’re trying to invade Earth, the best explanation he can give is “we’re aliens, it’s what we do”. Especially funny because the alien who says this is the Token Heroic Orc joins the good guys and proves that, no, aliens aren’t all bastards.
- The World's End: The Network's claim of wanting to "civilise" humanity rings pretty hollow considering they have to kill over 99% of it to achieve its aims. And then there's the aftereffects of them leaving...
- Zathura: The Zorgons are only interested in burning things and eating meat. Humans are meat.
Literature
- All Tomorrows: the first intelligent alien life humanity encountered, the Qu, definitely fit this. The Qu conquered and annihilated half of the human race, and bio-engineered the survivors into thousands of (usually non-sapient) subspecies. They did all this apparently just because they could and there was no one to stop them. However, the next intelligent aliens the various human descendants eventually met were friendly, or at least reasonable enough that coexistence was possible.
- Subverted in Animorphs, which often explores the implications of any sentient species supposedly being Always Chaotic Evil. The main antagonists, the Yeerks, are trying to enslave humans as hosts, but only because their natural forms are weak, blind slugs desperate for the lives other races can enjoy. It's explored further with the Howlers, servants of the Sufficiently Advanced Eldritch Abomination Crayak; while dedicated to wiping out every other species in the universe, it's revealed that Crayak keeps them unaware that other species have any sort of sentience or sapience, allowing them to slaughter other races as easily as people playing a video game.
- The Andalite case is far more interesting. In the beginning of the series, kids look up to their erstwhile saviors, the great and glorious Andalites, and are counting on them to swoop in and save the day. It becomes increasingly obvious, however, that Andalite military command couldn't care less about humans. In the end, their strategy for for winning the war was to bombard Earth from orbit to take out as many Yeerks as possible. This is not the first time they considered this strategy.
- Area 51: The Airlia are coldly indifferent to humanity at best, and see us only as minions. The Swarm, meanwhile, view all other life forms as hosts.
- While aliens tend to be fairly variable in Arrivals from the Dark, many of the books in the main series are devoted to wars with aliens, starting with a nearly-successful Alien Invasion of a then-primitive Earth (it only fails because of the assistance of a friendly alien). Humanity's rise as a galactic power is full of wars because some of the races see humans as upstarts and wish to crush them before they get any stronger. The Bino Faata attempt to invade Earth and then spend nearly a century in brutal wars with humanity, wishing to defeat humans and turn them into a Slave Race. The Dromi are Lizard Folk and Explosive Breeders, so their attempts to wipe everyone out are due to their constant need to expand. The Kni'lina are highly arrogant and mostly dislike humans because we look so much like them (it violates their own beliefs about their uniqueness). The Haptors are a Proud Warrior Race, so their reasons are obvious. Generally averted with several other races, such as the Technical Pacifists Lo'ona Aeo and the primitive but friendly Llyano (although this is a Retcon from their original depiction as a hostile starfaring race). The Proteids tend to play their own Long Games, but their interests generally align with those of Earth, and the Paraprims are both advanced and peaceful.
- Discussed in passing in Blindsight: a mention is made of the benevolent aliens of Carl Sagan, then compared with the idea that someone who ventures into space must have strong instincts of conquest and expansion. Later played with. While the scramblers are a huge potential threat to humanity, they aren't hostile because they're not capable of hostility. They're highly intelligent, but completely lack consciousness and self-awareness, which may be the Status Quo in the universe at large. Detecting signals from humanity sent out decades ago, they were unable to parse any information useful to survival from it and concluded that the signals- and human thought as a whole- are a dangerous virus designed to waste mental energy. Speaking to them is essentially the same thing as an attack.
- Most of the alien species in the Bolo series are automatically hostile to everything that is not them, and often are suicidally overconfident to boot, ruthlessly attacking not only before checking whether they stand a snowball's chance in hell against the humanity, but even after being given a good indication that they, in fact, do not. So usually this trope is played straight. Ironically, it is subverted with the race that proved to be the humanity's most dangerous enemy by leaps and bounds, the Melconians. Those were no worse or better that humans, and the war with them started mostly because both sides matched each other's hubris.
- The various Great Old Ones and Outer Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. These are extraterrestrial creatures billions of years old and possessing incredible power - people worship things that are younger and weaker than the Great Old Ones. Many of them operate on Blue-and-Orange Morality and nearly all of them are unfriendly or don't care about humanity in the least. Many of them owned the Earth long before humanity and see us as basically a lice infestation, and would not care to wipe us out and render all our accomplishments to dust.
- The eponymous High Priest of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu, who slumbers under the Pacific in the sunken city of R'lyeh waiting for "the stars to be right" so he can awaken and lead his kin to resume their rule over the world.
- Y'golonac, aka. the Defiler or the Violator, debuted in "Cold Print". Manifests as a corpulent, headless body with mouths in his palms. God of Covert Perverts and Squick. Merely reading his full name in some contexts is enough to summon him.
- Nyarlathotep, the heart and soul of the Outer Gods and the messenger of Azathoth. The most human-like and perhaps not-coincidentally the most truly malevolent. Intrigued by Humanity, in the worst possible way. Continuing the metaphor of humans being mere ants to the Outer Gods, Nyarlathotep is like a cruel child who burns ants with a magnifying glass. He could easily destroy all humankind if he wanted to, but prefers tricking lone people in a Deal with the Devil and eventually a Fate Worse than Death.
- Yog-Sothoth, debuted in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Yog-Sothoth is a living sentient embodiment of the space-time continuum. He often manifests as a mind-bending conglomeration of constantly changing, glowing orbs, but for some reason he is trapped outside our reality. Tends to be the patron of Evil Sorcerers.
- Azathoth, debuted in the story of the same name. Azathoth is the King of All Cosmos and the most powerful entity in the entire Cthulhu canon. A mindless, formless being of unlimited power that created the universe and dwells in the centre, Azathoth is a god of Primordial Chaos and embodies the bizarre uncertainly of physics, especially quantum physics. Azathoth is an insanity-inducing blasphemous horror.
- Ender's Game is a long deconstruction of this trope. The Formics, during the First and Second Invasions, would board captured ships and colonies and brutally murder the captives - while the recording equipment was still transmitting. Naturally, the humans have a deep hatred and fear of them because of this. It turns out the aliens did this because they operate as a Hive Mind. Killing all the individuals aboard a ship was simply their way of disabling the ship's communications equipment, and they never imagined until it was too late that each individual was an independent, thinking, feeling being. By the time the humans launch their counterattack, the Formics have figured this out and are deeply remorseful for their actions.
- Subverted in The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey. The Others are at first depicted as coldly killing off humanity, but then the main love interest, Evan is discovered to be one, and he explains that some of The Others wanted to live side by side with the humans, but were outnumbered by those who wanted to Leave No Survivors.
- Robert Reed's short story, Five Thrillers has an unknown race of aliens shooting the sun with a relativistic ship, causing it to eject plasma straight at the Earth. Because they can.
- A rather nasty science fiction novel by Charles R. Pellegrino, Flying to Valhalla is built around the theory that a species looks out for itself only, destroying all competitors. Also a sort-of-sequel, The Killing Star.
- The "Wormfaces" in the Heinlein juvenile Have Space Suit – Will Travel are arrogant and cold-bloodedly hateful interstellar conquerors who apparently consider humans to be a food source. On the other hand, the novel features a "bug-eyed monster" from very early on who turns out to be one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and eventually introduces us to a whole intergalactic society whose members range from Starfish Aliens to near-humans; it's clear that the Wormfaces are the exception, not the norm, and one of main duties of the aforementioned intergalactic federation is dealing with such threats before they get out of hand.
- The Vogons of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy are every Obstructive Bureaucrat stereotype cranked up and armed with planet destroying weaponry (and horrible poetry). Even evolution considers them to be a mistake.
- The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax are actually worse - the whole Krikkit War fiasco was an indirect result of their desire for the "ultimate weapon".
- Discussed and deconstructed in The Killing Star. The first thing a newly-discovered alien race does against humanity is attack them with projectiles travelling at 92% the speed of light, destroying most of our species immediately. They later spend years trying to mop up the remnants across the Solar System, leaving the survivors only able to speculate about what their motives may be. Some of them call to mind the suggestions made by groups like SETI and Carl Sagan, about how an advanced alien race would've moved beyond hostile intent or conquest. They come to the conclusion how, while the aliens can get all the resources they'd ever need and would have no real need for conquest, space is still full of unknowns and threats to their existence, including other civilizations. They probably wouldn't simply leave another species alone just because they were sentient, like how we haven't left dolphins out of our tuna nets, and would try to eliminate them as a threat before they can even become one. The survivors then boil down their conclusions to three rules about extraterrestrial civilizations.
- Their survival will be more important than our survival: no species survives by being self-sacrificing. If an alien race has to choose between them and us, it's never going to be us.
- Wimps don't become top dogs: no species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
- They will assume the first two apply to us as well
- And later on, we learn the aliens found out about us and were motivated by our transmissions. In particular, Star Trek: The Next Generation gave them the impression that we were so xenophobic as a species that we would never accept relations with a non-humanoid race.
- Larry Niven's Known Space series:
- The Pierson's Puppeteers are not just alien bastards, they are alien manipulative bastards. How so? They maneuvered all of humanity into the sights of the predatory, warlike, technologically superior Kzinti, just to give them some breathing room, then after the war was over used humans as if we were a race of Polish landmine detectors. Plus the thousands of humans they kidnapped and enslaved under the guise of "spacecraft failures". On the side of helping us to screw over other races, the Puppeteers set up a starseed lure because they knew that (for their own impenetrable reasons) the Outsiders follow the starseeds. When the Outsiders encountered humanity, they sold us the hyperspace drive. Humans quickly become a much bigger problem for the Kzinti. When a Puppeteer told a Human and a Kzinti the truth about their manipulation in Ringworld, both were furious. The human was furious that his race had been forced to fight, the Kzinti was furious that his race had been forced to lose.
- The Thrintun were a race of carnivorous reptilian aliens who once mind-enslaved every race in the Milky Way galaxy with their latent telepathy. They were noted for being very stupid by human standards and emotionally immature: most of their technological developments were just stolen from other races, and their society was very primitive philosophically, based around a slave economy and a religion centred around their power and their manifest destiny to conquer the universe with it. Every non-telepath including Thrintun lacking the power for whatever reason, was in their view a slave by definition. One of their slave races eventually rebelled against them by exploiting their arrogance and a flaw in their mind control, and the Thrintun reacted to their impending downfall by building a colossal psionic amplifier and then giving out a single command to every chordate: Die. Every living thing in the galaxy with a backbone committed suicide, including the Thrintun themselves, and multi-cellular life took billions of years to evolve back into existence again.
- The Toralii in Lacuna destroy three major cities on Earth just because humans were developing jump drive.
- The Prador of the The Polity are a Giant Enemy Crab race whose culture revolves around a Social Darwinist "kill-or-be-killed" mindset. Members of the species are cruel to those weaker than themselves and maim or even eat their own children. They are just as sadistic when they go to war with humanity, they barely made it past introductions during their first meeting with humanity before suddenly launching a sneak attack and trying to abduct as much of the crew as possible to eat.
- Lisanne Norman's Sholan Alliance series gives us two examples out of numerous interstellar species who are willing to be nice.
- The Chemerians are conniving, double dealing tree-climbing...
- The Valtegans from planet M'Zull have already wiped ALL life off the face of two Sholan colony planets for no other reason than that of being Sholans. They then go off and do the same to another planet of Valtegans simply because they are rivals.
- Played straight in the first book of the Slingshot series: the aliens show up and immediately start murdering people and blowing up spaceships and stations, without even providing a reason why, or communicating at all. In the later books, it is revealed that they had talked to the human military leadership how enslaving A.I.s was a big no-no, and said leadership lied about abolishing AI slavery. Out of exasperation and frustration, a faction of the aliens then chose to destroy everyone related to making A.I.s and enslaving them.
- Space Force by Jeremy Robinson: The Chote are stereotypical online trolls and the worst sort of gamers, except they also invade planets and kill people for real in their games.
- As far back as the 1940s, C. S. Lewis noted the tendency in sci-fi literature for aliens more advanced than humans to be amoral and regard humanity as inferiors. The Space Trilogy was a deliberate reaction against this trend—his aliens are more moral than humanity.
- Remembrance of Earth's Past:
- The Trisolarans' history bred everything out of their culture except the desperate need to survive at all costs... though there seem to be individual exceptions. By the third book, they have mastered human deception by feeding humans false science to hamper humanity's technological boom, embracing their culture only to deceive and enslave them later, and refusing to give them the means to escape a dark forest strike.
- In The Dark Forest this becomes a key plot point that involves game theory and reconsidering the Drake Equation. Luo Ji is given a few bits of information in the beginning of the story, which becomes the foundation for comsmological sociology. There are a few cornerstones: given communication is established between similarly technological societies, the first cornerstone being the Chain of Suspicion, meaning that it's practically impossibly to verify what one party says, what their counterpart thinks they're lying about, what they think their counterparts think, what their long-term intentions are, vice versa, et cetera, meaning that meaningful trust is impossible to establish. The second cornerstone is the Technology Explosion, meaning one society can experience sudden technological and societal growth and gain a sudden upperhand against an uncertain rival. Also given that life isn't uncommon, and in fact there are potentially billions of species out there in the galaxy competing for limited resources. Extrapolated out, everybody is a potential enemy, even well-meaning and naively friendly species, as even they can accidentally out anybody who they make contact with. In short, the Fermi Paradox is the result of virtually everybody assuming that their counterparts are going to be hostile, so they keep quiet. Its assumed by all species that any other species that can wipe them out would, not out of spite or hatred, but as a matter of course out of ruthless self-interest. The Trisolarans were shocked humanity hadn't figured this out ourselves, and dedicated considerable resources to us from figuring it out.
- It's not just the Trisolarans. In the third book it's revealed that casual annihilation of any intelligent race that is discovered is entirely routine; they don't care about the damage their weapons do to the fabric of reality; and the universe is effectively a war ruin as a result of billions of years of conflict and the damage wrought by those weapons. The grand unifying universal sociology theory is built upon this rule.
- Most aliens in Star Wars Legends are pretty variable. Planet of Hats is in effect and there are many nasty species, but search for long enough and there are always some who feel that My Species Doth Protest Too Much, and individuals can be anywhere from bastards to very much not. However, there are a handful of antagonistic species who are never shown to have any sympathetic representatives at all.
- The Yevetha are pretty hideously genocidal towards... well, everything. They're also Manipulative Bastards, playing nice for a long time so that when they did start war, the New Republic was caught unawares.
- The Enzeen in Galaxy of Fear: Eaten Alive similarly play nice, encourage tourism, and make visitors to their world feel welcome, when in fact the ground eats offworlders, and the Enzeen then feed from it.
- Subverted nicely with the Yuuzhan Vong. Initially introduced as quite possibly the most implacably evil faction in the setting- the one guy (a pacifist) who tries to negotiate with them gets ritually murdered and has his gem-encrusted skeleton shipped back to his friends for his troubles- but about a third of the way through the series a more openly sympathetic light starts getting shone on certain members of the species, and once the Vong's backstory is revealed, it's stated outright that they're no better or worse than humans would have been under the same circumstances. Oh, and the guy who murdered the pacifist diplomat? He was a member of a group that were considered particularly extreme and depraved even by Vong standards.
- In Nikolai Gudanets's Supreme Commander, the squid-like aliens are eventually revealed to be not a part of some Alien Invasion force, but groups of hunters on a safari. They like hunting humans, decapitating them, and drinking their blood. The most commonly seen species are octopods called the Ank. They are the strongest and the least intelligent. The decapods called the Falaha are their masters, who treat as little more than talking hunting dogs with plasma guns. When one is captured by a human task force, he insists on being treated as befits his royal status. Since he's also the first alien who says anything of consequence, the humans oblige. There is also a third alien species called the Ihlichi, also they are physically weak and don't like risk, which is why they don't participate in the "safaris". On the other hand, the Ihlichi are incredibly smart (the captured Falaha insists that an Ihlichi can give a human computer a run for its money) and have Psychic Powers. The only Ihlichi present in the book infiltrates the higher echelons of human politics using his Mind Control and Hollywood Hacking powers. Luckily, he ends up being the target of Laser-Guided Karma, which hits him in the form of a shark that eats him shortly after he escapes from a human raid.
- The Masters in The Tripods, who enslaved humanity with mind control caps and then planned to annihilate life on Earth in the process of making the planet's atmosphere breathable for themselves.
- Zigzagged in Pamela Service's Under Alien Stars: Yes, Tsorians are brutal, paternalistic bastards. Humans don't have much of a moral high ground. And compared to the Hykzoi, both races look like saints.
- The Martians from The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells, although it's a somewhat complex example. The author notes that Mars is a dying world, and that the Martians are only carrying warfare sunward so that their species can survive (in the epilogue, it is implied that after the invasion failed they settled for colonizing Venus instead). He also compares them with Imperialists of the 19th century, making the Martians something of a This Loser Is You to his primarily British readers.
- The Lindauzi of The Wild Boy. They were just trying to avoid their race regressing to wild animals. But they still released a virus on Earth, then released a second wave, killing millions before it was over. And to further endear us, they came with a vaccine, appearing to be saviors. They killed off our pets, cats and dogs, then started breeding humans like dogs to re-engineer the bond they once shared with the Iani, the creatures who originally created them.
Live-Action TV
- Played with in Defiance. We do meet a lot of decent Votan characters, but they all seem to be those who've assimilated into Earth culture. The ones who keep their own traditions and customs include ruthless crime lords, fundamentalist cultists, and insane terrorists. That's not to say all humans in the show are saints, mind...
- Doctor Who has plenty of good aliens, most notably the Doctor himself. However, the Doctor fights all manner of sundry horrors bent on our demise every other episode.
- Foremost on the list are the Daleks; super-intelligent, genetically engineered, Always Chaotic Evil space Nazis designed to feel no other emotion than hate (though they sometimes display fear and others). They are utterly fanatical about their own inherent superiority, to the point where civil wars have broken out amongst them if factions start displaying minor differences, and to where they have chosen death when "contaminated" by foreign DNA. Their goal is nothing less than to exterminate every living thing in the universe (and, once, the multiverse) other than themselves, and they often tend to find themselves dealing with Earth.
- The Cybermen (at least the version of them appearing from 1966-1988 and from 2010 onwards) are, basically, alternate humans from Earth's twin planet Mondas who converted themselves into emotionless cyborgs obsessed with the survival of their race, and the best way to do that is to forcibly convert humanity into them. That they are a direct threat to mankind means that they have also sought to destroy them, or sizable chunks, in the distant future when we manage to successfully fight back.
- The Time Lords themselves are a race of supposed non-interventionists, but they are really a controlling, elitist, and somewhat stagnant race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who, as their name suggests, have mastered time travel, amongst other technologies. Generally they are not malevolent and have plenty of decent members — notably the Doctor himself note — but they throw up plenty of maniacs like the Master and the Rani, not to mention their insane founders Rassilon and Omega, amongst other miscreants. As the Time War drew to a bloody close they became a race of Omnicidal Maniacs who were ready to put an end to time itself in an effort to avoid ultimate defeat, which means in their appearance in 2009 they showed up as a villain race.
- The Sontarans are an entire race of Blood Knights who are engaged in a 50,000-year war with another species, and to ensure a ready supply of troops turned to cloning, to the point where practically every living Sontaran is now a clone of someone else, resulting in a buttload of uniformity. They usually attack Earth as part of a strategy aimed at achieving victory in their war rather than any particular feelings about us, though they enjoy it when we fight back because to them because War Is Glorious, always.
- The Ice Warriors were first introduced as a villain race, but over subsequent appearances were gradually developed into an honourable Proud Warrior Race, similar to the development of the Klingons on Star Trek.
- The Master inverts this by holding this view of humanity, revealing to the Doctor that despite the Utopia Project's attempt to find a way to survive the end of the universe, the ultimate fate of humanity is to cannibalise themselves and devolve into the Toclafane.
The Master: The human race. Greatest monsters of them all.
- "The Ark": The Monoids, though they were only treating the humans like they had been treated.
- The Family of Blood is a group of short-lived sadists who delight in murdering people in their search for immortality. And they intend to conquer the galaxy once they achieve their objective.
- The Overlords in Falling Skies. They not only invade and destroy a lot of Earth and humanity, they put children in harnesses that turn them into monstrous Skitters. And we aren't the first race they did it with. Subverted with the other alien races, who are pretty much in the same situation as humanity and later bring humans into their rebellion against the Overlords.
- The titular aliens in The Invaders (1967) are presented as completely bad news for most of the show's run. However, toward the end of the second (and final) season, we start meeting some exceptions, including a group of dissenters who attest that back on the homeworld, there are a fair number of aliens who don't approve of what the Invaders have planned for Earth and want to stop it. The series ends before we learn if they might have any luck stopping the invasion, though.
- While there are some sympathetic aliens on Lost in Space, most of them are colossal self-serving jerks. To an extent, the premise of the show makes this inevitable — after all, if the Robinsons could befriend some competent high-tech aliens, they could probably, well, stop being lost.
- In The Outer Limits (1995), episodes dealing with aliens sometimes take this approach. One episode ("Corner of the Eye") features aliens who want to steal the Earth's atmosphere and even look like literal devils. However, there were just as many episodes with nice aliens who wind up in conflict with humans due to misunderstandings or because Humans Are Bastards.
- In Power Rangers Megaforce, the Armada often see humanity's traits as weaknesses and their desire to destroy or take over Earth is based primarily on Evil Cannot Comprehend Good and Humans Are Flawed. It's dialed up in Super Megaforce where Vekar's Monsters of the Week are decidedly less comical than Malkor's and they're shown to have enslaved the Silver Ranger's planet.
- The Skins in Roswell, plus Kivar. The Skins wore human skin to blend into Earth's environment. Kivar was the resident Big Bad who'd taken over Antar and who the Pod Squad were meant to defeat.
- The Stargate franchise is full of these:
- Stargate SG-1 has the Goa'uld, the Ori and the Replicators.
- Stargate Atlantis has the Wraith and the Asurans.
- Stargate Universe deserves special mention because in addition to the non-sentient aliens creatures (and even some of the plants) that are desperately trying to kill them, the sentient ones are no better, particularly the race obsessed with Destiny who make no attempt to communicate beyond "SURRENDER" and "NO ESCAPE", the latter sent after they pursued them into a completely different galaxy. Lampshaded by Volker when Rush wants to investigate an energy signature that could be intelligent life; he reminds them that the last time they encountered aliens didn't work out so well. And the time before that. And the time before that... Maybe they should have listened to him, because this energy signature leads them to the Berserker Drones.
- Also, the franchise as a whole has the Ancients themselves, who are (bar a few notable exceptions) the poster boys for Neglectful Precursors (although from what we see of their present-day actions or lack thereof and how those threaten their own survival, it may be more of another trope than this one).
- One of the main themes of Star Trek in all its incarnations is a deliberate aversion of this Trope. There is a huge variety of alien cultures out there, and only a handful are treated as objectively better or worse than humanity. And of those, fewer still are depicted as irredeemably evil, with some even becoming allies or members of the Federation eventually. Still, too many episodes to count revolve around the concepts of "Alien Race Does Something Morally Reprehensible That They Think Is Normal", or "Alien Race Acts With Subterfuge Against The Federation For Evil Reasons", or "Human Does Something Of Little Importance And Alien Race Responds With Reckless Force".
- The Borg Collective is one of the few truly irredeemably evil races in all of Star Trek, being an insane Hive Mind of cyborgs with an insatiable appetite to assimilate anything that might benefit the Collective — which is everything. Drones that gain individuality are usually decent people, but since they aren't part of the Collective anymore they arguably aren't really Borg anymore either.
- Even that depends on your definition of evil. If that happens to be malevolence, well the Borg do not hate any species and literally cannot wish harm against them. Their only desire is to advance the Collective, and they act exclusively on that desire. It seems the more powerful they are in an area the less dangerous they - as a single isolated Borg will assimilate just to gain numbers on its side, but in the heart of Borg space they are happy to ignore individuals, ships or even the occasional (simplistic) species if they have nothing to specifically gain from assimilation. They are a major power in the Delta Quadrant, yet other species abound in space surrounding them. In the rare instances they respond to the idea others do not want to be assimilated they act confused, as if the assimilation is a kindness the rejection of which they cannot comprehend. And by all accounts, being part of the collective is quite the experience and apparently not an unhappy life - for a given definition of the word 'unhappy'.
- The Pah-Wraiths of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There's a reason the Bajorans consider them to be devils.
- Also from DS9 are the Founders of the Dominion, who believe this trope is true of every other sentient species (but not themselves). In their minds, this justifies the extreme methods they use (like founding a despotic and genocidal interstellar empire) to protect their own species' existence from any threat (real or potential). In their defense, before they founded the Dominion, their people were apparently treated with suspicion, hostility, and outright persecution everywhere they went.
- The Borg Collective is one of the few truly irredeemably evil races in all of Star Trek, being an insane Hive Mind of cyborgs with an insatiable appetite to assimilate anything that might benefit the Collective — which is everything. Drones that gain individuality are usually decent people, but since they aren't part of the Collective anymore they arguably aren't really Borg anymore either.
- Taken: A belief held almost unanimously by the military and especially the Keys family. However, they are not deliberately cruel due to their Bizarre Alien Psychology. When the alien John gets badly injured protecting Allie in "John", he is met with no sympathy from Charlie or even his own granddaughter Lisa, who proceeds to tell him in the final episode "Taken" to leave Earth as he has caused enough pain already.
- Torchwood has a lot more bastard aliens than its parent show, Doctor Who, but Children of Earth goes much further: Aliens repeatedly subject humans to Sadistic Choices involving Human Sacrifice just so that they can get high ... off children.
- The Vardians of Tracker. Apparently they *could* cooperate with other races, they just hate doing it and prefer to be in control. They did create a Doomsday Device capable of destroying a planet. They're also notorious for betrayal, apparently. The fugitives were of all six of the series' races, but not all of the species were as evil as Vardians. Most of the others were just all the races' criminal element rather than the norm.
Zin: Never trust a Vardian. Sorry.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "A Small Talent for War", all life on Earth is destroyed by the alien race that seeded life on the planet two million years ago as humanity's talent for war is too small for their needs.
- The Ultra Series practically have these kinds of alien races by the dozen. Then again, the title heroes are, themselves, members of an alien race.
- From V (both 2009 and predecessor): "We are of peace, always". More Blatant Lies were never spoken.
- Subverted in The X-Files. The Greys are a bunch of bastards but it's not their fault. The Black Oil corrupted and twisted them into monsters just like it does to every other living being.
Music
- Dirk Wears White Sox by Adam and the Ants has a song called "Never Trust A Man With Egg On His Face", in which a woman shoots her husband in front of her children because of an extraterrestrial conspiracy:
She was the victim of an awful plan
Announced through the mouthpiece of a little green man
She'd heard the voices from outer space
Saying, "Never trust a man with egg on his face" - "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Slime Creatures from Outer Space":
They were ugly, they were mean
Biggest heads I'd ever seen
They made everybody scream and shout
First they leveled Tokyo
Then New York was next to go
Boy, I really wish they'd cut it out!
They wasted everybody on my block, there goes the neighborhood
They'll zap you with their death-ray eyes and blow you up real good!
(Run for your lives!)
Slime creatures from outer space! Slime creatures from outer space!
They're not very nice to the human race!
Professional Wrestling
- If "The Galaxy's Greatest Alien" Kris Statlander is working Heel, she will present herself as superior to humans.
Tabletop Games
- The Dervos of Damnation Decade were originally a Servant Race, but when their overlords vanished, the Dervos tore down the trappings of their civilization and forged an empire based on brutal expansion and subjugation. They have found Earth ripe for the picking and are sending scouting parties to evaluate the environment for conversion into yet another farm for their vital narcotic, Gank, and mutilating farm animals and torturing humans to see if they're suitable as slaves and cattle.
- Dungeons & Dragons has a lot of hostile alien monsters either from The Far Realm or other worlds.
- The most icon of D&D's evil aliens are the Illithids. They can only reproduce by turning humanoids into more Illithids and consume brains to live, and they are not particularly nice to each other either. Only the most evil of humanoids dare to trade or ally with them. Perhaps worst of all is the sometimes-canon implication that they actually evolved from humans in the far future and have been messing with time travel...
- Probably the worst of them are the Neogi. They are so unpleasant that even Ilithids can barely tolerate them. Their culture is entirely built around taking as many slaves as possible, including other Neogi.
- Grells are intelligent enough to use magic and some advanced technology, but they are obsessed with hunting and eating, and will eat anything that is edible whether it is sapient or not.
- Beholders would probably exterminate or enslave all other life in the universe if they were not constantly fighting each other over tiny differences between them, because every Beholder is convinced that they are the most perfect lifeform and all imperfect beholders must be destroyed first.
- In Systems Malfunction , the Praxar are a group of aliens who do horrible things to the other species of the game. If they find you worthy, they will assimilate you. Otherwise, they will turn you into a living battery and have your life drained out of you over the course of several weeks. Honestly, if they simply devour you whole, you should consider yourself lucky since your death will be quick and relatively painless.
- Averted in Traveller. The closest to this are the K'kree, who are herbivores on a holy war against carnivores (and omnivores, since those also eat meat), but even the K'kree have good qualities and are not an "evil race" as such. There are no "evil races" in Traveller.
- Likewise in Traveller's harder cousin 2300 AD. The major races avoid this trope except for the Kafer, and it's justified in that their biology only allows them full intelligence when they're fighting or fearful via an adrenaline analog.
- Every alien species in Warhammer 40,000 (it is a world of Evil Versus Evil, after all):
- The Orks are ridiculously violent and warlike, and think nothing of rampaging across the galaxy and killing everyone they come across, all in the name of the WAAAGH!
- The Necrons want to kill all life in the universe to rebuild their old dynasties. Though some of the Necron lords have different ideas of what is best for their race. One of them even wants to stop the Tyranids from devouring all life in the galaxy (because he wants to use that biomass to eventually create new organic bodies for the Necrons).
- The Eldar are Manipulative Bastards who would let millions of humans die to save a handful of Eldar (it is worth noting that that only happened once, and it was hundreds of thousands of Eldar. The humans in the setting do much worse to the other races). Although, given the situation they're in, they're much more sympathetic than most. Except they bring it on themselves by provoking everyone capable of kicking their faces in even though it is entirely unnecessary. More like a case of being Too Dumb to Live. Unsurprising, since they were created to be weapons, not people.
- Their cousins, the Dark Eldar, are even worse. As in, torture their victims so horribly that Warp (pretty much Hell) predators grow on their night terrors "like cysts" and are harvested to create war beasts.
- The Pre-Fall Eldar Empire committed so much hedonistic depravity that they squicked the Chaos God Slaanesh into existence. Imagine the Dark Eldar if they were the undisputed rulers of the galaxy instead of a bunch of pirates hiding in the Webway.
- In fact, the only aliens that don't fit are the Tyranids (who aren't sentient, but are still driven by a Hive Mind that wants to eat the universe) and the Tau (who are more "Aliens Are Good is Not Nice Well Intentioned Extremists", as long as you don't mind living in a place that's equal parts Brave New World). Except for the Tau using mind-controlling pheromones to keep its population and "allies" under control. Yeah, just that little detail. Move along, citizen.
- Subverted by the Kroot, who are shown to be quite likeable once you get past the fact they are avian mercenary cannibals.
- Oh, and one more thing: the humans of the setting? They aren't much better. Though, that is solely due to everyone else's evil forcing humanity to do just about anything to survive. And, some aliens are pushed into that spot by humanity's actions.
- The Necrontyr were even worse bastards than the murder machines they would eventually become. They were a short-lived and bitter race who hated and envied the Old Ones for not sharing the secrets of immortality. They also grew to hate each other, and civil war was only barely averted when their leaders decided to direct all of that hatred towards the Old Ones, using their refusal to share immortality as a pretext for war. Yes, the Necrontyr tried to kill an entire race who had never really done anything to wrong them as stress relief. The Necrontyr were as stupid as they were evil, since they really thought picking a fight with a race who they envied specifically because they were powerful immortals was a good idea. Realizing they were horribly outmatched, they made a pact with the C'tan, giving them powerful bodies of living metal and worshiping them as gods in exchange for the C'tan's aid. The C'tan gave the Necrontyr the immortality they wanted by transforming them into the robotic Necrons and waged war against the Old Ones. The war resulted in the creation of the Ork scourge (the Old Ones' desperate plan to fight against the Necrons and C'tan), the Old Ones' near extinction, and the corruption of the Realm of Souls into the nightmarish Warp and the birth of the first daemons. The bastardry of the Necrontyr is the root of nearly everything wrong with the galaxy, barring outside threats like the Tyranids.
- The C'tan were gluttonous monsters driven entirely by their appetite. Things were fine when they fed on radiation from stars. Then the Necrontyr gave them new bodies and they awakened to new intelligence and greater awareness of the galaxy around them, realizing that they could eat things other than radiation: lifeforce and souls. The entire reason the C'tan continued the war their slaves the Necrons started with the Old Ones was because they wanted to eat them (and everything else). In the end, they couldn't even resist eating each other.
- The Old Ones might have been an exception. They used their power and immortality to explore the galaxy and seed life on other worlds and more or less lived in peace. Even when the Necrontyr declared war on them, the Old Ones showed mercy to their vastly inferior foes instead of simply wiping them out. The setting being what it is, the Old Ones' lack of bastardry was rewarded with extinction. That said, the war made them desperate enough to make very careless decisions, such as weaponizing the power of the Realm of Souls (which is one of the reasons it became the nightmarish Warp) and creating the Orks to be their Cannon Fodder without creating an "off-switch" first. In the parody series If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor described them as "shitty neglectful grandparents".
- Zigzagged in regards to Bleak World where the Martians have a long running feud with the Venusians and noticed that the Venusians are trying to conquer the Earth. Where this gets tricky is that the Martians employ the tactic of invading and conquering as a means of protecting the foolish and scientifically backwards humans. Where this gets even trickier is when you realize that Venusians are likely on Earth to harvest all of the hope and goodwill to fight the Darkness.
Toys
- LEGO Space Police: Every alien appearing in the sets is a criminal and part of the evil Black Hole Gang.
- Transformers:
- (Almost) every version of the Decepticons. Usually, they're on Earth for a reason, but even if they get what they want, they mostly still decide to stay and cause untold devastation anyway. They are a faction of merciless warriors, led by a fanatical tyrant (Megatron) who willingly destroyed most of their home planet as well as a large percentage of their own species, so it probably shouldn't be surprising that they would show even more disdain to another species that are like insects by comparison.
- Stories that feature races other than humans show that because of this warmongering, Cybertronians in general have a very bad reputation among the peoples of the galaxy.
- There's also the Quintessons, who manage to be worse than the 'cons. Manipulative, greedy, and cruel, they'll mess with a planet for money, resources, or kicks. They usually try and conquer Cybertron, because as far as they're concerned, the Transformers are just some of their products gone haywire. Anyone who ends up on their planet either gets eaten by the local wildlife or dragged before a Kangaroo Court, which always ends with the victim being eaten alive.
Video Games
- The Grekim and Vecgir from Achron introduce themselves by wiping out three human colonies. They then engage and shatter the largest and most advanced fleet humanity has ever assembled... and then turn on each other.
- What do you get when you blend this trope with the Humans Are the Real Monsters trope? You get Aliens vs. Predator. There is all-out war between everyone and everything and they all kill each other for petty reasons (Xenomorphs for fun, Yautja for some few more bits of pride and humans for resources they don't need, power or fun as well).
- Body Harvest: The aliens in the game have all but completely wiped humanity out.
- The robot invaders from Clone Drone in the Danger Zone intend to roboticize every living human, and then force them all to fight to their deaths in spectator fights just for for fun.
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series Without a shred of doubt this is the elusive Scrin's defining trait. They invade Earth in C&C3 for one thing, and one thing only: The coveted green crystals they call "Ichor", though commonly known to the native Earth's people as "Tiberium", and they waste no effort in eradicating whatever/whoever gets in their way, leaving a bloody rampage across the entire planet in their harvesting of said mineral.
- Crysis revolves around fighting off an invasion by the Ceph, a powerful cephalopod-like race from the M33 galaxy who are intent on wiping out humanity. However the second and third game reveal that it's less "Aliens Are Bastards" and more "Aliens Are Fucking Pissed That Their Colony And Technology Has Been Stolen By A Bunch Of Smelly Apes".
- The Furons from Destroy All Humans!, as the title suggests. Also mildly deconstructed. The reason the Furons are collecting DNA from humanity is because they've driven their race into sterility through constant conflict and war. In other words, by acting like stereotypical Always Chaotic Evil aliens, they're essentially driving their race into extinction.
- Duke Nukem 3D, coupled with Mars Needs Women. Those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up his ride.
"Nobody steals our chicks... and lives!"
- Earth Defense Force: The common theme throughout all the games series is that the Ravagers appear and suddenly attack earth unprovoked in an attempt to wipe out or destroy humans and their cities.
- The Vortex from Ecco the Dolphin, who use Earth as their all-you-can-eat buffet every 500 years until Ecco fights back. The Foe in the reboot timeline seem to exist only to conquer various worlds.
- Fallout 3: The aliens from Mothership Zeta have been abducting humans and performing horrific experiments on them for the past 600 years, for reasons unknown. It's also heavily implied that it was they who launched the nukes that started the Great War and ravaged the Earth, for no other reason than to see what would happen.
- Zemus from Final Fantasy IV, who is coincidentally the least human-looking of the moon dwellers. (He is blue-skinned, with a bald dome.) He was the only Lunarian who opposed peaceful coexistence with humans, and sought to take over their planet.
- The Terrans from Final Fantasy IX were thinking along similar lines. After several failed attempts at keeping their dying planet alive, they went into stasis while their guardian, Garland, works to terraform Gaia and make their world live again.
- Jenova from Final Fantasy VII is an odd mix of humanoid and gross, veiny alien. Folklore suggests that she is a shapeshifter who mimics the appearance and voice of humanoids; hence her being stuck in mid-transformation from long-haired beauty to a Lovecraftian mass of wriggling tendrils.
- The Terrans in Freespace had once outright hated the Vasudans for this reason during the Great War. Naturally, the Vasudans had the same opinion about Terrans. Then came along the vastly more powerful Shivans...
- The Valfask race in the Galaxy Angel trilogy are a race of Human Aliens Galactic Conquerors who play The Long Game. For starters, they were responsible for the Chrono Quake that caused the collapse of the EDEN civilization (the predecessors of the Transbaal Empire), and many of their members display zero empathy for their victims, rationalizing their actions as The Right of a Superior Species. However, towards the end of Eternal Lovers, Wein's sacrifice to save Lushati make Tact and his Angel realize that perhaps they could subvert this trope if their emperor, Gern, is taken out of the picture. By the time of the second trilogy, they seem to have been proven right.
- On the other hand, in the Galaxy Angel II trilogy, the Will play this absolutely straight. While they have angelic appearances and try to come across as benevolent and generous, offering to uplift the civilizations they find worthy of joining them, in truth they've destroyed thousands, if not millions of civilizations either by assimilating their cultures into their own, or completely wiping them out if they're deemed unworthy or refuse their offer. By the time the story takes place, they have destroyed no less than six complete universes and now they're coming for the seventh.
- The Combine from Half-Life had been draining the Earth of its resources for the past two decades, and letting roads and cities rot. The surviving humans are essentially imprisoned in the few cities not overrun by alien fauna and are ruled with an iron fist, chemicals in the water, and a dampening field that prevents natural reproduction.
- And that's not the worst of it. The Combine is experimenting with humans in order to find the best method of converting them into a new Synth race like the Gunships. The Overwatch is the most successful; the Stalkers the least. By the time the Combine is done, humanity won't be human any longer.
- According to Word of God, they also did this sort of thing to the Nihilanth's race, hence why he fled to Xen and decided to invade Earth. They've also done it to countless other races. Curious to see what happened to them? Look no further than the Striders, Gunships, Dropships, and Hunters, all of which happen to be enemies throughout the series! There are also theories that the Alien Grunts from the first game were made using Combine technology.
- Subverted with the Vortigaunts, as they were enemies of the first game but it's revealed that they were enslaved by the Nihilanth and later the Combine. The Vortigaunts are more than happy to work with humanity to fight the Combine after Gordon freed them from their shackles.
- Halo:
- The only known space-faring races (besides humans) are all part of the Covenant, a theocratic caste-based empire led by its 'Prophets'. These Prophets have declared that humans are sacrilege incarnate and must be cleansed from the galaxy. Bastards indeed. Even worse is the reveal that the High Prophets realized that WE are their gods' real heirs (since they passed their Mantle to us), so they resolve to kill us lest their three-thousand-year-old Covenant founded on convincing their people that THEY are destined for godhood goes down the drain. However, this is subverted or least played with by the other member species of the Covenant:
- The Elites are the second highest-ranked Covenant race and mostly play this trope straight, unerringly serving the Prophets and committing the bulk of the Covenant's prolific war crimes. However, many actually come to respect the humans for their fighting spirit, despite the Elites' general disdain for most other species. When they find out the truth about the Covenant, several of them ally themselves with the humans and win the war for them.
- The Grunts are just an enslaved race who are forced to work as Cannon Fodder and don't have any real grudge against the humans; in fact, their hatred is primarily focused on the other Covenant species.
- The Hunters also were forced by the Covenant to join them lest they wanted their homeworld nuked. That said, Hunters have a generalized disdain for any species that isn't themselves or the Elites.
- The pacifist Engineers, who even tried to make peace from day one of the Human-Covenant war. Many of them would ally with the humans too during the Covenant Civil War.
- The Jackals are just Hired Guns who are Only in It for the Money, and are culturally the Covenant race who most closely resemble humans. Though they largely remained loyal to the Prophets during the civil war, it was nothing personal.
- The Brutes are largely depicted as savages who will happily eat other sapient species, but even they're capable of cooperating with other races in relative good faith under the right circumstances.
- The Drones may be hive minded, but they're not by default hostile to other species.
- The Prophets themselves subvert this too; most of them seem to have had genuinely no idea that the Covenant's ideology was a complete lie, and The Forerunner Saga reveals that they were once close allies of Advanced Ancient Humans.
- Played straight with the Flood, who seek to consume all life and don't quite understand why anyone would object to that.
- The Forerunners were said to be a highly advanced, wise, and peaceful species. The first part is true, and the second part kind of so. The third part? They were actually an imperialist empire who kept their subject species inferior to them. One of their most notable victims were Advanced Ancient Humans, whom the Forerunners forcibly devolved down to the literal Stone Age. Ironically, they did this because humanity appeared to be destroying Forerunner colonies, but it turned out the humans were actually trying to contain the Flood, with Forerunners simply caught in the crossfire.
- Depending on who's telling the story, the Forerunners' own predecessors, the Precursors, may have been no better, as they would create new species but then allegedly exterminate them if they didn't like the result. The last time they supposedly tried it, the Forerunners rebelled and wiped out the Precursors themselves. But a few remained, plotting their revenge. Guess where the Flood originate from?
- The only known space-faring races (besides humans) are all part of the Covenant, a theocratic caste-based empire led by its 'Prophets'. These Prophets have declared that humans are sacrilege incarnate and must be cleansed from the galaxy. Bastards indeed. Even worse is the reveal that the High Prophets realized that WE are their gods' real heirs (since they passed their Mantle to us), so they resolve to kill us lest their three-thousand-year-old Covenant founded on convincing their people that THEY are destined for godhood goes down the drain. However, this is subverted or least played with by the other member species of the Covenant:
- The Tasen in Iji invade and decimate the population of Earth. And then the Komato, another alien race, turn up and begin exterminating them.
- Injustice: Gods Among Us: While not part of an alien invasion or anything like that, Lobo is still an evil alien.
- Deconstructed in Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. The Martians only invade Earth because their planet and their species is dying, all their efforts to maintain a habitable biosphere have failed, and the surviving population are so desperate that they have actually started lynching their leaders until they come up with a solution.
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land has the Big Bad, Fecto Forgo. It invaded the titular forgotten land decades ago with the intent of destroying it, but the planet's scientists managed to capture it and perform experiments on it (even turning it into a tourist attraction). Said experiments led to the creation of Kirby's Fairy Companion Elfilin, the living embodiment of Fecto's compassion and kindness. When the two halves forcibly become whole again, Fecto Elfilis still remains determined to lay waste to the universe in revenge. So while it is smart enough to know what compassion is, it just doesn't care.
- The Shroobs in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time play this as straight as possible, destroying entire towns for very little reason and using the life force of native species like Toads for UFO fuel. Not set on Earth, but the town being destroyed during Christmas is definitely the bastard part of this trope.
- The Mass Effect series generally averts this. There's a thriving, prosperous, and peaceful galactic society integrating nearly every space-faring species, and the series gives every species more or less the same saint-to-asshole ratio. Even the batarians, by far the most villainous of the 'regular' species', are played more like a real-world rogue state than as a typical malevolent alien sci-fi race, and it's shown that most of their population are pretty much regular people who just happen to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. There are a lot of villains who happen to be aliens, but they're pirates, gangsters, mercenaries, terrorists, etc. no different than their human equivalents in that respect (indeed, human criminals seem proportionally more common, if anything). But this is played straight by the Reapers, who, interestingly, are the only race in the setting to be "truly" alien (in the sense of being totally unknown and foreign) on part of descending on the galaxy from darkspace, outside of the Milky Way. Can't get much worse than Abusive Precursors who are also omnicidal and sufficiently advanced. Justified considering that they're not a "real" race, rather they're all basically insane artificial intelligences (of organic origin) who are trying to function off of downright broken logic and programming that tells them that the solution to mass extinctions is to personally cause the mass extinctions themselves.
- There's an asari on Illium who thinks that Aliens Are Bastards (and since she's not human, we count in that statement), or at least horrifically incompetent. Subverted when Shepard calls her out on her Fantastic Racism and she reveals that her bondmate died on the quarian homeworld during the geth rebellions and lost both of her daughters during the attack on the Citadel, making it clear that it was simply the grief talking. Like most asari, her bondmate and daughters loved alien races and meeting new cultures.
- The yahg can certainly count. Giant bipedal aliens who are the apex predators of their planet (Parnack). When they were discovered, the Council sent a delegation of ambassadors to meet them. They immediately slaughtered all of the ambassadors and the planet was immediately deemed off-limits to all races.
- Even in their case, its not a clear cut thing. With the yahg possessing ocular setups with more in common with Jumping Spiders than anything else, they are capable of easily picking up on the tiniest details. Like body-language - the sort that might indicate lying. What the diplomats actually told them is unknown, but it's clear that little ability was not something they appreciated.
- In the First Contact War, the turians were pretty bastardly too. First they attack a human science expedition who were activating a mass relay, which is illegal by Citadel law. Humanity is a species who they knew they never met before and could have no knowledge of Citadel law, and even then aren't part of the Citadel, so they wouldn't be subject to it anyways. Then they proceed to attack and invade the nearest colonized planet for no sane reason as the humans shot them back in self defense, engaging in a short skirmish war. Due to cultural dissonance, they assumed that, like them, every human was military trained and simply in reserve, despite having no proof or evidence to back up that thought, and dealing with perhaps dozens of species who are unique in their own way as well, very few of which engage in such a practice themselves. So they were left rather confused when humanity considered them horrible monsters for attacking civilian targets. Even after the Council put a stop to the war, some turians (such as the instructor at Kaidan's biotics academy) continued to be right assholes to humans, though thankfully most of them chilled out by the time the games start. Bonus points for the Codex to point out that turians are hard to drive to war, despite humanity's first contact showing other wise. Keep in mind, the turians are basically the Citadel's police and peacekeeping forces. It can be extrapolated the turians suffered a massive ass chewing over it; background chatter confirms that they were forced to pay reparations.
- The Mars People from Metal Slug, who side with the Rebel Army only to betray them so that they can conquer the planet themselves. There's also the Invaders from 6, who are even bigger bastards than the Mars People (How so? They see the aforementioned Mars People as snacks to eat).
- The Kreegans in the Might and Magic series. Given their appearance and behavior, it's not hard to see why people thought they were actual devils.
- Naughty Bear: The Alien Bears, who enslave the island and its inhabitants.
- Oddworld: And how! The Mudokons were a race of avian humanoids who saw a giant crater the shape of a Mudokon's paw in the surface of the moon and took that as a divine sign that they were the Master Race. The Glukkons, their long-standing allies, were spited by the declaration and turned into a race of cynical hyper-capitalists and then used their technology to crush the Mudokons in a war, enslave and brutalise them and decimate their culture to spite them back. And if that wasn't bad enough, they drove many species of their homeworld to near-extinction and faced with declining profits, turned to butchering their Mudokon workforce as a last resort. The Vykkers are even more nightmarish.
- Phoenotopia and its remake Phoenotopia : Awakening have several alien species from two intergalactic empires on the verge of war. Unfortunately, Earth lies within the territory of the less pleasant empire, who are moving in to harvest its resources and either use humans as livestock or eradicate them completely. The Stellanites, who are former, genetically modified humans who escaped to space in the backstory, are members of the other empire and aim to prevent this. Also of note is the existence of Space Pirates, who take advantage of Earth's imminent destruction by abducting humans with the intention of selling them to zoos and/or slavery.
- The Strogg from Quake II and Quake IV could pretty much be the poster boys for this trope. Not only do they launch an unprovoked war on humanity which kills millions, it's implied they have done this to numerous other alien races in order to turn them into Strogg. They also basically see all other races as worthless inferiors to be killed, tortured horribly in prison camps, used for inhumane experiments, or ground up to make Strogg food/ spare parts.
- Saints Row IV: The Zin's idea of "saving" civilizations equates to keeping them in a Lotus-Eater Machine that brings their worst nightmares to life.
- Sins of a Solar Empire has the Vasari who eventually get a racial bonus towards enslavement. Subverted in Rebellion the Loyalist; Vasari stick to their plan on looting worlds and leaving, but the Rebel Vasari also want to do the same, but they are willing to bring the TEC, and Advent along with them.
- This trope in video games dates back to Space Invaders.
- Spore has this with the Grox, a toxic cyborg race that control most of the star systems around the Galactic Core and are constantly venturing out to destroy all organic life.
- Can also apply to the Warrior and Zealot class empires, the latter of which will constantly demand tribute from you and will often declare war whether you pay them or not.
- The player themselves can invoke this via Video Game Cruelty Potential, with a variety of tools and weapons capable of anything from sniping innocent creatures from orbit and blowing up entire planets, to messing with a planet's ecological cycle by altering the atmosphere until nothing can live on it anymore. All in the name of fun/vindictiveness/boredom.
- The Star Control series has several fairly nice (if quirky) alien races, but has its share of bastards as well. The most obvious are main antagonists the Ur-Quan, who depending on which faction you're dealing with either gives you a choice between becoming their slave-soldiers and being stuck forever on your home planet, or kill you dead, no choice given (although their Start of Darkness does give them an understandable motivation for their acts).
- The Dnyarri are an evil race of powerful psychics who enslave other races because they are too lazy to do anything for themselves. When they enslaved the Ur-Quan in the distant past, their first orders were to have them attempt genocide on their former allies in the Sentient Millieu. The Chmmr outright call the Dnyarri the devil.
- Similarly, the Ilwrath are a spider-like species that revels in death and pain. But, like the Dnyarri, they are not the main antagonists in the games.
- The trend continues with the main antagonists in the other sequels: in Star Control 3 the Ploxis are Manipulative Bastards who enslave other races through deception rather than force, and the Eternal Ones see the galaxy as their own private buffet. The Scryve of Star Control: Origins, like the Ur-Quan, believe that all other races need their permission to exist; on the rare occasion that such permission is granted, it comes with slavery and genetic engineering.
- The Zerg from StarCraft are largely mindless, but are controlled by Cerebrates and the Overmind. Who are all pretty bastardly. As a Horde of Alien Locusts, they desire to assimilate the most favorable genetic traits from sentient species and essentially swallow them whole. They get a dose of Humans Are the Real Monsters mixed in when Sarah "Queen of Blades" Kerrigan takes over, even explicitly referring to herself as "Queen Bitch of the Universe.'' The Protoss and Terrans also have their moments, and if the sequel is anything to go by, the Xel'Naga aren't/weren't exactly saints either. The latter's true enemies are probably worse.
- Portrayed to some extent in Stars! and other 4X space empire games. Each race is alien to each other, and the players generally think nothing of bombing/killing millions of colonists of the opposing players whose only crime, presumably, is not being the same race. No concept of assimilation (or at least subjugation, sparing lives) is typically offered.
- Master of Orion is an exception, as a planet's civilian population can be either annihilated or assimilated after its military is dealt with. Certain government types get bonuses or penalties for how quickly assimilation happens (for example, Unification Governments assimilate new populations very slowly, while Feudal Governments will have their planets instantly assimilate as the local Baron kowtows to a new master), and the Democracy government doesn't even have the option to annihilate. The depth of bastardry depends entirely on the player's actions.
- In Stellaris, a Fanatic Purifier species invariably sees all sentient life other than themselves as xeno filth deserving of only genocide, and as such, they cannot even conduct diplomacy with other species beyond declaring war and sending insults.
- In Star Trek Online, the Iconians play this straight unlike most alien races in Star Trek. They are responsible for all of the recent conflict in the galaxy and are bent on re-establishing their empire. The Iconians truly live up (down?) to the name the other races gave them: the Demons of Air and Darkness. Tragically, they used to be peaceful if a tad arrogant until the other races bombed their homeworld so they could steal their tech.
- Terra Invicta: The Aliens are attacking Earth and the outlying possessions in the Sol system for no apparent reason. When the Academy capture one of them and explain that the human race do not want to be enslaved, the individual reacts with amused laughter. Ultimately subverted, because it is revealed they are survivors of a genocide seeking a new homeworld after the destruction of their old one, and the invasion of Earth is partly justified by the fear of uncontrolled alien species. And the "amused laughter" was morbid amusement, as the Hydras felt the same way about the even more xenophobic and militant alien race who nearly wiped them out. Part of the Academy's win condition involves discovering that there's actually a large pacifist movement among the Hydras' population who are growing disillusioned with conquests, and then influencing the aliens' politics so this peace movement gains traction among the alien leadership, opening the way for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.
- UFO Aftermath starts off with aliens called Reticulans seeding Earth with a biological agent that eventually kills off most of the life on the planet. The agent was actually used to grow a huge web of alien biomass called Mycelium, which the Reticulans planned to incorporate into a planet-sized supercomputer with godlike psionic powers.
- Warcraft: The Burning Legion's members all hail from other worlds — some from other dimensions — and, thanks to fel corruption, are all bastards.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: The Aen Elle more than fulfill this trope in the context of the medieval fantasy genre, instead of the sci fi one. The powerful, superior, coldly logical Alder Folk Kingdom regularly invades other worlds with their advanced magic and technology, mercilessly carrying out campaigns of genocide and enslavement against their inhabitants, slaughtering or abducting them, in addition to trying to enslave the Unicorns on their own world and having entire mountains of human skeletons there. They even have at least one flying ship, and go so far as to abduct certain humans, take them to their world, screw with their minds and experiment on them, and then drop them back off on their world after what seems years to them, while mere weeks to months have really passed back on their world, likely so the released abductee can spread rumors and horrifying tales about themselves among the superstitious humans.
- XCOM uses this in spades. Attempts to communicate with the aliens are made, but it's generally a bad idea.
- The Bureau: XCOM Declassified: The Outsiders (AKA Zudjari) are Planet Looters who have ruined their own planet and dozens of others and have to keep on conquering new worlds in order to maintain their unsustainable culture. In fact, they have managed to conquer and enslave the Sectoids and the Mutons. Earth is just their latest attempt, but it can also be their last.
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The Ethereals want humanity in order to create the perfect Super Soldiers, with all the other races being failures. Assuming you succeed in destroying The Mothership, their attempt has Gone Horribly Right. Interestingly, the Sectoids and Mutons in this game look the same as in The Bureau. According to Firaxis, The Bureau can be treated as a sort-of prequel, meaning that, as soon as the Zudjari were defeated by the original XCOM, the two races were re-conquered by the Ethereals.
- XCOM 2: The Ethereals have turned the entire planet into a fascist police state. While the surface looks well-fed and shiny, humans are being kidnapped en-masse to be genetically experimented on and then pulped into a slurry. Trying to live in outskirt settlements is covertly declared punishable by death with genocidal hit-squads. Even worse, multiple times it is heavily implied that the Ethereals plan to screw their alien servants over after their decades of service, by sabotaging their own fleetnote once they acquire everything they need from humanity, leaving them stuck on a ruined planet that hates them and ruled by a psychotic governor overlord.
- XCOM: Chimera Squad: Subverted, since the introduction of human DNA to their genomes made several of the alien species more receptive to cooperation with humans after the fall of ADVENT and the Ethereals leading it. The game itself takes place in a city where humans and aliens live in relative harmony compared to most other places.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X: Earth during was caught in the crossfire in a war between two alien factions. While humanity managed to avoid complete extinction by escaping on space arks, they were still hunted down by these two alien factions. While one of them, the Ganglion, have a reason to hunt them down Humanity hold the key to stopping them within their DNA, the other alien faction has no reason shown why and they were the ones who were shown attacking the White Whale, the ark that the characters in the story were on.
Webcomics
- The Cyantian Chronicles gives us the Moulin Phedra, AKA the Squid. They wanted to have some new sport fighters for their fighting pits. Their creations drove them off.
- More recently we have been introduced to the Rastin. One of them kidnapped one of the main characters. The Rastin ship's commander implied that some of his passengers/crew did this sort of thing all the time.
- The trolls in Homestuck start out as literal Internet trolls and cyberbullies, and are revealed to be children of a race dominated by a Social Darwinist hierarchy that rewards cruelty and wanton violence. However, in some ways averted, in that some of the trolls (such as Feferi and Tavros) are actually fairly nice once we learn more about them, and some of the ones who are jerks get a fair amount of Character Development over the course of the story. It's implied that the trolls being forced to work together, along with their interactions with the human kids, is "humanizing" them to an extent. This is reinforced when the audience is introduced to Alternate Universe trolls from a peaceful universe, and they're a collection of the most banal stereotypes of shallow modern suburbia, combined with deconstructive parodies of how the fandom perceived the initial troll characters. In short, they're a nasty bunch of hypocritical backstabbing jerks themselves.
- The Lydian Option involves a prison filled with aliens hostile to humanity. Outside the prison, aliens resent humanity for winning the Spiral War - inside, humans lack protection and must travel together as a group.
- In Spacetrawler the G.O.B. will declare a species "non-sapient" for reasons up and including bad fashion sense and their technology is built by a race of highly intelligent but weak-willed (and therefore non-sapient) aliens known as "Eebs". And the Animal Wrongs Group devoted to Eeb rights shanghaied six humans from pre-contact Earth into helping them. And then it turns out that Eebs are only weak-willed because of brain clamps placed on them at birth, and they're naturally psychopaths.
- In Terra the Azatoth have Blood Knight tendencies, practice slavery, and antagonist Azatoth, particularly the Shadow Cabal, have little respect for other races' concept of civilians. The UEC isn't really any better, however.
- In Jack, the Arc Debs involve an alien race who plan on invading planets, and they have no known reason for doing this. They also ruthlessly kill the soldiers stationed there during the story. Probally one of the worse parts was when they gunned down an Injured Arthur Sullivan for several SECONDS straight. In other words, they're genocidal assholes.
- In Freefall, Sam Starfall's race, the Sqids, are amoral scavengers who regard theft, deceit and underhanded methods to be admirable qualities. He notes that their legendary heroes could easily be interpreted as criminals by humanity. However, they are laughably behind humans in the tech race and their psychology means their progress rate is exceedingly slow. To correct this, Sam uses those methods to convince a large group of robots to begin tailoring the Sqids a new planet via terraformation to promote their natural greed to the point they decide to start investing in their science and enter the cosmic scene before they are destroyed by their own irrelevance.
Web Original
- Being a channel about the weird, mysterious and unexplained, this trope naturally crops up in Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel). Highlights include:
- "The Body On The Reservoir" belonging to an unnamed and horrifically mutilated man whose injuries are consistent with cattle mutilations and betray an alien disregard for human life.
- "The Burning Man Of Brazil", wherein aliens burn a man to death in a very slow, cruel and Squicky manner
- "Enemy Unknown" about Flying Saucers in the Vietnam War attacking both Vietcong bases and American vehicles
- "Stardust Ranch" is about a group of The Greys who torment a couple over a period of years
- In Cradleland, the alien ba'thulaz had used humans as cattle and slaves, and still viewed them as such even a thousand years after they were overthrown in a slave uprising and forced to flee. Humans were not much better, as the slaves were purchased from human slave traders on Earth during The Middle Ages.
- Defection: One of the protagonists once foiled an alien invasion by tricking their scout into falling in love with her, and then simply avoiding the subject of marriage. Then he returns, with an army equipped with planet busters, and a marriage proposal.
- Early on in Freeman's Mind, Gordon refers to this trope by name after trying (and failing) to negotiate with a Houndeye and being zapped by a Vortigaunt. Which is pretty ironic, since Vortigaunts are some of the only aliens that aren't bastards after they are freed.
- In Brad Jones' "Catching Up" review of Dark Skies, he points out that the alien invaders pretty much come to Earth for the sole purpose of being dicks.
- Mahu: In "Second Chance" the trope is both averted and played straight. Some alien races are quite welcoming and friendly. Others however are slavers, fanatics or just wish to consume all life in the galaxy.
- Averted by most Xenosophonts in Orion's Arm, but one race, known as the "Jesters" had a truly sick sense of humor that made murder and genocide legal so long as it was part of a joke. At one point, they found a pre-industrial species and posed as gods, then directed an asteroid at their planet and brought a few "chosen ones" off-world just before impact, and chucked them out the airlock. Fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, after that incident their A.I.s decided they were fed up with their creators' "jokes" and exterminated them.
- The song "Los Putos Traterrestres" (Fucking Traterrestrials!), which portrays a quartet of martians as degenerated Extreme Omnisexuals out to rape anything in their way. WARNING! NSFW.
- SCP Foundation: Kalinin's proposal for SCP-001, Past and Future, a member of an alien civilization whose members enjoy the suffering of others. This race wants humanity to return to their true birthplace, one of their nine companions, the Planet of Hands, as armless, subordinate slaves, born to die for them. SCP-001's mission is to make humanity suffer on Earth so that they themselves can return to their homeworld. SCP-001, capable of creating very powerful anomalies, has teleported numerous objects outside of containment and improved their effectsnote , nullifying all Foundation efforts to contain them and causing massive damage to the entire world. Before completing his mission, he tortured SCP-990 and used its powers to send an ultimatum to O5-2, appearing as her dead child to emotionally torment her, driving her to suicide. Completing what it started, SCP-001 mutilated thousands of people in Egypt and flooded China, removing the Three Gorges Dam, and successfully persuading thousands of people to flee to Planet of Hands. An incredibly evil mind with insane logic, Kalinin's proposal for SCP-001 is considered one of the most evil characters in the SCP Foundation.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: The Shape-shifter Warren Ampersand threatens a pregnant lady, implants its egg into her husband, and chuckles wickedly at the end of it all before going home... it's the embodiment of this trope, albeit one (somewhat) toned down. And then there's the reveal about what he did to his own children.
- American Dad!:
- Roger, so very much. However, it is later revealed that this is justified, as his species needs to "let their bitchiness out", or else it will turn to bile and poison them to death. He turns out to be one to his own species as well as he was in a relationship with Emperor Zing but then cheats on him with a human man for no reason.
- Emperor Zing also counts as he is also the same species as Roger but has done a lot of bad things as well. It's strongly implied that Zing punished Roger for being unfaithful to him by attempting to kill him through a fake mission in which Zing sent Roger out to Earth as a crash test dummy and even when Roger survived, he was technically banished from his homeworld. While this does make a big Freudian Excuse, Emperor Zing becomes more of a jerk after his descent into madness, which results in him becoming tyrannical and humiliating his slaves in public while mutilating their tools for love all for the sake of propaganda that promotes the false idea that love does not exist and through this deception towards his own race in hopes of making them become more like him until Jeff exposes him.
- Justified in Axe Cop: When Axe Cop kills the last remaining bad guys on Earth, he decides Victory Is Boring and wishes for every alien to be a bad guy so he can go kill them.
- The Batman: The Joining are a race of alien robots that destroyed their creators and have since traveled the universe attacking planets and stealing all the knowledge and technology they can to make themselves smarter and more powerful before wiping out all life on the planet and moving on. They had already ravaged half the galaxy.
- Averted and subverted in the Ben 10 series, where there are good aliens, evil aliens, and everything in between. With some minor exceptions (most notable being the Incurseans), it seems most aliens avert the Always Chaotic Evil status (Azmuth's assistant, Myaxx, is from the same species as Vilgax, yet is in no way as evil as he is, and most of their species aren't portrayed as evil either.).
- Dexter's Laboratory: Aliens are generally evil. One episode featured alien parasites that took control of Dexter's family in an attempt to conquer Earth. Another episode had aliens come to Earth and steal Dexter's merchandise during a yard sale. One episode had aliens kidnap Dexter and his family so their leader could try and drain Dexter's intelligence. Most of the villains in the "Dial M For Monkey" sketches are also aliens.
- While the Felix the Cat (Joe Oriolo) cartoons has a friendly alien in the form of Martin the Martian and a couple friendly, shapeshifting martians in other episodes (i.e. "The Master Cylinder's Spacegram", "The Exchanging Machine"), Felix has also encountered a couple nasty aliens. In "The Martian Rescue", he encounters an unintelligible martian who crash lands near his house, rudely eats a load of Felix's food, and then tries to eat Felix himself! We also have General Clang, a minor recurring lackey of Master Cylinder who is a jerk who wants to invade Earth, to the point where in "The Master Cylinder's Spacegram", he betrays his own boss just so he can take over Earth all by himself.
- Final Space: The Lord Commander with his own empire and the Titans led by Invictus.
- Futurama: The scammer aliens from "Bender's Big Score" are the most straightforward example in the series. It's Played for Laughs, so their brand of bastardry is less "brutally exterminate the human race" and more "greedy, petty dickishness".
- Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi: When the band are abducted by aliens, Ami hopes they will be Innocent Aliens, but they prove to be this instead, doing experiments on the captured humans out of a combination of For Science! and For the Evulz. When Yumi asks them if they have anything better to do, they answer "Nah".
- In Invader Zim, the Irken Empire. Not only are they after total intergalactic domination, but, they destroy all the life on a planet, just to build a parking lot on it!
- Played with on Invincible (2021):
- The Flaxans are your typical alien invaders, dropping in the middle of a populated area and killing as many people as possible. Despite differences in the flow of time from their home dimension turning out lethal for them, they're willing to spend several decades developing the means to overcome it and finally conquer Earth, seemingly out of spite from their apparent leader.
- Subverted with Allen the Alien. It seems like he's a periodic threat to Earth but really he's an agent of an intergalactic coalition that's merely testing Earth's mettle to defend itself from actual alien conquerors, and even then he's mixed up Earth with another planet. When Mark takes the time to talk with him, they clear things up and he leaves amicably.
- Marvin the Martian was an Affably Evil bastard in his shorts, being perfectly willing to murder billions of lives solely because Earth was blocking his view of Venus—though like most of Bugs Bunny's foils, he's not too bright.
- Several of the villains from Mega Babies; this trope often overlaps with Evil Is Petty in the show.
- The alien cats from the Mighty Mouse cartoon "Goons From the Moon." Seems legit as they're invading Terrytown, a city populated by mice.
- In The Penguins of Madagascar episode, "Alienated", a Space Squid from Mars lands in the Zoo to take over Earth. When Private suggests a peaceful attempt at first contact, Kowalski replies by lampshading this trope:
Kowalski: Aliens are evil! They are slimy, disgusting, and ruthlessly determined to conquer and/or consume the Penguin race!
- Rick and Morty: While this show features many aliens who often fall between the lines of good, neutral, and bad, the alien species that comes closest to fitting this trope are the gromflomites. They run a People's Republic of Tyranny government called the Galactic Federation that treats humans and other alien species like second class citizens. They also don't seem to care about the well being of their prisoners and constantly invade other planets to expand their empire while committing several atrocities against them. Even Krombopulous Michael who is friends with Rick turns out to be an assassin who has no qualms with killing children and animals.
- Shaun the Sheep: Or at least their kids are really annoying.
- Kang and Kodos of The Simpsons subvert this in their initial Halloween appearance, but play this trope straight (or, at the very least, parody it) thereafter.
- Solar Opposites: Korvo discusses this, writing off their unintentional destruction of the town in order to give life to a fictional character as a case as them being aliens with a different set of morals that humans couldn't understand. Except that he says this to avoid responsibility for said destruction. Season 3 reveals that Shlorpians in general are considered a galactic threat due to being Planetary Parasites who go around aggressively terraforming planets into a new Shlorp, only to inevitably run the planet to the ground and send 100 teams to terraform planets.
- Teen Titans (2003) did have some good aliens (one of the main heroes is one, after all), but normally an alien species would only show up if some of their members were going to be the episode's villains. Lampshaded with the Source, whose only reason for wanting to blow up the Earth is "It is our way."
- Take out the risque language and you'd have the actual title of an episode of Tom of T.H.U.M.B.: "Guys From Outer Space are Creeps" (they are, too).
- Transformers: Prime: The Decepticons, although they do in this iteration have the occasional Noble Demon and Token Good Teammate among their ranks.
Real Life
- Stephen Hawking believed any aliens that would come to Earth would be imperialists (in space), pointing out that this has been the typical results of low-tech societies on Earth being "discovered" by high-tech societies.
- Others have argued that any species behaving like the typical version of this trope would be unlikely to cooperate among themselves long enough to discover Casual Interstellar Travel in the first place. Of course, if they cooperate among themselves in order to expand their empire to other planets...
