I don't think that means what you think it means... (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Saturday, February 13, 2016, 02:25 (2996 days ago) @ Durandal

When I invoked the trope, I was not referencing these politics or attitudes, just the Collectors specifically targeting humans to the exception of other races due to plot mcguffins.

I wasn't even thinking about that.

I actually didn't mean to invoke that particular trope, the idea that humans are better, but more the tendency of many works to make humans somehow special-- to make the works about humanity, and to make a universe in which humans are somehow special. The way Halo eventually did, first by hinting that Humans were the same as, or descendants of, the Forerunners, and then by turning them into something even better than that in the distant past. Or the way ME sort of does, by virtue of the fact that even though the Reapers are eventually foiled by a coalition of all races, the one person who gets to make the call about how things end is a human, and there's no option to play a non-Human Shepard.

I'd say it's a variation on the trope, where although humans are clearly not in a superior position in ME's status quo, there are those who believe that it is OK to put the good of your race above the good of all others, or above the need to adhere to certain standards of behavior.

One can argue that the humans are no more racist than some of the non-human races are. It just seems to me that some of the aliens you meet dislike humans, and some don't, but nearly all the humans except Shepard and Anderson are either suspicious of other races (Alenko) or downright xenophobic (Williams).

Humans appear to be the last spacefaring race to the party, and yet many (Udina, Illusive Man) feel they deserve better treatment for some indeterminate reason, despite the fact that other races that are presumably more advanced and have been spacefaring for longer also don't have seats on the council (Volus, Hanar, Batarian, Elcor).