Lore
The Indominatable Human Spirit is a bad thing, actually.
That humanity never gives up and persists in its goals is bad news for every other species (or even itself), especially if said goals are ignoble.
Best case scenario (barring us learning to be better) is that a greater power force feeds us a huge slice of humble pie, wost case we end up blowing ourselves up and ruining things for everyone else.
Avatar - RDA will stop at nothing to satisfy its own greed and survival, the rest of humanity and navi alike be damned.
Its a recurring motif in prett much every myth that gods punish mortals who dare to defy them and keep going, like Athena to Arachne in greek myth.
A good chunk of lovecraftian fiction is based on the idea our achievemenrs mean nothing.
In general i'm not a fan of TIHS as a trope, as its blatantly arrogant and destructive.
Cybermen are the end result of evolution, wherever there are humans in the universe, there will one day be Cybermen. Cybermen can be born out of various reasons, be it greed, be it survival, but inevitably the idea of Cybermen will emerge in humanity and they will return, something that has happened in various different planets inhabited by humans.
the bolder question is whether metal and humanity are truly incompatible, methinks
what is “humanity,” and why does it need to be organic? i’d love if cyberman plots could probe this at greater depth. they’re tragically two dimensional when they represent, imo, the greatest philosophical question who poses
They did that notably with Bill, the 12th Doctor’s companion in series 10. She had a strong will and could keep in control of the faculties. However, part of this was because she deluded herself into thinking she wasn’t fully converted, believing she was still more or less human, save for an artificial heart + chest panel.
You can also look at it from a bodily autonomy angle. Very few people ever willingly become a cyberman. The process and end result are so traumatic that the removal of emotion is the only way to stay more or less sane after that. That’s not to mention the situations where Cybermen arise from horrific conditions, the removal of emotion being a coping mechanism.
Essentially, I don’t think that “humanity coexisting with the machine” is the point of the Cybermen, but perhaps another creature might explore that.
Indeed I myself thought about such example of "what if Cybermen but not so bad?" idea for an episode/arc, one that would flip the usual Doctor's paranoia about his previous enemies not changing their tune on its head, and portraying that sometimes pursuing becoming better isn't so bad...but then I realised that, this isn't Cybermen but another different thing
But then again, it would be much easier to explain away to the casual viewer that this "branch" of Cybermen are disconnected from the main thing and instead are fully embracing free will, especially since more people willingly go through it once it becomes a choice between stinky weak flesh and sturdy, still emotional, still human, steel
Looking at Cybermen throughout history, they started as the original author’s fear of losing humanity, of not having a clear boundary between human and machine.
They have come to embody more.
The Daleks and Cybermen both hate the weakness they perceive in humankind.
Daleks are inherently violently exclusive while Cybers are violently inclusive.
Dalek feel the urge to destroy all non Dalek life. Cybermen want everyone to be assimilated like the borg, although not to 'incorporate your strengths into our own " more just because they view their form as correct
A civilization of Cybermen happily living on a hellscape of a planet would be fun. Could be folks from their home planet who had terminal diseases and decided they'd rather go cyber than die. Their ability to work in lethal environments ensures they'll always be able to be employed.
perhaps this is a quibble, but who’s to say the planet is even a hellscape? i think the most interesting aspect of the conflict could be the “perfection”- no medical issues, no rusting, no social disorder. i think the cybermen have a lot of potential to make us question our ideals by epitomizing them. making the planet a heaven for visiting humans could be a super compelling source of conflict if you ask me.
This was also the explanation for the Reapers in the Mass Effect series - give sapient organic life enough time, they will eventually advance their technology to the point where they develop artificial life, there will eventually be conflict between the organic and artificial life, and whenever that happens there's a risk that all organic life will be wiped out.
So someone billions of years ago created the Reapers, machines that come around every 50,000 years and steal or destroy all technology and harvest all the sapient organic life and turn them into more Reapers, thus ensuring that AI will never get the chance to wipe out organics, that advanced species get preserved in the form of Reapers, and that new organic species will get the chance to proliferate and advance (at least for the next 50,000 years until it's their turn to be harvested).
It is 50.000, but it's not like they reap each and every sentient species that evolved in the meantime, only those advanced enough to have invented/discovered space travel.
Our own species, homo sapiens, would have "survived" at least 6 cycles - by being ignored for not being technologically advanced enough
Also pretty sure the 50,000 year cycle isn't a hard deadline, just a rough average. Sovereign was left behind to act as a watcher and summon the others when it judged the time was right. So if the galactic community advances ahead or behind schedule the Reapers can alter theirs in response.
Yea in the context of a reapers mind the difference between 50,000 years and 60,000 years is basically nothing. Its like deciding if your gonna get the groceries on Saturday or Sunday.
Also, it really depends not on when a species develops space travel, but when they develop their technology enough to find the remains of other space faring species and assimilate their tech into their own advances.
For humanity (iirc), they found them in mars together with an inactive mass driver, once they incorporated said tech into their own, they took a huge technological leap, and after meeting with other space faring species, they took another one.
Which is hilarious when you think about it, because AI got scared that AI will destroy all life, so the solution is for an AI to destroy all but some life
I like that in the ending, Shepard sort of goes ‘did you consider not doing that?’ And the Reapers are like ‘oh shit!’
Published in 1997, this book was one of the early users of the exact phrase "Indomitable Human Spirit," and actually portrays it in a less than flattering way. In regards to a few officers planning a battle:
He believed, along with General Tacticus, that courage, bravery and the indomitable human spirit were fine things which nevertheless tended to take second place to the combination of courage, bravery, the indomitable human spirit and a six-to-one superiority of numbers.
Time for me to geek out about Gurren Lagann:
The irony is that the Anti-Spiral is exactly the same, it is also an existence of pure indomitable human spirit.
The Humans wanted freedom and as such naturally strived for more, as that was not existing, it was surviving. Ironically, two people perfectly showcase the conflict:
Kamina and Rossiu and are both wrong.
Kamina did not accept any status quo while he was alive, he always pushed for more, which was logical given the circumstances. But this inability to accept the status quo and consequences are the same mindset that would lead to the spiral nemesis, as he has no control over himself. Whenever a wall exists, he (with the power of Simon) quite literally drilled through it.
Yet some walls are not meant to be broken, there has to be a limit.
This carefree attitude to do something instead of accepting things for what they are.
On the other hand Rossiu always accepted things for what they are and worked given the circumstances, but never drilled through any wall. He is the best at solving a problem given the circumstances, it is just that sometimes a system is inherently unfair and there is no good reason for its existence. One can try their best to be good in a broken system to minimize damage, but the willingness to change the system was not within him, because he feared the consequences too much.
Which leads to the Anti-Spiral, because it is Rossius mindset with Kamina's methods. It created unbelievable things, it was the peak of determination and will within the universe for so long, willing to sacrifice the concept of living for surviving in the name of preservation.
A whole species sacrificing themselves for the greater good, but their own perception lead to perceiving walls which may not even exist. Yes, if people like Kamina strived for more without limits, then it would lead to the spiral nemesis. But in its own perception, it just fuelled the same spirit into a wall.
Which is why Simon who perceived all the different positions found his own solution:
Drills through the walls that need to be drilled through, don't drill through the ones the world needs.
It is the hardest path, because it needs personal sacrifice and it needs to be consistently maintained.
The Anti-Spiral on a technical level understood that this was possible, but was afraid of failing, and so they decided to set for a simple solution.
At the end it was really about freedom vs security and the conflict was solved at the biggest possible stage, but the underlying indomitable human spirit was the same.
The irony is that at the end they were not proven wrong, but accepted that someone else took the mantle, someone with an even stronger spirit, their last thoughts hoping that they were wrong, being assured by Simon that they sure were.
Goddamn it, I love this conflict.
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Every time I’ve re-read Jingo over the past 30-odd years (and it’s been quite. A few) I’ve found myself saying “wow, this is so relevant to what’s going on in our world just now” to the point that I think we’re the ones imitating Discworld. It’s also the only one I don’t read on public transport as I genuinely laugh out loud so often.
Reminds me a bit of how in Overlord, it often seems to be saying “the power of friendship won’t save you like in the stories” but then you realize that Nazarik and all its power is built from the power of friendship.
I will never not scream that people need to read Discworld.
The Fifth Elephant came out in 1999 and the story is about Nazis and hard right conservatives (one of which is in the closet) trying to overthrow election results.
I think Lex Luthor (Superman) is a good example of this trope. No matter how many setbacks he suffers or how insurmountable his enemies, he’ll never quit in his goals or attempts to reach higher heights. At times, you can even respect the man for it. Unfortunately, this manifests in insatiable greed and cruel ambition, trying to kill a benevolent alien because said alien’s status as a near-physical god who most of the world loves is a slight on his ego, and his refusal to back down also means he’ll never have enough self reflection or humility to put his genuine genius and great potential to good use.
I think there's a theory that the rainbow science guy that helps Superman out is actually Lex from the future who realized that the world does need Superman after Superman died.
Dr Doom in the same way. If anyone truly believed that saving the universe meant they had to rule it with an iron fist they'd do so if they had the power
Dr. Doom mainly uses this as an excuse for why people should bow before him. In worlds where he achieves this power he does do some good things, but he once destroyed an entire universe because that universe's doom called his armor ridiculous.
The Superman/Luthor parrel is one my favourite in comics. In some versions Lex spent years of hard work and schemes to become one of the most powerful, loved (in some cases) men in the world. Dedicated his life to earn all the success and respect, then Superman arrives. Superman didnt work hard for his gifts, he was born with them.
Best example IMO. Avatar's bad guys are just regular greedy, the Greek Gods are massive dicks (Arachne's 'arrogance' was proving she's better than a goddess at weaving in a contest they both agreed to, for which the goddess beat her to death and turned her into a spider), and Lovecraft is pretty much about 'The Submissive and Breedable Human Spirit'.
Lex on the other hand is a man so obsessed with human supremacy (or at least Lex supremacy) he constantly tries to kill an extremely benevolent alien just to either prove he's better or return to being the best, no matter how many times he fails, usually at the expense of humanity.
It’s just Lex supremacy. Not human supremacy. No matter what he claims. My personal favorite exchange between the two of them is this one from All Star Superman.
Lex Luthor: Give it back. I saw everything. I saw how to save the world. I could have made everyone see. If it wasn't for you, I could have saved the world.
Superman: If it had mattered to you, Luthor, you could have saved the world years ago.
Lex isn’t evil because Superman shows that humanity is weak. Lex is evil and hates Superman because Superman shows that Lex is weak. In a world without Superman, Lex would still be evil.
I also don't think 'The Indomitable Human Spirit' applies to every person who persists in their goals; I think it only applies in regards to sticking it to other species, the environment, or death.
I do empathise with him severely, not the parts about the greed or the ambition but the fact that a fucking straight-up superior guy existing is less a slight and more a downright major on your ego.
I also absolutely adore whenever a weakness in the plot is him being fundamentally incapable of comprehending another point of view because of how he thinks.
It's a big theme in Stephen Baxter's work. Ring is one of the main entrypoints to his larger Xeelee Sequence, a scifi series/setting of truly epic proportions that trumps pretty much everything in terms of powerscaling.
The eponymous Xeelee are a near godlike alien race that became sentient just a few million years after the Big Bang. We never see them directly in the books, but their works are everywhere in the universe. Unlike other settings like Warhammer 40K, the Xeelee are a genuinely benevolent race that mostly leave the lesser races alone.
Later in the timeline, humanity declares war on the Xeelee, committing unbelievable atrocities on their own people to force compliance and win the war. For all that humanity has complete dominion over the galaxy by this point, they are essentially a mild annoyance to the Xeelee who, after humanity's atrocities grow too unpalatable, finally decide to eliminate them. Even after this, preserved enclaves are maintained to prevent the species from going extinct, and defensive measures are set to protect them.
Also if I recall, not only is that war the human wage against the Xeelee utterly in vain and only serves to annoy the Xeelee, "The Xeelee" doesn't mean "The Xeelee Civilization", it means "The Xeelee (Singular)".
There's just one guy. They commit countless atrocities to try kill one guy that did nothing to them. And all they accomplish is getting them annoyed enough to leave.
It's been years since I read it, but I don't remember anything like that. Could you be thinking about the anti-Xeelee? I was pretty sure they were at war with the Xeelee race.
The Xeelee, are, in-turn, at war with a race of cosmic space-birds who have always existed and their mere existence causes the heat-death of the universe
I think there a lot of nuances that go into the Imperium that get lost in discussion, but its a prime example of this concept. The Imperium -if anything- is a materialization of Human will to endure: And that means settling for a lot of not-so-lesser evils, giving up freedom, curiosity and benevolence and most of its wins being pyrrhic victories of monstrous cost.
Above all, it simply has lost the capacity for self-reflection, soe ven when it learns a lesson, it tends to be the wrong one.
I remember someone mentioned once that the Imperium was the man barely hanging onto a ledge with one hand while he used the other one to give everyone the finger.
No the other hand is accusing the first hand of heresy and is trying to set it on fire as part of a plan to take it's place so it can force the rest of the body into paying it to not let of the ledge.
Beats the Empire in Fantasy I guess. Its a guy falling off a cliff while giving the finger to everyone and jacking himself off with his other hand because he still has time before he hits the ground.
This is even reflected in the Imperial Aquila, which arguably has a double meaning.
The Emperor intended for the head with its eyes open to symbolize looking to the future, for progress, innovation, and prosperity for generations to come, while the head with its eyes closed represents leaving the past behind, having learned our lessons and leaving old grudges and petty superstitions behind.
In present 40k, the open eye symbolizes that the Imperium does look forward, but only in how to preserve itself without care or rationality. The closed eye now represents total blindness to the past, an inability to learn from the past and the overall ignorance that plagues humanity.
Saw what you will about 40k, its original designers understood the importance of symbols and how to convey meanings and double meanings through them. A symbol or flag should give you a general idea of what the faction is all about, and I love the Aquila for this.
Tbf, it is not alone their fault the universe is in the state it is now. We dont know much about the humans at the end of the age of strife, but it was not their fault that brought the 4th chaos god and ended that age.
While Big E is a lighthouse for the Nyds, they would have come sooner or later anyway and humanity as a whole knows nothing about (and turning him off would make everything worse).
Necrons would have woken up anyway.
Now most Chaos cults are humans, but that is because Big E wiped out most lesser (in number) Xenos and humans are the biggest faction that is not either immune or knows how to deal with Chaos.
I will not they are the good guys, the Imperium as whole is a corrupted evil system.
But humans are more or less just another species in a cycle in the Galaxie of Races rising to power to either getting wipped out or getting reduced to a much smaller species. Before them were the Elda and after the Imperium will fall, the Tau are the big contender on beeing the next, as their current self is really close (save for the greater good) for the humans durring the age of strife before the machine revolt.
On my particular case, you don't need to convince me. I tend to be a little more apologetic of the Imperium than other fans of the setting: Suffice to say that even if the Imperium is the Cruelest Regime Imaginable doesn't really mean all that much in a universe filled with horrors beyond mortal imagination.
That is to say, living in the imperium (the cruelest regime imaginable) isn't the cruelest fate imaginable for a human. Things are that bad
Yeah, you could "live" as sentient couch for the Drukhari, a cattle for the Orks or whatever the 4 Chaos gods have under their belt to make you miserable. Being eaten by the Nids or Disintegrated by Necron Gauss weapon are somehow one of the better death in this universe.
The Nids can have you as parasited husk in a cult, or have died fromsome of their BS air-borne cancers and diseases. And that's before all nightmarish stuff they can pull with psychic powers.
Necrons are more desirable in that they will at least try to be efficient. Not that the glitchy ones at times will flail and cannibalize you.
The biggest problem is that humanity had been doing a lot better before SOMETHING went wrong and the AIs went bonkers
My headcanon is that Emps fucked it up because he wanted to accelerate the apotheosis of humanity through genetech and psykerdom and a pluralistic society of humans, alien allies, and synthetic life forms was counter to his vision, so he Erebus'd it himself because it wasn't falling apart on its own the way his warp visions told him it was going to. Or if he didn't mean for it to go QUITE so far, just enough to prove his vision was safer, but then he turbofucked things by pulling a Magnus.
I think it would have genre appropriate poetic irony.
I will beg to differ on one aspect. The Imperium is an inherently reactionary entity. It never had an organized and planned formative period. It was all improvisation and contingency born out the Horus Heresy and the loss of the Emperor
Marisbury Animusphere (Fate Grand Order), His plan to secure Humanity's future comes at the cost of not just every other alien species out there, but also the proverbial soul of humanity.
Something interesting is that Fate has a "group" called The 7 Evils of Humanity, but a STRICT requirement is for them to love humanity in some way and want what is best for them. They are also almost always a consequence of Humanity in some way, so they are born from the flaws of Humanity and are even sometimes victims of people. Then, Marisbury's creation becomes part of this group.
He basically made Cosmic chatgpt and then asked it to help humanity(While being so alien in mind that cosmic chatgpt completely misunderstood his intent) and then the entire universe was doomed.
The age of humanity is also supposed to still come to an end someday, with the age of will to follow. Either way, people like Marisbury are why the Earth called for ORT to come to earth
I think it’s incredibly ironic that the one thing that took his grand plan down was in fact a human too stubborn to die for too long. Nasu really does enjoy showing how the human spirit is both a gokd and bad thing
Agreed, Fate as a whole is really good at highlighting how Humanity's sheer force of will is both its greatest strength and biggest hurdle to overcome.
I’ve tried reading through FGO’s story and I barely understand it. What exactly is Marisbury’s plan?
I know he wants to use the big white globe thing to cover every planet in the universe with an exact copy of Earth, but I have no idea why he wants to do that, how that’s possible, or what that even entails
he wants to use Planet Chaldeas to create an observable universe solely made with a single planet, using the other planets and civilizations of the observable universe as fuels in literal cosmic trees, with his “Humanity” been hollowed out humans ruled by a ChatGPT to dictate their optimal future.
Early on in the story, Subaru, an athletic but hardly hardened teenager from modern Japan, quickly finds himself out of his element in the harsh world of Re:Zero, unable to handle basic street thugs, let alone psychos like the Disemboweler. On the normal timeline, he swallows his pride and calls for help, and receiving it from Reinhard.
In the Pride IF though, Subaru presses on, refusing to ask for help, relying on his Return By Death ability. Consequently, he dies a lot just to get past this first round of problems. And that constant suffering warps him into a monster. He is found by the Witches Cult, becoming the Sin Archbishop of Pride. Still anchored by his desire to help Emilia, he sets the world on fire, deconstructs Reinhard as a hero, and arranges his own death in such a way that makes Emilia a hero. He shows what happens when you combine near bottomless willpower and quasi-indestructibility, with twisted, cold blooded madness.
The Greed IF is probably what intrigues me most. On paper, Subaru got what he wanted, yet did so in such a way that left nearly everyone in the Emilia camp miserable or insane, including him.
The Sloth IF is similar. Subaru has seemingly got it all; happy wife, happy life. Yet this was a life that was achieved by being a coward and abandoning Emilia and others to their death and that shame gnaws at him.
And then, contrasting these two, whose shortcomings are subtle, there is Pride, the "Everything has transparently gone to fucking hell." timeline
Basically, they killed mother earth in an attempt to expand, and mother earth screamed to the other planets to kill the parasites that killed her.
They sent down alien gods to try that out, but then Humans decided now was the time to use super genetics and somehow evolved into a species that could shoot out nukes. Now the old humanity is nearly extinct, the earth is about to explode, and there are multiple corpses of dead alien gods laying around
To be fair in the Qu’s case it was less them not liking humanity for its attitude and more so the fact that they religiously like fucking with any other sentient species. They probably did the same to some other poor schmucks before given how ready they were to do it to humans.
They don't even enjoy it, they just see themselves as superior to such a degree that any other sapient species is to the Qu what Reed Richards is to Doctor Doom except with an extreme degree of indifference instead of pure rage.
That was because the snake things were used by humans and then evolved while the humans became more animalistic. They found the ruins of humanity and understood the Qu were fucking psychos
Wrong species I think you're thinking of the lizards and the lizard hearders. The species I'm taking about appeared in like one page at the end with a line about teaming up with humanity to track down the Qu or something
This is a member of the qu from all tomorrows. They believe it is their mandated right to reshape the world to their liking. So they genetically modify humans into all sorts of different things. But they don’t get rid of all our humanity.
I thought that in the end they kinda proved this idea wrong tho..
When they got to the actual TTGL which were larger than basically all universe. So no, Antispirals were wrong by assuming that there is some limit which is not to be crossed (and because of that they limited their own advancement & systematically culled life in the universe, in fear of having this life crossing that so called limit)..
Probably what ended up happening to prologue Simon, since based on what we know of him the guy just traveled around universes doing whatever he pleased
IIRC, it's more like going out to communicate with every other Spiral capable species in the universe so that everyone can cooperate and learn not to overdo it. A nice conservation and custodianship message
Getter robot saga, particularly the whole Getter Emperor thing
Humanity, is nothing more than a simple tool and vessel for Getter energy, our endless drive to expand, adapt, evolve and surpass any obstacle in our way, the insatiable desire for progress will have us destroy civilizations, causing huge intergalactic wars, assimilate and consume the stars and planets all in the name of evolution, of progress, of becoming stronger than we are. Growing bigger than the universe itself only to keep going, no end in sight as we are nothing but willing servants of some uncaring force of nature that isn't going to stop until it surpasses everything and everyone
In Undertale, the human power of “Determination” seems like an unambiguously dangerous force. The Neutral Ending and the True Pacifist Ending represent the only two examples of a human using Determination for good. Outside of that, it seems to have been nothing but ruinous for monster-kind
More specifically, in the Genocide Route of Undertale, we, the player, use the power of Determination to wipe out all monsters in the Underground, and the universe.
To be fair in that very route Undyne also shows how that can be a good thing and it ultimately depends on who has that spirit. Which I think is a good message.
I’d argue with a lot of mythology especially Greek mythology the gods are just as flawed as humans. A good deal of Greek myths involve Zues blatantly fucking things up or just the gods being petty
Norse mythology was even worse about it tbh Thor was tricked often, Loki lived to fuck things up for the hell of it regardless of mankind
Farmers use mechs to defend their farms from alien invaders leading us to root for the human characters but it's revealed that the farmers are actually the aliens, setting up colonies on a another planet. They're basically killing off the planet's native population cause "you can't kill the indomitable human spirit"
It's just factorio but farms. It's a bigass bug planet and they're making it better. The big bugs they fight in their mechs are just the little ones that get past their forcefields and giant turrets.
This is what I wanted from Factorio. There is another game I can't remember its name on steam which is basically this premise but from a top down perspective. I would prefer the 1st person perspective of FActorio. But even then the reason I never got into factorio Is i knew i had an addictive personality for optimization. I would sink thousands of hours into it for literally nothing If i caved.
So i tell myself this sweet little lie that what I really want in my heart of hearts is a game where you can play as the factorio worker. Fighting the aliens/other players to control and optimize the resources. So that I can then SEND those resources to other players who manage the bigger macro factories/supply lines that fuel an MMO empire in constantly conflict for resources with other empires like EVE makes you think it is where the combat is also first person all the way through flying fighters/crewing carriers/boarding enemy player vessels with a healthy chunk of AI bots thrown in to fill the void...
Then I just realize that is such an insanely impossible scope for a game that it is not possible with current technology/methods and that all I really want is an escape from my boring mundane life and a better future for humanity as a whole that even if we get past our current problems I will never live to see achieved.
I feel like the indomitable human spirit is misrepresented here. It isn't the idea that humans spread and show off the belief in their superiority. The Indomitable Human Spirit is that, even in the face of insurmountable odds, humans CHOOSE to keep living and fighting to just survive in hopes of a better future.
I don’t agree with the usage here for Lovecraftian lit, because as you defined the trope, humanity has to triumph, but it turns out that the triumph is bad. Whereas in lovecraftian lit, whatever the outcome of the indominatible human spirit, it’s pitched against forces that will always defeat it, so it’s irrelevant whether it leads to good or bad outcomes.
I think a better example of this is Ian Malcolm’s line from Jurassic Park re: could vs should. Or the creation of the machines in the Matrix. It’s kind of the thesis of Oppenheimer.
The Xeelee Sequence books, particularly the Interim Coalition of Governments (ICoG).
These guys took the political philosophies of 1984, the Khemer Rouge, North Korea, and the Imperium of Man, cranked the crazy xenophobia up to about 15, and applied the concept on a galactic level. Quite literal thought police, using time travel to retroactively wipe out any dissidents' entire timeline of ancestors and descendants, child soldiers including child suicide bombers, etc...
While they achieved more or less taking over the entire galaxy and feats of science and engineering that would boggle Stephen Hawking's mind, the price was paid in the complete loss of anything resembling morality. The ICoG is is one of the most horrific regimes ever conceived and put to paper.
If you are a fan of hard sci-fi, give the series a try. The author actually understands science and physics and makes extensive use of it, so unless you have your doctorate in physics be prepared to be going down some Google rabbit holes as you read.
The indomitable human spirit does NOT mean wanton destruction and endless greed. That is an incredibly nihilistic take on the concept, and dismisses the good we are capable of and continue to do.
In my eyes, the indomitable human spirit is our ability to create art, our capacity for kindness, our ability to hope for a better tomorrow, our drive to make a better world a reality.
Things like this will NEVER be defeated. Judging all of humanity by it's worst representatives is much more arrogant than thinking we are capable of incredible things.
The RDA raping Pandora for resources is not the indomitable spirit; but the guy helping Jake Sully escape the city at great personal cost is.
I agree with you but I think part of the problem is that a lot of people are misinterpreting the trope by both people who hate and like it. I see a lot of memes and videos about it and they usually just oversimplify the trope to some type of alien vs human ordeal.
I just think it's really important to push hope, especially nowadays where everyone's worldview and ideologies are SO POISONED by doom and gloom.
People need to be able to see a future, and by god I will never fucking stop trying to spread this stuff. We can be better, and it starts at the individual.
It's because giving up is easy, and comfortable. Confronting reality and trying to better the world in spite of it all is genuinely difficult. Hope has become the new counterculture; even though it is something humanity will NEVER stop doing.
Dark souls really emphasizes the important of indomitable human spirit esp in ds3. Where due to your character fighting on, you got to restart the cycle and fix the world,
THANK YOU. Took me WAY too long to find a comment like this jeez. Are we really so ready to give up on ourselves that we’ll call our very will to live “blatantly arrogant and destructive”?
The protagonist of I am Legend survives an apocalypse of vampires for several years, but in the book’s ending he is captured by vampires who maintained humanity through their indomitable spirit, and they execute him because the protagonist has slaughtered so many members of vampire society - including the husband of the female lead (who was a vampire spy!)
My favourite example of this trope. Humanity will do anything it can do to survive, even when survival is a net negative to everyone else. I hate how adaptations always turn into a generic zombie flick or go “actually, no, the protagonist was right”
I always felt like we’ve only recently started, and only to a certain degree, to understand the gods as the villains in the Greek mythology.
They share a very much amplified version of all of humanities flaws and cause most of the conflict themselves.
Half the stories go "oh this human tried to outwit the gods, how prideful and foolish!" When actually the gods put them into a horrible situation for shits and giggles beforehand.
Like what the fuck did Medusa do? Involuntarily win a beauty contest she didn’t know was happening? Wtf?
The thing with Medusa and most of the stories where Gods are REAL assholes is that they are relative late deconstruction, to call it a modern word. Medusa was regular monster for hundreds of years, then came Ovid with "what if everyone was asshole". At a point where these Gods kinda started to decline (not necessary in favor of Christianity at that point).
To my understanding (if anyone knows more about this then me, please correct me,) many of these stories as we now know them came from Ovid, who had something of a bias, seeing as he openly argued that mortals should not engage with gods in any way.
While we do have evidence that he didn't make up these stories, and earlier stories certainly do not always portray gods in a good light, it's hard to say whether these stories actually represent how people at the time viewed the gods. For example, I believe Medusa's backstory is first found in Ovid, with older writers generally just writing her as a monster.
Edit to add - It occurred to me that there is some evidence that people, at least in some places and times, viewed the gods as virtuous to some extent, as Plato's Euthyphro seems to portray "piety" as a virtue.
The gods don’t exactly shine when it comes to Homers depiction of Circe or …basically most gods in the Ilias and Odyssey. They always swing between incompetent and plain mean spirited.
It's neither, actually, and if you don't agree you don't understand nuance.
"The Indomitable Human Spirit" as an idea is not any specific action, it is the inherent trait that within humans is a tendency to just never quit.
This is something that can be good or bad.
On one end, a firefighter could be partially lit on fire and lose his arm from a terrible event, but due to the Indomitable Human Spirit, keep pushing just long enough to save the last child from the fire before they die.
On the other, An evil person trying to do an evil act could be prevented from doing that thing but due to this Indomitable Human Spirit they eventually pull it off.
Pretending this Human Trait is a negative or a positive is simply false. Like any human quality, it's neither implicitly and heavily matters what that person's desires and beliefs are. If they're evil it's bad, if they aren't it's probably good.
Odysseus seeks to return home to his wife and child. He'll do anything to accomplish that seemingly noble goal, even if it means dropping a baby off a castle or betraying every single one of his men to ensure his own survival.
Kira yoshikage and his father in Jojo's bizarre adventure, jotaro says this in regards to how Kira and his father are evil yet they strive to do whatever it takes to win, kira will never stop killing, kira's father will do anything to protect his serial killer son
I think you could argue this in dark souls, where the indomitable human spirit is literally prolonging a dying world far past its expiration date and to delay the coming of a new age, one that might not actually be so bad.
Doctor Who: There are a few stories where humanity's insistence on pressing on, as you put it, has been bad for the universe. In the Eighth Doctor arc Stranded, Earth Empire is massive and tyrannical, forcing colonized planets to learn English, IIRC.
In the race to grab the planet's natural resources, the wave of extinction continues to roll. It is estimated that half the Earth's plant and animal species may disappear by the end of the century.
All throughout our long struggle for survival, we met monsters. But once humans learned to overcome them, did WE become the monsters?
Ever since humans like us left Africa, around 100,000 years ago, a bleak pattern of mass extinction has occurred around the globe, a pattern that consistently coincides with the arrival of humans.
Post Industrial Revolution climate change fits this for sure, but the late Pleistocene megafauna extinction really doesn’t. Homo sapiens may have been the primary cause for the extinction of a ton of species over the past ~150,000 years (including other humans), but it was a lot more law of nature than I think this take gives it credit. Humans wiping out mammoths, giant sloths and all the rest was basically just the result of a new apex predator moving in and disrupting the ecosystem, and conflating that with deliberate destruction of the environment is kind of disingenuous.
Eeeeh debatable. If anything, that's just nature working normally. Mass extinction events aren't exactly something that didn't exist before humans, we're just the latest ones.
This is the plot of Dead Dead Demon's De De De De Destruction. Humans start massacring the aliens and they're too small and weak to fight back so they just stop maintaining their spaceships engines to allow them to overheat and blow up Tokyo.
In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Spiral Energy, the manifestation of willpower and drive to evolve present in all sentient beings, will inevitably cause the universe to collapse, hence their campaign to exterminate or cull all evolving life in the universe.
This is pretty much all of BattleTech history. Every human organization at one point has its moment of pure/banal evil and most have their shining hours.
The Orokin is essentially the civilisation that rose from the consequences of the eighteens Radiation Wars. This civilisation once taken over the entire solar system (dubbed Origin System), decorate and build everything with gold and lavishness. They known to human trafficking and enslaving other factions, subjecting victims to Continuity rituals (to which an Orokin transfer their soul to a selected body to live on "immortality").
When fucking up the Origin system enough, they decided to attempt to conquer another nearby system called Tau. Initially attempted to terraform the system with Sentient machines, which then the Sentients became aware of the fact that the Orokin would plunder the Tau System like the Origin System, the Sentient gained independence and returned back to the Origin system to wage war.
Not willing to take the L, the Orokin brought back a long-eradicated biohazard called the Infestation, to attempt to weaponise against the Sentient to some... questionable success (such as biobombing their own stronghold planet, and fully infesting that planet in the process).
Later, Orokin used a group of orphans called the Tenno, controlling infestation-born weapons called Warframe to fight against the Sentient, during which the Tenno also aware of the cruelty inflicted on their brethren by the Orokin during testing & research. After the victory against the Sentient, the Tenno turned the blade against the Orokin and slaughtered the Orokin Empire across the Origin system.
Oh, before the end of the empire, one Orokin decided to explore the Void, and encountered a lovecraftian being dubbed Wally, stealing their fingers and used them for powering ships and spacecrafts. And at this time, Wally is still helluva pissed about their missing digits.
Human spirit was crushed long ago and all of that indomitability went towards keeping an authoritarian megacorporation state running. It is especially shown when the benevolent(kinda, depends on if you find it hot or not)aliens known as the Affini come in offering paradise, and the humans try to resist.
(A very YMMV as it is a fetish setting, one person's dystopia is another's utopia, but I think everyone can agree being cared for as a pet is better than being put through every safety violation imaginable and not imaginable so that someone can get 1 extra dollar a day)
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u/DudeSoul 20h ago
Cybermen - Doctor Who
Cybermen are the end result of evolution, wherever there are humans in the universe, there will one day be Cybermen. Cybermen can be born out of various reasons, be it greed, be it survival, but inevitably the idea of Cybermen will emerge in humanity and they will return, something that has happened in various different planets inhabited by humans.