Bender: Humans are disgusting! I opened one up once. I almost barfed.
Destructor: Did you know their hair just keeps growing and growing?
Humans like to think that just because they invented toothpaste and dish soap, that somehow makes them immaculate. To an alien, humans all look the same, and to them they might look like walking, talking balloons full of phlegm, blood, cheeseburger grease, and intestinal parasites.
From a practical standpoint, this can be based off of a pragmatic fear of biological elements humans carry. Human immune systems are well-equipped to handle things like chicken pox or the common cold and they could be covered head-to-toe in microscopic pathogens that would prove fatal (or worse) to any life-form that didn't evolve naturally on Earth's biosphere. This is a very common reaction from machine and energy-based lifeforms, where things like digestion and sexual-intercourse in carbon-based lifeforms would be literally alien to them. More villainous or generally Jerkass examples probably use words like "filthy" or "disgusting" to get their contempt of humans across more out of a form of jingoism over any real medical reason. More extreme examples see humans as giant germs and blowing up the Earth is the only sane solution to sterilizing their infection before it could spread to the rest of the universe's intelligent life.
Just look at human children — their hands permanently sticky, their noses full of snot bubbles and pants full of piss — and you just might understand where they're coming from. This is one of the reasons why characters with a germophobic fear of humans are forced to share a room or a bus with a baby or a vagrant just to get the point across.
Sub-Trope of Neat Freak. Sister Trope to Humans Are Smelly. Compare Call a Human a "Meatbag", Humans Are Bastards, Humans are Insects, Humans Are the Real Monsters, Humans Are Ugly and Humans Through Alien Eyes. Contrast Intrigued by Humanity. Not to be confused with Humanity Is Infectious. See also Guilt-Free Extermination War, Humans Are Morons and The Pig-Pen. May overlap with Can't Argue with Elves.
Examples:
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Comic Strips
- The Far Side: One strip shows a dog about to take a human's steak, but another dog tells him not to, since "everyone knows their mouths are dirtier than our own".
Fan Works
- Being Human (A Portal Fanfic): GLaDOS transfers Wheatley into a human body and has to teach him basic functions, like how to walk, eat, and drink. Wheatley also discovers that humans poop, a learning experience that neither of them finds enjoyable. He's horrified that humans do that every day. After teaching him how to use the toilet, GLaDOS decides to delete that experience from her memory permanently.
Wheatley: [talking to Chell about being human] ...And then there's the leaking. Humans leak all the time! The scientists told me if I ever leaked I would DIE, but no, humans leak practically everywhere! From their eyes, their nose, their mouth and especially from the little thing that's kind of like a USB drive, but She told me not to talk about that part. But then, BUT THEN, once you're comfortable with all the leaking, it turns out if you leak this red 'blood' stuff, you really do die! It's so inconsistent. And don't even get me started on, what did She call them? 'Bowel movements'? I don't know...
- Riding a Sunset: Downplayed. When the Autobots came to Earth, Ratchet prepared a lecture on human biology so they'd all know what to expect from the planet's dominant species. However, shortly after Charlie goes missing, Ratchet finds (to his irritation) that no one (except Ultra Magnus) studied the documents. He then makes everyone read through the lecture. They're all left disgusted and horrified (even Optimus Prime). While they get over it fast enough (as they still see humans as fellow sapient beings), any mentions of digestion or using the bathroom leaves them extremely uncomfortable.
- In Chapter 10 of The Thespian and the Pop Star, Moxxie expresses just how low of an opinion of humans (and the idea of those humans being sexually interested in his girlfriend) by how "filthy and smelly" they are. Considering he's a demon and his only experience with humans are from Sinners bad enough to find themselves in Hell, this has likely colored his outlook on them.
Moxxie: Just the thought of them touching you, putting their greasy hands on your body, and covering you with their dirty- I don't even want to say it.
Film — Animated
- Finding Nemo: Gurgle expresses disgust when one of Doctor Sherman's patients spits into the sink.
- Ice Age: Sid remarks that "Humans are disgusting!" when Manny explains that because human babies wear diapers, their poop stays in said diaper rather than simply falling to the ground.
- Monsters, Inc.: Human children are considered by monsters to be living biological hazards. In the words of Mr. Waternoose, "a single touch could kill you". This is later proven to be nothing but a widespread superstition, but the presence of a single child in Monstropolis was more than enough to cause an initial mass hysteria.
- Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea: Fujimoto grumbles this trope's name word-for-word, though it's less geared towards humans biologically and more towards a general disgust towards humanity polluting the oceans.
- The Road to El Dorado: Tzekel-Kan describes his negative opinion of humans to Tulio, seeing them as being imperfect. When the latter goes along to call them disgusting, the high priest calls humans as "beyond disgusting".
Tzekel-Kan: My lord, you are perfect. But in your perfection, you cannot know how imperfect humans are... like snakes, spineless and slippery. They are as untrustworthy as rats, stealing and cheating with no remorse! Spinning webs of lies... like SPIDERS!
- Titan A.E.: The alien drej regard humans as "filth", and actually succeed in blowing up the Earth. This leaves the few human survivors to subsist in the margins of galactic society, with only drifter colonies (assorted spacecraft welded together into an ersatz biome) to call a homeworld. What set the drej off was the discovery of the Titan Project, which can convert space debris such as asteroids and ice crystals, into a habitable world. This would mean Mother Earth would be spawning little earths everywhere, like roaches laying egg clutches.
Film — Live-Action
- Bumblebee: While Shatter and Dropkick both agree Earth is disappointedly primitive as soon as they land, Dropkick takes particular displeasure in humans themselves. He liquefies one of the first humans he meets and shakes himself off of the goo afterward (albeit saying he likes "the way they pop"), and his response to seeing Sector Seven is to beg Shatter to let him slaughter the "multiplying" humans.
- The Matrix: During Agent Smith's Motive Rant to a captive Morpheus, he admits that he finds humans disgusting and worries their smell is in some way infectious.
- Men in Black (1997): When demonstrating a universal translator to J, K reveals that the MIB shouldn't even have it because "human thought is so primitive it's actually looked upon as an infectious disease by some of the better galaxies."
Agent K: Kinda makes you proud, doesn't it?
- Super Mario Bros. (1993): Koopa often refers to humans as filthy, both because of his germophobia and because humans evolved from apes.
Koopa: Ugh! Disgusting mammals.
Literature
- Animorphs: In Megamorphs #3, the heroes time-travel to the Battle of Agincourt, where nearly every person there is disease-ridden and filthy. Ax the Andalite remarks that if the invasive Yeerks had come to Earth at this point in time, they would've left to find some other species to infest.
- The Automatic Detective: Played with in the case of Mack Megaton; being an incredibly dangerous walking superweapon that spontaneously manifested free-will, Mack can be rather antisocial, but he has learned to tolerate a lot of the messier and unpleasant aspects of "biologicals", like sex and the digestive system. It's when they apply qualities tied to those biological imperatives into their non-freewill having AI — like a secretary Fem Bot that flirts with everyone she interacts with — does it really start to irritate him.
I didn't mind biologicals and the necessities of their existence: eating, crapping, sweating and all that jazz. But they didn't have to advertise their obsessions, and they didn't have to foist their compulsions on me and my kind in the guise of user-friendliness.
- Battlefield Earth: When Terl shows Johnnie to his boss, his boss keeps complaining about Johnnie's smell, and also thinks Johnnie is about to pee on the floor of his office.
- In Becky Chambers' The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (which features no human characters for most of the book), the stranded space travellers at one point trade bizarre gossip about humans for gross-out giggles.
- In "Green Magic
", a short story by Jack Vance, a human magician convinces a race of otherworldly mystical beings to take him in and teach him their highly advanced sorcery. They do, and he learns as much as he capable, but the price is that doing this simply highlights the wretched and limited nature of humanity, including himself. On returning to Earth, the now much more educated and enlightened protagonist finds himself utterly repulsed by the stupidity and squalor of human lifestyles. Human houses reveal themselves as crude and filthy, and even human food and sex lose any appeal they once had — having grown used to the complex and often abstract sustenance of the supernatural realm, the thought of having to feed on "fried animal tissue and the hypertrophied sexual organs of plants" revolts him, while he now views sex as untidy and repulsive.
Gravity tugged at his feet, held him rigid. The shoddy construction of the house, which heretofore he never had noticed, oppressed him. Everywhere he looked he saw slipshod disorder, primitive filth. The thought of the food he must now eat revolted him. - In the children's book The Pet Person, Rex's mother (an anthropomorphic dog who still eats from a pet bowl) thinks it's gross how humans eat at the table.
- Project Hail Mary: Eridians have a massive taboo against eating in front of others because open orifices are disgusting, while it's a common human custom to share a meal together. Rocky sarcastically calls Grace a "leaky space blob" when Grace compares him to a spider.
- In The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! a coalition of alien races launch a Guilt-Free Extermination War against humanity, claiming we are too disgusting to exist — no tentacles, no slime... It later turns out they were brainwashed into the war — by a bunch of renegade humans — and once they receive another brainwashing the aliens focus on our sweat and slimy tongues, decide we aren't so bad, and call off the war.
- They're Made Out of Meat is about two aliens discussing the unbelievable grossness of this new form of life they've discovered — humans — and the fact that, rather than being plant-based, metallic or incorporeal like civilized people, they're made of meat. One alien has trouble even comprehending the idea, and at the end they decide to erase their discovery from the record.
- In the Worldwar series, many lizards find aspects of human biology or anatomy repulsive, from the fact that they're constantly thinking about or motivated by sex (lizards have a mating season and are essentially asexual the rest of the year) to the nature of their waste (lizards excrete small dry pellets) to how human hair either flops around uncontrollably or is kept in place with (as one lizard puts it) "enough oil to lubricate a landcruiser motor".
Live-Action TV
- Dans Une Galaxie Près De Chez Vous: In the first film, any alien who hears the word human feels the instant urge to throw up in disgust, due to humans warmongering, polluting ways. This comes in handy later to identify robot duplicates of the crew, where uttering the word human makes the duplicates throw up.
- The Dinosaurs episode "Nature Calls" features a Talking Animal who thinks the more anthropomorphic animals are disgusting. The reason is that he thinks it's gross how "when nature calls, you must go to a particular room and sit in a special chair". He finds it especially disgusting how everyone uses the same "chair".
- Doctor Who: In the episode "Death in Heaven", while preparing to kill Osgood, Missy gives her fairly revolting take on humans, explaining that humans are constantly decaying and begin rotting as soon as they "slop out", further adding that she finds their stench is awful.note
- In The Good Place, Michael expresses his disgust towards humans and their weird anatomical qualities after he drops the pretense that he was a good guy. He even compares the humans in his neighborhood to cockroaches he gets paid to exterminate.
Eleanor: We're cockroaches to you?Michael: Yeah. Or dung beetles. I don't know, something small and gross that creeps on the ground in its own filth. Just being honest.
- Lucifer (2016): In Season 2, Lucifer's mother escapes Hell and takes a human body to spend time with him. After apparently being incorporeal before, she's not impressed with the human condition, especially the body's physical needs.
Goddess: They eat, darling. All they do is eat. And then afterwards the food comes out... changed. And not for the better!
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Discussed when Jake calls it disgusting when his best friend, an alien named Nog, mentions that on his planet, women are expected to chew men's food for them. Nog retorts that he finds many human customs disgusting as well, though he never specifies which ones.
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Deja Q", Q is turned from an omnipotent alien into a human and is repulsed by the idea of getting pimples and diseases while in this state.
- Star Trek: Voyager: The villain of the aptly-named episode "Revulsion" is a hologram who finds humans and other humanoids gross — he doesn't like how our skin flakes, how we sweat, and how our swallowed food goes into "a pit of digestive juices".
- Star Trek: Enterprise:
- Some Vulcans found human body odor to be this, to the point that they'd use suppressants to mask the odor produced by humans.
- The Kreetassans find people eating in public to be disgusting and eat in private. When they come across the Enterprise in "Vox Sola," they are quite angered to find the crew eating in the mess hall.
- Torchwood: In "Greeks Bearing Gifts", Tosh encounters a telepathic alien exiled to Earth who notes that human speech is disgusting to look at.
Magazines
- Heavy Metal published an illustrated story by Jiri about space explorers that encounter a huge alien construct. As a boarding party begins probing the dimly lit interior, something fast and vicious begins slicing and dicing them, forcing a retreat. No matter how heavily armored or prepared the humans are, they fall one by one to the blazing fast "ghosts." The team cryptographer finally decodes a repeating signal, but too late: humans are considered a "contagion" in the universe, and must be contained or sterilized, by which they mean slaughtered. The "ghosts" are part of an automated safety system to neutralize any contagion that escapes.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000: While the Aeldari look down on all other sapient species in general, those who are the most strident about it see humans as little better than vermin infesting the territories that used to be theirs, expressing the same degree of loathing and revulsion that humans would upon seeing a swarm of rats.
Video Games
- The Elder Scrolls: The Imga are a race of ape-like Beast Men native the forest region of Valenwood. They have a strong feeling of Fantastic Racism towards humans, and if forced to spend time in their presence, will pretend to be offended by how they smell and hold a perfume-soaked cape over their nose in disgust.
- Fallout: New Vegas: The Think Tank from the "Old World Blues" DLC are a group of Mad Scientists who abandoned their humanity to become Brains in Jars. When the Courier first encounters them, their leader Dr Klein assumes they're going to excrete all over everything and is revolted by their sheer number of useless extremities... particularly their toes, which he mistakes for multiple penises.
- Nine Sols: Solarians keep humans as cattle for the sake of harvesting their brains to run the Soulscape system on and enjoy eating human flesh. As such, Kuafu considers humans lesser species and is convinced that they spread disease. Kuafu immediately panics when he first discovers Shuanshuan in the Pavilion, all but speaking of the latter as if he were a sewer rat, and raises concern for his own health. He eventually overcomes his fear and disgust of humans after the boy takes an interest in his work.
- StarCraft II: As the Higher-Tech Species Protoss use photosynthesis to feed and telepathy to communicate, some find humans to have Bizarre Alien Biology. In Legacy of the Void, Rohana (who was put into stasis long before the Protoss encountered the Terrans, let alone fought alongside them) finds their method of communication weird:
Rohana: I must remind you, our sacred law, the Dae'Uhl, clearly forbids us to interfere with lesser beings... unless there is a direct threat to the empire. Your choice to aid these terrans is... perplexing.Artanis: Why do you assume that they are lesser beings, Rohana?Rohana: I do not make assumption. Gaze upon them. Unsophisticated. Primitive. They communicate through... orifices... mouths...Artanis: Many, including myself, once thought as you do. But I have seen their nobility. In time, you will also.
Webcomics
- The Petri Dish: One strip has an amoeba explaining mitosis to his son, in a parody of The Talk. When the son says that's disgusting, the father says, "If you want to hear something really disgusting, I'll tell you how the humans do it!".
Websites
- SCP Foundation: Part of the reason for SCP-682's Absolute Xenophobe nature towards humanity is due to it considering them to be utterly disgusting. What exactly it dislikes about humans is unknown, but the Foundation keeping it captive certainly hasn't improved its opinion. (SCP-5000 hints that there is a specific attribute of humanity responsible for this, and humans who learn of it share SCP-682's opinion.)
Web Videos
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Mr. Popo holds humans in contempt and disdain, considering them worse than dirt. The only reason he doesn't wipe them out entirely is because a part of him still thinks they could get their act together... eventually. He isn't above indulging in their earthly pleasures such as drugs, however.
Piccolo: What do you call a group of humans?Mr. Popo: An infestation.
Western Animation
- Ben 10:
- Ben 10: Alien Force: The Highbreed are a race of Absolute Xenophobes who see themselves as superior to all other species in the universe and intend on wiping out all other life after generations of inbreeded had doomed them to extinction via sterility and disease. Their Fantastic Racism has led to them seeing all other sentient life as a sort of "infection", humans included. In the pilot, Ben (as Humongosaur) bit one of them in battle and reacts by trying to blow up an entire city. In "Alone Together", Highbreed agent Reinrassig III shows an aversion to being touched by Ben (along with a general sense of superiority to him), eventually going into self-exile when Ben uses his abilities as Swampfire to fix his severed limb.
- Half-Arc Season of season 5 of Ben 10: Omniverse happens on Anur Transyl, whose entire population consists of alien races -- pastiches of classical monsters. They are treating humans and other similar species as monsters and vice versa (when Ben gets massive acnes all over his face because Swampfire was in the process of blossoming, they were treating him fine). The first episode even gets a Shout-Out to Frankenstein (1931) where Frankenstein's monster befriended a little girl only "the monster" is Ben, a human, and little girl is a transylian (a race-Expy of Frankenstein's monster) named Victoria.
- Futurama: Bender's general disdain for humans sometimes includes berating them as being filthy (which checks out, since his human roommate is pretty filthy). One example is how he finds human reproduction ("shooting DNA at each other to make babies") offensive. In the second movie, he joins a league of human-hating robots who talk at length about how gross human biology is.
- Invader Zim: A lot of the colorful ways Zim describes humans is their smell or how "filthy" they are, though most of the time this is just him expressing his feelings of superiority he has over them. It's not until the episode "Germs", where he discovers just how prevalent germs are, that he develops into a Neat Freak with a genuine (and nigh-consuming) fear of the biological hazards the Earth has. (Of course, given the show's Negative Continuity, this doesn't last very long.)
- Rick and Morty:
- Fart from the episode "Mortynight Run" is a gas-based lifeform from another dimension who was sent to Rick and Morty's universe to exterminate all carbon-based lifeforms because his kind think of them as a disease.
Fart: Wherever we discover you, we "cure" it.
- In "The Curicksous Case Of Bethjamin Button", Morty bumps into an alien girl at the theme park who has a major Race Fetish towards humans. Being able to smell the digesting food on Morty's breath, the numerous holes that humans have for various functions like talking, breathing, hearing, and excreting, and how they "practically invented racism" are all sexual turn-ons for her. Morty chooses to not simply be an object for her desires and eventually turns her away.
- Fart from the episode "Mortynight Run" is a gas-based lifeform from another dimension who was sent to Rick and Morty's universe to exterminate all carbon-based lifeforms because his kind think of them as a disease.
- The Simpsons: The episode "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner" has the Simpsons being abducted by Kang and Kodos and taken back to their home planet Rigel 7 to be eaten by their royalty. However, after their queen ends up dying from eating a single piece of Homer's flesh, it is discovered that humans are filled with indigestible toxins originating from unhealthy fast-food diets (with Lisa's vegetarian diet apparently making her the worst, to the point where even Bart is considered safer to eat than her). Outraged and repulsed at this revelation, the Rigelians stick the Simpsons on a spacecraft and send them back to Earth.
Lisa: Well, I guess we've learned that out of all the countless planets in the universe, we have evolved into the most inedible species. Like three-bean salad at a barbeque, we will remain untouched.
- Steven Universe:
- It's implied that part of Pearl's Neat Freak tendencies and general aversion to humans is based around this, gems being Silicon-Based Life that don't carry disease like humans do. She has a notable aversion to Steven when excess pollen gives him allergies in "Warp Tour", and expresses disgust with the process of digestion in "Fusion Cuisine".
- While Amethyst has a cavalier attitude towards hygiene even by human standards, in "Adventures in Light Distortion", she seems to think that bones are gross.
Garnet: You have bones in your bedroom.Amethyst: That's different. Those are my bones.
- Transformers: Animated: Cybertronians find humans (and organic beings in general) disgusting. In "Transform and Roll Out", Optimus is both shocked and disturbed when Sari answers his question on how humans make babies. In "The Elite Guard", the titular Elite Guard freaked out upon meeting Sari and afraid they might catch something.
- Transformers: Prime: The trend continues in this series too: Decepticons hate humans and consider them disgusting (just listen to Megatron or Starscream) and even Autobots have this attitude at the start of the series. The main offender of the latter is Ratchet with his Fantastic Racism. Just see his remarks at their first meeting In "Darkness Rising, Part 2". Deconstructed hard when Raf, his human friend, needed medical help and Ratchet was helpless because he never studied humans simply out of disgust.
Real Life