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Puny Earthlings/Playing With

Basic Trope: Aliens have racial superpowers compared to humans.

  • Straight: Herculean Alliance of Aliens (HAA) civilians all have superhuman strength.
  • Exaggerated: HAA civilians regularly juggle planets.
  • Downplayed: HAA civilians have superhuman strength, but they never interact in a manner where it would be useful.
  • Justified: The HAA made use of extensive genetic engineering to improve themselves.
  • Inverted: People of the HAA have no advantages over humans and plenty of weaknesses compared to them.
  • Subverted: The HAA civilians seem to have superhuman strength, only for them to be combat robot avatars.
  • Double Subverted: Which are less effective that the real thing.
  • Parodied: Similar to the Inverted example, but some fairly mundane thing humans do is considered a superpower (digesting salt, standing on two legs without a tail, binocular vision, yawning emits a universal Brown Note, etc.)
  • Deconstructed: Aliens advocate marginalizing, obliterating or outright ignoring Humanity like ants because they can't compete. As Humanity is surrounded by such beings who are advanced, powerful, huge and incomprehensible, Humanity develops a massive inferiority complex, and loses their will to progress, hope and meaning in life, becoming a race of suicidal Nietzsche Wannabes with the occasional Cult which advocates worshipping and becoming with the aliens. The whole story then plunges into Cosmic Horror Story.
  • Reconstructed: Humanity's inferiority complex leads to mankind subverting Can't Catch Up or proving that Humans Are Warriors. End result: Species level Badass Normal; no superpowers, but capable of giving those jerks in the HAA a run for their money.
  • Zig Zagged: HAA civilians use combat robot avatars as go-betweens, which are less effective than the real things, only for something as taken for granted as humming turning out to have a powerful compulsive effect on aliens, which rockets them to the top of the galaxy.
  • Averted: HAA members have advantages over humans that correspond to their native locations, just as humans have advantages over HAA members that correspond to their native locations.
  • Enforced: An alien species that's just like us wouldn't be very interresting to the audience, and there wouldn't be much drama if we could just push them aside if they disagree with us.
  • Lampshaded: "Jesus, it's like we pissed off the creator of the universe. How else to do you explain every alien species having all sorts of advantages over us?"
  • Invoked: What Measure Is a Non-Human? gets applied to all sorts of Superpowered Beings, including mere Humans that simply have Stock Super Powers
  • Defied: "So you're stronger than me. Big deal, plenty of my own kind are stronger than me too."
    • ->Human: "Look! An obvious deception!"
    • ->HAA citizen: "Where?!"
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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