Follow TV Tropes

Following

Muggle Power

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/3102079_foh_edit.jpg

In a world with Differently Powered Individuals, what use are Muggles? They're weak, need protecting, are evolutionary dead ends and are of no real use. Even the Badass Normal on a team of supers can start getting depressed from this, and they are useful!

This usually serves as a motivation for individuals and groups who decide to "do something about it" rather than take it lying down.

Option 1: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Much like a super-power groupie, these people will try to get super powers by mimicking their betters, often at great risk by trying to replicate how heroes get their powers. If enough people get this idea, or the government gets behind it, then it becomes a case of Utopia Justifies the Means. This can include Organ Theft, free Super Serum, cyber augmentations half off, and in general making Emergency Transformations routine medical procedures. Interestingly, though this group means well, anyone aspiring to power (even if they want to share it) is inevitably misguided if not outright evil, because a muggle should Never Be a Hero. The route of Badass Normal seems to have much better odds, on the other hand.

Option 2: If you can't join 'em, kill 'em!

These people usually come to this conclusion by adding some paranoia (justified or not) to Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke and fear that naturally born supers will out-breed or replace baseline humanity. They interpret the "obsolescence" of baseline humans as an edict to kill all Mutants/psychics/mages in an "Us or Them" fashion, fearing that supers will either forcibly take over or replace all muggles. These types are usually spurred on by the villains' attempts to do just that, and end up branding all supers as threats. Previously nice supers, in turn, will interpret this xenophobia as cause to exterminate or enslave all muggles... This is usually the fear behind any Super Registration Act. Typically accomplished by calling the Cape Busters. See also Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Whether the story chooses to address the underlying insecurity or not varies. When it does, it usually justifies baseline human's existence with a nice aesop like: our limitations drive us to excel, only muggles can truly create, a world of all supers would devolve into planetary civil war (like we normals have done such a good job keeping peace without supers)... or, that we're so fundamentally bad that only a handful should have these powers, if at all. Since super-powered heroes are usually the focus of these stories, it's not rare to see a perfectly sensible initiative by the government to have its own supers, either to stop supervillains or to stop a hero if he should go rogue, turned into paranoid and militant unit bent on killing all heroes on the off chance of a super powered Social Darwinist takeover.

Post-Cyberpunk stories that include The Singularity often have conflicts between humans and post-humans. Earlier stories had Mutants on higher Evolutionary Levels that likewise were generally incapable of coexisting with their predecessors.

An interesting variation has the supers be vampires, werewolves, aliens, or some other "bad" race... or outright evil race. In which case those wanting power (or unwillingly transformed) are prone to Transhuman Treachery.

Sometimes this trope is unsure what to do with a Badass Normal.

Opposite of With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility and Muggles Do It Better. Super-Trope to Mutant Draft Board and Superhuman Trafficking ("If you can't join them, enslave 'em!")

Compare What Measure Is a Mook?, Ape Shall Never Kill Ape, Ban on Magic, and Pro-Human Transhuman. Contrast Super Supremacist. A Sub-Trope of Fantastic Racism.

The Anti-Magical Faction is a variant of this trope that focuses exclusively on magic and those who can use it. This trope is very often a feature of Capepunk stories. Not to be confused with some sort of special capability that non-magic users may have.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • Academy City is essentially filled with superpowered kids (espers) for purposes on educating and training them on the use of their powers in one centralized location. However, their powers are ranked on a scale of 0 to 5, with level 0s basically being normal humans since their powers are so weak. Level 0s are sometimes considered social outcasts and tend to be bullied by more powerful espers. This leads many level 0s to try and find a way to boost their powers, even if such methods are morally questionable. In the Level Upper arc of A Certain Scientific Railgun , in the eponymous Level Upper is making its way into the hands of Level 0s, allowing them to temporarily gain abilities (or increase the level of ability users) at the cost of eventual comatose.
    • Skill-Out is a gang of level 0s who lead attacks on espers. They claim it is for revenge and to defend themselves against the bullying espers, but Touma and others call them out on attacking espers who don't do anything wrong and the occasional muggle bystander.
  • Darker than Black shows the few humans aware of Contractors having a "if you can't beat 'em, employ them" attitude, with the majority of the Contractors being aggressively headhunted and employed as 'special operatives' by various national security agencies like MI6, the CIA, or by the mysterious criminal 'syndicate' that employs Hei. It eventually turns out that all these agencies are part of a single conspiracy to wipe contractors clean off the face of the Earth. This led to the formation of a La Résistance-style group determined to wall off the Gates so that the Contractor-genocide wouldn't be possible, even though they would have wiped out all of Japan in the process. Hei does not approve of either option.
  • D.Gray-Man: Only Exorcists can kill Akuma. The Third Exorcists was formed by non-exorcists who were frustrated with this (and how the Black Order treats the regular humans who try to help anyway as expendable), and as a consequence they volunteered for a human experiment that transformed them into Human-akuma hybrids.
  • Durarara!!: Izaya Orihara claims to love all humans and his hobby is to observe them. He will manipulate them and even give out information for free just to see what will happen as he believes his love justifies it. However, he doesn't care about anything he considers inhuman, and loathes Shizuo Heiwajima, despite being a human, as Shizuo has super strength and is nigh-invulnerable. He also detests Saika and goes so far as to declare war on Anri. Izaya, despite this, repeatedly uses 'monsters' in his plans and even hires Haruna and uses Celty's head in attempt to avert the Cessation of Existence. Izaya will, on occasion, completely disregard any kind of etiquette towards 'monsters', such as when he decides to use Celty's head as a ball.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: There are a group of Naturals (unmodified humans) known as Blue Cosmos who seek to eradicate Coordinators (genetically-enhanced humans) because they believe they're "impure". In fact, Blue Cosmos' motto is "For the preservation of our Blue And Pure World". Their actions have started two massive wars because of this. Not bad for a group that started out as an environmental protection group! It was mostly because they were backed by LOGOS, an organization that's about War for Fun and Profit.
  • My Hero Academia:
    • Zigzagged in general canon: because Quirked individuals make up 80% of the population, and it's implied those numbers are rising, having powers or mutations in general is not seen as anything special or negative. That said, there is Fantastic Racism against those who possess Mutant type Quirks (physical mutation), especially the more extreme examples that leave their owners looking partially or completely animalistic, and likewise against Quirks that immediately suggest villainous desires, such as Charm Person abilities or powers like Mind Control.
    • Invoked in the animated movie My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission, where the enemy organization Humarise are an anti-Quirk cult willing to commit genocide to "restore the true humanity". In a blackly comedic twist, because Quirkless individuals are so rare, most of their own ranks have Quirks, with their membership being explained as them either being full of self-loathing for their powers or opportunists who hope they can survive being "cleansed" by making themself useful to the cult. Even the cult's leader is a self-loathing Quirk user, despite his Quirkless Supremacist doctrine!

    Comic Books 
  • The Avatar: The Last Airbender comic "No Benders Allowed" plays this for laughs. The badass normals feel left out, so they form a little club that benders can't join. The benders initially think the club is stupid, but they all eventually beg their way inside. However, it's played a fair bit more seriously with Aang as when he's left by himself, it's a reminder of how he ended up isolated from his fellow monk children when it came out he was the Avatar a century ago.
  • Empowered has an actual capeless uprising in its recent backstory, where a group of cape-killers began hunting down superhero and supervillain alike. The San Antonio Supervolcano may or may not be related to this. Unbeknownst to his girlfriend, ThugBoy was directly involved in it, and has a few cape kills to his name. And according to Maidman, another uprising may be in the near future.
  • Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted: Raymond Martin firmly believes in Type 2. He murderously despises all Titans and Sub-Titans regardless of whether they're hostile, benign or outright protective, and he believes that every last one of them should be wiped out. He seeks to kill as many monsters as he can using the Titan Hunter, even attacking cute and completely defenceless cubs.
  • Marvel Comics 2: American Dream idolized Captain America and decided to ask superheroes for training to become one (of the Badass Normal type). It worked.
  • Some comics in the Marvel Universe speculate Society Is to Blame for Muggle Power. Super-heroes are extraordinary people with amazing abilities and dedicate their lives to improving the world around them, so normal humans feel weak and selfish by comparison. The Kingpin ties this into I Just Want to Be Normal and Tall Poppy Syndrome in "The Reason You Suck" Speech in Ultimate Spider-Man #80.
    The Kingpin: They, "society," hate you because they don't want your help. You remind them of how weak-willed and sheep-like and unspecial they are. How gleeful they are, deep down, to be ordinary. They don't want heroes. They don't want special people around them. Because if there are special people and they aren't one of them — well, who wants that? Who wants a constant reminder that they aren't even trying to be special? See, the difference between you and I is that you really are just a child. You benefit from the wide-eyed optimism of youth. I do envy that, somewhat. But... like many of your decisions in life... it's just naive. And I don't envy that harsh cold slap of reality that will come your way soon enough. But I guess it's inevitable. People don't want to be special. I do think that. It is my philosophy. They — people want to be told what to do and how to live and they want men like me to tell them. They want to go to work and do as little as they can possibly get away with, and they want a big cookie at the end of the day for doing it. And they want men like me to give it to them.
  • In Alan Moore's Miracleman, the government-created supers turn out to be too powerful for the government's liking, so it tries to kill them all. It doesn't work, and the supers and aliens take over the world for its own good. Eventually, everyone is offered the chance to become superhuman. There is some musing on some fundamental humanity that they have lost in becoming superhuman.
  • PS238 had a government-funded "Project Rainmaker" in its backstory; it was trying to study metahumans to find out what made them different from normal people and possibly use this knowledge for the benefit of the US government. It got wrecked by the metahuman it was experimenting on.
  • In The Royals: Masters of War, The French Revolution sent shockwaves among the superpowered royals as it was the first time the non-superpowered "commoners" succeeded in threatening their kind on such a large scale. Centuries later, both the Nazis and Soviets had become adept in killing the old nobles and royalty, capturing those who couldn't die and persecuting the few in their territories who remain.
  • Superman:
    • It's become fairly common for Superman's archenemy, Lex Luthor, to be portrayed as a pro-human/anti-alien extremist who sees himself as enabling humanity to stand on its own two feet. While his position is ultimately self-serving, Luthor's argument that superhumans hold humanity back from truly excelling is one that resonates with some people in-universe and out.
    • Arion wanted to destroy Superman because he felt like Superman was propping the world up to the point that when he broke, it would crush humanity.
    • New Krypton sees Luthor join forces with General Sam Lane, a paranoid General Ripper (and father of Lois Lane) who believes that all heroes — and aliens in particular — are bound to turn on humanity. Lane proceeds to recruit Metallo and Supergirl adversary Reactron, as well as "Superwoman" (really his daughter Lucy) and Codename: Assassin to form the core of his Human Defense Corps and wage war against Superman and New Krypton.
  • Top 10 takes a rather unique approach to this problem. The Prequel The Forty-Niners explain that after the allies won World War II, they build a city and relocated all the Superhumans, Badass Normals and Mad Scientists who survived the war there.
    Steve "Jetlad" Traynor: Th-This is nuts. Everybody's a science-hero! I mean, this will never work, the government, this whole relocation thing, it's just...
    Leni "Sky Witch" Muller: The war's over, mein junge, and now nobody wants us living next door to them.
  • IDW's Transformers: When the Decepticons were recouping from Megatron's apparent death, the Autobots were being hunted by Skywatch, a government group that acquired Cybertronian technology. While Skywatch eventually comes on somewhat friendly terms with the Autobots, a new group known as Earth's Children rises up, wishing for the removal of all Transformers, and apparently headed by a really Smug Snake. Who turns out to be a facsimile for Swindle to stir conflict and make a market for him.
  • The X-Men are forced to deal with this all the time. If it's not the Brotherhood of Mutants trying to "save mutants" by using terrorism, then it's a radical human group trying to exterminate all mutants, or a radical human group trying to harvest mutant organs or just opportunists wanting to enslave mutants as mindless workers or Super Soldiers.
    • Before House of M, there was a movement among humans calling themselves the U-Men who believed they could become greater than mutants by harvesting and grafting mutant body parts onto themselves. Among the list of parts taken are the eyes of a kid with X-ray vision, the wings off a flying mutant girl, and even keeping a kid with electric powers imprisoned to use blood transfusions from him to gain powers. As for their effectiveness, they use Powers as Programs and have military-application superpowers to counter stock superpowers... but they can't hold a candle to a pissed off Phoenix protecting her students and academy from shock troopers enjoying their scalpel guns.
    • This has become a major case of Broken Aesop over the course of the various comics in the X-Men family. A great many storylines have revolved around some awesomely powerful evil mutant(s) openly threatening the world and scaring the heck out of the general population. Sure, the X-teams usually manage to stop whoever it is, but not before the landscape as been chewed up a bit. While the mutants are meant to be seen sympathetically by the readers, given the circumstances humanity's fear of mutants actually seems very rational, in particular since the power level of mutant villains seems to always be increasing. Then again, how many of those mutants became villains in the first place because "baseline" humans treated them with fear and hatred?
      Some Bigot in House of M: The reason why nobody likes you is because trouble follows you wherever you go!
    • And of course, attempts to combine becoming a super-society with killing mutants usually end badly. The Sentinels were an attempt to prove human superiority in creating robot servants and soldiers that replace the need for superpowers, and were programmed to kill all mutants. In almost all incarnations, they Grew Beyond Their Programming and logically deduced that humans are essential to the destiny of mutants, and must therefore be oppressed or killed to complete their programming. Usually the X-Men stopped them and saved humanity from its own self-destructive creation.
  • Zenith uses this extensively in its backstory. In the end, it turns out that the fear was dead-on, and they really did need to Beware the Superman, with a handful of exceptions.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Monarch seeks to achieve a completely benevolent Option I with the Titans by building a human-controlled Humongous Mecha, Kiryu MK I, so they can contribute meaningfully to Godzilla and the benevolent Titans' future battles against hostile monsters. However, Monarch's collaborators on the project, Apex Cybernetics, are implicitly interested in a much more sinister form of this trope, per their canon plan.
  • Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: General public opinion towards Bloodliners seems to lean generally towards Type 2, in no small part due to the recent increase in numbers for unexplained reasons, and the fact that many bloodliners use their powers for personal gain and/or to commit crimes. The fact that there's a faction of Bloodliners led by a Super Supremacist who wants to Take Over the World doesn't help matters either.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Incredibles:
    • Syndrome takes both options, reacting to what he sees as a snub by his hero for all the wrong reasons. Buddy was endangering himself and Mr. Incredible by being an untrained and self-appointed "sidekick," but Buddy misinterpreted it as being rejected because he had no superpowers. So, when Buddy grows up, he puts all his Gadgeteer Genius ability into making weapons and gear that allows him to be a genuine threat, enacting a vendetta on all super-abled people out of petty revenge, and then saying that he would sell his weaponry openly, making it so "if everyone is super, then no one will be."
    • The backstory of the film is that everybody loved supers, at first, and then they literally sued them out of existence; after Mr. Incredible was sued for his rough thwarting of a man's attempted suicide, it opened the gateways for a wave of such claims, until the government forced the supers to go underground. Making things worse, one could argue that this was all Buddy's fault; things might have just stopped with that first Jerkass if not for the fact that, on the same night, his disastrously malfunctioning rocketboots smashed a train-tracked bridge, and the passengers from that train then sued Mr. Incredible for the injuries they received from the impact.
    • The original conception for the film would have been even worse, as seen in the rejected opening, where Syndrome makes the blood-chilling comment to Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl about how they know "supers aren't supposed to breed" — very deliberately choosing the term "breed", as if supers are no more than animals.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Mary Lou Barebone tried to raise awareness of the perceived threat posed by the wizarding world by staging manifestations with her group that she calls the "Second Salemers". Subverted due to All in the Manual; it's revealed that her organization actually descends from magical Loyalists from the Revolutionary War.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: This is Apex Cybernetics' justification for creating Mechagodzilla. Their CEO doesn't trust Godzilla at all and believes that humanity should be retaking its place as the sole dominant species by usurping Godzilla and thereby dominating all the other Titans — specifically, he's a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to himself be the one credited with toppling Godzilla. Apex have a bit of both Options 1 and 2: they want to kill Godzilla (and implicitly any other Titan that they deem a threat) and replace Godzilla as the Alpha Titan with a Humongous Mecha deliberately made in his image, enslaving or destroying any Titan they set their sights on via the same Behemoth Battle method that the Titans use to settle disputes among themselves.
  • The Paladins in Jumper seem to be hunting down the eponymous teleporting mutants mostly because they're too powerful to be permitted to exist. Unfortunately, the rhetoric the Paladins use is more correlated to religious extremists: "Only God should have the power to be everywhere at once". That's enough to make them seem like religious nutjobs to many people. Additionally, they possess little care for collateral damage and while many do turn their crime, often it's a survival tactic because of the Paladins to begin with.
  • Almost immediately after the existence of Vampires and Lycans are exposed to humanity in Underworld: Awakening, human military forces hunt both races to near extinction for... no specific reason, really.
    • Even before that, Alexander Corvinus employed ordinary soldiers for centuries, keeping the progeny of his sons from being exposed to the world. According to the novelization of Underworld: Evolution, nowadays he mainly recruits from the elite special forces across the world.

    Literature 
  • The Puritan post-apocalyptic society in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids exterminates all mutations on sight... and 99% of them are totally harmless with stuff like 6 toes or blue skin.
  • The Dresden Files has a few finer points to this trope.
    • This trope isn't exactly in play, but every major supernatural power is well aware that human civilization has the numbers, resources, and infrastructure to genocide them all if they ever learn too much about them. Hence, despite all of the bickering and rivalries, there's a tacit agreement to keep humanity ignorant of their collective existence for fear of the consequences to all parties involved. Harry once made the comparison that regular humans are the nuclear option of the supernatural world; when two scary guys duke it out where the public can see them, even if one is on their side, regular people would burn the both of them at the stake to be able to sleep at night.
    • Individual humans may just be cattle and pawns to the supernaturals, but humans have numbers. All but the strongest of supernaturals can justifiably be afraid of a mob with torches and pitchforks; ever since humanity's numbers have been taking off since the Industrial Revolution, the advantage humans have had has only magnified. (As author Jim Butcher describes it, a wizard can kill a mortal with about the same effort you'd expend throwing a pebble across a room. Now throw a million pebbles.) Human numbers alone is reason enough for most power players to fear the potential of humanity as a whole.
    • In addition, we have guns and tanks and nukes. Harry Dresden, who's become something of The Dreaded to supernatural middleweights and below, and a figure of some respect for many entities of higher status, was nearly killed on several occasions due to the simple fact that the other guys used guns. To paraphrase his own words, firearms manufacturers have become the premier producers of killing implements in the mundane and supernatural world. The only thing that humanity seems to not be able to kill would be the eldritch abominations that lay beyond recognizable reality... and what some of the magic forces are actually fighting against.
  • Philip K. Dick wrote the short story "The Golden Man" as a reaction to editor John W. Campbell's preference for stories in which superpowered mutants were also morally superior to ordinary people. In it, humans are afraid of being replaced by "mutants" and try to hunt them down and kill them in the name of racial purity. The thing is, though, they're not wrong to be afraid. The "golden man" in the title is a superpowered mutant, but not one that can co-exist with human civilization for long: he can predict possible futures perfectly (up to a certain length of time in the future) and instinctively chooses the actions that lead to the "best" future for himself, but he lacks the parts of the brain responsible for language and conscious thought, making him more of an animal than a person.
  • In Gone, the Human Crew is a group of "normals" who go with option 2.
  • The House of Night books have Option 2. Churches decide that vampyres are sinners and start killing teachers at Zoey's school. Neferet, the head of the school, decides to wage war against them.
  • A large part of The Infected. The Infected gain superpowers, but also mental disorders. The first book opens to a man trying and failing to save a woman from a serial killer, being teleported back to his apartment and then being brutally beaten by police (he was complying, to the best of his ability), taken to the station, beaten some more, then left for days in a cell to die. The situation for Infected continues to get worse as the series progresses, from simple denial of services to outright lynch mobs gathering whenever a visible or known Infected appears in public.
  • In The Pillars of Reality, there are a lot of ordinary people who resent the power of the Mages and the Mechanics, and some of them want to do something about it. The first major attempt is attempting to secretly reproduce the technology of Mechanics' rifles; it's stopped, but the issue won't just disappear (despite the Guild tending to act like it will).
  • In Unique, the various supernatural entities the story focuses on were tracked down and told very plainly that they could behave themselves or die.
  • Ward has this as a central theme. After the events of Worm, there is a growing faction of normal people who are terrified of parahumans... all parahumans, including the heroes. And in many cases that fear has turned into hatred. On Earth Gimel it hasn't boiled over into an outright conflict just yet, but on Earth Shin, in which a parahuman conquered the entire planet and ruled as an absolute dictator, the people consider parahumans to be monsters to the point that one government official openly brags about having caved in the skull of a parahuman child, and is celebrated for it.
  • Lawrence Watt-Evans' Worlds of Shadow used the Warhammer 40,000 approach to psychics. Not because they are actually dangerous, mind you, but just because the society that has them considers them "mutant freaks."
  • In Super Powereds, the Bad Future foreseen by Alice's mom has a global Mêlée à Trois between ordinary humans (who are tired of being the bottom of the foodchain), Supers, and former Powereds (who want payback against the other two groups for being treated as second-class citizens all their lives). The humans have technology and greater numbers.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Andromeda, the Knights of Genetic Purity consider the Nietzscheans (and all others with genetic mods) an abomination. They are later revealed to be an extremist offshoot of the Templars, who themselves don't much like the Nietzscheans (but have no problem with other genetically-engineered humans). Interestingly, the GenKnights have much better tech than the Templars.
  • On Babylon 5, a lot of mundanes dislike telepaths. Including a group who builds a virus to kill all telepaths. And the Telepath war is a major part of continuity. The Psi Corps Trilogy novels reveal that, when the existence of telepaths became public knowledge, many telepaths were lynched simply for fear of having this ability. This is even after the Pope proclaimed that telepaths are still children of God and should not be harmed, although one Italian mobster does let a card-cheating telepath live because of this in exchange for help in catching other cheaters.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • The Watcher's Council is basically a group of Muggles who got together and decided that they and they alone were going to be in charge of the fight against evil, and they employ and monitor various agents (the most important of which being the Slayer) in their fight. The fact that most of them are incompetent dullards and piss-poor mages (which still qualifies as Muggledom, as most everyone in the Buffyverse is capable of magic) doesn't seem to occur to anyone until Buffy comes along.
    • Meanwhile, the Initiative is basically a government-run version that trades the shitty mages for denial and a splash of ultra-tech. It manages to do slightly better than the Watcher's Council, which was destroyed by a single psychotic preacher using a bomb.
  • Heroes:
    • The Company, a group with the ostensibly good goal of keeping tabs on all super-powered individuals and helping them cope with their powers to protect the general public and maintain a Masquerade... which, thanks to evil/incompetent bosses, has devolved to the point of doing Bag and Tag's of all heroes they can find with a complimentary mind wipe, and killing those deemed "too dangerous to exist"... unless they're Sylar. And all the villains they have in storage that got released in Season 3, despite Company's willingness to kill much more decent people in the pursuit of stability. Granted, while they do have a lot of muggle members, they have plenty of superpowered members too, and are in fact run by a group of superhumans, several of whom are actually pretty sinister.
    • In Volume 4 the Company is replaced with a government organization meant to capture all people with abilities — except Nathan, who started it. His claim is that he's doing it because people with abilities are too dangerous to be left running around, which would be more convincing if he didn't target his own well-meaning allies and a guy who can breathe underwater. Rather than concentrating his attentions on say, Sylar. Again.
  • The Hunters in Highlander: The Series are renegade members of The Watchers who want every Immortal dead. They were founded by James Horton, who was once the Watcher assigned to the Kurgan, the single most feared and brutal immortal in living memory, an experience which drove him to see all immortals as evil. Their Muggle nature gives them a few advantages over their supernatural prey. They hunt in groups and use ambush tactics and ranged weapons, while immortals are accustomed to confronting each other in face-to-face, one-on-one duels; immortals can sense one another approaching, but can't sense mortal attackers; and immortals are unable to do violence on holy ground, allowing the Hunters to attack them in such places while they can do little to resist.
  • Motherland: Fort Salem: In Season 2, an anti-witch movement among the civilian (non-witch) populace springs up, due to popular resentment after numerous attacks by witch terrorists. However, they're against all witches, and denounce the military conscripting young witches into their ranks, with a popular slogan being "Not Our Daughters". They turn out to be created by the Camarilla, bloodthirsty witch hunters with the goal of wiping out witches entirely.
  • Painkiller Jane was part of an organization who worked to find and "chip" all Neuros — even the ones who never did anything. Jane is the only superhuman member of the group, and even that's only allowed because she's not technically a Neuro. She's eventually revealed to be a Mark II Neuro, who are immune to being "chipped".
  • Shadow and Bone: Fjerdans view Grisha as abominations, and the Drüskelle are specifically tasked with seeking them out and killing them
  • One of the conflicts in Season 10 of Smallville is the political implications of superpowered individuals, which culminates in Congress passing the Vigilante Registration Act in an emergency session. Of course, the real movers and shakers behind it are Darkseid's followers, who are trying to take the Justice League out of the equation. The act is eventually repealed.
  • Star Trek:
    • In the backstory, the Eugenic Wars between genetically engineered and other humans lead to genetic augmentation becoming a forbidden technique. They apparently got over this in later years; genetic modification for mundane purposes (correcting congenital defects, for example) is perfectly okay, but physical and mental augmentation is still illegal. In Star Trek: Enterprise, we find out that part of the problem is that the Augment process seems to create musclebound sociopaths. We also discover that the Denobulans used the technology without problems.

      Star Trek: Picard portrays the one on-screen Eugenics Wars-era geneticist, Adam Soong, as an absolutely horrible person with fascistic attitudes and implies that other geneticists were much the same, giving a reason such attitudes would survive to the days of the otherwise-progressive Federationnote  and suggesting this is why it went so wrong for humanity but not the Denobulans or Illyrians.
    • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Founder Changelings derogatorily call all non-shape-shifters "solids" and struggle to either control or destroy them. This in turn was caused by Changelings being hunted by other species in the past because of their abilities (in "Shadowplay" we see such attitudes).
    • Also in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a group of illegally augmented humans are introduced being used to help crunch the numbers in the Dominion War for a tactical advantage. As it turns out the muggles might have had a point given one is stuck at a childlike level of maturity, another is a hair trigger egomaniac unable to view normal humans as equals, yet another is basically catatonic as her mind processes information at a different rate from all of her senses.
  • Supergirl (2015):
    • Lena Luthor takes a Type 1 stance from Season 3 onwards, in light of the apparent menace that superpowered aliens become to Earthlings. This leads her to try and experiment with the remains of the Harun-El stone when she discovers it could potentially give powers to humans.
    • By contrast, Agent Liberty, the Big Bad of Season 4 (until Lex Luthor is revealed to be The Man Behind the Man and takes over the role), and his anti-alien hate group take the Type 2 stance, seeing all aliens as dangerous invaders and seeking to expel them from Earth and/or exterminate them, in a fairly blatant allegory to real-world xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.
  • True Blood:

    Podcasts 
  • The third host of Plumbing the Death Star, Jackson, is a big proponent of genocide for Mutants, Wizards, and basically anything more powerful than a normal human. He explicitly denies any comparison to real racism when Adam calls him a Nazi for it in "How Dare Wizards?!", since normal minorities, unlike superhumans, can't do as much damage as a nuclear missile.
    "Minorities are not like 'Guess what? I can mind wipe you, torture you, mind wipe you again, make you shit your pants on purpose, mind wipe you, and then kill you,' they're just like 'We're existing.' It's very reasonable to kill all wizards!"

    Tabletop Games 
  • Aberrant:
    • Those unable to become Novas usually fall within two camps: adoring fans or xenophobic champions of genetic purity. Since there's actually no way of telling whether a particular human is able to erupt (become a Nova) or not, a small minority try to provoke their eruption in various ways. Since lethal hazards can give you powers to survive those hazards, you can imagine how they go about this.
    • Within the Abberant setting, one of the strongest of these factions is the fundamentalistic religion-based Church of Archangel Michael, which publicly denounces Novas as agents of Satan and has dedicated training projects to turn the faithful into assassins and terrorists directed at the Novas.
  • Paranoia secret societies include the mutant supremacist group Psion and the mutant-hating group Anti-Mutant. Of course all of this is just a farce, because every person in the setting — other than the theoretically subservient A.I.s — is a mutant... and everybody seems to know it... except for the all-seeing, all-knowing Computer which designates mutants as inferior, genetically treasonous creatures.
  • Unknown Armies discusses what happens when the supernatural element is scared senseless of breaking the masquerade. They liken the supernatural elements to being worst enemies trapped in a room with a sleeping tiger — if they fight and wake the tiger up, they're both dead. Maintaining the masquerade is necessary just to stay alive, and the rules feature a complete discussion of just how screwed you are if you're the one to wake the muggles up. (Imagine a soccer riot or worse with you as the object of its fury.)
  • In Warhammer 40,000, "psykers" are considered tools rather than people. Understandable, since it's best not to get attached to someone who has the potential to accidentally open a gateway to Hell. (This is not exaggeration)
  • There was a similar vein in The World of Darkness, but as the setting developed it fell to the background as the masquerade became an Extra-Strength Masquerade as each splat book kept upping the supernatural ante yet the muggles never caught on. Still, regardless of which game you played, your superiors have a healthy fear of muggle rage, and if that meant putting you in a body bag, so be it.

    Video Games 

    Web Original 
  • Epithet Erased:
    • The terrorist group Bliss Ocean is opposed to Epithets and seems to want to, if not kill, at least De-power them, hence why they take an interest in the Arsene Amulet. The only full-time member whose motivations are fully known at this stage, Zora, is a Boomerang Bigot who resents her frankly overpowered Epithet for making everything too easy for her (not that it stops her from constantly abusing it).
    • Downplayed with the likes of the STEM corporation and Howie Honeyglow, who have justified critiques of the pro-Epithet bias that seems to prevail in many areas (notably, the Sheriff in Redwood Run is basically dead weight from the neck up and only has his job because of an Epithet he can't even use effectively) but don't have problems with individual Inscribed: Howie has a sort of mostly-friendly rivalry with Percy King, and the CEO of STEM, Naven Nuknuk, does what he can to help Molly Blyndeff. Although Naven does seem to have secret ties to Bliss Ocean...
  • In the Whateley Universe, "Humanity First!" is a world-wide grass roots anti-mutant organization (with backing from the richest family on earth), and the more radical members have tracked down and murdered new mutants.

    Western Animation 
  • Ben 10: The Forever Knights are the "If you can't join them, kill them" type toward both aliens and magic, though they also have occasionally tried to acquire power through alien tech and magic artifacts.
  • In the Family Guy Superhero Episode "Super Griffins" from "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1", the Griffins abuse their powers to exploit the general populace, inspiring a comically poor attempt by Mayor Adam West to get his own powers by replicating their nuclear origin. It just ends up giving him lymphoma. The crazy part is this actually succeeds at stopping the Griffins, because seeing how desperate they made him causes a Heel Realization.
  • Justice League: The second season of Unlimited deals with the US government's efforts to build a force capable of stopping the JLU in the event they go rogue. Naturally, they end up going the route of the Well-Intentioned Extremist and a bit of Jumping Off the Slippery Slope when their efforts includes such things as creating Tyke Bomb Super-Soldier clones with a shelf life shorter than a decade, trusting Lex Luthor and other super criminals, as well as turning JLU member Captain Atom against Superman. The pilot of JLU specifically says that the non-super Green Arrow is a member specifically to call them on abuses of power.
  • The Legend of Korra begins with the main character having to deal with a violent uprising of people who can't bend the elements, and so use technology, martial arts, and superior numbers to threaten the democratic government of Republic City. While these "Equalists" are essentially terrorists who simply turn oppression on benders, it is shown that non-benders have less economic opportunity and social clout than benders (all five people on the city council are part of the bending minority). Their cause is only further legitimized when the city council approves measures to cut off power to the non-bending ghetto and to arrest non-bending civilians without trials.
  • Princess from The Powerpuff Girls (1998) wanted to be a Powerpuff Girl, but she didn't have any powers, so she gets technology that imitates their powers. Blossom outright tells her that her problem isn't lacking the powers, it's that she's a spoiled, selfish brat who doesn't want to be a Powerpuff Girl because she wants to help people, but because she just wants to be one for the sake of wanting it.
  • On Sabrina: The Animated Series, Tim the Witch Smeller has a murderous hatred for witches because he grew up mocked for being a Muggle Born of Mages, apparently a unique case in this series.


Alternative Title(s): What Measure Is A Non Super, What Measure Is A Human

Top