Humans are always special

I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, and I'm probably one of the last people who has not seen the ending yet, even if I have read enough about it to know what's going to happen.

Before reaching the ending, Mass Effect 3 feels like a natural extension of 1 and 2, just taking the plot and making it even more epic than before. I've read in TvTropes that the first game is based on science-fiction in the eighties, and the second follows more closely the philosophy of the nineties. This trend would proceed then to the third one, with an apocalyptic setting similar to Battlestar Galactica. I like the game so far, and I know that I can decide to ignore the ending and I will get a nice story that spans long hours of gameplay. However, there are things that bother me, of course.

One of these things, that appears heavily in other games, books, movies, etc., is the fact that humans are always "special". In Mass Effect, for starters, you will always be a human. You will always be in the military, as some kind of elite soldier, and all your actions will benefit or not impact humanity. Here one can argue that, for example, saving the Krogans may cause the extinction of humanity in the future, but the point here is that this is a long term situation that may or may not happen.

In the games there is several "specieist" characters, but you cannot use a renegade option to disagree with them. Sure, Mass Effects is an "RPG-for-Dummies", but I feel there's a wide range of options that are just never presented to the player. And the central idea everywhere is what I commented, humans are special.

When creating a science-fiction world, the writers had the chance to explore all these different cultures, completely alien to us....but humans are somehow better in lots of ways, even if it doesn't make much sense. They get access to the galaxy government sooner than other species, they manage to impress all the rest with their "adaptability"(because the Krogans clearly have trouble to adapt, for example), the bad guys target them because of their "bigger genetic diversity"(somehow more diverse than the Asari, a species that actually takes genetic information from other species and adds it to its own), and so on.....

It's a little detail maybe since a big part of the game, specially if you play the paragon route, is to insist on the idea that you should respect and accept each species with their differences and work together. But this detail always bothers me, because it invokes the "white male old producer" image as the force behind it. By that I mean that this, in my opinion, shows that the writers were forced to make sure humans were special, because the producers of the game wanted protagonists that would be idealised versions of themselves. Therefore, they wanted white, male and more or less young humans, and the humans had to be the special ones, the protagonists. It seems that they expect that there's no other way to relate to the protagonist if the protagonist does not comply with these specifications.

There's a chapter of Doctor Who that reminds me of that too. Doctor Who in general treats humans in a very special way, since the Doctor goes to great lengths to save them from the current threat, while sometimes other species are more easily sacrificed. But there was one episode with the 11th doctor that was specially bad in that sense.... The double episode where a group of humans drills too deep, and find a dormant species of human-lizards, that were the original inhabitants of earth. In this chapter, the lizards attack and capture some of the humans, but it's the humans who actually kill one of the lizards first. With any other species, the Doctor would condemn them for this, and make war against them. In this case, the human is forgiven, and the lizards are forced to keep dormant, because they cannot coexist well in this time and age.

I feel sometimes we're too proud of ourselves, and plenty of works of fiction cannot achieve the idea of maybe not considering ourselves so special. With so many attention to the humans, chances are lost to explore other fictional species, and that's really a shame.

Of course there are examples of this being exactly the opposite, like in the Chanur Saga,  But in the most popular works, it's harder to find this brave approach of putting us in a secondary plane. And I think it's a great missed opportunity to make science-fiction more diverse, specially in games and movies...

Introduction

I love to play games, I love to travel, and sometimes I create rants in my head about these and more topics. Lately I had the idea of sharing some of these rants. This blog should serve that purpose, even if no one ever reads it^^. We'll see how it goes...if nothing else, it will be a nice way to order some thoughts^^