There’s a whole genre of sci-fi that has a major premise as “humanity is the most powerful/dominating/victorious species in the cosmos…and that’s not a compliment”. I always understood that to be a facet of HFY, but per this sub’s description HFY should be “uplifting”.
Like, a story where aliens try to invade Earth and we kick their asses is definitely HFY. But what if we then enslave the survivors of the alien horde? What if we reverse engineer their tech, go to their homeworld, and nuke their planet? What if we tailor a virus to their genome and purge the galaxy of their entire species, and their little alien babies die screaming in their little alien cribs?
Is that HFY?
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And what if the aliens are right bastards and kind of had it coming?
A really good example of this is when humans decide in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”
SPOILER
to extinct an entire civilization made from uplifted spiders because they have the audacity to inhabit the planet the humans want to colonize
I’ll be honest, I’m a straight import from Reddit HFY, and always saw HFY as a subversion of the “humans are the boring, weak race” you’ll see in fantasy and sci-fi, so HWTF stuff would absolutely count as HFY to me, even if it wouldn’t always be to my particular tastes. It would not count as HFY to this community, which limits HFY to more uplifting/positive stuff, which is understandable because a lot of people want their HWTF marked and labeled as such. Although I don’t think we have caught on on the Fediverse to the point we can afford to have a split-off HWTF community yet.
HFY in the modern sense was originally the result of angry neckbeards being triggered by James Cameron’s Avatar and venting by writing a bunch of stories that basically boiled down to “chad humans showing the virgin xenos what for (usually via mass murder)”. After a while people calmed down enough (or enough non-angry neckbeards got drawn in) to start expanding beyond that original concept, which is when we started getting more “humans are the tide that lifts all boats” and “humans are weird and that’s OK” style stories. So yeah, I agree that even if the genre is more that that nowadays, it’s still a fundamental part of it.
Not exactly what you described, but Battlefield Earth isn’t too far off in spirit. Close enough that it might scratch that itch for you
Not exactly HFY, maybe a sub-genre. However it’s more suited for HASO (Humans are Space Orcs) !haso@sh.itjust.works
