Alien Conquistadors
Basically I’m looking for media where the world is invaded by aliens who want to Civilize humanity. They tell us they’re here to save our souls, but what that winds up meaning is slave labor, forced conversions, torture, and executions. Bonus points if it covers Earth’s later status as a colony to Space-Spain, and more bonus points if this is all tied to the Space-Doctrine of Discovery uniting Space-Europe under the Space-Pope
I know there have to be a few popular stories out there with premises like this, but I can’t think of any, and I’d like to try some
It’s a spoiler and only half fits, but this is the twist premise of
A Dark Room.
The game leads you to believe that you’re a human exploring an alien landscape, but you’re actually the alien and your race has subjugated humanity.
The movie Captive State but smaller scale the metaphor was more about american police than space conquistadores
One of the Three Body Problem books has
spoiler
every human rounded up and put into a concentration camp in Australia. But that’s more like settler colonialism, and ends up not even being a major focus anyway iirc
The Last Angel has some of this as the backstory. Humanity gets attacked by the Compact, an alien empire that wants to bring civilization to lesser species and essentially is white mans burden ideology cranked to 11. Humans say fuck that, and fight back, including making sentient AI(aliens really hate this), kill one of the aliens’ leaders(aliens really, really hate this) and aliens decide to exterminate humanity. The story starts like 2000 years after this, and follows both the AI of a human ship, who has been self upgrading and fighting a 1 ship guerilla war for centuries, and the descendents of the last few human survivors, who managed to escape genocide, and instead were conquered and their culture subjugated. Strong parallels to amerikkkan treatment of natives. Essentially imagine if american colonialism, but native people somehow built a jet fighter in the middle of being colonized. that occasionally blew up a military base or oil pipeline and the crackers couldn’t manage to find and kill it for centuries. But the main story is military sci-fi. Also lesbian relationship that I dont remember being written in a male gazey way is always a plus.
