Aliens As Allies

See:

The Alien As Threat
The Alien As Threat II

I grew up with heroes and villains as:

Cops and Robbers
Cowboys and Redskins
Cavaliers and Roundheads
Allies and Axis
Astronauts and Aliens
Capitalists (?) and Communists
superheroes and supervillains

Comments
(i) That should be "Cowboys and Indians" but I wrote "Redskins" to get three "C and R" antitheses.

(ii) In the 1950s, we said "spacemen," not "astronauts."

(iii) My upbringing had taught me that Communism was bad and that its opposite was Capitalism but I remember realizing that I did not know what "Capitalism" meant. Some real learning had to start.

(iv) Romans and Barbarians could have been presented as another antithesis and probably was in some juvenile fiction. (It is also relevant to Poul Anderson and particularly to Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys.)

(v) We become sophisticated enough to realize that, in human-alien conflicts, it is not necessarily the aliens that are the aggressors. We do not mind when Ythrians kill Terrans in Poul Anderson's The People of The Wind. In "The Hall of the Mountain King," Chapter Sixteen, a kzin nicknamed Spots rips out a man's throat. However, Spots is an ally of our human hero, Jonah, whereas the man with throat ripped out is a bandit. Again, another bandit, about to machine gun Spots, has his head blown off by "Tyra-human," i.e., the woman, Tyra Nordbo. We have gone way beyond human beings versus aliens but that is what life is like. Alien and human barbarians sack Earth during the Troubles in Anderson's Technic History. See Baldics, Gorzuni And The Commonwealth.