Plunderers of Knowledge - TV Tropes

All the math I ever learned,

brain-draining operation!

• Superman: This is the M.O. of one of the Man of Steel's greatest foes, Brainiac throughout most of his incarnations. He travels the universe downloading the knowledge of planets, often shrinking and bottling up entire cities to store on his ship. To ensure any collected knowledge will become valuable, he destroys these worlds and moves on to the next. One of the cities he collected is the capital city of Krypton, Kandor, which he took before Krypton's destruction (Fortunately, Superman was able to retrieve the bottled city and keep it safe in the Fortress of Solitude).

• Calvin and Hobbes: To get out of having to answer a math problem during class, Calvin makes up an elaborate rhyming poem about how he was abducted by aliens while playing in the snow, who proceeded to put a suction cup on his head and suck out all the knowledge of math problems from his brain.

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Due to becoming self-sufficient quickly and not wanting to be evil, Ami, unlike other Keepers, doesn't attack other people for basic resources and either advances a moral cause or pursues something she can't achieve by research. She attacks Malleus for the secrets of dungeon heart creation and invades the Avatar Islands to learn more about Hero Dungeon Hearts.

• Dexter's Laboratory: Ego Trip: Mandark’s young adult self steals Dexter’s Neurotomic Protocore in the future and uses it to drain the knowledge and intelligence from everyone else on Earth (except Dexter, who was out of range due to being underground at the time), turning the rest of the human race into primitive idiots and making himself even smarter so that he can be the smartest person in the resulting World of Dumbass, with nobody smart enough to rival his intellect.

• Batman Forever: The Riddler invents a machine he calls the Box, which can be attached to a TV and beam whatever show or movie is playing into the brains of the people watching. While using his boss, Fred Stickley, as an unwilling test subject, he realizes he can also use it to transfer people’s intelligence and knowledge into his own brain, making himself smarter and turning the viewers into drooling idiots. After teaming up with Two-Face and going on a crime spree, the Riddler (in his Secret Identity, Edward Nygma) uses the money they stole to start his own tech company, mass-produce the Box, and sell it throughout Gotham City. He then secretly uses the Boxes to steal the intelligence of all his customers, while also sharing some of the stolen intelligence with Two-Face.

• Bernice Summerfield: The Grel are a race driven by gathering information, and think of themselves as the monarchs of knowledge. In reality, they're more akin to data pirates, who use axes with data monitors to cut open people's heads and suck out the data from underneath, and they've destroyed entire planets in search of the most basic of facts.
• Worm: The source of parahuman powers, the two Entities, are at the same time highly intelligent, and also very stupid. They have immense power and knowledge but are essentially incapable of creativity in how they use it. As a result, they routinely distribute shards of their power to other races to watch what people will do, deliberately stirring up conflict to force people to innovate by pitting them against each other — then, once the Entities are satisfied that the Cycle has run its course, they'll harvest all the shards, with all their new data, and blow up the planet (and every Alternate Universe version of it) to fuel their journey to the next one.

• The Outer Limits (1995): In the episode, Second Thoughts, a mentally handicapped man named Karl works as a janitor in a lab, and an elderly scientist asks him if he’d like to be smart. The scientist is dying, so he’s invented a Brain Uploading machine. With Karl’s permission, he transfers his intelligence, knowledge, memories, and consciousness into Karl’s brain so that he’ll be able to live on in Karl’s body (though Karl still has complete control of his body). Throughout the episode, Karl kills more men and uses the brain-uploading device to gain their intelligence. First, he accidentally kills the owner of the lab, who was trying to take the machine from him. Using the two men’s intelligence, he makes millions on the stock exchange in an attempt to win the affection of a woman named Rose (who’s engaged to a poet), but it doesn’t win Rose over. Then, he purposely kills a detective who was investigating the death of the man Karl accidentally killed, and he takes the detective’s intelligence, too. Finally, Karl kills Rose’s fiancé and absorbs his mind to gain his poetry skills so Rose will love him, but Rose still rejects him. To make matters worse, Rose’s fiancé had suicidal thoughts, which were only kept in check by having Rose in his life, and absorbing the man’s consciousness causes Karl to have the same suicidal thoughts. The episode ends with Karl shooting himself in the head.
• Star Trek: The Borg are a Hive Minded collective of cyborgs driven by a desire to assimilate all valuable traits of other species into themselves. In addition to physically incorporating all captured individuals into their Hive Mind, they are also rapacious thieves of technology and technical knowledge, although they place no value on cultural works. By the time they encounter the Federation, they have absorbed the technologies of countless species and civilizations, which has made them into the single most advanced and powerful "culture" in known space.
• Wynonna Earp: A Season 4 Villain of the Week starts eating the brains of smart people in the town in an effort to make himself smarter. Subverted in that this doesn't do anything because he's literally too stupid to realize that that's not how it works, and all that happens is that he just develops kuru.

• BattleTech: The Clans frequently have "batchalls", formalized combat trials, with each other to determine possession of things like land or the rights to a new resource, as well as any new technologies that one of the Clans may have developed. Some of the Clans are somewhat notorious for this, like Clan Smoke Jaguar, who have taken stuff from virtually everyone with this method.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Nagpa, in their 5th edition incarnation, are ancient, power-hungry wizards who are cursed so that they can only learn from the ruins of old civilizations. They spend their time trying to accelerate the end of civilizations so they can plunder their knowledge.
• Mage: The Awakening:
  • The Mysterium, the resident Proud Scholar Race of the Pentacle, believes that (magical) knowledge must be preserved. This leads to their Archaeomancers raiding ancient tombs for artifacts and their Acquisitors stealing them from Sleepers or even fellow Awakened if they feel like the knowledge isn't safe in the latter's hands.
  • The Logophages are Left-Handed Guardians of the Veil Legacy that steal secrets and then consume them, destroying them utterly. They say it's because those secrets are things Man was not meant to know. Sometimes, they're even right.
• The Adeptus Mechanicus of Warhammer 40,000 holds knowledge to be sacred above all things and will happily plunder any vault, database, city and heavily-defended Necron tomb if they believe it has whatever they're looking for.

• Age of Wonders 4: One of the Shadow-affinity empire skills, "Stolen Power," grants +200 mana and +200 knowledge upon conquering a city.
• Carmen Sandiego: Several of Carmen and her gang's Impossible Thefts fall into this trope. To give just two examples, they once stole the recipe for Chicago-style deep dish pizza and the steps to the tango; in the latter case, the Chief explicitly says that the knowledge of how to do the dance has been pulled from the minds of everyone in Argentina.
  • Carmen Sandiegos Thinkquick Challenge makes Carmen's insatiable thirst for knowledge the main plot. She invents a fleet of KnowBots who have the power to literally steal knowledge from various sources; we see them using lasers to pull hieroglyphs from Egyptian pyramids, text from books, and data from a globe. Carmen also uses a Quirky Mini Boss Squad of "Master Thieves", and each case involves one of those crooks stealing concepts—including alphabetization, the theory of relativity, how to make microchips, and musical harmony—to further their own goals.
• In Civilization V, preparation and conduct of war usually entail lagging behind those civilizations that were busy with peaceful development and empire-building at the time. A notable exception to this is Assyria, whose "Treasures of Nineveh" unique ability rewards it for conquering a city by providing a free technology known to its previous owner (occurs once per city). Moreover, unlike the regular Library it replaces, Assyria's unique building, the Royal Library, has a Great Work of Writing slot, making Assyria have on average twice as many of them relative to other civs. As such, instead of having to worry at some point about where to place further Great Works of Writing, Assyria needs to figure out how to fill all the available slots for them, which typically results in it waging wars against civilizations with enough literature masterpieces. Accordingly, the lion's share of Assyria's success lies in capturing enemy cities, an activity oftentimes beneficial for it from simultaneously military, scientific, and cultural perspectives.
• The Elder Scrolls: The followers of Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge (particularly forbidden knowledge), are not above this approach if a piece of knowledge is being withheld from their master. For example, in Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC, he sends his champion Miraak to Solstheim where he instigates a world-threatening disaster just to learn the "secrets" of the Skaal... which are ultimately benign ways of communing with nature and kept secret more out of tradition than anything. He very much exemplifies Evil Is Petty and treats the mere idea of a secret being kept from him (no matter the reason or how trivial the secret might be) as unimaginably offensive.
• Fallen London: Dr. Gideon Orthos and his Fleet of Truth are a gang of crooked, plagiarising archeologists who prefer to mug their rivals and publish their research as their own rather than discover things fair and square. The player can give them A Taste of Their Own Medicine after becoming a corsair and raid the Fleet for their stolen knowledge.
• The Brotherhood of Steel from the Fallout series is a faction dedicated to the goal of collecting and storing advanced technology for the sake of preventing it from falling into the hands of less responsible and more villainous groups of the Wasteland. While its members are generally willing to negotiate and compromise, as one of the most ideologically driven factions in postwar America, the Brotherhood of Steel is ready to use force to get what it wants when the situation calls for it — a likelihood that increases the more rare, advanced, and dangerous the technology in question is. Notably, this policy only applies to weapons technology. When it comes to science or tech in the realm of medicine or agriculture, they couldn't care less. This attitude, combined with their willingness to resort to force to get what they want, has given them a reputation as glorified raiders with fancy armor.
• Final Fantasy XIV: The Illuminati are a group of goblins who have their base in Idyllshire. They collect technology and knowledge and believe that no one else can have this information and have caused fights over it. In fact, the first time you encounter them, they're attacking a goblin community because one of them has a unique cheese recipe. It later turns out that they're actually trying to reactivate the Primal Alexander.
• God of War Ragnarök: Odin's main motivation is collecting knowledge, and he's willing to do just about anything to get it, from manipulation to murder.
• Guild Wars 2: The Inquest will use whatever means necessary to take inventions or research they feel might be useful to them at some point, and "whatever means" includes assassins or mega-golems. Asura characters fight off Inquest attacks in both the intro mission and the first chapter of the Personal Story.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Zig-Zagged with the Cybernetic Consciousness, a Cyborg faction whose members firmly believe in the necessity of leaving behind the emotional, right-brain-based half of humanity for the sake of maximizing the capacities of the logical, left-brain-based one. Upon capturing an enemy base, they are able to steal one technology, allowing for more valuable war booty than usual. The thing is, the Consciousness is the most peace-loving faction in the Alien Crossfire expansion, if not the whole game, meaning that while they always can initiate wars to get more techs, they rarely do, especially given how they enjoy +2 to Research and thus have all the capabilities to be in the science lead entirely on their own.
• The More AI Personalities mod for Stellaris adds an AI personality named the Plunderers of Knowledge. Such empires are fascinated by knowledge, though they believe that its most natural use is for war and conquest, which is why they tend to pose a threat to most of their neighbors. During a war, they even have a specific dialog line where they urge the enemy to hand over their libraries to them, but unfortunately, unlike energy and minerals, the plunder of which can be a war goal as long as an empire has either the "Barbaric Despoilers" or the "Letters of Marque" civic, technologies and research points cannot be militarily acquired, meaning that the Plunderers of Knowledge stand out not gameplay-wise but thematically.

  "If an item does not appear in our libraries, it does not exist. We have done our best to index and catalogue all we've learned over our many centuries of conflict and peace."

• A one-character-example with Brainiac from the DC Animated Universe, who was originally a Kryptonian supercomputer designed to gather knowledge, but turned evil. Having hidden the facts of Krypton's imminent destruction so he could focus his resources on saving himself, he begins seeking out other civilizations so he can acquire all knowledge about them, by any means necessary — and then destroy them, so that the knowledge he has is all there will ever be to know about them. Plus, he considers the knowledge more valuable if he's the only one who has it.
• Futurama has the Brainspawn, an alien species resembling floating human brains.
  • In their debut episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid", it's claimed that the Brainspawn just want to destroy all intelligent life in the universe (as the thoughts of other species are abhorrent to them). But the Big Brain leading the Earth invasion force still takes time to visit a library, in order to absorb all of Earth's knowledge before they destroy the planet.
  • In "The Why of Fry", the Brainspawn are constructing the Infosphere, a huge repository of all information in the universe. As soon as the Infosphere is complete, they plan to destroy the universe, so that no new information can be created, and the Infosphere can be a perfect archive forever.
• Invader Zim: In "Gir Goes Crazy and Stuff", after Zim locks GIR in Duty Mode, GIR goes rogue and sets out to collect information on Earth. Duty Mode GIR gets a big metal backpack with extendable metal tendrils with robot hands at the ends, and goes to an Earth "information center" (a library). He then uses the backpack’s arms to grab all the library’s computers and the heads of every human in the library, and starts downloading all the information from the internet and the brains of the humans (which seems to rob the humans of their intelligence, as they are left with vacant expressions on their faces).

  Duty Mode GIR: The knowledge. It fills me! It is neat.

• The Simpsons: In Treehouse of Horror XIV’s second segment, "Frinkenstein", Professor Frink reanimated his scientist father’s corpse, and Frink’s father later attends a Nobel Prize ceremony where his son is going to receive the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Frink’s father (who had previously gone around Springfield stealing people’s body parts to replace his own), is overcome with lust for the big brains of all the scientists present. He then removes the top of his own head and goes on a rampage, pulling out the other scientists’ brains and attaching them to his own brain to increase his intelligence until his son stops him.