Assimilation Plot/Playing With
Basic Trope: A villain decides to unify mankind through mass fusion of minds, ultimately eliminating division and isolation.
- Straight: Big Bad Ecarion in Mechanical Messiah Aluabath decides to merge every mind on Earth into a single cluster.
- Exaggerated: Every mind, including animals and even some plants.
- Or every mind in the universe.
- Justified:
- Ecarion believes that division by any sort of difference or isolation is not beneficial to the human race.
- Every mind merged into a single cluster is much easier to control than separate minds running around.
- Inverted: Everyone on Vespia decides to differentiate themselves by the typical division that puts themselves at risk of discrimination.
- Subverted:
- Ecarion merges every mind on Earth into a giant red sphere... but actually the red sphere is a virtual reality machine where the intelligent beings live as usual.
- Ecarion's threats of assimilation were misinterpreted; he merely meant "you will become citizens of my glorious empire, and your culture will be supplanted by my own," not "your minds will be merged as one."
- Double Subverted:
- ...However, an entity/a glitch in the virtual reality merges the separate minds into one.
- ...But the unification under The Empire ends up making every mind to connect to each other and one superior Hive Mind through The Virus.
- The last step of Ecarion's conquest, however, turns out to be slowly assimilating all minds into one loyal Hive Mind anyways.
- Parodied: Ecarion wants to merge everyone into one Tang-y being simply because "it sounds pretty deep."
- Deconstructed:
- Ecarion's allies don't approve of his real plan, resulting in an Enemy Civil War. His former allies and the heroes obliterate Ecarion.
- Merged as one mind, people have no privacy and are forced to share thoughts and feelings with strangers and their enemies. As a result, the newly created entity is schizophrenic. And I Must Scream, indeed.
- Reconstructed:
- Ecarion's allies don't approve of his real plan, resulting in an Enemy Civil War. They fall to Ecarion, and are the first to be assimilated.
- ...which was Ecarion's ultimate purpose after all.
- Zig Zagged: Ecarion's plan works, and everyone on Earth becomes much more accustomed to a lack of differences, but can't stop assuming since their minds are connected to themselves and a single hive mind, but issues between thinking are easily resolved.
- Averted: Ecarion decides to rule everyone as their god instead, and shapes the Earth in his name in another way.
- Enforced: The author was running out of ideas for the Big Bad's ultimate plan.
- Lampshaded: The villain is reading a copy of Childhood's End in quite a few scenes.
- Invoked: ???
- Defied: The villain rejects an Assimilation Plot dreamed up by one of his henchmen, because "it would get boring too fast."
- Discussed: "There are times when we almost always have to merge every mind into a single core thinking area."
- Conversed: "Did that guy really have to do that, I mean merging everyone into Lipton and stuff?"
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