History Main / Blankslate

* ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverseTheMovie'': [[spoiler:Amethyst]] becomes this after being stricken with IdentityAmnesia. All of the other Gems affected [[spoiler:at least know their place in Homeworld's HiveCasteSystem and what they were made for, but Amethyst instead repeats and mimes whatever's done in front of her. All this implies not only that Rose, Garnet and Pearl had to teach her to talk after they found her, but that this state was probably due to her "overcooked" status by having stayed in the ground longer than normal.]]

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* ''WesternAnimation/GravityFalls'': Blind Ivan literally has no idea of who he is after losing his memories of the Society of the Blind Eye. Mabel gives him a new identity and he promptly believes it. Averted with the society's other members because each one of them already had a life outside it and still remembers it.

* ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'': While most of the Nobodies have their own memories to fake emote, Roxas and Xion does not, as they are essentially a zombie when they first appeared in Days before they eventually starts forming a personality as time goes own.

->''"What's interesting to me.. .is that you don't call out to God. It isn't a question of faith; it's just vernacular. [[ColdBloodedTorture Anyone in this much pain prays]], or at least curses, but... we take God from you too. You really ''are'' a shell."''

* ''VideoGame/BlazBlue'': Lambda-11, after having being revived by [[MadScientist Kokonoe]], was mind-wiped and reduced to a Blank Slate because the [[AndIMustScream memories]] inside her old body threatened to overwhelm the new soul inserted [[spoiler: ([[{{Yandere}} Nu-13]])]]. However, even then, she slowly started to develop a new personality, [[spoiler:especially when Nu's memories started to come back]].

^* The Last Castoff from ''VideoGame/TormentTidesOfNumenera'', being an ArtificialHuman 'shell' left over from [[BodySurfer The Changing God]] after it jumped to a new body.

-->'''DeWitt:''' I'm talking about a clean slate.\\

* From ''Literature/{{Worm}}, [[TheCorrupter Jack Slash]] accuses Oni Lee of being this. Jack nominated Oni Lee as a prospective member of the [[QuirkyMinibossSquad Slaughterhouse 9]], but quickly realized that Oni Lee had little to no motivation; that he was just an unimaginative robot, waiting for his orders. In a somewhat [[MotiveRant pretentious dialogue]], Jack notes that he ''hates'' blank slates.

* The historical figures in ''BillAndTedsExcellentAdventure'' are blank slates, as they have never encountered modern culture. Their individual personalities quickly assert themselves, where each past-dude finds a new interesting thing in the present.

* Wreck-Gar in ''TransformersAnimated'' is malleable to the point of changing alliances based on the last suggestion he hears. Repeatedly. He eventually settles on being "a hero" (at least as close to one as he can understand), but only after someone suggests that he stops taking suggestions.

* Prometheans in ''TabletopGames/PrometheanTheCreated'' refer to the process of coming to life as "waking up on the slab"-waking up in an adult body with no knowledge of ''anything'', except for basic physical coordination and one language spoken by the person (or people) whose corpse the Promethean now occupies. The odds of their creators being there to teach them anything are pretty low, as well, so they have to learn fast.

* Prometheans in ''PrometheanTheCreated'' refer to the process of coming to life as "waking up on the slab"-waking up in an adult body with no knowledge of ''anything'', except for basic physical coordination and one language spoken by the person (or people) whose corpse the Promethean now occupies. The odds of their creators being there to teach them anything are pretty low, as well, so they have to learn fast.

* There's a lot of hints in ''ChronoCrusade'' that Fiore started out this way before she became the subservient {{meido}} for Aion and Joshua. She often still ''insists'' she's one, but she has quite a bit more personality and will than she lets on. In the manga, she possibly would've ''stayed'' this way if [[spoiler:Joshua hadn't mistaken her for Rosette when they first met.]]

* All babies are the closest approximation to this trope in real life. To what extent exactly babies are blank slates is the subject of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture nature versus nurture]] debate, the war-ridden, trench-furrowed contested territory between biology and the social sciences. The paradigm that the human mind is a blank slate at birth was first formulated by Creator/{{Aristotle}}, but it became especially important with the development of John Locke's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism empiricist]] theory of knowledge in the 17th century, who [[TropeNamer began the use of the term]] in the Latin form "tabula rasa", at least in regards to human beings.