History Main / NeglectfulPrecursors

* Your Honor, The Elder Gods of the Franchise/CthulhuMythos would like to plead guilty, [[BlueAndOrangeMorality except that they have no concept of guilt]].... also, they want permission to use the buffet, that being what they prefer to call the jury.

* Your Honor, back in the Marvel Universe, the [[Comicbook/{{Eternals}} Deviants]] left enough advanced tech down in [[BeneathTheEarth Subterranea,]] along with multiple bioengineered [[ServantRace servant races]] and [[{{Kaiju}} giant monsters]] just waiting to be ordered around by the first shmoe to come across them, for both the [[Characters/FantasticFour Mole Man]] and [[Characters/IncredibleHulkCentralRoguesGallery Tyrannus]] to become super-villains. Of course, since the practical upshot of this is two guys making life harder for surface humanity, [[{{Jerkass}} the Deviants are probably fine with it.]]

** They ceded control over the Orange Light of Avarice to Larfleeze so they wouldn't have to bother containing it themselves (implicitly washing their hands off the entire Vega System, creating a safe haven for the criminal Spider Guild and their own even less restrained cousins the Psions and allowing the Citadel to enslave Tamaran, killing millions).

** The Guardians, in fact, have a noted record for hiding the records of their past failures, even though knowledge of this could prove critical in eventually saving the Universe as a whole, to make themselves look not completely terrible and/or incompetent. Examples of this include the sealed Apokolips campaign (in which hundreds if not thousands of Lanterns were slaughtered against Parademons), the existence of the Parallax Fear Entity (which led to the destruction of the Corps and the near-death of the universe), ceding control over the Orange Light of Avarice to Larfleeze so they wouldn't have to bother containing it themselves (implicitly washing their hands off the entire Vega System, creating a safe haven for the criminal Spider Guild and their own even less restrained cousins the Psions and allowing the Citadel to enslave Tamaran, killing millions) and most egregiously, the smear campaign against Abin Sur and Ganthet and the sealed records pertaining to the truth about Nekron and the prophecy of the ComicBook/BlackestNight, in which they ''continuously'' suppressed vital information and fomented discord within the seven Corps, which were all vital in the banishment of Krona and the end of the Blackest Night.

** The Guardians, in fact, have a noted record for hiding the records of their past failures, even though knowledge of this could prove critical in eventually saving the Universe as a whole, to make themselves look not completely terrible and/or incompetent. Examples of this include the sealed Apokolips campaign (in which hundreds if not thousands of Lanterns were slaughtered against Parademons), the existence of the Parallax Fear Entity (which led to the destruction of the Corps and the near-death of the universe), ceding control over the Orange Light of Avarice to Larfleeze so they wouldn't have to bother containing it themselves (implicitly washing their hands off the entire Vega System, creating a safe haven for the criminal Spider Guild and their even less restrained cousins the Psions and allowing the Citadel to enslave Tamaran, killing millions in the process) and most egregiously, the smear campaign against Abin Sur and Ganthet and the sealed records pertaining to the truth about Nekron and the prophecy of the ComicBook/BlackestNight, in which they ''continuously'' suppressed vital information and fomented discord within the seven Corps, which were all vital in the banishment of Krona and the end of the Blackest Night.

** The Guardians, in fact, have a noted record for hiding the records of their past failures, even though knowledge of this could prove critical in eventually saving the Universe as a whole, to make themselves look not completely terrible and/or incompetent. Examples of this include the sealed Apokolips campaign (in which hundreds if not thousands of Lanterns were slaughtered against Parademons), the existence of the Parallax Fear Entity (which led to the destruction of the Corps and the near-death of the universe), ceding control over the Orange Light of Avarice to Larfleeze so they wouldn't have to bother containing it themselves (implicitly washing their hands off the entire Vega System, creating a safe haven for the criminal Spider Guild and their even less restrained cousins the Psions and allowing a constant cycle of war between Tamaran and Okaara) and most egregiously, the smear campaign against Abin Sur and Ganthet and the sealed records pertaining to the truth about Nekron and the prophecy of the ComicBook/BlackestNight, in which they ''continuously'' suppressed vital information and fomented discord within the seven Corps, which were all vital in the banishment of Krona and the end of the Blackest Night.

** The Guardians, in fact, have a noted record for hiding the records of their past failures, even though knowledge of this could prove critical in eventually saving the Universe as a whole, to make themselves look not completely terrible and/or incompetent. Examples of this include the sealed Apokolips campaign (in which hundreds if not thousands of Lanterns were slaughtered against Parademons), the existence of the Parallax Fear Entity (which led to the destruction of the Corps and the near-death of the universe), and most egregiously, the smear campaign against Abin Sur and Ganthet and the sealed records pertaining to the truth about Nekron and the prophecy of the ComicBook/BlackestNight, in which they ''continuously'' suppressed vital information and fomented discord within the seven Corps, which were all vital in the banishment of Krona and the end of the Blackest Night.

* Your Honor, back in the Marvel Universe, the [[Comicbook/{{Eternals}} Deviants]] left enough advanced tech down in [[BeneathTheEarth Subterranea,]] along with multiple bioengineered [[ServantRace Servant Races]] and [[{{Kaiju}} giant monsters]] just waiting to be ordered around by the first shmoe to come across them, for both the [[Characters/FantasticFour Mole Man]] and [[Characters/IncredibleHulkCentralRoguesGallery Tyrannus]] to become super-villains. Of course, since the practical upshot of this is two guys making life harder for surface humanity, [[{{Jerkass}} the Deviants are probably fine with it.]]

** Back in the Marvel Universe, the [[Comicbook/{{Eternals}} Deviants]] left enough advanced tech down in [[BeneathTheEarth Subterranea,]] along with multiple bioengineered [[ServantRace Servant Races]] and [[{{Kaiju}} giant monsters]] just waiting to be ordered around by the first shmoe to come across them, for both the [[Characters/FantasticFour Mole Man]] and [[Characters/IncredibleHulkCentralRoguesGallery Tyrannus]] to become super-villains. Of course, since the practical upshot of this is two guys making life harder for surface humanity, [[{{Jerkass}} the Deviants are probably fine with it.]]

* A brief has been filed by the Kindgom of Astimata on behalf of the protagonists in ''Lightnovel/UndefeatedBahamutChronicle''. The, yet unnamed, race responsible for littering the continent, if not the planet, with numerous ruins, seven of which have been found and documented, left these structures mostly intact, only being damaged by the ravages of time. Inside these structures are large numbers of feral living weapons that attack any nearby humans with indiscriminate fury, killing them for sport, and should the humans somehow manage to defeat them, breeding chambers have been found within (at least in episode 8 of the anime continuity) which simply replace them. Absolutely no signage or warning of any kind is placed around these structures, the only documentation exists ''inside'' them. Furthermore, the only truly effective way to fight these monstrosities is the advanced, and long forgotten, weaponry and technology found within said structures, with little, if any, instructions in its use, leading to horrific, and unwilling, human experimentation, and at least one case of a massive living weapon of mass destruction, the Abyss Ragnarok being unleashed and wiping out numerous countries, and at least one case of a "ruins" structure itself being used as a weapon of mass-murder, by Hayes, an AxeCrazy OmnicidalManiac that the ruin's own internal systems recognized as being a blood descendant of said race. In addition, a lower-tier member of said race, Krulcifer, was also once found inside one of these structures with absolutely no idea of her heritage, or any information regarding these structures, except what she could get her own hands on, and discovered, purely by accident, that she's an "administrator" which can bypass certain security measures but would still be attacked by the living weapons mentioned above.

%% * Your Honor, [[AngelSanctuary the humanity, the court of angels and the demons of the nine nether planes]] would like to drag [[GodIsEvil God]] before the court.

* The prosuction would like to accuse [[spoiler:humanity]] of being this in ''Fanfic/TheWritingOnTheWall'', for constructing an imposing tomb thousands of years before [[MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic ponies]] learned how to produce masonry. [[spoiler: It wasn't a tomb, but a nuclear waste storage facility, and the ponies that explored it are now dying of radiation sickness.]]

* The prosecution submits the case of extra-dimensional aliens seen in ''FanFic/{{Fractured}}'' and its sequel, ''Fanfic/{{Origins}}'', both ''Franchise/MassEffect''[=/=]''Franchise/StarWars''[[spoiler:[=/=]''[=Borderlands=]''[=/=]''[=Halo=]'']] [[MassiveMultiplayerCrossover Massive Multiplayer Crossovers]]. While they had noble goals, their [[ItsAllAboutMe selfishness]] and a [[DuelingMessiahs species-wide fight]] over how to interpret their own shared faith resulted in some rather poor decision-making, as follows:

* Your Honor, The Elder Gods of the Franchise/CthulhuMythos would like to plead guilty, [[BlueAndOrangeMorality except that they have no concept of guilt]]....also, they want permission to use the buffet, that being what they prefer to call the jury.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'': The Craftworld Eldar. The very literal [[DefectorFromDecadence Defectors From Decadence]] saw what the debauchery of their civilization would result in and tried to stop it. They failed, and in a last resort to survive they constructed small artificial planets to escape the downfall of their species. That they seem to regard the failure to prevent the heart of their empire turning into [[NegativeSpaceWedgie The Eye of terror]] as "Neglectful" and they are now [[TheAtoner actively trying to fix the damage they've done]], the Court therefore infers a plea of guilty, as well as stipulation to a sentence of eternal community service. The Court finds no defect, and the Craftworld Eldar are permitted to proceed as they have. Further, Craftworld representatives have offered an additional penance: [[RedemptionEqualsDeath upon the extinction of their species, their combined souls will combine to create a new cosmic entity, which they say will destroy the cosmic entity created by their decadence, and hopefully heal the damage of its birth]].

* ''WebAnimation/IfTheEmperorHadATextToSpeechDevice'': The Emperor has this view of TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'s Old Ones, not deigning to give every other lifeform a proper push towards evolution and fucking up every attempt at actually doing something good. Or, in his words:

* The prosecution submits the case of extra-dimensional aliens seen in ''FanFic/{{Fractured}}'' and its sequel, ''[[FanFic/SovereignGFCOrigins Origins]]'', both ''Franchise/MassEffect''[=/=]''Franchise/StarWars''[[spoiler:[=/=]''[=Borderlands=]''[=/=]''[=Halo=]'']] [[MassiveMultiplayerCrossover Massive Multiplayer Crossovers]]. While they had noble goals, their [[ItsAllAboutMe selfishness]] and a [[DuelingMessiahs species-wide fight]] over how to interpret their own shared faith resulted in some rather poor decision-making, as follows:

*** That's what the ATA gene was for: locking out access to their technology for any non-Ancients. Dr. Rush does say in ''Universe'' that the ship ''Destiny'' pre-dates the ATA gene and genetic locks, so it's clearly something they added later on, perhaps for that very purpose (security). Unfortunately, that didn't stop sufficiently determined societies from getting around the locks (if you build it, somebody's going to find a way to tear it down), and the presence of the gene in a subset of the human population is thanks to a couple of post-Atlantis Ancients "getting frisky" during their brief time back in the Milky Way before ascending.

*** Point #3 also applies to the Asgard vis-a-vis the Replicators, and #4 is the fault of Rodney [=McKay=] editing the Asuran base code, thereby allowing them to edit it themselves and remove the restriction on attacking their creators.

* The Asgard would like to point out that the reason the Ancients didn't fight the Ori or Adria was that they were in fact more powerful than the Ancients. It is stated that any human who believes in the Ori makes them more powerful on the ascended plane. As the series went on the population of the ENTIRE Ori galaxy and a large portion of the Milky Way was helping the Ori, and all that power switches from being split by a whole race to concentrated in one single being. It would've been frankly suicidal for the Ancients to directly intervene, but letting SG-1 fight in their own way kept the focus away from themselves. Also, why would the Ori need to cheat and create a human with some Ori powers that wasn't ascended? Because the Ancients were preventing them from intervening directly, which would have been a thousand times worse.\\\

## The [[spoiler:[[LostTechnology loss of FTL drive and other advanced technogies]], the loss of which to the present day (and possibly beyond) leaves us with no way to evacuate the planet in case of an [[DeathFromAbove asteroid strike]].]] (And no, you can't blame [[spoiler:Lee Adama]] for everything; the colonials and cylons all thought this was a good idea.)

** All kinds of {{Big Bad}}s and [[MonsterOfTheWeek Monsters of the Week]] returned from previous 'defeats' on cue.

* The Old Ones' counterparts in ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}} Fantasy'' are no better than the 40K version, disappearing shortly after Chaos arrived and leaving their servants the Lizardmen unable to properly run the place and a bunch of unfinished projects that would spiral out of control and create even more problems for those living within.
* The ''TabletopGame/ScarredLands'' franchise. The back story to the series is a war against the amoral creators of the world, the Titans, and their rebellious children, the Gods. The Gods were unable to completely kill the Titans, so they just maimed and imprisioned them. Despite completely oblierating two of the Titans, the other Gods were left mostly whole and just imprisoned. Since then, the remains of the Titans has damaged the land and corrupted countless creatures, even the two who were almost destroyed. Despite the fact that the Gods now rule the world, they haven't shown themselves to be in any hurry to clean up their mess.

* ''TabletopGame/StarDrive'' is filled to the brim with ancient alien ruins, some of them quite advanced. Humans of various faiths (Hatire and Ancientist) find religious inspiration in these ruins, but this probably wasn't the intent of the precursors.
* Blackmoor and Evergrun, two ancient civilizations from the TabletopGame/{{Mystara}} ''[[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons D&D]]'' setting, aspired to technological greatness but succeeded only in damn near [[ApocalypseHow blowing up the world]]. Oh, and they left some spare nukes sitting around for their barbaric successors to tinker with, which is why the Known World now has a contaminated wasteland called the Broken Lands in the middle of it.

* The Ancient Martians from ''TabletopGame/RocketAge'' weren't all responsible for the downfall of Mars, but their millennia long petty power struggles during the Canal Building era ensured that Mars never truly recovered. They also subverted the purpose of their religion and social structures for entirely selfish reasons, leading to Mars' current stagnant culture.

** ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' has the Remnant builders, later identified as the Jardaan, who thanks to a lack of concrete evidence zigzag between here and BenevolentPrecursors. [[spoiler:Some four hundred years before, they created the angara, apparently either because they could, or for a process they dubbed "Renewal", which involved terraforming an entire stellar cluster. Unfortunately, they got into a fight with an unidentified race who dropped a NegativeSpaceWedgie on them, causing the Jardaan to declare "OhCrap Let's get out of here" and run for it, leaving the control hub for their terraforming network behind. The recordings found suggest they did plan to come back sooner or later, but four hundred years on there's not been a peep from them... meanwhile, the angara were left behind on planets with malfunctioning terraforming tech, with no instructions, to make do.]]

* The case against the P!k Gardeners of the ''Roleplay/GlobalGuardiansPBEMUniverse'' is, granted, mostly circumstantial, but the prosecution is confident that the jury will reach the correct conclusion. The first action these so-called "Gardeners" took upon discovering ancient Earth some sixty-five million years ago is to completely wreck Earth's biosphere by dropping a nickel-iron asteroid some ten kilometers in diameter onto what would later be the Yucatan penninsula. After performing this massive act of vandalism (an act which only prevents them from being charged as AbusivePrecursors because no sentient dinosaur-descendants survived the act itself), they fade into the woodwork for ''sixty million years''. When they return, they continue their program of vandalism by tinkering with the genetic code of certain primate species, giving them the potential to develop superpowers, but failing to provide supervision or instruction in the use of those superpowers by once again disappearing into the blackness of space, never to be seen again. The resulting chaos caused by the appearance of those superpowers can be measured in the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in damages. The prosecution rests.

* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'': {{God}} is, in Dean's words, "just another deadbeat dad with a list of excuses". He created angels to be ever-obedient soldiers and made execution the punishment for rebelling against his commands despite most angels never even receiving proof of his existence. He is also responsible for the creation of the Leviathans, a species of pure evil {{Eldritch Abomination}}s which he knew had the potential to destroy all of Creation. After realizing this, rather than taking away their HorrorHunger or even getting rid of them outright, he merely temporarily banished them to Purgatory. Furthermore, the fact that he locked them away before creating anything else meant that when they finally broke out, nobody had any clue how to fight them. After Lucifer's rebellion, God was so heartbroken by the corruption of his [[ParentalFavouritism favourite child]] that he abandoned Heaven entirely.

* ''VideoGame/QuakeIV'' exposits that the main villain, the Strogg are supposedly an initiative that broke free of their creators after a major war somewhere in the galaxy. Now the Strogg have become a menace to civilizations and invade to [[TheAssimilator assimilate]] organisms into their war machine.

* ''Fanfic/TheWritingOnTheWall'' has an imposing tomb constructed thousands of years before [[MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic ponies]] learned how to produce masonry. It eventually becomes evident that it was built by some sort of precursor civilization. [[spoiler: It wasn't a tomb, but a nuclear waste storage facility built by humans.]] Subverted, in that the precursors tried to warn them away, but because the ponies couldn't read their writing and just assumed it was a setup to deter grave robbers, the clear warnings became SchmuckBait. [[spoiler: It should be noted that this is an actual RealLife concern to people working on this problem: that all their attempts to warn people off will only entice future lifeforms that can't read the languages used to warn them.]]

** Their second expedition to prehistoric Earth was an experiment to test and gauge the threat level of the transformers. When the robots failed, the Vok's third machine was revealed - one of Earth's moons turned out to be a heat ray capable of a Class X ApocalypseHow event. This machine was used, and, if not for the intervention and sacrifice of Optimus Primal, would have achieved its' purpose. Additionally, this device was indeed in orbit long before the arrival of the transformers.
** Also, their fourth machine, while not quite as destructive, still posed an enormous threat, once it was captured by Megatron. The security protocols were almost laughably inept at keeping them robots out, much less preventing a hostile takeover.
** Finally, there is the arrival of the Vok themselves: intent on destroying the reality-breaking criminal Megaton, at a time when doing so would have created an equally damaging rift in time (i.e., the original Megatron's spark was still inside his body). Furthermore, their lack of willingness to cooperate, if not downright contempt for Optimus Primal's warning about these consequences resulted in him nearly being killed.

* The Consu from the ''Literature/OldMansWar Universe'' have [[spoiler:created the sentient race Obin without a sense of consciousness. Even though it turns out the Consu considers lacking consciousness to be an ideal state of being, the fact that they never told the Obin this little fact, and treated the Obin like a bunch of irritating insects who should stop asking questions definitely qualifies them as neglectful.]]

** First, the [[OurZombiesAreDifferent T'lan Imass]]. Their ritual sealing of [[OurOrcsAreDifferent captured Jaghut]] and Forkrul Assail proved ineffective in the long-term as any person with sufficient strength and interest could remove the rock and thus release the trapped being. In addition, their actions directly contributed to the destruction of magic at various locations around the world, which continues to this day.

** And not to forget the [[spoiler: Azathanai]], who can be credited for creating most of the known races in the [[TheVerse Malazanverse]]. Some still have some connection to whatever race they created, but some simply don't care anymore or think their creations deserve what they get.

* The [[StarTrek Humans, Romulans, Klingons and Cardassians]] collectively give notice and file suit against the race identified only as "The Precursors" for the irreparable damage caused to their respective native genetics due to the willing and deliberate insertion of the Respondents own DNA into the native life which permanently altered the ecology of the planet.

** While the case of the Atlantean Empire and Asgard's involvement in it would normally be considered a clear-cut case of this trope, giving humans technology they were most definitely not ready for, the prosecution accepts that Asgard has learnt its lesson and most definitely intends not to do it again.