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Possession Implies Mastery
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A reasonably common fan fallacy based on the notion that the possession of a piece of technology, excluding things specifically described as a Black Box, implies that the owner has a full understanding of its workings and mechanisms, the principles on which it operates, and can adapt and use those principles in other matters in a reliable way, and can even undermine them as necessary.
In other words, anyone who owns a car is fully capable of building a car, and ought to be able to build an anti-car weapon.
This makes more sense when dealing with governments, mind you, who are both interested in and good at reverse-engineering; on the other hand, this presupposes that other cultures' governments are similar to the US.
This fallacy is often reinforced by Mr Fixit, who generally can adapt any piece of technology he gets his hands on to do whatever the plot calls for.
Not the case in a Scavenger World, where people forgot how to make most of the stuff After The End. Compare How Do I Shot Web, which is the inverse superpowers version of this trope. Contrast Black Box.
Has nothing to do with Demonic Possession.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Conspicious by its absence in Macross (or at least the first third of Robotech), where barely understood higher technology acts like it. Multiple plot points involve the protagonists being forced to use a foolhardy technique or maneuver and having it blow up in their faces. The Cool Ship first takes off using alien antigravity generators, which proceed to tear through the hull and float off into the sky. The second attempt is done with ordinary engines. This actually works somewhat in their favor since their enemies are kept continually off guard with each stunt, unable to decide if their completely unpredictable enemies are pathetic amateurs or half-crazed tactical geniuses.
- On the other hand, the Zentraedi could operate all their technology - but when something broke (such as the big screen in Breetai's command deck), all they could do was clean up the mess and make do without because they were kept deliberately ignorant of how to create or repair technology.
- Shirou of Fate/stay night develops the ability to construct imitations of legendary swords out of seemingly nothing. This also somehow reconstructs the original users' skills at using said weapons, so possession in this case really does imply mastery, or at least proficiency.
- It's actually used as a plot point in UBW that Gilgamesh and Shirou, as mere "owners" rather than "wielders" of their weapons, generally suck in comparison to other servants in direct combat because they don't have the mastery gained by focusing in one weapon. Shirou actually points this out, and wins because Unlimited Blade Works provides him with an infinite amount of duplicates that are summoned faster than Gilgamesh pulls stuff out of his arsenal. He uses the duplicated proficiency and overload the duplicates to repel or destroy Gilgamesh's originals and forces the latter on the defensive.
- This is the power of the Gandalfr Familiar, the position held by Saito, in Zero No Tsukaima. If it's made for battle, he can use it. This is demonstrated when a shiny display sword given to him by Kirche completely fails in battle.
- Haru Glory's Ten Commandments sword in Rave Master. It has ten forms, and Haru seems to know exactly what every form does the moment he needs it, such as bringing out Runesave to save Elie without having to kill her. This is however justified since the Rave of Knowledge explicitly provides this insight.
- In Bleach, this is quite the opposite for pretty much anyone with spirit abilities. Especially captains, no matter how much of a genius they're stated to be. Which explains just why characters like Ichigo and Toushiro can keep getting pretty much curb-stomped, despite their power levels and genius. They have it - doesn't mean they've mastered it yet. Kubo seems to take great pleasure in proving this page's trope very, very wrong...
Comic Books
- Subverted mercilessly in Marvel Comics' GLX-mas Special #1, where the second Grasshopper is taking his first jumps in a brand-new super-suit. After foiling a villain, Grasshopper is approached with a dinner invitation by his unwitting sister. After denying her advances, he makes a heroic exit by engaging the suit's "Maximum Jump" ability, which propels him into space, killing him instantly. Sidenote: to this day, there have been three Grasshoppers in Marvel continuity, and not one have them have survived more than a single issue. The most recent one debuted and was killed in all of three panels.
- Played totally straight with one of the characters from the comic book Strikeforce Morituri, whose superpower was the ability to analyze and understand anything she touched. Since their primary opponents were a race of alien Planet Looters with scavenged technology, this was very useful.
Film
- The Matrix series features mankind using advanced lightning guns, not-so-humongous mecha, and oldy-style (well, compared to the machines) hover-tech. This trope had to be explained during a viewing of the series when this troper's father kept commenting how stupid it was the mechs and ships didn't shoot lightning as well.
- Even as a black box, it would be fairly easy to just mount one of the rifles in place of those useless impossible-to-aim gatling guns...
- A little known UK movie called Morons from Outer Space plays with this trope, as the aliens who crashland on Earth are assumed to be a higher order of intelligence. In point of fact, they are the interstellar equivalent of ignorant tourists who rented a camper and ended up running off the road in the wrong town.
- Similarly to above, the heroes of the film Spaced Invaders are the most incompetent members of their race.
- In the Iron Man film, Obadiah Stane pilots powered armor (that wasn't even made by him) for the first time and is immediately able to go toe to toe with Iron Man.
- Possibly justified, as Stane is the kind of person who would order the engineers and scientists to make the armor easy to use, as he would want to quickly sell it to the highest bidder.
- For example, after the computer-aided targeting system is taken out, Stane becomes unable to hit Tony at ranges of less than thirty feet. The suit's systems had been doing all the work.
Literature
- The alien races in the universe of David Brin's Uplift novels use nothing but technology handed down by the older races which raised them to sentience; furthermore the conservative/reactionary cultural bias of this entire eons-old multispecies civilization treats innovation as anathema and tantamount to blasphemy, as it implies that what was good enough for your creators isn't good enough for you.
- On the other hand, this is justified by the fact that they all have access to the Library, and it is also implied that the Library might actually contain everything that it's possible to know, at least without maturing as a species.
- The Fithp in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1985 novel Footfall are a young alien species who came across a cache of technological knowledge left by another, older species and built their entire civilization around it. However, they never developed any kind of science and have a cultural tunnel-vision centered around the technologies in the cache; not only are they unable to analyze or extrapolate base principles from the ancient knowledge, but they cannot imagine or cope with a technology not laid out in detail for them in the cache.
- The Yuuzhan Vong in the Star Wars Expanded Universe consider it heresy to even consider attempting to devise new biotechnology. Their race has possessed and used for their entire recorded history a cache of biotech they claim was given to them by the gods. New designs have secretly been introduced by their Supreme Overlord, who claimed the designs came from (fictional) parts of that cache only he can access.
- The Posleen of John Ringo's ''Legacy of the Aldenata''. All of their tech was ripped and copied from the
long dead withdrawn from the galaxy and negligent Aldenata (in a sort of angry Cargo Cult fashion) and they only vaugely understand how it works, but they can, and do, produce more.
- The limited A Is and the 'Net' that controls their society is copied into the new systems, and when long unused alarms go off people don't understand what Incoming Artillery Strike means.
- After a bit of evolution in action, the survivors start to learn.
- Played with by Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless. Arthur Dent's only practical skill is making sandwiches, so when he crashes on a primitive alien world he can't offer any of humankind's knowledge and inventions ("He couldn't even make a toaster"). But the alien villagers still venerate him as 'The Sandwich Maker' since they hadn't thought of the idea.
Live Action TV
- Star Trek frequently uses this trope. A trained Starfleet officer can operate any alien machine the first time he sees it. Voyager is particularly egregious here: with no starbases to visit, the crew had to make do with what they could buy or find in the Delta Quadrant, and they seldom had trouble making it work. The Doctor's mobile emitter, "borrowed" from the 29th century, is the classic example of a device they shouldn't have been able to repair, modify, or understand — and it did give them trouble now and then, but not really enough.
- It's so commonplace in Trek that when it was averted by Scotty's encounter with a Macintosh in Star Trek IV, it seemed kind of odd that an engineer capable of getting an abandoned starship working again with just two or three assistants had apparently never heard of a computer mouse.
- This Lampshaded in an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine where minion of the Dominion notes that, while they otherwise hold the Federation in contempt, Starfleet Engineers are famous as being the undisputed masters of technology adaptation and modification. "Turning rocks into replicators."
- The Borg do this too. The silliest case involved Seven of Nine's Borg nanoprobes accidentally assimilating the Doctor's mobile emitter. This resulted (via cloned crewman) in a "29th-century Borg drone"... based on one piece of technology from that era.
- This trope was reversed in the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" when Spock managed to show that Mastery Implies Possession. Using 1930s technology and limited funds he managed to create a processor interface out of vacuum tubes that was only slightly larger than a modern PC. This despite the fact that his machine would be unable to even add 2+2.
- A) The entire contraption, including all of the vacuum tubes, filled a freaking room. B) The device was based off of his malfunctioning Tricorder, he simply used 1930s tech for field repairs.
- The title character in The Greatest American Hero received an Applied Phlebotinum powered Super Hero suit at the start of the series, lost the instructions, and spent most of the series amusingly floundering about trying to figure out how to use it correctly.
- Stargate SG-1 tends to play with this trope fairly successfully on occasion. In one episode it's revealed that the SGC computers can't even interpret many of the Stargate's feedback signals, and others are disregarded on a routine basis in order to establish a connection. This is suggested to be a major contributing factor to the various mishaps of one type or another that have occurred when using the gate. Another episode introduces the Air Force's protptype hybrid fighter craft, combining standard Earth technology with that of Go'auld Gliders - which promptly goes wrong due to incomplete understanding of the alien technology incorporated in the design.
- On the other hand, it completely contradicts the many episodes in which they show a gate can be used simply by rotating the ring manually and all you need is a power source.
- On the gripping hand, what many consider a standard home phone is a wireless touch-tone device with things like Caller ID. At the same time, I can still plug a rotary phone into the wall and make it work, even if it ends up ignoring a lot of the features the system is capable of, and even some of the data sent over the wire.
- Sylar's base power (which he shares with his father) inherently grants him this effect; as soon as he aquires a new abilily, he instantly understands how to use it perfectly. Everyone else on the show suffers How Do I Shot Web at first (Peter suffers it constantly).
- For that matter, at least for this editor, it seemed implied that he was able to understand not just powers and machines (the clocks he finds comfort in) but most everything else too. Be it plots and schemes or people. He just never really had an interest in anything but powers (and with the amount of power he has, never really needed too) to avoid some of the mistakes he made.
- In Power Rangers, this is pretty much the standard. Hand five people giant robots, watch them pilot them effortlessly, including the part where they merge into one giant robot.
- Averted in the Doctor Who episode Attack Of The Cybermen, in which the Cybermen plan to use a time machine to change history. The Doctor cannot understand why the Cybermen would do something so catastrophic, since it would be just as damaging for them as for everyone else; it falls to another character to point out that the Cybermen's timeship is stolen, not built, and that they do not understand its principles.
Real Life
- As mentioned earlier, a subversion of this would be real life governments/militaries, but can even extend to average reverse engineer projects. Most notably, The Islamic Republic of Iran, unable to acquire spare parts for their mostly American fleet of aircraft and armor after the Revolution, have become able to likely reproduce the F-5 Freedom Fighter in full (they make an upgrade), and they can make a significant majority of the parts for the F-4 Phantom and F-14 Tomcat. Intending to stop the latter, the Americans crushed and destroyed all F-14s in their retirement houses, so no parts could find their way to Iran.
- Speaking of Tomcats, Iran allegedly sent both a Tomcat and a Phoenix missile to the USSR in exchange for military aid during the Iran-Iraq War - the Phoenix seems to have inspired the newest long range Ato A missile, the R-77.
- Subverting again, Heck, Soviets are old hands at this. The Tu-4 is a DIRECT COPY of the American B-29.
- For direct, read "exact". The Tu-4 was developed based on B-29s which made emergency landings in the USSR, on Stalin's orders to make copies of the B-29 down to the last detail. According to legend, the last detail included a 20mm hole in the fuselage, from Japanese cannon.
Tabletop Games
- The Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40000 are pretty much the same. More than a fair proportion of their military equipment relies on technology long since lost. Tech-Priests pray to the machines to convince them to fix themselves, while doing rituals they believe appease the machine spirit rather than realizing they're the ones fixing it.
- On the other hand, this universe has a Clap Your Hands If You Believe bent and appeasing the machine spirits has a track record of keeping individual machines in service for milennia...
- The Orks would seem like a straight play of the trope, as the "Mechboyz" know tech on a genetic level, including captured enemy hardware. Looking deeper, all Ork tech runs on the psychic gestalt generated by Ork belief in the fact that the tech will work, to the point where a human opening up an Ork gun will see a load of junk parts in a shoddy casing.
- This is an unfortunate fact of life for Yu-Gi-Oh card game players; duelists looking for a quick and cheap (figuratively, though definitely not literally) victory will "netdeck", or go online and copy a tournament-winning deck card-for-card. The theory is that playing a tourney-winning card will give them the ability to win more, and assuming they'll be able to pull off all of the best combos and strategies associated with that deck as the original player has. This should not work in reality, but somehow it does.
- Within the (relatively) simple ruleset of a card game, the idea of being able to reverse engineer the winning strategy for using the deck just from looking at its parts makes a bit more sense. When we're talking about spaceships, or even motorcycles... not so much.
- In Magic The Gathering, due to the ever-changing meta-game, don't expect to win a large tournament with a netdeck. By the time you master it, really good players will have analyzed the famous "winning deck", found how to beat it, and played the cards that stop it on its track. If you made the same analyze, you may have modified your deck accordingly in order to reduce its vulnerability to those decks. If you just netdecked in hope of a cheap win and thought your opponents will behave exactly as your friends at the local FNM... You're facing troubles.
- Parodied in Paranoia, where players are often ordered to test out new experimental equipment in the field, and report back on the results. Unfortunately, because the equipment is always well above their security clearance level, they cannot be told how it works, or even how to operate it. Hilarity Ensues.
Video Games
- One of the early complaints in World Of Warcraft's "The Burning Crusade" expansion were the Draenei, derisively termed 'space goats' for supposedly adding an intrusive sci-fi theme. Technically though, their technology was provided by vaguely demigodlike beings and they traveled thru a dimension; they were never a space-faring race, explaining their low-tech compromises in Azeroth.
- Dante of Devil May Cry likes this trope. Whenever he acquires a new weapon, he instantly has intimate knowledge of how it works, no matter its complexity or peculiarity. Usually this knowledge of demonic weaponry is displayed by an over-the-top cutscene, which was taken to a new extreme in the fourth game where Dante demonstrates masterful use of Pandora, a demonic briefcase that can transform into a multitude of weapons including: a huge rocket launcher, a huger rocket launcher, a laser cannon (not shown in the cutscene) a large 3-bladed shuriken, a gatling gun, and a flying missile platform capable of a Macross Missile Massacre. Within the first minute and a half of acquiring the weapon.
- Pandora is stated as being capable of transforming into 666 separate forms, yet Dante only uses a handful, in or out of cutscenes, thus it's first use could just simply be the demonic weapon version of hitting all the buttons and seeing what works...
- Its worth noting that most of Dante's weapons are incarnated forms of demons he has just defeated, thus his 'skill' with them could be more to do with them being subjugated to his will, and being aware of what it is he wants them to do.
- Which would mean that Dante has become their master. If anything, possession of these weapons requires mastery of them.
- After playing through Shadow Of The Colossus, one gets the idea that while Wander can shoot a bow well and ride his horse like a pro, he swings a sword like he has no idea what he's doing with it. Makes sense, since he's supposed to have stolen the sword. Maybe.
- It's a plot point in Mass Effect: the peoples of the galaxy have access to Mass Relay technology, and are able to use it quite effectively, but have no real understanding of it, which is just what the Reapers want. By guiding the development of sapient species, the Reapers are more easily able to wipe them all out every few millenia.
- In Final Fantasy VI, Sabin (a martial artist that spent the better half of 10 years living secluded in a wooded valley,), Cyan (a technophobe samurai,) and Shadow (a ninja who lives off the land and presumably doesn't hang around machines much) all manage to master the use of Magitek Armor within minutes of finding some, when it took members of the Empire that owns them months, if not years to do the same.
- Where is it ever said how long it took Imperial Pilots to master using the Magitek Armors? Besides that, Sabin comes from a highly mechanized kingdom, Cyan clearly had trouble figuring the Armor out at first, and Shadow Was an Imperial Spy. Aside from that, Cyan figures out how to use the Armor from Sabin's suggestions to work hand-positioned levers a certain way, so the controls are probably idiot-proof.
- I'm not sure what you'd call it (a subversion?) but Advance Wars DS has the wonderful plot point of having to reverse engineer using two COs at once. Keeping in mind that using a CO is basically having the CO stand there (At least as far as I've seen it explained plus some educated guessing).
- In every game in The Legend of Zelda series, once he finds an item Link is automatically able to use it almost perfectly (pending on how well the player is of course). Somewhat subverted in the case of items like the sword and shield, which many of the games give a tutorial for and thus does have Link train to learn to use them.
- Averted in the X-COM games; alien technology is totally unusable until researched. This troper felt that was a little unfair for many items, given that the guns all had human-style grips, triggers and ammunition magazines.
Webcomics
- Averted in Captain SNES, when Alex gets the Mouse. He's supposed to be able to say a phrase to activate its power, but has no idea what the phrase is, and the people who gave it to him thought he'd already know, so they didn't bother to find out themselves.
Western Animation
- Wade can understand anything given 10 seconds to scan it with the Kim Possible Kimmunicator.
- The same thing that happened to The Greatest American Hero above happened to Fenton "Gizmoduck" Crackshell in Duck Tales.
- This sort of thing happens to Invader Zim all the time. Remember the Megadoomer?
- Lampshaded in Gargoyles: Lexington builds a motorcycle. Brooklyn asks why this is such an arduous task for him, given that he has ridden one before, and Lexington responds, "You've ridden a horse before; could you build one from spare parts?"
- Ben 10 avoids this nicely. It's obvious that Ben has only the vaguest inklings of what the Omnitrix is capable of.
- The Plumbers, however, managed to reverse engineer a lot of alien tech successfully. We're never shown how long it takes but they certainly were good at it.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, Admiral Zhao deduces that Zuko is the Blue Spirit, a thief who uses dual swords, after seeing that Zuko had two swords hanging in his quarters. Zuko does protest that they're just decorations, and he has no idea how to use them, but of course he's lying.
- In Megas XLR, when Coop first gets the Megas, he somehow successfully attaches a car in place of its missing head/cockpit. He then pilots it skillfully, with no understanding of how it works, or what any of its features actually do. But then, the controls change from episode to episode. Make of that what you will.
- Handwaved, in that Coop was the one who did the heavy modifications. Doing that without blowing it up is a miracle, however...
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