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 single mind on Earth, including animals, plants and even microorganisms was assimilated.
- Or every mind in the universe.
- Even objects that doesn't have a mind on its own were assimilated into the Hive Mind.
- Downplayed: By merging everyone's mind Ecarion can download propaganda directly into their brains. Everyone still has ability to make decisions, though they are influenced greatly.
- Justified:
- Every mind merged into a single cluster is much easier to control than separate minds running around.
- Ecarion believes that division by any sort of difference or isolation would be detrimental to all sentient beings, as they're nearly driven into extinction by the Forever War caused by such conflicts.
- Inverted:
- Everyone on Vespia decides to differentiate themselves by the typical division that puts themselves at risk of discrimination.
- To end the Bug War against a Hive Mind, humans release a virus that turns the drones into Rogue Drones with individual thoughts and personalities.
- 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."
- 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: ???
- Exploited: Ecarion succeeds in merging all minds on Earth... but then it turns out he's only the Disc-One Final Boss, and his actions have made it all that much easier for the true Big Bad to enslave the world via mind control (after all, one mind is easier to take over than billions.)
- Defied: The villain rejects an Assimilation Plot dreamed up by one of his henchmen, because "it would get boring too fast."
- It turns out that even with immense supernatural power, human minds are too individualistic and violent to be merged like this, to Ecarion's absolute despair.
- 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?"
- 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.
- Rare optimistic deconstruction: Ecarion sees that, given an ego, most people end up very unhappy. His Assimilation Plot, instead of violating everyone's privacy, is more of a mass "enlightenment", in which everybody lets go of their ego and realises that everything is truly "one".
- Against all odds, Ecarion succeeds and creates the World Mind... Which then finds itself totally alone, having absorbed all minds into itself. The lone mind spends its time angsting in a World of Silence.
- Ecarion's plan was to end selfishness, but as the only sapient being on Earth, the World Mind ends up being monumentally selfish.
- 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.
- Enlightenment works at first, but then people decaying into the trope as we know it...
- The World Mind seeks to alleviate its loneliness by finding friends through the cosmos. Of course, the only thing that could possible be scintillating conversation for a worldmind is another worldmind, so it plants the idea of an Assimilation Plot into random species throughout the cosmos...
- But at least that selfishness doesn't harm others, because there are no others.
Be the first to be assimilated.
