Hive Mind

"I know, kids! Let me show you this one little site."
"What is a drop of rain, compared to the storm? What is a thought, compared to the mind? Our unity is full of wonder, which your tiny individualism cannot even conceive."
—The Many, System Shock 2

Two or more characters (frequently twins) are in such perfect harmony that they seem almost to be one person with two bodies. They finish each other's sentences, never seem to need to talk to communicate, and may even know what is happening to each other from far away.

In Sci Fi or Fantasy series, the connection may actually be a true shared mind, either with each member contributing to the whole, or the separate bodies being puppets which some central mind controls remotely. It makes sense that usually the first variant is sensitive to losses and avoids overt violence, but in the second, it's only the question of whether lost bodies will be replenished and it's inclined to expand itself. Expect "individuals" in such hives to be considered very killable by everyone else as well. It is not unusual for it to start out as the former and then slip into the latter as a series progresses and the writing staff changes. The Virus is often a Hive Mind (e.g., the Borg) and the Evil Matriarch becomes its Hive Queen.

Hive minds are not known to exist in reality—hive insects, upon which the idea is based, communicate intentions and commands through scent and body language. The closest approach to them would be the controversial superorganism concept.

Related to, but separate from Synchronization, where each individual experiences what the other does without necessarily being in rapport with each other. Compare Split Personality Merge, where many minds in one body become one. The opposite of Split Personality. A Hive Mind might be the titular keystone of a Keystone Army. See also Psychic Link for other connections between minds. A related plot is The Evils of Free Will. Contrast Pieces of God. Opposite of Mind Hive. For when all the minds are sharing one body, or the person speaks in plural, see I Am Legion.

See Mental Fusion for the willing version.

On this wiki, you will often see this term used as a nickname for the All The Tropes community, especially our collective power to invoke the Wiki Magic.

Examples of Hive Mind include:

Examples of people acting as though they share a mind

Anime

  • Bakuman｡: Mashiro and Azuki are "on the same wave" as he puts it.
    • And Mashiro and Takagi are basically "one soul in two bodies" as they put it.
  • All four of the parents of Miki and Yuu in Marmalade Boy are so synchronized as to seem at times to be a Hive Mind. This is so pronounced through most of the series that the few times when they don't seem to be in harmony (as when they staged a fight to bring Miki around regarding their odd living arrangement) come to seem even creepier than when they are.
  • The cheerleaders in Negima!?; even though there's three of them, they might as well be one character.
  • Ryou and Fuu from Sketchbook appear to be extremely in sync, especially when playing pranks on other students.
  • The Stand Alone Complex in the appropriately named Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex. Kind of. It's a social phenomenon that happens all the time which involves people enganging in copycat behaviour where there is no original. The people usually have nothing in common except their actions.
    • Even more so the Individual Eleven in the second season, which are actually all controlled by the same virus that infected their brain implants.
  • The Pict aliens in the Axis Powers Hetalia movie. They all say the exact same things at the exact same time, and are trying to get all humans to join them.
  • A Certain Magical Index: In yet another unexpected use of a power, the Mikoto "Imouto" clones use their electrical powers to maintain a collective memory. (Season two of A Certain Scientific Railgun explains how this works in one episode.) They're an interesting example because while they are very much not a Hive Mind, they are brainwashed into thinking they are, to the point that they originally put zero weight on individual lives. After Touma convinces them otherwise, they're like a very large family in constant radio contact.

Comic Books

  • In the classic Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories of Carl Barks, Huey, Dewey and Louie are virtually indistinguishable in appearance and personality, and almost invariably finish each other's sentences. Their ability to pool their intellects (and tap into the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook) makes them smarter than any of the other characters, including wily, savvy Scrooge himself; they're almost always the ones to solve the mystery/resolve the problem.
  • The Astro City story "Everyday Life" features the Gorilla Swarm, an army of insect-headed primates with a hive mind. The story even has them being controlled by a villain (The Silver Brain), making this a double instantiation of the trope.
  • The UOS in Atavar.
  • PSmith in the Buck Godot universe. They did this deliberately to themselves over the course of generations.
    • Which, in an interesting way, drives the plot of their introductory story. Buck is repeatedly assaulted by what appears to be a very angry bald man who loudly declares Buck to be his murderer, and seems to come back all the more frenzied each time Buck manages to incapacitate him. It eventually turns out that Buck, having a friendly drink with some guy (read:PSmith) in a bar, buys the guy a drink he can't quite handle, and the poor sap passes out. Up until this point PSmith had never experienced unconsciousness as a hive mind, so when one of those brains winked out, he reckoned one of his units had been killed.


Film

  • Ben 10: Alien Swarm - The live action movie based off the cartoon series Ben 10: Alien Force. The main antagonist is a swarm of alien nanotechnology chips dominated by a hive mind intelligence aiming to take over the planet. To make the villain easier to defeat, they also introduced a queen controlling the hive.
  • Battle Beyond the Stars has the Nestors as a hive-mind race.
  • "The Octopus" in The City of Lost Children is apparently a pair of conjoined twins who act as a single creature. In addition to working in perfect unison and finishing each other's sentences, the twins scratch each other's itches and taste what the other is eating.
  • Both the Squeeze Toy Aliens from the Toy Story series films and the Moonfish from Finding Nemo.


Literature

  • In Harry Potter, twins Fred and George Weasley often finish each other's sentences and jokes. (Though not nearly as often as Fanon would have it.)
  • Starship Troopers is quite possibly the Trope Maker (or at least the Trope Codifier) for science fiction, featuring a race of intelligent Arachnids divided into different castes and all directed by a central "brain" caste.
  • The ghosts or psychic echo which may or may not exist in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining are said to have a single, collective group intelligence which functions as the hotel's true "manager".
  • A Wrinkle in Time has IT as the Hive Mind controlling the entire planet of Camazotz.
  • The yrr in Frank Schätzing's The Swarm.
  • The Bugs, Baahgs, or Arachnids in David Weber and Steve White's "In Death Ground" and "The Shiva Option."
  • The "phoners" in Stephen King's Cell form flocks with apparent shared awareness within the flock and between flocks in the same geographical area.
  • The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter: direct interfaces between the human mind and computer networks leads to the development of a hive mind. This is not presented as a bad thing, and the hive mind has no interest in doing anything to force anyone to join who doesn't want to, or anything like that.
  • In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy Novel "Legion", the Alpha Legion invoke this trope: They use identity, conformity of appearance, and anonymity as a weapon. To the casual (or even acute) observer, every soldier appears identical (the fact that they all call themselves Alpharius doesn't help). Due to their particular doctrine of being incredibly well informed (beyond even the normal Astartes' capacity for knowledge), and each soldier being just as capable of leading each other as their immediate superiors, they could very well be considered a hive mind. Even more appropriately, the twin Primarchs of the Legion (Alpharius and Omegon) are so identical, they even think, breath, blink, talk, etc in EXACTLY the same way as each other.


Live Action TV


Tabletop RPGs

  • In Mage: The Awakening the Seers of the Throne have access to a group of servants referred to as "Hive-Souled"; essentially, a single mind/soul born in multiple bodies (generally twins or triplets, although modern science has allowed them to greatly increase the potential numbers). Each individual body of a Hive-Soul is essentially just a single component of their collective mind, having no individual personality, and being able to share experience and memory instantly (if one becomes aware of something, the rest are also immediately aware of it) and it can be difficult for any of them to act in a non-synchronised manner unless they are skilled at multi-tasking (although magic can help with this). For the purpose of magic, they also count as a single target; any spell cast on one of them affects all of them equally. This also extends to any kind of physical alteration (including, unfortunately for them, injuries).
    • In the Old World of Darkness, we had Drones, people possessed by a Weaver spirit. (Compare the monstrous Fomori, possessed by a Wyrm spirit.) Although they possessed functional individuality by themselves, whenever two or more Drones were sufficiently close by, they could share each others' minds and senses. One illustration shows a Drone observing from a high point while one on the ground "sees" an enemy sneaking up behind him.
  • In the AD&D Dark Sun setting, members of the insectoid Thri-Kreen race share memories of their ancestors and have some skills "built into" their genetic code so they don't have to learn everything to survive on the harsh world from a very young age.


Web Original

  • Most Wikis, including this one. "Collectively, we know everything. Individually, we're a bunch of idiots".
    • But be careful because, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
  • "Hivemind" is a 4chan meme where people who spend too much time on 4chan internalize certain memes (including hivemind itself) and when given familiar stimulus may respond with very similar answers in rapid succession. To count, the posts have to be made within the same minute. This happens fairly often. This meme has spread across the Internet and is now used by people who have no idea of its origin.
  • The SCP Foundation's SCP-253 and SCP-408 are examples of this. SCP-171 also counts as a hive mind, a gigantic foam-looking colony of microscopic organisms that incorporates any organism into its mass, resulting in a collective consciousness.
    • After 10 minutes of exposure, SCP-427 mutates its participants into "Flesh Beasts", shapeless masses of tissue apparently controlled by a hive mind as seen in the transcript between Dr. [DATA EXPUNGED] and a D-class personnel - "Our biology yearns to join with yours. We welcome you to our mass. Shake the tyranny of the individual."


Western Animation

  • The Delightful Children From Down The Lane in Kids Next Door speak and act in perfect synchronicity; this is less because of telepathy than because they personify conformity.
    • It's never really explained whether they all think the same, whether they all have a mental connection or whether they are just the same person.
      • Later episodes make it pretty clear they are separate people. As for the other possibilities...your guess is as good as any.
      • In the movie about Numbah Zero it is revealed that they were originally an elite group from the KND, but captured by Father and turned into their current state by a special personality altering machine. It went haywire and made the transformation permanent, except for a temporary reversion. And when that wears off they are actually draw to each other by what looks like magnetism.
  • The Skraaldians in the Men in Black series. After Jay kills one, ALL of them want revenge.
  • Phineas and Ferb seem to have a hive mind because Ferb's actions are always in perfect synchrony with Phineas's words. He performs the actions at the same time as Phineas says them aloud. A hive mind would also explain how Ferb knew what Phineas was going to say, before being knocked down with a water balloon, at the end of "Tree to Get Ready".
  • The Bebe robots from Kim Possible, and possibly Kim's twin brothers.


Real Life

  • We might already be part of a hive mind
    • As Irving Janis said: "The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups."
  • Termites, who are in a hive but possess individual—tiny—brains.
  • Sometimes spending extended amounts of time with certain people, such as during a project or secluded vacation, ends with you being close enough to the person that you can finish each other's sentences and the like.
  • Some pairs of twins, and intensely bonded lovers, give this appearance. An extreme example of such twins might be Jennifer and June Gibbons; an extreme example of such lovers might be certain BDSM Dominant/submissive pairings.


Examples of actual shared consciousness

Anime and Manga

  • The Invid of Robotech. At least, until the Regis decides humanity's individuality is evolutionarily superior, and starts artificially creating her own children as Half Human Hybrids.
    • The only change with the Half Human Hybrids is that they can shut down the link, and aren't totally ruled by it. By and large, they're still part of it.
  • Macross Frontier has the Vajra, who are one mind distributed over thousands of individually stupid drones, administered by a Hive Queen hub. Also, the Big Bad Grace O'Connor's conspiracy hive-mind is quite different. The Hive Mind isn't so much a collective as it is a network of implanted people with Grace as an "admin" node, effectively overwriting every connected member's personal desires with whatever Grace wants. (However, it's not made clear if she is the sole node, or whether the Executive Council of the Galaxy Fleet has administrative command as well. The latter is more likely, as she is seen communing with other members of her conspiracy over details.) Her grand scheme was to use the fold quartz and Vajra to spread this network over the entire galaxy, in order to incorporate all of humanity, and surpass the Protoculture.
  • In Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is probably the intended final result of Instrumentality since breaking down individual minds and merging them into one being at the very least happens at one point. Since the ending does not make it clear, it might be more accurate to label it above as a literal Hive Mind...or as something different altogether.
    • Some interpretations assume that it was never intended for life on Earth to exist as individual creatures. It was sort of a cosmic accident, which both the Angels, Nerv, and Seele all want to fix now. It's just the way on how that's supposed to happen on which they disagree.
  • The Mariage from Sound Stage X of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. This is the reason why they are quick to pull a kamikaze upon capture, as any information that one has is shared by every other Mariage. Their battle tactics are even commented by Quattro as being similar to those of insects.
  • The insects from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, though this is only stated outright in the manga.
  • The Galactic mooks of Pokémon Special. Not only do they all look alike, they all move as if one entity.
  • The Festum from Fafner in The Azure Dead Aggressor are a Deconstruction of this; because they are all controlled by a single mind, they have no concept of life, death, emotion, or even information. The Master-type Festum are their version of a Hive Queen, as they can greatly influence the whole (Idun) or become entirely separate entities (Mjolnir/Akane Makabe, Kouyou). They also demonstrate the ability to learn, especially in the case of Idun; it learning hatred and wrath was what provoked their ferocious attacks.
  • Heavily implied to be true of Kyubey in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Later confirmed by Word of God.
  • Saika's "children" in Durarara!!. A particularly strong-willed individual can become Hive Queen, but usually this just means becoming the voice of the Hive Mind. Anri Sonohara is the only one capable of actually controlling it.
  • This appears to be the case for the Anti-Spiral in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Though we only ever see the one, he doesn't appear as though he has a fixed physical form, and always refers to himself in the plural, or refers to himself as the Anti-Spiral race. It's thought that the Anti-Spiral shown is a psychic manifestation of the combined wills and minds of the entire species.


Comic Books

  • In the Ultimate Marvel Universe, one of the variant Skrull races are the Chitauri, who see individuality as a disease, and themselves as the "immune system of the universe". In order to operate among humans, they create an "officer" caste who have a limited degree of individual personality, presumably absorbed (along with physical form) from those they devour.
  • The Stepford Cuckoos of X-Men.
  • Buck Godot, Zap Gun For Hire has PSmIth. (Unusual, in that PSmIth is a population of genetically-engineered humans, and friendly to normal humans.)
  • The Commonality from PS238. Although presented as a benign entity, this is probably not much of a consolation for the one individual human left on the planet when everyone else is adjoined in it.
    • Especially since he was the one who accidentally created it.
  • The Orange Lantern Corps are beings made of an orange energy that resembles fire. They recruit new members by literally consuming them. Their Hive... uh, King is a comically hoggish alien named Agent Orange.
  • One of Spider-Man's lesser villains is Swarm, a swarm of bees whose individual members are each part of a (former) human consciousness.
  • The Phalanx in Marvel Comics, a race of mechanical beings that generate a nanovirus that infects beings that it contacts, turning them into phalanx. The Phalanx all seem to be connected by a sort of hive mind, or at least a general motivation.
  • The Zylons from the Star Raiders graphic novel are a galaxy-ruling Hive Mind species.


Film

  • The alien invaders of the film Independence Day, so says the theory.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull uses this trope to a huge extent, even stating that the aliens in the film are a hivemind.
  • In the 2007 film, The Hive, a colony of ants living on an island in South America develops a collective consciousness, possibly through the help of aliens. This eventually goes to the extreme of them being able to act as one entity, and even build an enormous supercomputer underground, made up entirely of ants.
  • The City of Lost Children features "The Octopus," conjoined twins who speak in tandem, scratch each others' itches, taste what the other is eating, and generally behave as a single organism with eight limbs and two heads.
  • The alien in The Faculty is a parasitic Hive Queen that infects host bodies to spread itself out. The infected lose their senses of self and become part of the collective conciousness.
    • "All of you were just like the others. So, I thought I would give you a taste of my world."
  • The alien in Slither is a parasitic Hive Queen that infects host bodies to make drones that it inhabits with its own consciousness.
  • "Eight" in The Specials is a superhero who inhabits eight separate human bodies, gaining the ability to to take a tropical vacation while simultaneously dispensing wisdom to teammates at the base.
  • The Arachnids (or Bugs) from the Starship Troopers. The series expanded on them having a caste system, with each subspecies filling a specific role. The Brain Bugs and Behemacoatyl (from the third film, Marauder; the largest Bug seen so far - its body engulfed almost an entire planet) have extreme psychic abilities that can be used to control all bugs in the colony. In the second movie, Hero of the Federation, the General (who's been infected by a mind-control bug) uses this as a justification for exterminating humanity:

General Jack Gordon Shephard: "Poor creatures. Why must we destroy you? I'll tell you why. Order is the tide of creation. But yours is a species that worships...the one over the many. You glorify your intelligence... because it allows you to believe anything. That you have a destiny. That you have a right. That you have a cause. That you are special. That you are great. But in truth, you are born insane. And such misery... cannot be allowed... to spread!"

  • The film sharing the name of this trope has a feminist version of this.
  • Nestor, one of the aliens in Battle Beyond the Stars is an entire hive-mind race. They are very bored with their life and join the heroes because it should provide exciting new experiences.
  • The Strangers in Dark City. They're on the search for human individuality.


Literature

  • The Primes from Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga are a textbook example of a superorganism. They evolved as mindless, animal-like "motiles" that had the ability to merge with each other into a more intelligent, sentient "immotile", which would then spawn and direct other motiles by sharing neural impulses with specialized tentacles. Since each immotile can transfer its mind from one body to another, they are all essentially immortal (and most immotile collectives are actually clusters of hundreds of linked bodies), and also insanely hostile to any life form that is not under their control, including other immotiles. Once they discover radio, they each become a true Hive Mind, singular consciousnesses inhabiting armies of motile soldiers and immotile clusters. Then they proceed to kill each-other and everything else.
    • Their xenophobia and expansionist imperative extends to the entire Universe. An immotile cannot envision a Universe containing anything other than itself.
    • The sequel to the Commonwealth Saga, the Void Trilogy, introduces Multiples - humans who spread their minds through multiple cloned bodies, with thoughts and emotions distributed through gaia motes and cybernetics.
  • Ygramul the Many from Michael Ende's The Neverending Story is a giant swarm of arachnids that share a collective/hive mind and together appear like a giant spider. This secret is revealed only to its poisoned victims who Ygramul is convinced will certainly die. Atreyu doesn't, due to a fortunate or destined encounter.
  • In Hosts, this combines with The Virus. The "Unity" takes over the minds of infected individuals, basically killing their personality, free will, etc. and inhabiting their body. They all share thoughts, try to expand the Unity and infect everyone to take over the world, and are quite willing to sacrifice individual members to meet that goal.
  • The Taurans in The Forever War. It is only after the creation of Man, a group intellect derived from humans, that the human race learns what a mistake the war was.
  • The Animorphs Prequel novel The Andalite Chronicles reveals that the Taxxons have a hive mind, though Yeerk control seems to cancel this.
    • Well they have a hive, but it's not quite clear how much of a Hive Mind they have. They would have to have some degree of individuality in order to defect to the Yeerks in the first place. The Howlers may be a better example.
    • The Taxxons are individuals. The Living Hive that spawned them is another organism. Some are loyal to it, others not. Unusually enough, it's a good hive.
    • Animorphs does have the Howlers which are definitely a hive mind, as the memories of each individual is shared with the rest of the species.
    • At one point, the Animorphs morph into termites. When they morph into a species of animal for the first time, the Animorphs have to contend with the animal's instincts. In this case, they ended up locked into the termite hivemind, and very nearly got stuck in it. For good. The only way they escaped was when Cassie managed to force herself to believe the queen was an ant for long enough to kill her, breaking the connections, at which point everyone got a hold of themselves and demorphed (through a wooden floor - yes, it hurt like hell). The Animorphs never took hive-insect forms again.
  • The Buggers of Ender's Game are the ur-example of the 'controlled by a central mind' variety. One of the causes of the war stemmed from their believing we had those too.
    • They also have multiple Hive Queens, and it's not entirely clear if the queens share their consciousness. They are stated to be separate beings.
  • The human hive living beneath Rome in Stephen Baxter's Coalescent. An example of a scientist working out how an actual human hive might develop over the course of centuries, by means of strict isolation, divergent genetic makeup, social conformity, and pheremonal cues. Turns way creepy with a multi-millennia jump into the future, when future humans rediscover the evolved, highly hive-ified human subspecies.
  • A character in Spider Robinson's Lady Slings The Booze is one person with two bodies. Apparently she started out as identical twins, but her parents treated them as one person and eventually she stuck that way. Sadly, Arethusa loses one of her bodies at the end of the book.
    • It should be noted that the two bodies share a telepathic connection, which helped reinforce the "one mind, two bodies" thing. It also plays with muscle memory a bit: Only one body can play piano, while the other is much better at their other job. (hint: they work in a brothel (though it's not sleazy, and it's implied that Jesus might be a member)).
  • Spider Robinson seems fascinated with this concept, as many of his later novels form a sort of continuity, with not two different takes on the Hive Mind concept.
    • The first is the Stardance series, where the Hive Mind is created by living alien Phlebotinum that grants telepathy along with a lot of other things.
    • The second is in the series of books started by Mindkiller and extended in Time Pressure, where the Hive Mind is just that - The Mind, created by humans linked up through a computer network that turned sentient.
  • Might be the case with the Grotesqueries in Drakengard.
  • The XCabs in Jeff Noon's Pollen are a fleet of taxicabs whose drivers are connected into a hivemind, forming (and sharing) a map of the city as drive, receiving their orders from the XCab Hive. They have their memories erased when they join, and return to the Hive every night.
  • Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe contains the Conjoiners, who have a fairly high degree of independence - more so since they figured out how creepy they were to other humans.
  • Dæmons in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy are the the manifestation of humans' souls in animal form, therefore a human does share a mind with their dæmon - though sometimes they can conceal secrets from one another.
  • Legion of the Wild Cards novels is a single individual who can grow and inhabit multiple custom-made bodies.
  • The Bug War novels In Death Ground and The Shiva Option have aliens which are telepathically linked. The latter novel's titular Option involves literally rendering lifeless all planets on which the Bugs have established bases, in order to both exterminate the beachhead and disorient the survivors.
  • Like Spider Robinson, Terry Pratchett uses this concept in A Hat Full of Sky where Miss Level is one person, in two bodies. Also like Robinson, one of the Miss Levels gets killed. However, the surviving one learns how to act like she still has two bodies, becoming de facto telekinetic.
    • Also in Discworld, Granny Weatherwax is able to "borrow" animals, and at one point she does this to an entire beehive.
    • Spider the Rat King, the Big Bad of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, was eight blind rats tied together by their tails. The only way to survive was for them to think as one, and the resulting hive mind was strong enough to control an entire town's rat population.
    • He also inverts the idea with Miss Pointer/Mrs. Pickles in Thud. Two people living in one body.
    • Not to mention Hex, which is a literal hive mind.
  • A recurring theme in Frank Herbert's books.
    • Hellstrom's Hive works both as a strange way to live and as a supersystem entity with its own goals. It's interesting that at the beginning of story even some of its own components used in such "anomal" activity are unaware and some can't believe this.
    • In The Santaroga Barrier the hive-mind is composed of linked unconscious parts of participants' brains, and does not show great intellectual capability. Though not actively hostile, it's very dangerous as it's prone to paranoid overreaction in self-protection. Even despite the fact that its own components don't like this at all.
  • Christopher Hinz's Paratwa series uses this as a main theme. The aliens' evolution stressed cooperation (instead of competition as on Earth) as the key to survival. Alien/human hybrids were telepathically connected, and usually went fatally insance if their twin died.
  • The Vord from Jim Butcher's Codex Alera are referred to as one of these, but in practice what they actually have is a series of Hive Queens, which controll the hordes around them directly. Without the queens, the Vord revert to individuals and pose a threat mainly to one another.
  • In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, the Tines are individually nonsentient, but form into collectively intelligent packs (of about four to six members) by means of constant subconscious communication through high-frequency sound.
  • Interesting subversion in Stephen King 's The Tommyknockers, where the transformed humans/aliens grow increasingly mentally linked—but they not only retain their individuality, they increasingly despise one another as they become aware of each other's secret thoughts.
  • In Asimov's Foundation and Earth, there is an entity called Gaia that includes every man, woman, animal, and even every plant and inanimate object on the eponymous planet.
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe has the Killiks in the Dark Nest Trilogy. One aspect of the Killiks which other species found disturbing was how any person engaging in extended contact with them found themselves losing their individuality and becoming a "Joiner" - essentially becoming part of the Colony and fighting their old people, feeling, at the most, regret if they couldn't convert their friends. However, there were several colonies, each with Killiks that had different appearances and specializations, and Joiners who were converted by one colony, if sent to assist another, actually found the Joiner bond weakening, something which they found horrifying.
  • Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Cosmic Rape details a galactic hive-mind coming to Earth.
  • The Gargantius Effect-equipped armies in The Cyberiad. This makes them pacifistic over time.
  • Zaphod Beeblebrox's two heads seem to have this in the first three books. Not so much in the sixth.
  • The Midwich Cuckoos, which was adapted onto film twice as Village of the Damned. The alien "Children" (30 boys and 30 girls) have two distinct group minds. They protect themselves (and cause havoc along the way), both use telepathy to control others' actions, organs, and other parts of the body.
  • The cho-ja from Raymond E. Feist's Empire Trilogy share conciousness amongst the hive queens who have reached maturity.
  • In the Star Trek Novel Verse, the Tholians are part way there. While all individuals (and indeed possessing just as many dreamers, dissenters, seditionists and individualists as any other Trek culture), they have a version of this on the instinctive level. The Tholian lattice connects the minds of all Tholians, distributing basic race-knowledge to all and allowing individuals to commune with one another. The lattice is regulated carefully, with different castes having different degrees of access. On occasion, it can indeed cause the entirety of the Tholian race to share an experience, as was the case with the telepathic assaults of the Shedai. See Star Trek: Vanguard and Star Trek: The Lost Era in particular.
  • As a result of their mental bond, Eragon and Saphira share a consciousness.
  • D'ivers of the Malazan Book of the Fallen are shapeshifters who transform into a multitude of creatures, but maintain a single mind. This can be anything from a dozen to literally thousands of individual bodies, and so long as one survives so does the D'ivers.
  • Sedmon of the Six Lives in The Wizard of Karres and The Sorceress of Karres, Eric Flint, Dave Freer, and Mercedes Lackey's Tie In Novels to The Witches of Karres.
  • The short-story "Missile Gap" by Charles Stross has humanity being wiped out by World War Three started by Puppeteer Parasites who are members of a hive mind destroying potential rival species. They distrust the "paranoid individualism" of humanity and lament the fact that humans haven't evolved a more efficient means of survival and evolution like their own.
  • Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series has a hive mind constituted of millions of tiny polyps, which normally live in underwater corals. By themselves they're practically insignificant, but in large numbers they become a telepathic, and rather malevolent, all-conquering mind - which even speaks of itself in the singular. The creepiest part is, they can infect normal people and create colonies - "walkers" - that will then obey them; they can offer subtle suggestions to drive the infected to do something on its own accord, or they can take over the body entirely - and suicide it when no longer needed.
  • The Tyr of The Madness Season. Their hive mind is what allows them to dominate space travel and maintain a vast interstellar empire.
  • Clare Bell's Clan Ground series has a group of cats that are a hive mind. They are led by a group leader called True Of Voice and the one cat who does get pulled away from the mindlink has a hard time knowing what to do on his own. Eventually, he ends up somewhere between, able to think somewhat on his own, but still with definite qualities of the hive mind cats.
  • The Swarm (or Roy) in Vladimir Vasilyev's Death or Glory. When the alien Alliance sends representatives to the human Volga colonists (having previously ignored humanity as a backward race of over-evolved apes), there are several insect-like creatures among them. Unlike the other Alliance races, who send official representatives, the Swarm merely sends random drones. After all, each drone is the same as any other.
  • The Insects in The History of the Galaxy series are partly this, although it's still possible for them to retain their individuality. Their hive can, though, force a number of its members to undergo a "de-evolution" of sorts, turning them into mindless drones, usually to accomplish some enormous task or for use in the "We Have Reserves" type of warfare. When there is no longer need for the drones, the hive reverses the process, returning the Insects their individuality. Because they have a virtually unlimited workforce, the Insects, while quite advanced in other areas, have never developed nor done any research in cybernetics. As such, they are well aware that the humans (who are millions of years younger than them) can quickly bring to bear awesome and precise firepower through their serv-machines operated by a fusion of human and AI.
  • In Sergey Lukyanenko's The Stars Are Cold Toys, the Kualkua are revealed to be a single consciousness with billions of bodies (which can split into even more bodies on demand). Another race of peaceful hive-minded insects is mentioned to have existed in the past, until their homeworld was destroyed by the Conclave, who view any "useless" race (the insects couldn't handle spaceflight) as a waste of resources.


Live Action TV

  • The Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
    • Another Star Trek example from the Original Series: the androids in the episode "I, Mudd" were all psychically connected, communing with a central computer during moments of uncertainty or confusion. Many of the androids had identical forms and even spoke in unison.
      • Another TOS episode had an omniscient computer named Landru which controlled and psychically linked the humans of its planet after they had undergone a process called "absorption."
    • The changelings of Deep Space Nine spend most of their time in a liquid state on their home planet (the entire species essentially resembles a vast ocean). While in this state, they share a collective consciousness, which they refer to as "the Great Link", while still retaining their individuality. It is also possible for any number of changelings to link in this way.
  • The new series of Doctor Who features the Ood.
  • Legion in Red Dwarf is a variation, in that he is essentially a composite gestalt entity formed from the consciousness of those around him; they retain their individuality completely, but he needs them to remain in his space station in order to have any kind of existence that isn't that of a mindless essence. His first incarnation was the sum mental abilities of some of the finest minds and geniuses of their generation. His second was that of the Red Dwarf crew.
  • In Dark Angel transgenics of X7 series (children having disturbing pure black eyes). "The X7s are stronger and faster than the X5 series. They were designed with hive minds and are capable of communicating through sound waves, much like bats, but do so without opening their mouths. Their communications are inaudible to non-X7s. They never speak. "
  • An episode of Sliders has the heroes travel to three remarkably similar worlds, all of which had invented a miracle cure of sorts that consists of bacteria that quickly repair any damage to the human body. The problem is, the bacteria communicate via pulses of light, which are not limited to just within the body. Thus, all those with the bacteria sense each other, although they still retain a measure of individuality. On one world, this has resulted in an Inquisition of sorts that hunts down any "Believers", as they're called. On another, the Believers are a peaceful commune living in tents and meditating. On the third world, the cure was destroyed years before once the authorities realized the problem, although Quinn re-introduces it from his own blood. The sliders also find a way to shut off the bacteria (without removing the effects of what has already been "fixed" in the body) using an oversized flashlight pulsing a coded shutdown signal. This immediately disconnects the individual from the hive mind and leaves them feeling empty and nostalgic.
  • A very weak version of this exists in Earth: Final Conflict with the Taelons, whose minds are joined in the Commonality. However, they are full individuals and don't share each other's thoughts. The Commonality mainly serves to keep the Taelons from reverting into the savage Atavus state. A human jacked into the Commonality experiences the greatest high possible, and a few seconds can feel like hours.

New Media

  • The protagonist of Conquering the Horizon has a hive mind. Her individual bodies have semi-independent lines of thought. She also often treats her bodies as individual people as both a way of playing/entertainment as well as coping with isolation. When circumstances permit she even gives her dead bodies funerals.

Tabletop Games

  • In the Vampire: The Masquerade, the Malkavian clan was eventually revealed to be a giant conduit for the mind of their founder, Malkav. He had his childer diablerize him en masse, and now exists in the Madness Network in their heads. It's a relatively neutral arrangement for the most part, because a hive mind of crazy people is still a large number of crazy people, but when he manages to focus them...
    • In Vampire: The Requiem, the Melissidae bloodline slowly destroy the will of their ghouls, essentially making them into a Hive Mind with the Melissidae in question as the Puppet Master. This is obviously a massive Masquerade breach, as a legion of slack-jawed ghouls walking down the street gets people asking uncomfortable questions. The covenants banded together to eradicate the Melissidae, but they missed three of them. The Melissidae, wisely, have chosen to hide themselves a bit better this time around; they pass themselves off as the extremely reclusive type of cult, for example.
    • For another Vampire: The Requiem example, it's mentioned that particularly radical members of the Carthian Movement (vampiric modernists and political experimenters) will attempt to form a hive mind amongst the members of a coterie, using telepathic powers, identical patterns of speech and uniforms to present the image of an unified front. There's even a Devotion (combo power), Hive Nexus Gestalt, that allows the true formation of a hive mind amongst coterie members.
  • In Magic the Gathering's Lorwyn setting, the kithkin are a race of halflings with a hive-mind referred to as the thoughtweft. Each kithkin has an individual mind and personality, but groups of kithkin have access to each other's thoughts and feelings that goes beyond mere empathy. In Shadowmoor, this makes the kithkin incredibly xenophobic and hateful toward any creature that isn't "one of us."
  • The Tyranids of Warhammer 40,000 embody this trope to a T. They are a Horde of Alien Locusts that do not have independent minds at all, instead being one giant cosmic superorganism. Their mere presence causes such a weird dissonance in the Warp (the alternate dimension where psychic powers tap into) that technologies that use psychic powers (including interstellar travel and communication) are rendered useless, and people attempting to psychically communicate with this strange hive mind are instantly driven insane. When removed from this hive mind (by taking them away from a suitably psychic repeater), the smaller Tyranid organisms become no better than exceptionally deadly animals.
    • The only person in the galaxy who has survived some form of espionage / eavesdropping / communication is a Super Soldier who is the most powerful semi-human psyker in the galaxy. And Eldrad.
    • As a result, a Tyranid player is sometimes jokingly referred to as a "hive consciousness".
    • I can feel them - scratching at the back of my head. They're coming for us, mind, body and soul!
  • In Dungeons & Dragons, there are a few species with a Hive Mind. One of these is the Abeil. Cranium rats are one of the most annoying. Illithids has a borderline example—a network (they are all telepathic) centered on the city's Elder Brain—fused mass of dead mindflayers' still living brains continuing to assimilate brains of every dying mindflayer of the city. Illithids obey these master minds and depend on its advice, but are individuals enough to trade, compete, have disagreeing factions and so on.
  • One viral example of this trope exists in the Ravenloft setting, in the form of Toben the Many, a Hannibal Lectureing Hive Mind composed of grinning, plague-carrying zombies.
  • One sample artifact from Unknown Armies is nothing more than a few words on an old wax audio recording, called the Alter Tongue. Hearing a conversation in the Tongue runs a Mind check, and failing that test imprints the Tongue into the listener's mind. There's no Psychic Link, unless the GM wants there to be, but new words in the Tongue appear out of nowhere and those afflicted with the Tongue isolate themselves from or even attack others that can't speak it, and have better-than-typical success conversing with other speakers of the Tongue, even finishing sentences for anyone who's talking in the strange, chittering language. Oh, and knowing the language starts breaking down the local fabric of the universe, too.
  • In Nomine has the Kyriotates, angels with the ability to possess multiple bodies at the same time, more powerful ones can possess up to 3 humans (or a larger number of animals)at once, those that work for Jordi (Archangel of Animals) can even possess multiple swarms of insects at the same time. It should be noted that this does not involve doing anything weird to the host consciousness, the host's mind essentially goes to sleep for the duration of the possession.
  • The snakelike Naga from Legend of the Five Rings have a sort of communal consciousness called the "Akasha", though they do have individual minds and personalities.
  • One published adventure from the Paragons setting for Mutants and Masterminds has to do with someone accidentally creating one of these while in a coma.
  • The teodozjia, a breed of demon from Exalted, all share a collective mind and memory. Kill one, and they're going to remember you.


Toys


Video Games

  • The Coremind from Achron fits this trope. Another hive mind emerges in the third campaign as well
  • The Zerg in StarCraft. They are led by a mind called the Overmind, "the eternal will of the Swarm". The Overmind is an odd one since, in essence, it is simply the Hive Mind itself, but it can create intelligent Cerebrates as leaders of individual broods. The Cerebrates have a certain amount of individuality, but they are still incapable of betrayal. If either the Overmind or the Cerebrates are killed, the Overmind can simply resurrect them in a new body (since they are, essentially, simply minds), unless they are killed by a dark templar. In that case, the individual Cerebrate is Killed Off for Real. However, the Overmind can create a brand new Cerebrate, and if the Overmind is killed by a dark templar the surviving Cerebrates can fuse together and create a new one.
  • The Many from System Shock II - and let's not go into when they try to recruit you into their fold.
  • The Infected in Prototype have a hivemind, connected back to their leader, a woman/Plaguemaster named Elizabeth Greene. Eventually, the protagonist is able to hack into this through consuming a Leader Hunter and see people carrying the infection who are not yet aware of their illness. He does this to get the trail of the Leader Hunter which took his sister from him, and to find it and Elizabeth Greene.
  • The Mindhome in Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (not surprising, as Athas is a psionic-rich world, someone has to try). It's of communal (as opposed to fused) variety and is not aggressive. PCs can pick (from both sides) side-quest to resolve the issue causing disagreement enough to split Mindhome in two (and demise of some participants).
  • The World Ends With You: Everyone wearing a Red Skull Pin. To right the countless wrongs our day...
  • The Flood from Halo. The flood do without a hivemind and behave like nonsentients until they assimilate enough people and then they create a Gravemind. They follow this trope then as the Gravemind organizes them better.
    • The Hunters are a gestalt organism composed of worms called Lekgolo. When a colony gets too big for one suit, it splits into a bonded pair with a shared consciousness, which is why they are encountered mostly in pairs during the game.
    • The insectoid Drones also share a hivemind, which makes them a lethal foe.
  • The Aparoids in Star Fox: Assault think collectively; further proven when the Aparoid Queen starts speaking weirdly.
  • The Bacterians from the Gradius series. They are usually led by Bacterion, the Eldritch Abomination Big Bad that uses smaller Hive Minds like Gofer and Venom to command his fleets. If a Bacterian Hive Mind gets killed, the pieces of the Hive Mind will regenerate to become a new Hive Mind.
  • Ermac from Mortal Kombat is a fusion of hundreds of souls which all operate under one mind (referring to himself in the plural form). However, his ending in Mortal Kombat Armageddon shows a godlike power separating the many souls contained within him. These souls soon become new bodies and eventually Ermac becomes an army linked by collective consciousness.
  • In Master of Orion 2, one of the government types is "Unification" compared in description to beehive. It is one of the most expensive variants, and has hefty food, industry and counter-espionage bonuses; advanced form becomes a species-wide "collective consciousnes", and production bonuses skyrocket.
  • The Voxai in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood are also run by an overmind. The Big Bad's influence turns this Overmind hostile, changing its messages from suggestions to commands.
  • The Mantis of Conquest: Frontier Wars are described as 'narrowly hive minded' and the Celareons seem to have a central brain.
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has a weird version: a planet-sized gestalt consciousness formed from the fungus that covers most of the planet, along with its mind worm guardians. Also notable for being an essentially benign entity and force as long as you play nice with the environment. If you don't, Planet is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the other human factions.
    • Even if they don't start as a true example (you can research tech to correct this), the Hive civilization holds this as an ideal.
    • One of the ways to end the game is to achieve Transcendence, at which point the minds of all humans on Planet are absorbed into the consciousness. The faction that does this first gets to keep most of their individuality, while the rest simply become part of the whole. The final interlude reveals that humans (as extensions of Planet) make it back to the ruined Earth and manage to restore it, also turning it into a planet-wide consciousness.
  • The Kha'ak from X2: The Threat and X3: Reunion/Terran Conflict are a form of this, centered around the massive Hive Queen ship.
  • The Hive Mind controlling the Necromorphs in Dead Space is called... the Hive Mind. Whould've guessed?
  • The 666 creatures making up Nero Chaos are all part of his mind. As he appears to talk to pieces of himself from time to time (such as getting irritated at one of his dog bodies when Shiki kills it) it seems more of a hive mind than a single mind controlling lots of bodies. Would that be worthy of a distinction anyway?
  • The Vortigaunts from the Half-Life series may be an example. The aliens are connected to each other through something they call the Vortessence, which apparently spans time and space, life and death. When two or more communicate, they are able to talk simultaneously (a process they call "flux-shifting"), and it is hinted that if one Vortigaunt allows itself to be captured, the rest of the race is able to gather information through it. With one exception, Vortigaunts don't seem to have names, and just refer to themselves as "this one." Then again, they start all names with "the" (where it makes sense "The free-man" and where it doesn't "The Eli Vance"), so it is possible because they're all linked none of them ever had a need for names, they were after all psychically enslaved by the Nihilanth for an undefined period...
  • The Omar from Deus Ex Invisible War do this through replacing parts of their brain with transmitters. The Helios Ending of the game has an interesting subversion of the trope. While like the Omar, it has all humans connected, instead of assimilating them into one mind, it merely brings together all their thoughts and desires through a highly advanced human-computer hybrid, which makes decisions for the world, creating a perfect direct democracy. Although depending on your ideology, Your Mileage May Vary.
    • The basic idea is sharing understanding. Unlike the Omar which eradicates individuality Helios is supposed to make people understand each others' opinions through a highly advanced form of technological empathy and telepathy. Basically it allows a callous bigot to feel his victims' pain as well as the sense of tolerance and empathy from kinder people in theory removing all prejudice and hatred. It's also supposed to let them share knowledge so no one misunderstands one another. Your Mileage May Vary will depend on whether or not you see this as better than the Borg-like Omar ending.
  • The Zoni from Ratchet and Clank. As revealed and explicitly stated in A Crack in Time, they become like ADHD-afflicted children when separated from a group. It appears that two or more are required for the creatures to exhibit any semblance of sanity; however (as far as the storyline is concerned), they are never shown in any less than a group of three.
  • From Dragon Age, The Darkspawn, tainted creatures that dwell in the underground caverns of the Deep Roads. Whenever an Archdemon (old gods manifested in the forms of powerful dragons) awaken, the darkspawn function in a sort of hive-mind. Otherwise they war amongst each other as much as against the other races.
    • They wage war against the Dwarves between Blights. One that the Dwarves are slowly losing when the game starts. Blights are actually a brief respite for the Dwarves since most of the Darkspawn go off to attack the surface instead. While Darkspawn do fight against each other, being Exclusively Evil most of them anyway, their taint drives them to focus on attacking anything that isn't a darkspawn or a completely tainted being like a ghoul which helps spread the taint even further.
  • The Silithids from World of Warcraft probably are such. Their Hive Queen (King rather) appears to be C'thun.
  • The Wisps in the Ultima games all share a single mind, which calls itself Xorinia and claims to be an interdimensional information broker. It/they are quite puzzled by the fact that humans are individuals, and don't quite understand why they have to repeat everything from scratch every time they speak to the human race.
  • Emperor: Battle for Dune - The House of Ordos is led by the Executrix, four beings that share a single mind and communicate only through a creature known as the "Speaker".
  • An obscure game called "The Adventurer's club" had a possible subversion. There was a telepathic. hive minded species called the T'hlang, but in that, each individual T'hlang was trying to break out of the hive mind, and the hive couldn't control all the guys, so you constantly had "rogues" breaking away from the hive mind, and sometimes getting re-absorbed.
  • The NPC Elf race in Mabinogi, although individuals, share a collective memory via a central "memory bank"; and aquire all of their knowledge and skills from this collective memory. Player characters, being spirits from outside Erinn, do not share in this collective memory; a fact which is pointedly imparted to the player during the introduction.
    • A repeatable quest for Elf characters is to recover "lost elves" who have been severed from the collective, and reunite them with the racial consciousness.
  • The cranium rats from tabletop Dungeons & Dragons appear in Planescape: Torment. A group of rats in one place will form a hive mind, and the more rats there are, the more intelligent the mind will be. The mysterious Many-As-One turns out to be the hive mind of an enormous number of rats.
  • Mass Effect 2 reveals that the Geth, a race of super-intelligent AI, are actually a hive mind, all sharing the same consciousness; instead of all geth thinking alike, "individual" Geth runtimes act as different perspectives to the same information that all programs share. When the 'heretic' geth chose to work with the Big Bad pre-series, the other geth peacefully allowed them to leave.
    • They also explain how this works rather more than other examples of this trope; the physical bodies are "platforms" and the actual geth are program runtimes (the character Legion comprises at least a thousand individual geth). The more platforms there are in the same place, the more processors can be devoted to their various tasks; this is why geth are smarter in numbers. Presumably, each platform is equipped with the right hardware to accommodate many runtimes at once without slowing down, overheating, or straining the hardware.
    • The Reapers are also revealed to be this. That is, a single Reaper is actually composed of thousands of programs. The various Reapers are not implied to be connected in such way.
    • In Mass Effect 3, you have the option of allowing the geth to be "upgraded" to full-AI status. Presumably, this eliminates the hive consciousness.
    • The Rachni in the Mass Effect backstory were an insectoid race with a telepathic hive mind controlled by the queens.
  • In Darkspore, the titular villains became this after the Crogenitors created them using E-Dna.
  • The Brotherhood of Shadow from the Knights of the Old Republic Game Mod of the same name were a Sith (the species, not the sect) order of warriors who considered themselves a single being, an extension of the Sith King's will. Once the lot of them are imprisoned in an Artifact of Doom, they slowly become a single mind - one looking for a proper host...
  • The Shivans in Free Space are hypothesized to be this in the second game because after the lead ship, the Lucifer, is destroyed, the remained units become uncoordinated and easily finished off, like it was the brain of the fleet.
  • The Orz in Star Control are hinted (and confirmed by Word of God) to be the extensions of an Eldritch Abomination which calls itself "Orz". As such, the "*fingers*" (as Orz's extensions refer to themselves) all have the same mind, which is currently staying in whatever dimension Orz calls home (it refers to our dimension as "*the middle*").
  • The Zuul from Sword of the Stars have two variants of this trope: Male Zuul can create coteries with nearby females: He becomes a Hive Queen that directs the females as easy as he would command his own limbs, and all parts of the coterie share a single consciousness. The males themselves have a higher-level hive mind that allow them to share their thoughts and information freely with each other over a long distance while remaining their own individuals. The novelization implies that this sharing of information does funny things with the Zuul psyche as they find the notion of having information other don't have, and things like a name, to be highly unusual.
    • In something of a departure from common uses of this trope the game's Bee People, called "the Hivers", have no Hive Mind (they're not even psychic) and use pheromones instead, much like real-life insects.


Web Comics

  • Mars, in the webcomic A Miracle of Science. One of the few examples of large-scale Hive Mind that aren't evil. It exists as a superstructure over implanted FTL Radio network and mostly inobtrusive, "possessing" its members only when it wants to say or do something directly. It also has a good sense of humor.
  • In Schlock Mercenary Petey after migrating from old hardware - and more broadly, the Fleetmind.
    • And the infamous Partnership Collective: A Hive Mind of Amoral Attorneys.
    • The Ot-Skadak (Flechette bugs evolved on Eina-afa) - they are carnivores, so the primary use of swarm communication is to coordinate high-speed attacks. These are up to 3 meters long (see the previous or next page for how huge the dragon-like critter was) - see a close-up image here. There smallest are finger-sized, though they still can kill a human wearing light body armour in a few seconds, even without the advantage of high approach speed. Like other linked minds in Schlock Mercenary, they can overcome range limitations via FTL communication implants. Their natural organization seems to be local swarms acting on a single purpose independently, while keeping in touch with nearby ones to much lesser degree (which makes sense resources-wise), so when Ot-Skadak get into the wider galaxy, they travel as distinct "clusters" with their own names, specializing as a diplomat, engineer, warrior...
  • In the comic MSF High, the Legion are a Hive Mind which maintains individuality amongst Legions. Their society is very in-depth, and they are surprisingly friendly. Now.
  • Bob and George has X, in his first chronological physical appearance (note: the rest were pre-existent spirit forms or time-travellers. Or Alternates. Or future alternate spirit forms. Or a pair of kumquats, hiding in the shape of X. Something along those lines.) go omnicidal (in a way) when no one would be his friend, and then proceeds to link up every robot to his mind. And then picks up a cyborg. And then through that cyborg the entire human race.
  • Gavotte from Skin Horse. An actual hive.
  • Sequential Art has "Think Tank" - four squirrel girls with implanted link chips. At a short range they can get in synk talking on Faxmodemish with each other, think together and act as a single entity at will. Quinten used them as a Wetware CPU network to check a buggy AI, but before that they were in R&D. Consequently, one of them alone is a hyperactive and hyperperceptive Genius Ditz who can build a beam weapon she knows from a souvenir blaster and spare parts is she isn't distracted by something shiny or moving, but four together go into all-out Mad Science and turn a lawnmower FTL-capable when trying to upgrade it.

Web Original

  • Los Hermanos of the Global Guardians PBEM Universe combines this with Me's a Crowd, as not only can he create thousands of copies of himself, he shares his consciousness between them. (He is somehow capable of dealing with all the conflicting sensory input, and is capable of handling multiple tasks at once, multiple conversations at once, and so on). At any given moment, he's likely got a dozen duplicates active around the world working in as many different occupations. Anything one duplicate learns, all the duplicates know how to do. And at least two of his constantly active duplicates are married. But only one is an active superhero.
    • Aryan Nation is a controversial white supremacist superhero (yes, you read that right) who shares Los Hermanos's powers. His powers are so similar to Los Hermanos that the Global Guardian once hypothesized that maybe Aryan Nation was one of his dupes who managed to gain a separate consciousness. (He found out later this wasn't true.)
    • The Seven Brothers is a super-strong Chinese hero who can split into seven bodies, all of whom share a consciousness.
    • Mob Rule, a South African supervillain from the same setting, has a similar power. His copies, however, are independent individuals.
    • Saba Devatao, an Indonesia supervillain, creates eight duplicates and like Los Hermanos is a Hive Mind. She's an expert martial artist who can flawlessly coordinate her bodies in attack routines that baffle most of her opponents.
    • The mutant supervillain known as The Swarm can transform into a seemingly numberless horde of cockroaches, each of whom she can somehow control.
      • Hive is a heroic example of the same power, only he transforms into wasps and isn't a cannibal serial killer.
  • If The Observer is to be believed, he is part of "The Collective." Interestingly, he seems to contradict himself, saying "I love you all" to the people asking him questions on Formspring and later stating that he feels no emotion.
  • Orion's Arm has in increasing levels of individuality: hiveminds, groupminds and tribeminds.
  • SMBC Theater explores hive mind dating.
  • Akinator is sort of a real-life example of this—he's a program who knows, in intricate detail, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of characters both real and fictional, assembled from the contributions of millions of players worldwide.


Western Animation

  • The LGMs in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command are a rather rare benevolent example; all of them in the universe are connected, and their ability to cooperate makes them excellent at pretty much all the technical work Star Command needs done (think about it; they share all knowledge and can work in perfect synch). In the pilot movie, it's revealed that this is made possible by the 'Unimind' on their home planet, and they go into disarray when Zurg steals it (mostly Played for Laughs, it factors into the origin of one major character).
    • They do, however, have the occasional one who isn't part of the LGM collective.
  • In Batman: The Brave And The Bold (specifically "Revenge of the Reach"), the Green Lantern Corps is attacked by an alien enemy called the Reach. Judging by their simultaneous dialogue and referencing themselves as "The Collective", they must have some form of hive mind.
  • Ben 10 Alien Force - In the episode "Ghost Town", Ben Ten is forced to team up with his arch nemesis, Vilgax, to battle one of his rogue alien forms, Ghost Freak. Vilgax released Ghost Freak from prison on the condition he defeat Ben, but Ghost Freak betrays him and possesses his planet, Vilgaxia. The planet's citizens are turned into Ghost Freak's minions (who look like his original less hideous, unmasked form in the first Ben Ten series) dominated by a hive mind.


Real Life

  • Some say that The Internet might be evolving into this.
  1. ↑ This is particularly handy when you play a card that would be near-lethal to you, but suicidal for everyone else.
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