Horde of Alien Locusts: Difference between revisions

 

Compare [[To Serve Man]] and the slightly less extreme (as in, they ''are'' intelligent and only want inorganic resources) [[Planet Looters]], and do not confuse them with [[Insectoid Aliens]], who may or may not be this trope. [[Horde of Alien Locusts]] is a common way to set up a [[Guilt Free Extermination War]], since it's a fight between a group that wants to eat everything and the groups that don't want to be eaten. Not necessarily related to [[Giant Space Flea From Nowhere]]. Related to [[The Swarm]]

 

== [[Anime]] & [[Manga]] ==

* 2nd Edition [[Dungeons and Dragons]] contains a good number of these such as:

** The Horde, which are an elemental (and Lawful Evil, ironically) race of insects which vary in size and shape from horde to horde, with all members of a particular horde being identical (i.e., sometimes they will appear as 20 ft. tall golden mantids other times they may appear as foot-long black beetles). They attack and consume anything that is not from their particular horde, even ''other'' hordes.

** The [[AI Is a Crapshoot|Clockwork Horrors]] which are like the Witchlight Marauders except that they're tiny metal spiders with death rays and buzz saws.

 

* One of the dreams of Mantis from ''[[Conquest Frontier Wars]]'' is to 'Mush terrans into a milky white paste and dance over the earth drunk on their liquefied corpses.'

* The Strogg from the ''[[Quake]]'' series. On a couple of occasions, you get to see the [[Squick|inside of their factories.]]

* Locusts and Silicoids from ''[[Sword of the Stars]]'' each embody this in a different way. Silicoids, also known as 'Swarms' are scilicon-based space-bugs who live in asteroid-belt and are mainly pests - a Swarmer Hive will send out a Scilicoid Queen every 10 turns, aimed at a nearby planet with an asteroid-field, and establish a new hive there if it isn't killed on the way. That hive will send out a new queen 10 turns later, and so on. Attacking either a hive or a queen gets you a fight with a swarm of angry drones, so you better hope you remembered to bring point-defense systems. The Locusts, meanwhile, are not actual bugs but robots, and as such consume inorganic material, but they otherwise follow the trope to a tee (they're not [[Planet Looters]] because they're utterly mindless and attack in bug-like swarms). The Locust Hiveworld will move slowly and deliberately across the map, draining the resources out of every planet it comes across (rendering them functionally useless), and - once it has gathered enough resources in this way - it will spawn a second Hiveworld. Left to its own devices, the Hiveworlds will turn every last bit of resources in the galaxy into more of themselves. Most players would rather face the [[That's No Moon|Deathstar-like]] [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|System Killer]] than the Locusts...

** The Von Neummans are an intelligent example: while they are certainly resource-hungry robots, they react to someone blasting them apart by sending an [[Cool Ship|ultra-cool looking]] "berserker" to eradicate the colony (presumably so that they can mop up the pieces later), and if ''that'' fails, they send a [[Weapon of Mass Destruction|Construct]], because at that point, the potential resources from the [[Earthshattering Kaboom|soon-to-be annihilated]] planet just isn't worth the threat of the base on it. They even create their own homeworld in some games.

* In the ''[[Xiaolin Showdown (Animation)|Xiaolin Showdown]]'' episode "Dangerous Minds", Jack Spicer accidentally [[Sealed Evil in A Can|releases]] a horde of [[Giant Spiders]]. According to the ancient legends, "The spiders are neither good nor evil. They are merely... ''consumers''. They consume vegetation, animals, buildings, even the earth itself. They eat... until there is nothing left to eat."

** There is also a Shen Gong Wu that releases a horde of stone locusts that luckily are solely herbivorous, but really quick at it. It was found in the episode in which the [[Monster of the Week|once-appearing villain]] was a plant, not stoppable in any other way.

** The [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|Changelings]] give off this particular vibe as well, what with their less-than-subtle similarities with to [[Starcraft|Zerg]]. The only difference being that they [[Emotion Eater|feed on love]] instead of ponies themselves.

 

 

== [[Real Life]]? ==

** But it's unlikely for many reasons one of their is for example that the will only be able to consume other things as fast as they move and receive energy so if they want to consume the earth it would take a while.

** Nanomachines are surprisingly susceptible to [[Kill It With Fire|high temperatures...]]

** Are not nanomachines simply metallic versions of bacteria or viruses? [[You Suck|How could humans possibly think they could develop a system of consumption and reproduction that is more efficient than billions of years of evolution directed towards that purpose]]?

*** Because evolution only selects for good enough, not good as possible. Many biological mechanisms are actually quite inefficient and could theoretically be improved significantly.

* And, of course, real-life locusts, which can totally destroy vast areas as they madly consume whatever they can before starving themselves back into depopulation.

* One could say that, from a cynical point of view, ''all'' life acts like this.