...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
Lost Common Knowledge
- 267 statements
- 48 feature instances
- 39 referencing feature instances
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| Lost Common Knowledge | comment |
The world has suffered some kind of massive calamity. Humanity has survived, but at a great cost. In addition to the population decrease, much of humanity's knowledge about the world and how it works has been lost. How can an author demonstrate the sheer scale of cultural, historical, and intellectual loss? By having the characters rediscover some scrap of information that is laughably common knowledge in the real world and react to this information with shock, disbelief, and amazement. Expect at least one character to become fascinated and obsessed with the rediscovered knowledge, vowing to travel off in search for whatever-it-is (if it's a location, animal, etc.) or to try and build it (if it's a form of technology). Expect at least one other character to scoff at the implausibility of these "facts" and question whether the long-dead writer of the text was just making stuff up. A variant is where the characters (usually children) will hear the lost knowledge told to them by an elderly relative who remembers the days when this knowledge was common. Again, their reactions will range from rapt wide-eyed wonder to "Granny must be going senile." Sometimes the common knowledge will be lost because that thing no longer exists in the future world (e.g.: a child asking her grandmother to tell her about that strange extinct creature called the "lion"), thus further demonstrating how far the world has regressed. Compare Future Imperfect, where the knowledge is still there but has been misinterpreted over the years. Compare to Aliens Never Invented the Wheel, which is where aliens (however advanced) never developed something that humans consider incredibly basic. Not to be confused with Common Knowledge. |
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| Lost Common Knowledge | isPartOf |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_1077f3ae | type |
Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_1077f3ae | comment |
Triangle Strategy: In the present day, the only supply of salt anywhere in the continent of Norzelia is the Source, a body of saltwater in the desert. The game's inciting incident is the discovery of salt crystals underground in a mine. The fact that salt crystals exist at all is a closely guarded secret known only to the most important people in Hyzante, the kingdom where the Source is located, who has spent centuries espousing that the Source is the only place salt exists anywhere on the continent. The Roselle originally came from a faraway land located next to something called an "ocean", a huge body of salt water, but this knowledge has been mostly lost to time. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_261c8d3f | type |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_261c8d3f | comment |
The Simpsons: In "Lemon of Troy", Bart has an Imagine Spot where people from the future bring him back to life using "technology" (namely, shooting a ray gun at a piece of graffiti he's made). He wows them by taking out a yo-yo. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_27b84429 | type |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_27b84429 | comment |
In The Last of Us, while some modern technology still exists, mostly in the quarantine zones, Ellie has a hard time believing that ice cream trucks used to be a thing. Similarly, the Left Behind DLC has Ellie and Riley find an old photobooth that asks if they'd like to upload their photos to Facebook: they spend some time mocking the idea of a "book of faces". | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_2dc145b5 | type |
Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_2dc145b5 | comment |
An Instinct for War features a future Forever War in which American soldiers see a page from Clausewitz's On War and dismisses it as being enemy propaganda, as they can't read it. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_310d6df7 | type |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_310d6df7 | comment |
Stand Still, Stay Silent is set in a world where Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are the only surviving nations as far as the characters are concerned. At some point, one of the mages ends up in a spirit world location that is set up just as it was Just Before the End, and the location's resident naturally offers him a brown-colored beverage that has to be either tea or coffee. Upon drinking it, the mage calls it "soup" and says it tastes gross. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_36ee2abe | type |
Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_36ee2abe | comment |
In Paranoia, most inhabitants of Alpha Complex display this attitude about anything relating to the semi-mythical Outdoors. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_39fe00f1 | type |
Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_39fe00f1 | comment |
Dragon Age: Inquisition: Almost everything about ancient elven society has been forgotten by modern elves, including the fact that vallaslin, face tattoos worn by all Dalish, were once slave markings. This is also a huge motivation for Solas's plan to restore the pre-Veil world, since he feels modern elves are shadows of what they once were, and is dismayed that most modern Thedosians (of all races) don't know anything of what had been common knowledge in his day. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_3ae518ad | type |
Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_3ae518ad | comment |
Played for laughs in Idiocracy. By the time of the dumbed-down future, people have no concept how to care for plants, and think that the sports drink Brawndo is "what plants crave". The main character tries to explain the (basic) science behind watering them, but the knowledge flies over their heads, so he settles for telling people that he can talk with plants, and that they've told him what they want is water. | |
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Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_3e8c09b9 | comment |
Attack on Titan takes place in a world where the last remnants of humanity are holed up in a walled off territory about the size of Madagascar, hiding in fear of the people-eating giants that have overrun the world. Information about the outside world is not only scarce — it's forbidden by the government, and Eren mentions that the book Armin is reading from is illegal to own. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_441ec102 | type |
Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_441ec102 | comment |
The Shannara Chronicles: Eretria scoffs at the idea that humans ever went to the moon, treating it as a myth. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_44d14174 | comment |
Death Need Not Apply: Due to the healing effects of the Zone, children who grew up there have little knowledge of things like death, disfigurement, or permanent injury. Izuku unthinkingly asks Shinso about the strange pattern on his skin, not knowing the "pattern" is numerous burn scars. | |
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Lost Common Knowledge | |
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Utopia Falls: So much was apparently lost as a result of the war that in the future no one, even young black people, knows what hip-hop is at first. Apollo learns that the Indigenous drumming he sees has been passed down to him by his father, but never knew until then of his heritage. From seeing this, he realizes that he's Indigenous. |
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The Twilight Zone (1959): In the episode "Elegy", a trio of astronauts land on a planet that resembles Earth in the late 20th century, despite it being the year 2186 and them being in another solar system. Their landing site is a farm, complete with trees, a barn, hay, and a machine that Captain Webber and Kirby don't recognize. The third among them, Meyers, explains that it's called a tractor, a device that was in use on Earth before World War III. | |
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Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_5aa9bb49 | comment |
In Peace on Earth, two squirrel pups ask their grandfather what "men" are, since humans have driven themselves to extinction. | |
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In The Lost Fleet, Captain Geary is periodically stunned when confronted with traditions, regulations, or beliefs that are not only contrary to his era but also just plain wrong. The biggest example, and what makes Geary so deadly, is the art of coordinating fleet-wide maneuvers at light-fractional velocities. Most officers learned this from more experienced officers before the war, but the massive casualties suffered by the fleet eventually wiped out anyone who knew. | |
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Lost Common Knowledge | |
| Lost Common Knowledge / int_62cafa4 | comment |
In the world of Mad Max: Fury Road this is demonstrated when Nux, one of Immortan Joe's War Boys whose entire short lives are dedicated to fighting and dying gloriously for their master, doesn't know what a tree is and refers to it as "that thing" until someone else provides the word. In context, it's quite sad. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_6e713b7f | comment |
Logan's Tale: At one point while exploring the wasteland, Logan comes across a children's playground, and has no idea what he's looking at. | |
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In Time Traveller's segment of The Cave, there's a (rather empty) museum with several examples, overlapping with Future Imperfect: Keys — nobody knows their purpose. Buckets — known only by description, probably used in a brutal children's game. President Franklin D. Bon Jovi, who was involved in World War I. |
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Half-Life: Alyx establishes that younger generations born following the Combine takeover of Earth have a pretty poor understanding of what life was like before the Seven Hour War. Russell has to explain the concept of livestock to Alyx before he can even begin to explain what a club sandwich is, and later has to do something similar with basic business ideas like the stock market. Alyx also understands few to none of the pop culture references made by older characters; Larry bringing up Mozart gets nothing but a confused "Who?" from her. | |
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"The Quiz Broadcast" in That Mitchell and Webb Look is a post-apocalyptic game show that plays this for laughs. For example: "Pre-Event sources talk about "hope". What was hope?" Note that it is made clear that the game show takes place not that long after the Event. That's right: the Event was so horrible that people lost common knowledge of things they'd personally experienced for the bulk of their lives. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_760644e9 | comment |
Eternity Road: According to legend, the October Patrol used a submarine to salvage human literature and remove it to a place called Haven before society collapsed completely from The Plague, thus preserving human knowledge and culture for future generations. The plot involves an expedition to find this Haven, however their scholars scoff at the idea of a ship that can travel underwater, regarding it as a fanciful embellishment by later storytellers. Because of this, they fail to realize that two of the doors at Haven form an airlock to a submarine docking chamber that has now flooded. | |
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Fallout (2024): Referenced. Lucy, who does have a rather advanced education even by modern standards, feels a need to check on what the post-apocalyptic wasteland knows. | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_7d8c61a2 | comment |
Star Wars: The Old Republic has an absolutely tragic case when a Republic PC searches through apocalyptic logs to learn what happened to a colony that disappeared shortly after The Empire bombed Taris into a toxic waste planet. After generations of devaluing education to survive endless famine, disease, failing crops, low fertility, still-births, rackghoul plagues, and more, the last leader of the last generation (only ten people) can only remember: | |
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In The Dark Tower (2017), Roland and Jake visit some mysterious ruins from the past. Roland says that no one knows what they were. Jake replies: "It's a theme park." | |
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| Lost Common Knowledge / int_81692f99 | comment |
Star Trek: The franchise in general sometimes does this, with knowledge having been lost after the world war that devastated the earth and the cultural transformation brought on by replicators, the Federation, and alien influence. Unfortunately, the writers don't always remember what things have been lost, so that the phrase "room service", which has been used several times in the shows without any hint that it's some archaic phrase, in one episode leaves the crew standing around in confusion until Data tentatively suggests that it's about cleaning the room. In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", the Fabrini built a generational starship into an asteroid to escape their dying homeworld. 10,000 years later, their descendants are completely oblivious to the fact they are living in space at all. Of course, it helps that the ones in charge make sure no one finds out. |
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In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, after the protagonists free a given colony from the Forever War by breaking their Flame Clock, subsequent sidequests show many of their commanders refocusing their efforts on new endeavours to help their people survive, as they can no longer rely on supplies sent from their respective Castles. As their lives up to that point were solely dedicated to training for and carrying out warfare, this leaves very obvious gaps in their skillsets once they no longer need to fight. For instance, in the specific case of Colony 9, commander Zeon endures unrest in his community as he attempts to resolve their food shortages by effectively rediscovering agriculture, and experiences several issues he hadn't anticipated while trying to establish his crop fields, such as blights and droughts. Additionally, in Colony Mu, they gradually figure out to breed and ranch Armus and Arduns (the game's functional equivalents of cows and bulls, respectively). Both of these colonies learn about these concepts from old books, and have to get to grips with their practice through trial and error. | |
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Civilization has (sort of) recovered by the time of The Wheel of Time's protagonists, but periodically they come across ideas or information that strike them as absurd. One villain is trying to distract one of the heroes, for instance, and mentions off-handedly that in her time, people were able to travel to other worlds, "even worlds in the sky". Only the last bit fazes Nynaeve, who's pretty familiar with other dimensions — but worlds in the sky? That's just ridiculous. Bonus points to the Aes Sedai who have spent thousands of years trying to figure out how ancient people could fly. They're certain it must have been a magical effect, but no-one has ever managed it. It's on the verge of becoming discredited as a myth, possibly a mistranslated text. Perhaps the ancient Aes Sedai could fly that way, but only the readers (and a few Aiel, who don't become Aes Sedai) know they had airplanes. | |
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In The Stars My Destination, the protagonist initially can't get rid of the hideous tiger facial tattoo he got at the hands of a Cargo Cult because in the future tattooing became a lost art. He does manage to get it removed eventually but even that process is flawed since the tattoo reappears whenever he gets angry. | |
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In WALL•E, when Captain McCrea (whose ancestors spent hundreds of years lounging around on the luxury spaceship Axiom after fleeing Earth) accesses the computer database, most of the facts he's getting all excited over are commonplace knowledge in the real world, like the definition of "dancing" and "farms". | |
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In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", the Fabrini built a generational starship into an asteroid to escape their dying homeworld. 10,000 years later, their descendants are completely oblivious to the fact they are living in space at all. Of course, it helps that the ones in charge make sure no one finds out. | |
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Legends of the Dead Earth: In Wonder Woman Annual #5, the Unremembered have regressed thousands of years since their Generation Ship was struck with disaster. They have forgotten the meaning of words such as "sky," "night" and "stars" and know nothing of planets, space vessels, the universe or anything else beyond the worldship. Most notably, most male members of the Unremembered believe that women make babies "out of some contrary nature unique to them." There is a growing number of men, such as CatXon, who believe that men are just as much to blame for babies being conceived but it is widely seen as a "preposterous belief." | |
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"By the Waters of Babylon": After a war had destroyed the US long ago, the future tribal humans no longer know much of how people lived then (they even think those once living were gods). John goes inside the former New York City, referring to "god roads" (probably paved ones) he traverses, and is unable to figure out how food they had is still in some cases edible through preservation, thinking they had magic containers. He eventually does realize they were not gods however, just humans, optimistic that through reading those books that are left behind eventually humanity can learn what they did and create it again. | |
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Lost Common Knowledge | |
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This is the whole point of The Giver. The title character's actual occupation is "Receiver of Memory", and his role in the community is to be the only one with access to Lost Common Knowledge (such as the existence of death, color, and animals), in case it comes in handy to the regime. For example, the Giver tells Jonas that he was consulted when the powers that be were considering increasing the number of children born, and he said no because he knew why they'd started controlling population numbers, to avoid starvation. Of course, he and Jonas come to feel that everyone else is being deprived of the knowledge of good things and that they're unfairly burdened being the only ones to know about things like starvation. | |
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In Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22, Shinji and his friends' visit to an aquarium of cloned marine life demonstrates how little they know of what the ocean was like before Second Impact rendered it nearly lifeless. Kensuke correctly identifies a sea turtle, but isn't sure of himself, while Shinji is initially confused by the briny smell because most of the ocean no longer features enough decaying plankton to create the scent. | |
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Taken to an extreme in Anthem: the protagonist rediscovers the very concept of individuality and the word "I". | |
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Warhammer 40,000 is all over this trope. Since nearly every world in the Imperium is insanely specialized, consisting of one climate, or both, what's commonplace in one world may be totally unheard of in another. Someone who grew up in an Underhive, miles deep beneath the towers of a continent-spanning city, may be awestruck at the thought of a "sky"; meanwhile someone who grew up in a farm-dedicated Agri World would boggle at the thought of a Forge World that is almost wholly dedicated to manufacturing. This doesn't even get into the Mechanicus having such a strangle-hold on all things science after so much was lost over time, nobody has any idea how all of the technology works, and this includes many in the Mechancium itself! | |
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In Shrapnel, thousands of years have passed since the end of the world, and only a few longer-lived individuals like members of the Fenri know of the existence of the sun, as the weather is so consistently terrible that people either live in Endless Winter on the dark side of the planet, or a Deadly Dust Storm on the light side. | |
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The Book of Eli: All copies of the Bible have been destroyed, to the point where a big driving force of the plot is various characters' attempts to protect or steal a rare surviving copy. Explained as after a terrible third world war nearly drove humanity to extinction, most of humanity decided that religion was to blame and burned religious texts en-masse. The ending reveals that Alcatraz has been converted into a massive library and printing factory, where a group of scholars work to protect and reprint the world's remaining holy texts. When Carnegie holds a gun on Solara outside the wreckage of the old couple's house, Eli reveals that he hid the Bible behind their TV. When Carnegie orders one of his young henchmen (born after the nuclear war) to check the TV, he replies with a blank look and a puzzled, "The what?" Carnegie rages, "You're fuckin' SHITTIN' me!" before telling Redridge (who is old enough to know what a TV is) to check it. |
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FFS, I Believe in You: In the sequel, a large part of the difficulty the heroes face in brewing the magic potion is that its recipe was written shortly after the events of Oracle of Ages, many thousands of years before Breath of the Wild, and thus uses names that have long since fallen out of common use and refers to things that most people have become entirely unfamiliar with. Likewise, when Link is looking through old bestiaries in Gerudo Town, most of the creatures are enemies that were very common in earlier eras but which, having since died out or migrated away, he doesn't even recognize. | |
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In the Doctor Who story "The Space Pirates", Zoe, being from the futuristic twenty-first century, doesn't know what a candle is (though she'd had no trouble recognizing them in previous episodes). | |
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An episode of Blake's 7 has the protagonists arguing over whether all humans came from Earth originally. Given that the series uses both Human Aliens and Future Imperfect tropes, either argument is plausible. | |
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The Dark Tower is set in a world that has "moved on", having suffered some never-specified apocalypse and slowly decaying. During a brief confrontation between Roland and the Man in Black early in the series (near the end of The Gunslinger), the Man in Black makes mention of the great deeds done by their progenitors; among other things, they cured cancer and walked on the Moon. Roland flatly refuses to believe the latter. | |
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In Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, an ice age caused some humans to fly off into space, while others stay on Earth. The protagonist, Ledo, is from the space-faring society, but rediscovers Earth That Was purely by accident. Since the people in space have few resources and are fighting a never-ending war against another species, he's Conditioned to Accept Horror and has to learn about a society where people are viewed in more than utilitarian terms. Also, he is completely Squicked by the fact that people on Earth eat animal carcasses. | |
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Not entirely lost, per se, but Lieutenant Huxley in Demolition Man is delighted to have obtained a Red Hot Chili Peppers LP (rock music is forbidden in San Angeles) and picks Detective Spartan's brain for information about 20th-century society. The rest of her squad think she's a weirdo for being obsessed with the violent old days. | |
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The Books of Ember: In The City of Ember, the simple fact that the surface world exists becomes this, as does the existence of animals, candles, matches, the sun, the sky, and many other things. In The People of Sparks, the Emberites don't know that the Earth is round, and don't know about things like animals, trees, trucks, rain, seasons, and gods. |
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Roland is the protagonist of the epic Chanson de Roland, written centuries after his death at the Battle of Roncesvaux, and the most famous of Charlemagne's knights as a result. The earliest source on the battle and only non-literary source on Roland, the early 9th century Vita Karoli Magni by Einhard, says that one "Hruodlandus" was killed - along with "Eggihard", "Anshelmus", and "many other knights" that Einhard didn't name because he considered them common knowledge. | |
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Cyberpunk 2077: V is momentarily confused on how to interface with an old wall telephone before Johnny nudges them put the handset close to their ear. Justified, as it is well in the future where such technology is completely obsolete, and would be no different than a lot of people's V's age in the real world trying to use say, a rotary phone, or a pre-GUI computer. | |
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Horizon Zero Dawn: Humanity is in a primitive tribal state without much knowledge of the old world, even though you have these obviously futuristic machine animals stomping around. Figuring exactly out what happened in the past is a major plot point in the game. There are many examples throughout the game, but the most obvious is probably the Collection Sidequest where you find old coffee mugs for a trader. He is convinced they were used in some sort of elaborate hygiene ritual (possibly involving shaving beards), and scoffs at the idea of such fine ceramic being used for anything as pedestrian as drinking. | |
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