Collector of the Strange

Don't worry, she pretends they're fake.

Janine: Do you have any hobbies?
Egon: I collect spores, molds, and fungus.

— Ghostbusters (1984)

People collect things they like: movies, stamps, hummel figurines of baby animals, bottle caps, books, and action figures. It's only natural for those individuals who have a specific hobby to develop a fascination with acquiring memorabilia that is directly related to their outlet of interest. Such a pattern of human behavior is quite normal and is relatively accepted in society.

However, there are those people who, because of their unique occupation or lifestyle, collect items that are too dangerous, rare or gross for the average human being to even want to own. For those people who gather anything bizarre and strange, this trope page is for you.

May have a Friend in the Black Market. A group of these might form an Artifact Collection Agency. For the superhero version, see Superhero Trophy Shelf. A more mundane version would be the Trophy Room. Room Full of Crazy is this taken to its logical conclusion. See also Secret Government Warehouse. A specific variant only wants things (and at times people) that are unique and one of a kind. Compare Creepy Souvenir, for when morbid items (often body parts) are acquired as trophies.

See also The Collector, driven by the need to collect someone in particular, the Living Doll Collector, who transforms the living into a collection of custom toys, and Nerd Hoard, which is a collection of items from the Geek Reference Pool.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In the manga story "The Collection" by Shintaro Kago, a high-school girl is intent on collecting everything the boy of her dreams touches... which is pretty much literally everything.
• Crimson Spell: This is Halvir's raison d'etre prior to meeting Vald. His house is packed with rare magical items (and that's not even all of them, as he keeps his most prized acquisitions in a Pocket Dimension). Vald is only able to convince Havi to travel with him by promising to act as a bodyguard while Havi chases obscure spell components and weird artifacts in dangerous locations.
• Domu: A Child's Story: Old Cho collects little trinkets as trophies from each person he kills with his Psychic Powers. His room is so full of junk that it was thought impossible to even get inside.
• The Familiar of Zero: Luctiana, an elven researcher, likes to collect human artifacts from Halkeginia. However, she tends to mistake the functions of those artifacts, leading her to use them in strange ways, such as hanging a bucket on a hat stand or using an upturned umbrella as a container.
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End: Frieren has a hobby of collecting all kinds of strange objects, like the skull of a monster or a drug that melts clothes. She also collects weird Utility Magic like producing tea, shaving ice, or magic that de-rusts statues. She started doing the latter as a hobby after Himmel praised her for casting a spell that could raise a bed of flowers.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: The D'Arby brothers combine this with Your Soul Is Mine!, using their Stands to claim the souls of those who lose to them in games of chance. There are a few key differences between them: Elder brother Daniel (The Gambler) keeps his victims' souls at rest and turns them into poker chips, while younger brother Terence (The Gamer) hand-carved marionettes of his victims and puts the souls into them, keeping them conscious so he can talk to them occasionally. Both end up being defeated by Jotaro (who's a better cheater than them), which frees all their victims.
• Kakegurui: Itsuki Sumeragi has a collection of fingernails she won from all of the girls she's defeated in card games.
• Kämpfer: Sakura collects animal entrails, stuffed animals with various mutilations.
• Karin: Anju collects Creepy Dolls, one of which houses a serial killer.
• Kenko Zenrakei Suieibu Umisho: Shizuoka is too embarrassed to let her clubmates know that she collects strange little statues in a secret closet. That's not what she should be worrying about.
• The Mermaid Princess's Guilty Meal: The mermaid Sango is in charge of studying humanity and has collected all manner of memorabilia dumped from the surface world. She's kind of like Ariel, except it's a job instead of a hobby and she actually knows what everything is. Her stockpile of human money comes in handy when Ela wants a bite to eat, the princess helping herself in secret much to Sango's chagrin.
• Naruto: Tobi apparently has a warehouse-sized room dedicated to storing pairs of eyes. It becomes apparent after events concerning Pain's corpse and Konan that he does this so he can swap them around at leisure.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Negi collects antiques which more often than not turn out to be powerful magic items.
• One Piece: The pirate empress Big Mom is a literal collector; she captures "unusual creatures" and imprisons them, using the Devil Fruit power of one of her sons to contain them in books. These poor souls are given the And I Must Scream treatment, but Brook, a living skeleton, gets it worse — Big Mom likes him so much she decides to keep him in a bag by her side, And Call Him "George"!
• PandoraHearts: Miranda Barma is rather manic about collecting skulls. While it's unknown how she goes about acquiring said skulls or even why she does it, it has been established that she has a certain desire for Glen/Oswald's head, and the way in which she attempts to secure it very nearly leads to The End of the World as We Know It, so it may not be hard to guess the how or why.
• Panorama of Hell: The unnamed Mad Artist collects deformed fetuses and animal parts preserved in jars full of formaldehyde, among other grotesque stuff. He's even seen licking them.
• Pokémon: The Series: Something you might not know about Team Rocket's James: he likes to collect bottle caps in his spare time.
• Rave Master: Ruby, the penguin. What he collects is unknown, but things he's at least attempted to add are Plue, a bell that becomes a sword, a man-like crab, and a Bluun doll.
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: Abiru shows her love for animals by collecting their tails.
• Soul Eater: In a darker take, Noah uses the Book of Eibon to "collect" various artifacts he finds interesting. He's not too picky: people, swords, Eldritch Abominations... it's all the same. He even gets Death the Kid at one point. Oh, and it turns out he's actually just a personification of the Book's will. He's nothing but the madness of obsessive collecting given form.
• Tono to Issho: Date Masamune and his collection of absurd eyepatches.

Comic Books

• Astro City:
  • The First Family seem to have a large number of weird things lying around their home, though home much of it is a collection, how much is there for safekeeping, and how much is there because Augustus and Julius want to tinker with it is not established.
  • Jared Everall, owner of the T.J. Scoundrel's chain of Kitschy Themed Restaurants, collects souvenir super-gear and is a supervillian fanboy.
    "You want to sell those Grav-Pods you arrived on, I'll give you a good deal. Those are vintage, man. First used in 1963 by Dr. Ecliptic agains Supersonic. Not many originals survive, but those two look cherry."
• Agent X: One issue features two rather strange people who collect famous people's underwear.
• Batman:
  • Through his years of crime-fighting, Batman has amassed quite a large stash of villainous weapons and gadgets that he keeps on display in his Batcave. His older incarnation is not opposed to using some of this technology if the situation calls for it. Three of the most iconic objects are a giant Joker playing card, a giant penny, and a giant dinosaur. Originally, the penny came from a 1947 comic strip story about "The Penny Plunderer", and the dinosaur from a 1946 adventure in a "Dinosaur Island" theme park. More recent continuities have changed up these origins, such as Batman: The Animated Series, where the giant penny comes from a failed attempt by Two-Face to kill Batman in "Almost Got 'Im". JLA Classified #1 establishes that Batman has a Dalek in storage. We don't know where he got it, we don't know what he plans to use it for, but he does have one.
  • In a silly comic that may not have been canon, Gotham City has a museum of the villains' failed death traps and other ridiculous props, and the Riddler is curator as part of his rehabilitation, where he figures out the flaws that allowed Batman to escape.
• Disney Mouse and Duck Comics:
  • Scrooge McDuck, when one thinks about it: his collection includes rare coins, rare books, the Goose Egg Nugget, the Striped Ruby, the majority of the Fabergé Eggs, the #1 Dime, his old prospector tools, a cannon from the Boer War (his sisters freaked out when he sent that one home. It was actually a way to not pay for the ship plane ticket for himself, as he was hiding inside the cannon, but he still kept the cannon and acquired more), a teddy bear (the first one), and many other things, including all the money in the Money Bin (it's actually petty cash, by his standards). The common theme is that they're things he earned himself during his adventures and wouldn't give up, but considering the collection, he still qualifies.
  • Donald Duck has made some strange collections from time to time, and in Paperinik stories he's shown to keep some weapons and tools from the supervillains he defeated and lots of his own old and damaged weapons.
  • Gladstone keeps some of the things he won through his luck instead of selling them, depending on his fancy.
  • Goofy collected his ancestors' collections. His attic contains literally almost everything.
  • Small-time villain Melvin Nickelby collected coins, but only first coins. This included first coins of a type minted, but also the first coin used for a coin toss, the first coin spent in a vending machine, the first coin dropped into a wishing well, and more of the similar. He tried to steal Scrooge's Nr. 1 Dime because he figured the first coin earned by the world's richest duck would round out his collection nicely.
• Doctor Strange: Doctor Strange himself does this. Generally, he has a pretty good idea of what everything is supposed to do.
• The Eagle, original home of Dan Dare, ran a short-lived series called The Collector in the early '80s. A horror anthology, each week's story was a horror story featuring an object from the collection of the title character. Possibly inspired by the radio series "Tales from the Black Museum", in which Orson Welles would relate the stories of items from Scotland Yard's "Black Museum" - see Real Life, below.
• The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones has a recurring villain named Ben Ali Ayoob. An extremely wealthy man, he collects valuable antiquities, with a special interest in unique artifacts. As these are the kind of things Indiana Jones hunts, this often puts him at odds with Indy: as, unlike Indy who wants to place these items in a museum for the world to see, Ayoob wants them for his private collection.
• Green Lantern: Agent Orange, the Orange Lantern, is driven by the light of avarice to acquire other beings. He does so by killing and consuming them. His ring then replicates their personality and creates an orange energy construct in their image which serves Agent Orange. This is the Orange Lantern Corps; they aren't welcomed. They are owned.
• Iron Man: Exploited in one of the early issues of Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man 2008. Tony Stark naturally knows several wealthy people who collect bits of Iron Man memorabilia, up to and including pieces of destroyed suits. When Tony discovers that someone has been buying up these pieces and using them to create one-shot disposable supervillains, he deliberately seeds the market with some choice bits — all of which have been tagged with a special tracking virus so he can find the mystery buyer.
• Marvel Universe: The Elders of the Universe are each defined by their obsession. Each one the Last of Their Kind, they devoted their entire immortal life to something, the most famous example being the Collector, a minor Avengers villain who collected superheroes.
• Strikeforce: Morituri: The alien Horde combine this with Battle Trophy. Horde leaders prominently wear souvenirs from hunts, ranging from bottle caps and trinkets to human bones and scalps.
• The Phantom: The titular character of has a huge collection of treasures in his Skull Cave. It helps that he's a Legacy Character and that the Phantoms have Been There, Shaped History for centuries. His collection is divided in two: The Minor Treasure room with gold and jewels, and the Major Treasure room which includes invaluable, historical treasures like the snake that killed Cleopatra, Excalibur, the diamond cup of Alexander The Great, Shakespeare's original Hamlet script, and one of Alfred Nobel's first sticks of dynamite.
• Planetary: Both the Four and members of Planetary maintain large collections of the world's secrets, including mementos from dead superheroes and alien artifacts. As Mr. Snow observes when visiting a parallel earth, "They killed an entire world so that they had somewhere to store their weapons."
• The Sandman (1989): Cain and Abel are brothers and collectors. Cain collects mysteries, and Abel collects secrets.
• Superman:
  • In the Silver Age, the titular character's Fortress of Solitude seemed to exist mainly as a place to house his collection of geegaws, including statues of his friends and things related to them. A few of said friends managed somehow or another to see their wing of the Superman Museum of Stalkees and most of them were flattered rather than creeped out.
  • Brainiac's whole thing is that he wipes out planets, but preserves one city from each civilization that he destroys, which he shrinks and keeps in glass containers. The most notable is Kandor, a Kryptonian city which Superman manages to recover but can't unshrink.
• Tintin: In the story The Secret of the Unicorn, the pickpocket who's been plaguing the city turns out to be an eccentric old kleptomaniac who keeps a collection of the wallets he's stolen, without bothering to empty the contents.

Fan Works

• Cat Tales: Per canon, Batman's trophy room in the Batcave is used for displaying mementos from his stranger or more memorable cases. Selina begins adding things to it as well, eventually, such as a souvenir glass from the Iceberg Lounge and a 40,000-carat fiberglass diamond that had been used as a display piece in Falconi Jewelers. "Trophies", story #63, has Batman telling her the stories behind some of the stranger pieces (such as the giant penny and the robotic T. rex) while they rearrange things to make room for said fiberglass diamond.
• A Change of Pace: Vicky notes that Taylor is becoming one, what with her disturbing amount of human body parts she keeps for her powers.
• There's a sidekick statue collection revealed in Ducktalez 6. It also keeps track of their deaths, and it is owned by Darkwing.
• In Family is Everything Harry once had a collection of 2,057 ice cream sticks, which he was building into a castle.
• In Food for Thought Colin has a collection of restraining orders and subpoenas, including an entire room of ones served on Harry's behalf.
• The Infinite Loops: Loopers in general tend to collect things in their Pockets, some of which are normal, but some of which are on the odder side - Ranma Saotome, for instance, collects Death Stars.
  • The RWBY Loops in particular gives us the Romantic Weapons and Ballistics of Yggdrasil Museum, maintained by Ruby Rose and stocked with duplicates of weapons from across the multiverse. Given the Mega Crossover of the setting, that actually spans quite a large scale — think of every weapon from every movie, book, video game, anime, television series, cartoon, toy line... the centerpiece is Starkiller Base, which is also where most of the museum is located, and various snips imply Ruby is still looking to collect.
• The Raptor Squad in It's not the Raptor DNA have a curious habit of decorating their nests with various junk and toys, similar to modern birds. Delta uses bottle caps whilst Blue has a boot that she stole from Owen a long time ago. Blue also gloats and taunts Owen with this boot.
• The Mansionverse has Philidore Gastley, an early 20th-century collector of cursed or otherwise mind-boggling items who gathered them into what would become the Museum of the Weird. The Ghost Host himself also has clear shades of this, though it's just a hobby for him and he only has a room full of weird to show for it against Gastley's Museum.
• In Petty's Nuzlocke Comics spinoff, Barb the Nidoran/-rina/-queen collects pieces of paper. Typically her collection is old greeting cards, receipts, and other trash, but at one point it included a Bike Voucher and an SS Ticket.
• No stars in sight: Ikharos has a hobby of collecting specimens of alien fauna that he's encountered while visiting other planets, which are kept in terrariums inside the Trophy Room of his Cool Starship. These include a feathered serpent from Venus, a nest of tiny red scorpions from Pluto, a slug from an unnamed Rogue Planet, and a spider from Amalthia.
• OSMU: Fanfiction Friction: Octavius, being a Bookworm, collects old typewriters, usually scouring the Internet for them and buying them.
• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: As explained in Act III chapter 46, Issa Shuzen is a collector of rare and powerful magical spells and artifacts, though he never actually intends to use them. Unfortunately, one of those spells/artifacts is the dangerous Chrono Displacement spell, and Akua and Kahlua steal it from his archive for Kiria to use in his Evil Plan.
• In Trophy Draco collects undergarments and other personal items belonging to people he's had sex with.
• The World is Filled with Monsters: Luna. Her "office" in Everfree Castle is not so much an actual office as a massive, dimly lit warehouse filled to the brim with a collection of objects and artifacts that she collected over her long life — works of art, musical instruments, armor and weapons, books and scrolls, statues and monuments, chandeliers, piles of coins and precious gems, astronomical equipment, and countless other things. The resulting hoard is stored with no order whatsoever, the centuries-old junk and treasures all stacked and piled haphazardly in massive heaps as far as the eye can see.

Films — Animated

• The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel salvages discarded human artifacts, most of which are quite strange by merfolk standards (e.g. shoes, cutlery, smoking pipes, etc.). King Triton later destroys her collection in a fit of rage.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Jack Horner has a massive collection of magic artifacts and objects from across the fairy tale world, from glass slippers to Excalibur, and he WILL use them as needed.
• Twice Upon a Time: The Big Bad Synonamess Botch shows our unwitting heroes around his castle, where he has collections of all sorts of weird things, including dried salami, stretched cats, and stuffed and mounted bat heads.
• WALL•E: The titular protagonist keeps a wide assortment of random trinkets that catch his fancy. The items he collects don't seem to have any particular theme, they're just anything that strikes him as interesting. (At one point he throws out a diamond ring and keeps the little velvet box instead, for example.)
• ×××HOLiC: In the movie, not only does the movie take place at a gathering of strange collectors, but it turns out the man throwing the party collects collectors themselves.

Films — Live Action

• Nino in Amélie collects footprints, strange laughs, and flawed ID photos.
• Citizen Kane: Charles Foster Kane collected... everything, including a lot of junk from his past, even a little sled.
  Newsreel Narrator: [at beginning of newsreel on Charles Foster Kane's death] Legendary was Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure ground. Here, on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu's mountain. Contents of Xanadu's palace: paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many another palace — a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised, enough for ten museums — the loot of the world. Xanadu's livestock: the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the beast of the field and jungle. Two of each, the biggest private zoo since Noah. Like the pharaohs, Xanadu's landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave. Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself. Here in Xanadu last week, Xanadu's landlord was laid to rest, a potent figure of our century, America's Kubla Khan — Charles Foster Kane.
• Egon from Ghostbusters (1984). "I collect spores, molds, and fungus."
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has one in the Collector, a recurring character who collects strange and powerful artifacts (and creatures) from around the universe. This includes multiple Infinity Stones, Cosmo the Space Dog, Howard the Duck, a cocoon that was believed to belong to Adam Warlock (until the real cocoon was shown in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2), and, most bizarrely, Tobias Funke.
  • Yondu collects little figurines. When Peter steals the Power Stone from him, he leaves Yondu a Troll doll for his collection.
  • The ride at Disney California Adventure combines Disney Theme Parks and Marvel and adds an Ultron drone, the Warlock's Eye, a Sakaaran head, a statue from Kamar-Taj and the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak from the same film, Stan Lee, the Yeti from the Matterhorn, Figment, a bellhop's hat from the Hollywood Tower Hotel, a Nova Corps uniform, a Hydra helmet and gun, the weapons of the Warriors Three, Dark Elf artifacts, and Stormbreaker.
• In Micmacs, one of the arms makers has a collection of the body parts of famous people, such as Marilyn Monroe's molar and the heart of Louis XIV (I think), and he's trying to get Mussolini's eye.
• MouseHunt features Eccentric Millionaire Alexander Falko, who is the world’s most famous collector of items relating to the architect Charles Lyle LaRue. When Ernie and Lars Munst discover the fabled "Missing LaRue" (the last house the man designed before he was sent to an asylum for undisclosed reasons), Falko swiftly introduces himself to the brothers as he proudly boasts that he possesses LaRue's books, letters, and forty-two of his houses, wants to make the building Lars and Ernie have just found his forty-third, and is sure that LaRue would have liked his shoes (though not before the brothers ask if they belonged to the man himself).
• While much of the movie Mondo Collecto is faked, some real collectors of esoteric items are featured. Filmmaker Ted V. Mikels displays his medieval weapon collection, and Earl L. Luckes (as a character named Harutak) displays his collection of Phantom of the Paradise memorabilia (including an original prop helmet).
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie showcases Tom Servo's underpants collection.
• Jack from Oblivion (2013) collects a variety of pre-war memorabilia artifacts he managed to scavenge, keeping them in a secret cottage he built in a somewhat-untouched grotto.
• The titular Predators from the Predator series, who all collect the skulls of their victims.
• At the start of Restoration (1995), young doctor Merivel encounters a man with a hole in his chest due to an injury that enables people to see his beating heart (Merivel is the only one who dares to touch it). Later he encounters the man as a living exhibit in a private collection kept by King Charles II.
• Road to Perdition. Maguire, a crime scene photographer (though also a hitman) has a collection of photographs of corpses.
• In Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door... (1948), Michael Redgrave plays the role of Mark Lamphere, an architect who "collects" rooms where murders have taken place by reconstructing the rooms using as much of the original crime scene material as possible.
• Several of the Pinball fans in the Documentary Special When Lit are presented like this; two examples include Steve Keeler, who collects pinball machines and Jaws memorabilia, and Josh "Pingeek" Kaplan, who collects and sells videos of pinball games being played.
• Owen, Danny DeVito's Manchild character in Throw Momma from the Train, collects coins. Not rare, valuable, or mint-condition coins; just coins. The coins are meaningful to him because he acquired them during times he spent with his father as a kid.
• In The Wrong Box, Morris Finsbury collects rare eggs.

Literature

• Bas-Lag Cycle: The Weaver from Perdido Street Station collects scissors, apparently because the sound they make appeals to its otherworldly aesthetic sense. Previously it'd collected chess sets.
• In Mark Twain's "The Canvasser's Tale" a traveling salesman tells the sad story of how his formerly-rich uncle died and left the storyteller nothing but his vast collection of echoes.
• The Charlie Parker Series has the Collector, who collects relics of murders and other crimes that he believes are important on some cosmic level.
• In Chronicles of a Strange Kingdom king Shellar III of Ortan collects... his own coffins. No, he's not a vampire, although later he gains the ability to manifests as a ghost while near death. A Running Gag in the series is whenever Shellar risks his life for the sake of his kingdom or his loved ones, or generally is in trouble, at some moment he is falsely presumed dead and a new coffin is ordered for him. Eventually, his collection becomes so well-known he starts receiving new additions to it from other monarchs, as sincere birthday gifts. This actually has some plot importance: Shellar's bloodline was cursed to die out unless one of them cheats death thrice, which he did much more than that, and in later books, the Archmage actually considers that Shellar's coffins became a sort of good luck charm for him and orders a new one on purpose when the king is in grave danger. It seems to have worked - Shellar survived, although spent several weeks as a ghost with his body comatose. Interestingly, he does not plan to use any of his collection ever, instead going to remain as Spirit Advisor to his descendants via the aforementioned manifestation.
• Clue: Some of Boddy's items may be valuable, but they're also decidedly odd, such as the antique rabbit's foot (with a solid-gold chain) from book #12, chapter 6 ("Bad Hare Day"), the piece of jade carved into the shape of a sparrow in book #14, chapter 1 ("You're So Jaded"), a solid gold peanut that's given away as a prize in book #15, chapter 3 ("A Nutty Day"), a jade ice cream cone also given away as a prize in book #16, chapter 5 ("Sundae School"), a necklace with every letter of the alphabet made from diamond, rubies, and emeralds in book #17, chapter 7 ("Alphabet Clues"), and a silent music box used in old silent movies in book #18, chapter 7 ("Party Poopers").
• Snazz, a gremlin murder victim from Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I., collected lint as a child.
• Discworld:
  • According to Making Money Lord Vetinari has, somewhere in the palace, the death masks of most of his predecessors as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork (those whose bodies were in any state to have a death mask made). When asked if he finds it creepy to have them all looking down on him, he replies that generally he looks down on them because they were fat, greedy, corrupt, and incompetent, and he's awesome.
  • When Gaspode the Wonder Dog is bathed against his will at the end of Men at Arms, he runs away from his adoptive home and returns to the streets, complaining: "Every flea, gone! And I had nearly the complete set!"
  • In Going Postal, the invention of the stamp attracts a new collecting craze, mostly among people who previously had collected pins. Let us clarify: these are not brooch-style decorative pins (a la Disney "Pin Trading"), but the sort of pins you'd use to fasten two pieces of cloth together temporarily.
  • A number of Discworld novels make reference to people collecting pressed lizards. An unpleasant child from Hogfather requested a "lizard press" as a Hogswatch gift, indicating it's a sufficiently-popular hobby that someone invented such a device.
    • Tiffany Aching once told a passerby that she was making a collection of pressed toads, but this was only a lie to justify her picking up the (talking) toad who accompanied her on a journey.
  • In Snuff, Young Sam starts a poo collection, inspired by the one assembled by Geoffrey in The World of Poo. There's a brief mention of some Ankh-Morporkians having smell collections, in carefully stoppered bottles.
    It was all a mystery to Vimes, who was absolutely sure that it was impossible to tell the difference between a chicken fart and a turkey fart, but there were those who professed to be able to do so, and he was glad that such people had chosen this outlet for their puzzling inclinations rather than, for example, fill their sink with human skulls, collected on the high street.
• Morollan of the Dragaera novels collects Morganti weapons.
• Richard Knaak's Dragon Tome in his Dragon Realm series has a magic-user who collects unusual people.
• In the book Dragonskin Slippers, each of the dragons collects something - windows, shoes, even dogs.
• The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden has a collection of vampire fangs. And not the hinged plastic kind. Other odd spell ingredients he used to keep on hand include sunshine wrapped up in a handkerchief, mainly for use on vampires. And in Changes, he has to remove stuff from his apartment in a hurry that the FBI might be interested in. The list of stuff he's bundling up includes two swords (one of which the police would call a murder weapon in a local case), depleted uranium, and a human skull. (The skull isn't actually a souvenir, incidentally; he's called Bob and he's on Harry's payroll.)
• Ferals Series: Felix Quaker the cat feral spends his time collecting rare feral artifacts throughout history.
• The Fire's Stone: Herrek, a man in Ischia who "helps" Aaron break into the palace, has collected so many treasures as trades for information and equipment that he has trapped himself within his own hoard. He also collects information.
• One of the proudest claims of the appropriately-named Bad Guy Bar, the Last Mistake from the Gentleman Bastard Sequence, is that it has secured a memento of every ship that has foundered within sight of Camorr over a period of seventy years. The walls are covered in "a bewildering variety of souvenirs, each one telling a visual tale that ended with the phrase 'not quite good enough.'" such as broken bits of ships, split helmets, and a suit of armor with a square hole punched into it by a crossbow bolt.
• Goblins in the Castle: Goblins On the Prowl reveals that the Baron keeps a collection of cannonballs from famous battles. They're seen on the fireplace in the Great Hall in the first book but aren't specifically identified as a collection until the second.
• In Good Omens, the angel Aziraphale collects books of prophecy and "infamous Bibles", antique Bibles with amusing misprints such as the Unrighteous Bible, the Wicked Bible, and the Bugger Alle Thys Bible. Apart from the Charring Cross and Bugger Alle Thys Bibles, all the misprinted Bible editions in Aziraphale's collection really do exist in Real Life.
• A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: The narrator of "Relic" has bought one of John Lennon's shoes...not just any shoe, but supposedly one of the two shoes that Lennon was wearing when he was murdered. He describes himself as "a special collector of things."
• Harry Potter:
  • Horace Slughorn collects people, but not in the way you think. He doesn't want to be in the spotlight himself; instead, he purposely acts to collect the trust and affection of hopeful and talented students so he could serve as a powerful influence for them.
  • Arthur Weasley collects Muggle artifacts. Some of them, like a Ford Anglia he enchanted to become invisible and fly, are pretty neat, but a lot of it is junk like electrical plugs and batteries. Considering the average Wizard is disinterested to the point of indifference regarding Muggles, and most of those who aren't are downright hostile towards them, he comes off as more than a bit weird due to his obsession.
• In John Dies at the End and its sequels, David Wong has a garden shed (later an apartment room) full of things that people send to him. Some are objects with supernatural properties, others are mundane items that simply should not exist in this universe, such as an issue of TIME magazine about the assassination of Bill Clinton.
• Laszlo Hadron and the Wargod's Tomb: Areton Sarm owns a vast trove of artifacts from various cultures and periods of history, ranging from old alien warships to a Tyrannosaurus skeleton.
• Longsummer Nights, "Seeds of Solace": Alessia keeps a collection of people she's turned to stone.
• The Collector is a series regular in the Nightside novels, a compulsive hoarder who seeks out anything exotic, unique, or historically significant, then stashes it in various super-secret locations (on the Moon, inside a live tyrannosaur's cage, etc). As one of the things he maintains a collection of is time machines, many of the historical artifacts he's picked up were taken directly from their periods of origin.
• In Pale this is an entire subset of magic practitioner. Collectors try to find magical items focusing on certain themes and fit them in diagrams. The strongest Collector in the story, however, is a collector of people, so his diagram is an apartment complex.
  • Abraham Musser, a later antagonist, is a Collector focusing on Implements, which he steals from other practitioners and masters. Among his collection are a catcher's mitt that lets him catch any incoming attack and a knife whose cuts grow over time.
• Paper Towns: "IT'S NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS!"
• The children's book Poo at the Zoo features Hector Gloop, who collects animal droppings and shows them off to other people.
• Orfeo Culzean, The Chessmaster for hire from Ravenor collects deodands - random, innocuous items that have caused people's deaths.
• Reuhurinteen ala-aste: One story has Rosita tell the class about her hobby of collecting pencil shavings. Vatanen gets upset that Rosita sharpened away the pencil he gave her, and pays her back by using up the eraser she gave him, and ends up thinking about collecting eraser dust.
• Discussed in one story in Stories for Nine-Year-Olds, in which Ruth Dixon (through a series of mishearings) thinks she'll have to bring a dead frog to school, and her brother Mike jokingly suggests she start a pressed frog collection.
• Jennifer Roberson also has a character who collects the unusual, including people, in her Tiger And Del series.
• Tress of the Emerald Sea: Tress collects cups from faraway places because they let her imagine life in other lands than her boring island home. Her interest wanes after she gets to sail the seas and see some of those places, but she keeps a few personally significant pieces.
• The main character of The Very Inappropriate Word keeps a collection of words he's learnt under his bed.
• In Black Legion, a novel based in the universe of Warhammer 40,000, Abaddon has a staggering collection of trophies, weapons, and curiosities aboard Vengeful Spirit, from the Talon of Horus to advanced biomechanical cogitators (computers) and the head of an enormous sea serpent. He acquired them during a centuries-long pilgrimage through the Eye.
• In The Westing Game, dressmaker Flora Baumbach tells Turtle that her late mentally-challenged daughter collected fabric swatches from her shop's sample collection.
• Several of these show in Brimstone Angels. Lorcan, who holds Farideh's warlock pact, collects warlocks in general, especially those from noteworthy bloodlines. Being able to have an impressive collection of pacted warlocks doesn't have a material benefit in devil society, but it does give you bragging rights. Sairche, Lorcan's sister and rival, collects secrets. Adolican Rhand, the Arc Villain of the middle of the series, collects surreal artwork, especially pieces that depict Body Horror - not as strange, but definitely creepy, and he likes showing them off to people to make them uncomfortable.

Live-Action TV

• In the live-action puppet series Bookmice, the cat that would later call himself "Exit"^note He took his name from an "EXIT" sign in the library; it was the first word he ever learned to read. is revealed to have a collection of keys.
• Gammil in the Charmed episode; "Size Matters" makes statuettes out of witches.
• Gil Grissom's office from CSI mirrors the owner's fascination with insects where he keeps full preserved bodies of giant spiders and other bugs that catch his fancy. This isn't particularly strange by the standards of this trope — entomology is a well-established and perfectly respectable field of study — but bringing his hobby to work with him like that must make his coworkers nervous.
  • Grissom's collection temporarily became even more macabre in Season 7. As the Miniature Killer kept leaving incredibly detailed dioramas of their crime scenes for police to find, Grissom started keeping them on shelves in his office. He even began creating miniatures of his own, in an attempt to get into the killer's mindset.
• Doctor Who: Considering the Doctor tends to have all sorts of weird stuff in his pockets for every occasion and the TARDIS has all sorts of cool stuff in it the Doctor whips out for use in various episodes and serials, he's this too, though it overlaps with Crazy-Prepared when you consider his lifestyle.
  • Henry van Statten of "Dalek" collected and studied alien artifacts. Collecting a live Dalek may not have been the best move...
  • Done again with Grayle in "The Angels Take Manhattan", who does much the same thing with a Weeping Angel, and meets an unpleasant fate.
• Marshall Teller from Eerie, Indiana collects leftovers from all the strange adventures he's been in and stores them in an evidence locker in his attic in the hopes of using them to prove that he lives in the centre of weirdness for the entire world.
• Itch: Itch collects elements from the periodic table. It's this hobby that kicks off the plot of the whole show!
• In an episode of Midsomer Murders, the fact a suspect for the murder is somewhat mentally distressed is lampshaded by the fact he is an obsessive collector of and wargamer with Games Workshop fantasy armies. He is also a Cannot Talk to Women type whose obsessive love for a female character is condensed into his trying to paint a warrior woman miniature figure to look exactly like her. In TV dramas, nobody ever collects toy soldiers who is mentally balanced, psychologically normal, and socially integrated. This is always a lazy TV shorthand for obsessive deranged loner.
• Gonzo on The Muppet Show kept a mildew collection.
• In the Night Gallery episode "A Death in the Family", a mortician collects preserved dead bodies.
  • The Night Gallery itself might qualify if one assumes that the narrator actually collects the paintings.
• This is the premise of Oddities produced by Discovery, showing off collections of old scientific instruments, animal taxidermies, and Victorana.
• Rumplestiltskin in Once Upon a Time collects magic artifacts, weapons, and virtually everything else; many of his deals involve having the other party seek out objects for him. Fittingly, his Storybrooke counterpart is a pawnbroker.
• Rimmer in Red Dwarf collects photos of 20th-century telegraph poles. Meanwhile, the Cat collects clothes, while Lister contents himself with growing the mould in his used coffee cup. (Admittedly that last one's mostly because it annoys Rimmer.)
  • Rimmer also collects headlines about other people with the name Arnold, "No Smoking" signs, and old wires. He also went on a hiking tour of the ship's engine decks and returned with photos of seemingly identical bits of machinery with only minor differences that only he can make out. It's a Running Gag that he's utterly clueless about the fact that nobody else on the ship is interested in them but him.
    • Rimmer's gift to a seemingly-departing Kryten in The Last Day is a vial of a famous general's spinal fluid.
  • The Skutters, the service robots on the Dwarf are big enough fans of John Wayne movies that they're members of a fan club. With posts directly addressed to them.
• Shining Time Station: Downplayed; Tito, one of the members of the Jukebox Band, collects the nickels that are put into the jukebox. While collecting coins is fairly normal, collecting those coins specifically can be considered strange.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "Treachery, Faith and the Great River", Nog mentions one Al Lorenzo, chief of operations on Dagos Prime, who collects holo-photos of himself sitting behind the desks of Starfleet captains. Nog helps him borrow Sisko's desk for a photo as part of an elaborate Chain of Deals.
• Berry Weiss on Storage Wars bids on storage lockers looking mostly for weird and cool collectibles. He's found things like a really creepy wooden head sculpture, and metalwork helmets etched with oil-industry images.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Mind of Simon Foster", the pawnbroker Mr. Quint sells removed memories to wealthy people who collect different experiences such as high school graduations and a person's first time making love.
• Everything from Warehouse 13. See Secret Government Warehouse and Artifact Collection Agency.
• Mike on The Young Ones claimed that he'd donated his used-tissue collection to the household kindling supply. He's also referred to his passport collection. Though knowing Mike, he probably never actually collected used tissues, but simply tossed a fresh one on the fire and claimed that he'd been collecting them. That way, he didn't have to forfeit anything he actually valued.

Magazines and Print Media

• Fortean Times could be viewed as one of these in print; it regularly reports on strange and bizarre collections surfacing around the world.

Music

• The Carnival in Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's "Karn Evil 9 (First Impression), parts I and II." Given that the song takes place after a nightmarish war between man and machine, the Carnival's wares (the remnants of the world before the war) would seem very unusual to the crowds.
• Evillious Chronicles: How strange these things (a silver spoon for Greed, a glass tainted with red for Gluttony, a clockwork doll for Sloth, four mirrors for Pride, a pair of scissors for Envy, a sword with poison on its blade for Lust, and a yet unknown object that is heavily implied to change forms for Wrath) are is up for everyone to judge, but Gallerian Marlon strives to collect the 'Vessels of the Seven Deadly Sins'- so much, that he is nicknamed The Collector, apart from his first name sounding very similar to 'gallery'.

Pinball

• Robert Ripley (and the player) take this role in Ripley's Believe It or Not!, traveling the world to document and collect various oddities.

Podcast

• Top Down Perspective: The three often talk about amiibo collecting and trying to track down amiibos, especially when new waves are released. Jon in particular quests to acquire eight Captain Falcons.
• The Magnus Archives has Jurgen Leitner, who had the largest private collection of books touched by the Entities. Emphasis on had, as putting together that many cursed books powered by unfathomable monstrosities is a bit like gathering sticks of dynamite around a campfire; when the library fell, the books were released into the world. Most of the rest of the characters on the podcast view him as an absolute git whose hubris in believing he was the only one who could contain these tomes only set him up for an inevitable disaster.

Professional Wrestling

• According to Silas Young, ACH is an avid collector of Japanese cartoons DVDs. This went so far as to be the catalyst of a feud between the two in Ring of Honor, where Young decided he was going to make ACH act more like a man.
• Hayley Shadows collects action figures, but don't give her a Barbie Doll.
• While Jim Londos had done something huge in lucha libre when he took the mask of El Enmascarado Rojo, it was Bobby Segura who gained a reputation for collecting the masks of luchadors and in fact was humiliation shaved as a result of failing to take Rojo's after Londos gave it back. Although this isn't so strange anymore what with some luchadors having "collections" that dwarf that of the entire Segura family combined, but in 1946, yeah.
• Sara Del Rey brought up Chris Hero's t-shirt collection, slamming it in comparison to her "very European" garbs.
• In WCW in 1997, Heel manager James Vandenberg^note Daryl Van Horne/the Sinister Minister/Father James Mitchell, the manager for Mortis (Kanyon) and Wrath (Bryan Clarke), was supposedly the curator of the Museum of Medical Abnormalities in Taipei and a collector of "rare oddities".

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street:
  • Bert and his collection of paper clips. He also collects bottle caps.
  • Telly likes to collect triangles.

Radio

• Linda in Linda Smith's Brief History of Timewasting collects ceramic birds. But she has to smash them when they become endangered.

Tabletop Games

• Numenera: Ghamalso is an alien being obsessed with collecting unique beings, machines, artifacts, and phenomena to store aboard his spaceship, which through some creative use of spatial warping now contains so much stuff that someone who spent a mortal lifetime moving from room to room, studying each object for only one minute, would still only see one percent or so of it all. Ghamalso has no real standards for what he collects beyond some degree of interest, and his collection includes, among other things, mummified alien heads, immense war machines, paintings and other artwork, a human child in stasis, and an alien zoo with a greater surface area than the Earth.
• Talislanta: The Sindarans have collecting as one of their hats. Most of them collect the things you'd expect — art, books, antiques, etc — but not all of them. A fandom suggestion list for "things for your Sindaran to collect" included "lint" and "other collectors' collections".
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Khorne, the Chaos God of war and bloodshed, collects blood and skulls, which form a lake and a mountain, respectively.^note Not a normal lake and mountain of course. It was said that just one of Khorne's servants collected enough skulls to form a small planetoid. Said servant was powerful, but mostly an ordinary daemon, overshadowed by monsters like Anngrath, Doombreed, or Angron.
  • The Necron special character Trazyn the Infinite. Think Doctor Doom if he was a killer skeleton robot from space and you have a decent idea of what he's like. His collection includes, among other things, the wraithbone choir of Craftworld Altansar, the preserved severed head of Sebastian Thor, an Enslaver husk, and baroque set of Space Marine power armour (with the accompanying Blood Angels marine; it's implied that the poor sap is far from the only technically living thing in Trazyn's collection), and the world spirit shrine of Maiden World Carnac. And Trazyn is always looking to add more things to his bizarre gathering of oddities.
  • Rogue Trader gives us the Stryxis, a Proud Merchant Race local to the part of space the game is set. Any given trader will have a vast hoard of unique treasures, rare technologies, and outright junk for trade. The challenge when dealing with them is that how much they would want for any of it and what they might find valuable in return is completely nonsensical to humans, and seems to vary massively between individuals to boot.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Changeling: The Dreaming: The Maeghar are fae-blooded vampires who typically build large collections of small objects, often Creepy Souvenirs like finger bones, children's teeth, pieces of tattooed skin, broken dreams...
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade: One of the Malkavian character templates is named "The Collector" who collects obsessively out of a desire to understand the world. To that end, he'll collect, examine, and catalogue every single variation of a certain item for months at a time; eventually, he'll exhaust all the insights the item has to give, put the collection in storage, and move on to another series of object- no matter how bizarre or macabre: insects, oak leaves, human hands, anything.
• Black dragons in the Pathfinder game, aside from the usual treasure, are infamous for collecting live prisoners to torture and torment.
• Battletech: Cranston Snord, mercenary commander and collector of Star League artifacts, selected similarly-minded people when starting up his mercenary company, and ended up with collectors of everything from Elvis memorabilia to pickled human organs. Some people in the setting say, only half-jokingly, that Snord didn't found a mercenary company, he just expanded his collecting hobby to include weirdos.

Theatre

• In the 2013 musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket collects other people's thoughtlessly-discarded Wonka Bar wrappers at the dump near his home, where a sweet stall passes each day. He's too poor to enjoy an actual Wonka Bar more than once a year, but he loves them so much that he faithfully collects the wrappers, with Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight wrappers (his favorite) especially cherished. His family doesn't see this as strange (Grandpa Joe practically encourages it!) but it does garner bemused questioning from an observer in the opening scene. This hobby-collecting eventually earned Charlie a trip to the titular Chocolate Factory when one of the discarded wrappers turns out to have a golden ticket.

Video Games

• In pretty much any video game with an inventory system (particularity RPGs), a player may become one of these themselves, especially if going for 100% Completion.
• The Worm from The Adventures of Massmouth collects unique artifacts (such as the ancient superweapon "Eye of Mahan") and creatures (such as the miniature demon "Mini-Baron") from across the universe, and in fact maintains his own Artifact Collection Agency to acquire new items.
• Over the course of the Baldur's Gate series, you can collect quite a few interesting items. A vampire's hand, golden, silver, and bronze pantaloons, a couple of heads, hearts from demons, sharks, and humans, a brain, a soul, and weapons of all kinds. Fortunately, you also get a Hammerspace bag.
• Carlos, from the Battle Clash duology, collects the heads of the mecha he's defeated in battle. He's made it his life's mission to defeat ST Falcon, the world's only known two-manned mecha, which he considers an abomination (all other ST models do not have a separate pilot and gunner).
• Dante from Devil May Cry adorns his office with trophy heads. While this is not unusual in itself, the skulls on his walls are of all the demons he's killed during his career as a bounty hunter. A bonus art from 3 takes this to its logical conclusion, where Dante's office is so filled up with corpses of all the monsters he's killed and gear he's collected over the game, there's almost no walking room left. Presumably that's why he only keeps trophy heads in the later games; space is an issue when your business is also your house.
• Xenon in the Black Emporium DLC of Dragon Age II, who owns a store of items he's collected in his quest to find immortality (which he succeeded in, but not the way he wanted) that Hawke and his group can browse around for.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In each game in the series since the 3D Leap, as well as in its Fallout sister series, you can easily turn your home into a Superhero Trophy Shelf with all of the questing treasures you acquire. There are far more in each game than you can possibly put to use, so most will go toward decorating your home. Many Game Mods exist that aid in this process.
  • In Morrowind, Divayth Fyr has amassed quite the collection of legendary artifacts and has even set up a Lock and Key Puzzle for those willing to risk their lives (to either his violent Corprus victims or catching the disease themselves) to try to steal them. In particular, he has a number of Dwemer artifacts and items associated with the Imperial Battlespire event.
  • Oblivion's Shivering Isles DLC has characters who obsessively collect things such as forks or bones. One can also assist the curator of the Museum of Oddities with new acquisitions.
  • In Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC, the Telvanni Mage-Lord and legendary enchanter Master Neloth collects the staffs of Azra Nightwielder, a legendary master of "Shadow Magic."
  • The expansive Skyrim Game Mod "Legacy of the Dragonborn" allows you to become this on a grand scale, with an expansive museum to store and display literally thousands of items (including many from previous games), ranging from dangerous daedric weapons and armor to rare books, rare coins, weird doohickeys, severed heads, and more.
• Subaru of Ensemble Stars! loves to collect shiny things, ranging from coins to ramune bottle marbles to any old glittery thing he happens to find on the side of the road. More than one character wonders whether he is actually somehow a crow.
• In E.P.I.C. Wishmaster Adventures a sergeant in the villain's army collects the skulls of mine slaves he's ordered to be killed.
• Final Fantasy V's Gilgamesh collects rare swords from all the worlds he's visited. His ultimate goal is to find Excalibur.
• Fire Emblem Fates has Keaton and his daughter Velouria, who share a hobby of collecting "treasures" like broken plates, discarded thread, clumps of dirt, and other random objects their human comrades tend to consider garbage or are ordinary to the point of being above their notice.
• In Ghostbusters: The Video Game:
  • Edmund Hoover, later known as "Azetlor, the Collector," collected ancient and extremely rare books and tomes, some of which were very powerful. He seduced (and later murdered) Eleanor Twitty, a librarian at the NYCPL, so that he could get his hands on The Gozerian Codex.
  • The Ghostbusters themselves fit this trope, what with all the Cursed Artifacts found throughout the game.
• Grand Theft Auto IV Add-On The Ballad of Gay Tony has Yusuf Amir. The son of a rich Arabian businessman says himself that he wants things that he couldn't buy, so he pays you for illegally getting him a chopper with miniguns and rockets (later he plated with gold), a subway car, and a S.W.A.T. Tank. He never uses anything for himself, he is lucky enough for having the stuff.
• In Legend of the Crystal Skull, Nancy Drew must gather each of the novelty glass eyes formerly owned by the late Bruno Bolet. Bruno also collected exotic pets as well as prosthetic eyes.
• Brainiac from LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham takes this even further than the comics counterpart. He still collects cities but is now growing bored with that. He's escalated it to collecting worlds, and also has the Lantern rings on his agenda.
• Gutten Kisling from the video game Okage: Shadow King collects toenail clippings.
• In Princess Maker 2, a Travelling Salesman will show up times. He has many weird things, which range from useless to very useful for the Daughter's stats.
• Tooth Fairy from Reverse: 1999, as her name suggests, collects teeth. This is partly a necessity as she needs to breed magical critters called tooth fairies as part of her magical medical practice, but she's also fond of collecting them for sentimental reasons, oftentimes for the memories associated with the specific events, such as the time that she accidentally ran over a young boy and managed to save his life but knock his baby tooth out in the process, her unknowingly being part of a harmful drug trial, and punching out her former mentor Prof. Evan's incisor in a fit of rage.
• Hisahide in Sengoku Basara collects various different antiques and famous artifacts but also collects people. Taken to the extreme in Utage where he now collects metaphysical objects like names and bonds such as taking Mitsuhide's real name and turning them into another person and also robbing Mitsunari of their bond with Ieyasu by killing the latter.
• In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the Collector Manikin was known for his collection of human-made stuff. Since this is After the End, they're not in wide supply. To progress in the game, you need to steal a yen note from Loki's room for him.
• In the second Simon the Sorcerer game, the two gargoyles guarding the entrance to the Fortress of Doom discuss how far Simon would be able to make it without dying, followed by expressing hope that they are allowed to keep his kneecaps.
• In the Let's Play of Sonic Unleashed done by pokecapn and company, medibot names all the collectibles in the game. Sonic ends up collecting everything from a lost sock to an umbrella that only works if you don't look at it.
• Admiral ZEX from Star Control II collects beings from various races.
• Geo Strigau in Tales of Hearts collects Spirunes, which are roughly peoples' souls in crystal form. He truly pisses off both Innes and the player when he takes the Spirune of one Lapis Silver.
• Touhou Project:
  • Marisa Kirisame, of Touhou Project fame, has a reputation for stealing and acquiring random objects, many of which are magical in nature. She can't be bothered to sort or identify them. Legendary artifacts have been discovered in her house.
  • Earlier, in the PC-98 games, Kotohime was fond of collecting "things no one else finds interesting". She also thought she was a police officer.
  • Rin "Orin" Kaenbyou collects corpses. It is mentioned in game how weird this is.
  • Kosuzu Motoori collects youma books, books that are written by and/or contain youkai. They are usually indecipherable by humans, but Kosuzu has a special ability to read them.
• In Until Dawn, Wendigo!Hannah is revealed at the end of the game to collect heads as some sort of trophy or possibly as a means for her friends to stay with her.
• In The Walking Dead: Season Four, Clementine can find different items to decorate her room at the Ericson's Boarding School. Some of them are fairly standard, like fake flowers, a crystal, or drawings of some of the kids who live in the school, but she can also find and display skulls of different animals (a deer, a boar, a cat, and a human). She can also decorate her room with a Venus flytrap and a potted mushroom.

Visual Novels

• CLANNAD:
  • Nagisa has a habit of collecting Dango plushies, given that they are based on her favorite food. Of course, this makes her all the more endearing.
  • Fuko is obsessed with starfish, collecting figures of them and carving them herself out of wood. She also likes to share them with her classmates.
• Yuri from Doki Doki Literature Club! is a knife collector. What makes her this trope is that Yuri is a Shrinking Violet high schooler with anxiety issues, heavily implied to be a Nightmare Fetishist who enjoys cutting herself with her collection. She ends up shanking herself to death with a knife once Monika pushes her over the edge.
• Spirit Hunter: NG:
  • Seiji has an odd hobby of collecting gross-sounding drinks, to the point that people will gift him with strange drinks to pacify his sadism. At one point, Akira's run-in with a spirit is interrupted when Seiji drops by with a drink for him to try.
  • The spirit Kubitarou collects heads from a variety of sources, ranging from plushies to humans. This is revealed to be because, in life, she presented the heads to sacred cedar trees in the hopes of reviving her younger brother. After becoming a spirit, she loses all sanity and only continues collecting heads out of habit.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!: Hiiragi collected his children's baby teeth and their (as well as his own) fingernails and kept them inside a drawer in the closet he used to scare Akane for doing the same to her cousins Tsutsuji and Kuroki.
• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Strong Bad Email "morning routine", Strong Bad inexplicably has a dozen or so assorted eggs hidden in the couch.
    Strong Bad: So I got a lotta eggs. And I keep 'em in the couch.
    Strong Sad: There needs to be a better word for "weird".
  • In "Decemberween Short Shorts", Coach Z claims to collect "embarrassing physical problems" when Homestar suggests he avoid talking about them.

Webcomics

• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: Daniel Ti'Fiona collects muscle-powered weapons, swords are his favorite, but his collection includes axes, crossbows, polearms, etc. They're displayed on the walls of his room.
  • Also, following an incident where he had to wear high-heels and kept tripping in them, he collects far too many high-heel training shoes.
• Demon Eater: Considering that demons don't have much time to worry about anything other than basic hand-to-mouth survival, the fact that the human club exists, and the fact that it has actual human things, definitely brands them for this trope.
• Drowtales: Snadhya'rune Vel'Sharen collects people with unique abilities, such as spellsong, empathy, nether summoning, and the like. These people make up a huge part of the Nidraa'chal clan's elite force as even a single person could quickly turn the tide on the battlefield. In Chapter 49, Snadhya'rune aided Anahid in ousting her rival Valla'drielle and becoming the rightful Ill'haress with the ulterior motive of recruiting the clan Seers once the Kyorl'solenurn ally with the Nidraa'chal out of gratitude for stopping their civil war. When Anahid uses her Seer powers to discover and expose Snadhya'rune's (very) numerous crimes to her people, Snadhya'rune tries asking for forgiveness, only for Anahid to tell her to look for forgiveness from her actual victims.
• Homestuck:
  • All the kids' parental figures collect weird things: Dad collects harlequin paintings and figurines because he thinks that John likes them, Mom fancies statutes and paintings of wizards, Bro fills the house with uncanny amounts of puppets, and Grandpa Harley collects everything from faded beauty salon posters to globes to mummies to suits of armour to taxidermy.
  • Among the kids, Dave Strider likes to collect things preserved in amber or jars, while Roxy has a shelf of dead mutant cats preserved in blocks of clear material.
• Scandinavia and the World: Iceland collects penises. Inspired by the Icelandic Phallological Museum. (Link SFW, against all odds.)
• Shadows Of Enchantment: Vrill is an artifact trader, but if he finds particularly interesting stuff he tends to just keep it (or buy it, or in some cases have it stolen). What he's really after is enchanted items, but anything rare and strange might catch his eye.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Väinö, who guards the border between a safe area and a Death World zone, has this as a side effect of his occupation. He keeps track of whether people who go through his checkpoint are still alive or not by having each of them leave a small personal item behind. If someone dies, their item magically bleeds... and apparently stays in the cabinet in which it's being kept.
• Tally Ho: The Fox collects golf balls.
• Unsounded: Chea Toma collects queensguard and constable badges. It is illegal for those who are issued the badges to give them up, but her father sends her badges for every town he visits by bribing, and through Elka terrifying people into handing them over.

Web Original

• 17776 devotes half a chapter to the exploits of a group of friends who made a game out of collecting footballs signed by Koy Detmer. To them, it's Serious Business.
• The titular character of Agamemnon Tiberius Vacuum collects planets (and is currently trying to add the Earth to his collection).
• The protagonist of Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child collects Shoddy Knockoff Products. Anything that is a genuine product or of actual value, he rejects.
• Ask That Guy with the Glasses: The titular character collects boils (because they apparently taste nice) and souls because that's part of his job of working for the devil.
• Brandon Farris likes to collect random objects from Amazon or anything shown on Tik Tok. This is mostly for use in videos where he is playing with potentially harmful items (the highlights being things that intentionally inflict pain, such as a riding crop and anything with a taser function), and they can occasionally be seen in the background when he is done. Of particular note is his collection of novelty Monopoly boards, which fills both bookshelves and which he is verbally defensive of when Gloria will not stop knocking them over.
• Bryan Ropar is a YouTuber best known for his collection of plastic lawn chairs- he posts videos about his collection, and also shows off his knowledge of the chairs' manufacturing history and design. His channel is almost a meme sometimes- when outsiders stumble on fan communities dedicated to things commonly considered mundane, such as computer keyboards, those outsiders might post a screenshot of one of Ropar's videos and say, "this is what you guys sound like", followed by Ropar's channel getting a small boost in views as people learn that this guy really knows his lawn chairs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he's also open about being on the autism spectrum, which tends to be known for these sorts of very specific interests.
• Katherine in Empires SMP Season 1 collects heads, as the server has a mod installed that lets all mobs drop their head when they die, including other players.
• Suzy Hanson of Game Grumps, Steam Rolled, and Table Flip fame has started a taxidermy collection.
• Two characters from Mugman are known to have strange collections. Mugman collects plates from famous shipwrecks, and Pementa collects knockoff toys.
• The Ningyo: The man who summoned Christopher to him has a large collection of live cryptids.
• Nobody Here: "Gum" shows us Jogchem's collection of used chewing gum that he took from strange women, as well as bits of info about what each one was like and how they reacted to him picking it up.
• The Nostalgia Chick: The Nostalgia Chick's sidekick Elisa has a large collection of skulls (...well, fake skulls, presumably), and another collection of The Phantom of the Opera merchandise. These are real!Elisa's actual collections.
• One auto mechanic on Not Always Working collects deployed car airbags with make-up stains on them. They seem to think it's amusing and like to show them to customers; the comments section finds it disturbing.
• Ross Scott of Ross's Game Dungeon is very skilled at hunting down rare and absolutely bizarre games that nobody's ever heard of before. A good example of this is Bip Bop II. A better example is Bip Bop III, which basically had Un-person status until he managed to track down a copy by contacting the original developer, who no longer had the source code to the game, but did have a few remaining retail copies on floppy disk, and wasn't sure if they even still worked or not (they did).
• The SCP Foundation spend a lot of time cleaning up after collectors of occult or otherwise anomalous items who get their hands on something actually dangerous and find out what it does the hard way. This brings them into frequent conflict with commercial Artifact Collection Agency Marshall, Carter, and Dark, who are alarmingly relaxed about supplying potentially hazardous artefacts to people who should really not be entrusted with them for the right price.
• Steve 1989 MRE Info: Steve collects (and eats) vintage military rations, as well as other military memorabilia and minutia like survival kits. When he's got a hold of a particularly historically significant or well-preserved example of an MRE, he will often take care not to destroy the packaging when opening it so he can reseal it for display.
• Olimar aka End of Days on There Will Be Brawl have a stash of various things from video games including the magic flute.
• Tara, co-host of TGWTG's weird news show, What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?, collects toy hippos. In fact, she's said on the show that she has a hippo for every occasion, and there seems to be no reason to doubt this. She has become so identified with hippos that a fan created a fanart of her as a superheroine with a cuddly hippo sidekick. This, in turn, spawned the Hippo Lantern Corps.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time:
  • Finn and Jake of Adventure Time do this to some degree. They have a whole room in their house filled with treasure from their exploits. They are never seen spending it or selling it, so presumably they just keep it around to look at it. Jake, however, is a collector of the strange in a different sort of way... He's a kleptomaniac, so it's inevitable that he'd pick up a few odd bits and bobbles from time to time. Finn also collects glass eyeballs.
  • The Ice King collects princesses. He has been shown kidnapping various princesses and sticking them all in a big cage. Unfortunately for him, they always escape or get rescued eventually.
  • Lemongrab's castle has multiple rooms, each containing nothing but a single left-handed catcher's mitt on a pedestal. "The Mountain" eventually reveals that this is because he wants to play catch with his mother figure.
• In an episode of American Dragon: Jake Long, it’s revealed that Spud’s favorite possession is a ball of bellybutton lint that he’s been collecting since he was 3.
• In Arthur:
  • Buster collects interesting food which he keeps in a glass case in his room. His mother periodically throws it out before it starts to moulder too badly.
  • Discussed in "Arthur, the World's Greatest Gleeper" where the rumour of Arthur's "gleeping" (stealing) spreads, but due to students mishearing it, Francine at one point thinks that Arthur keeps beans.
• Lawrence Lactavius Limburger, the Big Bad of the original Biker Mice from Mars, has a whole personal museum containing the last living specimen of several species he brought to extinction during his job for his home planet Plutark.
• Push from ChalkZone collects assignments that Mr. Wilter has erased from his chalkboard after they manifest as sheets in ChalkZone.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The Delightful Children From Down The Lane collect toenails.
  The Delightful Children From Down The Lane: It's not "gross"... it's a hobby.
• Charlie and Lola: In "I am Collecting a Collection", Lola wants to start a collection and she tries collecting cookies (only to give up and eat them) and other people's things (only to return them).
• In Danny Phantom, Skulker wanted to add the titular protagonist to his collection of unusual ghosts.
• In Ed, Edd n Eddy, Ed collects sponges in his basement bathroom's wall. He is also weirdly secretive about it.
• Hey Arnold!:
  • Helga made a statue devoted to her love out of wads of used chewing gum that the object of affection cast aside.
  • Arnold's cousin Arnie collects lint and it is usually mentioned at least once per episode he appears in.
• Egon's collection of spores, molds, and fungus is mentioned twice in The Real Ghostbusters, both times when he decides to bring home food served to him by a Cordon Bleugh Chef.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • Mandy was once credited as a napkin collector.
  • In the episode "Fear and Loathing in Endsville" a truck driver is shown collecting fingernails...but doesn't tell anyone he uses toenails as a substitute at times.
• Invader Zim: Dib collects haunted Gummi bears, aside from his general assortment of paranormal stuff.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes gives us Beezy's collection of chewed gum and mustard, the latter of which he bathes in.
• Kaeloo: Stumpy has collections of normal things like comic books and stamps, and some unusual things as well. In one episode, Mr. Cat even manages to trick Stumpy into buying a toilet by claiming that Stumpy has a toilet collection he could add it to. Stumpy, being a complete idiot, believes this and starts a toilet collection.
• Kim Possible: Kim Possible collected Cuddle Buddies, the local equivalent to Beanie Babies that look like combinations of two animals; not that weird. DNAmy collects the same toys, but then she turns around and uses her knowledge of bioengineering to make the living equivalent; very weird.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): Mrs. Twombly has a large collection of rare doorknobs.
• PB&J Otter: Mayor Jeff collects toilet seat covers. A little too enthusiastically for comfort.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Ren collects used celebrity underwear, opera records, fossilized dinosaur droppings, and jars of rare incurable diseases; his cousin Sven collects used bandages and spit in a jar; and Stimpy collects boogers, which he calls magic nose goblins.
• Rugrats (1991):
  • In "Planting Dil", Grandpa Lou is revealed to collect rutabagas shaped like the heads of former U.S. Presidents.
  • In "Chuckie Collects", Chas is revealed to collect inhalers.
• Scooby-Doo: According to the "Those Meddling Kids" interviews, Shaggy has the largest collection of decorator belt buckles in the world. 653. In fact, he wears a different buckle for every mystery.
• The Simpsons: In a Superhero Episode, Comic Book Guy was a villain called The Collector, who kidnapped celebrities and stored them in plastic wrap. He also had other various nerd collectibles, like a working dual lightsaber a la The Phantom Menace.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: "Kayshon, His Eyes Open": The Collector's Guild is an entire guild of people who collect random crap and fill their ships with museums' worth of miscellaneous exotica and elaborate deathtraps for would-be robbers.
• Star Wars Rebels: Ezra Bridger collects Empire trooper and pilot helmets, which is a rather dangerous hobby given he usually grabs new models off the soldiers in question.
• Sushi Pack: The Collector originally appeared as a connoisseur of fine art who somehow figured out how to animate the figures in paintings, but in his later appearances became a collector of anything, from spoons to hotel soap, and information. In one episode, in fact, he attempts to collects the Sushi Pack.
• ThunderCats (2011):
  • Prince Lion-O searches the Black Market of his friend Jorma in search of fairy-tale objects called "technology", collecting, tinkering with, and ratholing Black Boxes that most people in his medieval kingdom dismiss as Worthless Yellow Rocks.
  • The Duelist is a Master Swordsman who loves unique, well-crafted swords, carrying his collection in a rack on his back, the catch being that these are all trophies he's taken from challenging the unwary to duels. Lion-O's Sword of Omens is unique, and Lion-O is unwary...
• Time Squad: Buck Tuddrussel loves to collect random objects from his travels through history. These objects include some minor things like a telescope and various war helmets, to strange or outrageous things like George Washington's wooden teeth, King David's slingshot, and the American Bill of Rights.
• Transformers:
  • The Transformers: The Autobot Pipes collects interesting human knick-knacks.
  • Transformers: Animated: Lockdown collects the mods from his victims.
  • Beast Wars: Rattrap mentions having a collection of Predacon parts, including a very impressive one of Waspinator. To clarify, he claims to almost have enough parts to build his own Waspinator.
• The Venture Bros.: Jefferson Twilight collects the fangs from the blaculas he hunts and makes them into a necklace.
• Wishfart: Puffin collects chip bags from the potato chips he's eaten and keeps them in a scrapbook.
• Work It Out Wombats!: Out of all of the collections shown in "Zeke's Collection Selection," the strangest is Zadie's collection of chattering teeth.

Other

• George Carlin, in a comic routine about losing things, made references to collections of things no one would really want: used bandages, or nude pictures of Ernest Borgnine.
• British cartoonist/musician Gerard Hoffnung in a radio interview: "I like to collect various types of sauerkraut". Interviewer: "And what do you do with them?" Hoffnung: "That shouldn't be any concern of yours."
• The plot of the Alone house at Busch Gardens' Howl-O-Scream.
• A man goes to a psychiatrist:
  Well doc, it was my wife's idea to consult you, I like scrambled eggs and think it might be a mental illness.
  What? Oh come now, I'd know if it was a disease, I like scrambled eggs too.
  Really? Then you need to come and see my collection.

Real Life

• Adam Savage is a real-life example, he has even produced a realistic replica of the Maltese Falcon from the movie, as well as a dodo skeleton, and many many other things he's collected over the years, this was showcased in one of the "get-to-know-the-cast-better" episodes of Mythbusters.
  • And gorram it, these papers...
  • The Mythbusters themselves could be considered for this, given how many of their strange machines built in previous episodes are seen in future ones hanging from the ceiling or walls.
• The Black Museum crosses the line between this and an Artifact Collection Agency. Beginning as a collection of prisoners' property, it was expanded into an official museum in 1875 (although it is not open to the public). It collects items from criminal cases, including some infamous ones such as Dr. Crippen^note  Murdered his wife and fled to America; was arrested getting off the boat thanks to a Transatlantic telegram., Ruth Ellis^note  Murdered her lover, the last woman to be hanged in Britain., and John George Haigh^note  The 'Acid Bath Murderer', who despite the name did not murder his six (official) victims by putting them in baths of acid; the acid bath was to destroy their bodies after the fact, due to the mistaken belief that he could not be charged with murder if the victim's body could not be produced.. The items collected are definitely strange, although the reasoning is not: the Museum is used as an educational resource for Police Officers. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had his famous detective say "there is nothing new under the sun" of Crime, was one of the museum's famous visitors. The rather bland official website is here.
• Bowerbirds and pack rats are famous for collecting inedible items. Male bowerbirds use elaborate displays of shiny and/or colorful objects to impress females, while pack rats gather both natural materials and trash into large "middens" that they urinate on to mark territory.
• Cabinets of Curiosities and early museums in general.
• Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family collected macabre objects, like torture devices and execution implements, mostly sent by fans.
• Dave Barry has one of these collections in real life. In his work as a humorist, he has collected the following bizarre objects.
• Games Magazine once did an article on people with odd collections such as nuts (the edible kind), Mack trucks, doorknobs, and maps of Transylvania.
• Jeffrey Rowland, the creator of Overcompensating is an avid collector of vintage Admiral Ackbar figurines.
• There used to be a museum in Alabama, USA called the Museum of Miscellanea. It had a collection like this, featuring a wide variety of oddities.
• The TLC show called My Crazy Obsession features weird collections. The first episode featured a couple with the largest collection of Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, with over 5000 dolls. Each doll has its own name and personality, and they even built 6000 sq. ft of space to put them in. Other collections featured include wigs and Mickey Mouse memorabilia.
• This Neatorama post catalogues many Real Life eccentric collectors and their collections. Highlights (lowlights?) include the collectors of belly button lint, toilet seats, airplane barf bags, and posters of fish.
• Pathologists and hematologists tend to keep collections of slides from histological samples or blood smears.
• The Ripley's Believe It or Not! family of museums and associated books and shows are such collections. The museum's oddities include diseased skeletons, weird art, torture implements, sideshow hoaxes, and plenty of other randomness.
• Elvis Presley collected law enforcement badges, charming local police into giving him one in nearly every community he visited on tour. He even convinced Richard Nixon into granting him a federal one.
• The show Oddities on The Science Channel is about a pawn shop of sorts... where one can find taxidermy, outdated medical equipment, coffins, and other creepy memorabilia.
• Many specialist museums have some element of this; as an example, we offer the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. They do have a purpose, but for those outside the field in question, they may seem a bit odd or even macabre (especially true of those where the specialization is some branch of medicine).
• One of the creepiest allegations against Jimmy Savile is that Savile collected glass eyes from corpses in a mortuary and used them as jewellery.
• According to Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey collected antique brass bedsteads, believing that they would one day be worth a fortune.
• Quentin Tarantino collects old board games. John Travolta recalled that during their first meeting, they played the board games of Welcome Back, Kotter, Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

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