Living Battery

"I cannot tell you the reasons WHY this sanctum was built. But I can say that it runs on my powers. Without me, it's just a husk, an empty shell, an orbiting house of cards."

— Arlon the Serene (discussing the Lunar Sanctum), Kid Icarus: Uprising

Most Magitek and machines require some kind of Power Source. Common sources are coal, steam, electricity, or even Phlebotinum. But sometimes, that source is something which is biological and alive, sometimes even sentient. It's a Living Battery, which the machine or device takes the Life Energy from almost parasitically.

We generally don't feel too bad if such living batteries are plants or insects, but the more intelligent, humanoid and sentient the creature, the more likely this will be Played for Drama. The story may reveal the battery is being taken advantage of, if not outright enslaved, and the extraction of the Living Battery's energy is harmful, traumatizing, or even lethal. Often the justification for why it is necessary is some form of Higher-Species-Rights, Fantastic Racism, the fact that the parasitic species created the Living Battery in the first place, or simple desperation and need on the part of the extracting species. Or the extractors might just be villains who don't care who they hurt in the name of gaining power.

A Sub-Trope of Power Source, and Super-Trope to Powered by a Forsaken Child. Compare Life Energy, Sentient Phlebotinum, Human Resources and Cast from Hit Points. Hamster-Wheel Power is the family-friendly comedy equivalent.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Black Bird (2006) has this, with a twist. The living battery (the heroine) isn't harmed by having her energy used. She just gives it off like a fire gives off heat. Though the other things that she can provide aren't nearly as non-invasive to harvest...
• In Bokurano, Zearth is powered by this. It sucks the Life Energy of the pilot after the fight is over, meaning that everyone who pilots it dies.
• In Dark Gathering, this is why some people are Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious; they brim with spiritual energy, energy that ghosts normally need to cadge off victims or a ley line. One of these people, Keitarou, serves as a 'packhorse' for benevolent ghosts, passively sustaining them in exchange for their protection.
• Iczer: In Iczer-One, Ordinary High-School Student Nagisa is recruited by Iczer-1 to be her partner and help power her Humongous Mecha, Iczer Robo. The risks of this are shown in the sequel series, Iczer-3, where Iczer-3's inexperience causes her to nearly get Nagisa killed because of this. Well known in the early western anime fandom through a fan parody music video called "Nagisa Bonita" (to the tune of "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna), where Iczer-1 repeatedly asks Nagisa to "be my battery".
• The machines in Kakurenbo use the children they captured for this.
• Nurse Angel Ririka SOS has the Flower of Life. The flowers are used to make both the Green Vaccine (the heroine's power source) and the Black Vaccine (the power source for her enemies) through a process that isn't discussed, but seems to use the flowers up. Even though the flowers are supposed to grow wherever living things exist, quantities are severely limited and mostly in the hands of the bad guys.
• Queen Millennia: La-Metal's ships are powered by giant cell-looking organisms who are also sentient. The punishment for disobeying Larela is being attached to one of them and being drained completely.
• In Reborn to Master the Blade, the protagonist Inglis discovers this that the entire town of Nova is having their mana drained by the Highlanders, in order to activate a flotation spell that will rip their land out of the ground, stealing it for the Highlanders, and enslaving, driving out, or killing everyone unfortunate enough to be on there when it goes.
• Sailor Moon villains, especially Ail and Ann, quite often extract some sort of energy directly from human victims to supply to awakening some evil Big Bad.
• In Trigun, the people couldn't survive on Gunsmoke without the plants, giant humanoid alien things that were placed in equally giant bulbs from which energy was extracted, which powered just about everything.
• The Batteryman and Gadget cards from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card game. They also appear in the series finale of Duel Monsters, as well as Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds.
  • Everyone at Duel Academy during part of Season 3 of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. They were forced to wear wristbands which sucked out their energy as they dueled, all to give Yubel the energy to regenerate from her arm.

Comic Books

• In All Fall Down, the Order of Despots kidnaps the superhero Isotope to use him for this very purpose.
• In B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth, The King of Fear has Liz Sherman kidnapped so he can use her life force to power his war mechas.
• Dawn of the Jedi: The Ancient Rakata used Force-Sensitive slaves to power their ships and other technology by placing them in special pods that caused them constant agonizing pain in order to draw Dark Side force energy from them.
• Superman:
  • In Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl, Lex Luthor is the one to find Superman's rocket, and he turns the baby into a battery for clean energy machines.
  • The Super-Revenge of Lex Luthor: As trapped in an asteroid-prison, Lex Luthor transforms the bodies of several inmates -who had been previously turned into glass statues when they attempted to break out- into rocket fuel for a spacecraft.
  • In Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, villain Earth-Man captures Sunboy and turns him into a battery for a device that transforms the Earth's sun into a red star.
• In The Flash, Gregory Wolfe, the sadistic warden of Iron Heights Penitentiary, used the radioactive villain Fallout to power the prison.
• In the story "Fountains of Youth", in issue #22 of EC Comics title The Vault of Horror, an elderly woman that went through a series of young female companions turned out to be a centuries-old creature that was sucking the life force from them.
• The Transformers (Marvel): The Powermasters are this, though are more willing than usual for this trope as it was treated as a voluntary partnership. Though they usually use normal energon as a power source, the Marvel Comics versions were also capable of providing energy directly from their own body for a Transformer, though they had to eat absolutely enormous amounts of food to do this.
• X-Men:
  • When the group first discovered the island of Genosha, they discovered that mutants had been enslaved to increase the quality of life for the human citizens. One mutant was used as a living power source for the monorail-like mass transit vehicle that he piloted.
  • In another series called X-Treme X-Men about a multiverse traveling team of alternate X-Men had an arc where they traveled to an Earth where Magneto cracked the crust and destroyed the magnetic field out of spite. Thinking quickly, all the world's smartest scientists devised a machine capable of drawing upon mutant energy to hold the planet together. They supply it with mutants from parallel realities and have been draining them dry countless times, with their personal effects kept in storage in an eerie parallel.

Fan Works

• In Abraxas: The Clash of Silver, a Recursive Fanfiction based on Abraxas (which is itself a MonsterVerse fanfiction), it's revealed that Apex Cybernetics' plans for the other Titans after using Mechagodzilla to kill Godzilla is to forcibly use them as endless supplies of natural resources to power human civilization due to their Fertile Feet, enslaving them and farming their bodies.
  • The author of the original Abraxas fic subsequently incorporated this into her portrayal of Apex in this non-canon drabble.
• The Bridge: Enjin tries to absorb Aria Blaze and the human form of Monster X into its crystalline core in a bid to get enough power to return to its true form. Aria manages to give her necklace to X and shove him out of the way so Enjin would only get half of her magic and he'd get the other half, causing them both to return to their kaiju forms and duke it out. Aria fights to remain conscious inside Enjin and launches an internal attack to wound it and give the weaker X a power boost. Monster X finally manages to destroy Enjin by damaging its core and safely yanking the part of it containing Aria out, but he barely manages to resuscitate her after.
• Child of the Storm has Clark serve as this in the Mirror Image arc of the sequel, to his surprise (initially it was done relatively subtly, at night, via magic). It's very much Played for Drama, with the perpetrator referring to Clark as his 'source'. Not because he doesn't know Clark's name — quite the opposite — because that's all he deems Clark to be.
• Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness: Reimu willingly turns herself into one of these temporarily to give Megas access to her power set, and thus provide it with the means to do meaningful damage to Yuuka.
• In the Darkwing Duck fanfiction Negaverse Chronicles, Megavolt of the Friendly Four is captured by Gyro specifically to use as a power source to charge up his new invention. And he's not very concerned about the survival of his power source...
• Shows up three times in Origins, a Massive Multiplayer Crossover.
  • Sarah, the Sith/Siren can power a very large ship single-handedly, but cannot exert command over said ship while energizing it, so...
  • ...students from a biotic combat school are kidnapped and used instead (the process is painless) however...
  • ...they escape, only to volunteer to serve in the same capacity again on a temporary basis to fight the Flood.
• In the Pokémon fanfic The Power That's Inside, Pokemon bioenergy is used to power human civilization. An increase in the amount of Pokemon being used for this causes an uprising.
• Pulse and Void subjects poor Present Mic to this. The mastermind, Pulse, has Mic tortured and dosed with Trigger, a quirk enhancer, to draw energy from Mic’s screams. He also has a cohort with a teleport quirk that draws energy from the poor guy. Luckily she has a beef with Pulse and feeds Aizawa location information so he can be rescued. Mic’s body is pushed into metabolic overdrive and by the time it’s over, it gives him a Nothing but Skin and Bones look as though he was starved several weeks rather than just one.

• In the Worm fanfic, Intrepid, Laserdream is kidnapped by Kaiser to power a weapon built by Bakuda.

Films — Animation

• In Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, some of the weapons and equipment use organic power cells containing bacteria from which "Bio-etheric energy" was extracted. The power pack of some long-dead Red Shirt's weapon turns out to be one of the spirits.
• In the Bad Future of Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Captain Atom pulls a Leeroy Jenkins on Aquaman that results in himself getting captured and used to power a Doomsday Device.

Films — Live-Action

• eXistenZ: The biological game device runs on the energy of the user, since it plugs directly into a "bioport" (sort of an extra anus artificially installed in the lower back). It's suggested that all gaming devices operate the same way.
• In I, Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein's journal reveals that he used electric eels to generate the sufficient electricity to reanimate Adam's body.
• The machines in The Matrix were powered by a mixture of fusion and the energy produced by humans which they grew and harvested in fields like livestock or produce.
• Star Wars: Power Droids, the most famous model being the Gonk Droids, are essentially designed to be walking power generators, hence their rather simple design of being a box with legs.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • In X-Men: First Class, Shaw was the main component of the weapon he was going to use to wipe out humans so mutants could inherit the Earth. In his mind, "Mutation may have been helped along by nuclear power/weapons" equaled "mutants are nukeproof." His energy powers were what would fuel it.
  • Magneto's mutating device in X-Men also needed to be powered by Magneto's own magnetic abilities. Unfortunately, it would kill him. Fortunately (well, for him) there's a girl who takes on the powers of whoever she touches...

Literature

• A generic high-school science textbook used the following example to describe a hypothesis: A car engine is considered a black box, but you can expect this car engine to contain alien creatures from another planet who feed off fuel and are then used to provide the power provided to propel the car. Note that the example doesn't meet the definition of a hypothesis given that there was no prior testing, examination or research of said engine.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: All of the Magitek is powered by Mana. Plants will also grow much better on mana-rich land, which results in farmland needing to be topped up on a regular basis. The most powerful members of the Supernatural Elite have willingly powering the devices that protect the population among their duties. Those born with so little mana that they are practically a Muggle Born of Mages are forbidden from attending Wizarding School, Locked Away in a Monastery to an extent and only allowed to use what little they have towards topping up farmland. As mana remains a limited resource, members of the Supernatural Elite that did something bad enough to be imprisoned are often used as batteries, as well. Because of several elements of the setting, Mage Born of Muggles commoner children are often enslaved to be used as mana sources.
• In Avalon: Web of Magic, this is the role of the prophecied "blazing star". Other chosen have magic. Stars have a lot of magic, so much that magical creatures instinctively flock to them, and that any mage linked in with one can perform feats far beyond what they're normally capable of. Notably, during Kara's Super-Power Meltdowns, she does not see herself as a human that has magic. She sees magic which has, secondary, a human identity...that is rapidly, joyfully eroding in the primeval sea of magic from whence it came.
• In the Chaos Gods series, this trope shows up in The Unified God, when De discovers that people are being abducted en-masse and transported to the Sister Lands to be used as living batteries to power the magic of the Blessed.
• In Coda (2013), Conduits power the city via energy extraction. They also power President Z and the Board.
• In Doctor Who New Adventures Cats Cradle Times Crucible, a prototype Gallifreyan time capsule is powered by the psychic energies of its crew. "Battery" is an official title of one of the crew.
• In the Dresden Files novels, once Harry gains access to Soulfire, the obvious part of him is his own Living Battery.
• In Fate/strange Fake, Tsubaki Kuruoka's parents used her in horrid experimentation that saturated her brain matter in Black Magic-producing bacteria, intending her to become this trope for the Servant they intended to summon. The plan went down the tubes the instant the comatose Tsubaki summoned her own Servant.
• In The Golgotha Series, Professor Zenith has come up with a process for converting living humans into electric batteries. He is unconcerned with minor downsides such as the constant screaming or their tendency to catch fire.
• In The Locked Tomb, this is the focus of a field of necromancy known as Soul siphoning. Unlike what the name implies, the battery's soul is not actually the source of power, and, in fact, has to be temporarily shunted of elsewhere for it to work. After pushing out the soul, the necromancer lets the void left behind be filled up with energies of the beyond, and drains those for power. Once they're done, the soul may return. If it can. This is the specialization of the Eighth House, who raises entire generations specifically for the purpose of having their soul pushed out, and is considered the most dangerous form of necromancy, as there is no telling what might take residence in the empty body if left for too long.
• "Lose Now, Pay Later" by Carol Farley has aliens who powered their tech with human fat from special slimming machines they invented — and to ensure an adequate supply, they also came out with some beverage that was irresistibly delicious but also super-fattening.
• In the Ravenloft novel Dance of the Dead, a magical riverboat turns out to be powered by magical creatures and benign spirits imprisoned in its hold.
• The best devices of The Tommyknockers work this way, The Reveal being that Bobbi, the first person affected by the Flying Saucer, is using her beloved pet dog (and her not-so-beloved sister) for this.
• In the Towers Trilogy, Radiants produce such immense amounts of magic energy that they are used as living batteries for the great floating Mage Towers of the City, a process which is highly unpleasant for them.
• One of the dark secrets of Tad Williams' The War of the Flowers is that, with Oberon and Titania gone, the world of Faerie is drawing its power from living, working class fairies, draining and discarding them. It's only a secret to Theo and the audience, though. The world of Faerie knows and hates it.

Live-Action TV

• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Where the Wild Things Are", Buffy and Riley are living batteries in a frat house via nonstop sex.
• Doctor Who: In "The Christmas Invasion", the Doctor says that the "pilot fish" could run their batteries off his excess regeneration energy for "a couple of years".
• Occurs accidentally in Farscape when a Luxan priestess needs D'Argo's help to perform her death ritual, but chooses instead to make herself younger when she realizes how strong he is. Turns out she was actually sensing and stealing Moya's life energy.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Equinox", the USS Equinox, like Voyager, had found herself trapped in the Delta Quadrant. Her crew has discovered a faster way to get home by torturing the alien of the week. Janeway is not pleased. The rest of the victims' race are even less pleased.
• In Star Trek: Enterprise, the Xindi-Reptilians use regenerating worms to power their energy rifles.
• One of the artifacts in Warehouse 13 is a car which can run off the naturally-occurring electrical currents in the average human body. It was perfectly harmless, but Big Oil didn't take very kindly to it, so into the Warehouse it went.

Tabletop Games

• Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting: Rune Children are people randomly born with magical runes covering their bodies that naturally conduct magical energy. During the days before the Great Offscreen War, almost all of these people were enslaved to serve as power sources for influential wizards, causing the few that are still born to cover up their true nature.
• Dark Conspiracy supplement Darktek. A number of the Dark Minion items can only be Cast from Hit Points.
• Dungeons & Dragons. The Spelljammer campaign setting has Lifejammer and Death Helms, which powers their ship's flight by draining the Life Energy of the victim strapped into them (in game terms they drained Hit Points).
• In Genius: The Transgression, Geniuses can take the merit "Calculus Vampire" which allows them to drain mania from living creatures (or other things). Manes also have the ability to do so automatically.
• Rifts. The Splugorth's bio-wizardry frequently makes use of this, ranging from lobotomized alien snakes on the end of staves, to guns that literally torture faeries into projecting their powers out of the barrel.
• Shadowrun. Most cyberware is powered by the owner's bioelectric energy.
• Commandroids: The shapeshifting robots require protovoltage (a kind of energy field we produce) from their human pilots to maintain their robot forms and power their more advanced technology. The heroic Symbitrons require a willing pilot to bond with, but the Nemesites are almost like vampires. They wait for an unsuspecting human to get behind the wheel and then forcibly pierce their flesh with wires and nanites. Then the their heads and hands are removed so that the Nemesite can use their body like a puppet and drain their protovoltage. Eventually, they need to replace the pilot with a new victim.

Video Games

• It provides power even without this trope, but Yuri's basic power generator in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 Yuri's Revenge can have its output boosted by putting infantry in it. The good news is that this doesn't do any damage to the people it uses, even if the reactor is destroyed. Although it can be a bad thing if you put mind-controlled people inside it, since they get liberated from the mind control once inside. As long as they're inside, they can do nothing but provide power to you, but once released...
• In Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, K. Rool uses Donkey Kong and Diddy as such, forcing them to fuel the robotic KAOS.
• In Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, there's a level one of the Bad Futures where evil dolphins are using humpback whales as a living power source.
• The Zoltan from FTL: Faster Than Light are Energy Beings who can provide power to any system they are standing in the room of, even when the system is completely ionized. This seems to be active on their part, as a boarding Zoltan can't provide power to hostile ships' systems.
• In Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the Shroobs use Toads to power their flying saucers. A used-up Toad turns into a small purple (ordinary) mushroom.
• In the Mega Man Zero series, Cyber Elves are sentient beings of energy that will sacrifice themselves to the benefit of the player. The nurse types specifically are converted into usable energy. The Dark Elf is the only one that is used as a continuous power source without dying.
• In Metroid, infant Metroids are used like this by Space Pirates in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and in Super Metroid it is implied in the intro that this is what is meant by them being used to benefit mankind.
• In Palworld, Electric-type mons can serve as this.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Gold and Silver, Team Rocket is using several wild Electrode to power their base in Mahogany Town and the player is tasked with making them faint or instead catching them.
  • In Pokémon X and Y, it's implied that AZ's machine is powered by Pokémon's Life Energy. It seems to be rather inefficient with its fuel too — it drains the life from "many Pokémon" just to restore a single dead Pokémon to life. Though it does grant immortality to the Pokémon and AZ in the process. Team Flare later uses either Xerneas or Yveltal as the primary fuel source to power the same machine, now turned into the ultimate weapon.
  • In Pokémon Sun and Moon, Pikachu's entry in the PokéDex says a researcher has proposed using them to provide electrical power. Additionally, Charjabug, the mid-stage of the Grubbin line, is a small Bug/Electric type shaped like a 9-volt battery... and is actually mentioned as being used as a living battery by both campers and its final form, Vikavolt.
• In Quake IV, we discover just what produces the energy that the Strogg use: human corpses in various stages of mutilation ^note just the torso, torso and head, or sometimes the entire body. The ones with heads seem to be completely unaware of their surroundings, attached to the machinery they power. Near the end of the game, the player himself has to activate the distribution of these to power up a certain facility.
• Unfortunate humans captured by demons in Shin Megami Tensei games can look forward to being used as a power source as their eventual fate. The Mantra facilities and the Nightmare System in Nocturne and the Ashura-Kai Red Pill creation process are good examples of this, some of them crossing with People Farms.
• While they don't require one to operate, Lares and Lemures from Solatorobo will turn you into one in exchange for controlling them.
• The badniks of early Sonic the Hedgehog games were powered by little animals, making it Sonic's mission to destroy them, freeing his friends inside. This played a large (and tragic) part in E-102 Gamma's story in Sonic Adventure.
  • Eggman's been doing it as recently as Sonic Colors, where his mind-control ray is powered from energy siphoned from an alien race called the Wisps. There's still huge fan-debate over whether E-123 Omega might have one of these.
• The entire Inkling and Octarian civilizations in Splatoon derive their electrical power from Zapfishes, electrical catfish that are a natural species in their world. At the very least, they're the most powerful source of energy, with the Great Zapfish being the biggest and thus a central source of power. The Zapfishes don't seem to be fully sentient, and it's unknown if they mind being placed in chambers and harnessed for their electricity or not (but the Great Zapfish willingly secures itself on Inkopolis Tower). Major conflicts between Inklings and Octarians have occurred due to there being fewer Zapfishes than can sustain both civilizations.
• Rusty becomes one in Steamworld Dig 2. Rosie kidnapped him before the start of the game, due to him being full of Vectron tech.
• In Stellaris, Machine Empires can keep bio pop as slaves in Grid Amalgamation state, which is this trope and a Shout-Out to The Matrix. Alternatively, they can be put through Chemical Processing, which kills the pop but generate larger immediate energy yield.
• While the original Airborne Aircraft Carrier Balrog from Strider (Arcade) worked by using gravity control, the one from Strider 2 turned to this trope: its Reactor Core is a female Merrow (an Irish mermaid-like creature) encased in the core itself, which syphons and manages the psychic energy from her body to make the whole airship function. This doesn't appear to be a pleasant experience for her, as she begs Hiryu to kill her as soon as he arrives.
• Pikachu is used as an electrical living Battery in the Subspace Emissary in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Fortunately, Samus is able to rescue it from its captors.
• In Valkyria Chronicles 4, Angelica Farnaby and 2 other girls (with several more implied) are used to power Snow Cruisers as nuclear reactor analogue. They can also be overloaded to trigger Final Flame, which when combined with the ragnite implosion technology used on them, greatly amplifying their Fantastic Nuke power.
• WildStar has a giant terraforming device powered by the local ice golems in the Northern Wilds. A nearby datacube has one of the Eldan researchers expressing dismay they had to use them, but concedes that things like ethics musn't get in the way of "The Project."
• World of Warcraft has the Burning Legion, a demonic army that frequently uses soul-powered Magitek. Normally, the people who are used to power Legion technology die pretty quickly (although it does not mean their suffering ends. That is not the case when you are the titan Argus, a Physical God and the Genius Loci of the Legion's homeworld. Then you will spend thousands of years in endless torment as your soul is harnessed to give the Legion's demons Resurrective Immortality. When the players fight him, it's very much a Mercy Kill.

Visual Novels

• Masters in Fate/stay night act as batteries for their Servants, empowering their abilities and allowing them to maintain a physical form. This is a dangerous prospect for some Masters, as a reckless Servant can use so much prana that it kills their Master as with Berserker and Kariya in the Fourth War.
• The Synchronizers in Tsukihime, e.g. Hisui and Kohaku, are living magical batteries that can accumulate and transfer life energy to other people, such as Akiha, who has to live off a half of normal human life energy, and Shiki, after his Evil Twin starts parasitizing him.

Web Animation

• In the Animutation JamezBond, Hello Kitty is the power source that drives a reactor core.

Webcomics

• In Breakfast of the Gods, Cookie Jarvis the Wizard foresaw the coming of Count Chocula and his forces and needed someone pure of heart to act as a battery to boost Cerelia's defenses. This turns out to be the reason King Vitaman was missing for nearly the entire story: he volunteered to be the battery.
• In El Goonish Shive, Tedd serves as the power supply to recharge the drumstick wand.
• In Girl Genius, Agatha drinks water from the Dyne and is super-charged as a temporary power source. Played With in a few ways: the power is technically from the Dyne, and not extracted from Agatha herself; and rather than her battery status being detrimental, Agatha would have suffered a Phlebotinum Overload had the device she was powering not drawn off most of the energy.
• In Homestuck Sollux's ancestor, the Ψiioniic, suffered this fate as a punishment for rebelling against the highbloods. Instead of being executed, he's grafted into the spaceship of the Condesce, the empress of the trolls and the one with the highest blood of them all, due to his innate psionic abilities being more useful to her with the Ψiioniic alive rather than dead. Thus, he became known as the Helmsman, the ex-rebel who powers the Condesce's ship at the cost of great physical pain.
• The webcomic Machine Gun Angel has the MegaCorp who took over the world After the End running power plants on energy harvested from genetically manipulated humans (originally, they used sentient human clones, but they caved to public pressure and made clones that were Empty Shells).
• Sunbird: The continent of Pallas uses phoenixes as energy sources.

Web Original

• The monster Abcoulix from Mortasheen was designed for exactly this purpose, though it also works very well at dispensing Shock and Awe in monster fights.
• Battery from Phaeton is this in every sense of the word, being a quadriplegic who produces more energy than he or anyone else knows what to do with it seemed like a good idea. It is no secret and no one, not even Battery himself has a problem with this. He is even nick named "The God of the Orphanage".

Western Animation

• In the first episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Batman and the Blue Beetle face the villain Kanjar Ro, who is harvesting the Gribble aliens because apparently their bodies can be used as fuel. The process doesn't sound particularly pleasant.
• In Ben 10, Max met his future wife Verdona when a group of aliens meant to use her (an Energy Being) as a power source, which would be painful and eventually kill her.
  • The Megawhatts were introduced as annoying electrical beings who play pranks on people. However, they once needed to ask Ben's help because some of them were being kept as a fuel source by the villain of the week.
• In Generator Rex there's a whole country that gets its electricity from a single EVO.
• At the end of Justice League Unlimited episode "Alive", Lex Luthor uses Tala as one of these to revive Brainiac after a failed revolt led by Tala and Gorilla Grodd. In a final act of revenge, Tala interferes with the ritual, causing the resurrection of Darkseid instead.
• A relatively benign example: in The Legend of Korra, lightning-benders can find work powering the generators that supply electricity to Republic City. It's depicted as exhausting work akin to manual labor, but not life-threatening.
• The Secret Saturdays once visited a small nation that got its power from two imprisoned cryptids. What's more, they're baby cryptids, and momma isn't happy about it.
• In Ultraforce, it was revealed that Prototype's Powered Armor was fueled by his latent ultra abilities rather than having a built in power source.
• The Venture Brothers has a Mr. Fantastic knockoff using the flames of their Human Torch knockoff to power his entire facility.
• Hamster & Gretel: La Cebollaaaa! uses Gretel this way to power a device that will amplify her ability to speak to onions. When Gretel protests her actions, she responds by saying that batteries don't talk.

Real Life

• Evgeny Katz, a chemist at Clarkson University, has developed a way to use live snails to generate a small amount of electricity. The idea is to eventually make implanted medical devices such as pacemakers self-powered by applying similar principles to the human body. He eventually moved from snails to lobsters.
• Microbial fuel cells generate electricity using bacteria.

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