Other forms of Values Dissonance can come into play since what might merely be considered harmless Collector of the Strange behaviour in one place might be considered blasphemous in another. For example, a Muslim who collects Christian memorabilia might get some odd looks if he lived in the urban US or multicultural Singapore but might find himself being dragged out of his house and beaten to death in rural Pakistan or parts of the Middle East where there's much less tolerance for that sort of thing.
To clarify, to qualify for this trope the example has to show the reactions of the general public in-universe. If a character collects Nazi memorabilia but everyone in-story is okay with it and no objections are raised, then that doesn't fall under this trope. Similarly, if only one character complains and isn't representative of the in-universe society as a whole note it also does not fall under this trope.
This trope is a Sub-Trope of Collector of the Strange, The Collector might not necessarily have such a collection though a Living Doll Collector almost certainly does, it is also a Sister Trope of Creepy Souvenir. Also see Red-Flag Recreation Material.
Because of the subjective nature of this trope, No Real Life Examples, Please!
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Beauty and the Beast of Paradise Lost: La Medium has an extensive collection of beautiful faces she removes magically from the young women kidnapped by her minions. She became rich by selling some to noble women who want to change their looks, but she collects them especially for fun. The queen is horrified when she first sees the walls full of faces.
- In The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, Conrad Vandyne became obsessed with action figures after spending most of his childhood being drilled into becoming the perfect heir to his father's estate. While the collection itself is rather harmless, Conrad's fiance breaks off their engagement after discovering him playing with these toys. This causes Conrad and his father to lose face, resulting in Conrad's Start of Darkness and using a Seed of Magic to transform Nisvale into a children's paradise where he won't be mocked for liking toys.
- Saint Seiya: Cancer Deathmask has the walls and the floor of his temple full of the heads of the people he killed, including children. Shiryu decides to put an end to that when Seiya describes the place for him.
Comic Books
- Mandrake the Magician: In one story, a bored, reclusive millionaire decides to collect living people as a pastime. He first collected beautiful women, but he soon had enough of their futile, empty talk (it is a '60s story). Then, he decided to collect the most gifted people in the world: the greatest violinist, pianist, tenor, ballerina, and Mandrake, the greatest magician. The millionaire has them drugged and taken to his mansion on a remote island, where they wake up wearing shock collars. He orders them to give him a show with their gifts combined, promising that he'll free them afterward... brainwashed and hypnotized to forget their abilities, so nobody else will enjoy them! Despite their anger, the artists are forced to perform because of their shock collars; but, when it's Mandrake's turn, he hypnotizes the millionaire to think that he put a collar on himself. To avoid receiving a shock, the cowardly man deactivates the collars, placing himself at the mercy not only of his angry victims but also of his enslaved servants. Instead of sending him to prison, the group destroys all communications on the island and all the vehicles except the plane they use to flee, stranding the selfish millionaire, who is abandoned to live off the island resources alone.
- Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: In "The Strange Museum", Mickey and Goofy are investigating mysterious disappearances — including Minnie's. Remembering that an art museum employee had given her a strange look, they follow him. They find out that Minnie and the other missing people are frozen in a private museum of a count, who used to collect art objects until he grew tired of their "lifelessness". The employee is bribed to kidnap whoever looks like the count's favorite sculptures and paintings (Minnie looks like a flamenco dancer from a picture called Señorita); the count has them (un)dressed like the originals, then freezes the poor people with a chemical spray (it's never explained how the prisoners are fed). Funnily enough, the spray effect is ceased with a rumble, and Goofy, being Goofy... well, the result is obvious. One of the prisoners, a goose, is forced to sit naked in a Thinker Pose; when he wakes up, he's more annoyed because of the back pain than by his nudity, though he picks up a random cloth for modesty.
- Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Decepticon Justice Division leader Tarn has a collection of first edition writings of Megatron's treatise Towards Peace mounted on his wall. The thing is, those first writings were smuggled out of the mines Megatron was effectively trapped in by being written on the insides of deceased miners, meaning Tarn has a room with corpses hanging on the walls. When he proudly shows Deathsaurus the room, the latter is equal parts amused (by the audacity displayed by the method of smuggling out the writings) and disgusted (because, you know, corpses pinned to the wall).
- V for Vendetta: The Shadow Gallery both here and in the film stores a massive collection of items the Norsefire Government of Britain has outlawed and would very much like to see destroyed. In-universe politically correct British citizens would not be pleased with such a display and indeed Evie when she sees it is a bit taken aback. Another character has a smaller collection of his own, and when he's arrested and his house raided, it's used as part of the excuse to execute him for treason. Of course for the audience, the collections are intended to show their owners are far more open-minded than their contemporaries.
- In Watchmen: the former Silk Spectre, Sally Jupiter, keeps a number of mementos from her superhero career, including a pornographic comic someone drew about her (sent to her by a fan who apparently tried to buy her old costume.) While her daughter Laurie is disgusted by it, she finds it comforting to be reminded that men once lusted over her.
Fan Fiction
- In the Conversion Bureau fanfic Legacy of Hope
, we have Bonbon's boss Golden Gulp, a tavern owner who collects Conversion War memorabilia and decorates his tavern with it including one of Lyra's pro-human propaganda posters, he eventually fires Bonbon (who in this continuity sold out Lyra) for trying to vandalise the poster.
Films — Animation
- The Little Mermaid (1992): Rare good guy example with Ariel's collection of human artifacts. Humans are fish-eating monsters as far as the merfolk are concerned, particularly in King Triton's eyes. That Ariel has a whole grotto full of human stuff is considered appalling, and her father ends up destroying the collection trying to get her to see how dangerous humans are.
Films — Live-Action
- Ace Ventura: In an effort to get one over on Ace Ventura, who's gone to great lengths to be insulting to his guests, British Consul Vincent Candy decides to give Ace a treat, one animal lover to another. He proceeds to show Ace his game room, a huge space filled with dozens and dozens of taxidermied animal heads, many endangered. The Pet Detective reacts about as well as you'd expect a semi-insane animal rights activist to.
- Bamboozled: After Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show takes off in a Springtime for Hitler scenario, Pierre Delacroix ends up amassing a collection of Blackface-Style Caricature merchandise as the fame of the show gets to his head. In the film's climax, Delacroix hallucinates that the merchandise is taunting him after one of the show's stars is killed during a livestream by the Mau Maus.
- Calvin Candie in Django Unchained keeps a collection of skulls belonging to long-dead family slaves, one of which he takes out and graphically saws in half to show off his interest in the long-outdated practice of phrenology, which he uses to justify his offensive opinions of black people. Dr. King Schultz, Django's mentor in bounty-hunting, and a fervent anti-racist, is positively seething with barely-hidden disgust upon seeing this.
- In The Hunt For The Unicorn Killer based on the true story of Ira Einhorn's murder of his estranged girlfriend, Einhorn visits his girlfriend's family for the first time. He's being rude and arrogant, hoping to start a confrontation. The father has a small Nazi flag hanging on the wall of his study. Einhorn, who is Jewish, looks at it and says he's offended, which is a case of Jerk Ass Has A Point. The father replies that he was an Infantry soldier during World War II, and his unit liberated several small towns in France. The flag was hanging in the post office and he decided to keep it. He then cuts off Einhorn by telling him to make whatever he wants out of it.
- The Predator franchise: Predators collect skulls of the prey they hunt. There are two kinds of Predators, the regular kind and the so-called Black Predators who are less like hunters and more like serial killers; the collections of the former aren't this trope but the latter are because by the standards of mainstream Predator culture they collect "normal" trophies while Black Predators collect trophies from creatures who can't fight back like children, which normal Predators find dishonorable.
- Rat Race: Randy Pearl and his family visit the Barbie Museum because his daughter thought it was about the Barbie doll. Actually, it is dedicated to the Nazi Klaus Barbie and maintained by a sinister group of neo-Nazis. Since the Pearls are Jewish, they are properly horrified — though not above stealing Adolf Hitler's Mercedes, after other racers sabotage their car.
- Played with in Schtonk!, a satirical, partially fictionalized take on the real-life Hitler Diaries scandal. Karl Lenz, a factory owner and Nazi Nobleman, hosts "a birthday party for the Führer", during which he unveils what he believes is a diary from Hitler himself (in truth a forgery by Fritz Knobel, the fictionalised version of real-life Hitler Diary forger Konrad Kujau). While initially careful to only share their interests with those sympathetic to them, the resulting Nazi craze thanks to the sensational discovery of Hitler's Diaries causes many Nazi aficionados to begin publicly and proudly speak about their collections... which comes back to bite them once the diaries are found to be fake.
- In V for Vendetta, Gordon Dietrich owns a copy of The Qur'an, stating that while he does not practice Islam, he still finds it beautiful. The problem is that he lives in a fascist, fundamentalist Christian police state that has made Islam illegal, to the point that even possessing a Qur'an is punishable by death. No points in guessing what Norsefire do to him when they find out.
Literature
- In The Curse of Chalion the physician Rojeras collects tumors, and asks permission to collect Cazaril's tumor after his death. Cazaril is both horrified and curious, and Rojeras explains that he keeps the tumors in jars of wine spirits to study. "I know it sounds gruesome, but I keep hoping… if only I learn enough, someday I will understand, someday I will be able to find some way to keep these things from killing people."
- The Hollow Places: The Wonder Museum's centrepiece — the preserved and mounted body of an endangered Amazon river otter — is among the set of its exotic taxidermy all donated by one man, who very likely shot some of them himself. It's an impressive collection and he clearly took a lot of pride in it, but none of his children shared his passion, and since most of his specimens pre-dated the legal requirements for certification of origin, donating them to the Wonder Museum was his only alternative to letting them be destroyed. Kara doesn't care for how he obtained them but admits she does feel bad for the donor.
- Paul Feig wrote in his autobiography Kick Me that when he was a child, he found a Nazi flag in his father's collection of war memorabilia, and thought it looked so cool that he hung it up in his parents' picture window.
- Invoked in The Scarlet Pimpernel: An old woman leaving Paris in a cart shows to Sergeant Bibot her whip adorned with aristocrats' locks, saying she obtained them with the executioner. Despite having a sadistic pleasure in unmasking and arresting aristocrats sentenced to death, Bibot feels repulsed at her small collection. Actually, the old woman is the Scarlet Pimpernel in disguise and helping a family of nobles to run from Paris, so he disgusts the sergeant on purpose to be turned away.
Live-Action TV
- 30 Rock: In the aptly-titled "The Collection," Jack competes for a promotion to CEO of General Electric. He hires private detective Len Wosniak to look into his past and make sure that he doesn't have any dirt for his rivals to use. Beyond a few politically incorrect activities (such as belonging to a country club where the only non-white member is the king of Spain), Len claims that Jack is clean...until he reveals that he's learned of his Dark Secret: Jack owns a massive collection of cookie jars and has won competitions under the pseudonym "Victor Nightingale." It's also mentioned that Rudolph Giuliani had a huge assortment of antique wooden dolls that he was forced to burn to become a successful politician.
Len: This is bad. CEOs don't have thousands of cookie jars! Weird little guys in bow ties do!
- Bones: In "The Nazi on the Honeymoon", Booth discovers their supposedly Brazillian Victim of the Week was actually a secret Nazi war criminal when they find Nazi paraphernalia in the cellar of his home.
- CSI: NY: In "Yahrzeit," the investigators are horrified when they discover their first suspect AND the murder victim have hordes of Nazi memorabilia from WWII hidden in their homes. Their collections include everything from Nazi flags and uniforms, to toys of children killed in the Holocaust, to human teeth with gold fillings still in them.
- Doctor Who: In "The Pirate Planet", the Captain shrinks inhabited planets into small, portable balls that he keeps in his trophy room. When the Doctor realizes what the Captain is doing he reacts with absolute fury at the pointless waste of life.
- In an episode of Extras, Maggie is dating a black man. When she takes him back to her apartment, she remembers that she has a Golliwog doll on one of her shelves, and tries unsuccessfully to hide it from him.
- Father Ted: Father Fitzpatrick has a room of his house devoted to WWII memorabilia, all of which turns out to be Nazi-themed. When Ted is shown the collection he asks if he has any items produced by the Allies, but Fitzpatrick dismissively responds that that sort of thing wouldn't interest him. It's eventually revealed that Fitzpatrick is a full-on Nazi sympathizer and harboring an elderly Nazi fugitive in his house. When both said fugitive and Father Fitzpatrick accidentally kill themselves the collection gets passed to Ted in Fitzpatrick's will and the ditzy housekeeper Mrs. Doyle sets it up in Ted's living room, to the horror of both him and the members of the local Chinese-Irish community he'd just invited over.
- Frasier In "Death and the Dog" (Season 4, ep. 12) Roz is asked what happened after she agreed to date a gynecologist. He turned out to be an avid collector of antique medical equipment of a certain type and decided to show her his collection:
Roz: Well, we went upstairs to his apartment and he poured a glass of wine, and well... do you know what a speculum is?
- iCarly: In the second half of "iDate a Bad Boy", Griffin, the titular bad boy, is revealed to have a collection of Peewee Babies, which are mini stuffed toys for little girls. The rest of the cast is disgusted by this revelation and it leads to him and Carly breaking up.
- Subverted in Justified: One episode involved a man who collected paintings by Adolf Hitler. Later when he finally gets Raylan to see the collection it's actually jars of ashes from burning the paintings.
- Used in Selling Hitler (a Black Comedy-drama based on the real-life Hitler Diaries scandal) to highlight the character flaws of Gerd Heidemann, the journalist who first brought the diaries to the attention of his bosses in the venerable magazine Stern. In the first episode he's sent to photograph the decaying state of Hermann Göring's personal yacht the Carin II, and falls in love with it to the point he purchases it and spends his own savings restoring it. His friends are at first amused by this since he's known to develop obsessions towards his journalistic targets (his nickname among Stern staffers is "The Bloodhound"). However, they quickly become alarmed when he somehow recovers the yacht's original furnishings and reveals he got them from Göring's daughter Edda. note Throughout the series he pockets much of the money given by Stern to pay for the other diaries in order to purchase even more Nazi memorabilia.
Tabletop Games
- This is a recurring controversy in the military modelling and wargaming communities. Here on TV Tropes, the No Swastikas page covers the situation in general. While complete accuracy in miniature models of the WW2 period demands use of emblems like the Nazi swastika or the Italian fasces, both modern Germany and modern Italy have laws against their display. Modellers and collectors with an interest in WW2 Germany can find their interest is treated with suspicion and their collecting can be equated with Nazi sympathy. Facebook has been known to come down hard on modelling/collecting/wargaming pages displaying photos of Nazi topics with prominent swastikas, and this suspicion has also been extended to other eras — American Civil War collectors have pointed out the Confederacy's flags are rather unavoidable in context, but their use in the USA by far-right or racist groups has splashed suspicion on the modellers.
- Warhammer 40,000 has Trazyn the Infinite, a Necron lord obsessed with collecting artifacts, momentos and living creatures from across time and space to preserve in his continent-spanning collection. Not even his own kind are exempt from his kleptomania, making him Persona Non Grata across a number of Necron worlds.
Theater
- The stage adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 has an extra scene where Captain Beatty reveals his large private library to Guy Montag—a controversial collection by the standards of the Book Burning dystopia they live in, and even more surprising since Beatty's the chief of the city's book burners. (He's legally allowed to keep his library on a technicality: reading books is outlawed, but simply owning them without reading is still permitted.) This also makes explicit Beatty's implied backstory from the original novel, that he's a Fallen Hero who used to be an avid reader and free thinker.
Video Games
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
- Silus Vesuius has transformed his house into a museum dedicated to the Mythic Dawn, the Apocalypse Cult that worshipped Mehrunes Dagon, Daedric Prince of Destruction, assassinated Emperor Uriel Septim and caused the Oblivion Crisis 200 years prior. He boasts about being descended from one of the assassins who took part in the attack on the emperor and wants their deeds to be remembered in spite of all the evil they did.
- Ambarys Rendar, owner of the New Gnisis Cornerclub, has a display of Imperial armor on the 2nd floor of his establishment. Said establishment is in Windhelm, the centre of the staunchly anti-imperial Stormcloak rebellion.
- In El Matador, we have Helmut Koch, who is an elderly German philanthropist living in South America. His private island features a private museum of his time in the German army.
- FromThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt:
- Inverted near the start of the game, in the inn in White Orchard there's a Temerian crest as decoration, since the area is occupied by the Nilfgaardians the owner wants to take it down fearing they'll burn the inn down if they see it, later the locals notice and attack the innkeeper for her apparent lack of patriotism leading to a fight breaking out between Geralt and Vesemir against the locals.
- During the quest "A Dangerous Game" Geralt and Zoltan try to steal a rare Fringilla Vigo gwent card from a collector. Initially one might think the collector collects gwent cards, which wouldn't be unusual. It turns out he actually collects Nilfgaardian Empire memorabilia.
Western Animation
- American Dad!:
- In "I Am the Walrus", Principal Lewis is shown to own five of the ten Mickey Mouse watches made that have him wearing an S.S. uniform.
"Welcome back, Mouse-schwitz!"
- In one episode the Smiths try to shift the blame for multiple crimes Stan has (mistakenly) been accused of onto Roger's Jerkass co-worker. After searching the co-worker's house the police find zero evidence of the crimes he's accused of but do find his very large collection of Nazi memorabilia, which is enough for the Jewish detective in charge of the investigation to bring him in.
- In "I Am the Walrus", Principal Lewis is shown to own five of the ten Mickey Mouse watches made that have him wearing an S.S. uniform.
- Big Mouth: The Shame Wizard collects vintage Nazi dildos, disgusting even the Hormone Monsters. In "Girls are Angry Too," he's ashamed himself to be caught buying one at a Nazi meeting (though he seems just as ashamed of the fact that his card was declined when trying to buy one.)
- Captain Planet and the Planeteers: One episode dealt with the Planeteers trying to find an important cultural artifact for a Native American friend. In doing so, they come across a shop selling South American tribal masks, which Linka comments on the beauty of. Ma-Ti, who is from South America, points out that the masks have significant importance to the tribes they come from, and reducing them to a simple decoration is disrespectful. Linka admonishes him, stating that they are beautiful works of art and that it's not as if the shop is selling artifacts from the Saint Petersburg Cathedral. A shopkeeper, overhearing the last part of the conversation, apologizes that the shop is out of paintings from St. Petersburg Cathedral, but they do have plenty of statues from minor Russian churches if she's interested. Linka is horrified at this, only to realize Ma-Ti's point.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: Ed has a private collection of sponges inside his bathroom wall. Given Ed's very low hygienic standards and the state of his basement, he's Properly Paranoid about people finding out about such a massive health risk.
- Family Guy: Chris befriends an old German neighbor named Hans Gutentag, but realizes he's an ex-Nazi after finding a room in his house filled wall-to-wall with carefully preserved wartime memorabilia.
- Futurama: Played for Laughs with Professor Farnsworth who has a collection of Doomsday Devices:
Professor Farnsworth: Doomsday device? Ah, now the ball's in Farnsworth's court! I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
- Nascar Racers: More specific to the world of racing but this is what gives Lyle Owens his nickname, The Collector. An unscrupulous driver, Owens deliberately wrecks other drivers' cars during races, after which he is rumored to keep a piece of the wreck as a trophy. We never get to see the collection, but Owens never denies the accusation and makes frequent comments about wanting to add the heroes to his collection. Needless to say, this makes him something of a pariah even amongst the villainous racers.
- The Owl House: Invoked and Subverted. While on a heist to retrieve everything that the Emperor's Coven took from Eda's home during their raid, Eda tells Luz to grab a box with her collection of her longest toenail clippings, grossing out her ward. Upon opening the box, it's revealed to actually contain Palistrom wood and Eda had intentionally mislabeled it.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In "Launch", Horde Prime takes Glimmer to a room full of the "tokens" from the planets he destroyed. Among other things, there are weapons, animal heads, framed insects, and even some flowers; most things would be considered acceptable in Earth or Etheria, except that they are everything left from their respective planets, and Prime rubs that on Glimmer's face to convince her to tell him more about the Heart of Etheria. The collection ends up becoming a Chekhov's Gun much later: after Glimmer is rescued and comes back to save Catra, she uses one of the spears to fight the clones.
- Transformers: Prime: Rogue Decepticon Arachnid has made a hobby of collecting hunting trophies from across the galaxy. Specifically trophies made from sapient life forms she ruthlessly and sadistically hunts down on their own planets. When she discovers her old enemy Arcee on Earth, she decides to shift her focus from acquiring any old human to going after the Autobot's teenage partner Jack. There's an extended sequence of her stalking Jack through her ship which also houses her collection, sweetly asking if he likes what he sees and stating she's already got a spot picked out for him.
