History Main / ScatterbrainedSenior

* Grandpa Dave is implied to have an early stage of this in the ''WesternAnimation/{{Arthur}}'' episode, "Grandpa Dave's Memory Album". This gets played for drama, as a the first clue that something is wrong is when he forgets he's playing with the kids and then, later, he calls Arthur "Arnold".

* ''VideoGame/AlanWakeII'': Pat Maine was already getting on in years during the [[VideoGame/AlanWake first game]], but in the sequel thirteen years later he's still running his radio show out of the Valhalla Nursing Home on a much smaller scale and definitely doesn't sound quite as collected as he used to. Gets much worse as he continues fixating on the whereabouts of Wendy Davis, to the point of probable dementia.

-->''[[Music/TheCaretaker Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description.]]''

** Likewise, Jaehaery's wife Alicent starts to mentally unravel during the last year of her life.

* In Season 4 of ''WesternAnimation/BoJackHorseman'', [=BoJack=]'s mother Beatrice has succumbed to dementia, which [=BoJack=] very reluctantly deals with since [[AbusiveParents she wasn't the best mother to him]]. She confuses him for a maid named Henrietta and tends to get the past and present day mixed up. The episode "Time's Arrow" is a WholeEpisodeFlashback to her youth as shown through the lens of [[ThroughTheEyesOfMadness her deteriorating mind]], with disturbing details like background characters' faces being completely blank and the letters on signs glitching and getting mixed up. [[spoiler: By season 5, she has died from it.]]

Please limit real-life examples to notable cases of age-related memory loss, and keep it civil.

-->'''Merle''': I prostate myself before you--\\
'''Magnus''': Nope!\\
'''Merle''': What?

-->'''The Other Voice:''' "Who's there? I'm in the hole. Yes, I'm n-the sixteenth hole. If you can find, wined and dime it...*clapping noises* I ''am'' the hole-holy smokes..."

* Rosine of ''VideoGame/GranblueFantasy'' is often featured in events and is interacting with other younger characters. Sadly she has some mild dementia due to her age and often forgets Lyria and Vyrn's names. She mistakes Vaseraga for her husband in a Fate Episode due to some very thin similarities (i.e. a large man carrying a large scythe) even though the latter always wears a helmet.
* Old Reece from ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas'' is implied to be this, as Ryder mentions the former having 'popped his membrane years ago'. Indeed, he will talk to CJ in a manner that suggests he is mentally in the past.

* Anju's grandmother appears to have this in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaMajorasMask'', as she thinks Link is her deceased son (or the mayor as a child if he's wearing Kafei's mask). However, reading her diary shows that she is quite lucid, and she only fakes it to avoid having to eat Anju's [[LethalChef terrible cooking]].
* The premise of ''VideoGame/EtherOne'' is that you are using cutting-edge technology to embark on a JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind of such a person. Through it, you learn some information about the patient's experiences with their failing mental facilities including [[spoiler:that the patient could not remember why he was attending a funeral (for what turns out to be the patient's ''spouse''), that the patient once struggled to make a music box work only to be told that it was actually a cushion, that the patient has suffered extremely unpleasant outbursts due to misplacing things and, finally, that the technology does not exist, and that ''you'' are the dementia-afflicted patient and that your experience is an internal struggle to sort out your own memories.]]
* In ''VideoGame/Persona4'', Hisano's husband was clearly suffering from some sort of dementia, probably Alzheimer's, before his death (even if the game [[TheDiseaseThatShallNotBeNamed never uses the word]]) to the point of forgetting who she was. She considered his passing a mercy and is still incredibly broken up by it when you meet her.
* [[OldSoldier Sensei]] from ''VideoGame/AdvanceWars 2'' and ''Dual Strike'' seems to have shades of this, though it's unclear how much of this is down to humility and not wanting to be the centre of attention. He dismisses the idea that he was once a practically unbeatable C.O. in his bygone years[[note]]a CallBack to [[PurposefullyOverpowered Mr. Yamamoto]] from ''Super Famicom Wars''[[/note]] as mere rumours from so long ago that he had almost forgotten.
-->'''Sonja:''' Sensei! You did it! You are victorious!\\
'''Sensei:''' Hm? I am? Oh, that's nice.
* Implied for Gran from ''VideoGame/SurvivorFire'', who bakes brownies at two in the morning and then doesn't go out of the kitchen when they burn and start a fire.
* The ''VisualNovel/PhoenixWrightAceAttorney'' trilogy has two witnesses that Phoenix has to face with this characterization. [[spoiler: Both of them are subversions.]]:
** In the first game, the caretaker of the boat rental shop Phoenix and Maya investigate is a textbook example. He's so disconnected from reality that he thinks he runs a noodle shop. He believes the two are his grandchildren Keith and Meg and says that they will inherit the noodle shop someday. He's prone to falling asleep and does so several times, even when he was on the stand, and can't even remember his own name. [[spoiler: It turns out that he was ObfuscatingInsanity. His real name is Yanni Yogi and he was the court bailiff trapped with Miles Edgeworth and his father Gregory in the elevator. He was framed for killing the latter and his lawyer used the InsanityDefense, citing oxygen deficiency being trapped in the elevator, to have him declared innocent even though he really didn't take Gregory's life.]]
** In ''Trials and Tribulations'', it's Victor Kudo, a DirtyOldMan. The resulting cross-examination makes it look like Kudo's memory has gone bad, due to his testimony not matching up with some of the evidence. This cross-examination also tries to make it out that he was [[DistractedByTheSexy only looking at]] [[FanserviceWithASmile the waitress' outfit]], meaning he couldn't properly identify the defendant. [[spoiler:As it turns out, Kudo's memory is just fine despite his age. The inconsistencies were the result of Kudo witnessing not the actual murder, but a reenactment that was done to frame Wright's client. And the waitress of the reenactment purposefully hid her face from Kudo's view.]]

* In the good-prevails ending of ''VideoGame/MystVEndOfAges'', we meet an aging Atrus--who mistakes Watson for a long-dead friend, implying that as of the mid-'00s he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's.
* ''VideoGame/YouDontKnowJack'': The recurring character [[EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep known only as "Old Man"]] is highly eccentric and absent-minded, so much he gets an entire category of questions devoted to him trying to remember things, "Foggy Facts with Old Man". In ''VideoGame/TheJackBoxPartyPack'' he shows up as the mayor in "Civic Doodle", serving as co-host to his secretary ([[AccidentalMisnaming whose name he can never get right]]) and frequently going on [[RamblingOldManMonologue rambling tangents]].

* In ''VideoGame/{{Rakuen}}'', Kisaburo is an old man suffering from delirium caused by the the tumors that metastasized to his brain. He thinks he's at his job rather than a hospital, never recognizes his wife when she visits, and much to the ire of the hospital staff, has been sneaking out to dig up buckets of dirt and dump it all in a back room. [[spoiler: Completing his quest reveals that he was trying to use his fleeting moments of clarity to build a small flower garden as a token of his love for his wife before the disease claimed his life.]]
* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles3'': Hoo boy. [[{{Cloudcuckoolander}} Triton]] fits into this trope like a glove! [[ForgetfulJones He’s always forgetting things]] and [[RamblingOldManMonologue will sometimes ramble on about nothing]]. Although he has a good heart, nobody can ever tell what’s going on inside his head.
* ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'' features Siebren de Kuiper, aka "Sigma", a 62-year-old astrophysicist who wound up in a FreakLabAccident that gave him [[GravityMaster gravity-based superpowers]] and a bizarre mental disorder where he phases in and out of focus of his surroundings. Sigma is more of an [[InvokedTrope invocation of the trope]] due to his age having nothing to do with his mental condition, but regardless, Sigma often swaps between being perfectly lucid to [[CloudCuckoolander going off on weird philosophical tangents]] mixed with [[ObliviouslyEvil disturbing, yet unwitting acts of violence]].
* Invoked in the ''VideoGame/MrHoppsPlayhouse'' series - in the first game, Esther, the grandmother of the protagonist Ruby, had died a short time ago from what appeared to be severe dementia, with descriptions of her losing all control of her faculties and her mind degrading away. It's then revealed in the second game, which is a {{Prequel}} expanding on Esther's backstory and how she came across the titular demonic toy rabbit, that her mental degradation was actually the result of the demonic forces she had previously defeated as a little girl returning to get their revenge on her by driving her insane and killing her so that they can target the rest of her family.

* ''Webcomic/PoisonIvyGulch'': Parodied [[http://www.poisonivygulch.com/comic/poison-ivy-gulch-4-23-2021/ here when]] the mayor meets an old man protesting senility.

* This dark side of the trope is the foundation of Music/TheCaretaker, whose epics works ''An Empty Bliss Beyond This World'' and ''Everywhere At The End Of Time'' are intended to evoke the feeling of progressing dementia. The first tracks on either album start as fragments of early 20th century music, looped and slightly warped but still fairly clear and recognizable as their original songs. As both works progress, the tracks become far more distorted, warped, and distant sounding as the memories of the afflicted become hazier and more jumbled, and by the end of both there's only [[HellIsThatNoise harsh noise]]. The final tracks do contain somewhat recognizable choral music, but this is intended to simulate pre-mortem lucidity and the ultimate passage into death.

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'':
** Goldie Delicious is a distant relative of the Apples; she is portrayed as an elderly woman that lives with dozens of cats in a dusty house filled with junk. It's never stated but she seems to fit perfectly within the symptoms of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_syndrome Diogenes syndrome.]]
** Granny Smith was at least a little senile in the early seasons, but she's mostly lucid nowadays due to CharacterizationMarchesOn.

* Mama Coco in ''WesternAnimation/{{Coco}}'' is a sympathetically portrayed example. She very obviously has some kind of dementia, since she's very old (she's Miguel's great-grandmother), struggles to tell her family members apart, and is mired in the memories of her DisappearedDad, who she thinks is coming back despite him being long dead. [[spoiler:This is actually a plot point since she is the only one who actually still remembers Héctor, but her memories of him are slipping, meaning that it's only a matter of time before he is DeaderThanDead due to being forgotten. However, in the end, once Miguel plays "Remember Me" for her, she remembers everything about Héctor and is for a while more lucid than she has been in the entire film]].

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSuperMarioBrosMovie'': Mario and Luigi's grandfather doesn't seem to be all there anymore, needing to be fork-fed, biting into the fork despite the spaghetti already having fallen off of it and not showing any hint of interest in the dinner conversation.