Basic Trope: Somebody for any reason suffers an inescapable or never-ending Fate Worse than Death. Death is no longer an option.
- Straight: Bob accidentally locks himself in a very small box that is unbreakable. He cannot die from natural causes and is unable to kill himself due to a magical gas in the box that keeps him alive. His mouth is also sealed shut so he can't even scream.
- Exaggerated: Bob transforms into an immortal, indestructible, immobile mass after a laboratory accident. Soon he's witnessed the ends of a billion universes. Even deities are unable to save him. Also he lacks a mouth.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is in a coma, is aware of it, and is bored.
- While trapped and immortal, Bob has access to a laptop with infinite battery life and the best Wi-fi in the world, which allows him to surf the Internet, watch movies and shows, play video games, and even participate in social media (though everyone that he contacted to free him fail to break the box or even scratch it).
- Bob is let out of the box after 3 days.
- Bob suffers a week of solitary confinement.
- The box is extremely hard to escape, but not impossible. Bob eventually finds the solution and leaves.
- The immortality gas has a diminishing return effect on Bob, eventually letting him die.
- Justified:
- Bob angered a god through many mistakes and showed no remorse.
- Bob committed something that makes him utterly irredeemable, such as blowing up the most advanced city that held the world together in peace, bombing every hospital in the world, stealing food from starving African children, and mocking his pet dog Tropey. Regardless of his intent, the gods decided this must be the punishment.
- Bob was used as a test subject for a substance made to make the consumer immortal.
- The box was created by The Empire to be a punishment more severe than the death penalty. Their citizens got used to capital punishment over misdemeanors and readily started doing serious crimes because they were already going to get killed by their government anyway. The box was made so that even people who are guaranteed to die still fear it.
- Bob has Resurrective Immortality, but his enemies still wanted to dispose of him permanently.
- Inverted:
- Bob has a link to every mind in the universe, and can communicate clearly, but is very fragile.
- Mental Shutdown
- Bob enters Heaven and experiences infinite pleasure for eternity.
- Bob enters the box and gets deleted from existence.
- Subverted:
- Bob may be locked in a box, but there is a switch to open it and turn off the gas.
- To whatever strange values and thought processes Bob has, what would be a terrible, endless fate to any other is not that bad, or even pleasant to him. Having absolutely nothing to do where he is for the rest of eternity will do.
- Bob accidentally locks himself in a box but entertains himself with his own imagination.
- Double Subverted:
- The switch just so happens to be broken.
- Despite Bob’s unorthodox mindset, his Blue-and-Orange Morality only manages to slow his descent into tortured madness. Eventually, even he begins to mentally collapse as the sensory deprivation chips away at his sense of self.
- Bob's imagination starts to fade, and he becomes insane.
- Parodied:
- Bob has been trapped for millions of years, but the only thing he worries about is overcooking the meal he made before being locked up.
- Bob is locked up for millions of years. He's driven mad not because of the isolation, but because he can't watch TV.
- Bob gets grounded by his parents, is sent to his room, and goes mad from the isolation.
- Charlie attempts to inflict And I Must Scream on Bob but only manages to be vaguely annoying, like hiding Bob's wallet or forcing him to watch mediocre films.
- The Alpha Bitch is cast into an Ironic Hell where she is forced to dance naked in front of her laughing and jeering schoolmates for all eternity.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob finds out there's a switch to unlock the box, but it's so old it's rusted. Then the food fails to arrive the next day, but the day after that it works. Eventually, he finds a way to turn off life support, but it fails to work. He decides to go on a hunger strike to die, but the box has other ideas when it activates its force-feeding apparatus. Bob uses the apparatus to try to kill himself, but it doesn't work. The sheer number of false Hope Spots he faces means he's off worse than if he didn't try to end it.
- Averted: Nobody gets locked away.
- Enforced:
- "We need somebody that no matter how terrible, the audience still feels horrible for them."
- The creators want to suitably punish Bob, but also want to avoid raising the body count and possibly losing driving young audiences away.
- The creators originally thought of killing Bob off, but his Dark and Troubled Past made him a bit too sympathetic for the audiences and they might not react well to his death. However, as they thought letting him be a Karma Houdini was too boring and could make audiences angry, they decided on locking him in the box.
- Lampshaded: "For the love of God, let me out of here!"
- Invoked: The gods decide to make Bob lock himself in a box and portray it as an accident.
- Exploited: Bob's wife Alice sees Bob in the box, and being unable to free him, settles for using him as a club.
- Defied:
- Bob notices the small box falling towards him but moves out of the way before it traps anyone inside.
- Bob has a Suicide Pill on his person for exactly this reason.
- Bob refuses to lose hope despite being locked in the box.
- Discussed:
- "I don't want you to die, I want you locked up, and kept alive, forever. This way, I can make you wish you want to die."
- "So... how much did you remember about that Fate Worse than Death?" "All of it."
- Conversed: "I liked Bob. Why did they make him suffer a Fate Worse than Death?"
- Implied: Alice sees a box, but pays no attention to it until she starts to hear screams of despair which seems to be coming from the box...
- Deconstructed: The small box is disposed of into a trash compactor by a garbage man, which compresses the box and kills Bob.
- Reconstructed: The gas revives him yet again and he now has to experience being a bloody paste for eternity.
- Played for Laughs:
- Bob is locked up for two years before realizing that it's not even locked.
- Bob is trapped in an endless white expanse of nothingness, unable to die, and with only his thoughts for company. He proceeds to break sing "99 Billion Bottles of Beer on the Wall" to pass the time.
- The box has a radio installed that plays the worst currently trending song on loop.
- Played for Drama: Losing his mind because he's been locked away for so long is what fuels Bob's Start of Darkness.
- Played for Horror: Being locked up in a box and unable to die makes Bob suffer some significant psychosomatic injuries and illnesses and by the time he's let out, his mind is completely destroyed - mentally, he is an animal running on nothing but his destructive instincts, destroying everything in his path.
- Unparodied:
- After getting trapped in the small box, Bob is not concerned about his safety, but about his meal which is about to overcook. Bob's meal overcooking is also the start of the Fate Worse than Death.
- Bob goes insane, but it's not because he was trapped inside the box for so long, it's because he has no access to TV. Turns out, Bob is actually one of the creatures who need to watch TV in order to survive.
- Bob gets grounded by his parents, is sent to his room, and goes mad from the isolation. However, Bob's parents are actually putting him in a Fate Worse than Death.
- Charlie attempts to inflict And I Must Scream on Bob but only manages to be vaguely annoying, like hiding Bob's wallet or forcing him to watch mediocre films. It turns out that Charlie's failed attempts are only before the Start of Darkness. The second attempt means war!
I have no back button, and I must return.
