Basic Trope: A person is isolated from any and all human contact, whether he wants to or not.
- Straight: Grumpy Old Man Bob lives in a large house in the tropics all by himself in Tropia who shoos away anyone who tries to visit him.
- Exaggerated: Bob lives on an entire tropical planet all by himself, having to rely on farming his own food and using leftover resources from other humans in order to survive.
- Downplayed: Bob lives in a large house all by himself, but is still on good terms with his family who visits him for the holidays.
- Justified:
- Bob is a Shell-Shocked Veteran who lived through a traumatic war experience that prevents him from opening up to others, but is still sane enough to pay his mortgage. As such, he rented a large house to keep away from those who make his PTSD even worse.
- Bob is being hunted by a foreign government, and had to lie low to prevent from being captured. Anyone he meets could recognize him and tip off his location to an agent of that government, so a large house in the middle of nowhere is likely the safest option.
- Bob has recently been widowed, and his child(ren) don't visit anymore.
- Bob has been shipwrecked or marooned in an isolated area. Until outside help can arrive, he's on his own.
- Inverted: Bob lives in a small house surrounded by friends and family, and is constantly making an effort to remain with someone he knows at all times.
- Subverted: Bob looks like he lives all alone, but when Alice breaks into his house to confront him, he reveals he has an ill, elderly wife who he's caring for, which is why he isolates himself from society.
- A lonely child in school has friends, but doesn't go the same same school with them.
- Double Subverted: Bob's "wife" turns out to be a dementia-fueled hallucination, and he truly does live alone. Bob only tells himself and others this to prevent others from being suspicious, and to deny that he has gone mad from the isolation.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: Bob used to live with a large family as a child, but started living by himself by the time he grows into his teen years. However, he then finds love while visiting a Tropia, and settles down with his love to raise a family of his own. However, his time served in the war resulted in his children growing up and going to college, and his experiences result in him alienating everyone else who stays with him until everyone leaves him, leaving him a lone hermit again. He does hire some help on the side, but even that help rarely talks to him, and ultimately leaves him.
- Averted: Bob lives in a large house with plenty of people around who can help and talk to him.
- Enforced: Bob's character is given a traumatic backstory, but is mostly irrelevant to the plot. So the writers place him in an out-of-the-way place so that he's still significant, but not nearly as important as other characters.
- Lampshaded:
- "Doesn't Old Man Bob have anything better to do other than pace up and down in that huge house of his all alone?"
- "I wonder what that Bob fellow does in his spare time. He must be lonely up there..."
- Invoked: Bob's old friend Steve wants to help Bob evade from the government that's trying to catch him. Since he can't fight the government by himself, he does the only thing he knows how to help by relocating Bob to a place far from where society can reach him.
- Exploited: Because Bob is such an Implacable Man physically, Emperor Evulz breaks him mentally to discourage him from interfering in his plans further. Evulz also places Bob under house arrest unbeknownst to the latter in order to keep him in the one spot where he can't foil his Evil Plan.
- Defied:
- Bob refuses to let himself be relocated to a place where few people live to prevent any chance of going mad from the isolation.
- Bob rents his large house to various people who need it (including his family) so that he's not alone all the time.
- Bob hires some housekeepers and a butler to not only help assist him, but so he has a person to talk to in his spare time.
- Discussed:
- "If you had someone to talk with while you lived in this place, maybe you'd be a little less insane!"
- "Bob, you can't keep living like this. It's not healthy for you.
- "Someday, you gotta move out of this empty place and go into a retirement home. You won't have to pay rent anymore, and you'll have people to hang out with!"
- Conversed: "There must be some reason why Bob lives in that big house. Maybe he's hiding a MacGuffin or something...
- Implied:
- When Alice is exploring a dense forest in the middle of nowhere, she comes across a seemingly abandoned house. Then she notices a lone shadow move from inside.
- While exploring an abandoned home, Alice and Steve come across Bob's rotting corpse, with no evidence of anyone staying in the house.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob's isolation from society has caused him to devolve into a crazed lunatic who can't tell what's real and what isn't.
- When Bob encounters a person for the first time in 20 years, he's completely unable to communicate with them, and is forcibly shipped to an institution where he spends the rest of his days after the government discovers him.
- Reconstructed: Bob's isolated nature allows him to survive an Apocalypse How, and to continue living his life in peace.
- Played for Laughs: Bob's isolated nature is used as an inside joke in the town he belongs in, making up myths and legends about "old man Bob", and what he did in his youth.
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