Playing With / Wasteland Elder

• Basic Trope Description: An elderly, wise and usually heroic leader of a community of survivors in a post-apocalyptic setting.

• Straight: Alice, a woman in her 80s, is the leader of a community of plague survivors.
• Exaggerated: Alice is more than 100 years old, cannot walk or see anymore and is a Scatterbrained Senior. Despite this, she is the leader of a survivor community.
• Downplayed: Alice is around her fifties, and one of the older survivors in her community, being the one that leads them.
• Justified:
  • Alice is one of the rather rare survivors with experience in positions of authority.
  • Alice happens to be very wise, trustworthy and life-experienced.
  • Alice is the founding mother of the community.
• Inverted:
  • Alice is four years old and the leader of a survivor community.
  • Wasteland Warlord
• Subverted:
  • Alice, the leader of a survivor community, seems rather old, but is Younger Than They Look.
  • Alice is a benevolent leader at first, but becomes more and more corrupt and evil with time.
• Double Subverted:
  • Nevertheless, still rather old.
  • Then she has a Heel Realization and becomes a benevolent leader again.
• Enforced:
  • The author needs someone for the position of The Mentor.
  • The executive producers want to attract elderly viewers by giving them a character to identify with.
• Averted: All survivor communities have rather young leaders.
• Zigzagged: Alice's age is never so clear: one day she seems old, the other day not.
• Parodied: Alice is so senile that she believes everything, and her advisors can use her to enact the strangest stuff.
• Lampshaded: "Oh yes, the wisdom of many years!"
• Discussed: "Should we really allow this old woman to lead us?" "Why not, she is wise." "But old people are often...well...scatterbrained..."
• Conversed: "How sweet. She is like a grandma for everyone there."
• Deconstructed: Alice is a Scatterbrained Senior who needs help with everything due to old age and No Healthcare in the Apocalypse. Therefore not a good leader.
• Reconstructed: But she is the oldest and wisest member of her group, and they help her with everything to allow her to focus on leading.
• Implied: Bob, a young survivor, tells Charlie that his community is lead by his grandma.
• Played for Laughs: Alice is a Cool Old Lady always ready for some jest with her younger charges after all the cruelty of the apocalypse hit.
• Played for Drama: Keeping such a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits community of survivors together is a rather hard job, especially for a single old woman. Alice faces conflict every day and has to step up to prevent them from disintegrating frequently.
• Played for Horror: Alice is in fact the Eldritch Abomination that brought the apocalypse, and plots to lead the survivors into their final doom.