Basic Trope: An older person who is portrayed as forgetful, ditzy, and/or easily distracted.
- Straight: Alice is a 70 year old woman who easily forgets things, isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and tends to go on long tangents about specific anecdotes.
- Exaggerated: Alice is a 100 year old woman who is the logical extreme of Cloud Cuckoolander and Too Dumb to Live.
- Downplayed: Alice is around 60, and she's a little forgetful and easily distracted, but not very much.
- Justified:
- Alice has Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia.
- Alice has always been a fairly quirky and forgetful individual, which has stayed with her even in old age.
- Inverted:
- Alice is an old lady who's sharp as a tack.
- Alice is a young child who is a very forgetful Cloud Cuckoolander.
- Subverted:
- Alice turns out to be Obfuscating Stupidity.
- There's a Flashback to 50 years ago, and the 20-year-old college student Alice is every bit as clumsy and scatterbrained as her modern-day counterpart. She isn't senile; she's just Alice.
- Double Subverted:
- ...But then she actually starts to act senile later on.
- …But a flashback to 40 years ago show that she was cured of that at approx. the age of 30.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: How Alice acts seems to depend on the writer.
- Averted:
- Old people don't show up in the work.
- Alice is reasonably intelligent.
- Enforced:
- Alice is supposed to be depicted as having dementia, so the creators went with the usual stereotypes.
- Alice senilized along with her actor.
- Lampshaded: Alice's husband Bob tells his kids "She isn't senile; she's just Alice."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Alice is an elderly woman who appears as a minor character. In many of her appearances, she shows signs of being a little forgetful, but it's never specified why.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is portrayed as a goofy Cool Old Lady who's often prone to Non Sequitur dialogue and often comically mistakes things for each other.
- Played for Drama:
- Alice is slowly succumbing to dementia, and feels awful because she can no longer remember anything - worse yet, she may even feel as if her family wants to abandon her.
- Alice, who was previously a Cool Old Lady, becomes meaner due to her dementia. Even worse if she doesn't even realize that she's being mean and doesn't understand why people are offended or alienated by things she says.
- Played for Horror:
- Alice is the protagonist, and the audience gets to witness her increasing confusion and memory loss firsthand. By the end, she has suffered a complete mental shutdown, and her inner monologue becomes word salad with occasional flickers of faint memory, and finally nothing at all.
- Alice is an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer who acts much like Insane Equals Violent horror antagonists.
Back to Scatterbrained Senior. You see, when I was your age we didn't have Playing With pages, we imagined our own ways to play with tropes and... ooh, I knew of a good trope once...
