Loners Are Freaks: Difference between revisions

* ''He Was A Quiet Man''

* The Joker from ''[[The Dark Knight]]''.

'''Maroni:''' Friends? Have you ''met'' this guy? }}

* Somewhat averted in ''[[Silent Running]]'' - protagonist [[Significant Name|Freeman]] Lowell is a loner who is more at home with plants and animals than with people, but he's also the good guy in comparison to his uncaring, mercenary crewmates.

* [[Everworld|Senna Wales]]. The first book, ''Search for Senna'' notes that she "[[Understatement|was not the most popular girl at school.]]" She doesn't allow anyone to know anything about her personality or motives at first, not even her <s> minion</s> boyfriend, David Levin. Later in the book it becomes apparent that she is an antisocial, scheming [[Witch Species|witch]] who is running her own plans. And that's the ''first'' thing we learn about her.

* Edward D'Eath in ''[[Discworld/Men At Arms|Men At Arms]]'':

That's where people get it wrong. Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are ... well ... human beings. He was also spiraling inwards, as tends to happen in cases like this. }}

* Another ''Discworld'' example, played with ''[[Discworld/A Hat Full of Sky|A Hat Full of Sky]]''. Witches tend to dislike other witches nosing in on their business, and it's repeatedly made clear that witches are not necessarily people people ("among the people, but not of the people"), but it's still important for them to visit each other occasionally to make sure they haven't gone bonkers.

** In fact, an [[Alternate Character Interpretation]] is that ''Victor'' Frankenstein is the villain and the "monster" his victim. The monster himself points out that Victor created him and then immediately abandoned him, never allowing him to know love or affection. It poses a sort of chicken-or-egg question: is the monster a loner because he's a freak or is he a freak because he's a loner?

* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''[[Freckles]]'', Mrs. Duncan worries about Freckles's solitude, appeased only by his friendliness with animals.

* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''The Song of the Cardinal'', the young cardinal, for all his [[Pride]], is wistful about a mate.

* Tobias has a lot of this in ''[[Animorphs]]'' after he gets [[Shapeshifter Mode Lock|trapped in morph]]. He does spend a lot of time with the other Animorphs, but he also has periods as a loner because he struggles with his triple hawk/human/Andalite nature and figuring out where he fits in in the world. It gets taken [[Up to Eleven]] at least twice when he retreats from everyone and sometimes even lets the hawk take over-right after he gets trapped and after Rachel's death.

* ''[[Criminal Minds]]'' plays with this trope in just about every permutation. Sometimes the unsubs are revealed to be loners or anti-social people, sometimes they're perfectly sociable. In one episode, the BAU investigate a triple murder that seems to be perpetrated by a Satanic cult {{spoiler|and turns out to be one of the popular kids at the high school framing the Satanists.}}

** Played with in one scene where Elle is profiling an arsonist:

'''Reid:''' Of course. }}

** Given an interesting twist in "Solitary Man" where the killer essentially went crazy from loneliness, and that's what turned him murderous.

* As a result of [[Genre Savvy|his father's training]], [[Dexter|Dexter Morgan]] is aware of this, and goes out of his way to cultivate a "reserved but sociable" persona to keep from being thought of as an emotionally withdrawn loner. It works on everyone but [[Only Sane Man|Sgt. Doakes]].

* A case of "Loners become freaks" in ''[[Life]]'', where Charlie is clearly a well adjusted guy with a job and a wife and friends until he spends an ungodly amount of time (unspecified, but measured in years) in solitary confinement. When they let him out again, [[Cloudcuckoolander|he's kind of crazy.]]

* Parodied in the Buckwheat assassination episode of ''[[SNL]]''. A series of people who knew the assassin, John David Stutts, all say the same thing about him--"He was a quiet guy, a bit of a loner, but he always talked about wanting to kill Buckwheat." The caption under his high school yearbook photo reads, "Most Likely to Kill Buckwheat."

* Ranger Gord on ''[[The Red Green Show]]'' is a tragicomic example, in that being posted to a lonely tower to watch for forest fires and then forgotten by his head office has meant that he's lived all alone in the woods since about 1979. Being all alone out there has pretty much made him into a full-blown [[Cloudcuckoolander]], something [[Lampshaded]] by Red on multiple occasions.

* "A Most Peculiar Man" by [[Simon and Garfunkel]].

* John Cale's "Half Past France":

People always bored me anyway }}

* [[Harry Chapin]]'s "Sniper". The titular sniper is described throughout the song as a strange loner, according to those who knew him. [[Deconstruction|Deconstructed]] as, according to the sniper's thoughts, everyone treating him as a freak is what sent him on his rampage.

== Toys ==

* From [[Bionicle]]:

'''Pohatu''': What, by choice? [[Loners Are Freaks|Or just because nobody else can stand you?]] }}

** The reason for this is that being sociable is the norm, especially for criminals, so people rarely consider it worth mentioning if the criminal in question had a lot of friends. However, if a criminal is asocial it is considered out of the ordinary and therefore news worthy.

* Dane Cook has a joke about this trope in which he states he'll try to befriend the guy at work that people would find creepy with [[Tastes Like Friendship|a chocolate bar]]. In return, he'll be spared from the latter's eventual homicidal rampage through the workspace.

** When the first reported instances of postal workers "[[Going Postal]]" came about, in one instance an employee survivor actually lived because she was the only person that was friendly to the killer. No candy was involved, though.

* Thoroughly averted in [http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch this] article by Jonathan Rauch.