Mundane Luxury

There were three beds in here! Each with a frame and a mattress! A mattress! Was one of these yours???

—Vigor Mortis

To someone who has had a rough life, even the simple things are a big deal. The Woobie, the Butt Monkey, the Chew Toy, and other downtrodden characters tend to know better than to take them for granted.

In fact, when presented with simple kindnesses and conveniences, these characters will be completely overjoyed. The things that are utterly mundane to most people will feel like the most extravagant of luxuries to them. Our potato chips are their caviar. They react to simple fare from the local Burger Fool as if it were a five-star restaurant. And a simple shower will feel like a day at a fancy spa to them.

This trope is different from a Sense Freak, but there is some overlap. A Sense Freak gets their appreciation for mundane sensations from Bizarre Alien Biology, or the loss thereof upon assuming human form. Mundane Luxury comes not from a character experiencing such things differently than normal humans do, but from not having had a chance to experience them at all, and it's not just physical senations either. But the most important distinction is what the character's love of the mundane says about them. Sense Freak is used to establish characters as otherworldly and supernatural, while Mundane Luxury portrays them as downtrodden, illustrating the poor living conditions a character has suffered under, serving as an object lesson in appreciating what you have.

Compare with Humble Goal, where gaining a Mundane Luxury is a major motivation for a character.

Contrast with the Spoiled Brat, who is so used to luxury that normal living standards are like poverty to them.

Examples of Mundane Luxury include:

Anime and Manga

Nana from Elfen Lied. She refers to Kurama, the only one of the scientists experimenting on her to treat her with even basic kindness, as "Papa", and when she moves in with Kouta and the others, she finds great joy in a simple hot bath (compared to the cold hosedowns the scientists gave her), and gets extremely excited about the chance to eat somen noodles.
In Sailor Moon, Green Esmarude- your typical Vain Sorceress strolls into a fancy shin-dig, causing heads to turn at her hot elegance - until she discovered the food table, in which she immediately matches Usagi dessert for dessert in stuffing her face. This caused her extreme embarrassment once she snaps out of it. This can actually be rather tragic, if you assume she is so wild about the food because there is nothing like it on the barren planet she comes from.
Canon Foreigner Sasuke in Ranma ½ lives such a miserable life as the servant of the Kunou family that a full bowl of rice is cause for Tears of Joy.
- Likewise Konatsu the Kunoichi, for whom sleeping in a futon is pure heaven, and, while trying to poison Ranma's rice, realized that it was so clean and tasty-looking (what with Konatsu being forced to forage for food in trash cans and fight off stray dogs for scraps) that he abandoned his mission to eat the rice himself. Heck, when Ukyou hired him, he considered his 10-yen salary a fortune and a dry fish with rice "a luxurious meal".
Hayate of Hayate the Combat Butler deals with having found a job as the Sanzenin's butler as living in luxury in the beginning, having had to work extremely hard to barely survive on a meager living up to this point.
- When he's given a million yen so that he can live outside the mansion for three days, he's told to spend all of it and spends the next few panels explaining that he could live in luxury for the next year with that kind of money. Of course, he's spent it all before he even finds a place to stay for the night.
- This trope could also be used to explain why he doesn't realize that he has at least a half-dozen attractive women throwing themselves at him.
Oddly implemented with Mugi from K-On! Mugi is The Ojou, the only daughter of a filthy rich family -- and is absolutely delighted by the most mundane of things, like the products sold at a dollar store or getting a part-time job in a burger joint.
In Weathering with You, one of the signs of how bad Hodaka's life used to be is his calling a simple Big Mac the best thing he'd ever eaten.

Comic Books

When Black Canary took Sin away from her Training from Hell to be her generation's Lady Shiva, one of the first things they did when they got to the States was to go out for breakfast with the other Birds of Prey. Sin is driven to Tears of Joy after trying a pancake. This just makes Dinah even more determined to adopt her.
Pancakes are also the reason Hellboy rejects evil and becomes an Anti-Anti-Christ.

Film

Done in The Blind Side: When LeAnne shows Michael his new room, he says that he's never had one of 'these' before. LeAnne thinks that he means his own room. Actually, he meant the bed.
Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away is shown staring at things that are mundane for everybody, and were to him before his time on the island, such as clean bottled water, fresh fruit and boiled crab legs. He even has trouble sleeping in a bed after living four years in a cave.
- Actually, he was staring at the objects you mention because they are EXACTLY what he's been eating for the past four years while stranded. Crab legs, fresh fruit and water. These supposed luxuries being served were even more mundane to him.
- When looking at the crab legs specifically, the look on his face seems to show surprise at how big they were, sort of like, "I've been eating tiny crabs for four years, where did they find these big suckers?"
In the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the cursed pirates of the Black Pearl go on and on about what sensory experiences they've most missed during the curse, and therefore what they plan to glut on once they have their nerve endings back. Barbossa himself is almost obsessed with apples.
In History of the World, Part I, Spike Milligan's character is given a box of matches. "So rich!", whispers Spike.
Audrey's song, "Somewhere That's Green" in Little Shop of Horrors is basically about this, with her dreaming of living in a tract-house away from Skid-Row with "a fence of real chain-link" and a disposal in the sink.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory took the Bucket family's poverty even further. A loaf of bread seems like a banquet, and Grandpa Joe tries vainly to convince them not to waste money buying his tobacco, something they insist on.
Star Trek (2009); the first thing Scotty asks Spock Prime is if they have sandwiches where he's from; clearly, Scotty hasn't had one for a long time, as he's been working on an ice moon colony in the middle of nowhere.

Literature

Discworld:
- Rincewind, after long and grueling privations and lots of running away, is teleported back to Ankh-Morpork, and is so overjoyed to be back that he eats four of Dibbler's sausages (Inna bun). This act of suicidal happiness is almost one-upped a moment later when he is equally delighted to be beaten up by the Thieves' Guild.
- The Auditors of Reality get a fatal dose of this in Thief of Time after assuming human form. Myria LeJean almost barely survives the sensory overload of eating some dry toast, leading to the adoption of chocolate as an anti-Auditor weapon.
When Harry Potter comes to Hogwarts, he is at first overwhelmed by the fact that he can eat the food he really likes and no one is going to take it away from him. When he was living with the Dursleys, Dudley would always eat everything Harry liked out of spite.
- Also from Harry Potter, Dobby in his first few appearances, of the "simple kindness" variation.
In The Dark Tower by Stephen King, Roland of Gilead comes from a Scavenger World and is completely overwhelmed by the taste of a simple tuna fish sandwich and some soda. (Hot dogs, not so much.) He's also shocked to see paper - something rare and expensive in his world - used so commonly.
In the Ray Bradbury story The Fox and the Forest, time travelers can be easily detected because they immediately start sampling exotic foods, liquors, cigarettes, and perfumes, which apparently aren't available in the future.
In the first Doom novel, Flynn Taggart runs himself ragged fighting against zombies and aliens, and since he's not in a video game he actually does get hungry, filthy, and tired. While it hasn't been that long since he entered the base, it feels like he has been fighting forever. He compares the shower he takes when he finds the medical ward heaven and the fresh towel in the Garden of Eden. He is even able to enjoy eating the military MREs he discovers in the base.
In The Name of the Wind, Kvothe spends his young days so poor eating regularly is a luxury for him.
In Treasure Island, when Ben Gunn is rescued, it turns out that the thing he misses most about civilization is cheese.
Meat in House Of Stairs
In one of his books about life in Caracas at the turn of the XX century, Oscar Yanes wrote that a common birthday gift was sugared bread or cookies, then an expensive rarity for a mostly impoverished country.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the protagonist's family is so poverty-stricken that even being able to sleep in a bed is a luxury. Their house has one, and Charlie's four grandparents have to share it; Charlie and his parents use mattresses. Charlie himself has a craze for chocolate, and his parents can only afford one bar for him a year. Simply witnessing the well-off kids eat them is sheer-torture. Grandpa Joe often tells him stories about the eponymous factory that Charlie sees as a type of unobtainable paradise. Little wonder that the title of the chapter where he gains the Golden Ticket is called "The Miracle".
- Wonka also claims that cacao beans are this for the Oompa Loompas. While many compare their situation to slavery, it's much better than what they had before, living as a primitive tribe in a place where Everything was Trying to Kill Them and the only food available was caterpillars and other food that sounded as nauseating as they tasted.
I Survived: the Destruction of Pompeii, A.D. 79, apples were considered this because Marcus, a slave, is often fed gruel and rotten cheese by his egotistical master. Marcus secretly steals an apple from a freeman salesman, who was trying to clean his mess thanks to a minor tremor.

Live-Action TV

Charlie Crews from Life is obsessed with fresh fruit, since he couldn't get any when he was in prison.
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, after Odo is turned into a humanoid solid he becomes fascinated with food and drink, things he ignored as a changeling. In one episode, Sisko finds him in Quarks, listening to the carbonation in his beer.
- Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager is amazed that the Voyager crew has so much water he can take a bath in it.
At first, Hunter from Queer as Folk has a hard time accepting that Michael and Ben are being nice to him (giving him a warm jacket, feeding him, paying his hospital bills, letting him use their shower and sleep in their guest room when he wants to, and things like that) because they want to and not because they have some sort of ulterior motive. Understandable, considering that he's a teenage prostitute who's been living on the streets for quite some time.
In Torchwood: Miracle Day, Oswald Danes, a convicted kiddy rapist/murderer released from death row, is seen filling a trash bag with food from a buffet. When questioned, he makes a good point about how he'll be unable to find work, and must collect food whenever he can.
In Winds of War/War and Remembrance a train headed on the Transport to the East stopped at a Polish station. At that moment someone throws a sack of apples aboard and all the prisoners are pitifully grateful, having had no food and little water. In the book it was an "unknown benefactor". In the miniseries, a poor Polish farmer hefting a sack shoves his way past the SS guards and puts it on board. One of the prisoners asks, "Who are you" and receives the reply, "A Christian."

New Media

Vita from Vigor Mortis regards even having a proper amount of food each day as a luxury she doesn't deserve (in part because she is getting it and most of her family isn't). Her teammates in the Hunter's guild thought her astonishment at things like how much food she was getting was funny. After one of them walked with her while she was making a delivery to her family, and saw where she lived before using the guild lodging, that teammate apologized.

Video Games

In Mass Effect 3, you and your team visit a monastery for Ardat-Yakshi, Asari with a rare genetic condition that makes any mating fatal for the other partner, and generally leads to sociopathic tendencies if left unchecked. As an alternative to simply killing the Ardat-Yakshi, monasteries are set up where they are isolated and secluded, and that includes not allowing them access to the extranet or entertainment media. While exploring the monastery, you can discover a message from one young woman to another discussing how somebody managed to smuggle in a copy of the vid Vaenia, and how they are going to meet up at night to watch it. Despite the fact that everybody reacts as if Vaenia is some sort of porno, dialogue in Mass Effect 2 revealed that it was essentially just a love story between two Asari. The young women of the monastery are giddy with anticipation, and risking solitary confinement if they are caught out at night, all in order to watch a romance film.

Web Comics

Bud of Wapsi Square is quite excited when someone shows her kindness without fear or ulterior motives.
In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, Galatea is very slow to accept that anyone might be genuinely kind to her, and she reacts to pizza as an unimaginable luxury.
Played With in Bardsworth—when Mike first takes a shower at Bardsworth he thinks it's incredibly cool, causing his roommate to wonder if he's from a tiny dirt farm or something. It's actually just because the shower works by magic, which Mike (who's from our world) isn't used to.

Web Original

PVT Murphy's Law once claimed soldiers had found treasure in Saddam Hussein's palaces; toilets.
- Similarly, each time Murphy's unit rotates stateside after a deployment, their desire for beer is strong enough to cause the CEO of the Annheuser-Busch company to wake up suddenly from bed.
In Kickassia, the newly 3D'd Lee enjoys being 3D...by feeling up everyone he can get his hands on (including himself).
In Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series 9-year-old Marik travels to the surface for the first time after a life living underground. He is blown away by the fact the market they visit has rags, claiming he's "always wanted a rag". He's also amazed to discover television: "Oooh, a shiny box! I must worship it!"

Western Animation

The Simpsons, "Homer's Enemy": Frank Grimes spent his whole life struggling to get by, so he's shocked when he discovers that Too Dumb to Live Homer lives in a two-story house, which is palatial compared to his place (an apartment above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley). Grimes is also flabbergasted that he's dining on lobster (which, to be fair, he was just serving it that once to impress Grimes) and that he went to space and met President Ford (the last two were just odd coincidences).
- The Simpsons themselves experience this sort of thing all the time (in one episode, Bart refers to ordinary name-brand products as things rich people buy). Marge seems especially prone to it.
In one of the Futurama "Anthologies of Interest", Bender is turned human and becomes obsessed with such common pleasures as eating and drinking, leading him to become incredibly obese and eventually dying from it.
- Zoidberg gets this pretty frequently. "A floor? We live like kings!"
DuckTales (2017). In the episode "The Living Mummies of Toth-Ra!", Toth-Ra's subjects are blindly loyal to him, despite being slaves in all but name, and they see no problem with this. Scrooge's cliched attempt to rally them with benefits of freedom like, "feeling the warmth of the sun and the wind in their faces" doesn't convince them... But when Launchpad shows them what a burrito is, they switch to full revolutionary mode. And when they start to get cold feet, he re-energizes them with descriptions of other junk food, while Scrooge sarcastically mumbles, "This is the dumbest revolution I've ever been a part of."
In Amphibia, the food Anne has to live on in the eponymous fantasy-land isn't very appetizing for humans, often containing live insects, nor are living conditions all-too great, their technology level (at least in Wartwood) being comparable to that of Earth's Renaissance. When she and Sasha finally meet up, Anne is overjoyed when she learns Sasha has access to cheeseburgers, pizza, tacos, and KETCHUP! (clearly having explained the concepts of each to Captain Grime's mess sergeant) plus showers with hot water.

Real Life

Naturally Truth in Television. When a News Broadcast features a story about charity work being done in impoverished and disaster-stricken areas of the world, it won't be complete without a clip or two of the villagers/victims enthusing about the food and clothing they have been given.
When you've been to really big scout camps, living in a tent on field with 15,000 dirty people for two weeks, the simple act of being indoors feels heavenly. Not to mention having a shower, eating take-out and sleeping in a bed.
- This is doubly true of aid workers, soldiers, etc, returning from deployment into third world areas.
- Seen on any given season of Survivor with the challenge rewards. The players really start getting excited about simple comforts after the first week or so of roughing it (approximately the third or fourth episode).
At the 2004 Scout Jamboree in Australia, we had eleven thousand kids and the only food that was available was what the sponsors gave us, so the main snack was a cheese version of Tiny Teddies that Arnott's were testing out to see if they'd sell (Tiny Teddies are little biscuits). Eventually a group of kids took the radio station hostage with a demand for pizza, vegemite and the normal chocolate Tiny Teddies. That was all they wanted.
When concentration camps were liberated by the US Army many released prisoners were found to have a mysterious sickness(among many). It turned out that they had gorged themselves in a mad burst of joyful gluttony on spare army rations handed out by well-meaning but medically untrained GI's and had overstrained their weak stomachs. This is known as 'refeeding syndrome' and can be fatal.
People who have dated across class lines have probably seen or experienced this trope (and its inversion) when the wealthier partner's family gathers.
Following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, liquidators were ordered to place flags in areas of the damaged plant to inform others about the clean-up. This was very dangerous due to the high levels of radiation. The ones who followed those were given a day off and some Pepsi, which were both hard to come by in the Soviet Union in 1986.
It sometimes happens to those who had been hospitalized. Often times, via feeding tube, they would have to be given medical food. Of course, this depends on the situations where regular food consuming isn't an option due to injury or illness preventing such action, for example a jaw injury. In other cases, hospital food can vary ranging from bland to restaurant style.
This is why Elvis Presley had such a notorious appetite for junk food, such as bacon. In his childhood, such foods were luxuries that his parents couldn't afford, but as a rich celebrity, he could freely indulge.
In recent years,^[when?] bookmobiles and even a book vending machines have started to arrive in book deserts, where books, either printed or digital, are hard to come by. Since literacy is critical to have, being unable to access them can hurt both the person and society around them. As you guess, in these situations, books are a luxury.
- E-readers price down gargantuan hoards of books that previously would be only something the more scholarly of the rich would have access to. This is either straight or an inversion, possibly both depending on how it is received.
For somebody who has been in quarantine or medical isolation, simply talking with somebody else face-to-face can be a luxury (as so many people learned during and after the pandemic lockdowns of 2020).