Trash of the Titans/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Someone's living environment is filled with all forms of garbage.

  • Straight: The character's house is filled with useless clutter, meaningless paper documents, rotting food, organic detritus, and the organisms that feed off of such substances.
  • Exaggerated: Everything in the house is made of garbage, even the walls and furniture.
  • Justified: It can be justified by many character traits, including laziness, an indifference to or preference for living in a dirty environment, being preoccupied with other thoughts, being totally thoughtless, or an addiction to alcohol or other drugs, or some mental or physical disability.
    • There is either insufficient or no garbage collection services available - either the collectors are on strike or the city grew a lot faster than the local government can keep up with demand (i.e., rapidly urbanizing Third-World cities).
  • Inverted: Neat Freak
  • Downplayed: The place is dirty, but a person with normal standards of cleanliness would feel only a little uncomfortable, rather than finding the place intolerable.
  • Subverted: The character opens the door, and we see what appears to be a scene of Trash of the Titans squalor, but it's revealed that this is actually the result of vandalism, or that it's not really his home, or any other situation where Trash of the Titans doesn't apply.
  • Double Subversion: Bob brings Alice back to his apartment, and her reaction to the trash is very negative. However, Bob acts shocked about the "vandals who destroyed his house," and Alice believes him, though it actually was just Bob having a really messy house. (This was, of course, the plot of a certain Snickers commercial.)
  • Parodied: The character decides that if he's going to live like this, he might as well get paid for it, and rents his living space out for purposes of storing garbage.
  • Deconstructed: The plot centers around the Health Department preventing the community from suffering the dangers of places like this. Perhaps even with the health inspectors as the main characters, rather than the messy residents or their acquaintances.
  • Reconstructed: The messy character successfully argues that his lifestyle wasn't harming anyone, and the Health Department shouldn't intervene to change him.
  • Averted: The living space stays within the normal bounds of decent sanitation.
  • Enforced: "This character needs to be as much of a Straw Loser as we can make him. Let's make him live in an extremely dirty apartment."
  • Lampshaded: "I gotta warn you about the place we'll be visiting. Imagine that Oscar the Grouch and Hagar the Horrible rented an apartment together. Yeah, it's that bad."
  • Invoked: A character perpetrating a Springtime for Hitler Zany Scheme decides to go the route of deliberately making some area as dirty as the Trash of the Titans trope.
  • Defied: A Trash of the Titans character works hard at changing his ways, or the story's Aesop centers around keeping your house clean, etc.
    • Alice needs a place to stay, but Bob refuses on the grounds that her own house is maintained in Trash of the Titans filth, and he doesn't want his own house to end up like that.
  • Discussed: "Okay, you know how bad Bob's hygiene is. Well, his house is just as bad."
  • Conversed: "I love it when these TV shows not only drop the shiny, artificial image of keeping everything clean, but go to the opposite end of the scale and have everything be over-the-top dirty. Kind of like you and me, come to think of it."

Back to--OH GOD. CLEAN THIS PLACE UP!! GEEZ...I can't even FIND the BACK BUTTON in this GARBAGE!!

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