Bad Bedroom, Bad Life

"It's a cozy little depression nest, and it serves its purpose well, which is to store the body of a depressed 23-year-old woman when she's not working, whilst the decor manages to accurately reflect her personality and emotional landscape."

— Psycholonials on Z.'s bedroom

We all need a decent bedroom to sleep in and have a private space to relax and hang out in. It's a basic need — not only do we need to get a proper night's rest to function in the mornings, but we also need to feel safe, cared for, and happy. So what happens when someone's bedroom is cramped at best, and outright unlivable at worst? That means there's something bad going on, as they'd never choose to sleep in that setting willingly.

A character who is mistreated, struggling with poverty or depression, or otherwise unfortunate will have a bedroom that reflects their situation. If they're kids, they'll usually be The Unfavorite or an outright victim of abuse, in which they live in a nice home, have a relatively wealthy family, and yet are stuck in the attic, basement, closet, etc. Even kids who are treated well might have their poorly set up bedrooms suggest otherwise, though, if the problem is more subtle or complicated than just having mean parents. Occasionally, the room will be made bad by the person living in it, as a reflection of their mental state.

Expect these rooms to be small and cramped, no ventilation or natural light, perhaps impossible to decorate; in the worst-case scenarios, the poor person may not even have an actual bed, sometimes not even an actual bedroom either, which is almost always a sign of Abusive Parents. Sometimes, however, it's just that the room is built into a hall or storage area that isn't designed to be lived in. Whatever the circumstances though, a character's awful or nonexistent bedroom is used as a visual or narrative shorhand to show how crummy their overall life is.

An adult's bedroom may be messy, overcrowded with junk and dirty clothes, and filled with empty take-out containers to show us that they are lonely and depressed. For people who are facing marital difficulties, their "bedroom" might be an old couch in the basement or a sleeping bag and mattress in an old van.

One key aspect here is that the character's sleeping space is abnormal for the house they live in. Be it a small apartment or a huge mansion, their bedroom (or bedroom-equivalent) stands out as being a particularly poor place to sleep. In this way, this trope relies heavily on comparison, as if there's anyone else living with them, those characters will have a much better sleeping arrangement. It's also relative: a character who lives in a shack is expected to have a cramped, hard-to-live-in bedroom, but a character who lives in a palace isn't. If their bedroom is below what someone would expect of their home, or they were otherwise forced to sleep somewhere much worse than everyone else does, it counts.

Compare Non-Residential Residence, in which a desperate character lives somewhere that's not intended for living. Certain examples may overlap. Also compare Horrible Housing, when a character lives somewhere to show how impoverished and desperate they are for shelter. Sister tropes include Empty Fridge, Empty Life, where a poorly-stocked fridge is used to show someone's life struggles in a similar way to this trope, and Soulless Bedroom, where somebody's bedroom looks off-putting because it's too clean and sterile. Compare Mess of Woe, where a character's deteriorating mental state is represented by the amount of rubbish they have in their living area(s), and Poster-Gallery Bedroom, where decorations are used to indicate the character's personality. An Odd Place to Sleep differs in that the character chooses to sleep in an unconventional place despite having other options as a way of expressing their odd personality.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Bakemonogatari Tsubasa Hanekawa doesn't even have her own room, and sleeps in the hallway on the second floor with her meager belongings hung up in the kitchen. This shows how little her guardians actually care about her, but when the family moves to a new house and she insists on actually getting a bedroom of her own, it shows major Character Development on her part and how she will no longer passively accept their abuse.
• In The Garden of Sinners, Shiki's apartment isn't bad so much as bare bones to the extreme, consisting only of a bed, a phone, a fridge, and other necessities. This represents Shiki's inner sense of emptiness.
• In The Ichinose Family's Deadly Sins each family member deals with one of the 7 deadly sins, either in the form of conflicts against each other or from outside circumstances. For example, the main character Tsubasa gets/got bullied every day at school, so because of negative insanity, he wrote the word "DIE" repeatedly on the wall of his bedroom. His room is also a mess, as a representation of depression.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Misato's bedroom (let alone the rest of her apartment complex) is a complete mess, with empty beer cans, instant meal wrappers, dirty laundry, and other sorts of junk. While it initially demonstrates her lax, carefree nature, it also displays her unresolved trauma from the Second Impact along with other deep emotional struggles.
• Perfect Blue starts with Mima living in a tidy and well-decorated room. As her Sanity Slippage progresses, her bedroom gets dirtier and dirtier and darker and darker.
• Tiger & Bunny: While Barnaby lives in an upscale high-rise apartment, his home is noticeably sparse and empty, save for a bed, a chair with a side table, and a computer dedicated to investigating his parents' murder. Come the second season, after finally avenging his parents and getting through his trauma, he is shown to have decorated his room with various houseplants.

Comic Books

• Allergic: Maggie's room is empty of decorations after she tears down all the pictures of animals and gets rid of all her books about animals in anger after learning she's so severely allergic to animal dander. She redecorates it at the end once she decides she wants to be a marine biologist.

Fan Works

• Fantasy Kaleidoscope: Flandre's bedroom is full of destroyed furniture and toys (some of which were stabbed with knives) to indicate how being ignored for 495 years has affected her.

Films — Animation

• Cinderella: Cinderella, though living in a spacious mansion, has her bedroom in the attic, where it's dark, cramped, and undecorated compared to the much more fancy and colorful bedrooms of her Wicked Stepmother and stepsisters.
• Played With in Encanto. The ceremony that gives each Madrigal their gift also creates a matching, magically enlarged bedroom; before that, the youngest kids live in an ordinary nursery. Since Mirabel never got a power, she still sleeps in there at age fifteen (and, at the beginning of the movie, shares with five-year-old Antonio). The room isn't bad on its own, but it's another reminder of her situation, aside from the decorations looking kind of childish.
• Played With in Inside Out: Riley's bad feelings about moving are heightened because their furniture was accidentally sent to the wrong state, forcing her to sleep on the floor for her first few nights in their new house.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Peter B's one-bedroom apartment after he splits with MJ is an absolute mess. He has several beer cans scattered on the floor and a pizza in his bathtub; it's implied that he's too lazy to actually unbox any of his belongings.
• Turning Red provides a transitory example. Upon discovering that Meilin Lee's transformations have kicked in, her parents strip her room to the bare walls leaving her with only a mattress on the floor to sleep on until her panda spirit can be properly sealed in a ceremony during the next 'red moon'. It is out of genuine concern (and to a degree her mother's Psychological Projection) rather than any sort of malice. Still, it contributes heavily to the most miserable night of Mei's 13-year life.
• Wallace & Gromit: In A Matter of Loaf and Death, Piella's dog Fluffles, despite living in a luxurious home, is forced to sleep in an old cardboard box with a tattered blanket.

Films — Live-Action

• A Cinderella Story has Sam move into the house's cramped, dusty attic almost as soon as her father dies, showing the immediate downgrade she suffered as a result of being stuck with her stepfamily.
• In The 400 Blows, the downtrodden Antoine does not have his own bedroom but sleeps in the hallway of the family's tiny flat.
• In Rags, Charlie's bedroom is in the attic of their house/restaurant. It's small, cramped, and sparsely decorated, and helps to highlight his status among his family.
• Therese: Towards the end, after the family finds out that Therese tried to poison her husband, Therese is confined to a bedroom for a while. She starts to become more unglued, losing weight and no longer bathing while littering the room with stubbed-out cigarettes and other waste. The maid finds three cigarette holes in Therese's bedsheet.
• This House Has People in It: Though Jackson's family loves him, the stress of the new family dynamic is causing him to be neglected; his bedroom shows this off well. Not only does he have to live with his step-grandmother, who keeps her clay sculptures all over their room, but his bed doesn't have any bedsheets.

Literature

• The Descendants prequel book The Isle of the Lost gives some more backstory to the protagonists of the film, and Carlos's relationship with his mother Cruella DeVil is explored in more detail — it turns out that she treats him horribly, and instead of a bed, he just sleeps on a mattress in the back of her closet.
• Discworld:
  • Captain Vimes in Men at Arms has a bare bedroom that barely looks lived-in. He's a former alcoholic and the captain of the Night Watch, the least respected institution in Ankh-Morpork, but the other Watchmen realize that he makes more than any of them, and he should be able to afford more than what he has. Examining his trunk reveals that he pays for the widows and orphans of Watchmen out of pocket.
  • Unseen Academicals has a lengthy scene discussing how you can tell a lot about someone from their bed, ending with the fact that Mr. Nutt was an adult before he learned that, for some people, going to sleep involved a piece of furniture. We later learn that he spent his formative years chained to an anvil.
• Eleanor & Park: Eleanor and her four younger siblings all share a tiny bedroom that’s just big enough for a bunk bed and a dresser. The boys sleep on the floor with just some pillows and blankets. It gets worse for Ben in particular after his twelfth birthday, where Richie declares that he’s too old to sleep alongside his brothers and sisters and tries to get him to sleep in the basement instead....and Ben is afraid of the dark.
• The Goblin Emperor: When he's exiled from court and separated from his wife, Setheris spends much of his free time drowning his sorrows and keeps his room without any decorations or mementos.
• Harry Potter: Harry's abuse by the Dursleys was highlighted by the fact that they made him sleep in the cupboard under the stairs. To rub salt on the wound, Harry's cousin Dudley has two bedrooms, one of which is just for the overflow of toys; there is also a guest-room. Harry winds up moving into Dudley's spare bedroom early in the first book, but only because the Dursleys were freaked out by his Hogwarts letters being addressed to his closet.
• In Hidden Talents, Trash has a tendency to throw objects at random, which unnerves people and leaves him as a friendless social outcast. His room is described as looking like the inside of a rock tumbler due to all the damage he's done to it. It turns out that this isn't actually his fault. He's telekinetic and suffering from Power Incontinence, which causes things in his vicinity to pick themselves up and smash themselves against the walls.
• In Iron Widow, protagonist Wu Zetian notes early in the book that she sleeps in her grandparents' room on the floor because her parents always intended to sell her to the army as a concubine, so it would be a waste to buy furniture for her when they didn't intend to keep her.
• A Little Princess is about a girl who suffers a fall from grace after her wealthy father dies, forcing her to work as a servant. As part of this, she sleeps in a poorly heated attic, but despite her poor circumstances she dreams of better things there.
• Mansfield Park: Fanny Price gets adopted by her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams. Mrs Norris is Fanny's aunt who immediately puts the intimidated girl in her place and instructs Fanny that she is the "lowest and last" and must always be grateful for the charity. The other Bertrams aren't so cruel, but they largely ignore her except to treat her as an unofficial servant instead of another daughter of the family. Fanny sleeps in a very small attic without a fireplace.
• Millennium Series: In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander's room (which was the apartment where she first grew) is shown as messy as her life. However, her new apartment in following books is tidier and cleaner, showing how much progress she has made.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Hermes Cabin doesn't just house Hermes' own children, but any camper who's "undeclared"—that is, whose godly parent has yet to acknowledge them. Since the gods aren't really motivated to do this, plenty of campers spend years there, with most of its residents sleeping on the floor. It's also the most "normal" cabin, with no cool decorations or supernatural quirks to make up for the situation.
• Rhythm of War begins with Kaladin Stormblessed and Bridge Four successfully pulling off a mission, with rounds of applause and praise for everyone, especially Kaladin. The narration follows him into his room, which is completely bare and silent, highlighting how even though he's in a much better place than before, he still suffers from depression.
• The Scholomance: Students of the titular Wizarding School are stranded there to fend for themselves. With no friends or connections in Magical Society and all her own limited resources dedicated to staying alive, El's dorm room has the bare minimum of furnishings, zero decorations, a recurring monster infestation, and an uncovered hole into the Void Between the Worlds in the place of one wall.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • Count Olaf adopts the kids but is abusive, so he provides them with a bedroom that has only one bed and no crib for the baby and only a pile of rocks for entertainment.
  • In The Austere Academy, the Baudelaire children attend Prufrock Prep, a boarding school. While most students there sleep in dormitories, the Baudelaires are forced to live in a crab-infested shack, because they are orphans.
• Wicked: Elphaba's maybe-son Liir lives with her in Vinkus, where it's eventually noted that the boy doesn't have a bed; when asked about this, Elphaba just shrugs. This is just one example of the neglect goes through.
• The Yellow Wallpaper: The narrator's Sanity Slippage is because of the sickening yellow wallpaper in her bedroom, where she's forced to spend a majority of her time, isolated and without entertainment. In addition to the wallpaper, though, the room has scratches on the walls, bars on the window, and bite marks on the bed. The very fact that she's trapped in this room at all reflects badly on her husband, who put her in there, thinking her Postpartum Depression is Hysteria, much as was common for the time period.
• Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: Doubling as a Lonely Bachelor Pad, Nikaro's bachelor suite is cluttered with laundry, dirty dishes, and old take-out containers. He tries to convince himself he's Married to the Job as a distraction from the utter mess he's made of his social life.

Live-Action TV

• Cinderella and the Four Knights: Ha-won's Wicked Stepmother and stepsister make her sleep in the balcony/storage area while her father is away (and pretend that she shares a room with said stepsister when he comes for a visit). When she is given a luxurious bedroom to stay in at Haneul House, the bed is too soft for her and she sleeps on the floor.
• In Everything's Gonna Be Okay, Matilda's filthy bedroom in the otherwise-clean Moss house is a fairly apt metaphor for the fact that despite the fact that she's able to project the image of a "high-functioning" autistic, she has only the barest idea of how to actually take care of herself.
• In Perry Mason (2020) in the second season Perry gets a reasonably nice apartment in LA, but he hardly has any furniture. Instead of a bed he sleeps on the floor in the living room. This version of the character is a Shell-Shocked Veteran of World War I with a failed marriage who rarely gets to see his son, and his living quarters reflect how he appears functional on the surface but is actually struggling.

Music

• GAMI GANG by Origami Angel includes "Blanket Statement". The song describes the singer's depression and how he spends all day in his dark bedroom, unsure of how to start improving his life.
  I keep my room just like my life
  A fuckin' mess and out of sight
  With the curtains closed
  To block out any light

Theatre

• In Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, in both the play and the film adaptations, Cinderella is implied to sleep in the chair she sings about in the song "In My Own Little Corner". Being that she considers it her one little spot in the house that's truly hers, despite it just being a chair in the corner of the house, it shows just how mistreated she is.

Video Games

• In Bad Mojo, Eddie Battito owns a 1950's San Francisco bar with a second-floor apartment, but since he rented it out to Roger Samms, Eddie was forced to move downstairs into the building's basement. It's littered with all sorts of pests and garbage, and Eddie's only source of comfort are a worn-down bed, a few pictures, and an old tube radio.
• In LISA, Lisa and Brad's bedrooms are littered with various stains, discarded clothes, and other cluttered objects. And they live with an abusive father.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: One point of contention Rose has with Jack/Raiden is his refusal to let her in his room. When she finally let herself in without permission, she saw that, save for a bed and a desk, it was completely empty. Jack's life has been very difficult, having grown up as a Child Soldier in Liberia with all the trauma that entails and presently being manipulated by the Patriots to advance their agenda.
• In Pokémon Black and White, the player is eventually able to explore Team Plasma's giant castle, where they eventually come across N's childhood room. It's not a bad room necessarily, but it's covered in immature toys, Pokemon claw marks, and the music sounds like a creepy music-box. This communicates to the audience how he not only has an innocent and childlike mind, but that Ghetsis was conditioning him and abusing him all his childhood, never letting him experience the real world in an effort to keep him pure and easily manipulated.
• Undertale: The Sad Clown Sans has a complete mess in his bedroom, including a self-sustaining trash tornado, a jury-rigged light fixture, and an unmade bed. It's only accessible after the PC reveals their Retconjuration powers to him, and Sans' laziness and apathy stem from knowing he's trapped in Eternal Recurrence.
• Yakuza 0: While Kiryu's flat is messy but livable (like one would expect a bachelor in his twenties' pad would be), Majima's apartment, aside from a small table, a radio and small appliances, is completely empty, showing how despite being the manager of Osaka's biggest cabaret, he's a borderline Empty Shell without the yakuza life.

Visual Novels

• After the incident at Barbarossa, the protagonist of Double Homework really lets the clothes and dirty dishes get out of hand. And after he leaves his room for the first time in months, Johanna helps him clean up.
• In Psycholonials, Z.'s bedroom consists of a mattress on the floor, and her studio apartment is almost entirely unfurnished save for a kitchen table and the aforementioned mattress. This is a reflection of her depression and general state of emotional depravity and distress.

Webcomics

• Since Ethan, Deuteragonist of Immaterial is clinically depressed and has had a number of hobbies he gave up due to lack of progress. His bedroom is a Mess of Woe. It gets cleaned up with Alex's help when he gets his life back into gear in the epilogue.
• Questionable Content: Due to crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder, Hannelore's childhood bedroom was empty and sterile, and she spent a fair amount of time physically restrained there.
  Dr. Case: Her room was effectively a one-person psychiatric ward.
• Muted: When Nyra and Dendro see the room Camille lived in after her family died, they comment that they can't feel any of Camille in it at all.

Western Animation

• Clarence: In "Lil Buddy", Clarence goes into serious withdrawal after losing his favorite doll. To cope, he paints his bedroom walls black and sells all his possessions, leaving him with a nearly-empty, shoddy room.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Stan’s bedroom is fairly shabby and dimly lit, with a twin-size bed and a run-down feel. But as his backstory reveals, it’s far better than the run-down motels or his car.
  • Robbie is an Emo by default, but we only see his room when he's miserable about his breakup. It's cluttered, with walls painted black, and we also see an attempted apology note to Wendy, a Dartboard of Hate with Dipper's picture and "DIE DIPPER DIE" spray-painted on the wall.

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