Basic Trope: A character has multiple distinct personalities within their own mind.
- Straight: Bob holds three distinct voices in his head: Andy the brash hero, Clive the intelligent scientist, and Diana, the charming seductress
- Exaggerated: Bob also has Evan the bartender, Fiona the dancer, Greg the mailman, Henry the occultist, Ingrid the spy, and it continues on and on.
- Downplayed: Bob hints that there are voices within his head when he talks with Alice, but none of them are seen and she only talks with Bob.
- Justified:
- Bob is a Willing Channeler: The dead who want to speak to the living possess him so they can speak. Spirit mediums are a rare breed so so it's not uncommon for them to have multiple ghosts with them.
- Bob was subject to Demonic Possession that caught multiple spirits.
- Bob is an unholy fusion of science and occultism.
- Inverted The Troper Heights Apartment building has a large diverse cast of characters living inside, but if anyone talks to them, they all say, in the same voice, that they are Bob.
- Subverted:
- Bob doesn't have ghosts inside him: He has a Split Personality, and he simply thinks he's possessed by ghosts.
- Bob is an actor: He has all of those voices that he uses because his job is make people believe he's like that.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob's about to be possessed, the split personality is just how it begins to manifest.
- Those voices in Bob's head are real: The fact that he's an actor is how he hides his condition.
- Parodied: Bob has name tags for all of the spirits inside his brain. He even has a sketch comedy where they come out.
- Zig Zagged: Bob has voices in his head that come out at different times. There is a rational scientific explanation that explains that it's really a psychological condition. However, every so often, something happens science can't explain.
- Averted: There is only one Bob.
- Enforced: Writers of this story think Bob will be an interesting character and write him this way.
- Lampshaded: "Hey, look, it's Bob. Or is it Andy? Or Fiona this time?"
- Invoked: Bob the Willing Channeler willingly takes multiple ghosts into his body: They have knowledge he needs.
- Exploited: General Evil knows Bob's talents could be very dangerous to him, so he tricks Bob into getting possessed by murderers and other evil folk in the hopes it will cause Bob to be subsumed by them and perform a Face–Heel Turn.
- Defied: Bob is able to affect multiple accents and voices, but it's made clear he does this deliberately. There is only one Bob.
- Deconstructed:
- The pain of the ghosts threatens to overwhelm Bob's psyche to the point of being comatose.
- Possessing these ghosts [[Heroic RRoD take it out on Bob's body to the point where he has Tainted Veins everywhere.
- Bob learns horrible truths he never wanted to know.
- Reconstructed:
- Through force of will, Bob can tame the ghosts.
- Secret forbidden knowledge takes time to digest, and the ghosts Bob learned it from help him cope with it.
- Played For Laughs: Bob gets possessed by an entire circus's worth of ghosts, and can successfully pull off the one-man show of the ages.
- Played For Drama:
- Bob goes insane from all the voices in his head, causing him to be Driven to Suicide.
- Bob gets possessed by a jealous ex-lover of his friends, who uses his body to enact a dark revenge.
Back to Many Spirits Inside of One.
