Basic Trope: A powerful entity is bound inside a person to prevent it influencing the world.
- Straight:
- Alice has the Eldritch Abomination C'thogus sealed inside her body by The Omniscient Council of Vagueness to prevent it causing The End of the World as We Know It.
- Bob is sealed inside Alice after being fatally wounded, turning him into a Spirit Advisor-like entity guiding her against the Big Bad.
- Exaggerated:
- There are hundreds of Eldritch Abominations sealed in people across the world; Alice and C'thogus are just one of many such pairs.
- Alice has several million demons, Eldritch entities, retired heroes, and assorted badasses sealed within her, all of which are fighting for dominance over her body.
- Averted: C'thogus is sealed inside a jar or a statue rather than inside a person.
- Justified:
- C'thogus, by its very nature, can only be temporarily banished back to its home realm; sealing it inside Alice was the best The Omniscient Council of Vagueness could do to prevent it returning in the future and causing The End of the World as We Know It.
- Sealing C'thogus inside Alice was part of a long-term gambit to turn her into a Super-Soldier with Lovecraftian Superpowers, intended to defeat other Eldritch Abominations far more dangerous than C'thogus.
- Subverted:
- Alice isn't actually the can for C'thogus — the MacGuffin she's been carrying throughout her adventure is.
- The Omniscient Council of Vagueness thinks they sealed C'thogus inside Alice, but in truth it tricked them and escaped before it could be sealed in her...
- Double Subverted:
- After the original can is damaged during a battle, Charlie is forced to re-seal C'thogus inside Alice before it breaks free of its prison.
- ...Except a significant part of it was caught in their sealing ritual and is stuck inside Alice, essentially splitting C'thogus into a much-diminished 'free' half and the half in Alice.
- Parodied: The one doing the sealing meant to trap C'thogus in a can, but as there wasn't one in hand's reach, they used a random baby as the can instead.
- Enforced: "We need an explanation for why Alice can turn into a copyright-friendly Shoggoth, so she's got an Eldritch Abomination inside her that lets her become one."
- Discussed: "We can't beat C'thogus and we're all out of cans, so we need to seal it in a person. Any volunteers?"
- Conversed: "So, they're sealing a powerful and destructive entity into the body of an infant child in the hope they can make use of its power and fulfil an ancient prophecy? Hasn't this been done before?"
- Deconstructed:
- C'thogus is successfully sealed inside Alice, but as she lacks the mental fortitude to contain it it quickly takes over her body for its own ends. This allows C'thogus to impersonate her and fly under the heroes' radar, continuing its machinations without their knowledge until it's far too late to stop it.
- The Omniscient Council of Vagueness' enemies and rivals discover Alice's existence, causing them to start summoning and binding similar cosmic entities into their own staff to try and create possessed Super Soldiers of their own. This goes terribly wrong due to flawed bindings or unsuitable person-shaped cans, setting dozens of Eldritch Abominations and other questionably well-intentioned beings loose on an unsuspecting world, causing mass chaos.
