Basic Trope: Someone's living environment is filled with all forms of garbage.
- Straight: Bob'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, the furniture, and the ceiling.
- 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.
- 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.
- Subverted:
- Bob opens his 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.
- Bob opens the door to see insufferable trash, but he then realizes it's not really his home.
- Double Subverted:
- 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.)
- But it turns out that was a second home that Bob owned; he just didn’t live in it full-time.
- Parodied:
- Bob 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.
- Bob literally lives Down in the Dumps.
- Alice forces Bob to clean up his home. He is next seen in a Hazmat Suit; wielding a flamethrower.
- Zig-Zagged: When Bob has a big project at work, he lets his house get messy, but once he's done he tries to keep it cleaner. The way Alice knows Bob is busy or stressed is by checking the trash level.
- Averted: Bob's 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: "Okay, you know how bad Bob's hygiene is. Well, his house is just as 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.
- Exploited: Bob needs to be able to hide incriminating evidence from the local police, so he ensures that nobody else would ever have a hope of finding anything in the mess he's made.
- Defied:
- Bob works hard at changing his ways, or the story's Aesop centers around keeping your house clean, etc.
- Bob needs a place to stay, but Alice refuses on the grounds that his own house is maintained in Trash of the Titans filth, and she doesn't want her own house to end up like that.
- Discussed: "I gotta warn you about the place we'll be visiting. Imagine that Oscar the Grouch and Hägar the Horrible rented an apartment together. Yeah, it's that 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."
- 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 character in question turns to be diligent and extremely resourceful recycler/scavenger. The piles of "garbage" he has gathered are in fact usable/useful stuff that careless/wasteful people has thrown away, and which the character cleans, repairs and repurposes so that they might be used once again by him/her or by anyone else that might need them.
- Played For Drama:
- There is something seriously, seriously wrong with Bob. This is not a sign of "meh" laissez-faire laziness, this is a sign of suicidal apathy.
- The character of the "Reconstructed" example has a Neat Freak Fantasy-Forbidding Father who insists he believes the character's stuff is this no matter how hard the "hoarder" tries to sway him, and tosses it all away at the first opportunity with a smug "you'll thank me for this eventually".
- Played For Horror:
- The stinky mile-high pile of garbage is a cover-up for the cadaver Bob stashed in a wall.
- The garbage becomes too much in one room and creates an Eldritch Abomination that Bob eventually has to fight.
- The literal ton of newspapers Bob hoarded collapse on top of him and bury him alive, killing him. For further horror, this is an actual thing that has happened to hoarders.
Back to—OH GOD. CLEAN THIS PLACE UP!! GEEZ...I can't even FIND the BACK BUTTON in this GARBAGE!!
