Bubble Boy

aka: Bubble Girl

"This is the same plastic bubble that my father put me in for 14 happy years! [chuckles] Hey there, bubble boy!"

— Ebenezer Wheezer to his son Carl, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius

Someone is living in a bubble — literally.

The usual reason is because the Bubble Boy (or Girl) possesses a weak immune system or other rather serious illness and simply cannot venture out into the world without any protection. Any attempt to do so would prove nearly or completely fatal. So obviously, this trope is almost always played for comedy. Either it will set up a situation where characters are expected to treat someone like a woobie when they're all Jerkass, or they'll be in a mobile hamster ball that's used for physical humor. If the bubble is broken, expect the character to be fine. Serious depictions are rarer, but can be good.

Frequently The Woobie as a result.

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Example:

Advertising

• A flea-and-tick-powder commercial shows a beagle living in an elaborate network of clear plastic tubes and boxes, apparently intended to keep it isolated from any parasites.

Anime & Manga

• In Fullmetal Alchemist, the original Homunculus who later became "Father" was an amorphous alchemic creation who could not survive outside of a specially prepared flask. He then made a new "flask" that's essentially a human body, using the blood of a young slave man who he had befriended and tricked into it.

Comic Books

• Jinty has a story titled "Girl in a Bubble", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. In this case, the girl is in the bubble not because of lack of immunity to germs, but because her guardian wants to study the effects of being cut off from the outside world (although she claims that the girl has no immune system in order to stop her escaping).
• Marvel 2099 Unlimited has Ethan Shields, an immunodeficient Stark-Fujikawa scientist who is also the armoured superhero Galahad... or at least controls the robot from within his protective forcefield.
• Guardian Angel's Barrier Warrior powers in PS238 have effectively made her this. Since nothing even temporarily harmful can reach her, she can't be immunized, and since the barrier keeps all disease away from her, she has never developed an immune system. When her barrier is temporarily taken away by a Power Nullifier, she ends up dying as a result, but another character is able to bring her back. After that, her barrier ceases to be so proactive, and she becomes able to catch normal, non-life-threatening diseases.

Comic Strips

• Pearls Before Swine: Pig's sister Farina lives in a plastic bubble, though not because of her immune system but because she's a germaphobe. Shockingly, though, she's actually let other suitors like Dilbert and Hägar the Horrible inside, which drives her lover Rat insane.

Films — Animation

• Several gags reminiscent of this trope are used with Rhino in Bolt, although he's able to leave his ball whenever he feels like it.

Films — Live-Action

• The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is Very Loosely Based on a True Story (see Real Life). It became the Trope Codifier and the inspiration for most of the works which employ or parody the trope.
• The title character of Bubble Boy. It turns out that his immune system recovered several years prior, and he no longer needs the bubble — it was just a way for his mother to control his life.
• One of the orphans in The Cider House Rules, Fuzzy, is confined to an oxygen tent due to his damaged heart and asthma, brought on by fetal alcohol syndrome.
• The more obscure and insane Crystal Heart. How insane? It includes a scene where the main character and Tawny Kitaen have "sex" by rubbing on either side of a crystal window. 'Nuff said.

Literature

• Bubble 2016: Joe, as well as his online friend from America, have spent the bulk of their lives confined to a single room in a hospital.
• Inverted in one of the stories from Haunted (2005), in which young carriers of lethal viruses are quarantined at a secret government facility so that their ailments won't overwhelm everybody else's immune systems. So far as the isolated kids' lives are concerned, it's the same trope: sterile housing, airtight suits to wear outdoors, and no physical contact with other humans unless another kid with the same strain shows up.
• In Kill Ball, this is the fate of every single person in the world, courtesy of a disease that makes any contact with unfiltered air fatal within a few seconds.
• The Hitek in Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, due to being crippled by an accumulation of genetic flaws, must spend their lives sealed into life support vehicles.
• In Myth Directions, Tanda tells Aahz a story about one of these, and that when the bubble boy got out for a minute, he died of overexcitement. It's a non-too-subtle allegory on how Aahz is being a bit overprotective of Skeeve so he'll let his apprentice go off-world with her.
• Royd Eris, the captain of the ship in Nightflyers, was born on his ship and has never set foot outside it, and when he takes on passengers (which is rare), the section of the ship that they are allowed into is totally cut off from his own section.
• A similar effect surfaces in the case of Vivenna from Warbreaker. She spends most of the book shielded from a cocktail of diseases by a magically boosted immune system. When she temporarily loses the magic, she gets very sick very fast.

Live-Action TV

• Kenny from Being Human (US). He is in a fairly large room, so he has some comforts though. However, it is portrayed completely seriously. He comments that what he has is not living, and will walk out of the room when he turns 18. It's perhaps understandable that after figuring out Aidan is a vampire, he tries to convince him to turn him. Things go horribly wrong from there.
• "Jon" of Delocated makes himself an invulnerable, multi-million-dollar bulletproof bubble near the end of the series to protect himself from the Russian mob.
• Though not quite a bubble, a teenage girl in House who's just undergone a heart transplant is confined to her sterile bedroom by her germ-paranoid mother.
• The My Name Is Earl episode "Joy in a Bubble".
• Ned was stuck in a bubble in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.
• In Northern Exposure, Anthony Edwards played a man who had developed severe allergies to artificial materials (basically, to US civilization). His whole house was encased in a bubble. At one point he borrowed a space suit from Maurice (a former astronaut) to go among the townsfolk.
• In the Scorpion episode "Don't Burst My Bubble", Happy goes to check up on one of her online friends from her female engineers chat group. When she goes to her house, Happy discovers that a tree has fallen on it, and that her friend is a "bubble girl". The episode then revolves around how to save her.
• The Seinfeld episode "The Bubble Boy". The Bubble Boy is a bit of a Jerkass, though.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Unnatural Selection", the Enterprise crew find kids in a sterile environment inside a genetic research facility. Subverted in that the kids' altered immune systems are so aggressive that anyone who gets close to them starts aging rapidly and dies, which means they have to be kept in isolation forever.

Music

• "The Boy in the Bubble," the opening track from Paul Simon's 1986 Graceland, drops a mention of "the boy in the bubble" as an example of how "these are the days of miracle and wonder."

Video Games

• In God of War (PS4), Baldur turns out to be one of these. He's blessed with invulnerability to all threats, physical or magical... but the blessing utterly detached him from the physical world. He's unable to feel anything whatsoever, right down to the ground he's standing on or the temperature of a room. A hundred years of that has broken him by the time the game starts.
• A girl in Growlanser III, though it's more of a clean room than a bubble. One of the game's potential love interests can cure her, after which she can become a love interest herself.
• The entire quarian race in Mass Effect. Tali, your Quarian teammate, is even more of a woobie than the rest of her people. The quarians, due to their weakened immune systems (whose assimilative basis makes it almost useless in the short run), must spend long periods of time accommodating themselves (using specially prepared vaccines and suffering lots of side effects) to sharing an atmosphere even with someone of their own species, and generally only take the trouble with children or spouses. Even then they tend to be sick for days after sex. If you get the Golden Ending and reconcile them with the geth, the geth are able to upload into their suits and alleviate their problems immensely. The volus race may also apply, but the nature of their problem lies in the fact they require high atmospheric pressures and an ammonia-based atmosphere to live: an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is poisonous to them and the normal atmospheric range enjoyed by other species would cause them to explode.

Web Animation

• In an episode of Weebl & Bob, a boy in a bubble (named "Bubble Boy") asks if Weebl's clean and if he can use his toilet. However, he refuses to come out for fear of "the germs" (that's why he's in the bubble in the first place), starts urinating in his bubble, and drowns in his own wee.

Western Animation

• In the 101 Dalmatian Street episode "A Date with Destiny... Dallas and Deja Vu", Dylan is overprotective of the Triple D sisters to such an absurd degree that Dolly claims that he'd bubble wrap everyone if he could. On cue, Dawkins walks in and reveals that Dylan actually commissioned a "Puppy Bubble Wrapper", a gun that shoots bubble wrap balls that trap people inside and bounce them around. Later gets bricked as Dylan uses it to save Dallas and himself from falling to death in a plane stunt, sending him bouncing around the city.
• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, when a disease is going around kids of town, Carl is put in a bubble by his father, who apparently endured the same treatment for fourteen years. Part of the reason is because of the Sick Patch the title character made; what started out as a ploy to get out of school went out of hand.
• Batman Beyond: Scientists develop a special iso-field to envelop people like this. Unfortunately, someone weaponizes this into an impenetrable force field.
• Camp Lakebottom: In "Smells Like the Holidays", Squirt seals himself inside a bubble after he vows never to fart again as a result of one of McGee's pranks.
• The Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "Cry Ed" revolves around Eddy stealing Jimmy's attention by trying to appear even more pathetic and frail than him. Once Edd is fed up with Eddy's pettiness, he takes to putting Jimmy in an inflated rubber glove. Miraculously, he is now immune to physical harm while in the glove and the Cul De Sac kids get more fun playing with Jimmy than babying Eddy.
• In the Family Guy episode "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Fonz", Stewie ends up one of these after a botched baptism makes him sick.
• Boog from Fanboy and Chum Chum lived in a plastic bubble during his childhood because he had an air allergy.
• White Knight of Generator Rex keeps himself in a sealed room after an accident that cleansed him completely of the nanites that have infected everyone on the planet. Notable in that it's very hard to sympathize with him due to it being willing and that he's a big jerk. White Knight explains that since he is the only being on the planet not infected with nanites, he is only person who can be fully trusted to not turn into an EVO and turn on his allies. Given his fear of germs, he probably would be quite happy to stay in his clean room even if it didn't give him a position of authority.
• In KaBlam!, a Sniz and Fondue cartoon had Fondue moving into a sanitized bubble habitat after being freaked out by a documentary on skin parasites Sniz showed him.
• Kim Possible: In "Mathter and Fervent", Ron gets turned into antimatter by the episode's villain and has to remain in a giant hamster ball until he is returned to normal to keep him from destroying things with his touch.
• The Loud House: In "Butterfly Effect", Lana becomes one after Lola becomes injured in a freak accident, and decides life's too short to take any more risks.
• In one episode of My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Adam has to be in a bubble because he was thought of having allergies. His animal schoolmates were even jealous about him.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Three's a Crowd", Discord is quarantined in a bubble after being sneezed on by the Tatzlwurm and becoming sick for real.
• The main characters of Recess end up in one of these when they fake the symptoms of a severe illness (they were aiming for a more minor one, but Gretchen messes up).
• The Simpsons: The episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten" has Bart in a bubble to prevent others from getting sick after being infected with the contagious "Panda Virus" from being bitten by a Chinese mosquito that was in a Krusty Burger toy.
• South Park:
  • Played with in "Hooked on Monkey Fonics": Mark Cotswolds, who spent most of his life in homeschool, arrives at South Park Elementary School as this because of his parents' fear about public school. Cartman's first reaction is to ask Mark if he has an incurable disease, while the other boys' reaction is to put him out of the bubble to duct tape him on a bench.
  • In "Super Best Friends", Kyle becomes this as punishment after he attempts to tell Cartman they should leave the Blaintologists.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • SpongeBob when he gets infected with the "ick".
  • Sandy is pretty much a Bubble Girl — outside of her Treedome, she's always seen in her air suit, since she's a "land critter" who needs air. Whenever SpongeBob, Patrick, or any other sea creature visits her house, they also become this by wearing a water helmet.
• Talking Tom and Friends: Tom gets tasked with babysitting ginger, and gets so into it that he locks him in a bubble. Upon cancelling their plans to go to a demolition derby, the entire gang revolts on Tom, going to the derby while locking Tom in the bubble instead.
• Cameron from Total Drama is literally labelled "The Bubble Boy", and admits to having an overprotective mom and has never really done much outside of the bubble before auditioning for the show at age 16. He doesn't seem to mind the bubble though, and even cries out for it in one of the challenges. He struggles through the show so that the prize money can go towards having more oxygen pumped into the bubble, but by the end he decides that since he left the show in one piece, he won't need it.
• In the We Bare Bears episode "Bubble", Panda becomes this after germaphobia overtakes him.

Real Life

• David Vetter was the inspiration for The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, and thus many of the works that were inspired by it. He lived until the age of 12 when he died from a failed bone marrow transplant. The psychological effects of being a 'bubble boy' were... not pretty.
• Ted DeVita was the other person used as an inspiration for The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
• In some places you can pay to be encapsulated in a giant hamster-ball-style bubble and run along plains for a set amount of time. This is a sport called Zorbing.
• Leukemia patients who undergo bone marrow transplants have to live in extremely sterile conditions during the period after their own faulty stem cells have been eradicated, but before the donated marrow has generated new white blood cells.
• Ironmouse, of VShojo, has been diagnosed with Common Variable Immunodeficiency (CVID), a genetic disorder that has compromised her immune system. As a result, out of character, she is completely housebound. Ironmouse credits her Virtual YouTuber career with saving her sanity, if not her life, because it allows her to interact with people in a semi-normal way instead of constantly being sealed inside her room like a hermit.

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