The Hulk wanted to be left alone. He got his wish.
You have perhaps heard the phrase that hell is other people? In time, you will learn that it is wrong.
— Death, Small Gods
Maybe the End of the World as We Know It came and went. Perhaps they are the only survivor of an interplanetary expedition or a Robinson Crusoe on Earth. Or worst of all, they are trapped tantalizingly close to other humans, yet unable to escape the Tailor-Made Prison that keeps them trapped. However, the effect is the same; this guy or gal is now completely, utterly alone and it is slowly... driving them... mad.
On the plus side, they'll usually have a trusty animal companion that helps keep them sane in the absence of true human companionship (generally it's debatable just how sane they are)... that is, until it dies. Usually they will be rescued by movie's end, but before that expect them to run into another survivor and creep them out quite a bit before settling down. However, if they aren't the lead expect them to actually go insane long before being found.
This is also the ultimate Ironic Hell for any Misanthrope Supreme Big Bad.
Related to I Just Want to Have Friends, Last of His Kind, Alone in a Crowd, Living Relic, and Slept Through the Apocalypse. Compare The Hermit. Not to be confused with The Atoner.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix manga chapter 'Future' has antagonist/anti-hero Rock Holmes contemplate being the last sole survivor of mankind after a nuclear war has broken out and ravaged the Earth. Slowly dying of radiation poisoning, the fact that an all-powerful divine Phoenix entity exists, and is no doubt watching, does not console him. He sits over a smoldering crater of a vaporized megacity, and starts laughing.
- One Piece has Brook, who after a series of particularly unfortunate circumstances ends up spending nearly fifty years without contact with any other living thing. Because of a promise he'd made to his dying crew and Laboon he won't even consider killing himself. The brief flashback set ten years into his ordeal leaves little doubt that he's gone off the deep end, to say nothing of when the main cast finds him after another forty years. Made worse by the fact that he's made immortal by a Devil Fruit power, meaning that he doesn't even have a natural death to look forward to. This trope is emphasized by the fact that Brook's remaining crew dies while playing a song. As they die, he comments that it's only a quartet, trio, duet, and finally solo.
- In obscure doujinshi series Mythic Quest, every human in the world is transported to a different dimension at the beginning of the Sorcerer's Curse arc. Except one, the female lead. For five years.
- PandoraHearts has Alice, the B-Rabbit, spend a lot of time alone in the Abyss.
- Black Mage Zeref of Fairy Tail spent centuries in self-imposed exile after he realized the value of human life one day and lost control of his death magic because of it.
- Takahiro Aramaki of 7 Seeds is the only survivor of Team Winter... who turn out to have awakened from cryostasis about fifteen years before the other teams. He spends the intervening time alone except for his dogs; while he doesn't go crazy, he's very rusty at dealing with people by the time he meets the other survivors.
- L was this prior to his first on-screen appearance in Death Note, by his own choosing.
- Yonakano Reiji Ni Harem Wo, a Deconstructive Parody of the harem genre, gives us Rei, an immortal spirit who has existed literally forever but is completely unable to be seen or heard by anyone until the protagonist comes along. This kicks off the plot when, upon finding out that the protagonist’s mother can also see her, she comes to the conclusion that it’s a genetic ability, and tries to hook the protagonist up with as many girls as possible so that he has so many children that his descendants never die out, ensuring that there will always be people who can see her so that she will never be alone again.
Comic Books
- Hulk: The End:
- The Hulk is the only survivor of a nuclear war. He and his alter ego Bruce Banner are still alive hundreds of years after everyone else died. Banner grimly conjectures that he and his monstrous alter ego were spared as the atoner(s) for mankind's self-destruction, due to the Hulk, having been created in a radioactive explosion, being something of a walking symbol of the Nuclear Age. Finally, the Hulk becomes truly alone when Banner succumbs to a heart attack—even though Hulk retains the ability to revert to human form, Banner is no longer present in their shared consciousness, and Hulk realizes that changing back will mean his death as well.
"Hulk is the strongest one there is!! Hulk is the ONLY one there is!! Hulk is the only one there is!! Hulk feels...cold."- It is strongly suggested that Banner died of the heart attack. An internal dialogue has Banner pleading for the Hulk not to take over so that he can finally die and let Hulk be alone like he always wanted; it's implied that the transformation was held off just long enough to accomplish it. At this point in the story, they are two fully separate entities that hate each other, and Hulk's healing factor is the only thing keeping either alive.
- The short-lived The Last American, from Marvel's Epic Comics line, was about this.
- In a What-if tale in the Marvel Universe, Cain Marko, the Juggernaut, has powers that make him invulnerable and immortal. He wanders the Earth because a strange plague had wiped out both humankind and mutants. He discovers a stronghold of surviving mutants. Magneto tries to stop him. He cannot. When he gets to them, the survivors inform him that he has the plague but cannot die because his power made him immune. Cain is immortal, but he has doomed all that remained of mutantkind. They ask for him to leave before they die. Cain, who always was a dick, agrees with them. He roams the really solitary Earth, thinking about the truth about his battle cry: Nobody can stop the unstoppable Juggernaut.
- God in Preacher was this, being the first and only being before Creation. Many of the terrible things in the story happen because of his pathetic need for love and attention.
- In Star Wars: Age of Resistance, the issue featuring General Hux introduces a character named Blysma, a former Alderaan guard who was off-world when the planet was blown up and had been living on an unknown planet with just a couple of Norwoods as company ever since.
- Martian Manhunter: In some continuities, J'onn not only is the last Martian left, but he's conscious and active by himself for an indeterminately long time before coming to Earth.
Fan Works
- An unused idea for a Calvin & Hobbes: The Series episode ("Monophobia") has Socrates waking up to find himself as this. Since he's a social animal of sorts, it wouldn't bode well for his sanity.
- The Home We Built Together: With the exception of Astrid, Hiccup avoids socializing with anyone if he can help it.
- In Turtle Kittens, when Spike is mutated into Slash, he immediately decides to go off on his own.
Films — Animation
- WALL•E: The title character himself, being the last functional trash compacting robot on the heavily polluted and abandoned Earth. All he has for company is his pet cockroach Hal until another robot, EVE, shows up.
Films — Live-Action
- I Am Legend. Robert Neville even holds full conversations with mannequins he has set up in stores and completely flips out demanding to know if they are actually alive or not when he finds one has moved on its own. Turns out one of the vampires moved it as bait.
- Like the book it is adapted from, the film version of The Martian has NASA belatedly realizing that Watney is actually alive on Mars and now all by himself. The narrative again takes a comedic turn, though in a different way here: after the scene in Mission Control where Kapoor wonders about Watney's mental state, the film cuts to Watney's latest video log where he appears downbeat while Vicki Sue Robinson's "Turn the Beat Around" plays as background music because 70's disco is the only music he could find in any of the astronauts' personal files.
Watney: I am definitely going to die up here...if I have to listen to any more God-awful disco music. My God, Commander Lewis, couldn't you have brought something from this century?
- Moon (2009). Sam Bell is nearing the end of a shift maintaining Helium-3 mining operations on the far side of the moon. Unfortunately, his only company is a computer (GERTY) and his contact with the outside world is restricted to occasional transmissions bounced off other planetary bodies. He spends his days comforting himself with the fact that he'll soon be reunited with his wife and baby daughter... but after three years effectively on his own, he's starting to crack...
- The Noah
(1975). The protagonist is the sole survivor of a nuclear war.
- The protagonists of the indie flick Nothing. Hordes of angry people are settling on their house, they are hiding in a room, crying and hugging... and suddenly everything apart from them and the house disappears, replaced by a big, white, surprisingly bouncy nothing.
- Zac, the protagonist of The Quiet Earth, and the last man on Earth. Or so he believes - although meeting two other survivors is only a comfort for a short while when they start favoring each other's company and leaving him feeling even more alone.
- The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price. This was the first movie version of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, which was adapted twice more, as The Ωmega Man and I Am Legend (Will Smith film).
- Juan in a Million: Like in The Quiet Earth, above, Juan finds himself in an empty world.
- The farmer from Vase de Noces is quite literally the only human character in the whole film, with the other characters being regular farm animals.
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: after "going quantum" thirty years earlier, Janet Van Dyne - the first Wasp - has been stuck in the Quantum realm ever since. She remains there until her husband Hank Pym arrives and takes her back to the "surface". However Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania reveals that this trope didn't apply, as the Quantum realm is well-populated and she had her own adventures there.
- Atlanna from Aquaman has been stuck in the Hidden Sea after being sacrificed to the creatures of the Trench. She remains there until Mera and Arthur arrive and take her back to Atlantis.
- Cast Away: Chuck Noland survives a plane crash to end up marooned on a tropical island for more than four years with only a volleyball for company.
- I Am Mother involves a young girl being raised from birth by an A.I. droid called Mother in an underground bunker after an extinction event. As Mother is programmed for the task, the girl copes a lot better than you would expect. Not so the Woman who enters the bunker from the devastated outside world. Mother later mentions that she feared becoming this trope if humanity destroyed itself; hence her incentive to raise the human embryos so she won't be the last sentient being on the planet.
Literature
- Maglor in The Silmarillion. Oh, poor Maglor - zig-zagging with Walking the Earth, with singing a lament over his own violent stupidity and the fall of his nation after the end of the First Age
- Drizzt in The Dark Elf Trilogy runs away from the drow and lives alone in the cavern labyrinth for ten years and he's nearly losing his mind despite having the magical panther. In the end, he approaches the svirfnebli who have been fighting the drow for millennia in the hope of them taking him in.
- In the Nightside novel Something from the Nightside, a timeslip reveals a future where the immortal Razor Eddie is the only surviving human.
- Robinson Crusoe lives alone on a Deserted Island for years after being shipwrecked.
- The title character in Enoch Arden, while shipwrecked on a Deserted Island. When he is rescued after more than ten years, he hardly remembers how to speak:
Downward from his mountain gorge
Stept the long-hair'd long-bearded solitary,
Brown, looking hardly human, strangely clad,
Muttering and mumbling, idiotlike it seem'd,
With inarticulate rage, and making signs
They knew not what... - Pretty much every resident of Hell in The Great Divorce ends up alone, because they can't stop quarreling with their neighbors. Every time someone settles near another person, within a week they've fought so badly that someone decides to move farther out, eventually moving to the outskirts and building a new house.
- The protagonist of The Quiet Earth actually caused the quantum mechanics accident that removed every other person on the planet except him. He doesn't take it well.
- Treasure Island: Ben Gunn was marooned on the island by his mates after a failed search for the treasure.
- Ayla for a good part of The Valley of Horses from the Earth's Children book series. She gets thrown out of her tribe and has to survive on her own for three years by hunting, gathering, and working alone. She notes that if she ever should get incapacitated for a longer while, she would be doomed. She doesn't go mad but she sure feels very lonely and adopts a horse and a lion.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins: A Native American girl gets trapped, alone, on the island her people used to inhabit, but then left due to the unscrupulous Aleuts (led by a Russian) that came to visit them and ended up killing off many of their men. Even after she gets off the island, it's revealed that the very American boat that took the natives to the mainland got smashed in a storm and nobody survived, so even afterwards she's "alone".
- Mau goes through this in Nation after the Wave wipes out his people. It doesn't last terribly long, though, before other survivors start showing up.
- In The Island Keeper, a girl who fled to an island to grieve in solitude loses her canoe in a storm, and has to survive there alone until the lake freezes enough to walk out. While she isn't left isolated as long as other examples, bonus points are awarded because she winds up killing and eating a raccoon and a deer she'd originally thought of as her furry friends.
- The Culture: In the short story "Descendant" from the novella The State of the Art, an injured, shipwrecked soldier must hike a thousand kilometers to reach an outpost with only his damaged spacesuit's AI for company.
- Snowman in Oryx and Crake is the sole survivor after a virus wipes out the human race and his sanity is definitely debatable.
- Something Green by Fredric Brown has a protagonist trapped on an alien world where there is apparently nothing that is colored green. He keeps himself sane by a combination of talking to his alien pet and occasionally firing his Ray Gun, which has a green energy discharge, while he dreams of returning to Earth, apparently the only planet where green things grow. Then he's rescued. It turns out the alien pet is a hallucination. When his rescuer reveals to him that Earth has been destroyed in a war and that he'd have to settle on one of the other, non-green planets, the protagonist has a BSOD and murders his rescuer, then wanders off and completely forgets about the incident and continues to dream of rescue. It's implied that this has happened to him more than once.
- Used in Small Gods as villain Vorbis' personal hell (see page quote). The lack of other people isn't the true hell for Vorbis, though... it's being trapped in his own head.
- I Am Legend has this pretty bad. Robert Neville commits suicide while awaiting execution, after realizing that a single man in a world full of vampires is the true monster.
- In Coyote, a group of political dissidents escape on an interstellar spaceship, has exactly one passenger pulled out of hibernation en route. He can't go back in. The destination is centuries away. He goes mad for a while, then spends the rest of his life painting murals all over the ship.
- In Thomas Glavinic's novel Night Work, Jonas, a resident of Vienna, wakes up one day to find himself the only person in existence on the whole planet. Even animals and insects are gone. With no one to interact with, he turns on himself.
- Men opens with one of the characters engineering the apocalypse, killing everyone else on the planet except him. Naturally, he goes insane. Then becomes sane again. Then goes insane again. Then becomes sane again. Over and over, for fifty thousand years. Then he finds that he wasn't the only one left. There were still babies kept in capsules.
- The Mysterious Island has Ayrton, who, after 12 years alone on an island, is quite an extreme example of this.
- The Shadow King in The City of Dreaming Books would be killed if exposed to sunlight, and does not dare interact with normal people for other reasons. He occasionally watches or listens to them, but spends most of his time in caves deep under the city. He is not the most sane of individuals.
- Pi Patel of Life of Pi becomes stranded on a lifeboat for 277 days with only a Bengal tiger to keep him company. The only other human being he encounters on the ocean is a similarly insane, cannibalistic Frenchman.
- Trapped on Draconica: Invoked. Rana traveled to perhaps the most inhospitable place in Draconica to be alone. Ironically, this is also the only place in the world where one can hear what's going on everywhere in the world.
- The creature in Frankenstein is the only one of his kind and is too hideous to make friends.
- William F. Nolan's story "The Underdweller" has its protagonist as the last man (presumably, at least — we never get a global perspective), but there's something else wandering around that he works hard to avoid.
- The main character of "All the Time in the World" by Arthur C. Clarke isn't technically alone, but he's wearing a time-accelerator which isolates him because he perceives everyone else as essentially motionless, and if he turns it off, he's dead.
- The Martian: Due to a freak accident, Mark Watney is the only person on the entire planet of Mars, and the next expedition is years away. For the first couple of months, it never even occurs to anyone back on Earth that he might still be alive. His log entries are, largely, almost defiantly upbeat - he nearly kills himself (accidentally) several times, he's facing seemingly impossible odds that he's well equipped to calculate and appreciate, but in spite of it all he mostly keeps working on whatever problem is in front of him because the alternative (running away, screaming at the sky, crying like a baby) would just waste time and, eventually, leave him facing the exact same problem, only probably worse. Played for Laughs when NASA realises he's up there alive, alone, and thinks that everyone thinks he's dead:
"He's stuck out there. He thinks he's totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man's psychology?... I wonder what he's thinking right now." (Gilligan Cut:) "How come Aquaman can control whales? They're mammals! Makes no sense."
- In A Girl Named Disaster, Nhamo goes through this during her months on the island.
- In Marooned in Realtime, Marta Korolev is left alone on the depopulated Earth of the distant future, with nobody for company except a colony of fishermonkeys. There are several hundred other people around, but they're all in stasis and sealed away where she can't contact them or wake them up. She has enough wilderness training to survive and avoids going mad, but after living alone for forty years, she dies of old age before rescue reaches her. (That's not a spoiler; her death is reported before any of the details of the ordeal that preceded it.) When the saboteur who prevented her from entering stasis with the others is identified, he is punished with a similar ordeal. He does go mad, eventually.
- Nicholas Hoel from The Overstory lives completely alone after his whole family dies, with him left as the only survivor thanks to a Lifesaving Misfortune.
- The premise of Remnant Population is a single elderly woman who secretly stays behind when everyone else in her colony is moved to a new planet. Unlike most examples of this trope, she thrives while alone and starts making art, telling stories, and learning new things. And when the loneliness finally starts setting in, she meets the People, an alien race who respect her need for solitude and give her the supportive community she always needed.
- Hayy ibn Yaqzan is about a boy who is raised by a gazelle on a Deserted Island. When he realizes how different he is from the other animals, he searches the island for anyone who looks like him, to no avail. He doesn't realize that landmasses other than his island exist, so as far as he knows, he's the only human being in the world. Until he's fifty, when he gets a visitor.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica:
- Subverted by Galen Tyrol. Driven half-mad by Humans and Cylons alike, he settles in a dreary, desolate part of the world (implied to be Scotland) so he never has to see another living being ever again.
- Earlier in the season, D'Anna does the same thing, deciding to stay on the ruined Earth of the Final Five.
- Omega, from the third Doctor's run of Doctor Who, is trapped alone in an antimatter dimension for millennia. He's shown to be pitifully insane by the end of the story.
- Sylar experiences this in the final season of Heroes as he gets sealed inside an empty shell of a city inside his own mind by Matt Parkman. In there, he experiences three years of being alone with nothing but his various psychological issues and guilt to deal with. Add in the sudden appearance of his arch-nemesis Peter to further exacerbate his guilt, it's no wonder that Sylar has completely cracked to the side of good by the end of the series.
- Lost:
- Rousseau has been on the island alone for 16 years (until season 4) and is mad as a hatter. There's some chicken-egg debate here, seeing as she's alone because she killed the rest of her team.
- Claire has followed in her footsteps, spending about three years alone on the island.
- Stargate SG-1 uses this trope in the episode "The Torment of Tantalus," in which Ernest Littlefield has been trapped alone on an alien planet for about 50 years and has gone crazy. He recovers surprisingly quickly.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- The protagonist of the episode "Where Is Everybody?"
- Also, Henry Benis in "Time Enough At Last."
- Heavily implied to be the fate of Patrick Thomas McNulty in "A Kind of a Stopwatch" and probably loads of others. The show was awful fond of this trope.
- The protagonist of the episode "Where Is Everybody?"
- Red Dwarf:
- Holly reanimates Lister's dead bunkmate in hologram form to prevent Lister from becoming this, three million years after the presumed extinction of the human race.
- Kryten is rescued after being left alone on the Nova 5 for centuries, at least, and has succumbed to delusions and hallucinations. He thinks the dead crew members are still alive and well, despite being skeletons.
- Holly, the Red Dwarf's AI, has also -in his own words- "gone a bit peculiar" in the three million years between the death of the crew and the reawakening of Lister. He's certainly succumbed to at least a bit of computer senility.
- The Last Man on Earth: The show's protagonist lives like this for years, with only several balls with faces drawn on them and a mannequin for company. It's implied that the last women on Earth lived like this before finding him, too.
- Number Five in The Umbrella Academy, after accidentally time-warping to some time after the apocalypse. He claims to have found others, but considering the only one we ever "meet" is a mannequin he names Delores, that claim is dubious at best.
Music
- Lemon Demon's song Saga of You, Confused Destroyer of Planets has a character who, after unintentionally destroying the world, becomes the Aloner for a while. Though he deals with it better than most:
You moved on, you got old.
You got used to the dark and the cold.
You withered away into a pile of dust.
Completely withered away into a pile of dust. - The song Iter Impius by Pain of Salvation shows us what happens to a man who had cryogenically frozen himself in a process to grant himself immortality. In the intervening time, mankind destroyed itself. After contemplating suicide, he declares himself king of the world and presumably remains there alone for eternity.
I'm never crossing that line
Leaving this world behind
I will stay on my own
On this blood-stained throne. - Porcupine Tree's song "A Smart Kid" is about a young man who finds himself on an Earth completely devoid of all other humans after some man-made disaster. Some aliens show up and he plaintively asks them to "please take me with you." Youtube Link
- "Sole Survivor" from Blue Öyster Cult's "Fire of Unknown Origin" is the story of the last man on Earth, "cursed with second sight," who wants to know why he, out of all others, survived. Eventually, extraterrestrials arrive and beckon him to join them, but he chooses to run and hide, remaining the sole human alive on Earth.
- Green Day's Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
- The main character of Scanner's Concept Album Hypertrace was a result of Super-Soldier project from WWII, who along with his brethren was deemed too dangerous for service. They were launched into space, and he drifted there for over five years before he was found by the mystic Wizard Force, who turned him into an instrument for building a galaxy-spanning utopia.
- The Police's song "Message in a Bottle is about a castaway on a desert island, trying to reach people with... well, a message in a bottle. What the protagonist finds out the next day is "a hundred million bottles washed up on the shore"
- Rush's Xanadu ends with the protagonist finding the immortality he sought, but it turns out to consist of being frozen in a single moment of time within the Pleasure Dome. "A thousand years have come and gone/But time has passed me by/Stars stopped in the sky/Frozen in an everlasting view ... To taste my bitter triumph/As a mad immortal man."
- Cult of Luna has this as a frequent subject, particularly in Somewhere Along the Highway.
Radio
- Adventures in Odyssey: Unfortunately, Whit ends up in a coma before realizing his Imagination Station program about the Afterlife was a bit more than Man was ready for, leaving Eugene to discover that Curiosity Is a Crapshoot:
Eugene: (to Connie) It was the most horrifying thing I've ever experienced. I've never felt such loneliness or isolation. It was as though I'd become completely separated from... everyone and everything... completely and thoroughly alone. Nonexistent, in a dark void of solitude. I was alone, Connie! Utterly alone, in a burning blackness, and I've had nothing but nightmares since then!
Tabletop RPG
- In the Scion roleplaying system, the ultimate power of the 'Justice' domain allows the user to "condemn" someone - assuming he knows for sure that they committed a great crime. Doing so traps them within their own mind, in a prison cell, completely isolated from anything and everything, for months and years - to their perception. When their "sentence" finally ends, they wake up, with merely a second having passed in the real world. It is implied that most mortals do not get through this with their sanity intact - it is, after all, designed to put the fear of God(s) in magical beings and titanspawn...
- Bleak World has the Experiment organization "Isolationists". They gain humanity by staying away from civilization and sentient creatures. The challenge of this comes from your other voices likely trying to get you back to society. Probably to kill it.
Video Games
- *Hyun-ae and *Mute, the two Artificial Intelligences of the Mugunghwa in Analogue: A Hate Story, were like this during the 600 years before you showed up. And then presumably go back to this if you don't take one or both of them with you when you download the ship's logs.
- The eponymous protagonist of Dr. Muto, due to accidentally blowing up his own planet. The main goal of the game is to build a machine to rebuild his planet.
- Fallout:
- The Fallout 3 tie-in comic "One Man and a Crate of Puppets" features a vault dweller in Vault 77, which was filled with a crate of puppets and exactly one person. He rapidly spirals into believing that a vault-boy puppet is commanding him to murder, and when he emerges on the surface (which has, in the meantime, re-established itself to some degree), goes berserk on some slavers. In the game itself, you can find his jumpsuit, along with a note saying to burn it asap.
- The Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts has Randall Clark, a former soldier who survived the initial blast from the bombs and dedicated himself to helping other survivors, though mostly from afar. By the end of his life, he rarely left his cave, and become a god to the Sorrows tribe that eventually formed in Zion.
- Because Time Travel in Fire Emblem: Awakening is imprecise, Laurent ended up coming back in time three years earlier than the rest of the kids from the future, and spent it hiding in a village, unable to find his friends or go to the Shepherds to warn them about the Bad Future (due to a lack of proof). In his A-support with his father, he notes that he thought he would go mad or die alone.
- Nathan Prior in Growing Up plans to live alone after high school to live the quiet life and escape his messy upbringing caused by his parents' breakup. He does so in both of his endings, but he'll reconcile with his parents with the Player Character's help in the good ending.
- Halo:
- 343 Guilty Spark was left to oversee Installation 04 all by himself for 100,000 years, with nothing but increasingly infrequent communications from the Monitors on the other six Halo rings for company. After exhausting all his planned experiments and entering longer and longer periods of hibernation, he started ejecting portions of the ring's landscape into space to keep occupied. In the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary terminals, he notes that the Forerunners really ought to have assigned two monitors per ring.
- In fact, pretty much every Forerunner Monitor we've met so far have spent the previous 100,000 years by themselves. All of them have gone a little batty, but some do handle it better than others.
- Left 4 Dead 2:
- There is a single-player mode called "The Last Man On Earth" where you are the only human other than the rescue vehicle pilots and the gun store owner (there are also no Common Infected or Boomers). Keep in mind that this game is built entirely around co-op.
- Since there are still Special Infected, expect tons of Things That Go "Bump" in the Night horror (particularly so, since you're alone and any Special Infected could potentially kill you by itself) and Jump Scares.
- In a normal game, if you are a long distance away from any of your teammates, every once in a while your character will shout out something like "Hello?" or "Where is everybody?". As you're the only survivor in The Last Man On Earth, the character you're playing as will periodically give out these shouts for the entire game to have nothing but the sounds of the Special Infected answer back.
- Bonus creepy points for the survivor you're playing as talking as if the other survivors are still there, giving directions, pointing out supplies/weapons on the map, spotting Special Infected for "other people", etc.
- And, as each campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 is connected to the last, and your character still talks as if there were other survivors, in whatever campaign you're playing, this mode gives off the feeling that you were somehow separated from the other survivors between this one and the last one, but since there are also no longer any "normal" zombies anywhere, it suggests that something... else must have happened along the way, too.
- The Legend of Dragoon has a number of characters who used to be this trope: Dart, who wandered on a mission alone to find and destroy the Black Monster, refused to take companionship because it was a personal mission and would be incredibly dangerous. Rose, who wandered the world aimlessly and was said Black Monster. Miranda comments that she used to be that way in between the period of her father's death and her adoption by Queen Theresa, wandering the Kashua Glacier all alone.
- Samus Aran is usually completely alone on whatever planet her mission is on in most of the Metroid games.
- You are this in Minecraft's single-player mode. It's just you and a world eight times the size of the planet Earth. And lots of hostile and not-so-hostile creatures... unless you enable villages.
- The final fate of Porky in Mother 3. The Absolutely Safe Capsule is absolutely safe. For all eternity.
- Red from Penumbra: Overture, who has been living in a sealed-off area of the mine that is the setting of the game until he would prefer to die than continue with that life.
- In Portal, Doug Rattmann is the only survivor after GLaDOS flooded Aperture Science with a deadly neurotoxin. Hiding from GLaDOS in nooks and crannies of the Enrichment Center, he cracked up and scrawled messages, poems, and declarations of love for the Companion Cube on the walls.
- Proteus drops you on a remote island in the middle of the ocean with no companionship, except for some animals who flee at the sight of you. All you can do is walk around the island and check out the gorgeous scenery.
- This is both the past and future of Touhou's Fujiwara no Mokou, who impulsively drank the Hourai Elixir over a thousand years ago, becoming irrevocably immortal. After her agelessness drove others away, she spent centuries living by herself in the wilds, until she snapped and cut down anyone and anything who crossed her, then snapped further and sank into absolute apathy. She's stabilized since coming to Gensokyo, but speculation is that Mokou will outlive the planet Earth and the human race. The twist is that she won't be entirely alone - her nemesis Kaguya Houraisan also drank the Elixir, meaning that the two can look forward to repeatedly killing each other for the rest of eternity.
- The Walking Dead:
- Clementine Is introduced as such in New Frontier, and is quick to distrust people such as Javi and would rather be alone in order to save herself from being hurt and abandoned again. It's explained that it's due to her caretaker in Season 2 dying no matter the player's choice (whether it be Kenny, Jane, or Edith). Even if she was alone with AJ, she still ended up having him taken from her by The New Frontier on David's order after she tried to save his life, and is later exiled and left to fend for herself.
- Molly in season one had been alone since she lose her sister, and preferred it that way until she met Lee and the group. If she leaves the group voluntarily, she claims that she had always fared better on her own.
- After having a Heel Realization when with the Whisperers, James in The Final Season came to realize he does not fit in a group of people and has been fending for himself ever since. He actually prefers to be alone, and if not, to be surrounded by walkers as one of them.
Webcomics
- Gunnerkrigg Court: The Exposition of Immortality for Jones, an immortal entity as old as the planet, shows that she spent four billion years encased in rock, followed by half a billion years Walking the Earth alone until the human species evolved. However, she claims not to experience emotions like loneliness.
Web Original
- The SCP Foundation has SCP-451, a former Foundation agent who thinks he's the last human on Earth due to a Perception Filter which prevents him from perceiving other humans, any of their actions, or any of their attempts to communicate with him.
Western Animation
- In SpongeBob SquarePants, Squidward enters a Time Machine and ends up in a formless limbo. "Finally, a place where I can finally be alone." He lasts all of one minute before screaming to get back home. Probably has less to do with being alone, and more to do with the constant "Alone"s popping up and saying alone, over and over.
- In the Justice League episode "Hereafter", immortal villain Vandal Savage has accidentally caused the death of the human race and spent thousands of years alone. He had enough time to build a working starship but decided that he deserves to be punished. Thanks to a time-lost Superman, he's able to prevent these events from happening, and though it causes him to cease to exist, he's happy.
- In Ben 10: Alien Force, Paradox was pulled into a wormhole and stuck alone at the center of time for several lifetimes of the universe. He went quite insane, then grew tired of that and grew quite sane indeed.
- Strangely enough, came up a couple of times in the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake series.
- In "The Mystery of Seaberry Shore," Coco Calypso is the sole inhabitant of the eponymous shore (save her pet parrot and two dozen monkeys). When Strawberry is called in to investigate a seaberry robbery, it becomes apparent that Coco, contrary to her song ("With all that I've got, with all that I've found, it's okay by me if there's no one around."), is incredibly lonely. Fortunately for her, the thief was just a girl who lives in a neighboring lagoon who used the seaberries for sustenance before Coco started harvesting them. With the misunderstanding cleared up, the two girls resolve to be friends and share the berries.
- In "Strawberry's Big Journey," Strawberry's car breaks down just outside of a small town whose only resident, Banana Candy, takes on all the jobs in the town (claiming she needs them to make ends meet). In order to keep Strawberry and her friends from leaving, she plans to sabotage the car even more, but hearing about their trip, she has a change of heart, fixes the car, and confesses to everything. Hearing that she's never left the town before, Strawberry invites her along on their trip, and she seems to have taken up residence in Strawberryland since then.
- Demona from Gargoyles fits this trope well; decades of watching her species being driven almost to extinction (often through her own fault, not that she'd admit it), centuries of being hunted down by men in striped masks, and finally alienating the few gargoyles who survived to the 20th century have driven her completely insane.
Demona: The access code is "Alone."
- The Family Guy episode "Road To The Multiverse" featured a universe inhabited by only one guy. He did nothing but shout compliments.
- In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Sean's Year in Space", Sean tries to live in the treehouse for a full year all by himself, but nearly goes insane doing so, and eventually comes down for dinner.
- Lapis Lazuli from Steven Universe becomes this after she exiles herself to the moon out of fear of the Diamonds attacking Earth.
Real Life
- Teruo Nakamura, an Imperial Japanese soldier, did not surrender until 1974. He lived by himself on a small island for twenty years.
- Lt. Hiroo Onoda held out for 30 years, and only surrendered upon the direct order of his former commanding officer (who luckily survived the war as well). Onoda was not alone the entire time; two of his men surrendered in The '50s.
- People with insomnia can feel a lot like this if they don't live with people who also have it. Since most are asleep when they're doing their thing, it can seem that the whole world's died in its sleep.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins, in Literature, is based on a true story. The tribe lived on an island off the coast of California, and the American Government resettled them. One young woman missed the boat, and no one came back for 18 years. Disease had killed off the few remnants of her tribe, and she ended her days unable to communicate with anyone around her, even after she left the island because they had no language in common.
- The Other Wiki mention that philophobia can lead people into this. The dread fear of being committed to an affectionate relationship will cause the subject to lead a solitary life.
- Agafia Lykova, the last survivor of an Old Believer family that fled into the Siberian taiga in the 1930s to escape persecution. With her parents and siblings long dead (the most recent death, her father, dates back to 1988), Lykova, approaching 80, nonetheless continues to live in the isolated cottage the family built, with only occasional contact with the outside world. At one time she did have a single neighbor (a retired geologist who moved to the area specifically because of her presence there), but he too has since passed away.
