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Trier follows two young writers whose literary ambitions collapse into psychiatric breakdown and obsessive solitude, treating creative aspiration and mental illness as twin engines of the same withdrawal. The film's fractured, conditional tense mirrors how the hikikomori imagines a hundred unlived futures rather than inhabit one.

Though set during the dying Joseon dynasty, the series obsesses over characters who choose isolation, false identities, and self-erasure as the only viable response to historical catastrophe. The romantic plot keeps colliding with the protagonists' deeper preference for non-existence.

Szabó's housekeeper Emerence has barricaded a room of her apartment that no living person may enter, and the novel reveals that the locked door protects not shame but a taxonomy of grief too elaborate to share. The book understands withdrawal as curatorship of unbearable inventory.

Drake, born in Rangoon, recorded the album in two nights and delivered the master tape to his label receptionist without speaking, a gesture of social withdrawal embedded in the artifact itself. The eleven-track austerity sounds like someone deciding which words are worth the cost of saying them.

Set in a subterranean city whose residents have forgotten the surface exists, the series treats civilization itself as a hikikomori condition writ architectural, where everyone has agreed not to mention the door upstairs. Its near-wordless episodes enact the sensory flatness of long isolation.