Heroic Mime/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A good guy who never talks.

  • Straight: The player character never talks.
  • Exaggerated:
  • Justified:
    • The player character is mute.
    • Alternately: The player character has nobody to talk to.
    • Also alternately: The player character is The Silent Bob. He doesn't need words to get his message across.
    • Or the player character is a badass monk who has taken an oath of silence.
    • On the same note as alternately: The character never has a chance to talk, everybody else is talking too much to notice you, or at least until they need you to make a decision.
  • Inverted: The player's character is so incredibly wordy that all NPCs can't get a single word in.
  • Subverted:
    • The player doesn't talk, until the last cutscene.
    • Once people don't notice his message, he yells it out.
    • The Hero does talk, but not very often. Like a true heroic mime, he doesn't talk to NPCs, and rarely talks in cutscenes.
  • Double Subverted: At which point he clears his throat and says nothing.
  • Parodied:
  • Deconstructed:
    • He is driven paranoid by the fact that one little mistake on his part can kill him and leave the Big Bad free to take over the world.
    • One part of the game sees the player character separated from the party and as such unable to talk to NPCs.
  • Reconstructed:
    • He doesn't talk because he feels his work is too important to waste time on trivial things like small talk.
    • The player character meets Alice, whose brother is also mute. She helps him find the rest of the party.
  • Zig Zagged: A game series where some of the player characters of certain games in the series do not talk, while others do.
  • Averted: The player character talks, expositions and holds conversations on equal line with the rest of the characters.
  • Enforced: "If we have the character say something the player doesn't want to say, it will make the game less immersive."
  • Lampshaded:
  • Invoked: The hero doesn't like idle-chit-chat, and finds that not speaking is a small price to pay for not being bogged down with small talk when he's got a world to save.
  • Defied: "What, you're expecting me to shut up and be one of those 'never open my mouth' type people? I like talking."
  • Discussed: "How come you never talk?" "..."
  • Conversed: "You ever notice how the main character in these types of games never talk?"
  • Plotted A Good Waste:
    • The protagonist doesn't know the language everyone else is speaking in, has an actual speech impediment, or is a robot who simply lacks the necessary hardware.
    • Or it's just to prevent the player character from saying something the player doesn't want to. Or the way the player character talks is through a separate microphone-type peripheral.

HERO: (motions toward the Heroic Mime page)