The Voiceless/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character who never speaks on screen, despite apparently being capable of it.

  • Straight: Alice only communicates with her friends with notes or expressive gestures.
  • Exaggerated: Alice never speaks. Not to her friends, to her family... Nobody.
  • Justified: Alice has laryngitis.
  • Inverted: Alice is a Motor Mouth.
  • Subverted: Alice seems to be voiceless, but starts speaking normally halfway through the show.
  • Double Subverted: ...but that was the local ventriloquist, Bailey, throwing her voice.
  • Parodied: Alice's vocal cords have cobwebbed over.
  • Deconstructed: Alice's speechlessness leads to a case of Poor Communication Kills.
  • Reconstructed: Alice stays silent most of the time, but speaks when it is really needed.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice mostly never speaks, then sometimes does.
  • Averted: Alice always communicates through talking.
  • Enforced: Alice's actor has laryngitis when they're about to shoot, so the scenes are rewritten so that an already dialogue-light part has no dialogue in it.
  • Lampshaded: "Alice really isn't talkative around us, is she?"
  • Invoked: Alice never speaks because if she spoke, her powers would kill everyone in a six mile radius.
  • Defied: "I'm going to talk, and everyone who might be watching is going to hear me!"
  • Discussed: "..." "Honestly Alice, that's your answer to everything."
  • Conversed: "Is Alice mute?" "I...honestly don't know."

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