No Social Skills

aka: Socially Inept

"What is 'a normal conversation'...?"

— Kiyotaka Ishimaru, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

For some reason, the character is mostly ignorant of and often confused by common social conventions and behaviors. They usually grasp enough to minimally function around other people most of the time, but any circumstances outside of their limited experience fluster, puzzle, or (at worst) upset or enrage them.

Someone with no social skills is not necessarily stupid — just unfamiliar with how human beings act around each other. Consequently, they will tend to be blunt, straightforward, and brutally honest. They will expect everyone else to be totally honest, too. From a writing point of view, they are an asset: they say things that everyone is thinking but no one would dare say out loud.

One background that can lead to this trope is to be Raised by Wolves — growing up with animal parents. They may be an intellectual (from a nerd, up to an Absent-Minded Professor) who thinks more about their favorite subject than interacting with people. Alternatively, they may have had an isolated or abusive childhood or Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training. Or all three. They may be bamboozled by the opposite sex and ask What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?. Alternately, they may have had social skills in the past, but after being away on The Quest or some other mission for an extended time, may have a lot of difficulty reintegrating into civilian life due to being a Returning War Vet, a Shell-Shocked Veteran or a Stranger in a Familiar Land.

Quite often a point is made of stating that this character is very intelligent or "learns fast" to make sure the audience doesn't just write them off as dense and to justify characters trying to help them adjust, or as an excuse for why they've adjusted as well as they did. If done poorly, either of these versions of intelligence can become an Informed Ability.

An extreme form of Fish out of Water, milder cases may result in Cloudcuckoolander, Creepy Child, Innocent Fanservice Girl or No Sense of Humor. Homeschooled Kids are usually portrayed this way. If they stay this way, they may become The Hermit, The Shut-In, or Hikikomori.

This trope is a staple of Cringe Comedy, where characters do awkward, embarrassing, or offensive things without knowing why they're awkward, embarrassing, or offensive.

Related to: Friendless Background and I Just Want to Have Friends when the character isn't happy about this situation.

In Real Life, people with dyssemia and nonverbal learning disorders fit this trope. It's a symptom of certain forms of autism, including Asperger Syndrome; a differently wired mind can make it hard to grasp neurotypical social cues, which can give the unfortunate perception that Loners Are Freaks.^note Though it should be noted that this goes both ways — neurotypical individuals have difficulty interpreting autistic social cues as well, and contrary to popular belief, autistic people are just as capable of conveying information as their neurotypical counterparts. This is called the double empathy problem. The impulsivity of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can also manifest this way. Media is aware of this but tends to exaggerate its prevalence and intensity. A mild form is also common in people involved with academia. That said, No Real Life Examples, Please!

Compare Better with Non-Human Company, where a character has more of an affinity for non-human lifeforms. Also compare Socially Awkward Hero. Contrast with The Social Expert.

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Examples:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Visual Novels
• Western Animation

Comic Strips

• In a week-long Garfield storyline, Jon falls in love with a woman in a rec center who had been Raised by Wolves. She has only been in civilization for a week and she has tendencies like scratching her head with her foot, messily devouring her food, trying to bite off her foot when her shoe was too tight, and howling at the moon.

Films — Animation

• The Boxtrolls: Eggs was raised by Boxtrolls. Due to this, his social skills are completely alien to him (i.e, licking a person's hand while doing a handshake); he overall comes across as socially awkward.
• Cars: Mater is socially awkward and socially inept. He has a hard time communicating his thoughts and feelings to others and doesn't know what topics to talk about in front of other people. He has a hard time with others' opinions too, either not understanding them or thinking that they must be bad people if they don't like his friend McQueen. He sometimes says inappropriate things at the wrong times and unintentionally embarrasses his friends in public places when talking to new people. It's been speculated that he might be on the autism spectrum.
• Encanto: Bruno is very socially awkward. By the time Mirabel meets him, his eccentricity has been enhanced by years of isolation, but it's implied that he had this problem in the past; Pepa's wedding went awry because he made a well-meaning but ill-considered joke that Pepa may have confused for a prophecy.
• Frozen:
  • Blunt, grumpy Kristoff, who decidedly prefers his reindeer Sven to humans, and was raised by trolls. They even Lampshade it during "Fixer Upper" when one of the trolls calls him "socially impaired" while covering his ears.
  • To a lesser degree, Anna, who stumbles over her first conversation with a boy (adorably) and believes it is perfectly acceptable to marry said boy, even though she's only known him for a day. This too is Lampshaded several times.
    Anna: This is awkward... not you're awkward, but just because we're — I mean, awkward. You're gorgeous. Wait, what?
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Princess Peach, ironically for an otherwise-competent authority figure — she's demonstrably out of practice when it comes to socializing with other humans, getting right up in Mario's personal space as soon as she meets him, being a little too honest about his chances of rescuing Luigi from Bowser, and flubbing her attempts to sell him a white lie to help him feel better about his training (it still works).
• Tangled: Rapunzel has spent eighteen years in a tower with no one but Gothel and Pascal to talk to. Thus, she doesn't have the best social skills, being a bit of an over-sharer at times and not always understanding social cues (although her natural charm and an insane amount of luck tend to keep people from taking this the wrong way). She also appears to be a bit too trusting, which Gothel took advantage of for years to control her.

• Turning Red: Ming is clearly a successful businesswoman and is quite at ease dealing with the temple visitors, but when it comes to personal relationships, she seems completely at a loss. She swings back and forth between "overbearing helicopter parent" and "helpless bystander" with nothing in-between. The most glaring example of this is when she tells Mei that "we'll face this (meaning Mei's panda problem) together", but never offers any support or advice on how to control the panda transformations — not even when poor Mei is slamming herself against the walls of her bedroom hard enough to make the whole house shake in her desperate attempts to make the panda go away.

Films — Live-Action

• The Accountant (2016): Ben Affleck's character is an autistic accountant who is brilliant with numbers and highly trained in both armed and unarmed combat, but who lacks any social skills.
• Bad Boy Bubby: Due to having spent most of his life with his insane and abusive mother, who, among other things, taught him that inappropriate and downright perverted behaviour is normal, the titular Bubby has next to no idea how to behave in normal society. This ends up being a massive problem for him, since that sort of behavior is really all that he really knows, though he does eventually end up having a happy ending of sorts.
• Born Free: In a non-human case, Elsa, a lioness who was Raised in Captivity, has no understanding of how wild lions behave and interact with each other, which initially makes it difficult for her to interact with them. For instance, after initially getting off to a good start with a young male lion, Elsa ends up putting him off because she doesn't let him eat first as is expected of a lioness — one of the norms that Elsa, growing up with humans and no other lions, has never been exposed to.
• Danny in Unleashed aka Danny the Dog was raised like a dog—locked up in a cage and with a leash around his neck. He has no social skills whatsoever other than some basic English language skills.
• Simon in the film The Double. He's incredibly timid and has trouble speaking to other people at all. This is to contrast with James, who is great with social situations and getting people to like him.
• Edward Scissorhands is an odd example: despite being taught by his inventor about manners and politeness, the title character has no idea whatsoever how to live outside his castle. On top of that, while he is very kind and gentle, his understanding of ethics is a bit... sketchy. Edward's "father", for lack of a better word, actually intended to fully educate him and would have left him with a workable, if outdated, method of interaction with people. Sadly, he died before Edward's education was finished. It didn't help that, being a Mad Scientist (or at least highly eccentric), he thought teaching him manners took precedent over giving him proper hands.
• Eternals: Sprite is immortal but forever stuck in the body of a teenage girl, meaning she can only spend so much time around humans before they start to notice she isn't aging. As a result she's bitter, rude and acts like a permanently annoyed teenager. After Sersi uses her boosted powers to turn Sprite into a mortal, Kingo insists she enrolls in school so she can finally learn some much-needed social skills.

• Ghostbusters:
  • In Ghostbusters (1984), one frequently gets the feeling that Egon Spengler is more comfortable with the machinery he invents and the "spores, moulds and fungus" that he apparently collects than with human interaction. Ray Stanz isn't as bad, but his Manchild enthusiasm can at times override his social skills.
  • In Ghostbusters (2016), while neither Erin, Holtzmann or Abby excel all that much at social interaction, Erin appears to have this trope worst, mainly because she tries hardest to appear normal and socially well-adjusted while simultaneously being terrible at being either. Holtzmann is in theory the one with the least apparent awareness of acceptable social mores, but she's both more disinterested in them to begin with and naturally quite charming and cheerful regardless, while Abby is naturally more confident in herself and assertive / aggressive towards others.
• Griff the Invisible: Both Griff and Melody. Griff's very shy and childlike, so basic daily interaction with other people is quite a struggle for him, and he's so wrapped up in his own world that he's usually barely paying attention to anything else anyway. Melody's more confident, but has very little comprehension of social rules or other people, which makes it hard to communicate, or understand what others are feeling or why they're acting a certain way.

• The Hunger Games: Something that Haymitch frequently mocks Katniss Everdeen over is her lack of people skills.
• Leave No Trace: Both Will and his daughter Tom are lacking in social skills — the former mostly because of his war experiences; the latter due to not having much interaction with people who aren't her father.
• Let Me In: Abby, due to being a vampire who has lived a nomadic life for centures. She's cold and standoffish to people. Despite needing to keep a low profile, she doesn't make much attempt to hide her undead nature, i.e., walking in the snow barefoot. She doesn't seem to understand why people see her behaviour as odd. When she sneaks into the main character's room at night through the 2nd story window, strips naked and crawls into bed to cuddle with him before outright telling him she flew, she doesn't seem to understand why the boy is understandably confused.
• Mean Girls: Up until she came to the school, Cady lived in Africa and was homeschooled, thus winding up with absolutely no clue about how things worked in "Girl World". Her parents appear to be clueless every time they appear:
  Mom: Where's Cady?
  Dad: She went out.
  Mom: She's grounded.
  Dad: Are they not allowed out when they're grounded?
• A rather disturbing case in Nightcrawler. Initially, our protagonist, Lou Bloom, appears to be socially inept. He has No Sense of Personal Space, talks like he's reciting from a business pamphlet, and has an off putting vibe that makes him come across as stilted. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that our protagonist isn't a Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold, but rather a full blown psychopath whose lack of social skills come from a callous disconnect from human life. When his assistant, Rick, calls him out on this, Lou counters by saying his lack of social skills aren't a result of not understanding others, but rather, not liking them.
• Not Okay: Danni has a serious case of this, really struggling to understand how insensitive she can be even before her lie. One of her first scenes has her pitching an article where she laments not having been in New York for the September 11th attacks and therefore not feeling the same kinship with people her age who were and not understanding how tone deaf that is.
• Pixels: Ludlow is absolutely terrible with people, with others' reactions to him ranging from "What the hell is wrong with this guy?" to "Uh, get him away from me!"

• Stéphane from The Science of Sleep is an odd example. He uses his imagination to cope with a lot of the outside world but does have some friends, equally as strange as him, but when meeting Stéphanie it becomes clear he lacks some very basic social interaction. He goes into Stalker with a Crush mode in sincere innocence, unaware that he's doing anything bad.
• The eponymous character of Nell. Raised completely isolated with only her mother, who had a speech impediment due to a stroke, she spoke a language called "Nellish" that was almost unintelligible to anyone else. Initially, she is completely terrified of strangers, but she gets better.^note  The anthropologists studying her eventually figure out "Nellish" is just English, garbled by the speech impediment and years of living completely alone. Once they figure this out, the ability to treat it as a cipher instead of a completely unique language makes communication much easier. It also reveals that, language barrier aside, Nell can be quite eloquent when she wants to be.
• Replicant: The Replicant clearly has no experience with social customs and is rather childlike in his behavior, having only been born a few days prior.
• The title character in Starman is an alien who doesn't know very much about Earth and its inhabitants.
• Shine: David after his breakdown—one notable example being that he thinks nothing of groping the breasts of the elderly lady who is looking after him in church while she is playing the organ (getting understandable stares from those present).
• Shin Ultraman: The titular hero is an alien who has just wanted to learn about humans, so his interaction (as Kaminaga) tends to be awkward, such as his rather robotic first conversation with Asami and later him sniffing around Asami's body to memorize her scent. It's quite a contrast with the alien villains who talk and manipulate human so easily.
• In Soldier, Sergeant Todd was raised from birth to be a completely obedient, emotionless soldier. When he is left for dead by his superiors, he tries to reintegrate into a small community, but ultimately can't due to his underdeveloped social skills. He barely talks and except for some fleeting moments is a paragon of stoicism and actually dangerous to be around.

• The Terminators might look human, but it's only so they can infiltrate and murder people. Thus they struggle to actually behave like humans, often with hilarious results given they prefer aggressive solutions (the first even felt the best response to a heckler was a Precision F-Strike) and are prone to Spock Speak.
• In The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, Jekyll spends so much time in his lab he has little in the way of social skills or manners.
• Bobby Boucher of The Waterboy is developmentally stunted by My Beloved Smother, with his social interactions making up most of the film's humor. But he's actually quite intelligent as shown by his passing the high school equivalency exam, a feat which some of the other players admit they wouldn't have been able to do.

Music

• Evelyn Evelyn: The titular sisters are awkward and painfully shy, and have a tendency to speak in monotone. This is the result of their limited human contact and frankly abysmal childhood. Luckily, they are able to express themselves quite well through their music.

Podcasts

• Several characters from Cool Kids Table games deal with this.
  • Stege from Small Magic lives almost exclusively in the woods and rarely interacts with other people, which contributes to him being a shitty teen. His clothes are tattered, he's very blunt to other people, he hates being bathed, and he tends to eat with his hands.
  • Yoshi from Here We Gooooo! comes off this way since he was raised surrounded only by Yoshis. His grandpa the OG Yoshi told him many stories of the secrets in Peaches Castle, leading Yoshi to believe all castles were like that and begin randomly slamming his tongue into windows in Princess Caramel Seltzer's palace.
• Many of the stories in the Vent or Repent segment of Were You Raised by Wolves? concern strangers who have no clue about regular social conventions or who unwittingly disrupt social norms.
• Wooden Overcoats: The Funn twins, in different ways.
  • Rudyard just straight-up doesn't understand people at all, and is often taken aback when people are offended by his rude comments, or weirded out by the fact that he carries a mouse around in his pocket. So far as he's concerned, he's perfectly normal, and everyone else is either overreacting, misunderstanding him, or the real weirdos.
  • Antigone is a Shrinking Violet Nightmare Fetishist who often makes morbid and bizarre comments, but she does at least understand why people are freaked out by her. It's just that her lack of experience with people leads to her blurting out whatever's on her mind, only realizing after the fact that what she just said is rather off-putting.

Roleplay

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • Jacob has no time to slot socialisation into his schedule, thus he acts rudely to anyone who takes up much of his time. Because his social skills are so underdeveloped, he struggles to understand when people act emotionally rather than logically.
  • Vivian had a sheltered upbringing, and so she's completely lacking in social graces. She's awkward, stutters a lot, sometimes shouts her words when she's nervous, and tries to avoid people.

Tabletop Games

• In a bit of an inversion, at tables whose GMs insist that every (important) social interaction be roleplayed out without involving dice or other mechanics, it's potentially quite possible for one or more characters to formally have no social skills whatsoever without that making any difference in practice because they're just using those of the players instead.

• Eclipse Phase: AI characters and the occasional transhuman have the Real World Naïveté trait, which causes them to hugely misunderstand ordinary events.
• Pathfinder: Munavri have little reason to engage in spoken conversations with one another and have thus very little familiarity with common social etiquette. When non-telepaths have to interact with them, munavri will routinely go off on lengthy tangents, overshare personal problems and private information, and completely miss their speaking partners' cues to end the discussion. In general, conversations with a munavri tend to be both rather uncomfortable and a lot longer than they need to be.
• Ravenloft: In Heroes of Light, a caliban (mutant) paladin born with a tiger's head was abandoned at birth in a Japanese-themed domain, and was raised by the kami animal-spirits that found him. Although they taught him the idealized conduct of a samurai and holy man, they couldn't teach him how to deal with the less-than-ideal behavior of ordinary folk.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Werewolves are always born to wolf or human "kinfolk", awakening to their true nature later. Lupus-born werewolves are thus technically wolves who can take human form, with all the foreseeable consequences when they try to blend into human society. Oddly enough, it's usually assumed that after their first transformation most of them can automatically speak whatever language was prevalent in the country were born in, just as Homid-born werewolves instinctively know wolf language, but they can't necessarily speak it well. It's a lot of fun to tell a Werewolf NPC that the Lupus was raised by wolves when he shows a distinct indifference to conventional standards of politeness. Or hygiene. The degrees to which Lupus Garou assimilate human customs and language varies with the individual. Red Talons, a human-hating all-Lupus tribe, are generally the least knowledgeable about humans and prefer to stay that way. The other tribes all include both Lupus and Homid Garou.

Theatre

• In Jasper in Deadland, when Jasper is made to confess everything that weighs down his heart, the first thing he admits is that he's shy, awkward, and ignores other people.

Web Animation

• Every Faggot Ever: The titular faggot is not well versed in the art of interacting with other people. He usually walks up to people and tries to rope them into conversations only he's interested in, and made a very vulgar come on to a woman in episode 5.
• Epithet Erased: Percival King is a by-the-book cop who speaks in a very flat tone of voice, uses strange and unusual terminology about most things, and seems to be completely oblivious to when people are trying to lie to or mock her.
  • Rick Shades is loud and bombastic, acts overly friendly even to complete strangers, and frequently makes very morbid comments in casual conversation. The end result is that he comes across as incredibly off-putting and creepy, something he seems entirely oblivious to. He implies that he used to be better with people, but due to spending the last eight years locked away from the rest of society and used as a gladiator, his social skills have suffered. It doesn't help that he comes from the strictly isolationist Ocean Country, and is therefore completely unfamiliar with most things on the surface. 
• In RWBY, Ruby Rose is hilariously awkward, especially when it comes to introducing herself to new people. She has to be forced to interact with other people when she's first enrolled at Beacon (although it probably doesn't help that the people she's forced to interact with happen to be Blake and Weiss), and her reaction to being informed that she'll have to find a partner during the initiation borders on "Oh, Crap!" Really, the only people she's able to engage with to any degree are Yang (who's her older sister, so naturally) and Jaune (who's just as clueless in social situations as she is, so presumably there's common ground). By season 3, Ruby seems to have gotten fairly comfortable around her own team and Jaune's, but when we see her trying to socialize with someone outside of her comfort zone (Weiss's sister Winter) the result is a hilariously inappropriate attempt to sound sophisticated while Weiss tries and fails to cue Ruby to shut up.

Webcomics

• Raven from Archipelago has been created as a low-level Mind Rape device. When, due to a complex set of circumstances, he starts to become a person, social skills don't come naturally to him. He does (slowly) learn.
• Bastard: Jin, not having much social interaction with his peers (due to finding him creepy) has little clue on how to act around other kids his age, and has only a child's understanding on certain topics such as sex, even flat-out asking Kyun what porn was without realizing how it could have been interpreted as a perverse gesture. This works to his Dongsoo's advantage of keeping him under control.
• Black Adventures plays N this way. He's never heard of Christmas and isn't doesn't understand how to deal with jealousy.
• Bomango: Gogo speaks in broken English and has a tendency to act like a gross jerk. She also doesn't seem to know that a talking plushie of herself saying "I paw at mine crotch in public" among other things is embarrassing.
• Arianna from Castoff had a bad childhood and no mistake. Then her luck turned and she became a member of a mercenary group, a professional Bounty Hunter — not a job where "nice" pays. Consequently, she's bluntly distrustful, even paranoid, towards pretty much everyone, and when she genuinely wants to be nice, she stumbles. A lot.
  • Sage, though, seems to genuinely not understand that he's a Mad Scientist (mad mage, technically, but it's the attitude that counts) with all the social unskills this entails. He does catch himself and apologise occasionally.

• The eponymous Dawn of Time: her behavior is far more primitive than other humans in her time period. One strip implies that she was raised by a Neanderthal.
• Dumbing of Age.
  • Dina doesn't understand human interactions at all, and needs coached on things like "how to show sympathy via light physical contact". At one point she befriends Riley, because Riley has "simple, identifiable desires", but fails to recognise that Riley is a pre-teen. Interestingly, this seems to give her greater insight in very specific situations where most people's knowledge of human behaviour lead them to making incorrect assumptions. For instance, all the behavioural tics that tell everyone Amber can't possibly be Amazi-Girl? She doesn't see any of them, just two women who look identical, only one's wearing a costume.
  • Joyce introduces herself to Sarah as the most socialized person in her religious homeschool group. Sarah correctly identifies this as an Overly Narrow Superlative. A considerable amount of Character Development later, Joyce has become someone who will at least think of offering a Pre Emptive Apology if she's Innocently Insensitive when meeting new people.
  • Sarah herself isn't great with people, but in her case it's because she mostly doesn't want to be. Which doesn't stop her and Joyce developing an Odd Friendship.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Grace spent most of her life in a laboratory, where she was treated as a something between an experimental animal and a weapon project by most of the scientists (as were her brothers). After Damien 'freed' them, she spent several more years more or less imprisoned in an underground base. She is implausibly well-adjusted despite this, but is unfamiliar with many aspects of mainstream culture, and is often quite naïve.
  • Side character Noah also doesn't seem to grasp social convention. He doesn't really comprehend the concept small-talk, and he doesn't understand appropriate conversation topics for a person you just met. His first conversation with Elliot was more than a little awkward. The audience hasn't yet learned what kind of background he had to result in this.

• Gunnerkrigg Court
  • Antimony spent her childhood, up to about age eleven, wandering Good Hope Hospital while her mother was bedridden. Her only company was her parents and various incarnations of Death. As a result, upon beginning school at the Court, Annie has more difficulty engaging in normal small-talk with students her own age than she does dealing with mythological beasts and other weirdness.
  • Red is ignorant of haircuts and words like "chair" and "room", due to being a fairy for most of her life. However, it's implied that she would be able to fit in had she paid better attention during her "So You're a Human Now" orientation classes.
  • Zimmy was forced to raise herself in the back alleys of Birmingham, due to the immense psychological trauma her uncontrolled powers can inflict on the people around her.
• Jade Harley, Nepeta Leijon and Gamzee Makara in Homestuck. Though in Gamzee's case it might just be the effects of Faygo and sopor slime. Though he's much worse when he doesn't have the slime...
  • Also, Meenah, who is the Brutally Honest type. Rose lampshades this in the first Act 6 Act 3 Intermission walkaround flash by telling her that she isn't very good with other people, is she, but admits that she isn't really as well, though that might just have been politeness. Either way, Meenah completely ignores the comment. Aranea could be seen as this as well, given that she admitted she never really had any friends other than Meenah because she was kind of a wordy show-off who always turned conversation back to herself.
  • Jake is similar to Jade due to their near identical upbringings, but Jake's tendency to ramble on about his own problems and remain oblivious to other's feelings is to the point that it resembles some sort of disorder and colossally annoys the people around him to an extent never seen with Jade.
  • Kankri, who is completely oblivious to the way his preaching grates on the other players in his session.

• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Galatea was raised as a lab specimen by a Mad Scientist who never showed her any affection. When she escaped, she was wildly paranoid and her social skills were non-existent.
• Faevv of Juathuur has been an outcast her whole life, and as a result she seems incapable of acting nice.

• Hisaki from Kuro Shouri doesn't quite get how to socialize. He's often rude to people as a result, even in basic introductions.
• Mordecai Heller from Lackadaisy struggles with social situations outside of his contract-killing career, especially flirting (in one side comic he wishes he were a ficus after a misunderstanding between himself and a flapper results in an awkward encounter with said flapper’s angry friend).
• Taku from Mitadake Saga has no tact whatsoever. Not to mention he continues to pop up at the most inopportune of times.
• Asia Ellis from morphE is completely oblivious to simple social conventions to the chagrin of her fellow captives. There have been significant hints dropped as to what caused her to be this way.

• Questionable Content:
  • Brun is a downplayed example. She is quite socially astute when she can understand what social cues are given, but has severe difficuly reading non-verbal social cues except when they are very obvious. She also has strong tendencies towards Brutal Honesty and rarely if ever emotes. Later strips confirmed that Brun is on the autism spectrum.
  • Hannelore doesn't have the greatest grasp of normal social behaviour when she's introduced. Her upbringing is probably more to blame than her OCD; she was primarily raised on a space station by a mad scientist, after all. Later updates indicate that she was literally raised by the space station's sapient AI, as her father was too busy with his work. And even then, the Ship states that Hannelore spent most of her childhood huddled in a corner, terrified of everything.
  • Liz is a social disaster, completely lacking filters or empathy and with a rather short fuse.
• Brian from Rhapsodies plows through life oblivious to the chaos he leaves in his wake, and how much he confuses and terrifies people, missing every clue hurled his way with great force.
• According to Word of God, Sakana's Genji Sakana would love to not be a complete jerk to his family, but he has no idea how to be not a complete jerk to anyone.
• In Sluggy Freelance Aylee is a Justified case since she is an alien from another dimension. Her social blunders range from the awkward: thinking that women check out guys' butts because they want an efficient pooper, to the highly dangerous: forgetting that humans need to breathe, or thinking that driving a car works like the video game Carmageddon.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent:
  • Lalli doesn't like spending much time around other people and managed to get a job as a night scout that let him do just that, which causes him to be lost in social situations due to a mix of lack of practice and his mental disorder. This leads to a lot of Brutal Honesty, Innocently Insensitive moments and generally having a behaviour that takes a little getting used to for people who meet him for the first time.
  • Emil has trouble hitting a middle ground between overthinking things and letting the self-centered Rich Jerk habits he acquired before his family's Riches to Rags episode bleed out profusely. The worst part is that he actually means well behind all of it and is actually a quite caring and patient person. He actually ends up in an Odd Friendship with Lalli, with whom he doesn't share any language on top of everything else, of all people.
• Mahahah in Undead Friend spent a long time as a invisible ghost and has no memories of being alive, so when she finally starts interacting with people who can see her she is very awkward and has no sense of boundaries.

Web Original

• Frank Doyle of the Thrilling Adventure Hour's "Beyond Belief" segments is typically rude to anybody except his beloved wife Sadie. In the first episode he says to an old friend's face that he never bothered to try to remember his name and several episodes have him trying to shoo whatever supernatural threat visits their apartment out of the door.
• Most of the crew of Galactiquest's Celestion-5 are varying degrees of this, with social anxiety, misanthropic behavior, and some who are just plain... odd.

Web Videos

• The Autobiography of Jane Eyre: Jane Eyre, the protagonist of this Setting Update web series. She's really shown to behave a bit strangely around people, and she openly acknowledges it to camera when she's shooting. She has troubles to come up with a good opening line.
  Jane: First I'm awkward to people, now I'm awkward to inanimate objects, too...
• The entire cast of The Guild have various social quirks either caused by their video game obsession or enhanced by it. In no particular order:
  • Codex: On medication for depression and cannot form relationships not related to the game. In the first episode her therapist fires HER for not being able to make any progress.
  • Zaboo: Funny, loyal, and cares deeply about Codex — as only a stalker could. His personal knowledge of her definitely required some illegal hacking which he considers harmless homework.
  • Vork: The oldest member of the group who cannot refer to anybody by their real names. His every word is in game-speak. Is also a hoarder.
  • Clara: Seems fine in most circumstances, but only because she forgot she's a mother of three again. Where she left her husband and kids is a recurring distraction.
  • Bladezz: All the charm of a slacker teenager. Does not know how to politely talk to women and doesn't seem interested in learning.
  • Tinkerballa: Sarcastic, vindictive, and doesn't want to be talk to her teammates in the real world. She may be the most well-adjusted of the group.
• Pirates SMP: Whenever she meets someone new, the first thing Guqqie, the resident Rich Bitch, asks them usually relates to how much money they have in their bank account, to her love interest Aimsey's dismay.

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