Basic Trope: A character who is physically capable of speech willingly chooses not to talk.
- Straight: Alice can speak, but chooses not to, instead communicating by other means like notes or expressive gestures.
- Exaggerated: Alice eschews every possible means of communication, including sign language and notes.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is usually silent, but speaks up in really important situations.
- Alice is silent around most people, but would speak to some of them (for example, to her best friend Bob).
- Alice is capable of saying long sentences, but prefers being a Terse Talker.
- Justified:
- Alice took on a religious vow of silence.
- Alice is a mime.
- Alice has some hippie/New Agey ideas that "words are meaningless", and "those who would not take pains to understand my sign language communication are not worth my time".
- Alice has a Compelling Voice and doesn't know how to control it yet. She has morals and doesn't want to risk mind-controlling people into doing things unless there's no other choice.
- Alice has been disguising herself as a man; her clearly feminine voice would break her disguise.
- Inverted: Alice is physically mute, but she is very talkative by nature, so she "talks" to everyone by making incomprehensible grunts and noises.
- Subverted: Alice has selective mutism
, a condition which renders her actually incapable of speaking to certain people or in specific situations - but is wrongly believed to be silent by choice. - Double Subverted: Alice is silent by choice, but pretends to have selective mutism so that people wouldn't pester her about her unwillingness to speak.
- Parodied:
- Alice speaks to everyone by connecting wires into their brain and activating the neurons related to her thoughts. She can actually speak normally, but she doesn't want to.
- Alice's vocal cords have cobwebbed over.
- Zig Zagged: It's never made completely clear whether Alice is actually mute or just silent by choice, and she hints at both possibilities.
- Averted: Alice speaks normally, just like every other person.
- Enforced:
- Alice's voice actor died or left the project, so the character had to go mute by choice.
- Alice is cast by an actress who can't speak in English, and the production team decides to make her an elective mute in order to omit the need of dubbing.
- Alice was originally a fine 17 year old anime character who would speak a lot, but the production team lacked the budget to hire a good voice actress, nor do they have time for preparing her script, so they decided to remove all of her dialogues and portray her as a stoic, mute-by-choice character instead.
- Lampshaded:
- "Alice, so you're not mute? Then why do you communicate by writing notes?"
- "Alice really isn't talkative around us, is she?"
- Invoked: Alice never speaks because if she spoke, her Super-Scream would kill everyone in a six mile radius.
- Exploited: Bob needs backup on a stealth mission, so he brings Alice, who won't chatter and give him away.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "..." "Honestly Alice, that's your answer to eveything."
- Conversed: "We have seen that Alice can speak, so why does she write notes instead?" "I...honestly don't know."
- Deconstructed:
- Alice never speaks in most situations because of emotional trauma, a severe stutter, or brain damage.
- Alice's speechlessness leads to a case of Poor Communication Kills.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice is teaching herself to speak again by singing, or learning sign language. She is only comfortable doing so with a few people right now, but she's working hard and getting better at it.
- Alice stays silent most of the time, but speaks when it is really needed.
- Played For Drama: Alice used to be a real chatterbox... Until some horrible incident. Bonus points if the incident was caused or enabled by something she said.
Back to Elective Mute
