Basic Trope: Happiness is a good thing that everyone should have as much of as possible.
- Straight: The character is an Ethical Hedonist or simply an empathic person.
- Exaggerated:
- The character has a meltdown whenever anyone expresses even slight discontent.
- The character is an Extreme Doormat who lets everyone walk all over them to make them happy.
- The character cracks jokes and throws parties even as the world is ending.
- Downplayed: The character only cares for their loved ones' happiness.
- Justified:
- The character likes happiness (duh!) and has a good-natured disposition.
- Alternately, they're The Empath. Happy people are much more comfortable to be around.
- The character feels other people should never be as depressed as they are, or should be as happy as they are.
- The character had a rocky/stressful childhood (parents in a stormy marriage, for example), so they feel the need to make everyone around them happy (or at least act that way) to prevent the constant conflict that plagued their youth.
- The character is a follower of a religion and/or political school of thought that places a high level of importance on maximising pleasure and minimising suffering for all people.
- The character believes that there's no greater purpose to our lives, but our lives still have value, and we should make the most of the time we got.
- The character lives in a Crapsack World and wants to make life more bearable for themselves and those around them.
- Inverted:
- For the Evulz
- For Great Justice (whenever it goes against happiness).
- Happiness Is Mandatory (which eventually does not result in real happiness)
- The character is an unethical hedonist who only cares about their own happiness.
- Subverted: The character tells everyone, probably including themself, that he is For Happiness, but is really self-serving or clueless about what makes people happy... especially in the long term.
- Double Subverted: The character fails to make someone happy, but it was on purpose as a part of a plan to help the person reaching their own happiness and allowing them to take the credit for it themselves.
- Parodied: The character is an endless source of shallow gestures of happiness.
- Zig Zagged: Making Bob happy makes Alice unhappy, making Alice happy makes Steve unhappy, and none of them want to be cheered up anyway, but they actually need it although they refuse to admit it.
- Averted: Meh. We're all gonna die anyway. And besides, hedonists are immoral, aren't they?
- Enforced: Executive Meddling says: Screw Darker and Edgier
- Lampshaded:
- "No, Bob. I want people around me to be happy. When my pals are unhappy, I can't be all that happy myself."
- "I swear, every time I see Alice, part of me expects her to start passing out cupcakes..." "Oh, hi Bob! Want a cupcake?"
- Invoked: " Puppies, kittens, baby penguins...I think I've got everything I need."
- Exploited: A villain tricked Bob into doing something for him by showing how it will make everyone happy. In reality, it would lead to the apocalypse.
- Defied: "He needs time to process his sadness. And if he can't get the strength to stand up to the bully on his own, he never will."
- Discussed: "And there's Alice hard at work trying to reverse frowns."
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Totalitarian Utilitarian
- Alice avoids the above problem, but develops Samaritan Syndrome as she goes out of her way to cause as much happiness as possible.
- Alice just doesn't get that there are times when people should be unhappy, and her attempts to get Bob to weather a particularly nasty divorce with a smile on his face and a song in his heart only make the situation more stressful.
- Alice does what she can to make people happy. Unfortunately, said people are bloodthirsty monsters whose idea of entertainment is gory gladiator fights.
- Alice likes to make people happy so much because she's depressed, and it's the only way for her to feel like she's worth anything.
- Alice lives in a world so awful that happiness requires monumental levels of ignorance, callousness or both. She may think she's injecting a glimmer of hope into an otherwise bleak world, but all she's doing is distracting people from from awful truths and issues they have every right to be unhappy about, which ends up keeping corrupt systems in power.
- Alice is so determined to maximise happiness that not only does she spread her time and resources too thin to significantly benefit anyone, she causes harm in the process - her children go hungry because she donates most of her money to various charities instead of spending it on adequate food.
- Reconstructed:
- ...combined with Strawman Has a Point
- Bob reminds her that if she focuses on her own happiness once in a while, she'll be in a better frame of mind to help others.
- ...But still, it's not good to dwell on the negative so much, and while Alice realizes that Bob is going through a bad time and isn't going to be doing cartwheels any time soon, she does her best to make his life suck a little bit less.
- Alice teaches those people empathy (or downright forces some in them, akin to the Indigo Tribe) so they're able to find happiness outside others' suffering.
- Alice cares more about long term happiness than temporary pleasure. Hence, even if it upsets people at first, she does address exactly how shitty the world is so that she and others can make it a better place. Alternatively, if the world really is too screwed up to fix, temporary distraction proves to be the healthiest option because it's all that stands between some people and suicide.
- Alice accepts that she can't help everyone, so she does small reasonable acts of kindness whenever possible, and encourages others to do the same. She knows that several people doing a little will have more impact than one person trying to make everyone happy to the point of running themselves ragged.
- Played For Laughs: Alice is nowhere to be found. Bob tracks her down by finding out whose birthday it is and showing up at the party.
Come on back to For Happiness! We promise you'll love it!
