Basic Trope: A human can communicate with non-human animals.
- Straight: Alice can talk to and understand animals, and they can talk to and understand her.
- Exaggerated: Alice can speak to all animals, even insects.
- Downplayed:
- Alice can say some words to some animals.
- Alice and the animals around her can get the gist of each others' talking, even if it isn't word-for-word.
- Alice has a basic understanding of the vocalizations and body language of animals and can do a fair job imitating them.
- Justified:
- Alice is a superhero, witch, alien, fairy, or whatever, and uses Telepathy to communicate with animals.
- Alice has spent years studying and interacting with animals and was Taught by Experience how to communicate with them.
- Inverted: Alice is a dog who can speak to humans.
- Subverted: Alice is seen talking to a cat, but can't understand another cat.
- Double Subverted: That's because the cat was meowing too fast.
- Parodied:
- When animals make noises, Alice hears words. When a dog from France barks, she hears it in French.
- Alice can speak the language of a very rare (or sometimes even extinct) species. People note how utterly situational and useless her ability is.
- Alice holds a long conversation with a sea anemone. It's never explained how she can speak underwater or listen to an animal with no vocal abilities.
- Alice can speak to halophilic archaea.
- Alice can speak fluent animal, but she can't speak coherent or sane animal. Whenever she tries to speak to an animal, they wonder why the hell she's plotting to convince the USA to nuke both Ukraine and Russia.
- Zigzagged: Whether Alice and the animal can communicate depends on the animal's species, the day of the week, whether or not Alice is hungry, whether or not the animal is distracted, etc, etc.
- Averted: Alice cannot understand non-human animals.
- Enforced: It's one of the few ways left to make Timmy in a Well believable.
- Lampshaded: "How did you learn to speak Animal Talk, Alice?"
- Invoked: A wizard invents a potion to be able to make humans speak to animals.
- Exploited: Alice can get the animals to do her bidding or ask them for advice. She can also ask mosquitoes not to bite.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: Alice gives Bob a lesson on how to speak 'horse'. Bob asks a lot of how and why questions.
- Conversed: "I wish I could talk to animals like that character on TV".
- Implied: Alice is seen talking to some animals, who appear to understand.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is arguing with a squirrel, and a passer-by makes the 'cuckoo' sign.
- Played for Drama: Alice is an Eco-Terrorist villain who uses her ability to talk to animals to form an army of them to crush all those who oppose her.
Back to Speaks Fluent Animal.
