Misused: The Voiceless

I don't see how The Speechless isn't a trope, unless you completely misunderstand the concept of what a trope is. It's a tool to create a character who can't communicate with others in any normal way. "Cannot speak" is an unusual and rather severe character trait. It's something that deeply affects the character, so it's not something that's just there and can be removed without any loss of meaningful detail.

The Speechless is a character who cannot vocally communicate but they do with other methods, but the other characters don't notice or know how to interpret the communication — so they don't understand it. Meanwhile, the audience does understand The Speechless character, but not just because of facial expressions and whatnot — there's also the camera and music (or narration) that the audience hears that can clue us in on what this character is trying to say.

It isn't just that the character is mute, but even then, as Duck said, it's an unusual and severe trait that's used as a tool in storytelling.

Bump.

Bears repeating that we still have The Voiceless, The Quiet One, The Silent Bob, and Elective Mute, all of which are the same damn thing.

Should we start making single props for some of these redundant tropes? We could probably start with Mute But Not Silent, since that one's probably the most redundant so far.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I still think Mute But Not Silent should be cut. And by "cut", I mean the page should be cut and all examples should be moved to an appropriate trope, if not there already. No more of all the frivolous cutting and pretending it's doing the wiki a favour.

No, they're not the same thing. The two middle ones, yes, but there are three distinct tropes there.

edited 28th Nov '17 9:22:14 AM by AnotherDuck

Link to single prop for Mute But Not Silent: here.

Bumping for votes or comment. Right now, we've been at 9 for, null against. It's been like that for a few days now.

It seems we have 15 now

We're down to about 6 and holy guacamole.

Done wick cleaning.

Cutlisted.

I think the next thing we should tackle is either Silent Partner or Elective Unintelligible because they have double-digit wick counts rather than triple or quadruple. wdyt

edited 18th Dec '17 10:35:20 AM by WaterBlap

I think that's a premature cutlisting. The examples on the page haven't been moved, nor has there been any discussion about where to put them.

I moved the wicks to pages like The Speechless, etc., as appropriate, and then I went to those trope pages and crosswicked. But I see what you mean. Some examples were not crosswicked and so I missed them.

Since we've had a lot of discussion of the differences between these various tropes, I used the previous discussion to figure it out. In many cases, a character that was labeled Mute But Not Silent was already labeled as The Speechless, so it didn't require further discussion since we had agreement that MBNS was already redundant with the other tropes.

edited 18th Dec '17 12:00:48 PM by WaterBlap

I think that since those tropes always seem to appear more than one at a time, there's some evidence that at least one of them is redundant. If another relevant trope is there, and with enough context, I think just deleting them is fine.

edited 18th Dec '17 11:30:42 PM by AnotherDuck

Silent Partner definitely needs to go away. Merge into one of the other tropes.

I propose working on Elective Unintelligible next because it has the fewest number of wicks out of the tropes we're working on and Silent Partner would be better to discuss when we're discussing the other three possible "Auxiliary Translator Characters." Plus there may be an issue with Silent Partner and related tropes not being quite related to this particular topic.

Working definition: (from here)

Here's an exhaustive list of issues already brought up in this thread for this particular trope (only three people mentioned it by name):

• From here: it describes itself as The Unintelligible but the character intentionally is unintelligible.

I'd like to suggest that Elective Unintelligible should be about the reveal, rather than their ability. "A character that has been established as The Unintelligible is suddenly Intelligible." Examples with complete context would look like this:

• The two jailers from Monty Python's Life of Brian. The one played by Terry Gilliam speaks utter nonsense and the other (Eric Idle) has a severe stutter that causes him to draw out almost everything he says. These seem like verbal tics up until their last scene, where, after everyone else had left, they start speaking perfectly clear to each other, implying that it was all just an act to keep people from pestering them.
• In the film version of The Little Rascals, "Uh-huh" is so named because that's all he ever says. At the end of the film he instead says "Uh-uh", causing the other Rascals to react with shock that he learned a new word. Uh-Huh immediately responds "Actually, I've always had a rather extensive vocabulary, not to mention a phenomenal grasp of grammar and a superlative command of syntax. I simply chose not to employ them".
• Rebo and Zooty are a comedy duo from the fictional universe of Babylon 5. Zooty "speaks" through some kind of electronic device as part of the comedy. Rebo claims that in all their time together, Zooty has only ever said one thing to him out of character: "Why?" Before leaving the Station, Zooty tells President Sheridan, "Because it tells me to."
• The Benny Hill Show: Hill plays a fumbling Dutchman who uses his inability to speak the language to chat up an attractive woman he meets in the park. It turns out he's faking it and speaks perfect English.
• Chappelle's Show: In each Li'l John skit, he only screams "OKAY!," "YEAH!," and "WHAT?," and nothing else for a while, annoying everyone around him, then speaks full sentences in a calm and eloquent manner. He then goes back to his single-syllable bursts.
• The Order of the Stick has Blackwing, Vaarsuvius' raven familiar. Blackwing never speaks Common, considering it demeaning to speak anything but his native raven language. To Vaarsuvius, anyway. Later, once V thanks Blackwing for his noble efforts and starts treating him like a sentient being, Blackwing starts talking.
• Taz in Taz-Mania, though he usually spit-growls incoherently, can speak perfectly well if need be, or if it's funny. On one occasion, all he has to say is simply "Taz hate water", but he chooses instead to give a long-winded speech. It isn't received well.
• Nibbler on Futurama. Mostly just makes strange, gibberish noises... until The Reveal.
• Grubber, one of the Gangrene Gang on The Powerpuff Girls, often speaks merely via raspberry-ing, which no one outside the Gangrene Gang seems to be able to understand, but in the Gang's premiere episode, he speaks eloquently (in a Bad "Bad Acting" kind of way) in order to lure Blossom and Bubbles into a trap. In another episode, for show-and-tell at the Powerpuff's school, he stretches his body into a more normal shape, and greets the class with "Hello, I'm Grubber. Very nice to meet you all." Before changing instantly back into his usual shape. Taken Up To Eleven in the episode where the Gangrene Gang make crank calls, as Grubber is able to imitate the voice and speech patterns of anyone he feels like.

I like the idea of it being more about The Reveal. Since Tropes Are Flexible, I'm not seeing how it's distinct from The Unintelligible on its own.

Just want to point out that The Silent Bob isn't just that they don't talk, but that they can easily communicate with people or a specific person regardless (and not because they have Telepathy).

I feel like that part is also covered by Silent Partner and Translator Buddy.

The more interesting aspect, in my opinion, is the single scene of speaking from them. Much like the reveal I shared earlier.

Well, if they don't reveal themselves to be able to speak properly, there's no indication that they can. So there has to be some kind of reveal, even if it's understated or glossed over.

Honestly, I think The Voiceless works better for characters who cannot speak whereas The Speechless would be for those who do not speak in the story, but still can speak.

How do you tell the difference?

^^ Wouldn't the second scenario overlap with Elective Mute?