This is a visual tell to a character having a Not So Stoic or Oh, Crap! moment.
Related to Quaking with Fear. Contrast Calming Tea.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Frieren: Beyond Journey's End: In "Frieren the Slayer", Stark spills his drink while anxiously thinking about how easily the demons could kill him.
Stark: My hands still haven't stopped shaking. See? I even spilled my drink so it looks like I wet myself.
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: In episode 6, after Ishigami asks Kaguya if she's in love with Shirogane, she spews her tea out and then asks why he would say that, her shaking hands now rattling the teacup against the saucer.
- K-On!: In "School Festival", Mio is very nervous about having to sing lead when the band plays at the school festival. She tries to play it off cool, but when the girls meet up for tea, it's not just her hands that are trembling as she holds her cup and saucer, it's both arms. The others are not fooled one bit.
Comic Books
- X Treme X Men 2001: In issue #20 (the first part of the Schism arc), Sage and Bishop are investigating a series of murders in Alaska, and their trail leads them to a hut away from a chic lodge. Bishop uses his powers to melt the ice over freshly dug graves, while Sage goes down into the grave to check on the corpses. She mutters a silent "My God" to herself, then Bishop pulls her out of the grave to their truck. She enters the truck and Bishop pours her some hot coffee into a cup she is holding, her hands visibly shaking at whatever she saw on the bodies.
Film — Animated
- The Iron Giant: After his terrifying first encounter with the Giant, Dean is next seen with his coffee cup in his hand, which is shaking uncontrollably.
Film — Live-Action
- Clue: When the militant Colonel Mustard offers to pour everyone cognac to help cope with the stress of the evening, he spills the alcohol all over the tabletop while trying to pour everyone's drinks at once.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: When Harry and Ron visit Hagrid just before he's arrested by Fudge, Hagrid first greets them with a loaded crossbow, and then when he tries to pour tea for them, his hands are clearly shaky and he overfills one of the cups.
- Saving Private Ryan: Following the capture of Dog Green Sector on Omaha Beach, Captain Miller, suffering from a mix of combat fatigue and shell shock, shows his distress with shaking hands while grabbing and drinking water from his canteen. This helps to clue in viewers that Miller is a Shell-Shocked Veteran by this point in time that we are introduced to him.
- True Lies: The night after she was "kidnapped" by a shadowy intelligence organization, Helen nearly spills her drink with trembling when Harry comments about her getting home late the other night (she's unaware that Harry was the mastermind behind that operation and knows all about what happened).
- Yojimbo: After Sanjuro signs on with Seibei's gang, the leader almost immediately declares he will have an all-out war with his rival Ushitora. While he boasts of imminent victory, his anxiety about fighting to the death is obvious from the way the sake cup quivers in his hand, which is humorously contrasted with Sanjuro's relaxed pouring of the drink into it (and Sanjuro would be, given he has no intention of actually teaming up with either gangster, much less one he just overheard planning to betray and kill him after to avoid paying him.)
Live-Action TV
- Castle (2009): In "Significant Others", a divorce lawyer is found murdered, and after the investigation, it's revealed that one woman that the lawyer was looking into is in fact the wife of one of their murder suspects...the wife that everyone believed the suspect had in fact murdered. The lawyer had tipped to the fact that she was still alive, and was going to expose her for trying to frame her ex-husband for murder. She's holding a teacup but begins to falter when Castle and Beckett address her by her original name rather than the pseudonym she's going by now.
- The Last of Us (2023): In "Infected", after Professor Ratna is brought in to examine the Zombie Apocalypse-causing Cordyceps fungus, she's seen sitting with General Hidayat holding a glass of tea. He tells her that the infected woman she just investigated was found at a flour and grain factory, she ended up biting and infecting three other people who had to be executed before she herself was killed, and worst of all, fourteen factory workers are missing and unaccounted for. This last fact causes Professor Ratna's hands to start shaking uncontrollably, forcing her to put her glass down. At this point, she realizes that there's no hope and that humanity is experiencing the beginning of the end.
Video Games
- Digital Devil Saga 2: During their first meeting, Gale easily notices that Roland is visibly shaking as he pours drinks for everyone due to being uncertain that the team might kill him.
Web Animation
- hololive: At the start of the 2024 Hololive New Year Cup, an annual Mario Kart tournament between the talents, hosts A-chan, Towa, and Okayu spent a few minutes looking at the loading screens of each talent in the race. When they got to Suisei, they were very tickled
to see that she'd changed the toggle that gives her model hands holding a controller to make them shake as if she was nervous, along with characters on the screen reading "I'm not nervous".
Web Video
- Bennett the Sage: Parodied in "Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Story of an Otaku". When Sage brings up Studio Gainax's shady history with money early on, he lampshades just how much of an understatement that is by holding a teacup and saucer in one very jittery hand and pouring tea into the cup with the other...spilling the tea, so to speak.
Sage: It should be noted, though, that Gainax has a long history of misappropriating and using funds...and ohhhh child, you bet your sweet ass we'll get back to that one!
Webcomics
- Ennui GO!: In "Doppelganger", Adelie is deeply shaken when she sees Ashley for some reason. After she and Max leave the room, Adelie tries to refill her wine glass with trembling hands, and in the next panel she's holding her head in her hands and the wine bottle is draining onto the table.
Western Animation
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In "The Bloo Superdude and the Great Creator of Everything's Awesome Ceremony of Fun That He's Not Invited To", Bloo's jitteriness due to the overwhelming nature of him hallucinating himself as the titular superhero (the context being that he has a high fever) makes it difficult to drink the cough syrup given to him, which he briefly gripes about.
