Basic Trope: Socially awkward character gets along with other sentient beings better than they do people.
- Straight: Alice is a sweet-natured girl who can talk to - and understand - animals and plant life as if they were human, but when it comes to interacting with people of her own species, she panics.
- Exaggerated: Alice can communicate with anything living, but passes out when a human being so much as looks her way.
- Downplayed: Alice is more comfortable around animals than people, though she can carry out pleasantries with new people if it doesn't take too long.
- Justified:
- Alice spent so much time learning how to talk to animals that she didn't learn to talk to humans.
- Alice enjoys talking to animals because they don't (usually) understand what she's saying and are more interested in the free food she gives them. They're also not judgmental about her. It gets more complicated when the other party can respond to her words, which makes her nervous about what to say.
- Inverted:
- Alice is The Social Expert, but Animals Hate Him
- Charlie the cat is a sweetheart to any human who cannot get along with any other cats.
- Subverted: A group of companions run into Alice, The Hermit who lives in the woods alone, yet surrounded by animals and who initially treats them coldly. However, that's only because she so rarely gets visitors, she had no idea what to expect of them; once they explain their harmlessness, she's friendly and warm.
- Double Subverted: ...only in order to get them to quickly be on their way. It's all an act and she genuinely cannot stand their presence.
- Parodied: The naive Alice goes on a rant about various social injustices regarding humans' thoughtlessness towards animals that either never existed, barely existed, or have since been fixed.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is able to talk with some people but not others, depending on the other person's personality.
- Averted: Alice likes animales and people just fine.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded:
- "I like squirrels. Squirrels don't judge you. They don't stare at you or call you names. They're nice."
- "Many times I feel more comfortable with animals than with people"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice can see that her love for animals is hindering her ability to be with people so she joins local animal rights groups to pursue her interest and force herself to socialize with others more to counteract it.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's awkwardness towards humans and comfortability with animals makes it hard for her to work a normal job due to the high amounts of social anxiety she feels having to either deal with customers face to face or work on a team with others. Even many jobs that include working with animals (veternarian, animal caretaker, zoologist, etc.) still require extensive enough person-to-person interaction that she can't often manage, leaving her with very few career prospects.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?; the work questions why Alice even should get along with humans better than animals, given that we're all life forms with equal stake to the planet and its well being, however humans are the main destroyers of natural habitats.
Back to Better with Non-Human Company.
