Basic Trope: Manipulative characters tend to cover their faces or chests with their fingers tip-to-tip or interlocked.
- Straight: Darth Devious is a Manipulative Bastard who's often seen putting his hands together on mouth level.
- Exaggerated: Darth Devious is constantly finger-tenting every single time he appears on-screen.
- Downplayed: Darth Devious is only seen once or twice making the pose.
- Justified:
- Darth Devious uses the pose to hide his body language when he's lying.
- Darth Devious suffers from neurosis and finger-tenting is one of his nervous ticks.
- Darth Devious uses the pose to relieve stress.
- Inverted:
- Darth Devious, The Chessmaster of the show, is the only character who's never seen making the pose.
- Lianne, the show's resident Living Lie Detector, makes this pose to out potential suspects.
- Hiro finger-tents to show he's telling the truth.
- Subverted: Darth Devious starts explaining his evil plan and raises his hands like he's going to put them together, but at the last second he lowers them.
- Doubly Subverted: ...but a few minutes later, mid-sentence, he does puts his fingers together in the familliar manner.
- Parodied: Flashback from Darth Devious' youth shows him attending the Finger Tenting 101 class at the Academy for Amateur Chessmasters.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Darth Devious has no obvious ticks connected to his fingers.
- Enforced: "How do we make this guy look manipulative and cunning? Ah, let's just make him finger-tent in every other scene he appears in!"
- Lampshaded: "Darth, what the heck are you doing with your fingers? Do you WANT to look obviously evil?"
- Invoked: Darth Devious is a Smug Snake who pretends he has a complex evil plan to make the heroes anxious while he actually has no clue what he's doing. As a part of his masquerade, he starts to put his fingers tip-to-tip.
- Exploited: "I don't really have a clue who the traitor is, but Darth always covers his mouth with his fingers when he talks and it makes him look suspicious as hell. Let's make a background check on him first."
- Defied: Once Darth Devious starts putting his devious plans in motion, he deliberately abandons his habit of finger-tenting in order to look more innocent.
- Discussed: "Darth Devious really creeps me out. Have you seen this thing he does with his fingers? He always looks like he's up to something nasty."
- Conversed: "Why does every single manipulative character in this show do this weird finger-tenting thing?"
- Played For Laughs: It turns out Darth Devious' fingertips are always put together because somebody covered them with glue while he was sleeping and now he literally can't separate them.
Back to Finger-Tenting
