Basic Trope: A painfully shy person.
- Straight: Alice avoids talking to people because she feels anxious around them.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice keeps watching to the ground, blushes when someone talks to her, stumbles over her own voice and thus avoids people as best as she can.
- Alice is so shy that she is completely terrified of her own shadow and hides behind a bush or a large rock every time someone passes by her.
- Downplayed: Alice is only shy when around strangers or in unfamiliar situations. When she's with her family and/or close friends, she's more talkative and outgoing.
- Justified:
- Alice has experienced some traumatic event that caused her to be afraid of people.
- Alice has always had a shy temperament.
- Alice is shy because her parents and peers are abusive towards her.
- Alice has self-esteem issues.
- Alice has Social Anxiety Disorder and/or Avoidant Personality Disorder.
- Alice is autistic, making most conversations a much more stressful ordeal than they would be for a neurotypical person. Instead of risking embarrassment and/or stress, she opts to avoid people as much as possible.
- Alice simply doesn't leave home very often, so she doesn't know how to act in a social situation. Thus, she comes across as shy because she doesn't interact with people very often.
- Inverted:
- Alice is a brash, flamboyant Attention Whore whose one fear is not being noticed.
- Alice is extroverted, energetic and likes talking to people and making new friends.
- Subverted:
- Alice actually talks quite naturally with other people.
- Alice is quiet and reserved, but it's just because she finds attention to be tiring to handle, not because she's shy.
- Alice is soft-spoken and polite; she doesn't like talking much.
- Double Subverted: Only that's on the outside to push her inner hesitations aside for a moment.
- Parodied: Alice does not talk at all and becomes invisible if she feels she's being noticed.
- Zig Zagged:
- Depending on the situation (or the personality), Alice can be brash and outgoing one moment and hesitant and tongue-tied the next.
- Alice is usually an outgoing person, but becomes a shy and anxious person as a stress response.
- Averted: Alice isn't any shyer than anyone else.
- Enforced: An executive mandate states that all YA novels must feature a protagonist whose primary flaw is being anxious around people. Anyone who doesn't fit into that mold will be disqualified.
- Lampshaded: "Alice never talks to anybody! It looks like it's very painful..."
- Invoked: Alice acts shy so people don't notice she's plotting something.
- Exploited:
- Carol needs someone to help her with something and drags Alice into doing it, knowing she won't be able to refuse.
- Carol needs advice about something she'd rather keep a secret, and decides to ask Alice for it because Alice won't tell anyone since she never talks to people.
- Alice's shyness is a facade: she pretends to be shy so she can fool people into thinking she's not a threat.
- Defied:
- Alice puts forth every effort to not be shy and talk with others.
- Alice calmly and coldly tells her Jerkass "friends" that they are ungrateful and horrid people for bullying her and points out their faults and flaws, as well inwardly blaming herself for being so cowardly and weak.
- Discussed: "Wow, She's so shy and quiet, I could barely hear her."
- Conversed: "Geez, it's like talking to a broken record! I don't even know what she's talking about!"
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's shyness causes problems for her when she tries to approach people, who think she's either a creepy person or a stuck-up snob.
- Alice and her friends approach a boy who claims he's Alice's boyfriend. Alice knows who he is, but due to the traumatic things he's done to her, she is unable to warn her friends about him out of fear, leading to one of her friends being brutally attacked by him and the other girls giving her hell for not telling them about him.
- Alice's shyness becomes worse over time until her shyness turns into outright paranoia. This severely affects how she functions in daily life. For instance, she cannot speak to the cashier to buy a sandwich in a convenience store; she cannot speak to the waiter to order a meal in a restaurant; and she cannot reply to the interviewer to get a job that requires face-to-face social interaction (i.e., 99% of all jobs in the place Alice lives in). Contrary to popular belief, there's nothing "cute" or "endearing" about Alice's shyness when it's literally causing problems.
- Alice's shyness leads her to purposefully miss her only friend Bob's birthday party. Bob interprets this as her not liking him anymore, so he stops talking to her, leaving her friendless and confused.
- Implied: Bob notices that whenever a crowd starts to form around him, Alice tends to disappear, only returning if Bob finds himself alone again.
- Reconstructed:
- But she decides to overcome her shyness and debunk all of the mean rumors about her, or have a friend who does it on their behalf.
- But then, Alice's friends then realize that her boyfriend had attacked her the same way he did to their friend, and quickly apologize for being so harsh to her. Alice also apologizes, saying she should have told them sooner about her boyfriend.
- Alice finds friends, therapy and/or medication to help her along. They hardly stop her shyness, but she is able to function in a social environment.
- Alice's classmate, Carol, notices that Alice and Bob aren't talking anymore, and decides to get them to talk out their differences. Thanks to Carol's help, Alice not only gets back to being friends with Bob, but also gains a new friend in Carol, as well as an understanding of how her shyness can hurt other people, especially if she doesn't communicate her feelings clearly.
