Basic Trope: A character from a Southern state of the USA (or an equivalent to) is intelligent or even a genius.
- Straight: Amber is from Texas, and also has an Ivy League PHD in astrophysics.
- Exaggerated:
- Amber is from a trailer park in Alabama has an Improbably High I.Q..
- Amber is from part so deep in the Southern United States that the other characters cannot believe it has human habitation (inevitable incest jokes from the Jerkasses aside), and is so smart that she is omniscient.
- Downplayed:
- Amber is a Genius Ditz; incompetent at most things, but knows an impressive amount about astronomy.
- Amber has a slightly above average level of intelligence.
- Amber is Book Dumb, but she at least has common sense.
- Amber's a genius when it comes to a specific field, but she's dense as hell when it comes to common sense.
- Amber's smart when it comes to multiple scientific studies, but she's helpless when it comes to the concept of being street smart.
- Amber is from a more progressive city in the South that culturally is more similar to somewhere like New York or Los Angeles than it is rural Texas.
- Amber is from Louisville, Kentucky (not The Deep South, but not the Northern U.S. either) and is a skilled mathematician.
- Amber is from a wealthy family in the south and is able to afford to get an education
- Amber has an obvious niche in the team as the technical expert, by which we mean she does not knows quantum physics but ask her to repair a cyclotron and she will get it running in a jiffy.
- Justified:
- Truth in Television: some smart people come from the Southern States of the USA.
- Alice's father worked at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, sparking her interest in space.
- Inverted:
- Subverted:
- Amber isn't really Southern; she was put under a witness protection program and had to create a new identity for herself, even a new Texan accent.
- Alternatively, Amber isn't really smart; she forged her PHD and simply pretends to be intelligent to impress people.
- Double Subverted:
- Amber traces back her family history and finds out that her birth parents were in fact Southerners.
- After her friends discover this and lose their respect for her, Amber begins studying for an astrophysics degree to repair her reputation. She is a surprisingly able student.
- Alternatively, Amber is just that intelligent and cunning, but flunked out of college at last second due to her constant slacking off, so she forged the PHD and pretending she had actually passed.
- She may not be able to split the atom, but her capacity for flawless forgeries means her genius (in dire need of nuturing) just lies someplace other than science.
- Parodied:
- An intelligence boosting Super Serum has the side effect of giving everyone who drinks it a thick Southern accent.
- Amber may be a brilliant scientific mind, but she's still got the stereotypical redneck "hold my beer and watch this" attitude and the poor judgment that often comes with it.
- Amber can be best described as some kind of mixed clone of both Bill Nye the Science Guy and Cletus Spuckler, the slack-jawed yokel.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Amber isn't Southern, but she's exceptionally smart.
- Amber isn't exceptionally smart, but she's Southern.
- Enforced:
- Author Appeal; the writers are from Texas and wants to portray their State favourably.
- The writers are trying to appeal to a Southern state viewership; flattery seems to be the best way to go about this.
- The writers want to be progressive by subverting common-held stereotypes, including the idea that Southerners aren't very smart.
- The author has the chance of writing a story for their favorite show; the show takes place in the Southern United States, the story has a scientist character, if the only way to get the script approved is to make the character a proud child of the South, then so be it.
- Lampshaded: "Damn, Amber; did they teach you all that fancy rocket science down in Texas?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Rachel emotionally blackmails Amber into writing her dissertation for her, saying that it's her 'duty' to prove that not all Southerners are ignorant hicks.
- Defied: Amber's family made damn sure to move West or East before she was born, to downplay (if not outright remove) the stigma of her having family roots from the South.
- Discussed: "For a down home kinda gal, Amber's pretty dang smart."
- Conversed: "I wonder what the author was trying to get to by making Professor Amber say that she comes from Hazzard County? You know, aside from the obvious 'I am a fan' angle."
- Implied: Amber's home has a few science textbooks on its shelf, and her Netflix queue is full of scientific documentaries.
- Deconstructed:
- Nobody in the scientific community takes Amber seriously because of her accent. This leads her to become ashamed of her heritage and fake a Northern accent when speaking.
- Amber is constantly bullied by others for her Southern Accent.
- Reconstructed:
- But after spending time with Amber, people realize that being a Southerner doesn't preclude her from being smart.
- She may not be super-smart, but she's smart enough to take care of others and herself.
- Amber earns herself a Nobel Prize, meaning they all can suck it.
- Played For Laughs:
- Amber supplies a Technobabble explanation so thick it's incomprehensible even without her absurdly thick Southern twang.
Amber's friends: "What did she just said?"- Amber's super-scientific antics are all fueled by Jeff Foxworthy-style humor (ex. she created a Super-Soldier serum with some monsterism while trying to manufacture a better Coors beer. The serum still tastes better than Coors.)
- Amber lives in a Texas ranch that looks like Bonanza remade for the Solar Punk audience. The juxtaposition between it and the regular ranches surrounding makes more than one member of the cast assume that she is only looking after the ranch for the sake of some dude in the Fiction 500.
- Played For Drama:
- Amber is kidnapped by Right Wing Militia Fanatics who wish to exploit her scientific skills to manufacture a new kind of terror weapon to make the South rise again. To further complicate things for her friends trying to save her, the law takes one look at her biography (her being born in Texas, specifically) and instantly assume that she would go with that crowd on her own free will.
- Amber is a very bad example of the "hold my beer and watch this" Southern 'genius' mentality precisely because she is an actual genius. Southern idiots tend to die in car crashes or self-inflicted gunshots and take only themselves (and maybe a maximum of a dozen people) with them. Amber's accidents tend to cause tremendous collateral damage — chemical spills and such.
- Amber's cleverness means that she hates the trailer-trash, truck-driving, coal-mining, Stay in the Kitchen life her family has lived for generations and she will fight to be The One Who Made It Out of her Deep South hellhole even if that's the last thing she will ever do.
- Played For Horror: Amber is The Smart Guy of a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group, Majored in Western Hypocrisy (well, Northern, but you get the gist) and applying her education to make the lives of certain minority groups more of a living hell... and she is working fervently on doing something about the "living" part.
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