Basic Trope: A character who is usually gloomy and pessimistic.
- Straight: Bob is constantly depressed and sad.
- Exaggerated: Bob is sad 24/7 and physically incapable of feeling happiness.
- Downplayed: Bob can be sad a fair share of the time, but he also has his happy moments.
- Justified:
- Bob has depression and/or he has crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
- Bob always had a pessimistic outlook and a melancholy temperament.
- Bob sees no point in being happy.
- Bob cannot physically feel happiness.
- Bob thinks being happy makes people stupid or insane.
- Bob is Born Unlucky. No wonder that he is constantly sad.
- Bob lives in a Crapsack World.
- Inverted: The Pollyanna
- Subverted:
- Bob is seen acting sad for one episode, then it's revealed he just had a bad day.
- While his default expression (and most of his other expressions) may be mistaken for sad by a casual observer, those that know him recognize that as his content face.
- Double Subverted: But it's revealed that he's a Type A Stepford Smiler. During that episode, he showed his true self.
- Parodied:
- Bob is sad.... because Alice ate the last slice of pizza.
- Bob is sad because he had thirteen awful marriages and his happiness was literally taken away by one of the wives (well, normally when you read that kind of thing on the prenup, it's only supposed to mean "I shall make your life miserable" or something). The other male members of the cast (even the villains) wince in sympathy.
- Zig Zagged: Bob constantly switches between happy and sad.
- Averted: Bob isn't constantly sad.
- Enforced: Executive Meddling requires the writer to create a sad, depressed character for some reason or other.
- Lampshaded: "Bob is always so sad..."
- Invoked: Emperor Evulz proceeds to systematically break Bob's psyche and will in order to turn him from a Determinator into a gloom and utterly hopeless mess.
- Exploited: Bob becomes a Living Battery for a machine fueled by sadness.
- Defied:
- Bob's friends and family send him to a therapist at the first sign of this behavior.
- Bob asks anybody (even Evulz) to Teach Him Anger, because even being on the verge of becoming berserk is still more constructive than this depression.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "Dang, Bob just never even cracks a smile. He must be depressed."
- Implied: Bob is a background character, but he looks perpetually mopey.
- Deconstructed: Bob is genuinely struggling with severe depression but everyone just considers it his weird quirk so they don't take it seriously.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob finds acting positive and happy to be annoying and unfulfilling, and he acts gloomy and dark as a coping mechanism that increases his overall happiness level.
- Bob eventually finds a tether that allows him to soldier on his depression and, while he doesn't become a ray of sunshine, he finds it in himself to genuinely smile from time to time.
The world seems gray... I'm tired... Maybe I should go back to The Eeyore...
