Misused: The Voiceless

The Voiceless describes when a character can and does talk, but never does on-screen. It is often used in the place of The Speechless and Elective Mute because of their non-indicative names. It also is misused to refer to any time a character doesn't speak, even if that's only because they were a background character with no name or significance.

I did a wick check and here's what I found: out of about 55 wicks, 50 either were not examples of the trope, did not have enough context to tell if it was an example, or were simply sink holes. That's enough for some type of clean-up.

edited 16th Sep '17 7:23:09 PM by DustSnitch

Opening.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

The Voiceless, The Speechless, He Who Must Not Be Heard, The Quiet One, The Silent Bob, Elective Mute.

Seems like we have a few too many tropes that cover "doesn't talk."

He Who Must Not Be Heard is currently operating as supertrope for three of them.

I think The Quiet One and The Silent Bob are duplicates (Bob has the better description).

I think "characters who don't speak" does encompass a number of more specific tropes.

I don't think the pages really agree on what each other trope means.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Here's some summaries of these tropes from what I can understand of them. I don't think The Silent Bob and The Quiet One are actually duplicates, given their descriptions. There's a lot of "defining tropes in the negative" with these tropes, which makes it a bit more difficult than it needs to be as far as understanding their definitions goes.

I'm going to try to organize these by what I think makes sense for their supertrope/subtrope relationships, using bullets.

• The Quiet One: A character who can speak, but rarely does so on-screen. This character's speaking is considered O.O.C. Is Serious Business. This character may be part of a group of characters (e.g. The Squad). The origins of their non-speaking behavior are happenstance as opposed to a conscious decision.
  • The Voiceless: A character who can speak, but never does so on-screen, unless Suddenly Voiced.
• He Who Must Not Be Heard: Whether this character can speak or not is not important. If they do vocally communicate, they are not understood by the audience. This character communicates in such a way that the audience cannot understand them.
  • The Silent Bob: A character who may or may not be able to speak, but never vocally communicates on- or off-screen. They use body language — not sign language — to communicate. At least one character understands them perfectly.
• Elective Mute: A character who can speak, but chooses not to vocally communicate. They may use other methods of communication (e.g. sign language). The origin of their non-speaking behavior is a conscious decision as opposed to happenstance.
• The Speechless: A character who cannot speak at all.

I think the big separation between The Silent Bob and Elective Mute is that with EM, the audience has some ability to understand them (e.g. if you know sign language, or if they communicate with writing and you're literate) whereas The Silent Bob can only be "understood" by the creator and certain characters in the story.

I think a big separation between The Silent Bob and The Quiet One is that The Quiet One vocally communicates sometimes but otherwise rarely communicates much at all whereas The Silent Bob never vocally communicates but otherwise communicates as much as anyone else in the story.

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There's nothing saying that the Silent Bob "never vocally communicates," since the first sentence of the article says they can be "nearly speechless" and then mentions how the Trope Namer occassionally speak. And your The Quiet One and The Voiceless definitions boil down to "character only speaks rarely," making one of them redundant.

The Voiceless may be a trope if we define it as "character speaks regularly, but circumstance and narrative focus prevents them from doing so on-screen." If we do define it that way, I think a better name may be in order.

edited 17th Sep '17 4:50:30 PM by DustSnitch

My brain automatically skipped the parenthetical; I was more or less skimming (my bad). Note that the sentence is "A speechless (or nearly speechless) Stoic who can hold entire conversations without saying a word." I'm fairly certain that means someone who might say "Come on!" or "Humph!" but not someone who will communicate via, y'know, whole sentences and the like. Seems like a "rule patch" (so to speak) for those Rules Lawyers who want to argue that so-and-so said one word once.

That said, there's more to the description of The Silent Bob. Not sure how I missed it when it says that "it's normally incredibly significant when these characters speak," Contrasting this with The Quiet One: the description clarifies that the Silent Bob's talking is always giving insight, a part of a joke, or illustrating that someone has crossed over the line. I think it's fair to interpret that as "when this character talks, it's a special moment." The Quiet One's talking is not necessarily reserved for a special moment (e.g. giving insight, a part of a joke, or illustrating someone's gone over the line), and there's nothing about communicating with body language.

I still think they aren't duplicates. One hardly ever communicates, but when they do it's vocal or otherwise normal. Whereas The Silent Bob usually communicates, but when they do it's usually body language and not vocal. The audience can understand The Quiet One when they speak, but not The Silent Bob unless they're vocally communicating.

edited 17th Sep '17 12:16:43 PM by WaterBlap

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We are seeing these problems because we have too many tropes that are very very fine distinctions of the same basic concept. Six different tropes describing essentially the same thing. For starters, can one distinguish those tropes from each other by name? No. Ideally there would be some serious merging going on. Definitely merge The Quiet One and The Silent Bob as suggested above.

edited 17th Sep '17 5:54:20 PM by jamespolk

The way I interpret them is that some can be merged, but most are fine, maybe with some tweaks.

• The Speechless: Someone who cannot talk.
• Elective Mute: Someone who chooses not to talk.
• The Unintelligible: Someone who cannot be understood.
• The Quiet One: Someone who talks very little. Likely an introvert who's either shy, or someone who just doesn't have a lot to say.
• The Voiceless: Someone whose voice is never heard on screen, sort of like the voice being an Informed Ability. It's also someone who isn't explicitly The Speechless or Elective Mute.
• He Who Must Not Be Heard: Seems like a supertrope for a character who doesn't make herself understood to the audience, whether by not speaking or speaking in ways that aren't understood.
• The Silent Bob: Not entirely sure what this is. Someone stoic, who may or may be able to speak, but generally uses other means of communicating. Seems like a fuzzy idea just based on the Trope Namer.

I think the two last ones are the most doubtful. I don't quite see what they add.

A few of them also have additions that merges them into the others. I can accept something like exceptions to The Voiceless, as long as the character is portrayed as someone who doesn't talk on-screen. An Elective Mute may also change her mind. A few of them can overlap.

edited 18th Sep '17 5:18:26 AM by AnotherDuck

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Elective Mute, The Quiet One, and The Silent Bob are all the same thing.

Sorry for the terse post earlier; was a quick mobile comment before I started work today.

I agree with this because I like to break a trope down to the simplest version of the concept, and have the description expand from there. I see all of the descriptions here trying to say X, Y, and Z are elements of the trope, when really the trope is X, and the other two elements are extra elements that may not always be present. Ho-lee moley... have I missed any tropes for "character who rarely/never communicates verbally"? These five tropes all seem to do the job of "evidence that at least one character understand the character who rarely/never communicates verbally".

edited 17th Sep '17 8:21:56 PM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Good God, Mute But Not Silent, I've never even heard of that trope. That's at least seven tropes that all mean the same thing.

I am stumped. Why do we have so many damn redundant tropes for "person doesn't talk"?

Enemy Mime is just about evil mimes or silent clowns. It's pretty distinct from everything else so far. It may need clean-up or looking at on its own, but I don't think it's necessary to discuss it when we're discussing The Voiceless et al. Meanwhile, Cute Mute has the cuteness factor differentiating it from something like The Speechless.

Silent Antagonist and Heroic Mime are specifically game tropes. I think Silent Antagonist is a stub and could use its own effort to clean-up, but I think they're different enough from The Voiceless et al that it isn't a concern for this thread (correct me if I'm wrong).

I think the Elective Unintelligible should be cut because it describes itself as The Unintelligible but the character intentionally is unintelligible. It's built up 25 wicks in five years...

I think Mute But Not Silent is trying to be a little too Truth in Television. That is, it kind of reads like a Useful Note to me, or the beginning of one for muteness.

I created a table to help wrap my head around these tropes. I've done some folderizing...

When reduced to these parts, I definitely see how the following are basically the same tropes:

• He Who Must Not Be Heard (99 wicks) & The Unintelligible (2000+)
• The Quiet One (4000+) & The Silent Bob (734)

Not to comment on the rename, but... I think The Voiceless (with its 3,000+ wicks) could be a subtrope to Silent Snarker since they're both joke characters of a sort. I think The Speechless (with its 1,000 wicks) could be another subtrope of Silent Snarker. I think The Unintelligible (with its 2,000+ wicks) should be taken off the Silent Snarker's description as being a requirement for the trope, since The Unintelligible is not silent on screen.

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

I think the examples of Mute But Not Silent can be merged into whatever the examples fit, which is probably a mix of The Speechless and The Unintelligible.

Did you mean that Silent Snarker is a subtrope of the others, rather than the other way around? Silent Snarker is the only one that has to snark, after all, which is a specific role.

I don't think Elective Mute is the same as The Quiet One or The Silent Bob. The latter two pretty much the same, though. They might functionally be similar, but there's a difference in the character's motivation. An Elective Mute can be very chatty, which goes against the other two.

Also, this is a mess.

edited 18th Sep '17 5:20:38 AM by AnotherDuck

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The Voiceless is described as a gag, or joke character, which is why I said The Voiceless could be specified as a subtrope of the Silent Snarker. Though I suppose they could be on equal footing ("sister tropes") considering The Voiceless is itself the joke apparently ("subject who is joked about" on a meta level I guess) whereas the Silent Snarker is more a comedian ("actor who jokes").

For The Speechless and the Silent Snarker, I thought of it more through the lens of who understands this character, but I see your point.

It's such a mess that it's easy to get confused, hence my attempt at a kind of matrix to better understand the 10+ tropes that's been brought up.

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

The way I read The Voiceless is just someone who gets no lines but important enough to be named and on screen for a while.

Someone like Morn from Star Trek Deep Space Nine who in story is a hopeless chatterbox but never actually says a word on screen. At first it was just cause they kept getting cut for time but then it went memetic and the writers ran with it to the point he never talks even in the episode about him specifically.

I don't see that overlapping with anything else here.

edited 18th Sep '17 7:25:44 AM by Memers

Distinct, yes, but because I believe we are clearly dealing with Missing Supertrope Syndrome, I am trying to identify all related tropes. I don't think we are ready to rename yet. Your table is a good step in discussion as we look at the common elements explicit and implicit in the descriptions so we can identify the Word Cruft obfuscating the definition. For example, I think "Vocally Communicate" and "Who Understands" are relevant to understanding which narrative convention is being used by the work, but The Stoic seems independent of this category. A silent character will often seem stoic due to the lack of (verbal) reaction, but I don't believe it should be a necessary condition to any of these tropes. I'm not comfortable saying which tropes need to be cut yet, since I don't believe we have well-defined meanings for them yet. I know I'm still re-reading the descriptions to try and understand everything that's trying to be conveyed. Right; in this context, I think "gag" meant "trope". See He Who Must Not Be Heard referencing Running Gag.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

He Who Must Not Be Heard might work as a supertrope for all tropes about characters who don't communicate verbally so the audience can understand. I think it would need a rename, as many those characters can certainly be heard, just not understood. With all the confusion between all these tropes, I think that's an important distinction to make.

edited 18th Sep '17 8:06:22 AM by AnotherDuck

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That definition ("characters who don't communicate verbally so the audience can understand.") looks like Doctor Frankenstein built a sentence, but for now lets use it.

In any case, I think the clearest course of action is to get rid of Mute But Not Silent, since it's just describing a trait of real people with no narrative significance. Maybe we can put it's contents on a Useful Notes page, but since it is Not A Trope, I'd recommend cutting it so there's one less item to deal with.

Yeah, I could've worded that better. Anyway, my current opinion for how things are and how they should be is something like this.

• The Quiet One: Characters who don't talk or communicate a lot. Can overlap with The Stoic, but can also be shy or otherwise unwilling to talk.
• He Who Must Not Be Heard: Supertrope for tropes where a character doesn't speak in a way the audience can understand. Probably needs a rename.
  • The Speechless: Character who is unable to speak.
  • The Unintelligible: Character who isn't understood by the audience.
  • Silent Snarker: Character who doesn't speak, but snarks a lot through other means.
  • The Voiceless: Character where speaking is an Informed Ability.
    • Heroic Mime: Video Game Player Character who doesn't talk so the audience can hear (or read).
    • Silent Antagonist: Antagonist who isn't heard by the audience.
  • Elective Mute: Character who actively chooses not to speak, but can communicate in other ways.
  • Elective Unintelligible: Character who actively chooses not to be understood.
  • Cute Mute: Character whose innocence is shown through being mute.

---

Tropes cut, merged, or not related:

• The Silent Bob: Merged into The Quiet One. The Same But More Specific, and also a trope based on a single character.
• Mute But Not Silent: Redundant. Trope covered by others. Merged into where the examples fit.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Redundant. Just a combination of an Auxiliary Translator Character and a He Who Must Not Be Heard character. Merged into where the examples fit.

• Enemy Mime: Unrelated. Similar name, but different trope.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Just speaking different languages. Can still be understood if you speak the language, or if it's subtitled. I don't think it includes cases where one character is The Unintelligible, but I've not gone through it extensively. Regardless, the point is the different languages used, not the lack of understanding for the audience.

• Auxiliary Translator Character (Haven't gone through these, and they're separate from the main topic. This isn't meant to be a trope, just a convenient group name.)
  • Silent Partner
  • Translator Buddy
  • Voice for the Voiceless

edited 18th Sep '17 3:32:22 PM by AnotherDuck

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I agree with all of that, except I'd switch The Silent Bob and The Quiet One. The Silent Bob is about a character primarily communicated through body and facial language instead of words, while The Quiet One seems to serve as an excuse to recycle examples from The Stoic and to shove a trope onto characters that don't get a lot of lines (think Darth Maul).

Why is it not related to The Voiceless when the description says "Really, any voiceless, sinister character will count if they have a clown-like appearance or perform extremely stylized movements, or both."??? I'm not so certain. The first sentence establishes a trope, and then the second sentence establishes the aversion. Compare Morn (Star Trek) and Smellerbee (Avatar: The Last Airbender), both characters who, on-screen, are completely silent, to the point where you never hear either even grunt, with Harpo (Marx Brothers) and Nimby the dragon (Xanth), both characters who were even noisier than the rest of the cast if they wanted to be, despite the fact that neither could/would talk. But maybe The Unintelligible covers the idea?

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

It's just an evil mime. It may be appropriate for the appearance trope clean-up effort (since they're currently tackling professions, and clowning and being a mime is a profession), but this is about tropes regarding the ability to speak or how a character's speaking ability is portrayed in the work.

An example of something similar would be if we were talking about Breaking the Fourth Wall and then bringing up Hot Scoop because reporters-who-are-characters look into the camera in-universe. Like, that's just part of their profession, not necessarily related to the issue at hand.

edited 18th Sep '17 4:40:33 PM by WaterBlap

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Yeah. It's related to the type of tropes, but I think it's outside this discussion since it's more about a type of Evil Clown than about a non-communicating character. I suppose I could just have it on the list as its own trope, but I don't think it's something that needs this thread's attention.

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Evil Mime is probably out of the scope of this discussion. On Mute But Not Silent, the problem with it is that even if Mort grunted, it would not change the fact that he doesn't talk on-screen, which is the point of The Voiceless. It only matters in the case of The Speechless, but even then, it's about not speaking, because grunts and non-verbal noises are narratively insignificant.

It's not that there isn't a distinction between Mute But Not Silent and the other tropes here, it is that it lacks the narrative distinction that separates one trope from another.