The Quiet One

...and that's about all you'll get from her.

"I ain't quiet...
Everybody else is too loud."

— John Entwistle

This character isn't The Speechless, and is definitely not The Voiceless. Nor are they the Ineffectual Loner. They just rarely talk, so anything which IS said carries extra weight. In most instances, The Quiet One is physically imposing, and is either The Big Guy or The Lancer — perhaps also a Gentle Giant or Genius Bruiser.

If a member of The Squad, the Quiet One will typically either enjoy killing a bit too much or suffer anguish over the fact that they have killed and must continue to kill. If this is ever explained, it's credited to their former civilian occupation being one that abhors death and destruction. Often, this is the member assigned to carry the BFG.

This character's quietness may be a reflection of deep psychological problems. Otherwise they just come across as cool, calm, collected, and slightly above the madness of their universe; a less vocal Deadpan Snarker.

You might expect The Quiet One to be a loner, but unless they're the Aloof Big Brother (or Sister), that's hardly ever the case, probably because of the assumption that Loners Are Freaks.

Different from The Voiceless in that The Quiet One can be seen talking occasionally, not just once during some special moment. Differs from Elective Mute in that this character's silence isn't the result of a specific decision to avoid speaking. Unsurprisingly, the Quiet One isn't likely to be partial to small talk, and may have an enigmatic non-answer for any questions people might ask them.

A Sub-Trope of The Stoic. See also The Silent Bob. Compare Heroic Mime, Silent Antagonist. Contrast Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, Motor Mouth. If The Quiet One has a Berserk Button, it could be Beware the Quiet Ones.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Senri from +Anima, who also often is thought to be glaring menacingly at people when really he's just... really out of it.
• Toda Seiko from Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says overlaps with Elective Mute; she can speak, but is "slow at arranging her thoughts", so she mostly speaks in grunts. Tanaka is the only one who can understand her.
• Aharen-san wa Hakarenai: Reina Aharen can speak, but her voice is so soft that it's sometimes hard to tell what she's saying. The whole start of the series is Raido trying to learn to cope with this, whether by learning to lipread and escalating to ever more outlandish ideas like morse code and smoke signals. Aharen's voice is so soft that, when she takes Raido to karaoke, not even the microphone can pick up her voice.
• Angel Beats!:
  • Shiina. To the point that when she does decide to comment on the situation, the rest of the cast freaks out.
  • Angel/Kanade speaks rarely, briefly, and softly. Her words aren't taken as seriously as they should be because she's "the enemy", but they incorrectly think she's the enemy mainly because they don't listen to her.
• Ao from Asteroid in Love developed a fear of speaking from the one time she was teased from That Came Out Wrong. So, with the exception of Mira, she tends to avoid speaking as much as possible and would use nonverbal communication when practical.
• Bertolt Hoover from Attack on Titan. He's a self-admitted Extreme Doormat, with a tendency to linger awkwardly on the outskirts of conversation.
• Keith Gandor from Baccano! has been known to go years without talking, and as such the resident Knowledge Brokers have been known to forgo their usual $500 fee if he says more than five words to them. Yes, Keith's words are so rare that they have monetary value.
• In Beauty and the Feast, Yamato is a quiet kid most of the time who tends to go through life with a straight face. His refusal to blow up at his upperclassmen when they're bullying him for being a first-year regular and his seeming lack of motivation causes others to draw the wrong conclusions about him.
• Ran-mao from Black Butler is Lau's bodyguard and most loyal sidekick, she speaks very little or at all in some cases. Although her speech is restrained she has a habit of showing off her impressive figure to men, her stoic expression makes it hard to tell if she likes pleasuring others (and herself) or not.
• Yuno is one of the quietest characters in Black Clover, speaking only when he needs to express his thoughts and usually silent unless the situation is dire. Flashbacks show that even when he was young Yuno was shy and quiet, in contrast to the more loud, talkative Asta.
• You usually won't see Black★Rock Shooter speaking very much unless it's close to the end of the story.
• Bleach:
  • Chad sometimes speaks in monosyllabic noises. It's been lampshaded in the story, where Chad has been accused by Ichigo of stopping a story halfway just because he felt he was talking too much. The anime takes the joke even further, a filler arc pairing him up with the equally quiet Noba, resulting in Kon yelling at them for wasting screen time by saying nothing. Even his sweatdrops are subdued.
  • Nakeem only ever spoke once in the manga, even when fighting Rangiku. In the anime, he spoke twice.
  • Tsumiko is the only member of the Sword Five who never says a word and the lower half of her face, like the rest of her body, is completely bandaged over.
  • In the Zanpakutou Tales filler arc, there are several silent characters:
    • Katen Kyokotsu is a twinned zanpakutou, so has two female spirits. The smaller female is a ninja-esque character who, aside from a few muffled noises here and there, never says a word.
    • Tenken is mostly silent, only speaking once during the entire arc.
    • Wabisuke usually communicates by rattling his chains. He only speaks twice during the entire arc.
• Sana from ChiChi ChiChi has a habit where she forgets to speak out loud, relegating all her dialogue to thought balloons (though with her mouth still open). The only one who can understand her is her older brother Hiraku.
• Kyōtarō Ichikawa from The Dangers in My Heart. The majority of his dialogue comes from his thoughts in reaction to his Love Interest and other characters around him. He's a Terse Talker when he does speak, in addition to having a low tone of voice and being prone to stuttering. His teacher and his classmates get surprised whenever he makes full sentences, or in one case that he even speaks at all.
• Mogi from Death Note. Subverted slightly as he is forced to become an overly enthusiastic manager, and worries that it suits him too well. He starts to talk more once Soichiro Yagami dies.
• Decim from Death Parade. At work, he doesn’t say or explain anything more than the absolute bare minimum. Justified since he’s a Psychopomp who can’t give too much information away, but his coworkers are still more talkative than he is. He doesn’t seem to change much when he’s not working either, as his boss calls him boring right in front of him and he doesn’t bother defending himself.
  • His assistant tries to get him to open up every now and then, but even when she asks him about his hobbies, he’d rather show her than simply tell her.
• Daltanious: In contrast to the loud Kento, Danji often speaks in one liners. He's also aloof towards the group of orphans Kento and Sanae care for, not even bothering to help them scavenge food.
• Digimon:
  • The PawnChessmon only talk on-screen in episode 26, and it seems to be limited to a few clicks.
  • Digimon: The Movie has Omnimon, who only calls out the names of his attacks and nothing else.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Future Trunks from Dragon Ball Z could be counted as this, he doesn't even call out his attacks. As a result, the various video game adaptations have had to make up their own names for his moves.
  • Also Android 16. Though he does call some of his attacks.
  • Although he was far more cocky and melodramatic in Dragon Ball, Piccolo is the most silent and reserved character after he fused with Nail. He still has some rage outbursts every now and then, but it takes a lot more to get him there than before.
  • Jiren in Dragonball Super. Being a warrior from Universe 11, he's considered to easily be the strongest fighter in the Tournament of Power and on the level of a God of Destruction. He also rarely speaks, and the little dialogue he has tends to be short and to the point.
• In Endride, Felix starts out as the quiet one of the Ignauts, being of few words but quite quick with a knife. He's given a run for his money when the Tyke-Bomb Mischa joins the squad, both of them having traumatic pasts contributing to their reticence. They mostly only converse to compete over their Undying Loyalty to Demetrio.
• Eyeshield 21: Dakichi Komusubi rarely says anything beyond grunts or one-word sentences.
• Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star acts this way most of the time. Most of his lines are less than five words long, and he usually has less than 10 per episode, despite being the main character.
• Sousuke Sagara from Full Metal Panic!. Especially noticeable in the Burning One Man Force novel, with his interactions with Nami and her group. After every victory in the arena, the group always has festive celebrations with beer and drunk chatter. And every time, he'll always be sitting away, quietly sipping his water. Nami, having a crush on him, tends to watch him yearningly. Numerous times, she tries to go over and talk to him, but every answer from him tends to kill conversation. It's worth noting that none of that is because he particularly hates anyone or is that mean — he just has zero social skills.
• This is defining character trait of Kotarou from Gakuen Babysitters, who doesn't speak as much as the rest of the toddlers and conveys most of his thoughts with nods, head shakes, and non-intelligible "ung" noises.
• Gungrave: Brandon Heat. So much so, he was often mocked by other characters for being such a man of few words. He only usually has one or two lines per episode, and in the video game, with one exception, he says nothing at all.
• Yuki Nagato from Haruhi Suzumiya, who's also The Stoic. The only person she has a normal conversation with is Kyon. She rarely ever talks to anyone else, and often simply ignores the person or resorts to simple hand gestures. Most of her "dialogue" in the novels is simply "...", represented in the anime as prolonged silence without moving.
  • And, of course, this all depends on your definition of "normal conversation". Yuki speaks to Kyon, but she never says an unnecessary word.
  • To get an idea of how little she acts, her staring at Kyon and Mikuru playfully flirting is considered a great deal of emotion from her.
    • In the original episode "Someday In The Rain", Yuki spends about a third of the episode on-screen, but neither Minori Chihara nor Michelle Ruff is credited...because she doesn't speak throughout the entire episode.
• Isumi Saginomiya from Hayate the Combat Butler.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers:
  • Egypt has only talked on one occasion, and that was because France asked him outright if he was capable of talking.
  • On a less extreme scale, Japan is this to the Axis and Russia is (a much scarier version of) this to the Allies.
  • Sweden and Norway are this as well. While Norway is mysterious and seemingly unconcerned with the everyday world, Sweden at times wants to speak up more, but he gets very easily embarrassed.
• Mugi from Hitohira. Due to her Character Development she moves out of this, helped by the fact that she's somehow still rather popular with other girls.
• Jo from Innocent Venus. Sana is afraid of him at first because of his reticence, but it turns out that he's the nice guy of the group.
• Chino from Is the Order a Rabbit? always speaks in a soft voice. Lampshaded when Lize tries to teach her to speak commandingly so as to create a presence that will make up for her lack of height, and Chino can just barely raise her voice above her usual volume.
• Ukitetsu of the Noratama Trio in Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama is the least talkative of the three, as he tends to only have one line of dialogue in the episodes featuring the Noratama Trio.
• Kimi ni Todoke:
  • Occasionally, Ryu Sanada will speak in whole sentences. But not often.
  • Sawako would also fit this trope if the story was told from anyone else's perspective, but since she's the protagonist and we hear a lot from her, it's averted in her case.
• Rin in Laid-Back Camp is the dry and laconic girl in real life, but is more expressive when she texts.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Zafila /Zafira: trainees in StrikerS didn't even realize that he could talk until their second mission. Although, he's something of a Large Ham when in battle.
  • Bardiche. He talks far less than Raising Heart (even less in the movies, while Raising Heart got even more lines). The Forwards lampshade that Bardiche is a really quiet Device. However, Teana thinks his silence is one of his greatest things of him. Doing things through action and not words, protecting his master as her weapon at all times.
• Veffidas from Macross 7 has 5 lines tops throughout the entire series but whenever she talks, she usually has a point.
• Mischievous Twins: The Tales of St. Clare's: Between the O'Sullivan twins, Patricia speaks most of the time, while Isabel is less social. Though, she does raise her voice at her parents for sending her to St. Clare's, and is quite ineractive with the other girls when Pat's not around.
• Monster: Johan Liebert tends to be completely silent as someone who's with him is running their motor mouth. Partially a result of forced Emotion Suppression due to experiments done to him, and others, as a child.
• Moriarty the Patriot: Fred rarely has much to say, and even Moran comments on this, but he's perfectly capable of speaking when he has a reason and motivation to do so. He simply...doesn't, often.
• Mayu Morita in Morita-san Wa Mukuchi, which means "Morita-san is silent." She never says anything in any episode. We do hear her thoughts and sometimes see someone's reaction to what she just said but in all instances on screen she at most will nod or shake her head.
• My Hero Academia: Koda is deathly shy, so he almost never speaks. He first speaks in Episode 36 — which is three months into the school year.
  Jiro: You can talk?!
• Sasuke, Itachi, Shino, Neji and Gaara in Naruto. Although Sasuke and Neji make remarks, once in a while, about how stupid the others are (especially Neji in the Chunin Exams, where he spends most of the arc annihilating the other characters and calling them failures). More or less the only female example (until Shippuden) is Hinata.
  • Out of all of the Akatsuki, Konan is significantly the quietest; even when it's time for her and Pain's introduction, she only speaks when it truly matters.
• Akira Okochi and Zazie Rainyday in Negima! Magister Negi Magi take this in two different directions. Akira doesn't speak much, but talks normally when she does. Zazie, on the other hand, can hold entire conversations without speaking at all. She answers a phone call and relates how her day is going (apparently) without ever saying anything apart from a few ellipses and is understood perfectly. When she makes her formal introduction late into the series, she talks normally just like anyone else.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Rei. Especially in the moments that she suddenly decides to speak to Asuka. She is a character that symbolizes The Quiet One cliche and helped to codify it. The Internet has a term for the character inspired by her, Dandere (dan=silent, dere=sweet). Although Anno wants to mock the trope, she popularized it.
• Though he enjoys conversing with people, Kawayanagi from Ojojojo is so quiet because he's no good at starting conversations, and the few people he's talked to never talk to him again. He slowly opens up to Haru after enjoying (and admiring) the self-centered conversations she makes with him.
• Nico Robin from One Piece is not as heavy of a case anymore, but certainly was when she had just joined the Straw Hats — probably because she didn't want to open up to her new crew because she believed she would leave soon. But even nowadays, she is not that talkative unless the conversation really interests her, she needs to give a warning, or if someone asks her for exposition.
• Osomatsu-san: Ichimatsu tends to stay silent during gags where everyone chimes in with a comment, which often prompts Choromatsu to ask him to at least say something.
• Subverted by Takashi "Mori" Morinozuka from Ouran High School Host Club. He is physically large and doesn't say much, but what he says is pretty mundane most of the time, not to mention how he tends to have a personality change on rainy days or if he's sleepy. This trope was, however, invoked by Renge who tried to cast him as one in a Dating Sim-style movie.
• Saki Tsukiko from Paranoia Agent is this. The most she talks is to a figment of her imagination...and yes, there are deep psychological problems reflected in this.
• Trip/Shooti in Pokémon the Series: Black & White fit. And compared to Ash's other rivals, it really stands out. Especially in BW041 where there are many competitors in the tournament that are either talking about the battle or cheering for one side. Trip just sits by himself in the back with his own opinions that he doesn't bother giving to anyone as well as looking down to ignore lame battles (he looks up when Ash's battle gets his attention though.)
• Maggie from R.O.D. The TV. Has a habit of "nesting" with piles of books in small, enclosed spaces.
• In Saint Beast, Luca is always brooding but rarely speaks his thoughts, which is part of what makes him good for counsel.
• Sora from Sketchbook. She's quiet only because she's really shy. Since she's the show's lead character, though, we get to hear her unusual thoughts via Inner Monologue often.
• Doc Saito from Tiger & Bunny speaks very softly. So softly in fact, that he requires subtitles for the viewers to understand him. Unless he's on the intercom or using a speaker, in which case he's ear-screechingly loud.
• In Toriko, Melk the First is said to be a quiet, shy man. He's actually very talkative; it's just that he literally talks so quietly no one can hear him.
• Shiori from The World God Only Knows, as present in the page picture. She is only quiet because by the time she knows what she wants to say, there is nobody to talk to, but that also means any word she says on the spot, without analysing it countless times beforehand, is significant. And when she is allowed to prepare a speech in advance, she is quite a talker.
• Yona of the Dawn: Shin-ah isn't used to talking due to a very isolated childhood. He has no problems taking action as the situation calls for it, but because he doesn't explain what he's doing, he often confuses his companions, who try to encourage him to use words.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds this trait is given to the main character, more or less. In the very first episode, Yusei Fudo doesn't even open his mouth until near the end. As tradition, his first on-screen words are "Hey... duel me."
• Rise Matsumoto, the Student Council President from YuruYuri does talk, but she talks so low, and quiet, it's pretty much impossible to make out her sentences. Only Nishigaki-Sensei has no trouble hearing her, for some reason.
• YuYu Hakusho:
  • Hiei is the stone-cold, aloof version of this, which also brought the related Aloof Ally characteristic to industry standard. This was infamously proven to be a problem for his voice actors in most regions.
  • Chuck Huber, his English voice actor, told a humorous story in the commentary; he once watched an episode of the show with his family, and all Hiei said through the whole episode was "Hmph."
    "[His wife] was like, 'Wow. They pay you for that?'"
  • Hiei's original Japanese voice actor Nobuyuki Hiyama was teased (in a friendly manner) by the majority of his castmates, naming him "The Paycheck Thief" due to earning the same percentage of salary as most of the cast, even when Hiei only performs that one "Hmph" in that episode, and even took a long two-month break from recording due to not having any lines from Hiei for most of the Sensui Arc; which was indeed one heck of a sore point for his colleagues.

Comic Books

• In the The Authority: Kev series, Kev's squadmate Tiny talks very little... because he's been struggling with suicidal thoughts for years.
• Cass Cain (Batgirl II) from Batman speaks little and mostly with short words. This is the result of her father raising her without talking to her or letting her hear people talk, so that body language would be her language. Even after magic fixed this, she was never comfortable with words. If Cass is being talkative, the only explanations are brainwashing or bad writing (which will become brainwashing later via retcon).
• Wendy & Richard Pini's ElfQuest:
  • Strongbow. Talks aloud, but not often; he's far more prone to using the elven telepathy called "sending." Non-elves, or elves who don't know how to send, find him to be a very taciturn fellow indeed. His unfriendliness towards outsiders doesn't help. See also The Stoic.
  • Redlance could also qualify, but for the opposite reason: he's quiet because he's shy. His partnership with the more outgoing and assertive Nightfall is a classic case of role reversal, and they're both perfectly comfortable with it. (Also it's implied that when it comes to sex he does a 180 and goes completely wild.)
• Cougar in The Losers.
• In Noob, Battos had his first line of dialogue in comic 10, despite debuting in comic 4 and getting a few lines in the webseries and novel versions.
• Omega from Omega the Unknown, who says nothing for the first few issues, though he eventually deems it important enough to ask a suicidal woman how she could conceive of ending her existence and opens up a little after that.
• Duma from The Sandman (1989) evolves from The Voiceless into this in Lucifer.
• In earlier stories of Swamp Thing, Swamp Thing's dialogue was mainly kept inside thought balloons and it was very rare for him to speak at all.
• X-23 in her very first appearance in the comics, NYX, has only a handful of panels in which she says anything, and the rest of her companions consider her a Creepy Child as a result. She has perhaps even fewer lines (and none in English prior to the last two issues) in her origin series, X-23: Innocence Lost, where she's arguably the Decoy Protagonist and it's her mother/creator Dr. Sarah Kinney who's the main character. In fact, it's the abuse she suffered in Innocence Lost (along with the loss of her remaining family to protect them in Target: X) that led to her near-muteness in NYX. Though she starts opening up more after joining the X-Men, she nonetheless tends to be The Stoic of whatever group she's in and speaks generally sparingly at best.

Eastern Animation

• In Happy Heroes, Careful S., The Stoic of the hero team, rarely ever speaks.
• Technotise Edit I Ja's autistic math genius Abel doesn't speak much. Truth in Television; autistic individuals have a tendency to be quiet.

Fan Works

• Even though Talisman from Ace Combat: The Equestrian War does speak, he's much more quiet than Shamrock.
• True to her character in Batman, Cassandra Cain's style of speech in Angel of the Bat is highly simplistic and only has any real length to it when the plot absolutely demands it, though she is definitely more eloquent than in canon.
• Andy from Calvin & Hobbes: The Series. Lampshaded by Socrates:
  (trying to find Andy) "Well, [he] was never the talkative one. Admittedly, he's gotten better this season, but...
• The main character of Code Geass: Colorless Memories, Rai, counts. Rai rarely speaks more than a few words when asked on most matters, often only speaks when spoken to and tends to keep to himself. Justified due to being an amnesiac, Fish out of Water at Ashford and later in the Black Knights.
• Miyako Morino of Despair's Last Resort mentions that she's not the talkative type in her introduction. She's rarely seen talking, even during the trials and when the number of students gets lower.
• A blind Satsuki in the story titled Feel and she's only spoken once, when she was a toddler, generally being described as someone who "speaks when she wants to", thus communicating nonverbally, however, we hear her thoughts and ruminations on some matters. Naturally, coupled with the fact that she is blind, people tend to assume she's deaf. When she does finally speak in chapter nine, she really does have a lot to say.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Japan is this in spades. Italy can get him to speak more though.
• The Max and Ruby oneshot Her Max deconstructs Max's quiet nature. He used to be talkative but shut down from grief after his parents' deaths. Eventually, he began recovering from the trauma, however his voice is softer and he rarely speaks more than one word at a time.
• it's about the bones: The Body never spoke to Gideon for years, and rarely spoke to Harrow except to give her very quick warnings. Gideon is rather surprised when she suddenly starts speaking full sentences.
  Absolutely none of this is making sense. The Body refused to speak to me in anything but monosyllables for most of my life. And yet the second she started haunting you she got all chatty. She is talking over your crisis, okay!
• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, George becomes a centaur rather than a horse to carry Ringo, since “it was sometimes a drag not being able to speak.”
  • After becoming a brass dragon and boring the others nearly to sleep with his chatter and bragging, the others officially strip him of the title “Quiet Beatle.”
• Shino in Kitsune no Ken: Fist of the Fox, though, unlike his canon counterpart, he's a bit more sociable and talkative.
• Eileen of Legendary Genesis has a lot she'd like to say, but can only muster up the courage to speak very simple sentences. Her quietness frustrates her to no end and isolates her from her teammate.
• In My Huntsman Academia, Team RSBR has two of these, Lie Ren and Shouto Todoroki, who quickly strike up a close friendship over how little the two have to speak to each other. This gets taken to its logical extreme when they have a complete conversation with nothing but facial expressions.
• Downplayed for Kyril Sutherland from The Night Unfurls. Disliking small talk aside, he is not an active speaker during social situations, and in the case where he does speak, he often speaks in a neutral, whispery tone. Even when killing things, he is silent all the time instead of grunting. However, this doesn't apply when Kyril is playing a leader role, like a mentor or a Four-Star Badass, where the situation demands him to raise his voice and talk more.
• Red in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has this as one of his defining traits. Outside of battles, he doesn't speak much more than necessary, and often has Yellow to do most of the talking for both of them and handle the social interactions with others. Later chapters and sidestories reveal that he also can accidentally spit fire if he talks too much, so he's this partly out of necessity too.
• The Pokémon Squad: RM’s Friend can speak (unlike Red), but rarely does so, instead opting to read manga most of the time. Unusually for this trope, though, he has a Verbal Tic on the occasions he does speak^note Muahahahaha…
• In Queen of All Oni, Left, one of Jade's Shadowkhan bodyguards, rarely ever talks. Apparently he feels he shouldn't unless it's necessary.
• Lampshaded in The Sinister Solution. When they're telepathically linked for a mission, Hellion is surprised to find that X-23 thinks significantly more than she talks.
• Nivus in The Tainted Grimoire has not been known to have actually said anything yet.
• Nighttrace fits this perfectly in Transformers Meta.
• Harpo from The Vinyl Scratch Tapes, a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fic.
• The blacksmith Amaru in Warriors of the World: Soldiers of Fortune. He speaks about a total of five or six times in all 35 chapters and only when it's about something important. The rest of the time his best friend explains why this is so and speaks for him.
• George Harrison in The Beatles Real-Person Fic With Strings Attached; he had that rep in Real Life, and in the book, he's somewhat quieter than the others for two reasons: 1) he spends much of the First Movement meditating and trying to figure out God's plan for sending them to this strange planet (he ultimately concludes that God didn't do it), and 2) he becomes a shapeshifter and is often not capable of speaking.
  • Actually, Ringo Starr is something of a Quiet One as well, since when he's deep in mindsight he rarely speaks. Though he makes up for it because he often has to give long soliloquies to explain what he did offscreen.
• Overlapping with Perpetual Frowner, Elesis/Ellie in Tokimeki PokéLive! and TwinBee becomes a quiet type character when she enters her "serious mode" personality. Subverted since she is otherwise a talkative, cheerful type character, the latter being her normal personality.

Films — Animated

• The Incredibles: Violet is the quiet one in a family full of energetic and loud people.
• Kung Fu Panda: Despite the fact that they're voiced by some rather famous actors, the Furious Five don't really have much dialogue in the first film, in which Tigress and Mantis do most of the talking for the group. Monkey, voiced by Jackie Freaking Chan, is a particularly jarring case, as he only has a grand total of six lines in the first movie alone. This gets fixed in the sequels and the TV series.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Apart from Dopey, who is The Voiceless, Sleepy is by far the least talkative dwarf. Most of his lines involve him speaking in unison with the other dwarfs.
• In Turning Red, Jin is the quiet one in the Lee family in contrast to his high-strung wife and energetic daughter.
• Up: Carl was a very quiet kid. He barely makes a sound during the flashback.

Films — Live-Action

• Reuben's father in Along Came Polly spends most of his appearances silently glaring at everyone around him. When he finally launches into an eloquent speech, Sandy, who's known Reuben's family since childhood, remarks that it's the first time he's ever heard the man speak.
• Babe's Farmer Hoggett. "The man who in his life had uttered fewer words than any of them knew exactly what to say. "That'll do, pig. That'll do."
• Baby, the titular character from Baby Driver, is usually pretty quiet, to the extent he got his nickname from the crew he works for "waiting for his first words." He mentions to his Love Interest that he has talked to her more in a day than he has to anyone else all year. It makes a certain amount of sense considering he spends all his time listening to music and has been raised by a deaf foster father for most of his life, whom he mainly communicates with through sign language.
• When Radio Rock DJ "Midnight Mark" is introduced in The Boat That Rocked, Quentin says of him "Hardly ever speaks. Not even when he's broadcasting, which is...interesting." Presumably he's one of the "let the music do the talking" school of radio presenter.
• Joao from The Book of Life has no lines.
• Inspector Bao from Colour of the Truth doesn't like to talk. At all. At one point, sharing an Uncomfortable Elevator Moment with junior Inspector Casper, Casper comments that he heard Bao speak 8 words during the entire year they worked together, and asks what would happen if Bao gets too annoyed. Bao promptly responds by Flipping the Bird.
• The Driver from Drive (2011) speaks fewer than twenty whole sentences, and he's the viewpoint character.
  • In Nicolas Winding Refn subsequent film, Only God Forgives, Julian has fewer lines. He and The Driver are portrayed by Ryan Gosling.
• The title character in Edward Scissorhands has a fairly decent number of lines, albeit not as many as most of the other major characters, but the majority of them are very short, with him usually saying just a few words at a time.
• Johnny "Shellshocked" in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Everyone at the village meeting is astonished when he simply stands up to say something, never mind the plain few sentences he does speak. (Which are about how given his experiences in the trenches, it is possible to add to the height of their newly-designated hill.)
• DJ the Doctor from Event Horizon rarely talks, and when he does, it's normally somewhat intimidating. There's a reason he's the one who's allowed to play with bone saws.
• Gaear Grimsrud from Fargo is an almost mute character, though he is also a demented sociopath.
• Matsu, the protagonist of the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, is very quiet. She says little in the first film (one of her lines is "you talk too much"), but the second is her most sparse; she's onscreen for most of the 92-minute runtime, but says only eight words across two sentences. By contrast, Yuki in the first film seems to be literally mute.
• Though she has a few lines, Jinx from G.I. Joe: Retaliation is relatively taciturn.
• Christopher Lee's Count Dracula in Hammer Horror's Dracula series has less than ten minutes of talking stretched across seven movies, with his dialogue being concentrated mostly in the later installments. He only talks in his first scene in Horror of Dracula and has no lines at all in Dracula: Prince of Darkness.
• Hugo Stiglitz of Inglourious Basterds, who's definitely one of the most bloodthirsty of the Basterds (and that's saying quite a lot).
  • Stiglitz definitely falls into that "enjoys killing a bit too much" category mentioned above.
• In Iron Man 2 Vanko is notably very quiet, especially when compared with Tony or Hammer. In several of his most prominent scenes, Vanko says barely anything at all; most notably, during the climax, his only words are a simple "You lose." at Tony.
• In the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, the Giant Mook Jaws (Richard Kiel) never speaks... until the very end of Moonraker.
• Joshua, the unusually taciturn hitman in Little Odessa.
• Mad Max becomes this towards the end of the first film after Jessie and Sprog die, only speaking when he feels necessary. It carries over to the second and fourth films as well, where he only has 16 and 52 lines respectively. He's a little more talkative in the third.
• In The Magnificent Seven, there are two Quiet Ones:
  • James Coburn's character Britt (the knife-thrower), with 11 lines total during the 128-minute-long film Britt's lines are also invariably short: in his introductory scene he says a total of five words. The scene is 2:28 seconds long. 21 seconds into it, he says "You lost." 1 minute and 17 seconds later, at 1:38, he says "Call it." At 2:20, in response to Chris saying "Britt.", he says "Chris."
  • Robert Vaughn's Lee (the gambler) has a whopping 16 lines.
• In Ming and Ming, the autistic boy Xiaoming dislikes talking so much that he's exempted from answering questions in class.
  Daming: In the last week I've heard you utter ten sentences, and nine of them were to yourself.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur's servant Patsy only gets one line in the whole movie.
• Motherland Fort Salem: Raelle is the most reserved and soft-spoken of the main trio. She does show genuine affection to her loved ones, but still in a more quiet manner usually, with her hidden temper showing sometimes as well.
• Office Space's Milton. He actually talks all the time but he's so quiet and rambling that nobody even knows he's going to set the building on fire.
• The Parallax View: Bill McKinney's assassin character has no dialogue in any of his scenes.
• Predator:
  • In the original film, the quiet one is the Native American tracker "Billy", whose contributions are things like "Something is out there." Poignant because, sure enough, something is out there.
  • Predators has Hanzo, who at first seems to be this because he doesn't speak English. But then it's revealed that as a Yakuza member, he lost fingers for "speaking too much."
• Dot from The Quiet is definitely this, being a deaf-mute. She's not The Voiceless because she's been faking her deafness and muteness.
• Carol, the protagonist of Repulsion, doesn't like to speak much.
• Captain Miller from Saving Private Ryan possesses some of these traits. Notably, no one in his squad knows what his line of work is back in the States because he's so reluctant to chat.
• The abovementioned Britt was of course based on Kyuzo, the taciturn master swordsman from Seven Samurai (played by Seiji Miyaguchi).
• Aatami Korpi in Sisu doesn't talk at all, only speaking in grunts and making gestures when interacting with the Nazis and their Finnish prisoners. He has exactly one line of dialogue at the very end when he's cashing his gold at a bank in Helsinki: "Give me bills, and big ones. They're less fucking heavy."
• In Star Trek (2009), Keenser has one line in an alien language, one word in English, and one kind of whimpering sound. In the sequels, he's The Voiceless. Even though he's supposed to be eloquent in his native tongue.
• Star Wars:
  • Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace has only three lines during the whole movie. He speaks so infrequently that all of his lines are dubbed over. His later appearances in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels animated series avert this, as he is given more lines in those series. Anakin's mother, Shmi, also counts, as she only gets a rather small handful of lines in the movie.
  • Boba Fett has only a few lines and spends most of his screen time posing ominously, which is a major source of his following.
• The antagonists in each of the three original Terminator films don't really say much. The second movie plays with this, as the T-1000 actually does get a decent amount of lines at first while the T-800 doesn't say too much like the one from the original. Then after The Reveal that the former is actually the villain while the latter is the hero, the T-800 begins talking more frequently, while the T-1000 is almost entirely silent for the rest of the film, only having two really brief conversations from that point (four if you count when it's taking someone else's form).
• In Things Change, the humble cobbler Jerry is passed off as The Man Behind the Man. Because Jerry is an old, dignified, and quiet man, the local mobsters instantly buy him as a man of confidence and power.
• Brian Slade from Velvet Goldmine, despite being the main character and basically the subject of the movie, has surprisingly sparse dialogue throughout. When he does talk, he's almost always talking in riddles or quoting Oscar Wilde. Also Jack Fairy, who doesn't say a word until the Death of Glitter concert.
• Silent Bob from The View Askewniverse evolved from The Voiceless into The Quiet One. He usually has about one or two lines per movie. Chasing Amy is notable in being the film where he has the most dialogue.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: The Brotherhood members almost never speak. Mystique is silent but for one line early on, except when she's disguised. It's quite effective and adds to her, well, mystique. Sabretooth has two lines, Toad has three.
  • X2: X-Men United: Lady Deathstrike gets a single line of dialogue.
  • X-Men: The Last Stand:
    • Colossus utters one line.
    • Multiple-Man has a total of two lines.
  • X-Men: First Class: Azazel only says a few lines.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Colossus' speaking part consists of a single word.
  • Deadpool (2016): Although Colossus finally averts this trope, Angel Dust plays it straight, letting Ajax do most of the talking for the bad guys.
  • Deadpool 2: Domino doesn't have a lot of lines and the ones she has are some rather short, straightforward sentences.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Psylocke and Angel's dialogue is limited to a few lines each.
  • Logan: Laura doesn't speak for the first two-thirds of the movie, leading Logan and others to think she's mute. She actually speaks English and Spanish perfectly well, and she becomes more talkative in the final act.

Jokes

• A farmer tells the new farmhand: "I don't talk much. If I give you a nod, you'll come." The farmhand: "Guess we'll work together well, boss, 'cause I don't talk much either. If I shake my head, I won't come."
• A boy never speaks. His parents, concerned, take him to doctors and specialists who confirm that their child is not mute and there's no logical reason that he should be unable to talk. For eight years, he says not a word. One night at dinner, however, he suddenly says, "Please pass the salt." His stunned parents stare at him, asking why he's never spoken until this moment. "Well," he replies, "everything was all right up until this point."
• Two lumberjacks go to the forest early in the morning. One of them stumbles on some ice, and comments: "Slippery today." The two of them work all day without a word, and when they return in the evening, the other one stumbles on some ice and comments: "Sure is."
• An apocryphal story about Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge who was famously a man of few words: after returning from church one Sunday, Coolidge’s wife asked him what the sermon was about and he replied, "Sin." "But what did the preacher say about it?" his wife continued. Cal replied: "He was against it."

Literature

• Benjamin, the donkey from Animal Farm, is one of the most perceptive animals on the farm, but rarely speaks up. His enigmatic phrase is: "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey."
• Gry in Gifts, the first book in Annals of the Western Shore. Orrec has known her forever, so he can easily distinguish between Gry being silent because she's comfortable, or Gry being silent because she's upset. Her mother Parn is also a woman of few words.
• Bazil Broketail:
  • Mono gets very few lines despite being present in the series from the start till the end. At some point, in book four, he is openly described as taciturn by nature.
  • Chektor only talks to make occasional sarcastic remarks.
• Hettar from the Belgariad. But as one of the prequel novels shows, there's at least one worse; Algar, founder of Hettar's homeland, who could let days go by without talking. When asked by Polgara, "Don't you ever talk about the weather?", he just points to a window and responds, "What for? It's right out there. Go look for yourself."
• The Silent from The Black Company. He speaks only once through the entire series when he performs a ritual to bind Lady's powers.
• In The Cosmere short story "Sixth of the Dusk", the title character is exceptionally taciturn, thanks to being a Hunter Trapper who spends the vast majority of his time alone. This causes him some trouble when he has to cooperate with a chatty mainlander and finds himself at a loss for words when trying to deliver important information.
• Bang from the Croak trilogy, who uses sign language to communicate.
• Lilja Perhonen of Dance Of The Butterfly is Finnish, an entire culture that embraces silence. She has no issue talking, but she is often economical in what she says and does not necessarily speak unless pointedly asked a question, sometimes not even then. Lengthy periods of silence do not bother her at all.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Manny is normally this trope, but averts it at the end of The Long Haul where he has a conversation with two mechanics in fluent Spanish for almost an hour.
• Bill in Don't Call Me Ishmael! doesn't speak much, particularly at the beginning of the series. This is because he often zones out into his own world and because he has very low self-confidence due to being bullied for his weight. He becomes a bit more talkative when he makes friends with the rest of the debate team.
• Mac, from The Dresden Files. Getting words out of him at all is rare, and if you see him speaking in actual sentences, you know things are very, very serious. In Changes, he speaks an entire paragraph; Harry is completely floored by this, and not just because of what he said.
  • Hendricks, Marcone's top bodyguard, tends not to say very much either. The short story "Even Hand" lampshades this, implying that Hendricks actually talks a lot, and about profound philosophical matters; he just doesn't do it in front of Dresden.
  • Given that he's demonstrably as smart as a human, Mouse the foo dog probably qualifies: the only time he's barked since he was a puppy was when he needed to rouse a building full of endangered civilians from an enchanted sleep. At most, the huge dog will sigh or chuff quietly to express himself.
• Dominika of Each Little Universe at first appears to be an Elective Mute, but it turns out that she simply chooses not to speak unless she's completely sure of something. Protagonist TM points out that if Dominika feels that way, what with her status as the undisputed ace of the group, it's hard to see what hope anyone else could ever have of being certain of anything.
• Ulath, from The Elenium and The Tamuli series. He's actually very intelligent but tends to respond quite cryptically and briefly with one or two-word comments. It's explained that he works out all the logical steps in his head, but sees no reason to share any more than the conclusion. Then subverted when he usually has to explain what his one-word outburst means anyway.
• Harry Potter
  • The titular character is actually a man of relatively few words for most of the series. He is somewhat talkative when he is with only one person (like Ron, Hermione, or Dumbledore), but in large assemblies, he doesn't say much unless he really feels the need. It is, however, a trait often overlooked by readers because Harry is also the (third person) narrator and thus, you "hear" him all the time even when he doesn't talk. It seems to be a mixture of a bit of shyness (mostly in the first book) and that he simply often prefers to listen and observe rather than speak. In situations when he has to take up the leadership mantle, he becomes more talkative, and thus he has mostly gotten over his quietness when the last book rolls around.
  • Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle are a duo of this trope. While Draco Malfoy delivers all the verbal insults, they do little more than act as muscular bodyguards and laugh stupidly at those on the receiving end of his snark. In fact, the reader never gets to hear either of them speak in person until towards the end of the very final book, and it is indeed stated that Harry had "hardly ever heard [Crabbe] speak before."
• The title character of the Horatio Hornblower books. Granted, he's an English naval captain from the early 1800s, so isolation is part of the job, but Hornblower takes it beyond what would normally be expected because he's so cautious and self-conscious about saying something that might bite him later. He makes a point of never indulging in "unnecessary words." The few instances where he does let his reserve drop are notable, and he usually ends up regretting it.
• In Hover Car Racer, Jason's autistic brother, the Bug, only talks to Jason and their mom, and then only in a whisper.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: The Raven King was raised in Faerie and also spent a lot of time contemplating magic beyond anyone else's comprehension, with the effect of him being rather strange and quiet. The most notable instance of communication issues was when he mentioned to a servant that he was going out and would be back in a day, then vanished for a year. When he finally reappeared without explanation the nobles who'd been nervously running things in his absence went and asked the servant if it was possible he'd actually said he would be back in "a year and a day". The servant conceded that the King spoke very softly, and he might have misheard him. He also invented his own written language to better convey his thoughts.
• Kubo in Krabat, who gets just one line in the book.
• The warrior race of the Seguleh from Malazan Book of the Fallen choose not to speak, but rather communicate using body language to convey their feelings. Though they do rarely deign to speak to outsiders, if they don't understand subtle head movements.
  Envy: They are not a loquacious lot, I have found.
• Maggie from Old Man's War.
  We all turned to look at her. She was visibly annoyed. “I'm not mute,” she said. “I just don’t talk much. This deserves comment of some kind.”
• The narrator of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a physically imposing man who pretends to be deaf and mute. Between his deliberate silence, his hallucinations, and his distorted view of himself and others, it is assumed that he has schizophrenia.
• Daeis from The Outside stopped talking during their years as a prisoner of Akavi. Now they talk occasionally, but only to Splió, and only when they're sure no one else can hear them.
• Shane Drinion in The Pale King. When he does speak, he has a lengthy, thought-provoking conversation with Meredith Rand and completely throws her off her game.
• Amy from The Passage is a subversion as, being a 6-year-old girl, she's hardly physically imposing. Then she becomes a vampire.
• Tiecelin, a skilled marksman in The Reynard Cycle. When he does speak, it's usually short and to the point.
  • "Doom."
• Unc Nunkie "the Silent One," in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, is so so old and solemn that he rarely speaks more than one word, forcing his nephew Ojo to do all the talking for the both of them, which leads to surreal conversations where he rarely says more than a noun or adjective.
  Ojo: "Where's the butter, Unc Nunkie?"
  Unc Nunkie: "Isn't."
  Ojo: "Isn't any butter? That's too bad. Where's the jam, then?"
  Unc Nunkie: "Gone."
  Ojo: "No jam, either? And no cake—no jelly—no apples—nothing but bread?"
  Unc Nunkie: "All."
• Second Apocalypse: Lord Kosoter, aka "Ironsoul", is the captain of the Skin Eaters band of sranc-scalpers. Achamian quickly identifies him as one of those sort who begrudge every word. When Achamian tries to negotiate with him, Kosoter's sergeant Sarl pointedly speaks for him. Whenever Kosoter interjects in any circumstance, there's a palpable moment of panic from his men.
• The Sunne in Splendour: Richard of Gloucester, the protagonist of the novel, contrasts with his extroverted older brother King Edward IV in that he rarely talks. Even when he is among his close circle of friends, he only occasionally speaks and only when he feels it is necessary to do so. Anne, his childhood sweetheart and eventual wife is also portrayed as quiet, though when they are alone together they talk to each other quite a bit.
• Tortall Universe: Beka Cooper. At first it's because she's a Shrinking Violet; as she gets older and more experienced in Dog work she loses the anxiety, but she never becomes a chatterbox either. However, the effect is somewhat mitigated since her books are in the form of a diary and so she's always "speaking" in first person.
• Robert Doru from Vampire Academy can speak and even offers some exposition. But he tends to be eerily quiet when using his spirit powers.
• The warrior angel Jayt from Wars of the Realm. Lampshaded in his introductory scene:
  This warrior was quiet, even compared to Tren. There was an air of confidence in everything he did. He had narrow eyes, straight black hair, and movements like a human ninja.
• Winnetou, the Apache chief from Karl May's novels. When these were adapted into films, actor Pierre Brice at first complained that he had so few lines compared to Lex Barker as Old Shatterhand, but soon came to realize that by acting instead of speaking and by his dramatic presence he actually made a greater impression on the audience.
• Aeduan of The Witchlands doesn't talk much, and reacts with irritation when Iseult tries to start a conversation.
• Zenobia July: When Zen first starts attending public school after years of homeschooling, she can barely bring herself to talk above a whisper. She grows more confident over time.

Live-Action TV

• On Angel, Wesley becomes a lot darker and quieter as the seasons progress, most noticeably in season four (part of this may be a result of getting his throat cut. The scar is visible for a long time afterward, so it's possible that too much talking is physically painful for him).
  • Even in his early days on Buffy, though, Wesley was only really talkative when he was trying to impress people or make himself look good. When he wasn't being an insufferable show-off, he was actually fairly quiet.
• Ricky Fitness in The Aqua Bats Super Show usually has one line per episode that is when he's not having A Day in the Limelight.
• Kosh of Babylon 5 barely ever speaks at all, when he does it's generally a sentence fragment, and fragmentary or not, it rarely makes any sense. Interestingly, his most powerful statements are usually his shortest as well, in large part because they generally make more sense than usual. Often the emphasis he puts on words carries more meaning than the words themselves.
• The Barrier: Rai, the regular driver in the wealthy home for which Hugo and Julia work, is a man of few words. His longest line of dialog is quite early on when Hugo is asked to try repairing a car and Rai tries bullying Hugo into being submissive to him while he's in the garage.
• Henchmen of Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, especially Victor and Tyrus Kitt, have a habit of this to be more intimidating.
• Oz on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who famously explains his lycanthropy as follows:
  Buffy: It's a long story.
  Oz: I got bit.
  Buffy: Apparently not that long.
  • We see the Hidden Depths behind his silent demeanor when Buffy is granted telepathy and overhears Oz's thoughts:
    [thinking]: I am my thoughts. If they exist in her, Buffy contains everything that is me and she becomes me. I cease to exist.
    [aloud] "Huh."
  • Lampshaded like crazy in "The Zeppo."
    Xander: But I mean, what is it? How do you get it? Who doesn't have it? And who decides who doesn't have it? What is the essence of cool?
    Oz: Not sure.
    Xander: I mean you yourself, Oz, are considered more or less cool. Why is that?
    Oz: Am I?
    Xander: Is it about the talking? You know, the way you tend to express yourself in short, noncommittal phrases?
    Oz: Could be.
  • Angel's not known for his talkativeness, either; lampshaded when the two chat:
    Angel: Oz.
    Oz: Hey.
    Angel: Nice surprise.
    Oz: Thanks.
    Angel: Staying long?
    Oz: Few days.
    Doyle: Are they always like this?
    Oz: No, we're usually laconic.
• Control Z: Sofia is very comfortable with long silences, and when she talks it's never of the more petty stuff that other kids chat about. It's always serious or thoughtful.
• Dead of Summer: Drew speaks much less than anyone else, and mostly keeps to himself.
• In Emergency!, Mike Stoker was known for being quiet. It may have been at least partly due to Stoker actually being a firefighter and working in filming around his day job not leaving the most time to remember lines.
• In Fargo, Ohanzee Dent, the favored retainer of the Gerhardts, doesn't say much, probably because he's spent decades suppressing his feelings about having to be the "pet Indian" to a brood of German thugs. This, of course, makes it all the more shocking to the Gerhardts when he sets them all up to be wiped out by state troopers.
• Father Stone from Father Ted. He doesn't speak unless spoken to, answers questions in two or three words, and does nothing to maintain a conversation, which results in uncomfortable and eventually depressing silence when he visits.
• Firefly's River Tam both plays this straight and subverts it; she typically has the fewest lines of dialogue in any given episode and will go through a lot of scenes without ever saying anything. When she does talk, it's usually in the form of traumatized crying, gibberish, or veiled warnings or predictions.
  • Wash was once laconic, but that was a long time ago.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Pod doesn't speak unless he's spoken to.
  • Ser Harys Swyft, compared to the contributions of the other bannermen Tywin is discussing strategy with; he makes not a peep during the whole time he is on-screen.
  • In the first season, Gregor has only said two things, "Sword!" and screaming. As of "Garden of Bones", he's had a few more lines but is hardly what one would call verbose. In Season 4, he's had a grand total of three lines of dialogue, but all memorable. In Season 5, he is mentioned to have taken a vow of silence by Qyburn — perhaps it just means that he can't speak.
  • Malakho has no lines.
• Gladiators (2024): Viper is one of the show's heels, a brute with anger issues who barely speaks. When he does get to talk, it's mostly Hulk Speak.
• Nathan Wournos in Haven.
• The Haitian, of Heroes fame, was speechless in most of his early appearances and many of his later ones. He refuses to reveal his given name and, since he speaks so rarely, one wonders how everyone knows he is from Haiti.
• This is a problem in Hell's Kitchen. Chef Gordon Ramsay is looking for a head chef and one of those characteristics is a loud and clear voice along with leadership skills. He's eliminated decent chefs because they wouldn't speak up.
• Horatio Hornblower: In "The Even Chance", Lieutenant Chadd appears to be a fairly prominent character who hardly opens his mouth, and mostly he only grins or looks worried, awed, or amused, as the situation requires. He spoke exactly twice. First when he ordered his men to fire guns, and second when he got a splinter in his arm, he allowed Doctor Hepplewhite to take care of Hornblower's sailor ahead of him because the poor guy had lost his leg. Chadd dies during their next battle on a French ship that they boarded.
• LazyTown: Flobbie from "Robbie's Dream Team" has no spoken lines.
• The badass priest "Mr. Eko" from Lost does not speak for forty days after he kills two of the "Others" in self-defense.
• The titular protagonist of The Mandalorian is a man of few words, and those words are usually soft-spoken (unless he's really upset). This, along with his refusal to remove his helmet in front of others, gives him an air of mystery.
• Kenny in The Middle, mostly because he spends most of his time playing World of Warcraft, but when he talks is always to say something dramatic.
• Marilyn Whirlwind from Northern Exposure speaks few words, and when she does it's barely above a whisper. She stands out in a show filled with kvetchers (Joel), blowhards (Maurice), and philosophical chatterboxes (Chris).
• Power Rangers has its fair share of this trope in the following seasons:
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Trini, Adam, Tideus, & Corcus.
  • Power Rangers Turbo & Power Rangers in Space: Carlos.
  • Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue: Chad & Ryan.
  • Power Rangers Time Force: Lucas.
  • Power Rangers Wild Force: Danny.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Storm: Blake.
  • Power Rangers Mystic Force: Madison (insert "Who's Madison?" joke here).
  • Power Rangers RPM: Dillon prefers to brood rather than talk. This is quite ironic because his best friend Ziggy is a Motor Mouth.
  • Power Rangers Samurai: Jayden.
  • Power Rangers Megaforce: Troy talks less than any of his teammates.
• Nasir of Robin of Sherwood could go entire episodes without speaking. It's implied that in early episodes he doesn't know much English. He gets to talk a bit more later on. The real-life reason to his quietness in the first season is probably that he was originally planned to be a one-off villain's mook, not a regular outlaw, so there wasn't any designed room for his dialogue in the first season.
• Robin Hood.
  • Will Scarlett is known to keep his own counsel.
  • To a lesser extent, Little John — though when he did talk, he usually did so quite loudly.
• Kasumi of Samurai Gourmet, but since he's the protagonist it makes it a rather Mental Story. Fortunately, he has plenty of Internal Monologue, and when that fails there's the samurai.
• On Saturday Night Live, Robin Gibb in "The Barry Gibb Talk Show."
• Schitt's Creek: Mutt is the least talkative of all the main characters. It actually torpedoes his relationship with Alexis because it clashed with her talkativeness causing miscommunication.
• Sherlock:
  • John. Just don't get him to snap by messing around with his friend, though.
  • Molly also isn't a chatterbox, but has had her occasional moments where she's annoyed, or upset.
• In the first series of Skins, Effy Stonem only spoke twice — and she was incredibly intriguing as a result. In the later series, she talks progressively more often, although she continues to maintain long periods of silence and usually speaks less than the other characters. Nevertheless, most fans preferred her as The Stoic Ice Queen and grew increasingly disappointed with the character the more she spoke.
• Smallville: Emil Hamilton, the team's medic, often has very few lines in the scenes that he's in, and what he does say is said in a quiet, almost monotone voice. (Unless of course you get him completely wasted.)
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Malcolm Reed. Don't screw with his friends, though.
• Teal'c from Stargate SG-1. "You speak?" "Only when it is appropriate." Indeed.
  • He did become more talkative as time went by (presumably from spending so much time with humans), so much so that the commentary on an early episode of Season 9 had the director joking that Teal'c had spoken more in the first few episodes of that season than in the previous eight seasons combined.
• Jane aka Eleven from Stranger Things when she first showed up hardly speaks and seems to only know a handful of words, as the series progresses she develops a wider vocabulary and becomes much more vocal, but still remains one of the quieter members of the group.
• In Supernatural, season six, Sam and Dean's distant cousin Mark was introduced. Mark barely avoided becoming The Silent Bob. Promptly lampshaded.
  Dean: You don't say much, do you?
  Mark: Enough.
• Cameron of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles mostly lets the others do the talking, and when she does speak, its usually done with a very inflectionless monotone. She mostly just punches things. Or shoots them.
  • And beyond that, there's the character credited simply as "Chola". She appears in four episodes (including the one in which her crime family is massacred), and makes an instant impression — but she doesn't say a word until her final scene when she gives a tear-jerking speech to John and Cameron.
• James May of Top Gear, though it's mainly 1. relative to his two chatty co-presenters, 2. all the better to set up a well-aimed deadpan snark when they have argued each other into exhaustion and 3. can result in a Precision C-Strike (C standing for 'cock').
• The Wilds: Nora, especially compared to her sister, Rachel. She doesn't speak that much, and when Nora does it's sometimes surprising (e.g. her telling dirty jokes with a straight face). It's possibly a result of her being autistic or in some other way neurodivergent since she displays other typical autist traits.

Pro Wrestling

• Randy Orton seems to fit this trope. While he cuts promos and talks to other wrestlers like his fellow sports-entertainers, he doesn't do much trash-talking in the ring, and a lot of his "interviews" (especially as a heel) are Orton simply being asked a question and responding with one word ("No..." or "Pain..." or something of the sort), or responding by... not responding. He'd simply stare at the interviewer and then walk away.
• Everyone by now knows Christian to be a bit of a Loud Mouth...but before that happened, he and Edge were part of a group known as the Brood (a gimmick of pseudo-vampires). He didn't even speak the first few months...until Ken Shamrock ankle-locked him into revealing where Stephanie McMahon was during the Ministry of Darkness era.
• The Undertaker is also one unless he's cutting one of his amazing promos.
• Brock Lesnar usually lets Paul Heyman do the talking for him.
• After Vixen was billed as the American Kong by AJPW, she stopped speaking almost entirely, though she spoke in the NWA mostly in Zero 1, she went quiet for ROH, SHIMMER and stayed quiet in TNA until she yelled "Raisha". Broke silence to announce she would no longer be able to wrestle at a WWE event, stayed talkative after returning to the ring in SHINE, though still not particularly talkative by wrestler standards.
• Kanako Urai, better known as Kana in Japan and Asuka in America, rarely speaks and often resorts to a Slasher Smile to get her point across. Part of the reason why she does this (in WWE NXT as least) is that she doesn't speak English all that well. Not so much on the main roster, where she rants quite a bit (mostly in Japanese, but it's still pretty clear where her head is at).

Radio

• Fred Norris of The Howard Stern Show. Although he's in the studio, his job is sound effects, and they'll often do more talking than he does. When he DOES talk it could be just a quip or a punchline to jokes or impressions or even responding to Howard or Robin. If you even DARE insult him or call him on something, run he has been known to react VERY strongly to criticism, sensitive issues in his life among other incidents, once Howard looked in his bag and Fred nearly quit the show after an ugly outburst.
• The classic Jack Benny-Mel Blanc "Sí, Sy, Sue" routine might fit here, with Blanc's character responding entirely in deadpan monosyllables that are, in context and timing, hilarious.

Roleplay

• Jennifer O'Connell from Behind The Veil communicates entirely through written notes, sign-language, and text-to-speech programs, but only because of psychological reasons (her parents were killed in a car crash and she was trapped in the car with them for several hours because she had been paralyzed for years and couldn't escape herself). She is still capable of speech, and recently began talking to her stepmother, but limits herself to short sentences.
• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • Josephine seems like this to others, since she doesn't speak up a lot. Insight into her mind shows that her thoughts are a lot more rambly, she's just too shy to share them.
  • Before he received superpowers, Rhys kept to himself, rarely speaking and instead staying in his own head to judge the people around him. It's perhaps a little ironic that his power requires him to say a word anytime he activates it.
  • Tamasin very rarely speaks. This is because she's aware of how badly her words can be misconstrued, which is partially to blame for her bad reputation, so she thinks carefully before she talks.
• Coal, the Villain Protagonist of Digimon World: Infamy usually doesn't open his mouth unless it's truly something important. Entire weeks have gone by with the stoic Digimon never saying a word, which makes the times when he actually does talk stand out all the more.

Tabletop Games

• In Warhammer 40,000:
  • An Astartes Chapter's Honour Guard are said to speak and advise little, as to not undermine the authority of the Captains despite how they are likely even more experienced than them, but this gives their words considerable weight to all of their battle brothers, even the Chapter Master.
  • As a result of their past, the Dark Angels Chapter of Adeptus Astartes and their successors are known for this. They rarely speak to anyone outside of the Chapter, and in one noticeable instance, the entire Consecrators Chapter deployed en masse and relieved an Astra Militarum force by fighting for six straight hours and killing the enemy's leader without sending a single transmission to their allies.
  • The personal guard of the Death Guard Primarch Mortarion, the Deathshrouds, only ever speak when they are passing on the commands of their Primarch. Even in the heat of battle Deathshroud Terminators fight in complete, unnerving silence becoming the perfect embodiment of the silent onset of inevitable death.

Theatre

• Thomas Jefferson is portrayed like this in 1776, in light of Adams' claim that he "never heard him speak three sentences together." The first time he speaks without prompting, he saves Adams and Franklin from their flailing for an excuse to delay voting by giving a clear, concise reason why they need to write a Declaration of Independence first.
• Similarly to the books, Vincent Crabbe is portrayed as this in A Very Potter Musical. This might be because he was originally going to be a hand puppet played by Goyle but was changed to a normal person(albeit played by a girl) in the final version. His only line in the musical happens in his first scene where mentions that he and Goyle hate girls.
  • Another reason was the actress’ busy schedule outside of the show, which withheld her from getting many lines. In the sequel, Crabbe gets to talk a little bit more, though still not much.
• In How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Miss Jones is the quietest of the secretaries until she lets loose in "Brotherhood Of Man."

Toys

• Technically all of the ice-characters in BIONICLE, but Kopeke especially. Since he got appointed to be the official Chronicler, it's likely that he's wordier in his writing. Onua, an Earth character, is also known to only speak up when necessary in most of his appearances.

Video Games

• Backyard Sports: Ricky Johnson fits this trope to a bang.
• Valygar from Baldur's Gate 2. Putting him in the same party as Jan Jansen makes him a great example of The Comically Serious as well.
• Born Under the Rain: Discussed by Jabari, a Punny Name for how much he speaks, in an official screenshot◊:
  Jabari: This man is a quiet one! That's fine by me! Some of the best people are quiet! My father always said that, even on his deathbed. He took my hand and said to me, "Jabari, it's okay to be quiet sometimes. Some of the best people are quiet."
• In The Council of Hanwell, your character never speaks except in the text logs in between levels. The Mayor quips that the 1% of doctor DNA that you didn't inherit is his tendency to talk.
• A justified example in CrossCode, which is set in a fully-immersive VR MMORPG. The protagonist, Lea, is suffering a glitch with her speech sync that initially renders her The Voiceless, and her speech is limited to the few words Sergey hard-codes into her speech module (like "Hi" and "Bye"). Amusingly, while other players take note of how quiet she is, and at least one figures out that her speech module is broken, most NPCs react as though she's speaking normally.
• The Bounty Hunter class in Darkest Dungeon prefers to speak very little outside of the occasional generic comment when walking or stressed. While getting a critical hit as other characters usually have them say a Badass Boast or one-liner, the Bounty Hunter usually has Visible Silence or a snort as a reaction. Somehow he reacts less when faced with the chance of being subjected to what is implied to be eternal suffering during the Final Boss fight. He does, however, become slightly chattier when virtuous or afflicted.
• Frankenstein's monster is this in Die Reise ins All, especially when he is first met.
• Dragon Age:
  • Sten in Dragon Age: Origins, is very much like this. He's extremely intelligent and deep but doesn't chat much except in certain situations. There is a point when he monologues a bit with the player character about the nature of mages, and the Warden can respond by saying that it was the most words he/she ever heard Sten say. Sten's Deadpan Snarker reply: "I've been saving them up."
    • In-universe materials indicate that most Qunari are like this when they aren't speaking their native tongue. Since they pride themselves on doing everything perfectly, the prospect of possibly committing a linguistic error mortifies them. In the second game, the Arishok has little to say but "begone" to anyone besides Hawke.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition has Grim, a member of the Iron Bull's mercenary company, who never says anything except "Hm." Bull is half-convinced that he's the missing heir of some obscure royal family because nobody can get him to say much of anything.
• Until the fifth chapter of Duel Savior Destiny Rico is almost silent and when she does speak it's nearly inaudible. This is because without a proper master she burns through her lifespan when she takes action. Once this is taken care of, she becomes simply soft-spoken.
• Ensemble Stars!: Adonis is very humble, not generally believing that he has much interesting to say, and tends to be rather awkward and self-conscious, so he tends to speak very brusquely when he does so. He was even worse in his first year — due to him being a Foreign Exchange Student, Arashi believed for a while that he couldn't actually speak Japanese. This causes a bit of trouble for him on stage, to the point that Kaoru asks him directly in 1001 Arabian Nights why such a quiet person would want to become an Idol Singer.
• The Mysterious Stranger from the Fallout series. Clicking on him produces only two floating text balloon statements: "I will help thee." and "I don't talk much."
• Fire Emblem:
  • Gerome, a wyvern rider from Fire Emblem: Awakening, is not as talkative as the rest of the second-generation characters. He also states that conversation and charisma are not his strong suits. His specialty exists on the battlefield.
  • Beruka from Fire Emblem Fates is an assassin who is also not very talkative, and when she does talk, she tends to speak in very short, clipped sentences.
• The protagonist of Ghostrunner barely talks throughout the game, bordering on Silent Protagonist. When he does, it is mainly to ask a question that prompts the other characters to give some exposition. Zoe even lampshades it.
  Zoe: You don't talk much, huh? Still, it's good to hear your voice. I've been trying to make it happen for a year.
  Ghostrunner: [softly] Thank you.
• Unlike the Rookie from Halo 3: ODST, Noble Six from Halo: Reach does have a few lines in the cutscenes, but it's usually in brief sentences.
• Agent 47 from Hitman makes this trope look badass. A man of few words and mercy, Agent 47 talks when it's necessary, but when he isn't saying anything, that's when you should start running.
• League of Legends Champion Rammus. His standard exclamations include "yup" and "okay." His longest-known statement is "shut up." Most other champions in the game use actual sentences.
  • ok
• Mipha in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A demure White Magician Girl, she has a soft-spoken, gentle personality and rarely speaks up in conversation. Of the two cutscenes showing her interacting with her fellow Champions, one has her quietly watching Zelda knighting Link while the others comment on the event, the other has her shyly and somewhat haltingly trying to give Zelda some advice. The only person with whom she is portrayed talking openly and freely is with Link.
• In a mix between this and The Voiceless, as her name suggests, Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V is not only a less talkative character but is in fact entirely mute capable of only a few subtle noises due to the parasites infecting her. Besides being rather unpredictable at first, Quiet eventually shows her softer side even if she is a former enemy. The reason why she is on this page is that the player finds out later that she can speak other languages, particularly Navajo, she prefers not to speak in English because it would activate her vocal cord parasites.
• Nintendo Wars: Gage/Trak from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Repeatedly lampshaded by the supporting cast, who complain about how he never speaks more than a sentence at a time.
• The titular character in Ollo in The Sunny Valley Fair has No Mouth. The narrator simply speaks for him.
• Strix from Paladins is a Cold Sniper who doesn't talk much. When he does, it's short and to the point.
• Red from Pokémon Red and Blue rarely talks, apart from a few short lines of dialogue with the Copycat Girl, unless Visible Silence counts. In the game, it's even lampshaded, with a chef on board St. Anne calling him the "strong silent type" after asking what he wants to eat and getting no answer. At one point, his rival Blue sarcastically calls him a chatty gossip. In later games, he still doesn't say anything except ellipses with the odd exclamation point, and when he appears as an adult in Pokémon Sun and Moon, Blue comments that he's "as silent as ever," meaning it's a character trait. In Pokémon Masters he finally speaks a few words, and they're fitting enough:
  Red: Words are unnecessary.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • Sig, while not overwhelmingly quiet, isn't a very talkative character a lot of the time. In Amitie's story in 20th Anniversary, once Amitie and Sig encounter Arle, Sig only says one line to her and goes completely quiet for the next two stages.
  • Rei is very quiet and only says a few words at a time, a counterpoint to his twin sister Yu being a pun-spouting Genki Girl.
• Edgar Ross of the Red Dead Redemption series is this in Red Dead Redemption 2, where he usually stays silent while his superior Andrew Milton does the talking. It's a sharp contrast from his frequent lectures and remarks in the first game, and makes his one notable line ("Enjoy your fishing, kid... while you still can") even more noteworthy. After Milton's death, Ross steps out of this and can be heard shouting orders during the Pinkertons' assault on Beaver Hollow.
• Parker, the Player Character of Red Faction has a handful of lines in cutscenes and is totally silent in actual gameplay. Given that Ultor mooks are hardly great conversationalists, it's quite understandable that he wouldn't be very talkative.
• RPG Shooter: Starwish has Mare, whose dialogue consists solely of "..." until the post-Earthwall-battle cutscene.
• Rune Factory examples:
  • Dorothy from Rune Factory 2.
  • Kross and Cinnamon from Rune Factory Frontier.
• Playa from Saints Row has exactly four spoken lines in the entire game: three during the respective final cutscenes of the three gang storylines and one in the very last cutscene of the game. Other than that, he doesn't say a word, even in regular gameplay. They^note Playa could only be a dude in the first game, but later games allow you to pick your character's gender become more talkative from Saints Row 2 onwards, however, explaining that their earlier quietness was due to them essentially being a lackey.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Serph from Digital Devil Saga would be a Heroic Mime if not for certain cutscenes when the player is given a choice of lines of dialogue for him to speak. Interestingly, the other characters sometimes comment on this; in the first game, Heat notices Serph has been silent for a long time and asks him to say something, and in the second, Gale tells him "It's alright, you don't have to say anything."
    • This is inverted in the novel adaptation Quantum Devil Saga: Serph is no longer a Heroic Mime and he tends to talk a lot, while Heat is The Stoic, so he has much fewer lines than Serph. Justified, as Serph is a Composite Character that speaks most of Gale's dialogue from the game.
  • Likewise, Shin Megami Tensei IV's main character Flynn is noted to be a man of very few words. He very rarely opens the conversation, and when he responds to questions, he's implied to be very direct. The game itself lampshades this with The Bartender, who notes he's very rarely seen someone who talks as little as Flynn.
  • The Persona sub-series:
    • The Main Character (Minato/Makoto/etc.) from Persona 3 fits this trope to a T. To elaborate, he is a Heroic Mime who's never actually heard to speak (outside of summoning his Persona). However, the player is able to choose dialogue options for him when speaking to others. None of these options are ever more than one sentence long, and other characters have commented on his quietness.
    • The Protagonist of Persona 4, canonically known as Yu Narukami, actually has a large number of responses that are ".....". In Persona 4: The Animation this is subverted as he openly talks much more than the protagonist of Persona 3 after we get the impression he's meant to be this trope. In fact, most of the humor surrounding Yu is him being Not So Stoic as he can't help but comment on everything strange even with a straight face.
    • Played with and invoked in Persona 5; the Protagonist's seemingly quiet nature is actually a ruse used to hide his true self, as he is significantly hammier when in Phantom Thief mode. Nonetheless, he still never speaks more than a single sentence at a time. In Persona 5 The Animation, he's still silent, unlike Yu (who is Not So Stoic) and Makoto (who opens up from movie 2 onwards). Becomes Suddenly Voiced in Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight.
    • In a nice bit of subtle characterization, the Persona 3 and Persona 4 heroes are implied to have different reasons for why they each have so many '...' options. The former seems to use silence to indicate apathy towards whatever's being discussed, while the latter tends to have the option available when it will spare someone's feelings or if the situation is simply too awkward to comment on.
    • Played with in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, which involves both the P3 and P4 casts; the P4 hero only talks in the P3 route, and the P3 hero only talks in the P4 route (which also highlights the above-mentioned contrast in personality when you see how each one does speak). Both do talk in Q2.
    • A more obvious example would be Haru Okumura from Persona 5, where even though she's a shy and introverted girl, once she becomes familiar with fighting Shadows she becomes very outspoken about her enjoyment of killing them, going so far as to state: "Why is it that I get a shiver of excitement whenever the Shadows plead for their lives?".
• Henry Townshend is listed in the Silent Hill 4 manual as a "quiet individual who never lets his feelings show." Apparently, he's (mostly) capable of saying "What... the hell..?"
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Shadow, Espio, and Blaze are the more quiet and reserved characters, due to all of them being more stoic and composed.
  • Mephiles from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is this in a more creepy and evil way, although he does also use many speeches in an attempt to manipulate the other characters into becoming their pawn or believing his lies.
• Square Enix:
  • Arioch from Drakengard, except when she speaks it's usually to say something deliciously morbid or insane.
  • A2 from NieR: Automata rarely talks, but when she does, it's usually in response to a question, when she's angry, or in reaction to something.
  • Cloud of Dissidia Final Fantasy canon seems to fit this trope, with other characters going so far as to praise him for his calm and collected mindset. He also speaks relatively few words to the other Warriors of Cosmos, not to mention it seems like he's always in a perpetual contest with himself to see how he can express a thought in as few words as possible when he does speak.
    • During the ending, he almost shows off his laconic attitude. Everyone is saying their goodbyes (in reverse series order):
      Squall: Maybe we can go on a mission together again sometime. (disappears)
      Cloud: Not interested. (disappears)
  • Auron from Final Fantasy X is a stoic, taciturn man who chooses to only talk when it is important. Kimahri speaks even less, and that's not counting giving the protagonist the silent treatment at the beginning of the game.
  • Minor character Fujin from Final Fantasy VIII and Kingdom Hearts (going by Fuu there) speaks in broken statements of only one or two words at a time.
    • In the Japanese version, Fujin talked in only one kanji at a time. It's not a bad English equivalent.
    • Her last line of dialogue in Final Fantasy VIII is (in both versions) relatively long and spoken normally. In addition to highlighting the importance of what she has to say, it surprises the other characters, who presumably thought she was incapable of normal speech.
      Fujin: POSSE... We are. We always will be. Because we're a posse, we want to help you. Whatever it takes to fulfill your dream, we're willing to do. But... You're being manipulated, Seifer. You've lost yourself and your dream. You're just eating out of someone's hand. We want the old you back! Since we can't get through to you, all we have now to rely on is Squall! It's sad... Sad that we only have Squall to rely on... Seifer! Are you still gonna keep goin'?
    • FFVIII's main character, Squall, is not much of a talker, particularly early on when his "jerkass act" is at its strongest, to the point that "Whatever" and "..." are his catchphrases. Since the game allows the player to listen in on his Inner Monologues, the reasons for Squall's silences become increasingly more apparent as the game goes on.
    • For a character of Kingdom Hearts, Lexaeus of Organization XIII.
    • For a villain, Sephiroth is surprisingly non-chatty when you reach him for the final battles at the bottom of the Northern Cave in Final Fantasy VII. In fact, he doesn't say a single word.
• Stare Pris of Tail Concerto.
• Kratos from Tales of Symphonia. He has emotions, they're just not obvious at first glance.
• Team Fortress 2: Radigan Conagher, the Engineer's grandfather, is "a man of many ideas and few words."
  • This is what the official bio for the Heavy claims him to be. He cheers up once he starts mowing people down with Sasha.
    • Though other mediums (including the Russian dub of Meet the Heavy) suggest this is more a language thing.
• The Fatebinder in Tyranny can be played this way, with frequent use of the memetic "glare silently" dialogue options, which, depending on the context, imply anything from Sarcasm Failure in response to stupidity to a Death Glare to an enemy about to be crushed. Overdoing it leads to them being regarded as eccentric, with Eb being especially likely to tease you. And remaining silent when Tunon asks you a question is a surefire path to his enmity.
  • In fact, if you do it often enough, Tunon will take time out of his final trial, where you are the defendant, to ask the Fatebinder why they spend so much time being quiet. You're allowed to continue glaring silently... Or explain to him that you prefer remaining silent and observing while letting the other party self-incriminate themselves trying to fill in the silence. Doing so will make the centuries-old Humanoid Abomination admit that was a much better justification than he'd expected and thank you for satisfying his curiosity.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale):
  • Silence is almost always a valid option for the playable characters, so any of them could count as this.
  • In Season 2 Episode 3, Nick only speaks four times if he's still alive.
  • Jane rarely speaks when first introduced, but slowly opens up more to the rest of the group.
• Iceman, from the original Wing Commander easily qualifies, save one cutscene where he's oddly chosen to play Mr. Exposition. It's said that even when he does speak, he does so only barely louder than a whisper, and you have to listen closely to hear him.
• Played with in Yoku's Island Express. The third and largest of the pilgrims on the Ivory Peaks Trail never says anything until they and Yoku reach the summit of the peak, when she suddenly has a lengthy speech explaining that she'd taken a vow of silence in order to listen to what the universe had to say.

Visual Novels

• In Fleuret Blanc, you're unlikely to get anything other than grunts and terse sentences out of Masque. In a subversion, he can actually be quite the chatterbox if you engage him on a topic he actually cares about; however, the list rarely extends past masks.

Web Animation

• Teardrop from Battle for Dream Island. Though she has mouthed a single phrase, however that was with the other contestants when they all shouted "Cake At Stake" in the finale. According to Flower in one episode, she doesn't talk yet indicating that Teardrop still needs to learn how to talk.
• Kamimura from Broken Saints, apart from his internal monologues, is not the most talkative guy around. Of course, his limited knowledge of English, the language spoken to and around him for most of the series, could be part of that.
• DSBT InsaniT: Amber doesn't say much, and when she does, it's usually to quell the more obnoxious members of the group.
  • Killer doesn't say a whole lot, and when he does, it's usually something snide or sinister.
  • The trait is there for Asia, but characters like Lisa and Julie keep her from fully becoming this.
• Tord from Eddsworld. Even before he was Put on a Bus, Tord wasn't much of a talker, instead either speaking in short sentences or letting his expressions do the talking. Allegedly (though it's difficult to find sources on this), this was a trait of his real-life counterpart and voice actor, who didn't talk much partly because he didn't speak English very well and partly because he was shy. When The Bus Came Back and Tord was reintroduced with a new voice actor, the character became a lot more talkative.
• Major Snake from Lobo doesn't talk much. Justified since Snake got his uvula burned during one of his concerts.
• Corn and Vinkle in No Evil. With Corn, it's because he's deeply uncomfortable in the company of anyone but Kitty, so he tends to keep quiet and avoid people. Vinkle, by contrast, is just not very talkative or emotive; there's no indication that he's uncomfortable in social situations, he just seems to prefer to keep quiet unless he has something to say (outside of the one episode where he recites the story of Mahtigwess and Lusifee, anyway).
• While not quiet per se, Maine of Red vs. Blue comes very close to this trope — mainly because he almost never makes noise, and when he does he sounds like a Predator. Part of this is due to being shot in the throat during a mission (which we see in the prequel portions of Season 9) so he's actually physically incapable of speech, but it's established that even before that he very rarely said anything.
• RWBY:
  • Lie Ren is very quiet and speaks by far the least often out of any of the main characters, which contrasts him with his partner Nora. He starts to grow out of it as the series progresses. Ruby mentions in Volume 5 that he can be downright philosophical when he does speak. From Volume 7, his lack of communication begins causing problems between him and Nora; it resolves in Volume 8, after his Semblance evolves to make him The Empath, putting him into the unique position of being able to analyse and address people's emotional states.
    Jaune: You're quiet. I mean really quiet. And I don't actually know that much about you. But darn it, I consider you to be the brother I never had!
    long pause
    Ren: And I, you.
  • Hazel Rainart is the quietest villain. He rarely speaks unless he has to. It takes pressing his Trauma Button to get him to wax lyrical, but there's only one person alive who can do that. He blames Ozpin for the accidental death of his sister, Gretchen, a Beacon Academy student. He becomes extremely talkative whenever he's confronting Ozpin, blaming Ozpin for every act of villainy and violence he performs in Salem's name. Things come to a head in Volume 8, when he's torturing Ozpin's host, Oscar; he drops the quietness entirely and has extended arguments with both Oscar and Ozpin about why he thinks serving Salem is the logical conclusion to hating Ozpin.

Webcomics

• X of A Magical Roommate has never once spoken more than four words or six syllables in a single panel.
• Sikue, from Beyond Bloom. Lets others do the talking. Especially around unfamiliar parties.
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl has McCain, in addition to The Voiceless Amaya.
• In Boozle, the eponymous protagonist doesn't say much, and when he does, his speech bubbles contain only images or icons. Still, the other characters seem to understand him just fine (although Bitsy does comment that his speech sounds funny).
• Kanryl of Ears for Elves fits this, possibly because he spends most of his time with animals.
• In El Goonish Shive, Tedd, prior to obtaining the Transformation Gun, was so withdrawn and quiet, his cousin Nanase thought he was mute.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Roofus the Robot is probably the least talkative castmember, and he's nearly monosyllabic when he does speak. He's also probably the least intelligent of the regular cast (apart from wacky neighbors like Floyd and Heywood), though he comes across as one of the most soulful because he is so quiet. "Will I see the sky... when I am off?"
• Jagganoth from Kill Six Billion Demons. A Big Guy example (and not a particularly gentle one), his voice tends to dominate on the rare occasions he chooses to speak up.
• Zz'dtri from The Order of the Stick. Fitting as he is the Evil Counterpart of Vaarsuvius.
• Pacificators gives us Taffe, with bits of The Stoic and Emotionless Girl thrown in. Daryl getting Taffe to warm up to other people and opening up is a subplot, especially when it comes to Taffe's relationship with Larima.
• Paradox Space has Die of "The Inaugural Death of Mister Seven." He's a shameful mobster who's always caught in some embarrassing incident and spends most of his time mumbling an explanation, only briefly raising his voice to inquire about chickens, before trailing off into mumbles.
• R.J. from Paranatural only speaks when alone with Johnny's gang. Johnny tells Ed that R.J. took a vow of silence after the concert, and R.J. agrees. R.J. also recognizes comedic irony.
• Both of the Finland siblings in Scandinavia and the World, especially the brother who only swears every now and then. Except for in the sauna.
• The Shufflers has Hiddenite, who speaks so quietly that the other characters have trouble hearing him. He often needs to use something to amplify his voice, whether it be a speaker or a rolled-up newspaper. Even the font sizes of his word bubbles are smaller than the other characters.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent:
  • Coincidentally (or maybe not?), Lalli from Finland is also this. A large part of it results from Language Barrier, although he doesn't talk much with his cousin Tuuri either.
  • Mikkel also qualifies to a lesser extent, in addition to being The Stoic.
• Star Impact's Ponpon has only spoken once, and her reticence is played up in the I Have Many Names bit of her pre-fight introduction.
• Ben in Storywisher is this, and the polar opposite of his cousin Fi.
• Ghost from Tower of God only communicates with a cackle that creeps everybody out.
• Naim, from UC, so very much so. It’s so bad that the only way Iku even found out his name was by breaking into the school records.
• Weak Hero
  • Gerard doesn't speak much, and when he does it's usually to the point. At least, that's how he generally acts- once he becomes friends with Ben's gang, he opens up more and shows a more excitable side.
  • Seongmok is a serious and stony-faced boy who barely speaks at all, allowing his partner Dongha to fill up the space with his constant chatter.

Web Videos

• Ray Narvaez Jr. was this for Achievement Hunter. While he talks as much as everyone else, he's less hammy on the whole. Vocal Evolution eventually kicked in and he became more energetic, at least until 2014 when he was understandably annoyed by his Twitch account forcibly being taken over.
  • After his departure, newer members Alfredo Diaz and Fiona Nova are also quite energetic but tend to get drowned out by the others.
• Escape the Night: Due to confessions, every character gets a decent amount of lines and screen time thanks to confessionals. However, Andrea from season one gets only two confessionals in total and only speaks three times during her final episode(usually A Day In The Lime Light for every character).
• Evek is the most silent of the Freelance Astronauts, but then, given his competition, it's not exactly a hard title to achieve.
• Fantöm from Noob doesn't speak much and sometimes seems to have developed his "I see" Verbal Tic as a conversation filler.
• NintendoCapriSun while on The Runaway Guys. It doesn't help that the other two have No Indoor Voice.
• Downplayed with Travis in SMPLive. He's quieter and calmer than most others on the server, sure, but he also has a huge chaotic streak.
• DaveChaos of the Yogscast tends to say little when doing multiplayer content with the others. Granted, this could be because he's often with Simon Lane, the noisiest member by far.

Western Animation

• In The 7D barring Dopey who cannot speak but uses whistles and other sounds to communicate, Bashful and Sleepy are the least talkative of the dwarves, Bashful due to his shy nature and Sleepy due to being asleep half the time, some episodes have one or both of them having a line or two or remaining silent throughout the whole cartoon.
• In Animaniacs Wakko is the least talkative of the Warner siblings as in some segments he doesn't say anything (this is in marked contrast to Yakko, who is aptly named).
• As a reference to how she hasn't spoken in the twenty years she's been a background character, Maria from Arthur is presented as this in her Lower-Deck Episode. She prefers to write her replies when Ratburn calls upon her in class, was a mime on Halloween, and Arthur has apparently never even heard her speak. It turns out she has a terrible stutter and, despite seeing a speech therapist, is very embarrassed of it.
• Mai on Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • On the DVD commentary, the creators said that when they were looking for a VA for Zuko, they were looking for someone who could say one word but imply a lifetime of suffering. He was a man of few words for the first two seasons.
  • Longshot's whole character revolves around this.
• Black Panther in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes
  Wasp: I forgot you talked!
• Austin from The Backyardigans in some episodes, such as "Heart of the Jungle." He grows out of it in the newer seasons.
• Katana from Batman: The Brave and the Bold. When she does speak, her Outsiders teammates immediately stop whatever they're doing and listen to her. In the episode "Inside the Outsiders", there's a flashback dream sequence to a time when she was chattier. It's revealed that she doesn't speak in the present in order to honor her sensei's memory... and because she blames her loose tongue for indirectly causing the sensei's death.
• Shifty Dingo from Blinky Bill, mainly due to being a Shrinking Violet.
• Of the main trio in Camp Lazlo, Clam is the least talkative of the three. Most of his lines are just one-word repetitions of what others have said. In fact, Word of God stated he was intended to be totally mute, but changed as the creator felt it wouldn't work well.
• All the operatives of Sector V on Codename: Kids Next Door have a position/nickname: Numbuh 3 is "The Flirt", Numbuh 2 is "The Inventor" and Numbuh 5 is "The Quiet One". At least, that's how she started out before becoming a more talkative Only Sane Man.
• Giganto in Gigantosaurus speaks very rarely. Whenever he does, it's usually very short sentences.
• Brainy on Hey Arnold! has only said eight words during the entire series: "something", "I dunno", "Hi Helga" and "I'll go with you". However, it's because of his Vader Breath.
• Kaeloo: Eugly the rabbit rarely ever says anything (not just because she's The Unintelligible, she usually keeps absolutely silent).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • Applejack's brother Big Macintosh, which his younger sister Apple Bloom attributes to extreme shyness. In most instances, he only communicates by saying "Eeyup" or "Nope" in response to direct questions. At virtually all other times, his remarks are either similarly short and concise, directed at someone he's exceptionally comfortable talking to (such as Applejack at the beginning of "Applebuck Season"), or meant to convey his displeasure.
  • Speaking of shyness, Fluttershy is the least talkative of the Mane 6 because of this. There's been quite a few episodes where she only has a line or two at most and several where she's completely silent for the whole episode. There have been a few cases where the only sound she makes is either a yelp, a sigh or a scream.
  • Princess Luna seems to be turning into this somewhat, most notably in the season 4 premiere. Whenever the two sisters share a scene, she tends to let Celestia do most of the talking. Considering the season 2 episode "Luna Eclipsed" showed Luna as speaking solely in Antiquated Linguistics due to how much time she spent out of touch with civilization during her imprisonment as Nightmare Moon, it is likely she still struggles somewhat with learning the modern Equestrian vocabulary.
  • Shrinking Violet Marble Pie is a sharp contrast to her Motor Mouth older sister Pinkie Pie, communicating pretty much entirely through "Mm-hmm."
  • A more villainous example would be King Sombra, who in the 2-parter "The Crystal Empire" doesn't say much aside from growls, evil laughs, and screams; he only has a total of five eligible lines. Averted in "The Beginning of the End" where he becomes much more vocal.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: Gopher's Grandpappy in "To Dream the Impossible Scheme" is mostly not that talkative, often limiting to what he says to "Yup" and "Nope", and is described as "a gopher of few words", or in Tigger's case, "a gopher of two words". However, he talks more vocally in the final scene.
• Oh Yeah! Cartoons:
  • Max of the shorts "Max and his Special Problem" and "Max and the Pigeon Incident" barely makes any utterances that are actual words, being slightly more talkative in the latter.
  • The title character of the short "Magic Trixie" only has one line of dialogue ("I have natural talent"), two if you count the obligatory clip at the end of every short where the main character shouts "Oh Yeah! Cartoons".
• Spoofed in Pepper Ann with, "Hush, the senior who never speaks."
• Brenda from Perfect Hair Forever almost never speaks. She does, however, battle cry on occasion, and she said something in Japanese exactly once.
• Ferb from the Disney cartoon Phineas and Ferb, who, despite being one of the two main characters, generally only speaks once or twice per episode (and even then, there are some episodes where he doesn’t speak at all), expressing himself the rest of the time through nonverbal cues, which can be interpreted by the mostly talkative Phineas. These lines tend to be either the most random or funniest of the episode.
  • And like everything on the show, this is lampshaded to death. In the first episode, he's introduced as being "a man of action". In the episode "Candace Disconnected" he says two conservative lines, prompting Phineas to say, "Well, aren't you chatty today."
  • The most lines Ferb has ever said at once can be seen here. Watch and be amazed.
  • Ferb's mean counterpart Thor from "Thaddeus and Thor" doesn't speak at all, with Thaddeus doing all of the talking.
• Velma Dinkley on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo ("Velma said 'Jinkies!'" "It MUST be a clue!")
• Pig Three from The Raccoons is sometimes this; he is not so bright nor is he so dumb.
• Ashley T. from Recess.
• The eponymous character of Samurai Jack is one of these; there are several episodes in which he never speaks. He didn't speak much as a child either; of the five flashback episodes to his childhood, he only spoke in one of them.
• The Simpsons:
  • Referenced in "Lemon of Troy", where Bart and friends prepare to raid Shelbyville; Bart is assigning roles based on stock characters from war movies, and declares that Todd Flanders will be "the quiet religious guy who ends up going crazy."
  • In the episode where Homer joins the Navy, his superior officer gives the following keynote speech: "I'm a man of few words. Any questions?"
• Kenny from South Park especially in the later episodes rarely talks and he is not involved in the plots as much as he used to be. And besides, he's The Unintelligible too.
• Raven from Teen Titans (2003).
  Slade: It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?
• Leon in Titan Maximum is incredibly quiet for a monkey and his only response to things is usually just a blink. He does seem to be the Only Sane Man of the group though.
• Tammy of the LARPers and Mary of the Geniuses from Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race both barely spoke in the very brief time they were on the show.
• The Venture Bros. has Kano of the original Team Venture, who doesn't speak a word to anyone. It's later revealed that it's a vow of silence he took after killing a "great man", and he only breaks it once in over 30 years to speak with Brock. It's much, much later revealed that said "great man" was Venturion, A.K.A. the cyborg resurrection of the Blue Morpho, to whom Kano was his original sidekick.
• Wander over Yonder:
  • The Enfant Terrible Little Bits doesn't say anything for the first half of her debut episode until the scene where Sylvia spies on her.
  • In "The Waste of Time", Wilmur Wright doesn't say much aside from "Yup!" and "Nope!", while his brother Orbble does most of the talking.
• Ice Bear from We Bare Bears rarely says more than a handful of terse sentences in the space of a single episode. In a few episodes, such as "Everyday Bears", Ice Bear doesn't speak at all, nor does he speak in the baby bear episodes.
• Apocalypse from X-Men: Evolution, in contrast to other versions of the character. Despite being the Big Bad of the last two seasons, he never speaks at all until the Grand Finale, and then his dialogue consists entirely of terse orders for minions or blunt statements of superiority (almost all delivered telepathically). One gets the sense that he simply dislikes lowering himself to speak to common mortals.

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