Basic Trope: Germans are portrayed as being very serious and stuffy, or angsty and melancholic.
- Straight: Hans is German and is very serious.
- Exaggerated:
- Hans is German and is actually incapable of feeling emotions.
- All Germans are portrayed as sour people.
- Germany is the World of Silence.
- Downplayed:
- Hans is fairly uptight, but not much more than the rest of the cast.
- Hans is a Knight in Sour Armor.
- Justified:
- German culture really does support hard work and a strict division of business and pleasure.
- Germany is a Crapsack World (especially the East German parts) and Hans doesn't like the lifestyle, but he rather doesn't talk about it.
- Inverted:
- Hans is a jolly German who loves chocolate, beer, and seeing his favorite techno bands play at nightclubs.
- In a work set in German, an American character is notably dry and serious.
- Subverted: Hans seems very serious at first, but then is caught going kind of crazy at a party.
- Double Subverted: Hans has a Work Hard, Play Hard attitude.
- Parodied: Hans is a Chew Toy who stoically suffers thorough lots of slapstick.
- Zig-Zagged: Hans sometimes seems very serious, sometimes not.
- Averted: Hans is not notably serious.
- Enforced:
- The work is unexpectedly popular in Germany and the work's attempt to exploit this isn't well-researched enough for anything more nuanced.
- The writer is an East German (or have researched East Germany) and they have endured the sad state of the fall of East Germany; to them, portray the entire Germany as a Crapsack World is just appropriate.
- Lampshaded: "Geez, you'd think after living through three crazy dictatorships, those Germans would want to get that stick out of their ass now."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Bob stews trouble between Hans and his American girlfriend Alice by claiming Hans didn't like Alice's birthday gift for him, even though Hans just isn't enthusiastic overall.
- Defied: Hans realizes he can come off as too cold to foreigners and he tries to be more expressive around them.
- Discussed: "Hans is The Woobie and he doesn't even show any positive emotions ever possible." "Maybe we can only hope when he smiles."
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Hans is The Ghost, but after Bob talks to him offscreen, he makes a sarcastic commeunt about him being "a real bunch of laughs."
Back to Germanic Depressives.
