Basic Trope: An oppressive regime requires citizens to be happy.
- Straight: Alice, the ruler of Troperville, enforces a law that everyone must be happy or they will be sentenced to prison for life or without the possibility of parole.
- Exaggerated: Alice threatens to sadistically kill anyone who isn't ecstatic at all times, even during a national tragedy. They must also be unconditionally happy and never stay sad, or they will be in the asylum immediately, as well as lose all of their free wills.
- Downplayed:
- Alice, manager at a Kitschy Themed Restaurant, takes the requirement that employees at least come across as happy a little too seriously.
- Yelling and shouting in public will cause one to receive a monetary fine, and maybe some community service.
- Justified:
- Alice notices that all of the citizens are cynical and this doesn't suit them well with her crazy, yet idealistic beliefs.
- Alice is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
- Alice wants everyone to be happy so that she can be happy.
- Alice was badly mistreated by people around her, whom constantly pretended to be kind and decent people while being horrible bastards who reveled in their false image to ensure they could get away with their misdeeds. Alice eventually snapped from the cruel treatment, forcibly enslaved everyone who was even tangentially related to the people who destroyed her life, and now forces them to be happy even through the torment she inflicts on them, as a constant reminder of how they could have avoided this if they'd just been genuinely kind instead of malignant selfish assholes using false happiness to hide from the consequences. Nearly everyone deeply regrets that they were so horrible, and desperately want to stop the misery of being forced to be happy, but Alice is too far gone to listen or believe them, and everyone has to pay the price.
- Inverted:
- Alice enforces a law that everyone must be unhappy or suffer a severe punishment.
- Alice rewards those who are unhappy.
- Subverted:
- Turns out that everyone is happy, and Troperville is a pleasant place to live.
- Alice doesn't care about happy people either, it's just an excuse to discourage rebellion.
- Double Subverted: ...because shady dealings behind the scenes keep out the "undesirables".
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice doesn't force her citizens to be happy.
- Enforced: The work was created as An Aesop warning against forcing people to be happy against their will.
- Lampshaded: "I'm enforcing these laws because I don't approve of unhappy people."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: "They may be unhappy, but that doesn't give me the right to tell them to be happy."
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: The heroes enter a town full of creepy, smiling people. They all insist the heroes be happy, to a disturbing extent. The reason for this is unexplained.
- Deconstructed: The more Alice forces citizens to be happy, the more they become unhappy. Thus, they all overthrow Alice as their ruler.
- Reconstructed: Alice succeeds and now everyone is happy. According to official papers anyway.
Smile, Citizen. Always remember: Happiness Is Mandatory.
