Basic Trope: A character smiles all the time regardless of the situation.
- Straight: Alice is always grinning ear to ear whether it's appropriate or not.
- Exaggerated:
- Regardless of the severity of the situation, Alice is always smiling even (or especially) during funerals and wars. Sometimes sobbing with a smile on her face.
- Alice has never frowned her entire life.
- Every character never frowns at all.
- Downplayed: Sure, Alice smiles a lot, but she also knows when to get serious.
- Justified:
- Alice has been Brainwashed or otherwise forced into being happy all of the time.
- Alice's life is too peaceful and stress-free for her to experience other emotions than happiness.
- Alice is a Friendly Shopkeeper who thinks that smiling all the time is gonna leave a good impression on customers enough to make them come back again.
- Alice smiled so much when she was younger that her face stayed that way as she got older, it became her "neutral" expression, so although she is a very happy person, she isn't always smiling when she's smiling.
- Inverted: Alice is a Perpetual Frowner
- Subverted:
- The first episode she shows up in, Alice always smiles right up until the end, but doesn't smile at all for the next, more dramatic episode.
- While Alice appears to be smiling, that's just us misreading her felinoid facial expressions.
- Double Subverted: ... and after the third episode, she's always smiling again.
- Parodied: All the other characters are scared of Alice and her permanent Cheshire Cat Grin.
- Zig Zagged: Depending on the Writer, Alice smiles more than anybody else or frowns more than her friends.
- Averted: Alice doesn't smile more than any other person.
- Enforced: "Man the characters in our show are always too serious and grim, so how about we add a perpetually smiling character to lighten up the mood for a change?"
- Lampshaded: "Alice, knock that stupid smile off, this is serious!"
- Invoked:
- Alice takes some type of drug that causes her to smile constantly so that she appears happy (or friendly) at all times.
- Alice smiles all the time to encourage others to follow her and smile a lot, too, in their daily life instead of frowning or crying, etc... because it's healthier and draws people together!
- Alice is a celebrity, and because photos of her get taken all the time even without her notice, she constantly wears a smile on her face just in case and so she looks good in all of them!
- Exploited: Alice gets hired for almost every commercial within the show because she can promote whatever she's selling without vomiting on her own copy.
- Defied: Alice attempts to find a cure for the rare disease-causing her smile, or starts to frown as hard as possible when that fails.
- Discussed: "Everyone thinks that just because I'm constantly smiling that my smile isn't genuine. Well, news flash people, it is real. I refuse to succumb to misery and other negative emotions, okay!"
- "I love my name so much. 'Alice' is one of the only names you can say while smiling without changing your facial expression. I'm really blessed to have such a beautiful name! Thank you so much, mom and dad, for giving me a name that I don't have to stop smiling to say when introducing myself. And I can say it clearly, too!"
- Conversed: "You know Alice from That Generic Show? I wouldn't be surprised if she turned out to be psycho. Just look at that Nightmare Face of a smile she's always wearing!"
- "I like Alice, she's a ray of sunshine and one of my favorite characters on the show. I just wish she'd stop smiling long enough to swallow her spit. She has a pretty smile, but her saliva strings aren't so pretty"
- Deconstructed
- Alice is only pretending to be happy.
- Because Alice has a smile on her face 24/7, people always call her fake and creepy, and no matter how she tries to convince them that it's truly genuine they claim that she is putting on a show, never believing her. Thus, causing her to lose that smile and become depressed.
- Alice has a lot of saliva in her mouth from smiling so much, as she smiled so much that she physically can't close her mouth because it stayed that way, possibly giving a disgusting or even unintentionally terrifying foaming-at-the-mouth appearance. Everything she says sounds "wet", she can't even say her own name properly. Her smile that would look otherwise sweet instead grosses people out. Every time she looks down, she's a mess because she's helpless to stop herself from drooling. And she slurps it like it's hot soup every few minutes.
- Reconstructed
- In a case of Becoming the Mask, she becomes happy.
- Alice makes new friends and goes back to her old sunny self.
- People don't notice Alice's saliva most of the time because they're not as judgmental as the setup leads us to believe. People find Alice's "lisp" attractive. Alice declares she loves her name because it can be said clearly without breaking a smile, she even thanks her parents for naming her Alice because she feels blessed to have a name that can be said properly while smiling. Alice puts her hand in front of her mouth so she doesn't drool when she looks down. Alice's boyfriend, Bob, thinks her "slurp" sounds cute.
- Played For Drama: Alice always seems to be smiling, but it's not always a nice one.
- Played For Laughs: Evuls, a very dangerous villain, tries to do various horrible things to Alice to make her lose that smiling expression, ranging from throwing her in a boiling cauldron to gruesomely killing her whole family in front of her which only makes her smile grow wider and she even bursts into a guffaw!
- Played For Horror: as played for Laughs, but more emphasis is placed on how Eldritch Alice has to be, to the point of horrifying Evuls, his mooks and the heroes.
Back to Perpetual Smiler. :)
