Basic Trope: A character uses snark to hide their negative emotions.
- Straight: Alice, a Deadpan Snarker, turns out to have depression.
- Exaggerated: Alice, who uses the most snark out of the cast, turns out to have a horrible past and be suicidal.
- Downplayed:
- Alice doesn't use that much snark in the first place.
- Alternatively, although Alice has no suicidal thoughts, she does have some problems that need to be addressed.
- Justified: Alice used to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold before becoming depressed.
- Inverted:
- Alice uses snark to cover up her happiness.
- Alice, a straw nihilist turns out quite capable of making dry remarks.
- Subverted:
- Alice uses snark, but she's not depressed.
- Alice is snarky and depressed, but she's not using the snark as a cover...
- Double Subverted:
- She uses snark to hide her feelings of loneliness.
- ...she takes pride in her wits and uses snark to bolster her flagging self-esteem.
- Parodied:
- Alice switches between The Eeyore and the Deadpan Snarker without dropping the snark. Bob and the other characters say what the heck is wrong with her openly.
- Alice says to Bob, "You're dumb." Bob says back, "No, You." Alice then curls up on the floor and loudly sobs for a good ten minutes or so.
- Zig Zagged: Alice's mask of snarkiness cracks, revealing her depression, but she doesn't drop the act.
- Averted: Alice snarks at people so she can piss them off.
- Enforced: "We need to show Alice's sadness, but we can't make her pretend to be happy! Let's just make her current snarker attitude be a facade."
- Lampshaded:Bob: "You're a snarker. I like that."
Alice: "That's just how I look! Inside I want to die!" - Invoked: Alice has something tragic happen to her, so she takes her current state of snark and makes that a mask.
- Exploited: Charlie breaks Alice's mask by reminding her of a Noodle Incident.
- Defied:
- "I'm not going to hide my sadness behind my sarcasm. I don't care, I'll just show it."
- Alternatively: “Ha! You really though my cruelty was just a coping mechanism didn’t you? Like it was some sort of sign of depression?! NO! The only thing that makes me sad is how stupid of you to think I have depression! I am cruel because I feel like it.
- Bob decides to give a vicious "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Alice saying that he will NOT help her, after all those times she snarked at him, leaving her alone in misery feeling even worse.
- “A bitch is a bitch. So what if she’s depressed? That doesn’t excuse her nasty behavior towards us.”
- Discussed: "Alice is being more snarkier than usual. I bet something happened to her."
- Conversed: "That Alice is suspiciously snarky... I bet she's hiding something."
- Played For Laughs:
- Alice is the primary Plucky Comic Relief whose over-the-top snark is caused by a Hilariously Abusive Childhood that Crosses the Line Twice.
- Alice's attitude is revealed to be the result of being called an "upstart" 25 years ago, when she was 10, over a bad cup of lemonade. Everybody else in the cast calls it out as not really as Earth-shattering as Alice treats it.
- Alice's snark is treated as Dissonant Serenity in the midst of the chaos that is going on. Once it passes, Alice finally has a freak out over nearly being torn apart by a cocaine-fueled grizzly bear and begs everybody to keep this whole mess a secret.
- Played For Drama: Because of the fact that Alice hides her emotions behind snark, she drives away everyone who can help her with her problems.
- Played For Horror:
- Alice hides her suicidal thoughts behind snark. Nobody notices this until she kills herself (or tries and gets herself maimed as a result).
- Alice's mask does not hides depression. It hides a murderous maniac waiting for a reason to go off. When she finally goes on a killing spree, she maintains the snark as a Freddy Krueger-esque Faux Affably Evil act.
- Implied: Alice is mainly just a Deadpan Snarker, but occasionally there are hints she might secretly be depressed.
- Deconstructed:
- When Alice tries to open up about her problems, she does so in a snarky, ironic tone. Because of this, everyone assumes she is just being edgy rather than having serious problems.
- It does not matters if it's unprocessed trauma from all of her family being killed in a train wreck when she was five and a childhood that would beat the Misery Poker championship with the entire works of Charles Dickens and Roald Dahl combined as contenders, a jackass attitude is a jackass attitude and someone is going to get really upset about becoming a target of it sooner or later.
- Reconstructed: Alice's irreverent outlook enables her to objectively understand her problems and work on fixing them.
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