OOC Is Serious Business

Chuck: Does this seem like a particularly awkward silence? James: Dude, Miriam's not saying anything. It's the end times, man. —Out There

(The title should be read as "Out-of-Character is Serious Business")

Some characters have strong traits that they are known by. This is for when a character momentarily breaks away from their normal habits to make a point or because the plot demands it. Often causes the other characters to do a Double Take and mention why this event is Serious Business. When most or all of these OOC moments happen at once, you can be sure that the world is ending, or at least the Eleventh Hour, leading characters to behave in ways they normally wouldn't, because they know they might not have another chance to do so.

Some classic Archetypal Characters who might be the cause of this:

• The Actual Pacifist starts a fight.
• The Alcoholic/Bottle Fairy puts down their drink for the time being (or dumps it out and swears to never drink again).
• The Teetotaler needs a drink.
• The Berserker calms down.
• The Cloudcuckoolander begins to talk and/or act logically.
• The Complete Monster pets the dog.
• The constant Cool Mask or make-up wearer suddenly removes it for unknown reasons.
  • Bonus if the person wore mask to conceal their face.
• A Cowardly Lion stands up to fight.
• The Deadpan Snarker is at a loss for words.
• The Determinator gives up.
• A practitioner of Dissonant Serenity loses their cool.
• One who Doesn't Like Guns uses one.
• One whose eyes are always shut opens their eyes for a second.
• The Extreme Doormat stands up for themselves.
• The Fettered or The Unfettered compromises on their ideal or goal.
• The Fundamentalist thinks someone on their own side is too extreme.
  • Bonus if it's Big Bad and/or Complete Monster is the one outraged at something horrible even for them.
• The Glory Hound lets someone else take the credit.
• The Gosh Dang It to Heck person swears.
• The character with a Hair-Trigger Temper waves off a slight.
• The Kid-Friendly adult actually attacks child.
• The Man Child acts their age as in become social or intellectual matured and behave like one.
• The Messiah wants to kill someone.
• The Motor Mouth shuts up.
• Ms. Fanservice dresses conservatively, and not for health reasons.
• The Nicknamer calls another character by their real name.
• The person with No Indoor Voice whispers.
• The practitioner of Don't Hit Women clause actually does.
• The Omnicidal Maniac tells someone that You Will Be Spared.
• The Perpetual Frowner stops frowning.
• The Perpetual Smiler stops smiling.
• The Plucky Comic Relief becomes dead serious.
• The Pollyanna admits to despair.
• The Proper Lady uses improper language.
• The Shrinking Violet/Fragile Flower becomes confident.
• Sir Swearsalot doesn't drop even a single, mild swear.
• The Stoic becomes Not So Stoic.
• The Terse Talker speaks in complete sentences.
• The Trickster Mentor clearly and directly tells their protege what they wants.
• One who practices Thou Shalt Not Kill takes a life.
• The Voiceless and The Silent Bob both talks.

A Super-Trope of:

• You Called Me "X" - It Must Be Serious
• You Are a Credit to Your Race (for racists)
• When She Smiles (sometimes)
• Suddenly Voiced
• Sarcasm Failure
• Rant-Inducing Slight
• Precision F-Strike (when it involves a character who normally doesn't swear)
• Old Master (who doesn't break into fights for just anything)
• Not So Stoic
• Even Evil Has Standards (more so the closer to Complete Monster the villain expressing this sentiment is)
• Batman Grabs a Gun

This is a trope for when a somewhat-Out of Character action is used to draw extra attention to the scene (similar to a Title Drop). It isn't Hidden Depths because it isn't telling us something about the character we didn't already know; it's similar to an Out-of-Character Moment in that this is specifically the usage of such a moment to draw attention to a scene.

Not to be confused with the way some people react to badly-written Fan Fiction.

Examples of OOC Is Serious Business include:

Subpages

• Anime & Manga
• Comics
• Fanworks
• Films
• Literature
• Live-Action Television
• Video Games and Visual Novels
• Western Animation

Other Examples

Professional Wrestling

• Since wrestling announcers are supposed to be loud and talking all the time, it was always a pretty safe bet that when they went completely silent, it was a sign that someone was legitimately hurt (instead of when they kept talking, which showed it was part of the show). However, that's not quite as accurate now, since the people behind the scenes have caught on to this, and have started to use dead air when trying to sell a Kayfabe injury.
• When an announcer drops the kayfabe and explain about an incident “not part of the show”, you need to pay attention as they explain the matter since shoot accidents, known as a botch, have been known to happen with grave consequences. If ones needs another clue, EMTs being brought in should be a red flag. This is often known by fans as “Owen Voice” after Owen Hart was killed while he was being via lowered harness and grapple line to the ring from the rafters. The harness broke and Owen fell to his death, leaving everyone including Jerry Lawler in shock. This episode happen on an Over the Edge pay-per-view event in Kansas City, Missouri, and Lawler was silenced considered he made jokes about Hart earlier that night.

Tabletop Games

• A number of character-driven RPGs give characters compulsions to act in certain ways and require expending resources to ignore them, effectively making Out-Of-Character a form of Limit Break.

Web Comics

• Erfworld: Jack Snipe never, ever stops cracking jokes and speaking in riddles, even to Wanda. Except when she's just barely recovering consciousness after killing her own mount, plummeting hundreds of feet to the ground and just barely getting healed back from the brink of death. Once Wanda's back on her feet, though, Jack picks it right back up again.
• Sinfest: Sweet, caring, smart, shy little boy. Fantastic Racism against Fuchsia.

Criminy: Enough.

• Homestuck
  • Dave Strider is normally an unflappable Badass, so when he stares at his blood-stained hands for ten minutes after throwing the corpse of an Alternate Timeline version of himself out of a window, the audience knows that the Cerebus Syndrome has kicked into high gear.
  • The trolls all have a characteristic quirk or two when it comes to communicating through their messaging system. When Gamzee's changed from "hOnK" to "honk HONK", signifying that he's now sober and completely Ax Crazy, Karkat freaked out. (Along with the rest of the readers.)

CG: OH MY GOD CG: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

• This Is the Worst Idea You've Ever Had

"Oh my God! She's letting him drive her car!"

• Sluggy Freelance: When Torg starts to actually think (or simply stops acting silly), you know business has just got serious.
• Order of the Stick
  • The first time Elan proves he can actually be useful, it comes as a shock to his teammates. Belkar, naturally, also takes advantage of this to trick Roy.
  • Vaarsuvius passing on a perfect opportunity to say "I Told You So" can get Durkon really worried.
  • Belkar is a Heroic Sociopath Blood Knight at all times, so when he suddenly starts advocating the most peaceful solution to a conflict to reduce the bloodshed... it seriously freaks out Haley and Celia. (Which was of course his intention all along.)
  • Thog gets mean and nasty.
• Eight Bit Theater: Black Mage takes a serious hit during the fight with Lich. When the thickheaded and childlike Fighter realizes he's not getting up, he starts becoming visibly scared and a whole lot less strange, going so far as to beg the corpse to yell at him for being stupid.
• From Head Trip, Mal is an unapologetic Chaotic Neutral Comedic Sociopath. But when confronted with Twilight, she breaks down crying and begs a priest to come over and exorcise the book.
• In an arc of Dr. McNinja, Mitzi McNinja gets cursed to slowly disintegrate into ash, like a mummy. After she gets far enough along, she has a talk with her son, Sean, and apologizes for the way she raised him. Leading to this exchange.

Dan McNinja: (Returning with a method to cure his wife) How is she? Sean: Well... She gave me the "I'm sorry I was a horrible mother" speech. Dan McNinja: DRIVE FASTER.

Web Original

• Vixen of the Desu Des Brigade is very relaxed, informal and happy in most of her reviews, even in a lot of the shows that Squick her out. Then came her Film Fox review of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, where she's in complete distress with no escape throughout and screams more than once.
• It has been noticed recently in Marble Hornets by many that Totheark's videos have become disturbingly more coherent.
• Meta-example: When Yahtzee gives a game an even remotely positive review, his fanbase explodes.
• This My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fanart. When Fluttershy drops an Atomic F-Bomb, you know things are bad.
• When The Nostalgia Critic doesn't express joy, anger or depression through swearing and instead goes for Gosh Dang It to Heck ("holy smokes" is the usual), you know it's even more Serious Business than usual. His Cuteness Proximity-overload review of Sesame Street is probably the only episode with no swearing whatsoever.
  • In the Bum Review of The Avengers, Doug breaks character twice (pulling off Chester's trademark wool cap and wig) to give a Not Making This Up Disclaimer and assure the viewers that yes, the movie is that awesome, and they really should go out and see it.
• The Nostalgia Chick never apologizes. So when she tells Nella that she's sorry for not including her in a review, you can see the manipulation coming a mile off.

Religion

• In the New Testament Jesus has a very serious OOC moment known as "the cleansing of the temple". While some people may argue that Jesus could never have acted out of character, there is no doubt that even (and especially) his friends and followers were shocked by what they saw. He was literally the poster boy for patience and forgiveness. But everybody has at least one thing that really burns them up and makes them want to break something/someone; for Jesus, it seems, it was taking advantage of poor and ignorant people in the name of God (the corruption in the Jewish church was along the same lines as the selling of indulgences in Martin Luther's time). When he saw what was going on, he just stood there, looking around and emanating so much anger that he didn't even have to raise his voice for everybody in the temple to know that some serious shit was about to go down if they didn't get out of there. He flipped over a money-changer's table, and the priests and merchants ran like hell.

Jesus: It is written: "My house shall be a place of prayer." But you are turning it into a den of thieves.

Real Life

• Stephen Colbert testified to Congress, in character, about the terrible and paradoxical treatment of migrant workers in the US. When asked why he felt that this issue, as opposed to others, was so important, he displays this trope in such a subtle yet beautiful way.
• A soldier from World War II managed to invoke this trope unintentionally; he was well known for having a very poor grasp of punctuation, and once joked with his wife that if he ever sent her a perfectly punctuated letter, she should underline the first word of every sentence and it would reveal a coded message. when he was captured by the Nazis and put into a labour camp, he remembered the joke, and sent his wife a coded message hidden inside a well punctuated one. It worked, and his wife, with the help of the British government, managed to smuggle various items to him which he used to escape the camp.
• In 1985: the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) had gotten congress to pay attention to their concerns over music and wanted to produce a parental warning system on all music albums. Dee Snider of Twisted Sister were among the musicians who testified against censorship and the proposed warning system. What made Snider unusual, he didn’t have has usually make-up on and it meant business. He had his sleeve-less shirt along with denim vest and jeans, but no makeup. He also gave a straight forward speech, which including his Christian upbringing, having a family his own, and his straight-edge life style.
• On Diagnosis: Dead or Alive, there was a man named David's wife, Bonnie, who had some terminal motor neuron disease, throwing her left arm around him (which she wasn't able to do since nearing that stage of her illness), and pulled him into something of a hug before passing away the next day.

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