Steve Smith (American Dad!) - Personality

Personality

Steve was born in October 7. He is portrayed as a stereotypical geek: he is a bit of a social outcast, wears glasses and habors a strong academic interest in science, especially chemistry. More typically geeky traits of Steve's include his interests in Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter and Star Wars. Like most unpopular students, Steve is often physically and verbally picked on by the bullies of the more popular social circle. Steve's father, Stan, is often frustrated with Steve, as he would prefer that Steve engage in activities that would improve his social standing, like sports, a conflict that was first explored in the first season episode "All About Steve". Stan sometimes attempts to change Steve, usually unsuccessfully, as when he once gave Steve an experimental performance enhancer. The steroid caused Steve to grow female breasts but also ironically made him more popular at school. Steve looks up to his dad as a role model but his naïvete often leads him to follow his dad's advice or convictions, seemingly blindly. This led him to once openly display homophobia. Another time Steve received a failing grade on a presentation about fossils using information he got from Stan because he thought his dad was intelligent, despite Roger's attempts to convince him otherwise.

Steve's mother, Francine, does not care that Steve is a geek, and is more protective of him, seeing him as her "baby", a status she once attempted to prolong by using a special drug to keep him from reaching puberty. Steve's brown hair comes from Francine, who actually dyes her hair blonde.

Steve does not share many interests with his sister, Hayley, but has occasionally collaborated with her on schemes, such as when they tried to break up a young couple so Hayley could get the guy and Steve the girl, which ended up backfiring on both of them. They have also tried to teach both of their parents individual lessons, like when they tried to teach Francine not to be racist, only to learn that she was actually prejudiced against left-handed people, or when they exacted revenge against Stan for turning a homeless shelter into a bumfight business.

Steve and Roger play video games together, get advice from each other and come up with schemes together. For example, he once planned to make a Girls Gone Wild-type video and market it in order to generate money to buy a video game console. In another scheme, Steve and Roger ran away to New York to make their fortunes, while the rest of the family thought killed when lighting set the family's treehouse on fire. Steve's tendency to inflate his own ego, combined with Roger's easily irritated and vindictive nature, often leads the latter to physically abuse or play a prank on Steve because of a real or perceived slight or insult. Occasionally, Steve gets even, like when he once conned Roger out of $50,000. Despite their love-hate relationship, Steve considers Roger his best friend, even once intervening to rescue the alien from an abusive relationship.

A freshman at Pearl Bailey High School, Steve is a highly capable musician, having taken up the cello to once impress a girl. In a later episode, however, Steve says that he has been playing the cello since he was nine. Steve also plays guitar and sings, which he did as part of a band in the episode "American Dream Factory." In fact, both of the songs Steve's band rehearses ("Livin' on the Run" and "Sunset Blvd"), were originally recorded by Scott Grimes, who voices Steve. Among Steve's other talents are being able to read Elvish, use Morse code, and communicate with dolphins.

While academically skilled, Steve is also quite naïve and not socially savvy. For example, he knows more about the New York Stock Exchange than about prostitution. As a result, he can sometimes be tricked into believing outrageously implausible lies. Roger typically takes advantage of this, especially when he is upset with Steve or when he is simply bored. Once Roger made Steve believe he was not really Stan and Francine's biological child. Another time Roger tricked Steve into believing he was an adolescent wizard, and took him to a drug dealer's house, telling him it was secretly a wizard's school, and the drug lab inside a Potions class.

Although normally even-tempered and relatively tolerant, Steve cries when he is notably upset, but he has also had uncontrolled bursts of rage, during which he breaks nearby objects and screams very loudly. If pressed hard enough, Steve will also hit or attack people, such as when he beat up Beauregard La Fontaine for insulting his father, even though he is generally not aggressive or an adept fighter, as he was unable to even make a fist in "Bully for Steve", for example. He also uses childhood paraphernalia that teenagers have typically outgrown, such as the teddy bear he is implied to sleep with in "Live and Let Fry", and the Care Bears towel he is revealed to use in "Camp Refoogee".

In Hurricane!, it appeared that Steve might have a fetish for Asians and pregnant women, either separately or even both, when Francine found multiple magazines in Steve's bedroom. "Stanny Slickers II: The Legend of Ollie's Gold" and "Stan Time" also imply that Steve has a fetish for robotic women (in the former episode, he tried to build a date out of a vacuum cleaner and was shown to have a fully functioning female robot in Stan's vision of the future where Stan is famous after death, but everyone makes rude comments about his children being freaks. In the later episode, one of Steve's porno movie ideas depicts two women making out and turning into robots in a hot tub).