Someone who puts great effort into achieving
small, unimportant objectives (e.g. drop shotting to get a quick kill,
studying for a quiz, etc.) and often fails in the process, thus creating more embarrassment, due to the fact that they tried incredibly
hard.
Brandon Pugh is a textbook example of a try
hard. He consumes his leisure hours scanning and memorizing his Physical
Science textbook; he is then later scolded for knowing completely nothing about it, and failing all his quizzes. This then reduces him to a completely monotonous, often suicidal
facial expression, which indeed points out his try hardness.