Mad Oracle - Television Tropes & Idioms

"He is come. The three-fold man! He dances in the lonely places! O creator of us all, the Doctor is coming! Nehahaha!"

— Dalek Caan, Doctor Who

"Yes. Alive now, dead later. That's life. You all fall down. Girl next, then boy. You'll see. I see."

— The Homeless Man, Final Destination: Dead Reckoning

The good news about this guy is that he can see the future. The bad news is that it turns out that seeing the future is not good for your mental health. Perhaps it was the stress of breaking through the boundaries of time, perhaps it is the strain of seeing so much all at once, possibly including alternative futures. It could be that now he can see the future, the concepts of time and causality don't make sense any more. Or it could be that they are only able to see the future because they are mad, writers often don't distinguish. Either way what we have here is easily one of the most useful and irritating types of Seer. Work out what they mean and you have genuine cast iron visions, get confused or ignore it and you will find it coming back to bite you.

They tend to speak entirely in metaphor, riddles, and oblique poetry.

A partial inverse of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, related to Go Mad From The Revelation, Poke In The Third Eye and Prescience Is Predictable.

See also Waif Prophet and Fainting Seer.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

The old man from Paranoia Agent. After he dies, he passes the role on to Maniwa. The series ends with Maniwa finishing the calculations the old man started and pulling back in shock, though we don't learn why.
To some degree, Ran from Texhnolyze, who can see one of the many possibilities of the immediate future.

Fan fiction

Oracle Lunara from Of Darkness and Light (a DN Angel fanfic) speaks backwards when giving predictions, so she even needs a translator.

Comics

Cross Gen's The First has Orium, whose Meaningful Name is a portmanteau of "oracle" and "delirium." He's a creepy old god who was given the gift of true sight by Altwaal after the latter was disappointed with his vision as a leader.
Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen
- He's not crazy, just... strange.
- Apparently the explanation is meant to be that his powers (including the ability to see the future) have made him so out of touch with humanity he has forgotten how to act 'normal'. The future-sight is a major part of this, as he sees several times at once and can get confused between them.
In Captain Britain the precognitive Cobweb ends up like this when the Fury arrives in the 616 universe and Mad Jim Jaspers starts taking over the world.
Shouldn't be here... pattern broken... there was a Crooked Man and he... white wine turning red... white and red, like blood and bone, like chessmen... the board's askew... the gamer's hands are scorched and blackened... all strategies are shredded in the random wind... nothing is certain now...

Literature

The second quote at the top of the page comes from the novel Final Destination: Dead Reckoning, a spin-off of the film series. Throughout the book an unnamed vagrant, who apparently experienced the same vision of a nightclub collapsing as the Final Girl Jess, appears, usually right before Death kills someone, to offer cryptic, borderline non-sensical advice, all the while throwing in random references to mice and the moon.
One of the Young Wizards books features an intelligent Magical Computer which does this, speaking in haiku. (Its predictions turn out to be accurate, though, once the meanings of cryptic names like "The Hesper" are sorted out.)
The Dresden Files kind of tweaks this. Harry says the reason Oracles all talk in riddles and goofy parables and weirdnesses is that they:
- Are seeing more than one future event in one future timeline so they're not entirely sure which events connect the present to which future
- Are not able to say absolutely certain because saying may change/damage the timeline.
- In addition a number of "oracles" in the past who were also mad were actually that time's current incarnation of the Archive, a repository of all human knowledge who were driven mad by said knowledge and yet were able to make accurate predictions of the future through simply analyzing what they possessed and drawing accurate conclusions from it.
Ophelia from Hamlet is often portrayed like this in the mad scenes. Many researchers believe that her madness gives her an ability to sense everything (Unfortunately, she's unable to express her thoughts properly, which makes her a Cassandra-like character).
The prophet from the Mrin river in the Belgariad. (Particularly notable as when he wasn't speaking prophecy he could only speak in animal noises.)
- Just about all the prophets in the Belgariad. It's later related that after the Mrin prophet's predictions had started coming true, everyone rushed out to write down the ravings of every lunatic they could find. Of course, not all of them were actually seers.
The Clayr of the Old Kingdom trilogy seem to be an entire clan built of Mad Oracles. When their power to See is concentrated into a set number of people, they can receive clear visions of the future or present — assuming there is a future to See. However, in most circumstances, their Sight is divided among the hundreds of Clayr, granting each of its members with random fragments of possible futures. This also gives the Clayr a rather incoherent sense of time and causality (which might explain the number of one-night stands they have.) The trope apparently grows more pronounced with age, to the point that the oldest Clayr - who can apparently live to be a hundred and fifty years old - have to retire to special "Dreaming Rooms" when they become too disjointed in time.
In Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, there's the Weaver, a giant multi-dimensional spider who can see the strands of past and future and always speaks in never-ending streams of free verse. Of course, this isn't that bad for the Weaver, since it was never human to begin with, but the human characters in the book find its advice disconcerting and incomprehensible. Plus, if it doesn't like you, it can kill you with a wave of its pedipalp.
Forgotten Realms, The Erevis Cale Trilogy. Erevis and companions visit Sephris Dwendon, the chosen of the God of Knowledge, seeking information on the Mac Guffin. Initially Sephris is only a little cracked, yet after being raised from the dead, not because he wanted to be, but because of a sense of duty Sephris becomes more than a little crazy. Bitter, cyncial, carving mathematical formulae into his flesh.
The Sibyl at Orm in A Gathering of Gargoyles turns out to be mad Doona from the house in which Aeriel grew up as a slave. Subverted in that Doona is actually not the Sibyl. She killed her and took her place.
The Mad Arab Abdul Alhazreid, writer of the Necronomicon. Technically not an oracle, as he probably couldn't see into the future (altho the contents of the Necronomicon are too vague to say for sure), but other than that he fits this trope very well. Strange visions, cryptic texts, being completely off his rocker etc.
Feist's Rift Wars Saga contains an oracle which is mad because it shares a body with a god like being granting her its powers.
Raistlin's mother in Dragonlance.
The witch in Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40000 Gaunts Ghosts novel Blood Pact. She Cannot Tell A Lie — and apparently, can't shut up either.
In the Circle Of Magic books, the character Zhegorz is introduced as a madman, apparently a schizophrenic. It eventually turns out that he's actually able to scry on the wind, both sights and sounds, a very rare ability, which is why everyone assumed he was hallucinating... so unexplained visions + insistence from all sides that he must be mad + commitment to a Bedlam House = all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, only based in reality.
Tsinga from David Clement-Davies' The Sight is a pretty darn good example of this.

Live Action Television

The first quote above (from the Doctor Who episode "The Stolen Earth") is the example that caused us to go, "How Did We Miss This One?"
- Then there's the Visionary from "The End of Time".
The Hybrids in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, who only say things like "Mists of dreams drip along the nascent echo and love no more" and "Intruders swarm like flame, like the whirlwind; Hopes soaring to slaughter all their best against our hulls."
Joss Whedon likes this trope:
- Drusilla is a cross between this and Waif Prophet.
- River Tam from Firefly
- Both of them have very similar styles of speaking.
- An Alternate Universe Episode of Angel featured the title character as this.

Film

The 13th Warrior. The protagonists go to consult an old woman who supposedly knows how to defeat the 'demons' who are attacking them. A local girl mentions that she's quite mad, whereupon one of the Vikings replies sarcastically: "The perfect advisor."
6 in the movie 9.
Twelve Monkeys. Such oracles throughout history are implied to be time travelers who have gone insane.

Myth and Legend

Pythia, more commonly known as the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The chamber where she gave her predictions was filled with vapors that rose from the ground. Since she spent so much time in the chamber, it drove her into a frenzied state. This is the reason why most of her predictions were so cryptic, she was loopy from the fumes. Some sources even state she needed an interpreter to translate. Thus making this yada yada...
Cassandra is like this in some versions, either perceived or actual, due to never being believed. In her most recent portrayal, in Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, she was very much this. Age of Bronze has a tendency to do in the wizard, so her origin story there is deeply ambiguous.

Tabletop Games

In Exalted, Abyssal Exalted can take a background known as Whispers. This allows them to directly consult their dead-but-not-gone Cosmic Horror masters. Seeing as their minds are essentially human, characters with high Whispers are a little, um, odd.
In White Wolf's Hunter: the Reckoning, members of the Hermit creed all have a direct line to the Powers That Be, giving them oracular insight at the cost of overloading their psyches, which forces them to withdraw from human contact (hence the name).
- Also from White Wolf, all members of the Malkavian Clan, from Vampire: the Masquerade, are this. They all go insane as part of the Embrace (and that doesn't count the tendency to Embrace those who are already insane), but they become attuned to the "Malkavian Madness Network" (a sort-of Hive Mind that runs through the clan's Antediluvian) and thus know things that no one else does. In the PC version of the game Bloodlines, this is shown through, amongst other things, Malkavian specific dialog options that frequently reveal hidden information about people the moment you start talking to them.
  - Another Mad Oracle in Bloodlines is Rosa, one of the Thin-Bloods hiding on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier. She's not insane per se, but she's remarkably unhinged due to unwanted glimpses into the future: nonetheless, for twenty dollars, she'll babble some cryptic riddles that seem utterly useless until you actually start encountering them in the game.
- There's also a Goblin Contract (a Contract with some nasty side effects) in Changeling The Lost that serves as both ends of the trope. You can uncover anything you want to know about anything you've encountered... but you gain a derangement for the duration of the next day. And you only get the mild derangements if you roll high; if you roll low, you can look forward to 24 hours of schizophrenia. And once that wears off, you forget what you learned. Hope that you're lucid enough to write it down.
  - Also from Changeling is the College of Worms, an Entitlement that believes in the value of portents and omens. Unfortunately, they're all a little cracked in the head - to them, everything could be a portent or omen. ("A cat consorting with a skunk! The Fair Folk approacheth!")
Precognition is a fairly well-known power of psykers in Warhammer 40000, but carries with it The Dark Side. Aside from the Eldar, The Dark Side seems to win more often than not with would-be prophets.
The Dungeons And Dragons Ravenloft campaign setting has the Mad Seer Hyksosa, among others. It's pretty common, really.
- So common, in fact, that it's an NPC class.
Kairos Fatereaver, the oracle of Tzeench in the Chaos Daemons armies of Warhammer and Warhammer40000 is this trope. Tzeench is able to see into the future himself, but even he doesn't know which possible future will come to be. So he threw his vizier Kairos into the point where all timelines intersect, giving him the ability to see everything that has happened and will ever happen. The downside is that he came back unnaturally aged (note that daemons are immortal and normally don't age), with an extra head and completely off his rocker. To make things worse, whatever one of his head says, the other contradicts, and there is no way of knowing which one is telling the truth at any given time.

Video Games

City Of Villains has Diviner Maros and Mender Lazarus, who can see through all of time and often confuse cause and effect and talk to you about adventures you haven't even taken yet. Maros even uses his gift to lampshade the way that other contacts often send you out to figure out where the next mission is on your own, as seen here.
"The Freakshow in the cult are going to try to kill you now, but since you don't yet know where to go to take the fight to them, they have the advantage. However, we can edit out all of the tedious searching for hideouts and interrogation. I will tell you where to go."
The Hand of Repose in the Exmortis games serves this purpose when allowed to speak; normally, he acts as a living gateway for the Exmortis demons to return to Earth through, but his position as an anthropomorphic wormhole has allowed him to see a little way into the future- resulting in the Prophecy of the Hand booklet given to you in the second game. And in a particularly interesting twist, the Hand is none other than the PC of the first game.

Webcomics

The Gods Of Arr Kelaan gives us the Cloudcuckoolander Oracle Sephin.
As seen here, A Modest Destiny has Morris, who went insane when, after a Heroic BSOD, he woke up among numerous corpses and assumed he had killed them. He later gained prophetic powers when Black Bart, masquerading as a priest, picked an official-sounding passage from the bible - and christened Morris as the new pope.

Web Original

Mac from the <3-Verse can see the future when he's not stoned, but is stoned almost all the time. I wonder why...
Circe, in the Whateley Universe. Yes, that Circe. She's a couple thousand years old, and she's now a teacher at Whateley Academy. And when she predicts things, she tends to ramble weirdly. Okay, sometimes she rambles weirdly when she's not predicting stuff...

Western Animation