Basic Trope: A usually harmless screwball who lives in their own little world.
- Straight: Alice has a very strange thought process, but is still intelligible.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is so odd that she is constantly misunderstood by the remainder of the group.
- Alice speaks in an alien language all the time and always dances.
- Alice's mind trumps the insanity of an Eldritch Abomination and her imagination consists of Inconceivable Alien Geometries, sometimes with actual Eldritch Locations and entire Chaos Worlds inside them. Trying to read her mind would be suicidal and will cause you to be trapped in her alien imagination, forever.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality
- Downplayed: Alice has a slight character quirk, but is otherwise quite grounded in reality.
- Justified:
- Alice is actually from another planet and isn't familiar with local customs, etc.
- Alice is genuinely insane.
- Alice's real self is possessing another body.
- Alice is on hallucinogens.
- Alice is a hyperactive child, where such behavior is expected.
- Inverted: Alice is the one voice of reason among a cast of surrealists.
- Subverted:
- Alice seems to be crazy, but turns out to be eerily accurate.
- Alice is using Obfuscating Stupidity or Obfuscating Insanity.
- Double Subverted:
- It turns out to be a Seemingly Profound Fool.
- Alice is feigning feigning stupidity and is making it blatantly obvious because she doesn't want people to know that she really is crazy.
- Alice is using Obfuscating Stupidity, but while she's smarter than she lets on, she really is that weird.
- Parodied:
- Alice's head can't be seen — it's just a fluffy pink cloud that spouts cheerful nonsense.
- She's constantly a blur and is ultra-annoying.
- As weird as Alice is, she has more sanity than the rest of the main cast combined.
- Zig Zagged:
- Everyone thinks Alice is crazy, but then it turns out that's she's so genius no one can understand her thought process but other geniuses, so she's sent to a special school for geniuses, where she's considered weird by the other people who DO understand where she's coming from.
- Alice is in a constant and unalterable state of general weirdness. In most episodes, it makes her the weirdest member of the cast, but it also grants her Insanity Immunity to stress, chemicals, and various forms of phlebotinum, making her the Only Sane Man when the rest of the cast is going crazier than she already is.
- Alice acts crazy, but acts more normal when she encounters someone or something crazier than herself. However, after she leaves that person or thing, she goes back to her crazy self, and so on.
- Averted: Alice has normal intelligence and sanity.
- Enforced:
- The writers don't have the whole series plotted out yet, so they want a character to drop vague hints and suggestions which they can call on later on.
- "Everyone loves The Loonie."
- Lampshaded:
- "Alice, where did that train of thought come from, and where is it going?"
- "I'm not crazy, I'm just.... differently sane."
- Invoked:
- Alice is perfectly capable of making sense, but is cheerfully random as a way to avoid serious conversations.
- Alice acts this way to cover up her many dark, serious issues.
- Exploited: Alice is an attention-seeker using Obfuscating Stupidity or Obfuscating Insanity to get noticed.
- Defied: Alice says something that earns her weird looks, only to assure her team that she is not, in any way, eccentric at all.
- Discussed: "Try to be wary of Alice. She's a bit... off."
- Conversed: "Why are so many happy-go-lucky morons in this show?"
- Deconstructed:
- 1. Alice's Cloudcuckoolander tendencies come from a mental condition caused by a psychological disorder (like Disorganized Schizophrenia), a very screwed up childhood, a head injury, etc.
- 2. Her unusual thought process, though amusing and unique, causes her to make bad decisions most rational people would not commit.
- 3. Her strange behavior alienates everyone around her and makes her more prone to being bullied, leaving her with only her imagination, causing her to go even further into insanity and depression.
- 4. She becomes so entrenched in her imagination she is considered a schizophrenic and thus thrown into a mental hospital.
- 5. People find her incredibly annoying and exasperating, due to her quirks.
- 6. None of her oddities hurt herself. Instead, they hurt others when she acts so Innocently Insensitive. She doesn't know what she's doing is wrong.
- 7. Alice's unusual mindset impacts her ability to communicate, leading to Poor Communication Kills coming and going. This leads people to overlook that she's fully functional and capable, condescendingly assuming she's at best Inspirationally Disadvantaged.
- Reconstructed:
- 1. Alice gets treatment for the mental condition (medicine, therapy, etc.) and the randomness simply becomes part of her perfectly functional personality.
- 2. Alice has astonishing psychological, spiritual, or psychic insight, but the language is too limited for her to express her vision. She has a buddy for that.
- 3. Alice has friends who understand her, one of whom is her minder, which are sufficient to keep bullies away (most of the time) and her mind present.
- 4. Alice's intuition works so fast that the steps between her thoughts, while plausible if spelled out, can't be seen. Once she takes the time to spell out every little step, she is released from the mental hospital with an apology, and goes on her merry way while pretending to be an airplane.
- 5. She's just random. Some find it funny, some find it annoying and others are willing to bear with her because she's otherwise effective at what she does.
- 6. Alice has a minder to point out social norms that she doesn't know, forgets, or misinterprets.
- 7. People poor first impressions only last until they see what Alice can actually do, and either just accept that they'll never completely "get" her or figure out how to better communicate with her.
- Played For Laughs: Alice is loony and a massive goofball.
- Implied: Frederick informs Ben about how he had to deal with not only Danny's unwitting behavior and the annoying Bob that visit him from time to time, he also mentioned how he befriended Alice when her loony behavior made her seem friendly and giving some insight that helped out Frederick balancing his mishaps, temper, and flaws to better himself and implies that she visits him every weekend to partake in fun activities with each other.
Done playing with this trope, like an octopus (hey, the plural of octopus is octopodes, so if two octopodes lived on opposite ends of the earth, would they be antipodal octopodes?) playing with a tin can or something? 'Kay, back to Cloudcuckoolander.
I thought the plural was octopi?
octopuses also works.
It's "octopese", duh.
Isn't the plural form of octopus octopus, just like fish is fish when there's many fish?