Basic Trope: A scientist who does morally questionable things for the sake of their profession.
- Straight: Professor Drachenstein lives in a castle, performs experiments that don't make sense, and cackles maniacally when he feels it is necessary.
- Exaggerated:
- Professor Drachenstein lives in a castle on top of a hill with a perpetual thunderstorm. He performs experiments with strange green liquids just to see the explosions. He has an army of robot warriors at his command, and cackles maniacally anytime he speaks, and sometimes when he doesn't.
- Not only that, Drachenstein also gets away with Cold-Blooded Torture, Hollywood Hacking and Five-Finger Discount, among others.
- Downplayed:
- Professor Drachenstein is a sane scientist, but he has absolutely no sense of ethics.
- Professor Drachenstein has a sense of ethics, but he is very eccentric and many of his experiments are impenetrably weird.
- Professor Drachenstein is a Playful Hacker.
- Professor Drachenstein may be an insane, but is able to maintain a Mask of Sanity thus has a great amount of respect from his scientific peers.
- Justified:
- Drachenstein is a misanthrope who got his multiple doctorates with the eventual goal of world domination.
- Drachenstein lives in a Wretched Hive full of Criminals so he tries his best to clear the messes up, but the Corrupt Bureaucrats prevented him from doing so.
- Inverted: Drachenstein is the most levelheaded character in the cast.
- Subverted: All of Drachenstein's experiments look strange, but have believable premises and do follow the scientific method. Drachenstein's just a little eccentric.
- Double Subverted: The experiments follow the scientific process properly... with the eventual expected result of yielding a new kind of nerve gas.
- Parodied:
- The mad "scientist" has no real education, and is just a schizophrenic in a lab coat with food coloring and some beakers.
- Drachenstein is actually the most level-headed character, despite his experiments being so crazy.
- Drachenstein is a mad social scientist.
- Zig Zagged: Drachenstein is seen performing experiments in a dark room - but then he heads out to talk with his colleagues in the well-lit laboratory next door about the light-sensitive reactions he's working on, then heads back in to finish up. When he comes out, he oils his robotic colleague, and cackles about how he'll show the university fools. He shows them by creating a drug that cures cancer. But then, we start to see hints of strange behavior are seen in people cured by it... But the people displaying the symptoms were all eccentric already. ...Or so says the first person cured.
- Averted:
- All scientists in the story are sane.
- Drachenstein is a Bunny-Ears Lawyer who does moral experiments with reasonable methods to test believable ideas.
- Enforced: Dumb Is Good, Science Is Bad
- Lampshaded: "Und now, der cackle. It is important to der experimenten!"
- Invoked: Prestigious universities have scholarships for the neurotic.
- Exploited: A character hires Dr. Drachenstein for his big project because only mad science is able to achieve the desired result without the laws of physics getting in the way.
- Defied: All universities have required psych sessions for their doctorate students.
- Discussed: "I think Drachenstein might be off his medication again. He's talking about switching Bob's brain with a chicken's. Now, Bob got an F in his class, but I still don't think it'll improve things. Now, if he handed Bob over to me... Mwahahaha!"
- Conversed: "So, there's one old scientist, and two young ones. How long do you think it'll take before the old one's cackling while holding a beaker?"
- Implied: "Hey, did you hear? Professor Drachenstein is coming to the family reunion too!" "Ooooh noooo, please, not Drachenstein! After his last visit it took me two months to make my car street-legal again... and then there's him taking over the kitchen as his personal chemistry lab... and his robot minions... and the cackling, oh, the cackling!"
- Deconstructed:
- The mad scientist is a misanthrope whose dislike of people allowed him to concentrate on his research. His dislike of the human race lets him guiltlessly hoard miracle cures and super energy sources. His plans are much more horrifying and effective than one would expect.
- Drachenstein is a crackpot whose work only passes for science because his native country has no concept of how real science works. As a result, the country lags far behind the rest of the world in scientific achievements, and the country's population suffers because of Drachenstein's inhumane experiments.
- Reconstructed:
- The mad scientist has a Science-Related Memetic Disorder, striving for technological advancement to benefit all of humanity through his off-kitter methods and deathly afraid of crossing the Moral Event Horizon in his less lucid moments.
- Drachenstein is dismissed as a crackpot by the more orthodox scientists who work within well-established disciplines, but does rigorously follow the scientific method, and his work in the fields of Weird Science does bear fruit sometimes. His reputation as a "mad scientist" has less to do with his methods and more with the fact that he hasn't really struck gold with his experiments yet.
- Drachenstein's experiments, while adhering to rigorous scientific principle, are not reined in by any code of ethics. Any discovery he might make comes at far too high a human cost.
- Unparodied: Dr. Drachenstein, the Big Bad, is a mad social scientist obsessed with putting people through twisted and unethical social experiments.
- Played For Laughs: Drachenstein’s madness somehow goes completely unnoticed by his peers, even as the results of his experiments become more and more absurd.
- Played For Drama:
- A mad scientist in love.
- Legal trouble if he posses ill-gotten equipments.
- Played For Horror:
- A mad scientist meddling with Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.
- The story is told from the perspective of a mad scientist's test subject. Body Horror ensues.
- Perhaps even more horrifying in a case of Professor Guinea Pig; understanding offers no comfort, only a knowledge of all the subtler horrors of the condition that a layperson would be blissfully ignorant of, a realization of what went wrong and how powerless one is to undo what one has done to oneself.
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