Basic Trope: When a character slowly goes insane, their appearance changes (usually looking much scruffier or much cleaner).
- Straight: Alice begins to lose her mind, and as she gets crazier, her right eye starts twitching, her hair gets messy, her clothes get torn and dirty, and she starts smiling a goofy smile in that order.
- Exaggerated: Alice outright changes form because she's mad.
- Downplayed: Alice has a spaced-out expression once her shift to insanity has completed, but doesn't noticeably change appearance otherwise.
- Justified:
- Alice is becoming too insane to care about cleanliness or so insane she does reckless things that muss her up, the twitchy eye comes from either being too insane to care about sleeping and therefore being tired or being so insane that her eye got injured and she doesn't care. She's doing a goofy smile because insanity feels good to her.
- Alice is stranded somewhere so remote, that she Goes Mad From The Isolation. The disheveled appearance is a side-effect of not having access to things such as bathes or scissors.
- Inverted: Alice was introduced as being insane, but she slowly gets saner and starts looking different.
- Subverted:
- It turns out that Alice wasn't insane, she was faking.
- It turns out that Alice wasn't insane, just drunk.
- When Alice goes sane again, it turns out that the appearance changes had nothing to do with the insanity at all.
- Double Subverted:
- Then, Bob starts to go insane and his appearance changes.
- Later, this happens to Alice for real.
- Or so the people expecting No Ontological Inertia concluded. It will take some time for her looks to recover.
- Parodied:
- This doesn't happen slowly like in straight examples, instead, it happens instantly.
- Alice is completely sane, but she forgot to do her laundry so all she has to wear is a dress that's torn and stained with blackberry juice from when she walked through a bramble bush a week prior, then she goes to brush her teeth and the faucet comes off, squirting water in her eye and causing it to become irritated. Then, unable to see because she's rubbing her eyes, she falls downstairs, messing up her hair. Everyone who sees her thinks she's lost her mind.
- Zigzagged: The whole cast is driven insane. Some of them change appearances, some don't.
- Averted:
- Alice stays sane.
- Alice goes insane and doesn't look different appearance.
- Enforced: The writers live by the Show, Don't Tell policy but aren't all that good at "showing" so they just fall back on old standbys.
- Lampshaded: "I thought insanity happened in your brain, not your clothes, face, and hair."
- Invoked:
- Alice deliberately gives herself this look when she is deliberately trying to be insane.
- The villain drives Alice insane and gives her this look.
- Exploited: People can easily determine the sanity of other people.
- Defied: Alice may be crazy, but she still has enough thought to keep herself looking normal.
- Discussed:
- Conversed: "Why do these characters always change appearance when they go mad?"
- Implied: Alice is introduced as insane and scruffy-looking.
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed: Alice holds enough self-awareness to realize she's on the verge of losing it and tries to hold on as a Reluctant Psycho. She keeps to a strict self-care hygiene regimen as a way to provide a structure to her daily life to establish at least a baseline for normalcy and keep her mental well-being up as best she can while therapy and/or medication take their time to treat the root causes.
- Played for Laughs:
- Played for Drama:
Back to Madness Makeover.
