Properly Paranoid / Western Animation

Justified paranoia in western animation TV shows.

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• Amphibia: In "Marcy at the Gates", due to Anne's best friend Sasha turning out to be a manipulative Alpha Bitch who attempted to kill them, Sprig is apprehensive about meeting the titular Marcy, fearing she could be just as bad. He retains this mindset even after Anne assures him that she's more likely to hurt herself than anyone else, and treats her with suspicion, to the bemusement of his sister and grandfather who quickly come to like her. Subverted when it turns out she really is as kindhearted and helpful (and klutzy) as she seems, saving him from being digested by a monster towards the end of the episode. However, in "True Colors", Sprig turns out to be Right for the Wrong Reasons, when King Andrias reveals that Marcy knew more about the Calamity Box that brought the three girls to the other world. This forces Marcy to admit that on Anne's birthday, Marcy found out that her family was moving, and in desperation for the three friends to stay together, relied on the legend of the Box in hopes it'll take them to another world.
• The Angry Beavers: In "The Posei-Dam Adventure", Daggett nails all his stuff down and handcuffs himself to Truckie the shrew because he's worried Truckie will try to steal his stuff. Naturally, the two get trapped in the flooded dam after it's flipped upside-down by a natural disaster and have a harrowing adventure together. At the end of the cartoon, Truckie announces that he was going to steal Daggett's stuff, but out of gratitude to Dag for saving his life (and because prying all of that stuff loose would be too much trouble), he decides to steal Norbert's stuff instead.
• Arcane: Mylo complains about the door on Jayce's balcony being locked in a "Who locks their balcony doors?" kind of way. Considering he's trying to break in, evidently it was a good decision. If anything, Jayce should have been more paranoid and locked up his hextech crystals.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Midway through season 2, the Cabbage Merchant tries to bring his cabbages onto the ferry to Ba-Sing-Se, but the overzealous bureaucrat in charge refuses because his cabbages might contain slugs that could ruin the city's ecology. She then orders the guards to sic a platypus bear on his cart, who promptly do so. In the following shot, you can see a slug amid the flying debris.
  • Later in the same season, Iroh and Zuko are hiding out in Ba Sing Se posing as Earth Kingdom refugees. They'd be killed if they were ever caught firebending, so they never use their powers under any circumstances just in case. In one scene Iroh can't find the flint to light their stove so he goes next door and asks to borrow their neighbour's, even though he's alone in his home and could just do it himself with a snap of his fingers. This turns out to be justified, as Jet is convinced they are firebenders and stalking them to try and catch them in the act.
• Batman Beyond: In "Betrayal", one of the guards driving the truck at the start is this. The truck skids to a halt to avoid a seemingly wrecked truck that's blocking the road, but this guard is from Gotham and knows what a setup looks like. Being a Red Shirt, it doesn't help.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Buzz theorizes that anything bad that happens in the universe is the work of his Arch-Enemy, the Evil Emperor Zurg. He's usually right, as Zurg, being a classic Card-Carrying Villain, will do anything to cause chaos in the galaxy. There's even one episode completed devoted to this trope in which Buzz (after working nonstop for weeks) captures a pen from one of Zurg's shuttles, believing it to be the key to one of his most devious plans. Everyone thinks he's been wound a bit too tight and force him to take a vacation and relax. It turns out though that Buzz was right as the pen was the firing trigger for Zurg's (with dramatic sting music) Hyper Death Ray!
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: In "Domes of Doom", a man called Baron Giftus appears on the TV talking about the importance of the forests and a proposed measure that would place them under his protection. Wheeler wonders what he wants to get out of the arrangement. Wheeler seems to have no particular reason to assume that Giftus isn't on the up and up, and Gi chastises him for being so cynical. Even Ma-Ti ultimately has to admit that Wheeler was right; Baron Giftus is Looten Plunder in a wig and a beard.
• Chowder: When Chowder, Gorgonzola, and Panini are in a raft going down a river and faced with two paths, they see the right path going straight and leading to a happy sun, while the left goes down a series of rapids. Chowder takes them down the left path on the grounds that he doesn't trust the look of the sun, and sure enough, the sun was planning to hit them with a club.
  Sun: [angrily] Darn, I almost had 'em.
• Clarence: Joshua's most prominent trait is his phobia of the title character and his two best friends, Sumo and Jeff. This seems odd because all three of them are fairly nice boys. However, if you watch at least three episodes featuring him, you'll understand exactly why.
• Code Lyoko: Waldo Schaeffer, alias Franz Hopper; changing his (and his daughter's) name was only the tip of the iceberg. His electronic diary was encrypted with code that would take years to crack, hidden in a train station locker whose key was hidden in his daughter's plushy which was in turn hidden in a crack of a wall in his house. And he created a whole virtual world with the aim of hiding there with Aelita, out of danger from his pursuers. But hey, The Men in Black were after him, and they'd already kidnapped his wife.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The main character, Nigel Uno a.k.a. Numbah One, comes across as a big-time Agent Mulder, with theories ranging from "the adults are feeding children asparagus because they hate it themselves" to "the mystery meat in the cafeteria is rainbow monkey" to "the doctor is turning children into moose to sell their antlers" (or something to that effect). Numbah Five will often call him out on this, but even when Numbah One does turn out to be wrong, half the time it's only because the truth is even more outlandish. (For the record, out of the three examples listed, only the middle one was wrong.) For another example, in one episode parodying the Animatrix short The Second Renaissance, Numbah One gives an elaborate class presentation claiming that kids once ruled the world, until they created adults to be their playmates/servile caretakers. Naturally, the adults rebelled and took over the Earth, creating the fiction of "families" (with the adults in control and the children subservient). The teacher stops the presentation and chastises Nigel for his ridiculous flights of fancy, but after the class is dismissed, he grabs the apple off his desk (which is actually a communicator) and reports "They know..."
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: The show is built around this. Courage sees some sort of monster and knows his owners are in danger. Many, many episodes prove he's correct.
• Dan Vs.: Dan often develops extreme grudges over relatively petty slights, and takes them as evidence of a nefarious conspiracy. Most of the time, he's right.
• Elena of Avalor: Naomi is this in "Rise of the Sorceress" toward Rita Perez — really Carla Delgado in disguise so she can steal a treasure from the family — and tries to convince Elena that she can't be trusted. She's right, and Elena is shocked to learn the truth much later.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Mr. Crocker suspects that FAIRY GOD PARENTS! are involved in every unusual situation, regardless of how minor. He is always correct, not that it helps.
• Family Guy:
  • The psychotic Mayor Adam West tells Meg to "watch out for The Noid", the old Domino's Pizza mascot, because he's trying to ruin his pizza's freshness. Later, The Noid actually appears and West snaps his neck and then takes a bite of his pizza remarking "Perhaps it is The Noid who should have avoided me." Then there's the Evil Monkey...
  • In one episode, Peter mentions wanting to buy cloud insurance, insisting that the clouds are just "picking their moment". Cut to two clouds in the sky outside:
    Cloud 1: So, Bill. We attack tomorrow?
    Cloud 2: Yes, tomorrow.
    [Beat]
    Cloud 1: I mean it this time.
    Cloud 2: I do too!
• Garfield and Friends: Wade comes off as this once he points out that local Reality Warper Orson keeps dragging Wade into dangerous stories via Dream Sequences. This is emphasized in one episode where Orson's reading causes Wade (and later Roy) to be placed in a series of dangers, including a polar bear, a train, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Suddenly it makes sense for Wade to be scared of everything. At least Wade isn't alone in this — and he manages to convince Roy that a dinosaur and other dangers are after them and they both suffer from it, but luckily, Roy stops Orson by giving him a calm coloring book.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Dipper, as with most Agent Mulder types, is the first to suspect something weird is going on — and if he's wrong about what it is, it's usually because the truth is even stranger. For example, in the first episode, he thinks Mabel's first crush Norman is a zombie, a theory helped by Norman's bizarre gait and apparently detachable body parts. Then Norman reveals the truth; he's a bunch of gnomes doing a Totem Pole Trench.
    Dipper: Gnomes? Huh, I was way off.
  • Also, Dipper's great inspiration and indirect mentor of sorts, the mysterious author of the journals that catalogue the weirdness of Gravity Falls, also known as his long-lost great uncle Stanford. His writings read a bit like an Apocalyptic Log with numerous repetitions of "Is he watching me?", "Can't sleep!" and other signs of Sanity Slippage, half of which are written in invisible ink to throw off whoever is watching him. Of course, this all makes sense once we learn in the second season that the Author was been plagued by an omnipresent Mind Screw demon who's planning the apocalypse and could be possessing just about anyone he knows.
    • He's had an elaborate underground bunker-slash-fallout-shelter prepared as a "last resort", complete with an underground lab and sixty years worth of supplies. Also, 60 years worth of PEZ.
    • When we finally meet the man, it turns out he always carries (at least) a crossbow and a laser gun and had a metal plate surgically inserted into his skull to make it demon-proof.
    • When he and Dipper finally meet and work to confront the demonic menace together, a situation occurs where Dipper mistakenly assumes that the author's been possessed by said demon and nearly blasts him with a memory-erasing gun. The author's reaction? "If that really had been him, you would've done great. I wish I'd been more like you when I was young!"
  • In "Weirdmageddon", Wendy reveals that her father made her and her brothers do apocalypse training instead of Christmas. "Guess it's sort of cool the paranoia paid off."
• The Hollow: When served food by a woman they've just met, Kai is suspicious and asks her what is in the soup. Just vegetables... and Toros bones. Downplayed in that the trio don't freak out about it beyond an initial Spit Take and being slightly disgusted that they just ate soup that used bones from humanoid cows. Though later, one of her sisters drops a plate of jello... which contains things like eyeballs and these women are actually witches that want to eat the trio's souls.
• Invader Zim: Dib has a strong Cassandra Truth reputation going strong. But he's right — Zim, the main character, is indeed an evil alien bent on conquering humanity. What's more, whenever he's seen engaging in other paranormal studies (such as chasing a hairy kid he thinks is a baby Bigfoot), he continues to show much more awareness of the world around him than... well, the world around him. Maybe he'd be more credible if he stopped talking to himself. Subverted as far as his sister Gaz is concerned. She knows he's right about Zim (and a good chunk of his other paranormal ramblings, for that matter), but reasonably concludes from how Zim's plans tend to go even when Dib isn't there to stop him that the alien isn't a real threat and her older brother is just wasting his time:
  Dib: Don't you care that Zim is trying to destroy all mankind? Huh?
  Gaz: But he's so bad at it.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes
  • Beezy against the weavils. When Jimmy first meets one, he thinks it's adorable, but Beezy is terrified. Sure enough, Jimmy soon learns the weavils are in fact Jerkasses who like to screw around with people.
  • Also, Jimmy's fear of pickles seems like the most absurd thing ever, but once you find out the true nature of Mrs. Gherkin, it doesn't seem so foolish.
• Justice League Unlimited: The Question's appearances are filled with wild ramblings about obscure plots, but his crackpot theories seem a lot less crazy when you realize that he was right about Supergirl's disturbing dreams, Luthor triggering the apocalypse and Baskin-Robbins' 32nd flavor.
• Kim Possible: While being one of the most paranoid characters in the series, Ron Stoppable has been accurate many times. To elaborate:
  • In one episode where Ron's so-called irrational fear of monkeys was apparent, he claimed that the simian-wise archaeologist Monty Fiske was 'bad road'. Boy was he right big time as it turns out, he was a power-hungry Monkey Kung Fu expert who decreed that from now on, he'd be known as Monkey Fist. It was probably the fact that Ron suspected him from the get-go that he's more of Ron's enemy than Kim's.
  • During a flashback of his time at Camp Wannaweep, he felt that swimming in the camp lake was a bad idea. Turns out, the lake had been polluted by one of the neighboring camps, which resulted in Ron's camp bully Gil (who took to swimming in the lake all summer) becoming a mutant villain.
  • On the subject of Gil, another episode had him supposedly cured of his mutation and reformed. Ron, however, remained suspicious, despite even having most of the people he told his claims to pelt him with rotten vegetables. Guess what? He was right again as Gil wanted to become a mutant again and create an army of mutants.
  • Ron once mentioned to Kim his belief that Barkin was always dogging him was because he gave him a funny look back in Freshmen year. Upon ending up in a Chained Heat incident, Barkin confirms this when he claims he knew Ron was trouble ever since said incident.
  • Finally, in the Grand Finale, Ron was worried that graduation from high school would bring about the end of everything (though he was referring to it more in terms of his relationship with Kim). Turns out his worry was more justified than he thought as an Alien Invasion struck the night of graduation, bringing about the end of the world. As Ron put it:
    Ron: Oh, am I the only one who SAW THIS COMING?!
• King of the Hill: The conspiracy nut Dale Gribble has a practically encyclopedic knowledge of government bureaucratic procedures, a knowledge which has come in handy on several occasions. Perhaps the best example is the incident in which he blackmails a worker at the Department of Motor Vehicles into providing better service, simply by naming all of the worker's superiors in ascending order, then threatening to call them and complain: "I'm Your Worst Nightmare! I have a three-line phone and absolutely nothing at all to do with my time!" That doesn't stop him from being the resident Cloudcuckoolander who doesn't believe in one conspiracy, he believes in all of them. The only times he ever bashes an idea, especially ones said to him in jest, are when he has an even more outlandish idea. Taking a trip to Mexico every election day under the assumption (not fear, honest belief) that there's likely going to be a complete societal collapse because things didn't go the right way is one of the more blatant examples. It's mentioned that he believes so many nutty things that one or two have to be right eventually! There's also the time he's right about Hank being a victim of the vast government computer network known as "The Beast". Still, he's completely oblivious to a more mundane and much closer to home conspiracy: that his wife Nancy has cheated him with John Redcorn for fourteen years and that his son Joseph is actually Redcorn's biological son.
• Looney Tunes: A couple of the shorts have Sylvester as Porky Pig's pet cat, who's the only one who knows that, for instance, a sinister mob of mice are out to kill his master. Porky catches Sylvester doing truly bizarre things to save both their skins and chalks his behavior up to cowardice, insanity or both.
• The Looney Tunes Show: Throughout the B-plot of the episode "The Black Widow", Porky worries about the various fire hazards (his iron, stove, curling iron, and antique magnifying glass) he might have left on when Daffy talks him into going with him to Mexico on his Spring Break. At the end of the episode, every single one of these things go off, causing Porky's house to catch fire.
• Metalocalypse: The Tribunal seem like a bunch of crazy people, convinced that a metal band is going to fulfill some kind of prophecy. However, as the seasons have gone on, Dethklok has been doing almost everything The Tribunal has feared, and they aren't even aware of it. The Tribunal however is, and they're very worried about it. However, the Tribunal is being manipulated, and they are going to be the ones causing trouble.
• Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series: Mallory seems rather disturbed that brainiac Tanya not only has a named code in the case of a random dinosaur attack but defense plans for just such an occasion. Dinosaurs are cousins to the race that twice conquered their planet and enslaved their people, so it's not as out there as the show makes it.
• My Goldfish is Evil: Beanie is dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theorist by his mother and almost everyone else in the city, but only he stands between Admiral Bubbles and his plans for world domination.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "A Canterlot Wedding - Part 1", Twilight grows uneasy when Princess Cadance, a childhood Cool Big Sis figure of hers, begins acting uncharacteristically cold on the days before her wedding to Twilight's older brother Shining Armor, and later outright accuses her of being evil. Her friends, on the other hand, assume Cadance is just an ordinary Bridezilla who will get a hold of herself once she's married, and shun Twilight for her apparently unjustified outburst since they think she's acting like a Clingy Jealous Girl. In "Part 2," Twilight turns out to be right, as the "evil" Cadance is actually Chrysalis, the shapeshifting Changeling Queen, who is posing as the princess in a bid to take over Equestria. The real Cadance is every bit as pleasant as Twilight remembers.
  • In "What About Discord?", Twilight thinks that Discord must have done something to her friends over the weekend she spent indoors to get them to laugh at all of the inside jokes they are having. Later in the episode, Twilight admits that she was just being jealous, before Discord confesses that he didn't invite her on purpose to teach her that it's okay to feel jealous as long as you don't deny it. None of the others are amused by this, and suddenly all of their inside jokes stop being funny.
  • In "No Second Prances", Twilight doesn't think that her new student Starlight Glimmer should have Trixie as her first new friend because of their shared past as villains. Starlight just thinks that Twilight isn't actually giving Trixie a second chance like she said she was and ignores her. It turns out that Twilight is correct, or at least partly correct. Trixie uses her friendship with Starlight to make her skip an important dinner Twilight had planned with Princess Celestia all episode long to help her with a magic show instead just so she can claim that she finally "beat" Twilight at something. Unfortunately, despite her deception, Trixie becomes real friends with Starlight while doing this and is heartbroken when Starlight runs off over being used. Luckily, Twilight apologizes to Starlight and convinces her to forgive Trixie, allowing all three to make amends.
  • Pinkie is hit with this in "Secrets and Pies", in which she believes that Rainbow Dash is faking her love of pies and is secretly disposing of them in various places while Pinkie is distracted. It turns out that Pinkie is 100% correct.
• The Penguins of Madagascar:
  • Skipper, the leader of the penguins, gets over-analytical about anything new that happens, most famously in "Roomies" when he suspects Rhonda of working with Blowhole. He's right.
  • One episode has the penguins stumble on their hero and idol Buck Rockgut, a senior rockhopper penguin agent whose extreme obsession and paranoia of his #1 enemy, the Red Squirrel, dwarfs the other penguins' paranoia combined. He waited in a bunker for 47 years waiting for the Red Squirrel to appear and thinks all the zoo animals are agents or spies for the most trivial of reasons. It gets to the point that even Private thinks it's all in Buck's head. By the end of the episode, it's revealed that the Red Squirrel really does exist, spying from underground and voicing his nefarious plans as the credits roll.
• Phineas and Ferb: Major Monogram is like this. He calls Perry for every minor thing Doofenshmirtz does ("We saw Doofenshmirtz playing with a hula hoop... and that's all. Go stop him.") — but, just for a few exceptions, he is always plotting something, so Perry's help is actually important.
• The Proud Family:
  • In "Teacher's Pet", Penny Proud suspects that the reason why she's getting bad grades from her teacher despite having put much work into her paper is that her teacher hates her, which her family members don't believe (Oscar initially thinks that she gave Penny's paper on how Hillary Clinton inspired her a bad grade because the teacher is Republican). It turns out that Penny was actually closer to the truth than even she realized: the teacher dislikes Penny, not because of her, but because of Suga Mama. She and Suga Mama knew one another as young women and were well-known dancers who were both attracted to a charming young man. After beating their rivals, the two decided on who to pursue him with a coin toss. Suga Mama flipped and won, as the man would become Oscar's dad. However, turns out she cheated (using a same-sided coin). Fortunately, the two patch things up (with the teacher using the same coin on the agreement to dance to beat their old rivals).
  • Penny is hit with this again in "Thelma and Luis" when she finds out that the retirement home that Papi stayed in was actually a prison, but the adults don't believe her (except for Suga Mama). She's proven right at the end of the episode, though.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Stark Raving Dad", after Bart gets his shirts died pink, Homer worries that he'll get in trouble, since everyone else at work wears white shirts and he's not cool enough to be different. Marge thinks it'll be fine, but not only does Homer's pink shirt invite ridicule from his co-workers, Mr. Burns assumes Homer must be unhinged, resulting in Homer being Wrongfully Committed.
  • Parodied in "Bart Gets an Elephant", in which the supervisor of a peanut factory forcing his employees to undergo hours of drilling to prepare for any potential elephant attacks. His efforts are all for naught, however... since in the middle of just such an attack, as he's bragging about his preparations, he gets flattened by an elephant.
  • In "Lisa's Rival", Homer steals a pile of sugar from a crashed sugar truck. He then keeps it in his backyard and stays all night next to it with a baseball bat to "protect" it. When Marge says he's being paranoid, he immediately pulls out a stereotypical English guy with a teacup and saucer from inside the pile.
    Homer: All right, pal: where'd you get the sugar for that tea?
    British Guy: I nicked it when you let your guard down for that split second, and I'd do it again. [sips tea] Goodbye.
    Homer: You see, Marge? Do you see?
  • In "Brother's Little Helper", Bart is dosed with ADD medicine that makes him apparently paranoid, culminating in a wild theory about Major League Baseball spying on people via satellite and him stealing a tank to stop them. It turns out that, yes, he was right.
  • Marge even gets in on the act in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge", in which a woman named Becky becomes their new nanny/housekeeper, and Marge comes to believe that she's planning on murdering Marge and stealing her family. At the end of the episode, Becky admits that she was initially planning on doing exactly that, but gave up after realizing she'd have to buy a shovel to bury Marge's body.
  • "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" has Homer making up conspiracies and posting them to the internet. One such conspiracy (Flu shots being used for mind control) turns out to be true, causing Homer to be kidnapped and held in the Villa— ahem, "the Island".
  • In another episode, in the process of babyproofing the entire house, Homer encases the phone in concrete so Maggie can't call and have poison delivered to the house. Marge has trouble believing this, until Homer picks up a carrot (there to help with dialing), randomly hitting buttons, and, over the speakerphone, we hear "Thank you for your call. Your poison will be delivered shortly."
• Sofia the First: Sofia becomes this toward Sascha the Sorceress in "The Enchanted Feast", being the only one of the Royal Family who isn't keen on welcoming her, becoming suspicious of her behavior and recognizing her as "familiar" as she's seen her somewhere. Turns out her suspicions were all too correct — Sascha is Miss Nettle in disguise, to infiltrate the castle and steal Sofia's amulet.
• Sonic Boom: The episode "Can an Evil Genius Crash On Your Couch For a Few Days?" has Sticks predicting that Dr. Eggman has an Obliterator Bot ready to deploy against the group along with his latest evil scheme. Turns out he actually did have a literally named Obliterator Bot and an evil scheme to go with it.
  Sticks: Why doesn't anyone believe me?! It's not like I'm paranoid! [stops, glares at own shadow] Stop following me!
• South Park: Tweek, an 8-year-old boy addicted to caffeine and suffering from ADD, is constantly twitching, jumping, screaming, and pulling his hair out because he sees the underpants gnomes. Unfortunately, they are real. And of course, he lives in South Park of all places, so of course, he's constantly paranoid. Another time is when the boys try to steal Kenny's ashes from the McCormicks' living room. Cartman is checking the living room for robot guards all the while, but Kyle quickly tells him that his fear of robot guards in the living room is retarded. As it turns out, moments after they steal Kenny's ashes, there are robot guards. And given the McCormicks are Cthulhu cultists, the boys were lucky it was just robot guards.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man: Spider-Man begins to suspect partway through season one that Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin. However, he believes that he's been misled when he discovers Harry wearing the Goblin suit. Then, in the series finale, it's revealed that Norman was the Goblin all along, and framed Harry to throw Spider-Man off track.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "I Was a Teenage Gary", after getting injected with snail plasma, SpongeBob worries that something will happen to him, but Squidward tells him he'll be fine. Turns out SpongeBob was right. Squidward later falls victim to the same problem when the affected SpongeBob caused so much mayhem that Squidward found out at the end of said mayhem that he himself had been injected with snail plasma.
  • "New Leaf" has Plankton announce that he's giving up his pursuit of the Krabby Patty formula and converting the Chum Bucket into a knick-knack shop. Krabs refuses to buy it and goes as far as smashing up the knick-knacks with a baseball bat before Plankton finally manages to convince him that his Heel–Face Turn is genuine. The end of the episode reveals that it isn't genuine at all... but also reveals that Krabs knew that all along and was only faking his acceptance so he could trick Plankton with a charade of his own.
• Star Wars Rebels:
  • In "Vision of Hope", Kanan finds Senator Trayvis' codes in his transmissions, for setting up meetings with local rebels, too simple, and suspects the Empire could figure them out. Not only is he right, it turns out that Trayvis is an Imperial spy.
  • Lieutenant Lyste has noted that Alderaanian ships have a tendency to get stolen by rebels, so in "A Princess on Lothal", he's taking no chances with Princess Leia's ships — using gravity locks and two AT-ATs to deter any thieves. The rebels still get the ships, but it's more difficult than Leia had planned for.
  • "Warhead":
    • Upon finding a mysterious, damaged protocol droid in the wilderness, Chopper immediately wants to destroy it. The droid turns out to be an Imperial infiltrator, and Chopper gives an "I told you so" via AP-5 when it reveals its true nature. However, it's just as well Chopper didn't get his way, because that would have compromised the rebel base even sooner as the Empire would have known exactly which droid didn't report back.
    • Upon hearing that one of the infiltrator droids failed to report back, Kallus suspects that the rebels have it, so he contacts them as Fulcrum.
  • "Through Imperial Eyes":
    • Kallus is pissed that the rebels staged an operation to try and extract him because they thought his cover was in danger without telling him. His fear is proven right, because a piece of evidence is left behind that gives Grand Admiral Thrawn definite proof that Kallus is Fulcrum, which he wouldn't have had otherwise.
    • Thrawn insists that all Imperial officers entering his office use their code cylinders, no matter how well they may be known. If Ezra wasn't a Jedi, he, Kallus and Chopper never would've gotten inside.
  • In "Double Agent Droid", it's revealed that Hera always wipes Chopper's memory of hyperspace coordinates after every jump as a security precaution. This is why the Controller is forced to take Chopper over in an attempt to discover the location of the rebel base.
  • At the end of "Zero Hour, Part II", the rebels are taking a circuitous route to Yavin 4 involving at least three separate hyperspace jumps, so that Thrawn can't track them.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Cloak of Darkness", Luminara orders Ahsoka to stay in the detention level and guard Gunray just in case the Separatists have sent someone elite to rescue him. Ahsoka protests, but then ends up having to fight off Ventress.
• Steven Universe: In "Room for Ruby", when Steven tries to redeem Navy, he takes her to the other two defectors, Peridot and Lapis. He and Peridot are quick to take her in, but Lapis resists and continues to distrust her. Lapis eventually realizes that she was projecting her own insecurities onto Navy about adapting to Earth and starts earnestly trying to accept her. Only for Navy to immediately betray them and steal back her ship, causing Lapis to break into mad laughter about how she was right to be suspicious.
• Storm Hawks: Stork, overlapping with Crazy-Prepared, believes that various and hundreds of things are out to get him/the ship/his crew, and he often turns out to be right. Granted, his species are from a planet where natural disasters happen almost constantly, so this is more an ingrained survival mechanism than anything else. Stork also built an impressive array of traps in the Condor, much to the consternation of the other crew members, but on the numerous occasions the ship has been boarded they are very useful, and the crew are glad to have them.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: At the beginning of the episode "Two-Tone Town", when Warner Bros. holds auditions for an upcoming television show, Buster is worried that the new show will replace Tiny Toon Adventures in its time slot, canceling it and forcing him and Babs to get jobs at Toonywood Squares. At the end of the episode, what he said turns out to be true when he and Babs help obscure Warner Bros. stars Foxy, Roxy, Goopy Geer, and Big Bee get lead parts on the new show when they previously were all down on their luck.
• Tooned: Professor M sends along a robot avatar of himself to a secret McLaren base in Japan as a precaution in case Lewis and Jenson cause some sort of mishap with the robot test driver due to their usual M-ignoring antics. He proved to be correct.
• The Transformers:
  • Red Alert, the security director of the Autobots, is described by his comrades as really paranoid to the point that they may not take him seriously even if real danger occurs. One episode even has him become so paranoid after being badly damaged that he believes that his own comrades are out to get him, as well as believing that they want to tear him down for spare parts.
  • The Stunticon subgroup also has Breakdown, a decepticon so paranoid that he believes all things animate and inanimate are out to get him. The TFWiki even describes that he and Red Alert would be energon drinking buddies if each wasn't likely to be convinced that the other was trying to poison him.
• Ultimate Spider-Man: In the episode "Why I Hate Gym", Ava makes fun of Peter for intentionally underperforming at gym class and not defending himself from bullies, believing that he's going overboard with trying to maintain his cover. However, she's proven wrong when Taskmaster poses as their gym teacher to try and learn Spider-Man's identity. Peter Parker was eliminated as a possible Spidey because Peter did so poorly in class.
• The Venture Bros.: Colonel Hunter Gathers eats, sleeps, and breathes this trope. Nearly everything that comes out of his mouth sounds like completely insane conspiracy babble, but he's always right. On the very rare occasion that Gathers is outfoxed, it's because he wasn't paranoid enough.

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