With Great Power Comes Great Insanity / Western Animation

Power causing insanity in western animation TV.

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• Adventure Time:
  • Simon Petrikov, a.k.a. the Ice King, an antique merchant from Just Before the End who found an Artifact of Doom that gave him immense magical power and immortality... but also slowly drove him to become a demented, miserable sociopath who only has the vaguest memories and a Freudian Excuse from his past life.
    • In the season 5 two-part opener, Farmworld Finn wears the crown and starts going insane too, complete with maniacal laughter. Notably, he loses his marbles much faster than Simon ever did.
    • The crown has been driving people insane since it was first created, according to the episode "Evergreen". The first person to wear it, Urgence Evergreen's apprentice Gunther, wished to be more like his master... but he turned into how he deep-down perceived Evergreen, which was a bearded bully who goes around blasting things with ice and shouting "Gunther, no!"
    • Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake reveals that the madness the Crown imparts is so intense that it cannot be stopped or circumvented. The Winter King, an alternate reality Ice King, only kept his sanity because he channeled all the Mind Rape pouring out of it into Princess Bubblegum instead, turning her into the utterly psychotic Candy Queen.
  • In "You Forgot Your Floaties", it is revealed that this may be the case with all magic, through the triumvirate of "Magic, Madness, and Sadness". Betty goes crazy after accidentally absorbing Magic Man's powers.
  • Subverted, however, by Flame Princess in "Vault of Bones". As she is attacking the monsters with her flames, she shifts into One-Winged Angel form, laughs maniacally, and generally seems to be going this way... but then, when one of them grabs Finn, she opts to intimidate it into letting him go, rather than risk hurting him by burning it, and she seems perfectly normal later.
  • This is a common problem in single-episode plots, as well. As Jake says in "Crystals Have Power", after Tree Trunks has come down from a temporary-power-induced bout of deranged violence:
    Jake: If I had a penny for every time someone went crazy-hopped-up on magical energy, I'd be Abraham Lincoln!
  • Inverted in "The Tower" when Finn's trauma over losing his arm and being abandoned by his father a second time unlocks his latent psychic potential, creating a powerful psionic ghost arm. With Great Insanity Comes Great Power.
  • "The Real You" has Finn don a pair of magical glasses that make him The Omniscient. By the end of the episode, he's done a science experiment that threatens to kill them all, and is cackling cheerfully about the whole thing until Princess Bubblegum snaps him out of it. Amusingly, we then learn that the glasses let him know that he was going to go insane, so PB's help was part of his Batman Gambit.
  • In the miniseries Elements, Patience St. Pim creates a spell to wake the Elementals powers forcibly, which leads to them being overturned by their own elements and parting the land of Ooo in 4 parts, one for each. Fire Princess turns into a dragon who looks for things to fight against, as well as all her followers. Bubblegum becomes an always happy Tower-sized entity who turns everyone around her in candy overly sweet versions of themselves and does Brainwashing for the Greater Good. Slime Princess becomes tyrannical, lazy and wishes to absorb other slimes into her own besides behaving and talking in a similar fashion to Jabba the Hut. Patience herself becomes gloomy and melancholic.
• Aladdin: The Series:
  • In a less malevolent example, one episode has Genie's powers be transferred to Iago. Iago notices pretty quickly that along with Genie's powers, he has also become more eccentric and strange, while the de-powered Genie becomes more morose. Apparently, possessing semi-phenomenal, nearly-cosmic power makes you a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Played straight when Sultan dons the armor of Killeem, which grants him superhuman strength and speed, but at the cost of his identity.
• In the Atomic Puppet episode "Sword Sisters", Pauline becomes the superheroine Sword Sister after she gets her hands on a Cool Sword, but soon goes mad due to its incredible power. Joey and AP are forced to find the sword's original owner in order to stop their friend.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Aang can enter the Avatar State, channeling the power of all his previous incarnations. You'd think channeling all those former Avatars would make him calm, wise, and experienced, but no... Instead, he gets all incandescent and frags everything in sight. However, true mastery of the Avatar State includes being able to control it, which he finally manages to achieve in the Grand Finale.
  • In the Grand Finale, after being made Fire Lord, Azula loses it. In an inversion, it's because she's losing power and she knows it — her friends had shown themselves insufficiently scared of her and defied her, and her dad appointed her Fire Lord right before turning the position into "irrelevant figurehead". Paranoia of further betrayals if she didn't instill fear in everyone around her, and insecurity that no one (especially her mother) truly loved her for who she was, caused her to finally snap.
• In The Batman, when good cop Ethan Bennet becomes Clayface, he goes on a murderous vendetta against his former Captain. It's later asserted that the incident that turned him into Clayface damaged his mind, and that, the more he keeps his form, the less unstable he will be. In fact, whenever he stays in his normal form, he's polite and rational, but the moment he uses his powers, he tends to become violent and unhinged.
• In the Batman Beyond episode "Heroes", three scientists are transformed by a Freak Lab Accident. They are angry and frustrated at being unable to lead normal lives, and are pushed over the edge when they learn that the transformation is killing them and driving them insane — and that the "accident" was deliberately set up by a colleague who had intended to kill his romantic rival.
• Ben 10:
  • In Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, this is revealed to be the reason behind Kevin's villainy in the first show. Absorbing energy causes insanity in people with his powers: before he'd even met Ben, he was hooked on electricity and was planning to do things like crash trains full of people together to make a buck. After accidentally absorbing energy from Ben's Omnitrix, he really goes nuts, and turns into a full-on psychotic amalgamation of Omnitrix aliens. After the Time Skip in Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, he is noticeably wary about doing it. Aggregor claims that this is BS; however, since he is already an insane supervillain, he probably isn't the most reliable source. Kevin ends up proving it by absorbing Omnitrix energy to stop Aggregor, but loses his sanity in the process. In his new Omnitrix Amalgamation form, dubbed Ultimate Kevin, he then proceeds to take the power Aggregor stole and then try to drain energy from anyone with power, right after giving out Disproportionate Retribution to everyone he's ever had problems with. He is barely stopped long enough to cure him.
  • This is also a problem with the Alpha Rune, the mystical artifact from which all magic flows. Whomever wields it is gradually driven to madness, as shown by both Adwaita and Charmcaster.
  • Ben 10: Omniverse introduces the Nemetrix, an Evil Doppelgänger of the Omnitrix. In contrast to the Omnitrix only using the DNA of sapient life-forms, the Nemetrix used feral beasts that acted as predators to those life-forms, and as a consequence it could only be used by animals. Most intelligent life-forms attempting to use it would at best experience memory loss and mutation, and at worst have their higher brain functions destroyed.
• Professor Von Madman in the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command episode "Eye of the Tempest" after he tests his revolutionary crystal/human hybrid technology on himself. But he has a daughter...
• Danny Phantom:
  • Dark Danny, though the whole thing about watching helplessly as your family and friends get blown up and getting your super-powered ghost half removed did give a good start... but he only started a murderous rampage after getting his enemy's power. His past self is extremely horrified.
  • Vlad, as he seemed to be largely content with his life before the accident. Except that his one true love went and married their idiot friend who Vlad thinks caused the accident anyhow.
• El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera:
  • Maria is a mild-mannered family woman who is terrified of danger and hyperventilates when it is around her or her family. However, when she puts on her magical glove, she transforms into the 'superheroine' Plata Peligrosa. If she only has it on for an hour, she is fine, but a second longer and she becomes crazed and will do anything for a fight (even free crooks from jail). At one point, she even starts attacking herself (because she has released villains and that is evil) and trying to kill her own son because he is trying to help her when she has labeled herself evil and attacking herself.
  • Arguably Manny himself and the El Tigre beforehand. Those who end up with the title of El Tigre along with the belt buckle end up suffering from whether to become good or evil, with the first El Tigre having gone quite mad. However, they also have more raw power and abilities than either the Good or Evil family members. Besides the enhanced capabilities along with chain claw, the first El Tigre explains that Manny will keep getting new powers after demonstrating some such as growing the claws to be quite long and a sonic explosion-causing roar. Lastly, El Tigre has the power to escape the underworld with the power of the Ancient Tiger Spirit.
• Freakazoid! is the rare heroic example. Becoming the titular hero drives Dexter Douglas insane, but it's the "five-year-old after drinking an entire case of Mountain Dew" kind of insane, not the "Mwahahahaha! Ultimate power to rule the world!" kind of insane.
• The EVOs of Generator Rex can get hit with this, Body Horror, or both. The clearest example would probably be Breach, though she's at least coherent. No-Face from the Bug Jar also demonstrates a seriously degraded mental state, though not in the same way as Breach. Some EVOS are so far gone, it's easy to forget they were ever human in the first place.
• Happens to Goofy in the House of Mouse short "Sandwich Makers".
  Donald: He's lost it.
• The Mask:
  • Downplayed with the titular Mask himself. When Stanley puts on the Mask of Loki, he becomes a genuinely insane cartoonish man, but the Mask is pretty much harmless — despite being a Troll, he's a sweet and kind person with a charismatic personality which attracts girls to him despite him often coming off too strong at first towards them.
  • Evelyn accidentally puts on the mask when she puts on her glasses, which got attached to them, and becomes a Southern American Girl named Eve with an accent that goes with it. Like the Mask, she is also genuinely insane but a sweet and kind person as well, which is shown when she falls in love with Stanley in no time at all and ends up genuinely caring about him.
  • When Dr. Neuman puts on the mask, he becomes an insane and psychotic (he denies that he is wearing the mask even though he obviously is) but Affably Evil supervillain who still retains some standards, such as putting everyone in wedgie straitjackets, and still does his job, such as when his appointment alarm goes off on his watch and he decides to go to the prison where Pretorius is. After listening to Pretorius' story, Neuman agrees that Pretorius is insane but decides to help him with his plan and team up with him anyway.
• Miraculous Ladybug: This is the stated consequence of using too many Miraculous at one time, which is why the heroes never go above two on the rare occasions they use multiples at all. One episode featured Marinette employing some clever Loophole Abuse by first using the Mouse Miraculous to clone herself, then having each clone take a different second Miraculous to use.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot: In "Dressed to Kill", the Crust Cousins get their hands on some alien crystals that give them superpowers, but also cause them to go from mere school bullies to would-be tyrants. Jenny ends up tricking them into taking the outfits off by showing them a fashion magazine saying that crystals are out of style.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Magic Duel", Trixie's sanity deteriorates while under the influence of a magic-boosting Artifact of Doom; the first thing she does after banishing Twilight being to turn Ponyville into a micronation with her as its Caligula, then it comes to a head when she has Snips and Snails drag her chariot across the ground, as she is now so paranoid that she can't trust wheels.
  • In "Inspiration Manifestation", the more Rarity uses the book's power, the more deranged she becomes.
  • In "The Ending of the End – Part 2", Pinkie Pie briefly absorbs Discord's chaos magic and goes mad with her newfound power. Fortunately, Discord promptly drains his magic back out of her.
    Pinkie Pie: I COULD TRANSFORM THE COSMOS SO EVERYTHING IS MADE OF ICING!
  • When the main cast fails in their destiny, they go a bit wonky, which the fans dubbed Cutie Mark Failure Sudden Insanity Syndrome. However, the Alicorn goddesses have this manifest as full alternate personalities. Nightmare Moon and Midnight Sparkle are each an apocalyptic Mad God who's also stronger than their normal counterpart. It's good that Daybreaker is just a dream — as Celestia is the strongest, it's likely that she would have been an unstoppable god of fire.
• In the Ninjago episode "The Forgotten Element", Kai briefly becomes corrupted by the power of Master Chen's Staff of Elements, causing his suppressed envy of Lloyd becoming the Green Ninja to surface. Fortunately, it doesn't last long.
• Phineas and Ferb: In "Cranius Maximus", Baljeet becomes a super-genius thanks to an intelligence-boosting helmet Phineas and Ferb make him. He promptly becomes obsessed with stripping away the Earth's atmosphere so it doesn't interfere with astronomical observations.
• Inverted and then played straight in ReBoot. Hexadecimal started out very powerful and insane. When she gets reformatted into a sprite and as a result is depowered, she becomes very sane and cheerful. Then she needs to go viral again to fight Daemon, and the powerup makes her insane again.
• An episode of Samurai Jack centers around Jack defeating three shadowy warriors with amazing powers who attack anyone who comes near. After the battle, it turns out that the warriors were actually three men who used a magic well to wish for the power to be the greatest warriors in the land. While the well granted their wish, it also made them blind and took their free wills. And it was Aku behind this.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man:
  • Three supervillains qualify when they get bonus mental instability with their powers. Electro and Doctor Octopus each suffer a Freak Lab Accident. Electro gets volatile electricity-based powers, then freaks out at his loss of humanity. Doctor Octopus' robotic arms are fused to his spine when radiation fuses his mechanical arms with his spinal column, which causes an extreme personality change. The Green Goblin claims that he suffered no blackouts and no change in personality from his Psycho Serum, but it is very likely that he is in denial considering that he actually keeps acting crazy and speaking in rhymes while he's hovering above the prison in season 2 while no one can hear him. The Goblin formula probably enhanced his insanity, however.
  • John Jameson was infected by alien spores, which made him super massive, super strong, and essentially a Flying Brick without the flying, but, over time, messed with his head, making him filled with rage and aggression. After Venom threw him into a rage (making him think the one messing with him was Spider-Man), Spidey was able to purge the spores from his system, making his body return to normal, but he was severely addicted to the power, and had to be admitted to an insane asylum. The effect was made more evident due to John having a cell right next to the now completely insane Electro, who babbles on about how he has no more human identity.
  • Eddie Brock also qualifies as an example. When he's stripped of the symbiote in a battle at Peter's high school, he is strapped to a stretcher and removed by two hospital orderlies, screaming at a crowd of spectators that "WE'RE VENOM!" (though he had problems beforehand and the symbiote just released the inhibitions).
• Spider-Carnage of Spider-Man: The Animated Series is an example of this happening to a version of Spider-Man himself.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Strange Energies", Ransom is driven mad by his newfound power, remaking the planet in his image. He begins acting on his resentment towards Freeman and Mariner, partially because of the attention that the former is giving the latter, but mostly frustration that they're clearly hiding their anger at the new status quo.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil:
  • Played for Laughs in "Page Turner". At the end, Star has read the forbidden chapter of her spellbook and decided it's not for her. Marco, however, has gone insane with power:
    Glossaryck: Luckily, there's a spell to fix that.
  • Played far more seriously with the Solarian Warriors. Overexposure to the setting's magic has mind altering effects in general and Solarian Warriors are created by channeling it directly into the warrior's body. The first generation of warriors killed each other in their madness. The second took people who were merely intolerant and turned them into genocidal maniacs.
• In Static Shock, the Big Bang is occasionally thought to invoke this in earlier episodes. Notably, it's why Richie refuses to trust Static when the metahuman Replay frames him, believing that Static just took longer to go nuts than the others. However, since the Big Bang takes place in the middle of a gang war, the guys who get the highest doses are generally not great people to begin with, and later episodes introduce other perfectly sane superpowered characters.
• Steven Universe:
  • Sugilite, a building-sized fusion of Garnet and Amethyst, is a walking wrecking machine. Problem is, the combo of Amethyst's wild personality and Garnet's power makes her violent and hard to manage. If the fusion lasts too long, she becomes a serious threat.
  • It's implied that all fusions can have this effect, especially forced fusions. Malachite is essentially a case of multiple personality disorder (including with Steven having a short view on the two gems inside who are both going insane from the abuse they put each other through) and the Cluster is this times hundred, even adding And I Must Scream and Body Horror to the mixture.
• Superman: The Animated Series: Luthortech has two examples of experimentation causing insanity.
  • Lex Luthor creates a super-suit ostensibly to help the police fight crime. The officer testing it builds an unhealthy bond with it and becomes drunk with power, forcing the Man of Steel and John Henry Irons to take him down. Irons later works out the flaws in the suit that caused this behavior and creates his iconic "Steel" armor. Interestingly, the first opponent he fights as Steel is Metallo, the below example.
  • Luthor poisons unwitting gangster John Corben, then offers to save his life with the Metallo project. Corben, advised only that there may be "some adjustments needed" to help him live a normal life after the process, accepts. However, in his new robot body, the hedonistic Corben can't feel, smell, touch, or taste anything — already a criminal and card-carrying psychopath, Corben becomes destructive in his rage at his human sensations being lost.
• SWAT Kats:
  • Dr. Viper was formerly one of two biochemists who invented the Viper mutagen, which was intended to regenerate plants. Then he decided to try to steal it so he could sell it, directly leading to his transformation into the crazed, lizard-like Dr. Viper.
  • The otherwise peaceful Dr. Greenbox invents Zed, a robot that can repair any mechanical device. When said robot goes on a rampage, he initially comes along to help stop it... but is so delighted with how powerful his creation is that he tries to sabotage the mission and ends up merging himself with Zed.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Raven must suppress her anger — otherwise, she takes on a far more evil side that has no mercy and takes up a form that can border on Eldritch Abomination.
  • Word of God ascribes this trope to the Amazing Mumbo; originally a harmless Stage Magician, when he got ahold of a magician's wand that was actually magical, it granted him full-fledged sorcerous powers, turning him into a Reality Warper of such power he's even a Domain Holder, with a pocket-plane of which he is the Dimension Lord tucked away inside of his top hat. However, the powers also drove him completely bonkers, and as such he now uses them to create "real" magician tricks that he uses for petty crimes like robbing banks.
• Transformers:
  • This is the hat of pretty much ever version of Galvatron that's ever appeared in any iteration of the franchise. He's usually a powered-up version of Megatron, and he's also usually batshit insane. The one exception to this is IDW's run of the comic books, where the two are separate characters rather than Galvatron being a stronger upgrade of Megatron, though that Galvatron is possibly even more evil to make up for it (certainly he's allowed to do much more evil things than most other versions could get away with).
  • Beast Wars:
    • A Maximal experiment to create an immortal spark, Rampage is nigh-immortal but also completely insane and takes great pleasure from torturing others in the sickest ways possible. He's also a cannibal.
    • Megatron too. Once he mingles his spark with that of his namesake, and then takes control of the Nemesis, he goes completely bonkers and begins quoting the Transformer bible.
    • Optimus Primal has a couple of instances too. When he carries the spark of Optimus Prime, he not only gets a new body out of the deal but takes on some of Prime's mannerisms. Prime is an incredibly good character, so Primal doesn't get the nasty side effects Megatron gets. In another episode, he gets injected with a serum that was supposed to turn him into a coward. However, it instead removes all fear, turning him into an unstoppable berserker. He doesn't get stronger, just fully utilizes his already considerable strength.
  • Word of God for Transformers: Animated says that the experiment that turned Blitzwing into a triple changer drove him insane.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Ratchet goes nuts when hopped up on synthetic Energon. Silas gets hit with this as well when he gets drugged up on several doses of the stuff courtesy of Knock Out as payback for hollowing out Breakdown's corpse and turning it into a mech suit. Then he and Starscream get the brilliant idea to throw in some Dark Energon...
• Dark magic has this effect in Winx Club, as it's fueled by negative emotions, the more powerful its users become, the more they risk becoming fully evil. Best shown by the Trix:
  • They start out as powerful, ambitious and mean, but not particularly evil (especially Darcy, who actually fell in love and got together with Riven halfway through the first season);
  • The moment they got their hands on the enormous power of the Dragon's Flame (a power-up they couldn't handle), they instantly became borderline Omnicidal Maniacs bent to take over the universe or destroy it trying (with Darcy 'breaking up' with Riven in a nightmarish Break the Haughty sequence, in which she claimed she was only using him);
  • At the start of season 2, they've lost the Dragon's Flame, and aside from the mental trauma from getting imprisoned at Lightrock (a Fate Worse than Death, according to them), they seem back to normal;
  • Soon after, Darkar give them the Gloomix power-up, and they grow more sadistic;
  • In season 3, without the Gloomix and with little negative emotions due to their crush on Valtor, they're at their weakest, only returning to be dangerous when facing Bloom (who they blame for defeating them and letting them get imprisoned at Lightrock);
  • In the second movie and early season 5, after the Ancestral Witches' tutelage brought them on par with Believix fairies, they're back to Gloomix-like evil;
  • When they get the Dark Sirenix (and somehow maintain that level of power even after losing it), they're back trying to take over the universe.
• W.I.T.C.H.:
  • Nerissa is a sad example of this. She was actually pretty well-adjusted until she gained control of the Heart of Candracar. The Oracle tried to cut her off at the pass, making her hand it over to her best friend, Cassidy. All it did was drive Nerissa farther into needing it, in which she killed her friend in cold blood. A good generation later, she comes back, pulling off a plan to obtain more Hearts "for the greater good of the universe".
  • Will comes close in the second season, but manages to pull back at the last second (quite literally).
• In X-Men: The Animated Series, Apocalypse was this according to Professor Xavier, which means that unlike Magneto and the group behind the Sentinels, he cannot be reasoned with and has to be stopped at once by the X-Men before he will destroy the world.

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