History Main / ImproperlyParanoid

* ''Webcomic/BakeryEnemies'': Much of the plot (both comedic and dramatic) happens because Marinette assumes right off the bat that Adrien Agreste returning to Paris after several years away (and beginning work on her family's bakery) is part of some insidious plan to become [[SinsOfOurFathers Hawk Moth Jr.]] Adrien, after helping Marinette defeat Hawk Moth as Cat Noir, really would not care less about his dad (he took the bakery job to not touch whatever he has left of the Agreste fortune, for starters).

* ''Fanfic/BakeryEnemies'': Much of the plot (both comedic and dramatic) happens because Marinette assumes right off the bat that Adrien Agreste returning to Paris after several years away (and beginning work on her family's bakery) is part of some insidious plan to become [[SinsOfOurFathers Hawk Moth Jr.]] Adrien, after helping Marinette defeat Hawk Moth as Cat Noir, really would not care less about his dad (he took the bakery job to not touch whatever he has left of the Agreste fortune, for starters).

* Francie of the ''Literature/FamilyTreeSeries'' thinks she's justified in her overprotectiveness and only wants to keep her family and children safe, induced by nearly being kidnapped as a child (and never telling anyone, which makes her think a later girl being kidnapped and then never found [[ItsAllMyFault happened because she never spoke up]]). However, she takes it overboard. She refuses to let her children walk even as far as next door alone or play in the front yard without watching them. She panicked at having a baby sitter and used a nanny cam the first four times. After 9/11 she not only leaves a New Year's Party early because she can't spend one night away from her children, but then insists--without considering her husband's input--that she and her family must uproot their entire lives and move to Maine because it's "safer" than Princeton and because she can't live there anymore, everyone has to leave. While her children get some small freedoms in Maine, she still keeps them on tight leashes (for example, won't let them bike to the nearby town with friends). She even grounds her daughter Georgie for a week for taking her little brother Henry with her to a guitar lesson because--while Georgie told Richard they were going together--they didn't tell ''Francie'', and Francie panicked and nearly called the police even though Henry was with his sister the whole time. And almost anything her children ask to do she shoots down, even before her husband can have input, and often overrides him based on how she feels. This [[MyBelovedSmother smothering, overparanoid parenting style]] only breaks when Georgie, forbidden to perform with a band because it's an overnight trip with seniors, runs away to her grandmother's house--and when Dana sees Georgie going down the same path with Francie we went down with Abby and [[BreakingTheCycleOfBadParenting makes all four generations sit down and talk their problems out.]]

* Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir, the Bad of TheGoodTheBadAndTheEvil ensemble in ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'', is excessively paranoid of all things Orlesian, having spent his youth fighting a guerilla war against the Orlesian occupation of Ferelden. Unfortunately, this manifests itself in his utter distrust of the Orlesian chapter of the Grey Wardens — a truly ImpartialPurposeDrivenFaction — as well, leaving Ferelden (which, for historical reasons, barely has any Warden presence of its own) defenseless when the Darkspawn attack.

* Any storyline that involves plans made by superheroes to take out other superheroes (e.g. [[ComicBook/XMen Professor Xavier's Xavier Protocols]] and Franchise/{{Batman}}'s plans in ComicBook/JusticeLeagueOfAmericaTowerOfBabel) can come off as this to the targets. Often, it's acknowledged it's a good idea to know how to take down other heroes in case of things like mind control, but quite often the problem is the person planning the contingencies doesn't let the others know or abuses the trust of the others to come up with them.

* ''LetsPlay/AfterlifeSMP'': Near the start of her ninth episode, Enigma Lizzie hears Angel Scott breaking blocks near her hidden base. Believing he was there to "uncover the mystery" of her having undergone a FaceHeelTurn, she fixates her DeadlyGaze on him and [[spoiler:''[[AccidentalMurder accidentally murders him]]'' by staring at him for too long]]. For context, Scott was ''picking flowers'' at the time.
* Played seriously in ''WebVideo/DreamSMP''. During his spiral in the Pogtopia arc, [[WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds Wilbur]] was completely paranoid about everyone except Tommy either turning on him or dropping him once he's no longer useful. This carries across to after [[spoiler:he dies and is brought BackFromTheDead as well, where he talked to Phil about imagining him having a spatula put through his skull while building the burger van before Phil forced him to interact with Ranboo]]. His content creator counterpart eventually even [[WordOfGod confirms]] in a Reddit comment that his character "was suffering from intense paranoia and delusions".

* ''Anime/FullMetalPanic'': At least a third of the comedy of the series comes from the fact that [[TeenSuperSpy Sergeant Sousuke Sagara]] is this (and most of the time he is ProperlyParanoid, [[CerebusSyndrome the series is most definitely not being funny]]) and he brings ''Film/{{Rambo}}''-style guerrilla tactics, the JackBauerInterrogationTechnique, a HyperspaceArsenal and [[StuffBlowingUp enough explosives to vaporize a city block]] to [[AxesAtSchool a Japanese high school]]. Fellow students get hurt, pieces of the school get destroyed, and his protective detail target/[[SheIsNotMyGirlfriend eventual girlfriend]] gets freaked out when his paranoia gets the best of him and he decides, say for example, that someone placing a love letter in his shoe locker merits blowing up the locker thinking it's a booby trap.

[[folder:Web Animation]]
* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': This is the FatalFlaw for Ironwood , especially during Volumes 7 & 8, as the mere appearance of a chess piece crafted by the mastermind behind the Fall of Beacon is enough to trigger flashbacks to [[MyGreatestFailure his failure to defend Beacon]] and conclude that an evacuation he was overseeing was exactly what the villains wanted to sneak on aboard. From there, he begins to make bad decision after bad decision to try and keep himself and Atlas safe, eventually driving every ally he has away from him and causing enough division to [[spoiler:ensure that Atlas falls anyways]]. The worst part is that ''this'' was [[BatmanGambit what the villains really wanted out of him]].
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* This is the FatalFlaw for Ironwood in ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'', especially during Volumes 7 & 8, as the mere appearance of a chess piece crafted by the mastermind behind the Fall of Beacon is enough to trigger flashbacks to [[MyGreatestFailure his failure to defend Beacon]] and conclude that an evacuation he was overseeing was exactly what the villains wanted to sneak on aboard. From there, he begins to make bad decision after bad decision to try and keep himself and Atlas safe, eventually driving every ally he has away from him and causing enough division to [[spoiler:ensure that Atlas falls anyways]]. The worst part is that ''this'' was [[BatmanGambit what the villains really wanted out of him]].

* ''Anime/FullMetalPanic'': At least a third of the comedy of the series comes from the fact that [[TeenSuperSpy Sergeant Sousuke Sagara]] is this (and most of the time he is ProperlyParanoid, [[CerebusSyndrome the series is most definitely not being funny]]) and he brings ''Film/{{Rambo}}''-style guerrilla tactics, the JackBauerInterrogationTechnique, a HyperspaceArsenal and [[StuffBlowingUp enough explosives to vaporize a city block]] to [[AxesAtSchool a Japanese high school]]. Fellow students get hurt, pieces of the school get destroyed, and his protective detail target/[[SheIsNotMyGirlfriend eventual girlfriend]] gets freaked out when his paranoia gets the best of him.

* Tom Waits' poem "''What's He Building In There?''" is the musings of a man who believes a neighbor is up to no good because of little facts like not waving as he passes by and escalating to weird things (which the narrator may be making up) like swearing he heard someone moaning inside of the neighbor's house. The poem ends with "we have a right to know", implying that the narrator is going to go and barge into the neighbor's house.

* ''Anime/YuGiOhTheDarkSideOfDimensions'': Aigami was obsessed with stopping the Pharaoh from returning because if he ever did, Aigami and his family would lose their powers. He resorts to acts like trying to steal the Millennium Puzzle and trying to kill the Pharaoh's vessel, Yugi Muto. Even after Yugi demonstrates that the Pharaoh is no longer inside the Puzzle and is at peace in the afterlife, and that Yugi has made peace with this and doesn't even want him to come back even though he misses him, Aigami still tries to kill him and endangers the whole world. As the wiki lampshades, Aigami's paranoia ends up ''causing'' the Pharaoh to return because he became so dangerous that the Pharaoh came back to save Yugi and the others.

** He prevents Rista from viewing his stats because he suspects Gaebrande to host monsters that can obtain memories by eating people's brains. It is established that he is not a gamer, and so he shouldn't have knowldedge of monsters such as [[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons mind flayers]]. No such memory eating creatures appear.

* Stork, of the WesternAnimation/StormHawks, has boxed and labelled contingency plans for many unlikely outcomes, such as brain worms or mind control. He's also extremely twitchy and constantly predicting the worst case scenario for everyone. The now-defunct Storm Hawks website reveals this is because his homeland of Terra Merb is constantly beset by natural disasters, though we never see it in the series proper.

* ''ComicBook/{{Firestorm}}'' villain The Weasel was a former Stanford student who was kind of an asshole, and eventually got a job at a university with four people who were ''also'' from Stanford. Fearing that they disliked him and were planning to ruin his career, he donned a weasel costume and tried to kill them all. Turns out, none of them even ''remembered'' him, much less plotted revenge. All he manages to accomplish is ruining any non-villainous career when Firestorm gets on his case.

* ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekLowerDecks'': In "The Stars At Night", after quitting Starfleet, Mariner spends some time playing Indiana Jones around the galaxy but gets paranoid about who her employer can be and so she hacks the ship's computer to find out. It turns out to be a special archaeology project funded by none other than [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]]. [[{{Jerkass}} Mariner being Mariner]], it [[DisappointedByTheMotive actually makes her feel worse than if it had been funded by someone sinister]] -- she likes the danger but she does not cares about the artifacts and [[WantingIsBetterThanHaving now that she no longer works for Starfleet (for all that she seemed to hate it), she kind of misses it]].

* Played seriously in ''LetsPlay/DreamSMP''. During his spiral in the Pogtopia arc, [[WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds Wilbur]] was completely paranoid about everyone except Tommy either turning on him or dropping him once he's no longer useful. This carries across to after [[spoiler:he dies and is brought BackFromTheDead as well, where he talked to Phil about imagining him having a spatula put through his skull while building the burger van before Phil forced him to interact with Ranboo]]. His content creator counterpart eventually even [[WordOfGod confirms]] in a Reddit comment that his character "was suffering from intense paranoia and delusions".

** This is a man who uses a special attack on a ''slime'' wandering around a starter town, and even after completely obliterating it with the first strike, he then uses a high-powered fire spell on the empty ground where it used to be. By then, the area resembles an impact crater from a meteor, but he isn't satisfied and uses the special sword skill ''again''.
** He assumes that the pressed flower a friendly little human girl gives him is a "cursed item" immediately upon receiving it. Unless Rista explained what "S-rank world" means to him off-page, he wouldn't know how cunning the demons of this world are, yet he is suspicious before meeting Chaos Machina.
** He prevents Rista from viewing his stats because he suspects Gaebrande to host monsters that can obtain memories by eating people's brains. It is established that he is not a gamer, and so he shouldn't have knowldedge of monsters such as [[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons mind flayers]].

* In ''Literature/TheBible'', we have the story of King Herod, who after hearing the Wise Men speak of Jesus, orders the massacre of the first-born; but by then Joseph and Mary (forewarned by angels) are on their way to Egypt, thus meaning the child Herod is really after evades the slaughter.

* In ''Literature/TheBible'', we have the story of King Herod, who after hearing the Wise Men speak of Jesus, orders the massacre of the first-born; but by then Joseph and Mary are on their way to Egypt, thus meaning the child Herod is really after evades the slaughter.

* There's a zig-zagged case in ''ComicBook/UltimateSpiderMan'': When Spider-Man attacks the enforcers, Montana wants to take him out of the building, quickly, and close the door. The guy must be a trap from the feds. Ox says that no, he must be just a guy on his own doing stupid things. Eventually, the feds ''do'' show up, but on their own; Spider-Man's attack was not related to them and even interfered with it.