Success Through Insanity

aka: Crazy Awesome

"Ping, you are the craziest man I've ever met, and for that, I owe you my life."

— Li Shang, Mulan

A challenge is overcome due to a character's specific quirk of insanity. Their inability to handle normal reality has been weaponized into an effective means of solving one or more problems. Keep in mind, this character's madness is essential to the task. A saner version would have failed.

This type of useful insanity is usually Played for Laughs. In Real Life, we would typically expect these types of characters to get fired, arrested, and eventually hospitalized or even killed. Not so in the world of fiction; these characters have been able to achieve things their saner counterparts are unable to, similar to Achievements in Ignorance. They're often as entertaining as a Bunny-Ears Lawyer, who is a capable character despite or alongside their quirks.

This is a Sub-Trope of Cloudcuckoolander; a character who is simply insane/delusional.

If their insanity prevents them from being killed or arrested when anyone else would be, that's a Lunatic Loophole. If a character's quirky but not actually insane, they're a Bunny-Ears Lawyer. If the bad thing that happened was so bizarre that they're the only person prepared for it, they're Crazy-Prepared. When all of humanity is composed of Heroic Madmen, that's Humanity Is Insane. If the crazy person was right about something, that's The Cuckoolander Was Right. If they gained any powers from their insanity, that's Power Born of Madness. When a crazy person is in a position of power, that's The Wonka. Compare Crazy Sane, where their sanity is indeed in question, but they still maintain some degree of lucidity so they can still progress.

Contrast Sanity Has Advantages.

Not to be confused with Crazy Enough to Work.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Miss Naddy is a Japanese teacher in Rentaro's school. She is also a USA-obsessed reverse Occidental Otaku who dresses as a hot cowgirl and speaks in mangled Gratuitous English and/or Spanish despite being full-blooded Japanese. Chapter 118 has Naddy in trouble with a senior teacher because her way of speaking is nigh-incomprehensible and, until the matter is resolved, she is made to speak normally when giving her lessons. However, an extra page following the chapter reveals that Naddy's students' grades have not only improved since she began teaching, but have done so because of her mannerisms, as "her completely borked language" is interesting, keeping students engaged, and students have to put more effort into actually listening to decipher what she says. The page depicts a lesson when Naddy was required to speak properly and shows the students bored and uninterested.
• Chainsaw Man: Kishibe is the world's greatest Devil Hunter, and believes you have to be quite crazy to survive Public Safety's High Turnover Rate. Devils are strengthened by fear, so it's best to fight them as a Fearless Fool, making the devils fear you through sheer unpredictability. Encounters with them can be so horrifying, no sane person would fight them while maintaining a strong will to live.
• Getter Robo is described by one of its three pilots as a robot that can only be piloted by either superior pilots, or the insane. It's never quite clear which one the trio qualify as.
• High School D×D: This is Issei's go-to strategy for a while, making use of Achievements in Ignorance to defy the odds and take his opponent off-guard to let his snowballing brute strength do the rest. A classic example is when he incorporates a fragment of Divine Dividing into the gauntlet of his Boosted Gear Scale Mail, merrily ignoring the fact this was supposed to be impossible. The trope actually gets examined as the series goes on and Issei gets Character Development - he eventually grows the self-awareness to realize these antics aren't without cost (the above sheered centuries off his lifespan) and if it ever fails, that's probably it for him. It forms part of his reasoning for training his head as well as his body.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Joseph Joestar, snarky Pop-Cultured Badass and ostentatious Guile Hero has become well-known for the often nonsensical levels of trickery he uses to defeat his enemies.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shinji Ikari certainly qualifies, since it's implied Unit 01's berserk mode is tied to his manic state.
• Paranoia Agent: "Radar Man" has been driven mad by the revelation, but his craziness also feeds him the information he needs to fight the menace to reality... sort of.

Comic Books

• 52: All of Doctor Magnus's attempts to recreate the Metal Men fail while he's on his meds. Then he's abducted by people looking for mad scientists and, despite his warnings, deprived of those meds. He goes insane and, among other things, manages to recreate the Metal Man. Then he kills an egg-shaped supercomputer in the process of escaping. He did warn them he does crazy things without his meds...
• Batman: A villainous example. A great deal of what the Joker does should be impossible. He has a tiny fraction of Batman's resources, doesn't have his own Charles Atlas Superpower to match, has a reputation that should make it impossible for him to secure allies and minions, and his scientific knowledge, while great, is limited to "realistic" inventions (unlike, say, Lex Luthor). He's still one of the most successful (and terrifying) villains in The DCU because insanity is his superpower.
• Continuity Comics: Crazyman, whose power is being crazy. "Crazyman" is recruited by a secret service as the "Plan B" to dangerous "unwinnable" situations. Danny is to the secret service as Monk is to the San Francisco Police Department, and comes up with solutions no sane man would come up with. If James Bond were insane, he'd be Crazyman.
• The Sandman (1989): One story has Delirium in a foul mood, having hidden herself away in her realm and cut off all access. In order to get to her, Dream recruits several mentally ill people, as only their flexible interpretations of reality would allow them to navigate Delirium's home unscathed.
• For a while, Sturmtruppen has the Drunk Captain, an officer drunk the whole time... and, being drunk, he'll mistake bullets from a machine gun for insects and swat them out of the air.

Fan Works

• The aptly named Thor fan fiction Chaos War sees Asgard engaged in a losing war against the "shining ones", an Eldritch Abomination alien race who seem countless in number and devour everything in their path. Strategy is useless against them, as they always seem to be in the right place to subvert whatever Thor or Odin try, and the strength of the Aesir is waning. So Odin sends Thor to go get Loki and puts him on the throne, reasoning that if wisdom and strength have failed, madness might work instead. Loki promptly lives up to expectations, sending soldiers off to other planets at random — literally throwing darts to decide — and gleefully using his new power to indulge stupid whims like making an increasingly frustrated Thor collect him a bunch of acorns and closing down a highway to dry apples. Except everything Loki does works. The shining ones start showing up only on the planets where Asgard's soldiers are stationed, and the Aesir start winning battles with hardly a casualty. It gets to the point where Sif begins to wonder if Loki is somehow in command of the enemy since he appears to be predicting their behavior perfectly despite his insane, random decisions. Finally Loki explains to Thor how the shining ones work: They can see the future. None of the Aesir's previous strategems have worked because the shining ones can see what's going to happen and adjust accordingly — but they can only make decisions based on what future they see at the moment. So Loki, as the enemy commander, has to mentally commit to a course of action that would benefit them, then change his mind once the shining ones are fully invested. To whit, he meditates on how much he hates Odin and Asgard and wants them to fall, decides to do horrible things like poisoning his own soldiers and letting the enemy invade Asgard while it's undefended, and then when the shining ones show up to wreak destruction, decides not to do those horrible things after all and instead take advantage of the enemy's new position. Even the acorns and dried apples factor in! The mental gymnastics required are such that only a pretty crazy person could pull something like that off.
• The Infinite Loops contain a multiverse of characters like this. When you are an immortal time traveler who can gain new powers just by going to new places, part of the fun comes from seeing just how much insanity you can cause without causing a loop crash.
• Old Man Henderson is a Trail of Cthulhu character made specifically to throw the game as Off the Rails as possible. He attacks a cult of Hastur believing them to have stolen his lawn gnomes, is so high that he mistakes a shoggoth for a really ugly poodle (thus succeeding in his Sanity check), drops a yacht on a rooftop meeting of a cult of Cthulhu, causes an all-out war between the two cults, summons Hastur itself and blows it to kingdom come, and makes a joint from a page of the Necronomicon. In other words, he is completely off his rocker, which enables him to defeat Hastur, and is a prime example of this trope.
• With This Ring: After gaining Enlightenment Superpowers, Paul frequently comes across as odd to normal human (and other) beings, but even for him, it's still notably bizarre when he encounters a Spider Guilder with a yellow ring, who has kidnapped one of his Orange Lanterns, and he proceeds to cut off his own limbs and order the spider to eat them. Nonetheless, as a demonstration that he doesn't fear the worst the spider can do, it's effective in helping Lantern Onik to break out of the cycle of fear that he was trapped in and use his own orange ring to fight back.

Film — Animation

• Clopin from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney). He has an oddly adversarial relationship with his hand puppet and presides over a bizarro Kangaroo Court where he captures, tries, and nearly executes the movie's heroes — all in the span of three minutes. And this guy is also the heroic leader of the rebellion against Frollo.

Film — Live-Action

• The Caveman's Valentine: Romulus. "I have brain typhoons." But he was the only one willing to believe (and try to prove) that the murdered guy was murdered.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Captain Jack Sparrow, who, by the third movie is certifiably off his rocker, if only there were someone to certify him. Jack got most of his good ideas in the film from his hallucinations. Of himself. Lampshaded in the third movie..
    Lord Cutler Beckett: You're mad! ^note Jack is attempting to escape from Lord Beckett's ship in At World's End by blasting its mast down with a cannon and riding its rigging back to the Black Pearl.
    Captain Jack Sparrow: Thank goodness for that, because if I wasn't, this would probably never work.
  • The other captain of the Black Pearl, Hector Barbossa, is pretty crazy himself. For example, in the third film, he intentionally gets his own ship hopelessly lost in order to find the "World's End"... and does so, followed by sailing it off the edge of the planet into the Netherworld, while laughing like a maniac, with an "arr" or two thrown in just for giggles.
    Captain Hector Barbossa: Aye, fer sure, ye've got ta be good and lost to find a place as can't be found, else everyone would know where it was!

Jokes

• Common joke among mathematics or computer science students and professors involves asking how many people became insane while studying in their departments. The correct answer is zero: insanity is a prerequisite.

Literature

• Blindsight:
  • The main character's severe autism means he's the only one able to objectively synthesize all of the information and determine just what the deal is with the Starfish Aliens they discover. Of course, he's also unable to bond with other people or empathize with them, so...downer.
  • The predatory instincts and complete sociopath nature of the ship's captain (who is an actual vampire) also turns out to be vital in second-guessing the otherwise indecipherable behavior of the alien vessel and its inhabitants.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: The eponymous Strange must drink a bottle of distilled madness (causing him to lose his mind) in order to be able to see and interact with The Fair Folk on their own terms.
• In the Known Space story "Madness Has Its Place", Jack Strather's megalomania and paranoid schizophrenia make him one of the few men left on Earth with the cojones to actually resist the invading Kzinti.
• The short story "The Men Return" by Jack Vance features a world where causality had basically gone out the window. One character was barely surviving, trying to find patterns where there were none. On the other hand, the ones who were crazy before The Event were basically gods.
• Never Let Me Sleep: Whether it's the way her brain naturally works, or the medication she takes for her disorders, Melissa is the only person not affected by the death sleep within the "South Dakota Quarantine Zone".
• Gabriel Gale of The Poet and the Lunatics is a famous poet and painter who seems to be perpetually one mental misstep away from going completely bonkers. In addition to the profoundly beneficial effects this has on his art, it has several times enable him to solve crimes committed by lunatics which the police (who are generally quite sane) were unable to make heads or tails of.
• Redwall: In High Rhulain, the hare Major Cuthbert went insane after his daughter was killed by vermin. He ended up killing a sea monster single-handedly.
• Second Apocalypse: Cnauir urs Skiotha is quite literally crazy, as he is consumed with guilt over having been manipulated by Moenghus thirty years ago. However, this obsessive guilt also drove him to become the "most violent of men". He is amazingly skilled in combat (being the only character to land a blow on Kellhus in single combat), a very insightful tactician, and is so horrifying in battle his enemies see him as an avatar of their own god of war.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: There are a number of wild, barbarian clans living in the Mountains of the Moon. One clan, called the Burned Men, ritually mutilate themselves during a coming of age ceremony, most commonly in the form of something like cutting off a finger or such. A really crazy one will take off an ear. Even the other clans think the Burned Men are Ax-Crazy. But not to be outdone, one member of the Burned Men, Timmett son of Timmett instead took a searing hot knife and put his own eye out at his ceremony. The rest of the Burned Men thought this was so crazy awesome that they made Timmett a war leader on the spot, despite the fact that he had only just come of age.
• This Alien Shore: The Guerans (a mutant race descended from humanity) are all insane, which makes them the only ones who can pilot ships through hyperspace. In addition, the heroine's multiple personality disorder grants her a secret power that could alter the balance of power throughout known space.

Live-Action TV

• 7 Days (1998): The only person able to pilot the Chronosphere is Frank Parker, inmate at a military insane asylum.
• The A-Team: There's a good reason why he's called "Howlin' Mad" Murdock. He once created a successful diversion by impersonating a horse, and in the episode after that, when Hannibal's plan failed, Murdock managed to fix it just in time. He once insisted he could become invisible at will — the subject of much joking among the Team, who could see him quite clearly — and then proceeded to do precisely that to infiltrate a restaurant in search of a suspect. And he has an invisible dog named Billy.
• Pretty much everyone in Farscape has moments of this, but John Crichton takes the cake, who has ejected himself into space and propelled himself to a nearby ship by shooting a gun into space and manages to force the Scarrans to negotiate with him by creating a handheld nuclear bomb which he promptly dances around with.
• In The Good Wife, Elsbeth Tascioni verges on Bunny-Ears Lawyer but lands in this because her...'quirkiness' (as in, the type of 'quirkiness' that caused her to fail a police psychological evaluation) is crucial to her brilliance as a lawyer. She's one of the best lawyers on the show precisely because she comes up with bizarre strategies that no one else would think of (and thus no opponents are prepared for), and because her charmingly ditzy personality lets her get away with things that no one else could (such as cheerfully threatening to leak false information that would turn every judge in Chicago against Wendy Scott-Carr, in public, in front of Scott-Carr's kids).
• Deconstructed in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Detective Robert Goren was encouraged by mentor Declan Gage to indulge his darker impulses to help him understand the criminal mind and for a long time, this approach served him well. However, after a particularly grueling season, he learned that Gage was manipulating events in order to kill Goren's brother and his nemesis, convinced that Goren would be a better detective with fewer people in his life to distract him. Instead, it drove Goren into a psychotic break.
• Monk: Adrian Monk is arguably the paradigm for this type. His obsessive/compulsive disorder got him booted from the SFPD and makes it difficult for him to get through his day-to-day life, but it also aids him immeasurably in solving cases. As Monk himself often acknowledges, "It's a gift... and a curse." There once was an episode in which Monk was on pills which took away the Crazy, making him also lose the Awesome.

Role-Playing Games

• Destroy the Godmodder: Tricky the clown is the only character to repeatedly defy the curse of repetition, and the only listed reason: He's an insane psycho zombie clown.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: The signature trait of the Magical Society House Criamon is "Enigmatic Wisdom", an esoteric mindset that's completely incomprehensible to the rest of the world but helps them understand puzzles, dreams, and arcane mysteries. Advanced members can even use it in place of certain conventional skills — like, say, surgical training.
• Call of Cthulhu: There's a rule concerning "Insane Insight" that allows a PC going mad to obtain some hint from the GM as to what they're dealing with or the true natures of the cosmos.
• Cyberpunk: Adam Smasher is able to avoid Cybernetics Eat Your Soul because he didn't have one to begin with; he was already so utterly psychotic and unstable losing his entire body didn't, or couldn't, make things any worse.
• Malkavians in Vampire: The Masquerade are, when played well, famous for using their mental illnesses to produce both Obfuscating Insanity and supernatural insight.
• Warhammer 40,000: "Only the insane have strength enough to prosper; only those who prosper may truly judge what is sane."
  • Ork society is a chaotic mess where everything is driven by Insane Troll Logic and assumptions that they just kinda pull out of their asses like "red vehicles are inherently faster than non-red vehicles". These work so well thanks to the Orks' gestalt psychic field that in multiple editions Red Paint Job was an actual upgrade to make a vehicle faster. Their unquenchable belief that the entire universe exists for them to fight in has made them one of the major threats of the grim darkness of the far future, to the point where they and the Imperium serve as a kind of joint "you must be this tall to ride" sign for the entire setting.
  • Imotekh the Stormlord, a peerless Necron general whose chops come from Awesomeness by Analysis, is consistently flat-footed by the Orks because they're so stupid and insane he can't predict their actions.
  • Even before the Horus Heresy, the World Eaters were notorious for the amount of damage they could do in their trademark irrational screaming charges. Falling into the clutches of the Chaos God of Ax-Crazy Killing Machines did not make them any more stable, but it did make their irrational screaming charges even more dangerous.

Video Games

• Bloodborne: Insight, a secondary currency similar to Humanity, represents your exposure to the Lovecraftian madness hidden behind the Gothic Horror premise. It is primarily gained by encountering eldritch bosses (and slaughtering them), consuming the memories of other madmen, and discovering how thoroughly infested and minuscule the world truly is. High levels of insight are typically dangerous; enemies gain new forms and attacks because you can perceive them^note The Witches of Hemwick in particular can summon phantoms of Ax-Crazy scythe wielders - with at least one insight. Otherwise, they're just two old, slow-casting mages stuck in close quarters with you, and you are more prone to the Frenzy status effect, which causes your blood itself to go into a frenzy and deal massive damage. However, Insight is useful for purchasing weapon-upgrading blood ores, and the madness imparted by Insight does have a specific use: without earning at least one point, you are incapable of realizing that the Doll is in fact supernaturally sapient, and is your only means of using your hard-earned blood points to level up.
• Darkest Dungeon: While the stat debuffs, risk of a Heart Attack, and chances to act out make Afflictions extremely negative compared to Virtues, some Afflictions offer buffs as well.
  • A Paranoid or Fearful hero gains a nice +10 Dodge and +2 Speed buff, which helps out for heroes who rely on dodging to stay alive.
  • Abusive heroes gain an extra 20% damage boost, which has the humorous effect of them being able to back up their berating of their teammates if one of your DPS heroes goes Abusive.
  • Heroes who have visited the Farmstead have a chance to become Refracted instead of the usual afflictions, which gives them some extra Damage Over Time infliction buffs and the ability to ignore Stealth on enemies.
  • The Flagellant will always go Rapturous when he cracks, which gives him a hefty 25% damage boost and an extra 3 speed, and his dodge plummeting by 20 lets him use his powerful heals and Critical Status Buff much more often.
• Dead Space: Isaac Clarke has the blueprints of the Marker in his head. This makes him the perfect guy to go about killing the source(s) of the Necromorphs and allows him to read and decipher Marker texts. It also makes him paranoid, schizophrenic, and he often hallucinates dead people talking to him. Which is pretty par for the course for anyone who's survived close contact with a Marker, to be fair.
• Getting a good ending in Disco Elysium requires you to play your character like this; in the ending, it will turn out that the seemingly pointless fetch quests and idiotic political posturing that your character is getting distracted by all connect to the murder, with Kim pointing out the way that your unfocused approach allowed you to solve the mystery from all angles in the most incredible bit of detective work he's seen in his life.
• Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal: One of the things that makes the Doom Slayer such an effective killing machine is that he combines a certain blunt pragmatism with a deep, deep well of violent obsession; any man who finds his willpower restored by beating an enemy to death with their own arm has problems, but at the same time, this need to do as much damage to Hell as possible, as violently as possible, makes him willing to come up with solutions that a sane man would balk at, and perhaps need a change of underwear after hearing as a bonus. Best exemplified in Eternal, when he needs to gain access to a deep chamber on Mars that'll take too long to reach the old-fashioned way; he promptly hijacks a Wave-Motion Gun built into one of Mars's moons, blows a hole directly to the target area, and then gets access to this hole by shooting himself out of a cannon to where the escape pods are. The first part appalls Dr Hayden, who would be the Only Sane Man in a different universe, and the second even shocks VEGA, who has so far been down with basically any display of lunacy on the Slayer's part.
  Samuel Hayden: You can't just shoot a hole into the surface of Mars!
  OBJECTIVE: Shoot a hole in Mars.
• Hatoful Boyfriend: Anghel Higure is trapped in a delusion that his life is some high-fantasy epic story and those around him are characters in the same. His fantasy stories are, in fact, a perfect metaphor for some of the other characters' personal storylines, including some very dark secrets about them that not even they know, the "spores" he rambles about are probably the biological superweapon samples the doctor has in the clinic, and his senses are highly sharpened by the paranoia of believing himself a fantastical antihero, enabling him to detect threats sooner even if he can't always communicate them.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky The 3rd: In the 13 factories' development logs for the Mecha Pater Mater, every test pilot had their mind shattered by the experience. That was until the Angel of Slaughter was assigned. Being Too Broken to Break by her traumatic past of being sold as a child Sex Slave by her parents, she merely experienced flashbacks during testing, allowing it to be deployed against the Player Party.
• The New Order: Last Days of Europe:
  • Rurik II of Kemerovo, known as Nikolai Krylov before his mental breakdown, believes himself to be the reincarnation of Rurik, founder of the Kievan Rus', and rules an eccentric kingdom in Central Siberia. His apparent insanity has attracted a loyal, if eclectic, support base and he is still lucid enough to be a competent statesman and general, and is generally considered one of the better unifiers of Russia. Rurik II confesses on his deathbed that it was all a charade, but one worth it in the end. Even then, his children are left wondering if he was speaking the truth or not.
  • It is possible for the Siberian Black Army to pursue a nuclear weapons programme, either by making the research centralised or by applying anarchist principles to weapons development. Yes, the SBA actually go door-to-door and ask everyone how they think a nuclear missile should work, and ask them to crowdfund it. Hilariously, this approach has a very good chance of succeeding - the resulting weapon is Osvoboditel, or in English, "Emancipator".
• Portal:
  • Schizophrenic Doug Rattman was completely right in suspecting the operating system was out to kill everyone and so was the only survivor of the lab incident.
  • Cave Johnson is a madman who keeps inventing incredible devices without even trying, and then tries to use said devices for purposes they are incredibly ill-suited for. By the end of his life, he's clearly become a raving lunatic. But he's an incredibly charismatic raving lunatic.
• In the Saints Row franchise, it becomes slowly apparent that pretty much every member of the Third Street Saints is insane to some degree or another, especially The Boss, and they use their craziness to establish their dominance among the criminal underworld in the most suicidally ostentatious ways possible and pretty much always come out on top. Their bizarre antics and ability to run circles around rival gangs cause the Saints to elevate from a street gang to a group of national celebrities, before then ascending to high-ranking positions in the US government until finally slaying an alien warlord, taking his species' vast technological advancements for themselves, and conquering the entire universe.
• The Secret World: Daimon is a firm believer in this, hence his astonishingly eccentric behaviour. As he explains in both dialogue options and cutscenes, he believes that only individuals who are utterly without structure, dignity, and sanity can truly succeed in the dark days, and to this end has made himself as loose, adaptable, and eccentric as possible. He even compares this to incidents where drunk drivers somehow manage to survive accidents that would have killed sober motorists, reasoning that their survival is due to having lost all the self-respect that might have made them brittle, instead being malleable enough to walk away unharmed.
• Touhou Project is kind of crazy in general (as Sanae says, "Don't be held back by common sense") because by nature youkai think unlike humans so their behaviors tend to be like this to humans, but Marisa Kirisame stands out. Marisa and Alice's opponent at one point is a Moon Rabbit whose eyes can drive people insane. Reimu, Sakuya, and Youmu - who all have some supernatural background, turned somewhat insane because of the encounter. Marisa (who is pure-born human) didn't. In short, she tops the insanity that makes insane people go insane by being stranger than most youkai.
  Alice: Ordinary people would go insane in less than 5 minutes. Are you okay, Marisa?
  Marisa: Yeah, I'm insane to begin with.

Webcomics

• Darths & Droids: Out of character, Jim is apparently a very clever geophysicist, but he views roleplaying as a chance to "turn his brain off", which means that he rarely pays much attention, rambles incoherently on topics he's making up as he goes along, forms snap judgments that he rarely changes regardless of the evidence, says the first thing that pops into his head and otherwise kind of bumbles through the game in a sort of amiable fog...and as a result his characters come across as delusional, violent kleptomaniacs with no regard for human life and a five-second attention span. Those same characters, using the power of whatever ridiculous thing Jim just said, are powerful assets as soon as the Godzilla Threshold is crossed, because those absurd, short-sighted decisions either go right through the situation's weakness when rational thinking wouldn't, or crash into each other and lead to success in the chaos. That being said, nobody is letting him have a lightsaber again any time soon.
  Pete: If only Jim were here.
  Ben: So he could die too?
  Pete: Everything's already totally screwed. This is exactly the time when his ideas work best. Everybody, think like Jim!
  Ben: My brain just broke.
  Pete: That's the spirit!
• Romantically Apocalyptic: When given an order, Pilot charges a shape-shifting, regenerating, life-absorbing Eldritch Abomination with nothing but a broken sword. Upon being absorbed by it, he envisions its attempts to extract his memories for a rational explanation as a courtroom drama with himself in the role of the heroic lawyer. He's so completely insane that this temporarily scrambles the brain of said Eldritch Abomination.
• Madeline the paladin from Rusty and Co. is a "ditzy do-gooder". How ditzy? The first time we meet her, she wields a hoe and is convinced that it's Holy Avenger — because the gnome who sold it to her said so. Only to return later with a spade she called vorpal halberd. She also frequently fights with closed eyes. Which somehow makes her attacks more precise, allows to deflect thrown daggers and apparently lets "magical" agricultural equipment work as advertised—paladitz did beat a tavern full of various armed creatures and a pirate crew with that hoe, while the spade was used to the same effect as if it was a vorpal halberd. And she can SMELL evil.
• True Villains: Sebastian invokes this and doses himself with hallucinogens to defeat a Master of Illusion, so reality looks nonsensical to him, whereas anything normal-looking is being magically inserted into his mind.

Web Animation

• This trope has been exploited not once but twice in Object Shows to varying degrees.
  • Taco in the first season of Inanimate Insanity was the first one to utilize it. Knowing that Cloudcuckoolanders would become and are usually Ensemble Darkhorses in the Object Show Community, she deliberately pretended to be insane so that she would be regarded as Too Quirky to Lose by the audience since the competition was entirely viewer-voting. This strategy made her way into the final two though she ultimately lost the final challenge.
  • Object Connects has Lantern doing the same approach of Obfuscating Insanity as a cover to his evil plans and prevent anyone from seeing him as a potential threat in contestant-voting. This works extremely well since he can cajole others into helping him in challenges by being unreasonably incompetent while sabotaging their own attempts and has only been put up for elimination once.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Sarge, The Leader of Red Team. His plans generally make no logical sense, yet tend to bring surprisingly good results once he gets to execute them. Most notably, he caught Agent Washington at gunpoint by disguising himself as a cardboard imitation of himself, helped kill the Meta by tying a car to him and tossing it off of a frozen cliff, and made an adrenaline-fueled slow-motion car crash happen in real life.
  • Caboose is both dumb as a stump and completely divorced from reality, but his insanity results in him doing things like shrugging off psychological torture from two separate ancient A.I.s, reviving Church, and figuring out how to time travel through his own backwards logic.
  • Freelancer Agent North Dakota, while more or less sane, is seen as following this trope In-Universe for his unconventional battle tactics such as using the upgrade that has 99.9% chance of killing him on the spot and pulling off a Guns Akimbo with sniper rifles.
    Epsilon: North was a crazy son of a bitch.
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers discusses this as the greatest strength of its insane and moronic interpretation of Mario in the episode "POV: You're Mario", where Meggy spends a day in his shoes, barely lasts to the end of it, and realizes how his madness helps him roll with the punches their World Gone Mad throws at him on an episodic basis.

Web Videos

• Dr. Harold Pontiff Coomer from Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware, who formed an underground boxing ring, has numerous clones that he kills to gain more power, punches the top off of a tank, kills aliens and mutants with his bare hands, and uses the highly dangerous Barnacles as a Grappling-Hook Pistol.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series : The reason The Joker schemes work so well is that they’re usually so batshit insane and made up on the fly that nobody can predict them. A good example of this is his breakout from Arkham in "Joker’s Wild", where he manages to escape by mixing various chemicals together just to make a slippery substance, playing a guessing game with the guards pursuing him as to whether it’s poison or not, pouring it on the floor, pulling a handkerchief rope out of nowhere, and swinging it at a truck, pulling him on top of the truck. He promptly teases the driver before throwing him out and hijacking the truck. He does all of this in under a minute.
• In the Gravity Falls episode "Society of the Blind Eye", local Cloudcuckoolander Fiddleford McGucket's brain is too broken for the Society of the Blind Eye's mind-wipe device to work on him. It turns out that the reason why he's that way is that he invented it and used it on himself too many times.
• Justice League: Part of the reason why the Question is such a good detective is because he's an Agent Mulder who believes that the true purpose of aglets is sinister and that girl scouts are responsible for crop circles. He lives in the DC Animated Universe, which is so bizarre in the first place that only considering sane theories is a handicap. It is a world with superheroes, advanced technology like cloning, brainwashing, hyper-intelligent robots (and monkeys), teleportation, time travel and actual magic, ancient aliens, both new and old gods (like Oberon and Zeus), actual "earthling" demons, space demons, forces of pure Order and Chaos, Atlantis... all of these existing simultaneously and trying to influence reality for their own purposes.
• Project Gee Ke R: Geeker defeats his evil duplicate by uploading his craziness into his brain.

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