Sanity Slippage / Web Videos

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• Atop the Fourth Wall: Sometimes, the terrible quality of the comics he's reviewing sends Linkara over the edge, usually with the soundtrack of The Wurzels' "I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester" (in particular, Doom's IV, Amazons Attack!, and Maximum Clonage). An interesting variation of this happens twice in his review of Heroes in Crisis, where Linkara uses the song as he describes what he thinks is how the AI that uses the best parts of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman acts and then refuses to use it and break down after the revelation that Wally West was the murderer. As for why he didn't use it then, it was the fact that Heroes In Crisis dealt with mental health issues and Linkara thought it would've been in poor taste.
  ''Oh, I've got a brand-new combine harvester, and I'll give you the key
  C'mon now, let's get together in perfect harmony. I've got twenty acres, and you've got forty-three
  'Cause I've got a brand-new combine harvester, and I'll give you the key!
• Andrew Rea of Binging with Babish goes through a bout of this while making Il Timpano from the movie Big Night, partially due to sleep depravation.
• Channel Awesome:
  • The Nostalgia Critic went through one during his review of The NeverEnding Story III. He started the review feeling scared and hateful towards the film as he does towards most films he thinks that are horrible, then in the middle of his review he goes off on an unusually long (for his standards) Cluster F-Bomb rant over the derailment of the Rock Biter, and by the end of his review he insanely laughs while leaving his house to buy a crowbar, goes on a primitive rampage on the DVD with said crowbar, and tops it off with fucking the DVD.
  • Played for Drama in To Boldly Flee, as his guilt over losing Ma-Ti gets his suicidal tendencies into gear and makes him think that even Internet laws are all his fault.
  • Played for Laughs, on the other hand, when he goes mad with power in Kickassia.
  • Also Played for Laughs in his review of Batman & Robin where he goes on a screaming rampage for eight hours after seeing the Bat-Credit Card
  • Ever since he moved from his bookcase to a bar, Ask That Guy with the Glasses's sanity has been falling apart. Of course he was never sane in the first place, but it's almost sad to see him go from a Wicked Cultured chessmaster to a Jaded Washout who breaks into tears randomly. (So essentially he's now an evil version of Critic.)
  • Doug Walker seems to be going through this over the course of his Adventure Time vlogs.
• The Cry of Mann: Everyone in the Mann family suffers:
  • Jack goes crazy after being infected by Gorgiev, becoming more and more obsessed with his art and creating images of orange phones. When his solo show turns out a disaster, he flips out, destroying everything and proclaiming his hatred for everyone else in his family. His anger drives him to obsessively work out, and he becomes a buff monster named "Jack Prime".
  • Jouglat can't get over his time in the warr and thinks about it constantly. He starts to drink and his hair becomes long and unkempt; he reaches the point where he decides to just pack his bags and go back to the warr.
  • Courtney spirals out of control due to her personal conflict with Tank Mann and his family, as well as her desire to be beautiful. She starts to drink, covers herself in make-up, has several monologues about her situation, and then bursts into Jouglat's funeral with her face covered in glittery rhinestones.
  • Berry spends her time trying to keep the company alive and keep her dysfunctional family together in Tank Mann's absence. After the rest of her family start to become uncontrollable and absorbed in their own personal issues, she starts to lose control as well, reaching the point where she starts screaming at Courtney and threatening to murder her violently.
  • Gravesite, from Call of Warr, began as a wise-yet-tough captain who, though stubborn, cared deeply for his team, and put his foot down when needed. However, he eventually began to get interested in making an "action movie..." and it became an obsession, making him care more about the flashing monitors and his storytelling than actually acting as a leader. Prince said it best:
    Prince: You've just been acting really weird.
• As Daisy Brown's vlogs go on, it's clear that isolation, dealing with Alan, and trying to find information left by her father have left a significant and negative impact on Daisy's psyche.
• DeceasedCrab starts to ramble like raocow in the harder parts of his Let's Play videos. His Let's Play of Eversion is his best example of pretending to lose his sanity due to the game's Nightmare Fuel. His blind run of Hell Temple from La-Mulana is his best example of really losing his sanity due to the game's unrelenting cheapness.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Dr. Horrible becomes more evil when his love interest starts going out with his arch-nemesis (willing to kill), and really goes off the edge when he accidentally kills her. Really, it might as well be called Sanity Slippage: The Musical vBlog.
• On a similar note, the Freelance Astronauts attempt at beating The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (master quest version) descends into this between the forest and fire temple. Ferr begins making jokes about the gilded age and Maxwell gets the group stuck inside of a fire maze. The group had also been attempting a "Fantasy Race" with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, further compounding the insanity.
• As events progress and he finds himself in increasingly dangerous situations, Gordon in Freeman's Mind is showing increasingly common bouts of uncontrolled rage and paranoia, which is impressive considering his original personality. This was perhaps most clearly demonstrated in episode 29, when he threw a grenade at a large pile of explosive crates.
  Gordon: I HAVE TO BLOW EVERYTHING UP! IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO PROVE I'M NOT CRAZY!
• Gnoggin suffers this during his Pokémon Sun and Moon reboot theory videos, acting as if he has gone mad with what he has figured out.
• Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware:
  • As the series goes on, Gordon becomes more manic and unhinged thanks to being attacked by numerous horrific monsters and being stuck with the Science Team, a bunch of deranged weirdos who harass him constantly and murder anyone they come into contact with except him. He completely loses his mind after his arm is cut off
  • A more subtle example happens with Dr. Coomer after he realizes his world is fake. He manages to hide it for the most part, but he reveals it in full force when he tries to use Gordon as a puppet to escape into the real world. When this doesn’t work, he calms down.
• For that matter, any Let's Play of I Wanna Be the Guy is bound to end in this.
  • Or Calm Time, most notable would be the ones Manga Minx and Pewdiepie made.
    Minx: Calm time. Calm time.
  • Or an unsuspecting Let's Play of Kaizo Mario World. ProtonJon has a particular epic breakdown playing Special 2.
• Lanipator's let's play of Amnesia Justine. He plays through the entire game an goes for a 100% completion to get the Easter Egg. After many, many deaths (you have to start from the beginning if you die), he gets to the end of the game and he doesn't seem to get the Easter Egg. He did get it, but he didn't know it. He later expressed this revelation with a comment which was 90% F-bomb. After that, he starts over, kills all the prisoners laughing like a madman and yelling at the characters in the game, and stands next to the last prisoner so that they could die together. Then, when the screen goes black, the words rebel for life appear.
• Left POOR Dead: Tippy...not that he had much to begin with
• LittleKuriboh:
  • During his LP of Duke Nukem Forever, he gets stuck for one hour on a boss battle over the Hoover Dam. As time and deaths pile on, LK talks about random subjects, goes through many of his character voices, jumbles words together and repeats them ad nauseum. The last straw happens in Part 26 (at 13:00), when he's unable to complete a quick time event needed to kill the boss despite tapping frantically on the buttons (turns out he was tapping the buttons too fast for the game to notice). This makes him laugh maniacally.
    LK: [QTE fails and he's thrown to the ground] Are you kid— Are you— ... [laughter] Why does— Why— Why does— things not— Why— Why do things not do thing why are things in the''... things?!
  • He then spends most of Part 27 babbling incoherently about mushrooms, badgers, and barrels.
    LK: I may have lost my sanity... thank you game... for taking sanity...
    Duke: Killing you is as easy as breathing.
    LK: I have five rocket... Did he say killing you is as easy as breathing? What— it's not! If this is how difficult breathing is BREATHING IS THE HARDEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD! ... Mushroom style... I'm doing this Mushroom Style. Mushroom style all over the place. Mushroom. Badgerbadgerbadgerbadger. Gimme the mushroom!
• Arguably, Kiara on Season 2 of The Music Video Show. She wasn't completely sane in Season 1 but, after the incident during the end of its finale, something isn't quite right with her... Kiara's love interest is a Fluttershy plushie. Also, there was that thing that happened in Episode 32. Oh, and then there's Episode 49. Holy fuck.
• The Nostalgia Chick snapped completely around "Sleepless in Seattle vs. When Harry Met Sally", kidnapping Todd in the Shadows, tying him to a chair and her twisted mind calling it a date. You wouldn't think it was possible, but she's only got worse from there.
• Speaking of raocow, he goes in completely the opposite direction. Normally a Talkative Loon, he becomes very... sane and quiet when levels start to grind at him. Some Let's Plays have nothing but angry ranting.
• Played for Laughs with Roahm Mythril's Perfect Run of Ring Man's stage. Late in the outtakes segment, he says, "All right, that tears it." He then goes for a Roaring Rampage of REVEEEEEEENGE! through the stage, using Robot Master weapons left and right^note The restrictions of his Perfect runs are: No damage taken, no Robot Master weapons, no utilities, no charged shots. He'll break the latter three only if absolutely necessary, which it generally isn't—and this rule was definitely being ignored during his REVEEEEEEENGE segment, shouting "REVEEEEEEENGE! Sweet [name of weapon]-y revenge!" as he did so. Got especially silly when he included the balloon utility in the rant.
• Common in The Slender Man Mythos. For specific examples—
  • Evan and Alex from Everyman HYBRID, Logan from Just Another Fool, Zeke Strahm from Seeking Truth (but he gets saner, possibly) and Damien of ''Dreams in Darkness'. Quite a kettle of fish, is it not?
  • Marble Hornets is essentially made of this and nightmare fuel. Any character that is in front of the screen for several episodes is shown to become either paranoid to the point of obsession (Alex and Jay) or homicidally insane (Masky).
  • In her stay at the hotel, Jessica also appears to succumb to this when she realises that something is wrong.
  • Tribe Twelve is also progressing into this, as of Fortunes. For both Noah, ''and'' Firebrand.
• The epic LP of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) by pokecapn, medibot, Kung-Fu Jesus, IlluminatusVespucci and John Condit. They played the entire game in less than two days, playing almost non-stop, with only one of them sleeping at any point. Most involved are mildly Cloud Cuckoolander-ish to begin with, but as the game progresses, their commentary is filled more and more with non-sequiturs and Cluster F Bombs. A quarter of the way through, they've ordered and consumed copious amounts of General Tso's chicken because it's "full of ideas" (and thus, eating the chicken will give them ideas. It makes perfect sense!). Halfway through, one of them ironically blares out an a cappella version of Flashman's theme at random moments. Three quarters of the way through, they get stuck in the last level, and over the two hours it takes them to beat the level, they can be heard cycling through the Five Stages of Grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). By the end, one of them is reciting song lyrics in Shatner-esque spoken-word renditions, including "Rocketman", "Fast Car", "Down Under", and finally "Thriller" over the final boss fight. When combined with the slow, melancholic choral music used in the later stages, it borders on being strangely touching, depending on your mood. It didn't help any that, besides Medibot, none of them got any sleep. Even Medibot didn't get much; the portions of the LP where he's missing don't add up to much more than a catnap or two (and he apparently went home for those, cutting the sleep time further).
• SuperMarioLogan has revealed that Joseph's horrible home life resulting from his mother's death has started to take a toll on him. In fact, he believes that his dead pets are still alive, he thinks the black sludge under the sink is "water", and he has even drawn a very NSFW birthday card for Junior. Not to mention he enjoys the Squick at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. He may be still cool on the outside but deep down, he's freaking out a lot.
• The Hamster Alliance's LP of Super Meat Boy. Hamster seems relatively okay most of the time until he starts dying a lot. Then he devolves into swearing, flailing, laughter that really just says "kill me now" and incoherent gibberish.
• In Ten Little Roosters, the Rooster Teeth crew is slowly suffering from this as they're trapped in their studios with everyone knowing they killed someone and there's a killer among them. Chris was already somewhat like this, running around dressed up like a Hobbit from The Lord of the Rings and later learning that he had a mess of problems, but the others start succumbing to this as time goes on. As of episode 4, Ryan is showing the worst of it, haunted by the deaths of Gavin and Michael and fearing that he's developed a split personality. Ultimately, Ryan's incidents were revealed as a ruse by the real killer, Barbara, in an attempt to convince Ryan really was going insane and blame him for the murders.
• The Weather: Implied to be the case with the cowboy in "Snow". Over the course of three scenes, they're seen in the snow with their horse, trying to survive the elements. By the third scene, they've killed the horse and have crawled inside of it for warmth, and end up gushing to a wolf about how they love the wolf so much, they'd kill themselves and mail him their organs. Out of love.

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