History Main / SuccessThroughInsanity

** Ork society is a chaotic mess where everything is driven by InsaneTrollLogic 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.

* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' is kind of crazy in general (as Sanae says, "Don't be held back by common sense") because by nature youkai [[BlueAndOrangeMorality 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 MoonRabbit whose eyes [[MindRape 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.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsInTheSky The 3rd'': In the 13 factory's 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 TooBrokenToBreak by her traumatic past of being sold as a child SexSlave by her parents, she merely experienced flashbacks during testing, allowing it to be deployed against the PlayerParty.

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

If their insanity prevents them from being killed or arrested when anyone else would be, that's a LunaticLoophole. If a character's quirky but not actually insane, they're a BunnyEarsLawyer. If the bad thing that happened was so bizarre that they're the only person prepared for it, they're CrazyPrepared. When all of humanity is composed of Heroic Madmen, that's HumanityIsInsane. If the crazy person was ''right'' about something, that's TheCuckoolanderWasRight. If they gained any powers from their insanity, that's PowerBornOfMadness. When a crazy person is in a position of power, that's TheWonka.

--->'''Lord Cutler Beckett:''' [[YoureInsane 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.[[/note]]\\

* ''Manga/JojosBizarreAdventure'': Joseph Joestar, snarky PopCulturedBadass and ostentatious GuileHero has become well-known for the often nonsensical levels of trickery he uses to defeat his enemies.

* ''Anime/ParanoiaAgent'': "Radar Man" has been [[GoMadFromTheRevelation driven mad by the revelation]], but his craziness also feeds him the information he needs to fight the menace to reality. [[MindScrew Sort of.]]

* ''ComicBook/FiftyTwo:'' 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...

* ''ComicBook/TheJoker'': 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 CharlesAtlasSuperpower 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). And he's still one of the most successful (and terrifying) villains in the DC Universe because insanity ''is'' his superpower.
* ''ComicBook/TheSandman'': 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, ''ComicBook/{{Sturmtruppen}}'' had the Drunk Captain, an officer [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin drunk the whole time]]...and, being drunk, he'd mistake bullets from a machine gun for insects and ''swat them out of the air''.

* The aptly-named ''Film/{{Thor}}'' fan fiction ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/243244 Chaos War]]'' sees Asgard engaged in a losing war against the "shining ones", an EldritchAbomination alien race who seem countless in number and [[HorrorHunger 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 [[MadGod Loki]] and puts ''him'' on the throne, reasoning that if wisdom and strength have failed, [[CrazyEnoughToWork madness might work instead]]. Loki promptly lives up to expectations, sending soldiers off to other planets at random -- [[DecisionDarts literally throwing darts to decide]] -- and gleefully using his new power to indulge stupid whims like making an increasingly frustrated Thor [[FetchQuest collect him a bunch of acorns]] and closing down a highway [[SkewedPriorities 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 [[TheReveal explains to Thor how the shining ones work]]: [[spoiler:[[CombatClairvoyance 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. [[ChekhovsGun 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.

* Clopin from ''WesternAnimation/{{The Hunchback of Notre Dame|Disney}}''. He has an oddly adversarial relationship with his hand puppet and presides over a bizarro KangarooCourt 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.

* ''Franchise/PiratesOfTheCaribbean''

--->'''Lord Cutler Beckett:''' [[YoureInsane You're]] ''[[YoureInsane 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.[[/note]]\\

* Gabriel Gale of ''Literature/ThePoetAndTheLunatics'' 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.

* ''Literature/ThisAlienShore'' by C.S. Friedman: The Guerans (a mutant race descended from humanity) are all insane, which makes them the only ones who can pilot ships [[FasterThanLightTravel 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.

* ''Series/TheATeam'': 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.
* On ''Series/TheGoodWife'', Elsbeth Tascioni verges on BunnyEarsLawyer 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).

* ''Series/SevenDays'': The only person able to pilot the Chronosphere is Frank Parker, inmate at a military insane asylum.
* Pretty much everyone in ''Series/{{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 [[TheDreaded the Scarrans]] to negotiate with him by creating a ''handheld nuclear bomb'' which he promptly dances around with.

[[folder:Roleplaying Games]]

* ''VideoGame/TheNewOrderLastDaysOfEurope'':

* In the ''VideoGame/SaintsRow'' 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 [[spoiler: slaying an alien warlord, taking his species' vast technological advancements for themselves, and conquering the entire universe.]]

* ''WebComic/TrueVillains'': Sebastian {{invoke|dTrope}}s this and [[ChemicallyInducedInsanity doses himself with hallucinogens]] to defeat a MasterOfIllusion, so reality looks nonsensical to him, whereas [[LieToTheBeholder anything normal-looking is being magically inserted into his mind]].
%%* ''Webcomic/{{XKCD}}'': [[http://xkcd.com/556/ Don Quixote to the rescue!]]

* ''Webcomic/RomanticallyApocalyptic'': When given an order, Pilot ''charges'' a [[FromASingleCell shape-shifting, regenerating]], [[TheAssimilator life-absorbing]] EldritchAbomination with nothing but a broken sword. [[spoiler:And 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 ''[[TooSpicyForYogSothoth scrambles]]'' the brain of said EldritchAbomination.]]
* Madeline the paladin from ''Webcomic/RustyAndCo''. She's a "ditzy do-gooder". How ditzy? The first time we meet her, she [[http://rustyandco.com/comic/level2/level-2-1/ wields a hoe]] and is convinced 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 [[http://rustyandco.com/comic/level2/level-2-11/ frequently]] [[http://rustyandco.com/comic/level-6-5/ fights]] with [[BlindWeaponmaster closed eyes]]. Which somehow makes her attacks ''more'' precise, allows to [[SpinToDeflectStuff 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. [[http://rustyandco.com/comic/level-6-15/ And she can SMELL evil]].

--> '''Epsilon''': North was a ''crazy'' son of a bitch.

* Dr. Harold Pontiff Coomer from ''WebVideo/HalfLifeButTheAIIsSelfAware'', 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 GrapplingGun.

* In ''WesternAnimation/GravityFalls'', local {{Cloudcuckoolander}} Fiddleford [=McGucket=]'s brain is too broken for the Society of the Blind Eye's [[LaserGuidedAmnesia mind-wipe device]] to work on him. [[spoiler:It turns out the reason he's that way is that he invented it and used it on himself too many times.]]
* ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueUnlimited'': Part of the reason [[ConspiracyTheorist the Question]] is such a good detective is ''because'' he's an AgentMulder who believes [[WhatTheHeckIsAnAglet the true purpose of aglets is sinister]] and that girl scouts are responsible for crop circles. He lives in the DCU, which is [[FantasyKitchenSink so bizarre in the first place]] that only considering sane theories is [[ArbitrarySkepticism 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 those existing simultaneously and trying to influence reality for their own purposes.

* In the ''Literature/KnownSpace'' novel ''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.

* ''Literature/MadnessHasItsPlace'' by Larry Niven: 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 Men Return" by Creator/{{Jack Vance}}: The short story featured 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.

* ''WebAnimation/Supermarioglitchy4sSuperMario64Bloopers'' [[DiscussedTrope discusses]] this as the greatest strength of its [[AdaptationalDumbass insane and moronic interpretation]] of [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros Mario]] in the episode "POV: You're Mario", where [[OnlySaneMan 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 WorldOfCrazy throws at him on an episodic basis.

-->--'''Li Shang''', ''WesternAnimation/{{Mulan}}''

* ''LightNovel/HighSchoolDXD'': This is Issei's go-to strategy for a while, making use of AchievementsInIgnorance to defy the odds and take his opponent off-guard to let his [[GatheringSteam snowballing brute strength]] do the rest. A classic example is when he incorporates a fragment of [[ManaDrain Divine Dividing]] into the gauntlet of his [[GatheringSteam Boosted Gear]] [[PoweredArmor 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 CharacterDevelopment - he eventually grows the self-awareness to realize these antics aren't without cost (the above sheered ''centuries'' off [[CastFromHitPoints 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.

* A particularly infamous example of this is Fanfic/OldManHenderson, a ''TabletopGame/TrailOfCthulhu'' character made specifically to throw the game as OffTheRails 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 SAN 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 [[DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu 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.

* ''Manga/ChainsawMan'': Kishibe is [[WorldsBestWarrior the world's greatest]] [[DemonSlaying Devil Hunter]], and believes you ''have'' to be quite crazy to survive Public Safety's HighTurnoverRate. Devils are strengthened by fear, so it's best to fight them as a FearlessFool. Encounters with them can be so horrifying, no sane person would fight them while maintaining a strong will to live.

This type of useful insanity is usually PlayedForLaughs. In RealLife we would expect these characters to get fired, arrested, and eventually [[BedlamHouse hospitalized]] or killed. Not so in the world of fiction; these characters have been able to achieve things their saner counterparts are unable to, similar to AchievementsInIgnorance. They're often as entertaining as a BunnyEarsLawyer, who is a capable character ''despite'' or ''alongside'' their quirks.

* Dr. Harold Pontiff Coomer from ''Machinima/HalfLifeButTheAIIsSelfAware'', 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 GrapplingGun.

* ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'':

* Getting a good ending in ''VideoGame/DiscoElysium'' requires you to play your character like this; in the ending, it will turn out that [[ChronicHeroSyndrome the seemingly pointless fetch quests]] and [[WindmillCrusader 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.

* ''Fanfic/TheInfiniteLoops'' contain a ''[[UpToEleven 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.

* Exploited by [[spoiler:Taco]] in ''WebAnimation/InanimateInsanity''. Knowing that {{Cloudcuckoolander}}s would become {{Ensemble Darkhorse}}s, she [[ObfuscatingStupidity deliberately pretended to be insane]] so that she would be regarded as TooQuirkyToLose by the audience.

* ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueUnlimited'': Part of the reason [[ConspiracyTheorist the Question]] is such a good detective is ''because'' he's an AgentMulder who believes [[WhatTheHeckIsAnAglet the true purpose of aglets is sinister]] and that girl scouts are responsible for crop circles. He lives in the DCU, which is [[FantasyKitchenSink so bizarre in the first place]] that only considering sane theories is [[ArbitrarySkepticism a handicap]]. It is a world with superheroes, advanced technology like cloning, brainwashing, hyper-intelligent robots (and monkeys), teleportation, 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 those existing simultaneously and trying to influence reality for their own purposes.

* ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueUnlimited'': Part of the reason [[ConspiracyTheorist the Question]] is such a good detective is ''because'' he's an AgentMulder who believes [[WhatTheHeckIsAnAglet the true purpose of aglets is sinister]] and that girl scouts are responsible for crop circles. He lives in the DCU, which is [[FantasyKitchenSink so bizarre in the first place]] that only considering sane theories is [[ArbitrarySkepticism a handicap]].

* ''Fanfic/WithThisRing'': After gaining EnlightenmentSuperpowers, Paul frequently comes across as odd to normal human (and other) beings, but 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.

* Clopin from ''WesternAnimation/TheHunchbackOfNotreDame''. He has an oddly adversarial relationship with his hand puppet and presides over a bizarro KangarooCourt 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.