In Vino Veritas

aka: Doctor Jekyll And Mister Jack Daniels

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jack Daniel's.
"Now lemme (hic) tell you how I REALLY feel!"

"A drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts."

— Oliver Reed

A Latin phrase meaning "The truth in the wine" (or, if you will, "In wine, [there is] truth"). Used in popular media to illustrate what happens when a character consumes alcohol and his true personality emerges. This is Truth in Television to a degree, in that a drunk person has a much harder time keeping secrets and convincingly lying due to alcohol properties as a suppressant inhibiting self-control, but TV Land generally exaggerates it enormously. Symptoms include:

• Personality Inversion: The Stoic turns on the Ocular Gushers, Loser Protagonist becomes a Casanova Wannabe, the Nice Guy becomes a Jerkass (or vice versa).
• Personality Distillation: Sergeant Rock becomes Drill Sergeant Nasty, the Hair-Trigger Temper starts looking around for a chopping implement, The Klutz can hardly stand on his own two legs.
• Libational Libido: One or both characters of a pair let slip the Unresolved Sexual Tension the fans all knew they were living in denial of. Cue the Kissing Under the Influence.
• Loose Lips: A character gives away a secret that they would be adamant about not telling anyone, or would be careful to avoid even hinting at while sober; once drunk, they'll talk more easily, and tend to casually let the secret slip. The secret can be anything from a part of their personality that they keep repressed to a secret they're trying to guard for their employers (for example, the location of the MacGuffin).

More often than not, this is a quick byproduct of when someone who Can't Hold His Liquor gets ahold of alcohol.

Compare Alcohol-Induced Idiocy (for when booze causes a character's IQ to drop precipitously), Drunken Master (for when booze acts as a Super Serum), Liquid Courage (for when a character suddenly guzzles his bottle or glass dry and pulls off an awesome moment... or just asks the girl out), Gassy Gastronomy (for when they start burping), Mushroom Samba (for when things just get... weird instead), and But Liquor Is Quicker. If the booze-provided honesty gives the character an introspective epiphany, it is Higher Understanding Through Drugs. Compare the implications of Never Gets Drunk. Also, contrast Bottled Heroic Resolve, which overcomes physical limitations; because alcohol is a sedative, in Real Life it acts as anti-Bottled Heroic Resolve. Also, contrast Pink Elephants, which may lead to the truth being ignored because the person was drunk.

See also What You Are in the Dark. May result in What Did I Do Last Night?.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Hard-Drinking Party Girl Misato from Neon Genesis Evangelion tends to turn from Team Mom and crisp military officer into an immature, somewhat selfish slob after just sniffing a beer.
  • Alcohol also causes her to undergo a more somber personality inversion when Kaji is carrying her home. While we've seen hints of it earlier in the series, this the first moment where the alternating mask of confidence and professionalism/playfulness slips away completely and we are shown the full extent of the fear and self-hatred that she carries inside.
• Azumanga Daioh has strait-laced teacher Nyamo spending the weekend with the girls and drinking all the booze they smuggled in, to prevent Yukari from getting into it... and promptly telling the kids everything they ever wanted to know about sex (and probably almost certainly a few things they didn't).
  • Also earlier in the series, Nyamo and Yukari go to a restaurant. Yukari has too much to drink and undergoes a massive Personality Distillation.
• In My Balls, the sweet, unassuming shopkeeper girl turns into a raging nymphomaniac whenever she takes a drink. Which might potentially be a good thing, except the protagonist will destroy the world if he ever ejaculates.
• Yuno from Hidamari Sketch turns from Cheerful Teen into straight-faced Deadpan Snarker(?) ranting about various Nonindicative Names when drunk.
• Ramen Fighter Miki: Crude and violent Miki becomes amazingly demure and polite when drunk, while her Bitch in Sheep's Clothing rival Megumi shows what's Beneath the Mask.
• In one Naruto Shippuuden omake, Old Maid Shizune drunkenly confesses that she's jealous of Kurenai for having a boyfriend and maybe even husband while she is too busy working for Tsunade to find one. Unfortunately, Tsunade happens to hear it. (Ironically, this omake is shown a few episodes before Asuma dies and a couple months later in the manga Shizune herself dies. Temporarily).
  • Rock Lee turns from polite and formal into a cussing Boisterous Bruiser who can't tell friend from foe. Although recently, he's been able to recognize friends.
  • Another omake has a drunk Yamato complaining to Asuma that Kakashi's been dumping his responsibilities on him.
• England from Hetalia: Axis Powers considers himself a gentleman. He isn't quite one when sober, and he's often cranky and irritable. But when he gets drunk, he will run around naked and cackling, or sometimes start crying over that one ungrateful whelp. Sometimes both.
  • "YOU DON'T KNOW ME, I'M THE UNITED BLOODY KINGDOM AND I CAN HOLD MY LOQUER BETTER THAN YOU CAN ANY DAY!"
• In To Love Ru, it turns out that if you give the girls alcohol (or in this case, a pollen that makes them act drunk), they go through types 1 and 3 of this trope. Haruna's personality zigzags, Yui initiates Marshmallow Hell, Run tries very hard to kiss Rito but can never seem to get the right person, Mikan tries to confess, and Yami starts seeing things.
• Both the manga and anime of Ah! My Goddess feature a comedic variation of this trope. Belldandy is completely unaffected by alcohol, but ends up getting drunk off a can of soda, and ends up getting a personality distillation; she's already a friend to all living (and non-living!) things, but this gets cranked up and she ends up going on a miracle spree, granting miracles and wishes for everything she comes across, including a telephone pole who was tired of standing (so she knocked it over). It wasn't this extreme in the manga, though.
• In the Sgt. Frog manga, Tamama confesses his love for Keroro out loud at a New Year's drinking party. Also, a bottle of sake turns Angol Mois from a quiet and polite girl to a party animal.
• If you think Haruka Hasegawa from Moyashimon is scary under normal circumstances, you should see what she's like when drunk, as poor Misato found out. And it doesn't take a lot of booze to get her cutting your face with her Femme Fatalons and joking (we hope) about biting your nose off.
• In the manga version of Chrono Crusade:
  • Satella convinces Rosette to try some wine at a dinner party and they both get rip-roaring drunk as a result. Satella reveals that she's a paedophile, then starts to muse that she should give up trying to find her family's killer. Rosette's response to alcohol is to shout at Satella for giving up so easily, saying that people with not much time left to live don't have the luxury of doing so, then nearly starts to cry when thinking about Joshua...only to end up accidentally breaking an expensive vase when Chrono takes her outside to get some air.
  • In a later flashback, Aion and Chrono enjoy a drink together. Aion compliments Chrono for his prowess on the battlefield, but Chrono shows regret for the lives that have been lost, leading them to start an argument over how they should treat the memory of their fallen comrades, with Chrono saying they should be honored and remembered and Aion saying that having pity for the dead is the arrogance of the living and "the dead don't care what you do."
• In an audio drama that takes place after the cooking episode of My-HiME, the main characters (who are underage, as Nagi helpfully points out) start drinking alcohol, and end up confessing several personal details, such as Mai talking about having to look after Takumi after her parents' death.
• In D.Gray-Man Komui even uses this for his own good. In the drama CD, he feeds Allen, Lavi, and Kanda a drug that should make them blurt out their true thoughts about his precious, precious Lenalee. It works. And aside from that has similar effects as alcohol. Complete with Alcohol Hic and Allen losing his temper. Allen - high on the drug - even mentions it feels just the same when he ate a box of liquor-filled chocolates.
• In one episode of Inuyasha the gang comes across some magic mist that makes people who breathe it get drunk. Sango, who's in love with Miroku but stuck in the Can't Spit It Out stage, suddenly becomes brazenly sexual and flirty... with Inuyasha!
• In a flashback arc of One Piece, mermaid queen Otohime gets so depressed about her subjects being afraid to integrate with the surface world that she gets rip-roaring drunk, takes up a microphone, and starts calling her people out on their cowardice.
• In the Ace Attorney manga, Turnabout Gallows has Brock Johnson, who suspects Robin Wolfe killed his brother, giving alcohol to his brother Bobby Wolfe in order to get information, but Bobby apparently passes out after one beer without divulging anything useful. It turns out that Brock's real plan was to get Bobby drunk so that he could take the fall for him murdering Robin.
• In Hanamaru Kindergarten, Tsuchida is only able to confess his feelings for fellow teacher Yamamoto when he's drunk. The other teachers are so happy that they start up a celebratory conga line-slash-bunny hop, singing "He confessed! He confessed!" Unfortunately, Yamamoto's drunk too, so she participates in the conga line too and then promptly forgets the whole thing upon sobering up.
• Early in My Senpai Is Annoying, Futaba is out drinking with her coworker Takeda after a rough day at the office. When Takeda jokes about wanting to have a daughter like her if he got married, Futaba asks in a drunken stupor why she couldn’t be the wife in the theoretical situation. She spends the next day being flustered and trying to dismiss any possibility of her liking him.
• Invoked by Fumi in the Sweet Blue Flowers manga, who uses the "liquid courage" of the Christmas champagne she'd been drinking to confess to Akira. Since she has already done so several times, and they are currently dating, an exasperated Akira can only exclaim "I already know that!"
• Tokyo Ghoul uses this primarily for comedy, but also a little drama.
  • Poor Amon gets caught between office rivals Akira and Takizawa, quickly discovering neither of them can hold their liquor. Takizawa rants about his insecurities concerning Akira, calling her a bitch in the process and cussing his partner out over the phone. After he leaves, Akira turns moody and drunkenly blames Amon for her father's death. However, she also ends up crying and shows a more vulnerable side while still drunk. After he takes care of her (and rejects her drunken, half-naked clinging), she warms up considerably and begins to develop feelings for him.
  • Omakes reveal that Yomo is a major light-weight, and becomes incredibly talkative while drunk. He admits to struggling to find the words to express his concern for others, and his friends later suggest that he drink in order to have a serious conversation with Kaneki.
  • Likewise, Tsukiyama ends up plastered with Yomo and babbles about how incredible Kaneki is and struggles to express himself.
• Shiraori of So I'm a Spider, So What? is near-mute and withdrawn most of the time, on account of being rather anti-social. However when she gets drunk she'll start talking about her life, rambling on about how useful certain Skills are, and trying to eat a toddler.
• Yuri Katsuki from Yuri!!! on Ice is normally shy and reserved, but he becomes very wild and outgoing when he's had enough drinks. In Episode 10 it's revealed that he got incredibly drunk at the previous year's Grand Prix Finals banquet, where he challenged Yurio to a dance-off, pole-danced with Chris, and then danced and flirted with his idol Victor before begging him to be his coach, but he doesn't remember any of it. He inherited this trait from his father Toshiya, who also gets very rambunctious when drunk.
• Kobayashi from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid reveals her true personality when drunk (which happens rather easily). Her maid otaku nature comes out, she becomes very loud, often strips Tohru naked, and argues about nerd things.
• Imoko in It's Tough Being Neeko takes on the personality of a Handsome Lech after just a sip of sweet sake, acting rather assertive and flirty toward her friend Marimo and other classmates. This behavior even extends to her older sister once she gets home, much to Neeko's discomfort. Given Imoko's admission while under the influence that she's deliberately playing dumb most of the time, it's also ambiguous as to whether she's feigning her lack of memory of these actions when questioned the following morning.
• Fairy Tail has two chapters (adapted into OVAs) where the girls get drunk and suffer varying effects. In order:
  • Erza turns angry and violent (more than usual), and the second time she forces everyone to play a King's Game where she makes everyone do very sexual and embarrassing stuff.
  • Levy turns into a happy drunk who laughs at pretty much everything.
  • Lucy lets loose her libido and starts coming on Natsu.
  • Juvia becomes depressed and cries for everything, and comes on Gray (she does this even sober, though).
  • Carla starts bossing Happy and Lily around. Meanwhile, Wendy can't handle it and just collapses in a daze.

Audio Play

• Played for Drama in The Morgue Files. During one of Evelyn's drunken outbursts, she outright tells Tobias that she thought of him as a mistake, telling him that she never loved him at all. She tries to explain this away with the alcohol, but this doesn't stop Tobias from killing her and Frank.

Comic Books

• Played straight and exploited in Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield: one of the Roman legionaries disguised as a gaul tries to investigate where the titular shield is without being discovered, but since hes a drunkard, he goes to a wine store/pub where Asterix and Obelix happen to be in. As soon as he gets a little drunk, his secret is discovered, but when the owner tells him he's had enough wine, Asterix convinces him to give the spy some more wine precisely to see what he's up to. Sure enough, it's thanks to him the gauls find out about Caesar's plan for the shield.
• Dr. Moira McTaggart is quite the mean drunk.
• Parodied in German comic Rudi. Some cute songbirds start sieg-heiling, picking fights, and generally acting like most obnoxious drunks after drinking beer.
• Scott Pilgrim sees Knives and Kim get drunk and immediately engage in a passionate make-out session.

Fan Works

• Alicorn: Rainbow Dash, a tad delirious from both sickness and overindulging on alcoholic cough drops against her doctor's orders, loses her inhibitions and tells Celestia - her mother - everything she usually keeps locked up. Among other things, she laments that she feels she's lost her friends, asks Celestia why she abandoned her as a child and why she wasn't good enough, and even expresses suicidal thoughts. By the time Rainbow falls asleep, Celestia has broken down in tears.
• Another Way: When Deputy Director Renick expresses curiosity about what Ellisburg was like, Director Piggot tells him that he won't find out until medical science manages to repair her kidneys so that they can get very drunk together, and then she'll tell him everything.
• A Brief History of Equestria: It's shown that General Wind Whistler used this as part of her plan to build support against Commander Sullamander. She invited Generals Downpour and Torrent (who weren't blind supporters of Sullamander, like the other Joint Chiefs-Of-Staff) to her home for dinner, and slowly got them drunk on wine. Once their inhibitions were down, she got them to admit to hating Sullamander and talked them into joining her in leading a coup. Wind Whistler's daughter, Pansy, bore witness to this and was extremely impressed.
• A Certain Droll Hivemind: From "Guest Entry - Mikoto": Mikoto, annoyed that she can't just hack into Kuroko's radio chatter to figure out when she needs help, wonders if she can trick Uiharu (Kuroko's security expert) into giving up some secrets using a Fake High.
  Hmm. Note to self - buy Uiharu some rum and raisin ice cream and see if that has a placebo effect that gets her tipsy so she talks about how she implemented it. It's starting to get on my nerves that I can't reliably listen in.
• Contraptionology!: Applejack concludes that she can make absolute liquid Honesty by making sufficiently (quantum-level) high-proof alcohol, since drunk ponies always speak their mind.
• Higher Learning: After drinking a whole bottle of sake Asuka got drunk enough to confess to Shinji that she liked him.
• Reading Rainbowverse: A running gag is Fluttershy's passionate and outgoing nature... when drunk. She almost invariably regrets what she says because of how she says it... but never because it isn't true.
• Played for Drama in an Ah! My Goddess fanfic where Bell and Sayoko end up in a bar, with Bell standing in for an ill Keiichi. When Sayoko makes a 70-proof confession on how lonely she is, Bell responds by by kissing her on the lips.
• A new world:Story of a lost Shinobi when Cana convinces Naruto to drink with her. He fully admits that the Elemental Nations are a Crapsack World with constant fighting and that trying to be a Messianic Archetype is starting to weigh down on him and he'd much rather stay in Earthland.
  Naruto: Ya know, I like this place. Earthland. Compared to mine, this place is peaceful. Sure there are fights but it ain't as bad as back home. There we always got a fight or a war to worry about. If it were up to me, I'd stay in Earthland.
  Mirajane: So why don't you?
  Naruto: Because that crazy egomaniac Madara wants to rule the world and that jerk who I promised to bring back are still running around.
• Eleutherophobia: These Are the Damned is about Jake and Tom getting drunk. Jake talks about how he and his friends feel about the war being over, while Tom talks about what it was like to be treated as a slave for years.
• In Frozen Hearts (Sakume), this trope comes into play at the worst possible time. Heins, Hans' brother, who Cant Hold Their Liquor, eats some fondue, gets drunk, and reveals his and Hans' true identities at Queen Elsa's masquerade ball, which they're attending with assumed names. This is something they desperately want to keep secret since the truth getting out results in the brothers immediately being arrested and thrown in the dungeon.
• When R!Syaoran starts drinking with Kurogane in Shatterheart, he reveals to be open with his emotions and very affectionate, both things Syaoran is not when sober.
• In An Uncommon Witness, Femme Fatale Rue Corvo uses wine on Autor Brahms in order to get information out of him. Autor, with just two or three cups, is drunk enough to reveal detective Fakir's involvement in the case against her family but also unintentionally gives her hints about Duck being the witness that can bring her father down.
• In the RWBY fic A Night of Debauchery, has some of the characters indulge in drinking while at a strip club. Ruby and Pyrrha, the latter having drunk "her own weight" in alcohol, start flirting with Jaune while under the influence, much to his surprise.
• In the RWBY fic Emergence, when they get drunk at a Halloween party on Earth, Weiss angrily rants about how much she hates her father, while Yang casually starts telling everyone that she and her friends are from another world. Fortunately for Team RWBY, the party-goers dismissed this as drunken rambling.
• The entire plot of the 23rd chapter of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines started because an OC, offscreen, got drunk by mistake. The result was the story's first big Wham Episode.
• Yet another RWBY example: In ''A Rambling Drunken Confession To A Dying Girl, this trope is the entire Framing Device. The entire story is told from Qrow's perspective, and he is in character.
• Heartwarming example in Toward A Bright Future: After a mild night of dinner and drinking after the students' final exams, the normally aloof Aizawa thanks his teaching assistant and the main character Y/N for all the help he has given to his class and for looking out for everyone, prefacing it with a disclaimer that he is drunk, will say something he won't normally say, and that she shouldn't tell him afterwards.
• The Mountain and the Wolf: The Wolf holds a great feast for his men on the eve of sailing from Dragonstone, inviting Tyrion and Brienne as guests of honor (with Tyrion being ordered to go by Daenerys to see what he can find out about the Wolf's motives, as is his specialty). Tyrion turns out to be the only able to match the Wolf in drinking (note that the Wolf's crew are Norscan marauders, while the Wolf is bigger than Gregor Clegane), and as they get drunker they end up bonding over their respective traumatic backstories and possibly revealing more about themselves than they intended.
• Bakery "Enemies": Attempted, but failed. Marinette thinks that getting Adrien drunk will trick him into revealing the Peacock Miraculous. Instead he's just as nice and friendly as ever, though he accidentally outs Chloe as gay.
• In Not That Kinda Fired, Izuku accidentally drinks Burnin's alcohol instead of his soda. With lack of experience with alcohol, he proceeds to reveal his past with Bakugo and his plan to get himself fired from Endeavor's agency.
• In this unnamed Miraculous Ladybug story, Lila spikes Marinette's drink with alcohol to make her embarrass herself. Instead, her inhibitions vanish and she topples Lila's empire of lies by revealing all the stuff she's done.

Films — Animated

• Played with in Ratatouille, where an attempt to invoke this trope goes all too well, but not as intended. When Skinner gets Linguini drunk, trying to get him to confess he's being manipulated by a rat, he just gets an even-more-dorky Linguini (see: personality distillation in the description). Rat patootie, indeed.
• In "Tabasco Road", Speedy Gonzales has to save his two cousins when they try to pick a fight with an alley cat in a fit of drunken bravado.
• Subverted in Wonder Woman (2009). Steve Trevor buys rounds of tequila shots for him and Diana in an attempt to get her to loosen up and open up to him. Unfortunately for Steve, Amazons have an incredibly high tolerance to alcohol, so after quite a few shots, Diana is still completely sober while Steve can barely sit up.

Films — Live-Action

• Michael from The Boys in the Band. After falling Off the Wagon, he quickly reveals himself to be a self-hating Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.
• In the movie Blind Date, Kim Basinger's character undergoes a personality inversion from mousy and nervous to brash and wild after a few drinks. Hilarity Ensues.
• The Hangover had Stu Price undergo a classic Personality Inversion - with the bonus of not even remembering in the morning. He pushes this even further in the sequel, where he even admits "There is a demon inside me".
• In EuroTrip, the four main characters end up in a Czechoslovakian nightclub and all get smashed on Absinthe (green liquor that is very, very strong). Two of them, who happen to be twins, then promptly end up dancing together and making out....until they come to their senses mid-snogging session and scream their heads off.
  Worst. Twins. EVER!
• Charlie Chaplin's City Lights has the Tramp talking a drunken millionaire out of killing himself. The rich sot befriends him, invites him to stay in his mansion, drive his car, etc...but then turns on him when he sobers up. This cycle keeps repeating itself throughout the film.
• In Raise the Red Lantern, Songlian gets drunk and reveals that Meishan is having an affair with Dr. Gao, leading to Meishan's execution.
• In Happy Accidents, Sam keeps his identity as a time traveler secret from everyone but Ruby...until he gets drunk at an art show and promptly tells a small group of Ruby's friends.
• In The Maltese Falcon, Gutman alludes to this when he first meets with Spade:
  "I distrust a man who says 'when'. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does."
• In State of the Union, Mary Matthews is told to refrain from speaking her mind for the sake of her husband's political campaign. Things don't turn out so blandly between her and the delegates after she decides to have what the Lady Drunk's having.
• Shows up verbatim in Tombstone in a conversation between Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo. Holliday insults Ringo and Earp says, "Don't mind him, he's drunk." This exchange ensues:
  Doc: In vino veritas. ("In wine, truth." i.e. I mean what I say.)
  Ringo: Age quod agis. ("Do what you do." i.e. Watch what you say.)
  Doc: Credat Iudaeus Apella, non ego. ("Let Apella the Jew believe, not I." i.e. You're a fool to warn me.)
  Ringo: Iuventus stultorum magister. ("Youth is the teacher of fools." i.e. You're young and inexperienced, and that makes you the fool.)
  Doc: In pace requiescat. ("May he rest in peace." i.e. I'm about to kill you.)
• In The Smurfs, Grouchy has a scene in which he overindulges in M&M's and has a "candid" conversation with a green M&M plushie.
• In Kelly's Heroes, Kelly gets a captured German officer to reveal the location, amount, and protection of a cache of gold bars by getting him drunk.
• One of Watanabe's coworkers at the wake in Ikiru has this reaction when others are proclaiming that they'd have done the same thing if they knew they were dying.
  Ohara: Compared to Watanabe-san, we're all just worthless scum!
• Done rather heartbreakingly in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) with Rocket Raccoon. While drunk, he rails about how he didn't want to be made the way he is, and how he's sure that everyone views him as a monstrous freak or a joke. It did not help that Gamora and Drax had been calling him "rodent" and "vermin" throughout the film up until that point.
• When fourteen-year-old Manuela gets drunk in Mädchen in Uniform she ends up confessing that her teacher gave her a petticoat in front of her classmates, and unfortunately in front of the headmistress. After sobering up she is punished and banned from speaking to Fräulein von Bernburg again.
• In How High Silas and Jamal leave a plate of pot brownies at Dean Cain's house just as he is getting ready for a Halloween party. Once at the party he is so high that he transforms from a Dean Bitterman to a slightly foul-mouthed party animal who loves dancing to funk.
• In Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend, Clark tells Nell to interrogate Clegg and find out if he and his two companions were ever in the cavalry. She does this by getting him drunk. While drunk, Clegg blabs absolutely everything; from the fact that they've just mustered out of the army to the secret shipment of goods King has coming in.
• Bloody Reunion: Se-Ho is the former class president who was close to Eun-Young. Ms. Park bullied him for being poor. He is the first to tell Ms. Park how he feels in a drunken rage.
• In One Foot in Hell, Dan blabs Mitch's plans to Julie while drunk.
• In the Flashback part of the prologue of No Time to Die, the alcoholic mother of a young Madeleine Swann reveals to her that her father (Mr. White) is not a doctor as she believed, but rather that he kills people.
• The Batman (2022). Batman bugs Selina Kyle and sends her down to 44 Below to gather information. He gets more than he expected, as various high-ranking city officials are there openly taking drugs, including the District Attorney who starts hitting on Selina and blabbing endless secrets as soon as she joins his table. Batman's recording the whole thing, and he almost can't believe collecting the information he needs is this easy.
  Batman: He's wasted.
  Selina: No shit.
• Legend Of The Mountain has a scene where Mr. Tsui and Ho are having rice wine at an inn when Mr. Tsui suddenly screams that Ho's newly bethrothed Melody is a demon. The women running the inn tell Ho to dismiss his words as just drunken rambling, but Ho takes it seriously, citing this trope. Mr. Tsui's right, and moreoever, he wasn't just being metaphorical. A flashback reveals that as Melody was dying out, she asked an evil wizard to resurrect her as a demon so that she could take revenge on a rival musician.

Literature

• The titular location of The Citadel of Chaos have a wine cellar manned by a crafty Black Elf, who will offer any visitors drinks while randomly spiking them with Truth Serum. Intruders to expose themselves will be attacked on the spot.
• Terry Pratchett has fun with this several times in Discworld:
  • The dwarves are quiet, law-abiding workaholics... until they get a drink or two, at which point years of pent-up aggression takes over.
  • In The Last Continent, the cowardly and cynical Rincewind turns into a boisterous optimist after a few Ecksian beers.
  • Carpe Jugulum has timid Non-Action King Verence transforming into The Berserker after having a single sample of the Nac Mac Feegles' "brose," which is specifically designed to do just that. These are the fairies that consider Nanny Ogg's "sui-cider" a delicacy, after all. It's also lampshaded that giving him fifty times the brose, just because he's bigger, probably wasn't the best idea.
  • Unseen Academicals:
    • Downplayed, where Lord Vetinari gets stone drunk. It's mentioned that men twice his size with a reputation for being able to hold their drink had been hauled home in wheelbarrows, but despite having drunk just as much as they had the only noticeable difference in Vetinari's behavior is that he's a bit more sad, philosophical, and talkative than usual, and it's a bit harder the next day for him to do the crosswords in the morning paper. Apparently, he's very good at acting sober. Or very, very Knurd.
    • Played straight where the normally strait-laced Glenda finally starts to loosen up after a few glasses of sherry.
    • An extremely drunk football captain tries to give Lord Vetinari a Smack on the Back, opines that Vetinari's alright about football even though "everary one saysh you're a bit of a wnacker", and passes out. A quietly amused Vetinari tells the man's friends not to let him commit suicide when he sobers up and remembers.
• Hondo Ohnaka's Not-So-Big-Score: A drunken Hondo tells a Spoiled Brat passenger that he wants to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Fortunately for him, she thinks he's just flirting.
• A major plot point in The Three Musketeers hinges on a devastating autobiographical story Athos tells while drunk.
• In Flowers for Algernon, the super-genius Charlie Gordon reverts back to a barely-functional moron (in the clinical sense) when he gets drunk. This is actually an early sign that the surgery that made Charlie a super-genius in the first place might not be as permanent as previously thought.
• In the second Montmorency book On the Rocks, the titular character gets addicted to opium and goes from secretive, but fun, to broody and possibly too loose-tongued for the safety of himself and others. Or so Fox-Selwyn tells us; Montmorency doesn't spend much time actually on opium, most of the time he's having withdrawals.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Elayne Trakand is normally a reserved, sensible person with a bit of a temper. When she gets drunk for the first time, she becomes barely coherent and spends a lot of time giggling.
  • One of Nynaeve's many Noodle Incidents involves the personality inversion type.
• Ovid advises men to fake this in a chapter of his Ars Amatoria. Depending on interpretation, he either says that women will believe drunk men to tell the truth about sweet and true love, or that men will get away saying really dirty things to respectable women, since the woman won't mind and the men watching over the woman (father/brother/husband, etc.) will assume the "advancer" is just blubbering drunk nonsense.
• Quoted almost verbatim by Joy in The Republic Of Trees regarding the Kissing Under the Influence episode with Michael. Interestingly, she is the only teetotaler in the group...
• In Insurrection, a politician says some extremely bigoted things to the leader of a rival party while under the influence of legal recreational drugs. When he sobers up, he remembers what he said, realizes that he meant every word of it and what that said about him, and spends the rest of the book trying to be a better person.
• Alluded to in The Serpent's Shadow, when Maya Witherspoon brings a young man injured on the orders of one of the book's villains to the Fleet Street Clinic. The head nurse is worried about the attraction he shows to a female medical student/clinic volunteer until Maya points out that there's just as much truth in a quarter-grain of morphine as there is in wine.
• Wine is routinely used as a quick and dirty version of Truth Serum in A Song of Ice and Fire books. It's quite effective, especially on prisoners who probably aren't eating too well.
  • Although it is very subtle, in Sansa's last chapter in A Feast For Crows, Littlefinger is clearly drunk on wine and hubris, and is a lot more open in his desires to kiss Sansa and reveal his plans to her.
• In the George and Azazel story "The Evil Drink Does", George suggests that a rather straitlaced woman, who is worried about being a perpetual virgin, should loosen up a bit by getting drunk, only to be told that a single drink makes her violently ill. He then asks Azazel to adjust her body chemistry so that alcohol becomes a "healthful food" for her. This results in her becoming thoroughly uninhibited. Unfortunately, due to its having actual nutritive value and to the quantity she drinks for years afterwards, she also becomes morbidly obese.
• In the Matador Series, Pen teaches Khadaji Pubtending alongside his Sumito lessons, both for its practicality (a good pubtender is always in demand across the galaxy) and this trope:
  Pen: Ah, but it is a perfect job for a priest, even one so un-priestly as I. Consider: who has a better opportunity to see people with their masks lowered than a pubtender? Men will confide things to you drunk they wouldn't tell a brother when sober; stoned women will reveal secrets they'd never speak as pillow talk while straight. More than one pubtender has come from the ranks of practicing psychologists — or gone there from some bar.
• In East of Eden, Cathy Ames specifically avoids alcohol for this reason; any amount at all has the effect of breaking down whatever facade she's maintaining and revealing her true nature as The Sociopath.
• In Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers, when the brothers are trapped by the angry bulls on the large rock, Lauri gets drunk, and then proceeds to give the others a piece of his mind for their astonishment.
• Fire & Blood: During the reign of King Jaehaerys I, at one point two guards in King's Landing find the king's fool being tormented in a brothel, and hear the nearby Lord Motoon, who's plainly had more than one drink, claiming it was Princess Saera's idea. Lord Motoon and his buddy are brought up before the Iron Throne to explain that little comment, but by the time they get there they've sobered up amazingly quickly, and swear blind the guards misheard him.
• The Fourth Protocol: General Karpov has to down a lot of booze with a KGB colleague before he reveals anything about Plan Aurora. Even then it's only a couple of names, but it's enough for Karpov to go with (once he recovers from his hangover).
• Goblins in the Castle: During the "Goblin Freedom Day" celebration in Goblins on the Prowl, the Baron has had a bit much to drink and starts opening up more as a result, getting to talking about the old days and admitting that he had an older sister who went missing, along with how his parents treated him as a result. After a while, he catches himself:
  "Listen to me going on! Must be the brandy."
• Rubbernecker: When Patrick questions his drunk classmate Scott about some evidence that has gone missing, Scott angrily says that he didn't take anything. Patrick believes him because in his experience drunk people tell the truth, like when his mother drunkenly yelled that she almost killed herself because of him.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Get Sheldon drunk, and he'll perform Fiddler on the Roof karaoke or do stand-up and moon the audience. Give him caffeine and he'll think he's The Flash. Give him a Valium and he'll tell you that he's Batman.
  • Until the season 6 finale, Raj can only talk to women while drunk. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to blurt stuff out while so intoxicated.
    Leonard: Do you have a drink that'll make him less obnoxious?
    Penny: Drinks do not work that way.
• Blake's 7: In "Trial", Trooper Par offers Space Commander Travis a Quick Nip, then it's revealed he did so at the suggestion of Major Thania who wants to loosen Travis' tongue and find out what he's up to. But Travis refuses to talk to her, except to sneer at such an obvious ploy.
• In Breaking Bad season 4, after Walter drinks too much wine, he hints to Hank that Gale was not the mastermind behind Blue Sky. In other words, Walt sheds away his cold, logical exterior, and gives us a sneak preview of his egocentric reasons for getting into the business in the first place.
• Played for Drama on an episode of Community titled "Mixology Certification", which is centered around the group's visit to the bar to celebrate Troy's birthday. Almost everybody gets drunk, leading to minor personality changes and lost inhibitions (including Jeff and Britta almost blowing up their secret Friends with Benefits arrangement). The celebration ends with all the characters miserable and disillusioned.
• The Crown (2016):
  • In "Assassins", Margaret says that she knows that Porchey still holds a torch for Queen Elizabeth because he said so when he was drunk. Elizabeth doesn't believe it because, as she points out, drinking's "when the nonsense comes out" (though the episode hints that Margaret is right).
  • In "Dear Mrs. Kennedy", Jackie Kennedy's personal doctor gives her a shot for depression (implied to contain amphetamines) before a dinner party where she runs her mouth off with derogatory comments about Queen Elizabeth II and Buckingham Palace. She's horrified on hearing her comments got back to the Queen and insists on a private audience to apologize.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "A New Man", Giles runs into Ethan Rayne, and the two friends-turned-arch enemies get drunk in a pub together, with Giles spilling his frustrations about how obsolete he feels in the face of the covert techno-military demon-fighting efforts of the Initiative.
  • In "Life Serial", Buffy has been drinking straight from the bottle after a very bad day, and delivers a long rant to Spike over how her life sucks, the world sucks, and specifically Spike sucks for not fixing all this with some gratuitous violence, even though he's the only person she can stand to be around.
• Double-subverted on Doc Martin. Louisa tries this on Martin, but he says that alcohol just makes him sleepy. But then he admits that he loves Louisa. And then he falls asleep.
• Drop the Dead Donkey: Newsreader Henry Davenport gets drunk at his award ceremony.
  "I remember the days when the television industry was run by giants. Whereas now it is run... BY PYGMIES! LIKE HIM! AND HIM!"
• Farscape: In "Dream A Little Dream", Chiana spends the night drinking with a policeman to get information they can use in court the next day. Unfortunately, she has one frell of a hangover, so downs several stimulant pills. Hilarity Ensues.
• Feel Good: George inadvertently tells her friends she's with Mae while high on pain medication and thus gets uninhibited.
• For All Mankind: After the Soviets beat the US to the Moon, the Apollo astronauts are ordered to go out and blow off some steam. While Drowning Their Sorrows, an astronaut who did a lunar flyby mission but who wasn't allowed to land on it blows off some steam to a journalist about how the Apollo One disaster caused NASA to stop taking risks. He gets in a lot of trouble when the comments appear in Newsweek, and his wife angrily points out that the astronauts had a code where they don't discuss their feelings with anyone including their own family, whereas all it took in this case was a few beers.
• In Frasier, Niles has too many beers at a Halloween party and finally admits that he feels his father regards him and his brother as disappointments for not being down-to-earth, working-class guys.
• Game of Thrones:
  • When Tyrion is exceptionally drunk, he lets hidden sides of himself rise to the surface. He tells Shae and Bronn about his disastrous first marriage in a very depressed tone. After drinking heavily during his wedding, he struggles more than usual to contain his contempt for Joffrey and Lord Tywin and angrily threatens to castrate Joffrey when pushed too far.
  • Before Roose Bolton shows his true colors, it's mentioned a few times that his being a teetotaler marks him as suspicious to most people because of this trope.
• House of the Dragon: King Viserys spends a good portion of The Grand Hunt episode rip-roaring drunk and lets it slip to his wife Alicent that he worries he's made a mistake making his first child Rhaenyra his heir. This is notable because he had a prophetic vision that his son would be on the Iron Throne and now, he has a son.
• The Hexer: When interrogating Geralt and Dandelion about whatever they know about Falwick's conspiracy and the potential whereabouts of Ciri, they are both force-fed liquor. While Dandelion is initially enthusiastic about the concept of such torture and insists he can just get himself drunk on his own, he's mostly doing so to both buy time and avoid having the bottle forced down his throat.
• House:
  • Subverted in one episode, where House pretends to do this to break up Cuddy and Lucas.
  • In another episode, Thirteen says, "Being drunk doesn't change who you are, it just reveals it."
• I, Claudius: Claudius gets a bit too drunk at Livia's deathbed and she realises his Obfuscating Stupidity is just an act he's been putting on for most of his life. Being a master manipulator herself, she's genuinely impressed.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): As Louis de Pointe du Lac explains to Daniel Molloy in "The Thing Lay Still", because Lestat de Liocourt had a tendency to withhold information from him, his maker's tongue loosened on a blood-drunken night in Baton Rouge where Lestat divulged to his fledgling how a vampire can die.
• An episode of Lexx, when they met Oberon and Puck and Oberon's Wife (Titania?). Titania was played by a bearded dwarf in drag and Oberon seems to really hate being married to "her". Stanley asks Puck how they got together in the first place, it's explained that Oberon was very very drunk. Puck invokes the trope when Stanley is doubtful as to how drunk one would have to get to find Titania attractive: "So yer saying, he's the kind of guy who really prefers..." (cut off by Puck before he can explicitly question the Fairy King's heterosexuality)
  • Oberon actually tries to marry Stanley later in that same episode, ostensibly as an upgrade from his even more mannish current wife, but given what Puck has told us...
• When drunk, Robin from How I Met Your Mother becomes Super-Canadian.
  • Well, she was drinking Moulson.
  • Barney goes through several stages of drunkenness, including "Richard Dawson Drunk" (he kisses every woman he meets like the Family Feud host); "Friends With Strangers Drunk"; "Marcel Marceau Drunk" (he walks like the famous mime's walk-against-the-wind routine); "Jabba Drunk" (he talks incoherently like Jabba the Hutt); and finally, "Truth Serum Drunk", where he compulsively tells the truth.
• From one of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon's "Thank You Notes":
  "Thank you, summer barbecues, for always featuring fun family games like horseshoes, croquet, and 'Let's see how many daiquiris Grandma can drink before she gets racist'."
• The main topic of Law & Order episode"In Vino Veritas". The episode starts with a drunk person making anti-Semitic comments. It turns out that he had his 14-year-old son murder a Jew, and despite his attempts to claim otherwise, he clearly is anti-Semitic.
• Murdoch Mysteries:
  • Murdoch asks Brackenreid for a drink before confessing his compromised principles in "Murdoch in Wonderland".
  • In the B-plot of "Staircase to Heaven", Brackenreid and Crabtree are in the station house guarding a prisoner due to flooding at another station when they share some whiskey. Their conversation turns to the subject of Murdoch (who is on an island investigating a murder), and they confide to each other things about their colleague that they find annoying, including the fact that he never seems to have a hair out of place. Crabtree mentions the detective's repeated advice to "look for the small details" as a particular irritant, and Crabtree later notices such a detail that tips him off to the presence of an infamous criminal trying to kidnap their prisoner to prevent him from testifying in court.
• Parks and Recreation really had fun with this in "The Fight". There's super-positive Leslie crying and babbling over her fight with Ann, Tom's inflated ego, serious Ben saying "Baba Booey" in an extremely self-satisfied tone, Andy's intense singing, April's incoherent rapid-fire Spanish...
• The Professionals. In "Not A Very Civil Servant", George Cowley lends a sympathetic ear along with several friendly drinks to a local councilor facing charges for corruption. Given Cowley's oft-mentioned liking for single malt Scotch, he's a lot better at guarding his tongue while drunk than the councilor.
• A recurring character on Saturday Night Live, during the Weekend Update segment, is Drunk Uncle. His conversations always devolve into rambling rants about all the problems he perceives in modern culture.
  • The "Bill Brasky" segments center around four or five raucously drunk businessmen swapping tall tales about the mighty and (by all rights) terrifying Bill Brasky... interspersed with blurting out various secrets ranging from "embarrassing" to "criminal" that have nothing to do with Bill Brasky.
• This is why Elaine in Seinfeld can't keep a secret.
  Elaine: Come on, tell me! I'll put it in the vault!
  Jerry: No, the vault's no good.
  Elaine: Why's the vault no good?
  Jerry: Because everyone knows the combination. [gestures drinking from a bottle of liquor]
• In Smallville, while Clark is immune to alcohol, Red Kryptonite is his personal replacement, explicitly stated to strip away his inhibitions, leaving behind the 'Kal' persona. So far, while on Red Kryptonite, he has managed to buy expensive stuff with money stolen from his parents, make advances towards Lana, Chloe, Lois, Alicia, and other girls, run away to Metropolis and spend months causing havoc (bank robberies were involved), "married" Alicia in Vegas, crash Lana's engagement party and dropped cruel (but arguably accurate) comments to Martha and Chloe, and become best pals with Zod.
• A science fiction version occurs in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Naked Now", which includes Wesley taking over the ship, Tasha Yar seducing Data, and Picard and Crusher almost admitting their love for each other. The classic Trek version was better, with Sulu rampaging shirtless through the ship with a rapier and a Redshirt randomly pressing buttons on the reactor control console while singing Irish love songs over the PA system. Dr. McCoy ultimately realizes the water on the planet had mutated, causing it to affect the brain like alcohol.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine plays it straight, with stoic O'Brien only admitting how he feels about best friend Bashir after a few drinks. The scene includes this gem of Buffy Speak:

  O'Brien: You're not an in-between kind of guy. People either love you or hate you.
  Bashir Really?
  O'Brien: I mean, I hated you when we first met.
  Bashir: I remember.
  O'Brien: And now...
  Bashir: And now?
  O'Brien: Well... Now, I don't.
  Bashir: That means a lot to me, chief, it really does.
  O'Brien: And that is from the heart! I really do... not hate you anymore.

  • In "Image in the Sand", O'Brien shares a bottle of bloodwine with Worf to coax him into revealing why he's in such a bad mood lately. It gets an amusing Call-Back in a later episode when O'Brien offers to share another bottle and Worf bluntly refuses, remembering the hangover he had last time.
  • Worf pulls this trick when he first arrives on the station, getting drunk with a Klingon officer who was a friend of his family House and getting the truth about why a Klingon armada has turned up on their doorstep.
• On Star Trek: Enterprise A very drunk Malcolm talks about how pretty T'Pol is in the season 1 episode "Shuttlepod One". Malcolm up to this point (and after) is portrayed as a Stuffy Brit who avoided any sexual interest in his work colleagues.
  Malcolm: Have you ever noticed her bum?
  Trip: What?
  Malcolm: Her bum! She has an awfully nice bum, doesn't she?
• Stranger Things: In season 2, Nancy Wheeler gets drunk at a Halloween party, and her guilt and anger about having to keep her friend Barbara's death a secret, combined with her frustration that her boyfriend Steve (who is also participating in the cover-up) seems to accept it much more passively, all come out as a rant that everything between her and Steve is "bulls**t". She doesn't remember this incident the next day, but when he presses her on it, she can't bring herself to tell him she loves him as she usually does. This eventually leads to them breaking up.
• In season 2 of Supernatural, Sam usually plays serious, quiet, little brother to older brother Dean's loud, comedic style. But when Sam gets drunk, he gets giggly and truthful, calling Dean short and bossy before making Dean promise to kill him if Sam should ever turn to the dark side.
• A Discussed Trope in the Titans episode "Together". Kory Anders buys a big bottle of tequila and brings it to Dick Greyson's room, hoping to get some answers about him, since he isn't exactly a big sharer. Dick immediately realises she has this on her mind, even lampshading this trope. So they just sleep together instead, but he's no more communicative afterwards. But then they're attacked by the bad guys, and Dick has to reveal his superhero identity, which tells Kory a lot.
• The Twilight Zone (1959) has an example of this in the episode "It's a Good Life." Anthony Fremont serves as the episode's main antagonist. He is all of six years old and has erased the world save for a little village in Ohio. He can create entirely new creatures and read the minds of the people he lives with. Think any bad thoughts about him and he will kill you or worse.. None of this matters when the few adults left gather at Anthony's house to celebrate Dan's Birthday. He gets drunk on Peach Brandy and delivers a stinging "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Anthony that (Not surprisingly) begins with him calling Anthony a monster. Ultimately, Dan gets turned into a Jack in the Box with his human face on it and wished into the cornfield outside.The party resumes and the attendees act as if nothing ever happened. Silly Dan. It's A Birthday, Not a Break.
• In Wolf Hall, Cromwell is helping a rather drunk Henry back to bed and hears much more about him than he would if Henry were sober, like believing his inability to get it up with any woman other than Anne is a sign that he's right to pursue her. The next day, however, Cromwell finds that Henry has gifted him with a tapestry they'd discussed, meaning that Henry remembers the conversation and might not have been as out of it as he'd seemed.

Manhwa

• In Dorothy of Oz, Mara Shin blurts out to Abee about her huge crush on him...all the while yelling at him that he can't be the real Abee because her Abee is a kind and gentle person. Abee is understandably confused, especially when she compares him to both a fish cake and a gourmet pastry.
  Abee: Should I be flattered or angry?

Music

• Exemplified in the country song "The More I Drink". In fact you find this trope a lot in country music.
• One of the songs on The Who's Rock Opera Quadrophenia ("Dr Jimmy") is about a guy who has two substance-related Split Personalities:
  Doctor Jimmy and mister Jim
  When I'm pilled you don't notice him,
  He only comes out when I drink my gin.
• The David Burns song "The Whiskey Never Lies" is all about this trope.
  You said you had it bad fer me, you'd take me to the moon
  You said no other moved you so, no other made you swoon
  But when the drink was in your blood you sang another tune
  And that was when I learned the truth, the whiskey never lies
• The Lonestar song "Tequila Talkin'" is about the aftermath of this. The now-sober singer spends the entire song trying to convince his ex-girlfriend (and quite possibly himself) that the only reason he told her that he still loved her and wanted her back the night before was that he was drunk.
  It was just the tequila talking
  When I told you I'm still not over you
  I get a little sentimental
  When I've had one or two
  And that tear in my eye was the salt and the lime
  Not the memory of you walking
  If I said I'm still in love with you
  It was just the tequila talking
• Brantley Gilbert's "Stone Cold Sober," in which this trope acts as Love Epiphany, because he realizes he doesn't regret telling her he loved her while absolutely hammered.
  I woke up hungover
  But still had to call you
  'Cause I just realized girl
  That maybe it was all true, yeah
  I let the whiskey talk
  And baby it said too much
  I got the feeling now
  It didn't say enough
  'Cause I'm waking up alone
  Missing that midnight kiss
  I can't promise you forever
  All I know is I still want you to come over
  And I'm stone cold sober
• They Might Be Giants' "Your Racist Friend" touches on this in passing:
  He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking
  Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding
• San Holo and Broods’ “Honest” switches out drinking for a different intoxication left unspecified, but the sentiment is still there:
  How can I try to keep it hidden when I’m feeling like you’re reading my mind?
  High and I don’t know what I’m thinking but I’m talking to you like I can’t lie

Stand-Up Comedy

• Christopher Titus discussed this in stand-up, reporting that while he was borderline-hedonistic, his father was also a loving and responsible man.... But when drunk his personality would flip and he'd often say horrible things that destroyed his children's self-confidence. Titus said that as a little boy, not understanding what was going on, it felt less like his dad was getting drunk and having a personality shift and more like his father transformed into "Anti-Dad!", a superhero who waged war on self-esteem.
• Ron White admits to this when he was arrested for being drunk in public.
  "I had the right to remain silent...but I didn't have the ability."
• Bill Cosby shows how this also applies to other drugs, like cocaine, in a dialogue with a friend (as relayed in Bill Cosby: Himself):
  Cosby: What is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful?
  Friend: Well, it intensifies your personality.
  Cosby: Yes, but what if you're an asshole?

Theater

• The whole plot of Bertolt Brecht's play Mr Puntila and His Man Matti is an illustration of this trope. Puntila, when sober, is a boorish, exploitative boss, but get him drunk and he becomes the most affable and generous of men.
• This trope plays a major role in the play God of Carnage, as well as its film adaptation. It plays out mainly in the Personality Inversion variety.
• Tom Daley in That Championship Season is an alcoholic who spends the play getting even more drunk and telling his former basketball teammates and their coach what he really thinks of them and the arrested adolescence in which he feels they have been living for twenty years by relying heavily on Coach for life advice, even though the latter is incapable of framing their adult dilemmas in terms of anything other than athletic or jingoistic metaphors. The play climaxes with Tom Calling the Old Man Out by revealing just how destructive Coach's emphasis on winning above all else has always been to their lives.
• Implied in Much Ado About Nothing when Borachio (whose name means "drunkard") tells Conrad that he will "like a true drunkard utter all to thee," and proceeds to disclose how he carried out Don John's plan. Unfortunately for him and Conrad, the night watch are listening.

Video Games

• The heroine of A Dance with Rogues is way, way more promiscuous when really drunk. The two times the player has the option of getting really drunk are during the scene with Pia in the first chapter and the contest with Gemli in the second; during the first, if you get drunk enough you don't remember what happens but Pia implies it was really, really great, during the second if you lose the drinking contest your character, a human with relatively normal sexual tastes, will screw a filthy, stinky, hairy dwarf.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age II, we have Fenris. It is shown during a few of his more personal cutscenes between him and Hawke that he can really hit the bottle. In one scene alone there are at least two empty bottles on the table he and Hawke are sitting at and he is working on a third. Hilarity Ensues when he tells Hawke (if Hawke is a mage) that he or she is "A finer mage I've never met" which goes completely against his Mage hating usual self. He also throws a few rather sexy smiles Hawke's way, further showing how much of his usual broodiness goes away when he drinks. In vino veritas, indeed.
  • Done more subtly with Solas in Dragon Age: Inquisition should you bring him to the Winter Palace. He mentions rather glibly that the servants were eager to refill his cup, and while doesn't completely drop the Hermit Guru Nice Guy act, the wine does cause him to reveal a more cunning side with a love of court intrigue - something with which a self-confessed drifter should have no experience. He backtracks later once he sobers up, and if you call him out on his odd behavior, he claims he simply witnessed such things in the Fade.
  • Another one in Inquisition occurs if the player is romancing The Iron Bull. Bull normally only starts calling the Inquisitor kadan, Qunlat for "my heart", after the Inquisitor has made it clear that s/he is serious about the relationship. Bull also has a drinking scene after the player kills a dragon for the first time. If that scene is initiated after sleeping with Bull (it is not possible to see the scene where the Inquisitor affirms the relationship before the drinking scene), Bull slips up and calls the Inquisitor kadan right before complimenting him/her on his/her "fantastic ass/tits".
• Genshin Impact: The "Of Drink A-Dreaming" event showed Eula plastered after a night at the Cat's Tail, where she's less uptight in tone and more forthcoming with her insecurities. The title of the particular sub-quest is even "Solid Ice, Soluble in Wine."
• One quest in Jade Empire has you getting a man named Three Sheets Dutong drunk to confess that the Imperial writ that he used to cheat Old Mother Kwan out of her tea house is fake. There are three stages of drunkenness; first he's cheerful and doesn't want to talk about something as "dry and boring" as the writ, then he's depressed and is willing to confess to faking the writ, then he gets too paranoid and must be given a sobering potion. The player must give him the right number of drinks to get him into the second stage of drunkenness to finish the quest.
• In Jagged Alliance 2, one of the first missions the player gets is to organise food shipments to the besieged rebel base. The only person who is capable of doing so is Father Walker, a priest sympathetic to the rebel cause, but he initially refuses to help out of fear. However, he is also a well-known drinker and once you give him some alcohol, he drunkenly agrees to supply the rebels with the much-needed food.
• In one scene in Persona 4, the main cast is under the mistaken impression that they're drinking booze, leading to Yukiko telling Kid Detective Naoto everything about what the True Companions have been doing. Naoto doesn't believe a word of it.
  • How they managed to get drunk off non-alcoholic beer... well, it's probably the Placebo Effect.
  • Subverted in the case of Detective Adachi, who lets a few things regarding the case slip while drunk at the Dojimas', but no more than he usually does sober. Also averted, as he manages to not reveal his true intentions and crimes even while drunk. His ramblings while drunk may, in fact, also be the result of him being just as duplicitous as he usually is, making this a complete aversion. Hard to tell.
• Brought up by an NPC in Radiant Historia when he mentions how alcohol sales are high in times of war.
• Gets quoted in Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper by the detective after a drunk reporter reveals information essential to the case.
• The Demoman from Team Fortress 2 is actually a genial, easy to get along with guy off the clock and off the bottle. On the job, and with ample swigs of Scrumpy, he becomes the Demoman everyone is more familiar with.
• In the first season of TellTale's Sam & Max games, during the fourth episode, Bosco will hawk a "truth serum" that, upon purchase, turns out to be a bottle of vodka. This seems less useful than Bosco makes it out to be since the duo is well aware that In Vino Veritas is under no circumstances guaranteed, but they do in fact use it as such when Max needs to start a war and Whizzer is being tight-lipped to maintain peace among the brothers.
• In almost every Tradewinds game, if you tip the bartender enough, she'll provide information that someone let slip while drunk. In the first game, it's the location of Shangri La, a floating city.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, one of the ways you can recruit the resident booze hound Rose Cassidy is by challenging her to a drinking contest with a Barter skill of 75. You need a full Endurance stat of 10 to beat her, but with a low stat:
  The Courier: Mmmmmwhen ah firsmet you, ahmm thought you werem the mmmbiggestmm mmbitch in the world.
• Oden Cart: A Heartwarming Tale: The more your customers linger and become loyal (up to four stages), the more they'll get drunk, and they more they get drunk, the more likely they'll tell you very personal things or secrets. This is necessary to get all of the character endings and to uncover the plot.
• Invoked in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice. In Turnabout Storyteller, this is the only way to get Uendo Toneido to reveal his hidden fourth persona, who is a key character to the murderer's identity. All the wine does is knock Uendo and the other personalities out for Owen to come out in the open since Owen himself can't come out while the other three are out at the same time.
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag:
  • Woodes Rogers gets very drunk in a party towards the end of the game after having been called back to England, and as a result he gets much, much more honest than he usually is.
    Noblewoman: How is your wife doing?
    Rogers: I haven't the faintest idea, and I don't intend to inquire any further. We separated almost five years ago, and both our lives have been the better for it. [...] Perhaps I'll be more candid later when the remainder of my reason has left me.
  • And in the same scene...
    Rogers: ...And yet, for all my successes, his majesty has seen fit to sack me! And call me back to England! God bless the fucker!
• Invoked by Therion the thief in Octopath Traveler. When he needs info, he hits the bar since the alcohol tends to loosen people's lips.
• In the first installment of the Dark Tales series, one witness refuses to give the detectives any information. However, after they ply him with some wine, he's much more open to telling them what he knows.
• Strange Flesh: While sober, The Bartender is The Stoic and quite dominant; when intoxicated, however, he looks and walks very goofy (and is far more likely to trip if he runs), and is quite, erm, submissive instead.
• Yes, Your Grace: When first introduced, Sir Friderick seems like a fairly reasonable person with a justified chip on his shoulder against Miles Gloriosus types due to having been a military hero in his Glory Days. It later turns out that he's an outright abusive person when drunk, and is unfortunately also The Alcoholic.
• A more general intoxication example rather than specifically alcohol, but Warframe has the seasonal summer event "Dog Days", which is started when local Hanging Judge Kela De Thaym is exposed to a gas leak, and decides that it's such a nice day, why not just have her Executioners engage in water gun fights with the Tenno instead of fights to the death? Turns out she's actually quite pleasant when under some kind of chemical influence, and even wonders if they should do watergun fights all the time to solve their problems. She's even aware of her change in personality, too, warning the Tenno that she'll go back to being her mean old self once the gas leak is repaired.
  Kela De Thaym: I guess I gotta hand it to ya. You really hosed my crew. Well done, I guess. But jus' remember: they're gonna fix this gas leak at some point and when they do... WHEN THEY DO... it's back to business, buddy. NO MORE MRS NICE ME. Carry on.
• World of Warcraft: An overheard conversation in Oribos:
  Trader So'lek: Can you summon another case of the liquid that makes them more honest?
  Trader So'ran: The truth potion or the wine?
  Trader So'lek: Let's go with the one that tastes better.

Visual Novels

• Averted in Daughter for Dessert, especially with the drinking game that the protagonist, Amanda, and Kathy play at the new bar in town. Despite the wine, the many secrets that they are all keeping from each other, and the game that they are playing together, none of them lets anything slip.
• In Hanako's route in Katawa Shoujo, when they drink wine at her party, she gets drunk and starts clinging at Hisao, telling him she doesn't want him to leave, altogether being much more open about her emotions than usual. Hisao, who had also been drinking, finds this quite discomforting and is very firm about putting her to bed before either of them do anything they'd regret.
• Invoked in-universe in Morenatsu, by Tatsuki. He's in love with the Player Character and wants to tell him, so he deliberately gets drunk at the festival because he can't build enough courage to tell him while sober. Despite the fact that he's drunk, Tatsuki keeps enough presence-of-mind so that the scene still comes off as gentle and sweet.
• In VA-11 HALL-A, Jill's role as The Bartender gives her the option of making drinks more alcoholic than normal. If you get a client drunk, they become much more frank and open about the things going on in their lives than if they stay sober. For instance, the Idol Singer known as *Kira* Miki will naturally stay in her idol persona when she's in the bar. When she's drunk, *Kira* Miki admits that she's kept the mask on for so long that she doesn't know who she "really" is anymore, but doesn't care as long as that mask is able to make people happy.

Webcomics

• In It's Walky!, Jerkass Mike becomes sweet and friendly after a few drinks. His girlfriend, Dina, quickly takes advantage of this and attempts to keep him perpetually drunk. Note that this is basically treated as rape (though the rest of the cast doesn't care because its Mike and they have their own problems), but when he finally sobers up he comes within an inch of killing Dina.
  • And it's back in Shortpacked!, with Amber (although she just blackmails him so she can date him sober).
• In Penny and Aggie, the normally quiet, stoic Jack gets belligerent when drunk.
  • Also, Helen tends to blurt out things she really shouldn't after she's had a few too many spiked popsicles.
  • Jack's girlfriend, the devoutly Christian Katy-Ann, seeks to understand his drinking by getting drunk herself for the first time, and reveals to her friends her repressed sexual urges for him. The scene is mainly Played for Drama but culminates in a Played for Laughs moment where she calls out for Jack (who isn't there) to ravish her as she begins to strip.
• Bun-Bun the Killer Rabbit from Sluggy Freelance is usually a knife-wielding psychopath with a hair-trigger temper... but give him enough to drink, and he becomes a genuinely nice and friendly fellow. His drink of choice is Rum. Which may have something to do with his past(s) as the captain (and first mate) of a shipful of the Pirates above the Oceans Unmoving...
  • The cast once shot him with a tranquilizer dart. He got really happy and friendly (like the human who'd just gotten tranqs too), and very joyfully beat them all up.
• Due a tragic past Sidney Burns of Mob Ties is better kept slightly tipsy, if he isn't well, see for yourself
• The Girl in A Girl and Her Fed drops her cynical, world-weary persona and develops an abiding interest in fluffy kittens after drinking four screwdrivers simultaneously.
• In PHD, Cecilia, who is often a workaholic, gets "drunk" on chocolate. She suddenly acts very sociable and takes her shirt off, before Tajel stops her.
• In Something*Positive, Davan is complaining about a dating sim video game:
  PeeJee: Sounds like someone's cranky because he can't even maintain his virtual romances.
  Davan: At least with computer games there's a cheat code. I'd have killed for a button combination to enter that forced the women I've seen to say what they actually mean.
  PeeJee: Most guys I've dated have found that "up, down, circle, circle, three shots of vodka" works well.
• In this Questionable Content strip, Marten says some unkind things to Faye while drowning his sorrows over Dora breaking up with him because she needs to work out her own trust and intimacy issues. Of course, it has far more to do with his current emotional state than his true thoughts about Faye and his relationship with her. A better example might be his earlier drunken conversation with Angus in regards to Faye (in which he candidly disclosed their history and his assessment of whether Faye could handle a real relationship).
• Footloose: The two half werewolves Dan and his sister suffer from personality inversion, Dan become friendly and sociable while, Jin becomes sarcastic and serious
• In Bob and George, Megaman is "I love you man," and Protoman tells him not to touch him.
• Eerie Cuties had an all-girls party where a very young succubus drank some liquor and proclaimed "I feel like alllllll my inhibitions just melllllted away". Oh, and aside of girls being uncomfortable with her sudden urge to cuddle up in the absence of boys, they almost have seen her soul-draining a small crowd by accident once — those guys were reanimated, but the aftermath didn't look pretty.
• Homestuck: It took being drunk for Rose to finally admit that she and Kanaya were actually dating and go in for a kiss.
• Zii from Ménage à 3 enjoys her booze, but usually preserves her self-control (though she may cut loose with the practical jokes even more than usual when drunk). However, when she does get really plastered, she tends to say too much.
  • She spends weeks valiantly repressing her habitual lecherous promiscuity for the sake of her budding relationship with Erik. But while on a girls' night out, after intercepting multiple drinks bought for sex-goddess DiDi by various men, she ends up rather buzzed in her apartment with an ex-lover who has been trying to get back into her pants and someone whose pants she has been on a quest to get into, on and off, since the comic started. Cue Orgy and personal disaster.
  • On a later occasion, she hits the booze hard in order to blunt the pain of feeling obliged to flirt with the unappealing Yvan. Eventually, she gets drunk enough to express her burning envy of Gary's weird reputation as an oral sex master. Then she passes out. Whether her honesty there registers with anyone is uncertain.
• Four vodka cranberries are enough to turn Ally of Sunstone into the honest drunk.
• Slightly Damned: When we first meet Iratu he was drunk off his ass (and according to a Q&A comic he is always drunk in the ring of the slightly damned), but he was friendly but careless to his younger adoptive brother Buwaro, but when they meet him sober during the St Curtis invasion he is cold and even violent to Buwaro especially after he learns their adoptive sister Sakido died getting Buwaro and Rhea to Medus ^{more spoilers} Word of God says Iratu actually hated Buwaro so it could be assumed he got drunk just to be able to stand being near him
• In Mage & Demon Queen, the eponymous Queen Velverosa gets much more open about her feelings and affections towards Malori when she has had plenty of glasses of wine.

Web Originals

• Nicely crossed over with Sympathetic P.O.V. when Phelous and The Cinema Snob get a taste of The Nostalgia Critic completely wasted. We've see him clingy, tearful, vulnerable and touchy-feely plenty of times, but they haven't, and they're shocked by it.
• The Nostalgia Chick hates (or used to hate) having emotions. She's also an alcoholic. These two facts usually don't mix well for her.
• Both Rebecca and Donnie from Demo Reel share too much about their pasts when they're high for the former and drunk for the latter.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-3634 is a novelty corkscrew in a key-shaped case with this trope's very name embossed on it. When it's used to open a container of alcohol, anyone who drinks said alcohol will immediately start going off about something inappropriate they've done, thought, or said, and in some cases, start doing things they normally would never do in public. The object was discovered in England after a family Christmas party where all the guests got into a fight that resulted in 56 injuries and 3 deaths.

Western Animation

• The Tom and Jerry cartoon "Part Time Pal" has Tom getting all chummy with Jerry after taking alcohol.
  • Columbia's "Pickled Puss", released a year later (1948), used that same plotline. A cat becomes friendly with a mouse he'd been chasing—to the point of annoying him—after eating several herring pickled in pure hooch.
  • In a variation, TerryToons' Little Roquefort cartoon "Playful Puss" has Percy friends with Roquefort while under the influence of catnip.
• The Simpsons: In "The Italian Bob", just as Sideshow Bob is enjoying his newfound fame as mayor of the Tuscan village of Salsiccia, Lisa spills the beans (and wine on herself) on Sideshow Bob's criminal past:
  Lisa: [spilling wine on her dress] Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo! Whoopsy. I'll just get it out with more wine. See? It's fine! Go on, go on with the thing.
  Marge: [groans] It's obvious why Bob is a vaunted pillar of your community.
  Lisa: Yeah, but he's a wanted killer in our community! [Bob starts to sweat nervously]
  Marge: He deserves to be hailed at this wingding.
  Lisa: More like jailed at Sing-Sing!
  Sideshow Bob: [trying to prevent further disclosure of his past] Time for bed now! Drunken children tell the ugliest lies!
• Jared from Superjail! is a neurotic, spineless wreck of a person normally, so you can imagine that he's given into vice before. It's just that as a recovering alcoholic, even being near alcohol makes him hallucinate violently.
• Orel's dad in Moral Orel is an alcoholic who gets a whole drunken rant in the second season finale, "Nature", which culminates in the line "Drunk... is... NATURE!". This is also described perfectly at the end of Part 2 of the finale, when Orel flat-out asks his mom why she married his dad.
  Orel: Well, it's just that... when he drinks, he changes.
  Bloberta: Oh, he doesn't change, Orel! That's just his true nature coming out.
• Metalocalypse:
  • Every single of the band's mothers, but especially Toki's, who goes from an incredibly strait-laced religious person with a high amount of restraint to a total pervert when she gets drunk on alcohol.
  • The band's manager/lawyer Charles Ofdensen is generally a soft-spoken, sort of uptight guy... until you pour enough alcohol into him. Then he starts doing things like playing with Nathan Explosion's hair.
• In Daria, Trent suggests that he and Jane get through a family reunion by passing out drunk. Jane points out that not only is she underage, but Trent tends to get "honest" when he's drunk and it's probably not a good idea for them to tell their relatives what they really think of them.
• "Crumley Cogwheel" is a 1963 Paramount Modern Madcap about an office schlub who has spent 20 years with Michigan Nuts and Bolts and had never asked for a raise. His boss gives him a week to do so or else he will be fired. On the last day, Cogwheel is on his lunch break, and instead of going to his usual tea house, he goes into a bar. Only after he gets plastered does he summon up the courage to not only barge into his boss' office during a board meeting but also demand a raise. His boss is completely impressed and gives Cogwheel his raise — of one dollar. Stunned in utter disappointment, Cogwheel faints. (Boss: "Poor guy... I guess the shock was too much for him.")
• The Beatles (1965): The episode "I'm Down" has the boys helping an Italian wine-making family replenish their inventory. Wine is consumed, but nobody shows any sign of being drunk.
• The Private Snafu short "Spies" has this when Snafu gets drunk and blabs the final pieces of his military secret to Axis spies.
• Kaeloo: When Mr. Cat drinks alcohol, he tends to stop acting like a jerk and be much nicer.
• King of the Hill: Whenever Hank Hill gets drunk, he tends to talk about issues he normally finds uncomfortable talking about with anyone, like his narrow urethra.
• Rick and Morty: "The Wedding Squanchers", Rick's best friend, Birdperson, and who and what comes out at the wedding.
  Birdperson: The galactic government considers us terrorists. It's unwise of me to share these details, but I've become inebriated.
• In the Futurama episode "Benderama", Kif (normally a Servile Snarker who shows nothing but disdain for him) finds Zapp's quips about the giant ugly teenager to be absolutely hilarious after the world's water is transformed into booze by the tiny Benders.
• Hazbin Hotel: In "Masquerade", Husk reveals that this how he knows everyone's true feelings-people would get drunk and then rant to him. Among the things he learned are how Sir Pentious secretly watches everyone in their sleep out of a desire for companionship, Angel Dust isn't actually as carefree as he likes to pretend, Charlie wants to fix everyone else's problems to avoid dealing with her own, Vaggie's a Broken Bird who acts angry because she hates herself, and he refuses to share what he learned about Niffty.

Real Life

• Real Life example that may or may not be true. This is the reasoning behind a custom attributed to the Germans and Persians by Tacitus and Herodotus respectively: In their assemblies, matters are debated twice. Once sober, once drunk. Though it's more a 'too drunk to think their way through lies and subterfuge' than personality shifting.
  • The Romans didn't trust teetotalers, as they thought you could never be certain of what such a man was thinking or plotting if he never allowed the wine to loosen his tongue.
  • Caesar was known for never drinking or indulging in vices of any kind, always telling the truth and his general incorruptibility. This really annoyed his rivals.
• From the mouth of John Wayne, "I never trust a man that doesn't drink." Probably for the same reason as the Romans.
• Real Life aversion: King Charles II of England said of Prince George of Denmark (Queen Anne's husband), "I have tried him drunk, and I have tried him sober, but there is nothing in him." Boring guy all 'round.
• Several of Mel Gibson's rants have been attributed, correctly or not, to his self-admitted problems with alcohol.
• Eric Clapton was apparently drunk when he launched into a racist, nativist tirade during a 1976 Birmingham concert.
• The basic concept behind most real-life Truth Serums is that they render a person more likely to talk in general and less able to come up with a convincing lie. Incidentally, the only two substances that have been proven to be fairly consistently effective as (relative) Truth Serums are alcohol and marijuana. The former was a favorite of the KGB, whose agents were able to keep cover while their Western opposite numbers started gushing. The latter was tried out by the FBI, in the form of THC-laced cigarettes, on a member of The Mafia, who spilled the beans on a heist, embarrassing the CIA's MKULTRA (which was trying to do the same thing with more exotic substances like acid) in the process.
  • Undercover FSB agents may still try this technique. Imagine their surprise when it fails on a scrawny-looking American college student.
  • Even the more exotic substances used in fiction (most commonly sodium thiopental) are generally hypnotics that work in the same fashion: making the brain too tired to lie.
• The court of Mongke Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan) once hosted an event where representatives of the three major religions in the area — Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism — all met as part of a philosophical debate. Between each round of the debate, as was customary at Mongol wrestling matches, each of the participants drank from bowls of kumis which resulted in increasingly frank and insulting statements from all involved until several rounds in the Christians eventually resorted to loudly singing hymns rather than keep listening, so the Muslims started chanting the Qu'ran in an attempt to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists simply retreated into silent meditation. The contest ended in a draw once everyone was too drunk to continue.
• George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide to Donald Trump, reportedly went out to a London bar and drunkenly bragged to a top Australian diplomat that Moscow had offered him stolen emails as part of an effort to damage Hillary Clinton's campaign. The Australian tipped off the FBI, which prompted an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. This has resulted in a world of headaches for the Trump administration and a guilty plea from Papadopoulos on charges of lying to the FBI. In short, one of the biggest scandals in modern politics got started because a drunk guy couldn't keep his mouth shut.
• Joseph Stalin came to believe in this trope later in his life, and would frequently invite his inner circle to his private dacha for parties where he'd get them dead drunk in case any of them were plotting anything. Stalin himself would drink diluted spirits, both to avert this for himself and because of his own health post-WW2. Because of the frequency of said parties, said inner circle found themselves choosing between liver damage or Stalin's displeasure if they didn't go.

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