Insanity Immunity

Guess I'll have to break the news
That I've got no mind to lose!

"Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity."

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

When a character is already so crazy that none of the traditional Go Mad from the Revelation-type phenomena or Brown Note will affect them in the slightest; they can speed-read The King in Yellow and the Tome of Eldritch Lore, get into a Staring Contest with Cthulhu, contemplate the Void without any negative mental effects, and get caught in the Throat of Madness, simply because they can't get any crazier. This can also mean that they can wield/absorb any powers with these effects without any problems, either; powers that would drive a normal man insane simply won't affect them in any negative fashion.

They also cannot be controlled, predicted, or otherwise influenced by others: psychics will recoil in horror from the rotting offal that is their minds, those who can see the future will find their expectations dashed as destiny is royally screwed over, martial artists with Combat Clairvoyance will be no match for their Confusion Fu, etc. Of course, not all mentally ill individuals are immediately safe from (further) mental damage and a justified example will showcase what exactly type of insanity makes one immune to certain outside stimuli.

This is a Disability Superpower, more specifically a Disability Immunity. See also Crazy Sane, Power Born of Madness, Success Through Insanity, Too Dumb to Fool, Too Kinky to Torture, Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth, Too Broken to Break and Unfazed Everyman. Compare Infectious Insanity and Bored with Insanity.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Akame ga Kill!, the Teigu Demon's Extract is known for driving everyone who tries to use it insane. But when Esdeath is shown claiming it in a flashback, Prime Minister Honest speculates that she'll be fine because she's already insane. He seems to be right.
• A less extreme example: Osaka in Azumanga Daioh. She's generally less fazed than the others by weirdness, and exhibits less PTSD than poor Chiyo-chan after a ride in the Yukarimobile. Probably because she was thinking about hemorrhoids.
• Fate Series:
  • Gilgamesh from Fate/stay night is immune to being corrupted by the corrupted Holy Grail because his ego is too strong. He still helps out the villains because their goals happen to align.
  • Caster from Fate/Zero has this in the form of his Mental Pollution ability. While his twisted mind makes it impossible for him to get along with someone who isn't equally insane, it also protects him against mental interference spells.
  • Confirmed in Fate/Grand Order; Mental Pollution can be invoked by those who have it (including the aforementioned Caster) to resist debuff effects. In the main story, the franchise's version of Caligula was driven insane by the goddess Diana and so when an Alternate Timeline Artemis tries to use her insanity inducing attack on him, it just cancels out the original insanity placed upon him, leaving him lucid and heroic but with all the mental defenses granted by his insanity.
• Kimblee, in Fullmetal Alchemist, is revealed to have a form of this. After being swallowed by Pride, he's able to retain his personality and individual thought inside the teeming mass of screaming souls that occupy Pride's interior because to him, "it's like a lullaby".
• Downplayed in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. Reading Today Will Be Sweet normally turns people into shojo caricatures of themselves. Karen on the other hand is already in that mindset 24/7, so it has no effect on her.
• Kuroi in Thou Shalt Not Die can Mind Rape and read people's body language and emotions so well he can counter pretty much anything as long as he remains focused. However a soldier who is irreparably broken because of a Psycho Serum is immune to it and Mashiro's apparent personality disorder makes her impossible to read, the latter case actually arouses Kuroi as he can act like a real, if sociopathic, person with Mashiro since he can't understand her true intentions.
• Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle: Those who fuse with Sacred Eclipse slowly lose their sanity, lose their conscience, and gain the desire to eat humans. This is shown when the originally unconfident Queen Raffi Atismata calmly kills her political enemies and tortures her once beloved niece. In contrast, Hayes Vi Arcadia didn't change much after fusing with Sacred Eclipse, since she was already a genocidal and sadistic lunatic before the fusion.

Comic Books

• The Chronicles of Wormwood: Subverted: According to Wormwood, what makes Hell Hell isn't so much the tortures as the realization (even for "the truly insane") that yes, you objectively deserve to be here for the suffering you inflicted on others in life.
• Beauregard Salt a.k.a. the Phone Killer from Crossed is such a monstrous mass murderer that a virus that transformed mankind into rage-fueled predatory psychopaths couldn't make him any worse than he already was. If anything, it "enlightened" him: seeing the Crossed-ravaged world as paradise (i.e. the Crossed openly carried out the atrocities he'd always wanted to do), Salt became a messiah to the infected and enacted a centuries-spanning plan to make this paradise last forever.
• The DCU:
  • This is about as close as the Joker gets to a superpower.
    • For example, in a Batman/Judge Dredd Crossover, Judge Death tries to possess his body, flowing into his head only to fly out through the other ear, Joker's mind completely incompatible with his mind-control powers.
    • J'onn J'onnz is actually able to replicate this effect during the JLA (1997) story arc "Rock of Ages"; when he and Superman are trapped in a pocket dimension created by the Joker (which reflects his madness), J'onn uses his shapeshifting abilities to literally change the shape/function of his brain to resemble the Joker's, enabling him and Supes to navigate their way out without being consumed or driven mad. The same story also sees J'onn use his telepathy to impose order on the Joker's thought processes, rendering him sane (and immediately overcome with grief over everything he'd done). The exertion of holding back Joker's insanity for a few moments nearly causes J'onn to lose consciousness.
    • Also, in DC and The Mask crossovers, both Joker and Lobo put on the titular mask, and it doesn't affect their personalities much at all — at first, anyway. Eventually, Joker becomes much more destructive, and when Batman points out that this isn't funny (by Joker's standards, anyway), Joker realizes that Batman's right and promptly takes the mask off, showing that the mask actually does unlock inhibitions — it was making him pull stunts and commit crimes that he normally wouldn't think were "funny".
    • Another Elseworld comic has a mass depowering event take place; Joker loses his madness, leaving him quiet and remorseful over everything he's done.
    • During one team-up with the Scarecrow, Dr. Crane ends their alliance by gassing Joker with fear toxin to see what he's afraid of. Sadly, Joker turns out to be immune to the Scarecrow's gas and beats him with a chair.
    • In a story with the Teen Titans, Raven engulfs Joker in her cloak in order to Mind Rape him by flooding his mind with visions of horrors that could scare anyone out of their minds into a comatose state. However, Raven then ejects him in shocked horror because not only was Joker not scared of the horror world he was thrown into, he actually thought it was funny.
    • In his 1975 solo series, he claims in a flashback to have defeated Wonder Woman (along with the rest of the League) by being immune to her lasso of truth, as his Funny Schizophrenia made him unable to discern what was real and what wasn't. However, as the series was Cut Short and he's the king of Unreliable Narrators it's unclear whether this actually happened or not.
  • Harley Quinn looks to have followed in the Joker's footsteps; in Justice League vs. Suicide Squad, she looks into the face of Johnny Sorrow — a man remade by an Eldritch Abomination called the King of Tears into becoming a Humanoid Abomination in his own right, whose face typically kills those who see it and can do some pretty horrible stuff to even the few high-level magic users who can survive it. She is totally unaffected, calling Sorrow's face "cute". She subsequently explains to Wonder Woman "Once you've looked into one abyss you've seen 'em all." Another occasion with the Suicide Squad sees everyone driven murderously insane by an Artifact of Doom — except for Harley, who reverts back to being Harleen Quinzel and is the only one rational enough to save the day.
  • Film Freak, a minor foe of Batman and Catwoman, has a limited form of telepathic immunity, as the only memories he has are from movies.^note Zatanna notes that Film Freak has no actual memories, only "film clip after film clip".
  • The Psycho-Pirate once tried to use his Emotion Control powers to fill the Ventriloquist (who is subservient to a Split Personality called Scarface) with fear. The Ventriloquist just punches him while saying (in Scarface's voice) that, "No one controls the Ventriloquist! No one! But me."
  • Wonder Woman (1987): In one confrontation between Wonder Woman and the Joker, she calls upon the power of Pan to induce Pandemonium on herself, making her crazy, and thus immune to his crazy.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Bullseye and Doctor Octopus have both been shown with resistance to mind-control that could either be the result of cybernetics in their heads or sheer insanity.
  • Deadpool's Healing Factor, combined with his cancer, causes his brain to be in a constant state of flux, so much that even ultra-powerful telepaths like Cable usually can't get a grip on his mind. He also defeats Taskmaster (who pretty much defines Awesomeness by Analysis) by simply being naturally unpredictable to the point where even Tasky isn't sure what Deadpool will do next.
    • In Venomverse, Venompool is able to maintain his self-control even after being consumed by one of the Poisons through his "special brand of crazy". As a result, he can act as a spy within the Poison's forces and, eventually, a trojan horse for the resistance, though even he isn't sure how long he can hold out.
    • Deadpool also turns out to be immune to the effects of Demonic Possession. He can be possessed, but it has no effect on him — he's already got so many voices in his head that the demon quickly realizes that it's badly outnumbered.
  • Doctor Doom is so delusional that he was able to shake off both a psychic Hate Plague and a psychic "Truth Wave" in the same storyline. He's also able to No-Sell mind control because of his A God Am I complex; convinced as he is that he has an innate right to rule, accepting someone else's orders is not on the table, ever.
  • This trope is occasionally used against Ghost Rider as a way for enemies to No-Sell the Penance Stare, which is is supposed to force those afflicted to feel the pain of all the sins they've committed. Particularly deranged or fanatical individuals incapable of remorse for their actions won't end up being particularly affected by it.
  • When introduced in Maximum Carnage, due to having been driven insane by exposure to the powers of Cloak and Dagger two years earlier, Shriek is completely immune to Cloak's Teleportation Sickness and Vampiric Draining.
  • Dirk Anger from Nextwave is so batshit goddamn nuts that when he dies and is resurrected as a zombie, his behavior hasn't changed at all (only his diet).
  • Whether or not The Punisher is insane is heavily debated both in-universe and by the fandom, but his single-minded determination to exterminate all criminals means there isn't really anything that can distract him from that. Once, when two female super-villains who had the ability to control minds tried to take over Frank's, he gave it a complete No-Sell, telling them that it didn't feel different from any other day. The really frightening thing about that is not only couldn't they control his mind, but he didn't even notice their efforts to do so. He also fits into the above category of being unaffected by the Penance Stare, feeling absolutely no guilt for all the criminals he's put down.
  • In Venomverse, Ax-Crazy Serial Killer Carnage proves virtually impossible for the Poisons to control, an impressive feat given that the Jane Foster incarnation of Thor succumbs to their Hive Mind instantly. They're actually kind of freaked out by it.
• Scott Pilgrim: Gideon Graves creates a weapon of mystical psychological warfare known as "The Glow" which traps people inside their own heads and tampers with their memories, warping and distorting them while amplifying their vices into self-destructive tendencies. Gideon is immune to the Glow because, in his own words, he's been walled off mentally since he was a kid.
• Vertigo Comics:
  • In Lucifer, Fenrir manipulates a man with a mental disorder into thinking that he's gone crazy and killed his wife and daughter. This is so he and his companions can "ride his coattails" towards Yggdrasil. By tricking the man into thinking his wife and daughter are at the tree, he gets there without having his mind torn to shreds by the sanity-ripping "thorns" on the path there. The man is more or less immune both by virtue of his insanity and single-minded Heroic Resolve to rescue his family. Don't worry, they were reunited and lived Happily Ever After. (Fenrir, for his part, almost undid all creation.)
  • In Endless Nights, a companion book to The Sandman (1989), one of the stories is about Delirium becoming lost in her own realm and insane people being the only ones that can enter and leave her realm unscathed.
• This happens in The Darkness when Darkness host Jackie Estacado encounters a Monster of the Week witch/Eldritch Abomination that performs Mind Rape for a living, psychically feeding off people's desires and memories. This backfires horribly on her when she tries it on Jackie and sees the darkness and depravity that is the mind of a demonically possessed Professional Killer.

Comic Strips

• A slight variation — in Dilbert, Wally reacts to news his new bosses can read and control his mind by shrugging and saying if they try to read his mind, they'd go blind.

Fan Works

• In the Harry Potter fic Freak of Nature, after Luna and Xenophilius go bird watching and listen to the Fwooper bird song, they decide that the madness-inducing qualities of its song are just a rumor because they don't notice any difference.
• In the Death Note fic Friends Help Friends Light and Misa are immune to the psychopathic urges that are caused by handling the Death Note because they both have already been driven mad by it.
• In Nobledark Imperium, the reason Nemesor Zandrekh is immune to the Silent King's Villain Override isn't because he managed to circumvent the control codes (as Trazyn did), but because he is completely convinced that he is still a living Necrontyr, and that only robots (like normal Necrons) are subject to such things.
• In Oh God, Not Again!, Luna doesn't even notice when the Imperius curse is placed on her.
• An early arc of Nobody Dies has an Angel that attacks using Mind Control. It doesn't work on Asuka because Kyoko -whose parenting skills make canon Gendo look good by comparison- has fucked her head up so badly that one extra voice in her head doesn't really make much difference.
• Old Man Henderson is a drug-addled schizophrenic prone to bizarre and vivid hallucinations. As a result, he tends to dismiss the bizarre creatures he encounters on his quest to recover his lawn gnomes as just him seeing things, while he assumes the cultists he battles are some wacky Mormon offshoots. He even uses a page of the Necronomicon to make a blunt and smokes it with no ill effects beyond a particularly weird drug trip. To sum it up, he doesn't Go Mad from the Revelation because he was already mad to begin with.
• Oni Ga Shiku Series: Izuku explains to All Might that projecting Killing Intent to someone via Heat is half-dependent on the target's ability to read the room. So if they have some kind of mental disorder that prevents them from picking up social cues, then the killing intent won't work on them.
• In RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse, there is a magical poison called truth is a scourge which compels its victims to babble out anything and everything on their minds, rendering them incapable of the slightest hint of lying, obfuscation, or tact. It has no discernible effect on Pinkie Pie.
• Resonance Days gives the witch Elsa Maria a wish as a Magical Girl to know the names, wishes, and occasionally other informations about her fellow Magical Girls and Witches. Even in the afterlife it lets her know things about witches that they have forgotten about and can work on many of the crazy villainous Void Walkers. One of them, a magical girl named Tikki Nikki, however, is so nuts that even Elsa Maria can't get a read on her.

Film — Animated

• The Batman vs. Dracula: While all other vampires turned by Dracula become mindless, feral creatures who are under Dracula's complete control and can only snarl and growl, when Joker is turned into a vampire, he retains most of his free will and speech capabilities; however, Dracula is still able to exert enough control over him that Joker can't reveal the location of Dracula's resting place.

Literature

• While few of U. N. Owen's guests in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None are particularly well in the head, the first to die is The Sociopath Anthony Marston, who genuinely can't comprehend either his own culpability in recklessly running over two children with his car, or his companions' disapproval when he describes the incident as "beastly bad luck" for him because he had his license suspended. Owen, who invited the Ten Little Murder Victims specifically to punish them for their own role in other people's deaths, chooses to kill Marston first because he's too sociopathic to torment with either guilt (given his Lack of Empathy) or fear (given his reckless disregard for consequences). Overlaps with Too Dumb to Fool, or at least Too Dumb to Terrorize—particularly in contrast with Philip Lombard, a similarly amoral guest who also freely admits his own crime. Whereas the savvy Lombard at least grasps why others would object to his actions (even if he himself doesn't care) and has enough self-preservation instinct to use against him, the dim Marston's only use to Owen is as an example to the others.
• In Deathstalker, Valentine Wolfe invokes this by staying high on so many Fantastic Drugs that his mind is completely incomprehensible to anyone else. At one point, he brushes off a deadly psychic Brown Note, commenting that it doesn't even measure up to his daydreams.
• Faction Paradox's Godfather Auteur is exactly as screwed up as the Shadow Spire, so he suffered no particular ill effects from being imprisoned there for decades. Unlike his wardens.
• Alan Dean Foster:
  • In To the Vanishing Point, Burnfingers Begay can deal with the shifting realities matter-of-factly because he's already crazy.
  • In Paths of the Perambulator (fifth in the Spellsinger series), Sorbl the drunk is undisturbed by the constant Reality Warping around them because it's no worse than his usual hallucinations.
• Harry Potter:
  • Dolores Umbridge can conjure a Patronus, an Animal Battle Aura powered by inner joy—even while wearing one of the Big Bad's Soul Jars around her neck, in a room full of joy-sucking Eldritch Abominations, during a Kangaroo Court session when she's sending innocent people to Azkaban. She's so twisted that that kind of environment makes her happy.
  • Fans have speculated that even before her stay in Azkaban (guarded by the aforementioned Eldritch Abominations), Bellatrix Lestrange (née Black) was always as deranged as at the time of the story. At any rate, she was certainly sadistic from the start, and the House of Black has a known history of mental illness exacerbated by aristocratic inbreeding.
• In The Lord of the Rings, Shelob (a borderline Eldritch Abomination in the form of a Giant Spider) is immune to the One Ring's powers of temptation due to her radically alien psychology. The Ring uses promises of power to corrupt whoever holds it, but all Shelob wants is to destroy and devour, so the Ring holds no appeal for her.
• The Magic: The Gathering novel Final Sacrifice involves a Mind-Control Device in the form of a helmet that lets a wizard summon and control another wizard the same way wizards can summon and control ordinary creatures. (Interestingly, this novel was written long before the card Mindslaver was printed.) The druid Greensleeves, having once been insane, finds the effects of the helmet to be similar to the insanity she conquered and is able to ignore its commands - and is also able to access the vast amounts of information stored in it.
• Medusa by Theodore Sturgeon. There's a planet that sends the crew of any spacecraft that approaches it insane, so a specially selected crew of people who are suffering various forms of insanity is sent to find out why.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy: Unlike the other Possessed, Al Capone is the only one who's not afraid of the Beyond because he died while insane from syphilis, so hardly noticed the difference.
• The villain of The Crow: The Lazarus Heart was struck by lightning as a child, giving him untreated brain damage that caused him to grow up to be a psychopathic Conspiracy Theorist. The chemistry and electrical impulses of his brain are apparently so chaotic and cross-wired that he is almost completely immune to the telepathic powers of the new Crow.
• In Nine Goblins, Blanchett, being somewhat broken, is unaffected by the wizard's compulsion spell.
• Billy in Remnants has a mind that clearly does not work normally — he seems to be mildly psychic, has an eidetic memory and rarely interacts with anyone. It turns out he is the only one able to mentally interact with Mother, a Sapient Ship who has Gone Mad From The Isolation, without going crazy. He explains it as his mind being malleable, like rubber, while other people's are like sticks that break if you bend them.
• In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod Beeblebrox's survival of the Total Perspective Vortex is an interesting sort-of example: the Vortex destroys its victims' minds by making them fully aware of the smallness of their place in the universe. But Zaphod comes out smiling, saying it had just shown him what he already knew: that he's a pretty cool dude. So it appears that his narcissism saved him — that his ego really is big enough to appear significant on the scale of the entire universe. But this is subverted when it's later revealed that the encounter had taken place in a pocket universe that had been created for his benefit. He was that universe's reason for existing, and hence literally the most important person in it, and this is the only reason it went so well for him. Still, his fearlessness on entering the Vortex (while not knowing about the pocket-universe thing) qualifies: he was crazy enough to expect such an outcome. ("Hey, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox, man!")
• In The Sea of Trolls, berserkers are immune to trolls' Combat Clairvoyance because their mindless, drug-fueled Confusion Fu is impossible for the trolls to decipher.
• In The Shepherd's Crown, it's revealed that Granny Weatherwax's rival Miss Earwig is so prideful and self-absorbed she's completely immune to elfin glamour.
• In Void City, Greta's insanity renders her immune to mental attack. On several occasions, vampires and other powerful supernatural beings attempt to invade or dominate Greta's mind, only to find the inside of her head so horribly incomprehensible that they end up at her mercy rather than the other way around.
• Worm: Regent is completely immune to any parahuman that effects the mind. This has has nothing to do with his own ability, but is instead of the product of his father using his Emotion Control powers as a "disciplining tool" with horrific frequency during his childhood.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • The episode "Asylum of the Daleks" hints that the Doctor has survived so many Dalek encounters partly because of his obsessive, almost crazed, hatred of Daleks — who are therefore reluctant to kill the Doctor because, being the Omnicidal Maniacs they are, they're in awe of his pure hatred.
• In Kamen Rider OOO, the Medals Eiji uses to become OOO are said to make people go berserk as their desires are driven out of control, but Eiji doesn't seem to have a problem with them. It turns out that he had been traumatized so that he essentially has no desires. But then this is played with when a second set of Medals with the Power of the Void appear, and they're attracted to Eiji's emptiness and drive that out of control instead.

Tabletop Games

• Derro in 13th Age are considered immune to confusion effects because, being crazy dwarves, they are already insane. Well, kind of — if they particularly want to murder one of their allies, which isn't uncommon, they might still take a stab at one of them, just for the hell of it.
• Call of Cthulhu. When characters lose Sanity points they can go temporarily insane, which impairs their abilities considerably. Once people lose all of their Sanity points (and become permanently insane), they can no longer go temporarily insane, either due to Sanity loss or certain attacks such as the Mind Blast spell. If this happens to an NPC who is a Cthulhu Mythos worshipper, they can act effectively even though they're completely nuts.
• Adam Smasher of Cyberpunk isn't debilitated by Cyberpsychosis (a very real concern in-universe with severe cybernetic augmentation) and was able to keep his sense of self despite being a Full-Conversion Cyborg due to the fact that he didn't have much humanity to begin with. Statistically, one's ability to withstand cybernetics is measured by an "Empathy" stat. Smasher's EMP score is simply listed as "Yeah, right..." This is coupled with the fact that working for Arasaka means that he's receiving top-of-the-line augmentations from the best doctors money can buy rather than the typical Ripperdocs that most Edgerunners rely on as well as having a job that specifically permits him to kill as much as he wants.
• In Dark Heresy, characters ignore fear effects that equal their (insanity points/10)/2: Their minds have simply seen so much sanity-blasting horror already that they've gone insensitive to the little stuff. A character with 80 or more insanity points is literally immune to fear and can stare down a Eldritch Abomination with no ill effects, although at that point that's peanuts compared to the effects the cumulative mental derangements has on that character's mind anyway.
  • In mainline 40k, because of the Blood Angels and their successor chapters' need to feed on blood and tendency to lose their minds and degenerate into slavering beasts one would think they're all a fucking Khorne cult waiting to happen, but it turns out that because of the particular way in which the Red Thirst and Black Rage work, they're actually immune to Chaos. Not that this is much comfort to them or any innocent bystanders who happen to get between them and whatever monsters the Imperium has sicced them on.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In the first edition, psionic attacks could cause various forms of mental disorders in their victims, but insane creatures were immune to psionic attack.
  • There's a "Cloak of Insanity" spell in the Forgotten Realms sourcebook Menzoberranzan that emulates this effect. It shields the caster's mind from being influenced or read by both magic or psionics, but isn't completely safe in itself.
  • Several 3.5E feats or Prestige Class abilities have effects that are basically this with different names, usually with a fixed modifier. Bonus points go to the Tainted Scholar Prestige Class for casters. The Clarity of True Madness Secret that the Tainted Scholar can learn lets him add his Depravity score to his Will save once per day, which means that the more insane and mentally twisted he becomes, the better the modifier that Secret grants is.
  • Many monsters in 4th edition are immune to charm or daze effects because they're aberrant or insane.
• Exalted:
  • One standout example is Lilith, a Lunar who spent most of the First Age married to Desus, who kept her in line with regular doses of Mind Rape. She fled into the Wyld after the Usurpation, and actually got better over the centuries. That's how bad her marriage was — years upon years spent in the heart of screaming, primordial madness were effectively therapy.
  • The Fair Folk — natural inhabitants of the aforementioned Wyld — are all insane by human standards, and their interaction with reality revolves around masking their insanity to the Creation-born. When the masks are exhausted they reveal their true nature in a state known as Bedlam, and there are charms that specifically make good use of this state.
• In Ironclaw, the Enraged status effect makes the character unable to defend, focus or do mental actions, but it also negates the next mental debuff they would be affected with (which removes Enraged as well). Its more harmful version, Berserk, also does this, but also causes the character to attack the nearest target. Note that for Avarist, Enraged is important for some of their abilities, but helps compensate their low Mind stat.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: Vampires who drink Changeling blood or otherwise become Enchanted (infused with Fae Glamour, allowing them to perceive and otherwise be affected by Chimerical reality) must, due to the inherently Banal nature of vampirism, make a Courage roll in order to avoid succumbing to Bedlam (Glamour induced insanity). The vampires of Clan Malkavian are explicitly said to be immune to this effect as they are already mad.
  • One Advanced power of Dementation is Blessing of Chaos. At the price of gaining another derangement, you gain immunity against others' Dementation, Dominate, Presence, and Chimerstry.
• Witches and sorcerers from Pokéthulhu, who are immune to anything that requires a sanity save, because they have no sanity at all.

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham Asylum:
  • Implied when Scarecrow's fear serum doesn't drive Batman insane, either because of his indomitable will... or because his own insanity is strong enough to withstand it.
    Scarecrow: How are you doing this?! You've ingested enough toxins to drive ten men insane! What are you?!
  • Joker's mind proves immune to the side-effects of Titan serum, probably because he's already way crazier than the serum would make him.
• In Cyberpunk 2077, aside from the above-mentioned Adam Smasher, series creator Mike Pondsmith states that a reason why V never has to worry about Cyberpsychosis in regard to augmenting themselves is due to the fact that Johnny Silverhand's presence in their mind means that they effectively already have a naturally violent and unstable personality within their mind that serves as a massive buffer to the stress of cybernetics.
• Dawn of War: Certain units are immune to morale damage, some by virtue of their indomitable faith, others by being Robotic Undead who cause fear by their mere presence... and then there's Khornate Berserkers and Possessed Marines, who are simply too batshit insane to feel fear (although they do have lines for morale damage).
• In Eternal Darkness, Pious Augustus cannot go insane, as he completely lacks the Sanity Meter that all other characters have... so he's immune either because he's a battle-hardened Roman centurion, or because he was already insane to begin with.
• In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, touching Lehran's Medallion (the titular Fire Emblem) causes anyone with a hint of chaos in them to go completely berserk. On Hard Mode, the Final Boss Ashnard touches the Medallion to go One-Winged Angel, and is still able to speak and act normally afterwards. The implication is that Ashnard can't go insane because he already was. He's not called "The Mad King" for nothing.
• Heroes of Might and Magic: The Maniacs and Dementeds in Might and Magic: Heroes VI are two castes of demon who were created as servants to the Demon Lord of Madness. They are completely immune to mind-affecting spells because their thought process is too alien for any other race to comprehend.
• In The King of Fighters, those who are part of Orochi bloodline have the chance of suddenly becoming violent due to the Riot of the Blood effect... everyone except Ryuji Yamazaki. The guy is already so insane that any effect his bloodline would have on him is made redundant, with him not even caring about it in the first place.
• Inverted in the Pokémon series; confusion (and in following games, attraction) is not subject to One Curse Limit as with the other status effects like paralysis, burn, poison etc.
• Sands of Destruction has Noctua Rex trap your team in their own worst memories, reliving the things they regret over and over. But, among the many other things wrong with her, Morte has no regrets and doesn't dwell on the past. So, while everyone else is trapped in their minds, she's stuck wondering what's wrong with everyone and why nothing is happening to her. She's also so chaotic as to be utterly unpredictable, even by psychic dragonkin like Rhi'a.
• Touhou Project:
  • In Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night, when Marisa Kirisame is exposed to "pure" lunar rays, which can drive humans mad, she isn't concerned because, in her own words, "I'm insane to begin with." This is the only time she comes out and says this, however.
  • Later, in the official manga Touhou Suzunaan ~ Forbidden Scrollery, Marisa is able to read an original copy of the Necronomicon with no apparent ill effects.
  • Similarly, in the fangame Touhou Mother, the party is forced to eat some strange mushrooms to get their strength back. While everyone else goes on a Mushroom Samba, Marisa is unaffected due to "experiencing this sort of thing all the time", and takes over as party leader.
  • In addition to Marisa, Sakuya was exposed to the "pure" lunar rays as well. Even Remilia, who knows Sakuya better than anyone, was afraid and yelled at Sakuya not to look at them — naturally she already was and merely remarked how beautiful the moon was. Given how mysterious Sakuya already is, this naturally fueled some belief that Sakuya may actually be insane before the story begins, either from working in the Scarlet Devil Mansion or just naturally from before she started working there. This gets a sort of follow-up with Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View where Sakuya returns after the incident is solved with a whole bunch of interesting flowers to make tea with; when she notes that she should sort out which ones are poisonous first Patchouli notes that it's quite rare for Sakuya to show that much care/forethought.

Web Animation

• One Halloween episode of Homestar Runner featured a creepy, animate painting that gave everyone who looked at it a paralyzing case of "The Jibblies". Except for Homestar, who was such a ditz that he was completely unaffected. And, according to the Easter Egg, resident Cloud Cuckoolander Homsar was also unaffected... and even managed to turn the tables and scare the painting.

Webcomics

• Implied in Captain SNES: The Game Masta when Kefka is at ground zero of the Final Fantasy VI world getting "touched" and is unaffected by it.
• In Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden, there is a katana that bears a terrible curse. Anyone who touches it is corrupted by its evil with horrible results. The only person unaffected by the curse was Oroku Saki, the Shredder, who was so evil and hateful that the curse couldn't do anything more to him.
• In an early Sluggy Freelance plotline (before Bun-Bun's power level really got established), Gwynn's botched magic drove most of the cast insane with violent romantic jealousy. Bun-Bun was largely unaffected. His explanation: "These lightweights just can't hold their evil."

Web Original

• Dave Smith, the Unfazed Everyman of City of Angles, had childhood anxiety so bad that he punched right through to the other side. When an Eldritch Abomination tries to drive him mad, he politely apologizes and explains.
  Bedlam: ...What.
• Epic Rap Battles of History: Implied with "Joker vs. Pennywise". When Pennywise shows the Joker his Deadlights, which are enough to drive most people insane, the Joker is completely unaffected.
• Medibot made it through pokecapn's Let's Play of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) in considerably less psychological distress than the other three who made it to the end (there was a fifth guy, John Condit, but he wisely bailed). This was partly because they left to take a nap at one point, but mostly because:
  Kung-Fu Jesus: He seemed really out of it.
  pokecapn: As he always does?
• The Veil of Madness is basically the galactic Bermuda Triangle. Every sentient race that spends time there goes suicidally insane — except humans, who came from there and ended up becoming the galaxy's boogeymen because of it. They roll with it to make interspecies relations easier and because nobody believes them if they say otherwise. They do share their theory about why they can live in the Veil — they're already a little insane. And considering humans are basically playing a huge practical joke on the rest of the galaxy, maybe it's true.
• Ecila Mason of the Whateley Universe. She's been interacting with monsters for so long that she is no longer able to interact normally with humans.

Western Animation

• In the Adventure Time episode "Empress Eyes", Ice King is apparently under the control of a female vampire. However, after he adamantly refuses to kill Marceline, it is revealed that he was only following her orders because she was a beautiful woman he thought was interested in him.
• Subverted in the Atomic Betty episode "Dr. Cerebral and the Stupefactor Ray". The eponymous villain develops a weapon that can destroy intelligence. X-5 keeps making jokes about how "dumb" Sparky is. When Sparky is hit with the ray... it actually turns him brain dead.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Toph's seismic sense functions as a Living Lie Detector by picking up the stress-induced changes in breath and heartbeat that occur when someone lies. The only character this doesn't work on is the nigh-sociopathic Princess Azula, who lies without a second thought:
  Toph: And stick to the truth. I'll be able to tell if you're lying.
  Azula: Are you sure? I'm a pretty good liar. I am a 400-foot-tall purple platypus-bear with pink horns and silver wings.
  Toph: Okay, you're good, I admit it.
• Completely inverted in Batman: The Brave and the Bold when Joker gains the powers of Bat-Mite. After torturing Batman the entire episode, Batman tricks him into trying to drive Batman insane by entering his mind. Turns out Batman is so sane even the reality warping powers Joker now has are completely useless in there, and Batman ultimately uses it to show Joker his worst nightmare: a world where Batman doesn't exist and, consequently, the Joker is a no-name average joe... and a perfectly sane one at that.
• In the Gravity Falls episode "Society of the Blind Eye", a secret society determined to uphold the Masquerade through literal Laser-Guided Amnesia attempts to erase the memories of the Mystery Shack crew — but is stopped by Old Man McGucket ("local kook") Taking the Bullet from their memory-erasing ray gun, which doesn't work on him since he already used it so much on himself in the past.
  "YOU CAN'T BREAK WHAT'S ALREADY BROKEN!"
• Justice League: Ace, a girl with telepathic powers, turns people brain-dead with insanity just by looking at them. In "Wild Cards", the Joker is able to "befriend" her because he's too crazy for it to affect him, and puts her on TV to drive as many people possible insane. However, he held onto Ace's control headband, so he at least suspected that Ace would be powerful enough to affect him. Upon discovering this, Ace deliberately focuses her power on him and proves that suspicion right. However, Joker would eventually recover, proving that he was very resistant even if he wasn't immune.
• A variation appears in Steven Universe. Blue Diamond has the ability to project her own despair onto any other gems nearby, incapacitating them through sheer misery. Lapis Lazuli, however, is able to No-Sell it in "Reunited" due to the simple fact that she's been in despair for most of her existence.
  Lapis: I've felt worse.
• In Villainous, this is one of cloudcuckoolander Ultimate Life Form Demencia's powers. In one episode, the Villain of the Week is an evil luchador mask that possesses anyone who wears it. After putting it on and terrorizing Dr. Flug for half the episode, the moment Black Hat shows up and orders her to take it off she does so effortlessly. In the season 1 finale she's immune to Ms. Heed's Living Aphrodisiac power because of her insane, one-sided crush on Black Hat.

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