Temperate Berserker

While one might, for good reason, expect a character that's classified as The Berserker to not be able to understand why Sanity Has Advantages, there are actually a few of them that, for some strange reason, are well and truly capable of maintaining their sense of reason and situational awareness even when they're howling like a lunatic. As such, while they are still, for all intents and purposes, a berserker, that does not, by extension, mean that they're simply Dumb Muscle. Though they may fight with the intention to die one day, the ones that want it to be at the hands of a Worthy Opponent will make sure that their foe earns their victory. While they may continue their vengeful rage induced crusade, they do not put Revenge Before Reason, and may even understand that what they're doing is both evil and pointless in the long run. Even an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight may show that, while twisted, they actually view the many ways that people learn how to fight in the same fashion as an artist examining fine work. These individuals may be berserkers, but they know how to control themselves when necessary. In other words they are Temperate Berserkers.

To further elaborate, while these character do indeed behave as wild and recklessly as their namesake implies, their madness and/or bestial behavior is indeed usually backed by individual methods and reasons. Perhaps they're talented fighters who either never learned an actual fighting style or found the ones that they attempted to be too boring and/or restrictive, opting instead for the more Awesome, but Impractical Confusion Fu. They could have previously been a Wild Child who was Raised by Wolves, thus developing some Super-Senses while learning how to survive in the forest. It's also possible that they've simply Stopped Caring about getting hurt because they Feel No Pain and/or have well and truly lost their minds, but still maintain just enough sanity to continue their proper functions.

While similar to a Genius Bruiser, the key difference is the focus: Genius Bruiser is more about being an intellectual despite the tough appearance, while this trope is when a character who otherwise fights recklessly can be surprisingly tactical or sneaky when the situation warrants it (and may not be as intelligent outside of battles).

In terms of Underestimating Badassery, this trope actually works both ways. Characters who appear to be intellectuals will often be expected to fight in a, for lack of a better phrase, "sophisticated manner." Those who go up against them will therefore be easily bewildered by the wild and unpredictable brawler they now find themselves up against, as well as probably getting thrown off by the Slasher Smile and Killing Intent combo. The opposite is also true, characters who fight in a crazy and/or wild fashion may simply be viewed as if they were a literal beast that fighting simply on instinct. While that might also be an issue depending on how good said instincts are, the main issue for the opposition comes from them mistakenly disregarding the possibility of their opponent actually being just as, if not smarter, than them, resulting in said opposition falling for tricks and traps they otherwise would've noticed early on.

Sub-Trope of The Berserker. Compare Genius Bruiser, as mentioned above, Intelligible Unintelligible, where the way the character talks can make them out to be this (especially if they speak in Angrish), and Badass Bookworm. Also Compare/Contrast Tranquil Fury, which, while a possible side effect of this, has more to do with individual personality than actual intelligence and self-control. Can also be part of an "Anger Is Healthy" Aesop where a character learns how to channel their anger. Contrast Dumb Muscle, Fury-Fueled Foolishness, Revenge Before Reason, and Blinded by Rage. See also Smarter Than You Look. If done intentionally, this can also be a form of Obfuscating Stupidity and/or Insanity.

Due to the revealing nature of this trope, beware of unmarked spoilers.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Berserk: Guts, the "Black Swordsman", is Famed In-Story as an Unstoppable Rage-fueled juggernaut who can slay a dozen armored men with a single swing of his BFS. In actual fact, his decade-plus of hard-won battlefield experience gives him a surprisingly deep knowledge of tactics and trickery, and he can be surprisingly introspective during quieter times.
• Kagurabachi: Hiyuki, the top agent of the Kamunabi, is a Blood Knight with a combat-focused sorcery who becomes personally enraged when her opponent refuses to fight her with the intent to kill. Despite this, and the fact the Kamunabi themselves effectively use her as a blunt weapon, in actual combat she shows a side of cunning and strategy, baiting out an attack under the pretense of a drop in her defenses and using the opportunity to catch the blade instead of prolonging the battle.
• My Hero Academia: Katsuki Bakugo is very prone to lashing out at others. When in battle, he never holds back and tries to injure his opponent as much as possible. Despite this, there have been plenty of times that show that Bakugo is surprisingly intelligent in the battlefield, often using his Quirk in creative ways. For instance, one strategy that he likes to use is to fire an explosion in front of the opponent, but miss. This creates a smokescreen, giving Bakugo the perfect opportunity to strike from behind.

Comic Books

• The Incredible Hulk: While this varies with whatever alternate personality is in command, Hulks like Joe Fixit and the Devil Hulk tend to pair up their fearsome rage with cruel displays of cunning. Like on that ocassion in which Joe ambushed The Thing in Central Park. Attacking from the shadows, only to inmediately disappear, on an effort to tire him out. Or like when the Devil Hulk went to war with the Roxxon Corporation, by purposefully aiming his rampages of destruction towards the key infrastructure and buildings which losing would hurt their income and internal structure the most.
• Transformers Spotlight: Shockwave: Shockwave is normally emotionless, but when faced with the sheer illogical nature of the Dinobots' revenge-driven assault he turns out to have a "rage mode" program that he designed that lets him simulate a mindless fury. This sudden change catches the Dinobots off guard and lets him turn the fight around to beat them.
• Wolverine: While Logan can be prone to Berserker rages when pushed too far, he's also cunning and intelligent. In fact, during an incident in Madripoor, he once devised a plan to single-handedly convince a cadre of Hand ninjas that they were under assault by a joint group of assembled superheroes, using various simple gadgets to help fake the ninja clan out, such as a flamethrower to impersonate the Human Torch, and pulling out a vocabulary of "Ten dollar words" to imitate his teammate, The Beast.

Films — Live-Action

• In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, flashbacks reveal that Rocket, the trigger-happy raccoon with a Hair-Trigger Temper, is also a genius who managed to solve mechanical and chemical-engineering problems that stumped his creator.
• Zombieland: Tallahassee is in the ass-kicking business, and in a world overrun with ravenous flesh-eating zombies, as he puts it, "Business is good." While he is taken in by Wichita and Little Rock's ruse, so too was Columbus. And when it comes to fighting zombies, he seems to have a cunning and knack that makes him very, very good at what he does, such as using a banjo to lure out a zombie, then bashing its brains in with same.

Literature

• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Morrelia inherited her mother's temper, and qualified for a Berserker class as a result, letting her fury empower her at the cost of losing track of friend and foe and leaving her tired afterward. When she's not actively berserking, though, she's an intelligent and reasonably personable (if gruff) young woman who's a top achiever in the Abyssal Legion's training program and on the officer track.
• Joseph Conrad wrote a short story called The Duel that was adapted into a movie by Ridley Scott : The Duellists. At least in the original story, Feraud is an unsympathetic example of this trope. A hot-blooded man obsessed with his honor, it's observed by his rival and story's protagonist, Lieutenant d'Hubert, that men like Feraud are more calculating and manipulative than they let on, using their supposedly short tempers to their own advantage.
• Iron Widow: Li Shimin is known as The Brute among the Chrysalis pilots thanks to his enormous reserves of qi, an overwhelming fighting style, and a reputation for brutality stemming from his criminal past. When Zetian gets to know him, however, it turns out that beneath the unkempt facade, he is a highly intelligent, bookish man of firm principles (which got him on the wrong side of the law in the first place).
• Redwall: Gulo the Savage, the wolverine Big Bad of Rakkety Tam, is a borderline Feral Villain at times due to his love of combat, his warband taking avoidable losses to crows because he spends so much time fighting them and ripping them apart. However, he's perfectly capable of thinking for himself, as his Number Two Shard discovers to his cost after trying to lead Gulo into a more profitable direction.
• Spells, Swords, & Stealth: Gabrielle is a Barbarian. In this setting Barbarians possess the ability to use their mana to increase her fighting capability at the cost of their reason. This causes Gabrielle issues early on when she develops a Hair-Trigger Temper as part of her becoming a Barbarian that causes her to nearly lash out at her best friend Eric during a simple training exercise. As the books go on, Gabrielle learns more about how a Barbarian's rage works, and she's recruited to become a Reaper for the god of death, Gabrielle begins putting greater focus into finding a balance between retaining her mind while still tapping into her Unstoppable Rage.
• The Traitor Baru Cormorant occasionally mentions the Student-Berserkers of Lyxaxu duchy, a fringe sect of nihilist philosophers concerned mainly with facing death without fear. During wartime, they put their beliefs into practice by taking drugs that drive them into a berserker rage, devoid of all self-preservation, and are described as shouting "axioms of nihilist self-negation" as their Battle Cry.

Live-Action TV

• Leverage: Eliot once beats a pair of mooks for spilling his coffee, showing a willingness to beat wholesale ass when provoked. He also once gets into a conversation with Hardison about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, correctly and accurately citing the Drake Equation. And he's also known as a Supreme Chef by his team. And in "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job" he correctly sees through the Frame-Up the villain-of-the-week had perpetrated on his boss and guesses the real identity of their opponent.
  Maggie: You know, Eliot, people underestimate you.
  Nate: [pleased] That's sort of the point.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate III: Karlach, despite being a Barbarian Hero who admits to being Book Dumb, is shown to be street smart as well as being very capable of keeping her anger in check in most scenarios. The latter is much more important as the infernal engine that makes up her heart runs the risk of overheating to the point of burning her to a crisp whenever she feels strong emotions.
• The main protagonist of the Doom series, the Doom Slayer is fueled by both Unstoppable Rage and a desire to kill any demon unfortunate enough to cross his path. Despite his violent tendencies, he's actually quite intelligent. Him being able to modify his guns suggests he's a talented gunsmith and in his quarters on the Fortress of Doom, a partially disassembled Praetor Suit can be found indicating he also is a skilled mechanic. He's also able to use the U.A.C.s technology on their Mars facilities with little trouble. He also created a backup of VEGA, the artificial intelligence assigned to Mars before destroying him.
• Fate/Grand Order: In stark contrast to most other Fate Series works, many Servants under The Berserker class are revealed to be fully capable of speech and retaining their intelligence, on top of still having the rage and ruthlessness associated with the class as a whole. Among the most notable examples is Morgan, who is established to be an excellent planner, mage, and crafter while also being powerful in range-based combat.
• Kratos from the God of War franchise is most famous for running on Unstoppable Rage and furiously shouting while swinging and hacking away at his opponents with his Blades of Chaos, but that is not to say he's stupid. He's intelligent enough to operate puzzles in order to make progress, and he can pin-point his opponent's weak spots and use their own weapons against them. He was even strong and intelligent enough to survive a literal Spartan upbringing and eventually become a military general, a job that requires good tactical thinking (until that one battle where he had a Moment of Weakness and pledged his service to Ares, but never mind). He qualifies even more as this as of the Norse duology of games, seeing as he's had centuries to mature past his vengeful, impulsive past behaviour, and now channels his legendary Spartan Rage so as only to target the monsters who attack him, never civilians who could end up becoming collateral damage. In God of War Ragnarök this self-control even allows him to alter the form of his rage from the berserker's "Fury" he's been using to either an all-out "Wrath" attack, a "Valor" fueled heal (don't ask), or, come DLC, summon the "Legacy" of the Blade of Olympus. He is trying to impart this same behaviour to his son Atreus as My Greatest Second Chance.
  Kratos: [To Atreus, after they've come home following a battle with a troll] You lost control.
  Atreus: That thing was trying to kill us! It's not like you don't get angry when you fight!
  Kratos: Anger can be a weapon... If you can use it. Control it. You clearly cannot.
• Roquefort from Hi-Fi RUSH is Kale Vandelay's Head of Finance, meaning that Roquefort keeps track of all the production costs of Vandelay Technologies. Get him angry however, and you'll learn he's not to be trifled with, transforming into a giant cyborg werewolf that is incredibly fast and deadly. While he'll occasionally revert back into his human form during his Boss Battle, he'll also simply run away and protect himself until he can transform back.
• League of Legends: Briar, the Unrestrained Hunger, is a quasi-vampiric homunculus designed to have an insatiable, literal hunger for blood to make her a deadly assassin, but one that proved to be far too unstable and dangerous for her creators, resulting in her being bound 24/7 in a large magic pillory that restrains her body and tempers her mind. Following a long stint in imprisonment, Briar has come to enjoy the peace of mind of sanity but still remains hungry, leading to her MO of willfully staying in her pillory for the most part, but freeing herself and entering "ravenous feral vampire" mode whenever she feels it's time to eat. This translates directly to her gameplay, which is built around a "Frenzy" mechanic: whenever the player activates her "Blood Frenzy", she gains a massive offensive buff with increased Life Drain and attack speed, but the player loses nearly all control of her until the buff wears off or something can knock her out of it, requiring careful judgement on when to use it lest she accidentally do something suicidally dangerous.
• Mega Man X5: Part of why "Awakened Zero" is dangerous isn't just his sheer strength and aggression, but because he retains his skills and most of his mind — practically, the only difference is that he's out to destroy everything (per his original creator's intentions) as part of his "awakened" programming. Compare this with the Zero in a flashback from X4, who's a raving, Laughing Mad lunatic armed only with pure aggression, lack of restraint, and whatever is in his grasp before Sigma subdued him.
• Persona 5: Akechi's intelligence is often remarked upon, being a Teen Genius working as a detective and routinely achieving high scores in exams. Though his fighting style initially reflects his polite and proper Nice Guy persona, after he cuts loose and reveals his true colors, Akechi becomes an Ax-Crazy menace who can turn himself psychotic, which the other Phantom Thieves find disturbing.
• The main character of Tales of Berseria, Velvet Crowe, is a former Nice Girl turned vengeful Anti-Hero towards her brother-in-law and leader of the Exorcists of "The Abbey", Artorius, for the latter's killing of their younger brother, Laphicet. In order to achieve said revenge, Velvet will tear through (both figuratively and literally) anyone and anything that gets in her way with her daemonic left arm. However, in spite of her initial strategy of killing Artorius simply being Attack! Attack! Attack! while having another party member heal her in between, Velvet proves that while she may have tunnel vision, she's not a complete idiot, waiting until Artorius was alone before attacking (as opposed to, you know, jumping him in public the minute she saw him) and willing to seek an alternative when her plan ultimately failed. Funnily enough, her first plan might've actually had some merit, as while Velvet's wounds would heal, Artorius' wouldn't, which would lead to Velvet's Victory by Endurance. At least, that was until Artorius showed that he also had someone who could heal him.
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: Zoran Lazarevic is an Ax-Crazy Serbian war-criminal with a Hair-Trigger Temper who is all too willing to kill anyone in his way (as well as his own men when they fail him or disobey him), and spends most of the final battle just running after Nate screaming his name repeatedly, not caring whether he gets injured or not. For all his unsavoury qualities, however, Lazarevic is not stupid: his career shows that he was able to obtain a high rank in the Serbian military before he went terrorist, he correctly surmises that his chosen lackey Harry Flynn is a far less competent archaeologist than Nate when it comes to finding Shambhala, and he's the only person who correctly worked out that the Cintamani Stones that Marco Polo brought back from Shambhala are actually solidified sap from an ancient mystical tree that acts as a Psycho Serum to those who drink it, and that the Yeti Guardians haunting the entrance to the lost city are actually Shambhalans mutated by the sap. As Harry points out, Lazarevic worked this out long before Nate and the heroes ever did. An impressive feat for a violent, murderous sociopath.

Web Animation

• In RWBY, one of the Big Bad's main subordinates is a man named Tyrian Callows, who, when first introduced, comes off as an Ax-Crazy murderer with a psychotic laugh. And he is. Problem is, not only is he a capable Dance Battler, he's also very smart and proves himself to be quite crafty, hiding his scorpion tail during his first onscreen fight and escaping from battles he can't win. In fact, when he and his fellow subordinate, Arthur Watts, infiltrate one of the cities later on, it's Tyrian who voices his concerns over the inherent problems with Watt's plan to stay mobile until the latter gives him a proper explanation for it.

Webcomics

• Daughter of the Lilies: Implied regarding the Team Dad orc Orrig. He shows the same physical signs in combat as when Brent goes berserk, but is so disciplined that he otherwise acts normally. He's helping Brent work on his self-control.
• Housepets!: Tarot is logically-minded, crafty, and intricate in her plan-making, ranking among the most intelligent characters in the comic. In combat, however, she forgoes logic and planning for instead pouring all of her mana into making herself as bulky and strong as possible and then whaling on the problem as hard as she can. Bailey, a similarly strong and normally larger dog, struggles to keep up with her even in armour, and in Temple Crashers 2 a team of four players is needed just to keep her occupied.
• Lackadaisy: Provided he's kept away from firearms, Calvin "Freckle" MacMurray is an unassuming son of Irish immigrants who's reluctant to be part of a criminal syndicate. The instant a Tommy Gun is in his paws, however, he turns into a devastatingly effective and almost cartoonishly agile hitman.

Web Video

• Critical Role: Campaign Two: Yasha Nydoorin has Unstoppable Rage as a class feature as a Dungeons & Dragons barbarian. However, she tends to be shy, reserved, and perceptive, and even her Rage comes across as Tranquil Fury.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Discussed in "The Firebending Masters". Zuko, who was infamous for being Hot-Blooded prior to his Heel–Face Turn, is cautious and logical when approaching the Sun Warrior temple, such as figuring out how to trick the Sunstone lock. Aang is impressed, saying, "You know, Zuko, I don't care what everyone else says about you. You're pretty smart."

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