Basic Trope: A character is so insane that mind-affecting powers fail to work on them.
- Straight: Alice's telepathic powers can't read or control Crazy Bob's mind because he's just that much of a Cloud Cuckoolander.
- Exaggerated: Telepathic Alice can't read or control Crazy Bob's mind, and is infected by his insanity when she tries.
- Downplayed:
- Alice can make psychic suggestions to Crazy Bob, but he's so crazy that he won't carry them out in the way she intends.
- OCD Bob is used to intrusive thoughts, giving him practice resisting psychic suggestions but nothing that anyone with practice couldn't manage.
- Justified:
- Crazy Bob is under the influence of a Mind Virus that has defenses against telepaths, if it doesn't infect them.
- Depressive Dan is immune to a Lotus-Eater Machine because he can't feel any pleasure from it.
- Inverted:
- Crazy Bob is significantly weaker to Alice's telepathy because his grip on his own mind is already loose.
- Immunity to telepathy tends to make someone go insane as very low-level psychic effects keep people sane and are explained as the actual mechanism preventing people from going crazy through isolation.
- Alice is Immune to Mind Control when The Conspiracy rules the world through it enmasse. People treat her as emotionally unwell for noticing the complete lack of consistency as views are overridden and noticing that their trains of thought make no sense whatsoever. Thus she is treated as insane because she is immune.
- Subverted:
- Crazy Bob is sent by Charlie to deal with Alice because Charlie assumes Bob will be immune, and explicitly says as much. Bob isn't immune.
- Crazy Bob displays immunity to the effects of Eldritch Abominations and universally called crazy. He is actually more sane in the sense that he is closest to comprehending the universe as it really is.
- Double Subverted: Bob pretends to be mind controlled by Alice, but while he can hear her psychic compulsions, he chooses an opportune time to reveal he doesn't have to obey them.
- Parodied: Bob's obsession with baseball makes him effectively immune to telepathy as telepaths find his mind too boring to read as he constantly thinks about baseball statistics in the driest way possible.
- Zig-Zagged: Depending on the particular power-sets of the would-be telepath, Crazy Bob may or may not be immune. Pheromones work on him as usual, direct telepathy fails, a Compelling Voice can be resisted with effort...
- Averted: Crazy Bob is neither resistant nor vulnerable to telepathy.
- Enforced: It's Crazy Bob's Day in the Limelight, and the writers want his quirky mind to be useful.
- Lampshaded: Alice gives orders to Bob to assassinate the President. He just starts scribbling on dollar bills due to delusions of money being 'organs of the state' and physically linked to the health of the president. She sighs and says that she really should have expected him to do something useless.
- Invoked: Charlie's greatest enemy is a telepath, so under Crazy Bob's tutelage, he teaches himself how to go Crazy Sane.
- Exploited: Crazy Bob has schizophrenia and Alice mind controlled most of the town. He attacks Alice with a whittling knife counting on his condition to protect him.
- Defied:
- Dr. Evilstine specifically puts in five extra years work on his mind control device after finding out it doesn't work on the mentally ill. If for some reason the adjsutments make it so the device won't work on the sane, he will just make two of them, one for each setting, and use them at the same time.
- Dr. Evilstine just brute-forces it and achieves control of Bob (although admittedly it takes pushing his device into unsafe levels for a long while).
- Dr. Evilstine researches Bob's mentality and obtains methods of control that Bob's insanity cannot shrug off (such as threatening Bob's dog).
- Dr. Evilstine does not even bothers trying to control Bob. He just orders his subjects to get rid of the Wild Card the very second he achieves control and Bob is still unaware of the threat.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Played For Laughs: Dr. Evilstine attacks Bob with his mind control beam. The beam's monitor begins to display a bunch of bizarre images at stroboscopic speeds before it begins to spit out smoke, explodes and melts.
- Played For Drama: After Dr. Evilstine tries (and fails) to brainwash Bob, Bob reveals that he is Too Broken to Break.
Back to Insanity Immunity
