Basic Trope: An Oracle or Prophet who seems insane.
- Straight: The Oracle of The White Temple talks constantly, spouting apparent gibberish in response to questions that turns out to be an accurate prediction of the future.
- Exaggerated: The Oracle says and does totally random things that seem to have nothing at all to do with what they are asked.
- Downplayed: The Oracle is mostly coherent and clear, but shows signs of severe stress and suffers from mental health problems.
- Justified:
- The strain of seeing the future renders it difficult for the Oracle to properly refocus on the present.
- The sheer volume of information packed into the Oracle's brain makes it hard to organize her thoughts, and some of her visions are pretty cryptic to start with.
- Sometimes seers see things that are better off unseen. Sometimes, they see them a little too often.
- Oracles see connections everywhere, including where they don't really exist.
- Inverted:
- Only the most strong willed, focused and sane can see the future.
- The Oracle is perfectly composed and sane - however they are very careful how they speak because they know enough that to utterly crush hopes resulting in either Heroic BSoD, Driven to Suicide or Go Mad from the Revelation if too much is spoken, say that everything they hold dear will collapse in a century with nothing they can do about it.
- Subverted:
- The mad old woman everyone thinks is an Oracle is just a mad old woman.
- Alternately, the mad old woman is actually completely sane.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but the attendant priest can use her gibberish as the medium for a form of Divination.
- ...at least until one vision causes her to Go Mad from the Revelation.
- Parodied:
- People treat the random gibberings of a passing person as prophesy with no evidence or track record.
- The Oracle's visions are coming from further in the future than anyone realizes; her ravings are actually just contextless pop-culture references.
- Zig Zagged: Mad Alice speaks in gibberish sentences which have some bearing on the current situation. Bob goes to her the next day and asks her to speak plainly. She gives clear, lucid advice which is entirely wrong. Her followers abandon her. Then she warns about a coming disaster, which everyone ignores. When the town is destroyed, she gives up and returns to gibberish... and gains a greater following than before.
- Averted: A seer is otherwise an ordinary person.
- Enforced: "If he were mentally stable then why wouldn't he just solve the crime himself?"
- Lampshaded: "Why are all the good Seers loco?"
- Invoked: The Oracle knows that to get taken seriously he will have to seem insane.
- Exploited: Alice does brisk business selling tranquilizers and sleeping droughts to oracles - they have plenty of gifts from petitioners and welcome a relief.
- Defied: The Oracles of the world are carefully watched and given medical care to ensure that they don't become crazy.
- Discussed: "The Oracle's predictions are always exactly what you need to hear. You just don't realize it until much later."
- Conversed: "Just watch: by the end of the movie 'the blue cow mounts the red horse' will make perfect sense."
- Deconstructed: The very fact that one can see the future alters the nature of their mindset, they become detached from humanity in a way that causes them to appear insane to other humans. They are in fact a different kind of sane, operating as they do on a different level of consciousness and are able to plan and communicate with each other with perfect clarity.
- Reconstructed: The future is so nebulous and fluid that it defies attempts to speak of it clearly. Oracles speak in riddles and gibberish because it is the closest they can come to expressing it.
- Implied: Bob diplomatically states that gaining insights from oracles is quite trying on patience but worth it.
- Played For Laughs: Oracles tend to state hilariously inappropriate conclusions of actions to taken in response to events they foresee. Like to bring marshmallows when the capital burns, or soap after a great battle.
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