Basic Trope: A sane character pretends to be insane in order to fool people about how effective they are.
- Straight: King Bob, the ruler of Troperia, fakes being a Cloudcuckoolander in order to appear less threatening to his enemies. He is actually a perfectly reasonable person.
- Exaggerated: King Bob pretends to be an Ax-Crazy lunatic in order to appear scarier to his subjects. He is entirely sane and secretly a genius at that.
- Downplayed:
- King Bob is legitimately a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander, even in private. He just tends to exaggerate his eccentricity whenever he appears in public.
- King Bob pretends to be a Narcissist so that his enemies take him less seriously. Still, nobody thinks he is insane.
- Justified: If other monarchs knew how intelligent Bob really is, they could feel threatened by him and preemptively attack Troperia.
- Inverted: Mask of Sanity
- Subverted:
- King Bob really is crazy. People who suspect he is faking it simply read too much into him.
- While Bob is not actually a Cloudcuckoolander, he is secretly a Knight Templar struck with Black-and-White Insanity.
- Double Subverted:
- King Bob is sane after all. His deception is just really, really good.
- Bob's Knight Templar persona is just another mask.
- Parodied: King Bob tries to fake insanity by bursting into mad laughter randomly and occasionally saying something stupid. Nobody falls for it, but since people think he is an idiot now, the deception proves successful in a way.
- Zig Zagged: King Bob projects multiple personas, each with a different kind of insanity. There is no telling whether one of them is genuine, all of them are fake or is he suffering from multiple split personalities.
- Averted:
- King Bob is a sane, reasonable ruler. He never pretends to be anything else.
- King Bob is simply a lunatic. He does not fake it and it would make no sense for him to do so, as his insanity only gains him enemies.
- Lampshaded: "Come on, there is no way Bob could remain a king if he really is that crazy."
- Conversed:"Tricking the insane by making a facade with faking as one. I like it."
- Exploited: Baron Redhand, even though he sees through the deception, convinces people that Bob is a danger to Troperia due to his insanity.
- Invoked: King Bob is trapped in Cloudcuckooland and cleverly and thoroughly pretends to be a local dingbat to fight his way out of the weirdness and idealistic insanity and go back into reality, something he loves more.
- Defied: The kingdom's standard procedure when dealing with insane people is to send them to a hellish Bedlam House. People who arrive there who are discovered to be faking their insanity are tortured until they are truly mad - if they survive. Whatever schemes King Bob has up his sleeve to prevent assassination, "pretend to be a madman" is not one of them.
Back to Obfuscating Insanity. I mean, MUAHAHAHAHAHA!
