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Sanity Slippage / Webcomics

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  • In Awful Hospital, The Parliament is slowly driving the doctors mad with a Perception Filter to ensure they are unable to fight back against or even notice the disease the Parliament is using to assimilate the current reality back into the original being.
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl has Lucy having a mental breakdown when Michael falls off a rock bridge while saving her.
  • The Croaking: Del, after failing to kill his classmate Scra, failing to get his father's approval or sympathy, can't look in the mirror for fear of seeing the reflection of his father and starts to murmur "sickening, sickening" whenever he sees Scra, or anything that reminds him of his least favorite classmate. After getting kicked of the Aerial Combat team, his sanity degrades further: he starts living in a canyon and crafts a knife of stone to finally murder Scra ... only to get killed in turn... sorta.
  • In Distortion Nuzlocke, Johnny goes through this more and more as the story goes on. He was already pretty messed up, but his fantasies cause him even more pain.
  • In El Goonish Shive, Pandora's decent into madness caused by her husband's untimely death is represented by her Significant Wardrobe Shift at the end of the "Legacy" storyline.
  • Garfield Minus Garfield: With no cat to give him sarcastic remarks, Jon Arbuckle slowly descends into madness. Examples include smushing ice cream cones into his face, dressing up for a date... that's in three weeks, jumping in the streets wearing a party hat, chasing cars in the manner of dogs, breaking down sobbing at the most random times, Madness Speak, and, finally, being sent to a Mental Hospital.
  • In Girl Genius, Gil's father overlaying his own personality over a portion of Gil's mind and his inheriting the responsibility of ruling his father's quickly crumbling empire, combined with losing nearly every single friend and family member he had all at once, has not been kind to him and he's implied to have been in The Madness Place for two and a half years. All of Europe can tell there's something off with him.
  • Jack from Gunnerkrigg Court (pictured on the main page). He started off as a pretty normal guy, then he briefly got pulled into a Dark World and saw some very unpleasant things, causing him to become insane. Since then he became increasingly antisocial, paranoid (at one point he starves himself because he's convinced the Court has laced his food with nanobots to track him) and amoral (compare his treatment of the Laser Cows to his treatment of the Guard Robot). Not to mention, even his appearance became worse over time. Fortunately, after Zimmy removed the whitelegs from his head, he's gotten almost back to normal. Oh, and he was right about the food.
  • Homestuck:
    • Karkat starts getting shades of this after a particularly brutal Trauma Conga Line. Two of his friends were murdered in front of his eyes, two others are on killing sprees, he's dragging his newly-blinded friend's body (and accidentally drops him down some stairs), and he gets a message from his girlfriend, pronouncing the details of another murder - and when he tries to contact her, one of the Ax-Crazy trolls responds, hinting that she's been killed.
    There. Good as new, best friend! It's like it never happened. No one can ever blame you for dropping him down the stairs now. Stairs? What stairs! Ha ha ha!
    • Rose starts showing signs of it too, around the time her mother died.
  • Jack: The American Ghost: While she wasn't that sane to begin with, Cindy definitely goes off the deep end by the end of the series, due to her being a Loony Fan for Jack while watching his growing relationship with Go-Eun.
  • Rocky in Lackadaisy was never exactly stable, what with his habit of turning into an Ax-Crazy Pyromaniac when under severe stress, but suffering a severe head injury from a car definitely didn't help matters.
  • Happens to Benjamin Prester in A Miracle of Science when he believes that his partner Caprice has been killed. He becomes increasingly violent, and he starts acting more like he did in flashbacks - when he had full-fledged Science-Related Memetic Disorder. The two biggest clues are he redoes his hair in a particular style when in Mad Scientist mode, and he introduces himself as Benjamin when fully sane but as Ben when in the throes of SRMD.
  • "My Life with Asperger's" directly references this trope name when going onto the topic of having a meltdown.
  • Vaarsuvius spent most of "Don't Split The Party" undergoing this in The Order of the Stick. They ultimately recovered but not before committing an act which may have completely crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
  • In Pacificators, one of the best Pacificators they had, Castella Brandsford, snapped and murdered thousands of people before she was killed by a suicidal guy. Ever since, the regular people have hated the people who has powers, because they fear another Castella Brandsford.
  • Tekno slips in Sonic the Comic – Online! after her and Shortfuse become trapped in a dimension without modern technology. Tekno being a Teen Genius takes this very poorly and becomes more disheveled by the day. It comes to the point where she's writing manically on the walls and she attempts to murder a villain by beating him to death.
  • Sweet Home (2017):
    • Hyein goes more and more crazy as time goes on, from a confident if a little bossy woman to a raving lunatic who tries to burn someone else alive in their sleep with a Slasher Smile. After almost being raped by Gapsu and then believing that she'd killed an innocent woman, she completely loses any remnant of sanity she had left.
    • Ihyun starts as an Affably Evil follower of Joon who, despite his loyalties, seems nice enough. Then he kills the Tentacle Monster and makes it clear he may be the most insane one out of all of them.
  • Unsounded:
    • Lemuel, in Duane's memories of their time in the army, was effected poorly by the horrors of war and feeling abandoned by his family. Despite being an amazing warrior Lem took more and more actions that were far from noble, like chopping up corpses while singing about killing the gods, culminating in burning a cart full of unarmed helpless prisoners. He got quite good at hiding his war crimes from authority figures.
    • By the time the comic starts Roger has spent fifteen years having his memories and soul dissolved so Crescian wrights can pick through it to figure out how to dismantle the Dammakhert. He is far from the princely noble rebel leader he was when Duane and Lemuel ran into him during the Foi-Hellick rebellion, though his fall started when he hit his Despair Event Horizon when forced to kill his lover in self defense.
    • Anadyne's despair at failing to save Stockyard, and accidentally decapitating him when she tried to rescue him is exacerbated by the First Silver. She lies despondent in the belly of the Silver Eel, until it merges with her and she tears off her own breast and shoves it in Stockyard's decaying head, then walks into the night having become an avatar of pain and suffering and the face of a magical weapon of mass destruction.
    • Duane becomes more and more desperately obstinate about his brother being righteous as he's faced with evidence Lemuel was a war criminal who likely betrayed him to the assassins who arranged his death and zombification. In his vehement denial he starts acting less and less logically and lets Aldish soldiers into a shrine thinking they won't harm any children despite knowing soldiers are not always noble. This results in the deaths of several named characters and the main cast being fractured.
  • Jin of Wapsi Square suffers from a bad case of this after destroying the calendar machine. It was actually built at least partially for the purpose of keeping her sane.
  • Bryce of We Are The Wyrecats is falling victim to this due to a tumour in his brain.

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