Cloudcuckoolander/Playing With
Basic Trope: A character has a non-standard perspective on life.
- Straight: Alice has a very strange thought process, but is still intelligible
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is so odd that she is constantly misunderstood by the remainder of the group
- Alice speaks in an alien language all the time and always dances.
- Up To Eleven: Alice's mind trumps the insanity of an Eldritch Abomination and her imagination consists of Inconceivable Alien Geometries, sometimes with actual Eldritch Locations and entire Chaos Worlds inside them. Trying to read her mind would be suicidal and will cause you to be trapped in her alien imagination, forever.
- Downplayed: Alice has an slight character quirk, but is otherwise quite grounded in reality.
- Justified:
- Alice is actually from another planet and isn't familiar with local customs, etc.
- Or Alice is genuinely insane.
- Or Alice's real self is possessing another body.
- Inverted: Alice is the one voice of reason among a cast of surrealists.
- Subverted:
- Alice seems to be crazy, but turns out to be eerily accurate.
- Alice is using Obfuscating Stupidity or Obfuscating Insanity.
- Double Subverted:
- ...And then turns out to be a Seemingly-Profound Fool.
- Alice is feigning feigning stupidity and is making it blatantly obvious because she doesn't want people to know that she really is crazy.
- Parodied:
- Alice's head can't actually be seen -- it's just a fluffy pink cloud that spouts cheerful nonsense.
- She's constantly a blur and is ultra-annoying.
- She's actually more sane than the rest of the main cast combined.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's Cloudcuckoolander tendencies come from insanity, another psychological disorder (like Disorganized Schizophrenia), or a very screwed up childhood.
- Her unusual thought process, though amusing and unique, causes her to make very bad decisions most rational people would not commit. And worst, end up getting people killed.
- Her strange behaviour alienates everyone around her, and makes her more prone to being bullied, leaving her with only her imagination, causing her to go even further into insanity and depression.
- She becomes so entrenched in her imagination she is considered as a schizophrenic and thus thrown into a mental hospital.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice has astonishing psychological, spiritual, or psychic insight, but language is too limited for her to express her vision. Alternatively, her intuition works so fast that the steps between her thoughts, while plausible if spelled out, can't be seen.
- She's just random.
- Zig Zagged: Everyone thinks Alice is crazy, but then it turns out that's she's actually so genius no one can understand her thought process but other geniuses, so she's sent to a special school for geniuses, where she's considered weird by the other people who DO understand where she's coming from.
- Averted: Alice has normal intelligence and sanity.
- Enforced:
- The writers don't have the whole series plotted out yet, so they want a character to drop vague hints and suggestions which they can call on later on.
- "everyone loves The Loonie."
- Lampshaded:
- "Alice, where exactly did that train of thought come from, and where exactly is it going?"
- "I'm not crazy, I'm just.... differently sane."
- Invoked: Alice is perfectly capable of making sense, but is cheerfully random as a way to avoid serious conversations.
- Defied: Alice says something that earns her weird looks, only to assure her team that she is not, in any way, eccentric at all.
- Discussed: "Try to be wary of Alice. She's a bit... off."
- Conversed: "Why are so many happy-go-lucky morons in TV?"
Done playing with this trope, like an octopus (hey, the plural of octopus is octopodes, so if two octopodes lived on opposite ends of the earth, would they be antipodal octopodes?) playing with a tin can or something? 'Kay, back to Cloudcuckoolander.
- I thought the plural was octopi?
- octopuses also works.
- It's "octopese", duh.
- octopuses also works.