Go Mad from the Revelation: Difference between revisions

In many stories, there are some experiences that are so horribly mind-shattering that the usual result is stark raving madness. This is the signature characteristic of an [[Eldritch Abomination]] and one of the central tropes of the [[Cosmic Horror Story]] genre, but other things can cause it as well, such as [[Cold-Blooded Torture|prolonged torture]] or learning [[These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know|Things Man Was Not Meant to Know]].

This almost could have been [[Truth in Television]], insofar as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a real mental illness, but a character who Goes Mad From the Revelation usually is portrayed in a more generic insanity, often resembling Freak Outs, [[Heroic BSOD|catatonia]], schizophrenia or most commonly, psychotic mania with [[Laughing Mad]]. Sometimes, if you whack someone with the "insane stick" enough times, they'll get [[Bored with Insanity]].

The extreme form of a [[Freak-Out]]. May take the form of a [[Heroic BSOD]] where the thing isn't going to start working again. If the whole nature of the universe is opened to you because of your velocity, this is [[Ludicrous Speed]].

* In ''[[Fantastic Children]]'', scientist Dr. Radcliffe became obsessed with unraveling the mystery of the Children of Befort. Needless to say, the more he found out, the madder he went. He could have been saved a lot of suffering if he knew that his theory was actually {{spoiler|as far from the truth as you could get}}.

* ''[[Space Pirate Mito]]'': Masatsuki Nenga goes totally batshit insane when {{spoiler|he comes to the realisation that his "Justice" is nothing more than a tool of oppression (one that has no issue shooting down a "mob" of villagers, men, women and children) used by a pretender to the throne}}. This leads to about two episodes worth of him screaming "I AM JUSTICE!" at the top of his lungs whilst firing his gun like the lunatic he is. This would be fine all in all, but the guy doesn't look older than 12.

** Notably, if you didn't already know who was going to grow up to be the villain, it would ''look'' like Knives handled it better than Vash. They both locked themselves in and attempted to starve to death together, but after Rem broke in and saved them it was ''[[The Messiah|Vash]]'' who did the [[Creepy Laugh]] and [[Humans Are Bastards]] and hysteria, and Knives seemed...perfectly okay. He saved his freak-out until after he'd set up all the colony ships to crash.

* ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'': Certainly not the only factor in his descent, but his visit to the [[Cosmic Horror Story|Dark Ocean]] a perpetually dark realm, populated by various Lovecraftian horrors and where Love and Hope are a foreign concept, was definitely the Straw that Broke the Camel's Back for Ken Ichijoji. One look at his [http://www.alltrees.org/anime/basetwo/images/ken.chibi.evil.jpg expression] in that [[Flash Back|scene]] is enough to convince you that this kid just went off the deep end.

* In Spanish comic-book ''[[Mortadelo Y Filemon]] ,'' the title characters are tortured by their boss with an LP of Spanish blockbuster songs (apparently repeated ad infinitum). Thy are driven mad, and other characters talk about the cruelty.

* In ''Captain Britain,'' the precognitive Cobweb goes mad when she makes the mistake of looking into the very near future, which has just been invaded by a cybernetic nightmare from another dimension and is steadily being dominated by an insane [[Reality Warper|reality-warping]] Prime Minister by the name of Mad Jim Jaspers. Naturally, after puking her guts out and mumbling a few [[Mad Oracle|garbled prophecies]], she tries to swallow her tongue.

* According to ''[[Transformers: Shattered Glass|Shattered Glass]]'' [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Optimus_Prime_%28SG%29 Optimus Prime's bio], he discovered something so shocking from Cybertron's past that it made him to go insane, and to the present day no one knows what it was he found.

* One issue of ''[[Hellblazer]]'' features a [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] priest who gets into the habit of calling the police when teenagers start confessing their misdeeds to him- and at one point, he goes so far as to physically assault a girl who confessed to having sex with her brother. And then the Devil shows up; after letting him know how badly the teenagers have suffered, he ushers the priest back into the confessional and lets him hear ''his'' confession. Minutes later, the priest burns the church to the ground; from then on, he's straight-up [[Ax Crazy]], murdering people from one end of the country to the next, culiminating in his attempt to rape a young John Constantine- which results in him getting a razorblade wedged in his face, being arrested, and committed to an asylum. After being released over twenty years later, he bumps into Constantine again at a local church; by now completely lucid, he explains everything, then [[Eye Scream|jams a pencil in either eye]] and [[Driven to Suicide|headbutts the pew in front of him.]]

* In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s novel ''[[Methuselah's Children]]'', Slayton Ford goes mad when he meets the [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]]. Interestingly, after Ford goes mad, Lazarus Long mentions he is afraid that if he met them he ''wouldn't'' go mad.

** That didn't stop Lazarus from stating that, in a few centuries, he planned to go back to that planet and see one of the mysterious aliens himself. He's told it's not a good idea, but he plans to do it anyway. We never find out if he actually did go back or not.

* In [[Stephen King]]'s book ''[[IT]]'', seeing the true form of the titular character automatically drives a person crazy.

** The ending of King's short story ''The Jaunt'' offers another memorable example of the trope.

* ''[[The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde]]'' has the "good" scientist, Dr. Lanyon, undergo this when he sees the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation.

* ''[[The Magician's Nephew]]'', the 6th (publication order) and 1st (chronological order) book in [[The Chronicles of Narnia]] includes an inscription stating that the reader must either face something very dangerous, or go insane wondering what sort of danger they would have had to face. So, this is more of an instance of possibly "Going mad from the lack of revelation". However, since they end up facing the danger (reviving a powerful sorceress), it's never revealed if leaving the situation alone would have indeed driven them mad or if the inscription was just there to scare people into doing something needlessly dangerous.

** Seen again later with the Seanchan. Their culture believes that women who can use magic are far too dangerous to go free, but also too useful to kill... so they slap collars on them which utterly enslave their wearer and make them puppets to a master, called a sul'dam. Recently, the main characters have disovered that the collars can't be used by anyone who does not have some degree of magical prowess themselves... meaning the sul'dam are essentially the same as the women they treat as objects. When one sul'dam discovers this she undegroes a borderline mental breakdown, and it's speculated that if this knowledge got out publically, it would shake the very foundations of the Seanchan Empire.

* In ''[[Darkness Visible]]'' ordinary people can go mad when exposed to unreality. As things [[It Got Worse|deteriorate]] this eventually happens to something like a quarter of London's population.

* "Need to Know", an episode of the 1980s ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'', featured William Petersen investigating an insanity epidemic in a small town. It turns out a resident has discovered the meaning of life, but to hear the secret is to go crazy.

** In another episode of ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'', a [[Those Wacky Nazis|retired Nazi general]] returns to the death camp he worked at, only to be [[Laser-Guided Karma|tortured to insanity by the ghosts of the people he murdered]]. Let's just say they showed him ''everything'' they went through while in his "care".

* When [[Battlestar Galactica|D'Anna]] learns the identities of the Final Five Cylons, it appears to be so overwhelming as to at least render her comatose. Only a borderline example, though, because she does get better.

** An alternate interpretation is that the mechanism in the Temple of Five that showed her the images also fried her brain, hence her gibbering and her [[Psychic Nosebleed|nose bleeding]]. When she ressurected, emotionally overwhelmed as she was, she was not insane.

== [[Poetry]] ==

** The ''Lords of Madness'' supplement indicates that the safest thing to do with the spellbook of an aboleth or the power stone of a mind flayer is to bury it, because trying to actually ''use'' the damn thing would do horrible things to the contents of your skull.

*** Let alone the book itself.

* The Black Spiral Dancers from ''[[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]'' get their name because every last one of them walked the Black Spiral, an equally metaphorical and literal path that brought them face-to-face with the Wyrm, a cosmic embodiment of suffering and hatred. The experience breaks the minds of all but the most strong-willed like a twig; most Black Spiral Dancers take their deed name after whatever pathetic growls or mewling noises come out of their mouth upon "revelation."

** Similarly, the Weaver, originally a cosmic embodiment of order and purpose, was turned into an all-consuming force for stasis when it tried to define the Wyld (a cosmic embodiment of primal chaos) and got the biggest "DOES NOT COMPUTE" in history.

* ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]: Shadow of the Comet'' begins with the scientist Lord Boleskin going bat-shit insane after making a discovery in the ''[[Town with a Dark Secret]]'', Illsmouth. As mentioned in the trope description though, this being a Lovecraftian tale it's all par for the course.

* In ''Call of Cthulhu: [[Dark Corners of the Earth]]'' Jack is subjected to a series of revelations driving him more and more insane, culminating in him committing suicide in a mental institute {{spoiler|after discovering that his father was possessed by a Yithian when he was conceived, making him not quite human}}

** Additionally, Alex's sanity meter is set to a lower point every time you finish a chapter. Most cases of lost Sanity are an inversion of the trope though, happening when you're discovered rather than from learning anything.

* In ''[[Neopets]]'', a Neopian called Eliv Thade was driven mad from a book of unsolvable riddles. He died, and now his ghost speaks only in anagrams. (You know, [[Meaningful Name|"Evil Death"]]?)

* Invoked in the venerable ''[[Chrono Trigger]]''. The "[[Standard Status Effects|Confuse]]" status effect causes the character to go [[Laughing Mad]], so it's really not surprising that any monster related to the game's [[Big Bad]], the [[Cosmic Horror]] known as Lavos, can and ''will'' inflict this status with any of its attacks unless you've equipped items that prevent it.

* Subverted in the third season of ''[[The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police|Sam and Max Freelance Police]]''. Sam must travel through a dark dimension in search of a puzzle solution. He doesn't come back all there, but he gets over it in about half-a-minute.

* In ''[[Assassin's Creed]] 2'', Altaïr notes in the Codex that many would-be Assassins could not accept the [[Badass Creed]] - Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. - and were mentally broken for it.

** The reason why Sibrand cracked. [[The Reveal]] about [[Cessation of Existence|the afterlife]] by the Piece of Eden turned Sibrand scared-shitless of death. His fears became even worse when Altair was after him. Everything that wore white and hoddy clothes would be immediatly killed by him, even if they were obviously just scholars and not assassins.

{{quote|'''Homer:''' It's dogs! ''And they're playing poker!'' '''AAAAAHHHH!!!'''}}

* On one episode of ''[[Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (animation)|Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers]]'', the villain loses it when he realizes he's just been defeated by chipmunks.

** And in ''Toy Story 3'', {{spoiler|Lotso}} endures a long and grueling journey back to Daisy's house, only to discover that he had been replaced. As [[The Stoic|Chuckles]] puts it, "Something changed inside him that day. Something ''snapped''."

* The titular Ren from ''[[The Ren and Stimpy Show]]'' often went completely insane in various episodes leading to much [[Nightmare Fuel]]. Two notable example of this came at the end of "Svën Höek" where Ren completely lost it upon finding out what a mess Stimpy and Sven made in his house and the episode "Stimpy's Fan Club" at the end of which he contemplated strangling Stimpy in his sleep.