The Ophelia/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Basic Trope: An insane, but beautiful, young woman.
  • Straight: Alice is psychotic but undiagnosed, has long Messy Hair, Does Not Like Shoes, and is quite pretty.
  • Exaggerated: Inexplicably, Alice begins going by Ophelia and quoting Hamlet constantly, and strews flowers on people at will.
  • Justified: Alice enjoys playing up her condition for all the classical references it's worth.
  • Inverted: A crazy, pretty young man.
  • Subverted: Alice is diagnosed with some mental disorder, and responds by taking her meds and listening to her therapist.
  • Doubly Subverted:...but she was misdiagnosed, and neither of those things help. Eventually, she takes on Ophelia-esque traits.
  • Parodied: Alice's condition is Played for Laughs, as she exhibits every madness Trope in the book.
  • Deconstructed: Alice falls more and more into madness, and it is thoroughly unromantic. No one helps her, and she is eventually Driven to Suicide, or at least an attempt.
  • Reconstructed: Before Alice got help, she was a mess. It's only gotten a little better since then, and she still has to contend with her demons, but she's trying.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice goes from periods of almost normalcy to The Ophelia to Cloudcuckoolander, and no one knows what side will surface.
  • Averted: Alice has had this condition from the beginning. She takes her meds and is mostly typical.
  • Enforced: "Of course we'll have a mad scene!"
  • Lampshaded: "This is the scene where I babble something about rue and drown myself, isn't it?"
  • Invoked: "I know! I'll channel Ophelia till he leaves me alone."
  • Defied: "I know you expect me to be all 'look, I don't like shoes or combs!' but I don't actually do that. At all."
  • Discussed: "Oh, that chick's named Ophelia. Wait for it...Yup, there goes her sanity."
  • Conversed: "Why do girls who go mad always seem to have turned into Ophelia?"

Oh, you want to go back to The Ophelia...Don't leave yet! The frogs must chirp first, while I fetch your and my rue...