World Gone Mad

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment..."
—Lucky, Waiting for Godot

A world that would be utter hell to live in. But instead of everything being depressingly rotten like in the Crapsack World, everything is depressingly ridiculous. Nothing in the world makes sense, and the very laws of physics seem to exist for the purpose of making things turn out unfairly. Any attempt to find meaning or validation is answered with an Anvil on Head.

The protagonist is usually the Only Sane Man, who never comes out well and sometimes winds up Giving Up on Logic.

For some reason, writers who work in this genre tend to only do this genre. This tends to be a specialty genre for its creator, who is usually very, very bitter, and almost always a Sadist Show (or Sadist Book, or whichever).

Compare Cosmic Plaything, Finagle's Law. May leave the reader saying "What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?" May be a result of stepping into a Cloudcuckooland.

Examples of World Gone Mad include:

Anime and Manga

  • The Digital World in Digimon Adventure. The weather is forecast as: "Sunny with occasional ice cream". Sadly, it fails to actually rain ice-cream.
    • Also, the scenery can be quite weird and random at times (like The Forest of Irrelevant Road-Signs). It's literally subconsciously pieced together by random crap the Digimon dig up on the internet.
      • Let's consider THE INTERNET for a moment here. Now let's all realise how lucky those digimon are to end up with what they did.
    • Gennai says that anything weird (factories that don't produce anything, phone booths to nowhere) is the result of broken or missing data.
    • Digimon Adventure, Digimon Frontier and Digimon World all give us the wonder that is the meat plants: trees that grow apple lookalikes that taste like various kinds of meat, bushes that grow legs of lamb and chicken and sirloins that can be planted from seeds and grow in a garden. They all have to be cooked a little before they're eaten, but their very existence stuns Hiro into silence at one point.
    • And the Digital World as presented in Digimon Adventure gets even weirder during the Dark Masters arc, when the entire thing (except for a few crumbling pieces of ground) gets twisted up into Spiral Mountain - which, when viewed externally, can be seen as mountains, cities, forests and oceans twisting around each other up into the sky.
    • The Tamers version of the digital world was probably the single most surreal. It's comprised of numerous layers that shape themselves to the inhabitants (the newest layer being a barren wasteland because it hadn't been customized yet), the physical laws are completely subjective (i.e. you don't need to eat or even breathe if you don't think about it), raw data appears as pink tumbleweeds, gigantic data streams can randomly warp anything caught in them to any part of of the world, day and night change instantly with no transition, and the physical world is visible in the sky of the lowest plane as a computerized graphic of a globe at all times. It's nowhere near as whimsical as the other series efforts, but every bit as strange.
  • The world in the year 300X in Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo basically runs on this, Hurricane of Puns, and Rule of Funny.
  • Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei.
  • This is what happens to Tokyo in Paprika after the mad parade (a conglomeration of surreal and maddening dreams) gets enough power to intrude into the real world.

Comic Books

  • In an issue of Grant Morrison's Animal Man called "The Coyote Gospel", it shows what a Roadrunner cartoon would be like from one of the participants (the titular Coyote). It's a living hell, a continual and weary cycle of violence. Eventually, the Coyote begs his cartoonist-creator for the cycle to end and it does, but only with the Coyote leaving it for the "real" world (the world of Animal Man) and eventually dying.
    • Almost anything by Grant Morrison ends up involving this trope, whether the original writers intended it that way or not. Seaguy, of course, started out and remains this way.
  • Warren Ellis likes to combine this trope with Crapsack World and What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?.
  • Marvel Zombies is certainly a World Gone Mad.
  • In the Emperor Joker storyline in DC Comics, The Joker, having gained godlike powers, turns the entire world into a surreal hell. The world of the Joker's mind in Superman & Batman: Generations II is similar.

Film

  • Catch-22 is halfway between this and the basic Crapsack World.
  • The world of Brazil would be a good example.
  • In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Eddie Valiant must get himself back into the proper, insane frame of mind to be able to cope with Toon Town.
  • Dr. Strangelove is what happens when you give Cold War paranoia that last little nudge into the abyss, then watch it fall.

Literature

  • Almost anything written by Douglas Adams. Both The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently series fit this.
    • Most of Adams' heroes maintain their sanity by being ready to abandon it at the drop of a hat. Also, Arthur Dent is in a Universe that appears to have gone mad, but that stands to reason when viewed from the eyes of an alien. Wonko the Sane lampshades this when Arthur returns home to find that he's built an inside-out house called "Outside the Asylum" to keep the crazy world in — like the Earth, everything inside is sane, outside is crazy.
    • Dirk Gently doesn't live in a mad world, it's just that being a Weirdness Magnet makes it locally insane.
  • Almost anything written by Kurt Vonnegut.
  • Franz Kafka's work is halfway between this and the basic Crapsack World.
  • Almost anything written by Alexis Gilliland. His cartoons for the old RPG GURPS Illuminati set the tone. ("It'll be tough to test my theory without destroying the universe... but what the heck... it's a really neat theory!" or "Paranoid police, sir. You're under arrest. Nobody could look that innocent unless they were plotting against the state.")
  • The Discworld sometimes verges on this, especially in the books that star Rincewind.
    • Played with in Moving Pictures: When one man wonders why all of CMOT Dibbler's movies (or "clicks") are set in a "World Gone Mad", Dibbler's nephew comments, "Because he is a very observant man."
  • Of Two Minds is set in a world that used to be one of these, before the local Reality Warpers got their act together and turned everything internally consistent. The sequel, More Minds, sees the whole thing falling apart again. It's not quite as dangerous a place as most examples on this list, since everyone has some influence on what the world is like, and since Death Is a Slap on The Wrist, but the constant shifting isn't very good for one's psychological stability.
  • Inverted in a short story by Robert Sheckley. The protagonist, who lives in one of these, finds himself crossing dimensional boundaries into a universe where your physical surroundings don't change completely at random; the implication is that he finds ours to be the real World Gone Mad. By the end of the story he's a raving street preacher who spends his days ranting about how of course nothing can ever truly change and it's stupid to pretend otherwise.
  • The world in Fahrenheit 451 or Nineteen Eighty-Four is this.
  • Wonderland and Looking-Glass House read rather like this, more than once reducing Alice to tears of frustration at trying to deal with their nonsense.
  • The planet Placet in the 1946 short story "Placet Is a Crazy Place" by Fredric Brown: Firstly, it's made of a core of collapsed heavy matter wrapped in normal matter, and birdlike heavy-matter lifeforms "fly" through the ground, occasionally breaking its surface like fish at the top of the sea. Second, it spins faster than the speed of sound, and orbits a dual-sun system where one of of the suns is made of antimatter, in a figure-eight pattern that takes it between both suns twice every orbit. Thanks to the interaction of the suns, the space between them is a place where light is slowed to the speed of sound, and which allows Placet to elicpse itself twice at the same time, run into itself every forty hours and chase itself out of sight. The inter-sun zone also affects the human brain, causing extremely vivid visual hallucinations. Naturally, there's a research station on Placet, and the folks stationed there don't exactly have the easiest time of it...

Live-Action TV

  • One Foot in the Grave. The Meldrews are afflicted by a constant barrage of cruel and surreal events at their expense. Nothing nice ever seems to happen to them, or indeed anyone in the Purgatory-like suburbia they live in.
  • Many sketches on Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  • Many sketches on Spitting Image.
  • The Day Today/Brass Eye, and most other things produced by Chris Morris.
  • The TV series Red Dwarf, where the whole universe can be summed up in Rimmer's closing line for one episode: "It's a smegging garbage pod!"
  • The sections of The Daily Show where Jon Stewart talks to a "correspondent on the scene" are often like this, where the correspondent pretends to be a government shill and gives Cloudcuckoolander justifications for stupid or criminal government programs.
    • It's eerily possible to say that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report both point out the absurdities of government in the World Gone Mad perspective. Eerie because, well, it's the real world. Truth IS sometimes stranger than fiction.

Music

Theatre

  • The 1950s "Theatre of the Absurd" (especially Eugene Ionesco's work) may be the Trope Maker. Ionesco, by all accounts, based his World Gone Mad on bad experiences with Romania's Communist bureaucracy.
  • Absolutely every play written by Christopher Durang. Summed up in the famous Peter Pan Monologue, which would be the opening quote for this page if it weren't so long.
    • His play 'Dentity Crisis, where the Peter Pan Monologue comes from, may be the best example of this trope. Jane lives with her mother, her brother, her father, her grandfather, and a visiting French count. However, Jane is the only person who realizes that the brother, father, grandfather, and count are actually a single person with multiple personalities. Everyone else thinks they're separate people, even though they see him switch personalities in front of them all the time. When Jane points this out, they think she's crazy. If you can't guess how the play ends from this description, TV Tropes has not sufficiently ruined your life yet.
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. As Hamlet puts it, "the time is out of joint."

Tabletop Games

  • The RPG Paranoia, where the heroes are secret Commie Mutant Traitors assigned to capture Commie Mutant Traitors, the Bond gadgets never work right, and Friend Computer executes anyone who leaves their color-coded zones. One adventure for the game has the "heroes" on their way to a briefing. Missing the briefing is punishable by death... but a badly programmed robot painted the hallway the wrong color, so walking to the briefing room is also punishable by death.
    • The game does encourage Friend Gamemaster to let things work sort of right sometimes, especially if the players are ruthlessly clever, and/or can be set up for an even bigger fall. if you're not dying several times in the first hour or so, you're doing it wrong.
  • The RPG GURPS IOU: Illuminati University is about a Planet Eris university where everyone has learned to adjust to an utterly futile universe. For instance, blood feuds between professors are fully regulated and organized by the school bureaucracy.
  • Warhammer 40,000 creeps into this territory at times-it's a Crapsack World taken up to such a ludicrous extreme (along with every other trope) that at times you can't help but think the setting has well and truly lost its marbles.
    • The God-Emperor of humanity is a ten thousand-year-old husk in a life-support machine. Every day thousands of psychics are slowly sacrificed to him to provide a navigational space beacon, in the same way that you can see the burning bodies of a million people from quite far away. Once what's left of the emperor fails, all the ships will be lost in hyperspace and all the colonies will be cut off from each other. Also, there's probably a death god under Mars. There is some speculation that the Emperor will be reborn as a warp entity when he goes, which is not really worth looking forward to.
    • The Eldar are cursed with enslavement to a god who will appear out of hyperspace and kill anyone who feels excesses of emotion. This means that procreation is at an all-time low. Also, the Eldar race is unimaginably old and is slowly dying off in an universe that no longer can sustain them. The best case scenario (as stated by their religious beliefs) is that they'll manage to raise a new god of their own to combat their old nemesis... after they're all dead.
    • The Tyranids are an all-consuming race - killing the populations of entire planets, turning the remains into goo and then sucking it up into their giant organic spaceships so they can breed more terrifying engines of oozing death. The only option is to run away from them, and what's been seen so far looks like a 'scouting' party. There's probably a bigger hive fleet moving towards our galaxy from what used to be another.
    • The Necrons are undead metal killing machines, created in concert with a race of star gods to kill one of the oldest races in the galaxy. They can't be killed, and when they are heavily damaged they simply teleport back to base to be repaired. They once attacked Sol, the most heavily guarded solar system in the Imperium, to get at the aforementioned death-god inside Mars. They were repelled only because the Necron force was a 'scouting party' and the Imperium threw millions of soldiers at them before they escaped.
    • The Tau are a race who have taken fascism/communism to the extreme, giving all discovered races a "submit to our happy collective or die" ultimatum under the name of the Greater Good. If anyone resists their benign takeovers, they blast their worlds into cinders and move on. They are the setting's fluffy liberals.
    • The Orks are fungus-creatures with the ability to reproduce their entire biosphere anywhere they go thanks to the spores they shed when they are killed. To make up for their crazy breeding rates, they seek out battle constantly, 'cause it's fun. Personality-wise, the entire species resembles football hooligans who have been given guns and axes.
    • The forces of Chaos are empowered by warp entities to pursue their deepest desires. Unfortunately, they are shackled to those desires and are mostly twisted to the point that the terrible mutations induced by their patrons are of no concern to them. Also, their patrons are not exactly nice, at least in human terms.
  • The game JAGS Wonderland is a great one. Other realities are invading our world, and if you're not careful, you'll get infected by them and dragged away in the night. And it's all available for free download from the publishers.

Video Games

  • The Shivering Isles, in The Elder Scrolls, seem to fit in, particularly in the realm of Mania. It's the realm of the god of madness and he is, unsurprisingly, a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • The Wonderland of American McGee's Alice has gone from playful weirdness to cracked insanity.
  • This trope pretty much sums up the entire world of Dead Rising series thank to both the unending government atrocities and the psychopaths that want to kill you, aside from it being also a Crapsack World.
  • Pretty much the entire setting of Pathologic, coupled with Just Before the End.
  • The city of Stillwater in Saints Row is practically a playground for various gangs, criminals, and other forms of mayhem. Driving a septic truck around spraying sewage on people's houses to lower property values is pretty par for the course.
    • Steelport, of Saints Row the Third is even worse. Aside from The Syndicate consisting of hackers and Luchadores, costumed mascots seem to be a sizable minority within the city and is also home to Professor Genki's Hyper Ethical Reality Climax (not to mention Professor Genki himself occasionally running around and killing civilians himself). As such, only a man such as Burt Reynolds is capable of being the mayor of such a city.

Western Animation

  • Looney Tunes shorts drop into this occasionally. (Grant Morrison's "The Coyote Gospels" deconstructed this in an issue of his run on Animal Man, described above in the comics folder.)
  • What time is it? Adventure Time! Constantly. Though the Land of Ooo in Adventure Time seems to (mostly) be a benign sort of mad, with hints of darkness.
  • Planet Insanus, the aptly-named setting of Robotomy.
  • The world of Teen Titans when some people get a hold of Larry the Titan's powers.
  • Superjail.
  • In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "The Return of Harmony, Part 2", Equestria gets turned into this under Discord. Everything gets crazier and more chaotic as the episode goes along and everyone is pretty much driven insane.
    • To state a few examples: The dirt roads are transformed into soap, some houses are turned into flat props, others are uprooted and float seemingly of their own accord, the very sky shifts rapidly from day to night and back again, along with truly random creatures roaming the chaos-stricken land (buffaloes in tutus, rabbits with impossibly long, spindly legs, pies...)

Web Comics

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