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The Cuckoolander Was Right - TV Tropes
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The Cuckoolander Was Right
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"Your paranoid ramblings weren't completely detached from reality."
Okay, so one of the characters is a little... odd. He's a Talkative Loon who rambles, talks to people and things that aren't there, and rarely pays much attention to what's going on around him. So it's just natural that the other characters ignore everything this guy has to say...
Until, in a strange twist of hindsight, it turns out he was right all along.
...Crap.
Sometimes the guy's truly the Only Sane Man whose condition is due to the frightening nature of the things he had uncovered. Sometimes, he is mad but still got one thing right (he's usually smart enough to notice that this one is somehow different from his usual delusions), but people who already know him will just dismiss this as another lie. And occasionally, he's Right for the Wrong Reasons (sometimes despite particularly bizarre Insane Troll Logic).
Compare Actually a Good Idea, Dumbass Has a Point, Jerkass Has a Point, No Mere Windmill, Properly Paranoid, Mad Oracle, Cassandra Truth, The Cassandra, Cue the Flying Pigs, The Dog Was the Mastermind, Thinks Like Pulp Sci-Fi , and I Warned You. Contrast Windmill Crusader. This trope may result in someone else Giving Up on Logic. When combined with Breaking the Fourth Wall, may result in Audience? What Audience?, and a meta-version of this can overlap with Accidentally Correct Writing. If it's the Madness Mantra that was right all along, perhaps you should be a little afraid... And if the whole thing was a joke that happens to match reality, it's Joke and Receive (doesn't require a Cloudcuckoolander).
Contrast Scully Syndrome, in which an individual, despite witnessing any less-than-realistic-sounding truth that someone else like the Cloudcuckoolander has been suggesting to others, tries to deny such fact through a defense mechanism called rationalization, where it can potentially (and ironically) make the former sound, act or even become crazy themselves from doing so.
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Anime & Manga
- ''Astroganger: When Professor Hoshi warns Planet Earth that an Alien Invasion is about to occur, everyone laughs at him, and his own boss calls him a madman. The aliens arrive as predicted and cause a large scale massacre, but luckily the titular robot has been built to protect the planet.
- Out of all the characters in Azumanga Daioh, Osaka is the only one who appears to be aware that Kaorin has a thing for Sakaki. At one point, she's also discovered to be a genius at word puzzles.
- The supernatural in Ayakashi Triangle is real, but Lu only believes in the science fictional. Despite this, she does correctly guess Mei is afraid of getting her picture taken because she's a Fish out of Temporal Water.
- In Bakuman。, the highly eccentric Nizuma is nevertheless often right about manga. When looking over works that Mashiro and Takagi, Fukuda, and Aoki and Nakai plan to submit to the Golden Future Cup, he predicts that two of them are tied for first place but refuses to say which to avoid upsetting the one in third. He's correct, as Detective Trap and Kiyoshi Knight- Muto Ashirogi and Fukuda's work, respectively are tied for first place in an unprecedented result.
- During Digimon Adventure 02, Miyako pretty much flips out over feeling nervous and starts yelling and jumping around. Her assumed reason for Ken's base disappearing is that it flew away. No one really listens to her because she is so worked up, but it actually turns out that's exactly what it did.
- In the start of Doraemon: Nobita's Chronicles of the Moon Exploration when Nobita's class is discussing a news broadcast reports of an unidentified object being spotted on the moon, everyone had conflicting ideas on what the object could be. Gian says it's probably a UFO, Suneo thinks it's merely dust on the lens, Haruo and Yasuo says it's ectoplasm... and then Nobita, usually portrayed as The Ditz in the series, thinks it's a Moon Rabbit. Just guess who got the closest answer.
- At some point in the third arc of Durarara!!, Walker and Erika casually decide that Simon and Dennis, the owners and staff of the local Russian Sushi restaurant that they regularly eat at, are secretly Former Regime Personnel on the run from The Mafiya. The next volume proves them completely right.
- Tom from High School Ninja Girl, Otonashi-san came to Japan so he could become a ninja and learn to breathe fire. Arima and Shimura (the latter of whom is a ninja) repeatedly tell him that breathing fire is impossible. Then Otonashi-san's father launches a massive fireball in the penultimate chapter...
- In Fire Force, while searching a remote location Lieutenant Pan Ko Paat, Viktor Licht, and Arthur Boyle come across a random jumbles of numbers. Arthur believes that it is the coded saga of the knight Sir Comference, most people know the saga as pi. He is not incorrect.
- Gowapper 5 Godam: Everyone calls Dr. Hoarai a Conspiracy Theorist for saying that aliens exist and will soon attack Earth. He falls from grace in the scientific community and dies dishonoured. A few years later, those who mocked him end up eating their words as Emperor Jigokuda leads his army of extraterrestials to ravage the planet.
- In Higurashi: When They Cry, two of the most insane characters actually come the closest to breaking the truth about what actually happened. Rena deduces that the the men in the white van are after her and want to kill her. She also decrees that the men going to see Chie-sensei and tending to their garden was really suspicious. Actually, this turns out to be true, as they are indeed out to kill the gang. The Yamainu drive around in their van and monitor their victims to take advantage of them.
- Next, in Tatarigoroshi-hen, Keiichi takes a ride with Takano and notices Tomitake's bike in the back of the car she is in, he questions her and she says it indeed belongs to him. He asks her where he is, but she turns creepy and he wisely gets away from her. He had every right to be suspicious of her. She is the Big Bad.
- The one who got the closest was Shion Sonozaki to solving the mystery behind Oyashiro-sama's curse. She correctly deduced that Tomitake was killed by a drug to make him crazy and scratch out his throat, that Rika was coming to inject her with a drug, that someone was following Rena and Satoshi, Hanyuu was following them, that someone wanted the bodies of Miyo Takano and Tomitake to be found, and that Takano probably faked her death. She also assumed that when she thinks of the killer, she thinks of nurses and doctors. Takano was a nurse. If she hadn't assumed the Sonozakis were behind it, she would have stopped Takano.
- A common event in Katteni Kaizo. For all the times the crap that comes out of Kaizo's mouth has been true, you'd think the other club members would stop looking at him like a brain-damaged idiot. Of course...
- Mako Mankanshoku from Kill la Kill has a tendency to launch into bizarre rants filled with Chewbacca Defense-style arguments and Insane Troll Logic... that often act as exactly the Rousing Speech that the characters need to hear at that particular time.
- From Naruto we have Might Guy, who says things like his student Rock Lee needs to watch out for his enemy Gaara's gourd, because it's suspicious. Everyone else present rolls their eyes at how obvious this advice is, as they've already seen that Gaara's abilities are almost entirely related to the sand he keeps in that gourd. However, Gaara only survives Lee's Desperation Attack because of the gourd itself, as he can turn it into additional sand to cushion an impact. As well, throughout various other materials, Guy offers a lot of passionate-and-sound advice; he's not a top-level taijutsu ninja for nothing.
- Soar High! Isami: One of Isami's chubby, nerdy space-obsessed classmates suggests that the Black Tengu Organization is secretly run by aliens. He's dismissed as an idiot...until episode 45 reveals Black Tengu's backstory that confirms he is an alien and arrived to Earth 2000 years ago by complete accident.
- In Episode 3 of Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!, Nyarko wonders if Mahiro's Tsundere attitude and skill with forks mark him as a descendant of the cursed deity hunter from the "forbidden black book". In Episode 4, Mahiro's mother returns home and everyone (including Mahiro himself) learns that she's a part-time deity hunter who's also deadly with forks. When this is revealed, even Nyarko is shocked, since by her own admission her earlier remark was just an off-the-cuff joke and not meant to be any serious speculation.
- It actually happens semi-regularly in this series, most often with Nyarko trying to identify the Chekhov's Gun that will turn out to be the lynchpin of the current crisis. Mahiro almost always dismisses her suggestions because they would make for a really stupid resolution...and he gets really ticked off when she's right. There was even one incident where Nyarko dismissed her own suggestion as being way too contrived, so naturally she was 100% correct.
- In PandoraHearts, the hyper Lottie says to Jack after he has taken over Oz's body to scare them away, "You're so full of yourself because people call you a hero and somesuch! You must have been so glad when Glen died." Later on, it turns out she was entirely right to suspect Jack. Woo-hoo for Lottie.
- In Paranoia Agent, that crazy guy chalking random things on the ground? The only one who truly gets what the hell really happened.
- Rebuild World: The at-first-unhinged-seeming Cyber Ninja Nelia gets decisively proven right in her Villainous Crush claims that she and Akira go great together when they work perfectly in a Badass Minds Think Alike situation, with Akira being In Love with Your Carnage just like she was when they first met. In part due to Nelia's weirdness serving as Commonality Connection to Akira's own I Gave My Word and Consummate Professional values.
- In Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo, in a long crazy spiel, Kaoruko Odagiri says the new transfer student is an alien who has come to Earth to abduct the main character's ex-boyfriend but given what else she was saying, why would anyone believe her?
- Kotonoha Katsura in School Days up until the ending, depending on interpretations of whether her claim about Sekai's pregnancy is true or not.
- In Slayers, one of the main characters turns out to be a Mazoku. Everyone expresses shock and surprise and various levels of betrayal, except for Cloudcuckoolander Gourry, who says he knew it all along. Turns out he thought it was so obvious that it didn't deserve a mention.
- Free from Soul Eater may be a rather silly and strange person, but he does make a good point about Lord Death acting as an absolute moral authority when it comes to deciding who's good and who's evil, which may work for your Jack the Rippers and your Medusas, but less so when it comes to some of the other witches or Mifune.
- Kamina in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Yes, he's admired as a leader and a fighter, but no one pays any heed to Kamina's constant praise of Simon and saying how he is destined for greatness, thinking it's the one thing he says that is absolutely bonkers. Simon not only proves that Kamina was right all along, he goes beyond even his brother's already sky-high expectations and literally becomes the greatest human in history.
- In ∀ Gundam, Corrin Nander is quite crazy and violent besides. But he's also the only person to recognize just how dangerous the Gundam really is, having apparently survived a Gundam attack long before the series.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX there was Princess Rose, a Society of Light member in the second season. She certainly seemed to be rather spacy (even more so in the dub, where she talked like a Valley Girl). A fan of the fairy tale The Frog Prince all her life, she insisted that she could see the spirits of the Des Frogs in her cards, much like Judai and Manjyome could, giving them names and calling them "princes". However, Judai wasn't able to see them (although he tried to keep open-minded) and Manjyome was downright rude to her about it, calling her insane (You might be able to chalk a lot of that up to the fact he was brainwashed at the time). However, after Judai finally won the duel, he finally was able to see one of the spirits she was speaking of. It seemed they did exist, though the spirit was a humanoid frog in a suit rather than a handsome prince like Rose thought.
Comic Books
Fan Works
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In-Universe, Dr. Vivienne Graham in this MonsterVerse fanfiction. Tejada initially thought Vivienne was a loon because of her worshipful attitude to Godzilla, but realizes Vivienne's notes are right about Ghidorah's Brown Note effect on humans who spend too much time near its biology even when it's immobile.
- In the Fate/stay night fanfic Behind the bandages Dark Sakura intuitively senses that Archer's hand is Shirou's hand, even though the two look very different. And she's right. (Future alternate realities are a hell of a thing.)
- Boldores and Boomsticks: Professor Cypress is seen as a conspiracy nut by most, and most of his theories are completely baseless, like the time he mistook an annual Absol migration for a warning of a disaster. However, he has accurately predicted things like the Shamouti Island Incident, the potential danger of the Unown, and now the threat of the Grimm.
- Fool's Paradise (TungstenCat): While incoherent during a really bad heat cycle, Sakura repeatedly refers to Archer as Shirou. He's initially afraid she's realized his true identity, but dismisses it as wishful thinking from her. Unfortunately, it wasn't; she suggests the idea to Rin after her heat passes, which leads to the girls learning the truth.
- Legendarily Popular: Ash has a reputation for craziness, but the things he says all make sense from his perspective.
Ash: Hey, uh… Have you seen a Ghost Pokémon around here called Marshadow? Ho-Oh can't remember where he left him, and Suicune says Marshadow can take care of himself, but Ho-Oh wants to do this whole thing with a feather and… it's important?
- In Oh God, Not Again!, Luna is the only person to figure out Harry and Sirius time-traveled. It seemed obvious to her. Harry himself who comes off like this to others, as most things he says are bat-shit insane yet accurate no matter how over-the-top they are (he knows what's going to happen because he's from the future).
- In another Harry Potter fanfiction, The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, the Quibbler's conspiracy theories concerning Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew aren't all wrong. They did guess correctly that Pettigrew was the real traitor who'd framed Sirius. That doesn't make the parts about rock-singers, a lovesick Dementor in disguise and a metamorphmagus any less ludicrous.
- In Anthropology, the human-obsessed Lyra goes to absurd lengths to try to prove that humans exist. She hasn't yet proven it in her world.
- In Ardashir's My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic / Silver John Crossover "My Little Balladeer" (available here), Lyra (once again) is not only right that humans are real, but gets to encounter two of them. Unfortunately, the one she teams up with is the Evil Sorcerer plotting to conquer Equestria, not the Wandering Minstrel hero who has been summoned to stop him.
- In All You Need Is Love Naomi Misora's paranoid conjectures turn out to be accurate more often than not.
- Mega Man Recut has this. In "The Strange Island Of Dr Wily", Dust Man makes a ridiculous rant about the Bermuda Triangle and how the island Wily is going to is haunted. Considering all the weird stuff that starts happening shortly after Wily and the Robot Masters arrive, he had a pretty good point.
- After rustlers storm Grace Glossy's farm and steal half of her livestock in the Rango fanfic Old West, Sheriff Rango believes them to be the same mercenaries who have been harassing the town of Mud lately and whom he has hired Rattlesnake Jake to keep away. He adds to Jake's duties protection over Grace, her son and their home despite the reluctance of both parties. Grace thinks the sheriff has too many screws loose to not consider it to be a coincidence, but Rango turns out to be right.
- In Intercom, the protagonist is picked on for thinking her emotions are little people inside her head. Sounds silly, right? Well, this is an Inside Out fan fiction, so...
- Kyle from Sporadic Phantoms walks a fine line between this and Entertainingly Wrong - he's wrong that the Sharing is an animal trafficking ring, but anyone who's read Animorphs knows he's right that birds are spying on them.
- Harry Potter is convinced he's the hero of a fairy tale in Storybook Hero. The gods watching proclaim him insane, though one points out he's also right.
- In a meta example, the author of notorious Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal correctly predicted in an author's note that Harry is the last Horcrux and will have to die to defeat Voldemort in the last book. She's not the only person who guessed this one, but given Tara's extremely questionable grasp of the canon and tendency towards bizarre "plot" elements, this is actually rather impressive.
- In the Ultra Fast Pony episode "A Library with No Twilight", Rarity claims that she's allergic to water. The only evidence she cites is the fact that she gets a cold every time she stands in the rain for an hour. At the end of the episode, she actually does get a nasty rash on her face. "I told you I was allergic!"
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, Tristan mistakes a reference to Lord of the Flies (since they're a bunch of teenagers on an island) to one for "that movie with the evil ring and the hobbits", and is immediately lambasted for thinking those would be on the island. The episode promptly notes that both are on the island: the Millennium Ring, which is an evil ring, and Yugi, who is really short.
- All Guardsmen Party: Twitch's Properly Paranoid tendencies tend to leave him a little off in regular life, but he can be quite prescient when it comes to plot twists.
- In "What's In The Box", Twitch was convinced that the titular box was full of Orks and the non-PC Guard Regiment were all Orks in disguise (The actual Orks they were fighting were 'Double Orks'). He was right on both counts, although the Guard Regiment were technically humans getting more orky because of their use of the Orks in 'The Box'.
- When the crew was transporting a Zoanthrope and being attacked by ghost tyranids during Warp transit, he claimed that the Daemons and Tyranids had teamed up to become 'Daemonids'. The crew later discover that the Zoanthrope they were carrying had in fact been possessed by a Daemon.
- Whatever Happened to Elfstar?: Brother Raymond is a typical example of The Fundamentalist who thinks that Tabletop games are evil occult tools, but Debbie notes he at least has a point about some things:
She’s listened to Brother Raymond preach on about the
occult powers of rock music
and
Dungeons & Dragons
. And he’s a crazy guy with a moustache ten years out of fashion, but some of what he says makes sense. He talks about power and, yeah, wasn’t that what she was always after? Wasn’t that why she let Marcie tag along after her those twelve long, precious years? Wasn’t that what she never had, growing up with her father always at the corner of her eye?
- In Shadow the Hedgehog - First Class, Sticks manages to figure out that Shadow is a government experiment; not because she found any viable evidence, mind you, but because she's an Insane Conspiracy Theorist who suspects everything and just so happened to be right this one time.
- In chapter 13 of Squad Goals, Sabrina, Max, and Kim are participating in an escape room but find out that a few of a clues weren't replaced. Kim thinks that one of the keys might be hidden in a bowl of fruit, so he spends the entire chapter eating the fake fruits to find it. Near the end when the teens run out of clues, Sabrina notices that Kim is about to eat a fake eggplant he got from the fruit bowl which is very out of place. Sure enough, the missing key was in the fake eggplant.
- Parents of Ponyville features four different accounts of what happened at a parent-teacher conference. The two parents both give obviously biased, self-serving accounts, while the teacher Cheerilee gives a relatively plausible story, and the child Terry tells a nonsensical story about flying through space fighting aliens. It's later implied that Terry's story was the true one.
- The Chaotic Masters: When the Oracle Twins are giving Jake an Infodump about the Chaotic Masters and get to the part tying into Monkey King's origin, he has a flashback to Professor Rotwood giving a lecture on the subject, and is shocked to realize that the man was actually correct in one of his rants for once.
- The SPY×FAMILY fanfic Tin Foil Hat has Ewin Egeburg wearing tin foil to protect his mind from mind-reading aliens. The rest of his classmates think he read too many comics, but secret telepath Anya finds out that the tin foil does block her powers from reading Ewin's mind. However, this causes Anya to think Ewin does know she's a telepath, so (taking a page from her parents' memories regarding their double lives) she tries to kill Ewin so he couldn't tell anyone or blackmail her.
- The Zootopia fic The Fox and the Rabbit has a variation: after Judy and Nick's very new relationship is made public thanks to a paparazzo at Gazelle's concert, Judy's parents are contacted by her mentally-ill Conspiracy Theorist Uncle Benny, who read the newspaper's early edition and twisted the story into a fox going savage and attacking her. When they contact Judy about it, Judy dismisses this to them as Benny tending to "exaggerate". It's not until they travel to Bunnyburrow the next day that her parents reveal just how much Benny told them: he knew about Nick's past as a con artist and his ties to the mob, having had run-ins with him and Finnick more than once when they were pulling a scam.
Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
- Anarchy TV: When Frank opens Reverend Wright's safe, he finds evidence of a right-wing Christian Supremacy movement that has been secretly assassinating prominent left-wing leaders.
- The Big Lebowski, true to form, features a complicated example. After learning of the disappearance of the titular Big Lebowski's wife, head-in-the-clouds stoner the Dude casually suggests to his friends that she probably kidnapped herself. Walter, the PTSD stricken (or so he likes to believe) Vietnam veteran latches onto this theory and stubbornly maintains it as if the Dude was speaking the iron-clad truth even when the evidence (including a toe in the mail) begins to pile up suggesting otherwise, much to the Dude's horror. Turns out that technically she didn't actually kidnap herself (she just left for a weekend and didn't tell anyone) but the Nihilists, who were friends of hers, knew this and were faking the whole thing to try and bluff money out of the Big Lebowski. So the Dude was kind-of right originally and Walter was kind-of right to keep believing it.
- In The Big Short, Michael Burry earns skepticism, derision, and rebellion from his mentor and his investors for shorting the housing market, but he refuses all attempts to pull out and is eventually proven correct when the bubble bursts.
Dear Lawrence,
Your profits totaling $489 million from Scion Capital have been deposited into your account.
You're welcome.
- In The Cabin in the Woods, Marty is The Stoner, always talking about the "puppeteers" and how he isn't going to be controlled by them. It turns out the characters are being manipulated, and it goes way deeper than even Marty guessed.
- In the film Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson's character prints a newsletter called "Conspiracy Theory", filled with conspiracy theories about anything and everything under the sun. Everyone, possibly even including himself, thinks he's just another crackpot with an axe to grind. Then the assassins start chasing him.
- Dark City provides one of the most shocking examples: everyone believes Detective Eddie Walenski has been driven mad by the stress of his job, the horror of the serial killer case he'd been working on, and other pressures. Walenski, on the other hand, keeps saying that there is no case, his wife is not his wife, that things keep changing on a nightly basis, that everyone's past has been erased, and the only way out of the trap they're all in is to kill oneself. He is, of course, utterly and completely correct.
- In Dark Skies, the couple being terrorized goes to see Edwin Pollard, a ufologist. At first, they clearly aren't impressed by him, as he lives in a cluttered, messy apartment surrounded by cats and discusses alien invasion as casually as one would discuss the weather. However, they quickly realize that a lot of symptoms commonly experienced by alien abductees are exactly what they and their children are experiencing. By the end of the movie, he's proven completely right.
- Disney's RocketMan: NASA tries to time the Aires mission so the crew can complete its mission between anticipated storms on Mars. Fred's data analysis shows that the next storm will arrive earlier than anticipated, but he's disregarded until Bud sticks up for him.
- Dr. Strangelove — General "Buck" Turgidson comes off like an unhinged paranoid goofball, but darned if he isn't right about the Russian ambassador spying in the War Room.
- Dragonball Evolution: When his teacher asks him about the solar eclipse, Goku responds that it's actually the Namekians, a race of aliens that nearly destroyed the Earth 2000 years ago. The entire class laughs at him, but later, he's proven right as Piccolo later comes back from the dead and tries to kill everyone on Earth.
- Eternals: Thena is afflicted by Mahd Wy'ry, which causes her to speak about dooming other planets and fight the other Eternals. Once the others learn that their true mission is to sacrifice planets to the Celestials and that Thena's Mahd Wy'ry is a result of her memory wipe not fully working, they apologize to her for dismissing her ramblings.
- The aptly nicknamed Crazy Ralph in the first two Friday the 13th films repeatedly warns people about "Camp Blood" to no avail, and eventually gets killed by Jason. He gets a couple of "successors" in later films.
- In Ghostbusters II, Venkman interviews 'fake' psychics on a little-watched cable show — but one of his two guests actually turns out to be a real psychic, and correctly predicts the events surrounding Vigo and his plans for the world.
- At one point Good Burger, a dog runs up to Ed, who reads his barking as "A bunch of clowns are stranded on the highway with a broken radiator". Dexter tells him not to be stupid and that the dog's just hungry, so they feed the dog a Mondo Burger. When the dog refuses to eat it, they feed him a Good Burger, which is how they find something suspicious about Mondo Burger. At the end of the scene, Gilligan Cut to a bunch of clowns, standing by a broken car, wondering where the dog went.
- In The Happening, the plants really were the culprit, just as the somewhat eccentric character claims in the beginning.
- This exchange from A Hard Day's Night: Ringo:
Any of you lock a man in the cupboard?
John and Paul:
A man? Don't be soft.
Ringo:
Well,
somebody
did.
[leaves]
George: [looks in cupboard, closes door, comes back]
He's right, y'know.
John: There you go
.
- In the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, one of Luna Lovegood's weird magical creatures turns out to be real.
- Russell Casse from Independence Day is regarded as a Cuckoolander for saying that he was abducted by aliens, and characters roll their eyes at him, even when he is addressing a group of refugees from an alien invasion, standing outside the no-longer-secret Area 51.
Reporter: Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. have been left in ruins.
Russel Casse: Good God! I've been sayin' it. I've been sayin' it for ten damn years. Ain't I been sayin' it, Miguel? Yeah, I've been sayin' it.
- In Land of the Lost, Will suspects the alien is lying to them based on his policy of "never trust anyone wearing a tunic". The others dismiss his concerns, but later we find out that not only was he an imprisoned criminal but part of his punishment was to wear a tunic as a symbol of his distrust.
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action: Daffy Duck believes that Damien Drake is a super-spy whose secret identity is an actor who plays a super-spy. DJ believes it to be nonsense, but later finds it out to be true.
- In Love Actually, grungy Casanova Wannabe Colin has a truly daft plan to score chicks by visiting America, where he believes his British accent will make him irresistible to women. He is thoroughly and rightly mocked for this idea; he attempts it and it works exactly as he expected.
- In Men in Black, this is how J gets the job — him and a group of straight-laced soldiers are put into two tests. The first test is a written one; the soldiers fight to get comfortable and write on their legs, J drags the (metal) table over to his seat. The second test is target practice; the soldiers go gung-ho on the random aliens, J shoots a little girl and explains that her being out among the others in the middle of the night carrying highly-advanced books probably means she's the real threat. Later material reveals he's quite right!
- MonsterVerse:
- In Godzilla (2014), Joe Brody's obsession with his wife's death has left him more than a little nutty, but he was still right about the cover up.
- Dr. Serizawa has been claiming since the 2014 movie that Godzilla is in fact a guardian of Earth's natural balance and that him staying alive is key to mankind's survival, but it isn't until the ending of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) that he's proven right.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, Bernie Heyes is a crazy conspiracy theorist, where majority of his theories are wrong (for one, he believes tap water is used to dumb down the population), but he was right that Apex Cybernetics is plotting something sinister to provoke Godzilla.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
- At first it seems like the guard at the French castle has no idea what the Holy Grail even is, yet his claim that "we've already got one" turns out to be the truth.
- Sir Bedevere's Insane Troll Logic about identifying witches by comparing their weight to a duck proves, at least in the instance shown, to be correct. The accused does indeed weigh the same as a duck, and admits "'Twas a fair cop" before being dragged away to be burned. Except it turns out the scales are clearly unbalanced, as seen after the mob carries the witch away. It's part of the joke.
- In the horror film Mother's Day, the eponymous character is the matriarch of a sadistic band of psychopaths, who is terrified of an imaginary monster named "Queenie". Little is made of this, until the main characters appear to have escaped danger...
- Our Miss Brooks: Miss Brooks' wacky landlady, Mrs. Davis, often gives good advice. In The Movie Grand Finale she plays a critical role in Miss Brooks' finally marrying Mr. Boynton and living Happily Ever After.
- In Pacific Rim, Hermann claims that the rate of the kaiju attacks is increasing exponentially, and will continue to do so until kaiju are attacking every hour. His prediction sounds like a completely ludicrous extrapolation, but it turns out to be completely accurate, right down to his final prediction that eventually multiple kaiju will attack at once.
- In Pod, Ed and Layla's brother Martin is implied to be a paranoid schizophrenic, who suddenly calls Ed one day telling him that he found something that killed the dog he had with him in his remote Maine cabin. Ed, a licensed therapist, doesn't believe that there's any actual threat, and assumes that it is Martin's mental illness flaring up again. This despite the fact that Martin claims he captured the creature that killed the dog and locked it in the basement — and Layla can hear something moving around downstairs. Turns out Ed should have believed Martin, as there totally is a monster, and it kills Ed.
- In Red (2010), Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich) is more than a little paranoid. Over the course of the movie, he thinks a helicopter is following them, that the CIA is tracing a phone call made on a pay phone, and that a woman at the airport is actually an assassin who is following them. None of the other characters believe him, but as it turns out, he's 100% correct, every time. Frank also tells Sarah when she meets Marvin that he believes he was part of a top-secret mind control experiment, and as it turns out he was being given daily doses of LSD for years.
- Rosemary's Baby: This happens to Rosemary. It turns out her neighbors were indeed part of a satanic cult that, with the help of her own husband, impregnated her with the son of Satan during a creepy ritual and were forcing her to stay on a disgusting diet to ensure that her hellspawn would be born strong and healthy.
- In Scanners II: The New Order, when Peter Drak informs David Kellum of Commander Forrester's bad intentions, David dismisses it with "You're crazy!". Drak points out that while that may be true, it doesn't mean that he's wrong.
- Mose Harper in The Searchers is looked on by everyone as a crazy old coot and is actually shown to be wrong on a couple of occasions at the beginning of the movie (about Ethan Edwards having gone to California and about the cattle-rustlers), but later on, on two occasions, he supplies crucial information about the whereabouts of Chief Scar and his camp.
- In A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), insanely paranoid Aunt Josephine turns out to be Properly Paranoid when every single ridiculous-sounding thing she worried about becomes an obstacle for the heroes.
- In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), despite being a crazy old man who lives in the woods, Crazy Carl's absolutely right in the belief that there's a "Blue Devil" that roams across Green Hills.
- Stargate: Daniel Jackson is first showing being laughed at and his audience walking out when he completely rejects the Egyptological consensus on the origin and antiquity of ancient Egyptian culture during a lecture. It is heavily implied that he's living on the cusp of poverty due to his eccentric theories (that's most probably because he can't get a good academic job). When he travels to the other planet and sees the pyramid, he sighs "I knew it", his theories fully vindicated (although even he didn't explicitly claim aliens were behind ancient Egypt).
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Roger, having a Freak Out over his wife Jessica playing patty-cake with Marvin Acme, tries to claim that "Someone must have made her do it!" Later on, Jessica admits to Eddie that Roger's boss R.K. Maroon wanted to blackmail Acme, so he had her pose for the patty-cake pictures by threatening to fire Roger.
Music Videos
- The music video to "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Foil" has him rant off the typical government/alien conspiracy theories while wearing an aluminum foil hat at a cooking show. The director appears to be annoyed that he's ruining the show... until he calls two guys in black suits and sunglasses to sedate and take Weird Al away. The director then takes off his human face, revealing himself to be a reptilian.
Pro Wrestling
Puppet Shows
- In an Ernie and Bert sketch on Sesame Street, Ernie prepares to take a bath. At first, he takes things one would expect to have in the bathtub with him, such as a bar of soap, a towel, and his Rubber Duckie. However, he soon starts taking things such as a flashlight, an umbrella, and Bert's bowling ball. When Bert sees these things, he asks Ernie why he's taking them into the bathtub. Ernie tells Bert he took the flashlight in case a fuse blows out, the umbrella in case it starts to rain in the bathroom, and Bert's bowling ball in case somebody comes by asking to borrow it. Bert dismisses Ernie's idea as silly, but as Ernie begins to bathe himself, all the stuff he described begins to happen.
Roleplay
- In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Mr. Morrison is able to perceive the Mass Super-Empowering Event while the other adults cannot. This is because he vapes. Combined with his strange behaviour and ramblings, he struggles to have people take him seriously.
- In Semper Ad Meliora, Lelouch's resident Mad Scientist, Kenshin Jaeger, specializes in psionics (which are real powers in this setting, though mostly regarded as superstition) and believes that he is being hunted by multiple conspiracies (which is mostly shown as a sign of mental instability. Lelouch's induction into the Walpurgis Club reveals that at least one of these conspiracies is real, and that they have started sponsoring pirate attacks on Lelouch's fief of New Caledonia.
- In We Are Our Avatars, Kari points out that, technically, it was Arcie's fault for letting the other Legendaries in the Pokémon world grow up to be so dysfunctional. Arcie agrees.
Tabletop Games
- Blackbirds RPG: "Mother's Watch" causes the afflicted to become increasingly paranoid and childish, eventually becoming convinced that there exists a grand conspiracy to replace ordinary people with monstrous doppelgangers and throwing tantrums if this belief is questioned. It only affects those who have glimpsed the servants of the Allmother, a monstrous Deity of Human Origin whose ultimate goal is to Kill and Replace every single person and whose creations have already infiltrated every level of society in several regions. As a result these conspiracy theories are often fairly accurate, but the people making them are so obviously deranged and paranoid that nobody really believes them.
- In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Malkavian clan are like this, as they are all insane in one way or another, but tend to have a hidden insight that is frequently ignored by the more sane clans due to their weirdness.
- Warhammer 40,000: The Adeptus Mechanicus carries out incredibly bizarre rituals to assuage the "machine spirits" of various machines. It's heavily implied, however, that "machine spirits" are real, at least in a manner of speaking - whether machines actually have spirits within them (this would be far from the strangest thing in this universe) or whether they're actually rudimmentary artificial intelligences, the tech-priest rituals actually work for their intended purpose, and not performing them can result in all sorts of unpleasant outcomes.
- This also applies more broadly to the Imperium's obsession with religious iconography, which is often lampshaded as absurd and useless superstition. However, the setting also contains literal demons that tend to corrupt everything they come into contact with and runs on a certain level of Your Mind Makes It Real and Clap If You Believe, so the Imperium's religious devotion sometimes does actually give them just enough of an edge to win.
Theatre
- Rosencrantz of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The general rule is that Guildenstern is the smarter of the two but talks in circles, while Rosencrantz is a bit dim but usually hits the nail on the head (even if he doesn't know it himself).
- A perfect example of this is the beggar woman in Sweeney Todd. She has the greatest awareness of the characters' secrets in the musical but people disregard her because she seems crazy. Tragic when you find out why she seems to know so much.
- A Very Potter Musical, and this is quite the spoiler: Draco insists that Hogwarts is a terrible school and he's going to get transferred to Pigfarts, which appears to be him making up completely random nonsense for attention: Pigfarts is on Mars, is run by a lion named Rumbleroar, which is suspiciously similar to Dumbledore's name, and of course no one else has ever heard of it. When it's suggested Draco go to Pigfarts and leave the heroes alone, this prompts Draco to flip out and berate Harry for not having a spaceship. But then, near the end of the play, Rumbleroar actually appears to Dumbledore and flies him off to Mars, and in A Very Potter Sequel, it turns out that Luna is familiar with Pigfarts as well.
- Their predecessors, Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot, have a similar dynamic, with Vladimir as the misguided intellectual and Estragon as the understanding fool.
Toys
- BIONICLE
- Vezon has this passage, as he and a Ragtag Band of Misfits move down a tunnel:
Vezon: I hear something too.
Roodaka: Shut up.
Vezon: And I see something as well. But since you aren't interested...
Roodaka: We're not.
Vezon: Personally, I always find my comments and observations most interesting. You haven't truly lived until you have seen the world through the eyes of madness. Why, half the time I don't know if what I see is what's really there, or what I wish was there...or what I pray, I beg, I plead is not.
- Other characters, all thoroughly irritated, discuss killing him to shut him up.
Vezon: But, since you seem to have no interest, well, then, I won't tell you that the floor is moving. You can find out on your own.
- Cue trap being sprung.
- Kiina strongly believed in life on other planets, and wanted to leave her Crapsack World Desert Punk planet and visit them. Naturally, everyone thought she was nuts until Mata Nui showed up.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa:
- In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Yasuhiro is a bit odd and rather ditzy but one of his predictions is more correct than he realizes. At the start of Chapter 4, he predicts no more murders will occur. This being only halfway through the game, the characters (and the audience) doubt that, but he is right in that there are no more homicides. Sakura's death was a suicide. Mukuro's murder had happened weeks earlier. Makoto survives his execution and the mastermind willingly executes herself. And if that prediction was wrong, he also predicts that he and Makato's children will have the same mother. In the bad ending, that is exactly what happens (although it's Zig-Zagged as that ending ended up being Makoto's Daydream Surprise).
- Akane in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is far from being one of the more book-smart members of the cast but has fantastic intuition that occasionally leads to breakthroughs in a case. In Chapter 2 when she and Hajime discover a high window that could be used as a potential escape route for the killer, she says that the only person that could get up there would be a Ninja. She ends up being proven completely right, as the killer ended up being the Ultimate Swordswoman Peko, who used a Stepping-Stone Sword to escape through it.
- Miu Iruma in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony ends up inadvertently leading the class to the correct conclusion through her investigative efforts, such as discovering the killer's trap in the first case using a drone she built to avoid doing any actual legwork. Additionally, she manages to accurately finger the killer in every trial she participates in but lacks the deductive skills to answer the how and why.
- Kaito Momota in V3 was a Ditzy Genius like Miu but an Excellent Judge of Character with an accurate and consistent read of the emotions and motivations of other people, although his total lack of logic often undermines this. In Chapter 1, when Kaito is gathering up a group of students to fight Monokuma, he looks Maki up and down for about two seconds and instantly concludes, "Yeah, you look like you know how to fight." As far as anyone knows at this point, Maki is the Ultimate Child Caregiver, probably the last person you'd think would be any good in a fight. One chapter later, it's revealed that she'd been lying about her talent. She's actually the Ultimate Assassin.
- In Double Homework, Henry says at one point that he was looking for the protagonist all over “summer school,” which according to him is separate from the regular school building. He described a place where all the other kids in summer school are studying. He dismisses Henry at the time, but when he gets expelled from his summer school class, he starts to attend the same summer school that Henry described.
- The Fruit of Grisaia: Both Makina and especially Michiru are capable of talking a lot of nonsense, however sometimes their insight is spot on.
- Michiru is the one who manages to guess (on pure gut instinct) the true nature of Yuuji's occupation suspecting him to be somekind of spy or terrorist, which considering that he works as an agent for a secret government organization, is not far off the mark.
- Makina accurately guesses that after the initial outburst of hostility Yumiko will mellow out.
- Hatoful Boyfriend:
- Anghel Higure is a bird who's... not quite right in the head. Just for starters, he's convinced that he's a Fallen Angel and the heroine is his reincarnated love Edel Blau, regularly crashes through glass windows and loudly proclaims that he can sense demon spores that must be eradicated at once, and treats even the most pedestrian decisions as life-and-death matters. However, in the Bad Boys Love route, it turns out that at least one part of his ramblings actually has validity to it: the "demon spores" he keeps on ranting about and senses the most strongly in the infirmary were most likely the Charon virus Doctor Shuu was preparing to infect Ryouta with in the same infirmary, which indicates that he can actually sense diseases/viruses that no one else can.
- There's a scene where Anghel can talk to Nageki Fujishiro, who is baffled. Partly because Anghel is... being Anghel, but also because he's talking about things from before Nageki's death five years ago that he should have no way of knowing. It goes far beyond this, in fact: After you've completed Bad Boy's Love, going back to the regular routes and listening to Anghel again will leave you with the mind-blasting realization that everything he says, which once came off as complete nonsense, describes the events of that plot perfectly, leaving you with the impression that perhaps Anghel is the only sane bird at St. Pigeonation's.
- In Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, Rihatsu Shinpuku, the mother of Raiko, the main character, is often rather childish and eccentric, such as trying to get Raiko to dress up in a cat costume for her friends' Halloween party. After reading a pre-game entry about Kamen throwing a paper airplane at Raiko in class, Rihatsu comes to the conclusion that Kamen is secretly in love with Raiko. Rihatsu's conclusion seems entirely baseless, but the good ending(in which Kamen kisses Raiko on the cheek) and post-game extra content suggest that she's right.
- In GENBA no Kizuna, Hiro Shiratake, from Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair makes a cameo in which he gives testimony about witnessing the victim being killed by a T-Rex animatronic biting down on him, and comes off as obnoxious and arrogant as in the original game, albeit with his worst qualities under wraps. He delivers a completely exaggerated account of the murder, complete with nonsensical metaphors, like how the victim was as motionless as "a tranquilized woodpecker," but is right about one key detail. The victim was not moving prior to the bite, and in fact was already dead at the time, meaning the murder was carried out elsewhere.
- Steins;Gate uses this as its primary plot element. Protagonist and self-proclaimed Mad Scientist Kyouma Hououin (birth name: Okabe Rintarou) sees conspiracy in everything, blaming even minor, everyday inconveniences on the shadowy machinations of the world-spanning Organization, but since he's pretty much harmless, those around him just let it slide. So when he starts raving that SERN has been researching Time Travel with the ultimate goal of enslaving humanity, and that his microwave is the only thing that can stop them...
- Throughout the Zero Escape series the protagonists will be bombarded with conspiracy theory, parapsychology, obscure philosophy, and occultism. A few characters in particular (like June and Lotus in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors) will unload long explanations that sound like utter nonsense at the drop of a hat. Their actual In-Universe accuracy rate is about 75% — and even when one of their theories is completely wrong it still hints at the truth.
Web Animation
- Battle for Dream Island: In TPOT 3, Clock is a massive fan of Winner and is eager to have Winner perform onstage as part of their amusement park attraction. Bottle, a quirky contestant with a childlike sense of optimism and cheerfulness, advises him not to push it, especially because Winner is perfectly content with his obscurity and their team already had a willing performer in Yellow Face. Clock disregards her advice, and when Two arrives to judge their attraction, Clock tries to push Winner onstage. Winner refuses to perform, resulting in Clock's team having nothing to show for their attraction and being up for elimination the next episode.
- One chapter of Broken Saints features eccentric egg farmer Masayuki, who tells a silly story to Kamimura (one of our heroes), and is hardly seen again. As it turns out, the moral of that story is the central message of the whole series.
- Monkey Wrench: The episode "Ghost Egg" features Nobert, an incredibly odd fellow who hires Beebz and Shrike to transport him to a distant space station so he can get away from something he calls the "Ghost Egg". Nobert's fearful ramblings about this thing seem like nonsense at first, but as it turns out, an invisible, egg-shaped craft really is pursuing him. When the ship reveals itself at the end of the episode, Beebz and Shrike are left dumbstruck by the realization that the Ghost Egg is real.
- Red vs. Blue:
- A lot of the seemingly crazy things Caboose says actually turn out to be right (at least to some degree) in the long run. For example, in the first season he thinks that Church is "a gay robot", and six years later comes the big Reveal that Church was in fact an A.I. rather than a human. After a time travel episode, he also notes that "Time... line? Time isn't made out of lines. It is made out of circles. That is why clocks are round." which actually fits with the eventual series theme of events going in circles, including a Stable Time Loop.
- In Season 8, Doc, Agent Washington, and the Meta are heading to Sidewinder to track down Church. Wash stops the jeep, and notes that there might be a trap waiting, one set up by a freelancer. Doc suggests that Wash noticing the trap might be part of the trap, but Wash assures him that he's overthinking things. Then it turns out that they stopped the jeep in the center of a circle of proximity mines. Doc manages to say, "Told you so" just before the kaboom.
Webcomics
Web Original
- According to Season of Chaos from The Wanderer's Library, Emperor Joshua Norton wasn't crazy, just from a different universe where he actually was emperor.
- In Worm, Glaistig Uaine is a psychotic mass murderer who thinks she's a faerie Queen, and makes a number of bizarre claims that no-one takes seriously, though they humor her because she's incredibly dangerous. Pretty much everything she says turns out to be foreshadowing, though it's actually caused by aliens, not faeries.
Web Videos
Real Life
- Happens fairly often in mathematics and science. Quantum mechanics is surely Cloud Cuckoo Land material, and it's been proven correct at every test. Relativity is similar, if a LITTLE easier to understand.
- Dr. Michio Kaku famously said "It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."
- Niels Bohr: "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
- Also Niels Bohr: "We are all agreed that [quantum theory] is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."
- Edgar Allan Poe's 1848 prose poem "Eureka," where, falling into dementia and having professed skepticism about mathematics as a tool of scientific discovery, he uses his own "ratiocination" (read: free association with elements of proto-logic) to decide that the universe had arisen from a singularity, that there were celestial objects so dense that light cannot escape, that many of what were then thought to be nebulae were in fact galaxies as large as the Milky Way itself, that the solar system was at the edge of the Milky Way rather than the center, and that Newtonian gravity was a special case of a broader property of matter. Of course, there are also many, many errors, but it's still pretty impressive.
- This Cracked article had 5 cases of people who had 'insane' theories that was proven to be true.
- Charles Manson, the infamous head of the Manson Family and all-around crazy megalomaniac, vacillates between being all of the above and accurately pinpointing issues in world affairs decades before they happen when asked for his commentary, as seen, for example, in his discussion on wealthy elites.
- Snopes spends its time debunking Urban Legends, which for the most part you'd be a fool to believe. But a small but non-negligible percentage of the stories they've researched actually turn out to be true. A prime example is this story of FBI agents trying to order pizza in an insane asylum— sounds like a joke, but to their astonishment it was confirmed by the FBI. As the site's authors observe:
"…no matter how bizarre, far-fetched, or incredible a story may seem at first glance, it should never be entirely discounted without at least some effort being made to verify it."
- Emperor Norton was infamous for claiming to be the "Emperor" of the United States, making ridiculous decrees such as abolishing the United States Congress and declaring that anyone who utters the word "Frisco" (as a synonym for San Francisco) be fined 25 USDnote Roughly 500 USD today. That said, one of his more well-known decrees was the construction of an Oakland-San Francisco suspension bridge as well as a tunnel connecting the same. Both ideas would be realized years after his death in the form of the Bay Bridge and the BART Transbay Tube.
- Martha Mitchell claimed that the CIA drugged and kidnapped her so that she wouldn’t tell the media that the US President and his staff were engaged in illegal activities. She was referred to a psychiatrist who diagnosed her as suffering from paranoid delusions. Then Watergate leaked, showing that there were illegal activities, and evidence later came out that the CIA did drug and kidnap Mitchell to try to keep it a secret. The "Martha Mitchell effect" is named after her to describe how "sometimes, improbable reports are erroneously assumed to be symptoms of mental illness".
Bottle and Goku
Goku is upset at Bottle for her wacky team name conception to the point where he refuses her ideas, and selects Stan's instead, which takes seemingly a long time to work. Mind you, if he'd actually bothered to accept her idea from the start, he would have seen how useful it would have been.
Alternative Title(s): The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right, The Crazy One Was Right, The Loony Was Right, The Cloud Cookoolander Was Right
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