Basic Trope: A character is defeated by taking advantage of their deranged nature.
- Played Straight: Alice suffers serious disconnect with reality. Bob manages to take her down when she starts arguing with her hallucinations mid-fight.
- Exaggerated: Alice is so disconnected from reality that she doesn't even notice Bob attacking her.
- Downplayed:
- Bob gets a few hits in while Alice is distracted by hallucinations, but she is able to recover before he can deliver the coup de grace.
- Bob and Alice are both crazy, but Bob isn’t as crazy as Alice, which despite not being enough to easily take her out, does allow him a clear edge in the fight.
- Alice’s hallucinations don’t make her helpless.
- Justified: Bob is a Guile Hero and deliberately provokes her into situations where her madness will be debilitating.
- Inverted:
- Being insane makes Alice extremely unpredictable, making her a very real threat to Bob.
- Being insane gives Alice insights in her chosen field of battle that Bob just won't ever have, making the match even.
- In the series' setting, "Magic A" Is "Magic A" and it's Power Born of Madness. Alice may ramble on about poop trains, but she is a Person of Mass Destruction who can vaporize half of the planet with a wave of her hand. It's really hard to tell if being sane is an advantage next to that.
- Alice is crazy, sure, but she is functional and (most important of all) not stupid. Bob may have a hundred ideas of how to beat her in a mind game, but the one that involves exploiting her insanity isn't as 100% sure-fire as he thinks it will be.
- Alice is the World's Mightiest Warrior, The Juggernaut, a Super-Persistent Predator in human form and a Revenge Before Reason-obsessed nut job. If she wants you dead for whatever reason, your only options are to kill her (yeah, right) or kill yourself and deny her the sweet kill she is yearning, because any other option with a degree of sense (especially negotiation) will be violently rebuked.
- Subverted: Alice gets distracted by hallucinations in the middle of her fight with Bob, but it turns out she was faking it to lure Bob into doing something stupid.
- Double Subverted: Alice may not be mentally ill, but she still carries around massive issues related to her Freudian Excuse. Pushing these buttons lures her into a berserker rage in which Bob can easily outthink her.
- Parodied: Alice has an extreme case of Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!. One can defeat her by tossing a a coin in the other direction and telling her to fetch.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice has an unspecified mental disorder. It's so unspecified, in fact, that it's never obvious whether she is really mentally ill and, if so, if this helps or harms her.
- Averted: Alice's insanity does not affect her combat or tactical abilities.
- Lampshaded: "Alice, why on earth did you do that? Darnit, what wouldn't I give for her to be powerful and mentally stable?"
- Invoked: Charlie realizes that Alice's insanity makes her irrational and so sends Bob the Only Sane Man who's good at Awesomeness by Analysis, reasoning that if anyone can turn that irrationality against her, it's him.
- Exploited: Bob steals Alice's meds prior to their fight so she won't be functioning at full capacity.
- Defied:
- Alice takes medication to make sure she's fighting on the same level as Bob.
- Alice's insanity (and she can do because of it) makes her too dangerous to risk such a plan backfiring, so Bob decides to never exploit it.
- Discussed:Captain Bob: "Listen, team, we have a mission to apprehend Alice. Remember she's an escaped mental patient."
Corporal Charlie: "Oh heavens no, I don't want to deal with another psycho nutcase!"
Sergeant Diane: "Actually, I think we have an advantage over her, especially if she catches a breakdown during a fight. But again, who knows?" - Conversed: "Alice's insanity is definitely going to be the end of her. She can't stop treating her hallucinations as reality."
- Implied: Alice is never stated to have a mental disorder, but she displays several symptoms- and in the end, it's those symptoms that allow Bob to beat her.