I can’t remember who, but I read a while ago that some people have come up with a list of all the plot devices seen in art (film, TV, books). I don’t know if thats possible but I’m wondering about this particular plot device.
The character (usually main character) acts erratically and weirdly. Everyone assumes the character is crazy. Towards the end of the film/movie/book you find out that not only is the character sane, but their weird and erratic behavior makes perfect sense because they have some kind of superpower or secret knowledge and are using that info.
Examples may be the night visions episode ‘patterns’, the movie 23 with Jim Carrey, 12 monkeys, the machinist, etc.
Then you have the opposite type of film where the main character appears to be sane and thinks they are sane, but it turns out they are insane (shutter island, fight club).
That is a good website, but the page ‘mistaken for insane’ also has a lot of good tropes too. The trope ‘Cassandra Truths’ also seems to fit. Maybe theres more than one definition for it.
It seems to me that, say, Lord Shojo and River Tam are two completely different sorts of things. Shojo is sane, but seems to be insane because he actively pretends to be, because he’s found it politically advantageous for his enemies to underestimate him. River, meanwhile, is sane, but seems to be insane, because the world around her (or at least, some aspects of it) is insane, and because she has a creepy level of knowledge and awareness of that insanity.
Not exactly a name for the plot device, but as a general description of the type of person described in the OP, the term “crazy like a fox” might apply.
Yes, exactly as described in the TV Tropes article:
It’s also a given that a lot of people give crazy people a wide berth lest they flip out on them. A lot of people are aware of this and choose to take advantage of it, although their reasons for doing so vary from one character to the next. Sometimes the apparent nutcase is actually perfectly sane,