"That's the problem. He's a brilliant lunatic, and you can't tell which way he'll jump. Like his game, he's impossible to analyze — you can't predict him, dissect him... which of course means he's not a lunatic at all."
— Anatoly Sergievsky, Chess
Some fighters have speed, some have strength. Proponents of Confusion Fu have unpredictability.
Their attacks and motions are random (or seem to be), making them difficult to read and predict. Perhaps their priorities and motivations are so different from your own that attempting to guess their next move doesn't work, or perhaps their bodies are structured in such an unfamiliar way that you do not recognize the movements that foretell a particular action.
They are the natural nemesis of those blessed with Awesomeness by Analysis. Stylish Confusion Fu fighters sometimes double as Dance Battlers. This style is often used by Bunny Ears Lawyers characters who have Success Through Insanity. And on larger scale, if moral standards of the fighting factions are mutually incomprehensible, everything can suddenly become a confusion fu styled stratagem.
In gaming, most of these characters tend to be Jack of All Stats characters, as their versatility makes them very unpredictable. Or it is Random Number God who makes the game unpredictable for both sides.
Sister Trope to Spanner in the Works, in a general sense. The reason why something Crazy Enough to Work might actually work. Refuge in Audacity is a favorite tactic. See also Drunken Master and Drunken Boxing, and for a more complicated version, the Kansas City Shuffle which relies on giving the victim false assurance that they can predict your moves. Compare Improv Fu. Contrast Strategy, Schmategy, where the randomness is unintentional. Not to be confused with What the Fu Are You Doing?, where the fighting style doesn't work because the fighter is incompetent at it.
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Animation
- Mechamato: The entertainer robot Amazeey specialises in making elaborate and dangerous labyrinths to trap and confuse his victims.
Board Games
- Chess:
- Often seen in the chess world. Many's the amateur who succeeds through offbeat play, and even at the grandmaster level, some players favour bizarre openings like 1. b4. A 19th-century example, William Potter, is described in Lasker's Manual of Chess:
Potter probably saw through the emptiness and the presumption of the style then dominating and with his style of play he seemed to call out to his contemporaries: "You want to beat me right from the start by force of your greater genius? Look! I make ridiculous moves, and yet you cannot beat me. Become, I pray you, more modest and more reasonable."- Though not nearly as often as popular culture would think it happens. While you can certainly irritate grandmasters with offbeat variants in the opening, leading them astray from their vast knowledge (and often crazy preparedness) about mainstream openings, trying confusion fu later in the game will way more often than not lose you the game in a single move without you even realizing it. The problem is that the general knowledge (as opposed to the specific knowledge of Lasker's time) got way more advanced during the last century.
- Chess-playing computers play like this — not bound to any strategy or school, but simply by picking the moves that will, in the long run, have the greatest chance of success. Or should have... Kasparov did win his 3rd and 4th games in a 4-game match against a computer by ensuring that there was no positive history for the computer to rely on in the games they'd played — and going into purer Shrodinger Fu than the computer was designed for netted him a win while playing black. Future iterations do not have this vulnerability; it is currently pretty much impossible for an unassisted human to beat a dedicated chess computer, and phone apps have won Grand Master tournaments by a landslide.
- Google's Go-playing program.
It completely ignores normal board control strategies and the current point balance while it made the moves it calculated were most likely to lead to final victory, and as a result nobody had any idea what the hell it was doing until it won. Several moves that were, in retrospect, core to its victory were thought to be mistakes at the time because they gave up points.
Card Games
- In Poker, the most dangerous players at the table are the ones who always call and raise at random. It's impossible to tell whether they have a good hand, so calling their raise is a very risky business — but at the same time, folding means you'll lose your earlier investment when they could easily just be sitting on a high card. Aside from that, online players who sit down at physical tables tend to completely ignore their opponents' physical expressions and focus on their betting patterns, simply because you can't read people online. This tends to throw off live players, though it can also create an exploitable weakness because the online players don't train themselves to get rid of their own tells.
Comic Books
- The Authority: This is one of the three ways to beat Midnighter, as it completely confuses the precognitive computers in his brain. (The other two are "Be better at Awesome by Analysis than he is" and "Be so powerful that it just doesn't matter if he predicts your moves or not.") Taken to extremes in the DC/Wildstorm crossover, where Midnighter takes one look at the Joker, tries to predict him and has a petit mal seizure (think of a computer lagging to a freezing halt, which was literally what (probably) happened here).
- In Veys and Barral's Baker Street — a parodic take on Sherlock Holmes — Holmes has to travel back from Ceylan to Bombay, with Moriarty trying to stop him. He openly admits planning is useless, and chooses to rely on a deck of cards upon which all sort of random actions have been written. Some of the things we see, though the cards are not read aloud, include a music hall number, performing a dragon dance (in the heart of India!) and sliding down an Himalayan mountain on an overturned grand piano. Moriarty is suitably distressed:
Moriarty: I HaTe tHeM.
- Batman:
- Batman himself has claimed that this is one of the reasons fighting the Joker can be so dangerous, even for a well-trained and experienced fighter. This is even more true for fighters who rely on reading and predicting their opponents moves as the Joker was able to catch Cassandra Cain, who was even better than her mother Lady Shiva, off-guard. In these instances, the only way to beat the Joker is to take a more simplistic approach or get him angry and let him attack you first.
Black Canary: What's wrong with her? I thought she could beat anybody? She should be able to drop the Joker in a hot New York minute.
Batman: Almost anybody. Batgirl reads body language. She knows what her opponents will do before they do it. She can read his too. But the Joker's body language makes no sense. It's jibberish. - This also extends to Joker's arsenal. Most villains have a gimmick that they'll stick to no matter what. Poison Ivy will always do something involving plants, Penguin will always do something involving birds and/or umbrellas, etc. Meanwhile, Joker will use guns, knives, explosives, whoopie cushions, buzzers, laughing gas, jet packs, fish, anything he feels like using or has within reach at the moment. Half the time they don't even work because of Rule of Funny.
- In one comic, Joker plays chess with Ra's Al Ghul. Despite Ra's being very, very good at chess, Joker beat him by using random moves which Ra's couldn't effectively counter. Ra's didn't seem too upset about it, however.
- Tim Drake managed to overcome Cassandra Cain's bodyreading ability by throwing out all style and just going with what felt natural, despite the fact that this is not how her abilities work.
- Batman himself is sometimes portrayed this way, not due to his moves being random, but due to the fact that he sticks to the shadows and employs gadgetry. You might know Batman is stalking you, but you don't know which direction that Batarang/gas grenade/grapple/fist is coming from. He's been known to, among other things, trick an opponent (like Wonder Woman's alternate universe counterpart, Superwoman) with super-breath into thinking he was using a smoke bomb to cover his escape. She simply inhales all of the smoke... whereupon Batman informs her that it was also anesthetic gas.
- Batman himself has claimed that this is one of the reasons fighting the Joker can be so dangerous, even for a well-trained and experienced fighter. This is even more true for fighters who rely on reading and predicting their opponents moves as the Joker was able to catch Cassandra Cain, who was even better than her mother Lady Shiva, off-guard. In these instances, the only way to beat the Joker is to take a more simplistic approach or get him angry and let him attack you first.
- The Quiz, from the appropriately named Brotherhood of Dada, had the superpower of "anything you haven't thought of yet". A particularly nonsensical example was the ability to turn people into toilets with flowers in them. In fact, her ability was so chaotic, it was only defeated by the power of Lists. The Doom Patrol fought her by running away and yelling out powers, so she couldn't use them.
- Deadpool
- He's chaotic to the extent that he once defeated the freakin' Taskmaster by sheer unpredictability — Tasky thought that Deadpool was about to get angry and sloppy, but he really just started on a dance number. True, Confusion Fu has already been proven to be an effective strategy against Taskmaster (for example, Daredevil used a similar trick to goad Taskmaster into jumping in front of a moving car), but Deadpool beat the Taskmaster by being Deadpool.
- In their next fight, Taskmaster didn't even bother trying to copy or predict Deadpool's moves, instead he copied the fighting style of the Punisher and used that against him, which was significantly more effective.
- In an issue of Green Lantern, Sinestro cites this as the key reason he can never beat Hal Jordan.
Sinestro: You're too blasted unpredictable. Set a plotter or a schemer in my path, I'll crush their bones to dust. You've escaped that fate not because of something as silly as willpower. Nor because of your prosaic notions of justice and morality. You've survived because your actions never make sense. Yet despite yourself — and this is the truly infuriating part — your instincts always see you through.
- Hellblazer: One of the main reason how John Constantine manages to outwit omniscient gods and Eldritch Abomination. His plans and strategies are so complicated and genius, even God didn't see it coming.
- May from The Interman knows many fighting styles and uses them at random — which makes her a very dangerous opponent for Van Meach, a Ditto Fighter who needs time to adapt to each new challenge.
- In the Justice League of America story arc where the league had to fight the Martian Manhunter's alter ego Fernus the Burning, Batman found a solution to fighting a shapeshifter who could predict your every move by reading your mind: bring in Plastic Man, a shapeshifter whose mind is so chaotic that his thoughts bear little connection to his actions.
- In the Brian Bendis series of Moon Knight, the title character can manifest the personalities of Captain America, Spider-Man, or Wolverine and, so doing, adopts their weapons and fighting styles. To say that this is unexpected by his opponents is an understatement. It also saves his life several times when fighting Count Nefaria. Plus, he's notoriously mentally unstable, and it shines in his fighting style and general actions being insane. Taskmaster (again) has refused to fight him after several intel mismatches, copying self-damaging moves by accident (Moon Knight's style involves eating a lot of hits to counter them harder, which Tasky hates) and finally having Moon Knight crashing a helicopter into a building to catch him off-guard.
Taskmaster: Good luck finding anyone in the city who's up for that kind of pain.
- Done in Regifted during a hapkido tournament; the main character takes a move from her sparring buddy, that she describes as idiotic, and it works; no-one would know to expect it.
- During a Secret Six/Suicide Squad crossover, Catman explains that he is able to hold up in his fight against Bronze Tiger because Bronze Tiger has "a defense for every style... and styles are for $%#@ing idiots." He then proceeds to take a big bite out of Bronze Tiger's jugular.
- Spider-Man: With his speed, agility, spider-sense and ability to climb or swing anywhere he wants, Spider-Man has often invoked this trope with opponents having difficulty predicting his movements. The main reason for his unpredictable fighting style actually is that he never really had to learn how to fight professionally, as he can always relay on his spider-sense in battles, telling him where to move and punch. When he lost his spider-sense once, he actually got some proper Kung-Fu training by Shang-Chi.
- In Watchmen, Dan says that Rorschach was a good fighter because he was unpredictable. Probably related to the fact that he's not quite sane.
- In a couple X-Wing Series books, it's stated that this trope is the main advantage of "ugly" starfighters. In a straight comparison, an ugly is a definitive Master of None, being cobbled together from spare parts of other fighters and having all the reliability you'd expect of that. But because seemingly every one is unique, and they bug out constantly, it makes them pretty unpredictable in combat — your targeting computer finally thinks it's got a tracer on this ship that isn't quite like anything in its database, and then its engine craps out for a second right before you can fire and your missiles streak directly in front of it.
Fan Works
- Socrates, Calvin & Hobbes: The Series' resident prankster, uses the Time Pauser during a climatic fight to appear "everywhere and nowhere", as the fic puts it.
- In Child of the Storm, this is Harry's strategic trademark, mixed in with frequent Indy Ploys and latterly, Xanatos Speed Chess, and along with his tendency (partly down to Doctor Strange's manipulations) to be in the right place at the right time, it's why he's such a Spanner in the Works to various villains — he's the wild card factor, because no one quite knows what he's going to do next. All they do tend to know is that it'll probably be completely nuts. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that when combined with a habit of not sharing changes in plan, it's also prone to derailing his allies' plans, and sometimes even his own. After one particular piece of attempted Xanatos Speed Chess goes horribly wrong in the sequel, he learns to moderate it by actually stopping and thinking first, and communicating — at which point the plans he comes up with often still qualify as this, because they're still just that nuts.
- DNMC has Fulhaus "Clu" Cluspaheadia. He sings, he dances, he uses his Semblance on whatever odds and ends he's got on him, he'll play a shell game using hats as the shells and strike once your guard is down. Clearly, he's not someone who'd be easy to nail in a fight.
- An Eye for an Eye: During his second run-in with Keith, Diego (already weakened) and Audrey struggle to fight off the hulking bear until Diego realizes that Keith is baffled by the sight of a tiger and hyena fighting together, so in a last-ditch effort to escape, he tells Keith at length how he and Audrey are the bestest of friends, causing the dumbfounded bear to laugh uncontrollably, which the duo uses as a distraction to run away from him.
- Failure (Thatlonelyguy2010): After the Scouts give a report on their first attempt to capture the Hunter Titan, Zackly orders that the Scouts schedule expeditions randomly to prevent the Hunter Titan from noticing a pattern of when the Scouts make capture attempts.
Zackly: Very well, then you shall continue as usual commander Erwin. Although I say your expeditions should be changed time wise. If the Hunter Titan is as intelligent as you claim, it may notice a pattern of when you attempt to capture it. So I'd prefer if the expeditions were more random in nature.
- Fate/Long Night: Queen Nymeria Martell is incredibly agile and both her body and her spear are extremely flexible, allowing her to attack from unexpected angles.
- Friendship Is Aura: Unlike in the Pokémon games, Lucario has access to his entire moveset, which any Pokémon player can tell you is a lot of moves. This is how Lucario beats most of his big opponents.
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
- The central strategy of Harry Potter's Chaos Army. Harry lacks Draco Malfoy's cultural knowledge and political acumen, and he doesn't quite match Hermione Granger's raw aptitude for learning. Harry actively courts traitors and sows confusion among all three armies while training his own soldiers to adapt to the chaos. It works... most of the time.
- Most people — especially his enemies — suspect that Dumbledore's apparent insanity is an act to mask his true intentions. However, some speculate that he may actually have cracked along the way...
- In A Horse for the Force, the Echani people are insanely skilled at reading body language, especially in combat. But Ranma knows so many styles and can switch between them flawlessly that they simply can't keep up.
- In Juxtapose, Izuku's opponents at the Sports Festival struggle to figure out what his Quirk actually is after he topples a zero-point robot with a touch, generates massive gusts of wind, and propels himself forward at Super-Speed. They're all stunned to learn that it's just Minor Banishment at the event's end.
- KibblesTasty: Voidwatchers with the Chaotic Thesis Rite become very capable of bewildering the battlefield through their Void Gaze and related features being able to use one of three effects instead of being chained to the specific effect of their Conclusion.
- A literal example in Later, Traitor. When Frazie goes up against a boss that can predict her every move, she uses Confusion on herself so it (and herself) have no way of knowing what she’ll do. It also impairs her fighting ability and temporarily turns her into a goofball, but she only needs to get lucky once and confuse the boss itself in order to negate its omnipotence and start turning the fight against him.
- In Mass Effect: Human Revolution, Jules' fighting is a blend of moves from many styles, making it impossible for Adam to analyse and develop a counter.
- Mischief (MHA): Much like Loki, Izuku's fighting style can be described as such. Since his illusions are not particularly powerful, when facing an opponent, Izuku relies on making decoys of himself, shapeshifting, invisibility, trash talking and tossing as many knives as possible. This becomes deconstructed during his match against Denki at the Sports Festival. As his friend points out, "being unpredictable, makes him predictable" meaning that he needs to learn to adapt and use every tool and knowledge of his arsenal in a fight, not just what Loki taught him. Reconstructed during his internship with Gentle, where Izuku learns how integrate his scpeter and ice powers as well to his orignal fighting style, improving it immensely.
- My Dream Is Yours: Just as in canon, this is Ohlm's battle style, and he employs it on Jamie Jam as he pretends to be unable to comprehend her "Knock Knock" Joke clue. It works spectacularly to the point that Jamie ends up admitting defeat and leaving without even bothering to attack the town, as was initially planned.
- Nami beats Ohm in Nine Minutes by hitting him with random dials to overcome his haki. If she doesn't know what her attack will do, neither will he.
- In One Eye, Full of Wisdom, part of Naruto's training is learning to embrace his randomness. In his match against Shikamaru, Naruto fills the arena with Shadow Clones that play with various toys and tells Shikamaru they'll only attack him if he interrupts their play. Later when facing Jashin cultists, one of them notes that literally anything and everything near Naruto or his clones could (and likely has) been booby-trapped with exploding tags, from dishes to carts to vegetables.
- Pony POV Series:
- Lots of characters do this when they need to fight. As in the above, Pinkie Pie is the stand-out due to having performed a Split-Personality Merge, making her a considerably saner Cloudcuckoolander who runs on Toon Physics. This results in her doing such things as weaponizing a Hard-Work Montage or use Offscreen Teleportation after being thrown out a window to come back in through the other window with a flying kick.
- This is pretty much the norm for every character in Dark World, as one side is run by Discord and the other is fighting Discord. Twilight even invokes this trope when they're planning to fight Discord (and makes good use of it later with her vast amount of spells) because any well laid plan is destined to fail in this situation. She even outright refuses to come up with a single plan, instead opting for a list of optional goals that can be completed in any order, with the rest of the "plan" being an Indy Ploy.
- This is particularly clear with Dark World Derpy, whose flying style is completely unpredictable and thus makes her very difficult to hit.
- Another notable example is Dark World Spike, who's a Genius Bruiser that's spent the last thousand years pretty much reading whenever Discord wasn't using him as his personal ride. When faced with Rancor, Discord's little sister and The Dragon, he breaks out everything from Tickle Torture to chiropractic massage to simply pinning her wings and letting gravity do the rest to bypass her immunity to violence and fight her off.
- Notably subverted with the Valeyard who, while he came to the fight Crazy-Prepared with layers upon layers of backup plans, ultimately had lost the Doctor's knack for this and Indy Ploys. Because of this he's ultimately out-thought and beaten.
- In Son of the Sannin, Haku often mixes genjutsu with his Ice Release, taking his opponents off-guard as they can't tell what is real and what is not. This plays a huge role in the defeat of Hidan, who first gets caught in an ice illusion that he easily dispels, and then he gets encased in real ice and doesn't realize until it's too late because he thinks it's another illusion.
- Upon a Falling Feather has Pinkie Pie fight like this, to rather impressive effect.
- Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: During the Sky-Seas Saga, Harumi ends up fighting an alcoholic, pyromaniac Monster Clown whose fighting style is described as a combination of Drunken Fist Kung Fu and extremely dangerous attacks with fireworks, flamethrowers, and water balloons full of alcohol. He almost beats the swordsman when Harumi instinctively cuts a booze-balloon projectile, soaking himself in highly flammable liquid and making himself an easy target for the lighter-wielding maniac. Luckily, his opponent gets so distracted taunting Harumi about his impending death that Harumi's Violently Protective Girlfriend runs up behind him and clobbers him.
- In The Weaver Option the Imperium's attack on Mandragora is halted by the tactical brilliance of Zahndrekh and Imotekh. At the suggestion of an Admiral, Taylor's forces decide to stop trying to out-think the two and instead focus on confusing them. In space this consists of rapidly cycling between obviously flawed formations, confusing the Necron fleet until the Imperium can partially encircle them. On the ground the Imperium spends several days pulling bizarre and illogical actions, such as digging a tunnel, collapsing it before it can be used, and then digging it again, or organizing a race between soldiers riding Dragon Armors. This allows Taylor's forces to accrue a number of minor victories and lure the Necron leadership into an ambush.
Film — Animated
- Kung Fu Panda: Because Po invented his own kung fu style instead of learning one of the others, he has an advantage against more seasoned fighters like Tai Lung who don't know what to expect from him. It helps that, half the time, he appears to be goofing off more than actually fighting.
- Shrek the Third: When Charming attempts to interrogate Pinocchio on Shrek's whereabouts, Pinocchio starts talking in Confusing Multiple Negatives to avoid telling the truth, confusing Charming — and, if the three little pigs hadn't squealed, he would have managed to drive him away entirely.
Film — Live-Action
- Near the end of Chocolate, Zen gets rather badly beaten by a man with Tourette's syndrome. Her usual method of evading attack, anticipation, is ruined by his tics — she can't tell them apart from his attack tells. Only when she starts mimicking his tics does she get any offense in.
- Blaze, in Delusions of Grandeur, finds himself at one point facing a nobleman who seems to be a much better fencer than him. His solution? Taunt his opponent with erratic sword moves, before literally kicking his butt.
- Drunken Master (Series):
- Wong Fei Hung's drunken boxing style is all about doing stuff that seems insane or physically impossible to do.
- In the first movie, Fei Hung's master, Su Hua Chi, teaches him the style and how it's based on the 8 Drunken Immortals — Fei Hung learns 7, but refuses to learn the last since it's based off a woman's style. Fast-forward to the final battle against the assassin, Thunderleg, where Fei Hung bests Thunderleg's Devil's Kick style. Thunderleg switches to the Devil's Shadowless Hand instead, besting Fei Hung each time he demonstrates another Drunken Immortal's style, until he gets to the 8th — Miss Ho. He admits to his master he didn't learn the style, so Su Hua Chi tells him to combine the other 7 styles and improvise, creating a hilarious and nearly unpredictable improvised style which defeats Thunderleg's Shadowless Hand.
- The original version of Game of Death: The whole point of the movie was to demonstrate that an unpredictable fighting style is superior than any formalized system. Bruce Lee's associates use a traditional style and fail. He uses a fluid, adaptional system and succeeds.
- In the earlier Godzilla films monsters would sometimes have a hard time even getting close to the three headed space dragon King Ghidorah because he'd keep moving his heads around in such wild ways that it was hard to predict which volley of gravity beams he fired from his mouths would hit or miss or if he would rake them across an enemy monster's body or readjust his aim if he missed or not and because there is no glowing or charge time he spammed these rays like no tomorrow. It's because of this he'd hit any attacking monsters half the time and the other half miss. He wasn't a dangerous planet killing monster because of strength but because of how wild he was. He is chaos incarnate!
- Green Room: This is what Pat ultimately does to defeat the remaining Nazis when he and Amber are cornered in the end: remembering how he and his band defeated some Marines in paintball by simply attacking them in an unpredictable way, he shaves his head, paints his face, and screams "Shazbot!" at the Nazis when they break the door down before leaping down into the basement to lead them into an ambush. The Nazis are thoroughly baffled and their uncertainty eventually gets them killed.
- A lot of Jackie Chan movies often have his character performing this, using anything and everything around him as a weapon and utilizing a lot of misdirection, usually making a fusion of legitimate martial arts action and slapstick comedy.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill is a baseline human in a galaxy of superhuman aliens (and that's not to mention the angry gods). He gets by with gadgets and trickery. At the end, he distracts Ronan the Accuser by challenging him to a dance-off while singing "Ooh Child".
Ronan: What are you doing. ... What are you doing?
- The title character of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings notes he met his friend Katy when she prevented a fight from starting between him and some jerk by jumping between them and singing "Hotel California". Katy calls this "the art of confusion" and adds that it "works great on stupid people". And then when she's cornered by a mook with a sword, Katy tries the exact same tactic, and it works, at least until the stumped guy just decides to resume attacking.
- In Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill is a baseline human in a galaxy of superhuman aliens (and that's not to mention the angry gods). He gets by with gadgets and trickery. At the end, he distracts Ronan the Accuser by challenging him to a dance-off while singing "Ooh Child".
- Pirates of the Caribbean : As anyone who's fought Jack Sparrow more than once knows he's a wicked Chess Master with a one-track mind; sometimes the only way he can win a fight is by being unpredictable. DVD commentary said he's actually the worst straight-up swordsman in the series.
- In Push, this is how the good guys hide their plan from the precognitive Pop Girl. Nick writes the individual steps of the plan down and seals them in envelopes, which are marked as to when and where they are to be opened. He then has his memory wiped so even he won't know what the group's going to do until he opens the envelopes he carries. Since Watchers like Pop Girl can see the future based on a subject's conscious intentions, her vision ends the moment Nick gets wiped.
- In Quantum of Solace, this is what lets the physically nonthreatening villain stay alive (temporarily — not a spoiler, it's a Bond film). He flails about so wildly that Bond can't really fight him effectively (that they're also fighting in a hotel that is literally exploding around them, so Bond has to mind his surroundings while fending him off, also helps) — that is, until the downside of wild flailing is illustrated, when the villain performs an inadvertent axe-foot interface that is excruciating to watch.
- Serenity: So says Joss Whedon in the commentary, regarding the end fight between River and the Reavers:
Joss: My wife often refers to this style of fighting as "just keep waving things until they go away."
- Wheels on Meals: Thomas initially tries to fight the mook played by Benny Urquidez toe-to-toe, but despite some initial success, he finds himself outgunned at all ranges. His answer is to change his mindset and not take the fight seriously anymore, countering his opponent with typical Jackie Chan silliness, and although it still takes time, this helps him land a massive kick-punch combo that ends the fight.
Manhwa
- In Shin Angyo Onshi this is pulled off in army level. Seeing how the Big Bad relied heavily on mind reading, Munsu rolls dice to determine the army's strategy.
Pro Wrestling
- This is the key behind Gracie Hunter Kazushi Sakuraba's success. Tire and bedazzle the foe with dazzling agility, take them off guard with tom foolery, beat their throat in with your open hand...
- The fighting style of Delirious has been called "Unpredictable Scientific Virtuoso". His enemies in Gateway Championship Wrestling, Operation Shamrock, sought to figure him out, without much success. However, his trainer, Kid Kash, does do a fairly decent job of figuring out Delirious...fairly. This actually worked out against him when he was working with MsChif and she repeatedly struck him at times she didn't expect him to be in a certain place, including an accidental blind mule kick to the balls.
- The one finishing move everyone sees coming from Delirious and Kid Kash trained Daizee Haze is the German Suplex...except when its the tiger suplex. Then there is the heart punch, which sets up the springboard Daizee Cutter, or Cashed Out jawbreaker face buster combination, or slumber in the tight roller, or being driven to the mat with the mind trip, or being put out with a Yakuza Kick...
- When Boogeyman finally started getting put in matches, this, combined with No-Sell, played a large part in him steamrolling all opposition. From his build and preferred finishing moves, one would expect a power wrestler, but sometimes he would just strangely gyrate instead of attempt any grapples, shaking off any in turn attempted on him, and strikes just causing him to gyrate more. Then he had uncanny agility and leaping distance usually only seen in the "high flyers". And then he sometimes had the unnerving strategy of charging while shards of glass were embedded in his head.
- Cody Rhodes changing his gimmick to Stardust has elements of this, as Stardust has a completely different fighting style and move set from him, throwing off opponents who were prepared to counter Cody's moves.
Web Animation
- DEATH BATTLE!:
- Used as an argument for why Deadpool wins over Deathstroke. While Deathstroke is The Strategist and a masterful one at that, all the tactical acumen in the world can't do a thing to predict absolute insanity.
- Naturally, the battle between Deadpool and Pinkie Pie puts two brands of Confusion Fu against each other, and it's glorious. In the end, they just give up fighting each other and start wrecking havoc in others Death Battles... This takes even the Combat Commentators off-guard.
- Deadpool ends up on the receiving end in his fight with The Mask. Deadpool can break the fourth wall, sure enough, but the Mask running on pure Cartoon Physics makes him a full-on Reality Warper and ultimately puts him on a different level than Deadpool. Deadpool has difficulty countering the absurd amount of random crap the Mask can throw at him, which ultimately costs him the fight.
Webcomics
- Bone to Blades has the Holy Spirit "The Man Comes Around". When the user activates the Spirit's ability, it will create a wooden sign with a rule written on it, which everyone (user included) must follow. If someone breaks one of the rules, the Spirit will either impose a new rule, Warp Reality to nullify the transgression, and/or launch an Always Accurate Attack against the offender. The "confusion" part comes from the fact that neither the user nor the Spirit decide what these rules are; a "higher power" does.
- Grrl Power: Sydney suggests that "the best counter to super speed is super confusion". Maxima, who has super speed, agrees.
- Hello from Halo Head: Pepper tries to escape Clair's questioning at one point by confusing her:
- Homestuck:
- Vriska is armed with the Fluorite Octet, a set of eight eight-sided dice that "execute a wide range of highly unpredictable attacks" when rolled; the higher the roll, the more powerful and lucky the attack. It's implied this is a bit of a double-edged sword, as getting a low roll against a sufficiently powerful opponent would leave the attacker defenseless. However when she rolls the highest possible number, all 8's,(which, incidentally, has a probability of 1/8^8 of being rolled, or 1/16,777,216) she channels the fighting soul of her ancestor and is able to go toe to toe with an omnipotent super being. Becomes a Game-Breaker once she ascends to the God Tiers, as her role as the Thief of Light means that she is guaranteed good rolls when she needs them.
- The Pop-A-Matic Vrillyhoo Hammer, which combines the Fluorite Octet with the Warhammer of Zillyhoo, does this, but on a smaller scale. Whenever you successfully bonk someone on the head with it, a list of 8 appears, and one status from that 8 is triggered.
- Vriska is armed with the Fluorite Octet
- Nemen Yi, the Chosen of Battles in Keychain of Creation, fights using a unorthodox Sidereal Martial Arts style that involves Medium Awareness and Breaking the Fourth Wall, literally. She jumps between panels of the comic strip, breaks off a piece of the gutter to throw at an enemy (which then pins them in place, because the gutter doesn't move), tosses her opponents across panels, and uses the perspective of the comic to hit enemies out of her reach — the Real Life equivalent of "I squish your head". It's enough to utterly baffle her Abyssal opponents, with whom she mops the floor quite handily. It doesn't hurt that, in Exalted, Sidereals can make themselves impossible to predict by most people. She also looks down towards the following panels of the comic to see what will happen in the future. Yep, Sidereals.
- Kill Six Billion Demons: Intra the Sword Saint defeated his first opponent with a blow that was, in his own words, "an idiot's blow" — the defender was completely incapable of realising he'd been seriously attacked before the sword had taken his head off. When challenged, he explained that no ordinary fool could use his lack of technique, only one extremely devoted to foolishness.
- In Scarlet Lady's episode "Party Crasher", Marigold eventually realizes that the title Akuma is able to predict the heroes' moves, so she has one of them put on some music and tells everyone to dance erratically. When Scarlet Lady decides to show off her "world-class dancing skills", she gets tagged by Party Crasher, but the others manage to win by following Marigold's plan.
- This Surviving the World comic advocates this strategy for Rock-Paper-Scissors, in that going insane means that even a professional watching your arm for minor movements couldn't predict you.
- Lord Sykos from The Wotch is particularly dangerous because, though his moves are random, each individual move is also incredibly clever and effective, showing a keen understanding of the psychology of most magicians.
Web Videos
- Dream is one of the best Minecrafters at this strategy:
- In Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE, the three hunters and Dream are in a cave. Suddenly, they meet and Dream uses a splash potion of invisibility to make them all invisible. Keep in mind that they are all wearing full iron armor. They can't tell which one was Dream and started attacking one of their team members while Dream started attacking them.
- In the same episode, Dream builds a Nether Portal so that he could trick the hunters into thinking he was back at the Nether. The hunters are confused why he built the portal if he wasn't going to go in in the first place. But the compass gives it away, since it can indirectly tell whether Dream's at the Overworld or the Nether.
- In Minecraft Speedrunner VS 3 Hunters FINALE
- Gavin Free is a master of this in various Achievement Hunter videos. Granted, it usually works against him, but when he pulls this off correctly, it is beautiful.
- Appears on The Guild. Kwan is revealed to be a champion-level gamer in Korea. He was defeated by Mr. Wiggly, who seemingly picked his spells at random — including spells so unorthodox that Kwan hadn't bothered defending against them.
- In Noob, this was the specialty of Ash, the Real Money Trade guy, during his time as legitimate player. Spectre kept him close due to his lone weakness basically being Didn't See That Coming.
- The Nostalgia Chick in Suburban Knights does this by imitating a Lord of the Rings montage and speaking gibberish, then suddenly punching her opponent in the face.
Western Animation
- In the Big City Greens episode "Coffee Quest", Tilly helps Cricket and Gloria escape Chip Whistler by attacking him with the "Tilly Tornado", which is just her spinning around. It's rather ineffective as a Spin Attack, but it does confuse Chip and his cohorts enough to let Cricket and Gloria get away.
- In the Captain Planet and the Planeteers episode "Planeteers Under Glass", Dr. Blight's evil computer MAL takes over an environmental simulation and is able to block out the protagonists' attempts to regain control. Then Wheeler steps in to confuse MAL into submission by randomly inputting commands into the terminal, like he did earlier in the episode.
- Against all odds, a nonviolent example from Craig of the Creek: J.P. Mercer is a goofy Cloudcuckoolander whose thought processes are an enigma, but in the episode "The Jinxening", his eccentricity and randomness come in handy against Paloma, whose silent observation of everyone in the Creek has enabled her to predict what any other kid is going to say and jinx them as revenge for leaving her jinxed for an entire year. In an entirely non-martial confrontation, J.P. throws Paloma off her groove because she just can't figure out what he's going to say next, before jinxing her back, forcing her to free everyone else in the Creek.
- Danger Mouse once illogicked a computer to death by performing the following routine for it:
DM: My dog has no nose.
Penfold: Your dog has no nose? How does it smell?
DM: Terrible. - Darkwing Duck: Crazed toymaker Quackerjack. In addition to his deadly toys, his sheer instability and unexpected acrobatics make him as much of a challenge as the other members of the Fearsome Five.
- The episode of The Legend of Korra called "Harmonic Convergence" shows Bumi ravaging a whole Northern Water Tribe camp with his usual goofy antics. He decides not to tell Tenzin about it because Tenzin has always dismissed his stories earlier.
- The Legend of Vox Machina: In the fight with the Briarwoods on the ziggurat, Grog closes his eyes so he doesn't fall under Sylas' hypnosis. Sylas smugly remarks that now he can't even see to which Grog retaliates that if he can't tell where he's swinging, then neither can Sylas. it works, and Grog embeds his axe in Sylas' gut long enough to restrain him long enough for Keyleth to finish the job.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the rare cases Pinkie Pie is actually drawn into a fight, you can bet her style is going to be very unpredictable.
- Against the changeling army in "A Canterlot Wedding – Part 2", she begins by excitably urging a foe to take her own form ("Do me! Do me!"), then start using Twilight Sparkle as a magical machine-gun, and finally pulls out the party cannon to blast changelings.
- In "Slice of Life", this is the most likely explanation as to why Pinkie Pie is seen on a unicycle spinning plates on sticks at one point during the fight against the bugbear — she must be trying to confuse the monster. The scene is too short to tell whether it's working or not, though the bugbear does give her a stare.
- In "The Ending of the End – Part 2", when she has to fight Chrysalis, as usual Pinkie Pie does so by being relentlessly random, avoiding blasts through Offscreen Teleportation and annoying the Changeling Queen with showman guise, huckster speech, puppet, lucky wheel, etc.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob's bad driving becomes useful in "Demolition Doofus", as all his reckless ways of driving (plus the fact he's an invertebrate) protect him from getting killed, maimed, or injured otherwise by the other contestants, making him a completely impossible target.
- The episode of South Park where Cartman thinks he died plays with this, in that Cartman actually intended to use his ghostly spookiness as the tactic. However, being that Cartman was entirely visible, what the criminals saw definitely qualifies as this trope, and were simply too weirded out to react.
- Spinel of Steven Universe: The Movie relies on this. As her unique Rubber Man powers prove to catch the Gems completely off guard when she arrives to fight them. Slightly subverted as once the Gems get their memories back and shake off two years of fighting rust, she proves largely ineffective during round 2.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Master Splinter, as befits someone that advises victory over fairness, fights like this. He'll distract his opponent anyway he can, even if that means licking them in the face. His weapon at first appears to be a cane, but conceals a sword and tangling line. And if that doesn't work, he'll drop to all fours and fight like, well, a rat, something that catches even a master ninja off guard. The latter is something that he prefers to avoid though, as he doesn't want to embrace the new bestial instincts of his mutated self.
- In the ThunderCats episode "The Duelist and the Drifter" Rascally Rabbit and Trickster Mentor the Drifter befuddles opponents with his Dance Battler brand of Not Quite Flight Nonchalant Dodging that involves drifting on currents of wind like a leaf, and also employs Brandishment Bluffs, heavily exploiting the reflexive movements of those who attack him.
- In Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man and White Tiger use this to beat Taskmaster, who can quickly copy their moves. They do this by switching weapons, luring him into the gym (which still has the obstacle course from yesterday set up), turning the lights off, and using the numerous obstacles as weapons. In a later episode, just like the Comic Books example above, Taskmaster has an Oh, Crap! moment when he hears Spider-Man brought along Deadpool to capture him. Deadpool humiliates Taskmaster by dancing all over him.