Book Dumb/Playing With
Basic Trope: A character makes pathetic grades but is of above-average intelligence regarding non-academic pursuits.
- Straight: Alice regularly makes terrible grades in her classes, but comes up with clever and intricate plans outside of the classroom.
- Exaggerated: Alice is a perpetual F student, but solves quantum physics problems in her spare time.
- Justified:
- Alice either finds school boring or a waste of her time, or both. She'd rather apply her talents elsewhere.
- Alice may be smart,but she's illiterate.
- Obfuscating Stupidity
- Brilliant but Lazy
- Inverted: Alice is a straight-A student - but is completely helpless in the real world.
- Subverted: Alice starts making good grades.
- Double Subverted: But it turns out she's been bribing her teachers to inflate her grades.
- Parodied: Alice is perpetually truant and has a Double F-----, but cures the common cold.
- Deconstructed: Alice's poor academic performance comes back to bite her, as while she is an effective Schemer, any potential colleges/employers won't be able to look past her bad grades.
- Reconstructed:
- However, Alice decides to make her own path, and becomes decidedly successful in a different field.
- A professor gets her working at an academic institution despite her grades, due to a few strings pulled.
- Zig Zagged: Alice gets bad grades in school, but they start going up suddenly. This turns out to be because she built an android to go to school for her. Then the android malfunctions and becomes Book Dumb itself, so it builds another one to go to school for it. The same thing happens until Alice droids take over the world.
- Averted: Alice is a well-rounded student and an intelligent person.
- Enforced: "Those idiots in the audience need a character that is intelligent despite poor academic performance to sympathize with!"
- Lampshaded: "You know, if you worked half as hard on your schoolwork as you did on your scheming, you'd be headed to Harvard!"
- Invoked: "I'm not going to study today. Not when there's too much to do."
- Defied: Alice decides to buckle down and study for an important test.
- Discussed: "Mr. and Mrs. Troper, if your daughter showed the same enthusiasm for school as she did for making mischief, she'd have a much brighter future."
- Conversed: "So, wait. If these protagonists are so clever, why do they always get such horrible grades? You'd think they'd at least be able to pull off a B average."
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