Dumb Muscle/Playing With
Basic Trope: Strength/size and intelligence are inversely proportional.
- Played Straight: Bob can lift a small car with one arm, but is simple-minded and incredibly dense.
- Exaggerated: Bob is an 8-foot-tall behemoth who can effortlessly fling a car over the horizon, but can't count past ten and frequently forgets his own name.
- Inverted: Bob is a genius strategist who can play Xanatos Speed Chess with the best of them, but can't lift anything heavier than a book.
- Averted: Bob is huge and immensely strong, but has roughly average intelligence.
- Justified:
- Bob's low intelligence caused him to develop self-esteem problems early on, and he works out obsessively in an attempt to make up for perceived flaws.
- Bob simply prefers working out over studying.
- Parodied: Bob could beat up the Eldritch Abomination single-handedly, but promptly switches sides after it bribes him with candy.
- Subverted:
- Bob is actually highly intelligent, but comes across as dumb because he rarely speaks and prefers to let others to all the brainwork.
- Also, the Genius Bruiser.
- Double Subverted:
- While actually quite intelligent, Bob is still rather dense and generally oblivious to the world around him.
- Or Bob used to be very intelligent, but a lifetime of close-quarters combat has taken its toll on his brain.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob's strength and intelligence seem to vary wildly from one moment to the next, never being particularly proportionate to one another.
- Deconstructed: Bob is too dumb to fully grasp the fact that not everybody is as freakishly strong as he is, and frequently hurts his companions without meaning to.
- Reconstructed: Bob is a giant of a man, but isn't very bright; Alice is a genius but is very frail and sickly. Alice reins in Bob, helping him apply his strength constructively and preventing him from making rash decisions, while Bob protects Alice and performs tasks that she can't do herself. They grow to trust each other so absolutely that nothing the Manipulative Bastard Report Siht does can force them apart, which ultimately allows them to thwart his plans.
- Lampshaded: "Why is it that the stronger someone is, the dumber they are?"
- Enforced: "Bob's already ridiculously strong; giving him brains as well would make him border on Marty Stu territory."
- Invoked: Everybody tends to assume that Bob's an idiot simply because of his size, a fact that Bob gleefully milks for all it's worth.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "Wait, you mean that your friend that just lifted my car is a complete moron? He seemed to handle the door ok."
- Conversed: ???
Why should I use the door to get back to Dumb Muscle when I can just smash through the wall instead?