Idiot Plot/Anime and Manga

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Examples of the Idiot Plot in Anime and Manga include:

  • Angel Densetsu raises the Idiot Plot to an art form - the entire concept is that the main character unwittingly becomes the most fearsome gangster in Japan because of the whole cast's inability to communicate properly.
  • The ending of Gundam Seed Destiny hinged on the Minerva crew acting like complete idiots so that they would fight the Three Ship Alliance. The crew ignores Gilbert Durandal creating a fake Lacus Clyne and his plan to control people's destiny. They even let slide the fact that Durandal is willing to use his newly acquired doomsday cannon to blow away entire countries if they don't agree to his Destiny Plan. Actually between all of the characters the idiocy extends to most of the series.
  • Sonic X takes this to absurd proportions when everyone on the planet Fails Astronomy Forever for a couple of episodes, except Sonic himself, amusingly enough. Eggman rigs the moon to block out the sun, making it look like the moon pretty much stopped, along with the sun. Nobody finds this fishy because they've forgotten that the moon revolves around the Earth, and the Earth around the sun, not to mention the Earth spins on an embarrassingly wonky axis. Eggman takes the opportunity to try and Brainwashed everyone with the lamps he sells, only to have his plan foiled by Sonic yet again, because he was the only one not holding on to the gigantic Idiot Ball. The ball in this case being more of an Idiot Moon.
  • In X 1999 The Movie, the seven Dragons of Heaven each guard a magical barrier which serves to prevent The End of the World as We Know It. When the Dragon of Heaven protecting a given barrier dies, the barrier collapses catastrophically, and if all of the barriers are destroyed, humanity will be wiped out. So naturally, almost to a man, the Dragons of Heaven sacrifice themselves to kill the Dragons of Earth... who are trying to destroy the barriers to wipe out humanity. (The manga and the TV series handle things much better.)
  • In Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo, Nami's sisters structurally fail to acknowledge her obvious depressed state, going so far as to kick her down even more, as Kazane does in one episode. Even after Nami's Face Heel Turn, Akiha simply tells Nami to shut up instead of listening to her during their first critical confrontation. Yeah, that really worked, now did it.
  • Yuria doesn't want to have sex with Shunsuke because if she does she'll become his life-long sex slave, being a Sex Bot and all. She's pretty sure she doesn't like that idea, even after she starts wondering if she's fallen in love with Shunsuke. That's all well and good, but Shunsuke also doesn't want to have sex with Yuria because he is bafflingly devoted to his chaste, ice-cold girlfriend who he rarely hears from and even more rarely gets to see. And anyway what kind of idiot makes a Sex Bot who is intelligent and emotional enough to decide they don't want to be a Sex Bot? (oh right, that kind).
  • My Balls.
    • Simply put, the protagonist has a powerful demon sealed in his balls and can't ejaculate for a month or humanity will be destroyed. He does away with his Porn Stash, yes, and manages to deal with the various Horny Devils going after him, but doesn't stay away from his nymphomaniac-when-drunk coworker.
    • Which gets even funnier because he does leave her. AFTER the world is safe.
  • One of the two major conflicts in the final arc of Phantom of Inferno relied entirely on one of the characters coming to a braindead misunderstanding and the protagonist not only not making any attempts to correct her, but saying whatever he could to make himself look guilty and egg on the conflict.
  • Suzuka would be about a dozen volumes shorter if Yamato didn't find a way to say or do exactly the wrong thing every single chapter.
  • Naruto:
  • "Stink Bomb", from the anime anthology movie Memories is about a salaryman at a pharmaceutical company who takes some experimental pills - thinking they're cold medicine - and becomes the vector for a chemical agent that kills everyone within several hundred meters from him. From then on, everyone just gets dumber. His immediate superiors call him out of a quarantine zone to deliver the pills to them. The JSDF try to kill him, but are so incompetent they just cause massive property damage and only exacerbate the problem. The American military screws things up even more by trying to capture him alive to get access to the chemicals. And throughout all this, the salaryman just can't figure out that he's the source of the obnoxious stink and no one EVER bothers to try explaining it to him. It's played for laughs, but galling all the same.
  • In Lost Brain the entire plot is basically one when Fridge Logic kicks in. The plot is based off Hiyama's plan of using hypnosis to remove human weakness with him controlling them having no chance at working, which any amount of additional research would have told him. The plot get even more stupid with the fact that Kuonji and the police never seems to even try to investigate Hiyama even though all the trouble happening can pretty much be linked to him.
  • Little Jumper would be a lot shorter if Chimari had thought to look up her mother's name before going back in time. But then again, the Idiot Ball is an Ichinose family heirloom.
  • Infinite Ryvius would have been resolved if they had transmitted what happened to the rest of civilization, and definitely would have if they simply landed or had somebody leave the ship.
  • In Zeta Gundam a lot of trouble would be avoided if the Argama crew could control the catapult deck traffic better.
  • Guilty Crown episode 15 suffers from this. The entire plot for that episode depends on Souta and a few other unnamed characters acting like complete idiots, which eventually results in Hare's death.
  • The entire plot of the latter half of Zoids: Chaotic Century hinges on Hiltz, the main antagonist, being a complete imbicile. His evil plot: revive the Death Saurer, Kill All Humans, ???, profit. He wages a pointless war against the heroes, giving them all the time they need to become more powerful, build the weapons and acquire the allies they needed to defeat him, when he could have simply pretended to be nice, asked Fiona to open the door to Zoid Eve, betrayed her, and revived the Death Saurer at a point in the series where nobody would have had the skill or the technology to stop it. In light of the revelations made in the Final Four, the Geno Breaker and Death Stinger arcs retroactively become padding whose only point was to sell toys.
  • The very first arc in Clannad hinged on the entire cast failing to have the common sense to question or search out a reason for why one character was being unseen and forgotten by more and more of the school and town.
  • This is how Deadman Wonderland starts, Ganta gets thrown into the titular prison, simply because he survived the brutal massacre. He pretty much gets accused of being responsible for said massacre.
  • Any pre-Unova Pokémon episode is guilty of this, as Team Rocket would show up in every episode wearing easily transparent disguises and the protagonist would always fall for it, then act surprised when Team Rocket tries to escape with their Pokemon.
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