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Idiot Plot: Difference between revisions
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** To further explain the above: in order for the story to occur as written it requires a spaceship to be designed with enough interior wasted space and mass to allow a stowaway to not only fit inside but be able to conceal herself from the pilot's line of sight, despite the spaceship being intended to function under the most extreme of weight limits. It requires a space mission to be planned with such a nonexistent margin of error that so much as 100-120 lbs. of additional mass (the stowaway in question is described as a relatively small young woman) at takeoff will result in their being insufficient fuel to safely land unless the excess mass is jettisoned, despite the fact that such a nonexistent margin of error would imply that only the most precise of computer-controlled navigation would have any hope of maintaining exact course and speed (if the fuel margin is so narrow that a minor weight difference can put you outside your flight envelope, try to imagine what being a few seconds early or late with an engine burn is going to do) and this is a manually-piloted ship. It requires the pilot to not do his 'make sure the ship is carrying no excess mass aboard' check ''after'' takeoff instead of ''before'' takeoff. And it requires the stowaway to be entirely ignorant of the fact that courier missions of this type are under extreme weight limits and that her presence onboard will require her to either be spaced halfway through or else cause a fatal crash on landing. So, from the original designer of the spaceship on up, literally every person of relevance to the plot, even those who never appear onstage, has to make a major unforced error in order for the plot to exist at all. This is the [[Trope Codifier]] here, folks.
*** The really ironic thing? The person in this story who is most called out for being an idiot (the stowaway) is actually '''the least idiotic person in this whole mess'''. In that unlike everyone else her error was one of ignorance and not stupidity, and in addition she is the ''only'' person who actually has any ''excuse'' for being ignorant, because unlike everybody else in this mess she is simply a civilian passenger, not a trained space pilot or engineer.
**** Which also means that an untrained civilian passenger was allowed onboard a spaceship without any kind of basic safety briefing, ''and'' that there is no security guard outside the courier ship hangar to warn people of this thing, ''and'' that there is also no warning sign on the door. We can add 'the captain and crew of the mothership' to the list of people who have to act like idiots in order for the plot to exist.
* Robert Jordan's ''[[The Wheel of Time]]'':
** It is so full of potentially lethal errors in judgement by both the protagonists and antagonists that a strong argument could be made for the series consisting almost exclusively of [[Idiot Plot]], particularly in the latter books.
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