Too Dumb to Live/Literature: Difference between revisions
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* [[Older Than Print]]: ''[[Little Red Riding Hood]]''. [[Terry Pratchett]] said it best in ''[[Discworld/The Wee Free Men|The Wee Free Men]]'':
{{quote|"... some girl who can't tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family."}}
* T'Lana from the ''[[Star Trek]]'' pocket books is a very short-lived character in the current Borg [[Story Arc]] for just this reason. From the first book she is introduced in she immediately questions the judgment of practically everybody on board the ship who isn't a [[Fantastic Racism|Vulcan]], she objects to nearly every action anyone ranked above her takes, and spearheads a mutiny with other members of the senior staff against [[Star Trek: The Next Generation|Picard]], only to give command back to him refusing to simply admit that she fucked up majorly. Even [[Star Trek: The Original Series|Spock]] eventually just walks away during a conversation with her, after calling her the vulcan equivalent of a dim-witted jerkass. At the end of the second book she appears in, Picard wants her gone, which means something when his current first officer once defected to the Klingon Empire and thus could, ''very technically'', be called a traitor. Her ultimate fate? She's replaced with [[Genki Girl]] T'ryssa Chen, a [[Half-Human Hybrid|half-vulcan]] who prefers her human side and roleplaying as an elf, and gets blown into powder when the Borg partially glass Vulcan.
* ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]''. Ma Su. Good God, Ma Su. During the Shu Kingdom's expedition against the Wei Kingdom, Ma Su was put in charge of defending Jie Ting, a very important location for the Shu forces. The location is near a mountain so Ma Su thought it would be a good idea to camp at the top of the mountain. Normally this would be a good idea, EXCEPT in this case, if they camped at the mountain and Wei surrounds them, their water supply at the bottom of the mountain would be cut off. Pretty much everybody except Ma Su sees this and he even ignores their warnings and proceeds to camp at the mountain. Guess what happened.
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* Pippin in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. Even if you don't count the first time ("Ooh, we're in a dark scary place that Gandalf wants us to move through quickly, but there's a big hole in the ground and I wanna see how deep it is... let's drop a stone!"), there's still this lovely number. "I have to look at it! I'll take it from the wizard when he's sleeping! But, hey! This time he doesn't have a perfectly good reason for not letting me see the shiny rock that Saruman used to communicate with Sauron! Even though he's older than the world and I already killed him once."
** It's pretty explicit that the palantiri are addictive for people who aren't very strong-willed, at least if the person they've got on speed-dial is Sauron.
** And wasn't throwing the rock down the deep hole an accident? In the movie, they simply decided to tone down his too-dumb-to-live factor a bit and make it an accident. It was wholly on purpose in the book.
* Bella Swan of ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]''. Bella ''NEEDS'' to be changed over so she'll have the strength to lug around that big-ass [[Idiot Ball]] she's been strapped to ever since she saw Edward Cullen walk into the school cafeteria.
** A dedicated [[Spork]]er put it best while describing the cliff-diving incident in ''New Moon'':
{{quote|"She's not just [[Tempting Fate]]. She's rolling around on fate's bed. Naked. With one of her girlfriends. Pouring baby oil on each other. Begging fate to join in on the fun. Um, if you'll excuse me, I need to, uh . . . [[A Date with Rosie Palms|take five]]."}}
{{quote|"I have never met anyone so prone to life threatening idiocy."}}
* The unnamed SMERSH agent who executes Le Chiffre and his crew at the end of ''[[Casino Royale]]''. This has the interesting side effect of saving Bond's life. Despite knowing that Bond is a resourceful, and therefore dangerous, foreign service agent, he declines to kill him, basically giving the reason that his superior did not file the paperwork that would give the order for him to kill any opposing spies that he happened to encounter over the course of his mission. He also acknowledges that, under ordinary circumstances, he'd be under orders to kill Bond. But, that order wasn't specifically given, so he's just going to carve a brand onto Bond's body (to help them identify Bond in the future, a randomly dickish move that serves no purpose other than to make Bond hate SMERSH just a little bit more) and leave him be. Come on!
** To be fair, the SMERSH agent works for an organization that kills its own people for undertaking independent projects without prior permission from headquarters first. Indeed, the SMERSH agent is there to kill Le Chiffre precisely because Le Chiffre had had an excess of initiative in trying to fulfill his mission (and thus lost SMERSH's money when he took risks with it). Under those circumstances, we can hardly blame the guy for deciding not to shoot Bond—not when 'independent action' is literally a death sentence in his organization. So while there is still a lot of stupidity in this scene its not the agent's stupidity, its his boss's.
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# She was on the Saganami Island unarmed combat team. Add to that that she's from a heavy-gravity planet ''and her family had been genetically modified to cope with that'', he was lucky to get away with ''just'' broken bones.
** Pretty much any flag officer in the Solarian League Navy. Seriously. The only one shown yet who's even remotely competent is planning to defect from the League as soon as possible. The rest are self-serving, belligerent assholes who all ignore the ''many'' reports of their enemy's vastly superior technology. And then get blown to chunky salsa for their pains.
** Not to mention that Honor herself has demonstrated a pattern of sneaky tactics, misdirection, concealing her intentions and disguising her forces. Her enemies, who have often studied her tactics in detail, then routinely see exactly what she wants them to see, decide "Oh, she's just screwed up this time", and charge straight into her traps. The one time they didn't? Was the one time she was actually running a bluff.
*** Also, the time Admiral Theisman was 'fooled' by her bluff, he actually ''knew the entire time'' that it was a bluff. The only reason he took a dive and pretended to fall for it anyway is because he thought the entire mission he'd been assigned was a giant pile of idiocy and quite cheerfully leapt at the first politically-acceptable excuse he found to call mission abort.
* Governor Aubert of [[David Weber]]'s ''[[In Fury Born]]'' is a subversion. When we first meet him, he's ignoring the warnings of the elite Marines stationed on Gyangtse, instead listening to the advice of his even stupider advisor, Salgado, which results in a major uprising by separatist forces. However, when said uprising occurs, Aubert realizes his stupidity, fires his advisor, and aids the Marines in resolving the conflict.
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** In ''Ghost Story'', ghost Dresden got a good hit in on an opponent and then stood there gloating with a pop culture reference. There were two other enemies, one whom he downed but didn't eliminate (so in principle, maybe it would have gotten back up and hit him), and worse, one he didn't get a hit on at all. As he is literally being ripped apart, he laments his terrible math.
* [[Mother Goose|The Three Blind Mice]]; you'd think ''any'' mice, let alone blind ones, would know better than to tease the Farmer's Wife. They were lucky she ''only'' cut off their tails with a carving knife.
* [[The Big Bad Wolf]], specifically in ''[[The Three Little Pigs]]''. Big and bad, maybe, but not very bright. Guy really should have considered the ''purpose'' of a chimney before trying to break into a house that way.
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