Achievements In Ignorance / Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater:
  • Fighter and Black Belt do this constantly. Black Belt has No Sense of Direction to the extent that he can ignore gravity, warp the Space-Time-Continuum, and duplicate himself. Fighter meanwhile, has done things such as fold portable holes into themselves and split himself into multiple Fighters in order to even out conflicting teams. Although this may be more of an achievement in poor organization than stupidity, Red Mage once survived having his skeleton pushed out his mouth because he lost his pencil and was unable to record the damage on his character sheet. Besides, as he claimed, everyone knows that skeletons are vestigial organs.
  • Red Mage frequently tries to invoke this trope, with various degrees of success. His approach is probably best summed up with "I know that and you know that, but I don't know that".
  • Vilbert (who claims to be a vampire, but is also a LARPer and probably just making it up) explains that he is able to survive in the sunlight because he feels it would be an uninteresting death. ^note Vilbert is definitely some sort of supernatural being: after all he did survive having a bunch of organs pierced by a falling armoire.
  • Black Belt once held up a rope for the others to walk across over a lava pit. He then followed. When asked how, he replies, "Simple. I held up the rope and walked across, like you guys."
    Thief: But...we took the rope down on this side.
    Black Mage: Yes, but I don't think he knows that.
  • Fighter survived a fall at terminal velocity by blocking the ground.
    Thief: You blocked the Earth.
    Fighter: Why not? I can block magic, and fire, and all kinds of stuff.
    Thief: I hate it when the things he says that don't make sense make sense.
  • This trope was explicitly used by Red Mage when he told Fighter to use "make [his] swords as things unto chainsaws", the logic being that Fighter is too stupid to realize he doesn't know how to do that. It works.
  • Black Mage, naturally, has mixed feelings about this trope.
    "What I hate about my life...part of what I hate about my life is that it is working..."
  • Or the time Fighter started flying because he thought they had slain gravity. After surviving an airship crash, he assumed that since falling didn't kill them, that they must have killed falling instead. That one was actually caused by Sarda "jackassing" the Light Warriors back to his cave.
• According to an author note on this page of Angel Down, Samuels abilty to no sell a Groin Attack is this. ^note He belives that since he is transgender, and therefore doesn't have a penis, groin attacks wouldn't hurt him. Hits there hurt biological females too, because the groin area has a lot of nerve endings regardless of sex and therefore feels extra pain.
• In Bob and George, on at least two occasions Mega Man has undergone violence that should have killed him and survived because he's too dumb to realize he should be dead. For example:
  Ran: Mega Man?! You're still alive?! You were at ground zero of a nuclear explosion!
  Mega Man: Oh, that. I just regenerated like you're always doing.
  Ran: Mega Man, you don't have a regeneration chamber like I do.
  Mega Man: Well, it's a little late to tell me that now.
• Dave does this every time he fixes a machine in Narbonic. This turns out to be because he's a latent Mad Scientist.
• Collar 6: No one told Laura that she shouldn't be able to reach subspace at her level without physical stimulation.
• In Dubious Company, after somehow managing to burn down the water temple, Elly was banished.
• Tedd's attempt to investigate the scientific underpinnings of magic in El Goonish Shive reveals that this is one of the rules, at least when it comes to magical enchantments put on people. If you put a 1-hour enchantment on someone and tell them it'll last a week, it will last a week simply because they don't know it's supposed to have worn off already. This cuts both ways — tell them the magic will wear off shortly, and it will, even if it wasn't supposed to. As long as they trust your word, anyway. That essentially means that being very naive and completely uninformed about magic has the potential to turn you into a magic-powered supersoldier...
  • Another instance of mind over magic: Tedd's ability to see and interpret magic in action went completely unnoticed because everybody assumed Tedd was using Magitek, and Tedd thought it was normal .
  • Tedd at one point invents a magic wand of size-changing and laments that it can't go beyond a factor of two. When Sarah uses it on Ashley, not realizing that Tedd had meant volume, she manages to shrink Ashley to half her height - a factor of eight - simply because it's what Sarah had expected.
• Goblins:
  • Drowbabe is able to shrug off wounds because she's under the effects of a Mage Armor spell and has convinced herself that the spell provides damage resistance (it actually gives you extra AC, meaning that your opponent has to roll higher to hit you).
    Big Ears: Mage Armor doesn't offer damage resistance.
    Drowbabe: Seriously? Oh, Crap!. That means I actually should have taken more damage from your hit to my leg earlier. Well, that would put my hitpoints way past negative... [dies]
  • Minmax manages to create a sword made of Oblivion, the concept of nothingness, by toying around with a magic sword and a hole in reality. Kin theorizes that the sword only continues to exist because Minmax can't comprehend the concept of Oblivion, and his ignorance might even fuel the sword and make it more powerful.
    Forgath: By Herbert's dice! In Minmax's hands, that sword is insanely powerful.
    Minmax: Huh? I don't get it.
    Forgath: That's perfect! Keep thinking that way!
  • Minmax then proceeds to give the sword the incredibly appropriate name of "Oblivious". Naturally, while not knowing what the word "oblivious" means.
• An octopus in Gunnerkrigg Court somehow learned to levitate because he didn't realize he was supposed to be in the ocean. Upon learning that octopuses normally live in water, he flies to the ocean, dives in, and decides that "this makes a lot more sense". But he appears to be doing dolphin-kicks with his tentacles.
• Homestuck:
  • While not stupid by any means, Sollux still managed to walk out of a dream bubble and come back to life simply because he didn't realize you weren't supposed to do that. Later turns out to be an aversion: he was never fully dead to begin with, and it was perfectly within the rules to leave.
  • Eridan managed to completely drive the angels in the Land of Wrath and Angels to extinction, despite them being nigh-unkillable NPCs that each take at least a minute's worth of sustained fire from Ahab's Crosshairs to kill and don't drop anything like enemies do...because they aren't enemies, they're game constructs, and you aren't supposed to attack them.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, when Molly meets Jolly the Giantess (in a Looney Tunes homage)—
  Molly: So how's it feel, pushin' the envelope of the ol' Square-Cube Law?
  Jolly: Well, I hath ne'er studied law.
• In Jupiter-Men, Nathan's aunt Binny somehow manages bypass all of his security measures to get into his Elaborate Underground Base despite being unaware of what it actually is.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Atru, the most dominant religion in the KSBD-universe which honours YISUN and The Multiplicity, outright extols this trope as a virtue. Three particular examples:
  • In the comic proper, Allison successfully re-binds the devil Vladok by shoving a mask on its not-face and shouting names at it, something that normally requires a lot more preparation and effort, to the utter shock of everyone present.
    Allison: I'm drunk as hell and have no idea what I'm doing.
  • In the lore, Pree Aesma managed to defeat the three greatest disciples of YISUN, the Masters of Space, Aesthetics and Ethics, essentially by being too ignorant to learn their teachings and throwing violent temper tantrums whenever she got frustrated. It is because of her scheming, vile, ignorant nature — and because she is always trying to improve herself, unlike YISUN's more self-satisfied disciples — that YISUN names Aesma his greatest disciple, the Master of Want.
  • Aesma once picked up the universe while still inside it in order to beat the Red Eyed King. No-one entirely understands how this was possible, but Aesma was so angry she did it anyway.
  • Intra, possibly the greatest swordsman ever to live, first made his name by killing a Master Swordsman in a single blow, which was so incredibly clumsy and unskilled that his opponent couldn't figure out how to evade it. His career appears to have been built on working very hard to not know how to use a sword, and therefore having no limits with what he could do with one. Naturally, he later achieved the Kill Six Billion Demons equivalent of enlightenment.
    “Beetles cannot learn Pankrash Circle Fighting, Lord Intra,” said Intra’s attendant, and made a bitter motion.
    “Don’t tell the beetle that,” said Intra, who was very skilled at smiling. “If you don’t tell him he will learn it anyway and cut the lion in half with a single blow.”
  • Inverted by the Demiurge Jadis. Jadis is The Omniscient, hence she is ignorant of nothing. Consequently, Jadis is the most impotent of the Demiurges because she cannot achieve anything she doesn't already knows will happen. It's implied this has not been good for her psyche - she considers herself to have no free will, little more than a thing playing back actions and words that have been recorded in advance.
  • To a lesser degree, also inverted with King Zoss. He has studied the wheel (the flow of the multiverse) to the point of mastery, and he says that his mastery over it makes it impossible for him to destroy. But he hopes that one of his ignorant successors can succeed where he failed and Screw Destiny the multiverse's fate to fall into ruin.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things:
  • Jared succeeds in using a Level 5 Magikarp as his starter Pokémon, which should be impossible because the only attack Magikarp has at that level is the useless Splash. Jared, however, doesn't understand the basic mechanics of Pokemon battling and instead uses Mr. Fish as a bludgeon, and wins enough battles this way for Mr. Fish to evolve.
  • Jared also doesn't understand anything else about Pokemon training, and instead uses real-world logic and animal handling techniques to manage his fifty-foot sea dragon. This is seen as revolutionary by Pokemon professors, and has dramatic results when Lysandre compares his own Gyarados (kept in a Poke Ball and only fed Poke Puffs) to Mr. Fish (free-range and an active predator).
  • Time Travel works this way: there are no paradoxes or alternate timelines as long as you don't worry about how it works. If you do...
• Done in Melonpool when Sam, an alien dog, is writing a letter when Roberta comes along and asks how he's doing it with no thumbs. His handwriting promptly turns to scribbles before he glares at Roberta.
• In this Mountain Time, a Styrofoam lifesaver manages to sink because a character points out that there's a hole in it.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Elan has fallen into this a time or two, to the point that Daigo has theorized that Elan is of more use in a given situation the less he understands what is going on. On one particular occasion, Elan managed to invoke this trope. When face to face with his Evil Twin Nale, Nale is surprised that Elan thought he was dead. As a Genre Savvy bard, he should've known that a villain is never dead if they Never Found the Body, and half the time not even then. Elan counters that the hero always thinks the villain is dead until he shows up again.
    Nale: Gah! I think I'm giving myself a migraine trying to understand the level of willful ignorance that requires!
    Elan: First blood: ELAN!
  • A rogue once managed to land a sneak attack against Haley because he didn't realize that she had Improved Uncanny Dodge, which makes her immune to sneak attacks by characters with less levels than her. When this was pointed out, she was instantly healed of the damage inflicted.
  • When Redcloak battled a fellow priest in Azure city, the priest got hit with a Destruction spell. He asked Redcloak if his Saving Throw result was good enough to survive the attack, then promptly died when it wasn't. Later on, we see him waiting in line in the afterlife, and he realizes that he calculated the Save wrong and should have survived after all.
  • Blackwing intentionally invokes this to good effect. In need of magic, he manages to find a scroll of Vaarsuvius's, and while he recognizes that it's a harmless Divination spell, his complete inability to properly activate it causes an explosive Magic Misfire — which is exactly what he needs at the moment.
  • The heroes are having a conversation while they are riding their horses (and riding dog) when Elan interrupts to remind everyone that they had left their mounts behind earlier, which causes the mounts to vanish out from under them. So they had been riding on mounts that didn't exist because they forgot that they didn't have them anymore until the Plot Hole was pointed out.
  • In one of the early strips, Durkon miscalculates his to-hit rolls against an enemy. When Roy and the enemy in question correct his to-hit score, wounds appear on the enemy. When they help him calculate his damage, the wounds grow increasingly severe until the enemy concludes "that puts me at negative health" and drops dead.
• In a Questionable Content strip, Hannelore, like John Bonham below, does complicated drumming in an unusual way.
• Sailor Ranko: Ryoga, a character combining No Sense of Direction with insane strength and stamina, keeps getting lost all over the world, and even routinely visits other worlds without noticing. Or maybe Sailor Ranko was hallucinating. Judging from Ryoga's reaction later, she wasn't.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has this somewhat...unnerving take.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Tagon promotes Schlock two ranks to Sergeant when Schlock manages to distract the boarders and allow the company to retake the ship. When Schlock admits he had no plan and just got lucky, Tagon reconsiders and just promotes him one rank to Corporal.
  • While Captain Tagon is smarter than he looks, he's also really lucky, so this shows up a lot.
    Jevee Ceeta: Tagon, you're a better negotiator than I took you for. In one short session you've managed to pry out everything we need to lay our plan to recapture Breya and the remainder of her forces.
    Tagon: Oh. You know, mostly I was just antagonizing her for sport.
    Jevee Ceeta: Sometimes it depresses me when I see just how well dumb luck works for you.
  • Sorlie is an excellent spy primarily because she is a genuinely nice person who gets on well with people and isn't a trained spy. As such, people tend not to be on guard around her, which means she finds out things that an actual spy would not. Bala-Amin is happy to take advantage of this.
    Flinders: She is exactly what she looks like, Captain: An engineering specialist who does image analysis on inbound traffic. She has no field training beyond boot and the usual annuals. Her posting as a "cultural liaison" caught her completely by surprise.
    Captain Murtaugh: So she's not a spy?
    Flinders: No, she's a perfect spy. I like her and I feel sorry for her. She's cleared my first two lines of defense.
• Spacetrawler: Yuri's Eeb brain graft should not have been possible. Ears are one thing, but grafted brain tissue from another species should have been immediately rejected. This foreshadows that humans and Eebs are closely related species.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Due to some traumatic event in his past, Onni is someone extremely reluctant to leave his comfort zone, both in the real world and in the mage-space. His family members are aware of this, and understand when he refuses to join the expedition. Reynir initially met Onni via walking into his mage-space safe area, where, in the midst of mistaking him for a threat, Onni showed his hidden more combative side. This causes Reynir to be completely oblivious to Onni's fear of less safe areas, consider him a go-to source of magical reinforcements and push the right buttons to get Onni to help when needed completely by accident.
• Tales From Alderwood Katherine doesn't have the power, training or material components to cast a high level spell. She does it anyway.
• Tales of the Questor:
  • Quentyn and his friends put together an absolutely unique magic item using techniques no-one has ever seen before. Subverted in that they're not stupid, but three sheets to the wind at the time. In other words: drunk.
  • Not only were they responsible for creating perhaps the most powerful magical sword in existence from what should have been the most magically worthless enchantment training sword (think about recording over a cassette tape hundreds of times), they invented new runes to tie all the latent enchantments together, essentially revolutionizing the field.
• Ashura of Two Evil Scientists can run on air just by not looking down.
• Ronnie, the Loser Protagonist of Whomp!, is asked by his roommate to pick up "a loaf of milk, a dozen bread, and a gallon of eggs. She figures he'll know what she meant.
  Agrias: You did it. I don't know how, but you did it.
  Ronnie: I'm afraid to disappoint people.
• xkcd: This may explain how Beret Guy manages to unlock vacuum energy from a vacuum cleaner. Not to mention inflating a laptop through its power cable, pouring soup from a power socket, simulating a giant dog using two small dogs through the power of interferometry, and running a profitable business in the face of all reason.

---