Too Dumb To Live Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Pro-Mole: Why "Too Dumb Too Live"? It doesn't make sense and is only barely funny. Cut List it?

Looney Toons: While I improved the grammar and readability of the new BTVS example, I'm pretty sure it's not accurate. Did Dawn sneak out "many" times? Really?

Kendra Kirai: Not only did she sneak out at least three times, she was also responsible for inviting at least one vampire into the house. One of the ditzy ones, I think.

Looney Toons: Harmony. "Just you come in here and try that!" or words to that effect. But does three times really count as "many"?

Ununnilium: I haven't seen the episodes in question, but if she runs into vampires/demons/spooks and has to get rescued by Buffy every time? Yes.

Kendra Kirai: And it's not as if she doesn't know what's going on. She isn't the early-seasons Cordelia, blissfully oblivious to anything but herself, she knows what's out there and that her sneaking out is like slathering a cow in steak sauce and pushing it into a pen of starving wolverines. But still she does it! There's Star Trek Red Shirts with a better-developed sense of self-preservation.

Cassius335: I always figured they at last partly wrote Dawn (and peoples reactions to her) as if she was quite a bit younger than her actual age. Though to be fair, if she's really sneaking out every night, there might be several instances where she goes out at night and DOESN'T get captured, we just don't see them. We never saw most of her theiving, after all.

Obsidian: Dawn was kidnapped a mere 3 times (Harmony in "Real Me", Glory in "Spiral" and Sweet in "Once More, With Feeling") and none of them were when she snuck out (Harmony grabbed her when she stepped outside, Glory from their hiding place, and Sweet from right in her own house).

That was less than the number of times that some of the other characters were kidnapped. Like Willow (6 times: "I Robot—You Jane", "When She Was Bad", "Lovers Walk", "Gingerbread", "Choices", "Gone") or Cordelia (4 times: "Out of Sight, Out of Mind", "When She was Bad", "Reptile Boy", "Some Assembly Required", and that's not counting the several times it happened to her on 'Angel').

She snuck out twice that I can recall, and the first time she was protected by Spike ("Blood Ties"). The second time, however, she did have an encounter with a vampire ("Potential")

The other encounter with a vampire in "All The Way" doesn't qualify because: A.) She didn't sneak out. She led Buffy to believe that she was staying at a friends house and B.) It was Halloween, when vampires, demons and all are usually quiet, so she had no reason to believe she'd be in danger.

So no, Dawn doesn't qualify. It may be fanfiction convention that Dawn gets kidnapped all the time, but it certainly isn't canon.

((Peteman)): The belief that she's the queen of being kidnapped probably comes from "Once More with Feeling", where Buffy says something along the lines of: "Dawn got kidnapped again, must be Tuesday". So it might be one of those things that happens off camera (like Andrew's attack on the school play with flying monkeys).

arromdee: I think "All the Way" should count. Sure, technically, lying about where she's going isn't "sneaking out", but it's the same type of thing—she's hiding where she's going.

Lord Seth: Should we just delete the whole part about Dawn from the BTVS example? It's fine without it, and the way it reads currently is rather awkward; it's listed as an example, then immediately dismissed as one.

Freemage: I'm trying to figure out if Kate from Lost would be a better fit here, or The Kimberly. Her Jack-fixation has routinely caused the other castaways to be put in one bad fix after another. Is it a separate trope if the character's dumbness always seems to stem from a single cause?

Lale: Love Makes You Crazy? Love Makes You Dumb?

Freemage: After looking them over, it's pretty clearly Love Makes You Dumb; I'm putting her on that page as an example in a moment.

wia: Just a thought here - rewatching Lord of the Rings, and I've just reached the scene where Elrond and Isildur are alone inside Mount Doom, and Isildur refuses to throw the ring into the flames. One or both people in the scene could count... Corrupting influence, yes, but Isildur's held it for perhaps an hour or two by this point, just finished fighting a war against it's last bearer, and wasn't even touching it directly (he was wearing gloves when he took it, and never put it on). Elrond, for his part, put precisely this much effort into destroying it: He shouted at Isildur a couple of times. Now, if I had been in Elrond's place, I'd have thought *permanently banishing Sauron* would be worth more effort then that. Especially for someone who would most likely live to see the dark lord rise again. Hell, in his place, I would have pushed Isildur in and told the humans he slipped...

Took out the Human Nature/Family of Blood example. There's a few good reasons why Tim didn't just use the watch, not least his being as afraid of the Doctor as he was of the immediate danger...if not more so.

Bob: Cutting Conversation In The Main Page.

This troper was particularly disappointed in the movie on several levels; not least of which because in just about every promotion portrayed the Pale Man as a Satan figure, a tempter, rather than a slavering monster; in the capacity the promotional materials made him out to be, someone to make Ofelia question the faun and his motives. Since Ofelia essentially had to provide her own "Who's to say he's right?" thought processes, and up until this point the only evidence that the faun was in any way untrustworthy or unreasonable was his annoyance at Ofelia tending to her mother when the book started spewing blood everywhere instead of telling her what to do next, this troper found the scene particularly jarring and unbelievable.
- On the other hand, this troper liked her meeting with the faun afterward; not because it was a particularly well-done scene (it wasn't, frankly), but because it reminded him of Tenacious D's Karate, and it was all to easy to imagine the faun singing, "You broke the rules! Now I pulled out all your pubic hair...you motherfucker."

arromdee: The Superdickery link no longer works.

This troper seeks approval to remove every last one of those A Song Of Ice And Fire examples. First of all, it's the most massive spoiler chunk ever, and those are discouraged. Second, most of those examples are single mistakes at best, not instances of really dumb people all around. (I'll give you Cersei.) I admit that this is a sore spot for me, since I'm really bloody sick of seeing people act like Catelyn and Sansa are the bane of all Westeros. But the whole thing reads like a big grudge wank. Kill it now.

Arakhor: I'd say to go right ahead. Twenty "blank" lines in a row is just pointless.

Lina: It Got Worse! The spoiler lines filled up an entire screen, and then some. It was so funny I took a screenshot for posterity. Have killed with fire. But my sincere apologies to all the contributors who worked on it.

RadicalTaoist: It's okay; I only contributed my small part in that style because everyone else had done so. I would like to see Cersei and Lysa resubmitted though. Those were two characters with a major difference between how intelligent they thought they were and how intelligent their actions proved, and each can be summarized in a sentence.

Lina: Hey, go nuts. I'm not sure I agree, but if you can make your case in a sentence, more power to you. By the way, if you can write it without spoilers or with only a little bit of spoiler, I'll love you forever. ;-)

RadicalTaoist: Done, though I think I probably only minimized the spoilers to the point where you should love me for just a few months. By the time you understand the context of Cersei's it ceases to be a spoiler (and you can realize just how incredibly stupid her actions to that point have become). Lysa's crowning moment of idiocy had to be hidden, but if you've read to the end of A Storm Of Swords you'll know how bad.

Lina: No, that is brilliant. It's not that I'm trying to avoid spoilers for myself, it's just that it irks me how many of the Ice and Fire examples on this wiki are spoilerized. Makes it useless to people who haven't read it, and also doesn't encourage people to read the series if they can't learn anything of substance about it. So nice work on this one.

Rebochan: I cleaned up the Pokemon example before realizing it belonged under Idiot Ball instead. I moved it.

Seven Seals: Removed this:

Galileo Galilei had caused a storm in the Catholic Church with his theories but was safe because the sitting Pope defended his right to have those theories. His response? Write a book with an obvious Strawman of the sitting Pope.

Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" featured a character named "Simplicio", who was there only as a foil to discredit opposing theories, but he wasn't based on the Pope. That's just what Galileo's opponents managed to convince the Pope of, with predictable results.

Mysticpenguin: I removed a couple of real life examples that boil down to "people who live in areas prone to natural disasters are too dumb to live!" Those comments are themselves too dumb to live. Being born into cyclical and/or extreme poverty and not having the resources to leave a place your ancestors moved to scores or hundreds of years ago is stupid? Nobody should live in the Midwestern US because it has tornadoes? Where are they supposed to go? There can't be more than about two square miles of land in this country that isn't sometimes threatened by some natural disaster. The taste factor aside, there are magnitudes of difference between a fictional character doing something blatantly, wall-bangingly stupid for no real gain and real live people who, because of a complex mix of factors, don't necessarily have the choice to stop living in undesirable locations. In short, no. Just... no.

Whatever: Removed this reply to the Cloverfield entry. Lets just cut the Conversation In The Main Page before it turns into a big argument over the quality and depth of Cloverfield, hmm? Better to just let people decide for themselves if the other reply had something to it or not.

Or to justify a silly gimmick once you realize you've written yourself into a corner by including it in the first place. When the choice comes down to "film" or "survive," it takes a serious idiot to ignore his own survival instincts and keep filming. This is Cloverfield we're talking about; not an art house film.

And I cut the Fan Wank-y reply, so HA.

Charred Knight: Deleted, the cast of Gurren Lagann except for the Lawful people (Rossiu, and his subordinates) are all genre savy and know that their universe works by the Rule Of Cool.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Every single character. Fighting a giant robot with a katana? Stabbing your Humongous Mecha with another in an effort to combine them? Using a walking battleship to flying kick an Airborne Aircraft Carrier? Flying headfirst at a mecha that doubles as a city? Attacking the moon? The Dai-Gurren Brigade have done all this and more in the name of going Beyond The Impossible, and if their universe didn't run on Rule Of Cool they would have all died about fifty times by now.
- But that's the ONLY law of physics. And anywhere else, the laws of physics would eventually give up in the face of that level of HOT BLOODED MANLY BURNING SPIRAL ENERGY.

The Nerdy Ninja: Is it on TV Tropes or somewhere else that I read the Anonymous quote "I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but shouldn't we just take the warning lables off of everything and let the problem deal with itself?"? Because that would make a great page quote.

Grimace: Bash.org? That's where I remember it from.

Whatever: Cutting the last 28 Weeks Later entry, on the basis that the army didn't know the woman was infected. She wasn't showing symptoms, after all. They figure it out just a little bit too late - as the General's going back to the infirmary to kill her, she spreads the virus to her husband, and he spreads it to some more people.

Let's not forget, they find a woman who carries the rage virus but is not showing symptoms. They leave her alone and unguarded in the infirmary, because it's not like she could ever pass along that infection to anyone else.

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