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Popularized by film critic Roger Ebert, a term for a plot that hangs together only because the main characters behave like idiots. It's not so bad if the characters are supposed to be acting like idiots, but it's very bad if the Idiot Plot depends on a character suddenly acting stupid enough for the plot to work.
A much more grating form is the "second-order idiot plot", in which the plot can only function if every character involved, including side characters, suddenly loses about 50 IQ points. In fact, Damon Knight originally coined the term "second-order idiot plot" to refer to science fiction stories in which the entire fictional society relies upon its citizens behaving like idiots.
See also Idiot Ball, Too Dumb To Live, Wall Banger, Credit Card Plot, Plot Induced Stupidity and Stupidity Is The Only Option.
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Examples
- School Days. Somewhat excusable by the fact that it masquerades as a comedy for, oh, about one episode and a half; afterwards it becomes truly cringe-worthy.
- 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.
- Durandal's plan to replace Lacus Clyne with an impostor is entirely dependent on the world population being stupid enough not to notice the impostor's vastly different personality (not to mention much larger boobs, and the fact that she dresses much more revealingly).
- Worse than that, while ZAFT was busy invading Earth in the name of self-defense, they completely ignored the OMNI military bases on the Moon, practically in their back yard considering that they lived in space colonies. This, of course, bit them in the ass when OMNI used their moon-based laser cannon to completely blow away several colonies.
- The show as a whole turned into an Idiot Plot by episode 13, where everything up through the ending hinged on the Archangel going to war and creating conflicts due to their stubborn belief that just because anonymous would-be assassins were piloting ZAFT suits (nevermind three had just been stolen by the Earth Alliance weeks earlier, and Kira owned one himself), they must have been personally sent by top of ZAFT command.
- The final nail(s) in the coffin for SEED Destiny was that not only did Shinn turn into an uncaring, violent idiot by the end, every episode involving the Archangel in action was caused by idiotic reasoning on the part of borderline terrorists and the fact that not one civilian on Earth and in space seemed to have minded Durandal's proclamation of the Destiny Plan.
- Lampshaded in the Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series spinoff Cr@psule Monsters:
Alex "Definitely Not A Villain" Brisbane: Step on the map. Yugi: Make me. Alex Brisbane: Oh, come on. I'll be your friend. Yugi: Look. There's no way I'm stepping on any freaking map. Alex Brisbane: What if I told you there was candy inside the map? Yugi: You've got to be kidding me. I'd have to be an idiot to fall for that. Tea: Candy? That sounds pretty good. Tristan: Yes. Let's go get the candy!
- Sonic X takes this to absurd proportions when everyone on the planet forgets the very basics of astronomy for a couple of episodes, except Sonic himself, amusingly enough. This is when 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 brainwash 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 hentai fantasy manga Dawn of the Silver Dragon is a manga about a band of female police officer-type warriors in a mildly Magi Tek world trying to fight Villain Sue Radim and his gigantic conspiracy. Radim's Materiél technology allows him to utterly control the body of any woman who undergoes the process, which he eventually uses on every member of the all-female Silver Dragon band, which was established specifically to combat this technology, despite the glaring weakness in that plan. At one point near the beginning, one of his lackeys takes one of the Silver Dragons, a known materiél, pimps her out in public in an unsubtle manner, at a time when lack of discretion could cause the plan to fall apart, and the Silver Dragons never once consider the possibility that something is wrong with their coworker until she goes missing. When that happens, the leader Celes goes to a rendezvous location unguarded and unprotected and is subjected to materiél treatment. The rest of the team goes in to rescue her with a reasonably thought-out plan, which fails because Radim is so Crazy Prepared as to be omnipotent. Thus ends the second volume. As time goes on, we learn that virtually the vast majority of the government are misogynistic and sympathize with Radim, which is proven when he enslaves the empress and launches a coup, which he really didn't need to do because he was already pretty much in charge of the government, making the entire story pointless. The combination of the incredibly stupid main characters, the illogically invincible Villain Sue, and the Crapsack World makes the entire plot a monumental Wall Banger Idiot Plot.
- In X1999 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.)
- The movie was brought into existence because of an admittedly cool music video that had one of X Japan's songs (the inspiration, basically.) And trying to fit what was at least a dozen plus books by that point into 90 minutes without stripping things to the bare minimum? Ain't happenin'.
- Hiltz' master plan in Zoids Guardian Force is pure idiot plot on everyone's part, including his. In short, rather then launching his master plan at the start of the series - which he allready had all the resources to do such - he instead spends thirty episodes destroying the scenery. The result is that not only does it lead the heroes right to his doorstep, it gives them the weapon and the technology that they used to defeat him, and wouldn't have had otherwise. The only reason one can think as to why he did this was simply "to sell more toys"
- 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. This troper actually came close to rooting for Nami, even though she takes her revenge pretty far.
- The last few episodes of Code Geass, the UFN wants peace, Lelouch wants peace, Schneizel wants peace. So how is this handled? By fighting over which way to make peace is the best! You could argue that they where fighting over how to make the peace last, but Word Of God states that the peace is temporary anyway. So thousands of people died in a war for something that could have been avoided by just talking about it. By the end the whole thing is revealed that Lelouch and Nunnaly had the exact same plan but with themselves as the evil overlord.
- The entire population of Earth (or Tokyo, at least) and several aliens seem to have a habit of carrying around an Idiot Ball in Sailor Moon in that they are never able to figure out Usagi is Sailor Moon until she either tells them directly or transforms in front of them, usually the latter. Think about it: they're both blonde Japanese girls, which are pretty much as rare as they come, with one of the single most iconic hairstyles in history, wearing the same brooch, and you can't tell Sailor Moon and Usagi are the same person because why? Sailor Moon wears a tiara and tends to be a bit less ditzy, but that's about it. Same goes for the other Senshi. (Yes, I'm talking about you, Uranus and Neptune.)
Comic Books
- Supreme Power, the J. Michael Straczynski reboot of Marvel's Squadron Supreme (a typically Marvel-dark riff on the characters of DC's Justice League Of America), has large parts of its plot dependent on the chronic tendency (seen before in much of Straczynski's work) for virtually everyone in any kind of government-representative role to be malicious, incompetent, or both.
- The most egregious example is in the story of Mark Milton, or "Hyperion," the Superman-analogue: when a superpowered child falls from the sky in a spaceship, he is taken within minutes by the government and put in the custody of two dedicated agents, who pretend to be married so they can raise him as an American citizen in an artificially created (and heavily-monitored) "perfect family environment". However, with all the effort put into creating this environment, it somehow fails to occur to anyone in the project that getting an actually-married couple to play the role of Mom and Pop would be far easier on the agents, far more psychologically healthy for the child, and far safer should he ever, oh, find out about any of this.
- 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. Granted, this is well-justified by the personalities of the characters involved.
- The infamous Spider-Man storyline One More Day, because making bargains with a devil is never a good idea.
- In the So Bad Its Horrible Wonder Woman storyline Amazons Attack!, the entire Amazon race (the only apparent exception being Wonder Woman herself) carries an Idiot Ball the size of the moon. On the advice of Circe, an evil goddess who has tried to exterminate the Amazons on multiple occasions, they decide to declare war on one of the most powerful nations in the world; one that is home to many of the strongest superheroes in the DC Universe. The end result? The Amazon race is scattered across the world, they suffer Character Derailment that makes them a bunch of Straw Feminists, the entire USA hates them, and the reputations of heroes associated with them (Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, Supergirl to name a few) are left tarnished.
- Oh, and the secret weapon they were going to use to bring the US to its knees? Giant magical bees. While awesome, a bunch of giant bees doesn't exactly measure up to jet fighters, attack helicopters, cruise missiles, anti-aircraft guns, or nukes.
- Quoth Batman: "Bees. My God." Taken out of context, it's a perfect Face Palm statement that sums up the idiocy of this storyline.
- Issue #36 of X-Men. To summarize: Professor X and Banshee have been kidnapped in the Alps, and the X-Men need to get to Europe to rescue them before someone uses their powers to conquer the world. The problem? Their plane is out of gas, Warren's parents are out at sea, and the X-men don't have access to Professor X's bank accounts. They apply for a loan, but get rejected and as they drive away the bank manager notes that they were driving in a Rolls Royce (easily valuable enough to serve as collateral for said loan). The rest of the issue is the X-Men trying to get part time jobs to raise cash. The question is, why don't they just sell the damn car? Surely it would get them enough cash to get to Europe, and hanging onto it can't be as important as rescuing their mentor and saving the world. Sheesh.
- The Green Goblin is being hailed as a hero, and is now basically in charge of America's self defense. Just to be clear, Norman Osborn was outed months ago. He was convicted of mass murder. He strafed his own arraignment hearing with pumpkin bombs on live television. He is known to be dangerously bipolar, and that's when he's on his medication. He's the single most infamous example in Marvel of why superheroes need secret identities, given that he's the first MU villain to murder a hero's supporting cast *coughGwenStacycough*. This. Man. Now. Has. Every. Registered. Superhero. On. File. And. Under. His. Authority. Legally. This. Is. Madness.
- In addition, they also disbanded SHIELD and gave Norman Osborn full authority to create and run its replacement, HAMMER. So not only have they given him his own private army and intelligence agency, they're not even maintaining the minimal control that having him direct personnel already chosen and loyalty-screened would give them. Instead, Osborn gets to recruit all his own people. Appointing Charles Manson the Director of Homeland Security would make more sense than this.
- New Avengers #50 ended with Ronin (Clint Barton) actually going on TV and (with understandable shock) rehashing out all the above issues and just how mind meltingly stupid the people are for accepting a known psychopath as their new leader. Of course, this being the MarvelU, it probably won't work.
- Thor: Vikings by Garth Ennis assumes no other heroes are in New York to help out, but it's okay since Doctor Strange is there, but his plan relies on finding a couple people to fight an invincible opponent and his army face to face, instead of using his own powers to temporarily subdue, banish or restrain them, protect the city with some kind of force field, evacuate people, or find a more clever solution than watching and complaining about how invincible the opponent is.
- Any plot that involves Thor or anyone else trusting Loki becomes one of these after, oh, his tenth betrayal (so, since the mid-1960s). The current mega-arc by J. Michael Straczynski would be the most recent example.
- The movie X-Men: The Last Stand features a double idiot plot. The government hears that Magneto is raising an army to attack the mutant cure laboratory on Alcatraz. In response, they arm the guards there only with mutant cure dart weapons in plastic dart rifles, thus leaving them totally defenseless against an attack with conventional weapons (Magneto could easily take care of firearms, but the dart rifles should be able to use the Instant Sedation darts seen in the second movie). Then, Magneto's army attacks, and no one in it brings along any weapons.
- It's actually a triple idiot plot. Magneto and his army are attacking an island compound in order to kill the mutant being held within, as his blood is being used to make a mutant cure. In order to get there, Magneto rips up a bridge and hovers it over to the island, with his entire army standing on the bridge. This looks very cool. However, rather than dropping the bridge at the entrance to the island and then fighting a pitched battle to get to the mutant, Magneto could have literally dropped the bridge on the mutant.
- The whole thing is full of "it's not as if" moments — Magneto is surprised to realize that the guns are plastic, partway into the fight, but it's not as if he had some kind of ability to sense metal at a distance that had been highlighted in the plot about fifteen minutes ago; Logan has to kill Jean Grey, 'cause it's not as if there's a bunch of needles full of make-you-not-a-mutant juice nearby...
- And then there's Magneto's apparent decision that he's playing chess rather than fighting a war during the attack by sending in the "pawns" while the queen sits around doing abso-frigging-lutely nothing. Apparently Magneto was so focused on scheming the rest of his war that it took up 90% of his brain cells.
- Dvd bonus materials feature a deleted scene in which Magneto kindly asks Jean to lend him a hand in the battle by unleashing her unstoppable powers on the troops, to which she smiles and answers "No." This leaves a somewhat puzzled and freaked out Magneto with the pawns to fall back on (not that he had to keep Pyro for later, but that's another story). That's one deleted scene you wish they left in the movie, isn't it?
- Star Wars, specifically Return of the Jedi and the Battle of Endor. On the Imperial side of the ledger — the Emperor's plan is to let the Rebels think the second Death Star is vulnerable to attack so they will plan a fleet assault against it, then cause the failure of the Rebels' attempt to sabotage the Death Star's shield generator and thus have the Rebel fleet destroying itself by attacking an impregnable fortress, yes? Would somebody please explain to me where in this strategy is there any requirement to let the Rebel sabotage team land on Endor at all? There isn't any, of course. The only thing that needs to happen here to let the grand scheme go forward is for the sabotage team to accomplish nothing. Having their shuttle tractored into the Executor's hangar bay and then be peeled open at leisure by Darth Vader and 500 stormtroopers would qualify for a whole lot of nothing.
- The Rebel sabotage team was flying a captured Imperial shuttle and thus no one knew that it was full of Rebels until they had already landed. And even then, Palpatine's Xanatos Roulette was so all-encompassing that it took the wild coincidences of Chewbacca springing an Ewok hunting trap, the Ewoks mistaking C-3PO for a god, and the Ewoks attacking the Imperials while their attention was most divided (if you noticed, the Imperials quickly regrouped and started slaughtering the Ewoks en masse, but by that point it was too late) to bring down the shields. Those stormtroopers were probably chosen more for their political loyalty and ability to keep secrets than their actual combat prowess as well.
- The Rebel sabotage team was using an access code that the Emperor had deliberately leaked to them. These codes are arbitrary strings of characters that are looked up in a database maintained onboard the Executor. Han even mentions during the scene that the Rebels have no way of knowing whether or not their access code is still good until they actually try it out. So why didn't Palpatine simply give the Rebels a code that came up in the database as "HEY, REMEMBER THAT REBEL SABOTAGE TEAM WE WERE EXPECTING? GUESS WHO JUST SHOWED UP. GO INFORM LORD VADER AND ADMIRAL PIETT AT ONCE. YES, EVEN IF IT'S THREE O' CLOCK IN THE MORNING AND THEY SAID NOT TO WAKE THEM UP. OH, AND ABSOLUTELY UNDER *NO* CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO TAKE THE SHIELD DOWN UNTIL AND UNLESS LORD VADER *PERSONALLY* TELLS YOU TO. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL BE PUNISHABLE BY HORRIBLE, NASTY, FORCE-CHOKING DEATH. WE ARE SO TOTALLY NOT KIDDING." Because, y'know, he could have.
- There's also that since the shield installation can literally be seen from orbit when it's operating, which means concealment is not a priority, then why the hell is it in the middle of a forest? As far back as the frigging Assyrians people had figured out that not clearing away the trees and bushes from around your fortress only means that people can sneak right up to the gates. What the hell was the Imperial Army Corps of Engineers smoking? Even just a few minutes of orbital bombardment could have blasted them a nice large cleared zone in among the trees that they could set up their base on. And then, y'know, maybe a fence, some searchlights, a few proximity alarms, some infantry support weapons...
- I always viewed it as the plan was to capture the ship and the troops were there as a back up if the Rebel Alliance tried to send another expedition to replace Han's team or to break off from the main attack. It all changed when Vader realized that Luke was on board that ship, and he was conflicted about betraying his son. That's why the Emporer was annoyed when he found out that Luke was with the command crew. Then again, I may be filling in dots, that Lucas hadn't intended.
- Attack of the Clones scored a major idiot moment by Obi-Wan being told point blank that the clones had been made for the republic years before. Does anyone think that an army of clones made this far in advance is a little suspicious? No, they just take the clones, and be glad they have an army to fight with.
- The villains in Signs are aliens who have a vulnerability to water. They invade a planet that looks like this
 ◊ without wearing protective suits, or any clothing at all for that matter.
- And they want to eat people, who are mostly made of a fluid that burns them like acid. It'd be like humans invading Venus so they can drink from large vats of boiling sulphuric acid...
- The ending of the original Ocean's 11 movie. How stupid could the team have to be to put the money in a coffin and not make sure that it wasn't cremated?
- If the coffin in question was a regular burial coffin, and not the flimsy version used for cremation, then we either have a classic case of Did Not Do The Research, or a legendarily stupid operator at the crematorium.
- Much of the tension in Spider-Man 3 could have been relieved if Mary-Jane had asked Peter "You do realize my role in the play was replaced, right?" Or if Peter would have taken a deep breath and talked things through with her after "killing" Harry. On the other hand, he was under the effects of the evil suit, but it felt like he forgot her entirely after getting his revenge. In fact, there were a lot of problems with that movie's plot, many of which were pointed out in a HISHE episode.
- Don't forget the admittedly in-movie (but treading actual What An Idiot territory) stupidity of, on a whim, publicly giving an open-mouthed kiss to his lab partner at the same time he was still going steady with Mary-Jane. "Special kiss" in and of itself or not, and not even going into fidelity issues, it doesn't take a sociologist to realize that that is going to raise some hackles.
- Harry gets his memory back, and then threatens Mary Jane, telling her that he would hurt Peter unless she breaks up with him. Both Harry and Mary Jane somehow forget that Peter is just as strong as Harry. Mary Jane proceeds to break up with Peter, and forgets to tell him that Harry got his memory back, is once again dangerous, and that he threatened her.
- Harry's butler tells Harry that Peter did not intentionally kill his father. Either the truth about Harry's fathers death slipped his mind for several years, or the writers retro-actively made the butler an idiot to advance the plot, and make Harry and Peter friends again.
- Scientists detect extra mass in their experiment (which has to take place in a pit open to the environment for some odd reason), but rather than actually go check, they assume it's a bird and keep going with the experiment.
- Into the Blue hinges almost entirely on the main character, Jared, being nose blood-inducingly dumb at every possible turn. Why does he drive his girlfriend away by refusing to tell her that her life is in danger because of his dumb deals with the gangsters? Why doesn't he try to tell the gangsters why there's been a delay in the plan instead of getting into a firefight without a weapon? Why does he leave his girlfriend tied up at the mercy of the gangsters to dive in the water WITH his hands tied behind his back? Why does he destroy the drugs when they're the only thing the gangsters are interested in? Why does he randomly tell them all they need to know about the giant treasure?
- Hellboy 2: The Golden Army: Is rife with these. Beside the usual "I'm pregnant but I won't tell him as to maximize the angst" plot, the heroes rapidly capture one of the Mc Guffin the Big Bad needs to awake the titular Golden Army. Now, they realize that they have no particular need for that item or the Golden Army, but rather then destroying it by giving it to the one team member who can melt anything, they leave it with Abe's Shallow Love Interest, who told them explicitly that she acts as a magic homing beacon for the Big Bad. Guess what happens?
- I don't really see how you Liz choosing not to tell Hellboy, 'cause hey, he hasn't had the best day of it and she's waiting for a good time to tell him is really an Idiot Plot. After all, she might have assumed that the two species couldn't procreate (like everyone but Guillermo del Toro assumed) and then oops! She's pregnant and they haven't discussed it at all and the father of said children is using her toothbrush to feed his cats.
- To be fair, Krauss did want to take the artifact away from Princess Nuala. Who is just an Idiot, and failed to mention any of the key information ("I'm psychically linked to my brother") that might have allowed the heroes to respond appropriately, instead of making them prey to their own ignorance. Makes you wonder how Abe, who is so smart, could have found someone so dumb attractive...
- She does mention her brother knows all that she knows, but it seems Abe didn't catch that part. Or he's just dumb.
- As for why they didn't destroy the crown piece right away, it's highly likely the government was salivating over the prospect of gaining control of the Golden Army for themselves. A thousands-strong army of giant indestructible robots? What kind of sinister military-industrial complex would they be if they said no to that?
- Open Water 2: Adrift concerns six people who sail a luxury yacht into the middle of nowhere and decide to go swimming. It would have been nice if one of them had remembered to lower the boarding ladder first. The one hydrophobic woman who didn't want to go swimming gets thrown overboard by her oh-so-sensitive husband trying to cure her fear of water. So now we have six people trapped in the water and an infant alone on board. Believe it or not the stupidity level increases from here.
- Sybok's Xanatos Gambit in Star Trek V The Final Frontier is pretty dumb and only works because everyone else in the galaxy is apparently an idiot. He takes a Federation officer, a Klingon and a Romulan hostage so that a starship will be sent for him and his primitive followers to hijack. This plan relies heavily on only one of the three most powerful governments in the galaxy bothering to make a rescue attempt, that they sent one ship rather than a whole fleet, and that that ship would not have functional transporters.
- Two of those three governments are capable of writing off the hostage and vaporizing Sybok and everything around him instead of negotiating, and its a tad OOC that they didn't.
- Hilariously, Sybok is outraged when Kirk and company attack Paradise City, saying he didn't expect violence to result. Yes, how dare the Federation take the forced overthrow of Nimbus III as a hostile act! And that's to say nothing of how the Klingons or Romulans would treat it...
- And let's not forget how no one noticed the Klingon ship coming towards the Enterprise.
- Con Air starts off with an Army Ranger meeting his wife in a bar, and her getting hit on by a drunk guy who later tries to beat him up in the parking lot, along with two friends. The drunk guy had to rip off the lead's ribbons-several rows of 'em-before starting the fight. Poe, of course, rips 'em a new one, culminating in the first guy pulling a knife, whereupon Poe gives him a strike to the head that accidentally kills him. Cut to the courthouse, where his lawyer advises him to plead out so he can get a reduced sentence. The judge disagrees, citing the fact that Poe should be held to a higher standard because he's...an Army Ranger. Given that he was wearing a uniform before the fight, and the assailants tried to rape his wife and kill him, he should've gotten off with self-defense. The lawyer doesn't even have him dress in a spare uniform at the trial. The rest of the film can be excused by Rule Of Cool.
- His wife implies that he was a hellraiser before he joined the army ("You were almost 'that guy' again"), Poe's wife runs before the knife comes out, and the guys' friends take the knife with them as they flee. This might make a self-defense claim risky...if there hadn't been dozens of witnesses in the bar to prove that the other guy started it earlier in the evening. The Idiot Ball was bouncing off every character in that courtroom.
- In 28 Weeks Later the so called "shelter", where people are crammed in at the first sign of trouble without first checking whether the zombie that started the trouble is inside or not! And then demonstrate how the doors to this impenetrable shelter can be breached by zombies and panicked humans alike from inside - had no-one in the military heard the saying "don't put all your eggs in the same basket"?
- That's not even the start of it. For no reason whatsoever, they turn off the lights which not only lowers visibility and harder to see the (so far) lone infected coming, but greatly panics the civilians before it even shows up. Wouldn't it have been easier/safer to tell everyone to stay in their rooms? And what's more, the infection started because a man tried to see his wife (who was carrying the virus but acting normally due to a genetic condition) was able to enter the room. The room was completely unguarded.
- Bruce in Bruce Almighty: Gee, I'll answer everyone's prayers without any thought that it might cause a problem. He not only can't think of any logical way to use the powers of GOD but he doesn't even think to ask someone wise...which being God you could call up Einstein (or anyone) for advice. Idiot Plot indeed.
- Burn After Reading is one of the few examples of an Idiot Plot done deliberately. And thus, it manages to be hilarious and entertaining rather than annoying, like most straight examples.
- Comedian Richard Jeni had an extended bit on the massive Idiot Plot that was Jaws IV: The Revenge.
- The vast majority of Romantic Comedies, particularly since the 1980s, rely heavily on Idiot Plots for their existence.
- Half the Harry Potter novels hinge on adults giving Harry and his friends incomplete or misleading information about what is going on because they don't want to burden young Harry with the Awful Truth. This never helps, and by the fifth novel you start to have serious doubts about how wise The Dumbledore really is if he thinks that keeping the truth from the Heroes will somehow get them to keep themselves out of the action. He himself admits that this was pretty stupid in the fifth book.
- Also on the baddie's side, the plan to get Harry to the graveyard in Goblet of Fire was impossibly convoluted, as was the plan to steal the prophecy from the Ministry... and then Voldemort blew his cover by showing up at the end of the battle anyway. Voldemort should get the Evil Overlord List thrown at him. Hard.
- He did. He doesn't stack up too well.
- Further, it never occurs to Harry that he should just take his suspicions to Dumbledore in books 2, 3, or 4. Even after each book ends with Dumbledore proving himself to be a very sympathetic listener who believes everything he's told, at least by Harry.
- In the first 3 movies, the characters acted somewhat reasonably. But in The Goblet of Fire, the school administration breaks rules, seemingly with the intent of putting Harry in danger. They forced Harry into the tournament even though he never entered his name and he was too young. Alastor Moody informs them that the cup is a "magically binding contract", but no explanation of what that means is given. Just "we must obey the cup." Harry was bound to a contract he was never a party to, and the cup was obviously tampered with.
- The school administrators kidnapped children that were not in the tournament, put them in a magic stasis, and tied them down at the bottom of a lake. They then told the competitors to get them, or they would die.
- That's a movie problem. The book says that those kids were told what was happening and that they would be completely safe and wake up once they exited the water.
- Dracula would have never sunk his fangs in Mina's neck if the heroes had remembered anything they'd learned about vampires during their ordeal with Lucy. Especially since Mina was displaying all the symptoms of being a vampire victim that Lucy displayed earlier... Exacerbated by the fact that Mina was with her when Lucy got first attacked and started displaying those symptoms. And they had Van Helsing with them the whole time.
- Also for an all powerful vampire, you'd think Dracula would have had more common sense. Such as taking Lucy with him after fully vamping her rather then leaving her behind. Not only did he give the heroes an example of what a vampire was like and what they could do - he practically led the heroes straight to him. What the point of making undead women if you're not going to use em? =P
- The White Tower rebellion plotline from the Wheel Of Time has turned into this. One side of the conflict has rediscovered several lost spells, has a large army led by a famous general, and has surrounded the White Tower, preventing most movement. The other side, inside the tower, are at each other's throats, constantly in-fighting, and are vastly outnumbered due to their leader being Too Dumb To Live. Not to mention the fact that the Chosen One will never make a treaty with the Tower because their leader ordered his kidnapping, and beating. Granted, The Mole organization is doing its best to foster these problems, but one would think that the Tower's ruling body would, at some point, notice that they are in a ridiculously weak position, their leader is a fool, and remove her from power. And all this is going on with the final battle over the fate of the world just around the corner...
- The story of Adam and Eve in The Bible. They can do whatever they want, have eternal life, eternal youth, and their work consists of stuff like making up names for species and subduing the Earth. The only condition is that they don't eat the fruit of a certain tree. No prizes for guessing what they end up doing, but it makes this trope Older Than Dirt.
- Note the other side of the coin. God has an entire world at his fingertips and the ability to create as much as he wishes on a whim, and he puts the tree in the same small, isolated region as his two pet humans sans any sense of right and wrong. What happened to omniscience?
- Some Islamic philosophers believe that they got thrown out on purpose; knowledge of good and evil would bring them closer to Allah, which was worth the suffering.
- Not just Islamic philosophers.
Ford Prefect: Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.
Arthur Dent: Why not?
Ford: Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.
- The conventional explanation is that refraining from some act intrinsically important or terrible would be just self-interest, but refraining from a meaningless act simply because you were asked not to do it is an opportunity to show love and respect. Omniscience doesn't come into it—free will does.
- Incidentally, this is the central theological debate that C.S. Lewis raises in his Perelandra, so that's worth a read. And it's a good book, the best in the trilogy.
- Similarly, God orders Lot and his family to flee the burning city of Sodom if they are to survive—with the arbitrary condition that they must never look back. Lot's wife does anyway, and God reacts by turning her into a pillar of salt.
- The BC strip actually joked once that the last words of Lot's wife were "the heck with your fanatical beliefs, I'm going to take one last look!"
- Mentioned in a Black Widowers story: One character mentions he's having trouble writing his story without it turning into an idiot plot, and was trying to find a way to prevent characters from asking the obvious question that would resolve the mystery. Their guest then causes another idiot plot in much the same way.
- A good portion of folklore involves people doing the one thing that they've been warned they must not do under any circumstances: Orpheus looking back on Eurydice, Psyche lighting a lamp to see Cupid, Snow White letting strange people into the house when the dwarfs are away...the list goes on and on.
- The Draka stories by S.M. Stirling. There's this empire in Africa which conquers everything it can grab (talking about whole continents here), enslaves pretty much everyone, has an extremely supremacist ideology, plus supreme technology, acts like independent even while being a British colony, but noone - whether nazis, communists or good democrats - decides to do anything to stop them.
- The premise is that the Draka are a sort of Evil Twin society to the United States. Historically, no major nation decided to stop the US from becoming powerful from 1812 up to World War Two. The catch, and this is where the idiocy comes in, is that the US wasn't deliberately expanding into the spheres of interest of countries powerful enough to stop it, except for a few minor border clashes with the British Empire over a river valley here and there. Whereas the Draka do, especially during their alternate version of World War One.
- There's more idiocy to that, because during much of their power grab the Draka are still a British Dominion, and not once does the British Empire even attempt to slap them down despite repeated brutal, hostile and illegal actions.
- Pretty much everything that PG Wodehouse ever wrote, but the man was so incredibly good at it, you barely notice. Plus, let's face it; when you're dealing with characters like Bertie Wooster, what else do you expect?
- The science fiction short story The Cold Equations was originally a brutal, much-needed subversion of early 1950s scifi and its omnipotent men of SCIENCE!. That trend is over and done with, so attention is instead drawn to the idiotically negligent design and procedure choices of the starship builders. This results in a Broken Aesop.
- Being There, both novel and film, is a satire that uses an Idiot Plot to help make its point. The whole story hinges on how people who believe themselves to be sensible and intelligent nevertheless jump to their own, desired conclusions time after time in their dealings with Chance The Gardener, never asking the questions most people would be tempted to ask based on what he says. This is partially because he appears to be a sensible, intelligent person himself, but is in fact an imbecile who doesn't understand what's going on and thus isn't able to correct others.
- The entire Dutch novel Descartes' Dochter (Descartes' Daughter), which revolves around the discovery of a lost manuscript of Descartes. When the main character Henriette returns home to her girlfriend Maartje in a coat covered in blood, Maartje gives up trying to find out what happened after a half-assed attempt at questioning, and the two proceed to make love. Later in the story, when Henriette murders her own mother, Maartje does not go to the police, does not get the hell away from Henriette, but e-mails the French professor she has been corresponding with about it. Who responds with only some vague philosophical stuff about "the gift". Later on, Maartje converses with a German professor about a lost manuscript of Kant that has turned up. When the German professor hears that Maartje has also been corresponding about it with that French guy (the actual French philosopher Jean Luc Marion), she exclaims: "Oh no! A Catholic!" and takes a train to Holland straight away, where she is immediately murdered by Henriette. Later, Henriette lures Maartje into the toilet on a train and then kills her. Serves her right for being too dumb to live.
- Tristan and Isolde is a juggling convention of Idiot Balls. Most egregious examples:
- Tristan is finally allowed to marry Isolde after a bunch of totally epic adventures ending in winning her heart while he's naked in a bath even though she had sworn to kill him. So he decides she'll marry king Mark instead. She hates him for it.
- They accidentally drink the Love Potion meant for Isolde and Mark. They don't even consider asking king Mark permission to marry or anything. Granted, an oath is a pretty big thing, but so is permanent magic, and it's not like Mark cared that much.
- Tristan meets another woman (also named Isolde), is asked if he wants to marry her, and says "OK" completely out of the blue with no kind of justification. He immediately regrets it and refuses to have sex with her, making her jealous. Then the first Isolde also gets jealous, despite knowing the effects of the Love Potion are permanent and exclusive.
Live Action TV
- Pretty much every episode of Three's Company.
- Ditto for virtually every episode of The Secret World of Alex Mack.
- The entire premise of I Dream Of Jeannie. Major Nelson wears the Idiot Ball around his neck for the first five seasons.
- Smallville, episode "Whisper", in which Clark gets super-hearing and everybody's IQ drops 30 (desperately-needed) points.
- Another glaring example is "Action", where super-secretive Clark Kent stupidly rents his farm to a film crew for the Movie-Within-the-Show, "Warrior Angel". This is especially idiotic because only a few episodes previous, Clark's Super Powered Cousin, Kara, arrived and she's far less careful about keeping her secrets than Clark is, increasing the chances of being found out tenfold. Also, why a big-budget movie is being filmed on a goddamned Kansas farm rather than in California, or, better yet: Canada is never made clear.
- Once the plots got a little longer and more complicated than finding out who the Monster Of The Week is and having Clark throw them thirty feet, this has been happening all over the place. Mostly because Clark is so powerful he could stop everything bad from happening if only he would get off his ass.
- Heroes unfortunately (for an otherwise great series) has several examples of forced railroading of the plot in its three-part season finale.
- Near the end of the season, Claire has several Damsel Scrappy moments, fleeing from people who obviously had her best interests at heart and into trouble on more than one occasion. Ando's deciding Hiro would give up if he had one more conversation with his dad, and thus going to take on Sylar(!) alone (!!), isn't much better.
- In "Landslide", Peter Petrelli telepathically eavesdrops on Sylar's plans to enlist the police's unwitting aid in attacking Ted Sprague... and then does nothing when he's subsequently arrested.
- In "How To Stop An Exploding Man", Mr. Bennet warns Parkman not to confront Sylar because "he'll kill you" - but one would think just telling him Sylar is telekinetic and has Ted Sprague's powers would be more viscerally persuasive.
- The idiocy of the Company in controlling their superpowered prisoners seems pretty key. Depowering Sylar was a good idea, but leaving him alone and guarded by only one person, whom he wanted to kill anyway with no means of knowing their condition, is roughly the worst idea imaginable. And Adam? Oh, let's just keep him in a cell. Next to the impressionable idiot with god-like powers. It's not like Adam has had decades to plan his escape or anything. There are so many more, it would probably be easier to list plot points that weren't pure stupidity.
- In season 3, a group of supposedly Bad Ass freakjob villains escape. Their big plan? Hurt people and rob a bank. Joker they ain't.
- Also from season 3, basically anything to do with Mohinder and his impromptu reenactment of The Fly.
- Basically every time Peter shows up on screen and forgets that he can teleport or read minds (ie, always). Notable examples include not bothering to mind-read the villainous Adam to find out if he can be trusted.
- Most of the things that have gone wrong in the series, have been either directly, or indirectly caused by Hiro. Actually, everything was indirectly caused by him, since he caused the formation of the company.
- Also, Peter Petrelli meets his father, Arthur Petrelli, who was presumed dead despite the fact he hasn't seen him in years and is the head of a shady organization, does not stop to read his mind to understand what the hell was going on, and why he had disappeared for so long. Instead, he runs to give him a hug, and loses his powers (all of the ones he absorbed) to his father (who took in a lot of powers to begin with), launching the latter ever closer to A God Am I status, and the former being telekinetically thrown out a window by Sylar, as Arthur's way of saying "thank you" to his son. In fact, Sylar spared him death even if his idiocy didn't suggest so.
- Arthur Petrelli is easily the stupidest villain ever. He absorbs every power Peter ever absorbed, which is a hell of a lot of powers, including teleportation, phasing, many, many ways to blast somebody to pieces, and healing, so they can't really hurt him back. In short, there's nothing to stop him from going over to Primatech and kicking everybody's ass. What's he do? He sits on his ass, drawing the future, and sends out his incompetent mooks to fail at doing his dirty work. Furthermore, he draws a future where Claire is dead, and he needs her alive. He could teleport straight to her, capture her, and teleport back to ensure her safety. What's he do instead? He sends out his two most psychopathic followers to capture her, and is surprised it didn't work. What An Idiot indeed.
- As stupid a villain as Arthur Petrelli is, his wife, Angela, may well surpass him. Deciding that the best way to fight Arthur was to send Hiro to fetch Adam was just one of a long string of extremely questionable choices she has made over the course of the series.
- The latest season finale takes the cake. Having finally rendered Sylar helpless, do they finally kill him? No. They need Nathan to convince the President to end the project, and Nathan's just been killed by Sylar. So they use Matt Parkman to brainwash Sylar into believing that he's Nathan, and using his shapeshifting to support this. And the episode ends with Sylar having been left in this imposture for weeks. Angela Petrelli, Noah Bennett, and Matt Parkman are just having Sylar walk around in Nathan's role and life permanently and expecting everything to be OK. Why? Why not at absolute minimum dispose of Sylar the instant he's finished with what you needed "Nathan" for? Better yet, since Peter had already absorbed/mimicked the shapeshifting power from Sylar, why not just have Peter pretend to be his brother for a little while, convince the President, and then pretend to go missing or die? And above all else, why not at least tell Peter, Claire, et al that "Nathan" isn't actually Nathan, so they don't trigger inevitable disaster via their ignorance next season?!?
- They aren't Genre Savvy enough to realise that Sylar will get his memories back, and they need to get Sylar out of the picture. What else are they supposed to do with a literally unkillable (as nobody knows where he has to be hit to die for real) telekinetic shapeshifting serial killer? Telling Peter or Claire would throw them into a murderous rage, probably leading them to attack Sylar and die horribly. Peter can only copy one power at a time, so all he has at the moment is shapeshifting presumably, and Claire couldn't really do much to Sylar given the sheer number of powers at his disposal, and the fact that he knows what spot to hit that would prove fatal where she doesn't know his.
- Have Matt mindwipe Sylar into catatonia (a technically much simpler task than rewriting his mind to act like an entirely different person), then destroy Sylar's helpless body cubic inch by cubic inch? Cremation and/or tree shredders would entirely hit the hidden spot, by hitting all spots.
- Adding onto this, "Nathan" will still have all of Sylars powers, so he's never going to get sick, and if he gets so much as a cut he's bound to notice the fact he instantly regenerates it. Furthermore, if he ever tries to fly he'll find himself unable to do so given that's one of the few powers Sylar never got.
- Too many episodes of Star Trek Voyager to count, but it occurs in Star Trek Enterprise, too. Either the main characters have to act like morons for the sake of "conflict" or "suspense", or the crew runs into some stubborn Aliens Of The Week who behave like belligerent jerks or fanatical idiots solely so that there will be a conflict of interests.
- Not to mention the Original Series...
- A few of the Next Generation plots had this too, like the 'Datalore' episode where Picard sends Wesley to check on Data, and when Wesley says that Lore is disguised as Data, no one believes him. Queue the obvious signs that Lore is disgused as Data.
- One episode of The Twilight Zone had some people rob a bank of gold and then put themselves in suspended animation (which one of the robbers invented) for years in order to avoid getting in trouble for it. Had they just patented and sold the invention not only would they have probably become made more money than they did in the bank robbery, it also would've prevented them from having to worry about the law in the first place.
- As the above-linked trope indicates, this is actually the problem with a LOT of villainous inventors.
- CSI Miami. Many, many times. When the main cast aren't being idiots for the sake of contrived personal issues, the case of the week inevitably depends on everyone else being idiots. The acting and writing varies between So Bad Its Good and So Bad Its Horrible.
- Not to mention the series can't go two episodes without having some form of Strawman Political. So not only do we have idiots, we have smug idiots.
- Although really, these problems abound in all of the CSI's. New York, Miami, Original Recipe, Extra Crispy, There all like that.
- In one episode of Scrubs, JD is distraught about turning 30 without having accomplished anything on his "Things To Do Before I Turn 30" list. Understandable enough. Two days before his birthday, he finds out that a couple of the hospital's sad sacks are competing in a triathlon; very convenient, as "finish a triathlon" is one of the things to do on his list. You can guess what happens next. This would be a perfectly acceptable, if thoroughly silly, sitcom plot, if one of the other to-do list items wasn't "learn the difference between 'Senator' and 'Congressman.'" Five minutes with the Constitution or, even worse, 30 seconds on Google would have given him a solution and an end to his angst.
- You're really over-estimating JD's ability to learn simple things. He read "The Iraq War for Dummies" and still didn't understand simple concepts. Besides, how often do you get to run in a triathalon? He could always learn that crucial difference later.
- For all the well-written plots Firefly had, "The Message" had a huge, glaring plot point that relied on Mal not taking five seconds to explain the plan they came up with to Tracy. Instead, they had a tense standoff with guns drawn, trading barbs and threats for a good five minutes straight, and Mal never bothers telling Tracy how they're going to get him out of trouble.
- It's definitely second-order at that. Most of the crew knew of the plan, and Tracy didn't bother to ask why his old commander would suddenly be so willing to sell him out either. On top of that, Mal repeatedly stated that Tracy had gotten himself into that mess, and they weren't going to help him out of it, as if he actually wanted it to end the way it did.
- Veronica Mars season one ends with Veronica finding the tapes that implicate Aaron Echolls and then, rather than immediately going to one of the many state troopers who would certainly have been present in the house, since the governor was attending a party there, she drives away all by herself except for the full-grown man she somehow managed to avoid noticing hiding in the backseat of her Chrysler LeBaron. (The entire last third of that episode was more like a horror movie than a detective show, complete with a Made Of Iron Big Bad.)
- Don't forget the season finale where she singlehandedly went after a very powerful organization with absolutely no regard for the consequences. She doesn't even check for security while breaking into their mansion headquarters so of course she gets caught on tape. When another character states she just made some powerful enemies, she just Hand Waves it away with "It wouldn't be the first time." No, you idiot: This time you pissed off the kind of people who can make you disappear and the fact that this is America isn't going to save you. At the end of the episode, the head of the organization states quite clearly to a shocked Veronica (who literally thought she had won) that he's decided to make her life a living Hell because he knows she's responsible. He does.
- In an episode of CSI New York, an escaped convict's plan to escape to Canada involves hijacking a commercial airliner flying out of New York and landing at an abandoned airstrip in Montreal. Leaving aside the writers apparently not realizing that Canada does, in fact, have police who would respond to a hijacked plane entering Canadian airspace, there's also the stupidity of the plan given that the bad guy could have taken a bus or train to upstate New York, gotten off, and found someplace to quietly walk across the Longest Undefended Border in the World.
- Pretty much all of the problems in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles could be easily solved by simply proving to the FBI, and the rest of the world, that the machines are real. They could have easily done this the first time that they had managed to deactivate one of the machines by simply calling a news agency and showing them the damn thing. Instead, the characters actively seek to destroy every last bit of evidence that they can manage to get their hands on. This was justified in the second movie when they thought that they had stopped the threat, and just needed to get rid of a couple of loose ends before the future would be safe. In the TV series, with dozens of machines running around actively trying to create Skynet, this justification makes no sense except as an excuse to keep the plot going.
- The BBC remake of Survivors has 99% of the global population killed by a plague. The survivors apparently suffered massive brain damage given their behavior. In episode #6 the protagonists head into Manchester, now a cesspit of disease populated by scavengers and countless unburied dead, to try and find a runaway teenager who doesn't want to be found. And they do this while being hunted by one of the local colonies who is trying to take them in by force under the pretense of being the new government. Naturally they make no attempt to protect their meager supplies from the desperate survivors who remained in the city. From the way they act you'd think nothing had changed and it was just another day out in the city.
- In The Sarah Jane Adventures, Mark of the Berserker, there's a serious issue. Rani gets the bright idea of leaving an Artifact of Doom alone, unguarded in the room, Sarah Jane shut down Mr. Smith while she was out, Clyde decides to spill all his secrets, Rani, when she starts to act, forgets to grab the Artifact of Doom. Clyde also, you know, spills his secret to his iffy father.
- The miniseries Kingdom Hospital is about 80% filler. The hero is hit by a car, whereupon a monster appears and tells him that he won't die, if he helps them. An ambulance then takes him to the titular hospital, where he talks to ghosts and other presences. The reason he got taken there is because they want him to break their curse. Of course, they don't mention how, and he doesn't figure it out until the last few minutes of the finale. To top it off, the task at hand - drawing a fire extinguisher which becomes real in the dreamworld, and using it to put out the mill fire that killed the children which started the curse - takes all of two minutes.
- In a season 5 episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the titular heroine goes on a vision quest in the desert. Meanwhile, Spike has ordered a robot replica of her to use as a sextoy. Buffy's friends stumble upon said robot and cannot figure out that the eternally cheerful vapid robot having sex with Spike is, well, a robot, and not their friend. All the wacky hilarity that ensues depends on Buffy's best friends not being able to figure out the difference between her and a robot, even though a few episodes earlier, it took them all of five minutes to detect that a woman they had never met before was the same kind of bot.
- The Series Finale of Stargate Atlantis was a major Idiot Plot. First, the control chair for the Ancient outpost gets destroyed because it was, at the International Oversight Advisory's insistence, moved from the outpost in Antarctica to Area51 in Nevada, despite the fact that the IOA was created specifically so that America wouldn't have sole control over advanced alien technology, and the non-American members have long been paranoid about exactly that happening. This is explained with the ridiculously flimsy premise that international treaty requires Antarctica to be demilitarized, ignoring the fact that a prehistoric structure could in no way be covered by the treaty. Later in the episode, when Atlantis tries to dial Earth and instead reaches a Stargate inside the Wraith ship attacking the planet, their response is to send a small team through to infiltrate the ship. Obviously, anybody who's not carrying the world's largest Idiot Ball would've just sent a nuke through.
- The anti-war song "One Tin Soldier" tells of how the people of one nation invade and massacre another to claim a treasure that turns out to be symbolic. The other nation could have avoided this easily if they had just taken five minutes to explain the situation to the messenger sent to demand it rather than being needlessly cryptic.
Video Games
Videogames really can't get away with these, as they can cause brutal Gameplay And Story Segregation, but developers try anyway. If the player character is the idiot, see Stupidity Is The Only Option. Plot-essential NPC stupidity can go here.
- The Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series is really guilty of this. Most of the time your clients are in a pickle because they won't talk.
- The fourth game (Apollo Justice) is a major offender. You have to figure out a magic trick, not because it has any relevance to the case but simply because the judge wants to know. Furthermore, everyone except the judge and the main character have already figured out the trick but refuse to help since "you can't tell a magician's trick". These statements are made by the woman who loves your client like a son and would sooner die than see him go into prison, your partner who works on the case with you and is a magician (who also expressed extreme sympathy for your client) and even the prosecution whose self-declared duty it is to "find the only truth" regarding murders. However, that part wasn't half as stupid as the fact that practically everyone is convinced that the frail little fourteen-year-old pianist who was unlikely to have ever handled a weapon before in his life managed to use a 45-caliber pistol to kill the victim, despite the fact that it's constantly mentioned that the recoil would be enough to dislocate the arm of a grown man of average build. The most the prosecution says about this is that it may have thrown the boy's aim off a bit, and nobody else questions it. And after firing two shots from the gun, the small child apparently had the strength to carry the corpse of the victim (a large adult) a fairly long distance to where it was found. The question of whether he would be strong enough to do this is never even brought up.
- The Bards Tale - the modern version had an idiot plot, that only revealed itself to be an idiot plot at the end. It turns out the Distressed Damsel is really an imprisoned demon queen, thing is the Druids not only did not warn The Bard that he was being manipulated to unleash a great evil (not that it would be the first time the Bard did it). If anyone stopped to explain anything, then well, there goes the whole game.
- And that the cute little dog that the Bard adopted wouldn't have been killed in the game's major Kick the dog moment.
- Much of the conflict from Sonic Adventure 2 comes from the fact that people can't tell Shadow and Sonic apart. Although the two are fast, the same height and share similar facial features, their color patterns are vastly different (Sonic is blue, Shadow is black and red, and the two aren't mirror images of each other, such as Shadow's chest hair vs Sonic's stomach) and their spines are shaped differently, making it very easy to see the difference between the two, even as blurs.
- Similarly, Mario and Shadow Mario in Super Mario Sunshine. Shadow Mario looks like he's made of dark blue water, while Mario is Caucasian with a red shirt and hat (although the overalls are blue).
- In Knights Of The Old Republic, it is revealed that the main character is in fact Darth Revan, a Sith who waged war on Republic, slaughtering millions and then was apparently betrayed and killed by Darth Malak. The truth is that Revan's memory was destroyed and was then reprogrammed into the main character. As a result, the game either ends with Revan's ultimate redemption, or tragic return to The Dark Side. However, in the sequel, the writers apparently felt that many players may not have liked the idea that they were forced to have played as an ex-Sith, and came up with a bizarre subplot that Revan had apparently invaded the Republic in order to save it. A completely pointless plot that makes no sense which all came about as a heavy handed attempt to make a character appear more sympathetic.
- For this editor, the revelations about Revan in the second game made him less sympathetic. Training soldiers to deliberately torture and kill Jedi? Sending the people he didn't trust to Malachor V so they would be killed along with the enemy? Revan was far more sympathetic as a generic Sith Lord being backstabbed by his apprentice.
- Mega Man 9. Dr. Wily, the villain for the last 8 games, appears on TV to declare that Dr. Light, the man who helped put him away the last 8 times, is the true villain. He then goes on to ask for money to be transferred into his Swiss bank account, so that he can fight Dr. Light himself. For some reason, a planet full of idiots falls for this, and Dr. Light is arrested.
- Every Mega Man game is full of idiots. In Mega Man X, humans actually thought it was a good idea to build robots with free will, and then give them a massive amount of built in weapons, and then keep producing them till they outnumber humans. And later on, they make them godlike by giving them copychips, which allow them to transform into ANYONE else. And they put the thoughts of the main villain Sigma, into the chips.
- Many of the Story Arcs in City Of Heroes, especially when Nemesis gets involved. A lot of it involves blatantly misplaced trust in blatantly villainous organizations with proven track records. None of it quite compares to the free comic books involving the Freedom Phalanx, however. They basically get turned into total caricatures of their in-game selves, completely incompetent to a level that makes one wonder how they could have become the premier superhero group. They also get defeated by opponents that, in-game, would just go squish in a single attack from them (although Gameplay And Story Segregation could technically apply here). It has to be seen to be believed. It still bothers a majority of the players that these comics are, sadly, canon.
- The Dungeons And Dragons computer game Death Knights of Krynn featured a stunning moment of idiot plot. For most of the game, the party have been accompanied by Sir Durfey, a veteran knight and expert undead hunter. Bear the latter in mind. During the penultimate dungeon (an evil tower in this middle of undead-infested countryside), the party rescues Lenore, a (very large and muscular) serving girl who is blatantly Kitiara (minion of the Arch-boss) in disguise. Durfey immediately volunteers to leave the party and escort her home on his own. Repeat: The expert undead hunter wants to lead the thinly disguised henchwoman home through undead country. He leaves (the player can't control this; he will leave the party regardless) and is, unsurpsingly, ambushed by the undead, killed and bought back as a Zombie to fight the party.
- Note that he's only two rooms ahead of the room that he left from. That's right, he was killed, bought back as a Zombie and positioned with an army of minions to fight the players in the time it takes to cross two rooms.
- Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks is a humongous offender of this, made especially egregious when you realize it's an action-adventure remake of Mortal Kombat 2, where our heroes aren't nearly as moronic. Whereas our heroes' foolish actions in MK 2 is forgivable due to their unfamiliarity with Outworld and distractions of other important things (like taking revenge for the death of an entire shrine or rescuing a fallen comrade), Shaolin Monks used Character Derailment to make everyone so brick-stupid as to fall for a Thirty Xanatos Pile Up that could've only succeeded if they weren't smart or perceptive enough to realize their "friends" are not themselves. Well...Johnny Cage retained enough Genre Savvy to realize what was going on, but his keen insight unfortunately didn't rub off on anyone else.
- While all the Resident Evil games fall into this trope, special attention should be given to Code Veronica. In his spectacular Let's Play, The Dark Id takes colossal fuck-up Steve Burnside to task - noting that the game is significantly longer due solely to his screwing up...
- He refuses to hand over gold-plated guns needed to open a door unless you can give him "something fully automatic" - which sends you an a wholly unnecessary fetch quest.
- Actually finding the guns results in falling into the [1]'s trap.
- When he has an opportunity to shoot an unarmed Big Bad he completely freezes up because it turns out said Big Bad is a transvestite. This gives him time to set the self-destruct system and force you to go to Antarctica when you do escape.
- While trying to escape Antarctica, Steve screws up operating a crane and flooding the room you're in with poison gas.
- Valkyria Chronicles. Alicia could have stopped the antagonist's tank by blasting it to hell with her Valkyrur powers (which also could have been used to win every battle after her awakening without any disk to the rest of the army), but instead tries to use her Valkyrur flame (a mass explosion at the expense of the user's life), giving Welkin an excuse to rush in and save her and spit some stupid idealistic nonsense about "doing things with their own power". This is supposedly more important than reducing the risk to everyone on the front lines (and it probably would have saved many lives, both military and civilian), creating a strong deterrent force against anyone who might want to invade Gallia in the future, and saving much money in both taxes and damages. His worries about her being seen differently if everyone knew her identity were legitimate (the hell, didn't it already get out when she first used it?), but that could have been easily solved with a mask. Likewise, Max could have won early on by having Selvaria rush and smash the defenses of all of the key targets so that they could be captured.
Western Animation
- Virtually every episode of the most recent Fantastic Four animated series involves a catastrophe either A. started when Reed Richards' latest invention malfunctions, B. triggered by Johnny Storm's stupidity, or C. set off when Johnny Storm's stupidity causes Reed Richards' latest invention to malfunction.
- The entirety of The Grim Adventures of the Kids Next Door was just one big Idiot Plot that involved all kinds of different KND and Billy and Mandy characters falling for some of the most pathetic Paper Thin Disguises in fictional history. We can expect this thing from the cast of Billy and Mandy but every single KND moon base operative too?
- As mentioned above, this is standard fare for The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, to the point where few episodes begin without being catalysed by Billy AKA Idiot Ball incarnate and Grim and Mandy stupidly giving in to his demands. Sure, Grim is their best friend/slave forever, but one expects better from the relatively Genre Savvy Mandy.
- Mandy does it because it amuses her, and to torture Grim.
- Grim also never realizes that he only promised to be their best friend for ever, not their slave. He's fully capable of doing just about anything he wants that a friend could do such as standing up for your self or even being a jerk to them as long as he still is considered their best friend (think Mac and Bloo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends).
- One episode does somewhat address this issue, with Grim getting tossed into Underworld Jail for breaking his contract with Billy and Mandy when they denounce him as their friend. This troper assumes that Billy and/or Mandy set the standards for what a "friend" qualifies as, so they could denounce Grim at any time, and he would get hauled into jail.
- Happens more than it should to poor Eddie Spenser, Jr. on Filmation's Ghostbusters. It doesn't help that he gets a few episodes where he's quite capable of busting ghosts along with the best of 'em.
- The various Super Mario Bros cartoons were often driven by the characters being suddenly weakened to the point where they walk into or can't escape traps that they would have easily dealt with before. Some ridiculous examples include them just standing and watching as Harmless Villain King Koopa tosses Chain Chomps at them, which latch onto their ankles like makeshift manacles and leave them easy to capture and, in the Super Mario World cartoon, they get forced to jump into a warp pipe leading to a Magikoopa's haunted house HQ when he threatens to throw Bob-ombs at them"!
- Almost any given episode of Super Friends. Seanbaby elaborates here.
- A lot of the new episodes of Spongebob Squarepants contain Idiot Plots but one that really stands out is "A Flea in her Dome", where Sandy gets a flea from her trip to Texas, and uses a flea collar to get it off, which then goes to Spongebob, then Patrick. They spend 6 minutes of idiocy before realizing that they could use WATER to get the flea off. SIGH.....
- Is it really an Idiot plot when it's already established that the every character is actually an idiot beforehand?
- One Chaotic episode involves Kaz's science teacher receiving scans from the UnderWorlders in exchange for the technology to travel between dimensions. Did he not stop to consider that if Chaotic was invaded, all his scans would be worthless? (It Was All Just A Dream though.)
- What's with Andy? is a walking Idiot Plot as you'd have to be a complete idiot to fall for ANY of Andy's pranks.
- In Bender's Big Score, the entire population of the Earth becomes dumber than usual, falling for transparent internet scams on a global scale.
- In Transformers Animated episode "Where Is Thy Sting," first when Bumblebee and Wasp switched places with none of the other Autobots noticing that Bumblebee (Really Wasp) has purple eyes as oppose to his normal blue ones. This was visible even with Bumblebee's battle mask up. Then, Optimus and Ratchet get into a battle with Jetfire and Jetstorm of the Elite Guard which could have been avoided.
- "Wasp - I mean, Bumblebot - I mean, I will stay here in case Bumblebot - I mean, Wasp - comes back." He's being so incredibly obvious and while Bulkhead can be forgiven (though he really should notice his best friend acting so strangely), Prowl cannot. Especially since at one point they both gape at him before he corrects himself.
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