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The Guards Must Be Crazy
This will get you into the red zone at APEC.

"All this constant turning my back on the dark woods really makes me miss my wife and family."
—Random Guard, The Adventures of Dr McNinja.

Chakotay: "Are you responsible for the ship being out of contact?"
Vorick: "It was necessary to disable the communications, transports and shuttles."
— Star Trek Voyager (showing its usual excellent security)

Being a guard for an Evil Overlord is a low-status, low-pay, high-risk job in an unsafe workplace, with very little long term job security, but hey, they normally have a brilliant pension plan. So it's hardly surprising that most applicants aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer (not that their bosses tolerate incompetent underlings), and could be fooled by tricks that wouldn't bother an average six-year old.

Common issues are:
  • When searching for people, not looking in ridiculously obvious hiding places.
  • Dismissing odd sounds as nothing.
  • Assuming anyone in a guard outfit must be a guard, even if they don't recognize them.
  • Attacking heroes one at a time.
  • Leaving important keys dangling from an easily accessible chain, and walking very close to prisoners.
    • And daydreaming or arguing on the phone whilst they do so, so that the prisoner can grab the keys without the guard noticing.
  • Examining unwell prisoners whilst unarmed and alone, and having left the cell door open.
  • Never watching prisoners locked in a room with a bed.
  • Not raising an alarm upon seeing something suspicious, especially the corpse of another guard.
  • Particularly in stealth-based video games, staring at the wall or otherwise ignoring key entry & exit points. Stealth-game guards also tend to have very limited peripheral vision and a very predictable sweep of the head while patrolling, although it's a smidge unfair to call someone "stupid" for what are obvious physiological or psychological problems. Whoever hired them, on the other hand...
  • Getting easily distracted, especially by prisoners getting it on.
  • Ignoring the fact that Joe just put that box in the storage closet.
  • Blurting out the password to the door they're supposed to be guarding.
  • Not properly searching prisoners before throwing them into the cell.
  • Falling asleep.
  • Not noticing that the other guards seem to be disappearing.
  • Carrying or storing weapons in a prison, in such a way that they are easily stolen by the escaping prisoners (prison guards being heavily armed makes sense, but not in a way that allows the prioners to acquire these weapons).
  • Talking too freely with prisoners.
  • Allowing the prisoner/captive to go to the bathroom or relieve him/herself unguarded, especially when the bathroom contains possible alternate exits.
  • Forgetting all about a discovered intruder if he stays out of sight for 30 seconds.

Examples

Anime
  • The Britannian guards in Code Geass frequently wait until Lelouch has geassed them before actually doing their job. Twice they have waited for Lelouch to give a long pretentious speech before he geassed them into killing themselves. Reaches its peak when Lelouch just walks up waits more than a minute while the guards attack him with spears before geassing the entire room. Britannia has got to have the dumbest guards in fiction. At least stormtroopers bring blasters.
    • Aside from the fact that Suzaku can also easily dodge gunfire and wallrun, it can be assumed that they had this spears mostly for ceremonial reasons, as most soldiers seen carry firearms and only a few people actually fight with swords and other melee weapons (while not in Knightmare at least).
      • What kind of moron would have his guards only carry ceremonial weapons? Do you honestly believe that the Swiss Guard just have swords, and halberds? They also make sure that beside the ceremonial weapons, they also have a non-ceremonial gun!
      • If you like to know the Swiss Guard hide assault rifles and wear body armour under their silly outfits.
    • The Chinese Federation are even worse, while they do have guns they just stare dumb founded as Xingke fights them off with a sword since the only Chinese soldiers to fight are the ones with spears, and then they watch as Lelouch gives a speech before finally Lelouch has the sense to take his gun and hold Tianzi hostage with it.
    • If a crazy guy in a mask comes up to you and starts babbling weird stuff, you'd pause in confusion, too. Especially if he's not supposed to be there in the first place. How would you radio it in, for one?
      • Not unless that crazy guy happens to be Zero, the world-renowned leader of the Black Knights. Then all you'd really have to say is "Zero's here!" and your superiors would understand.

Comic Books
  • An old Fantastic Four story saw the government imprisoning them in specially designed cells. Reed Richards and Johnny managed to find tiny flaws in the prison design. The Thing found that the door was strong enough to take one punch from him, but not multiple blows, which makes the prison designer crazy. Sue Storm turned herself invisible. And yes, guards set to guard The Invisible Woman opened the door because they couldn't see her.
    • Pfft, in 1602, Doom was able to get all four locked up way better than that all by his lonesome. Only Ben was able to break out, and only because he spent years whittling away at his "cell". Reed, Sue, & Johnny had to be freed by other characters' actions.
  • A not so old issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four uses the same idea, only it was evil zombie versions of the entire team in one cell together, and the Reed Richards counterparts prepared the trick by claiming he had built a teleporter from a ballpoint pen and a string of hair.
  • In Asterix the Gladiator Asterix and Obelix find a guard who works at the prison where they are holding Cacophonix prisoner. Asterix tells Obelix to ask him some "clever questions" to find out his exact location. Obelix, to Asterix's astonishment simply asks "Hey you! Where is Cacophonix imprisoned?". The guard replies in detail adding "but it's a secret" while Asterix sits there befuddled.
    • That would be Refuge In Audacity, methinks. Well, if Obelix wasn't The Ditz. Besides, Rule Of Funny.
      • Stuff like that happens a lot with Asterix and Obelix. May or may not have anything to do with the fact that Asterix has a Magic Potion of superhuman strength, and Obelix fell into the potion when he was a baby, and it had a permanent effect on him - meaning either of them can hit guards until they talk.

Film
  • The ultimate and truly memorable subversion in Titan AE: Preed, Stith, and Korso are trying to free Akima from a slave prison. They see a large, brutish guard around a corner, and Stith offers to take him out. Preed refuses, saying "this requires cunning and deception". They then walk up to the guard, and Preed spins a tale that he and Stith are traders, and that Korso is his slave. After delivering his story, the guard says these exact things: "You're lying. He's (Korso) not a slave and you're not traders. Look at the way he stands. He doesn't carry himself like a slave. Probably ex-military (Korso is a former Earth Space Marine). Akrennians (like Preed) always threaten before asking a favor, it's tradition (Which Preed apparently completely forgot). And your (Stith) robes are made out of bedspreads!" Preed then asks if they have a Plan B. Stith promptly reverts to her Plan A by kicking the crap out of the guard.
    Preed: "An intelligent guard! Didn't see that one coming."
    • The commentary reveals this is one of the very few complete relics of Joss Whedon's pass at the script.
  • Consistent in all the Austin Powers movies. One even manages to fall into the lava flow when he's outwitted by Felicity Shagwell's boobs.
  • Partially subverted in Goldfinger after James Bond is recaptured after escaping his cell. The next scene shows Bond back in his cell with three guards inside with at least one with a gun trained on him at all times to make sure he stays put.
  • Double subversion: In Mom And Dad Save The World, a guard, despite being from a planet of idiots, doesn't assume Dad is a guard just because he's wearing a uniform... however, she unquestioningly accepts the laughable answers he provides in response to her questioning and lets him go on his way.
    • He acted well to suspicious afterward, by running into another patrol.
  • Played with again in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, when the racist white prison guards attack a peaceful African American prisoner, thus allowing Kumar to escape with an enormous bag of marijuana.
  • The security guards on the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope.
    • Although Vader did actually order them to let the prisoners get away.
      • And Princess Leia notes afterward that Vader had to have let them go deliberately, because their escape was entirely too easy.
    • Ben uses a Jedi Mind Trick version of this after turning the tractor beam off. This is actually an inversion of Its Probably Nothing. Presumably, Ben made the guards think they heard something off in the distance, and like intelligent guards they go to investigate. Unfortunately for them, it really was nothing.
    • The novel Death Star turns this on it's head. One of the normal human Stormtrooper commanders was sensitive to the Force and really hated his bosses. He mislead his own troops and thus allowed Han and the others an easier path to freedom.
  • The guards of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
  • Avoided in The Incredibles, where a guard effectively fights against a girl whose powers are to become invisible and to make forcefields by chasing her into water and throwing some dirt into it. He loses anyway, but that's still pretty smart.
    • To be fair, he really lost because heroes don't believe in Mook Chivalry.
    • Not all of them are bright though. When Elastigirl is stuck between three sliding doors, one of them stands there with a stupid look on his face while she feels around to find his chin, then KOs him with one punch to the jaw.
      • You'd have a silly look on your face too (presuming you're this way inclined) if an incredibly bendy girl was stroking your chin, too.
  • Justified in THX 1138, in that, though the guards are glaringly incompetent, the general population (with the sole exceptions of the hero and his girlfriend) are too stupid/strung out to notice. For example, the guards routinely leave the doors to a high security prison unlocked, but none of the prisoners had ever bothered to check.
  • Race For The Yankee Zephyr (1981). A mook standing on the edge of a cliff catches the hero sneaking up, intent on braining him with a lump of wood. Instead of grabbing his rifle the mook begins waving his arms about and howling in a highly exaggerated martial arts style. The hero gapes in astonishment then, as the mook turns to deliver a spinning kick, kicks him down the mountainside.
  • In the movie Charlotte Gray, which takes place in Nazi-occupied France, the eponymous heroine and a member of the French resistance are being held in a house by Nazis, and manage to distract the guard who's supposed to be watching them by making out, then jump him and run for it when he comes over to separate them.
  • The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (1966). Wallace lets Tuco go relieve himself. BIG mistake.

Literature
  • The Discworld books have a lot of fun with this. In The Last Hero, Evil Harry Dread (the archetypical Evil Overlord) hires his henchmen on the above criteria. "Butcher" is the archetype of the trope.
    • And Guards! Guards! opens with a dedication to those people "whose job it is, round about chapter three, to rush at the hero one at a time and be slaughtered."
    • In Thud!, the text mentions how when Sergeant Colon is on guard duty, he "kept the cell keys in a tin box in the bottom drawer of his desk, a long way out of reach of any stick, hand, dog, cunningly thrown belt, or trained Klatchian monkey spider (making Fred Colon possibly unique in the annals of jail history)."
    • Seemingly averted in The Last Continent, where the guards at Bugrup Prison are wise to every escape trope, but haven't worked out how Tinhead Ned (and later Rincewind) did escape (the jail door can be lifted off its hinges). Possibly because they reckon it makes a better ballad if the prisoner escapes and then gets killed in a last stand at the Post Office.
  • In one of the Get Smart novels, one guard is particularly immune to this. Instead of entering the cell when Max sets fire to the bed as a diversion, the guard merely opens up on him with the firehose.
    • However just a few pages later the rest of the guards in the prison are fooled by Max writing "out of order" with a piece of chalk on a death ray!
      • I wouldn't want to touch a broken death ray.
  • Subverted in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: Ford attempts to save himself and Arthur from being chucked out an airlock by talking a Vogon guard into questioning the purpose of his life, but the guard is too dumb for Ford to get through to him.
    • That, and the guard really enjoys shouting at people, something his job supplies in great quantities. RESISTANCE IS USELESS!!
  • Both fiercely subverted and then played straight in An Oblique Approach, the first book of the Belisarius series by David Drake and Eric Flint. The Kushans guarding Princess Shakuntala were so highly disciplined, effective, and intelligently led that Raghunath Rao, greatest assassin in India, knew he could never rescue her from them. So Belisarius tricked Venandakatra into replacing the Kushans with "guards" so inept that Rao had no problem wiping them out — except for two killed by the princess herself.
  • The guards at the "best guarded keep of the stoutest castle" in The Wind In The Willows apparently can't tell the difference between a washerwoman they see every day and is the sister or sister-in-law of the chief warden, and their main prisoner, who is an anthropomorphic toad.

Live Action TV
  • Played with in the Doctor Who episode "Dragonfire," when the Doctor distracts a guard by engaging him in a philosophical discussion on the nature of existence, a subject about which the guard is particularly enthusiastic.
  • Also both averted and played straight in State of Decay - one of the guards recognises that the man claiming to be a guard is, in fact, a known deserter. But the other doesn't... and falls for 'the old prisoner trick'.
  • The A Team. Many a villain has been laid low by not paying attention to machine sounds after Locking Mac Gyver In The Store Cupboard. This troper recalls a particularly egregious instance where Hannibal and Face are arrested. Hannibal seems to have escaped, so the sheriff unlocks his cell and checks inside, then both he and the other officer in the building leave to find him... when Hannibal turns out to be hiding under the bed and promptly lets Face out and escapes.
  • "Schuuuuultz!"
  • Merlin. In the first episode, two guards go chasing off after some enchanted dice.
    • In the fourth episode, they fail to notice a servant girl riding off into the night. What temp agency do they get these guys from?
      • That may be justified - later in the episode they said she'd been using magic to prevent anyone from recognizing her, so the could have used magic to escape unnoticed.
      • It seems like every episode, the guards are doing something even more retarded than the last one. This Troper}} has no idea why they even hire them.
      • One has to wonder whether or not Merlin has to trick his way past them every time he wants to go and see the Dragon... you'd think they'd get wise eventually.
  • Subverted in Dark Angel when Max tries to distract a guard with a rock, but he isn't fooled. She laments, "Why did I get the smart one?"
  • Star Trek. Standard procedure for security personnel on Voyager is to stand in the formal 'at-ease' position, looking straight ahead (not at the person they're guarding) so they can be knocked unconscious at a suitably plot-related moment. The M.A.C.O's in the next Trek series Enterprise acted a bit more professionally.
    • "Sir, there is a multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder..."
  • From a review of the Blakes Seven episode "Bounty".
    "…to say nothing of the guards' color codes, which include Red Standby Alert (apparently meaning stand around and do nothing), Red Mobilisation (wander around outside the house), and Blue Mobilisation (allow the President and his daughter to escape in a vintage car accompanied by two terrorists)."
  • Averted in Buffy The Vampire Slayer: "Why do I always get the smart ones?"
  • In season 3 of Lost, Sawyer tries the whole "prisoners making out" thing to get the guards to come over when he kisses Kate, then overpowers them and takes their gun. It doesn't work though.
  • In the original series of Star Trek, one particularly ridiculous scene has a guard of an enemy installation watch calmly and without taking action as Spock walks up to him and informs of an imaginary "multi-legged creature" on his shoulder.
  • Subverted in Battlestar Galactica in that when someone escapes from a cell it's either a Xanatos Gambit (Bulldog, and later Ellen Tigh escaping from the Cylon basestar) or because the guards are in on things (Laura Roslin in Season 2, and Tom Zarek during The Mutiny). Probably the least plausible occasion is when Gina escapes from the Pegasus brig, makes her way to Admiral Cain's quarters and shoots her, and then slips off the battlestar unnoticed. Although she had the help of Baltar and things were chaotic in the aftermath of a major attack, it still stretched the bounds of credibility.

Tabletop Games
  • Most classes that would traditionally be used as guards in Dungeons & Dragons don't have Spot, Listen or Sense Motive (or their 4e equivalents) as class skills.

Video Games
  • The guards in the Metal Gear Solid series exhibit most of these traits at lower difficulty levels... and don't when you play the game on "extreme" difficulty. Also, the enemy AI seems to improve from game to game, leading to a rather strange situation wherein genetically-engineered super soldiers (the Next-Generation Special Forces) in the first game are dumber than Russian special forces in the second and third games.
    • This is justified in that the Genome Soldiers, despite being flaunted as genetically enhanced Super Soldiers, have no actual field experience. All of their experience is in VR Training, and Snake in the second game commented on how it is a poor substitute for experience. That, and the soldiers also have an apparent flaw in their genes, which the terrorists need to correct with Big Boss' DNA.
      • Well, in the Twin Snakes remake of the first game, the Genome Soldiers are now as smart as the second game's Russians (And even got a new AI clearing method for outdoor areas). It was the technology of the time.
    • The guard's lack of peripheral vision in these games can actually be partially justified. Think about it: in every installment of the series, the guards are always wearing balaclavas, which do slightly reduce one' capability to see out of the corner of one's eye.
      • Furthermore a lot of the heavier-armored guards are wearing helmets with face shields, which would limit peripherial vision even more.
    • The third game also nicely averts the "disguised as a guard" subtrope. Your stolen scientist and maintenance outfits are foolproof disguises...until someone sees your face.
  • In the various games of the Thief series, guards are notoriously brain-challenged. They carry obviously important items dangling from their belts, they take a remarkably short time to go from "I saw something" to "must've been a rat", and they ignore fires and candles that get doused by water arrows (that would presumably leave a mess all over the floor). Heck, they don't even try to relight them. At least they go into full-alert mode if they notice a dead mate lying on the floor, which is more that can be said for some other games. And even then, in some of the titles, all you have to do is hide out for a while, and they'll conclude that "The murderer must be long gone by now" and resume their patrol, without even calling for assistance.
    • Lampshaded in the first of level of Thief 2: The Metal Age, where dousing one of the torches prompts a pair of nearby guards to argue about who should relight it, and then ultimately doing nothing as it transpires that they forgot their tinderbox.
    • And lampshaded in the Gold and Platinum releases of Thief 1, where one of the added levels has you infiltrating a thieves' guild: you watch two people go up to the guard at the front door (you'll probably use the back) and be challenged for a password. One points out that they've known each other for years - no dice, the guard wants the password. The first visitor recites it exasperatedly, tries to enter and is stopped, as the guard points to the other man (who is standing right there) and complains, "Well, now he hasn't given me the password!" And yes, the first man comments on this.
  • Hitman relies on this trope for gameplay, as 99% of guards hardly notice the bald man with the barcode on the back of his head, unless you really screwed up in Blood Money. The exception are the lovers in the Mardi Gras level, assassins, and certain people in the Heaven/Hell party.
    • Particularly in the level in Blood Money where the Hitman can take the outfit of the clown at someone's birthday party. Apparently the guests don't notice that the "clown" removed his facepaint, and suddenly has a barcode on his head, not to mention he doesn't smile, just keeps his face in that permanent expression of badassery.
      • Clearly he must be the elusive "laughing on the inside, scowling on the outside" kind of clown :)
  • In a memorable early-game sequence in Breath Of Fire 3, your characters must sneak into a mansion guarded by a wide variety of inept guards. It's a puzzle sequence, so almost every single one of the types listed is played with, including a few who just don't care and will let you go by if you bribe them or even find their lost wallet. So hard to find good help these days.
    • One particularly egregious example is a guard that admits he would be completely unable to stop the party, then orders them to go kill a guard dog to cover his ass, or he wouldn't let them pass. Wait a minute, couldn't we just kick your ass?
    • Justified in that the guy they're guarding is both a complete dick and a total miser, and the goof-offs all probably figure they're not getting paid enough to deal with a band of robbers. Of course, they're also the exception, as the majority of the mansion's soldiers are loyal mooks.
  • The guards in Assassins Creed suffer immensely from this trope, though considering the nature of the game, it is actually justified. Examples include:
    • The inability of any guard to comprehend that the guy in a white robe who just hugged their patrol partner, who collapsed less than a second later, could be... you know... a suspect.
      • And that's even if the robed guy follows up the first hug of the death with half a dozen more, stealth-killing bystander after bystander right in front of the guards' faces, occasionally stabbing them so hard that his hidden blade visibly goes all the way through them and sticks out the other side. Just don't run, jump, or climb a wall in front of them, or they'll be on you like stink on a camel.
      • But woe to Altair is he forgets to walk very slowly with his hands brought together. The guard will go apeshit on him.
    • Not looking inside of the curtained frame directly next to them on the roof that the assassin was just spotted on.
    • The inability to conceive the notion that the man in a white hood and covered in weapons might be the source of the numerous mysterious (or, if open combat breaks out, not-so-mysterious) recent guard deaths.
    • The inability to spot the only "praying scholar" that's loaded down with weapons.
    • To make up for this, if they ever see the main character galloping on his horse, even before people start mysteriously dying, they immediately realize that he's an assassin and chase after him. Curse those medieval speed limits!
      • Also to make up for it is "that man in white was shoved by the mentally insane man hes clearly an assassin" but considering he only shoves you and no one else they might be actual assassin detectors.
  • Similarly, the NPCs in Oblivion have an amazing ability to mistake loud clanking sounds and arrows sticking out of their head for the wind, or their own imagination. The last words of many a bandit have been, "Damn rats, always sneaking about in the shadows, making me-ARGH!"
    • Also, guards in the game will only ever react to a corpse by muttering to themselves about a killer being on the loose, and resume patrolling. They'll also not react much to seeing their buddies being assassinated right beside them other than blankly staring and said muttering.
      • Even better is when two NPCs are talking, and you shoot one while sneaking. The other one turns and walks away, mid-conversation. This Troper's personal experience with crazy stupid guards was the time I killed a NPC. I was standing over the body. The guard runs up, I run away. I hear him say "There's a killer on the loose!" He chases me and arrests me... for Assault.
      • They do have quite a skill for knowing who murdered another guard. I can't tell you how many times I've stealth-killed a guard with perfect invisibility when he's the only NPC in the whole damn cell, yet somehow I still get slapped with a Murder bounty.
  • In City Of Heroes, mobs of enemies will usually ignore fights going on in plain sight halfway across the room with automatic weapons.
    • Justified in that otherwise the hero(es) would be overwhelmed and it would get really frustrating really fast.
    • It's best to remember that the MMO convention of hitting an enemy a few times doesn't translate into the mythology of City Of Heroes. A low level hero carrying an assault rifle should be able to drop a Mook with a single shot or burst, but because of the requirements of the game, it takes a few shots. Likewise, clearing a room would theoretically take a few seconds for the same assault rifle guy just going buckwild on the auto-fire, but because of the game requirements...
      • To be fair, a non-bulletproof hero (like a blaster) versus a roomful of enemies with chainguns and rocket launchers...
    • It's a convention of MMORPG in general that the aggro radius of the mobs is much smaller than their line of sight. It always lead to egregious situations where the guard twiddle their thumbs while you slaughter their colleagues in front of their eyes, waiting for their turn to die. World Of Warcraft made a commendable effort to give the players the impression that they were really storming an enemy stronghold in the Shattered Halls instance, with constant reinforcement coming to face you and guards lining up in formation. Sadly, they still included a room where a bunch of guards kept training rather than facing you, and another where they managed to sleep through the whole ruckus.
    • And in another dungeon the boss greets you when you get close to him, but makes no attempt to stop you slaughtering his remaining guards, who all just stand there.
    • This is lampshaded by a boss in the aforesaid Shattered Halls dungeon, who will actually comment as you individually kill his henchmen. "Go ahead. I was going to kill him anyway."
  • In Beyond Good And Evil, the heroine can shoot a projectile into a guard's air tank - and unless she's in plain sight or really unlucky, the other guards present will just fix the tank, then declare "false alarm" and get back to their business.
    • And even if she is seen, she can just run around a corner where they can't see her, and after a few seconds they'll do the same thing. Repeatedly.
      • And if you shoot the tanks of all the guards in the room, there will be no other guards to fix the tanks, so they'll simply run around like headless chickens. You can then kick them for a satisfying finisher.
      • Alternatively, fire a projectile at their groin and watch them double up in pain. They're apparently so distracted by the pain that they fail to realize someone is shooting at them. Unless, of course, you're standing right where they can see you...
    • Perhaps the only (moderately) justified action they take is when Jade runs out of sight, they dispatch a droid to clear the area. Of course, they usually clear the area just out of sight and ignore any areas slightly farther out of sight.
    • In many areas, but particularly notable in one guard-riddled passage in Alpha Sections HQ (roughly 6 guards in a 50-foot stretch of open balcony, plus about 4 more immediately above and below it), the guards will look around everywhere except entrance points. In the referenced area, one guard faces in a direction no attack could possibly come from, and if he stayed in place but turned around the mission would be impossible.
  • In the early stealth portion of the Forsaken Fortress in The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Moblins patrol small areas of the fortress, and if they see you, it's into the prison with you. However, there are barrels that you can hide in. You can even move about as long as they're not looking, because the fact that a barrel is somewhere that it wasn't tells them absolutely nothing. This is possibly justified by their being explicitly stated to be really, really stupid.
    • The smartest one in the game is an automated statue that spits lasers at you with alarming accuracy (well, alarming when you account for the fact that they're only about a second slow, and in real life, that would be close enough to scare the piss out of most anyone. Certainly a twelve-year-old like Link).
    • It's pretty much ethablished that also the guards of Hyrule castle are, well... dumb, without exception. No matter what time period the game in question plays in (not that we would know)), the guards never seem to notice anyone walking by, if he's not right before their eyes. Even Princess Zelda has been mentioned to sneak out of the castle with no problems frequently. The only time the guards actually keep something from going in- or outside is in Majora's Mask. And this almost ensured the Termian apocalypse.
  • Vaan has to infiltrate Rabanastre palace early on in Final Fantasy XII. In advance it sounds like an annoying Stealth Based Mission. Then you get there and the guards are apparently blind, as they never notice you unless you bump into them or yell at them.
  • Pokemon games all have an evil team of some sort. You can infiltrate their base, but the guards will only see you if you walk in front of them.
    • People only see you if you are directly in front of them... so groups of trainers are like a laser wire maze.
    • Also, no one in the Pokemon universe ever has any sort of weapon or armament except for a team of Pokemon. You can blatantly walk around the suspiciously Mafia-like organization's lair, and all the guards will do is challenge you to a trainer battle. Once your Pokemon beat theirs, they just kind of go "aw, shucks, well, the leader will beat you for sure" and then let you go on your way.
      • But really, when a guy with complete control over a team of rabid wolves made of fire and twelve foot tall steel golems wants to go up the elevator, you let him go up the elevator.
      • What good are a few pistols going to do against the aforementioned golems, anyway? Not to mention the being that controls the very fabric of space-time with its mind.
      • Well, the goal wouldn't be to shoot the demigod, it would be to shoot the ten-year old before he could let the demigod out of it's tiny cage.
      • All of the above is beautifully described in this Brawl In The Family strip.
    • Not only that, but the random guards usually have completely awful Pokemon. Whatever Mafia don decided it would be good security to give their patrol guards standard-issue Magikarps deserves to have his entire syndicate taken down by a single ten-year-old. At least this was lampshaded in Diamond/Pearl, where the grunts complain about how useless their issued Pokemon are after being beaten and before letting you continue.
    • Don't forget the totally idiotic guard who goes, "Who has the lift-key?! I'm not telling you who!" and battles you, and after the battle he goes, "Oh NO! I dropped it!" and he... lets the player pick up the lift-key... WTF?
  • The guards in the Tenchu series are not the brightest folk in medieval Japan. While they will look around for you for a while if they spot your shadow or see you moving just out of clear sight, the fact that a dead guard causes no more than a few minutes searching, and no call for backup, seems to indicate that broken necks and gaping sword wounds weren't considered too unusual in an average night's work.
    • Although, to be fair, in the Tenchu universe, it's sort of implied that this happens all the time.
    • Most hilariously is the animal whistle. Throw an exploding shuriken at any enemy. They grunt in pain as it hits them. Then they explode. Then you blow the animal whistle. "Oh, it was just a chicken."
  • The guards in Splinter Cell are a pretty surprising aversion of this; they can be remarkably thorough, especially when they've detected the player, and if entering an area of low light, they'll often whip out flares or flashlights. Later in the series, enemy troops also start carrying night vision goggles, and in Chaos Theory Douglas Shetland's personal bodyguard are equipped with thermal goggles. They even notice broken lights, cameras, locks, or anything else you broken really. Speaking of cameras, the cameras will detect any dead body left in their vision, and some of them are bullet proof. Strangely though, whoever is watching the monitors of these cameras doesn't seem to notice them going out one by one through rooms that'd leave a very specific trail of which room Fisher is hiding in.
    • However, they still call a false alarm after searching for a while. Yep, definitely a false alarm. All those dead bodies, shattered lights and eye witness viewings of the mysterious commando running around? Guess it was the wind. To be fair though, they do spend a lot more time searching for the player than most other games do, and after the alarms are turned off, the guards still tend to be more alert.
    • Not in the later games. A guard who finds a dead body or sees Sam Fisher will not forget even when he returns to his post, and when confronted with a suspicious sight or sound, is more likely to investigate with bullets instead of a flashlight.
  • Averted in Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. If the guards see you with a weapon out, they start shooting. In Beyond, you can sneak up behind them with a knife and stab them; if the other guards see the corpse before you drag it out of sight, they'll head for the alarm and set it off. They'll also ask you for a pass periodically. In the original Castle Wolfenstein, you could steal a uniform and wear it; the regular guards would generally ignore you, but the SS would find you out.
  • When playing as a Spy or the occasional Scout in Team Fortress 2, opposing players in general and Engineers in particular ARE the guards. This troper has seen competence at this role go from extremely genre savvy to playing it completely straight, often failing to notice the deaths of their allies as they charge to the frontlines.
    • Then you go to another server, and find that everyone shoots their teammates JUST IN CASE.
      • As someone who mains the Spy class, this troper is amused to see this trope's relevance. On public servers, you can get away with all sorts of suspicious behaviors, such as standing around conspicuously around sapped sentries, making beelines at your targets in full view of the opposing team, and running away from the frontline for no apparent reason. Play on a clan server or some other place with TF2 veterans, and, as the above troper said, the dynamic changes to a subversion. Simply being seen, even with a disguise, will get you shot at as a caution, and so much as looking at a enemy will reveal your true role to them, and being within twenty feet of a sentry or a heavy-medic combo will result in horrific maiming by the respective engineer and medic, and people chasing you will never, NEVER let up, no matter how far you run. But even against competent opponents, it's surprising to see how powerful the trope still is. People standing around the bombcart have a nice habit of following it's path slowly while all facing the same direction, a single scout running around 100 yards away will steal the attention of an entire group of people and make them oblivious to their teammates cries of spy-inflicted death, and if they see you run around a corner, they'll blindly charge down the hall, allowing you to fake them out by cloaking outside their line of sight and running the other direction.
      • This Troper mains Engineer, and he can entirely confirm the prior troper's remarks about clan servers. My teammates have long since gotten used to the fact that if they want to use my dispenser or so much as go within 20 feet of my sentry, they have to accept 2-3 shotgun blasts in the face. Each.
  • Guards in Golden Eye must be blind and extremely nearsighted, because a patrolling guard will not bother to investigate the sound of gunfire even if you are using the loudest weaponry and they don't seem to notice you until you're almost right in front of you.
    • You can also shoot their hats off their heads without getting a response.
  • In Deus Ex, you can shoot someone in the face with a tranquilizing arrow (which usually takes two or three hits to knock them out) from a small pistol crossbow, and they will, if you're not in plain sight in front of them, briefly run around waving their arms... then go back to whatever they were doing.
    • Not to mention they can walk to the source of a noise, look straight at one of their colleagues' body lying dead on the floor and promptly declare it was "probably just a cat".
      • The worst part in all of this is that the Majestic 12 armored troops will notice said colleagues' bodies... so it's not an engine limitation. Other guards are just *that* stupid
  • In Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse in one of the first levels the player may gain control of a policeman by using the protagonist's arm. Other policemen won't notice the odd one unless he has a gun out, despite wearing a zombie arm as a hat.
  • The guards in Perfect Dark 64 are pretty smart. Blast a couple, the survivors will run for the alarm button. Snipe one, his buddy will run up and yell in despair (at which point you slay him also). But the good guy guards aren't always the smartest. You can tranq a stewardess for Air Force One (!) with a crossbow bolt (huge, works if it goes in her brain) and steal her uniform. Nobody checks your ID, even though your guard detail is long gone. In an earlier level, helicopter pilots will shoot through their (female) colleagues to get to you.
    • Even funnier, if you shoot a guard who is not aware of you, they will occasionally say in a curious tone "Was that a bullet?"
  • In Mother 3, at one point Lucas and his dog attempt to get into a nightclub, only to be informed by the bouncers that "No Dogs Allowed". The two slink away and seconds later, Lucas and his Dog(now wearing human clothes and walking upright) walk up and try to enter. The guards aren't fooled, and even mention that Lucas was just here with his dog, and now walks up with a dude who looks suspiciously like a dog. They only get in due to one of the staff members vouching for them, and even then the guards seem suspicious.
  • The Krimzon Guard in Jak II: Renegade will forget about the Guard-slaughtering Phlebotinum Rebel the city's supreme ruler considers Public Enemy Number One if you enter a safehouse for two seconds. You can also walk down the street with gun raised, distinctive haircut and Team Pet sitting on your shoulder (almost impossible to fake, not that anyone wants to try), and they won't give a damn. Rule Of Fun applies, because being gunned down by KG every time you step out of a safe house would produce an even more frustrating game.
  • In Okami, the Imp guards outside the main part of the Moon Cave dismiss Amaterasu as a normal wolf (perfectly reasonable though, in that only a few can see her markings), but when she comes back wearing a piece of paper over her face, they immediately let Ammy through, telling her to "Get back to [her] post!"
  • The military in Prototype takes this to ridiculous extremes. Random Marine jumping off a skyscraper, flying into the base, landing hard enough to make an impact crater, and proceeding to run up the walls? When it's well-known that your highest-priority target is a Voluntary Shapeshifter? Perfectly normal, apparently.
    • Of course, they make up for it once they do find you, with a relentless pursuit using extremely heavy firepower, and they call for air support immediately. Not to mention that by late-game, infiltrating a military base becomes nearly impossible because they're smart enough to deploy virus detectors and UAVs with overlapping coverage at all their bases.
    • Particularly annoying when you attempt to use the wall climb ability rather than wall run. Rather than make you more stealthy, it sends your threat level sky high as soon as you're sighted.
    • They also fail to notice that when the same Marine accuses several other guys of being the target and blindly gun down the accused until they've cleared the room.
      • Considering the nature of the infection, Mercer's shapechanging powers, and how absolutely twitchy and paranoid the military are due to those same issues with Mercer's shapechanging powers, that's actually very much justified.
    • One almost gets the impression that the soldiers really don't want to find Mercer. They only open fire when he's being really obvious with his powers to the point where they can't pretend that they didn't see him. They can hardly be blamed for not wanting to meet a crazy powerful shapeshifting man-eating abomination.
  • Evil Genius plays this absolutely straight and quite deliberately. Your Evil Minions will outright ignore any agent of the forces of justice unless they've been tagged for execution or capture. These include squads of heavily-armed soldiers, thieves in brightly-colored Spy Catsuits, Highly Visible Ninja, and musclebound supersoldiers Dual Wielding machineguns.
  • Why Princess Peach still pays her guards is a source of continual mystification to videogame fans. She'd have better luck with a "Do not kidnap the Princess" sign than her usual group of Toads.
    • Also, the kings in Super Mario Bros 3. They have, in the entirety of the royal castles, 1 guard for each king in each country, and being as that guard is a Toad, said guard gets instantly knocked out by a Koopaling just charging at it.

Web Comics

Web Original
  • The LifesBlood Labs goons in LG15: the resistance are pretty incompetent. The "Mace in Yo Face!" and "Done Dirt Cheap" incidents are particularly shameful.
    • Although the "Mace in Yo Face" incident is justified because those weren't real LBL henchmen.

Western Animation
  • Jonny Quest used this one a lot.
  • Used, played with, subverted and lampshaded frequently in The Venture Brothers, most often through the misadventures of Number 21 and Number 24, two guards who somehow manage to survive the carnage of the series, and give plausible voice to the wit and social skills necessary for career henchmen.
  • Subverted in the Gummi Bears episode when trolls are holding the Gummi hostage in Gummi Glen to force the colony to recover a treasure hidden in a tree they uprooted and put in Castle Dunwin. Unfortunately, when Gummis get to the tree they find it empty, because the castle guards were apparently smart enough to discover the treasure and moved it to the castle treasury.
  • Used and slightly lampshaded in an episode of Duck Tales where Huey, Dewey, and Louie are imprisoned in a room with a guard looking in at them once every hour or so. While two of the identical triplets work on the means of their escape, the third one sits in front of a trifold mirror, giving the impression — sort of — that there are three boys sitting there. Lampshaded in that one of the boys asks whether the guard won't notice that they're all wearing the same clothes, only to be told by the one devising the plan that "he's so tired, he's not going to care WHAT we're wearing, just so long as there's three of us." Improbably, this turns out to be true.
  • The Trope was played with in "Stroker and Hoop", when Stroker has to knock a guard out to get deeper into a complex, after dressing as the guard, he gets into the next room where the guard is seemingly fooled by Stroker holding a clipboard over his face and using a bad falsetto until he starts to continue, at which point the guard asks him if he thinks he's an idiot, and that he was on the monitor, to which Stroker asks if he's even supposed to be watching the monitors.

Real Life
  • Alcatraz's guards were fooled by one oldest trick in the book after another: dummy heads in the bed, digging a hole with spoons, and climbing up the ventilator shaft, making this trope not only Genre Blindness but Truth In Television. Since the Alcatraz escape was done some years ago, it might be Seinfeld Is Unfunny too.
    • To say nothing of It Only Works Once...
    • Thing is, this isn't a bad escape plan, which is why it worked. Basically it relies on the fact that it simply isn't practical to monitor prisoners TOO closely, so if you're clever enough... plus, after this happened I suspect it became a lot more popularized anyway.
  • Truth In Television: A convict in a US prison was able to escape by dressing up as a guard, because the guards were more familiar with the prisoners than each other.
    • There has also been at least one case where an accomplice faxed realistic-looking release papers from a nearby McDonald's fax machine, resulting in a convict walking out scot-free, without anyone thinking about double-checking even the clearly visible fax-number.
  • The Chasers War On Everything proved this was Truth In Television at the APEC summit, getting to George W. Bush's hotel, past two security checkpoints in a fake motorcade, with "insecurity passes" that stated they were NOT official delegates. And a guy dressed as Osama bin Laden in the back seat.
  • There is a Ninja technique, the name of which translates as "throwing the toothpick", to distract guards. Yeah it's that old, at least. To be fair, if it's done properly, the guards never see anything, they just hear a sound.
  • During World War 2 there are plenty of stories of people hiding in basements from the Nazis and not being captured. As my Dad put it "Maybe they didn't want to check the basement."
    • Which is depressingly ironic since the Nazis were disturbingly efficient at finding people hidden in floors, walls, etc.
    • Probably has to do with the volume of searching to be done. Platoon is ordered to search an entire town in a day or so. That's how many houses that have to be searched. Going to rip up the floorboards of every house? I don't think so.
    • Other theories; who wants to invade a fortified bunker? Or the guards were secretly sick of so much killing.
  • Recently in Germany, an inmate managed to get out of prison by climbing into a cardboard box and getting shipped out, apparently no one checked to see all the prisoners working that detail came back or why the package was unusually heavy.
  • In 1982, an unhinged man climbed the wall of Buckingham palace. Someone saw him and reported it, but by the time guards came to look, he was gone and they decided he must have left already; they raised no alarm. When he went through a window, the security system alerted a policeman on duty, who assumed it was a malfunction and silenced the alarm twice in a row. Wandering through the halls, he passed a housekeeper, who greeted him. He eventually made it to the Queen's chamber, where she was sleeping unguarded, woke her up, and chatted to her as she tried to get help by two different methods (a button and the phone); nobody came for ten minutes.
Durable Deathtrap
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