Too Dumb To Live - Television Tropes & Idioms

Poor Midorikawa Retasu. Her first appearance in Tokyo Mew Mew, she was a cool Dark Magical Girl... for less than an episode, until she became too weak to fight the Monster Of The Week. But as stressful as that would probably be, you still can't excuse her for forgetting her own powers when she falls into the ocean and panics. (Those powers? Water - including breathing it.)
Messily lampshaded in Elfen Lied: Kitsuragi, Director Kurama's Dojikko secretary, really is Too Dumb To Live, as Lucy proves about 10 minutes into the first episode...
The premise of Kage Kara Mamoru, in which a family has been secrely protected for ninjas for so long that they've lost the ability to survive normal life. The latest descendent, the female protagonist, therefore has a supernatural ability to walk blindly into trouble, and generally gets rescued before she even realises what's happening.
Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan: Sakura is this way around Sabato, always offering her a hand even when she had tried to kill him just seconds prior or allowing her to seduce him in her attempts to kill him.
- However, Death Is Cheap in the series, which is lampshaded at countless opportunities. And in the scarce opportunities where Sakura isn't carrying the Idiot Ball he proved to be quite Genre Saavy.
Jun in Devilman Lady gets episode 1 going by encountering a strange woman (Asuka) stalking her. When Asuka comes to her door in the middle of the night, Jun, despite being afraid, unlocks her own door, willingly gets in a car with Asuka, lets Asuka drive her to a darkened area of the docks, and obediently walks into a deserted warehouse whereupon Asuka locks her in with a werewolf. Then again, Jun is a complete doormat in the beginning of the series and doesn't really think highly of herself. The fact she's a rather plain-looking model - a fact several other models say to her face - doesn't really help give confidence.
Fate Stay Night: Shiro, while not a typical Idiot Hero, wins some sort of prize there due to spending a good portion of the anime refusing to let the fighter do the fighting because she is a girl. He gets called on it by a number of people who think him to be What An Idiot before it sticks. The only reason he gets that far is because of his Death Is Cheap auto-healing powers.
- The "Saber's a girl" excuse really seemed more of a "I don't want the girl I love to be in danger" cop out (and watching her get her ass handed to her the first time she fought probably cemented that). Shirou's real stupidity is his extremely high penchant for self-sacrifice (which he's also called on).
- This is also only in the anime adaptation of the Fate route. In the game, especially in Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel, he ditches the whole self-sacrifice gig soon enough.
The main plot in the Gunnm OVAs involves a young boy trying all he can to make enough money to reach a floating city in the sky where everyone supposedly lives in luxury. He steals and kills in order to appease the requirements of a villain who has promised him he'll bring him to the city if he brings him enough money, but the audience is at a loss as to how he has fallen for it — considering said villain screams "bullshit" from a thousand miles away. He gets a bounty slapped on his ass, but he keeps up with the plan. He gets minced by a bounty hunter and saved in the nick of time — by being turned into a cyborg, while being told that the city isn't accessible by standard means. He decides not to believe that, and tries to climb one of the cables that anchor the city. A rotating anti-intruder blade comes down and slices his feet off, but still he thinks it's a good idea to keep on going. And when, in the end, he is convinced by the main character that reaching the city is an illusion and he should come down and live his life, he forgets to look behind him — and gets sliced to oblivion by another rotating blade. Way, way, way Too Dumb To Live.
The main character of Kyougoku Natsuhiko Kousetsu Hyakumonogatari, Yamaoka Momosuke. He has a habit of blindly trusting and attaching himself to even Obviously Evil people, trying to sacrifice himself for others and jumping in to save people from sword-wielding maniacs without any other means to defend himself than yelling "Please calm down!" He'd probably have died at least once every episode if it wasn't for Mataichi's team always saving his ass.
In Grave of the Fireflies, the main character, Seita, endures incredible hardships with his sister during and after WWII. Most of that hardship is a result of him running out on his kinda-mean-but-not-that-bad aunt's house to live in a cave. One of the reasons the aunt resents him is that instead of working, he goofed off during the day. And instead of getting a job, he runs off with his toddler sister. Even when things become so bad that their lives are threatened, instead of simply asking his aunt to take them back, he sticks it out, while his sister eats mudballs out of hunger. And then both he and his sister die.
- Then again, it's quite unbelievable that their aunt just let him go — with his little sister. She should realize that in those circumstances the chances of survival for a child are very low. And she makes no attempt to get her back, even if the girl is very visibly not doing fine. Resentment aside, letting children run off to their doom is bad practice for an adult.
  - There is something to be said about running away during a war - the kid can go anywhere, any time, and the person looking for them will have no clue where, when or how to begin finding him.
- I guess Reality Is Unrealistic; the story was based on the author of the original book's life.
  - Only in the very vaguest sense, the events above were not from real life.
- The aunt wasn't being stupid, really; she just had too much pride, as did Seita. The whole tragedy of this aspect of the plot is that the aunt never hated Seita or his sister; she was just under stress from being in a war zone and having to manage her own family plus two new children who couldn't contribute to the house. She felt that Seita buying his own food and cooker were his attempts at insulting her, but as we know, that was not the case. Along the same line of logic, she thought the pair leaving her house was another example of spite, but probably thought they would return once they could no longer eat. Seita however, attempts to hoist too much responsibility onto himself and doesn't ask for help, hence why he is such a dark example of this trope.
In the manga version of Fullmetal Alchemist several members of the Amestris military give Solf J. Kimblee a Philosopher's Stone so he can test it to see how much more powerful he gets. Kimblee uses it to create massive destruction, upon his return they ask for it back, and Kimblee does what everyone who has spent 5 minutes with the man expects. He swallows the stone than kills the morons who gave arguably the most psychotic person in the series (only Envy is as close) a stone that upgrades his power. Maybe next time they should do some research on the guy they use for their experiment.
Lolly and Menolly from Bleach are two Arrancar Clingy Jealous Girls who aren't happy to see their boss, Aizen Sousuke, bring a young woman from Earth, Inoue Orihime, as a part of his Xanatos Roulette. What do they do? Go torture the girl out of jealousy. See them getting brutally mauled by their superior Grimmjow when he comes to free Orihime so he can get his arm fixed and fight her friend Ichigo. Then, after Orihime shows Messiah traits and revives/heals them out of pity, what do they do? After a while, they try to kill Orihime again and then use her as a hostage in front of Ichigo and Ulquiorra. Sweeties, that will NOT end up well for you two.
- It doesn't- Menolly is slapped into a pillar by Bleach's resident Kool-Aid Man- Yammy, for those who don't still know- and Lolly is crushed like a bug, thrown into a wall, and dropped out of a tower. And all because of jealousy...
In Devilman Lady, Jun's girlfriend Kazumi dies when she leaves her hiding place for no good reason whatsoever.
Inverted magnificently in Baccano when Randy and Pecco's stupidity leads to them becoming immortals.
Schneizel and Nunnaly become to dumb to live in the end of Code Geass they know Lelouch has geass, they know that lelouch geass works by eye contact, why the fuck didn't they close their eyes when he geassed them? Neither of them die, but that's because Lelouch didn't want them too. Plus the only way Lelouch can geass his guards are that either Lelouch knows whose his guards are, or Schneizel was too dumb to order his guards to shoot on sight.
- Nunnaly is something of a subversion since her reason for not closing her eyes was that she did not believe Lelouch would actually use his Geass on her. As idiotic as her reasoning may sound initially, she was actually being Dangerously Genre Savvy at the time. At this point she was already aware of her status as Lelouch's Morality Pet and in spite of claims he made in a previous episode she may also have been aware of her status as the reason that he was using his power to control and manipulate the people around him. In this situation, she was aware that her innocence and purity were in essence her best weapons for dealing with her older brother and realized that it would have been a complete contradiction of everything that he had done beforehand if he used his Geass on her. The only reason she failed was that her position in opposition to Lelouch made him realize that in order to follow through with his plans as well as atone for his crimes, he would need to Jump Off The Slippery Slope and become the Complete Monster he had already made himself out to be. Only then would his ultimate plan succeed.

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The Guardians of the Universe, as of Green Lantern #27. Seeing as how what they're doing here is essentially recreating even more dangerous versions of the original Manhunters - which crazy obsessed justice machines once overthrew, and almost massacred, the Guardians.
- And in Final Crisis, we find out that the Guardians' latest group of crazy obsessed justice machines are the perfect host bodies for the disembodied spirits of some of Darkseid's minions, who have been dead ever since Death of the New Gods. But now they can get better! Thank you so much, Guardians of the Universe!
  - In fairness, the Guardians would have had no way of knowing. Sure, there was that one Alpha Lantern from Apokolips as foreshadowing, but to foresee that as relating to thew dead New Gods, well, they would have to be nigh-omnipotent and -omniscient... Oh, wait.
  - Also, this will theoretically allow some of the other New Gods to come back, like Big Barda. ...damn. Big Barda as a Green Lantern. If that doesn't give you shivers of one kind or another, I don't know what will.
  - Lucky for them, only Granny Goodness did this.
  - See JLA: The Nail, where her husband Mr Miracle ends up *as her ring*. Sex stuff is implied.
  - And again in Green Lantern Corps, where they decide that it is forbidden for Green Lanterns to love anyone...Right when a new Corps entirely dedicated to Love forms. Can't imagine how that could turn out bad, nosir.
  - Green Arrow/Green Lantern trade where Hal can't seem to work out shades of gray in any situation but it appears neither can Ganthet, who has to be taught this little trick by Oliver Queen, a guy who can't keep his zipper shut to save a life.
Slightly different in 'Emerald twilight' of Green Lantern, with The Guardians of the Universe again. During 'Emerald Twilight' (when Hal Jordan became Parallax), Jordan was on his way to Oa to take nearly limitless power from the Central Power Battery. After stranding several Green Lanterns in space (where they probably would have died), Hal arrives on Oa. Jordan removes his power ring, effectively making him a normal human, and the Guardians, who have power on a cosmic scale (give or take) just let him walk into the central power battery. They knew Jordan would kill them if he had the chance, and they practically let him. The central power battery explodes, revealing Hal Jordan as Parallax. All but one of the Guardians died, and for no good reason.
- At least here, the Guardians realize that they are indeed Too Dumb To Live. One of them says "Thusly it ends? We simply allow him to expunge our grand design? Brothers, are we too atrophied to save ourselves or preserve the doctrine by which we have guided the universe?"
Superboy. All the Lampshade Hanging in the world can't explain how Superboy could be that stupid and live. Even the narrator acknowledged the stupidity of that Superboy. It turned out to be all a dream, even.
- He was just a kid, remember.
One could make an argument most of the characters of The Walking Dead fall into this, though for a fair bit of them one should take into account the Uncanny Valley factor.
- Exactly! In The Walking Dead, a good hard hit to the head takes care of a zombie. Shotgun blast to baseball bat, to well-swung brick. It's all good. Do the humans, with potentially unlimited 'ammo' take down all possible zombies? No, no they do not. Plus, much of the first story arc involves them sitting around in an open field. This, with two police officers leading the humans.
- Except that getting close enough to a zombie to hit it with a bat or other weapon means you are close enough for it to try and eat you. Oh, and don't forget that there are potentially BILLIONS of zombies out there. Yeah. As for throwing bricks, trying to hit a small moving target (albiet a slow one) while it walks up to try and eat you,May not be the best idea.
- The latest arc introduced the concept of 'herds'. It's been well established that loud noises (gunshots especially) attract 'roamers.' What hasn't been fully explored until now is that as any roamers who heard the shot travel to its location, they come across other roamers. Size of the Party doubles. By this time of course, dumbass human who fired the gun, is long out of the area. Party keeps going. Meets with other parties, size triples. Essentially zombies are made to turn into giant swathes of death. Of course, none of the main charachters knew this, so . . .
Lampshaded in Nightwing #150. One of Two-Face's mooks was standing right behind a guy Two-Face wanted to shoot. Two-Face points out that this isn't a good place to be, and the guy needs it explained to him: "I can't afford to lose any red shirts." When the mook doesn't get the reference, Two-Face has had enough, declares him too dumb to live, and blows him away.
The US government (or, hell, the population in general), as portrayed in recent Marvel comics. Yes, let's give a mass-murdering, barely contained psycho his own private army and spy agency on our dime and let him be the one giving orders to all registered superheroes. That's surely not going to come back and bite us in the ass later down the road.
- Let's also let him have a team made up entirely of OTHER mas murdering barely contained psychos. Including a misogynistic serial killer, a cannibal serial killer, a feral berserker serial killer, a living GOD serial killer and...y'know, I think I've made my point.
  - He also now has a "Dark X-Men". Which includes Dark Beast, the guy who is essentially Josef Mengele with fur. By this point this troper just laughs whenever super villains slaughter the citizens of the Marvel U. Every last one of them are candidates for the Darwin Awards, I'm just glad responsible citizens like Bullseye, Magneto and Dr Doom are stopping them from breeding.

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Lampshaded in Scream, when one character calls slash film victims "dumb blondes who are always running up the stairs when they should be going out the front door." And then, some manage to still die.
- Also lampshaded at the beginning, when Drew Barrymore's charachter asks if anyone's in the house, the killer taunts her on the phone with "Oh, please! Why don't you just go outside to investigate a noise?"
In Dantes Peak, the grandmother decides not to leave the area of the erupting volcano, prompting most of the other characters to go after her. Later, she attempts to wade through acid, which does kill her.
- It was arguably stupid to end up in that situation, but the actual jump into the acid was a deliberate sacrifice on her part; she was pushing the rapidly-disintegrating boat in which the rest of protagonists were huddling.
Ofelia of the movie Pans Labyrinth surely qualifies in the infamous Pale Man scene. She has been warned by the Faun not to touch any of the food on display, or else; the magic book, just in case she forgot, tells her again... and guess what she does? She apparently doesn't notice the horrific looking creature sitting as still as a statue at the head of the table, never mind hear it springing to life as she takes a bite out of some fruit. The fairies with her even wave their arms and try to warn her not to, but she just greedily swats them out of the way and they end up getting eaten by the Pale Man for their troubles. At this point, this troper found it hard to feel any sympathy for Ofelia when the Faun goes apesh** on hearing she ate some of the food when we were obviously meant to think the Faun was being harsh. I can't blame him. I don't care how tasty that fruit looked, when a mystical, creepy looking thing with antlers and some monkey-like fairies tell you not to touch anything, don't touch anything!
The entire Jedi order. Let's make a bunch of rules that not only run counter to human nature, but help ensure that your number will always be relatively low. Then let's blithely ignore signs that all is not well until one of your members gets de-lifed by something you thought was a myth. And then let's utterly ignore the growing power and corresponding immaturity and unpredictability of your "Chosen One", all the while getting played like chess pieces by the ultimate BBEG, who was literally staring you in the face the whole time.
- As someone who didn't particularly care for the prequels and who found the overall stupidity of the Jedi Order astounding, this troper has always found their rule of celibacy quite rational. Since the mastery of the Force (of the Light Side, at least) apparently requires peace of mind and monk-like serenity, it makes sense that any form of non platonic love - leading to passion - would be discouraged (and in fact, think of what Anakin's crush for Amidala caused!). A justified, blander version of Sex Is Evil, perhaps.
  - But that's the thing: The prohibition wasn't against sex, but specifically against emotional attachment. So a Jedi could be the biggest whore this side of a brothel planet, so long as he didn't care for any of his/her conquests on a deeper level than "Wham, Bam, Thank You, Ma'am."
  - Then again Palpatine used this detachment to his advantage. It wouldn't have been hard to manipulate a lack of innate knowledge of it, and still be able to manipulate it in itself. And then Yoda pulls a Broken Aesop on Anakin that pretty much ends up driving him insane. The Disciple in Kotor II stated this as a severe drawback, and even 2000 years later the Jedi still hadn't caught on. Remember, Anakin's love was only part of the problem; It was the outright hypocrisy of the Jedi themselves that drove him over the edge.
  - The lesson Yoda was trying to impart to Anakin was one Mace Windu learned decades before, in Shatterpoint. "Holding too tightly to what we love will destroy it." Not Yoda's fault it was delivered in a Lucas film, thus making said lesson come out wrong.
  - That's all very well, but Yoda specifically told Anakin to train himself to let go of everything he loved, and not to mourn them or even miss them. So, given that he said this to Anakin Skywalker, the guy who's most likely to take this sort of "advice" badly, we can safely say that Yoda was being cataclysmically stupid.
- Feltipern Trevagg. If you're going to seduce a space babe, you might try to find out what her species' mating habits are.
Basically, the level of intelligence exhibited by the human race in the film Idiocracy can be boiled down to two phrases: "Ow, my balls!" and "Welcome to Costco... I love you."
- "It's got electrolytes!"
Hud from Cloverfield ~~may qualify~~ definitely qualifies. Whether his friends are being attacked by parasitic creatures or a gigantic monster is hovering over him with a hungry look in its (many) eyes, it never occurs to him to just put the damn camera down and do something! Naturally, another character loses her life to save him from the parasites while his hands are full, and the hungry monster ends up eating him. One of the Rifftrax boys describes Hud as "straddling a fine line between dumbass and inanimate object."
- Heck, the same goes for The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, the remake of House on Haunted Hill, and Quarantine, too. Well, Quarantine is a contested case, as they at least offer a decent justification for the usually flimsy "people have to know!" premise, but still: we can B.S. about a director's artistic commentary on voyeurism and whatnot (that doesn't mean we should), but when it comes down to brass tacks, Handheld Camera = Idiot Ball.
  - House on Haunted Hill drove me nuts. OK, they have to find a lock-down mechanism. You can start in the labrynthine asylum in the basement, or the SINGLE ROOM ATTIC. Why go down FIRST??? Especially given that the system was built at such a time that it likely relies on a counterweight system that would make more sense to be ABOVE the shutters, not below them.
Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds has Melanie going up to a room she knows is filled with birds. The result is She is nearly killed by dozens of attacking birds.. When the actress asked, "Hitch, why would I do this?", he replied, "Because I tell you to."
The opening scene in Scary Movie treats us to the opening Chase Scene, where the Pursued Protagonist has to make the hard choice between "safety" and "death" seen in the page picture.
- This is one of those cases where it's hard to tell whether the person is too smart or too stupid. After all, who put those signs there? Most people would follow the safety signs, so it's not implausible that the signs would be reversed. Or, maybe it's a Man in Black gambit where both actually lead to death and the sign is just to mess with you. And so on and so forth.
  - Let's not forget that this is a comedy, hence the Rule Of Funny.
In a rather unfortunate moment of Fridge Logic Michael's Heroic Sacrifice in 2004 version of Dawn Of The Dead was spoiled for this editor when he began to wonder how many zombifications could have been avoided if characters wore thick, long-sleeved clothing instead of flimsy t-shirts. Pretty much all his sympathy for the characters went out the window at that point.
- Given the existence of leather jackets and dog-handler outfits in the real world, you can expand this to cover all zombie films.
Ed from Shaun of the Dead takes this to new levels. The characters need to get past a horde of zombies, and do so by acting like zombies to avoid drawing attention. When they are nearly to apparent safety, Ed's phone goes off... and he answers it and starts cheerfully talking on the phone, less than ten feet from dozens of zombies.
- But this movie was a satire of horror movies, so this is kind of what you'd expect.
Anyone that gets in a fight with a character played by Samuel L Jackson is by definition the paragon of this trope.
- Well, unless it's Elijah Price, anyway.
- Or a mutant shark.
- Or you're played by Ian McDiarmid. And can shoot lightning from your fingertips.
Although this trope is hardly rare in slasher movies, special mention must be given to the Final Girl from Friday The 13th. She ommitted Once Is Not Enough no less than three times, each time leaving the killer's weapon right there for them when they woke up. There were a bunch of other examples of her stupidity, but that was the outstanding one.
- At one point in a screening of "Halloween", Laurie Strode's stupidity is too much for one audience member. When she fails to make sure Mike Meyers was dead after he came back from apparent death the first time, the audience member shouts, "You stupid b***h, you deserve to die!"
Multiple characters in Burn After Reading more than qualify, but Chad Feldheimer goes above and beyond the call of duty, and definitely earns the title since he ends up getting shot in the head before the second act is even over.
The science fiction spoof Mom And Dad Save The World has a memorably absurd case of this on a massive scale, played for laughs of course: There's a weapon called the light grenade that disintegrates anyone it comes in contact with once the pin is pulled, but only if the victim is dumb enough to actually pick it up. It has the phrase "PICK ME UP" engraved on it. Because the movie literally takes place on a planet full of idiots, one of these left out in the open takes out an entire platoon of evil troops, each one picking it up immediately after seeing what just happened to the last guy who did that.
You'd think by now that the JSDF in the Godzilla films would learn that their conventional weaponry (IE: Tanks, missiles, cannons, giant lasers...Ok, maybe that last one isn't that conventional.) have NO effect whatsoever on the titular monster and, if anything, only makes him angrier. Nope. Even after 28+ movies, they still try the same tactics over and over again.
- To be fair, not all the movies are in the same continuity. The first fifteen films take place in Showa continuity, and Godzilla is only opposed in by the JSDF in seven of the films, in the others he's a hero. The Heisei continuity is composed of eight films, including the original Gojira. The Millennium series is composed of multiple continuities. With the exception of the Mechagodzilla duology, the Millennium film continuities are composed of only one movie, with the exception of the original Gojira, which is a part of all Godzilla continuities. Thus, it cannot be said accurately that the JSDF goes up against Godzilla twenty-eight times without learning their lesson, but they do keep screwing up many more times than they should have.
Capturing a giant ape who's smitten with a female human and bringing him back to civilization? That's a GREAT idea! What's the worst that could happen? Oh...right...
The archangel Gabriel from the movie Gabriel qualifies. From the very first person that he meets onward he is constantly warned that using his powers will attract the attention of every bad guy in the city, letting them know exactly where he is. So what does he do? Why, he seeks out his fallen comrades who are in hiding and proceeds to use large quantities of his powers to "help" them, even when they specifically and emphatically tell him not to and yell at him for it after the fact.
- To top it all off, Gabriel is actually shocked and suffers a Heroic BSOD when he learns that he DID, in fact, lead the bad guys to his comrades and they all died because of his stupidity. Asmodeus even points out "if you didn't want them dead, why did you lead us to them?"
- Gabriel truly proves himself too dumb to live when after Michael makes a last minute heel face turn and gives Gabriel the last of his life essence in order to save his life, dying in the process, Gabriel proceeds to throw himself off of the building to his own death MERE MOMENTS LATER!
In the end of the film adaptation of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, despite the fact that the only thing that can kill Dorian Grey is looking at the painting, that is in that very room, while his nemesis is in that very room, and is aware that Dorian Grey will be killed by looking at the painting, he does not close his eyes but just waits to stare at the painting. The fact that he did tell The League that he can only be killed by looking at said painting earlier in the movie is not a good idea either.
- He didn't have it at home. Remember when Quartermain mentioned he had a missing portrait? That was the portrait that killed him. He worked for M so he could get it back, because it was apparently missing and he didn't want that floating around. As for why he didn't shut his eyes, if he did Mina would probably force them open or something, and he probably had some morbid curiosity as to what would be on the portrait. He was pinned to the wall at that point as well.
- Well, remember that Quatermain noticed the missing portrait because of an empty space amongst the paintings on the wall of his library, presumably out there for anybody to see when it was there — including Dorian, unless he spent all his time averting his gaze from that section of wall... which was along a staircase.
- Yes, but how long did he keep that blank space on the wall? Why didn't he just cover it with another painting, for reasons of aesthetics alone?
- How many characters in the movie came up with a plan that involved blowing up a large area without leaving it first?
I Know What You Did Last Summer. Helen, a blonde, is running through back alleys. So close, so very close is a crowded parade. Back behind her is the killer, her dead sister and piles of tires. She hears a sound, stops, turns back, the killer is there and grabs her and drags her behind the tires. Death ensues. Noteable in that Helen is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. POST-Buffy. Good lord.
Revolver, a forgettable 2005 Guy Ritchie movie, has one scene where a somewhat quirky and unstable hitman is clearly uncomfortable about TheDragon's interrogation techniques. When he complains, the bad guy threatens him with "Question me again, Sorter, and we will have a falling out.". They do indeed have a falling out.
In 28 Weeks Later... all of the UK has been overridden by Infected crazed lunatic zombies. However, they starved (these "zombies" are mortal infected). So the US Army goes in and seals off a small section of London, that resembles The Green Zone in Baghdad, as a launch-pad to restore the UK to nationhood. Beyond this zone is the devasted abyss of England. So when a couple surviving English schoolkids are brought here, what do they do? They immediately sneak out of the safe zone to go home.
- Even More epic stupidity: the military's plan in case of an infection within the compound: Relocate all the survivors out of their high-rise apartments and pack them all into a large basement with no lights. With, apparently, unlocked doors in the back.
  - Let's not forget, they find a woman who carries the rage virus but is not showing symptoms. They leave her alone and unguarded in the infirmary, because it's not like she could ever pass along that infection to anyone else.
The entire cast of The Ruins is not only shockingly unlikeable - they're also terminally stupid. What to do when you find you're surrounded by man-eating vines? Go to sleep.
Many, many, many characters in the Jurassic Park series. Especially in Jurassic Park III, when Amanda is shouting into a megaphone. Towards a forest. On an island she knows is filled with dinosaurs.
Jesse from the second Alien Vs Predator movie. Her companions already killed the Alien in the stairwell, but she runs away and screams, forcing her companions to chase after her through a more heavily Alien-populated section of the hospital. Then she dies when she gets into the path of the Predator's disc blades. What An Idiot.
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 about 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.
- Kinda justified as God expected Bruce to fail epically. After all, even GOD himself can't figure out how to make someone happy without ignoring that little thing called "free will".
Dr. Schneider from The Last Crusade, who refused her one chance at survival for a magical trinket; though to be fair, that magical trinket was the Holy Grail.
Raymond Cocteau in Demolition Man frees a dangerous psychopath in order to get rid of an enemy, but he has it implanted in his brain that he can't ever harm him. However, he also allows him to bring other criminals inside his home who don't have the don't-harm-Cocteau rule implanted. It doesn't end well for him.
Davis in the 2004 remake of Flight Of The Phoenix; the plane has just crashed in the middle of the desert and it's stormy outside. He goes out, in the middle of the night, to take a leak. Not only does he walk unnecessarily far away from the plane (it's the middle of the night! No one's gonna see you, jeez), he somehow trips and falls down, then rolls like, ten meters away from where he were - and gets lost. He fails to find his way back to the plane, and dies out there.
Can we just summarize this and say pretty much every hero/heroine from any given horror or slasher movie?
Considering the numerous mistakes they make throughout the film, ~~Brad and Janet~~ Asshole and Slut certainly apply.
Given that they've watched dozens of their comrades writhe in excruciating pain, I reckon most of the mooks in this scene qualify.
Many of the characters in Gorgo qualify. First, our heroes bring a dangerous animal into a major population center, then disregard the possibility of Gorgo being a juvenile, then disregard the effects of its mother coming into said population center (confident that modern technology can stop it) to the point where the government didn't even bother to evacuate the city! But the jewel in the crow has to go to a trio of teenage gawkers who got up close to the edge of the river Thames to watch the monster. They watched the army fill the river with gasoline, ignite it and watch the river burn for a full minute before realizing: Hey, maybe it's not such a good idea to be near the water while it holds burning gasoline. They are promptly, gloriously, incinerated.
Half of Gotham in the 1989 Batman movie seems Too Dumb To Live. It was already common knowledge that the Joker had murdered many people, but that didn't stop them from diving at the cash he offered in public. He even said into a microphone, "Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives," but they're too engrossed to listen. A minute later, many are dead. And some who aren't dead yet still grab for cash.
"Your weapons have no effect on me!"
- "Shoot him!"
There's plenty of stupidity in The Naked Gun series, but one particular moment comes to mind: In The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, three cops come across what the audience can clearly see is a time bomb. They all mistake it for a nice clock and set it forward to correct the time. Guess what happens next.
Wolverine. Striker's plan to create the perfect indestructible kiling machine;
- Find a mutant with healing powers, sharp claws, and a short temper.
- Cover said mutant's bones with indestructible metal.
- Piss off said mutant.
- Said mutant escapes
- Try to kill said mutant.
In the horror movie Darkness, Regina (Anna Paquin) performs a tracheotomy on her dying father to save him - knowing full well that, if she spills his blood, she will complete some arcane ritual and unleash hell on Earth. Well done, girl.
Let us not forget one of the hit men in Outland who comes to the base on Io — an airless moon of Jupiter — to kill the local marshal (played by Sean Connery) who's been looking into the use of ostensibly performance-enhancing drugs by the miners. As he stalks through a chamber with one transparent wall separating him from the vacuum outside, a falling pane outside (thrown by the marshal) catchs his eye and he promptly blasts away with his shotgun. Explosive decompression ensues.
Many, many characters in movies written or produced by Akiva Goldsman (see the sharks, above). Also, by extension, whoever it is who keeps hiring him.

Close Film

Anybody who has ever allowed Hercule Poirot, Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, or any other crime-solving detective to be anywhere near them. Dinner, vacation, school reunions, wherever these people go, murders are committed that they have to solve. This might be mistaken as simple Genre Blindness, but for the fact that this is often a known phenomenon within the show. Poirot, for example, has commented that he can't go anywhere without people dying. Adrian Monk's assistant Natalie called him the 'anti-Christ' in one episode, noting that even when he was on vacation people died around him. When Jessica Fletcher testified in a murder trial, a lawyer tried to discredit her by pointing out how many of her friends, relatives and acquaintances were accused murderers.
Elaida from the Wheel Of Time might be too dumb to die—as in, she could be impaled in the head with a Blighted tree specifically charged by the True Power to kill anything it touched instantaneously and she would be too confused about what was going on to actually bother to drop dead. Everything she does creates one diplomatic disaster after another. She sends the White Tower into civil war, tries to kidnap the Dragon Reborn (the Dragon must kneel to the White Tower!), sends fifty Aes Sedai to attack the Black Tower (I don't believe those rumors of there being hundreds of organized, militant channelers!), and ends up doing everything possible to prevent unification. Forget the rebels, she has a fabulous new palace to build for herself! By the penultimate book, the rebels' existence and the impending final battle against the Dark One are probably all that's keeping her alive.
- Therava, who seems to be more interested in turning Galina Casban into her sex slave, than in being the advisor of the Shaido Aiel. The rest of the Shaido Aiel may also be Too Dumb To Live. Many, many other characters get handed Idiot Balls from time to time, but their moments of clarity may disqualify them from this trope.
- The dumbest character in the entire backstory is King Laman Damodred, who 20 years before the start of the series cuts down a special tree called Avendoraldera. Said tree was given to his nation by the Aiel, a bunch of Proud Warrior Race Guys who could take over half the world if they weren't busy raiding each other. The insulted Aiel join together to invade the country, destroy its army, loot the cities, and chop Laman's head off. All because Laman wanted the wood for his new throne.
  - Only three clans went into the Wetlands, and it took every nation's armed forces and the unprecedented cooperation of the Children of the Light and the White Tower to fight them off. Even then, those three clans weren't actually trying to conquer anyone; they were just there to kill Laman. In Laman's defence, if he hadn't been such a pillock then Rand's mother would never have crossed the the mountains and died giving birth, and so Rand Al'Thor would have simply gone up the the Waste and killed himself by taking out as many shadowspawn as he could..
- A lot of the important characters in this series tend to be too dumb to live, most notably Rand, who Wouldnt Hit A Girl... even if said girl is a legendary, psychotic Forsaken who is actively trying to kill both him and his girlfriends. He could have overpowered her but ends up just barely holding his ground instead while his friends are tortured, forcing Moiraine, the only Aes Sedai he could really trust, to make a Heroic Sacrifice to save them all. To his credit(?), he was also laughing his ass off at the time at how ridiculous the situation was.
Burt, the lead character of the Stephen King short story Children of the Corn is a particularly terrible example of Too Dumb To Live. He takes far too long to admit to himself that something is seriously wrong in the town of Gatlin... and even once he does, decides to linger just to make his wife - who realized much earlier and wanted to leave immediately - squirm. This results in both of them dying horrible and otherwise completely avoidable deaths.
The existentialist/absurdist book The Stranger has Meursault, the main character. The majority of the book is Camus trying to turn the What The Hell Hero moment in the first part into a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
A Song Of Ice And Fire has several characters who think themselves to be considerably more intelligent than they really are, with disastrous results. Cersei re-empowered the Faiths Militant, and Lysa was dumb enough to trust Littlefinger without question. Leaving the Moon Door open and then confronting him right in front of it wasn't bright either.
- This is actually a big character trait for Cersei, who thinks she's a lot smarter than she really is. Tyrion and Jaime, her brothers (and quite possibly the only viewpoint characters with any affection towards her, though they're both losing it fast) lampshade it several times.
- And then there's Catelyn. Get a load of this: she spends several pages musing about how a war with the Lannisters would prove disastrous for her friends and family, and is even told flat out by her husband that they are not yet prepared to win such a war. The very next thing she does is abduct and threaten to execute the presumptive heir to the Lannister family, based on the uncorroborated testimony of a pathological lier with known grudge against her husbands family. Smart move.
  - Not entirely fair - they were close childhood friends, and everyone still trusted him.
- And check out Ned Stark, who let his Honour Before Reason complex completely destroy his life and his family.
- For that matter, pretty much anyone who has even so much as made eye contact with Littlefinger could be considered Too Dumb To Live. And since this is ASOIAF we're talking about, they generally don't. Seriously people, when will they learn. (This Troper, when introducing a friend to the series, went as far as to warn her not to get emotionally attached to anyone who spends to much time hanging around Litterfinger.)
  - Oh, yeah. Littlefinger obviously has mindbending powers that make people around him Too Dumb To Live, either through actual magic or through being a Canon Sue. You would think that at least someone as shrewd and treacherous as Tywin Lannister is going to think that, well, this guy is highly dangerous and unreliable, at some point but no.
- Arguably justified—as soon as any given character starts to realise the depths of Littlefinger's Magnificent Bastardry, is immediately murdered. The only one who hasn't yet is Tyrion, and that's probably only because he's nearly as good at plotting as Littlefinger. And because he left for the Free Cities not long after.
- Lets not forget Arya Stark here. Has a *single* one of her plans ever worked without someone to come in in a deus ex machina to save her from her own stupidity? The real galling thing about her is that her "plans" require everyone around her to be too dumb to live. Adults actually aren't as dumb as they look, Arya.
  - In fairness, she's 11 years old, thinks the successful plans Jaquen manipulated her into running were actually her ideas, every adult she's ever trusted either got murdered or betrayed her...
- Aw hell, there are a lot of people in A Song Of Ice And Fire who do incredibly stupid things. At least they always pay for their mistakes.
Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's original novel, decides to run away from, and afterwards basically forget about, his completely successful experiment in the creation of new life, after he decides that the result is uglier looking than he expected. He is then surprised when said creation becomes angry and decides to kill him.
- Not only that, but all the monster wants is a female companion. Victor starts making one to appease it, then gets afraid the two of them would spawn a race of monsters, so he destroys the unfinished female, which prompts the monster to commit new murders in revenge. Victor never considers that he could just leave out some of the plumbing. Not only that, but despite knowing the monster has a history of killing the people that he, Victor, loves, despite knowing that it considers him guilty for the death of its 'bride', despite its explicit warning that it will "be with you on your wedding night," when Victor marries Elizabeth he assumes that he is the monster's next target, and sends his new wife away to wait in her room completely unprotected. The results are predictable.
The heroes of Dracula, for their choice to stage their vampire-fighting headquarters in the insane asylum next door to the creepy mansion.
- Probably justified, as Dr. Seward had worked there for years with no problems before a vampire moved into the neighborhood. One could just as easily brand Dracula himself as Too Dumb To Live (or whatever), for moving in next door to one of Van Helsing's proteges, then sticking around to harass the wife of a lawyer who'd already learned what he was.
- To be fair, there wasn't enough popular horror genre hits that made it into mainstream culture at the time, so one might forgive them with genre blindness.
Anyone who steps into the Mended Drum declaring themselves to be invincible will find the patrons will test that claim seriously.
- Quite naturally, by the usual Genre Savvy Discworld population, any examples of Too Dumb To Live that result in the person getting killed are marked down as "suicide" by the City Watch. There are a lot of ways to commit suicide in Ankh-Morpork. Walking into the Drum calling yourself "Vincent the Invulnerable" was just the icing on the cake.
In Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the plot is initiated by a group of teenagers who, as a prank, try to sneak into a heavily surveillance filled arcology while carrying a box labeled "bomb". They take just enough precautions to defeat all of the nonlethal methods of stopping them. The abject stupidity of this act is very heavily lampshaded, and spawns the repeated phrase "Think of it as evolution in action."
- Don't forget the locked door they break through has a sign that warns, "If you enter here YOU WILL DIE!". Among other skull and cross bones type warnings.
This is a long standing complaint of fans of Romance fiction who use the abbreviation TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) to describe any heroine (or hero) who drives the plot by sending all reason and common sense on sabbatical while pursuing the love of their lives.
- And speaking of which, let's give a big shout-out to Bella Swan ofTwilight! Honestly, while I freely admit that the books are one rollicking avalanche of Guilty Pleasures, Bella NEEDS to be changed over so she'll have the strength to lug around that big-ass Idiot Ball she's been strapped to ever since she saw Edward Cullen walk into the school cafeteria...
Little Red Riding Hood, making this one Older Than Print. Terry Pratchett said it best in ''The Wee Free Men":
"...some girl who can't tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family."
Bella from Twilight takes this to uncharted levels.
T'Lana from the Star Trek pocket books was a very short lived character in the current Borg Story Arc for just this reason. From the first book she is introduced in she immediately questions the judgment of practically everybody on board the ship who isn't a Vulcan, she objects to nearly every action anyone ranked above her takes, and spearheads a mutiny with other members of the senior staff against Picard, only to give command back to him refusing to simply admit that she fucked up majorly. Even Spock eventually just walks away during a conversation with her, after calling her the vulcan equivalent of a dim-witted jerkass. At the end of the second book she appears in, Picard wants her gone, which means something when his current first officer once defected to the Klingon Empire and thus could, very technically, be called a traitor. Her ultimate fate? She's replaced with Genki Girl T'ryssa Chen, a half-vulcan who prefers her human side and roleplaying as an elf, and gets blown into powder when the Borg partially glass Vulcan.
An honorary mention goes to the Harry Potter series' Remus Lupin, for his astonishing Genre Blindness. You'd think even fictional characters would be sufficiently aware of the Fatal Family Photo trope to not play it painfully straight at a point when they shouldn't really be playing show and tell anyway.
Speaking about Harry Potter, what about Lord Voldemort? Aside from generally failing the Evil Overlord List, has it occurred to anyone else that the series would have been very different if he made exactly one Horcrux from an ordinary rock in a coastal city, in the middle of the night, and took it on a broom ride a couple hundred miles into the ocean?
- Or instead of using some complex plan to kill Harry, just walking up to the Dursley's and shooting him?
  - Dumbledore isn't too dumb to live, so he made sure there were all sorts of powerful protections at the Dursley's.
The main character of The Da Vinci Code spends the first half of the book saying how incredibly smart he is because he's an expert on Da Vinci and codes and stuff. When shown an example of backwards writing, neither he nor his co-expert can even recognise it, let alone decipher it. This is just one example among many of how dumb the book was.

Close Literature

Prior to the start of season 7 of 24, the U.S. government decides to disband CTU. All of it. Even with a national organization of highly-trained agents with the latest equipment, the nation was always less than 24 hours from disaster, how do we make it safer? Yes, I know! Let's get rid of our best line of defense, which includes a One Man Army that has saved the country time and again. Headto Desk!! It's as if when President Palmer died, he took the last of the working brainpower in Washington with him.
Smallville: As already mentioned above, Lana Lang. (Honestly; going swimming, after dark, in the school pool, in Smallville?)
- One of Robert Anson Heinlein's sayings by way of his longest lived character fits her perfectly: "Live and Learn. Or you won't live long." (The interested can look it up in The Notebooks Of Lazarus Long.
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the residents of the town are hilariously aware and in denial of the presence of vampires and other demons.
- Given a Lampshade Hanging in one episode where a character gleefully predicts that if there aren't as many mysterious disappearances and unexplained deaths on the team this year, their football team is going to rule!.
- Consider Deputy Mayor Alan Finch: this is a guy who knows all too well about the dark creepies in Sunnydale, and he’s got some important information about the Mayor he needs to share with the Slayers. So what does he do? He decides to approach them in a dark alley in the middle of the night while they are being attacked by vampires. Guess what happens.
The entire cast of the British comedy The Young Ones falls into this trope. The amount they don't know, and then the amount they presume to know, boggles the mind, but it's all harmless fun. Watching them try to sell a nuke to Libyan dictators was especially hilarious. To be fair, the environment they find themselves in could have come out of a Dada Comic's portrayal of London, as said nuke is actually a plane's egg, and it hatches a baby plane at the end of the episode.
Shane Vendrell from The Shield. Stupid, racist hick cop who's put his and his entire corrupt team's necks on the line due to his attempts to work the system like his mentor, Vic Mackey. Never mind that twice, those schemes have cost innocent lives and given the ~~bad~~ worse guys reams of blackmail material. Oh, and he killed teammate Lem because he was afraid Lem was going to rat them out to the Feds. Never mind that they were making plans to sneak Lem to Mexico.
- Though not as street-smart as Vic, Shane does possess a low cunning that's allowed him to subvert this trope. Of course, the final season still has a few episodes left....
  - But ultimately he didn't, committing suicide and taking his wife and children with him in order to "preserve their innocence."
People from the civilian fleet tend to do this a lot in Battlestar Galactica.
- Just to provide an example. At least 1/3 of the civilian fleet is dependent upon the Galactica for water supplies, and the whole fleet is dependent on the Galactica as the only source of defence they have against the Cylons, not to mention its crew are the only proper organized force remaining so that even though they have a civilian government, it would be unable to function with the military running things. Then you have people like Zarek who wanted to bring it all down just a few days after the genocide of the Colonies (though he has gotten better about it), but he has always been a Well Intentioned Extremist anyway. Then you have the other civilians. Granted you don't want to be walked over all the time, but how do these actions make sense?: Refusing to supply your only defence as a protest, Halting supply of the fleet's entire fuel thus limiting their options hugely in the event of a Cylon attack, sabotaging the military and blowing yourself up because you think the fleet needs to make peace with the Cylons when in fact the Colonies had already surrendered but the Cylons were not (at that time) amenable to opening a dialogue even if the military had considered it as a viable option.
  - But inverted in beginning of Season 3: Cylons accept surrender this time and civilians seem to be living relatively normal lives, at least not much worse than they were before. Cue for the military stranded on planet to start an resistance which nearly gets everyone killed.
  - This is especially ridiculous considering that the Colonials live on New Caprica under sufferance from the Cylons. What does the dwindling and nearly extinct human race do? Begin suicide bombing the Cylons. Who are for all intents and purposes invincible thanks to their resurrection capabilities. Who when they do resurrect become more and more disillusioned about living with the humans.
- The Cylon aren't much better, either. "- Cylon Centurions once rose against humans? And we control them with the Inhibitor? Let's remove it and let the rebel again, this time against us! - Oh, and let's reprogram the raiders so they can shoot at us, too!" How dumb is that? The result two fractions basically wiping each other is entirely predictable.
  - Enslaving the Centurions and Raiders wasn't too smart as well
Various characters on The Red Green Show, most notably Bill and Edgar Montrose, as well as most of the characters mentioned by Red but never actually seen on the show.
In the CSI episode "Boom" from season 1, the team is investigating a bombing and receives offers of help from a guy who says he's a real amateur bomb enthusiast. Said guy is, of course, the primary suspect. The guy ends up blowing himself up by going to retrieve a bomb the real bomber placed in a high school.
How could no one have mentioned Mohinder Suresh of Heroes fame? For someone who's supposed to be so intelligent, he manages to be pretty darn stupid. Perhaps the best example is how in the third season premiere, he decided to inject himself with a serum that he just randomly created without ANY regard to possible side effects. Too Dumb To Live indeed
- Well, at least he seems to be paying for it.
  - Still, it's a testament to his idiocy that - considering he spent all of Season 2 working with a virus that removed a person's superpowers - that he created a formula to do the EXACT OPPOSITE (i.e. give a normal person superpowers) within a matter of days... after being asked to find a cure for superpowers.
  - Not having seen the series, I don't know how that worked out in the story, but that's not necessarily a dumb move in theory. Not to many scientists in fiction, when asked to make something that could easily go wrong or be misused, have the foresight to make something to counter it.
- Oh come on! This is Heroes. If we listed all the characters individually giving them one Too Dumb To Live entry each, we'd effectively triple this page in length.
  - Even so, Mohinder is something special... and by special I mean "special needs" special,
- That Mohinder, a scientific genius, would do something so stupid is arguably more a case of Character Derailment. After all, in previous seasons he seemed in love with the concept of scientific ethic, and then suddenly, for absolutely no reason, he just throws it all out the window.
  - Then again, this is the same guy who willingly chose to betray Noah Bennet to The Company in Season 2 - despite having numerous first-hand experiences in seeing how hopeless corrupt The Company is - based on their word that Noah had obviously gone crazy and was too dangerous to be allowed to run free.
- The worst Too Dumb To Live of Heroes HAS to be Peter Petrelli 2nd season. not only does he end up with the villain of the season, but he repeatedly encounters trusted individuals straight up telling him that Adam is evil, including several of the people who worked with him to save New York earlier. Not to MENTION the fact that he watches as Adam casually and calmly BLOWS SOMEONE AWAY without any kind of comment on Peter's part. Only at the very end does he put two and two together and realize he is about to assist in genocide.
  - The worst Too Dumb To Live of Heroes is Peter Petrelli doing anything. If the man made a sandwich, it would have sand in it.
A fair number of MacGyver antagonists are undone by their own stupidity: in the very second episode ("The Golden Triangle"), a dictator dies when he lunges at Mac with a sword, trips, falls down, and impales himself. In "Partners", Murdoc, who would become a recurring nemesis, is undone because when Mac throws a rock at him, Murdoc, one of the world's most notorious assassins, panics and drops a lit stick of dynamite. In "Kill Zone", a risk-taking scientist cavalierly waves around a container of mutated super-virus while insisting that nothing could possibly go wrong until her dog (For some reason, it's "Bring Your Dog To Work Day" at the xenovirology lab) concludes she wants to play fetch. It gets bad enough that in the Clip Show episode "Friends", Mac actually has a Ten Minute Retirement when he realizes that the only reason he's still alive is through an unlikely string of luck and the stupidity of others. And that's not even considering Locking Mac Gyver In The Store Cupboard.
- There was also the female antagonist in Phoenix Under Siege, who throws a flying kick at Mac, misses entirely, and catapults herself right out of a high rise window.
- Murdoc, supposedly a master assassin, lives and breathes this trope thanks to his chronic inability to just shoot MacGyver (and, well, you know). So, Mac's standing two feet in front of a sheer drop? Great time to run him over with a car, Murdoc!
Many many many teams in Knightmare lost because of abject stupidity, like responding to an attacker by turning off the lights or seemingly taking great care to walk their dungeoneer off a cliff.
- Especially in the corridor of saws: "Right! No, left! No, right!" Goodbye dungeoneer...
Susan Meyer from Desperate Housewives is way too 'dumb to live', add her uncanny ability to misinterpret absolutely everything about everyone with her ungodly clumsiness and you just ask yourself how did she manage to live up to be twelve (I mean, thirty... something). Oh, the characters of the series also question themselves the very same thing.
Most of the cast of The Red Green Show suffers from this trope to some extent, but by far the best example is Bill. Whether it's pouring gasoline into a go-cart while the engine is still running, using his finger to test the sharpness of an axe, carrying chainsaws around in his coveralls, attempting to pole-vault off the roof of a moving vehicle, or sitting on a beanbag chair filled with propane and using a lit match to blow himself into the air to catch something that had drifted off into the sky, it's a miracle that Bill is not only still alive, but has all his limbs still intact.
Robin Maxwell in V: The Original Miniseries. First she wanders out of hiding, to be discovered by collaborator Daniel, which leads to the Maxwells having to move, Daniel's parents being arrested, and his grandfather being killed. Having learned nothing, she leaves hiding again, this time getting captured by the Visitors, which leads to the Resistance camp being attacked and her mother being killed.
The page quote from Kappa Mikey could just as easily have been said by Marshall Wheeler of Black Hole High, who never seemed to realize that taking old technology made by a company known for suspicious dealings from the basement of a school that has a wormhole in it might not be the safest idea.
Damian Spinelli in General Hospital, with his Rain Man-esque computer skills, has to compensate somewhere...and it appears to be his common sense. For instance, he became trapped in a utility room in the eponymous hospital while it was on fire...because he was searching for a better internet connection.
Senator Kinsey in the first season of Stargate SG 1 is an interesting case. At first in his episode, he looks like a Living Lampshade, pointing every trope the series uses against the Stargate Program, then he gets through Genre Savvy to Dangerously Genre Savvy to Genre Blind and lingers in the last one until the last minutes of the episode, when he suddenly becomes Too Dumb To Live when he openly states that even if the Goa'uld do get to earth, God will not let anything happen to America.
- God wouldn't. Of course the Lord helps those who help themselves.
  - Dude, the Go'auld!! The epitome of Too Dumb To Live. They could've pounded the Earth to dust in 36.4 seconds, but the morons decide to sit back, eat berries, and speak in that ridiculous vocoder-style. They figured, the Tau'ri were simply no match for them....no matter how many times, SG-1 personally served them their asses. When it did finally dawn on them that maybe, just maybe, these feeble humans and their reverse-engineering capabilities, nuclear weapons, and special forces training might actually be a threat; the Asgard stepped in and made them sign a Protected Planets Treaty, which ended any hope of a direct assault against Earth, and gave Earth time to start building better weapons, discover the Ancients base in Antartica, and build actual starships. Dumbasses for sure.
Everything Virginia's father does in The Tenth Kingdom makes him Too Dumb To Live. Starting with the idiotic use of wishes.
Numerous characters in many, many soap operas.
ANYONE who disobeys the Doctor's warning: "NO, DON'T!" will end up in a very unpleasant situation. This results in THREE Family Unfriendly Deaths in the 2009 Easter special. When the bus driver ignores the Doctor's warning not to go back through the wormhole, the results are...unpleasant. Later, an alien stays to fight a killer stingray that devoured his partner, in spite of the Doctor's warning, and suffers the same fate as his partner.
In Malcolm In The Middle, season 1, each of the four brothers does something incredibly moronic:
- Reese pounds a nail into a spray can.
- Francis flips a knife high up into the air and extends his hand out to catch it.
- Malcolm hangs his head over an open pair of scissors.
- While one of the brothers cranks the pedal of an overturned bicycle, Dewey takes a bite out of the spinning wheel.
Several of the marks in Leverage. But especially the judge who, after disarming a pair of bank robbers, held everyone in the bank at gunpoint.
Princess Michelle Benjamin in Kings. A bunch of armed religious fanatics holed up in a warhouse, what does she do? Walk in sans body guard or wire to negotiate with them. What do they do? Take her hostage. Then in another episode she goes to comfort a quarantined plague victim without any protective gear!
In one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the guys spoof a road safety movie from the 50s. At the end, the protagonist's brother dies because he's too distracted looking over his shoulder and waving to notice the oncoming train; you can imagine the jokes made at his expense.

Close Live Action TV

The Hand of Vecna is an Artifact Of Doom that requires its user to cut off his or her own hand/eye (there's also an eye of Vecna) and graft Vecna's in its place, the artifact grants its user magical power, but has a mind of its own and wants the user to follow its agenda. The hand can kill those who disobey. And those who obey, too! So, you're pretty much screwed either way.
- And that's not remotely as stupid as the Head of Vecna...
Generally anyone who sells their soul in Warhammer, a boost, albeit a very large one, in one's abilities does not justify becoming a monster. Also note the parents who give their mutant children to Beastmen in Warhammer Fantasy, yes it is understandable as the child would be killed otherwise, but it is stupid because these children have a habit of coming back with beastmen during a raid, then killing and feasting upon their own parents.

Close Tabletop RPG

Phoenix Wright, great lawyer that he is, suffers from this on occasion in service to the plot; his own intuition has to be shunted aside for the player to have an active role. Sometimes, however, this justification fails. Take the third case of the first game, where he blithely confronts a blackmailer on her actions, knowing full well she has ties to the Yakuza. Only a Big Damn Heroes moment from Gumshoe keeps him from getting rubbed out. Actually, Wright does this in almost every single case in the first game, and always seems to do so in secluded places with no witnesses where his suspected murderer holds all the cards.
- This troper thought that case 4 in the first game was the worst offender, when you have a letter planning out the entire conspiracy that the villain's planned in his (apparently distinct) handwriting then the first thing I'd do (and would have done if the game allowed me) is immediately head to the court house and have it placed in evidence after making several photocopies and putting them in a safe place. Or at the very least not carry the bloody thing around with me so the villain can subdue me with a tazor and make off with it. Although to be fair when his mentor tried the same thing in case 2 it got her killed for her troubles.
  - To be fair, in the first game, Phoenix was working on his first, second, third, fourth and fifth cases ever, which gives him some leeway in terms of naivete. (Why he should be more naive than the players, many of whom haven't attended law school and who knew better on their very first playthrough, is still a fair question.) Not to mention the fact that he's going up against extremely powerful people, in most cases without knowing it. Mistakes are par for the course, and he does eventually learn, as shown in the second and third games.
  - He's got a pretty stupid moment in the third game, too, even if you don't count the way he acted when he was on trial in college. The fifth case may include the stupidest Phoenix moment in the history of Ace Attorney, when Phoenix attempts to run across a burning rope bridge high above a canyon because Maya is on the other side and she might be in danger. This troper is even a Phoenix/Maya shipper and she finds Phoenix's actions pretty ridiculous.
- Given that Phoenix Wright is the protagonist, these become frustrating But Thou Must moments - most players are probably not too dumb to live. In the more open-ended investigation sections, it almost reaches Guide Dang It - after all, Phoenix Wright can't really be too dumb to live, can he?
  - I wouldn't say Phoenix is "dumb" per se, but more like wacky Courtroom Antics force him to play dumb (including us, the players) to find out the truth in the pool of nonsense.
  - In fact, in Trials and Tribulations, Phoenix does get an Smarts Upgrade, and he begins saying this like, "There's something wrong with that testimony" to draw attention to it. This troper found it annoying as hell, because I want to figure things out for myself!
  - Even more so for the above, despite his appearance and occupation in "Apollo Justice", Phoenix has clearly matured significantly to the point that while his wits have not dimmed, he's completely shed the 'nervous beginner' side of his personality.
- Phoenix's moments of this don't even compare to that of Misty Fey and Godot, the former who dies as a result in the final case. When Godot finds out about finds out about the plan Morgan Fey has to allow her daughter Pearl to become head of the Fey clan rather than Misty's daughter Maya, which is through Pearl reading a letter Morgan gives her instructing her to channel multiple murderer Dahlia's spirit and kill Maya, and finds said letter, he confronts Misty Fey about it. Rather than solving this conflict the easy way, which would be to hide the letter or warn Maya and Pearl about Morgan's plan...Misty channels Dahlia's spirit instead, in order to prevent Pearl from doing so, nevermind the danger she would be putting her daughter's life and her own life into that she could have easily prevented.
  - In their defence that was actually their back up plan, with the original plan simply keeping Pearl under surveillance and make sure she didn't try to summon Dahlia. Unfortunately, despite their team consisting of three people they manage to let Pearl totally slip past all of them and make it all the way to the objective without being seen once. Either she developed Off Screen Teleportation or all of them were really holding the Idiot Ball that night.
  - She's a preteen girl in a Capcom game. They've been able to teleport off-screen since Sherry Birkin.
In Supreme Commander, an ally of your character touches an ancient alien device that is emitting a strange energy signature, in violation of a direct order from the commander in chief of the entire cybran nation. He survives, but you have to kill him and his robotic battle suit after the artifact takes over. you know it's a bad sign when the other AI characters start yelling at him, but the funny energy signature mentioned should have given it away.
In Age Of Empires III: The War Chiefs campaign Sheriff Billy Holme, cornered by his ex partner Chayton (Holme had a Face Heel Turn) chooses to back into a cliff face surrounded by TNT. after talking for a bit, Holme attempts a Quick Draw shot on Chayton, forgetting that A) his gun was at his back while Chayton had his at his side and B) Native Tribes have a quick reation time and Chayton was half Sioux. You can guess how it ends.
- Are you implying that Native people are automatically faster or something? Sorry, but being Native doesn't give you any special abilities.
  - They do in this game, apparently.
In 7 Days a Skeptic, something has been killing off the members of a starship. The three surviving crew members have just been attacked by the revived corpse of the captain, the first to die. They defeated it, but they're not sure whatever animated it is really dead. Then they realize they can flee the ship on the escape pods... after a good nights rest. In separate rooms. (Not to mention the fact that the escape pods are restricted access!)
- This is not so much an example for those involved, so much as the designer of the ship. They characters explicitly state that it takes twelve hours to fuel and ready the escape pods... yeah, the EMERGENCY ESCAPE PODS. The author admits it to be contrived in the commentary, in order to have it get up to the "7 Days" mentioned in the title.
  - Still, the fact that they decided to go to sleep alone (instead of, say, barricading themselves in the escape pod corridor and keeping watch) qualifies them as Too Dumb To Live.
Bioshock: Dr Suchong, who created the Big Daddies, was having trouble imprinting the Big Daddies on the little sisters. In a audio diary it is shown that he got angry and slapped a little sister. You find his body drilled to his worktable.
- Mind you, if you listen to the whole audio log, Suchong explains that he's been having problems getting the protective instinct imprintation-thing working. His death at the Big Daddy's hands is supposed to ironically reveal that he he did, in fact, get the imprintation to work correctly, he just didn't know what triggered it...
Pretty much every target of an Escort Mission ever. Taking the longer but safer route? Nah, lets take the way through the heavily populated monster village!
- To say nothing of civilians who insist on going through a warzone at all for whatever retarded reason.
  - To say nothing of the civilian who decides that taking a convoluted and longer route meeting every enemy in the war zone rather than the shorter path (e.g. The Alchemist from Spyro The Dragon 2).
  - Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has a variation: There is a time limit on how long you have for your convoy to reach the target area, it's the player's choice at each crossroad whether to take the short path or the long path, and the shorter paths have more enemies.
- Another variation is if the escortee is combat-capable but lacks target priorization: see Oda Nobunaga in Samurai Warriors (Battle of Honnouji, Oda side while not playing as him), or Gilthares Fairbough in World Of Warcraft (in the Horde-exclusive Free From The Hold quest) for their tendency to fight whoever they come across, no matter how inconsequential the enemy or how far it would diverge them from their path.
- Inverted in Dynasty Warriors 6 (PS 2 version) if you're playing the Battle of Chang Ban as Wei... part of the Fake Difficulty comes from the fact that Liu Bei does prioritize fleeing due to his many civilian followers; that's the whole point of the mission for both sides.
God Of War 2: Our "hero" is a jaded, brutal, paranoid man-god who's storming through the city of Rhodes in an effort to destroy it in the name of Sparta. This is an extraordinarily capable man. So what does he do when Zeus sends down a heavenly sword, demands our guy drain his godly power into the blade and answers the man's suspicious question with a vaguely ominous response? Three guesses.
- And he does this after an epic quest to kill Ares, because he was personaly attacking Athens and destroying cities of other gods.
In Final Fantasy Tactics, Rapha (or Rafa in the original translation) becomes Too Dumb To Live in the Riovanes Castle Roof battle of Chapter 3, where Rapha charges blindly into Elmdore and his Assassins, even though she barely has any HP to withstand more than two hits and the Assassins can kill instantly. Considering the battle is lost if Rapha dies, and she starts out closer to the enemy than Ramza's party does, keeping her alive proves extremely frustrating for all but the fastest-moving parties. Her steadfast determination to get herself killed eventually prompted the "Rafa Syndrome" description for AI-controlled characters.
- Made more acceptable by the fact that she had just watched her brother get shot, and Elmdor and co. were protecting his murderer. Being blinded by grief partly (but certainly not completely) excuses her behavior.
Civilians in every Arcade Shooter ever. Here's a tip, people: If you're a hostage or otherwise in a building full of nasty evil things and the heroes come to rescue you, get down on the floor in full view of the rescuers and don't get up until they tell you it's all clear. Do NOT jump out from behind crates and surprise them!
- Subversion: House Of The Dead have people that, sure, sometimes are in the way, but at least they're running away from zombies most of the time. Sure, unless you help out with a few bullets it never actually helps them any, but it's nice that they're not just jumping into your aim to screw you up.
Lindsay in Dead Rising. We Could Have Avoided All This if she hadn't opened the mall's front door, which a horde of zombies is clawing at right now, in order to let her precious little poochy in. And did I mention that the dog is clearly also a zombie? (The glowing red eyes are a dead giveaway.) The devteam clearly knew what people would think of her, though, and in the bonus Infinity Mode, where food-hoarding survivors are trying to kill you just as hard as the zombies, she dies as soon as you see her.
Sims and Sims 2 are notorious for its less-than-intelligent behavior. The best known example is an accidental kitchen fire. Rather then flee the house, the Sims will scream and yell around the fire, occasionally then burning themselves to death. Another example is pathfinding. Rather than taking the shortest route through a house, a sim may decide to take a longer path, sometimes even leaving the house and re-entering it.
Truly, many AI characters are Too Dumb To Live in ways the programmers probably didn't intend. One example in Deus Ex: Miguel, the NSF member whom you may invite with you on your escape from the Majestic 12 prison. He doesn't believe in stealth and is liable to charge as soon as he sees an enemy, wielding only a combat knife. Has anyone ever managed to keep him alive all the way to the exit?
- Yes. Using an annoyingly long winded method of telling him to wait out of sight of the enemies and then litrally killing every enemy in the area (and this is on realistic difficutly). Needless to say, this troper was heartbroken when miguel stopped following and dissapeared after leaving the area.
Astrid in Fire Emblem 9 when you first meet her. Despite being an archer and having barely any Speed, Defense or HP, she rushes straight towards the enemy and will usually be killed on the first turn if Ike doesn't get to her. Did I mention that in order to reach her on the first turn, you have to use half your party to shove Ike to her?
Some of the above examples are about characters taking on enemies far out of their league, but that's nothing compared to killing yourself directly. In Final Fantasy VI, check before sending Sabin, Gau, or Strago into a Collosseum fight. Each one may have learned a skill designed to hurt or heal others at the expense of his own life. No longer under control of the player, they may fail to realize that these moves make sense only in team battles, if ever. When fighting alone, it's instant defeat.
"Being on fire sure makes you thirsty! I feel like a good beer."
- The Dwarves will also drop everything to collect the fallen items of the dead, even if it's next to an Elephant or on fire.
Any incompetent player (or even your friends) in Left 4 Dead. Since the game is all about team work, anyone who keeps making dumb decisions (wasting items, rushing ahead of the team to go solo, etc.) will have the trope name shouted by the other players.
The early villain Judge Ghis from Final Fantasy XII. Upon receiving a very important and very powerful piece of rock, one that he knows kingdoms were conquered and vast resources spent to acquire, he decides to find out what it does. By hooking it up to his giant airship's power supply. You can probably guess what happens next. Derp derp, Judge Ghis, derp derp.
The pack beasts from Dungeon Siege tend to fall victim to this trope - you have to protect them very carefully, or they have a tendency to wander into the line of fire. It gets worse in the expansion, Legends of Arranna, when you get pack beasts which have attacks - they continue to target and attack enemies even when they're hopelessly outclassed. You waste more resurrection spells on the pack beasts than anyone else...
The Meat Sims in Perfect Dark have a horrible aim, run past you, and will stand still in order to make it easier for you to kill them. Playing against them in the Combat Simulator is like squeezing a stress ball.

Close Video Games

Fighter from Eight Bit Theater. In fact, he's so dumb he can't even BE killed.
- Fighter may in fact be Too Dumb To Die. Evidenced by the fact that he is the champion of Drownball due to being the only person who has ever lived through a game. This is explained in that he can hold his breath for so long because his brain uses very little oxygen.
Gordon Frohman from the Half-Life based comic Concerned is quite possibly the definition of too dumb to live as it's revealed near the end of the comic that he's been playing the entire game with the Buddha cheat on this whole time; he then turns it off, with predictable results.
The crocodiles from Pearls Before Swine frequently end up killing themselves or fellow crocs in their idiotic attempts to kill the Zebra ("zeeba neighba").
Ethan of Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Girl Genius: "I will shoot any man who tries to move this ship". Not only is this guy as good as dead, he just doomed the whole crew with him (well, assuming they could have made it out in time).
- Although if you read on, you'll find that the crew definitely did not comply. He even seems to have helped in their escape, albeit not as he'd have hoped!
- Also, it seems that Agatha only ordered the castle to chase them out.
Torg (and sometimes Riff) take this role occasionally in Sluggy Freelance. Probably the most extreme example was when they summoned a demon with the power to destroy the world just so it would give them a case of beer and $20 in cash. If the demon hadn't been a few cents shy of the full twenty, the series would have been a lot shorter.
Casey And Andy may be brilliant inventors, but they're literally Too Dumb To Live, since they get killed constantly. Trick juggling near unprotected anti-matter, skydiving but forgetting to pack the chutes, the wood-powered submarine with the chimney... The list is WAY too long.
The webcomic Bob and George parodies this by noting that one of the main characters has the "extraordinary ability to not recognize life-threatening injuries." In other words - he's too stupid to die.
In Book 10 of Schlock Mercenary, the inhabitants of the Credomar Habitat use fuel-air explosives inside their space station as part of a protest march.
- And then there's the ones who kept enough anti-matter around to create an eighty-megaton explosion and didn't even bother to fire-proof the containers. As it turns out, fuel-air explosives and fullerened anti-matter don't mix....
Leo from VG Cats. The examples are too numerous to list them all, but one includes him going back in time and cutting off his younger self's arms, just to see if his own would turn into stumps. And they did.
Joey from A Game of Fools. He drank bleach because it was legal to do so, brought a drawing compass instead of a directional compass on a camping trip, packed nothing but alcohol for said camping trip after reassuring his friends he had "planned everything", and at no point seems to realise the aliens that have abducted him and his friends mean him horrible, horrible harm.
Celia from The Order of the Stick. She doesn't know that humans can't shoot lightning or sense Cloister spells, and most recently she bargained a deal with a group of criminals that she would pay them money that they no longer have to resurrect the people that were just trying to kill them, so that she could stop a battle that Haley and Belkar had already won.
- That, however, was not because of any stupidity, but because she is incredibly pacifistic, to the point that she would gladly pay money to amend the deaths she was indirectly the cause of, even if they were in self defense. Besides, the money in question had already been stolen from someone else.
  - And she didn't know about humans' lack of those abilities because until she recently had little to no contact with any humans. And humans don't get an entry in the Monster Manual, so she can't just look it up.
- See also Crystal, who is actually dead because of it.
Kaalinor of Anti-Heroes. Fortunately, he's already dead, so his stupidity can't cause him further harm.

Close Web Comics

Inspector Gadget is a klutzy, incompetent detective that constantly needs help from his niece and dog.
- And doesn't even know they're helping. Heck, he rarely has the slightest clue what's going on.
Every single character in Drawn Together.
Hank and Dean from The Venture Brothers. In fact, they truly are too dumb to live: the show reveals that they have both died several times, mostly due to their own incredible stupidity. Describing them as "death-prone", their father keeps a few clones growing in the lab as a precaution.
Sealab 2021 has characters who, if not meeting this trope individually, meet it as a team. Many episodes end in the destruction of the Sealab (continuity means nothing).
- To say that the Sealab crew is Too Dumb To Live is an understatement; they're Too Dumb To Save The World, as evidenced in the episode "ASHDTV" where they get a combination asteroid smasher and HDTV intended for Spacelab, and despite warnings of a giant meteor heading towards Earth, ignore the TV's asteroid-destroying abilities and keep on watching TV.
It is amazing how long the eponymous character of Invader Zim has managed to survive, considering how often his idiocy has made things literally blow up in his face. GIR is a more extreme example, although being a robot, he's easily repaired.
If Spongebob Squarepants doesn't count - Patrick Star inclusive - nothing does.
- In his defense, they established in the earlier seasons that he really can't be hurt, so long as he stays underwater and doesn't get eaten he's basicly indestructible.
The eponymous character in Chowder. Not only does he usually drive the plot along by either destroying something in stupidity or just by being incredibly stupid, but, well, apparently he's literally too dumb to live without someone directing him. This is a guy who once thought the proper way to put away a spoon was to shove it in an electrical outlet after all (and judging from the marks it happened more than once).
- But he's so cute!
Winx Club, "Secret Guardian": Bloom finds a book on herself at Cloud Tower's (witches' school) library, and decides to read it. This was not part of the mission's intent (to take Stella's ring from the witches, stolen one episode earlier), and it leads to CT's principal noticing their intrusion, resulting in the Winx being attacked by bugs, and then being stripped of their powers upon returning to their school.
While most of the cast of Aqua Teen Hunger Force qualifies for the Idiot Ball in some form, no one exemplifies Too Dumb To Live as well as Master Shake. Indeed, Shake repeatedly dies in many episodes (continuity is non-existent on the show), usually by his own stupidity. He has sliced himself in half with a katana, eaten a sandwich that he knew would send him to a hell dimension where an axe-wielding cyclops awaited to slice his head open, and has gone as far as committing suicide to ruin Meatwad's Ouija video game.
- Don't forget sucking out his own intestines (or contents if you will) with a vacuum cleaner to win a weight loss contest that he wasn't even a part of.
After seeing the episodes again (Thanks to the anniversary marathon), I realize The Powerpuff Girls' Mayor of Townsville qualifies.
- Not to mention every one in townsville.
Timmy Turner from the Fairly Oddparents, because the show has grown to depend on the same thing happening for every episode. The formula is "Timmy makes a stupid wish and spends the episode fixing it" the show's fantastic premise depends on his use of his unique ability, it's sort of a Catch-22, the show gets repetitive when he does do it, and they can't change it or they'll lose their show's unique premise.
Jimmy Neutron may be a genius, but it never seems to occur to him that inventing is a poor match for him, considering that many episodes consist of Jimmy making an invention that nearly kills everybody and makes a new one to fix it, which sometimes has problems of it's own. And then acting like he's a big hero for fixing the problem, even though it's his fault for causing it.
Most of the adults in South Park.
Brilliantly subverted by Fry in Futurama. Fry is so dumb that he lacks a certain brain function that even inanimate objects are said to have; ironically, it is the exact lack of this brain function that serves as a highly effective defense mechanism against extremely dangerous threats (i.e., threats that seek to destroy the entire Universe) that are capable of reading minds, rendering him entirely invisible and mostly undetectable to them. It often falls to Fry as the only person in the Universe who can save it, because his unique ability to survive against these threats derives directly from his being Too Dumb To Live. However, it's later revealed, that he lachs this brain function (delta brain waves), because he's his own grandfather.
Peter Griffin.
Bobby from King of the Hill, who can be influenced by anything from white supremacist websites to his misogynist grandfather. Another case can be found on King of the Hill, Dale Gribble. When evidence proves he's not Joseph's father, despite being far away from his wife Nancy, he thinks he is, thinking that of all things Aliens either made Joseph, or transported his DNA to Nancy to impregnate her. Not only that, when he walks in on Nancy practically having intercourse with John Redcorn, he thinks it's just a massage. I mean, seriously, is Dale as dumb as a brick? On another part of his stupidity, John Redcorn admits, to his face, that he slept with Hank's best friend's wife. Instead of interpreting that like a normal human being, he thought Bill's wife was the person, and not him.
- This can be applied to about %75 of the cast. Luanne for joining what was clearly a cult. Peggy for falling for incredibly obvious scams, and joining said cult. Hank for putting up with a boss who if not for Hank, would be at best out on the street, at worst in jail for various crimes. An entire page could be made for Bill.
Sentinel Prime of Transformers Animated. Constantly badmouthing his sort of kinda friend Optimus, even though he's much more compotent and has saved his life several times in the past? Check. Hiring an Axe Crazy Decepticon bounty hunter to capture fellow Decepticons so Sentinel can take take credit for them? Paying him with parts of his own ship (which he would need intact if he wanted to get back to Cybertron to get his rewards)? Interrogating Decepticons (who are much stronger then him) and not even bothering to put them back in their cells afterwards? The only reason Sentinel's gotten to his position (let alone survived) is because his only friend Optimus is too nice to make him pay for his mistakes.

Close Western Animation

On occasion, Jesus's apostles. Some people can't understand "I will die, and rise again in three days" or the fact that Jesus can make more food when people are hungry.
- Granted, there's some room for doubt what with the extraordinary claims... except they've all seen him do this kind of thing before.
The Benjamites in Judges. Among your people are some Depraved Bisexuals who wanted to rape a guy, who was forced to give up his concubine to save himself. Said concubine gets fatally raped and abused. Said guy tells the rest of Israel about it, and when they go all What The Hell, Hero? on the Benjamites, tell the Benjamites to give up the villains or get their asses kicked... The Benjamites refuse. Then subverted when the Benjamites defeat the rest of the Israelites at least twice before they get finally defeated.

Close Religion And Myth

The Darwin Awards chronicle people who are literally too dumb to live, and have thus removed themselves from the gene pool in incredibly stupid accidents.
- Though they didn't actually die, an honorable mention should go the two British Star Wars fans who tried to film a lightsaber duel scene... by filling glass tubes with gasoline and then lighting them.
  - And they weren't just ANY glass tubes, they were old FLUORESCENT LIGHT BULBS. Yes, let's mix fluorine, mercury, and gasoline! This will surely end well!
This Olympics Commentator, who seems to be in some sort of Stupid Jetpack Hitler Alternative History
Saladin sent back at least one captured Crusader leader for thinking that God would protect the Crusader armies such that they wouldn't need a battle plan or well-stocked supplies or plans to get more supplies or any number of basic things that one needs to keep in mind when waging a single battle, let alone a war. Saladin, correctly, assumed that such an opponent was Not Worth Killing.
Giant Pandas. Reason they're dying out? Because they either don't want to mate, or don't know how. Some zoos even have to show male pandas videos of pandas mating - yes, panda porn - to get them to breed. I believe Sarmoti from Father Of The Pride said it best:
Sarmoti: God, you whole species is so meshuggah. No wonder you're going extinct!
- The narrator from Fight Club said it better:
  Narrator: I wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its species.
- In the pandas' defense, this is done for pandas that were hand-reared by human beings, hence had never observed any sort of within-species interaction. In the wild, a young panda would probably get to see its mother mating at some point.
  - Squick
Julius Caesar might fit. He apparently had been warned that a plot was afoot to assassinate him on the Ides of March, but dismissed his bodyguard and went to Pompey's Theater (where the Senate was meeting on that day) alone. However, some commentators believe that Caesar knew what he was doing, and was so ill with epilepsy and other ailments that he was going to basically use the plotters in a Xanatos Gambit to let him commit Suicide By Cop, essentially.
- Lampshaded in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which Garak expresses disbelief that in reading Shakespeare's Julius Caeasr, he knew exactly what Brutus was up to before the second act, while Caesar himself was literally surrounded by a conspiracy that included his best friend, and didn't see it coming until the knife was already in his back.
  - Also consider Caesar's pride. He probably would have rather died than show weakness. In reference to the above, "Julius Caesar" can hardly be considered the definitive life of Caesar. In addition, many of the ancient writers reveal that Caesar did suspect Brutus and Cassius, but again, was either to proud to show weakness, too nihilistic to do anything about it, or too overconfident. Of course, if I was Caesar, I might tend to be overconfident as well.. And, as a matter of fact, Brutus was not Caesar's best friend, and their relationship was not as close as many have made it out to be.
Getting stuck in the early stages of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire can sometimes just be a case of very bad luck - there are sometimes questions on supposedly 'common knowledge' subjects such as nursery rhymes or TV soap operas. This wasn't the case on the French version for the man who couldn't identify the moon as being the object that orbited the Earth. Understandably when he 'asked the audience' many of them decided to stitch him up and deliberately picked the wrong answer, and he duly went with them. His other half in the audience looked more than mortified...
There has to be space here for William Henry Harrison, Idiot of Tippecanoe, also known as "You know what, I think I'll give a two hour speech in the freezing cold without a coat to show how badass I am."
- Except that Harrison didn't become ill until three weeks after his inauguration, making it very unlikely that his long speech was the cause of his death. (See The Other Wiki for details.)

Close Real Life

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