"When your life has been directly threatened by your boss and there's already been one unsolved murder in your office building, always work late and alone!"
The people from the Jack Links Beef Jerky "Messin' With Sasquatch" commercials. Seriously, its not worth it for just a few laughs!
Anime & Manga
Right, Keiichi go into that creepy basement with self-confessed psychotic murderer. Nothing bad will happen. And after you survive that, feel free to go out in the dead of night to chat with her.
Many, if not all, of the characters in Ranma ˝ get at least one occasion where they act like this. However, this trope gets played to its actual conclusion in one late-manga story, which really makes it into Mood Whiplash. One character's father receives a scroll detailing a martial arts style which makes use of a lot of brute-force tricks, a bearhug attack explicitly stated to be capable of snapping a man in half. Kumon Senior intends to use these moves to revitalise his dojo, which is dilapidated to the point it's being held aloft only by a single, rotting pillar, but he decides to master this spine-shattering bearhug by practicing on the pillar. Naturally, when he succeeds in learning it, the whole house collapses on top of him, killing him.
In the second movie, the monkey guy who uses his super-cool psychic attack of soul-crushing despair.....on Ryouga
The premise of Kage Kara Mamoru, in which a family has been secretly protected for ninjas for so long that they've lost the ability to survive normal life. The latest descendant, the female protagonist, therefore has a supernatural ability to walk blindly into trouble, and generally gets rescued before she even realizes 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.
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.
Also in Devilman Lady, Jun's girlfriend Kazumi dies when she leaves her hiding place for no good reason whatsoever.
The main character of Kyogoku Natsuhiko Kosetsu Hyaku Monogatari, 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 the manga version of Fullmetal Alchemist several members of the Amestris military give Zolf 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 then 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.
Kimblee later suggests that he faked being sane in order to pass the State Alchemist exam. Perhaps everyone except the Homunculi and those in on their plan was fooled.
Dietlinde Eckhart, the main villain of The Movie. She invades Amestris on the mistaken belief that it's Shamballa, which it shares no similarities with, and doesn't even make sense. Shamballa is supposed to be located near Tibet, and Amestris is in another dimension. She then tries to take over the place when the Thule Society has only about 1,000 members while Amestris is a heavy militarized nation with a much larger army. Her army is crushed in about 15 minutes.
Envy itself qualifies. It went on a huge rant about how it was the one who killed Roy Mustang's best friend, and almost hurt himself from laughing about it. Keep in mind, Envy went out of it's way to tell how it was also the one who started the Ishval War and how amusing it was to see such a huge battle over the death of one little girl that it killed. Envy finds himself on fire about two seconds later.
Loly and Menoly from Bleach are two Arrancar Clingy Jealous Girls who aren't happy to see their boss, Sosuke Aizen, bring a young woman from Earth, Orihime Inoue, as a part of his Gambit Roulette. What do they do? Go torture the girl out of jealous, only to be mauled by their superior. 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.
Loly goes so far to claim that she's going to kill Yammy and Ulquiorra, two of the Espadas while she has no special combat ability of her own even if she most likely didn't know about Yammy being Espada #0.
It doesn't help much that the only thing stopping her from being mauled AGAIN is the fact that Ulquiorra, of all people, was forcing Ichigo to continue the fight, saving them... for another ten seconds.
Inverted in Baccano! when Randy and Pezzo's stupidity leads to them becoming immortal.
Isaac and Miria, also Too Dumb To Die, as they'd probably fly under the radar of anyone who could kill them.
Not that they'd be able to anyway; it takes them until they're walking around the modern-day world to realize they haven't aged in about 70 years, and are thus also immortals.
Koukaji in the anime version of the first Saiyuki series. He had previously been beaten with an inch of his life by Son Goku with his power limiter removed, and in the finale, he decides to try and fight him on his own again, and nearly gets killed, again. Note that this wasn't in the manga.
Death Note. The fiancée of the recently murdered F.B.I. agent figures out crucial information on the Kira case and then decides to trust Light with it after he's been acting creepy, following her around, and asking "Have You Told Anyone Else??" Incidentally, she decides to trust Light because he reminds her of L, lampshading that the two are Not so Different.
Someone who uses the name of Kira to pad his own pockets, knowing that Kira is a vengeful god of justice without much sense of mercy. Demegawa? Can you say "SAKUJO"/"DELETE?"*
SAKUJO means something like 'eliminate' or 'erase'. It's the catchphrase of Mikami, the 4th Kira. All caps are a must.
Tytania: Duke Idris Tytania betrays another member of the clan he was sent to rescue, and stands by to watch while the enemy destroys his ship, presumably killing everyone on board, including Idris's subordinate, Berthier, who thought he was in on Idris's plans. Berthier actually manages to get to an escape pod and survives, though he is permanently crippled. Then, although he is presumed dead and could easily just take off, he goes back to continue serving the guy that just double-crossed and tried to kill him. Yeah. That works out real well for him, as you'd expect.
Rave Master: Main character Haru Glory's mother Sakura. When someone is telling your husband about how they're going to make him suffer by being alone, you don't run up to them and let them impale you.
Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Protagonist Jaden/Judai nearly dooms the world by handing over the key to a Kill Sat, then expecting that Season's Big Bad to not activate it until after defeating Jaden in a children's card game first. The fact that said Big Bad didn't attempt to duel him first was a shock to many fans, as Saiou was the probably the first Genre Savvy villain in Yu-Gi-Oh! history.
Thinking himself to be the baddest ass of them all, he obnoxiously hits on Revy in an attempt to get her to duel him, then beats the crap out of Rock in order to antagonise her enough to draw on him, until he gets dragged off by Yoshida. This, despite the fact that Rock and Revy are working for Hotel Moscow, whom his bosses are trying to conduct important negotiations with.
He decides to take over the group by kidnapping the heiress to the leadership of the clan with the help of a street gang, and holding her hostage in order to draw out Ginji, her katana-wielding,Badassprotector, to kill him before selling the girl into sexual slavery Predictably, Ginji and Revy tear the Mooks apart, whilst Chaka exits, dragging Yukio with him (and loses her after Rock blindsides him with some cleaning fluid, a bowling pin, and a "Fuck You!".
Later, he comes across Revy again, and again tries to get her to draw, because clearly he can take the woman who just tore through his entire crew like they were nothing. He starts counting down from ten... and of course she doesn't wait, and instead drop-kicks him in the face and delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, before luring him to a nearby pool... where Ginji is waiting for him to deliver an extremely nasty, but very, very Karmic Death.
The Neo Nazi who brags about how powerful his Hand Cannon is. As Revy reloads her guns. The expected follows.
Hansel. They made him too aggravated to think and he walked willingly into a trap.
The climax of episode 2 relied on this.
Pokémon: Ash Ketchum, during the Pokélantis debacle. He starts off by touching things on suspicious-looking pedestals and sets off a rolling boulder that would've killed the whole cast if Brandon didn't show up. Brandon chews him out for being an idiot. What's Ash do next to prove him wrong? Runs off on his own, touches more things that look very much like they shouldn't be touched, and subsequently gets possessed by a dead king. Brilliant, son.
The Red Shirts from the battle against Teppelin in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Our leader has just obliterated himself against the mysterious shield surrounding our enemy's city? Quickly! More of us must ram into it so that his death will not be in vain!
still trusts the cousin who sold him to pay off gambling debts
after gaining a measure of freedom he goes back to his old house to get a photo album, intending to come right back!
after one of his so called "friends" tries to rape him, follows him into an empty storage room after said friend tells him he's sorry
gets a job at a club which basically acts as a brothel.
Every single government in Dragonaut: The Resonance. One side commits several outright acts of war, which the other side ignores. The same government then kidnaps one of the dragons, which causes the hive mind of the dragon's homeworld to launch an attack which destroys an entire space station, and a battle which wrecks most of Mars. Who does ultimate blame get placed on? The rescue party. And in a separate incident, a clearly insane dragonaut attacks another dragonaut over a perceived slight at the spaceport. While a shuttle is launching. When he misses a shot, trashing part of the launch equipment (nearly getting all the other dragonauts killed, as they are in the shuttle), he blames his target for dodging. He doesn't even get reprimanded, let alone receive the court-martial that kind of action deserves.
The torturer in Berserk. Thinking that he has the upper hand because he locked the most dangerous enemies of his kingdom (aka the main characters) in a dungeon room, he proceeds to hang around to taunt them. When Guts slowly stands and asks in an unnervingly quiet and soft voice if he was responsible for Griffith's mutilation, the torturer pays no heed and proceeds to describe exactly how he tortured him over the past year, finishing by showing them his crowning jewel: Griffith's severed tongue, worn as a necklace. His death is brutal, quick and horrifically painful. Worse, he brags how nothing they do will succeed, because the door is three times thicker than any normal door. Too bad he never took Guts' weapon of choice into account...
ChiChi does this a few times. One of note actually got her killed during the Buu Saga, where she walked up to Buu and slapped him while yelling at him for killing her oldest son. She gets turned into an egg and squished.
Frieza has been sliced in half, near dead, and was given a sliver of Super Saiyan Goku's power to survive on as an act of mercy. And what does he do with it? He tries to use it to kill the Super Saiyan from behind, despite the fact that it most likely wouldn't have made a dent. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for the tyrant. He got better. Only to get Killed Off for Real by Future Trunks.
Pretty much every Z-Fighter except Goku, particularly the human ones. While it may be somewhat justified by their Determinator natures, how many times do they have to be killed and/or nearly killed trying to fight the current villain only for Goku (possibly Gohan) to show up and beat the guy before they figure out it's probably better to not even bother. Heck, Future Trunks history (where Goku dies of a heart virus and all but 1 of the Z-Fighters are quickly killed by the next big villain) practically lampshades this fact.
Ookami Kakushi gives us Hiroshi. He's prone to things like staying in a car with someone making creepy advances on him, walking around town at night after witnessing a brutal murder, specifically walking around the areas another classmate warned him to stay away from, seeing nothing suspicious in being called up at night or being asked to go into an abandoned barn...
Isuzu, for the most part, manages to make the right decisions to stay alive until episode eleven, wherein she sees the villain (whom we should add is highly unstable by this point in the story) walking through the forest. Instead of reporting it to the authorities, she decides it would be a better idea to follow them into the forest alone. While wearing bells tied to her wrist. Did we forget to mention this Ax Crazy has a gun?
In Char's Counterattack, the Earth Federation makes Char promise not to drop any giant space rocks on them...and pays him off with a suitcase full of money and a giant space rock. Guess what happens next. No, seriously, guess.
Sailor Moon: Because Usagi/Serena is such a klutz (as well as a crybaby), the other Sailor Senshi/Soldiers/Scouts, and even the two cats started pegging her as this (or at least that's what DIC's English version would like us to think...). However, this applies more to the anime than to the manga (especially the crybaby part).
Run from A Channel. In the first episode, she almost falls out of a third story window while waving to Tooru on ground level outside, and is only saved when Nagi and Yuuko grab her feet and pull her back in.
In Code Geass, there are a few characters that fit. Tamaki has a tendency of rushing into things, despite having no special combat talents, and survives most battles only by luckily ejecting from his knightmare as it blows up. Nina Einstein is this as well, during the incident at the lake hotel. Girl, if you're faced with an angry rebel of the island you forcibly conquered, don't call him the derogatory nickname that your homeland gave them!
Suzaku is a subversion of this trope: he wants to change the government of Britannia from the inside by joining the military, even though it discriminates against his very people, including himself, and such a position involves putting down his own people to prove his loyalty. It's through sheer luck that he manages to make any progress. The subversion? He's doing it all to fulfill a secret death wish.
Nunnally herself also counts. She is more in the right mind, and position, than Suzaku, as governess of Japan, not to mention the ability to detect lies. Not using the latter on Schneizel, who lies to her about Lelouch and Pendragon being evacuated, and later uses her as a pawn in his latest plan with no aversion to abandoning her: big mistake.
Joseph Greer fatally shoots Alyssa with Miyu nearby, but does not run away immediately afterward, instead announcing his intentions for doing so. Within moments, an enraged Miyu kills him.
During her confrontation with Shizuru, Haruka not only unnecessarily insults Natsuki, but continues to insult Shizuru even as her Element is drawn rather than stop provoking her or run away as Yukino suggests, thus forcing Yukino to try to defend her, leading to the destruction of Yukino's CHILD Diana, and Haruka's own death.
When Nao first encounters Shizuru while attacking Natsuki, she is easily defeated. In response, she kidnaps Natsuki again, this time for the express intention of luring Shizuru out. To make matters worse, by this time, Shizuru has gone insane from Natsuki's rejection, and not only destroys her CHILD Julia, but tries to finish off Nao before Natsuki intervenes.
Kanaria from Rozen Maiden has some shades of this during the series, but it becomes blatant obvious during the final battle of the second season: not only she is the cause of turning Suiseiseki's Heroic Sacrifice in a Senseless Sacrifice by going back to the battle field, she also is killed by Barasuishou after the strings of her violin snaps and she forgets that, since she has Suiseiseki's Roza Mystica, she could use her Green Thumb powers.
Akko-chan, from Himitsu No Akko-Chan, in the aptly named '_____' episode asks her magic mirror to make her deaf and mute, thus, more empathic to the new deaf kid in her class. After realizing that she just wished herself mute, and her magic mirror could only obey to spoken commands, she spends the whole episode as a non-verbal deaf girl, moving from curiosity to deep rooted depression. Keeping her rationality until the realization of her newfound handicaps kicks in, she then starts acting in a completely unreasonable way, ranging from acting as she were completely uncapable of any kind of communication to running blindly in a dangerous, isolated place, knowing that, being unable to cry for help, she'd risk falling in a ravine and being left there to starve. Exactly what happens to her. On the top of it, the deaf boy "inspiring" her wish sees into her self-destructive ideas and manages to save her from certain death.
The last Saitama team in Initial D's fourth season calls a bunch of gang-banger types to beat up Project D and neglects the fact that the gang-bangers are from the same region as Project D and thus likely to be fans and that the owner of the car they forced into a wreck during the practice runs (using a cheap trick of spilled oil) was the former boss of those same gang-bangers. The current boss was NOT amused at being made to look bad.
One Piece example: Luffy embodies this trope in the Alabasta arc. He makes it to where Crocodile is, a big casino with a lot of people in it, and starts yelling his head off for Crocodile to come out. Then he comes up to a fork in a hallway with a sign pointing left and right, the left saying "VI Ps" and the right saying "Pirates". And guess which path Luffy takes? Well, he said in the Arlong arc that he didn't know how to lie.
Played straight during his fight with Eneru: Eneru can read his mind, so he tries to fight back without thinkingAT ALL. For a while, it works, but it gets so bad, he actually spaces out mid-fight!
Comics
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.
Its supposed to be because the Guardians don't directly interfere in anything. They tried that with the Manhunters and it didn't work out so well, which is why they give their powers to local mortals throughout the universe instead of doing everything themselves. Its still taken to the extreme here and later stories show the Guardians occasionally willing to get involved (at least some of them.) To be fair, it seems like no matter what they do, the writers make it backfire on them. Get involved, don't get involved, they will choose whichever is the wrong option and get a lecture from beings they are supposed to be vastly superior to.
Especially problematic since, only 48 issues earlier, the Guardians had directly and personally fought and killed the Old Timer.
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.
Then there's Lester Dent in Gotham Adventures. After he wins two million on a game show, Two-Face takes over the studio. A session of Calling the Old Man Out ensues on live television, but Lester keeps calling his (gun-wielding, supervillain) son a "punk" and whining that he's ruining his lucky day. When it's clear that Two-Face is going to flip the coin on whether to shoot him or not, he dares him to do it.
The US government (or, hell, the population in general), as portrayed in recentMarvel Comics. Yes, let's give Norman Osborn, 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. Since he ended the Secret Invasion, we can ignore every single detail of his past actions. Let's also let him have a team made up entirely of OTHER mass murdering barely contained psychos. Including a misogynistic serial killer, a cannibal serial killer, a feral berserker serial killer, a living god serial killer, and a pathologically depressed schizophrenic whose alternate personality is a serial killer. The US Government doesn't catch on until Osborn decides to invade Asgard. The President doesn't approve of his actions, but by that point, Osborn has too many resources and manpower to care.
Though viciously mangled and missing a few limbs and eyes, a pair of skinhead thugs (The Zyklon-B Boys) managed to survive an encounter with Deadshot and Catman in an issue of Secret Six. However, a few weeks later one of the thugs sees Deadshot entering a club and decides it is time for revenge, following him until the rest of the gang can gather for the attack. Deadshot notices him and delivers another vicious beating, but again leaves him alive because he had made a promise not to kill anybody tonight (He was on a date). However, even though the thug has now lost a second eye, when the rest of the gang arrives they decide to still go after Deadshot. This same person has now beaten and mutilated their members on two separate occasions, and they still want to track him down. At this point they are simply asking for it, and Deadshot's date kills the lot of them, explaining that she did not make any promises that night.
The crocodiles from Pearls Before Swine frequently end up killing themselves or fellow crocs in their idiotic attempts to kill the Zebra ("zeeba neighba"). This was even lampshaded in one strip where Charles Darwin appears and explains that the crocs are so dumb, they have to die for the good of the rest of society (survival of the fittest, and all that).
In The Punisher comic Welcome Back Frank, Castle is attacked by the entire remaining army of a certain mafia boss after finding out his location. Coincidentally, he had just been on his way to finish them off. Caught in the street but with all of his ordnance at hand, he proceeds to butcher several carloads of Gnucci soldiers, only to run out of ammo when he's down to the fast few. After killing one with his bare hands, the last man does the smart thing: he shoots him from a distance. However, while his gun is powerful enough to punch through Castle's kevlar, it doesn't take him down. So what does the guy do? He keeps shooting him in the chest. When a person is in shock, more bullets to the center of mass doesn't accomplish much of anything. Yes, head shots are hard to pull off, but when the target is only a few feet away and staggering slowly towards you, even a novice gunman could pull it off. Six bullets at close range, and not one head shot.
A street thug in another issue is lightly beaten on a rooftop (with the implied threat that he would be thrown off of the roof) for information. He tells the Punisher what he needs to know, then tries to extort money out of him. When it doesn't work, he says that he has to get some money somehow tonight, and that he might even have to cut a woman up.To the Punisher, whose biggest Berserk Button is cruelty to women and kids in general. It all goes downhill for this thug from there.
The "Up is Down, Black is White" storyline opened with the returning Nicky Cavella digging up the skeletons of the Castle family — Frank's wife, son and daughter — and urinating on the bones, then mailing footage of this CLEARLY IDENTIFYING HIM (panning up to his smiling face) to the news, in HOPES that Frank Castle would see it. Amazingly this almost went according to plan, to so enrage the Punisher that he'd lose focus and thus be vulnerable to ambush (as even the Punisher admitted, that's what happened)... what made it Too Dumb to Live was assuming that his mooks could take advantage. This would prove his downfall once the mooks realized that they were the ones supposed to be taking on the Punisher, and let Cavella know it in no uncertain terms.
Let's face it: Thomas Wayne. Instead of waiting for Alfred to show up and chauffeur them back to the mansion, he decided to take a shortcut through Crime Alley. All dressed up. At night. In the rain. It's just a pity his foolishness got both himself and his wife killed, and his son traumatized along with him.
It wasn't called Crime Alley back then. It's canon that it used to be a nice neighborhood called Park Row. The Wayne murders signaled the decadence of the neighborhood. But then again, they walked into some random, trash-strewn alley, through a side door of the theater,because that's how rich people routinely exit such establishments. I'm sure that there's some HUGE alternate reality story waiting to be told, where ol' Tom Wayne decided to used the front entrance.
Let's not forget the literally short-lived X-Man Thunderbird. Here's the situation, the issue's big bad Count Nefaria is getting away in a plane, Thunderbird goes after him, in an effort to prove himself "Warrior of the Apache". So what does Thunderbird do? He punches through to the cockpit and starts ripping the plane apart. Despite Professor X, Banshee, and even Nefaria yelling at him to get off the plane before he kills them both, he keeps just keeps it up until, big surprise, it explodes, killing him. He doesn't even take Nefaria with him. The worst part is that during this Banshee even outright states that he himself could have taken the plane out and caught Nefaria without anybody getting killed. To dumb to live indeed.
Another depicts a safari photographer taking pictures of a water buffalo. He's not too dumb to live, but his friend is, who is making a mocking face at the water buffalo...
A security guard in Arkham Asylum: Madness ran head first in to this trope when he decided to put the Name "Milton Napier" on a plaque to screw with The Joker. It ended badly. For the guard that is.
Rantanplan's stupidity frequently causes him to almost kill himself. If it weren't for Luke (or in the spinoff, the prison guards, who are none too bright themselves but at least not suicidal) rescuing him, he would have drowned, starved or frozen to death by now.
In the post-Endor comic Star Wars: Crimson Empire, Carnor Jax grows increasingly disgusted with his incompetent right-hand, General Wessel. Whether or not Wessel was actually too dumb to live, Jax said as much to one of his more competent underlings and left Wessel to be killed by a trap that Jax had foreseen.
In Tiberium Wars, the Brotherhood of Nod considers sexual assault to be an "offense againstthe Messiah" and therefore a capital crime. At least one Nod soldier apparently didn't read up on the rules, because he attempts to rape a GDI prisoner while one of the Black Hand is in the next room. An epicass-beatingensues.
In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Haruhi thinks this of Taniguchi after learning about his ratings. Kyon calling him a 'living perv-wiki' probably didn't help.
Arnold of Soulless Shell falls for Leif's ruse and says that he'll "never do it again" when threatened with execution for rape, prompting Leif to conclude that he has the evidence necessary to confirm his guilt. He breaks out of prison, and not only is dumb enough to want to kill Leif in revenge, but tries to rape a young girl first, pushing Leif's Berserk Button and earning him a messy death at the hands of his One-Winged Angel form. Apparently, he didn't even think to bring the guards he recruited with him, although given how easily Leif dispatches them soon afterward, they wouldn't have done much good.
Played for Laughs with the narrator in Bruinhilda's Galaxy Rangers story "The Trouble With Tortuna". He voluntarily ships off to the worst Wretched Hive in the galaxy, one where humans are banned because it's controlled by The Queen's forces. Any human caught by the Crown will have their Life Energy stripped from them and turned into a Slaverlord. The reporter goes there, gets ridiculously intoxicated, then interferes several times when the Rangers show up and try to bail his ass out.
In one Death Note fan comic, a Parody Sue girl goes up to Light and lists all her qualifications to be his girlfriend, including being smarter than anyone else at Wammy's House. He then asks her to write down her name, and she does... in the Death Note.
In one Naruto fanfic, the Kyuubi released a powerful pheromone when it was sealed that basically made everyone into sex maniacs the moment they hit puberty (extreme horniness is a perfectly acceptable reason to be excused from class and it's considered extremely rude to reject someone if they want to have sex). When he first uses his Sexy no Jutsu, he's flat out told that turning into a naked woman, especially in public, will get him raped. When he says he'd just change back and laugh, he's warned that his attackers probably won't care what gender he is at that point. Naruto promptly vows to never use it again, unless it's really funny.
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.
In Skyline, with LA full of alien monsters eating everything that moves, our heroes decide to try and escape in cars with big, growly engines and in broad daylight. Granted, their chances weren't all that good whatever they tried, but at least on foot and at night they had some small hope of evading detection. And let's not even think about the fact that their entire daylight plan was to escape by boat. From flying aliens. Yeah, that will work!
Hartman from Full Metal Jacket. When Pyle is in the middle of a nervous breakdown and holding a rifle, he decides that, rather than call the M Ps, he should insult the poor guy. It doesn't end well for him
Also in general, ANY movie where at least one character stops running to tell the murderous psychopath/monster/demon/abomination/whatever to "wait."
Any horror movie that relies on a bodycount will usually have at least one character whose utter stupidity gets them killed.
Bulk and Skull during the skydiving scene in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie. Kimberly has to remind them that it's a good idea to skydive with parachutes.
In the opening sequence of Iron Man, Tony Stark is riding in a Humvee that is ambushed. The crew immediately identifies that the attack is coming from the left. The driver immediately jumps out on the left side and gets shot. The rear left passenger sees the driver die, and then does the exact same thing.
Note that this is exactly what they are supposed to do. Since the ambushers are firing antitank weapons and armor piercing small arms, the soldiers have much better chances dismounting and finding cover outside of the vehicle than they would have staying in a stationary bullet magnet where they can't shoot back.
Dismounting might be the right thing to do, but dismounting out of the side of the vehicle that all of the incoming fire is hitting?
When the doors on the other side won't open due to the hit your Humvee just took? Not much of a choice.
Lampshaded in Scream with Sidney Prescott's assessment of a lot of slasher movies:
Sidney: What's the point? They're all the same — some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act and who's always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting.
Also lampshaded at the beginning, when Drew Barrymore's character asks "Who's there?" the killer taunts her on the phone with, "You should never say, 'Who's there?' Don't you watch scary movies? It's a death wish. You might as well go outside to investigate a strange noise or something."
Only about three minutes after uttering the above line, Sidney is attacked by the killer and she actually attempts the front door first before realizing it's locked and she has no time to unlock it, which sends her running up the stairs.
Another character in the movie, Tatum (Rose McGowan) is killed after trying to crawl through the pet door in an automatic garage door. Naturally, she dies when the killer does something she wasn't smart enough to do: open the door.
The location of Deep Blue Sea implies this form of mentality in the project designers. Genetically-enhanced super-sharks with improved brain functions? Why don't we build the research lab for them in the middle of the ocean where nobody can reach us and where, if the overly-sophisticated defense system breaks down, said sharks can escape into the wild and spread their super-genes around the world. And then Samuel L. Jackson stands in front of an open pool to give his Rousing Speech, and is eaten by a shark at its climax. It's not clear if the movie did that last bit on purpose.
Not to mention the sheer dumbness of giving something as deadly as a shark increased human brain power in the first place. That was bound to go well.
The Northern Water Tribe counts as this in The Last Airbender, since the firebenders need torches to bend fire, Pakku suggests extinguishing all of them to render them powerless and... they never actually do that.
Also the Fire Nation imprisoned some earth benders on...Earth. Luckily the Earth benders never actually figure this out until Aang came along.
Everybody in the movie Screamers. Two sides are fighting a war on a planet. One side deploys the screamers, small burrowing robots. Ok, not so bad. Said screamers are equipped with an adaptive learning AI. Ok, that's risky, but not suicidal. The screamers are also built in an automated factory, and the screamers design and build newer generations of screamers. At this point, the concept moves from "risky" to "out and out suicidal". But the worst part, the thing that make you suspect the designers of the first screamers had a death wish, is the robots programing. The screamers are programed to kill any living thing they encounter, without any Friend or Foe system. Naturally, the screamers kill every single person on the planet. Its the worst case of this trope and Genre Blindness I've ever seen.
To be fair, the film implies that the Screamers were only set up and let loose by the Alliance after the planet's population had already mostly been killed off with bio-weapons and nuclear strikes by the NEB, and the Alliance was literally at the point of losing the war if they didn't do something crazy and desperate to change the balance of power. It's also pointed out by the surviving Alliance commander that this was a crazy act of desperation, and that there were all sorts of potential unintended consequences. So not quite Genre Blind so much as simply an attempt at Refuge in Audacity that didn't work out so great. Also, the Alliance troops did have an Identification Friend or Foe system they could wear, called a "tab," that was supposed to protect them from screamers.
The IFF system would have been great if it actually worked, but the film makes it clear that screamers looked at the IFF tabs as just a thing that goes "ping".
And the tabs wern't an IFF system. They said "I'm already dead, don't kill me" not "I'm on your side, don't kill me".
In Dante's 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.
Ofelia of Pan's 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.
To be fair, it's possible that the feast exerted a sort of hypnotizing effect on her. Pan's Labyrinth was influenced by various fairy tales, and such an effect is not unheard of.
YMMV. Ofelia likes fairy tales, and the movie is set up like one. In some fairy tales (but not all), the main character will fail to listen to advice, or do something they were told specifically not to do. In some cases the tale ends here, otherwise the main character must do something to redeem themselves in the eyes of their quest-giver. So Ofelia is just acting in accordance with the fairy-tale princess that she believes she is.
On a more minor example, during a High Speed chase through a densely packed forest in Return of the Jedi, a Stormtrooper turns around just long enough to see if his target died, and promptly crashes into a tree. Look where you're driving! Or... avoid doing a high-speed chase through a densely packed forest to begin with?
Also, the Imperial ground forces in general in ROTJ deserve this. Locating your sensitive base in the middle of a forest where there's plenty of places for the hostile natives to hide? Oh, and wearing bright, gleaming white armor to a fight in said forest? Apparently, the Empire never invented camouflage.
Hud from Cloverfield may qualify. 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. On the Rifftrax, Kevin Murphy describes Hud as "straddling a fine line between dumbass and inanimate object." There's a reason one of the Fan Nicknames for the monster is "Darwin".
Micah from Paranormal Activity definitely deserves a mention. During the talk with the psychic, Micah asks about using an ouija board to contact the demon. He's told not to contact it at all, as that would constitute "letting it in" and make things much worse. What does he do? He verbally taunts the demon, keeps trying to get in contact with it in various ways, and states repeatedly that he's going to get an ouija board. The crowning point of his stupidity has to be when his girlfriend is freaked out by multiple nightly disturbances, and he tells her that all of the demonic activity is "cool stuff that he has to record". He basically thinks the whole thing is some sort of fun horror game. Pity he's not Genre Savvy in the slightest.
Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds has Melanie going up to a room she knows is filled with birds. The result is that 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."
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.
Previously, he had "accidentally" crashed their first car, giving him an excuse to drive a Jaguar instead. Following after the cellphone incident, the electricity comes back on and he starts playing a pinball machine, which draw the attention of a zombie in the same building as them.
Although this trope is hardly rare in slasher movies, special mention must be given to the Final Girl from Friday the 13th. She omitted 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 bitch, you deserve to die!"
This is especially prevalent in Zombie's films when several people insult and even strike Myers. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that Myers in those films is A SEVEN FOOT TALL GIANT!!!
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.
Still worse is the Light Grenade is commandeered technology, so the troops all know exactly what it is and what it does, and lampshade this with such lines as, "The Earth Man has a light grenade for a head" then when everyone asks what they pick it up, or "Everyone be careful, there is a light grenade on the ground." then responding to "Where" they pick it up and say, "Right Here" before poofing into a flash of light with a moment of sudden realization on their faces.
Of course the irony of this is King Raff, the smartest of the people on the planet, who admits even he himself is an idiot, somehow invented almost all the technology on the planet, including the Light Grenade, a device that is infinitely reusable, and leaves seemingly no waste, just lots of piles of perfectly clean clothes, as well as a beam that can pull a car and safely transport it and its occupants through space from Earth to his planet.
In addition, Todd, while trying on hairstyles, asks "Mutton chops or Goatee" to one of the pair of twin guards, to which the guard responds, "Mutton chops, M'lord"; Todd's response is to tell the Guard, "No... shoot yourself in the head." which the guard does (Too dumb to live, so he killed himself, because he was ordered to do so) then Todd asks the other twin, who without a moment of pause or thought cheerfully responds, "Mutton chops!" then at Todd's stern look draws his gun and shoots himself in the head (Twins, too dumb to live... or maybe not), but wait, after checking himself in the mirror once more, Tod says, "You know, they have a point." Of course the entire planet is essentially TSTL.
Of course that isn't Tod's only TDTL moment. To penetrate the castle and save his wife, Richard Nelson aka Dad in the title, leads the idiot rebels (whose favorite weapons that their leader innovated are large smooth and round rocks which they hurl like shot puts) to build a giant hollow wooden statue of Todd and put it outside the castle. Todd is called to see it, and cheerfully rushes to look, then chides his soldiers on how it looks nothing like him, but instead of having them destroy it, he shouts to open the gates and bring it in to show everyone how much it looks nothing like him... though the rebels did nail the trapdoor securely shut.
Pretty much any attempt the JSDF uses to stop/kill Godzilla falls under this. Most of the time, they only succeed in angering him...which only makes things worse. Conventional weaponry only annoys Godzila and giant robots and laser cannons only serve as a temporary solution before Godzilla gets back up again and lays waste to them. And, yet they still use them in each film.
The aliens in the Showa era don't seem to fair much better. You'd think they'd learn by now that Ghidorah is just going to be defeated by Godzilla (and whoever Godzilla is teamed-up with at the time). Yet, they don't.
Orga from Godzilla 2000 is a particularly infamous example. He tries to swallow Godzilla only to be killed by Godzilla's Nuclear Pulse. Ok, how dense do you have to be to not realize that trying to eat the dinosaur with extremely powerful radiation-based abilities is a bad idea?
Gabra from Godzilla's Revenge just loves to bully Minya, even though he's well-aware that Minya happens to be Godzilla's son. He learns his lesson the hard way, maybe.
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?"
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. Notable in that Helen is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. AfterBuffy, which was specifically made to subvert the idea of the helpless blonde cheerleader. Good lord.
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.
That's not even half of it:
Amanda:(on the megaphone) ERRR-IIIC! Dr. Grant: And tell your wife to stop making so much noise! We're food to these damn animals. Paul:(yelling) AMANDA, HONEY! DR. GRANT SAYS IT'S A BAD IDEA! Amanda:(on the megaphone) WHAT? Paul:(pointing broadly at Alan) HE SAYS IT'S A BAD IDEA! Amanda:(on the megaphone) WHAT'S A BAD IDEA? (a roar is suddenly heard)
Jurassic Park II, with the supposed biologist Sarah Harding being one of the worst. She goes alone on an island filled with dinosaurs, and complains that Ian doesn't need to rescue her, then stumbles from one moment of rampaging stupidity to the next like a female Mr. Bean. To make matters worse, she lectures everyone with her about what you should or shouldn't do in a situation before immediately going out and doing what she said NOT to do. And unfortunately, this is a situation where her being Too Dumb to Live results in not her death, but the deaths of nearly EVERYONE she encounters on the island.
Burke: No, no. You're wrong there, Dr. Harding. We'll lose them once we leave their territory.
Sarah: No, don't bet on it. Tyrannasaurs have the largest proportional olfactory cavity of any creature in the fossil record with the exception of one.
So naturally, she continues to wear a vest covered in the blood of the aforementioned tyrannosaurs' infant. It's not like she forgot that it was there—Roland pointed the blood out to her and she explained that it was the t-rex infant's, and even then didn't think that there might be some danger in carrying it around.
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.
There's also the part near the beginning when the pizza delivery boy and his brother go down into the sewer for his car keys at night and nearly get killed by the Predator. It wasn't even like it turned to night by the time they got to the sewer, they clearly waited until night to go down, presumably so no one saw them doing it. Granted they didn't know that the Alien or Predator were on Earth yet, but still one would think that going into a sewer at night is just asking for some sort of trouble.
Dr. Schneider from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who, after being told by the immortal knight that the Holy Grail must never cross the great seal, grabs the Holy Grail and starts backing away with it while Indy keeps telling her to don't move and don't cross the seal!
Donovan also qualifies. After being told that "while the true grail brings life, the false grail will take it from you", he pauses, not knowing which one to pick. When he lets Dr. Schneider choose for him, he simply assumes it must be the one. Should have asked for another volunteer.
Raymond Cocteau in Demolition Manfrees 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 The 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 will see you, jeez), he somehow trips and falls down, then rolls ten meters away from where he was — and gets lost. He fails to find his way back to the plane, and dies out there.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Considering the numerous mistakes they make throughout the film, Brad/Asshole and Janet/Slut certainly apply.
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 mothercoming 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 crown 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.
Crow: (laughing) Oh, now that just seemed completely avoidable.
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.
Batman Returns gives us The Ice Princess who is shown to be a ditz when she can't remember whether the lights come on and then pushes the switch or vice versa, but the real crown jewel is when she stands on the edge of a building; it's no wonder The Penguin so easily got Batman framed.
She wasn't there by choice — Catwoman took her up there to have a "girl talk" and probably let her go like that in order to set up Penguin's frame. Batman definitely didn't help things by telling her "don't move" immediately before Penguin showed up with the umbrella full of bats.
In The Dark Knight, a guy is still driving towards the Joker at the end of the epic car chase sequence. Joker shoots up the car and the car crashes (the fate of the driver is not shown on screen). As pointed out on the movie's Rifftrax, "If you're still driving towards him at this point, you deserved that!"
The three victims in The Strangers; Kristen doesn't do anything but scream, trip and cry and actually injures herself, James among other things decides to go get a radio (because they were too stupid to have their cellphones on them) leaving Kristen alone and unprotected in the house, where their attackers can breeze in with ease, and their friend has his windshield broken, sees destruction, mayhem and hears loud music playing (which to a normal person would scream DANGER) and goes blithely in. Of course they all die.
Anyone in the 2008 not-remake of Prom Night, especially Claire (Jessica Stroup) who sees the killer coming for her and just stands there and the local police, whose bumbling and ineptitude cause all the deaths in the movie.
Parker in the 2010 Open Water knockoff Frozen. Granted, the guys weren't the brightest bulbs either (especially Dan, whose decision to bring the skiing-impaired, fair-haired maiden on a skiing vacation set the whole chain of events that led to them getting trapped on a skilift in motion - on his defense, though, it was at her insistence), but she takes it too far. She is also the sole survivor of the flick due to a gigantic Ass Pull.
Every single human being in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 film The Creeping Terror qualifies. The title monster eats people, but in order to do so it has to reach them by moving very slowly. However, because idiots simply sit there and scream rather than run away, they suffer the grisly death that their stupidity deserves. The fact that they have to crawl into its mouth to be eaten doesn't help.
Also another film riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000; Women Of The Prehistoric Planet. A group of guys try to walk across a pit of acid on a small branch, and one them ends up falling in and dying. There was a path around the pit a few steps away.
Will Stanton in the film Dark Is Rising. At the end of the movie, he and the other Old Ones are forced to retreat into the Great Hall, where their enemy the Rider cannot enter unless invited. Will then proceeds to throw open the doors when he hears his parents and sister calling him only to learn that it was just the Rider who — oops — is now able to enter. Evidently Will thought his completely ordinary family was able to somehow get to a mysterious place which seems to be in an alternate time/dimension.
This is based on a very early scene from the book, where he, Merriman, and the Lady are holding a three-person circle of power in the Hall while the Dark tries to beat down the door, and they break his concentration by convincing him briefly that they've got his family captive. He lets go of his new comrades' hands, and the Lady has to temporarily die to save the day. Then Marriman actually explains a little bit, although he has an infuriating habit of explaining nothing, ever. (Will's also only just eleven in the book.)
The only good thing about that movie is it had the Ninth Doctor as the villain.
Both ofThe Incredible Hulk movies. Seriously, will General Ross ever get that shooting ? stopping Hulk, hurting Betty = Hulk turning into Banner? Bruce spends the entire movies trying to lay low and keep things under control. Then the military catches him, tries to perform experiments on him, he turns into the Hulk, and they make things WORSE by hitting him with heavy artillery, making him angrier than before.
In the second film, Ross specifically tries to knock Bruce out with gas instead of making him angry, and orders his men not to engage. If Bruce hadn't seen Betty there being kept away from him, it might've worked. Nice job breaking it, Betty!
Emil Blonsky deserves special mention. He held his own in a battle with Hulk, mainly because of how quick he was, due to the super soldier serum he'd been given. After he and the rest of his military division have thrown everything they have at Hulk, and he is still walking, Ross tells Blonsky to fall back. Blonsky then rips off his earpiece, drops his gun and attempts to stare down the Hulk, saying "Is that all you've got?" Cue Hulk-powered thrust kick to the chest, followed by being smooshed all over a tree.
ANYONE who buried anything in the burial ground in Pet Sematary after seeing the initial results (heck, after the initial warning for that matter). You'd think that after seeing what happened to Church the cat they would have stopped, but the guy then proceeded to bury his hit-by-a-truck toddler son Gage, who then came back and killed his wife. If that wasn't enough yet, he then buried his wife there, and she mercifully put an end to his chain of idiocy.
This is easily explained by the book. The burial ground calls out to people, and at one point the main character mentions that he feels great when going off to bury Church. Besides, the main character is insane with grief after Gage dies and just loses it when his wife and Jud get killed as well.
Then came the movie Pet Sematary Two (yes, there was a second movie), which was more of the same, but with most roles reversed either gender-wise or species-wise, plus a much higher body count, reanimated or not and a MUCH higher "creepy" factor in that the plot dared to bring up the utterly stay-up-all-night-thinking-about-it scientific side of the undead people/animals, courtesy of Dr. Chase Matthews the veterinarian: first the kids Jeff and Drew buried Zowie the dog after he was shotgunned by Drew's abusive stepfather Gus, and upon Zowie's return didn't really feel like there was anything wrong when the dog acted nasty — Zowie was probably just irritable from being away from home for a bit. Of course more burials took place, including Gus himself and Jeff's actress mother Renee, who is taken from her grave much like Gage in the first book/movie. Interestingly, the undead Gus even does some of the burying, effectively enlisting Clyde the bully (who he killed while undead) as his henchman.
The military, law enforcement, and basically the government in general in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, though pretty much all of government in all of fiction is guilty of this trope, and it's not an entirely unexpected reaction to aliens being suddenly real. Klaatu comes to Earth and reaches out his hand to the protagonists. Clearly, putting a bullet in him is the appropriate response. Only later do they realize he was able to shut down their defense network on a whim, and so they decide imprisoning and (implicitly) torturing him is a good idea. Klaatu's decision, after consulting a spy on Earth, is naturally that Humans Are Bastards and have to go, so the swarm of nanobots beings devouring every man-made object in its path. The military bombs it to hell and back, only to see it grow larger. The Secretary of Defense at least grows a brain at this point, but the president orders even more bombing as if the opinion of his military adviser isn't worth considering.
Klatuu's people deserve extra stupidity points as well. Consider that their entire motivation for destroying humanity is to preserve the non-human portions of Earth's biosphere. They then set their nanotech-based weapon on "Dissolve Everything", including rocks and trees! In the immortal words of Robert Asprin, "Very inferior as superior beings go."
And then of course he totally ignores the diplomatic mission entrusted to him and spends three months having a fun time. The Humans probably assumed he would have at least told Na'Vi that the humans needed them to move before, you know, the very last day.
"Having a fun time" was actually helping the diplomacy along a bit. For one, Dr. Augustine was allowed back into the village (she had been presumably banished after the school shootout).
In Orphan, the two kids never reveal that they've seen Esther committing violence, even though A) the mother clearly believes that she is and needs support and B) Esther keeps trying to kill them.
Zombieland: Wichita and Little Rock ride the rides at Pacific Playland, which light up, make noise, and naturally attract lots of zombies. Many fans think they may have been deliberately suicidal, even.
First averted then played straight with Bill Murray: Using make-up and his acting abilities to blend in with the zombies and avoid being killed? Pretty damn friggin' smart. Pretending to be a zombie in order to scare the unsuspecting jumpy teenager WITH THE GUN? Stupidity of epic proportions, especially when he saw the reaction that he got from the survivors who weren't currently armed with firearms and then trying it again with someone who was...
Its important to remember that all characters involved are literally stoned out of their minds at the time they start thinking this is a good idea.
The girls also get one in their introduction, when they're setting up a scam pretending that Little Rock is bitten and needs to be offed. The whole monty hinges on the mark getting cold feet about shooting a kid and deciding to let Wichita do the deed - all it would've taken was for Tallahassee to say "Okay, I'll put her out of her misery" and a double-tap, and Wichita would've lost her sister. And it would've been entirely her own fault.
The mark getting cold feet was never a necessity of the scam. The ploy was that they had no weapons to do the deed themselves. All Wichita had to do was request to do it herself regardless, with Tallahassee's gun.
The whole race of Romulans in the latest installment of Star Trek. Their whole sun goes supernova thus killing millions in the process? Sorry, but you must be plain dumb in order to let that happen (according to Star Trek Online, they caused it by testing weapons that were banned due to this specific reason). Not only do they possess a whole star empire, which means they have more planets then just the one being threatened by the super nova, they should also have the technological possibilities to detect super novas in time. It's not like they happen as a total surprise. It shouldn't have been a problem to evacuate that planet in time at all (although it's a shame about the buildings and the capital). And to let Spock as the only person in the goddamned empire try to prevent it because they were too busy arguing. That's beyond dumb.
Also Olson, not pulling his chute till the last second.
Jaws: The Revenge. The widow Brody is convinced that Jaws is still alive and going after her, so where does she go? Nebraska? Oklahoma? Some other place that's far away from the ocean? Nope: THE BAHAMAS.
Clive in Cold Storage.
Several of the children who potentially stand to benefit from the tontine in the British ensemble comedy The Wrong Box grow up to be too dumb to live, as shown in a montage following the opening credits. Just to name two, an army sergeant orders his men to fire a cannon, oblivious to the fact that he is standing directly in its line of fire, and a big game hunter insists on waiting for a rhinoceros to charge before opening fire, and waits so long that he is swiftly gored when it finally does start charging.
The Stepfather remake has the main character's mother debunking all possible theories that her fiancé is a serial killer, from an old lady seeing his face on America's Most Wanted to her sister telling her that the fiancé quit her company shortly after he was required to fill out certain information that might get him caught.
In traditional horror fashion, pretty much everyone else is just as dim. Everyone who finds evidence that the titular stepfather isn't who he says he is steadfastly refuses to notify anyone of note and putt around with the killer knowledge. Special commendation goes the supposedly Genre Savvy son who, despite being paranoid as sin, ignores several anvilicious clues that he's -right-. The cops at the end may also be considered this, if not 'Too Out of Shape to Live'; They fail to apprehend a man who has been stabbed, beaten, and thrown out a second story window. You could SEE THEIR LIGHTS APPROACHING while he was still sprawled out on the ground recovering.
Goddamn near everybody in the movie Warning Sign. Firstly we have the Biotek employees who unzip their hazmat suits inside a sealed quarantine room - where they're making a deadly Hate Plague - to pose for a photo. Then when the virus is released into the facility, the other Biotek employees apparently have no idea what a quarantine lockdown is, staring at the closing shutters and alarms in confusion and then get upset when they are locked in. They then try to argue with Joanie, the security guard who started the quarantine, to let them go because she was scaring people with the quarantine despite some of them knowing they were working on a hate plague. Then the concerned townspeople and relatives outside the quarantined building try to break their way in, despite being told the spin story that a chemical that would destroy their crops had been released inside. If not for Joanie having more common sense than everyone in the county and sticking to the quarantine protocols, Utah would have been screwed.
Rose in Titanic. From pretty much the moment the ship hits the iceberg, she has the Idiot Ball superglued to her hand. Though Winslet's performance is a little vague, Jack's later dialogue ("When did you realize I didn't steal the necklace?") seems to indicate she DOES believe Cal's frame job, however briefly. We're then given the impression she knows, from what Andrews told her for no discernible reason other than to set this up, that the lifeboats are totally inadequate and it's imperative to get off the ship before they're all gone. She then spends the rest of the sinking running around the boat, trying to save Jack, who convinces her to just GET IN THE GODDAMN BOAT ALREADY, jumps back out, runs DOWN in a sinking ship, and generally slows Jack down. Admittedly he and Cal play hackey-sack with a mini-Idiot Ball throughout this (to the point you wonder what Cal has on him that the valet doesn't just say "Screw both of you" and get on the lifeboat offered) but Jack pretty much sums up Rose when he tells her "You're so stupid!"
The crew and the ship designers that went along for the ride could also qualify. Believing the ship to be unsinkable despite knowing full well that it can only sustain limited damage? Pretty dumb. Putting a small number of lifeboats on the ship that can only house half the people on board tops in case the ship does sink? Really dumb. Sailing full speed into a part of the Atlantic that has icebergs out the wazoo, leaving you little time to react, and coupled with the two previous factors? Congratulations, you're Too Dumb To Live.
Actually, neither The White Star Line or Harland & Wolff ever described -or believed- the ship to be unsinkable. They said that she was PRACTICALLY unsinkable. The press at the time simply did away with the 'practically' and it was never corrected. The number of lifeboats actually exceeded the amount set by regulations -that were twenty years out of date. What's more, all other large liners at the time suffered the same problem -inadequate lifeboats due to outdated regulations. It was just pure Irony that the 'unsinkable' ship needed them.
After the disaster, a U.S. Senate Inquiry discovered -to their shock- that procedures on the Titanic that they thought were negligent, were actually standard practice for the time. The big liners for all the major shipping lines tended to go full speed ahead at almost all times. (Blinding fog was pretty the only thing they'd slow down for). Maintaining the schedule was regarded as being paramount. As well, Captain Smith was not doing anything different than he'd done throughout his career. For decades, he'd operated ships in that manner and never had any sort of accident or serious incident. There was, realistically, no reason why he would think to do things differently now. And, as noted, all other captains did the same thing. As Senator Smith noted at the Inquiry, the state of shipping practices meant that a major disaster was BOUND to happen sooner or later. It was just Captain Smith's bad luck that it happened to him.
The Animal Wrongs Group at the beginning of 'Film/'28 Days Later''. After being explicitly told that a monkey is infected with a contagious disease, one of them frees it anyway.
The US military in 28 Weeks Later. They allow unsupervised access to an asymptomatic infected, who consequently infects someone. Then they evacuate another one to Europe where the whole thing starts all over again.
The initial mistake wasn't allowing unsupervised access, it was giving a civilian access to 'ALL' areas of the military installation, even the top secret areas—including the place where the asymptomatic woman was.
Balian (Orlando Bloom) in Kingdom of Heaven. It makes more sense in context and is more like a case of lazy writing, but Balian's inaction is the prime reason behind the Big Battle of the film. His refusal, on many occasions, to kill a blatantly evil and dangerous character (a French Templar named Guy de Lusignan, played by Marton Czokas), is the prime reason behind the siege and the Big Battle of the film. Guy and his conspirators are the ones that provoke the war between Muslims and Christians, and their intentions are made clear (in-story, i.e. to other characters and not just to the audience) from the outset, and yet Balian doesn't make a move, and he refuses to do anything when his advisors/friends repeatedly express their concern. He doesn't come off as noble, more like an idiot and a passive character. Many characters die as a result of his course of action (or, rather, inaction), but he survives the film. In the film's epilogue with King Richard I he should probably say: "I'm the blacksmith, and the main reason you have to retake Jerusalem from Saladin, I'm the one that should be thrown in a dungeon full of Twilight merchandise." This film is not worth watching for this very story element, it's a classic case of a story where if the main hero acted within common sense, there wouldn't be much of a story to be told.
2001 heist film Firetrap. A building is on fire. A guard is badly injured. What's a guy to do to save him? Get on the elevator during a fire, and talk a woman you like into going with you. What do you think happened to them?
Several characters in both versions of Dawn of the Dead. Since they're in the middle of a mass zombie outbreak, most of them die.
The Boogens features an entire cast of this. The titular monsters may actually be smarter than the humans and dog, and they're not actually depicted as anything other than hungry. Sadly, probably the stupidest of the humans are the alpha couple, and thus survive.
Madison, the birthday girl in My Super Psycho Sweet Sixteen. While she and Skye, who happens to be the killer's daughter, are running from the killer, she picks that time to insult Skye again. You can guess what happens.
Don't forget Chloe! She sits around in the dark, abandoned bathroom planning to spray Skye with a fire extinguisher. Can you say "Genre Blind"?
All the criminals in Hancock, and arguably most of the citizens. The titular superhero Hancock is a Jerk AssFlying Brick who can and will use his powers to frighten, humiliate, or possibly mutilate anyone who remotely displeases him. He's also totally immune to harm. Despite this, everyone save Ray, the main character and the only one with any common sense, either insults him, try to provoke him, shoot him despite knowing better, and generally seem to fail to comprehend that he will cause them serious harm.
In Waterworld, there is a character named Enola who doesn't know how to swim, when 99% of the planet is covered in water. It's made very clear that she can be taught to swim and that no one ever thought that a child growing up on a planet covered by water should know how to swim.
Though it is not lampshaded, it could be that she was sheltered inside all of her life so that no one would notice her birthmark/tattoo. Wearing a bathing suit or skinny dipping, someone would eventually notice it.
In Lethal Weapon 2, the bad guy who is responsible for killing Riggs's girlfriend and a bunch of their cop buddies is involved in a major shootout. He's a South African diplomat, so when they have him dead to rights, he pulls out his passport and intones, smugly, "Diplomatic immunity!" He gets shot in the head for his trouble by Roger Murtagh, who delivers the immortal line, "It's just been revoked."
And to lay the icing on the Too Dumb to Live cake, just before saying this line, the bad guy in question had just gunned Riggs down, which anyone watching a buddy cop picture knows is going to get you killed no matter which half of the law-abiding/loose-cannon partnership it's done to.
Not to mention that diplomatic immunity does not protect you when you're openly committing crime and your guilt is obvious. If nothing else, your country will revoke it in a heartbeat because they don't want to be associated with your crimes.
Everybody in Night of the Living Dead. Nobody in the film uses any sort of common sense, and it costs them their lives.
Sure, it's a disaster film (and a pretty silly one at that), but The Day After Tomorrow had this in spades. Hundreds of people are sheltering in the public library, and decide that rather than listening to the son of the smartest climatologist in the country (who just had an extended conversation with his father), they're going to go and do the exact opposite. Of course, they all freeze to death. Had they bothered listening, they would've been uncomfortable, but they would've survived.
Those who do stay in the library, decide to burn books to keep warm. Books that they have to take off the wooden shelves to burn.
Wooden shelves have to be broken up to fit in most fireplaces, and are usually painted/stained with substances that release toxic fumes when burned. Books were the safer alternative by far. The dumb part was in tearing them apart and burning them page by page rather than using some loose pages as firestarters and then burning entire books- that would have been much more effective.
Then there was the scene meant to be a crowning moment of heartwarming in which Frank is dangling from a glass roof. The glass starts to crack and Frank decides to make a heroic sacrifice because there is no way the glass can support Jason and his weight. Fridge Logic sets in when you realize Jason is holding onto two steel support beams that could have easily held the weight of the sled, the entire party, and probably an elephant.
The Prison Guard in Con Air. This Prison Guard and FBI Agent Larkin have just found a box labeled "Do Not Open" in the cell of Cyrus Grissom, a criminal genius, terrorist, murderer, and general all-around Complete Monster. Larkin goes to fetch the bomb squad, explicitly ordering the guard to not open the box. Literally the second Larkin is out of the room, the guard sits right down on the bed and opens the box. He is immediately blown to smithereens.
It should also be noted that the other guard with him warns him that Larkin said not to touch anything. That's three seperate warnings the guy ignored. Truly TDTL!
The aliens from Signs walk around Earth naked, despite being as much vulnerable to water as we are to sulfuric acid.
In Southern Comfort, the main characters are in the National Guard on a training mission in a swamp, miles from civilization. They see one of the inhabitants from a distance and decide to mess with him... by pointing their rifle (loaded with blanks) at him and "opening fire." Shockingly, the locals have their own rifles, not loaded with blanks. Natural selection ensues.
Vincent Vega of Pulp Fiction. A veteran hitman who really should have showed a little more respect for his weapons, he ended up causing the Trope Namer for I Just Shot Marvin In The Face due to recklessly pointing his weapon in the wrong damned direction, and when he was sent to whack Butch Coolidge for turning around and winning the fight he was paid to throw, he left his MAC-10 submachine gun on the counter while he went to the bathroom, not taking heed to the fact that his intended target might come across it while he was doing his business, leading to Vincent getting blown away.
Vega is more careless than dumb, in large part due to him being a sociopath, as after Marvin gets shot, he doesn't even seem to care one way or the other about it and in Butch's case it seemed so absurd that Butch would actually come back there that Marcellus leaves to get donuts.
The two dumb kids in Jaws, who decided that, while the town is on high alert for ANY potential shark fins, would do a prank involving a fake shark fin on a piece of wood, and tow it from underwater. Fortunately for the kids, they didn't get shot. Unfortunately, thanks to their distraction, at least one person was eaten and another kid was injured by the real shark, and managed to get away as a result.
The shark himself, for eating an explosive.
The Last House on the Left: Aw, man, we raped and murdered these people's daughter, and they don't even know! Wow, now the mom is giving me a BJ! This is the best road trip ever!
I'd honestly like to take a poll of women to see how many would continue shaving their legs if the skin started to slough off with noticeable amounts of blood and scraping noises to Squick pretty much anybody out.
100Feet. A woman is being haunted by the vengeful ghost of her abusive husband. He's shown her that he can move anything in the house anytime he wants, so what does she do? She throws her wedding ring in the garbage disposal, then decides to fish it out with her hands. After narrowly avoiding losing her hand, she invites the neighbor boy over for some fun...
Each member of the Mystery Team, but especially Charlie and (later) Jason. Jordy also qualifies.
Coolio's character in Red Water escapes from an exploding boat with a trunk of cash by jumping into a river being prowled by a shark (don't ask why). Instead of ditching the money and swimming for land, he tugs it along. But that's not the worst. When the shark rises out of the water and bites the trunk, what does he do? Instead of swimming away, he tries to pull the trunk out of the shark's mouth until it breaks open, scattering the money all over the water. And of course, he tried to collect every bill in sight, and is promptly eaten.
A nameless Triad thug in Hard Boiled shoots two SWAT officers in the climactic hospital battle, killing one of them. As he goes to finish off the other, Teresa Chang snatches up a pistol and holds it on him. Possibly believing that she was merely a trapped civilian (she was wearing plainclothes) and wouldn't have the nerve to shoot him, the thug slapped her and called her a "fucking bitch!" She promptly shot him about five times in the torso.
David and Jack in the beginning of An American Werewolf in London exemplify this trope by, after being warned of danger, wandering off the road in the middle of the night, presumably without any food. Without the werewolf they still would have been lost for a long time. Your Mileage May Vary on many of the other deaths, which could be explained as stupidity by panic.
The title characters in Yossi And Jagger. One could argue that the film works best as an hour-long PSA about Why You Do Not Have Affairs Within Your Chain Of Command.
In Zoolander, Derek Zoolander lost his friends in a tragic gasoline-fight accident. The only reason he survived is that he spotted his image on the front of a newspaper and went over to look at it.
Judge Dredd. That rookie Street Judge that dies in the beginning. Isn't one part of police training to not run off alone into an unsecured building? In his first attempt to run blindly into combat, he actually cites a training exercise at the academy as giving him grounds to do so, before Hershey admonishes, "This is NOT a training exercise."
In Taken, Kim and Amanda are this. They are 2 American teenagers who go to France by themselves to follow around a band. They take a taxi with a stranger and then tell the stranger their apartment number and that they will be alone in the apartment. No surprise, within the first 30 minutes of the movie they are kidnapped. The criminals that take them could be considered this as well. They run on the premise that trafficking some young, pretty white girls from wealthy countries is the way to go, not realizing that even if Kim's dad Bryan wasn't a former spy who could kick their asses, the families of those girls would ask questions (not to mention Missing White Woman Syndrome).
Invoked in the slasher spoof Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth. Everyone agrees that with the recent killings they should hide out at a safe place but they all think it should be in the middle of nowhere, preferably the dark woods in the pouring rain, and without any adult supervision or police protection in the near vicinity. One even suggests that they should go to a deserted place that's been abandoned ever since a bunch of dorky kids were dismembered there.
Head goon Buddy in Christine, when chased by the possessed big V-8 powered car, opts to run down a long stretch of straight highway, rather than get off-road where a car might have some difficulty getting through at any speed.
Arguably Kalle from Troll Hunter, who concealed the fact he was a Christian from the crew and the hunter despite the hunter warning them that Trolls will go after anyone with Christian blood. It would have been justified since he didn't initially believe it to be a life or death decision when mythological creatures were involved, EXCEPT for the fact that both he and the crew had two violent encounters with trolls before finding themselves trapped in a cave filled with Mountain King Trolls that led to him getting killed.
Literature
In 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King, Susan Norton, despite being warned by Ben Mears and Matt Burke that they should stay away from the Marsten House for now, goes there all on her own to see if there's really a vampire there. What's more, on the way she encounters twelve year old Mark Petrie who actually has warded off a vampire the previous night. Now, with proof and a new ally, does she suggest that the two of them go back to town and get reinforcements to return in force? No, she and Mark go up to the house all on their own. What do you think happens?
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels this pretty much sums up the New Republic/Galactic Federation of Free Alliances. The Old Republic lasted "a thousand generations". The New Republic lasted less than one, largely because it was so mired in politics that it was wholly unable to adequately respond to an extragalactic invasion. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our passionately individualistic heroes the invaders are eventually stopped and the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances is formed. During it's brief existence it has allowed a Sith Lord to exploit a legal technicality to seize power, the second time this had occurred in less than a century. Once our heroes sort that out, the GFFA then arbitrarily appoints a former enemy who once tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy their capital planet as their new Chief of State for no apparent reason other than that a real election would be too much trouble and there were seemingly no qualified candidates amongst the ranks of their own government. Needless to say, more trouble quickly ensues. All of this keeps the Jedi in a role of constantly having to oppose their own government and likewise routinely being out of favor with said government, who are deeply offended by the Jedi's ceaseless attempts to stop their lemming-like drive towards self-destruction.
Carpathia's plan in Left Behind is to follow every step of the divine plan that leads to his inevitable defeat, as opposing to try and Screw Destiny by, for example, ruling fairly and trying to create a better world, or just nuking the whole planet to spite Him. Well okay, he did intend to deviate from the plan at the last possible minute by waiting until Jesus actually returned and then shooting him. This works about as well as you'd expect.
The Dune prequels: the machine empire is many times bigger than the League of Nobles, with hundreds of planets, and robots working around the clock on every one of them. They could easily create enough nuclear missiles to take out the dozen or so Noble planets in one swift strike. They don't. We learn that they can't reach the planets because they are surrounded by an atmospheric shield that fries robot brains; but why not simply firing nukes from above the atmosphere, straight down? Especially since every planet in the Duneverse is a Planetville.
Peter in The Boy Who Reversed Himself. He is sacrificed to a man-eating boar (he lives anyway) because Laura and Omar don't consider him worth saving. Besides, it was Peter that got them stuck in the 4th Dimension in the first place due to his stupidity.
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.
One example that stands out in Harry Potter is when Dolores Umbridge spews racial slurs at a herd of armed and very pissed off centaurs.
All the authorities in the story Watchbird, by Robert Sheckley. First, they build a crowd of machines programmed to protect humans, and make them autonomous, self-taught and without any control circuit so they can be efficient, and the machines get out of control and start protecting anything, from cows to other machines, so economy, farming and stuff ends in chaos, and then, to protect humanity they build a crowd of machines programmed to kill the first ones... and these are also autonomous, self-taught and without any control circuit so they can be efficient.
Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's original novel, decides to run away from, and afterwards basically forget about, his completely successfulexperiment 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 feels epically neglected and decides to kill him.
Not only that, but all the monster wants is familial love at first and then 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 Kzinti from Larry Niven'sKnown Space series. While they are formidable-looking 8' tall, 500-pound tiger-men, a combination of room-temperature IQ and uncontrollable hair-trigger tempers means that they ALWAYS lose, even in hand to hand combat with humans 1/3 their mass. Specifically, their only tactic is "scream and leap". Niven, actual cats know more complicated tactics than that. Part of it can be chalked up to Honor Before Reason, but societies whose honor codes start hurting them learn how to Rules Lawyer the honor code pretty fast, if they don't junk it outright. Even worse, their race supposedly got its space-age tech by overthrowing an advanced spacefaring civilization that conquered their planet. How the heck they managed to do so despite their above-described dumbassery is anyone's guess.
They did so before they were that dumb. They were tribal warrior primitives before they overthrew the spacefarers and stole their tech. Then they used the biotech they'd stolen to genetically engineer themselves to be perfect - as defined by a primitive tribal warrior culture, i.e. massively aggressive, status-conscious, and utterly truthful. They actually rebuilt their descendants to be unable to Rules Lawyer their honor code. This doesn't change much until evolution kicks back in... once they attack humans.
By the usual Genre SavvyDiscworld 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" is just the icing on the cake.
Calling a dwarf short stuff or lawn gnome is also suicide, considering the insulted dwarf most likely possesses a very sharp pickaxe about his person.
Wandering into the Shades in Ankh Morpork is also a definite form of suicide.
In fact, it's such a recurring problem in Ankh-Morpork that the city actually has a 'Being Bloody Stupid' law.
Twoflower. Oh gods, Twoflower..."Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."
The all-volunteer Lancre Mountain Rescue Team have an even less tolerant attitude to Too Dumb to Live than the Ankh-Morpork Watch. They're happy to help people who are in trouble through no fault of their own, but if they have to risk their lives for someone who thought it'd be fun to go mountaineering in slippers, with a length of clothesline for the difficult bits, they may take him further up the mountain and leave him there. Stupidity kills, so it's best if it kills the stupid before they take someone else with them.
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 crossbones-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.
"... 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."
The modern version rubs salt in the wound by producing an awful mixture of Deus ex Machina, I Got Better, and Bowdlerisation. Not only does she suffer nothing for her impressive stupidity, but the original version's moral of "don't trust strangers" is completely dropped in favor of a happy ending.
T'Lana from the Star Trek pocket books is 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.
Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. Ma Su. Good God, Ma Su. During the Shu Kingdom's expedition against the Wei Kingdom, Ma Su was put in charge of defending Jie Ting, a very important location for the Shu forces. The location is near a mountain so Ma Su thought it would be a good idea to camp at the top of the mountain. Normally this would be a good idea, EXCEPT in this case, if they camped at the mountain and Wei surrounds them, their water supply at the bottom of the mountain would be cut off. Pretty much everybody except Ma Su sees this and he even ignores their warnings and proceeds to camp at the mountain. Guess what happened.
Of course, the implication was that Gandalf successfully got them so busy arguing that they simply lost track of the time and didn't notice it was getting to dawn. Of course, one would assume that with such a weakness, the trolls would have the sense to take better care, but yeah...
Word Of God says that most trolls are extremely low in intelligence and the mere fact that these three could speak basic English meant they were the troll equivalents of astrophysicists.
Pippin in The Lord of the Rings. Even if you don't count the first time ("Ooh, we're in a dark scary place that Gandalf wants us to move through quickly, but there's a big hole in the ground and I wanna see how deep it is... let's drop a stone!"), there's still this lovely number. "I have to look at it! I'll take it from the wizard when he's sleeping! But, hey! This time he doesn't have a perfectly good reason for not letting me see the shiny rock that Saruman used to communicate with Sauron! Even though he's older than the world and I already killed him once."
It's pretty explicit that the palantirs are addictive for people who aren't very strong-willed, at least if the person they've got on speed-dial is Sauron.
And wasn't throwing the rock down the deep hole an accident?
In the movie, they simply decided to tone down his too-dumb-to-live factor a bit and make it an accident. It was wholly on purpose in the book.
Bella Swan of Twilight. 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.
A dedicated Sporker put it best while describing the cliff-diving incident in New Moon:
"She's not just Tempting Fate. She's rolling around on fate's bed. Naked. With one of her girlfriends. Pouring baby oil on each other. Begging fate to join in on the fun. Um, if you'll excuse me, I need to, uh . . . take five."
"I have never met anyone so prone to life threatening idiocy."
Bree and Diego from The Short, Second Life of Bree Tanner would surely count as well. They both know that they're being kept in a basement by a Riley, who (A) has been kidnapping other teenagers to make into vampires and (B) clearly doesn't care if they kill each other. Later on, they discover that the story they had been fed about how sunlight burns them up was a lie. They also learn that they were all being used as canon fodder and Bree remembers that the night she had been turned into a vampire, she had been kidnapped and tricked into it. They also find out that Riley is discussing plans with Victoria. So of course they come to the conclusion that Riley is completely innocent and will surely help them if they tell him everything they know, so Diego decides to meet him alone, to tell Riley that he knows all of these secrets, without telling anyone except for Bree where he is going. Needless to say, Diego does not return. Bree qualifies as this trope because after all of that, she doesn't realize that Diego is dead until Riley has run off and left her and the other vampires to be killed by the Cullens. What a brilliant pair!
The unnamed SMERSH agent who executes Le Chiffre and his crew at the end of Casino Royale. This has the interesting side effect of saving Bond's life. Despite knowing that Bond is a resourceful, and therefore dangerous, foreign service agent, he declines to kill him, basically giving the reason that his superior did not file the paperwork that would give the order for him to kill any opposing spies that he happened to encounter over the course of his mission. He also acknowledges that, under ordinary circumstances, he'd be under orders to kill Bond. But, that order wasn't specifically given, so he's just going to carve a brand onto Bond's body (to help them identify Bond in the future, a randomly dickish move that serves no purpose other than to make Bond hate SMERSH just a little bit more) and leave him be. Come on!
Pavel Young from the Honor Harrington series is a villainous example. His pinnacle of stupidity may have to be raping his own chief of security which unsurprisingly happens shortly before his death.
Raping his own chief of security by force would be bad enough — and in character, too. But no, Pavel's not quite that smart. No. He rapes her by blackmail and then has her set up the murder of Honor's lover. So, when she quietly makes sure the information on where to find the killer, who can in turn tell Honor who hired him, it really comes as no surprise to those of us who aren't Too Dumb to Live.
From what we find out later, if he'd just asked nicely and not used blackmail at all then she'd probably have consented to everything he blackmailed her into, without betraying him.
In addition, when planning to rape Harrington herself, he failed to put two and two together in that: 1) He realised that she used the gym alone in the dead of night, and 2) She was on the Saganami Island unarmed combat team. Add to that that she's from a heavy-gravity planet and her family had been genetically modified to cope with that, he was lucky to get away with just broken bones.
Pretty much any flag officer in the Solarian League Navy. Seriously. The only one shown yet who's even remotely competent is planning to defect from the League as soon as possible. The rest are self-serving, belligerent assholes who all ignore the many reports of their enemy's vastly superior technology. And then get blown to chunky salsa for their pains.
Governor Aubert of David Weber's In Fury Born is a subversion. When we first meet him, he's ignoring the warnings of the elite Marines stationed on Gyangtse, instead listening to the advice of his even stupider advisor, Salgado, which results in a major uprising by separatist forces. However, when said uprising occurs, Aubert realizes his stupidity, fires his advisor, and aids the Marines in resolving the conflict.
In Hell's Gate, we have (Commander of) Fifty (roughly equivalent to a lieutenant, I believe) Shevan Garlath, whose stupidity promptly leads to the first Arcanan/Sharonan bloodbath. He died in said bloodbath, fittingly enough.
In the Dale Brown novel Edge of Battle, Zakharov criticises the prison-breaking illegal immigrants as this, saying that if they had ran for the border rather than trying to take on a Motion Capture Mecha they would still be alive.
In the Gaunts Ghosts novel His Last Command, Gaunt has a group of enemies under his guns when one of them reaches for a gun. Gaunt calls him an idiot and shoots him.
Judge and Jury, by James Patterson and Andrew Gross, is about the trial of a mob leader who is a powerful sociopath. The judge lets him hear the jury's names during selection. Even after he gets someone to break into her alarmed house, leave the evening paper under her pillow, and all but openly threatens her, she does nothing. By the end of the day, all but one of the jurors is dead to a bomb. The retrial is locked down like Fort Knox.
In the last book of the Inheritance Cycle, King Orrin takes this Up to Eleven with his plan to send an envoy to Galbatorix, try to negotiate a peace agreement, and tell him the Varden's position. Because to do otherwise would be discourteous.
Wolfbreed gives us Darien, a man who must have been born under a stupid sign. First off, he is a werewolf and grew up in a town made up entirely of werewolves. His parents and everybody in the town tell him not to let anyone outside the village know he is a werewolf or run around in wolf form in broad daylight because there is a Church MilitantBadass Army out there that has pledged to destroy werewolves. Guess what Darien does, and then after the predictable results, refuses to accept blame for his actions and projects his self-loathing onto humanity. So he starts killing innocent people to lure a unit of said army into his trap. That's right, he picks a fight with a group of about forty elite soldiers specifically trained and armed to kill his kind and have plenty of experience doing so and then Darien has the gall to act surprised when they nearly kill him. Then he tries to convince a female werewolf, who has been raised by ordinary humans, that he lusts after that Humans Are Bastards and he does so by framing her for murder! And he does so in such a way that the girl, the soldiers and just about every other major character knows he is really responsible in about two minutes after the killing takes place!
For all of the times that R.A. Salvatore has made drow look vastly superior to humans, the drow invaders do something immensely stupid in Siege Of Darkness. The drow forces are split into two groups: one attacking Mithral Hall from underground, and the other attacking from the surface. During the planning stages, everybody seemingly forgot that drow eyes cannot tolerate sunlight unless they've become used to it. Or perhaps none of them thought that the battle would last the entire night and that they would still be fighting the good guys when the sun came up. In any case, when the dawn comes, the drow on the surface are blinded and pretty well screwed.
The drow expected the sun to come up and even trained looking at light to be prepared for it. They just greatly overestimated their tolerance for sunlight, as it was the first time they actually saw it.
You don't need to know the lore behind Lemarchand's Configurations to realize that a small, ornate box sitting in the middle of a blast zone of blood, flesh and entrails is a bad sign. So what does one of the protagonists of the short story A Little Piece of Hell do? March right across the carnage to the box and decide he wants to figure out how to open it.
The father in the 1998 Newbery Medal winner Out Of The Dust instigates the main plot of the book by leaving a pail of kerosene by the stove. A pile of highly combustible fuel that has a flashpoint of roughly 100-150 degrees Fahrenheit and that gives off toxic fumes. Not to mention that, since it's oil, it's hard to extinguish with water. Really greatidea to have a bucket of this stuff around a food preparation area.
Agatha Christie stories. You can pretty much guarantee that one of the victims saw who did it and decided it would be a smart move to blackmail the serial killer and sneak off to meet them in a lonely spot to collect the first payment.
In the third Mercy Thompson novel, several kids beat up Jesse Hauptmann precisely because her father is a werewolf. If Jesse hadn't refused to tell her father their names, he would have killed them.
Tang Sanzang of Journey to the West definitely qualifies. Despite having three demonic bodyguards constantly warning him about the evil nature of the strangers that they encounter he constantly disregards their advice because he can't see the forest through the trees. Even after being captured and nearly cooked alive multiple times Sanzang still doesn't understand that beauty doesn't equal good.
Vee and Nora both of Hush, Hush. Vee finds out that a mysterious stalker is frightening Nora so her brilliant plan is not to talk to an employee at the store they're in for help, but to disguise herself as Nora, lead the stalker off into a graveyard, have Nora follow after, and between them confront a potentially armed and dangerous person. This, unsurprisingly, leads to Vee being concussed and having her arm broken. And immediately after she gets out of the hospital, she decides that they ought to go poking around and spy on the guy who they think attacked her to begin with. Nora gets this because she is point-blank told by Patch that he has planned to murder her and knows that he can influence her thoughts and feelings and still thinks it's a good idea to date him!!!
In Alastair ReynoldsRevelation Space novels Whichever moron invented the Greenfly - self replicating robots whose only directive is: Modify all matter in the Universe into the form most efficient for the growth of plants. The latter books and stories show they succeed in this to the extent possible in the lifetime of the universe. Given that FTL flight is not possible in this universe, there's no conceivable use for the Greenfly on a solar system wide level (there are too few near-FTL ships to make importing food economic). It is conceivable that they would be of use in inhabited systems where they could convert spare asteroids etc. So why build them to have such blind ambition? Hell, why give them the ability to think at all given the problems humanity had with the Inhibitors?
A tangential example in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." When the rebelling lunar colony starts throwing 100 ton rocks from orbit, they explicitly target highly visible but mostly unoccupied places, since this is an intimidation tactic: they want the Earthlings to know that they could flatten cities if they wanted to, but not to have to actually kill millions. Even so, in the first round of strikes, thousands of people (mostly in North America) decide that this is so little of a threat they pack picnics and go to the target sites to watch... even though these impacts had the power of a small nuclear bomb. The rubberneckers got predictably dead.
Michael from the Knight And Rogue Series makes a habit of seeking out killers, and will knowingly walk into traps that are pretty much always set to get him, a man with no legal rights, framed for a hanging crime. Even if this is to save lives or try and at least see who's setting you up, when you're the sort of protagonist who usually gets at least two good beating a book and have people wanting you executed just for getting into a street fight, this is a very bad idea.
Harry Dresden gets invited to a vampire ball. As it's an obvious trap, and there will be dozens of homicidal vampires there, Susan isn't allowed to come. More so, she is specifically warned and explained to, that as a Muggle, she shouldn't be going. Makes sense right? Apparently not to Susan. She sneaks in to the party for a scoop, violating the peace pact that the vampires had, meaning either she, or one of the other main characters have to be sacrificed. She gets herself turned into a vamp. Chalk it up to a moment of holding the Idiot Ball.
In Death: Some of the murder victims completely qualify for this trope. Tiara Kent from Eternity In Death stands out the most, because she had a boyfriend who had her convinced that he was a vampire and he could make her into one. She shut off the security system like he asked her to, and never considered that he needed to keep his face from being seen on the cameras. She drank a concoction like he asked her to, and never considered that it might contain rape drugs and other lovely ingredients in it. She has sex with him, and he drains her blood, resulting in her death. She didn't change into a vampire, by the way. Eve and Peabody even discuss the victim's stupidity, and Peabody explains that the victim was a rich, spoiled girl who was not known for her brains.
In a case where Too Dumb to Live is apparently contagious, Robert Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos story "Fane of the Black Pharaoh" concerns an archeologist who's lured to a hidden Egyptian tomb that has prophetic depictions of the future on its walls. He walks past centuries of illustrated history, never suspecting his death-cultist guide is going to murder him, despite seeing one picture after another in which previous foreign visitors have been led there by death-cult members and killed. Not only does he stride obliviously to his own death, blind to the implications of his predecessors' fates, but apparently is only the latest idiot to do so, among centuries of similar idiots!
The guys who broke the cardinal safety rule when working with a woodchipper (i.e., "Don't stick it in the machine unless you want it to come out the other end ground into bits").
The two frog lickers who licked a poison dart frog.
A biker who tried to drink gasoline from his motorcycle's gas tank for a buzz and puked on his campfire.
The braintrust who tried to rob a jewelry store, but went in the wrong door...the door to a gun shop.
The two college kids who locked themselves in a helium filled balloon. With absolutely no oxygen. Predictably, they suffocated.
One paint huffer who covered himself with highly flammable industrial grade solvent to get high from the stronger fumes. When they got rid of his body heat, he asked for a lighter to get warm. Do the math: A man covered in highly flammable solvent + flame. What does that equal?
The two stoners who ran out of pot and tried smoking anything they could get their hands on. What did they get their hands on? Poison sumac.
A guy tries to impress a girl by serving live escargot. Except the snails came from his garden. And were covered in BRAIN-EATING PARASITES. Also contains a surprise twist: on their deathbed, we find out he's gay.
The guy who pissed on an electric fence.
Though MythBusters' experiments indicate that this story is bogus. When they first tested it on the electrified "third rail" of a train track, they found that urine streams tend to be too broken for an electric current to pass through. A second experiment, on an actual electrified fence (at close range, to ensure a laminar flow), gave Adam a minor shock, but it was only a fraction of the ampage that he would have received by, say, touching said fence, and even that would not have been lethal.
Two Ozzy Osbourne fans heard a story about how Ozzy snorted ants to prove how "hardcore" he was; they decided to do the same because they wanted to be "hardcore" like their idol. Pretty damn sure that Ozzy was smart enough to not use fire ants.
A chef working at a black market restaurant which served endangered animals tried to recapture a King Cobra, by hand. While getting his face near the giant poisonous snake.
Kim Bauer in 24 is a character who seems to be a deliberate attempt by the writers to create a character so frustratingly dumb that it becomes almost impossible to enjoy the rest of the show. There's a reason she was once the Trope Namer for Damsel Scrappy.
In Season 1, she gets kidnapped by boys she doesn't know, but trusts enough to make-out with. She has various chances to escape, tries, and always fails until she is saved.
In Season 2, Kim Bauer gets into a series of avoidable, ridiculous scenarios.
In every situation, (with a merciful exception in a later episode) Kim could avoid the entire ordeal by stating the truth plainly, instead of getting defensive or just standing there for an awkward amount of time with a dumb look on her face. She get's accused of kidnapping, child abuse, and murder because of this.
She agrees to go with a strange man to the isolated cabin where he lives alone.
Practically everyone in Blackadder who isn't Eddie. One of Baldrick's somewhat less than brilliant "cunning plans" to escape a life-threatening situation involves waiting until they've all had their heads cut off before they spring into action. George and Baldrick whilst crawling across No-Man's Land randomly stand up just as a flare is going off. The first George is so stupid that he can't work out how to put a pair of trousers on — and tries putting them over his head. Percy fails to recognise Baldrick in drag and hits on him, despite Baldrick having his normal rich odour ("What an original perfume!") and normal appearance — including a beard.
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 Larry gleefully predicts that if there aren't as many mysterious deaths on the football team this year, they're 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. Faith mistakes him for a vampire and stakes him, only realizing she's killed a human when he bleeds instead of puffing into dust.
And then there's Dawn who is way too eager to get out of the house at nighttime either alone or with strangers, despite knowing perfectly well what lurks outside. For her defense, she's a teenager, a species not known for its rationality. There may also beother reasons.
Principal Snyder nearly succeeds in this nomination when he attempts to leave a safe room besieged by vampires and then succeeds with flying colours when he attempts to explain a 20-feet long serpentine demon that its behavior is "unacceptable".
Spike does a lot of crazy things because he's a little psychologically unbalanced and (from series four onwards) vaguely suicidal, but he gets special props here for constantly setting himself on fire by going out in daylight. He also gets bored and pulls a Leeroy Jenkins on his own scheme ("I had a plan. A good plan. But then I got bored") and he dated Harmony and invites her along on his schemes, despite how she messes up every one. Harmony holds the Idiot Ball everytime the two work together, but is quite effective whenever she . Also, it's revealed in Angel that he was once captured by the Secret Service because they invited him to a free virgin blood party. He tells Angel never to go to one of those parties later because "it's probably a trap". When he tries to stake himself, he goes about it in such a stupid fashion that it obviously won't work, so he might also be Too Stupid To Die. At other times, he's pretty perceptive and comes up with decent schemes, so his shenanigans might have something to do with boredom and his suicidal tendencies rather than terminal idiocy. Harmony should get special mention, too, for trying to kill Buffy by using nothing but three vampire mooks, long after much larger groups of vampires had ceased to be a serious threat.
And that's not counting the countless vampires who decide they'll be the ones to kill the Slayer.
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.
Vyvyan: * hits bomb* Why won't it go off, Mike?
Luckily for them, they never permanently die. The permanence of their deaths in the series finale is debatable, though.
Sam's mom on iCarly (she was driving a car after having laser eye surgery and crashed through a school wall).
Honestly, its surprising that he survived to the end of the series. He should have died 10 times over. He goes STRAIGHT into Scrappy territory due to his stupidity.
Agent Mulder, several times during the run of The X-Files. It's a miracle he only died twice in the nine years the show was on the air.
In possibly the worst example, he learns that there are shapeshifters who are immune to gunshots and other conventional attacks and whose blood releases a toxic gas when exposed to air. Later in the same two-parter, he handcuffs himself to a suspect, who then changes to look like someone else. Mulder's response? He shoots him!
Also, anyone who tries to separate Mulder and Scully to get them to do something. Seriously, it happens at least once a season. Since "someone is always watching", shouldn't they know that it doesn't work? Do they all have a death wish?! You would think after a few times of it just inciting bloodshed rather than cooperation, they'd find another tactic.
Shane Vendrell from The Shield. He 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 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.
In the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 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.
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.
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.
And let's not forget that Peter has the ability to read minds, so he could verify the claims of anyone in a couple of seconds.
The runner-up is everyone's reactions to Sylar. The guy is/was provably evil. He should be dead by now. They've had more chances to off that sadistic bastard than they've had hot dinners. And yet everyone lets him live or keeps him alive. Surely- surely- they could forego vivisection in favor of dissection? Just once?
Joseph Sullivan. when confronted by his unbalanced and highly-dangerous Earthbending brother Samuel, he not only admits to lying to Samuel all his life by keeping him in the dark about the potential of his power and betraying him by calling in a government official to bring Samuel in, he does this IN THE MIDDLE OF A DIRT FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, far, far away from anybody else, and without having alerted anyone to where they were going. Naturally, Samuel kills him and blames the government offical.
Hiro and Ando. Cheating at Poker in Las Vegas by switching your cards with those of your opponent at the last possible moment? How on earth is that not a plan to end up in a shallow grave somewhere in the desert?
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 10-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 MacGyver 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.
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...
Veronica Donovan spends the first season of Prison Break being too dumb to live, culminating in walking alone straight into the house where the Vice President's secretly alive brother is being held captive and ignoring him when he warns her not to let the door close. This doesn't end well.
Susan Mayer 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 (let alone thirty... something). Oh, the characters of the series also ask 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. Not to mention actually falling for one of the Visitors' sweet talk — very dumb, even if it did lead to a useful Half-Human Hybrid.
In the series that followed the mini-series, Robin passed this trait on to her daughter, Elizabeth.
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.
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 is actually a big bluff, as the Asgard are too tied up fighting the Replicators to enforce it — which ended any hope of a direct assault against Earth, and gave Earth time to start building better weapons, discover the Ancients' base in Antarctica, and build actual starships. Dumbasses for sure.
SG-1 and the Stargate program get passed the Idiot Ball a fair bit too. Perfect example is with Big Bad Adria — they had an episode where she had lost her powers and they were standing at the top of really tall cliff. So what does Daniel do? He lectures her and then does exactly what she wants. One episode they had her and Ba'al in the same body. Shoot them? Nah! We'll try and take over Adria's body too until she gains back her powers and... well Hilarity does not Ensue. Ba'al's request that SG-1 find all his clones and gather them in the same room is another example of Too Dumb to Live — big surprise, Ba'al was only out to help himself like the last million times.
And let's not forget the time that a beautiful, strangely-dressed woman turned up at the entrance to the secret base, talking weird. Despite all obvious evidence shrieking at them, they failed to notice she was a Go'auld and arranged for the top brass of the base to meet with her alone, then were surprised when she drugged them into doing her bidding.
The entire cast of Samoa, with the exceptions of Russell Hantz, Brett, Natalie, Marisa, and Betsy. They never learned to keep an eye on the idol-hunting Russell, repeatedly changed their votes, didn't think that maybe the minority tribe might actually have a hidden immunity idol in their grasp, or that they're actually a tight knit alliance. (Hm, we have a 8-4 majority...let's ignore them and take out our own, first!) Perhaps most egregiously, members of the Galu tribe were practically shown a map to the Hidden Immunity Idol...and they didn't look for it. Really? Russell had just played two hidden immunity idols...yes, let's just stand there! Marisa and Betsy were voted out because they weren'tToo Dumb to Live (Russell Hantz said that he went after them first because he knew those two could beat him), Natalie realized what was going on and feigned stupidity, and Brett merely kept his mouth shut while everyone else got themselves voted out.
James had two hidden Immunity Idols. At that point in the game, he had a free pass to the final five (The rules were changed after the Idol was a Game Breaker in Cook Islands). What does he do? Not play the idol.
Yes, J.T - give the idol to Russell Hantz. Maybe he's on the wrong side of an Amazon Brigade. Whoops!
Let's see, Erik is on the wrong side of an all female alliance. What does he do? Give up the immunity to one of them. Great move.
Phillip manages to actually become too honest and flat out spilled everything going on at the first tribal council. It's amazing he's still around!
Of note, he claims to just be Obfuscating Stupidity. Considering he's got a plan to make it into the finals. And it's working. As it hasn't killed him yet, and moreover may have actually helped him, this is more of a What an Idiot moment.
And in Redemption Island, Russell Hantz comes back for the third time. He doesn't have the advantage of being a newcomer/not having any of the other players view Samoa like he did the previous times. So now everybody knows his game and has finally learned to keep an eye on him and watch out for his harem. Russell then tells them he's playing the game differently...only to assemble his usual harem and hunt for the idol without even making sure he wasn't in plain sight or being trailed by people who want his ass gone. Then he tried to ask someone to flip and vote out someone who is physically strong while making them become a third wheel in the alliance. (Oh yes, you're going to take her to the finals? When you already have two people with you, there can only be three in the finals? No Shambo here!) Amazing - one of the most Manipulative Bastard types in the game who is often considered the best fitting in this category?
And one of his girls, Stephanie, intentionally proceeded to put a huge target on her back. She's already in the minority because everyone else wants Russell Hantz gone, knowing how good he is at the game (and that the producers will forget about everyone else.) So what do you do? Say that everyone else will backstab each other and that Russell wouldn't...Yeah, Steph? It's best not say that Russell Hantz, who wantonly bullied and betrayed his way through two seasons in a row is not going to backstab anyone.
Stargate Atlantis has a great example in the episode "Whispers". Carson and an alien are trapped in a room, being hunted by a group of blind creatures with incredible hearing. It has been established multiple times that these creatures hunt by sound. The other guy starts yelling at Carson, refusing to quiet down despite Carson reminding him (once again) of this fact, and is abruptly eaten, to the relief of the audience. If they had been on Earth, then this guy would have surely been nominated for a Darwin Award.
That's not all that guy did. Earlier in the episode he had intentionally released genetic experiments that came from a lab that was also the origin of an insane creature that had massacred his people and murdered his wife. Why? He thought his wife might be one of them. Moron.
Chloe Armstrong seems to be taking up this mantle in Stargate Universe. Frankly, if you hear a noise, investigate it, see the ceiling above you (mind you, this is on a spaceship) being cut through with a laser, and don't even have the common sense to run, you deserve what happens next. Abducted by aliens, in case you were wondering.
Everything Virginia's father does in The 10th Kingdom makes him Too Dumb to Live. Starting with the idiotic use of wishes. This is, however, part of the point of his character. There's a reason the Gypsy fortuneteller draws The Fool for him.
Also the Buffoon and the Village Idiot.
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 Reese stands behind him, about to pop a balloon.
While one of the brothers cranks the pedal of an overturned bicycle, Dewey takes a bite out of the spinning wheel.
All of these are from one episode in a montage showing why the brothers are well known to the hospital emergency ward staff.
Several of the marks in Leverage, after the team gets through with them. 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!
Taking naked pictures of yourself on your phone when your father is the King and has found out and gone into a murderous rage over pettier shit before, while noting this fact jokingly, is by far the dumbest thing she's ever done.
In one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the guys spoof a road safety movie from the 1950s. At the end, the protagonist's brother dies because he and his girlfriend are too distracted looking over his shoulder and waving to notice the oncoming train. You can imagine the jokes made at his expense.
Tom Servo: The cop never said anything about doing intensely stupid things!
In a tragic example, the entire Markab race which was wiped out by a plague in episode 18 of Season 2 of Babylon 5. Instead of going through their own quarantine procedures, they routinely sent out people carrying the plague to different planets, eventually infecting all of their known colonies. Know the reason? For the dark age belief that the disease only targets the 'immoral' and the immoral people are getting divine retribution. Many of the first outbreaks were covered up due to this dark age belief. Were humans the only race in this show to go through an Age of Enlightenment and an Age of Reason? Even Doctor Franklin Lamp Shades this through the episode. At the end, all 5000 Merkats on the station were dead, Two Billion on their homeworld were dead, and millions more throughout their colonies were dead. Too. Dumb. To. Live.
The new Discovery reality show The Colony saw an engineer say she would rather have toilet paper than electricity. Just proof that having an advanced degree doesn't make you smart.
In The Sopranos, after Vito gets brutally murdered by Phil Leotardo for being gay, one of Phil's men, Fat Dom goes to visit Silvio and Carlo, who were Vito's crew members, to apparently show sympathy for the death... only to start making crude jokes that imply they were involved in gay sex with him. Guess what happens.
The Big Bang Theory has a variation called Too Socially Inept To Live. Many of the things Sheldon says and does would, in the real world, cause one to be arrested, hospitalized, possibly even killed. One episode even reveals he doesn't even cash his paycheques because nothing available to buy in the present interests him. Apparently he's never heard of stale dated cheques, inflation or compound interest.
And apparently the university's payroll department has never heard of direct deposit, or even modern accounting practices. Somewhere an auditor is having a field day...
Sheldon's hardly the only offender - in the real world, Howard would have been done for sexual harassment half a dozen times by now, and there'd be injunctions blocking him from about half of Pasadena.
Howard has been sued for sexual harassment a lot more times than six.
One Girl of the Week in Star Trek TOS had a guy obviously in love with her who was Too Dumb to Live. Given that said girl had to spend four years on Vulcan to retain her sanity, I'm sure trying to make her feel strong emotions is a wonderful idea! Oh, and what better way to get a girl to like you than by ruining her career by murdering the ambassador she's accompanying? The ambassador is an eldritch abomination the mere sight of which can make humans go mad. Just walk up, look it straight in the whatever-seeing-organs-it-possesses, and kill it. What could possibly go wrong?
Almost every Red Shirt on Star Trek TOS seems Too Dumb to Live in a way. (Except in the cases where their deaths were the direct result of the orders or actions of a superior officer.)
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Red Squad ends up on a Defiant-class ship behind enemy lines during a training mission, and the actual officers are promptly killed, leaving the cadets in command. The ranking cadet, naturally, decides they should just run the ship themselves, despite having ample opportunities to get home. While this in itself is dumb, he later decides to pull a David Vs Goliath against a new type of Dominion battleship. Never mind that even getting close enough to potentially succeed was a one-way trip, he doesn't even seem ready to give up after the plan fails. Predictably, they all die.
Even worse, the decision to engage the Dominon battleship goes directly against the mission's standing orders, which were to gather intelligence on the new design and return with them, rather than to confront the enemy. Jake Sisko deserves stupidity points for not using this argument when attempting to talk Acting Captain Redshirt out of the self-assigned suicide mission.
Ensign Nog (and the Red Squad "CO") gets even more Too Dumb to Live bonus points for not recognizing that an Ensign outranks a Cadet (Acting Commander) when the officer by whose authority the cadet has been acting is deceased, or otherwise removed from the chain of command.
From Star Trek: Voyager, Seven of Nine's parents. A pair of scientists who plan to study the Borg by sneaking onto Borg Cubes. This could be considered TDTL all on it's own, but they also bring their young daughter along with them on their expedition.
The Doctor actually Lamp Shades this by expressing his digust over their blatant disregard for their daughter's well being by bringing her along on such a dangerously idiotic quest.
Also, the Borg themselves could arguably be considered Too Dumb to Live. Namely because of their tendency to ignore intruders on their star ships until the intruders go out of their way to present an obvious threat (such as by shooting a drone). Of course, this makes it absurdly easy for Star Fleet officers to do stuff like wander right into the very heart of Borg ships, plant a bunch of high explosives, steal valuable Borg technology, and beam safely out.
And therefore, any Star Trek captain who fights Borg ship-to-ship (the Borg have repeatedly been demonstrated as invincible that way) instead of just asking nicely if they might beam over, and then setting a bomb and then beaming out.
When the victims in the Criminal Minds episode "Roadkill" decided to run straight down a highway to get away from a truck trying to run them over, they were Too Dumb to Live.
The show Time Commanders: horse archers go in front! Do something about their horse-archers! NO, DON'T CHARGE THEM WITH HEAVY CAV!
Rebecca: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute you guys. Let's not jump to any wild conclusions here. Let's just look at the facts. Now, all we really know is that Robin is using my secret password to break into my corporation's confidential files, and from the date on these, well it looks like he's been doing it since, well since the day after we first slept together. So all I think we can conclude by this is... I AM TOO STUPID TO LIVE! Sam: Hey now Rebecca. It's not like he ever tried to screw us over, no wait, he did that to me once. Well, it's not like he ever cheated on you, no, he did do that. Hey, maybe this is the last scummy thing he'll ever do. Rebecca:(hopefully) Do you think so? Norm: You're right, Rebecca, you are too stupid to live!
The Winchesters in Supernatural. The family members die so often for each other, that Dean (DEAN!!!) is the first one to notice it and lampshade it. Even if it's a deconstructed aesop in-universe, they DO tend to be stronger alone.
Several of the victims of the week aren't much better - a lot of their deaths can be considered Darwinism taking its course.
Happens with disturbing frequency in the 3rd season of Chuck. Even if the CIA Agent about whom you've BEEN BRIEFED has convinced you that he's harmless, he's still a CIA Agent... perhaps you shouldn't uncuff him before you kill him?
Animals in the virtual fights in Animal Face Off tend to act extremely dumb simply for the fight to turn out a certain way. Biggest example is with the hippo vs. bull shark episode. The bull shark bites the hippo, but fails to inflict any major damage (they tested a model shark mouth molded off a real one, and it couldn't open wide enough to bite a kayak, that's where it not being able to damage the hippo came from). The shark's response is too keep trying, and it achieves no success. The hippo, being surprisingly inactive at first, has enough and goes under to face the shark, which stupidly rushes right in the hippo's mouth and gets its skull crushed.
In Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, there's an episode when a young girl's mom is captured by monsters. When the little girl ask another woman's help, the older woman says that there's no such things as monsters. This was midway through the season, after dozens of monsters had attacked the city.
Not to mention that just a few years ago, Earth was temporarily taken over by monsters.
And this was the team-up episode, confirming that, yes, the last six seasons of monsters attacks did happen.
In the final episode of Power Rangers RPMVenjix, After Gem and Gemma destroy the Control Tower's supports it takes about 45 seconds for it to fall from the roof of the dome to the ground, he just stands directly under the tower preparing for his demise when all he needed to do was survive it was to simply move out of the way, It's rather unbelievable that this was the being that destroyed the Earth yet he can't even see danger coming from a mile away.
Of course, this ends up being subverted in the end as Dr. K shuts the briefcase containing the Ranger Series morphers . . . with a familiar red glow emitting from Ranger Series Red's morpher, and with the Venjix leitmotif playing softly in the background.
A particularly stupid example in Being Human: Mitchell's ex-girlfriend sends him a DVD of what is essentially vampire porn (a recording of a man having sex with and then being murdered by a female vampire) and, in a moment of weakness, he decides to actually keep it for God-knows-what reason. The moment when he gets really stupid though is when he opts to hide the DVD in the box for a Laurel and Hardy movie. And then tells a young boy he's befriending to go ahead and borrow any Laurel and Hardy movie he wants. Cue the Pćdo Hunt. George is rightly angry at this all, asking Mitchel "What else have you got up there, some German scat inside Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?"
Doctor Who: The Daleks have an unfortunate habit of becoming this, particularly when their "VISION IS IMPAIRED!!!". Naturally, as they are unable to see, they will begin shooting wildly, in one case causing the Dalek to destroy itself when in a hall of mirrors in The Five Doctors, and making for very annoying gameplay in the 2010 Adventure Game, City of the Daleks. Apparently their vision isn't the only thing that is impaired when they are damaged...-
Every so often, the Doctor's pacifism sends him into this territory. While his desire to avoid death is understandable, any time he tries to save long-time enemies such as the Daleks, Sontarans and Cyberman just make people want to slap him. He himself admits that they are bred to do nothing but hate and kill, yet he keeps walking up to them and yelling "Let me save you!", often while they're pointing a gun, laser, etc. at his head, usually risking himself, his companion, and the world in the process.
Worse still, if you decide that maybe you don't want to do it this way, the Tenth Doctor will see fit to punish you.
Once, when the Doctor was carrying out the typical "go towards something you should probably be going away from" version, River Song tells one of her crew to go with him and "pull him out when he's too stupid to live."
Elsewhere in the Whoniverse, in The Sarah Jane Adventures, Sarah Jane has a habit of marching into villains' offices, etc. and telling them she knows what they're up to. Somehow this never goes well, though she always gets away in the end.
The American Midwest and Canada can be a boring place, with huge stretches of open land where one can go miles without seeing anybody. There's little to do, and winters can be brutal. There is, however, an advantage, in that the residents don't have to worry about being eaten by tigers or bitten by vipers. Fatal Attractions is a documentary show about people who have solved that "problem", who build their own private zoos and then get eaten by their own lions.
Kate from Robin Hood. She abandons the outlaws in order to try and rescue her brother on her own. She tries to cut a deal with Guy of Gisborne. She blunders into fights without a weapon. She mouths-off at a tax collector. She refuses to follow Robin's (perfectly reasonable) orders. When an entire room full of outlaws, nobles, and castle guards are searching for Prince John's crown, she grabs it and begins waving it above her head, yelling: "I've got it! I've got it!" She interrupts a peaceful protest in order to scream abuse at the soldiers and dare them to kill her. She joins the outlaws despite having no useful skills whatsoever, and doesn't show much interest in adquiring such skills either. (Like learning self-defense, or at least some medicine.) She wears an ankle-length dress in a forest. She's the only female character to survive the show! Gah!!
Eddard Stark from Game of Thrones has become emblematic of this. What do you do when you find out the queen's been shtupping her twin brother? Tell her, of course! Littlefinger tells you not to trust him? Trust him completely! No wonder his head ended up on a pike.
Pretty Little Liars basically every decision they make dealing with A. Let's not tell the police we're being stalked. Oh, look we have a video that could be evidence in a murder case, let's not make copies when we know A's been breaking into our homes and stealing our stuff.
Cirilo in Carrusel had neither book smarts nor common sense. He did poorly in school and did not always make the best decisions in his daily life.
Eric in the slasher-themed episode of Boy Meets World, where it is Played for Laughs. He agrees to stand out in the hallway by himself when he knows there is a killer running around the school. However, this is not what actually kills him.
In the pilot of Lost, some of the survivors find the cockpit of the crashed plane complete with pilot, who is still alive. Suddenly, they hear something that is obviously a very, very large animal crashing around outside, roaring and generally acting seriously pissed off. So what does the pilot do? He sticks his head and upper body out through the broken cockpit window to see what it is. Seriously, is anyone REALLY surprised when he gets dragged out through the cockpit window to his death?
How did Jason Stackhouse of True Blood manage to keep himself alive? It's almost offensive, especially since never has to answer for the terrible things he does. One example: In series one, just before helping his sociopathic girlfriend Amy abduct and murder a vampire ( a pretty stupid decision itself, considering that the whole thing could be fairly easily traced to him) , he wonders into a vampire bar and asks for the drug V ( vampire blood), knowing that vampires kill anybody who uses, then completely botches up any attempt his girlfriend makes to cover his tracks.
Sookie and Bill fit here too. Sookie is just a little over eager to associate with people who want to eat her, although that might just be a Death Seeker thing. At the end of series one, when Sookie has been captured by the serial killer (Arlene's boyfriend Rene)) , he pulls himself out of the ground in broad daylight to go rescue her. He's a vampire- what exactly does he think that scenario is going to end?
Every character on Married... with Children has Too Dumb to Live moments, but Ted deserves special mention, as he can hardly go through an episode without doing something that would get him killed in real life.
In S3 of The Vampire Diaries, vampire Caroline has been imprisoned in a dark cell and manacled to a chair by her estranged father. And if that wasn't enough, a debilitating vervain gas has been pumped into the cell to further weaken her and she's been starved of blood. Dad asks how she is able to walk in sunlight without harm. Caroline...tells him. Honestly, is anyone surprised by what happens next? he opens a metal plate covering a window and begins torturing her with sunlight.
In the series finale epilogue of Caprica, Clarice Willow. She may have genuinely believed that it was God's will to convert the "differently sentient" (Cylon robots) to monotheism, but when she outright encourages a robot rebellion and declares that there will be "a day of reckoning" for humanity during her prophecy can be described as misguided at best and suicidal at worst. Or she just forgot what species she belonged to.
Timmy in Lassie. While he never actually feel down a well, he got himself into a LOT of situations (many of which were much worse than falling down a well) to the point where you wonder why he's allowed to go even a few minutes without adult supervision.
Music
That girl with a white flag in the last verse of "Hero of War" by Rise Against. So, you're in the middle of a war, and a soldier carrying a BFG is asking you to stop. What do you do? Why, keep walking! Of course she got shot, white flag or no white flag.
I've been stranded in the combat zone I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone Even rode my motorcycle in the rain And you told me not to drive But I made it home alive So you said that only proves that I'm insane!
That fateful night The car was stalled Upon the railroad tracks I pulled you out And we were safe But you went running back.
And what was so damn important that she was willing to throw herself back into the path of an oncoming train?
They said they found my high school ring Clutched in your fingers tight...
Reinhard Mey (German songwriter and singer) had a song Die Legende vom Pfeifer (there's even an English version called The Whistler) about a gunman who always whistles before he shoots. Someone convinces him to go to the sheriff and tell him who he is and that he'd like the bounty that was offered for himself. He gets sentenced to die, and hung - or they try to, but the branch keeps breaking until the movie director decides to call it a day and continue shooting the final scene the next day...
Myths & Religion
The Bible seems to think that this is true of people in general
On occasion, Jesus' 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.
How many people do you know who can do this? There were still doubts even in His camp about His true nature.
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.
Samson is the Ur Example of this trope. (The "Dur" example?) The first time Delilah asks him the secret of his power, he lies to her and says he can be bound with fresh bowstrings. The next night she tries this. When it doesn't work, she asks again, and he lies to her again and says he can be bound with new ropes. The next night she tries this. When that doesn't work, she asks again, and again he lies to her and says he can be bound by weaving his hair together. Once again she tries and fails. So far so good. But the next time she asks? After she's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she's going to screw him over? He tells her the truth. Did we forget to mention that each of these attempts involve soldiers bursting in on cue to try to take advantage of the situation? Samson must have really been into bondage.
Made worse by the fact that Samson is not supposed to be your typical big dumb brute, and is shown in at least a few instances to be rather clever.
Heck, most of mankind in the Book of Revelation is this, generally overlapping with Humans Are Bastards also. When God unleashes cataclysms (like turning the seas into blood, a Colony Drop in the form of a star that poisons the global water supply, and an army of fire-breathing warrior angels) that wipe out more than a quarter of the human population at once, you might want to consider giving up idol worship.
If you buy the theory that John was explaining the prophecy in terms that he could understand, it may be the case that the apocalypse, horrible as it is, won't be so obviously supernatural in it's trappings.
The Egyptian army when pursuing Moses. You're pursuing a guy that brought several plagues upon your nation, a column of fire prevents you from pursuing while the sea splits for this guy and his people. So you follow them into the sea bed?
In Greek Mythology, Orpheus goes to the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice. Hades allows him to leave with her on one condition: that he stay in front of her and not turn around until they reach the upper world. So, naturally, what does Orpheus do in some versions? Turn around, of course, just as they were about to reach the surface. This time, however, Orpheus would lose Eurydice forever.
To be fair, it was stated that Orpheus couldn't hear his wife and couldn't tell if she was even on the boat since the dead didn't make a sound. Sure he did turn around, but he was afraid that Hades wasn't going with his word.
Which was the whole point. Orpheus was supposed to trust Hades to keep his word (which he was actually fairly likely to do; contrary to modern portrayals, Hades wasn't evil in the slightest. He was, however, grouchy and asocial, which is probably why he decided to test Orpheus at all).
In some versions, it's Poor Communication Kills: Orpheus leaves the underworld, then turns around to help Eurydice up from the threshold, thinking he's done very well to have actually made it; but Hades meant that they both had to be out of the underworld, and so, literally inches from success, and having technically met the conditions Hades was actually testing, one stupid mistake undoes all of Orpheus' hard work.
Let us not forget the story of Theseus and Pirithous, which is somewhat similar. Basically, Theseus and his mate Pirithous decide that it would be a great idea to take a wife of a god for themselves. Theseus chose Helen, whilst Pirithous chose Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld. Apparently, the best plan they could come up with for kidnapping Persephone was WALTZING INTO THE UNDERWORLD AND ASKING HER GODLY HUSBAND HADES IF THEY COULD TAKE HER. Long story short, Pirithous never left.
Not wives of gods - daughters of Zeus. (Helen was married to Menelaus, a human, though we all know how well that went.) Theseus' choice was squicky at best, because Helen was six at the time - he was apparently going to wait until she was of marriageable age until actually marrying her, but still, by then he'd have been an old man - and didn't work anyway because she was rescued by her brothers; but Pirithous' was just stupid.
Not necessarily an old man, as marriageable age in ancient Greece was about 13 or 14 years old.
Also in Greek Mythology, Jason near the end of the quest for the Golden Fleece. So here he has Medea, the beautiful black sorceress who had fallen so madly in love with him thanks to Cupid's arrow, that she helps him steal her father's most prized possession and kills her own brother to make a diversion so Jason can escape. So everything's going pretty good for a while, and they have two children together. Then what does Jason do? He goes up to Medea, who as seen before isn't exactly the nicest and stablest person, and tells her that he's dumping her for some native woman, despite the fact that A) they have two kids, B) he kinda still owes her quite a lot, and C) she has nowhere else to go, since going home would be a most definitely bad idea. Naturally, Medea takes revenge. (You can read the details in Euripides)
And D) Jason and Medea's patron deity? Hera. Yes, THAT Hera. OF COURSE things won't go well for you if you dump your Dark Magical Girl when your protector is the goddess of wives, marriage and family, damn it.
Arachne. It's fairly well-known to the people of Greek mythology that the Olympians were extremely jealous when it came to mortals claiming to be their equals or betters. So right off the bat, this Arachne girl marches into this trope by spreading word that she's a better weaver than Athena. She blunders on when she is confronted by an elderly woman who begs her to reconsider her boastings and claim to only be the best of the mortals (because it's not like the Olympians have never gone to Earth in the guise of the old or crippled to warn or test humans before). Arachne still refuses to listen, so the old woman is of course Athena and challenges her to a weaving contest. So this girl is sitting there, weaving while Athena herself is there and pissed off - and what does she do? She makes the pictures of her tapestry depict scenes of Athena's father Zeus being a womanizing scoundrel. After all of that, of course Athena has had enough and turns her into a spider.
In another version of the myth, Arachne really WAS a better weaver than Athena, and wove such a beautiful tapestry (with no scenes of godly womanizing) that Athena became jealous and threw her shuttle at Arachne, which either turned her into a spider or mortally wounded her before Athena regretted her action and put her soul into the body of a spider. Athena then decrees that all spiders will bear Arachne's name in honor of her and will have the ability to weave webs. Still not a good tradeoff in the end.
One thing that nearly all Greek tragic heroes have in common is their tendency to fly in the face of several generations' worth of evidence that whining to oracles is never a good idea. Oracles almost invariably tell people something they don't like, or something that is extremely cryptic, or both. If they manage to figure out that something terrible is in their future, they do everything possible to avoid it, apparently not realizing that prophecies have a habit of coming true. This is particularly egregious when the prophecy involves a recently or soon-to-be born child. Said child will always be abandoned in the mountains, to be found by some kindly shepherds. The more people try to avert their prophecy or deny its truth, the worse things get. Death almost always ensues. Examples who try to avoid their fate include Acrisius, Oedipus and his father Laius, and Priam and Hecuba when Paris is born. An example of someone just too dumb/conceited to understand the wording of the prophecy would be Croesus.
King Midas. There is no way that everything you touch turning to gold could go wrong. No sir, none at all. Oh, look, your daughter wants a hug!
In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the title character travels for days to find the gods and attain eternal life; after failing the test the gods give him (he isn't able to stay awake for a week), one of them takes pity on him and gives him a plant that grants immortality. It's understandable that Gilgamesh doesn't want to use it right away, since for all he knows it could kill him, and he wants to try it on someone else first. What's not understandable is that Gilgamesh leaves it on the ground to go take a bath, and lets a snake steal it from him. You, sir, are an idiot.
Joukahainen in The Kalevala. He challenges Väinämöinen, the greatest sage of the epos, on one-on-one bespelling matchup. Väinämöinen bespells him into marsh. He is saved from death by drowning only by promising his sister to wife for Väinämöinen.
A 2009 quip from Church of the SubGenius minister Ivan Stang: "God forgot to make stupidity painful."
Oral tradition
There is a joke about a Dumb Blonde where she is found sleeping with headphones on. The others think she must have forgotten them on and helpfully take them off for her. Later she's found inexplicably dead. Turns out the tape she was listening to went "breathe in — breathe out — breathe in...".
A tale about a donkey who died of hunger between two equally big piles of hay.
Professional Wrestling
The first episode of the 2011 revival of WWE Tough Enough has a girl named Ariane. In the first assignment, cleaning around the arena and setting up the ring for the Royal Rumble, she makes comments in "interview aside", as this troper calls it, about looking like a janitor and not looking "Divalicious". In the house, when one of the male contestants makes a sexist comment which seems like it makes sense in context of recent years with the WWE Divas, she and the latest Miss USA, Rima Fakih, both rag on this guy viciously. However, in the training exercise where the contestants are asked to run the ropes for three straight minutes, both she and Rima are among those who spectacularly fail to impress the judges. Said judges being Stone Cold Steve Austin, Trish Stratus, Booker T, and Bill DeMott. While Rima used padding under her shorts because she was already sore from the previous day's work, Ariane had the audacity to go pulling her pants up every trip over across the ropes. Right in front of the aforementioned, highly credible judges.
The absolute icing on the cake is when Ariane ends up on the chopping block, along with large black guy Eric and supposed eleven-year pro Michelle. Austin asks Ariane what this opportunity means to her. She comes with crocodile tears and a sob story about how she gave up everything to be here. Eric, not impressed, rolls his eyes. Austin says she has powderpuff written all over her, then questions her on adjusting her pants all the time running up and down the ropes, before recalling how he shat his pants in the middle of a match with Yokozuna in South Africa and kept working. When asked what she thinks of Michelle, she insists she did better because she doesn't have any experience. Michelle calls her out on not having passion, so she starts ragging on how Michelle gave it up for modeling six years ago, which Michelle has already admitted several times over. Austin, seeing the angle here, questions what Ariane is passionate about. She describes wrestling as her "new passion". Then tells him that her favorite match, out of all the matches in the history of this business, was between Melina and Alicia Fox. Naturally, she's the one Austin sent packing, which means Rima still has a decent shot at becoming The Scrappy of the show.
Stand-up Comedy
Comedian Ralphie May has a bit about how he once drank 16 ounces of Cuban coffee not knowing it was the equivalent of 84 shots of espresso. Granted it didn't kill him, but the point still stands.
From Rodney Dangerfield:
I tried marijuana once. Just once. I didn't know what I was doing...I was on cocaine at the time!
Judy Gold talks about seeing the Anne Frank house, and how they had to be quiet all day, "which would have the end of my family, because there's no way my mother could keep quiet all afternoon!"
Judy's Mom: Judith, I told you to wash that plate ten minutes ago!
Judy: (hushed tone) Ma, shut up, or we're gonna get caught!
Judy's Mom: That's right, we're gonna get caught, and we're all gonna die, just because you couldn't wash a goddamn dish! Ya proud of yourself?
Tabletop Games
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.
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.
And the dwarves. If three dwarves manning a cannon are killed by ogres, do they find a small group of ogres and ambush them? No. They hold a massive pitched battle to avenge the grudges, then write down all the casualties of that battle in the Book of Grudges, to avenge next time. How well is this working? They're dying out. Essentially, it's natural selection in action.
Declaring a constant war on the most powerful mages in the world, and the most skilled warriors (Elves, even if they are dying out), the most numerous enemies (Orcs), the toughest soldiers (Chaos) probably do not help the dwarves chance of lasting longer than a few years.
The Dwarven Slayers (Troll Slayers and Giant Slayers) take this trope to Up to Eleven.
Becoming a submarine sailor is an alternative career for a Dwarf who would otherwise become a Slayer. Dwarves have a notorious fear of seas.
The absolutely mad vampire Konrad von Carstein, although it is probably more of an example of being Too Insane to Live. This is the kind of guy who convicts his own mother for the crime of giving birth to him without his own permission.
Bretonnian Knights Errant. Those Hot Blood young knights are impetuous - i.e. they will spontaneously attack any enemy at reach unless they pass the Leadership check, and they are Immune to Psychology on the turn they charge. The usual result is a Suicide Attack. This tendency acts also as a kind of a Darwinist natural selection - those Knights Errants who survive, are to become the new Knights of the Realm.
In Warhammer 40000 being Too Dumb to Live is epidemic almost to the point of an actual infectious disease. The Imperium is the most common offender (having among other things ignorance and blind fanaticism to government policy might be a reason for that) but by far the worst are any and all servants of Chaos, a faction that performs regular human sacrifices for anything more complicated than boiling water and is engaged in a perpetual Enemy Civil War due to being, well, Chaos, yet they still have a constant stream of followers willing to embrace madness and slaughter for the miniscule probability of achieving the "honour" of daemonic possession.
While we're on the subject of the Imperium, the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer. Whoever wrote it seems to have been a lobotomized imbecile with no military, tactical, or mechanical experience whatsoever, assigning hymns to everything such as loading a lasgun or autopistol and throwing a grenade which we all know is bullshit, encourages Leeroy Jenkins tactics, tells soldiers they will die horribly, gives disturbingly awful background information on enemies, giving gems such as: "Ork weapons are extremely crude and prone to misfires or jamming." +
Maybe true for the shootas and any other ranged weapons, but as the HERO OF THE IMPERIUM points out, they're effective as the average bolter. And I did see an axe misfire once, but it really wasn't all that likely. Impossible under any circumstances, really.
"Tyranid weapons are formed of living tissues,+
True.
they often fall apart." +
Not true.
"Eldar technology is antiquated,+
Technically, true.
Eldar craftsmanship is inferior to our own."+
Haha, no.
"Beware the tau - they'll sacrifice your babies to their gods!" +
bullshit, bullshit, and groxshit. First one is racist, second-Well, that's only true if it's with sonic weapons. But that's true for everyone. 3rd-lethal groxshit-Tau guns are some of the most powerful in the game, being very capable of knocking over a Space Marine.
Then, somewhere else in there, it says that Imperial soldiers have the best armor and weapons, which will oneshot anything and protect from anything+
So a glorified t-shirt and flashlight is a better choice than power armor, a chainsaw and bolter? Ah had no idea...
. What's dumber than that book? A guardsman that takes it seriously.
Then again, we're still waiting for a Canon Guardsman who treats the "Primer" as something other than a glorified toilet roll...
Then you have Orks, who suffer the opposite—too dumb to die. They are so dumb that their technology is actually the result of their belief in ignorant ideas making reality bend to their will. Give an Ork a metal tube attached to a box full of scrap and convince him that it's a gun, and he'll be able to shoot with it. The more Orks you convince, the more powerful their technology can become.
Also, the Eldar, who despite their ability to predict the future, managed to orgy into existence the fourth god of Chaos (Slaanesh, god of Excess, in case you wondered), which drove their species to the brink of extinction, wiped out their galaxy-spanning empire and dooming their entire race to having their souls eaten upon death.
Having your intelligence drop to 0 in certain RPGs will render you literally Too Dumb to Live and lead to immediate character death. Presumably your character forgets how to breathe. Others just turn you into a human (or appropriate species) vegetable.
Racial Holy War. The "holy white warriors" you roleplay are, put bluntly, so dumb they can be wielding an assault rifle and still be chased off by a horde of Jewish babies and grandmothers (and not Badass Grandmas either).
In BattleTech Clan Ice Helion historically had a bad habit of rushing into situations without thinking. This resulted in them being one of the weakest of the Clans and they were derided by their fellows as "Clan Tantrum". However they only truly hit this trope when they tried to invade the Inner Sphere on their own; something that seven, vastly superior Clans had (at best) limited success with. They were promptly ripped apart before they even reached the Inner Sphere as they ran straight into the Occupation Zone of the much stronger Jade Falcon and Hell's Horses Clans. They now act as a glorified pirate band to acquire resources.
In Rifts there are aliens called the Arkhon, a race of (not proud) warriors. One particular clan has lost favor, and decides to redeem themselves by invading Earth. The reasoning behind this is that the Arkhons had attempted an invasion on Earth a few thousand years ago, and had gotten utterly routed by the magic of the Incan Empire. Basically, the plan was to go to a planet that had proven itself to be more than a match for them when said race thought bronze was the height of technology, and has presumably been advancing steadily ever since then, and try and take it over. Even ignoring the fact that the Arkhons didn't know about the insanity that had happening on Earth over the last few hundred years, the Arkhons were more or less committing very elaborate suicide.
Theater
Hamlet. So he just found out that his dad was killed by his uncle, but he still wants to spy around and make sure that the ghost was telling the truth. Fair enough. And then he decides to pretend to be insane, for absolutely no reason at all. There is no suspicion on him at this point and the uncle has no idea that the ghost even exists, let alone that it might warn Hamlet of what happened. Of course, his insane act is what gets everyone suspicious in the first place and sets up for the massive death scene at the end.
Depending on the performance, Polonius could also count. Towards the end of the play, he decides to hide in the queen's bed chambers to spy on her conversation with Hamlet. As things go on, he panics and starts screaming for help, leading a very paranoid Hamlet to run him through. If the actor playing Hamlet is sufficiently insane and frightening, it's a bit more understandable. Otherwise...
Antony And Cleopatra. Who have even less excuse for this than Romeo and Juliet, seeing that they're not teenagers and that they are two of the most powerful people in the world. Antony ignores the advice of his generals to fight on land, and fights at sea because Cleopatra wants him to. Halfway through the battle, Cleopatra gets frightened and orders her ships to flee, and Antony orders his ships to FOLLOW HER. Naturally, he loses the battle, and blames Cleopatra. To test whether Antony still loves her, Cleopatra sends him a messenger bearing word that she is dead. When he hears this, Antony decides to kill himself, but he's almost too much of a coward to go through with it, and stabs himself in the wrong place so that he is badly wounded, but not yet dead. THEN Cleopatra sends another messenger to say "Oops, I was just messing with you!"
Video Games
Given the amount of interaction with Npcs in Bethesda games, it is possible in uncountable instances to get on someone's wrong side, and pestering them until they simply get rid of you.
Just about every protagonist in any adventure game ever created can be ordered to do some pretty stupid things. Look at many "Ways to die" videos on YouTube to see some characters doing some... really really dumb stuff. (Like drinking a pot full of salt water in the desert, saying "Hello" to a sleeping bandit, stuffing a lockpick up your nose, microwaving radioactive pool water...)
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.
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 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 the Ace Attorney world, no one holds a candle to Larry Butz. Just by entering a room, he complicates every situation. He can't go ten minutes without falling for someone, which never works out, he can't hold a job, and he's pigheaded and belligerent. We're talking about a man here who in Ace Attorney: Investigations, refused to cooperate with Edgeworth, who was in the middle of trying to prove him innocent of murder. He also agreed with everything said by the man who was trying to prove him guilty. It's a miracle the man survived long enough to be this much trouble.
Yes, Kay, it's a wonderful idea to let everyone in a five block radius know that you're the Great Thief Yatagarasu. Including Interpol agents. When you're standing over a corpse in a burned-out room and the Yatagarasu is wanted for theft, murder, and arson. Certainly this will not hurt your defense at all. One wonders how she plans on not getting caught, or if she even thought that far.
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 reaction time and Chayton was half Sioux. You can guess how it ends.
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!)
The whole ship was built with massive and illogical design flaws, explicitly with the assumption that nothing would go wrong. (Any engineer in any field can attest how stupid that is.) In addition, the crew are either incompetent or unwilling to do their job - the engineer routinely send the counselor to fix things while he hides in the mess hall. Yahzee has admitted that many things were left this way because the plot wouldn't work otherwise.
If you think that's bad, they didn't choose to have a good night's rest before they used the escape pods. That's how long it took the automated systems to prepare the pods to be used. Either the people who designed the ship were really confident that nothing would go wrong, or they expected the escape pods to be used more like Save Scumming than actual emergency measures.
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.
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!
Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has an inversion: 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 prioritization: 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 (PS2 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 personally attacking Athens and destroying cities of other gods.
Most of the Mooks in one of the levels of The Getaway. Instead of trying to escape a ship that has a bomb on it, a major gunfight ensues and they start killing each other.
Frank Carter: "Half the waterfront's about to go up and you're STILL arguing!"
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.
The Assassins themselves are actually Too Dumb to Live. The easiest way to beat the Riovanes Roof battle is to unequip one of your characters, lowering their HP. Rather than go for the instant win in Rafa, they will try to kill your naked character, leaving you ample time to win the battle.
Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has this with several missions that are an Escort Mission. Some of the units you have to protect are usually several levels lower than the enemy party, yet they will gleefully run up and try to attack them when their damage is equivalent to poking someone with a stick. And yes, doing this will invariably activate the enemy's counter attack skill, which is likely to kill them in one hit. So be sure to have your Paladins covering them at all time, kay?
In Final Fantasy VIII, we have Laguna Loire. He can be dead serious one moment, and then be a complete moron the next. Some of his most hilarious moments are during the second Laguna-Sequence, when they run around in the Centra Excavation Site.
Kiros: Laguna... Are you sure this is the right way?
Laguna: Of course. Just give me a moment and I'll check the map... Oh!
Kiros: What's wrong?
Laguna: I brought the wrong map.
Another situation, when they leave Centra.
Laguna: Look, guys! It's a ship! We're gonna take it and get out of here!
Ward: La... guna... Ki... ros... It's... been fun... guys...
'''Laguna: What? You say something?
Ward: It... was fun... Laguna... Kiros...
Laguna: Ward, that's really way uncool to say something like that! *helps Ward up, helps him to the edge of the cliff, throws him* *Repeats with Kiros*
Laguna: You guys... sure have guts. Do you know how high it is down there?
That's right. He actually didn't realize that he pushed them both off the cliff. He also has a tendency of forgetting maps or bringing the wrong ones. In other words, Laguna Loire is pretty much this trope incarnate.
And this is the man they make the president of Esthar.
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!
Lindsay in Dead Rising. Could have avoided the plot 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. 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.
Many of the survivors in Dead Rising 2 qualify as well. Sure there's a zombie plague, they are alone and helpless, but that doesn't mean they will go along with someone offering to rescue them, no sir. In some of the most ridiculously contrived situations ever, some will need to be carried for no justifiable reason, others will refuse to come unless you beg and plead with them, one wants you to strip to your underwear, and others will simply demand you give them money first before they accept to be rescued. Oh, how I dearly wish there was a "suit yourself, stay here and die then" response. Also a bag of popcorn I could munch on while watching the zombies tear said survivor to ribbons.
A nameless mercenary mook on a motorbike sees Chuck Greene pick up a long, thin metal bar and crouch around the side of a stack of shelves. Instead of driving into sight of Chuck from a safe distance, he guns his bike right alongside the shelves, and is promptly speared.
Pokémon using Dig, hoping you're too stupid to pick "Earthquake".
Pokémon using Fly or Bounce, hoping you're too stupid to pick Stone Edge or Rock Slide and hoping Thunder misses.
Using Sunny Day so they can use Solarbeam, even if you have it on the currently selected Pokémon. (Does not count if it's Groudon or Kyogre, as their abilities trigger the same effects as Sunny Day and Rain Dance, respectively.)
Using Sunny Day when your current Pokémon can use even a single, weak Fire-type attack. That's just screaming "You deserve the beating I'm about to hand you... *FLAME!*"
Using Rain Dance so they can spam Thunder, even if your currently selected Pokémon can use Thunder (or any Water-type move, for that matter).
Or when you're using a Water/Ground type (giving you the double advantage of getting an attack bonus from Rain Dance and being immune to Electric attacks).
Using Selfdestruct or Explosion when the Pokémon out currently is a Ghost-type.
They also do it on Steel-types, but they might actually inflict some damage.
Also, using Selfdestruct or Explosion when the Pokémon ordered to do so is the trainer's last one and their opponent still has multiple 'mons left.
Using Perish Song as their last Pokémon when you still have at least one other Mon conscious in your team.
In the Battle Tower's Multi-Battle mode, this trope occurs when your computer partner uses Earthquake and the only Pokémon affected on the field is the player's, while both of the opponents are immune to the Ground-type, whether through being Flying-type or via the ability Levitate.
Attacking with a barrage of Swallow, Spit Up and Fling, despite not once using Stockpile or holding an item.
The move Curse does something different when a Ghost-type uses it. It deals 50% maximum HP damage to the user and lays a curse (like a poison damage-over-time effect) on the opponent. Not only will Phoebe's Pokémon in Generation III and Karen's Spiritomb in Generation IV do this when they're below 50% HP (thus making the Pokémon faint), it may at least be seen as a Xanatos Gambit to screw the player. That doesn't, however, excuse wild Haunter who use it... it can sometimes make catching them a bit needlessly frustrating.
Furthermore, in Pokémon Emerald Version, Phoebe's first Dusclops will constantly spam the move Protect until it fails, leaving the player to freely use items and non-damage-dealing (Status) moves.
Graveler seems to have specifically evolved against the will of natural selection and appears biologically programmed to explode at the sight of other Pokémon.
The same may also be said of Electrode, though it will at least put out a contractually obligated thundershock or tackle before choosing "death before dishonor."
The 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.
In the original game you can avoid the fire problem by telling the sim to stop flailing at the fire and go do something safer until the fireman arrives. In The Sims 2, however, the sims often ignore your commands and go right back to flailing.
Pathfinding way is simple. Sims are too lazy to open doors still they are not lazy to walk. So they may walk more 10 miles just to open one door less than walking 0.0005 miles
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?
In fact, it's quite easy to keep Miguel alive; leave him in his cell until you've killed all the enemy soldiers, then ask him to follow you out.
Astrid in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance 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, which requires a great deal of shoving form the other party members.
Fire Emblem in general can be really bad about this. Almost any game in the series will have at least one map where a green (NPC) character will attempt to fight his/her way through the entire enemy army and die, or a recruitable enemy will rush your party and get slaughtered by your counterattacks. The only way to end the Artificial Stupidity is to have your army haul ass and recruit the character as quickly as possible.
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.
Sometimes a mason will build a wall from the wrong direction, leaving him trapped. If the player doesn't notice in time, said mason dies of dehydration or starvation.
Military dwarves will not run away from a monster they're chasing if restationed somewhere else or told to kill something else. In the case of titans or megabeasts, this results in Fun.
Some dwarven soldiers seem to think that a goblin siege is the best time to go on break. Or get drunk.
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 special infected AI are not always bright, but in Left 4 Dead 2, a Hunter and Jockey will be too happy to try to pounce you, despite the fact that you are reving a chainsaw aimed at their undersides!
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.
Let's elaborate for those who aren't in the know; the said MacGuffin is a magic-absorbing stone. A magic-absorbing stone being inserted into the power supply of an airship powered by magic stones. This is only minutes after Larsa's weaker, but still magic-absorbing stone eats a magic attack intended to kill the entire party, right in front of Ghis. Guy deserved it for being that dumb.
Incidentally, Larsa pretty soundly averts this very trope. Though it could probably be chalked up to hopeful youth or brotherly love, Larsa seems the only person in the entire plot that doesn't seem to catch on that his elder brother Vayne is a half a peg down from a puppy raping sociopath. Averted, because even not only does Larsa survive, but he winds up being the games only truly purely good person in the story.
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 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.
They're technically not alive, but Champions of Norrath has a level where you must escort souls to freedom. They don't bother to stay behind you, they run into lava, and when they're attacked they just stop and kneel, letting the enemies beat on them! What's worse, if all of them are killed you have to restart the level. And there are several of these escort levels.
Nearly every single character in every Silent Hill game, player characters, villains, minor characters, and even characters who don't appear. Usually justified by them being a) trapped against their will, b) searching for someone important to them, c) completely batshit insane, or d) all of the above, and sometimes... it isn't.
Lampshaded in Star Trek: Borg; an early puzzle requires the player to make repairs to a console. One of the wrong choices in the situation results in the player getting a lethal electric shock, after which Q (who is masquerading as the ship's doctor) scans the player's body and apologetically tells his shipmates that the player was "just too stupid to live."
In The Godfather: The Game, you will encounter citizens who run in the same direction as your car and throw themselves in its path. Almost all of the shopkeepers and racket bosses may qualify — if you push them too far, they will fight back, despite your proving to them that you won't flinch from beating the crap out of them or shooting them or others. It's almost as if they know they're indispensable and that you'll be worse off for killing them.
According to the aforementioned citizens, the best solutions for when two gangsters are having a shootout are to a) run right between the gangsters, b) simply keep walking between the gangsters; maybe they'll mi—BANG, or c) if they're already in the middle, just stand with their arms up and go "AAAAHHH!" That'll get them to stop shooting!
Also, "Hey, I've got a shotgun and ammo upstairs in my house! But rather than use that, lets use our gardening tools! And rather than use our only advantage, numbers, lets all slowly walk towards him in a single file line so he can blow our heads off one by one!"
Vice-Admiral Arthur Norbank in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a subversion of the trope. While his arrogance and boasting are reminiscent of Dubya, his almost complete ineptitude in all things military regularly results in huge casualties and embarrassing defeats (sometimes at the hands of an inferior force). Unfortunately, despite many players wishing it was so, he can never seem to die. There is a mission where the player has the option to rescue the thought-to-be-dead vice-admiral. Fortunately, the player can choose not to save him without any consequences. The real problem is how the Nova Command even let this guy command his own shuttle, much less entire fleets, as his only real military victory owed much to the element of surprise (the enemy were prepared to fight Technical Pacifists and never before encountered humans).
Imagine for a moment that you are an officer of an Evil Empire's army, and you are in the process of invading enemy woodland territory with the intent to conquer the country. While looking for one of your wounded soldiers who has gotten separated from your group, you find that he has died of his wounds — in the company of that plucky young maverick lieutenant from the enemy side who is the only reason you haven't been sent home to your family yet, with no back-up beyond his equally plucky pigtailed girlfriend/sergeant, who currently has a busted ankle. You have your entire unit with you, ready to gun them down at any moment, and could rid yourself of the only serious obstacles in the way of your success in one fell stroke. Now imagine that you're a moron because the game has An Aesop to preach, and you let them go because now is not the designated killing time and they're obviously no threat to you at the moment.
A car is driving close to the sidewalk at high speeds; do you:
A. Run or dive in the opposite direction of the car. "I'm not going to risk it!" B. Not do anything. "It doesn't look like the car is going to come close enough to hit me." C. Strategically dive into its path, making sure your head lines up perfectly with the front tire. "Ha! This close call should teach you a lesson about driving reckle--"
If you answered C, congratulations! You are qualified to be a civilian in the GTA universe.
A possible rationale for this behaviour comes from one of the game's fake radio ads, for a legal firm that will "even teach you how to throw yourself in front of a bus and pretend to be injured" with the intention of then suing the driver.
"Dragon Age" Awakening, Bann Esmerelle and the other nobles conspiring to get rid of the Warden Commander if the Warden Commander is the Fereldan Grey Warden imported from Origins. They do this knowing fully that the Warden will has both faced and claimed victory over including but not limited to: several dragons, an Archdemon, the Witch of the Wilds, a Pride Demon, a broodmother, and Tevinter slavers led by a powerful Magister. Not to mention he/she (with hardly any effort) dispatches bandit gangs on a regular basis, defeated a Fereldan war hero in one on one combat, stormed an Arl's estate and either killed several of the previously mentioned war hero's top knights, or escaped from the largest Fereldan prison while leaving dozens of corpses in his/her wake, and plows through countless numbers of Darkspawn while coming out with hardly a scratch.
For that matter, any enemy of a Fereldan Warden Commander in Awakening.
In Mass Effect and its sequel, you're given the option to pursue several romances with your squadmates. In the second, you can replace Samara with her daughter Morinth, who has a rare condition that causes her to kill anyone she mates with. You can proceed to sleep with her, instantly killing the player.
Lampshaded in the first game, where Wrex uses this as justification for fighting Krogan on Saren's side.
"Anyone who faces us is either stupid, or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the galaxy."
In Mass Effect 2 there's Warden Kuril, who was supposed to give Shepard a prisoner he was holding, but instead decides to capture Shepard and hold him/her for ransom or sell him/her on the black market as a slave. Yes, he tries to take the galaxy's biggest Badass prisoner. Needless to say, it does not end well for him. And Shepard still gets the prisoner s/he wants.
The icing on the cake is Kuril boasting that the facility can easily handle three armed guests... he was wrong, of course, and It Got Worse when Shepard let Jack out. The only time he isn't Too Dumb to Live is when you see the precautions for keeping Jack imprisoned; she's shackled in cold storage and guarded by a trio of powerful Mecha-Mooks. But that still wasn't enough!
The situation with Morinth is even worse because Shepard does ask about this right before deciding to sleep with her. It turns out that a serial killer that makes heavy use of deception as part of her MO is willing to lie.
Bowser in the Mario series qualifies. Numerous times, his defeats are literally due to his own stupidity. As a character he displays even more idiocy, once setting a bomb on fire that was a few feet away from to show how to set it off in Paper Mario 2, and not realizing that he couldn't take over the world if the world was destroyed in Super Paper Mario.
Pretty much everyone in Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 and 3 falls under this. In Red Alert 2, the Soviets decide to give the character Yuri mind control powers, and then not do anything to keep him from running amok with them, which he does. Using his powers, he gains a private army, and creates some mind control machines that he plans to use to mind control the whole planet, and nobody pays any attention to them. Later, he radios the allied intelligence lieutenant and mind controls her, but doesn't use any secure or scrambled lines, leading to his call being traced back to his main base. In Red Alert 3, the Soviets go back in time to kill Einstein to keep him from developing the technology that allowed the Allies to beat them (again). That works, but in the new time-line, Japan is turned into a global superpower called the Empire of the Rising Sun, which the Soviets pay no attention while they are trying to invade Europe, which causes them to get invaded. The Allies display similar incompetence when it turns out that there was a city destroying laser weapon that could hit targets across the globe in Mt. Rushmore, which they could have used to easily defeat the Soviets, but the American President only decides to use it on the Soviets when they and the Allies have to team-up against the Empire. Granted, there is some speculation that the president was really a robot set-up by the Empire (he turns out to be in the Empire campaign, but there are not hints in the others). The Allies later fail to pick up that the Soviets turned on them until a Soviet scientist defects to them. They apparently didn't learn their lesson in the expansion, because in the Allied they decide to trust the Empire's crown prince Tatsu to help them deal with some insurgents, and then not anticipate him turning on them. At the end of the Soviet campaign, the Soviets note that Allies are starting to make the mistake of trusting them again after the Soviets defeat an evil-megacorporation.
No hints? Every time Ackerman stepped in, it was to keep the Allies and Soviets fighting, which would have made them easier targets for the Empire. Gotta read between the lines.
LeChuck from the Monkey Island series. Too many incidents to list. Same could apply to everyone else in the series except Elain.
Isn't LeChuck dead to begin with ? I'm not sure he qualifies.
That just makes him Too Dumb To Unlive.
Scarface: The World is Yours averts this sometimes. The last two guys in a gang of fifty will wise up and run away... or sometimes come back. Yes, Tony Montana just shot dozens of your friends dead. You, with your pistol, will succeed.
Not an intentional example, but in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, there are portions of the game where you are with a platoon of NPCs. If a grenade is thrown within radius of your team (regardless of whether the grenade came from the enemy or from you), the team member that spots it will run to the grenade and attempt to kick it away from the area. Ideally, this can potentially save lives if they spot a grenade you didn't see and kick it before all of you become a bigger bloody firework than The Kid, but then the usefulness also depends on how far the grenade is from the would-be-hero. If the grenade is far enough from the NPC, that NPC who sees it will run toward the grenade (sometimes even involving more than one NPC in the area seeing it and dashing toward it) and attempt to kick it, but arrive just in time for all of them to explode on impact. It will never occur to them just how much time it'll take to get to the grenade to be worth risking their ass to save the platoon, it will also never occur to them if said grenade was in a distance that (as close as it was) is still avoidable by the rest of the platoon who are smart enough not to run to their death, and there are quite a bit of lols to be had when you're doing a casual play on one of the earlier levels where the stage is practically set up for making the friendly-mooks run to their deaths.
Played for Laughs in God Hand. In one cutscene, Gene punches two Mooks through a window into becoming A Twinkle in the Sky. When a third is about to attack, Gene gestures to him to stand in front of the same window. Guess what...
In Heavy Rain, despite repeated admonitions from his father to "stay here", Jason wanders off in the middle of a crowded shopping center, gets outside, and somehow crosses the street. When his father gets outside, Jason darts into traffic and gets hit by a car two steps off the curb...despite not being struck by the car.
Star Wars Battlefront: occasionally you'll get an AI ally who has himself as both Nemesis and Bait. Meaning not only has he managed to grenade himself, he's managed to grenade himself more often than any given enemy has managed to shoot him.
People in Black & White. Too dumb, lazy and apathetic to live, to be more precise.
The race Thraddash in Star Control 2 is so warlike they bombed their own civilization into the Stone Age. Nineteen times.
One of the bosses of the Three Kings mission in Just Cause 2 uses a sort of satellite missile system to try and kill you. Thing is, you're on top of a building, without much room, and if you stand in certain spots, he'll happily blow himself up without even touching you.
In the first game of the Exile/Avernum series, Erika Redmark is one of three immensely powerful archmages that was tossed into Exile for being on the wrong side of a political struggle in the Mages Guild on the surface. Not being very genre savvy, the Emperor apparently never even paused to consider that pissing off one of the(if not THE) most powerful Sorceresses in the world would have consequences. It's not like she could construct a portal back to the surface that leads directly to your throne room, right?
Well, the Emperor's mages did give her a curse so powerful that even she could not repeal (and just that demanded the collective effort of hundreds of the Empire best mages): what they did not expect was that one banished in Avernum, she would prove capable and cunning enough to change the local ecosystem to make the caves more habitable and build a whole civilization from the ground up as a tool to get her revenge: they knew she was the most powerful mage of the Empire, they just did not realize by which margin
Also, the First Expedition to explore the underworld. "They were arrogant. They were stupid. And they were slaughtered."
Used as humorous Lampshade Hanging in Conquests Of The Longbow: in one of the final segments, the player (as Robin Hood) has to sneak into a tower to rescue an captive knight. If the player decides to talk to the enemies he's sneaking past, Robin will say "Excuse me, could you lend me a hand? You see, I'm nearly safe, but I thought I'd do something truly foolish instead and get myself killed." The enemies gladly oblige.
The titular Pikmin have a bad habit of being this, on accord of automatic AI decisions getting them into often-perilous situations.
In a NewGrounds flash game called Gretel and Hansel, Hansel (the older brother and leader in the original fairytale) is very, very, very mentally challenged. He watches his little sister burn to death and doesn't seem fazed when she dies horribly in front of him in part 2. Speaking of part 2: Instead of saving his sister from the pit she fell into, he chases after a fairy and leaves Gretel to deal with a tree monster. When Gretel needs saving a second time, he shoves the fairy who's willing to help into his mouth, cuts that same fairy in half with scissors and even swallows those scissors. He then stands on a cliff's edge tip-toed. No wonder Gretel is our protagonist.
Fairies in Touhou are an entire species of this trope, pathetically weak beings that throw themselves at individuals magnitudes more powerful than them and are swiftly obliterated as a result (fortunately for them they instantly resurrect after death, but they never learn their lesson). Cirno is a stellar example, declaring herself to be "the strongest!" and acting as such, which rarely ends well for her. In Great Fairy Wars she even picked a fight with Marisa, a girl with enough firepower to level continents (that Cirno managed to actually win doesn't make her actions any less stupid).
Word Of God states that fairies are agitated by the powerful youkai in the vicinity (that you will soon be fighting). They either try to run away, i.e., run towards you, or are just scrambling at random and fire at whatever startles them, i.e., you.
After a large number of zombie outbreaks and failed business ventures resulting from said outbreaks, you'd think that Umbrella Corporation would move on to something different or at least put in stricter containment protocols, but nooooo...
As the Punisher is ascending some stairs in the 2004 video game, a group of mafia soldiers blow themselves up while trying to set an explosive trap. The Punisher even comments something to the effect of "Gnuccis and explosives. Bad combination."
The Space Pirates in Metroid. They decide to reverse engineer Samus Aran's vast and dangerous weaponry and other such functions of the Power Suit she wears, all well and good up until they try to replicate the Morph Ball, of which they know jack about. Since its been made clear that Science Team has vapor for brains, they went ahead anyway. Result:
Pirate Log: "Aran's Power Suit technology remains a mystery, especially the curious Morph Ball function. All attempts at duplicating it have ended in disaster: four test subjects were horribly broken and twisted when they engaged our Morph Ball prototypes. Science Team wisely decided to move on afterward."
Jade Empire has a sequence where you can help the target of a bounty escape the city. To do so, you have to talk to the city guards while he leaves, telling them he's left the city. Only, instead of simply walking out like a normal traveler, he takes the opportunity to practice walking in a fashion obviously designed to call attention to himself. Then he goes back and does it again. It's like the game's begging you to tell the guard, "You know what, I guess he hasn't left yet. See that idiot? That's him."
The 9th Man in Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors attempts to kidnap Clover at knifepoint to force her and Ace to open one of the doors, believing it to be his ticket off the ship. He immediately messes up after that by attempting to go through the door by himself even though Zero explicitly stated to all of the passengers that everyone who opened the door had to go through it, and is "rewarded" with a very messy death after being exploded by the bomb planted in his small intestine.
Arguably justified because Ace told him that the game was altered so that the bomb wouldn't go off if everyone didn't go through the door. Given what Ace has done over the years though, the 9th Man would still justify, just for listening to him.
The enemy AI in Scott Pilgrim isn't smart enough to avoid obvious and fatal environmental hazards. They'll walk into pitfalls and through roaring fires without a second thought.
In Sim Ant, when the ants are in the house, they can walk into electrical sockets and die.
The Church of Unitology in Dead Space. What they worship? An Artifact of Doom that turns you into mindless, bloodthirsty, psycopathic ZOMBIES. And then, even after investigating the setting of the first game, they bring the ship back to a densley populated human colony. Granted, that's not as bad, given that the Artifact of Doom was destroyed and the ship was harmless. Until they make a new, bigger Artifact of Doom. And intend to make even more. What happens next is easy to guess. At least the small group of Unitologists you meet eventually end up dying in the vacuum of space by a Cavalry Betrayal hostile-to-you-and-them gunship.
The people of the planet depicted in Tales Of Symphonia and Tales Of Phantasia suffer from this collectively. Periodically, somebody builds a massive Mana cannon that devastates the environment and frequently causes The End of the World as We Know It. As soon as the dark ages caused by its previous use are over, they get started on the next Mana Cannon, and are then astonished when it makes things worse instead of better. You'd think they'd notice the pattern after the third time or so, but no.
The first time around isn't actually an example, as the only country that would have been able to pass on the information about the Mana Cannon's first firing was Thor and it was hit directly by a comet after the other two nations destroyed each other. Symphonia is an example though, because not only is the Mana Cannon extremely dangerous to the world, it is one of the direct causes for the world being in the shape it is in.
Symphonia and Abyss's characters have a common habit of keeping secrets and vital information from their fellow comrades and the player, which sometimes leads to needless injuries, deaths and heavy Wall Banger issues.
In the Portal universe, the entirety of Aperture Science deserves a posthumous stupidity award for empowering their AIMaster Computer, who had already been proven to have murderous intentions, to release a deadly neurotoxin throughout the facility. Portal 2 explores this further by revealing that when they ran out of test subjects in the 1980s, the researchers began testing their inventions on themselves. The founder, Cave Johnson, died of poisoning from deliberately ingesting moon rocks.
GLaDOS: This. Sentence. Is. FALSE (to self) don't think about it don't think about it... Wheatley: Um... TRUE. I'll go "true". Huh. That was easy. I'll be honest, I might have heard that one before, though. Sort of cheating. GLaDOS: It's a paradox! There IS no answer!
Interplay, as a company, has fallen into this trope.
Step 1: Have Blizzard, Bioware, Black Isle, Parralax, and Volition developing games for you.
Step 2: Convince those companies to develop new intellectual property, which you own, that are critically acclaimed, well known, and easily allow for sequels to be made. This is the last step where you are legitimately allowed to make money.
Step 3: Stop any attempt to advertise games to save money.
Step 4: Cancel sequels for every intellectual property you own.
Step 5: Use your intellectual property to rush out games using your intellectual property in whatever genre is the flavor or the month. This ensures the original series fan base is unhappy because the game lacks all of the gameplay qualities that made the original games good. Fans of that gameplay genre ignore it because the game was rushed out and not the same quality as the other games of that style. Also, the story lacks the complexity of the longer developed games and often falls prey to Did Not Do the Research. Failure Is the Only Option.
Step 6: Rather than selling off your franchises, make up for what losses you can, and disband the company, create elaborate licensing deals with other, more successful companies resulting in costly legal battles.
Buster Badshot from the classic arcade game Cheyenne (made by Exidy of Death Race infamy) is implied to be this. He's supposedly a bounty hunter who goes after various gangs (with various "creative" names), but all he ever does is walk around the stage (or drive the stagecoach in one level) while the player has to protect him (and get the gangs). Indeed, even his last name alone seems to imply this.
Esher from Myst V: End of Ages. He admits to Watson that he considers his Mengele-esque experiments on the Bahro essential. And he wondered why Watson did not give him the tablet?
The citizens of New York in Prototype. You're driving a tank, and they think it's a good idea to run right to you.
Practically anyone who thinks it's a good idea to go one-on-one with Alex Mercer and isn't a Super Soldier.
Hector Badge Of Carnage has many of the inhabitants of the town of Clapper's Wreake qualify but the town's police force qualifies almost to a man. By the time Hector takes over the hostage negotiations they have lost 37 hostage negotiators. They just keep sending them forward and the Terrorist keeps shooting them in the head with a sniper rifle.
Too many to count in Fallout New Vegas, but the thugs in Camp Searchlight stand out. This gang of looters are hanging out in a basement in a very radioactive town full of giant scorpions and ghouls, looking for radsuits. You know, the things you'd expect to bring before going in? If you bring them the wayward suit package, they'll agree to split the loot with you, if you help them loot the police station and the fire station. Note that the fire station is home to a gigantic queen scorpion, which you'll have to help take down. Once you've looted everything (because the thugs do nothing but loiter around), their leader tells you that he's going to kill you now. At this point, you're probably pointing your powerful gun at his face already, and blow him away (and possibly a few of his men, if you have the action points for it) the moment he stopped talking. Winner takes all.
In many games, perhaps too many to name, AI (and occasionally player) characters have the tendency to fire small arms at large, heavily armored vehicles. Word of advice, your pistol is not gonna hurt that M1 Abrams barreling down the street. (Does not apply to Halo, though, where just about any weapon can harm a vehicle and/or it's driver.)
On the subject of Halo. It's worth pointing out that in a peculiar inversion of this, even a year after Halo: Reach was released, players still can't figure out that their weapons (DMRs, Sniper Rifles) can damage vehicles. Allowing enemy Warthogs or Banshees to wreak havoc while they wander around looking for a Rocket Launcher. While this fact has been present in every Halo game, it is most obvious and visible in Recah.
Even further back, still. 4 years after Halo 3 came out, and people still don't realize that bubble shields do not protect you from oncoming vehicles.
Arniel Gane in Skyrim. He actually wants to replicate the event that caused the Dwemer to vanish from existence. Fortunately for the world, the shortcuts he takes in his experiment ensure that he is the only to be killed by his stupidity. Better yet, his ghost becomes a very powerful combat summon.
Many of the "be weird" options in Fantasy Quest are fatal and pretty obviously so. Like, say, jumping off a cliff.
Web Comics
Fighter from 8-Bit Theater. In fact, he's so dumb he can't even BE killed.
Fighter isn't the only one. Black Mage also qualifies, most famously for his fondness of solving every problem with nuclear blasts, having apparently once used it on a bee. It gets worse when it turns out that he can only use his nuke spell once per day, and favors using his knife over other spells (he repeatedly tries to kill Fighter with it, with no success), and when once suggested that he use a lower-than-level-9 spell, he said they weren't his idiom. Aside from this, there's also his attempts at hitting on White Mage, which usually result in her beating him to a pulp. Red Mage also falls under this, once being too dumb to use to white magic on himself after getting his ass kicked by werewolves, and once not noticing a bridge across lava that Fighter and Black Mage notice. Even Thief get's this as this strip shows. In spite of this, all four of them have some moments of intelligence.
The entire order of the Red Mages. There's a reason Red Mage is The Last Of His Kind, they held there elaborate, secret meetings, while other people were busy meeting finding mates and reproducing. Combined with there trying to find the underlaying rules of how the universe worked, by hitting each other with random weapons and spells to see how much damage they did. As Muffin so aptly put it.
Muffin:"You stupided yourselves into extinction."
Sapphire Gem from Monsterful, all her "special" moments could have their own page.
Since she's a zombie she's already dead anyways.
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.
With full knowledge that the device before him is a bomb (as it gets hinted that he himself planted it there) and with apparent full knowledge of how to disarm said bomb, Captain Broadband still comes to the conclusion that the best way to resolve the situation is to treat the bomb like a PSP and punch it out of anger for the square button not working correctly. He survives, though the next issue reminds us that he had died in the previous issue.
Background character mentioned only in passing, but: X The Destroyer is definitely an example.
Also, Snapper, who once he learned "Wilhelm" was actually Othar's sister immediately tried to take her hostage. She then kills him with a single kick and even the other inmates start claiming how stupid this was, earning him a place on this list.
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.
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...
Given that Aeris had given his mother an abortion two strips previously and Leo got better, and that young Leo seems just as enthused about his future self's arms being cut off, Leo's a textbook case of Too Dumb to Die.
Kaalinor of Anti-Heroes. Fortunately, he's already dead, so his stupidity can't cause him further harm.
Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger. Thus far, the title character has had to deal with nothing BUT this sort of alien... first with a crew of "space pirates" who manage to get eaten by their third would-be hijacking victim; then the blue-skinnedFederation aliens who run their ship with an exposed antimatter reactor, have crackerbox computer security, fly shuttlecraft with the aerodynamics of a cement block, and use matter-transporter technology despite having at least one crewmember who has been grotesquely mutated and deformed by its chronic use....
Elan, early on in The Order of the Stick. "Bluff, Bluff, Bluff, Bluff the stupid ogre!" Summed up by the team leader:
Roy: I tend to see Elan more as an obstacle that this team overcomes on a regular basis.
Also from that same quote...
Roy: Traveling with Elan is kind of like, say, adventuring with syphilis. It can be done, for a while, but it's not easy and it's not pretty.
Some fans also think that Celia the Sylph is this by way of Stupid Good, due to her pacifism and her willingness to do things like ignore the obviously evil surroundings of Greysky City, and Haley's explicit warnings, and wander off on her own with Roy's body. Haley certainly thinks so:
Haley: How can you be so smart sometimes and still be such... an airhead!?
Crystal of the Thieves' Guild is described by Rich in the commentaries as being too dumb to live, and really only survives because she's got Bozzak thinking for her. The comics repeatedly demonstrate this fact.
Tsukiko, necromancer (and -phile) and one of Xykon's lieutenants, thought that because Redcloak tolerated her constant taunts and attempts to undermine his authority he was a submissive coward. So when she found out that he was betraying their master, she told him that she knew and was going to alert Xykon, expecting him to stand meekly aside and allow it. What really makes this too dumb to live is that even if Redcloak was submissive, telling him that you're going to get him killed would certainly provoke a response—even a docile animal can be dangerous when cornered.
Many prey animals in Kevin and Kell display this behavior, such as walking into obvious predator traps, attracting attention to themselves while out in the open. Ray (a firefly) in particular isn't at all bothered by Lindesfarne being an insectivore.
On the other hand, Ray is a bit on the dim side. His moth wife Tammy is theoretically smarter, and she has a close friendship with said insectivore.
One of Larvova's Scourges in Drowtales makes the mistake of threatening Kiel'ndia in the presence of Kharla'ggen. His boss certainly seems to consider him this and walks away without another look at him.
The time-traveling paleontologist in thisDawn Of Time strip. He fails to consider that he might be wrong about the T-Rex being a so-called "pure scavenger" — or that even if it were, there hasn't ever been a scavenger on Earth "pure" enough to avoid eating a small, easy-to-kill creature that's not even trying to get away.
Apparently, the two kids in thisxkcd comic are just bright enough to recognize Indian bones but not bright enough to recognize an Indian Burial Ground until after they've desecrated it (and no doubt invited all sorts of well-deserved supernatural horrors onto themselves - check out the Alt Text for more fun).
Minmax of Goblins verges on this at times. It is played especially straight in this strip.
Tempts Fate managed to drown a score of hostile World of Warcraft PCs (It Makes Sense in Context) by telling them that if they submerge into water and wait untill they run out of breath, they'll be teleported to a secret place full of loot and XP. And why did they listen to him when only moments before they were after his blood? Because he had an exclamation mark over his head that marked him as a quest-giver, which he stole from an actual quest-giver right before the eyes of said PCs.
Zeromus in Captain SNES falls for every stupid trick in the book, mostly because he's a personification of protagonist Alex's hatred. It just so happens that that the thing Alex hates most is stupid people.
Looking for Group has a gnome guard on Page 275 who makes a snide remark about Richard. While standing in arm's reach. Next to a pit of magma.
Web Original
Belmont in A Day in Dracula's Life thinks it is a wise idea to keep spammingHydro Storm. If not for Maria's Big Damn Heroes moment, Belmont would have stayed in Dracula's mercy after finding himself on the bad end of Dracula's Unstoppable Rage, which resulted from all the spamming. The Super Smash Bros. Brawl spin-off, A Day in Meta Knight's Life, has fun with this to deconstruct Character Tiers by having the Pikmin's Big Damn Heroes moment be a Double Subversion where they just increase Pit's intelligence increased by one rank, so Pit, no longer relying on his arrows (which besides being annoying can wreck any player without sufficient skill) at all, is at most a step above Too Dumb To Live when he is counteracting a (suddenly) Dangerously Genre Savvy Meta Knight's moves with ease.
The Interviewer guy of On the Set of 4th Edition normally is a Cosmic Plaything, getting killed by the creatures he interviews that don't get killed alongside him. But when drunk, all survival instincts flee him at high velocity as, to demonstrate a skill challenge, he decides to hit on The Lady of Pain, who he knows is capable of nullifying gods and flaying people with a glance, and he outright tries to intimidate her into giving him her number. Of all the times he's been killed in these shows, this was the one time he deserved it.
"It was ill-advised to begin with. But Johnny has a track record with this stuff."
Shrooms has Red; he believes the right way to drive ghosts from a haunted house is to insult their originality.
Crops up from time to time in Survival of the Fittest. One of the most notable examples was the very first death in v4. Danya tooks pains to tell the students that the collars were more sensitive this time, and not as prone to tampering. This does not stop Remi Pierce from attempting to slice off his collar with a knife the second he woke up on the island, with expected results.
Cracked blog once poked fun at Terminator, specifically how all these people were clearly either terminally dumb or seriously determined to self-terminate (sorry). That is —
Cyberdine's tech support engineer: ...Again, my strength really lie in fixing computers, not in designing or managing needlessly nightmarish robots, but it just seems like a basic rule of computer-making that you should be able to turn it off at some point. I mean, my toaster has a plug in case something goes wrong, you know? And i haven't armed my toaster or given it access to my house's security system.
From the Dragonball Z Abridged Movie The World's Strongest: Doctors Wheelo and Kochin have just discovered that Gohan has an infinite supply of badassery and ki that only comes out when he is pissed.
Wheelo: Kochin, did you feel the amount of energy that just came out of him?
Kochin: Yes, I did. And I have a great idea! Let's piss him off until he explodes!
Toad often makes mistakes that cost him and his friends their lives examples are consintration of constipation [2] when he doesn't drink enough water for the pills and inflates and at the end of the christmas episode [3] when he slathers gasoline on the christmas tree which causes the tree to ignite and explode.
J from Marble Hornets has made such brilliant decisions as, after being attacked when he visited an abandoned house, immediately deciding to return. Then announcing when he would do so to the internet at large. Totheark, who J thinks is the attacker, responds with a video that basically amounts to, "Yes, please come so we can eat you!" J still goes. At night.
And taken to new heights in Entry #40, wherein J gets tired of waiting for Alex, so he decides the best idea is to go for a walk in the creepy haunted woods. He had never been in the woods before, didn't know his way around, and, needless to say, didn't tell anyone where he was. On the plus side, he then did the most sensible thing anyone in the whole series has done so far: When Slender Man shows up to say hi, J just drops the camera and runs.
In a world where you can buy mutant powers for money, these two guys decide they want to be like Wolverine. Problem is they only have enough for either adamantium claws or healing factor...
February, the schience officer from Starship who goes down to an uncharted alien planet and scans the air for breathability... after taking off her helmet. It gets worse from there.
Western Animation
Beavis And Butthead put this to the extreme in many episodes. The acts from their stupidity often put themselves in grave danger.
Eustace and Muriel from Courage the Cowardly Dog. Both are completely oblivious to the dangers that surround their home or even outside of it. Without Courage, those two would have been dead far before the series even began.
Eustace even more so, as he's usually continuing to antagonize whatever current danger is befalling them even after Muriel wises up.
Guitierrez: Oh, we're wasting time. What is your weakness? Freakazoid: Well... [quick cut to Freakazoid in a cage] Freakazoid: [to self] Dumb, dumb, dumb! Never tell the villain how to trap you in a cage! Guitierrez: You probably shouldn't have helped us build it, either. Freakazoid: I know. Dumb!
April O'Neil in the 1987 version of TMNT. From Season 2 onward, Shredder et al. know where she lives. Yet, despite being kidnapped constantly, she never moves.
Hank and Dean from The Venture Brothers In fact, they truly are too dumb to live: the show reveals that they have both died 14 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.
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).
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.
Another sterling example of Too Dumb To Live is an episode where the Mooninites (usually actually fairly competent by the show's standards) are menaced by a monster that wants to eradicate them, and instead of doing anything to stop this, use it as the basis for a pyramid scheme. At the same time as The Reveal that the monster was real, one of them gets a Karmic Death for his stupidity and Jerkassness when it squashes him, while he's trying to enroll it into the pyramid scheme. Truly epic instance of the Idiot Ball.
The Powerpuff Girls' Mayor of Townsville. This even gets a Lampshade Hanging in an episode where the girls get sick of "saving the day" which as revealed turned out to be mostly mundane tasks like screwing in a lightbulb, at which point they decide to take a vacation. But they can't get a break, having to walk the town through defeating a monster.
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 lacks this brain function (delta brain waves), because he did the nasty in the pasty, as he so eloquently puts it.
Zapp Brannigan is another odd case, he meets all the requirements except that his stupidity rarely hurts him personally. Even though the danger would be as likely to kill him as would anyone else in all but a few of the situations he causes through his epic stupidity/incompetence he always survives through dumb luck and/or heroically leading a retrograde advance while everyone around him (aside from the rest of the main cast... usually) dies.
Most of the adult cast from South Park is this, but Randy Marsh takes the cake. Drives drunk with his kid and friends, gets into drunken fights in little league games, gets Finland nuked off the face of the planet, is responsible for the death of his daughter's boyfriend.... His stupidity risks himself and pretty much anybody caught in the line of his scheme.
TF;A Starscream takes to cake for this instance. His constant attempts to kill Megatron, end with him being repeatedly killed (in a montage that is described as the "best TF montage of all time" by the TF wiki and is a huge Crowning Moment of Funny); only surviving to try again due to an All Spark fragment embedded in his head. Almost every Starscream has displayed this kind of thing at some point.
Really, it became more as to stupid to die for him, I mean he technically wasn't alive in the first place, as soon as the shard was removed, he died, so yea. But anyway, attacking Megatron like that still qualifies.
Miko of Transformers Prime is a prime example of this. She follows Bulkhead in a sneak mission, yells at the top of her lungs making it into an active battle zone after that hitches a ride in Bulkheads cockpit hurls in said cockpit and then defends her decision to friends who come after her. All the while being a Genki Girl. Annoying and dumb, what an amazing combination!
The anti-mutant bigots in X-Men Evolution take Bullying a Dragon to insanely suicidal levels, even given that this is the X-Men. "Hey, that guy just accidentally knocked through a wall with his head. Let's beat him up!" Why do you think you're even physically capable of doing that? That girl is threatening to blow up your car with a ball of lava, and you're threatening her?
At least some of the bigots are smart enough to go after the mutants that they know actually try to co-exist and thus not kill people. One episode has Principle Kelly kiss up to the Brotherhood, not only keeping them from attacking him, but also convincing them to fight the X-men and thus discredit the mutants further. Still, while the main cast generally prove themselves safe targets, it's still rather stupid to attack the younger, less self-controlled teenagers.
Robot Chicken parodied The Hills Have Eyes by putting three of the dumbest celebrities together. One of them drove the car off the road when he complained things were "too hard" and claimed the tires were flat. The other complained to the main dumb idiot that she was just jealous that she got Aaron the dumb driver and that things were also "too hard." Both idiots left in a huff. Finally, the third idiot couldn't back into the car, and realized either the dumb blond or the dumb driver had the car keys. Instead of going after them, she decided to go a completely OPPOSITE way.
Homer Simpson. Citing one example, he KNOWS a certain donut in his fridge will send him to straight to Hell if he eats it. No points for guessing what happens.
Total Drama Island lampoons typical horror movie idiocy in the episode "Hook, Line, and Screamer." After learning that a "Psycho Killer With a Chainsaw and an a Hook" is loose on the island, the contestants then shower, make out in the woods, and get snacks.
When Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants receives an extremely rare trading card, he does so many stupid things it descends into Dude, Not Funny! territory. To exemplify this-he starts walking into a construction zone and without even realizing the danger he's in, nearly plunges to his death into a barrel filled with fire. Patrick Star is the absolute dumbest thing in fiction now, bar none.
The general population of Bikini Bottom too. When there is an infectious disease going out, none of them even recognize the green stuff on their drinks, fries, and Krabby Patties.
Numbah 4 of Codename: Kids Next Door, the best example is the cooties episode when he shows that he is too stupid to remember that he allergic to coconuts.
There's also Numbah 3, who can't get it through her head that she's NOT being thrown a surprise party when situation after situation comes up that has no birthday ring to it, and the fact that her birthday is a year and a half away (Numbuh 4's words).
Mr Bump in The Mr. Men Show. You'd think by now he would learn not to hang around so much with Miss Whoops,(related or not)....or Mr. Strong....or Mr. Tickle...or Miss Helpful....and he's just ONE example from this show.
In the Jimmy Two-Shoes episode "Air Force None" has Jimmy, beezy, and Molotov making a series of decisions that can only be defined as this. Wrecklessly grabbing the controls, pressing the big black skull labeled button, Molotov abandoning the plane when he's the only one that can fly, accidently losing the back-up pilots, pulling out the controls of the plane, doing a barrel roll and ruining rescue attempts, throwing pies at a rescue plane...you get the idea.
Most of the cast of Squidbillies, although the Sheriff takes the cake for the sheer number of deaths/mutilations/etc. due to dumbness.
Apparently the protagonists in Street Sharks think that it's perfectly normal for their dad to ask them to meet him at an abandoned nuclear reactor and send word through his creepy assistant, instead of sending word directly. And that the best course of action, upon mutating into shark monsters in the middle of the street, is to attack and eat a hot dog stand. And that after eating said hot dog stand, the police will surely be understanding of what's going on.
There's something Daffy Duck doesn't know that Bugs Bunny does in the Duck Season-Rabbit Season trilogy of cartoons. All Bugs has to do is manipulate a little of Daffy's syntax and Daffy's demand to get blasted in the face with Elmer's rifle will be granted. He virtually pleads for it at the near end of "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!":
Daffy: Shoot me again!!! I love the smell of burnt feathers...and gunpowder...and cordite! I'm an elk! Why don'cha shoot me?? It's elk season! I'm a fiddler crab!! Shoot me!! It's fiddler crab season!!!
In Batman The Animated Series, the Mad Hatter takes his secretary out on the town after a breakup. Somehow she fails to notice that everyone serving them has an extremely conspicuous card reading "In This Style 10/6" on their heads (the Hatter's mind-control device), and fails to pick up on Tetch's crush on her until it's too late.
Two words: Inspector Gadget. Why else is Penny (and Gadget's dog Brain) having to help him from behind the scenes?...
Peter Griffin from Family Guy is a particularly extreme example, as demonstrated throughout the show's run. Gets a lampshade in an early episode where Brian tries putting out a fire, only to discover that the extinguisher is a prank item that sprays plastic snakes - which promptly explode, exacerbating the fire. When the family comes back, Brian angrily demands to know Who Would Be Stupid Enough to do such a thing; Peter responds "A man who cares enough about prop comedy to put his family at severe risk, that's who!"
Elmyra from Tiny Toon Adventures, who is so dumb that A JAR OF MAYONNAISE has a higher IQ than her.
In Adventure Time episode "The Limit", we meet the Hot Dog Knights, who are described by their own princess as being slow. When two of them (along with our heroes) are granted wishes:
Finn: Okay, so you guys should wish to get your buddies back right? Hot Dog Knight 1: I wish for a box! (a cardboard box appears) Sweeeet! Hot Dog Knight 2: I wish to blow up! ...I mean get big! *BOOM!* Finn: Wow, you guys are really stupid. Hot Dog Knight 1: What do you mean?
Jasmine does this in the series version of Aladdin in the episode "When Chaos Comes Calling" where she orders Chaos, a god-like being shown to be more powerful than Mirage (who herself is a powerful evil elemental capable of wiping Agrabah easily off the map without the heroes saving the day) to stop causing madness around the palace during a royal guest meeting. Although Chaos looks like a harmless silly blue cat with wings, genie had explicitly warned her not to make him mad as he had "more power in his whisker than a palace full of genies" and could grant his own wishes. To no one's surprise, Chaos does not take being ordered around well and shrinks her to the size of an ant right under Aladdin's feet, who unknowingly endangers her life. Fortunately she is brought back to full size due to Chaos love for unpredictability. Jasmine should really have known better than to order around a trickster deity.
