• Yu-Gi-Oh GX, "Start of the New School Year! The Premonition of Tribulation": It's the start of the third school year, and despite showing amazing talent and tenacity in the two previous years, our hero Judai is still in the Osiris Red dorm, having turned down promotion.
  You'd expect: Sameshima, the chancellor at the Academy, to flex his authority muscles and simply promote him to a higher dorm.
  Instead: He calls Professor Cobra in to further motivate the lad... only to realize later that Cobra is an unhinged hardass nutjob under the employ of a demonic Duel Monsters card, and his brand of "motivation" involves life-energy-sucking armbands.
  • Also in Yu-Gi-Oh GX, it's eventually made abundantly clear that the Big Bad of the third season is specifically targeting Judai's friends and loved ones in order to inflict maximum pain on him, and will continue to target them as long as they're made a target for him/her/it.
    You'd expect: Judai's friends to agree to back off and not providing a target for the Big Bad, knowing Judai is The Ace and, with only himself going in to take care of the Big Bad, he has the best chance of doing so while cutting off the Bad's biggest advantage over him.
    Instead: They completely ignore Judai's pleas to this fact, dive in with him, and die off one by one as they become sitting ducks for the Big Bad.
    • Yet again when Judai is facing Yubel, (this one will make more sense if you have played the card game). See, Yubel has a card that allows his opponent to choose a card to put in her hand. Meanwhile Judai has finally found a way to defeat Yubel's nigh invicible monster with his Over 9000 one. He equipped a magic card that allows him to bypass the ablity that has caused him so much grief. So he then has to choose one of Yubel's cards to put in her hand.
      You'd Expect: Judai to pick Grinder Golem (Which is useless to her at this point), or even Super Polymerization (Although Yubel would probably pull out some BS fusion).
      Instead: He picks Mystical Space Typhoon. A card that destroys Magic cards. Such as the one that is stopping Judai from LOSING. Yubel (predictably) does destroy it and Judai is in an even WORSE position.
• In Mamotte Shugogetten, the hero Tasuke looks into a ring and gets a guardian spirit from it because of his purity of heart. A legend that his dad sent along with the ring said that something like this would happen. Of course, she causes him lots of trouble by doing things like destroying his school, locking him up at Christmas, etc. He receives more gifts like this via the mail from his traveling dad. They have legends that say if someone with a pure heart does something or other, some spirit will appear, etc.
  You'd Expect He'd remember the legend of the ring and therefore count all these legends as true, being careful to avoid doing the stuff that would activate them.
  Instead He does exactly what is required to activate those legends. He repeats this mistake twice. Once the spirit inside has repeatedly tried to get him to pay attention to only her, and the other time the spirit's only job is to create "trials" for her master, really just making life more difficult on him.
• Dragonball Z, Vegeta, while effortlessly defeating Imperfect Cell, acknowledges Cell's last transformation.
  You'd expect that he would acknowledge his son Trunks' warnings, considering that he knows a great deal about Cell, and annihilate the evil alien while he still had the chance and prevent the destruction of the world as well as thousands of lives.
  Instead he beats the crap out of Trunks and then allows Cell to transform into his ultra-powerful One Winged Angel form because of his massive overconfidence. Cell proceeds to promptly beat the crap out of Vegeta, Trunks, and anybody who stands in his way at that point, threatening the entire world with his power.
  • In the Frieza saga Goku splits a magic bean (the beans that can cure any wound except for death) in two parts, so that Gohan and Kuririn can both have their part. They are fully recovered, even despite eating just half a bean.
    You'd expect that from that point on they'd actually split any magic bean into two so that they have double the limited supplies of magic beans without having any drawbacks.
    Instead no one splits a magic bean ever again...
  • The Full-Power Super Saiyan (FPSSJ) means that by remaining transformed as a SSJ for extended periods of time the users can conserve their energy consumption much better than any other form of SSJ, thus they become stronger in training than any other form of SSJ would make them. While the FPSSJ users Goku and Gohan exit the training room in this state Vegeta and Trunks notice how genius this kind of training is, Vegeta even comments about this.
    You'd expect that during the year long training Trunks and Vegeta entered they'd be SSJ all the time, thus not only becoming FPSSJ but they'd be if not stronger at least equally strong as Gohan and Goku.
    Instead Vegeta and Trunks completely forget about the benefits of training as a SSJ all the time, thus even if they trained double the time Goku and Gohan did, they became far weaker.
  • During his fight with Goku, Frieza decides to destroy Planet Namek due the fact that because he can breathe in space, and believes his enemy can't, he hopes to suffocate his increasingly superior enemy.
    You'd expect Goku would immediately remember the fact that during his youth he once travelled 384,403KM to the Moon on his Power Pole to dispose of a murderous Boss Rabbit. At the same time, Frieza would realize the fact he once watched Goku's father Bardock attack a battalion of elite henchman orbiting planet Vegeta.
    Instead Freiza proceeds to annihilate Namek, during which Goku completely forgets that he can breathe in space whilst he desperately tries to escape an explosion that can't possibly harm him.
• In Bleach almost every swordfight will end with one character severely injuring or incapacitating their opponent.
  You'd expect The winner (at least the villains) would finish off the loser, or at the very least, check to make sure they're actually dead.
  Instead The winner will always make some snide comment about how badly the loser was owned, and leave them for dead.
  • Then the series would be over by like, episode 4!
  • One could probably write a book on these moments in Bleach at least that way, something would happen... Aizen, the Big Bad, has finally brought a small contingent of his troops to the battlefield, only to be met by ...an even smaller contingent of the good guys. This leads to one of these moments on both sides. Considering Aizen's goal only to become God, and Soul Society seeks to protect peace, justice, and the American Dead Japanese way, this fight should be sufficiently epic.
    You'd expect The bad guys would immediately swarm the good guys with their superior numbers and unknown abilities. Aizen and his cohorts, being traitors, should have told their forces all about Soul Societies capabilities, and have prepared as such. Alternatively, Soul Society, somehow having gained superior skill since the last time they had their asses handed to them, would put aside their pride and take each match seriously, finishing in as healthy a condition as possible and working as a team when they could. Hell, maybe, after old man Yamamoto temporarily holds Aizen, Gin, and Tousen at bay, everyone goes 100% at the start and takes out the Arrancar before they get the chance to power up and be a problem, or vice versa for Aizen's side.
    Instead Ho-boy, this is a whopper. The bad guys take turns doing their fights, with the stronger troops literally sitting and waiting for their enforcers to finish. They would also not monitor the fights, even as they occur right in front of them, or recall anything about their opponents at all. With only ONE exception, the Good Guys would let their pride hold them back in every single fight. The Shinigami seem to forget that Arrancar are nothing more than fancy hollows, who they have no problems with killing in one blow. Instead, they treat them as they would treat each other in several cases. Example, instead of one shotting Stark's faccion, Captain Ukitake merely toys/plays around with her. He's established as much stronger than her (to the point where he can block her cero with his bare hand). One would think he, one of the eldest and wisest captains who probably kills normal hollows right and left without a care in the world, would kill her in one shot to thin out the herd (and also prevent Stark, the number one Espada, from powering up as an added bonus). Nope. The one exception, Komamura, actually pretended to be deaf to give an excuse to the most egregious offender a chance to repeat his stupidity. Head Captain Yamamoto, who could likely wipe out all enemies in one strike, only steps in after he lets FIVE straight Leiutenants nearly be killed, and complains the entire time. It's like no one has any idea how to fight a war. Of all the things "Titty Kubo" is given credit for, strategy is not one of them.
• In Death Note, Naomi Misora engages in her own attempt to track down Kira after he murders her fiancé. Having deduced that Kira needs both a name and a face to kill his victims, she uses a pseudonym the whole time she's in Japan, even when she meets someone who seems innocent, like high school student Light Yagami. As it turns out, Light is the son of a member of the official investigation team, and offers to help Naomi join them - if she gives him her personal information. He is inhumanly persuasive, but even so...
  You'd expect that Naomi, a former FBI agent who is respected by the world's top detective, would keep using her pseudonym, because she has no idea who or where Kira is and could become his next victim easily.
  Instead she gives Light her real name, even apologizing for using a pseudonym when they first met. Of course, as the viewers already know, Light is Kira, and 40 seconds later Naomi is as good as dead.
  Light (thinks): God, this woman is stupid!! I can't believe she fell for this. If she hadn't insisted on the task force and just talked to the police, Kira would've been caught... Instead, now she's saved his life.

  • Please remember that Naomi is under an ENORMOUS amount of emotional trauma at the time. It is not surprising that she slips up in her excitement to join L in defeating Kira and getting revenge.
  • In the second episode of Death Note, Interpol makes a broadcast wherein "L", the greatest detective ever, announces that he will be taking the Kira cases. More importantly, he does this while giving his real name and showing his face for what is supposed to be the first time ever, and is practically daring Kira to kill him right then and there. There is something suspiciously fishy about this.
    You'd expect: Light realize this was likely to be a trap or probe of sorts and avoid killing the man. Or, if the temptation is too strong, do some research on the name and face to check if its falsified first and then kill him at a later date (for extra points, arrange it so that his blood splatter reads "Nice try, idiots.")
    Instead: He writes his name in the Death Note right then and there and, big surprise, it was a trap. Now, not only did L figure out his MO and limitations, but he pinpointed his location. Way to go, dumbass.
    Furthermore: both English and Japanese (as the languages of the broadcast) have disadvantages that would deter anybody in Light's position from doing this. In Japanese, the broadcast suggests that Kira is somewhere in Japan, because it claims to be an international broadcast but it is not speaking in English, which the Death Note's instructions were in. In English, it's suggesting it is indeed international, but then that would tell Light that L doesn't have proof.
    However: it's well explained post-broadcast (and it's fairly easy to understand, having seen what we have thus far of Light's God complex) that Light was blinded by pride - "L"'s insults hit very close to home, prompting Light to do something stupid - it's a slip-up, and Light chastises himself for it afterwards for being so stupid and falling for the obvious trap.
    • This troper faintly recalls that the broadcast was in English with a Japanese interpreter (what would probably have been the case with a real international broadcast), but she can't check the manga and is not too sure if she remembers correctly. Anyone else?
    • Yeah, that's what happens in the manga. Also in the Movie, with Lind L. Tailor being an american actor voiced over by a Japanese presenter. I dunno about the anime, though...
    • Plus Lind L. Tailor in the film isn't killed simply for calling Kira evil, but for bashing him without making his valid points first, only made during the 40 seconds. If Master Knight were Kira, especially in the films where the Kira persona was born out of frustration with the justice system, he too would be annoyed and probably wouldn't see the obvious trap. He doesn't even agree with Kira's methods and he's already annoyed with L's methods because they feel like troll attacks.
  • After his first failed attempt to kill Near in Death Note, Light Yagami sends the Death Note to Teru Mikami, a definite Kira supporter, with instructions on it.
    
    • You'd expect: Light to send a message to Mikami to hide a page of the Death Note on his person, considering he must have had Kiyomi Takada do the same herself. This would help him handle emergencies, the number of which had lately been high enough for Light to be tempted to kill Sayu with the watch trick.
      
    • Instead: He does not. This is clear from the fact that Mikami has to go to the bank a second time in a single day in the first place to kill Takada, leading to Kira's defeat.
  • Light, still being a student, has been keeping his Death Note activities in the afternoon to late evening. L comments upon this, suggesting Kira is a student (correct, to his investigation team, which includes Light's father, who promptly inform Light.
    • You Would Think: Light would try and dissuade the notion by suggesting that it is just a coincidence and many people may only be able to attack in the afternoon, not just students, being the Chess Master he is.

    • Instead: He begins writing down names to die in a more spread out fashion that day the night before, leading L to deduce that the Kira has insider information about the investigation and prompting him to lock everyone in the same room together, which forces Light to actually get on the team to keep up with his opponent.
• Happens to Team Rocket on numerous occasions (making this more of a "What Idiots" moment), usually used as an Ass Pull. In "Pokemon Paparazzi" they've successfully captured Pikachu and defeated Ash and Todd.
  • You'd expect - Them to the get the heck out of there.
    Instead - They throw bombs at Ash and Todd and are fooled into posing for a shot, where the bombs blow themselves up, thus defeating them.
  • In another episode, Ash is fighting Misty in the Whirl Islands Tournament. When Misty tries to use her last Pokemon, Psyduck comes out. Ash has his Kingler out on the field. However, Psyduck has a tendency to go into a Psycho rage when it gets a headache.
    You'd Expect Ash to command Kingler to tickle Psyduck (as he acually USED this tactic to defeat Psyduck before), or better yet, knock it into the water (This Psyduck cannot swim).
    Instead- Ash commands Kingler to use Vicegrip. On Psyduck's head. A few seconds later, Ash's face comes in contact with flying crab.
  • You'd Expect: Ash, over his many encounters with Team Rocket, to smart up and realize that their weapons/tools/whatever are more often than not designed to nullify electric attacks.
    Instead: Time and again, Ash sics Pikachu on their asses as a first attack, with unsuccessful results.
    However: There were a few handfuls of occasions that they forget to shock-proof the weapons/tools/whatever, and the shocking works. It's not like Pikachu can do much else helpful.
• While Gundam SEED Destiny is full of Idiot Plot, the most egregious is Lord Djibril, leader of the Atlantic Federation (North America and Britain), getting a new super weapon: the Destroy Gundam.
  You'd expect - He would join forces with his allies (the rest of the Earth Alliance, especially the Eurasian Federation), and put Neo Roanoke (his best pilot) in it.
  Instead - He attacks the Eurasia Federation, which is stopped when Zaft and the Three Ship Alliance destroy the Destroy Gundam, which is piloted by Stella Loussier, who is clearly mentally handicapped. Betraying his most important ally causes nearly all of the rest of his allies (except for the two schmucks in Orb) to join forces with Zaft, basically ending the war. (Just as a side bonus, Djibril's threats of You Have Failed Me and his use of Stellar as the Destroy's pilot help goad Neo into defecting to the Archangel's crew.) Way to go, Djibril!
  • Kira had an argument with Athrun, with his friend defending his right to fight for ZAFT and Kira asking if he'd go so far as to attack ORB due to it getting stolen out of Cagalli's hands, more or less. Athrun vehemently urges Kira to go back to ORB with Cagalli and Lacus to patch things up there.
  • You'd expect - Kira would understand that ZAFT's real enemy is Logos and ORB has been dragged into this by idiots. Hence, if Kira and Cagalli can get ORB to stand down, it would save everyone a lot of trouble and possibly avert much of the stupidity that follows.
  • Instead - Kira doesn't even acknowledge the validity of this idea and keeps on arguing. Then Athrun stops trying to convince Kira this is a good idea. Keep in mind that the last quarter of the series, maybe a little less than that, could have been avoided if they had done that. Jesus Yamato? More like Dumbass Yamato.
• In Oh My Goddess, the heavenly computer Yggdrasil has just lost the contract that was binding Belldandy and Keiichi in the aftermath of the Lord of Terror incident, which the two played a major part in stopping.
  You'd Expect - The Almighty One as supreme ruler of heaven would just flex those authority muscles of his and arrange for a new contract to be made or just allow the two to stay together without a contract, especially since they have just saved the world and heaven, too.
  Instead - He informs Belldandy that she can only stay with Keiichi for three more days (?) and then she must go back to granting wishes. The original contract is eventually restored but still, this guy is supposed to be the ruler of heaven; you'd expect he'd be nicer...
  Justifying note - The anime is built around Norse mythology, where gods aren't omnipotent. The main God just happens to be the boss, because he is the strongest. Besides, he does seem to look the other way while several of his subordinates restore the contract from backup, even though they acknowledge that they're breaking some rules in the process.
  However- Since when do you need omnipotent magic to write a contract? Also, this seems especially cruel since it has been implied that Belldandy is his daughter. And he seems pretty willing to force her to go back to granting people's wishes, even though that really can't be a busy job (how many pure-hearted people can there be). So he can't even bend the rules for his daughter that just managed to save both Heaven and Earth from utter destruction?
  • This troper always interpreted it as him being a typical overprotective father who didn't consider Keiichi worthy of his little girl.
• Hagino in Blue Drop is the commander of an alien battleship who learns about her people's plan to invade the earth, which she is squarely opposed to since the has grown to love the planet and its inhabitants—and one inhabitant in particular: Mari.
  You'd Expect - Hagino puts all of her knowledge and resources on the line to stall the invasion and to save as many people as possible—including herself and the girl she loves. She'd be a greater asset to the Earth's resistance when she's alive, after all.
  Instead - She wastes a lot of time and energy rehearsing a silly school play, because the girl she loves is in it as well. Once the invasion starts, she can't do much more than put on a kamikaze-act to save her girl's city from destruction. Although this is very heroic, it is also very stupid and wasteful. Hagino's people obviously have a lot of trouble thinking clearly when under the influence of hormones, as is also shown in the manga.
  • Not to mention that she ejected her co-pilot against her will, and didn't, you know, eject herself afterwards when the ship had demonstrated quite enough AI to do it by itself. During the manoeuvre, she neither gives any order nor touches any command, it's like she was just there for the ride.
• In Hot Gimmick, a girl named Hatsumi is tasked with getting a pregnancy test for her (decidedly underage) sister, under the premise that it's for her. On the way back however, she bumps into Ryouki, the Manipulative Bastard son of the landlady (who is very traditional and disapproves of teenage sex).
  You'd expect: Hatsumi lies and says "it's for me" or even better "my parents are trying for another child" (they aren't that old).
  Instead: She says "they're for my sister", setting up the blackmail plot of the series.
• In Welcome To The NHK, Satou is given a stash of underage pornography by Yamazaki. Afraid that he himself is becoming a Lolicon, he resolves to improve himself.
  You'd expect: He gets rid of the pornography.
  Instead: He comes up with a plan where he hangs around in the bushes outside a middle school wearing a trenchcoat and looking every inch the creepy paedophile while carrying a camera - the idea being that seeing himself like this will be sufficient impetus to stop his attraction to Lolita-like characters (while keeping the pornography). This won't end well.
  However: Welcome To The NHK's unique selling point could best be described as "it's a Slice Of Life show... and they're all mentally ill", so it's not completely out of character.
  • In a later episode, Satou is invited to a seminar which instantly makes the fact that it's a pyramid scheme obvious (the promotional posters show people in a literal human pyramid), and realizes it's a scam right off the bat.
    You'd Expect: He runs away.
    Instead: He runs away... and still gets talked into joining. When he gets home that night, products in tow, his friends berate him for it. One of them runs to a bookstore and buys a book on pyramid schemes, and studies it for a solution. They find they have the option of returning the items and getting out.
    You'd Expect (Pt. 2): They return the items and claim their refund.
    Instead (Pt. 2): They return the items and claim their refund... and then get talked into buying more products. On the way back, they start talking about how stupid someone would have to be to be involved in a pyramid scheme. They only realize this when the book they had consulted earlier falls out of one of their bags.
• In the Sailor Moon R TV series, Mamoru Chiba starts freaking out after he has a dream where Usagi will die. And not only that, he has it several times (considering the source, it can be seen as mild Mind Rape). All of this takes its toll, and he dumps Usagi to avoid exposing her to danger.
  You'd Expect: Mamoru to eventually tell Usagi straightforwardly that he's got big issues of his own to solve and needs some time out to figure what the hell goes on. Maybe not tell her the content of the dream, but he could at least let her know that the blame's not on her.
  Instead: Not only does Mamoru dump Usagi without any decent explanation, but he actually does everything in his power to push her away for almost 20 episodes straight, sometimes even resorting to borderline psychological abuse (calling her weak, yelling at her, etc.)... and still refusing to tell her why he let her go. The result? - the confused Usagi flickers between being determined to become strong enough to win him back and being so depressed that the enemy takes advantage of her fragile state of mind and almost kills her in episode 69.
• In the Watanagashi arc of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, Keiichi narrowly manages to escape from his friend's Torture Cellar after almost having nails hammered into every joint in his hands. Before he escapes, However, Shion warns him not to come near her if he sees her again. She manages to escape as well and a few days later throws stones at Keiichi's window in the middle of the night.
  You'd Expect: Keiichi would lock all of the doors, stay inside, and call the police, since at this point, she's a full-blown Ax Crazy who's responsible for the murder of four different people.
  Instead: He goes outside and talks to her to find out if she's okay. After giving a few good Evil Laughs, she shows him why this was so stupid and stabs him in the gut. Ironically, this isn't even the thing that does him in this arc. He finally dies from psychological trauma from all the abuse he racked up.
  ** You mean including the anime-only event (Or So I Heard) where that girl is now an Undead and starts hammering nails into his hands again?

  • That IS the "psychological trauma". He reaches Hinamizawa Syndrome level 5 and dies from heart attack caused by his own hallucinations and paranoia.
  • However: The real reason Keiichi goes outside is to give her the doll that he failed to give to Mion, not realizing that she's actually Shion. It's possible that since she'd guilt-tripped him about it in the torture chamber, he may have thought that if he gave it to her, it might get her to calm down.
  • In Onikakushi-hen,Rena and Mion,though mostly Rena,suffered from this. For Rena,Keiichi has been screaming at her and avoiding her for days now. You'd expect: For her to stay away from him at the next sign of a threat.
    Instead: She goes up to him,most likely with her signature machete in hand(or it could have been her school bag,the world may never know),and starts talking to him. Also,this is after he banged her hand into a door at full force.
    However: Rena is known for her loyalty,and often tries to help them at the risk of her safety.

  • In another scene,from the same arc, Mion put tobbaco sauce in Keiichi's ohagi,even after all the incidents with him and Rena. However,she may not have noticed them since she wasn't around them
• B-Ko from Project A Ko has fallen in love with her ditzy classmate C-Ko.
  You'd expect: B-Ko tries to woo C-ko with positive attention, handing out compliments, giving her presents like chocolates or stuffed animals — and eventually asks her if she'd like to date her. Since C-Ko loves cute stuff, approaching her in a cutesy fashion might be the best strategy.
  Instead: B-Ko tries to kill C-Ko's best friend A-Ko, even though it's obvious that C-Ko and A-Ko are not romantically involved. Heck, A-Ko might have even rooted for her friend's new love. And anyway, killing a girl's best buddy might be a bad idea when you want to win over her heart. B-ko has a long history of similar behaviour.
• Mai-HiME: Episode 13, "Night of the Tamayura": Yuuichi and Shiho are out on a date, and they bump into Mai and Reito just as they're about to kiss. He's still struggling to decide whether or not he actually likes Mai "in that way".
  You'd expect: Yuuichi to keep his mouth shut and wait until the end of the festival to ask Mai about what happened...or perhaps confronted her about his feelings, oh, I dunno...eight episodes ago, when Reito wasn't around.
  Instead: He picks the worst possible time to blurt out Mai's name, and breaks two cardinal rules of dating in the process: 1) Never cockblock another guy (especially one of your friends) just as he's about to get some action, and 2) Never confess/imply that you like another girl in front of your date (especially when your date actually loves you, and she gets jealous very easily). Now, Shiho's mad at Mai and refuses to talk to her; and Reito, usually a calm and collected guy, is mad at Yuuichi because he suspects something's going on between the two of them (at this point, there isn't). Nice job breaking them up, "hero".
• In the second season of Full Metal Panic!, Mithril's intelligence department put down a report stating that Sousuke is being wasted as Kaname's bodyguard, causing the South Pacific fleet commander to order captain Testarossa to recall him to full service as the Arbalest's pilot.
  You'd Expect: Mithril to consider the fact that Sousuke has spent the last six months integrated into civilian society and has been solely responsible for a VIP's well-being (not to mention that he's developed a crush on her), and include forewarning and a sensible recall schedule followed by a thorough psychological debriefing and a monitored return to active service to ensure he doesn't break down from the ensuing stress.
  Instead: Over the course of the next 24 hours, Sousuke is promptly ordered out of the mission and permanently banned from contacting Kaname. Once back in Mithril's fold, his CO proceeds to verbally lambast him because she's jealous and he is assigned a new superior officer who further belittles him and uses Training From Hell to retrain him, followed by immediate deployment into an active terrorist attack without any kind of follow-up. To the shock and awe of no one watching, Sousuke suffers a Heroic BSOD shortly after from the resulting stress. What's worse is that The Lambda Drive is dependent on the user's emotional and mental stability to even work, and since this is precisely what Sousuke was recalled for...
  • The first series also has a grand example of this kind of mistake. After participating in a massive joint military operation to capture Gauron, the team proceeds to imprison him aboard their high-tech super submarine.
    You'd Expect: Since Mithril is explicitly stated to be a MERCENARY ORGANIZATION, the two individuals who should have guarded this man would be the only two who wouldn't be motivated by anything other than personal vendetta or duty, particularly Sosuke and either Kalinin or Kurz, whose partner was just injured in battle against him. As long time members of the organization, it is likely they could be trusted to, at the very least, not help Gauron in any way.
    Instead: Sousuke is not put on duty guarding this guy, and instead the job is relegated to two nameless guards who, surprise, surprise, work for Gauron. Cause they are MERCENARIES.
    Please Note: Standard procedure in dealing with dangerous people like Gauron was likely not violated in any way, and killing him, although a extremely smart option, would have been a big no-no. Think "Dark Knight Joker" and how standard procedure failed there. In addition, putting someone with a personal vendetta like Sousuke or Kurz on duty guarding a prisoner with Gauron's known button-pushing abilities is asking for trouble.
• Mahoro from Mahoromatic finds out that her master Suguru participates in a street fight festival. She sets out with Minawa to retrieve him and bring him home safely.
  You'd Expect: Mahoro and Minawa take off for the air and survey the area from there, since you have to fight when you walk the streets. Alternatively, they could simply break the flowers on their heads indicating that they are disqualified, so they won't be bothered by all those baton-swinging morons looking for a brawl.
  Instead: They walk around with the flowers intact on their heads and get distracted by fighting all those apparently brain-damaged locals - which also takes a ridiculous amount of effort, considering they are battle-androids.
  • Also from Mahoromatic: Mahoro keeps confiscating Suguru's Porn Stash, since according to her "dirty thoughts are bad".
    You'd Expect: Suguru makes it clear that he is the master and she is the maid, and she has no right to tell him what he should or should not keep under his bed.
    Instead: Suguru lets Mahoro simply take away his expensive erotic books, even though he sometimes goes to great lengths to obtain a rare issue. Worse, he even allows himself to be scolded by her. Who is the master and who is the maid again?
    • However: It's implied that Suguru was developing significant feelings for Mahoro at that point — if not romantic ones, then ones more akin to a mother/son relationship (as Chizuko points out in the manga.) He may have potentially given up willingly just to keep her happy. That, and she is a battle android and everything; would you want to risk a beatdown for the sake of keeping your porn? At least she doesn't burn it on him.
• In Oniisama E, Mariko makes sure Nanako and her best friend Tomoko miss each other after school. She then tells Tomoko that Nanako doesn't have time to spend with her anymore, since she joined the Sorority.
  You'd Expect: Tomoko calls Nanako the same evening to ask her directly what's up. Seeing how Mariko is openly clingy with regards to Nanako should already have sounded some alarm bells.
  Instead: Tomoko simply decides to believe Mariko without any evidence and goes into instant sulk mode. She even refuses Nanako's phone calls later that evening, not even wondering why Nanako would call her in the first place when she doesn't have time for her.
• In the second Pokemon movie, the villain has just captured Moltres + Ash & co (and Team Rocket) acidentally.
  You'd Expect: The villain to keep Ash and friends imprisoned, or just for kicks, dump them into the sea.
  Instead: He lets them go as he monologues. A few minutes later, his flying base is in ruins and the two birds he captured have escaped. Nice work, moron.
• In Strawberry Panic, sweet, shy, and cutesy Hikari has fallen in love with her older classmate Amane. However, as a result, she is being stalked, harassed, and almost sexually assaulted by a Psycho Lesbian duo who want to get Amane to join the Etoile Election by threatening to harm her.
  You'd Expect: Hikari and/or Amane to report these occurrences to either the school staff or the police.
  Instead: Neither of them do anything, and the evil duo end up nearly raping Hikari twice (necesitating her rescue at the very last minute), and she continues to be stalked and tormented until the end of the series. Not to mention that Amane is more or less bullied into entering the Etoile Election anyway.
  The Result: Two Words: Karma Houdini.
• In Rurouni Kenshin, Kenshin and Shishio are on their last legs. Shishio's 15-minute limit has already elapsed. His right-hand man, Houji, has a rifle.
  You'd Expect: Yumi: "Why Dont Ya Just Shoot Him?"
  Instead: Houji: "I believe in Lord Shishio!!!!!" *throws his gun away*.
  The Result: Shishio: *Man On Fire*
  However: Houji is ridiculously loyal to Shishio, gleefully following him in wish desire to conquer hell. People who really believe in someone tend to be loyal to them as well, so it may not be that much of a stretch to say that's the only way his character would of acted. Doesn't make it less stupid, mind you, but much more understandable.
• During the most recent arc in Naruto The Dragon, Pein has attacked Konoha and is destroying everything in sight. He wants to capture Naruto. One problem: Naruto is away training. Tsunade has to decide what to do.
  You'd Expect Tsunade to keep Naruto away from this mess. He has not finished his training yet and Pein is the person who killed Naruto's mentor, Jiraiya.
  Instead Tsudade asks a frog messenger to get Naruto back to the village! The Village where a death machine wants him and will probably kill him if he engages him. (It would have happened too, if it weren't for the following events......)
  However Another group of ninjas who wants to overthrow Tsunade as leader of the village killed the frog messenger before it could get anywhere. Up until the village was destroyed, Naruto had no clue what was going on, in the village. Conveniently he had just finished his training. Cue a grand level of Bad Ass.
  • This trope retroactively applied to Jiraiya when we learned that Pain/ Nagato and Konan were trained by Jiraiya when they were kids. Pain had the Rinnegan, supposedly the strongest of the Eye powers, first used by the creator of ninjutsu, ninja philosophy, and, supposedly, the freakin' moon!!

You'd Expect Jiraiya would take the kids back to Konoha with him so the village could have all three Eye powers, getting major braggin rights in the ninja world.
Instead Jiraiya leaves them to own devices, and gives nothing to let them get in touch with Konoha. Eventually, Nagato loses one too many best friends to the violence of the ninja world, and gets manipulated by Madara Uchiha and plans to use the Tailed Demons to make the equivalent of an atomic bomb. His quest for the Demons is what brought him to Konoha's doorstep.

• ' The issue of whether to let Naruto fight the Akatsuki had come up before ( Homura and Koharu believed that Naruto should be kept away from the Akatsuki as much as possible, while Tsunade believes Naruto is strong enough to fight them, and if he remains in the village, the Akatsuki will attack it to get him). Furthermore, as this is not the first time Naruto went out to fight the Akatsuki; he fights Deidara in the Gaara arc and defeats Kakuzu in the Hidan and Kakuzu arc, and Naruto had trained in Sage Mode specifically to defeat Pain, Tsunade's decision is not especially surprising.
• In Ranma 1/2, when Akane has been given an unbeatable powerup thanks to a Battle Dougi, Soun and Genma convince Ranma to seduce her, since this would be one way to make the Dougi desert its master. Ranma does, but quickly realizes he's being a Jerkass and stops the charade, allowing his true feelings to surface instead. They're on the verge of kissing...
  You'd Expect: That Soun, Genma, and Nabiki would back off, since they actually want Ranma and Akane to get together conclusively, and allow the scene to reach its expected outcome.
  Instead: Nabiki gleefully lets the Dougi interrupt the moment, and Soun reveals the entire "seduce the Dougi's master" plot to Akane. She does not take it well.
  However: In actuality Nabiki is listening in on the happenings with Kasumi when the suit shows up. And if RANMA can't touch the fucking thing, you expect Nabiki or Kasumi to stop it if it wants to open something? There was something else here before this edit, but it was made of ridiculously stupid fancruft and was excised.
• Again, in Ranma 1/2 Ranma, who has a surplus of Fiances, suddenly has Shampoo, a Fiance he's not interested in, to lose interest in him.
  You'd Expect: That Ranma thanks the gods that something has finally gone right in his life

Instead: He tries to win Shampoo back, not because he's worried about her being brainwashed, but because his ego can't handle being rejected by a woman. Any issues he has involving Shampoo from then on are by deifinition self inflicted. Also to note, he never learns she was brainwashed right until Akane, brainwashed now herself, breaks it up.

• Ranma 1/2, the character of Ranma is a boy who is cursed to transform into a girl everytime he comes into contact with cold water & vice versa with hot water. He is uber-masculine and absolutely hates having his life ruined by these transformations.
  You'd Expect: Every single time he leaves his house he would carry a backpack containing at least a Thermos of hot water, a kettle, a full body anorak and a towel.
  Instead: He leaves his house every morning wearing a short sleeveless vest and without precautions of any kind. This frequently turns out exactly how you would expect.
• Kagome (and to some extent, Inuyasha) from Inuyasha can travel from Feudal Japan to modern times via the Bone-Eater's Well. For a while, shortly after the hunt for the Shikon shards has begun, Kagome took to keeping these shards in a bottle on her desk back home —which the bad guys can't get to, being stuck in the Feudal era.
  You'd Expect: For her to take each new Shikon shard with her back home, put it in the bottle, and assemble the Jewel in a time and location that Naraku has no hope of getting to, and where mythological Japanese beasties are much less numerous and easier to dispatch than in Inuyasha's native time period.
  Instead: She keeps the incomplete Shikon Jewel on her person, making it child's play for Naraku to steal it and keep it, making himself stronger and stronger with each passing minute.
  However: Without the shards, Kagome's chance to go through the Bone-Eater's Well is greatly reduced, so she must have at least one shard with her to make sure she can go back home when needed. Not to mention, if she leaves the bottle in the shrine, it increases the chance of modern Obake reaching there. It's basically a "damned if you don't, damned if you do" settlement.
• In The Daughter Of Twenty Faces, Chiko accompanies the Twenty Faces gang on a trip with a submarine.
  You'd Expect: The captain of the submarine has Chiko frisked just like the grown-ups and makes her leave behind the conspicuous basket she's carrying. Better still: he leaves her ashore, since a submarine is no place for children. Yet even better still would be to only take the people who are needed for the mission, since a submarine tends to be crowded pretty fast.
  Instead: He lets her enter the submarine unchecked. That's really stupid, since Chiko might be a kid, but she still accompanies a troop of known hoodlums.
  However: That was ageism at play, adding to her gender (this is recent post-war, after all), which was probably what Twenty was banking on anyway.
• In CLANNAD, Sunohara has to endure ridiculous amounts of abuse at the high school soccer club.
  You'd Expect: Sunohara takes this up with the school authorities and at least tries to make clear how messed up the soccer club is. Failing that, he could simply join another club outside school, since every Japanese town worth its salt has at least one or two. In the unlikely case that there are none in his town, he could try in a neighboring one. And failing that, he could even try to found his own club. Anything for the love his sport, right?
  Instead: He causes a fight at the high school club, gets thrown out and then even gives up soccer completely, sulking about it for most of the series.
  However: Even if he did tell the authorities, there was a high chance it would be ignored as just an inevitable part of the senpai/kouhai hierarchy; also, the city is so small that there's no hospital, so there being, or someone starting, a soccer club would be strange, especially in a city where the school gets students from all over the country to compete in its sports.
• In Tokyo Mew Mew, Kish figures out that Aoyama can only transform into Blue Knight if Ichigo is in danger.
  You'd Expect: Kish would attack Aoyama, and Aoyama only, since he is in a "I want to have my revenge on the Blue Knight!" rampage.
  Instead: He ignores that vital fact and attacks Ichigo. Failure Ensues.
  However: Wishing for revenge notwithstanding, the previous episode had Kisshu witnessing the Blue Knight unleashing a massive amount of energy. Him attacking Ichigo was to provoke Aoyama into showing off his powers, which Kisshu apparently planned to put in use, as the next episode had him attempting to get Aoyama's spirit. Whether or not he was aware that Aoyama is Deep Blue's host body is unclear, but if he was, this doesn't make the situation any better, as Kisshu essentially ended up assisting his awakening, and he doesn't really trust Deep Blue by this point — he even complains that it's "too early".
• In Ef: A Tale Of Melodies, Mizuki sends Kuze a "letter of challenge", urging him to meet on the school roof in an effort to get him out of his self-inflicted isolation since he discovered he suffers from a terminal heart condition. He indeed shows up.
  You'd Expect: She challenges him in words only to try to make him understand she really loves him and wants to be with him, despite his condition.
  Instead: Mizuki actually pulls off a surprise attack and kicks Kuze hard in the chest, telling him that he "died once" already. Sure enough, Kuze gets a heart attack shortly after.
• Sachiko from Maria-sama Ga Miteru has a hard time when her grandmother, who she loves immensely, becomes terminally ill and winds up in the hospital.
  You'd Expect: Sachiko explains to Yumi why she won't be around school much anymore in the following period, even if she finds it hard to talk about it. After all, Yumi is her beloved soeur and therefore the first and foremost person that she can confide her troubles to, outside family. That way she could have given a Yumi a chance to stand by her emotionally as well.
  Instead: Sachiko tells Yumi nothing and keeps on disappearing without explanation, seemingly conspiring with her cousin Touko, Yumi's biggest rival at the time. This results in quite a bit of emotional turmoil for Yumi, who really has no clue about what is going on.
  • Also in Maria-sama Ga Miteru, first-year student Naito Shouko desperately wants to be a member of the Yamurikai, so she signs up for the tea-party which Yoshino and Yumi hold to find a soeur, since being picked by either one of them would secure her position in that prestigious student council.
    You'd Expect: She concentrates her efforts on one girl, preferably the least popular one (i.e. Yoshino), and tries to woo her into becoming her grande soeur. Since she has quite an impressive appearance her chances would have been rather good.
    Instead: She outright mentions that either one of them is fine, spoiling any chance she might have had to be picked as a soeur.
• In Gakuen Alice, a heartbroken Mikan follows her beloved best friend Hotaru to a weird school filled with supernaturally gifted children. Once she gets there, Hotaru treats her like dirt most of the time.
  You'd Expect: Mikan tries to get out of the school back into the normal world, to forget about Hotaru and mend her broken heart.
  Instead: She sticks around, being the victim of abuse by the school's staff and students and of Hotaru's tsundere tendencies.
  Then again: Love is blind. And of course there wouldn't have been much of a story left if she had done that.
• In Yami No Matsuei, Tsuzuki is pretending to be a casino dealer on a cruise ship. Antagonist Muraki comes over and offers to play poker with Tsuzuki. When asked what they're betting on, Muraki answers, "your body," and proceeds to describe what he would do with Tsuzuki (most of it bleeped out and Tsuzuki acting embarrassed and disgusted, implying sex). However, Muraki never states (and Tsuzuki never asks) what's in it for Tsuzuki if he wins, making it a lose-lose proposition.
  You'd Expect: Tsuzuki to say "Hell no. Do you think I'm stupid? There's nothing in it for me. Go away."
  Instead: Tsuzuki says yes, promptly loses, and gets all whiny and whimpery when Muraki starts feeling him up. He doesn't even have the guts to punch Muraki or push him away.
• In Code Geass R2, shortly before the second battle of Tokyo, Lelouch gets so angry with Suzaku that he wants to punish Suzaku.
  You'd Expect:Lelouch to order Karen to just render Suzaku powerless to make him stuck unable to get torture or death, since Suzaku is seeking punishment for his father's death and Lelouch knows this.
  Instead:Karen's order is to kill Suzaku. Thanks to the Live Geass, this leads to the nuking of the Tokyo settlement, leading to Nunnally supposedly dying. One moment Lelouch would particularly hate and all because of an IQ drop that stands out in his Idiot Ball moments. To be fair here, in the heat of battle Just how much Idiot Plot does R2 have?
  • To be fair, there's no way in hell Suzaku should dodge that attack with a crippled mech that just seconds before couldn't avoid ANY of Kallen's attacks.
  • Then we have two of these moments during the Black Knights' mutiny, Lelouch not being the idiot in either case:
    • First, the Black Knights, on conjecture and word of mouth thanks to a Britannian prince, try to have Zero/Lelouch executed on the spot, and use Kallen to draw him out. Part of the reason is because they believe Zero/Lelouch Geassed them into obeying. Zero/Lelouch just gloats like a maniac instead of Geassing them to cause horrible infighting, causing a third massacre to add to the two he's being held accountable for. The BKs just open fire.
      You'd Expect:the BKs to realize that Zero/Lelouch has his share of morals after all, never Geassed them into obedience, and just offer him the fair trial he deserves.
      Instead:they just declare him dead. All so they can liberate Japan instead of the whole world. Congratulations. You may say hello to a seemingly despotic emperor Lelouch. (They still get far enough away with it though.)
    • Then there's Rolo's Big Damn Heroes moment: he is right there in a Knightmare and has a Geass power capable of stopping the senses of anybody in range, however temporary. He is quite okay with overusing his Geass to save Lelouch, whose life is threatened because of everybody else in the room except for Kallen, but cares too little for anybody else to not think twice of killing them.
      You'd Expect:Rolo to use the Knightmare and his Geass power to wipe those people off the face of the map.
      Instead:take a wild guess. Of course, with Schneizel and Kanon being allowed to live, they get to report Zero/Lelouch escaping; this leads to making sure Rolo has to lose his life to ensure Lelouch's safety. And with them and the Black Knights still alive, Lelouch has to fight through them later on.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: There is this shy, introverted, cowardly, etc. 14 year old boy, one of the few people who can prevent the destruction of the whole human race, whose performance is directly linked to his state of mind.
  You'd Expect: A team of psychologists and/or therapists working to ensure top condition. Extensive psychological evaluation, therapy sessions after battles, supporting friends/colleagues.
  Instead: Left completely alone with his doubts and mental problems, abused by nearly all people, never receiving credit for his accomplishments, being belittled at every possible occasion, being the butt of every malicious joke. It's a complete miracle that it took Shinji 19 episodes to Freak Out
  However: There are two reasons why NERV would need to care about the long-term welfare of their pilots: a) If the pilots cannot be easily replaced. b) Because its the moral thing to do. Neither reason remotely applies here. The pilots are considered to be just a stopgap solution until they can perfect the Dummy Plug autopilots and the Mass Production Evas, and they have an entire classroom full of potential pilot candidates and only three Evas anyway. As for the moral dimension... ahahahahahahaha, we're talking about Gendo Ikari and SEELE here. It is key to the entire plot that they are megalomaniacal sociopathic monsters who are entirely willing to sacrifice the lives of every single person in the world to bring about Instrumentality, even if SEELE and Gendo have different scenarios for what they'll do with it. So long as the Angels keep being defeated, the Powers That Be absolutely do not care how many pilot candidates go insane in the process. Nor do they have any need to.
• The Evangelion have to have cords attached to them for power, and being unplugged and without a power source is a major problem for some episodes.
  You'd Expect: They'd add external battery packs to the Evengelion for every sortie.
  Instead:They do......in one episode, in which they are destroyed and are never rebuilt or mentioned again.
  However: The Eva's have battery packs — but they're only good for five minutes of uptime. These things are major power hogs. Presumably the power cables are hooked up to massive generators in the geo-front.
• Nami from Sora Wo Kakeru Shoujo turns against her sisters after they had been neglecting her obvious depressed state for a while already. The fact that her oldest sister Kazane favors her sister Akiha over her just adds to her feelings of helplessness. It doesn't take long before Nami and Akiha have their first violent confrontation, during which Nami vents her frustration.
  You'd expect: Akiha tries to convince Nami that she and her sisters really do love her and asks her to reconsider what she's doing.
  Instead: Akiha simply tells Nami to shut up, and Nami starts attacking her in full vigor. Smart move, Akiha. This troper can see why Nami hates your guts so much.
• Utawarerumono: A thief (Oboro) breaks into a government fort and attempts to steal medicine for his sick sister.
  You'd expect: A man hunt.
  Instead: Soldiers ride into a nearby village that knows nothing about the crime and demand that they turn over the thief that "they know" is being hidden there, get rowdy, and kill the village leader Tusukuru.
  • The village starts a rebellion for the death of Tusukuru and the later imprisonment of Oboro.
    You'd expect: The emperor to simply crush the rebelling village.
    Instead: He orders the destruction of non-rebellious villages as an example. This of course lead to a full scale rebellion.
• In Chocotto Sister, Choco and her friends find a full-grown panther in a shed.
  You'd expect: They call the police, who have the panther caught and taken care of properly. Feeding a cat that size is near impossible for laymen, for starters.
  Instead: Choco and her friends keep its existence a secret and try to feed it scraps they bring to the shed. The panther, now dubbed "Kuro", then gets itself killed when it crosses the highway after visiting Choco's home. Choco is devastated by it, but c'mon girl—it's your own damn fault. Kuro would have been much safer in a zoo, where you might even have been able to visit it.

• X-Factor, The problem is evident from the outset. Jean Grey comes back from the dead (sorta) without her telepathy and finds that not only are her old teammates at loose ends and Charles Xavier missing; but Magneto was running the latter's school, the X-Men were wanted outlaws, and Mutants had a worse rep than ever. When she gets the old gang together they decide to gather young mutants themselves to train them in safety and away from dangerous influences, but they do not have a Cerebro unit or a telepath to use it.
  You'd expect: The two 'outed' mutants (Hank 'Beast' McCoy and Warren 'Angel' Worthington) would use the former's Avengers contacts and the latter's massive fortune to start up a massive public relations blitz of PSAs along the lines of "Are you Different? Are your children? Call us, we can help." while opening up a nice day-camp/compound well away from New York (w/ regular shuttle service) if security is an issue.
  Instead: They go undercover as a commercial mutant hunting crew (with a full bore advertising blitz) that could be summoned to capture and 'cure' dangerous mutants with menacing (read: newly manifesting and thus out of control) powers, complete with an HQ in the Big Applesauce. Sure you might beat the real lynch mobs to them, but how many will go underground rather than come to you? Please note that Worthington was backing this with his own money, and the world knows he is a Mutie, so this is a P.R. disaster waiting to happen considering how many will be digging from every angle.
  • And, in the same book: Cyclops, having retired from superheroing, is having difficulties with his marriage. Then he gets a phone call telling him the girl he used to be in love with has just come back from the dead.
    You'd expect: That he'd sit down with his wife and explain what's just happened, reassure her that he's determined to make the marriage work, then ask her to come with him to meet the woman he used to date who is also one of his oldest friends. Sure, it would be tense and awkward and might fuel further arguments, but it would still be better than...
    Instead: He makes vague excuses about how he has to go, then runs out in the middle of an argument and doesn't call for several days. By which time his wife and baby son have been kidnapped by supervillains. Whoops. And by the time she reappears, she's turned evil and is trying to destroy Manhattan by using their son as a human sacrifice. Double whoops.
    However: Cyclops' complete inability to express, or possibly even understand, emotions is a long-standing central character trait. Even so, this does rather take the cake.
• Ultimate Fantastic Four: It's the dramatic conclusion of the arc, and Reed Richards is squaring off against Nihil on the Vegas Strip! The tyrant opens his mouth to devour the hero, who stops him by picking up a nearby plasma rifle and wedging it in between his jaws!
  You'd expect: Nihil to do literally anything except what he actually does. Literally anything else.
  Instead: He tries to pull the gun out...by the trigger. It's...not pretty.
• A two-part Darkwing Duck comic story in Disney Adventures: Gizmoduck is about to go pay a visit to fellow Super Power Union member Mr. Wonderful, but just as he's opening the door, he discovers that Mr. Wonderful (whom Darkwing has distrusted throughout the story) is in fact working for F.O.W.L. when he sees him speaking with Steelbeak via videophone.
  You'd expect: Gizmoduck to get out of there without being noticed and go alert Darkwing to tell him he was right.
  Instead: Gizmoduck rushes into the room, preparing to pulverize Mr. Wonderful, who responds to his threat by calling the other members of the Union to come take care of Gizmoduck.
  However: Gizmoduck manages to escape before they show up and go warn Darkwing anyway.
• Y: the Last Man is another tale that starts out with a screwup. Two months after everything on the planet with a Y chromosone drops dead out of the blue, the son of one of the surviving congresscritters (Yorick Brown, the title character) shows up at the White House (he had a vague idea that he inherited whatever immunity he had from his father, no luck).
  You'd expect: The U.S. government would promptly haul Mr. Brown to the most secure place they can reach and gather whatever security/military/police people to track down the following in this order of priority: A) a competent and functioning shrink (odds are this is the worst living case of Survivors Guilt by definition); B) whatever salvigable sperm-bank equipment that can be found, along with a reliable power source (even if they get nothing but X-chromosone sperm, milking him like a cow is a good idea); C) any medical/biotech experts that are remotely qualified to figure out why this boy is still alive and how to duplicate it/him (requistion orders to the effect of "anything they want" to be issued); and D) the guy's girlfriend, last seen in the Australian Outback (he's a romantic and it is better to keep him happy if possible).
  Instead: The send the guy, escorted by one secret agent sort, to a cloning expert that was last seen in Boston before everything went to heck (note again, D.C., and they have to scrounge thier own transportation). Supposedly they were convinced by his arguments concerning being to easy to locate if he were in one spot, even the mother who was probably aware he was pretty hung up on this Beth person.
  However: The decision-makers were not at 100% at that point. The widows of several legislators just tried to shoot thier way into congress, the Secretary of Agriculture President was shaken out of her Heroic BSOD the morning before Yorick showed up and made it to the White House just after he did, they are short-staffed as all get out, and the whole country is on the verge of collapse. Not to mention President Valentine getting advice from someone working on some sort of Batman Gambit to get Yorick's pet monkey to her daughter the cloning expert.
• The much-maligned One More Day arc of Spider-Man involved Aunt May in a coma, after being shot by a gunman following Peter Parker revealing himself to be Spider-Man. Spidey has asked practically every magical/technological superhero he can find to save his aunt's life, many claiming that they either can't or it would be wrong to do so. In a seance, Aunt May revealed that she accepts her death.
  You'd expect Peter to realize that maybe the entire elite cadre of the Marvel universe is right, and let his elderly aunt pass on, surrounded by friends and loved ones. Peter would be hurt, but he has faced personal tragedy in the past and survived.
  Instead He keeps grasping at straws in attempts to save his aunt's life. Eventually, the demonic villain Mephisto shows up and offer's Pete a deal; he'll save Aunt May's life, if Peter and MJ agree to let reality be warped so that they would never be married.
  You'd expect that after being told by a guy who's pretty much a Comics Code-friendly stand-in for Satan that destroying Peter and MJ's marriage would make him very, very happy, Peter would realize the danger of making a deal with the devil (after all, look how well it worked out for Johnny Blaze, or Doctor Doom's mother), and refuse.
  Instead Spidey accepts, and perhaps the biggest Wall Banger in comic history occurs.
• One Superman/Batman team-up featured Doctor Light trying to take down Superman with a magic wand (the rather phallic-looking Satanstaff), explaining that apparently Zatanna's magic has...something to do with light, nobody's really sure what.
  You'd expect he'd place the wand in his hand, point it at Superman, and kill him with it, since Superman is weak against magic. Having done this, he'd nuke Batman, thereby removing two of the most dangerous Justice League members.
  Instead he somehow gives Superman a secondary personality who believes that Superman is trying to kill him. This second personality duly hires a group of backstreet assassins to take out Superman with the Satanstaff, which has somehow found itself at the North Pole. When it looks like it's going to work, Light comments that he used this kind of tactic because he personally is incredibly inept and if he tried the "sensible" way of doing it, he'd lose (even though he ends up doing that anyway). For additional idiocy, he expected the crooks Split-Personality hired to hand over the Satanstaff to him, despite having used it to take down both Superman and Batman (neither of which stuck).
• During the Infinite Crisis a superhero named Risk was one of the many fighting Superboy Prime. In the process he got his right arm torn off.
  You'd expect him to stay far, far away from the guy.
  Instead The next time Prime is on Earth he jumps out at him again with the apparent intent of punching. He promptly has his other arm torn off.

• Rarely does What An Idiot actually work. Tin Cup is one of these cases, where Kevin Costner won't listen to Cheech Marin's advice to play the ball conservatively, and then loses a golf tournament when he doesn't.
  • ...although after Jean Van Der Velde in the 1999 British Open at Carnoustie lost by doing almost the exact same thing (leading by three at the 18th in the final round, he hit a shot behind the stands, resulting in a triple-bogey, and a playoff which he then lost to Paul Lawrie), it seems that either truth is stranger than fiction, or we shouldn't expect as much of fictional characters as we do.
• Minority Report, where a cop who is racing to prevent a murder. He is armed with foreknowledge imagery of the crime, but it stymied when confronted with a row of identical houses.
  You'd expect: He would turn out a siren, loudspeaker, or simply shout out that the police were outside of the building.
  Instead: He takes several seconds to figure the one detail that was different about the correct house (an open door), then quietly races into the building to surprise the murderer.
  • Far more importantly, when that same future-viewing device shows him and several coworkers that he will commit a murder himself, along with a heaping helping of details including the exact time, he runs. I'll grant him that, since the machine saying you will commit a murder is by itself enough to get you arrested and indefinitely cryogenically frozen with apparently no trial. However, what he does next is totally nonsensical.
    You'd expect: He would stay the hell away from wherever the murder was supposed to take place, and continue staying away until twenty minutes before it was supposed to happen, then take a taxi over to headquarters and show up three minutes before he's supposed to kill someone in a completely different location and say "Look, I'm here, not killing anyone, and you didn't have to arrest me for me not to kill someone. Therefore I'm not guilty." Or some variation of the above, the main part being that he avoids doing it and uses the fact that he didn't do it as evidence that he isn't a murderer.
    Instead: Convinced this was a plot to frame him, he goes all-out trying to find out who's responsible, committing many illegal acts. When at the end of the time limit he realizes he is standing outside the very building his future victim is in, charges in and confronts the guy, who turns out to just be a very bribed man who then forces him to shoot him as part of a deal to make his family better off. That's right, in trying to prove his innocence he knowingly charges right into the scene of the crime and nearly commits it. Clearly, he never heard about Self Fulfilling Prophecies. On the other hand, he proves there is no such thing as fate by refusing to kill the man. Not that it works out well for him.
    • Egregious security errors on the part of the headquarters. Access is controlled via retinal scan.
      You'd expect: Once Anderton goes on the lam, they would lock out his retinal scan. Once he's captured and put into lockdown, they'd doubly make sure to lock out his retinal scan, especially since he switched out his eyes.
      Instead: Anderton manages to breach the security of the Temple, using his retinal scan, and steals one of the Pre-cogs. After he's arrested and detained, his wife uses his eye AGAIN to gain access to the jail.
      However: Some fans actually speculate that the second half of this incident is all part of a dream Anderton is experiencing whilst in the suspended animation jail- so noted due to the fact that the guard mentions that "All your dreams come true." Also, to be fair, that's the sort of thing that could readily get lost in the shuffle, at least the first time. The second time is less forgivable.
• Election sees a paranoid teacher put in charge of counting the votes in the class election. Much to his horror, he sees that his least favorite student Tracey Flick has won, but the election was Decided By One Vote.
  You'd expect: He'd simply erase one checkmark for Flick and replace it with one for her opponent. It's not unheard of for someone to change their mind in the voting booth, after all. He also could have just stuffed the papers in his pocket. It's not like they'd frisk him.
  Instead: He casually tosses two votes for Flick into the trash can, taking no effort to disguise or bury the papers they're written on. Naturally, the papers are discovered and his voter fraud is caught.
• Pans Labyrinth sees the normally intelligent and bookish Ofelia given the task to enter a magical room and retrieve a knife that's under the care of a monstrous, sleeping guardian. Said guardian will only remain asleep as long as Ofelia doesn't touch any part of the sumptuous feast that's sitting on the table in front of him.
  You'd expect: That Ofelia would remember every single Fairy Tale she's ever read that featured a situation similar to hers that had gone sour; that she'd remember the admonitions of the very scary-looking faun who'd given her the task, the disturbing, sharp-nailed cenobite-like guardian who is sitting at the end of the table (and the huge pile of children's shoes that is sitting next to him,) and the time limit that she's working under, AND that she would complete her task and get the hell out of there as quickly as her prepubescent legs could carry her.
  Instead: She stops to dawdle long enough to eat two grapes, (while swatting away the fairies who are begging, pleading with her to hurry up) thus awakening the ravenous guardian, which proceeds to chow down on the fairies and then try to eat her as well.
  • I assumed the food had a supernatural (and very strong) "you want to eat me!" spell and Ofelia simply failed her Will Save.
    • This troper did wonder about that, until I discussed the film with a spanish friend, who immediately said "She takes the food because she is hungry"- simply put, Vidal and his people, the fascists, control the food till the people starve and then kill them for wanting to steal it. Like so much else in this film, Ophelia's experience with the pale man is an allegory for the country's situation- a direct parallel is made with Vidal's sumptuous feast earlier in the film. So, this isn't really a case of Ophelia simply being stupid, but more being used to make a point.
    • It's worth remembering that the film also emphasizes the power of righteous disobedience when faced with evil authority figures. Ofelia spends the film working out the right and wrong ways of dealing with the Faun's orders; here, she's still in the wrong.
  • Also in Pans Labyrinth, when Mercedes gives the key of the storage house to Captain Vidal, she confirms (falsely) that it's the only key.
    You'd expect: She would then proceed to tell the partisans she's aiding to bring some explosives or other means to break through the sturdy door.
    Instead: She gives them a duplicate of the key, which they use in their very next raid to steal supplies. This immediately results in Vidal getting suspicious of the person originally in charge of the keys, i.e. Mercedes, and eventually leads to her getting captured, and inches away from horrible torture.
• This seems to be the only reason (barring outright surprise) that Psycho For Hire Anton Chigurh from the film No Country For Old Men is able to kill anyone at all, and it may be possible that a supernatural ability to instill crushing stupidity in otherwise fairly savvy people is why he's done as well as he has. This ranges from garroting a deputy who forgets he has (or should have) a gun, pulling over (in the deputy's car, no change in clothes) and shooting at literally point blank range an old man who may or may not be from the area and know the man who was supposed to be driving (not to mention he doesn't look a damn thing like a policeman). This is while surveying the corpses of a half dozen of their men. You'd think they'd be a little wary. Also, despite a marked ability to fight the Chigurh on his own terms, hero Llewelyn Moss is implied to be killed while drunk and womanizing, despite having issued a challenge the previous day, and knowing Chigurh is capable of easily tracking down the man who tracked him down.
• In Passenger 47 — which, overall, makes perfect sense if it's intended to take place in a parallel universe where everyone is an utter moron — one of the best moments comes when the Hero's Girlfriend is fighting one of the henchmen near the open luggage door of a moving airplane. She's about to fall out the door, clutching at the henchman's pant leg; he reaches desperately for his rifle, lying a few inches away. Finally he gets his fingers on it, gets it in his grip...
  You'd Expect: he might consider, you know, shooting her.
  Instead: he turns the gun around, and hits her with the butt. Guess who ends up falling out of the plane?
• Star Wars: In "Revenge of the Sith" Obi-Wan discovers that Anakin has turned to the Dark Side, fights him and ends with having him without legs and one hand, burning, and sliding into a river of lava.
  You'd think: That he'd kill him (because he's a Sith or for mercy), or at least wait for him to die. Or try to save him, somehow. It would be smarter and probably closer to Jedi morality to do so.
  Instead: He leaves him to a painful death. And has to deal with the consequences.
  However: The novelization justifies this, in that Obi-Wan senses the approach of Palpatine (or at least somebody too dangerous to want to deal with right after the duel—in the junior novelization at least) and figures he doesn't have to finish Anakin off and escape. (Let's not forget that the not-yet-dead Padme is on his ship, as well).
  • The Jedi Council in the prequel trilogy. They find a child who is supposed to bring balance to the Force.
    You'd Think: Being the calm, logical, rational loonies they are, they'd objectively analyze the situation and realize, Hey! Light Side is rocking the good times, man! Balancing the Force would be bad for us!
    Instead: "Well, we'll train him since he's so powerful." Enjoy the afterlife, idiots.
    However: It's clear that Obi Wan is the only one (alive) who believes in the prophecy. The Council allows Anakin to be trained as a final honor to the fallen Qui Gon. Which, come to think of it, is even dumber: All the risks, none of the strength of conviction.
    • Double however: The Expanded Universe explains that the balance is not a Balance Between Good And Evil. The Light Side and Dark Side are not a balance. The prophecy was actually talking about the balance between the Unifying Force and Living Force: which Anakin did fulfil when he killed Palpatine in Return of the Jedi. The Jedi are still idiots for having a prophecy telling them that the Force wasn't in balance and not doing anything about it, though.
    • Triple however: For that matter, if you pay attention, it is clear that "balance in the Force" = "no Darksiders" to Jedi in the films as well. Watch Obi-Wan's final words to Anakin in Ep3 for the most salient example. Even Palpatine himself does not pretend that there is a Balance Between Good And Evil in Star Wars universe when he makes his sellspeeches.
  • Another example of Jedi Idiocy: Anakin approaches Yoda, seeking guidance on his premonition of Padme's death. Anakin is clearly troubled, and by now, he's also well known for his impatience and temper-tantrums.
  • You'd Expect that the wise and compassionate Master Yoda would explain the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies and recommend that Anakin not go to extremes to save the people he cares about. At the very least, he would say something to placate him.
  • Instead Yoda quite callously tells Anakin to let go of everything he loves, never mourning their loss or even missing them. As a result, Anakin stops listening to the Jedi and starts listening to Palpatine.
  • Palpatine in Episode 6. Luke Skywalker has defeated Vader and about to get in the finishing kill, cementing his transition to the dark side.
    • You'd Expect: Palpatine to stand and watch, wait until after the killing blow, and then start making speeches to Luke to make sure he doesn't relapse to the light side.
    • Instead: He basically says "Good, good, kill Vader and then your transition to the dark side will be complete!", Luke realizes what he has almost become before it's too late, and he and Vader kill Palpatine.
• Signs: There is a species of aliens for whom water is a lethal acid.
  You'd Expect that these aliens would stay far away from a planet that's over 70% water. Or, at the very least, they'd stay in their advanced interplanetary spaceships for the duration of the invasion, or they'd wear some sort of environmental suits to protect from the deadly acid that exists in gaseous form in the air and frequently falls from the sky.
  Instead, the aliens invade water-soaked Earth, on foot, naked.
  • You'd Expect that aliens advanced enough to conquer interstellar travel would be somewhat intelligent, or at least technologically superior to humans.
    Instead, these aliens are unarmed (except for gas-shooting talons that require close combat), are outmatched by baseball bats and glasses of water, and are outsmarted by closet doors.
  • Finally, you'd expect that these hydrophobic creatures would finally be repelled in a scheme that makes use of the planet's prodigious water supply.
    Instead, news reports say that the invasion is repelled in the deserts of the Middle East.
• At the end of Night of the Living Dead, Ben goes upstairs to investigate the sound of gunshots and sees a rag-tag group of vigilantes and local policemen blasting away the few remaining zombies.
  You'd Expect Ben to shout to the militia for help and come on out to meet them.
  Instead he stares out the window in a rather emotionless fashion, whereupon a pair of rednecks see him in the window, think he's a zombie, and shoot him, after taking a noticeable amount of time to line up a headshot that he could have easily gotten out of the way of before said redneck pulled the trigger.
  To be fair, he'd just pulled the most stressful all-nighter of his life and probably wasn't quite all there due to trauma and exhaustion.
  Also, it's clearly implied that Ben was shot by the rednecks because he was black, using the zombie invasion as a convenient excuse.
  • Actually interviews with George Romero said there was no Intentional racial undertones or commentary in Ben's treatment throughout the movie and that it was all just Fanon. In fact, Ben's character was originally meant to be played by a white guy until Duane Jones auditoned. It was pretty obvious to this troper that the rednecks shot him for thinking he was a zombie than because he was black.
• Jumper: The main character's a freaking moron. After living it up with his teleportation ability, he encounters a guy who knows what he is and has been following him since a locked-door bank robbery he pulled years ago.
  You'd Expect After escaping, he'd flee far far away. Hide. Keep a low profile. Anything but...
  Instead Return to his hometown (which he hasn't visited since before that robbery), immediately visit his father, then look up an old flame. And then pick a fight with a guy who has a vendetta against him, teleport him to THE VAULT FROM THE SAME GODDAMN BANK ROBBERY THAT TIPPED OFF THE BIG BAD IN THE FIRST PLACE and leave him there. And then is angry when he squeals.
• Iron Man: Tony Stark is being kept alive by an electromagnetic device which is powered by a miniature arc reactor. Eventually, he develops a far more powerful version of said reactor, strong enough not only to power the electromagnet, but also to easily provide energy to his Iron Man suit without running out of juice.
  You'd Expect: Considering it's the only thing keeping him alive, Tony would build at least two or three more of these, in case something goes wrong with the one that's currently installed.
  * Or else, as soon as he got home, he'd simply get surgery to remove the shrapnel near his heart and render the electromagnet in his chest, and the arc reactor powering it, unnecessary.

Instead: He only builds one, which Obadiah Stane, his Treacherous Advisor eventually yanks out of his chest. Tony goes into cardiac arrest and nearly dies before he manages to install the far weaker prototype. He then suits up and fights Stane and his Iron Monger suit, runs out of power at a critical time, and nearly gets killed because of it.
However: These things can explode if handled wrong, and also are composed of ultra-secret proprietary technology that can be easily used to power all sorts of weapons, so the fewer of them that are lying around, the better.

• Nevermind that it could also pretty much obviate the need for weapons, but we all knew Tony Stark is useless anyway.

• Sweeney Todd: Anthony Hope has made a plan to elope with Johanna in order to get her away from Judge Turpin, who seeks to marry her despite the fact that he's raised her as a daughter, and is making his way to Sweeney's barber shop in order to inform him of the plan. Unknown to Anthony, Turpin is paying Sweeney a visit for a shave so that he can seduce Johanna, and Sweeney has murder on his mind for Turpin.
  You'd Expect: Anthony would contact Mrs. Lovett and ask if Sweeney had a customer before barging in, or at least take a moment to look through the goddamn window of the shop before busting in.
  Instead: He busts right into the barber shop, with Judge Turpin right there in the room, in order to inform Sweeney that he's found Johanna and that she has agreed to the plan. Because Judge Turpin is in the room, this means that he has now been informed about it as well, which not only blows Anthony's plan to elope with her straight to hell, but also Sweeney's plan to kill Turpin — and to make matters even worse for them, Judge Turpin then returns home and has poor Johanna sent to Fogg's Asylum for seeking to defy him. And to make things even worse, Sweeney goes from Anti Hero to full on Villain Protagonist as a result of being denied his shot at vengeance. Way to break it, Anthony.

However: Mrs. Lovett (at least in the musical) states that she saw Anthony going into the shop - "I thought the fat's in the fire, that's for sure!" - and did nothing to try to stop or even slow him down. But of course she wouldn't do anything detrimental to her dear Mr. Todd!

• In the Lost In Space movie, the hotshot pilot feels the best course of action was to activate the self-destruct mechanism in order to destroy the alien-infested ship.
  You'd expect: He'd get clear of the blast radius first.
  Instead he sets off the destruction of the ship while they're right next to it, and rather than fly up and away from the exploding ship, he travels along it. This cripples the ship and leaves them stranded on a planet. Nice job Joey.
• In The Dark Knight, the Joker is in the cargo hold of a ship, burning down money. The police know he's there and have the ship well surrounded. Then they hear that the Joker's going to blow up a hospital in an hour.
  You'd Expect: That they'd send some men to evacuate hospitals or disarm the bombs in them, storm the ship, incapacitate the Joker and thus end the madness.
  Instead: They abort the operation, send every policeman to evacuate the hospitals and let the Joker walk away, which almost causes the complete collapse of Gotham into anarchy.
  Except: They didn't have ship surrounded. Gordon was clearly in the initial stages of prepping to deploy his men. For God's sake, they're standing outside the police station, still getting orders when the Joker makes his call.

  • Police procedure as a whole suffered just so the Joker could be scary. Seriously, Leaving the Joker with a single guard, unhandcuffed and not locked up? One thing among many.
    You'd Expect: that a city police department up against a madman who uses dynamite (that he admits is simple and inexpensive) would deploy a bomb unit at some point in time. Hell, even bringing one in from another city would be much cheaper than REBUILDING AN ENTIRE HOSPITAL.
    Instead: They wholly depend on a costumed vigilante who isn't much saner than his archenemy.
    However: Every single one of the bombs, except the ones on Harvey and Rachel, are remote controlled. If the Joker's prepared to remote-detonate his bombs as soon as he sees the bomb squad rolling in, you're kinda stuck.
    Also: The sheer number of explosive charges in the hospital would probably have required a bomb team with Flash-esque speed to disarm in any meaningful amount of time.
    But: How did nobody notice all that dynamite being armed in the first place? It had to take awhile to set up something so extensive, and even if all the bombs were placed in innocuous containers, somebody would/should have noticed something at some point.

• In the Transformers Generation 1 movie, Megatron is stalling Optimus so he can grab a gun to shoot him while Optimus is busy talking instead of executing him. Hot Rod sees this and tries to stop Megatron.
  You'd Expect: Hot Rod shoots the gun, shoots Megatron in the back, or yells at Optimus "He's going for a gun!"
  Instead: He tries to tackle pound-for-pound one of the strongest and most dangerous Decepticons in the series, who easily overcomes him, thereby giving Megatron an Autobot shield from which be can blast Optimus with ease without fear of retaliation (rather than Optimus being able to fire back or potentially shoot Megatron before he can get a shot off). Optimus dies as a result.
  However: Hot Rod is supposed to be the cocky young rookie.
• Star Trek: Nemesis: The Enterprise has been boarded by light-sensitive Remans during a Red Alert, when the ship's lights are dimmed. The Remans are not wearing goggles.
  You'd Expect: Someone to turn the lights up, blinding the Remans and ending that threat.
  Instead: Long, drawn-out running phaser battle throught the corridors of the ship ensues.
  • The baddies want Picard. The good guys beam him over, and the transporters promptly fail. They do, however, have an prototype emergency transporter.
    You'd expect: The good guys to beam over a bomb, use the independant transporters in the shuttles, have Data/a security team with a tech on it take a shuttle and hack their way in, or replicate the emergency transporter.
    Instead: Data jumps for the enemy ship, finds Picard, slaps the transporter on him, then dies in the most pointless Heroic Sacrifice ever.
• A Clockwork Orange: Alex is welcomed into the house of the writer whom he left as a cripple and whose wife he raped and possibily caused her death. The writer doesn't recognize him due to he and his friends using masks by the time of the assault. Additionally, he is in a state in which he can't fight back to any kind of violence.
  You'd expect: Alex would try to make sure the writer absolutely wouldn't recognize him.
  Instead: While on a bath, Alex sings the exact same song he sang while raping the writer's wife, loudly enough for him to listen from the other side of the door.
  Except Alex probably doesn't remember that he sang that song. After all, the rape took place years ago, and it would probably have not been especially noteworthy for him (just another rape out of dozens), whereas the writer was severely traumatised and would have remembered it in meticulous detail.
• Burn Hollywood Burn: A director has seen his film recut by the studio behind his back. He's embarrassed about the finished product and wants to have his name taken off it. The studio heads agree to let him be credited under the standard Director's Guild psuedonym Alan Smithee. The only problem is, the director's real name is Alan Smithee.
  You'd expect: Smithee would change his own name. After all, what kind of reputation could you possibly enjoy when your name is already synonymous with failure?
  Instead: Smithee steals the only existing print of the film and holds it hostage. When the studio refuses to allow him to recut the film the way he wants it, he burns it. Smithee is committed to an insane asylum, and the studio ends up making a profit anyway when they produce a documentary about how Smithee went crazy.
• Jurassic Park: The girl is told that dinosaurs are attracted to sound and movement. The car she's in breaks down, and dinosaurs start moving around it, eventually attacking the car.
  You'd expect: She'd hide in the footwell and be quiet so it would go away.
  Instead: She screams and waves a flashlight.
  However: It should be noted that she's a 12-year-old girl being attacked by a fucking dinosaur. Screaming and panicing is really the only reaction you should expect.
  • The raptors are trying to get in, and Ellie and Grant are struggling to hold the door closed, the gun just out of reach. Lex is busy fixing the parks computer system, and Tim is there with nothing to do.
    You'd expect: He gets the gun for them, or at least helps hold the door.
    Instead: He stands there cheering on his sister, completely ignoring their cries for the gun.
• In the Phantom Of The Opera film, Raul bests the Phantom in a duel.
  You'd expect: He takes advantage of this moment.
  Instead: Immediately goes home to plan a Zany Scheme to catch the Phantom, leaving the Phantom lying there in the snow.

However: The only reason he doesn't kill the Phantom there and then is because Christine tells him not to. She calls to him as he raises the sword for the finishing blow.

• Batman And Robin: Robin has just survived Poison Ivy's Kiss of Death by wearing wax lips.
  You'd expect he'd keep them on, in case she tried it again.
  Instead he pulls them off, remarking that wax lips are "immune to [her] charms".
  You'd expect Ivy would take advantage of Robin removing his only protection against her lips and give him another snog, this one terminal.
  Instead she just shoves him into a pond.
• Superman Returns: Lois Lane is investigating a story about a blackout which seems to have spread from a specific location.
  You'd expect she'd do some research into who lives there before barging into the house, or tell somebody, anybody where she was going, or at least drop off her four year old son somewhere else before going there.
  Instead she goes in without telling a soul, and gets herself and her four year old son held hostage by Lex Luthor.
• Full Metal Jacket: Although R. Lee Ermey defined the Drill Sergent Nasty trope with his character Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the climax at the end of the first half of the film proves that he was a failure in the end. Take "Pvt. Pyle"'s suicide, where Joker finds him in the bahtroom, holding his rifle, and has it fully loaded. His loud shrieking of the Marine Corps Prayer (in the middle of the night, mind you) garners the attention of Gy Sgt. Hartman.
  You'd expect that, upon discovering that the mentally shattered Pyle is holding a fully loaded rifle, he would get ahold of some military police to come and diffuse the situation.
  Instead Hartman taunts and speaks down to him more, even when it's clear that the guy needs serious help. But after asking him, "What is your major mental malfunction? Didn't your parents show you enough love as a child?!", Pyle guns down Hartman.
• Moonraker: James Bond is being all sneaky-like on the eponymous space station when he runs into the Giant Mook, Jaws, from the previous film. Jaws is reknown for toughness and his metal teeth.
  You'd expect That Bond would try hitting a weak spot, evading him, or pull out a fancy gadget to dispose of him.
  Instead He punches Jaws in the teeth. Nice going, James. One connection and a "CLANG" sound, and Bond's hand is in agony.
  However Bond tries again, trying a Groin Attack instead. At least that's a better idea.
  However Again When the blow connects, there's a similar metallic "CLANG" sound. Now Bond's bewildered, confused and in pain. Jaws captures him after this tomfoolery.

• In Harry Potter, the mysterious, almost inhuman Dark Lord Voldemort appears out of nowhere to rally the Wizarding world to his cause of pureblood supremacy.
  You'd Think: Someone, anyone, would try to figure out who this ominous figure is and whether he really is a pureblood wizard, or human for that matter.
  Instead: Blinded by pureblood madness, the Wizarding world lauds him until he's able to infiltrate the government and nearly stage a coup.
  However: It's probable that whenever anyone got close to figuring out Voldemort's real identity they'd mysteriously "disappear." I'd imagine it's not too easy to ask a person like him what his favorite fairy tale was as a child...
  Also: Nazi allegory. Hitler managed to convince Germany of the supremacy of tall, blond Aryans... while being short, dark-haired and Austrian. And the true Aryan's being....not blonde for one thing
  • However: Harry and Co. have known Voldemort's true name (Tom Marvolo Riddle) since Chamber Of Secrets. Half-Blood Prince made it clear that Dumbledore not only knew of Voldemort's dubious origins, he's known since before his first defeat.
    You'd Expect: Dumbledore to use this info to torpedo Voldemort's pureblood support and damage the air of fear and mystery about him.
    Instead: He sits on the info with no explanation whatsoever, only using it to track down the Horcruxes. (Although this may be a case of JKR simply not caring about that detail)
    • Double However: When Harry did mention this in Order of the Phoenix, it was pretty clear that the hardcore wackjobs wouldn't be convinced if he'd had a birth certificate and a DNA sample. The few followers that might accept the truth, like Malfoy and Umbridge, aren't actually that interested in pure-bloodedness, they just want to rule/take petty revenges/get rich. All the rest are too scared or lazy to help.
    • Reverse Double However: Harry spits out this info in the middle of a fight, and then more to taunt the Death Eaters that they were following a phony (and Voldemort that he knew the truth). Easily dismissed as lies coming from their most hated enemy. Now, had Dumbledore made these facts public... as you said, the hardcore zealots like Bellatrix or the political animals like Umbridge or Malfoy wouldn't have batted an eye (though this troper suspects that Malfoy starts looking for an escape route MUCH sooner than he did), many of the people who respected or feared him would look down their noses at them because he'd be "just another halfblood" (because humans can be that stupid.)
  • Another Example: In Wizarding World, Imperius Curse and Polyjuice can be acquired by virtually anyone ignoring the laws. Thus anyone important can be either replaced or controlled.
    You'd Expect: frequent and rigorous controls against such things (for example all ministry personnel forced to perform "finitete incantatem" to reverse Imperius curse and some solution for Polyjuice. Maybe Voldemort and his followers could find a way around this, but this certainly had a chance.)
    Instead: no such thing, which is responsible for half of success for bad guys, and some success for good guys, indicating baddies don't control it, either.
• In the Death Gate series second book, a race of... let's say, invulnerable giant golems, called the Titans, march across the huge planet, asking everyone they meet "Where is the fortress" and flying into Hulk Rage if they receive an answer along the lines of "I don't know". If the answer they get is "Ask that guy" or "Over there" they do just that - ask that guy, or go over there.
  You'd Expect: At least one guy out of thousand queried would have answered along the lines of "At the bottom of the sea" or "inside a volcano" or "on the other side of the world", and then passed the information along to the rest of the population, rendering the Titans relatively harmless even for people who had no idea about the Secret Special Knowledge Lore that controlled them.
  Instead: Nobody does, and most of the world's population is slaughtered, one bunch of morons at a time.

However: Pryan is a vast world, approximately the size of Jupiter, except that it's hollow and people live in its inner surface. Furthermore, it's made clear that there are many, many more civilizations there than the one the story centers around. The chances are that at least some of them did do exactly this when the Tytans came calling. This doesn't happen in the story proper, because everyone already sees them as bloodthirsty monsters, and is terrified out of their minds when they come to ask the question. You get exactly one chance, and if you blow it, they'll slaughter not just you but the entire settlement around you. Being coldly rational under such circumstances is more easily said than done.

• In the novel Dracula, the eponymous Count preys upon innocent Lucy, until the all-knowing Dr Van Helsing arrives. After Lucy dies, returns as a vampire, and is bloodily dispatched by the shaken heroes, Van Helsing and Mina Harker put together the scattered diary records and other clues to discern the villain behind it, and the group bands together to hunt down Dracula.
  You'd expect - With Genre Savvy Van Helsing as their Obi Wan, they'd fully investigate anything and everything going on in and around their group that might be evidence of Dracula messing with them, and keep a close guard with full precautions (garlic, crucifixes, watching each other's sleep in shifts) on every member of their group.
  Instead - They get so focused on gallantly tracking down and destroying Dracula's earth-boxes that they ignore the pleas and warnings of Renfield, despite knowing his connection to the Count, and being chivalrous Victorian chauvinists, leave Mina behind...alone...unprotected...while they do so. When she's suddenly pale, exhausted and shaken by recurring nightmares identical to Lucy's, they conclude that she's just tired from her 'unwomanly' exertions as part of their group. Several times they see a big black bat flapping about and don't realise who it is. Dumbasses.
  • This is lampshaded by Dracula himself in Saberhagen's subversive retelling The Dracula Tape. Dracula confesses that he needed Mina's active assistance to throw Knight Templar Van Helsing and his proteges off his track without anyone (including Mina herself) getting killed, but points out the number of times he could have slaughtered the lot and borne his 'victim' away if he were the beast they hunted.
  • Dracula's not exactly a genius in the story either.
    You'd Expect - After the heroes catch onto what Dracula is and try to ward him off. He'd have the common sense kidnap Lucy away from the bedroom. Finish vamping her then use her to lure Mina away and make her his as well or even better as a distraction to the heroes while he move in on Mina.
    Instead - He leaves Lucy there, giving the heroes a perfect example what vamprisim is and how to kill it (up till Van Helsing's arrival, none of the main characters knew what vampires were and were skeptical when Helsing tried to explain this to them) And thus how to kill him.
    Furthermore - Why didn't he bother to take his brides along with him as well? It obvious the main characters outnumbered him even with his power. More backup would've benefited him greatly during his blood drinking spree.
• Frankenstein, makes this one Older Than Radio. The young scientist, after abandoning his Creature in a panic, goes back to his normal life and stubbornly pretends it never happened, even after mysterious murders begin to crop up all around him. When the monster confronts him and demands he build a mate in exchange for stopping his rampage, Frankenstein later realises the implications and destroys the mate, prompting the enraged Creature to swear to "rob him of his wedding night."
  You'd expect - Frankenstein to realise, after the monster has systematically targeted his family and friends, that it's going to murder his beloved Elizabeth in revenge and either not marry the girl and send her somewhere as safe and as far from him as possible, or keep her under constant guard until the Creature was brought down. (Or, for that matter, just making a small snip when installing the fallopian tubes so as to ensure that there's no progeny.)
  Instead - Frankenstein instantly assumes it's after him, calls in friends with guns to guard his house on said wedding night, and when he's startled out of the marital bed by a noise, arms up and rushes out into the night to confront the Creature, leaving Elizabeth alone and unguarded, with incredibly predictable results.
  However - Frankenstein has been shown throughout to be something of a self-centered, immature dumbass, completely failing to think through the consequences of his actions. Of course, this is just another way of saying he's an idiot...
• In Lord Of The Rings, the Big Bad Sauron can only be killed if one specific ring is thrown into one specific volcano, which happens to be in dead-smack-middle of his realm.
  You'd expect- He'd have guards watching over every inch of it 24/7. All of his best troops, sent in groups of five, with the best armor and weaponry he had.
  Instead- He leaves it completely unguarded, relying on Mordor's hostility alone to protect it while his armies are away. Sure the place stinks, but any really determined heroes can take advantage of the fact that he sent all his minions to battle an army immediately outside his own front door, rather than leaving some to guard Mount Doom. I mean, does it ever occur to him that the attack might be a distraction, because the good guys are outnumbered 10:1, at least.
  However: In the book, it is specifically stated that Sauron couldn't even imagine anyone would be willing to simply walk into Mordor for a small chance of succeeding at giving up that kind of power. He's sort of right, since even Frodo can't do it by his own will in the end. What Sauron knows is, the ring went south from Rivendell, Rivendell being north of pretty much everything. Suddenly, Isildur's Heir and Gandalf become much more powerful, what with the summoning undead hordes and defeating Saruman and the leader of the Nazgul. A hobbit caught in the mountains can be explained away as a "strange bold spy" scouting the passes into Mordor. A small army sets out from Minas Tirith right to the Black Gate. Sauron concludes that Gandalf or Aragorn took the Ring, got arrogant, and thought they could beat him by strength of arms. As was the whole point of Gandalf's strategy, Sauron knows that he must destroy the entire army at all costs, lest the ring-bearer escape. Well, he had to lose somehow, didn't he?
  • However however: Doesn't Sauron know the exact location of the Ring every time someone puts it on? He can see Frodo wear it, and see that Gandalf and Aragorn never do?
    • No, he does not automatically sense Frodo when he wears the Ring. Frodo and Sam puts on the Ring at various occasion without being spotted. It is not until Frodo proclaims ownership of the One Ring that Sauron senses its location. Also, there are a few hints that Galadriel is using her Noldo powers to distract Sauron during the conflict; one might perhaps consider that to be magical jamming of the Big Bad's supernatural perception.
    • Also: the Movie portrayal of The Ring isn't exactly like the movie portrayal of the book. They did make it seem in the film like "oh, Frodo put on the Ring, suddenly all evil rushes to that spot". In reality, Bilbo was able to wear the Ring repeatedly in The Hobbit, but as he wasn't seduced by its power at the time (yet) Sauron hadn't a clue about where it was. It's probably worth mentioning that in the novel, it's implied that you can use the ring to destroy Sauron, but the person using the ring would basically just become Sauron's replacement.
    • Also also: Sauron wasn't a giant eye in the books either, that was more movie magic. He had assumed the form of his physical body and references to the "eye of Sauron" are almost all purely metaphysical. So, no, he would not have suddenly "seen" the ring and locked onto it like a beacon like he did in the film.
• Another Lord Of The Rings one, they have to get to Mordor to destroy the One Ring right?
  You'd Expect: Gandalf to ask the Eagles if they could simply drop them off, destroy the Ring, and be back in time for tea.
  Instead: They go on the epic quest, and suffer many hardships, many of which could be avoided with some common sense...
  Howebver: The point is moot: the Eagles refused to fly into Mordor so long as Sauron was still alive. Given how easily the Eye could have seen them coming, as nothing else save the Nazgul ever actually fly over Mordor, their reasoning makes sense.
• In Lord Of The Rings, Aragorn has recruited a bunch of cursed ghosts whom only he can release from their undeath. They cannot be hurt by anyone. He is in the middle of a World War with Sauron.
  You'd Expect: He'd agree to release them if they destroyed all of Sauron's armies, which they could.
  Instead: He releases them after they won one battle for him. Then he leads an attack on Sauron with only human soldiers. Both those ghost guys would've sure been useful in attacking the Black Gate.
  However: In the books, they don't actually attack anyone, they just scare the sailors into abandoning the black ships. Also, it would probably be a bad idea to lead an army of malevolent ghosts that you're only barely yoking to your will via an ancient pact and sheer willpower into Mordor, given that you would then a) be breaking your pact and b) going up against Sauron, who 1) is at least as strong-willed as you, 2) is possessed of infinitely more experience in controlling the dead, and 3) whom said ghosts once worshiped as a god.
  • More importantly: Expanding on that "breaking your pact" thing, the Dead were only bound to Aragorn- and indeed the living world- because they had broken an oath to help his ancestor win a battle. They're a whole army of The Punishment. Once they had won that one battle for him, their oath was fulfilled and it would have been a major moral lapse for Aragorn to force them to do more, if it was even within his power to do so. It very well might not have been.
• In Mistress of the Catacombs, the main characters have an enemy army landing on the island they are on.
  You'd expect: They would use their massive advantage in warships to crush the enemy fleet as it lands troops.
  Instead: They come up with a plan of confronting the larger force in a field battle, although they wind up negotiating a surrender.
• The Sword Of Truth: The first book revolves around Richard's quest to keep the Big Bad from acquiring and activating an ancient artifact with the potential to destroy--or allow its user to enslave--any or all living beings, at his whim. The evil plan is eventually thwarted because Richard is the only person alive who knows how the artifact works, and he tricks the Big Bad into using it wrong and getting killed. This results in the artifact ending up in Richard's hands, along with gradually revealing that Richard is a natural-born wizard of unimaginable power, the secret heir to an ancient empire, the only person immune to the soul-destroying magic that prevents his love interest from ever experiencing true love, and the one man designated by prophecy with the ability to save the world from the true BigBad, who makes his appearance a few books later. The real Big Bad, Emperor Jagang, has an immense evil army capable of effortlessly crushing all resistance from the free world.
  You'd Expect: Richard would use the artifact to wipe them all out. He's certainly capable of it. He knows how to use it. He's seen the ritual to activate it performed in his presence. He has the artifact and all the necessary magical raw materials in his possession. And he's always going on about how big a threat the bad guys are to everyone who values life, freedom, reason and all the other Objectivist principles he and every single decent character in the series holds dear, and how it's necessary to destroy them at all costs, to avoid throwing the world into a Dark Age of indefinite duration.
  Instead: He forgets all about it. It is never even mentioned as a possible resolution to the impending crisis, until the very end of the series, when it's handwaved away by the sudden discovery that the knowledge Richard had about the artifact was incorrect and would have killed him if he'd used it, which doesn't explain why he never tried to use it before he found this out. (This wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it is if Kahlan wasn't always gushing about how intelligent Richard is.) However, since we're talking about a character who spends pages justifying killing evil pacifists. A lack of rational thought is to be expected.
• Animorphs: In one episode, Jake is taken over by a Yeerk. The rest of the Five Man Band figures this out pretty quickly, so they put him under lock and key in a remote cabin for the three days it takes for the Yeerk to starve without its Kandrona rays, and keep him under constant guard.
  You'd Expect: The Yeerk turns Jake into a housefly and escapes. The Yeerk had full access to Jake's memories, and so would know that this is one of the morphs Jake possesses. A fly would have been small enough to avoid attracting attention, and in the two hours before he has to change back, he could have been several miles away, even at a fly's average speed of 3-4 mph.
  Instead: He attempts to escape as a tiger, but gets lost. He tries a wolf morph, but gets stopped by a rival pack. He tries an ant, but gets thwarted by an enemy colony. He threatens to escape as a flea, but the others point out that he couldn't travel very far as a flea before he had to change back. He never even attempts the fly.
  ** However, the others were watching him & only let the tiger morph even leave the shack as a way of toying with the Yeerk; they could have immediately put a stop to an attempt at the fly morph.
• The plot's progression in The Inheritance Trilogy pretty much relies on What an Idiot moments. For example, the rebellious Varden and their allies the elves are in possession of one of the few remaining dragon eggs, the other ones being held by the evil King Galbatorix. A dragon only hatches when in the presence of the one person who is destined to be its Rider. Naturally, everyone wants a turn hatching the dragon. It should be noted that the elves are essentially all ultra-powerful magic users. Also, the forest of the elves and the stronghold of the rebels are on opposite sides of the map, separated by a vast desert.
  You'd Expect: The Varden uses magic to teleport the egg back and forth between hideouts. While the magic of the elfy forest prevents direct teleportation into its borders, dropping it off a few feet away from the border would work just as well.
  Instead: The elves select their princess Arya to act as egg-courier. Once a year, she crosses all the distance between the two bases, on horseback, with two bodyguard Red Shirts for company, and brings the egg to whoever's turn it is to have it. Thus inviting all manner of trouble. Naturally, the book starts with the elf princess finally getting ambushed by the Big Bad's Dragon and teleporting the egg away just before she gets captured. The egg lands right into the hands of Eragon, farmboy and designated hero, thus allowing the story to begin.
  However: For it to happen any other way would have required Paolini to come up with a plot point he didn't steal from Star Wars. And how try to launch the egg barely half that distance with minimal accuracy almost killed the Elf Chick. And it's not all stolen from Star Wars, he rips off LOTR and D&D too.
• Shakespeare is not immune to this. At the end of Act 3, Scene 3, Hamlet has just received confirmation that his uncle Claudius did, in fact, kill Hamlet's father. Claudius is in a confessional, alone, praying desperately to God for repentance and mercy. He does not see Hamlet enter, dagger unsheathed, seeing the time ripe to avenge his father's death. Minor hindrance: as a man in prayer, if killed at that instance, Claudius would go to heaven. However, Claudius' prayer is insincere; he cannot feel remorse for his brother's murder.
  You'd expect: Hamlet, like the son of a king, would alert Claudius out of his prayer and provoke him to a fight. When Claudius is enraged, swearing, and other damnable things, Hamlet skewers him. Since Hamlet would be King himself if he killed Claudius, it doesn't matter in the least what anyone else thinks, so why doesn't he do it?
  Instead: Hamlet reasons that killing Claudius and sending him to heaven is not fair for Claudius killing King Hamlet and sending him to hell (having not received absolution for his sins.) He sits there for a while explaining this out to himself, and then, a Momma's Boy to the very end, he decides he shouldn't keep Queen Gertrude waiting and goes out to meet her. This results directly in Polonius' death, Ophelia's suicide, and, well, you know the rest.
  However: This move was clearly intended to be seen as idiotic. Kid, just Kill Him Already!
  • In the comedy faux-sequel Fortinbras, Hamlet's ghost is tortured for this inaction by being trapped in a stone pillar until he gets the other ghosts to act out the killings he should have made.
• In Anne McCaffrey's Lyon's Pride, eldest son Isthian is ambushed and nearly killed by an unknown member of his expedition to explore an abandoned Hiver ship, after he's used all his personal energy to send a distress call to his Grandfather - also his boss - about what they found (viable Hiver eggs).
  You'd Think: Once Thian's grandmother (The Rowan, a Prime Talent stronger than every other T-rating in the entire fleet put together, save Thian) arrives on the scene, they'd simply round up the team members and grill them 'til they find out which one of them is trying to hide something, then either peel his mind like an orange to find the real story or, at the very least, ship him back to the relevant Naval authorities.
  Instead: The assailant goes unknown for days while Thian recuperates (and his equally powerful younger brother and stronger mother arrive - making four talents on board capable of taking the ship apart by themselves), while they catch the occasional untrackable flash of hatred towards them. And they catch the guy with some insane stunt they'd used on a Jerk Ass cousin years ago. This troper still isn't sure what actually happened. The best I can describe it is that the brothers let out one giant mental shout, which pinged off the assassin's guilty conscience, causing him to lock up and fall over. Or something like that.
  However: The Talents of this series have a truly severe case of Mind Over Manners: they are trained and brought up under the strictest morals regarding their Psychic Powers. They have to be. Just imagine, after all, would could happen if a guy who can fling massive starships across interstellar distances went rogue. The very idea of performing a Mind Probe that intrudes beyond a person's "surface thoughts" is utterly abhorrent to them. Although it's implied that some Talents do this as a form of background check, those seem to be a select few, and they only do so under very specific circumstances.
• In the sixth Apprentice Adept book, Unicorn Point, wayward Tyke Bombs Flach and Nepe had just been located, after four years in hiding, meaning the parallel deals with the Contrary Citizens and Adverse Adepts for access to the all-powerful Oracle and Book of Magic were back in force.
  You'd Think: The bad guys, who were only weeks away from irrevocably seizing power from Stile/Blue and their allies when the kids disappeared (as part of Stile/Blue's desperation plan to stall for time), would simply slap some sort of tracker on the kids to keep them from disappearing again, and simply count on their opponent's Lawful Stupid nature to deliver them the win.
  Instead: The bad guys threaten Flach and Nepe with harm towards their mothers if they didn't follow their instructions. A threat which completely negated their deal with Mach and Bane (who happened to be, at this point, the single most dangerous people on both planets). Bad enough... but they also seemed to forget that Mach and Bane managed to finally track the kids down by listening in on their mental connection (The older men have a similar connection) and never dreamed that it would occur to Flach to do the same thing to get word out about the death threat. He did. And with Mach and Bane freed from their word, they quickly acted against the Contrary/Adverse forces, which threw the question of control back open, and ultimately resulting in the good guys permanently turning the tide. All because they couldn't trust a couple of eight year-olds to behave for a month or so.
• In Stephen King's Firestarter, there comes a point where the sadistic John Rainbird is in the loft of a barn, holding Charlie hostage, threatening to kill her if Andy tries to use his mental domination abilities on him. Andy risks it and gives Rainbird a command he is forced to obey.
  You'd Expect: Andy would say "sleep" (when he does this earlier in the book, the victim falls into a coma for six months) or something similar. There is, for example, no reason to believe that "die" isn't a valid command.
  Instead: Andy commands Rainbird to jump out of the loft, which, while severely injuring him, isn't fatal. And while it does save Charlie, it gives Rainbird the opportunity to mortally wound Andy with his gun.

However: Andy had been drugged up by the company for however long he and Charlie had been held hostage, and had just recently cleaned himself of the drug and had access to his powers.\\

• In HP Lovecraft's novella "The Whisperer in Darkness," the main character has been communicating with a scientist living in remote Vermont who has found significant evidence of an invading, hostile alien species. His friend has constantly urged him not to visit, in case the aliens decide to take care of the other person who knows about him, and their correspondence has gone astray before, they suspect due to spies. They know that the aliens have human contacts, too, having obtained a recording of an evil religious ceremony in which both a human and an inhuman voice can be clearly heard. The protagonist receives a series of increasingly frantic and terrified letters from his friend, saying that his house was being attacked in the night, when suddenly a letter comes going on about how he'd misjudged these guys and they're really nice after all. It urges him to come visit Vermont, and suggests he take a train that would get in at 10 at night and bring every bit of the evidence he has with him, along with all the letters.
  • Not to mention, the last telegram the narrator receives has the last name of the man he'd been corresponding with ("Akely" misspelled as "Akeley"). How often does a person MISSPELL THEIR OWN NAME?!?!

You'd Expect: He's be a little suspicious about the whole "sudden total reversal of attitude" thing, and maybe about the "bring all the proof to the heart of their territory" bit too, and not go. Or at least make copies of everything he possibly could, and then some.
Instead: His only concession to even remote sanity is to take a train that gets in during the daytime. He brings every single freaking thing, goes along with some total stranger who says he's "a friend" of a guy who's pretty much a hermit and sounds like the dude in the recording, and generally ignores every single modicum of common sense he has. Results are predictable.

• The author actually remarked on this and felt the gullibility of the narrator was the weakest point of the story. But - then again - how many of you have met college professors who act in a similarly idiotic manner despite being very intelligent people?

• The Aeneid: Aeneas makes a pitstop on the road to his destiny to fool around, If You Know What I Mean, with Queen Dido. The gods give him a wake-up call and tell him to the lead out.
  You'd Expect: Aeneas to explain to Dido "It's not you, baby, it's my destiny. If it were up to me, I would stick around, but the gods told me I have to go, so I don't have a choice."
  Instead: He's afraid of how she'll react if he breaks up with her, so he tries sneaking away to his ship without her noticing! Thereby creating the very Woman Scorned he was trying to avoid.
  However, when she confronts him about it, he does explain it to her. And she does react very, very badly.
• In The Lake House, Ethan Kane's attempt at killing Max is...odd, to say the least
  You'd expect: He'd just suffocate her, considering that he has just demonstrated that he is strong enough to do this.
  Instead: He pushes her out of a window, and is dragged out with her. She flies to safety, while he falls to his demise.
• From Discworld: Though her Crowning Moment Of Awesome comes later in the book, Magrat has such a moment in Lords and Ladies. One of the young wannabe witches has been wounded by an elf's arrow, and while recovering Granny Weatherwax has her placed in the castle surrounded by iron to protect her from the elves.
  You'd Expect: Magrat to just listen to Granny and leave things be, considering the older woman has spent the entire last three books being right about damn near everything, and there's already an unmistakably elven arrow sticking out of the younger witch.
  Instead: Magrat spontaneously declares she knows better, because she's about to be queen and "everyone knows Elves are nice," and has the iron barriers removed from the room, which of course ends up attracting the psychotic elves to the castle.
  However: Magrat has a nasty habit of not listening to Granny when it's important - especially when what Granny is saying directly contradicts her very naïve, romantic ideals of how the world should be. Add to this the fact that witches naturally don't get along very well, and the fact that Magrat is trying to convince everyone - including herself - that she's not a silly, soppy girl to be bossed around all the time, and this makes that series of events more understandable (although still pretty stupid, in hindsight). Plus, it's stated a few times that hardly anyone knows the truth about elves any more, although it's implied that Nanny Ogg and Granny were intending to inform Magrat at some future date when she'd lost enough naïvete that they could trust her not to run off to the nearest stone circle and let the "wonderful" elves back in.
  • Also, in Magrat's defense, Granny can be a bit of a bitch about things.

• Cold Case, "Justice". The brother of the girl you raped is holding you at gunpoint.
  You'd expect: That you are acting meek as hell until you get the gun away from him. You are a psychopath, not stupid.
  Instead: You call his sister a great lay that asked for it. Really, at this point it is not so much a murder as it is assisted suicide.
  • However, it's strongly implied in the episode that the detectives were actually goading the brother into giving a fake version of events to make it sound more like self-defense than murder because they didn't want to arrest the brother for the killing.
• Malcolm In The Middle, "The Reunion" (the one with Christopher "Doc Brown" Lloyd in a guest role): Lois sees her extended family about to take their family portrait without her.
  You'd expect: That she would yell "Stop!" or something like that to allow her time to get into shot, especially since she wanted to be part of it, and had been spending the last few minutes trying to find some high-heels to replace her sneakers. Besides, even with the photographer's quick second take, she still had about 9-10 seconds to do something.
  Instead: Those 9-10 seconds pass without Lois saying anything, and she spends the rest of the reunion crying in her room's closet.
  However: Lois was shocked that her in-laws had gone to such lengths to keep her out of the picture (which was why she wasn't in it, since one sister-in-law had told her to get the high heels), after she had spent the whole episode being nice to them, which they were pretending to reciprocate (again, the shoes). She goes off to cry when, after the picture, the sisters-in-law come over to Lois (who can barely speak) and cruelly mock her.
• Two Flight 29 Down characters decide not to kill a pig, just because another tells them: "We have to survive on this island, but we also have to live with ourselves after we're rescued." First, in any context, it's the Lost version of throwing your first caught fish back into the river just because it bit your nose instead of your hook and line. Second, you do have to live with yourselves after you get rescued, but you have to survive on this island first. Yet, instead of the two characters calling the other character on this comment, the pig gets to run free.
  • Probably for the best, since people that stupid deserve to die, at least for the good of removing themselves from the gene pool.
• Heroes: At the end of Season 1, the Company captures Sylar. They inject him with a virus that suppresses his powers. That's a pretty smart idea. But then there's the question of what to do with him afterwards.
  You'd expect - That they would keep him in a cell in one of their facilities, with armed guards, scientists to run tests on him, and security systems that would work to prevent his escape, and inform them if he succeeded.
  Instead - They put him in a shack in the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing to prevent him from just walking out, and only one guard. She proceeds to have her own What An Idiot moment when she carefully demonstrates her powers of illusion to the psychotic power-stealing serial killer, then does nothing as he acts threateningly towards her and shortly attacks and kills her. Finally, the Company apparently has no way of telling whether Sylar has escaped, as he is able to walk away from the shack for three days without any pursuit.
  • Also Heroes, Season 2: Peter stands before a giant door, with a needlessly complicated lock mechanism, behind which lies a deadly virus he's intent on destroying. The bad guy claims to have the same goal, but really wants Peter to open the vault so he can release the virus. Peter has been warned repeatedly by people he logically should trust, including Hiro —who helped him save New York before.
    You'd expect - Since Peter can phase through walls (and he knows this having done it earlier) he would just do so. By leaving everyone else outside, and destroying the virus himself, he could have completely eliminated trust as a factor.
    Instead - He uses telekinesis on the lock, almost squeezing his brain out in the process. Because phasing through the door would have been less interesting.
  • Again in Season 3: Tracy and Nathan come to see Suresh, and Tracy shows Suresh her power. Suresh knocks them out with a sedative, but they're not the idiots. Later on, Nathan and Tracy are strapped to operating tables. When Mohinder says he feels like he's becoming a monster, Tracy offers her hand for comfort...
    You'd expect- Mohinder to use the marvelous intellect he used in acquiring a degree to deduce that Tracy isn't just trying to comfort him.
    Instead - Dr. Suresh reaches out for Tracy's hand and falls to the floor actually surprised when she freezes his forearm.
  • And a little earlier with Mohinder, when he developed a serum that he thinks will give people super powers a few hours earlier, from studying a woman with one of the worst powers on the show.
    You'd expect - Him to hold onto it, perform some animal tests, try and get samples from other people, employ as close a semblance to the scientific method as is possible when dealing with a super-power serum.
    Instead - He goes out into a bad part of town and stabs himself in the arm with a needle containing the substance he just invented, falls unconscious, and wakes up to get mugged. Fortunately he just happened to develop a power that would help with this situation, as opposed to any power that isn't defensive, or which requires practice to use. Then he started mutating into a bug.
    Even worse is that immediately beforehand he has a brief speech about animal subjects, how to get funding, etc. but then he just goes and Professor Guinea Pigs it up anyway.
    However, shortly before he uses the serum, Maya convinced him to destroy the serum because in her eyes, superpowers can be a curse. He's down in the harbor to throw it in the ocean, but then he feels tempted by its potential power. If he took it back to continue researching it, he'd lose Maya's trust and she might decide to destroy it herself, so the only way he can find out if it really works, he decides, is to test it on himself before he changes his mind again.
    • Mohinder pretty much embodies this trope, really.
  • The ending to Season 3, to the point of being a Wall Banger. Sylar kills Nathan, but is then tranq'ed. Everyone is now in a room with an unconsious Sylar and a dead Nathan.
    You'd expect - HRG to say "Hey, Claire has magic bring-dead-people-back-to-life blood. I should know, seeing as it did so for me. Let's inject Nathan's body with some and toss Sylar into a wood chipper."
    Instead - The group decideds to have Matt hypnotize Sylar into being Nathan and just pretend that Sylar is dead.. Naturally, the Volume 5/Season 4 preview implies that this "solution" won't last for very long.
• Law And Order Special Victims Unit: The team finds a homeless girl and got her to give up information about her "father", a wanted criminal who has killed several people and is still on the loose after a woman is murdered.
  You'd Expect: They'd put her in the protective custody of the police and keep her safe in case her "father" wants to kill her for ratting on him.
  Instead: They release her to the head of a shelter with no one there to guard her. Predictably, her "father" comes back for the kid and kills both her and the head of the shelter. Saw that one coming.
  • This show seems to be made of this trope. In one episode, some family member comes barging in worried about their relative.
    You'd Expect: They'd learn to shut up, or at the very least hide traumatizing information.
    Instead: They clearly don't. I say one episode, because naming one would be a disservice to all of the other times this happens. Invariably, the family member will either go into an unrecoverable funk, go batsh-t insane, or do something else impossibly stupid.
• In Robin Hood, episode "Brothers in Arms": Guy of Gisborne confiscates a necklace from a woman so that he has a gift for Marian. Robin Hood tells Marian about its origin.
  You'd expect: Marian to return the necklace to its owner herself, and tell Guy that she does not accept stolen gifts. (She could have easily come up with an excuse of how she found out. Say: "I have overheard it at the market, asked the woman, and it was indeed hers.")
  Instead: Marian gives the necklace to Robin, who returns it to its owner. Predictably, Sir Guy finds out and starts suspecting that Marian spies for Robin Hood. This starts the chain of events which ends with Marian being forced to promise to marry Guy, to dispel the suspicion.
• In the penultimate episode of Roots, one slave character (this troper forgets his name, possibly Virgil) discovers a thief in a food storage shed who messed the place up and runs off when discovered.
  You'd expect: "Virgil" to go to his masters and tell them about the thief to minimize the risk of being beaten when the thief runs off.
  Instead: Virgil nonchalantly tries to clean up the mess whereupon his masters come across the scene seconds later. They don't believe him when he (with surprisingly little emotion, though this could be a "deer in the headlights" type reaction) tells them about the thief and he is promptly used as a punching bag by his handlers.
  However: Since the slave was familiar with his masters, he could have known that he wouldn't be believed if he did try to tell them, and so decided to simply clean up the mess and hope no one would notice (or that he wouldn't be blamed if someone did).
• The Xindi in their arc of Star Trek Enterprise season 3. They hate humans, they are building an Earth Shattering Kaboom gun. Now at this point they have five major advantages: Their enemy has no clue they exist, they have four hundred years to refine their prototype, they have allies who give them technology and can see the future, they live in a remote and inaccessible part of space, and they can travel nigh-instantaneously across the universe. Now they complete a Small Country Shattering Kaboom prototype of their weapon, and...
  You'd Expect: They test it on some out of the way moon or planet no one will miss. Then they use the data from that test to refine their final version, teleport it over to Earth, and destroy the planet with one shot.
  Instead: They test the prototype on Earth itself. Earth immediately sends The Enterprise after them, which: finds them, destroys their next prototype, convinces them not to blow up Earth (causing a racial civil war in the process), and murders their future-seeing allies. Good job, Xindi! You failed only because of your own stupidity.
  • But Truth In Television in some ways. It wouldn't be the first time a weapon was rushed into combat before it was perfected, or before an overwhelming strike was prepared (eg. the first tanks at the Battle of the Somme). This is especially the case with the Xindi who are shown to be riven by internal politics - maybe the first strike was a way of 'committing' those Xindi who might have second thoughts about xenocide.
    • WWI had been underway for years before the Somme, its not like there was an element of surprise to throw away. And given that the Xindi had centuries of lead time, and Earth no inkling of any threat at all, it's hard to see how internal obstructionism would have posed enough of a threat to the plan to make it worth "blowing their wad" just to speed things along.
• Star Trek The Next Generation: In "Datalore", the Enterprise happens to find Lore, an identical twin robot of Data. At one point, when Data and Lore are alone, Lore reveals himself to be an Evil Twin by incapacitating Data (turning him off), then claims that he is Data and that Lore attacked him, and he disabled Lore in response.
  You'd think: That the very blatantly obvious fact that the two are identical would make Picard (who is The Captain after all) suspicious, and he would ask Lore something only Data would know to find out if he was really Data or not. Even if he didn't bother with any of that, you'd think he'd at least be sure to keep a careful eye on Lore and take any advice from him with a grain of salt, just in case.
  Instead: Picard implicitly trusts Lore, believing he's Data, even when he does things that Data wouldn't do (seriously, isn't the fact that he manages to stop the crystalline entity's attack on the Enterprise just by talking to it suspicious in and of itself?). Even worse, Wesley explicitly tries to point out the possibility to Picard, and Picard for some reason ignores him. Sure, he's The Wesley, but that does mean he has a tendency to be right. The only reason everyone on the Enterprise didn't die due to Picard's appalling stupidity is that The Wesley goes against orders and manages to save the day. Just for the record, Kirk would never have made that mistake.
  • However: Being The Wesley means you're right because the writers say so, and it especially means that you will be persecuted for it. Reality will contort in whatever way is necessary for this to happen, even smart people like Picard will grab the Idiot Ball in order to accommodate your vindication.
• Star Trek Voyager: An earlier episode of The Next Generation had a wormhole with a stable entry point on one side (in the Alpha Quadrant), and a constantly jumping exit point on the other (which included parts of the Delta Quadrant). Voyager finds this wormhole. They also find the Ferengi that were stranded in the Delta Quadrant, who set themselves up as gods among a bronze-age people.
  You'd Expect: They make a beeline for the wormhole, or at least grab the Ferengi first and then hightail it back to the Alpha Quadrant, letting 5 or 6 generations to undo all the damage that was done.
  Instead: They try to fix all the meddling of the Ferengi, who escape and even destroy the Wormhole.
  • Hardly the worst. How about the first episode. After having been transported to the Delta Quadrant by some powerful array. At the end they are being stared down by Kazon who want to capture the array, and Janeway does not want the Kazon to obtain such a powerful device.
    You'd Expect: Voyager sets a bomb in the array set to go off the moment they leave. Alternatively, not even bother to set a bomb, realizing that the only race dumber than the Kazon are the race whose hat is stupidity, and just let fail to figure out how to operate a device that can move ships to the other end of the galaxy nearly instantaneously.
    Instead: They blow it up. And the crew only raises token complaints about being stranded 70+ years from home for no reason.
• Dark Angel: Max comes across a transgenic who can see into the future. At one point he tells Max several actions he can see her taking in the near future, then is shocked when he sees her die as a result of these actions.
  You'd Expect: The guy would warn Max that she'll die if she does all the stuff he just told her about.
  Instead: He keeps quiet and just starts crying, leaving Max to assume she's supposed to do what he just said. He ends up dying because of his own idiocy when he throws himself in front of the bullet she would have taken.
• Greek: The main sorority house is given a national consultant, Lizzi, who's there to oversee the house's recovery after a newspaper scandal takes them down a few pegs. In a slightly passive-aggressive fashion at the first meeting, she intimates that she does have disciplinary power over the house.
  You'd Expect: Casey, the president, would at least work with Lizzi, or even confront her when some decisions Lizzi makes might not get the house's damaged social standing back.
  Instead: Casey sulks silently to Ashleigh and lets Lizzi run roughshod over the house without actual protest. What power she does have is that which goes behind Lizzi's back, with nearly disastrous consequences...nearly every time.
  However: The house prides its sisters on being very ladylike, plus Casey is an interim president after the former president was stripped of her presidency thanks to the scandal. Said former president was incredibly good at manipulating and beating down the willpower of the sisters, especially Casey.
• The Tenth Kingdom: After losing the magic Traveling mirror to the Huntsman and being filled with despair at the thought of never being able to go home again, Wolf takes Virginia out to dinner to cheer her up. He rents a gorgeous tux, composes music especially for her, gives her a romantic carriage ride with lots of flowers, rents an entire restaurant just for them, and then after a long, huge dinner and a wonderful first kiss, gives her a magical singing engagement ring to propose marriage.
  You'd Expect: Moved by these many gestures of devotion, true love, and romance, Virginia would realize Wolf really does love her and wish to give her anything to bring her happiness. Tearfully, she accepts the ring, agrees to marry him, and starts believing in happy endings again.
  Instead: She demands to know how Wolf paid for all of it. Once he admits he won a huge gambling jackpot and spent it on this instead of buying the mirror she throws a huge tantrum, insists Wolf is selfish and doesn't love her, then stalks out, leaving him to howl alone in the restaurant. All this accomplishes is setting up for Wolf's Face Heel Turn and Virginia's Rock Bottom moment just before the mirror gets broken.
  • Just because the character doesn't desire what the viewer might desire desn't make them an idiot.
  • Nah, Virginia wasn't the idiot, it was Wolf. When she confronts him...
    You'd Expect: Wolf to do his conman routine, lie through his teeth, and say half of Kissing Town owes him favors.
    Instead: See above. The one time in the miniseries he doesn't even try to come up with a good lie.
  • The main characters have the Huntsman temporarily indisposed through a series of lucky shots.
    You'd Expect: Them to at least think about finishing off a man who murdered hundreds of innocent people in cold blood. Or at the very least to take his magic crossbow.
    Instead: They simply run off, ensuring that he comes after them again as soon as he recovers.

However: Wolf *does* consider killing him, but gets voted down.

• Charmed: The Charmed Ones are helping the half-demon Cole redeem himself by preparing a potion to remove his demon side and make him fully human. They complete the potion, but before he gets to drink it, Cole's former mentor shows up and uses magic to take control of his demonic side, forcing him to kill someone the sisters were protecting.
  You'd Expect: them to give him the potion, to make sure this doesn't happen again.
  Instead: They destroy the potion in anger and end their friendship. Obviously, this does not end well.
• Doctor Who, a '70s example. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs episode 3, Sarah Jane decides to take pictures of a chained, sedated Tyrannosaurus Rex.
  You'd Expect: her to keep pictures to a minimum, not use flashes or anything that could annoy the dinosaur, and keep to the small antechamber of the main hanger where the dinosaur is held.
  Instead: she jams on that flash hard as hell, and even when the dinosaur stirs, she just waltzes in to take close-ups, naturally awakening the dinosaur, which breaks the chains. She's hit by a falling 2x4 while screamingly trying to open the unaccountably locked exit door, as the dinosaur bashes the anteroom with its tail.
• Doctor Who, new series example: In The Sound Of Drums, the Doctor, Martha, and Jack find the TARDIS, which has been turned into a Paradox Machine by the Master. The Doctor states that it's too dangerous to do anything with the Machine until it's activated and he can find out what the exact paradox is that the Machine will create.
  You'd Expect: someone, most probably Jack with his extensive military background, to suggest the following plan of action: Split up. The Doctor and Martha can go and try to take care of the Master before the Machine activates. Meanwhile, Jack goes off on his own to try to find a way to destroy the Machine after it activates in case the Doctor and Martha fail (as seen, it only takes a machine gun to destroy the Machine). All Jack needs to do is find a weapon, get back to the TARDIS, lock himself in, and destroy the Machine when it goes critical. He's not taking any risks in either going off on his own or being in the proximity of the Machine when he destroys it, since he can't die. Regardless of which of the two groups succeeds, the paradox fails and the Master is defeated.
  Instead: all three go off to try to stop the Master. They fail miserably.
• Power Rangers SPD "Recognition": The Rangers begin the day by dealing with Wootox, an alien criminal who has wiped out ninety planets. After trashing his giant robot, the rangers would normally confine him into a special card for transportation purposes. As an added twist, the big dog Kreuger decides to have Wootox brought in for questioning. The alien, additionally, is physically unable to speak English, and his words are translated by a neck-worn Electronic translator. So...
  You'd Expect: The rangers card him off to jail. Given his threat level, the rangers should only be dealing with him when he's in a jail cell.
  Instead: The rangers cart him off to jail unconfined. Only one ranger, Sky the Blue Ranger, gets the job of showing him to his cell. Unfortunately, Wootox unveils his ability to switch bodies with others by using it on Sky. The alien escapes, destroys the translator, and leaves Sky temporarily in no position to thwart the villain. By the time the switcheroo's exposed, Wootox has even used his new body to authorize Sky's execution! If this was a visibly formidable criminal, SPD would have gone down.
  • Also in Power Rangers: an episode of Jungle Fury has the rangers trapped in a TV game show. Unfortunately, the show is being run by the bad guys and epitomizes The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard, with half the team being eliminated from the game for petty rules violations. (Example: The Monster Of The Week team buzzes in, the monster flubs the question, and he's out. It goes to Theo and he gets it right - but is still out for being second.) The host offers the rangers the chance to give up some of their winnings for a trip to Hawaii.
    You'd Expect: The rangers remember that not only are cash prizes at stake, but also the fate of the human race, so they shut up and keep playing.
    Instead: Lily jumps at the chance, claiming she's always wanted to go to Hawaii. For that, she not only loses some cash from the pot, but she's out of the game as well.
• Supernatural: It's a long story involving nutcases, mandroids, shapeshifters and hostage situations so let's just cut to the chase here, shall we? They're looking for the shifter, the police have got them (and Ronald - the nutcase taking everyone hostage) surrounded, a guard has a heart attack and needs to leave, Sam is going to get the guard out while Dean is going to take out the shifter but then Ronald gets hit with a bullet and dies.
  You'd Expect: them to carry on as normal. Dean can take out the shifter and Sam can let the guard out, seeing as how he's not the one wanted for almost every crime under the sun.
  Instead: Sam tells Dean to help the guard out while he goes after the shifter. Dean gets his face on the 11 O'Clock News, they're even more royally screwed to hell than they were before and, in the next episode, Sam/the show has the gall to blame Dean for all of it.
• Smallville: In Pariah, Alicia Baker is suspect of attacking both Lana and Jason. Even Clark Kent suspects her, so he talks to her after the second attack. Unknown to him, Alicia was locked in an interrogation room with the sheriff during the second attack, so she couldn't have done it.
  You'd Expect: that Alicia would at least tell Clark that she was in fact locked with the sheriff in during that second attack, thus taking away every trace of suspicion towards her.
  Instead: Alicia makes a demand that means that she and Clark will go to the sheriff and explain everything, but only if Clark agrees that he will tell about his powers to the sheriff. Naturally he can't do that, so he still suspects Alicia, only to later talk with the sheriff himself, only to find Alicia dead by the time he wanted to apologize to her.
  • Also in Smallville, the S8 finale has both Chloe and Jimmy looking like morons. The pair of them have just found the insensate Davis at the Luthorcorp plant and take him back to Watchtower. Previously, Davis had shown tendencies toward being jealously protective of Chloe and "unable to live without her". He had also, both as Davis and as Doomsday, murdered several people, to control his transformations and in defense of Chloe. Also, Jimmy had just had Clark's secret revealed to him, after saving Clark from kryptonite.

You'd Expect: Jimmy and Chloe to talk about the entire ordeal later, perhaps when Davis isn't lying three feet away from them and only mildly unconscious.

Instead: Chloe loudly blabs to Jimmy that she didn't go off with Davis for him at all, and it was all "to protect Clark". Jim—er, Henry's Heroic Sacrifice is the only thing that stops Chloe from being shish-kebabed by an angry, jealous Davis.

• In My Name Is Earl the warden has been giving Earl certificates for time off his sentence in exchange for helping out with various prison problems. When the time finally comes that Earl has earned enough time off that he can leave, the panics, because he's too incompetent without Earl there.
  You' expect: The warden to just let Earl go, and possibly offer him a job as a general adviser or something.
  Instead: He panics, tears up Earls certificates, and expects him to just go on for the rest of his sentence. He throws him in solitary when he gets (understandably) pissed.
  However: The warden is always portrayed as a incompetent, panicky sort of guy (he only got the job because his wife is the governor), so at least this "What An Idiot" moment is in line with the character.
• Season 16 of Survivor had a particularly stunning example of this. Near the endgame, there were five contestants left - 1 male (Erik) and 4 females. Erik won the Immunity Challenge, so the four women plotted to get him to willingly surrender his immunity. They sent one of their group (Natalie) to convince him that he needed to give it up to "redeem" himself. Natalie herself lampshades the absurdity of the scheme possibly succeeding, stating "who would fall for that?"
  You'd expect: Erik to tell Natalie exactly where to stick her request, knowing that this game is based upon the concept of "Looking out for #1"
  Instead: He gives her the immunity necklace just before the elimination vote. No points if you guess what happened next.
  • His move was so epically stupid that James, the guy known for getting eliminated while sitting on two (yes, two) hidden immunity idols, stated that Erik had beaten him for the title of "dumbest Survivor ever."
• Season 13, episode 2 of The Amazing Race. The detour is a choice between a beach task and going to a shipyard to track down a specific container. Kelly & Christy chose the former, and after completing the task reread the wrong clue, which told them to find the container.
  You'd expect: That the words "container" and "yard", the apparent lack of such things, or at least several other teams coming and going in front of them without making any effort to find a container would tip them off really quick that they might have read the wrong clue. Or hell, just realise that something is wrong and reread the clue to check.
  Instead: Kelly & Christy look for that container in the water, on the sand, they use their hands to dig for it, they decide that all the other teams giving them weird looks and leaving are just "giving up", and the fun goes on and on and on...
• Season 1, episode 9 of The Amazing Race has even more mind-boggling examples. The first one is delivered by Team Guido: they've managed to beat Nancy and Emily to the Fast Forward, an in-game device that allows a team to skip all other tasks and proceed straight to the Pit Stop.
  You'd expect: Team Guido to hop on the next passing cab or train to the Pit Stop to arrive there in first place with a good lead on the other teams.
  Instead: They decide to rest in a hotel, confident that their lead is big enough to lounge around for a couple of hours. This causes them to arrive at the Pit Stop in dead last place. Yes, behind even Nancy and Emily, the very team they beat for the Fast Forward.
  • The sole reason Team Guido wasn't eliminated in the same episode is because Nancy and Emily suffered from an even bigger What An Idiot moment. After failing to get the Fast Forward, they have to return to completing the usual tasks. The Detour gives them a choice between searching streets for a specially-marked private car to drive to their next destination or take a slower-moving bus to the same destination. They opt for the first choice, which while relying heavily on luck (one team was able to find their car quickly, but another one was unable to), is understandable enough. Unfortunately, luck is not on their side, and they're on the verge of giving up after several minutes of fruitless searching.
    You'd expect: Them to do what Kevin and Drew did earlier in the episode and switch choices. It isn't too hard to find a bus.
    Instead: They give up entirely on the Detour and take a taxi to the destination. Even though they arrive hours ahead of Team Guido at the Pit Stop, they're penalized 24 hours for failing to complete the Detour, which is enough to eliminate them. Since Team Guido was the team everyone wanted to see eliminated and Nancy and Emily the ones everyone wanted to see come out ahead, the latter's gaffe was all the more heart-wrenching. The urge to shout at the TV screen, "Just take the damn bus!" was overwhelming.
    Justifying Note: Nancy and Emily were fatigued and exhausted by that point and certain they were in last place; they had no way of knowing that another team would screw up even more badly than them, much less that team being Team Guido. It probably seemed like a good idea at that time to just get it over with as quickly as possible. Still, there's a reason for the popularity of the motto "Never give up!".
• Many contestants on The Price Is Right attempting to play the Clock Game.
  You'd expect: The contestant lowers his/her bid when Bob or Drew says "lower", and raises it when Bob or Drew says "higher". Binary search if the contestant is smart.
  Instead: "$599!" "Lower!" "$600!" "Lower!" "$610!" "Lower!"
• Many of the subjects on Locked Up Abroad do this to themselves, when thinking about the mistakes they made. Such as the guy who was going to pick up a packet of drugs from the post office. That's pretty stupid itself, but he took drugs before he went to pick up the package.
• Many FamilyFeud and Family Fortunes contestants tend to pick up the Idiot Ball, especially during the toss-up and Fast Money. To name a few examples:
  • "During what month of pregnancy does a woman begin to look pregnant?"
    You'd expect: A number between 1 and 9.
    Instead: "September."
  • "Name a yellow fruit."
    You'd expect: Lemon, banana, pineapple, etc.
    Instead: "Orange."
  • "An animal with three letters in its name."
    You'd expect: Dog, cat, etc.
    Instead: "Alligator."
• In the much-reviled Battlestar Galactica episode "The Woman King," Helo meets this doctor working in the Galactica's refugee camp who's prejudiced against Sagittarons. His reason for this is almost understandable, in a way, since he's a doctor and all and the vast majority of Sagittarons apparently fear modern medicine, so the antagonism is mutual.
  You'd expect: He would have a hearty respect for the Sagittarons who go against their people's superstitions and seek his care, since that's clearly the only thing about the Sags that he finds objectionable. In time, word of mouth from the patients he's cured might start to bring other Sagittarons around on the idea.
  Instead: He develops a policy of murdering Sagittarons who seek treatment from him. Yes, that is correct: he hates Sagittarons for being suspicious of doctors (and for their refusal to participate in the rebellion on New Caprica), and his plan for correcting this is to kill all the ones that aren't suspicious of doctors, which coincidentally would give all the other Sagittarons a pretty damn good reason to be suspicious of doctors, wouldn't it? I guess his fancy Colonial med school neglected to teach him anything about basic logic.
• Veronica Mars: In Season 3, a group of Straw Feminists are accusing the Hearst University fraternities of committing the serial rapes on campus and demanding that they all be kicked off of campus. Eventually, one "victim" claims she was raped by a frat boy, but it's revealed she made the whole thing up at the behest of the Straw Feminists.
  You'd expect: The school board would stop listening to the activists' extreme demands altogether and take no action against the fraternities until there is actual concrete proof that they are involved.
  Instead: They go ahead and vote the frats off campus anyway. The dean of students reinstates them not because they're innocent (or at least innocent until proven guilty), but because the school's largest booster threatens to pull his donations.
• Veronica Mars: The murderer of Lilly Kane has been found and is in jail awaiting justice.
  You'd expect: Logan Echolls, who was in love with Lilly and hates the murderer, to do everything he can to see the murderer behind bars.
  Instead: In an extraordinarily misguided act of "loyalty" to his dead girlfriend, Logan destroys the evidence and the murderer goes free.
  * Veronica Mars: Veronica is neck and neck with another student with another student for having the highest GPA in her class, which will earn her the Kane Scholarship, allowing her to attend Stanford on the Kane family's dime.
  You'd expect: She'd do her best to earn the scholarship, and only sacrifice it if something truly important got in her way.
  Instead: She deliberately walks out on a test, thereby forfeiting the scholarship, in order to see the verdict in Lilly's murder trial. Just to hear the verdict read, mind you — there was no way she could affect the outcome, and the verdict would be all over the news seconds later. I guess she decided it was worth giving up her dream of going to Stanford just to see the look in the murderer's eyes when he was convicted ... oh, except that, due to her boyfriend's idiocy, he got acquitted.

• Pecos Bill. On their wedding day, his bride, Sluefoot Sue, tried to ride his horse Widow Maker. Widow Maker throws her off, and her bustle starts bouncing her higher and higher, and she can't stop herself because her wedding dress was made to be removed by her husband, and she's not carrying her knife to her wedding.
  You'd Expect: Pecos, being a sharpshooter supreme and a true master of the lasso, would either shoot out the bustle to stop her bouncing, or throw a rope around his beloved and brake her down. This is, after all, a man who can shoot a star from the sky or rope and ride a cyclone.
  Instead: Pecos shoots her so she won't have to suffer a horrible death from thirst. What An Idiot indeed.
  Additonally: It should be noted that the Disney version spares Sue that ignominious fate, instead having her bounce to the moon. (Coyotes started howling at the moon out of sympathy for Bill). You'd think Disney would've given him a happier ending.
  Also: Depending on the version of the tale, Bill does try roping her, and misses. For example, in the Disney version Pecos tries to lasso her but his horse Widowmaker steps on the rope and keeps from succeeding.
    Close Mythology 

• Warhammer 40000: in Angron's (one of the Emperor's sons) backstory, he was an escaped gladiator who was trapped with his army of fellow escaped gladiators (a la Spartacus) with a huge army coming at him. The battle barge of the Emperor is in orbit, and the Emperor could probably destroy the army and rescue Angron's comrades in no time.
  You'd expect The emperor destroys the enemy army. Orbital fire, Space Marines, doing it personally. You've got a lot of options when you have spaceships, troops, guns and enough Psychic Powers to make the gods themselves run screaming.
  Instead he rescues Angron (against his will) and retreats with his ship, thus killing most of the gladiators and giving Angron a grudge that would later cause him to join the traitor legions.
  • In a similar manner, at the start of Warlord Ghazkhull's first invasion of Armageddon, the planet was under the rule of Overlord Herman Von Strab, who was once described as, and I quote, “the greatest waste of flesh and bone born in the last five hundred years.” So, the Orks start to invade.
    You'd expect Von Strab to pull his finger out and deal with it the moment the first hulk appeared - after all these are the Orks, who live for war and aren't really sure how their death-spitting war machines work anyway.
    Instead Von Strab sits on his backside, doing absolutely nothing as the Orks happily establish a beachhead. He then sends his army piecemeal to be happily slaughtered, sent out a legion of titans unaided to try and destroy them, then virus bombs the major cities when the Orks get to them. Needless to say, when the Space Marines turn up, they are not happy.
    So the idiot becomes a war criminal, and is turfed off of Armageddon.
    And then He comes back in the Second War, supported by the Orks, and claims he has divine right to rule over Armageddon. I'm really not sure why anyone believed him, but some did.

• Mortal Kombat Armageddon: It's learned in the game's Konquest mode that in the future (as it starts out thousands of years in the past), the Mortal Kombat tournament will become corrupted and its competitors will grow more numerous and gain more power from tapping into more of the fabric of reality than normal, thus causing The End Of The World As We Know It with their infighting.
  You'd Expect the Elder Gods to stop the tournament right then and there, thus preventing it from being the crux of the future apocalypse.
  Instead they use a lowly Edenian god to start a Xanatos Roulette, in the hopes of stopping the Armageddon just when it begins to start. Naturally, it backfires on them.
• Freespace 2: A few missions into the campaign, the GTVA discovers an ancient artificial subspace portal deep in the previously strategically uninteresting Gamma Draconis system, near the site of an ambush by the returning-after-thirty-years Big Bad Shivans. The Alliance is intrigued by this discovery, because of the potential for the technology to be used to revive the collapsed subspace link to Earth, as well as the strategically-important resources that lie in the nebula beyond the portal. Unfortunately, as they explore the other side, they discover Shivans, Shivans, more Shivans, even more Shivans, and ummm... Lots of Shivans, which eventually ends up in an encounter with a massive juggernaut warship, designated Sathanas, that could rip apart an entire fleet in two minutes.
  You'd expect The Alliance to gather as much data as they can about the ancient portal, immediately retreat from the nebula, deactivate the portal, blow up the subspace link, and live happily ever after. The Shivans, of course, are those Omnicidal Maniacs from thirty years ago who had that invulnerable SD Lucifer with the Wave Motion Gun that was used to level all of the cities in the planet of Vasuda, killing four billion Vasudans and rendering the planet uninhabitable. They nearly reached Earth, if not for the heroic efforts of Alliance pilots who managed to destroy the Lucifer in subspace, which caused the collapse of the subspace link to Earth (which is why they're interested in the portal technology).
  Instead The Alliance:
  • Kept trying to fight the Shivans inside an unknown system. Never mind that this is a species that almost wiped out everyone in this side of the galaxy thirty years ago. To heck with the fact that it was the Shivans who destroyed the Ancients, a race that had a huge empire and was way more advanced than the Terrans and the Vasudans combined (the only reason the latter two species still exist is Ancient transcripts which described the weakness of the SD Lucifer). Despite the fact that the only response to a threat this species knows is more...and bigger.
  • When the biggest ship came around, they tried to fight it by sending a pilot to scan/destroy subsystems while it's being distracted by a way smaller ship that it could swat like a fly.
  • The Big Battle took place in a heavily populated system deep in Alliance territory. They didn't fight the Big Bad in their backyard, they had it break into the house and into the master's bedroom (please excuse the really bad analogy).
  • Logically, with the Shivans having sent their biggest, they could only respond with more. The GTVA still went back inside the nebula. And did they get more. They retreat, but now it's too late. The only option left is to evacuate an entire star system and blow up the jump nodes leading to the Shivan-infested systems to seal them off.
  • In one of the final missions, the Colossus, the biggest and most Bad Ass ship in the Alliance, was engaged by one of the Shivan juggernauts. It has taken down one successfully, but that ship was crippled and this one isn't. Despite Command finally evolving some common sense, ordering the Colossus to retreat, they refused, saying that they didn't want the mission to be in vain or something or other. While the 30,000 officers and crew on that ship might have wanted to be remembered for the Heroic Sacrifice, they'll mostly be remembered for being a bunch of morons.
  • Ironically, a dialogue between your wingmen in the first nebula mission (i.e. the beginning of the disaster) heavily foreshadows the later events. Yes, even the Red Shirts think this is a bad idea. One wingman even told the other to shut up, that they're just following orders and they can't do anything about it!

    Wingman A: ...I never signed on for hunting Shivans!

    Wingman B: Don't kid yourself, we're the ones being hunted, pilot.

    Wingman C: Command should shut down that portal and send the Aquitaine back to Deneb. We've got no business being out here!

    Wingman D: If Command needs your opinion they'll promote you to Admiral, now shut up and focus.

  • The creepiest thing though, is that empires have been defeated by "lesser" civilizations through a series of bad tactical decisions like this. Ergo, Truth In Television.
    However: They did set up a system where they could destroy the gate at a moment's notice, and they did have the Colossus up their sleeves. They were also much more powerful than they were at the time of last war, having multiple Lucifer-type weapons on all of their capital ships, as well as being on their way to retrofitting Shivan fighters. Meanwhile, the Shivans didn't seem to have advanced much at all, (the only technological advantage Shivans had were having better accuracy with their intra-system jumps) and at the start, the GTVA were succeeding in pushing them back. Their final plan to defeat the Sanathas actually succeed completely, resulting in the loss of only the initial ship, and the accidental loss of a ship sent to buy time. The fact that they had more, and that the gate could not be closed, wasn't something that Command could really be expected to anticipate. They were also secretly waiting for the results of Bosch's attempts at communication.
  • Corollary: The stealth mission to scan the Sathanas is basically a tactical analysis; where the Sathanas is strong, where it's weak, where best to shoot it, etc. In fact, a mere visual on the thing confirms that it follows a common Shivan design philosophy, in that its main guns are all up front, in sharp contrast to the Colossus and all the newer Terran designs that spread their weapons out to engage multiple smaller ships (the new Vasudan designs seem to be a halfway point between the two. Admiral Bosch's Iceni is both at the same time, with ridiculous guns for its size in a wide arc.) Armed with this information, the alliance actually does something sane, and plans to attack the Sathanas with three smaller but still powerful destroyers, from behind and at the flanks where its main guns can't hit them. However, the Sathanas alters course and successfully enters Alliance space.
    'You'd Expect: The Alliance would station its destroyers and their support ships to the sides/above/below where the Sathanas will emerge from jump nodes. Capital ships exiting subspace do so at increasingly faster speeds the larger the ship is and decelerate to their comparitively slow cruise speed; the Sathanas wouldn't have time to fire on ships positioned in such a way (this is also true of the game mechanic; if its beams are unlocked, it would probably try and may land a glancing hit, but the beams would fly off into nothing as soon as the ship passes by.)
    Instead: The Alliance panics, and they panic so hard that they loose all semblance of common sense and throw everything nearby in front of the Sathanas as a blockade. A blockade the Sathanas tears through in, literally, minutes, as its beam cannons are several orders of magnitude stronger than the strongest beam cannon fielded by the alliance, and that is actually an overloaded version of the next step down, it doesn't exist in the fiction, and using cannons in this manner will melt them down. Even the Colossus, designed not to engage targets of equal size but many smaller targets, is positioned right in front of the Sathanas. By now, the player has destroyed at least half of the Sathanas' beam cannons; this is the canon situation for when the Collosus engages it, and the Sathanas will still bring it down to somewhere between thirty and fifty-percent hull integrity. In the storyline, it's noted that the Colossus will take several months to repair.
    However: The Sathanas can turn unreasonably fast for a ship its size, and for the general slowness propulsion systems in the setting seem to work at (it's maximum speed is fifteen meters per second.) In fact, all capital ships can do this, so it may be a game mechanic that, unlike many others, does not reflect fluff.
  • As mentioned before, the Sathanas has extreme powerfull forward mounted guns.
    You'd Expect: When attacking an enemy, it will try to keep the enemy in front.
    Instead: The ship is passing the Colossus and is unable to continue firing. As a result, the Colossus survives even without further assistance of the player with the above mentioned thirty to fifty-percent hull integrity. Otherwise it would be destroyed.
• In God Of War, Zeus has heard a prophecy that his son will overthrow him, just he did his father, who had overthrown his own father.
  You'd Expect: He'd just not have sex, thus eliminating any danger of having a son who might overthrow him.
  Instead: He has kids anyway, and instead of simply killing his son as an infant, allows him to grow up. His son eventually does lead a revolt against him. Surprise surprise.
  However: If Zeus was celibate, he wouldn't be Zeus. And killing heirs didn't save Cronus, did it?
  In Addition: Once again, Zeus. "Your son will overthrow you" is like saying to a modern-day American "there's a person somewhere in Asia who dislikes you." Thanks, care to narrow that down further than near half the world's population?
  It should be noted, though: This was one prophecy that Zeus did avert in the original myths. In that case, it was a bit more specific, that if Zeus had a son with Thetis, the son would become "greater than his father." Zeus, in what must have been an epic moment of self control for him, kept it in his toga and instead married the goddess off to a mortal warrior, who sired Achilles.
• In the original Dawn Of War campaign, the protagonist has battled his way through aliens and heretics alike to keep the forces of darkness from acquiring a powerful artifact. After most of them are crushed, he stands victorious with the Mac Guffin in his hand, ready to destroy it. He also stands staring down the barrels of a lot of semi-friendly alien troops and one of their farseers (note: clair-freaking-voyance) who begs him not to destroy it. He is understandably reluctant, given that its destruction has been his objective for some time now.
  You'd Expect: The farseer's next words would be, "destroying it will release the powerful demon sealed inside, you unbelievable dumbass" which would be helpful, fulfill her agenda on the planet, ensure that the vast majority of her troops won't have died in vain, avoid releasing a Greater Demon and still fill her contractual quota of insulting the Puny Earthlings. If he ignores her, she can have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so", should she live long enough.
  Instead: The equally wordy but far less useful, "you know not what you do! We cannot allow this..." followed by her ordering her troops to shoot him. The artifact is broken in the ensuing firefight, and Hilarity Ensues.
  However The Ideal of an Eldar telling a straight answer and a Space Marine to listen to a Xeno Witch, in Warhammer 40,000 is laughable. And HERESY!!
  It should be noted, though: Soldiers of the Imperium do put an ear out to what Xenos say, especially when it concerns something this important, and Angelos is depicted to be a bit more open minded than most Space Marines. The Eldar, on the other hand, still felt the need to act high and mighty even if doing so will screw them over.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: It's a fun game, but the opening is pretty ridiculous. The Emperor knows the exact minute of his own assassination. He also knows that once he dies the Legions Of Hell will invade unless one of his offspring wears the magical Mac Guffin around his neck and is coronated as the new Emperor. Fortunately he has legions of loyal soldiers and secret agents and the resources of an entire continent at his command. He also has a network of tunnels underneath his palace in case he needs to escape.
  You'd expect that he would surround himself and his heirs with every soldier at his command near the appointed time so they can kill every assassin who comes near. Even if the Emperor dies, he has at least three legitimate and one illegitimate heir who can take his place. And just in case, he would have his agents routinely patrol the escape tunnels and run emergency escape drills.
  Instead he doesn't inform his bodyguards of the fact that he knows he's going to die. He lets his bodyguards stumble blindly through the tunnels to a dead end, where he gets knifed in the back. He entrusts the Mac Guffin to a complete stranger who was imprisoned in the city dungeons, hoping that the stranger can find his last remaining heir.
  However: Given his prior experiences in Elder Scrolls 3 the Emperor knows, as objective fact and not just belief, that divinely mandated prophecies work. He also knows that the 'complete stranger' imprisoned in the city dungeons is the prophesied savior, as he's 'seen your face'. Basically, the gods told him to do it, so he did. And it did work, leading not to a continuation of the impending stalemate (as simply letting one of his heirs relight the Dragonfires without incident would have), but the permanent destruction of the Demon Prince and the removal of the threat for all time. Especially given that none of his legitimate heirs possessed the forbidden magical knowledge — or would have possessed in any conceivable future generation, given just how forbidden that knowledge was — that allowed his illegitimate heir to do what he did in the final scene.
  Double however: Given that the Daedra can't actually be destroyed and that Word of God-supported Wild Mass Guessing indicates that all this may possibly maybe be helping (in a convoluted way) to bring about The End Of The World As We Know It, we are right back to What An Idiot. And moreover, there's some indication within the game itself that his vision from the gods/Aedra may have been Daedric misinformation anyway.
• Grand Theft Auto Vice City : Tommy Vercetti is a low level mook sent to Vice City in order to negotiate a major drug deal with a cartel. As expected, a rival cartel ambushes the deal, resulting in both the drugs and the money being stolen in the chaos. This makes the boss extremely angry and he's spends the rest of the game getting angrier and angrier at the main character for not being able to get the money back. During this time, Tommy starts to make connections of his own and starts to make his own little empire in Vice City, coming into contact with a substantial chunk of change and enough drugs to make the original deal look like chump change.
  You'd expect Tommy would at one point tell his boss that he'll fully pay him back for everything lost in the initial ambush, since even a quarter of the way through the game he has enough money to do this, and then offer a rendezvous to give the money. Even if he didn't have all the money, he could at the very least persuade one of his many powerful friends to help him out in this situation just to get the mob boss off his back and maybe even have some of the mob boss's assets to help him out once things cool down.
  Instead Tommy seems very nonchalant during all of this, every time the mob boss demands money Tommy either says nothing to help his situation, or just saying he'll "figure out a way" to pay him back. He literally does absolutely nothing to help out the situation. As expected, near the end of the game the mob boss, finally fed up, sends hitmen to extract the money from Tommy's friends, and after those are dispatched the boss openly declares war on Tommy resulting in the final mission where literally most of his friends abandon him, leaving him to fight off the entire force by himself.
  However: Tommy was basically setting up his own family while trying to keep under the radar until he became Scarface, erm, I mean a mob boss. Giving the family the money would have raised suspicions and then the family would have came down and started muscling in on his operations. Also, the Mob has never shown Tommy much respect, treating him like a mook at every turn. The start of the game is his first mission for the family since leaving jail, where he spent fifteen unnecessary years at the hands of the mob boss threatening him. It's not hard to see Tommy getting whacked for sheer convenience (look at the way non-family talent is treated in GTAIII and the events in Las Venturas in San Andreas.) That he could set up his own empire and piss off his old nemesis at the same time probably gave Tommy more pleasure than all of the whores and blow he controlled.
• Sherlock Holmes versus Arsene Lupin (AKA Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis). Pretty soon in the adventure, Watson gets followed by a journalist with a French-sounding name.
  You'd expect: Him to tell Holmes, or at least take five seconds to figure out the journalist's name, which he has on a business card, is an anagram of Arsene Lupin, French master of disguise who's used an anagram as name all of five minutes before you meet this journalist.
  Instead: Watson plays the perfect Xanatos Sucker and lets Lupin steal the Rosetta stone.
• In the anime of Mega Man Star Force, Bob Copper suspects Geo Stelar to be Mega Man (which he is). He follows Geo all over the city (even in hilarious and awesome manners). Please note that "Mega Man" has the same hair, eyes and voice as Geo. Geo also shows up all the time whenever trouble is brewing... Or after. It's no surprise Copper is suspicious. In a following incident, Copper locks Geo in his car as a test to see if he's Mega Man. Mega Man does show up, and Copper finds Geo inside the car after that. However, anyone could conclude that Geo could have actually escaped, changed into Mega Man, fought the bad guy, and then locked himself in the car again to avoid suspicion. This is what actually happened, as Zack Temple demonstrates the fallacies of "childproof" touch-command door locks by opening the door and letting Geo loose.
  You'd expect: Put two and two together and either accuse Geo of being Mega Man... Or continue suspecting him, at least, and tailing him all the time.
  Instead: He immediately assumes Geo to be one of Mega Man's groupies. Cue surprise on Geo's part. Clark Kenting seems to work better than people think... Or one can wonder how a man who can come to such ridiculous conclusions actually got onto the force.
• In Half Life 2, Alyx and Gordon have just broken into a high security prison to rescue Alyx's father. They learn that Dr. Mossman is a traitor who is a Well Intentioned Extremist when it comes to keeping Alyx's father out of harm's way. Alyx confronts the traitor, and takes this person along to their escape method (a teleporter).
  You'd expect: Alyx to just enter the coordinates herself (or have the guy who is supposed to have a Ph.D. do it), or at the very least ensure that Dr. Mossman isn't in the same teleportation group as her father. Keep in mind, that this is less then a minute after she called this person out for being a traitor.
  Instead: She has the known traitor do it, then acts surprised that Dr. Mossman entered the wrong coordinates and kidnaps her father.
  Of Course: Alyx has never trained on operating a Combine teleporter, only the resistance's version. If the Combine so much as uses its own nonstandard coordinate system, let alone materially changed the controls, Alyx would have no choice. As for ensuring that Dr. Vance and Dr. Mossman aren't in the same teleportation group: Alyx had planned for everyone to go together, but the traitor rushed Eli Vance into the teleporter and pushed the button as soon as Alyx and Gordon turned around to fire at the Combine troops that had just blown in the door.
  In Addition: If Alyx and Gordon had been in the same teleportation group, they'd just have been trapped in the Citadel. Granted that this is how the game ends anyway, there would have been no massive Resistance uprising in the streets to empty the Citadel of troops in this version of events, making the odds of victory ginormously lower for 'Team Blow Up Citadel Reactor'.
• Tales Of The Abyss: Cute Bruiser Anise is secretly being forced by the game's Big Bad to act as his spy inside the party. His leverage over her is her parents, who are being held hostage in the city of Daat under the pretense of being housed inside the religious citadel there. At one point in the game, the party, including Anise, goes to Daat to break out one of their friends, who is being held under heavy guard in a military garrison adjacent to the citadel. This poses no great challenge.
  You'd expect: Her to realize that her allies are more than strong enough to rescue her parents, tell them what's going on, and beg them to stop off and collect two more passengers.
  Instead: She says nothing, and isn't revealed as a traitor until she openly turns on the party and helps the villains to murder the person who is essentially the Pope of the religion that she personally follows - and who, for extra irony, is the person they went to Daat to save in the first place.
  Bonus Idiocy: She is, of course, Easily Forgiven.
• In Knights Of The Old Republic it's implied that Revan never wanted to take over the Republic, just prepare it for the upcoming war with the True Sith.
  You'd expect: Revan to convince the Republic of the coming threat, using his/her status as a war hero to gain respect and trust and then offer the ridicuously large fleet, created by the Star Forge, to them and spend the next few years helping to train their soldiers in combat and instruct them in how to use the technology created by the Star Forge, or striking at the True Sith in their galaxy, meaning there would be no collateral damage to the Republic itself, while they are still preparing to attack.
  Instead: Revan wages war against the Republic, supposedly to gain control even though as explained, Revan should really have enough respect to get the Republic to work with him/her. Revan then ups and leaves to go and fight the True Sith who have now had plenty of time to prepare for war, while the Republic is now bankrupt and on the verge of collapse having spent so much resources on the war against Revan. And this guy is meant to be a master tactician...
  However: The Republic is so corrupt and so troublesome that it's only little better than the Sith, and that getting their help would make it impossible to fight the True Sith, if their military records are anything to go by. The Jedi weren't very helpful there either.
  In that case: Why fight the Republic at all? If the Republic is supposedly so useless (keep in mind, Revan was more than willing to accept their help in the Mandalorian Wars), why not just go to the True Sith galaxy and fight them right away and leave the Republic alone?
  However: It's said in the game that Revan attacked but mostly kept the infrastructure intact so he could use the Republic to fight the True Sith, When Malak was at the helm his plan was 'destroy all resistance!'
  • Then 'destroy all too weak to resist!'
• In Phantasy Star II, the party is unable to use the access tunnel leading to the Biosystems Labs because of the bandit Darum, who went a little nuts after his daughter Teim was kidnapped. They retrieve his daughter, put a veil on her (to protect her from people who may want to harm her because of her parentage), and go to the tunnel.
  You'd expect: Teim would throw off her veil, yell, "Daddy, it's me!" and hope he recognizes her.
  Instead: She walks up to Darum in the veil. When he demands her money, she haughtily refuses, and he cuts her down. Then he kills himself on realizing what he's done, at which point Rolf sermonizes about the increasing evil of the world. You know, Rolf, you could've prevented this one!
• Bioshock: Mad Scientist Dr. Suchong is put in charge of developing a plasmid that will make Big Daddies protect Little Sisters whenever the Little Sisters are in harm's way.
  You'd expect: That Suchong would not do anything to harm the Little Sisters, in the case that his research were successful.
  Instead: While complaining about the initial failures of his creation, he slaps a Little Sister that was trying to get his attention. It ends up revealing his work was, in fact, successful when he gets drilled to his desk by a suddenly-protective Big Daddy.
• Warcraft III has Medivh trying to redeem his earlier evils by preventing a demonic invasion. He knows what's going to happen and warns every leader he can reach.
  You'd expect Medivh to be specific and detailed to the leaders about the incoming invasion, and to try and convince the orcs to make peace with the Alliance. He'd tell Arthas exactly how the Scourge works to prevent Lordareon falling, and would try his hardest to fight the Legion if no one believed him.
  Instead Medivh makes non specific, vaguely threatening prophecies, and demand leaders follow instructions with logical fallacies apparent when one knows everything. Medivh becomes angry and petty when he's not immediately obeyed, and encourages the orcs to run away from their punishment, prompting the Alliance to pursue them in the expansion. Medivh also never helps the orcs prepare for Kalimdor, directly leading to an important demigod being killed.
  However, Arthas was already driven mad by the Scourge having slaughtered countless humans during their campaign against the living in Lordaeron, and was probably not exercising excellent judgment; as an example, rather than attempting to quarantine and attempt to treat the people of Stratholme, who he knew had been doped up on tainted grain, he ordered the town to be immediately purged. Furthermore, in Hellscream's defense, Medivh couldn't predict that Tichondrius and Mannoroth would taint the Moonglades of Cenarius in an attempt to use the orcs to kill Cenarius. Despite the Horde easily befriending the Tauren, Hellscream was starting to go crazy himself, hence Thrall relocating him to the northern forests while he went to meet with the Oracle.
  Justifying Note: 'Attempt to treat' the people of Stratholme how? They were already full of lethal poison that would cause them to rise as zombies upon their imminent deaths. Several of them died and arose while Arthas was talking to them, it was working that quickly. If he hadn't purged the town when he did, he would have had to do it an hour later when the zombie horde of former townsfolk started marching out. Arthas was in a no-win situation there. Now his later decisions, when on Northrend, are him seriously starting to lose it, yes.
• In Skies of Arcadia, during the aerial battle for Yafutoma between the Armada and the Tenkou, the heroes attempt to, and succeed in, locating their captured ship. They attempt a boarding action, preparing to go side-to-side by a distance of meters with this airship, with a full crew of hostile soldiers.
  You'd expect the Delphinus' new management to attempt evasive action, any evasive action or movement at all, or fire on the pirate ship as it makes itself a fat, slow and impossible to miss target by closing in.
  Instead the ship remains completely motionless in midair, obligingly allowing the air pirates to pull up, leap aboard, and presumably for the ship to fly off again without shooting at it once or trying to maneuver or follow the entire time. Way to go, guys. Way to go.
  By the way, this isn't an isolated case. In at least one other instance that comes to memory, the situation happened, only in reverse. The heroes allowed their ship to be boarded with no problem by marauders. However, in the beginning sequence of the game, the victim ship at least makes an effort to pull away for like a minute or so.
• Army of Two has a scene that actually Lampshades this Trope. Salem and Rios have been set up as the fall guys after they unwittingly killed a US senator to help their corrupt boss back S&C get him out of the picture so a bill to privatize the military will pass. They board a cargo plane to head back to Miami to stop him. But Phillip Cylde, crazy as hell mercenary, who has apparently cut his mouth to create a sick Joker-esque smile, has snuck aboard the plane.
  You'd Expect Clyde to simply kill Rios and Salem while they are sleeping and try everything possible to avoid using guns... in a flying airplane. Or maybe even just planting a time bomb and jumping out of the plane before it goes off.
  Instead He not only kills the pilots of the plane instead of his intended targets, he delays shooting them to gloat at how much he's going to enjoy killing them. This would be fine as he took Salem as a hostage and pretty much had control of the situation. But the US Air Force noticed the dead pilots, figured it was an approaching terrorist attack and started shooting at the plane. This gives Salem and Rios the chance to overpower Clyde and get themselves to cover. Clyde starts shooting wildly damaging the plane even further. Then Clyde throws a grenade, a short-sighted move in general. But it only gets worse as another hit from the US Air Force manages to roll the grenade back at him. Rios then lampshades Clyde's actions up to this point by saying "What an Idiot" and he and Salem head for the hovercraft at the back of the plane. But Clyde isn't done, he actually decides to fire a Javelin missle inside the plane. He apparently doesn't know how to use its "fire and forget" technology 'cause he misses and manages to help Rios and Salem by blasting open the jammed cargo door behind them. Rios and Salem escape on the hovercraft while Clyde ends up in the drink with the crashing plane. He survives, but he seriously screwed up his mission in so many ways.
• In Fable 2, Lucien needs to gather the three heroes and absorb their power in order to use the Tattered Spire. Obviously, you, as the hero, has to stop him.
  You'd Expect The hero (especially if being played as evil) to kill one of the heroes. The Hero of Skill is a mass murderer, extremely narcissistic, and a total ass all around.
  Instead The hero spends over a decade gathering the heroes in order to perform a ritual in order to forge an artifact that removes Lucien's power after he performs his version of the ritual with the same heroes. Not only does this plan only work if Lucien captures the heroes after you already used them, but a ton of very bad things happened as you wasted all of that time.
• Near the end of Silent Hill 2, James (the protagonist) is confronted by Eddie, an overweight and mentally disturbed man who's been mocked by his peers for his entire life. Eddie is surrounded by corpses, wielding a revolver, and delivering a monologue about how everyone is made equal in death, including the fact that he's going to murder the next person who so much as looks at him funny. Eddie then says a friendly 'goodbye' to James and turns around to leave the room.
  You'd Expect James to say nothing about the crazy, bid Eddie a fond farewell and get the hell out of there.
  Instead, James asks Eddie if he's gone nuts. Eddie responds about as well as you'd expect.
• In Super Robot Wars OG Gaiden, Kyosuke has just saved Lamia from a souped up Bartoll, by plugging her out of the cockpit, though not until after she gives him some beatings. Now he has her on Alt Eisen Riese's arms... and they're inside the enemy base.
  You'd Expect Kyosuke to realize that the place is still dangerous, destroying her mecha doesn't mean the rest of the mecha will also fall, thus she is still suspectible to a stray shot. Thus, he would give the order for the rest of the team to cover him as he brings Lamia to the Cool Ship for medication. Or Lamia could warn him about that when he didn't realize it.
  Instead, he leisurely chats with her, commenting on how glad he is that she's okay, and vice versa, thus allowing a cheap shot by Juergen to knock Lamia away, but enough for Kyosuke to think she has become another Gwen Stacy (She doesn't permanently), putting him through a series of Heroic BSOD and Wangst. Even he admits that it was a stupid mistake he committed.
• Imperator Ix, after taking a thrashing from the entirety of Sonic's team, taps the Villain Ball long enough to blurt out how he plans to conquer the world like he tried four thousand years ago (you learn soon enough the Twilight Cage, where the Nocturnus are holed up, runs on a Year Inside Hour Outside timeframe). Procurator Shade, who has demonstrated tactical competence up to that point (and was probably driven by Ix's propaganda to participate in this raid for the purpose of "returning the Nocturnus to the world"), happened to be within earshot and immediately questioned his motives.
  You'd expect Ix to apologize to Shade, grab the Master Emerald, return to the Nocturne with Shade in tow, and explain to her the necessity of such actions.
  Instead Ix firmly grasps the Villain Ball, cuts her off with a very loud "SILENCE!!" and blasts her off the island. He gets away with the Master Emerald anyway, but Knuckles saves Shade's bacon, having recovered from the shock that the Nocturnus are still alive after all this time. This incident gives Shade all the reason she needs to switch allegiences.
• Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2: Military Turncoat Lee Linjun has just had his forces beaten badly by those of his former co-officer, Tetsuya Onodera.
  You'd expect Lee to get the hell out of there and recoup his losses.
  Instead He takes his ship, the Shirogane, and attempts to use it to ram Tetsuya's ship, the Kurogane. Unfortunately, as Tetsuya points out, he failed to notice the drill in front of the Kurogane. Naturally, this doesn't end well for Lee.
• Megaman Zero. Dr. Weil has just been captured, after cursing the Dark Elf and creating Omega, who has wiped out 60% of human population and 90% of Reploid population. All mostly For The Evulz.
  You'd expect His captors deem him too dangerous and irredeemable and just kill him already.
  Instead They decide to get more 'theatrical', thought he could redeem himself, and gave Weil an escapable Fate Worse Than Death: seal him in a capsule that prevents aging, but keeps his memory intact, hoping to make him repent. Naturally, when some idiot centuries later break the seal down, he becomes more monstrous and vengeful and eventually succeeds in taking over the world and make it so crapsack that it's worse than hell.
• Final Fantasy VII. The Ancients create an world-destroying object which, if used, summons a giant meteor to come and destroy the Earth. However, they need a way to keep this object from falling into the wrong hands, because if it did, said evildoer could use it to... summon a giant meteor to come and destroy the Earth.
  You'd expect They wouldn't make such a thing in the first place, since it has no apparent productive use.
  Instead They make their entire temple itself the world-destroying object, and as a security measure, design it so that anyone who activates the mechanism to shrink the temple down to usable size gets crushed inside. Because villains never have minions that they consider expendable.
  • The heroes are in the above-mentioned ancient temple. The villain is coming, and wants the world-destroying object. The mechanism to collapse the tower is controlled by solving puzzles. The villain is leading an army of minions who lack the intelligence even to form complete sentences.
    You'd expect The party would just camp out near the controls, and fight off the villain or his mooks when they arrived, assuming any of the villain's expendable mooks would be able to operate the device in the first place.
    Instead They go ahead and do the villain's work for him, destroying the irreplaceable archaeological treasure trove which is the temple and forming the world-destroying object, even sacrificing one of their own party members to do it, only to lose the world-destroying object to the villain not five minutes after they've acquired it.
    Justifying Note: Given Sephiroth had all these minions, Cloud and his gang could have been stuck playing Whack-A-Mook with a veritable horde while one of them slips through and operates the device anyway. If they were going to stick to this plan, they'd have Cait Sith camp at the controls to do the fighting while the rest camped outside; this way, if the temple started doing anything funny, they'd know Sephiroth had pulled it off and be ready to jack the prize from under his nose.
  • The main character has just demonstrated that he is vulnerable to the villain's mind control powers, which the villain has just used to cause him to give him the world-destroying object. The Staff Chick needs to go to a particular place to use her unique powers to counteract the effect of the world-destroying object.
    You'd expect She'd either keep the rest of the party around her for protection, or she'd keep the location of the place she's going a secret to avoid the villain following her.
    Instead She goes alone, but tells the mind-controllable main character where she's going, so that the villain can read the information from his mind not five seconds later and proceed to go and make Staff Chick Shish-Ka-Bob.
    For added idiocy certain members of the fanbase believe she set herself up to die, whereas nothing in the game even confirms this, especially at this particular moment. The supplimental material being out of the USA certainly does nothing to stifle this troper's rage on the subject.
  • The party comes across the Staff Chick after the aforementioned disappearance, and when Cloud goes up to check on her, he behaves erratically, as if under mind control again. They stop him from carrying the deed out, however.
    You'd expect the entire party to take this as a not-so-subtle hint that Sephiroth will be in the area shortly, if he wasn't there already, and kabob Aeris should Cloud prove himself inadequate, and prepare to protect Aeris accordingly.
    Instead they twiddle their thumbs and watch Aeris die.
    You'll note they had all of about a second and a half, if that, between when Aerith looked at them and Sephiroth stabbing her. I'd love to know exactly how they were going to stop him given they were A. quite surprised that he'd shown up, and B. focused more on having stopped Cloud from doing it.
  • The party actually manages to get the world-destroying object back from the villain before he is able to use it. The main character, having figured out by now that he shouldn't be the one holding onto the thing, gives it to another party member, with instructions that he shouldn't give it to anyone, no matter what.
    You'd expect This order would be interpreted as "Don't give it to anyone for any reason, *especially me*." Especially since there is no reason at all why the main character would ever need the thing for anything. It's an albatross, and the only reason the party is hanging onto it is to keep the villain from getting his hands on it.
    Instead The main character predictably falls under the villain's mind control again and casually asks for the world-destroying object back, which is quickly and cheerfully given. He then gives it to the villain, who promptly summons the giant meteor to destroy the world.
• In Mega Man X 4, the Repliforce army is held under suspicion for being responsible for the fall of Sky Lagoon, destroying an entire city and killing millions. Zero comes across Colonel, a high-ranking member of Repliforce, in the ruins and asks him to come in for questioning.
  You'd expect Colonel to immediately disarm and come in for questioning, both in a show of good faith for the victims and to clear Repliforce's name.
  Instead He declares that laying down his sword would be dishonorable and leaves the scene, causing all of Repliforce to be declared Mavericks and start a massive war.
• Also in Mega Man X 5, Lifesavor discovers ominious data that implies that Zero is heavily linked to The Virus somehow, since it increases his power output instead of hurting him. He reports this to Commander Signas, who wisely decides to keep this top secret for now and not to act rashly.
  You'd expect Lifesavor to follow orders and go back to his job, trusting his level-headed commander to make the best decision on how to move forward, since he's just a medic.
  Instead Lifesavor goes behind Signas's back and tells his suspicions to X, Zero's best friend, accusing Zero of being dangerous and points out that Zero is unaffected in an area brimming with The Virus. The resulting concern and mistrust between the two friends causes them to fight and nearly get killed by the Big Bad when he takes them by surprise. Lifesavor unsurprisingly hasn't been seen in the games ever since.
• Command And Conquer 3: The forces of GDI have managed to finally lay seige to Temple Prime, HQ for the Brotherhood of Nod and assumed location of the Nod mastermind/Messianic figure, Kane. Nod has the nasty habit of outsmarting GDI at every turn; oftentimes twisting GDI's actions against the organization. GDI's leading general advises that GDI forces attempt to hold the seige until Nod forces surrender. GDI's Director (an Obstructive Bureaucrat) demands that they use GDI's Ion Cannon. The general notes that Nod was storing weaponized Green Rocks with enormous explosive potential in the facility; and suggests they consult their Green Rock Expert. Turns out, he's been kidnapped by Nod.
  You'd Expect The director to realize that these events might be related, and the risk of falling into yet another scenario where Nod tricks GDI into doing something terrible; therefore erring on the side of caution with the Death Ray.
  Instead The director orders the Ion Cannon be used, and Nod's Green Rock weapon explodes, causing a chain reaction with other Green Rocks in the area. This leads to a rather large explosion that more or less erases Eastern Europe from existence; the director notes that the area was primarily Nod-controlled.
  However it turns out that Kane, that Magnificent Bastard, had this all planned from the beginning. He knew the GDI Treasurer would be easily tricked into blowing up Temple Prime, therefore he arranged for him to be the only high-ranking GDI bureaucrat alive; therefore making him Director.
• Persona4: Dojima, the player character's uncle, finds a letter adressed to said character from a serial killer who's had the local police department tied up for the whole game (admittedly, at this point they do have a murder culprit who did one murder, and confessed to others, but by this point it's known he's lying). This letter telling him, basically, that if he rescues any more people then somebody close to him will die (of course, Dojima knows none of this rescuing business).
  You'd expect Dojima to watch his own family, the only people who could possibly classify as 'close to [the player character]', while learnign the truth about what's going on from his nephew.
  Instead Dojima admittedly tries the latter. ...By taking his nephew in to the police station, thereby taking in for interrogation the only person he knows could logically not only not be the murderer, but may well be the only one who can stop the murders. During this, he leaves his daughter Nanako home alone. ...As in the person who perfectly fits the bill for who the murderer is going to target. Naturally, while the two are in the police station, Nanako is kidnapped by the murderer, who is quickly identified as somebody who is quite evidently not Dojima's nephew.
  However It is known that Dojima isn't exactly Father of the Year material, so this lapse in family-protective logic isn't uncharacteristic.
  Also it is as much of a stupid moment for the player character. This troper had been fearing the killer targeting Nanako for ages, and was practically yelling at the game to give him an option to tell Dojima "dude, it says here he's going for someone close to me, I'm not leaving my fucking surrogate sister home alone at midnight! Call the police here if you really want to question me!". Dojima didn't think of it, but he was a paranoid man who already suspected the main character. The MC, on the other hand, knowing a lot more seemed to suddenly decide to act on his Heroic Mime tendencies.
• During the Battle Between the Gardens in Final Fantasy VIII, part of Balamb Garden's Quad collapses, leaving Rinoa clinging for dear life to the broken side of the Garden too far down for Zell to reach. With nothing immediately handy to lower down to her and no way to reach her, Zell is forced to go looking for help, and reports the situation to Squall and the rest of the party.
  You'd expect Squall's friends, knowing that he has the responsibility of commanding the entire Garden during the battle and thus has his hands full, would figure out a way to get back to Rinoa and rescue her, particularly since two of them use weapons (oversized nunchaku and a whip) that would also serve admirably as rescue lines.
  Instead the entire party gangs up on Squall and insists that nothing will do but that he personally and on his own go rescue the girl, abandoning his command at a point in the battle in which it is vitally important that Garden's troops be reorganized and a new strategy worked out, and leaving such planning in the hands of people who couldn't manage to organize the much smaller task of getting back to the Quad to rescue one civilian.
  Uh, no. Squall does plan and organize the counterattack, and has his comrades physically lead the attack instead of planning it.
  Also the Galbadians had the Quad thoroughly barricaded, making it impossible for anyone to get in there to rescue Rinoa.
  Which does nothing to explain why all of Squall's friends insist that he is the only person at all capable of rescuing Rinoa and that he and he alone should focus on that to the exclusion of any other responsibilities.

Except for the fact that one more soldier won't make a difference in the middle of a massive melee in a large-scale battlefield and the fact that Squall, being one of the best agents of the Garden, would be expected to be the most capable of completing a single-person task like saving Rinoa.

• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Ganondorf, surprisingly enough, gets one of these. After Link meets Zelda in the Temple of Time and obtains the light arrows from her, he traps Zelda inside a crystal so that he can get the triforce of wisdom.
  You'd Expect He would trap Link too while he was distracted by the monologuing, obtaining all three triforce parts and being able to rule the kingdom of Hyrule without any opposition.
  Instead He allows Link to enter his castle, and gets defeated twice, and then trapped in another dimension.
  However Link holds the Blade of Evil's Bane. What is Ganondorf after the timeskip? The King of Evil. Why he doesn't try to trick Link into putting the sword down is another story ...
• Mercenaries 2: Corrupt Corporate Executive Ramon Solano hires the player to break a Venezuelan general who had attempted a coup out of jail. Airstrikes are called in, tanks are used, stuff blows up, mission accomplished.
  You'd Expect Solano thanks the merc for a job well done, pays them, sends them on their way, and goes on to take over the country and elevate it's status to that of a world power.
  Instead He turns on the player and has them shot. Cue the Roaring Rampage Of Revenge that ends with Venezuela getting torn up and Solano himself dead.
  For Added Idiocy The merc Solano hired was the mercenary that had previously been involved in the Song Initiative. During that situation, the mercenary showed their aptitude at singlehandedly taking down a military dictatorship for money.
• Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations: Godot has just learned that Morgan Fey has told her daughter Pearl Fey where to find instructions for a plan that must be carried out "for the good of the Fey family". This is really her plot to kill Maya Fey and install Pearl as the new Master of the Fey family. The plan hinges on Pearl finding and obeying the instructions.
  You'd Expect Godot to get to the hidden instructions first and destroy them utterly so that the plan can never be carried out.
  Instead Godot gets to the plans first, reads them, and puts them back in the same place. Because of this, Maya Fey is put into mortal danger, and Misty Fey is killed.
  For Added Idiocy Godot omits Phoenix Wright from his plans to counter Morgan's plot, and later admits he should have gone to Phoenix first.

• In Girl Genius, Othar Tryggvassen has been "kidnapped" by Ferretina, the Weasel Queen, who has made it extremely clear that she will offer sexual favors in return for companionship and understanding to help her get over her self-esteem issues.
  You'd Expect: He stays, at least long enough to help her out, convince her to stop attacking the villagers, and maybe pick up some "treats".
  Instead: He figures that she's lured him into a deathtrap., but then it is well established that Othar is an idiot. Also, everything in the radio plays in exaggerated to hell and back in order to be played for extra comedy and drama, including Othar's usual tendencies.
• Misfile. Rumisiel finds the corpse of a missing angel.
  You'd Expect: Him to contact heaven since not only is a dead angel a really big no-no and he's needing all the brownie points he can get to get back into heaven and have a proper investigation done.
  Instead: He jumps to the conclusion his brother must be the murderer, disintegrates the body obliterating all the evidence and Wangsts about it before confronting his brother in a handy out of the way place with no witnesses. Thankfully it appears Vashiel is innocent, of that murder at least.
  However: It's his brother. Killing your boss under unknown circumstances is one thing; killing your brother when asked- away from witnesses- if you did it is quite another. Especially if said brother is already offering protection, and unlike you, can lie to the authorities.

• Hey Arnold!, "Stinky Goes Hollywood": country bumpkin Stinky decides to turn down a lucrative soda ad contract, even though his family is poor, and he is doing so right in front of his dad, and tons of his classmates (in an attempt at Celebrity Is Overrated).
  You'd expect: that Stinky would explain why he wasn't going to sign the contract, especially since his dad might be able to accept his reason instead of repeatedly crying "Why???" He had just overheard a conversation at the advertising studio that Stinky was perfect to make fun of, and that's why he was picked to film the ads.
  Instead: Stinky says "I ain't signing it, you can find yourself another fool," without explaining anything. While Helga does say "What an idiot", this is because she is likely thinking "It's a million dollar contract, of course you sign it."
  • Another Hey Arnold! episode, "Arnold Betrays Iggy": while taking homework to the "Cool Kid of the School" Iggy who was sick that day, Arnold finds out that Iggy has an embarassing secret- he wears full-on bunny pajamas: cotton tail, bunny feet, and even big floppy ears. Iggy begs Arnold not to tell, and Arnold gives his word; however, Sid and Stinky find out due to really accurate conclusion-jumping and now Iggy is a laughing stock. Arnold feels guilty because Iggy thinks that he told and will never forgive him, even after Arnold profusedly apologized and told him that he didn't spill.
    You'd expect: that after apologizing and telling Iggy that he had no part in exposing his secret, Arnold would've then just moved on; the ball is now in Iggy's court, if he doesn't want to accept his honest, sincere apology, then too bad.
    Instead: Arnold completely throws himself at Iggy's feet, doing anything he can to insure that Iggy completely forgives him, including doing all of his chores and homework for an entire week. However, Iggy either can't forgive easily or just likes to see people squirm, because he still doesn't forgive Arnold. Arnold, at the end of his rope, asks what can make Iggy forgive him. It turns out in order for Iggy's forgiveness, Arnold walks out of his house in the same bunny pajamas that Iggy wore, out in front of everybody in the urban public area, and grovel at Iggy's feet. While Arnold is doing this Walk of Shame, kids and grownups are laughing, some kids douse him with water balloons, and the entire Walk of Shame is taped live on public access TV! It's only then when Iggy realizes he's gone overboard; however, Arnold doesn't forgive him...
• Rocket Power, "Race Across New Zealand": Reggie has taken the lead in a windsurfing race. However, her dad Ray is still cheering on her younger brother Otto (itself bordering on "what an idiot"-ness), prompting her to think: "Maybe this will get Raymundo's attention".
  You'd expect: That Reggie would get Ray's attention by just winning the race, and in the process putting herself in contention for the main title.
  Instead: Reggie deliberately jumps off her board to ensure that both she and Otto lose the race.
• Powerpuff Girls, "Cootie Gras": Mojo Jojo throws the girls into a pit along with Harry, a dirty boy with cooties, that the girls are mortally afraid of.
  You'd expect: Oh right, the girls have flying powers. How about, oh let's say, flying out of the pit?
  Instead: They run from Harry around the pit. Only when they realize that their fears of him were nonsense, they fly out of the pit to beat Mojo Jojo.
  • What about Mojo in this example, since it was a simple case of Your Mind Makes It Real, won't it seem like a bad idea to force them into touching the fake illness in the first place?
• Codename Kids Next Door, the episode with the talking baby (you know the one): The KND have just defeated a minor villain with a device that changes people's ages.
  You'd expect that Numbuh One would keep this age-changing device to use against the adults, or at least to stop anyone else from getting their hands on it.
  Instead he throws it away, and the Delightful Children From Down The Lane pick it up. Way to go there, Nigel.
  • Though he later rectifies this mistakes in the season finale, smashing it to bits after he and his crew defeat Father.
• Lilo and Stitch, the TV series. In the episode "Wishy Washy", Gantu captures an experiment who grants wishes and Lilo and Stitch have come to stop him. Gantu has captured this experiment by saying "I wish that the experiment was in my grasp".
  You'd expect - Gantu would say something like "I wish no one could stop my plans" or "I wish Lilo and Stitch would be teleported into space".
  Instead - Gantu wishes that his blaster was 100X more powerful and larger. This means that not only is his blaster harder to aim, it also does more accidental damage to his ship.
• In the Rugrats: All Grown Up episode "Bad Blood," Dill has stolen a video that claims to show an alien autopsy and he invites Tommy's friends and various other people to watch it. They would be punished if his parents found out but his Grandpa Pickles is babysitting that night. However Tommy and Dill's other Grandpa (who comes from their Mom's side of the family) comes and wants to upstage Grandpa Pickles. Eventually Tommy and co get both grandpa's to settle down. As they go to watch the video they hear a crashing noise and have to stop the video.
  You'd expect - Dill to leave the video in the VCR while coming up to solve the problem.
  Instead - Dill takes the video with him and as a result the video gets destroyed and Tommy and Co are in a disaster situation. Seriously, what the hell?! So this is not just an example of "What An Idiot", this is also an example of Deus Ex Machina!
• In the Batman The Animated Series episode "Mudslide", Batman is chasing down actor Matt Hagen (aka the shape-shifter Clayface), who has been robbing various chemical factories. Hagen is obviously falling apart at the seams, leaving muddy trails behind him as he struggles to run. Batman offers to help restore Hagen's humanity but Hagen - justifiably skeptical given that Batman nearly killed him in the past - says that he doesn't need Batman's help. It turns out he has found another doctor - a medical consultant from one of his old movies - who has found a chemical process that will restore his body... and the final chemical they need is at Wayne Enterprises, which leads to Batman catching the trail again and finding Hagen's hideout, just as Hagen is undergoing the final process to save his life.
  You'd Expect- Batman to just let this crime go. Hagen was an unwilling villain, blackmailed into crime by a corrupt businessman and unwittingly turned into a monster by the minions of the same businessman. Batman knows of Hagen's past and offered to help Hagen earlier in the same episode. Even if he couldn't justify letting the crime go, nothing stops him from letting him get cured then throw a non superpowered Hagen in jail. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time Bruce Wayne made a public show of supporting the rehibilitation of a criminal, having paid for the experimental surgery and therapies that would restore Harvey Dent to a normal life in "Second Chance"
  Instead- Batman blows up the machine that is injecting Hagen with the chemicals and says "It's all over, Hagen. The lab boys can take it from here." This leads to an all-out battle which Batman only wins after taking the fight outside where the rain further weakens Hagen. Effectively, Batman murders Clayface by denying him medical treatment...
  • Batman does this to Clayface again in the Justice League episode "Secret Society". Granted, Grodd probably wouldn't really have allowed Hagen to be cured of his condition anyway, but still...
  Batman: Always trying to find a cure, aren't you?
  Clayface: Can you blame me?
  Batman: No... but it's made you predictable.
• In the Batman The Animated Series episode "Cat Scratch Fever", Batman is being chased by a rabid, infected dog through the snowy wilderness with several crooks he was trying to foil also following him. He slides out onto a frozen-over lake and manages to administer a cure to the dog. The villains arrive on the scene, armed and ready against a potentially tired and weakened Batman.
  You'd Expect- The villains to keep their distance and shoot Batman with their weaponry from afar, perhaps breaking the ice so that he falls in and guard the immediate area so that he can't get back out. This would insure an icy death for the caped crusader.
  Instead- The villains do indeed submerge Batman after shooting the ice, but not before walking out onto the ice themselves. The predictable happens and Batman comes out from under them, causing the villain's weaponry to go off and break the ice beneath their feet, disarming them and allowing Batman to take them in.
• Justice League Rather then a specific moment, it's a re-occurring theme for J'onn J'onzz.
  • He'll see a missile/blast/laser or some other projectile heading towards him. He has no time to dodge; but enough time to gasp in surprise.
    You'd Expect- He'll turn ethereal to avoid the attack. Or morph into something so the blast would miss him. He's been shown to do both in the blink of an eye.
    Instead- He forgets about his own superpowers and gets shot in the face - again.
  • In the Justice League Unlimited episode Grudge Match, Lex Luthor finds a way to mind control the members of the Justice League.
    You'd Expect- He'd use it to make the JLU members help conquer Earth, defeat the other superheroes, rob banks, etc.
    Instead- He forces female JLU members to fight in underground cage matches.
    However - His mind control may have the standard "Cannot force target to do something they'd have a moral objection to" disclaimer. But, as we know from long, long experience, smacking the living crap out of each other is not something Superheroes have an objection to.
    Additional however - Lex is a human male over the age of eighteen. Due to events in the previous episode, his body had romantic relations with Tala... and his mind did not. He just gained the ability to mind control a bunch of superheroines. Honestly, can you blame him?
  • Another one from JLU: Downpour, a pastiche of Zan from the Wonder Twins, gets into a fight. With Aquaman.
    You'd Expect - He'd run like freakin' hell, never looking back, because of his powers. Which loosely translate to "I lose against Aquaman."
    Instead - He fills the room with water. Attempting to drown Aquaman. AQUAMAN. This works as well as it sounds.
    However - He is a mentally unstable clone who just saw his beloved sister get smacked down, so he probably wasn't really thinking that clearly.
  • One more, this time shared with Batman. In the original series finale, someone needs to crash a ship into a BFG, making sure that it does not burn up on entry into the atmosphere. In this series, J'onn J'onzz does not have his trademark fear of fire. His three most prominently used powers are telepathy, flight, and Intangibility/Phasing.
    You'd Expect - Batman would evacuate himself and Flash, the other Stooge, and telepathically guide J'onn through the whole process, like they did in the series premiere. J'onn would then complete his task, and phase out of the ship, and fly away from the ensuing explosion. Doing the job well would mean there'd be no fire to be afraid of anyway.
    Instead - Batman pushes the other two Stooges into an escape capsule, tells them It Has Been An Honor, and prepares to go through with his suicide mission, NOT knowing that Superman would hear him and come to his rescue. Why does he think he can get away with being such an idiot? Because He's the GODDAMN Batman!
• Avatar The Last Airbender, "The Blind Bandit": Lao Bei Fong, a wealthy Earth Kingdom merchant, discovers that the blind twelve year old daughter (with some basic capacity for Earthbending, as far as he knew) he kept hidden within his estate has been sneaking out to participate in quasi-legal (at best) underground pitfights. He then witnesses firsthand how great of an Earthbender she really is when she beats half a dozen experienced adult earthbenders (with functioning eyes mind you) into submission and makes it look easy.
  You'd expect that - after reading her the obligatory riot act for sneaking out at night, and probably a bonus one for associating with such "riff-raff" - he'd assign her a seeing-eye maidservant, fire the so-called instructor who was supposed to teach her only breathing exercises (poor chap had no clue what she was capable of, either), and allow her to instruct the Avatar.
  Instead he announces that he has been permitting her too much freedom by letting her wander the gardens of the family compound on her own, and that she will from now on be guarded 24/7 (by what army he fails to mention), while ordering the Avatar and his companions to leave. When Toph (predictably) bolts, he compounds matters by hiring the guy who kidnapped her to bring her home by any means possible. (Well, he did choose someone with the right experience, I guess...)
  However Toph's parents are clearly very disillusioned and unable to cope with the fact that their daughter is growing up/can do all these things. While this is a rather large overeaction, I know real life parents who are almost this bad (if not worse) to their college-age sons/daughters. This is more of a case in Truth In Television - though the bending is fantastical, the situation is not.
  • While wandering the Earth Kingdom in the beginning of season 2, Iroh, The Dumbledore of Avatar The Last Airbender, comes across a plant that is either "the rare White Dragon Bush, which's leaves make a tea so delicious it's heartbreaking!", or else "the White Jade Bush, which is poisonous."
    You'd expect he'd demonstrate the good sense possessed by even the most scatterbrained Cub Scout and not touch the thing with a ten-foot-pole until he's 100% certain it's the right one.
    Instead he drinks it and almost dies. Idiot.
    However Iroh displays throughout the show what amounts to a tea addiction. He even uses firebending to heat tea, while pretending to be an Earth Kingdom refugee. So, still an idiotic thing to do, but expected.
    • It's insinuated that Iroh did it on purpose, because he knew neither of them would last long alone in the wilderness and he needed a way to convince Zuko to seek out civilization.
  • In the first season of Avatar The Last Airbender one of the villains Zhao captures Aang who has less than a year to master all four elements if he is going to stop the villains' plan to take over the world. However, if Aang is killed he will simply reincarnate a month later.
    You'd expect that Zhao would realize its extremely unlikely that a newborn baby would have time to master one element let alone all four and would thus decide to kill Aang.
    Instead he decides to imprison Aang.
    Then Again this is Admiral Zhao we're talking about here. From blowing up his own ship to killing the Moon Spirit, his entire career is defined by lurching from one idiocy to another.
    To Be Fair the Fire Nation, or at least Zhao, was rightly afraid that after waiting a hundred years to get their hands on the Avatar, it wouldn't be worth it to have another one on the loose within a month.
    Although Fire Nation propaganda could have turned the Firebender Avatar into a Super Soldier - but they'd have to kill 2 more avatars as well to get to that point, and the Spirit Mentor might make that impossible... So Yeah.
  • The series finale. Aang does Avatar stuff and goes on a vision quest and consults with past Avatars and all that good stuff. Everyone tells him that he has to kill Ozai. It's the Avatar's job to do things like this for the good of the world. Airbender Avatar Yangchen tells him that his duty as the Avatar comes before his teachings as an Airbender(which condemns violence).
    You'd expect Aang to take their advice. They never steered him wrong before and, as they have many many years of experience more than him, accept that they know better than he does, and kill Ozai.
    Instead he ignores them all and risks the safety of the world to try and use Soulbending, coming dangerously close to having it backfire on him.
    However it's rather hard to end a lifetime of Technical Pacifism, no matter how important it is. One study found that enlisted, trained soldiers only had something like a 15% rate of actually shooting at the bad guys, much less a twelve year old who's only been fighting less than a year. While it is true that that 15% percentage rose to over 90% when military training methods were revised to include operant conditioning to overcome the default reluctance to kill on orders, Aang's never had that training.
    Also this is nominally a kids' show. Does anyone here honestly believe that if Aang were to kill Ozai, no matter how much sense it made, no matter how desperate the situation, no matter how utterly evil, depraved, and genocidally murderous the Phoenix King might be, that the Moral Guardians would not come crashing down on the studio, the writers, and everyone else involved in the show like a rain of meteors?
• Cobra Commander from GI Joe follows right on this tropes in The Movie. After a failed battle with G.I. Joe, Serpentor insults them.
  You'd Expect: Cobra Commander to shut up and take his abuse as usual.
  Instead: Cobra Commander insults the Serpentor.
  • Also, in that very same scene, literally all of Cobra Commander's lieutenants stand around berating him for being a coward, an idiot, and generally just a horrible leader. Then, there's an intruder alert, and Cobra Commander orders everyone to follow him to stop the intruder.
    You'd Expect: Having just stood around enumerating his plethora of flaws in leadership, everyone would tell him to buzz off, or at least smack him once or twice.
    Instead: Everyone blindly falls in lockstep behind him, as if they weren't even listening to themselves not two minutes before.
    Actually: Wouldn't deciding to postpone the personal arguments and/or civil war until after the intruder alert was taken care of be one of the smartest decisions Cobra's ruling elite has ever made?
• Superfriends has a LOT of instances of characters forgetting that they have superpowers. In one particularly egregious example, the Legion of Doom has come up with a device that can transport people into books (don't ask). Toy Man lures Hawkman into following him into "Jack and the Beanstalk", and proceeds to flee by scaling the beanstalk.
  You'd Expect: Hawkman would remember that, not only does he have wings, flying is his only power, and thus he would use that power to chase and apprehend the villain.
  Instead: Hawkman climbs up the beanstalk after Toy Man, and has quite a difficult time of it, from the look of things. You just know that, the whole time, he's thinking "Boy, if only I didn't have these big weights on my back, I'm sure I could climb a lot faster!"
  Then Again: The show is fueled by this trope. If someone ever actually acted intelligently, the Superfriends universe would probably implode from sheer shock.
• An episode of G1 Transformers saw Optimus Prime and Megatron agree to single combat - losing side leaves Earth. Every single Autobot (and Spike) tells Prime this is a bad idea, because Megatron can't be counted on to fight fair. He doesn't: using Applied Phlebotinum to transfer the special abilities of the other Decepticons into himself (Skywarp's teleportation, Rumble's pile drivers, etc.), Megatron routs Prime.
  You'd Think: Prime would believe his own eyes, see that Megatron was using abilities he'd never used before (and were suspiciously similar to those of his minions) and call Megatron out on the deal, at least until he was sure about it.
  Instead: Until footage from Teletraan-1 shows him exactly how Megatron pulled his deception off, Prime simply accepted his defeat and prepared to pack the Autobots off to parts unknown. With every Autobot (and Spike) protesting that Megatron obviously cheated. "Honor Before Reason"? "Lawful Stupid"? Take your pick. Prime's an idiot, regardless.
• In Cats Dont Dance, Darla's Evil Plan to discredit the heroes has worked: she tricked Danny into using a soundstage to try and impress the studio head. Then she sabotaged it via floods, and just drops by to drop off the hostage again.
  You'd Think: She'd feign being angry, shouting "What the hell?! How could you disappoint me like that, after that opportunity? And you trusted the controls to a little penguin?"
  Instead: She takes the opportunity to engage in some Evil Gloating that makes it very clear she's responsible, and eventually leads to them counter-Xanatosing her.
  Then Again: How old is Darla Dimple anyways? Little kids do like to gloat, and possibly she figured that Pudge would tell them how the whole sabotage happened, since he saw the whole thing while being tied up, so she thought that she could indulge herself in a little gloating.
• In Transformers Animated, the Constructicons (who aren't evil so much as mercenary and simple-minded) have recently had their memories erased after drinking a tainted batch of oil provided by Bulkhead. While their basic, generally helpful and friendly personalities are intact, they have no recollection of any of their previous dealings with either the Autobots or the Decepticons.
  You'd expect: That Bulkhead would attempt to explain, slowly and calmly (and using small words), that the Autobots are good and the Decepticons are evil. This would allow him to maintain his friendship with the Constructicons and gain powerful allies for his team.
  Instead: Bulkhead, still livid from the Constructicons' betrayal, threatens them with his giant wrecking ball weapon and generally throws a temper tantrum. This frightens the Constructicons off, which eventually leads to them falling back in with Megatron and becoming true-blue (well, true-green-and-purple), dyed-in-the-wool (dyed-in-the-steel?) Decepticons. That's what happens when you are voiced by Patrick Star...
  • In a later episode, the "You'd Expect" is exactly what he does after he tracks them down again, and for a while it actually works. Unfortunately this is confounded by a) Dirt Boss and b) the fact that at core the Constructicons seem to have a tendency to follow orders no matter who's giving them or what they were doing before.
  • Another episode of Transformers Animated has Sentinel Prime, on the way back to Cybertron, bringing out the captured Decepticons from their cells (but still bound and gagged) to interrogate them. Then he is called to the bridge to speak with the High Council.
    You'd expect: That Sentinel makes sure that the Decepticons were back in their cells before leaving them alone, realizing how dangerous they are and how stasis cuffs aren't always a sure thing (As seen with Starscream in "A Fistful of Energon."
    Instead: He completely leaves them unattended, not even bothering to make sure that they were back in their cells (Jetfire and Jetstorm were the last ones there, to be fair, but he could've made sure that they knew to make sure that the Decepticons were secured back in their cells). Thus when Swindle, who was previously Mode Locked, is revived thanks to the lightning from an Ion storm they traveled to (which could also be considered a What An Idiot moment), he frees the other Decepticons and thus proceeds to take over the ship.
• Ben 10 Alien Force, "Kevin's Big Score": Kevin finds out an old partner of his in the blackmarket alien tech underworld has a Holoviewer containing a message for Ben from his grandfather.
  You'd expect: Kevin to share this information with Ben and Gwen so they could come up with a plan to buy, trade for, or steal it.
  Instead: Kevin steals the Rust Bucket to trade it because he doesn't want to bring up his past - a past Ben and Gwen already know about! - for fear they wouldn't trust him again. But stealing their grandpa's house with no explanation is sure to gain their trust...
  • In the original Ben 10 episode "Back With a Vengeance" Ben and Gwen are trying to escape the Null Void, a horrific pocket dimension. However Ben's arch-nemesis Kevin (whose main goal is to get revenge on Ben) is trying to escape before them. Then Ben calls to him saying "I'm over here Kevin! Come get me!"
    You'd Expect Kevin to do, as he said a few minutes ago, "leave him stranded in the dimension with his arch nemesis, which is a satisfying enough revenge.
    Instead He charges at Ben to kill him. A head hop and a few jumps later, Ben is home free. Kevin is just plain screwed.
    • In the episode "The Galactic Enforcers", Ben and the titular Galactic Enforcers (minus one, who was temporarily brought down by chocolate poisoning. Don't ask.) are fighting two crazed and deadly mercenaries called Sixsix and Volcanus. Gwen and Grandpa Max are locked in the Galactic Enforcers' ship, being not allowed by the Enforcers to be involved with the business below.
      You'd Expect Gwen and Max to stay where they are. They are both unarmed humans and Max doesn't even have access to his plumber equipment. They are not going to be able to dent the two villains in the state they are in now.
      Instead Max hacks and activates the teleporters and he and Gwen teleport, Leeroy Jenkins style, down to the location. Upon arrival they IMMEDIATELY get in trouble and Ben has to save them, allowing Sixsix and Volcanus to get away with what they wanted.
• Kim Possible. Shego has recently fallen into a shallow trap with crocodiles, and says she can't hurt any of the crocodiles.
  You'd Expect that Shego, with her abilities to shoot plasma beams just by pointing her fingers or jumping straight several meters up the air, would either shoot the crocodiles with her plasma beams or just jump out of that shallow hole.
  Instead she starts wrestling with one crocodile's jaw while whining about needing help...
  • In the end of the movie, Drakken has succeeded with all his plans. He is not only mere hours away from unleashing the evil machines that he will use to take over the world, he has also captured and tied up his arch enemy Kim Possible and her sidekick though a cunning plan of his.
    You'd Expect that Drakken would a) learn by his mistakes and actually capture Rufus so that the pet does not free Kim and Ron again, and b) not take the backpack, containing a laser beam and the necessary disrupter to the transmitter to the evil machines, to the exact same room that TP were tied up in.
    Instead Drakken overlooks Rufus, again, and puts the backpack, with all the mission crucial toys, in the same room as Team Possible are captured, so naturally Team Possible escapes and not long after destroys Drakken's plans.
• The Super Mario cartoons have plenty of these, but right now one particular scene springs to mind. In the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 episode "Reptiles in the Rose Garden", Mario and friends see Bowser's Doomship hovering above.
  You'd Expect that they'd just run for it.
  Instead they stand there like idiots, somehow avoiding getting shot by the ship's gunshots, and as a result, get captured by the Chain Chomps that Bowser sends down after them.
• In the Aladdin animated series, Genie often falls under this trope. One example that comes to mind is the episode I Never Mechanism I Didn't Like. Genie miniaturizes himself so he can get inside a robot to disable it. The villain of the episode responds by sending a miniature robot after Genie.
  You'd Expect Genie would poof himself back to his normal size and skoosh the robot.
  Instead he stays small and lets it chase him around.
  Well, what do you expect when you're voiced by Homer Simpson?
  • In the same episode, Genie discovers he can reverse the villain's mind control. After freeing Aladdin, they set off to kick the villain's butt and save Agrabah.
    You'd Expect Genie would use what he discovered to release everyone else.
    Instead he leaves everyone else under the villain's mind control, forcing Aladdin to fight them off.
• In Disney's version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Frollo is clinging to the side of Notre Dame with his sword drawn, and sees Esmeralda holding up Quasimodo, thus making her vulnerable, and goes to attack her.
  You'd Expect: He'd take the second to hop over the balcony rail that's inches away from him before attacking her, or at least quickly cut off her arm if he really wanted them both dead.
  Instead: Shouting "...And He shall smite the wicked!", he raises his arms above his head and balances his whole weight on an already centuries-old gargoyle, causing it to collapse and him to fall from the tower into the blazing inferno below.
  However: He's a Large Ham. Trading an entirely reasonable action for a chance to overact is par for the course.
• In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer hijacks a blimp and falsely tells a baseball player that his wife loves him in order to help him win a game. Sadly the plane crashes, and the baseball player thinks his wife is dead. Homer has to come up with an excuse.
  You'd Expect: Homer says that the baseball player's wife told him to say the message since she apparently has either a fear of heights or work she has to do
  Instead: Homer, being the loveable idiot jerkass he is, tells the baseball player that his wife is pooping.
• In another episode of The Simpsons, Maggie is proven to be the solution to world peace, provided she lives in a monastary.
  You'd Expect: Marge to do the mature thing and allow her child to stay there, since a monastary isn't that bad of a place to be. Plus, small price to pay for world peace, right?
  Instead: Marge goes all "She's mine and no one else's" and keeps her. No explanation beyond "God would never ask anyone to give up their child for the good of the world." is given. This is fairly annoying since she learns that her children have to leave their nest in almost every episode about her. A MAJOR Flanderization of her Mama Bear attitude to be sure.
• In an episode of Futurama, Fry gets infested by worms that make him smarter, stronger, and brave enough to tell Leela he loves her, which ought to lead to a discretion shot, If You Know What I Mean.
  You'd Expect: He leaves the worms in, because they are the best thing that has ever happened to him.
  Instead: He goes inside his body (long story) and drives the worms out in order to prove to himself that Leela would love him without the worms. He's wrong.
  • However: Status Quo Is God is taken too a ridiculous extreme in Futurama, considering the amount of episodes that end with Fry either performing some earth-shatteringly romantic gesture, or sacrificing his own life to save Leela (which has happened multiple times. So...)

You'd expect: that Leela finally gets a clue that Fry is exactly the kind of person she's holding out for.
Instead: the next episode/movie happens, and she's back to treating Fry like her idiot kid brother.

• In the Spectacular Spiderman episode "Identity Crisis", Venom has declared that Peter Parker is Spider Man. As journalists are trying to get proof, Venom attacks Spidey and eventually rips off his mask as Spidey quickly dives behind a car to avoid being seen.
  You'd Expect: Venom to rip the mask in half, so Peter has no way of protecting his identity.
  Instead: Venom, holding the mask with him, checks under the car for Spidey. He get whacked, allowing Peter to put his mask back on.
  • From the same series, in "Gangland," Peter is on a date with Liz Allen on Valentine's Day. Many of his friends are also there with dates, including Gwen Stacy, who Peter has feelings for more then he does Liz. Halfway through the date, Peter has to leave early for photographer/Spider-Man reasons. Liz forgives him, but wants a goodbye kiss.
    You'd Expect: Peter to give her the goodbye kiss and go off superheroing. If he must break up with her so he can pursue Gwen, do it at a more oppurtune time. While there is no way to break up with someone who loves you "in a good way," it's a much better option then what Peter ended up doing.
    Instead: Peter acts like a Jerk Ass, not give the kiss and apoligizes to Gwen for leaving early. Poor Liz is humiliated, her realationship with Peter is shattered, and Peter is to blame for being stupid.
  • And one more, this time from the episode Natural Selection. Even though its a growth in character development and meant to establish the status quo of the Spider-Man mythos I couldn't help but shake my head at the following: Kurt taken his serum and becomes the Lizard through some unforseen side effects. Peter, as Spider-Man, manages to defeat him in the process taking some pictures for the Daily Bugle for a contest and has it printed on the newspapers.
    You'd Expect: Peter, being as smart as he is, would request he'd be listed as "Anonymous" or use a fake name since the whole affair was a private matter (this is his boss's family after all) and keep suspicion off of him since he was suppose to be helping them.
    Instead: Like a dope, he has his name printed in bold letters on the paper. End result is he gets fired from his intership and his friends are now distrustful of him. And the funny thing he does it again in a later episode, "Persona", which leads to his falling out with Eddie Brock. You all know what happens after that.
• In X-Men: Evolution, the team is taking a boat cruise to get away from the mutant persecution. During the evening, Bobby "Iceman" Drake decides to start making sculptures out of the sea water. Now, this is already pretty dumb — considering they're trying to avoid having anyone onboard I.D. them as mutants — but Bobby is not content with just that level of idiocy. Thus, at a request to "make a big one" he declares: "name this movie" and creates an iceberg.
  You'd Expect: Bobby to create his "masterpiece" off to the side, so the ship will pass right by it. (Or for him to realize he's being an idiot, and stop making sculptures altogether.)
  Instead: He creates the iceberg directly in the ship's path; despite the fact he has no way of moving it aside, or changing the ships course. Perhaps he wanted to emulate Titanic as much as possible.
• Total Drama Island, "Haute Camp-ture". The eliminated contestants are given the power to vote off one camper who's still in the running. Kadie and Sade get the ball rolling by choosing Leshawna, because they want to hang out with her. The other campers object, saying that they shouldn't eliminate Leshawna if they like her. Unfortunately, just saying "Leshawna" counts as a vote against her.
  You'd Expect: Someone to figure out that they should say someone's name besides Leshawna.
  Instead: They keep saying "Don't say Leshawna... oh shit, I just did," and the votes against her continue to pile up, until she has enough votes against her to secure her elimination.
• In the Ed Edd N Eddy movie, Double D had just been pranked by the other two Eds into believing they had been killed by a supernatural figure. He is smart and has previously lampshaded his being Surrounded By Idiots in a past episode, the Eds are on the run from the kids, and [[he's in an abandoned factory originally used for pranking toys, with two guys known for pulling pranks]].
  You'd Expect: Double D would suspect that Ed's follow-up offer, quite possibly thought up by Eddy, for a can of jelly beans was a trick.
  Instead: He just accepts the offer, not suspecting anything at all during the whole minute he tries opening the can. The result? The can causes an explosion of many rubber snakes being spewed all around the factory's area. Kevin, who was in the area with Nazz, realized where the Eds were hiding, although this didn't help them all that much in catching the Eds, who move on anyway. Of course, Double D himself was propelled by the explosion, and ended up stuck to a rock high up on a waterfall.

• Lonelygirl15
  • TAAG has kidnapped a brainwashed girl from an evil cult and tied her up. She complains that her hands are going numb and begs them to loosen the ropes just a little. The last time they loosened a prisoner's ropes "just a little", the prisoner escaped the instant their backs were turned.
    You'd Expect: They'd tell the girl to just deal with it. Especially since Daniel (the one who made the rope-loosening mistake the first time) and Jonas (the one who escaped using the rope-loosening trick the first time) are both there.
    Instead: They loosen the ropes just a little, and the prisoner escapes the instant their backs are turned.
  • TAAG, having recently failed a mission, blames Steve on suspicion of treachery and decides to abandon him in the wilderness. The last time they abandoned a friend in the wilderness, said friend was captured and brainwashed by the aforementioned evil cult.
    You'd Expect: They'd at least drop him off in a town with enough money to buy a ticket home.
    Instead: Apparently having learned nothing from their past mistakes, they abandon him in the wilderness.
• In a certain hentai, the main star has wishing powers given to him by a demoness! Who warns him, straightforward, on the rules of wishing, including that "If you wish for anything specific, we will steal it.", along with "You will get what you desire and <didn't pay attention> what you get." (You will desire, by the way) This is not the first time he has heard this lecture. Also, this demoness is rather kinky, with a TF fetish.
  • You'd Expect: He would pretty much be careful with his wishes, considering this is a DEMONESS! Who is BLUNTLY TELLING HIM THAT SHE IS A LITERAL GENIE!
  • Instead: His first wish is to be hung like a herd of bucking broncos. Clydsdale. You sure? YES! This ends, well, just about as well as can be expected. Oh, as a bonus, You want the stamina? Yes. Give the girls the same stamina? Yes! End Result: Demoness gets a TF field day. His next wish? I want a cowgirl. Can you make me one? The rest get worse.
    • Warning: While I am going to give the link, it is REALLY not safe for work. http://www.yiffstar.com/?pid=61939

• In Bionicle, Takanuva, Gali and Pohatu are fighting giant bugs. Business as usual for them really, but Takanuva is worried that his regular light powers won't be powerful enough. He does have a bunch of new toys, though!
  You'd expect: That he'd just use his new power-amplifying weapon if he was that worried. Or if he didn't want to drain his light powers, he has a blaster that could do it for him.
  Instead: He uses his new shadow power without the amplifier, winning the fight but freaking his friends out and making them think he might be one of the evil shadow-slinging shapeshifters flying around.
  However: Shadow is The Dark Side and probably affecting Takanuva's judgment.
  Double However: Word Of God has actually stated that shadow isn't evil in and of itself, but has been used by the Brotherhood of Makuta to evil ends.
• This Troper: Makes a mess of editing this page and then has her computer play up.
  You'd expect: That she would take a deep breath, go have a cup of tea and then come back to try and sort it out with a clear head later.
  Instead She keeps plugging away with every attempt making an even worse mess and getting all annoyed and flustered until finally throwing her hands up in the air, swearing, and vowing death on the entire internet.
• No ProfessionalWrestling examples huh? I figured there'd be way more examples than mine. :/
• Michelle McCool's current angle on Smackdown.
  You'd expect: After McCool losing 2 matches and taking it out on Maria both times, Maria would show some caution around McCool, and so would Eve after Maria gets the snot kicked out of her when Mc Cool finally loses the title.
  However: Apparently girlfriends do this all the time in wrestling land?? Thats what she told them, and that was enough to gain there forgiveness. and they totally did not see the asskicking they would get coming. Sorry Smackdown, I don't believe it.
• The six people trapped together one cold and stormy night in the poem The Cold Within.
  You'd expect: However they felt about present company, they would at least try to keep the fire going.
  Instead: Each is hell-bent on spiting someone else of a demographic they have ill will towards.
• The titular monarch in the song "There Lived a King" from The Gondoliers, who was grieved that not everyone was as well-off as he.
  You'd expect: He would call together the best minds on economics and try to work out a policy that prospered as much of the population as possible, and revisit it from time to time.
  Instead: He promoted each person in the kingdom to the top of the hierarchy of their chosen métier.
  That king, although noone denies/His heart was of abnormal size/Yet he'd have acted otherwise/If he'd have been acuter.

    Close Other 

• * Don't know if it counts since we have 2332 (at 2009) years of medical knowledge to look at but when Alexander The Great got sick, his doctors used the medicine of the time (which was giving him small doses of poison that would cause him to vomit up the sickness). Alexander, un-impressed by the speed of his "recovery", demanded more "medicine". He died shortly thereafter.
• After making a deal with Hitler for Poland, Stalin basically sat on his ass while German troops massed near his borders. Confident in his "friendship" with Hitler, he ordered troops to not engage. Later, when the Germans got around to attacking, he still ordered his troops to not firing back, for fear of offending Hitler! After the Soviets sustained heavy losses, he finally got a clue, and began the enormously costly campaign against Nazi Germany. And won! Colour me surprised.
  • This troper is not surprised since Hitler was as big an idiot (possibly bigger) than Stalin was. Even though Germany's resources were already showing signs of being stretched with all the other campaigns he had started, he just had to take on the guy with a large, untapped resource base who would've been willing to let him continue unharassed if he didn't. Cue Nazi armies being buried under sheer numbers of Soviet infantry and armor. Plus Hitler, like Napoleon, seemed to forget Russia had a, what's that called again...hideous fucking winter.
    • However, the purpose of Operation Barbarossa was to capture and exploit the rich oilfields and mineral wealth of the Caucasus, easing the strain on Germany's resources. Defeat of the Soviet Union was a secondary goal, at least at first.
    • Which begs the question of why not attack it first?
  • Agreed. As me and my sibling put it in our best Russian accents"You come to invade mother Russia? WE WELCOME YOU! Please, do not mind the cold cold cold conditions of our land"
• There's also the issue of the Western Allies' desire to "appease" Hitler by letting him have Austria and the Sudetenland. What makes this an even bigger case is that their main goals were not just an effort to avoid war with Germany, but they were aiming to make Hitler an ally against Russia. We all know how that went.
• Keep in mind, though, that hindsight is always 20-20. Sure, we know all about Hitler and the Nazi regime now because it's in the history books — but back then, as far as its neighbors were concerned Germany was basically still the nation that had lost the first world war in a big way and was still scrambling to recover.
  • Not to mention that the memories of the first world war were still fresh on everybody's mind and anyone who knows how that war went would know that the Allies were justified in trying to prevent another war.
    • But still...completely useless at it. Their efforts to prevent Germany from starting another war amounted to a) Disallowing a union with various neighbouring nations (which weren't even part of Germany in Kaiser Wilhelm's day); b) Demilitarising the Rhineland (which really accomplished nothing except making the Germans angry); and c) Giving West Prussia to Poland while practically erecting a sign that said "Please invade me". The Paris Peace Conference was far more interested with punishing their ally Russia for its recent Bolshevik revolution. The primary effect of this was to encourage Stalin to agree to the aforementioned agreement with Hitler in the hopes of winning back lost Russian territory in Poland. Even without the benefit of hindsight you'd expect them to get at least one thing right!
• Jerry Falwell, known for his conservative stance (particularly his strongly anti-gay beliefs) has just died.
  You'd expect: The Westboro Baptist Church to acknowledge the fact that every time Jerry Falwell is so much as mentioned, it talks about how he hates gay people—the guy used gays (and other groups he didn't like) to scapegoat for 9/11. Or at least you'd think the Westboro Baptist Church would do anything other than what's outlined in the next line:
  Instead: Fred Phelps releases a statement saying Falwell is going to hell because he supported gay people. Um...huh?
  • "Supported gay people" in the sense that he said something along the lines that he believed they should be cured, rather than executed.
• Another example from Fred Phelps: He has somehow stumbled across an article that claims homosexuals are attempting to recruit others in an effort to make the world gay.
  You'd expect: He's spend approximately one minute (at most!) on google or wikipedia to investigate the source, in this case the Onion, which is a parody newspaper. The article was meant as satire, not as fact.
  Instead: He uses the article seriously and posts it to expose the "evil homosexual conspiracy", making himself look incredibly stupid stupider.
• Recent example from the sports world: To "minimize the level of inconvenience for Orioles and Ravens fans", the Baltimore Orioles moved the game originally scheduled for Sunday, September 7th, to the afternoon of Saturday the 6th. Which ended up being right when Tropical Storm Hanna was passing through Baltimore. The storm passed in time for the regularly scheduled game that evening to take place.
  You'd expect: They'd play the game at its originally scheduled time on Sunday.
  Instead: No makeup date has been announced. Their opponents, the Oakland Athletics, are not scheduled to play outside of their own division, on the other side of the country, for the rest of the season.
  However: Mercifully, the game is meaningless anyway because neither team has any chance of reaching the playoffs. Still, in the spirit of "minimizing inconvenience", I hope the Orioles are offering refunds.
• Another World War II example involving Hitler concerns the massive, deadly Panzer tanks Hitler had decreed could only be unleashed on his personal command. When the Allies attacked Normandy on D-Day, the Panzers were ready to be deployed.
  You'd expect: The German commanders would radio Berlin to contact Hitler, so he could give the order to deploy the tanks.
  Instead: Hitler's cronies didn't contact him, given that Der Fuhrer hated being woken up from sleep and the stooges were too afraid of his wrath to disturb him. As a result, the Panzers sat idly by as the Allied invasion pulverized the German forces. Of course, given Hitler's personality, it's likely he would have refused the request even if his stooges had woken him up.
  • Although the Allies had run a successful misinformation campaign to convince Hitler that the real landing was going to be in the Pas de Calais area (and the landing in Normandy was just a feint), so it could be considered a successful intelligence coup on the part of the Allies. Still, they should have woken Hitler to let him know.
• Not as massive in scale as all the WWII examples, but for some reason, a man in the front row at a Tim McGraw concert in Washington State decided to rough up a couple of women sitting by him. (This troper isn't aware of all of the details, but what he does know is enough.)
  You'd expect: If some guy's going to do something ugly like beat on women, he'd do it in the privacy of his own home, where nobody would see.
  Instead: Not only did he do it in public, he did it in the front row of a concert, being given by a big cowboy who's well-known for loving and respecting his wife. Tim and a couple band members grabbed this guy, hauled him up on stage, and held him there, threatening to punch his lights out, until the security guards could arrive and toss him out. Then Tim just went right back to his song, without missing a beat. (Oh, and the next words of the song he was doing just happened to be, "I ain't looking for trouble.")
  • On that note, this troper now has a lot more respect for Tim McGraw.
    • Crowning Moment Of Awesome material.
• A very different example. Richard Nixon was, by the end of first four years as president, quite popular president and his opponent for the 72' campaign, George McGovern ran a weak campaign.
  You'd expect: That, you know, he'd run a clean presidential campaign, make use of his popularity and abilities and win fairly.
  Instead: His campaign used dirty tricks and blantaly illegal actions throught, culminating with Watergate. And we all know how well that ended for him... What An Idiot indeed.
  Additionally: He named his re-election committee CREEP.
• The 2004 US Presidential election had Democrat (and poll leader) Sen. John Kerry suddenly see his biggest campaign talking point (his military experience in Vietnam, implying he'd be a better choice to lead - and win - the war in Iraq) under attack on two fronts: First by "The Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" - who accused Kerry of lying about his service record. Secondly by the Republican Party attacking him with archival footage of Kerry on the early 70s talk show circuit, decrying his (and the US') actions in Vietnam - the most damaging of which was his admitting he threw away the combat decorations he'd won.
  You'd expect: He'd either defend the latter actions as acts of conscience or apologize for them. As for the former: most expected him to come out swinging against the SBV, challenging them to prove their allegations, drop the ad spots, or prepare for a slander suit
  Instead: He refused to address either issue directly, choosing to hammer at the fact that Bush spent the war on a National Guard base in Texas. This had the triple effect of giving legitimacy to the SBV's allegations ("Why won't he fight back? Does he have something to hide""), make him look like an empty suit - as if the fact that his service record was all he had to draw on vs. Bush, and (most damming) made him look weak and foolish ("If he can't counter a bunch of gadflies like the SBV, what's he going to do against a real threat"). Kerry lost the popular vote by a 50%-49% margin.
  There Is Also The Fact: That if he'd taken the matter to court, Senator Kerry would have given the defendants the right to file discovery motions requiring the release of his service records. If he had anything at all embarassing in there, whether related to the matter at hand or not, then the one thing Senator Kerry absolutely could not afford to do is put the case in a courtroom. And contrary to reports, Senator Kerry had not (and to this day, still has not) released his service records — while he has released extracts from his records to selected members of the press and on his campaign website, the full unredacted transcript has yet to be released. This is as compared to President Bush and Senator McCain (and pretty much every other veteran running for President that this troper is aware of since World War II), both of whom filed the Form 180 allowing the press to root at will throughout the entire paper pile.
  • Both candidates agreed to accept public campaign financing, which imposes overall campaign spending limits. These limits are defined into two segments- before the convention and after the convention; the SBV ads began between the Democratic and Republican conventions, the former scheduled at the traditional midsummer time, the latter the first week of September. Kerry, a creature of political conventional wisdom if ever there was one, thought this was done to get the R convention as close to the 9/11 anniversary as possible and wasn't expecting an attack in the interim.
• The guys who tried to get around smuggling tortoises through customs...by labeling the box "scorpions".
• Brutus, Cassius and their crew wanted the power of Rome to be in the senate's hands again, so they went ahead and killed Caesar to make sure they would get control of the city.
  You'd think that Roman senators would a) be aware of the laws of the republic, b) have noticed that Caesar was kinda' popular.
  Instead they were completely dumbstruck when the only way to make the assassination legal (which was pretty essential to them since otherwise they would just be murderers who had not only killed the dictator but also their own political futures) was to declare Caesar a tyrant, in which case all his legal actions would be nullified. Since Caesar had appointed his assassinators-to-be to their political positions, Brutus and the lot would thereby lose their jobs and new elections would have to be held. And the people were not likely to vote for the people who killed their favorite dude.
• Stan Kroenke, owner of the Denver Nuggets and their home arena, the Pepsi Center, is faced with the genuine possibility that his team might make the NBA playoffs. Problem is, he'd already scheduled a WWE Monday Night Raw broadcast during playoff week, when, should the team actually make the playoffs, there's a 50/50 chance they'd be playing a home game.
  You'd think that Kroenke would alert WWE to the possible conflict months in advance, and allow them the possibility that they may need to find another venue for that date.
  Instead he waited until the Nuggets had made the playoffs, and the playoff schedule was officially announced, which deemed the Monday night game a home game, thus giving WWE all of six days to move their event somewhere else. And offered them a much, much smaller venue to run their broadcast from. And did all this to Vince McMahon, widely acknowledged as the world's richest carny. The whole thing spun into a vicious firestorm of negative publicity for Kroenke, the Nuggets, and the NBA, which Vince was only too happy to stoke, making the rounds of various sports shows to talk about how little confidence Kroenke had in his team. The Nuggets' playoff rivals, the Los Angeles Lakers, got in on the Nugget-bashing by giving WWE their arena, the Staples Center, to do the broadcast. All in all, the whole fiasco meant tons of lost revenue for Denver and a whole lot of egg on Kroenke's face.
  However, the problem wasn't the Nuggets just making the playoffs but advancing to the conference finals; had they been eliminated in the first or second round, the conflict never would have happened. Had Kroenke backed out of the WWE date months in advance and the Nuggets been eliminated earlier, he'd have had nothing.
  Meaning the real Idiot Ball here is why would Kroenke schedule a WWE or other event during the NBA playoff season to begin with - especially since the NHL playoffs take place at the same time and the Colorado Avalanche play in the same building. How could Kroenke gamble at there being any available dates in the Pepsi Center from mid-April to mid-June?
  • And that's just the beginning of Kroenke's humiliation. Mr. McMahon himself came out during the broadcast in L.A. to chew him out. See for yourself.