Artemis Fowl: In The Arctic Incident, our heroes are saved by a group of goblin gangsters pulling a Klingon Promotion, killing themselves off to become leader, during a combat mission.
Bazil Broketail: Seriously, Gadjung — we all know you are powerful, but what was coming through your head exactly when you thought you could enslave an entire military fleet — with a few dozen dragons aboard — just like that? It's a miracle he lived through it in order to continue tormenting people elsewhere.
Charles Birkin's works:
A prominent example is his short story "Ballet Negre". A London theatre critic goes to see a Haitian ballet company perform a story about zombies; finishing with a pas de deux between two convincingly zombie-like performers dancing over actual flames. The journalist becomes obsessed with trying to get an interview with them. He finds out that the two don't travel with the rest of the company and no one is allowed to see them (with different people giving conflicting explanations as to why.) Then he breaks into their hotel where he discovers that the two dancers lie on a bed all day, can barely speak except to repeat the word "hungry", look grey and corpse-like, and don't have pulses. Naturally, he comes to the conclusion that ... they are drug addicts, and he's going to expose the ballet company for drugging its stars! He breaks into the hotel again, and gives the two corned beef sandwiches to eat. To the surprise of absolutely no one reading, they are real zombies, and now they've tasted meat they want more. It's not pretty.
The protagonist of "A Poem and a Bunch of Roses", since she not only agrees to have dinner at the isolated home of her lover's widow (and her violent, deformed son), but mentions that nobody knows she's there. While nobody actually deserves what ends up happening to her, one can't escape the conclusion that it would have been relatively easy to avoid.
Bazil Broketail: Despite a previous incident where was beaten up, Gryff apparently did not learn his lesson, since at the very beginning of book six, he provokes Purple-Green again by pushing all three of his Berserk Buttonsat once, calling him a useless bonehead with clipped wings who's barely able to wield a sword. Needless to say, the wild dragon does not take it well.
In Belgarath The Sorcerer the titular character recounted his time learning how to summon demons. One of his instructors, a highly-skilled magician, tried to grand-stand in his instruction by drawing a protective sigil in flame on top of a river before summoning a demon lord. He failed to take into account the fact that the sigil was washed downstream while he stood still, and was promptly eaten.
Blindsight: Let's resurrect the species of sociopathic superhuman apex predators that are also smarter than us, put them in charge, and give them a means to suppress the weakness that led to their extinction the first time around. There's no way this could go wrong! It does. At the end, it's implied that the vampires have exterminated baseline humanity.
Jacky in the last book of Bloody Jack is on the run from the US government. Not only does she not try to get out of the country, but she keeps corresponding with her known associates, and telling them where she is.
In Joan Didion's The Book of Common Prayer, the narrator Grace notes how Charlotte Douglas, an American searching for her runaway daughter, always rewrites reality to be more agreeable to her no matter what the evidence is and is incapable of understanding that different circumstances require different choices. Charlotte stubbornly remains in Boca Grande (a fictional South American Banana Republic) on the eve of a violent coup, despite being warned by everyone including Grace to leave, insisting she'll be fine because she's "not involved in politics". Leaving aside that coups are not generally known for their logical decisions about who counts as involved, she's slept with not one but two members of the ruling family. Then she goes for a walk alone at night in the middle of the fighting like nothing's wrong. Unsurprisingly, she ends up dead. Played with at the end of the book, though, as Grace reconsiders the various traumatic events that drove Charlotte to Boca Grande, and concludes she may have judged Charlotte wrong—the strong implication being that on some level Charlotte understood the danger perfectly well, and that was the point.
Peter in The Boy Who Reversed Himself. He is sacrificed to a man-eating boar (he lives anyway) because Laura and Omar don't consider him worth saving. Besides, it was Peter that got them stuck in the 4th Dimension in the first place due to his stupidity.
While a total bastard, Ryuuji in Broken Gate, as per flashback, decided to antagonist his sister, Nezumi further, despite her offering forgiveness, nevermind the fact that she placed a curse on him for treating her so poorly, which wasn't a very good idea to start with, as she is an omnyouji and a powerful one at that, along with the fact that he's the reason that Nezumi had opened the gate in a fit of retaliation. Later in the story, he decides to antagonize her again and, unsurprisingly, while she's dying, she breaks the seal, opening the gate, and whatever was sealed behind had swallowed him, ending his life once and for all.
The villains of A Brother's Price. They seem to consider hammering on others' Berserk Buttons to be a hobby, based on such idiocies as not only setting off the princesses by kidnapping their new husband, but also setting off his birth family, who are very loyal to their sisters-in-law and very skilled in combat. Of course, lack of brainpower does seem to run in the family, since their brother, the previous Prince Consort, got himself killed by failing to get clear of a bomb that he knew was going to go off and when in time.
First there's Bonsoir. During the team's assault on Mephetic's castle, he breaks away from the team so he could find the castle's vault. Then he wastes almost half an hour trying to break inside the vault, fully aware that there are still enemies lurking about in the building. When Puss comes along and shoots him in the stomach, even he is marveled at how easily he managed to take Bonsoir down.
On that note, Puss himself. After mortally wounding Bonsoir, Puss wastes his time giving him "The Reason You Suck" Speech, instead of finishing him off. He was so focused on insulting the stoat that he didn't notice when Bonsoir lit a stick of dynamite.
Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? allows you to make some extremely stupid choices, like trying to fight zombies with a pool cue and a bright orange Big Buck Hunter toy shotgun. Making these choices will lead to your death, and sometimes undeath.
The Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner's Tale is about three drinking buddies who see their friend is dead, and decide to go out and find Death so they can kill him. Three guesses as to what happens...
In Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor lures Fortunato into a crypt and buries him alive. If Fortunato weren't so damn inebriated, he'd have caught on that something was up soon enough to probably save his skin. In fact, his implied perpetual drunkeness might be what put him in Montresor's bad graces in the first place.
A non-fatal example-in the sixth Captain Underpants book, "The Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1", Jerome Horwitz Elementary's trip to a tissue factory goes awry when the tour guide Mr. Snoddy tries to give Melvin-who has been transformed into a giant snot monster-tissues; this, naturally, causes Melvin to freak out and grow to a colossal size-with the gift shop ending up as collateral damage-, but what, in his infinite wisdom, does Mr. Snoddy do to try and calm Melvin down? Give him more tissues, of course! It goes about as well as you'd think, and he ends up glued to the factory floor. The narrator even lampshades it:
Narrator: As you might have noticed by now, Mr. Snoddy wasn't exactly the brightest bulb on the Hanukkah tree.
The four brats in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all foolishly endanger their lives by going after something they want in the Wonka Factory without heeding Mr. Wonka's warnings: Augustus can't swim but decides to drink directly from a chocolate river (he falls in and is sucked up a pipe), Violet chews a piece of experimental gum (and turns into a blueberry), Veruca tries stealing a trained squirrel (the rodents toss her down a garbage chute), and Mike decides to test a teleporter on himself (and winds up shrunk). While none of them die, only Veruca isn't permanently physically altered in the process of being saved. In the 2013 stage musical adaptation, the first three kids actually perish for their foolishness, though Augustus and Violet might be saved or given a Disney Death offstage.
Burt, the lead character of the Stephen King short story "Children of the Corn" is a particularly terrible example of Too Dumb to Live. He takes far too long to admit to himself that something is seriously wrong in the town of Gatlin... and even once he does, decides to linger just to make his wife — who realized much earlier and wanted to leave immediately — squirm. This results in both of them dying horrible and otherwise completely avoidable deaths.
In Daredevil Park, you can choose to stay instead of going out to explore, well, Daredevil Park. In this case, your character will hang around a bit, play a few video games, take notice of the big fancy bathtub, then decide to take a bath while playing video games. It's hardly a surprise that this almost immediately leads to death by electrocution.
The Mystery of Chimney Rock mixes this with Schmuck Bait at one point: your character narrowly escapes a catastrophic moment inside the titular mansion, thanks to a supernatural entity that lets you exit the mansion with a stern warning, don't look back. "The End. Unless you choose to ignore the warning; in that case, turn to page..." It's never really made clear what happens if you do turn to the listed page, but it obviously is a bad ending.
Agatha Christie stories. You can pretty much guarantee that one of the victims saw who did it and decided it would be a smart move to blackmail the serial killer and sneak off to meet them in a lonely spot to collect the first payment.
Played with in Hallowe'en Party, where the young teen loudly shouts around about how she once saw a murder happen and ends up killed shortly after, when everyone first laughed her story off since she often told lies. Turns out the girl never saw a murder. Her friend did and told her, so she decided to make herself interesting by simply "taking over" the story.
In Edge of Battle, Zakharov criticises the prison-breaking illegal immigrants as this, saying that if they had ran for the border rather than trying to take on a Mini-Mecha they would still be alive.
The Yemeni in Executive Intent. After the Chinese prove they're not going to be soft-hearted like the West with their Disproportionate Retribution takeover of Mogadishu, the Yemeni still bomb a Chinese frigate. No prizes for guessing whose shit is going to get wrecked.
There is one moment in the Deptford Mice trilogy where Twit, usually portrayed as misunderstood, actually does live up to his humiliating nickname. When he, Arthur, and Oswald enter the sewers to look for Audrey, he shouts her name as loudly as he can in spite of knowing that there are bloodthirsty rats around who would definitely hear them. And they do. They're almost killed before they happen to be rescued by Audrey and Piccadilly.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down: Uncle Gary saws a branch off of a tree...while still sitting on said branch. Not surprisingly, he falls to the ground and breaks his collar bone.
Rich-Craft in The Discreet Princess. When you capture a princess and tell her that you're about to put her in a barrel filled with blades and roll it off a mountain, what do you do then? Sure, turn your back on her and start inspecting the barrel's insides. It's not like she can kick you in and push the barrel downhill herself.
Feet of Clay features a Running Gag about a vampire whose employment choices (including holy water bottler, sunglasses tester, picket fence builder and worker in a pencil factory) take it up to eleven, seeming to indicate an intense desire to end his afterlife.
By the usual Genre SavvyDiscworld population, any examples of Too Dumb to Live that result in the person getting killed are marked down as "suicide" by the City Watch. There are a lot of ways to commit suicide in Ankh-Morpork. Walking into the Drum calling yourself "Vincent the Invulnerable" is just the icing on the cake.
Calling a dwarf short stuff or lawn gnome is also suicide, considering the insulted dwarf most likely possesses a very sharp pickaxe about his person.
Wandering into the Shades in Ankh-Morpork is also a definite form of suicide, unless you're the toughest of the tough.
A great moment in Feet of Clay:
''The screams stopped, and Angua walked back in, adjusting her armour. Vimes raised an eyebrow.
"Only flesh wounds." She assured him.
"Hm, okay, I think you'd better put down their wounds as self-inflicted in your report." He replied.
"Self inflicted, sir?" Carrot asked.
"Captain, they took Angua hostage."
"Ah yes. Yes, self-inflicted."
On Twoflower: "Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'." This is in a universe where speculation about whether gods really exist regularly end in a bolt of lightning through the roof with a note wrapped round it saying 'Yes, we do' and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out.
The all-volunteer Lancre Mountain Rescue Team have an even less tolerant attitude to Too Dumb to Live than the Ankh-Morpork Watch. They're happy to help people who are in trouble through no fault of their own, but if they have to risk their lives for someone who thought it'd be fun to go mountaineering in slippers, with a length of clothesline for the difficult bits, they may take him further up the mountain and leave him there. Stupidity kills, so it's best if it kills the stupid before they take someone else with them.
The Dresden Files universe has no shortage of schmucks who manage to sign their own death warrants by antagonizing someone way above their weight class, even knowing who they're dealing with. Examples include:
Linda Randall, a Muggle who tries to blackmail a warlock.
Kim Delaney, a low-level practitioner who tries to bind a loup-garou.
Lucille Delarosa, who decides targeting vampire king Lord Raith's daughter with a curse was smart.
Madrigal Raith, who decides he should absolutely drag Harry Dresden into his and Vittorio Malvora's power play for the White Court.
Magog, who decides to fight Eldest Gruff even after Eldest Gruff offers to let him back down and let him fight the person Magog himself was trying to kill. Even if Magog didn't realize he couldn't handle Gruff, he wouldn't have lost anything by complying. Magog, being a demon in a cursed coin, survives, but his host body doesn't, and he gets to spend a few years in a vault despite it being completely avoidable.
Torelli, who tries to usurp Johnny Marcone without making sure Marcone is dead.
Madeline Raith, who threatens her significantly more dangerous cousin's lover in front of both him and Harry Dresden, who is known to be protective of those who need him and who crippled her brother quite easily. She doesn't die that minute (though she could have), but she unnecessarily catches Harry's attention while Harry is investigating a crime that she was involved in, ultimately resulting in her death.
The Eebs, who try dragging The Erlking into their fight with Harry and Susan even though they had the upper hand.
A Sidhe noble who questions Harry immediately after Harry just killed one of his peers.
Burt Decker, who sells junk to wannabe warlocks and doesn't realize the Wardens could kill him for it, even mouthing off to Harry after refusing to help Murphy with an investigation, again not realizing he could be arrested for that.
The Legends of Dune prequels: the machine empire is many times bigger than the League of Nobles, with hundreds of planets, and robots working around the clock on every one of them. They could easily create enough nuclear missiles to take out the dozen or so Noble planets in one swift strike. They don't. We learn that they can't reach the planets because they are surrounded by an atmospheric shield that fries robot brains; but why not simply firing nukes from above the atmosphere, straight down? Especially since every planet in the Duneverse is a Planetville.
In the "Eternal Champion" story by Michael Moorcock, at the climax, we have a very large (million people) Middle-Age level technology army, equipped with the typical armor, horses, spears and swords. Their leader has JUST seen a demonstration of a highly-advanced ray gun which shot a HUGE bolt of fire into the air. Said weapon caused the generals' faces to turn white at the display of VASTLY superior firepower. The owners of the advanced weapon BEG the leader to leave in peace and PROMISE no harm will come to them. The leader's incredibly dumb decision is to fight. The million man army (and said leader) is literally torched to ashes within minutes.
The shades of night were falling fast, The fool "stepped on it" and rushed past, A crash—he died without a sound: They opened up his head and found Excelsior!
In a case where Too Dumb to Live is apparently contagious, Robert Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos story "Fane of the Black Pharaoh" concerns an archaeologist who's lured to a hidden Egyptian tomb that has prophetic depictions of the future on its walls. He walks past centuries of illustrated history, never suspecting his death-cultist guide is going to murder him, despite seeing one picture after another in which previous foreign visitors have been led there by death-cult members and killed. Not only does he stride obliviously to his own death, blind to the implications of his predecessors' fates, but apparently is only the latest idiot to do so, among centuries of similar idiots!
Earth and...: During the Contamination Situation, Felipe steals Wren's medicine for himself. When confronted by Jarra and Valeshka Orlova, he sneers that they have no legal recourse against him. Valeshka admits this is true, but points out that the evacuation point is full of witnesses, including teachers who still have plenty of contacts in academia, and he will undoubtedly lose his position when University Earth find out what he did; who wants someone like that watching their back? Also, he needs to speak to a doctor, because the dosage for a 12-year-old girl will undoubtedly be different than for a man in his twenties. He's seen at the end, chasing after a doctor. The doctor is not sympathetic.
In The Faerie Queene, Pyrrochles releases Furor and Occasion only to be fiercely attacked by him and suffers injuries that would have eventually killed him if not for Archimago's help. Later, he takes King Arthur's sword from Archimago despite warnings that he will not be able to slay its rightful owner with it, and predictably gets himself killed. If he had taken Guyon's sword along with his shield (leaving Arthur's sword with Archimago), he and Cymochles would've likely won that fight (and slain Prince Arthur).
Everest (2002): The adults express this opinion in a horrified and angry fashion after learning that Bryn sleepwalks and never told anyone but Sammy, even though they are going on a mountain climbing trip and will be sleeping near lots of cliff faces. They are right to feel this way, since Bryn does walk off a cliff and is lucky to survive.
The Gardeners, who had been running the Reach in southern Westeros for about a thousand years, decide to face Aegon (the Conqueror) head-on, which is perfectly understandable if you don't know about dragons. Which they did. Adding to this stupidity, King Gardener's entire family goes into the fight with him, and none of them have any kids sitting around far away from the imminent fight in case something happens. Cue the Field of Fire, and the line of Gardener going up in flames.
Prince Morion Martell of Dorne tried to start another war against the Targaryens, but made no attempt to hide it before his forces were ready. King Jaehaerys I and his sons flew out on their dragons and incinerated Morion and his entire army, in the shortest and most decisive war Westeros has ever seen. It is pretty telling that even Dorne, whose whole history with the Targaryens is a Cycle of Revenge, made no action then or afterwards to avenge Morion, as if in admission that, yeah, he had it coming.
Ser Swann, during the Dance of the Dragons. Having read a few story books on dragons, he decided to try and sneak up to one with a mirrored shield, which will fool the dragon and allow him to kill it. Turns out a shield is not an adequate defense against fire breath, and Ser Swann's goose is cooked.
Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's original novel, decides to run away from, and afterwards basically forgets about his completely successfulexperiment in the creation of new life, after he decides that the result is uglier looking than he expected. He is then surprised when said creation feels epically neglected and decides to kill him. All the monster wants is familial love at first and then a female companion. Victor starts making one to appease it, then gets afraid the two of them would spawn a race of monsters, so he destroys the unfinished female, which prompts the monster to commit new murders in revenge. Victor never considers that he could just leave out some of the plumbing. Not only that, but despite knowing the monster has a history of killing the people that he, Victor, loves, despite knowing that it considers him guilty for the death of its 'bride', despite its explicit warning that it will "be with you on your wedding night," when Victor marries Elizabeth he assumes that he is the monster's next target, and sends his new wife away to wait in her room completely unprotected. The results are predictable.
Averted in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. The heroine gets a call ostensibly from the Warden's maid saying there had been an incident. She remembers all the silly heroines in adventure novels who get in trouble by not verifying and calls the Warden's quarters back.
In the Gaunt's Ghosts novel His Last Command, Gaunt has a group of enemies under his guns when one of them reaches for a gun. Gaunt calls him an idiot and shoots him.
In The Girls of Death by Helen Grant, the main protagonist is a 10 year old girl. When young girls at her school start being murdered, she starts an investigation to find the murderer, which among other things includes late-night activities and run-ins with the underworld. As a result, not only does she drastically increase her chances of becoming the murderer's next victim, but she is also subject to other random dangers from the shady persons she interacts with.
The Godfather: How can we forget Carlo Rizzi? Sure, go ahead, beat up and cheat on your wife. She's only the daughter of one of the most powerful Syndicate dons in the country. And her oldest brotherisn't going to go nuts and beat the stuffing out of you when he finds out how badly you've treated her, is he? And when he does it's perfectly safe to make a deal luring him to his death. What could possibly go wrong with this?
In the Hannah Swensen series, the titular baker/sleuth can make some particularly dumb moves. A prime example is in the 5th book, Fudge Cupcake Murder. There, Hannah is in the auto shop of Ted Koester and notices not only the "used" auto parts being new as Ted has been part of a stolen car parts ring, but the tire iron he used to bash in Sheriff Grant's head. Now, at this point in the book, there is no-one in the auto shop, and Hannah has been left there alone, so the logical thing to do would be to slip the tire iron into her car since no-one is there to stop her. What she does is try tobuythe tire iron from Ted when he returns. Understandably, he recognizes the thing immediately and tries to kill Hannah. She's just lucky she had cupcakes to throw out of the window of the car she was locked in and put in the crusher, or she'd be dead.
Vernon Dursley in Philosophers Stone. When Hagrid shows up Vernon spends the whole time acting like an abusive jerk to Harry and insulting his parents and Dumbledore, this after knowing Hagrid really cares for them. Have we mentioned Hagrid is a half giant with Super-Strength and he can use magic? Although Dudley ends up paying for it instead of his father.
Mr. Weasley: Harry, promise me that whatever you do, you will not go looking for him.
Harry: Mr. Weasley, why would I go looking for someone who wanted to kill me?
Then played straight with Harry, as he feels an urge to go looking for Black after he finds out some of the Awful Truth. He ends up hating Sirius so much that, when they meet at the end of the book, Harry charges at him and tries to choke him with his bare hands, forgetting that he was unarmed, much weaker than Black, and that Black had several wands on him at the time. Lucky for him, Black was there to protect Harry, not kill him. In all fairness, Harry's got so many people after him that if he wants to go looking for someone who wanted to kill him, he doesn't have to go very far. In general though, Harry's reckless curiosity does get him into trouble, and Dumbledore enables this reckless curiosity.
Voldemort, who keeps using the same Killing Spell on the one kid it clearly doesn't work on, until it finally fails so epically it kills him.
Voldemort also uses notorious items to make his Horcruxes, hiding them in places related to him, places that can be easily tracked down by anyone who knows his background, instead of using random rocks and and just dropping them in the bottom of a lake. What's particularly funny is that the moment Harry heard about the concept, that was the first thing that came to mind for him.
Lucius Malfoy in the second film, who tries to cast the above mentioned killing spell on Harry right outside of Dumbledore's officenote Jason Isaacs used said curse because it was the only spell he could remember at the time.
Vincent Crabbe casting Fiendfyre, a jinx so deadly and unpredictable that even Hermione was afraid to try it in Deathly Hallows. For most of the series, he and Goyle were portrayed as too stupid to think without Malfoy. In the second book, they choose to eat cakes left in a random location without showing the slightest suspicion. The film makes it even more jarring when they eat the cakes which are floating in midair.
Sirius tells Harry in Goblet of Fire that when Bertha Jorkins was in school, she had a big mouth that got her into a lot of trouble. This is ultimately what kills her. She was visiting family in Albania, she ran into Peter Pettigrew, whom everyone believes was killed by Sirius. She wants the gossip so bad that she lets him talk her into going into a walk in the woods with him and they go to where Voldemort is hiding. She then tells a bunch of information to Voldemort who quickly kills her once she's no longer of use to him.
Dumbledore is ultimately done in by a moment of stupidity. When he found one of Voldemort's Horcruxes (Marvolo Gaunt's ring) and realized it was the Resurrection Stone, he hastily put it on his finger so he could see his family again and beg their forgiveness for failing them. Dumbledore forgot that the ring was still Voldemort's Horcrux, one that he knew Voldemort probably cursed. Dumbeldore falls victim to the curse, and despite Snape containing the curse in Dumbledore's now withered hand, Dumbledore still had less than a year to live. Dumbledore even admits to Harry that he was an idiot in Half-Blood Prince.
You don't need to know the lore behind Lemarchand's Configurations to realize that a small, ornate box sitting in the middle of a blast zone of blood, flesh and entrails is a bad sign. So what does one of the protagonists of the short story A Little Piece of Hell do? March right across the carnage to the box and decide he wants to figure out how to open it.
In Hell's Gate, we have (Commander of) Fifty (possibly roughly equivalent to a lieutenant) Shevan Garlath, whose stupidity promptly leads to the first Arcanan/Sharonan bloodbath. He died in said bloodbath, fittingly enough.
Pavel Young from the series is a villainous example. His pinnacle of stupidity may have to be raping his own chief of security, which unsurprisingly happens shortly before his death. Raping his own chief of security by force would be bad enough — and in character, too. But no, Pavel's not quite that smart. No. He rapes her by blackmail and then has her set up the murder of Honor's lover. So, when she quietly makes sure the information on where to find the killer can be found, who can in turn tell Honor who hired him, it really comes as no surprise to those of us who aren't Too Dumb to Live.
In addition, when planning to rape Harrington herself, he failed to put two and two together in that:
He realised that she used the gym alone in the dead of night, and
She was on the Saganami Island unarmed combat team. Add to that that she's from a heavy-gravity planet and her family had been genetically modified to cope with that, he was lucky to get away with just broken bones.
Pretty much any flag officer in the Solarian League Navy. Seriously. The only one shown yet who's even remotely competent is planning to defect from the League as soon as possible. The rest are self-serving, belligerent assholes who all ignore the many reports of their enemy's vastly superior technology. And then get blown to chunky salsa for their pains.
Not to mention that Honor herself has demonstrated a pattern of sneaky tactics, misdirection, concealing her intentions and disguising her forces. Her enemies, who have often studied her tactics in detail, then routinely see exactly what she wants them to see, decide "Oh, she's just screwed up this time", and charge straight into her traps. The one time they didn't? Was the one time she was actually running a bluff.
The Horse and His Boy: Rabadash sure earned his epitaph of "Rabadash the Ridiculous". First, his whole plan relies on speed: step one is take the royal castle in Archenland by surprise, then step two is quickly rush to Cair Paravel before Susan's ship arrives there. Shasta successfully warns King Lune in time, so the Archenland castle is sealed. Rabadash ought to know full well that he doesn't have time to lay siege to the castle. He should've called it quits and turned around right then and there, but whether from pride or lust, he doesn't. He wastes critical time trying to take the Archenland castle, and now, instead of him being at Cair Paravel in time to catch Susan, King Edmund (who was on Susan's ship, no less) rides out with an army from Cair Paravel to rescue his Archenland allies at the besieged castle. Next, Rabadash gets captured in battle by the Narnians and Archenlanders and, even though they treat him quite nicely as a royal prisoner of war, he continues to throw fits and refuse to negotiate with them and threatens them all, even though they could just as easily have his head for it. This despite the fact that his father had told him in so many words that Calormen would not rescue or even avenge Rabadash if he fails. Then he continues to act like this while Aslan is in the room, even when he's told to shut up or something bad will happen to him.
As Katniss said in The Hunger Games, when the female District 8 tribute lights a campfire, at night, which makes her a sitting duck for the Careers who viciously attack and kill her, "Stupid people are dangerous."
In Death: Some of the murder victims completely qualify for this trope. Tiara Kent from Eternity In Death stands out the most, because she had a boyfriend who had her convinced that he was a vampire and he could make her into one. She shut off the security system like he asked her to, and never considered that he needed to keep his face from being seen on the cameras. She drank a concoction like he asked her to, and never considered that it might contain rape drugs and other lovely ingredients in it. She has sex with him, and he drains her blood, resulting in her death. She didn't change into a vampire, by the way. Eve and Peabody even discuss the victim's stupidity, and Peabody explains that the victim was a rich, spoiled girl who was not known for her brains.
Governor Aubert of David Weber's In Fury Born is a subversion. When we first meet him, he's ignoring the warnings of the elite Marines stationed on Gyangtse, instead listening to the advice of his even stupider advisor, Salgado, which results in a major uprising by separatist forces. However, when said uprising occurs, Aubert realizes his stupidity, fires his advisor, and aids the Marines in resolving the conflict.
In Inheritance of the Inheritance Cycle, King Orrin takes this up to eleven with his plan to send an envoy to Galbatorix, try to negotiate a peace agreement, and tell him the Varden's position. Because to do otherwise would be discourteous.
At the end of Brisingr, Eragon and Arya abandon his elven guard and go see the queen themselves. Naturally, they end up badly outmatched.
Iron Druid Chronicles. Atticus fakes his death and the Morrigan, the Celtic Chooser of the Slain shows up to "claim his soul" and reclaim a Cool Sword he had stolen from the Tuatha De Dannan back in the day. One of his would-be killers, the Norse god Vidar, tries to claim the sword as the spoils of victory but the Morrigan says oh heck no. When he tries to get uppity with her she offers to let him win it off her in a sword fight. Just to reiterate. The Morrigan is a psychopomp. Not just any old psychopomp, but a chooser of the slain. Meaning she can choose who dies in battle. What's more, that magic sword they're fighting over? Its ability is to go "not happening" at any armor that gets in its way. It goes about as well as you might expect.
In Ken Follett's World War II thriller Jackdaws, Flick Clairet leads her Strategic Operations Executive commandoteam behind enemy lines in occupied France. While in Paris, Flick arranges for the team to stay at an out-of-the way flophouse who proprietor Flick knows to be sympathetic to the resistance. But one team member, Maude, wants to stay at the Ritz, the famous Parisian luxury hotel, and had previously convinced another team member, her girlfriend Diana, to take her there. When Flick hears this, she is appalled at Maude's stupidity, asking her "What world do you live in?" Sure enough, pretty much as soon as Flick's back is turned, Diana and Maude sneak out of the flophouse to go check into the Ritz, never mind that it is pretty much the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Needless to say, they get arrested in the main dining room in a matter of minutes.
In James and the Giant Peach, the abusive aunts meet their end when the giant peach breaks free from its stem and rolls towards them. You'd expect Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge to jump out of the way and let it pass, but why do that when they can try to outrun it? Granted, the book all but states that they were panicking.
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer has a pair of inept thieves, Daniel and Denzil, try to rob Johannes. When Johannes pulls out his Webley .577 box revolver, Daniel is OVERJOYED and turns towards Denzil. Daniel wants to tell him that their victim has something valuable to take only to see Denzil fleeing. Johannes just point-blanks Daniel in the back. Denzil almost escapes as Johannes misses his first shot against him, but his second shot is more accurate. And now the necromancer has two new zombie slaves.
Tang Sanzang of Journey to the West definitely qualifies. Despite having three demonic bodyguards constantly warning him about the evil nature of the strangers that they encounter he constantly disregards their advice because he can't see the forest through the trees. Even after being captured and nearly cooked alive multiple times Sanzang still doesn't understand that beauty doesn't equal good.
Judge and Jury, by James Patterson and Andrew Gross, is about the trial of a mob leader who is a powerful sociopath. The judge lets him hear the jury's names during selection. Even after he gets someone to break into her alarmed house, leave the evening paper under her pillow, and all but openly threatens her, she does nothing. By the end of the day, all but one of the jurors is dead to a bomb. The retrial is locked down like Fort Knox.
Knaves on Waves could have this apply to any of the pirates who antagonize Carnage. It doesn't matter how brave or Badass you think you are, pissing off an enormous, unstable Super-Soldier is never a good idea.
Michael from the Knight and Rogue Series makes a habit of seeking out killers, and will knowingly walk into traps that are pretty much always set to get him, a man with no legal rights, framed for a hanging crime. Even if this is to save lives or try and at least see who's setting you up, when you're the sort of protagonist who usually gets at least two good beatings a book and have people wanting you executed just for getting into a street fight, this is a very bad idea.
The Kzinti are formidable-looking 8' tall, 500-pound tiger-men, but a combination of room-temperature IQ and uncontrollable hair-trigger tempers means that they ALWAYS lose, even in hand to hand combat with humans 1/3rd their mass. Specifically, their only tactic is "scream and leap". Niven, actual cats know more complicated tactics than that. Part of it can be chalked up to Honor Before Reason, but societies whose honor codes start hurting them learn how to Rules Lawyer the honor code pretty fast, if they don't junk it outright. Even worse, their race supposedly got its space-age tech by overthrowing an advanced spacefaring civilization that conquered their planet. (They did so before they were that dumb. They were tribal warrior primitives before they overthrew the spacefarers and stole their tech. Then they used the biotech they'd stolen to genetically engineer themselves to be perfect - as defined by a primitive tribal warrior culture, i.e. massively aggressive, status-conscious, and utterly truthful. They actually rebuilt their descendants to be unable to Rules Lawyer their honor code. This doesn't change much until evolution kicks back in... once they attack humans.)
The Pak protectors deserve special mention, as it's their very intellectual brilliance (which is not the same as wisdom) that condemns them to eternal war. They're so good at calculating the odds of gaining an advantage for their own offspring, and so hidebound by their compulsion to seize such opportunities instantly, that they're unable to consider alternatives that might be marginally more risky, yet could provide a greater, more lasting benefit (e.g. interbreeding their offspring with other protectors' so they become eternal allies rather than destroying one another on sight).
In Jack Vance's The Last Castle, being too dumb to live seems to be obligatory for gentlemen. A Slave Race has decided it doesn't want to be slaves any more, depriving the castles of technicians and laborers? It is all very well for a gentleman to theorize on how the unattended machinery works, but no true gentleman would sully his hands with the physical labor of actually repairing or maintaining it. Those former slaves are now systematically destroying the castles and slaughtering their occupants? A gentleman can design a weapon to scramble a ex-slave's brain, but heaven forfend he get his hands dirty building those weapons or engaging in personal combat (although it is acceptable for a gentleman to lead in combat — if he had anyone to lead). End result: eight of nine castles are destroyed, and the ninth only survives through the arrival of The Cavalry.
Carpathia's plan is to follow every step of the divine plan that leads to his inevitable defeat, as opposing to try and Screw Destiny by, for example, ruling fairly and trying to create a better world, or just nuking the whole planet to spite Him. Well okay, he did intend to deviate from the plan at the last possible minute by waiting until Jesus actually returned and then shooting him. This works about as well as you'd expect.
The people who live through the Tribulation who refuse to believe in God and Jesus Christ, despite growing evidence that it is His hand at work pouring out the judgments, also qualify.
Life of Fred:
Fred Gauss is the smartest person in the world except maybe for his long-lost twin sister, but he’s also a five-year-old, and as such has done some stupid things. He rents a yacht, it springs a leak, and when he tries to read a book on boat leaks to figure out how to patch it, he gets distracted reading the section on the Titanic and forgets about the boat leak. He’s perpetually broke because he can’t identify even an obvious scam to save his life. He’s severely underweight for his age because he hardly ever eats anything. And he got drafted once, and failed to realize that not only would he be ineligible for the draft, but the U.S. Army cannot draft people except during world wars. (The “army” he got drafted into was a mercenary company that thought he was an adult because of his job as a college professor, and recruited soldiers by sending official-looking letters to people in order to get stupid people to sign on with them).
C. C. Coalback, a scam artist, once broke out of prison. He got caught because he stole the shirt of a prison jumpsuit on the way out, didn’t realize it had the name of the prison on the back, and wore it in public.
A bank robber once asked Joe, one of Fred’s students, to lend him a gun. Joe took his girlfriend’s pistol out of her purse, intending to hand it to the robber. The only reason he didn’t was because he accidentally fired it, and the robber thought it was a warning shot and immediately started begging for mercy until the police showed up.
In The Long Walk, a walker who dies early on was wearing sneakers, despite the rulebook that the contestants were given in advance explicitly telling them not to do so, as no other type of footwear will help develop blisters faster on long distances. Predictably, he develops blisters pretty soon, and is ticketed after walking at the required speed becomes too painful for him one time too many. Garraty even discusses it in his internal monologue.
The Marvellous Land of Snergs: Golithos lures Gorbo out of his hiding place and completely ruins his ambush by yelling and waving his axe as charging out of the wood, with the result that Gorbo easily puts three arrows in his head. Underlining his stupid strategy, Golithos knew that Gorbo is a bowman, but he still chose to attack from a distance.
In Iron Kissed, several kids beat up Jesse Hauptmann precisely because her father is a werewolf. If Jesse hadn't refused to tell her father their names, he would have killed them.
In River Marked, several fey try to kill Mercy in front of Adam (the above Papa Wolf). Uncle Mike tells Mercy that he's going to classify their deaths as "suicide by werewolf," since anyone who's stupid enough to try hurting her with Adam present clearly has a death wish.
Moon Crash Series: Even though she has been living in an area with no reliable electricity, and brownouts that last for days, Bri decides to take an elevator in her apartment building, and dies when she is trapped in there for days.
A tangential example in Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." When the rebelling lunar colony starts throwing 100 ton rocks from orbit, they explicitly target highly visible but mostly unoccupied places, since this is an intimidation tactic: they want the Earthlings to know that they could flatten cities if they wanted to, but not to have to actually kill millions. Even so, in the first round of strikes, thousands of people (mostly in North America) decide that this is so little of a threat they pack picnics and go to the target sites to watch... even though these impacts had the power of a small nuclear bomb. The rubberneckers got predictably dead.
And after this happens, a random Congressman decides to personally blame Mannie (the protagonist/narrator) for it in a highly insulting and sanctimonious fashion. While Mannie, as Luna's military commander, was responsible for the bombing, he was not (as he points out) responsible for the actions of anyone stupid enough to ignore his repeated warnings. Note that Mannie was on the tail end of a very long and stressful day, had been up for over 24 hours at this point, and has zero tolerance for fools even under the best circumstances. Add to this the fact that impropriety is considered an elimination-worthy offense in Luna. Mannie eventually delivers a "him or me" ultimatum and storms out before he does something he'll regret. He mentions a little later that he never saw that Congressman again after that.
Simon in The Mortal Instruments. Breaking into a hotel of murderous vampires that have expressed that they wouldn't mind having an excuse to turn you into hamburger meat isn't such a good idea. Especially if you go alone. And do it at night. Sure the vampire blood was summoning him back to Raphael, and he would have given in and sought them out sooner or later, but if he had only asked Luke, he would have known to wait a few more days, and the blood would have gone out of his system, as well as the compulsion it had on him to return to Raphael.
After a hiatus of several years, George Mann returns to his Newbury and Hobbes Investigations stories with The Revenant Express. Revenants are powerful, plague-created zombies with talons, a transcontinental European train is using the body parts of revenants for fuel as a cheaper, lighter alternative to coal. The still contagious body parts are fed into the furnace by firemen who only had thick leather gloves for protection. So when one poor newbie handles a sharp piece of bone with a glove that unknowingly has a rip in it... Newbury can't believe the foolishness when he finds the furnace room and believed the Revenant outbreak was inevitable on the train. Further compounding the foolishness, early in the novel, a fireman was cooking and eating his food in the furnace room full of Revenant bits.
Some young cats in the Warrior CatsCode Of The Clans story, "A Night Of Listening", plan on jumping into the gorge after injuring themselves in games. If it weren't for medicine cat Meadowpelt finding an answer from StarClan, they would be dead already.
In No Country for Old Men, Llewelyn Moss gives this trope to the dead gangster he tries to bring water to when he comes back by night to the scene of the shooting. Apparently the said gangster (though he was indeed wounded) just sat there waiting for the man who ultimately came and finished him off, and therefore...
Llewelyn: Here you are. Too dumb to live.
In Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the plot is initiated by a group of teenagers who, as a prank, try to sneak into a heavily surveillance filled arcology while carrying a box labeled "bomb". They take just enough precautions to defeat all of the nonlethal methods of stopping them. The abject stupidity of this act is very heavily lampshaded, and spawns the repeated phrase "Think of it as evolution in action." At one point they even break through a door which has a sign that warns, "If you enter here YOU WILL DIE!" Among other skull and crossbones-type warnings.
The father in the 1998 Newbery Medal winner Out of the Dust instigates the main plot of the book by leaving a pail of kerosene by the stove without telling his wife or daughter what it is. A pile of highly combustible fuel that has a flashpoint of roughly 100-150 degrees Fahrenheit and that gives off toxic fumes. Not to mention that, since it's oil, it's hard to extinguish with water... not that they had any, given that they're living in the middle of the Dust Bowl. This all ends with his daughter and his pregnant wife both being seriously burned. His wife and newborn son both quickly die after the birth.
Penny From Heaven: When Penny has to stay in the hospital due to an injury from her arm getting caught in a wringer, she comments to herself that most of the other young patients, including her, are there from doing dumb stuff. One boy was mauled by a dog after baiting it, another burned himself on a camp stove, and a third burned a pile of poison ivy even he was allergic to it—he's covered in so many blisters he looks like he should be in a monster movie.
It is a well known fact that demigods dreams can show the future, or even something important about the present. Percy is particularly fond of having prophetic dreams, but he never tells anybody.
In the first book, Crusty lays down on one of his beds despite knowing that Percy just saw him operating them, and is perfectly capable of doing so. This ends in him getting his head cut off after Percy activates the ropes to tie him down. This has happened to him before.
In the second book, Chiron is suspected of disloyalty due to being Kronos's son. Let's ignore that many children of the gods aren't particularly loyal to their divine parents. Let's also ignore that Kronos isn't exactly the kind of father who engenders much loyalty from his children. Olympus is still reeling from a few betrayals, so maybe it's not that unreasonable to have him replaced for the moment. But out of everyone the gods could have picked to replace him, why Tantalus? You know, the guy who killed his son, cooked him, and served him to the gods at dinner?
This continues in this Percy Jackson followup series where the heroes tend to make the same mistakes. What is worse is the gods. Zeus knows the giants cannot be defeated without the aid of the demigods so what does he choose to do? Seal up Olympus and ignore the problem repeating the same mistake he made with the Titans.
Alcyoneus, as pointed out by Frank - when you're unkillable as long as you stay in the boundaries of the state of Alaska, you really shouldn't hang out in the part of the state that's only 10 miles wide.
Frank: "Welcome to Canada, idiot."
Octavian. Not trusting the Greeks is one thing. But thinking monsters are more reliable allies, especially during a war against the giants? Really? It’s just as well that he didn’t notice his leg was caught in his own artillery piece and killed himself by accident.
Dion from the Conan the Barbarian story, "The Phoenix on the Sword." When the chief slave of the guy who plans to have Conan killed tells you that he was once a powerful sorcerer of Stygia, and is clearly obsessed with getting back a lost Ring of Power that was stolen from him by a Shemitish thief — and you have a "ring of good fortune" that just so happens to have been stolen from a sorcerer of Stygia by a Shemitish thief — it just might not be a good idea to bring up this little fact around the guy, much less actually show him the ring. Dion's swinish stupidity promptly gets him stabinated as Thoth-Amon reclaims his ring and sets out to unleash the unholiest vengeance upon his former master. Even better (or worse, depending on the interpretation) Dion wasn't even paying attention to Thoth-Amon talk about it and only shows the ring because he finally decided to half-listen after the story was over and hear Amon mention the ring. Thoth-Amon is beside himself with rage at the ''sheer stupidity'' of Dion right before he murders him.
The Plot: The reader may be unaware of Crib's killer plot twist until the end of the book, but Jacob has known about it all the time. Still, when it dawns on him that the twist in Evan Parker's story about the mother killing the daughter and assuming her identity actually happened in real life, it never occurs to him that his new wife Anna is about the same age. That same wife whom he met the very day he began to receive threatening e-mails. A woman with a very sketchy past and a name suspiciously similar to "Dianna". Somebody who knew where to mail threatening letters and the only one who knew in advance that he was going to visit Arthur Pickens, Esq. Want some more of that delicious soup, Jake, before you take a very long nap?
Project Tau: Renfield delivers a big The Reason You Suck speech to Dennison and Mason. Telling two kidnappers outright that you're going to help their victim escape and screw the consequences really isn't a smart move, however satisfying it may be, and he winds up dead.
Mary Guisse Stuart, you are so stupid. If someone pointed a gun at your head, you'd stick it up your nose and dare them to pull the trigger.
And then proceeds to call a teenage warrior boy pointing a crossbow at her an idiot.
Jacob Esterbrook, in Rage of a Demon King, is urged repeatedly to evacuate from the path of an oncoming army, one so huge that the plans for fighting it are "make a scorched-earth retreat to defensible lines, then starve the army over the winter". He's convinced that his skills as a merchant and diplomat will let him make a negotiated settlement between his employer and the leaders of the army. The first soldiers to encounter him are a pair of scouts from a cannibal tribe...
In the Rainbow Magic series, Rachel and Kirsty have had to save the goblins from being hurt by their own stupidity many times.
In The Relic, there's a mysterious creature killing people in the New York City Museum of Natural History and eating their brains. It's a known fact that these killings happen after nightfall and they always occur in the exhibit hall, so it's warned that all the museum workers should clear out of the exhibit hall before nightfall until these killings are solved. Late in the book one of the workers heads into the exhibit hall after midnight to relieve some stress by engaging in his personal hobby at look at some of the rare artifacts, in spite of the fact that he's been warned that doing so is dangerous ground. True to form, he winds up becoming another victim.
In Alastair ReynoldsRevelation Space novels, whichever moron invented the Greenfly — self replicating robots whose only directive is: Modify all matter in the Universe into the form most efficient for the growth of plants. The latter books and stories show they succeed in this to the extent possible in the lifetime of the universe. Given that FTL flight is not possible in this universe, there's no conceivable use for the Greenfly on a solar system wide level (there are too few near-FTL ships to make importing food economic). It is conceivable that they would be of use in inhabited systems where they could convert spare asteroids etc. So why build them to have such blind ambition? Hell, why give them the ability to think at all given the problems humanity had with the Inhibitors?
Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Ma Su. Good God, Ma Su. During the Shu Kingdom's expedition against the Wei Kingdom, Ma Su was put in charge of defending Jie Ting, a very important location for the Shu forces. The location is near a mountain so Ma Su thought it would be a good idea to camp at the top of the mountain. Normally this would be a good idea, EXCEPT in this case, if they camped at the mountain and Wei surrounds them, their water supply at the bottom of the mountain would be cut off. Pretty much everybody except Ma Su sees this and he even ignores their warnings and proceeds to camp at the mountain. Guess what happened.
In 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King, Susan Norton, despite being warned by Ben Mears and Matt Burke that they should stay away from the Marsten House for now, goes there all on her own to see if there's really a vampire there. What's more, on the way she encounters twelve year old Mark Petrie who actually has warded off a vampire the previous night. Now, with proof and a new ally, does she suggest that the two of them go back to town and get reinforcements to return in force? No, she and Mark go up to the house all on their own. What do you think happens?
Sandokan: Salgari's unnamed counterpart of Purandar Singha is a literal example. During his attempt at massacring his extended family for no apparent reason, his cousin Sindhia begged him to let him try and shoot a rupee coin, and let him go if he succeeded. The rajah accepted, and died when Sindhia shot him.
Mary's mother might have survived the cholera outbreak at the beginning of The Secret Garden if she hadn't delayed her escape to attend a dinner party. Lampshaded by the young officer that reminds her that she should have fled over two weeks ago.
Most of the adults in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Their apparent blindness to Count Olaf's Schemes result in several murders, mobs, and razed buildings.
Siege Of Darkness. The drow forces are split into two groups: one attacking Mithral Hall from underground, and the other attacking from the surface. During the planning stages, everybody seemingly forgot that drow eyes cannot tolerate sunlight unless they've become used to it. Or perhaps none of them thought that the battle would last the entire night and that they would still be fighting the good guys when the sun came up. In any case, when the dawn comes, the drow on the surface are blinded and pretty well screwed.
The drow expected the sun to come up and even trained looking at light to be prepared for it. They just greatly overestimated their tolerance for sunlight, as it was the first time they actually saw it.
A Song of Ice and Fire. A common misconception about A Song of Ice and Fire is that the easiest way to get yourself killed in the series is by being good. The truth is that the easiest way to die in Westeros is to be stupid, regardless of morality. For example:
Viserys. Threatening the wife of a barbarian chieftain in front of said chieftain, with your sword out in the barbarian's holy city where it's forbidden? And where you're surrounded by some twenty thousand of said chieftain's people? What could possibly go wrong?
Ned. Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned. So here's the guy who has a crush on your wife and tells you explicitly not to trust him? Well, trust him! So the queen is fucking her twin brother, has three incest children and might have had a part in killing one of the king's advisors for finding out? Tell her that you know enough to get her killed! Oh, and said king? He is on his deathbed — this is the time to be tactful and not to tell him what you know, even though it could have saved the country from a civil war. And as long as you're there, agree to keep it secret that the king has appointed you regent after his death: What could possibly go wrong? And when the King's brother suggests a plan to avert years of war and the deaths of millions? Blow him off! Great job!
Like father, like son. Congratulations on marrying the first girl you slept with, Robb, even though you have just broken your arranged marriage pact. Even worse, relying on Roose Bolton to lead a significant part of your forces while out of your sight even though his house has been opposed to yours for its entire existence and he has a tendency to get your allies to suffer oddly high casualties.
Tell you what, unstable queen who's been belittled and insulted for hours, they'll sell you their entire army of fanatically loyal super soldiers who will obey any command for one of your fanatically loyal baby dragons. An army is nothing compared to a baby dragon, after all! You may call this idiocy, but in Astapor, they call it good business!
One popular song in the wake of King Robert’s death is highly insulting to both Robert and the Lannisters. One not-so-bright minstrel decided to sing it in one of the royal courts during the War of the Five Kings. So whose court did he pick? Robb’s court? Stannis’s? No! He picked Joffrey’s court! Joffrey must have been in a good mood that day, because the minstrel only lost his tongue for the insult.
Also, belittling the son you despised since he was born while said son — who is, by the way, convicted on charges on regicide and kinslaying and sentenced to die — is holding a crossbow at you is a great idea. Right, Tywin?
Some people might spot the slight flaw in any plan which involves enraging almost everybody with an army on the continent thanks to breaking social conventions so basic, they aren't even written down as distinct laws. And, the only thing that is kind of, sort of holding the slaughter back is having their relatives as hostages... who you will have to think about giving back; probably sooner rather than later. But, not the Freys. How is that working out, guys?
If it had just been Robb and Catelyn Stark that had been killed, you would still be in a bad position, Roose, because the Starks were beloved in the North. But to add insult to injury, you and the Freys killed representatives from almost every noble house in the North, ensuring that none of them will ever forgive you. And if that wasn't enough, you let your insane bastard son torture everything in sight, which will not endear you to anyone. Your House is so despised that the Night's Watch has outright sided against you. How much longer do you think you can last like this?
Flouting direct orders is a great way to keep your head. Especially if your Commander just spent the last several months among savage raiders. And you locked him in the cooler, literally, for a few days. And tried to get him killed. And had a hand in killing his father. Surely Lord Snow only meant to give you a haircut, right Janos?
"I took Dragon Taming 101, how hard can it be to tame two dragons?" Well, how hard is it, Quentyn?
To be fair he thought that due to having Targaryen blood they would obey him, especially as they seemed to do so for Daenerys.
A number of wildings take the cake. What do you do when caught between Stannis’s forces and the Others? Negotiate? No! March all the way back North through territory completely under the control of the Others to take the closest possible position to the Others’ home that you can!
A special mention for a couple of minor characters thanks to the sheer dumbness. Well done, SerBalmanByrch: trying to kill Bronn in a jousting session was a really incredibly well thought-out plan that couldn't possibly backfire. Worse, your wife, Lady Falyse Stokeworth, wouldn't want to compound the problem by running to such a reliable "employer" as Cersei Lannister expecting help after your inevitable screw-up... I mean... death, now, would she? Congratulations, you two. Ten out of ten for teamwork.
Arys Oakheart's death is so stupid that one observer wonders if he wasn't trying for Suicide by Cop.
In the TWOW preview chapters, Raff the Sweetling. Go on Ralf, abandon your guard post (while on duty!) and follow a girl who promised sex to you to her flat. There is no way it could be a trap, is there?
An example from before the books but still. Lord Luthor Tyrell, the current Lord Tyrell's father and husband to Olenna Tyrell, died while hawking. He was riding a horse and was too focused on what his hawk was doing he rode off a cliff. Clearly his surviving progeny got their wits from their mother instead. Though after meeting his wife Tyrion wonders mostly jokingly if it could have been deliberate.
Again before the books: You typically don't antagonize your king if you want to keep your head. Any king, but especially an unstable one who could very well be one bad day from going completely off the deep end. And doubly especially when the royal army lives right next door. And triply especially when the King's right hand man is Tywin Lannister, who doesn't know the meaning of the word "mercy." But go ahead, Lord Darklyn. Kidnap King Aerys. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Victarion, trusting your caring and compassionate brother Euron Greyjoy and use a horn to tame a dragon... You're absolutely going to come back in one piece with Dany in your arms, are you? What could possibly go wrong? Hell, what could possibly go right with that. Euron will be reeeeeeaaaaaally happy to see your roasted ass along with a Fantastic Nuke! (Could potentially be subverted if Victarion decides to betray Euron and swear loyalty to Dany.)
Jon Connington, what the heck is going on with you? Instead of asking a Maester to tend to your Greyscale, you don't care and bring it to Westeros. What are you, some sort of kamikaze?
In Michael Flynn's Spiral Arm novel On the Razor's Edge, at the end Mearana is told she's too stupid to live, and usually they would accommodate her, but as things are not usual, they will send her back over the Rift.
T'Lana from the Star Trek pocket books is a very short-lived character in the current Borg Story Arc for just this reason. From the first book she is introduced in she immediately questions the judgment of practically everybody on board the ship who isn't a Vulcan, she objects to nearly every action anyone ranked above her takes, and spearheads a mutiny with other members of the senior staff against Picard, only to give command back to him refusing to simply admit that she fucked up majorly. Even Spock eventually just walks away during a conversation with her, after calling her the Vulcan equivalent of a dim-witted jerkass. At the end of the second book she appears in, Picard wants her gone, which means something when his current first officer once defected to the Klingon Empire and thus could, very technically, be called a traitor. Her ultimate fate? She's replaced with Genki Girl T'ryssa Chen, a half-vulcan who prefers her human side and roleplaying as an elf, and gets blown into powder when the Borg partially glass Vulcan.
Too dumb to live pretty much sums up the New Republic/Galactic Federation of Free Alliances. The Old Republic lasted "a thousand generations". The New Republic lasted less than one, largely because it was so mired in politics that it was wholly unable to adequately respond to an extragalactic invasion. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our passionately individualistic heroes the invaders are eventually stopped and the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances is formed. During its brief existence it has allowed a Sith Lord to exploit a legal technicality to seize power, the second time this had occurred in less than a century. Once our heroes sort that out, the GFFA then arbitrarily appoints a former enemy who once tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy their capital planet as their new Chief of State for no apparent reason other than that a real election would be too much trouble and there were seemingly no qualified candidates amongst the ranks of their own government. Needless to say, more trouble quickly ensues. All of this keeps the Jedi in a role of constantly having to oppose their own government and likewise routinely being out of favor with said government, who are deeply offended by the Jedi's ceaseless attempts to stop their lemming-like drive towards self-destruction.
The latest Galactic Government, the Galactic Federation Triumvirate seems destined to fail too: The Empire forms one branch, the New Republic another, and a Jedi the third.
The Fel Empire decided it was a good idea to side with the One Sith, sure they are different from the previous Sith, but they still have the same old Chronic Backstabbing Disorder prevalent among them and won't settle to being second banana to anyone.
Spaceship thief Niles Ferrier spends most of "The Last Command" screwing up Thrawn's most carefully laid plans due to his Small Name, Big Ego personality which almost results in the Grand Admiral having him killed at one point. Attempting to frame Karrde for an earlier Imperial attack, Ferrier name drops the Imperial Lieutenant who he bribed to attack earlier, even though he shouldn't have had any knowledge of the name. He is quickly taken care of by the other smugglers, who now oppose the Empire even more than they did before.
Admiral Thrawn's death is a direct result of trusting the Noghri, a species the Empire directly tricked into servitude. Despite recognizing that something was wrong with the Noghri and thus refusing to trust them with missions during the last book, he keeps his own Noghri bodyguard around and said bodyguard eventually kills him. This is all the more idiotic of a death as Thrawn is easily the best strategist in all of Star Wars, Legends canon or not.
The colonists of the planet Ennth as shown in the Young Jedi Knights series. Ennth is a planet that due to the gravitational forces of two suns periodically suffers from planetwide quakes and volcanic eruptions wiping everything from the surface every 8 years. Despite being perfectly aware of this, the colonists don't abandon the planet and keep rebuilding after every cataclysm only to evacuate to a space station just before it happens every 8 years, getting several people killed and everything they built destroyed only to move back down once it's over for another 8 years and start the process all over again. When asked why they do this, the leader doesn't even understand why they wouldn't.
The New Republic can be summed up this way in the new Star Wars Expanded Universe. The New Republic only lasted about 30 years before it was destroyed by the First Order. In the years leading up to its destruction the Senate was too busy with internal political infighting to take the rise of the First Order seriously. It gets to the point that Leia herself realizes the New Republic is doomed several years before the events of The Force Awakens and forms the The Resistance.
Played straight with the later death of Sadeas, in a rather stunning display of Wrong Genre Savvy. Brilliant idea to tell your main political opponent's far more pragmatic son that you're going to poison his father's victory to undermine his leadership, after all of the politics in your kingdom have literally just ceased to matter, because the first steps toward The End of the World as We Know It have happened and stopping that is far more important.
The existentialist/absurdist book The Stranger has Meursault, the main character. The majority of the book is Camus trying to turn the What the Hell, Hero? moment in the first part into a Moment of Awesome.
Grunt is too knuckleheaded even for a puppy. He threatened a retreating black bear, and after it tried to attack him at that, because he didn't believe in backing from a fight. Grunt and his siblings are only narrowly saved from being mauled to death.
The Leashed Dogs have terrible, almost nonexistent, survival instincts. They would have surely died without Lucky's help. Some errors are understandable, like the young Alfie not realizing that just because water looks clean doesn't mean it's actually safe, but others are less so, such as when they start running around in panic during a thunderstorm.
Elena had gone out of her way to get both himself and Octavian into situations where, even if they were brought down lower than the humblest commoner, they were not in any danger of dying. Except, perhaps, by being monumentally stupid.
There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns: On the one hand, if Delta had been more established, she certainly would have ensured that her goblins didn't kill anyone — or better yet, didn't steal from a farmer and bring him chasing after them in the first place. On the other hand, "the way he charged into a cave after a pair of goblins was Darwin awards level stupid." She's very saddened by his death, but Ruli later agrees that he brought it on himself.
The Hobbit: The trolls spend all night arguing about how they're going to cook Bilbo and the dwarves, apparently forgetting what happens when sunlight hits them. This is because Gandalf successfully got them so busy arguing that they simply lost track of the time and didn't notice it was getting to dawn.
In the background of The Lord of the Rings, it's revealed that Eärnur, the last king of Gondor, met his fate in a manner befitting someone "like his father in valour, but not in wisdom." Seven years into his reign, the Witch-King of Angmar, whom he had faced on the battlefield with an inconclusive outcome some years prior, issued him a challenge requesting he ride out to Mordor and face the wraith in a duel. The Witch-King happens to be an incredibly powerful immortal sorcerer and warrior dripping in magical protections and gear, the fight would be occurring on his home turf where he'd be backed up by all his soldiers and minions, and a prophecy (which Eärnur was present at the making of) had proclaimed that he would not die at the hand of man. Nonetheless, and ignoring the begging of his steward Mardil, Eärnur decides to answer the challenge anyway, escorted only by a personal guard of knights. Unsurprisingly, he never returns home. The narration suggests that he never even got the duel he wanted, with his men being trapped and captured and him dying as a tortured prisoner of Minas Morgul.
The Fall of Gondolin: When his army and his new weapons are ready to assault Gondolin, Morgoth withdraws all his spies prowling around the Encircling Hills to lure the hidden city's inhabitants into a sense of false security. The Gondolinrim swallow the bait utterly, convincing themselves that Morgoth has given up, and Turgon reduces the number of wardens and border patrols. A few months later, Morgoth sends in his legions of orcs and war machines, Gondolin ends destroyed and Turgon and most of its people dead.
Many situations the main cast gets into could have been resolved if anyone bothered to remember they live in the twenty-first century with all of its wonderful human-made technology or if the vampires remembered that they are the top predators of the food chain. The seven-member Cullen family could have destroyed James' coven of three if they had bothered to fight! Call the Volturi, have them restrain Edward, and have Bella talk to him so he would stop being suicidal! So many incidents could have been avoided if anyone bothered to pick up a phone!
Bree and Diego from "The Short, Second Life of Bree Tanner" would surely count as well. They both know that they're being kept in a basement by a Riley, who (A) has been kidnapping other teenagers to make into vampires and (B) clearly doesn't care if they kill each other. Later on, they discover that the story they had been fed about how sunlight burns them up was a lie. They also learn that they were all being used as cannon fodder and Bree remembers that the night she had been turned into a vampire, she had been kidnapped and tricked into it. They also find out that Riley is discussing plans with Victoria. So of course they come to the conclusion that Riley is completely innocent and will surely help them if they tell him everything they know, so Diego decides to meet him alone, to tell Riley that he knows all of these secrets, without telling anyone except for Bree where he is going. Needless to say, Diego does not return. Bree qualifies as this trope because after all of that, she doesn't realize that Diego is dead until Riley has run off and left her and the other vampires to be killed by the Cullens.
Roald Dahl's The Twits has the titular Twits meeting an end befitting their names: they walk into their house to find that all the furniture has been glued to the ceiling, and the floor has been painted the same color as the ceiling. Their conclusion from this: the entire thing has been flipped upside-down, and now they have to get back to being right-side-up. They decide to accomplish this by standing on their heads. As it turns out, they've had glue splattered on their heads by the same animals that performed that little prank, and the moment their heads make contact with the floor, they're stuck there. By the end of the night, they end up being squished into nothing under their own body weight.
Universal Monsters: Late in book 5, Ben Browning's greed gets the better of him, as he holds up a remote detonator in the middle of a lightning storm. It promptly gets struck by lightning, exploding it and nearly costing him his hand in the process.
In Virenzo en ik by Mireille Geus, Virenzo, who attends a sailing club, has a habit of tying his hand to one of the sail ropes "because it is easier to steer this way". One day the boat he is on capsizes and sinks, and drags him down with her.
All the authorities in the story Watchbird, by Robert Sheckley. First, they build a crowd of machines programmed to protect humans, and make them autonomous, self-taught and without any control circuit so they can be efficient, and the machines get out of control and start protecting anything, from cows to other machines, so economy, farming and stuff ends in chaos, and then, to protect humanity they build a crowd of machines programmed to kill the first ones... and these are also autonomous, self-taught and without any control circuit so they can be efficient.
The short story We Can Get Them For You Wholesale has the narrator, who is obsessed with bargains and deals, looking to hire a hitman to kill his wife's lover. He finds an agency in the phone book and meets with their probably-not-human representative, who tells him that if he asks them to kill ten people instead of one, he gets a discount. He immediately starts thinking of other people he wouldn't mind getting rid of. The representative makes more offers, the price per person keeps going down, and the list keeps growing, until he asks what it would cost to kill everyone in the world. Upon hearing it would be absolutely free, he eagerly tells them to do it, and goes to bed satisfied. His death is at least implied to be quick.
Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: The agents beneath Headgate Rock Dam should have fled instead of arguing about whether the dam would really fail. One man with a hard hat waits too long and is swept away by the water when the dam breaches.
The works of Pepper Winters, dark romance novelist, suffer from this a lot.
Yes, Tess Snow, when you've just had a chance to cut off the GPS device your captor strapped onto you, you should still bring the removed device with you for no reason.
Nila Weaver, at least once a chapter, will monologue about how she can't possibly escape from her captor. The original capturing process pretty much amounted to "Come with you, obviously dangerous man? Okay!" and involved her captor Jethro leading her through multiple crowded public places, undressing her in public, leaving her unsupervised in an airport bar, and not taking away her cellphone. Jethro not only leaves the cellphone with her throughout the multiple books of her supposed enslavement/imprisonment, but allows her to go running outside without supervision, bragging that his manor's lands are too big for her to possibly run to the edge of, despite stating in the first book that they were "a thousand hectares", which is only about four square miles.
The Witch of Knightcharm is set in an evil Wizarding School which teaches young witches how to cast The Dark Arts. Class rank is mostly determined via Wizard Duel, meaning the top-ranked students are the best fighters. Despite knowing all this, the brash and arrogant rookie Julia Medina arrives and immediately challenges the the top-ranked student in the entire school to a Wizard Duel in order to establish dominance. Suffice to say that things go very badly for Julia, who winds up as the first casualty of her class.
Wolfbreed gives us Darien, a man who must have been born under a stupid sign. First off, he is a werewolf and grew up in a town made up entirely of werewolves. His parents and everybody in the town tell him not to let anyone outside the village know he is a werewolf or run around in wolf form in broad daylight because there is a Church MilitantBadass Army out there that has pledged to destroy werewolves. Guess what Darien does, and then after the predictable results, refuses to accept blame for his actions and projects his self-loathing onto humanity. So he starts killing innocent people to lure a unit of said army into his trap. That's right, he picks a fight with a group of about 40 elite soldiers specifically trained and armed to kill his kind and have plenty of experience doing so and then Darien has the gall to act surprised when they nearly kill him. Then he tries to convince a female werewolf that he lusts after, who has been raised by ordinary humans, that Humans Are the Real Monsters — by framing her for murder! And he does so in such a way that the girl, the soldiers and just about every other major character knows he is really responsible in about two minutes after the killing takes place!
Mark Smeaton in Wolf Hall. After Anne Boleyn publicly puts him down as someone too far below her to think of as more than a "little doggy," Thomas Cromwell invites him over to interview him about Anne's unhappiness. Cromwell is ready to cleverly ensnare him after a Battle of Wits, but no need — Smeaton says right away that he's having an affair with her to show that lowborn people like him can seduce the wives of powerful men. Adultery with the queen is treason in of itself, and Smeaton doesn't realize that Cromwell is building a case against Anne until it's too late. Once Cromwell's boys are done terrorizing him, he names every other man in England as her illicit lover (including her actual husband, Henry) and Cromwell just picks out the names of his enemies, and Smeaton is beheaded with the rest. (Cromwell is well-aware that Smeaton was making things up, too, and is shocked that he gave himself over so easily.)
Bakuda of Worm manages this on two fronts. First, her debut in Brockton Bay is a massive bombing spree resulting in multiple deaths and fatalities, not to mention using implanting bombs in "recruits". This successfully pushes her into the "too dangerous to ignore" category, resulting in every cape in the city hunting down her gang. Second, she insulted Lung while they were about to be locked up in the Birdcage where he killed her for the insult and to make a point. Even without that her ego would have gotten her shanked eventually.
In You Are Dead (Sign Here Please), while Nathan's complete lack of self-preservation is a result of a brain lesion, it's abundantly clear that even if it weren't he'd still be this. For but one example, he's an avid supporter of Dead Donkey's prominent serial killers union.
Warning against such an act would be useless, as the only people deranged enough to try would be unconcerned for their own safety.
Multiple player characters in The Binder of Shame. "Everyone agreed there should have been some sign that the Desert of Certain Doom might be dangerous."
The Crawlspace: The narrator’s roommates. A nice three-bedroom apartment in one of the most desirable and expensive areas of Rome is so cheap that four college students can afford to rent it for three months? Seems sound. There's a small door leading to a crawlspace which was intentionally blocked off by the owner? Let's open it! Our roommate has been hearing something moving about in the crawlspace and the door opens by itself? Probably a pigeon that flew in. Something tried to come in our flatmate's room at night and it wasn't any of us? She’s probably just going crazy and imagining things. They all end up disappearing, presumably killed by the creature.
Trout, despite being one of The Most Wanted men in America (complete with a SIN constantly advertising this fact) and having basically no resources but the tacsuit on his back, repeatedly tries to backstab his teammates at the drop of a hat. Unsurprisingly, he ends up being turned in by the team after one too many betrayals and a botched robbery that makes him into a massive security risk.
Trout's replacement, Tank, is no slouch in this department either; his Establishing Character Moment has him coming out of his house in a cop-patrolled neighbourhood, openly carrying a Troll-sized LMG and combat axe. Later on he decides to run back into a house he's been warned is booby-trapped, causing an explosion that badly injures and would probably have killed him were he not a Troll with heavy-duty bioware and armour. The crowning moment of dumbassery, however, is signing into a hotel with his real name and SIN — already a bad decision due to the nature of Shadowrunning, he does this despite knowing there's a Shadowrunner team out there that wants to gank him as part of a feud. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this does indeed get him ganked.
One of Wildcard's teammates checks the group's bounties on his personal commlink during a bank robbery. Wildcard's response is immediate, coupled with him lampshading how stupid the guy was.
Wildcard: Burn his body, we don't want a datatrail. Idiot signed his death warrant when he checked our bounties on his personal commlink. As if I wouldn't hack it.
