Too Dumb To Live / Visual Novels

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• Danganronpa:
  • In the first two games, even after all the evidence has been examined and the killer has been identified, the students will still vote the Player Character as the killer if they ran out of influence while attempting to sum up the events of the murder in the Closing Argument, resulting in all students except the killer being executed. Keep in mind that there are only two cases in which the Player Character is seriously considered as a suspect — the first and fifth trials of the first game (in the latter, Makoto has to get convicted for the story to progress), and in the third it's established early that he has an airtight alibi. Fortunately, this became an averted trope in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, in which, if you run out of influence, Monokuma calls for a vote before everyone's ready^SpoilersThe choice to not have the students vote for the protagonist is possibly to disguise the fact that Kaede, the Decoy Protagonist, is actually the first culprit, so the others voting for her, even if it's for the wrong reasons, is the correct choice and continues the plot.
  • Hifumi Yamada has a big moment of this in chapter 3. Celestia's plan supposedly involved them both killing other students and graduating together, but not only does her plan involve Hifumi playing dead (which would get suspicious since he'd still need to appear at the class trial), she's quite vague over how her own murder will go. When she's found out, Celeste herself admits she's quite surprised Hifumi never realized he was obviously being set up to die for real to tie up the narrative.
  • In the second game, Akane Owari, upset over recent events, goes out to challenge Monokuma to a fight, despite knowing that violence against Monokuma is a rule violation punishable by summary execution. Akane is only saved when her friend Nekomaru Nidai performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save her. Worse, she later antagonizes Monokuma again, and is saved by Nekomaru's robotic body.
• Nicole: The titular character, for reasons unknown to anyone with a functioning brain, decides that the correct response to being targeted by a kidnapper who has already kidnapped and drugged three women before her is to tell no one about the threatening messages that she has been receiving. Not even the police, because she doesn't want anyone getting hurt. And then it gets worse, because if the player chooses to have her pursue information on the kidnappings, she decides that wandering around in an old, decrepit building that she strongly suspects is the kidnapper's hideout and telling no one where she was going is a good idea. Nothing comes of it, thankfully, but it's a tense scene. Even if that was forgivable, there is absolutely no excuse in the world good enough to justify running off to face the kidnapper alone instead of calling the cops and telling them that that she knows exactly where the guy is going to be — because he told her himself! — so they can arrest him. She even decides not to bring a weapon solely because it might have gotten her weird looks or questions on the way there. Really?
• The 9th Man in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors attempts to kidnap Clover at knifepoint to force her and Ace to open one of the doors, believing it to be his ticket off the ship. He immediately messes up after that by attempting to go through the door by himself even though Zero explicitly stated to all of the passengers that everyone who opened the door had to go through it and is "rewarded" with a very messy death after being exploded by the bomb planted in his small intestine. While Hongou told him that the game was altered so that the bomb wouldn't go off if everyone didn't go through the door, given what Hongou has done over the years, the 9th Man would still qualify, just for listening to him. It becomes even more stupid in hindsight when it turns out that 9th Man was one of the people who helped Hongou designed the Nonary Game in the first, so he of all people should have realized that he would have gotten stuck at the next set of Numbered Doors even if he did survive, rendering his gambit pointless.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright, great lawyer that he is, suffers from this on occasion in service to the plot; his own intuition has to be shunted aside for the player to have an active role. Sometimes, however, this justification fails. Take the third case of the first game, where he blithely confronts a blackmailer on her actions, knowing full well she has ties to the Yakuza. Only a Big Damn Heroes moment from Gumshoe keeps him from getting rubbed out. Actually, Wright does this in almost every single case in the first game, and always seems to do so in secluded places with no witnesses where his suspected murderer holds all the cards. By the 2nd game, he seemed to have learned his lesson and had stopped confronting suspects since.
  • Yes, Kay, it's a wonderful idea to let everyone in a five block radius know that you're the Great Thief Yatagarasu. Including Interpol agents. When you're standing over a corpse in a burned-out room and the Yatagarasu is wanted for theft, murder, and arson. Certainly this will not hurt your defense at all. One wonders how she plans on not getting caught, or if she even thought that far.
  • Also from Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, is recurring character Larry Butz. Usually, he's content to just Be as Unhelpful as Possible, but his unhelpfulness crosses into this trope when he, out of nowhere, suddenly finds himself determined to defeat Edgeworth in a "battle of wits"...while Edgeworth is in the middle of attempting to prove him innocent of murder.
    Larry: Watch as I defeat Edgey in a battle of wits!
    Edgeworth: (Larry, have you forgotten that, should I "lose", your victory prize will be your arrest?)
  • There's also Wocky, who ran into the rival family's territory with just a knife and was shot for his trouble. He even tries to obfuscate Apollo's attempts to find the true culprit because she's his girlfriend, even as Apollo also proves she's a Gold Digger who was planning on capitalizing on his imminent death from that gunshot injury (and she lied about the bullet being removed so he wouldn't get it fixed for real) to get his family's money.
  • Florent L'belle, who would rather create an ungodly convoluted plan which includes murdering the alderman, which ends up getting him jailed for murder, all in an attempt to steal a gold ingot that turns out to no longer be there, than just go ahead and commercialize his haircare product, which he already received several offers for, rather than keeping it just to himself, when caught in a huge debt, part of which is due to him wasting money on advertising the said haircare product that he doesn't even intend to sell. It's more like Too Narcissistic To Live, but still.
  • In the first game, Miles Edgeworth accepts an invitation to go out on a lake in a canoe, in the middle of the night, alone with a person he barely knows. You'd think a genius prosecutor would recognize such an obvious setup for a crime, even if the bait was being told more about the cold case in which his father died.
• Root Letter: In the "Cursed Letter" route, Yukari Ishihara tries to stab Max under the belief that killing him will end the curse, but almost falls off a cliff, only saved by Max grabbing her. She then tries to stab him while he's pulling her up, causing him to let go, and falls to her death.
• You can play Makoto Itou as this in School Days. This is a good thing, as doing so is both hilarious and leads to the bad endings that made the game (in)famous.
• In Spirit Hunter: NG, confronting a murderous spirit as if she were an everyday criminal was perhaps not the smartest move in Ooe's book. She promptly gets sliced to pieces by the spirit's katana, but a convenient time-loop brings her back to life.

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