There's lots of discussion about the Harry Potter example and I can't rewrite it all out, but this one part I have a clear answer to, so I removed it:

• The real problem is why didn't they just make James or Lily the secret keeper. After all, they weren't going to tell anybody, were they?

The answer: It almost certainly doesn't work that way. The rules of magic in the world have enough respect for what makes a good story that you can't exploit loopholes like that. If you could make a person their own secret keeper, everyone would do that and everyone could use that magic to stay completely undetectable by anyone.

Now, was this page meant for religious commentary? See Literature folder. The Bible, not Left Behind

The criticism of X-Men 3 strikes me as a little glib.

"Magneto could have literally dropped the bridge on the mutant." Seriously, you don't use the thing that your army is standing on as a projectile weapon. He could pull this off if he went to battle all by himself, and even then I'm not confident that even a falling section of bridge is going to smash through the prison with any ease.

"Magneto is surprised to realize that the guns are plastic, partway into the fight, but it's not as if he had some kind of ability to sense metal at a distance that had been highlighted in the plot about fifteen minutes ago." A cursory look at the scene shows that there was a lot of metal around anyway; methinks you're presuming too much from the vaguely established sense you allude to.

"The "pawns" are mutants, the very people who Magneto has made perfectly clear are the superior form of humanoid life. Yet he sends them off to be killed and stands around watching it happen. Some mutants must be more superior than others." I think this idea is made pretty clear; they set up that whole hierarchy of ranking mutants from one to five, and Magneto explicitly places the more mutated mutants over the lesser ones.

I'm throwing this...

• Persona 4- Idiot plot all around mixed with police are useless and plot stupidity.

The only reason this game went on for so long was because everyone had to be completely incapable and idiotic. Later on the writers realized what kind of hole they threw themselves into and had to introduce a plot device character so the main characters could even have a chance of catching the killer.

out, not just because I disagree, but also because it utterly fails to give a decent explanation. Why are they idiots? What "obvious" things are they failing to put together and/or do? You can't just say everyone's an idiot, you have to explain what they should be doing.

Should we add a Troper Tales page? I'm sure that there are a lot of plots in the real world that could've been solved easily if the people weren't such bumbling incompetents. This would be a good idea.

Should this be a subjective trope? I mean, what one people consider to be stupid, others would see why somebody would actually do this and may actually seem reasonable given the circumstances and lack of hindsight.

Removed this from the page:

• J.K. Rowling's explanation of how James and Lily Potter got killed by Voldemort is a prime example of this. Here's the set-up: the Potters are in hiding with their fifteen-month-old son, in an ancestral cottage of the pure-blood Potter family. One person, and only one, (the secret keeper) is able to tell others where they are. To those who have not been told, the building is invisible. Voldemort, who they are hiding from, is able to see the building, with them in it, and walks boldly into their house by using a simple unlocking charm (Alohomora) on their front door.
  • No explanation is given for why the couple, with one week's warning to go into hiding, have chosen to be in a home without protective wards (the fidelius charm is not a ward, it is a memory charm), which is unexpected for an ancestral wizarding cottage. No explanation is given for why they are not in their manor house or out of the country entirely (it can be inferred that they do have plenty of money). No explanation is given for why they are relying on a simplistic locking charm or mere physical lock for the front door, making it vulnerable to Alohomora. No explanation is given why they have not hired private security guards, or at least called in some volunteers with them.
  • Now, logically, upon hearing the front door open unexpectedly, James and Lily should have cast Shield charms on themselves and either a) double-teamed Voldemort with the Full-Body Bind and the Entrail-Expelling Curse, or b) grabbed their son and Apparated anywhere else in the world, or c) Portkeyed away, or d) run out the back door, or e) blocked the doorway to the sitting room they were in by transfiguring the hall rug into a 20-ton block of marble, or f) James could have turned into his animagus form (a stag) and run him through with his antlers. Instead, James rushes at Voldemort yelling "I'll hold him off!", (yeah sure; without picking up his wand) and Lily takes Baby Harry from James, runs upstairs, (She had no wand upon her either) and locks the door after her—ignoring the fact that all Voldemort has to do to open the door and get to her and the baby is cast the Alohomora spell—He already used it once tonight!
  • Surprise and panic can explain a minute of two of stupidity, but not why they were so unprepared after having had a week's warning that they were targets. For that length of time, they had to be braindead on purpose, so the only question is who cast the confundus charm on them, the author or somebody else?
  • Voldemort could have set wards in place to prevent Portkeys and Apparitions and placed Death Eater guards at the back door, but he never had to. Lily runs UPSTAIRS with the baby in her arms, which makes escape out the back door difficult. Both James and Lily lose track of their wands in their panic, despite the fact that James was playing with his before the attack and had to deliberately set it down on the sofa and ignore it. Emergency Portkey? Whazzat?
  • To make James even more braindead, he owns a one-of-a-kind invisibility cloak, a priceless relic of his family's heritage which would be very handy to hide from a Dark Lord out to kill his baby. Stupidly, he lent it to Albus Dumbledore for the occasion!
  • Of course, Voldemort is braindead too. If he had only wanted to corrupt 1/4 of the wizarding youth and harass the other 3/4, and cripple the nation's potion brewing industry, healing industry, and law enforcement industry, he would have had no opposition: Albus Dumbledore would have trusted him with his life! But no, Voldemort wanted to kill 6 billion people, give or take a few hundred thousand, and torture the rest as he ruled for all eternity. Bwahaha!
  • It's much more capital and profound then that. The whole plan of the good guys would've collapsed on spot if only Big V had dropped his "nobody will ever find out about me horcruxes, let alone find them, let alone be able to steal them" self-delusion sessions and just checked on the damned things from time to time.
    • Or, as the What An Idiot page notes, dropped the Horcruxes in the Pacific Ocean, used a grain of sand in the Sahara or a leaf in the Amazon as a Horcrux, or used an unfeasible-to-destroy object, like a building, a work of art, or a landmark as a Horcrux. Instead, he chose to put them in places notable to his personal history or gave them to subordinates, and made them either artifacts or objects with his name on them.
      • But one of Voldemort's largest flaws was his arrogance. It's completely plausible for Voldemort to believe he's way smarter than everyone else and no one will ever discover his brilliant plan, therefore he probably didn't feel the need to check on the Horcruxes, much less make them artifacts that didn't have personal meaning.
      • The reason that important objects were used was explained in the sixth book - even as a child, Voldemort liked to collect trophies of his conquests. All of the horcruxes were made from things that connected to the founders of Hogwarts, the one place he felt at home. The diary showed he was the heir of Slytherin, and the snake showed his power as a Parseltongue. Dumbledore even says that while using random objects would have been bad news for them, there is no way Voldemort would stick a bit of his soul into something he considered common and unworthy.
      • Still feels like there should have been some middle ground, though, right?
      • It's Voldemort. He would be nearly incapable of making Horcruxes without importance. Also, no one, ever, had been mad enough to make that many Horcruxes.

Can someone please sum up all this natter in a nutshell before putting it back on the page?

I'm surprised Spooks gets a mention for events in its ninth series. I switched off from the idiocy in the first.

An MI 5 agent accepts a laptop from a man with known terrorist affiliations, and rather than checking to see if any of its hard-drive bays had been replaced with explosive devices or the like, he instead keeps it at his home with his wife and daughter - A home, I hasten to add, that had just been made impossible to get into *or out of* unless you happen to have the swipe-card at hand.

Okay, this trope needs serious cleanup, and I'm thinking it may even need Trope Repair Shop. A lot of the examples don't fit the trope at all, just being examples of one person being stupid rather than everyone in the plot as this trope requires. Others blame people for not knowing events ahead of time, or seem to conflate being unpleasant with being stupid. A lot of it is just complaining rather than actually meeting this trope.