Idiot Hero / Mythology & Religion

• Norse Mythology:
  • Thor thanks to being depicted by skalds who preferred Odin to warriors who preferred Thor.
  • Thor is this to a T. In the "Lokasenna" (from the Poetic Edda), nobody is able to successfully rebut Loki's insults until Thor shows up and just keeps waving his hammer at him til he runs away. He solves virtually every other problem he encounters this way.
• Classical Mythology:
  • The mythological Heracles doesn't fit the trope, but a lot of modern interpretations do, usually because the writers didn't know better. However, in Marvel's The Incredible Hercules, the writers did do the research, and decided on an Alternate Character Interpretation which is hiding from his numerous screwups by being a Cloudcuckoolander Bruiser - Like, he gets too hot, so he fires arrows AT THE SUN. (Which does nothing.) Or once the waves are rocking his ship too much, so he leans over the side and TELLS THE WAVES HE WILL WHIP THEM if they don't stop. (They don't.) He also does a lot of dick moves and is generally too nice... except when he goes nuts and slaughters people.
  • Heracles actually zigzags in and out of this trope. For example, the incident of him threatening to shoot the sun is taken straight from Apollodorus' Biblioteca, the closest thing to Greek mythology "canon" there is. ^note  After which the Sun is so impressed with his manliness that it gives him a giant golden drinking goblet to fly around in Most of the time Heracles' solution to any given problem is to either shoot it or beat it with his club until it dies.
  • There are other cases where he exhibits surprising cleverness and cunning, though. Such as the incident with the Augean stables or the slaying of the hydra.
• Older Than Feudalism: In the biblical Book of Judges, Samson is an archetype of the super-strong fighter who makes a habit of acting without thinking. He's most blatantly an Idiot Hero when he lets Delilah talk him into revealing the secret of his strength. He even tested Delilah by feeding her false information. Despite betraying him twice, he still tells her the (true) secret of his strength the third time.
• In Russian fairy tales, male heroes often fit this pattern - tell them they must or must not do something, such as not fall asleep while guarding a bridge, and nine times out of ten that is precisely what they will do. Funnily enough, heroines seem to be much better at taking good advice and heeding warnings.
• Sir Percival, in many entries of the Arthurian mythos, dumbfounds the rest of the knights (and others) with his sheer stupidity. Some of this (e.g. Thinking a group of passerby knights were literal angels) can be chalked up to him being a Kid Hero raised in the wilderness where his mother sheltered him as much as possible, and having his knightly education sort of given to him on the fly, but sometimes his stupidity is beyond mere naïveté to the point it gets rather ridiculous. Notably, in Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, the Story of the Grail, Percival finds himself in the castle of the Holy Grail by happenstance, and has questions about what it is and what it does. If he had asked, he could have used the Grail to heal the Fisher King and bring prosperity back to his kingdom. However, he follows his mentors Exact Words not to ask too many questions of his host and allows the Grail to pass by him without comment. Characters don’t let him live this down, frequently engaging in What the Hell, Hero? because if he had just spoken up the whole quest would have been over right there. But there are many other incidents where he engages in even more airheaded behavior throughout legend, up to and including forgetting his own sister’s and his very own name. Other incidents from varying legend include basically breaking and entering into a knight’s pavilion, kissing the lady inside, and helping himself to the food, all the while being completely oblivious as to why said lady and her boyfriend aren’t very happy with him, being absolutely oblivious to a horse who very clearly hates his guts and tries to harm him repeatedly, almost dying from being mauled by a wild lion he cuddled (to be fair, the only lion he had known about before that point was Sir Yvain’s Empathy Pet), getting distracted when a maiden sends him on a quest to hunt a white stag, obediently putting himself back in the dungeon he was being kept in after escaping to help people (while Lancelot did the same in Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Lancelot at least made a promise to return as a condition for being let out to help Guinevere... and Percival does it repeatedly), and the entirety of Percival of Galles, which goes as far as to basically be almost entirely just Percival steamrolling through everything with an invincibility ring he didn’t know he had (which he took from the above mentioned lady in this tale) and Achievements in Ignorance. Fortunately, he also happens to have oodles of natural talent to pull him though. Sometimes he grows out of this (most notably Parzival), other times not so much.

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