Basic Trope: Someone who on the surface doesn't have much smarts turns out to have more strategical chops than they let on.
- Straight: King Mark pretends to be a sluggish oaf so he can get legislation he thinks is good for the people through his squabbling royal court. The only people who know that he's doing this and why are his political allies and his best friend, Lord Bob.
- Exaggerated:
- The Dog Was the Mastermind
- King Mark creates an almost absurdly intricate scheme to kill God, while in public he pretends to be senile.
- Downplayed:
- King Mark pretends to be an oaf so people will underestimate him, but he certainly isn't a tactical genius of any sort.
- King Mark is genuinely Book Dumb, lacking the formal education of his colleagues but nonetheless being creative enough to outwit his enemies.
- King Mark's traits like being fat and vulgar in tone causes people to think of him as a mere fat and crude idiot.
- Justified: King Mark has studied the failures of his predecessors and knows that just stomping around like he owns the place, even when he does, is going to get him killed.
- Inverted: King Mark is a Know-Nothing Know-It-All who thinks he's much smarter than he actually is.
- Subverted: In public, King Mark is a sluggish oaf. In private ... he's still a sluggish oaf who is a borderline Puppet King.
- Double Subverted: ...but even that persona is fake, and only his wife, Queen Alice, and their best friend, Lord Bob, know of his true brilliance.
- Parodied: Whenever he's dealing with his court, King Mark has literal puppet strings trailing from his back, but when he's in private, they detach from his back and move into his hands.
- Zig-Zagged:
- King Mark acts as a sluggish oaf among some of his courtiers, but shows his true intelligence among others.
- King Mark is right on top of the subtlest plots against him but doesn't notice the Obvious Judas in his court.
- Averted: King Mark is a genius king who regularly outwits his scheming court.
- Enforced: It's a Bio Pic of King Mark, a real king whose contemporaries erroneously thought they could manipulate him while the reverse was happening.
- Lampshaded: "Don't tell anyone, but I'm not just some silly oaf!"
- Invoked: After getting into a horse riding accident, King Mark pretends to have brain damage so that his Evil Chancellor Charlie will drop his guard and attempt to kill Mark himself.
- Exploited: Bob betrays Mark, and uses his status as a Secret-Keeper to blackmail him into giving him a valuable political position.
- Defied:
- Chancellor Charlie tricks Mark into revealing that he's been Obfuscating Stupidity all along by making him comment on something he’s been pretending to know nothing about.
- King Mark decides he's not going to beat around the bush with mind games and establishes his dominance immediately and decisively.
- Chancellor Murder makes a point of killing King Mark the very second he begins his treachery. Obstacle, witness, or convenient bullet sponge — any way, he's got to go.
- King Mark is denied any power by any means necessary, no matter how stupid and harmless he looks — maybe for extra irony points, it's because of how stupid and harmless he looks.
- Discussed: "There's no way King Mark is that stupid, he has to secretly be The Chessmaster or something..."
- Conversed: "Wonder how long that character's gonna keep up his idiotic act while simultaneously pulling everyone's strings."
- Implied: King Mark looks and behaves like a stereotypical Joke Character but has had the longest reign of all monarchs and never has his actions blocked or sabotaged by intrigue among others of his court.
- Deconstructed:
- King Mark's subtlety results in avoidable trouble caused by nobody taking him seriously to help prevent a problem.
- For all of his attempts at misdirection, King Mark forgot one detail: he is still the King, and that automatically makes him the top-most target to any schemes to take over or destroy his kingdom. There is just no dodging that.
- Reconstructed: ...Which was part of King Mark's Batman Gambit — he knew they wouldn't take him seriously and instead would go to his ostensible Hyper-Competent Sidekick, Lord Bob, who would let Mark know so he could handle the problem anyway.
- Played for Laughs: ???
- Played for Drama: ???
- Played for Horror: ???
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