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Basic Trope: The stupid rich.

  • Straight: Alice has a lot of money and fancy things, but she is The Ditz.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is a Too Dumb to Live billionaire.
  • Downplayed: Alice has an upper-class lifestyle, and has very little common sense or idea of how to care for herself.
  • Justified: Alice is from a wealthy family, was spoiled all through her life, and never had to work hard or rely on anything other than looks or charm to get her way. Everything was just handed to her on a silver platter, literally or figuratively.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted: Alice is rich and acts like an idiot, but that was Obfuscating Stupidity. She is actually very intelligent.
  • Double Subverted:
    • But only in that she's book smart; when it comes to street smarts, she is in way over her head.
    • Alternatively, Alice is smart in other ways, but Book Dumb.
  • Parodied:
    • When someone mentions a vacuum cleaner, Alice has to look up the word in a dictionary...except she doesn't know what that is either.
    • Upon losing her money, Alice becomes a genius, but when she gains it back again, she promptly returns to being an utter moron.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted:
  • Enforced: An Aesop about how wealth and status aren't everything.
  • Lampshaded: "Just another rich idiot..."
  • Invoked: Alice graduates high school, marries a rich man shortly thereafter, and drops out of college halfway through her first semester, thinking she won't ever need further education as she is going to be nothing more than a rich and beautiful trophy wife.
  • Exploited: Alice makes everyone think she's Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense, which attracts con men and allows the actually very smart Alice to reveal them and turn them in before they can steal a lot of money.
  • Defied: Alice may be rich, but she keeps up her smarts and social skills by reading, doing puzzles, interacting with people, etc.
  • Discussed: "Why are rich people always so stupid?"
  • Conversed: "So the writers made everyone who was born rich an idiot. Are they trying to alienate the audience most likely to have time to watch this?"
  • Deconstructed: Alice is this way because she never had to work for anything; it was all just handed to her. She never had to rely on smarts of any kind to get what she wanted and needed, so she never did.
  • Reconstructed: Alice uses all the extra time she has as an idle rich person to learn about the world, by doing things like interacting with people, watching documentaries, reading books, taking classes, etc. So she knows a lot, and can even do things she doesn't have to (like vacuum), even if she normally doesn't.
  • Played For Laughs: Alice tries to live among average people, and doesn't have any clue how to do things for herself.
  • Played For Drama: Alice loses all her money when the market goes bad, and has no idea how to live without all she's accustomed to. Will she be able to learn? Or will she just be a pathetic spoiled adult brat?

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