"A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless."
— Vlad Taltos, Iorich
You can't tell a man who knows.
This is a character archetype. These characters:
- Are extremely smart and/or good at whatever it is they do.
- Know it, and are probably pretty arrogant (in fact, they tend to think they're even better than they are).
- Often suffer some impediment, or endure some prejudice, to the point where being dramatically and demonstrably more awesome than everyone else in their field is a necessity if they're going to be seen as a success at all.
- As a result, are continually driven to go farther. Usually they succeed (remember, they're really good), but their failures are spectacular.
Usually these characters are protagonists (though generally not The Hero); they're often the Foil to Too Dumb to Fool. If they have Blue Blood, they could be Gentleman Snarkers. The Smug Super, Insufferable Genius, or Mad Scientist frequently acts like this. When they are antagonists, their cleverness serves them well at the beginning of the story, but their belief in their own intellectual superiority over the protagonists will always trip them up at the end. If the character isn't even that good, but acts like this trope applies to them, you might have a Miles Gloriosus, Know-Nothing Know-It-All, or Smug Snake on your hands.
Unwillingness to heed the advice of others is a big part of this. After all, if you're convinced everyone else is dumber than you, then how could they understand things that you don't?
These characters are especially susceptible to the Kansas City Shuffle, a deception that relies on the targets' overestimation of their own cleverness, as well as Underestimating Intelligence, where someone fails to manipulate someone because their would-be victim was smarter than the would-be manipulator. See also Hoist by Their Own Petard, when a schemer's own plots end up being their downfall, and Hero Ball/Villain Ball, when competent characters fall into the trap of being one-dimensionally good or evil.
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Other Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach: Sousuke Aizen is considered the greatest mastermind in the series, capable of playing the entirety of Soul Society like a harp. He enjoys using his cunning to manipulate everyone, but he despises Kisuke Urahara, who is perhaps the only person who can match his intellect. His arrogance comes from his drive to break his limits, causing him to antagonize most of Soul Society because their lack of exponential growth pisses him off, as opposed to working with the Mad Scientist division and their secure protocols. Eventually, his minions and experiments break free of his control and he is beaten by one of them - Ichigo, whose mother was genetically augmented by one of Aizen's infectious Hollow test subjects, something Aizen was too haughty to deal with.
- Lelouch vi Britannia in Code Geass is a brilliant strategist and gifted leader, but his personality issues and tendency to lose all rationality when his loved ones are put in danger. By the end of the series, his paranoia and strategic cornering has led to him being completely isolated after his army gets manipulated by a city-razing sociopath into turning against him.
- Death Note:
- Light Yagami is impossibly clever, charming, and manipulative. But for all his great plans, he ends up falling victim to his own pride too often. By the end of the series, Light can't even consider the possibility he might fail anymore.
- L also has traits of this. He's confident enough in his abilities that he's willing to get very close to a serial killer that can kill supernaturally. He pegs Light as Kira relatively quickly, but keeps playing mind games to get hard evidence, arguably risking the whole case just so he can decisively win against Kira. This winds up getting L killed.
- So does Matt. He's the third-smartest of the Wammy's Kids, and very much falls into the category of Brilliant, but Lazy. He additionally gets a little too confident that he won't miss anything important going on at Misa's and completely misses Misa and Mogi escaping with the help of a "delivery man" until it's too late, and attempts to talk himself out of a confrontation with Takada's bodyguards which ends up getting him shot a million times over and killed as a result.
- Digimon Fusion: AxeKnightmon spends the first 2 seasons of the series manipulating every faction, facilitating Lord Bagra's rise to ruler of the Digital World and acquiring the power of Digi-Fusion for the Bagra Empire and allowing his brother to begin D5. As it turns out, it was all for the sake of using Digi-Fusion to forcibly absorb his brother, recognizing that he could never match him physically. Unfortunately, as it turns out, even absorbed, Lord Bagra wasn't destroyed and remains more powerful than AxeKnightmon. During their Battle in the Center of the Mind, Lord Bagra says that AxeKnightmon's continual attempts to earn his favor only made the coming betrayal that much more obvious. Bagra allowed his brother to carry on for so long as his plans already did so much of the heavy lifting for him. Having clearly outlined the gap between them, Bagra then proceeds to devour his brother from the inside out.
- Dragon Ball Super: Goku Black's plan to kill mortals and take over the multiverse as the supreme god was nearly flawless outside of two major errors. He didn't seem to notice that Goku's body was corrupting him since he didn't have the desire for immortality, only the desire for gaining more power. This error gimped Fusion Zamasu's immortality and made it possible for the heroes to destroy his physical body. His second major error was not coming up with a counter to deal with Zen'o outside of probably hoping that Fusion Zamasu could beat him.
- Sora from .hack// is at the maximum level possible in The World, has the maximum possible stats, and goes around killing people for fun. Much of his arrogance is probably due to his age. Apart from that, he also openly manipulates everyone and is essentially the most obvious sufferer of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder ever. He has information sources no one else has and is basically invincible in any of the fights he gets in, constantly killing BT. He gets called on it, but it never hampers him until finally motivated into doing something somewhat heroic (he didn't realize he couldn't get away) and taunting the Big Bad, at which point she turned him into a Sequel Hook, and the show ended.
- Taikobo from Hoshin Engi. He's a brilliant strategist who once managed to save an entire village by getting them drunk so they couldn't fight an army that came to capture them and then killed the leader, causing the army to scatter. He's famous for manipulating most of the cast with ease...but the first time he met Dakki, he ended up being enslaved and forced to watch members of his clan get thrown in a pit filled with crocs and snakes, one of them calling him pathetic. His ego went down in size after surviving that.
- Tarkus names this as Bruford’s mentality in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure after crushing his armor underfoot. Quoted verbatim in the English dub of the anime.
Tarkus: He died like a spineless dog! He was too clever by half. Liked winning his fights with thinking. I just hit ‘em until they fall to pieces!
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War: The titular heroine is prone to this during her and Shirogane's "war of love", as despite the fact her access to the Shinomiya fortune allows her to be Crazy-Prepared, all it takes is for one small surprise variable to completely throw her for a loop, which her ego tends to leave her blind to. Usually, it's Fujiwara, but it doesn't change the fact that Kaguya's victories are rarely due to her plans working flawlessly.
- Minami-ke: Chiaki, the youngest of the Minami sisters, is a Little Miss Snarker who's very smart for her age and knows it, rightfully viewing her older sister Kana and friend Makoto as idiots. However, her intelligence often makes her over-analyze simple situations, and she's so convinced Makoto is beneath her that she somehow can't tell that "Mako-chan" is really just Makoto wearing a skirt as a disguise.
- Monster Rancher:
- Hare has a tendency to overestimate himself, constantly reassuring his friends that his plans are bound to work just as he intends. Sometimes they do... but other times something winds up going wrong and they're forced to improvise.
- Notably, he warns Color Pandora about this very thing during "Color Pandora, Guardian of the Forest". The warning goes unappreciated, with Color Pandora accusing him of being jealous of his smarts.
- Naruto:
- Sasuke Uchiha is a child prodigy and one of the few survivors of the all-powerful Uchiha clan. Even amongst his kin, he was pretty talented, if though Always Second Best to his The Paragon of the clan, his older brother Itachi (though the two brothers adored the other.) Unsurprisingly both were the children of the clan leader (and he was quite capable himself.) However, after his brother exterminated their clan, he was left with a deep trauma which led to an Inferiority Superiority Complex. Sasuke is very talented, but his need to be the strongest from this trauma and only beginning to recover from it leads him to make a lot of really bad decisions. When he meets up against with his older brother (chasing after him when he learns he's going after his rival/teammate/ best friend, Naruto, he ends up getting defeated easily before undergoing the same psychological horror he went through as a child, being forced to relive his clan's extermination in his mind for 72 hours. When Naruto, who had always been inferior to him, manages to almost defeat him, it reinforces the severe doubts he has on himself, and coupled with his greater troubled mind, he defects and begins the long road of being an antagonist.
- Kakashi's childhood self also ticks all the boxes. Another child prodigy (Chuunin at 6 and Jounin at 13), he was driven by the ambition of the mission above all else after his father committed seppuku for failing his mission due to saving his teammates. He had a relatively rocky relationship with his teammates, namely Obito Uchiha, and though he was genuinely brilliant, this arrogance got him badly hurt when he tested an unfinished technique on an enemy. This led to a series of events that led to the death of Obito, whose final gift to him was his Sharingan. As an adult, Kakashi remains haunted by Obito's death and we later discovered what happened to Rin, his other teammate: she was captured by Mist village and implanted the Three Tailed Beast in the hopes of using her on the village when she got far enough. Kakashi was forced to kill her. Obito, who was secretly alive, witnessed and it finally caused him to snap.
- Sakura, being a Teen Genius, has a bad habit of believing she knows better than those around her. This often leads her to completely disregard their input, resulting in disastrous outcomes like in the "Five Kage Summit" arc for example.
- Kabuto Yakushi takes the cake as the series' most extreme example. He's very smart and cunning, also very arrogant. He defeats a Sannin in battle after negating several of her medical jutsu and taking advantage of her fear of blood, only to be neutralized by Naruto Uzumaki's first Rasengan. Later, he becomes a Sage, averting the typical Villain Forgot to Level Grind, surpasses Orochimaru in power, summons a Undead Army of many powerful ninja and blackmails Tobi into an alliance -all very impressive- but his arrogance also turns up to eleven to become truly massive and gets him to waste and mismanage a good portion of this powerful army rather quickly. He becomes convinced in his technique's perfection, though Itachi and Madara gain independence from it. The former fights him alongside Sasuke and eventually defeats him with Izanami, and the war he helped start goes on without him a good while longer.
- Ibiki suffers from this in his role as proctor of the first stage of the Chunin Exam. He's proficient at mind games and psychological torture and works several layers of such into his test, with the end result being a person could (and, to his amusement, the titular character does) sit at their desk without completing a single question and still pass the exam.
- One Piece: Caesar Clown. While not quite on Vegapunk's level, he is still a brilliant scientist who managed to develop several scientific advances, including (inefficiently) replicating Vegapunk's process of creating artificial Devil Fruits via his SAD gas. This earned him the patronage of one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea, Donquixote Doflamingo, who used his research to sell artificial Devil Fruits to one of the Four Emperors, the reputedly unbeatable Kaido. By doing this, Caesar was placed in Doflamingo's direct protection, shielding him from the World Government, and Kaido's indirect protection, shielding him from everyone else. Finally, he hid himself at the barren island of Punk Hazard, which was off-limits from everyone due to being a massive Hail Fire Peaks wasteland, keeping himself hidden and allowing him to do his research in peace. Thanks to all this, Caesar had it made and could effectively do whatever he wanted. It was during this time that he would do several stupid things, the stupidest being swindling money from Big Mom, another Emperor, confident that he would remain untouchable to even her. The problem? He didn't have Kaido's direct protection. Caesar's contract was with Doflamingo, who developed the artificial Devil Fruits himself using his factory in Dressrosa. All Caesar had to do was produce the SAD gas and ship it to him, freeing up his time to pursue his own research projects. This backfired on him. Doflamingo is defeated and exposed by the Straw Hats then jailed, and the factory at Dressrosa is destroyed, meaning Caesar loses the protection of both and all the stupid things he's done immediately come back to bite him in the ass.
- This is the reason why many former beta testers die in Sword Art Online- they're unshakably confident in what they know about their game from their time playing the beta, to the point at which they don't realize that their knowledge is out of date until it kills them. Some specific examples follow:
- In the first volume of Progressive and the second episode of the anime, Diavel becomes leader of the raid to defeat the boss of the level, and acts based on what he knows, intending to claim the last attack bonus so that he'll be at an advantage when it comes to deciding a leader. To that end, he plans on charging in when the boss is almost dead, puts his fellow beta tester Kirito in the back where he's less likely to get it, and, in Progressive, attempted to buy Kirito's Anneal Blade through an intermediary for another advantage. Too late, Diavel learned that the boss's new weapon in its second phase was different from in the beta, and paid for his mistake with his life.
- In a side story in Volume 8 of the main series, Kirito teams up with a beta tester named Kopel, who intends to trick Kirito into going into an area full of plant-like monsters, cause more to come, hide while the monsters kill Kirito and steal Kirito's gear once he's dead. Unfortunately for Kopel, he didn't realize that the plant monsters don't use sight to track their prey, which means that his Hiding skill is useless, and he's the only player who dies.
- Though Eirin Yagokoro is perhaps the smartest person in Touhou Project lore, Silent Sinner in Blue makes it clear that she doesn't have anything on Yukari Yakumo when it comes to cunning and manipulation. Throughout the manga, Yukari consistently stays several steps ahead of Eirin, unable and by the end Eirin finds herself completely played while Yukari is toasting victoriously with Yuyuko and her other associates involved in the plan.
- Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh! has great confidence in his skills and is a genius who can create impossibly advanced gadgets while he's still a high-school student. He starts the series as the undefeated champion of Duel Monsters, but his arrogance earns him a beating by The Power of Friendship. He never quite abandons his pride throughout the series.
- Apparently, this is the result of his childhood. After being left in an orphanage with Mokuba by their relatives (who spent their parents' inheritance), Seto set out to get the both of them adopted. To where he even challenged Gozaburo Kaiba, a brilliant but ruthless businessman and master chess player to a game and beat him. The whole thing impressed him to where he did indeed adopt the two brothers... and made Seto his heir, giving him ruthless training. Seto would eventually strike back at Gozaburo and claim Kaiba Corp for his own, but not before becoming a seriously messed-up young man who is haunted by the past and has a need to prove himself. To him, he can only move beyond his past by beating everyone in his way, with his final obstacle being the King of Games himself, Yami Yugi.
- Astral in Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL has a bad habit of falling into this while dueling. In contrast to his partner Yuma, he plays extremely cautiously, often setting up defenses to lure out his opponent's best cards so he can properly counter them. Unfortunately for him, he's also very blatant about doing this and his opponents subsequently play into his expectations to fool him into going on the defensive when going on the offensive would be more effective.
- In his duel against Kaito, Astral sets up a defensive combo on his second turn due to being wary of a potential set trap card on Kaito's field. However, on Kaito's next turn, he reveals the set card was simply a spell card he couldn't even activate on Astral's turn, and the opening allows Kaito to easily wipe out Astral's whole strategy along with half his life points.
- Even after all his Character Development during the series, Astral still falls victim to this in his final duel against Yuma. Astral actually cancels a game-winning attack under the assumption that Yuma has a counter ready, only for Yuma to reveal the trap he set would actually only trigger if an attack was negated. Had he just kept going, he would've won the duel right there. Of course, that was what Yuma was counting on.
Comic Books
- Batman:
- The Riddler, one of Batman's most famous enemies. He's a genius by any standards, far less psychotic than most of Gotham's criminal elite, and has even shown himself to be an excellent detective in his own right. So why can't he just put his intellect to good use and live a life of comfort and fame? Because he would have to accept that he is Gotham's second most intelligent inhabitant. He NEEDS to prove that he is smarter than Batman, so he keeps needlessly challenging him and losing.
- Bruce himself is not above this, either, usually when his paranoia gets the best of him. Three arcs (Batman: War Games, JLA: Tower of Babel, "Failsafe" in Batman (Chip Zdarsky)) come to happen because he made "perfect" plans (to take over the Gotham underworld in War Games, to take out League members in case they went rogue in Tower of Babel and creating a powerful Amazo android with a programming that prioritizes targeting him if he ever went rogue), but was not as Crazy-Prepared when it came to taking measures to prevent them from being stolen and implemented by other people.
- To say nothing of his Brother Eye project. That went... poorly. A.I. Is a Crapshoot, indeed. Also an example of "not good enough anti-theft failsafes" (Maxwell Lord's psychic powers notwithstanding).
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Happens all too often to Donald Duck, of all people: he'll start a new job, quickly become a master and then go beyond it, and then his magnum opus will ruin him due to him not listening to the obvious suggestion that someone with less expertise (usually his nephews) will give him.
- Paperinik New Adventures: Lampshaded by Two in #30, when his attempt to deceive and manipulate the Evronians fails, but he states that "only a fool" doesn't consider the possibility of being defeated, so he promptly flees on the escape shuttle he secretly prepared in order to defy the trope. Unfortunately for it, the Evronians were aware all the time of its backup plan, for the same reason they were aware of its schemes. In a twist, Two didn't consider that the failure emergency plan might fail as well.
- East of West: Ultimately leads to Archibald Chamberlain's death. He's clever enough to rig a Mexican Standoff in his favor by emptying Solomon's gun beforehand... but he's also shortsightedly spiteful enough to shoot Solomon first anyways, giving the Ranger the opening he needs to shoot Chamberlain dead.
- Fantastic Four
- This was the original characterization of Doctor Doom. Although a legitimately brilliant scientist, his god-complex-driven ego outstripped even his prodigious intellect. His entire backstory revolved around the fact he disfigured his face because he made a flaw in an experiment's calculations, and couldn't hold back his ego enough to double-check it. Instead, he clings to his false accusation that Reed Richards sabotaged it because he can't bear to admit that Richards was smart enough to spot that mistake before he made the experiment. Technically, this is still supposed to be his major failing, but after decades of Memetic Badassery, writers tend to present him as legitimately being as good as he thinks he is.
- In Ultimate Marvel, Doom having a case of this directly led into Ultimatum. As revealed during these events, he arranged for the death of the Scarlet Witch, knowing it would provoke Magneto into going Papa Wolf and declare war on mankind, leaving it up to him to "pick up the pieces." However, instead of just overthrowing humanity as Doom expected, Magneto decides to wipe it out entirely and bring about The End of the World as We Know It; Doom later reflects that he never imagined Magneto would be willing or able to go that far.
Doom: I had Magneto's daughter - the Scarlet Witch - murdered. I knew Magneto would then declare war on mankind and when it was over... I would be there to pick up the pieces. I... never imagined that Magneto either had the power or the will — to destroy the human race... What good is a king if there is no kingdom...? - In James Robinson's arc of Fantastic Four (2014), the team is expertly brought down by a genius calling himself the Quiet Man. He sets the Thing up for murder, has the Human Torch depowered, causes the FF to lose both their homes and patents, Reed and Sue lose custody of their children, and the team torn apart. He's been helped by the Psycho Man using the power of an alternate universe to manipulate everyone. The Quiet Man plans to have Earth invaded by this other world, all so he can shut down the portals, then "save" the world himself and blame the entire incident on Reed. When Reed dares him to go ahead, the Quiet Man gives the shut-off signal...and the attack continues. As the Quiet Man gapes in shock, Reed dryly points out to this supposed genius mastermind that it may not have been the smartest move to give ultimate power over two worlds to THE PSYCHO MAN.
- Played for laughs when the FF return from an alien world to a spic and span home. Franklin and Valeria act like they just hung around bored and are stunned when Reed asks just how many parties they threw while the FF were gone. Reed states the two did a great job cleaning up the place...too great as they cleaned the place down to the molecular level and what Earth teenager cleans their home that thoroughly?
- This was the original characterization of Doctor Doom. Although a legitimately brilliant scientist, his god-complex-driven ego outstripped even his prodigious intellect. His entire backstory revolved around the fact he disfigured his face because he made a flaw in an experiment's calculations, and couldn't hold back his ego enough to double-check it. Instead, he clings to his false accusation that Reed Richards sabotaged it because he can't bear to admit that Richards was smart enough to spot that mistake before he made the experiment. Technically, this is still supposed to be his major failing, but after decades of Memetic Badassery, writers tend to present him as legitimately being as good as he thinks he is.
- The Incredible Hulk: The Leader can fall victim to this. As the depowered Samuel Sterns notes in a flashback in The Immortal Hulk, the Leader designed all his equipment without the thought he might ever lose his powers, so when he does, Sam can't get anything to work.
Sam Sterns: The Leader was too smart to be smart.
- Jupiter's Legacy: Walter assumes that his super-intelligence alone makes him best-suited to turn the economy around, but Sheldon tells him that he doesn't really have the expertise to do so. Sheldon is proven right after Walter and Brandon seize control of America, as their policies quickly tank the economy.
- Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: This is the flaw of Clarabelle Cow. She's a genuinely smart woman — certainly more so than her friend/rival/love interest, Horace Horsecollar. Unfortunately, Horace comes off especially bad against Clarabelle because he's a Know-Nothing Know-It-All, so Clarabelle has an overinflated sense of her own intelligence, which leads her to do foolish things.
- Prodigy:
- Super-genius Edison Crane is approached by CIA operative Rachel Straks who needs his help. Claiming to have been sent by General Bear Thriftbank, Rachel says a vast conspiracy is afoot. Crane is able to figure out this is a sinister organization that's spent years trying to open a gateway to allow Earth to be invaded by another dimension. Crane is able to figure out the calculations for the gateway at which point, Rachel shoots him. She's the half-sister of villain Tinker and they gloat on how they've been using Crane all along. They note how her name is an anagram for "Charles Trask", the traitor from East of Eden and that the general is an anagram of Frank the Rabbit, the Imaginary Friend from Donnie Darko. They use Crane's calculations...only to realize too late that it's giving Crane full access to their systems which he uses to thwart the invasion. Crane informs them that he actually figured out the fake names early on. More importantly, the duo had gone to massive lengths to craft an elaborate fake background for Rachel...but missed the fact she couldn't speak Bedouin, which was a prerequisite for any CIA operative in that area. Crane lampshades how the duo's attempts to be so clever just tipped him onto their scheme.
- Slaves of Mars has Crane framed for murder and on the run, joining with brother Elijah. After various twists and turns, they learn Kelvin, their father's robotic aide, has achieved self-awareness and has been plotting for decades to sell humanity as slaves to the alien race that began life on Earth eons before in exchange for technology that can let him evolve further. Kelvin claims to have arranged for wars, pandemics, lockdowns and more to contain humanity and outwitting the Cranes (the smartest men on Earth) to prove how capable humanity can be. The aliens arrive with Kelvin making his sales pitch...only for the aliens to interrupt with how they could care less about some species they likely forgot about billions of years ago (as the Cranes put it "you're trying to sell them something they threw away.") However, an A.I. that achieved self-awareness, could secretly control a planet for years and even figured out the alien language in minutes? That is a lot more appealing to snatch and use. Too late, Kelvin realizes all his actions did was make himself look more valuable than humanity could be as the aliens whisk him away to use as their own slave system.
- Superman: Lex Luthor is prone to this. Being a multibillionaire who innovated, conquered, and murdered his way to the top of a multibillionaire empire wasn't enough. His motivation for ANYTHING comes solely from his ambition to prove that he can do what others can't — so in almost any continuity when he can't beat Superman, but Superman can beat the brains out of him, he goes into a steady Villain Decay as a result of his obsession with this humiliating reversal of his motives.
- Tales of the Unexpected: Issue #1 features the story of a man named Charles Duval, who attempts to assisinate Louis XIV and is set to be executed—but the fickle monarch offers a simple exile instead in exchange for a test of wit. He places Duval in a cell and tells him that there is only one way to escape, and if Duval finds it within three days, he may leave the country unmolested. On the first day Duval accidentally spills his pitcher of water, and discovers a trapdoor which leads to a long passageway which leads to a loose wall—it's the wall of his cell and he's back where he started. On the second day, he discovers that the rope hanging from the top of his cell is just long enough to reach a hook on the wall and pulling the hook opens a trapdoor in the ceiling with a ladder. Duval climbs and climbs—only to discover himself at the top of a 500-foot tall tower. On the third and final day, his shirt snags on a brick which Duval discovers can be pushed in. The whole wall is loose! And on the other side...the outside! A patch of land surrounded by a moat full of crocodiles! On the fourth day, when Louis and his guards come for him the doomed Duval accuses the king of cheating him, but Louis assures him that there was one obvious avenue of escape that Duval was too clever to try. The door to Duval's cell was unlocked all along and simply pushing against it would have led to his freedom.
- In The Ultimates (2024), this is Tony Stark's Fatal Flaw. He may be the runner-up for World's Smartest Man, but he's also an awkward teenager who struggles dealing with people directly. His attempt to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and restore the other heroes fails because he didn't take human emotions into account (and his messages weren't particularly rousing) while stubbornly refusing Doom's suggestion to simply try again with their Time Machine, and he offends Ultimate She-Hulk during their first meeting with his Innocently Insensitive remarks. It's implied that he only gets worse with time, and that he's set to become Kang the Conqueror.
- Wolverines: Mystique falls victim to this in issue #16. She's been manipulating the team almost from the beginning, and eventually gives up on pretense and outright seizes control of them from Shogun. However, even though she's firmly in command, she still can't dispense with manipulating them rather than being upfront about what her plans are and how they will solve everyone's problems (in issue #15 outright telling Sabretooth that the rest of the team isn't smart enough to understand). When she tries to prevent X-23 from helping Shogun and Skel rescue the rest of the Paradise experiments because she needs her (the other two are expendable), Laura balks at being controlled and triggers a mass walk-out by the entire team, who all agree to help just to spite Mystique (except for Laura, who genuinely wants to help). It turns out the rescue mission is a trap by Sinister. Had Mystique been honest about her intentions and not been so determined to manipulate the rest of the team — who she had control over, anyway — the entire situation likely could have been prevented.
Comic Strips
- Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes can be very thoughtful, imaginative, and philosophical. Unfortunately, he's also a Small Name, Big Ego whose plans frequently go haywire. His creations like his duplicates and snow goons have a nasty habit of turning on him, he's regularly outsmarted by Hobbes and Susie in his efforts to prank them, and his schemes constantly backfire (e.g. by getting himself completely stuck when he has Hobbes tie him to a chair so he can be an escape artist). Like Jason Fox (see below), he's a little kid without much life experience.
- Jason from FoxTrot is incredibly intelligent, excels in school, and is an overall technical wizard. But he frequently does incredibly stupid things, potentially getting himself hurt or in trouble in the process due to being a ten-year-old boy with little life experience.
- Knights of the Dinner Table: Brian Vanhoose has a streak of this. He's able to pull off a lot of brilliance, but he always pushes it too far and eventually his plans come tumbling down.
- Bob got his own turn at this in a Cattlepunk game. Bob somehow got his hands on a copy of the rulebook with lots of loopholes written in. Unfortunately, he not only badly overplayed his hand, he had the bad luck of the GM at the time being Brian, the book's original owner.
- Game Master B.A. sometimes runs into this whenever he tries to force the Knights away from derailing the game. His plots to keep them on track and discourage their usual behavior inevitably blow up in his face.
- Linus seems to have this trait in Peanuts. He often explains things using scientific facts and theories (most of which are true), quotes philosophers and the Bible, and often compares simple things to famous works of art. On the other hand, there are times when he acts naive or downright foolish; his well-known belief in the Great Pumpkin is mocked by most of the other characters except for Sally (because she likes him, though even she kinda finds the idea silly herself), Charlie Brown (who tries his best to be supportive, though even he voices his doubts), Peppermint Patty (who admits herself that she is kinda dumb) and on occasions, Snoopy.
Films — Animation
- A Bug's Life: Hopper is cognizant of the fact that if the ants ever realized they have superior numbers they could easily fight off the grasshoppers. Unfortunately for Hopper, he greatly overestimates the ability of his stick-before-the-carrot approach to keeping them in line. Flik's Rousing Speech combined with the knowledge that Hopper planned on killing the Queen results in the ants finally standing up to the grasshoppers.
- Corpse Bride: Lord Barkis seduced and murdered Emily and stole her riches. Years later, he plans to do the same with Victoria, but somehow utterly fails to notice Victoria's parents, the Everglots, are broke aristocrats. It leads to his death in the climax.
- Megamind. Megamind's intelligence is hyper-advanced compared to Earth standards, he's a genius inventor, and his hobby is creating grandiose revenge schemes against the kid who bullied him in elementary school. Worth mentioning that these schemes don't just fail, they fail completely... Until one day one didn't, setting the plot in motion. Metro Man made it seem like Megamind succeeded in killing him, so he could retire. His absence leads Megamind to create Titan, who uses his powers for his own personal gain. Upon discovering that Metro Man is still alive but refuses to come out of retirement, Megamind realizes he has to change his ways in order to stop Titan.
- In Superman: Doomsday, Lex Luthor's plan to create and control a clone of Superman is sound in theory but fails in practice because of how badly he overestimates the intelligence gap in his own favor. Ignoring his practice of locking the two of them in a red sun-lamp room and beating the crap out of the clone with a pair of Kryptonite-lined gauntlets just for the kicks of beating the crap out of Superman on a constant basis, he does at least go to the extent of putting a lead capsule full of Kryptonite in the clone's brain as a lethal take-down. Except the clone gets suspicious of Luthor, and promptly uses a combination of a mirror, his X-Ray Vision to check his brain, and then heat vision to perform some impromptu brain surgery on himself. Likewise, when cornered by the angry clone, Luthor's best plan is to try and lure him into the room where he used to torture the clone... which fails because the clone doesn't take the bait; instead he locks Luthor in the chamber, and then rips the whole vault out of the building before dropping it onto the street. Luthor survives the fall through sheer luck.
- Scar from The Lion King (1994) (and remake) schemes to take the throne, believing himself to be smarter than his brother, Mufasa, and actually succeeds in doing so without anyone suspecting he played a role in Mufasa's death. The only real hole in Scar's plot, unbeknownst to him, is that the hyenas failed to kill Simba, but the young lion is still ashamed and runs away. However, after the Time Skip, it becomes clear that while Scar is certainly a cunning schemer, he puts no thought into being an actual ruler. In a few years under his rule, Pride Rock has fallen into ruin, the lions are running out of food, and even the hyenas who had been loyal to Scar, are about ready to revolt, and eventually turn on him, literally ripping him to shreds after he tries to blame them for the coup. It seems that Mufasa was much smarter than Scar gave him credit for. Or at least, Mufasa was much wiser than Scar.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Teen Genius Miles Morales, who really does not want to be in the academy for gifted children he is in, attempts to get kicked out by using Obfuscating Stupidity and getting a zero in one of his tests. His teacher is instantly on to him because, as she points out, the only way someone would get a perfect zero in the test (which is composed completely out of "yes/no" questions) would be if they knew all of the answers and marked the opposite.
Films — Live-Action
- Benoit Blanc Mysteries:
- Knives Out:
- Harlan Thrombey is smart enough to immediately devise a detailed plan so his intended heir can avoid taking the blame for his Accidental Murder and being at minimum disinherited, but a bit too overenthusiastic to leap into one of his own murder mysteries. Had he reacted in more conventional fashion he might have noticed that he felt remarkably normal for a man who'd supposedly been given a massive overdose of morphine instead of slitting his throat.
- Ransom Thrombey puts together a Frame-Up clever enough to trick someone into thinking she did it herself, but when she's not arrested hires Benoit to investigate so he'll catch her. He's too arrogant to consider the potential downside of hiring a renowned detective to investigate your own crime.
- Glass Onion:
- Andi Brand is an intelligent and driven woman who managed to build Alpha into a major company in just a few years with the help of Miles Bron. However, she has a blind spot when it comes to people, which allows Miles to steal the entire company when he turns the Disruptors against her. Andi's last attempt to get what she's owed has her lure Miles to her house for a confrontation, expecting him to not retaliate because she thought he was too smart to do something as stupid as try to hurt her about a week after being part of a court struggle that made international news and would make him one of the primary suspects of the police through motive. Unfortunately, Miles is that stupid, and last thing she knew she was drinking coffee he had drugged as step one of faking her suicide.
- Benoit Blanc, even if he is a Great Detective, also falls under this. It takes him a pretty long time to put Miles as a primary suspect of Andi Brand's murder, let alone as the killer, because just like Andi he thought Miles was smarter than that. When he finally understands that Bron is that dumb and opportunistic, Blanc is actually pissed. Furthermore, the plan to investigate all of the suspects that he and Andi's twin sister Helen perform is burdened by Complexity Addiction.
- Knives Out:
- EX_MACHINA:
- Nathan's undoing is his pride. He needed to construct a scenario in which Ava would deceive and use Caleb to facilitate her escape, thus proving her sapience. His failing is that someone clever enough to be capable of assisting her, would also be clever enough to outwit him, and thus all his machinations fall apart because Caleb caught on to the game and played into it, which Nathan didn't figure out until it was too late.
- This also applies to Caleb, when he rightly guessed that Nathan was still able to observe him and Ava when the power outages occurred, and put his plan to free Ava into motion before Nathan realized it was too late. What he didn't count on was Ava betraying him and leaving him locked up in the monitoring room. Meaning, while he saw through Nathan's gambit, he still fell for the Damsel in Distress act that Ava was doing after all, though his feelings for her could be blamed for him trusting her, as love is known to cloud sound judgement.
- The Godfather has an interesting discussion concerning this between recently ascended Don Michael and one of his few genuinely trusted supporters about who of his Caporegimes is most likely to betray him to the older, more experienced, and apparently more powerful Dons. They agree that betraying him is the smart thing to do and therefore they single out Capo Salvatore Tessio as the most likely turn-coat as he is smarter than Capo Peter Clemenza. What remains unspoken, however, is that he is still not smart enough to realise that Michael anticipates this, is planning the demise of his enemies as well, and will immediately recognise his treachery.
- Godzilla vs. Kong: Apex Cybernetics CEO Walter Simmons (or at least the people in his company who helped their Glory Hound CEO form his plan) are cunning and deceptive enough to succeed in Apex's machinations to turn the world against Godzilla by driving him to act destructive in major population centers, and then get Monarch to guide Apex to the Hollow Earth energy readings they need to activate Mechagodzilla under the illusion that both organizations are trying to stop Godzilla's seemingly-unprovoked rampage. However, Simmons is completely incapable of heeding his own limitations, to the point where he apparently doesn't see anything remotely wrong with turning a malevolent, man-hating Draconic Abomination's still-partly-alive remains into his Mecha's control system, and he foregoes Pragmatic Villainy in favor of risking everything when he needlessly invokes the Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway trope for immediate gratification – and unlike Alan Jonah before him, Simmons and his company don't have any Plan B's, emergency recourses or ways to salvage their agenda in the event that they lose control of the Titan-type forces they're meddling with, their pride was just that overbloated. Furthermore, a big part of why Apex get as far as they do over the film and they aren't busted and shut down before the penultimate act is in the folly and stupidity of other humans generally: the world at large easily condemn Godzilla, almost everyone decides to focus on killing Godzilla first and asking absolutely critical questions later, and almost everyone who broaches Godzilla's rampage completely misses or just plain ignores the signs in Godzilla's attack that Apex Cybernetics are a Devil in Plain Sight.
- The Hunger Games: Foxface dies because, lacking the know-how to forage food from the forest for herself, she relies on stealth to observe and steal from other Tributes - meaning that she doesn't recognize nightlock berries and, assuming them to be safe because Peeta collected them, inadvertently poisons herself with them. While this is true for the book, an early shot during the training sequence indicates that Foxface actually had a higher knowledge of the flora in the area than the other tributes. In fact, the addition of this shot carries the implication that she committed suicide rather than dying at the hands of, or killing, the other tributes. The fact that the Nightlock berries were out in the open had to have set off some warning bells as well, if she were clever enough to avoid the other tributes without being detected after all this time.
- Mark Whitacre, the title character of The Informant! (2009), is an accomplished scientist who speaks several languages and sorely overestimates his own prowess when he gets between his company's corrupt leadership and an FBI probe. Not only that, but it turns out he's been embezzling millions from the company and spinning outrageous lies to make himself look good, both in the company and in his personal lifenote . Not that he isn't brilliant (he earns two PhDs while in prison), but he's determined to succeed big and when that fails, he fails big.
- Inglorious Basterds: Hans Landa (who is by all means and purposes Nazi Sherlock Holmes) flawlessly exploits the Gambit Pileup of the film's climax to kill all of the Nazi high command and get himself a cushy life in America on the government's dime and a spot in the history books as one of the men who ended World War II, but he underestimates how much of a Sociopathic Soldier Aldo Raine is and gets a swastika carved in his forehead as a result.
- This is the basic accusation leveled at the showrunners and scientists of Jurassic Park (1993): they were so eager to actually clone and revive the extinct dinosaurs that they didn't stop to consider if this was in any way a good idea. It wasn't.
Ian Malcolm: Your scientists were preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should.
- Mister Miyagi in The Karate Kid (1984) is less arrogant than most examples of this trope. However, he still seems unable to resist opportunities to be clever, even when it goes counter to his goals. His Wax On, Wax Off teaching regimen in the first movie (or rather, his refusal to explain it) almost drove his student away. His impromptu bet at the bar in the second movie may have paid for Daniel's college, but also humiliated the man he was trying to talk out of a duel to the death with him. His "sweep" joke in the third movie drove Daniel straight into the arms of the Evil Mentor when he needed support.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: Loki tends to follow a pattern in Thor and The Avengers: he'll devise a clever plan, successfully manipulate everybody, have them where he wants them...and then he'll Kick the Dog, giving the heroes the motivation they need to bring him down, while his gloating lets them figure out exactly what he's up to. He wised up in Thor: The Dark World, where his apparent schemes were really giving Thor the chance to save the day, while actually setting up his successful scheme of faking his death and take Odin's place without anyone suspecting a thing. Loki then fell to old habits by Thor: Ragnarok, putting on an egotistical play which causes Thor to immediately figure what's going on.
- The Matrix Resurrections: The Analyst, the new overseer of the Matrix, certainly proves himself as very cunning and dangerous. Unlike his predecessor, the Architect, the Analyst understands the potential of human emotions, and so decides to turn those emotions in the Machines’ favor. By resurrecting Neo and Trinity and using their love and attraction to one another as a super-battery for the new Matrix. He spends the whole movie as arrogance personified, completely assured of his eventual victory. As Sati points out, however, the Analyst’s attitude has made him incautious. His whole plan hinges on keeping Neo and Trinity subdued and kept in the Matrix. When Neo is set free, he has no backup for preserving the new Matrix or any real plan for getting Neo back beyond using Trinity as bait. The Analyst is forced to parley with Neo, giving the Resistance, with Sati’s help, the window they need to save Trinity. Additionally, he recreated Agent Smith to act as Neo’s handler. Smith, the one who nearly destroyed the entire world in the previous film. Sure enough, when Smith is broken from his new programming, he immediately starts plotting against the Analyst, and is ultimately the one who locks in his defeat by allowing Neo and Trinity to fight back.
- The Running Man (2025): Dan Killian tries a bit too hard to increase audience loathing of the Runners and boost ratings by any means, even mentioning at one point that the Network did tried to fake the whole thing via computer-simulated contestants but humans still work best because they make "happy little accidents" that increase audience preference. Unfortunately, his typical manipulations run into the difficulty that is Ben Richards absolutely refusing to die (when he he did not let a few moments in which Richards could have been easily taken out go past because it was not good for the narrative for him to die right then). He wanted an explosive seventh season finale and he instead got a symbol for La Résistance.
- Detective Kujan from The Usual Suspects condescendingly tells Verbal Kint, the prisoner he is interrogating, that Kujan is smarter than him, that Verbal is stupid, a cripple, weaker than the criminals he associated with, and that Verbal will not be free until he will tell Kujan exactly what he wants to know. And then The Ending Changes Everything; Verbal was Obfuscating Stupidity all along, subtly leading Kujan to focus on his story, fabricated from random objects around the interrogation room, instead of suspicions on Verbal himself. Kujan being utterly obsessed with catching Dean Keaton only gave Kint a perfect angle for his swindle, by turning Keaton into the Fall Guy.
- Katharine Parker in Working Girl, a high-ranking businesswoman that speaks fluent German and views herself as a trailblazer for women in the business world, with a giant head to match. When it's discovered that she stole a brilliant idea from her equally intelligent secretary, she's promptly (and satisfyingly) fired and disgraced.
Sports
- Pete Carroll, former NFL coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He built a reputation of being a clever coach known to call unexpected plays that resulted in epic wins. His credibility was cemented when he led the Seahawks to their first Super Bowl win in franchise history in the 2013-2014 season, and even led them back the following year. With twenty seconds left at the New England Patriots' one-yard line, the Seahawks were down 28-24. Instead of making the logical choice of giving the ball to Marshawn "Beast Mode" Lynch, Pete Carroll calls for quarterback Russell Wilson to throw the ball into the end zone. The ball gets intercepted, and the Patriots win their fourth Super Bowl during the Bill Belichick and Tom Brady era. So instead of being the coach that won back-to-back Super Bowls for his team (and that would've been pulled off against a coach who has done this before), Pete Carroll is now seen as the coach who made the dumbest call in NFL history.
- In the 2021-22 season, the Dallas Cowboys were down 23-17 with 14 seconds to go and no timeouts at the San Francisco 49ers' 40-yard line. Knowing they had to stop the clock, Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott ran to get some extra yardage before spiking the ball. But Prescott went down way later than he should have, while the entire Cowboys team seemingly forgot that a play cannot start until the umpire in charge spots the ball. The Cowboys tried to get cute and spot the ball themselves, while the umpire not only had to respot the ball properly, but had to push through the Cowboys to do so. All of this led to Dallas running out of time and the game ending when Prescott spiked it. Even if Dallas had gotten the ball off in time, the referees could've flagged them for an illegal formation because they tried to set the ball themselves, which would've also ended the game. So a potentially clever play was ruined by Dallas trying to get cute instead of just doing the easy thing.
Theater
- The eponymous character in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is one of the best examples of this trope. His own brilliance in all things academic (and belief that he can do even more than he has) lead him to explore Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. The results are predictable.
- The Mrs. Hawking play series: Young Victoria, as can be seen in the flashbacks of part four, Gilded Cages.
Web Comics
- El Goonish Shive: Susan and Diane are normally pretty laid-back about their keen analytical skills, but both fall into this trap when suspecting that their friends Catalina and Rhoda may have secretly gotten magic powers:
- Susan, not wanting to break The Masquerade unnecessarily, comes up with a plan to casually talk to Catalina about those powers under the guise of "hypothetical" Personality Powers, banking on Catalina's well-known Cannot Keep a Secret tendencies. She figures that if Catalina has powers, then she'll either blurt out the truth or at least obviously pick up on the Hint Dropping; if the conversation goes without incident, then she probably doesn't have magic. Susan fails to consider what actually happens; Catalina has gotten just good enough at keeping secrets to put on a poker face, while still missing Susan's hints.
- Diane, meanwhile, pieces together all the hints that Rhoda has been using magic in secret, as well as her likely reasons for not telling Diane. However, actually confronting her would require Diane to accept that Rhoda is keeping secrets from her; she flatly refuses to consider that her shy friend could do that, and so immediately discards the entire train of thought.
- Suspiria, Insufferable Genius mage prodigy from Flipside. She really is a phenomenally powerful mage, but given her youth, she lacks both the experience and stamina of other mages of her rank, making her a much less formidable opponent than she should be. This has bitten her in the ass twice, in-story (the first with tragic consequences, the second costing her the other main characters' good will and respect and any sympathy the former granted her).
- The Order of the Stick:
- Vaarsuvius is the resident Squishy Wizard and needs to be smart; also, V's an elf, so there's the arrogance. Put together, V tends to go on long boasts about being able to easily solve a problem and thus loses the chance to actually do so. Later, after one failure too many, V takes to obsessively studying magic scrolls, only for a physically superior foe to best V by just putting up an Anti-Magic field. This trait is even invoked; while making a Deal with the Devil, the demonic trio present an alternate, non-Evil plan to solve the current problem, at the cost of V tacitly admitting that they couldn't solve everything alone. After V goes through with the deal anyway and flies off, the demons note that V was too focused on the ego-bruising issue to realize that the "plan" was logistically impossible anyway, so any I Did What I Had to Do justifications will fall flat. Later on, we find that their "Familicide" spell killed even people who merely had black dragon blood in them, or anyone related to them, such as their parents. People whose only crime, as V puts it, was "falling in love with a mysterious scarlet-tressed stranger"
... such as the Draketooth clan, who the Order was trying to find and ally with. Cue Heroic BSoD.
- Roy as well, at times; the below line is from when he crafted a very specific question that an Oracle would not be able to weasel away from, got an exact answer to that question, and therefore missed something very important that the Oracle honestly wanted Roy to know:
Oracle: Yes, you've certainly managed to cunningly outsmart yourself at the very least. note
- Also Nale. He may be smarter than Elan, but he's definitely not as smart as he thinks he is. For example, Nale had his succubus Femme Fatale girlfriend disguise herself and send the party on a dangerous quest to recover star metal. He assumed that the star metal would have been recovered as "everyone" has known about its existence for a great deal of time. However, it hasn't been recovered, since it was an extraordinary valuable prize under the guard of an extremely powerful black dragon who just so happened to be on vacation at the time. After it is found, the only result is Roy, Nale's enemy, having the star metal used to forge an Infinity +1 Sword. His intelligence has also led to a crippling case of Complexity Addiction. Most of his plans are characterized by initial success, followed by everything falling apart when one of the far-too-many moving parts hits a snag. This ultimately leads to his death sometime later. Having killed Minister Malack, right-hand man to General Tarquin, Nale's dad, he boasts about it straight to his father's face — in an exceptionally mean-spirited way to boot. He then rejects Tarquin's subsequent offer to reconcile and states outright that he doesn't want Tarquin's nepotism or pity. Tarquin, finally having had enough of his son's crap, proceeds to kill him, explaining that said nepotism and pity were the only things keeping Nale alive.
- Vaarsuvius is the resident Squishy Wizard and needs to be smart; also, V's an elf, so there's the arrogance. Put together, V tends to go on long boasts about being able to easily solve a problem and thus loses the chance to actually do so. Later, after one failure too many, V takes to obsessively studying magic scrolls, only for a physically superior foe to best V by just putting up an Anti-Magic field. This trait is even invoked; while making a Deal with the Devil, the demonic trio present an alternate, non-Evil plan to solve the current problem, at the cost of V tacitly admitting that they couldn't solve everything alone. After V goes through with the deal anyway and flies off, the demons note that V was too focused on the ego-bruising issue to realize that the "plan" was logistically impossible anyway, so any I Did What I Had to Do justifications will fall flat. Later on, we find that their "Familicide" spell killed even people who merely had black dragon blood in them, or anyone related to them, such as their parents. People whose only crime, as V puts it, was "falling in love with a mysterious scarlet-tressed stranger"
- Many, many characters on Homestuck. Rose is one of the worst, admittedly very intelligent and knowledgeable but constantly getting outplayed and biting off more than she can chew. Vriska is slightly more self-aware about her overly complicated plans and double-crosses, but still cheerfully forges ahead, admitting she'd be bored if she wasn't either succeeding awesomely or crashing and burning in Shakespearean fashion.
- Girl Genius: Describes almost every Spark; they gain supernatural intelligence and insight, but also severe cases of megalomania.
- Many untrained Sparks quickly build half-baked doomsday devices and are just as quickly lynched for witchcraft, while most of the trained ones love to charge into the front lines with their "unstoppable" death machines and are quickly obliterated in the chaos of war while their rampant creations add force multipliers to collateral damage.
- The reason why Baron Wulfenbach runs Europa itself despite his damaged Spark powers is because his brain is damaged just enough to ground his megalomania, and even then he has occasional flights of fancy (his obsession with ending Agatha despite all evidence of her cooperation is his undoing). The aristocrats stay in power because they know how to pull the strings of Sparks/channel their megalomania into backstabbing their enemies, but they also suffer from sheerly stupid levels of hubris. Everyone else is hard-pressed to survive this mad world.
- In a flash-forward side-story, Vanamonde von Mekkhan is the current Mechanicsburg seneschal and formerly ran a shadow government in Mechanicsburg. He ends up targeted by Hadrian Greenclaw's plan to kill those conspiring to assassinate Agatha. Since Vanamonde likes to portray himself as knowing everything that goes on within the town, Greenclaw assumed that Vanamonde knew about the plot and only didn't act because he was in on it.
- Galatea in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! is made of this. She's a genius, knows it, makes flipping well sure that everyone else knows it... and keeps concocting schemes that whirl utterly out of her control.
- Dabbler/Xuriel from Grrl Power. Her conviction in her own brilliance can lead to her doing some pretty stupid things. For example, she tries to track down Sciona's hideout by casting a tracking spell on Cooter/Wyrmil and then using their location and a bunch of complex math to pinpoint where Sciona's lair is located before they arrive. She did this because she didn't think to simply cast the tracking spell on a rock and kick it through the portal generated by Cooter/Wyrmil, which Sydney offhandedly comments about later (assuming that it mustn't be possible, otherwise Dabbler would have tried it, right?).
Web Original
- On the Dream SMP, Sam, as the Gadgeteer Genius of the server running Pandora's Vault, is more than deserving of his confidence inside the walls of the prison. Letting anything move through all the defenses while the prison's on lockdown from an attack would be foolish, and Dream had said before that he can't afford to kill Tommy, who Sam had become quite protective of after the latter's Trauma Conga Line. Unfortunately for Sam's ego, Dream and Tommy spending a week together has frayed their nerves to the last and Dream was already at the end of his rope when Sam informed them that they might have to spend another week together. That, combined with Dream having memorized the contents of his necromancy-based Tome of Eldritch Lore, finally causes Dream to snap and give a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Tommy, taking his third and last canon life.
- Escape the Night: Matt, who plays The Professor, is usually an Insufferable Genius, but during Episodes 6 and 7, he firmly holds the Idiot Ball. First, he decides to foolishly volunteer to perform an exorcism, only to realize that there’s a big chance he might die and he decides to back out of it. This gets him voted into said challenge because everyone thinks he’s a Dirty Coward. During the challenge, he panics and forgets to read the final instructions, instead rushing through the exorcism as fast as he could. He was given the choice to kill either himself of the other person voted into the challenge, but his stupidity caused the other person (whom he promised to protect) to die. Matt becomes extremely depressed and bitter following the incident and refuses to help in the next episode. This, combined with his Jerkass behavior, leads to everyone voting him into the following challenge, where Matt loses to the Street Smart Timothy. Matt’s final words are him Tempting Fate as he confidently swallows what he believes is a vial containing a cure, only to drink poison instead.
- Nice Life SMP: Or rather, too much of a Disney fan by half. When Santa Bot quizzes the players on whether The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie, as a Disney nerd, Scar points out how controversial the question is — that "hardcore" Disney fans see it as purely a Christmas movie because they want to keep The Haunted Mansion the way it is for Halloween, even though Disney officially classifies it as a Halloween movie for marketing reasons to redecorate the ride for the entire last quarter of the year. For this reason, he answers the question incorrectly by Santa Bot's standardsnote , to his Tranquil Fury.
- Rats SMP: Owen's Fatal Flaw; while he's a The Engineer and one of the cleverest of the rats, he acknowledges that sometimes, his pride gets the better of him. This results in him losing his tail to an over-ambitious project involving a clock and his first canon death, the latter of which only happened because he thought he could think of a solution while not listening to the actual experts on related topics. His insistence on fixing the Festering Fungus problem also almost kills him a second time, as his homemade gas mask ends up being so stuffy that he almost suffocates in the smoke from the burning toxic fungus.
- Sylvester, in Twig, has this as his main protagonist limitation. While he is The Social Expert, he gets overwhelmed by rapid inputs of new information and spends so much time planning how to react to it that he forgets to react to it. This often leads to him getting punched in the face.
- Many devisors and gadgeteers in the Whateley Universe get this, but the biggest of all must be Jobe Wilkins, Prince of Karedonia. A literal child prodigy even before he started breaking the laws of reality — and a first-class Jerkass — he sets about making a nanotech formula to transform anyone into his ideal wife. And then he injects himself with it.
Web Video
- Game Changer: Brennan Lee Mulligan is a master of nerd knowledge, a great improvisor, and a Competition Freak. Sam Reich, the host, showed an early penchant for casting him in games specifically that he (always correctly) thinks will drive Brennan nuts by turning those qualities against him, including one that was designed to make Brennan, specifically, lose. When the series began doing elimination games (based on existing reality television shows), Brennan did very well in the first couple... and then everyone else figured out that their best first move in such games was to get rid of him however they could. Brennan wryly points out during one elimination that he's heard multiple speeches about what a great player he is while he is losing the game.
Western Animation
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: This results in Princess Azula's downfall. At the beginning of Book 3, she tells Ozai that Zuko killed Aang, not her. This is a perceived Xanatos Gambit for her — either she has Zuko's Undying Loyalty out of gratitude or Zuko will take the fall and lose everything he had wanted to gain should Aang still be alive. She never considered Zuko would become disillusioned with the Fire Nation's campaign of conquest and would tell Ozai himself what really happened and that Aang was still alive before defecting. This decision, while Zuko didn't go in with that intent, destroys Ozai's faith in Azula and sets the foundation for Mai and Ty Lee to turn on her. As a result, her genius idea actually does more harm than had she just told Ozai the truth and acknowledged Zuko did assist her in the final stages.
- Gravity Falls: This is The Author Stanford Pine's Fatal Flaw summed up. He's very intelligent, but his insecurities, arrogance, and stubbornness cause a lot of problems, including letting his twin brother be disowned over an accident, trusting the Big Bad Bill Cipher who blatantly played to his intellect and ego, pushing away his friend (which indirectly caused his insanity) when he tried to warn them, later withholding critical information about Bill Cipher and The Rift from everyone except for Dipper. He even ruins the best (or at least less risky) chance to destroy Bill Cipher by taking the literally worst time to correct Stan's grammar (It Makes Sense in Context). He gets better in the end, after realizing the damage he unintentionally caused.
- During a flashback on Hey Arnold!, Grampa Phil recounts how while serving in WWII, he was captured by a Nazi panzer brigade. The Nazi captain (Major!) decided that the bad meat Phil was carrying to a dumping ground was good because Phil warned the Nazis not to eat it in an absurdly long and one-sided I Know You Know I Know. As Phil's narration puts it;
Grampa Phil: That's when it hit me! I realized that if I let him think he was smarter than me, I could make him do anything I wanted.
- The title character of Invader Zim is an Evil Genius armed with advanced technology, but his massive ego and faulty programming prevent him from taking over Earth. For that matter, Dib is a Child Prodigy who is much better at investigating paranormal phenomena than the so-called experts... and absolutely terrible at convincing anyone with the resources to do anything about it of what he's found.
- In Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Teenage Tony Stark has many of the problems of his other incarnations (keeping secrets from his friends, arrogantly fiddling with technology he really shouldn't be, and some outright hypocrisy) with the problems of a super genius who's been home-schooled all his life and suffering from the loss of his only parent. For example, he creates a really good computer virus that devours data like a swarm of digital locusts but unfortunately merges with a swarm of nano-machines to become the very hungry Technovore monster. When Tony screws up, he screws up phenomenally.
- Looney Tunes:
- Bugs Bunny says "Sometimes I'm so smart it frightens me" after he tricks the giant in "Jack Wabbit and the Beanstalk" into a twenty-paces duel that makes the giant disappear into the horizon. Then the giant reappears on the other side. The twenty paces were enough for him to circumnavigate all the way back.
- Wile E. Coyote as well when he's pitted against Bugs. Part of his problem is he overestimates his own intelligence while gravely underestimating Bugs', allowing Bugs to get the upper hand before he ever realizes it, combined with his problem in the Road Runner cartoons of falling for his own traps.
Wile E. Coyote: [at the start of Operation: Rabbit] Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wile E. Coyote, "genius".
Wile E. Coyote: [at the end of the same cartoon] Allow me to introduce myself. My name is "mud".
Bugs Bunny: [to the audience] And remember, "mud" spelled backwards is "dum".
- In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Twilight Sparkle can fall into this trap. She has an innate desire to be perfect and is Obsessively Organized. She was acknowledged by Princess Celestia as having the most potential of any unicorn Celestia had ever met; even when outclassed, Twilight outsmarted Nightmare Moon and defeated Discord with The Power of Friendship. Twilight has studied magic her whole life and is one of the most knowledgeable magic users in the world. However, Twilight is so terrified of failure that her perfectionism causes Sanity Slippage whenever things start going pear-shaped, especially if she thinks it will cause Celestia to be disappointed with her.
- In "Lesson Zero", Twilight's perfectionism caused every bit as much chaos as one of the Big Bads. She basically became the episode's Villain Protagonist, reaching the point where she accidentally caused a city-wide riot so as not to potentially fail before realizing how far she'd gone.
- Twilight also tripped herself up in "It's About Time", when she used a time travel spell to go back in time and warn herself not to worry, thus causing herself to worry to begin with.
- In The Movie, Twilight's recognizes they're in such a serious situation her friends normal friendship antics keep getting them in trouble, leading her to go behind their backs and make a even bigger mistake because she didn't realize their friendship antics were finally working. Then her repressed frustration at her friends prior incompetence leads her to snap at them which she immediately regrets but the damage is done.
- Happens in one episode of PJ Masks where Romeo’s latest scheme involved him replacing the text in all books across town with pictures of himself; thinking that he would be instantly recognized by the residents of the town for his genius. Unfortunately, due to the fact that he is a "Night Time Villain", and the only people that he interacts with on a regular basis are other Night Time Villains and the PJ Masks, nobody in town even knows who Romeo is. Not helping matters is that he failed to leave some sort of caption behind in the books to list his name, and ironically-enough: he doesn't even know how to read in the first place.
- The Simpsons: Lisa tends to do this.
- In the first "Treehouse of Horror"'s segment "Hungry Are the Damned", Kang and Kodos abduct them in their flying saucer to live in luxury. Lisa Simpson snoops around the ship and finds a book titled "How to Cook Humans". Offended at the notion, the aliens blow some space-dust off the book's cover revealing the title to be "How to Cook for Humans". To which Lisa points out that there is still dust on the book, with the title now "How to Cook Forty Humans". Kang (or Kodos) then demonstrates that there is yet still more dust on the book's cover, finally revealing the book's full title "How to Cook for Forty Humans" (the Simpsons are gluttons).
Marge: Now you know what we mean when we say you're too smart for your own good?- In "Little Big Mom", Lisa's attempt at causing an Induced Hypochondria scare on the Simpson males so they will help her clean up instead ends with her having to do all of the chores by herself because they literally would rather die (or seek help from someone they loathe, namely Ned Flanders) than do that.
- Mary and Ellody, The Geniuses of Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race only made it to Episode Four, because when given a task as simple as making sand castles they first wrote complex equations for how to do so in the sand.
- In an episode of The Venture Bros., Augustus St. Cloud tries to defeat Billy Quizboy through a round of trivia, with a question involving a number of robots from various pop culture franchises in a room. He attempts to out-nerd Billy by placing what looks like four robots but is actually five (Nomad, H.E.L.P.E.R., a walking eye, and Twiki, who has a fifth robot in Doctor Theopolis hanging around his neck). However, though St. Cloud was nerdy enough to recognize that Twiki and Theopolis were two different robots, he didn't realize that Nomad isn't a robot, being an interstellar probe. By trying to create a trick question, he got a question that cancelled itself out: there were four robots in the room.
- Young Justice (2010):
- Nobody could say Amanda Waller is an incompetent warden... but by the end of "Terrors", The Alcatraz has suffered a nearly-successful Great Escape and falls under the control of the Light, all because Waller was so focused on the facility being impregnable that she failed to realize that one of the staff, prison counselor Dr. Hugo Strange, is secretly a Light agent working against her.
- Vandal Savage is a brilliant Chessmaster with thousands of years of experience, constantly using subtle and long-running schemes so that he comes out ahead even against stronger enemies. However, occasionally his grand schemes put him into conflict with much more powerful entities and his manipulations aren't enough, which threatens to derail everything he's built.
- In Season 3, Savage has the hero community divided and bogged down in red tape. When an alien armada shows up, Savage realizes that he's gotten the heroes so spread thin that they can't defend the planet, forcing him to personally intervene with the WarWorld.
- Savage gets the grudging respect of the Lords of Order and subsequently completes a plan to install a puppet ruler of Atlantis, using an Order-infused artifact to cement the claim... only for the Lords to Order to disintegrate the fake ruler. Dr. Fate outright mocks Savage for not only arrogantly assuming that he had their full approval, but also thinking that the notoriously fickle cosmic beings would ever tolerate such blatant disrespect, especially as this miscalculation resulted in an extremely rare total loss for Savage.
- Canonically, the Reach ultimately were just an Unwitting Pawn for Savage's long-term plans. However, while the show doesn't call attention to it, the existence of Impulse's Reach-dominated Bad Future shows that inviting a powerful and cruel alien empire onto Earth could've easily gone extremely poorly.
Real Life
- Humans, as a species, are prone to this. Humans are amazingly capable of adapting the environment, including their own behavioral programming, to suit them, which sometimes means overwriting a basic survival instinct. Food? Sex? Sleep? Avoiding violence or dangerous situations? Basic desire to continue existing? People almost routinely violate these basic needs, sometimes to achieve better results at a later date, sometimes out of a sense of moral duty or obligation, sometimes for fun, sometimes to the point of self-destruction.
- This is often the cause for the so-called "Nobel prize syndrome", that is, scientists who won the Nobel prize (the highest prize that can be assigned for a scientific achievement) who then start to support fringe pseudoscientific theories and several crackpot quackery - if they didn't already previously, only they get notoriety now. And the examples can be blatantly incrediblenote . In a downplayed version, they might simply start to give their opinion on multiple serious topics, without having the necessary expertise on them, thus stating incorrect facts. Contrary to the stereotype that scientists immediately change idea when presented by new evidence, they are so inflated by their ego that they won't accept criticism from the rest of the community, and will stick to their ideas stubbornly while trying to land their opinion. Paul Nurse, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, warned later laureates against "believing you are expert in almost everything, and being prepared to express opinions about most issues with great confidence, sheltering behind the authority that the Nobel Prize can give you".
- It is also an example of the The Peter Principle, as this career path requires traits that are different from just being smarter than anybody else. A Nobel prize winner is not more intelligent than the average researcher. And almost everyone is not anymore a researcher, but a professor, who landed a tenure track to lead and manage a research group rather than perform experiments and interpretate the results in person, showing the skill needed to direct a group of researchers which doesn't mean being competent in every subject or particularly brilliant when trying to analyze something outside their own field of specialization.
- Lynn Margulis was likely this as a result of being a very precocious intellectual but moreover a victim of Cassandra Truth. On a larger context, she challenged traditional views of evolution as just competition, putting emphasis on collaboration and symbiosis. More in detail, she proposed a comprehensive theory of the origin of mithocondria and chloroplasts as a result of ancient eukaryotic cells incorporating primitive bacteria, which then evolved into organelles. This is known as the endosymbiotic theory and today it is widely accepted by the scientific community. However, she initially struggled to make her work published in a decent academic journal, being rejected many times by skeptical if not dismissal editors, despite the accumulating evidence. Several colleagues and professors refuted her ideas on the basis of prejudice and reactionary attitude towards their cemented beliefs. She also met hostility which she blamed on her being a woman in a then male-dominated science. After being Vindicated by History, she became known as a "free mind", a visionary, curious and anticonformist inquirer, who didn't shy on from challenging established theories and proposing new innovative thoughts. However, she started to propose even more radical ideas, but without the necessary evidence, and never stepped down when definitely proved wrong. For example, she postulated that cilia were also originally absorbed spirochetes, but without any data that suggested it. On a more dangerous note, she stepped into HIV-denialism territory, asking for published evidence despite at least a decade of research showing it. She seemed to enjoy contrarianism, controversy, and challenging widely accepted biological models for the sake of it, because in the past she had been right all along despite not being believed, so any criticism was threated as the establishment trying to curtail "heretics". Her ultimately arrogant attitude can be summarized with her statement "I'm not controversial, I'm right". Finally, she too became very disrespectul towards colleagues: she dismissed zoologists as "poorly educated" and medical scientists as "misinformed", collectively, and accused Richard Lewontin of being a money-grabber.
- This trope is the reason why a startlingly huge proportion of people who get roped into scams, cults, and buy into other patently bogus things are actually very intelligent. They think of themselves as being too smart to possibly ever be tricked into handing over their money to a crook or be manipulated by someone who heads a Scam Religion, or even come to very invalid conclusions because they believe they're simply so smart that nobody could fool them, so therefore anything which registers in their mind as checking out has to be correct, even if there's good evidence that they're wrong. More than a few cons are based on letting the victim think they've spotted the con and can find a loophole to profit from it when that supposed loophole is itself actually the bait for the real con. This is also the reason why scammers and the like can end up on the other end of this themselves because they assume that since they're so good at fooling others and know the tricks of the trade they would never fall into the trap themselves.
- This is also the reason legitimately intelligent people are surprisingly vulnerable to falling for conspiracy theories. A large part of what makes someone "intelligent", and what the IQ score primarily measures, is a person's ability and speed at drawing connections between things. The problem is, this ability doesn't necessarily come with wisdom or familiarity with all the subjects involved, meaning they often can't decipher which connections are real and which ones really are just coincidence, making them prone to jumping to conclusions.
- This also factors into how famous fraudsters such as Elizabeth Holmes or Bernie Madoff got so far before being exposed. In hindsight, the problems with their businesses are actually quite obvious, but they had so much capital behind them that future investors assumed they must have some kind of genius behind them. This lead more people to invest in them without thinking about how their businesses actually worked, the possibility that they simply don't never crossing their minds until the whole operation comes crashing down.
- Assuming it happened as it was described, this trope is Older Than Feudalism as it factors into the Battle of Megiddo in 1457 B.C.E. The battle pitted New Kingdom Egypt under Thutmose III against the Syrian/Canaanite rebels led by the king of the rebel city of Kadesh. When Thutmose's army advanced on Kadesh, they were faced with three options for reaching the city: to the north and south were the Yokneam and Taanach roads, while in the middle was the narrow Aruna Pass. The Aruna Pass road was significantly shorter, but required marching in a very thin and spread-out column, making any army moving through there vulnerable to attack from the front and the heights. The king of Kadesh assumed that Thutmose would reason that the Aruna Pass was too unsafe and would choose one of the two roads: therefore, he divided the rebel forces to block both roads, reasoning that one corps would slow the Egyptians while the other could come around and attack them from behind. Thutmose's generals also felt that the Aruna Pass was too dangerous and suggested he take his army on one of the roads. However, Thutmose instead came to reason that Kadesh had thought him too smart to take the pass, and so decided to use his game against him and took the pass route anyway despite the danger it put his army in. By the time the Syrian scouts returned to the king to tell him that the Egyptians had taken the one route he had thought they wouldn't, it was too late and the Egyptian army had scattered the rebel pickets and was rapidly assembling outside of Kadesh. The rebel forces thus had to rush back to the city to defend it, and between their exhaustion and lack of training the Egyptians won a commanding victory, with the King of Kadesh barely escaping back into his own city after the gates had shut by way of a rope up the outer wall. The siege ultimately ended several months later with the rebels' surrender, and Thutmose's legacy as Pharaoh was cemented.
- Galileo appears to have been one of these (see his entry under Instructional Dialogue), assuming Simplicio really was a caricature of the Pope. Even before he earned the attention of the Inquisition, he alienated the University of Pisa (which prompted his relocation from Venice to Florence — he needed new patronage) and pushed matters so hard that even the powerful Medici family began to find him a liability. The man just didn't know when to keep his mouth shut.
- You might find this in education, when the instructor uses the Socratic Method — feigning ignorance of the subject and asking questions of the students to draw out the correct answer. The intelligent or well-read students will often try to bring out information which, while interesting, either doesn't get to the heart of the matter or assumes that the central question has been answered when it hasn't. This typically leads the instructor to shut the student down — or try to, as such students tend to be stubborn. This is particularly common in American law schools, where the Socratic method is standard. Free advice: There's a reason that Socrates' most famous statement is "I know that I know nothing."
- The Nazis. Most of the senior politicians and generals were brilliant (when the IQ test had been performed on the Nuremberg defendants, most were high above average in the 120-138 range, while the most stupid and clearly insane of them, Julius Streicher, still scored a bit above average) and their military-industrial complex had been staffed with tens of thousands of equally brilliant officers, engineers, and bureaucrats who used the most advanced technology of their time. They managed to convince themselves so surely of their own superiority that they willingly walked into an unwinnable war. Not to mention that the Allied intelligence services were running circles around them, having subverted essentially every German agent while their own agents were placed in very high positions in the German war effort. Much like the scam/con example above, they'd so thoroughly convinced themselves that they couldn't be fooled that they never even bothered to look.
- This mainly had to do with their early success and their racist ideology. Their early successes in the war made them extremely cocky which also gave credence to the idea they were the perfect race. After defeating most of Europe they thought the USSR would be easy because it was full of Slavs. Never mind the fact that the USSR had more troops, massive area to cover, the weather being against them, and having no plan for what to do if the invasion stalled. It was Germans vs Slavs so to them, it was an easy win. Suffice to say they were wrong.
- Cocky medical residents should be reminded of "July Syndrome," a catch-all term for the sudden spike in iatrogenic (caused by medical treatment or examination) problems in teaching hospitals around the United States. July, because that's when after 4 years of medical school and accolades, all the brand-new residents start their residencies at once.
- There's a reason that many high-end private jets (and prior to that, high-end private aircraft in general going back to the "Fork-Tailed Doctor Killer") are referred to as "Doctor Killers". A lot of these guys buy a plane that they can't handle, assume it will be simple (because they're very smart, and they bought the model with all the bells and whistles), and end up crashing it and killing themselves.
- There's a reason that many high-end private jets (and prior to that, high-end private aircraft in general going back to the "Fork-Tailed Doctor Killer"
- Obsessive fandoms in general are often guilty of overthinking matters when it comes to various theories and Fan Wank-y explanations (e.g. A 50-page treatise, complete with diagrams and charts, on how both Luke Skywalker and TRON are, in fact, secretly clones of one another in a Shared Universe because both are played by Mark Hamill), and simultaneously underthinking them by not checking to see if the premise was sound to begin with (i.e. they were confusing Hamill with Bruce Boxleitner the whole time).
- There is a quote by Gamal Abdul Nasser:
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something."
- Mind you, America being what it is, it might be this trope, Right Hand Versus Left Hand (due to the nation's size), or even Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance...
- In 1970s Quebec, the Parti Quebecois passed Bill 101, a law that restricted the use of English and promoted French as the primary language in Quebec. The Parti Quebecois' intent was to use Bill 101 as part of their efforts to separate Quebec from Canada, but Bill 101 addressed many Franco-Quebecois's concerns about language issues. As a result, support for separatism actually decreased. In the end, Quebec's language laws actually strengthened Canadian unity, something even the original architect of Bill 101 lamented.
- Which was made worse for them by the fact that the Office québécois de la langue française, formed by the bill for the purpose of enforcing it, has gained a reputation for being overzealous, doing things like citing an Italian restaurant for using the word "pasta" on their menu, issuing a complaint against a store for having a small "recommended on Tripadvisor" sticker on their window, and forcing a hospital in a region with a large English-speaking population to remove all bilingual signage. It got to the point that the provincial government had to change the laws from not allowing any language other than French to simply requiring French be first and larger than other languages, but it took both a Supreme Court case ruling against them (which they got out of due to a law that basically allows provinces to ignore such rulings), followed by the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruling against them.
- Which was made worse for them by the fact that the Office québécois de la langue française
- Lawrence H. Summers, former Treasury secretary to Bill Clinton, economic adviser to Barack Obama, and one of the youngest academics to earn tenure on the Harvard faculty explained an academic debate from his undergrad years at MIT in The '70s: “smart people,” exemplified by economist Robert Solow, took a view commonly shared by many sociologists then that technological progress would lower employment and called it “stupid”, since in their opinion, people would have more money to spend on more commodities, creating more jobs. Summers wondered, “Suppose the stupid people were right. What would it look like?” The hypothetical answer he gave lined up pretty closely with the economic statistics of 2016 America: “For large categories of workers, wages are inadequate. Many are withdrawing from the labor force altogether.” The sociologists had been able to predict declines in workforce participation among men, and the share of workers on disability benefits being the same as forty years earlier despite a healthier workforce overall. Essentially, Summers believed companies would use technology alongside their workers to make huge profits, and dismissed the likelihood that they might use technology to replace their workers and make the same money while paying fewer people. (You can see the complete article here; the 19th-century sociologist Karl Marx wrote an earlier version predicting much the same and attempting to explain some of the mechanics.)
- "Maybe the stupid people weren’t quite as stupid as I thought they were".
- Siberian Huskies are one of the smartest dog breeds in existence, but this intelligence has earned them a reputation of being idiots and drama queens. They notice things that other breeds don't, but they're not smart enough to discern that the things they notice don't mean as much as they think. For example, most dogs will cross from a carpet to a linoleum floor without any issue. But a Husky may step off the carpet, notice the linoleum floor is different, and freak out.
- This is how people often lose in competitive games. Many competitive games require the ability to anticipate your opponent's moves in advance. Often the best players of many kinds of games are the ones most proficient at making these reads and predictions. But ironically, this same capacity for considering all of an opponent's options and countering the moves they'll likely make is exactly what can lead to their own defeat. Often skilled players will make decisions to account for the most advanced or sneaky thing their opponent will do since they expect their opponents to not be silly enough to make moves that are too obvious or straightforward for a good player to be surprised by. But more often than not, these more complicated moves end up backfiring cause it turns out the opponent was too ignorant to realize how supposedly obvious their play was. Or worse, the opponent knew how obvious the move was after all and does it anyway precisely because they knew the move was so obvious that a good player wouldn't expect someone to go through with it. This type of mind game is often why simpler, less complicated tactics end up being the way to go after all.