Dead Topics: When are characters too stupid?

[@guardianHQ]

Saul is getting paid overtime for this one

[@1000nod]

hi love your high guardian spice plot video, i highly recommend Monkey wrench Plot ep. They did very thing right that spice did wrong. hell they use the travel montage way better then spice, world building, character building, furry backround events and best of all it payoff at the end.

[@WobblesandBean]

I love that my favorite media analysis youtuber was willed into existence by a Crunchyroll anime being so bad.

[@jasmineflower2888]

"*OVERTIIIIIME????!!!!*" - Spongebob Squarepants

[@grandarkfang_1482]

I believe a character is too stupid when the narrative goes out of its way to establish that the character shouldn't be doing what they're doing, they do it, and the narrative just keeps on keeping on with how stupid it is. Yes, I'm talking about The Boys.

[@Ratface0007]

The biggest fool in Invincible is Kate. Why doesn’t she carry weapons? If she can duplicate clothes, I don’t see why she can’t do the same for guns or swords.

[@jm7781]

Some mistakes are just plot holes in disguise. The writer needs the hero to scape so the villain does something stupid, or the opposite.

[@RockR277]

For me, the dumb characters ruined the story of the Outer Worlds. I think the message is supposed to be "capitalism bad", but the message I took away was "putting really stupid people in charge bad"

[@phantom-ri2tg]

"putting really stupid people in charge bad" And yet that is a major reason groups fails. Because eventually someone who makes bad decisions gets put in charge. A big part of making government systems work is making it so a single person in charge can't ruin things. Because we don't have some perfect filter that will never let a person who makes bad decisions slip through.

[@spongebobfan384]

The specific mistake you have issue with is when a protagonist breaks character for the sole purpose of establishing a threat, and no time is spent to justify how or why. The homelander example doesn’t really apply as an example. I do think it’s possible to have a character choke or crack under pressure and for that to serve the story well, the important part is to ground that mistake as believable and character is still considered. If the audience is yelling “Why didn’t you do this?” Have the character feel that guilt and ask that to themselves. Maybe (in addition to letting the villain get away) this gives the character doubt or causes tension with others on a team as a point to grow. My main point is real life mistakes do feel dumb and out of character and that “This has never happened to me, I never do this” emotion tied to mistakes can be a very powerful tool when used intentionally and not as a had wavy crutch.

[@phantom-ri2tg]

It is true that real mistakes can feel out of character. However 1: realistic does not mean good writing. 2: There really is mistakes it makes no sense for a given person to make. Especially when the character does numerous things wrong without noticing. That said it is possible for a character to have the opposite problem of never making mistakes.

[@HappyAspid]

Is mistake a food?

[@Flutterdark_]

no rosemary mistake is not a food... wait how did you get here this is hell? did sage buckle her shoe again or is taht still the one time she did.

[@phantom-ri2tg]

Now that is something Rosemary can't eat. It would result in a paradox if her universe lost the concept of mistakes.

[@VainerCactus0]

Yep, I agree with this video. I also find it quite annoying when mistakes are treated like this.

[@BlackVulcanX]

I just watch (more like listen) to something talking about how The Boys and Invincible change the standard troupe of superhero is suppose to be good moral people and how our "jagged reality" would be if it include superheroes.

[@zionalbina691]

I honestly disagree with the Atom Eve segment, because I do think her mistake with Kill Cannon says something about her character, and that she learns from it. With the two robbers she handles them quickly and relatively harmlessly because they're just normal guys that aren't particularly skilled or well armed. With Kill Cannon, he's a supervillain, who won't go down quite as easy. So what does Eve do? She fucks around, because it's a (very slightly) more fair fight, and she can experiment with other aspects of her powers more, like her solid air constructs. Eve had already been established to be curious, and fun loving. The fight with Kill Cannon reaffirmed that she is heroic, but is also a kid who enjoys the thrill that comes with fighting bad guys, and likes to play with her new powers. Immediately going for transmuting his cannon would've been boring. She already won the last fight that way. Getting to jump around and taunt the bad guy while he actually puts up a fight? That's new, and exciting, and is a way for her to test how she performs under a little more pressure. And what does she learn from that fight? If she fucks around too much, she can still get hurt, even by opponents that are technically weaker than her. And she takes that into her fight with her siblings. She doesn't hold back or play around because they're technically inferior. She recognizes that even though they aren't as powerful as her, it isn't a game or an experiment, she (and the people around her) can still get hurt or die if she doesn't try to end the fight as quickly as possible. Because she's not Invi-

[@syahmisamba9694]

Yeah I agree with you

[@phantom-ri2tg]

That is plausible given she used her power to disable him around the end of the fight. But I find it works weaker because this wasn't simply a villain who was weaker. She had the equivalent of an I win button. And well someone could be made the argument of refusing to just auto win. I don't think it makes for a compelling lesson of needing to put everything you have into fights.

[@retrox2776]

*INVINCIBLE*

[@phillipanderson7899]

So letting yourself get hurt and the possibility of a guy literally called "Kill Cannon" have his Kill Cannon, that he could have been using to kill people, or even destroy surrounding infrastructure around you with the possibility of more than just yourself dying, a Goku wanting to fight for fun moment to you? When the character has already shown herself to take robbers seriously enough to immediately disable their ability to fight, when it would have been a better example of what you're talking about if she got in a fight with the robbers instead, then instead of Kill Canon being a moment of lessons learned, disabling him as soon as possible but due to his experience still has tricks other than just the Kill Cannon because he's been at this for a while, showing that she lacks experience and has to use more than just her powers to end a fight, finally ending with the mutants, giving a final pay off for her mistakes of underestimating threats, and just because they can supposedly be weaker, she has to take any threat seriously and use all her abilities or otherwise she's going to get hurt or worse others, because then that'd display that she made several mistakes handling threats she thought she could easily handle without and with her powers stemming from the mistake of underestimating opponents

[@phantom-ri2tg]

By the way another comment chain said it is plausible her power simply didn't actually work. Reason being because he was a cyborg the mental block might have viewed the cannon as part of an organic creature.

[@thomaslacroix6011]

I'm going to put out a hypothesis for the kill cannon thing: if her power is restricted by a mental block, it's not entirely impossible the mental block is confused about cyborgs. Plugging the cannon is manipulating the air in the cannon. It doesn't change much, because if I need to go into theory crafting to plug your plot hole there's still something clumsy about the writing.

[@omnianimator8468]

In my writing, I don't think of these as mistakes but the character's best logical decision. What they want and their current mental state is what dictates it.

[@abigailbishop8267]

New Dead Topics video let's GO!!!!!! 🎉🌟✨🔥👏

[@hypnotichistorian8152]

Wake up babe, new Guadian video just dropped

[@draketheduelist]

Probably one of the most egregious cases of this I can think of is _Final Fantasy XIII,_ which I played to completion (story completion, not 100%) fairly recently because I literally had nothing better to do and I bought the thing years ago on Steam for $5. I have _no idea_ how the game was meant to be read on release day. Most of why I knew what was going on was because I saw many reviews of the game, including Spoony's, and because I made the effort to read every single datalog the game threw at me. It wound up being true that the game is obnoxiously linear, almost as if the entire first half of the game is a tutorial, but the main issues were that the worldbuilding was absurd (turns out the datalogs _didn't_ help all that much; I _still_ don't know what a "Ragnarok" is or how it works or where it comes from or who made it or why or how or what its upper capabilities are or its motive or how one becomes a Ragnarok despite _literally all of those questions_ being integral to understanding the story's stakes...) and the characters were annoying and melodramatic. (Even Lightning? _...Especially_ Lightning!) Not necessarily stupid, Snow notwithstanding, and he was kinda' written that way. The _real_ plothole of the game hits home by about the time the party makes it off Gran Pulse and back to Cocoon for the final battle. See, in theory, the plot of the game is that the main villain, Barthandelus, is trying to summon God by culling all of humanity, and the way he plans to do this is to enslave the main party and force them to kill Orphan, a kind of living battery for all of Cocoon, which would kill everyone... somehow. (I think the implication is that Orphan maintains Cocoon's orbit over Gran Pulse, so take him out and Cocoon crashes and kills everyone... but at no point does the game ever _say_ that, let alone set it up. Like I said, the worldbuilding is a mess.) But to hedge his bets, Barthandelus also tricked a quasi-rebel military faction into _also_ going to kill Orphan. Either way, Bart wins. Of course, the main characters rebel against their appointed task to kill Orphan themselves and instead go back to Cocoon and fight the rebel militia before they can kill Orphan. Then, when the rebel militia is finally out of the picture and Orphan is safe, the party decides to... kill Orphan themselves, thus killing all of Cocoon. This was _literally_ Bart's entire plan, the party _knew_ this, and they had _zero_ stated reason to fall for it. I'd know. I looked. I read _every_ datalog, didn't skip _any_ cutscene, and I still don't know what must've went through the party's heads to make them think doing what Bart wanted and killing Orphan was in any way the optimal way to get what they wanted. Killing Bart? Sure, I get that. Unlike what Spoony said, Bart is actually _not_ load-bearing like Orphan is, and he _was_ responsible for a considerable amount of damage and suffering. But why kill Orphan? Orphan literally never did anything to them. The implication is that the culling of Cocoon was Orphan's idea, but again, that's never stated in game. In fact, at one point, a character _agrees_ to kill Orphan, which the game implies to be a bad thing, but then the rest of the characters stop her and they all join hands and agree to kill Orphan _together._ What exactly is the material difference between Fang killing Orphan and _everybody_ killing Orphan? (Made worse because Fang was my party lead, so in the end it was Fang who killed Orphan anyway.) Either way, you've got a dead Orphan and a dead Cocoon. I was _so confused_ and I still don't get it. The characters leapt to an impossible conclusion and deus-ex-machina'd their way out of all negative consequences. I've looked to defenders of the game to try and make sense of what happened. Maybe I missed something? But no, they either agreed with me that it was stupid, or they shrugged it off with some info that wasn't anywhere in the games. I'm betting those details probably came from the Japanese novelization, but I don't think it was ever officially exported, nor do I care to go looking for some paperback DLC to make the game's story make more sense. Whether this qualifies as character _stupidity_ is arguable, but it definitely falls within the subset of problems that exist because the writer wanted a specific outcome to happen and weren't too particular if they got there in a way that made sense.

[@quinntessentialskill7414]

What game is jacksepticeye playing at the beginning?

[@aladdin8236]

Man of Medan I think

[@applinbestmon]

It's actually Devil in Me.

[@doohickeyhandy758]

The Devil in Me, Episode 3, 1:04:21

[@quinntessentialskill7414]

Thank you!

[@sailoranime289]

I would like to know your opinion on the show super crooks.

[@whatthefilmwtf7171]

I love the inv..... show

[@CluelessKitty93]

Yay new video!

[@johngr1747]

Just like a wise person once said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense"

[@VaellinTheBard]

You know Dave, if you like The Boys, you should consider checking out The Reckoners. Kinda a similar base concept of superheroes=villains but taken to a bit of an extreme.

[@whatthefilmwtf7171]

I like the boys

[@Flutterdark_]

holy fuck that atom eve ability is like, SEVERELY busted if in the right hands. like this shit is a 1 shot ability if used right yeah you cant use it on people but you can use it on their clothes, their guns, anything they have. you can change a helmet to be a cage. change the outfit to a very restrictive one. put them into diffrent shoes so they trip. about that kill cannon thing... DAUFCK GIRL disabeling weapons is the first thing you do when you have OBJECT MANIPULATION like literally its the first thing i would do. and depending on the range of the ability i would snipe that shit. like holy fuck i have been mentioning in other video comment sections probably how busted object manipulation and summoning is. you literally cannot have such a power in a story without any restraitns on it. this shit breaks the plot. or at the very least it breaks fights. it breaks fights super hard.

[@PizzaMan879]

Were they stupid?

[@qq-wy7zs]

Dumbabolical

[@SWANSWAN-nc7ds]

Homelander in the boys ss4 is what I call stupid ,and the writers literally forgot how to write smart character. If you compare the Homelander in ss1 ,and ss4 you can see that ss1 Homelander is very smart he is like the only who try to locate the missing member of the seven, and being a threat to our main character all the time. SS4 he literally just a cameo, and he having a big ego right now make no sense when he already know there are people capable of hurting him, and for some reason they forgot he have been working with Vought for a long time so he should know how to run a business like Marketing, and PR

[@Thefakewomanwithamustache2]

Exactly 30:00

[@Flutterdark_]

on the topics of characters being really really stupid im throwing into the ring Kingdom Hearts 3 cause OH MY FUCKING GOD the writing HATES the characters in endgame, and i do not mean that because they get their ass kicked. its the how. example 1: aqua vs vanitas in land of departure. it has been stated like a cutscene prior that aqua didnt rest up yet after returning from the realm of darkness. so she aint at 100% she goes into a 1v1 with vanitas and makes her own barrier aroun d the battlefield. mind you, you play this fight so not only do you DEMOLISH him gameplay wise but you have aquas entire 0.2 moveset, which includes a spherical barrier which is her guard. in the cutscene after vanitas shoots at the battle barrier trying to break it to get to ven, long story im not getting into the why, but then aqua jumps and t-poses INFRONT OF FIREBALLS and this is the stupid. she COULD have tried her gameplay barrier in the cutscene and it just breaking due to the stated exhaustion. she would still get fucked and the story can continue unchanged. but that one change would turn it from her being stupid to her just getting beat cause exhausted. then we have multiple examples in keyblade graveyard which i will describe in less detail as to not explode youtubes character limit: kairi not even trying to fight back properly when xemnas grabs her (keyblades can be de and resummoned at command so left arm could do shit) most characters in the 1v9 against terranort because they either dont do anything, or literally dont even use their weapon. of the characters who got their ass kicked axel is a noteworthy exception. he tried to defend kairi by blocking with his keyblade but just got so outmatched he flew in a wall. but he WAS SMART ABOUT THIS. oh and then there is just everyone getting rekt by heartless tornado with most not even trying to block that shit. examples like this are seen in many games and media as a whole. and its the form of stupid that irks me the most. when you know that people are made more stupid JUST for the plot to work. and i also dont mean when a char has been smart one game and stupid another nah i mean varying ammounts of stupid within the same story.

[@shrek292]

the boys comic isn't this bad it's just the show