This video was sponsored by Campfire! Guaranteed to never
jump to wild conclusions about a half-overheard conversation.
Some tropes have nice, chill, nonjudgmental names that communicate their general vibe in
intriguing and fun ways. And then there’s this. The Idiot Plot, as defined by Roger Ebert back
in 1990, is “any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were
not an idiot.” The gist is that some stories are contrived to happen only through the remarkable
stupidity of the characters involved. Simple solutions will be ignored, characters will make
bad decisions that lead to extremely predictable bad consequences, and overall the situation will
contrive itself to be as convoluted as possible at the cost of making the characters involved seem
very, very dumb. Audiences will typically respond to such stories by noting the simple solutions
being pointedly sidestepped and questioning why the characters are having such a hard time
with such a basic problem, which can provoke frustration with both the characters and the
writer. It’s generally not too bad if the audience gets mad at a character for doing something bad,
since at least that means they’re immersed in the story, but if the audience starts getting
mad that the author made the character do that, the audience is officially aware of the
hand of the author shoving the plot in specific directions and their immersion is compromised.
This… spicy number is a pretty subjective judgment, but there’s actually a surprising
amount of depth to unpack here. Is the idiot plot always bad? Is it a shortcut or a narrative
weakness of the author? Is it even a trope or is it just a criticism of bad writing? Well,
spoiler alert, but I wouldn’t be talking about it here if it were any of those things. Idiot
plots sound pretty terrible, but there are ways to make them work - and to defend this hot take,
let’s throw back all the way to the literal first thing I did on this channel: Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare, The Bard Himself, wrote nearly forty plays in his lifetime,
and almost all of them hinge on a single dramatic plot point: miscommunication. Characters will make
assumptions about other characters and act on those assumptions, leading to wacky hijinks in
the comedies and bodycounts in the tragedies. Characters act impulsively and irrationally,
either for dramatic or comedic effect. Romeo kills Tybalt in a rage after Tybalt kills Mercutio,
and when he thinks Juliet is dead, he kills himself immediately, leading Juliet to do
the same when she wakes up literally seconds later. Othello is gaslit by Iago into thinking
his beloved wife Desdemona is having an affair, and because they never actually communicate about
any of these suspicions, he ends up killing her moments before learning the truth. Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth, upon learning that Macbeth will be king but Banquo’s heirs will succeed him,
assume that the only way to make this work is to kill the king and then kill Banquo and his son,
which is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy, but also sidesteps the other possibility one might
conclude if one was a little less murder-happy - that Macbeth would either have no heirs or would
have a daughter who married Banquo’s son. They jump to the murder conclusion and write their own
downfall easy peasy. On the comedy side of things, the climax of Twelfth Night’s entire plot is a
comedy of mistaken identity because people keep mistaking Sebastian for his disguised twin sister
Viola, and Viola has meanwhile gotten herself tangled in a full love triangle. None of this plot
would have happened if the people involved were clear about who they were and what they wanted,
and in fact one large honest conversation is all it takes to end the play in a satisfactory manner.
These characters act dumb at several intervals. But they also act in ways that make sense for who
they are. Romeo is impulsive and emotional and feels all his feelings very strongly,
leading to his two big dumb decisions - killing Tybalt and killing himself. Everyone in Twelfth
Night assumes they know who they’re talking to and thus don’t clarify their statements. They casually
address Sebastian as Viola and vice versa, because why would anyone assume that the person they’re
talking to is actually that person’s secret identical twin? Othello is established as
passionate and emotional and Iago actively fosters his paranoia, driving him away from Desdemona so
they can’t reconcile their conflicting stories. Hamlet is an interesting case because he’s
genre-savvy enough to know what kind of story he’s in and tries very hard not to do what the plot
wants him to do because he knows he’s been slotted into the role of doomed tragic Orestes-style hero,
but his self-pitying angst and constant delays mean the situation deteriorates around him until
he’s made so many enemies trying to get rid of him in complicated ways that the finale has a
ridiculous accidental bodycount. The characters act dumb, but in a way that makes the audience
sympathize with them rather than getting mad that they’re not perfect computational
logic machines who at all points in the story make the maximally efficient decision. I mean,
most people don’t get mad about that. These plays are, in whole or in part,
idiot plots. Major events in the story happen only because characters act impulsively or fail
to communicate with each other. And they’re also really good stories. Crucially, this is because
the characters never break character for the needs of the plot. Characters can do dumb things without
it being bad writing. Many comedies hinge on the fact that the characters choose wacky hijinks
over sensible solutions and complex lies over simple honesty. Where the idiot plot becomes a
problem is when it stops making sense for those characters to do those dumb things.
At this point I think it’s important to bring up two other tropes that are basically just smaller
and bigger versions of the idiot plot. On one end of the scale we have the “Idiot Ball”, which is
when a character who is established to know better suddenly begins acting in conveniently irrational
ways specifically to enable the needs of the plot - as if they have “picked up the Idiot Ball.” And
on the other end is the Second-Order Idiot Plot, or as I personally call it, the Idiot Setting,
in which an entire world only functions the way it does because every single person in that world
has a specific blind spot, character weakness or weird oversight that keeps them from making
very simple smart decisions. Many particularly contrived dystopias fall into this category,
where the unique trait that seems to set our plucky protagonist apart from the rabble is
a single whiff of critical thinking. These two extremes frame the goldilocks zone of
the Idiot Plot, where decent writing can still exist - but for the most part, the
Idiot Ball and Idiot Settings are the byproducts of iffy writing and cannot themselves be good.
The Idiot Ball is, of course, a problem because by its nature it forces characters out of character.
Worse, it forces them out of character to make a specific plot happen, which means it’s a shortcut
that lets the writer bypass writing that plot organically. Instead of coming up with a reason
the characters would have to play out this specific scenario - external circumstances
forcing their hand, simple solutions being shown to be nonviable, etcetera - the easy solution is
to just make the characters do what the writer needs them to do, no matter how much that
contradicts their established characterization and the basic logic and compassion we’d expect
them to display. Characters who have previously been shown to be kind or clever or meticulous in
their planning will suddenly be cruel, myopic or impulsive just because that’s the easiest
way to keep them from preventing the plot the writer wants to make happen. Some idiot plots,
especially in serialized media, suffer from this in a big way, if characters who have been shown to
act one way in previous installments suddenly pivot to acting in a much more conveniently
irrational way that just so happens to enable whatever exciting setpiece or forced conflict
the story needs. Because not every idiot plot is Shakespeare. A character making a bad decision
because of a personally established fatal flaw is a good tragedy in the making. A character making a
bad decision because there’s no way this character would let this specific plot happen otherwise is a
case of the idiot ball. If enough characters get smacked with the idiot ball, it can morph into a
full-on idiot plot - and these idiot plots are rarely compelling. A key factor here is that we
expect better from these characters, which is not something we typically feel in stories where the
characters’ dumb or illogical actions make sense for them. We might wish they acted better, but we
aren’t surprised when they act the way they do. Say, for instance, that the writer really wants
two of our heroes to fight each other. There’s a lot of reasons this would appeal! The potential
drama in a clash of heroes can’t be overstated. The audience wouldn’t know who to root for. And
sometimes it’s just really cool to watch two superpowerful badasses absolutely go to town on
each other and see them use all their fun tactics and special moves. The problem, however, is that
heroes are typically on the same side. In fact, this is a mandatory prerequisite for some of the
really fun hero fights, since the emotional impact of two friends fighting is a lot more impactful
than two enemies doing what we expect enemies to do. So if we want two people who should be on the
same side to fight, how do we make that happen? Well maybe we brainwash one of them for a classic
I-know-you’re-in-there-somewhere fight, but that’s not really the heroes fighting, since the
brainwashed character isn’t themselves. Or maybe we highlight deep-seated points of contention -
fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews that circumstances eventually force the heroes to
come to blows over. Or maybe one of the heroes is trying to stop the other from doing something
they’ll regret, fighting them to save them in the long term. But that sounds like a lot of
work! You know what would be easier? Just making the characters hate each other for a bit. Then
of course they’ll wanna fight! Drop in a little forced conflict and let them fight over a shared
love interest or a minor bit of ego-bruising or a good old-fashioned miscommunication that
could be resolved in ten seconds of punch-free communication. The only downside to this cunning
shortcut is the characters will spend the lead-up to the fight acting bizarrely myopic and petty,
and when the conflict inevitably does resolve, the simplicity of the solution can highlight how dumb
the whole fight was in the first place. The easier it is for our heroes to resolve their differences,
the dumber it makes them look that they started punching first. This is a shortcut that turns a
potentially interesting conflict into a tedious one - and it does that by using an idiot plot.
I think we should draw another internal subdivision here. There are broadly three
kinds of idiot plots: comedies, tragedies and accidents. Comedic idiot plots are things like
romcoms or sitcoms where all the characters have specific idiosyncrasies and quirks that
dictate the hijinks they get into - they don’t act like real rational people but they do enable
a lot of punchlines. Comedic idiot plots are funny because the characters act like clowns rather than
rational, relatable people - the idiot plot is the joke, and very intentional. The entertainment lies
in seeing just how long an entire cast can go without realizing their one erratic friend is
actually twins. Tragic idiot plots are actually quite common in tragedies overall - basically
any story where the tragic hero isn’t being notably clever in trying to escape their own
fate will involve the tragic hero making some reckless and unwise decisions that contribute
to their eventual downfall. It’s easy to judge tragic heroes by their poor decisions and the
catastrophic consequences of their actions, but a key factor is that most tragic heroes don’t
realize they’re in tragedies. They don’t know that a grand romantic gesture or an exciting
swordfight or a friend’s betrayal is going to kick off a domino chain that’ll completely ruin
their life. In any other story those would just be plot points, not the beginning of the end. With
the benefit of context an audience can easily see why a certain decision will go very wrong,
and that dramatic irony is a major factor of what makes tragedies so impactful - but
giving the audience information the characters don’t have can make the characters seem… well,
dumber. Many tragedies wouldn’t happen if the characters were perfectly rational and honest in
their communication, making them technically idiot plots - but in the same way, as we’ve discussed in
the trope talk on tragedies, the whole point of many tragedies is that they only happen because
of the specific character flaws of the tragic hero - the downfall is tailor-made to the protagonist.
The hero makes those decisions because of who they are, and if they were anyone else,
the tragedy wouldn’t happen, or at least wouldn’t happen the same way. This means that hero making
bad decisions isn’t a plothole, it’s kind of the whole point. It’s the specifics of their tragic
downfall that make it so compelling to watch. A modern tragedy that follows this to a tee
is Hadestown, which - being a retelling of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice - ends with Orpheus
turning around despite being warned that doing so will doom Eurydice to the underworld forever.
Dumb decision, everybody knows it, everybody knows how the story’s gonna end. What makes this work is
that the Orpheus we see at the beginning of the play wouldn’t have done that. He was optimistic,
a bright-eyed idealist. If someone told him to do this one thing and he’d save the girl,
he’d do it. But he spends the rest of the play being broken down over and over again. Doubt
comes in, and in the end he can no longer see his idealistic vision of the way the world could be,
but instead the scarred, mistrustful vision of the way the world has been to him up til now. As
a result, by the time he leaves the underworld he’s grown justifiably mistrustful of Hades,
and doubts that he would ever release Eurydice, leading him to believe Hades is tricking him - and
so he turns around. His journey to rescue Eurydice transforms them both - she takes on his optimistic
worldview while he absorbs the jaded realism that weighed her down in the beginning, and in the end
the journey renders him incapable of rescuing her from the underworld - incapable of that one
act of trust that would have given them their happy ending. Like any idiot plot, this story
wouldn’t happen if the characters just made smart decisions. And that’s not in question. The story
agrees with us that this tragedy was preventable. We know that. The tragedy is why these characters
don’t make that one smart decision. The story and the audience both recognize that it would be
better if the characters didn’t do the dumb thing - and yet here we are, singing the same song,
watching them make the same mistakes. Like comedies, tragedies that rely on idiot plots
know that that’s what they’re doing. The story is aware that the protagonists are making bad
decisions and it doesn’t try to frame those decisions as good or reasonable - just as things
we understand those characters would do. But of course, there’s still that third
category - accidents. These are idiot plots where the characters are dumb in ways that don’t make
sense for them. Now, this judgment is subjective, since it’s dependent on the audience’s perception
of the character and what actions do or don’t make sense for them, but broadly we can say that these
are stories where the writer did not intend or did not realize that the characters are acting
notably dumb to make the plot happen - or worse, they did realize and wrote it anyway. There are a
lot of ways this can manifest. Maybe a character attempts to explain the rationale behind their
less-than-ideal actions, but the explanation feels inadequate to justify whatever it is they’re doing
or it doesn’t cover all their bases. Maybe the characters fail to notice a simple solution that
would allow them to escape whatever situation the plot is forcing them into without having to
do any dumb, contrived conflicts. In some cases the stories might go a little overboard trying
to cover all their bases and make it really clear why the characters have absolutely no
choice but to do something dumb, when - as we’ve discussed in the tragedy and comedy case - it can
totally work that the characters just choose to do something dumb of their own free will,
as long as that’s in character for them. Driving home that the characters have absolutely no choice
in the matter actually just removes their agency and can increase frustration with the idiot plot.
Sometimes the writers will successfully put the characters in a bad situation via limited
communication or misunderstandings, but then fail to explain why the characters don’t immediately
resolve the misunderstandings by just talking. This is a BIG problem in hero-fight idiot plots,
where getting them to fight in the first place isn’t too hard, but stopping them from talking
through the problems DURING the fight becomes tricky. There’s something very funny about the
big payoff fight in Batman V Superman and how much time Clark spends saying “you have
to listen to me” and “you don’t understand” and slowly walking towards Batman and then throwing
him farther away rather than just saying “my mom is being held hostage by a supervillain
to make me fight you.” Kinda undercuts the supposed desperation of the situation - we
need to do some serious mental gymnastics to contrive a scenario where this makes sense.
Accidental idiot plots are stories that don’t want you to think the characters are dumb.
Unfortunately, the way they attempt to influence their audience away from this conclusion is not
by making the characters act smart, or by sufficiently justifying their actions to
make their illogical choices seem appropriate for who they are. This results in stories where
the character’s actions break the audience’s immersion - which is fundamentally the problem
this trope struggles with the most. We tend to expect fictional characters to act like people,
and while that’s a very subjective and personal judgment that varies from every person to every
other person, if characters do things we think are ridiculous, or don’t do things
we think are obvious, we start to wonder why. If an answer is provided by the story - the obvious
solution actually wouldn’t work, the seemingly irrational action made perfect sense to them at
the time - that keeps us immersed in the story even if we don’t agree with what the character
did. But if an explanation is not provided, it starts to look like authorial oversight,
and we find ourselves contemplating the mechanics of the story and the writer behind it. And that
means we’re not immersed anymore. The problem with an idiot plot is not, as one might think,
that the plot involves characters acting dumb. The problem is when it makes us question if the
author is also dumb. So… yeah!
And thanks again to Campfire for sponsoring this video!
As you may have heard, Campfire is a browser-based tool suite designed to help writers and creators
write and create! It’s got a ton of modules you can mix-and-match for the requirements of your
specific project and only pay for what you need, and a whole community of creators you can share
your world with and bounce ideas off of. It’s got all the greatest hits - character pages,
locations, maps, custom wikis, timelines, encyclopedias and a manuscript word processor
so you can do all your worldbuilding and your writing in the same place.
They also recently unveiled the Campfire mobile app, which lets you use all their core features
from the comfort of your own phone, 100% free with no ads and no limits on how many elements you can
add. And as always you can collaborate with other users if you work well in groups and don’t mind
risking miscommunication-based Wacky Hijinks. If all that sounds interesting, you can make a
free account to try it out, and if you want more bells and whistles you can build your own tool
suite for as low as 25 cents a month, or even unlock everything for a few dollars a month,
with a thirty-day return policy if you change your mind. Campfire’s also constantly updating
with new features, so if you’re interested, check out the link in the description,
and remember to use promo code OSP22 for 20% off a lifetime membership!