Blaming the Tools

Badger: [laughing as Pete plays a video game] Dude, you suck.
Skinny Pete: This thing's, like, defective and shit. Think you got Cheeto dust in the controller.
Badger: It's a bad carpenter that blames his hammer, yo.
Skinny Pete: Whatever.

—El Camino

The quality of the tools that someone uses can potentially limit the quality of work that someone is capable of. Sadly, some people love to blame their own incompetence on their tools, even if said tools work just fine. They will insist that the tools are cheap, old, or poorly made even when it's obvious that their own poor skill or carelessness that's the issue.

Characters who hold this attitude are almost always extremely prideful in some way. If the one doing the blaming is a bad chef, they might insist that their low-quality dishes are a result of bad ingredients rather than their own poor cooking skills. If the blamer loses a contest involving tools, they might insist that their loss was a result of having worse tools than their rivals rather than their own lack of effort or inferior skill. A bad musician may insist that their inability to play music is the result of having bad instruments rather than a lack of practice or skill.

A common variant of this trope involves a character who breaks something insisting that the thing they broke was poorly made. A bad driver who damages or destroys the car they were driving might blame the car's destruction on the poor materials rather than their poor driving skills or carelessness. A lazy or careless person who breaks their tools or lets them be destroyed due to lack of maintenance might claim that their tools broke due to being poorly made rather than admit to being negligent or careless.

Sub-Trope of Never My Fault. Compare and contrast Magic Feather, when the character's belief in their tools gives them confidence, and When All You Have Is a Hammer…, when the character's equipment limits the work they're willing to attempt. May overlap with Technician vs. Performer, with a technician insisting on the correct tools and technique and the performer wanting to do what comes naturally. Contrast You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum, wherein someone insists that someone is incompetent without their tools. Also contrast The Man Makes the Weapon and Improvised Weapon.

Examples

Advertising

• In one Poo Pourri ad, a woman farts and tries to claim it was only the floor squeaking.

Anime & Manga

• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Alice is a duel spirit whose original owner blamed his losing streak on his deck rather than his own skill. The English dub lampshades this by having one of his friends sarcastically remark "yeah, blame it on the card, real mature."

Comic Strips

• Foxtrot: One early strip has Roger tell a coworker he needs to write a report as it's so full of spelling errors it's like a 3rd-grader wrote it. The coworker complains it's not his fault the computer didn't come with a spell-checker.

Films — Animated

• Corpse Bride: When Mrs. Van Dort gets stuck in the doorway, she denies being fat and thinks her dress must have caught.
• Igor: Brain has a habit of calling things stupid when actually he's to blame for the thing not satisfying him — he misspells his own name on his jar and then says, "Stupid permanent marker!" when trying to rub it off. Then, when he can't get a remote control to work, he says, "Stupid remote!", even though the whole reason it didn't work was because he dropped it in water.

Films — Live-Action

• Back to the Future: When Biff wrecks George's car at the beginning of the film, he blames it on a blind spot George failed to tell him about, combining this with Never My Fault.
• Blazing Saddles: When Governor Lepetomane tries out paddle ball for the first time, he totally fails, calling the toy defective. Hedley Lamar picks up an identical paddle and does it perfectly.
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action: Discussed; when the ACME chairman chews out Wile E. Coyote for failing at his assignment, he specifically warns him not to blame his failure on the equipment he was given, because it was ACME equipment and thus (at least according to Mr. Chairman) good. The Irony of it of course is that in this case, the complaints regarding the equipment are actually totally justified.
• Nacho Libre: Nacho implies this to Sister Encarnación, saying that the brothers make him cook all day (and with most of his meals being some form of stew slop paired with donated chips) but they never give him money for fresh ingredients. Interestingly enough, Nacho is proven right when he starts using his wrestling winnings to buy said ingredients and is able to give the orphans much better meals.

Literature

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In one book, Rowley insists that volleyball is called "bolleyball", and when he can't find that word in the dictionary, he decides the dictionary must be outdated.
• In Flabby Cat And Slobby Dog, the eponymous anthropomorphic cat and dog refuse to admit they've gained weight and decide that their sofa has shrunk and/or their cushions have grown.
• Red Dwarf: Lister calls Rimmer out for this attitude in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, arguing that Rimmer will always complain about how his dividers don't stretch far enough or that he never had the right pens for his drawing, ignoring his own horrible attitude in the process. Rimmer simply points out that his dividers really didn't stretch far enough.
• In Who Wet My Pants, when Ruben realises that none of his friends wet his pants, rather than realise he did, he thinks that his pants are broken and "leaky".

Live-Action TV

• Bear in the Big Blue House: In "If at First You Don't Succeed", Pip and Pop keep failing to hula-hoop. They think that the hoops are broken or need batteries, until Bear explains that they just haven't got the knack yet, introducing the episode's theme of practice.
• In The Butcher, in one of the episodes, the contestants were required to separate a deer carcass into three primals^note A term used in butchery to denote animal sections such as the romp and the torso using prehistoric-era stone knives rather than their own tools. While some of the contestants (all of them being seasoned butchers on their hometowns) had no problem, one of them was taking too long because they struggled with this specific kind of knife, and outright confessed their dislike of the tool in the interview room.
• Canada's Worst Handyman: As the show is about bad handywork, this is practically a given.
  Angela: The saw doesn't like me.
• In Fargo: Season Five, when he's not blaming his wife Indira, Lars Olmstead constantly blames his stalled professional golfing career on his equipment, rather than the fact that he just isn't an exceptional golfer.
• Law & Order: In "Corpus Delicti", Briscoe blames his protective goggles for his accuracy (or lack thereof) at the shooting range. "Ah, these goggles. The lenses are all distorted."
• Sports Night: In the second season episode "And the Crowd Goes Wild", Casey tells Kim that the TelePrompTer read, "Houston goes bunting for a new power forward", where it was supposed to read, "Houston goes hunting for a new power forward." Turns out the TelePrompTer was correct, and Casey had misread it because he needs new contact lenses.
• Ultra Series
  • In the Ultraman Ace episode "The Life-Sucking Sound!", a young boy named Haruo reprimanded for his poor musical skills blames it on his violin, opting to throw it into the trash. Being Ultraman, this somehow leads to the residual anger attracting negative energy from Yapool's dimension, turning the violin into the violin-based monster Geegon who goes on a rampage.
  • The Ultraman 80 episode "The Evil Glove" (a Recycled Plot from Ace above) repeats this premise in a Baseball Episode. A child Yamato is friends with sucks at baseball, and takes his anger out by stomping on his glove claiming "it's too tight for him to use". Then Minus Energy infects the glove, turning it into a baseball-glove-esque monster called Glovusk.

Video Games

• Cave Story: Discussed with Tetsuzuo who states that people who use weapons made by others often blame the weapons for their own failures.
• Dead Space (Remake): When completely empty of ammunition and trying to fire an empty weapon, Isaac will curse the CEC for apparently having shoddy equipment.
• Inverted in Final Fantasy XIV. Greinfar, a famed Ul'dahn gladiator known as the "Bronze Bull", fears that he's washed up after a string of losses after returning to the ring for the first time in years. In truth, his old, weathered sword is to blame. His old rival J'moldva realizes this and secretly commissions a new Cobalt Winglet for him from the Warrior of Light in the Level 50 Blacksmith quest. Should you meet him again in the Stormblood Paladin quests, you'll learn that he's been invited to the Ul Cup, a tournament of the realm's finest swordsmen, with the sword you crafted for him in hand.
• Sonic Riders: After Storm is beaten by Knuckles in a race, he tells Jet that he believes Knuckles won with a special Extreme Gear. Wave, who designs and maintains the Babylon Rogue's Extreme Gear and refuses to accept anyone could make a better board than her, interprets this as Storm claiming he lost because of her work and tells him his skills just suck.
• In Yakuza 0, Majima learns the Slugger style from an arms deal with a weaponsmith named Fei Hu and an ornery Jerkass of a yakuza complaining about the Chinese broadsword he was just given instead of any "normal" weapons like daggers or guns. Fei Hu decides to test him in a spar using an ordinary wooden staff, and promptly whoops his ass. The yakuza decides that he lost because the broadsword was terrible and the staff Fei Hu just used was far better. But Fei Hu explains that the staff was a random piece of lumber he scooped off the ground, as opposed to the painstakingly crafted broadsword the yakuza was using.

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE!: In the "Red vs. Blue" episode, much like in the original show, Church is unable to shoot Donut with a sniper rifle and ends up tossing it on the claim that it is busted. This bites him when it ends up in the hands of Caboose of all people shortly after.
• Minilife TV: In "Robots, Wizards, and Rock 'n Roll", Chris, Ian, and Michael are practicing playing in a rock band. When Chris notices they're performing poorly, he tells them their instruments are defective and they're convinced that the way they're playing isn't the problem.
• Red vs. Blue: It's a Running Gag that Church cannot effectively use a sniper rifle, missing every shot he takes. Usually when he does, he blames the rifle not being sighted or misfiring.

Webcomics

• Unwinder's Tall Comics: When Dr. Minivan utterly trounces Chad "Shadow" Wilson in a Halo multiplayer session (despite having never played the game before), Shadow tries to insist that the game controllers are to blame. Dr. Minivan shoots that one down, of course:
  Dr. Minivan: This "Halo" game is fantastic! I am very entertained by it!
  Shadow: Stupid... he must have the good controller!
  Dr. Minivan: Don't be a dense dunce, Mr. Shadman! We have exchanged remote control devices numerous times, with no disruption to my killing streak.
• In the xkcd strip "Think Logically", an amateur chess player questions why an experienced player sometimes moves their pieces backwards — if the goal is to checkmate the enemy king, then moving pieces away from the king doesn't make any sense. The experienced player challenges the amateur to a game and gets an easy checkmate, and the amateur decides the loss demonstrates that chess is a badly designed game.

Web Videos

• Satirized in the Collegehumor video The Worst Video Game Controller. The titular Jawdawgz controller is bulky, laggy, wired with an inch-long cord, flammable, and all-around unusable. But at every junction, whenever Mike complains the other players insist "Don't blame the controller!"

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In the episode "Send In The Clones," one of Jimmy's clones borrows Nick's skateboard and starts doing tricks on it. When he breaks the board, rather than admitting fault, he claims that the board couldn't "handle the Neutron style."
• Angelina Ballerina: Defied in one episode of The Next Steps — the Mouseling sisters break a violin due to playing it when they weren't allowed and initially consider pretending it came alive and broke itself, but decide not to because he'd never believe that.
• Bluey: In "Bingo", Bingo is indecisive about which food to choose (since hunger makes her indecisive). When the fridge beeps, she thinks it's being rude and doesn't like her. Justified since she's only a little girl and young kids often personify things.
• The Casagrandes: In "The Grandparent Trap", Hector denies having gained weight, claiming his shorts shrunk instead.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: When the Spirit of The Harvest Moon criticized Eustace, a self-proclaimed farmer, for his inability to grow anything, Eustace gives the excuse of "bad soil," rather than admit he's a lousy farmer.
• Earthworm Jim: Inverted in "Sword of Righteousness" where Jim becomes the chosen wielder of the titular sword who berates him with every failure, making him feel worthless. However, when the sword reveals that nobody who wielded it ever won a fight, Jim realizes the problem is the sword itself rather than him, prompting him to discard the sword and go back to how he usually fights.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In "Cosmo Con", while pop diva Britney Britney uses the Turners' bathroom, she gets soap in her eyes and blames the soap for it.
  Britney: Stupid, mean soap! You'll never work in this town again!
• Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs: In "Silly Pencil", Harry is having trouble drawing straight lines, and blames his pencil.
• Johnny Test: The episode "Johnny Mint Chip" has Johnny trying to make his own mint chip ice cream using an ice cream maker despite Dukey's claim that nobody ever really uses them. When Dukey lists off the ingredients as "ice, pint of cream, mint, chips, and rock salt", Johnny gets the first two right but uses mint-flavored toothpaste, potato chips (due to Dukey not specifying that they have to be chocolate chips), and actual rocks and salt separately. Expectedly, the ice cream ends up tasting terrible, yet Johnny chooses to place the blame on the machine even though he was the one who added the wrong ingredients.
• The Loud House: Lori Loud has a problem with flatulence, and whenever she lets one rip, she usually claims that it's her shoes squeaking, or on one occasion, her car seat.
• Martha Speaks:
  • Inverted in "Martha Fails the Course", when Martha thinks she's clumsy for failing at an agility course, but then it turns out that the equipment is just too small.
  • A straight example occurs in "Martha's Must-Have", when Martha learns that "cheap" can mean "poorly made" as well as "inexpensive", she uses a pair of slippers as an example. Helen counters that they weren't cheap; they just broke because Martha chewed on them.
• The Moomins: When Little My has trouble opening an umbrella, she says to herself, "Wretched umbrella! They don't make them like they used to!".
• The Mr. Men Show: Whenever Mr. Stubborn breaks something or uses it improperly, he will always insist that the item is cheap rather than admit any fault.
• Open Season 2: When Giselle's stick she was using to roast marshmallows breaks, she complains, "Even my roasting stick is weak and pathetic!".
• Paddington: Inverted. In one episode Mr Curry takes Paddington to play golf, planning to use Paddington as his caddy. At one point Paddington accidentally snaps one of Mr Curry's golf clubs and apologies as it just snapped in two in his hands, the furious Mr Curry claims it was his best club only for another player to point out it was horrifically rusty and poorly maintained.
• Pet Alien: In one episode, Tommy has a growth spurt, but thinks his shoes shrunk.
• The Save-Ums!: A Running Gag is characters blaming the object involved for the problem they're having. For example, when Winston got stuck in a door:
  Winston: It's not your fault, Andre, it's the door's fault.
• The Simpsons: In "See Homer Run", Homer feigns interest in a homemade book that Lisa made him for Father's Day, so he tries to make her feel better by putting it up on the fridge with a magnet, only for it to slide down into the water dispenser and get ruined. Homer blames it on the magnet... which Lisa made him for his birthday.
• Steven Universe, The episode "Nightmare Hospital" has a variant where the blaming is the result of a misunderstanding rather than an attempt to dodge responsibility. Connie's mother takes a call at the local hospital, where it seems that a patient has been brought in from a car accident. With a stethoscope, she tries to check the patient's pulse, but she throws it in the trash, frustrated that she can't find it, blaming the "cheap hospital budgets". What she does not know is that the patient does not have a pulse because it is not human; it is a Gem Mutant.
• In the Disney short The Story Of Anyburg USA, the citizens of the titular town angrily blame automobiles for the road accidents they have been experiencing and in turn sue the automobiles. During the trial, the defense attorney convinces everyone in the courtroom that they as the drivers are responsible for causing road accidents with their cars.
  Defense Attorney: I think we all know who the criminal in this case really is. It’s you, and you. And it’s me too.
• Thomas & Friends: Whenever an accident or derailment occurs, it's often the engine that tends to be blamed for it, rather than the crew. (Zig-Zagged a bit since in this case the engines are in fact sentient and capable of making their own decisions to an extent, but there are still human crew members who surely ought to share at least some of the responsibility.)

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