First-Step Fixation

"Homestar, are you using galvanized nails to hide the fact that you don't know how to build a deck?"

— Cardboard Marzipan, Homestar Runner, "No Hands on Deck!"

A primarily comedy trope in which a character comes up with a plan to achieve some goal, then gets so fixated on following that exact plan that they temporarily lose sight of their actual goal.

In the more overt version of the gag, the character comes up with a Plan A, but some complication hinders an early step of the plan. Then a Plan B falls into their lap, which would let them reach the goal by a completely different, and usually much simpler, method. But the character just uses the tools from Plan B to accomplish the now-redundant first step of Plan A, instead. For example, say Bob is imprisoned and trying to escape. He tries the door, but it's locked tightly and far too solid to break. Then he tries the window and finds he can pry the bars loose and create enough space to slip through. At this point, a normal human being would exit the window and make a break for it, which wouldn't be this trope at all. But Bob is The Ditz, not a normal human being, so what he does instead is climb out the window, sneak into the guard station to steal his cell door's key, then climb back through the window into his cell so he can unlock the door and exit that way. Bob is so fixated on his Plan A (exiting through the door) that he jeopardizes his actual goal (escaping the prison) with the unnecessary detour to steal the key.

In a slightly more subtle variation, sometimes the audience only learns that this trope happened after the fact. The character does accomplish their goal through their very first plan, however difficult or complicated it is. Then, having gone through all that trouble, they reveal that they could have done it by another, much simpler method — but for no adequately explained reason, it never occurred to them to do so. (See also "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot.) For example, say Alice is imprisoned and trying to escape. So she pockets a spoon during one of her meals and starts digging through the floor with it. Months later, she finishes her tunnel to the outside and makes her escape, only to realize that she left her favorite toothbrush behind in the cell. So she reaches into her pocket and pulls out the complete set of prison keys (which she had on her all along) and uses them to sneak back into her cell to get her toothbrush back. She could have escaped with those keys at any point, but just didn't, so she wound up digging a tunnel with a spoon instead.

A subtrope of Comically Missing the Point (or Dramatically Missing the Point, in the occasional non-comedy examples), and sister trope to Not Now, We're Too Busy Crying Over You. The final result of the character's fixation may be indistinguishable from Complexity Addiction. If the fixation lasts for longer than a quick gag, then it may evolve into When All You Have Is a Hammer… or outright Motive Decay. If the character is self-aware enough to realize what they're doing and insists on fixating on the first step anyway, they may fall into the Sunk Cost Fallacy attempting to justify the decision, or just say "It's the Principle of the Thing." Compare with Gift of the Magi Plot and Two Rights Make a Wrong, where attempts to solve a problem become redundant and counter-productive due to a lack of communication between the problem-solvers. Also compare with It Was with You All Along and You Didn't Ask, where the character goes on an epic quest or uses other elaborate means of solving a problem because they didn't know (and couldn't have known) that a simpler solution was available all along.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• Crabgrass: After Miles and Kevin fail to catch up with an ice cream truck, they begin to scheme how they can get the truck driver to notice them. Then Miles' mom offers the boys some ice cream she already has in the kitchen, but Miles turns it down since he is fixated on getting ice cream from the ice cream truck, much to Kevin's frustration.

Comic Books

• Lucky Luke: In The Inheritance of Rantanplan, the Daltons plan another prison escape, but they'd need a weapon. Averell reveals he sculpted a fake Colt out of soap and dyed it with shoeshine. His brothers marvel at how realistic it looks, and Averell informs them he had a model — a real, loaded Colt that a prison guard misplaced. Averell then guilelessly explains that he couldn't make a fake Colt without a real one as template, otherwise the soap gun would have looked fake. Joe is so incensed by the stupidity of the whole thing that he forces Averell to eat the soap gun. (The gag is reused in an episode of the Lucky Luke TV series and in the movie Go West! A Lucky Luke Adventure.)

Fan Works

• Hope Comes to Brockton Bay: When Hope's presence seems likely to derail Cauldron's carefully laid plans, by bringing down the Siberian and delaying the end of the world, Alexandria and Doctor Mother are insistent on removing her from the board — until Contessa points out that letting the Siberian escape was only ever a means to an end. Their true goal is to ensure humanity survives, and working with Hope offers better paths to that without needing a serial killer to run free.

Films — Animation

• Strange World: The Clades are locked in a room with Splat, a local being lacking anything resembling a skeleton. The room can be opened via a switch that is outside it and they hear their dog, Legend, coming close to it. As the Clades' efforts to get Legend to activate the switch prove fruitless, Splat gets frustrated, slides under the door, does what's needed to make it openable by Legend, then returns inside the room to get freed alongside the Clades.

Films — Live-Action

• Avengers: Infinity War: A distinctly non-comedic example with Thanos, who was originally concerned with overpopulation depleting the universe's resources, and decided the only solution was to kill half the people in it in order to increase the amount available to the survivors. To this end, he sought out the six Infinity Stones, which would give him the power to eliminate half the universe's population in an instant. It would also enable him to solve the problem in any number of far less mass-murdery ways, not least of which would be simply creating more resources, but he never considers any other option, instead going ahead with his original plan. It's likely justified in that, by this point, Thanos was less concerned with solving overpopulation and more with proving to the naysayers (i.e. practically everybody) that his insane plan was the right one.
• Hot Shots! Part Deux: In this scene, Colonel Walters is imprisoned in a jail cell in Iraq. Topper throws him the keys, but they land just a bit short. Walters slips between the Widely-Spaced Jail Bars to exit his cell and grab the keys — then he slips back into his cell so he can unlock the door and exit that way.
• In Jumanji, Peter is sent to bring an axe from the shed. The shed is locked, so he looks for something to break the lock... and grabs the axe nearby. It takes him a few strikes before he realizes what he's doing.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Black Knight blocks access to a bridge over a small ravine. Small as in one could easily cross without the bridge, but people insist on fighting to the death over it anyway.
• Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Robin comes across a bridge guarded by Little John who demands a toll. Robin refuses to pay since they are on his family's land and decides to fight John. Achoo points out that the bridge is over a creek so tiny that they can simply hop across but Robin declares It's the Principle of the Thing.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Toons have to follow the Rule of Funny, which means Roger Rabbit has to play out this gag when the opportunity arises. To wit: Roger handcuffs himself to Eddie Valiant, only to learn Eddie lost the key to those cuffs. Eddie and Roger, cuffed together, narrowly avoid getting discovered by Judge Doom's goons, then sneak into a secret room behind Dolores' bar. There, Eddie starts cutting off the cuffs with a hacksaw — at which point Roger effortlessly slips his hand out of the cuff to help Eddie with the sawing. Eddie thanks Roger, then does a double-take, and Roger sheepishly slips his hand back into the cuff.
  Eddie: You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?
  Roger: No, not at any time, only when it was funny.

Jokes

• There was once a young shepherd who, lonely with the long hours alone in the fields with his sheep, was horrified to find himself starting to cast sideways glances at his charges. He asked an older, more experienced shepherd for advice, and was told to train a vicious dog to attack him if he started disrobing around the sheep. He did so, but the loneliness continued until one day he heard a woman screaming off in the distance. Tracking down its source, he found a beautiful maiden who had been chased up a tree by a pack of wolves. After the shepherd and his dog chased away the wolves, the maiden asked if there was anything she could do to repay him. "Actually, there is," he replied. "Can you keep this dog distracted for about ten minutes?"
• A mathematician and an engineer are marooned on a desert island, which has two palm trees: one very tall, the other much shorter. Each has one coconut, at the very top.
  The engineer decides to have a try for the more difficult coconut, on top of the tall tree, while they still have the energy to reach it. He clambers up, scraping his legs raw, and eventually returns with the coconut. They smash it open with a rock and eat and drink the contents.
  Three days later, both of them now weak with hunger and thirst, the mathematician volunteers to get the other coconut. He climbs the shorter tree, detaches the coconut, and brings it down. The engineer then watches bemusedly while the mathematician starts climbing the taller tree, groaning and sweating profusely, finally gets to the top, deposits the coconut there, and makes his way back down with even more difficulty. He is completely exhausted.
  The engineer stares at him, then up at the distant coconut, and then back to the mathematician. "Whatever possessed you to do that?"
  The mathematician glares back. "Isn't it obvious? I've reduced it to a problem that we already know how to solve!"

Puppet Shows

• The Muppet Christmas Carol: Gonzo and Rizzo have to climb a tall iron fence to get to where they can continue narrating the story, only for Rizzo to turn out to be afraid of heights: Gonzo has to coax him to jump. After the ensuing pratfall, Rizzo realizes he left his bag of jelly beans on the other side of the fence... and squeezes back through the bars. Lampshaded by a disbelieving Gonzo:
  Gonzo: You can fit through those bars?
  Rizzo: Yeah.
  Gonzo: [sotto voce] You are such an idiot...

Literature

• In The City Without Memory, Pashka and a member of a local sapient bird species are trapped in an old abandoned kids' sanitarium. Pashka decides that they need to signal the people searching for them with a smoke column. There is a nearby medical office, so he decides that taking apart the microscope there and using the lens to start a fire is his best bet. The problem is, there are a few rather vicious bears between him and the office. He manages to find an old piece of tech with which he scares away the bears, and is preparing to go and grab the microscope... but then the bird asks if the item itself might not be better for signaling the rescuers. It's a fireworks launcher.

Live-Action TV

• The Nanny: In "Here Comes the Brood", Maxwell Sheffield discovers, in the middle of a phone conversation with Fran Fine, that his youngest daughter Gracie has run away from home. Max starts to panic and announces he's calling the police to find Gracie — at which point Fran puts Gracie on the phone, revealing she's safe and sound. It takes a few seconds for Max to realize the significance of hearing her voice:
  Maxwell: I have to call the police!
  Gracie: Hi, Daddy.
  Maxwell: Grace, get off the phone! I have to call... [does a double take] Gracie, you're there?

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: The Chapter 3 culprit, Korekiyo Shinguji, gets caught this way. Initially, the culprit comes up with a complex murder trap utilizing a seesaw, only to get caught by Angie Yonaga setting up the trap, to which the culprit responds by bludgeoning the victim and setting up their corpse in a way that none of the other students can tell who did it. The culprit could thus readily have accomplished Monokuma's task of murdering a student without getting caught... but then decides the murder trap is such a cool method that it would be a waste not to use it. This second murder is the one that leaves all the evidence leading to their conviction, which they could have avoided had they been satisfied with the first murder.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue: Defied in The Blood Gulch Chronicles episode "We're Being Watched". The Red Team want to find out where Tex is broadcasting from; at first, they want to triangulate her position by using multiple radios tuned to her broadcast, and Sarge comes up with an elaborate plan to make a second simulated radio for this purpose... Then Tex directly tells them her coordinates. Simmons offers to help Sarge make a radio later anyway, but Sarge tells Simmons not to patronize him.

Webcomics

• Darths & Droids. In the Rogue One Campaign, the players are trying to get vital information from the Empire's top-secret archives on planet Toprawa, but they have no idea where Toprawa is. Jim suggests using information from planet Kamino to calculate Toprawa's location... but they don't know where Kamino is, either, and the only records of Kamino's location are going to be stored in the top-secret archives on Toprawa. With the players stuck, the GM relents and outright gives them Toprawa's space-coordinates — but now it's too late and Jim is fixated on his Kamino plan. He keeps reiterating that they're going to Toprawa so they can find Kamino so they can find Toprawa, even after they've landed on Toprawa.
• Played for Drama in The Order of the Stick. Many years ago following his village being destroyed and family massacred, the Goblin Cleric Redcloak vowed to make life better for the Goblinoids (who all exist as little more than XP sources for heroes). Thus he devised a complex plan to threaten reality itself so that he could blackmail the gods into improving conditions for Goblinkind. Over halfway through the series, Redcloak is on the verge of achieving his goals just through war and politics (i.e. the Goblins now have a massive army, vast amounts of valuable territory, and a position of strength from which to begin negotiations with other nations) without needing to involve the gods and possibly destroy the world. But Redcloak is still hellbent on carrying out his original plan, to the point that his efforts actively sabotage the Goblins' new advantages and lead hundreds to their deaths. It's made clear that Redcloak simply can't accept any other solution because giving up that plan would force him to face up to the fact that all the horrible things he's done in the pursuit of it, in particular murdering his beloved brother Righteye, were not justified.

Web Original

• "Chrisposting" is a meme associated with Resident Evil 2 (Remake) and subsequent games in the Resident Evil series, portraying Chris Redfield as obsessed with "continuing the Redfield bloodline" and to that end, aggressively pushing for eligible bachelors (primarily Leon Kennedy) to date and impregnate his sister, Claire. Further lore developments resulted in scenes where Chris's female partners like Sheva or Jill proposition him by offering to help "continue the Redfield bloodline" without any need to involve Leon at all. Invariably, Chris responds to these offers either with "Oh thank God. Let me know when you're done fucking my sister," or "That doesn't make any sense. You can't get my sister pregnant."

Web Videos

• In the Joel Haver short "How bad do you want it?" Dave is trying to pass a DVD to Brian, but neither of them wants to leave their car, and they just can't figure out how to park so their driver-side windows are close enough to reach. Eventually Dave tries throwing the DVD to Brian, but it lands short. Dave finally gets out of his car to retrieve the DVD, and winds up just a few steps away from Brian's door — then he gets back into his car, so he can try throwing it again.

Western Animation

• 2 Stupid Dogs: In one cartoon, upon seeing a girl scout going door-to-door selling cookies, the dogs try to use a house in order to get some. Unfortunately, Little Dog doesn't know how to open the front door, which leads Big Dog to continuously go out the window to make sure the scout stays there until he opens it.
• Futurama:
  • In one episode, Bender winds up on a small planetoid and needs to jump over a ravine. He backs up so he can get a running start — and keeps backing up until he's circumnavigated the planetoid and winds up at the spot he was trying to jump to in the first place. Then he runs and jumps over the ravine anyway.
  • In "Proposition Infinity", Bender is briefly imprisoned and feels threatened by another inmate. He decides to make himself a shiv for protection, so he pulls a chunk of wood out of his central cabinet — then pulls out a full-sized combat knife to carve the wood with.
• In the Looney Tunes cartoon "Buccaneer Bunny", Yosemite Sam is left behind on an island with a boat that has no paddles (as they were taken by Bugs Bunny). He swims over to a ship to retrieve the paddles to his boat, swims back to the island with the paddles, and then rows back to the ship in the boat so he can continue chasing Bugs.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: In the episode "Spooky Space Kook", Shaggy locks himself and Scooby inside of a building to hide from the Monster of the Week, before Scooby tosses the key outside to get rid of it. Then when they are cornered by the monster (who enters through the back door), Scooby and Shaggy jump out the window to grab the key, then climb back into the room so that they can use the key to unlock the door to get back outside.
  • In the A Pup Named Scooby-Doo episode "The Babysitter from Beyond", the Monster of the Week is trapped in a basement due to several large objects barricading the door. The monster climbs out of the basement through a nearby window, goes into the house through the door, removes the obstructions, then goes back outside and climbs back into the basement so that he can leave.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The climax of "New Student Starfish" has Patrick trying to grab a fresh lightbulb from the ceiling... by climbing an entire mountain of spare lightbulbs.
• Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: In "Happy Go Nutty", Screwball Squirrel is in an insane asylum. He slowly opens the door to his cell, looks around to see that nobody is watching... and then closes the door again so he can cut the bars with a file. Afterward, he climbs the outside wall right next to an open gate.
• Timon & Pumbaa:
  • In one episode, when Pumbaa is caught up in a pre-arranged marriage, he and Timon need to think of a way out of it and decide to look through a loophole in the judge's book of warthog by-laws. When the pair sneaks up on the sleeping judge and find him using the book as a pillow, Timon notes they'll need to replace it with something similar so he won't notice. Timon decides to use Pumbaa's copy of the by-laws book.
  • In another episode, after Timon and Pumbaa are taken into a nature reserve by a scientist that believed they were endangered animals, the pair plots to escape by digging a tunnel. To create a distraction for the scientist, Timon sets up a motorized wagon with a pair of potato sacks (poorly) disguised as them. After the wagon is sent off, it crashes through the reserve's front gate, allowing all the other animals to escape, with the scientist chasing after them. Timon and Pumbaa then start digging their escape tunnel.

Real Life

• "Burnside's Bridge". During the Battle of Antietam, a small Confederate force held off a numerically superior Union force from IX Corps for far longer than it should have because the Union commander, Major General Ambrose Burnside, insisted on attacking a bridge over Antietam Creek head-on — even after one of his own officers jumped into the creek to show him it was shallow enough that IX Corps could just wade across. This was the first of several incidents that led to Burnside earning a reputation as a General Failure.
• Finding himself in need of a paperclip, Albert Einstein decided to try to straighten out a previously mangled one but found he had no tools to do so. An assistant walked in with a box of fresh paperclips, but rather than use one for its intended purpose, Einstein instead used one to fix the older paperclip. When questioned about this, Einstein said that once he set his mind to something, it was not in his nature to stop until successful.

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