Basic Trope: Strength/size and intelligence are inversely proportional.
- Straight: Bob can lift 250-lb weights, but is simple-minded and incredibly dense.
- Exaggerated: Bob is a thirty-foot-tall behemoth who can effortlessly fling a tank over the horizon, but he can't count past ten and frequently forgets his own name, and he doesn't wash his hands.
- Downplayed: Bob, The Big Guy, is Book Dumb in a cast full of geniuses.
- Justified:
- Bob simply prefers working out over studying.
- Bob has a birth defect that hinders his mental faculties.
- Bob was a wrestler/boxer who suffered too many blows to the head.
- Bob's formidable physical strength has allowed him to be able to use brute force to solve most of his problems and interpersonal conflicts, as a result he hasn't really developed any real sense of subtlety or creative problem-solving skills because he has never really felt a need for any of them.
- Inverted:
- Bob is not only very dim-witted, but also a skinny little weakling who could get his ass handed to him by a little girl.
- Bob is extremely intelligent, but is also very weak and fragile.
- Bob is a Genius Bruiser, with a Ph.D. in rocket engineering and a punch so strong that it can send the enemy flying like a rocket.
- Subverted: Bob is a big brute who's only pretending to be a moron, when he's actually just as smart as he is strong.
- Double Subverted:
- While actually quite intelligent, Bob is still rather dense and generally oblivious to the world around him.
- Or Bob used to be very intelligent, but a lifetime of close-quarters combat has taken its toll on his brain.
- Parodied:
- Bob is fairly intelligent and takes up bodybuilding, but he soon starts to act like he's severely mentally disabled.
- Bob can take down any other badass in half a second, but he's laughed at when he fails a simple 1+1 equation, or thinks he's someone else.
- Bob could beat up the Eldritch Abomination single-handedly, but promptly switches sides after it bribes him with candy or treats him nicely.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob's strength and intelligence seem to vary wildly from one moment to the next, never being particularly proportionate to one another.
- Averted: Bob is huge and immensely strong, but has roughly average intelligence.
- Enforced: "Bob's already ridiculously strong; giving him brains as well would make him border on
Marty Stu territory." - Lampshaded: "Bob, buddy, I assure you we will call you when there's something to smash but, for now, we've got a riddle to solve so...thanks."
- Invoked: Bob deliberately takes drugs that will give him great strength at the cost of his mind, because he thinks being a gleefully strong manchild is preferable to his current state.
- Exploited: Everybody tends to assume that Bob's an idiot simply because of his size, a fact that Bob gleefully milks for all it's worth.
- Defied: Bob starts studying hard in order to become strong AND intelligent, and avoid being mocked.
- Discussed: "Wait, you mean that your friend that just lifted my car is a complete moron? He seemed to handle the door ok."
- Implied: We never see Bob speak, but he's unusually large, and has a spectacularly dumb look on his face.
- Conversed: "Why is it that the stronger someone is, the dumber they are?"
- Deconstructed:
- Bob is too dumb to fully grasp the fact that not everybody is as freakishly strong as he is, and frequently hurts his companions without meaning to.
- Bob's brute strength makes him surprisingly useful to others, so nobody really bothered to teach him anything and he never really bothered to learn. For all anyone knows, Bob could have average intelligence or higher.
- Bob is convinced that working out makes you stupid as well as strong, deliberately avoids all exercise, and winds up neither strong nor intelligent.
- Bob's naïveté and lack of intelligence let Charlie manipulate him into being his partner in crime.
- Reconstructed: Bob is a giant of a man, but isn't very bright; Alice is a genius but is very frail and sickly. Alice reins in Bob, helping him apply his strength constructively and preventing him from making rash decisions, while Bob protects Alice and performs tasks that she can't do herself. They grow to trust each other so absolutely that nothing the Manipulative Bastard Report Siht does can force them apart, which ultimately allows them to thwart his plans.
- Untwisted: Bob is a frail looking mage with mental abilities, except his only tactic is flood the enemies mind with mental static until they bleed from the ears.
Why should I use the door to get back to Dumb Muscle when I can just smash through the wall instead?
