Basic Trope: A character, (sometimes The Ditz, a Cloudcuckoolander, or The Fool), ruins The Plan completely by accident.
- Straight: Bob The Fool accidentally derails Emperor Evulz's plan to Take Over the World.
- Exaggerated: Bob The Fool unintentionally derails an entire Gambit Pileup between several factions... one that had been going on for millennia prior to his unexpected involvement!
- Downplayed: Bob The Fool only complicates Evulz's plans.
- Justified:
- Bob is Too Dumb to Fool for Evulz to manipulate him into his plans.
- Evulz didn't factor Bob into his plan at all, exactly because Bob is a buffoon and therefore was beneath Evulz's notice. Evulz was therefore completely blind-sided when Bob, through his bumbling, somehow got messed up in the plan.
- Bob is something of an Outside-Context Problem; he wasn't even supposed to be there, and Evulz didn't know he existed. Bob just took a wrong turn on his road trip to somewhere else and blundered into a key part of the plan by pure dumb luck. (Optionally) packing some kind of powers or skills that, again, it was impossible to plan against because it could not be assumed they existed.
- Evulz is Too Clever by Half, and Bob is a particularly dull-witted mook who took the boss's orders a bit too literally.
- Achievements in Ignorance: Evulz' plan was "fool-proof" but he unfortunately didn't factored Bob's stupidity being so great it somehow bent reality.
- Bob may be less clever than Evulz but he's also determined to do any kind of damage to Evulz's schemes come hell or high water, and this leads to him aiming for high-risk, high-reward targets that hurt Evulz a lot.
- Bob was left Locked Out of the Loop, so he couldn't have known there was a plan to begin with, and just did his usual thing... unaware that it would cause trouble for Evulz.
- Inverted:
- Unwitting Pawn
- Unintentional Backup Plan
- The Chessmaster
- Genius Clay manages to foil Evulz's... Frankly idiotic plans.
- Subverted:
- It may appear that Bob has destroyed Evulz's plans, but Evulz had changed his plans in case someone were to ruin it.
- Bob was only pretending to be The Fool. He is actually a genius and destroyed Evulz's plans on purpose.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but it turns out that in changing the plans to prevent Bob from ruining them, Evulz has left himself wide open for Alice's bumbling to devastate them.
- However, Bob's master plan to defeat Evulz fails because one of his companions accidentally spills the beans.
- Parodied: Bob The Fool derails Evulz attempts to Poke the Poodle.
- Zigzagged: Sometimes, Bob inadvertently derails Evulz plans. Other times, Bob has unintentionally advanced Evulz in some way.
- Averted: Bob The Fool has not derailed Evulz's plans to Take Over the World.
- Enforced: "Evulz is a Devil in Plain Sight who can fool nearly everyone. We need to find someone who can ignorantly break his plan.
- Lampshaded: "Did that idiot just ruin my plan by accident!? NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
- Invoked:
- Bob is such a Walking Disaster Area that the only reason his friends so much as tolerate him is the outside chance that, should anything bad happen, his unlucky bumbling will wreck the enemy's plans before the enemy wrecks them.
- Alternatively, Evulz needs to lull the heroes into a false sense of security, and what better way of doing so than sacrificing a plan or two and making himself look like someone that can easily be thwarted by any random brain-dead idiot?
- Implied: The Opening Narration talks about Evulz being a criminal mastermind so great he can destroy entire countries after a brief Sherlock Scan. Gilligan Cut to Evulz crying like a little girl in the middle of a wrecked room and Bob staring at him stupidly.
- Exploited: John, a Guile Hero, notes that Bob is an idiot, and, with a few supervisors for the latter, use Bob as an Unwitting Pawn against Emperor Evulz. Bob, being the kind of idiot that he is, is unaware of this.
- Defied:
- Emperor Evulz have his guards set fences, strictly enforce the "No Commoners Allowed" rule, and place his animal in case they do.
- Alternatively, Evulz' first Kick the Dog act once he has the heroes at hand will be to kill Bob in front of the rest of cast (most probably in an unceremonious fashion), declaring Bob as dangerous because he was Too Dumb to Fool (and thus, ironically, Too Cool (or Powerful) To Live).
- Emperor Evulz acknowledges the possibility of someone or something making a dent on his plans as inevitable, and he absolutely refuses to allow his campaign of terror to be destroyed by a single point of failure. Because of this, he tries to be as Crazy-Prepared as circumstances will allow him, and tries not to have any 'all or nothing' strategies on his playbook.
- Evulz spends some of his training time observing complete nimwit beginners trying to fight. That part of Mark Twain's quote about how the best swordsman in the world fears the worst one "because he doesn't knows that the idiot will do" is, thus, prevented.
- Similar to the above, Evulz spends time trying to comprehend Bob's psychology. Sure, he is a colossal idiot of such proportions that reality bends to his whims, but he is still a human being and there must be some kind of consistency to what drives his moronic mind (insatiable hunger? Unquenchable sex drive? Does he gets bored easily, is too kind for anybody's good, or maybe he just has an incredibly obscene degree of pettiness?).
- Discussed: "Hmm... This guy can definitely destroy Emperor Evulz's plans. The Emperor can't predict him."
- Conversed: "The idiot always ruins the mastermind's plan if not monitored."
- Deconstructed:
- Bob becomes so important that he turns into a spanner in the works of the good guys. If anything happens to him —be it that Evulz lucks out and kills him, Bob bumbles in the wrong direction, gets stuck in traffic, or he gets fed up with people telling him what to do and tells them to take a hike— the heroes are screwed.
- The Perils of Being the Best start to apply to Bob and his capacity to ruin plans. He becomes a priority target to Evulz' assassins, his friends start to hate the fact that they may as well shout "We Are "Team Cannon Fodder"" when compared to Bob's luck, and Bob may start feeling alienated because his friends are putting him at arm's length (if he's smart enough to feel alienated, otherwise he will just raise the other heroes' ire more).
- Reconstructed:
- The knowledge that Bob is essentially Evulz' Kryptonite allows people to breathe easier whenever Evulz unleashes another evil plan and goes to the national networks professing that this time they will all suffer, true, evil pinky promise with additional evil truth syrup and an evil cherry on top.
- In response to his alienation, Bob works to be an even better person for his friends, while his luck causes him to trounce his assassins as easily as he trounces Evulz. Bob's friends eventually come to terms with the fact that Bob is the reason why Evulz has never succeeded in his goals, and why they are still alive and well. Although his apparent lack of realisation of their ire causes it to grow, seeing Bob continue to treat them as companions in spite of their behaviour slowly turns it into guilt. His friends put aside their jealousy, and their friendship is restored.
- Played For Laughs: "Now I'm invincible!" "Ohhhhh... What Does This Button Do??" "How did this idiot entered my impenetrable fortress? No, wait, DON'T TOUCH —- !!!" Ker-bloom! Evulz looks at the ruins of his plan, and starts crying like a little baby... literally.
- Played For Drama: The heroes' incredibly desperate final all-or-nothing plan to stop Evulz ends in tears because Bob couldn't do the one little simple thing that he was begged to do right.
- Played For Horror: The Dwindling Party figures out far too late that their plan to avoid being massacred is not going to work thanks to Bob.
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