Basic Trope: Character is hard to trick because he's too unaware to notice the bait.
- Straight:
- A captured Evil Empress Alice tries to seduce the guardsman, Bob, into restoring her dark powers. He has such a poor grasp of flirtation that Alice's words fall on deaf ears.
- "Evil Empress" Alice is a fighter that can mind-game people like it was going out of style. But when she tries to bluff Bob with faked bad defenses so she can punch him, Bob doesn't understand anything about her bobbing and weaving and just hits her over the head, Bud Spencer-style, knocking her cold.
- Alice is a Consummate Liar who constantly tries to swindle Bob. Bob is too stupid to understand Alice's lies as words strung together to form a sentence, let alone as false facts. Result: Alice constantly Rage Quits after four or five minutes of getting nowhere with Bob.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob mistakes Alice caressing his arm as an assassination attempt and quickly subdues her, foiling her plans.
- Alice is a borderline In-Universe Mary Tzu strategist that has annihilated entire armies through copious use of many brilliant plans for millennia and is proclaimed as a result to be invincible. Unfortunately for her, all that Bob literally knows is "stab people until they drop dead"... she really shouldn't have stood still.
- Alice frames Ellie for murder, masterfully creating an Orgy of Evidence that would (and did) convince Sherlock Holmes himself to at least look closely on Ellie's stuff just to be on the safe side and eventually makes all 700 people in Alice's list of enemies a high-priority suspect (ensuing that many of them will be deeply troubled by this mess, if not flat-out arrested). Bob absolutely refuses to stop thinking with his groin and won't believe for a single second that Ellie is guilty of anything (even if she was actually guilty) because he's got a crush. Much to the eventual embarrassment of Holmes and the entire police department, Bob's bull-headed decision to keep investigating Alice turns out to have been the correct choice.
- Alice is a Consummate Liar who constantly tries to swindle Bob. Bob is an idiot with a Reflexive Response to punch people in the face when they get too close. Result: nine times out of ten all Alice gets is a smashed nose and the tenth time (when she tries to factor the smashed nose as part of her swindle) is not a victory she likes to talk about.
- Cuddles is a very dumb dog, but he's so strong and driven that when he's given the command to "attack" he becomes a Super-Persistent Predator. Result: nine Phantom Thieves, pure Arsene Lupin/Diabolik/Fantômas/Charles Lytton/Kaito Kid-level crminal geniuses, all lying right next to each other in a super-max hospital wing with missing limbs and other injuries typical of an animal attack.
- Alice is so clever she has broken the magic/scientific code on how to bend reality to her whim. Bob is so stupid he trumps her in this field through just not knowing the world does not works like he thinks it should.
- Downplayed: Alice is at a store. She tries to seduce the clerk, Bob, into giving her a discount, but he doesn't notice her advances.
- Justified:
- Bob's parents sheltered him as a child in the hopes that he would focus on his studies. It limited his knowledge of social cues.
- Bob is literally brain-dead (ex. he's a zombie) and running purely on instinct (ex. "anything that isn't me is food"). Any tactic that isn't "put a bullet in his brain" (ex. a Badass Boast meant to provide Victory Through Intimidation) is just as good as standing there asking to get gnawed on.
- Bob is Unskilled, but Strong, and he still hasn't found any situation that rushing in and beating the threat to a pulp hasn't been able to solve... yet.
- Bob is dumb but zealous at his job. So if his orders are to not let Alice enter a room, then Alice's not going to enter that room, period.
- Bob is Oblivious to Love or a Chaste Hero. So he really didn't get why Alice stood there and said things that didn't get through his head.
- Bob is a Fearless Fool going against an antagonist who has embraced (to their detriment) specializing in terror tactics.
- Alice's powers require belief to work. Bob, because he is stupid, literally can't believe her or her powers.
- Inverted:
- Alice's attempts to charm Bob are clumsy. Bob, usually quick-witted, vigilant and perceptive, sees her as no threat and falls right into her trap.
- Bob is trivial to manipulate and trick because he is so simple. He is turned against the king because Alice told him that the king insulted his mother.
- The great detective Bob, while impossible to fool, is incredibly easy to distract as he is too focused and investigates everything. While he will figure out everything eventually, dropping a foreign coin outside a deliberately failed assassination attempt will cause him to go through an amazing yet painstaking process of figuring out the precise lineage of the coin, if it was from a foreigner who obtained it or a native, and if so if the native had sanctioned and it would be a cause for war or if they were rogue — and if it would be better off to capture or kill them diplomatically. While amazing, it will take him a few months to realize the coin and clumsy assassination attempt were just a distraction so the villains could plunder the entire treasury and replace it with decoy loot. By the time he does, they have fled long ago and got off scot-free since admitting the crime took place would cause the nation's collapse.
- Bob's friends know he is the stupidest man in the history of the galaxy, so when Bob provides some kind of insight in the current situation that seems to be correct or seems to be doing anything right, they decide to hedge their bets on "infiltrator" instead of "broken clock". It pays off more often than not.
- Bob is incredibly gifted at fooling people because he is an idiot (it is not Obfuscating Stupidity - he is as stupid as he looks. His scams purely run on Crazy Enough to Work).
- Subverted:
- Bob gets caught sweeping several women off their feet later that day, so it's clear his encounter with Empress Alice was a ruse.
- Alice realizes her plan isn't working and switches to bribing Bob, in very small words, with promises she'll bake him a tasty cake. That works.
- Bob is "dumb", not brain-dead stupid. He can still recognize that Alice is trying to come on to him.
- Double Subverted:
- A few hours before, Bob got a crash course in talking to girls by some bemused, but grateful town The Casanovas. He's doing it all by rote.
- Bob only likes dry chocolate cake. Alice's entire operation gets demolished by an angry Bob, starting with her getting her custom-ordered $15,000 replica of Princess Diana's wedding cake splattered all over her face.
- Unfortunately for Alice, the fact Bob can recognize sexual advancements doesn't equals having the mental capacity to wish to act upon them.
- Parodied: Bob's unintentional rejection wounds the Empress' pride. Forgetting the point of seducing Bob, Alice tries to get him to notice her in comically overblown ways, before finally breaking down and screaming "Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?" at him. None of this works.
- Zig Zagged: Bob's idiocy is his "hammer", and he keeps noticing or missing plots as the series goes along because he either can't make sense of any of the clues given to him or because the enemy keeps underestimating how Obviously Evil they are.
- Averted: Bob is shown to have no understanding of flirtation, but this doesn't make him any less vulnerable. Empress Alice goes in to seduce him and get her powers back, and comes back an hour later making a smug remark about taking candy from babies.
- Enforced:
- Lampshaded:
- "Wow, even if I was genuinely interested in you, you'd be too stupid to get anywhere with me. What a shame!"
- "You can't use mind games on Bob! There's no mind to game!
- Invoked: Knowing Empress Alice is as charming and sexy as she is evil, the rebel forces deprive their soldiers of social interaction to keep them loyal and hard to blandish.
- Exploited: Bob and Alice's encounter was engineered in a scheme to help Empress Alice fall in love and mellow out. The rebels know that she likes her men simple and determined, like Bob.
- Defied:
- Before seducing Bob, Alice sends a minion to spell it out for him: "Dude, I heard Evil Empress Alice is into you. Go talk to her!"
- Alice refuses to waste her time trying to swindle Bob in any way, shape or form. "It would be easier to get blood from a stone!" she says.
- Discussed: "Good ol' Empress Alice, she's got a way with men. Few of us are smart enough...or dumb enough...not to fall for it."
- Conversed: "If this was an old Looney Tunes cartoon, Bob would be so much of a walking definition of the word "moron" that Lennie would look like a Nobel Prize winner next to him and he still would be defeating Alice's ass in an instant."
- Implied: A quick cut to the aftermath of Alice's arrest has her trying to flirt with someone while she's behind bars... camera pans to Bob, who is guarding her with an utterly dull look on his face.
- Deconstructed:
- While Bob is Too Dumb to Fool by exotic tricks, he is still The Ditz, and can still be manipulated by very basic tricks that wouldn't fool a six-year-old.
- Because of how many idiots have survived when the more clever heroes have been humiliated or died, an "Ignorance is Strength" culture begins to form, with all of the awfulness that follows.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob is a Fake Ultimate Hero, looks smarter than he is, is so stupid that his luck is overcompensating to the point he's winning the Superpower Lottery or otherwise he comes off as competent so no-one realises he's an utter dullard until it's too late.
- Eventually the idiots run into something or perform an action a more clever being would not do and get culled as a result. The lesson is "the proper tool for the job" — some are best for idiots, some are best for clever people, and the universe is the only one who gets to choose.
- Played For Laughs:
- Alice tries to beg Bob to release her, using all kinds of absurd flirting methods every time we cut back to her. By the time she's showcasing the multiple blow-up sex dolls with her face and the pole dancing, we have seen Bob's dullard face about six times and his lack of response to all of this is hilarious.
- Alice's inability to swindle Bob because of his idiocy leads to a lot of comedic pain for Alice, sometimes literally by Bob's hand.
- Played For Drama:
- People die because Bob is too stupid to pass on the fact Alice tried to fool him to those who actually could fall for it.
- The heroes were the people trying to fool Bob and Bob is The Dragon (or worse yet, the Big Bad), and the heroes can only despair as the atrocity they were trying (very hard) to prevent with this gambit comes to pass regardless.
- Because he's impossible to fool, Bob has become an Idiot Houdini. People, understandably, are pissed that "this utter moron" has kept everything when they have lost it all.
- Bob is an idiot, but unfortunately for Alice, he is not a lovable idiot. Or a harmless one. Alice ends.up.getting hurt or even nearly killed by severely underestimating her enemy's capacity to strike back.
- Played for Horror:
- Bob is a slasher villain in the vein of Jason Voorhees and his stupidity is part of his implacability. No trap will detain him, no swindle will fool him, because all he desires is to tear people apart and he will not stop until it's done.
- The death of all of the smart heroes leads to the idiots of the world uprising and placing Bob on a pedestal. Eventually this leads to the questioning of why the smart people should be allowed to do anything cool if they can only screw up, which quickly devolves into "let's get rid of them". And the method the marching idiots take for said getting rid of the smarties is bloody to the extreme. And the remaining smart heroes? What can they do against a relentless tide of marching idiots, where for every single one that they may be able to swindle there are a hundred, a thousand, to carry on the purge?
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