This trope is about someone's blundering accidentally ruining carefully laid out plans. A smart character could qualify if they were, say, an unpredictable but intelligent Cloud Cuckoo Lander.
But if the character's intelligent and his own plans can ruin someone else's it would be Didn't See That Coming.
Edited by Larkmarn Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
As far as i can tell inteligence of a character is irrelevant, the bare bones of this trope is that someone messes someone else's plan by accident, without intending to. Idiots are simply more prone to this.
I think that this description could use some work, particularly when someone (such as Florence in Freefall and Quentyn in Tales Of The Questor are spanners in their respective works quite deliberately (even though Quentyn has no idea how big the scope of the works are).
I think that without the "unwitting" bit (and I'd accept "I know i'm standing against the bad guy, but I have no idea how important that is" as "unwitting"), that leaves us with "The villain has a plan, and the hero stops it" which seems ... a bit broad?
Meatbag
This trope seems to apply to someone ruining a villain's plan- what would we call it when a dopey character or Cloudcoocoolander ruins the hero's plan?
WUT? Hide / Show Replies
Star Wars Expanded Universe. Thrawn not knowing that Leia was Darth Vader's daughter would qualify as this trope.
Hide / Show Replies
As a non-native speaker, I was having trouble understanding the trope's name: the "-er" suffix in the word spanner indicated to me a PERSON that is doing spanning, and "in the works" sounded like "working"
While in fact, spanner is a tool, and "works" in this instance means an engine, so basically, this is "throwing a wrench in a clockwork engine".
What would be the best way to include this explanation in the trope's description?
Just a question: does the person who is the Spanner in the Works HAVE to be someone who is classified as an idiot, according to the trope's description on the main page? I have seen examples of SMART people being listed as this in different media, such as Fujitora from One Piece.
Hide / Show Replies