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Examples of Idiot Ball in Fan Works.


  • In Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies, Kaworu is very enthusiastic about maintaining the species with Rei. The Idiot Ball? The first attempt fails by loss of Ocular Virginity. The second by Defenestration. He still tries.
  • Played for Laughs in the Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep fanfic Reaching the Understanding, which turns Terra's tendency to be overly trusting of the wrong sort of people into a Running Gag by way of a chain of Gilligan Cuts.
  • In the Firefly/Series/DoctorWho crossover fanfic The Man With No Name, some of the characters are hunting Reavers. When they stop, thinking they've heard something, the Doctor keeps going anyway, walking smack right into one. Even the Doctor admits it was blindingly stupid.
  • The goal of Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality seems to be to avert this.
    • Although, it does get a lampshade in chapter 63, when Moody mentions a drug called "Bahl's Stupefaction", the effects of which include causing the user to do extremely stupid things.
  • The cast of Hogwarts Exposed grab the Idiot Ball frequently, but special mention has to go to the scene in which Harry, Hermione and the entire Hogwarts faculty get outwitted by Crabbe and Goyle.
  • Yet another Harry Potter example: Little Miss Mary has the boy who lived lose more than half his functioning brain cells and knowledge of how the world works to become Snape's innocent little sex doll. And so Snape can teach "her" the facts of life with a gentle fatherly tone and "hands-on" demonstrations.
  • Way too many Voltron: Legendary Defender fics have Pidge lose the common sense, intelligence, self-preservation skills, and self-awareness she's known for in canon just so she can find herself in a dramatic and complicated situation. Pregnancy fics are especially bad about this; it's like carrying a baby somehow robs her of half her brain cells and leads her to do things like fail to realize she's in labor for a whole day until her dog noses her belly, or go on a dangerous mission close to her due date. Naturally, bad things happen.
    • The entire team tends to catch this in fics where visits to Galra-hating planets lead to Keith being poisoned for hls half-Galra blood just so everyone can fret over him (especially Lance or Shiro). One would think that the group would be keeping an eye out for such things from the very beginning, especially Allura and Coran (who know more about these cultures than anyone), Pidge (the smart one), Hunk (the cautious one) or Shiro (Keith's best friend). Hell, even Keith would normally have more common sense than to accept a strange drink. At the same time, these planets somehow catch the Smart Ball because Keith appears to be fully human, hence the people having no way of knowing of his Galra blood unless told outright.
  • Lyndis is given the Idiot Ball in the Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade fic Lies, where her Fish Out of Water status (she has noble blood, but was raised on the plains) leads to her naively allowing a bunch of lecherous nobles to get her drunk so they can take turns having their way with her. It's all just a set-up for Kent to rescue her, of course.
    • Kent also catches the ball during the dramatic rescue scene, when he attackes the men outright rather than calling for someone in a higher authority who would not only put a stop to it immediately, but give the nobles the punishment they deserved for such disgraceful behavior. Instead, he points his weapon at the ringleader (an out of character Erik of Laus) who then taunts Kent about how he's totally going to get in trouble with Lord Hausen for attacking a lord. Then, rather than explaining the situation outright, he claims he was drunk and attacked Erik for the hell of it.
  • In the Fire Emblem Awakening fancomic Future of Despair, a pregnant and about to be due Panne stupidly runs off from the Ylissean castle and into the woods to give birth to her and Henry's son Yarne, for no other reasons than "her Taguel instincts kicked in". She gets shot full of arrows and subjected to a needless, incredibly stupid Death by Childbirth for her trouble.
    • A Chrom/Female Robin fic has Robin suppressing her (apparently very active) labor until after a dinner with a good-will ambassador, causing her to collapse and end up on bed rest. Somehow, baby Lucina comes out in perfect health.
    • Another fic has female Robin sleep with Frederick and end up pregnant. She still insists on going into battle against Gangrel and gets badly hurt for her troubles, causing the enemy to find out she's pregnant when she whimpers about the baby being okay. Somehow this doesn't lead to the entire army finding out, so she can run away and nearly die giving birth to Morgan in secret.
  • A Fire Emblem: Three Houses kink meme prompt has the female Byleth having unprotected sex with Dimitri because he's pretty and smells good and she didn't think anything bad could happen if she didn't take her contraceptive tea every single day. Naturally, she ends up pregnant and is shocked that such a thing happened.
    • Faerghus in general likes to give the ball to its students by claiming the Kingdom has "bad sex ed" so we can have gems like trans!Felix getting pregnant because he thinks identifying as male is birth control.
    • A certain Three Hopes fic series has Ashe try to use a Heroes Relic to "prove a point" about them, leading to him almost turning into a beast and needing Yuri, Seteth, and all of the Blue Lions to save him. Ashe has never canonically showed a lick of interest in the Relics positive or negative, and while he's gotten into trouble a few times he's known for his survival skills and has two younger siblings he wants to stay alive to support. The fic has him lose all sense of self-preservation just so he can be the fic's designated damsel.
    • Another post-canon Azure Moon fanfic has a pregnant Female Byleth grab this firmly when she decides to go to Abyss to make research on the Slithers. When she's almost due. And her husband Dimitri isn't there. And while having only Linhardt (who may be a White Mage but is likely unprepared for such a huge emergency) as company. The result? As soon as she starts having contractions, the two are kidnapped and locked away by the Slithers themselves - more exactly, by a Slither-allied Patricia, who wants to take the newborn baby with her and raise him/her as a Tyke Bomb, as revenge for her daughter Edelgard's death in battle.
      • The villain's motivations are not much more clever, especially due to a not-so-small detail. In canon, Patricia was so desperate to get Edelgard back that she helped in the Tragedy of Duscur under the belief she'd be both punishing her second husband/Dimitri's father Lambert for supposedly separating them, and then get to see Edelgard again. In this fanfic, after doing this she gets told by the other Slithers to wait since Edelgard isn't ready to see her (read: they want to experiment on her)... and she just waits for years in Shambhala, the Underground City of the Slithers, apparently doing nothing to reach for Edelgard herself or ask for an explanation...
    • The fic "The Savior King, the Master Tactician, and the Queen of Liberation" has female Byleth suffer from "magic burnout" due to the power of the Crest of Flames (something that literally never happened in the game itself). The first time she uses it she merely faints, but the second time she does it she winds up unconscious in bed for a day and a half, with Linhardt and the rest even saying she needs to be careful. What does she do two chapters later? Use that same power to exhaustion saving Dimitri, causing her to vomit blood, faint, and need Yuri to use the Chalice of Beginnings to save her life (never mind that it's not a healing item). All this so everyone who went down to the Abyss can fret by her bedside and beg her to live and stay with them.
      • Byleth carries the idiot ball and doesn't let it go for the majority of the fic. After the above incident, she faints again after overusing Divine Pulse and has to be on a week and a half of bed rest until she's better. Every single person tells her to take better care of herself, but Byleth, stubborn ass that she is, keeps putting herself in danger even though she claims to be trying not to. The crowner comes when she goes into battle in Shambala against the Ten Elites while pregnant, and only Maurice's timely intervention keeps her from getting hurt and possibly miscarrying. This version of Byleth has zero sense of self-preservation, all for the sake of having the other characters fuss over her and shower her with attention.
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