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Redditor RedstonekPL, whose real name is Timothy, told us all about what inspired them to create the thread and why some characters act really dumb.
“Pretty often in movies, the main character (or main characters) does something dumb. When that happens, I think to myself, ‘Man, if only they were a little bit smarter this would be a lot shorter.’ I wanted to spark some discussion about it on the internet, see other people's opinions and examples, and r/AskReddit is the best place for questions like that.”
According to Timothy, asking a question on the sub is like a lottery: you never know when your thread might go viral. “You can get nothing, get a lot, and anything in between. Although questions like this usually are more popular in the community, people there like to discuss stuff,” he said, adding that the awards he got were a total surprise to him.
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Timothy pondered that filmmakers make some characters intentionally foolish for a variety of reasons. “In my opinion, there are 3 types of foolish characters. Some characters are foolish because without them the movie wouldn't exist. Some characters' foolishness is a part of their personality. And some characters sometimes do stupid things once or twice to make the viewer laugh.”
He continued: “There are some movies where not being dumb wouldn't be boring, but there are some films, where one or two foolish actions are required to even start it. A good example for the former is a stereotypical horror film where some characters enter some kind of an abandoned house and then read out loud some kind of ancient curse or whatever from a book with a note saying, "Do not open," and then get attacked.”
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The redditor said that another stereotypical example of this would be a horror movie where the characters get warned by the locals not to enter an abandoned, haunted house, but they do it anyway. If the characters didn’t do this, there would be no need for the movie in the first place.
Bored Panda also wanted to learn more about Timothy’s viewing preferences. “To be honest, I'm a person who would rather watch a TV series rather than a movie. When I do watch one, it's a comedy, so being stupid is basically required.”
They added: “I just want to tell everyone, that y'all should watch anything you want, don't let anyone insult you for what you watch.”
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RedstonekPL’s thread got over 73.5k upvotes, more than 23k comments, and got 112 awards (which had us thinking whether Christmas has come early since everyone’s in such a giving mood).
If everyone were perfect and behaved rationally, movies would end very quickly because problems would get solved or avoided almost immediately. However, this would make for incredibly boring movies.
In fact, you could argue that the essence of any film (or any story, to be honest) is that there are challenges and issues to overcome and that things don’t go according to plan.
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Science fiction author James Blish coined and film critic Roger Ebert popularized the term ‘idiot plot’ where everything could be resolved in the blink of an eye if the characters weren’t, well, ‘idiots.’
Idiot plots don’t allow thinking, asking the right questions, or behaving like a normal human being, otherwise, the plot would fall apart. No plot. No movie. No big blockbuster and millions of dollars in revenue.
However, keep in mind that far from everyone behaves rationally all the time in real life: we don’t magically solve all of our problems even though we could. If we suddenly found out that we’re the protagonists in our own movies, is there something that we’d do differently? Would our movies end in 10 minutes or 10 hours?
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