Electric Bone Flute
Troubadour
There is a cycle of Polish jokes that some Jews used to tell about a city named Chelm, where everyone is an idiot. The plots of such jokes tend to be what Damon Knight, author of To Serve Man, calls a "second-order idiot plot;" you cannot by definition tell a Chelm story (whose modern day, American equivalent may or may not involve a Man from Florida) without everyone being an idiot.
Maybe there is a race of idiots, like Orcs. Maybe someone has an idiocy-inducing powers or wields an idiocy-inducing device like that one-hour Dexter's Lab special where Mandark makes himself the smartest man alive by making everyone else dumber. Maybe there's an idiocy-inducing substance that has been administered to a key character in the plot. I don't necessary mean low intelligence either; I've seen stories where certain actions cannot be conceived of by chosen individuals because of their programming. Has any writer out there ever noticed that their plot requires people to act dumb, and rather than "fixing" the plot, decided to double down and add a plot device that involves literally making the relevant parties idiots?
Maybe there is a race of idiots, like Orcs. Maybe someone has an idiocy-inducing powers or wields an idiocy-inducing device like that one-hour Dexter's Lab special where Mandark makes himself the smartest man alive by making everyone else dumber. Maybe there's an idiocy-inducing substance that has been administered to a key character in the plot. I don't necessary mean low intelligence either; I've seen stories where certain actions cannot be conceived of by chosen individuals because of their programming. Has any writer out there ever noticed that their plot requires people to act dumb, and rather than "fixing" the plot, decided to double down and add a plot device that involves literally making the relevant parties idiots?