Basic Trope: An idiot or moderately intelligent character plays the role of the smart one only because others around them are more stupid.
- Straight:
- Alice is The Ditz whose ideas are poorly thought out, but she's smarter than her friends, who don't think at all and are Super Gullible, while Alice requires at least a token effort to be fooled.
- Hiro is an Idiot Hero who is The Smart Guy of his team mainly because he has some sense of self-preservation, while the others are largely Too Dumb to Live.
- Exaggerated: Alice is a Womanchild who is stupider than some children, but she's still smarter than her friends, who can only say their names.
- Justified:
- Alice is an adult while her friends are literal children, so it's expected that she's smart compared to them.
- Alice and her friends are all children, but Alice is a preteen, while her friends are toddlers.
- Alice is stupid, but is willing to improve herself, while her friends are Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance.
- Inverted:
- Alice and her friends are all idiots, but Alice is especially so, being a Too Dumb to Live Womanchild that the others have to keep out of trouble.
- Alice is incredibly intelligent; however, she's only above average compared to her friends, who are super geniuses.
- Subverted: Alice seems more intelligent than her friends on the surface, but she's later revealed to be a Know-Nothing Know-It-All who is just as stupid, if not stupider, than her friends.
- Averted: Alice isn't especially smart or dumb compared to her friends.
- Lampshaded: "In a group of brainless morons, the person with half a brain is the king."
- Invoked:
- Alice deliberately hangs out with people dumber than her to make herself feel smarter.
- A villain recruits only Stupid Crooks so that, by comparison, he looks like an evil genius.
- Defied: Alice decides to improve her own intelligence to become genuinely smart rather than settle for being the smartest idiot.
- Conversed: "Alice isn't really that smart. She just uses her brain sometimes, while everyone else doesn't use theirs at all."
- Deconstructed:
- While Alice is the smartest of her friends, because she's still an idiot, it results in her making boneheaded decisions that end up hurting her friends.
- Just because Alice is smarter than her friends doesn't mean they will listen to her. After all, plenty of stupid people ignore the warnings of actual smart people, and they aren't likely to listen to the words of someone who's merely less of an idiot than them.
- Played for Horror: Alice gets bitten by a zombie, and while it degrades her intelligence, it doesn't turn her mindless. While she's no genius, her slightly higher intelligence makes her able to coordinate the zombies and infect and/or eat more people than the typical mindless shambler.
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