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Hanlon's Razor

491 statements
90 feature instances
96 referencing feature instances

Hanlon's Razor	type	FeatureClass
Hanlon's Razor	label	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor	page	HanlonsRazor
Hanlon's Razor	comment	A corollary to Finagle's Law which seems to have almost infinite applications in writing comedy: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Ignorance of Hanlon's Razor is one of the more common forms of Genre Blindness. However, applying the Rule of Shades of Grey ("No rule is universally valid, including this one"), Hanlon's Razor is often stated this way: Don't assume malice when stupidity is an adequate explanation. At least, not the first time. Many, many plots disregard it with cheerful abandon. This can be justified if the plot involves an Ancient Conspiracy, Government Conspiracy, or similar antagonist with major ability to operate behind the scenes that makes the character question each and every occurence. The existence of a powerful, secretive, and malicious cabal makes for juicier storytelling than the idea that something bad happened because one of the people in power was lazy, short-sighted, impulsive, or just plain stupid. Of course, THEY would prefer that you believe THEM to be stupid instead of evil. Most aversions involve someone saying that the noise you heard was just the wind. Sometimes, the villain is both stupid and malicious at the same time. Granted, it does have a corollary of sorts, Grey's Law:note A variant of Clarke's Third Law Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Hanlon's Razor relies on the assumption that ignorance in and of itself isn't malicious, which often doesn't fly in a court of actual law (either way, it still led to disaster, so it still needs to be punished). It also doesn't account for malicious actions taken to conceal ignorance — which is Truth in Television; see the Blue Code of Silence — or when malicious actions are being done but the men doing said actions are stupid and incompetent themselves and caught in bad timing, or when malicious actions are being done but the people doing them might be ignorant about how they might be negatively affected, possibly even more so than the people they intended to harm. Though one could just note that the law is about attributing motives, until the actual motives are proven, in which case the law is moot. In the war between Romanticism and Enlightenment, Hanlon's Razor is decidedly on the side of Enlightenment (if most bad things are the result of stupidity, incompetence, and ignorance, then one can make the future better through education and good design/idiot-proofing). Not to be confused with Occam's Razor, although the two can end up being invoked together; many conspiracy theories, for example, assume complicated scenarios based on malicious intent to explain things which the two Razors would prefer to attribute to simple events based on incompetence. See also No Delays for the Wicked. Note that the phenomenon of Trolling, in all its forms, specifically contradicts this law (though trolling by design does adhere to Grey's Law). The Trope Namer was Robert J. Hanlon, who contributed the quote to one of Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law books in 1980. However, the idea is much older, with Goethe writing a similar sentence in 1774's The Sorrows of Young Werther. See also Poe's Law and Troll Fic. Note: this article mainly discusses the Hanlon's Razor influence in media (Real Life section notwithstanding), for a more detailed analysis of the concept and implications of the razor itself, please see its article on Rational Wiki.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_13652756	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_13652756	comment	Finding Nemo operates on this trope to a huge extent; the otherwise friendly dentist believes he has actually rescued the lame Nemo from the dangers of the reef, when what he has actually done is tear him away from his loving father. Likewise, the main antagonist is a hyperactive little girl who simply doesn't realize that if she shakes a baggie with a little fish inside too hard, she'll kill the poor fish. In both cases, simple human ignorance creates the impression for more helpless creatures that Humans Are Cthulhu.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_145d53f0	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_145d53f0	comment	Five Nights at Freddy's: The management of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria are either the most incompetent bunch of Corrupt Corporate Executives on the far side of Aperture Science for not destroying the homicidal animatronics that are causing the downfall of their company or they are Card Carrying Villains who willfully hire people just so the animatronics can kill them. Regardless of which, if an employee is discovered dead by the janitors, they clean and bleach the carpets, hide the body and file a Missing Persons report in a few months. Note that this isn't some clandestine cover-up, it's their advertised company policy.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_194b501b	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_194b501b	comment	In The Infinite Loops, this trope (more specifically, Grey's Law) is why Billy is considered a Malicious Looping Entity. He's not malicious in any way, nor is he a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and he doesn't really have a goal at all. However, he keeps doing stuff that causes horrible consequences because he's just. That. Stupid.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_1b386512	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_1b386512	comment	In Ranma Â½ this is the ultimate cause of Ranma and Ryogaâ€™s rivalry as neither one is wholly in the right or wrong. While Ranma did knock Ryoga into the spring, he had just just been knocked into a spring himself, so the only thing he had on his mind at the time was delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on his father. So while Ranma does at least bear partial responsibility, ultimately he is guilty of negligence, not deliberate intent, and Ryoga partly shares the blame by following him to the cursed springs in the first place. Even before this Ranma is Brutal Honesty, but Ryoga took his blunt observations as Ranma teasing and bullying him despite him repeatedly walking Ryoga to and from his house. Even the bread feud was less Ranma stealing Ryogaâ€™s food and more winning a free for all. A huge number of misunderstandings with Akane and Ranma are entirely this trope. The big problem for this couple is one word: communication. On more than one occasion, Ranma actively tries to help Akane, and the audience witnesses this, but Akane isn't aware. Since Ranma is so consistently disrespectful, she just assumes he's being vindictive or bullying her when it's much more likely actual help. It also doesn't help his case that 9 out of 10 times when Akane gets like this, Ranma then deliberately acts like an arse. This isn't to say either side is more right, but Ranma doesn't communicate his intentions well at all and responds to anger with petulance, and Akane constantly invokes the point this trope tries to disprove by seemingly always assuming malice on Ranma's part no matter the situation. On the flip side of this argument is Shampoo, someone who seems to always assume kind intent with everything Ranma does even when he is being manipulative or stupid.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_1beda93b	comment	Sluggy Freelance in general could be considered a big example of Hanlon's Razor. Half the story arcs in the series wouldn't exist if it weren't for people making incredibly stupid decisions. Though that particular example was a subversion, they thought the Ghouls were caused by some idiot unleashing a zombie plague, when in actuality the Ghouls were a Horde of Alien Locusts that had taken human form.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_1eb0bbe	comment	Mr. Jones (2019): In-Universe. Orwell is initially unsure whereas the famine is deliberately engineered by the Soviet authorities, or if it's the consequence of poor logistics and organization in Ukraine.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_21ec74db	comment	Better Off Ted: While Veridian Dynamics are indeed involved in projects of dubious moral character (killer pumpkins, the bunny that will 'snuggle' everyone within a 5-mile radius, etc.), nearly every bad company policy or consumer product is usually done without any intentional malice. The episode "Racial Sensitivity" is probably the best invocation of the trope.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_22126d33	comment	Andor: Imperial toady Syril Karn kicks off the events of the series and gets a lot of people killed with his obsessive investigation of Cassian Andor. But he's not evil, and he doesn't cause all this chaos purposefully; he's just really stupid, overeager, and incapable of taking "no" for an answer.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_22d87fc9	comment	Invoked on That '70s Show when Charlie sees Kitty naked. Kelso advises him to walk in on Red naked: that way, Red will think he's an idiot rather than a pervert. It backfires when he accidentally walks in on Kitty naked again.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_234b21a7	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_234b21a7	comment	Both the 1951 and 2008 versions of The Day The Earth Stood Still have Klaatu admonish humans for being irresponsible, not outright malicious.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_247422c7	comment	Mentioned in the Honor Harrington book Crown of Slaves.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_2593556	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_2593556	comment	In Fear No Evil, a My Hero Academia fanfic, All for One put a ton of resources into hiding his son Izuku's existence from Humarise because he knew they were obsessed with the Quirkless. This included bribing recruiters to look the other way, using his pet Mad Scientist to be his son's pediatrician and hiding his son's information on the Quirk Registry. All of it undone by a middle school Bakugou deciding to be a dick to Izuku by signing him up for Humarise's mailing list.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_261c8d3f	comment	The Simpsons: Every destructive act Homer Simpson does can be attributed to him being stupid, an asshole, or a stupid asshole. Even when he tries to do right, his bumbling can lead to a lot of chaos before he can even make clear that he wants to make things right, let alone actually pulling said act through. And many of these times when he's trying to do things right, it's because the rest of the family (or even the town) has pretty much given up on him. In the Treehouse of Horror episodes this evolves into full-blown Grey's Law, with Homer being such a stupid asshole that he brings, at worst, the annihilation of all mankind, and he still can't comprehend his role in this horror even when he's told about it (at the absolute best he notices what he did way too late and gives a little "uh-oh"). To a lesser degree than Homer, pretty much the whole of Springfield may fall in this trope occasionally, as they tend to be gullible, shortsighted and selfish enough as to completely overlook the consequences of their collective actions. Even when they aren't actively being jerks as a whole.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_36ee2abe	comment	Paranoia. As deadly as the world of Alpha Complex is, the real threats aren't those out to get you, but the whole incompetency of the system. The Friend Computer wants to help you, not kill you, but unfortunately it isn't able to do that properly. Shortsightedness, competing interests, and general incompetence destroy the world. There is a note on the game mastering section that it's okay for the game master can play Alpha Complex as incredibly competent in moments in which he believes it would be scarier or more annoying to the players.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_3aabfec3	comment	Almost every episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers completely ignored and subverted this rule. Are environmental or social problems the result of people not understanding the consequences of their actions, or poor judgement, or short-sightedness? Of course not, they're caused by mutant villains spreading pollution deliberately... because they're evil. Not even because of greed which is deliberately malicious yet much more realistic (with the exception of Sly Sludge, the only member of the rogues gallery who was interested in actually trying to profit from otherwise pointless pollution).
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Hanlon's Razor / int_3b34143f	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_3b34143f	comment	In the earlier books the Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter series could be argued to fit this trope. It was an incompetent organization run by an incompetent minister that meant well but ultimately was in urgent need of modernization. Book 5 and beyond reveals a lot more (although it starts incorporating more Head-in-the-Sand Management as the series progresses). Hogwarts isn't immune either with its hiring of Gilderoy Lockhart as no matter how questionable the decision seems in hindsight there really is no proof that Dumbledore knew the full depths of Lockhart's background.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_3cd90f30	comment	Arrested Development: The various crimes of the Bluth Family are done less out of actively criminal malice and more out of incredible amounts of short-sighted selfishness and both them and the people they surround themselves with being idiots. The event that starts the whole series — the discovery the family performed a multi-million-dollar theft of Bluth Industries' money — was done purely because the family wanted to live large and (except for maybe George Sr., and it's a big "maybe" considering the level of his lawyers) didn't knew this was a Federal-level crime.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_3defe34c	comment	This is a Discussed Trope in Proven Guilty, where it is shown that practitioners of Black Magic almost always get involved in it due to not fully understanding the consequences of their actions, until they get too Drunk on the Dark Side to turn back. Harry specifically mentions that most "bad guys" never want to be bad guys, and often don't even realize that they are.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_3f633fb4	comment	Cracked: An article on 9/11 conspiracy theories claims "There are basically two views on the subject, and I intend to provide both equally." Neither view supported in the article is that the conspiracy theorists are actually correct, so that leaves, "They're liars," or "They're stupid." At the end, the writer subverts it by concluding that "Truthers" are both liars and stupid. Another Cracked article referring to a supposedly haunted bridge where dogs commit suicide, gives us this gem: This article about Kanye West, written after some of his more controversial actions, theorizes that he "might just be retarded".
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Hanlon's Razor / int_41b0198a	comment	Harry Dresden has been both a beneficiary and a victim of this trope in a few instances; in Turn Coat, the Gatekeeper says he can't decide if Harry is a truly brilliant Diabolical Mastermind or a blundering imbecile. Harry just says "Dude," and indicates his currently heavily bandaged head wound, just one of the the many injuries he's constantly getting. In Grave Peril, a big moment for Morgan is his acceptance that the many times Harry has flouted the Laws of Magic or been part of some kind of disaster are not due to deliberate malice, but due to arrogance, impulsiveness and recklessness. This is a Discussed Trope in Proven Guilty, where it is shown that practitioners of Black Magic almost always get involved in it due to not fully understanding the consequences of their actions, until they get too Drunk on the Dark Side to turn back. Harry specifically mentions that most "bad guys" never want to be bad guys, and often don't even realize that they are.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_4c095a1f	comment	Megatron from The Transformers gives Starscream the opportunity to use this as a defense when they are betrayed by the Triple Changers, who then take over the Decepticons.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_4cc06582	comment	Hot Fuzz: The Milkman Conspiracy of the Sandford Neighborhood Watch Alliance has been committing wanton murder for decades for the sake of making extremely damned sure that Sandford will win the Village of the Year award. The targets of said murders are people who are extremely tiny and petty possibilities to potentially ruin the town's chances, such as printing the local newspaper full of typos, being a bad actor, having an annoying laugh, being a street performer (a living statue or a crusty juggler) and owning a McMansion. When Sergeant Nicholas Angel first catches wind of the NWA's conspiracy existing, he creates an elaborate theory for all of the murders involving a Real Estate Scam and when the truth comes to light he is both baffled and horrified that the town became the murder capital of England for "no reason! No reason whatsoever!"note Furthering Angel's point, Danny (Chief Butterman's son) eventually gives the Chief a "The Reason You Suck" Speech telling him that his deceased wife (the reason he is doing this) would be horrified if she was still alive.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_4d1ba412	comment	In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Doc despised Monster Marty for years for seemingly selling out the Vigilante Club, but forgives him when he discovers that Marty did it because his monster form makes him dumb. This leads to the Aesop: "It's better for people to think that you're stupid, than to think you're a jerk."
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Hanlon's Razor / int_5132212e	comment	Black Beauty discusses this; after the teenage Joe Green's ignorant handling of a delicate situation nearly kills the eponymous horse, one character tries to defend him on the basis that he didn't mean any harm, but another responds harshly that ignorance has caused more far more evil in the world than actual malice.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_52c8adde	comment	Inverting this seems to be almost instinctual to the Skaven in Gotrek & Felix. Any time one of Grey Seer Thanquol's underlings screws up his plans, Thanquol often assumes it's because of a conspiracy to remove him from power. He also applies this to his "eternal enemies", the eponymous duo, as he believes they set out specifically to ruin his day. When he finally meets Gotrek and Felix face to face, they have no idea who he is!
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Hanlon's Razor / int_544333c5	comment	Touched on in The Shadow Over Innsmouth
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Hanlon's Razor / int_5652e0b9	comment	In one episode of The League, Ruxin thinks Taco is trying to screw with him by manipulating him into sacrificing a great deal of time and money for an elaborate 5th wedding anniversary party for his wife, and Taco later gets Ruxin in trouble with his wife by showing her previously unseen footage of their wedding video. If it was another member of their group, it would seem plausible that it was done on purpose, but there's no way Taco would be capable of pulling off something like that, nor would he want to.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_5755b96a	comment	The Order of the Stick: Roy tells Miko that he had killed the evil lich Xykon. When she meets Xykon in the flesh (except, y'know, not), she immediately comes to the conclusion that Roy and the rest of the Order of the Stick are working for Xykon, and deceived her. The real explanation is that the Order didn't know how to destroy a lich: Xykon did get destroyed, but regenerated from his phylactery after the Order were long gone. Miko's Lawful Stupid nature causes her to attribute anything to malice rather than incompetence, particularly since she embodies the Prosecutor's Fallacy in dismissing any explanation that doesn't fit her preconceived conclusion that Belkar Bitterleaf and everyone working with him is evil, evil, evil, despite evidence to the contrary showing that Belkar is just the Token Evil Teammate who's kept on a leash by the others. The ridiculous and paranoid theories she's forced to devise to hold to this viewpoint results in her invoking Grey's Law, when her willful ignorance that the Order of the Stick is not working for the bad guys becomes much, much more harmful to her homeland than any actual malice could have been. Murdering the city's ruler in the insane belief that he was working with Xykon because he was cooperating with Roy, who, as we all know, has to be evil, nearly murdering the ruler's heir because she assumes being proven wrong was just a test by the gods/a trick by Roy, and eventually stopping the founder of her order from defeating the villains and saving the city when her own incompetence leads her to destroy the stone he was guarding, killing her, saving the lives of the Big Bad and The Dragon, and dooming her homeland to Goblin occupation. Goblinkind did not have a patron god until they raised one themselves, are Always Chaotic Evil, and were given the worst lands. Redcloak believes that this is because the Jerkass Gods wanted them to slave away as a Cannon Fodder race, existing only to provide XP at the end of a cleric's weapon. His main motive is to take the entire world hostage to make the gods acknowledge them and become equal with the other races by force. The Chaotic Evil god Fenrir was their original patron, hence their alignment. He wanted a race of followers with short lives and high reproduction, but was too impatient to wait and abandoned them. Their lack of good land was simply due to careless planning.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_57ad0c07	comment	The Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil franchise appears to be a generic Evil Corporation, what with its using the T-Virus to experiment and attempt to create biological weapons. More often than not, the constant outbreaks of Zombie plagues are the result of massive stupidity and recklessness. Half the notes you find are employees questioning why they're building research facilities so close to Raccoon City or why they're wasting time with inefficient bioweapons. In addition, Umbrella's bioweaponry is a side-effect of its founder's search for eternal life and power.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_59da62aa	comment	Fallout: New Vegas: Despite the presence of the aptly-named Chief Hanlon of the NCR Rangers, the situation involving him subverts Hanlon's Razor. The Chief, a veteran and hero of the First Battle of Hoover Dam is rightly displeased with the course that the buildup to the Second Battle is taking, namely being done in the name of politics rather than actual benefit to the Republic at the hands of President Kimball and General Oliver. When the Courier discovers that someone at Camp Golf has been sending out falsified reports indicating that NCR positions are compromised, resulting in a number of deaths caused by the mismanagement of resources trying to solve the nonexistent issues, their investigation reveals that Hanlon was the one falsifying the reports. He wanted to put pressure on the top brass to end the Mojave campaign and pull back their forces before they got innocent people killed going up against Caesar's Legion, only to end up causing unneeded deaths himself in the process. Whether he's allowed to continue with his sabotage, gets exposed as a saboteur (which leads to him committing suicide), or is convinced to stop the sabotage, Hanlon never wanted more people to die, only to get everybody home safe.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_5c897f4a	comment	Schlock Mercenary: Subverted. During the Kssthrata Takeover campfire story, when Petey started getting conflicting orders from 3 different officers, he assumed it to be a communication issue at first. During the "Mallcop Command" arc, Tagon allows their client to negotiate away their weapons and armor, making their jobs much harder. Shodan angrily asks if Tagon has turned into an adrenaline junkie who "needs more and more risk to get a fix." And then he realizes that Tagon is just a terrible negotiator.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_60156176	comment	In the Vorkosigan Saga, a number of seemingly-elaborate schemes are either purely or partially the results of somebody screwing up. The initial conflict between Barrayarrans and Quaddies in Diplomatic Immunity is a result of a panicked general giving stupid orders and Gupta, the decoy antagonist, flailing around in an attempt to draw law enforcement's attention to the main villain. In Komarr, every death the antagonists cause is the result of a screw-up — first a weapon malfunctioning during a smoke test, and later a man left chained to a railing with (unknown to his captors) insufficient oxygen supplies (because that guy was too careless to ensure his own safety). In A Civil Campaign, Ekaterin spends a significant portion of the plot being hassled by a whole host of well-meaning but dimwitted people, who cause her quite as much trouble as anyone who might wish her harm.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_64d714a	comment	In Spaced Invaders, you have a group of Martians who while close to Earth on Halloween, overhear a broadcast of The War of the Worlds (1938). They end up mistaking it for an actual Martian war against Earth and proceed to join in the fight. In the end, a little girl named Kathy, who befriends them after discovering their mistake, summed it up best.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_664ed909	comment	Yue Qingyuan unintentionally cuts off his spouse Shen Qingqiu of any financial support or domestic support in SV Wishes. This wasnâ€™t done to punish him. Yue Qingyuan just got used to Shen Qingqiu handling the money and the servants throughout their marriage. He didnâ€™t realize that by demoting Shen Qingqiu, he as the Lord of the Household or the new First Husband, Liu Qingge would have to give him the income to survive on and command the servants on the formerâ€™s behalf. The neglectful Yue Qingyuan and the unintentionally ignorant Liu Qingge accidentally leave Shen Qingqiu destitute in own home and allow for the servants to mistreat him. Liu Qingge finally helps Shen Qingqiu when he comes to own his position as First Husband and gave Shen Qingqiu new servants and money. Yue Qingyuan still continued in his neglect and ignorance until it was too late.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_6a8aff51	comment	King Elhokar in The Stormlight Archive is an incompetent, weak king who gets in the way of the protagonists' plans, such as faking an assassination attempt to prove that there really are assassins after him, and throwing Kaladin in jail for accusing a high-ranking lord of a serious crime. Speaking to him as a person rather than a king reveals that he's very insecure about ruling a recently established kingdom (it was founded by his father within his lifetime and he only became king after his fathers assassination), and his actions are the result of poor judgement and an inability to determine which of his advisors have his or the kingdom's best interests in mind. Even several people who dislike him acknowledge that he's really not a bad guy, he's just a terrible king, but with how much power he has his intentions are largely secondary to the results.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_7257afca	comment	Invoked in Sword Art Online Abridged. The big twist revealed at the end of the first season is that the whole "death game" scenario is actually the result of a Game-Breaking Bug that popped up when Akihiko Kayaba was rushing to finish SAO. Since he was losing his mind from stress and sleep deprivation, he decided to lock ten thousand players in the game and present himself as a villainous mastermind forcing them all to Win to Exit, instead of admitting that he was a colossal fuck-up. In general, the series bases much of its humor on demonstrating what actually happens when you trap the kind of people who play MMOs — particularly the toxic, idiotic players who either invoke Leeroy Jenkins tactics or don't get along well with other players — inside a game and force them to finish it. For one, it explains why 2,000 people died in the first month. Said explanation also being why Kayaba joins the game as Heathcliff, hoping that he can actually help them not kill themselves.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_7460586f	comment	Archer gets a lot of mileage out of "No, it was just incompetence." "And that makes it better?" "... Doesn't it?"
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Hanlon's Razor / int_75149ccd	comment	The X-Wing Series in the greater Star Wars Legends continuity invokes this specifically. With a hugely stressful job, multispecies staffing, cheap and obsolete technology in places where the cutting edge would be better, and an enemy that will stop at nothing to exterminate them, several characters use this idea to defuse tensions among their squadmates. In some of the books, the trope is quoted verbatim.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_79d9b538	comment	The Palaververse: When talking about Saddle Arabian religion, they have dispensed with the razor for their Creator of the lands that surround them, going full God Is Evil, due to the horrific nature of the wildlife that encompasses their land:
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Hanlon's Razor / int_7b5f914a	comment	In Dumb and Dumber, the bad guys believe that Harry and Lloyd are some kind of master assassins out to get them, when really they're just two Lethally Stupid buffoons.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_7c48915b	comment	Gunnerkrigg Court: In chapter 38 it seems as if Annie's father is deliberately hurting her by attacking her fire-elemental half. Chapter 53 reveals he had no idea that Annie would be involved in what he was doing at all (he thought he was summoning his wife's spirit; unfortunately her life force passed on to Annie and that's what he was trying to pull closer to him) and he feels awful about almost killing her. Quite a few of his seemingly malicious acts can be credited to ignorance: He feels he "killed" his wife/Annie's mom because he couldn't stop her from dying — her problem was supernatural and he barely acknowledges that aspect of the world exists despite being married to a supernatural being with two supernatural girlfriends and working for an institution that studies the supernatural which is filled with unusual people including an honest-to-goodness ghost and is next door to a magical forest filled with genuine gods and monsters. Annie felt he abandoned her because he resented her — his guilt made him assume she hated him and his absence would be for the best. In the lead-up to the "attack" on Annie he only just started researching Grim Reapers while looking for answers to his wife's death and really had no idea what to expect — Annie had been in touch with them for years and could have summoned them if he knew (though the beings her dad met were quite different from the ones we've seen). The spoiler'd issues could be described as "Hanlon's Razor" meets Poor Communication Kills considering how much these two assume about each other "Annie must hate me because I killed her beloved mother"/"Father must hate me because I killed his beloved wife"/both: but I hate myself more for what I did to them while being too awkward and estranged (and British) to talk to one another before they hurt themselves/each other.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_82c5dce1	comment	"Have those who work evil no knowledge?" (Book of Psalms 53:4), making this trope Older Than Feudalism.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_834197b2	comment	Inverse Hanlon's Razor still applies too, regarding the Emperor's treatment of his sons, which ended up resulting in the crapsackiness of the setting. In short, the Emperor treated several of the Primarchs with such horrendous incompetence, in many cases directly causing their Start of Darkness, that readers find it increasingly difficult to believe he wasn't deliberately trying to turn them against him for some unfathomable reason.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_84823809	comment	Kaeloo: Stumpy normally gets away with destructive acts because everyone knows he's probably just doing them out of sheer stupidity. However, this starts to get subverted in later episodes since he starts to intentionally do malicious things for the sake of being mean.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_8763ca4e	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_8763ca4e	comment	Tucker & Dale vs. Evil runs on Hanlon's Razor, with each side thinking the other is murderous/suicidal lunatics, when it's all (until the final act) a series of deadly accidents and misunderstandings.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_8d318bad	comment	In Super Mario RPG, Booster wants to marry Peach after accidentally kidnapping her. However, it quickly becomes clear that he has no idea what marriage is, and just thought that a wedding party sounded fun. In the end he goes through with the marriage, eats the cake, and leaves, apparently not even realizing that a wedding involves, you know, marrying someone — Peach leaves with Mario at the end, without a fuss.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_8dd0bbcc	comment	A Series of Unfortunate Events: The line between willful villainy and pure incompetence is rather thin, especially since some incompetent and stupid characters become pawns in what seems like a Gambit Roulette.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_90c73dda	comment	This trope is mentioned in the Animorphs side story Visser. While recounting her past during a trial, Edriss notes that she had potentially discovered an ideal host species for the Yeerks, but was reassigned to a dead end position. She implies to her inquisitors that her rival Visser Three was responsible, but then notes to herself that it was more likely incompetence than conspiracy that led to her discovery being ignored.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_91e45f5	comment	An interesting version comes up in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney: it becomes a plot point that a victim was sent a poisoned stamp, and it is presumed that having sniffed out the trap, he kept it in a frame to preserve it as evidence, which contradicts with the notion that he poisoned himself with the stamp after figuring it out. The reality is that he didn't know the stamp was poisoned, and he only kept it in a frame because his daughter liked the characters on it.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_924bb56e	comment	Dollhouse contains a powerful inversion. Topher and Boyd are investigating the enemy's hideout and come across the prototypes of the mobile memory removal/implantation device that Topher had invented. Boyd picks up one of the units and tries to use it on Topher, and notes that it doesn't work.note This ends up being because the unit's battery wasn't charged. Topher takes it away from him, assuming he was just being an idiot; it turns out he's actually one of the villains.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_9ba382b	comment	In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, the Shriekers seem to be deliberately preventing the protagonists from escaping: disabling their vehicles, destroying radios, damaging power stations. At first, it's assumed that they've become intelligent. Gradually, the heroes realize that they're blindly attacking anything that radiates heat, being unable to distinguish between food and electronics.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_9d4fbe8e	comment	In Freeman's Mind 2, after Barney's suggested route through the canals results in Gordon being a sitting duck for the Civil Protection cops, who are able to easily surround and shoot down at him from high ground as he tries to swim and navigate around obstacles, Gordon is left legitimately unable to tell whether Barney is just a bumbling idiot who has no idea what he's doing, or a diabolical genius who deliberately tried to get Gordon killed. Gordon also feels this way about the entire Resistance, as it seems so incompetently run that he can't help but wonder if it's actually secretly run by the very government it's ostensibly resisting as a way to easily find and kill anyone who opposes their regime.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_a3c14f85	comment	Don't Look Up: When Kate talks with Yule and his Conspiracy Theorist friends about the government's response to the comet, she shoots down a couple of their theories, saying, "The truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for." Of course, one theory involving a Sleeper Starship is later proven right, but her point stands given what happens to the people on board.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_a4a6b86a	comment	In Code Geass, this trope explains: Why Clovis ends up fearing that the Emperor will consider him to be disloyal if he finds out about C.C., despite Bartley's indication later on that they had no traitorous intentions against the crown. Why Clovis becomes such a bad viceroy in the first place - in the drama CD where he tells Schneizel and Cornelia that he's accepted the position, he tells them that he'll just use "the usual methods" of rule - he's not smart enough to think about it and realize that what everyone around him wants him to do is wrong. Lelouch and C.C., and their combined role in what happens with Euphemia around episode 22. She hadn't been as forthcoming about what she knew about her previous contractors, and Lelouch's extremely recent headaches when attempting to use Geass should have tipped him off, since he'd seen what had become of Mao and his geass. Suzaku's reaction and hatred of Lelouch is also an example, though considering the circumstances, it's probably the most justifiable, particularly since Lelouch just went with it. When Lelouch gets captured by Schneizel and Kanon after his allegedly "private" meeting with Suzaku, he blames Suzaku for it, even though Suzaku really had no idea he was being followed; though this is also arguably the most justified, as Suzakuâ€™s had already sold Lelouch out once, and even previously used Nunnally to try to entrap him, and his long history of fighting against Lelouch doesnâ€™t give him any credibility to think otherwise. Well... A good chunk of the other characters end up doing this afterward. Long story short, Lelouch and Suzaku manage to take advantage of the whole thing to create a Genghis Gambit where they take over the world and have Lelouch's death bring peace, which works. Ending on possibly one last example where Nunnally's grief over her dead brother is ignored by a whole crowd surrounding them, who are just cheering for Suzaku disguised as Zero right above them for putting an end to Lelouch apparently being a monstrous emperor. On that note, part of this is because Nunnally ended up figuring it all out at the very last second, while no one else is actually supposed to know. Kallen, and maybe Tohdoh, are implied to have figured it out as well.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_a5549ed0	comment	From The Bible: "Have those who work evil no knowledge?" (Book of Psalms 53:4), making this trope Older Than Feudalism. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." (Luke 23:34). Granted, it was for malice they crucified Jesus. They just didn't understand the magnitude of their mistake.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_a627ddb3	comment	In the movie, Samson and Sally, while the humans are hunting whales for food, Moby Dick states that "Mankind is not vicious, mankind is stupid!"
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Hanlon's Razor / int_a895e9d3	comment	In Portal 2, this is often used by fans to describe Wheatley, though it may or may not be accurate in canon. After being in charge of the facility for a while, it's a bit unclear whether or not he's just going along with it to cover up how incredibly inept he is. Whatever he may have become, GLaDOS is very clear that Wheatley was ingeniously designed to consistently make bad choices, to such a degree that the only times he does anything clever is when doing so would inadvertently make the situation worse or hasten his own downfall.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_ad29dc16	comment	This trope was one of the central tenets of All in the Family, especially regarding main character Archie Bunker. Though openly racist, sexist, conservative, and distrustful of anyone who wasn't a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man like himself (Jewish, gay, Catholic, Italian, Russian, communist, and liberal people were all fair game for his derision), the show often goes out of its way to show that Archie wasn't malicious, just uninformed and resistant to change. When genuinely hateful people showed up—such as an episode where a branch of the Ku Klux Klan moves into the neighborhood or one where Edith's gay Drag Queen friend Beverly is killed in a hate crime—Archie would be horrified at what happened and either try to keep them away from his family or comfort their victims. Later episodes also gave him a Freudian Excuse of an abusive father who taught him much of what he knew. It's part of what makes the character so appealing: he's not a bad guy, just a Book Dumb one.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_af7aead4	comment	Followed up years later on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver when John Oliver coined "Stupid Watergate": "the scandal where everyone wants to be a criminal mastermind, but they're hampered by the fact that they're all idiots."
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Hanlon's Razor / int_b12e31c6	comment	Played with in Star Trek: Federation. The main villain in the future sections is an uploaded intelligence of a man, Adrik Thorson, who once tried to force Zefram Cochrane to weaponize the warp drive into a physically-infeasible "warp bomb" and is fixated upon it. His efforts to hack Starfleet looking for data on the warp bomb were detected, leading Admiral Kabreigny to question if there might not be something there, and tighten security. The heightened security convinced Thorson that Starfleet knew more and was hiding it, while his determined and repeated efforts to get at essentially useless data drove Kabreigny and Starfleet Security into fits of paranoia, to the point she couldn't trust Kirk because his fibbing on a report to protect Cochrane's privacy made him possible a member of The Conspiracy.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_b212951e	comment	This is a major theme of The Outer Worlds. The Board is not actively evil or malicious, and certainly isn't trying to run the Halcyon System into the ground and get all their citizens killed or worse. They're just staggeringly incompetent at their jobs thanks to a mixture of poor training, nepotism, loss of personnel, and a total lack of oversight, with the result that they cause just as much damage (or more) with their brainless attempts at governance as they would with a deliberate genocide.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_b36952af	comment	In Cube this is played with but ultimately subverted, with the left-wing doctor's assumption that the Cube is part of some maniacal government plot, immediately shot down by the revelation that it's just a senseless project that no bureaucrat had the cojones to pull the plug on. Which, once the truth sinks in, she admits to being actually worse. It is subverted because the whole actively kidnapping and putting people in life-threatening situations is a bit too much like the aforementioned Blue Code to ignore and deliberately hurtful to conceal the incompetence part.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_b4fe32c9	comment	Dib from Invader Zim put it best, in regards to a man stuck in a chicken costume who is convinced he has turned into a Half-Human Hybrid:
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Hanlon's Razor / int_b9e26f05	comment	Fargo and Jerry Lundegaard's extremely ill thought-out plan to try to cover up his attempt to pull fraud on the GMAC for reasons that are never explained, and probably didn't worked out. The plan, as far as he's envisioned it, is to kidnap his wife and use the ransom money to pay back the GMAC loan he'd lost. The fact he's going to traumatize his wife, that the people he hired to perform the kidnapping may be Ax-Crazy and greedy because they are criminals, and that the GMAC will just find it more suspicious that he just hands back the money after dragging them around for weeks with badly-made (because it's forged) paperwork for vehicles that do not exist has not occured to him at all and he spends the whole film trying (very poorly) to bluff his way out of trouble.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_bcadd7cb	comment	Warhammer 40,000: On the one hand, your homeworld may be left to the predations of mind-shattering horrors simply because someone in the Imperial bureaucracy misfiled something and forgot your planet existed. On the other hand, if they did remember, they might order your world destroyed anyway because you've had contact with the aforementioned gribbly monsters. In this setting, there is malice and stupidity in abundance, which helps the body count climb ever higher. Inverse Hanlon's Razor still applies too, regarding the Emperor's treatment of his sons, which ended up resulting in the crapsackiness of the setting. In short, the Emperor treated several of the Primarchs with such horrendous incompetence, in many cases directly causing their Start of Darkness, that readers find it increasingly difficult to believe he wasn't deliberately trying to turn them against him for some unfathomable reason.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_bd1b79c6	comment	Sarah Z: Sarah's video essay about Idiocracy inverts this, as she makes the argument that the film is too willing to dismiss instances of genuine malice as simple idiocy, and has no broad thesis for why its society became dominated by uneducated louts other than "stupid people are just like that." She claims that in real life, societal dysfunction is often the result of people who do know that what they're doing is wrong, and simply don't care. Well-educated and logical people are capable of making incredibly selfish decisions, and stupid people can often have bad intentions. They contrast this with Sorry to Bother You, where CEO Steve Lift is portrayed as a pretentious, hedonistic moron, but this doesn't prevent him from being shown as evil.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_bd310eaa	comment	El Goonish Shive: One story arc had a griffin from another dimension looking for her wife Andrea, who had apparently gotten stuck in this one. The griffin suspects that the only reason Andrea would have gotten trapped is if she had been kidnapped and imprisoned, which almost leads to hostilities, but it turns out Andrea just has a terrible sense of direction, and is perfectly fine.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_bd418357	comment	StarCraft 2 has a few examples. Wings of Liberty: Tychus Findlay was in prison and given the opportunity to leave by simply taking a deal with Arcturus Mengsk: kill Sarah Kerrigan. It's very clear that this wasn't a good idea and that the universe would be doomed, but Tychus didn't exactly think the deal through when he took it, nor did he know all the details since he never bothered to get into it. Raynor's Raiders meet Doctor Ariel Hanson on Agria, where Raynor helps the civilians escape being eaten and infested by the Zerg. At the end of the questline, you are contacted by Executor Selendis who warns you that the colonists are infested. You are then given the choice of who to fight alongside, and both basically fall into this trope Choosing to work with Hanson has you working against the clock to save Terran camps, destroy the shield generators for the Planet Cracker, and ultimately taking the Planet Cracker down (Selendis survives). In the end, it turns out that Dr. Hanson had a cure, and it works. If the Terrans were infested, they aren't anymore. As a result, Selendis may have had good reason to attack the settlement to start, but she wasn't doing so out of malice, but simply she believed a cure was impossible and glassing the planet seemed like a better solution than remotely looking into it. Choosing to work with Selendis has Raynor call Selendis off to attack only the infested Terrans. You run through infested camps and destroy all of the infested Terrans and structures you can. Ultimately, when you do actually return to the Hyperion, you're forced to kill Dr. Hanson as her infestation has spread too much and she is as monstrous as any other infested. You can take away one of two possible thoughts. A ), Hanson was too ideological and nearly destroyed her own allies as a result of her vainly trying to find a cure for something that doesn't exist or B ), that the cure in the other version of this mission could have been finished in time, but Selendis and Raynor were so hasty that they effectively killed dozens of Terrans in the false idea that this was a better solution. It is ultimately up to the player which ending was more justifiable and if Raynor was correct in his decision, as the game never brings the missions up after this. If the player sides against Tosh, he doesn't take it well and outright tries to kill Raynor, but is killed by Nova who proves herself far superior an assassin. The problem with Tosh's anger is that he immediately assumes Raynor deserves death over betraying him, when the real problem is that Tosh was giving extremely vague answer to anything Raynor told him, making trusting the man very difficult. They didn't even find out that Tosh was a Spectre until they got a secret message from Nova Terra, so Tosh should be far angrier with himself about not just being up front and less at Raynor who makes a judgement call because of limited information. In the final mission of the Protoss mini-campaign, we discover, to the horror of the last remaining Protoss (and by extension, life in the universe not controlled by Amon), that they effectively doomed the universe because of their desire to kill Kerrigan. Zeratul's death speech even implies that they couldn't have known. In an inverted example, Mengsk has long been held not responsible for the destruction of Tarsonis in the first game, an event that led to the creation of The Queen of Blades. In the end of the Rebellion missions, after the adjutant that has a recording of Mengsk blatantly ordering leaving Tarsonis to its doom is played on air, even the media turns on Mengsk and he is finally unmasked as the demon he is to the public. Heart of the Swarm: Zagara is the first boss on Char in the Heart of the Swarm mission. The goal is to hatch Zerg and proceed to defeat Zagara, who is doing her best to try and kill Kerrigan. This battle could have been avoided if, instead of being super intimidating and threatening Kerrigan, Zagara told her that she was doing what Kerrigan told her to do in the first place. In the first of three missions on Kaldir, Kerrigan tries to collect her brood, only to find Protoss covering the planet. The Protoss quickly begin trying to kill the Zerg, so Kerrigan fights back. Eventually, Kerrigan is forced to destroy a series of escape ships to avoid the Nerazim from Shakuras arriving with an attack force which, at this point, would be way more than Kerrigan could safely handle. The problem comes in when speaking to her captive, Lasarra, who reveals she is one of many colonists who were trying to terraform the planet to make it hospitable to Protoss when you showed up and murdered a bunch of colonists. Unfortunately, she still threatens Kerrigan with the Golden Armada, so big surprise when Kerrigan destroys the only chance of their vessel reaching the Protoss. Kerrigan was no longer the Queen of Blades, so it's highly likely that had the colonists simply backed off and allowed Kerrigan to escape without incident, they all wouldn't be dead, but they immediately assumed Kerrigan was there to kill them and kept threatening her. This plan actually does work for Valerian Mensgk, who asks Kerrigan for time to evacuate the Terran civilians before she attacks his father. She gives him the time. Legacy of the Void: Artanis feels ultimately responsible for the death of Zeratul and the corruption of the Protoss on Aiur, but the truth is that he did consider Zeratul's words. It was Selendis who refused to listen to Zertaul due to him being branded as a traitor, and ultimately scorned everything he said which likely incited the other Protoss to her side and gave Artanis no choice to argue. The only fair argument one has is that neither Selendis nor Artanis had any evidence other than Zeratul's word, so both of them basically nearly doomed their species due to their incompetence.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_bd886ad	comment	Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law had a variation in an episode where Shaggy and Scooby-Doo get busted for drug possession because they were acting goofy, giggling a lot, and talking about having the munchies when a police officer stopped them. As Fred, Daphne and Velma explain to Harvey, that's just how Shag and Scoob behave normally; they aren't stoners, just food-obsessed idiots.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_be245531	comment	Discussed in Gotham Central when Gordon observes to Stacy that most criminals are not evil, just people who didn't consider the potential consequences of their actions.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_c09d77b1	comment	Sex House takes six people, almost all of them completely incompatible with each other, and essentially locks them inside to make sure they have as much sex as possible. The events of the series imply that the producers are not evil, just completely incompetent, idiotic, lazy, and cheap.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_c4282b71	comment	This is central to the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic Frigid Winds and Burning Hearts, where Princess Luna fears that her sister Celestia is secretly a manipulative tyrant. This Alternative Character Interpretation leads her to leap to conclusions and assume the worst. Similarly, other ponies tend to presume the worst about Luna, leaping to the conclusion that she's reverting to her old, Nightmarish ways... when those ways are mostly the result of history being Written by the Winners.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who: A weird variant of this in "The Daleks' Master Plan", where, although there is a Government Conspiracy, everyone in it is staggeringly incompetent. While running away from an assassin Mavic Chen sent, the Doctor and Steven run into a room where a teleportation experiment is taking place, and, due to the scientists not clearing the area, end up being accidentally blasted to the other end of the galaxy along with the MacGuffin. The Daleks constantly remind Chen of this for the rest of the story, asking him why he didn't stop scientific experiments on the station, but when they land on Mira they get sidetracked exterminating a bunch of lab mice that had also been teleported there because they aren't sure they aren't dangerous. Chen realises at this point that he's lost all control of the situation, and spends the rest of the story trying to convince the Daleks that he's still useful to them - mostly by trying to blame them for it - while becoming more and more stressed-out and unstable. Even when they find the Doctor in Ancient Egypt and draft a fellow Time Lord to fight him, everyone is so disorganised and out for themselves that the Doctor slips easily out of their clutches. Thanks to a satire-loving script editor applying this, in "The Deadly Assassin", the Time Lords - previously shown to be Crystal Spires and Togas Sufficiently Advanced Aliens controlling and puppeteering the Doctor with their near omniscient understanding of reality - are suddenly revealed to be a ritual-obsessed Punch-Clock Villain Obstructive Bureaucrat society where everyone has Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, based on the worst aspects of the British parliament and the worst aspects of university academia, where everyone clings to the symbolism of Time Lord mythology in the hope of making their trivial incompetence seem important. As a result, the Doctor's desire to leave the Time Lords goes from the mysterious persecution he was previously fleeing, and moves towards general disgust and boredom with his awful culture. Lots of fans are still unhappy about this.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_c4fa53cb	comment	In Jurassic Park, the sensors of the park are not set to warn about a nearly 200% increase in the dinosaur population (the result of a mutation in their DNA) because the designers did not wanted to spare the computer cycles (contrast with the willful evil of Dennis Nedry sabotaging the computers to rob the Park and John Hammond putting money ahead of human safety).
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Hanlon's Razor / int_cdc1e75a	comment	In The Andromeda Strain, a major faux pax that nearly causes The End of the World as We Know Itnote before the climactic Race Against the Clock to shut down the Wildfire lab's nuclear fail-safe before it went off and turned Andromeda (an organism that feeds on radiation) stronger happens because 1) standard procedure with Wildfire-class crises is to sterilize the area with a nuclear bomb and 2) a sliver of paper got in the way of the bell that warns of incoming telex messages in the lab's central communication room and the room's technicians never thought of checking that out even as they tore the machine apart to look over the rest of the electronics. The nuclear bomb order was delayed only because the President hesitated about dealing with Realpolitik.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_d2b52919	comment	Discussed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart during several skits in which the correspondents argue whether Fox News's misleading reporting is due to them being evil or stupid. Wyatt Cenac and John Oliver represent "Team Evil" and "Team Stupid", respectively. Followed up years later on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver when John Oliver coined "Stupid Watergate": "the scandal where everyone wants to be a criminal mastermind, but they're hampered by the fact that they're all idiots."
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Hanlon's Razor / int_d2bae484	comment	During season 10 of the American version of The Amazing Race, the smart (both had Master's degrees and one went to Harvard for undergrad), fit Cho brothers who ran towards the top of the pack at the beginning of the season formed a large alliance group with the back of the pack teams. Both the other teams and the audience assumed they were using the "goat" strategy which is, in essence, intentionally working to keep around weaker teams to give you a leg up once you get to the finale. note The term was coined by sister show Survivor where it's a more established strategy. Only one team on Amazing Race, Jason and Amy from season 22, have managed to pull it off. However, they weren't dragging along the weaker teams to thin out the crowd for themselves, they actually thought working with the weaker teams was a strategic move. This ended up being their downfall as well as the last of their allies weren't willing to repay their kindness of waiting around on them to finish and passed them up driving as soon as they got the chance.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_d9c602eb	comment	South Park hung a big lampshade on this trope in an episode debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. The existence of conspiracy theories is itself a government conspiracy; Washington failed to prevent twenty Muslim lunatics with box cutters killing 3,000 people, so they'd rather allow people to believe that they made it happen — it actually makes the government look more formidable and in control than it is. They do this because the conspiracy theorists are going to ignore them when they try to tell the truth, so they might as well play to that crowd as well.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_db96ded4	comment	The Legend of Korra: Mako is the root of the infamous Love Triangle due to his lying, dithering, and overall lack of tact, though it's clear he was not "a player," like Wu initially thinks; rather, he's got No Social Skills.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_dc25de3f	comment	Portal: Aperture Science may use human guinea pigs and have created the most malevolent, twisted AI in the history of their Earth, but it has been made painfully clear that they suffer from such staggering stupidity and way-out cloudcuckooland-thinking that there is no room for malice in their plans. In Portal 2, this is often used by fans to describe Wheatley, though it may or may not be accurate in canon. After being in charge of the facility for a while, it's a bit unclear whether or not he's just going along with it to cover up how incredibly inept he is. Whatever he may have become, GLaDOS is very clear that Wheatley was ingeniously designed to consistently make bad choices, to such a degree that the only times he does anything clever is when doing so would inadvertently make the situation worse or hasten his own downfall. Aperture founder Cave Johnson embraces willful ignorance in the belief that all scientific discovery occurs by accident, which would be hindered by competence. Does his deliberate stupidity make him more evil or does such a belief make him more stupid?
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Hanlon's Razor / int_dddb5ff9	comment	Burn After Reading: All of the murder and mayhem that occurs happens because both sides in a blackmail attempt believe the utterly worthless information they are struggling over is that valuable out of sheer imbecility and stubborn pride. In the final scenes it is highlighted by having the Director of the CIA, one of the few people in the film with something resembling a sound mind, flatly stating that he has no idea of what the hell just happened and only hopes he'll make sense of it at some point in the future if only to be sure he'll never have to deal with any similar messes ever again.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_e293455a	comment	Invoked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Harmony was the only person whose transformation into a soulless monster wasn't portrayed as tragic; objectively, it wasn't much of a change.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_e3316f33	comment	In The Big Short - a film about several money managers betting on the housing market implosion of 2008 - the razor is Jaret Venett's defense after the value of subprime bonds goes down, but they're still priced high to the public. It's not (all) the banks being fraudulent; most genuinely just don't know what's in the CDOs (which the bonds are made up of), and only know about the fees they get for selling the stuff off. They find this is painfully true when they go to a Securities conference in Las Vegas.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_e68decb8	comment	In Star Control II, the Slylandro Probes seem bent on deconstructing everything in the galaxy to create more probes. Why was this plague of Von Neumann probes unleashed upon creation? Answer: a programming slip-up. The Slylandro, being physiologically unable to build interstellar ships, purchased the self-replicating probes for peaceful exploration. Wanting to learn as much as they possibly could, they innocently made the probes' first priority finding unknown ships and civilisations, and also set the probes' program value for self-replicating to maximum. The result: the probes sought out ships and evidence of civilization... and then immediately destroyed them for raw materials to make more probes. At least when it's brought to light, they're horrified and immediately look for ways to fix the mistake.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_e8343108	comment	Used in Angel Beats!, where the Battlefront assumes "Angel" is an emotionless tool of eradication when really she's just like the rest of them. People around her vanish because she tries to make them happy, which usually results in them attaining that which they missed in life. Also inverted later on when they succeed in getting a new student council president. They start off thinking he is a mindless "NPC", but he turns out to be a sadist intent on ruling that world with an iron fist.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_e8cd02cd	comment	The single most destructive force in Hypnospace Outlaw is incompetence, particularly that of Merchantsoft and especially Dylan Merchant. The trolls, pirates, and even virus-writing hackers you have to chase down as an Enforcer are much less destructive than the numerous poor decisions of the company that runs Hypnospace.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_f0c816fb	comment	Breaking Bad: Invoked, when Skyler has to help Ted explain away his massive tax fraud to the IRS. She acts like a ditzy moron who only became the company's accountant by sleeping with Ted, making the auditor think it was merely massive ignorance which led to the tax form discrepancies rather than intentional criminality, buying Ted some time to pay off his taxes and fine rather than being arrested.
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Hanlon's Razor / int_f62e4f3	comment	Anecdote of Error: Talshko, the head of Mityaitimai Tshetshume School, assumes Atshi faked her magic score on her application, despite Atshiâ€™s insistence that she didnâ€™t. It isnâ€™t until Litasha produces the application form, and sees the score is 14.9, and was rounded up to 15 (the minimum entry requirement) by mistake, that she lets Atshi go. Ironically, when she catches Luntsha out after hours walking with the enemy soldier they captured, she suddenly remembers the razor and assumes that Luntsha was manipulated or deceived into freeing her, rather than doing it on purpose (which she actually did). She still expels her immediately, however.
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Anecdote of Error (Webcomic)	hasFeature	Hanlon's Razor / int_f62e4f3
Hanlon's Razor / int_f74b5f80	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_f74b5f80	comment	Zig-zagged in the Babylon 5 episode "Acts of Sacrifice". A representative from a Social Darwinist species tours Down Below — the station's slums — and is impressed because he believes humans have deliberately segregated the inferior of their species, going further than even his species. Of course, the slums are simply the result of poverty and neglect.
Hanlon's Razor / int_f74b5f80	featureApplicability	1.0
Hanlon's Razor / int_f74b5f80	featureConfidence	1.0
Babylon 5	hasFeature	Hanlon's Razor / int_f74b5f80
Hanlon's Razor / int_fa52665d	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hanlon's Razor / int_fa52665d	comment	In Infinity Train: Voyage of Wisteria, during her "Eureka!" Moment, Chloe finally stumbles upon a connecting factor between a lot of the actions that shaped the Blossomverse: Goh getting so hung up over a misunderstanding with Tokio, only to take her friendship for granted; Tokio letting the guilt for that incident drive him onto the Train, when he could have reconnected with Goh with a phone call or a train to Vermillion City; Ash Ketchum being so helpless in connecting with Chloe, and instead let her turn him into an icon of resentment; Trip barging onto the scene like a Tauros in a china shop, when he really did want Ash, and to a lesser extent Goh, to learn from their mistakes; Yeardley joking about being a "work in progress" in class; and Chloe's Character Development having to result in her loved ones being traumatized and her hometown hating her? To put it quite simply, it was because they were all children. They kept encountering situations that they didn't know how to handle, and kept making mistakes because they didnâ€™t know better. Most of the players in this game really did have good intentions, even if their actions made it seem otherwise. Even those individuals who were malicious weren't one dimensional monsters that couldn't be redeemed. The bullies of Class 5-E were inexcusably cruel to Chloe, but that rose out of being Driven by Envy and believing Loners Are Freaks. If they had received better instruction on what being a Trainer was actually like, and allowed themselves to get a better picture of Chloe and what her life was like, who knows how things might have turned out? As for Chloe and Parker Cerise, their malicious actions came about when they ignored the Razor and assumed malicious intentions from everyone in Vermillion City. Subconsciously, Chloe believed that her trauma had to be something massive and horrible, so she could make sense of both the hurt she felt and the hurt she inflicted upon others as catharsis.
Hanlon's Razor / int_fa52665d	featureApplicability	1.0
Hanlon's Razor / int_fa52665d	featureConfidence	1.0
Infinity Train: Voyage of Wisteria (Fanfic)	hasFeature	Hanlon's Razor / int_fa52665d

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Hanlon's Razor	processingCategory2	Comedy Tropes
Hanlon's Razor	processingCategory2	Laws and Formulas
Hanlon's Razor	processingCategory2	Philosophy Tropes
Hanlon's Razor	processingCategory2	Stupidity Tropes
Aggressive Retsuko / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Aggretsuko / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Death Parade / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Digimon Ghost Game / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Princess Mononoke / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Gotham Central (Comic Book) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Embers / Fan Fic / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Arad's Stardust (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Compass of Thy Soul (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Embers (Vathara) (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Fantastic Foxes of Zootopia (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Fear No Evil (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Harry Potter and the Not-Fatal-At-All Cultural Exchange Program (Fanfic)	seeAlso	Hanlon's Razor
Infinity Train: Voyage of Wisteria (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Karmic Backlash (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Little Uzumaki (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Most Unlikely of Friends (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Most Unlikely of Friends (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
SV Wishes (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Shed Some of This Black Light to Surrounding Towns (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Stardust (Arad) (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Conversion Bureau: Not Alone (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Grand Unified Theory of Shen Qingqiu (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Negotiations-verse (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Watashi no Hero Academia! (Fanfic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Apocalypto / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Contagion (2011) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Cube / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Don't Look Up / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Europa Report / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Fargo / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Glass Onion / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hot Fuzz / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Mr. Jones (2019) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Big Short / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Dark Wind / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
A Series of Unfortunate Events / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Book of Psalms / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Codex Alera / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Harsh Tales / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Sharpe's Triumph / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Call of the Wild / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Case Files of Yakushiji Ryoko / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Hare and the Pineapple / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Quintessential Mary-Sue / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Rising of the Shield Hero / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Sorrows of Young Werther / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles (Machinima) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Conviction by Contradiction / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
GannonBanned	seeAlso	Hanlon's Razor
HarshRealm	seeAlso	Hanlon's Razor
The Demon Girl Next Door (Manga) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Everything Everything (Music) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
CDT Adventure (Roleplay) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Trustfell 2 Trust Harder (Roleplay) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Blindspot / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Elementary / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hell's Kitchen / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Law & Order / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Silicon Valley / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The League / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Sweeten That Aesop / Sugar Wiki / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Romeo and Juliet (Theatre) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Brink! (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Darkwood (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Five Nights at Freddy's (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Hypnospace Outlaw (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Robot Wants (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
The Outer Worlds (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Beware (Video Game) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Fully Ramblomatic (Web Animation) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles (Web Animation) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Beatrice the Golden Witch (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Civvie 11 (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Digibro (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Freeman's Mind (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Internet Historian (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Sarah Z (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Sex House (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Sword Art Online Abridged (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
UrinatingTree (Web Video) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Anecdote of Error (Webcomic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Feast For A King (Webcomic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
qxlkbh (Webcomic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Spying with Lana (Webcomic) / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
Apple & Onion / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor
CatDog / int_118a2d16	type	Hanlon's Razor

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