"Dumb kids. Know-it-alls. Just like my nieces; Heads full of rocks."
— Enos, Friday the 13th (1980)
Characters (adolescent or young adults, usually) get together to do something manifestly dumb and often prohibited, but hey, they're young and so immortal, aren't they? The hold-outs are often persuaded because they don't want to look like a Dirty Coward, and often one of the bolder characters urges it's Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught. Visiting an abandoned house or performing a ritual are common. Bullying a Dragon can be a form of it; you're not afraid of him just because he can warp space and time with his thoughts! The Call Reception Area and the Forbidden Zone are popular destinations. A particularly idiotic Wild Teen Party may feature one, especially if the participants got very, very drunk.
Occasionally performed by a solitary figure (but even then, he often brags about it beforehand).
A popular Horror Trope. Often makes them Too Dumb to Live. "Hey everyone, we should so go to the abandoned campground where dozens have been slaughtered in the last year and have a party with bad music and alcohol! Afterwards, we'll all split up and have sex!!"
Compare Kimodameshi. Scare Dare involves even younger characters, children, and is much less likely to be dangerous; and Straying Baby a character younger still, who really is oblivious.
Contrast Deadly Prank, where someone else is imperiled. If whatever they do ends up backfiring and yet they get out of it without a scratch, then it's No One Should Survive That!. If the character is habitually dumb, they may be a Dumbass Teenage Son.
Note: does not cover shows that set challenges; this is something the characters dream up of their own stupidity.
Because this is often Truth in Television, no need for Real Life examples.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- The Incredible Hulk: Bruce Banner became the Hulk because Rick Jones accepted a dare to drive onto a nuclear testing site. To his credit, Rick has spent a good chunk of the rest of his life trying to make it up to Bruce as best he can.
Fan Works
- A Brief History of Equestria: This is basically what got Chancellor Puddinghead into power: a younger generation reached voting age and figured that awesomeness would be a better criterion for governing one's nation than say, competence. Or sanity.
- Crimson and Emerald has Hawks lament the stupidity of teenagers. Not even Izuku is exempt from this, despite his intelligence; he and Neito decide to test whether Neito's Copy Quirk could copy Izuku's Copy All, which results in both of them getting knocked out.
- Found in Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail as Chloe's classmates are around Year 5 (age 10 to 11) and decided that it would be such a smart idea to bully the girl who is associated with their goal to be Pokémon trainers instead of just asking her father what it would take to be one. So they bully her, mock her, and do all that is possible to break her self-confidence into nothing, resulting in one dare to fight Alola League Champion Ash to cause her to run off onto the Infinity Train and to them getting exposed for their cruelty and then expelled from school. Even worse, they were warned earlier by Chloe to never do it again after she pummeled their ringleader with a paint can and got suspended, believing that if they just used words instead of actions then the stupid teachers wouldn't notice. Needless to say, they learned why you shouldn't bully anyone the very hard way.
- Issei: The Gaming Gear features an Exaggerated version: while Raynare and all of her teamates are Older Than They Look, Raynare is the only one who's over 200 years old (in fact, she's around 500 or so. Mittelt is barely 75, Kalawarner is 150, while Dohnaseek is 185 years old. Kalawarner and Dohnaseek are also incompetent enough that they lose Asia to the Purifiers during a milk run, with Rayname and Mittelt implying that they only earned their positions by sleeping into them.
- Lyssophobia: The sixteen-year old Lyanna recklessly opts to elope with Rhaegar despite how he's already married while she's betrothed to Robert Baratheon. She realizes too late that she Didn't Think This Through after learning that people believe she was kidnapped, but the damage was already done by that point.
- Our Week Off Together!: When Luz and Amity's Abomination homework assignment goes wrong and starts rampaging through Bonesborough, a pair of Coven Scouts question their involvement and Amity assures them that they were just dared to get up close to it.
Steve: You kids and your total lack of respect for your own lives.
Films — Live-Action
- An Invoked Trope in The Cabin in the Woods. The five selected victims must be both young and ignore the Harbinger of Impending Doom, engage in "transgressions" (e.g. Sex Signals Death), and choose the manner of their demise (by going down into the Creepy Basement and handling the Schmuck Bait). If they fail to do these things, the ritual can't take place. Of course the Facility does everything possible to make the selected five engage in these actions, including drugging them to ignore common sense.
- Civil War: Jessie makes a lot of reckless decisions that endanger her and her friends (and, in a few cases, actually gets some people killed) due to being a naive, inexperienced, and somewhat sheltered young woman who's just gotten her first taste of combat.
- The three teenagers who follow the firefighter and father into the obviously dangerous, quarantined apartment block in [REC] 2.
- The teens in Talk to Me feel the typical invulnerability and rebelliousness that come with the age, which is why they continue to mess with the spiritual realm and play at being possessed, despite it being clear that the results are unpredictable each time. Of course, inevitably, one of the possessions turns deadly.
Literature
- Older Than Print: In Beowulf, the titular hero describes his and his cousin's swimming across the sea as something they did when they were young and prideful.
- Ciaphas Cain: In Sandy Mitchell's Cain's Last Stand, Ciaphas Cain observes that Kayla has too much sense to keep up with Jurgen's crazy driving, despite the delusions of immortality that youth gives.
- Dave Barry Slept Here explains in the introduction why young people are too dumb to know their country's history:
Young people have always been stupid, dating back to when you were a young person (1971-1973) and you drank an entire quart of Midnight Surprise Fruit Wine and Dessert Topping and threw up in your best friend's father's elaborate saltwater aquarium containing $6,500 worth of rare and, as it turned out, extremely delicate fish. (You thought we didn't know about that? We know everything. We are a history book.)
- Edenborn has Deuce and Penny, who steal a Cool Plane, ransack pantries and wine cellars across Europe for victuals, and realize they're in way over their head with their parents.
- The fake terrorists from Oath of Fealty are extremely smart in some ways but convinced that the two doors they pass through marked "IF YOU GO THROUGH THIS DOOR, YOU WILL BE KILLED" don't really apply to them.
- In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, when Stephan goes back to college after the war, a prankster conjures up a fire elemental, and it escapes his control.
- The informant ghost invokes it in Shaman Blues, noting that pure bravado makes young ghost try to feed on shady energy sources, rather than build their own reserves safely.
- Skippy Dies: In a flashback to Howard's teen years, Guido LaManche rigs up his own custom-made bungee-jumping setup, and talks a bunch of friends into jumping off a cliff with it in the middle of the night. Everyone is initially gung-ho about it, but all back out out of fear, so they choose lots to see how it goes. Howard is chosen, but backs out of it out of fear, leading to his nickname "The Coward". Tom goes in his place, and is permanently disabled after the device unsurprisingly fails and he hits the bottom.
- In Robin McKinley's Sunshine, youngsters sometimes gang together to see if they can spot a vampire. Sunshine did it herself, and her little brother Kenny might be doing it.
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake, Space Marines are forbidden to try a stunt, diving into a sea trench and leaving something. One young Marine does it, and has an older Marine come to ensure that he needs no help. Then, later, another tries, and the Marine who goes after him is only able to recover the corpse.
- In Lee Lightner's Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf novel Sons of Fenris, Lieutenant Paulinus tries to remember his travels in the city in his younger days. He was ashamed of them — "callow youths looking for cheap thrills" — but now, he needs to lead his men in those sections.
- In a Warrior Cats Expanded Universe story, this is why the tradition exists of having new warriors sit a silent vigil for one night to watch over the camp. A RiverClan medicine cat named Meadowpelt was worried because his Clan's young warriors were repeatedly injuring themselves doing stupid stunts, such as deciding to jump off a cliff for fun, or having a "who can fall out of a tree the hardest" contest. Eventually, he convinced them to grow up by having them sit a silent vigil for one night. They were uncertain about it at first, but Nettlepad heard a fox about to sneak into the camp and attack the nursery, and Molewhisker and Lightningpelt chased it away. This incident made them realize they never would have heard the fox if they had been playing around. They decided to take their warrior duties more seriously from then on, and the vigil tradition was instituted for new warriors in all Clans as a result.
- In Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, the young students are showing off their spellcraft when Ged casts a dangerous and powerful spell. He nearly dies himself, the Archmage does die, and a creature is unleashed.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who:
- In the serial "The Dominators", Cully and his friends arrive on the island without permits, for thrills. It makes it hard for him to persuade anyone after the others get killed.
- In the serial "The Invasion of Time", the Doctor assures Borusa that his faciliating the invasion of Gallifrey is not this.
- Game of Thrones features a particularly severe and tragic example with Lyanna Stark, as revealed in Seasons 6 and 7. Young Lyanna (in the books she was stated to be around sixteen) ran off with Rhaegar Targaryen, the handsome (already married) prince she'd fallen in love with, rather than marry her betrothed Robert and without telling anyone what she was up to. Subsequently, everyone thinks she's been kidnapped, which culminates in a bloody civil war that ends with both Rhaegar, Lyanna and several members of their families dying. It can be assumed she didn't consider how disastrously things could end before she decided to elope with Rhaegar.
- In the second season of Lexx, the crew finds and thaws a group of Human Popsicle teenagers. When two of them find the hibernating Kai, they decide it would be fun to pretend he can be given subconscious commands, and tell him to kill everyone on the ship. Including themselves. He proceeds to do so, and only the main cast are spared by snapping him out of it, but not before the teens all bite it. What makes it extraordinarily dumb is that the kids had no in-story reason to do what they did; they were just goofing around in the arguably dumbest way possible. Even disregarding whether they believed it would work or not, they could have picked literally any other instruction than "kill everyone".
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "Valiant", Jake and Nog are rescued from a Dominion attack by a Defiant-class warship manned by a group of Starfleet Academy cadets, who have been operating behind enemy lines since their grown-up officers were all killed. Their "captain", Tim Watters, announces that their last mission before they return to Federation space is to destroy a prototype Dominion battleship approximately five times larger and ten times more heavily armed than the Valiant - but hey, they're young, invulnerable, and part of an elite squad back at the Academy, so What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Only Jake has an answer to this question, and he is proved terribly, horribly right in the climax.
- For all the intelligence shown by the younger generation on Terra Nova, it might as well be Twin Peaks In Space. Favorite pastimes include making out in the raptor-infested jungle, among other idiotic pursuits.
- Virtually all the teenage characters in Twin Peaks are so dumb it's almost painful to watch. From Bobby trying to scam Ben Horne to Shelly offering live-in care to her comatose Ax-Crazy ex-boyfriend Leo (on Bobby's advice) to cash in on insurance checks to James...well, anything James does, ever, it's a wonder anyone ever reaches old age in this town.
- Teenagers and young adults did many, many stupid things over the course of Veronica Mars, from vehicular manslaughter to accidental arson to assault and even rape. Many of the kids depicted doing these things weren't even stupid; it was Truth in Television in that a young person's decision-making skills are prone to be compromised by a number of things, including hormones, substance abuse and lack of life experience.
Music
- Little Simz's "Young" is a self-deprecating look as to what she envisioned was "the perfect life" when she was a young woman growing up in lower-class London, full of reckless abandon, partying, getting into fights, and just being generally irresponsible. The song itself is already quite tongue-in-cheek in execution (being delivered in Simz' most cartoony "posh" accent), and the music video illustrates it further by having her made-up to look like an elderly woman, acting out her youthful fantasies in a way that makes her look like a grouchy old jerkass.
- The "Weird Al" Yankovic song "Young, Dumb and Ugly" combines this trope with Poke the Poodle, and showcases the titular youths doing dumb things like driving with one hand on the wheel and swimming right after a big heavy meal.
Theatre
- Coppélia: Swanhilda and her friends dare each other to sneak into Doctor Coppelius's house and mess with his stuff.
- In many productions of Romeo and Juliet, the fights that break out among the young men in the feuding houses are the result of this. The only cool heads among them, Romeo and Benvolio, get called out on being scared to fight. The title characters are also guilty of this themselves. They're teenagers, have known each other for all of three days, marriage was entirely for business and family honor reasons in their era and social class (Marry for Love was considered laughable back in the day - indulging in romance was what mistresses were for), Romeo was on the rebound from a breakup, and the absolute worst idea either of them could have picked was the cute boy or girl from the arch-rival's house. By the time it's over, half the cast is dead.
Video Games
- Killer Frequency:
- After Leslie barely manages to to escape the Whispering Man, a boy named Jimmy calls the station pretending to be the killer. He and his friends opt to play a similar prank on poor Carrie, which swiftly turns sideways when the real murderer shows up and kills him in the same way he'd threatened to kill Forrest.
- This also plays a key role in the Backstory: Twenty years ago, several of the residents participated in a prank that turned deadly when somebody died while trying to escape the faked threat. The Whistling Man is targeting people connected to that tragedy, though in some cases, their only sin is being related to the culprits.
- The Last Sovereign has this as a Running Theme:
- With a singular exception, all of The Chosen Ones seen throughout the story are actually The Poorly Chosen Ones who tend to think more with their "second head". The first one players are introduced to, Kai, targets a Succubi with the intent of forcing himself upon her after he wins, only to lose and perish at her hands.
- A student mage hoping to summon a succubus accidentally opens a rift into the demon realm due to getting succubi and demons mixed up, getting fatally wounded in the process. When Aka expresses incredulity at his stupidity, Simon remarks that he believes them, since the mage is only a teenager.
- The premise of Shivers (1995) is that you get locked in an abandoned haunted museum on a dare.
- Reading some abandoned notes also reveal that this is why the museum is haunted in the first place. Fifteen years ago, two teenagers broke into the place (the guy because he was curious; the girl because she thought the boy was cute). After opening one of the Ixupi pots and being impressed by the "cool special effects" (read: a murderous spirit being released into the world), they opened all the others too. They did not survive the night.
- In The Woods Are Dark, six Irish teenagers decided it'd be a great lark to visit the home where a local boy had murdered his entire family. Despite the fact that one of them disappeared and another was found white-haired and gibbering a few days afterwards, five years later the four remaining idiots actually decide to go back.
Webcomics
- Erstwhile:
- Brother insists on going out when there's a hunt
— and he's a deer.
- Rose Red and Snow White engage in bear-tipping.
- Brother insists on going out when there's a hunt
- Pretty much the entirety of Homestuck is based on one of these, though it's not apparent to the B1 kids that Sburb is going to be anything more than a video game (well, Jade seems to be aware of it, but for all sorts of reasons she's actively encouraging them to play). And it turns out the whole thing is a causal loop, so they were going to do it anyway.
- In Sinfest, one drone taunts another into diving through traffic.
Web Videos
- What if _ Talked?: In "What if the Player talked in Poppy Playtime", Kit lampshades how Playtime shouldn't hire teenagers and give them access to heavy hydraulic machinery while seeing the first VHS tape on the Grabpack.
Western Animation
- In the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers episode "Adventures in Squirrelsitting", the Rangers are hired to babysit two young squirrels right in the middle of an ongoing case against Fat Cat. One is the toddler Bink, the other one is the teenage Tammy who is completely smitten for Chip. In order to impress him and show him that she's just as worthy for his attention as Gadget, she decides to go and solve the Rangers' case. Neither the fact that she knows the villain (Fat Cat has threatened to throw her and Bink out of the tree while holding them by their tails) nor the one that she doesn't have much of a plan or experience won't stop her.
- The Gravity Falls episode "The Inconveniencing" involves Wendy and her friends breaking into an abandoned convenience store, which turns out to be haunted by a reality warping elderly couple with a homicidal grudge against teenagers. They only survived because the ghosts were willing to negotiate with 12-year-old Dipper (technically not a teen), who has no choice but to play the Deliberately Cute Child after spending the whole episode trying to prove that he's cool enough to hang out with the teens.
- In the Justice League Unlimited episode "Wake the Dead", a group of college students performs a ritual that revives Solomon Grundy as a mindless rage monster. The resulting rampage begins with Grundy attacking one of them.
- Transformers: Animated: Bumblebee might not technically be a kid (as far as we can tell), but he's got the mind of one and does equivalent stupid stuff. The most notable might be his upgrading himself with illegal and dangerous boosters and sneaking out onto an underground racing circuit with Sari.