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Dumb Muscle - TV Tropes

— Roger Alan Wade

A characterization that leans very hard on the brawn side in Brains Versus Brawn. The Big Guy and The Brute are usually slightly dim at the very least (with The Smart Guy and Evil Genius at the opposite end of the scale; incredibly intelligent, but knocked over by a stiff breeze). Typically afflicted with a form of Hulk Speak. This is a common assumption: there's a reason Genius Bruiser is meant to be a shocker, even though there's no real reason brains and brawn should be mutually exclusive to begin with in Real Life. Overlaps with Gentle Giant in some cases, as well as Tiny-Headed Behemoth. A Sub-Trope of Personality Powers. Often Played for Laughs.

Almost Always Male; only in ultra-rare cases will you see very strong female characters be portrayed as lacking in brains. He might be only Book Dumb but Street Smart. Note that this also does not always apply to tactics; a character with this trope might know how to use every weapon he picks up, but if that is true, he will still lack intelligence outside that specialty (in which case he is shown as a Genius Ditz). When this character causes injuries and property damage due to being clumsy with his immense strength, he is Lethally Stupid. If he’s an athlete, he’s probably a Dumb Jock.

Compare Smash Mook. Contrast the Genius Bruiser and the Badass Bookworm. Given this, its inverse is often the Squishy Wizard. Often overlaps with Mammals Are Superior, when non-mammals are (generally incorrectly) assumed to be this trope compared to mammals as a whole. By extension, Super-Trope to Dumb Dinos. May overlap with Powerful, but Incompetent. These types are frequently, but not always, a Top-Heavy Guy. When this sort of character is paired with its opposite — someone who's very clever but runty and weak — it will form one half of Brains and Brawn.

No Real Life Examples, Please! noreallife

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    Asian Animation 

• Motu Patlu (2012): What Motu lacks in intelligence, he makes up for in strength, especially if he eats a samosa. Even Boxer, who is usually the strongest person in Furfuri Nagar, is unable to withstand Motu's muscle power if he eats a samosa.

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    Fan Works 

• Accommodations and Cabbages: Goku is an immature Manchild who doesn't seem to know or understand what's going on the entire time, but he's still as strong as his canon self, as shown when he tears a door off the wall.
• Avenger of Steel: This is a perfect description of Solomon Grundy; an undead entity controlled by the Hand that can apparently bring himself back to life if killed, Grundy is capable of engaging Superman in a fight, but all he can apparently do is roar and hit things.
• The Wyrmspawn is this in The Dark Lords Ascendant. It's incredibly powerful, capable of decimating an entire city with the mere shockwaves caused by its breath attacks. However, killing is the only thing it knows: if its senses are blocked off to the point where it can't detect anyone, it thinks everyone around it is dead and settles back down to wait.
• Kimberly T's Gargoyles series makes it clear that the gargoyles consider their old foe Wolf to be an example of this. At one point, when assessing old enemies who might be responsible for the kidnapping Owen, Fox, the Xanatos' nanny Anne Marsden, Alexander Xanatos and Anne's daughter Bethany (Bethany also receiving magical instruction from Puck), Lexington observes that Wolf is too stupid to be a suspect as he's become little better than an animal since he was genetically augmented; in his current state of mind he'd never be able to come up with a plan of attack that his intended targets wouldn't see coming a mile away.
• In order to make sure Sapphiron couldn't break free from his weakening powers, Arthas in Metagaming? completely destroyed the dragon's mind. This leaves the Draco Lich too stupid to think tactically, merely attacking whatever is currently hurting it the most. Notably, when Jaina shields Luna from its Breath Weapon with an ice wall, Sapphiron continues breathing ice at her even though all it's accomplishing is making the wall larger.
• More than Meets the Spy: All three of the Coneheads (Ramjet, Dirge, and Thrust) are this in Chapter 4 of the Camien Odyssey side story. Their main job is to intimidate Big Top's workers into submission through physical force. However, they have very little in the way of brains and it doesn't take much to dupe them.
• My Iron Giant: Izuku's Quirk allows him to pilot a Humongous Mecha, but it also takes away his autonomy to the point he is akin to a higher functioning Nomu.
• Ryuko and Mako are rare female examples of this of the Book Dumb variety in Natural Selection. While neither is "dumb" per say, they're both shown to not be very bright with Ryuko often coming up short in fields like business and other intellectual pursuits while Mako is incredibly ditzy, often having her intelligence derided by everyone. In the former's case, Inumuta even outright calls her "a murderous moron". That said, both are physical powerhouses to the point where Ryuko spends the first half of the plot as an Invincible Villain while Mako proves to be the strongest of the Elite Four in pure physical terms, causing tremors and shockwaves with her fists that are powerful enough to wipe out armies.
• The Night Unfurls: This is a common trait of many mooks. Orcs, trolls, ogres, mutants... you name it. Their relative strength in comparison to the Red Shirts makes up for their primitive and unintelligent nature.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Story of Arceus: Rikzyod is a bruiser who's not all too clever. He's forgotten where he even came from, and he suggests fighting at completely inappropriate times.
• Vow of Nudity: Walburt is a hulking butt-naked gladiator who wrestles wild animals for a living, but requires a team of assistants to organize the hunting expeditions that allow him to actually find them.

    Films — Animation 

• Beauty and the Beast (1991): No one exemplifies this trope like Gaston! He's brutish, illiterate, and uncultured — and proud of it. However, it's hinted that he might be smarter than he lets on as he's shown to be a cunning manipulator with a high-level vocabulary, even quoting Shakespeare at one point. One gets the impression that Gaston has a good deal of natural intelligence and possibly even a formal education, but he just happens to place no value in books and learning.
• Catwoman: Hunted: After La Dama summons a couple of demons, Batwoman gags her with a sticky bomb and "interprets" her muffled outcries as La Dama telling them that their service is complete and they should go home. They're stupid enough (and/or lazy enough) to do just that. Batwoman even lampshades this for good measure before knocking La Dama out cold with a punch.
• The Emperor's New Groove: Kronk, Yzma's giant henchman, isn't stupid per se, but he's not always focused on the same thing everyone else is at the time and tends to come across as distracted and as a ditz.
• Megamind: After receiving Metro Man's powers by Megamind, Hal Stewart becomes a muscular stud. Nevertheless, he is still a complete idiot who believes Space Step-Mom was real and the Queen of England isn't real.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Batman & Robin: Bane is a dumb, hulk-speaking, simpleton that can only follow orders. He's a Super-Soldier powered by chemicals, though, so whatever. That's just the version Joel Schumacher used, though. He's actually a Genius Bruiser in the comics.
• Bedazzled (2000) capitalizes the undermentioned basketball player stereotype when the main hero gets turned into one. He can barely put two words together and those tend to revolve around "pushing yourself to 100%... For victory".
• Blazing Saddles: Mongo is a giant bandit who speaks in broken English, although he subverts it with the thoughtful line "Mongo only pawn in game of life".
• The City of Lost Children: Circus strongman One — Hulk Speak is his first language, and it's strongly suggested that he's developmentally challenged.
• Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children: Loz embodies Sephiroth's strength. He's also dumber than a box of rocks. That an aspect of freaking Sephiroth is caught bawling for his mommy like an idiot child is a pretty extreme example of this trope.
• Free Guy: DUDE is uploaded into Free City as Antwan's last-ditch gambit to stop Guy from exposing a theft of his. He has a bodybuilder's physique and can toss Guy around like a ragdoll, but his AI is only half-finished and his placeholder-riven mud-pie-sentence speak is like that of an AI-powered story generator, like Chapter 34 of Atlanta Nights.

  DUDE: There are three things I love in life: Kicking ass!... TBD!... Third thing here!

• The Golem: The Golem is incredibly strong, but also painfully dim.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Wallace, Angel Eyes' torturer, is big on the brawn, but not so much with the brains.
• The Goonies: Sloth is a hulking simpleton. It seems that he was dropped as a baby.
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch: Lenny the dopey gremlin, is larger and dimmer than the rest, obviously inspired by Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
• Hot Fuzz: Michael "Lurch" Armstrong. Body of a gorilla, mind of a child, Lurch is also a subversion because while he's dumb, that doesn't mean he's innocent; When Nicholas asks him if he really wants to be part of the evil Sandford conspiracy, he replies with his typical "Yarp." "Suit yourself," says Nicholas, and the fight resumes. His dim mind is due to his dad being his grandad and his mom being his sister.
• The Ladykillers (2004): Lump Hudson is a mouth-breathing jock who uses Hulk Speak. One-Round from the original version isn't much better.
• Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome: Blaster, the lower half of MasterBlaster "has the mind of a child" and relies on his dwarf Shoulder Teammate Master to do his thinking for him.
• Mutant Action: M.A. is said to have one of the lowest IQ in the world. He is also the squad member with the greatest physical strength.
• The Princess Bride: Fezzik is a good example of this. It ought to be noted, though, that most of this reputation is based on the word of Vizzini, who has an overdeveloped sense of his own mental superiority. In truth, Fezzik has a number of moments of profound insight, along with a gift for rhyme. Some of the time.^note Being able to consistently pull off such wordplay on demand and without preparation, and without the aid of a thesaurus, requires a great deal of intelligence.
• Sling Blade: Karl is a mentally handicapped man who is noted by his employers as being surprisingly strong.
• The version of Knuckles the Echidna in the Sonic the Hedgehog films is a Boisterous Bruiser, but also Literal-Minded. It's demonstrated in the second film, his debut in the film series; on one hand, he is so strong that his handshake hurts anyone he does that with, while on the other hand, the film has him reading the dots that appear when someone is typing in a text conversation as though they're part of the conversation, and smashing a hologram projector after Dr. Robotnik seems to want a hologram of Sonic destroyed, not understanding it's in jest for the hologram.
• Street Fighter (1994): Zangief is portrayed as a misguided muscleman who's none too bright. He isn't aware that he's working for the bad guys until Dee Jay tells him, and thinks he can stop a truck that's speeding towards them by changing the channel!
• The Suicide Squad: Nanue/King Shark is strong enough to rip a man in half vertically, but he isn't the team's smartest.
  • A few of his outburts have little to do with the situation at hand and more to brag that he's spatially aware of things like reporting he sees a bird on the communication channel.
  • When introduced, he's seen intently reading the classical theoretical text Varieties of Religious Experience by the philosopher William James...but he's reading it upside down, and wants to give the appearance that he's literate more than anything.

    Peacemaker: He's pretending to read a book!
    King Shark: So smart, me! Enjoy books so much!

• Superman II: Non is the largest and most physical threat of the criminal Kryptonians, but doesn't speak and is clearly slow-witted.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze: Shredder decides to make his own mutants to fight the Turtles. The result is Tokka and Rahzar, a mutant snapping turtle and wolf. But while the two are immensely strong, they both possess an infantile mentality, and simply overwhelm the Turtles through pure brute force. Prof. Perry later explains that he altered the mutagen used so that Tokka and Rahzar would come out less intelligent than they would have been otherwise.
• There's Something About Mary: Mary's mentally handicapped brother Warren can toss people around like rag dolls.
• Top Secret!: Bruno is almost blind, and has to operate wholly by touch. Klaus is a moron who knows only what he reads in the New York Post."
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Fred "Blob" Dukes, employed by Stryker to do the heavy stuff like stopping a tank from firing at them, is not the smartest of Stryker's team, even getting a tattoo of a woman he only met the night before.

    Live-Action TV 

• Angel: The Beast in Season 4. He delivered a Curb-Stomp Battle to basically all of Angel Investigations' fighters in his debut, and throughout his time in Los Angeles he never lost a battle even against experienced warriors such as Angel/Angelus and Faith. However, he was explicitly described as only being interested in smashing things on his own; just the fact that he has a long-term plan other than mindless slaughter and wanton mass destruction on this occasion was taken by Angelus as a sign that he was working for someone else on this occasion
  • This is zigzagged with Gunn, who seemed typecast as the dumb muscle (and he is aware of this). That is, through the end of Season 4. The upgrade that Wolfram and Hart gives him is to make him into the brains of the outfit, the Ace Attorney.
  • The half-demon Groosalugg is in his physical strength on the same level as Angel, a vampire over 200 years old (vampires in Buffyverse are getting Stronger with Age, and Angel is really badass). He is also the unbeaten champion in his homeworld, where he killed numerous demons and never lost a fight. However, it quickly becomes apparent that he is anything but clever. Of course he's not a complete idiot because he left Cordelia when he realized that she actually loves Angel.
• Breaking Bad: Saul hires Huell as a bodyguard due to his intimidating size, when he actually needs to protect Saul, he fails at his job. He also easily falls for Hank's fake story without realising he's being tricked into giving away information.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Glory constantly underestimates her opponents and acts without thinking. The only thing that makes her a threat is that she has a lot of muscle.
• Carnivàle: The carnival strongman is an enormous Manchild.
• Chuck: Played with with John Casey (another Adam Baldwin character). As he's played by all 6'4", 230 lbs of Adam Baldwin, Casey is without question the biggest and strongest member of the team (Zachary Levi is quite tall as well, but not nearly as powerfully built), shown to be able to resist multiple tranq darts, and many bad guys just injure themselves when they try to punch him in the face. He also once ripped an old-style radiator out of a hotel wall after he was cuffed to it and used it as a weapon while still cuffed to it in the subsequent fight. However many laughs are also had at his expense over not being as bright as Chuck and Sarah, even failing an aptitude test miserably with the lowest score ever recorded when he and Chuck are trying to infiltrate a Fulcrum recruiting center. The played with comes in that Casey's is actually closer to average in intelligence, well-trained, and capable of thinking quickly on missions. It's just that many of his associates on the show are unusually intelligent and highly-technical people due to the nature of the assignment, so his main role on the team is acting as the muscle while Chuck and Sarah usually handle the finesse.
• Community: Troy is a Manchild and a former Jerk Jock.

  Jeff: I want you to clear your mind—
  Troy: Done.

• Doctor Who:
  • Ogrons, a species of gigantic caveman types used as muscle by the Daleks.
  • "Midnight": Biff is very hotheaded and isn't very smart, immediately jumping to conclusions based on a complete lack of evidence or thought.
• Firefly: Jayne appears to be this at first; a moron whose skills are limited to hitting and shooting stuff. But don't be fooled. Over the course of the show, he's demonstrated that he's a reasonably-cunning planner, a skilled tracker, and a capable pilot. Admittedly, he's not academically bright, but he's very knowledgeable about a lot of practical skills. He's also shown to be an impressive judge of character — seeing through Dobson's lies instantly, for example. There’s also material suggesting that if the show wasn’t cancelled, he’d have been revealed as one of the creators of Blue Sun, a huge, system-wide corporation, but who was kicked out. That could really throw his intelligence into question.
• Game of Thrones:
  • The Eyrie's jailer Mord may even be mentally retarded, but is big and strong enough to be competent at his job. He's also nearly too dumb to bribe.
  • Hodor isn't very intelligent, but he can rip chains off the wall and pulverize the throat of a strong and skilled man. He also stopped a wave of wights pushing down a door to the point the wights had to break the sides of the door and slice him up to advance since they couldn't simply push him down.
  • Lorch is a competent warrior and certainly has his uses...relying on his brain is not one of those uses.
  • Gregor is a killing machine with little to no sense of tactics or restraint, as he's too Ax-Crazy to consider whether his acts of brutality are actually detrimental in the long run. Nor does it seem likely that he cares, it's not like the Lannisters pay him for being smart, his job is to apply Disproportionate Retribution to those who cross the family. After his transformation, Qyburn implies he's even dumber than before as the "experiments" he did to save him affected his mind, and most of his free will appears to be gone, becoming instead an obedient drone.
• Glee: Finn is a six-foot-three athlete who isn't exactly the brightest bulb in the bunch.
• Justified:
  • Coover Bennett is a hulking Mighty Glacier who is also the show's poster boy for arrested emotional development. He acts like he's about eight years old. Get him in a fight, though...
  • The final season introduces Choo-Choo, so named because when he hits you, it's like you've been hit by a train.
• Kamen Rider Build: Ryuga Banjo, the Second Rider, is as dumb as a sack of obsolete encyclopedias and has a mean temper; the title character even explicitly calls him this^note Kinniku baka, literally "muscle idiot". On the other hand, he also has suprising amount of insight and intuition, provided his temper doesn't get in the way.
• Kingdom Adventure: Gorf is one of Magistrate Pitts' guards at Lumia Castle, and he's dimwitted and very easy to trick.
• Lab Rats: Adam, the Lab Rat with Super-Strength. Lampshaded in how it takes a second to come up with a plan to trick him.
• Li'l Horrors: Duncan Stein (a Frankenstein's Monster) is easily the strongest and dumbest of the Horrors.
• Manhunt (2024): The burly Lewis isn't the brightest of Booth's conspirators; he briefly forgets who the man he's trying to assassinate is, then, when told it's the (U.S.) Secretary of State, he asks, "Which state?"
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Ken Clean Air System in "Live from the Grill-o-Mat." The "muscle" part obviously comes with being a boxer, and as for the "dumb," his own manager calls him "almost totally stupid." When he comes across a parked car while jogging, he can only think to turn and go back instead of walking around it.
• NOS4A2: Bing is a none too smart man, naive and childlike enough he can be easily manipulated into doing Charlie Manx's bidding. He only realized that Manx is using him very belatedly.
• Our Miss Brooks: School athlete Stretch Snodgrass.
• Power Rangers is infamous for turning Super Sentai villains who are either brutes, Genius Bruisers, overweight, or weirdos into stupid expandables.
• The Red Green Show: While he never actually appears on camera, Moose Thompson is described this way. Red describes Moose as being physically stronger than an ox, while mentally it's too close to call.
• Star Trek has a few races who wear this as their hat.
  • Nausicaans are a minor race who frequently pop up but haven't been examined in great depth. They are portrayed as big, thuggish, and not particularly bright, usually showing up as Space Pirates or hired muscle. That said, they are still a spacefaring race, which implies that they are intelligent enough to invent (or at least reliably utilize) advanced technology.

    Quark: (Seeing two Nausicaans throwing darts at each others' chests and laughing) Doesn't that hurt?
    Brunt: I'm sure it does. Most Nausicaan games do.

  • The Pakleds, in their first appearance on TNG, were just plain dumb without any muscle. Their size was, at least to outward appearances, more obesity than anything else. Their recurrence on Star Trek: Lower Decks is where they fit this trope better; they are just as stupid as they were before, but with a more intimidating physical presence that emphasizes their brute strength.
  • Subverted with the Klingons, the archetypal Proud Warrior Race Guys of the franchise. They're best known for their strength and durable physiology, but that doesn't mean they're stupid. At worst, they can be more prone to letting their bloodthirst or sense of martial honor cloud their reasoning, as evidenced by how Klingon Scientists Get No Respect, but anyone who has met a Klingon scholar knows they are intellectual equals of any other Alpha Quadrant power.
• Stargate Atlantis: Ronon. Played for Laughs at times and sort of justified because of his past. His "plans" often contain simply Stuff Blowing Up or killing the enemy instead of (necessarily) working together and he's very unwilling to try a more intelligent method. However, he seems to work great with McKay.

  "Mission Report: Michael invaded Atlantis. Tried to blow it up. We stopped him. End of report."

• Strong Girl Nam Soon: Downplayed. Nam-soon's father said that the female side of her family are renowned for their Super-Strength but they're also not bright. At one point Nam-soon's mother mentioned that her I.Q. is 97 and like Nam-soon she hates studying. However Nam-soon's mother and grandmother are very business savvy with granny being wealthy through a restaurant specializing in bone soup and mom taking their riches to Fiction 500 levels with a pawn shop and many other successful businesses. So the women all had their idiot moments, mostly they're just Book Dumb but make up for it with cunning and the smart use of muscle power.
• Supernatural: The Men of Letters saw hunters as brutish but necessary.
• Tales of the Tinkerdee: Taminella's ogre henchman Charlie is definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed: he's stupid enough to call her "Tammy" while they're both disguised, risking blowing their cover, and he even mistakenly clubs Taminella on the head while she's disguised as the princess that Charlie was ordered to clobber and kidnap!
• Ultra Series:
  • Red King, beginning with the original Ultraman. While he may be physically powerful enough to tear apart other kaiju limb from limb, his lack of brains means he usually stands no chance against Ultra heroes.
  • Ultraseven: Windam, one of the Capsule Kaiju, is a heroic example. As a Humongous Mecha, Windam is quite strong and able to spar with other kaiju quite well, but also rather mindless. The alien invaders Seven often faces are quite good at taking advantage of this, with one of them even brainwashing him to attack Ultraseven (who then subdues Windam by making him dizzy).
  • Return of Ultraman: Black King is Red King on steroids. Even stronger than him, and with armored hide capable of surviving nearly any attack, bur even stupider to the point where he can only act under the command of highly intelligent alien invaders, such as Nackle.
  • Ultraman Ace: Doragoris/Doragory is considered the most physically powerful of Yapool's Choju (like Red King, he can literally rip lesser kaiju to shreds), but is also considerably less intelligent than most of them.
  • Ultraman Tiga continues the tradition with Silvergon. He's strong enough overpower Tiga's Power Type and punch holes through a friggin' force field. but when faced with Tiga, his stupidity comes to light as he actually tries to perform Tiga's Finishing Moves and Multiform Balance abilities when it sees the hero do them. Additionally, his terrible eyesight means all Tiga had to do to get the upper hand was simply stand still whenever Silvergon was looking at him.

    Manhua 

• Thoroughly subverted in The Ravages of Time, it's Genius Bruiser which is closer to the norm. After all, the "big dumb brutes" from the novel? What fool would leave them in command of an army? Lu Bu and Zhang Fei are the most prominent examples of this subversion, but as a general rule, if someone looks like Dumb Muscle they're almost certainly faking it... yes, even Xu Chu.

    Myths & Religion 

• Heracles from Classical Mythology was stereotypically portrayed this way in Attic comedy (for example in Aristophanes' The Birds). In the "canonical" version of the myths, despite being prone to fits of irrational rage, he is not dumb, and occasionally pretty sharp — one of his most famous stories is the Twelve Labors, in which he is forced to find clever solutions to twelve seemingly impossible tasks.
• The titan Atlas. After getting Heracles to take over holding up the sky (heavens) for him while Atlas did him a favor, Atlas decides not to take it back as he likes his freedom. Heracles admits defeat then asks for Atlas to take the sky back long enough for Heracles to put his lion skin on his shoulders as a pad. Atlas agrees, and Heracles walks away. This was the guy the other Titans picked to lead them against the Olympians after Cronus fell out of favor with the rest of them. No wonder they lost. Averted in an alternate version of the myth, in which Heracles and Atlas simply came to a mutually beneficial arrangement in which Atlas did the favor and Heracles built the Pillars of Hercules to carry Atlas's load forever. This version was less common as Atlas was an unpopular character and the ancient Greeks enjoyed making him out to be both a villain and a moron.
• In The Bible's Book of Judges can be found the story of Samson, a man with the strength to kill a hundred men with a donkey's jawbone yet lacking in pattern recognition skills to the point that he doesn't realize his girlfriend is actively betraying him to his enemies. For those unfamiliar with the story, the source of his strength was his long, uncut hair. When she asked about the source, he twice lied to her (first saying he needed to be bound with ribbon, then with rope) and was immediately afterward attacked by men attempting to restrain him using the method he had confided in her. He finally confessed the true source of his strength when she confronted him, accusing him of not trusting her.

    Podcasts 

• Dice Funk: As the party's fighter, this is Rinaldo's role, although his frequently poor dice rolls make it easy to forget.
• Find Us Alive's Agent Love is a Rare Female Example. She's the most physically capable member of the cast who also thinks having your appendix removed means you're diabetic, attempts to tame a vine monster that just trapped her inside a wall by throwing away her only weapon, tries to waterboard someone who's standing up, and can't remember how to pronounce "suspected".
• Greff from The Lucky Die. His family has a goat named "Goat Greff," so named because it kind of resembles him, and is about as intelligent.

    Roleplay 

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • Jemimah is an aspiring judoka and one of the strongest members of the cast. What she has in brawn, she lacks in brain, mostly bumbling her way through classes and possessing a ditzy mindest that baffles her peers.
  • Carlie inherited her love of wrestling from her parents, and has the muscle to back up her fangirlism. She's also incredibly dumb, enough so that she's had to retake a year of high school.

    Tabletop Games 

• Changeling: The Lost: Played With as a stereotype of the Ogre Kith. Most Freehold leaders generally view new Ogres as this trope, and while there is occasionally some truth to this due to the Ogre's innate curse of getting less mentally adept as they grow magically powerful, it explicitly does not make them stupid. A genuinely dumb Ogre is actually extremely rare, and for good reason; few changelings escape from Arcadia and their True Fae captors with dumb muscle alone, and usually tricking the True Fae or bargaining their way out, and most sample Ogre characters in the books avert this trope. To paraphrase Winter Masques, "A Gargantuan who spent forty years guarding the libraries of a Faerie Knight spent forty years reading those tomes."
• Dungeons & Dragons,
  • Most Demon Lords of the Abyss are Genius Bruisers, Chessmasters, Magnificent Bastards, or some combination there of. The exception is Kostchtchie, a Psychopathic Man Child who may or may not have been a former frost giant, which is ironic as he's a textbook case of Hot-Blooded. (Technically, his official statistics in at least one source list his Intelligence Score at 18. He's clearly not as smart as most other planar rulers, but that's better than the average human.)
  • Of the player races, half-orcs are consistently portrayed in this fashion; they get a bonus to their Strength scores, and in 3rd Edition, a penalty to Intelligence. Wood elves have also in 3rd Edition both a bonus to Strength and a penalty to Intelligence on top of the modifiers to Dexterity and Constitution of elves.
  • Of the classes, Barbarians fit the mold better than any other. Before 4th Edition, anyone rolling a Barbarian had to spend points for their character to know how to read. Naturally, the popular half-orc Barbarian is often both a mental midget and a paragon of power. Meanwhile, the Fighter of 3.5 is actually something of an aversion: though they're free to dump mental stats, one of the best feats in a Fighter build, Improved Trip, requires an above-average Intelligence of at least 13.
  • Forgotten Realms: The orc god of strength Bahgtru is stupid even by orc standards with one of his nicknames being "the awesomely stupid." He is so stupid, intelligence draining attacks have no effect since he cannot get any dumber; one source backs this up mathematically by giving him 3 Intelligence, the bare minimum a creature can have without being a nonsapient animal. On the other hand he is so strong he is immune to strength draining spells and can bypass spells that protect from physical damage. Weapons and armor only slow him down, and he is never depicted using either in any myths, instead pummeling legions of enemies into paste with his bare hands; the symbol associated with him, a broken femur, comes from a famous orcish myth where he slew a giant, hundred-legged monster from another dimension by breaking all its legs.
  • A lot of monsters fit the profile of dim-witted thugs, if you go by stereotypes, including ogres, hill giants, trolls, and minotaurs (except minotaurs on Krynn, who can be rather smart). Ogres and hill giants, in particular, have an Intelligence stat of 5 in 5th Edition, making them exactly as smart as shambling mounds, which are non-sapient, predatory piles of compost. The mental stats of zombies also usually range from "low" to "nonexistent", so while they can follow orders they can't do things that are more complicated than "Attack that creature" or "Stand in this doorway and attack anyone trying to get past".
  • Trens are much bigger and stronger than common troglodytes, but also much less intelligent.
  • In 5E, Intelligence is a common Dump Stat, even more so then Charisma, because the Wizard is the only official (as of 2019) class that makes regular use of it. The skills it governs are all lore related (Arcana, History, etc.) so it unlikely for any class other than Wizard (or Artificer) to have even an average score.
• F.A.T.A.L.: If your intelligence is under a certain level, you can end up with a sizable strength bonus. This being FATAL, they actually call it "Retard Strength".
• In Nomine: Well, by archangel standards at least. Stone isn't exactly a concept known for quick thinking or complex philosophy, and its Archangel, David, is mentioned as being one of the few Superiors that's relatively easy to outwit. Still, an avalanche doesn't care if you outwit it, and in most cases David is more than strong enough to punch through clever plans.

  "Asmodeus spins Gordian knots of intrigue, well beyond my ability to unravel. I do not bother unraveling them. My hands can tear the strongest knot."

• Orcworld: The orcs' war god is so stupid that he actually tells a dragon that he doesn't care whether he woke him up. At one point his (much weaker) Pugg openly says, "It's true, he knows nothing." and he doesn't even realise the insult.
• Paranoia: Internal Security likes to promote these types straight to Green clearance. The goons love the authority, plus they act as a Hate Sink to distract attention from their superiors. "You're thinking, 'They sound like orcs'. Nope— these are orcs you're not allowed to kill."
• Pathfinder: Any given type of enemy has examples ranging the whole gamut of challenge ratings. However, based on the rules for the different enemy types, animals can never have an intelligence score above two and oozes usually don't have an intelligence score at all. As such, they can pack a mean punch for players of any level but don't have the brainpower to back up their muscle.
• Shadowrun plays with this; orks and trolls (races with higher physical stats) have lower intelligence caps than humans, elves and dwarves. Your average troll is no dumber than the average human, but trolls and orks can never be as smart as the highest possible peaks of human intellect. In the third edition intro to the races, the guest troll writer complains about the trope and claims that trolls and orks face discrimination and prejudice because everyone assumes this trope is true. Earlier editions stated that orks and trolls weren't dumber than humans, just slower. As in, their thought processes were slower. Give a human and a similarly gifted troll an advanced mathematical problem and they'll both solve it, it'll just take the troll a bit longer.
• Warhammer:
  • Blood Bowl: Most teams can hire at least one "Big Guy." With only a handful of exceptions, they all have either the Bone-head, Really Stupid, or Wild Animal traits, which means they are liable to stand around and do nothing for a turn. Even more of them have the loner trait, which means they can waste rerolls.
  • Necromunda:
    • Abhuman Scalies are recruited into Scavvy Gangs for their considerable size and strength rather than for their, somewhat limited, intelligence. To represent this, the 2nd Edition rules for Scalies barred them from becoming a gang leader as their high Leadership represented the fact that they are unlikely to run away (due to being too stupid to understand the danger they are in) rather than their command abilities.
    • House Goliath are notorious for being a gang of meathead bruisers, undergoing Bio-Augmentation that leaves them huge and muscular but does less than nothing for their brains. Their stats tend to give them very good Strength and Toughness, but poor Intelligence, making them exceptional at melee fights and soaking up fire but leaving them in trouble when the objective involves things like locked doors.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The Orks fit this trope to a T. They're loud, they're strong, but they're not very bright. They do, however, tend to possess a certain animal cunning. In any case, Orkz which exhibit unusual intelligence are called 'Oddboyz', and would be outcast, if not for their obvious usefulness in a fight.
    • Orks do have a major subversion in that the stronger the Ork is (and in turn also larger he is), the more intelligent an Ork is in matters concerning far beyond violence. Ork Warbosses make more proper use of languages and have a base understanding of math and science and so on enough to communicate with Mad Doks, Oddboyz, Mek Boys and other specialists of an Ork band.
    • Ogryns, who are humans who have evolved into being very tall and strong, at the expense of their intelligence (which is about the same as an average ork). To make a revealing example, the ogryn Nork Deddog is a genius by his race's standards, as he can write his first initial of his name, speak in full sentences, and count on up to four using his fingers (his thumb confuses him). The Imperium is quite fond of them due to their Dumb Is Good philosophy, in addition to their great size and strength for a non-Space Marine human, making them powerful, loyal soldiers. One of the main reasons ogryns are allowed to join the Imperium and not destroyed as mutants is their unquestionable faith in Emperor. They are simply too dumb to think about betrayal. In cases of Chaos-corrupted ogryns it's always their leaders who turn to Chaos and then lie to ogryns. They still think they are fighting on the right side.
    • Big Tyranid creatures, such as Carnifexes, Tyrant Guards and Biotitans only have small brains so as to not give them a vulnerability to headshots. However, since they are so big, the Hive Mind only needs to point them at the enemy before letting them run wild.
    • Genestealer Aberrants are massively muscled creatures capable of wielding heavy weaponry with ease, but are very dim-witted and mostly useful as heavy lifters and shock troops. Abominants, Aberrants further mutated by the Patriarch, are a more extreme case of this — they're even bigger and stronger than Aberrants, but have at best the intellects of infants and are mostly useful to the cult as something to throw at the enemy in order to sow chaos and destruction.
    • One of the side effects of the Kroot's You Are Who You Eat powers is that if they focus on eating too many of a given kind of animal, they'll be reduced to animalistic intelligence in future generations. The hulking, ape-like Krootox are larger and more powerful than standard Kroot, and Great Knarlocs resemble nothing so much as alien Tyrannosaurs, but neither are as smart as the standard Kroot Carnivores.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle:
    • Orcs are loud, strong, and so terribly dim that it's rare for them to use any tactic other than "violent melee charge".
    • Trolls cannot think of anything that isn't their next meal, and that's a pretty easy decision as is due to how open it can be.
    • Ogres are not quite as bad as trolls, but they're still pretty dumb; maybe smarter than orcs in average, but only slightly. Their thoughts mostly concern violence and ways to inflict it, and most of all their next meal. To exemplify, the smartest ogre of all, Greasus Goldtooth, already clever to begin and wearing an intellect-enhancing crown, is explicitly described as almost-human in intelligence.
    • Minotaurs are gigantic killing machines and so monumentally stupid that without the smarter Beastmen around, they'd all starve because they're can't find food on their own.
• World Tree (RPG): Khtsoyis are proverbially stupid —although strictly speaking they tend to be uneducated more than unintelligent— but also very strong and tough. They're commonly hired when strength, stupidity, and a certain low viciousness are desired.

    Technology 

• All computers and calculators are is dumb muscle, doing calculations and rendering but not really understanding what they are doing, or even understanding anything.

    Theater 

• Ida's brothers in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Princess Ida are described as being "not intelligent" in their song "We are warriors three". They also make the mistake of removing their armor before fighting Hilarion and co., finding it too cumbersome to move in. (They lose the battle.)

    Toys 

• BIONICLE:
  • Krekka, whose speech is not too far off from Hulk Speak and forgets about his own powers. He relies on the much smarter Nidhiki to tell him what to do.
  • Reidak loves to play the role because he honestly finds breaking things to be more fun than actually thinking tactically, but can be surprisingly cognizant when the situation calls for it.
  • Nocturn, who is the deadliest warrior in the Barraki's employ, but his mind is only slightly more advanced than a beast's with thoughts mostly devoted to killing and was imprisoned for accidentally destroying an entire island.
  • Carapar has shown shades of this due to the effects of being regularly hypnotized by Takadox for centuries, especially in contrast with the tactician he used to be as a warlord. He's probably still smarter than Krekka and Nocturn though.

    Web Animation 

• Dreamscape: Vampire Lord describes Boru as "One of those strong, yet stupid, types."
• Epithet Erased: Indus is the size of a small van and covered in muscles, but is very gullible and prone to poor decisions - for example, he's entirely convinced that doing Mera's laundry is Wax On, Wax Off training and not just Mera using him for free labour.
• The Fear Hole: In "All Hallows Adam", the character antagonizer is a parody on Nemesis with the brain and personality of a small child. And he is adorable. Too bad about what happens to him though...
• Homestar Runner: Strong Mad. His idea of reading is looking at a waffle with "BUG" written on it in syrup. "THIS BOOK IS TOO LONG!"
• Napster Bad: James Hetfield is depicted as a gorilla-like Neanderthal who talks in Hulk Speak. In "Metallica Millionaire", he's shown as being too stupid to answer a game show question about what band he plays in, even though every one of the available answers is "Metallica" and the host outright tells him to pick anything.
• hololive: Shirogane Noel and Kazama Iroha are the resident warriors, and are self-admitted muscle brains for whom strength is the solution to all of life's problems.
• Red vs. Blue: Caboose seems to get dumber as time goes on, but he's blessed with seemingly superhuman strength, as evidenced when he effortlessly lifts Andy the Bomb. As Tucker says: "We think it's God's way of compensating." In Recreation, Sarge comments on Caboose's strength when he effortlessly flips a warthog.
• Water-Human: Bogdan speaks mostly in single words, and even is lauded when he manages to compose a sentence for the first time.

    Webcomics 

• 8-Bit Theater: Black Belt is a Genius Ditz, a master of hand to hand combat who can't navigate a straight line, while Fighter and Bikke are all around morons (although still smarter than people give them credit for). Among other things, Bikke insists on being known as "The Claw", on account of the fearsome claw in place of his right hand. Except he actually has two perfectly normal hands, at least until he acquires a claw that he simply slips on. Meanwhile, Fighter simply doesn't understand that Black Mage hates him.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: This is Martin Monster's (a Captain Ersatz of the Hulk) fatal flaw, in that his Super Mode leaves him dumb and easy to manipulate, resulting in him accidentally betraying his college buddies and leaving him in debt to Mafia leader King Radical. It's also an inherent effect of having too much muscle. Eventually the muscle forms into a jetpack, and when you're flying around all the time your oxygen-starved brain becomes less efficient, causing you to speak solely in bodybuilding cliches.
• Curse Quest: Subverted with Mogarth, in his original depiction in "The Kobold's Dungeon" he definitely fit the bill, smashing through doors without regards of what is on the other side. However, in his updated version, he seems to be more socially awkward and inattentive, but not outright stupid.
• Elf Blood: Death Elves tend to get this treatment, having absorbed some dwarfy/orcy qualities from other fantasy lines. A possible exception is JN, who is strong and has not yet been shown to say anything profoundly stupid. He hasn't exactly been shown to be doing anything unduly smart, either.
• El Goonish Shive: A fantasy panel shows Nanase exchanging strength buffs for intelligence debuffs.
• Girl Genius: R-79, an incredibly strong construct and prisoner in Castle Heterodyne, though he does clue into some things a bit faster than some of the other prisoners on occasion his normal solution to problems is to destroy and murder anything in his way.
  • The Jägermonsters are a complicated case. Most of the world sees them as bloodthirsty and stupid killing machines, and the Jägers do nothing to dispel that image. Their behavior is a mix of several factors: 1. The Jägers as a whole do tend to be impulsive and think with their muscles before their brains, 2. they like being blunt objects that don't have to worry much about more complicated things and just carry out their orders, but most importantly, 3. they have a tendency to play up their goofy and mindlessly violent images specifically to make both their opponents and their employers underestimate them. The Jägers are by no means a race of genuises, but the majority are sharper than they appear to be.
• Goblins: Minmax traded all of his skills and intelligence points for attack power. As a result, he can't do very much other than fight.
• Homestuck: Eggs and Biscuits, in the Midnight Crew intermission, are described as "morons, but dangerous morons". Biscuits in particular thinks hiding in an oven until the timer goes is a form of time power.
• Irritability: Chappy Chappy rarely tries to solve any problems without violence.
• Looking for Group: Cale assumes this of trolls, after his first meeting with Tim. As it turns out, most of their species are quite intelligent, Tim's just been hit on the head with a mace a few times too many.
• Nerd & Jock: The titular Jock appears as a simple-minded bodybuilder when next to his best friend, the intelligent Nerd, but it's subverted as he's shown to be capable of introspective and thoughtful moments that imply a deeper personality. He's even aware of the trope, too, and wishes he was smart as Nerd since physical strength can only get someone so far.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Thog, who proves to be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to half-orcs. Of course, being a barbarian, INT was his dump stat. A later introduction is the dragon/ogre hybrid Enor, who appears to be very slightly more intelligent than Thog, and possibly even stronger.
  • Of the Order itself, Roy finds himself constantly battling this stereotype. He could have been a wizard like his father wanted, but he chose to become a fighter instead.
  • Crystal of the Thieves' Guild is an inversion of the typical stereotype. She's a petite, lithe girl who's both the Guild's deadliest assassin and dumb as a rock. Her boss, Bozzock, is a hulking half-orc who has to do Crystal's thinking for her.
• Schlock Mercenary: Nick has trouble with numbers above 1 and has managed to misunderstand a great many situations. He makes up for it with a good heart, a bottomless supply of loyalty, and being the size of a caravan. Shep was like this too in the early strips, but Divergent Character Evolution gave him at least a modicum of intelligence.
• Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: Barbarians are physically powerful but are so strongly stereotyped as such utter idiots that they're barred from most professions. When the protagonist gets transmigrated into the setting as a Barbarian, he initially agrees, but later finds that they can be just as canny as humans if they can be distracted from the warrior lifestyle long enough to learn new information.
• Tower of God: Kurdan, a literal-minded big guy who doesn't even know who or what he is fighting half the time.

    Websites 

• Serina: Savage gravediggers are the largest and strongest of the three gravedigger species of the Late Ocean Age. However, unlike their sapient relatives, they are only about as smart as a chimp due to losing the higher intelligence of their tundra gravedigger ancestors.
• Something Awful: In the "WTF, D&D" column, occasionally they run an actual Dungeons & Dragons module. In one of them, "Journey to the Rock", Steve "Malak" Sumner played Dean Snakehands, a level 4 elf with stats specifically meant to suggest the barbarian class he wasn't allowed to pick because this was Basic. Raised by frost wolves in the frozen tundra of the north, Dean Snakehands is "a muscley, savage, brutarded elf" with a meager intelligence score of 6. Dean does everything wrong because he's an idiot, but kills giant rock monsters who greatly outnumber him because he's a freaking beast. Despite playing the character for comedy, Malak was applauded for a fairly realistic depiction of an unsupervised slow-witted behemoth.

    Web Videos 

• Berserk Abridged: Guts. One of his moments is thinking that menstruation is a myth, along with women stealing men's bodily fluids to create leprechauns. He also thought that the Hawks were literally going to impregnate a castle.
• Critical Role: Grog is a Goliath Barbarian who believes that he himself is the smartest member on the team, even though in Episode 4 he thinks putting a pot on his head will stop the episode's monsters from mind controlling him.

  Grog: I have an Intelligence of 6, I know what I'm doing!

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Captain Hammer has super strength, but fundamental deficits in the intelligence department. In a comic adaptation, Dr. Horrible devises a serum from his DNA to grant himself Captain Hammer's powers and ends up almost dumber.
• Everyman HYBRID: Evan is noted as the most technologically dumb of the group and he even seems momentarily confused by the concept of a keycard as a method of opening an electronic lock. He shies away from technology to the point where Vince describes him as an "RL-troll" because he's got a troll mentality (although he's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at worst) but only checks the Internet once or twice a month. It's considered a big deal when he gets a laptop. He's also a martial artist, he carries a giant bayonet around everywhere, and he even went after Slender Man with a baseball bat.
• My Dad's Tapes: Uncle Don describes his son as having the physical prowess but not much in the way of brains, contrasting Chris's puzzle-solving abilities.

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