How do you make a clever character stupid?

You give them an infatuation. A fixation. Something that completely overrides their critical thinking and better judgment. Something that drives them nuts like a switch is thrown.

And when that happens, they're dumber than a bag of rocks. (And they're also extremely obnoxious/irritating/frustrating to their environment AND the audience, so use sparingly if you want that character to remain at least somewhat sympathetic)

What is a fixation (or infatuation or obsession)?

It is something or someone that attracts a character's interest so much that they get tunnel vision. When under a fixation, this character will act more or less like an addict in withdrawal, looking for a fix: they will be unable to practice restraint, unable to accept refusal or inability to have what they want, unable to listen to reason, unable to stop themselves from getting entagled in risky situations even though they can grasp the risk and in ANY other situation would have opted out of it.

Fixation comes with a very specific possessive approach coupled with self-centeredness. Nothing is more important that satisfying the obsession and getting that dopamine hit when the character manages to do it, or even attempts some kind of substitute satisfaction of the obsession to get that hit: for example, a character obsessed with a woman that keeps refusing them may attempt to shape another woman to look like the one that rejected them, like demand they wear certain clothes favored by the woman they can't have, and so on.

An obsession can push a character to villainous acts when in any other situation they wouldn't engage in them: to get this unattainable woman, they may resort to deception or they may try to attack whoever they perceive is the reason for the woman being unattainable or they may try to blackmail the woman into accepting them, all behaviors they'd be shocked by if they weren't infatuated themselves.

They may also neglect all other duties or responsibilities to nurse their obsession. It doesn't need to be a romantic interest. An obsession could be gaining a certain job or rank. It may be marriage before X years of age (to whomever). It may be attaining a certain title or vanquishing a specific adversary or enemy at any cost.

Obsession takes many forms- even being obsessed with keeping a thing even if that means sacrificing human beings or livelihoods can be (and usually is) a form of obsession. (Gone With the Wind is a good example of that)

An obsession could be the driving force of a descent into madness or a cross from good to evil. Whether the character can reverse that course depends on the obsession, their personality, and who surrounds them that can potentially help them break the obsession and give up on whatever unreasonable, unattainable, or impossible target they have fixated. (Trying to find a way to resurrect your dead (insert significant other/relative/etc here) is another obsession)

Obsession might seem to be coming from a noble or well-meaning place (often love is blamed, but also it could be loyalty or adherence to the law or any other value or tennet or principle) but it never is. Obsession is ALWAYS about pride or selfishness of some sort: a person's self-esteem or self-concept is hurt in some way through a rejection of some sort which then drives them to heal that hurt by overturning it. The rejection must be turned into acceptance even through force, at all costs, so the grievance can be eliminated and the person reassured their self-concept is unthreatened and intact. That's all there is to it under all the dressing and the rationalization.

To give a non-romantic example, Javert from Les Miserables is obsessed with catching Jean Valjean because a) he's the one that got away (i.e. Javert feels his competence is threatened) b) he is an ex-criminal that is however an asset to society doing good things (i.e. Javert's conviction that criminals can never be reformed/good/etc is threatened) and c) he is stronger than Javert in every way, including physical (i.e. Javert's antagonism is triggered). To eliminate all these threats he has to catch Jean Valjean no matter what. How does obsession make him stupid? Well, an otherwise clever man cannot fathom Valjean's motivations because he refuses to consider them in the first place. And when in the end he is brought to a position where he has to let Valjean go, Javert has to eliminate himself instead to achieve it. Which is also a stupid thing to do (understandable psychologically, but stupid).

Even an obsession about something like acquiring many shoes can be tracked back to some kind of mitigation of rejection, depending on context: having many shoes may symbolize social acceptance to that person, or it may remind them of someone buying them for them that isn't around anymore or it may give them comfort that nothing else does for some reason (e.g. shoes always fit, clothes often don't if the person is struggling with weight and how they are treated for it).

An obsession may be underlying in a character, only to be triggered when that rejection takes place. They may not obsess over ‘winning over’ someone until that someone suddenly is won over by another, etc.

While serving an obsession can start off “cleverly” by scheming and planning and going about attaining the goal elegantly, it's a mathematical certainty that the more frustrated the character becomes when they can't attain the goal of the obsession, the more frantic and erratic and less sophisticated in their planning they become. They make more and more mistakes, more glaring each time.

It's like when you start off trying to carefully balance cards to make a tower because that is tremendously important to you and you MUST make the tower or else you can't survive: if they keep collapsing, making you have to start over, which is more painful every time, in the end you will just flip the table and set fire to the deck of cards. Is it the clever thing to do, when you *must* make a card tower? No. You're left with no table and no cards, so you can't make the tower anymore. But you think of that after you flip the table and set the cards on fire in a rage.

Narratively, obsession is a double-edged sword. It can be a powerful tool to push a character to evolve but if it's not done right it can even threaten suspension of disbelief if the obsession is too intense too quickly. Like every character trait it needs to be given time to take hold and, in this case, fester in the characger's mind until it's too powerful and will believably inform a character's behavior to the point they make wrong, stupid choices they most likely will regret later.

Have you ever written a character with an obsession?

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