I remember 2 cases- the "smart juice" one and the sword one.

Worse crime solving you've seen? by cattomboy/jebboy on 2015-11-19 23:06:00 UTC Reply

So since my first thread asking about what is the weirdest changes to a canon character you've seen was a success and off the first page I figured I'd ask you guys something else.

This is based off the ending to the badfic Wipovsky School for Twins which is a Layton Brothers Mystery Room Au where everyone for some reason has a good twin and evil twin. (Warnings for murder,puns,written out accents,and very ooc characters) If you don't know what Layton Brothers Mystery Room is it's an IOS game where you play as Lucy Baker solving murder mysteries with the canon son of Professor Layton.

It makes sense there would be a murder mystery in the fanfic no?
However the way the murderer gives up in this fanfic is because a very ooc(actually way too ooc to be him) Alfendi points out he had a blindfold on therefore he couldn't shot the gun. Ignoring the fact people with blindfolds can still shoot guns.

So I wonder,what is some of the worst crime solving you've seen in fanfics? Or even in canons.

Well, if we are including canons in this discussion... by James Shields on 2015-11-19 23:48:00 UTC Reply

then I absolutely gotta go with Encyclopedia Brown. There's a reason why the trope Conviction by Counterfactual Clue, which is the sort of thing you are describing, used to called Encyclopedia Browned. If you check the literature tab on that page, the first thing you'll see will be lots of examples of bad crime solving from that series.

So his name is the only smart thing about him? by cattomboy/jebboy on 2015-11-20 00:35:00 UTC Reply

I had heard about Encyclopedida Brown but I hadn't heard of that kind of logic being called Encyclopedia Browning. Looking at all the examples I sort of want to read the books to see how bad they are.

Well, you could only count him as smart if... by James Shields on 2015-11-20 02:38:00 UTC Reply

you counted using random pieces of trivia to catch someone in a lie and then using that as pretty much as your own evidence to name them as the culprit, as being smart. That's Conviction by Contradiction and it's yet another trope that used to be named after his series. It gets to the point that The Onion wrote this parody about him.

I remember 2 cases- the "smart juice" one and the sword one. by OrangeYoshi99 on 2015-11-21 04:14:00 UTC Reply

Then we have Cam Jansen, which wasn't as bad.

And at least it was justifiable in the pocket knife case by James Shields on 2015-11-21 18:49:00 UTC Reply

Since in that case the contradiction was being used to create reasonable doubt for the defendant, instead of being used to accused someone of a crime as he usually does.