Hellistics

4 Following

• Great Teacher Onizuka:
  • Onizuka is on a train on the way to his last-chance interview for a teaching position. He spots an old man fondling a woman's behind and, being the direct sort, headbutts him. Good coincidence: the young woman is also applying for a position at the same school and is grateful for his help. Bad coincidence: the old man is the principal of the school and the one interviewing him.
  • Interestingly enough, Onizuka is for seemingly unrelated reasons the name of the man's wife's and daughter's pet dog, who hates him and has apparently been trained to pee in his shoes. ...Actually, both this series and its chronological prequel do a lot to show everybody getting in everybody's (even their own) way regardless of whether they're trying to. The closest thing there seems to be to a moral is something like "You can only help being your own bad guy, so admit who you are, loosen up, live free and dirty, and accept the world will still dish out grief."
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2016): A conversation with Telma prompts Link to (correctly) suspect that his Doomed Hometown, recently sacked second hometown, and the ominous activity around Hyrule Castle Town are fate's response to his lukewarm reception towards the Call to Adventure.

• Cuori Grassi: Whenever Rocco is at his closest to achieving his goal of losing weight, some absurdity or another will inevitably hamper his path. Be it his parents winning free meal tickets to Rocco's favorite restaurant or him getting injured and, thus, unable to keep exercising. Either of which may be caused by unrelated events to Rocco's quest or actions.

• Paradoxus: The quality of Altalune's plan notwithstanding, the many bumps in the time traveler team's path that occur for seemingly no reason are enough to make them fail. These include Bloom and Stella not deciding to stay in Alfea the night they were due (nor the following few), the Book of Destiny giving a nonconclusive prophecy, and Eudora attacking Stacy and Gilliam during their recon mission. Among other things, countering their actions, the days pass, and the five fairies see no noticeable deviation in the timeline. The narration gives us the answer—time is fixing itself. The reason why the universe seems to be spitting on their attempts to prevent the Bad Future is that they are trying to preclude events that have Ontological Inertia for the timeline, which renders all efforts null.

My Hero Academia

• better luck next time: Ace gets initially involved with the Gekkeiju when he sees a report in the morning about a kidnapped little girl with an empathy quirk. Resetting time, he goes to save her and successfully foils the villain's plans. The villains are not to be deterred, so this means, sadly, that another person with an empathy quirk that also gives him some mild mind-reading, and who is a U.A. student is captured and blackmailed into becoming The Mole for them. As things get derailed, Ace ends up forced to join the Gekkeiju as well, so he unwittingly meets their other spy. So, now, just because he risked his neck to save a person from quirk trafficking, he's got to be real careful at U.A. as to not reveal that he plans to betray the aforementioned villain group.

Potter Verse

• A Brand New Start: Pandora Lovegood's descent to madness is purely the result of bad coincidences Hydrus had no way to even know about to prevent. It was her dream to find a way to make Muggle appliances work along with magic. A dream that gets shattered when Hydrus, having inherited Frostwell's journals, travels back in time and introduces them to the market. Then, when The Times outsells her family's newspaper, she can no longer keep researching and creating spells. Instead, she has to become a full-time editor to support her family.
• Dodging Prison & Stealing Witches: Virgo Malfoy is a girl whom Harry dismisses as unimportant; a far-reaching by-product of his meddling on the timeline. When he deduces she's the one in possession of Riddle's Diary, he sends Ginny to eliminate the threat. Ginny's attack of conscience and Harry's small slip-ups derail into a paranoid Virgo finally getting complete control of her body, merging with Riddle in the process, and deduces not only that Harry is a time-traveler but that he was sent back when John failed his mission.

• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Goldilocks and the three bears track Puss to hire him to steal from Jack Horner. He hides, mistaking them for bounty hunters, but then decides to go for the treasure himself anyway. Later, we learn that Goldi and the bears previously tried to hire Kitty Softpaws for the same purpose, and she rebukes them to double-cross them and get the MacGuffin for herself. That's how Puss and Kitty accidentally end up meeting. The Hellistics part of this is that Puss left Kitty at the altar years ago in Santa Coloma. So Puss' karma for being a lousy lover comes back to bite him at the worst possible moment—he's lost his sword and is thus at Kitty's mercy.
• Ratatouille: From the villain's perspective. To Chef Skinner's dismay, the newly-hired, 'talented' cook he's spent the whole movie bullying and demeaning is the legitimate heir to Gusteau's restaurant due to being the deceased chef's son. It means that the comfortable life Skinner's gotten used to as the manager of the place is about to end. Furthermore, Linguini would become Skinner's boss.

By Author:

• Harlan Ellison's short story "The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge" exaggerates this, as the Jerkass protagonist finds that the entire universe is apparently out to get him in the name of the man he wronged, including a dog and inanimate objects such as an elevator door and a car door. after he does himself in, it is implied that the very same fate will befall the man the main character wronged

By Work:

• A Certain Magical Index: GREMLIN tries to make an Esper based on Holism, who would change the macroscopic world to achieve a microscopic effect.
• Children of the Lamp: Philippa grants a police officer three wishes. One of these wishes results in Layla Gaunt's body being incinerated by a volcano.
• Dirk Gently: The title character, a holistic private investigator, is always in the middle of The End of the World as We Know It thanks to a string of ridiculous coincidences; the first book alone involves a crash-landed Ancient Astronaut, a malfunctioning robotic monk, and time travel leading to an old college friend of Dirk's becoming a murder suspect.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has an unusual example in that the main characters are revealed to be the ones doing the screwing-over. Every single time Agrajag has been reincarnated, which is many, he has been killed by the protagonist Arthur Dent. No matter what species, time, or planet, Agrajag has always managed to die due to Arthur's actions. This has given him a burning hatred of Arthur, while Arthur himself had no reason to even suspect that all these many different creatures dying in pretty normal ways (or at least normal for the situation they found themself in) were the same person over and over again.
• A World for Julius: Because of parental neglect, Vilma becomes Julius' mother/older sister figure despite only being his nanny. She's sadly fired because of egotistical reasons, and not seen until many years later, Julius now a teenager, ventures into Lima's ugly underbelly. There, he meets a prostitute—Vilma, who has been forced to resort to the oldest profession out of need. To make matters worse, earlier in the novel it was mentioned that Julius' older brother was prone to acts of debauchery such as sleeping around with hookers. Wanna guess who's one of said hookers? This is Played for Drama, as this anagnorisis was the final one needed for Julius' sheltered, privileged world to crumble.

• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry's Jerkass behavior often causes him to get screwed over because of this trope.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: In the episode where Will and Lisa are supposed to get married, Lisa's dad complains about some battleaxe of a woman whom he had to sit next to on the plane ride there. Then Will's mom arrives and complains about some man she sat next to who called her a battleaxe. Will and Lisa decide to let them have dinner together so they'll start to like each other. Meanwhile, Will is having doubts about his upcoming marriage to Lisa. When he goes to talk to his mom about it, he finds that she slept with Lisa's dad. At the altar, Will and Lisa end up canceling their marriage...and Will's mom and Lisa's dad decide to get married in their place.
• Frontier House: Being reality TV and all, with little malicious intervention on the production team's part, the trope is never played straight. However, one of the families—the father, in particular—comes to believe this to be the case. That everything they do ends up setting off a negative consequence... somehow.
• Hot L Baltimore: In "Historic L Baltimore", half the plot is spent trying to save the hotel-turned-apartment-complex from the wrecking ball. The universe seems intent on it being destroyed, because just as the characters manage to get it declared a historical landmark, their hijinks indirectly catch the attention of a Japanese Corporation that now wishes to buy it due to its increased value.
• Intimate: The Camping Episode splits into two storylines when the guys flee from a thunderstorm in the night and seek shelter with people they'd met during the day, and dovetail in the end through a series of events: Chris, the comedian whose party Max and Oskar crash, happens to be booked for a set at the hostel where Bruno and Emil spent the night. Because Oskar stole Chris's cocaine, he's unable to perform and runs off the stage, so Emil and Bruno decide to deliver an impromptu comedy show. The doctor who oversees the group of hospice patients at the hostel is, by incredibly Contrived Coincidence, Max's doctor who diagnosed him with scabies at the beginning of the episode. When he recognizes Max and Oskar (who took a cab to the show along with Chris) in the audience, he connects the dots and realizes that the guys are a group who have broken their quarantine and spread the disease around. He orders Max and Oskar on stage with Emil and Bruno and gives them a dressing down in front of the shocked and angry crowd.
• Sadakatsiz: Doctor Asya is driving when she notices a distressed man in the middle of the road. She stops and quickly deduces he's suffering a panic attack induced by his schizophrenia. Asya calms him down and walks him to a safer place. Afterward, he's deeply grateful and becomes Asya's regular patient. Some months later, Derin (Asya's ex-husband's mistress) is kidnapped for real. The culprits are Faruk (the man Asya helped out) and his wife Nazan; their motive being a severely misguided and sociopathic attempt to pay back Asya's kindness. It only makes Asya's life more stressful, especially as they later kidnap her too so she can take revenge on Derin, the woman who has wronged her so much.
• Seinfeld:
  • George needs a car battery to power up an arcade game, so Kramer's friend carries said battery at night. Meanwhile, Jerry has to remain with a girlfriend he loathes because he heard some news of a serial beheader and mistakes Kramer's friend with the battery for the psycho carrying a head.
  • The "maroon Golf" Jerry ("black Saab") blocked in traffic and who paid him back.
• Workaholics: The guys nearly hit a man in their car while driving to work. At the office, they discover a visiting company executive is that man. Turns out to be an example for the exec too, as he was trying to get hit by a car.

• EPIC: The Musical: While in The Odyssey, Odysseus' many plights are a direct consequence of Poseidon's curse, EPIC leaves some of them an Ambiguous Situation. Since Poseidon's main tools to terrorize him and his crew are literally turning the tides against their ship and actively hunting them down, this means that some of the crew's bad decisions and misfortune are not Poseidon's direct influence. For one, Zeus likes seeing Odysseus suffer and, therefore, is the reason why Calypso can keep him trapped on her island for 7 years. On another account, Odysseus' crew is outright stupid at times for no good reason—Eurylochus opening the windbag has no actual justification, only serving to greatly set them back. Was this Poseidon's influence invoking this trope to cause the world to conspire against the protagonists? Or is it just a combination of stupidity and Odysseus' hubris?

• Our Miss Brooks: In "Poison Ivy", Miss Brooks tells off an obnoxious man who is tying up Mrs. Davis' party line. Later, Miss Brooks and Walter Denton nearly run over an obnoxious jaywalking woman on their drive to school. Unhappily, Mr. Conklin soon informs Miss Brooks that said obnoxious man and woman are important state officials who have the power to fire Mr. Conklin or Miss Brooks on the spot!

• Ghost Trick: An undercover cop working as a waitress at a restaurant spies a couple of suspicious foreigners, and plants a bug in their food to be monitored by her colleague. One of them spots it and burns it, causing the one listening to receive extreme feedback. This knocks him out, causing the van he was driving to crash into the same restaurant, killing him and one of the patrons.
• Guardian Tales: The Knight's unexpected döppelganger from World 12 appears just as he's trying to convince some police officers that he's the real deal.

• El Goonish Shive: Inverted. During the party, a lightbulb explodes, interrupting Susan and Justin's ill-advised hook-up. They see this as a fortunate coincidence. It's actually the Demonic Duck saving their friendship. He owed Justin a favor after a joke went very wrong.
• Misfile: Missi causes problems between Heather and Emily, to be solved on the tracks. Emily wins. Heather gets pissed. Heather gets a prodigy to try to beat Ash. Said prodigy and Eponine, a friend of Cassiel, hit it off at a party. Cassiel takes it upon herself to try to help said prodigy win the race with magic. Rumisiel attempts to keep Cassiel from rigging the race, which causes Logan to crash. The police arrive to check up on the accident, also finding Emily, who they were looking for since she ran off in the middle of the night to watch said race. Emily's mother blames the night on Ash, forbidding Emily to hang out anymore, though Molly quickly steps in and takes the blame while also calling Ms. McArthur out on being so overbearing toward Emily. This results in Ash inviting Missi. Long story short, Ash eats with Missi somewhere. Getting out of said eating place, Ash and Missi are approached by two men who hint at raping them before the aforementioned prodigy shows up and threatens to call the cops.

• Phineas and Ferb: Whereas her brothers are protected by the powers of convenient contrived coincidences that destroy their inventions before their parents can see them, Candace is afflicted with the contrary. She has such bad luck, that whenever she is the one to plot something or get in trouble, the stupidest things will cause her mother to come back home at the most inopportune moment and bust her. In "Candace Gets Busted", Perry defeats Doofenshmirtz early enough that, despite Doof's inator of the week banishing Candace's guests, they come back to the Flynn-Fletchers' backyard just when Linda is calling Candace to check on her and her brothers. This causes Candace's mom to ground her for throwing a forbidden Wild Teen Party. Perry's secret agent activities have absolutely nothing to do with Candace, despite him being her pet, by the way.
• Winx Club: The Trix are the Winx's nemeses and, by far, the most prominent recurring villains of the series. This means that, come the start of the next season, there is a mandatory plot contrivance that allows them to be involved yet again, often allied with the new season's Big Bad. A couple of times, the places they've been incarcerated in just so happen to have a powerful bad guy nearby (e.g., Valtor and Tritannus). In others, they are freed by the new villain, such as Darkar. The most ridiculous ones are when the Trix are supposedly sent into nothingness (like the Realix realm, of which the portal back was destroyed, or the Oblivion dimension), and they somehow still come back! The universe sure seems intent on the Winx and the Trix remaining bitter enemies till the end of times.