History Main / ItBeganWithATwistOfFate

* In ''Anime/CodeGeass'', had Lelouch not decided to play the HeroicBystander, he wouldn't have met C.C. and gained the powers he needed to initiate the rebellion.
* ''Manga/DeathNote'' happens when a {{Shinigami}} gets bored and drops his [[ArtifactOfDoom eponymous notebook]] in the human world to see what will happen, and it just so happens to get picked up by a genius high school student with a god complex.
* ''Anime/GaistCrusher'': Recka being in the right place at the right time.
* In ''Anime/GuiltyCrown'', had Shu gone straight home instead of to his usual hangout, he wouldn't have encountered Inori and set off the chain of events that would result in gaining the incredibly powerful Void Genome.
* Similar to the ''Forrest Gump'' example, Gene and Jim of ''Manga/OutlawStar'' begin their adventure by accepting an ordinary offer to be bodyguards for a client.

* Lampshaded in the opening narration of ''Literature/ShakuganNoShana''. Yuji wonders how different his life would have been had he not decided to go to the CD store on the fateful afternoon where he met [[TheHero Shana]] and found out that he's a Torch with incredible magical power.

* Lina Inverse from ''Literature/{{Slayers}}'' is hardly an everygirl, being one of the most powerful magic-users of her world. However, her usual ''modus vivendi'' is just being a wandering mercenary and treasure hunter; all that unwanted SavingTheWorld stuff happens to her due to seemingly insignificant choices, such as not agreeing to sell a particular statuette for cheap.

* In ''Fanfic/AmazingFantasy'', Izuku gets his spider powers by turning down an alleyway out of curiosity rather than walking under a shady underpass.
* In ''Fanfic/NeitherABirdNorAPlaneItsDeku'', Inko and Hisashi Midoriya would have never found their adoptive Kryptonian son if they had decided to camp somewhere other than Mt. Fuji on that fateful night.
* In ''Fanfic/OfQuirksAndMagic'', the story begins when Izuku takes a dare to sneak into an abandoned mansion rather than chickening out as Bakugo anticipated.

* ''Fanfic/ThisBites'' starts off with Cross discussing online how amazing life in the ''Anime/OnePiece'' setting would be as long as you find a way to stay alive, and that joining the Straw Hats should keep you safe since they always look out for each other. A passing Bastard Random Omnipotent Being takes him up on the suggestion.
* In ''Fanfic/YuGiOhTheThousandYearDoor'', the Shadow Queen's rise to power and evil unlike the world ever knew - at the time - would have been prevented had a town simply not refused the pleas of three starving and homeless children begging for food. [[note]]The DisasterDominoes were as follows: three siblings, Iris, Seth, and lars, came to the now-forgotten town begging for aid, but were turned away. Desperate, Seth tried to steal from a temple to get money, but was caught. The judge was sympathetic, but to prevent the town from lynching him, he handed down a lenient punishment of one week in jail; but Seth was to sickly and died after one night. When Lars and Iris tried to claim the body, a horse on the carriage carrying it was spooked, and Lars was dragged behind it, horrifically torn apart. Iris was enraged, cursed at the now-repentant townsfolk, and fled into the wilderness. Eventually collapsing from a combination of exhaustion and hunger, she waited to die... Until a voice came to her, offering help. Whether she realized then the dark being the voice came from or whether she just didn't care, she accepted, becoming a loyal servant of Graz'zt and reforged into a villain who would threaten the world.[[/note]]

* In ''WesternAnimation/TurningRed'', Mei's decision to glance down at her notebook causes Ming to notice it, open it, and grossly overreact to its contents leading to the incident at the Daisy Mart. [[NiceJobBreakingItHero Said incident is implied to have been the trigger for Mei's first transformation into her giant red panda form]]. Had the incident at the Daisy Mart not happened, Mei's first transformation would have likely been under significantly different circumstances leading to completely different events and Pandapocalype 2002 may have not happened at all.

* In ''Film/{{Chronicle}}'', three teenagers accidentally get superpowers just because they decide to check out a weird-looking grave. [[spoiler:The source of their superpowers is never even explained.]]

* Cab driver Max in ''Film/{{Collateral}}'' gets pulled into the plot simply by picking up the wrong passenger: a sociopathic hitman named Vincent who forces Max to drive him to his targets.
* Lee from ''Film/{{Eraser}}'' detected a "clerical error" which led her to the conclusion that the arms manufacturing company she works for has been selling weapons to America's enemies.
* In ''Film/TheKnowledge'': Chris goes on The Knowledge after he and Janet wander into a cafe, where they overhear Knowledge boys earnestly discussing the subject.
* ''Film/{{Miracle}}'' crosses over with {{real life}}. In Team USA's first game of the 1980 Winter Olympic ice hockey tournament, it scores a tying goal against Sweden. In the film, the goal is depicted as a confidence booster, giving the team momentum for their run to the gold medal. However, that goal had an effect on the final standings that was ''far'' more important than anyone remembers, or realized at the time.[[note]] At that time the final round was not an elimination round as has been done in every Olympics since 1992, and has been standard in almost every other sports tournament in the world. Instead, the top two teams from the two pools advanced to the medal round and played the top two teams in the other pool. The medals would then be determined by the points standings after these games. Just to make it even more confusing, teams carried their points they'd earned against the team who also advanced in their pool into the medal round, but not the points against the teams that did not advance. Since the Soviets had beaten Finland in pool play they came into the medal round with two points, but the USA and Sweden entered with only one point since they had tied. Finland entered with zero points since they had lost to the Soviets. The film does point out that the USA still had to beat Finland to secure the Gold. But had they not tied Sweden in the last minute of that first game, they would've finished the medal round with four points instead of five meaning they'd have been tied with the Soviets. Okay, so the USA beat the Soviets so they get the tiebreaker, right? Nope. The first tiebreaker is goal differential, which the Soviets had the edge in due to beating Sweden 9–2 giving them a +6 differential compared to just +3 for the USA. In other words, that one last-minute goal against Sweden spared the USA, and possibly the entire world, [[AllForNothing from the most baffling and anti-climactic result in sports history.]][[/note]]
* ''Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1968'' begins with a ''literal'' twist--that of Johnny twisting the radio dial to "OFF" just as the news bulletin comes on announcing the unfolding emergency. If Johnny had listened to the emergency broadcast, he might have piled himself and Barbara back into the car and driven to a shelter. That probably wouldn't have changed anything that happens to the other characters in the film (or the terrible situation facing humanity at large), but since Barbara (and the audience) never would have been introduced to them, the story on the screen undoubtedly would have been different, [[spoiler:and perhaps she and Johnny would even have survived]].
* Near the beginning of ''Film/NorthByNorthwest'', advertising executive Roger Thornhill shares a taxi to the Plaza Hotel with his secretary and asks her to phone his mother for him; it is not until the taxi pulls away that he remembers his mother is unreachable by phone and will need to be contacted by telegram. So he flags down a pageboy who is calling for a Mr. George Kaplan to ask about sending a telegram, unaware that two henchmen for a criminal organisation are on the lookout for Kaplan and interpret Thornhill's action to mean that he is Kaplan and is responding to the page. They proceed to abduct Thornhill at gunpoint and take him to their boss to see how much "Kaplan" knows about them, and things snowball from there...
* And then there's the time Luke Skywalker's uncle bought a couple of droids in ''Franchise/StarWars: Film/ANewHope.''

* ''Last Passenger'' starts with Lewis Shaler boarding a late-night train home with his young son. After some talking with the few remaining passengers, they notice that [[RunawayTrain the train isn't stopping at any stations...]]
* In the Creator/JohnSayles film ''Limbo'' (1999), Joe, a handyman and fishing captain, agrees to take his estranged half-brother Bobby to pick up a client. What he doesn't know is Bobby is involved in drug smuggling, he had dumped drugs to avoid arrest by the police, and in retaliation, Bobby's partners sneak on the boat and kill him, forcing Joe to flee for his life, and he's left stranded in the Alaskan wilderness. Also counts for Joe's girlfriend Donna and her daughter Noelle, who came along with Joe expecting a nice boat ride and end up having to flee into the same wilderness, where they all have to struggle just to survive.
* ''Film/TheManWhoKnewTooLittle'' begins when the main character answers a phone booth earlier than he was supposed to.

* How did the plot of ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' get kicked off? A group of kids decided to take a short-cut through an abandoned construction site instead of taking the long way home. If they hadn't, they never would have discovered the aliens.
** In ''Megamorphs #4: Back To Before'', [[TheDragon the Drode]] gives Jake the chance to change the past so that they didn't take the shortcut, and thus never became Animorphs. The results? [[spoiler:All the would-have-been Animorphs die, except for Jake and Ax, but the Drode stops the alternate timeline in frustration, since they have just killed Visser Three and Ax is about to use the Visser's Blade ship to destroy the Pool ship and thereby the invasion. The death-blow to Visser Three, though, is only delivered by Cassie after [[ItMakesSenseInContext she self-reincarnates]] due to being a temporal anomaly that has been slowly breaking the alternate timeline, so if they had done this in the real timeline, they might not have won.]]
* Pretty much the entire plot of ''Literature/CodexAlera'' happened because Tavi decided to get some flowers for a girl.
* ''Literature/CiaphasCain:'' Nearly every important plot event stems from Cain looking for a quiet, routine assignment away from the front line. All it does is allow him to run into the secret cult/the backdoor entrance into their base/ the unseen flanking attack which only leads him into greater danger as a result. Pretty much everyone, including his BattleButler who's right there beside him, thinks he's doing this on purpose; this is largely because the excuses he contrives to justify staying away from the front line always end up panning out.
* In the original book version of ''Film/ForrestGump'' most of Forrest's adventures start with some variation of the following: "So I was just sitting there minding my own business and a guy comes up to me and says 'Do you want to [join the army/be in a play/play college football/get shot into space/star in a movie/etc.]?' Well, I had nothing else to do that day so I said OK."

* The catalyst for the events of ''Literature/LetMeCallYouSweetheart'' is Robin getting her face cut by flying glass, when her father pulled out of his driveway too quickly and another car slammed into them. Dr Smith was recommended to Robin's mother Kerry to treat the cuts and it just so happened that during two of Robin's appointments, Kerry also happened to see two different patients who bear an uncanny resemblance to an infamous murder victim, piquing Kerry's interest. Kerry herself acknowledges that if it weren't for these events, she would likely never have looked into the Sweetheart Murder Case.
* ''Literature/NoSpanishCivilWarIn1936'' short-circuits a [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar three-year fratricidal war]] and ends up altering the course of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and beyond with a non-Stalinist anarchist-leaning Spanish Republic joining the Allies, all because a letter from Francisco Franco to Prime Minister Casares that went unanswered in real life was answered in that timeline.
* In ''Literature/TheSagaOfDarrenShan'', the title character made an odd move in a competition between his friends over a ticket to a circus, ended up winning the ticket and going to the circus. Throughout the first book, he can't stop talking about how much he regrets every little thing he did, how he wishes he had done anything differently -- he's writing this down in his diary just after being forced to become a vampire, fake his death, and leave his happy childhood behind.
* ''Literature/TheSevenRealmsSeries'': Han Alister never would have found himself pulled into a struggle for control over the Fells and the truth behind the Demon King's legend if he hadn't decided to steal Micah Bayar's amulet, an artifact that once belonged to the infamous Demon King.

* ''Shatterday,'' by Creator/HarlanEllison: Peter is subsumed and replaced by a doppelganger he didn't even know existed, solely because he dialed his home phone number out of instinct.

* The Emily debacle on ''Series/{{Friends}}'' would never have happened had Rachel just picked her up at the airport as she was instructed instead of ditching her to go on a date.
* Young-shin begins investigating ''Series/{{Healer}}'' when she tries to give a reckless driver a piece of her mind, only to overhear him talking about the enigmatic courier.
* The Time Variance Agency in ''Series/{{Loki|2021}}'' is dedicated to prevent all changes to the Sacred Timeline, which includes hunting for this kind of small divergence. Their InstructionalFilm gives the example of how arriving late for work can be enough to cause a branch in the Sacred Timeline, and mark the person responsible as a Variant to be [[UnusualEuphemism pruned]].
* In ''Series/{{Lost}}'', many of the characters end up on Flight 815, but wouldn't have if circumstances had been different.

* ''Series/TheMandalorian'' opens with the titular character, a bounty hunter, taking up mundane bounties and deciding to take up an especially sensitive bounty because he needs to pay the metaphorical bills. Then the episode ends with him discovering that the bounty is an orphaned child.
* ''Series/MyRoommateIsAGumiho'': The fantastical MonsterRoommate premise happens only because Dam's drunk friend throws up on an expensive car...that happens to be owned by a thousand-year-old fox spirit. Cue Dam accidentally consuming Woo-seo's fox bead and being roped into living with him so she won't die.
* On ''Series/{{Psych}}'', after Jules finds out that Shawn's not really psychic and dumps him, Shawn suffers a HeroicBSOD that causes him to fantasize about what might have happened if he'd made one different decision (offering Jules DaChief's pashmina instead of his own jacket, as the contents of the jacket pocket were responsible for Jules realizing that he was a fraud). The fantasy version of events and the reality veer off in wildly different directions.
* ''Series/StrangerThings'' season 3 began for Joyce when she noticed that the magnets on her refrigerator have fallen off because they somehow lost their magnetism. This leads to the discovery of a secret Russian base beneath the mall. Go figure.
* In ''Series/ThunderboltFantasy'', a traveler gets caught in the rain and decides to take an umbrella left as an offering to a Buddha statue. A man under a tree nearby points out the blasphemy of the act and challenges the traveler Sho Fukan to show kindness to the next person he meets in lieu of the Buddha. That person turns out to be the key to a LegendaryWeapon who is being hunted by an evil organization, and now Sho has made himself their target for helping her.

* ''VideoGame/DigimonWorldDS:'' If your character had chosen to ignore the rumors about the "fighting monsters that are friends with humans" he or she (you can choose your character's gender) never would have been placed on the chain of events that would culminate in saving the Digital World from destruction.

* Most ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' games are built on this trope.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTheWindWaker'' 's Link, unlike his predecessors, was not chosen by the gods to become the next wielder of the master sword and Ganondorf's demise. He was just a normal kid who just so happened to be the older brother of Aryll, an adorable little girl who Ganondorf ''kidnapped by accident'', prompting Link to begin his quest to save her and deliver a [[NoHoldsBarredBeatdown royal beatdown]] on whoever dared to touch her.
* Arthur's story in ''VideoGame/WeHappyFew'' started like any other day in the office until one of the papers he discovered was of him and his brother, triggering memories of his brother who went missing after the war.
* ''VideoGame/WhiteKnightChronicles:'' Leonard and co sneak into the palace on a whim. The guards just left the front doors open when they were delivering wine to Princess Cisna's ball. (No, seriously. That's how it happens.) Then he decides to rescue the princess from an assassin as the palace is under attack. Then he decides to take control of the [[HumongousMecha incredibly powerful White Knight]] in order to defend his home town.
* ''VideoGame/FrontMission3'' opens this way, with Ryogo asking if protagonist Kazuki would come along to help with a delivery. This one choice determines if he's discovers Alisa's presence on Yokosuka Base sooner instead of later.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'' has Jaune Arc. A friendly young man who quotes his mother about strangers being friends you haven't met yet. This sole reason is why he decided to offer a helping hand to a poor girl laying on the ground upon his arrival at Beacon Academy and she would later become one of his closest friends. This girl being [[TheProtagonist Ruby Rose]] and the one who drags him into the plot.

* In ''Webcomics/JupiterMen'', the event that gives Quintin and Jackie their powers starts with Quintin losing his camera and rushing out to find it. Jackie follows him to drag him home and they take Quintin's shortcut through a construction site. After tripping and sliding down a slope, they encounter an energy ball that Quintin touches by accident after Jackie is spooked by falling debris. The resulting explosion of energy gives them their superpowers.