Times where characters realized they "Could Have Avoided This!" in Literature.
- In The Annals of the Chosen Sword is furious when he learns that after killing the Dark Lord in the first novel the other wizards decided to create a new Chosen: The Traitor, whose special ability was to avoid the Wizard Lord's notice and earn their trust. Not knowing the nature of the new Chosen made Artil increasingly paranoid, which resulted in him attempting to kill off the Chosen when they requested he step down as Lord.
- Matt Stover's Blade of Tyshalle: In the book's prologue, protagonists Kris Hansen and Hari Michaelson plot to get Hari out of Magic School and into Battle School. Their plan hinges on getting Hari to demonstrate his fighting prowess by "saving" Kris from a rival, crippling him in the process. Afterward, the head teacher tells them their plan has succeeded, but laments that another person's dream was crushed so that they could have theirs, adding plaintively "Couldn't you have asked?" It's played also as a sort of "What the Hell, Hero?" moment. The dean who has been depicted as an antagonist jerk is completely at the end of his rope, almost in tears because whatever else he is, he is a teacher who cares for his students.
- Bodies Are Where You Find Them: As it turns out, murder victim Helen Stallings was secretly married. By the terms of her biological father's will, since she married before she turned 21, her trust fund reverted to her mother, and consequently also to her stepfather, Burt Stallings. So the crimes for which Burt Stallings and his partner Arch Bugler are going to prison—embezzlement, kidnapping, fraud, and in Bugler's case two murders including Helen's—were completely unnecessary.
- A Certain Magical Index:
- Ouma Yamisaka kidnaps Index (blowing up Touma's apartment, a restaurant, and Touma's homework in the process) and tries to extract knowledge from her mind to lift a curse from a woman he loved. Touma tracks them down and says that he and Index would have been happy to help save the woman if Ouma had just asked for their help. Touma easily lifts the curse off-screen.
- Stiyl Magnus pretends to kidnap Index to lure Touma to him so he can ask for help in retrieving Orsola Aquinas. An annoyed Touma says he could have just asked him directly instead of going through these theatrics.
- Last Order becomes gravely ill, so Accelerator frantically tries everything to cure her. When he runs into Touma, he becomes enraged that Touma is a hero, yet is not doing anything to help Last Order, and attacks him. After a long and destructive fight, Touma defeats him and points out he can't be everywhere at once and didn't know about Last Order's condition, and he would have helped if Accelerator had just asked for his help instead of attacking him. Touma temporarily heals Last Order and gives Accelerator instructions for a permanent cure.
- Jeff Stage's Chasing Jenny: The Big Bad's goal is to obtain a rare stamp to sell for lots of money. Towards the end, his The Dragon points out that if he really needed the money so badly, the villain could simply have sold the copy of the stamp he already owns. This would have saved several murders, arson and grand theft auto, as well as avoided the strong possibility of getting caught. (The villain's ulterior motive appears to be a grudge against the owner for being a better person than him.)
- In The Croning, Don Miller is told by Barry Rourke, one of Les Collaborateurs, that he only has himself to blame for getting involved with the Ancient Conspiracy and the Humanoid Abomination behind it. If only he had just allowed his wife to be alone for some days and tend to some undisclosed business after getting a mysterious phone call...Rourke: Man, you don't know when to let sleeping dogs lie. Always meddling. You simply had to go hunting for Michelle instead of listening to sage advice and spending a couple of extra days drunk at the hotel bar.
- Cradle Series: Played for Drama. In Underlord, a major part of the plot revolves around a deadline. After Yerin is hit with an attack that damages her lifeline, she'll die in months unless she can advance to Underlord. In the previous book, Lindon found a well of life-enhancing Phlebotinum that could heal her with only a spoonful, but he didn't bring any of it with him after he left. He drank a lot more of it himself, even though it was mostly wasted. Needless to say, this is a major source of guilt for him.
- Dragaera:
- In the first Vlad Taltos booknote , Vlad makes a complaint of this nature to Sethra Lavode and Morrolan after learning his embezzling employee was their plot to meet with him. Subverted in the next two sentences when he acknowledges that he probably wouldn't have come if they just asked.
- The entire goal of Fornia in Dragon is to release the Great Weapon concealed within the sword he stole from him. To do so, he waged a massive war against Morrolan on the off-chance that they would come into single combat in battle, which ends up getting him killed. Later, Vlad comments that Fornia could have just challenged Morrolan to a duel, except that Morrolan had already declared war on him, and a Dragonlord can't resist a good war.
- One Encyclopedia Brown case has him investigate when a friend's bicycle gets a wheel stolen. The culprit was a young artist who was collecting junk to use in his works. When he's caught, he returns the bicycle wheel. He also tries to return the rest of the junk to the other people he stole from only to find they didn't want it back because it was junk. They even tell him they would have let him have it if he'd just asked, something he admits he never thought to do.
- Mercedes Lackey's Firebird: At one point Ilya muses that if his father Ivan had encouraged his eight sons to work with each other instead of against each other, he could have created a legendary band of warriors who could have brought him even more land, wealth and fame, and incidentally not ended up in a situation where Ilya had to fake his death and go wandering off into the wilderness.
- Harry Potter:
- In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron take Mr. Weasley's flying Ford Anglia to Hogwarts after they miss the Hogwarts Express thanks to Dobby's interference. The car's invisibility malfunctions mid-flight, and six or seven muggles see the flying car, getting them in hot water when they arrive at Hogwarts after crashing the car into the Whomping Willow. Professor McGonagall asks Harry why he didn't just send his owl Hedwig to Hogwarts with a letter explaining their predicament, forcing him to admit he hadn't thought of that.
- Most of the troubles in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are caused by Dumbledore's insistence to keep Harry Locked Out of the Loop for as long as possible, and spending the better part of the year ignoring him without so much as telling him why (he's afraid Voldemort could use their mental link to possess Harry's mind and use it to spy on him). At the end of the year, Harry explodes in anger and lets Dumbledore have it, and then Dumbledore finally acknowledges Harry was long ready to know the truth, and he should have told him everything from the beginning.
- In The Hearts We Sold, Dee tells the Daemon that he could've avoided a lot of hassle if he'd just been upfront with his charges from the start, telling them what, exactly, he needed them for before they made a deal with him, and then letting them decide for themselves, rather than tricking them into it. The Daemon explains that he doesn't think anyone would willingly lay down their lives if he was honest with them from the start, even though it's for the greater good.
- In Heartless (2016), Cath's parents spend the entire book denying her what she truly wants, insist that she must marry the King, and forbid her from starting her dream bakery. Towards the very end, after Cath has clearly gone into Sanity Slippage and is about to become the Queen of Hearts, her alarmed mother tells her that all they've ever wanted is for her to be happy, and asks if this wedding will truly make her happy. Cath bitterly points out that things could have turned out a lot differently if they'd just asked her that question from the beginning.
- In I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, Azusa's search for a cure to the gnome mushroom's effects is one of these on multiple levels. When she asks the demons for information, Pecora points her towards Yggdrasil, which she spends a sizable amount of time (and money) climbing. When she finally makes it to the pharmacy at the top, she discovers that the cure is Eno's Mandragora Pills. The thing is that 1) Azusa is good friends with Eno and could have just asked her, 2) she still has a bottle of the pills in question at home, 3) it turns out the while dragons can't fly up the tree, smaller sized wyverns can, as proven by Eno showing up to drop off a shipment at the pharmacy, and 4) Eno also ships to Vanzeld Castle and Pecora definitely knew already, all of which means that she wasted all her time climbing a giant tourist trap tree for a solution she already had at home.
- Steven Kellogg's The Island of the Skog: A group of mice set sail to find a new home, and they find an island that their guidebook says is inhabited by a Skog. Some of the mice make a show of force by firing cannons. Then, the next morning, their boat is gone. They lay a trap for the Skog, which turns out to be a mouse-size creature wearing a huge, terrifying disguise.Skog: I was frightened by your cannons and your trap. I cut the line to the ship because I thought you were sleeping on board. I thought it was better to be alone than to be afraid.
Jenny: If only we'd trusted each other. - Jinxed: Edward is an actor and con artist about to marry a wealthy woman to get his hands on her fortune. He's worried that her sister will recognize him from an acting class they took together and has his brother kidnap her. It gets totally out of hand and all ends with both arrested. At which point, Edward is stunned to discover that the sister has no recollection of him whatsoever. He openly thinks that had he just kept his cool, he'd be a rich man as he's hauled off to jail.
- Lord Peter Wimsey:
- In Clouds of Witness, Sir Impey points out in his closing speech that the mystery could have been cleared up within hours: all it would have taken was for someone to investigate the bag of outgoing letters at the Lodge rather than just taking them down to the post office as usual.
- The antagonist in Unnatural Death murders three people, and attempts to murder another four, before finally killing themself, all to secure a fortune that, as we discover in Gaudy Night, they would have inherited anyway.
- In Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!, a time-traveling alien named Yithka appears and attempts to use a mind-swapping gun to "borrow" Nyarko's body, but messes it up and instead swaps Nyarko and Mahiro with each other. After Yithka explains her situation (she needs help dealing with extremists from her time period) and the gang agrees to help, Hasta asks "Why didn't you just tell us that in the first place?" Yithka responds by beating a hasty retreat.
- Princess Academy: Miri’s false Maternal Death? Blame the Child! perception of her father could have been avoided if she’d known the full story of her mother’s death sooner. Her friend and Parental Substitute Dottor lampshades this trope when she tells Miri the truth.
- Guy de Maupassant's classic short story "The Necklace": A young lower-middle-class woman named Mathilde dreams of being an aristocrat, and seems to get her chance when her husband receives an invitation to a grand ball. She makes herself a dress and borrows a gorgeous diamond necklace from Jeanne, her actually-wealthy friend, and has the time of her life at the dance, only to find that she's lost the jewelry along the way home. Mathilde and her husband discover a replacement necklace at a jeweler's shop for thirty-six thousand francs; he uses all his savings and takes out a huge loan ("at ruinous interest") to pay for it. The couple spends ten years working like dogs and scrimping wherever they can to pay off the debt, which destroys both their marriage and Mathilde's youth and beauty. After they're finally free of the loan, Mathilde has a chance encounter with Jeanne and tells her the whole tragic story...only for Jeanne to sadly reveal that the diamond necklace was a fake worth less than five hundred francs. Had Mathilde been honest about losing the jewels in the first place, she could have quite literally lived a completely different life.
- In Queen Zixi of Ix (by L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz series), the title character is a Vain Sorceress who attempts to steal a magical cloak that will grant one wish to each person who wears it. In the end, when her schemes are discovered, the cloak's owners tell her that they would have been willing to let her borrow the cloak and make her one wish, so she had no need to resort to theft. However, this incident convinces the fairies who made the cloak that humanity is no longer worthy of such a gift, and they take it back — so Zixi still never gets to have her wish granted.
- In Baum's last Oz book, Glinda of Oz, Ozma and Dorothy get entangled in a conflict between two equally unpleasant tribal leaders out on a distant fringe of Oz and end up trapped in a domed underwater city; Dorothy bemoans the fact that they're only there because she idly read about the looming conflict in Glinda's magic records book.
- Raise the Titanic! revolves around trying to find a super-rare ore with records indicating a batch of it was dug up by Colorado miners in 1912. Hunted by French agents, the leader, Joshua Hayes Brewster, left behind a journal entry on how he saw the ore "lowered into the vault" before sailing...on the Titanic. The Americans and Russians are soon on a hunt to find and salvage the ship, leading to a few deaths and nearly war. In the end, the Americans head to the ship's vault only to find nothing but worthless rocks in the hold. A few months later, Dirk Pitt leads a few figures to a cemetery in England where the ore is buried. It turns out Brewster had been talking about the burial vault of one of his comrades. Pitt lampshades that had the Titanic not sunk and/or the paranoid Brewster been less cryptic with his clues, the ore would have been found and dug up long ago. Instead, his words and the timing sent everyone on the same wild goose chase.
- In the Dale Brown novel Shadows of Steel Big Bad Buzhazi is told that he could have avoided getting into trouble with the US had he only destroyed their spy ship but let the crew be, since the US would have swallowed the destruction of the ship in exchange for not letting the truth about it out.
- The Tales of the Otori series ends with a fairly spectacular disaster that was considerably worsened by Takeo not telling Kaede that he had gotten another woman pregnant when he left her and thought they would never see each other again. It is worth noting that there were sixteen years during which this information could have been imparted, but every time he considered telling her he kept putting it off. He does, at least, fully acknowledge how stupid he's been, but by then it's too late to solve the problem.
- Threadbare: King Melos spent fifteen years trapped in a situation of his own making, with absolutely no one who he could share the burden with. Near the end, it is pointed out that if he had been willing to explain everything to literally any single person besides the daemon trickster he summoned, then the vast majority of the plot would have been averted. Partly justified by the fact that he was in a constant and literal state of Sanity Slippage, but that was his fault too; there was a device that drained his sanity, and because he didn't trust anyone else enough to explain the situation, he couldn't share the burden.Garon: It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're not a paranoid jackass!
- At the end of Too Many Magicians, it is revealed that the crimes were committed by an officer who was Trapped by Gambling Debts in an attempt to recruit him as a double agent under threat of speaking to his superior about it and ruining his career. Lord Darcy remarks that had the offer to recruit come a bit earlier, the officer, instead of all the crimes, would have simply told his boss he suspected there was a spy ring, and the debts were a deliberate gambit.
- In the Wars of Light and Shadow, the Koriathain Order had been searching for the Waystone of the Koriathain, an enormous Crystal Ball that could amplify their power immensely, for five centuries. Upon learning that Sethvir of the Fellowship had it, they try breaking into his tower and seizing it by force. After being violently repelled by the wards, they are forced to ask him for the return of the Waystone when he returns from a business trip. At which point he mentions that they had asked for the return of the stone (Or assistance in finding it) at any point in the 500 years since they had misplaced it, they would have given it back without any fuss.
