Unluckily Lucky

"Y'know, people are always telling me how lucky I am. But the truth is, everything I touch turns to shit."

— Nathan Drake, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Some people are a magnet of fortune. Some people are constantly beaten up by it. Then there's these guys.

Some characters seem to live in a strange limbo of fortune: They are constantly finding themselves trapped in awful situations, many times without even trying. This would be seen from almost any perspective as rotten luck; but despite all that they always manage to come out of all those problems without a scratch, much less troubled than any reasonable person would expect, or even with the upper hand.

From another perspective: These people have an amazing ability to come clean out of any sort of pickle thrown at them, no matter how unlikely the chances or ludicrous the way. Anyone would say Lady Fortune has them under her wing, except that there's the little fact that they always get themselves into those sorts of situations in the first place, and in fact seem to attract them like honey to bees.

Are they Born Lucky? Are they Born Unlucky? It's hard to say. Friends, enemies, and even they themselves will be hard-pressed to give a straight answer. Answers will probably lean towards the lucky side, since no matter what they still come out alive out of anything; just don't expect that to mean much while they are knee-deep into yet another trouble.

Note that characters that are lucky in some aspects and unlucky in other completely different ones do not qualify under this trope. The main factor here is that their luck and unluck are at odds in the same circumstances.

If the unlucky events that follow these characters are sufficiently awful, they have a good chance of being a Walking Disaster Area or The Jinx; and if they are strange enough, they can be a Weirdness Magnet. Compare with The Fool, who gets out of dangerous situations by pure dumb luck without even realizing it, as well as Plague of Good Fortune. Often gets Mistaken for Badass and may even become a Badass on Paper. Characters like this will usually be a Pinball Protagonist. If a character has a flaw that in certain situations turns out to save the day, then it's Handy Shortcoming.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Anne Happy: Main character Anne Hanakoizumi, a.k.a. "Hanako" is incredibly unlucky, to the point that her "luck" measures in the negative. Despite, or possibly because of this, she very frequently experiences surprisingly lucky, even miraculous, events. For instance, her luck class's first assignment is to carry an egg for a day without it breaking. It was expected that, since everyone in the class was unlucky, no one would succeed. However, not only did Hanako succeed, the near-expired store-bought egg hatched a healthy chick in the middle of class.
• Berserk: Despite living what seems like a life cursed by fate, every misfortune in Guts' life is accompanied by some stroke of luck or fateful encounter that enables him to endure it, if only just barely, and prevents his hope from dying.
  • Concerning his childhood: He was an orphan the moment he was born, but he was discovered by Sys and saved from dying beneath his mother's corpse. Sys died and Gambino abused him while making him fight as a Child Soldier, but he survived and developed precocious talent as a warrior. He killed Gambino in self-defense and got wounded while escaping, collapsing by the side of the road, but another troupe of mercenaries happened to pass by and take him in before he died of exposure.
  • In the Golden Age Arc, he got in a fight with Griffith and received a wound that almost killed him, but he had impressed Griffith so much that he ordered Guts to be nursed back to health, and offered him a job when he woke up. He had the rotten luck of encountering Zodd the Immortal, and later Wyald, but the former he survived because his destiny was entwined with Griffith's, and the latter because by that point he was pretty much the ultimate fighter. The Eclipse—in which he was betrayed by his best friend, got branded as a demon sacrifice, had all his companions devoured by monsters, and lost his left hand and right eye while being Forced to Watch the rape of Casca, his true love—gave him reason to curse the day he was ever born. AND YET: he and Casca are Rescued from the Underworld by the Skull Knight just in the nick of time, meaning that he basically survived by cheating death and the laws of causality.
  • It only gets crazier from there. Long story short, Guts' life is painful and miserable, but if his luck keeps up there will always be a silver lining.
• Kobeni from Chainsaw Man keeps on getting into incredibly dangerous situations despite her best efforts to stay away from them but inexplicably survives all of them while many people around her die. She's even one of the very few major characters to survive Part 1.
• Exaggerated with the Dirty Pair: every assignment they have, no matter how normal, always ends with encountering absurdly powerful criminal conspiracies and massive gunfights. They always survive and get the people responsible, but what is left behind once the assignment ends tends to be very little, and by that we mean they are occasionally responsible of extinction-level events.
• The Genius Prince's Guide to Raising a Nation Out of Debt (Hey, How About Treason?)'s Wein is essentially anime version of Ciaphas Cain (see below). His various attempts to sell out his nation in order to retire comfortably or at least trying to avoid trouble in order to stop his country's cashflow problem or getting dragged into international conflicts always spiral out of control due to uncontrollable external factors, but the combination of his skill and sheer luck, he manages to not only comes out alive, but his nation benefits and his reputation is enhanced...which makes fulfilling his goal of selling his country even harder.
• Head Jailer Kadokura from Golden Kamuy is a man constantly beset by terrible luck who at the beginning of the series is barely scraping by at a prison working for a man he loathes. However, when it specifically comes to circumstances that threaten his life, Kadokura's luck suddenly becomes one-in-a-million good. The greatest example of this is when he gets poisoned by escaped convict Sekiya Waichirou, and in an attempt to hasten his own death takes a different kind of poison that was lying around, that happens to be of the exact type and quantity needed to cancel out the first one.
• The titular Great Teacher Onizuka is sometimes this. In one example from the anime, he comes across a large bag of money (that's good), which he spends all at once. It turns out the money was the school's field trip funds, which was planted on him in order to frame him for embezzling (that's bad). He somehow manages to convince the school not to fire him (that's good), but only by pledging an even more expensive field trip which he can't possibly afford (that's bad). He then fails to earn anything near the amount needed, only to win a car in an unrelated lottery (that's good). He then lends the car to a complete stranger, with no guarantees that the stranger will return it on time, if ever (that's bad). The stranger turns out to have been hired by the person trying to frame Onizuka (that's bad), but has a change of heart and returns the car anyway (that's good). At the last possible minute, naturally.
• Guido Mista from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. In his backstory, he saved a woman who was about be raped, and when the rapist and his criminal partners tried to shoot him, they all missed their shots, so much that Mista had the time to take one of their guns, reload, and shoot them back with perfect aim while staying still under their fire (and this was before Mista gained his Stand ability to redirect bullets). However, this story was claimed too unbelievable by the jury, and he was condemned for 15 years of prison. This story caught the attention of Bruno Bucciarati, a gangster who was looking for potential Stand users, and Bruno got him out of jail and gave him a job that paid well and that he was good at. Most of his fights in the series have an element of unluckiness, but he always manages to get out alive and/or with some advantage on the long run. Fans have taken note of how he ends up fighting people who can redirect his bullets back at him one way or another, to the point that by the time the battle ends, his body is usually completely riddled with bullet holes, yet he usually does win in the end. And, unlike Abbachio, Narancia, and Bucciarati himself, he manages to survive the whole part.
• Touma Kamijou of A Certain Magical Index is extremely unlucky, thanks to the Imagine Breaker power in his right arm cancelling out the good fortune he would otherwise receive. However, it also negates the powers of both magicians and espers. He has the bad luck of getting dragged into battle against powerful members of both factions, but also the good luck of having the power to defeat them.
• Mazinger Z: Boss is the Plucky Comic Relief and he becomes increasingly more incongruent as the series/franchise goes deeper and deeper into Darker and Edgier territory, and his Humongous Mecha Boss Borot is The Alleged Mecha all the way, getting trashed to pieces in every single fight. And yet, Boss and his two minions constantly survive and he is the occasional Spanner in the Works of the bad guys (even if he gets no damn acknowledgment for it).
• Medaka Box: Kumagawa Misogi is repeatedly referred to as the weakest person in the world. His inability to win is also repeatedly remarked upon. However, due to his knowledge of both these facts, he can always turn his losses into benefits to screw over others. And despite his label as the weakest, this just means that he is aware of the the weaknesses of everyone. This makes him capable of taking down nearly any opponent other The Hero and some exceptionally powerful beings.
• One Piece: Monkey D. Luffy is really this instead of Born Lucky. It’s just that he's so optimistic and thrill-seeking that the bad situations he gets into are exciting rather than horrifying for him.
  • One example is in the Impel Down arc, where he and his allies find themselves falling into a vat of molten lava. However, the alternative would have been them getting caught on their way down to the fourth level by the Warden, so this ultimately was the better option (not that they could appreciate that).
  • And then there's his escape from the Buggy Pirates on the way to the Grand Line. While it's seen as the example of his Born Lucky status, in actuality all it did was put him in the hands of Smoker, who would probably have put him in the above mentioned Impel Down. Even when he is rescued from that situation, he is thrust into a giant storm that, without the quick thinking of his crew, would have sunk them all.
  • Luffy and his crew's tendency to end up in horribly dangerous situations and getting out of them has culminated in him unwittingly gaining the allegiance of a massive alliance of pirate crews, the friendship of multiple kingdoms' royal families, and being designated as the Fifth Emperor.
• Zombieland Saga has Ai Mizuno, who was unlucky enough to get hit by lightning TWICE in the exact same circumstances (performing during a storm in front of loads of fans). The first time kills her. The second, well... it turns out that for zombies, being hit by lightning autotunes their voices, makes them glow, and lets them shoot (harmless) lasers from their fingers. The audio/video effects prove so awesome that she and her band are skyrocketed into popularity.

Comic Books

• Zayne Carrick from the Knights of the Old Republic. The clumsiest, most unlucky Jedi of his generation, he manages to survive the massacre of his fellow Padawans by simple virtue of arriving late to the knighting ceremony made by their Evil Mentors. He runs away, pursued by said mentor Jedi under trumped-up charges of becoming Sith, and in trying to prove his innocence and raise hell on the masters' plans he runs into all kinds of problems involving the Mandalorians, the returning Sith, said mentors becoming more mustache-twirling evil from the stress and hundreds of relatively mundane (yet hair-raising) problems. Despite all that, he doesn't die no matter how crazy things get, manages to kill anybody who threatens him, builds a reputation as a formidable warrior that helps him occasionally, and eventually gets the girl.
  Zayne: The Force does not want me dead. It doesn't want me happy, but it doesn't want me dead.
• Jimmy Olsen, even in his more competent iterations, is a world-class Weirdness Magnet with a tendency to get into major trouble as a result. However, except for a few (often Elseworlds) occasions, he always comes out with no permanent harm (in fact, many times, with nary a scratch) or even angst.
• In Marvel, Rick Jones is a lot like Jimmy Olsen. But then, he's always partially blamed himself for Bruce Banner being turned into the Hulk, and tries to help him (both Banner and the Hulk) as a result; this tends to make the nature of his luck (good versus bad) ebb and flow.
• The Water Wizard (now called Aqueduct) was an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain just like everyone who was invited to meet at the Bar with No Name during the original "Scourge of the Underworld" story in Captain America's comic. But he missed the meeting when his car blew a tire. He was upset at what he thought was just more bad luck at the time, but could only say prayers of thanks — and turn himself in for his own safety — when he found out that everyone who did make the meeting was ambushed and murdered by Scourge.
• Scooby-Doo #20 (Gold Key, July 1973) had a story titled "Unlucky Luck", where Velma tries to break Scooby and Shaggy of being superstitious. She has Fred and Daphne plant a ladder and a black cat along a designated path on which she has Scooby and Shaggy follow as part of a game. Of course, they're hesitant, until crossing each bad luck path results in some fortune—a wallet full of money and boxes of candy and dog biscuits. Velma thinks her plan has worked until Scooby and Shaggy go back for their luck talismans—they think if that was bad luck they had, just think of how much good luck they'll have now.
• Martin Soap in The Punisher suffers misfortune after misfortune throughout his time in the series. Miraculously enough, he also survives all of it in one piece. He ultimately becomes one of the very few Punisher characters who leaves the series with his life and sanity intact.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Depending on the Writer, Donald Duck himself is this. He was Born Unlucky and there is no story whatsoever where he is not put through a gauntlet of injuries and humiliation, but on some of them he managed to obtain a silver lining by staying around (sometimes because of determination, sometimes because of despair) when whoever was his rival for the tale had already taken the apparent prize and left and the real prize appeared afterwards (thus making the "lucky" rival someone who Gave Up Too Soon).
• Scooter Girl: Desmond has a reputation as a badass killer, but all three times he's supposedly "killed" someone have been freak accidents, usually involving the other guy trying to kill him.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Ford Brody's status as such from canon gets lampshaded at the climax. The Osprey he's on gets disabled in mid-air by an EMP blast from Keizer Ghidorah which the Osprey just failed to clear the range of... and as the Osprey is crashing it earth, Ford and everyone onboard is saved from a deathly impact by Manda catching the falling tiltrotor, and they survive to the end. For bonus points, the mother of all Titan battles is occurring while all this happens, and Ford still makes it out alive.
• The title character of Alexandra Quick is pretty heavy on this. Almost every year something comes up that tries to kill her but she almost always has available just the right tool or asset that will allow her to escape with her life. This also functions on another level as she's Skilled, but Naive and Too Clever by Half so that in addition to the world trying to screw her while also giving her what she needs to save herself, she tends to throw herself needlessly into dangerous situations while being smart enough to get herself out.
• Like in canon A Certain Unknown Level 0's Touma Kamijou is misfortune incarnate, yet with every deadly situation he faces he always comes out barely unscathed, which will ensure his further adventures into danger once more at every arc.
• Shepard in Cycles Upon Cycles by his own admission has a combination of really good luck and really bad luck.
• Common Sense: Part of Ash Ketchum's growing "It's All My Fault" martyr complex is that he's constantly running into incredibly rare Pokemon and other amazing (other trainers would give their souls to see just one of the things Ash does) circumstances as per canon... and he's being relentlessly pursued by Team Rocket, who in this fic have Taken A Level In Badass and have become a Knight of Cerebus Terrible Trio. Which means that so wherever he goes, whatever he meets, they are at best a few minutes right behind him to try to steal it... and every single time he (or whoever/whatever he meets) loses a fight to Team Rocket (which happens pretty often), the organization as a whole becomes much more powerful and the Terrible Trio has one more humiliating thing to rub in Ash's face. And the worst part about said complex is that Ash alone seems to be the only Pokemon Trainer that can do any kind of damage to Team Rocket's operations.
• Everybody envies Hikigaya Hachiman in My Hero School Adventure Is All Wrong As Expected for having such an explosive jump-start to his pro-hero career—being born with an impressive Difficult, but Awesome Quirk, garnering a huge fanbase that makes him seem like The Casanova, and having plenty of high-profile acts of heroism under his belt. What people don't know is that Hachiman is in the middle of a massive "Fawlty Towers" Plot that is forced to keep up, and he has to endure a bucket-load of trauma and attention that he'd rather not have to deal with.
• The Triptych Continuum incarnation of Flash Sentry falls under this trope. His talent is, essentially, to act as a lightning rod for disasters, setting them off in such a way that nobody gets hurt. Unfortunately, his talent isn't necessarily concerned with his own safety, and it really doesn't care about Flash's dignity. If something utterly humiliating needs to take place in order to defuse a crisis, then that's what's going to happen. Flash having spent most of his post-manifest life with no idea of what his talent is doesn't exactly help.
• In the Worm fanfic It Gets Worse, Taylor triggers with a power that tends to put her in dangerous situations, but that always gets her out of them not only unscathed but sometimes even laughing.

Films — Animation

• Mulan has Cri-kee, the lucky cricket. All this means for poor Cri-kee is that people keep taking him into dangerous situations, much to the Lovable Coward's dismay. He could also be considered "luckily unlucky", as he ruins Mulan's meeting with the matchmaker, which embarrasses Mulan considerably, but also spares her from an Arranged Marriage and helps prompt her to run away to the army, where she does considerably better for herself.
  Mushu: (rescuing Cri-kee from an avalanche) You are one lucky bug.
  Cri-kee: (resigned expression)

Films — Live-Action

• The movie 29th Street follows Frank Pesce, the "luckiest man alive in spite of his bad luck."
• Bullet Train: People constantly tell Ladybug how lucky he is, to the point his handler gave him that name because of his luck. Ladybug disagrees and, in fact, thinks of himself as having the worst luck humanly possible. Noticeably, every single misfortune that happens to him is countered by some fortune (like being stabbed in the chest, but having his phone block the knife or being bitten by an extremely venomous snake, but only after he'd taken the Hornet's antivenom earlier in an unrelated attempt to poison him). The Elder explains to him the meaning of ladybugs being lucky in Japan is that they actually hold the bad luck for others, and that alone makes them lucky.
• The classical pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina in The Death of Stalin twice puts herself or winds up in a position to be killed, only to escape certain death by sheer luck and complete coincidence while the men who would have killed her die. The first time, she writes a note to Stalin bluntly telling him off for his faults and moral failings. Incredibly, the brutal, mass murdering dictator who is in the process of having thousands of random people arrested and murdered for little to no cause even as he reads her note is amused by her sheer audacity and starts laughing as he reads the letter... and promptly suffers the stroke that would ultimately kill him before he can order her killed for her impudence. The note then falls into the hands of Beria, the chief of Stalin's secret police and an infamous Serial Rapist, who plans to use it to either send her to the gulag or force her into being raped by him to avoid the gulag... and before he can do more than be a sleazebag to her, the rest of Stalin's inner cirlce (who for all their faults and misdeeds are absolutely disgusted and horrified by Beria) proceed to take down Beria during a coup, saving Maria from a grisly fate.
• Godzilla (2014): Ford Brody, big time. After the first MUTO matures, Ford's pit stop at Hawaii on the way home to his family puts him in the male MUTO's warpath by chance, with him narrowly avoiding getting crushed, or injured by a fall, when the MUTO tears into the train he was on. About 24 hours later, when Ford is catching a ride on a military train in order to get back to his family (whom are in the MUTOs' warpath), the train gets destroyed by the gigantic female MUTO and Ford is the Sole Survivor of the entire convoy. And then, at the climax roughly another 24 hours later, Ford volunteers to be part of the team sent into San Francisco to disarm a ticking nuke into the MUTO's nest: he's unable to disarm it, and so he gets it on a boat to send it as far out to sea as possible while the female MUTO again slaughters the rest of his team and leaves him the sole survivor... And then the MUTO's EMP disables the boat with Ford still on it, the enraged MUTO looking to kill Ford, only for Godzilla to suddenly surprise-attack and kill the MUTO first, restarting the boat's journey out to sea, and an airlift rescues Ford before the nuke detonates.
• Lampshaded by Charlie at the end of Kangaroo Jack. At first, it seems incredibly unlucky that he and Louis lose $50,000 when the titular kangaroo runs off with Louis' jacket—until it turns out that had they delivered the money to the mysterious "Mr. Smith," he would've killed them as ordered by Charlie's mafioso stepfather. Not only that, but thanks to the events of the film, Charlie gets said stepfather thrown in prison, develops a hot-selling line of hair-care products and finds True Love.
• The Pirates of the Caribbean character Jack Sparrow is a genuinely brave, resourceful pirate...but he is also alcoholic, incredibly petty comic relief. One scene involves him escaping angry natives by falling off a cliff. Then he is almost speared by a similarly-falling pole, but manages to see it and dodge. Then he gets to his ship and gleefully taunts the natives, but a rogue wave hits him in the face.
• Force Sensitivity in the Star Wars universe works like this. On the upside, you get some pretty awesome powers, up to being a borderline Reality Warper and can shape galactic history. On the downside, you're now conscripted into a ceaseless religious war between two schools of equally powerful sorcerers (a war that's already lasted for over 25,000 years, so don't expect to avoid it) and spending your life lurching from one crazy situation to the next. Zayne (see the comics section) is an Exaggerated case.

• Louisa May Foster, the heroine of the Black Comedy What a Way to Go! unwillingly burns through four husbands, who all get rich(er) and then die. Then she finally marries Leonard Crawley, who is so unlucky even this Cartwright Curse can't affect him.

Folklore

• A Chinese folktale has an old farmer go through this, to the point where he responds to everything with "I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing." Case in point: One day he wakes up to find his only horse has run away: "I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing." The following day, the horse comes back with a herd of wild horses: "I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing." The day after, his son tries to break in the horses and breaks his leg: "I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing." A war breaks out the next day, and all the village's able-bodied young men are conscripted, sparing the son getting killed on the battlefield.

Literature

• Ciaphas Cain:
  • THE HERO OF THE IMPERIUM, Ciaphas Cain himself. Every dangerous situation he gets into is a result of him trying to avoid another one that sounds more dangerous on paper, only making it out through luck and incidentally foiling an enemy plot in the process of saving his own skin. For example, instead of joining the frontline defense against an Ork horde, he attaches himself to a search party investigating tunnels the Orks might be able to use, and finds the far more lethal Necrons instead, and only escapes due to his sidekick Jurgen's Anti-Magic properties. In another, he goes away from a main battle with Chaos forces to an out-of-the-way dredger where there plausibly might be a demon summoning taking place; as he'd fervently hoped against, there was. This, incidentally, keeps enhancing his reputation and makes his attempt to get cushy desk job even harder.
  • "Jinxie" Penlan of the Valhallan 597th causes accidents through her clumsiness every time she's mentioned, but they all work out in her favor. This actually improves her squad's morale since they trust her to be their resident Weirdness Magnet and absorb all the bad luck that'd kill them.
    Cain: She's not nearly as accident-prone as she's supposed to be. I'll grant you she fell down an ambull tunnel once, and there was that incident with the frag grenade and the latrine trench, but things tend to work out for her. The orks on Kastafore was as surprised as she was when the floor in the factory collapsed, and we'd have walked right into that hrud ambush on Skweki if she hadn't triggered the mine by chucking an empty food tin away... (trails off as he realizes what he's saying)
• In Cooking With Wild Game, this is one reason why Ai Fa's tribe consider her weird. For one thing, she's a female hunter in a society that discourages that sort of thing. But she was born into like the one family that would accept her ambitions and nurture them. Then her entire family died out through various causes, which would normally be a death sentence (the setting is very primitive), but she managed to survive and thrive on her own for three years. Then a cute boy who was perfectly compatible with her beliefs and skillset dropped out of the sky and became her friend, but then he got kidnapped by the local tyrants, but then that gave the tribe legal justification to depose the tyrants once and for all. Because of this pattern, Ai Fa is a very confident yet emotionally guarded person, because she never knows when the next shoe is about to drop.
• Discworld: Rincewind is The Lady's favorite... which is a very bad position to be in, as she is Lady Luck. He stumbles into so many disasters while running away from more disasters that only the Theory of Narrative Causality has kept him alive. In fact, in one story he joins a Magnificent Bastard scheme by someone who called him the (un)luckiest bastard he's ever met before even being told what it is; this is because he's Genre Savvy enough by now to know that if he declined and walked (and then ran) as far away from the scheme as he could, the scheme and its potential collateral damage would still find him. Part of the problem is that, as he is the favorite of the Lady, Fate (the literal god of such) absolutely hates him. His Discworld Roleplaying Game write-up literally gives him Extraordinary Luck and Unluckiness. These don't cancel out, they just ensure that whatever happens to him, it's going to be... interesting. Rincewind's luck is so uncannily unpredictable that even Death finds him baffling. Every being in the multiverse (even gods) has an hourglass that runs out of sand when their time is up. Rincewind's hourglass looks like something made by a glassblower on LSD who had the hiccups, full of interconnecting tubes, and features sand occasionally flowing upwards, all of which makes it totally unclear if he's close to dying. Death keeps it on his desk as a curiosity.
• In The Wheel of Time, Mat Cauthon is Born Lucky and uses it to get through battle after battle safely. However, the same luck (or fate) keeps getting him in battle after battle. This inevitably results in Mat bemoaning the circumstances and crying out "What happened to my luck" when he is thrown into a fresh battle or other strange and dangerous event, and then not acknowledging it when luck or strange happenstance gets him back out of those situations in (more or less) one piece.
• Rene Arroy from the Arcia Chronicles was Born Lucky, so when things are left up to chance, they usually go his way. However, this also means that he casually subjects himself to incredible dangers that, even though he always manages to survive them (in some way), have long-lasting and grave consequences for him.
• John Putnam Thatcher: In the Back Story of "By Hook or by Crook,'' Mark Parajian was horribly injured in a construction accident and took months to recover. However, the hospital records from this accident allowed a Long-Lost Relative to track down Mark and his siblings (who were living miserably in a refugee camp) and give them a prosperous, happy life in America.
• Blake Thorburn, in Pact, inherited seven lifetimes worth of terrible Karma from his (very evil) forebears to the family name, and as a result people tend to dislike him, animals hate him, twists of fortune don't go his way, and he's often caught up in events that force him to fight various supernatural creatures. However, he's usually able to pull through thanks to his own luck- it's theorized in-story that, as Blake is, unlike his predecessors, actually trying to do good and improve the world, the universe is giving him enough rope to hang himself instead of just crushing him.
• Discussed in Animorphs #12: The Reaction. After Rachel has jumped into a crocodile pit to save a kid and caused her house to collapse by accidentally morphing into an elephant, she then gets interviewed about the two incidents...
  Interviewer: How did it feel to fall into a crocodile pit, then have your house fall on you?
  Rachel: Not very good.
  Interviewer: Don't you think you're incredibly lucky?
  Rachel: Um, no. If I were lucky I wouldn't keep falling. Right?
  Interviewer: But you weren't hurt either time.
  Rachel: I think winning the lottery would be lucky. Having the house fall on me, that's not all that lucky.
  Interviewer: Do you have any advice for other kids like yourself?
  Rachel: Um, yes. My advice is don't fall into crocodile pits and don't have the house fall on you.
• In David Eddings' The Malloreon, the hero and his companions are chasing a villain who'd kidnapped his son. Initially, they are months behind their quarry as they chase her, and they suffer through countless troubles and misfortunes that turn them off their course and delay them drastically. Oddly enough, as is noted well into the story, after all the delays and hold-ups, they're now only a few days behind their enemy.
• In Henry Kuttner's short story "Housing Problem", a couple rent a room to an extraordinarily lucky man, who turns out to have built a tiny house for House Fey. When they accidentally drive the fey out, he walks out and leaves the house with them, saying they won't be back. Different fey move in, but they seem to be less houseproud, and the wife suggests it's become a bad neighbourhood. Then things happen like the husband falling into the machine he works on and the whole thing breaking - saving his life, but putting him out of work for a week - and the two of them slipping and falling in the mud just before they were about to walk in front of a bus. It's not bad luck, just sloppy.
• One of Us is Lying: Nate's father considers falling off a roof and suffering back damage to fall under this this. It allowed him to qualify for disability payments at a time when he was an alcoholic who probably would have ended up unemployable in short order anyway.
• A Song of Ice and Fire gives us the Gang of Hats called "House Slynt" — and, you can argue that this trope is more their hat than their trademarked froggy-faced countenance and naked opportunism are. They've risen from their humble roots in King's Landing to being knighted and/or squired lords to being arguably listed among the great lords of the Riverlands... and then promptly reduced back to keepless nobles-in-name-only after only a few months on this rollercoaster ride of mixed fortune. On the plus side, they no longer hold the title to the biggest money sink Westeros has to offer. Yup. In this series, coming out (mostly) alive (if a little poorer) and not holding the rights and titles to Harrenhal anymore can be counted as rather massive strokes of great good fortune wrapped in the incredibly grubby package of a terribly unjust demotion care of both familial missteps and unrelated events.
• Bink, the first protagonist of the Xanth series, is a Muggle Born of Mages in a setting where magic is required to survive. His whole life has been a chain of lucky-but-often-humiliating events — which turns out to mean that he has magic after all: the magic of never being harmed by magic. And since his magic would harm him if it were too obvious about its nature (as demonstrated in the first book when the enemy who first figured out what was happening promptly switched to a sword), he seems to escape harm through sheer accident, which does nothing for his reputation or self-esteem.
• There's a children's book called Fortunately where a boy keeps getting into alternating fortunate and unfortunate situations, often finding a way out of the latter through sheer luck or athletic skill. It starts with the boy having no way to go from Florida to a party in New York, but fortunately a friend loans him an airplane, which gets destroyed midair, but he has a parachute, unfortunately there's a hole in it, he sees a haystack on the ground to land, but there's a pitchfork sticking out, he narrowly misses the pitchfork in it and the haystack, but lands in Soft Water...
• Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files. While it's implied that he gets up to some relatively easy work offscreen, in the actual books, the man can barely accept a commission to find someone's lost dog without running into three angry vampires, a warlock, two Eldritch Abominations and a school of zombie piranha. And sure, he usually wins, but usually with a cost. At one point, one of the most powerful wizards in the world, the Gatekeeper, wonders whether Harry is a masterful trickster and manipulator - or if he's just that clueless and unlucky. Harry helps him make up his mind by pointing out to the Gatekeeper that his entire head is swathed in bandages, which works (and also makes the Gatekeeper bust out laughing as he remembers an incident in the past where he found Harry hanging from a tree covered in mud after escaping seemingly certain death), making a rare case where being so unlucky is actually lucky for him.
• The Stormlight Archive: Kaladin starts out as the poster boy for this trope. People keep telling him how lucky he is for always surviving all the dangers he gets into. Kaladin himself considers himself practically cursed, since he does get into all that danger despite his best efforts. There's also the fact that his "luck" doesn't let him keep the people around him alive, meaning that he survives to watch people he care about die while being unable to help them.
• Played with in The Pyat Quartet. Pyat considers himself dogged by misfortune, because whatever sure-fire way to achieve fame and fortune he tries, it always fails and leaves him with nothing. His sidekick Mr. Mix considers Pyat insanely lucky, because no matter what idiotic get-rich-quick scheme he embarks on, he somehow survives the inevitable consequences.

Live-Action TV

• The Adventures of Superman: Jimmy Olsen gets into trouble almost every time he appears. At whatever his ambiguous age is, he's been kidnapped, knocked unconscious, pushed off a building, nearly drowned, and left in as many death traps as one could care to count. However, thanks to being friends with the world's only superhero, he always comes out fine. In fact, he doesn't even seem to have any angst from it.
• In The Amazing Race, season 21, part of the reason eventual winners Josh and Brent wound up over 12 hours behind the lead teams and set the record for bottom-2 finishes without getting eliminated was they kept catching unlucky breaks, but at the same time, they repeatedly got saved by dumb luck.
  Brent: We've had good luck, we've had bad luck, we've had dumb luck.
• In the Babylon 5 episode "Grail", the character Thomas Jordan (a.k.a. "Jinxo") believes he's at the center of a curse on the Babylon stations; he was one of the people who constructed them, but the first three blew up while he was on leave, and the fourth disappeared after being completed (that time he didn't take leave at all until the task was finished), so he deliberately stayed on Babylon 5 after it was completed so it wouldn't suffer a fatal catastrophe, despite his long-term ability to sustain himself there being questionable at best. The character of Aldous Gajic has a different perspective; perhaps Jinxo was Born Lucky, having escaped catastrophe four times. Either way, it fits; good fortune for Jinxo to escape, and bad luck for the first four stations he helped build.
• One episode of Frasier has Niles concerned about a tooth ache which he thinks could be a sign of a heart problem. Roz attempts to comfort him by saying the odds of it being a heart problem is the same as winning a prize from a Snapple cap... which Niles immediately does. The rest of the episode is Niles repeatedly getting more and more lucky, winning more and more prizes from Snapple, and getting more and more terrified of his luck, until he finally visits a doctor who confirms he does have a heart problem, one so bad they need to operate immediately. The Stinger has the doctor pop a Snapple cap... and win a prize, which he offers to Niles.
• Murder, She Wrote: Grady Fletcher, Jessica's nephew and adoptive son, has very mixed fortune. On the one hand, he has unfortunate luck with jobs and girlfriends (up until he meets Donna Mayberry, his eventual wife) and has been accused of murder more than his share. On the other hand, he has Jessica Fletcher, the best detective in the world, as his doting aunt, meaning he'll always get cleared.
• In Supernatural, Sam and Dean Winchester, as well as Castiel, are at the center of one cosmic disaster after another, but they continue to survive and are even brought back from the dead on the occasions they do die.
• Uchu Sentai Kyuranger has the Red Ranger, Lucky, appear initially to be Born Lucky before establishing that he's more like this trope, with his relentlessly positive attitude being what draws good fortune to him even when bad things happen to him. Lucky himself declares that nobody is lucky to live in the show's Crapsack World, so he celebrates any good fortune that comes his way as something to be treasured and emphasized until the day they can fix the universe's rotten luck.
• Chance in a Million (UK 1980's sitcom) had main character Tom Chance constantly plagued by extremely unlikely coincidences, often parodying common sitcom tropes.
• Stan Lee's Lucky Man. The show's premise: a cursed amulet becomes attached to a man's wrist and it gives him lots of good luck. Of course, now everybody who knows how the amulet works is out to get him but it handily explains why the man is able to survive all of the typical insane stunts of an action series.
• Red Dwarf: Rimmer at one point wins the grand prize in the Reader's Digest lucky dip... an all-expenses-paid vacation in Mauritius!... which he can't claim because he is stuck in the brig of a mining ship millions of light years from Earth.
  Oh, for taking the smeg! I've won the lottery as well! "Present the winning ticket at No. 14, Argyle Street"... four million! No luck, that's my lot in life.

Music

• "Your Lucky Day In Hell" from Eels' album Beautiful Freak about someone whose life has been unlucky from the start, but tries to marvel at the thought of having one lucky day in his awful life. As the title indicates this doesn't provide much fun to look forward to.
• Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath tragically lost two fingers during an accident with work machinery. In order to ease the guitar he loved to play, he downtuned strings and invented a new style of fingering. This all turned into the founding stones of heavy metal, an entire genre for which he is considered as one of the most important forefathers if not the most important.

Tabletop Games

• In Old World of Darkness, the dhampyr suffer from this. Their birth (a child of a human and an eastern vampire) is so unlikely that it messes up their fate. As a result, they gain supernatural luck, which they can learn to consciously manipulate but at the same time, they attract trouble a lot.
• Setback in Sentinels of the Multiverse is a justified example. His ex-girlfriend cursed him with "the misfortune of the coyote", but because Setback interpreted this through the lens of cartoons, that manifests as him periodically getting massive surges of good luck to counterbalance the endless low-key disaster montage that is his life. For example, it meant that after having the bad luck to stumble into one of Baron Blade's super-serum tests, he had the good luck to have it actually work and not mutate him horribly or kill him... meaning that he now has the strength and durability to survive an extended career of pratfalls onto marauding war engines, falling off roofs while fighting rat monsters, and otherwise putting his foot in it. In play, Setback tends to have turns of little achievement or even hurting himself or emptying his pool by random chance...and other turns where he hits harder than almost any other hero, bounces from near-death to full health instantly, draws a giant hand of cards or gives everyone a round of free power uses.
• The rules for Champions note that Luck and Unluck are not mutually exclusive, but will result in a very confused character who gets inexplicably screwed over when things are going well and saved when things are going poorly.
• Played for Horror in Deadlands with the "Grim Harbinger O' Death" Disadvantage. It's high-point so it allows for min-maxing, and the disadvantage does not provides any penalties to rolls, so the possibility still exists that a player will be able to make his character succeed despite all of the savage odds placed against him. The Game Master, though, is asked by the rules to make the consequences of the player's actions, whether good or bad, end in lots of collateral death and bloodshed.
  • A common house rule to give this Disadvantage mechanical weight, was that any ability that allowed the character to negate damage instead transferred said damage to other player characters or friendly NPCs.
• Exalted has the Destiny merit, which pushes a character towards a predetermined role (decided by its player and the Storyteller). This role may or not be benevolent, but it is 'ironclad; loved ones may die if their doing so serves the destiny, cautious people will try to avoid the character, or attempts to depose a terrible dictator might inexplicably fail (it's explicitly said that villains have (D)estinies too). Fate cares not for the context in which a Destiny happens.

Video Games

• Chest: Tole has poor control of his magic, causing him to break a nobleman's belongings and putting his family into debt. When his family threw him off a cliff to hide him from debt collectors, he instantly mastered the teleport spell to a degree far beyond the world's best mages. He starts the game looking for treasure at the top of a dangerous waterfall, only to find an empty chest. However, said chest turns out to be Duke Capulet, who helps him reunite with his parents in the ending. In terms of gameplay, his luck stat is maxed out at 999.
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the player character's ability to get into life-threatening situations and then survive is the main reason people think they're The Chosen One. It starts with them being the Sole Survivor of a mountain-shattering explosion (by wandering into the Big Bad's plan, getting thrown into the Fade, and then having to escape while being chased by demon spiders) and goes from there. Lampshaded more than once, especially if the Inquisitor tries to downplay the messiah-hood thing.
  Cassandra: A strange kind of luck. I'm not sure if we need more or less.
• The backstory of Drakengard 3 explains that Zero was this before she died. Truly awful things constantly happened to her, ever since she was born, but somehow the universe always contorted itself so that she survived those things. She was beaten, but not so badly that she couldn't steal the food she needed to survive. She was betrayed, but slavemasters showed up at just the right time to distract the person attempting to murder her. She was caught by bandits, but they decided to sell her instead of killing her. She caught the plague, and then was betrayed again, but her sickness was still in its early stages, so she was able to kill the guy in self-defense. And then she was caught by guards and sentenced to be lashed for every person she'd murdered, but somehow they got the count wrong, so her death came a lot slower than it 'should' have. And then she actually died for real, but an Eldritch Abomination conscripted her into helping it destroy the world. So now she's a zombie Walking the Earth, trying to figure out how to die permanently. Which, after all the crap she's been though, she really wants to do.
• Taking the Jinxed trait in Fallout or Fallout 2 can have this effect on the Player Character. It causes half your misses to become critical misses, which means you could suffer any number of negative effects like shooting yourself, dropping your weapon, losing your ammo, breaking a limb, or having your gun blow up in your face. However, it affects your enemies too, meaning they're just as likely to kill or cripple themselves just by being in your vicinity. For added effect, you can give yourself a high or maxed-out Luck Stat, making this trope even more statistically true.
• Fire Emblem Fates has Arthur, who's partially this and Born Unlucky. Cursed with god-awful luck from mild (never once winning at the lottery) to the downright absurd and life-threatening (lightning strikes, poisoned food and being mistaken for a bandit), you'd think that the stuff he survives will land him in an eleven-foot hole, but he brushes off falling off cliffs like it's a small cold. He certainly has bad luck due to his tendency to get into these situations, but his ability to survive situations that would kill most people cements him in this territory.
• Henry Stickmin Series has the titular protagonist, whose luck can zigzag phenomenally over the course of a game depending on what's funnier. This is a guy who can smash a teleporter and have the resultant malfunction end up sending him where he wants to go, or have a guard accidentally knock a tranquilizer dart back in his face by yawning at the wrong time. His questionable levels of common sense don't help matters.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, this applies to Aloy when you look at her life circumstances. 1000 years After the End she is cloned from a brilliant 21st century scientist to fix the AI running Earth's terraforming system, because it's coded to her DNA. The AI puts her in the care of the Nora, a matriarchal tribe that reveres childbirth. But because Aloy has no mother, she is exiled and shunned by her people from birth, to be raised by another exile in the wilderness. This makes her a social outcast, but drives her to train until she's the strongest warrior of all so she can pass the Proving and end her exile. When a (different) rogue AI recognizes her it tries to have her killed, but fails and sets off a sequence of events that allows Aloy to defeat it for good, when otherwise she'd likely live out her (short) life completely ignorant of her legacy, and the AI would destroy the world unopposed.
• In PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Nathan's ability to get into and out of danger is made into a gameplay mechanic. He reacts with noticeable surprise when his Level 3 Super happens, and it's one of the odd supers that puts the user in some danger. He's the only one not affected by the mutation of El Dorado, and turning what would be a horrible situation for anyone else completely around is the intention with successfully pulling off the whole super. As per the usual Adaptational Badassery, being a Walking Disaster Area is now a super-power.
• Lady Luck seems to give Saints Row's Donnie some weird smiles. The man's repeatedly found himself in bad situations in Saints Row and Saints Row 2, yet he always lives to see another day (the same cannot be said about his colleagues or friends, however). He also survived the downfall of the two gangs he rolled with and is among the people who were abducted by the Zin Empire in Saints Row IV, which saves him from being a casualty of Earth's destruction.
• Super Robot Wars Z gives the second game's protagonist Crowe Broust this kind of luck as the reason he's a candidate to pilot his Humongous Mecha at all. Not that a bout of good/bad luck got him into the pilot's seat, that the artifact powering the robot actively seeks a pilot whose life will continuously swing between extremes of good and ill fortune. It manifests most strongly in Crowe's Perpetual Poverty, as he constantly finds himself forced by circumstances beyond his control into acquiring some kind of massive debt, which is always followed by a lucky break that allows him to pay it all off just in time to acquire a new one.
• The Uncharted series has Nathan Drake. A Walking Disaster Area, his adventures always attract some nastiness along the way; falling architecture, stupidly uneven firefights, exploding vehicles, or the occasional supernatural threat to name a few. While this makes him severely question his luck, his uncanny ability to dodge everything thrown at him (including the bullets), have stuff fall in just the right place, or, in the worst cases, survive and fight with injuries that would kill any other man in seconds, has given him fame amongst his friends as a lucky bastard. In fact, while he keeps getting into firefights, his "health" meter is stated by Word of God to be actually a "luck" meter, meaning until a player dies, he isn't shot, but is narrowly missed instead.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: when the hitpoints of a soldier go to 0, there is a chance he/she doesn't die but gets critically wounded, and you have some turns to stabilize him/her before bleeding out (which can be difficult if you are under heavy enemy fire). Then the soldier will spend some weeks in infirmary and ultimately return in the barracks with decreased will. Considering that one point of the series is that your troopers might die like flies, one could argue that crit wounds are both lucky and unlucky.
  • Panicked soldiers will fire at the closest target. Very bad news is that often this means that they will shoot to other soldiers. Good news is that sometimes they will shoot back at the enemy. Very good news is that the shot might even kill the alien that caused the panic status. In XCOM 2, more often your panicked soldier will fire back at the aggressors and outright kill them.
  • XCOM 2: critically wounded soldiers may also become shaken, getting a malus to their will until they successfully kill an enemy in a subsequent battle without taking any damage, debuff status or panicking. Then, not only the shaken trait is removed, but they get a bonus to will too. If you are so unlucky to get such an occasion, you can say that you are lucky, provided all goes well.
  • Some enemies have area of effect explosive attacks which deal small direct damage but totally destroy the environment. If they use them while on a roof, trying to kill your soldiers through the fall (and they will do), but happen to be on the roof with your soldiers, they might end killing themselves too. Also a case of Artificial Stupidity.

Visual Novels

• While every Ace Attorney protagonist is this to an extent, the trait is far more pronounced in the original protagonist, Phoenix Wright. Not only do his cases hit rock bottom several times before finding just the clue or lead he needs to continue pressing on, but outside investigations he's still at odds with Lady Luck. To name the most spectacular ones: he's been hit by a speeding car and sent flying head-first into a telephone pole, only coming out with a sprained ankle; and he's fallen from a burning bridge into a raging river known to be deadly, and all he caught was a cold.
  Franziska: As always, hard to know if he should be called lucky or unlucky.
  • Maya Fey ends up being a murder suspect in every game she appears in (no, seriously, EVERY game), and in only one of these cases was not the actual defendant. Fortunately, her best friend and boss is Phoenix Wright himself.
  • The bad luck that's haunted Maggey Byrde throughout her life is practically legendary: she's been hit by a bunch of vehicles, gotten sick from all kinds of foods, she fell from the ninth floor of a building as a baby, and she's been accused of murder no less than three times. On the other hand, none of this misfortune has actually managed to kill her, she always manages to get extremely competent legal aid to save her from her legal woes, and she's able to maintain a positive outlook in spite of it all.
  • One of the murder victims in the third game wins the lottery and gets murdered immediately after, for that very reason. He was massively in debt to a Loan Shark because of his gambling addiction, but said loan shark was in even more debt to The Mafia. The victim simply paying back his debt wasn't enough to cover the loan shark's debt, but the victim's collateral was. Since the victim won the lottery at the literal last second and was able to pay back his debt normally, the loan shark was forced to kill him for the collateral he otherwise would have gotten without a hassle. Oh, and just because we're on the topic, Maggey Byrde was the suspect in this murder.
• The protagonists of Danganronpa games in general frequently find themselves subjected to various embarrassing or annoying circumstances throughout the course of the game that then turn out to be crucial evidence to prove their innocence in various cases:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Makoto Naegi's luck seems terrible on the surface, even to him, but much of his supposedly bad luck is actually good luck in disguise, because it lets him avoid something even worse. He's the only student with a poorly-fitting bathroom door that sticks closed, but that same door clears him of suspicion of murder, because he knew how to open it while the murderer did not and had to force their way in. He gets roped into being the unwilling referee for a sauna endurance contest, which ends up giving him a crucial piece of knowledge that lets him solve another murder. In Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, he slips and falls on his ass like an idiot, narrowly dodging a wrench thrown at his head. And, of course, he got put into the killing game in the first place, but goes on to defeat the mastermind and be hailed as a hero.
  • In the What If? short story Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc IF, Naegi takes a spear meant for Mukuro Ikusaba. While she's treating his wounds in the infirmary, she's not sure whether his being in this situation is extremely good or bad luck: she doesn't know his blood type and can't give him a proper blood transfusion, but the spears missed any major arteries or vital organs.
  • In the Fan Game Ace Attorney Ultimate Justice, Makoto loses his gloves on a cold day and gets arrested for a murder he didn't commit. However, he conveniently borrowed his sister's which were a different color, which ruins the real killer's attempt at framing him.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Nagito Komaeda is far worse off, enough to qualify as a Cosmic Plaything. He lives in a constant cycle of extremely bad luck followed by extremely good luck. In elementary school the plane he was on with his parents got hijacked, and then was later struck by a small meteor in mid-flight, which took out the hijackers but also killed his parents, thus leaving him a massive inheritance. Then he was kidnapped for said inheritance but ended up being saved by the police, and also found a winning lottery ticket in the bag the kidnappers stuffed him in. And so on, and so on. This teeter-totter fortune has given him a blind faith in things going his way when he needs them to, and a belief in all his misfortunes being the precursor to good fortune (almost to the point of Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad). In a dark deconstruction of the trope, the cycle has left him so deeply-disturbed that in his Island Mode ending it's revealed that he's weary of living and hopes to die on the island in some way that leaves "the seeds of hope" behind. All in order to finally be free of all luck and to lend some meaning to his complexly chaotic existence. His luck can seemingly also be manipulated. When he engineers his own murder in which the other students would kill him without even realizing it until after the fact, he deliberately mutilates himself in order to fulfill the "bad thing" requirement of his "bad thing followed by good thing" luck cycle, thus ensuring that the one he wanted to kill him is the one who dealt the final blow.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue: Virtually all of the Reds and Blues seem to have terrible luck considering how their lives are a never-ending escalation of various personal tragedies and surreal accidents, and yet things still seem to work out for them surprisingly well in the end. For instance, their idiotic actions aboard the Hand of Merope prior to Season 11 (which got them stranded on the interstellar equivalent of a war-torn Ruritania) actually ensured their long-term survival by preventing the ship from getting boarded by evil Space Pirates.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-503 is described as being inclined towards "short-term good fortune and long-term misfortune" to a supernatural degree. His entire family was killed in a car crash when he was a child except for him (and he was trapped in the car with their corpses for days), he was divorced once and widowed twice and had ten (now deceased) children, and survived 9/11 as well as several suicide attempts. His second-to-last one alerted the Foundation, as he survived a point-blank shotgun blast that only took his lower jaw, which should have been impossible.
• Youtube Let's Play-er and Twitch streamer MasaeAnela, in contrast to her friends Chuggaaconroy being Born Lucky and ProtonJon being Born Unlucky, is known for having incredibly two-faced luck that never treats her with dignity no matter which way it sways, dubbed as "Masae Luck". Oftentimes, her luck treats her with Tall Poppy Syndrome, where her luck supplies her with tons of good graces that places her high above the rest, only to then yank it all away from underneath her feet. This also works vice-versa. To quote Chugga when the two of them played Koopa's Seaside Soirée...
  Chugga: You've pointed that out yourself, though, that whenever a game is going well for you, it just explodes in your face in, like, the last 5 turns, though. But then, when you get crapped on for the first 15 turns, then you suddenly shoot ahead at the last second.
• From Not Always Working, this grocery store worker reveals himself to be something of a Butt-Monkey by way of stating that he's also the submitter for this story, where he got written up and threatened with termination over a technical issue, and this one, where a manager held back from letting him take his break for over five hours before finally declaring he simply wasn't getting a break that day, period. Turns out he has a knack for finding the bad managers at every location he gets transferred to and ultimately making sure they get their comeuppance, by having them mistreat him in increasingly-ludicrous ways. By the time of the third story, when he's once again threatened with a writeup for not helping a customer while off the clock, i.e. breaking labor law, he's had enough and turns in his two-weeks notice.

Western Animation

• The title character of The Amazing World of Gumball is subject to countless misfortunes, but when his life is in danger, his luck tends to reverse in a way that lets him narrowly survive. And while Gumball does gradually shift from a hapless Idiot Hero almost entirely dependent on luck and his family's assistance to a more competent Action Survivor, he still needs a bit of well-timed coincidence to stay alive. For instance, in the fourth season finale, Gumball narrowly avoids being erased and manages to hit the Reset Button because his enemy's weapon malfunctioned, but in a way Gumball was able to fix when he took it.
• Milo Murphy, the titular character in Milo Murphy's Law, is a Walking Disaster Area who somehow manages to not only survive his phenomenally bad luck but be the Pollyanna about it, while often benefiting in some way from his mishaps. In fact, he actually sees his terrible luck as a blessing, as at the very least it ensures that his life will never be boring.
• As with the comics verse above, DuckTales (2017) has Donald Duck as this. Seeking an accounting job? Actually, you got an adventuring job... from one of your estranged uncle's arch-nemesis. Outright stated when he's forced through a deadly obstacle course against his Born Lucky cousin Gladstone: Donald has horrendous luck and overreacts to every slight the universe throws his way, but he NEVER gives up and will stop at nothing to protect his nephews. In the end, Gladstone stops to pick up twenty dollars at his feet right before the finish line, while Donald obliterates a tiger through sheer rage, runs up the sheer cliff side of a giant pachinko machine, and launches himself to victory.
• The What A Cartoon! Show short Awfully Lucky focuses on the Paradox Pearl, which gives its owner extraordinary good luck that is immediately followed by extraordinary bad luck. The main character experiences this first hand as he finds himself caught in numerous catastrophes that he’s lucky enough to survive. By the end of the short he’s had half of his body replaced and finally decides the pearl simply isn’t worth, ditching it for some other schmuck to find.

Real Life

• Tsutomu Yamaguchi is sometimes considered the luckiest man in history because he survived the nuclear attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, he could also be considered the unluckiest man ever because... he was in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were nuked. To top it off, his boss didn't believe him when he described what happened to Hiroshima... only for the second nuke to go off with perfect (black) comic timing when he was called crazy.
• George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia about how he was shot in battle during the Spanish Civil War. Many of the people he talked to while recovering told him how lucky he was to be shot in such a way that the blood wouldn't drown him before he could be recovered from the field. He, on the other hand, wondered how anyone who'd gotten shot in the neck could be called lucky.
• Simho Häyhä was The Dreaded sniper during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, he was so lethal to be nicknamed "white death", and so dreaded among his enemies to the point that the Soviets deployed disproportionate forces just to try to kill him and basically invented extensive artillery barrage as the standard method to deal with snipers. One counter-sniper sent after him managed to hit him in the face with an explosive bullet. Still, Simho survived all of this, even with a damaged jaw and face.
• Roy Sullivan, the man struck by lightning 7 times in his life, who lived through all of them. Tragically, he eventually died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound due to unrequited love. Being struck by lightning so often also took an unexpected psychological toll on him: People started avoiding him out of fear of being struck themselves.
• Similarly, Walter Summerford was struck by lightning 3 times during his lifetime and survived all three. Then after his death, his gravestone was also struck, bringing the total up to four.
• Ivan Basso crashed on stage 5 of the 2015 edition of the Tour de France. The days after the crash, he still had testicular pains, so he asked the race doctor to take a thorough look at what could be wrong. The diagnosis: Early-stage testicular cancer. So early that he will most likely make a full recovery after the surgery is done. Which he did, but it did cause him to retire from competition.
• Frane Selak, who escaped death eight times in various different accidents (a train, a plane, two bus accidents, a Groin Attack via a gun, two car fires, and a truck). He then went on to win a lottery in 2003.
• The co-pilot of the plane that landed in the Hudson has said in interviews that part of the reason the landing worked out as well as it did was that everything that day went their way — except, of course, for the whole "getting stuck by birds and having to land in the Hudson" thing.
• The psychologist Richard Wiseman has studied luck and discovered it's mostly down to interpretation. If someone who thinks they're Born Lucky is shot in the shoulder, they focus on the fact they survived, whereas someone who thinks they're Born Unlucky can have the same thing happen and will focus on the fact they were shot. One example he found was a man who claimed to be incredibly unlucky, but had won the National Lottery. But he wasn't the only winner that week, which he felt was typical of his bad luck.
• Violet Jessop, a nurse who was serving on the ocean liner RMS Olympic. Then the ship was accidentally rammed by a cruiser. No one was harmed. While Olympic was being repaired, she was assigned to its brand-new sister ship, the RMS Titanic. She escaped the following events unscathed. Four years later she was on the third sister ship, HMHS Brittanic, which had been converted into a hospital ship during World War I. Then that ship hit a mine and sunk even faster than Titanic did. Violet Jessop also survived that one, but barely, as she was on one of the lifeboats that were launched prematurely and ended up caught in the ship's still-running propellers.
• During World War I, the Italians primarily faced off against the Austro-Hungarians, but by 1917 both sides were starting to run low on food. The USA had recently entered the war and would send the Italians some much-needed supplies, including food, but their convoys suffered heavy delays. Around the same time, the Austro-Hungarians inflicted a major defeat on the Italians at Caporetto and advanced over a hundred kilometers, taking the key city of Udine in the process. "Luckily" for the Italians, however, Udine's food depots were still nearly empty thanks to the American delays, so there was little food for the Austro-Hungarians to loot. In 1918 the stockpiled food was one of the decisive factors in the Allied victory, as the Italian troops were now well fed and organized, while the Austro-Hungarians were on the brink of starvation.
• The USS Enterprise (CV-6) was, depending on your point of view, either the luckiest or unluckiest ship of World War II because she took a heck of a lot of damage during her career, enough so that the Japanese misreported her as having been sunk three separate times, but ultimately survived through to the end of the war. To give an idea, she managed to avoid being stuck at Pearl Harbor because she was delayed by bad weather for a day, but she still managed to lose 11 aircraft over the course of that day: seven were lost as part of a recon group to scout her intended path that got caught in the attack, shot down either by enemy aircraft or friendly AA guns who couldn't tell who was who; three were part of an intended retaliatory strike on a Japanese carrier that turned out to not be there, who diverted to a friendly airbase only for the AA guns there - despite being told friendly aircraft were coming in to land - to panic at the sight of them and open fire anyway; and one was also part of the strike group who simply ran out of fuel partway through and had to bail.
• Speaking of World War II, there's also the story of how the fairly infamous USS William D. Porter (a Fletcher-class destroyer notorious for having almost killed the U.S. President by accident) was sunk: Namely, after shooting down a Japanese kamikaze plane during the Battle of Okinawa, the ruined plane basically "slid" under the waves and then settled under the Porter before exploding and forcing the crew to abandon ship. Yes, the Porter became quite possibly the first ship in American naval history to be sunk by an already destroyed plane. Miraculously, though, the Porter's string of bad luck seems to have ended there, as every crewman aboard was able to be safely rescued.
• Later on in that theater, there's Taffy 3, a small group of destroyers and escort carriers that just so happened to be smack in the way of the Japanese Center Force during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. This threw Taffy 3 into a hilariously unbalanced fight against the majority of the IJN, but also saved most of the landing forces at Leyte, as the main American force was off on a wild goose chase, and had Taffy 3 been somewhere else (and not fought like they were battleships and fleet carriers), the Center Force would have clear seas all the way to their goal.
• The Hunt for the Bismarck, over on the Atlantic side of the war. The Bismarck managed to destroy the British Navy's flagship, Hood, with a single lucky shot, but this was unlucky for her mission of convoy raiding, as it put her in the crosshairs of the rest of the Royal Navy seeking revenge for their flagship. Then the Brits had their own moment when the Ark Royal's torpedo bombers mistakenly attacked one of their own cruisers (HMS Sheffield)... but did no damage as their torpedoes' magnetic detonators all failed, which prevented any friendly fire casualties and allowed them to rearm with contact-detonated torpedoes for their next run, which targeted the real Bismarck and scored a crucial hit that disabled her rudder and prevented her from reaching Luftwaffe air cover.
• Hockey player Taylor Hall is very unlucky, only entering the playoffs in his eighth season (and second team) and once missed the All-NHL Team because the league chose to put the same guy in two positions. And yet he's a good luck charm for draft lotteries, something he downright admits and admires: after he was picked with the top pick by the Edmonton Oilers, the team won the lottery thrice in the next four years; Hall got traded to the New Jersey Devils, that very season the team won the top pick, and two years did it again; and even if Hall left the Buffalo Sabres halfway through the 2021 season, Buffalo still won the lottery to keep the number one pick.
• Have you ever been forced to make an emergency landing on a busy railroad? Well this guy has and lived to tell the tale. His plane chose the worst possible time to have an engine failure, forcing him to make an emergency landing in one of the worst places possible: in the path of an oncoming train. Thankfully, several police officers were nearby, but just as they were phoning for an ambulance, the train horn sounded, so the officers had to race against time (and the train) to pull the guy out of the plane wreck (which they did FIVE SECONDS before impact by the train). The unnamed pilot is therefore perhaps the only person to survive both a plane crash AND a train crash at the same time.
• New Zealand Racing Driver Chris Amon was considered by contemporaries to be the unluckiest drivers in F1, with Mario Andretti quipping that "if he became an undertaker, people would stop dying", given his chronic inability to win (WDC) races despite being considered World Champion caliber. Reliability, bizarre incidents ^note like accidentally ripping his visor off while dominating at Monza, leaving Ferrari right before their early 70's purple patch, all doomed him to never winning.
  
  And yet Amon never considered himself unlucky because, unlike far too many of his contemporaries, he was able to retire alive and in full health. In a career that had seen teammates like Lorenzo Bandini and Francois Cevert, and Jochen Rindt's WDC won Posthumously ^note Not to mention many other racers among other fields, including the legendary Jim Clark whose death left Amon wondering "If this can happen to Jimmy, what chance do the rest of us have?", he'd survived accidents that on first glance looked just as bad if not worse. This included a practice accident at the 1976 Canadian Grand Prix, after he'd been coaxed out of retirement following Niki Lauda's fiery Nurburgring shunt. Needless to say, barring one last Can Am race (which he didn't enjoy for some reason) he decided not to push things any further.
• American woman Ann Hodges, who became the first reliably documented person to be struck by a meteorite in 1954. Obviously something extraordinarily unlikely, and she did survive it, but one imagines she would have preferred not being hit by a space rock.

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