Basic Trope: A character suffers from chronic bad luck.
- Straight: As soon as Alice goes out, it starts to rain, and her umbrella turns out to be broken. The store was out of everything she set out for, and she loses her money to a vending machine. On her way home, she gets splashed by a passing truck, and trips over a crack in the ground. When she gets home, she finds that her house has flooded.
- Exaggerated:
- When Alice tries to call a repairman, she drops her phone into the water. When goes to buy a new one, a crook corners her and robs her of all her money and clothes. While trying to hide, she accidentally sneaks onto a school bus and a Dirty Kid takes photos of her and posts them online. After the bus stops, the kid handcuffs her to a pole in the city square. A news team, led by her old high school bully, then arrive and start asking her invasive questions on live TV.
- As soon as Alice goes out, an assassin's errant attack kills her.
- Alice is so unlucky that any attempts at actually exploiting said unluck (ex. to get pity points with a date or selling herself out to bad luck-powered magicians) inevitably go wrong.
- Downplayed: Alice is a little bit accident-prone and tends to lose at gambling.
- Justified:
- Alice has been put under a bad luck curse.
- Alice is a Jerkass, and the bad luck is her karmic retribution.
- Alice has the power to manipulate luck, destiny, chance or some similar concept but suffers from Power Incontinence, or she's not even aware of her power on a conscious level, and her power runs amok because she can't control it.
- Inverted: Alice is Born Lucky.
- Subverted:
- After a long run of bad luck, Alice finally has a win.
- As soon as Alice goes out, it starts to rain, and her umbrella turns out to be broken. The store was out of everything she set out for, and she loses her money to a vending machine. On her way home, she gets splashed by a passing truck, and trips over a crack in the ground. When she gets home, she finds that her house has flooded. But it turns out it was Friday the 13th. Every other day, she has perfectly normal luck.
- Double Subverted: ...But after that Friday the 13th, her luck seems to stay that way...
- Parodied: Alice wins the lottery, and curses her bad luck because now she's in a much higher tax bracket.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice switches between being Born Lucky and Born Unlucky every other day.
- Alice is Unluckily Lucky.
- Averted: Alice has relatively normal luck.
- Enforced: The writers wanted Alice to be a Butt-Monkey, without making the other characters seem like Jerkasses by bullying her.
- Lampshaded: "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."
- Invoked: A practitioner of dark magic curses Alice while she's in her mother's womb.
- Exploited: Bob always persuades Alice to make bets with him, knowing he'll always win because of her bad luck.
- Defied: Alice will be lucky even if she has to put a gun to God's face (in any way that term must be interpreted) to make it happen.
- Discussed: "Why is it always raining when I'm outside?"
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Alice's unbroken streak of bad luck from birth makes her wonder: "Why even bother trying? Everything's going to go wrong anyway — why did I have to be the universe's chew toy?" She has an existential crisis and attempts suicide. She fails.
- Reconstructed: She is an Iron Butt Monkey.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is The Chew Toy.
- Played for Drama: Alice's bad luck causes her severe physical and mental trauma.
- Played For Horror: Alice is a Walking Disaster Area, essentially walking around with a Red Shirt grafted to her skin, and the only reason why all of the monsters and slashers that have mauled her did not killed her is because the universe does not wants to hand her an easy way out to her misery.
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