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Largo: "I knew it! You are our enemy from 'Endgames!'"
Miho: "Don't be ridiculous, Largo. What are the chances of that being true? You'd be more likely to get hired by the brother of your girlfriend's ex, whose daughter happens to have a crush on your best friend."
Marty: That's right, Doc. November 12, 1955.
Doc: Unbelievable, that old Biff could have chosen that particular date. It could mean that that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the junction point for the entire space-time continuum! On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.
In order to keep a story moving, things need to happen a certain way. Sometimes everything is carefully set up and orchestrated, so that events unfold in an organic, natural fashion. More often than not, though, things happen the way they do simply Because Destiny Says So.
There's just one tiny little problem with that theory: Sometimes, Destiny doesn't explicitly say so.
Contrived Coincidence describes a highly improbable occurrence in a story which is required by the plot, but which has absolutely no outward justification. The concept of "destiny" is glossed over altogether, and the events in question are simply disguised as mere happenstance. This would be jarring, but most of the time no attention is drawn to the event at all. It's just a narrative convention designed to skip over lots of irrelevant stuff by putting the important events all together, leaving the audience to forget the improbability of the event.
For example, when two characters are separated in a huge battle involving millions of combatants, they will bump into each other again just in time for one to save the other's life. This is not highlighted as an example of destiny or fortuity in any way, and in fact the improbability of the two people meeting again at such a convenient moment is ignored altogether.
In many an action/adventure show or movie, the protagonists are introduced to at the very beginning or portrayed to retain various gadgets that invariably play perfectly into a dire situation they find themselves in later on. It has the potential to be reasonable, such as bringing hiking equipment to a mountainous terrain mission, but more often than not it's just a flat-out Asspull. Honestly, what didn't Batman "just so happen to" carry in that little belt of his? (For that matter, RPGs and Adventure games are particularly common offenders, as inventory coincidences are often used to maintain the progression of gameplay.)
It's not Destiny, it's not By Design; heck, the writer may not even bother calling it a coincidence. It just happens. Deal with it and move on.
In cases where the coincidence is acknowledged, it's likely a Lampshade Hanging.
Can be justified to a limited extent by the Anthropic Principle (see also The Other Wiki ). Unlikely coincidences are bound to happen once in a while. Exceptional things don't happen to the main characters because they are main characters; rather, they are designated main characters because exceptional things happen to them.
Make note that this is one of the most pervasive tropes out there. Just about any work of fiction, no matter how excruciatingly well-written, is sure to use this as much as they are allowed.
For a more grandiose or plot-wrapping version, see Deus Ex Machina. See also Fridge Logic for the moment it sinks in, and Not My Driver for the vehicular version.
Its A Small World After All is a subtrope of this. So is the variant of Framing The Guilty Party where the one doing the framing didn't know that party was guilty. Too many contrived coincidences may result in One Degree Of Separation.
Examples
Anime
Comic Books
- This troper has gone his entire life without seeing a crime that would require him to step in to help. No superhero, particularly one who has resolved to give up his cape, can last a day without seeing someone being mugged in an alley, or stumbling across a burning building with a woman screaming for help from a window.
- If you are a superhero, then someone you know will be murdered horribly, or develop superpowers, or at least have some slightly odd be seemingly innocuous problem that will be intimately connected with a supervillain's latest Evil Plan. If you're lucky, this will be because your enemies know who you are and are targeting them because of the connection. Probably not though.
- A recent Superman/[Batman story featured Jor-El using a probe to take the mind of a human to Krypton, so he could ask what kind of planet Earth was. The human he selected went on to use the advanced technology of the probe as the basis of a great company called Wayne Enterprises. And Now You Know The Rest Of The Story.
Film
- Independence Day seems to be the poster child for this sort of thing. The movie was so chock full of utterly ridiculous coincidences, it seems the alien invasion was the most credible aspect of the story. To take just one of the many examples, Will Smith, an astronaut wannabe and the only fighter jock to survive an attack on his base, who has shot down an alien fighter and captured its pilot, just happens to crash nearly in front of a convoy of refugees who happen to be going in the general direction of Area 51, which Will just happened to notice in the middle of a dogfight.
- Lampshade Hanging in The Great Muppet Caper: When Miss Piggy is stranded and needs to get across town in time to foil a museum heist, a motorcycle just happens to drop off a passing box van, to which she remarks, "What an unbelievable coincidence!"
- In Star Wars Episode IV, the odds of Luke meeting up with childhood friend Biggs at the Rebel base (as shown in the Special Edition) is next to nothing — as the two characters themselves acknowledge earlier in the film (this part of the footage was not restored). All six films are riddled with bizarre Its A Small World After All moments, starting with the two droids just happening to be brought to the Lars homestead. There's some justification since "There's no such thing as luck," and KOTOR lampshades the matter by having most Jedi characters interpret the massive coincidences and unlikely happenings coming their way as part of the Will of the Force.
Mission: "Wow. What are the chances of that happening?"
Canderous: "Remember, we're talking about the Force here. At this point, Malak himself could drop out of the sky, and I wouldn't bat an eyelash."
Mission: "Good point."
- Quite a bit of it goes down in Crash, most conspicuously the car crash scene with the cop and the woman he had molested earlier. However, the film presents it all so dramatically that you can't help but disregard it.
- In Borat, the titular character falls for Pam Anderson at first sight, but doesn't wish to cheat on his wife. A few hours later, Borat receives a letter telling that his wife is dead. High five! And even later, he happens to meet her in person!
- Tokusatsu action film Casshern literally runs on this in almost every single scene, with the broken lightning bolt from a giant mountaintop statue accidentally landing in a scientist's mystical Neo-Cell soup and reanimating a bunch of dismembered body parts into the baddass Shinzo-Ningen...who then just happen to stumble during their escape into the funeral of the scientist's dead war-hero son and kidnap his mother...and then just happen to find a giant war factory in the middle of nowhere with an army of robots for them to use...while the scientist resurrects his dead son whose expanded musculature can only be contained by a super-suit coincidentally designed by the scientist dad of his girlfriend...and that's only the beginning! The only excuse this movie has for any of it is its stylised weirdness and the epic, Gotterdammerung-esque tone that hints that, though not explicitly stated, literal Deus Ex Machina may be involved. After all, that was a hell of a convenient lightning bolt.
- In Vantage Point, watching the Contrived Coincidences come together is half the fun. The other half is figuring out the stinking Xanatos Roulette.
- In The Fifth Element, the taxi Leeloo falls into just happens to be that of the ex-special forces major who was chosen to bring back the four elemental stones.
- Receives a Lampshade Hanging in George of the Jungle, with the narrator's line, "Every story has a really big coincidence and here's ours..."
Literature
- Pick a Charlotte Bronte novel. Any novel.
- Jane Eyre: When Jane, penniless and homeless, passes out in the middle of a field, it just so happens to be on the property of her long lost cousins. Also, right before she's planning on leaving for India with St. John, she just happens to hallucinate someone calling her name, making her go back to Mr. Rochester and his burnt down house. And we cannot forget the mysterious rich uncle who bequeathed her the money necessary for her to marry Rochester "as an equal".
- The first Thursday Next novel, The Eyre Affair, does an External Retcon on many of these, revealing that before Thursday's tampering Jane Eyre was a largely contrivance-free book with a Downer Ending.
- Even The Eyre Affair offers no explanation for the fact that Jane ended up getting taken in by the Rivers family.
- Villette is an even worse offender. British heroine Lucy Snowe goes to work at a school for girls in some French-type country (most likely Belgium), and it so happens to be the school where her god-brother serves as a doctor. Also, her potential romance with Dr. John is stopped abruptly when the woman in France he mysteriously rescues from a burning theatre happens to be the former ward of Dr. John's mother. From England.
- Charles Dickens was the Grand Champion of coincidentally plunking long lost relatives together in convoluted plots. In fact, it would probably be easier to list the books of his that don't employ this type of plot twist...
- Not to mention the fact that at one point the entire denouement of his David Copperfield hinges on Mr Micawber a] just happening to be in Canterbury, and b] just happening to walk past the Heeps' door (which is of course c] wide open due to nice weather) on d] the one day - and hour - that David has been invited to tea within. This, in a book that already depends pretty heavily on characters just happening to run into one another, frequently on the streets of London, then as now one of the biggest and busiest urban metropolises in the world.
- Thus this trope is Older Than Radio.
- Thomas Hardy did this a lot as well - The dénouement of Tess of the D'Urbervilles required the titular character to run into the man who raped her earlier in the book, while yomping across Dorset, in just the state of mind to consider taking up with him again, and, by the way, he's given up being a country gentleman to be an itinerant preacher in the intervening time...
- Terry Goodkind did this too many times to mention in The Sword of Truth, to the point where impossibly long coincidences become a major plot staple in some of the books.
- Dracula. Dracula's first victim upon his arrival in England happens to be the best friend of the fiance of the solicitor whom he left for dead in Transylvania. Oh, and she's also beloved by three young suitors, all of whose skills come in handy later, and one of whom is the protege of Professor Van Helsing, probably the only man in the Victorian world to instantly recognise a vampire attack and know exactly what to do about it. This helps, as the heroes otherwise seem to be clutching the Idiot Ball throughout the entire book...
- In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court the titular Yankee's time of execution happens to coincide with a solar eclipse. (Not even to mention that he knew the exact date and time said eclipse would occur despite its status as obscure fourteen-hundred-year-old history.)
- The real coincidence being that he was the kind of person who would calculate all the solar eclipse dates in the past few millenia for fun... just before getting time warped into the past.
- The narrator of Betty Miles' The Real Me writes an essay in which she describes such coincidences in the "horse books" girls her age are supposed to love, in which a poor girl who wants a horse conveniently wins one. When the family wonders where they're going to put it, a nice man offers her father a job in the country, and their new house has a big barn out back. You'd expect someone to say "If you expect this whole family to pack up and move fifty miles just because of some damn horse, you're crazy," she says, but "nobody ever says that in horse books".
- The Wheel Of Time books show this trope in spades, starting in the first book (Moiraine and Lan showing up right before a Trolloc attack, Egwene and Thom just happening to join the group before they flee, Loial just happening to be in Caemlyn when Rand and Mat show up, etc.), and never really stopping. This is actually justified in-story: "ta'veren" are people who warp destiny and create freakish coincidences around them just by existing, and the story happens to have three. This also applies to non-plot related coincidences; Rand in particular has trouble with it, as people around him have the tendency to stumble onto buried treasure or fall from ten-story balconies and get up unharmed...or, alternately, have their house burned down (with their neighbors' untouched) or trip over their own feet and break their necks.
- Les Misérables has some of the more spectacular Contrived Coincidences in literature. One example: Marius's grandfather is (apparently) the father of two little bastards by his housemaid; he fires her, but pays her a substantial allowance to support them. When they die, to keep from losing her income, she takes in two children about their ages — who just happen to be the two youngest Thenardier kids. And when these two are thrown out onto the streets, who do they take up with? Why, Gavroche... who never uses the name "Thenardier", and who's forgotten that he ever had two younger brothers.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy pokes fun at this a lot. Most famously, when Douglas Adams had his main characters thrown out an airlock into space, he realised anything that saved their lives at this point would be a Contrived Coincidence. Rather than Handwave this, he gave it the biggest lampshade he could think of, by inventing a space drive that creates Contrived Coincidences as a side-effect of its nonsensoleum.
- In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Guards! Guards!, it is stated that a chance of one in a million holds true in nine of ten cases. This "universal truth" is later used by a bunch of people in a (failed) attempt to slay a dragon.
- Rincewind's 'entire life' is one Contrived Coincidence after another. Of course this is explained as the interferance of Luck herself.
- In the Young Wizards series this is both lampshaded and justified by the phrase "There's no such thing as coincidence", meaning that the Powers That Be and/or God set things up so they'd happen that way. One example is the fact that whenever Nita and Kit go on anything resembling a vacation, whatever their destination is just happens to be the exact place they need to be in order to fight the Lone Power.
- The Bard is not immune to this. There's no reason at all that Romeo didn't get the message about Juliet's sleeping potion, except to make the story a "tragedy" in the loosest sense of the word. Arthur Laurents, librettist of West Side Story, was very proud of inventing a more compelling reason the message was lost, as Tony's gang very nearly rapes the messenger. Making this Older Than Steam.
- Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, has Romeo hear of Juliet's death and leave Mantua before the letter from Friar Lawrence arrives.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs is another classic example; he was particularly fond of having separated characters be unexpectedly reunited while lost in the middle of thousands of square miles of jungle, ocean and/or trackless wasteland.
Live Action TV
- Many episodes of Monk rely on a Contrived Coincidence to help Monk solve a case, which sometimes results in a Creek Moment. For example, in the episode "Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame," Monk discovers the killer's identity only because a TV playing a commercial that featured the killer happened to be on while Monk was questioning a suspect.
- In Life on Mars (UK version), the heavy-drinking Gene is shot — but it turns out he's okay because the bullet hit the flask he keeps in his jacket pocket. "What are the odds of THAT," one of the characters asks; and Gene, pulling flasks from several other pockets, says "Pretty good, actually."
- Happens in the US version too.
- The Red Dwarf episode "Quarantine" features a man-made virus which temporarily gives the "infectee" insane amounts of luck, eventually leading to the use of a rapid string of Contrived Coincidences to save the day.
- It sure was lucky that the Farscape crew happened to land on Earth just when Hallowe'en came around, so they could (nearly) get away with being aliens on an earth which had only seen the first Star Trek...
- In tokusatsu Kamen Rider Den-O, the Transformation Trinket that Ryoutaro recieves in episode one has four coloured buttons, each corresponding to one of his four forms. This despite the fact that he only has one form at the beginning, and the monsters he goes on to make contracts with for his remaining forms just happen to have the same colour schemes as the remaining buttons. You'd think it wouldn't really matter, but on some forums, you'd be deadly wrong.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy VI. Celes resembles the opera singer Maria closely enough to take her place.
- Final Fantasy VII. Cloud, a former comrade of Sephiroth (who becomes the Big Bad), meets Aeris, who is the last survivor of her race (and just so happens to be the only one able of stopping Sephiroth) and who just happens to be Zack's ex-girlfriend, who was another comrade of Cloud and Sephiroth, and Cloud & Zack were experimented on (as adults) by Hojo in the basement of a mansion in Cloud's childhood hometown, and Hojo turns out to be Sephiroth's father...
- Speaking of Final Fantasy, don't even get me started on six amnesiac kids, who happen to be the player's party plus a Rival Turned Evil suddenly remembering that they were all raised in the same orphanage by the game's seeming Big Bad.
- This one can actually make sense, if you consider the fact that Edea knows Squall is going to kill Ultimecia and that Squall is the one to give her the idea to create Garden in the first place. Since Edea and Cid are in charge of Garden, it would have been easy enough for them to contrive to have the kids come together and work together as a team.
- In God Of War II, it would appear that every hero in Greece scheduled an appointment with the Fates the same day Kratos did.
- Justified in at least one case (Theseus serves the Fates, so would be around most of the time), and possibly justified in the others if you think of the Fates as being sort of "outside of time."
- Regal from Tales Of Symphonia manages to keep his true identity secret for almost half of an entire disc. Yes, he emphasizes his role as a criminal to hide it, but the secret would have been revealed if anyone ever mentioned him (and he's well known) using both his first and last name.
- It helps that he never actually says his full name (before The Reveal)...and that the one person who figured it out (Zelos) decided not to call attention to it.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and its sequels run on these. Almost all the cases would be unwinnable if it weren't for at least one witness being in the right place at the right time. Any specific example would be woefully spoileriffic, though.
- Here's just one: Phoenix simply doesn't have the testimony needed to prove that a witness is not who he says he is and is forced to resign himself to defeat. The other prosecutor, von Karma, just happens to make a joke about Phoenix interrogating the witness' parrot. Because he suggested it, Phoenix is able to claim that it is a legitimate interrogation technique and the interrogation (of the parrot!) does help crack the case and lead to a "not guilty" verdict.
Web Comics
- Order Of The Stick:
Elan: Wow, what were the chances?
Julio: Pretty good, considering we wouldn't be having this scene if it didn't forward the plot in some way."
- Megatokyo has quite a few of these, most notably the significance of nearly every member of the Sonoda family (Yuki is Piro's student, Meimi has a hit on Largo, the Inspector knows half the cast and Erika was engaged to his brother). Oddly, the example quoted above is one of the few that can make any sense, if you're willing to believe that Largo actually CAN sense evil (given everything else in the comic, it isn't too far a stretch).
- In Sluggy Freelance, Torg accidentally stumbles upon Dr. Steve's laboratory and becomes the object of Oasis's affections. By sheer coincidence, one of his friends (Riff) is secretly employeed by Steve's old company, Hereti Corp, which is desperately searching for Oasis.
Western Animation
- Quite frankly, a vast majority of, if not virtually all, American cartoons rely less on quality writing than on condensing an inexplicable amount of bizarre happenings into fast-paced, consecutive 11- or 22-minute stories. As a result, the West is teeming with this trope.
- It's a good thing Scooby Doo and co. never stopped being scared of the fake ghosts, because there's probably not a single episode in which a chase scene didn't by pure blind luck lead them to a clue they wouldn't have seen otherwise.
- There was a Lampshade Hanging on an episode of Futurama, where Bender, after having spent quite some time hurtling through space at the speed of light and encountering all sort of circumstances along the way, gets thrown back to his worried friends, Leela and Fry, while they just happened to have started giving up on ever actually finding him. When he lands in front of them with a parachute to somehow slow his descent, Leela in incredible disbelief states, "This is, by a wide margin the least likely thing that has ever happened."
- Ironically, since Bender was thrown by God itself, this wasn't really all that much of a coincidence...
- The real coincidence comes when both Bender and Fry manage to somehow communicate with God, despite the monks failing to do so after 700 years, which is of course extremely unlikely.
- Avatar The Last Airbender: Even though it is unquestionably a Crowning Momentof Awesome, Azula's conquest of Ba Sing Se relied on a striking number of coincidences (notably that Sokka decided not to wait an hour to greet the Kyoshi Warriors when they arrived).
- Captain Flamingo uses this a lot in the workings of the eponymous character's Bird Brain — his "super power" to misinterpret his sidekick's suggestions in such a way that his actions end up solving everything. One of the most extreme examples is Lampshaded and Hand Waved by Lizbeth (the aforementioned sidekick) and the Captain. "Isn't it awfully convenient that the book you checked out just happened to be on the exact subject you needed to return it?" "My Bird Brain works in mysterious ways. I don't question it, and neither should you. *Aside Glance* And neither should anyone else."
- One episode of WordGirl was entirely built around Lampshading this trope, starting from normal usage and becoming I Am Not Making This Up territory by the end of the episode.
Real Life
- That you exist. For one thing, a single proto-you had to beat tens of millions of sperm to the other half of the proto-you at a time when your mother just happened to be receptive to pregnancy. She has to have not miscarried, and you have to have not died in your first year of life. Every coincidence that happened to your parents had to have affected you in some way to shape the person you would eventually become, to say nothing of the sheer unlikelihood of things happening to you. Meeting your first friend, meeting your first love, developing an interest in whatever, all of these rely on phenomenally unlikely coincidences. Just making it to about a year old, the odds are more than 186 trillion to one.
- This troper's great-grandfather ran off to America instead of marrying my great-grandmother when they discovered she was pregnant. Nobody in either family heard anything from him for twenty years, before his younger brother accidentally walked into him on the streets of New York. Imagine the odds of that...
- This troper's great-grandfather left his wife and moved east, never to be heard from again. On a visit to Little Bighorn National Monument, an old lady overheard our name as my father and I checked in at a random little hotel and said it was familiar to her. As it turns out, she's my great-aunt. She worked at the hotel, but her shift had ended at least an hour prior, and she rarely stayed late - except, of course, the day we checked in.
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