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Ray: "Now let's explore the improbable chain of events that led to this amusing yet tragic farce."
Narrator: Every story gets to have a really big coincidence and here's ours...
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.
- In the very first Batman/Superman crossover, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne happen to take a cruise at the same time and are coincidentally assigned to be roommates. Why Wayne can't afford a single occupancy cabin or, for that matter, his own cruise liner, is unexplained. They are both in the cabin at the same time, changing into costume, when a bright ray of light beams through a port hole, lighting up the room and revealing the two superheroes' to each other.
- And Lois Lane wound up on the same cruise, because a female passenger chickened out at the beginning. Apparently only one person disappeared from the cruise, so Clark couldn't be given his own room.
- A later comic RetCons this story, saying that due to an overbooking error, there are only two rooms to share between Clark, Bruce, and Lois, and obviously Lois isn't going to share a bed with either of them.
- This deliberately happend in Cable & Deadpool. In the wake of House of M Deadpool was was searching for the real Cable trapped somewhere in an alternative timeline. But just as he teleported to the real world with the real Cable, Scarlet Witch had changed the real world into her image, thus the middle aged Cable was transported into a baby (It Makes Sense In Context). And despite everything changing to normal, baby Cable stayed as a baby (but not for long). It was all to being sold as a tie-in to House of M, and apart from some breath issues forward it didn't do much for the plot.
Film
- Independence Day has loads of this, being a massive Homage to old disaster and sci-fi movies, which were also loaded with this. 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.
- 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 motherfucknd 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 stylized 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..."
- Music And Lyrics: Alex is a musician and former pop-band singer/songwriter who has been commissioned to write a pop song for a current pop queen, but only ever wrote the music and can't write lyrics. Sophie, the girl who waters his plants, turns out to be a budding lyrical prodigy. What a happy coincidence!
- Not every nasty turn of events in The Dark Knight can be chalked up to the Joker's work. In particular, there is the moment when Harvey Dent gets half his face neatly burned off, and the same fire renders one side of his trick quarter distinct from the other. This was well after he'd earned the nickname "Two-Face."
- Also, if that quarter turned up the wrong side when Joker talked Harvey into "introducing a little bit of chaos," the third act of the movie would not have happened.
- In Lantana the number of coincidences builds up to become a theme. All of the major characters bump into each other randomly.
- In Star Trek XI, no attempt is made to explain the immense improbability of Kirk running into Spock Prime in a cave on the ice planet and thereby getting the exposition he needs to save the day. The novelization lampshades it by suggesting that the timeline is attempting to restore itself.
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.
- Let's not forget Shirley, in which Shirley Keeldar's governess also turns out to be Caroline Helstone's mother.
- 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 Miserables 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.
- Also, Valjean is being pursued by the police through the alleyways of Paris. He climbs over a wall into a convent. And who's that working as the gardener? Why, it's that guy whose life he saved a few chapters ago! (Parisian population at the time: over 600,000...)
- 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.
- And then totally accidentally, when it's a million-to-one chance that they won't die in the ensuing chaos. Naturally, they're fine.
- 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.
- In fact, the way Romeo learns of the party (Where he meets Juliet), is because the clown Sir Capulet has entrusted his guest list to can't read, and asked Romeo and Benvolio ot read it for him by chance.
- Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, has Romeo hear of Juliet's death and leave Mantua before the letter from Friar Lawrence arrives.
- The Comedy of Errors requires unimaginable coincidences, as do most of Shakey's comedies.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs (who created Tarzan, among other things) is another classic example; he was particularly fond of having separated characters be unexpectedly reunited while lost in the middle of thousands of square kilometers of jungle, ocean and/or trackless wasteland.
- A non-Tarzan example is Burroughs' At the Earth's Core. The Marty Stu main character, after coming to the inner world of Pellucidar immediately meets a beautiful girl who happens to be a princess, an old man who happens to be a king, and soon after a young man who happens to be yet another king. Needless to say, he will need the help of all these royals and their kingdoms later in the story.
- One could argue that The Dresden Files Knights of the Cross have Contrived Coincidence as a part of their skill-set courtesy of Divine Intervention. A funny example occurs in Grave Peril, when knight Michael prepares to rush out to his wife's rescue despite the fact he has children at home. Lo and behold, his priest comes to the door and begins explaining how his car suddenly broke down on the way home from giving someone a ride before stopping and asking Michael "You need a babysitter again, don't you?"
- It's even better than that: Harry is still skeptical that the contrived coincidence power works, so Michael sighs and opens the door without looking out, just as the priest is about to knock.
- The heroes of SM Stirling's Emberverse novels are either the beneficiaries of a whole honking string of these, or they are getting very powerful help from somewhere.
- A particularly egregious case of this trope occurs towards the end of A Clockwork Orange in which the brainwashed and rehabilitated ex-hoodlum Alex just so happens to bump into every single person he ever wronged throughout the course of the book, all within in the same evening. The consequences were dire.
- Lampshaded in several Peter Wimsey stories, in which Peter discusses with an author the annoying fact that coincidences look contrived in stories, even though they happen all the time in real life.
Live Action TV
Video Games
- Final Fantasy V. The party needs to cross the ocean. They just so happen to find a cavern used by pirates. They try to steal the ship, and it just so happens that Faris, the goofy male pirate with pink hair, is pink-haired princess Lenna's long lost sister Sarisa. Which is great timing since Faris needs to be around to watch her father die and give her a motive to save the world.
- Final Fantasy VI. Celes resembles the opera singer Maria closely enough to take her place.
- And is a proficient enough musician to convincingly pass for a world-renowned soprano after at most a few days of rehearsal.
- 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...
- Crisis Core takes it to a whole new level, with Zack Fair actually meeting many characters seen in the original game, including all the playable characters who join Cloud's party. Why none of them remember seeing a guy with the same haircut as Cloud carrying the exact same sword...
- 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."
- In Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake starts out with a stunningly realistic mask shaped after a GRU officer's face. The mask supposed to be used in an espionage mission that was later scrapped and it would have been thrown away had it not been for the insistence of SIGINT. Conveniently, the GRU officer happened to be Colonel Volgin's homosexual lover and helped Snake sneak into the high security wing of Groznyj Grad. Note that the mask was given to Snake during a mission that would not (theoretically) involve the GRU or Colonel Volgin.
- 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.
- In Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis in one place you need to gather several small blue stones to solve a puzzle. Those stones were removed from the cementary to be used in constructions. For some reason, all of them were used in visible places and not buried under other stones.
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 is secretly employeed by Steve's old company, Hereti Corp, which is desperately searching for Oasis.
- Lampshaded and subverted in Digger, when the titular character is told she's a descendant of Helix, one of the wombats who worked on the chains binding the dead god:
Digger: What? Me? Isn't that a little...improbable?
'Helix: I had eight sons a thousand years ago. You do the math.
Web Original
- Simon Wood in Survival Of The Fittest version three managing to navigate his way across an entire island and find his girlfriend just in time to rescue her from an attacker.
- To some extent, this also occurs when groups of friends manage to meet up with one another very quickly: the Deserted Islands upon which the games take place are rather large, and the odds of meeting your friends that fast are rather slim, to say the least.
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." Justified, because actual literal God was involved.
- Further lampshaded on the commentary when one of the writers notes 'And that's how we wrote our way out of that one'
- Avatar The Last Airbender: Even though it is unquestionably a Crowning Moment Of 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).
- Or how for some reason Toph beating Aang's back with rocks didn't unlock his Avatar State.
- Katara was pretty lucky Pakku was sweet on her Grandma and he just happened to see the necklace.
- 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 territory by the end of the episode.
- Contrived Coincidences happen frequently in Kim Possible, usually neatly lampshaded, but the episode "Rewriting History" is the most blatant and over the top example: Kim and Ron discover that Ron's great-grandfather Jon Stoppable was a police constable with the same kind of relationship to Mr. Barkin's ancestor, the chief of police. Most of Jon's success in police work is down to ace reporter Miriam "Mim" Possible, Kim's great-grandmother. Professor Dementor's ancestor is demonstrating his device at the World's Fair, and is just like his modern equivalent. Chasing this up, Wade discovers that his ten-year-old ancestor was there too. Ron finds this pile-up of coincidences unlikely, and when Drakken's great-grandfather enters the picture (with a sidekick resembling Shego), Ron declares the whole thing ludicrous. Having just discovered all this, it turns out that after a hundred years, the device is due to go off that day. With sixty seconds left on the clock and no idea how to disable it, Drakken and Shego burst in to steal it. Their craft takes the device far enough to go off harmlessly. Ron notes that the villains arriving in the nick of time is so unlikely, it's like a dream - and it was (though according to Word Of God all the persons were real.).
- The episode ended with a statue of Ron's ancestor in Rome, who was the enemy of Dr. Drakken's ancestor. His victories may really be due to a mysterious masked Amazon who resembles Kim...
- The entire Simpsons episode "Trilogy of Error". Everything that happens to each character is a direct result of something (usually stupid) that another character has done, always with no idea that their actions are influencing the rest of the family. Eventually everyone's paths have crossed and re-crossed until, at the end of the episode, everyone's in the same situation.
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