That cigarette must be made of tissue paper.
He smoked incessantly but the weird thing, Carrot noticed, was that any cigarette smoked by Nobby became a dog-end almost instantly but remained a dog-end indefinitely or until lodged behind his ear, which was a sort of nicotine elephant's graveyard.
Many fictional characters who smoke cigarettes often demonstrate a peculiar ability: any cigarette they light — even if it was just taken from a completely fresh pack — is instantly crumpled and bent out of shape.
Characters who are wealthy or otherwise "fancy" seem to be immune to this, particularly Femme Fatale characters. Presumably they're buying a more expensive brand, but even the cheap ones are evidently more expensive than the cigarettes you can buy in Real Life, which are extremely difficult to crumple up without breaking them and rendering them unsmokable.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Sanji in One Piece as pictured above.
- Nicholas D. Wolfwood in Trigun. Justified in that the setting is a desert world where tobacco almost certainly can't grow, so any and all cigarettes to be found are "old technology".
- FLCL: Mamimi. Possibly averted, as in one episode she takes a cigarette from her jacket, and it's already rumpled up.
- Oscar in Count Cain: God Child. It becomes an important plot point towards the end of the manga.
- Jigen in the Lupin III franchise. A Lampshade is applied in The Castle of Cagliostro, which shows him lighting a butt taken from the ashtray of Lupin's car.
- Ginko from Mushishi smokes Mushi cigarettes, possibly justifying the trope for the mystical properties those creatures bare. Or, because it looks cool.
- Most of the main characters from Cowboy Bebop. Given the number of fights they get into, along with their Perpetual Poverty, they might just be taking cigarette packs of people they've beaten up while arresting.
- Most of the main characters from Black Lagoon.
- Jean Havoc in Fullmetal Alchemist
- Stein in Soul Eater
- Bard in Black Butler
- Zorthy in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
- Masamichi Fujisawa from El-Hazard: The Magnificent World. Since his cigarettes were transported with him from Earth to El-Hazard (and appear to be a soft pack, no less), it makes some level of sense that they would always end up looking this way.
Comic Strips
- Andy Capp: In the bar, at home, right after he lights up—he always has a cigarette stub dangling from his mouth.
Eastern Animation
- Nu, Pogodi!!: Wolf.
Films — Live-Action
- Heather Mooney, in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. "Twice the taste in half the time for the gal on the go"; she reportedly invented fast-burning paper, which means that cigarettes become dog ends very quickly.
Literature
- Discworld:
- Corporal Cecil Wormsborough St. John "Nobby" Nobbs is frequently noted for displaying this ability. It's said that cigarettes quickly become butts in his presence, and stay as such for an apparently infinite amount of time.
- Death's manservant Albert has a similar talent.
Only an expert could get a rollup so thin and yet so soggy.
Video Games
- Starcraft II: The Hellion's unit portrait is smoking one.
- Trauma Team: Gabriel Cunningham, in addition to being a very thinly veiled House Expy, has this ability.
- Wild ARMs 4: Played With Gawn, who appears to have a perpetual dogend, but when asked about it, explains that it's not a cigarette but rather a freeze-dried noodle. Probably a Bowdlerization, there is a frame at 0:44 in the second version of the animated intro sequence where he is very obviously smoking.
Real Life
- Spike Milligan, in the volume of his autobiography dealing with service in North Africa, vividly describes a fellow artilleryman of this inclination. In order to light a diminutive dog-end that was so short he ran a risk of burning his own nose with the lighter flame, his comrade diligently held a piece of thick cardboard between upper lip and nostrils to act as a flame-deflector whilst he lit the cigarette stub.
