Usually, when you get caught for doing something you're not supposed to, your main worry is how you'll get punished for it. But the last thing you'd expect from being punished for something is that it saves you from something worse. Get exiled from your current location? Congrats, you just missed the attack that destroyed the place. Get locked up in a cell or dungeon? Good thing no monsters can get in. Have to do some menial task like inspecting weaponry or equipment? Chances are, you'll have what you need to get out alive.
This may involve being a Sole Survivor. Compare Unishment when the punishment itself is desired by the subject. Sub-Trope of Lifesaving Misfortune and Serendipitous Survival. Can be a result of being Reassigned to Antarctica if it leads to a Reassignment Backfire. May involve Born Lucky. Contrast Anti-Interference Lock Up.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In one story arc of The Simpsons comic, everybody gets mutated by an explosion at an event being held at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, except for Bart, who was grounded.
- Superman: In most depictions of the Phantom Zone criminals, their imprisonment within that dimension spares them from the destruction of Krypton like the rest of their species.
Film - Live-Action
- In The Day of the Triffids most people were blinded by a meteor shower, but a group of prison convicts kept their eyesight because they were confined inside the prison.
- Ghosts of Mars. The inhabitants of a human town on Mars are possessed by the ghosts of ancient Martians. James 'Desolation' Williams escapes the fate of the other humans because he was a prisoner in the local jail when the ghosts attacked.
- In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Indy is about to be hanged by the Nazis when a bomb blows the floor out from under them. With his hands tied behind his back, the only thing that stops him from plunging to his death is the rope around his neck.
- The Story of a Cheat: As a boy, the titular Cheat steals a few francs from the cash register of the family bakery to buy marbles. He gets caught, and as a punishment is not allowed any of the gourmet mushrooms the family is having for dinner. The mushrooms are poisonous, and everyone in the family except for him dies.
Gamebooks
- The Fighting Fantasy book Black Vein Prophecy has a meta-example: you have to fail a luck test to find one of the items you need to finish the book.
- At the very start of Lone Wolf, the main character becomes the Sole Survivor on his order when they're attacked by the Darklords, because he was punished for inattention in class by being made to gather firewood while everyone else was gathered for a feast.
Jokes
- There is a joke about a boy whose entire family is being taken to the hospital, and he explains that due to bad behaviour, he wasn't given any of those amazing mushrooms Daddy gathered in the forest.
Literature
- In Carrie, one of the survivors of Carrie's rampage is someone who was locked in the drunk tank of the town police station.
- In Guards! Guards!, Havelock Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, is deposed by a fake heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork. However, being Havelock Vetinari, he's planned for this: the dungeons were modified to have heavy locks on the inside, as well as secret escape routes only he knows. As a result, when a dragon starts killing people, he's in one of the safest places in the entire city, and can choose the best moment to leave.
- In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Dobby intended to get Harry Potter expelled from Hogwarts to save him from Tom Riddle.
- There is a short story in Russian called The Lucky One
, about a woman whose entire life was a string of Lifesaving Misfortunes. One of them is her being arrested during Stalin's repressions and being sent to Siberia. She was a Jew living in Kiev.
- She Who Became The Sun: Invoked by Zhu when she first disguises herself as a man and joins a monastery. She "slips" and falls into the public bath while the senior monks are there, so Master Fang furiously bans her from ever using it, saving her from needing to undress in front of the other novices.
Live-Action TV
- Andor: Cassian is impossible for the Imperials to locate in order to torture him for information or punish as a Rebel because they already have him imprisoned under a false name for being near a bit of civil unrest, ensuring that his record doesn't draw any attention.
- Red Dwarf
- The plot of the show begins when Dave Lister, a chicken-soup machine repairman on board the mining ship Red Dwarf, is put into stasis for eighteen months as punishment for bringing a cat on board the ship in violation of quarantine rules. He ends up being the sole survivor of a radiation leak that kills off the rest of the crew, being woken up 3 million years later when the radiation has dropped to a safe level.
- A later episode involved a dimensional vortex introducing an alternate version of the crew, where Lister's ex-girlfriend Kochanski took the blame for the cat, and ended up as the sole survivor of the leak instead.
Religion
- The Bible: In 1st Corinthians 11:31-32, Paul the apostle tells the Corinthians in regards to partaking of the Lord's Supper (a.k.a. holy communion), "If we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord, so that we would not be condemned with the world." Basically saying that God's punitive actions toward the believers work for the cause of keeping them from an even worse judgment.
Video Games
- Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords At the beginning of the game, mining "accidents" and rogue droids kill most of the crew manning the Peragus Mining Facility. Fortunately for Atton Rand, he is in jail. Behind a locked door. Shielded by a force field. He survives long enough for the player to free him.
- Invoked in Mass Effect 2 when Commander Shepard runs into a young man looking to join up with the gangsters hunting Garrus. Shepard breaks his gun and tells him to get lost for his own good, and later receives an email from him thanking them after he realized they saved him from certain death.
Webcomics
- In El Goonish Shive, Dr. Sciuridae tampered with Project Lycantrope by swapping one experiment's human DNA with that of his recently-dead daughter, resulting in someone unsuited for serving as a Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb against Big Bad Damien. When caught he was transferred, resulting in him not being in the lab when Damien attacked it, killing everyone inside but the experiments.
- Outsider's main character, Alex Jardin, was third-seat helmsman for his ship but, at the start of the comic, had been busted to damage control duty as a disciplinary action. This ended up saving his life when the ship was attacked by an unknown force; the bridge was explosively decompressed, killing everyone there, but Alex was in the bowels of the ship with other damage control personnel.
Western Animation
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Bloo tries to invoke this in the episode "Crime After Crime". Seeing that the dinner Frankie was forced by Madame Foster to do is disgusting and Mr Herriman punishes everyone that "breaks" some "rules" by forbiding them dinner that night, he intentionally tries to get into trouble throughout the episode. Unfortunately for him, his plan backfires hard. Played straight with everyone who got punished, though.
- Gargoyles: During "Awakening, part 1", the then unnamed Lexington and Brooklyn are playing with Bronx by tossing a ham back and forth over him, while Broadway eats as much of the food as possible. A young boy named Tom tries to talk to them, but his mother pulls him away and calls them monsters, even throwing something right at Brooklyn's head. Demona goes to intervene, but Brooklyn and Lexington stop her, and decide to scare the humans by showing them "just how monstrous we can be," and moves towards them threateningly with their eyes glowing. Goliath stops them however, and orders them, along with Bronx and Broadway, down to the Rookery to deal with later. They end up being the only gargoyles at the castle not to be smashed and killed during a Viking raid that morning, as they were effectively hidden away while the rest were still on the castle parapets.
- Cartman from South Park attempts this in Breast Cancer Show. After getting challenged to a fight by Wendy and failing to convince her to call it off, Cartman takes a dump on Mr. Garrison's desk to get detention. It ends up backfiring when the other boys convince her to wait until the next morning. Despite his best efforts, the fight eventually happens regardless, and she wipes the floor with him.
- Steven Universe:
- During the rebellion, Lapis Lazuli was mistaken by Homeworld as a Crystal Gem and stuck inside a Magic Mirror as a way to interrogate her for information she doesn't have. When the Diamonds corrupt all the gems on Earth, Lapis being in the mirror protects her (though her gemstone does get cracked when a evacuee steps on it).
- Bismuth was similarly saved by being bubbled by Rose Quartz for making the Breaking Point and possibly attacking her, though that was less of a punishment than a way to hide her away.
Real Life
- Louis-Auguste Cyparis survived a cataclysmic volcanic eruption because he was in a badly-ventilated prison cell at the time (and even that wasn't enough to spare him from very strong burns).
- Frantisek Saidl survived being murdered in Lidice because he was then jailed for the manslaughter of his son.
Oh no, I'm not gonna graduate from high school because I was too busy browsing TV Tropes on the night of one of my finals and failed it!...oh. Turns out there was a massive fire at the graduation ceremony that killed everyone there...
