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alt title(s): Xanatos Gilligan; Plot Wrecker; Gambit Gilligan; Wrench In The Works "A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
"My plan was perfect but there was one thing I overlooked, one factor I failed to calculate. He's a dumbass and there's no accounting for dumbass-ness"
Gyahahaha! Now, I, the Chessmaster, will see my plot's fruition! From here, in my impregnable fortress, I shall now beam my Phlebotinum Mind Control Lasers world-wide! I shall be as unto a God! Nothing can stop me n--! Wait... how did that idiot get in here?! No! Stop! Get away from that! NOOOOO! **BOOM** No... NO! IT'S NOT FAIR! IT'S NOT FAIR! *breaks down sobbing*
Whether it's The Ditz, The Fool, Inspector Oblivious, or a monkey, this miscreant is capable of derailing the most intricate Xanatos Gambit and implausible of Xanatos Roulettes by exploiting their one, intrinsic flaw: their reliance on Contrived Coincidences, rigid patterns, and the assumption that nobody would be stupid enough to actually push the Big Red Button or fight the apparently unstoppable robot.
How can they outdo the master at his own game with nothing but stupidity and clumsiness? It's precisely because these characters are the fools and tools of fate that they are uniquely placed to derail these schemes with the gentleness of a Butterfly flapping its wings... of doom!
Put another way, they are an author's walking deconstruction or Lampshade Hanging of the Theory Of Narrative Causality: just as easily as a plot can come together it can be pulled apart with the tiniest, most ridiculous things.
When the character ruins the protagonists' plans by unknowingly doing something small but crucial, he becomes a Swiss Messenger. When the plan is screwed and the character is also aware that he will screw the plan, and doesn't care, he becomes a Leeroy Jenkins. Ocasionally, may be Mistaken For Badass.
Compare Nice Job Fixing It Villain.
Opposite of the Xanatos Sucker, often is the Xanatos Sucker until the final crucial moment. This is the main cause of Didnt See That Coming, this trope being the "that". Compare with Out Gambitted, where someone's Xanatos Gambit is successful but ineffective against a better-planned-out gambit. Compare Too Dumb To Fool, where the character is too stupid even to be baffled by explanations. Also compare Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, where the flaw is that the villain can't see someone being generous or brave or honest enough to foul up his plan. Specialty of The Fool.
Examples
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Comic Books
- In IDW's Transformers series, Shockwave, planing to seed dozens of worlds with super energon so Cybertorn wouldn't be mined hollow and die, is attacked by the Dynobots looking for revenge.
- In the Mad Thinker's original appearance in Fantastic Four, he manages to overcome all the defenses of the Baxter Building, take control of it, and trap the heroes. His plan fails to account for their mailman, who cuts the power.
- Wrong example, as the mailman is asked by Reed Richards to do it at an exact time to foil Mad Thinker's plan. So it's just Reed Richard's badassery at work.
- This is actually the Mad Thinker's hat, in a way - He's able to create amazingly complex, unassailable plans at the drop of a hat, however there is always some random variable (what he calls the "x-factor") that doesn't take into account and buggers up his calculations.
- Marvel Adventures Spider Man once established that the Thinker hates Spider Man because his precognitive spider sense makes him the one person on Earth who can effortlessly derail the Thinker's schemes without even deliberately trying.
- Zayne Carrick in the Knights Of The Old Republic comics basically sets in motion the Self Fulfilling Prophecy of the Jedi — the one that they were trying to escape by killing their Padawans — when he (unintentionally) misses the knighting ceremony and then escapes. He continues to thwart their plans, intentionally or not, ever since.
- He also thwarts Arkoh Adasca's plan (with the help of Lucien and Alek) by tricking the Mandalorian leader into thinking Adasca is working with the Republic to trap him, which results in a three way brawl which culminates in Adasca's ship getting eat by giant space slugs.
- Runaways often sees villains' perfect plans ripped to shreds by Badass Normal Chase Stein, who claims to be street smart but as a fellow team mate inquired, "What street? Sesame?" It should be noted that he did find the first base and the unassuming white van he drives was requested by him for his first car (over fast sports cars that his parents could afford) because he had paid attention to the DC beltway sniper incident (which went on as long as it did because cops were looking for a car that wasn't involved) so he isn't inept.
- In DC Comics, the Challengers of the Unknown are a team of adventure-seekers who miraculously survived a terrible plane crash, and therefore decided that they would willingly face any danger because, as they always put it, they were living on "borrowed time." It has recently been revealed that this is literally true: because they did not die on their appointed death date, the Challengers are the only people in the world whose fates are not recorded in the Book of Destiny. They can freely disrupt predestined events that would otherwise be literally inevitable, making them the ultimate example of this trope.
- Subverted in the Dan Dare series Reign of the Robots, wherein the only person that the Mekon paralyses after capturing the group is Dare's bumbling aide Digby, on the grounds that "he has no brain, therefore there is no predicting his actions".
- Groo The Wanderer is this trope incarnate. One of his more memorable derailings involved him going up against a mind-reading sorcerer. Groo fights his way to the sorcerer's throneroom, is confronted confidently by him... followed by a full page of the sorcerer making strange faces at Groo while the latter stared at him in befuddlement until he finally screamed "There's no mind to read!" and ran away.
- In Cerebus, the title character is also this trope incarnate, as he possesses a "magnifier" quality that influences everything and everyone around him to varying degrees. This causes the plans of everyone who tries to do anything that directly involves Cerebus to succeed wildly then crash spectacularly.
- Deadpool is frequently seen as such a rogue element that the guy who can copy someone's fighting style completely (Taskmaster) was still surprised by him.
- There's another event (context is unknown) in which a genius tactician of some kind is countering the moves of every other hero in their attack on his base, but none of his predictions of where Deadpool is are accurate; turns out DP took the "Super Mario strategy" and went through the sewer pipes.
- I don't remember the context either, but it had an army of dinosaurs in it.
- Cyclops in the Ultimate X-men arc Return of the King. Let us recap the situation so far. Magneto has regained his memories and is going on a rampage across the world with his acolytes while he waits for Forge to get his Doomsday Weapon ready. All the X-men are either captured, killed, or on the run and still have no idea where Magneto's base is. It looks like all hope in lost, when Cyclops, who everyone thought was killed by Wolverine a few issues ago, is taken into Magneto's base as an injured mutant in need of healing. After recovering Cyke busts his way out, clues the other X-men in on where the base is. All of this leads to a truly epic smackdown against Magneto and saving the world.
- In one week-long Fox Trot series, Jason finds it impossible to beat one guardian monster in a video game, as it instantly squashes his character every time he tries. Paige, who almost never plays video games, takes the controller and gets by the guardian by simply walking around him.
- Snively describes Sonic as this in the Archie Comic's 200th issue after the blue blur defeats Eggman yet again, causing the doctor to go mad.
Snively: Eccentrics aside, he really is a genius. He can build the most amazing things and plot a hundred steps ahead ... And then there's you. All the building, calculating, and planning in the world couldn't beat you.
- Cebolinha/Jimmy Five from Brazilian comic Monica's Gang is known for "infallible plans" against Monica. They usually work up until a certain point, when "accomplice" Cascão/Smudge screws up, usually by revealing it was a plan.
- In Tintin and the Picaros, Colonel Sponsz plots to have his old enemies (i.e. Tintin, Haddock and Calculus) be the subjects of a fake kidnapping by Tapioca's nemesis (and Tintin's old friend) Alcazar so they can all fall victim to an ambush on a back road. The Spanner In The Works is a monkey in the road, which causes Alcazar's getaway truck to suddenly swerve the moment it comes into firing range.
- In the Fables spinoff The Nearly Great Escape, Jack figures out that Goldilocks is working for Revise because she wears the same style of glasses that several of his minions wear. This is a complete coincidence, but it turns out that he was right anyway.
- An early issue of Spider-Man has Mysterio convincing Spider-Man that he's going insane, and then posing as a therapist who offers to help our web-headed hero. Of course, Mysterio then sets up more illusions to make Spidey think he's hallucinating again. Spidey's about to have a complete nervous breakdown when J. Jonah Jameson and Flash Thompson, who had both heard about the therapy session and wanted to support Mysterio and Spider-Man (respectively) wander into the house. When they start seeing and reacting to the same "hallucinations", Spider-Man realizes that he's being conned, and swiftly defeats Mysterio. It's later Lampshaded when Jameson realizes that Mysterio was on the verge of making Spider-Man reveal his Secret Identity, and that his own arrival torpedoed the whole plan. After that, Jameson is the one who seems like he needs therapy.
Film
- The ending of the film Layer Cake has the protagonist outclassed not by dumb luck, but by being shot. Because while he was really successful in tricking clever criminals in his Xanatos Gambit, he ends up shot (and possibly killed, it's a little vague) by a guy whose girlfriend he stole and whom he considered of little importance.
- Carlito's Way ends in a similar fashion. After outsmarting all his enemies by the skin of his teeth Carlito ends up getting killed by some random lowlife he mistreated earlier in the film.
- Star Wars has a few examples:
- The Ewoks in The Return of the Jedi are the one tiny overlooked factor that brings the Emperor's entire grand scheme crashing down.
- Luke just happens to wound Vader in the same way Vader wounded him, thus making Luke realize what he had almost become. Of course, the Emperor really wasn't helping his own cause, either.
- The Expanded Universe has the entire Imperial Fleet artificially boosted by the Emperor's force powers. The Emperor's death ended up causing the imperial officers to lose control of the situation, preventing them from shooting down the Millennium Falcon before it could destroy the Death Star 2.
- There's also Jar Jar Binks, whose clumsiness is more than a match for several tanks.
- There are about a dozen ways the Rebels lucked into the plans for the Death Star in the expanded universe. By now you'd think they had enough plans to spare.
- The scheming husband in Dial M For Murder is undone because he underestimates the intelligence of Swann/Lesgate, the thug he hired to kill his wife. Swann puts the key right back after using it, rather than keeping it, as his employer expected.
- In the recent adaptation of The Pink Panther, it seems like Inspector Clouseau, a seemingly Inspector Oblivious is one of these until the very end, where he reveals that he was a Chessmaster after all.
- According to Peter Sellers, the original Clouseau qualified as well, but he knew he was a buffoon deep down. Strikes Again had killers from all over the world come after him. He bends over to tie his shoes at the exact right moment...
- Sweeney Todd would have killed Judge Turpin and ended the movie right there and then in the middle had Anthony, who had recently talked to Sweeney about his plan to elope with Johanna in order to get her away from Turpin, not busted into his shop with the judge right there in the room in order to inform Sweeney that he has found Johanna and that she has agreed to the plan. Needless to say, this ends up blowing both the aforementioned plan and Sweeney's attempt to kill Turpin straight to hell.
- All throughout Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, Jack repeatedly plots for the most favorable outcome (for himself), but stubborn fool Will Turner and arrogant jerkass Captain Barbossa assume they know best how to get things done, and nearly screw themselves out of their goals frequently. If Barbossa had wanted to cut Elizabeth's throat instead of her hand, Will would've been too late to save her on his own, and if Will had died like he should've when Barbossa ordered the Interceptor scuttled with Will trapped below, Barbossa would never have gotten Will's blood to pay Bill Turner's debt. Near the end of the film before the climactic battle, Jack has everybody where he wants them, but because Barbossa and Norrington don't trust him at all, his plans almost fall apart.
- That's what Jack WANTS you to think.
- In the 1932 sci-fi mystery film Doctor X the Mad Scientist Serial Killer manages to not only trick the other characters into believing he is innocent but also manipulates them into physically restraining themselves so he can slaughter them at his leisure. Unfortunately he forgot about the Plucky Comic Relief Intrepid Reporter, who manages to dispatch him in a terrified and bumbling fashion at the last minute.
- In The Caper film The Killing,(1956) one of director Stanley Kubrick's earlier efforts, a band of criminals pull off an elaborate robbery of a racetrack. Even though the most of the criminals kill each other off fighting amongst themselves, the Anti Hero and his Love Interest manage to escape to the airport and prepare to board a plane out of the country with all the loot. However, all their plans are foiled when a dog runs out in front of the luggage train, causing it to crash and spill the loot all over the runway for all to see.
- In The Man Who Knew Too Little the main character foils a terrorist plot without even knowing there was one.
- The Joker in The Dark Knight describes himself as a kind of non-stupid Spanner ('I'm a dog chasing cars: wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it!'). Really, his Xanatos is just bigger than yours. His Character Filibuster about chaos and anarchy derailing 'the plan' could be either hanging a lampshade on this trope, and subverting the hell out of it. Or both. You decide.
- And the people in Gotham turn out to be the ones who ruin his plan.
- Oh, the joys of Chicken Run - this is one of many visual gags, and surprisingly one that is relevant to the plot.
- The Clue movie: Mr. Boddy tries to get one of his six blackmail victims to kill his butler Wadsworth to prevent him from reporting him to the police; instead, one of them kills Boddy. One of the film's three endings however, revealed an even bigger Batman Gambit: Wadsworth was really Mr Boddy all along, getting the six to kill his butler in his place and the rest of his informants so there would be no evidence against him. This one is ruined by the FBI sending a plant in place of Mr. Green, who kills Wasworth/Boddy in the end.
Literature
- A ditz cultist hands the newborn Antichrist off to the wrong unsuspecting parents in the beginning of Good Omens, thus setting off a plan that derails Armageddon itself.
- In JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings the Dark Lord was eventually destroyed accidentally by poor Smeagol.
- That's not exactly accurate. It was due to Gandalf's planning and Frodo and Sam's perseverence that the One Ring arrived at the one place that accident could have happened.
- Wrong. As the Film Of The Book indicates, the only key difference between the scene in Mount Doom with Elrond and Isildur, and the scene with Frodo and Samwise, was the presence of Smeagol/Gollum.
- In Isaac Asimov's Forward the Foundation amidst the chaos surrounding high-level plots and counter-plots, Galactic Emperor Cleon I is assassinated by a totally insignificant palace minion, because he (Cleon) was insisting on promoting said peon, against the peon's fervent wishes, from "gardener" to "chief gardener".
- Gunner First Class Ferik Jurgen, assistant to CIAPHAS CAIN, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!, turns out to be the one who most often saves the day, with his combination of being a "blank" who nullifies psychic powers and the fact that he carries a really, really big gun.
- Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Witches Abroad had a Xanatos Gambit based on Narrative Causality fall apart before the sheer onslaught of Nanny Ogg's ordinariness.
- Other leading Discworld characters have acted as this on occasion:
- Rincewind never wants to get involved in events, being a coward. In Interesting Times, his great ambition is to stay as far away from the villain's Xanatos Gambit as possible. However, he always seems to run away from danger in the direction of even more danger... until he winds up cornered and desperate, at which point he does the right thing in spite of himself.
- Some of the more inept members of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, especially Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs, fit this trope.
- Happens to Queen Cersei in the A Song Of Ice And Fire book "A Feast For Crows". Lessons learned: 1, be careful about which member of your royal guard you let those newly empowered religious fanatics interrogate; and 2, younger twins count as younger brothers.
- Not that Cersei had the smarts to pull off a Xanatos Gambit in the first place. If it hadn't been one thing, it would have been another.
- The Repairer of Reputations, one of the short stories in The King in Yellow, has the evil scheme being foiled by the title character getting his throat torn out by his own Right Hand Cat. Then again, since most people involved were insane, the plan might not have worked anyway.
- Kender, gully dwarves and gnomes in the Dragonlance series...especially (by their very nature) the kender. While all of the above races have the ability to change events in the past through time travel, due to their origins as races created by the Greygem of Gargath (pure Chaos-in-a-rock), kender have innate fearlessness, insatiable curiosity, guileless but mischievous personalities, and chronic kleptomania as racial traitd. Tasselhoff Burrfoot, for example, is both the Xanatos Sucker of Raistlin's evil schemes and the only person unpredictable enough to screw them up. One of the most dreaded sounds on Krynn is the sound of a kender saying 'Oops.'
- Given the choice between being locked in a room with a hungry dragon or a bored kender, anyone with any sense picks the dragon.
- Remember, the cruelest thing one can do to a kender is lock him up. The cruelest thing one can do to anyone else is to lock them up with a kender.
- This trope is sort of lampshaded in the second Honor Harrington novel where the protagonist explains to her subordinate that the best swordsman in the world doesn't fear the second-best one, but the worst swordsman in the world, because he can't predict what the dumb son of a bitch will do.
- Apparently there is some truth in that. An inexperienced swordsman is more likely to do something that gets both combatants killed than an experienced one trying to avoid dying.
- John Blackthorne in Shogun is a rather magnificent one, as circumstances force him into a key role in the Thirty Xanatos Pileup of choosing Japan's next shogun in the year 1600. And he's based on a real guy, to boot.
- Tom Clancy's Executive Orders: A pair of domestic terrorists spend most of the book preparing a massive cement truck bomb to kill Jack Ryan, driving it all the way across the country, dodging roadblocks put up as a result of The Virus spread by the other Big Bad of the book, only to be pulled over and arrested by a random Highway Patrolman just doing his job when they panic.
- The titular assassin of Frederick Forsyth's The Day Of The Jackal seems well ahead of the international police effort to stop his attempt on Charles de Gaulle until some things come up to derail his plan. Just one of many comes up when his seduction of a baroness to gain a hiding location falls apart when said baroness eavesdrops on a call with his informant, forcing him to kill her and letting the police make him publicly wanted as a common murderer.
- And ironically, his last spanner was de Gaulle himself, who leaned forward to kiss a recipient on the cheeks instead of shaking his hand like the Jackal expected, therefore making the Jackal's shot miss and giving Lebel enough time to stop him.
- David Eddings's Tamuli trilogy reveals that the Child-Goddess Aphrael and her priestess Sephrenia were this to a Man Behind The Man without ever realizing it until his plans were exposed.
- In James Swallow's Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels novel Deus Sanguinius, Rafen shocks Arkio's forces by being alive. Inquisitor Stele is quite glad that he will die in single combat, because he had landed in the plans by a fluke and quickly grown to "the most serious nuisance." Of course, he wasn't dead at that point. . . .
- Mat Cauthon in The Wheel Of Time almost literaly personifies this trope. He isn't stupid, but he's rarely clued into just what exactly is going on around him. Despite this he foils many schemes, especially when he's actively trying not to.
- The War Of The Worlds is essentially one long Curb Stomp Battle with the invading Martians effortlessly rolling over all of humanity's attempts to stop them. Then a month later they all die of common Earth diseases, germs and therefore antibodies being non-existant on Mars.
- In the last Chronicles Of Narnia novel The Last Battle, the villains come pretty close to winning. What ultimately derails their schemes? Oh, just that the demon lord Tash really exists.
Live Action TV
- In the Doctor Who story City of Death, Duggan, the detective who seems to have gotten into his line of work just because he likes hitting things, derails the villain's multi-millennial scheme with one thoughtless, well-timed punch.
- Get Smart, of course; Maxwell Smart is
as more likely to defeat KAOS by accident than on purpose.
- A British Sketch Comedy program parodied this. A man is buying a camera, and is shown one that is "totally idiot proof". He then smashes it on the table. "What did you do that for?" "Well, I'm an idiot." The shopkeeper then shows him a camera made out of concrete.
- In an episode of Wallander, the title character avoids a fatal bullet by tripping over a conveniently-placed rug.
- In TNA, Taylor Wilde and Lauren Brooke derailed Dr. Stevie's attempts to turn Abyss into his puppet. Despite using drugs, physical abuse, and mind games to keep him in line, Dr. Stevie didn't count on Abyss falling in love with Lauren. Then, when he ordered Abyss to attack Taylor, he didn't count on her being Lauren's best friend...
- Kelly Bundy tended to mess up whatever plan she became involved in, given her role as The Ditz, The Fool and The Brainless Beauty. It's even lampshaded by Peggy at one point as the Bundys and the D'Arcys are being arrested by the police, when she notes that it probably wasn't a good idea to let Kelly in on the plan.
Manga & Anime
Tabletop Games
- In just about any D&D module, the adventurers are the Spanner. And any good GM has to be able to handle a Spanner, as the PCs can be expected
- Example: Give the PCs the Eye of Vecna, you get some fun people fighting over it. However, one of the PCs sacrificing the Eye of Vecna to THE GOD OF JUSTICE? Not so expected.
- In Unknown Armies, you can become an Avatar of an archetype by mimicking that archetype's classical behavior. One of those is The Fool, who can pull this off easily and walk away unscathed.
- In Chrononauts, new players are the spanner. Plans in the game range from Xanatos Roulette to "I win next turn as long as no one makes a minor change in 1914". New players will often meddle with history (even starting World War III), steal random historical artifacts, or kill the makers of said artifacts, to "see what happens".
- In Exalted, beings that exist outside of fate are the ultimate Spanners from the perspective of the Sidereals. Since they cannot be detected, manipulated, or predicted by fate and fate-based powers, one of these beings can derail centuries of careful planning before the Sidereals realize that anything's amiss.
Video Games
- In Grandia II, this role goes to Millenia. The Big Bad's plan requires that all eight pieces of Valmar be absorbed by Millenia so that Valmar's resurrection can be brought about and the Big Bad can merge with him. What the villain didn't count on was Millenia refusing to absorb the Horns after they merged with Ryudo, and then sealing them inside Ryudo rather than risk killing him. As a result, not only was Valmar's resurrection incomplete, but Ryudo eventually used the Horns as a weapon to kill the villain.
- Arguably, what Jimmy did to Bully, Though Jimmy was smart (in terms sociality).
- In The World Ends With You, Neku points out to a Manipulative Bastard that it is utterly impossible to predict what Beat is going to do. Heck, if you collect the Secret Report after the end of the game, even the Angel, Mr. Hanekoma, thought Neku was screwed before Beat's Heel Face Turn, which was conveniently possible because of his Face Heel Turn in the first place.
- Persona 3. After his Reveal as The Chessmaster, Shuji Ikutsuki plans to sacrifice most of the party by forcing Robot Girl Aigis to murder them, in order to bring about The End Of The World As We Know It. He's just about to succeed, too. At that point, the player is reminded that Ikutsuki forgot to crucify the dog, too.
- Kristoph Gavin's ultimate scheme in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney was meant to be the murder of Vera Misham via a poisoned postage stamp depicting the magician act Troupe Gramarye. However, the girl is such a huge fan of the Troupe that she saves the stamp for seven years; her father eventually uses the stamp instead and dies. The flaws in Gavin's plans run deeper than this, but this is his only apparent mistake; everything else is because of Phoenix Wright's meddling.
- Larry Butz also counts, owing to his tendency to do unreasonable things that end with him stumbling onto vital evidence. In the first game, he was coincidentally returning a boat he had been using at precisely the right time to overhear a gunshot, in the third he shirked his work as a security guard when the villain's plan relied on him being at his post so that he would hear the noise of a panic button, rush into the room and arrest the wrong person and then in a later case his choice to wander around at night in the cold leads to him witnessing a number of things he wasn't meant to.
- In the fourth case of Justice For All, the lead that helps Gumshoe and company track down Shelly de Killer is, of all things living and not living, Matt Engarde's cat, who meows at the end of a transmission from de Killer.
- In the third case of Justice For All, Acro's plan to murder Regina was to call her to a specific point where he would drop a heavy weight on her head. Problem is, the note he secretly planted on Regina began with "To the murderer...". Due to Regina being very naive, she didn't think the note was for her, and posted it on the circus's bulletin board, where her father saw it and responded to it in Regina's place. It's a Wall Banger once you realize that Acro wanted to kill her because of her naivety, and that he should have known better that she would never think the note was meant for her.
- "All right, chums, let's do this! LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOY JEEEEENKINS!".
- In Wrath of the Lich King, after Drakuru plays you for a Xanatos Sucker, you get to do this to his plans repeatedly. Revenge is so sweet...
- Xenosaga: The entire plan of the Big Bad, that has taken centuries and all three games to complete, is undone because Allen can take a beating and look really pathetic while it happens. It's more awesome than it sounds.
- A much more minor, but hilarious, example comes from Chrono Trigger. Ozzie, inept sidekick to the great Magus, was originally defeated by being dropped down a trap door. In his second coming, he's smart enough to make the switches instead drop the heroes down the trap door. When they come back, Ozzie's ready for anything... except for a random cat, which wanders in, flips the wrong switch, and down he goes...
- It's one of Chrono's cats, scattered through time in the last ending, and is there specifically to help its master (Alphador is one of Chrono's cats too).
- In Soul Nomad And The World Eaters, Lujei Piche apparently is stated to have ruined the effort involved in banishing Sulfur of Phantom Brave, sending him back to Ivoire as a Bonus Boss.
- Revya and Gig, for all the multiple times they are Xanatos Suckers during the storyline, also become epic spanners: The demon path is basically you laying waste to the entire Thirty Xanatos Pileup: Virtious, Thuris, Dio, Rashka and all the other manipulators' year-long plans are ruined by one free-roaming Omnicidal Maniac doing it For The Evulz.
- Final Fantasy IV offers a minor example in the Dark Elf. A monster who messed up Golbez's plans to steal the Earth Crystal from Troia by snatching it first and running off to a cave where he rendered metal weapons unusable. Golbez works around this by sending protagonist Cecil to fetch the crystal in exchange for Rosa.
- Ash DragonBlade's story in Dragon Fable from Artix Entertainment consists of Ash foiling the plots of would be Big Bads through his own sheer stupidity.
- In La Pucelle Tactics the plans of both Noir and the spirit infecting Croix are foiled not by the Maiden of Light, but by Priere, a newbie priestess who is perhaps the least likely person you'd expect being a nun, though she has a mean right hook and an even meaner set of legs.
- In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, Larkeicus does this to his own Xanatos Gambit. He builds a tower to reach the point in the sky where the hero's going to cause the crystals 2000 years ago to vanish, and prepares for every possible outcome, including his own defeat. Too bad he forgot to consider how the hero would get that high up in the first place.
- In Evil Genius, this can easily happen to the player if (s)he gets careless. Even the lowest of the agents of justice can become the Spanner In The Works if you neglect to pay attention.
- General Shepherd didn't expect one thing in Modern Warfare 2. SAS Captain John Price. Price firing the nuke at Washington caused Shepherd to resort to some Xanatos Speed Chess and move up his timetable for TF 141's disposal, but Price's willingness to co-operate with Makarov pushed him on to the defensive and gave him a knife through the eye.
- In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the cunning plan created by Vader and Palpatine fell apart due to one bit of (bad) luck and one unforeseen relationship. The accidental wiping of PROXY's primary programming resulted in a Heroic Sacrifice when Vader tried to kill Starkiller, and the emotional connection between Juno and Starkiller meant she came back and rescued him after Vader's failed attempt to kill him. Starkiller himself then became the spanner when he went after Vader and Palpatine, saving the rebel leaders. The end result is that Palpatine and Vader ended up creating the Rebellion that eventually defeated the Empire. Oops.
- The Alien protagonist in Aliens vs. Predator 2.
- Aqua becomes this to the Big Bad's plans in Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep. Xenahort's plan involves having Vanitus take over Ventus to form the X Blade, while he himself steals Terra's body for his own use. Aqua is just a friend of theirs that he has no role for in his Xanatos Gambit and therefore has outlived her purpose, however she's unexpectedly powerful and repeatedly survives his attempts to kill her, and sure enough she ruins his plan by being the only member of the trio still active in the end, breaking the X Blade and beating him amnesic. Aqua is essentially the true hero of Birth by Sleep. Ventus and Terra were completely suckered by Xenahort.
Web Animation
- In the Homestar Runner holiday toon "A Death-Defying Decemberween", Homestar announces to one and all that he's going to sled down the Steep Deep - a vertical cliff face - and Strong Bad catches The Cheat surreptitiously helping Homestar bury a mattress at the foot of the alleged slope. Of course, Strong Bad being Strong Bad, he moves the mattress expecting Homestar to maim himself on impact...but the next day, when Homestar sleds down the Steep Deep, he makes a perfect landing. As it turned out, the mattress was full of "hammers, broken glass and candy canes sucked down 'til they're all pointy"; the whole thing was a ridiculously elaborate (and painful) scheme to get out of having to spend Christmas with his girlfriend Marzipan's parents, one that Strong Bad successfully sabotaged (even if the end result wasn't quite what he had been expecting).
- In a recent episode of Yu Yu Hakusho Abridged:
Kurama: "...so I believe Hiei's superior speed would be the best choice for this fight."
Hiei: "Well Kurama, your plan sounds good except for one fatal flaw."
Kurama: "What? What are you talking about? My plan is foolproof!"
Kuwabara (screen-shift): "Here kitty kitty!"
Kurama: "I stand corrected."
Webcomics
Web Original
- In the Whateley Universe, this is Jade's purpose in life. She's screwed over at least four Xannatos Gambits, simply by being there. See "It's Good to be the don", "Christmas Elves", "Christmas Crisis", and Ayla 7-6.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Greece might have been this in World War II. If they hadn't held off the Italy invasion that required Germany to help them, Operation Barbarossa might have been started earlier, and the invasion of Russia might have succeeded.
- Even before surrendering to the Allies in 1943, Italy was probably as much a hindrance as a help to the Axis war effort through opening new fronts and then calling for German help. The desert war was another example, starting when Italy tried to invade Egypt from Libya and promptly collapsed to the British counterattack until Rommel arrived ... which, of course, meant Rommel wasn't on the Eastern Front. Perhaps Germany would have been better off if Italy had been neutral from the start ... which may mean that, ironically, we should be thanking Mussolini for his role in history. If, you know, he hadn't been a role model for Hitler to begin with.
- Originally Mussolini despised Hitler, and apart from some basic similarities, their ideologies were very distant — for example, Mussolini's Facism didn't have a racial doctrine — but we still might have to thank Mussolini for eventually jumping into Hitler's bandwagon, when it started to seem that Jackboots & Mustache might actually win.
- Ironically, Hitler himself may count. If he hadn't meddled with everything, thereby wasting resources (like the V2 — great for propaganda, terrible for the war), the Germans might actually have had a chance. And that's not even counting that brilliant idea of attacking Russia.
- In the first World War, Germany intended to go through neutral Belgium in order to attack the French. It probably would have worked if not for the Belgian resistance delaying them.
- Santa Anna's plan to finish off the Texas Revolutionaries at San Jacinto on April 22, 1836 was ruined by Sam Houston's decision to attack first a day earlier despite the Mexicans outnumbering the Texans 1,400 to 900. Santa Anna also sealed his own fate by diverting too many of his soldiers and failing to post lookouts while his army rested — not to mention supposedly getting seduced by the "Yellow Rose of Texas" Emily Morgan. The Mexicans surrendered to Sam Houston's assault after just 18 minutes of fighting.
- If you're doing user interface design, one of the best tests is to hand the software to an entirely untrained user. They will ferret out all kinds of little bugs and quirks because they'll choose utterly ridiculous but nonetheless logical ways to use your application.
- Similarly, video games. Less skilled gamers will find those accidental holes in the wall before experienced gamers, who aren't, you know, accidentally running into walls all the time.
- Developers of the perl programing language have stress-tested new versions by having it parse /dev/random as input. Bugs that had resulted in segmentation faults were discovered this way.
- This trope describes much of the history of economics. Even the most brilliant economic models and philosophies can break down because people are neither strictly rational nor in possession of "perfect information."
- Professional poker players can sometimes be thwarted by novices and amateurs, who make plays that no professional would be stupid enough to attempt and end up short-circuiting the professionals' expectations. This also is true for billiards players.
- In the training of fighter pilots during WWII, the best students of all were made flight instructors. They generally were not sent to fight, because it was found that highly skilled pilots were more predictable and thus easier to shut down than someone who's slipping and skidding all over the sky.
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