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Born Lucky
aka: Super Luck

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Such a bad day. Usually a squirrel will just vomit it on the table.

"I survived the Battle of Yavin. I survived the Battle of Hoth. Hell — Just a couple of weeks ago I blew up the Death Star during the Battle of Endor. The reason I'm still breathing when a lot of other good Rebel pilots aren't? Maybe it's because I'm better. Or maybe I'm just lucky."
Wedge Antilles, X-Wing Series

A character that's so mind-bogglingly lucky, it defies all probability. They'll win every contest or lottery they enter (in especially extreme cases, they don't even need to, the winning ticket will somehow come to them). Usually a weak explanation is given for this luck, attributing it to some kind of supernatural force but not going into any kind of detail. Despite the trope title, this luck does not necessarily begin at birth.

Sometimes the character actually dislikes their luck, because it makes things boring or alienates friends, or if it's the kind of luck that involves their friends dying instead of themselves.

The extent of this luck can vary greatly; sometimes the lucky individual has to be careful with taking advantage of it, lest it run out at the worst possible time. Other times it applies all the time and can get a little ridiculous.

Often some kind of Amplifier Artifact can bestow this super-luck. If Clap Your Hands If You Believe is a large force in the series, expect it to be a Magic Feather in the end. If the artifact in question follows Equivalent Exchange and gives you bad luck if you lose it, then it can cross into Artifact of Death or Artifact of Doom. Of course, if your luck is dependent enough on said artifact in these ways then it may not count as this trope anymore (See Winds of Destiny, Change!).

In games, this may be represented with by a Luck Stat or Luck Manipulation Mechanic. Compare Winds of Destiny, Change!, which generally has no subconscious element (i.e. wielders have to want something to happen). See also The Fool, who frequently has luck but it's never quite to this level. See also The Magic Poker Equation. May be related to Born Winner. Contrast Idiot Houdini as well as Unluckily Lucky. The opposite is Born Unlucky. A character using a Two-Headed Coin in coin flipping may also appear to be this until The Reveal.


Examples:

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  • Akagi:
    • The mahjong genius, Akagi Shigeru. His game style involves a shocking level of insight into how his opponents think and a degree of luck that could only be called godly. He plays like a drunk with a deathwish, but he never loses.
    • Washizu possesses this too, as his luck is referenced as a supernatural ability on multiple occasions. It's what gets him the killer Dora 12 hand in Episode 25 of the anime, which would instantly kill Akagi (yes, literally kill) if he self-drew the tile (Tsumo) or won from Akagi's deal-in (Ron).

  • Miria and Isaac from Baccano! From accidentally becoming Immortal to never learning that they are in fact Immortal and everything before and in-between.

  • Yuno from Black Clover is a mage blessed with a four-leaf clover grimoire, which is said to have good luck. He was born with an incredible amount of magical power as well as talent for magic, learning advanced techniques not long after he joins the Golden Dawn. He luckily finds a scroll containing the power of Sylph, allowing him to finally defeat Mars. His team later goes on to place first in the Magic Knights Examination by the luck of Rill accidentally destroying his team's crystal. When the elves are reincarnated, the soul reincarnated into his body is an unborn's child, allowing him to regain control of his body. He's so used to things going right that he hates losing.
  • Case Closed:
    • Ran Mouri has absurdly good fortunes playing luck-based games like Poker or Mahjong. First seen when she goes into a mahjong parlor where her father Kogoro is gambling, very upset because he took Conan with him... then she gets interested in the game itself... and in the next scene she has fleeced her dad and his companions out of all their "prizes". (And then the owner of said parlor, who doubled as a loan shark, appears dead...)
    • Another case started with her aiming to win the second prize in a raffle, which was a family trip to the beach. Conan was all "I don't think you'll win"... Cue to the next panel, with Ran happily telling Kogoro about the trip she won and a terrified-looking Conan next to her.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • Touma has the opposite problem. His special power destroys his own luck so he's born unlucky if you don't count his Unwanted Harem. It's so bad that when he actually does win an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy in a contest, he's immediately suspicious of what kind of severe misfortune inevitably awaits him there (and indeed, it's not a relaxing vacation for him).
    • Played straight when he finds out that Kaori has this and rightfully angsts over it. As a Saint, she's basically unkillable — but her friends are not.
  • Code Geass: Downplayed. In contrast to Lelouch being a Cosmic Plaything, the amount of instances where things just fall into place for Suzaku Kururugi, at least in the first season, is amazing. He gets shot in the very first episode only for a conveniently placed pocket watch to stop the bullet. He is then thrown into a the cockpit of a Super Prototype, despite being an Eleven and thus normally not being allowed, by dent of no one else qualified being around. He just so happens to meet the one genuinely good Britannian princess, who happens to share his beliefs, and makes him her personal knight despite being pressured to do otherwise. Every time he’s faced with the dilemma of sacrificing his morality or following Britannian’s cruel orders as a test of his loyalty, the Black Knights show up to give him an enemy he has much less qualms about. And even when becoming a Knight of the Rounds after capturing Lelouch, he’s fortunate that the Emperor who has been publicly espousing racism and Social Darwinism, doesn’t actually believe his own rhetoric, and has no problem with Suzaku’s ethnicity. Despite Suzaku being a genuine Ace Pilot, one can legitimately say his ascension in the show, is more a product of the world bending over backwards for him, than any merit of his skills or beliefs.
  • In Cowboy Bebop, Faye Valentine's debut episode "Honky Tonk Woman" sets her up to look like this. A casino hires her, claiming she's this ancient Lady Luck figure who can win every game she's ever played and never cheated. "She was just a born winner." It appears for a while Faye is indeed the woman they speak of, as when she works the blackjack table, she takes everyone's cash almost effortlessly, even robbing our hero Spike of every chip (save one). Then Spike nonchalantly points out that she was cheating. As the series goes on, we see Faye is anything but lucky.
  • Death Note: Deconstructed. While Light Yagami's Super-Intelligence and being The Social Expert does make him an effective Chessmaster, along with his status as an Academic Athlete and the son of a Police Chief giving him a shield to prevent anyone from strongly suspecting him, sans L, one could make an argument that a lot of his Batman Gambits worked out as they did mainly due to good luck. Case in point, his gambit to learn Raye Penber's true identity through a bus jacking could've gone wrong in a number of ways and it's mostly because of Raye's own incompetence that made Light's gambit work. Furthermore, Light's own Fatal Flaws regarding his prideful and childish personality gives him obvious blindspots to how people, and by extension, the world, works, which doesn't help how his string of successes after the 5-year Time Skip worsen his flaws to the point he can't even fathom the idea that he can lose and it finally cultivated in him being Out-Gambitted by Near.

  • Did You Know that a Playboy Can Change His Job to a Sage? has Tina who possesses an EX-rank Luck stat which is powerful enough that it sometimes borders on warping reality.
  • Dragon Ball Z gives us Cell and Majin Buu, who reach their ultimate forms as much because of their own cleverness and guile as sheer chance; either the heroes make either overemotional or at times plain stupid decisions while trying to destroy them, or some ability they didn't know they had kicks in (Cell was unaware his regeneration was powerful enough to survive his suicide explosion, and Super Buu was shocked to see that his screaming tore a hole out of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber).
  • Katsuhiko Jinnai from El-Hazard: The Magnificent World. He lands in an alien world and immediately becomes ruler of a powerful nation with millions of slavishly loyal and murderous servants (not to mention the not-unattractive Queen). For no reason other than dumb luck. Ironically enough, Jinnai sees Makoto as this. It is important to note, however, that while dumb luck may have been what gave Jinnai power,note  it was his tactical genius that (at least in the first OVA series) allowed him to continue being successful as a villain. The Bugrom had been attacking other countries for centuries after all. They had little, if any, success until Jinnai began leading them. Once he did, he made conquest after conquest, coming very close to taking over El-Hazard. He most likely would have succeeded were it not for the heroes' Plot Device superweapon.
  • Lucy from Fairy Tail is credited with extraordinary luck. The explanation is that it's right there in her name — her parents chose it when they were looking at the sign for their old guild, "Love & Lucky" (The "K" fell out of the sign and they decided to run with it). In a later arc a villain Lampshades it by declaring her escape from a near-certain deathtrap that got everybody else in the guild "a one-in-a-billion chance".
  • In Franken Fran, a man on death row who defied multiple attempts to execute him is posited to be just that "fortunate". Ultimately, though, he dies when struck by lightning, as each time he evaded death made it that much more likely for him to be killed by improbable means.
  • Millefeuille Sakuraba of Galaxy Angel has this as her defining trait. In the second episode, a meteor smashed the casino she was playing in to give her the win. That's just one of many instances of her extreme luck. This was later balanced by a recurring and plot-convenient Conservation of Luck.
    • In the games, Millefeuille's luck isn't quite so outrageous, but even though the anime exaggerates everything to incredible proportions, it's still pretty close; such as winning the grand prize in a supermarket sweepstakes SIX TIMES IN A ROW. At the end of her path in the first game, she retires from the Angels, believing that she's used up all her luck... but it and she are back for the next one.
      • Her luck goes both ways in the game. If she's lucky, she's unbelievably lucky, when something involving bad luck happens, it happens in a spectacularly bad way.
  • The plot of Good Luck Girl! revolves around Ichiko Sakura's extreme good fortune.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers: It's not a good idea to place bets against Hong Kong. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • The lead character from I.O.N. She has known a jinx since she was little that when you say it, you land in a fortunate situation. She uses it often.
  • Irresponsible Captain Tylor: Justy Ueki Tylor is a lazy, incompetent, bumbling idiot, and as the name might suggest, he is the most irresponsible man to ever hold the rank of "Captain." He also happens to be the luckiest man alive. He gets out of near-impossible situations by nothing but luck (unless he's really just that good). At his bad days, he only escapes from overwhelming fleets; on his better days, he sinks them. Without any weapon. Or fighter. Damn, they sink themselves.
    • The show itself goes to significant lengths to suggest that this is subverted, and Tyler is just that skilled and using Obfuscating Stupidity to hide his brilliant tactics.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • Joseph Joestar, best shown in the final battle of Battle Tendency, where in a case of completely miraculous luck, he defeats Kars by getting him to strike the Red Stone of Aja with Hamon, causing the nearby volcano to erupt and launch both of them into the air. Joseph's severed hand that was also launched then grabs Kars by the throat, distracting him long enough for rocks also launched to hit him out of Earth's gravity and into space. He proceeds to Troll Kars by pretending that he'd planned it all that way. Joseph then survives the return into Earth's atmosphere and gets picked up by a boat a few hours later. There's also the fact that he's the only JoJo confirmed to live into his old age.
    • In Stardust Crusaders, there's a character with a book that can predict the future — and it's explicitly mentioned that anything that appears in the book will come to pass, no exceptions. But it's completely ineffective against the heroes, who escape unscathed thanks to a series of lucky Prophecy Twists that become increasingly implausible — the biggest would have to be when the book shows a picture of the main character having bullets being shot through him...and then it turns out those bullets were shot through the picture itself.
    • Yoshikage Kira, the Big Bad of Diamond is Unbreakable, literally has luck in his name. It's because of this luck that he managed to get away with the murder of over 49 women. It inevitably ran out near the end of the Part. One interpretation is that it even works against him, as the ambulance that was coincidentally there and could have saved his life accidentally ran him over.
    • Golden Wind:
      • Guido Mista manages to survive a lot more than a normal human should be capable of, and is also one of the few main character to survive the Part.
      • Diavolo is stated by a fortuneteller to be the luckiest person he's ever met, which can be seen in his tendency to exploit convenient circumstances to his advantage.
    • The character Pocoloco in Steel Ball Run has his Stand Hey Ya! tell him to do things that may sound stupid until the good luck factors in. It bears mentioning that the luck and the Stand are entirely separate; the latter can just offer advice and cheer the user on, but is entirely aware of the luck and factors it into all suggestions.
  • Tetora from Joshiraku, to the point where Marii all but starts worshiping her.
  • Karen from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War is a massive Kaguya/Shirogane shipper who seems to have almost inhuman luck when it comes to witnessing romantic moments between them. Case in point, she happened to be in just the right spot to see the start of their Duel of Seduction, both of their first two kisses, and their Relationship Upgrade, all by complete coincidence.
  • Subverted in the final arc of (and really, throughout) Kaiji. In the final gamble of the first series, Hyoudou tells Kaiji that he won because he possessed "the luck of the King" and goes so far as to patronizingly give Kaiji the winning lot, telling him that Kaiji should "absorb" the luck and make use of it. Later, Kaiji realizes that Hyoudou saw through Kaiji's strategy and deceived him. There was no random luck involved; it was all planned out.
  • Chairman Metsudo in Kengan Ashura was this throughout his life. During World War II he was the Sole Survivor of a kamikaze squad, and after realizing the impossible odds he overcame he devoted his life to seeing just how far his luck could take him. He then became a successful Black Market merchant soon after the war ended, and managed to outsmart and befriend the elite assassin sent to kill him through sheer luck, with the two of them becoming among the most powerful men in Japan in the current day.
  • Played With with Kazuma from KonoSuba, who's Luck stat is easily his highest. Unfortunately, his luck only seems to apply in specific scenarios (such as winning Rock, Paper Scissors matches or using skills dependant on Luck,) as it doesn't stop him from being supremely unlucky in his day-to-day life and being the series' Butt-Monkey.
  • Lupin III... Possibly. Sometimes it's hard to tell if he pulls off some of his tricks by luck or actual planning. Nevertheless, when he offers the entire treasure on a poker hand or flip of the coin... he's only lost when the game was rigged.
  • The whole category of "Abnormals" in Medaka Box. The basic criteria of which is to be lucky enough to open a door with a randomly changing password by entering random numbers. On the first try, with no hesitation.
    • Medaka stands out because she's even luckier than that. One commonly-used test is to have a person roll a handful of dice; if they're an Abnormal, they'll roll all sixes. When Medaka takes the test, not only does she get all sixes, but the dice land stacked one on top of the other.
  • While you hardly call the circumstances of his birth and life lucky, Rau Le Cruset from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED mentions often that fortune is on his side, and indeed his plan to kill everyone by playing both sides nearly goes off without a hitch. He manages to become a high ranking officer on Zaft (a military of genetically engineered supermen) despite not being a superman himself but being such a skilled pilot that they never ever question him, and serves for years and is never exposed. He leaks info to their enemy, and is never ever caught, or not believed. And during the finale he in short order 1. Manages to survive fighting his rival because said rival just happened to have poor mech to mech battle equipment that day as he was on fire support. 2. Manages to fight the one guy with superior power that won't kill anybody, allowing him to escape. 3. Launches a pod with data critical to his plan at 2 warring armies and the army that he needed to retrieve it is able to get it because the hero on the other side has a nervous breakdown in battle. 4. The people with the data (the data enables nuclear power) opt to use all of it on nuclear missiles rather than solve their more immediately energy crisis and nuke their enemy. 5. His own army has a superweapon of their own that they are now willing to use and both sides are now posed to wipe out each other (and thus humanity) to total extinction. His luck finally runs out on the last day, when he's unable to break the hero, who kills him, and his plan is foiled when the hero's sidekick is able to stop the superweapons.
  • Katsuki Bakugou and Shoto Todoroki from My Hero Academia, but this leads them to different ways.
    • Bakugou’s Quirk, the ability to create explosions, has been praised even since childhood. This leads him to being blinded by his amazing superpower, but by the time he started attending U.A., he noticed that the once Quirkless Deku now has a Quirk on his level, forming a rivalry. He also becomes a one-sided rival (on his side) with Todoroki.
    • Shoto's Pro-Hero father Endeavor married a woman with a powerful Ice Quirk to go with his Fire Quirk, creating their fifth and youngest child. Born with the Half-Cold Half-Hot Quirk, inheriting both of his parents’ Quirks, his father both physically and emotionally abused him and his mother, to the point where his mother spilled a boiling kettle of water on his left eye out of emotional trauma. The hatred for his father grew well into the U.A. Sports Festival, where forbade himself to use his left side, until Midoriya intervened and urged him to use his Half-Hot Quirk to beat him fair and square.
  • Naruto:
    • Naruto Uzumaki is shown to have unnaturally high luck while he and Jiraiya are looking for Tsunade. He wins big by putting a coin he picked up off the ground into a slot machine (anime had him try a lottery and win that instead). His chakra training also had the inadvertent side effect of blowing dice Jiraiya was using to bet for information into just the total number to allow him to win.
    • Naruto is so lucky during his time spent with Jiraiya, that just walking remotely close to nearby gaming vendors and casinos result in everyone winning.
    • Subverted when Jiraiya uses his SANNIN-LEVEL NINJA SKILLS to win every carnival game he wants.
    • This trope has arguably been deconstructed with many characters who appear to be gifted, and therefore perfect, such as Karachi. Dysfunction Junction is the mildest bad thing going for them.
  • Sakurako of Negima! Magister Negi Magi. Her luck is so well known that, when the Muggle part of Negi's class found themselves unable to find where Negi's travelling party went, they relied on Sakurako to randomly lead them in the right direction, which she successfully did... despite the fact that it's a location so magically hidden, that a normal human has a lottery's chance of accidentally stumbling across it. It's a Running Gag that whenever the 3A girls are betting on something, she wins, no matter how unlikely the eventual outcome was. Word of God says that should she ever get a pactio, it would boost the luck of whoever she chooses. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, it's mentioned that she became an assistant to a government official, and when she concentrates she can affect the global economy.
  • One Piece:
    • Monkey D. Luffy has been described as having the Devil's Luck. While the most notable of these, the lightning bolt that saved him on the execution platform may or may not have been his father Dragon's doing (or even just the natural consequence of holding up a sword on a high metal platform in a thunderstorm), he's survived any number of encounters due to extremely good fortune.
    • To an extent, Marshall D. Teach has had great success partially due to unlikely circumstances. After failing to capture Luffy he runs into Ace, who rushes into battle after finding out his brother is a target, giving Teach the chance to capture him instead. By the time of the Marinefored Arc this has caused him to become a Shichibukai and sets up a war between the Marines and Whitebeard. Being a Shichibukai gives him the chance to gather crew members from Impel Down, which only works as well as it does because the Marines are busy with Whitebeard. By the end of Marineford the war has weakened Whitebeard to the point where Blackbeard can finish him off, steal his powers, and set his sights on Whitebeard's territory. Though some of this was part of his plan to begin with, much of it was taking advantage of his own good fortune.
      • Teach was also saved by incredible odds during the Impel Down Arc. Luffy happened to be infiltrating at the same time Teach made his move, and Luffy had caused such a disastrous riot that Warden Magellan was forced to release former Warden Shiryu, hoping he would kill off the rioters. Teach and his entire crew were covered in Magellan's poison and left to die. They were incredibly fortunate that Shiryu had been released, that they had run into him, that he had decided to ally with them, that he knew there was an antidote, and that he knew where to find enough of it in time. If any of those factors had not happened, Teach and his entire crew would have died from Magellan casually running past them.
    • Anyone who is able to use Conqueror's Haki, the rarest form of haki that cannot be received through training, unlike the other 2 types. They say those who has Conqueror's Haki has the potential to be a, well, conqueror.
  • In Pokémon Journeys: The Series, due to being a walking advertisement for Pokémon GO, Goh has an extreme luck in catching Pokémon by simply tossing a mere Poké Ball their way in order to claim them. Strangely enough, no one is amazed by how easy it is for him to capture Pokémon, not even Ash himself, who should know by now that weakening Pokémon is the true way to go before attempting to capture them (though he himself would get lectured for doing the reckless way that works for Goh). His luck also seems to extend to his own collection of Pokémon evolving without his input most of the time, as some train by themselves offscreen. His luck is so pronounced that he managed to catch Suicune (though it was weakened a great deal from getting injured by poachers), though a simple act of keeping it safe convinced Suicine that he was worth of having it, and then he catches Grookey by literally doing nothing but sleep on his bed (the Grookey just liked the hell out of him for no reason when it snuck into his room). The only times when his luck doesn't work is when the plot tries to make the occasion Played for Drama or when Ash has to make the effort to do it the right way.
  • Ranma ½: Whenever Akane Tendō enters a raffle or some other competition based solely on luck, she always wins first prize.
    Man: Congratulations! You win a trip for one to a health salon.
    Nodoka: Isn't that wonderful?
    Akane: Oh, I'm usually lucky at these things.
  • Elie in Rave Master, to the point that letting her loose in a casino is a genuine way for the gang to make a large amount of money fast.
  • Likewise, the eponymous mahjong anime heroine Miyanaga Saki has "superhuman luck" as, quite literally, her SUPERPOWER. Ridiculous amounts of luck seem to be very common for most of the characters since they routinely pull off hands that have about one chance in a lifetime to happen, but Saki is especially outrageous since she can apparently pull off one-in-a-billion-chance hands almost literally at will.
  • Tenchi Muyo!: Inspector Oblivious Mihoshi Kuramitsu's sheer blind luck is the main reason why she's not only still in the GP (her grandfather and great-aunt running the organization being the other reason), but is actually considered a distinguished officer — she's simply too much of The Ditz to get it the other way. On the other hand, considering that she is the great-granddaughter of the one of three Goddesses who created the Universe, it's hardly surprising that It Runs in the Family.
  • Shinji Nagumo from the Tokyo Babylon OAV is so lucky that he has survived many events in which he should've kicked the bucket. Unfortunately, he's very aware of it, and uses it to set up different scenarios and kill whoever stands in his way to the top of the enterprise he works in...
  • Toriko has the aptly named "Food Luck" ability: it helps the user to find ingredients, both by making the user avoid dangerous creatures and animals through sheer chance and by making ingredients "attracted" to the user (thus making them attracted to the user). However, one character possesses Food Luck so powerful, they can make enemy attacks miss or outright negate their damage even if they do hit.
  • Sakura from Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- possesses this trait to a remarkable extent and is aware of it. At one point later in the manga, she trades her good luck to the witch Yuuko in order to prevent some convoluted catastrophe.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Despite not believing in the "heart of the cards" and lacking the outright fate-warping powers of Atem, Seto Kaiba is a very good drawer. Just like Yugi, he often draws what he needs in the nick of time, and frequently has overwhelmingly powerful opening hands (such as drawing all 3 Blue Eyes).
      • It is played with when he throws a card from the top of his deck at a Rare Hunter to disarm him, hoping the card he drew was a cheap one. It was the Blue Eyes White Dragon...
    • Joey Wheeler wins many, if not most, of his duels by being on the good side of luck-based cards. He is actually a very skillful duelist, but cards around chance and luck are often a big part of his deck, having started with Time Wizard (given to him by Yugi) and gone from there, using them in very creative ways. It does help to contrast against the very tactical and wealthy Kaiba.
      • The luck-based approach also serves as a foil to his father, at least in the manga. In the manga, his father was an alcoholic and a gambling addict, which forced Joey to take multiple jobs to pay off the gambling debts.
    • Played much straighter in Season 0 with Ryuichi Fuji, a Game Master whose luck extends to being able to randomly walk into a restaurant and win a prize letting him get free meals, press random buttons on a keypad and get the code, break for pool and have all of the balls hit someone, and win at Russian Roulette (with only one chamber empty).
    • Jaden/Judai in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX is repeatedly noted in-story to have much better luck than any person should have. One of the funnier moments of this is when he activated a card to place his ace monster, Neos, on the top of his deck, at which his opponent triggered a card that let them shuffle his deck. He then proceeded to draw Neos anyway.

    Comic Books 
  • Black Cat, who first appeared in Spider-Man's adventures has (well, sometimes) an interesting inversion of this: She gave OTHER people bad luck. Good when it affects your enemies, bad when it affects your friends...
  • Gladstone Gander, Donald Duck's cousin. His luck goes to absolutely ridiculous extremes, much to Donald's dislike. Much of the character's humor comes from watching the Rube Goldberg Device of Deus ex Machina events that make everything go his way. Worst of all, he reveled in his luck, knew everything was coming to him without any effort and thought working was beneath him, which made the character all the more obnoxious. At one point it's implied he's lucky because the Goddess of Luck fell in love with him, which would certainly explain why his luck doesn't usually work when it comes to gaining Daisy Duck's love. He's also had a number of things like a lucky rabbit foot, Depending on the Writer. In the Don Rosa canon, It Runs in the Family — Gladstone's mother Daphne is/was ridiculously lucky, as well. This was in turn based on a lucky hex sign a traveling painter had placed on the family barn as a gift for the new child. It was once established, however, that Gladstone's luck cost him the greatest prize: Scrooge, disgusted by how lazy he is, has continuously refused to leave him anything.

    The exact nature of Gladstone's luck varies a lot depending on the story, probably because it's boring writing the same old basic thing. Sometimes everything just works out for him, but there have been a lot of ways things didn't. He might run into someone equally or more lucky and face a serious contest; Second Place Is for Winners may work for him when it looks like he's losing, but it may also turn against him when it looks like he was winning; he may be Blessed with Suck, winning a constant stream of prizes everywhere even though he doesn't want to; or, in one Don Rosa story (see below), his luck may even produce extremely unlikely events when that is to his disadvantage, so that he wins when he's likely to lose but loses if he's overwhelmingly likely to win. He supposedly always wins against Donald, but often he doesn't if Donald gets good karma by being braver or fairer than him. He can sometimes temporarily woo Daisy, but that's one thing in which he often loses to Donald. And sometimes when he seems to "win", it turns out that he was (by his standards) trying too hard, and Donald managed to gather the actual (or at least a slightly) better reward because Gladstone had left too soon. There have also been occasions when Donald uses his Italian superhero persona Paperinik to mess with Gladstone, and his superhero cool seems to entirely negate Gladstone's luck. These ones have a bit of a Power Fantasy thing going on, like many Paperinik stories.

    Generally, when heroics need to be done, Donald (or the nephews) gets to use whatever karma Donald gained by taking a lot of misfortune (usually because of Gladstone's good luck hurting Donald) to pull off feats where you need a LOT of luck to pull off heroism (such as saving the millionaire's young daughter by steering the runaway speedboat away from running aground on sharp rocks). Even if it becomes The Greatest Story Never Told in the process, that's why Donald, not Gladstone, is often the hero. However, that's not to say that Gladstone can't be a hero. Sometimes when Gladstone learns there's trouble, he goes in to help, relying nothing more on himself. A noteworthy example was when Donald was drowning in a river. He dived in immediately to save him, swam against the current and gave him the attention needed until medical assistance arrived.
    • Perhaps the most spectacular example of this luck is when Gladstone gets saddled with a contract to move a house from the top of one mountain to the top of another: A hurricane comes by and moves the house from the mountain to the other with no damage to it whatsoever.
    • Subverted in one comic where Donald and his nephews dig up every square inch of a beach, looking for a sultan's lost ruby (with a massive reward attached). Gladstone just lies there and waits for his luck to bring it to him. At the end of the day, a cop busts Donald for digging up the beach, Gladstone goes home... only leaving Huey, Dewey, and Louie to dig in the one exact spot they never searched — the one Gladstone was lying on. It's right there. The ruby was directly under Gladstone the whole time, and he never found it because he was waiting for it to fall into his hands. And guess who ended up as a chauffeur to Donald and his nephews...
    • Zigzagged twelve ways until Sunday in one comic, where he and Donald both enter a fishing contest. Gladstone quickly catches what appears to be the largest fish in the water with no effort at all, while Donald's rod breaks. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, meanwhile, run into a fellow who knows where far bigger fish swim (he himself only didn't win the contest because he'd already won plenty of times). The nephews catch a fish larger than Gladstone's and attach it to Donald's boat, making it look like Donald will win. As everyone is heading for shore though, Donald's boat is hit by a runaway speedboat, knocking his fish into Gladstone's boat and letting Gladstone win the contest. Donald gets the last laugh though when it turns out that the young daughter of a millionaire was trapped on the speedboat and had a large reward for whoever could save her. So while Gladstone's luck allowed him to win the contest, Donald ended up getting a much bigger reward than the prize (even the final panel's caption says "and for once, Donald wins!").
    • Again zig-zagged on another comic where Donald and his nephews race against Gladstone to get to a long-lost Viking ship that was full of riches. Donald and the kids went through all kinds of hell (including losing their ship right when they were close to the Viking ship), while Gladstone managed (somehow) to round up a full expedition with a top-notch ship. After gathering all of the riches on the ship (pretty much everything not nailed down) and leaving Donald and his nephews on the sinking galleon, Donald found a single scrap of paper... which happened to be a map made by the Vikings that was hard-core proof that they had sailed to that area (when nobody else believed they had ever done so). With the ship now gone, this proof would be worth more than everything else that had been on the ship to any museum.
    • His annoying lucky streak extends beyond the pages. When the Italian branch of Disney (it actually happened) got the idea to playfully point out which crimes the Disney characters would have committed if they were real-life characters, guess who was the only one who got away with a clean criminal record? However, a number of readers have noted this is probably because Gladstone rarely does anything other than wallow in his own luck.
    • In one comic he did have a "charm" of some sort, kept in a vault that he never let anyone see inside. It was a dime like Scrooge's. But it turns out it wasn't a charm at all; it was the only honest salary he ever made, and he got it during a time where his luck momentarily failed him and he had to get an actual job. Gladstone was so ashamed of having been reduced to working for a living that he kept the dime inside the vault just so he'd never have to see it.
    • As an example of his apparent unlucky moments being blessings in disguise. In one Don Rosa story, a contest involved catching entries tied to balloons and when a balloon flies above Gladstone, he refuses to exert himself reaching for it, reasoning that if it was the winning entry, the balloon would pop and drop the entry into his hand, which actually happened. Donald's nephews, however, use Gladstone's luck against him, by filling the ballot with tickets with his name on it, and only one with Donald's. Just as Gladstone, sure of his victory, picks out the winning ticket, and hands it to the judges, he realizes to his horror that picking out Donald's ticket would truly require luck. And sure enough, the ticket is Donald's. But then later, his consolation prize (a year's supply of oolated squiggs) turns out to include a fish that swallowed a 10 carat diamond, while the main prize, a cruise on a ship, ends up getting icebound, leaving Donald with the worst vacation ever.
    • Inverted in a Don Rosa comic. Due to being struck by lightning on his birthday while in front of a magic symbol in his youth, Gladstone is always phenomenally unlucky on his birthdays. He spends the entire comic trying to get away from attending, but circumstances bring him to his own party, where he admits the truth. When a lightning storm suddenly shows up he manages to undo the curse, and prevent Donald from gaining luck powers of his own.
    • And on top of that, his luck occasionally got him into more trouble than he would have been in without it. One story involved a treasure in the Amazon, and he decided he needed a helicopter to get to it before Donald could. He got there, but he didn't know that the tribe native to the area attached negative superstitions to helicopters. (Yes, they played with this character a lot. As a general rule, Gladstone's luck works at its best when he just lets it flow. When Gladstone asks for something specific, most of the time it come back to bite him. Lazing around is his most profitable activity.)
    • In A Little Something Special, Gladstone Gander actually weaponizes his lucky streak when the main villain is about to escape by asking the police captain to put a bounty on his head, causing a sudden wind to dispatch the villain and land him in front of Gladstone's feet so that he can collect the reward.
    • In the Don Rosa story Nobody's Business, Gladstone is challenged to make a profit by investing $1000 he receives from Scrooge. Gladstone proceeds to do very well indeed, and then Scrooge learns that all of the profits that Gladstone made came at the expense of business deals that Scrooge had made earlier. This leave Scrooge mortified, and he declares that the Gladstone Luck is the one thing even his business sense can never hope to challenge. To avoid being bankrupted, as per the terms of his declaration, he gives Gladstone ownership of a company in the one business that he would never, ever be tempted to get into — a comic book company.
    • In one particular story, his luck ends up biting him in the ass in another way. Other characters simply get so fed up by his smug attitude and how he takes his luck for granted. This leads to him trying to nullify his luck to try and fix things, resulting in him suffering constant bad luck, not so much from actual misfortune, but rather due to him having taken his luck for granted for so long that he ends up inviting constant misfortune on himself through his actions alone. He eventually gets the luck restored when he can't take being normal anymore. And though he still acts smug around others, as soon as no one is looking he shows that he ended up learning some humility as well as taking pleasure from the simple things in life such as finding fulfillment in stuff he put actual effort into, such as growing a plant.
    • Another story introduces its own twist to the above concept: when everyone else in Duckburg gets tired of his constant luck and refuses to associate with him anymore, Gladstone moves out to the country, where he soon discovers that his luck is now gone, but since everyone else in the town he's now living in is so welcoming and friendly, he doesn't mind it much and starts to enjoy his new life there. However, since Status Quo Is God, it turns out that he's only lucky while he's living Duckburg and without him there, the city's undergone a massive amount of natural disasters and a huge crime wave in the short amount of time he's been absent, meaning that he also brings luck to everyone else living there by preventing various major misfortunes threathening the city with his presense, forcing him to move back due to his family's pleas and not wanting to be responsible for the destruction of Duckburg, although he's still welcome to visit the country town whenever he feels like it.
    • Gladstone has, however, consistently been shown to suffer misfortune in the social aspects of his life: While his lack of friends and strained relationship with his family is something that one can argue he has brought upon himself with his insufferable attitude, his love life has been conspicuously bad: Whenever Daisy does pick him over Donald, it's mostly to punish Donald for something. His brief relationship with Magica fell apart on a somber note with Gladstone feeling like he had just gotten a taste of something he would never be lucky enough to find again. And his romance with the similarily lucky Feather Mallard had them realize that their luck cancelled out and turned into misfortune, whereupon Feather decided to break it up with Gladstone, the story ending with him feeling that he gladly would've lived the rest of his life with bad luck if he only could've shared it with Feather.
  • It could be argued that Groo the Wanderer fits this trope — all the bad things happen around him, afflicting everybody else, never Groo himself.
  • Talisman from the Justice Machine comics. His mutant power is Karma — as long as he's working for a righteous cause, good things happen to/for him (and by extension his teammates). One of the team's standard combat maneuvers is "let Talisman be taken hostage and dare the villains to shoot him".
  • This was explicitly the only power of Johnny Thunder, a Golden Age Gag Series character best known for his membership in the Justice Society of America. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, born on July 7th, 1917, and this gave him uncanny luck. It later turned out that the circumstances of his birth had given him control over a genie called the Thunderbolt, and it was the T-bolt who pulled him out of so many jams.
  • This is the sum of the Marvel Universe character Longshot's powers. After appearing in a miniseries of his own, he was grabbed by Chris Claremont for a stint in the X-Men, despite not originally being a mutant (he was first thought to be a genetically engineered alien). Longshot's luck was extremely strong but limited: it could only be used for altruistic purposes.
    • The Ultimate Universe version has even better luck with no such restriction. In his first appearance, a man is about to kill him with a machete and is suddenly struck by lightning. On a clear day. Without damaging anything in the area.
      • The only one who has ever defeated him was Scarlet Witch, a mutant who also has the power to manipulate luck.
  • Domino from Marvel Comics, (best known from her X-Force days); her probability-altering powers are not as strong as Longshot, things just tend to fall in her favor.
    • It could be pretty powerful sometimes, though. For example, there was a time when somebody put a revolver to her head and pulled the trigger. Six times. All six bullets failed to fire. The odds of this actually happening are, needless to say, astronomically low. Unlike most of the examples here, she can actively trigger her powers as well. She once had to infiltrate a mansion to open a safe. She had no idea what the combination of the safe was, so she just entered the telephone number of one of her ex-boyfriends (who had nothing to do with the mission or the safe). She is not surprised when it opened the safe. She doesn't actively trigger her powers in the sense that she can turn the luck on or off, it's more like she has to be aware of what she is affecting the probability of. From TOW, "if debris falling from the sky was about to hit her in the head, she would still be hurt if she stood still. However, if she tried to avoid it, she would move perfectly to avoid each and every piece about to hit her." Also, her powers often work by causing bad luck to strike someone else near her: if, for example, a sniper tried to shoot her while she was in a group of people, someone would walk in front of the shot just as the trigger was being pulled.
    • Same thing was used in a Judge Dredd story, when a psyker in a Circus of Fear manipulated the odds so that her boss, seeing the six misfires, angrily tried the same on himself. Bang.
  • Roulette from the Hellions, enemies of the New Mutants, could create disks of energy that affected probabilities (white for good luck, black for bad).
  • A largely defunct American manga, Pantheon High, had a character with this kind of luck because he was the son of the Japanese goddess of luck, Benten. (Un)fortunately he had no guarantee whatsoever of getting lucky in ways that are actually useful to his situation. When he and two girls are threatened by the World Snake, one of the girls remarks that he might end up beating the snake, or he might end up making out with both of them at once.
  • One minor character in Joss Whedon's run on Runaways, the Swell, had a walking stick which he claimed made him supernaturally lucky. It's mostly an Informed Ability since it's never really shown on-panel. Except near the end of that storyline when Kid Twist, a villain whose superpower is that his bullets never miss (they act like homing missiles), shoots a bullet at him. Instead of killing him, the bullet hits the head of his walking stick, destroying it in the process. Apparently whatever magical luck the stick possessed burned itself out saving him from the bullet.
  • The Marvel heroine Shamrock appears to have this power, though it's actually a form of I See Dead People — ghosts often agree to help her in return for her completing their Unfinished Business. (Notably, she got killed off in one burned-out alternate continuity after a foe convinced her that with so many people already dead, there was nothing left to achieve in the world, and it was time for her and her ghosts to finally rest.)
  • Dr. Robotnik/Eggman from Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog: When he was first discovered by Charles and Jules, Robotnik was being shot at for undisclosed but obviously serious crimes. In the years between his discovery and eventual takeover, nobody in the royal court stopped to both think about why he was being shot at and/or plan ahead in case he tried something. He later stole the roboticizer from Uncle Chuck, who seemed way too open about it given what it could do, gaining the means to build up his robot army. Even King Max, who was literally being guided by a primordial intellect, was taken by surprise at Robotnik's takeover. As the book has gone on and revealed all the powerful wizards, factions, and occasions that could've ended in his defeat, but have obviously not, he really seems to be this. To the point that Sonic's Chaos Factor is really just someone finally getting a counter ability.
  • Spirou & Fantasio fit this trope whenever they appear in the same story as Don Vito Cortizone, alias "Vito La Déveine" (French for Hard Luck Vito). In the comic book featuring Vito's first appearance, he chooses them because of their luck.
  • Tharg's Future Shocks: Jeremy Chance is a man who has the best luck in the world, but always at the expense of someone else. In fact, it turns out that his mere presence actually creates all sorts of disasters so that he can miraculously survive them (for instance, someone shoving him out of the way for a seat and immediately getting killed by falling debris from a spontaneously collapsed roof). It's decided to blast him off into space, where Jeremy's ship goes through a time portal that appeared for no other reason than to have Jeremy avoid a collision with another spacecraft. The end twist is that Jeremy was thrust back in time and became the center of Halley's comet, which has been causing disasters as it got ever closer to Earth. After crashing into the planet and wiping out all life, Jeremy's sleeping body is perfectly unharmed.
  • Often, the titular character of Tintin overcomes a peril not thanks to his skills, but because of sheer blind luck.
  • Spawny Get from Viz embodies this trope, typically having a piece of moderate bad luck that causes a piece of very, very good luck. In one strip, he is carrying a ten-pound note into a bookmaker's to place a bet when he slips on a turd; he lets go of the money and yells "Oh bugger, I've skidded on a dog dirt!" The ten-pound note flies into the hand of the bookmaker, who assumes Spawny Get is placing a bet on a horse called "Oh bugger, I've skidded on a dog dirt". Which wins. At odds of 1,000-1.
  • The X-Wing Series has Wedge Antilles, the "designated survivor" and everyman of Star Wars, who is sometimes seen in-universe as lucky, though it's not to the extent of most people on this page. There was actually a one-shot comic called "Lucky", the cover mentioning "The Curse of Wedge Antilles"; in it he thinks about it, flashes back to his first love and how she and most others around where he lived were killed while he was "luckily" away, and thinks "Lucky? Sometimes it doesn't feel like it." When he was a child, he was "lucky" enough to be some distance away from his parents' refueling station when they were killed. At many, many points, he was "lucky" enough to survive events that killed his companions and friends; he once reflects on the first Death Star and how he was "lucky" enough to be able to fly away while Biggs Darklighter stayed and was killed. In the novels he is vaguely aware of his Plot Armor, at least in that it seems like friends are always dying while he lives, has some survivor's guilt, and wonders what will happen when his luck runs out.
    • To some extent, Baron Soontir Fel as well, Wedge's Imperial (metaphorical) twin. He is undoubtedly the best damn pilot in the Empire next to Vader, but surviving two tours of duty in the ridiculously fragile TIE fighter or TIE Interceptor takes more than mere skill. Even when he was finally shot down by Wedge, he survived with no injury. Despite the fact that a TIE Interceptor is such a physically small craft that downing one without killing the pilot is near-impossible even if you have a Jedi actively trying to do so.
    • One novel had some fun with this when Wedge Antilles as a general was coordinating a battle which they were supposed to lose (well, retreat believably) as a part of a larger strategic maneuver. To put it in his own words: "We're about to achieve a tremendous victory we don't want."

    Fan Works 
  • Naruto Fanfics have a tendency of taking Naruto's good luck and flanderizing it to ridiculous degrees. Take, for example, the Naruto fanfic Yet again, with a little extra help. One such occurrence is when Naruto has to bet on either Sasuke or Tenten for a swordsmen's tournament, having (correctly) predicted that they would be the two finalists. To help him decide, he flipped a coin. It landed on its side. You can guess how the match ended. In fact, Naruto was so lucky during that tournament that he ended up winning thirty million ryo.
  • The epic Supernatural fic Down to Agincourt mentions that angels have the ability to manipulate probability on a local scale. Castiel, apparently, mostly used it to make a whole lot of money playing the stock market and to win at dice.
  • Earth and Sky: The Flim-Flam brothers seem to have reached this status ever since the Pegalathon started, and is the only reason they're still in the race. Whenever it seems they're about to be arrested (or harassed by the other racers), something happens that stops it (usually in the Amusing Injuries category) and lets them get away scot-free. Up until they nearly kill all the other contestants by accidentally burning down the Appleloosa prison. Then Princess Celestia decides she's had enough of their horse apples and has them disqualified from the race and pursued by an entire battalion of her best guards. They still manage to dodge the guards all the way to Canterlot, but then their luck runs out and their flying machine falls apart just short of the finish line.
  • In Fate Genesis, the narration notes that if Sonic the Hedgehog was a Servant, his Luck rank would have to be A+ for his Banana Peel prank to have worked on Berserker.
  • It Gets Worse: Taylor's luck power is entirely unconscious, to the point where she's not sure at first that it's her doing things at all. But its range appears to be limitless or at least worldwide, and it apparently has perfect prescience, using tiny but precise manipulations of probability to confound her enemies and bring prosperity to her friends. Of which it collects many more for her. It even kills Scion without her ever knowing.
  • May in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines is revealed to have a luck-based Dominion Bloodline, which she often uses to win in games of chance and lottery to get some extra money. Her cousin Sapphire has a similar one, albeit hers is more about probability manipulation than sheer luck.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Domino from Comic Books above example appears in Deadpool 2, where Deadpool initially doesn't believe her luck is a superpower, nor does he consider it very cinematic. However, it actually allows her to perform insane action feats without suffering so much as a scratch, which none other character are able to pull off.
  • Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Ferris Bueller (for those who view him unfavorably) undeniably accomplishes some of his achievements through his own cleverness, but he had a hell of a lot of luck with some of them.
  • Forrest Gump. He becomes, in chronological order: able to walk after being born disabled, a football star, war hero, Olympic champion, successful business owner, multimillionaire stockholder, and national phenomenon, all just out of sheer chance while bumbling his way through life. Not to mention setting various historical events in motion without even realizing it... It's strongly hinted that he isn't really disabled, but his mother (being equally naive) is being conned by a quack doctor. His luck is in being scared into running himself out of the braces on his legs, and concluding that he's miraculously got better. While Gump really is incredibly lucky throughout the film, it should be noted that this often happens because of him doing what he believes to be the right thing to do. A major theme of the film is Forrest doing things that everyone considers stupid just because he doesn't consider the pros and cons like everyone else, and just does the simplest thing with childlike sincerity. One of the best examples is him becoming a war hero without firing a single bullet: he goes to the jungle to find his friend, and he ends up personally carrying to safety what is implied to be ALL his injured squadmates instead of, say, calling for someone to help them. His only reaction to being told to stop because napalm is about to be dropped in the jungle is to yell "I've gotta find Bubba!" So while he is incredibly lucky and, in a way, he doesn't know any better, he DOES become a war hero because he does something heroic. There are other situations in the film where he is very lucky as sort of a karmic payoff for doing something silly, but noble in its simplicity. His shrimping business takes off because he was the only one foolish enough to try and ride out a hurricane; all his competitor's boats were smashed in the harbor, while he and Lieutenant Dan amused themselves bobbing on the waves (leaving the previously over-fished waters all for him).
  • In Godzilla (2014), you can count how many times Ford survives with his encounters with the MUTO, the same one he keeps encountering. Five times, the last two due to Godzilla's Big Damn Heroes moments.
  • This trope is the basis of the Spanish thriller Intacto. Certain people are Born Lucky; Samuel Berg (Max von Sydow) is luckier than most, and has the ability to take the gift from others.
  • In the James Bond movies with Sean Connery, Bond always has the better hand at Baccarat.
  • Ashley in Just My Luck has extremely good luck, until she inadvertently swaps her good luck with a man's equally extreme bad luck by a kiss, and the rest of the film has her searching for the man to reverse the exchange.
  • The Lone Ranger: Whether it's blind luck or Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, John Reid is exceedingly lucky: he survived the initial ambush, had every single bullet miss him while he was essentially a human shooting gallery, killed two men with one bullet, survives an execution and then a cave-in, and then makes another improbable shot to disarm the Big Bad.
  • Subverted in Lord of War: Yuri manages to come out unscathed from a drug-induced stroll around Monrovia despite having unprotected sex with a prostitute, encountering a pack of hyenas and two militia members who would have killed him if their Kalashnikovs had not jammed, not to mention being a rich Westerner in one of the deadliest African cities. The subversion? He had just committed his only actual murder and wanted nothing more than to die himself. Easily one of the darkest moments in an already very dark film.
  • The protagonist, Kyle Johnson, in The Luck of the Irish. He's a popular junior high basketball player, gets good grades by guessing answers, finds money on the ground often because of the lucky gold coin he wore his whole life.
  • Chris Wilton of Match Point: he murders his pregnant mistress by trying to make it look like a robbery but ends up making a few mistakes and one of the investigating cops manages to figure out his methods and motive to the letter...but one of the rings he took to simulate the robbery ends up falling on the street instead of the river he threw it at, was picked up by a drug dealer who was then found dead and thus ended up taking the fall for the robbery, allowing Wilton to get away with it scot-free.
  • Somewhat seen in the film Maverick, with Mel Gibson as the title character. In fact, that's pretty much what it's about. Although sometimes it could be seen as a subversion, his bad luck usually ends up being a con. Goes to ridiculous heights when he gets four of the five cards for a Royal Flush to beat his opponent's Straight Flush (only hand in poker that can actually beat it and the best hand possible.) on an "all in" for the tournament and manages to get the fifth card on a single cut of the deck. With instances before and after failing in practice, it seems he can only do this at the best possible moment. Subverted since he basically worked out that the house was cheating and exploited it (there's a full explanation on the film's page).

    Literature 
  • Erast Fandorin in Boris Akunin's detective novels always wins in gambling games, which causes him to find them boring. In The Turkish Gambit (and its movie adaptation), he exploits this to win a donkey in an inn in a game of dice to transport away Varvara Suvorova... who later discovers, to her shock, that she was his stake. Later, in The Jack of Spades, he uses this ability to expose a fake lottery wherein he loses his bet (meaning that there was not a single chance to win, otherwise, he would have). Even later, he plays Russian roulette in front of a suicide club president to convince the latter to accept him to the club. In fact, he comes from a family where luck always skips a generation: his father and only son were extremely unlucky, while his grandson (Nicholas Fandorin) was extremely lucky again.
  • The titular character of the Alex Rider series can usually get out of most bad situations through a combination of resourcefulness and fancy spy gadgets, but some of his more dire life-and-death escapes come down to pure luck, such as when he manages to survive an assassination attempt because he was hit with a sniper's bullet just as he was stepping off a sidewalk, causing it to narrowly miss his heart.
  • Rene Arroy in the Arcia Chronicles is actually nicknamed "the Lucky One" or "Lucky Rene" for his improbable luck that saves his skin again and again throughout his life and unlife.
  • Bazil Broketail: Played with. Thrembode's service record is not stellar in the least and he ends up being blamed for multiple blunders, whether he's actually at fault or not (to name a few: the failure of King Sanker's assassination plot, not capturing Lessis when she's hiding in Tummuz Orgmeen, the fall of said city following the destruction of Blunt Doom ruling it). However, in the first book he manages to evade Lessis multiple times not thanks to his own cleverness, but pure, dumb luck. Arguably the most egregious example occurs when Lessis conjures a solar flare which ends up blinding the numerically superior Baguti accompanying Thrembode. The wizard himself retains his sight simply because he happened to fall from his horse into the river, making him close his eyes at just the right moment — and quickly uses the resulting chaos to make a quick exit.
  • Princess Odelia is seen as the luckiest of the princesses in A Brother's Price. Her older sister Ren reflects that she doesn't know how Odelia wasn't at the theater explosion that killed their eldest sisters — and would have killed Ren if she hadn't been sent out for crying — but it's of a piece with her luck.
  • The Duck from Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon stories is an interesting variation of this: his luck (and the luck of those around him) is not unbelievably good or unbelievably bad, but simply extreme, tending to cancel itself out over time. As he puts it, if you're standing next to him and win a million dollars, rest assured that you'll have lost it again by nightfall.
  • Senior White from Cultivation Chat Group has absurd luck. When asked how cultivators make money, he replies that he just goes outside and finds it on the ground. Unfortunately, his luck is often catastrophic for people around him; the example given is a meteor of rare, valuable materials that obliterates everything near him without harming him. This has apparently happened multiple times.
    • The main character of the series, Song Shuhang can also be considered to have great luck, coming close to, if not rivalling that of Senior White, even if it does not initially appear that way (a fact not lost on other characters in the series). While he may frequently face situations that cause him great harm, he will either survive the misfortune and receive even greater rewards for it, or be revived in the event that he dies. This is purely because he often finds or receives items with the ability to bring him back to life at some point prior (a frighteningly lucky occurence in and of itself since these items are often cited to be exceedingly rare, costly to make and coveted by nigh everyone). This is also a fact not lost on the other characters, as well as Song Shuhang himself, who comments that whenever he finds one, his odds of dying increase). It had also been indicated by other characters that while he may be a lightning rod for misfortune — whether it's his own or others' misfortune — with his luck in surviving most hardships, this "lightning rod" ability manifests as him being the only person to not only be able to survive and neutralize any misfortune generated by either himself, others, and/or being in the presence of, and living with Senior White, but to almost guarantee both himself and those around him receive benefits from the misfortune as well. Other cultivators are also comfortable interacting with Senior White ONLY when Shuhang is present. Senior White, being aware of this ability, is often appreciative of it (largely because it allows him to interact with his friends without worrying about accidentally killing them or being avoided out of fear for safety) and as a show of his appreciation, he is often keen on ensuring that Shuhang's development in becoming an immortal is the best it can possibly be (which is significant as this means Shuhang is paradoxically guaranteed immortality).
  • Ways, from the Terry Pratchett science fiction novel The Dark Side of the Sun is a robot built with an intrinsic ability with p-math, meaning he can manipulate probability to make himself lucky. In one scene he's forced to roll 3 sixes twice in a row at gunpoint to prove his identity.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
    • Manny has many more privileges than his brothers, and barely anything bad happens to him, to Greg's annoyance.
    • Rowley can be a Butt-Monkey on occasion, but he has much better luck than Greg and even got a girlfriend at one point.
  • Pratchett's Discworld series also has several examples:
    • Rincewind has the most amazing luck (thanks to being the pawn of the Lady herself), and has leapfrogged in, out, around, and through so many sticky situations relatively unscathed that even Death doesn't know when he'll die. He considers himself to have amazingly bad luck — he feels it would be luckier not to go through the kind of things he experiences at all, but the Lady doesn't seem to see it that way. In truth, his problem is that while the Lady blesses him on a regular basis, Fate is out to get him. Literally. The two of them are playing a board game, and Rincewind is one of the Lady's favorite pieces that Fate is always trying to take off the board.
    • Nobby and Sergeant Colon are also Born Lucky. As Watchmen, they are always stumbling across important clues (usually without realizing it) and surviving "million to one" events seemingly by chance. By the time of Snuff, they have demonstrated this power so often Commander Vimes finally catches on and gives orders to just let them follow their noses, confident they'll trip over the key to the mystery sooner or later.
  • In Harry Potter, there's a potion, Felix Felicis, that gives the user luck and will make everything go their way, usually in improbable ways. For example, when Harry drank it, he accidentally bumped into Ginny while invisible, causing her to think it was her current boyfriend, and got unusually annoyed and dump him, so that leaves her open for Harry. It also gave Harry the perfect chance to bribe Slughorn. Later it is used by nearly all the main characters to survive the climactic battle. The effects are temporary, and Slughorn advised against abusing the potion, as it'd make one reckless after a while. It's also banned from sporting events, essays, and elections.
    • And in The Film of the Book Harry acts so mellow that you'd think it was a luck joint.
    • It should be noted that the potion doesn't actually make one lucky, per se. Rather, it lets the user instinctively take actions that will bring them towards the best possible outcome.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's recurring Marty Stu Lazarus Long had "a feeling for what makes the frog jump", which his descendants put down to latent Psychic Powers, but which he saw as a learnable skill. That he just happened to be born with.
  • Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is both this AND Born Unlucky. He's one of only two humans to survive the destruction of Earth (amongst other events throughout the five book trilogy), but this isn't necessarily a good thing.
  • Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit is explicitly stated to have been born with an unusual amount of luck. It saves his life on several occasions.
  • Roran of Inheritance Cycle doesn't fit this trope (at least no more than is usual for a protagonist), but nevertheless Nasuada invokes this trope in sending Roran to end the Siege at Aroughs, because he was (in her estimation) lucky, and they desperately needed it done fast.
  • A literal example appears in The Hazard Squad: Into the Void, the 12th entry in the La Fuerza Series of superhero short stories. It’s revealed that Camilla's superpower is a specialized low-level variant of Reality Manipulation that subtly alters reality so that the odds are always slightly in her favor. Since superpowers in the La Fuerza series are genetic, this means that she was literally born lucky.
  • Malazan Book of the Fallen:
    • There are Oponn, the Twin Jesters of Chance. The female Oponn, the Lady, will sometimes give mortals what is referred to as the Lady's Pull, making them lucky, with occurrences like "avoiding an assassin's crossbow bolt by picking up a coin" or "killing an enemy by tripping and falling into them with your sword". It's suggested that this eventually turns around on the poor mortal, which is known as the Lord's Push.
    • Crokus Younghand unwittingly receives the Lady's Pull in Gardens of the Moon, which saves his life multiple times. The Twins mostly use him as an unwitting Spanner in the Works for the other gods' plans. Knowing that the Lord's Push often follows the Lady's Pull, Crokus wisely throws the Twin Gods' coin away at the end of the book before his luck can wear out.
    • Sergeant Hellian, the constantly drunk watchwoman-turned-soldier, is quite formidable a Drunken Master without any help, but at the climax of The Bonehunters, she receives the Lady's Pull when she drunkenly decides to swim through the harbor of Malaz City (which is known to be full of sharks) to hunt for more liquor. Whether this is a permanent investment or not is left unclear.
    • Corabb Bhilan Thenu'alas is literally born lucky. He has nearly every form of cancer on the planet, yet will never sicken. Multiple arrows fired into his back all strike the same spear shaft hanging on his back. On the other hand, everything he tries results in a lucky fumble — he will drop his weapon if he swings it, but it will trip up his foe. This is exploited at one point when his squad needs to take down an officer but can't get close enough for a clear shot: Corabb is made to fire the crossbow, which predictably causes the shot to go wildly off-mark, but the ricochet causes it to impale the target's neck perfectly.
  • Falkor the Luck Dragon from The Neverending Story belongs, as you may have gathered, to an entire species of dragons who are Born Lucky to the extent that they can fly because they are too lucky to hit the ground. He is very conscious of this and will often rely on blind luck to get him and Atreyu through tight spots.
  • Subverted in the Alfred Bester story "Oddy and Id". Oddy has the ability (unknown to himself) to have everything go in his favor. The subversion is that what he gets is what his id wants, not what his ego does. So while he really wishes for peace, his id really wants him to be galactic dictator and a war soon enables this.
  • Clever Jack from Playing for Keeps has the superpower of being incredibly lucky.
  • The luck virus in Red Dwarf (see below) also makes an appearance in the novels, subverted when an evil alternate universe Lister uses it just before he and the Dwarfers get hit by a psychic hellstorm called the Rage which will choose one person to destroy. As the Rage sweeps through them, everyone is filled with a desire to join it. And since Evil Lister has the luck...
  • Riddle of the Seven Realms: In the world of the aleators, luck is a literal commodity which powerful individuals have managed to hoard for themselves. It's also a finite natural resource, so the hoarding of vast quantities of luck by such people means that everyone else in that world is Born Unlucky by default, and must exercise extreme caution just to make it though a day alive.
  • Teela Brown, in Larry Niven's novel Ringworld, was the result of a project to try to breed a person with supernatural luck: she, and her ancestors for seven generations, were all born because of lucky draws in Earth's Birthright Lottery. The Puppeteers figure that humanity exists primarily due to luck anyhow (since humans are just Puny Earthlings), so breeding for luck will make humans extremely lucky. There is much debate about whether she is extremely lucky, and, for that matter, what it means to be extremely lucky.
    • The debate is mainly between the other main protagonists. Louis thinks she's lucky because she has survived many brushes with death, each time by pure chance. Nessus argues that her luck does not exist because the rest of the crew was not protected. Louis counters that the luck works only to preserve her and her fortunate genes; he says that her luck brought them to the Ringworld in the first place because it will be the safest place for her descendants to ride out an inevitable galactic disaster.
      • The counter-counter-argument is that the Puppeteers were already planning this expedition before they started the breeding program that produced Teela. In-universe, there are yet more viewpoints and further levels of argument.
      • Canon indicates that the luck is real. Niven has a later story in this universe, Safe at Any Speed, showing a future world populated by people even luckier than Teela. The protagonist gets swallowed by a giant pterodactyl and comes out perfectly unhurt.
    • Interestingly, when recruiting for the mission, they have a lot of trouble filling the Born Lucky slot. Teela Brown is the only one they can reach since attempts to call the others end in very improbable failures. Either Teela's luck is causing her to win a position on the mission by process of elimination, or the luck of all those other candidates is causing her to lose.
      • Funny thing is, Teela refuses (at Louis's urging) to join the mission at first, at which point Nessus receives word from another Puppeteer that another candidate was found. Apparently, Nessus doesn't talk to the others of his kind much because this "other candidate" is once again Teela.
    • This seems to change in the sequel, where Teela ends up eating the Tree-of-Life root and becoming a Protector, ensuring that her genes will not be preserved, as Protectors are unable to reproduce. She also allows herself to be killed during the climax in order to preserve the Ringworld.
      • This seems to change in the sequel to the sequel, where Teela had allowed her contraception implant to expire so that she could bear Louis' child (she loved him and he was a hero and he had good genes) but never told him before she left the expedition to remain on the Ringworld. Teela was protecting her child by arranging for the Ringworld to be saved since she could not do it herself and by dying so that her child would not be held ransom by the existing protector who she knew about but had been unable to find to kill.
  • Played with in A Song of Ice and Fire:
    "The gods always smiled on Watt, though. When the Wildlings knocked him off the Bridge of Skulls, somehow he landed in a nice deep pool of water. How lucky was that, missing all those rocks?"
    "Was it a long fall?" Grenn wanted to know. "Did landing in the pool of water save his life?"
    "No," said Dolorous Edd. "He was dead already, from that axe in his head. Still, it was pretty lucky, missing the rocks."
    • Edd's own bad luck is interesting as well despite being at least partially a matter of perception. For example, when they name one of their scarecrows after him it gets filled with arrows by the enemy but once the men start betting on which scarecrow will get hit the most Edd's one stops being hit.
    • Ramsay Snow is reckless, stupid and is the most hated man in the North, by all logic he should have gotten himself killed years ago, but things always seem to go his way somehow.
      • Given that his father was there to rein him in for most of his later life, it is not that surprising that he is still alive. The first time he really gets to act up is when his father leaves for war, and even then, he very nearly dies after news spread of his actions.
  • In Starluck, citizens are required to take the Autobeneficient Aptitude Test, which determines a person's luck. The protagonist, Paul Cartier, got a perfect score and has thus been targeted by The Emperor as a likely threat.
  • From the Star Trek Novel Verse, Auger in Hollow Men. He's a wide-eyed innocent youth serving under Captain Steyn (a freighter captain and sometimes smuggler). She has him on the crew entirely because he's Born Lucky (well, that and she's quite fond of him). He has a natural affinity for gambling and seems to somehow “tap into”...something...other beings can't, so as to always win. Note that this is consistent with the TV show, which occasionally suggested luck was governed by an unknown force that could be sensed or even controlled. Quite why this boy has the talent remains unexplained. Steyn apparently doesn't care, she's just happy it makes her money.
  • In Super Powereds, this is Nick's power. Unfortunately, since he's a Powered, not a Super, he can't control it, so it usually results in a stroke of good luck followed by a stroke of misfortune (he calls it his "bipolar luck"). For example, he's introduced having just won the lottery, gotten hit by a truck while celebrating, safely landing on a bouncy castle nearby, and the air compressor exploding. He survived, but all the winnings went to cover his hospital bills and the lawsuit filed by the guy who was renting the bouncy castle. Thankfully, the secret procedure he undergoes to turn him into a Super grants him control over his ability, so now he uses it to exclusively get good luck. After winter break, he returns to college having just won a VW Beetle in Vegas. His dormmate Vince demands that Nick return the car, since Nick, technically, cheated by using his ability to win. Nick counters by pointing out that he merely fulfilled the conditions set forth by the contest. Nick keeps the car. Interestingly, when the college has a casino night, he doesn't use his ability when playing blackjack. He is, however, very good at counting cards, having been taught by his aunt, a Vegas casino owner.
  • The Sunne in Splendour: King Edward IV's allies and enemies alike marvel at how lucky the man is. At one point, Anne Neville wonders why anyone, especially her father who knew him, would stand against Edward.
  • Thursday Next had a villain who could manipulate entropy. Thursday soon learned to judge whether her enemy was near by seeing whether a lot of weird coincidences were going on.
  • In Mack Reynolds' United Planets novel Code Duello, one operative is a young man who's never lost a bet. When he bet on a horse race, his horse broke its leg, but he still won; there was a big pile-up on the racetrack, and his horse limped across the finish line first.
  • In A.E. van Vogt's novel The Weapon Shops of Isher, the character of Cayle Clark is a "callidetic giant", which makes him crazy lucky to the point that being forced into sex slavery comes out to his advantage.
  • Seven in Wearing the Cape got this as his power. He describes it as like a guardian angel who keeps him safe and indulges his whims but doesn't work for stuff like picking lottery numbers.
  • This is one of Mat Cauthon's defining characteristics in The Wheel of Time series. He goes from the son of a horse trader in a small town into a rich gambler throwing around money like it grows on trees simply because he can regain it easily. While all three of the ''ta'veren'' characters tend to twist probability and cause unlikely and bizarre events to happen just by being there, those events can be either good or bad. Mat, however, adds an elven gift of luck to this. Not only does he have amazing luck in general (including battle), but his gambling luck is openly supernatural: If he's paying attention, coins are liable to land on edge, and dice on their corners. (Happily, this sort of thing never happens when it would have gotten him killed....)
    • It should be noted that his luck can often be a string of bad luck that turns out to be useful to him in the end, such as losing a dice roll when winning would result in a fight, or losing many rolls as a sign that something is about to happen.
      • As a matter of fact, his luck is so predictable that he WEAPONIZES it — if he's getting too poor of a streak, he and his friends know the fecal matter is going to hit the impeller, because his good luck is "being stored up" for what's to come, which has saved their hides several times.
  • Wild Cards: It is strongly implied that Cody Havero is an ace with this power. She is just a little too lucky.
  • Shamrock from Worm possesses a combination of clairvoyance and small-scale telekinesis that essentially results in this.
  • Bink's power in Xanth looks like this, but it's actually that magic can't harm him. This was determined to be a top-tier magic talent.
    • Given that everything in Xanth is at least partially magical, it is.
    • The reason his talent manifests as luck is because his talent can't hurt him either. In other words, it makes it look as though he's just lucky at avoiding magic because if fireballs just bounced off him, people would just start punching him. And that would be his talent causing people to punch him, thus harming him indirectly via magic. In the finale of the first book, it manifested by having his enemy work it out through being unusually blatant; when he then attacked with his sword it set off an unlikely chain of events that ended with them reconciling their differences.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Bar Karma: Doug is described as being supernaturally lucky. This doesn't come up much past the first episode, possibly because being in the Bar cancels it out the same way it cancels out Dana's inverse power.
  • The Barrier: Hugo and Julia are considered to be born under a lucky star by their superior Rosa. Rosa has a point because they got a job as house staff at a time where it's relatively hard to find any sort of job, one of their employers is implied to sometimes fire house staff over minor mistakes, while the other keeps needing to bail Julia and Hugo out of compromising situations. The latter is doing so mostly because he used to date Julia's mother, especially the first couple of times.
  • British-Iranian comedian Omid Djalili has a sketch titled "The Bloody Lucky Arab" in which he portrays a stereotypical rich Arab who manages to strike oil everywhere he goes. Mostly on golf courses.
  • Tom Chance, from the mid-'80s series Chance in a Million, for whom life always seemed to fall in place (including once knowing the train schedule of an obscure route, from having been held hostage by terrorists in the past, who forced their captives to memorise the London Underground timetable...)
  • In Charmed (1998), Leprechauns have the ability to influence a person's luck, either for good or for bad. Typically, they only dole it out in small doses, but when their race is threatened with extinction, they pool all their good luck for the sisters. They also note that luck increases when you take risks, thus Phoebe, who does nothing with her dose, doesn't feel particularly lucky, whereas Paige brings Piper right to a casino and winds up winning almost a million dollars in craps. Even when she winds up losing it all, it's still technically good luck, because her losing roll (double ones, aka "snake eyes") gives Piper the "Eureka!" Moment they need to find the reptilian demon they're hunting (specifically, they can use literal snake eyes to scry for him). Their luck only changes when the demon doses them with an equal amount of bad luck.
  • Drake Parker of Drake & Josh: He's a Chick Magnet and popular musician who gets away with a crazy amount of, er, crazy stuff and seems to naturally charm anyone he meets. According to The Teaser in the episode "Blues Brothers," it's nothing new — he lists so many random good things that happened to him throughout his life that his mom now says he was "born under a lucky star."
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Most of Ramsay Bolton's actions would have gotten him killed, or at least horribly mutilated, yet thanks to being the bastard of a high lord who is evil enough to be okay with it, but not quite evil enough to kill him when he fucks things up, he has support. And, since some of the strongest Northern houses are ruled by more ruthless and opportunistic offspring, he still has enough allies to cower the indecisive in an uprising. His luck finally runs out in the penultimate episode of Season 6.
    • Tyrion outright claims to be this. Keyword: claims.
    • Tormund has been involved in more battles than the majority of the characters (Castle Black, Hardhome, the battle of the Bastards, the journey beyond the Wall and the battle against the Night King's armies in Winterfell), and survived all of them. While this is mostly due to his tremendous fighting ability, a lot of the time it can be chalked up to him being extremely lucky.
      • He is taken hostage by the Night's Watch instead of killed, even after he had killed many of their friends and they had already shot him multiple times with arrows.
      • He is fortunate enough to have Wun Wun on his side during the massacre at Hardhome, which gives him and the other named characters involved time to run to the boats.
      • At the Battle of the Bastards, he comes close to being killed by Smalljon Umber, but the arrival of the Knights of the Vale gives him time to turn the tables on his distracted opponent.
      • He has his closest brush with death yet when wights nearly drag him underneath a frozen lake beyond the Wall, but Sandor saves him in the nick of time.
      • The battle against the Night King's armies at Winterfell ends with him and Gendry standing Atop a Mountain of Corpses; how he managed to survive that particular battle likely just gives even more credence to his earlier claim of being "good at killing people".
  • Graham Chapman's assessment of Dinsdale Piranha from Monty Python's Flying Circus:
    It's easy for us to judge Dinsdale Piranha too harshly. After all, he only did what most of us only dream of doing. (facial tic; controls himself) I'm sorry. After all, a murderer is only an extroverted suicide. Dinsdale was a loony but he was a happy loony. (quietly) Lucky bastard.
  • This is Mr. Lucky's shtick, as his name indicates. In any game involving chance, he apparently can't lose.
  • Nightwatch (2015): Featured in the video compilation "Top 5 Luckiest Patients".
  • Parker Lewis Can't Lose: Parker Lewis, being another High-School Hustler, is extraordinarily lucky.
  • Helen, the Big Bad from Primeval. In nearly every episode she appears in, she gets captured at gunpoint but always either manages to convince her captors to let her go or tackles away their weapon. Considering she's a 40-ish archaeologist and the people holding her at gunpoint are usually trained soldiers with good reason to hate her, she must have some sort of superpower that causes any heroic character within earshot of her to juggle Idiot Balls. At one point she escapes from the middle of the hero's base by taking another villain hostage and demanding to be released... for some insane reason, the heroes not only let her go but give her the MacGuffin as well, instead of just shooting them both. However, karma gets her in the end. In the form of a Velociraptor.
  • In the Red Dwarf episode "Quarantine", the crew find a luck virus that causes extraordinary good luck. For instance, Lister gets a dosage and is able to solve the ten-digit combination of the lock of a quarantine room.
  • Lance White from The Rockford Files. Jim Rockford himself points out that Lance's good luck is always balanced by the people around him suffering from bad luck.
  • Much of a Seinfeld episode is dedicated to reiterating the fact that everything consistently turns out all right for Jerry, and nobody else. And then he gets thrown into prison with the gang for a year. But before then, he's pretty darn lucky.
    Elaine: [exasperated] You know, one of these days, something terrible is going to happen to you! IT HAS TO!
    Jerry: [nonchalant] No, I'll be fine.
  • Chance Harper's "power" from Strange Luck. It's not always good luck, often getting Chance into deep trouble, but it always works out in the end. There are hints that Chance's father may have had the same condition.
  • Supernatural had a rabbit foot that gave this but once you lost it, it did the exact opposite: that is, giving you bad luck. For example, while in possession of the foot, Sam Winchester could survive gunfights by virtue of having everyone else's gun jam when pointed at him and win as much as $2000 dollars from each Scratch And Win ticket he bought. Once the foot was stolen, however, Sam started tripping over everything up to and including thin air, lost his shoe in a sewer hole, had a hotel room heater catch on fire when he was doing literally nothing, and knocked himself out while trying to put out said fire.
  • Rob Mariano, especially in Redemption Island where he's put on a tribe full of the dumbest players since the cast of Samoa and manages to not once run into his Achilles' Heel (Food challenges, but also some physical challenges), manages to get the lion's share of screen time, and is good at all the puzzle challenges. Conveniently, that's what most of the individual immunity challenges were! (Read: Challenges he had to compete in) That's some amazing luck if the producers weren't slanting the show for him and Russell.
  • The protagonist of Stan Lee's Lucky Man receives a bracelet that grants this power. Pretty fortunate for a gambling addict. Though it appears that always winning is somehow taking the shine out of the compulsion. It is also strongly hinted at that every bit of good luck that falls on him is balanced out by bad luck falling on someone close to him — unfortunately, he can't take the bracelet off (and attempts to do so have been spectacularly unsuccessful).
  • Subverted on Uchu Sentai Kyuranger. Lucky initially seems to be this trope, but it is later revealed that he was Born Unlucky. However, by constantly believing that his luck would turn around, he managed to become the luckiest man in the universe.
  • An episode of The X-Files, "The Goldberg Variation", is about a man whose luck is absolutely ridiculous. The catch: Whenever his luck gives him a benefit, the universe seems to "balance" itself by either making him unable to benefit from it, or inflicting something bad on someone else. During the episode, he is desperately trying to raise a large sum of money very fast (for a sick kid's medical bills). When he wins it by gambling at a Mob table, they assume he was cheating and throw him off a roof. (He lands in an industrial laundry basket, harmlessly breaking his fall.) When he buys a lottery ticket, he wins, but (a) the payoff would take too long to help the sick kid, and (b) the ticket is for waaaaaay more than he needs and he is terrified of the inevitable backlash, so he throws it away. The guy who picks the ticket up gets hit by a bus seconds later.

    Manhua 
  • Zui Wu Dao: Wu Di. He survives getting sent to an area that's impossible for anyone that's not a martial artist to survive thanks to an incredibly skilled one incidentally hanging around, stumbles upon a highly sought after item that houses a spirit that decides to help him become a martial artist, said spirit makes it possible for him to use his vigour - which he has so much of due to training that he practically starts off at the Martial Arts Realm, manages to get his hands on another highly sought after item by sheer chance, and avoids the murderous intentions of a highly skilled martial artist thanks to an arguably more skilled on taking an interest in him.

    Podcasts 
  • Callie Linder in Metamor City has a "chaos aura" that tends to produce good luck for her but has varying effects on people near her.

    Print Media 
  • MAD had an article (in issue #133) called "What is a Born Winner?" about such people. "A Born Winner is easy to spot. He's the guy who's drafted the morning the war ends. He's the guy who marries for love and then discovers his bride concealed the fact that she's a millionairess to avoid fortune hunters. He's the guy who's turned away from a fancy restaurant for not wearing a tie the very same night thirty-six diners succumb to food poisoning."

    Radio 
  • Douglas Richardson of Cabin Pressure claims to have been Born Lucky. Sometimes he does so to avoid exposing a successful scheme, but other times Douglas's good luck involves factors, such as the weather, that are beyond even Douglas's control.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Many tabletop games use an "action dice" system which allows a player to add another die to a roll's final result to avoid bad luck, create an exceptionally good result, etc, a certain number of times a session.
  • Champions has the Luck power: the more levels of it you have, the luckier you are.
  • Halflings in 4.0 Dungeons & Dragons have a power that basically emulates really good luck. And in 3.5 you had the Fate-Spinners, whose entire arsenal of powers was based around luck manipulation.
    • 3rd edition Halflings were inherently lucky as well, reflected in their racial +1 to all saving throws.
    • The 3.5 sourcebook Complete Scoundrel had a prestige class based around this trope. The "Fortune's Friend" could force so many re-rolls a day in so many different situations that he must have been as infuriating to the DM and his teammates as he was to his foes.
    • There was also the Luckstealer from Races of the Wild, who could curse others with bad luck, and claim their good luck for himself.
    • In 5th edition, an available feat is "Lucky", which grants players three "luck points" that they can spend to re-roll an ability check, take advantage on a roll or force an opponent to take disadvantage (in effect, forcing the DM to use a bad roll if attacking the player).
  • A version of this is part of a deity's legend in the Forgotten Realms. Tymora, goddess of luck, supposedly flips a coin for every person born in Faerun. If it comes up heads, that person will have good luck in their life. If it's tails, naturally, bad luck follows. And for those extremely lucky few where the coin lands on its edge...they make their own luck, not being fated to anything.
  • In GURPS it is possible to give characters varying levels of the Advantage aptly named "Luck". There is also Super-Luck which, while much more expensive, is well explained by a nearby picture of a man standing in an alleyway surrounded by bullet holes. There is also another Advantage called "Serendipity" which causes fortunate coincidences outside of dice rolls as the GM sees fit.
  • Marvel Super Heroes models super-luck by allowing characters with the power, like Longshot listed above, to pick which die is the tens die and which the ones die when rolling d100. Look into the statistics of that die roll and you'll see it's the most powerful ability in the game.
  • Mutants & Masterminds features "Luck Control" as a superpower which allows the user to change the effects of other character's dice rolls, helping your allies and hindering your enemies. "Probability Control" from the Ultimate Power sourcebook is a more traditional example of this trope; your power rank becomes the minimum result for any one die roll that round. To put it another way, a person with 20 ranks in this power could essentially throw their dice away and declare "I win."
  • Nobilis has a Gift simply known as Luck, which allows you to bring yourself some good fortune. "I was born lucky" is also entirely acceptable as text for an affliction, which will produce minor miracles whenever the HG thinks it's appropriate.
  • Savage Worlds has the "Luck" and "Great Luck" advantages, which give you one and then two more spare die re-rolls per game session. There's also Common Bond, which lets you give your rerolls to other players.
  • This is how the Edge stat works in Shadowrun — and humans get an extra point of it as a racial bonus.
  • The Spycraft tabletop game, designed around the cinematic physics of spy movies, obviously has an entire feat tree of abilities that embody this trope. Among other things, there is an ability that causes you to roll a die after being hit by any attack. If it comes up odd, circumstances interfere and the attack misses entirely and you take no damage instead. Extra funny because it applies to things like nuclear explosions and buildings falling on you as much as the usual bullets and fists.
  • Asian Dhampyr from the Vampire: The Masquerade supplement Kindred of the East are best known for their luck powers, a spiritual side effect of the unlikelihood of their existence. They're born to Asian vampires with significantly more Yang chi than Yin, the only time said vamps are fertile.
    • Meanwhile, Vampire: The Requiem has the Bohagande bloodline. Their unique Discipline, Sunnikuse, emphasises draining the luck from others, typically supplementing the Bohagande's luck in the process.
  • In Warhammer 40,000 Aeldari Harlequins believe that those with exceptional luck are blessed by Cegorach, the Laughing God, and such individuals often rise to become Troupe Masters. The 8th Edition rules represent this with the 'Luck of the Laughing God' Warlord Trait that gives the warlord a re-roll to their to hit rolls of 1.
    • Makari the Gretchin, Ghazghkull Thraka's standard bearer, was renowned for his supernatural luck, so much that after his (supposed) death orks would flock for a chance to carry his "Lucky Stikk" into battle. When he returned as a playable character in 8th Edition, he was given a 2+ Invulnerable save (probably the best unmodified save in the entire game), making him surprisingly difficult to kill for something that would otherwise be less than Cannon Fodder.
  • All of White Wolf's Mage games rely primarily on powers that manifest as extremely convenient turns of fortune, referred to as 'covert' magic. The "entropy" sphere from second edition deserves special mention for even blatantly magical effects manifesting as insanely good luck of the "a grenade goes off at your feet. conveniently, all the shrapnel happens to miss you and a gust of wind negates the blast wave" variety.
  • Witch Hunter: The Invisible World. If a character had the Lucky talent, fortune favored them and always seemed to intercede on their behalf in the direst of circumstances.

    Toys 
  • Transformers has Jackpot, whose main character trait is that he's possessed of uncanny good luck. This particularly shows up in the TransTech story "Gone Too Far", where he puts it to use hustling people with his partner Hubcap. Notably, at first it seems that his luck is turning against him (he loses a very important card game), but this then kicks off a chain of events that result in him and his partner not only returning to their home dimension, but doing so by teleporting on top of (and crushing) a Decepticon menacing a small community of aliens who just want someone to get rid of those explosive glowing cubes.

    Video Games 
  • This is Nell's defining character trait in the Advance Wars series. She has an occasional chance of causing more damage than normal, and her CO and Super CO powers amplify this luck immensely. Her sister, Rachel, doesn't have Nell's normal luck but her CO Power (though not Super CO Power) increases her luck for the turn.
    • This also applies to Flak and his Dual Strike counterpart Jugger, although it's more depicted as brute force (but works the same in-game) and comes with the drawback of sometimes inflicting less damage than expected.
      • The two vary a little. Flak and Jugger's luck (good or bad) still falls within the realm of normality, as while they can do more (or less) damage than expected, it doesn't allow for anything blatantly unexpected (e.g. infantry dealing serious damage to tanks with their machine guns). Nell's (and Rachel's, during her CO Power) luck, on the other hand, can result in the highly improbable and unrealistic, as her luck is treated mechanically as a random flat increase to damage rather than the random percent multiplier of the normal damage that Flak and Jugger get.
  • Discussed in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Considering everything which has happened to the Player Character over the course of the game, Varric comes to the conclusion that they either have the most amazing luck in the world or the absolute worst. However, he also thinks that this is a further bit of evidence that they really were chosen by Andraste to serve as Her Herald because such luck was "kind of her thing" when she was alive too.
  • The Elder Scrolls
    • From the series' lore is Sai, a Deity of Human Origin God of Luck celebrated in the Iliac Bay region. He plays with it a bit, however, as he was indeed "born lucky", but the luck only applied to the people around him, never himself. After he died in battle (while all of this fellow soldiers survived), he was granted immortality by Ebonarm to use his gift of luck to help "balance" the world.
    • The Bosmer (Wood Elf) Gaenor from Morrowind's Tribunal expansion is an Optional Boss. You first meet him as a sort-of beggar in Mournhold, where he will demand that you give him some money. If you do, he will continue to ask for more until it reaches outrageous sums you probably won't be able to pay and even if you can, he won't believe you really have the money anyway. Either way, pay him or deny him the money, he will get angry. Come back a few days later to encounter him again. This time, he is wearing a full set of (extremely expensive and powerful) Ebony Armor. He will confront you and tell you how he came upon a Lucky Charm. Ever since he found it, he had insane amounts of luck, money was practically falling into his pockets all the time, he never lost a fight, hell, he never even got injured. Then he decides to take revenge on you. While in battle, he lacks any significant powerful attacks, but his insane luck makes more than up for it. In-game, all the important chances, such as whether or not a blow will hit or miss or whether or not a Magic Reflection/Damage Reflection spell will kick in, is influenced in part by the Luck Stat. That includes attack evasion, damage reflection, and spell reflection. Gaenor is so lucky that he can make you kill yourself by attacking him. Should you, despite all the odds, manage to kill him, you can loot the lucky charm from his pockets, but while the enchantment is certainly powerful, it only grants 20 Luck points. Attribute-Wise, however, Gaenor had 770 of them... (Barring cheats or exploits, the Player Character Cap is 100.) One of the most straightforward ways of beating him is to temporarily increase your own Luck to similarly absurd levels with potions/spell effects/enchantments or some combination thereof.
    • Skyrim:
      • Imperial characters have a racial trait called Imperial Luck, which increases the amount of gold they can earn from looting containers.
      • There's also the 'Prowler's Profit' bonus which increases your characters chance of finding assorted gemstones, and two perks in the lockpicking skill tree that make you find more money and magical items.
      • It's revealed that Luck is something considered the domain of Nocturnal, the Daedric Prince revered by the Thieves' Guild. If you complete the Thieves' Guild quest line and get the guild back into Nocturnal's good graces, she'll reward them with good luck, causing the members of the Guild to fall under this trope.
  • Fallout:
    • In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas you can select your Luck SPECIAL stat at the start of the game. This mainly determines your chances of getting critical hits in combat. However, in New Vegas, it influences your gambling ability.
    • In Fallout and Fallout 2, it still determined critical chance, but setting the Luck value to maximum and picking the Sniper perk makes every single hit score a critical. Even better, picking the Jinxed trait with Luck maxed out is the epitome of assholishness to your opponents, because everyone's weapons will be falling apart or exploding except yours.
    • Mr. House of New Vegas has a maxed-out luck stat, representing his ability to see probabilities and manipulate them to his own benefit. In practical terms, it allowed him to win an entire Vault in a game of Blackjack, and when he tried to predict when the Great War would start he was off by just one day.
  • The Lady Luck dress sphere in Final Fantasy X-2 has abilities based on luck, including rolling huge dice and spinning reels for results.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the people who have Ullr's Holy Blood (like the sisters Edain and Brigid and their children) have Luck growths of at least 30%, among the best ones in the whole franchise. In-story, this is supposed to be tied to a blessing bestowed upon Ulir the "Bow User", creating a whole legend in regards to their descendants — now the Royal House of Yngvi. Edain herself invokes her Born Lucky status in the Oosawa manga by pulling a Go Through Me to recruit Prince Jamke, standing in between two armies and hoping the legendary luck of House Yngvi causes her to be unharmed by Verdane's barrage of arrows. And except for a mere cut on her cheek, it works.
    • Princess L'Arachel from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones appears to actually be divinely blessed; she wins coin tosses when the tosser is cheating. This is reflected in her growth rates, as she'll almost always max out the Luck Stat on her own.
    • And then there's Percy from Fates who stands in contrast to his Born Unlucky father Arthur. Not only does he have a great Luck growth (easily capping it well before the Level cap), his personal skill also boosts his own ability to avoid critical hits slightly while boosting nearby allies' ability to avoid crits to a larger extent. However, he himself states that he doesn't like his luck so much because it takes away all the effort he could put, but he greatly admires his dad because he pushes through bad luck.
    • The playable incarnations of Anna universally have incredible Luck; in particular, Awakening's has an 80% growth with a +3 cap modifier, while the one from Three Houses has a personal ability that provides a direct +5 boost to the stat.
  • Chad Kensington in Friday the 13th: The Game has the highest luck stat of very counselor, meaning his weapons last much longer than others while also increasing some of his other stats.
  • Woozie in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is blind, but he's so incredibly lucky that he can often pass as sighted anyways. He can even race a car along a narrow, winding ledge!
  • It's been stated numerous times that Halo's protagonist Master Chief John-117 is this trope embodied, which makes sense, considering that he's one of the last Spartan-IIs alive and has survived near-death multiple times.
    • In Halo 3's opening, the AI Cortana says this about Master Chief:
    "They let me pick, did I ever tell you that? Choose whichever Spartan I wanted. You know me. I did my research; watched as you became the soldier we needed you to be. Like the others, you were strong and swift and brave. A natural leader. But you had something they didn't. Something no one saw, but me. Can you guess? Luck."
    • In the prequel book Halo: The Fall of Reach, Halsey chooses John to be the first Spartan to test the MJOLNIR armor because "You've always been lucky."
    • This comes to a point in Halo: Reach, where the new Player Character is Noble Six. They are likened very much to Master Chief, having similar exploits. So why is it they die while Chief goes on to live? He/she didn't have luck.
    • That said, it becomes more and more apparent that John's kind of luck only prevents John himself from getting severely injured. As for the people around him, they tend to drop off one by one over the course of the franchise.
  • KanColle: Your shipgirls have a Luck Stat based on their historical counterparts' careers; in the case of vessels that managed some spectacular feats or escaped near-certain death will have a high stat.
    • The luckiest of vessels are of course those that managed to survive to the present day as museum ships: Iowa (though her luck is knocked down a bit because of a turret explosion she suffered), Massachusetts, Intrepid, and Souya (an icebreaker with the highest luck in the game- though not much else- due to being the only IJN ship to survive to the present day).
    • Lucky vessels of the IJN (aside from the aforementioned Souya) include:
      • Destroyers- Kamikaze, Harukaze (survived the war), Nagatsuki (managed to survive heavy damage long enough to beach herself), Ushio (only member of the Pearl Harbor strike force to survive the war), Hibiki (a downplayed case, as she survived Allied curbstomps by virtue of being busy getting repaired when they took place), Hatsushimo (survived Operation Ten-Go), Shigure (managed to escape 10 Japanese defeats unscathed), Yukikaze (survived some of the most brutal battles in the Pacific and managed to make it to 1971 before being scrapped), Suzutsuki (survived Operation Ten-Go), Fuyutsuki (survived the war, including participation in Operation Ten-Go), and Take (sunk the USS Cooper with a torpedo and survived the war).
      • Cruisers- Kikatami, Sakawa (sole survivor of their classes), and Aoba (survived until the bombing of Kure, one week before the Hiroshima bombing, which meant outliving every other ship in her fleet).
      • Battleships/Carriers - Haruna (outlived her sister ships), Ise, Hyuga (both lasted until the bombing of Kure), Nagato (only surviving Japanese battleship), Jun'you (sole survivor of her class), Hiryuu (survived the initial ambush of the Battle of Midway and managed to bomb Yorktown before being sunk herself), Zuikaku (evaded serious damage in battle until after Shokaku was sunk), and Katsuragi (only Unryuu class carrier to survive the war).
    • Lucksters from the rest of the Axis: Prinz Eugen (sortied with Bismarck, survived that and the war, and only sank in Operation Crossroads because she was too radioactive for minor damage to be repaired), Grecale (survived the war and had a long career in the post-war Italian navy), Duca degli Abruzzi (survived an arial torpedo hit and the war), Giuseppe Garibaldi (survived the war), Littorio/Italia (survived the war), and Luigi Torelli (had a very fruitful career as a submarine and survived the war).
    • The United States, aside from most of the aforementioned museum ships, has a number of lucky ones: Fletcher (for her excellent design and long service history), Johnston and Samuel B. Roberts (for turning back the Center Force in the Battle off Samar), Brooklyn (for her achievements during Operation Torch and surviving until 1992 after being sold to the Chilean navy), Colorado (for escaping the bombing of Pearl Harbor and surviving the war), Maryland (for being present for the Pearl Harbor attack but taking minimal damage), Washington (for bailing out South Dakota and sinking Kirishima during the Battle of Guadalcanal), Saratoga (one of three pre-war US carriers to survive the whole war), Ranger (for her performance during Operation Torch and surviving the war, along with Saratoga and Enterprise), Langley (for her performance in various battles, plus surviving until 1963), and Scamp (for her very successful submarine career).
    • The British navy has Jervis (for being a highly decorated destroyer and managing to never lose a crewmember during the war, which earned her the nickname "Lucky Jervis"), Sheffield (participated in the hunt for the Bismarck and narrowly escaped a friendly fire incident, which also warned the British to not use the magnetic detonators on their torpedoes when they really caught Bismarck), Warspite (for surviving both world wars as the most decorated ship in the Royal Navy), Nelson (for having an active career and surviving the war), and Victorious (for her active career in both the Atlantic and Pacific, culminating in surviving the war).
    • The French navy has Richelieu (for surviving the war) and Jean Bart (survived several pitched battles under Vichy French control, and remained as a training ship and radar testbed until 1970).
    • The Swedish navy has the seaplane tender/cruiser Gotland, whose scout planes kicked off the hunt for the Bismarck by spotting the German battleship off the coast of Norway.
  • Kingdom of Loathing has several familiars and an outfit which embody this, including a pair of dice who help you and a Steampunk outfit which turns all critical failures into Inspector Gadget — style successes.
  • Love of Magic: This is the key ability of sorcerers. The Voices tell them what they need to do, and things just happen to break the way they want them to. An Exaggerated Trope for the "Blessed by the Voices" who have this to such a degree that they don't need to try - their lives work out perfectly without any active effort.
  • Sergio Morello from Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven even has this very Trope Name as the title of his mission. First, he evades being shot, then he evades a car bomb, then he evades being shot again, then he evades being hit by a train and just after one hell of a heist, he is finally put down.
  • Venus from Metal Gear Ac!d 2 demonstrates her supernatural ability to toss coins that only come up heads, dowse for water and hit targets with her gun a handful of times. Her initial assertion that she was 'lucky' seemed just to be her being obtuse, but by the time you fight her it turns out to be her power. She still got disappointingly little mileage out of it.
  • The character Fortune in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty seemed to be literally Immune to Bullets because she was too lucky in battle to ever get hit; unfortunately, her luck in her personal life was as awful as her luck on the battlefield was good, and she became a Death Seeker.
    • Subverted, though, in that it was all set up artificially and deliberately behind The Man Behind the Man.
      • Double Subverted: However, after the device was removed from fortune and she got shot for once, she still manages to deflect missiles, actual missiles, apparently by luck.
  • Any Pokémon with the ability Super Luck will have their critical-hit ratios increase by a single stage. Not only that, if a Pokémon with that ability leads the party, the player will have higher chances of finding a wild Pokémon holding items.
  • Jack, from Radiata Stories. When he starts the game, his stats are fairly low, except for his luck. The passive ability he starts with increases his Luck Stat even further.
  • Resident Evil: Outbreak has Jim Chapman, noted as being very in-tune with his luck in the form of lucky coins he carries with him. In a series-wide display, he's also one of the only characters who isn't scripted to die during a scenario, a trait he shares with experienced fighters Kevin Ryman and Mark Wilkins.
  • Kyosuke Nanbu of Super Robot Wars Compact 2, and the OG series has this. His backstory has him surviving a space shuttle crash, with minor injuries. In OG 1 a traitor sabotages a prototype Humongous Mecha and Kyosuke once again crash lands and escapes unscathed. It's also a reason given for surviving the beating that he got from Axel Almer. For some reason, this inhuman luck does not actually include the Lucky skill. (Tasuku has this.)
    • It's been theorized that this luck is in fact what allows Kyosuke to perform well in his Alteisen, which is, in all honesty, an outdated Real Robot that really wants to be a Super Robot when it grows up. Anyone else using the Alt would probably find themselves shot down pretty quickly.
    • To be honest, this trope, when combined with his skill, experience, and determination makes him damn near impossible to kill. (having a really tough mech doesn't hurt either).
    • Then there's Arado Balanga in Alpha 2/Original Generation 2, who once survived his mech blowing up because he couldn't eject in time. In fact, for a long part of Original Generation 2, every mech he pilots gets severely damaged or destroyed.
  • In the Super Smash Bros. franchise, Kirby has strangely exceptional luck in the story modes. In Subspace, Kirby spent most of the story charging headlong into whatever caught his interest and by some bizarre coincidence, he ended up slicing up the enemy's battleship in half and incidentally swallowed King Dedede's brooch, preventing Tabuu from completing his plan. In World of Light, Kirby managed to be the Sole Survivor, escaping from Galeem's attack.
  • Touhou Project
    • Tewi Inaba has this as her main ability, and can even spread it to others. One chapter in the Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth manga had her digging a pool for Princess Kaguya, and every place she dug had her striking gold, silver, and other assorted treasures.
    • The main character Reimu Hakurei also has this power. Her luck mostly manifests in each game as her literally wandering around until she stumbles upon the Big Bad of the latest incident. The last chapter of Curiosities of Lotus Asia even mentions that Marisa hates to play dice with Reimu because Reimu always wins.
  • Uncharted's Nathan Drake manages to survive his adventures by the skin of his teeth. His mentor/treasure hunting companion Victor Sullivan even opts out of the second game because he doesn't "have [Nate's] luck". This apparently also applies in-game as well, with the notion put forward by the developers that the screen graying as you take damage is not a representation of "health" but rather "luck" (that is none of the enemy bullets that don't kill Nate actually hit him, just graze him or fly very close, but the one that does Nate in is a direct hit).
  • Joachim from Valkyria Chronicles II has fortune smiling upon him, but he never sees it that way, being a glass half-empty kind of guy. If something good happens to him, he'll still find something to complain about: Girls like him, but he wants to be left alone. He was saved from a bullet by a statue, he loved that statue! You get the picture...
  • In the Nintendo Switch adaptation of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, certain playable characters have the Lucky trait, representing their naturally higher fortune. Not only do such characters tend to have a higher Luck stat than the other characters, but their Trait causes certain Luck tests to either be passed automatically or converted into Skill checks, representing how good fortune just naturally comes their way.

    Visual Novels 
  • Danganronpa: The Ultimate Good Luck talent that Makoto Naegi and Nagito Komaeda represents this trope; to get it, all you have to do is win a lottery for the invite, since getting into the prestigious Hope's Peak Academy is considered a very lucky thing. In practice, it tends to manifest as Unluckily Lucky; whenever a lucky student gets a favorable outcome, they also suffer a related turn of bad luck. For Makoto, this is fairly subtle and mostly serves as Plot Armor (he gets a bathroom door that sticks shut... which is also vital evidence to clear his name in the first case, he gets roped into refereeing Mondo and Ishimaru's sauna endurance duel... which turns out to be vital evidence in identifying the next culprit, and so on), but Nagito exaggerates it to insane levels; he can make plans that require some element being entirely up to chance and know it'll work out for him and all sorts of minor things go his way (such as winning a draw for one of the best Funhouse rooms), but all his most spectacular lucky breaks involve something horrible happening to him to balance the scales (when he was accepted into Hope's Peak, he was also diagnosed with two separate terminal diseases, for example), something that has left him with the deep set cynicism that nothing he does really matters because his luck will find some way to cancel it out as part of the 'bad luck' stage before giving him some sort of 'good luck' reward, but also with a bizarre belief that causing bad things to happen is good, because every time something bad happened to him it meant that something good would happen soon (i.e. finding a winning lottery ticket after being kidnapped).
    • Somehow, Izuru Kamukura managed to acquire this talent. In Danganronpa 3 Side: Despair, Nagito decides to check which luck is stronger by shooting Izuru in the heart. Izuru "wins" by causing Nagito's gun to jam. However, he later admits that Nagito's own luck is also impressive when he shoots Nagito in return but his School Handbook blocks the bullet.
    • Celestia's Ultimate Gambler talent involves a specific form of good luck in games of chance; she'll never get a bad hand in poker, but outside of gaming her luck is rather average.
    • The Korean fangame Danganronpa Another introduces Utsuro, who goes beyond just being lucky and borders on Reality Warping. His ability, called Divine Luck, basically makes it so that anything he wants to happen will happen somehow and without effort for him. It also affects anyone around him; at the moment of his birth, every sick person in the hospital was cured and his parents won the lottery. However, not only did this mean he didn't need to work toward achieving anything, but his power also drew greedy people who wanted to exploit his luck for themselves. As a result, he ended up homeless, depressed and tired of the world and people. He couldn't even commit suicide because his luck would always save him. He's later revealed to be the mastermind behind this Killing Game, as well as the true identity of Yuki Maeda.
  • Fate/stay night:
    • Rin has magical control over all five elements (fire, water, wind, earth, aether), which is rare among Magi as most are born with control over one element, and she is a prodigy at her art.
    • Her younger sister, Sakura, is also this trope in a way: She has the element of Imaginary Numbers, which is powerful against non-humans but is otherwise useless. However, events in Heaven's Feel change that soon enough... She's also not so very lucky with what happens to her after her father gives her to the Matou family, although he did this because he thought the Matous would raise her into a capable mage and keeping two powerful children in the household would've risked attracting unwanted attention by both supernatural events and the Mages' Association.
    • One of the drama CDs to the prequel Fate/Zero reveals that Taiga of all people is reality-warpingly lucky. Her actions during the Fourth Holy Grail War somehow averted multiple natural disasters, including an asteroid impact.
  • Kieta from Gakuen Heaven has this as his only "special trait". When the bridge malfunction on his way to his new boarding school and the bus crash, both he and the driver fell out onto his futon that just happened to fall out of his bag, open up and land in time to catch and save both of them.
  • Giancarlo from Lucky Dog 1 is widely renowned as the Lucky Dog because of his fantastic luck, which has helped him escape from prison at least four times in a row. He seems to have been blessed with great luck from a young age after he survived an attack on his family that left both his parents dead. In fact, his luck is even represented in-game by a lucky meter which starts out at 100% but can nevertheless drop depending on the actions he takes throughout the course of the game.
  • Some characters in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney believe that Phoenix wins most of his cases by sheer luck since he always manages to turn the case around in his favor when all seems lost. Franziska von Karma even notes Phoenix's luck out loud after she finds out from Edgeworth that he fell through a broken bridge to a river 40 feet below (Said river was stated to be notorious for being deadly) and only suffered minor bruises and a bad cold — In the middle of winter, while the bridge was on fire! To top it off, in Apollo Justice, Phoenix gets run over by a car, flies 30 feet in the air, smacks his head into a telephone pole, and only suffers a minor ankle sprain! To quote Franziska herself: "As always, hard to know if he should be called lucky or unlucky."

    Webcomics 
  • Achewood's Ray Smuckles can't seem to turn around without falling into a pile of money.
  • In Dubious Company, Sal is the future high priestess of the god of Randomness, things tend to go her way.
  • El Goonish Shive: This is presumably Usagi of The Lucky Bunny Bounty Show's motif.
  • Andrew Smith of Gunnerkrigg Court has this as a superpower extra-normal ability. That is, his very presence allows things to go smoothly. For example, he can throw a pile of cards over his shoulder and they'll land in a deck, in order. Another example here (back up three pages for context).
    • His "luck," though, is more of a magical ability to make all tasks as simple as possible, which isn't always a good thing. Parley's joke that "his superpower is to make everything boring" has so far been completely accurate.
    • A more direct case of this trope happens when Annie needs to get her magic-channeling gem to a specific spot at the bottom of a ravine, but neither she nor Kat can figure out a way to do it without overshooting or alerting the adults (they're not allowed to go near the edge). So they ask "Smitty" to throw it, without even fully explaining the situation. Right when the stone reaches the ravine, it hits a passing bird and drops straight down to the perfect spot.
  • Homestuck:
    • Vriska Serket claims to have "all of the luck", particularly because she's able to steal luck from other people at will.
    • Then there's Clover of the Felt, whose luck makes it so that almost nothing can harm him. The one thing thought to have put him downnote  is implied later to possibly not have killed him. However, it's possible to subdue him with more mundane means, such as bopping him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
    • Hearts Boxcars is a subversion. He always rolls boxcars...but he's also the first Dersite agent to die in every timeline. Usually by decapitation. Even Clubs Deuce, who thinks stuffing his hat with C4 is a brilliant strategy, generally lives longer.
  • One-Punch Man: King, one of the strongest, if not the strongest hero in existence, has this as a power. Or rather, his only power. He's nothing but a frequently terrified man who finds himself being victimized by all kinds of insanely destructive threats, and yet, they keep dying before harming him and he gets all the credit for killing them. Even when it looks like the jig is finally up, events conspire to make sure he's still one of the most feared and well-respected heroes in the Association.
  • Xykon the lich of The Order of the Stick has a few instances of this, such as when he and Redcloak (who was carrying his phylactery) were inadvertently saved from death by the actions of Miko Miyazaki, which also ended the Battle of Azure City in their favour. A more recent (half) example (in a strip actually titled "Lucky Breaks") his phylactery just misses the hole into the Snarl's prison, although it still falls into a sewer which will carry it somewhere difficult for Xykon to recover it from.
  • Romantically Apocalyptic: Pretty much the only reason (aside from Sniper's vigilance) that Zee Captain is still alive.
  • In Spinnerette, this is an explicit superpower of Benjamin Franklin. So long as he's in a future the existence of which depends on his surviving to return to the past, anything that might harm his person will miss him and every strike will be a lucky perfect hit.
  • In Yokoka's Quest, Yokoka and Grace are shown to have high Luck on their stats pages.

    Websites 
  • One of the many Chuck Norris Facts sees Chuck Norris doing everything that could be considered an omen of bad luck, like breaking a mirror over the head of a black cat while standing under a ladder on a Friday 13th. The next morning, Chuck won the lottery.

    Web Original 
  • Minic, a minor character in Everybody Loves Large Chests, has an abnormally high Luck stat, due in part to an exploit: whenever something particularly lucky happens to it, it gains a point in Luck, and because it's so lucky, that sort of thing keeps happening. Most people have a Luck of, say, 20, if they have it at all. After hundreds of years of this, its Luck stat is in the tens of thousands. This also makes it one of the favored parties of the Goddess of Uncertainty.
  • Less Than Three Comics: Pixel and Rabbit both have luck-altering powers.
  • Renard of Oktober is basically this trope condensed into a physical form, and he knows it. You should ask him to do a card trick for you.
  • Orion's Arm has a relatively realistic take on this with the Luckies, people who've been modified to be good at spotting and exploiting opportunities, causing them to appear lucky.
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-181 is lucky to a supernatural degree. However, one of the researchers discovered that he's also The Jinx (as casualty rates at the research site increased by a triple-digit percentage since he was contained) and placed him in solitary confinement.
    • SCP-503 is Unluckily Lucky as he's inclined towards "short-term good fortune and long-term misfortune." His entire family was killed in a car crash when he was a child except for him, he was divorced once and widowed twice and had ten (now deceased) children, and survived 9/11 as well as several suicide attempts. His second-to-last one alerted the Foundation, as he survived a point-blank shotgun blast that only took his lower jaw. When a Foundation researcher tests his luck, they experience sixty consecutive misfires with 17 different firearms pointed at his head and he survives a game of Russian Roulette with one empty chamber (aimed at his chest) after the bullet passes through his heart without piercing any chambers.
  • Spooky Month: Skid and Pump keep finding themselves into dangerous situations or against dangerous people, yet always find a way out of it, sometimes even befriending them along the way.
    • They're spared a kidnapping by the Monster Clown who offers them an unintelligible joke instead, and are outright on obliviously friendly terms with Frank the neighborhood kidnapper, who even gives the two a ride to the mall out of good will.
    • A man in the spooky mansion trapped and cornered the boys with malicious, probably perverted intent only for them to be inadvertently saved by a dwelling Eldritch Abomination snatching them with its tentacles and scaring the creep off.
    • The Eyes of the Universe outright planned something terrible to do with the children before it got excited to learn it's Spooky Month, and became their new friend.
    • Moloch puts up with the kids locking him in an attic for two years, only breaking out when he possesses a human body with intent to murder them, but ends up having a lapse in judgement and accidentally kills himself.
    • Dexter has Lila and the kids cornered in the attic, only for the mannequin to fall on him, giving them time to get away.
  • The "probability Warpers" of the Whateley Universe have this. Currently, there are so many of them at Whateley Academy that the administration has problems spreading them out among different dorms (because Bad Things — or at least very strange things — can happen when two or more of them get into close proximity, as their fields can heterodyne in odd ways). Kismet also has magical powers. Hazard also has some kind of precognitive gift. Clover is trying to become a powerful wizard too. Then there's Murphy whose luck is usually bad.

    Web Videos 
  • Chuggaaconroy has repeatedly proven to be stupidly lucky when it comes to video games:
    • In his LP of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, he found three Golden Beanies and killed them all before they could run away.
    • He had decided ahead of time to include a Koffing/Weezing as part of his Pokémon Crystal team, and the very first catchable Koffing he encountered was shiny.note 
    • While attempting to catch Groudon in his Pokémon Emerald playthrough, he decided to use a Nest Ball, a Poké Ball that is more effective on lower-levelled Pokémon, while Groudon was at Lvl. 70, and almost at full health. The catch was successful.note 
    • In his replay of EarthBound, he turned out to be very fortunate indeed with obtaining 1/128 items from enemy encounters, including a Sudden Guts Pill from a Musica in the Fourside Department Store, (almost immediately after discussing the odds of this happening), the Sword of Kings from a Starman Super in the Stonehenge Base (on his sixteenth attempt; almost right after explaining that he would likely need to continuously reset for it in order to ensure he doesn't get too overlevelled from fighting them), and two Magic Fry Pans in a row from Chompasauri in the Lost Underworld.
    • As part of The Runaway Guys, who could forget the time he won Bowser's Magma Mountain with a Chance Time and a single leading coin?
    • A ridiculously convoluted example occurs when he played Boo's Haunted Bash with MasaeAnela, but it is sensible to say that Chugga's own brand of luck is what sealed his victory. Click the note for details. note 
    • There's an exchange during a Mario Party session on The Runaway Guys that sums it up well:
      Emile: Well, it's still only a 40% chance of me actually doing it.
      Jon: Yeah, but it's you!
      (Chugga immediately gets the roll he was hoping for).note 
    • For some reason, Shulk and Pyra managed to get into Super Smash Bros. each time Chugga did an LP on their respective games, much to his lampshaded bewilderment.
    • During his LP of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, he goes into detail about how much his luck has been with him ever since he was a child.
      "I've had a reputation for being lucky in every group of friends I have ever had. Where, when I was really, really little, I had a reputation among my immediate family for being very lucky, where I was winning raffles all the time, I was getting prizes in contests, I would do things that other people would do, and I would get a prize every time when no one else would. And then, among my friends, I again got a reputation for being lucky. I moved coast-to-coast, and among that group of friends that I made in that other town, though I didn't have that many friends growing up, I still had a reputation for being lucky among them; that included some online friends, as well. And then... now that I'm, like, you know, making videos on the internet, I again have a reputation for being very lucky, and my mom thinks it's the funniest thing in the world because she was saying it years before everyone else was."
    • Heck, his luck was with him even before he was a child. His birth weight was 7 pounds, 7.7 ounces, meaning he was literally born lucky.
  • Counter Monkey: Noah "The Spoony One" Antwiler is ridiculously lucky when it comes to dice roll in tabletop RPG, which will both come up in his vlogs a good bit and his role-playing campaigns. Between this and his reluctance to curb the difficulty, it gives him a bit of a reputation as a "killer dungeon master".
  • On that note, Spoony's amazing luck was very apparent in the 2012 D20 Live event. His luck rubbed off on other players, and both the 2012 and 2013 campaigns ended with all players surviving, with little to no injury... leading dungeon master Big Mike to use the Tomb of Horrors module for 2014.
  • Dimension 20: Ally Beardsley. For some reason, nearly every season they're in, they'll manage to hit a natural 20 at a very opportune story moment.
    • Fantasy High: Asked "if I hit a natural 20 right now, can I be alive again?" during the final battle the party was badly losing. They then did exactly that, resulting in the creation of a new god and the tide of the battle turning.
    • The Unsleeping City: Rolled a natural 20 on an insight check to see the American Dream's true form in the final fight, allowing the party to kill it.
    • Fantasy High Live!: A single critical religion check to find the true nature of the Nightmare King results in Kristen resurrecting a dead god, then resurrecting herself, in the process making herself a saint.
    • The Unsleeping City Chapter II: Pete directly confronts an unknown entity in its own realm, shocking the DM and uprooting the whole campaign. He only made it out alive because of a critical saving throw.
      Brennan: Ally, I'm gonna be real with you. If you had rolled a 19, you'd be fuckin' dead.
  • Mario Party TV has Mr. Doom — or as he's more commonly known, "Mr. Freaking Stinking Cheating DOOM!" While he's pretty good at Mario Party, for some reason, the games' Random Number Gods seem to smile upon him far more than any of the other players. Due to this, he's seen as the main villain of the Let's Play group — and has plenty of victories under his belt.
  • Party Crashers:
    • In Mario Party, Nick has ridiculous luck with Hidden Blocks, especially ones with Stars, in which he calls "Skill Blocks". It got to a point where in "Mario Party but we can't be TOXIC", he outright planned and correctly predicted where a Hidden Block would be before he landed on it. And if he is currently in 3rd or 4th, he will almost always gets the pity reward during the last 5 turns intermission, even if he's 2 Stars ahead of someone who has 0 for instance. Just to rub salt into the wound, he argues that he's just skilled, not lucky.
    • The others often joke that nothing bad ever happens to Brent. Whenever something bad does happen to him, one of them will joke that this is the first time it has happened. Brent on the other hand disagrees with them, even making a compilation of his own misfortunes in response.

    Western Animation 
  • Archer. This is lampshaded when Ray is complaining about how Sterling Archer expects that things will always work out for him, and he responds with "They almost always do!"
  • Princess Azula of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been called "born lucky" explicitly: she’s firebending prodigy and everything comes naturally to her, earning Azula her father's "love" and a place as heir apparent to the throne. But she winds up being a deconstruction just as Zuko being Born Unlucky being a reconstruction; she's so used to success that she cannot cope with failure, and when events start turning against her in the final episodes her sanity begins to nosedive. By a sequel comic, she's convinced that there's a grand conspiracy responsible for her downfall, rather than admit weakness or failure on her part.
  • In Ben 10, Gwen managed to get her hands on a magic amulet that made the holder lucky beyond belief. She made a superhero outfit and did heroic acts just to get back at Ben, who was being a Smug Snake at the time. Basically, she showed up, stuff happened, and crisis averted. Then she destroys it, along with the other 4 in the set, due to the various problems they could cause. note 
  • The title character of Camp Lazlo counts.
    Edward: Darn it, Lazlo, why are you so lucky?
    Lazlo: Lucky? Me? I don't believe in luck!
    (camera zooms out to reveal it's storming, all except for a sunny spot following Lazlo)
    • The explanation is revealed when Lazlo trades his luck with Samson and has them later see SMITS (Scout Master In The Sky) when Lazlo wants his luck back while Samson wants to know why he is unlucky. Turns out all Bean Scouts roll a slot machine to select their luck at birth. Samson ending up going overboard on the machine and ending up making it so Lazlo would get Born Lucky. SMITS restores Lazlo's luck and gives Samson gets a second shot at it. He manages to give himself the same level of luck as Lazlo... but of course, he tries to go further still and this ends up reducing him back to a Butt-Monkey.
  • In the animated series, Class of the Titans, the phenomenal luck of one of the main characters, Neil, allows him to win everything from battles against mythical creatures to coin tosses. This is especially useful for him since, unlike the other Titans who are descended from ancient Greek heroes and possess incredible fighting abilities, Neil is descended from Narcissus and only has his ancestor's good looks and vain personality.
  • Gladstone Gander, listed and pictured above, makes a guest-starring appearance in an episode of DuckTales (1987), where his luck is actually weaponized by Magica De Spell in order to bypass Scrooge's security system. Despite being hypnotized into stealing it he is still cursed due to using his luck for evil and is instead saddled with bad luck. Naturally, but the end of the episode he gets his luck back and refuses to learn his Aesop about relying on luck for everything.
    • In its reboot, Gladstone is a recurring character and more like his comic book counterpart, completely reveling in his luck while lazily and selfishly breezing through life. This unsurprisingly leads to Donald disliking him for obvious reasons and Scrooge likewise being annoyed by his laziness. He's not completely safe from getting out of trouble, however, as his luck is why he became a prisoner of a spirit who feeds on good luck in his debut episode. As with the comics, Gladstone is normally pitted against Donald in competitions, usually being a battle between his own crazy luck and Donald's sheer determination. When his luck gets stolen by the Phantom Blot in "The Phantom and the Sorceress!", he has no clue on how to fend for himself and becomes just as much of a Butt-Monkey as Donald, if not more so.
  • In The Fairly Oddparents, the Turners' next-door neighbors the Dinklebergs show signs of this. For example, the moment the Turners buy their current house, the one next to it goes on sale, note  which the Dinklebergs buy for less money, even though it's bigger and fancier.
  • Follow the Sun: The pickle plate, which receives nothing more than having their film slide briefly flipped upside down and the addition of a caption reading "SEXATIONAL". And no, this was not because the snow cones understood that the pickles were non-sentient and therefore inherently innocent of any "wrongdoing"; an equally non-sentient hamburger was spoiled to the point of having mushroom fungus begin growing out of it.
  • In the Futurama episode "The Luck of the Fryrish" the seven-leaf clover given to Fry's nephew, also called Philip J. Fry, granted him lifelong luck. "The ever-lucky Fry made his fortune after striking oil in the bathroom of the mansion he had won in a lottery."
  • The short cartoon Jinxy Jenkins & Lucky Lou has the eponymous Lucky Lou. Flowers perk up and slot machines go off and come up jackpots just by her walking past. However, Lou seems to resent how boring her life is thanks to her luck... and then she gets all the excitement she could ever want when she meets Jinxy Jenkins.
  • Kaeloo: Subverted with Quack Quack, whose extremely good luck stems from being the test subject of a science experiment as a baby, rather than naturally being born that way.
  • In Kim Possible, Ron is definitely lucky. It's explained by a combination of the Ron factor and the Mystical Monkey Power. His own father, an actuary, calculates that Ron should've been taken out years ago on Kim's missions.
  • An episode of the Animated Adaptation of Krazy Kat revolved around Krazy being this trope. She would win contests she hadn't even entered and miraculously be the 500th customer at an ice cream parlor simply by "strolling along, minding [her] own business". When a jealous Ignatz demands how she does this, she replies "I guess I'm just born lucky."
  • The Road Runner from Looney Tunes. Even gravity seems to help him out, much to Wile E. Coyote’s dismay.
  • An animated short called Lucky Lydia wherein the title character had impossibly, parodically, good luck. Examples include waking up to a rainbow (complete with a pot of gold) every morning, finding several hundred dollars in loose change, and winning a poker game when her opponents had marked the cards. In fact, about the only unfortunate thing that happened to Lydia throughout the short was her friend being unable to come out and play (said friend had gone to the doctor to have her blood dyed red).
  • Although it's never brought up in their own show, the cross-over episode with Milo Murphy's Law reveals this to be the case for Phineas and Ferb. Their mere presence guarantees that things will go right, hence all the beneficial coincidences that repeatedly got the main characters out of trouble.
  • An episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) focused on a small-time crook who had this power... to an extent.
  • One segment on Schoolhouse Rock! featured Lucky Seven Sampson, who "never did a whole day's work in [his] life; still, everything seems turn out right."
  • The She-Ra and the Princesses of Power character Entrapta is notable for getting herself into many normally-fatal situations that she always survives. Being trapped in an enemy fortress? Trespassing in the Evil Overlord's room? Spacewalking with nothing more than a jury-rigged suit and a rope? It all works out for her. Her prodigious skill sometimes plays a part in this, as does the compassion of other people, but mostly it's just incredible luck. It's gotten to the point where she feels only mildly inconvenienced by robotic experiments blowing up in her face, because they never result in more than a few hours of memory loss.
  • The Simpsons: While Homer Simpson has definitely had his moments of misfortune, he still is shown to quite a lucky guy all things considered. This is specifically Played for Drama in the episode “Homer’s Enemy,” where Frank Grimes gets jealous of just how lucky Homer can get. People like him can breeze through life without even trying, while people like Frank have to struggle to even get anywhere in life. In the end, he snaps, which results in his untimely death.
    Frank: If you lived in any other country, you would have starved to death long ago.
    Bart: He’s got you there, dad.
  • Ultimate Book of Spells: The episode "Lucky Gus" featured Gus being extremely lucky and alienating his friends because of that. It turns out Zarlak was behind this good luck wave exactly to keep him apart from his friends. It also counts as Loophole Abuse, since he used the luck spell because the boarding school where the heroes live is protected against Dark Magic and lucky spells aren't dark. Fortunately, Zarlak forgot the spell on and Gus used his luck to save the day.
  • Zig & Sharko: Marina the mermaid is in danger of being eaten by Zig the hyena in every episode, but she's always rescued from being eaten in the nick of time, either by her friend Sharko or a stroke of fate working in her favor to stop the hyena. She is also very popular among the island inhabitants and is given gifts by Sharko and the others, like a sand castle or a free cruise.

    Real Life 
  • Napoléon Bonaparte allegedly had as a hiring policy that whenever he was asked to decide between two people with equal recommendations he'd ask them if they were lucky. Reasoning that if you don't know who to pick, you might as well pick the one who has been lucky thus far.
    • Odd as it may seem, there is some merit to this question. The goal is not to find out who's lucky, but who thinks they're lucky. People who are conscientious, prepared, alert and intelligent are more likely to recognize opportunities and avoid pitfalls. Because these habits are internalized and taken for granted, it's common for capable people to ascribe at least some of their success to good luck. By contrast, people with less capability and ineffective habits frequently blame poor luck for their failures, rather than trying to recognize and correct their own flaws.
  • One of the most infamous people in history: Adolf Hitler. While he was of average intelligence and had incredible skills as an orator, his rise to power and rule over practically all of Europe was by sole virtue of dumb luck. He survived a gas attack in World War I merely because he was lucky. The Great Depression messed up the world's economy just as Germany was starting to recover economically, the Treaty of Versailles produced huge backlash and anger in Germany, and the Jews were a convenient target as anti-Semitism was on the rise. Hitler showed up just as all this was happening with fiery oratory about how Germany deserved better and Jews were to blame, and Germans responded in force. Then, when he was in control, his legitimate threat to the world was ignored because the Soviet Union under Stalin had started to act up, letting Hitler build power with a relatively free hand. When the German army had great difficulty penetrating the superior armor of French tanks, the desperate tactic of turning the anti-air guns on the enemy tanks worked brilliantly, saving the war for Germany and letting them conquer France. When people actually started trying to kill him, he survived far more assassination attempts than anyone really should (not by awareness or the competence of his guards, but solely because he was lucky). One incident involved him deciding, for no apparent reason, to shorten a speech from an hour to eight minutes then leave; the building exploded shortly after he left or when a silent bomb with 30 minutes fuse was put on his plane but the bomb didn't explode because the percussion cap became too cold as the parcel was carried in the unheated cargo hold. The "Valkyrie" attack plan would have worked, but the bomb was moved one foot behind a table leg just before it went off. Historians are actually aware of this, and have coined the term "Devil's Luck" to describe Hitler. Eventually, his luck ran out but even then, he ended up dying by his own hand. All of those lucky escapes just fed into Hitler's belief that he was The Chosen One, feeling that obviously he kept surviving because he had a greater purpose to fulfill.
  • Timothy Dexter, who became wealthy after marrying a wealthy widow, was persuaded by his friends to invest his wealth into all sorts of ridiculously dumb things. When Dexter sent mittens and warming plates to the West Indies, the mittens were bought by Asian traders next headed to Siberia and the warming plates were sold as ladles to the molasses industry. When Dexter shipped coal to Newcastle (the British capital for coal mining at the time), it arrived during a strike and was bought quickly for a great price. When he played the stock market by buying stocks at random, all of them went up. When he wrote a book called "A Pickle For The Nowing Ones" — a travesty of literature — it sold very well and is a popular collectors item today. To give an idea as to just how blindly lucky he was, he's the only example for The Fool under Real Life.
    • He actually made it into The Book Of Lists for shipping coal to Newcastle (along with such others as selling oil products, specifically lighter fluid, which was too small a market to bother building a refinery locally to produce, to Saudi Arabia). Every one of the entries on the list was something that's generally used as an example of a stupid thing to ship to a particular place.
  • A man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. He was injured and spent the night there before returning to his hometown. Which was Nagasaki. He survived again and lived to the ripe old age of 93. If that's not simultaneously the worst and best luck in the world, then what is?
    • Even more than that, Yamaguchi returned to Nagasaki still significantly injured, so he went to see a doctor. The doctor asked him how he had been injured, and as Yamaguchi was explaining the vaporization of Hiroshima, the second bomb dropped. In the middle of his explanation. That's remarkable coincidence.
    • Other sources say that he was in the office of his supervisor, explaining what he'd experienced in Hiroshima. The disbelieving supervisor supposedly told him in exasperation, "You're an engineer. Think about it! How could just one bomb destroy a whole city?" just as the Fat Man exploded.
    • As a result of being one of very few people to survive the only two offensive atomic bombings in history and the longest-lived of them, he became an extremely vocal opponent to nuclear weapons, and his voice was respected in Japan (which, to this day, refuses nuclear derivatives — although nuclear power plants are just fine).
  • George Washington was not the great general people like to remember him as, at least not in his early career. Rather, he seemed to have the closest thing somebody in real life could get to Plot Armor. His early career was noted for a series of catastrophic military failures that he always managed to survive by pure luck. In the Battle of Monongahela during the French and Indian War, four musket balls passed through his cloak without hitting him. His reputation as impossible to kill was such that as soon as they realized who they were shooting at, they aimed for his horse instead. It worked. Twice.
  • Croatian music teacher Frane Selak is often referred to as the luckiest man on earth. He’s been in a train wreck (it fell into a ravine, Selak swan into safety, all other 17 passengers died), an airplane crash (the door suddenly opened, he was blown out and landed unscathed in a haystack), a bus crash, his car blew up a few times, he was hit by a city bus, and his car was forced off a cliff by a truck. In 2003, he won $1,000,000 dollars in the Croatian lottery (although not on his first try, as many people rumor, he has been playing for some years).
  • During World War II, Jon Pertwee served in the Royal Navy. The ship he was initially assigned to was HMS Hood. He transferred off for officer training right before the ship left for her fatal encounter with the German battleship Bismarck, of which only three British sailors survived.
  • Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga (whose Historical Villain Upgrades you can enjoy in dozens of anime, videogames, and Jidaigeki) was a tactician and strategist of impressive skill and appalling ruthlessness, but it certainly helped that two of the most powerful lords opposing him (and who were also the best generals in Japan during the era) suddenly dropped dead of mysterious causes just as they were about to enter a full-scale war with Nobunaga.
    • Many Japanese historians debate over whether or not this was sheer luck, given the timing and the fact that Nobunaga had access to men trained in undetectable assassination. This is why historians hate ninja.
  • George W. Bush was born into a wealthy family. His Grandfather was a Senator, his father became President. He was admitted to Yale on a Legacy. He had a long history of poor behavior and alcohol abuse, but nevertheless became Governor of Texas. Then when he ran for President in 2000 he lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than half a million votes. In the Electoral Vote Florida became the deciding state, the state where his Brother Jeb was the Governor. Bush “won” Florida by a total of 537 votes or .009% of the total. There was a lot of dispute about many ballots in Florida, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled to stop any further recounts, two of the justices making that ruling were appointed by Bush’s Father. Even after his Presidency his friendship with the Obamas and criticism of Trump has earned him respect from many who hated his Presidency and has given him a much more favorable public approval rating than what he had when his Presidency ended.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Blessed With Luck, Super Luck

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Timmy tries to Off Jimmy

Timmy hates the new kid Jimmy and tries to have him killed. He gives him Kenny's Parka jacket as a "gift" (since Kenny dies every episode). Jimmy accepts, puts on the jacket, & walks away... all while unknowingly avoiding several deadly accidents, much to Timmy's frustration.

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