Curse Escape Clause

"What's up with all the loopholes? Seriously, was this fairy tale written by a lawyer!?"

— Chester A. Bum on The Princess and the Frog

There is the tendency for every magic spell (usually Curses) to have a condition that negates the effect, frequently involving a True Love's Kiss. Maybe the curser is trying to teach the cursee a lesson, maybe they're making it the most unlikely thing imaginable, or maybe there's something in the magic that requires the escape clause in order to function.

Of course, nobody said achieving the clause has to be easy, and many a tale has focused around finding ways to achieve or exploit the conditions though epic journeys, risky bargains, use of technology, or clever interpretation.

Compare No Man of Woman Born, which is a prophecy that acts as an If/Then Statement. Like that trope, the Curse Escape Clause is usually something ludicrously unlikely (of course, we all know how statistics play out in stories). Playing with the language of the escape clause is common; sometimes the words are twisted around to use puns or less obvious meanings but this is so old that taking it literally has become more common.

Alas, forbidding someone to do something because such abstinence is needed to break the curse tends to be Forbidden Fruit.

Not to be confused with Curse Cut Short. Compere the Either/Or Prophecy.

Warning: By its nature, this is a spoiler trope.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Bloody Cross, all half-bloods are cursed to die by the age of 18, but the curse can be removed by either drinking the blood of a pure demon or finding a powerful enough God's inheritance to remove it.
• In D.N.Angel, the Niwa family possess a genetic curse that affects the oldest male of each generation. The curse causes the host to transform into the phantom thief Dark Mousy, and vice-versa, whenever they feel unrequited love. The only way for the host to be released is for him to find true love, his "Sacred Maiden", and for that true love to love him back, demonstrating that love in some way. However, the "Sacred Maiden" must also learn that the host is sharing his body with Dark and still love him regardless of that.
• Averted in Fruits Basket. Although some of the characters are desperately looking for a way to break the curse (the rest of them having already given up hope for it), there's not the vaguest prophecy to be scrutinized. It's implied The Power of Love formed by forming healthy bonds outside of Akito's toxic influence broke it entirely.
• Fairy Tail:
  • Zeref and Mavis are affected by Ankhseram's Curse, which gives them immortality and the curse to kill everyone around them especially those they care for. However, the "kill everyone" part does have a workaround: If they stop caring about others and kill with impunity. Either way, they're condemned to kill others. It turns out the only reason Mavis' "Instant Death" Radius didn't activate sooner was because she was involved in a war in which she willingly sent her allies to their death in battle to save more innocents.
  • There is one other way to break it — the purpose of the curse is to deny the recipient happiness. When Zeref fell in love with Mavis, his love for her was great enough to bypass the immortality clause of her curse and kill her (mostly) after they kissed, denying them the chance of being together. The reason it didn't do the same to him is because Mavis subconsciously forced herself to not to admit to loving him as much. In fact, the curse is ultimately broken when in the end they both admit they still truly love each despite everything, providing the ultimate contradiction and allowing them both to die.
• Dowman Sayman's Frog Curse is a short story about a girl looking for a way to break the titular curse upon herself via True Love's Kiss. The catch is that she was turned into a poison dart frog, so unprotected contact could potentially kill anyone who tried to kiss her.
• In Hunter × Hunter, powers, called Nen are made stronger by adding a Necessary Drawback or two. Nen abilities are considered very strong, so most Nen-users need to implement an out in order for their curses to work.
  • Genthru, for instance, allows victims to negate his power, Countdown. This is done via a victim making physical contact with him and saying, "I caught the bomber" before they explode.
  • Knuckle Bine's Nen, Chapter Seven Bankruptcy, has a much simpler out: make Knuckle lose consciousness, and the Nen doll and all its effects will go away immediately.
  • Cheetu can conjure an inescapable savannah-like space where his target has to tag him within eight hours, or else... something will happen. Maybe. Because Cheetu is so arrogant that he likes nothing more to show off his Super-Speed, he didn't really come up with a punishment for failure, and the technique merely provides him with an excuse to show off while his target struggles to catch him. Morel catches Cheetu by pretending to sleep for five hours and secretly ensnaring him with smoke, as there was no condition forbidding such things. And to top it off, Cheetu added a clause that stipulates it cannot be used anymore if someone catches him.
• Naruto: Izanami is an incredibly rare and powerful technique from the Uchiha clan that places their target into a "Groundhog Day" Loop in exchange for permanent blindness in one of their eyes. Originally, Izanami was designed to serve as a counter to Izanagi, which had the power to overwrite undesirable outcomes but came to be overused by clan members who fought each other over mutually exclusive outcomes. The only way to escape Izanami is to consciously realize that destiny cannot be changed so easily and accept the original, unaltered outcome. When Itachi uses it against Kabuto, the latter is trapped for countless loops over the course of a single night, only finally breaking free when he gives up on his mad quest for more power and admits to himself that he wishes to return to the orphanage where he grew up. When he rejoins the ongoing battle against a revived Madara, he reveals to Orochimaru and the rest of Taka that Itachi helped him see things more clearly, and that he wishes to repay him by saving Sasuke's life.
• In Ranma ½, Shampoo is captured by Maomolin (a giant ghost cat) to be its bride. Shampoo easily beats him up and tries to leave, however a curse is already put on her. With more beating up and a threat of her commiting suicide, she manages to force it to create a way to break the curse: a kiss from her true love, specifically with Ranma in mind. Later when Mousse and Akane learn about this they are not happy about it.

Comic Books

• One XXXenophile story had a genie and his mortal lover, who (before the story began) had gained her freedom when her oppressor changed her name, thus qualifying her for three additional standard wishes. She wants to set the genie free, but can only do so by making a wish he wants to grant, but cannot. She wishes for him to make love to her until he's exhausted, which he does. Then she wishes for him...to do it again. Which he's too tired to do, thus freeing him (he promises to make good on it once he's rested up, though). Another story featured the warrior Blue Opal who, in a homage to Red Sonja, was prohibited from indulging sexually unless defeated in combat first. A traveler tries to take her mind off things by teaching her a strategy game...and upon winning the first time, accidentally breaks the prohibition. Turns out the game was called, in the traveler's native language, "Combat"...
• The Incredible Hulk: In issue #298-300, the Hulk had reverted to a mindless brute and was sent to "the Crossroads" by Doctor Strange. From this nexus he could go to almost any world (except straight back to Earth), with the caveat that, if he were truly unhappy in a given world, he would be sent back to the Crossroads to choose again.
• During the early 2000s restart of The Defenders, Doctor Strange, Namor, Silver Surfer and the Hulk were cursed by Gaea to always unite whenever there was a threat to the Earth. They solved that problem by taking over the Earth and waiting until the curse was lifted.
• Chakan: The Forever Man won immortality in combat with Death. But it didn't come with eternal youth, and now he doesn't want it anymore — so Death tells him he'll undo it if he destroys all evil. After spending an ungodly amount of time destroying all evil on Earth, Death clarifies that he meant all evil in the universe. Including all those planets out there in space. So now Chakan waits for humanity to develop interstellar travel...
• In the Spider-Man series, Kraven the Hunter was resurrected with immortality with the caveat that either he kills Spider-Man or Spider-Man kills him to free him from this immortality. During Hunted, he figures out a loophole that gets him freed: he becomes "the Spider" and faces off against his "son", the last surviving clone of himself, and allows his son to kill him.
• Marvel 2099's 2019 storyline included a future version of Conan the Barbarian. Morgan Le Fay cursed him so he would live "until the sun burns the Earth under his feet" and she would be in his head until then, attempting to steal control of his body. Eventually he took an old Nova Corps spaceship, flew it into the sun, and stood on some dirt which promptly burned. Mortal and with Morgan exorcised, Conan took a Nova helmet and flew away.

Fairy Tales & Mythology

• In general, expect either the victims of fairy-tale curses, or a random guardian spirit, to know the precise details of the loophole with no explanation given.
• In Brazilian Folklore, Cobra Norato was the son of a woman and a supernatural snake. To become human he required someone to pour three drops of breast milk inside his mouth and tap his head with iron while he sleeps. The problem is that everyone was afraid of him, being a snake and all, until he befriends a soldier who does the ritual and he becomes human.
  • Another story tells of a monster called Cabeça-de-Cuia (Gourd-Head). He was a man who killed his mother accidentally and was cursed to become a giant-headed monster haunting the rivers. To break his curse he must kill and eat seven young women named Maria (though according to the tale he generally kills them first and asks names later, so no one is safe).
• Celtic Mythology:
  • One Celtic myth had the hero under a geas that he should not see his love, neither in day or by night, neither on foot nor mounted, neither clothed or naked. He visited her at twilight, wrapped in a fishing net, with one leg on a mule.
  • A myth in Mabinogion uses a similar geas for Lleu Llaw Gyffes, though in his case he couldn't be killed in day or night, on foot or on a horse, clothed or naked, and on land or water. And the weapon had to be a special spear worked on every Sunday for a year. His treacherous wife tells her lover this, and somehow gets Lleu to take a bath at twilight under a roof but with no walls around the tub, and get off it onto a pig, while wrapped in a net. He gets hit by the spear, but ends up surviving and returning over a year later for revenge.
• Another myth had a fairy cursed to remain as a human because the guy who’d captured her said her name. If she was ever hit by something made of iron, she would return to her own people forever. Sadly, by that point, she has genuinely fallen in love with the man and had children with him, so the event is a Tear Jerker for all involved.
• Sleeping Beauty is cursed to die on her Dangerous 16th Birthday until another fairy turned it to merely sleeping a century in many variants. In others, she's victim of a prophecy.
• In "Beauty and the Beast,'' the Beast is actually a transformed prince, and will only turn back if "Beauty" agrees to marry him, which is why he proposes every day.
• In "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", the hero was cursed into a white bear by day by his Wicked Stepmother. If the heroine had only not looked at him for a year by night...
  • Other tales of this type include "The Brown Bear of Norway", "The Hoodie Crow", "The Iron Stove", "The White Wolf", "The Enchanted Pig", and "The Black Bull of Norroway".
  • East, the retelling of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" keeps the white bear's curse and plays with one for the heroine Rose, who as her mother's north-born child is cursed to die "buried in an avalanche of ice and snow." Apparently, she survives "due to the mitigating factor of being in proximity to a talking white bear." To be fair, it's likely that only Rose's extremely superstitious mother believes this.
• The froggy heroes of "The Queen Who Sought a Drink From A Certain Well" and "The Well of the World's End" was cursed into that shape. He had to have the heroine obey him for a whole night and then cut his head off to free him.
• In "Snow-White-Fire-Red",
  • the prince is cursed as a small boy to be unable to marry anyone but the heroine, so he tracks her down.
  • the ogress curses the hero to forget the heroine as soon as his mother kisses him. However, when she sends a magical dove to recite her story, it jogs his memory loss.
  • In "The Dove", any kiss whatever makes him forget the heroine, but she cures it the same way.
• In "The Six Swans", the heroine must not speak for six years and make shirts out of star-flowers to free them, and nearly gets burned as a witch for her strange behavior.
  • In "The Twelve Wild Ducks", their sister must also keep silent and make shirts out of thistledown.
• In the classic fairy tale The Gold Mountain a princess is cursed to turn into a snake and be alone, until someone spends three nights in the castle, as a gang of men visit each midnight and do greater and greater violence to him, unto death, without fleeing or fighting back or crying out. Fortunately at this point she'll turn back to human and can use some magic water to resurrect him.
• In "The Seven Ravens", the sister has to track them down.
• In the Old Norse "Tale of Norna-Gest", an angry norn curses the baby Gest to live no longer than a certain candle. A friendly norn extinguishes the candle, and Gest becomes immortal, so long as the candle is kept safe.
  • A similar tale exists in Greek Myth - Meleager was fated to die when a particular log on the fire was burned up, but his mother overheard the fates and rescued it. However when Meleager killed his uncles over their treatment of the huntress Atalanta (whom he had a one-sided crush on), his mother in anger threw the log into a fire, and Meleager died suddenly.
• In "Sorli's Tale", Odin puts a spell on the fighting kings Hedin and Hogni and their warriors that makes them come to life again as often as they are killed, so that their battle will last forever. Only if a Christian warrior kills the combatants they will stay dead, and that is the only way to free them from fighting and dying again every day.
• Iron Hans: At the very end of the story, Iron Hans suddenly shows up at the prince's wedding as a human king, and announces that the prince broke the curse on him. A very strange case of this: Iron Hans being human hadn't been foreshadowed at all, nor do we get an explanation of what the prince did to turn him back.
• When the Vain Sorceress turns Princess Margaret into The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh, she specifies that Margaret will never be herself again "until Childe Wynd, the King's own son, comes to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee".

Fanfics

• In Long Road to Friendship, Sunset Shimmer is cursed by the Elements of Harmony to always tell the truth, and to do whatever's asked of her if she's asked politely. Also, as Sunset later finds out, she can't tell anyone about the curse, even if she wants to. The Elements say the curse will be broken once Sunset learns to trust people and be trusted in return, which Sunset does once she unites Canterlot High School at the Winter Ball.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Thousand Year Door:
  • The Three Heroes defeat the Shadow Queen and use a curse to prevent her from leaving the Palace of Shadow. However, she eventually discovers that should she or anyone working for her (whether the 'anyone' in question wants to or not) defeats the three heirs of the heroes in a fair contest, the curse will be broken. However, should a heir of the Three Heroes defeat her, the Queen will die.
  • As punishment for trying to steal from her, the Shadow Queen cursed the pirate Cortez to guard his treasure hoard as a ghost forever. The curse can only be broken if someone can defeat him in a fight or a game of skill like Duel Monsters. If he holds back or throws the contest, it doesn't count.
• Facing the Future Series:
  • In "Royal Occupation", Tucker ends up transformed into a frog by Aragon. Being Genre Savvy to fairy tales, he think he can return to normal if he's kissed by a maiden. He turns to be right when he shares an Accidental Kiss with Jazz.
  • In "What She Wants", it's revealed that Desiree's compulsion to grant any wish she hears was due to a spell being placed on her in life by an ifrit. The only way to break it is if she finds her One True Love, who will reveal themselves only when they do something that nobody else has done before (and she can't tell anyone what that is in case someone tries to fake it). Believe it or not, her "true love" is Sydney Poindexter, who asks her what she wants rather than just making wishes for himself.
• In the Angel/Dark Angel crossover "Darkest Angel", it is revealed that, just as Angel's curse had a clause that would cause him to lose his soul, there was another loophole that would make his soul permanent; he would lose his soul if he experienced a moment of selfish happiness, but would keep his soul if he fed on the blood of the purest innocent, offered freely. While Willow expresses surprise that the loopholes were that way around, they speculate that the second clause was triggered when Max fed Angel her blood, as her potent healing abilities mean that her blood is comparable to the blood of an unborn baby, due to such factors as her potent stem cells.
• Dangerverse:
  • While true curses cannot be removed with normal countermagic and never wear off their initial target (unless programmed to do so), there are still two possible escape clauses. Non-lethal curses can be removed by transferring them to a new target that meets the original criteria: this removes the curse from the original target and it slowly wears off the substitute. Lethal curses cannot be transferred, but they can be turned by willing sacrifice, causing them to return to their caster in all their strength.
  • In this setting, lycanthropy originated as a curse with four parts: that the victim should transform into the likeness of a wolf at every full moon, that when so transferred they will have the mind of a rabid beast, that they will be outcast and friendless through all their days, and that the cursed are made sterile. Three of these pillars can be broken (using magic to retain your mind and regain your fertility, and building friendships with those around you), and by doing this the curse breaks, giving the werewolf full control over their shapeshifting and freeing them from the madness.
  • In the final battle, Neville uses the Hufflepuff bloodline magic to imprison Bellatrix in a tree grown from her wand, keeping her alive as long as the tree lives. If she ever comes to understand that what she did was wrong and feels even a moment of true remorse for her deeds, the tree will split open and she will be free to go.
• A few fanfics have come up with loopholes around the memory spell that erased all knowledge of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home;
  • In "Morgan Stark Remembers", while Strange’s spell erased all memory of Peter Parker, since Morgan has always thought of Peter as her brother, she thinks his name is ‘Peter Parker Stark’ and thus never forgot him in the first place.
  • In "Spiderman: A Way Back Home", Bruce Banner is revealed to still remember Peter; when he learns about the spell, he speculates that the Hulk is the one who remembered Peter given his other self's unconventional nature.
  • In "The world kept you like a secret, but I kept you like an oath", Tony was left in a coma after using the Infinity Stones to kill Thanos rather than dying, but by sheer coincidence his heart stopped for just the couple of minutes when Strange was casting the spell to erase Peter from the world's collective memory, with the result that Tony still remembers Peter when he wakes up from his coma a few days later (others start to regain their memory of him after meeting Peter 'again').
  • In "Long Story Short (It Was A Bad Time) Or AIs Don't Forget", Tony's AIs still remember Peter (likely because they aren't the kind of intelligence that the original spell was ever designed to affect), which leads to Karen alerting FRIDAY when Peter is injured, FRIDAY thus alerting a still-living Tony to Peter's condition so that he can help. Those close to Peter subsequently regain their memories of him when reminded of a traumatic event involving him, although the epilogue reveals that Morgan never forgot him; Peter and Tony speculate that this is because she always calls Peter 'Petey' rather than 'Peter Parker', speculating that the spell essentially didn't realise who 'Petey' was in Morgan's memory.
  • “Study Buddies” has Peter become classmates with America Chavez, which leads to her re-introducing him to Doctor Strange after he reveals what happened. When talking with Peter, Strange regains his memories as he and Peter echo a conversation they had before the spell was cast, prompting Strange to speculate that the complexity of the spell required to erase a whole person left a loophole where those with detailed memories of Peter Parker can regain their memories of him if they are reminded of a key past moment together.
• In The Hobbit fanfic I'll Make a Dwarf out of You, Smaug is cursed with a Sleep-Mode Size that will only be broken once he performs a genuinely unselfish act. He decides to help Bilbo pose as a dwarf (It Makes Sense in Context), but because he's only doing it to break the curse, and not because he genuinely wants to, it obviously doesn't count as an unselfish act. It's only when he chooses to try and defend Bilbo from Azog - despite being badly injured - instead of fleeing that he returns to his normal size.
• Invoked in the Contractually Obligated Chaos series. The Fairy Godfather explains that the magic which prevents Beetlejuice from saying his own name is, in fact, not a curse as he had believed - the fact that there is no Curse Escape Clause is proof.
• In The Lost Kingdom, Trick essentially speculates that this is how Morgana is manifesting fae heritage despite Trick having taken the power of her mother Vivienne; looking over the spell he used on Vivienne, Trick essentially took away Vivienne's powers and natural advantages as a fae, but he only made her like a human rather than actually turning her into a human.
• Three in With Strings Attached (and probably more, since curses seem pretty common there):
  • The curse on Lyndess keeping her in Ketafa could only be overcome if she could cross the ocean without using any sort of vessel or teleportation. She was hoping to build up enough charge in her teleport plaques to overcome the proscription and send her over. However, she decided she had a better chance to escape by porting the four to Baravada, asking them to find her friends and have them rescue her. She also came up with a wacky scheme to shrink herself and ride John over (he had been mutated into a Winged Humanoid), which would have taken weeks, and turned out not to be feasible because his appetite had increased beyond her ability to keep him sated.
  • Brox's stay-in-Ta'akan curse on Ast'aris could be broken if he died—not as drastic a solution as it sounds, as resurrection is cheap and easy in Baravada. However, he was much too proud to kill himself, which Brox knew very well.
  • The curse on Ketafa that prevented the gods from seeing it could only be removed if the Vasyn, a statue sundered into three pieces that were scattered across dimensions, was restored to the continent. Of course, the four ultimately found themselves doing this. However, subverted in that there really was no curse on Ketafa; the gods merely told everyone there was so they didn't have to pay attention to the place. They were, however, delighted when the Vasyn showed up, because they'd been wanting to leave the planet forever but couldn't for legal reasons. The arrival of the Vasyn meant they could transfer the place to the Pyar gods.
• In The Legend of Link: Lucky Number 13, Link escapes an endless cycle of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time runs (where he would win, be sent back to "regain his stolen childhood", and everything would repeat) by instead living 6 of the designated 7 years normally and then defeating Ganondorf a year early. This way, there would be no justification in sending him back to regain anything - he gave it willingly.
  • Possibly subverted in that the goddesses had full control of the situation and could have sent him back anyway, and chose not to because they figured he was sufficiently prepared to face his father.
• Seventh Horcrux establishes that truly powerful curses, such as the canonical one on the Hogwarts Defense professorship, require an escape clause to work correctly. Voldemort, still hoping to get the job one day, picked the escape clause of the position being filled by someone at least as well-suited as Voldemort himself. He's comfortable in his first impression that Quirrell clearly doesn't qualify, but (never catching on that he's a massive fraud) is genuinely worried that Lockhart might. In the end, though, the curse breaks when Voldemort himself takes the position, as he always intended it to.
• In moral of the story (Nyame), after Laurel commits suicide and is brought back to life by the Lazarus Pit, others note that the Pit usually drives the resurrected into a feral anger unless they kill the person who killed them. Laurel and others privately speculate that Laurel likely never had to deal with this issue because she killed herself rather than being killed by someone else.
• In Touhou Ibunshu, Eirin bases the spell hiding Eientei on the Five Impossible Request items and their properties, believing that by their very natures it would be impossible for the spell to fail. Cue a bunch of heroines that have gone through their own Character Development matching the requests in a manner Eirin probably would have never imagined and five destroyed legendary items.
• Daphne Greengrass and the Boy Who Lived features Daphne meeting with a curse-breaker to find a cure for the bad luck curse cast on her friend Isaac. Daphne learns that the involved ritual would require Isaac to remain in a potion-induced sleep for two weeks, as the nature of the curse means that any choice Isaac makes would essentially work to preserve the curse- the curse-breaker can’t even make an appointment with him because the curse would ensure that Isaac could only make appointments at times she’s unavailable for- so for the actual curing process Isaac must remain in a state where he cannot make any choices that might interfere.
• A variation features in Spider-Man: Finding Home, which reveals the existence of the White Tiger amulet, originally wielded by the second defender of Wakanda before the amulet became cursed so that it corrupted its wearers and drove them feral. The curse is apparently broken when circumstances force Yelena Belova to wear it to give herself the strength necessary to help Spider-Man lift a collapsing building until Shuri can create a new support, her act of heroism somehow purifying the amulet to the extent that she is not only able to take it off, but the Wakandans allow her to keep it after leaving their country.
• Gaz Dreams of Genie: As we find out at the end of the story, Gaz was cursed to switch lives with Azie after her third wish because she broke the lamp, but could have avoided this fate by making a Selfless Wish. Unfortunately for her, Gaz's default attitude means this was never going to happen.
• Monstrous Compendium Online: Putting an escape clause into a curse makes it significantly easier to cast, and putting in an escape clause that the victim knows about makes it ten times easier on top of that. The Win to Exit challenge was the escape clause; Kayaba told the players about it, but knew they'd never be able to take advantage because the curse would be completed immediately before the win condition activated.
• Harry Is A Dragon, And That's Okay:
  • Up until Voldemort's finale defeat in Chapter 100, this is how Alastor Moody, Dedalus Diggle, and Aberforth Dumbledore all escape the curse on the DADA position. They simply quit a few months/weeks before the end of the term, technically fulfilling the curse while at the same time avoiding all the nasty side effects.
  • Likewise, end-of-year replacement teachers such as Sturgis Podmore and Percy Weasley are able to avoid the curse because they weren't the original teacher for the year and because they are only teaching for a couple of weeks/months. However, it's for that reason that they all refuse to come back and teach a full year, for fear of the curse reacting to that accordingly and dealing a nasty fate to them.
  • Subverted in one instance mentioned in Hogwarts: A History, where the staff tried to subvert the curse entirely by renaming DADA to something different. The chosen teacher barely managed to make it past teaching one class before falling down the stairs for over half an hour, via a previously unknown route in the castle, dealing him grievous injuries that took him out for the rest of the year. His replacement is stated to have not been very good, but she at least survived the year.
• Percy Weasley and The Prefect Job That Isn't A Vanity Role: While not a means of removing the curse entirely, the jinx on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts that brings misfortune to anyone who tries to fill it won't activate if the professor doesn't intend to keep the position long-term.

Films — Animated

• In the Disney adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, this is justified in that Merriweather was actually augmenting Maleficent's "die on her Dangerous 16th Birthday" curse. She wasn't strong enough to negate it, but she could provide an out through True Love's Kiss.
  Merriweather: And from this slumber you shall wake, when True Love's Kiss the spell shall break.
• Disney's Beauty and the Beast had the enchantress give the stipulation that if the Beast could learn to love someone selflessly, and have his love returned by the time the petals fall off a magical rose, the spell would be broken. Possibly to teach him a lesson, but her motives aren't revealed.
• Disney's adaptation of Hercules involved a deal made between Hercules and Hades where Hercules would give his powers up for 24 hours in exchange for the safety of his Love Interest Megara. After a fight between Hercules and the Cyclops, a pillar was knocked onto Meg, fatally injuring her. As a result, Hercules' powers were restored.
• In Disney's The Princess and the Frog only the kiss from a princess can break the spell, all others need not apply. They try to break the spell through deliberate Loophole Abuse, too. First Naveen and Tiana try to break the spell by having Naveen kiss Charlotte, who's been crowned Princess of Mardi Gras (a ceremonial title akin to a prom queen), but only until midnight when Mardi Gras is over. When they fail to do so before the end of Mardi Gras, Naveen marries Tiana. Since Naveen is a prince of the kingdom of Maldonia, their marriage automatically makes commoner Tiana a princess. So when Naveen kisses her right after, the spell breaks. Bonus points that neither of them knew that that would happen.
• The spell Queen Grimhilde of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs places on the apple. It stipulates that one who suffers from the sleeping death can be cured only by love's first kiss. Grimhilde dismisses the loophole since Snow White will be taken for dead and Buried Alive. Grimhilde obviously didn't read a lot of fairy tales as a child.
• Frozen (2013): The condition to save Anna from being frozen alive from the inside goes that "Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart." In this case, it was Anna's act of love in saving her sister's life that thawed her heart, not the True Love's Kiss with Hans as Anna and Kristoff thought it was at first. Just as well, as Hans was nobody's True Love.
• The Swan Princess, being a fairly straightforward adaptation of the ballet Swan Lake, maintains similar elements. Odette turns into a swan by day and a human by night, and Rothbart will only lift the curse if she will marry him. The only other method to break it is for someone to publicly pledge a vow of everlasting love to her - but if that pledge is broken, Odette will die. Prince Derek takes up the challenge. And much like the ballet, Rothbart uses magic to send a false Odette to Derek, ensuring he makes the pledge to the wrong person and triggering Odette's death. Fortunately since this is a kid's movie with endless direct to video sequels, they find another escape clause. Derek confesses his love to Odette's body and she revives as a human.
• Shrek:
  • In the first movie, Princess Fiona is cursed from a young age to transform into an ogre at sunset and return to her human form at sunrise. It can only be undone by True Love's Kiss — but when this kiss comes from the titular male ogre, she retains the form that's compatible with him, subverting the usual Beauty Equals Goodness ending.
  • In Shrek Forever After, Rumpelstiltskin's Magically-Binding Contract with Shrek is rendered null and void by... wait for it... a True Love's Kiss. Further played with by noting that Rumpelstiltskin is obligated to provide an escape clause in his contracts, and he's had to resort to alternate forms of trickery to hide it. In Shrek's case, the words are scattered willy-nilly about the page and it requires origami to put it together. There's also a passing mention of the "correctly guess my name" escape clause from the original fairy tale. Apparently, he stopped doing that after it got to the point that everyone knew his name.
• Brave:
  • Aside from the Celestial Deadline of breaking the spell before the second sunrise, there's an actual rhyme whose meaning Merida must puzzle out. "Fate be changed/Look inside/Mend the bond/Torn by pride."
  • Interestingly, in a short film on the DVD, the witch explains more of the backstory for the Big Bad Mor'du and how he was given a similar clause. She made a small cauldron for him, which he could use to gain the strength of ten men as he wanted, or he could instead use it to heal the rift he caused within his family. As you can probably guess, he chose the former, slaughtered his brothers, and then his own men either turned on him or fled in fear because they only saw a beast, not their leader. So unlike Merida, he ended up destroying his kingdom due to his wish to change his fate.
• Hilda and the Mountain King: After spending three long days as a troll, Hilda returns in her human form, after she and the Troll child, who was also subjected to the Changeling spell, are reunited with their true mothers. Although it was discovered completely by accident.
• Turning Red: All of Sun Yee's female descendants acquire a mystical red panda spirit sometime during their teen years, which remains with them for life and gives them the ability to turn into a giant red panda. But the panda can cause a lot of trouble if it's not controlled, so eventually they figured out a way to banish the panda spirit into a talisman, usually a piece of personal jewelry. With the spirit confined, the transformations stop.

Films — Live-Action

• In Countdown, the titular app is eventually revealed to be a curse inflicted by a demon; anyone who downloads the app will die at the time indicated, and will suffer if they attempt to avoid their fate. A priest eventually determines that the entire app and everyone who used it will be defeated if they can prove the app "wrong", either by keeping someone alive beyond the time they were meant to die or killing someone before the app's predicted time of death.
• Ella Enchanted: The Gift of Obedience bestowed upon Ella by her fairy godmother Lucinda forces her to obey every command given to her, and Lucinda will only tell Ella that only she can rid herself of this gift. When Ella has been commanded to kill Prince Charmont in the mirror garden at midnight, she manages to break the gift for good by seeing her reflection in one of the mirrors and demanding herself to no longer be obedient.
• Fantastic Beasts:
  • Yusuf Kama made an Unbreakable Vow to avenge his mother by killing the person Corvus Lestrange IV, her kidnapper and rapist, loved the most, namely his son Corvus Lestrange V, who vanished long ago. If he refuses to uphold it, the Unbreakable Vow will kill him. Thus, when he learns that Credence Barebones might be the long lost Corvus V, Yusuf is compelled to seek him out and kill him. However, it turns out Credence isn't Corvus V, who actually died over two decades ago. Since Yusuf is still alive and well years after discovering this, it's evident that he was freed from his vow after he learned it was no longer possible for him to fulfill the conditions.
  • In Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a key issue is the blood pact Dumbledore and Grindlewald made when they were younger, as its existence prevents either of them from directly acting against each other; even the thought of attacking Grindlewald causes the small amulet containing the pact to try and strangle Dumbledore until he stops thinking about it. However, the pact is eventually destroyed when Grindlewald and Dumbledore indirectly confront each other over the fate of Credence Barebone, in reality Dumbledore's long-unknown nephew Aurelius Dumbledore; Albus and Grindlewald do not attack each other directly, but when Grindlewald attempts to kill Credence for his earlier defiance and Albus acts to protect his nephew, their spells collide and the pact is broken.
• Played with in Frog Story. The magic frog who turns into a woman apparently isn't cursed; she can turn back into a frog at will. But she does need a true love's kiss in order to change into a woman again.
• The lovers of Ladyhawke are cursed to be apart: she is a hawk by day, while he is a wolf by night. When they are reunited in human form during a solar eclipse, before the man who cursed them, the spell is broken.
• Zig-zagged in Maleficent, when the title character curses Aurora, claiming that no force on earth can stop it once it is cast; King Stefan's begging appeals to Maleficent's sense of humor and she includes the True Love's Kiss escape clause. Neither Maleficent nor Stefan believe in true love after Stefan's betrayal, making it a cruel No Man of Woman Born situation in their perspective — though while Love at First Sight turns out to be a wash, Maleficent's own eventual love for Aurora as a surrogate parent is strong enough to overcome the curse.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl has the eponymous curse laid on the gold by the Aztec gods: Any man who removes but a single piece from the chest is cursed for all eternity. The only way to break the curse is to return not only every single gold piece to the chest, but also blood from the one who took it. Merely possessing a piece from the chest is not sufficient to suffer the curse; it only affects those who actually remove the gold themselves. Moreover, the curse can be lifted only by the specific afflicted individuals (or their direct blood descendants, as "Bootstrap" Bill Turner was presumed lost at the bottom of the sea while his son William Turner was available). Both the curse itself and the escape clause are employed strategically by Jack during the final battle.

Literature

• George MacDonald:
  • Little Daylight, a princess is cursed to be nocturnal and have her beauty wax and wane with the moon. When the moon is full, she's very beautiful and looks as young as she is; as it wanes, she gradually loses her beauty and seems to age. The condition of the curse ending is that a prince kiss her without knowing it. (It's broken when a prince meets her or sees her when the moon is full, and then later meets her when the moon is new and (platonically) kisses the "old woman" he sees without knowing it's her.)
  • The Light Princess:
  • A witch curses a baby princess with her Baptismal water (it's a very Christian book) to "lose her gravity" — which means that she's tossed about by the slightest breeze, and that she cannot take anything seriously. The only time she is unaffected is in the water, so the kingdom's finest scientists reason that if she can be made to cry, the spell will be undone.
  • Upon discovering that water makes the princess regain her gravity, the witch creates a second curse that creates a hole in the bottom of the lake near the castle into which the lake water disappears, and prevents any rain from falling across the kingdom. To break this curse, someone must knowingly and of their own free will use their body to plug the hole, remaining in position as the water rises around them until they drown.
• In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, a fairy woman is bound into service until "the moon loses her daughter, if it happens in a week when two Mondays come together". The condition is met by the moon "losing" her daughter (the star) to love, in the same week that Mr. Monday gets married.
• In Shaman of the Undead it's a healthy practice to include an escape clause in your immortal oath if the oath proves impossible to fulfill. You can make an oath without it, but you're doing it at your own risk, and if you fail to fulfill the oath, side effects include annoyed ghosts, lack of sleep and Heroic RRoD.
• These are apparently mandatory on the Discworld: in Sourcery, a dying wizard tries to cheat Death by transferring his essence into his sourcerer (not a typo) son's staff. Death reminds him that, because only he is inescapable, there must be some loophole in the prophecy. The loophole is that the wizard would truly die when his son voluntarily threw away his staff. Which he did when he realized he just wanted to be an eight year old boy, not the most powerful wizard on the Disc. The wizard had originally tried "till hell froze over," but Death stopped him because he was "not allowed to enlighten [him] on the temperature of the next world."
• In The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, one of the subplots involves a sorcerer who uses pure gold as his power source, but must deliberately put a flaw in each spell. For example, he created a magical prison for the destructive Sandgorgons, the flaw being that if a particular Sandgorgon's name is spoken aloud, it is released until it kills the speaker. He wants Covenant's white gold ring, because being an alloy, it is "flawed" already, and thus can be used to create perfect works.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, setting and foiling these clauses is practically a science (though it would have to be, since The Tradition, ambient magic in the land, causes events to turn out like whichever fairy tale they most resemble). If there isn't an escape clause in the curse The Tradition will put one in. It hates unbreakable curses.
• In Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly, the villainess performs a curse without 'limitations' and summons a dragon which she refuses to banish. The heroine later figures out that she can't banish it, not won't, since the 'limitations' keep the curse alive and give the caster ongoing control over it.
• In "Iron Shadows in the Moon", when a Physical God used Taken for Granite on his son's murderers, for some reason he let them move in the moonlight — which lets them plague people during that time. Fortunately, Olivia deduces this from her dream.
• In James Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon short story "Child of the Gods", Telzey is mentally enslaved by another psionic, with several of her most potent skills locked away. When the man is incapacitated and a monstrously powerful alien is shortly due to arrive to enslave and/or eat them, Telzey breaks free when she realizes that his command to look after his best interests—without him conscious to decide otherwise—would best be served if she had full access to all her abilities and was free of his control so she could use them most effectively.
• Panchatantra: This collection of morality fables contains a particularly devious escape clause for a horrific curse. Whenever a bunch of treasure seekers arrive at the foot of the Himalayas, an ascetic gives them four tablets. The seekers are informed that they will find mineral wealth at the spot when one of the tablets falls and shatters. The first tablet breaks at a copper lode, the second at a silver lode and the third at a gold deposit. If someone is greedy enough to still continue, he is fated to encounter a man in stasis, screaming in pain and bleeding as a wheel spins above his head. The tablet breaks and the wheel transfers to the treasure seeker instead. He is informed that this wheel of agony is intended to be a lesson for the greediest of treasure seekers from Kundera the divine treasurer. Someone punished to endure this wheel is set free only if someone else just as greedy as him finds him - and takes on the punishment instead.
• In Jim C. Hines' The Princess Series, curse loopholes are explained as being about leverage and possibility; a truly unbreakable spell would require an enormous amounts of power but true love is rare enough that it's functionally the same as an unbreakable curse. Which also implies that people only hear about the notable cases — the rare ones that have been broken.
• Shadow Spell by Caro King (from the Seven Sorcerers series) features many of them:
  • Azork - If he ever feels love again, his existence as leader of Cryptmonsters ends.
  • Simeon Dark - if somebody tells him who he is, he will remember everything and become the sorcerer again
  • And Stroodds Complete Immortality also has one...
  • And while never explicitly stated, it's heavily implied that Nin's luck will expire if she ceases to be a Plucky Girl.
• In Vadim Panov's Secret City:
  • The Key of Three Races is an ancient prophecy involving the three oldest races in the known universe - the Asura, the Nav' and the Tat'. As the Nav' have exterminated the Asura and hunted the Tat' down to three individuals, no details are known except that the prophecy must contain some specific trigger condition.
  • The House of Lyud' carries the Harbringer prophecy. While all male Lyuds are incapable of magic, a boy born with magic will change the very nature of the House of Lyud'.
  • The Hyperboreans, upon losing the war against the united forces of Nav', Chud' and Lyud', willingly sealed themselves in pocket dimension known as the Deep Bestiary. Azag-Thot and his three mistresses stayed outside, and their coming into power would release the Hyperboreans. Over the course of the series, a sizable Hyperborean army is released in this fashion, but some stay behind.
  • The mistresses of Azag-Thot could not stay as they were. Their essences were grafted into three human women and are carried by their bloodlines, always skipping two generations and manifesting in girls. The carriers are easily identified, as they perfectly resemble their grand-grandmother, but resemble neither parent. The escape clause is imbibing a dose of the Golden Root extract or an artificial designer drug of the same structure and properties.
  • The Flying Dutchman exists as a ship of the name, cursed to forever attempt traveling around the Cape of Good Hope. The escape clause is actually completing the journey, but the crewmen on board are ageless and impervious to harm as long as they don't decide to quit.
• Bruce Coville:
  • Bruce Coville's Book of... Ghosts:
    • The Pooka is being sought by a ghost who can only pass on, along with the Pooka itself, if he can make a wild boar take off the chains around its neck. Arthur and Cai, whose family crest is that of a wild boar, are the ones whom he's been looking for all this time.
    • Ghost Stories by Lawrence Watt-Evans features an inversion: a ghost of a seafarer who simply could not stop wandering the world, much to the annoyance of his wife. Since she was a witch, she put a curse on him preventing him from leaving home (even after death) until man had walked on the moon and he learned about it. However, he's not in much of a hurry to move on, as he's found a young boy who's eager to hear his stories (and the boy's friend almost spills the beans before he knows that).
  • The Enchanted Files: In Diary of a Mad Brownie / Cursed, the only way for the Cairns family to break the curse laid on their family line is for a male of the McGonagall line to retrieve the Queen of Shadows' lost daughter and return her, not just to the Enchanted Realm but directly to her mother.
  • Goblins in the Castle: Goblins on the Prowl doesn't exactly have a curse, but the Spell of Stonely Toadification, which has a counter-spell. That spell was placed inside Will Smith, a friend of Edrick (the wizard who cast the original Spell of Stonely Toadification), who can only cast it himself if he's willing to do so (he cannot be forced to perform it). It was also designed to pass on to Will's son, and his son in turn, as each of them died, so Will Smith's only living descendent is the only one who can make Edrick human again. He finally succeeds at the end.
  • Magic Shop: In Juliet Dove, Queen of Love, Juliet Dove gets a magic locket stuck around her neck. Because the locket magically causes all men to become obsessed with her and is the prison of Eros, god of love, she really wants to get rid of it. Unfortunately, she can't break the love spell on it until a "mouse roars like a lion" and can't get the locket off without a "mother's touch". The mouse roaring like a lion refers to her overcoming her shyness and improvising a poem in front of an auditorium of people. The mother's touch is fulfilled when Aphrodite, mother of Eros, touches the locket while acknowledging she was wrong to separate him from Psyche.
  • Moongobble and Me:
    • Book 2 features the Weeping Werewolf, who's cursed to transform every night "Until the day the sun shines / In the Forest of Night". It turns out he misheard it — the line is actually "Until the day the son shines". When Edward — the werewolf's son — stands up to the Old Woman of the Forest of Night over her nastiness, it's a shining deed (literally, as he starts glowing as a result of his actions), which breaks the spell.
    • Book 5 has the Old Woman send Moongobble and co. on a quest to find a cure for her curse, which makes her a were-toad. It involves finding the oldest toad in Bogfester Swamp and getting him to spit in a bottle, which is the last ingredient she needs for the cure. In reality, she never expects them to get it — she just sent them on a quest she thought would get them killed.
• Holes: The protagonist, Stanley, is under a family curse because his ancestor Elya Yelnats did not fulfill his promise to carry an old woman named Madame Zeroni up a mountain and sing while she drinks from a stream. At the book's climax, Stanley carries his friend Hector Zeroni up a mountain, where the severely dehydrated pair finally find water after wandering for days in the desert, and as they drink, Stanley absently sings an old family lullaby — a translation of the same song that Elya was meant to have sung to Madame Zeroni. In this case, no one in the family was aware that the curse even had an escape clause, and Stanley also had no idea that Hector was a descendant of the woman who cursed his family; he was simply trying to save his friend's life, and the rest just happened to fall into place.
• The Sweet Valley Twins book The Magic Christmas, the magic of the fairy land the twins travel to requires curse escape clauses—though the caster of the curse can make it as difficult as possible to invoke the escape clause. The initial curse that the twins break to set off the adventure involves two princes who were changed into dolls until two different people could solve a riddle at exactly the same moment. At the end, the heroes change the villain into a doll, keeping him in that form until the twins' friend Lila can come up with a rhyme for "kingdom." The twins tell Lila not to think about it too hard.
• In Pavane in Pearl and Emerald, all curses have an escape clause as a side effect of the magic system. Unfortunately the protagonist doesn't know what the escape clause is for the curse binding the princess.
• In Tales of the Frog Princess, it's actually a set law of magic that all curses need to have one of these. No Impossible Tasks, either; the way to break the curse has to be something that can actually be done, and if the cursed party hasn't achieved it by the time the person who cursed them died, it breaks automatically. Of course, witches and wizards live longer, and fairies live forever, so waiting it out is rarely a good option. None of this means they won't make use of Exact Words and loopholes to make it really difficult, though. (For example, when Olivine cursed her daughter's beau Haywood and turned him into an otter, all the items needed to turn him human again don't technically exist... if you take them at face value. They need "the breath of a dragon green" and there are no green dragons? Turns out, dragons get green in the face when they're sick. And there Ain't No Rule saying she can't add a stipulation that will trigger another curse as soon as hers is broken...)
• The original novel version of The Nutcracker has two of these and they're a great deal more complex than the very simple version in the ballet.
  • In the backstory, Princess Pirlypat was cursed by the Mouse King and Mouse Queen to turn into an ugly nutcracker doll. Drosselmeyer eventually consults an astrologist who divines the solution in the stars - a young man who has never shaved nor worn boots must crack the uncrackable nut Krakatuk between his teeth, present it to the princess with his eyes closed, and take seven steps backward without stumbling...
  • ...Drosselmeyer's nephew takes up this laborious process but gets tripped by the Mouse Queen when taking the seven steps, leaving Pirlypat saved but himself cursed into a Nutcracker instead. Marie ends up breaking it long after her visit to the doll kingdom by vowing to love the Nutcracker if he were real, no matter how ugly he was.
• Thank You for Taking Care of our Enchanted and Haunted Castle: The inhabitants of the castle are cursed to be both immortal and not be able to leave the castle. However, there are two ways to get out of it - one is to guess the correct age of the Fairy Queen, whilst the other (and the one which the previous owners of the castle used) is to invite a guest over, then swap shoes with them and give them the curse instead.
• A rare example of the good guys setting one is found in Fablehaven. The architects who created the magical prison Zzyzx knew it would fall apart and release all of its inhabitants unless one of these was included, so they went for the next best thing and made opening the prison and unleashing the demons a difficult, dangerous, centuries-long process involving dungeon-crawling, the operation of dangerous artifacts with no instruction manuals, finding ways to reach places that aren't supposed to exist, and tracking down immortal guardians who keep the prison sealed just by being alive. And then they went the extra step of preparing a failsafe for when the prison was inevitably opened, allowing the protagonists to re-imprison the demons and make the escape clause for the new Zzyzx even more difficult.
• Oddly Enough: In "The Hardest, Kindest Gift", narrator Geoffroi is able to break the curse on his grandmother Melusine by acting with love and courage to find and give her the item representing her mortality, which was separated from her at the moment of her transformation into a monstrous bat-winged human/snake hybrid. It also breaks the curse binding his great-grandmother Pressina to the mortal world.
• The Lightlark Saga: A prophecy vaguely foretells a way to break the curses; the "original offense" that led to the curses must be re-committed and a "ruling line" must "[come] to an end". Everyone has interpreted this to mean that one of their six rulers (and by extension their subjects) must die to end the curses, though no one has been able to figure out the original offense. Oro believes that it could've been the use of the Heart of Lightlark to cast the curses, which could be seen as an abuse of its power, and hopes that by finding the Heart with Isla's help they could use its power to end the curses. Aurora believes the original offense to be a Sunling and a Wildling falling in love, given she was prompted to cast the curses because her Sunling fiance left her for a Wildling woman, leading her to try and set up Isla and Oro as a couple. Isla finally figures out that the true offense was the betrayal and killing of a friend; Aurora killed her friend for running off with her fiance, while Isla kills Aurora (who had befriended then betrayed her), thus fulfilling both requirements to break the curses.
• Tress of the Emerald Sea: The Sorceress builds an end condition into her curses — but given her sadism, they're usually framed to torment the victim with faint hope, might demand something terrible from the victim, and prevent the victim from revealing them. Not even she can break a curse without satisfying the escape clause, but a skilled mage can revise the clause to something more convenient.
• Unnamed Memory: Curses are a type of magic shaped primarily by intent and the user's wording. This allows the caster to either include or exclude a method for the victim to break the curse.
• World of the Five Gods: In The Curse of Chalion, the Gods can only break the titular curse by acting through a man who willingly lays down his life three times for the House of Chalion. Interestingly, it's eventually shown that this not just an arbitrary condition: the first two deaths are necessary as practice, so that on the third death the sacrifice can set aside his own will and provide an unimpeded channel for divine power.
• In The Mermaid's Daughter, Kathleen is a descendant of Fand, also known as The Little Mermaid. She comes from a long line of women who suffered from severe chronic pain in their feet and tongues and committed suicide in their early twenties. The Hereditary Curse can only be broken when a descendant of Fand uses the knife forged with Fand's sisters' hair to kill the person she loves so that when the blood falls upon her legs, they'll turn into a tail. Kathleen stars in an opera about the Little Mermaid, written by her girlfriend Harry and her father Robin, who change the ending so that the mermaid kills the prince and his bride and returns to the sea. Just before the climactic scene, Kathleen switches out the prop knife for the real knife. She doesn't kill her co-star, but she gets so far into character that he fears for his life. Theater has its own magic that is so powerful that even though no real blood was spilled, Kathleen starts to transform into a mermaid as soon as the curtain drops.

Live-Action TV

• Cleverly applied in Buffy and Angel: Angelus, described as "the most evil vampire on record," is cursed with a human soul, resulting in him having a conscience and suffering guilt for the 150 years of atrocities he had committed. The clever part is that the escape clause is "if he experiences perfect happiness", which in the season it became a plot point is explicitly defined as "one moment when his soul is at peace". Effectively meaning that the curse would break only when it was no longer making him suffer. When Angel has his night with Buffy, the one he loves, in the second season of her show, it's enough to activate the Curse Escape Clause and before Buffy knows it, it's Angelus time.
  • The curse is later deliberately broken when they need to ask Angelus some things Angel doesn't know, by hiring someone to feed him into a magic Lotus-Eater Machine.
  • It's a bit subverted when Wesley tells Angel to stop using the curse as an excuse not to go after a relationship opportunity with an interested woman whom Angel met because she was bitten by a werewolf. After all, as Wes puts it, "Most couples have to settle for acceptable happiness."
  • It's played with when Angel is given euphoric drugs by a starlet wanting to be turned so she can keep her youth and good looks, and the curse is loosened enough to allow Angelus to seemingly take control while he's high. Also, the curse fails to break after Angel has sex with Darla, as this was an act of despair, not love.
• On one episode of Charmed (1998), when Phoebe wishes a genie free, the curse placed on the bottle forces her to take her place. Now stuck as a genie, she can only be set free if someone else wishes her free and switches places with her, which thankfully Richard, not knowing about the curse, does much to his own surprise. In the end this method is used to put things right when used against Jinny, the original genie, who is forced by ghostly posession to wish Richard free, cursing her to be the genie once more.
• Once Upon a Time is all over this trope. The entire town of Storybrooke is cursed with Laser-Guided Amnesia, but Snow White and Prince Charming's daughter was smuggled out and is slated to break that curse Because Destiny Says So.
  • In-universe, True Love's Kiss acts as a universal cure for all manner of curses.
• Married... with Children: To exact Disproportionate Retribution against the blacksmith who insulted her, a witch cursed the village where they lived into never receiving sunlight again. The curse was set to last until the blacksmith and all his male descendants were killed within the village limits. Four hundred years later, the trope was averted when Al Bundy (descendant of the blacksmith) defeated Igor (descendant of the witch) and it ended the curse without fulfilling the conditions set by the witch.
• Being Human (US): Werewolves can lift the curse on themselves by killing the werewolf that first turned them. The catch? It has to be done while in human form. The part where doing so also cures anyone you've infected, on the other hand, is just a hopeful myth.
• On Wynonna Earp, it's believed that the Earp Curse can only be broken if the same Heir manages to kill all 77 revenants before the next one comes of age. We never find out if this is true or not, as ultimately the demon responsible for casting the curse in the first place ends up breaking it himself in order to advance his ultimate agenda.

Pinball

• In Golden Logres, the Green Knight's curse can only be lifted after he is defeated by Sir Gawain.

Tabletop Games

• In the Ravenloft campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, if any character speaks a curse against somebody, they may attract the attention of the Dark Powers that control the setting, which will inflict the curse upon the victim. This is more likely to happen if the curse has an escape clause. Additionally and more prominently, every Darklord of the setting is in very special hell tailor-made to constantly torment them despite their powers. The only known way to break free is to admit that they've done unforgivable deeds and deserve their punishment, but the whole thing is doubly ironic as if they were capable of admitting their mistake, they would never have become Darklords in the first place.
  • The Book of Vile Darkness gives us dying curses, which are spoken by an evil creature as it dies. There are two ways to cure them - one is ninth-level magic, and one is a condition set at the time of casting (such as "Climb the tallest mountain in the world"). These may be completed by someone acting on the cursed's behalf, as long as they do so explicitly to lift the curse (for example, if a peasant didn't know the king was cursed and climbed the tallest mountain in the world, nothing would happen - but if the king's champion did so in his lord's name, the curse would be lifted).
  • In the Forgotten Realms sourcebook "The Fall of Myth Drannor", the elves of Myth Drannor captured daemons (yugoloths) and locked them in an invisible prison, which would only break if a "good-hearted dragon" flew past it. Centuries later, as elven civilization became far less militaristic, a hybrid red dragon, raised by a good person, did just that. Oops...the daemons went on to destroy Myth Drannor in a massive war, at one point being attacked by the furious dragon, when it discovered how they had escaped.
  • The Imprisonment Spell places the victim in an And I Must Scream situation. They can become imprisoned underground, in a Pocket Dimension, a gemstone, etc. The caster can provide a set of requirements for the victim's release. It's also possible to dispel this curse by using Dispel Magic as a 9th-level spell or Wish, but if you do not have access to either of those things, it is probably a better idea to see if you can somehow fulfill the curse's escape clause.
• Exalted: Exalted in 3rd Edition's Essence publication are explicitly immune to the worst effects of curses; no curse has a permanent hold on an Exalt, and they always have enough time to save themselves by figuring out how to break the curse before it reaches its lethal end. Alas, no Exalt can be turned into a lawn chair without a whole quest in the way first.
• Inverted in New World of Darkness game Changeling: The Lost. One power changelings get is the ability to create Pledges — magically binding agreements with a range of possible effects. For instance, a person may agree to do a changeling's laundry in exchange for having a servant show up out of nowhere and work for them free of charge. While low-power pledges can be of the "do this to get that" variety, increasing power requires both parties to stipulate some kind of increasingly-bad punishment for breaking the pledge. Fortunately, they can be made for a set duration.
  • However, it is possible to work around the conditions of a pledge, which is why most people with a brain don't try making deals with the Gentry — they likely know every trick in the book. Similarly, the Gentry have made deals with the very nature of creation, but as a result of such phenomenal cosmic power, they're inflicted with Frailties, things that weaken them or cause them harm. The intro fiction to one book has an abducted mortal realize her captor kept visiting her at twilight, compares it to the situation in the Celtic myth above, and wait for the time to take advantage of an in-between state.
  • Mage: The Awakening plays it straight with conditional durations that can be set for spells by a mage with sufficient power over Fate. It allows a mage to extend the duration of a spell, in return for setting a condition under which the spell will end instantly (the easier the condition, the longer the extension). This is the only way to reach infinite duration by mortal magic, which is the reason this is done. It's explicitly noted that impossible conditions (such as "When the moon falls") cannot be set. It's also subverted with the Curses of the Proximus bloodlines (families of mortals with a magical heritage). If a Proximus family attempts to exploit loopholes in their family Curse, the Curse just alters itself to become worse, while closing off the loophole.
• For game balance reasons this is required for any "permanent" effect in GURPS.
• Pathfinder has the Conditional Curse spell, which must come with a condition that's within the target's power to fulfill within a year and a day, but is harder to break by magic than a normal curse.

Theatre

• In Into the Woods, the witch's spell causing the Baker's family to be barren will be lifted if the Baker and his wife can procure a few select objects. (The objects are not directly related to the curse on the Baker's family: they're actually part of the Escape Clause for a curse that the witch is suffering under, and she promises to take the spell off the Baker if he helps her out.)
  • And why does she need the Baker to get the items for her? One of the stipulations of the clause is that the Witch cannot touch any of the ingredients, which becomes critical when they try to use Rapunzel's "hair as yellow as corn" for the spell. Luckily, cornsilk "hair" works in a pinch.
• In the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Ruddigore, Baronets of Ruddigore are cursed to commit a crime every day or die painfully. The main character outwits the curse by pointing out that not committing his daily crime is the same thing as killing himself, which is in and of itself a crime.
• In the musical Once Upon a Mattress King Sextimus the Silent is mute until "the mouse devours the hawk". This is fulfilled when his son, Prince Dauntless, finally stands up to his domineering mother Queen Aggravain.
• In Damn Yankees, Joe, being a shrewd real estate man, insists on writing an escape clause into his Deal with the Devil: he can walk out of the deal at 9:00 PM on the 25th of September, the last day of the pre-World Series baseball season (Joe originally wanted to make the time limit midnight, but the Devil set it back to nine o'clock because the final game of the season would clearly be over by 12:00). Joe ultimately invokes the escape clause at the last possible second, but is still able to help the Senators win the pennant.
• The ballet Swan Lake is about Princess Odette and her maidens who are cursed by the Baron von Rothbart to turn into a swan by day, only regaining her human form by night. The only way for the spell to be broken is for a man who has never known love to make a vow to love her and marry her. Siegfried falls in love with her and makes this pledge at once as he is coincidentally about to be engaged. Unfortunately for Odette, Rothbart finds out about this and disguises his own daughter Odile as Odette, causing Siegfried to mistakenly propose marriage to her. And then he finds out that this will doom Odette to be a swan forever, leading to the two to commit suicide together at the end of the ballet. In most versions of the ballet, their noble sacrifice breaks the curse on the rest of the maidens after all, allows Siegfried and Odette to rise to heaven united forever, and sometimes it even kills Rothbart in the process. Swan Lake is one of the most frequently staged ballets in the world and while the ending sometimes shifts a lot, the curse itself and its escape clause remains the same.
• The Nutcracker greatly simplifies its version of the Nutcracker's curse - kill the Mouse King.

Video Games

• This is the premise Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as Simon has been cursed with Dracula's curse after battling the latter, and in order to prevent himself from dying, Simon must retrieve Dracula's five body parts from mansions across Transylvania, and bring them back to Castlevania in order to fight Dracula one last time. Depending on how fast you beat the game, this either saves Simon's life, gives him just a few more years of borrowed time, or comes too little too late.
  WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE.
• Renon's contract in Castlevania 64 states that he owns your soul if you spend more than $30,000 on merchandise from him, on the proviso that he himself has to actually enforce the contract. As a demon from Hell he's no pushover, but this means that if he can't take you down in combat you don't have to pay up and the contract is moot. Cue Optional Boss!
• City of Villains characters can be cursed by the Circle of Thorns with a particularly nasty curse that will cause them to undergo the same horrible end that the Circle's enemies, the descendants of the Mu, are planned to face. It's not clear exactly what the result of the curse itself would be, but the Circle were going to slowly torture and kill each Mu, then rip out and then send to a special corner of Hell their souls to be the feed of a demon named Lilitu. As there's roughly 1 billion descendants of Mu on the planet, and the player character would have that done roughly a billion times simultaneously to him or her, mystically inclined contacts tend to assume the term blast radius is apt. Destroying and trapping Lilitu prevents the curse from working.
• The premise of Cthulhu Saves the World is when the titular Eldritch Abomination had a curse casted upon him that took away his powers, and the only way to reclaim them is to become a true hero. Cthulhu eavesdropped that from narrator and then went on a quest to become a true hero and save the world, only to destroy it after that.
• Twisted Wonderland: Azul's Magically-Binding Contract will be voided if the paper contracts are physically destroyed. They appear to be indestructible at first, but it's later revealed these copies are a decoy; the original, destructible copies are kept in a vault.
• Presented in the Quest for Glory series introduces the concept of a counter-curse that can, well, undo the original curse. The manual for the original game (Hero's Quest) stated that the more powerful the curse used, the less stringent the counter-curse would be. In other words, if a curse was overly powerful, then undoing it would be child's play, but if the curse is minor, countering it would require very specific conditions to occur. And all curses and counter-curses are in rhyming verse, which necessarily results in ambiguity. The player character naturally undoes the curse (though, strangely enough, it's not required to fulfill all the objectives of the counter-curse to win the game, resulting in the game telling you What the Hell, Hero?). The counter curse is as follows:
  Come a hero from the East You arrive from the eastern pass into Spielburg during the intro
  Free the man within the beast The Baron's son has been turned into a bear, you need to change him back to a human.
  Bring the child from out the band The Baron's daughter has been enchanted and became the leader of the bandits. She needs to have the enchantment lifted.
  Drive the curser from the land Baba Yaga laid the curse, she needs to be driven out of Spielburg.
• Lampshaded then averted in the AGD Interactive King's Quest games. The Big Bad did put Graham under a curse. All parts of the curse (the family in danger, Graham's heart attack, Rosella and Alexander not inheriting the throne) came true, but not in the way the Big Bad wanted!
  • Invoked with King's Quest VI where Alexander is cursed by the Beast. Alex, being a minor sorcerer, points out that every curse has a weakness to which the Beast tells him to go out and fetch a "Beauty" for him.
  • In King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, the spells cast upon Attis, Lord Tsepish and the Lady of Dreams, all have this escape clause built in.
• In Fantasy Quest, you can break the curse on a man trapped as a dog by feeding him. This serves mainly as mad mockery; the dog appeared in the first game, you had no option to feed him, and now he's retconned as a man still bitter about your earlier indifference.
• Caius Ballad of Final Fantasy XIII-2 tries to invoke this regarding Yeul (who is cursed to constant death and resurrection because of seeress powers) by initiating a successful Time Crash. After all, if there's no timeline to see, there's no impending threat on Yeul's life.
• Because the Dark Parables are based on classic fairy tales, there are a number of curses in them which don't quite work the way they were originally written. The escape clauses, therefore, are similarly turned on their heads, and the Fairy Tale Detective has to fix things in order for the assorted characters to live Happily Ever After. In Requiem for the Forgotten Shadow, the once and present bad guy had his spirit drawn from his body as a shadow and split into shards, which were sealed in people and passed from parent to child. The escape clause said the shadow had to be reunited with his body under very specific circumstances, but you couldn't get the shadow without hurting innocents. But if you were willing to do what it took...
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt remarks that curses are tricky and play on irony after resolving one with a woman who was transformed into a wight. The beggar who placed the curse on her said that since she was beautiful, she would never wish to look at herself in the mirror again; since she adored feasts, nobody would ever wish to dine with her; and since she refused him food, "she would never find a spoon in the world to sate her hunger". Geralt then lifts the curse by eating with her willingly without utensils and making her look at her reflection.
• In Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Eikichi Mishina a.k.a. the Death Boss's personal Arc Villain Hiroki Sugimoto a.k.a. the Leader has used the power of Joker to rewrite reality such that the Leader is always stronger than the Death Boss. If allowed to resolve matters on his own, Eikichi outsmarts him by renouncing his own title, meaning it's now a match between Eikichi and Hiroki. Hiroki eats pavement in one punch.

Web Animation

• RWBY: As punishment for trying to trick the gods to resurrect her dead lover, Salem was Barred from the Afterlife and told that "So long as this world turns", she cannot die. If she wants to be freed of her immortality, she needs to learn the importance of life and death. Salem, not interested in doing that as it would be admitting that she had done wrong in her desire to bring Ozma back, has instead latched onto the "So long as this world turns" part and decided another escape clause is that if the world is destroyed, she'll be able to die.
• In Unforgotten Realms, the curses the Heroes have are only bound to their bodies, not their souls.

Webcomics

• In one Arthur, King of Time and Space strip, the sorceress Morgan mentions that every curse needs to have an out, "or the spell is structurally unsound and won't work".
• One section of Beach WZRD is devoted to Wizard trying to find a way to undo her being turned into a frog. She decides to go with the classic solution "kissing a royal"… except she lives in a modern setting were royalty is nothing common. Turns out, anything that's only symbolically royal counts – even an ant queen!
• In Dangerously Chloe Teddy accidentally sells his soul to a demon lord for a girlfriend, said girlfriend reveals once they have sex, he will shortly die after and have his soul dammed. After some arguing, Chloe agrees to help Teddy.
  Teddy: You mean you'll cancel the contract?
  Chloe: Well, I can't... exactly, but there's always a loophole to these things.
• In Erstwhile, the heroine can be saved from being turned into a flower if she is picked.
• In Housepets!, Pete actually uses this against King. Pete turned a human into a dog with the intent of breaking him so that he'd consent to becoming his avatar. When that failed, he let King build a happy life for himself as a dog (by his own admission, far happier than he'd ever been as a human), complete with love interest. And then told King that he'd surrender their game in one year, at which point King would return to his human form.
• In pages 94 through 105 of Looking for Group, Richard's imp Hctib Elttil puts a pendant on him that shrinks him to the size of a toddler, which also makes him a lot weaker. The pendant's curse can only be broken by performing a selfless act. Seeing as this is Richard, he seems to be screwed. But when the building he and a small boy are in is about to explode, Richard protects the kid with his magic, causing the curse to be broken.
• Roza features two searches for this.
• Schlock Mercenary: Invoked. When Nick thinks he's on the lethal end of a Cartwright Curse, Legs tells him that curses always have a way out. Since he thinks he's fated to die due to being kissed by a certain girl, she suggests he kisses someone else. He tries to get a kiss from Bunni, but she's married, so she hurriedly improvises and says he needs a "pure, freely offered kiss" from someone who doesn't know about the curse.
  Legs: You do realize you just turned my quick fix into a quest.
  Bunni: I'm sure I just violated my Hippocratic Oath on somebody.
  Nick: [off-panel] Anybody got some cologne I can borrow?
• In Sluggy Freelance:
  • One Story Arc involves a private war between a couple ghosts. One ghost is cursed to play Solitaire over and over until he wins, which he can't do because his deck is missing one card. The 52nd card is framed behind glass, with a sign saying only to break the glass in an emergency.
  • Amospia sold her people out to demons, dooming their world. As punishment for her betrayal, a wizard placed her under a curse, making it so that she would become a beast of burden, all would forget her name, and no one in this entire world would ever seek to remind her of who she was. The curse caused her to go along with the actions of two demons she was fused with. It also made the demons unable to so much as acknowledge her very existence, with the two demons she was fused with simply assuming the other demon was controlling their Multiple Head Case body. Torg, a person from a different world, was not subject to the curse and ended up asking for her name, allowing her to start making her own decisions again.

Web Original

• In ''The Tale of Harvey the Hare'' the story's protagonist of the same name appears to be doomed until he finds a loophole in the prophecy that has sentenced him to death.

Western Animation

• 101 Dalmatians: The Series: In "DeVil-Age Elder", the mindlessly happy curse of DeVil Ville can be broken if the affected inhabitants are kissed by a chicken.
• 850 Meters: The "Ugly" Princess is only ugly because of a curse that'll be broken if the dragon guarding her tower is slain. It turns out to be a lie to convince the knight to look for the invincible sword. The "Princess" is actually a hand puppet controlled by the dragon's sister.
• In Aladdin: The Series, Agrabah was once attacked by a would-be conqueror while Aladdin, Jasmine and Genie were away on other business. In desperation, the Sultan donned a suit of enchanted armor that would make him "as strong as stone". The armor allowed him to defeat the conqueror, but also allowed the spirit of the armor's original wearer, an evil sultan of Agrabah's past, to possess him, turning him evil and paranoid to the point where he tried having Jasmine executed. Aladdin realized that "as strong as stone" meant that the armor drew its magic from a stone statue of the evil sultan, and was able to break the spell and restore Jasmine's father to his old self by coercing him into destroying the statue.
• The plot of the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: L.I.C.O.R.I.C.E." involves Black John Licorice and his crew of Ghost Pirates, who are cursed because they greedily chopped down an entire forest of red licorice. The curse made the licorice black and turned them into licorice skeletons that will only come alive at night. They seek to break the curse by planting a seed that can restore the forest, which Numbuh 5's rival Heinrich von Marzipon unwisely stole, and then ate during his time at the Kids Next Door prison.
• This is what keeps Shirley the Medium from Courage the Cowardly Dog in the Good Is Not Nice category; she is fond of placing karmic curses on people who screw her over or prove to be extremely unpleasant at the drop of a hat, but she'll always give you a way out, and it usually isn't a difficult way either (unless you're Eustace Bagge): she just requires you to be a decent person. Courage ends up having to fix things because it usually puts Muriel in the line of fire too.
• Featured in the Donkey Kong Country episode "The Curse of Kongo Bongo". The only way to undo the effects of the Curse of the Double Doubloon ("The Double Curse of Bluebeard Baboon lies in these words you see / Read them once, then read them twice and your island is history") is to read a spell from one of Cranky's spell books; "The Curse of the Double Doubloon can easily be reversed / Read these words, and you will see your island is no longer cursed"
• Dora the Explorer:
  • In "Te Amo", the Evil Sorcerer El Mago casts a spell on King Popo and Queen Maria, turning them into mountains. To break the spell, two true friends, two true heroes — in this case Dora and Boots — must climb up the mountains, meet up in the middle, then yell out to each other, "Te amo."
  • In "Dora Saves the Snow Princess", the Wicked Witch's spell on the Snowy Forest causing all the snow to melt can only be broken if someone who is brave, kind, and helps others smiles into the magic crystal which makes it snow.
• Gargoyles loved this one. Word of God says that adding an escape clause makes spells much easier to cast, no matter how unlikely the clause may seem. The only sorcery we've seen that can get around it is either short-term combat magic, or that of The Fair Folk, who are incredibly powerful.
  • The original "permanent statue" spell had the Gargoyles as statues until their castle "rose above the clouds." When too-bored, too-smart, and too-rich David Xanatos moved their castle onto his skyscraper, it did just that. He wanted to see if it would work.
  • Happens again in the "City of Stone" arc when David Xanatos again screws The Rules with money in order to "Make the sky burn"—he creates a flammable gas that will ignite at a specific time, then has the Manhattan Clan and his own robotic gargoyles fly the skies with packs full of the stuff. Unfortunately, Demona catches on, reprograms the gas packs to ignite early (which would make the spell fail), and then changes the computer system's password to something only she knows to prevent anyone from stopping her. It takes magic to get her to reveal the code.
  • Elisa uses Loophole Abuse to undo a spell that made Goliath into an obedient, unthinking slave, by ordering him to behave exactly as if he's not under the spell. Although this loophole wasn't built into the magic by its caster, the nature of this command evidently cancels it out entirely, as Goliath not only resumes behaving normally but ceases to look ensorcelled.
• The Ghost and Molly McGee: The curse that jump starts the plot has the caveat of breaking if Molly is forced to leave the house and live elsewhere. Molly is ecstatic about having a ghost friend and her family as a whole ends up taking well to his presence, leaving Scratch reeling at how much the curse backfired, though he and Molly eventually become such good friends that the curse almost becomes an afterthought. Towards the end of the first season, the McGees are evicted from their home after failing to pay the mortgage, and while the family does manage to move back in after a few weeks thanks to a community fundraising effort, this fits the condition needed to break the curse. From that the point on, the only change to the duo's dynamic is that Scratch can no longer be magically summoned to Molly's exact location.
• "Secret Decoder Ring," an episode The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy involved a giant female worm creature named Lubber. She was a former classmate of Grim's who had a crush on him. When the whole student body made fun of him for it, she proceeded to devour every single one of them. As punishment, the principal banished Lubber to a bottomless pit and cursed her to guard the secret of the universe for all time. But the curse came with an escape clause: if a human looked upon the secret, she'd be free, and the poor schmuck who saw it would be forced to take her job. An honor which goes to Mindy. Bonus points for the curse being treated as an actual contract, complete with the specific section containing the clause (and a 401K, apparently).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "Hearts and Hooves Day", the Love Potion spell is broken by keeping Big Mac and Cheerilee from looking at each other for an hour. This, however, is harder than it sounds, as the Love Poison makes those it's cursed become psychotically obsessed with each other.
  • Telling the truth breaks the Inspiration Manifestation spell.
• Spoofed in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XII": Homer ruins a gypsy fortune teller so she levies a curse on him that affects those he cares about, which results in several people dying including Bart. At the end of the episode we find out that if Homer would just apologize the curse would be lifted — which would also bring back the people who died — but he refuses to do it because "She's not the boss of me!"
• Steven Universe: A standard feature of Pearls is that if their owner gives them a clearly defined order, they have to obey it, even if their owner isn't around anymore. However, if they can find a way to break the order, they're free of it forever. The problem comes in that they are physically compelled to fulfil the order, making it extremely hard to find loopholes. One such instance was a Pearl who was ordered to keep a secret, and whenever she tried to talk about it, or anything connected to it, her hand would forcibly cover her mouth. She finds a way around it by sending somebody ready enough into her memories to see the order itself and the circumstances behind it.
• Vampirina: In "Bat Got Your Tongue", Vee "speaking the truth" — by telling everyone at the Ghoul Girls concert verbally that she lost her voice due to overwork and apologizes — is what restores her voice.
• Wunschpunsch: Every spell cast by using the Wunschpunsch parchment comes with a Curse Escape Clause that comes in riddle shape and it's up to the heroes to figure it before it's too late. (Wunschpunsch spells that last seven hours become permanent).

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