That cigarette must be made of tissue paper.
"He smoked incessantly but the weird thing, Carrot noticed, was that any cigarette smoked by Nobby became a dog-end almost instantly but remained a dog-end indefinitely or until lodged behind his ear, which was a sort of nicotine elephant's graveyard."
Many fictional characters who smoke cigarettes often demonstrate a peculiar ability: any cigarette they light — even if it was just taken from a completely fresh pack — is instantly crumpled and bent out of shape.
Characters who are wealthy or otherwise "fancy" seem to be immune to this, particularly Femme Fatale characters. Presumably they're buying a more expensive brand, but even the cheap ones are evidently more expensive than the cigarettes you can buy in Real Life, which are extremely difficult to crumple up without breaking them and rendering them unsmokable.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Cowboy Bebop: Given the number of fights they get into, along with their Perpetual Poverty, the anime's main characters might just be taking cigarette packs of people they've beaten up while arresting.
- FLCL: In one episode, Mamimi takes a cigarette from her jacket, and it's already rumpled up.
- El-Hazard: The Magnificent World: Since Masamichi Fujisawa's cigarettes are transported with him from Earth to El-Hazard (and appear to be a soft pack, no less), it makes some level of sense that they would always end up looking rumpled.
- Mahoraba: Haibara's cigarettes always look as if they are about to fall apart.
- Mushishi: Ginko smokes Mushi cigarettes, possibly justifying the trope because of the mystical properties those creatures bear. Or, because it looks cool.
- One Piece: When Sanji chain-smokes, his cigarettes become crumpled almost instantly.
- Trigun: Nicholas D. Wolfwood smokes like a chimney and always has a dogend in his mouth in all of his appearances. Justified in that the setting is a desert world where tobacco almost certainly can't grow, so any and all cigarettes to be found are "old technology".
Comic Strips
- Andy Capp: In the bar, at home, right after he lights up—he always has a cigarette stub dangling from his mouth.
Eastern Animation
- Nu, Pogodi!: The cigarettes the wolf is smoking could be mistaken as such, but they're actually Papirosa
.
Films — Animation
- The Castle of Cagliostro: Jigen lights a cigarette butt taken from the ashtray of Lupin's iconic yellow Fiat 500. This is consistent throughout the Lupin III franchise, as even his fresh cigarettes are crumpled and bent out of shape.
Films — Live-Action
- The Grand Budapest Hotel: Monsieur Jean instantly snuffs out his cigarette during his first appearance on-screen.
- Number 17: Every cigarette Ben smokes is a battered dog-end. It is not clear if he is just constantly relighting the same cigarette, or if all of his cigarettes are old dog-ends he collected on the street. (He is a tramp, so the latter is likely.)
- Romy and Michele's High School Reunion: Heather Mooney cheerfully declares that used cigarettes are "Twice the taste in half the time for the gal on the go". She reportedly invented fast-burning paper, which means that cigarettes become dog ends very quickly.
Literature
- Discworld:
- Death's manservant Albert has a talent to smoke his cigarettes so throughoughlt, that they become soggy and thin.
"Only an expert could get a rollup so thin and yet so soggy."
- Guards! Guards!: Corporal Cecil Wormsborough St. John "Nobby" Nobbs is frequently noted for displaying this ability. It's said that cigarettes quickly become butts in his presence, and stay as such for an apparently infinite amount of time.
- Death's manservant Albert has a talent to smoke his cigarettes so throughoughlt, that they become soggy and thin.
- Good Omens: Shadwell smokes constantly, but Newt's never seen the cigarette and just deduces its existence from the way Shadwell cups his hands (and presumably, smells).
Live-Action TV
- QI: Discussed by master impersonator Bill Bailey. He'd rather smoke from a "pipe" (aka his biro) to appear a Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe than take drags on a disheveled dogend and appear a boorish, untrustworthy tradesman.
Non-Fiction
- Spike Milligan, in the volume of his autobiography dealing with service in North Africa, vividly describes a fellow artilleryman of this inclination. In order to light a diminutive dog-end that was so short he ran a risk of burning his own nose with the lighter flame, his comrade diligently held a piece of thick cardboard between his upper lip and nostrils to act as a flame-deflector whilst he lit the cigarette stub.
Video Games
- Trauma Team: Gabriel Cunningham, in addition to being a very thinly veiled House Expy, has this ability.
- Wild ARMs 4: Subverted. Gawn, who appears to have a perpetual dogend, but when asked about it, explains that it's not a cigarette but rather a freeze-dried noodle. Probably a Bowdlerization, there is a frame at 0:44 in the second version of the animated intro sequence where he is very obviously smoking.
Visual Novels
- YU-NO: The original 1996 VN prominently depicts Eriko as almost always smoking a crumpled cigarette.

