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Real Life section maintenance (including NRLEP and LRLEO) (New Crowner 9/20/25)

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Note: If a newly launched trope was already given a No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only designation while it was being drafted on the Trope Launch Pad, additions to the proper index do not need to go through this thread. Instead, simply ask the staff to add the trope via this thread.

This is the thread to report tropes with problematic Real Life sections.

Common problems include:

Real Life sections on the wiki are kept as long as they don't become a problem. If you find an article with such problems, report it here. Please note that the purpose of this thread is to clean up and maintain real life sections, not raze them. Cutting should be treated as a last resort, so please only suggest cutting RL sections or a subset thereof you think the examples in question are completely unsalvageable.

If historical RL examples are not causing any problems, consider whether it would be better to propose a No Recent Examples, Please! (via this forum thread) for RL instead of NRLEP. If RL examples are causing problems only for certain subjects, consider whether a Limited Real Life Examples Only restriction would be preferable to NRLEP.

If you think a trope should be No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only, then this thread is the place to discuss it. However, please check Keep Real Life Examples first to see if it has already been brought up in the past. If not, state the reasons and add it to the crowner.

Before adding to the crowner:

  • The trope should be proposed in the thread, along with reasons for why a crowner is necessary instead of a cleanup.
  • There must be support from others in thread.
  • Any objections should be addressed.
  • Allow a minimum of 24 hours for discussion.

When adding to the crowner:

  • Be sure to add the trope name, a link to where the discussion started, the reasons for crownering, whether the restriction being proposed is NRLEP or LRLEO (and in the latter case, which subject(s) the restriction would be for), and the date added.
  • Announce in thread that you are adding the item.
  • An ATT advert should be made as well (batch items together if more than one trope goes up in a day).

In order for a crowner to pass:

  • Must have been up for a minimum of a week
  • There must be a 2:1 ratio
  • If the vote is exactly 2:1 or +/- 1 vote from that, give it a couple extra days to see if any more votes come in
  • Once passed, tropes must be indexed on the appropriate NRLEP or LRLEO index
  • Should the vote fail, the trope should be indexed on KRLE page

Sex Tropes, Rape and Sexual Harassment Tropes, and Morality Tropes are banned from having RL sections so tropes under those indexes don't need a crowner vote.

As per Real Life Troping, we never trope unscripted real life sports — so sports tropes where RL examples would only apply to those scenarios don't need a crowner vote.

Crowner entries that have already been called will have "(CLOSED)" appended to them — and are no longer open for discussion.

After bringing up a trope for discussion, please wait at least a day for feedback before adding it to the crowner.

NRLEP tag:

%% Trope was declared Administrivia/NoRealLifeExamplesPlease via crowner by the Real Life Maintenance thread: [crowner link]
%%https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13350380440A15238800

LRLEO tag:

%% Trope was declared Administrivia/LimitedRealLifeExamplesOnly via crowner by the Real Life Maintenance thread: [crowner link]
%%The following restrictions apply: [list restriction(s) here]
%%https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13350380440A15238800

Notes:
  • This thread is not for general discussion regarding policies for Real Life sections or crowners. Please take those conversations to this Wiki Talk thread.
  • Do not try to overturn previous No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only decisions without a convincing argument.
  • As mentioned here, the consensus is that NRLEP warnings in trope page descriptions can use bold text so that they stand out.
  • The [[noreallife]] tag no longer works. This is a deprecated tag that was introduced many years ago — originally, it would have displayed a NRLEP warning banner when you edited the page. Per word of admin as of 2025, any replacement for this system will not use markup, so these tags can be removed.
  • If a newly launched trope was already given a No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only designation while it was being drafted on the Trope Launch Pad, additions to the proper index do not need to go through this thread. Instead, simply ask the staff to add the trope via this thread.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 3rd 2025 at 6:31:00 AM

WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#16651: Jul 25th 2025 at 11:43:14 AM

I'm not sure it actually is a morality trope? It's not using "evil" to strictly mean "morally evil"; the subtropes include things like Close-Enough Timeline and Enemy Mine. "Lesser of two evils" is just a phrase about two bad options, where one is simply less bad.

Also cannot see how No Good Deed Goes Unpunished is a morality trope. The description goes on about "the hero" doing this, but really it's just about how someone's attempts to help can backfire and get them into trouble.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 25th 2025 at 2:45:40 PM

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
CompletelyNormalGuy Am I a weirdo? from a place where folks put cream cheese on hot dogs (Oldest One in the Book)
Am I a weirdo?
#16652: Jul 25th 2025 at 12:33:48 PM

I'm inclined to agree. Neither of those really seems like a morality trope despite having good and evil in the title. If I dodge into the path of a bicycle to avoid getting hit by a truck, I'm choosing the lesser of two evils. There's no morality involved there.

Edited by CompletelyNormalGuy on Jul 25th 2025 at 12:35:00 PM

Bigotry will NEVER be welcome on TV Tropes.
WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#16653: Jul 25th 2025 at 12:37:33 PM

Hell, my coworker and I had a conversation literally last night where we called chemotherapy the "lesser of two evils" versus just suffering through cancer untreated. There's literally nothing moral about the phrase.

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
jandn2014 SMILE! from somewhere in Connecticut Since: Aug, 2017 Relationship Status: Hiding
SMILE!
#16654: Jul 26th 2025 at 10:07:13 AM

Smug Straight Edge is both a stereotype and morality trope, and thus obviously shouldn't have any RL examples. (What examples currently inhabit the RL section range from "overbroad" to "passing judgment on real people".)

SkylaNoivern Since: Sep, 2016
#16655: Jul 26th 2025 at 3:49:01 PM

[up] I was actually going to bring up how I found the real life section for that page and this was the first message I saw. I'd support making it a NRLEP trope.

Nen_desharu Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire from Greater Smash Bros. Universe or Toronto Since: Aug, 2020 Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
#16656: Jul 26th 2025 at 4:06:40 PM

[up]I strongly agree.

Kirby is awesome.
SW1008 Since: Jul, 2020 Relationship Status: Complex: I'm real, they are imaginary
#16657: Jul 28th 2025 at 12:50:28 PM

I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this, but there are a few entries on Good Victims, Bad Victims which seem to be very narrowly skirting NRLEP (which the trope is). Several non-fiction books are listed describing how real people displayed/suffered from these attitudes, which feels like troping real life in an NRLEP trope and then hiding behind "it's in a book, so it's literature" to excuse it. Idk, but I feel like if we can take something that happened in real life and trope it on an NRLEP page because "someone wrote a (non-fiction) book about it", there's not much point in making it NRLEP in the first place. For reference, these are the entries:

* Tatum O'Neal's autobiography A Paper Life claims her father's reaction to finding out she was molested by her drug dealer was to accuse her of leading him on.
* Debbie Morris writes in her book "Forgiving the Dead Man Walking" that she was considered a bad victim for her kidnapping and rape by many people in her town due to her having broken curfew.
* Fantasia Burrino wrote in her autobiography that her father blamed her for being raped due to her sexy clothing.
* Rain "daughter of Richard" Pryor wrote in Jokes My Father Never Taught Me that her father blamed her for her teenage sexual assault due to the way she dressed.
* Pure Evil by Maureen Harvey. She writes about football fans chanting at matches that they are glad her son was murdered cause he supported a different team. They were almost definitely joking but still.
* The Lost Girl, a true crime biography by Caroline Roberts who was kidnapped by Fred and Rose West, describes how they got away with raping her due to her having had a couple of one-night stands.

costanton11 Since: Mar, 2016
#16658: Jul 28th 2025 at 12:55:06 PM

Those seem like breaking the spirit of the rule.

cannen144 (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: This is not my beautiful wife!
#16659: Jul 28th 2025 at 1:08:07 PM

I wouldn't even say breaking the spirit, it's outright breaking the letter. An autobiography is a non-fiction book by definition, and as such, any troping of it would be troping real life.

SW1008 Since: Jul, 2020 Relationship Status: Complex: I'm real, they are imaginary
BoltDMC Since: May, 2020
#16661: Jul 28th 2025 at 8:20:48 PM

Just noticed that Flirtatious Smack on the Ass has a Real Life folder. Should it?

Sorrelfox Total Poser (he/him) from Twilight Town (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: He makes me feel like I have a heart
Total Poser (he/him)
#16662: Jul 29th 2025 at 8:03:13 AM

[up] I’d venture to say probably not? We don’t want it turning into “every time anyone’s ever been slapped on the butt” and there’s also grounds to NRLEP it under being gossipy (I’m thinking celebrity romance drama) or a sex/romance trope

Edit: just looked at it. It’s four examples, two of which are general, the other two of which are suggestive, and one of which is about a politician and seems like it could invite ROCEJ issues. I vote NRLEP.

Edited by Sorrelfox on Jul 29th 2025 at 11:04:17 AM

I'm in a car underwater, with time to kill...
BoltDMC Since: May, 2020
#16663: Jul 29th 2025 at 9:28:22 AM

If this is a sex trope, it would automatically merit NRLEP status by default, yes? If it counts as one, we can nuke the folder and add NRLEP status to the description, am thinking. Won't even need a crowner.

Edited by BoltDMC on Jul 29th 2025 at 12:28:50 PM

WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#16664: Jul 29th 2025 at 9:52:20 AM

It's not so much a "sex" trope as it is a flirting / sometimes assault trope. But I'd still support NRLEP.

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
MonaNaito Since: Jun, 2011
#16665: Aug 1st 2025 at 8:54:34 PM

I see a problem with GodzillaThreshold.Real Life, namely that the trope occurs when "circumstances are so dire as to justify the use of anything and everything that might solve it". By listing RL examples, the implication is that the actions in question were justified by their circumstances.

This opens up a ROCEJ issue where people have listed, for instance, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki amd the formation of the Confederacy.

Edited by MonaNaito on Aug 1st 2025 at 11:55:27 AM

Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#16666: Aug 1st 2025 at 9:08:01 PM

This thread’s OP still mentions the [[noreallife]] markup, but apparently if a way of doing what it did does come back, it’ll work differently.

Edited by Lymantria on Aug 1st 2025 at 12:08:12 PM

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#16667: Aug 1st 2025 at 9:08:59 PM

It also says it doesn't work, so I'm not sure what needs changing

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#16668: Aug 1st 2025 at 9:10:38 PM

Does the fact that Kory said “If I add any new functionality it won’t use markup like that to do it” make a difference? Besides, this thread’s OP says not to remove the markup, but Kory seemed to be okay with its removal.

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
GastonRabbit C'est la vie. (he/him) from Robinson, Illinois, USA (General of TV Troops) Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
C'est la vie. (he/him)
#16669: Aug 3rd 2025 at 4:28:07 AM

[up]It does matter, because the current text in the OP was added in 2024 if the wording is anything to go by. I'll rewrite that bullet point to mention what Kory said.

I got a rock for Halloween.
GastonRabbit MOD C'est la vie. (he/him) from Robinson, Illinois, USA (General of TV Troops) Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
C'est la vie. (he/him)
#16670: Aug 3rd 2025 at 4:30:10 AM

Continuing from the above, changed that bullet point to this:

  • The [[noreallife]] tag no longer works. This is a deprecated tag that was introduced many years ago — originally, it would have displayed a NRLEP warning banner when you edited the page. Per word of admin as of 2025, any replacement for this system will not use markup, so these tags can be removed.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 3rd 2025 at 6:31:11 AM

I got a rock for Halloween.
randomtroper89 from The Fire Nation Since: Nov, 2010
#16671: Aug 3rd 2025 at 1:42:31 PM

All Love Is Unrequited has three real life examples and they are all badly written, but the first two are general examples and the third self-argues. I know the trope is under repair, but the three should be cut regardless.

  • Almost everyone has experience with this trope in Real Life. The vagaries of dating being what they are, you end up having a lot more crushes that go nowhere than the ones that result in anything. It's hard to generalize, but a ratio of 5 unrequited crushes to 1 relationship is what a lot of people may end up experiencing.
  • Very often happens amongst taken best friends.
  • Dante Alighieri is considered the posterboy for unrequited love, although his situation was Courtly Love.

GearFriedTheKnight BLOCKING - A weapon for the 21st century. from The nearest road that can be raced (Experienced Trainee) Relationship Status: I'm in love with my car
BLOCKING - A weapon for the 21st century.
#16672: Aug 3rd 2025 at 1:56:33 PM

Bringing up two tropes here that I mentioned before...


First up, Secretly Wealthy. The Real Life folder contains general examples and a particularly judgy example about relative wealth amongst poor people and "posers", as well as one that feels particularly judgemental. Here's the folder:
    Real Life 
  • In many parts of the world lottery winners are allowed to claim their winnings anonymously, usually so they don't start getting harassed by "long-lost relatives" and/or scammers trying to nab a cut of the money (there are even a handful of cases where non-anonymous lottery winners were killed by people who wanted to steal the money). Your neighbors may be richer than you think.
  • Subverted with a proverb that says "In this world, there are two things you can't hide: love and money".
  • Snopes tells the story of a man who walked into his bank, cashed a check, and asked them to validate his parking. The teller and the manager both looked at his shabby clothes and refused. As it turns out, the man was John Barrier, a man who made millions refurbishing old houses, and thanks to the teller and managers' snobby refusal to validate his fifty-cent parking stub, he closed down his million-dollar account the next day.
  • Jesse Camp, the winner of MTV's first Wanna Be a VJ contest, portrayed himself as a street kid and viewers assumed he was homeless based on his attire. It later came to light that Camp was actually from an upper-class Connecticut family and had recently graduated from an exclusive prep school.
  • This is very common among people who live frugal lifestyles. When they cut costs for things they deem unnecessary, it often makes them look less wealthy than they really are simply because their money is still saved where people typically won't see it.
  • Occasionally in some social circles where most people in them are poor it can be revealed that one member of the group is relatively wealthy compared to the others. This can cause issues if some or all of the poor members were helping out the wealthier member despite their small means to do so while the wealthier member took their hospitality having plenty of means not to need it, let alone the means to return the favors if they never did.
  • As cited on The Quincy Punk, the crust punk scene is known to attract "trusty crusties" — wealthy posers who cherry-pick the most superficial aspects of crust punk (voluntary homelessness, lack of hygiene, excessive drug use, etc.) to rebel against society/their parents, only to fall back on substantial trust funds when they struggle to make a living on the street.

The second one, Life Saving Misfortune, also contains general example, misproven myths and misinformation, on top of being prone to misuse, but is in general incredibly tasteless, being tropings of illnesses, catastrophes, disasters, accidents and shootings. I'm personally incredibly uncomfortable at them. Some examples were also hidden under the Web Video folder, which is why I'm also including it here:
    Web Video 
  • Jet Lag: The Game: A meta example for the New Zealand season, as explained in The Layover podcast. For unclear reasons, Sam's visa required him to leave the country by a certain date, meaning that they had to move the season up by a week. This meant that they got the one week of good weather in a summer that was otherwise very rainy and stormy.
  • Youtuber Lazy Masquerade did a series of three Butterfly Effect stories, which include several examples of this trope:
    • A Taiwanese woman who was supposed to fly to Japan with her boyfriend for a birthday trip, but a few days before the trip she fell down a flight of stairs after breaking her heel at a particularly unfortunate moment and was forced to cancel the trip due to her injuries.note  The plane she was supposed to be on was China Airlines 140, which suffered a catastrophic crash that killed 264 people.
    • A gas station worker who badly cracked a tooth and had to swap shifts with a coworker due to being in too much pain to work. The night of the swapped shift ended up being the night that armed robbers stormed the store and killed the cashier in order to help themselves to the contents of the register.
    • A woman had minor car trouble and had to take her car into the shop for repairs on the day she was supposed to give her mom a ride to the doctors' office. The woman's uncle (the mother's brother) offered to give her a ride instead, leaving his wife to hang out with her own mother a little longer while he ran the errand before they would leave town for the weekend. The wife's mother ended up having a massive heart attack that very afternoon and would have probably died had she been alone (which she would have been if the uncle and his wife had left town when they originally planned to), but because a relative happened to have car trouble, the wife was still there when the heart attack happened and was able to summon help in time.
    • One submitter got rear-ended while driving to work. He had hit his head in the crash and was consequently given an MRI as a precaution, only for it to turn out he had an undetected brain tumor — one that wouldn't have presented any symptoms until after it had already progressed too far to be treatable. Because he just happened to get an MRI for an unrelated reason, the tumor was caught in time and was able to be fully removed.
    • A sailor who got into a fight the night before he was due to ship out and missed his boat due to spending the night in the drunk tank. The boat was attacked by pirates and all the crew were killed.

    Real Life 

18th Century

  • Francis Marion, a guerilla leader in the American Revolution, broke an ankle in an accident in 1780 and had to leave Charleston to recuperate. This meant he wasn't in the city when it fell to a British siege, sparing him from experiencing the all too often fatal horrors that Patriot prisoners of war were frequently subjected to.
  • Israel Hands, first mate of the famed Blackbeard, was shot by his boss for seemingly no reason. He survived the shooting, and was forced to stay behind on a particular voyage. Said voyage would be Blackbeard's last.

19th Century

  • Five men serving on Franklin's lost expedition were forced to disembark at Greenland due to being judged unfit for service. This meant that they avoided the horrible fates everyone else on the expedition suffered.
  • In April 1865, William Seward, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State, had been injured in a carriage accident a week before Lincoln's assassination and was confined to bed wearing a jaw splint. On the night of the assassination, one of Booth's conspirators snuck into his house and stabbed Seward in the neck, but his jaw cast blocked the assassin's knife. His son Frederick too also had a lucky accident that night. When trying to fight off the assassin, the attacker Powell pulled out a gun but it jammed. Rather than clear the jam, Powell pistol-whipped Frederick and knocked him out. Painful, but it broke the gun in the process and kept him from following up with a kill shot.
  • While he was just an average businessman, John D. Rockefeller booked himself on a routine train ride from Cleveland to Buffalo. However, he arrived at the station too late to catch his train. While passing over a bridge near Angola, New York, the last two cars of the train derailed. All but two of the passengers in the car he would have been in were burned alive.

20th Century

  • On the night of May 7, 1902, a man named Louis-Auguste Cyparis got into a fight in the town of St. Pierre on the island of Martinique. He was booked for either assault or murder (accounts differ) and placed in solitary confinement in an underground cell. The next morning the island's volcano, Mount Pelee, erupted, wiping out the town of St. Pierre and killing thirty thousand people. Cyparis was one of only three documented survivors.note  The sheltered underground prison cell saved Cyparis's life. He later spent years traveling with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, telling his story from inside a replica of his cell.
  • On April 28, 1903, a group of 128 Canadian Pacific Railroad workers bound for a work site in Frank, Alberta were unexpectedly delayed when, for reasons lost to history, the train that was supposed to pick them up in Morrissey, British Colombia and take them to Frank never showed up, forcing them to spend the night in Morrissey while alternate arrangements were made. Shortly after midnight on April 29, the camp where they were supposed to have been staying was obliterated by the deadliest landslide in Canadian history, instantly killing the 12 men who had already arrived at the site. Given the extent of the damage to the camp (it was completely buried under tons of rock), it's likely that all 128 would have perished alongside those 12 if not for the delay caused by the no-show train.
  • There have been quite a few stories from April 1912 of passengers who were scheduled to travel on the maiden voyage of the ill-fated RMS Titanic but never making it due to either cancelling for unknown reasons, such as J.P. Morgan and Hershey’s chocolate founder Milton S. Hershey, or for losing their tickets prior to sailing. One man who was hired as a stoker was reported to have had his workbook stolen, thus saving his life, most likely at the cost of the thief's. Another example is from a last-minute reassignment among the ship's officers. Initially First Officer William Murdoch was to be the Chief Officer with Charles Lightoller as the First Officer and David Blair as the Second. But White Star Line wanted Olympic-veteran Henry Wilde as the Chief Officer due to his experience commanding the sister ship, which bumped Murdoch and Lightoller down to First and Second respectively and kicked Blair out of the ill-fated voyage altogether.note 
    • Legend has it that a racist ticket-taker wouldn't let black heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson on the Titanic, saving his life. This has never been confirmed, but did lead to a song called "The Titanic", recorded by Leadbelly in 1948. (In 1969, folk singer Jaime Brockett re-recorded the song, adding a whole long comedy passage about the Titanic's first mate and captain getting high after smoking "hemp" rope, leading to the crash.)
  • On July 15, 1915, George "Papa Bear" Halas, future founder, owner, and coach of the Chicago Bears who was working for the Western Electric Company at the time, ended up late for work and a boat trip to a company picnic in Indiana due to his training for Big Ten Football running over time. He arrived just in time to see the boat that would have taken him and other employees to the company picnic, the S.S. Eastland, capsized next to the dock due to being overloaded with too many passengers and lifeboats, a disaster that claimed more than 800 lives. Reportedly, local newspapers erroneously stated in their obituaries that Halas had been on the boat and had died, causing friends who came to Halas' house to pay their respects to their supposedly deceased friend to be surprised when they found Halas alive and well inside!
  • On September 4th, 1939, inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin was scheduled to board the S.S. Athenia to New York City. Before he was to board, Zworykin realized that he had forgotten to pack a tuxedo for the trip and booked a later ship so he could stay to shop for a new one. (He was booked for first class, and not wearing a tuxedo for dinner would have been embarrassing for him.) On her way to New York, the Athenia was sunk by a Nazi U-boat, killing 128 people.
  • Stalin and Hitler signed a nonaggression pact for their joint occupation of Poland. Some Jews escaped from the Nazi occupied parts of Poland to the Soviet-occupied parts only to be deported to The Gulag and other detention facilites (same as lots of Jews who had never escaped but just ended up living in the Soviet occupation zone). When Hitler double-crossed Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union, Stalin granted amnesty to his Polish prisoners and let them form their own army (this only concerned a tiny minority of the Jews in question, but even those who stayed in Gulag at least weren't there for the Holocaust).
  • Early in the War in Asia and the Pacific, the Light Cruiser USS Marblehead, part of the ABDA Fleet, was severely damaged during the Battle of Makassar Strait, with its steering and compass destroyed. It was subsequently forced to sail alone, in enemy-occupied waters, to the nearest friendly port, in order to seek repairs. Twice, repairs had to be rushed or improvised either due to drydocks in the ports they made anchor in being inadequate to make the necessary repairs, or the Japanese were close to attacking or overrunning the islands they were taking refuge at. Ultimately, the ship's crew were forced to make a journey halfway across the globe to South Africa, where adequate repairs could be made. By the time the ship made it to New York, she turned out to be the only large ship of the ABDA Fleet to have survived, with all others having been sunk during the Battle of the Java Sea and the Battle of Sunda Strait, with the surviving crew members of the sunk ships becoming prisoners of the Japanese and forced to endure years of torture and mistreatment.
  • On the night of April 23, 1940, Tiny Bradshaw and his orchestra were scheduled to perform at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi. Bradshaw had to back out, since this conflicted with another booking at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. This oversight wound up potentially saving his life, as a blaze that night killed more than 200 people and injured many others. It remains one of the worst nightclub fires in American history.
  • On November 28, 1942, the Boston College football team faced off against its cross-town archrival, Holy Cross. Boston College was undefeated and headed to a New Year's Day bowl game, and the Golden Eagles were heavy favorites against lightly regarded Holy Cross. Holy Cross proceeded to shock the college football world by demolishing Boston College 55-12, ruining the Golden Eagles' perfect season. The stunning defeat led to the cancellation of a victory party scheduled for that night at Boston's Cocoanut Grove nightclub. That night, the Cocoanut Grove burned to the ground, killing 492 people... but nobody on the Boston College team or its entourage, because they weren't there.
  • Sometimes thought of as an urban legend, but marked as true by Snopes. In 1950, the Reverend at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska lit a fire in the furnace and went home to eat with his family before choir practice at 7:20. Before he could go, his wife soiled her dress and they had to wait while she ironed another. Additionally, every other member of the choir had something delaying them as well. (Car trouble, a persistent math problem, oversleeping, etc.) As a result, every member of the choir — a usually punctual group — was late for practice... and therefore weren't present when the furnace ignited a gas leak and the empty church exploded five minutes after practice was supposed to begin.
  • In 1958, Elizabeth Taylor was scheduled to accompany her then-husband Michael Todd on a flight to New York City for a Friars Club dinner given in his honor. However, she came down with severe bronchitis and fever and was kept home on doctor’s orders. Todd’s plane would crash in New Mexico en route, killing all aboard.
  • "The Day the Music Died" features a double whammy. Tommy Allsup, guitarist in Buddy Holly's backing band, lost a coin toss to Ritchie Valens for the last seat on Holly's plane, which later crashed, killing Holly, Valens, and The Big Bopper on February 3, 1959. Big Bopper wasn't even intended to be on Holly's plane: When Holly chartered the plane, both Allsup and Holly's bass guitarist helped him pay for it, since they also wanted to arrive early for the next show so they could get some rest and do laundry. However, Bopper was suffering from the flu and had trouble fitting into a bus seat, so he persuaded bassist Waylon Jennings to give him his spot on the plane. While Jennings would live on until 2002, he would spend much of that time haunted by the near miss—especially since Holly had joked to Jennings before the flight, "I hope your ol' bus freezes up!"—and Jennings had jokingly replied, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes!"
  • Yuri Yudin, a student at the Ural Polytechnical Institute, joined a group of nine fellow students to conduct a long-distance ski/hiking expedition. A day after leaving the last permanent settlement on the route, his chronic health problems forced him to turn back. All nine others in the group perished under mysterious circumstances in the Dyatlov Pass incident.
  • In 1960 Marilyn Meeker & Larry Pierce were fifth in the world in ice dance, and were looking almost certain to win their first U.S. National title and return to the World Championships, but that December Meeker broke her ankle and was unable to compete for the rest of the 1960-1961 season. Pierce teamed up with another partner, and they won the National title and a spot on the World team. Then the plane the entire World team was on crashed, killing everyone. Meeker would struggle with Survivor's Guilt for a long time afterwards.
  • Allan West was supposed to be part of the infamous 1962 Alcatraz escape. Unfortunately, he was unable to get out of his cell, resulting in the other three leaving without him. Given that it's very possible that the trio drowned in the bay, this may ultimately have been for the best. note 
  • In 1966, while scouting locations in Japan for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, Eon producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, director Lewis Gilbert, cinematographer Freddie Young, and production designer Ken Adam were booked to leave the country on BOAC flight 911 departing Tokyo for Hong Kong and London. Two hours before their Boeing 707 flight departed, the team was invited to an unexpected ninja demonstration, and so missed their plane. Their flight took off as scheduled, and twenty-five minutes after take-off, the plane disintegrated over Mount Fuji in severe turbulence, killing all aboard.
  • In 1969, novelist Jerzy Kosinski was invited by his friend Voytek Frykowski to a party at the Hollywood home of actress Sharon Tate. However, Kosinski was unable to attend because the airline had sent his luggage to New York instead of Los Angeles, leaving Kosinski with nothing to wear for the party. The party wound up having uninvited guests – Charles Manson and his followers, who slaughtered everyone in the house.
  • Happened in 1970 to Pope Paul VI: some Attention Whore Bolivian painter stabbed him in the neck but didn't kill him - partly because the Pope was wearing a rigid collar to relieve pain from cervical spondylosis.
  • Manny Sanguillén of the Pittsburgh Pirates volunteered to accompany his teammate Roberto Clemente on a trip to Managua, Nicaragua in 1972 which had been devastated by an earthquake. Sanguillén missed the plane because he misplaced his car keys. The plane wound up crashing off the coast of Puerto Rico shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board.
    • Sanguillén ended up suffering considerable Survivor Guilt in the immediate aftermath. He engrossed himself personally with searching for the bodies of victims of the plane crash—so much so that he missed Clemente's funeral.
  • Normally fans attending a sporting event don't want to see their team lose big, particularly when it's a win or go home playoff game. And yet, in Baltimore on December 19th, 1976, many Colts fans seated in the upper deck of Section 1 only lived to see the end of the day because their team got demolished to the point that most fans left early, and those that didn't left as soon as the game was over. This is because six minutes after the end of the game, a pilot doing an unlicensed flyover of Memorial Stadium crashed into the upper deck. If Baltimore had won, or if the game had even been close, there would have still been hundreds of fans in those seats when the plane crashed; as it was, the seats were mostly empty by the time the plane crashed, resulting in only four injuries and no deaths.
  • Robert Bishop was unable to serve his usual role as steward on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, due to being bedridden with bleeding ulcers. The voyage he had to miss turned out to be the ship's last, as she was lost with all hands in a storm the day after she left port.
  • During Metallica's European leg of the tour for Master of Puppets in 1986 Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton were drawing cards to determine who got the top bunk in the tour bus, Cliff got the Ace of Spades and took the top bunk, later that night the tour bus crashed and rolled over resulting in Cliff getting crushed underneath and dying.
  • The 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing produced several stories like this, including Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten, whose wife had failed to pack. This and the subsequent argument caused them to miss the flight.
    • This Not Always Working story tells of a recording studio owner who ends up missing a flight to see his family because his studio got in hot water with the fire department after an inattentive and rather stupid manager accidentally locked the employees in the building, and he had to stay in England to deal with the fallout. The final line reveals the flight he missed was Pan Am 103, so the manager indirectly saved the boss's life by being such an idiot (and the story's narrator calling the fire department to get them out).
    • Another life saved was that of Kim Cattrall, who changed her flight at the last moment to purchase a tea kettle for her mother.
  • On August 26, 1990, musician brothers Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan (along with some other musicians, most notably Eric Clapton) played a concert at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. Following the concert, Jimmie, Stevie Ray, and Jimmie's wife Connie were initially offered seats aboard a helicopter leaving the venuenote , but it turned out there had been a mix-up of some sort and there was actually only one seat available. Stevie Ray was eager to get back to the hotel and Jimmie didn't want to leave Connie behind or vice-versa, so the brothers agreed that Stevie Ray would take the one remaining seat, while Jimmie and Connie stayed back to wait for a later flight (which wouldn't be for several hours). Jimmie and Connie ended up arriving at their destination hours later than planned — only to learn that the helicopter they were supposed to have been on had never arrived at all and had been declared missing. A few hours later, the wreckage of the helicopter was found less than a mile from the takeoff point; the helicopter had crashed into a hill due to pilot error and poor visibility and everyone aboard, including Stevie Ray, was killed on impact.
  • Philadelphia Phillies first baseman John Kruk was holding someone on base (during 1994 spring training) when pitcher Mitch Williams threw the ball at him to keep the runner on, which bounced and hit Kruk in the groin, also breaking his protective cup. In the course of the subsequent medical examination, early stage testicular cancer was discovered, and Kruk also made a full recovery after surgery.
  • The Guidepost magazine column "His Mysterious Ways" often features stories like this. For example, a woman had her shoes stolen while at a conference. She was forced to give her speech in a pair of flats. When a crazed gunman stormed into the conference room and opened fire, a bullet struck the wall two inches above her head—where her head would have been had she been wearing the high heels that were pilfered.
  • The story of unfortunate skydiver Joan Murray. While skydiving in 1999, Murray's parachute failed to deploy. And her backup chute only finally popped at 700 feet, deflating almost instantly after deployment. Murray smacked into the ground at 80 miles per hour, shattering about every bone she had. What should have been a fatal accident was avoided because Murray also landed on a Fire Ant nest. What seems like adding insult to literal injury actually saved her life, as the Fire Ant venom triggered her body release a wave of adrenaline that kept her heart beating. Murray would survive the incident, and live another 23 years after.

21st Century

  • The 9/11 attacks had many instances of this. Some are documented, while others are apocryphal:
    • On September 11, 2001, Seth MacFarlane was scheduled to take a flight to Los Angeles from Boston. Due to a hangover and his agent giving him the wrong time for the flight, he missed the plane (by as little as ten minutes by some reports). He tried to find another flight, only to find that the terrorist attacks that day grounded all flights. He also learned that one of the hijacked planes, American Airlines Flight 11, was the one he was supposed to be on.
    • There were people who worked in the buildings, but weren't there, either because they were sick, at somebody else's funeral, waiting at the poll lines to vote (it was NY state's primary voting day), one woman was actually laid off the day before, and one case even tells about someone who wasn't at his work on time because his shoelaces weren't tied!
    • The History Channel documentary 102 Minutes that Changed America shows an instance of this. A man who worked in one of the Towers can be seen on the phone with a friend, telling them that he overslept that morning because he was watching Monday Night Football the night before and stayed up too late. He ends the conversation with, "Monday Night Football saved my life."
    • All My Children actress Eva LaRue (Dr. Maria Santos-Grey, 1993-1997, 2002-2005) and her husband John Callahan (Edmund Grey, 1992-2005) were scheduled to be passengers on American Airlines Flight 11, the first one to strike the World Trade Center. However, she felt ill due to her pregnancy and they decided to postpone to a later flight, thus saving theirs and their unborn child's life.
    • Hall of Fame basketball coach John Thompson was scheduled to do a studio interview in Los Angeles for Jim Rome's TV show. He wanted to fly out on the 11th so that he could make a friend's birthday party in Las Vegas on the 13th, and booked a ticket on American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington to L.A. A few days before the show, Rome's producer called, telling him that Thompson's original plans wouldn't work for the show, and asked him to rebook for the 12th. Thompson resisted, but the producer insisted, adding that Thompson would still be able to make it to Vegas in time for the party. Thompson finally agreed... and back at home in Arlington, Virginia, he claimed he felt the impact of Flight 77's crash into The Pentagon.
    • A double whammy of misfortunes for a United Airlines flight attendant Elise O'Kane: thanks to accidentally reversing two numbers when entering a flight code to try to book her usual schedule, she ended up being scheduled to work all the wrong flights for September, but got most of her regular trips back via trading with other staff, with one exception: United Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, on September 11. Then the night before the flight, she logged in to try again to request it, only for the system to freeze; by the time it processed the request, it was one minute past the required deadline. At Logan Airport, O'Kane happened to meet Robert Fangman, a younger flight attendant who was scheduled to staff the flight in her place, and despite being "steamed" about not being on it, tried her best to be happy for him. Flight 175 went on to crash into the South Tower, killing everyone onboard, including Fangman.
    • After the South Tower's collapse at 9:59 am and a call for all firefighters to evacuate the North Tower, NYFD Captain Jay Jonas, his unit, and a couple of other first responders on their way down came across a woman Josephine Harris at around the 20th floor who had come down from the 73rd floor, exhausted and struggling to walk. At the risk of slowing down the evacuation, the firemen escorted her down. Around the 4th floor Harris collapses to her feet saying she can't go on and they should leave her but the group refuses. The North Tower then collapsed with them still inside at 10:28 am, but due to how the building debris fell around that area the group ended up in a cove all still alive; they were eventually rescued five hours later. The firemen called Harris their "guardian angel" because had she not ended up stopping on that floor, the group would have been further along and subsequently killed in the collapse.
  • Enrique Wilson of the New York Yankees was planning to fly home to the Dominican Republic on November 12, 2001, a week after the Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks were to finish up the 2001 World Series in order to allow time for the Yankees to celebrate their fourth championship in a row and fifth in six years. The Diamondbacks won, however, and Wilson decided to go home early since there would be no celebratory parade for the Yankees; the plane he would have been on ended up crashing in Queens, where all 260 people on board died along with five others on the ground.
  • On April 15, 2002, a South Korean tour group was shifted to the rear of the plane back to Busan because the tour guide left his bag at the hotel and the bus carrying the group had to go back for it, and this delay meant that the good seats were taken by the time they checked in. However, this blunder ended up saving most of their lives; that plane ended up flying into a mountain because the pilots mishandled the approach to Gimhae Airport, leaving only 37 survivors, most of them in the crappy seats the guide caused his group to be shifted into.
  • Natalia Kornilyeva recounts how her aunt who lives in Moscow broke her arm on January 18 (the Eve of Epiphany, one of the major Orthodox Christian feast days) in 2011 when she slipped and fell on her way from the church. The aunt's husband, who was in Germany and due to return on the 24th, changed his ticket flew home to her immediately. On the 24th, they learned of a terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport, which occurred exactly at the time and place where Kornilyeva's aunt would have been, preparing to meet her husband — if she hadn't broken her arm and he hadn't arrived early.
  • This Not Always Working story involves a woman who was planning to stay at a hotel with her children during the April 2011 tornado outbreak, but couldn't check in because she'd misplaced her driver's license. She begins making her way to a friend's house who had a basement, but on the way, she stops for gas and finds her license in plain sight in her wallet, allowing her to check into another hotel (which is fortunate, as the weather took a nasty turn just as she was leaving the gas station which would have made for a treacherous drive the rest of the way). The next day, she learned that the hotel she had originally intended to stay at had been hit by a tornado. To this day, the submitter can't explain how she could have overlooked her driver's license in her wallet at the first hotel, but knows that the fact that she did saved her family from potential disaster.
  • In December 2014 the Taliban attacked The Army Public School and College in Pakistan killing 148 children and teachers. For one class, the only surviving student was absent due to oversleeping after attending a wedding the night before and his alarm clock not working.
  • Ivan Basso crashed on stage 5 of the 2015 edition of Tour de France. The days after the crash, he still had testicular pains, so he asked the race doctor to take a thorough look at what could be wrong. The diagnosis: Early stage testicular cancer. So early that he made a full recovery after the surgery was done.
  • After the Paris attacks in 2015, at least a few Eagles of Death Metal fans ended up on the news because they were meant to go to the Bataclan theatre but ended up missing the concert because they were sick or had family commitments. At said concert, roughly 89 people were shot dead by gunmen working for the so-called Islamic State.
  • One girl at the 2017 Ariana Grande concert attacked by ISIS in Manchester only survived because she misread a text from her mother telling her where to meet up. The mother died.
  • Sony Setiawan was due to fly on Lion Air 610 on 29 October 2018 for the weekend, but was late that day, due to a severe traffic jam on the Cikampek highway on the way to Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, meaning the plane had already taken off by the time he arrived (He would book a flight with a different airline at 9:40 AM to get to his original destination). His original flight crashed into the Java Sea ten minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people onboard.
  • A few passengers were not onboard Sriwijaya Air 182 when it crashed into the Java sea (killing all 62 people on board) for a variety of reasons. One person, alongside his friend, cancelled their plans to board the plane because they were not willing to pay for a COVID swab test (antigen tests were not sufficient as evidence to board the plane). Another person, a flight attendant, had her flight schedule changed to Makassar. A student due to board the plane- to see his sick mother in West Kalimantan- was also told by his mother to stay back in Jogjakarta to focus on his exams.
  • In Super Bowl LIV in February 2020, the San Fransisco 49ers entered the fourth quarter with a 10-point lead over the Kansas City Chiefs, only to end up crumbling in the fourth quarter, giving up 21 points while being unable to score any of their own, resulting in a 20-31 loss — and, critically, no parade, which is extremely notable in hindsight given that the first cases of the COVID-19 virus had already been reported in San Fransisco by then (and while the known cases had been quarantined, given what we now know about the spread and transmissibility of the virus, the fact that it was present in the city means there were almost certainly other people who were infected but didn't know it). Had the 49ers won, it's likely that the parade — involving large numbers of people packed closely together — would have become a superspreader event, making the first wave of the pandemic even more deadly. Instead, the parade was in Kansas City, where Covid was not yet present in the population.
  • A fire starts in the same room as an elderly man with dementia but luckily a family member forgot her purse.
  • On September 1st, 2022, an attacker disguised as an autograph-seeker tried to assassinate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, former president and vice-president of Argentina. Then a book she was carrying fell to the floor, right when the attacker was about to shoot her. The gun also didn't work as intended. While the perpetrator was eventually caught (and a whole conspiracy was eventually uncovered), this was the catalyst for her to step aside from the 2023 presidential election.

Other tropes brought up by other tropers (Anonimus, namra) are Unexplained Recovery, Commander Contrarian and Un-person, but I'll let them make the posts. As for these two, I believe they're best made No Real Life Examples, please, with Life Saving Misfortune in particular something that should've been NRLEP from the get-go.

Edited by GearFriedTheKnight on Aug 3rd 2025 at 10:57:01 AM

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
McMagma The most average weirdo and happiest nihilist from Cloudcuckooland. It's very fluffy. Since: Oct, 2018 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
The most average weirdo and happiest nihilist
#16673: Aug 4th 2025 at 12:41:26 AM

Good day.

I've noticed that Comically Oversized Butt has a No Real Life Examples, Please! note in the description but is missing from the index page.

Since the page is locked for average tropes like me, could someone who can access the page add it?

Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#16674: Aug 4th 2025 at 11:33:49 AM

[up] The same is true of Unsettling Gender-Reveal. Should this just go to the locked page edit request thread?

[down] Thanks.

Edited by Lymantria on Aug 4th 2025 at 3:02:49 PM

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
GastonRabbit C'est la vie. (he/him) from Robinson, Illinois, USA (General of TV Troops) Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
C'est la vie. (he/him)
#16675: Aug 4th 2025 at 11:58:37 AM

The edit request thread should always be used, but since I happened to see the above two posts without checking that thread, I went ahead and added them myself.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 4th 2025 at 1:58:59 PM

I got a rock for Halloween.

Projects: Long Term/Perpetual: Real Life Section Maintenance
20th Sep '25 9:57:50 AM

Crown Description:

Vote UP to cut real life examples; vote DOWN to keep.

Anything marked DONE has been resolved.

In order for a crowner to pass:

  • Must have been up for a minimum of a week
  • There must be a 2:1 ratio
  • If the vote is exactly 2:1 or +/- 1 vote from that, give it a couple extra days to see if any more votes come in
  • Once passed, tropes must be indexed on the appropriate NRLEP or LRLEO index
  • Should the vote fail, the trope should be indexed on KRLE page

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