Misused: Lottery Ticket

This trope is a fairly specific set of story plots dealing with lottery tickets, yet checking the tropes:

My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: Wrong. According to the summary, none of the outcomes in the Lottery Ticket trope description happens. The key to the trope is that a legit ticket never works out, and it worked out.

Dada Ad: Potholed for lottery tickets in general.

Courage The Cowardly Dog: Wikia summary of the plot of the cited episode (whose title is listed incorrectly on the works page) has nothing to do with the Lottery Ticket trope description.

I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham: Potholed for lottery tickets in general.

Too Close For Comfort: Has nothing to do with Lottery Ticket trope description; reflects generalized lottery ticket plot.

Due South: The short recap description shows no indication it goes into the detailed plotline required, as there is no sign that the guy in question actually wins, or thinks he wins, anything.

Concentration: Potholed for lottery tickets in general.

Grave Robbing: Potholed for lottery tickets in general.

My Wifes Relations: It admits it's a "letter regarding an inheritance," which is NOT what the trope is about.

The Brady Bunch film: Potholed for lottery ticket in general.

The Time Travelers Wife (book): Potholed for lottery ticket in general.

No matter what, I think I'm going to rearrange the paragraphs in the description so that the fourth (which seems the most relevant) is up top. Still, I think this could use some help. Thoughts?

"A legit ticket never works out" isn't a key part of the definition; that's mainly because Status Quo Is God on many television shows. (It's like On One Condition that way.)

Huh? Then what is the key point? Why does it say "The Rule of Drama ensures that nobody will get a legitimate winning lottery ticket and just cash it unless "character wins the lottery" is the core premise of the work"?

And if you're right, does that justify the use of this trope for the appearance of lottery tickets in a plot in general?

Winning lottery tickets, I'd say.

I don't see it. The entire description is about how winning tickets end up not really affecting the characters/plot at all.

Yes, the key to this trope is that "no character will actually win big at the lottery, because Status Quo Is God." Potholing for just lottery tickets in general is misuse, plain and simple.

Suggest we rename to something like Never Win the Lottery or Never Really A Winning Ticket.

Looks like a classic case of Missing Supertrope Syndrome.

eta: A trope transplant might be a good approach here. Alternatively, depending on how few examples actually fit the current definition, we might consider simply broadening the trope.

edited 16th Jul '12 11:26:35 AM by Xtifr

How is just "lottery ticket" a trope?

Well, just to start off with, it generally indicates that at least one character in the work is a gambler (and probably not very good at math). :)

eta: Broad supertropes often don't have a lot of specific meaning. The Protagonist doesn't tell you much except that the story actually has one or more main characters. But this is clearly not chairs—lottery tickets don't appear in stories for no reason, even if there can be a wide range of reasons.

edited 16th Jul '12 12:16:59 PM by Xtifr

Significant Chairs! (I'll start popularizing that phrase one day, just see...)

Lottery tickets may always have significance, but if they're unrelated significance, it's not a single trope. We can make a trope about someone's gambling addiction to lottery tickets, and one about the lottery ticket plot where a character gets a winning ticket that proves somehow invalid, and one about a character winning the lottery but then suffering a string of bad luck. But those are all different tropes. In fact, they could all probably be lumped with other tropes - just not lumped with each other.

By that logic, I move to cut The Protagonist. Except that I simply don't agree.

eta: to clarify, I think that can be a valid argument depending on the case. I think it absolutely doesn't fly in the case of The Protagonist. I'm still thinking about Lottery Ticket.

edited 16th Jul '12 12:56:59 PM by Xtifr

How?

The Protagonist is the main character of the story. That is the trope's significance. It applies with every subtrope. A lottery ticket is a piece of paper. It can be significant, but in various independent ways, and each alleged subtrope has different significance.

A lottery ticket doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of paper. We could broaden the concept, while still keeping the name as an iconic and most-common example.

As I say, I'm still thinking about this. I'm not convinced one way or the other yet.

eta: but I'm not sure what the specific significance of having a main character is. The main character can mean all sorts of things, depending on the story—just as a lottery ticket can mean all sorts of things depending on the story. Like a protagonist, though, a lottery ticket is always significant.

edited 16th Jul '12 1:03:02 PM by Xtifr

Before we determine if we need a supertrope (my instinct is no), perhaps we should compile a list of other ways lottery tickets are used in fiction and see if we have any other subtropes here.

Off the top of my head:

1. Lottery ticket as part of Rags to Riches
2. Lottery ticket as MacGuffin or Chekovs Gun
3. Lottery ticket as part of a gambling addiction

Seems to me that all of the above are The Same But More Specific of one trope or another.

edited 16th Jul '12 2:06:36 PM by ccoa

^ Agree with all this. For example, if someone is addicted to lottery tickets, that should go under a tripe for gambling addiction, not Lottery Ticket - and that trope should be Gambling Addiction, not Lottery Addiction because the latter isn't a distinct trope.

This discussion is quite similar to the open one on wills. There, we agreed that wills are always significant, but {{Wills} isn't a trope. Rather, many tropes exist about wills.

Added a crowner for renaming the current trope while we discuss whether or not we need any other lottery ticket tropes. If we choose to have a supertrope later, we can simply remove the Lottery Ticket redirect and use it.

That seems reasonable. I'm still not sure either way on the supertrope thing, but I'm closer to being convinced that we don't need a supertrope than I was previously.

Bumping for votes. And any other opinions for/against a lottery ticket supertrope.

Crowner called.

Alternative titles hooked.

Votes bump. It's 9-1 now, but there is only one name.

The bad part about the name is that it's one of them "never happen" tropes. They seem to frequently pop up in TRS.

Crowner called for Never Win the Lottery. Time to do the rename and move around the wicks.

Did the rename, discussion page tag, FAQ tag, Renamed Tropes tag and the wicks. Requesting lock.

lu127, if you are reading this, could you please reply to this?