Lottery of Doom

"May the odds be ever in your favor!"

- The Hunger Games

Hey, you just won the lottery! Sounds pretty good, right? After all, you just got a few million dollars, and are, unless you stupidly spend it all, probably set for life. Who wouldn't want to win the lottery?

Well, you wouldn't want to, if it was one of these lotteries. The Lottery of Doom is a lottery where the prize is something really bad happening to the "winner," usually death. The reason for the Lottery of Doom varies, ranging from an attempt to keep the population down, appeasing a dragon, wrathful god or Monster of the Week, or just to be creepy. Sometimes the lottery players know that it's a Lottery of Doom, sometimes they don't. The lottery sometimes gets the perks of actually winning the lottery, but you aren't the able to enjoy it for very long, leading some characters to arrange some sort of inheritance thing.

So next time you buy a lottery ticket, be sure to read the fine print.

In a Town with a Dark Secret, expect this to overlap with A Fete Worse Than Death.

Compare Russian Roulette.

Anime and Manga

 * One of the episodes of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann featured a village that could only support fifty people, so when the population got too high they would select people by lottery and exile them.
 * The end of the episode hints that the lottery was rigged and had always been rigged by the village elder, who chose lottery "winners" himself based on who the village could afford to lose.
 * Bokurano: The kid who gets to pilot the giant robot gets selected at random.
 * Kinda moot point with the lottery, since.
 * An inversion occurs in Full Metal Panic!. When Sousuke accidentally releases a biowarfare agent in class, the students have to draw lots to find who'll get the only vaccine available. Then it seems to go from inversion to reconstruction: When Sousuke wins the lottery, the outraged classmates promptly attack him en masse.
 * In Ikigami, future Japan has rebuilt it's economy and education system around this one: every person is injected at childhood with nanomachines that have significant health benefits. However, for 1 in a 1000, the nanomachines are programmed to destroy the heart at a random time between before the age of 25... And you only get 24 hours of notice before that. The intention was to make every Japanese person live his life to the fullest knowing that every day really could be his last.

Comic Books
"An escape bid -- but only for two! For a tense minute, the eight people in the doomed space ship watched one another in cautious silence. There would be no lottery of luck!"
 * The 1950's Space Opera Rick Random: Space Detective. Lampshaded and averted in the episode "Kidnappers from Mars!" in which Space Pirates are caught in a space tide with the only hope of escape being the two-man space shuttle. After a pause to consider the implications, everyone starts blazing away at each other.


 * In Peter Milligan's relaunched X-Force/X-Statix, Orphan, Anarchist and U-Go Girl are trapped in a spacecraft with only a two-person escape pod. They roll dice to determine who gets to use the pod.
 * This strip by Quino.

Fan Fiction

 * In Cupcakes, Pinkie Pie chooses her victims by lot.

Film

 * Dragonslayer. To appease a dragon, all of the virginal women in a small kingdom must take part in a twice-yearly lottery: the "winner" is chained up outside the dragon's lair as a meal.
 * The Island. The people apparently participate in a lottery, the winner of which is relocated to a paradise island.
 * Clonus. The people apparently participate in a lottery, the winner of which is relocated to America.  If this sounds familiar, know that Clonus came first and yes, there was a lawsuit.
 * Population 436 does it to keep the town's population at the exact same number. They draw names out of a box, then have a harvest festival, during which the "winner," is hung. Winning is a great honor, and both the winner and her husband are absolutely delighted about the whole thing.
 * Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond) (1929). After a struggle punctures the oxygen tank, the two male crewmembers draw straws to see who stays behind. The Dirty Coward gets the short straw and breaks down sobbing, so the hero makes the Heroic Sacrifice and stays on the moon instead.
 * The climax of Armageddon requires one of the miners to stay behind to activate the nuclear bomb. They draw straws. AJ wins,.

Literature

 * The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is about a town that has a yearly lottery. The Twist Ending is that whoever wins the lottery gets
 * There's a YA book also called The Lottery by Beth Goobie where the Absurdly Powerful Student Council holds a lottery whose "winner" is ostracized by the rest of the school.
 * The Andre Norton novel The Zero Stone. Gem dealer Vondar Ustle and his apprentice Murdoc Jern are in a bar on an alien planet. A group of priests from the local religion enter, set up a wheel and start it spinning. Jern knows that whoever the wheel is pointing at when it stops must be sacrificed to the local deity. The wheel ends up pointing between Ustle and Jern: Ustle is quickly killed by the fearful locals, and Jern barely escapes with his life.
 * Mercedes Lackey's One Good Knight from the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series. There is a weekly lottery from the kingdom's virgins to see who will be sacrificed to a dragon that week. Subverted: the lottery is fixed -- and the "winning" girls aren't actually eaten by the dragon.
 * Stephen King's Storm of the Century. The parents who gets the "winning" rune stone give their son up to a wizard/demon.
 * Taken Up to Eleven in the Dark Tower series. The ruined town of Lud has speaker towers that play mind-searing music at random, and whenever it does, its residents hold a lottery to decide who to sacrifice to the 'ghosts' that are putting forth the horrible sound. Several times a day, somebody's name comes out of the hat and is set to dancing the jig at the end of a hangman's rope.
 * Battle Royale's "Program" ostensibly works this way, with classes of ninth-graders being volunteered, and one of the many volunteered classes being selected at random. Of course, this may not actually be how it works...
 * No. In the book it is stated it is completely random. All 9th grade classes are entered; even if someone in the class is the son/daughter of someone important or the teacher is against it.
 * There's also a short story set Twenty Minutes Into the Future. A yearly fair is held well outside of town, and who gets in is decided by lottery. Once the protagonist enters the fair, they're given a choice of carnival rides, each of which has a chance associated with it (1 in 10, 1 in 500, etc.). Trying to be macho, the protagonist picks a high-risk ride.
 * What is the name of the story?
 * Used in Terry Bisson's short story The Toxic Donut. The star of the show is chosen by lottery - and this year, they started letting you buy tickets for other people!
 * The Hunger Games is a lottery to be put into a Battle Royale scenario. Children between the ages of twelve and eighteen must put in a ticket each year; poorer children can provide for themselves and their families by getting more tickets. These are cumulative, so a poor teenager trying to help feed a large starving family can end up with a truly staggering number of tickets.
 * In the Discworld book Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, the ancient winter lottery comes up. A dried bean is put in one bowl, and the one who gets the bean is 'crowned king'. Until they need to slaughter the king to make the sun come up again and get spring to return. This is based on Real Life history, even though it's part of Discworld lore. And it's a plot point more than once.
 * In Philip Jose Farmer's Attitudes, a gambler from Earth happens upon a group of non-human locals playing a game similar to roulette and convinces them to let him join in. Since his success as a gambler is the result of psychic powers, he does very well in the game
 * In Borges' "The Lottery of Babylon", the inhabitants of the namesake city run a lottery game in which the prize can be literally anything: from kingship to death by torture.

Live Action TV

 * Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "Ypres 1914". Five WW 1 British Army soldiers face a dilemma: they must make a break through enemy lines, but there are only rations for four. One of the methods they use to decide who will take "the other way out" is drawing straws.
 * The Sliders episode "Luck of the Draw" involves a lottery in a seemingly-Utopian world. What the players don't know is that the winners are killed by the government in order to keep the population down to preserve the Utopia.
 * Actually it's largely Subverted coupled with Moral Dissonance: all the people of that world know what will happen to the "winners". They are even given wills and the money is given to their relatives, they can spend as much as they want before they die etc. There's even (more specifically, especially, because in most other cases the "players" don't get a choice) the option of not buying a ticket and those who wish to live, don't. Of course, assuming it's common knowledge, they don't print it on the machine for aliens, "sliders", general off-worlders and those stuck in their basements for 50 years to find out. It's definitely set up as a trap for them!
 * And the price of these lottery tickets? It's negative. You just walk up to the machine gets some cash and a ticket. So even natives who know do get tempted.
 * On Lost Hurley wins the lottery. While he doesn't die, everything that happens afterward is terribly unlucky. And his grandfather DOES die. And he gets stranded on the island...maybe death for the other examples wasn't so bad after all...
 * However, his problems aren't the result of the lottery, but rather the Arc Numbers he used to win it.
 * A variation of this happens in the original Battlestar Galactica series. On a visit to a planet with a wild west motif, Starbuck is involved in a card game that is rigged for him to win. One of the items he wins is a badge, which forces him to become the town sheriff, a responsibility he can't shrug off easily.
 * Inverted in Stargate Universe - the winners of the lottery get to live - more precisely, they get to go on the shuttle fleeing the ship on a collision course with a nearby star..

Mythology

 * The young men and women chosen by lottery at Athens were sent to the Cretan Labyrinth to become food for the Minotaur. This comes to an end when Theseus steps up to the plate and kills the Minotaur. This detail goes back to Older Than Feudalism writers such as Apollodorus, Plutarch, and Diodorus Siculus.

Video Games

 * If you get three deaths-heads on the slot machine in Space Quest, it kills you with a Disintegrator Ray.
 * Crimsonland features its Fatal Lottery perk (not that anybody picks it, though - too ineffective).
 * In Fallout: New Vegas you come across the town of Nipton where Caesar's Legion has recently held a lottery.
 * In the same game, there's also, a very straight example, with the additional twist that there was no actual necessity for the sacrifices, just the impression that they were needed.
 * Played for laughs by an Announcer response in Monday Night Combat, as hard as that is to believe. Although it might NOT be all that hard to believe...
 * In the adventure game adaptation of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Benny's scenario involves a village of cavemen who have to sacrifice one of their own to AM. The key to the good ending involves
 * In Final Fantasy VI, getting "Doom-Doom-7" on Setzer's slot kills the entire party.

Western Animation

 * In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Dickisode", meals from a certain restaurant in town all come with peel-off lotteries much like the annual McDonald's Monopoly game that include free drinks, meals, coupons... That last part is even mentioned in the commercial, but it's said quickly and quietly. Not even thirty seconds after Carl "wins" the lottery, the collectors show up...
 * Squidbillies had the Tricky Two Jackpot. The winner gets torn in half by monster trucks.
 * Two or three Speedy Gonzales cartoons start with this trope, particularly if Sylvester is involved. Desperate mice draw straws, and the "winner" attempts to outrun Sylvester. The mouse invariably loses, we see this isn't the first time the mice have lost, and this is what drives them to call for Speedy Gonzales.
 * The mice in Disney's Cinderella pull a similar lottery to see who will distract Lucifer while the rest go get food. Hilariously, the one who 'wins' is the one who called for the lottery!

Real Life

 * Arguably, when a country has a military draft.
 * This was literally the case with National Service in Australia in the 1970's, when the Vietnam War was at its height. The drawing of lots was actually televised and resembled a game show lottery.
 * And many escaped to Canada, when they could've just pretended to want to kill people - which is something the military wouldn't want.
 * Or being a conscientious objector which puts you in civilian roles instead of military service.
 * There were examples of stranded crews in real life pulling straws to see who gets eaten in cases where they ran out of food. When they were not fudging the results or just lying about it when their story is told.
 * This is parodied in The Far Side where a man on a life raft is dismayed to find he drew the shortest straw of everyone on his life raft. Which includes a dog.
 * The historian Josephus was among a handful of holdouts trapped and surrounded by Roman soldiers, so they cast lots to see who got to die first (they were all planning to die, but since Judaism considers suicide a sin it was up to the others to kill whoever drew the metaphorical straw first); in the end, Josephus and the other remaining survivor surrender to the Romans.
 * The amazing thing is that Josephus, an obsessively image-conscious writer who did everything he could to make himself look good, apparently didn't realize how bad a light this story put him in.
 * There is actually a math puzzle similar to this (Josephus' Permutation; featured in Professor Layton). A given number of people get in a circle, and starting at a specified person and for a given N, every Nth person is killed and removed from the circle until only 1 remains. The puzzle is to figure out who the survivor is.
 * If someone tried to escape a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the guards would line up all the prisoners and kill every Nth one.
 * Ancient Romans used "decimation" as a means of group punishment. The soldiers were divided into groups of ten, and a drawing of lots would decide which one would be killed by the other nine.
 * Jury duty.