Bad Luck Charm

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The inverse of the Good Luck Charm - an item that is deemed to be unlucky, either because of its strange markings or a demonic shape or something. If you ever find yourself in the possession of one of these things, watch out. When a Bad Luck Charm is in the possession of a character, expect very bad things to happen, like slipping on a Banana Peel, getting stuck in a puddle of glue that's been spilled on the sidewalk, or a plane suddenly running out of gas and plummeting to the ground right behind or in front of you.

Related to Artifact of Death. Bystanders will likely see The Jinx as a walking Bad Luck Charm.

Examples of Bad Luck Charm include:

Anime and Manga

  • In One Piece, the Kitetsu class swords are extremely sharp but also cursed and eventually lead the wielder to his tomb. So far, Zoro is the only one who has carried such a dangerous sword without ill effects, as his luck was stronger than the sword's curse. Note, this was probably a Shout-Out to the Real Life Muramasa swords, which have a similar fame.
  • In Ojamajo Doremi, when Majoruka took over the Mahou-Do, she sold bad luck charms exclusively.
  • The pendant that Nagi's grandfather gives Hayate in Hayate the Combat Butler adds more trouble for Hayate. Knowing the old man, it was probably deliberate. First hinted in the manga when Isumi exorcises some of the bad luck off the charm.
  • A manga chapter of Nagasarete Airantou featured a cursed broom that brought misfortune to all who tried to use it... until it wound up in possession of Ayane, who has such horrible luck anyway that she completely failed to notice its effects.
  • The Doomful Diamond from an episode of Adventures of Mini-Goddess.

Comic Books

  • Iznogoud: one story revolves around the vizier obtaining a cursed diamond that brings very bad luck (your chair collapses, the doorknob snaps off in your hand, rooftiles fall on you in the middle of the desert) to the holder as a gift to the caliph. Of course, it's a Clingy MacGuffin, and things only get worse.

Literature

  • The children's book The Bad Luck Penny. Picking one up leads to misfortunes like getting concussed by a baseball while sitting in the stands, and choking on your food.
  • Jack Vance's Lyonesse: The Green Pearl features the eponymous item which will turn anyone who owns it to evil, until somebody else murders them to possess it. At one point the chain is broken when the owner is rendered helpless by somebody who's only interested in punishing him, and the pearl is temporarily forgotten.

Live-Action TV

  • The Supernatural episode "Bad Day at Black Rock" had the Winchester brothers find a lucky Rabbit's Foot Talisman that gave the holder good luck until it left their person, at which point their luck would turn Necro Non Sequitur-inducingly bad. The only way to avoid certain death was to destroy the amulet in a specific ritual.
  • The Brady Bunch episodes "Hawaii Bound", "Pass the Tabu" and "The Tiki Caves". Bobby finds an ancient tiki idol which appears to bring the family bad luck. The curse can only be lifted by leaving the idol in an old burial ground.
    • In an episode of Scrubs, JD buys a pair of the tiki idols used on those Brady Bunch episodes for him and Turk when everyone takes a trip to the Bahamas. Even though, in-universe, they're just a prop, they appear to bring bad luck to the two.
  • An episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
  • In Generation Kill the ironically-named candy, Charms, are seen as bad luck and are not allowed to be eaten within Team 1 Alpha's humvee.

Corporal Josh Ray Person: Oh, no. Now not only do we have to worry about all the Charms you've eaten, but now Brad's just pissed off God.

  • A first season episode of Babylon 5 has a character nicknamed Jinxo, who is believed by many to be a walking Bad Luck Charm. He worked on the construction of all five Babylon stations. The first three stations were blown up in terrorist attacks, and the fourth vanished mysteriously. He refuses to leave Babylon Five because he thinks that if he does, something bad will happen to it. Another character tells Jinxo that he's got it backwards: he should be called "Lucky" because he managed to escape unharmed from four separate dangerous incidents. Jinxo says that he never thought about it that way before, the other guy comments that no one ever does.
  • "The Clover", in The Middle's third season, inverts the trope by having a four-leaf clover, usually considered to be a good luck charm, bring Brick nothing but bad luck.

Music

Newspaper Comics

  • In one Hagar the Horrible strip, Hagar asks Lucky Eddie how he bought the lucky penny he is carrying so cheaply. "It has a curse on it", he replies.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • The Bible: Whenever the Arc of the Covenant ended up in the hands of rival nations, bad things happened to them.
  • Sir Balyn removes a sword from a lady's scabbard. This sword ends up causing all kinds of horrible things to happen, eventually causing Balyn to kill his brother Balan in battle.

Web Comics

  • Mind Mistress invented a colorful design good luck charm that attaches to the back. This charm really works, but she couldn't stop it from switching into bad luck mode, which is colored gray. Naturally, this escapes the notice of a thief who steals it to become rich and famous - when it eventually turned gray, he didn't know what it meant and continued wearing it for a month, increasing his bad luck to deadly levels.

Western Animation

  • An episode of Garfield and Friends had Garfield receive the Klopman diamond from Jon's deceased cousin. Said diamond was rumored to be cursed, but Garfield doesn't believe it, despite all of the unusual disasters that befell him, until the end when he finally gives it to the lawyer who wanted the diamond in the first place.
  • The Little Lulu episode, "The Curse Of The Thingamajig", had Lulu and Tubby find a mysterious object that they called a "Thingamajig". The Thingamajig gave them a lot of bad luck throughout the episode, until it was discovered that it was actually the hood ornament on a guy's car.
  • The cursed emerald from the Jackie Chan Adventures St. Patrick's Day episode. When Jade gets it, she has two potentially fatal accidents in about a minute. When Jackie takes it off her, he immediately gets a phone call telling him he's bankrupt. They have to return it to its proper resting place in Ireland to break the curse - and just to make things more complicated, the curse only passes from person to person if the emerald is exchanged "willingly".
  • An episode of What's New, Scooby-Doo? had the gang in Greece, where Shaggy bought what he thought was a lucky amulet that keeps monsters away. It was actually an emerald attracting the attention of the Centaur that kept chasing the gang.
  • In a Phineas and Ferb episode, Candice finds a tiki charm which appears to give her bad luck, and keeps coming back when she tries to get rid of it. She interprets a locals advice to be "throw it into the volcano", but it turns out that there is a restaurant on top of the mountain, the "charm" is a "your table is ready" alert device.
  • Happy Tree Friends had the Idol that would cause certain death to anybody near it.
  • Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy had one episode with a mysterious unconnected phone that somehow rung. Eddy got his hands on it after Rolf attempted to get rid of and immediately got plagued with bad luck, which Edd was hard-pressed to deny (albeit not for lack of trying).
  • An episode of Lilo & Stitch: The Series featured Experiment 113 a.k.a. "Shoe", who was essentially a living bad luck charm. Subverted later on that Shoe's bad luck could be switched over to good luck by simply lifting up the horseshoe-shaped projection on his head.
  • The animated Spirou and Fantasio had an episode where an already-unlucky bad guy had to transport a full cargo of these for resale. Naturally, he crash-landed.
  • A short on the What a Cartoon Show, "Awfully Lucky", had a sleazy guy trying to get a rare gem to a museum offering a huge reward for it. The gem was cursed to give whoever owns it alternating extremely good and extremely bad luck, so the guy ends up suffering all sorts of increasingly ludicrous calamities, and just barely living through them, trying to get the gem to the museum.

Real Life

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