Career-Building Blunder/Playing With

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Basic Trope: A character screws up badly, only to be accepted/promoted because of having experienced this failure.

  • Straight: Jack activates the bomb too early, rendering it completely useless when it’s needed. Jim chooses not to fire him or promotes him, believing that because of this he’ll never jump the gun again.
  • Exaggerated: The explosion not only wasted the time and effort put into the bomb, but killed the entire, extremely valuable bomb squad placing it, yet Jack is promoted to second in command for apologizing.
  • Justified:
    • The mistake didn’t really affect anything, and Jack did a great job of trying to fix it anyway.
    • Jack is being Kicked Upstairs to get him out of anywhere he can cause harm.
    • That particular mistake is considered evidence of intelligence, as all the people who currently excel in the company made the same mistake when they were new.
  • Inverted: Jim is The Captain whose mistake killed part of his crew; Jack sees how broken up he is over this and fights to keep him in charge, because now he’ll look out for the rest of them even more.
  • Subverted: It turns out that Jim only kept Jack around because he hopes to prevent future mistakes by keeping an eye on him.
  • Double subverted: ...and then the same situation comes up again and Jack makes the right call, proving that he really did learn from his mistake.
  • Parodied: Jack’s mistake killed the rest of team; Jim is now forced to keep him around- with him screwing up the whole time- until he can find replacements.
  • Deconstructed: Jim's lax attitude toward mistakes makes the whole team lazy and undisciplined.
  • Averted: As soon as Jim finds out it was Jack’s fault, Jack is demoted or fired.
  • Invoked: Jack intentionally makes mistakes in hope of being promoted.

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