Coincidence Magnet: Difference between revisions

== Comics ==

 

 

== Literature ==

* The protagonist of [[Robert Heinlein]]'s ''Citizen of the Galaxy'' is a slave boy whose owner turns out to be an anti-slavery secret agent. He ends up escaping by being adopted into the notoriously clannish and hateful-of-outsiders society of spacefaring traders. Eventually, he leaves them and ends up as a fire-control officer on a military ship. When his enlistment papers go through, they identify him as the son-and-sole-heir of the late owner of a [[Mega Corp]] on Earth. Upon returning to Earth, he must wrest control of his company back from the [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]] that's been running it in the meantime. Any one of these could have made an interesting and exciting story; the protagonist goes through ''all'' of them before he's turns 20.

* Grant and Christina from Carole Marsh's mystery books. They're not even teenagers, but they've already visited almost every state in the Union and several foreign countries, met the President of the United States at least twice (Once after sneaking into the Oval Office and nearly spraying him with a fire extinguisher), run the Boston Marathon, and recovered the Statue of Liberty's torch, a functioning model of the Wright Flyer and a T-Rex skeleton after these things were stolen (By separate people!).

* This is the entire premise of a short story, in which a man tells a boy the story of his life and how it entirely is composed of events which were ''theoretically'' possible, but extremely unlikely (his bread ''always'' landing butter side up, his body briefly becoming magnetized, breaking a glass with the sound of a violin playing, etc). It gets so bad that a woman he was walking with actually flew away!

* The [[The Hardy Boys|Hardy Boys]], in most of their novels, couldn't go anywhere without being involved in hijinks or mayhem. Occasionally they were dragged into it by their incompetent friend or their girlfriends.

* One of the recurring themes of the [[Liaden Universe]] series by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller is that [[There Are No Coincidences]]. The Korval clan comes in for special attention from fate (or "the Luck" as the characters themselves have it), perhaps due in part to Cantra's role in leading humanity to that universe. It is demonstrated repeatedly that members of Korval's families are magnets (or "nexuses" as the characters have it) for strangely unlikely chance. This tends to result in members of the family ending up in impossibly coincidental situations that can leave other characters shaking their heads (and often, quite reasonably from their perspective, seeing conspiracies where only coincidence exists).

** It is actually hard to decide whether [[Coincidence Magnet]] or [[Weirdness Magnet]] is more apt, since from the point of view of Clan Korval there is nothing supernatural about the [[Lost Technology]], aliens, or psychic powers they keep encountering. But the mundanes who frequently get caught up in events and swept along in Korval's wake would have different opinions…

 

== Live Action TV ==

** Coincidence in "Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing" for Monk to be at that firehouse when a killer stopped by to steal a coat? Probably not.

** In "Mr. Monk Goes to a Rock Concert," this happens when Monk and Natalie are passing by a port-a-potty, at the moment that some maintenance workers break open the door and a body falls out.

*** In ''Mr. Monk Is Miserable'', Monk and Natalie go into the Parisian catacombs, and Monk finds a very freshly deceased person's skull that was dumped there a year ago. Later, when they are having dinner at a blind restaurant, a woman claiming to know the identity of the skull is stabbed and killed to keep her from telling them his name.

* There was a [[Too Good to Last|short-lived]] Fox Network series called ''[[Strange Luck]]'' about a guy like this named Chance Harper. He had enhanced powers of luck, both good and bad, and kept alternatingly winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning (as just random examples from memory).

* Similarly justified in ''[[My Name Is Earl]]'' - whereas in early episodes it's not clear how much "Karma" is just Earl's personal [[Hand Wave]] for his predicament, as the series progresses the idea that an [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] of [[Laser-Guided Karma]] has [[Cosmic Plaything|made him its personal bitch]] starts to become [[Occam's Razor|the most logical explanation.]]

* ''[[Breaking Bad]]'' has Walt entering a bar he's never been to, running into the (unknown to him) father of his partner Jesse's {{spoiler|junkie}} girlfriend Jane, who has {{spoiler|turned Jesse on to heroin and blackmailed Walt for half a million dollars}}. Their conversation on family leads Walt to save Jesse from himself by {{spoiler|letting Jane die when she chokes on her vomit. Unfortunately, Jane's father is a air traffic controlman, who in his grief over his daughter's death, accidentally guides two planes toward each other, where they collide right underneath Walt's house.}}

** Wow, planes can fly ''underneath'' houses?