Failure Is the Only Option/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: No matter what one does, one can NOT achieve one's ultimate goal.

  • Straight: Bob is the owner of a small bakery. He wants his bakery to be the best around but success eludes him.
  • Exaggerated: In spite of all his efforts, Bob's bakery is just too pitiful for words, so nobody bothers to come.
  • Justified:
    • Bob isn't a very good baker at all, despite his desire to have a great bakery.
    • Alternatively, although Bob's a very good baker, his little bakery is overshadowed by a large chain bakery not far away.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted: It seems like Bob is going to give up on his dream...then a local newspaper writes up his cakes, which causes a huge influx of business. He eventually succeeds.
  • Double Subverted: However, the new popularity of his cakes causes the customers to have the opinion that It's Popular, Now It Sucks, so he ends up right where he started.
  • Parodied: Bob has no idea how to bake, run a business, or even how to work a cash register. He still wants to have the best bakery in the world.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Bob never achieves his goal of having the best bakery around. The inevitable failure takes its toll on him, causing him to develop into a bitter, unhappy shell of a man.
    • Alternatively, Bob quits.
  • Reconstructed: Bob revisits his goals and resets his parameters. He decides that it's OK as long as he has a good bakery, even if it's not the best, which makes him much happier and takes undue stress off of him.
  • Zig Zagged: A successful marketing campaign causes an influx of new customers, who in turn decides that his bakery is popular, so it now must suck. But this doesn't stop him from still getting new customers in the door.
  • Averted: Bob's goal is vague enough to where he can succeed at it.
  • Enforced: "If Bob achieves his goal of having the world's best bakery, this series as we know it would end! We can't have that!"
  • Lampshaded: "Why is it that every time I try to get the word out, I fail somehow?"
  • Invoked: Bob is a great baker; however, he has very little business sense.
  • Defied: Bob plans all the facets of running a bakery as soon as he starts up.
  • Discussed: "Everything I do just ends in disaster."
  • Conversed: "Oops! Bob's trying to succeed again in this episode."

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