Gave Up Too Soon

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"[My uncle's] greatest accomplishment was a soft-drink called 4-Up. It wasn't very successful, so he invented 5-Up. Still it didn't click, and then came 6-Up. Still nobody liked it, so he died heartbroken. Little did he know how close he came."

Victor Borge, Caught in the Act

Timing conspires against the main character(s). As soon as they leave the scene, whatever they were waiting for arrives. Another version of this is having the main character in a zombie attack kill him/herself a few seconds before help arrives.

Frequently occurs when two characters are searching for each other. (In Real Life, the lost are often advised to stay in one place to avoid this trope.)

Frequently only the audience knows it was Real After All.

Needs a Better Description

Compare You Were Trying Too Hard.

Possible spoilers ahead!

Examples of Gave Up Too Soon include:

Anime and Manga

  • Dirty Pair Flash: Iris (a.k.a. Flare) has a grudge against the 3WA because they didn't provide backup when she called for help, which caused Molly to get killed. Or so she thought—actually, they could and would have provided backup if she hadn't thrown away her communicator device, assuming that they weren't going to.

Comic Books

A proverb said that he who gives up could be doing it the second before a miracle comes. So, we never give up. We wait for the miracle. And the few instants we hang on could sometimes mean the difference between life or death.

Film

  • The main characters in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist spend a good chunk of the movie looking for their inebriated friend Caroline. They just lost the cell phone connection with her and decide she's not at the bus terminal, so they leave to look somewhere else. Three seconds later, Caroline emerges from the terminal bathroom.
  • In Home Alone 2, the mother is looking for her son Kevin all over New York. After searching for him in her brother-in-law's house, she doesn't find anybody so she picks a taxi and leaves, moments before Kevin arrives on the scene.
  • In the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet made by Baz Luhrmann in 1996, Romeo + Juliet, Juliet starts waking up from her coma as Romeo is drinking his poison, and he realizes his mistake right before dropping dead. This raises the drama from the original, where she merely woke up to find his corpse.
  • A ridiculously tragic version: in The Mist the main character mercy-kills his son and all his friends (he had just enough bullets for everyone but himself) moments before the ominous pounding sound drawing ever closer is revealed to be the military coming through killing all the monsters and burning up the mist.
  • At the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Edgin’s plan to break himself and Holgo out of prison is as follows: knowing that Jarathan (an Aarakocra, one of a race of bird people) is on the parole board, and that their parole hearing will occur in a tower at the highest point of Revels End, they plan to bull-rush Jarathan and push all three of them out the tower's window, forcing Jarathan to fly them to the ground, letting them escape. Unfortunately, due to a storm, Jarathan is late to the hearing, and the magistrate insists on holding it without him, so and Edgin complies and tells them his account of how he became a thief in order to support his daughter after his wife's murder, eventually set up by his assumed allies and subsequently abandoned as a fall guy. As he finishes, Jarathan finally arrives, the two put their plan into motion, and they succeed - unaware that the magistrate had decided to approve their parole, which results in both of them becoming fugitives for the remainder of the story.

Literature

  • In Neverwhere, Door agreed to meet up with the Marquis at the floating market. They could have touched him, had they known where he was. Dead. By the time he recovered, they had already left.
  • The book Gold and Silver, Silver and Gold, about buried treasure, mentions that treasure hunters should be persistant because "You could dig four feet down, find nothing, and give up when the treasure is buried five feet down."
    • Interestingly, there's a real life instance of this subverted to ridiculous levels. The exact location escapes me, but following a rumor of gold on a island, decades of treasure hunters have dug over a hundred feet down looking for the loot, because "If the previous guy didn't find it, maybe it's just a little bit further!" Considering that the shaft is now so deep to be prone to flooding, and the gold was supposed to be from the 19th century... And so goes the story of the treasure of Oak Island. Chalk this one up to not knowing when to quit.
    • Long story short: Due to them finding man made obstacles, they know something is buried down there, but no one has been able to get to it (or nowadays, even figure out where the original pit was). how would the original owners have put gold hundreds of feet down, anyway?

Live Action TV

  • The Twilight Zone had a rather disturbing example of this trope. In the episode Mr. Garrity And The Graves, a con artist scams an entire village into believing he can raise their dead. After being paid not to, he feels badly and performs the phony ritual anyway before leaving town in disgrace. Cue the dead rising.
    • The episode "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" involved a space shuttle crashing onto what the astronauts think is a distant desert planet. One Jerkass member of the crew, determined to survive, kills the rest of the crew one by one so he can steal their water canteens. Shortly after killing the captain, the crew member finds out they were on Earth All Along, not far from a freeway leading to Reno, Nevada.
  • On Seinfeld, the quartet spends the entire episode waiting for their table to be available at a Chinese restaurant. Just after they leave... "Seinfeld, 4?"
  • In one episode of Doctor Who, Donna Noble lived a highly compressed life in a virtual reality system, meeting "the perfect man", falling in love with him, and having children with him, all in the space of a few real-time minutes. Once she leaves the system, she hangs around to see if he really existed or if he was just a computer illusion. She gives up and leaves, just as he shows up.
  • The X-Files episode "Quagmire" was about the deaths of several people around a lake where a lake monster is purported to live. The killer turns out to be an alligator that Mulder shoots. Right after he and Scully leave, the lake monster surfaces.
  • In an episode of Sliders, the characters only have a few seconds to decide whether or not to stay on the latest parallel Earth they've landed on. To see if it's their home or not, Quinn tries a fence, knowing it is always squeaky (something he does in the pilot), and it doesn't squeak. After they leave, a gardener with an oil can comes into view.
  • Season 2 of Jeremiah; Mr. Smith convinces Jeremiah, Kurdy and Markus that God is going to finally, overtly, come to Earth and grant one wish to each person in a selected place. Each character discusses what their wish would be; Mr. Smith says only to have his broken arm, which the doctor's said had little chance of healing, repaired ("That's it?" * shrug* -"I travel light"). Long story short, they all wander off except Mr. Smith-then the next morning, they are throwing a baseball around, and Mr. Smith catches it-with his theretofore broken arm (saying sadly, "You guys shoulda stayed...").
  • Happens in the So Weird episode with the aliens, and probably some others as well.
  • Zigzagged in one Night Court episode, where the courtroom is dealing with a bad infestation of cockroaches, due to a construction project on an adjoining floor. Art the custodian tries everything to get rid of them, but even breaking out the extra-extra-professional-strength "Roach Nuke" insecticide fails to work, and he's sobbing at his own incompetence. Then Harry reads the label on the Roach Nuke and notices that it has a four-hour incubation. Seems the stuff did work when he used it, and now it seems Art will need to find a broom.

Music

  • The song "Zangra" by Jacques Brel is about an officer stationed in a frontier fort who looks forward to the enemy attacking so he can become a hero. But years pass and the enemy doesn't come. Finally, he retires, and that's when the enemy shows up.
  • The song "Stan" by Eminem focuses on the relationship between the artist and an obsessive fan who, furious at his idol for not writing back, kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend. In the final verse of the song, Slim Shady does write a reply encouraging Stan to seek professional help so as not to end up like a suicide victim he heard about on the news and then realizes Stan, himself, was the victim.

Newspaper Comics

  • Occurs in one week-long Doonesbury story arc. In a pastiche of Waiting for Godot, Mike and Zonker wait for Mario Cuomo to announce his bid for the presidency. The two finally give up out of frustration, and a beat later, Cuomo arrives in the last panel.
  • In the Andy Capp strip seen here, Andy is so upset about losing a billiards tournament, he storms out of the pub and hurls his cue into the canal. Then he's told there was an error with the scoring, meaning he's in the finals.

Theater

Video Games

  • It's possible to do this in Final Fantasy VI without realizing. During the escape from the Floating Continent's collapse, the only way to ensure Shadow appears in the World of Ruin is to wait until the last possible second before entering the Airship. Leave just a second before and he'll be gone for the rest of that playthrough.
  • Yakuza 0: In Majima's "Toilet Talk" substory, Majima exchanges messages with what appears to be a woman named Rina, who tells him that she will be wearing a red rose on her lapel and waiting near a phone booth at Shofukucho West. He goes there and gets ambushed by a quartet of goons who say they've been using such a setup to bait suckers, but when he asks about "Rina" after kicking their asses, the confused goons say they were going by "Mayumi" instead. Majima storms off, angry at having been fooled... and walks past a woman with a red rose on her lapel, who really is called Rina and disappointedly says to herself that the stranger didn't show up. The final shot of the substory is of Rina leaving literally behind Majima's back, neither realising how close they came to meeting.

Webcomics

  • After The Order of the Stick is forcibly split up, the party mage Vaarsuvius gets fed up with the inaction of the half he/she ended up with and leaves to find a way to reunite with the other half. Once he/she returns with enough power to magically reunite everyone, he/she finds the rest of the party has already gathered somewhere else.
    • Perhaps more appropriately to this trope, the Order spends a whole day searching the desert for leads to one of the gates. It's only after they leave that a scry shows up. Though if the scry seems was left by Zz'dtri as the magical aura surrounding it suggests (the character's own spells have auras the same color and style), it's not exactly a straight usage.

Western Animation

  • In episode 3F10 of The Simpsons, before normal closing time:

Moe: [sighs] Might as well close the dump.
[outside, Quimby leads a bunch of people toward the bar]
Quimby: I am going to drink you under the table.
Man: No, I am going to drink you under the --
[the "Moe's" lighted sign turns off]
[the crowd sighs and turns back]

  • An excruciating example in Treehouse of Horror V's "Time and Punishment" segment:

Homer:(after having changed history via time travel several times) Hmm, fabulous house, well-behaved kids, sisters-in-law dead, luxury sedan...woo hoo! I hit the jackpot. (sits down) Marge, my dear, would you kindly pass me a Doughnut?
Marge: Doughnut? What's a Doughnut ?
Homer: (Shrieks repeatedly and pushes toaster handle, disappears)
Marge: (Looks outside and sees doughnuts fall from the sky) It's raining again.

  • In An American Tail, Fievel's parents assume Fievel died while falling overboard on a ship, and they spend most of the movie having near-misses while Fievel is out looking for his family, because Papa Mousekewitz refuses to entertain the notion that Fievel is alive.
  • An American Dad episode involved the Smiths being trapped in a cave. They end up cannibalizing the side character who was with them almost immediately, and are rescued soon after.

Real Life

  • The Burke and Wills expedition of Australia is a sad example of this. They and their team were to travel from the southern to northern coast of Australia and back. They had left part of the team at a halfway point and took two extra teammates with them to the coast. After waiting for several weeks, the other team gave up waiting and left only nine hours before Burke and Wills returned, which eventually led to their deaths.