Lottery of Doom: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Hey, you just won the lottery! Sounds pretty good, right? After all, you just got a few million dollars, and are, unless you stupidly spend it all, probably set for life. Who wouldn't want to win the lottery?

 

Compare [[Russian Roulette]].

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* One of the episodes of ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]'' featured a village that could only support fifty people, so when the population got too high they would select people by lottery and exile them.

** Kinda moot point with the lottery, since {{spoiler|all the pilots will get their turn. It's not a matter of who so much as when they will bite it}}.

* An inversion occurs in ''[[Full Metal Panic!]]''. When Sousuke accidentally releases a biowarfare agent in class, the students have to draw lots to find who'll get the only vaccine available. Then it seems to go from inversion to reconstruction: When Sousuke wins the lottery, the outraged classmates promptly attack him en masse.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* The 1950's [[Space Opera]] ''Rick Random: Space Detective''. Lampshaded and averted in the episode "Kidnappers from Mars!" in which [[Space Pirates]] are caught in a [[Space Is an Ocean|space tide]] with the only hope of escape being the two-man space shuttle. After a pause to consider the implications, everyone starts blazing away at each other.

{{quote|An escape bid -- but only ''for two!'' For a tense minute, the eight people in the doomed space ship watched one another in cautious silence. There would be no lottery of ''luck!''}}

* [http://www.sectormatematica.cl/comics/Quino2.jpg This strip] by [[Quino]].

 

 

== [[Film]] ==

* [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s ''One Good Knight'' from the ''[[Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms]]'' series. There is a weekly lottery from the kingdom's virgins to see who will be sacrificed to a dragon that week. Subverted: the lottery is fixed—and the "winning" girls aren't actually eaten by the dragon.

* [[Stephen King]]'s ''Storm of the Century''. The parents who gets the "winning" rune stone give their son up to a wizard/demon.

* ''[[Battle Royale]]'''s "Program" ostensibly works this way, with classes of ninth-graders being volunteered, and one of the many volunteered classes being selected at random. Of course, [[Unreliable Narrator|this may not actually be how it works...]]

** No. In the book it is stated it is completely random. All 9th grade classes are entered; even if someone in the class is the son/daughter of someone important or the teacher is against it.

* There's also a short story set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]]. A yearly [[Fete Worse Than Death|fair]] is held well outside of town, and who gets in is decided by lottery. Once the protagonist enters the fair, they're given a choice of carnival rides, each of which has a chance associated with it (1 in 10, 1 in 500, etc.). Trying to be macho, the protagonist picks a high-risk ride. {{spoiler|And then we discover what the chances were: the risk that the ride's restraints wouldn't hold you and that, instead, you would get flung off the ride and into a large pit full of garbage bags. Worse, the protagonist ''stated to still be alive, merely stunned'' when they hit the ground - and then one of the carnies in charge of keeping the grounds clean comes by with [[Fate Worse Than Death|a large black garbage bag]], despite his protests that he's alright and is dragged off screaming [[Big No|"one in ten! They said one in ten!"]].}}

** What is the name of the story?

* ''[[The Hunger Games]]'' is a lottery to be put into a [[Battle Royale]] scenario. Children between the ages of twelve and eighteen must put in a ticket each year; poorer children can provide for themselves and their families by getting more tickets. These are cumulative, so a poor teenager trying to help feed a large starving family can end up with a truly staggering number of tickets.

* In [[Philip Jose Farmer]]'s ''Attitudes'', a gambler from Earth happens upon a group of non-human locals playing a game similar to roulette and convinces them to let him join in. Since his success as a gambler is the result of psychic powers, he does very well in the game {{spoiler|until the last spin, when his power is suddenly overwhelmed and one of the locals wins. He then witnesses the fate of the winner; it isn't pleasant.}}

* In Borges' "The Lottery of Babylon", the inhabitants of the namesake city run a lottery game in which the prize can be literally anything: from kingship to death by torture.

** Actually it's largely [[Subverted]] coupled with [[Moral Dissonance]]: all the people of that world ''know'' what will happen to the "winners". They are even given wills and the money is given to their relatives, they can spend as much as they want before they die etc. There's even (more specifically, ''especially'', because in most other cases the "players" don't get a choice) the option of ''not'' buying a ticket and those who wish to live, don't. Of course, assuming it's common knowledge, they don't print it on the machine for aliens, "sliders", general off-worlders and those stuck in their basements for 50 years to find out. [[Sarcasm Mode|It's definitely set up]] as a [[Too Dumb to Live|trap for them!]]

*** And the price of these lottery tickets? It's negative. You just walk up to the machine gets some cash and a ticket. So even natives who know do get tempted.

** However, his problems aren't the result of the lottery, but rather the [[Arc Number]]s he used to win it.

* Inverted in ''[[Stargate Universe]]'' - the winners of the lottery get to ''live'' - more precisely, they get to go on the shuttle fleeing the ship on a collision course with a nearby star. {{spoiler|Turns out that the ship was ''designed'' to survive going through stars - in fact, this is how it recharges its power reserves}}.

 

* In ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' you come across the town of Nipton where Caesar's Legion has recently held a lottery. {{spoiler|Roughly half the town are enslaved. Most of the other half get ''crucified.'' The second-prize winner gets shot in the kneecaps, with only one person getting the lucky ticket to walk away unharmed. It was all a [[Batman Gambit|test of character]] by [[Affably Evil|Vulpes Inculta]]; he had already enlisted their aid to kill some NCR troopers that came to town, and he was seeing if they had any redeeming value at all to the Legion by seeing if they'd rise up against him and his legionnaires after seeing what the prizes were as they worked their way up to the "Winner".}}

** In the same game, there's also {{spoiler|Vault 11}}, a very straight example, with the additional twist that there was no actual necessity for the sacrifices, just the impression that they were needed.

* In the adventure game adaptation of ''[[I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream]]'', Benny's scenario involves a village of cavemen who have to sacrifice one of their own to AM. The key to the good ending involves {{spoiler|Benny saving a mutant child from being sacrificed by offering to be killed in his place.}}

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* ''[[Squidbillies]]'' had the Tricky Two Jackpot. The winner gets torn in half by monster trucks.

* Two or three [[Looney Tunes|Speedy Gonzales]] cartoons start with this trope, particularly if Sylvester is involved. Desperate mice draw straws, and the "winner" attempts to outrun Sylvester. The mouse invariably loses, we see this isn't the first time the mice have lost, and this is what drives them to call for Speedy Gonzales.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* The historian Josephus was among a handful of holdouts trapped and surrounded by Roman soldiers, so they cast lots to see who got to die first (they were all planning to die, but since Judaism considers suicide a sin it was up to the others to kill whoever drew the metaphorical straw first); in the end, Josephus and the other remaining survivor surrender to the Romans.

** The amazing thing is that Josephus, an obsessively image-conscious writer who did everything he could to make himself look good, apparently didn't realize how bad a light this story put him in.

* If someone tried to escape a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the guards would line up all the prisoners and kill every Nth one.

** Ancient Romans used "decimation" as a means of group punishment. The soldiers were divided into groups of ten, and a drawing of lots would decide which one would be killed by the other nine.