Nailed to the Wagon: Difference between revisions

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Bob likes his booze. ''[[The Alcoholic|A lot.]]'' He may be a recreational alcoholic, or drinks to [[Drowning My Sorrows|escape remembering]] his [[Dark and Troubled Past]]. Fate, being a cruel and fickle mistress, has other ideas. Alice drags Bob (usually shambling and slurring rather than kicking and screaming) somewhere without liquor of any kind. The reasons vary, Alice may be doing an intervention, she may be trying to save his life from people out for his blood, or Bob (all by his lonesome) stumbled onto a [[Put on a Bus|bus]]/ship/plane/rocket/FarsideIsland to a place where the only spirits are of the figurative variety.

Bob likes his booze. ''[[The Alcoholic|A lot.]]'' He may be a recreational alcoholic, or drinks to [[Drowning My Sorrows|escape remembering]] his [[Dark and Troubled Past]]. Fate, being a cruel and fickle mistress, has other ideas. Alice drags Bob (usually shambling and slurring rather than kicking and screaming) somewhere without liquor of any kind. The reasons vary, Alice may be doing an intervention, she may be trying to save his life from people out for his blood, or Bob (all by his lonesome) stumbled onto a [[Put on a Bus|bus]]/ship/plane/rocket/FarsideIsland to a place where the only spirits are of the figurative<ref>Or, in some settings, supernatural.</ref> variety.

Effectively, Bob has been '''Nailed to the Wagon''' and will be forced to go sober against his wishes. He'll whine, complain and take every opportunity to get a drop of booze. (Oddly, he will seldom see [[Pink Elephants]], although in [[Real Life]], they are the consequences of withdrawal rather than drunkenness.) However, once he's over a rather epic hangover and finishes his physical withdrawal, he'll do the emotional equivalent of curling into a ball in a corner because now he can no longer avoid facing his life. If he can resolve whatever emotional hangups were leading him to drink the sadness away, he may decide that being sober is better, and it will stick. If he's fundamentally unchanged, he'll jump [[Off the Wagon]] into the nearest vat of beer.

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Compare [[No Matter How Much I Beg]], where the character makes the decision to shut himself away from temptation, with friends enlisted to enforce that decision after the fact.

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== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[El Hazard]]''{{'}}s Mr. Fujisawa: He hates being sober, but he gains super-strength from it, so the other characters enter a conspiracy to keep him off the bottle. He doesn't take it well.

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* During the [[Gulf War]], P.J. O'Rouke was sent by ''Rolling Stone'' to join the war correspondents in Saudi Arabia, and recounted that because the strictly Islamic nation was dry in more ways than one, some of them sobered for the first time in years (himself possibly included), and found that "what they thought was the pain of genius was actually a hangover".

* Upon the announcement of the Quarter Quell in ''[[The Hunger Games|Catching Fire]]'', Peeta dumps all of Haymitch's liquor, much to the latter's dismay. This is in spite of the fact that Haymitch had previously had a rather terrifying withdrawal when he ran out of liquor, but the sobriety doesn't last long anyway.

* As revenge against Maladict ([[Addiction Displacement|a vampire]]), a soldier in ''[[~~Discworld/Monstrous Regiment|~~Monstrous Regiment]]'' steals Maladict's coffee machine and beans, resulting in a vampire getting more and more insane and willing to revert to drinking blood as the book goes on.

* As revenge against Maladict ([[Addiction Displacement|a vampire]]), a soldier in ''[[Monstrous Regiment]]'' steals Maladict's coffee machine and beans, resulting in a vampire getting more and more insane and willing to revert to drinking blood as the book goes on.

* Eddie of Stephen King's [[The Dark Tower|Dark Tower]] books gets nailed to the wagon when {{spoiler|Roland kidnaps him into a heroin-less Mid-World through a magic door in ''The Drawing of the Three''. Notably, the nailing is permanent}}

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[[Category:This Is Your Index On Drugs]]

[[Category:Hard-Drinking Tropes]]

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