DE: Murphy's Law

[yakalskovich]

 After finally getting away from the all-work weekend in the boondocks yesterday, the bus was late so I couldn't buy any food on the way home, and the iffy huge old work Mac won't start while my bosses kept the small one for the business travelling they will have to do this week -- presumably. I'm working on my private computer now, which is prone to overheating. Murphy's law hit me in grand style.

So, what is the worst concatenation of things going wrong (no matter what the reason) that either canon or yourself ever threw at your poor, long-suffering charries?

 

 ETA: And the miserable old thing can't even be repaired. Now I am all out of Mac.

Comments

[just_cant_lose]

Loooool omg, Valjean's whole life is a series of unfortunate coincidences that serve to try and ruin him. Mainly in the form of Inspector Javert.

OK, so if Javert hadn't been assigned to Montreuil then Valjean's super sekrit super Mayor identity would never have been thrown into question. If Javert hadn't arrested Fantine and forced Valjean to intercede, Javert wouldn't have got pissed enough to denounce him to the Prefecture, get told he was wrong and therefore make him apologise to Valjean...thereby letting him know that the 'real' Valjean had already been caught.

So then Valjean wouldn't have had to rush off to the court to give himself up, Javert wouldn't have come to arrest him and Fantine might have survived, or at least might have lived long enough to see Cosette again. So with no mother and Valjean feeling responsible, he had the will to break out of prison and fake his death in order to find Cosette.

WHICH MEANT

that he accidentally happened to cross Javert's path again in Paris, forcing him and Cosette into the convent for years. And then when they left the convent, he went about his life helping people with money and aid, which led him to meet the Thenardiers and get locked up in their house (I will leave the Maris Connection alone here because coincidence overload), thereby bringing Javert across him again.

AND THEN oh noes! a barricade which circumstances convened to make him appear at in order to save Marius's life for Cosette, and who should be there? Good ol' Javert of course, who he set free when he was supposed to kill him, which meant that he inadvertently escaped being sent back to prison again but resulted in Javert killing himself.

This is a very simplified version but in short, Valjean's whole life is written to highlight how man's fate is at the mercy of chance and the injustices inherent in the system, he has the worst luck and then he dies, the end.

All this is conversely true for Javert also, of course, though he might see all the coincidences as a good thing, right up until the moment he realises he is the worst person in the world and throws himself into the river. Hard to say who gets the worst deal...well no, Valjean gets the worst deal hands down, but at least he's decent and has love whereas Javert's just an ass and dies knowing it. :\

ISN'T CANON GREAT.

[yakalskovich]

Les Miserables is miserable; film at eleven. **hides**

[pro_patria_mortuus]

...I mean.








I feel like I make this joke a lot for DEs. But it's actually true, in this case! In the book (and in history) it's not that the revolutionaries planned badly or were foolishly reckless. Yeah, it was a risk, but a calculated one, and other people all over Paris were making the same calculated risk. But a lot of things went poorly, from rain to powerful allies turning their backs (a historical fact, possibly because they were pushing for July instead of June) to especially extra-murderous feeling soldiers against this particular fictional barricade. The actual historical revolt was put down harshly, but it didn't involve the violent deaths of EVERYBODY INVOLVED, SERIOUSLY, EVERYBODY the way the Les Mis barricade did, because of Victor Hugo's desire for symbolism.

[genarti]

Okay, for my others:

Cosette: has had bad stuff in her life for sure, but a concatenation of things going wrong? Hmm. Well, really it was a concatenation of things going wrong for her mother Fantine, which led to Cosette being stuck with the horrible abusive Thénardiers for a lot of her childhood. That sucked for everybody (except the Thénardiers.)

Kazul: Probably the end of book 3, which involves her friends more than her, but still involves the King of the Enchanted Forest getting magically locked away for a multi-year timeskip. If I ever bother to play that out, I may AU it, but I'll probably just hang out perpetually between books 2 and 3.

Thor: Gonna have to think about this one. Maybe Thor 2? Probably something in backstory, instead. I think enemies actively working against you is somewhat different than things going wrong, even if enemies sometimes help those things along.

River: Gonna have to think about this one, also! Probably the Serenity movie, though, even with the Milliways alterations we did.

Trowa: Probably when he was a toddler and his circus performer parents died and he wandered lost until he was picked up by mercenaries! As happens, when you have a shonen mecha backstory.

[harryhotspur]

Harry's penultimate scene is an almost hilarious series of people arriving to tell him about all the things that have gone wrong/all the allies that are actually not going to be showing up. And, of course, he is deliberately misinformed about whether or not the king would be open to reconciling, but it's not totally clear whether or not he would have cared to have that option anyway.

One of the crucial points of Arabella and Mr. Segundus's canon (IMO anyway) is that the bumbling around of the title characters causes a ripple effect of disaster for other people in and around their lives (much more for Arabella than Segundus, and much more for some other characters than for her).

Viola, of course, has being shipwrecked, having to disguise herself as a boy, falling in love with the man she's serving, having to go woo a woman in his behalf, having that woman fall in love with her, getting challenged to a duel, being mistaken for her apparently-not-dead brother, being threatened with death (??) by various nobles who think that she married the woman her brother in fact married...

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka: Become the padawan to the prophesied Chosen One, who is secretly being manipulated by a hidden Sith Lord who is grooming him to become a Sith Lord in his own right (which of course in Sith translates as favorite tool).

Rollo: Get separated from Ragnar or anyone loyal to his brother. ; p

[vance_prime]

I'll take "the entirety of my pup's canon" for $800, Alex.

And she doesn't even have the worst of it.

[have_no_mercy]

Another one here for "their life" in Tess. It's one thing after another after another.

Kylo, so far as we're aware, doesn't have anything quite like that. Yet.

[inlovewithwords]

I don't know. "Being in the most doomed family in the galaxy" might count for--

... both of yours, as I think about it.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: ... I don't know. The canon being so poorly written?

Henry: Prrrrooobably season 3.

Evelyn: L O L other than being born a mage in Thedas? Somehow winding up with the delegation of mages going to the peace summit. I really need to explain that adequately.

Lois: She is still hanging out at the tail end of season 7, but probably the worst concentration is season 8, the wedding arc, which coincides with Lana's return and Lois is left without emotional support in an awful set of circumstances.

Tavi: The Vord attacking Alera coinciding with his absence from it and his grandfather's poisoning, probably. Led to a lot of bad for a lot of people, and a lot of heartache for him personally.

R2-D2: . . . uuuuuuuuuh somehow ending up on Naboo such that he's adopted by some questionably competent Jedi leading to him adopting a family who need constant supervision or they rip the galaxy to shreds? Seriously, arguably from the moment he meets the party is n years of constant The Worst. (Now including post-Original Trilogy: Lather, Rinse, Repeat! YAY!!!)

Anakin Skywalker: MIDICHLORIANS DO NOT EXIST LUCAS YOU-- ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
The entire apocryphal prequel trilogy and I do not mean ICly I mean on a level of WORST WRITING
Uh
That part where his padawan, upon whom some of his mental stability depended, was driven out of the Jedi Order (thanks in great part to Palpatine's manipulation) towards the tail end of a war (created by Palpatine's manipulation) constantly inflicting damage on his already delicate psyche, and coinciding with his wife's pregnancy and his own foretelling dream that she would die in childbirth leaving him vulnerable to (yet more of) Palpatine's manipulation, leading him to betray and literally or figuratively murder everything he loved, and then his older brother and guardian figure nearly killing him and not having the mercy to just end it, leading to almost twenty-five years of constant physical and mental and spiritual agony while being Palpatine's pet and taking it out on everyone around him in positively legendary measure. (cf Revenge of the Sith)

. . . Potentially just 'Palpatine.' Or arguably 'Existing.'

[rudderless]

Clem and Eponine: Death

Juliet: Everything with Yang. And Scooter. And Shawn lying to her, the dork.

Pinkie: Too Many Pinkie Pies, Her test in the labyrinth - the show likes to Break the Cutie her a lot because sad Pinkie is the saddest thing.

Dixie: Multiple near-deaths