Consider for example the first Star Wars trilogy, and the prequel trilogy. In fact, all the initial conditions of the main work are unavoidable, including but not limited to the presence of the villain. If the Big Bad of a given work appears at the prequel, you can be sure that he will not die at the end: he has to live on, to be the big bad of the main work. Mind you, it is almost guaranteed that somebody somewhere will come up with a hack or unorthodox strategy to get around this, resulting in either a complete failure of the plot to acknowledge the players victory, the game crashing, or some kind of Easter Egg. This is usually done by making the hero extremely weak at that point in time, or making the boss unbeatable due to superior level or some outside force, especially if it's still early in the game. Thus, if they ever do get their hands on a windfall they have to quickly lose it.įission Mailed, Hopeless Boss Fight, and Stupidity Is the Only Option are when this trope is applied to video games, where the player must fail, be defeated, etc. When a show's impending end is known ahead of time to the producers, however, they may choose to go out with a Grand Finale, in which Failure is no longer the Only Option.Ī related trope is Perpetual Poverty the show's plot is the characters making a living doing something entertaining to audiences such as catching criminals for money (or maybe being criminals), and if they ever had a windfall they might actually choose to do something less troublesome and therefore less entertaining.
Conversely, a character may briefly rise above his Genre Blindness and try to take advantage of the permanent state of failure, consequently falling right into Springtime for Hitler. The frequency of such eps can range from occasional ( Star Trek: Voyager, "Timeless") to frequent ( Gilligan's Island, Samurai Jack, Dungeons & Dragons (1983), Pokémon: The Series). On shows with premises like these, there will be episodes in which the characters make an attempt to actually resolve the premise.