Meet this year's lucky winner... and loser.
"I told them their sins, the foremost being disloyalty. I told them that when Legionnaries are disloyal, some are punished, the others made to watch. And I announced the lottery. Each clutched his ticket, hoping it would set him free. Each did nothing, even when 'loved ones' were dragged away to be killed."
— Vulpes Inculta, Fallout: New Vegas
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?
Well, you wouldn't want to, if it was one of these lotteries. The Lottery of Doom is a lottery where the prize is something really bad happening to the "winner," usually death. The reason for the Lottery of Doom varies, ranging from an attempt to keep the population down, appeasing a dragon, wrathful god or Monster of the Week, select a "volunteer" for some dangerous or outright lethal task that needs to be done or just to be creepy. Sometimes the lottery players know that it's a Lottery of Doom, sometimes they don't. On occasion, there's a pretty significant prize alongside the horrible doom, or at least you will get pleasant accommodations until the fatal moment, but you really shouldn't get too comfortable...
So next time you buy a lottery ticket, be sure to Read the Fine Print.
A variation is to invert the scenario: in these cases, you do want to win, because the prize is to be the only one who doesn't get horribly murdered.
In a Town with a Dark Secret, expect this to overlap with A Fête Worse than Death.
Compare Cold Equation, Doom as Test Prize, Drawing Straws, and Russian Roulette. Contrast Deadly Game of Chance, when losing a game results in death, and winning awards life.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bokurano: The kid who gets to pilot the giant robot gets selected at random. Unfortunately, the robot runs on life force and the pilot dies after the battle's over. Kinda moot point with the lottery, since all the pilots will get their turn. It's not a matter of who so much as when they will bite it. In the manga, Koyemshi says that when his Earth went through the game, there was a larger pool of pilots, and thus, any given pilot had a reasonable chance that their turn would not come up, which resulted in a fair amount of discord in the group.
- Dragon Ball: When King Piccolo takes over the world (for a short time anyway), he declares that the day of his victory will become a holiday, where every year he'll draw a city from a lottery to be destroyed. He draws West City as the lucky first "winner," but is defeated by Goku before he has a chance to make good on his decree.
- An inversion occurs in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. When Sōsuke 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 Sōsuke wins the lottery, the outraged classmates promptly attack him en masse.
- In Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit, future Japan has rebuilt its economy and education system around this one: every person is injected at childhood with nanomachines that have significant health benefits. However, for 1 in a 1000, the nanomachines are programmed to destroy the heart at a random time between before the age of 25... And you only get 24 hours of notice before that. The intention was to make every Japanese person live his life to the fullest knowing that every day really could be his last. Handily enough, the lottery is also rigged so that people who annoy the government are more likely to end up with the killer nanomachines...
- One Piece:
- Played for Laughs whenever Luffy wants to venture to an ominous-looking island. The crew draw straws to pick who'll go with him. Usopp, Chopper, and Nami, being the weaker and less brave members, always dread this. This was particularly driven home when they first met Brook on his broken ghost ship. They drew lots for two to follow Luffy onto the ship. To her dismay, Nami was one of the "winners" (Sanji was the other), and she immediately complained, even though just minutes ago, she, Usopp, and Chopper begged Zoro to use the straws when they learned that the alternative was being left alone aboard the Thousand Sunny while everyone else went with Luffy to the ghost ship.
- In the Whole Cake Island Arc, Charlotte Linlin a.k.a. Big Mom uses this as her means for anyone, whether a citizen of her country or a resourceful ally, who requests to leave her country. It is later revealed that not only does the spinner lose something (a limb or high portions or their life span), but it also extends to anyone the spinner is close to, their crew or their country.
- One Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann episode features a village that can only support fifty people, so when the population gets too high, they select people by lottery and exile them. The end of the episode hints that the lottery was rigged and had always been rigged by the village elder, who chose lottery "winners" himself based on who the village could afford to lose.
- In Yo-kai Watch, The Grim Reaper-esque beings hold a lottery where someone dies randomly. Jibanyan's owner Amy 'won' the lottery and was almost hit by a truck, however Jibanyan shoved her out of the way.
Comic Books
- A House of Secrets involved a man accidentally getting a train ticket to the wrong destination, ending up in a small town. By happenstance he learns there's a lottery for $50,000 and decides to enter on a whim. Upon winning, he's confused when asked for his address to send the money to his family, before getting knocked out and waking up tied to a tombstone in the local cemetery. He has moments to wonder what's going on before a vampire descends on him. Apparently the townsfolk cut a deal to hold the lottery to sacrifice one victim to him a year, instead of the vampire preying on them every night, and they hold the lottery to both choose a victim and compensate their family.
- Lampshaded and averted in the 1950s Space Opera Rick Random: Space Detective, specifically the story "Kidnappers from Mars!", in which Space Pirates are caught in a 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.
An escape bid — but only for two! For a tense minute, the eight people in the doomed spaceship watched one another in cautious silence. There would be no lottery of luck!
- In the Sky Doll short story "White Cinderella", one lucky girl wins a lottery with the prize being the right to be "Papess for a Day", which entails taking the place of Agape, the local messianic figure, for a day. What they don't tell the poor girl is that part of the Papess' duties involves producing erotica to be sold to her followers. When the leader, Lodovica, finds her softcore images boring and unprofitable, she signs the poor girl up for more hardcore fare.
- In the graphic novel version of Thrilling Adventure Hour, Banjo Bindlestiff and his fellow hobos are made "citizens for a day" of Jacksonville just in time for one of these. Banjo manages to fast-talk the townsfolk into making stone soup instead; the police chief didn't like this idea until he learned that he would have been the lottery winner.
- In X-Statix, Orphan, Anarchist, and U-Go Girl are trapped in a spacecraft with only a two-person escape pod. They roll dice to determine who gets to use the pod.
Comic Strips
- In an early Dilbert strip:
Ted: Everybody pick a straw. The loser has to kill our abusive co-worker, Floyd.... Dilbert loses, he drew the blue straw.
Dilbert: [annoyed] I thought the short straw loses.
Ted: You're already a murderer; don't be a cheater too. - Parodied in one The Far Side strip: a man on a life raft is dismayed to find that he drew the shortest straw of everyone on his life raft, including a dog.
- This strip
◊ by Quino.
Fan Works
- In Alexandra Quick, every seven years, a pureblood child is chosen from a lottery of those who are too young to have a wand to be sacrificed as part of an ancient treaty. This did not go down well and was the major cause of the most significant uprising in the Wizarding World.
- In Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), Pinkie Pie chooses her victims by lot. Then she kills them and bakes them into the eponymous cupcakes. Rainbow Dash is the latest loser.
- The Fan Sequel Le Petit Four expands the scope of said lottery, with her assigning a number to every single pony in Ponyville and mixing them all up in a hat.
- Ditto with Fluttershy in Pattycakes. Granted, they probably get off easier by ONLY having to pretend to be Fluttershy's baby, but given the Mind Rape she put Rainbow Dash through, and considering the foalmula...
- Dead Man Switch: Something called a "Dragon's Lottery" was used to chose 15 teenage girls to be taken to Lorwardia to be beheaded, as part of their annual tribute to the Lorwardian Empire.
Films — Animation
- The mice in Cinderella (1950) pull a lottery to see who will distract Lucifer while the rest go get food. Hilariously, Jaq, the one who "wins", is the one who called for the lottery!
Films — Live-Action
- Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos proposed a solution to his planet's Overpopulation Crisis — namely, killing a randomly-chosen half of the population. After the rest of his kind died out, Thanos began applying this logic to his conquests of other planets — randomly dividing the population into two halves, then having his Mooks execute one of the two groups.
- Discussed in The Belko Experiment. When everyone is locked inside the office building and informed that there will be "repercussions" if they don't follow instructions and murder a certain number of their colleagues within the alloted time, several people argue that it would be best to let things unfold in this matter: don't kill anyone, and simply wait to see who dies.
- Clonus: The people apparently participate in a lottery, the winner of which is relocated to America. Only the people are clones, the lottery's a sham, they don't go to America, and the winner is harvested for body parts.
- Dragonslayer: To appease a dragon, all of the virginal women in a small kingdom must take part in a twice-yearly lottery: the "winner" is chained up outside the dragon's lair as its next meal. Wealthy families are able to bribe the king to leave out their daughter's names. Virginity is a requirement, but in those times, being unmarried and not a virgin was terribly shameful, so...
- The Island (2005). The people apparently participate in a lottery, the winner of which is relocated to a paradise island. Only the people are clones, the lottery's a sham, there is no island, and the winner is harvested for body parts. If this sounds familiar, know that Clonus above came first and yes, there was a lawsuit.
- Jackpot! (2024) takes place in Los Angeles in 2030, where the state's government has organized the Grand Lottery. The winner gets a lot of money… and so will anybody who kills said winner within the 24-hour period after they win (and the city has gone to Hell just enough, financially-wise, that there is no shortage of people willing to commit murder). The only rule is that you cannot shoot the winner dead. The film ends with the possibility that things are going to become From Bad to Worse because the people who made the Lottery legal have managed to expand it to other states.
- Near the climax of Midsommar, Siv (the Hårgan elder) declares that the ninth and last Human Sacrifice must be picked by the May Queen between a visitor from the outside and a separately chosen Hårgan. The Hårgan death candidate is then selected by way of a sophisticated hand-driven lottery wheel containing small wooden balls marked with runes, in which presumably each individual ball represents a person from Hårga. The Hårgan whose ball comes up, a certain Torbjörn, remains remarkably calm. Ultimately, he is not the sacrifice chosen by the May Queen.
- Population 436 does it to keep the town's population at the exact same number. They draw names out of a box, then have a harvest festival, during which the "winner" is hanged. Winning is a great honor, and both the winner and her husband are absolutely delighted about the whole thing.
Literature
- In Philip José 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 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.
- 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. 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.
- Book of Joshua: This is used to find out Achan's theft of stuff from Jericho.
- In "The Carnival", a regular fair is held well outside of town, run by Populace Control. The sixteen-year-old protagonist gets to attend through a lottery, and continues to be excited about the rides even after a worker dragging a large black garbage bag into a huge pit tells him "The odds are one in eight you'll make it kid". This lasts right up to the point where he gets flung off the "Whirl-Away" and into the ground at over two hundred miles an hour while yelling "It isn't fair! They said one in eight!".
- "The Chosen Maiden" by Raul Reyes, a short story published in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthology series, features an annual lottery to select the virgin to be sacrificed to the local dragon. The local priests are known to fix the lottery to select girls who'd spurned their advances... or boys who'd rendered those girls ineligible.
- Day of the Choosing has an inverted example. Every ten years, people within the city are chosen at random during a ritual. Those who are chosen get to remain in the city for another ten years. Those who aren't get fed to a giant Eldritch Abomination.
- Gesta Danorum: Starkather is sea-roving with king Wikar when they are stopped by permanent storms. They determine that the gods must be appeased by a Human Sacrifice and draw lots over which one of them is going to be sacrificed for fair wind.
- In the second book in the Helliconia series, an orbiting space station observing the eponymous planet has something like this for its residents: the ironically named "Helliconia Holiday Lottery" where the winner gets the chance to actually go down and visit the planet. The catch being that eventually, they inevitably succumb to a deadly virus and die. Still, no winner ever refuses to go.
- In Hogfather, the ancient winter lottery comes up. A dried bean is put in one bowl, and the one who gets the bean is 'crowned king'... until they need to slaughter the king to make the sun come up again and get spring to return. It's also mentioned that the lottery is rigged, the priests responsible for serving the beans are skilled at slipping the dried bean into the correct bowl.
- Humane Tyranny: The government fears the ramifications of an overpopulated country and so they passed a law in which one person every night will be randomly selected to die through lethal injection.
- The Hunger Games:
- The titular Deadly Game selects its participants through a lottery. Children between the ages of twelve and eighteen must put in a ticket each year, with each year adding to the number of times entered; poorer children can also 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. Gale Hawthorne, who has a mother and three younger siblings to take care of, is mentioned as having put 42 tickets by the time of the 74th Hunger Games.
- The only time the lottery is not used is for the 25th Hunger Games (the First Quarter Quell), where the tributes are selected by voting. However, there are a few other cases where a tribute is not selected through lottery. There is a rule that another person of age can volunteer to take the lottery winner's place, and it's said that Reapings in the wealthier districts are often very difficult, because getting to compete in the Hunger Games is treated as an honor worth training for, meaning many are willing to volunteer themselves. In the 75th Hunger Games (the Third Quarter Quell), where tributes are selected from the existing pool of Victors, there is a lottery, but since Katniss is the sole living female Victor from District 12, she is defaulted to go back to the Arena, so it's just a formality to further humiliate her in the eyes of Panem. Up to the 10th Hunger Games, the tributes are not selected by Capitol escorts but by the mayors of each districts, and they can be very biased; Lucy Gray mentions that Mayor Lipp likely rigged the lottery at request of his daughter, Mayfair, who dates Lucy Gray's ex-boyfriend and wanted her out of the way. In the 50th Hunger Games (the Second Quarter Quell), one of the District 12 male tributes, Woodbine Chance, is executed when he tries to escape, and Haymitch is forcefully taken to replace him as punishment for defying the Capitol by preventing the Peacekeepers from shooting his girlfriend, Lenore Dove (who herself had saved Woodbine's grieving mother from being punished for trying to take her son's body).
- "The Lottery" is about a town that selects a member at random (or 'at random') to be stoned to death as a sacrifice for the harvest. The 'prize' of the Lottery is not revealed until the very end of the story, though there are hints throughout that no one actually wants to win. Some have claimed that it's allegorical of the draft, but the author says it's just a story.
- There's a YA book also named The Lottery by Beth Goobie where the Absurdly Powerful Student Council holds a lottery whose "winner" is ostracized by the rest of the school.
- In Jorge Luis 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.
- In the Redwall book Taggerung, Tagg and Nimbalo end up staying briefly with a tribe of pygmy shrews who regularly perform a variant of this. The whole tribe essentially dances a conga line underneath a dripping stalactite; whichever shrew the drop of water lands on is sacrificed to a giant eel. Tagg manages to kill the eel and the lottery is promptly abolished.
- In The Reluctant King by L. Sprague de Camp, the king of Xylar is beheaded every five years and his head thrown to the spectators. Whoever catches it is the new king. The protagonist is Jorian, who happened to be passing through Xylar when someone threw a head at him; against the odds, he escapes the universes' cushiest death row and is pursued by his subjects ever after.
- The Saga of Erik the Red: Lost in the Greenland Sea on a ship infested with shipworms, and with a lifeboat that can only hold half of them, Bjarni Grimolfsson and his crew cast lots about who is going to get into the lifeboat. The losers are left behind to certain death.
- Shadows of the Empire: Darth Vader's men draw lots to see who's stuck bringing him bad news, as Lord Darth was known for strangling people who did nothing but deliver news to his quarters when he was in a bad mood. (The practice itself does not irk him; being a Sith Lord, it pleases him that his subordinates have a healthy amount of fear of him).
- Soul Rider: In Spirits of Flux and Anchor, the areas of normal land called Anchors have limited supplies of food, living space, and jobs, so they also have to limit their population. Every year the government counts how many people are "coming of age" that year and determines how many they need to get rid of, then holds a random drawing called the Paring Rite to see who stays in Anchor and who gets sold into Flux (which is considered a death sentence). The main protagonist, Cassie, discovers early in Book 1 that the Paring Rite is actually fixed beforehand, so that people with connections and people with needed skills are never chosen. It's the first sign of just how corrupt the government is.
- Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms: In One Good Knight, 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.
- Used in Terry Bisson's short story "The Toxic Donut". The star of the show is chosen by lottery — and this year, they started letting you buy tickets for other people!
- The Waste Lands: The ruined town of Lud has speaker towers that play mind-searing music at random (actually a vocals-less rendition of ZZ Top's Velcro Fly) and whenever it does, its residents hold a lottery to decide who to sacrifice to the 'ghosts' that are putting forth the horrible sound. Several times a day, somebody's name comes out of the hat and is set to dancing the jig at the end of a hangman's rope. "The Lottery" is directly referenced.
- The Zero Stone: Gem dealer Vondar Ustle and his apprentice Murdoc Jern are in a bar on an alien planet. A group of priests from the local religion enter, set up a wheel, and start it spinning. Jern knows that whoever the wheel is pointing at when it stops must be sacrificed to the local deity. The wheel ends up pointing between Ustle and Jern: Ustle is quickly killed by the fearful locals, and Jern barely escapes with his life.
Live-Action TV
- In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it is revealed that Hydra was initially founded to bring back to Earth the powerful Inhuman Hive, who survives by consuming normal humans, and for centuries members of at least one faction of it ceremonially drew stones out of a bag to decide on a "traveller" who goes through the portal to the planet Hive is on. This is considered an honor and it's hinted not all the people participating even know what's on the other side of the portal, but they do know that no one who goes through the portal ever returns. Although at one point one character rigs the stones to keep himself from ever being chosen (all the stones are supposed to be perfectly smooth, but by switching the deadly white stone with one that has a small but noticeable notch on it, one can ensure that he doesn't pick it so long as he doesn't draw last), and at another Hydra arranges for some astronauts to be sent through the portal instead.
- A variation of this happens in Battlestar Galactica (1978). On a visit to a planet with a wild west motif, Starbuck is involved in a card game that is rigged for him to win. One of the items he wins is a badge, which forces him to become the town sheriff, a responsibility he can't shrug off easily.
- Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has the Feast of Feasts, in which one female member from each family is offered up for a drawing. The winner is sacrificed to the Dark Lord and eaten by the rest of the coven. This is an inversion since the witches (except for Sabrina) consider being chosen a high honour.
- In the Eerie, Indiana episode "Mr. Chaney", the town uses a lottery to pick a "harvest king" every few years: Supposedly all that happens is that they're sent into the woods with Mr. Chaney as a guide, and if they see the "Eerie wolf", the town will have plentiful crops. Of course, every harvest king seems to mysteriously disappear (it's a running gag that they're all allegedly "in Spain"). It turns out that Chaney unknowingly is the "Eerie wolf" — the town regularly sacrifices one of its own to Chaney in werewolf form, presumably so he won't run rampant. The lottery is apparently always fixed, and you can be picked to "win" whether you actually entered or not: In this case, the mayor had it rigged so Dash X would win, but Dash X in turn rigged it for Marshall.
- The Goodies: When the Goodies are sealed inside a block of concrete in "The End", they draw straws to see which one of them will be eaten by the other two. Tim and Graeme don't tell Bill that this is what they are drawing for.
- In Lost, Hurley wins the lottery. While he doesn't die, everything that happens afterward is terribly unlucky — his grandfather DOES die, and he gets stranded on the island... Maybe death for the other examples wasn't so bad after all...
- In the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "Ypres 1914", five World War I British Army soldiers face a dilemma: they must make a break through enemy lines, but there are only rations for four. One of the methods they use to decide who will take "the other way out" is drawing straws. The joke is the Major keeps drawing the short straw no matter how many times he tries to manipulate it so he doesn't. Likeiwse, the Major fails at a session of "Stone Paper Scissors", when he draws scissors and the others draw stone:
Major: Now, let's see... scissors cut everything, don't they?
Sergeant: Not stone, sir.
Major: They're very good scissors. - The Sliders episode "Luck of the Draw" involves a lottery in a seemingly Utopian world. Players claim some money from special ATM machines, and a random winner (it's implied that bigger withdrawals increase the odds) gets the big payout. What the Sliders don't know is that the winners are killed by the government in order to keep the population down to preserve the Utopia. It isn't actually a secret; they just didn't ask any questions until it was too late.
- 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. It turns out that the ship was designed to survive going through stars — in fact, this is how it recharges its power reserves.
- The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Taste of Armageddon" revolves around The Most Dangerous Video Game in which two neighboring planets, Eminiar and Vendikar, are fighting an entirely simulated Forever War to preserve their infrastructure. However, they have no regard for the actual lives involved and have mutually agreed to kill everyone who dies in simulated attacks, with casualties chosen semi-randomly via this trope. Everyone on both worlds is so fanatically devoted to this plan that they'll happily march to their own deaths.
- Storm of the Century: The islanders decide that, in order to figure out who will sacrifice their child, they will draw a lottery.
- Yellowjackets: Happens in the past AND the present in "It Chooses":
- In the past, the survivors draw cards out of a deck. Whoever picks the queen of hearts card with crossed out-eyes is deemed to be the Wilderness's chosen one to be ritually sacrificed and eaten.
- At the compound, Lottie Matthews proposes one (whoever picks the one poisoned cup from a tray) in order to give "it" what it wants.
Music
- In the Finnish rock song "Ajan henki" ("Zeitgeist") by Juice Leskinen, the old state lottery where four million people made one happy has been replaced with new state lottery where one person makes four million happy — the "winner" is picked randomly on the census records, taken to Helsinki and clubbed publicly to death...
Myths & Religion
- Classical Mythology: The young men and women chosen by lottery at Athens were sent to the Cretan Labyrinth to become food for the Minotaur. This comes to an end when Theseus steps up to the plate and kills the Minotaur. This detail goes back to Older Than Feudalism writers such as Apollodorus, Plutarch, and Diodorus Siculus.
- In the legend of Saint George, the inhabitants of a town beset by a dragon cast lots to determine whose children are going to be fed to the dragon.
- According to some legends, certain Celtic tribes would select a young man who was given many luxuries for a year and then sacrificed to make sure the next harvest would be good. In some versions this was done by lot, to stay fair. As this man would be given royal treatment, often they are portrayed as quite happy with their lot.
Podcasts
- In The Hidden Almanac, there's a recurring bit involving the Sacred Order of Bull Moose Men's annual New Year Fun Run, in which the initiate who drew the short straw gets hunted down and sacrificed to the moose gods by the other initiates.
- Welcome to Night Vale mentions one of these in episode 8. The winners will be ceremonially disembowelled and eaten by the wolves at the Night Vale Petting Zoo and Makeshift Carnival.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden: On every afternoon before a new moon, the towns of Bryn Shander, Easthaven, and Targos hold lotteries on which citizen of their respective towns is to be sacrificed to Auril by nightfall. The unlucky winner of the lottery is then stripped bare and either tied to a post or sent into the tundra to die. And although accusations of rigged lotteries are common in these towns, they're not usually acted upon. Once Auril has been dealt with and the Everlasting Rime ends, the town speakers are very eager to end the practice, since the whole point of these sacrifices was to appease the goddess so that summer can return to Icewind Dale.
- Ravenloft: Barok Urik von Kharkov, the Darklord of Valachan, chooses his wives this way; every year, a lottery is held in one of Valachan's four towns. It doesn't seem so bad until you start to contemplate why he needs a replacement every year. (Kharkov is a vampire, and while he has made an honest attempt to keep at least some of them from dying from his feedings, they never last more than a month or so. The common excuse is that they died from white fever, a disease that Kharkov uses as a scapegoat to explain any deaths from him or his vampire servants, which his subjects are either too gullible to disbelieve or too afraid of him to deny.)
Video Games
- BioShock Infinite features a version of it that isn't dangerous to the winner, but results in a terrible "prize" that marks the point where Columbia's idyllic image comes crashing apart: Booker wins a local draw that turns out to be for the stoning of an interracial couple, and is given the first baseball (the American way!). The game prompts you to either throw it at the couple, don't throw it at all, or throw it at the announcer (which you almost certainly might feel tempted to after his little "Do you like your coffee black these days?" remark), but whichever way, the coppers stop and notice that Booker has the brand of "The False Shepard" on his hand and attempt to execute him on the spot. Booker's retaliation is violent, and everything goes sideways from there.
- In Borderlands 2, Hyperion runs a monthly one in Overlook, where the "winner" is thrown into the Grinder. There's no reason or even attempted justification for this.
- Played with in the Dark Brotherhood questline of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. One of your targets is an Orc bard who is considered the worst bard in all of Tamriel. So unbearably awful is his music that the Brotherhood recieved multiple requests for his assassination, and had to hold a lottery to determine whose request would be fulfilled.
- Broken Age presents a variant in that the selection process isn't random: Every 14 years, the young women of each village compete to gain a place in the "Maidens' Feast" via a selection process very similar to a beauty pageant. Except that their "reward" is to be trussed up in fancy clothes on the shoreline to be devoured by a giant Eldritch Abomination, in the hope of keeping the town safe from its wrath. The pageantry is an elaborate ruse the people play to cope with the horror of what they have to do.
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- You come across the town of Nipton where Caesar's Legion has recently held a lottery. Roughly half the town were enslaved. Most of the other half got crucified. The "lucky losers" got a mercifully quick beheading. The second-prize winner got both of his legs broken. Only one person got the lucky ticket permitting him to walk away unharmed.note Vulpes Inculta explains that it was all a test of character; he had paid the mayor to turn in both the NCR soldiers and Powder Gangers that visited the town, and he was seeing if the townspeople 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". Except inspecting the town even further shows Vulpes was lying; you can see several Nipton residents fought back and killed a few of Vulpes' men, but were immediately killed and the lottery continued anyway.
- The Legion is apparently fond of this trope. One of Mr. New Vegas's news reports notes that Legate Lanius enacted the ritual of "decimation" (see Real Life below) on an underperforming squad he took over. Dialogue with Caesar confirms Lanius does this regularly.
Caesar: Lanius is savage. Savagely loyal, too, but only to me - he has no love for the Legion. But this has its uses. He has no attachment to his men, no compunction about battlefield losses. All he cares about is destroying the enemy. When another Legatus or Centurion fails to achieve results, I send Lanius to make things right. His first step is to beat the failed commander to death in front of his assembled troops. Then he orders the ritual of decimatio. It means "decimation," but in ancient Rome the word had a very specific meaning - a punishment for cowardice. The Legionaries are lined up in ranks. Every tenth man steps forward and is beaten to death by his brothers. It instills a certain... robust obedience.
- In Vault 11, the dwellers were told that if they did not perform a yearly sacrifice, the vault's mainframe would kill them all. Since the Overseer was the one who informed them of this, they made him the first sacrifice, which started a tradition of sacrificing the replacement Overseer every year. This led to the formation of several heavily corrupt voting blocs who could basically kill off anyone they wanted since they held the majority in every election. Katherine Stone was forced to perform sexual favors for members of the largest voting bloc under the threat of getting her husband elected. Then they elected him anyway. This enraged Katherine to the point that she started murdering prominent bloc members, which naturally made her a shoo-in to win the next election since no one would be losing any sleep over sending the psycho murderer to die. However, this was exactly what she wanted. Katherine's first act as Overseer was to abolish the elections and instate a lottery, declaring that all future Overseers would be chosen by random number generator. This stripped the voting blocs of all their power since now everyone had an equal chance to be sacrificed. Unsurprisingly, they were absolutely furious over this, and they started a civil war in an attempt to regain control, after which there were only five people in the entire vault left alive. Those five people then went to the mainframe and told it to Get It Over With and finish the job, because they refuse to sacrifice anyone else. To their horror, the mainframe congratulated them on their selflessness and unlocked the vault door as a reward. The whole thing was a Secret Test of Character all along, and all of those deaths were for nothing. Consumed with guilt, four out of the five committed suicide, and the fifth guy left the vault, fate unknown.
- Final Fantasy:
- In Final Fantasy VI, getting "Doom-Doom-7" on Setzer's slot kills the entire party.
- In Final Fantasy VII, getting "Cait-Cait-Bar" for Cait Sith also kills the entire party.
- In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, this trope drives the scenario for Gaia Rock. One person wins the lottery to feed the serpent within Gaia Rock. However, there is an effort being made to break this deadly cycle, which is finally broken by Felix's party.
- 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 Benny saving a mutant child from being sacrificed by offering to be killed in his place.
- Mario Party 1: Peach's Birthday Cake has the Flower Lottery, which determines whether players will visit Toad or Bowser whenever they reach the junction. Players are forced to pay ten coinsnote to partake in the Flower Lottery, where they must pick from a group of four seeds. As a Goomba is running the lottery, he'll claim that the three "loser" seeds are the ones that send players to Toad, while the "winner" sends a player to Bowser. It's completely random as to which seed will be the "winner". The Goomba will only refresh the seeds once all four have been sold, meaning that if the "winner" is not picked last, the other seeds will invariably be safe. Likewise, if only the "winner" is left, too bad for whoever's stuck with it.
- An Announcer response in Monday Night Combat makes an offhand reference to a "population control lottery".
- Inverted in Shardlight: "the Lottery" is the only way to get a sample of the rare vaccine against The Plague, known as "Green Lung". However, a citizen can only enter the Lottery, if they work for The Remnant government, which has a habit of sending its agents on very dangerous tasks if not outright Suicide Missions.
- If you get three skulls & crossbones on the aptly named "Slots of Death" slot machine in Space Quest, it kills you with a Disintegrator Ray.
- In Suspended, your character was selected in a planet-wide lottery to be buried deep underground in hibernation for 500 years while your subconscious mind regulates the planet's computers. At the beginning of the game, you've been woken up because things are going haywire. Good luck fixing things with your barely-functional robots before you get terminally disconnected.
- In the backstory of Tooth and Tail, a "Harvest Lottery" was implemented in the backstory once it became clear there weren't enough pigs for everyone to be able to eat meat. As can be implied by the name, losers of the lottery were eaten by the rest. When Bellafide lost his son to a Harvest, he decided to start a Civil War rather than accept it, setting the game's plot in motion.
Webcomics
- Centurii-chan: This strip shows an Aztec priestess telling a villager they won the grand prize in the lottery. The villager asks what they won before the priestess points to a bloody sacrificial altar.
Websites
- The Onion gives us this horrifying gem.
Western Animation
- In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Dickesode", meals from a certain restaurant in town all come with peel-off lotteries much like the annual McDonald's Monopoly game that include free drinks, meals, coupons... and a one in ten chance to get your dick ripped off. That last part is even mentioned in the commercial, but it's said quickly and quietly. Several hours after Carl "wins" the lottery, the collectors show up...
- Two or three 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.
- Squidbillies has the Tricky Two Jackpot. The winner gets torn in half by monster trucks. Granny wins, but the Monster Trucks are incapable of tearing her in half, Granny stretching for hours as the trucks try. Before this, Dan Halen mentions The Lottery and even reads it to the Cuyler family.
- Alluded to in The Venture Bros. when Dean is stricken with acute testicular torsion — Billy tells him how rare it is and Pete chimes in "It's like you won the genetic freak lottery!"
Real Life
- There were examples of stranded crews in real life pulling straws to see who gets eaten in cases where they ran out of food. When they were not fudging the results or just lying about it when their story is told.
- 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.
- There is actually a maths puzzle similar to this (Josephus' Permutation; featured in Professor Layton). A given number of people get in a circle and starting at a specified person and for a given N, every Nth person is killed and removed from the circle until only 1 remains. The puzzle is to figure out who the survivor is. Whoever the count starts on will be the survivor.
- In medieval Europe, a semi-generalized variant of the puzzle was developed where instead of just one survivor, there were multiple. The framing story was that Christians and Turks/Moors were casting lots on a sinking ship to see who's to be tossed overboard, and the question, which places to take to toss out only the Turks. (At least one scandal resulted from the puzzle presented in an unchanged form at a school math contest.)
- If someone tried to escape a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the guards would line up all the prisoners and kill every Nth one.
- The Roman legions used "decimation" as a means of group punishment for units that deserted or rebelled. The soldiers were divided into groups of ten, and a drawing of lots would decide which one would be killed by the other nine.
- Most ironically of all, the lottery itself. A statistically significant elevated percentage of jackpot winners die a few years later, either because they went crazy with all the people begging them for money, or because a family member murdered them for it. If they're lucky, they survive as a bankrupt hobo. Long version here.
- The Lottery of Huruslahti: during the Finnish Civil War, in Varkaus, anti-Communist White Guards selected among Red prisoners all leaders and a fifth of the remainder before shooting them.
- Following Texas's independence from Mexico, a group of Texan soldiers launched a raid on Mexican towns following a series of Mexican raids on Texas. The Texans were captured, and then escaped. After the decision was made to kill every tenth man, the men chosen were determined by drawing black beans from a pot. The execution was known as the Black Bean Episode.
