Unwitting Instigator of Doom

A character plays a small and/or unlikely but crucial role in some horrible development. The character being put on task, meanwhile, only serves to bumble in and botch the hero's hopes of a surefire victory, and worse, quite possibly deprive the story of its Happy Ending, all the while often remaining oblivious to the overall implications of the situation and their role in it. Their actions have no real necessity in elevating the drama, often taking it to Beyond the Impossible levels, making them a walking Diabolus Ex Machina.

A more temperate soul may simply wish that person were Put on a Bus prior to the critical moment, assuming that this character may have acted out of idiocy rather than malice, and that their presence and actions at that moment were their only errors. The audience, fully aware of the For Want of a Nail implications, will hate this character nearly as much as, if not even moreso than, the people who could more accurately be called responsible for whatever happened - and very often, as much as the character hates themself for it.. This hatred can be understandable, in that the antagonist more directly responsible in the development is playing their role in the story, for the sake of Rising Conflict.

An Unwitting Instigator of Doom can be basically complicit with the villain, but in that case, they're generally seeing only a small portion of the picture. If they're being specifically manipulated but does not realize, s/he's an Unwitting Pawn. Other times, they're simply blundering in like a wrench in some particularly highly valued machine. Do not expect the levels of venom to differ between the scenarios. Will be seen as The Scrappy by some fans. If worse comes to worse, they may also end up as the Idiot Houdini. Expect no shortage of Fix Fics or Revenge Fics on account of this character. Often causes A Tragedy of Impulsiveness to occur.

Compare Nice Job Breaking It, Hero and Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds. See also Interrupted Cooldown Hug.

Examples of Unwitting Instigator of Doom include:

• Anime & Manga
• Films
• Literature
• Video Games and Visual Novels
• Real Life

Comic Books

• In Volume 5 of Scott Pilgrim, Stephen Stills tells Knives that before Scott broke up with her, he had already started dating Ramona. Knives then tells Ramona, leading her to break up with Scott.
• Inverted in the Tintin story The Secret of the Unicorn with the pickpocket who had been stealing everyone's wallets. He ended up stealing the Bird brothers' wallets which contained their parchments, this lead them to think that Tintin stole their wallets. They ended up kidnapping Tintin, and after a long chain of events, they got captured. Tintin got the last two parchments from the pickpocket and ended up finding Red Rackam's treasure. If it wasn't for the pickpocket stealing peoples' wallets, who knows whether or not Tintin would've gotten those parchments.

Fan Works

• From the later parts of Gensokyo 20XX, we have an age-regressed Reimu, who was conditioned not to sense danger. This is especially so in 20XXIV, when she crawls out of the house right into danger, which has Ran almost raped by another male kitsune. From 20XXV, we have the unknown and unnamed tenant who left rat poison where the aforementioned could get it and it leading to her suffering brain damage in the aftermath.

Live Action TV

• Wesley in Buffy the Vampire Slayer revealed that Faith accidentally killed someone. The rest of the team is already on-board with helping her deal with her issues and giving her the support and acceptance she needs in order to not fall to the dark side. Wesley's response on the other hand is to call in some goons and try to ship her to England to be locked away forever. By the end of the episode, she doesn't trust any of them, resents all of them (because she thinks they want her to just be like Buffy), and has taken a job as the Big Bad's number two.
  • • Fortunately, when almost the exact same situation comes up again on Angel, he has learned enough to actually trust the protagonist and go with his plan. This time it leads to Faith turning herself in and beginning her path to some measure of redemption.
• In murder mystery Harpers Island, nine-year-old Madison is kidnapped by the Ax Crazy Big Bad, John Wakefield. When rescued, she goes along with the lies Wakefield told her to tell the others — specifically that it was the Sheriff who kidnapped her. Even though she knew that Wakefield was evil. This gets several people killed and Madison became The Scrappy.
• Due to a lot of Time Travel and Anachronic Order being involved, the Blue Senturion in Power Rangers Turbo is often accused of being this, the negative result being Zordon's death. He'd come back in time a thousand years to warn of a massive war a year later — but the villains intercepted him, took the message, then wiped it from his memory, resulting in the evil side of the war being way more prepared than the good guys.
  • Of course, time travel being what it is, no one really knows how different the end result would have been.
• Power Rangers RPM: To escape from the research facility she spent most of her pre-series life confined to, Doctor K decided to release a sentient computer virus her captors had her design for them. She intended to keep it to the facility's computers, but two guards caught her before she could finish installing the firewall, ignoring all her protests. Cue the destruction of human civilization outside of Corinth City. In Power Rangers.
• In the BBC's Robin Hood the titular character is trying to make a tentative alliance with Isabella Thornton, the new Sheriff of Nottingham (and his ex-girlfriend, plus Guy de Gisborne's sister) despite the grumblings of the other outlaws. His reasoning is sound, and after striking a deal with her he asks Little John to escort her safely home. For no reason whatsoever, John decides to tell Isabella that Robin "has eyes for Kate" (a fellow outlaw). This achieves nothing except pissing Isabella off and leading her to doubt that she has any kind of power over Robin; she turns on him at the next available opportunity which leads directly to two outlaws' deaths. Nice job antagonising the valuable ally, John.
• Degrassi the Next Generation gives us Paige Michalchuk, who gets her friend Terri drunk before a dance and ends up with the guy Terri wanted instead. Later on, Terri thinks she'll never find a man and ends up with abusive boyfriend Rick. Later, Rick comes back and Paige gets to be an inversion of this trope, albeit ultimately subverted because someone else pisses Rick off enough that he starts shooting people.
• In the second season of Criminal Minds, the team was trying to bring in a delusional war veteran who is panicking because the construction sounds like the war zone. Now, they find him and have swat surround the suspect as they coaxed him to surrender. They tell these construction men nearby in plain view of the drama to stop working until they are done, but naturally the men resume construction before the suspect is apprehended. This causes the suspect to panic and he runs towards a kid on a bike, forcing a swat marksman to shoot him. The construction crew couldn’t have waited 30 minutes for the damn police, swat, and FBI to finish?
• Octavia in Rome may have been indirectly responsible for the deaths of Julius Caesar and Vorenus' wife. Octavian told her about Vorenus' wife's affair in which he told was supposed to be a secret. For no reason whatsoever, Octavia told Servilla this. When Caesar's enemies planned to assassinate him, this information became crucial and was used to drive Vorenus (who was supposed to guard Caesar) away, leaving Caesar as a sitting duck. Meanwhile, Vorenus confronted his wife and she ended up killing herself out of honor.
• While everyone in Doctor Who agrees that the Daleks would have eventually left Skaro, the Doctor feels that his stupid act of exploring the Dalek City was what made them so eager to leave and exterminate other planets.

Theater

• Zeroth Law of Trope Examples: Romeo's servant Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet, when he brings his message to Romeo telling him of Juliet's death. Sadly, the friar's letter telling him that the death was faked does not get through - so there are of these, the one who delivers the wrong news, and the one who doesn't realize how important the real news is, and fails to deliver it. Actually seems to have achieved some degree of Popcultural Osmosis, which runs counter to the norm for an author so prone to Everybody Knows That.
• In Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, the scatty Lady Markby brings a friend to a party, appearing in two scenes in the first act, and never appears onstage again. Said friend turns out to know their host's dirty secret, thus causing the events of the entire play.
• Cyrano De Bergerac: Hilarously subverted by De Guiche: he is a villain who unwittingly derails his own plans: At Act I Scene IV, he utters a simple Dare to Be Badass to De Valvert, a small but crucial gesture that sets events that result in the derailment of his own plan to marry Roxane with De Valvert so de Guiche could bully her to be his mistress.

Web Comics

• In Kid Radd, two Moderators are given a large sum of money in order to hire an assassin to kill Radd, as Captain QB can't be directly implicated in illegal activities and needs to use a proxy. They reason that it can't be hard to kill someone in jail (as Radd is being imprisoned for illegally entering other games)), and hire Kobayashi the discount ninja so that they can pocket the rest of the money. Radd survives the assassination attempt and Kobayashi becomes a recurring character who later meets up with Gnarl and, while training together, stumbles upon Chimera Point, the keystone to Crystal's plans, which eventually results in her finding it too.
• In the Jack Chick tract Fatal Decision, Brutus, an orderly on the brink of being fired for rudeness to patients, makes hints that John shouldn't trust Dr. Bowers, leading to John destroying the vaccine and dying of his disease.
  • The devils often invoke this trope, choosing someone who has an incidental relationship to the person whose soul they want to claim. In "The Assignment" they succeed in convincing Charles Bishop's subordinate's wife to badger him out of witnessing to his boss. They try to distract Cathy with a boy, only for it to fail when he proves to be a Jerkass, and try to have the previously mentioned subordinate call Bishop with a sales proposition, only for the angels to thwart this attempt twice. Charles ultimately dies in his sins, making the first example a successful one.
• In Kevin and Kell, Nick and Ki's arrival in Domain by way of interdimensional travel disrupts the balance between the animal- and human-dominated worlds to the point at which the other two humans living on the animal side Lindesfarne and Danielle are forced to leave lest the world suffer instinct loss. Luckily, Catherine and Nigel do it instead.
• Miko Miyazaki from The Order of the Stick, having already lost her Paladin abilities through the unwarranted execution of of Lord Shojo, ends up destroying the Sapphire Gate, having once again misinterpreted what the gods wanted of her. Had she not been so hasty in doing this, the ghost of Soon Kim could have permanently ended the threat of Xykon and Redcloak, who, themselves, were aiming for the gate, anyway.

Western Animation

• On a similar note as the Power Rangers RPM example above, Project Carthage in Code Lyoko, since XANA, the Big Bad of the show, was created to stop Project Carthage.
• A strange example of a fictional character ending up being one for the real-life events. The Ren and Stimpy Show had the minor character George Liquor getting brutally beaten up by Ren in the episode "Man's Best Friend". Said scene was later one of the reasons for creator John Kricfalusi's firing.
• The Earth King informed Azula (disguised as a Kyoshi Warrior) of the invasion of the Fire Nation, cue next season where the invasion force finds all royalty in hiding.
• The Ice King from Adventure Time interferes with Finn's attempt to destroy the Lich from reaching the Well of Power and reaching his full power by pestering Finn and Jake in an attempt to gain their blessing to wed Princess Bubblegum. As a result, the Lich, having regained his full power by the time Finn and Jake finally reach him, ends up jobbing Finn destroying the Gauntlet, the one weapon able to destroy him outright, forcing Finn to find an alternative. It doesn't stop there, though. The Ice King, who apologizes for having just kidnapped the Princess, accidentally drops her into the Well, which, in the subsequent episode, has the effect of melting her. She is saved, but is possessed by the spirit of the Lich. After being frozen with help from the Ice King, she shatters, requiring medical attention to be put back together. Part of Bubblegum is missing though, causing her to come back as a 13-year old, which later results in Earl of Lemongrab assuming the throne, if only for an episode.
• Kova in Voltron: Legendary Defender is the ultimate example of this trope. He was once a simple spacenoid cat who grew old before his mistress, a scientist named Lady Honerva treated him with Quintessence as a way to help him out. Once his youth was restored, Honerva threw herself into her Quintessence Experiments and eventually became Haggar.
• While the lion's share of the blame for nearly destroying Etheria in Season 3 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is Catra's, and she'd already been pushed to shakier mental ground by Adora defecting to the Rebellion, it was Shadow Weaver, who'd brought Catra up with the belief that she was Always Second Best to Adora, also joining the Rebels that broke Catra to win by any means necessary. And beyond that, the cataclysmic energy burst released attracted Horde Prime to Etheria's location. Nice one Shadow Weaver.
• In the non-canon American Dad! episode "The Two Hundred", Roger, somehow, dropping his sunglasses in a particle accelerator led to the end of the world. He apologizes for it at any rate.
• As Homer Simpson himself lampshades in "Alone Again, Natura-Diddly", he's the one who drove Maude out of her seat, ensuring she'd be standing up to be struck by an ultimately lethal barrage of t-shirts, which he provoked to fire where he was before bending down, that sent her plummeting from the top row of a NASCAR stadium and was also the one who parked in the ambulance spot preventing any chance of resuscitation.
• Nora Freeze in the Harley Quinn (TV series) episode "Il Buffone". Thinking that Lex Luthor wants to take Volcana away for sex (because why else would a Corrupt Corporate Executive give vague answers about why he's taking a hot twenty something Latina?), she kicks him out. Unwilling to let his Evil Plan be thwarted, Lex locks down the LOD forcing Nora's group to Die Hard their way out, in the process creating the very apocalypse that Lex was hoping to use Volcana to create. The "Unwitting" part comes from the fact that in the process, Nora "imbigulated" King Shark's hands, leaving him with no dexterity. Thus when he tries to take part in the resulting mass looting when the apocalypse, he accidentally lobs some dynamite into the Time Machine that they could have used to fix everything.

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