Weirdness Magnet

So now I'm being kidnapped by a bug-girl from outer space who's investigating the death of the New Gods, which has something to do with the fact that I just started inexplicably acquiring random superpowers for the 147th time. Must be Wednesday.

"Strange and bizarre things happen to you with alarming frequency. You are the one with whom demons will stop and chat. Magic items with disturbing properties will find their way to you. The only talking dog on 20th-century Earth will come to you with his problems. Dimensional gates sealed for centuries will crack open just so that you can be bathed in the energies released... or perhaps the entities on the other side will invite you to tea. Nothing lethal will happen to you, at least not immediately, and occasionally some weirdness will be beneficial. But most of the time it will be terribly, terribly inconvenient."

—"Weirdness Magnet" disadvantage from GURPS

For some reason, the character is always standing at the intersection of Strange Street and Bizarre Boulevard. They run into situations or creatures that most people don't even believe in, much less have to deal with on a regular basis. Through no fault of their own, they constantly suffer through the effects of the paranormal and supernatural. Alternatively, the character may not think of the weirdness about them as particularly strange; after all, this sort of thing happens to them all the time. However, if something starts getting surreal on the show, chances are, they're at the center of it.

Often seen in comedy, especially when the writers get lazy and don't even bother to Hand Wave their plots anymore. Also used egregiously in Sci Fi and fantasy series, with the chain of weirdness catalyzing in the pilot, and each specific occurrence resolved at the end of the episode. Bonus points if, at some point, one of the characters brings it up and questions, "Why does this kind of stuff keep happening to me/us," or notes that that "Ever since [the events of the pilot happened], you've been a magnet for the freaky."

If the events surrounding the character are possible, just staggeringly unlikely, then they're a Coincidence Magnet. The title of Weirdness Magnet is reserved for those who draw the outright impossible—involving monsters, aliens, magic, Psychic Powers, Time Travel, etc. Weirdness Magnets are also more likely to be explicitly noted by characters. If a Weirdness Magnet is the focus of external forces that causes things to happen around them, then they're a Cosmic Plaything. If there's something literally about the person that makes them attractive to the Supernatural, they're Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious. If the Weirdness Magnet is a location rather than a person, it is either a City of Adventure or a town where nothing exciting ever happens. In anime, Tokyo is particularly vulnerable. In the US, New York is the place to go for excitement. In general, Earth tends to get more than its fair share of craziness. In any case, it may be justified by a Magnetic Plot Device.

Alternately, they may have a gift or power which draws attention, because Magic Is a Monster Magnet.

Magnetic Medium is a specific, character-based version of this trope, where the character draws the weirdness in because they are capable of sensing the weirdness in the first place. Or perhaps the weirdness came first and they merely became alert to it out of self-preservation.

Some characters tend to be more prone to this than others: like the Unfazed Everyman, Cosmic Plaything, MacGuffin Girl, Strange Girl, Unlikely Hero, and Yuppie Couple. The Only Sane Man is often one of these as well. Often, it's because they have a Clingy MacGuffin, in which case these people consider themselves to be Blessed with Suck. If it goes on long enough, expect the character to start getting chummy with some very diverse "people", even picking up a Monster Roommate. This trope is one of the causes of the Superhero Paradox.

The original Trope Namer was the Blue Devil comic book published by DC in the 1980's, where the main character's status as a Weirdness Magnet is noticed (and explicitly named) within the series. It was later adopted and popularized by the GURPS RPG.

Not to be confused with Strange Attractor.[1]

Examples of Weirdness Magnet include:

Anime and Manga

  • Osaka Naru (or Molly, if you prefer) from Sailor Moon was notorious for attracting almost every kind of supernatural creature in existence as the most frequent Victim of the Week, earning the Fan Nickname "youma bait". However, her role in later seasons was downplayed until she was finally Put on a Bus.
  • The protagonist of Detective Conan is basically a Bizarre Murder Magnet, at least in the early seasons. Everywhere he goes, someone gets murdered, kinda makes you think, eh? Lampshaded by Inspector Megure upon arrival who always wonder why Conan and Kogoro always happened to be there whenever a murder takes place.
  • The entire cast of Urusei Yatsura, but especially the lead character, Ataru Moroboshi.
    • As a cultural note, the very first story has Ataru's mother reminiscing about all the bad omens that took place on the day that Ataru was born. It reads like a beginner's guide to superstitions with particular references to Japanese beliefs, starting with the fact that he was born on the anniversary of the Buddha's death. Also, his name can be translated to mean "Many stars will hit him on the head". And finally, the name of the series itself can be translated as "Those Annoying Aliens", suggesting that the galaxy and series' version of Earth is teeming with sentient species who are all irritating in their own ways. Ataru is therefore simply unlucky enough to catch the attention of all of them.
  • Played with in xxxHolic, as Watanuki is fully aware that he is a weirdness magnet, and starts the story by making a Deal with the Devil (Yuuko, actually, but Watanuki seems to consider them one and the same) to get rid of his unwanted ability.
    • The cause of his weirdness magnetism is actually explained later on—suicidal thoughts and desires that have been magically amnesia'd away. He may not remember that he wants to die, but he still smells like it to spirits and stuff.
    • A second reason, seemingly taken directly from Futurama, is that as a time travel duplicate, he's doomed, as reality itself tries to excise him. He just manages to hang on regardless.
  • Ranma from Ranma ½, to the point that most fans suspect that Ranma's curse isn't gender bending so much that it's his almost supernatural ability to attract weirdness wherever he goes.
    • Others have theorized that it might actually be Akane Tendo who's the real weirdness magnet; Ranma, and the trouble associated with him, could be considered the weirdness that she attracts. Or perhaps they're both weirdness magnets, and their mutual presence is strengthening the effect, hence why more and more whacked out stuff happens as the anime/manga goes on.
    • Though it's never outright stated that any character in Ranma ½ is a weirdness magnet, it is a fairly easy conclusion to leap to. While the world itself clearly is full of weirdness—the existence of the various Martial Arts and Crafts practitioners proves it—it does seem that Ranma, Akane and the other characters do have a particular knack for getting involved with the more bizarre parts of life. Kuno manages to be the 1 millionth customer to a "Pull the Wish-Granting Sword from the Stone" contest, which means he gets the three wishes. Shampoo brings back a supposedly haunted set of bells as a present for Ranma, and sure enough, out pops a ghost. In the first Non-Serial Movie, a young woman who is the third generation of her family to have possession of a relic that will supposedly bring a prince or princess to marry the one who holds it has gone her entire life waiting to be swept off her feet. When she tracks down Old Master Happosai to express her disgruntlement at its failure to work, guess who shows up the second the relic falls into Akane Tendo's hands? Ryoga just happens to stumble upon a creepy merchant selling toy fishing rods that make the person you "catch" fall head-over-heels in love with you. And these are just a few examples.
  • More or less the entire premise of Suzumiya Haruhi. It's not that weirdness gravitates toward Haruhi, though, so much as that she generates it. Relating to the Monk example below, at one point two characters in the series have a conversation to the effect that fictional detectives cause bad things to happen by virtue of their very presence, and that Haruhi, at that point on a "detective" kick, might subconsciously will such a disaster into being. Completely subverted when the expected murder actually happens -- Kyon immediately knows it's a hoax precisely because he trusts that Haruhi wouldn't really wish for someone to die just so she could play detective.
    • The series doesn't portray this very well, but Kyon himself has some pretty weird acquaintances from middle school. There's Nakagawa, who falls in love with Nagato at first sight because he just happens to be a semi-esper who can see her link to the Integrated Thought Entity, and Sasaki, a very strange girl who's also the center of attention for a collection of aliens, time travelers and espers who are rivals to the SOS Brigade's members' factions.
      • Though there is some indication that the reason for this is that it is not Haruhi who is the weirdness magnet, but actually Kyon himself.
      • Whenever one of the goddesses gets Kyon to repeat their patterns (visual patterns for Haruhi, audio patterns for the other girl), strange things shall happen.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: In Season 4, Judai almost drops out of the Academy under the assumption that, as The Chosen One, he is the Weirdness Magnet attracting all the evil, psychotic villains to the place. Two former said psychos clarify that it's Duel Academia that is the Magnetic Plot Device (Sameshima actually revealed it was built for that specific purpose), and Judai can best protect it by staying, not leaving.
  • In the early chapters of Bleach, characters with spiritual affinity were weirdness magnets. Ghosts appeared to such characters, and hollows hunted them. Ichigo's spiritual attunement spilled over to his classmates making them weirdness magnets as well.
    • Due to its new status as a spiritually enriched area, the entirety of Karakura Town, the hometown of the human protagonists, can be considered as one giant Weirdness Magnet.
  • Akari of Aria tends to stumble into all sorts of supernatural phenomena—many of them involving the king of cats, Cait Sith. These include, but are not limited to: traveling back in time, visiting The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday, nearly taking a ride on the soul train, and an attempted abduction by a ghost.
  • Mizuki in Mokke has the talent to get haunted by lots of different kinds of ghosts. Her older sister Shizuru can see them, but is lucky not to be influenced by them directly.
  • As the My-HiME quote above attests, Mai (and possibly the rest of Fuuka Academy) appears to be a magnet for the surreal. Nagi specifically mentions in one episode that the Orphans are drawn to girls like her. However, it later turns out there are more sinister forces at work...
  • Lina seems to be this in the first third of Slayers Next, as she inexplicably keeps tripping on one Mazoku plot after the other. As it turns out there's nothing accidental about this, as Xellos was leading her into these situations by order of the Hellmaster.
  • Being a magnet for mushi, the Meta Origin for weirdness in Mushishi is apparently a common affliction for members of the title profession, including main character Ginko.
  • The titular character of Natsume Yuujinchou has spirits (Youkai) coming at him from every direction. It's a genetic thing.
  • Sousuke from Full Metal Panic!. Not that he isn't weird himself, but... good lord, even the "normal" people he interacts with are later revealed to be oddball psychos. Sure, he causes things to become weird, but a lot of situations that occurred were outlandish before he made it even weirder.
  • In Shakugan no Shana, it seems that almost all of the main characters in high school get pulled into something related to the Crimson Realm.
  • In Haunted Junction, Saito High School was built at the center of a triangle formed by a Shinto shrine, a Buddhist temple, and a Christian church. The resultant flow of energy makes it a weird place that seems to attract more weird.
    • This is not helped by the Chairman's habit of actively bringing more weird items and creatures onto school grounds. He's a deliberate weirdness magnet, to the chagrin of inadvertent magnet Haruto Houjo.
  • In Project A-ko, whenever C-ko is the Damsel in Distress, it's usually because she's this.
  • Tadayasu Sawaki from Moyashimon. In addition to being born with the power to see and communicate with microorganisms, he ends up hanging out with all sorts of weirdos, including a college professor seemingly obsessed with bio-remediation and weird fermented foods from around the world, the professor's leather-wearing workaholic Ice Queen grad assistant, a pair of slackers obsessed with sake brewing and insects, respectively, a girl who washes way too much and another girl who drinks way too much. And to top it all off, his best friend since childhood comes out as a Transsexualism and starts dressing up in Elegant Gothic Lolita outfits.
  • Naota from FLCL. His big brother's ex-girlfriend tries to hit on him, a crazy woman riding a scooter hits him in the head with a guitar and then moves into his household as a live-in maid, and a horn grows out of his head that eventually turns out to be a robot with a TV for a head. All that happens in the first episode, and it only gets weirder from there.
  • Tsunayoshi Sawada from Reborn. For the first sixty or so chapters he meets a baby in the mafia who shoots him in the head and causes him back to life in his underwear with a flame on his forehead, a high school student with a lot of dynamite, a five-year-old dressed as a cow who uses grenades trying to kill the mafia baby and can switch with his future self, a person who is a klutz without anyone from his family near him, wakes up to find a corpse in his room, etc.
  • Ciel from Black Butler.
  • The Straw Hat Pirates from One Piece always gets in trouble wherever they go and will surely continue do so in the future. Nami actually lampshades a much more literal version of this trope when the eccentric talking living musician fencing skeleton Brook joins the crew, by saying "Why do our crew always attract the weird ones? - other weird members being the perverted cyborg Franky and the reindeer human Chopper.
  • The system force in Ah! My Goddess tends to cause strange things to happen for no apparent reason whenever someone tries to pull Belldandy and Keiichi apart.

Comic Books

  • John Constantine has spent most of his life as a weirdness magnet, as have many of his ancestors. It seems to run in the blood...
    • Oh, it's worse then that. Turns out John's unborn twin is using synchronicity (the ability to warp reality, making things work out for him that comes with being the "Laughing Magican") to screw with John's life. The twin uses the power to attract all the bad stuff that happens to John whilst using the power to stop him dying from it (neatly explaining all the bad stuff that happens to everyone around him but John manages to escape). Why, you may ask? So John will give up, commit mental suicide and allow the twin to take over
  • Devi D. from I Feel Sick, from dating a zombie and a serial killer/psychopath, being attacked by a cat with acid for blood, having her painting come to life and try to drive her insane, Devi can never escape her insanely bizarre life. Her friend Tena even lampshades her status as a weirdness magnet.
  • Shade the Changing Man lived in Hotel Shade, which the Angels told him would "draw madness to it like a magnet." John Constantine visited there, as a matter of fact.
  • The main character of the comic Major Bummer is a Weirdness Magnet by design—the implants that give him and various other characters in the series powers are programmed to attract one another as well as other weirdness, like demons.
  • Peter David played with the concept of a 'chaos river' for his Supergirl series. This partly explained why a superhero fought so much oddness while living in a small town.
  • The protagonist of Blue Devil, as noted above.
  • Aardvarks in Cerebus act as magical amplifiers; one consequence of this is that strange things tend to happen around them without their conscious control.
  • Ivy Town from The All-New Atom was described as a Weirdness Magnet by one of the series antagonists. I blame the writer.
    • Or the series creator.
    • In universe, Atom foe Chronos and his temporal manipulations are partly to blame.
  • Astro City. It's mentioned that there are superheroes in other cities and countries, but most other places with heroes seem to only have one major hero (Silversmith in Boston, Iron Cross in Stuttgart, etc), whereas Astro City seems to have ridiculous amounts. One character compares the city's abundance as the equivalent to LA's earthquakes.
  • In one Batman comic (I think maybe during Broken City) a cop remarks that the answer to the issue someone has posed to them of what would make for a good Gotham City "reality show" would be The Outer Limits.
  • Tintin seems to be Evil Overlord and The End of the World as We Know It prone.
  • Jeremy... well, hell, the entire Feeple family in Ninja High School have all sorts of strange and odd thing happening to them throughout their lives. The town they live in, Quagmire, just seems to like these kinds of people.
  • Superman once had this to some degree, but the Silver Age Superboy was worse. He lived in a small town, yet was continually beset by space aliens and other strange things that found their way there by pure coincidence.
  • A few strips in Two Thousand AD have used this as a premise; namely Bec & Kawl and Caballistics, Inc.
  • Xombi. David Kim's status as an immortal, artificial zombie makes him the target of a lot of weird plots.
  • Zayne Carrick from the Knights of the Old Republic comic. The Force seems to have a very perverse sense of humor when it comes to him.
  • The Incredible Hulk is this, especially in the Silver and Bronze Ages. Even when he had successfully eluded the military and anyone else who might be chasing him, he would inevitably just blunder into a landing alien spaceship, or try to take a nap in a cave and discover it's a supervillain's hideout, or try to find privacy on a desert island only to find it's full of monsters, etc... when all the poor lug really wants is some peace and quiet.
  • Jimmy Olsen, Full Stop. There's a reason why Super Dickery has made a drinking game out of counting the times Jimmy gains superpowers through one way or another, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Being a newspaper photographer in Metropolis kind of justifies all the weirdness he gets subjected to, but it's one of the bizarre Silver Age cliches that has continued Post-Crisis, including a full-blown, targeted, massive example in Countdown to Final Crisis.
    • Basically, Jimmy Olsen is to the city of Metropolis what the city of Metropolis is to the rest of the world: always the victim of whatever crazy catastrophe happens to be going down in the DC universe on any given day or night, only he's a person instead of a location.
    • Lois Lane was one of these Pre Crisis, but now she's mainly notable for actively chasing after weirdness with a frenzy. However, the city of Metropolis, where she does most of her investigative reporting, is a major weirdness magnet itself.
  • Rick Jones, longtime ally/sidekick/mascot of The Avengers, is such a big example that he's infamous for it in-universe and listing the number of utterly outlandish things that have happened to him almost purely by coincidence could fill up the entire page. Lampshaded and taken Up to Eleven in Avengers Forever.
  • Usagi from Usagi Yojimbo has an amazing tendency to attract all the weird and dangerous things in any area he is passing through. He will accidentally bump into an ancient, mystic sword and get himself in the middle of an anti-shogun conspiracy or become number one on a local psychopath’s “to kill” list. No matter how much he tries to avoid it, he always ends up in a fight. If it's not Youkai he has to kill, then a village needs to be saved from a Yakuza. Most of his friends are not ordinary people, either. This happy bunch includes: a bounty hunter, a powerful daimyo, said daimyo’s Action Girl bodyguard, the former head of a ninja clan who would love to get rid of Usagi, a Badass Grandpa Old Master, a Classy Cat Burglar, and a professional demon hunter.
  • PS238 has Bertram Norris -- an obvious Jimmy Olsen's expy, with all this entails (see above).
    • Ron/Captain Clarinet/Argonaut came up with a notion that Moonshadow is "such a bad luck!" The reason being that Tyler either starts stuck into whichever potential trouble is about to happen, or moves toward it, if at all possible -- and Ron despite being the son of Atlas (Superman's expy) just didn't get the knack for handling troubles.

Fan Works

  • Mainiac97 of the RuneScape fanfiction The Adventure Through Runescape certainly qualifies. He is attacked by vampires and powerful monsters on a regular basis, and all of it happens whenever he tries to go mining, questing, completing tutorial island, or does anything mundane.
  • Harry in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, even more so than in canon (probably because he is much more curious in this version). Some of the girls at the school take the implications a bit too literally.

It said something, Hermione Granger thought, and it was something rather sad — as the eight of them strolled back through the maze of twisty little passages that was Hogwarts, their time before the next class having run out without finding any bullies — that she genuinely didn't know whether Harry Potter had been led around by the ghost of Salazar Slytherin or a phoenix or what. And whatever Harry had done, she hoped it didn't work for them. And most of all she hoped that the others didn't vote for Tracey's idea of stunning Harry Potter and carting his unconscious body around with them to attract Adventures. That couldn't possibly work in real life, or, if it did, she was giving up.


Film

  • Monster In a Box. Spalding Gray complains that it seems like weird people are always attracted to him.
  • Acknowledged by Max Bialystock in The Producers'.

"They come here, they all come here. How do they find me?"

Literature

  • The namesake character in Candide makes this trope Older Than Radio.
  • Arthur Dent, in all incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is perhaps the quintessential Weirdness Magnet.
    • From the same author, Dirk Gently—in two and a fragment books, he encountered a ghost, a time machine, Thor, God of Thunder, had an eagle turn into a jet and fly out the front of his house, and narrowly avoided employment to track down the rear half of a cat named Gusty Winds. This isn't counting the minor difficulties with probability during his education.
  • Rincewind in the Discworld books was one of these, and it bothered him; he didn't just want to be normal, he wanted to be actively boring. It's no coincidence that one of the books with him is titled Interesting Times.
    • He's a favorite of the Lady, and Fate hates him personally. Death actually gave up on trying to collect him, as he can no longer tell when Rincewind's due to die (due to massive deformation of his life hourglass—that Death now keeps on his desk as a curio), and treats him rather like an amusing show he drops in on occasionally to see what's happening this episode.
    • Tiffany Aching could also be said to be one, and even before Agnes Nitt was an official witch she could sing harmony with herself and had hair that would occasionally eat combs. This trope seems to come with the territory for Discworld witches.
  • In Blood Debt, the last of Tanya Huff's Blood books, Henry Fitzroy wants to know why he is being haunted by ghosts that he does not know, and his lover/regular snack, Tony Foster, points out that "like attracts like", and as a vampire, Henry should expect ghosts and things like that to show up on his doorstep.
    • In the second book, Henry swears that he used to live a quiet life; while this is not entirely true, his attraction to the supernatural does seem to have gotten much stronger once Vicki and Tony came along. Maybe it's their fault.
      • Given the events in the subsequent Smoke and Shadows novels it seems pretty clear that Tony is, in fact, the actual weirdness magnet.
  • The Armitage children from the various Armitage stories in Joan Aiken's collections have this peculiarity, but it has its genesis in a wish their mother made with a genuine wishing stone, that she would have two children and they would have interesting magical things happen to them one day a week, usually but not always on the same day. She got her oddly specific wish...
  • The whole premise of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
  • The protagonist of Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, described as a "shit magnet", is never more than a few pages away from coincidentally bumping into something extraordinarily weird or disturbing.
  • The title character of Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell Trilogy; though that seems to be more Johnny being the only one who notices the weirdness (due to his chronic lack of imagination, he lacks the mental filters "normal" people have that tell them "This can't be real").
  • Callahan's Place in the Callahans Crosstime Saloon series at least begins as a magnificent but otherwise ordinary bar that just happens to draw alien observers, talking animals and darts masters who cheat with telekinesis.
  • Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez:

"That happen a lot?"
"More often that it should. When you cross over into the weird stuff, there's no going back. Hector has a theory on it. Calls it the law of 'Anomalous Phenomena Attraction.' He explained it to me once. Didn't really pay attention, but it boils down to 'weird shit pulls in more weird shit.' Figure it's gotta be true. Ever since I killed that guy, I keep runnin' across cults and monsters and fallen gods."

  • There is a series of young adult books about a place called Eerie, Indiana. It involved these two kids named Marshall Teller and Simon Holmes who were in a small town in Indiana where lots of weird and crazy stuff happened (like running into kids from the future, or a TV cable salesman ripping holes in reality). It turns out the town literally was a weirdness magnet, for two reasons. One, a meteorite filled with a material called "eerieum" had landed, and it soaked into the local landscape. This material causes weirdness. Two, the Roswell aliens are being stored there, attracting even more weirdness. Guess you could call them space oddities.
    • Paralleled by the TV series Eerie, Indiana, as noted below.
      • Preceded, actually: after FOX rebroadcast the former NBC episodes for Saturday morning, the series became much more popular; the books were then written to take advantage of the resulting new demand for young adult Weird Fiction.
  • Kitty Norville. Arguably justified in that most of her problems are the result of being a werewolf and public celebrity. Some, though, really have no possible explanation other than the bad luck and/or destiny of being a Weirdness Magnet.
  • Tom Holt's character Paul Carpenter. He gets a job with a major firm of unknown purpose, despite confusing Anton Chekhov with Pavel Chekov. The building seems to reshape itself more or less at random, the stapler will disappear across the building if you put it down for two seconds (even if you're the only one in the room and the door is locked), new employees are left to sort graph printouts that have been scrambled and draw circles around anything on an aerial photograph that looks like a bauxite deposit, and claw marks and sinister glowing eyes appear to pop up occasionally. Paul's misadventures last for three books, all of them introducing new elements of the Fantasy Kitchen Sink any of Holt's characters find themselves stuck in...and all of them seem to need Paul for some purpose in their great (ten-sided) game of Xanatos Speed Chess. It turns out he's been pretty much developed as a living weapon by a couple of blood relatives, one of whom is a) God and b) his real father, and as an additional bonus he's the reincarnation of a Norse warlord.
  • Jasper Fforde's character Thursday Next.
  • In L. J. Smith's Vampire Diaries, the town of Fell's Church was a weirdness magnet, because of all the souls buried there.
  • One of the (many) drawbacks to being a demi-god in the Percy Jackson and The Olympians series is this; monsters are literally drawn to their presence.
  • Harry Potter and his friends Ron and Hermione, as well as Hogwarts School in general, are a definite magnet for weirdness. Lampshaded in the sixth film, where Professor McGonagall wonders aloud why "you three" are always around whenever something bad happens. Ron responds that he's been wondering the same thing for six years.
  • Justified with Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files, since he's the only openly practicing wizard in the country. Name's in the phonebook. Conjure by it at your own risk.
    • Also, Chicago is Harry's area of operations, and it happens to be both a hub of leylines and a financial and travel hub in the United States. As a result, a lot of weirdness naturally converges on Chicago.
    • Thirdly, Johnny Marcone is a mob boss (and later member of the magical United Nations) who deals in magical artifacts, and whose enemies are more than willing to use black magic against him.
  • Even after Sparrowhawk loses his magic in the third book, he retains his ability to turn up precisely where and when he's needed. Tenar comments on this pointedly.
  • Bella Swan of Twilight fame. Her first love and boyfriend turns out to be a vampire, her best friend turns out to be a werewolf. A vicious vampire sets a whole army to kill her, and the leader of the vampire royalty Aro, places his eyes on her.
  • In the original books by P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins is clearly a weirdness magnet. Although by all measures she is a typical British nanny in appearance and behavior (commutation via wind and fireworks notwithstanding), eight books' worth of weirdness occurs around her (and, just as tellingly, stops whenever she leaves, a fact the Banks children notice and bemoan).
  • Eragon in The Inheritance Cycle

Saphira: Nothing out of the ordinary ever occurs to me when I'm by myself. But you attract duels, ambushes, immortal enemies, obscure creatures such as the Ra'zac, long-lost family members, and mysterious acts of magic as though they were starving weasels and you were a rabbit that wandered into their den.

    • This, of course, from his supposedly extinct dragon just to emphasise the point. When the fantastical beast is calling you out on being a Wierdness Magnet, you have no grounds to deny it.
  • Jakub Wedrowycz attracts all kinds of weird happenings, supernatural or otherwise. At one point, after he finds a nuclear warhead (and tries to break it open for scrap), the local police officer goes insane when trying to comprehend just how come that all the bizarre things in the world are happening to that one guy.
  • Clan Korval in Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe series is either this or a Coincidence Magnet, depending on your point of view—the strange series of coincidences Clan Korval is susceptible to are not particularly supernatural to them, but to the mundanes who get caught up in events it could be a different story.
  • Jame, in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, seems to attract weirdness and catastrophe, enough that it's lampshaded by other characters. This may, of course, be because she's pretty damn weird herself.
  • Three of the primary protagonists in the Wheel of Time series are known to be ta'veren, which means that the Wheel reshapes destiny around them. This causes very odd and improbable things to happen to them and to those around them. Lampshaded on at least one occasion by having characters track Rand, Mat or Perrin by following the trail of unlikely occurrences.


Live Action TV

  • Lost: The Island has a habit of attracting strange and often insane people.
    • In the fifth season, Sawyer complains that he spent three years in peace, only for chaos to return along with some of his fellow survivors.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus once did pretty much a whole episode about such a man ("Michael Ellis").
    • Mr. Pither ("The Cycling Tour") also qualifies.
  • Dharma and Greg: Dharma was definitely a Weirdness Magnet; out-of-the-ordinary folk just seemed to naturally gravitate to her.
  • Friends: Phoebe was usually the source or the focus of surreal happenings.
  • Married... with Children: Even in the strange world that we see around the Bundys, Al always seemed to attract the oddest things to him.
  • Doctor Who: He may be a time-travelling alien from an old and powerful race, but even by those standards, the Doctor manages to get caught up in cosmic trouble with absurd frequency. Even if he just pops out for a bit of air on a street corner in Cardiff, you can bet an intergalactic conspiracy will be brewing within spitting distance. By extension, the entire planet Earth may be considered a Weirdness Magnet for the series; a disproportionally large number of Evil Alien Schemes happen to involve the blue marble and a disproportionally large number of alien craft happen to crashland here, and, for that matter, 20th to 21st-century London in specific.
    • A nice Lampshading was done on this in the story Battlefield, where the modern-day version of UNIT regarded the Doctor as a troublemaker, since wherever he turned up, all hell broke loose.
    • Somewhat averted in the new series, where a couple of times he mentions those visits to planets that did not involve crazy adventures. However, one short trip gives a good half a season of adventures.
    • The Tenth Doctor liked to describe himself as a "traveler", roaming the universe just for a bit of fun. On one occasion another character gave him an incredulous look, and he sheepishly added, "It never seems to quite work out that way."
    • Possibly justified (maybe just handwaved) in the new series episode "The Beast Below", when The Doctor says "It's a big day every day. I've got a time machine. I just skip the little ones."
    • Possibly averted in "The Doctor's Wife" when the TARDIS tells him it does not always take him where he wants to go, but instead has always taken him where he needs to be.
  • Lampshaded in The Sarah Jane Adventures story "Goodbye Sarah Jane Smith". Ruby White refers to the area where Sarah Jane lives as "The Ealing Triangle", citing Truman the astrologer, the Bubbleshock factory, rhinos in police cars, and alien plant life as just some of the weird things which had taken place in the area.
  • The Canadian kids' series The Zack Files was about the titular Zack and his friends, who chronicled all the weirdness that would inexplicably happen to him.
    • Not only is the audience expected to accept that weird stuff just happens to Zack, he even has his own theory to explain it -- "maybe it's life that's weird, and I'm just the first person to notice it".
    • It gets to the point where Zack just assumes that anything happening to him is due to the ambient weirdness of his life, rather than anything more sensible. Case in point: assuming that his bank account not decreasing when he takes money out is the first time general bizarritude is working in his favour, rather than being, say, a computer error.
      • Acting on this assumption, if I recall correctly, caused his conscience to go on strike.
  • After ticking off a Scottish god thingie, Harris Pembleton in the Canadian kids TV show Seriously Weird is cursed (in the god's own words, to "become a magnet for all that is weird") for strange things to happen to him. Mind you, this is a show with episode titles like "When Gods Get Angry", "When Yoghurt Attacks", and "When Fairies Get Mad".
  • Used, then lampshaded, then subverted in Monk. In the episode "Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever", Natalie observes that everywhere Monk goes, people get murdered, supposing he's followed by some karmic cloud of disaster. By the end of the episode, she changes her mind about him: he's not a Weirdness Magnet for murder, he's cosmically drawn to where murders occur so he can solve them.
    • Natalie's one to talk here. Before her daughter got her driver's license, she was involved one way or another in at least six murders and a museum heist!
  • There's a specific variant which happens in any series featuring a supernatural detective. For some reason every time they get a case, the case will be related to the supernatural—for instance, nobody walks in the door with a normal missing person's case, the missing person will have turned into a werewolf or have been sacrificed to a demon. This despite the fact that the person with the case doesn't know that their own case is supernatural, let alone that the detective is supernatural and is the only one who knows how to handle it. Series which do this include Angel, Blood Ties, Moonlight, and The Dresden Files; it's hard to think of a supernatural detective series which doesn't.
    • And the tradition continues with Grimm. Every case Nick has had since the pilot has had a Wesen involved.
    • Although you could claim that they do get normal cases, they just aren't the ones we see. After all, we only see them for a small part of their lives, a show might detail one or two days a week for six months out of the year, not every day of their lives.
      • And the series listed usually have the characters at least refer to more mundane cases, if not show them as tiny side-stories; Dresden, for examples, mentions at one point that he's usually just asked to find things. And, at least in the case of The Dresden Files, Harry openly identifies himself in the phone book as a wizard.
    • Harry specifically mentions in Storm Front set before he effectively retires from the "wizard in the Yellow Pages" schtick by being drafted into the Wardens that he has referral-exchange deals with various other non-magical investigators in Chicago.
    • Angel is actually a more interesting one, at least early on. In the beginning Angel makes it clear to Cordy any time she brings up a non-paranormal client that they don't do that sort of thing. On the other, when Angel Investigations is contracted in season 2 to spy on a woman using alien abduction to hide cheating (and quite obviously so) the only reason Angel seems to have a problem with it is his Darla obsession.
    • Doyle's visions are a way of getting around this; one case they investigate appears to involve an ordinary police matter, but it's quickly pointed out the Powers That Be wouldn't have sent Doyle a vision unless the supernatural was involved.
    • Justified in Blood Ties, as Vicki's demon tattoos cause supernatural things to be unconsciously drawn to her.
  • The entire cast of Dead Last ended up as Weirdness Magnets after finding a medallion that let them see ghosts.
  • The various crews of the Star Trek franchise seem to come across an inordinate number of rare phenomena. This was Lampshaded in Q-Squared, with a scientist researching temporal phenomena explaining that she specifically requested transport by the Enterprise (even calling in favors) because it encounters more Negative Space Wedgies in a year than most ships encounter in their lifetimes. In that same book, most of the anomalies are explained as creations of Trelane, but why the Enterprise itself keeps running into them, no answers are forthcoming:

Trelane: It's a massive sort of kismet, I suppose.

    • In addition, Picard is in awe of the sheer volume of weirdness encountered by Kirk's Enterprise:

If there's one thing Kirk and his crew seemed incapable of doing, it's having a normal day...

    • Lt. Barclay. Period.
    • Regarding temporal anomalies this is lampshaded and partially justified in a book about the department of temporal investigations: once you run into one, it becomes more probable that others will form in your proximity.[2] Only the first Negative Space Wedgie is unusual; after that, it'd be odd to not encounter more.
  • Xander Harris attracts the attention of demonic females. In one episode Willow accidentally curses him to attract vicious demons all the time.
    • Lampshaded in the season 7 episode "First Date" when Willow receives a text message from Xander. It's coded in such a way that it could mean either "I'm getting lucky don't call me for a while" or "Help, a demon's eating my head." Playing the odds, the Scooby Gang save Xander from being a sacrifice for the Hellmouth just in time.
      • I've always theorized that Xander is simply attracted to power—whether it's supernatural (Mrs. French being one of the first, also Buffy herself); social (Cordelia); or both (he wasn't attracted to Willow until she dated a guitarist / became a witch).
    • The hellmouth Sunnydale is built on is the main driver for the show's plot. Everything in the show happens because of the hellmouth or something that happened because of the hellmouth
    • Buffy herself, as the Slayer, is an explicit weirdness magnet, because of all the Big Bads that come to Sunnydale specifically to kill her—such as Dracula, whom it is explicitly stated came to challenge her.
      • The origin comic stated that Buffy, as the Slayer, is a "creature of destiny". Fate will ensure that she always ends up where she needs to be.
    • Cordelia became the magnet in Angel, getting impregnated twice. The third time was tragic.
  • Short-lived series Eerie, Indiana—clearly related to the book series cited above—depicted a town that attracted Weird the way Sunnydale attracted Evil.
  • Anyone who has the misfortune to be a friend of the Power Rangers tends to get any and all excess weirdness dumped on them. Of particular note is Toby from Power Rangers Mystic Force, who was kidnapped by demons at least twice. They put him back promptly when they realized that, A. he didn't know anything important, and B. he was incredibly annoying.
  • The eponymous private school of Strange Happenings At Blake Holsey High aka "Black Hole High" because there is a black hole in the basement which is the source of all the weirdness.
  • Oliver Wendall Douglas in Green Acres. Everyone in Hooterville (or Hootersville, if you use Mrs. Douglas' pronunciation) was weird and seemed to understand each other. Oliver was the only one who was "normal."
  • The Winchester brothers from Supernatural, half due to them actively seeking out weird stuff to kill and half due to both of them being destined by birth to be major players in the apocalypse.
  • Firefly. The good ship Serenity seems to have attracted a very strange and curious crew, including an exceptional pilot, a virtual savant of an engineer, a priest who is definitely no stranger to violence, a genius doctor, and a psychic assassin.
  • The Twist kids in Round the Twist, whose experiences range from regularly running into ghosts to having their remote-control blessed/cursed with the ability to effect the real world like a TV. Happens to be the precursor for similar shows such as The Zack Files. Possibly the Ur Example of this type of kids' program.
  • Short-lived mid-'90s Fox show Strange Luck was based around this trope. The main character goes fishing? A briefcase full of money and a dead body plunge from the sky. He worked as a freelance photographer, because all he had to do to make a living was get up and pick up a camera.
  • In Farscape, Leviathan starships, especially Moya and her son Talyn, attract alien predators, guests with malicious intent, social outcasts and criminals, Energy Beings, shapeshifters, Starfish Aliens and extradimensional entities. Less fantastically, they also attract trouble in general. One of the other Leviathans encountered in the series was being consumed by the Xarai, cloned minions of a dangerous escaped, insane criminal cyborg named Kaarvok who "twinned" his captives and fed on them until they degenerated into living zombies. Another Leviathan had gone insane after watching all her children be captured by the Peacekeepers, and began attacking other Leviathans to deny them the opportunity to bury their dead in the Leviathan Sacred Space. Finally, Talyn, Moya's son, was modified before birth by the Peacekeepers, making him a hybrid gunship, wwhereas all other Leviathans were unarmed and could only perform defensive maneuvers. Basically, Leviathans are a race of Weirdness Magnet broken Woobies.
  • Every season of True Blood introduces at least one new, hitherto unmentioned, species of mythological being. As of season 4, it is getting to the point where almost the entire population of the podunck town Bon Temps is supernatural in some respect.

Music

  • The narrator of Ookla the Mok's song "Stranger In The Mirror" (about a fellow who discovers someone else looking out at him from the other side of his bathroom mirror one morning) appears to be one, or at least thinks he is; he complains "things like this are always happening to me", and says "after that Newcastle incident I thought I'd seen it all". In the bridge he lists some of the other things that's experienced:

There was that time that shopping mall devoured my Aunt Sue,
And then my veterinarian turned to stone ...
That was the same week Adrian Veidt removed my intrinsic field...

Newspaper Comics

  • Samantha in Safe Havens, while not so strange herself, keeps meeting and befriending bizarre characters.
  • The entire plot of Lio.
  • Bloom County (and Outland and Opus and, well, anything by Berke Breathed).
  • Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes was this... at least in Calvin's imagination... we think.


Tabletop Games

  • As mentioned above, GURPS has a disadvantage that turns you into this.
    • Illuminated also tends to cause this.
    • Depending on the setting, the weirdness can reach absolutely batshit levels of bizarre. Illuminati University, for example, is weird on its own. Taking Weirdness Magnet there means that you stand a good chance of having Shub-Niggurath invite you to tea, and then reveal that it (she?) is your character's great aunt.
    • I'm inclined to think that the "Weirdness Magnet", is not a disadvantage at all (from the player POV) as it will tend to put their character right in the center of events (or at least dedecate valuable game time to resolving the inconvenence) .
  • In Scion, every single character has a "Fateful Aura" that basically turns them into this. No matter where they go or what they do, their own Legend draws things to them, forcing them to respond and thus increase their Legend. It is possible to tone down this aura and shed Legend dots, but characters can never be entirely free of it, and since Legend determines how powerful a character's Boons and Epic Attributes can get, shedding Legend may leave them ill-equipped to deal with the weirdness when (not if) it arrives.
  • Promethean: The Created has a similar effect. Prometheans' own Azoth (part of the divine fire of creation which sustains their existence) can be felt by other Prometheans as a call, and will also awaken any Pandorans they go near.
  • The Anchors of the Nobles in Nobilis suffer from this. However, they also have immunity from the Reality Warping magical powers of Nobles themselves.
  • The Gifted in Witchcraft have an innate tendency to be drawn into supernatural events. Since the setting is unabashed Fantasy Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy this technically makes them Coincidence Magnets, but it looks more like this trope. And they're also Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious.
  • Changeling: The Dreaming has a flaw you can take called Chimerical Magnet. Three guesses what this does. Given that your character can literally die of boredom in this game if not enough weird stuff happens to you, it's uncertain how much of a flaw this really is.
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters gives this to one of the five character types. All of the types are sensitive to ghosts who died by particular means, but the "Forgotten" (victims of what might be considered death by Weirdness Magnet) find such ghosts are actually drawn to them.
  • It doesn't matter how peaceful, quiet, and isolated the place is. Once the Group comes in, the weirdness level skyrockets.


Theatre


Video Games

  • Kazuma Kiryu, protagonist of the Yakuza series. Diaper-clad regression-fetishist gangsters are one of the least weird things he gets exposed to during the course of the games.
  • Lampshaded by Adell in Disgaea 2, quoted on the quote page.
  • Noted in Tsukihime to affect Shiki quite drastically. His Mystic Eyes of Death Perception are a bizarre anomaly and tend to attract others. So far, he's run across the last remaining True Ancestor, the most powerful seat of the Burial Squad in the Church, his sister is a super powerful half demon, Nero Chaos incident, Roa, SHIKI, Sion, Walachia (who showed up precisely because Shiki has these kinds of incidents), Len and the Kagetsu Tohya events. Almost all of the above females are also in love with him for some reason. Aozaki Aoko is not, but she showed up simply because his eyes are so weird without even knowing that herself. This is clearly the real reason that Shiki will not live long, not the eyes themselves.
  • Vayne from Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis. He has "attracted" a ghost and an alien invader to be members of his workshop. And then there are the quirks of the rest of his friends (a boy-crazy Catgirl, a Superhero-turned-Evil Overlord, to name a few). In the end, though, they will always remain his friends (yes, even The Rival), regardless of what happens to him in the game.
  • Gaia Online's Johnny K. Gambino. Seriously. No matter what's going on in the world of Gaia, he's got his foot in it somewhere. Vampires? He pissed them off twenty years ago. Zombies? Oh, yeah, they're part of his science corporation's latest failed experiment. Aliens? He is inexplicibly on a first-name basis with their leader. The Animated? Powered by a Negative Space Wedgie created when he came back to life, facilitated by a disillusioned clone... of him, natch.
    • Possibly the only competition he has in this department is his son, Gino, whose accomplishments include (but are in no way limited to) a Fusion Dance with dear old dad, creating a Negative Space Wedgie by exploding, and getting possessed by a demigod in the form of a large clam, who does this by eating his head. Gaia Online is weird.
  • Fallout: New Vegas brings us the Wild Wasteland Perk, which replaces several random encounters with much weirder versions. For example, a group of mercenaries being replaced with crashed aliens, raiders being replaced with rolling-pin-wielding grannies, and a shaman summing up a spiritual journey by shouting "Take drugs! Kill a bear!".
  • Madison from Heavy Rain. Including the DLC, she is attacked by two serial killers and a rapist before she even meets the Origami Killer.


Web Comics

  • Lauri Salmi from Route 148 but he seems to find it amusing.
  • Annashi from WTF Comics. Around her, impossible things occur on a regular basis, from encounters with Gnome Monks to visitors from another dimension.
  • Roger Pepitone from College Roomies From Hell!!!, who at times seems to be weirdness personified.
  • Dave Davenport from Narbonic, due to his latent madness.
  • Monica Villareal from Wapsi Square, though she appears to actually be a Cosmic Plaything for Aztec gods. She's not thrilled about it.
  • Dominic Deegan, from Dominic Deegan Oracle for Hire. Fortunately, he can usually see it coming.
    • Arguably a reversal; he sees that weird stuff will be happening, so he goes there. Weirdness is a Dominic Deegan magnet.
  • Many, many characters from Girly, but especially Otra and Winter; the effect is multiplied exponentially when they're together, to the point of occasionally being so strong it pulls in another' weirdness magnet from the supporting cast, such as Officer Policeguy, and so on until either the magnets are pulled apart by the plot or the weirdness reaches critical mass.
  • Any member of the cast of Sluggy Freelance.
  • Shelley Winters certainly, and maybe just the whole cast of Scary Go Round in general. Shelley seems to get the worst of it though: recently she was unable to report on a summer fete without her and two others regressing to primal states through various forms of intoxication and having to fight a bee the size of a cow.
  • Antimony from Gunnerkrigg Court, partly because of curiosity, partly because she's a medium.

Headmaster: Tell me, do you find strange things seem to happen around you?
Antimony: ... On occasion.

  • Jenn from Casey and Andy. The author has said that when strange things happen, they happen to Jenn. Notably, when someone confronted her about it, she got Trapped in Another World mid-conversation, has a presumably lengthy adventure, arrives back a second or two after she left, and merely asks, "anyway, you were saying?"
  • Most of the weirdness in El Goonish Shive can be directly or indirectly linked to Tedd, and only half of that's stuff he created rather than attracted. Without him, neither Ellen nor the Goo would even have existed, Abraham wouldn't have woken, Damien might not have found Grace (or would at least have taken longer to find her) . . . The only thing he's completely unconnected to is Nanase and Susan's backstory.
    • Until Ashley jumped into it. She ran into transforming Elliot, decided it's cool and she likes him, and may as well get a date. So on their first date, in addition to simple fun stuff like chatting, kissing and him transforming on a lark, she met a raging griffon, local superhero, three immortals, another griffon and the feistiest bunch of late-teen magic users locally available, from whom she heard casually dropped details like some of their company actually killing vampires and creating a remotely possessed fairy doll apparently ex nihilo (after hearing one griffon argue that this matter is "merely" grabbed from another universe, but warping laws of physics like this requires rare power even by the standards of a high-magical world). Which certainly should count as a fair warning. On their second date, she got kidnapped by other-universe version of Elliot and a vampire, had her emotions magically manipulated, saw a body snatching vampire as it really is, got attacked by an alien golem and somehow wound up as a wizard tutored by a talking wand .

Tedd: Oof. Yeah, that… That's a lot to process…

  • Jamie Kingston from Kismetropolis has had the weirdness since day one, but its intensity is increasing.
  • Ash Upton from Misfile has, to date, been one of only two people on the whole damn planet to be "misfiled" by a stoned angel (who then moved in with him and is posing as her boyfriend), been forced to race against a woman possessed by a vengeful ghost, been stalked by Lucifer's niece, and raced against a guy who can hold conversations with cars and is haunted by his girlfriend's psychically manifested Id. Oh, and apparently his car growls at people.
  • Fox in Friendly Hostility is continually getting into bizarre situations, whether they're due to the demands of his job as newspaper reporter or some random person on the street who recognizes him from a long time ago and proceeds to greet/glomp/kidnap him. His boyfriend Collin lampshades this with the remark that he makes a great reporter as weird things keep on happening to him.
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, the title character apparently has a Weirdness Magnet in the roof of his house. Yes, it is a Running Gag—see panel 4 of this strip.
  • Detective Franklin Clarke from TRU-Life Adventures has a reputation among his fellow police for getting stuck with unusual cases. Enough of them turn out to be related to Time Travel that the Time-Line Authority eventually recruit him as an agent.
  • Michelle Jocasta of Skin Deep seems to be this. She starts off the show by turning into a creature that was supposed to be extinct, and then is promptly chased down by a number of creatures that are either very rare, or are also supposed to be extinct. Not to mention that every one of her newly-found friends aren't human, and they even think she's weird.
  • A Magical Roommate has established Children of Prophecy to be natural weirdness magnets. The main character rooms with one unknowingly at the beginning of the strip, and is now shacked up with TWO!
  • Hanna of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name is a paranormal investigator, so this stands to reason, and has attracted a zombie looking for a job, and was the first person to be assaulted by the Lee!Ghost in the second job arc.
    • Lampshaded by Toni in Chapter 3 when she says, "There's something about you that draws out all the paranormal oddities. I am one, and I have never seen so many until you."
  • In Sam and Fuzzy, Sam is a weirdness magnet for everything from fridge possession to ninja mafias. Fuzzy even lampshades it.
  • Bob and George: Proto Man justly blames the Author for weirdness
  • In The Whiteboard, Doc's shop qualifies, according to Jake.
  • David of Ow, My Sanity seems to have become one. Then again, it is rather hard to build an Unwanted Harem of Eldritch Abominations if you aren't one.
  • Dangerously Chloe has two - Teddy and Naomi. Teddy at least got there on his own initiative - he entered a museum by skullduggery to have a close look at a mechanical automaton, and left with contracted succubus "girlfriend", and the rest was mostly caused by his new "roommate" and her friend. Naomi met Prudence by accident. Prudence came to conclusion that she must have been sent down here as a guardian angel, but even the one who really sent her (but not Celestial Bureaucracy) understands that Prudy herself is the main source of Naomi's problems.

Web Original


Western Animation

  • Courage the Cowardly Dog has something strange happening each episode despite the show literally being set in the middle of Nowhere.
    • This kind of makes sense. If nothing weird happens here (somewhere), what's the only place left?
  • Another contender for the king of this trope would be the flash animated series O'Grady, which aired on The N network. This series, featuring quite a few of the same crew and cast members as the UPN/Adult Swim series Home Movies, was centered on the lives of four teenagers living in the town of O'Grady which was constantly plagued by "The Weirdness." The Weirdness was literally weird, unexplained occurrences that affected the entire citizenry in every single episode. The show was compared to the Twilight Zone for this aspect of its premise. Examples of the Weirdness include the "Old Cold," a disease which caused sneezing-induced age shifts (the young turned old, the old turned young, and main character Abby went from about 15, to 30, to 60 something) and a a bizarre force-cord which caused two people to be inseparable for the duration of the Weirdness.
  • Poor Jackie. All he wants to be is a simple archeologist and he gets into a plot with criminal organizations, magic talismans, top-secret government organizations, demons, ghosts, curses, an order of fighting druids and magic reality books. Every day seems to be a "bad day" for Jackie Chan.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were often subject to this, with Michelangelo usually providing the Lampshade Hanging.
  • Ben 10; be it the Big Apple or the Grand Canyon, no matter where Ben goes on his four-season summer vacation road trip, he seems to have a knack for attracting weirdness in the form of various aliens and monsters. If the weirdness isn't immediately obvious, expect Ben to go looking for it. He'll find it within two minutes. This is lampshaded early on by Gwen, almost by name:

Gwen: You know, ever since you've had that watch, you're like a magnet for the weird.

Craig: That's a shock. I decided to follow you guys, and now I'm in the land of the giant lost world.
Stan: Craig, it isn't our fault! You make it sound like we always wanna be in situations like this but we don't have any choice!
Kyle: Yeah. Stuff just happens.
Craig: Stuff just happens.
Kyle: That's right!
Craig: You just wind up being sent by the government to take down the city of Lima only to wind up in the land of the giant lost world.
Cartman: That's right.
Craig: You know what stuff happens to most kids? They fall off their bikes. They get in fights with their parents. They get swindled out of their birthday money.


Real Life

  • There appears to be something about the state of Florida that attracts a whole lot of weird stories (the Elian Gonzalez affair, the 2000 electoral recount, hurricane after hurricane, Jack Thompson, etc.) Eventually, so many out-of-the-ordinary stories kept coming in from that state that Fark.com had to devise its own tag just for that state.
    • The News show Countdown with Keith Olbermann has a regular segment of odd stories, called "Oddball." So many of them occur in Florida that Florida has its own wing in the "Oddball Hall of Fame".
      • Could it be the fault of our state motto? 'Florida; The Rules Are Different Here'. Not exactly 'Live Free or Die' is it?
    • Dave Barry lives in the Miami area, and his columns are frequently full of stories about the state's ingrained oddness. He has jokingly recommended that the US expel it from the union, simply to save the rest of the country some headaches. In fact, he has literally referred to it as the Giant Underground Weirdness Magnet, and in a 2007 column he claimed it lay under the Golden Glades Interchange, making the only logical action the interchange's violent demolition.
      • Loveline use to have a weird news game, where they would read very odd news stories, and people had to guess whether they occured in florida or germany
    • Before around 2000 or so, California was usually thought of as being The State Where Strange Things Happen, and it is still considered to be a weird place by most people. This was less due to strange occurrences as because of the large number of eccentric people who seemed drawn there, pulled by the twin Weirdness Magnets of Hollywood and San Francisco. The saying used to be that when they tipped the country, everything loose rolled into California.
      • There was a variant of that phrase in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where Harry says 'I mean, it's literally like someone took America by the East Coast and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.'
    • New Jersey also has more than its fair share of weird stuff. Pick up one of the Weird NJ books (yes, there are multiple) or the semi-yearly magazine that spawned them, and you'll see what I mean.
  • While there's a high chance of most (or all) instances being faked or psychological, when you hear about people who seem to have close encounters with ghosts, shadow beings and otherworldly horrors almost every other week you almost start wondering whether some people are real life weirdness magnets...
  • Nearly any college town.
    • Virginia Tech in particular has become this in the opinion of many faculty and students in recent times. For being a rural college located deep in the sleepy mountains of southwestern Virginia, a lot of really weird and rather horrific stuff has happened here in a very short period of time, including the infamous Virginia Tech massacre of 32 students by Seung-Hui Cho, the violent beheading of a graduate student by her friend a few months later, and the various murders and disappearances of students that took place shortly thereafter.
  • Digipen Institute of Technology is bascially what you would expect to see if you culled your entire student base from the member lists of various video game forums. You know when you read some comment online you can't help but shake your head in disbelief at? The person who wrote that either goes to Digipen, is planning to apply, or (most likely) has dropped out after discovering it's not a big Nintendo tournament.
  • Wizard lookalike and comedian Bill Bailey describes himself as a "nutter magnet" and "a Mecca for those with no agenda."
  • Stephen King has referred to himself as one. Citing a time a fully dressed gin drinking Ronald McDonald sat next to him on an airplane during his first book tour.
  • Portland, OR seems to be one of these, and its citizens seem to embrace and even promote this. Ever seen a marathon race featuring people crossdressing as Mario and Peach, Pac-Man, billiard balls, a sand worm, and so much more? I can now say that at least I have.
    • There is even a popular slogan/campaign in the Portland area to "Keep Portland Weird." An evening wandering around Downtown will reveal, among other things, their success.
      • Of course, as a state with an easy-going culture, Oregon itself seems to attract its fair share of weirdness, particuarly Portland and Eugene (the Oregon Country Fair, held near Eugene, is basically a family-friendly version of Burning Man and must be seen to be believed).
  • The Vancouver Art Gallery. If there's any kind of organised strangeness (including protests) going on in the city, its participants will, without fail, pick the Art Gallery as the place to do it. Or to meet up, or start or wind up there if it's mobile.
    • It helps that The VAG used to be a courthouse, and so has these impressive steps flanked by huge granite lions to make speeches from. Next to that, a soapbox is pretty weak.
  • Nevada, and California's Mojave Desert for good measure. For starters, of course, Nevada, while not the only state with legal gambling, has allowed it longest and has been the least restrained about it; driving through Vegas on I-15, it just seems so circuslike, almost cartoonish, that it could almost be a mirage (pun not intended, really). And to top it off, prostitution is also legal there (though not in Clark County, which contains Las Vegas). But that's just the tip of the bizarre iceberg. You also have Area51 and all its creepy rumors and a range where they used to test nuclear bombs. On the California side, you have an exit off the freeway called Zzyzx Road (former home of an eccentric radio preacher; the name was coined to be the last word alphabetically in the English language), and until 2000, a phone booth in the middle of absolute nowhere (originally installed for staff in a long-closed mine). A lot of music videos (many meaning to be MindScrewy and existentialist) are shot out here, especially around the many abandoned gas stations and Hell Hotels. Case in point: Soundgarden's "Burden in My Hand".
    • Don't forget Burning Man...
    • We were somewhere outside Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
  • Juliana Hatfield says in her memoirs that more than one tourmate has told her that she has weird fans.
  • St. Louis is also a weirdness magnet, at least in terms of hauntings. There is a haunted mansion, a haunted hospital, some woods outside the city that has a road called "Zombie Road", and there's also a haunted brewery. Yes, an old, haunted beer factory. Not to mention that this city was where the real story of The Exorcist took place.
  • Sports announcer Gus Johnson is one of the most excitable in the business. During the 2010 NFL season, fans noticed that for several weeks in a row, the game he was chosen to call became the most exciting for the day.[3] Bill Simmons started calling it the "Law of Gus Johnson" and a not-insignificant number of fans tune into games he is calling as a result.
  • Urban legend after urban legend claims that the Bermuda Triangle is this.
  • Reading the Real Life examples leads to conclusion, that US as whole are this.
  1. ↑ Although Niles Caulder may see a correlation...
  2. ↑ or in places where you'll eventually be, temporal anomalies naturally involve time travel so verb tense is confusing here
  3. ↑ Johnson was part of CBS's lower tier pairings, which meant that the games he was given tended to be lesser-quality teams, making this even more unexpected.
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