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For some reason, the character is always standing at the corner of Strange Street and Bizarre Boulevard, in the town of Uncanny Valley. 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 asks, "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", often resulting in I Just Want to Be Normal.
If the events surrounding the character are possible, just staggeringly unlikely, then they're a Coincidence Magnet. The title 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, Unlikely Hero, and Recurring Extra. 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.note
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has the Joestar bloodline. Hell, just look at the title. Though every part has its share of weirdness.
- Joseph Joestar from Part 2 is the biggest weirdness magnet so far. Imagine godlike super vampires who eat vampires to live, warrior monks who turned into vampires, mafia, Nazis, the power of the sun, and Stroheim. Then getting a futuristic prosthetic hand like Stroheim. Then dying, having his spirit ascend, and then being brought back thanks to a blood transfusion from the body of his grandfather which had been kept alive by a vampire's head. Joseph Joestar is the only JoJo to have battled vampires, Pillar Men, and Stands (which means he's also the only hero to have used both hamon and a Stand), not to mention encountering ghosts and being around when there's a guy claiming to be an alien. Also, he managed to accidentally find an abandoned invisible baby that he ended up raising in his old age.
- Stroheim, the ultra-hammy, Nazi captain who got blown up in a grenade incident, got rebuilt as a Terminator-esque cyborg and fires a machine gun built into his chest while making hilariously campy poses. He kills vampires with 'NAAAAAZI SCIIIIIIIIIIENCE!!! Also he's actually a good guy. Kinda. Don't even ask how that happened.
- In Part 3 onwards, it's explicitly stated that Stand users tend to attract one another, resulting in this trope. This ends up sparking the main plot of part 4, as serial killer Yoshikage Kira acquiring a Stand gets him discovered by another Stand user by complete coincidence (involving stolen sandwiches), ending his years of staying virtually undetected and throwing him against a bunch of supernatural people who don't appreciate him or his "line of work" too much.
- 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". Luna lampshaded this early in the second season. However, her role in later seasons was downplayed until she was finally Put on a Bus.
- Kamijou Touma from A Certain Magical Index. This does not only include his streak of misfortune that is a side-effect of his powers, but also he attracts weirdness in general because of other side-effects. When there's a girl holding the greatest secrets of magic hunted by her Coven, she will land on his balcony. When he takes vacation in Italy, the people keeping him will most definitely get attacked. When someone casts a spell that switches the body of every single human being, he is one of the select few unaffected. Considering how long the series and original novels went (not even counting the New Testament sequel where at one point, a giant flying fortress tracks him down because of the disturbance he causes in the earth's Ley Lines), this happens to him a lot. And then there are the moments when people are actively trying to recruit or use him in weird situations. It doesn't help that he lives in a city full of psychics and his roommate as well as his neighbor are mages.
- The protagonist of Detective Conan is 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 wonders 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 nor the reason for why he does, 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 exorcise 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, plus the cursed, easy-to-fall-into Jusenkyo ponds, prove 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, intending to use it on Akane, he winds up snagging Ranma instead. And these are just a few examples.
- More or less the entire premise of Haruhi Suzumiya. 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.
- 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.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: In Season 4, Judai almost drops out of the Academy under the assumption that, as The Chosen One, he is 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.
- At this point, we can probably classify the Duel Monsters card game itself as a Weirdness Magnet, considering how many mystical forces have used it as a conduit (like Egyptian gods, Incan gods, and some kind of outer space cosmic forces, for starters).
- 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.
- The entirety of Karakura Town, the hometown of the human protagonists, can be considered as one giant Weirdness Magnet, going back at least 15-20 years before it became relevant to the Big Bad's plans.
- 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.
- Mai (and possibly the rest of Fuuka Academy) in Mai-HiME 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.
- Anytime Lina is around she'll have to gather up her True Companions and defeat some sort of Big Bad — not just in Slayers Next.
- 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's Book of Friends 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) has no less than six Whispereds personally connected to him — including his Love Interest Kaname, commanding officer Tessa, and arch-enemy Leonard. He and Tessa both lampshade this at different points in the story, with Tessa suggesting that maybe it's a sign Sousuke is special in his own way.
- 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. And as if to throw fuel to the fire, the Holy Student Council comprises the son of a Christian minister, the daughter of a Shinto priest, and the son of a Bhuddist monk.
- 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 Hokujo (the Christian member of said Council).
- 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 Transgender and starts dressing up in Elegant Gothic Lolita outfits.
- Naota from FLCL: 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 - which also moves in with his family. All that happens in the first episode, and it only gets weirder from there.
- All the events of the first episode are underscored by Naota's constant comments about his town, how "everything is normal", "nothing amazing happens here", etc. Then at the end of the first episode, Kanti the robot and Haruko are making bread while Naota says, "and everything's back to normal .. nothing amazing."
- Tsunayoshi Sawada from Katekyō Hitman Reborn!. For the first sixty or so chapters he meets: a baby in the mafia who shoots him in the head and causes him to come 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 (by climbing into a bazooka pulled out of his large afro and firing), a person who is a klutz without anyone from his family near him, oh and he wakes up to find a corpse in his room, etc.
- Played for Drama with Ciel from Black Butler, since it's implied all the weirdness he's been through is slowly driving him off the deep end.
- 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. Plus there's Robin who can make body parts appear all over the place. And then there's Luffy: a living rubber band. We later get an explanation when we see other pirate crews competing with the Straw Hat Pirates: It turns out that all of the other crews carefully choose their paths to avoid as much trouble as possible, whereas the Straw Hats' captain, Monkey D. Luffy, deliberately seeks out the most dangerous options because he finds them the most amusing. That is, Luffy makes himself a Weirdness Magnet on purpose and is fully aware of it.
- 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.
- The title character of Tenchi Muyo! is a serious weirdness magnet.
- Sena in the spinoff Tenchi Muyo! GXP, who to begin bears an uncanny resemblance to the former, is even more so.
- The title character of Puella Magi Madoka Magica has some of this going on. After she saves Kyubey from Homura, she starts coming across witch labyrinths on a regular basis, her friend Hitomi gets hypnotized by a witch and nearly commits suicide, and so on, and she isn't even a Magical Girl yet. Her insanely high potential magical power probably has something to do with it.
- While nobody in Baccano! can escape the chaos entirely, crazy tends to gravitate towards Firo the most. Childhood Friend? Ax-Crazy solipsist Insufferable Genius. Join a gang? It just happens to have a 250-year-old alchemist and an Eldritch Abomination in the ranks. Promoted? Two loony thieves crash the party, spike the booze with the Grand Panacea. First love? The Mad Scientist's Beautiful Homunculus Daughter. Picking up said loony thief friends at the train station? They brought you a 230-year-old child to be your new flatmate. Friend went missing? Well, that guy over there with the crazy blood eyes and shark teeth seems to want to help find them...
- The 104 Trainee Squad in Attack on Titan have ridiculous luck, lampshaded by Jean, considering all the things that has happened to them. Among their numbers are: the last half-Asian (Mikasa), five Titan shifters (Eren, Annie, Reiner, Bertlolt, Ymir) (and from that number, there is Eren as the Coordinate and Ymir as a Wild Card with knowledge of the Titan's secrets) and a Heroic Bastard from a noble house (Krista/Historia).
- Mahiro Yasaka from Haiyore! Nyarko-san is an Ordinary High-School Student whose only special traits are a fondness for the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the ability to use forks as deadly weapons. Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos appearing in his life and declaring her undying love for him is just the start of his troubles, which includes dealings with time-traveling Moral Guardians, alien Animal Wrongs Groups, and being kidnapped so he can be auctioned off as the star of a Boys Love TV show. Lampshaded in one episode where Nyarko remarks that something about Mahiro makes him "strangely attractive" to aliens.
- Chiaki, the main character of Today's Cerberus, attracts yokai to him because, as a child, a piece of his soul was accidentally stolen by the Cerberus head Roze. His magnet status is further enhanced by the fact he is a teenager, "neither child nor adult."
- Sgt. Frog: Fuyuki and Natsumi Hinata get entangled in all sorts of extraterrestrial weirdness as a result of the Keroro Platoon moving into their house. Fuyuki, a prodigy paranormalist, loves it while Natsumi, an average girl who would rather have her average life back, hates it.
- Dragon Ball has Bulma. The first story arc alone gets her a group composed by a boy with a monkey tail who can turn into a giant berserker ape and is actually an alien (Goku), a perverted antropomorphic pig with Voluntary Shapeshifting abilities (Oolong), a desert bandit who freaks out at the sight of women (Yamcha) and a flying animal with better Voluntary Shapeshifting than the pig (Puar). Lampshaded in Dragon Ball Super when Jaco (a weird-looking alien Super Cop) shows up and people wonder why all her friends are weirdos... And they don't even know that she first met Jaco before the others.
- Also, Bulma's older sister Tights. In the few days she spent in East City she met and befriended Jaco (indeed, it was her who made Bulma and Jaco meet) and Omori, a scientist who could stop time as a side effect of his research on Time Travel, and later actually embraced it, getting Jaco to make her travel through space to meet weird people and things and write novels about them.
- 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 than 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 may you 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.
"It's like my life is being done by an awful, awful cartoon guy..."
- Fellow JTHM-spinoff star Squee! has it even worse. Aside from his sentient teddy bear and Johnny, Squee's Hilariously Abusive Childhood has also contained aliens and their experimentation, giant evil dustmites, The Antichrist and his father, zombie classmates, an evil cyborg grandpa, and far too much more. Oh, and this kid's probably only 7 years old.
- 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 this 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 the Aardvark 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 this by one of the series antagonists. Either the writer or the series creator are to blame. 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 one (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 (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, the 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 2000 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 Knights of the Old Republic. 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 is well-known for this quality. There's a reason why Superdickery 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 even then, Jimmy 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 DCU on any given day or night.
- Lois Lane was also one of these Pre-Crisis, but unlike Jimmy Olsen, who's continued being this since the Silver Age (including a full-blown, targeted, massive example in Countdown to Final Crisis), she's since become notable for actively chasing after weirdness with a frenzy.
- 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 psychopaths 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 daimyos 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.
- Cal McDonald from Criminal Macabre has been attracted to weird things all his life since he encountered a decapitated corpse as a kid. As a grown up, he is a private detective that deals with vampires, werewolves, et cetera. Being a Weirdness Magnet has taken its toll though, since Cal also a drug addict.
- The Fantastic Four are either looking for something beyond normal, or attract some out of this world creature or being. Or they attract it by accident, or stumble upon it by coincidence.
- Let's be honest — if you're a superhero at all in any universe, you are this. If you go on holiday, you'll be abducted by aliens or transported to another dimension and if you stay home you'll find yourself under attack by gnomes. Also note that in the Marvel Universe 90% of superheroes live in or near to New York City; nobody in the Marvel Universe wants to go to New York City because this number of weirdness magnets causes some truly strange things to happen there.
- Achille Talon is both this and a Doom Magnet, as the surreal nature of the comics leads to most doom causes being utterly weird. By the time of the last long episodes of the series (which eventually switched back to 2-pages gags instead of 44 pages adventures), all the other characters had became Genre Savvy enough to scream whenever something weird happens that they should have known it and that they were wrong to have taken Talon with them. This is justified by the anthropomorphic personification of Destiny for some reason finding Talon amusing, and having decided to use him as his personal Cosmic Plaything.
- Samantha in Safe Havens, while not so strange herself, keeps meeting and befriending bizarre characters. During the cast's middle and high school days, they were part of the "other" clique, which was basically designed to be this, to give people who didn't fit into or was too weird for any of the 'cooler' cliques to join. Predictably, Samantha was one of the more normal members.
- The entire plot of Liō.
- Bloom County (and Outland and Opus and, well, anything by Berke Breathed).
- Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes is this... at least in Calvin's imagination... we think.
- In Bird Taylor has the uncanny ability to run into the most interesting patients at Alchemilla. Mimi, Elle, Heather, Charnel... All the while her power allows her to sense their true natures is it any surprise that she comes to show compassion for them?
- Mainiac 97 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 Child of the Storm, as in the below example, is even more of this than in canon. He even lampshades it to Hank McCoy:
The more powerful I get, actually or just potentially - and mostly just potentially - the more people try and kill me in new and interesting ways. Don't get me wrong, I love having a family and the Avengers. I love being a wizard too. But I could do without the near-death experience every few months.
- 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.
- In several other fics Harry stated that if it was unlikely or impossible, chances were that whatever it was would happen to him. Sometimes on multiple occasions.
- The protagonists in Swing123 and garfieldodie's Calvinverse attract all kinds of strange stuff. Calvin really enjoys it.
- The Emiya Clan attracts insanity like has its own gravitational pull. Each kid seems to find some way to get themselves into interplanetary politics, monster academies, stuck in medieval Camelot, or dumped on the front lines of a war in a parallel world to name a few. Whether this is Laser-Guided Karma due to Shirou having so many wives, the result of the family's Cosmic Plaything status, or just Zelretch messing with everybody is up for contention. Most likely, it's a mixture of all three.
- In the Pony POV Series, Shining Armor becomes this in his own Story Arc. So far, he's attracted the attention of an insane General Ripper (and Super Soldier who turns out to be an existence eating Equineoid Abomination escaped from Pandora's Box and now seeks world domination) who takes a tiny offense and tries to murder him for it with tripods powered by unicorn horns, been chased by a wolf-like entity trying to Retgone him, and has to meet with a spy to get intell in a supposed haunted Abandoned Hospital built on a convergence of leylines where magically sensitive individuals can supposedly see into other worlds. And that's not taking into account the craziness that is going to happen at the wedding...
Shining Armor: (after finding out about the aforementioned meeting with a spy) ...When did I become a Weirdness Magnet?
Shining Armor: I think I'm either a victim of a prank, or I got abducted by aliens in my sleep...And I'm not doubting either at this point.
- It only gets better, as it eventually turns out that he's Immune to Fate, living in San Dimas Time compared to the rest of the series, and is the only one who can circumnavigate said General Ripper's powers and destroy him because of this; by the climax, he's shrugging off anything weird that comes his way, and even his squadmates don't let it get to them anymore. For bonus points, at one point he meets the Doctor, who's also one of these, and they compare notes.
- Even after Makarov's been erased Shining is still one of these. The biggest example being he's literally the nail between the main timeline and Dark World. And that the Interviewers are technically his sisters (though he never finds that out.)
- And now the Wedding happened. Not only did it turn out Chrysalis is actually a demi-goddess, Cadence's Enemy Without, and a Peggy Sue, the Wedding Arc ends with Cadence overthrowing Chrysalis, becoming Queen of the Changelings, and thus making Shining Armor the King. Also, they adopted Chrysalis' after she was rebooted into an innocent Zebra Alicorn filly. Yep, his life is STILL weird as ever.
- He decides to make sure his honeymoon doesn't happen at any place with a history of weird events or such. And still ends up unknowingly kidnapped by the Dark World Nightmares to be used in a sacrifice to resurrect Amicitia, sleeps through a gigantic battle, has part of his essence used by the Goddess of Wishes to harmlessly reincarnate as Half-Light Midnight, and is returned to his room where he wakes up with a bandage he doesn't remember getting on his stomach.
- In Fractured, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel Origins, Samantha Shepard repeatedly experiences this even more than in canon. Being in a crossover universe helps, as giant ships appearing out of nowhere to apparently solve the Reaper problem definitely counts as weird. Then, the Flood shows up which may count as In-Universe Serial Escalation in the weirdness department. Unfortunately, some things go exactly as you'd expect, while others surprise.
- In Star Wars: Paranormalities, Zolph Vaelor has been dealing with weird stuff - especially by Star Wars standards - ever since he joined the Jedi Academy. In the five years between Episode I's prologue and first chapter, he's had to deal with masochistic, dogmatic aliens with organic technology at a few points in time. In the story itself, he's had encounters with an undying soldier, a pseudo-Sith Lord prone to Body Horror, an eccentric Bounty Hunter in touch with the fourth wall, and an army of Eldritch Abominations that can possess people and defy the nature of the Force, and that's not even the end of it.
- In Mass Foundations: Redemption in the Stars, Ethan Sunderland, the Courier, possesses the Wild Wasteland trait, which increases the likelihood of weird scenes, such as an encounter with Ersatzes of Han Solo and Greedo.
- Stars Above: Kagami and Tsukasa, as Barrier Maidens for The Multiverse, become irresistable targets for the Demons.
- One Harry Potter ficlet pokes fun at this. When two separate but related accidents turn Hermione into a Time Lord and Harry into a Tardis, Hermione steals Harry who simply remarks, "It's because it's Wednesday isn't it? On Tuesday I turned into a magic blue box so on Wednesday my best friend carjacks me."
- The Power Rangers Fan Fic Of Love and Bunnies lampshades this. Repeatedly. If you are, were, or will be a Ranger, weird stuff will happen to you. Angel Grove is so used to the insanity that the Rangers bring that the citizens are almost blase about it, and Reefside is quickly following suit.
- In the Star Trek: The Original Series fanfic Insontis II, McCoy reflects on the sheer amount of bizarre dilemmas that occur on the Enterprise after Kirk is almost electrocuted by a wire malfunction.
- Sailor Moon: Legends of Lightstorm: Tokyo is inside a bizarre region of space-time called the Tokyo Anomaly. No one knows where it came from or how it works, but it generates unique conditions that enable the Negaverse to harvest energy from the people of Tokyo, among other things. This is why the Negaverse cannot harvest energy from elsewhere in the universe, or even elsewhere on Earth.
- Ashes of the Past: Ash Ketchum and co., and time travel has only made it worse, since he now actively seeks it out. Ash's former/future traveling companions, upon seeing his antics on the news, barely note it besides it being a little more "spectacular" than last time, while everyone else who knows about the time travel thing but lack the memory restoration are downright flabbergasted at what he gets up to. Houndour at one point wonders why an Absol (a Pokémon known to appear right before disaster) doesn't follow him around, leading one reviewer to speculate that there's an agreement among all Absol not to follow him, otherwise all of them would (turns out they just escape whenever they see him).
- In Battle Fantasia Project, Naru Osaka's status as one gets lampshaded by Minako, whose birthday gift to her is a Death Busters weapon for self defense. She then demonstrates it when the Sailor Animamates show up to have a snack and she mistakes it for an attack (they were planning one, but after finding out how many times she had been attacked they realized she couldn't possibly be a target or she would have awakened as a Sailor Senshi already).
- Ditzy Doo flat out states she's a weirdness magnet in Sailor Orbital and backs up her claim with enough Noodle Incidents to start a small buffet. It helps that her Kid from the Future is there to agree with her.
- According to Cologne and Parvati in Ranma Saotome, Chi Master, Jusenkyo has a secondary curse that attracts chaos to the cursed, though usually just in the form of getting hit by water at inopportune times. Ranma somehow got a supercharged version of the secondary curse.
- In the Contractually Obligated Chaos series, Lady Delphine describes her foster son Hugo as being more or less this, noting that spirits are drawn to him and he's drawn to them right back. She theorizes that Lydia is something similar.
- The Dragon King's Temple shows a Jack O'Neil so jaded by his team's various mishaps that when Sam and Janet don't come back in time, he's ready to consider the possibility of them being abducted by Santa Claus.
- The Gaang proves itself Not So Different when Sokka talks about how they thought Toph and Zuko had been carried away by flying mutant were-lemurs and Suki sheepishly admits it would be more than possible for their group, it would be probable.
- In Dreaming of Sunshine, Team 7's C-rank level missions routinely end up A-rank or worse, S-Rank. This why the Mission Desk Ninja fear assigning them missions, and Special Jonin do not want to go on patrol with one.
- 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?"
- In Ghostbusters, Ray and Egon go over the schematics of the apartment building where Dana lives and figure out that it was specifically built as a portal to another dimension.
- Older Than Radio: The namesake character in Candide (1759).
- Kyle Griffin the protagonist of The Impairment, is described in the book's own synopsis as "just another ordinary freshman college student with an ordinary life and problems". That is of course when one particular night of heavy drinking, he returns to his dorm and finds his roommate murdered by an extra-terrestrial. From there, all hell breaks loose.
- Once Ida from Shaman of the Undead leaves her family house's magic wards, her Inner Eye starts working like a ghost lighthouse, bringing to her ghosts, demons, curious spirits and, by extensions, annoyed magical police officers.
- Douglas Adams
- Arthur Dent, in all incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is perhaps the quintessential example.
- 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. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, one gets the impression he wouldn't have it any other way.
- 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 — which 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 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.
- Soul Music states that wizards, being naturally attuned to occult frequencies, are natural weirdness magnets, comparing them to mine canaries or lightning rods. 'If anything strange was happening, it would happen to the wizards first.' This is strengthened by that the senior faculty of Unseen University, minus Mustrum Ridcully, are the first ones sucked into the Music With Rocks In craze. In Reaper Man, before Ankh-Morpork is hit with a rash of poltergeist activity when Death Takes a Holiday, ancient wizard Windle Poons dies and comes back as a zombie. And in Hogfather, the excess belief caused by the Hogfather's disappearance allows the wizards to inadvertently call new personifications into existence, such as the Veruca Gnome and Oh God of Hangovers.
- Susan laments being prone to this in Hogfather, ruing the fact that she's riding the horse of death in the company of a talking raven and stranger beings, on a desperate and ill-conceived mission to avert supernatural misfortune... again!
- By Snuff, one of the major reasons why Colon and Nobby remains on the otherwise fairly respectable now Watch is that Contrived Coincidences that lead to the solution of cases keep happening to them. This has involved, for example, Colon finding a goblin soul pot in his cigar and Nobby having something try to lay eggs in his nose.
- 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. The events in the subsequent Smoke and Shadows novels suggest 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 Callahan's 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:
"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 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. Preceded by the TV series Eerie Indiana, as noted below; 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.
- A great deal of Tom Holt's characters. For example, Paul Carpenter from the J.W. Wells & Co. series. 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 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 The 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 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.
- In the Earthsea series, 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.
- The Anti-Zombie Squad, a group created to put an end to the After the End scenario of a Zombie Apocalypse in How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse features no less than a pizza-loving, BFS-in-the-shape-of-a-giant-pencil-wielding Idiot Hero, a Comedic Sociopath Hippie-wannabe with an Ambiguous Disorder, a Genki Girl who dresses as a reaper, an Emo Teen afraid of black things who can't look at himself in a mirror for obvious reasons, a pesudo-geek popular guy wannabe who tells deafening jokes and sings like a walrus and last but not least a Big Guy who may seem scary as hell but writes My Little Pony fanfiction. And each member thinks of themselves as the most normal one.
- 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 Mary Poppins 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 from his supposedly extinct dragon just to emphasise the point. When the fantastical beast is calling you out on being this, you have no grounds to deny it.
- Jakub Wędrowycz 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 viewthe 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 be because she's pretty 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.
- At the end of Another Fine Myth, Aahz tells Skeeve point-blank that neither of them will have to go looking for adventure;
Aahz: In our profession, it usually comes looking for us.Narration!Skeeve: I had an ugly feeling he was right.
- The protagonist of the Garrett, P.I. series is so used to getting into weird things by this point, he takes things like dogs transformed into pretty teenage girls completely in stride. As early as Red Iron Nights, thugs at Morley's Bad-Guy Bar leave the premises when Garrett shows up, not because they're scared of the guy, but because they know that weird trouble is sure to follow him.
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit was minding his own business, as all hobbits do, when a prototypical wizard and his posse of fallen dwarf-lords showed up out of nowhere and dragged him off on an epic dragon-hunting adventure. Among the many bizarre things he encounters on his unwanted quest is a deranged cave-dweller, who happens to have an ancient demon prince's long-lost Soul Jar. Bilbo waltzes off with it, not having a clue how important it is. It takes three more books to deal with the aftermath of his magnetism.
- Farmer Giles of Ham. A fat red-headed farmer who doesn't like trespassers. Including giants and dragons. Especially dragons.
- The entire town of Golgotha in Six Gun Tarot is one. Half the people in town have some supernatural trait or possession of some sort, and the town attracts such people. Also mentioned in passing are the grave that must be surrounded with a circle of salt lest a presence in the night drain the blood from livestock and people, a bat-winged creature that snatched people off the street, a plague of rat-people
- A Fantasy Attraction has Alice, a young girl who has the literal ability to attract magical beings. She, in just the one day the story covers, pulls in : A genie, hobgoblin, horde of goblins, gnome, fairy, manticore, griffins, pixie, troll, dragon, sphinx, kobold, tribe of ogres, wyverns, salamander, harpy, hippogriff, gargoyle, and phoenix.
- Our Hero in Mr Blank never thought he was, but in the sequel when he tried to retire he found out that wouldn't stop everyone within a ten mile radius approaching him with various noir plots, dealing with Eldritch Abominations, or various magical artifacts.
- The town Gusliar from Gusliar Wonders by Kir Bulychev, with new aliens, fairy tale creatures or social experiments in every story. Recurring character Udalov is a prominent magnet even by the town's standards, usually as Butt-Monkey, Cosmic Plaything or Action Survivor.
- Nancy Drew is always followed by weirdness no matter where she goes.
- In the Strange Matter series, Fairfield is a hotspot of ghosts, aliens, monsters, and other weirdness.
- The Affix is a jewel that abuses probability. Its chosen keeper is a target for whatever bizarre crap it throws their way. This is worse when it's "awake" and goes beyond mere low-level coincidences into car-crashing, casino-breaking mayhem.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: Pearl Forrester during the Hamlet experiment namedrops the Trope when after poisoning Fortinbras; she looks at the camera and mutters exasperately, "Is it me? Am I a magnet for these idiots?!"note
- Sherlock: Sherlock, John and Mary are attracted to weirdness. "His Last Vow" points out that John's attracted to dangerous people and situations. John didn't expect this-and the main leads had no clue that Mary was an assassin from the CIA. Oh, and Sherlock, of course, is an eccentric but brilliant detective and finds John and Mary interesting, since Sherlock was interested in the fact that his friend was a soldier and that Mary is-well-you know-an assassin. She's still as loyal to John as Sherlock is, though. Still, once you consider what happened in all of the episodes, all three of them are attracted to weirdness, and can't avoid it. Heck, they can't seem to even avoid dangerous people or situations.
- Hannibal: The protagonist, Will Graham, has an empathy disorder that helps him understand serial killers, making him one of the best and most talented profilers the FBI has. It also drives him crazy and attracts an absurd number of serial killers to him. Hannibal Lecter is obsessed with him, Matthew Brown stalks, protects and kills for him, Abel Gideon speaks to him about his identity crisis, Georgia Madchen and him emotionally bond, etc. Will's life is so dark and macabre that you'd think he was the missing member of The Addams Family.
- Smallville takes this to ridiculous levels with the few main characters, especially Lana. During the earlier seasons, Kryptonite infection helped created a lot of freaks of the week. These meteor freaks would then almost invariably gain a fixation on Lana or Chloe and end up trying to kill them, only for Clark to save the day. Ian in "Dichotic" tops this by trying to kill them both at the same time.
- "Accelerate": Lana's dead childhood friend is cloned and now is an Enfant Terrible with Super Speed.
- Season four: Lana happens to have an ancient French witch as an ancestor and is possessed by her.
- "Thirst": Lana is turned into a vampire.
- Season six: Chloe is also shown to be meteor-infected.
- Lampshaded once by the sheriff when the police find the Kent house surrounded by a forcefield.
Officer: What the hell is this, Sheriff?
Sheriff: [sighs] Another day in Smallville.
- 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.
- Partially explained in the sixth season when Jacob reveals he brought people to the island whose old lives were bad/tragic enough that they might not want to leave, given what they'd be going back to.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus once did a whole episode about such a man ("Michael Ellis").
- Mr. Pither ("The Cycling Tour") also qualifies.
- Dharma & Greg: Dharma was definitely one; 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 one for the series; a disproportionally large number of Evil Alien Schemes happen to involve the blue marble and a disproportionately large number of alien craft happen to crash-land here, and, for that matter, London in the series' "present" in particular.
- 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.
- In the original series, the Brigadier explained that the invention of space travel, along with radio and television, had caused the planet to radiate a vast number of signals, and that the near-constant alien invasions stemmed from aliens responding to all the signals.
- 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 (or maybe just hand-waved) 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.
- 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.
- Played with in Teen Wolf. Beacon Hills definitely draws some interesting people to it. Stiles often laments his tendency to be a human form of this as well.
- 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 favor, rather than being, say, a computer error.
- Acting on this assumption, if recalled 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. This is a show with episode titles like "When Gods Get Angry", "When Yoghurt Attacks", and "When Fairies Get Mad".
- A Greek god thingie with a Scots accent. Yes, it's that kind of program. One in which the lead automatically goes straight to Deadpan Snarker without even two seconds of "hey, that was odd" (in the pilot episode, food is hurled out of the fridge at him; he makes a smart remark to his brother). One in which his first actual success in going out with the Alpha Bitch leads to one of his friends nearly being hurled around to the other side of the earth. What were they ON?
- 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 an example for murder, he's cosmically drawn to where murders occur so he can solve them.
- Natalie's one to talk here. Before her daughter Julie even gets her driver's license, she was involved one way or another in at least six homicide investigations and one museum heist. In at least two novels, Julie provides a crucial clue for Monk to solve a homicide.
- 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. Shows 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. Lampshaded a few times: One episode has Nick's partner Hank remark that their cases are becoming weirder and weirder and the next has a coroner remark that Nick and Hank get all of the most interesting cases. Justified in that Nick's boss knows that Nick is a Grimm and is keeping an eye on him, although it's not always obvious at first that Wesen are involved. Also, more and more Wesen are finding out about there being a new Grimm in town and are curious about him.
- 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 shows 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.
- Star Trek:
Trelane: It's a massive sort of kismet, I suppose.
- The various crews of the 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:
Janeway: Mr. Kim, we're Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job.
- 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...
- It seems that all starships Enterprise share this. In Star Trek: Generations, the Enterprise-B had been commissioned for roughly four minutes before running afoul of her very first Negative Space Wedgie.
- Lt. Barclay. Period.
- And he is very much aware of it. When Picard jokingly suggests that reality as they know it may just be a fiction being played out on some kind of machine, Barclay waits until he is alone, and checks to make sure it isn't.
- 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 proximitynote . Only the first Negative Space Wedgie is unusual; after that, it'd be odd to not encounter more.
- It makes a certain amount of sense for each crew. Kirk's Enterprise was exploring the fringes of explored space and engaged in a Cold War with the Klingons and the Romulans. Picard's Enterprise and crew were designed to undertake every possible role, from diplomacy to combat to exploration to scientific studies, with their orders reflecting this; also, being the flagship, they had no set jobs so were often the most available to go investigate when something weird came up. Deep Space 9 was not only situated in a hotbed of Cardassian, Bajoran and Federation politics, it was also guarding the only known stable wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant, served as the front line in several wars and was right next to the meddlesome Bajoran Prophets. Voyager was alone in the Delta Quadrant, with little to no knowledge of what lay ahead.
- Obliquely lampshaded by a one-shot character, Dr. Elizabeth Lense, in DS9: "Explorers". Based on her description of the USS Lexington's interstellar charting mission, the job is apparently quite boring most of the time if you aren't a member of a main cast.
- After the USS Voyager (and Harry Kim in particular) having survived a particularly bizarre situation, Captain Janeway made the following statement:
- Buffyverse:
- Buffy: Xander Harris attracts the attention of demonic females. In one episode, Willow accidentally curses him to attract vicious demons all the time. He probably comes closest to fulfilling this trope when he is recruited by Zombie Bank Robbers as a wheelman. 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 saves Xander from being a sacrifice for the Hellmouth just in time.
- The Hellmouth Sunnydale is built on is the main driver for the show's plot. Everything in the show happens either because of the Hellmouth itself or because of 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. This means that all Slayers have this trope in the job description.
- Cordelia became the magnet in Angel, getting impregnated twice. The third time was tragic. She possibly caught the condition of being a weirdness magnet from living in Sunnydale.
- 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. Toby from Power Rangers Mystic Force was kidnapped by demons at least twice. They promptly put him back when they realized that A) he didn't know anything important and B) he was incredibly annoying. However, the embodiment of this trope in many Power Rangers series are none other than Bulk and Skull. No matter the Evil Plan, no matter where in Angel Grove the attack is taking place, odds are Bulk and Skull will happen to be nearby when things go down. Their interactions with monsters occurred so often that Lord Zedd knew them by name. This trope was eventually lampshaded in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Season 3:
Lt. Stone: I find it very odd that you two are the only ones in Angel Grove outside of the Power Rangers to face off with a different monster every week!
Skull: Lt. Stone, it's true. Every time we turn around, well (sputters), there they are.
- The eponymous private school of Strange Happenings at Blake Holsey High is also known as "Black Hole High" because there's a black hole in the basement which is the source of all the weirdness.
- Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres. Everyone in Hooterville (or Hootersville, if you use Mrs. Douglas's 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 affect 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, whereas all other Leviathans were unarmed and could only perform defensive maneuvers. Leviathans are a race of Weirdness Magnet broken Woobies.
- John Crichton. Full stop.
- 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.
- Carl Kolchak from Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He can't help run into various monsters.
- The Collins Family and their acquaintances on Dark Shadows.
- Fi (and, later, Annie) always seems to stumble onto something strange no matter where the family music tour takes her in the aptly-named show So Weird.
- Blair Sandburg in The Sentinel is called a "trouble magnet". This is flanderized in fanfiction to the point where one writer hypothesizes that it is the nature of Guides to send out a subconscious telepathic beacon to attract criminals, creeps, crazies, and other nasties for his Sentinel to deal with.
- In Warehouse 13, the warehouse that the primary protagonists work in (and the artifacts therein) is always causing some sort of trouble in weird and unexpected ways that keep the plot moving. For example, the Warehouse was designed to be a pocket dimension, and when it senses it needs more storage capacity, it tries to expand itself; in one of the episodes this causes a great deal of mayhem because it becomes stuck, preventing it from expanding and causing the whole place to shake and discharge electricity as the protagonists try to figure out what's going on. At times the Warehouse seems to be almost sentient, with a personality and agenda of its own, having absorbed some of the strange powers imbued in the supernatural items stored inside of it.
- The four main characters of The Young Ones have been visited by demons, bank robbers, murderers, Well-Intentioned Extremist Christians, the Easter Bunny in July, an African vampire/bus driver, and medieval peasants. They rarely care about or pay any attention to these occurrences.
- Castle: Castle and Beckett tend to gravitate toward more unusual cases. Lampshaded at the end of "Room 147" where Beckett comments, "It's okay, Castle, you know I like the weird ones."
- The Defenders: Throughout the four Netflix shows, Claire Temple finds herself running into each and every one of the four Defenders. By the time she runs into Danny Rand, she's incredibly nonplussed to learn he has superpowers.
Danny Rand: I am the Iron Fist.Claire Temple: What the hell does that mean?
- Daredevil: Nelson and Murdock have a habit of getting caught up in the activities of the criminals in Hell's Kitchen. Karen Page in particular has a case of this. Over the course of the last four episodes of season 2, she's shot at twice, witnesses three gory murders, and is taken hostage by the Hand. When Brett Mahoney first sees her after Matt rescues her from the Hand, he asks her, "Is there any shitstorm you're not a part of?"
- The protagonist/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...
- Fortean Times is a repository of stories and accounts of alleged Weirdness Magnets (both places and people) around the world.
- GURPS provides the page quote with its disadvantage that turns you into this. Named Weirdness Magnet, of course.
- 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.
- In Scion, every single character has a "Fateful Aura" that 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.
- Nobles themselves tend to attract oddness, especially in the form of Actuals and Excrucians, but it's less emphasised, especially since the average Noble responds to a day without weirdness by going out and either finding some, or making some.
- 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 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.
- In 13, Evan is this. He ends up involved in a Betty and Veronica Love Triangle between the Brainless Beauty Kendra, the Jerk Jock Brett, and the Alpha Bitch Lucy, is forced to arrange a date between Archie and Kendra, or else Archie will Ruin his Bar Mitzvah.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Player Character from RuneScape, oh so much. Checking on a friend's friend who's been acting strangely? You end up in a plot involving the Goddess of Destruction trying to take out the small kingdom of Al-Kharid. Try to help a boy through his rites of manhood? That thing you helped him find was actually a member of an ancient, nigh-extinct race of Voluntary Shapeshifters, and finding him is the first step down a long rabbit hole. Helping a retired sculptor create one last statue? End up releasing two Arch-Enemy members of the same race of Voluntary Shapeshifters. Investigate a thief in the castle basement? That questline ends with you fighting the avatar of the god of war. Help a cook bake a cake for the Duke's birthday? A chain of events causes you to release the Culinaromancer, an evil sorcerer who uses food magic.
- The ClueFinders. 4 supposedly ordinary kids who can't even go out in their backyards without finding an underground civilization of plant-people who want to take over because humans polluted their water supply.
- Much like her spiritual predecessor, Lara Croft in Tomb Raider is an Adventurer Archaeologist who somehow manages to land right in the middle of conspiracies by obscure secret societies, megalomaniacal arms dealers, ancient Atlantean dictators, mafia bosses obsessed with ancient Chinese magic, mad scientists, and demons and fallen angels.
- The Sith Inquisitor from Star Wars: The Old Republic is heavily immersed in the more mystical elements of the Force and has a bizarre affinity for running into Force-Ghosts on a regular basis. Lampshaded by the ghost of their ancestor, who explains that this is actually a rare gift, allowing them to draw out restless spirits and draw forth their emotions. He even describes their mere presence as being akin to an overwhelming pull.
- On Voss, at one point the Inquisitor explains to another Imperial their plan to enter a region steeped in the Dark Side that causes most who venture inside to go mad, simply to find the Gormak they'd met whilst Dreamwalking, in the hopes it will help them find a way to cure their Heroic R.R.O.D. from having too many Force Ghosts currently bound within them. Rather tellingly the Imperial's response is to be more worried by the utterly blasé manner in which the Inquisitor treats the entire situation as if it were routine.
- In Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2nd OG, it is revealed that the weirdness magnet is an actual object. The core of Shuu's Granzon was designed by the Guests to cause probability alterations, attracting all kinds of invaders from other worlds. It's pointed out that this explains why Earth has been attacked by lots of aliens in a relatively short time period.
- The Hero from Sierra's Quest for Glory series. While a certain amount is to be expected considering he's an adventurer and hero, so is likely to be intentionally walking into the weirdness, some of the bizarre situations he finds himself in go way beyond what would be reasonably expected.
- Conker's Bad Fur Day: Poor old Conker had a bit of a Bad Fur Day. All he wanted to do in the first place was go home, yet anything that could go wrong went HORRIBLY wrong, and the game consisted of him being thrown into bizarre non-sequitur after bizarre non-sequitur.
- In Dragon Age: Inquisition, Varric will at one point outright say that everything that happens to the Inquisitor is weird. He later notes this as the reason he believes the Inquisitor is the Herald of Andraste. Either s/he is the Maker's chosen, or s/he has the absolute worst luck. Most likely both.
- It's explained in Kingdom Hearts that The Heartless are drawn to those who possess a keyblade and attack them on sight. The Heartless fear the keyblade as one of the only things that can destroy them and seek to remove the threat at every turn.
- In God of War (PS4), what starts out as a simple task of bringing Faye's ashes to the highest peak leads Kratos and Atreus to battling against the Norse pantheon. Even Mimir had a hard time believing that Baldur happened to find them and start a fight. He lampshades this once he discovers Kratos's background.
Mimir: I knew you hate gods, but you really can't stay away from them, can you?
- 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.
- Aoko explicitly tells Shiki, as part of her warning for him to exercise good judgement in using his Mystic Eyes, that "Special powers attract other special powers."
- To be blunt, this is a Nasuverse thing with the male lead. Shirou and Mikiya, especially Mikiya, tend to simply attract people with odd/fantastic powers and abilities. And like Shiki, most of the people Mikiya attracts tend to be women — including a girl who shares Shiki's name and has the same powers he does.
- The whole crux of Matt N Dusty revolves around the two titular characters dealing with this trope in one way or another. As a result, this is lampshaded to the point of becoming a Running Gag.
- Charlie of "Charlie the Unicorn" fame. Enough Freaking Said.
- Bob and George: Proto Man justly blames the Author for weirdness
- 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?"
- In Charby the Vampirate Victor inherited his ability to see supernatural creatures even when they're hidden by glamors, this means said supernatural creatures have been making attempts on his life since he was quite young. He also managed to get the attention of an evil cult by the time he was 13 and the attention of a council of day walking vampires in his late teens. It's no wonder he grew up to be a Hunter even if his eventual best friend is a vampire.
- Roger Pepitone from College Roomies from Hell!!!, who at times seems to be weirdness personified.
- 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.
- 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 Girl Genius Jiminez's brother Aldin laments that Jiminez is one of these, though Jiminez himself seems to love it. This seems to go Up to 11 when Aldin tries to make him avoid adventure.
Aldin: Lady Heterodyne, if we take him back now, he will complain for months. He will actively seek me out, follow me around, and tell me at excruciating length why we shouldn't have "run away-" And while he is doing so, he will drag me into six "adventures" worse than this death crawl can ever be.
- 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.
- El Goonish Shive:
- The city of Moperville, the main setting of the story, is described as the kind of place where weird stuff happens, and neighboring towns treat the Moperville newspaper like a tabloid. While it's eventually revealed that the town has elevated levels of ambient magic that draw all kinds of strangeness to it, it's implied that the place was weird even before the ambient magic became a problem.
- Elliot seems to get more than his fair share of strangeness even by Moperville's already elevated standards. To start off, he is gender-bent against his will in a series of events resulting in an Opposite-Sex Clone. Later, a simple walk in the park results in him getting kidnapped by a hedgehog person. He's attacked by a gremlin-like monster at school, and by a dragon at the martial arts dojo. He apparently thinks nothing of a griffin asking him for directions. He eventually wises up to his status enough to correctly predict that his date would be interrupted by something weird happening. Basically, weird things happen to everyone in the comic. Things happen to the rest of the cast due to some personal reason or another. Things happen to Elliot just because.
- When something weird has to happen to someone outside of the main cast, it usually chooses Rhoda. When an Immortal makes a brief appearance on live TV, guess who's getting interviewed. When a giant boar finds its way into Moperville, guess who it encounters first. When she and Elliot happen to be at the mall at the same time, the resulting griffin attack is almost expected.
- 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.
- 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 The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, the title character apparently has this in the roof of his house. Yes, it is a Running Gag — see panel 4 of this strip.
- Fiona Fennec has been one for Kevin & Kell in late 1990s-early 2000s, but the trait has subsided since then.
- Jamie Kingston from Kismetropolis has had the weirdness since day one, but its intensity is increasing.
- 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!
- 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.
- Dave Davenport from Narbonic, due to his latent madness.
- 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.
- Questionable Content is longer on weirdness than its first-glance Slice of Life appearance would suggest, and a couple of characters are particularly prone to weird experiences:
- Marten seems to be a strange girl magnet: Faye is wildly bipolar, Dora has control issues, Hannelore is severely obsessive-compulsive and germophobic, and Marigold is a shut-in. Claire, on the other hand, is rational and focused (although she is transgender).
- Emily, another of Marten's acquaintances, is ... at present, without explanation. However, she seems to be something of a weirdness magnet in her own right.
Marten: *Regarding Emily* Oh, great. I've adopted another one.
- Lauri Salmi from Route148 but he seems to find it amusing.
- Fuzzy of Sam & Fuzzy explicitly calls Sam this in this strip.
- Sam is a weirdness magnet for everything from fridge possession to ninja mafias. Fuzzy even lampshades it.
- The Sanity Circus: When Nimbus Owens tells the main charcters that his reason for fleeing the Directorship is kind of weird, Attley points that she's currently being accompanied by a boy with feathers for hair and a man who was once a flute before being brought to life, and that they've been chased by fear-eating monsters all day.
Attley: "Weird" is a bit lost on us, now.
- 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.
- The titular toy store in Shortpacked! seems to be one. The owner is an Evil Overlord wannabe who can't tell genders apart, a former government super-soldier shows up looking for a job only to randomly find another former government super-soldier already working there (one who is supposed to be dead), Ronald Reagan and Jesus are likewise resurrected solely to work retail, one employee is obsessed with ninjas to the point of stabbing people and hallucinating the world around him as a manga, a sentient talking car now works in the stock room, a disgruntled former employee plots for years (even getting elected to congress and recruiting Walter Mondale and Sarah Palin in the process) to get revenge for being fired, a religion is founded around one employee, another briefly achieves world peace through the consumption of Cadbury Creme Eggs, and the whole place seems to have a "good twin" in the form of another store across the street with suspiciously similar workers where everything is perfect.
- Not exactly weirdness, but Shortpacked! has also been described as a "Gay Nexus" by one employee. Totally straight people seem to be in the minority among the cast.
- 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. Every one of her newly-found friends aren't human, and they even think she's weird. This was lampshaded by Michelle in one comic.
- Any member of the cast of Sluggy Freelance.
- Too Much Information: Lampshaded here - "Does anything normal ever happen to you, Ace?"
- 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.
- Monica Villareal from Wapsi Square, though she appears to actually be a Cosmic Plaything for Aztec gods. She's not thrilled about it.
- Though her weirdness magnet status may actually be because she herself is one of the most incredibly powerful supernatural beings in the world.
- In The Whiteboard, according to Jake Doc's shop qualifies.
- Annashi from WTF Comics. Around her, impossible things occur on a regular basis, from encounters with Gnome Monks to visitors from another dimension.
- Zebra Girl: Lampshaded by Jack, who states that "magic attracts magic", and by Gregory, who explained that Sandra's very nature has this effect.
- We Are Our Avatars: It doesn't matter how peaceful, quiet, and isolated the place is. Once the Group comes in, the weirdness level skyrockets.
- We Are All Pokémon Trainers: The J-Team attracts the wrath of most every villain, not to mention whatever other weird happenings occur on their adventures.
- Adam Dodd of Survival of the Fittest. Doesn't only get put into the act, but after he wins, he gets put in one of the sequels too. At one point in V1 he was attacked by various lunatics, including a sex-crazed schizophrenic and a sadistic (and gay) serial killer. Even early in the game, before most of the truly bizarre events have come to pass, he wonders if he's a "psycho magnet."
- Arguably, the members of the SCP Foundation. For instance, two of them try to go on a holiday, and wind up getting captured and having to rescue themselves and another agent who's been captured as well.
- Warning! Readers Advisory!: Derek the Bard, partly because he's a Magic Librarian at a magic infinite library.
- The main characters of The Questport Chronicles, at first. They soon get used to it. The village of Questport itself is famed in-universe as an example.
- 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 inexplicably 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 and bringing his dead father back to life by exploding (which didn't harm him but did leave him without pants), and getting possessed by a demigod in the form of a large clam, who does this by eating his head. Lately he is being hunted by murderous vampires, again, though this time they're carrying out a genocide plot by a dark-elf Mafia boss, rather than just being the Von Helsons again. And he also has girl problems.
- Incidentally, there may be some justification due to the current plot revealing that the Gambino family is part-god.
- The various reviewers on Channel Awesome seem to be this. They've been attacked by aliens, cursed by evil DVDs, haunted, interacted with their past and future selves to save the world, and many, many other things (some of this all is justified by the bizarre company they keep, including at least two mad scientists). The crossover anniversary events seem to be a result of so many magnets coming together:
- The first resulted in Giant Robotic Donkey Kong Jesus fighting Super Mecha Death Christ.
- The second had the appearance, death, and rebirth of Santa Christ.
- The third involved the groups cased by murderous people in cloaks, a hippie summoned out of a book by magic, a bizarre witch, a dude with a living hand puppet, and magical artifacts . This all is justified in that the group was actively participating in a strange quest, but that doesn't explain how the map was sent to the Critic out of everyone in the world. Plus, there's the fact that the only reason he went for it was his greed.
- The fourth event centered around them being pursued by two evil aliens, Ma-ti living in Spoony's head, and a huge hole in time and space causing random, unexplained events. In fact, the Plot Hole, as it was named, ended up becoming an in-universe explanation not only for the strange things that happened to everyone in that event, but in the entirety of Channel Awesome history.
- The youtube blogger Amazing Phil seems to fit into this trope, always meeting strange and sometimes even paranormal people on a regular basis, such as a woman who knocked on his door and asked if he wanted to meet The Holy Mother or a couple he sat next to on an airplane who called themselves Tea People and spent the entire journey drinking tea while making incredibly strange noises.
- Courage the Cowardly Dog has something strange happening each episode despite the show being set in the middle of Nowhere. This kind of makes sense. If nothing weird happens here (somewhere), what's the only place left? There is in fact one episode that explicitly states the farm was built over a cemetery.
- 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 weird, unexplained occurrences that affected the 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.
- Jackie Chan Adventures: 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.
- Apparently this wasn't just for him — Azmuth lets him keep the Omnitrix partly because it's a "magnet for trouble". Apparently even though he is an alien, Azmuth had the same problem Ben does.
- Sokka, The Smart Guy on Aang's team in Avatar: The Last Airbender, known to occasionally acknowledge tropes, is the first to point out that "weird stuff happens to us" — somewhat justified given that Aang is The Chosen One.
- All the main characters of Kappa Mikey appear to be dogged by random events, though considering the stuff that goes on in a typical episode, they might just live in a world where that sort of mayhem is an everyday thing.
- The Simpsons lampshaded this when Smithers once re-introduced Mr Burns to Homer by reminding him;
Smithers: That's Homer Simpson. All the recent events of your life have revolved around him in some way or another.
- The fundamental premise of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Indeed, in the series' infancy the network execs made the creators of the show turn the characters into detectives, because they couldn't conceive of a show where every single episode consists of something completely crazy happening to the protagonists, apropos of nothing.
- Lampshaded in South Park "Pandemic 2 — The Startling," when Genre Savvy Craig gets sucked into the boys' adventure because they were using his birthday money for their scheme.
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.
- Egon from The Real Ghostbusters seems to attract more than his fair share of strangeness, even though he's already in a profession known for running into weird things.
- The "Life with Loopy" segments on KaBlam! had this as its main premise.
- Josie and the Pussycats cannot give a concert anywhere without bumping into a supervillain.
- Dan from Dan Vs. The targets of his vengeance include a werewolf jogger, a supervillain dentist, a ninja cookie-thief, and the ghost of George Washington. Mildly justified by the characters living in a Crapsack World. Dan gets the brunt force of all the chaos because his antisocial tendencies and his obsession with revenge mean that the psychos hoping to steal his identity, or the robots that want to use his body to build an army, think no one will miss him. And they're right.
- Mordecai and Rigby from Regular Show. These guys can't escape an episode with facing such odd situations as a black hole spawned by too many rock paper scissors ties, a half deer, half man trying to kill them, fighting off zombies spawned by a malfunctioning movie projector, and so on.
- Lots of The Everyman characters in old theatrical cartoons were this—they existed to react to whatever bizarre, surreal situations and adventures the animators could come up with. Examples include:
- Felix the Cat (who continued to be this with his TV series in the 50s and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat in the 90s).
- Mickey Mouse.
- Porky Pig: In his solo shorts he's been tormented by Leprechauns, homicidal mice have tried to kill him, twice, and he's been abducted by aliens.
- Bimbo the Dog.
- Dipper, Mabel, and arguably Soos seem to be drawn to the strange things in Gravity Falls. While this can be justified in that Dipper is trying to figure out the town's secrets, there are times when the oddities just come to them. This is actually lampshaded by one side character;
Robbie V: Why is it that whenever you're around, there's always monsters or ghosts or, whatever!?Dipper: I dunno, man.
- According to The Author, the real Stanford Pines, the entire town might be one big magnet. Millions of years ago, a UFO created the future site of Gravity Falls when it crash-landed, but it's unknown if the ship caused the weirdness, or if the town's inherent weirdness attracted the craft. Weird things are drawn to Gravity Falls, which is why occasionally we see creatures from outside it, like Mermando the merman from the sea, or Sev'ral Timez, the boy band of clones. This magnetism is exactly what prevents Bill Cipher from leaving the city limits.
- He explains this even more directly to Dipper in the canon post-episode Journal 3 book: he stands at the city limits, and holds a handful of jellybeans - with one defective oddly shaped jellybean among them - and drops it onto the ground. The weird, defective jellybean proceeds to roll towards the town. The best theory he came up with is that Gravity Falls is a thin point between parallel dimensions, allowing weirdness to seep in from other dimensions and act like a magnet for it, though the exact cause of this is unknown (it might just be a naturally occurring thin point).
- Packages from Planet X has Dan Zembrosky, who seems to be able to attract and even activates the packages meant for the evil alien Copernicus.
- Kim Possible is definitely one of these. Every day, she encounters robots, mutants, magical forces, doomsday machines, or even aliens.
- On Milo Murphy's Law, Milo seems to attract all sorts of weirdness as a side effect of him literally being a living embodiment of the adage "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." note In the first episode alone, Milo and his new friend Zack are nearly crushed by a concrete pipe, almost burned alive in a oil fire, chased by a pack of wolves, lost in the sewers, caught in a flooded construction site, and abducted by aliens in their efforts to get to school on time.
- The setting for The Amazing World of Gumball is already pretty weird, but whenever something especially weird happens, the Wattersons are always at the center of it, or more specifically, Gumball.
- My Little Pony Tales is generally a mundane, Slice of Life show, but there are the occasional fantastical elements. When these fantastical elements show up, they gravitate towards Patch for some reason, with her meeting the ghost of an ancient knight in the first episode, later running into a UFO that turns out to be a trio of flying, glowing magical ponies, one of which is a Winged Unicorn, and finally finding out she might be the long lost princess of an island nation. She's not. Her best friend from when she was at an orphanage was, and the process of finding that out involved a magical crown that only glows when worn by the true princess.
- Todd Chavez of BoJack Horseman has a bizarre tendency to go on wacky misadventures given the otherwise-serious nature of the show, including one episode where he and the Prince of Cordovia swap places, and a later episode in which his cell phone falls in love with him.