Date: Hey, Mizuki. What's inside that backpack you always have on you?
Mizuki: Well... Water, dehydrated bread, chocolate, biscuits, a flashlight, a hand charger, Swiss army knife, a candle, matches, triangular badges, a first aid kit, whistle, portable toilet, a plastic bag, duct tape, a grenade, a magnet, disposable hand warmers...
Date: Do you have an entire disaster relief kit in your bag?
Mizuki: Better safe than sorry. I'm ready for anything.
Mizuki: Well... Water, dehydrated bread, chocolate, biscuits, a flashlight, a hand charger, Swiss army knife, a candle, matches, triangular badges, a first aid kit, whistle, portable toilet, a plastic bag, duct tape, a grenade, a magnet, disposable hand warmers...
Date: Do you have an entire disaster relief kit in your bag?
Mizuki: Better safe than sorry. I'm ready for anything.
Simply put, a character is excessively prepared for a scenario, no matter how unlikely.
This trope is for you if you always have a backpack with tools and supplies to MacGyver your way out of a tight spot, if your car's trunk has enough camping gear and food to spend an unplanned night in the woods if your vehicle breaks down, or if you have a large, impressive gun rack all sorted by varmint size, and if you are Genre Savvy enough to prepare for every unlikely trope.
See also: Police Code for Everything, Properly Paranoid, Suddenly Always Knew That, You Didn't Ask, Unspoken Plan Guarantee, Batman Gambit, Hidden Supplies, Survivalist Stash, Seen It All, Wall of Weapons, DIY Threat Detection, Crazy Survivalist, Betrayal Insurance. Also compare The Anticipator, who manages to remain unsurprised despite lack of preparation. Compare Unlikely Spare. Contrast Forgot to Feed the Monster. Trust Password is a Sub-Trope. If programmers try to anticipate everything the user might do, then it's Developer's Foresight.
Examples:
By franchise:
By medium:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Comic Strips
- Fan Works
- Film — Animated
- Film — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games
- Web Animation
- Webcomics
- Western Animation
- Real Life
open/close all folders
Advertising
- Sent up in an ad campaign for Smirnoff Ice, in which the host has a very conspicuous preparation for (with the exception of one drunk driving device) extremely unlikely events, such as a giant tennis ball catapult in case of giant dogs and a surprisingly dinky trident in case a kraken surfaces from the swimming pool.
- One of Mastercard's "Priceless" commercials👁 Image
featuring MacGyver (yes, starring Richard Dean Anderson) shows him buying all the little things he uses well ahead of time. - The short-lived Toshiba advertising campaign "Ramifications of Yes" suggest that their electronic products have certain features specifically to avert extremely unlikely circumstances. For example:
- If they don't put shock absorbers in a laptop, an electric worker will blow out power for the entire United States by plugging in a damaged computer, leading to a Zombie Apocalypse by way of spoiled milk.
- If they don’t put Wi-Fi in a TV, a man trying to connect his TV with an Ethernet cable would end up disconnecting a cable at a communications center that controls GPS satellites, causing them to malfunction and lead drivers to drive off cliffs.
- If they don’t put HDMI, USB and Mini-USB ports on a tablet, the inability to connect it to a TV would cause a Prison Riot that ends up with convicts overthrowing the United States government.
- In this Vodafone Omnitel👁 Image
commercial, the main character must smuggle the title product across some kind of checkpoint. Ducking into a car-wash, she changes clothes and removes a very lifelike mask to reveal a completely different look. Qualifies because the mask is a duplicate of her normal appearance, and the curly-haired blonde underneath it is a disguise-by-makeover. - This woman👁 Image
could easily be part of the Batfamily. Everything the public servant tries, she's ready... - Batman becomes even more Crazy-Prepared in 2001 after Alfred installs OnStar into the Batmobile.
Audio Plays
- The CD release of The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief has the sketch "Radio Shop", where a verbose customer wishes to have his radio repaired, but the clerk tries to get around it. But the customer recognizes that "avoidance of responsibility is as English as toasted muffins," he produces the following:
- A receipt for the radio, with the store's address on it.
- The manufacturer's catalog, to prove that the receipt didn't have any typos.
- A witness to the sale, who took a Polaroid of the transaction to debunk the claim that the chain never sold the customer's model of radio.
- A tape recording of the customer talking with the clerk's manager, who promises to have the radio fixed as soon as possible because he's "an old customer", to prevent the clerk for sitting on the repair job for nine months.
- And finally, he surrounds the shop with armed men to ensure the staff will fix the radio. When the staff STILL refuse to cooperate, the customer, who reveals his name as Mr. Armageddon, has the shop demolished.
- We're Alive:
- Burt owns a gun store with a vault containing massive amounts of handguns, rifles, ammo and even claymore mines. He apparently "thought that whole Y2K thing was some kind of take-over".
- There's also CJ, who has a whole apartment building stocked with dozens of rifles stolen from the local Army Reserve base along with other kinds of weapons, ammo, how-to books, and various plans she's come up with. On top off all that she maintains an extensive network of safe-houses and gardens throughout Los Angeles for her to live on. It's worth noting that while she did have people with her at the start of the outbreak, she has been maintaining all of this by herself for several months.
Blogs
- How to Hero's stated purpose is to guide superheroes through any situation they might find themselves in and indeed they have entries on everything from picking a codename👁 Image
to coping with having lame superpowers👁 Image
. Their entry on drills👁 Image
(not to be confused with their entry on drills👁 Image
) takes this to the next level, advising readers to train for all kinds of scenarios including, hiring a psychic to tell you the next ten people you're going to fight, and then preparing to fight their relatives too, and stopping an world-ending event without missing your favorite show. - Occupy Richie Rich portrays Richie himself as this. For instance, one cover👁 Image
has a Kitchen Sink Included gag. The caption below has this to offer:"he carries that sink everywhere in case someone says 'everything but the kitchen sink'"
Podcasts
- Welcome to Night Vale:
- When the town is threatened by a plague of "wheat and wheat by-products", it turns out that the City Council already had a bunker built for that specific purpose. When asked why there was already such a bunker, the Council replied only, "Prophecy."
- Also, Cecil seems to have earned a lot of merit badges from back when he was a Boy Scout. Among those mentioned are Subversive Radio Broadcasting and Siege Warfare.
Professional Wrestling
- Roddy Piper was unaffected by The Mountie's stun gun attack: after the match, he revealed he was wearing a rubber shirt under his iconic "Hot Rod!" t-shirt. The shirt said "Shock Proof" for the less perceptive viewers.
- Jushin Thunder Liger revealed that he has face paint under his mask, which came in handy when The Great Muta pulled his mask off.
- Someone has to keep putting all those tables, ladders, and other weapons under the ring should they be needed...
- John Cena proved himself to be this. Facing Batista in a Last Man Standing Match and armed with nothing more than a roll of duct tape? No problemo...
- Triple H, in street clothes including a leather jacket, went up to the ring to attack Randy Orton. Both were armed with sledgehammers. After some confronting each other with the ring ropes between them, the two agree to give up their weapons and use Good Old Fisticuffs to handle this. Both drop their weapons and... Triple H had another sledgehammer hidden in his jacket.
- An earlier episode mixing the best Wrestling has in Big-Lipped Alligator Moment and Brick Joke, we have the forklift incident. During another match (Booker T and Big Show), we see Triple H driving a forklift in the background, with no explanation at the time. Later on, during Triple H's lumberjack match with Rob Van Dam... it seemed the Lumberjacks couldn't get out of their locker room because someone barricaded the door with a forklift. What an amusing coincidence!
- Rey Mysterio Jr. occasionally wears a second mask to counter being unmasked.
Roleplays
- Kathleen Martin in Survival of the Fittest v3 has spent years doing everything possible to prepare herself for the game just in case she's thrown in it, leading her to have many advantages in the game including survival techniques, knowledge of hand to hand combat, and skill in firearms. Some say the handler takes it too far and makes her rather overpowered, as her only disadvantages are that she's paranoid and nobody likes her. Though, there are signs indicating that she is a parody of this character type, especially since her handler has already created one such parody (Josh Goodman).
Stand-Up Comedy
- Jon Pinette has a standup routine where he explains that he knows how to say "Feed me I'm starving" in 26 languages. 27 if you count Ancient Hieroglyphs, just in case he gets sent into the past — he wants his bases covered!
- Suzy Eddie Izzard lampoons this in regard to James Bond and his ridiculous gadgets from Q; she envisions a situation where Mr. Bond is about to be attacked by sharks and goes to pull out his handy breathing apparatus, but finds he has nothing on hand but a pair of jam trousers. (Strangely enough, the sharks see this and decide to go away.)
Theatre
- Brian Le Petit (principal clown) in Mystère is crazy prepared for pulling any prank you could think to pull on unsuspecting Real Life audience members, such as fake tickets, a blonde wig, confetti, a lacy bra, and several buckets of popcorn, most of which he hides up his sleeves or in his pockets. If that does not count, we later find he has quick access to a gun, a chainsaw, and a can of air freshener. As a bonus, he's not one of the characters in the story, but a prankster who somehow got into the theater and decided to amuse himself, so there's even less sensible explanation for where he's finding/why he's carrying some of these things.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney:
- In Case 1-4, it turns out that Manfred von Karma has trained Polly the parrot to stop squawking her usual phrases because he correctly anticipated Phoenix might be desperate enough to take a joke suggestion to call the bird as a witness at face value. That said, Phoenix and Maya are still able to work around it and blow the case wide open.
- Phoenix Wright, aka the player, himself. You may not know why you have to pick up random pieces of "evidence", but they will come in handy, because you're ready with them. Lampshaded twice in the first game's final case, where Edgeworth tells him about a seemingly unrelated screwdriver from the game's second case. Phoenix jots down info about it just in case, prompting Edgeworth to point out how stubborn Phoenix can be sometimes, and Phoenix himself later notes his own surprise when said screwdriver ends up being a key piece of evidence on the final day of the trial. Despite what you might expect, the screwdriver really wasn't related to the case... until Edgeworth was asked to transfer it to his evidence locker; Edgeworth carrying this order out played right into the killer's hands.
- Lana Skye has people doing work for her while she's in containment. One case is when she kept very conclusive evidence in the back of an Evidence Law book. And for bonus points, the Evidence Law book itself was the final piece of evidence needed to convict the killer—not the evidence within the book, but the actual law.
- Nahyuta Sahdmadhi, from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, states that, as a prosecutor that takes cases all over the world, he studies all he can about the context of the cases he takes. While in itself a very sensible thing to do, what puts him in this trope is the ridiculously short timeframes in which he manages to do so. For instance, he manages to research enough information about rakugo, in a single night, to be able to talk about it for hours and even give full performances, added by the fact he was handling a completely different case the previous day.
- Anonymous;Code: GAIA is already a massive supercomputer, and Gai Institution has build multiple fake ones across the facility, just in case of the intruders. Asuma has additionally watched countless GAIA simulations and has made a lot of security features exclusive to himself in case of betrayal.
- The fourth case's culprit in Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane almost gets off scot-free because they prepared for the very unlikely scenario that ended up happening, and only gets caught thanks to a Deus ex Machina. Beatrice used her demonic familiar, Marrunath, to murder her father. Marrunath is constantly hidden from everyone else thanks to the invisibility spell she casts on him every hour, so nobody even knows about his existence. Despite this, Tyrion manages to figure out through deduction and Celeste's Detect Magic spell (which can detect the usage of the invisibility spell) that Beatrice has a familiar. He has him testify, and finds out that demons can't lie. When it seems that it's going to be easy for Tyrion to prove his case, Beatrice steps in and has Marrunath confess to the crime. Then she asks him "Did I order you to murder my father?", to which he answers "No, you did not". Which is technically true - she just told him he could murder the victim, knowing that he would. She argues that familiars have their own agency and she's not to blame for the murder, except her Blood Contract with Marrunath explains the concept that he can't kill any human without her express permission. Of course, the contract is not in evidence, so Tyrion would have normally lost had his dead mother not suddenly communicated with him and taught him how to issue a Divine Edict to get a copy of the contract - something that not even Beatrice could have possibly predicted. And keep in mind, the only reason Beatrice was even a suspect in this case was because an unpredictable third party accidentally framed her. So she avoided directly ordering Marrunath in preparation for the extremely unlikely scenario that Marrunath was called to testify.
Web Originals
- "50 Completely Unexplainable Stock Photos No One Will Ever Use"👁 Image
. It says no-one will use them, but if anyone ever does need a picture of a man in a rabbit costume weighing lettuce, a woman with bread as hat, or "a one-eyed accountant flashing 'East Side' while listening to an abacus", the people who made these stock photos have them covered. - The Former System Administrator from Dave "Fargo" Kosak's Daily Victim is defined by this trope. No matter how outlandish the situation that's come up, he has planned for this contingency well in advance ("You see, you never want to fake a major organ failure to hijack an ambulance to a concert where you falsify medical documents and sneak into the trunk of your friend's car in a Spider-Man costume unless you're PREPARED for the eventuality that someone might get hurt if the car slams into a deer."). He always has a backup plan.
- The Evil Shakespeare Overlord List👁 Image
has the following requirement. Anyone who actually fulfills it qualifies.I will have a contingency plan for outdoor plays in case of disasters other than weather. For instance: search helicopters looking for fugitives in the area. The actors are accomplished clog-dancers, but it's not fair to ask them to do that for the interim. - Legendary Usenet poster "Gharlane of Eddore" (not to be confused with the other Gharlane) once wrote a post detailing his design for "Standard Generic Monster Load", bullets intended to let you be prepared for almost any conceivable supernatural emergency:
Gharlane: Silver bullet; hex-scored jacketed hollow-point filled with a gel made of Holy Water, wolfsbane, garlic, fugutoxin and curare, laced with dimethyl sulfoxide to provide tractor-solvent Spreading Factor. Traditionalists can also cut crosses in the bases of the bullets, and have them blessed by a priest. .44 magnum 240-grain load over the standard Elmer Keith hunting load, 24 grains of IMR 2400. (The manual says 21.8 grains is maximum, so don't use the 24-grain load if you have a cheap revolver.) These work reliably on Vampires, Werewolves, the generic Undead, and Evil Human Minions like Renfield, with sublime indifference.
- One J.R. Mooneyham has a rather eclectic web site👁 Image
, containing things ranging from supposedly autobiographical stories of his supercar racing days, through survivalist essays and advice for living cheap, all the way to a detailed speculative timeline of world history/prehistory/future history and a Science Fiction novel starring the author's alter ego. There are certainly examples of Crazy-Prepared, both in the fiction and the non-fiction. For instance, see the insanely detailed description👁 Image
of the extensive security measures of a fictional research lab. - SCP Foundation:
- Aside from the incredibly detailed containment procedures for every SCP, the Foundation has task forces, protocols, and warning labels for every situation.
- The Global Occult Coalition's standard course of action when dealing with reality benders is to have one person distract the individual while a sniper takes a shot from miles away with a .50 caliber sniper rifle. If that doesn't work, then the second sniper takes a shot, and so on until the target is eliminated.
- By definition, the "You might be a Survivalist if..." list has many handy suggestions.
Web Videos
- Michael Swaim of Agents of Cracked. In one episode, he explains how he has knives, thousands of them, hidden everywhere. He pulls two knives out of his pockets, another from his slushee cup, and when he asks a government agent to check his pocket, there's a knife there.
- Analyst Bronies React:
- Voice of Reason brought his "anti slasher villain spray" for the Legend of Everfree review.
- For the same video, Stupid Private 913 brought his shotgun, just in case any monstrosities from Equestria showed up.
- Atop the Fourth Wall: While we're on the topic of Channel Awesome, Linkara, due to the bizarre life he leads, always seems to have multiple contingency plans for most, if not all, of the threats he encounters, which always seem to buy him enough time to review another crappy comic. Many of these plans seem to rely on rather intricate Batman Gambits.
- An impromptu musical number in The Awkward Compilation has Alex garbed in a dress. Apparently it actually belongs to his actor. Why? Well, in case he should ever require a dress. (The fact that Batman is his trademark favourite series is actually not much of a surprise.)
- Batman Reacts features Batman's contingency plans against a huge number of potential opponents from other franchises, from Sauron to Team Rocket.
- Critical Role:
- At one point, the party visits Percy's old hometown. Percy takes Vax and Scanlan to see if they can find help in an old temple, where they are then ambushed by a banshee. Because of the nature of Dungeons & Dragons, that detour was entirely unscripted, so when the DM pulls out a map of the temple, we get this exchange:
Taliesin/Percy: You were so prepared for me to go to the temple that you actually built it?
Matt/DM: I had no idea where you guys were gonna go, so I built the whole city. - In the second campaign, Taliesin again expresses surprise at Matt being prepared with a map, since there was no way he expected them to plan an ambush at a specific location in a wide open area. Matt says that he always has maps of various locales and biomes prepared in the event of a fight. The same goes for miniatures, which he brings to the sessions even if the chance of such a creature is low, but not impossible. In one episode Travis has Fjord cast Summon Greater Demon and Matt produces a miniature of the demon while openly admitting that he wasn't even sure if Travis had chosen that spell when the party leveled up.
- "Matt, do you have a mini for the dark spectre of my soul?"note He does, of course.
- At one point, the party visits Percy's old hometown. Percy takes Vax and Scanlan to see if they can find help in an old temple, where they are then ambushed by a banshee. Because of the nature of Dungeons & Dragons, that detour was entirely unscripted, so when the DM pulls out a map of the temple, we get this exchange:
- The Infectious Disease doctor in Dr. Glaucomflecken not only always carries tweezers (for removing ticks) with him on hikes, but also a dedicated hiking microscope to identify the species of tick.
- From Everyman HYBRID, we have Evan. Anyone who seriously keeps an emergency machete in a friend's car (without them knowing about it!) ought to qualify for this trope.
- Tess Masazza in the Italian webseries Insopportabilmente Donna. Among other examples, the stock of "most essential supplies" she brings with her when she goes camping with her friends includes a rope, a flashlight, batteries for the flashlight, a candle should the batteries not work, a can of pepper spray, a sound repellent device for wolves, an amulet for protection against ghosts, a book to read should she become bored (which she knows she will), an incredible amount of medicines (including a kit to make orthopedic casts)...
- The Nostalgia Chick made a video about "Playing God" so everybody could prepare for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.