Loser Archetype

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Some guys have all of the luck, while some have no luck at all. Why are they doomed to fail? We'll probably never know, but we love watching them stumble through life.

Contrast Master of the Index, for characters who excel in at least one craft.

Tropes about characters that explicitly are defined as losers:

• Basement Dweller: Many people consider a grown man still living with his parents to be the epitome of a complete loser.
• Beady-Eyed Loser: The character is designed with beady eyes to represent their lack of cool.
• Beleaguered Assistant: This character would really love to tell their boss to Take This Job and Shove It, but instead they are overworked and humiliated to the point of exhaustion.
• Beleaguered Boss: Sometimes it is the boss who has to pick up after their utterly crappy (when not actively sabotaging) employees.
• Beyond Supernatural Assistance: This character fails at a task even with help from a supernatural source.
• Born Unlucky: This character's defining trait is to be always unlucky (in life and in games), so it makes you believe in fate.
• Bully Magnet: This character is target number one for just about every bully in school.
• Butt-Monkey: A character whose purpose is to provide comedy by constantly suffering misfortunes.
• Casanova Wannabe: A character who wants to have a lot of sex, but fails to charm every woman he comes across.
• The Chosen Zero: The Chosen One has been chosen poorly.
• Classical Anti-Hero
• Cosmic Plaything: The whole universe hates this character. Literally.
• Death Is a Loser: The Grim Reaper is portrayed as a pathetic and pitiful being.
• Designated Monkey: A character the creator dislikes is subjected to misfortune that the audience finds excessive or too severe.
• Deus Angst Machina: This character's life sucks to an unreal degree
• The Devil Is a Loser: Satan is depicted as a loser.
• Doom Magnet: This character attracts chaos, catastrophe and disaster like the magnet the iron.
• Dreaded Kids' Party Entertainer Job: People who work as entertainers for kids' parties are treated like crap.
• Dream Sue: "I am the king of the world" - in my dreams only
• Dublin Skanger
• Emasculated Cuckold: A man is seen as a wimp because his wife cheats on him.
• Expectation Lowerer: This character sucks so much, that the audience just knows to be better
• Extreme Doormat
• Failure Hero: A hero who seldom, if ever, succeeds in saving the day.
• First Friend
• The Friend Nobody Likes: A member of a group who is openly disliked by the rest of the group.
• Future Loser: A person is shown to become utterly pathetic in the future.
• Graceful Loser: A person who takes the loss with dignity rather than throwing tirades.
• High Hopes, Zero Talent: This character has a dream and everything to fulfill this dream - except talent
• High-School Rejects: Not everyone made it big after graduating.
• Hikikomori: An extreme social recluse/shut-in, typical to Japanese society
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: A villain who’s weak and/or stupid, and does nothing but fail, causing you to actually feel sorry for the poor chump.
• Inept Mage: A magic user who is very poor at casting effective spells.
• Iron Butt-Monkey: A character who constantly suffers misfortunes, but manages to go through it all unscathed.
• Jaded Washout: A cynical, washed-up, and self-aware loser.
• Karmic Butt-Monkey: A Butt-Monkey who is a Jerkass and therefore deserves every bad thing that happens to them.
• Little Jimmy: The naive "I don't know anything about this subject" character in an educational or science show. Kaboom optional.
• Loser Deity: A deity that is a loser, or serves a loser, or both
• Loser Friend Puzzles Outsiders: A cool and successful character has a friend so lame that others are confused as to why the cool guy even bothers hanging with this dweeb.
• Loser Protagonist: The protagonist of the story is many of the tropes on this list.
• Loser Son of Loser Dad: A person is considered a loser just because their father was a pathetic person.
• Loser Team Mascot: School team mascots are seen as losers or otherwise portrayed in a negative light.
• Lower-Class Lout: The character is poor, lives on the wrong side of the tracks, has little education... and is a complete jackass.
• Master of None: The character has some knowledge of many trades but is a walking Epic Fail at all of them.
• Memetic Loser: A character is portrayed online as a complete wimp because of one humiliating defeat.
• Neet: Not Employed, in Education or under Training.
• No-Respect Guy: A character who doesn't get any respect no matter what they do.
• Perennial Losers: A sports player/team with an exceptional penchant for losing.
• Polka Dork: The character's love of Polka when everybody else in the cast, if not the universe, finds it intolerable is shown as perfect proof of his loser-dom.
• The Poorly Chosen One: The Chosen One is completely atrocious at their job, to the point that people In-Universe wonder if The Chooser of the One had the slightest idea of what they were doing.
• Poor Man's Substitute (when used In-Universe)
• The Slacker: The character is a loser because of their own apathy.
• Sore Loser: The character doesn't take losing well and angrily complains about their loss by throwing tantrums.
• Stereotypical Nerd: Nerds as stereotypically depicted in fiction: no sense of fashion, physically unattractive, no social skills, geeky hobbies.
• Straw Loser: A loser that only exists to make someone else look cooler.
• Super Loser: Has cool superpowers, but still a loser personality.
• This Loser Is You: An unsuccessful character is intended to represent the audience.
• Unconvincingly Unpopular Character: A character who's unpopular among other characters, but the audience finds them cool.
• Unlikely Hero: This character shouldn't be the hero by the rules of the setting but somehow still is.
• Unlucky Everydude: The Everyman minus the luck of the everyman.
• Unwanted Spouse
• Walking Disaster Area: Because of unluck, clumsiness, idiocy, the universe hating them or some combination of the above (when it's not all) this loser brings constant devastation and doom to everything and everybody in the vicinity.
• The Woobie: The character is so unsuccessful and unfortunate that the audience can't help but feel sorry for the character.

Tropes that are very closely related to losers and/or show up in almost every loser story:

• Achievement Mockery: An achievement given to you if you suck at a particular video game.
• All of the Other Reindeer: The loser is considered an outcast and everyone looks down on them for being different.
• Apathetic Clerk: These characters will usually be portrayed as stereotypical losers.
• Athletically Challenged: A character sucks at sports.
• Atrocious Alias: You know this character is pathetic when they can't even give themselves a halfway decent code name.
• Brown Bag Mask: A character deciding to wear a paper bag over their head is often done to indicate how ashamed they are of themselves.
• Cannot Talk to Women: Male losers have never been able to talk with the women of their dreams and never will.
• Chronic Self-Deprecation: Going through life with a very low self-image.
• Circle of Shame: A character is humiliated by a group of people making fun of them.
• Cool Kid-and-Loser Friendship: A loser hangs out with a cooler character; usually both are children or teens.
• Critical Failure
• Disaster Dominoes
• Disproportionate Celebration: Can apply when the character making a big deal out of a minor achievement is used to demonstrate how pathetic they are.
• Dissatisfied Family Man: A depressed middle-aged man working a dead-end job who is a mediocre husband and/or father.
• D.I.Y. Disaster
• Dodgeball Is Hell: Dodgeball is a playground for bullies.
• Domestic Appliance Disaster
• Dunce Cap: A child in school gets punished for misbehavior and/or getting an answer wrong by having to sit in the corner while wearing a pointy cap.
• Eating Lunch Alone: You know this person is a social outcast when no one ever sits near them during lunchtime.
• Eject the Loser
• Embarrassed by a Child: Someone is embarrassed by a child pointing out something embarrassing about them.
• Embarrassing Nickname: A character is embarrassed by a nickname someone gave them.
• Epic Fail: Someone manages to fail at something in a way that just isn't possible, which is often done to underscore what a loser they are.
• Even the Dog Is Ashamed: The character has screwed up so badly that even their loyal animal companion is ashamed to be associated with them.
• F--: A character has done so poorly in school that they somehow receive a grade that goes even lower than what the education system would allow in real life.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Characters fail again and again at achieving the Series Goal, because succeeding would end the story.
• Failure Montage: A montage that shows all your failures and screw-ups.
• Failures on Ice: A character sucks at ice skating or roller skating.
• Fake Muscles: Fake muscles tell everyone how you want to be but aren't.
• Flexing Those Non-Biceps: A muscle flex that isn't.
• The Freelance Shame Squad: A bunch of characters who show up solely to point and laugh at someone's misfortune.
• Friendless Background
• From Bad to Worse: You thought your situation couldn't get any worse? Think again.
• Future Me Scares Me: Either the cool-in-the-current-day character is horrified about their Future Loser fate, or the loser-in-the-current-day character is repulsed about the things their future self endured or chose to become] in order to become (comparatively) cooler.
• Geek Physiques: Geeks and nerds are never muscular.
• Give Geeks a Chance: The nerd ends up getting a love interest.
• Gym Class Hell: Physical education is nightmare.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Some people are just better than our characters, regardless of time and effort.
• Humiliation Conga: A character ends up going through a long string of humiliating misfortunes.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me
• If I Were a Rich Man
• I Just Want to Be Badass
• I Just Want to Be Special: A character thinks they're too normal.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: A very lonely character.
• Internalized Categorism: Believing that being part of a certain group makes you guilty of the negative stereotypes associated with this group.
• Kafka Comedy: A form of Black Comedy where the dark humor revolves around misery and misfortune.
• The Klutz: Someone who's really clumsy.
• Losing Horns: Stock sound effects in game shows that indicate you lost.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: Being bad in bed is portrayed as a major character flaw.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: If someone plays with themselves, this means they can't get any.
• Misery Lit: Literary genre focused primarily on tragedy, misfortune, failure and suffering.
• Misery Poker: A character complains about how rough they have it and the person they're talking to argues that their problems are even worse.
• Misfortune Cookie: A character gets a fortune from their fortune cookie promising them that misfortune and disaster will come their way.
• Muscle Angst (type A)
• My Car Hates Me: A character's car never starts when they need it to.
• Nerds Are Virgins: Geeky characters tend to be portrayed as having never had sex in addition to it being unlikely that they ever will have sex.
• No Respect for the Village Idiot: The village idiot gets no respect from the community.
• No Social Skills: The loser doesn't know how to properly communicate and interact with others.
• Not on the List
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: There are few ways to indicate that a character has rotten luck and little hope of turning their life around that are as effective as establishing that the character did something embarrassing or stupid that everyone else constantly reminds them about.
• Passing Judgment: Character does something embarrassing in public and gets stared at by appalled passengers of a vehicle.
• Pathetically Weak: The character is incredibly feeble and weak compared to other characters to a downright ridiculous degree, such as not even being able to lift a stuffed animal without straining themselves.
• Perpetual Poverty
• Picked Last: Being the last person picked to join a team is a very good indicator that a person isn't very popular.
• Pity Sex: Having sex with someone solely out of pity towards how rough they have it.
• Plague of Good Fortune: A character suddenly has things go well for them in spite of not wanting good fortune.
• Plethora of Mistakes: An attempted plan ends up failing miserably because of a ton of stuff going wrong.
• Poke the Poodle: The bad guy boasts about doing an "evil deed" that's really nothing more than a harmless prank.
• Poor Man's Porn: This loser is desperate enough to placate their sexual urges that they're willing to wack off to any non-pornographic material that happens to contain remotely suggestive content.
• Power Fantasy: The loser fantasizes on what they'd do if they had the power to stand up to those picking on them.
• Revenge of the Nerd
• The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction: Attractive women flirting with unattractive schlubs can only be a prank or scam.
• Soul-Sucking Retail Job
• Stuffed into a Locker: Someone has the misfortune to get shoved into a locker (typically by a bully).
• Stuffed into a Trashcan: Someone has the misfortune of being shoved into a garbage can.
• Suckiness Is Painful: You suck so much at what you do, people are even in physical pain.
• Swirlie: Your head gets sticked into a toilet for extra embarrassment.
• Teasing the Substitute Teacher
• Teeny Weenie: A character gets humiliated because he has a small penis.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: The unlucky character finally gets a chance at happiness.
• Trauma Conga Line: A rapid-fire succession of misfortunes to push you towards the Despair Event Horizon.
• Treated Worse than the Pet: Someone's status in their family is so low that even animals are treated better or valued more than they are.
• Triangles Are the Worst Instrument: If a character on a school band or orchestra plays a triangle, you know they are a loser.
• Vaudeville Hook: A character performing onstage has a hook appear to drag them away when their performance sucks.
• Vengeful Vending Machine: Someone has the misfortune of having to deal with an uncooperative vending machine.
• Viewers Are Morons (when used In-Universe)
• Wannabe Line
• Wedgie: Bullies love to grab the waistband of a victim’s underwear and yank upward.
• Wet Willie: Bullies stick a spit-covered finger in a victim's ear and twirls it around.
• What the Fu Are You Doing?: Failing at martial arts to a hilarious degree.
• Wimp Fight: Two combatants fight each other in an ineffectual way.
• The World Mocks Your Loss: When everything is reminding someone of a bad breakup.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Right when it looks like the unfortunate character will have things go right for them for once, their chance is ruined at the last minute.
• You Are What You Hate. You are in group X and you hate all members of group X.
• Zonk: A silly joke prize given to those who lost big time in a high-stakes game.