Trope Talk: Faustian Bargains

My favorite example of the “Faustian Bargain” trope is an SCP. The SCP is a furniture set of a table and two chairs. If someone sits in a chair, a mysterious figure implied to be the devil appears in the other chair and offers a bargain. The twist is that the person can ask for literally anything, and the devil will offer a somewhat fair price. One D-Class asks for “the power to escape this facility”, and the devil asks for all of the memories of his mother. Another D-Class asks for a cheeseburger, and the devil asks for $5. The story culminates in the Foundation sitting one of their lawyers in the chair. What follows is 48 hours of negotiations before the lawyer collapses from exhaustion. The devil leaves a note saying “I’d love to see you again. I haven’t had that much fun in centuries”. Apparently before the lawyer passed out, he had spent 4 hours negotiating a precise legal definition of the word “shall”.

Fun fact: devils in dungeons and dragons - being lawful evil - can actually be sued if they don't hold their end of the deal. Having an erinye as their "lawyer".

I wish the "Outsmarting the Devil" Faustian bargain appeared more often. One of my favorite folktales involves a young heroine doing this. Her fiancee, in a moment of frustration and haste, accidentally invoked the aid of a witch when his horse was injured near her tree, binding his soul to her in exchange. He tries to get out of it, but she keeps demanding more and more gold from him, preying on his desperation. So the girl goes to the witch and demands to parlay with her master, the devil. She offers to trade her soul to free her fiancee, and the devil eagerly agrees, because he has very few souls as pure and good as hers in his possession. He demands to dictate the contract to which she agrees, provided she can write it out (to which the devil agrees). After outlining the exchange (her soul for his) the two parties sign. The devil exalts in his triumph at acquiring such a pure and beautiful soul, only for the girl to remove her shoe and hand it to him, revealing that she had included a typo in the contract (i.e., she offered to trade her SOLE for her fiancee's SOUL). The girl departs victorious and the witch doesn't even care anymore, too busy laughing at the ancient, all-powerful lord of darkness getting outwitted by a sweet village girl. The story ends by noting that the villagers took notice of two things about the couple: 1) that the young man who married her was an unusually devoted husband who passionately doted on her for the rest of their lives, and 2) how odd it was to attend a wedding where the bride was decked in all the finest matrimonial clothing while only wearing one shoe...

“Cute kitty things offering superpowers are only benevolent like 60% of the time.” ILL TAKE THOSE ODDS

Loved how "born great, achieved greatness, had greatness thrust upon them" corresponded to the triforce of power, courage, and wisdom respectively

Hiring a team of lawyers before I get into my warlock pact. Enough loopholes can win this.

I just realized that Anakin turning to the dark side is actually a faustian bargain type story, which follows both the "deal to save a loved one, but get tricked" and the "become inhumain and forget their initial motivation" archetypes.

The origin of the Jack O'Lantern is a "trick the devil" story. Jack was not the lantern, as now, but the man who carried it (Jack of the lantern). Jack had previously made a bargain of his soul to get the devil to pay his bar tab (yup). When the devil came to claim his due, Jack persuaded him to climb an apple tree to grab him an apple for his last meal. When the devil was up in the tree branches, Jack carved a cross on the trunk so he couldn't get down. To get rid of the cross and let him down, Jack made the devil promise never to take his soul to hell. When Jack died and tried to enter heaven St Peter, unsurprisingly, said absolutely not. But when he went down to hell, of course, he couldn't get in there either, which left him doomed to wander. The devil gave him a coal from hell to light his way back to earth, and Jack popped it into a hollowed-out turnip, where it (being an infernal coal) continues to burn eternally.

My favorite part is when Red implicitly calls Light Yagami a "short-sighted goober." 😂🤣

My favourite example to this day is Homer selling his soul for a doughnut, then having Marge win it back in court.

My favourite subversion of this trope is in the Owl House. It turns out that the main villain made a deal with a god-like being, but they're still the asshole in the dynamic. The deity just wants someone to play with, while the bad guy never planned on honoring their deal.

Probably the saddest example of a Faustian bargain made for the sake of someone else, followed be the person making the bargain getting betrayed is Megara from Disney's Hercules. She sold her soul to Hades to save her boyfriend. Only for said boyfriend to leave her for another girl. With no indication that Hades had anything to do with it. The boyfriend for whom she sold her soul just ditched her for someone else, entirely by his own choice. The saddest Faustian bargains are, in my opinion, the ones where the person making it does so for the sake of someone else, only to be betrayed, not by who they made the bargain with, but by who they made it for.

Semantics! To paraphrase an old Tumblr thread: Fae: Your mother will be healed, and you understand the price, you shall give me your firstborn? Human: Yes, so when do we start on making the firstborn? Fae: \*blushing\* Oh

I don't know why but the joke in fairly oddparents cracks me up when wishing for a lawyer is the correct answer against a Faustian deal/wish

I love the "Fool, I sold my soul a long time ago" Twist so the deal-making entity goes on empty handed because the mortal has no soul.

That moment when you realize student loans are a Faustian bargain. 😳

My favorite way of getting out of a Faustian bargain is showcased in American Dad. Roger sells his soul to gain the ability to play guitar well enough to show up a guy who interrupted him at a coffee shop. When he beats the guy and wins the bet, Roger tells the guy “just pay for my lessons, and we’ll call it even.” When they shake on it, the guy promptly drops into a fiery portal.

"Outsmarting the devil" tales are amazing. One I heard from Quebec, the condemned man's wife, pleading for five more minutes with her husband, asks Old Scratch to take her soul along with his, if he promises not to collect the souls until the candle in the lantern melts down. He says yes - she throws the lantern in the river and lets it sink. Now it never will.

Can’t stop thinking about a short story I read in which the MC “outsmarts” two devil-like entities by playing them off of each other, and the twist ending reveals that it was in fact one entity making two deals with her, letting her get the best of them in order to lull them into feeling confident and potentially making more and more dangerous deals in the future

I think a really unique Faustian bargain would be Howl and Calcifer. It's glossed over in the movie, but in the book giving your soul to a fire demon is a really bad idea, and we see the Witch of the Waste get taken over by her demon. Calcifer and Howls' deal however, was born out of compassion. Howl didn't want power, he just wanted to save Calcifer who was scared of dying. Neither of them realized the consequences of their actions, and it's actually the demon who tries to find help breaking their deal.