If it happened once, it’ll keep happening forever

The expression “If it happened once, it’ll keep happening forever” names Nanao’s conviction that a single misfortune can become an unending pattern. It is more than a prediction about one bad job: by linking each disaster to the next, the maxim makes recurrence feel inevitable and gives his working life the shape of a domino effect.

Origin and Formulation

Five years before the present, on his first job, events became far more complicated than Nanao had expected. He thought, “If this happened once, it could happen again.” His subsequent jobs were disasters too, and the thought hardened into a broader rule: “if something happens once it’ll keep happening forever.” The expression thus grows out of experience rather than abstract speculation. Its movement from possibility to certainty is the crucial change: what might recur becomes something he believes will continue without end.

A Pattern of Misfortune

Nanao understands his jobs through accumulation. The first disaster makes a second seem possible; the next failures then appear to confirm the pattern. His domino-effect comparison captures the logic: each mishap becomes the condition for expecting another, until separate jobs blur into one continuing run of trouble. The maxim does not identify a cause for the failures or establish that they are literally connected. Instead, it shows how Nanao interprets their recurrence—as evidence that once bad luck begins, it cannot be stopped.

Maria’s Counterpoint

Maria, who gives Nanao his jobs, has told him on multiple occasions that he is overthinking things. Her response sets his certainty against a more dismissive interpretation: where he sees a lasting rule in the sequence of disasters, she treats his conclusion as excessive thought. That contrast also places the expression within their working relationship. Nanao receives the jobs from Maria, but it is his own growing theory of repetition—not an explanation from her—that gives those jobs their ominous continuity.