Flower From the Mountaintop: Difference between revisions

* Used in ''[[Kimagure Orange Road]]'', only that in this case, a young man has to go fetch some snow from the mountaintop as a test of character to see if he's worthy of marrying the girl he likes. She's the only daughter of a family with [[Psychic Powers]] and he's a [[Muggles|just a normal human...]]. {{spoiler|The girl likes the guy so much that she uses her powers to help him out, and the parents give them their blessing anyway. The young couple are Takeshi and Akemi, the parents of the male lead, Kyousuke Kasuga, and his sisters Kurumi and Manami}}.

* Subverted in the last [[Tenchi Muyo!]]! OAV. Tenchi's mother is injured climbing a mountain for a healing herb... which grows abundantly in the valley below.

* Occurs in .hack//Sign. Tsukasa is entrusted with a grunty which gets sick. To cure it, he must collect a rare herb from a very high level dungeon, even though he is very low level. {{spoiler|He is able to get it, but he doesn't return in time and the grunty dies anyway.}}

** Also occurs in [[.hack|.hack//Legend of the Twilight]], where Tsukasa's (and Elk's) near-identical counterpart asks Sugo-in-Kite's-avatar to help her get a [[Healing Potion|Pfenix Feather]] from a high-level [[Mix-and-Match Critters|Cerberus]] to save a sick baby [[Messy Pig|grunty]], even though they are both at very low levels. {{spoiler|She goes with him, and they get the feather in time to heal it}}.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

 

 

== [[Film]] ==

* Inverted in ''[[Dark Knight Trilogy|Batman Begins]]''. Bruce is told to pick up a flower in a field, then has to climb the mountaintop to get to the monastery. The flower is also the source of a powerful hallucinogen that the film's version of Scarecrow weaponises into his signature fear gas.

* Basically the entire plot of ''[[Once Upon a Forest]]''.

* In Feist's [[The Riftwar Cycle|Riftwar saga]], Prince Arutha has to go get the extremely rare Silverthorn flower from the top of a mountain of death infested by dark elves, as it's the only way to save his fiancée from a painful death by poison.

* In ''The Magic of Oz'', one of the [[Land of Oz|Oz books]], a character decides he's going to go get an incredibly rare flower as a gift for Princess Ozma, or something. It grows on an island in the middle of a river. Only it turns out that if you step on the island, your feet grow roots.

* In [[Lloyd Alexander]]'s ''Taran Wanderer'', the fourth book (and unplanned one) of [[Prydain Chronicles|Chronicles of Prydain]], [[The Hecate Sisters]] send Taran off to find a mirror that, if he looks into it, will reveal who he really is (something that Taran, who has no idea who his family is, desperately wants to know). Subverted in that {{spoiler|it turns out that the magic mirror is just [[It's the Journey That Counts|a particluarly pretty puddle]]. It was the trials of looking for it that gave Taran a sense of who he really was, not looking into some magic mirror.}}

* Susan Cooper's fifth book in The Dark Is Rising series has the epynomous ''Silver on the Tree'', a bloom that happens rarely. Of course, the battle is waging around the tree, because the other side understands the importance as well.

 

* In the old ''[[Superman]]'' TV show, Superman was sent to get edelweiss for Lois Lane for her wedding (it was something a villain prompted her to request as the setup to some dastardly plot).

* In an episode of ''[[Dinosaurs]]'', Charlene needed to get the (aptly named) [[MacGuffin]] lily in order to change her scent, which was supposed to attract her true love (hers was a big, oafish brute). She arrives to the mountain top only to find {{spoiler|that the field had been cleared away to make room for a photo booth. When she returns, however, she finds that her scent had changed nonetheless, apparently triggered by her desire to improve herself and not settle.}}

* Sexiest example of this trope: In the NBC series ''[[Robinson Crusoe|Crusoe]],'' the title character must climb a mountain and them repel down a forbidding cliff on his island in order to retrieve a rare plant that is needed to create a medicine to cure a delirous Friday. Not only that, but he has to cut his rope (the stump it was tied to above pulled out and fell down past him, threatening to yank him off the cliff face), forcing Olivia, the medically savvy temporary visitor to the island who was posing as a man and who was along on the climb helping him find the right plant, to save him. She does this by removing all her clothes and unwinding her bindings to fashion a make-shift rope and then, completely naked, proceeding to haul him back up to the top.

 

 

== Music ==

 

 

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''[[Star Ocean: Till the End of Time]]'': Ameena, the [[Ill Girl]] you befriend, is making a wishing charm out of a rare flower, which grows only in the wildnernessy area around the town where you meet her. It doesn't appear to be anything more than an inconvenience for most people to find it, but she's in such poor health that it nearly kills her.

** Subverted humorously and combined with the [[Unexpected Gameplay Change]] in the [[Star Ocean 1|original]] for the Super NES, where you, having been living on a normal fantasy world, have to obtain the flower to cure a plague which is [[Taken for Granite|turning people into stone/crystals]]; however, as soon as you get there, an exploration team from the starship above beams down, hears your story and takes you back to the ship to get a cure. {{spoiler|It doesn't work, but this does eventually cause you to wind up saving everyone in the world, and the galaxy.}}

** This also happens in the [[Star Ocean the Second Story|second installment]]. There's a sick little girl whom you can get Private Actions with (along with another character-- who it is depends on who you're playing as and who you have in your party), and in some of them you go on a journey to the Lassguss Mountains to get a plant to cure her. The Star Ocean series seems to like this trope...

* In ''[[Exile III]]'' / ''[[Avernum]] III'', you have to fetch the most beautiful flower in the world for a faerie. It's deep in a mountain valley full of increasingly pretty meadows of flowers, each guarded by even huger hoards of gremlins that use the "[[Charm Person]]" spell.

* In ''[[Seiken Densetsu]] 3'', you go get flowers from a mountaintop... but when you arrive you make it so your wind spirit blows them toward a castle you are about to invade. Said flowers act like a sleeping gas.

* In the "Game of Peril" episode of ''[[The Perils of Penelope Pitstop]]'', Penelope's scavenger hunt list includes a rare flower called the "Crimson Avuncular", which grows only on Mount Mishmash.

* ''[[The Clone Wars]]'', though it's not so much as "flower from the mountaintop" as it is "root from the canyon on another planet".

* An episode of [[Kim Possible]] had sidekick Ron Stoppable trekking into an Amazon valley to find an orchid that could cure Kim of a poison that made her disappear when she got embarrassed.

* Po and Monkey in ''[[Kung Fu Panda]]'' scale a mountain to obtain an orchid for Tigress.

* ''[[He-Man and the Masters of the Universe|He Man and The Masters of The Universe]]'': In "The Bitter Rose", Orko does this to [[Grand Romantic Gesture|prove his love]] for Dree'Elle. Initially it causes problems for everyone until it's revealed he did something unexpectedly beneficial, after all.

[[Category:Plots]]

[[Category:Flower From the Mountaintop]]