Four-Leaf Clover

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Yotsuba&! with her namesake.

Four Leaf Clover = Good luck charm. For this reason, four leaf clovers tend to have special significance when they appear in media. Sometimes parodied or referenced with mention of a clover that has an absurd number of leaves.

More info can be found here.

See also Fleur-de-Lis.

Examples of Four-Leaf Clover include:

Advertising

  • One of the marshmallows in Lucky Charms breakfast cereals.

Anime and Manga

  • In Negima!?, Yue gives one to Nodoka to give to Negi as support for her Crush on him. (Even though its a Love Triangle between the 3.)
    • The Cook Satsuki Yotsuba is named after this.
    • In the first Negima anime series 100 of these are needed for a love potion spent all night looking for them. (This is different in the manga when Negi had 7 magic pills That were placed in his bag by his cousin, that could help craft the thing.)
  • Yotsuba&!. Her hair is even shaped like one.
    • She gives one to Asagi as a souvenir, reminding Asagi's mother of when Asagi gave one to her... and she tasked her with finding a five-leaf clover.
  • Cross Game uses a four-leaf clover motif. With each sister representing a leaf.
  • Clover uses clovers as a motif for the psychics with the most powerful being a four-leaf.
  • Kaitou Kid of Magic Kaito and Detective Conan not only uses has a stylized four-leaved clover on his monocle, his real name, Kaito Kuroba, has the word "clover" (romaji kurobaa) in it.
  • In Honey and Clover, the four leaf clover is used as a symbol of people's search for happiness, with one notable scene in which most of the main cast is looking for four leaf clovers on the river bank. And then there's the ending, where the combination of clovers and honey comes into full fruition.
  • A one-episode subplot in the second season of A Certain Scientific Railgun has some of the characters help some children search for a four-leaf clover in order to keep them from breaking the law (by looking for a different good-luck charm). The character who considers herself to be the least inclined to believe in good-luck charms finds one for them. The other recurring characters find more than one four-leaf clover each.
  • Yotsuba in Sister Princess calls herself Clover and wears an outfit with a four-leaf clover motif during the episode that features her.
  • A flashback story in Aria the Origination uses Akira's fruitless search for a four-leaf clover as a metaphor for her lack of inborn talent... with an Aesop provided by her employer's daughter giving Akira the determination to succeed by using skill instead of inborn talent.

Film

Literature

  • In Mostly Harmless, there's an alternate-universe Earth where—due a stray bit of radiation affecting the genome of the first clover plant—four-leaf clovers are the norm and three-leaf clovers are the exception. This particular Earth also didn't get destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Coincidence? It gets destroyed in the end by the updated Guide, anyway.
  • In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, one of the Oz books, a six leaf clover that can only be found near the Emerald City is an ingredient in a magical compound.

Video Games

  • Nethack: after sacrificing, you may "glimpse a four-leaf clover at your feet", which just means that you've been granted extra luck by your deity.
  • Four-leaf clovers are lucky in Animal Crossing.
  • Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: Nine clovers were given by Snake to the other players of the Nonary Game. They were to be given to Yotsuba. And that's disregarding the bookmark.

MMORPGs

Web Comics

Western Animation

Real Life

  • The New Jersey lottery uses a four leaf clover with a picture of the state in the middle as its logo, early televised drawings used the song "I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover" as theme music.
  • As does the symbol of the French national lottery.