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alt title(s): Gotta Catch Em All Gary: "Every Pokémon? Are you serious? You're sending us KIDS out into the world to find EVERY POKÉMON? You don't see ANYTHING dangerously irresponsible about this?"
Oak: "Nope! GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL!"
Fantastic! I can't believe you went through the hassle! Are you some kind of machine? If it were me, I would have probably just let the world implode.
— Narain Soothfancy, World of Warcraft NPC
Simply put, there's a number of somethings spread across far and wide, and the cast has to go find them. It could be more cast members, magical artifacts, pieces of a single artifact, or some other MacGuffin, but somehow each and every one will be involved in some individual plot that can pad the episode or even an entire Story Arc. The most basic form of Plot Coupon.
Ideal for TV series, as each episode can have its own obstacles, villains, and setting, and be written by a different author; just as long as each episode ends with a new plot coupon being found. The series can then claim there is a Story Arc to an otherwise completely unrelated set of stories. Also found popularity among video games for a while due to its simplicity, e.g. the Commander Keen series.
The Twelve Labours of Hercules are perhaps the earliest occurrence of this, making it Older Than Dirt. (Originally Hercules was expected to perform ten, but the Dungeon Master decreed that two of them didn't count and made him do two extra. This still happens today.)
Often the reason for Walking The Earth, specially as a step in the way To Be A Master.
Main types of this trope are:
- Type A: Artifacts. It's about collecting ancient artifacts.
- Type B: Dismantled Mac Guffin. Usually an important item is broken into several pieces and now has to be reassembled.
- Type C: Cast members.
In video games, they can also be categorized as following:
- Crucial: All pieces of something have to be collected to complete the game and dependent on plot. Often every of the piece or artifact is guarded by a guardian. Example would be Serious Sam 2 where a hero has to collect all 5 pieces of a medallion.
- Semi-important: Only some part of them has to be collected to complete the game unless wanting to achieve Hundred Percent Completion. Super Mario 64 and Super Mario galaxy are examples of it.
- Optional: None of the artifacts of that type is needed to complete the game, unless aiming for Hundred Percent Completion. Kirby 64 is an example of this.
Examples
Anime
- Trope name taken from the advertising slogan for Pokemon, which had both the titular creatures and the Gym Badges.
- Dropped from the Anime because Ash never got his act together and wasn't, as he so proudly liked to boast he would, catching them all.
- He wouldn't know what to do with most of them if he did "catch them all".
- The slogan has been dropped altogether from the game boxes, probably because there's 493 Pokémon (plus many extra forms) and thus catching them all would be difficult. This is particularly apparent in Diamond and Pearl, which put a greater emphasis on just seeing all the Pokémon.
- Also take into account that this slogan is an American creation. Pokémon in Japan doesn't have this slogan. And for good reason: in the anime, it's clearly treated as immoral (and even world-endangering) to capture certain Pokémon.
- It originally had a very similar one though: Pokémon GET da ze! (I'll get Pokémon!)
- The Dragon Balls in the series of the same name and its sequels.
- In the first two arcs of Yu-Gi-Oh, the tournaments required specific numbers of Star Chips (Duelist Kingdom) or puzzle cards (Battle City) to gain entry to the finals.
- A completely different manifestation of the same trope, Yu-Gi-Oh also features the God Card-hunt and eventually the Millenium Item-hunt - this time objects hunted for their power when brought together.
- The cast of Inu Yasha are searching for the umptynine pieces of the Shikon Jewel, an artifact of incredible power (that, incidentally, will allow the main character To Become Human). The big bad wants all the pieces to, just so he can use it to become stronger.
- Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch takes an odd spin on this: the main characters are also the items, at least in part.
- Subversion in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, where the search for the Plot Coupons, the Jewel Seeds, is pretty much discarded halfway through so that the writers can get to the character development.
- Sailor Moon anime does this at least twice. In the first season with the seven Rainbow Crystals, and in the third with the Talismans.
- Don't forget the last season, where the Big Bad wants to take all the Star Seeds that belong to Sailor Senshi. Gotta Catch Them All, indeed.
- The first ten or so episodes of Transformers Armada focus on recovering Minicons, a small race of robots with power-boosting abilities. Because of this, the series is sometimes referred to as "Pokeformers."
- There are also the protoforms/stasis pods in Beast Wars and RID, the Cyber Planet Keys in Cybertron, and so on.
- Naruto has a little bit of this, excepts it's the villains (Akatsuki) looking for the people (Bijuu).
- At the begining of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles the cast sets out searching for Sakura's 50 bajillion missing feathers of memory, but in the Acid Tokyo Arc, it is revealed that the feather hunt is part of the Big Bad's Xanatos Roulette, and thus literally pointless. The focus of the plot shifts drastically from there on out.
- In Princess Tutu, the titular character searches the town for shards of the Prince's heart, which was shattered when he imprisoned the raven from the story.
- Dinosaur King revolves around new dinosaurs appearing in every episode, with the D Team and the Alpha Gang racing to get them. The DS game makes this mandatory, including a Dinosaur Encyclopedia that catalogues the Mesozoic beasties that you obtain, with rewards for getting certain amounts.
- Soul Eater starts with the titular character eating the last of 99 evil souls and going for the witch's soul he needs to complete the collection. Of course, since this is the beginning of the series, he screws up and needs to start over from the beginning.
- In Chrono Crusade, Aion's plan hinges around finding the gifted children known as "Apostles". Chrono and Rosette's nakama attempts to stop him from doing this...but only ends up handing him the last one he needs. Oops.
- In Fushigi Yuugi, Miaka, being the Priestess of Suzaku, must gather the seven Celestial warriors in order to summon Suzaku. Cue an Unwanted Harem of men.
- Type C is found in Katekyo Hitman Reborn, after a sudden Genre Shift with the story getting more serious and actually having a plot. It is revealed that in order to become the next Vongola leader, Tsuna must assemble all seven of his Bishonen guardians (Rain, Storm, Thunder, Mist, Sun and Cloud). Tsuna ends up having to do this twice, the second time being after he gets transported into 10 years into the future.
- This is essentially Dark's main goal in DN Angel—he's stealing all of the magical works of art created by Satoshi's family, the Hikaris—who also created him.
Film
- The cursed pieces of eight from the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie; the nine pieces of eight in the third movie might count too.
Literature
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth Harry Potter book, made it clear that the final book would revolve at least in part around a Gotta Catch Them All scenario, using Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes. (However, this isn't quite on the scale of most of the other examples of this trope, largely because there's only one book to deal with it, not a television series of indeterminate length.)
- Deathly Hallows, however, subverts the trope by having Harry collect all three of the MacGuffins from DUMBLEDORE's failed childhood quest by sheer accident in the course of collecting the Plot Coupons for HIS OWN quest. Of course, he then discards them anyways after he's done with his quest.
- The Deltora Quest books, unusually, differentiated their Plot Coupons from each other and gave them individual powers. The topaz, for instance, could clear and sharpen the mind, but its effectiveness depended on the phase of the moon; it could also be used to see into the spirit world. The emerald darkened at danger, the amethyst paled in the presence of poison, the opal could be used to see the future, and so forth.
- The later two series of the books had different takes. The second series had the heroes searching for the pieces to a magical flute (which only held real power when it was whole), and the third series had them searching for the Four Sisters who were draining the life from the land (making it more 'Gotta Kill Them All').
- Played with backward in Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy, where it's the villains who are collecting the pieces of the Wikkit Gate, and our heroes are trying to stop them (or, some of them are. The rest would rather get a drink and have a lie down).
- Subverted in the Twelve Treasures Trilogy - The plot of each novel involves restoring one of the stolen Treasures of the magical kingdom, and (obviously) there are Twelve Treasures, but only three of them have actually been stolen (that the readers know of; a different noble house keeps each one, and no one will admit to having lost one, so things get a bit murky).
- Louise Cooper's Indigo series involves an immortal protagonist who is destined to walk the earth until she has banished the seven demons which she accidentally loosed upon the world.
- Author Matthew Reilly is a little overly fond of this trope. To the exent that his latest piece of alliterative schmutz "Six Sacred Stones" ends with a bitchy, mid-plot cliffhanger where the badass Hero has not caught them all with his bionic arm and we simply must buy another (as yet unreleased) hardcover for the resolution. Gosh, what a great way to build up a happy, loyal readership.
- In The Dresden Files, the Knights of the Cross have, over the centuries, collected some of the demon-possessed coins of the Order of the Blackened Denarii, but cannot finally defeat the Denarians until they get them all. This was a major plot point in Small Favor.the
- In Coraline the title character has to find the souls of the taken children and her parents before she is allowed to go back to her own world.
- Ummm... no. Rescuing their souls was just something that she decided to do in addition to getting out of there.
- In each volume of Jack Chalker's The Four Lords of the Diamond, one of the Assassin's alter egos has to find and either kill or subvert the Lord of the particular Diamond world to which he is assigned, as well as investigating his particular piece of the overall puzzle.
- Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising.
- In the individual book of that title, the protagonist must find the six Signs of the Light.
- Over the course of the series, each book involves finding at least one artifact or set of artifacts (the grail, the Signs, the harp, the crystal sword).
- Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom combines at least two forms of this; in each book, the protagonist must find one of the seven separated parts of the Will of the Architect (each of which is a character in its own right) and one of the seven Keys.
Live Action TV
- Ezekiel Stone, the main character of Fox's short-lived 1998 series Brimstone, is released from Hell by the Devil to use his police skills to track down and retrieve 113 damned souls who escaped the afterlife back to Earth. Short life meant he got nowhere NEAR his goal.
- Ditto with Jeremy Piven's Cupid, who was supposed to unite 100 couples. The show only ran 15 episodes, and some of them didn't add any couples to his tally.
- Similarly, 100 Deeds For Eddie McDowd, a show that was Too Good To Last on Nickelodeon. The titular character, a juvenile delinquent, was turned into a dog and needed to do 100 good deeds in order to regain his human form.
- The premise of Friday The 13th The Series is that Micki and Ryan must recover all of the cursed antiques purchased from their uncle's store.
- The six pieces of the Key to Time in Doctor Who.
- Subverted in 'Last of the Time Lords' where Martha talks about having to travel around the world to collect the four hidden pieces to a gun that could kill the Master and prevent him from regenerating. When the Master catches her and reveals that he knows her plan, she laughs at him and says, "You really believed that?" Turns out the whole thing was a bluff and her actual plan was something else altogether.
- The titular Keys of Marinus.
- In TV show My Nameis Earl, the titular character must fix all the things he's ever done wrong in order to clear his karma.
- In the first ever Chinese Tokusatsu Armor Hero they have to seal 52 monsters into 52 cards,in 52 episodes. It's quite a clean show like that.
- Power Rangers has had a few "Find the five Ranger-color-coded somethings" plots.
- In the children's TV series T.Bag, every season was centered around the protagonist collecting items to complete a set, to prevent T.Bag from gaining more power.
- In the Sci-Fi show "The Lost Room," characters are, for various reasons, seeking artifacts known as Objects, which originated in a 1960s motel room and are endowed with curious properties (for instance, one Object is a watch which can boil an egg placed inside the band).
- The main plot point of Reaper is that the lead has to catch escaped souls from Hell, similar to Brimstone mentioned above.
- The twelve Cosmo Capsules in Chousei Kantai Sazer X. When united, the twelve of them grant one wish. So naturally everyone is after them. Each episode even keeps a tally on who has what Capsules.
- WMAC Masters, a short-lived show that was a strange cross between Professional Wrestling, American Gladiators, and Power Rangers, featured this as its central mechanic. Winning a competition allowed one of the competitors to take his opponent's "symbol" (a medallion with a symbol engraved that relates to the character's nickname), and once one of the competitors got the symbols of each of the others, he could challenge for the championship.
Machinima
Video Games
- The Legend Of Zelda series always have some of sort: 8 pieces of Triforce, 6 medallions, 8 instruments, 3 jewels, 4 masks... the apparent only exception is Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, in which the hero has to put 6 jewels on statues, but the principle is the same...
- Twilight Princess is a particularly egregious offender: In the main plot alone, you have 3 fused shadows, then 3 mirror shards, then you have to kill 20 monsters in one village, then find 6 owl statues covering sigils. This isn't even counting all the Fetch Quest efforts that are standard to the series—Poes, Golden Bugs, Heart Pieces, etc.
- Eh, Twilight Princess isn't really any different than the other games in the series, except for that it splits up the required collectibles into two groups rather than just one. The 20 masks, however, in Majora's Mask, while not all plot-required, are still the main focus of the game if you want Hundred Percent Completion with the best ending.
- Also, in The Minish Cap, you have Kinstones, which each matching pair having a different effect (unlocking secret paths, removing barriers, making special items available, etc.)
- The seven (or six, or five, or fourteen, or...) Chaos Emeralds from Sonic The Hedgehog. Often optional extras hidden in Bonus Stages that are still required to get the Good Ending or the final boss (except when they aren't due to being vital Plot Coupons)
- And in Shadow The Hedgehog, while the Emeralds weren't compulsory, to get the Last Boss you needed to get all 10 endings, each of which Shadow had all 6 Emeralds in whether you collected them or not.
- Then there were the Team Chaotix levels in Sonic Heroes, which often focused on collecting some sort of random item. Most non-neutral missions in Shadow The Hedgehog also focused on some sort of collection, ranging from sucking up 20 bombs to collecting 400 rings to destroying all thirty-five Artificial Chaos.
- In the game King's Bounty, in order to find the scepter that was the game's ultimate goal, one had to find the pieces of the map detailing its location. As a Shout Out, its successor series, Heroes of Might & Magic, has generally allowed you to similarly gather pieces of a map to find some special building or artifact, although it's now a side quest, rather than the game's central plot.
- The Suikoden series of games does this with the 108 Stars of Destiny — party members and usually-helpful NPCs for your castle.
- Most games in the Final Fantasy series feature some form of this, either in the main quest or as part of one of the subquests.
- Final Fantasy VI features an odd take on this trope. After Kefka turns the entire planet into a ruinous wasteland, the second half of the game revolves heavily around finding and
collecting reuniting the scattered members of the old party to face him.
- You don't need to find all the characters to finish the game though.
- In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, the main quest was to collect the 5 titular stones. Never mind that you fail to collect 4 out of the 5 stones, and still manage to win because Humanity Is Superior.
- Rareware seems to be in love with this trope, managing to shoehorn huge numbers of things you need to collect into practically every game.
- Sly Cooper did this with the first game collecting pieces of his family's how to be a great thief guide, the second collecting the remains of the first games Big Bad, and the third game revolved around collecting party members for a big heist at the end of the game.
- Unreal 2's Tosc-unlocking thing. You hop around all but two missions (the first and the defense one) gathering pieces of the artifact. Then it turns out that it alters the most harmless sentient creatures in the game into killing machines with black hole guns, so what you just spent the entire game doing turned out to be a really bad idea.
- Kakurenbo Battle Monster Tactics has 125 types of monsters to defeat, each with their own type of pawprint (called a Montac) and a skill to learn if the defeated monster has enough power. (Some monsters give up the same skills though.)
- Myst likes to do this, especially in the first one: in this Gotta Catch Them All scenario, you have to find almost all of the blue and red pages for the brother's books. I say almost because completing either brother's book with the final page results in the player being trapped in that brother's book for eternity.
- As if that wasn't enough, Myst III: Exile has you traversing three ages in order to find mantras that the villain has tampered with. This scenario is, however, a truncated version of this trope, as there are only three mantras that you need to find - Along with a fourth mantra that helps you solve a certain puzzle at the end and is hidden in the text of one of the character's journals. I Am Not Making This Up.
- Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge. The player has to locate four pieces of a sacred scroll, each of them concealed in a different "world" within the game. The gameplay of each world is completely unrelated to the others and except for the first one, can be played in any order as the player chooses. It sort of smacks of a committee of writers who couldn't get along and were separated for their own good.
- The Ham-Chat words in Hamtaro Ham Hams Unite and {{Hamtaro]] Ham Ham Heartbreak.
- Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic had the player going on a quest from the Jedi Council to find all the pieces of a corrupt star map.
- It is later revealed that the player previously found the maps as a Sith Lord, but had had his brain wiped clean and was converted by the council.
- KOTOR II also has this, except you're "catching" Jedi Masters. Light side, you're gathering them at the Dantooine Enclave. Dark side, you're killing them where they stand.
- You basically do this in Mass Effect as well: you collect bits of a coordinate, more coordinates that tell you how to use what you find when you get to the first coordinates, and somebody who can understand the whole damn thing in the first place. A checklist of planets, each with a beginning, middle and end, and each with their own miniature scenario which you must resolve as part of your Big Quest.
- The Megaman Battle Network series does this. In each of the 6 games in the series, you battle with battle chips. Each game has a couple of hundred to find by either defeating enemies quickly or simply picking them up. Collecting them all usually allows you to fight a Bonus Boss.
- In Oblivion you can get a sidequest in which you have to collect a glowing plant called nirnroot.
- In the first Metroid Prime, you have to collect all the artifacts to gain access to the impact site.
- Used similarly in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
- Spyro the Dragon games ALWAYS have a Gotta Catch Them All. In the first it was "free the trapped dragons," in Year of the Dragon it was "find the dragon eggs," in Enter the Dragonfly it was, well, "catch all the dragonflies," and in A Hero's Tail you needed to destroy Dark Gems, find Light Gems, AND find Dragon Eggs.
- Fallout 3, coming from a franchise that has avoided this collection chase, snuck one in as The Nuka-Cola Challenge to hunt down Nuka-Cola Quantums. To be fair, it's not required to catch them all, as the prize is a schematic that makes Nuka-Cola Quantum into a powerful weapon, and unlike most of this trope's instances the player is given a lead to large stashes by the quest-giver.
- Fallout 3 also has the "Optional Artifacts" in the form of the 20 Vault Boy Bobbleheads scattered around the Wasteland. Funnily enough, there aren't any at Vault-Tec Headquarters.
- Fallout 2 did it first with finding the 10 issues of Cat's Paw magazine as a sidequest.
- In Diablo II, the hero is forced to collect the pieces of the Horadric Staff, and then combine them in the Horadric Cube (the cube looks about the size of a fuzzy dice to me, so I never really understood those physics, but whatevs), there is also the option of collecting various armor sets, when you get all the pieces you usually get a special bonus.
- The Harvest Moon games have a Gotta Catch Them All aspect in Magical Melody (music notes) and Harvest Moon DS (harvest sprites).
- The Mega Man Zero series until the fourth game also does this, with the cyber-elf computer programs. These little critters are collected all over the place, powered up, and used to give Zero useful bonuses. The games inhibit the latter feature, though, by lowering Zero's rank with each use.
- World Of Warcraft, like many MMORPGs, has a ton of these. The page quote from Narain Soothfancy actually lampshades one of the earliest examples of a mandatory Catch 'Em All quest chain that requires visiting every raid dungeon that existed in the game at the time, sometimes more than once. (Fortunately, only one player per realm actually had to complete the quests to advance the story.) More recently, the Achievement system has been added specifically to encourage this behavior, although it's completely optional from a gameplay perspective. Collectibles include pets, mounts, tabards, crafting recipes, faction reputation, revealing the world map, completing quests, and of course, achievements themselves.
- Glider PRO: "There are 6 stars in the house. Get every star to win."
- In Skies Of Arcadia, you do this with both the Moon Crystals (the 5 you actually can get are promptly stolen from you when The Dragon ambushes and destroys your base; you do not get them back) and optionally with crew members.
- Guild Wars. Hoo boy. There are 1,319 skills including 293 elite skills, 26 heroes, and 33 charmable animals to add to your Zaishen Menagerie. Aside from the elite skills, it's all just for fun and/or Hundred Percent Completion; the elite skills contribute to four maxed titles toward the thirty required (and thirty-eight available, so you don't technically Gotta Catch Them All, and in fact can't) for the game's ultimate Bragging Rights Reward: the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals title.
- It seems that we have forgotten the the one who made this trope, good old Pokemon, which as of now has you to go and collect not 151, but 493!! And consider that some of these you can't obtain unless you visit a Nintendo event.
Western Animation
- The Shen Gong Wu from Xiaolin Showdown.
- Jackie Chan Adventures seemed to feature a new set of these for each season. First came the twelve talismans, then the eight demon portals, then twelve animals that had gained the powers of their respective talisman, and so on.
- Lamp Shaded in the first episode of the fourth season, in which the different masks were discovered. While one character discovers that there are 9 masks, another mentions "Let me guess. The masks were scattered to the 'four corners of the globe, right?'".
- The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo had those meddling kids (well, four of them: Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy) plus mentor Vincent Van Ghoul and the supposedly loveable young rascal Flim-Flam trying to recapture 13 ghosts that had escaped from "The Chest of Demons".
- The premise of Lilo And Stitch The Series (a Recycled The Series of the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch) is that everyone has to find the other 625 experiments (Stitch's "Cousins") lost throughout Hawaii. As of the finale movie 'Leroy and Stitch', this has been completed, up to and including Leroy, who is unofficially Experiment 629
- Danny Phantom's "Reality Trip" episode, requiring Danny, Tucker, and Sam to find and retrieve three gems within a set time limit and return them to Monster Clown Freakshow. As a side note, the opening theme song implies a need for the titular character to catch all the ghosts in the show ("Gonna catch 'em all, 'cause he's Danny Phantom".)
- In Transformers Animated the All-Spark shatters into umpty-nine pieces each which affects Future-Detroit's technology as well as the giant robots in different ways. The cast has to find them.
- They're probably not going to find all of them, considering that some have been bringing Transformers to life from machinery, and stuck in there pretty damn well.
- The crew of the Wraith in The Pirates of Dark Water were supposed to collect 13 treasures. The show only lasted long enough for them to get 8, in part because the eighth took the entire (truncated) second season to find.
Other
- ''Bionicle"
- First has the heroes gathering Great Kanohi Masks.
- Then Krana, similar to masks but alive.
- Then the heroes found out that the little village elders were collecting loads and loads of scary worm things called Kraata.
- Then Or rather earlier Great Kanoka Disks.
- Then after everything above but before everything else on this list a bunch of heroes turned mutant hunchbacks, were trying to save every surviving monster in the city after an attack of spider monsters
- And then, The heroes were given a big list of things to do including collecting several ancient artifacts
- Last time we saw this in bionicle the heroes were trying to collect some magical keystones to open a big magical door.
- Also worth noting is Onu-metru a city that consists of a huge underground museum where a sample of everything is kept quite obsessive folks aren't they.
- Those Who Hunt Elves spoofs this by scattering the runes of a spell to send the cast Trapped In Another World home. However, the runes are on the bodies of the elf inhabitants, so the cast decides that the logical (huh huh) thing to do is to strip every elf they come across in order to find the runes.
- Johnny Cash's song "One Piece at a Time" is about a man who builds a Cadillac in this manner.
- And a Donald Duck story by Don Rosa, "Recalled Wreck", has Donald doing the same after he finds out that his neighbor (without any bad intention) sold the pieces of his beloved car to the neighbors.
- The "plot" of Adventurers! revolved around finding the Elemental Relics
 . Unfortunately, these were the relics of the modern elements: Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, and all the other elements in the periodic table. The progress on this quest was generally kept in the background.
- The 1976 Dungeons And Dragons supplement, Eldritch Wizardry, introduced The Rod of Seven Parts, a "greater artifact" that was, as the name suggests, broken into its components. The description of the item explicitly states that the Rod will never be found whole; while each of the components is powerful in and of itself, combining them brings out entirely new abilities. Thus, you Gotta Catch Them All. Years later, the publishers produced an adventure module that used the Rod as its central MacGuffin.
- Eldritch Wizardry also introduced other artifact "sets", such as the Orbs of Dragon-Kind.
- Real Life example: One of the great mathematical accomplishments of the 20th century is the classification of all the finite, simple groups. Fits this trope because beyond the well-behaved, predictable cyclic groups of prime order, alternating groups, and classical Lie groups are the three exceptional Lie groups and the twenty-six so-called sporadic groups which do not readily fit into any category.
- Real Life again: the attempt to "catch" all 94 naturally occurring chemical elements. Finally achieved with plutonium in 1941. But, rather like the Pokémon creators, science now gives us the possibility that element 121 may also occur in tiny amounts in nature.
- However, even discovering this element's existence would either shove a pipe up the rear end of, or totally revolutionize modern chemistry, depending on your point of view.
- Whether something exists "in nature" is a matter of definition; many elements have long since decayed away on the Earth and only exist in stars or in very small amounts created by natural nuclear reactions. If you count stars, there may be other elements discovered in nature. Plutonium that has survived from the origin of the Earth rather than been formed since then was not discovered until 1971 (the half-life of the longest lived version is just barely long enough that a few atoms survive today).
- Lab/Treasure/Land maps, Talisman pieces, collectable plushies... Petsites are full of these, and they always have a final goal, that's it, some sort of status for the users that collect these, since it's impossible to have all the pets at once.
- The Holders Series are an odd subversion. The idea is apparently for the Seeker to "Catch" one or two of them to prevent them from ever being brought together, which will result in The End Of The World As We Know It. Then again, it also says that not bringing them together will result in something which may or may not be just as horrible ...
- The TV Tropes Wiki itself is a Gotta Catch Em All of tropes and archetypes from both fiction and nonfictional sources, whose success will have an unknown significant meaning for the universe!
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