Plot Coupon - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Plot Coupons

Whenever somebody tells you about "the five ancient talismans" or "the nine legendary crystals" or whatever, you can be quite confident that Saving the World will require you to go out and find every last one of them.

—#40, The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches ("Zelda's Axiom")

A thing that a character needs to obtain in order to cash it in for a plot resolution.

For example, let's say that our intrepid hero must steal a key, then find the Treasure Chest of Galumphry that the key will open, then remove the Orb of Power from the chest and use it to banish the Big Bad. The key, the chest, and the Orb are all plot coupons. Extremely common in video games, where collecting these coupons is known as a Fetch Quest, it is often presented as collecting several pieces of a lost artifact or gaining recognition from several factions.

The reason why you're collecting these mystic MacGuffins may not be entirely clear. It probably has something to do with either gaining some sort of power to stop the Big Bad, preventing that same power from falling into the Big Bad's hands (a quest that is typically doomed to fail), or opening the door to his lair so you can fight him.

A plot coupon might as easily be one or more in a series of MacGuffins, where the things are not important, it is the seeking of them that moves the story along. See also Sword Of Plot Advancement.

Coined by Nick Lowe in a science fiction convention talk, later printed as an article The Well-Tempered Plot Device in the fanzine Ansible and popularized by the Turkey City Lexicon

Examples

Anime

Shards of the Shikon Jewel in Inuyasha.
The rings with the Cagliostro crest in The Castle Of Cagliostro.
The Dragon Balls in Dragonball. In its sequels, the plot is resolved more by fighting, and they become McGuffins to enforce status quo.
Fushigi Yuugi: the two Shinzaho
Every Story Arc of Sailor Moon had one or more of these. Most notable are the Seven Rainbow Crystals...especially since they weren't in the original manga and were created by the anime specifically to extend the storyline. In the manga they're just looking for one big crystal; in the anime it breaks into seven color-coded pieces so the senshi have to spend that much longer trying to find them.
The Cyber Planet Keys and Omega Lock in Transformers Cybertron.

Film

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider had the pieces of the Eye of the Illuminati.
Men In Black had the Galaxy "in Orion's Belt" or rather, on the cat Orion's collar.
- Still a belt.
Pirates of the Caribbean had this in each movie. The cursed coins of Cortez needed to lift the curse in the first, the key to open Davy Jones chest in the second, and the Pieces of Eight in the third.
The Ark of the Covenant, the Sankara Stones, the Holy Grail, and the Crystal Skull in Indiana Jones
The car in Hey Dude, Where's My Car?
The White castle restaurant in Harold and Kumar

Literature

Helen Hawthorn, the narrator of Ni Claydon's Hand Of Mercy, is increasingly annoyed when she realises that the scattered bones of Clem's severed hand are effectively Plot Coupons.
Each volume of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising requires tracking down one or more Plot Coupons, all of which are named in a poem presented in the second volume.
- Over Sea, Under Stone is the hunt for the grail (not the Holy Grail, though).
- The eponymous book (volume 2) involved a hunt for six similar, elementally-themed discs known as The Signs of the Light.
- In Greenwitch, the protagonists had to retrieve a cipher key for the inscription on the grail.
- The Grey King involved winning the golden harp (clues having been provided by the grail), then using it to wake the Sleepers.
- Silver on the Tree had a mini-Plot Coupon sequence to retrieve the actual Plot Coupon (the crystal sword), the user of which had to be protected by the Signs.
Lampshaded in Death by Cliche by Robert J Defendi; only, it's the bad guy who's been collecting them.
In Teresa Edgerton's The Grail and the Ring, the titular grail. (It is not the Holy Grail, but a grail carved out of a single large sidhe-stone, a substance that grants it magical powers.) Subverted in that Prince Tryffin, when tracing the object's history in the Inner Celydonn, actually collects a "shadow" of the grail, not the original. It's strongly implied that Dame Ceinwen disposed of the original in the Marches-Between-Here-and-There to keep it from making any more trouble, then couldn't find it again when it might have been useful.
In The Ancestral Trail, the pods and, later, omni pieces.
In Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, Doctor Impossible must collect three of these to construct his latest Doomsday Device.
Sort of subverted in Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart — the story is structured as an elaborate, carefully-scripted quest, and it turns out that there's a reason why it's structured that way.
Lampshaded and averted in Un Lun Dun by China Miéville. The book of prophecy claims that, in order to defeat the Big Bad, they must collect a chain of these. The protagonist decides this will take too long, and skips to the last link in the chain.
In Keys To The Kingdom, there are parallel sets of Plot Coupons such that one of each set must be retrieved in each book: the Key held by that day's Trustee, and the portion of the Will of the Architect being held prisoner by said Trustee.
Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest series and its magic gems (plus other random broken pieces of something in the sequels.)
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry has to track down two sets of Plot Coupons before he can finish off Voldemort. The second set was strictly optional, but as long as Voldemort's already looking for one of them...
Lampshaded in Charles Stross' Saturn's Children via a particularly egregious pun: "'Don't get cute.' He grinds the gun barrel against the back of my neck. 'The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?'"
Inverted in Roger Zelazny's Forever After, in which the group of heroes who originally gathered the five sacred weapons/armor pieces, must return them to hiding, to keep the world from tearing itself apart from the strength of the combined energy.

Live Action TV

Mocked in the Angel episode "Reprise," wherein Angel is told that to get to the Big Bad, he needs a ring; to get the ring, he needs to kill a certain demon; to kill the demon, he needs a magic glove. Angel cuts off his informer with, "Okay, now you're making this up."
The long-running T-Bag series, whose 9 series and 4 specials consisted of nothing except chasing plot coupons (first letters, then numbers, then whatever arbitrary things the writers came up with). And hanging lampshades on them.
Subverted in the Doctor Who episode Last of the Time Lords: The Doctor's companion Martha spends an off-screen year assembling a super-gun and set of super-bullets that can kill a Time Lord permanently. As soon as she's done it, the Master captures her and destroys it; Martha later laughs at him for believing in such an obvious plot device and reveals that her search was just a cover for her real mission.
- Although the real mission required her to find everyone on the planet. Sort of counts.
- Done straight when the Fourth Doctor spent an entire season chasing the segments of the Key to Time.
The Objects in Sci-Fi's miniseries The Lost Room.
Just about every Rambaldi artifact from Alias (very evident in season one).

Video Games

Just about every adventure game ever made: Space Quest, The Dig, Sam and Max, Monkey Island...
- The second episode of the new Monkey Island games by Telltale Games did some Lampshade Hanging with this, when a local bait shop will ONLY accept literal coupons to purchase bait. One of these three coupons leads to a (literal) red herring, but the other two are quite essential to progress in the plot.
In Albion, a long quest revolves around finding (of all things) a virility amulet for a tribal king (and saving the guy who made it, who got lost in a big dungeon). Then there's the Metal-Magic Scroll and the High Knowledge which are required for a spell that is pretty much the only thing that can defeat the Big Bad.
The Jiggies in Banjo-Kazooie, which are used to complete the jigsaw puzzles in Gruntilda's Lair to open new worlds. Used again in Banjo-Tooie as proof that you are worthy to complete the challenges of Jiggywiggy, who seems to be the master of all things Jiggy. Naturally, these challenges open up new worlds.
- Lampshaded pretty thoroughly in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, where you once again have to collect Jiggies, but no particular reason is given outside of L.O.G. saying you have to. Kazooie even chides him, saying "that's the best you could come up with? We've already done that twice."
  - Also, the game starts with L.O.G. initiating a race to collect hundreds of meaningless tokens. Being a race between an out-of-shape bear with an obese bird in his backpack and the disembodied skull of a witch, it lasts about 5 seconds before L.O.G. gets fed up.
- Don't forget the Jinjos and the Mumbo Tokens. In true Plot Coupon style, in the last battle of Banjo-Kazooie all the Jinjos you have collected join together to summon The Jinjonator.
  - And the Stop n Swop items.
The parts of Dracula's body in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, again in the inverted castle portion of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and a third time in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance.
Used in most Commander Keen games. (Ship parts in Invasion of the Vorticons, guardians in Goodbye Galaxy!, bombs in Keen Dreams)
Used repeatedly in Diablo II:
- In Act II, you must collect the Viper Amulet, the Staff of Kings, and the Horadric Cube to assemble the Horadric Staff, which acts as a key to open the tomb of Tal Rasha.
- In Act III, you must collect Khalim's Relics; combined, they act as a key to open the Durance of Hate.
In Dragon Warrior/Quest IV and sequels, the player must collect the 4 legendary armaments (sword, shield, helmet, and armor). Only the hero may wear them, and by the time the player acquires these, his hero likely already has better equipment.
In the flagrant Dolled Up Installment Dragons Lair: The Legend, Dirk quests to collect the Lifestones to awaken a sleeping giant knight. Specifically, 194 of them. It's as much fun as it sounds.
Elemental crystals in many Final Fantasy games.
The music notes of Harvest Moon: Magical Melody and the harvest sprites of Harvest Moon DS
Kirby games generally have a set of special stars (or Crystal Shards in the game with that title) that you must collect to actually face the real Big Bad. Who will only show himself you complete everything else. However these items are generally used to make the weapon he needs in the final fight.
The Legend Of Zelda and its various sequels are the namesake for this trope. In later games, there are often two sets of coupons, the first usually being three items (pendants, pearls, etc…) needed to claim the Master Sword, rewarded halfway through. The second act then has a set of eight more items (medallions, instruments, etc…).
- The Legend of Zelda: Eight Pieces of the Triforce.
- Adventure of Link: The Six Crystals, or rather the six statues to put the crystals in (you have the crystals at the outset).
- A Link to the Past: Three Pendants first, then the Seven Maidens.
- Link's Awakening: Eight Siren Instruments
- Ocarina of Time: Three Spiritual Stones followed by the Six Medallions.
- Majora's Mask: Four Mask Remains
- Oracle of Seasons/Ages: Eight Essences of Nature/Time.
- The Wind Waker: Three Goddess Pearls, then the Two Sages, finally the Eight Pieces of the Triforce.
- Four Swords Adventure: Eight Shrine Maidens.
- The Minish Cap: Four Elements.
- Twilight Princess: Three Fused Shadows, then the Four Mirror Fragments.
- Phantom Hourglass: Three Spirits, next the Three Pure Metals.
- Even closer to the trope, in Ocarina of Time Zelda gives you a letter that allows you to pass by a certain guard.
- The Wind Waker featured plot coupons in the form of maps to Triforce pieces, each of which must be redeemed at your expense for almost 400 rupees... Then you have to go collect the pieces.
Every Mario RPG game uses this.
- Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars has you locating the seven pieces of the broken Star Road.
- Paper Mario makes you rescue the seven Star Spirits.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has you locating seven Crystal Stars. Peach is also a MAJOR plot coupon, but for a different reason. A bad one.
- Super Paper Mario mixes it up a little, you need eight Pure Hearts (You start the game with one of them, though, so you still only actually need to find seven).
- Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga has you collect the four pieces of the Bean Star after it shatters.
- Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time has you collecting the six pieces of the shattered Cobalt Star.
  - Played for laughs in this one, as the number of shards you have goes up and down wildly throughout the game, until you get them all which is worse than useless; it actually frees the Final Boss).
- Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has the three Star Cures.
The 3-D Platforming Mario games also use this trope. Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy all have you looking for 120 stars. In Galaxy, you even have to get them all a second time to with Luigi to unlock the 121st star for the 100% completion. However, none of these games actually require you to get them all to see the ending.
Each Metroid Prime games has a set of items that must be collected in order to access the final level. Fortunately, neither Metroid Prime or Metroid Prime 3 force you to get them in the main quest, and Prime 2, despite having a set of keys for The Dragon of each energy controller (which aren't Plot Coupons themselves), only told you to find them when you needed them, many times along with you doing something more important/interesting.
- The big exception here are the Octoliths in Prime: Hunters, where you must find them all at very specific plot points, and in a specific order.
Each game in the Earth Bound series features Plot Coupons. However, only the first game actually had you collect anything, and that's in the loosest sense of the word.
- Earthbound Zero features the Eight Melodies, or the 8 parts of a song that the mysterious Queen Mary of Magicant has forgotten. The Melodies aren't actually items. Instead, various NP Cs or Items sing them to you, you even get one melody from a cactus. In order to proceed to the Big Bad, you have to sing all eight melodies to Queen Mary. It turns out that Mary is actually Maria, Ninten's great-grandmother, who was abducted by aliens. Gigyas was a baby she volunteered to raise, and the song you have spent the whole game learning is a lullaby she used to sing to him. Singing the lullaby to Gigyas is the only way to actually defeat him.
- Mother 2/Earth Bound features Your Sanctuaries, eight locations where Earth's Power was the strongest. Each also had a melody associated with it, and when Ness uses the Sound Stone to play them all back, he goes to his own version of Magicant. Unlike the first game however, the eight melodies, nor the power of Magicant are used against Gigyas. Paula has to pray nine times instead.
- Mother 3 features Seven Needles scattered across the Nowhere Islands, which require the use of PK Love to be pulled out. Pulling out all seven awakens a sleeping dragon that the islands rest upon, who will only listen to the person who pulls out the seventh and final needle. The Big Bad eventually reveals a mysterious masked general who can use PK Love as well, and uses him to try and pull out the seventh and final needle. The Final Battle takes place at the site of the final needle, where Lucas fights the Masked General only to discover that the general is really his brother Claus, who apparently died earlier in the game, but was revived and brainwashed to join the Pig Mask Army. The Final Boss mostly consists of your father and the Franklin Badge blocking his attacks, while the ghost of your mother restores his sense of self, so he can die in peace. When the final needle is pulled, a fake Downer Ending is shown, which can be replaced by the actual ending by inputting a command at the "The End?" Screen.
Pages and books in the Myst games.
- Only pages in Myst 1, then symbols in Exile and, in a reverse usage, you need to bring the Plot Coupons to a specific point in Myst V. Revelation and Riven both center around solving a few overarching puzzles (namely, the water shaft puzzle and the door in Revelation and the Moiety and Dome puzzles in Riven).
In the Roguelike game NetHack, one must obtain the Bell of Opening from the Quest Nemesis, the Candelabrum of Invocation from Vlad the Impaler, 7 candles (which are not guaranteed to be generated, although there is a guaranteed lighting shop), and the Book of Dead from the Wizard of Yendor. One must then search the second-lowest level of the dungeon for the Vibrating Square and perform the Invocation Ritual.
- And that then gives you another Plot Coupon, the Amulet of Yendor, which you then can cash in on the Astral Plane to win the game.
Neverwinter Nights consists of one Plot Coupon chase after another. Waterdhavian creatures needed for the plague, evidence of who was behind the plague, Words of Power...
- And in the first expansion, four Artifacts.
Gym Badges from Pokemon, which are required by defeating the Gym Leaders in a Boss Battle. Acquring eight of these within a region is required for competing in the regional tournament in the anime, or challenging the Elite Four and the champion in the games.
Many Rare games do this. For instance, Donkey Kong 64 had gold bananas, regular bananas, banana tokens, banana faries (captured on banana film), the Nintendo and Rare tokens...
"In line with Banjo tradition, your task will be to collect as many pointless objects as possible."
- Conkers Bad Fur Day had a subversion of this in that the only thing your character collected was fat stacks of cash. Of course, it's still a Rare game because the stacks of cash have googly eyes.
The plot of Shivers, a Windows 95 game by Sierra, revolved around thirteen elemental ghosts called ixupi who were kept in pots but have been unleashed inside an abandoned museum. To capture each of these monsters, the player must find two halves of that ghost's pot, and of course each fragment is hidden until the player solves various puzzles. A completed pot is the only thing that can contain the ixupi. When all the pots are put together and the ixupi are captured, the final ixupi can be caught, triggering the ending cinematic.
The Chaos Emeralds in the Sonic The Hedgehog games. Robotnik goes after them so many times throughout the series (and fails so many times) that one would think that he'd try for another power source for his superweapons.
- Sonic CD also has the Time Stones. Sonic Rush adds the Sol Emeralds.
The Spyro The Dragon games have different Plot Coupons in each game. The first game actually switches the plot coupons as you move toward the end of the game, but in order to enter the last level of the game, you need all the dragons saved, all the dragon eggs, and all the gems.
The space exploration game Starflight required three specific items to defeat the Big Bad: one to get past its defenses, one to locate its weak spot, and one to attack with. Unlike many examples, you also spend a good chunk of the game discovering that you need these in the first place, and you may pick one or more up before learning what they're for.
Pieces of the Star Forge map in Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic.
- The missing Jedi masters in its sequel.
- It shows up a lot in various other forms too. You have to complete X number of side quests to complete certain planets, for instance.
In Thief, the main story arc of the first game begins with a series of quests to find the four elemental Talismans that will unlock the wards on the doors of the haunted cathedral. In the original Thief: The Dark Project the talismans are distributed over two missions, while in Thief Gold each of the four has its own mission.
The Evil Pig Bags in both Tomba Games.
Every single Tomb Raider, save for Unfinished Business. The most extreme example would be in Tomb Raider 2, when a Plot Coupon (the Seraph) is used to obtain another Plot Coupon (the Talion) which is used to obtain the game's Artifact Of Doom, the Dagger of Xian.
The pieces of the Artifact Of Doom in Unreal 2.
World Of Warcraft has ~~hundreds~~ thousands of quests based on the format "Find/make/kill X plot coupons and bring them to me". Indeed, this has become a trait of massively multiplayer online games, primarily because it means people will keep paying for their subscription so they can get the last three widgets, only to finally get them and be rewarded with a quest to find more of a different widget.
- The items you must collect in order to attune yourself to a raid instance, such as the Vials of Eternity from Vashj and Kael.
Rare cards in the various Yu-Gi-Oh series, particularly the three Egyptian God cards and the three Sacred Beast cards.
Crash Bandicoot has gems in the first game and crystals and gems in every game since them. The original explanation for this was a powersource for a huge mind control device.
The pearls in Beyond Good And Evil are a cross between this and Gotta Catch Them All - you earn them for plot advancement, boss battles, success in side tasks and minigames (or you can just find them at hidden spots, or even purchase them), and use them to buy equipment for your vehicle in order to gain access to other areas of the world. (There are about a dozen extra pearls above and beyond what is needed to complete the game.)

Western Animation

The Thirteen Treasures of Rule in Pirates of Dark Water.
The ~~jewel shards~~ Allspark fragments in Transformers Animated.
Jackie Chan Adventures had a different set in every season.
- First season: The Twelve Talismans.
- Second season: The eight demon portals.
- Third season: The Twelve Talismans were destroyed, and the power found its way to the "most noble examples" of the associated animals... better find those, too.
- Fourth season: The eight Oni Masks.
- Fifth season: The eight Demon Relics.
Kim Possible, A Sitch in Time, Collect the body of the Time Monkey Idol. Check. Collect the head of the Time Monkey Idol. Check. Have the Time Monkey Idol in the sunlight in a cave to activate the Time Traveling. Check. At least this was the Villains' quest, Kim just failed stopping them.
- This also happens in the episode revolving around Kim's new mission outfit: Drakken and Shego have to collect three MacGuffins for their Doomsday Device, leading to three meetings with Kim, who tries out a different (and rather misguided) outfit in each one, before busting them the fourth time in her new threads.
The five-episode stories in GI Joe always boiled down to Joe and Cobra racing each other to see who could collect the necessary plot coupons first.