Solo Mission Becomes Group Mission

Frodo: Go back, Sam! I'm going to Mordor alone.
Samwise: Of course you are, and I'm coming with you!

— The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

A hero from a group of heroes (usually the leader, but just as easily the most prominent hero) decides to go on a dangerous mission alone, quite likely to end in a Heroic Sacrifice. But the other heroes find out and say words to the effect of "If you go, we all go."

In the case of a leader wanting to go alone on a mission that has not been approved by the top brass, the leader might say something along the lines of "I won't ask you to disobey orders," to which the subordinates may respond with some variation of "To hell with our orders."

The group of heroes may or may not have a formal hierarchy with a rank structure (like a ship's captain and his senior officers) but is generally a Band of Brothers with loyalty to each other that's Thicker Than Water. They are also often True Companions and Fire-Forged Friends.

Related to This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself, except that the other heroes disagree and think it should be a group effort. Contrast Never Split the Party, in which everyone agrees that no one should go alone, Breaking the Fellowship or Let's Split Up, Gang!, in which the group separates or dissolves temporarily, and The Fellowship Has Ended, when the split is permanent.

Might overlap with Most Definitely Not Accompanying Us. See also Attack on One Is an Attack on All, for another trope in which something involving a single person ends up involving multiple people.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: When Rentarou makes his plan of rescuing Hakari from her mother known to the other girls, they all decide to join him in his mission.
• Rebuild World: When Akira insists on facing the incoming armored formations alone at the start of The Siege, Shiori and Kanae use the Chameleon Camouflage of their new sets of Powered Armor to shadow Akira until he begins to fight since they realize it’d be pointless arguing with him. They did this because the enemy commander has a personal grudge against both of them, so they can best protect their master Reina who’s at the Home Base by drawing enemy attention away.
• Space Battleship Yamato 2199: A Villainous Valor example. After Capt. Okita tricks Domel into getting too close to a plasma stream in the Rainbow Cluster, and the ship is being destroyed, he orders his men to abandon ship while he prepares to separate the command module and do a kamikaze attack on the Yamato. His men make no move to leave their posts, and Domel's XO grins and says it looks like they're all being court-martialed. They show no fear as Domel prepares to self-destruct the ship.

Films — Animated

• Bolt: After the titular dog decides to continue on to Hollywood to reunite with Penny, Mittens refuses to follow, preferring the plentitude of Las Vegas food to the heartbreak of human fickleness. When Rhino learns that Bolt has taken on his adventure alone, he invokes this trope in a Rousing Speech. Later, at the outskirts of Los Angeles, both Mittens and Rhino survey the sprawling city. Even cats can have pangs on conscience.
• Kung Fu Panda: While Shifu is off training Po to be the Dragon Warrior, Tigress tries to prove her worth by sneaking out to face Tai Lung herself. The rest of the Furious Five, knowing she can't do it alone, decide to join her on her quest.
  Tigress: Don't try and stop me!
  Viper: We're not trying to stop you!
  Tigress: What?
  Viper: We're coming with you!
• Pinocchio: When Pinocchio finds out his father has been swallowed by a whale, he immediately starts for the sea despite Jiminy attempting to talk him out of it. Once it becomes clear that nothing will stop him, however, Jiminy decides to stick around and help his friend.
  Pinocchio: Goodbye, Jiminy.
  Jiminy: Goodbye? I may be live bait down there, but I'm with ya!
• Trolls:
  • In the first movie, Poppy was willing to go on a trip to Bergen Town on her own to rescue her friends, even though she asked Branch for help before. Branch rejected the offer at first, but eventually joins her because he believes she wouldn't make it on her own due to her lack of skills (as well as Poppy sending the rest of the Trolls into his survival bunker basically forcing him to get out of it).
  • The same thing between Poppy and Branch happens in Trolls World Tour. Poppy doesn't mind going alone again to travel through the other newly-revealed Troll kingdoms, as she now has a hot air balloon to travel safely. Branch immediately gets on the balloon just as Poppy sends it into the air.

Films — Live-Action

• Armageddon (1998): When Harry tells the other members of Stamper Oil that they don't have to go and help him destroy the asteroid. The other men agree to go up with Harry to save the world.
• Backdraft: Bull tries to pull Adcox to safety. "You go, we go."
• Fury (2014): Right before the climactic battle, Wardaddy orders the rest of the tank crew to make their way to friendly territory and give them a heads up of the Waffen S.S. battalion headed their way, while he battled them alone. However, the rest of the crew decides to stick by him until the bitter end.
• The Matrix: Neo states his intention to return alone to the Matrix and rescue Morpheus from the Agents... until Trinity tells him in no uncertain terms that she is coming to help, and since she outranks him there's not a damn thing he can do to stop her.
• The Rise of Skywalker: When Rey decides to go searching for the Sith world Exegol alone, her friends Finn, Poe, and Chewbacca (plus C-3PO) insist on accompanying her.
• Star Trek: Insurrection: Captain Picard has dramatically taken the pips off his collar and is planning to go down to the planet by himself to save the Ba'ku from the Son'a. But his senior officers, including Lt. Commander Worf, catch him and say "no uniform, no orders."
• War for the Planet of the Apes: After the deaths of both Blue Eyes and Cornelia, Caesar leaves the ape colony to pursue his revenge against Colonel McCullough alone in spite of Rocket's, Maurice's, and Luca's protests. The following day, Caesar turns to find that Rocket, Maurice, and Luca have decided to join him despite being ordered otherwise; Rocket at one point sadly notes he's all too aware of the same anger, hatred, and the loss Caesar is feeling, and empathizes with Caesar greatly because of it. Though the trio know they can't convince Caesar to abandon his revenge, they joined him simply in the hopes that they could prevent Caesar from becoming the Death Seeker he slowly shapes into over the course of the film. Unfortunately, this leaves the Ape colony without any higher-ranking members to lead them, and as a result the entire colony is captured by McCullough's men shortly after, though it does shake Caesar out of his depression long enough for him to enact a plan to save the rest of the apes, which succeeds at the cost of his own life.

Literature

• The Belgariad: When Garion learns at the end of Guardians of the West that he'll have to undertake another lengthy quest, the Seeress revealing this information also tells him that one of the companions who accompanies him will die. As soon as Garion hears that he resolves to undertake the quest alone since he doesn't want anyone he cares about getting killed. It takes the intervention of the Prophecy itself to make him back down and bring the people he needs to.
• Harry Potter: At the end of Half-Blood Prince, Harry explains his plans for leaving Hogwarts to set off on the Horcrux hunt to Ron and Hermione, fully expecting to do it alone and wanting them to understand that. Of course, to no one's surprise except his, they insist on going with him.
• The Scholomance:
  • The endgame of A Deadly Education begins when a member of the senior class publically proposes Orion Lake, whose constant rescues disrupted the Food Chain of Evil to the point that the malifectra in the sealed-off 'Graduation Hall' by the exit to The Scholomance have been starved into unprecedented ferocious desperation, go down and repair the long-nonfunctional scouring engines which would cull the monsters down to a survivable level. Galadriel Higgins promptly cuts Orion off before he could agree, denounces sending a mediocre (and highly distracted) alchemist with maybe a kit-bashed golem for help to do such a thing as pointless aside from getting rid of him, and offered up a modification of the plan (the top "Maintenance Track" kids fix the thing, several strong encanters keep a shield up between them and the mals, while Orion goes to town on anything that may push the shielding past it's tolerances) as an alternative. Given that El promptly volunteered to join the latter mission, the student body got the impression that it was likely to get better results than, say, wrecking the wards and unleashing the horde of monsters on a lot of comparatively vulnerable underclassmen as they bolt for the gates.
  • About midway through The Last Graduate, El makes a private decision that she will use her growing arcane power to make sure her entire year gets to the exit of the Scholomance at "Graduation" rather than leave anyone to die. When she blurts her intention out during an argument with a loosely aligned Enclaver, her allies Yi Lu and Aadhya convince her to inform the rest of the senior class of her intentions and try to put together more of a plan than El giving the normal everyone-for-themselves scramble covering fire. Then the class valedictorian Liesel bullies her way into the planning sessions and imposes successful levels of organization/teamwork on the practice runs.

Live-Action TV

• Il Commissario Montalbano: At the climax of one episode, having uncovered a conspiracy involving assassination and money laundering with strong ties to the local mafia, but having absolutely no concrete evidence to make an arrest and left with no other options Montalbano opts for a risky stratagem of confronting a key player whose father was killed by the others, gambling he wasn't involved in that murder and carries enough resentment to flip. However, as if this fails it could lead to them being arrested or even killed he orders Mimi and Fazio to simply go home and let him go alone. The two immediately reject this on the spot, refusing to allow him to walk into such a dangerous situation alone and make it clear their behind him every step of the way.
• Power Rangers Time Force: In the three-part finale, Wes sends the four future Rangers back to their own time so they won't die alongside him fighting the villains. The future Rangers reject this and insist on fighting side by side with him, no matter the outcome.
• Star Trek: Discovery: There have been at least three instances of this in the second season of the show:
  • The combined crews of Discovery and Enterprise realize that the only way to keep the sphere data truly safe and out of Control's reach is to take it into the distant future. Michael Burnham is prepared to go alone. However, the core of her crew volunteers to go with her, even knowing that it's a one-way trip, meaning they'll be leaving everyone and everything they've ever known and loved 900 years behind.
  • Lt. Spock is accused of multiple murders of superior officers in the course of escaping a Starfleet mental health facility. Firmly convinced he is innocent, Michael Burnham finds Spock and takes him to Section 31, believing he needs psychiatric treatment and they can help him. However, she's warned that they intend to extract his memories regarding the Red Angel and possibly leave him brain-damaged. With a little help from former Emperor Georgiou, she breaks him out of the Section 31 ship and they go on the run. When Captain Pike finally catches up to the duo, they have to outsmart Section 31 to rescue them. By bringing them on board, the whole ship is in defiance of Starfleet orders and will need to go on the run, leading to the following interaction:
    Pike: I can't ask any of you to participate in what is clearly an act of disobedience...
    Detmer: Course heading, sir?
    Tilly: Does feel like we should get moving, like, now.
    Burnham: I think you have the crew, sir.
    Pike: Helm, get us out of here.
  • After Ensign Tilly is pulled into the mycelial network by a fungal spore posing as her dead middle school friend, the astro engineering team is confident she's still alive and can be saved. They convince Captain Pike to make a spore jump wedging Discovery half in the mycelial network and half out, while Stamets attempts to locate and extract Tilly. This plan is dangerous to both the ship and the crew, but even more so to whoever goes into the mycelial network. Stamets intends to carry out that part of the plan by himself, but Burnham insists on going with him.
• Star Trek: Voyager, "The Omega Directive": Captain Janeway would go by herself to take care of the Omega particle, but since Seven of Nine already knows about Omega, she has no choice but take the former Borg drone along for the ride. However, the rest of the senior officers learn of Janeway's plans and insist on helping her.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy X: After the slaughter of the Ronso by Seymour, Kimahri goes to avenge them, but is quickly joined by the others despite his telling them to stay behind.
• Fire Emblem Fates: One of the earliest missions in the Conquest Route sees Corrin sent on a suicide mission for allegedly "betraying" Nohr. Despite being ordered to do it alone, their sister Elise, her retainers, and several others assist them. Played with because their intervention infuriates Garon, who wanted Corrin to die, and sends them on another suicide mission.
• Halo 5: Guardians: During a mission with his fellow Spartans, Master Chief learns that Cortana is alive, and chooses to defy orders and go looking for her. Despite all of them having been raised to follow authority, his teammates' loyalty to each other is secure and they insist on coming along.
  Kelly: Whoever they are, let's get to Meridian before they do.
  John: Kelly, no.
  Linda: No need to do this by yourself, Chief.
  Fred: (slaps Chief on the shoulder) They won't court-martial all of us, right?
  John: (sighs)
• Love of Magic: Despite it being a Suicide Mission, Bella, Molly, Katie, and Jalsa all insist on joining Owyn on the mission to deliver the Black Sun.
• Yakuza 4: This is how the newly-introduced protagonists Akiyama, Saejima, and Tanimura end up tagging along with Kiryu for his usual bout with the Amon clan superbosses. Kiryu is sent a letter from Amon, and when the others offer to help him fight against the assassin, Kiryu insists that it's his problem alone and leaves. What he doesn't know is that Tanimura, who had been given the letter to give to Kiryu, had read it before passing it along, and so the trio shows up at the meeting spot to offer their help. Good thing too, because Amon just so happened to have brought along his three disciples for each of the protagonists to face off against.

Webcomics

• Often characters in Invincea and the Warriors from Hell, typically Invincea or Lon, set out to do something on their own but quickly wind up drawing other members of their friend group into the escapade.

Western Animation

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Elements of Harmony", after Nightmare Moon is freed, Twilight is initially reluctant to take other members of the Mane Six with her, insisting that she can do this on her own. However, they're quite insistent, with Applejack stating that they're not letting her go off on her own to the Everfree Forest. This proves to be fortunate since the trip required each one of their positive qualities to get through and it's where they eventually find out what their Element of Harmony is.
• The Penguins of Madagascar: In the episode "Crown Fools", Skipper accidentally causes King Julien to throw his crown into the sewers. When they go to the sewers, Skipper insists on going alone, but the other penguins make him accept their help.

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