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Just to make sure that the hero can't refuse the call of destiny, his family or loved ones will be brutally murdered by the enemy to drive home the point that he can't run away from his life mission. The extreme of And Your Little Dog Too.

The hero thus takes up the avenging banner, embittered and hardened for the experience. Many an Anti Hero has been shaped by this. He Who Fights Monsters almost certainly has.

Related to Doomed Hometown, only viciously more personal. Contrasts with Stuffed Into The Fridge, where the similarly personal tragedy is exceptionally cruel but there was no Refusal Of The Call and the event seems largely unnecessary for the story.

Related to and sometimes overlaps with Death By Origin Story. The Forgotten Fallen Friend is the name of the trope where, after the hero starts the adventure, he or she gets over the deaths with remarkable aplomb.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Peter Parker was taught that power comes with responsibility through the death of his Uncle Ben.
• Matt Murdock loses his strict but loving father when the old man refuses to take a dive in a prizefight. Father is killed, ergo Daredevil.
  • To be fair, Spiderman and Daredevil were invented by the same person.
• The Punisher.
  • Most conspicuous in Born, set during Castle's time in Vietnam. Castle is seen having an internal monologue with himself, pushing him towards violence and guaranteeing that he could keep Castle's war going on forever. Towards the end of the book, Castle is in the middle of a truly hopeless battle, alone versus a massive amount of VC. The voice says that it will let Castle live and continue to fight... if he pays a price. Castle agrees, goes on to murder the entire enemy force alone, but promptly leaves the service, planning to live in peace with his wife and children. The voice then remidns him, there's a price to be paid.
• In Joss Whedon's comic Fray, new slayer Melaka Fray drags her heels over her destiny until her young friend Loo - The Cutie - is murdered. The really awful twist is that she wasn't killed by vampires, but by Mr Exposition Urkonn, specifically in order to motivate her.
  • Joss likes this trope. See also, Serenity. Crew decides maybe they'd better not, y'know, mess with an entire interplanetary government. Then the Operative starts destroying all their safehouses...
• A variant is used in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer Origin comic. Buffy's family does not come under attack, but her school does - The Call Knows Where You Go To School, perhaps? Later, a character tells Buffy that she is a creature of destiny - in other words, her school wasn't attacked by Lothos because she went there, she went there because it was under attack by Lothos.

Film

• Dates back as far as the 1956 classic The Searchers.
• In Star Wars, Luke is obliged to become a Jedi when his home is burned down with his aunt and uncle left as charred remains outside.
• An oddly literal variation occurs in the first Pirates Of The Caribbean film: Elizabeth's cursed gold piece actually 'calls' to the pirates, which brings them to her Doomed Hometown.
  • Except Port Royal wasn't a doomed hometown. It was just roughed up a little.
    • Same function, less wholesale destruction.
• The beginning of Mel Gibson's The Patriot fits this to a tee. Benjamin Martin is a dedicated pacifist, arguing against going to war in the State Assembly and refusing to let his sons join the Continental Army. It's not until the British Col. Tavington burns down his farm, kills his second son, and drags his oldest son off to be hung as a spy that Martin joins the fight.
  • Happens first in Braveheart- William Wallace just wants to 'till fields and maybe raise a family.' Guess what happens to his new wife?
• In a literal case, in Bruce Almighty, Bruce finds a pager which he cannot lose or destroy with a number. When he calls the number, he is told to go to a certain address "or we'll just keep beeping you."
• In Transformers Revenge Of The Fallen The call knows where Sam goes to school and where his parents went on vacation. It's a very thorough call.
• Anti-hero Josey Wales is content to be a poor dirt farmer in Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales; until the Union's brutal "Red Legs" militia burned his farm and murdered his family, which he barely survives. After he's had time to recover, he's met by and joins up with a Confederate guerilla band; achieving noteriety as a skillful and unrelenting fighter, and a substantial bounty is placed on his head by the Union. After the war, he ends up defending several First Nations individuals from brutal exploiters, and an innocent homestead from former Union Red Legs turned bounty hunters and bandits.
• Alex Rogan wasn't crazy or stupid enough to hop into the middle of a space dogfight that had absolutely nothing to do with him...until Xur decided to send assassins to Earth to hunt him down and kill him. Cue epic one-man god mode wipeout.

Literature

• God wants Jonah to deliver a message of damnation to Nineveh. Jonah says no, because he thinks that if Nineveh will repent, God won't destroy them. Jonah attempts to flee God. Cue great fish.
• Eragon finds his uncle's house blown up and his uncle dead; abruptly he realizes that dragon ownership comes with responsibilities.....
• In Animorphs, Marco was reluctant to involve himself in fighting the good fight — until he discovered that his mother was also controlled by one of the brain-stealing aliens.
• Rand al'Thor and friends in the Wheel of Time have their village attacked not once, but twice, because the Pattern is calling them into service.
• In Lord Of The Rings, Frodo Baggins never actively resists the Call, but he drags his feet about leaving the Shire to the point that he just avoids meeting a Nazgul on (literally) his front doorstep. (And it turns out that, at the same time, Saruman's thugs were invading the Shire from a different direction...)
  • Being fair to Frodo, the message sent to warn him that he had to leave right now got lost in the mail.
  • You could say that this happened literally to his uncle Bilbo in The Hobbit, since Gandalf invited the dwarf party, which provided the Call, right into Bilbo's house (without Bilbo's permission). It would've been tough for Bilbo to refuse the Call without injuring his pride or insulting his (unexpected) houseguests.
• The Name Of The Wind: Kvothe leaves to gather firewood for five minutes, and comes back to witness the (supposedly fictional) Chaindran kill his entire acting troop, family included.
• In both the second and last Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, Lord Foul exerts influence in our world to torment the previous heroes until they return to the mythical Land to confront him, as his plans require their powers.
• Hogwarts sent Harry Potter a series of acceptance letters, pinpointing his near-exact location at the time the letter got there. Uncle Vernon went to great effort to keep Harry from getting the letter, up to moving the entire family to a small shack on a rain-swept island - where Harry got the call in the un-ignorable, unavoidable form of Hagrid.
  • Destiny seems to have a thing against Harry, since it seems to kill a lot of the people he loves.
• Di Tregarde, refusing the call to use her Guardianship, ignores an inept sorcerer's plans to summon an inhuman demon that was too strong for him, thinking it's Not My Problem. Naturally he summoned the thing, it killed him and was wounded in the process, and it then went after Di, because even if she wasn't doing anything with it Guardianship sticks around. She beat it, but the panic attacks triggered by anything that reminded her of it lingered, as did the lesson that ignoring these things, on a purely selfish level, meant that they would meet her on their terms.

Live Action TV

• Happens twice in Supernatural's pilot episode for Sam. First, his Dad goes missing and Dean comes to get him. He refuses that after killing the monster of the week, but watching his girlfriend burn up on the ceiling like his mother finally forces him to take the call for good.

Video Games

• The title character of Max Payne initially refused Alex's offer to transfer to the DEA and work for him ("You'd make me work undercover in some hellhole. Sorry, Alex. Michelle and the baby come first."). But all that changed when three murderous junkies hopped up on a new designer drug called Valkyr broke into his home and killed his wife and baby girl.
  • And, literally enough, the Big Bad phones Max's house as this happens to see if her hit worked.
    • "Is this the Payne residence?"
• In Lost Odyssey, the call most definitely knows where Kaim lives. In fact, the call essentially comes (for all the immortal characters) in the form of the main villain, who, years ago, inflicted tremendous emotional pain to the point that the damage to their psyche was literally a fate worse than death, then subsequently sealed off their memories and left them to become walking corpses, eternally (but NOT desperately) searching for their purpose in life.
• Happens twice in Baldur's Gate. First, the protagonist's foster father is killed. Later, almost everyone in your entire home town is killed and replaced by evil shapeshifters loyal to the Big Bad.
• Fei from Xenogears, not only is his mother (who was taken over by one of the Big Bads) is killed by his father (who is taken over by a previous incarnation of Fei). Then, his adopted hometown is burned to the ground by a battle from the ongoing war.
• At the start of Starship Titanic, the titular starship literally demolishes the fourth wall by crashing into the player's house.
• Infamous: To be honest, there was no way Cole could have possibly avoided The Call. Kessler knew where he worked, asked for him to deliver a package by name and took him to an area with a large number of people before having him open it, so he could absorb plenty of neuro-electric energy to make him as powerful as possible. Kinda hard to avoid The Call when the guy who's making it is you from the future and knows pretty much all there is to know about you.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor somewhat inverts this; your character has a mighty destiny that he can take hold of in any way he wishes. However, he also has the option of running away from it all; the result of this course of action, however, is that the huge majority of his friends, along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent people, die in a manner so horrific that it will Squick you out if you think about it too hard; it's so bad that the top Seraph of Heaven comes to bitch you out for being a coward... and the player knows this is how things will play out before committing to the option.

Web Original

• In ''Peasant's Quest'', Trogdor burninates Rather Dashing's thatched-roof cottage, thus motivating him to liberate the peasant kingdom of Peasantry from the Burninator's influence forever.
  • Too bad Trogdor is totally invincible.
• Active in Dept Heaven Apocrypha, where fate was so insistent that Nessiah wind up exactly as messed-up as his canon self, his only place of sanctuary—his previous school—was destroyed when his unstable magic went out of control.

Western Animation

• Terry McGinnis from Batman Beyond had his father murdered, which made him steal the batsuit and set him on the path of a new Batman. In Justice League Unlimited, it's revealed that project: Batman Beyond was planning to have his parents murdered in a manner similar to Bruce's to inspire him, but scrapped it due to moral restraint... Only to have some villain do their job for them eight years later. Didn't they get lucky?
  • And Hello? The original Batman was set on his life's path by the death of his parents.
• Avatar The Last Airbender: Aang finds out he is The Chosen One. Aang runs away. His entire race is exterminated. No one ever said the call was subtle.
• In the Stardust Crusaders part of Jojos Bizarre Adventure, Jotaro's mother develops a Stand that's slowly killing her; the only way to save her is to destroy Dio.
• In Transformers Super God Masterforce, Hydra and Buster start killing truckers in order to eliminate Ginrai; since most of their victims are Ginrai's friends, this results in Ginrai being motivated to actually get involved in the fight.
• In Barbie And The Diamond Castle, Liana jumps at the call (despite her friend Alexa's reluctance) after their home is destroyed by the Big Bad's literal dragon.

Real Life

• During World War II, the US was reluctant to enter the conflict, instead aiming for a peaceful resolution. The bombing of Pearl Harbor pushed them over the edge and precipitated the US's active involvement in the war.
  • Note this was 1941, and Hawaii was not a state yet. So it was specifically The Call Knows Where Your Strategically-Located Island Territories With Military Installations Are.

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